education in south africa before apartheid

Cape Town Project Center

Active 2007 through 2015.

education in south africa before apartheid

CTPC Overview
Cape Town: Many Cities in One
How Will We Build Our Project Website?
Resources for Project & Website Development
What is Shared Action Learning?
Projects Overview & Search
Expanding Early Childhood Development Opportunities in an Informal Settlement
Exploring New Outreach Models for Early Childhood Development
Fostering Community at the Canterbury Street Lot
Providing More than a Meal at Service Dining Rooms
Upgrading the K2 Informal Settlement through Community Collaboration
Women’s Empowerment through Increased Access and Understanding of Technology
Safe House Empowerment
Early Childhood Development in Flamingo Crescent
Energy Entrepreneurs at Creches
The Big Issue Vendor Profiling
WaSH-UP Livelihoods and Business Operations
Expanding WaSH-UP Services
Reflection and Growth during the IQP Journey
Blue Sky Recycling Programme
Community Mobilisation Through Reblocking in Flamingo Crescent
Early Childhood Development Connection
MGV Park Redevelopment
Capacity Building of a Community Based Organisation in Maitland Garden Village
Envisioning a Black River Pathway: Creating a Heritage Destination through Social Development
Supporting Reblocking and Community Development in Mtshini Wam
Laying the Foundation for a Resilient Partnership: Innovative Upgrading in the Informal Settlement of Langrug
Rooftop Gardens for Sustainable Livelihoods in Cape Town
Black River Corridor: Visions for Restoration and Recreational Use
Supporting Asset Based Community Development in Maitland Garden Village
Envisioning the Future of Oude Molen Eco Village
Greywater Management in Langrug
Sustainable Livelihoods Through Beekeeping
WaSHUp: Innovating Water Sanitation and Hygiene Upgrading in Langrug
Profiling Community Assets
Collaborative Construction
Stormwater Management
Strengthening Spaza Shops
Supporting Early Childhood Development
Initiation Site Development
Co-Researchers
Mapping and Planning
Water & Sanitation
Communications
Mapping & Planning
Laundry Centre
Sustainable Housing
Flood Risk Management
Informal Trading
Transportation
Recreational Facilities
Resource Library

Act III Scene I: Adding Color (November 16, 2015)
Slideshow Test
“Bawawethu” (December 3, 2015)
Social Enterprise
Acronym Dictionary
What is an IQP?
How do we do an IQP in South Africa?
Where do we start?
How do we start?
What do we actually do?
What do we actually do — take two?
What’s the hard part?
How do we communicate what we are doing and learning to others?
What is the difference between doing and learning?
Your Project Homepage
Context Pages
Connecting Pages
Planning Pages
Acting & Observing Pages
Our First Liaison Interview – Spaza Team Example
First Community Encounter – Culture Team Example
Executive Summary
Resources for Project & Website Development
CTPC Partners and Sponsors
Cape Town Creche Registration
Building a WaSH-UP Facility
WaSH-UP Programme Services and Management
Assessments and Proposals
Greywater and Stormwater Drainage
Informal Settlement Upgrading
Energy Systems and Options
Background Research
Methodology and Planning
Partnership
Process Narrative
Accomplishments
Project Resources
Student Guide to Acts and Scenes 2014
Academic and Published Resources
Projects Overview
Challenges Facing Early Childhood Development
Crèche Registration
Case Study: Little Paradise Educare Centre
Shared Action Learning
Participatory Development and Adaptation Process
Mission and Objectives
Ethical Considerations
Meet the Partners
Meet the Steering Committee
Meet the Team
“One Hand Must Wash the Other”
On the Same Page
Little Toy Guns
There’s no “I” in Team
Celebrate Good Times, Come On! It’s A Celebration!
Closing Time
More Interactions
Sustainability
Importance of ECD
Exploring Various Approaches to ECD
Cast of Characters
Planning and Implementation
Putting it All On the Table
First Walkthrough of Vygieskraal
Thinking Inside the Box
Branching Out in Vygieskraal: Meeting the Committee
A People of Great Hope & A Hidden Paradise
Combining Two Worlds: FCW Staff Meets the Committee
Goodbye for Now
All Scenes (Password Protected)
Proposal to FCW (password protected)
Philosophy Behind Helping the Homeless
Belonging and its Psychological Impact on Street People
Establishing Social Inclusion in the Street Community
Understanding Homelessness’ Role in Urban Development
Investigating the Effect of Public Spaces on Cities
Creating a Sense of Community Through Green Areas
Commemorating the Street Community’s Lives
Co-Developers
Khulisa Social Solutions
Additional Partners
Objectives and Process
Shared Action Learning (SAL)
Ethical and Safety Considerations
Challenges of Being Outsiders
The Cape Town Partnership Takes the Initiative
Emotional Impressions
The Memorial Comes to Life
A Wall Full of Life and Color
Understanding Different Perspectives
Additional Scenes
Homelessness in South Africa
Resources Available to Street People in Cape Town
US Soup Kitchens
Interior Design Methodologies for the Homeless
Arts and Music Programmes for the Homeless in the U.S.
Meet the Co-researchers
Meet the Sponsors
Meet the Cast of Characters
Safety Considerations
Scene 1: First Day Observations
Scene 2: Dominos
Scene 3: Tessa’s Stories
Scene 4: Music
Scene 5: Art Viewing
Art Gallery
K2 Informal Settlement and Participatory Action in Informal Settlements
Upgrading Efforts and Early Childhood Development
Objectives and Participatory Processes
Meet the K2 Community
Meet the WPI team
Act I Scene I: New Beginnings (October 22, 2015)
Act I Scene II: Getting lost in the K2 Maze (October 23, 2015)
Act I Scene III: The Outsiders (October 26, 2015)
Act II Scene I: Touring Tuesday (November 10, 2015)
Act II Scene II: Trouble in K2 (November 16, 2015)
Act III Scene I: Luncheon: A Change of Scenery (November 17, 2015)
Act III Scene II: Adding Colour (November 20, 2015)
Act III Scene III: “Bawawethu” (December 3, 2015)
Act III Scene IV: Financial Contribution: One Step at a Time (December 7, 2015)
Project Outcomes
Challenges and Opportunities as a Result of Technology
Adult Learning Philosophies and Strategies
Asset Mapping
Co-researchers
Sponsor and Liaisons
Objective 1
Objective 2
Objective 3
Objective 4
Introducing Our Fifth Member (October 29, 2015)
The Teachers Take a Leap (October 30, 2015)
A Change in Course (November 16, 2015)
An Attempt at Teaching Methods (November 24, 2015)
Getting on the Map (December 9, 2015)
Act 1 Scene 1
Act 1 Scene 2
Act 1 Scene 5
Act 1 Scene 6
Act 2 Scene 1
Act 2 Scene 3
Act 2 Scene 4
Reflecting on Relationships: Insights Gained and Lessons Learned
Increasing Understanding through Peer and Project-based Learning
Increasing Access through Asset Mapping
Understanding and Access Sustainability: From Pilot Programme to Technology for Women’s Empowerment Programme
Cape Town Project Centre Context
Domestic Violence: A Larger Context
Objective 5
Scene i: A Proper Introduction
Scene ii: Meeting the Entire Crew
Scene iii: Breaking Ground
Scene iv: What a Girl Wants
Scene v: Our First Goodbye
Scene vi: Peacock Crown
Scene i: Painting the Town
Scene ii: The Return of Gershwin
Scene iii: The Final Coat
Scene i: Off to a Rocky Start
Scene ii: Hidden Talents
Scene iii: Divide and Conquer
Scene iv: Full Steam Ahead
Scene v: Power Struggles
Scene vi: Hard Work Yields Results
Scene vii: The Countdown Begins
Scene i: The Home Stretch
Scene ii: The more we get together…
Vendor Mentors: Co-Researchers
Vendors Of The Month
The Big Issue
Street Papers
Interviewing
Participatory Video
Connecting Activities
Mentor Group Activities
Interview Questions
Privacy and Consent Considerations
1. From 0 to 60
2. Starting Off On The Right Foot
3. Getting Techie
4. Seeing Through A Vendor’s Eyes
1. Emotions Run High
2. Vendor Mentor Pilot
3. Take Two
4. Breaking It Down
5. Becoming A Family
6. Sharing A Coke With…Friends
1. Making A Business Deal
2. “It Is Such An Honor Having The Opportunity To Learn”
3. Taking It To The Streets
4. An Old House Of Memories
5. Mentor Pilot Program
6. Vendors Have Their Voices Heard
7. Graduation Day
Ari’s Reflection
Challenges of Early Childhood Development in South Africa
Crèche Regulations and Finances
Best Practices for Crèche Development
Determinants of Crèche Quality
The Effect of Playground Design on Child Development
The Effect of Playground Design on Communities
Developmental Benefits of Recreational Space
Public Space Inequality in South Africa
Recyclable Playgrounds
Flamingo Crescent Informal Settlement
Asset-Based Community Development
Project Philosophy
Mission Statement & Objectives
Meet the Community
Scene 1: When in Africa…
Scene 2: Communication Troubles on the Forefront
Scene 3: “Hallo Gemeenskap”
Scene 4: Pulling Strings
Scene 5: Progress Behind Closed Doors
Scene 1: From the Outside…
Scene 2: Home Alone
Scene 3: Pushing for Progress
Scene 1: Another Day, Another Design
Scene 2: Community Initiative
Scene 3: Gettin’ Down and Dirty
Scene 4: Where is the pipe?
Scene 1: Steering to Paradise
Scene 2: On a Roll…
Scene 3: Leaving a Little Handprint
Scene 4: A Promising Start to the Park
Scene 5: Let There Be Playgrounds!
Scene 6: “To my new family!”
Scene 7: Life Through Murals and Trees
Scene 8: Closing Time
Team Flamingo Reflections
Introduction
Issues Resulting From Energy Practices in Informal Settlements
Interactive Qualifying Project Center Context
Methods of Financing Business in Low Income Communities
Strategies for Implementation in Low Income Communities
Methodology
Mission & Objectives
Interview with Sizwe
Interview with Yolanda
Interview with Auntie Marie
Second Interview with Yolanda
Scene 1: First Introductions
Scene 2: Getting to know Wonderbags and Building Networks
Scene 3: Sharing Ideas and Findings
Scene 4: Cooking with the Wonderbag
Scene 1: Creating Interest in Wonderbags
Scene 2: First Trip to an Informal Settlement
Scene 3: Looking for New Products
Scene 4: Gathering Community Energy and Crèche Information
Scene 5: A Visit to Flamingo
Scene 6: Just Do It: Three Crèche Visits
Scene 7: The Reality of Low Income Areas
Scene 8: A College for Kiddies
Scene 1: Pilot Program
Scene 2: A Second Pilot Program
Scene 3: Sustainable Sales
Scene 4: Low Income Energy Services Task Team Meeting
Scene 5: Lunch at the Crèche
Scene 6: Exploring Other Products
Scene 7: Graduation
Scene 8: Enjoying Electricity
Scene 9: Collaboration for Future Implementation
Scene 10: Keep Smiling
Tati’s Reflections
Alex’s Reflections
Business Model
Entrepreneurial Support Packet Overview
Wonderbag Business Guide
Wonderbag Safety Flyer
Wonderbag Sales Log
Energy Savings Advertisements
Pilot Program Contract
Wonderbag Advertisements
Pilot Program Log
Pilot Programs
Findings Report
Cape Town Sanitation and Health Programmes Context

