Let My People Go. Albert Luthuli
Apart from the shock with which we recognised that the Bantu Education Act dealt a crippling blow to African education, the thing which disgusted us most was the Minister’s glaring refusal to say one word of thanks to the group responsible for initiating all social services among Africans – the missionaries. It was they who started education, health services, social training institutions, the training of nurses, and who were first behind the training of Africans as doctors. Dr Verwoerd dealt bitingly and insultingly with them and then, with no word of praise for their long labour, ejected them. They were at liberty to do no more than hire out their school buildings to his Department for his education. Tragically, they did exactly that, except for the Roman Catholics and the Anglican Diocese of Johannesburg.
By itself the Bantu Education Act was felt not to go far enough. It left the universities untouched. It has therefore been recently supplemented by an Act called (with characteristic hypocrisy) the Extension of University Education Act. We are by it denied access to the established universities. In place of this, provision is made for a chosen few of us to proceed to ethnic colleges. Up to the end of his education the African child and youth is to be kept isolated, sealed right off. Not only must African not meet European, but Xhosa must not meet Bechuana, nor Zulu meet Swazi.
These new Tribal Colleges are set in the culturally stagnant wastes of what are now called “Bantu heartlands” (the reserves). It is as though Cornishmen and Irishmen and Welshmen and Scots were forced by law to go to separate colleges, while only “ethnically pure” Englishmen could go to Oxford or Cambridge. It is as though each of the colleges was remotely set among moors and mountains, and the students in them taught only by staff appointed and dismissed by government authority. Their libraries would be of the dingiest, consisting only of a few censored text books. Discipline would be that of the primary school, and cultural contacts with other bodies would be nil.
Again, what I say is not fanciful. It is said by the authorities. As I write the University College of Fort Hare, for long a bright light among us, has been seized, eight members of staff have resigned and seven have been dismissed – not in any case for professional reasons.
Now, Fort Hare is not placed in a “Bantu heartland” (the Nationalist government did not choose the site). But the new regulations set out to create a vacuum all the same. All students must live in hostels. No student is allowed to have any visitor whatever without the prior consent of the Principal himself. No student is allowed to possess any vehicle without official approval. All women students must be in their hostel by 7 p.m. There is a general curfew at 10 p.m. Students are permitted to make no statement to the press, and are allowed to produce no magazine, pamphlet or news-sheet without official approval. Only Xhosa students need apply for admission. Others go to their “own” colleges elsewhere.
Students must apply yearly for “permission to report for registration”. The normal understanding that, unless they are expelled, they will be allowed to finish their courses is removed. And if a student complies with every condition laid down, still the Minister4 may debar him if he so chooses. No reason need be given.
Again, the aim is beyond doubt. The present Minister of Bantu Education, Mr Maree, speaking in support of this destructive measure, told his listeners that the aim of the Act was “to produce native leaders who will accept and propagate apartheid”.
There it is – the naked intention to indoctrinate, to which all else must be subordinated. That is why some of our most eminent African scholars, Professors Matthews and Nyembezi, and Mr Selby Ngcobo, resigned. Yet, confronted with all the evidence, many white would-be sympathisers tell us uneasily: “Oh, come along, surely it’s not as bad as you make out. It can’t all be negative!”
It is worse than they seem able to imagine. It was some small comfort to us to see the way in which world universities, and South Africa’s formerly “open” universities, demonstrated against the Act. But they were too late. This Act’s foundations were laid much earlier, when the Act applying to school education was passed. The Nationalists were not deterred. They have already set about the task of breeding up in their “Tribal Colleges” their new kind of blueprint African – as they think.
Take these Acts in the context of all other Apartheid-Baasskap Acts, and it is not difficult to see that we are in for brainwashing on the grand scale – or, rather, the attempt is going to be made. It will not succeed, this attempt to enslave the minds and spirit of ten million people. But it will wreck African education, such as it was, and I predict that it will be carried over before long into European education. It will have to be. Men so manifestly insecure as South Africa’s rulers cannot afford to stop short of absolute power. So they will go on until they drop.
One of the deep-seated intentions of this type of education is to erase all African leadership. I cannot help wondering how the Nationalists would have felt if, after the Boer War, the British had introduced this type of indoctrination for Afrikaners. We hear echoes of how English-speaking South Africans react now that the Nationalists are preparing to take over the education of their children by means of a system called “Christian National Education”. But the erasure of African leadership is felt to be a good thing by nearly all whites, who want leaders who will not lead, and that is why they have consented to the emasculation of our education. They are requiring our teachers to help enslave the hearts and minds of our children.
The ethnic grouping principle in education and throughout other spheres of life is significant. Africans were very painfully beginning to shed themselves of purely tribal allegiances. Even in the most backward areas they were beginning to see themselves as part of a larger African community, and many made the step of expressing allegiance to South Africa as a whole, and to the family of mankind.
But the Nationalists and their fellow travellers start off with the principle of disunity. Where bonds have formed, they must be broken. The only allegiance they recognise is allegiance to disunity, apartheid. Now not only in education but throughout our lives ethnic grouping must apply. They eagerly impress on us our differences – a Xhosa must not even sleep in a Basuto suburb. The evils of suspicion, hostility, and disunity were going. Now a host of evils is cynically and mischievously welcomed back. It suits the white man’s book, so he thinks. If their motive were paternal and protective, as they claim it is, would they set brother against brother, as they do?
What an appalling world these men have made for our young ones! In my own family I have been relatively fortunate, for most of my children have been old enough to miss the worst of this, though they do not escape altogether. And our own fortune serves only to make my wife and me more acutely aware of the terrible misfortune of others, of those whose children are younger and must, if the white sickness has its way, be subjected to a life of indoctrination, of tribal pettiness, of subordination – and of very little real education. In former times our children were carefully instructed in the customs and traditions of the tribe. Subsequently they were offered an education on the white pattern which at least attempted to nurture and expand the personalities of real people. Now there is nothing but this cruel deformity.
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