The Struggle for Education in Apartheid South Africa, 1955-1994

During the years of apartheid, 1948-1994, the National Party set about building a mass education system. In 1948, there were just 580,000 black students in South Africa, most in private missionary schools. By 1973 there were 3,300,000 students, the tradition of independent missionary education destroyed, the number of students rising year on year. On one level this massive rise in students seemed to bring South Africa in line with wider global history, as governments around the world turned to education systems to help meet the needs of modern industrial society. But the National Party’s interest in mass education had little in common with the history of turning peasants into citizens. The Bantu Education system sat at the heart of apartheid’s most reactionary ambitions, forcing Africans to return to the Bantustans to receive an education in which mother-tongue language instruction would bind them to their supposed tribal identities in perpetuity. Yet it soon became clear that these institutions possessed a capacity to betray their masters’ intent; for a period, black parents and teachers took substantive possession of the schools and managed to bend them to their own purposes. What exactly these purposes were has been obscured by the backward glance of the history of the struggle against apartheid. More specifically, what has been lost, and what this dissertation aspires to retrieve, is the distinction between resisting apartheid and aspiring for one’s children to be educated. For while the struggle for liberation and the struggle for education overlapped at times, they were also distinct. And the history of Soweto’s schools is in many ways the history of a tussle between these two imperatives. Moving chronologically, each chapter explores the very different ways Sowetans dealt with the tension. The end result is a new bottom-up history that differs from the well-known political narrative of the fight against apartheid for which Soweto is so famous. The common thread that ties each chapter is how much people’s investment in education shows determination to keep a sense of control over their lives in extraordinary times. During the final decade of apartheid this sense of control unravelled in the face of sustained insurrectionary violence. The state education system that was left standing in 1994 was hollowed out. Liberation was thus coupled with pain and a deep sense of loss.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Aiken, Oliver

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Dubow, Saul

• History of Education
• Apartheid
• Soweto

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/5f8f1606-8d10-4b63-8b76-ac09dff5ac91/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.116645

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/381494