History of Education in the Context of Apartheid

The Relationship between Water, Sanitation, Hygiene and Education
The Relationship between Education and Career Development
Health Promoters®
Other Community Members
WaSH-Serv Co-Researchers
Act 1 Scene 3
Act 1 Scene 4
Act 2 Scene 2
Act 2 Scene 5
Act 2 Scene 6
Act 2 Scene 7
Act 3 Scene 1
Act 3 Scene 2
Act 3 Scene 3
Act 3 Scene 4
Act 4 Scene 1
Act 4 Scene 2
Act 4 Scene 3
Act 4 Scene 4
Act 5 Scene 1
Act 5 Scene 2
The Concept: What is WaSH-UP?
Challenges: Where can it go wrong?
So What Does This Mean? Lessons Learned from Langrug
Important Lessons Learned: Working in Challenging Communities
What Works? Successes in Surprising Places
Where do we go now? Some Musings on the Future
Heather’s Reflection
Informal Settlements in South Africa: Langrug Community
Community Assets
Cooperative
For Profit Small Business
Opportunity International
Savings for Health Expenditures in Kenya
Village Savings and Loan Association in Malawi
How to Start a Small Business in Informal Settlements
Micro-Enterprise: An Example
Research Question 1
Research Question 2
Research Question 3
Research Question 4
Sources and References
Act 1: The Journey Begins
Act 2: Getting the Business Up and Running
Act 3: The World Isn’t All Sunshine and Rainbows
Act 4: Money- A Universal Problem to Overcome
Act 5: Progress in Adversity
Act 6: We’re In Business!
Act 7: Is This Worth Fighting For?
Act 8: The Journey Continues
Cast Of Characters
Project Focus
Scene 1: First Day on the Job
Scene 2: A Tour of the Facility
Scene 3: A Day in the Field
Scene 4: Talking About Expansion
Scene 5: Buy Backs Centres and Expansion
Scene 6: A Working Buy Back Centre and Successful Picker
Scene 7: Helping the Community, no matter the Business Value
Scene 8: TrashBack offers an Interesting Opportunity
Scene 9: Hoist Manufacturers
Scene 10: CommSell Helps Digitize the Paperwork Process
Meet our City Sponsors
Meet the NGO Partners
Meet the Student Team
An Introduction to Informal Settlements
Flamingo’s Current State
The Infrastructure Research
The Social Development Research
Scene 1: First Meeting with Levona
Scene 2: An Introduction to 7de Laan
Scene 3: Beginnings of Turmoil
Scene 4: Finding Hope
Scene 5: A Motivation for our Work
Scene 6: Red Hill Settlement Tour Highlights Opportunities
Scene 7: City Mission Visit Illuminates the Option of Reblocking
Scene 8: Meeting the Key Planners
Scene 9: First Weekly Meeting Causes Confusion
Scene 10: Subcouncil Meeting Eases Worries
Scene 11: A Raw and Unexpected Story
Scene 12: Ethiopian Experience
Scene 13: Shack Demolition
Scene 14: Engineering the Future
Scene 15: Public Meeting in 7de Laan
Act 1 Reflection
Scene 1: A Taste of Flamingo
Scene 2: Getting to know the Community Leaders
Scene 3: Cluster Meetings in Flamingo
Scene 4: Introduction to Mtshini Wam
Scene 5: Kuku Town Visit Provides Example
Scene 6: All Parties Come Together
Scene 7: Library Networking
Scene 8: Communication and Enumeration
Act 2 Reflection
Scene 1: Meeting the Contractors
Scene 2: Breaking Ground
Scene 3: If You Build It They Will Come
Scene 4: Visiting ELRU Opens Doors for a Crèche in Flamingo
Scene 5: A Living Virtue
Scene 6: Meeting a New Potential Stakeholder
Scene 7: Meeting with the CECD: “Let’s do it.”
Scene 8: Bringing Green Innovation to the Crèche
Scene 9: Final Stakeholder Meeting
Scene 10: Saying Goodbye to Flamingo Crescent
Act 3 Reflection
Charles’ Reflection
Mike’s Reflection
Zach’s Reflection
Resources and References
Building a Background Through Research
Liaison Discussions
On-site Observations
Community Discussions
Visiting Other Communities
City Mission
Springfield Road
Imizamu Yethu
Freedom Park
Mtshini Wam
Nametag Activity
Language Bridge
Cultural Exchange Through Photographs
Likes and Gripes Drawing Activity
Profiling Community Members
Participatory Photography
Cluster Meetings
Talking Circles
Facilitate Access to Government Resources
Strengthen Ties to Local Resources
Develop Relations with NGOs
Collaborate with Cape Town Project Centre Teams
Document Resources for Future Use
Improve Document Circulation and Accessibility
Improve Communication – Involve Community Members
Periodically Assess Progress
Meet with all Stakeholders
Working Professionally
Show your Team’s Investment
Enumerate the Settlement
Formalize and Solidify the Layout Process
Facilitate Construction Progress
Our Partners
Centre for Early Childhood Development
Kiddies College Preschool
Langrug: Connecting ECD with WaSH
Final Presentation Materials
Challenges of Early Childhood Development
Models of Early Childhood Development
Resources for South African Creches
South African Government Regulations and Policies for Registration of Early Childhood Development Centres
Visual of Early Childhood Development
Scene 1: First Day of School at Kiddies College Preschool
Scene 2: Hit the Ground Running
Scene 3: Visiting the New Location
Scene 4: Getting the Word Out
Scene 1: Nobathembu’s Crèche
Scene 2: Sudden Realizations
Scene 3: Just One Grain of Sand
Scene 1: Getting To Know Nobathembu
Scene 2: A Lunch with David
Scene 3: All Hands on Deck
Scene 1: Back to Langrug
Scene 2: A Kiddies Graduation
Scene 3: Meeting with the CECD
Scene 4: Blessing in Disguise – Promoting Health in Langrug
Nick’s Reflection
Cast of Characters: Who’s Who in This Project
Educational NGO’s
Important Informational Links
Registering a Crèche in Cape Town
Meet the WPI Team
Project Coordinators
Co-Research Teams
Meet the Parks Department
Early Childhood Development
Park Design
Design Process
Community Involvement
Research Questions
Scene 1: Arriving in Maitland Garden Village
Scene 2: First Sight
Scene 3: Meeting with the Project Members
Scene 4: Community Survey
Scene 5: Working with Co-Researchers
Scene 6: Village Day
Scene 7: Monday’s Meeting with Jude
Scene 8: Monday’s Meeting with Co-Researchers
Scene 9: Discouraging Moment
Scene 10: Setting up the Fantasy Playscape Activity with the Crèche
Scene 1: New Faces
Scene 2: Fantasy Playground
Scene 3: Cape Town Park Tour
Scene 4: Design Meeting
Scene 5: Park Clean-Up
Scene 6: Park Depot Visit
Scene 7: Spreading the Word
Scene 1: Friday Fun Day
Scene 2: Maitland Garden Village Community Meeting
Scene 3: Steering Committee Comes Together
Scene 4: Planting the Seeds
Scene 5: Last Day in Maitland Garden Village
Personal Reflections
Preparation Research
WaSH-UP Principles
Langrug Community
How Does the Enviro Loo Toilet Work?
Mission Statement and Objectives
Scene 1: And So It Begins… Touring Informal Settlements
Scene 2: Connecting with the Women of Langrug
Scene 3: Learning from the Past
Scene 4: Laundering an Agreement
Scene 5: Doodling to Improve
Scene 6: Nailing Down Improvements
Scene 1: A Loo with a View
Scene 2: Not Reinventing the Wheel
Scene 3: Toilet Viewing at Signal Hill
Scene 4: Meeting Nobathembu
Scene 5: Children of Langrug
Scene 6: Exploring with Paula
Scene 1: Alfred’s Worries
Scene 2: Scott’s Discovery
Scene 3: Multitasking
Scene 4: Hendri and Harold
Scene 5: The People’s Place
Scene 6: The Signal Hill Exchange
Scene 1: Meeting with Stephen
Scene 2: Moving Forward with Enviro Loo
Scene 3: Meeting With Joey
Scene 4: The Pilot Project
Scene 5: Extracting Elevations and Pitching the Pilot Program
Scene 6: Launching the Public Health Programme
Scene 7: “Do You Trust Us?”
Scene 8: Leaving Langrug
Mackenzie’s Reflection
Joe’s Reflection
Morgan’s Reflection
Assessment of the 2012 Mandela Park Facility
Proposal for New Dry Sanitation Facility in Zwelitsha
References and Acknowledgements
Garden Village Affiliated Football Club
Garden Village Residents’ Association
Scene 1: First Encounter with Maitland Garden Village (MGV)
Scene 2: Tour of Maitland Garden Village
Scene 3: Ronell’s Sight into the Help Centre
Scene 4: First Look at the Potential Venue
Scene 5: Getting to Know the People We are Working With
Scene 6: Tour Of Oude Molen
Scene 7: Village Day
Scene 8: Monday Morning Meeting
Scene 9: Meeting at MGV Community Centre
Reflection and Moving Forward
Scene 1: Green Light Project Meeting: Brainstorming Session
Scene 2: After School Programmes
Scene 3: Advice from the Community Plough Movement
Scene 4: Guidance from Basil
Scene 5: Community Meeting Part I
Scene 6: Community Meeting Part II
Scene 1: Meeting With Property Management
Scene 2: Meeting with Ibrahim
Scene 3: First Music Meeting
Scene 4: Meeting with Sponsor
Scene 5: Figuring Out a Programme for the Concert
Scene 6: Meeting With Naiela
Scene 7: Training Session with the Kids
Scene 8: The Final Presentation and Concert
Surrounding Communities
Black River 2011
Objective 1: Developing Relationships
Objective 2: Collaboration for Agricultural Plans
Objective 3: Collaboration for a Pathway Vision
Sponsors and Liaisons
Notable Organisations
Scene Eight: Maitland Garden Village Day
Scene Five: Faces of Oude Molen Eco Village
Scene Four: First Meeting with our Sponsors
Scene One: The First Pathway Experience
Scene Seven: Visiting Company’s Garden
Scene Six: A Presentation to our Sponsors
Scene Three: Walking the Desire Lines
Scene Two: Tour of Maitland Garden Village
Scene Four: Desire Lines Tour with Martin
Scene One: Weekly Meeting with our Sponsors
Scene Three: Sustainable Livelihoods Meeting
Scene Two: Heritage Interviews
Scene One: Meeting with Jonno
Scene Three: TRUP Committee Meeting
Scene Two: Weekly Meeting with our Sponsors
Scene One: Mapping the Pathway at 44 Wale Street
Scene Two: Weekly Meeting with our Sponsor
Scene Three: Visit to Harvest of Hope
Scene Four: Meeting with Storm Water Management
Scene Five: Meeting with Parks and Recreation
Scene Six: Two Rivers Urban Park Steering Committee Meeting
Scene One: Meeting with Property Management
Scene Three: Additional Meeting with Sponsors
Scene Four: Weekly Meeting with our Sponsors
Scene Five: Trip to the Liesbeek River
Resources & References
Historical Context
Reblocking Efforts
Urine Divergent Systems
Pit Latrines
Dehydrating Systems
Flush Toilets
Fire Hydrants
Laundry Stations
Rainwater Collection
Detailed Mission and Objectives
Multi-Stakeholder Involvement
Initial Steps in Building Strong Relationships
Designs and Planning Stages
Construction and Implementation
Long-Term Management
Models to Learn From
Meet the Langrug Project Team
Meet the Municipality of Stellenbosch
Meet the CORC Representatives
Meet the Langrug Working Team
Greywater Health and Maintenance
Multi-purpose Community Centre
WaSH Facility
Initial Tour Highlights Many Contrasts
First Partnership Meeting: Tensions Emerge
A More Positive Start to Day Two
Challenges of Reblocking
Envisioning a Multi-purpose Centre
Zwelitsha’s Unique Problems
Reporting Sets a Precedent for the Future
The WaSH Team’s View
Discussing the Needs of the Community and How the MPC Can Help
Making the Decision to Move Forward with the Multi-Purpose Centre
Reblocking Guidebook Discussion
Re-Measuring for Reblocking
Spacing Out ReBlocking
Fire In Zwelitsha
Lunch Scene
Working Team Arguments
Playing Games
Introductions at the Municipality: A Revelation
Amanda Realises the Importance of Documentation
The Working Team Presents to the Municipality
How Simple Office Supplies Can Spark Progress
Further Difficulty with Planning
Learning How to Do (and Teach) a Cost Analysis
Working Group Expresses Community Urgency
Impromptu Meeting with Dawie
Meeting with Scott: Ending a Day of Confusion
Partnership Meeting 13 November
Alfred’s Presence in Langrug
Realising the Greywater Cleaning Problems
Working Group’s Apparent Lack of Trust in the Municipality: Putting Together a Report
Tensions Regarding Community Contributions and the MPC
Conversation with Koko
The Farmers’ Strike in Langrug
Act 5: Our Reflections
The Sponsors
Professor Robert Hersh
Problem Statement
On The Ground in The Sky
Developed a Framework for the Programme
Monetary Outputs and Inputs
Market Investigation
Raising Awareness
The Farm in the City
Laying the Foundation
Reflections and Recommendations
Ethical Consideration
Acknowledgements
Analysis of Potential Roofs
Harvest of Hope
RUAF Foundation
Preparation Phase References
Leader Profiles
Additional Resources For Mtshini Wam
Scene 1: Day One in Mtshini Wam
Scene 2: “Before you leave, leave us with something”
Scene 3: Planning with the Community – Shared Action Learning
Scene 4: Realization of Project Assumptions
Scene 1: Complexities of the First Major Reblocking Process – 11.6.12
Scene 2: Meeting With The City, CORC, and ISN – 11.9.12
Scene 3: First Meeting with Stephen Lamb – 11.12.12
Scene 1: Pressing Forward Despite Little Progress – 11.12.12-11.13.12
Scene 2: Mini-Projects for Community Development in Mtshini Wam – Gardening and Carpentry
Scene 3: Big Day Implementation and Collective Learning
Scene 4: Profiling the Mtshini Wam Community Leaders, 12.3.12-12.7.12
Informal Settlement Context
Joe Slovo History
Lessons Learned in Early Cape Town Upgrading Projects
Prospective Projects
Interview Methodology
Meet the Greywater Team
The Beginning
Building a Channel in J-section
The Process – Step 1
The Process – Step 2
The Process – Step 3
The Process – Step 4
The Process – Step 5
The Process – Step 6
The Process – Step 7
The Process – Step 8
The Process – Step 9
Applying the Process in I-section
Lessons Learned
Moving Forward
Mission Statement & Design Criteria
Results: Visions and Rationale
Final Vision
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: What is the best way to aid a community in a sustainable and positive way?
Village Day
Conducting Interviews
History of the Crèche
Details of the Crèche Work
Chapter 5: What is the best approach to gain governmental participation in preparation for a community programme?
Green Light Program Committees
Chapter 7: How can MGV continue to develop through mutually beneficial relationships with neighbouring communities?
Epilogue: What does the future hold?
Sydney Baker
Bryan Karsky
Emilee Kaufman
Lauren Laboissonniere
Nathan Sarapas
Photo Gallery
Downloads and References
Acknowledging Our Partners
Our Findings
Mapped Facility 1
Mapped Facility 10
Mapped Facility 2
Mapped Facility 3
Mapped Facility 4
Mapped Facility 5
Mapped Facility 6
Mapped Facility 7
Mapped Facility 8
Mapped Facility 9
Mapped Facility 11
Mapped Facility 12
Mapped Facility 13
Mapped Facility 14
Mapped Facility 15
Mapped Facility 16
Mapped Facility 17
Mapped Facility 18
Mapped Facility 19
Mapped Facility 20
Mapped Facility 21
Alternative Facilities
Documentation of Co-researcher Interaction
Gujarat and Kerala, India
WaSHUp Process
Multi-Purpose Centre Preliminary Drawings
Supplemental Material
Cultural/Social
Institutional
Safety and Security
Infrastructure
Personal Profiles
Recommendations for Continuation: Training Community Facilitators
Asset-Based Community Development Background
Methodology and Conclusions
Stakeholders
Building Guide: Step-By-Step
Function and History of B-Section Community Hall
Future Building Advice
B-Section Hall-Female Team Member Reflection
B-Section Hall-Male Team Member Reflection
ABR- Chemical Process
Future Plans
Sanitation Step-By-Step
Sanitation: Female Team Member Reflection
Sanitation: Male Team Member Reflection
Playground Background
Construction Pictures
Our References
Description of Project
Communicating Results through Documents Method
Generating Alternative Designs Method
Identifying Flooding Hot Spots Method
Interview Method
Measuring and Modeling Hot Spots Method
Future Recommendations
Project Diagrams and Models
Alexandra Settlement
Ondo Town, Nigeria
Porto Alegre, Brazil
Monwabisi Park Spaza Market
Focus Group Discussion
Informal Conversations
Key Informant Interviews
Mapping Exercise
Monwabisi Park Spaza Association Meeting
Recommendations
Monwabisi Park
Triple Trust Organisation
Spaza Shops
Creches in Monwabisi Park
Innovative Integrated Outreach Programme
Vision For the Future of Early Childhood Development
Existing Site Conditions
Proposed Site Design
Capital Costs
Site Management and Operational Costs
Vegetation Costs
Good Hope College Initiation Site Management Plan
Implementation of Good Hope College Initiation Site
Training of the Ingcibi
Government Actions and Health Initiatives
Involvement of the Health Department
Role of Site Committee
Role of Site Manager
Emergency Access
Waste Management
Site Management
A Historic Perspective of the Initiation Ritual
Limited Physical Space and Lack of Seclusion
Building and Burning of Initiation Huts
Challenges of Initiation in an Urban Environment
Economic Challenges for Initiates
Health Concerns during the Initiation Process
Malnutrition during the Seclusion Period
Psychological Challenges Faced by Initiates
Conflicts Between Traditional Leaders and Authorities
Government Actions in the Initiation Community
Good Hope College Initiation Site Visits
Initiation Indaba
Interviews and recommendation
Langa Site Visits
Project Identification
Andiswa Putsu
Happiness Mamfenguza
Thabo Khomane, Songezo Gulwa
Thembakazi Salman
Housing: Background
Housing: Plan Implementation
Housing: Design Considerations
Housing: Proposed Designs
Housing: Logistics
Housing: Costs of Construction
Housing: Ownership, Management and Maintenance
Indlovu Project Redevelopment Seed
Housing: Enforcement, Tenure and Rent
Community Centres: Background
Community Centres: Plan Implementation
Community Centres: Designs
Community Centres: Logistics
Community Centres: Management
Community Centres: Employment, Job Descriptions and Finance
Co-researcher coordination
College Assessment Exams
Final Celebration
Outside Organizations
Photo Service
Participatory Media Outlets
Redevelopment Tensions
Advancing the Co-Reasercher Program
Bringing Outside Organizations to Monwabisi Park
Community Interview Questions
Exploring Community Views
MOT Proposal
Photography as a Community Initiative
Photography Proposal
Cited Sources
Redevelopment Process
Guest House Suggestions
Our Overnight Experience
Volunteer Program Suggestions
Small Business Week
Imiza Moyethu
Sustainability Plan
Fundraising Methods
Indlovu Project Hiring Concerns
Indlovu Project Presentation
Spaza Shop Interviews
Complementary Currency
Microfinance
Tall Poppy Syndrome
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Apartheid in South Africa: Effects on Life and Education

The National Party gained power in South Africa in 1948, approximately 30 years after its founding. Originally, the National Party was created as a new, opposing political party to the ruling South African Party in 1913-14 by General JBM Hertzog (Carter, 1955, “Apartheid and reactions to it”, n.d.). Louis Botha, the first Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, founded in 1910, and leader of the South African Party, was an advocate for the English-speaking white South Africans. General Hertzog contrastingly advocated for the Afrikaans, an ethnic group comprised mainly of Dutch descendants. Members of the National Party believed in political freedom from Britain, whom South Africa was directly connected to as a Union, cultural superiority of Afrikaans, and complete nationalism (“Apartheid and reactions to it”, n.d.).

General Hertzog obtained the position of Prime Minister under the National Party in 1924. Daniel F. Malan, a dedicated member of the Party, became the Minister of the Interior, Public Health, and Education and soon became a leading figure in the politics of South Africa. After the Great Depression and other events, the original differences between the South African Party and the National Party seemed to disappear as they were working toward common goals (“Apartheid and reactions to it”, n.d.). The two parties soon merged to become the United Party. Daniel F. Malan and some others, upset by this joining, left to create the Purified National Party, the same one that introduced apartheid to South Africa. (“National Party”, n.d.).

In 1948, Daniel F. Malan transitioned into Prime Minister and under his leadershipapartheid was instituted in South Africa. Literally defined, apartheid means separateness in Afrikaans (Spaull, 2013). In practice, this existed as the systematic segregation of non-white people from white people concerning everything from political and economic rights to living boundaries. Mark Saunders, author of Remembering Apartheid , described apartheid as a group of policies that slowed social and economic development (2005).Whereas former policies separated races economically and socially, apartheid “cruelly and forcibly separated people, and it had a fearsome state apparatus to punish those who fought against it” (“Apartheid and reactions to it”, n.d.). Despite increasing opposition, such resistance was internalized and occasionally dismissed due to apartheid’s harsh repercussions and segregation’s historical presence. In other words, apartheid was not much different superficially but in the way it was executed.

While apartheid was a major political and social shift, there were distinct acts that contributed to the cruelty and intensity of it, specifically for those of a non-white race. The Population Registration Act and the Group Areas Act of 1950 forced citizens to register as a specific race, either black, Indian, or coloured, so they would be treated “accordingly”, including separation and relocation based on skin color. Thousands of families were moved to “correct” areas of living. An important example is the area of District Six (“Apartheid and the reactions to it”, n.d.).

The area known as District Six was considered a slum, an impoverished area populated mainly with blacks and people of color, but its cultural community was lively and well known. During the apartheid regime, it was declared as a white only area, therefore most of the initial inhabitants were forced out. Some qualified for accommodation from the Community Development Board, but many were left without housing options. Years after the District Six population had been relocated, the area was still going unused. It was soon destroyed, leaving behind little to remember the community that once thrived (Dorsett, 1999).

In addition to a multitude of other policies, a major source of concern was the Bantu Education Act of 1953, a foundational piece of the apartheid regime. These policies separated blacks from whites in school and provided non-whites with inferior education that kept them economically and politically lower, with fewer opportunities for advancement (Spaull, 2013). Blacks were educated to meet their “cultural standards”, as established by white government officials. Thus, the curriculum was created to keep blacks poor in factories and as manual laborers under white control. The effects of this incredible discrimination are still relevant twenty years later (“Bantu Education Act No 47 of 1953”, Spaull, 2013).

How education has changed in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Even after apartheid was revoked in 1994 and the African National Congress (ANC) took power, the effects of years of segregation and inferior education remained intact. E.B. Fiske and H.F. Ladd, authors of Elusive equity: education reform in post-apartheid South Africa (2004) considered revamping the entire education system as the main way to accomplish post-apartheid success (Kanjee and Sayed, 2013, Spaull, 2013). This required protecting white education, but bringing black, Indian, and coloured schools up to par. Challenges the ANC faced included a lack of funding and an absence of centralization of the departments of education. Much of the country budget was already allocated to education, so increasing that amount would prove challenging. Additionally, there were multiple departments to oversee the different racial segments of education. Compiling them into a cohort under the Department of Education was difficult, but a necessary part of education reformation (Spaull, 2013, Kanjee and Sayed, 2013). The Policy Framework for Education and Training (1994) was developed to help the government give equal opportunities in schools, change curriculum in areas such as early childhood development and special education, and break down the barriers of cultural and racial prejudice (Fiske and Ladd, 2004). Yet still, twenty years later, the urban poor of South Africa are struggling.

Anil Kanjee and Yusuf Sayed(“Assessment policy in post-apartheid South Africa” 2013) consider the greatest challenge of the South African government to be changing the curriculum through a system of improved policies and judging one’s ability to advance to higher levels of education. The effective implementation of these new policies has been the downfall of the education reform. Although the policies of apartheid have been revoked, non-white schools still suffer from dysfunction and lack of leadership past the local level, according to Nicholas Spaull, writer of Poverty and Privilege (2013). They are informally run by communities and are constantly facing “disorder, distrust, rebellion, and lack of cooperation” due to apartheid effects on education (Spaull, 2013).

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The Politics and Governance of Basic Education: A Tale of Two South African Provinces

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2 The Transformation of South Africa’s System of Basic Education

Published: September 2018
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As background to the rest of the book, the chapter describes and analyses the main structural transformations that took place in post-apartheid education in South Africa. The chapter provides analytical context to the rest of the book. It focuses on three key transformations: governance, school funding, and curriculum. For each, the chapter provides historical background, describes the transformation in some depth, and attempts to answer whether the transformation ‘worked’, and in what sense. The chapter concludes that some of the transformations worked, in that they were actually implemented and had some of (in some cases, such as finance, most of) the immediate intended impact (e.g. increase in equity of resource allocation). In some cases, such as curricular change, the immediate impact was elusive. The chapter concludes that the transformations have not yet had the desired impact in terms of either average achievement or equality achievement, but there are hopeful signs.

2.1 Introduction

Since 1994, South Africa’s education sector has undergone a process of far-reaching transformation. The principal goal of the research presented in this book is to explore at the micro level some political and institutional dimensions of this transformation. However, these micro-level dynamics played out within a broader context of far-reaching change—and are best understood in the context of that change. The aim of this chapter is to provide the requisite background on this broader context.

The transformations wrought by the ANC government, and its civil society partners, on South Africa’s education system in the mid-1990s could be argued to be among the most far-reaching of the second half of the twentieth century anywhere in the world. Nineteen administrative racial systems had to be joined and then re-shaped into nine geographical provinces; funding had to be put on a rational footing that did not provide white children with ten times as much per-child support as African children; large-scale ambition had to be tempered against fiscal realities; salary scales had to be unified; curricula revamped; boundaries between provinces re-established; capital planning systems streamlined; exam systems re-calibrated; and procurement, tendering, and payroll systems unified. The key changes all took place within a few critical years, between roughly 1995 and 1998.

This chapter describes these transformations, suggests some reasons for the key decisions, and details some of what the results for post-apartheid South Africa have been. We do not purport to assess whether other decisions might have produced a better outcome; rather, we argue that the most important transformation choices were to a large degree driven by circumstances, as perceived at the time. The set of circumstances, to be explored as hypotheses that determined the transformational policy choices, include:

The felt need to transform education sector governance by decentralizing certain elements of decision-making to both new provinces and schools. As section 2.3 details, these decisions were not always taken for purely technocratic reasons. Some were political compromises needed to keep important social groups involved in governing the country by giving them a share of the governance, especially over their own spheres of action.

The broader fiscal context which prevailed as of the end of apartheid and the dawn of democracy, discussed in section 2.4. These did not concern only fiscal aggregates, but also the fact that there were other social sectors, affected by apartheid inattention, that were perceived to be in a far sorrier state than education, at least judging from an enrolment criterion and in comparison with other countries.

The necessity of transforming the education curriculum—both to expunge the apartheid legacy, and in response to strong global trends in professional opinion on ‘what works’ in education, as mediated by South African intellectuals, sometimes isolated, as they were, by apartheid sanctions and relative lack of intellectual exchange with the rest of the world during the height of the sanctions in the 1980s and early 1990s. How this played out in practice—and some of the implications for learning outcomes—is the focus of section 2.5.

Before turning to the details of these transformations, we first set the stage by describing the legacy of extreme dualism that was a consequence of South Africa’s dismal apartheid history.

2.2 South Africa’s Education Sector—A Legacy of Dualism

Though it is fairly common to look for the origins of South Africa’s education problems under the explicit apartheid policies that were introduced in the late 1940s, and culminating in the Bantu Education Act of 1953, in reality the attitudes, policies, and issue-treatment that determine the dynamics of the system until the end of the twentieth century go back at least three centuries—in fact, nearly all the way back to the founding of the Cape Colony in 1652. In this brief historical sketch we pause at the very beginning, 300 years ago, just to ‘prove’ how deeply ingrained and historical the problems are; we then ‘fast forward’ to the formalism of apartheid in the 1940s and 1950s, and end up with a look at the situation towards the end of apartheid, providing a quick snapshot of the result of the dynamics of forces over 300 years.

2.2.1 Some Deep Background

The first school in the Cape Colony was started in 1658, just six years after the founding of the colony. As it happens, this coincided with the first arrival of slaves from outside the Cape itself. Already then, van Riebeeck (Commander of the Cape Colony from 1652 to 1662) ‘saw the need to establish an institution…[that] would teach slaves sufficient linguistic skills, in order to promote a greater understanding of their master’s orders…In addition, these slaves would also be indoctrinated in their master’s religion, which would teach them the values of servitude, discipline, and obedience’ (Molteno, 1984 : 45, cited in Moore, 2015 : 20). (Of course, this may not have been so different from how European children were schooled in those days, either in Europe or in the Cape—the influences of Montaigne and Comenius would have been distant indeed. The more interesting point is that this would be done in separate institutions which would presumably allow different interpretations for these curricular values—some for citizens, others for slaves—and interpretation is everything.) The first officially separated building would be opened in 1685 (Moore, 2015 : 20). Later, (some) missionary schools might have had a relatively more humanistic attitude towards education. But, interestingly, this led to conflict with trekboer policies which forbade missionary activities in the Eastern Cape, as a way to not ‘disseminate unsettling ideas of human equality as taught in [one presumes some] missionary schools’ (Moore, 2015 : 21, citing Welsh, 2000 : 109).

2.2.2 Fast-Forward 300 Years

Up until the middle of the twentieth century, the ‘history’ of (African, or in general) education policy in South Africa has to be interpreted as a quilt of various colours, and tendencies, where big ‘Policy’ can only be seen as the accretion of the policies of many different, localized, time-bound policies of particular bodies, some official, some not (e.g. missions). Even so, the tendency for education for Africans to be distinct and inferior, often by design, was self-evident to even casual observers working from the 1960s onward. But it is only in the early 1950s that ‘policy history’ becomes much more easily interpretable via the documentary evidence—the historical documentation leaves no doubt as to the intent of policy, and by then one can now mean Policy with a capital ‘P’—though even so, academics find ways to disagree about ‘deep’ motivations. Some ascribe high apartheid policy to be mostly aimed at the limitation of Africans to be providers of cheap, relatively unskilled labour; others ascribe it to serving the needs of apartness first and foremost. But in the end, the impact is similar.

The guiding policy document was the Bantu Education Act, passed in 1953. This Act, while decisive for education, embodied much of what was criticized about apartheid in general. Under the guise of providing the opportunity for separate development in separate ‘nations,’ it laid out a framework of centralized control, bureaucracy, physical apartness, inferior funding, and paternalism. In the words which many anti-apartheid activists have engraved in their minds, F. W. Verwoerd, one of the architects of apartheid, noted in a Senate speech in regard to the Bantu Education Act: ‘There is no space for him [the “Native”] in the European Community above certain forms of labour. For this reason it is of no avail for him to receive training which has its aim in the absorption of the European Community, where he cannot be absorbed. Until now he has been subjected to a school system which drew him away from his community and misled him by showing him the greener pastures of European Society where he is not allowed to graze’ (Maree, 1984 : 149).

According to one of its key tenets, the Act centralized control of Native Education in the Department of Native Affairs. Mission schools, whose curricular offerings were seen as suspect by the new apartheid government, were brought under the control of the state, and subsidies were eliminated, forcing many to close down. Efforts to create ‘Bantustans’ (quasi-independent ‘reservations’ or ‘homelands’) were initiated in the 1950s. These entities were theoretically able to devise their own education systems, but in fact largely operated in accordance with Bantu Education. Indeed, the intention behind the creation of the Bantustans can be seen as mirroring the Bantu education curriculum: ‘to limit and reorient African political, economic and social aspirations away from a common political and economic life and towards a separated, rurally-oriented, ethnically-based life’ (Chisholm, 2013 : 408). In addition, it would be soon discovered, the Bantustans offered abundant opportunities for populist and patron–client politics. Under the guise of separate development, for instance, high schools were created in the Bantustans, but not so much in the areas where Africans lived within the Republic of South Africa ‘proper’ (though later this policy was rescinded); similarly, each Bantustan was to be given a teacher training college.

Under this legislative regime, per student funding for black schools was much lower than that for other ethnic groups, school feeding disappeared and the state largely placed the burden of the costs of the expansion of schooling on local black communities themselves. Hartshorne ( 1981 ) gives an indication of the inequalities of the system. In 1969, the gap between the unit cost of black and white education reached its widest, at a ratio of 20:1 white to black. At the same time as financing of black education was being squeezed, the government attempted to increase enrolment. In 1972, responding to the crisis in African schooling, the structure of financing changed, and slowly per capita spending differences between black and white children were reduced. However, little additional funding reached primary schools, although in some provinces there was a significant reduction in the number of double-shift schools. Although some gains were made in the retention of children in primary school, quality remained dire. Schooling was further disrupted through the late seventies in widespread student protest action, reaching a climax in the 1976 Soweto school uprising.

In the 1980s, under P. W. Botha, there was an effort to ‘modernize’ apartheid education, largely in response to human capital demands. This was a period of great expansion of schooling, with large increases in African enrolments in both primary and secondary schools. By 1985 the number of secondary students was four-fold that of 1975; 76 per cent of children aged 5–14 were enrolled in primary school (Unterhalter, 1991 : 39). Enrolments, expenditure and the number of African matric passes continued to increase over the 1980s. By the late 1980s the ratio of white to black spending had been decreased to 1:6, although with enormous variations within the ‘black’ category (see below).

Changes in curriculum over the course of apartheid largely mapped onto the shifts in broader ideological discourses and the shifting economic context of the rising and declining apartheid state. Curriculum broadly moved from a culturally oriented curriculum, with a strong emphasis on content and education for the rural, racially distinct ‘native’ and manual labourer in the 1930s and 40s, to a progressively more technicist orientation, and an emphasis on vocational education and the development of skills for a modernising economy. From early on, however, different curriculum knowledge was distributed to different race groups less through different syllabuses and more through different institutionalized forms of provision, especially the lack of broad subject offerings, teaching resources, and qualified teachers in schools for black, coloured, and Indian students.

Schools were governed through nineteen racially separated departments of education for different racial and geographical groupings. Information systems were poor, examination systems dysfunctional and often corrupt, and a draconian inspectorate system was the only accountability and performance management mechanism within the system (Swartz, 2004 ). The Hunter Report (DOE, 1996 ) showed the dismal state of school infrastructure in 1995 after years of neglect. Increasingly, and especially after 1976, black schools, in particular those in urban areas, were largely dysfunctional, the material conditions deplorable, and teacher morale decimated. The apartheid-based curriculum was rejected, and any progressive or state-driven reform became unacceptable. Inspectors were driven from schools. Exams were regarded as illegitimate. Especially in urban areas, student protest action made many schools ungovernable in this wide-scale rejection of apartheid schooling.

2.2.3 Educational Inputs and Outcomes at the Dawn of Democracy

The educational inputs and outcomes at the end of apartheid were a legacy of inequity and, not often noted, also inefficiency. These views influenced important technocrats in the new government. A perspective on both inefficiency and inequity is provided by Figure 2.1 , which shows both expenditure per student in 1990, and a simple ‘instantaneous’ indicator of internal school efficiency, namely the ratio of enrolment in Standard 5 (Grade 7, the last grade of primary) to enrolment in SSA (Grade 1 in the new parlance as an informal measure of the ‘survival rate’ to Standard 5). The results of the relationship are graphed in Figure 2.1 . 1 As the figure shows, there were huge differences in spending per pupil across the systems (far from the ‘5 to 1’ that is often noted with regard to White/African in general)—with the massive additional per pupil spending going to white schools doing nothing to increase ‘survival’ rates. With no comparative data available at the time on learning outcomes, this led some observers at the time to question whether the ‘white windfall’ was achieving much beyond providing pleasant surroundings and ‘posh’ infrastructure.

School efficiency by racial department towards end of apartheid

Aside from the implicit efficiency critique of having to spend so much more on white schools than seemed strictly necessary, there is the equity or equality critique of spending so little on the poor schools, an issue to which we return in section 2.3.

Matric exams are also revealing. Cronje ( 2010 ), using data from the Institute of Race Relations, tracked the performance of black African matric pupils from 1955 to 2008/09. In 1955, only 598 black Africans sat for their matric exams and only 259 achieved a pass. Through the 1960s, the number of black Africans sitting the matric exam increased rapidly, as did the proportions of those pupils obtaining passes and university entrance passes. By 1970, 2,846 black Africans wrote matric and of this group, 1,865 (or 65.2 per cent) passed and 1,103 (or 35.6 per cent) achieved a university entrance pass. The 1960s had therefore seen significant increases in the number of black Africans writing their matric exams. In 1980, 29,973 black African pupils wrote matric. In 1985, 82,815 wrote and by 1990 the number of black African pupils writing matric had rocketed to 255,669. At the same time, however, and through the 1980s and early 1990s, the pass rate and university exemption rate began to fall. In 1993 the pass rate touched a record low of 37 per cent and the exemption rate bottomed out at 8 per cent. The decline in the pass rate is generally attributed to increasingly disrupted schooling through the 1980s, mainly due to political struggle and the breakdown in the culture of learning and teaching in most schools. Some spoke of a ‘lost generation’ of youth who had forgone years of schooling in service of the struggle.

Figure 2.2 extends the analysis by trying to compare not just matric pass rates, but by taking into account the percentage of pupils who reached Standard 10 (Grade 12 in modern parlance). In that sense, what cognitive disadvantage had apartheid education created for the least advantaged in society, as measurable towards the end of apartheid (the early 1990s)? This question is more difficult to answer than it might appear at first. Looking only at the matric pass rates (Senior Certificate Examination pass rates) is not enough, because the proportion who even made it through to Grade 12 varies a lot by population group. To get at that, one might rely on data about persistence in school. But surveys tended not to ask, of those attending school, which grade they were in, and asked instead the highest grade achieved ever, which creates a timing issue. It is difficult to derive completely clear answers, but one can derive a range of estimates of advantage, triangulating various sources. Figure 2.2 , which focuses on the extremes of whites and Africans so as to unclutter the graphics, shows a range of interpretations. Panel A in Figure 2.2 shows the percentage of twenty-one-year-olds having achieved Standard 10 (Grade 12 in today’s parlance), plus various certificates or higher. It shows that for the white population, this was 91 per cent, while for the African population the percentage was 55 per cent: a 1.65 ratio (91/55) in advantage for whites. The 55 per cent strikes us as a little high, but not extremely so, as Panel B confirms. But, in any case, Panel A has the advantage that all the data come from a single source. Panel B shows decrements in percentages achieving certain ‘bars’ according to increments in quality or ‘demandingness’ of those bars. The first two columns show the ratio of enrolment in Standard 10 in 1994 to population of eighteen-year-olds for Africans and whites. In addition, data for senior certificate passes and exemptions were obtained for the early 1990s. Applying the pass rates to the first two columns and the exemption rates to the same two columns gives all the other values. According to these data, whites had advantages over Africans of 1.41, 3.3, and 5.9 respectively, depending on how high the bar in question was. All this provides less optimistic conclusions than the usual pass/writer conception of the pass rate, as the denominator is not those who sit or write the exam, but the whole population, and thus takes into account dropping out prior to Grade 12. A grosso modo , the white/African difference was about 4 to 1 at the end of apartheid.

Educational success, by race, as proportion of populations

This disparity cannot be attributed to differential labour market returns from passing matric; numerous studies have shown that rates of return to secondary and tertiary education range from about 10 per cent to 18 per cent, are similar for whites and Africans (actually higher for Africans), and the returns from post-secondary education are relatively high (Bhorat, 2000 ; Crouch, 1996 ; Mwabu and Schultz, 1996 ). The differential access to matric was therefore a socially inefficient and inequitable phenomenon, depriving society and individuals of access to production and income.

Further insight into the South African patterns of access to education at the dawn of democracy is provided by a comparison for 1989–94 with a selected group of international comparators. 3 As Figure 2.3 shows, relative to these comparators, South Africa was a little—not hugely—skewed, but in ways that are revealing of the racial differences. South Africa’s access to primary education was, at 115 per cent, above the ‘efficient’ maximum for the age cohort—a sign of low quality in the early grades particularly in the African parts of the system, which induced repetition and excess enrolment. Some provinces, largely those where Bantustans had been located, had Grade 1 enrolments which were more than 50 per cent above the age cohort. Secondary enrolment was low in comparison with other countries, but was rapidly (one could say more rapidly than quality could keep up with) catching up (especially in the African portions of the system) and had essentially caught up by 1994. However, the low pass rates highlighted above resulted in a low tertiary enrolment rate relative to the comparators.

Comparative performance of South Africa on access to education

2.3 Transforming Education Sector Governance

The 1996 the South African Schools Act (SASA) and the new Constitution (1996) both transformed radically the institutional arrangements governing the country’s system of education. It replaced the pre-existing, fragmented and racially ordered institutional arrangements with a unified, multi-tiered system:

The national (central) level was assigned responsibility for policymaking, for resourcing the system, and for setting the overall regulatory framework.

The provincial level was assigned responsibility for implementation—spending the budgetary resources made available from the centre, and employing the teachers, administrators, and other personnel who comprised the vast majority of employees in the system.

Substantial school-level responsibilities (including the recruitment of the school principal and senior teachers) were assigned to school-governing bodies (SGBs) in which parents were required to be in the majority.

This transformation in the structure of governance seemingly was consistent with both a technocratic and a political logic. The apartheid state was seen by new technocrats as not only unjust, but also inefficient in its racial decentralization combined with administrative centralization. Decentralization of power, in the framework of a new Constitution and, in the education sector, a new Schools Act, along with a fiscal framework to go along with it (the ‘equitable shares formula’ and the ‘school funding norms’, on which more in section 2.4 ), were seen as a way to both load-shed some responsibility for finances, encourage important social groups to ‘keep skin in the game’, and encourage sub-national levels of government (all the way down to the school) to take substantial responsibility for decisions. Two funding contrasts between SASA and the Bantu Education Act (and its remnants) are especially noteworthy: in the new South Africa, poorer schools would be supported out of the central fiscus (through inter-governmental transfers and the requirements of the school funding norms), instead of depending on supposedly local taxes; and independent schools which attended to the relatively poor and maintained certain quality levels would be funded, instead of deprived of funding as the mission schools had been.

At the time when South Africa’s new education sector governance arrangements were put in place, there was a strong reformist impulse worldwide for downward delegation of education governance to subnational and school levels 4 (e.g. Bray, 1996 ; Fiske, 1996 ; Patrinos and Ariasingam, 1997 ). Even so, a narrowly technocratic perspective is misleading. The South African Schools Act (SASA) was promulgated in the same year in which the country’s final constitution was formally approved. Indeed, the new institutional arrangements for South Africa’s school system aligned well with broader political imperatives which were at the heart of South Africa’s 1994 transition from apartheid to constitutional democracy.

South Africa’s extraordinary transition from racist, apartheid minority rule to a new competitive, rule-of-law based political settlement was one of the most inspiring democratic miracles of the 1990s (a decade of many inspiring democratic miracles). En route to a democratic election in 1994, and the promulgation of a new constitution in 1996, the apartheid-era governing National Party agreed to give up its stranglehold on power; the exiled African National Congress agreed to end its armed struggle and pursue a negotiated settlement; and multiple other protagonists, including large-scale organized business, played influential roles in facilitating the transition. The complex story of what brought these protagonists to the table, and how they reached agreement, has been well told elsewhere 5 and goes way beyond the scope of the present exercise. For present purposes, the crucial insight is that the institutional arrangements incorporated into SASA were explicitly designed to be responsive to the central concerns vis-à-vis the education sector of both black South Africans who were about to become the majority in the emerging constitutional democracy, and white South Africans who were negotiating away their monopoly control over government.

The African National Congress was a mass-based political party, committed to ending South Africa’s system of racial discrimination. In 1994, it received a sweeping electoral mandate, winning almost 63 per cent of the vote nationally. Universal access to education, the move to non-racial institutions in the sector, and the elimination of racially discriminatory practices in the allocation of public funds were all non-negotiable political imperatives. As subsequent sections of this chapter will detail, all of these indeed were achieved under the new institutional arrangement for the sector established by SASA.

For white South Africans, a central concern was agreement on a system of governance which could sustain the quality of the public 6 schools which historically had served their children. The institutional arrangements laid out in SASA were responsive to these concerns in two ways. First, consistent with the broader constitutional logic of the political settlement, the delegation of substantial authority to nine provinces served as a check on at least some aspects of discretionary decision-making by central government. The second, more direct way in which the concerns of the white minority were addressed was via the delegation of substantial authority to the school level. This delegation included, in subsequent regulation, the ability to vote, at the local level, fees to be paid by parents at school level, and for these fees to stay at school level and to be used there with considerable discretion, including the appointment of extra teachers.

SASA (and the South African constitution more broadly) incorporated an overarching principle of non-racialism in admissions policy—although the details were left ambiguous as to how decisions should be made regarding who had the right to attend individual schools for which there was more demand than available places. But beyond this, parents of children in elite public schools (which historically had served the white minority) were well-placed to leverage the authority granted to SGBs to ensure that the schools would remain well managed. Further, as noted, the autonomy provided by SASA included the right to top up public funds with self-financing by the parent body—ensuring that elite schools need not be starved of resources as a result of the racial equalization (indeed, the pro-poor skewing) of certain public expenditures.

To be sure, keeping middle class and elite children in the system was not only in the interests of the relatively privileged minority. There is strong evidence from around the world that ensuring that multiple classes (not only children of the poor) are served by a public system is a crucial buttress for the system’s efficiency and budgetary defence. Further, both delegation to provinces, and participatory school-level governance aligned well rhetorically with the embrace by all parties of the principles of constitutional, democratic governance. In practice, though, as this book explores in detail, the gap was substantial between this rhetorical alignment and the reality of the challenges of governing the education sector in a way which served effectively the disproportionately poor majority of the country’s citizens. And the evidence in Chapters 8–10 suggests that efforts to turn this rhetorical embrace of participation into genuine empowerment of parents and communities, beyond the already-empowered elites, were disappointingly scant.

2.4 Transforming Education Financing

Compared to other upper-middle income countries (UMICs), particularly those that went on to grow robustly, South Africa’s finances were in a dismal state in the period roughly five years before the new government took power. 7

The economy was not growing. In the period 1990 to 1994, immediately preceding the start of the democratic government, South Africa’s economy shrank at an average annual rate of −2.2 per cent, while comparators’ economies grew at 1.8 per cent: a 4-percentage point difference.

The fiscal deficit was high. In the same period, South Africa’s deficit was, on average, 5.9 per cent of GDP; that of its comparators was 0.9 per cent of GDP. South Africa’s deficit peaked at 9 per cent in 1993—it was the highest of any of the comparator countries in that year.

Because debt was accumulating, interest payments as a proportion of total government expense were high, and rising fast. Payments as a proportion of government expense were 15 per cent in South Africa, only 9 per cent in the comparator countries. What’s worse, in South Africa they were rising by half of a percentage point per year, whereas in the comparator countries, interest payments were going down by 1.3 percentage points per year.

Apartheid had left in its wake some urgent social crises outside the education sector. Under-five mortality rates were 183 per cent higher in South Africa than in the comparator countries, and were worsening rapidly. By contrast, as noted earlier, there was already universal access to primary education, and in education the percentage of the population enrolled in secondary education was only a little lower in South Africa than in comparator countries (70 per cent versus 83 per cent), and was growing rapidly.

In short, as detailed further below, relative to other UMICs, South Africa’s fiscal effort in education was relatively high, and enrolment already high. Given the other economic and social challenges, and a pervasive sense (notably including on the part of some influential public officials 8 ) that resources for education were not well used, it followed that there would be no ‘end-of-apartheid’ dividend in terms of increases in aggregate public spending on education relative to GDP. The overwhelming fiscal challenge was to put in place new fiscal formulas which could assure high levels of access to education and reverse the stark inequalities in expenditure inherited from the apartheid years, but without putting too much pressure on the fiscus. The subsections which follow detail how this was addressed, and what was achieved.

2.4.1 New Fiscal Formulas

The fiscal solutions to this dilemma, arrived at by the new technocracy (with particular relevance to education) were two, which worked to complement each other. First, an ‘equitable shares formula’ would create a division of centrally sourced revenue and provide those shares to the provinces and local governments. The formula would consider the weight of certain needs (total population, enrolment, the size of the economy, the need for a certain fixed cost to run a province) to create shares of funding. After keeping a certain amount of funds for financing national-level activities, and a certain amount for subnational activities (the ‘vertical’ break), the central government created a ‘horizontal’ division for the provinces. From within their share, the provinces were free to allocate to various sectors with considerable freedom. Some chose to devote relatively more funding to education, others to health, and so on, as they saw their needs. This allowed the central government to be perceived as responding strongly to a pressure for equity and transparency, while promising only ‘shares’ (but fair shares) of the fiscal fortune, and thus enabling a certain degree of austerity.

In a similar manner, the norms and standards for school funding, as well as the post provisioning norms for educators, provided policy direction from the national Department of Education as to how provincial education authorities should assign resources to schools in an equal (in the case of teachers) or even pro-poor manner (in the case of non-personnel, non-capital expenditure). Schools would typically not be mandated as to how to spend the funds, and some could even procure their own inputs. Echoing the ‘equitable shares formula’, the basic idea was to mandate equity in the shares of per student spending going to schools of different levels of poverty, but not to mandate absolute amounts of per student spending. At the same time, the funding norms allowed schools to self-assess fees, under certain conditions, to keep the funding at their own level, and to meld this private funding with their public funding into a unified vision of the school’s budget under the (presumably) strong supervision of the school governing body. Both ‘formula-driven’ solutions thus focused on equity and shares, without making promises about absolute levels of expenditure. The results seem to have been pro-equity, encouraged the maintenance of an upward trend in enrolment, and did prevent a privatization of middle-class schooling.

As Figure 2.4 makes clear, funding for education remained reasonably constant as a proportion of GDP, at least over the longer haul. Thus, in that sense, the ‘trick’ of keeping the middle classes involved in public education ‘worked.’ Compared to other upper-middle income countries, South Africa spent a high proportion of GDP on education and it maintained this proportion throughout the late 1990s and onwards, as other countries caught up. The result was that by 2015 the expenditure patterns of South Africa and the comparator countries were similar to one another.

Funding for education, South Africa and comparator countries

2.4.2 Trends in Access to Education

After and before apartheid, what did the spending buy for South Africa and for other countries, in terms of access to education (enrolment)? As section 2.2 detailed, as of the end of apartheid, access to primary education was ‘raw’ (‘raw’ in the sense that though access was high, quality was highly variable, and almost always poor for low-income black South Africans).

As Figure 2.5 shows, access to secondary enrolment, already high in comparison with other UMICS, continued apace after the end of apartheid. The percentage of South Africa’s youth cohorts attending secondary education was known to be rising (though the figure makes it hard to see this precisely in the early 1990s, because South Africa was not and in any case reporting in the late 1980s showed South Africa to be nearly on par with the comparators). The rise in attendance at secondary education in the early 1990s had obviously nothing to do with any policies set in place by the democratic government, and much to do with a sort of populist expansion of investment in the Bantustans (which included also the creation of large numbers of teacher training colleges). But the approaches put in place by the democratic government allowed those trends to continue and for secondary enrolments to essentially catch up to the comparator UMICs by 2010 or so.

Access to secondary education, South Africa and comparator countries

Figure 2.6 shows both the growth in enrolment as a proportion of the more-or-less enrolable age groups and, importantly, changes in the pattern of enrolment within those age groups. 9 Given constancy in spending, South Africa showed relative constancy in both enrolment and in composition of enrolment: the end of apartheid had hardly any discernible impact. The comparator countries showed much more growth in total enrolment and that enrolment came about both because of more spending, but also because of a reorganization of enrolment between sub-sectors, with a strong relative shrinking of primary education and an expansion in other levels, achieved partly by increasing the internal efficiency of primary education. Countries in other regions, particularly in Latin America, became more and more convinced of the importance of human capital in generating growth and combatting inequality, and spending was stepped up, particularly in sub-sectors such as early childhood. (Also stepped up in South Africa, but not quite as much, and, perhaps, with not—yet—much demonstration of cognitive results.)

Composition and relative size of enrolment by level, South Africa and comparator countries

2.4.3 Equity in Resourcing

It is clear that resourcing came to be far more pro-poor after democracy. Being pro-poor correlates very closely with being pro-African, but note that the funding norms in South Africa (both in the sense of funding from centre to provinces, and from provinces to schools) were (naturally) de-racialized after democracy, and were set in terms of poverty or were poverty- and race-neutral at best (with one proviso: formerly richer schools typically kept more expensive teaching staff, even if the numbers of teaching staff publicly provided were de-racialized). Data can be tracked by province as well, and, with some assumptions, by race. But the important categories are poverty and province. Strong evidence of the fast changes in, for example, public funding, can be found in Department of Education ( 2006 : 36), and is reproduced as Table 2.1 .

.	1990/91 .	2000/01 .	2004/05 .
EC	78	93	95
FS	104	109	116
GP	154	123	108
KN	80	87	92
LP	74	92	92
MP	86	93	102
NC	153	135	112
NW	88	111	112
WC	180	117	109
Total	100	100	100
Gini	0.39	0.09	0.08
CV	0.34	0.15	0.09

.	1990/91 .	2000/01 .	2004/05 .
EC	78	93	95
FS	104	109	116
GP	154	123	108
KN	80	87	92
LP	74	92	92
MP	86	93	102
NC	153	135	112
NW	88	111	112
WC	180	117	109
Total	100	100	100
Gini	0.39	0.09	0.08
CV	0.34	0.15	0.09

Two summary measures of inequality are presented in this table: a Gini coefficient and a Coefficient of Variation (CV). Both show radical reductions in the inequality of public funding—roughly 75 per cent to 80 per cent in just fifteen years, with most of the change coming in the space of just ten years (1990 to 2000, roughly). Naturally, the provinces did not exist in 1990, but their constituent ‘homelands’ and RSA departments did, their enrolments and their per capita expenditures were known, and so it is possible to present a fairly complete and accurate picture of matters towards the end of apartheid and the progress in the years immediately after. Note that we do not necessarily know the intra-provincial spending inequality, so these numbers may overstate (or conceivably understate) progress. Spending increased faster in the provinces whose internal inequality would have been greater; on the other hand, the school funding norms were already operating and were already reducing intra-provincial inequalities, and if spending increased faster in provinces whose internal equality was improving faster, then Table 2.1 could be understating total equalization.

Table 2.1 makes it clear that the apartheid inheritance disproportionately favoured Gauteng and the Western Cape; so the rebalancing meant spreading their ‘excess’ resources to the other provinces. The Northern Cape, being very small in enrolment terms, did not contribute much in absolute terms to the re-balancing, but gives further evidence that the formula-based cutting back of the ‘bigger spenders’ worked transparently and without much favouritism. However, note also that because the poorer provinces were also among the largest, cutting back on the spending in the higher-spending ones could not result in big per pupil increases in spending in the lower-spending provinces. (Also, recall that how much to spend on education was, according to the equitable shares formula, a matter for the provinces to prioritize, so these numbers are a result both of equity drivers in the central funding, the equity drivers in the school funding norms, but also of provincial decisions on how much of their fiscal share to spend on education.)

Another take, using the actual homelands data from Buckland and Fielden ( 1994 ) and Department of Education ( 2006 ), gives the Lorenz curves shown in Figure 2.7 for inequality of public recurrent expenditure in terms of the fourteen departments that spent money on pupils in a distinguishable manner (i.e. ignoring provincial differences in HoA spending). The curves are approximate, because for the erstwhile administrative departments the curve is plotted with population by expenditure level on the horizontal axis. Nonetheless, the results are striking: the dashed black spending curve for 2004 is nearly exactly equal to the 45-degree line of equality, whereas the lower line for spending in 1991 yielded a Gini coefficient of 0.33.

Changes in inequality curves for distribution of public resourcing of public schools

Naturally, given that the system allowed schools to charge individual fees (determined at local level, and therefore much higher for the higher income groups), these numbers under-state the amount of inequality reduction achieved. Nonetheless, such a rapid reduction in inequality in public spending is unequalled in modern history, to our knowledge. Remaining inequalities, though, surely account for some important differences in performance (van der Berg and Gustafsson, 2017 ).

2.5 Curricular Trends and Learning Outcomes Implications

Among the many transformations of South Africa’s education system, the transformation of the education curriculum was perhaps the most far-reaching in terms of its implications for day-to-day practice in the classroom. This section describes this transformation, reports on the consequences (of the full set of transformations, curricular and otherwise) for learning outcomes, and also on some recent, perhaps somewhat encouraging trends.

2.5.1 Curriculum under Apartheid

Over the forty-eight years of National Party rule, syllabuses, examinations, and prescribed instructional practice changed significantly, adapting to both shifts in political economy and broader international trends in curriculum. The shifts in curriculum can be seen in the changes in the ‘imagined’ learner of different curricula across time. As outlined earlier, early mission and colonial curricula were concerned with the conversion of the ‘heathen indigene’. Industrialisation and the onset of mining focused the curriculum on the development of manual skills and docility (the ‘moral’ and ‘industrious’ learner). In the 1930s, in the light of international debates, the notion of the (indigenous) colonial subject became tied up in issues of cultural specificity and questions of the mind of the ‘native’. Here, strong culturalist notions of the learner, whose language and traditions should be preserved through education, provided the platform for Bantu education and the apartheid ideology of separate development. With the modernization of the economy, higher skills were sought and the curriculum focus became increasingly vocational. In the later 1980s and early 1990s the imagined learner of the curriculum became something quite different—the individual learner of no determinate race on the one hand, and a worker for a growing and diversifying economy on the other. These last reform attempts of the apartheid government, came, however, late in the day and given the intensified political protest and breakdown of teaching and learning in schools, reached only the minority white sectors of schooling.

Despite these shifts, a number of general points can be made about curriculum, especially from the mid-1950s onwards. Firstly, different knowledge was distributed to different race groups, accomplished less through different syllabuses and more through segregated provision, and differences in the material and symbolic resources available to different race groups in different schools. The fact that the curriculum was very similar on paper was used to mask inequities. The Minister of Bantu Education in the late 1970s proudly claimed that his department ‘had not only adopted the same curricula and syllabi as were used by Whites, but Black and White students were now writing the same senior certificate and matriculation exams’ (Marcum, 1982: 21, cited in Jansen, 1990 : 202). Black students, however, received watered-down, minimal or narrower curricula than children in the white department of education. There were different subjects on offer in white and black schools, more academic in white schools, and more vocationally oriented in black schools. The distribution of teachers capable of teaching more demanding subjects was also quite different. Secondly, the issue of language was paramount and would become the flashpoint for intense protest in the 1970s. The language issues are complex, and shifted over time, but crucially had to do with the imposition of Afrikaans on African language speaking learners as the language of instruction and testing. Language was also used, especially in the primary school, as a means for establishing the cultural particularity and apartness of black learners; while white, Indian, and coloured children had to learn two languages, African children had to learn three (for long periods, as early as the third grade). Third, curricula contained racial biases favouring whites, and the stereotyping of the black population as tribal, rural and backward. Ideological content was added to the syllabuses specifically for black learners presenting a narrow (largely rural) and static view of ‘Bantu society’, and referencing some folk and historical heroes as well as contemporary apartheid arrangements and governing institutions for the black population. Fourth, and throughout the period, curricula constructed during apartheid were subject-based and content-driven, with minimal explicit conceptual content-skill relationships made. Knowledge across curriculum reforms was regarded as ‘given’ and strong boundaries were maintained between different subjects.

Among South Africa’s education sector pedagogical thought leaders, there was an enduring progressivist thrust in curriculum, both inside and outside of the state, sustained through the decades up until the transition to democracy in 1994. To be sure, official attempts at curriculum innovation in the 1970s and 1980s were largely piecemeal—often consisting of taking out contents or adding in new contents in different subjects. But there also were ongoing micro-reforms, often influenced by trends in the United States and United Kingdom, notably ideas arising out of progressive reforms there. Galant ( 1997 ) gives the example that, between 1974 and 1984, at least five new syllabuses were introduced in South Africa following the ‘new maths’ movement in Europe. However, these largely had effect in white schools only. There was also a significant amount of curriculum work being done outside of state institutions, as alternatives to the traditional curriculum forms developed during the apartheid era.

2.5.2 A Radical Curriculum for Democracy

The first post-apartheid curriculum, Curriculum 2005 (C2005), introduced in 1998, was a radical constructivist curriculum that emphasised a learner-centred, outcomes-based approach to teaching and learning. It backgrounded prescribed knowledge content, leaving it to teachers and learners to select the appropriate content or precise method in order to achieve specified outcomes. Textbooks and testing were regarded as authoritarian and backward-looking, and were dispensed with (apart from the Grade 12 examination). C2005 was framed as a ‘radical break’ from the apartheid past. It was essentially a reform focused on pedagogy—intent on shifting authoritarian relations of classrooms, defined by bureaucratic routine, deferential ritual and whole class, choral production of knowledge at a very low level of cognitive complexity. In the process of addressing issues of pedagogy, knowledge and its specification was lost.

What is often missed in the accounts of the shift from apartheid to C2005 is that although the changes introduced represented a radical departure from the past for black schools, for white schools (which had been part of the final progressive curriculum reforms of the apartheid era) there was much continuity between the new curriculum and established pedagogic practices (Harley and Wedekind, 2004). Thus, the schools where teachers were in the first place less qualified, were also the schools who were most disadvantaged by the very unfamiliar terms of the new curriculum.

2.5.3 Reforming the Reform

The new curriculum, C2005, quickly came under severe criticism. What became clear in its implementation was its complexity, incomprehensible to many, and inappropriate for the majority of classroom contexts (Jansen and Christie, 1999 ). The system was unprepared for the shift to a radical, learner-centred, outcomes-based curriculum—introduced in a very short space of time, with very little training. A review of the curriculum followed in 2000, presenting the central critique of C2005 as barring access to school knowledge for both learners and teachers. The fact that the curriculum had removed most of subject content, and replaced it with outcomes expressed as generic skills, meant that teachers were expected to select the appropriate content and design ‘learning programmes’ themselves. Teachers in more advantaged schools were confident, well advised, and could rely on past experience and training in selecting content from their field of specialisation to construct appropriate learning programmes for students. However, in the majority of schools, poor prior training, and a lack of school-level support made this impossible. Pedagogic practices of the past, entailing the communal production of low level, localised content, persisted. The central difference was that learners sat in groups—group work becoming for many teachers a graspable outward form of the curriculum they could implement, masking real change in the classroom.

The 2000 review introduced a second iteration of this curriculum, the National Curriculum Statement. It retained the outcomes-based framework, but delineated more clearly content knowledge and appropriate methodologies for teaching. It also attempted to reassert the importance of summative assessment (tests and examinations). The retention of outcomes, however, would prove politically contentious and pedagogically problematic. Under increasing pressure of poor student academic outcomes and stringent public criticism of the outcomes-based education framework, a further review was initiated in 2009; in 2012 the current curriculum, the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) was implemented. In this curriculum, outcomes-based education was abandoned in favour of clear, per grade content stipulation, as well as specified pacing and sequencing requirements for the curriculum. The importance of textbooks as key pedagogical resources for both students and teachers was reasserted. A programme of distributing curriculum-aligned workbooks to all learners was entrenched. CAPS thus established a clear and stable curriculum-based signalling system for teacher training, the development of textbooks, and accountability for classroom practice. The highly specified curriculum would also lay an important basis for experimentation in instructional reform, discussed below.

Teacher training did not receive the same levels of attention as curriculum reform—and was complicated by the under-stipulated nature of C2005. Thus, teachers schooled and trained through Bantu education under apartheid lacked opportunity to overcome the legacy of a very poor preparation for teaching. Without teachers gaining a better content understanding of subjects to be taught, not simply new and complex ways in which to teach them, there was unlikely to be significant change in classroom practices and learning outcomes. Although more recently there has been some shift in instructional practices (Hoadley, 2018 ), especially in the number of texts in classrooms, many of the practices dominant under apartheid, the communalized, slow pace of learning and low level of classroom content, persist in the majority of classrooms (Hoadley, 2012 ). The clear specification in the CAPS of what content is to be covered when and in what order has promise to shift these practices both directly in classrooms and through defining subject-specific teacher training requirements more precisely.

2.5.4 Cognitive Achievement after the Transformation

This is a complicated story, and much depends on what countries one compares South Africa with, and on what issues. One can start with the most commonly held and alarming part of the story: that South Africa, in comparison with the world as a whole, or at least in comparison with the parts of the world that participate in assessments such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) or Progress on International Literacy Study (PIRLS) (repeated approximately every three years since 1995), performs badly, in absolute terms (last or nearly last—but noting that most countries that participate in these assessments are wealthy countries with long-established education systems), but also, perhaps more alarmingly, relative to its level of per capita income and the level of fiscal effort devoted to education. In exercises predicting results in TIMSS Grade 4 Mathematics for 2015, and PIRLS 2016, using GDP per capita and public spending on education as a share of GDP as predictors, for instance, South Africa’s actual performance is much worse than expected—in fact, South Africa is perhaps one of the ‘worst’ outliers. Figure 2.8 shows predicted performance on the horizontal axis and actual performance on the vertical axis. South Africa is clearly a negative outlier—and this is at least fifteen years after the end of apartheid, when the system has had at least ten years to ‘practice’ with improving lives for the children who take this assessment.

South Africa as an efficiency outlier in TIMSS and PIRLS

In the case of SACMEQ III (2007) data, South Africa appears not so much as an under-performing outlier. Part of the reason for this is that in making comparisons in SACMEQ, the total score achieved by students is affected by the degree to which the country has a high primary school completion rate: countries with a higher completion rate are making a bigger ‘access effort’ in reaching out to previously un-served portions of their populations, and are thus trying to educate those who are harder to educate (e.g. may be first-generation literates in their families). Once this is corrected for, 10 what is interesting is not so much that South Africa is a negative outlier (as is the case in TIMSS 2015 and PIRLS 2016) but that (as Figure 2.9 shows) there seem to be positive outliers, namely Kenya, from which South Africa could perhaps be learning (but generally has not been, or had not been until recently). Chapter 10 explores this issue further.

Kenya as positive outlier in SACMEQ

Almost any way one looks at it, the internal distribution (the cognitive equality) of South Africa’s scores is quite poor, at least in comparison with other countries taking part in assessments such as TIMSS, PIRLS, and SACMEQ. However, using various rounds of TIMSS, inequality has decreased, even markedly if one believes the data. Taking the score produced by children at the ninety-fifth percentile of the score distribution, subtracting the score produced by children at the fifth percentile, and dividing the result by the score produced by children at the middle of the distribution is a reasonable measure of relative inequality. Typically, developing countries with low averages will tend to show higher relative inequality (because the denominator is low). Wealthier, more educationally developed countries will tend to show less inequality, both because they actually apply more effort to improve things at the bottom of their distributions, and because their averages are higher.

Table 2.2 shows some examples, and shows South Africa’s placement both at a given point in time and over time. The data are sorted from the most equal country in 2003 to some of the most unequal in 2003, 2011, and 2015. It is clear that South Africa is among the most unequal, though there are sometimes one or two that are just a bit more unequal. Table 2.3 shows the data for PIRLS 2016, showing that South Africa, has, if not quite the worst inequality results (using our index), close to it. Some developing countries which have done more work on improving equality are shown. Chile, for instance, in 2016, has nearly 40 per cent less inequality as South Africa does in PIRLS 2016. (But note only about 25 per cent less in TIMSS 2015 Grade 4 Mathematics.)

Country/year .	Score of the child at the following percentiles of the score distribution, TIMSS Grade 8, Various years .					Inequality ratio (score at 95th minus score at 5th)/score at 50th .
Country/year .	5th percentile .	25th percentile .	50th percentile .	75th percentile .	95th percentile .	.
Singapore 03	455	556	614	662	723	0.44
Australia 03	368	450	506	561	634	0.53
Chile 15	297	372	427	482	560	0.62
Jordan 03	279	362	427	488	567	0.67
Chile 03	258	328	382	441	531	0.71
Turkey 15	289	385	454	531	634	0.76
Saudi Arabia 03	204	279	331	385	460	0.77
SA 15 (Gr 9)	242	311	364	426	529	0.79
SA 11 (Gr 9)	229	295	343	398	516	0.84
Ghana 03	130	213	274	337	430	1.09
SA 03	117	191	248	316	484	1.48

Country/year .	Score of the child at the following percentiles of the score distribution, TIMSS Grade 8, Various years .					Inequality ratio (score at 95th minus score at 5th)/score at 50th .
Country/year .	5th percentile .	25th percentile .	50th percentile .	75th percentile .	95th percentile .	.
Singapore 03	455	556	614	662	723	0.44
Australia 03	368	450	506	561	634	0.53
Chile 15	297	372	427	482	560	0.62
Jordan 03	279	362	427	488	567	0.67
Chile 03	258	328	382	441	531	0.71
Turkey 15	289	385	454	531	634	0.76
Saudi Arabia 03	204	279	331	385	460	0.77
SA 15 (Gr 9)	242	311	364	426	529	0.79
SA 11 (Gr 9)	229	295	343	398	516	0.84
Ghana 03	130	213	274	337	430	1.09
SA 03	117	191	248	316	484	1.48

Country .	Score of the child at the following percentiles of the score distribution, PIRLS Grade 4 (Reading) .					Inequality ratio (score at 95th minus score at 5th)/score at 50th .
Country .	5th percentile .	25th percentile .	50th percentile .	75th percentile .	95th percentile .	.
Singapore	432	528	570	633	695	0.38
Chile	356	442	489	550	614	0.42
Iran	226	361	420	505	581	0.61
Morocco	180	282	350	436	529	0.66
South Africa	147	246	311	390	498	0.70
Egypt	112	246	319	420	520	0.78

Country .	Score of the child at the following percentiles of the score distribution, PIRLS Grade 4 (Reading) .					Inequality ratio (score at 95th minus score at 5th)/score at 50th .
Country .	5th percentile .	25th percentile .	50th percentile .	75th percentile .	95th percentile .	.
Singapore	432	528	570	633	695	0.38
Chile	356	442	489	550	614	0.42
Iran	226	361	420	505	581	0.61
Morocco	180	282	350	436	529	0.66
South Africa	147	246	311	390	498	0.70
Egypt	112	246	319	420	520	0.78

The inequality in South Africa looms particularly large also in comparison with other countries in the SACMEQ region. Figure 2.10 shows each country’s average reading and mathematics scores in 2007 (SACMEQ III) in the bars. Differences, in each country, between the performance of high and low SES students are shown as lines. One line (solid) shows the absolute difference, that is the difference in points scored, between the high-SES and the low-SES students. Another line (dotted) shows the difference divided by the average score: a more thorough indicator of inequality, if perhaps a slightly harder one to understand. 11 Countries are shown ranked from left to right in order of overall performance. This helps make it clear, comparing the size of the bars and the slope of the lines, that in general (in the case of SACMEQ—no such assertion can be made for other cross-country assessments) there is an association between increasing average scores and increasing inequality. South Africa is seen to be of middling performance in terms of the total score. But the most striking thing is that in spite of South Africa’s average performance being only middling, its inequality as measured using either of the measures noted, was distinctly the highest, especially taking the relative (dotted) measure into account. 12

South Africa as an inequality outlier, SACMEQ data

2.5.5 Recent Upticks in Performance

The low results for South Africa, especially when one controls for fiscal effort made in favour of education and for GDP per capita, and also the inequality in the results distribution, have been alarming, especially as they are evident ten to fifteen years after the changes that would supposedly benefit the children were crafted. Some, as noted above, foresaw likely low impact from early on. However, more recently there have been some signs of hope. First, as van der Berg and Gustafsson ( 2017 ) have shown, recent levels of improvement of South Africa in TIMSS are quite fast, comparable to Brazil’s improvements on PISA—themselves quite fast. Table 2.2 shows that, at the fiftieth percentile (the median), South Africa’s TIMSS performance between 2011 and 2015 improved by about twenty points. Van der Berg and Gustafsson ( 2017 ) explain that Brazil’s improvement in PISA, of about 0.06 of a standard deviation per year, is at about the upper limit of how quickly countries can improve, and that South Africa’s improvement is on a par with Brazil’s. Whether these trends will continue, and how truly solid they ultimately are (they seem to be) would be hard to say. But for now they seem to bode well. The same authors show improved results in the equity of matric results in more or less the same period (roughly 2008 to 2015). And this lines up well with the evidence on the reduced inequality in TIMSS results presented in Table 2.2 .

At the same time, at the pilot project level, it seems as if fast improvements are possible and are documented, even in underprivileged schools, via what Fleisch ( n.d. ), and Fleisch ( 2016 ) calls a ‘turn to the instructional core’ and sometimes the ‘triple cocktail’ of simplified curricular lesson plans, vastly improved and intensified coaching of teachers, instructional and curricular materials that (perhaps for the first time) are aligned a) with the lesson plans and with vastly improved and increased coaching and b) are available in the home language of the learners. 13 A description of the components of these early grades reading projects is to be found at Department of Basic Education ( 2017 ). To some extent, these efforts represent the most serious attempt, perhaps since the end of apartheid, to reverse the litany of cogent critiques of classroom instruction presented by Hoadley ( 2012 ) and are documented perhaps most succinctly and accessibly in Spaull and Hoadley ( 2017 ). 14 Even earlier, however, critics of C2005 had experimented with methods of direct instruction that seemed to work well, at least at imparting basic concepts (Schollar, 2015 ).

Now, one might over-read into these glimmers of hope, because of the usual ‘external validity’ problem of pilot projects and randomized controlled trials. However, there is a lot of evidence from other countries that the basic ‘formula’, elsewhere referred to as ‘structured pedagogy’, (Snilstveit et al., 2015) used in these particular efforts in South Africa, does work in general, and are thus less of a concern over what one might call pedagogical or cultural external validity. 15 This is part of a broader worldwide trend towards ‘teaching at the right level’ while eschewing the damage created by curricula and teaching and lesson approaches that are theoretically ambitious but very badly implemented in practice. 16 While strong evidence would suggest that these programs do not suffer from much of a pedagogical or cultural external validity problem, they could suffer from the usual ‘exhaustion when taken to scale by government problem’, whereby, when a programme is implemented by government, the necessary fidelity which can be guaranteed by good governance and accountability is lost, as has been documented in other cases (see Bold et al., 2013 ).

But serious concerns remain. The glimmers of hope noted above seem real enough. But they are either not big, or if big, not sustained (yet) over any serious length of time. Or, the changes refer only to pilot projects, sometimes without rigorous randomized controls (though sometimes with). South Africa’s educational outcomes are so far behind other middle-income countries, as noted above, that stronger remedies seem necessary, and most commentators on the scene do not see them. Either the lists of remedies scholars provide are very long, or the remedies would seem to require using up quite a bit of political capital. The pedagogical dysfunctionalities observed in the classroom and reported by Hoadley ( 2012 ) are many and profound. Nick Taylor, writing for DPME/Department of Basic Education ( 2017 ), notes that time management in schools remains poor, teacher content knowledge is way below what is needed to sustain instruction, formative assessment is weak, and teaching and learning materials are not always present. He lays particular blame on corruption, nepotism, and usage of union power to select often inappropriate teachers—in essence, governance and management problems.

2.6 Tentative Conclusions

To speak of the results of the transformation as if they could be causally traced to the transformation would be mistaken. Policy changes as massive as those wrought in South Africa are hardly controlled experiments; any mention of causality therefore should be seen with suspicion. We occasionally lapse into language that seems to assign causality because it is inelegant to be qualifying constantly. But the proviso holds throughout.

The thesis of this section, and hence of the whole chapter, could be put something like this:

Governance was reformed and unified in ways which were responsive to both the imperatives of South Africa’s broader political settlement, and to normative conceptions of ‘good practice’ which prevailed at the time, both globally and within South Africa.

The government succeeded in transferring resources in a sharp manner. Perhaps not as much as would have been desired by progressive educationists, but to an extent that is unprecedentedly large relative to the international experience and, strikingly, was achieved within a framework of severe macroeconomic constraint.

The curriculum was reformed and unified so as to do away with odious apartheid implications and at the same time to ‘modernize’ it according to the dominant global and national perceptions of the day, recognizing that even under apartheid certain ‘modernizing’ reforms had already started.

Yet, at least by the middle 2000s, or approximately ten years after the formal end of apartheid and the start of the transformations, there seemed not to be much to show for the effort, particularly viewed from the twin lenses of efficiency and equity. Numbers (‘access’) had increased a little (in some sub-sectors a lot). But learning outcomes, and their inequality, in particular, seemed largely stuck, in spite of some glimmers of hope.

The general view continues to be that the overall effort has been a failure. Indeed, almost immediately upon the announcement of the reforms, especially the curricular reforms, critics such as Jansen ( 2001 ) had noted these reforms could not possibly work, or at least not to the extent of the hopes pinned upon them.

The conclusion might be that the better-off segments of the system, at the outset of the transformations, were able to weather the changes in funding, either by self-funding or by becoming more efficient. It is also possible to conclude that they were able to either tune out some of the least useful of the curricular reforms, had already adapted them (given that some of the curricular reforms pre-dated the end of apartheid), or were able to adapt them in light of what they saw as more sensible, given that these segments of the sector had much better-trained teachers, and given that the governance of these schools trusted (and had good reasons to trust) the professionalism of the teachers (and principals). These segments of the system were those where ‘good governance’ (defined elsewhere in this book) was common.

In other segments of the system, however, neither teachers nor other officials within the education bureaucracy had the training, background, and incentives to put in the hard effort it would have taken to interpret the new curricular and teaching/learning dispensations in a manner that made sense to them and for their environment. Nor, of course, notwithstanding the enhanced role afforded them vis-à-vis school-level governance, were parents in a position to provide support for implementation of the new approaches. Schools on the whole seem unable to make much use of the extra non-personnel funding allocated via the Funding Norms. Informality and maybe even corruption seem to be playing a role in preventing good management.

But things continue to evolve. Some pilot research has shown that, at least in the lower grades, there are sensible ways to simplify and structure the curriculum so that children learn better. These simplified approaches are also easier, in principle, for parents to supervise and in that sense might fit better with a governance model that provides School Governing Bodies considerable power—though the whole notion of the sorts of stable, idealized ‘parenthood’ envisioned in the South African Schools Act might be problematic in the South African context. In that sense, presuming that additional study and evidence confirms the seemingly compelling evidence from pilot projects, curricular simplification or, at any rate, clearer specification of lesson plans and more direct teaching (along with delivery of more and better learning materials and capacity building for teachers) could be nicely made to coincide with a revamped role for localized parental accountability, if governance could be improved along the lines explored in later chapters of this book.

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The figure uses both a formally estimated semi-logarithmic fit of results (the ‘survival’ rate to Standard 5) on the vertical axis and inputs (cost per student) on the horizontal axis, as well as a casually estimated ‘envelope’ or ‘near envelope’ of the data.

For reasons explained below, we prefer to assure the integrity of international comparisons by using one standardized international database, in this case the World Bank’s, which derives from data reported by countries to UNESCO. If one debates the SA data, then in principle one could similarly debate the data for every single country, and these kinds of comparisons would become either impossible or very tedious to read. The point of using a large number of comparators is to support fairly general statements such as those we make here.

See n. 7 for a discussion of the comparator countries.

A Google search for ‘World Bank interest in education decentralization’, for instance, produces, at the top of its search results, five documents, all produced between 1996 and 1998, some by prominent and influential thinkers such as Mark Bray, Edward Fiske, and Harry Patrinos (Bray, 1996 ; Fiske, 1996 ; Patrinos and Ariasingam, 1997 ).

See, for example, Mandela (2004), Sparks (1996), Marais (1998), Seekings and Nattrass (2005), Gevisser (2007), and Welsh (2009).

In South Africa, public education dominates, both historically and to the present day; as of 2016, about 95% of school-going children were enrolled in the public system. See https://www.education.gov.za/Portals/0/Documents/Reports/School%20Realities%202016%20Final.pdf?ver=2016-11-30-111439-223 , p. 3.

For this section, we constructed a set of comparator countries consisting of countries that were a) upper-middle income in the period 1990–95, according to the World Bank’s classification for that period, b) were ‘big enough to have complexity and interest’ (our judgement—examples include Antigua and Barbuda, Malta, etc.), and c) not oil-rich (Gabon, Saudi Arabia, etc.). The resulting comparator countries were Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Malaysia, Mexico, Slovenia, South Africa, and Uruguay. As is often the case in using international databases, not all countries have data for all variables in all years, so the medians for the comparators have to be interpreted with caution: only for the overall sense of direction. Note that in principle, it would have been possible to use South African data for the South African case, but we opted to use World Bank data for all countries, as this would provide a standardized set where data would, hopefully, be maximally comparable to each other.

For instance, Andrew Donaldson (1992), who would become a prominent actor in the Ministry of Finance, was already noting in the early 1990s that the education system in South Africa was notoriously inefficient: ‘“Internal efficiency” is of course not the only aspect of the economic efficiency of the education system, but it is all too easily neglected…And in South Africa, improved educational opportunities must be afforded to some 10m children…although available financial resources are stretched more or less to their limits. In these circumstances, improving the “internal efficiency” of the education system is the only way forward…I take the view that there is scope for improvements in the way schooling and training are organized and provided in South Africa, that this is an arena in which the post-apartheid state can meet substantially the rising expectations of the new electorate, and that reorganising the education industry will lay an important foundation for sustainable long-term economic growth’.

The age groups in question are three to twenty-four, to take into account pre-primary and even pre-Grade 0 pre-primary all the way up to tertiary.

Using SACMEQ data we have corrected for ‘access effort’ by creating a simple index of human capital contemporaneously produced by the country, by taking the SACMEQ score (averaging reading and mathematics) times the primary school completion rate (divided by 100, to keep the numbers in the same range as the scores). This score is then controlled by the speed with which the completion rate has been improved (increasing the completion quickly would presumably drain resources away from improving learning outcomes), the fiscal effort the country devotes to education (education expenditure as a share of GDP), and GDP per capita.

Note that the scores and the absolute differences between the low and high SES levels are shown as bars on the left-hand vertical scale, whereas the relative differences (high minus low divided by the mean) are shown as lines, on the right-hand vertical scale.

Inequality also happens to have increased between 2000 and 2007, though this is not shown in the graphic. Inequality seems to have increased in all countries, but it increased most for South Africa.

See https://internationalednews.com/2015/06/10/brahm-fleisch-on-building-a-new-infrastructure-for-learning-in-gauteng-south-africa/ . Also see Spaull’s weblog on the ideas behind Early Grade Reading projects in South Africa, at https://nicspaull.com/ .

It is important to note that the ineffective techniques noted by these various authors, which the pilot projects are reversing, are not necessarily ‘due’ to post-apartheid curricular reforms. These practices have been endured by poor South African children for many decades; but the confused idealism of the post-apartheid curricular reforms did nothing to improve on the situation or, in some cases, could have made it worse. This would be especially the case where parents are not able to understand the nature of the transformations and are under-equipped to hold teachers accountable for ineffective practices, teachers found the new practices bewildering, and districts were unable to help.

See literature such as Piper and Korda ( 2010 ) from Liberia and Freudenberger and Davis ( 2017 ) from Kenya. Kelly and Graham ( 2017 ) mention many other country cases. Patrinos describes the Papua New Guinea case ( https://hpatrinos.com/tag/papua-new-guinea-education-early-grade-reading/ ).

Banerjee et al. ( 2016 ) and Pritchett and Beatty ( 2012 ) discuss the global experience.

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The History and Devolution of Education in South Africa

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Christopher B. Meek &
Joshua Y. Meek

Part of the book series: CERC Studies in Comparative Education ((CERC,volume 24))

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Since the changeover from South Africa's apartheid system and government (which had been heavily influenced by South Africa's elite Afrikaner leaders and the secret Afrikaner society the Broderbond ) in 1994, much has been expected of the post-apartheid government in terms of greater equalization of opportunities in all aspects of life. This includes education. Although South Africa's education system is definitely structured differently than it was prior to the end of apartheid, unfortunately, access to high-quality education for all citizens regardless of race has yet to be fully realized. Wealthy and middle-class Blacks have been able to access the best education available to any White child, but for poor and working-class Black families which make up the majority of South African citizens by the tens of millions, this is not the case. In part, this is because the roots of separate and unequal education are so deeply embedded in South African society. However, the key factor on which these inequalities rests now tends to be socioeco-nomic class rather than race. Given that the poorest and least educated of all South Africans during the apartheid regime were Black, class distinctions tend to be tantamount to the same racial distinctions that existed during apartheid. However, a very small proportion of South African families in professional and managerial jobs, as well as in political leadership, now have access to the same educational opportunities as middle- and upper-class White families by attending South Africa's best educational academies.

Later in this chapter, we will explain why the system—and educational opportunity for all citizens—has changed so little since democracy was extended to all of South Africa's citizens. First, however, we need to understand the history of education in South Africa especially as it was designed, structured, and administered during the apartheid era.

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Meek, C.B., Meek, J.Y. (2008). The History and Devolution of Education in South Africa. In: Holsinger, D.B., Jacob, W.J. (eds) Inequality in Education. CERC Studies in Comparative Education, vol 24. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2652-1_22

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Introduction

Unequal education: apartheid's legacy

Rediscovered activism
Educational haves and have-nots
Broken windows, missing books
Campaign for school infrastructure
Going to court
Settlement and a draft
Rushing into a quandary
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The Europeans who colonized Africa generally viewed the natives as intellectually and morally inferior, and exploited the labor of the local populations. Thus it was no surprise that when, in the early 20th century, colonial governments instituted public education systems, the goal was to prepare young Africans to be compliant laborers. In Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe), for instance, the formal British education policy aimed to “develop a vast pool of cheap unskilled manual labor.” [1] The result was, in effect, two school systems: one appropriately subsidized, and the other chronically under-resourced.

In South Africa, the minority white population retained control of the government when the then-Union of South Africa gained full independence from the United Kingdom in 1931. At the time, the education system was segregated and unequal. As one history recounted, “While white schooling was free, compulsory and expanding, black education was sorely neglected. Underfunding and an urban influx led to gravely insufficient schooling facilities, teachers and educational materials as well as student absenteeism or non-enrollment.” [2]

In 1948, 90 percent of the few black South Africans who went to school attended mission schools that were answerable to the country’s provincial governments. That year, the Afrikaner-dominated National Party won control of the white government and instituted the infamous apartheid system. Under apartheid, the government forced everyone to register her or his race and further restricted where nonwhites could live and work. It also established separate public amenities for whites and nonwhites similar to the US South during segregation. Education was a key component of apartheid, and the Bantu Education Act of 1953 centralized black South African education and brought it under the control of the national government. [3] The public schools that replaced the mission schools were funded via a tax paid by black South Africans; the monies raised were inadequate to maintain the schools properly. In 1961, just 10 percent of black teachers had graduated from high school. By 1967, the student-teacher ratio had risen to 58 to 1. [4]

Soweto. In June 1976, high school students in Soweto, a black township on the southwest side of Johannesburg, organized a mass protest against unequal education. On June 16, thousands of students marched through the streets on their way to a rally at a stadium. The South African police broke up the march using dogs, batons, tear gas and, ultimately, gunfire. The police action and ensuing confrontations with the police left hundreds of students dead and more than a thousand injured. [5] The events of the day sparked a nationwide uprising, made Soweto an emblem of the anti-apartheid movement, put the apartheid education system in the spotlight, and cemented the role of students in the nation’s political struggle.

Nearly two decades later, on April 27, 1994, the African National Congress (ANC) won South Africa’s first democratic election, ending apartheid and the era of white minority rule. The country’s new constitution declared that all children had the right to a basic education. But overcoming apartheid’s legacy of severe educational inequality was a monumental task. In the first years after the constitution’s adoption, formerly nonwhite schools, meaning black, colored and Indian, graduated far fewer students than formerly white schools. Formerly black schools, which remained nearly 100 percent black, had abysmal matriculation rates.

As of 2000, 10 percent of formerly black schools graduated fewer than 20 percent of their students, 35 percent graduated 20-39 percent, 32 percent graduated 40-59 percent, 16 percent graduated 60-79 percent, and just 7 percent graduated 80-100 percent of their students. In contrast, 2 percent of formerly white schools graduated 60-79 percent of their students, and 98 percent graduated 80-100 percent. [6]

[1] Dickson A. Mungazi, Colonial education for Africans: George Stark's policy in Zimbabwe , New York: Praeger, 1991.

[2] Bantu Education Policy , South African History Online. See http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/bantu-education-policy

[5] South African History Online lists 383 names as casualties of the uprising. See: http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/june-16-soweto-youth-uprising?page=8

[6] Servaas van der Berg, “Apartheid’s Enduring Legacy: Inequalities in Education,” Journal of African Economies , Volume 16, Number 5, published online August 2, 2007, pp. 849–880.

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Apartheid Education

Apartheid was a system of government in South Africa, abolished in 1994, which systematically separated groups on the basis of race classification. The Apartheid system of racial segregation was made law in South Africa in 1948, when the country was officially divided into four racial groups, White, Black, Indian and Coloureds (or people of mixed race, or non-Whites who did not fit into the other non-White categories). ‘Homelands’ were created for Blacks, and when they lived outside of the homelands with Whites, non-Whites could not vote and had separate schools and hospitals, and even beaches where they could swim or park benches they could sit on.

It was a criminal offence for a White person to have sexual relations with a person of another race, but the person of the other race, not the White, would be prosecuted as a result. The system of Apartheid came to an end when President Nelson Mandela came to power in 1994

A classroom in Crossroads, a squatter township in South Africa, 1979. ] ‘Apartheid’ means ‘being apart’ in Dutch and Afrikaans, a variation of Dutch spoken by the Dutch settlers of South Africa.

With these notorious words, Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd introduced Bantu Education to Parliament in 1953. This began the era of apartheid education. In 1959 universities were segregated. In 1963 a separate education system was set up for the ‘coloureds.’ Indian education followed in 1964. And an Education Act for whites was passed in 1967 …

The 37 million people who live in South Africa [in 1990, just before the end of Apartheid] … are … officially divided into four ‘population groups’: ‘African’ (about 75%—of whom some 45% are under the age of 15), ‘Whites’ (13%), ‘Coloureds’ (9%) and ‘Indians’ (3%). Apart from a few ‘mixed’ ‘private’ schools, there are separate schools for the four ‘population groups’; it is illegal for a person to attend a state school designated for a ‘population group’ other than that to which she has officially been assigned, or for a school to admit as a pupil someone from the ‘wrong population group’.

Along almost any dimension of comparison, there have been, and are glaring inequalities between the four schooling systems in South Africa. This applies to teacher qualifications, teacher-pupil ratios, per capita funding, buildings, equipment, facilities, books, stationery … and also to ‘results’ measured in terms of the proportions and levels of certificates awarded. Along these dimensions, “White’ schools are far better off than any of the others, and ‘Indian’ and ‘Coloured’ schools are better off than those for ‘Africans’. Schooling is compulsory for ‘Whites’, ‘Indians’ and ‘Coloureds’ but not for ‘Africans’.

When the apartheid government came to power in 1948, it saw the schooling system as the major vehicle for the propagation of its beliefs. For the period of its duration, schools were one of the system’s most stark symbols. Today, as a new and democratic government seeks to repair and reconstruct the fabric of South Africa’s ravaged past, it is to the schooling system that much of its attention has turned.

The structure for education was marked by the central principle of apartheid, namely separate schooling infrastructure for separate groups. In terms of the apartheid principle, nineteen education departments were established. Each designated ethnic group had its own education infrastructure.

Curriculum development in South African education during the period of apartheid was controlled tightly from the center. While theoretically, at least, each separate department had its own curriculum development and protocols, in reality curriculum formation in South Africa was dominated by committees attached to the white House of Assembly … So prescriptive was this system, abetted on the one hand by a network of inspectors and subject advisors and on the other by several generations of poorly qualified teachers, that authoritarianism, rote learning, and corporal punishment were the rule. These conditions were exacerbated in the impoverished environments of schools for children of color. Examination criteria and procedures were instrumental in promoting the political perspectives of those in power and allowed teachers very little latitude to determine standards or to interpret the work of their students.

Morrow, Walter Eugene. 1990. ‘Aims of Education in South Africa.’ International Review of Education/Internationale Zeitschrift fur Erziehunswissenschaft/Revue Internationale de l’Education 36:171–181. p. 174.

Gilmore, David, Crain Soudien and David Donald. 1999. ‘Post-Apartheid Policy and Practice: Educational Reform in South Africa.’ Pp. 341–350 in Education in a Global Society: A Comparative Perspective, edited by Mazurek Kas, Margaret Winzer and Czeslaw Czeslaw Majorek. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. pp. 341–343. || Amazon || WorldCat

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This first chapter outlines South Africa’s early history, from native groups living in the region to Europeans settling and gradually exercising colonial control over African peoples. This period of colonization helped shape how these groups conceived of their identities as well as how they saw others.

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Inside this chapter, explore the readings, introduction: before apartheid, african identities, indian identities: mohandas k. gandhi, afrikaner identity, africans resist white control, mines in south africa, you might also be interested in…, the 1963 chicago public school boycott, standing up to hatred on cable street, standing up for democracy, teaching resources for the us elections, current events toolkit, current events in the classroom, materials for from reflection to action, introducing the concept of race, addressing racist and dehumanising language, creating a society in which everyone can thrive, supporting question 4: memory of the founding, reflecting on climate change and ecological grief, unlimited access to learning. more added every month..

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		Global Perspectives on Human Language: The South African Context


			Updated 9-19-2004 "Challenging the past and moving beyond the legacy of apartheid" is how the South African Department of Education plans to work towards social justice and equity with the introduction of the new curriculum titled "Curriculum 2005" (Asmal). Eliminating the overt racism in educational policies is the first step in challenging the past, but other factors of social inequalities need to be addressed to minimize the racial inequalities in education for the future. The Apartheid system created educational inequalities through overt racist policies (see ). The Bantu Education Act of 1952 ensured that Blacks receive an education that would limit educational potential and remain in the working class (UCT). This policy directly affected the content of learning to further racial inequalities by preventing access to further education. In addition to content, apartheid legislation affected the educational potential of students. School was compulsory for Whites from age seven to sixteen, for Asians and Coloureds from seven to fifteen, and for Blacks from age seven to thirteen (US Library of Congress). Clearly, the less education students received, the fewer choices they had in the working world and in accessing more education. Since these policies ensured that the content and amount of education perpetuated social inequalities, changing these policies in a post-apartheid era was the logical step towards social equality. Educational inequality was also evident in funding. The Bantu Education Act created separate Departments of Education by race, and it gave less money to Black schools while giving most to Whites (UCT). Since funding determines the amount and quality of learning materials, facilities, and teachers, disproportionate funding clearly created disparities in learning environments. For instance, Apartheid funding resulted in an average teacher pupil ratio of 1:18 in white schools, 1:24 in Asian schools, 1:27 in Coloured schools, and 1:39 in Black schools (US Library of Congress). Furthermore, the apartheid system also affected the quality of teachers. White schools had 96% of teachers with teaching certificates, while only 15% of teachers in Black schools were certified (Garson). In addition to affecting the quality of education, the Bantu Education Act also resulted in the closure of many learning institutions since it withdrew funding from schools affiliated with religion. Since many church schools provided education for a large number of Blacks, the Black students were the ones most profoundly impacted by the withdrawal of these funds (US Library of Congress). Although the government explained its actions under the premise of separation of church and state, eliminating schools that serve Blacks is an ultimate form of educational injustice. The policies and funding disparities in schools ensured contrasting access to higher education. Four Afrikaans speaking universities and one English speaking university admitted only Whites, while the other five had restricted admission and segregated classrooms (US Library of Congress). Additionally, there was no financial aid, and banks did not give out loans to Blacks or Coloureds (Knipe-Solomon). This means that even if students could break through working class instruction with under-qualified teachers in overcrowded classrooms, they still faced financial barriers to achieving their academic goals. Since the apartheid era, many policy changes have occurred within education to try to address educational inequalities. Integration has occurred in the school system, and school is compulsory for nine years for all races (Garson). Although Bantu education ideology has been officially left behind, schools are still under de facto segregation. Whites have moved to private schools, and suburban schools have a majority of Coloured students, while township schools are overwhelmingly Black, and rural schools tend to have Black and Coloured students (Knipe-Solomon). The Global Perspectives on Human Language: the South African Context seminar witnessed this when visiting schools. Chris Hani Independent School is a township school that operates in tin shacks with at least forty students per shack. They have volunteer teachers and limited resources. All students are Black. Elizabethfontein School is a rural school with students who travel so far to attend school that they must stay in the school hostels during the week. The students are Coloured. Although diversity exists in the Cape Town area schools, the student populations of individual sites remains largely homogeneous based on race, and the quality of schools follows this division. Despite policy efforts to equalize education among races, there still exist many seemingly racially neutral policies to funding that may disproportionately and negatively affect Blacks and Coloureds. The government spends 20% of its budget on education. Administrative responsibility rests with the nine provinces along with elected school governance bodies to decide how to spend their education budgets (Garson). The government attempts to address inequalities through a funding plan that divides schools into five strata according to income levels in the community where the lower income level receives the higher funding per pupil (Pearce). This funding system is definitely a large step towards improving historical disadvantages, but these funds are not enough to operate schools. Schools receive a minimum amount from the government, and parents are required to pay a fee to the school; fees vary considerably depending on factors such as class size, facilities, and the quality of teaching offered (Garson). For example, former white schools in suburbs charge R10,000 ($1,500), and other schools charge R150 (about $25) a year (Pearce). These differences in fees result in disparities between the qualities of schools. Private schools have one teacher for every fifteen students, while schools with extra fees have a maximum of thirty students per class, and poorer schools have as many as forty to fifty per teacher (Garson). While acknowledging that more students have been introduced to the education system since Apartheid ended, these ratios are still more widespread than those during apartheid. The difference now is that Bantu Education is gone, and blacks are unofficially at the bottom. This segregation in schools is due to the cross between race and socio-economic status. When apartheid ended in 1994, Africans earned an average of just 20% of Whites (O'Gorman). Blacks obviously will have less economic means to pay for a higher quality of education. Some schools have parents with 90% unemployment (Pearce). In this case, schools must charge smaller fees in communities that need the most resources to provide a higher quality of education. Furthermore, "While 65% of whites over 20 years old and 40% of Indians have high school or higher qualification, this figure is only 14% among Blacks and 17% among the Coloured population" (Pearce). Because apartheid education aimed at keeping blacks and Coloured at the lower end of the socio-economic system, they will have less means to pay the high fees for the good quality schools. Disparities in access, funding, and quality of education are not limited to primary and secondary schools. Inequalities also exist in the higher education system. There is no financial aid to go to college (Knipe-Solomon). Since Blacks and Coloureds historically have been limited to working class jobs, the ability to fund an education for younger generations is a challenge many families cannot overcome. Furthermore, overseas scholarships ended after apartheid ended (Knipe-Solomon). Here again, racial inequalities are perpetuated through lack of access to higher education. It is impossible to address the inequalities in education without taking into account the economic disparities resulting from apartheid education. Contrasting tiers of the work force linger in the wake of apartheid's separatist presence; a large population of working class blacks stands out against the elite professional force comprised mainly of whites. This signifies that the education system needs to rely less on individual contributions from parents for compulsory education as well as higher education in order to be able to further aim at "moving past the legacy of apartheid." This ideal reform into free public education for all and financial aid for higher education requires money. Since 20% of funds already go to education, it is crucial that the Department of Education explore creative reforms to reallocate funds or find resources through other avenues, e.g. tourism in townships. These efforts will further achieve the goal of moving beyond the past and work towards a future of social justice. __________________________________ Asmal, Kader. "South African Curriculum: The Twenty First Century," Report of the Review Committee on Curriculum 2005. Presented to the Minister of Education. http://education.pwv.gov.za/Policies%20and%20Reports/2000_Reports/2005/Chisholm_2005.htm Garson, Philippa. "Education in South Africa." Accessed on 16 September 2004. www.southafrica.info/ess_info/sa_glance/education/education.htm>. Knipe-Solomon, Colleen. Interview. 16 September 2004. Interview conducted by Lizet Ocampo. O'Gorman, Melanie. "Education Disparity and Racial Earnings Inequality: Insights from South Africa and the US." 10 June, 2004. . Accessed on 16 September 2004. Pearce, Justin. "SA Poor's Education Struggle," BBC News. Accessed on 16 September 2004. . University of Cape Town Conference Talk with Members of the Writing Department, Mellon Fellow Program administrators and professors. Seminar Lecture. 8 September, 2004. US Library of Congress. Accessed on 16 September 2004.

Thursday, August 29, 2024

The effects of apartheid’s unequal education system can still be felt today

Children in an overcrowded classroom. pic aamarchives

Published Jun 16, 2016

APARTHEID’S legacy in education lives on, and the poor are still getting a poorer education, according to education expert, Graeme Bloch.

In 1953, finances for black and white schools were separated, and black children were given significantly less than white children.

In 1975/76, the state spent R644 annually on each white pupil, R189 per Indian pupil, R139 on a coloured pupil, and only R42 on an African pupil.

There was also a lack of black teachers, and many of those who did teach were underqualified.

In 1961, only 10% of black teachers held a matriculation certificate.

This perpetuated an inferior schooling system for the country’s majority.

Bloch, a former board member of Equal Education – a movement of pupils, parents, teachers and community members working for quality and equality in South African education – said 22 years after democracy, black and coloured schools in South Africa are still left under-resourced.

Bloch currently serves on the UCT council.

He has taught in the education faculty at the University of Western Cape, and was project manager for youth development at the Joint Education Trust.

He has also worked as head of Social Development in the Department of Welfare, and as Director of Social Development in the Joburg Metro.

Before 1994, he was executive member of the National Education Crisis Committee, as well as the United Democratic Front.

“Former white and Model C schools had more money and resources to a build a solid foundation for children, whereas schools in townships did not.

“This legacy lives on.

“and the poor will always get a poorer education unless there is more investment and teachers are trained,” Bloch said.

It is estimated that at least 250 000 people in Soweto were actively involved in the resistance of the Bantu Education Act, which was designed to provide black people with skills to work in manual labour jobs under white control.

That legislation deprived and disadvantaged millions for decades, and its devastating personal, political and economic effects continue to be felt today.

Prior to the Bantu Education Act, in 1949 the government appointed the Eiselen Commission to consider African education provision.

The Commission recommended “resorting to radical measures” for the “effective reform of the Bantu school system”.

The Coloured Persons Education Act of 1963 put control of “coloured” education under the Department of Coloured Affairs.

The 1965 Indian Education Act was passed to separate and control Indian education, which was placed under the Department of Indian Affairs.

No new high schools were built in Soweto between 1962 and 1971, and pupils were meant to move to their relevant homeland to attend the newly built schools there.

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@FrancescaJaneV

Apartheid legislation

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Part of the crowd of 10 000 who took part in today's bloody riots in Soweto, near Johannesburg. They were protesting against the use of Afrikaans in school teaching. 6/16/76

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apartheid - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
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Table Of Contents

racially restricted beach in apartheid-era South Africa

Apartheid ( Afrikaans : “apartness”) is the name of the policy that governed relations between the white minority and the nonwhite majority of South Africa during the 20th century. Although racial segregation had long been in practice there, the apartheid name was first used about 1948 to describe the racial segregation policies embraced by the white minority government. Apartheid dictated where South Africans, on the basis of their race, could live and work, the type of education they could receive, and whether they could vote. Events in the early 1990s marked the end of legislated apartheid, but the social and economic effects remained deeply entrenched.

Racial segregation had long existed in white minority-governed South Africa , but the practice was extended under the government led by the National Party (1948–94), and the party named its racial segregation policies apartheid ( Afrikaans : “apartness”). The Population Registration Act of 1950 classified South Africans as Bantu (black Africans), Coloured (those of mixed race), or white; an Asian (Indian and Pakistani) category was later added. Other apartheid acts dictated where South Africans, on the basis of their racial classification, could live and work, the type of education they could receive, whether they could vote, who they could associate with, and which segregated public facilities they could use.

Under the administration of the South African president F.W. de Klerk , legislation supporting apartheid was repealed in the early 1990s, and a new constitution—one that enfranchised blacks and other racial groups—was adopted in 1993. All-race national elections held in 1994 resulted in a black majority government led by prominent anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela of the African National Congress party. Although these developments marked the end of legislated apartheid, the social and economic effects of apartheid remained deeply entrenched in South African society.

The apartheid era in South African history refers to the time that the National Party led the country’s white minority government, from 1948 to 1994. Apartheid ( Afrikaans : “apartness”) was the name that the party gave to its racial segregation policies, which built upon the country’s history of racial segregation between the ruling white minority and the nonwhite majority. During this time, apartheid policy determined where South Africans, on the basis of their race, could live and work, the type of education they could receive, whether they could vote, who they could associate with, and which segregated public facilities they could use.

apartheid , policy that governed relations between South Africa ’s white minority and nonwhite majority for much of the latter half of the 20th century, sanctioning racial segregation and political and economic discrimination against nonwhites. Although the legislation that formed the foundation of apartheid had been repealed by the early 1990s, the social and economic repercussions of the discriminatory policy persisted into the 21st century.

(Read Desmond Tutu’s Britannica entry on the apartheid commission.)

Racial segregation , sanctioned by law, was widely practiced in South Africa before 1948. But when the National Party , led by Daniel F. Malan , gained office that year, it extended the policy and gave it the name apartheid . The implementation of apartheid, often called “separate development” since the 1960s, was made possible through the Population Registration Act of 1950, which classified all South Africans as either Bantu (all Black Africans), Coloured (those of mixed race), or white. A fourth category—Asian (Indian and Pakistani)—was later added. One of the other most significant acts in terms of forming the basis of the apartheid system was the Group Areas Act of 1950. It established residential and business sections in urban areas for each race, and members of other races were barred from living, operating businesses, or owning land in them—which led to thousands of Coloureds, Blacks, and Indians being removed from areas classified for white occupation. In practice, this act and two others in 1954 and 1955, which became known collectively as the Land Acts , completed a process that had begun with similar Land Acts adopted in 1913 and 1936: the end result was to set aside more than 80 percent of South Africa’s land for the white minority. To help enforce the segregation of the races and prevent Blacks from encroaching on white areas, the government strengthened the existing “pass” laws , which required nonwhites to carry documents authorizing their presence in restricted areas.

Other acts also led to physical separation of the races. Under the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951, the government reestablished tribal organizations for Black Africans, and the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959 created 8 (later expanded to 10 )African homelands, or Bantustans . The Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act of 1970 made every Black South African, irrespective of actual residence, a citizen of one of the Bantustans, which were organized on the basis of ethnic and linguistic groupings defined by white ethnographers. Blacks were stripped of their South African citizenship and thereby excluded from the South African body politic . The South African government manipulated homeland politics so that compliant chiefs controlled the administrations of most of those territories. Four of the Bantustans— Transkei , Bophuthatswana , Venda , and Ciskei —were later granted independence as republics, though none was ever recognized by a foreign government, and the remaining Bantustans had varying degrees of self-government. Regardless of their independence or self-governing status, all the Bantustans remained dependent, both politically and economically, on South Africa. The dependence of the South African economy on nonwhite labour, though, made it difficult for the government to carry out this policy of separate development.

Separate educational standards were established for nonwhites. The Bantu Education Act (1953) provided for the creation of state-run schools, which Black children were required to attend, with the goal of training the children for the manual labour and menial jobs that the government deemed suitable for those of their race. The Extension of University Education Act (1959) largely prohibited established universities from accepting nonwhite students. The government created new ethnic university colleges—one each for Coloureds, Indians, and Zulus and one for Sotho , Tswana , and Venda students as well as a medical school for Blacks.

Video thumbnail image shows Black South African schoolchildren standing behind a fence.

Other laws were also passed to legalize and institutionalize the apartheid system. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) and the Immorality Amendment Act (1950) prohibited interracial marriage or sex. The Suppression of Communism Act (1950) defined communism and its aims broadly to include any opposition to the government and empowered the government to detain anyone it thought might further “communist” aims. The Indemnity Act (1961) made it legal for police officers to commit acts of violence, to torture , or to kill in the pursuit of official duties.

The policies dictating the physical and political separation of racial groups were referred to as “grand apartheid,” while the laws and regulations that segregated South Africans in daily activities were known as “petty apartheid”—for example, those that dictated which transportation, recreation, or dining options one could utilize based on race.

South Africa: 30 years after apartheid, what has changed?

Big socio-political gains have followed apartheid but the legacy of racism and segregation is still starkly visible.

Three decades ago, on April 27, 1994, after centuries of white rule, Black South Africans voted in general elections for the first time. This marked the official end of apartheid rule, cemented days later when Nelson Mandela was sworn in as the country’s first Black president .

Since the arrival of Dutch settlers in the 1600s and British colonists in the 1700s and 1800s, South Africa had been a project that subjected Black people to systematically segregationist laws and practices.

Keep reading

‘i am prepared to die’: mandela’s speech which shook apartheid, mandela’s world: a photographic retrospective of apartheid south africa, thirty years waiting for a house: south africa’s ‘backyard’ dwellers, in search of ramadan with south africa’s men who sight the moon.

But it was the adoption of apartheid in 1948 that codified and formalised these racist practices into law. It strictly separated people into separate classes based on their skin colour, putting the white minority in the highest class, with all others, including Black, Indigenous, multi-race people, and descendants of indentured Indian workers, below them.

South Africa’s road to freedom was long and bloody – laden with the bodies of thousands of Black activists and students who dared to protest, both loudly and quietly.

The wounds of those times are still painful and visible. Black South Africans make up 81 percent of the 60 million population. But, burdened with the trauma and lingering inequalities of the past, Black communities continue to be disproportionately afflicted with poverty.

Here’s how apartheid unfolded, how it collapsed, and what has since changed in South Africa:

What was apartheid?

The Afrikaner National Party (NP) government formally codified apartheid as government policy in South Africa in 1948.

Translated from Afrikaans – a language first spoken by Dutch and German settlers – apartheid means “apart-hood” or “separateness”, and its name embodied the ways the ruling white minority sought to separate itself from, and rule over, non-white people socially and spatially.

The policies rigidly and forcefully separated South Africa’s diverse racial groups into strata: White, Coloured (multiracial), Indian, and Black. These groups had to live and develop separately – and grossly unequally – such that although they lived in the same country, it was largely impossible for any one group to mix with another.

The rules were debilitating particularly for the Black majority who were relegated to the bottom rung. Laws limited their movement and squeezed them into small sections of land. The places they were allowed to inhabit were generally impoverished and included designated “Bantustans” (rural homelands) or townships on the outskirts of cities – settlements largely built out of ramshackle corrugated iron homes that were unplanned, overcrowded and had few to no amenities.

Meanwhile, the minority white population reaped the benefits of a gold-and-diamond-powered economy and flagrantly underpaid non-white labour as it kept the lion’s share of land, resources and amenities for themselves.

Apartheid also affected Indians, at first brought into South Africa as indentured labourers and later as traders, and multiracial people, called the Coloured community, who faced segregation and discrimination but to a lesser degree than Black Africans.

What were the apartheid laws?

Apartheid was enforced through a system of strict laws that kept everything in its place. There were “Grand” laws dictating housing and employment allocations, and “Petty” laws dealing with rules of everyday life, like the racial separations in public amenities.

Some of the most important laws were:

Where people lived: The Group Areas Act – People were legally segregated based on race and allocated separate areas to live and work in. The law relegated nonwhite groups further away from developed urban cities. Black people, in particular, were housed in under-resourced fringe townships far from the centre. From the late 1950s, some 3.5 million Black South Africans were forced to relocate from urban areas, and some 70 percent of the population was squeezed into 13 percent of the country’s most unproductive land. Those who opposed the laws and refused to move had their homes forcibly demolished and were sometimes arrested and imprisoned. Black people, specifically men, who worked in cities as a source of cheap labour were required to carry “pass books” that dictated which white areas they were allowed to be in and for how long. Under the Separate Amenities Laws, public transport, parks, beaches, theatres, restaurants, and other amenities were segregated racially. Signs stating “Whites Only” and “Natives” were commonplace.
What people learned: The Bantu Education Act – Apartheid laws stipulated the segregation of schools, including setting a different standard of education for different races. White schools were the best resourced, Coloured and Indian schools in the middle, while Black Africans were intentionally given an inferior education, specifically meant to ready them for manual labour and more menial jobs. A later law also segregated tertiary education. Some universities allowed non-white students to study but only to a limited degree, as apartheid officials sought to intentionally underskill the population. Government spending on white institutions was far higher than those catering to other groups.
Who people could marry: The Immorality Laws – While intermarriages between white and Black people were already illegal under a 1927 law, a revised version ( PDF ) criminalised marriage and intimate relationships between white people and all other groups. The penalty was up to five years imprisonment. Thousands of people were arrested for this during apartheid, with nearly 20,000 prosecuted.

Why did apartheid end?

Apartheid came to an end out of the need for the white minority to sustain itself, not because of a change of heart, noted Thula Simpson, a historian of apartheid at the University of Pretoria.

“There was nothing benevolent or voluntary about the retreat of the white government,” he told Al Jazeera. “It was because there was an internal criticism of apartheid, and people were basically saying, ‘In order to maintain white supremacy, you must maintain white survival.’”

Before apartheid finally yielded, it was placed under tremendous pressure, including by growing resistance among Black South Africans. Political groups like the African National Congress (ANC) led by Nelson Mandela, and the Pan African Congress (PAC), roused the population, instigating protests, peaceful and violent. These movements triggered deadly crackdowns by the apartheid government.

When, on March 21,1960, apartheid police officers opened fire on some 7,000 Black people protesting pass laws, killing 69 people and injuring 180 others in what is now known as the Sharpeville Massacre, the world noticed. International uproar and condemnation from the United Nations followed, even as Mandela was imprisoned and the ANC liberation movement and others like it were banned by the apartheid government.

The 1976 killing of hundreds of Soweto pupils protesting the compulsory use of Afrikaans in Black schools also drew a similar global reaction. June 16 still marks the African Union’s “Day of the African Child,” in remembrance of those killed in the Soweto Uprising.

Increasingly, South Africa became isolated as it was slapped with economic sanctions, starting with a trade ban from Jamaica in 1959. The country was banned from sporting events, as well. By the 1990s, President FW de Klerk was forced to release Mandela and start negotiations for a democratic transition.

What’s changed since apartheid?

Legally and politically, much has changed in South Africa, with people of all races now free and equal under the law. Anyone is technically able to live, work and study anywhere, and people are free to interact and marry across colour lines. Black South Africans have democratically governed through the ANC for the past 30 years, compared with during apartheid when it was illegal for a Black person to even vote.

However, despite the significant gains, the legacy of apartheid is still present economically and spatially, which has contributed to South Africa being one of the least equal countries in the world.

Although South Africa’s economy grew with the end of apartheid and international sanctions, Black South Africans households continue to receive only a small share.

In the first decade after apartheid, the ANC-led South Africa’s gross domestic product (GDP) went from $153bn in 1994 to $458bn in 2011, according to the World Bank.

However, a cocktail of corruption and government inefficiency has seen economic growth taper off, with gross debt rising from 23.6 percent of GDP in 2008 to 71.1 percent in 2022, according to researchers at Harvard ( PDF ).

While infrastructure quality has declined in general – partly due to the crumbling of the coal-powered electricity system that provided cheap power for production – it is exacerbating the historical inequalities Black communities face, experts said.

“The whole network has not been maintained so now the collapse is spreading out [even] to areas where it was not the norm,” Simpson of Pretoria University said, referencing South Africa’s recent, but frequent power and water cuts. “That impacts first and foremost the poor people,” he added.

A shopkeeper serves a customer during an electricity load-shedding blackout in South Africa

In 2022, the World Bank classified ( PDF ) South Africa as the most unequal country in the world, and listed race, the legacy of apartheid, a missing middle class and highly unequal land ownership, as the major drivers. About 10 percent of the population controls 80 percent of the wealth, its report said.

Researchers from Spain’s Universidad de Vigo in 2014 found ( PDF ) that the average monthly income of Black South African households was 10,554 rand ($552), compared with 117,249 rand ($6,138) in white households.

In 2017, a government survey tracking household expenditure echoed those findings, stating that nearly half of all Black-headed households were spending the least while only 11 percent were in the highest spending category.

Economic woes have added pressure on the ANC, which is predicted to lose a parliamentary majority in the upcoming May elections for the first time since 1994. Simpson said a divide between older voters who witnessed the ANC’s struggle to end apartheid and younger people who do not have an attachment to the party has widened.

Education and skilled employment

After apartheid collapsed, historically white schools with good amenities and qualified teachers were desegregated and drew ambitious parents from Black communities, where government schools were poorly funded and lacked amenities like toilets – conditions that have persisted. According to a 2020 Amnesty International report, out of 23,471 public schools, 20,071 had no laboratory, 18,019 had no library, and 16,897 had no internet.

However, there is persistent trouble with transport to these formerly white-only schools for pupils from low-income and rural communities as these areas remain far apart and are not easily accessible. Pupils have also complained of racism in the formerly segregated white schools.

Meanwhile, general unemployment in South Africa is at more than 33 percent – one of the world’s highest. Nearly 40 percent of Black South Africans were unemployed in the first three months of 2023, while that rate was 7.5 percent among white people, according to government figures ( PDF ).

Where Black people make up 80 percent of the employable population ( PDF ) and account for 16.9 percent of top management jobs, white people who comprise about 8 percent of the employable population hold 62.9 percent of top management jobs.

A new law aimed at seeing more Black people employed – the Employment Equity Amendment Bill of 2020 – was signed last year by President Cyril Ramaphosa, but it sparked debate, with South Africa’s main opposition party the Democratic Alliance (DA) saying the law prescribes “race quotas” for companies and would cause other groups to lose jobs.

Although Black South Africans are no longer confined to rural, fringe townships – and people of colour spread out to urban areas across the country at the end of white minority rule – many still live in settlements with limited amenities.

In the once-majority-white Cape Town, for example, the population of Black South Africans increased from 25 percent in 1996 to 43 percent in 2016, according to the Center for Sustainable Cities ( PDF ).

“There’s been a massive redistribution of the population and whites have moved to the suburbs or outside the country,” Simpson said. “It has created the opportunity for Black South Africans to move closer to business districts.”

But, the historian added, “the townships remain the areas that have not been de-racialised.”

In some parts, small buffers separate Black townships from high-income neighbourhoods, providing starkly visible differences in satellite images. For example, a quick Google Maps tour will reveal the beautiful Strand, a seaside community in the Western Cape province that boasts of big homes with large, well-tended yards, and clean streets. Just beside it though, the Nomzamo township stands, with tinier homes and streets littered with refuse.

Raesetje Sefala, a researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), said her organisation has observed that townships are still expanding. “They continue to resemble their appearance during the apartheid era, indicating that similar small land sizes are still being allocated,” she told Al Jazeera.

Sefala said the South African government now groups townships together with well-serviced suburbs as “formal residential neighbourhoods”, which makes it difficult for researchers to track the actual improvements in quality of life since the end of apartheid.

However, as someone who comes from a township, “I can attest to the extent of the poor service delivery,” she added.

Government reforms have sought to provide subsidised homes for low-income earners, with some four million homes ( PDF ) delivered since 1994 according to the South Africa Human Rights Commission. But some of those policies have meant houses are located far from economic centres, inadvertently recreating the same apartheid dynamic, some researchers have said.

Besides, there is a national backlog of some 2.3 million households and individuals still waiting for a home since 1994.

Meanwhile, rural homelands, where Black people were once forced to reside, continue to be at a disadvantage. For one, they experience extremely low employment rates: Although some 29 percent of South Africa’s population lives there, employment rates are roughly half of what they are in all other parts of the country according to Harvard researchers. Experts have blamed the government’s failures to expand connecting infrastructure like transport, technology, and know-how to these historically excluded places.

What a Beauty Pageant Reveals About Identity in Postapartheid South Africa

The controversy over one departed entrant’s national background fed on the country’s history of xenophobia and racial hierarchy.

“You are not one of us. Go back to Nigeria, the land of scammers.” These words recently echoed across social media in South Africa, targeting 23-year-old Chidimma Adetshina, one of the contestants in the 2024 Miss South Africa competition.

After being named one of the top 11 contestants in the pageant, Adetshina faced severe criticism and online bullying from a cross section of South Africans, who claimed that she was not qualified to compete because of her heritage. Adetshina was born in Soweto, Johannesburg, at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital to a Nigerian father and a Mozambican mother. By law, foreign parents can obtain South African citizenship for their children who are born in the country if at least one parent is a citizen or permanent resident.

The issue is not merely, however, about the technicalities of Adetshina’s birth certificate. It raises broader questions about national identity and representation in South Africa and has opened up a debate about what it means to be South African and who is deemed worthy of representing the country. The controversy reflects tensions about nationality and belonging in South Africa’s diverse society, where race, ethnicity and heritage are interwoven with personal and national identities.

At the first stirrings of controversy over Adetshina’s eligibility, the Miss South Africa organizers said that they did their due diligence and maintained that she was eligible to participate. But this did not stop a torrent of online abuse that culminated in a petition calling for her disqualification. Politicians weighed in as the situation escalated, with Culture Minister Gayton Mackenzie’s right-leaning Patriotic Alliance joining the discussion and threatening to take her to court.

As the pressure mounted, the Department of Home Affairs, prompted by the pageant organizers, investigated Adetshina’s nationality and found evidence that her mother might have committed fraud and identity theft, further complicating Adetshina’s legal status.

Two days before the competition kicked off, Adetshina withdrew from the pageant.

“After much careful consideration, I have made the difficult decision to withdraw myself from the competition for the safety and well-being of my family and I,” read her statement on Instagram. Immediately after the news broke about her withdrawal from the Miss South Africa pageant, the Miss Universe Nigeria contest invited her to join the competition to “represent your father’s native land.”

Black South Africa’s fragile relationship with the rest of the continent is fraught with flare-ups of xenophobic violence that have seen hundreds killed and displaced from township areas, where ignorance and lack of education contribute to conflagrations. Yet this merely scratches the surface of a deeply rooted problem. South Africa’s race relations are a kaleidoscope of conflicting relationships based on color lines that go back to the first arrival of Dutch settlers in the 17th century, the ancestors of the Afrikaners.

The pageant controversy highlights the little-discussed underbelly of the “rainbow nation.” The ugly discussion on social media reflected the racial and cultural tensions that simmer beneath the surface. It also spilled over into officialdom, because South Africa still hasn’t come to grips with its own nationality.

When British settlers came to the lucrative gold and diamond mines in South Africa in the latter part of the 19th century, they had expertise in mining, finance and international gold markets. The Afrikaners — “the Boers” — resented the influx of outsiders who they felt threatened their way of life and control over the mines. The tension between the British, who were called “uitlanders” (literally outlanders) and Boers escalated into a conflict known as the First Anglo-Boer War in 1880-81, with the Boers prevailing.

The Boer government-imposed restrictions on the uitlanders’ political rights and privileges caused more friction between the two sides, which led to the Second Anglo-Boer War in 1899-1902. These two wars were fought between two ostensibly “white” groups on African soil. But, in fact, at the root of this conflict is the uitlander concept, which despite the passage of time has left a lasting effect on the dynamics of identity and nationality in the country.

The uitlander concept encapsulates how South Africa has long been divided based on both origin and ethnicity, a legacy that persists in various forms even today.

“Regrettably apartheid racial coding remains a feature of South African policymaking, and South Africans are reminded every day that what they look like or where they come from still matters,’’ Michael Morris, head of media at the South Africa Institute of Race Relations, told New Lines .

If relations between the different white groups were fraught with differences, it is no surprise that Black South Africans were placed on the lowest footing in the pecking order. This would eventually lead to the rise of the abhorrent system of apartheid that would see them excluded and oppressed up until the early 1990s.

“Swart gevaar” (Afrikaans for black danger) was a term used in South Africa during apartheid to instill fear among the white minority about the supposed threat posed by Black majority rule. It was key in the apartheid government’s propaganda used to justify racial segregation and minority rule. This apartheid agenda portrayed everything associated with Blacks, including their culture, hair, language and skin tone, as dangerous and inferior to whiteness.

Blacks, Coloreds and Indians in South Africa were classified as separate from the whites and marginalized, creating a society where race was the key identifier of national identity, with deep divisions that have persisted in the postapartheid era.

During apartheid, segregation helped to create categories not unlike that of “uitlanders,” and there was tension toward foreigners, even from those within the same racial group. This history has spilled over into the controversy about Adetshina, who was targeted as not truly representative of South Africa by Black South Africans.

When apartheid crumbled under the weight of sanctions, rising violence and the eventual realization in the early ’90s by the then-president, F.W. de Klerk, that there was no other option but its dismantling if South Africa were not to implode, the stage was set for a new dawn for previously disenfranchised sections of society. The belief was that the barriers that had held them back from achieving their aspirations and goals would come tumbling down and that their lives would improve. Yet while there has been change, for many there has been little or no effect on their straitened circumstances.

The socioeconomic and racial challenges that Black South Africans are facing have immensely contributed to the xenophobic sentiments targeted at Adetshina. Popular expectations of “a better life for all” have not been fulfilled, and this dissatisfaction has fueled xenophobia.

When South Africa transitioned from apartheid to democracy, anti-apartheid activist and Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu coined the term “rainbow nation” to describe a new inclusive national identity that celebrated South Africa’s diverse cultural, ethnic and racial composition. Yet this aspiration has failed to find a secure footing in South African society, which is still deeply divided on race, ethnicity and class.

“The rainbow rhetoric is dangerous,” said Nombulelo Shange, a sociology lecturer at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein. “It glosses over the injustices that we went through. It is basically saying that what we went through for the last 300 years must be forgotten because we are one. It is dangerous because it denies us the opportunity to deal with these issues and to introspect.”

Adetshina’s case illustrates the failure of the rainbow nation ideal to take root fully in South Africa, underscoring the gap between the aspiration of a unified society and the lived reality of ongoing national tensions.

South Africa’s racial turbulence has left a mark on its relationship with the rest of Africa, with South Africans often less than welcoming toward the millions who have sought better lives in a country viewed by many as a version of the United States in Africa — a land of opportunity and economic prosperity unmatched anywhere else on the continent.

The deep scars left by colonialism and apartheid have influenced how national identity is constructed and how African foreigners, even those who are naturalized and become citizens, are perceived.

“Chidimma was presumed to be an illegal immigrant and not South African enough to be Miss South Africa because she is Black and of African descent,” Dan Corder, a television presenter with South Africa’s eNCA station, told New Lines . “She was bullied and trolled. The new information about her mother’s alleged fraud doesn’t change the fact that people were Afrophobic based on the old information that they had.”

Corder drew a contrast between Adetshina and an earlier Miss South Africa contestant.

“In 2001, Vanessa Carreira won Miss South Africa,” he said. “She is what South Africa would consider as a white woman, but her parents are of Portuguese-Angolan origin. Because she’s white, even though from Angola, she didn’t experience what Chidimma did.” The cases of Carreira and Adetshina depict the complex nature of identity in South Africa, where race, rather than a shared national identity, continues to be the primary lens through which people are judged.

Despite the efforts to promote a “rainbow nation,” South Africa is struggling to forge a unified national identity that embraces all of its citizens. Twenty-four-year-old Shari Maluleke, who runs a nonprofit organization in Johannesburg called Menstrual Project, maintains that South Africa does not have a national identity because much of the Black population’s history and culture was erased, instilling a deep trauma that made them want to separate themselves from other Africans.

“We are the awkward cousins of Africa, and we don’t know how to claim our identity. We want to have the title that we are better than most African countries,” Maluleke said. “It’s a painful wound for Black South Africans to confront their national identity, because they don’t have a foundation of what their histories look like.”

This struggle with identity is in stark contrast with countries like Nigeria, where a strong sense of pride and patriotism defines what it means to be Nigerian. Both Nigeria and South Africa are dubbed the giants of Africa because of their economic and political muscle on the continent. Both have a rich tapestry of cultures, but Nigeria has largely been able to unite its different cultures under one national identity. The country has made tremendous progress globally through its film industry Nollywood, which is the second-largest in the world. The music genre Afrobeat has gained global recognition and authors like Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe have gained international acclaim, which has enhanced national pride among Nigerians.

Twenty-eight-year-old Faeeza Lok is a social entrepreneur and political activist based in Johannesburg. She is a South African of Asian origin born in Durban and raised in Hong Kong. When she returned to the country of her birth at 15, she experienced a sense of not belonging because of her mixed-race identity.

“The Asian community in South Africa wants a sense of belonging too. In this Chidimma issue we don’t share the same feelings that she’s not South African because we are minorities and we feel marginalized too,” Lok told New Lines . “We have an unconscious bias and we struggle with what it means to be South African unlike Nigerians who have a strong sense of national identity.”

But not all South Africans are worried about the country’s identity fault lines, with some regarding the issue as part of a wider phenomenon. They see what is happening in their country as a mirror of trends that are gaining momentum globally as issues of identity, belonging and citizenship are increasingly debated.

“Taking into account, if one looks at the recent race riots in the U.K. and the increasing support for anti-establishment and populist parties in Europe, we are seeing an increasingly large division between a foreigner and patriot,” 29-year-old philosophy student Mitchell Black told New Lines .

But Cape Town-based historian Lerato Majoro disagrees. “Many of these other countries that are dealing with identity issues face different challenges from us,” she said. “Our main problem was apartheid, and when it was dismantled, we should have tackled how to deal with the scars with one voice. Our nation-building efforts failed dismally.”

The backlash against Adetshina is a stark reminder that South Africa’s attempt to forge a unified national identity stands in limbo and that her experience is not an isolated one but a symptom of a broader societal issue whereby African immigrants are often blamed for social frustrations.

The question remains as to whether South Africa can truly embrace the diversity it proudly displays on its flag and in its slogans or whether these symbols will continue to mask the deep wounds of history.

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History of Education in the Context of Apartheid
Apartheid in South Africa: Effects on Life and Education. The National Party gained power in South Africa in 1948, approximately 30 years after its founding. Originally, the National Party was created as a new, opposing political party to the ruling South African Party in 1913-14 by General JBM Hertzog (Carter, 1955, "Apartheid and reactions ...
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Bantu Education Act
Bantu Education Act, South African law, enacted in 1953 and in effect from January 1, 1954, that governed the education of Black South African (called Bantu by the country's government) children. It was part of the government's system of apartheid, which sanctioned racial segregation and discrimination against nonwhites in the country.. From about the 1930s the vast majority of schools ...
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In 1954—5 black teachers and students protested against Bantu Education. The African Education Movement was formed to provide alternative education. For a few years, cultural clubs operated as informal schools, but by 1960 they had closed down. The Extension of University Education Act, Act 45 of 1959, put an end to black students attending ...
Introduction: Before Apartheid
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The Transformation of South Africa's System of Basic Education
Though it is fairly common to look for the origins of South Africa's education problems under the explicit apartheid policies that were introduced in the late 1940s, and culminating in the Bantu Education Act of 1953, in reality the attitudes, policies, and issue-treatment that determine the dynamics of the system until the end of the ...
PDF Chapter 6 Education, Schooling and Apartheid Education
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PDF FROM APARTHEID EDUCATION TO INCLUSIVE EDUCATION: The challenges of
EDUCATION: The challenges of transformation.. International EDUCATION SUMMIT For a Democratic Society Wayne State University Detroit, Michigan U.S.A. ducation Department Cape Town, South [email protected] paper attempts to tease out the complexity of change in South Africa regarding the shift from a dual.
From Apartheid to Democracy: Education in South Africa
Broadly speaking the shift was towards a pluralist education approach in that it recognised the need to deal with the actual plural nature of society. However, the preferred approach in both places was to adopt a version of pluralism which sought variation within schools rather than between them.
The History and Devolution of Education in South Africa
Since the changeover from South Africa's apartheid system and government (which had been heavily influenced by South Africa's elite Afrikaner leaders and the secret Afrikaner society the Broderbond) in 1994, much has been expected of the post-apartheid government in terms of greater equalization of opportunities in all aspects of life.This includes education.
PDF 22 The History and Devolution of Education in South Africa
us Education Before and After the Dutch and British LandedThe original inhabitants of South Africa were the San people, often refe. red Bushmen in E. h or Boesman by the Dutch Afrikaners. The small number506D.B. Holsinger and W.J. Jacob (eds.), Inequality in Educat. ves, 506-537.Comparative Education Research Centre 2009this group that still ...
Unequal education: apartheid's legacy
In South Africa, the minority white population retained control of the government when the then-Union of South Africa gained full independence from the United Kingdom in 1931. ... Education was a key component of apartheid, and the Bantu Education Act of 1953 centralized black South African education and brought it under the control of the ...
Grade 9
The impact of Apartheid on education was so profound it can still be seen today. Verwoerd's 1953 Bantu Education Act established an inferior education system for Africans based upon a curriculum intended to produce manual labourers and obedient subjects. ... Germany, Romania, China and Russia before returning to South Africa as a "wanted ...
Apartheid Education
Apartheid Education. Apartheid was a system of government in South Africa, abolished in 1994, which systematically separated groups on the basis of race classification. The Apartheid system of racial segregation was made law in South Africa in 1948, when the country was officially divided into four racial groups, White, Black, Indian and ...
Before Apartheid
About this Chapter. This first chapter outlines South Africa's early history, from native groups living in the region to Europeans settling and gradually exercising colonial control over African peoples. This period of colonization helped shape how these groups conceived of their identities as well as how they saw others.
The History of Education under Apartheid, 1948-1994: The Doors of
This higher education system of post-apartheid South Africa was declared a way of maintaining the black South Africans in a permanent state of political and economic subordination fuelled by ...
South Africa Seminar: Info Pages
There were 134 deaths of children under the age of eighteen. "Liberation before education" became the phrase for ANC supporters that took to military training to protest apartheid education. 1978 - Only 20 percent of all university students in South Africa were black even though they were the overwhelmingly majority of the population.
South Africa: Broken and unequal: The state of education in South
South Africa is failing too many of its young people when it comes to education. Although it has made significant progress since the end of apartheid in widening access this has not always translated into a quality education for all pupils. The system continues to be dogged by stark inequalities and chronic underperformance that have deep roots ...
Education
Before the apartheid era came to an end during the early 1990s, South Africa began to address the crisis in African education. An Education Renewal Strategy was released in 1993. Discussions involving government officials, educators, parents, and students were initiated in the mid-1980s and were formalized in the 1990s.
South Africa Seminar: Info Pages
Maria Lizet Ocampo Updated 9-19-2004 "Challenging the past and moving beyond the legacy of apartheid" is how the South African Department of Education plans to work towards social justice and equity with the introduction of the new curriculum titled "Curriculum 2005" (Asmal).
Post-1994 South African Education: The Challenge of Social Justice
Changes and continuities in South Africa's higher education system, 1994 to 2004. In Changing class: Education and social change in post-apartheid South Africa, ed. Chisholm Linda, 293-314. Pretoria: Human Science Research Council Press. ... In The search for education quality in post-apartheid South Africa: Interventions to improve ...
The effects of apartheid's unequal education system can still be felt today
The effects of apartheid's unequal education system can still be felt today. APARTHEID'S legacy in education lives on, and the poor are still getting a poorer education, according to education ...
Apartheid
Apartheid was a policy in South Africa that governed relations between the white minority and nonwhite majority during the 20th century. Formally established in 1948, it sanctioned racial segregation and political and economic discrimination against nonwhites. Apartheid legislation was largely repealed in the early 1990s.
Liberation before education
"Liberation before education" was a slogan of some activists in South Africa from 1976 in rejecting the education offered to black children in Apartheid-era South Africa. ... From apartheid in education to no education without liberation; Spotlight on missing link in apartheid writing This page was last edited on 29 August 2024 ...
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In the first decade after apartheid, the ANC-led South Africa's gross domestic product (GDP) went from $153bn in 1994 to $458bn in 2011, according to the World Bank. However, a cocktail of ...
What a Beauty Pageant Reveals About Identity in Postapartheid South Africa
Two days before the competition kicked off, Adetshina withdrew from the pageant. ... where ignorance and lack of education contribute to conflagrations. Yet this merely scratches the surface of a deeply rooted problem. ... (Afrikaans for black danger) was a term used in South Africa during apartheid to instill fear among the white minority ...
South Africa opposition in turmoil as Malema's deputy jumps ship
South Africa's radical opposition politician Julius Malema suffers a big blow as his deputy ditches him. ... youth population frustrated with the slow pace of political and economic reforms since ...
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