Former South African President Kgalema Motlanthe says producing teachers that can offer the African child a good basic education is essential if we want to build a strong economy.
Former South African President Kgalema Motlanthe says producing teachers that can offer the African child a good basic education is essential if we want to build a strong economy.
Speaking at the annual Archbishop Thabo Makgoba Development Trust (ATMDT) lecture on Monday, under the theme values based leadership, Motlanthe told the packed Barratt Lecture room that Bantu Education was the most serious crime of apartheid.
Motlanthe said the Statistician General of Statistics South Africa, Pali Lehohla in his census report of 2011 states that basic education in the white communities in a good place while in the Indian communities it is doing very well, but he says basic education in African and coloured communities is getting worse. "When I read that report I asked myself wherein lies the problem? I had to go back and do some reading," he said.
Motlanthe says he read a book written by author Edgar Brookes in the 1940s on native education. Motlanthe said at that time native education was the responsibility of the churches, not the state. In his book Brookes explains why native education at that time was of a much better quality until Bantu Education was introduced in 1954.
Motlanthe told the packed lecture room that the way Bantu Education was introduced and engineered was by taking over teacher training colleges from the churches, so the teachers who had up until that point been trained through the mission schools were to be weeded out of the education system, and out of the profession.
He says a new cohort of teachers was produced and Dr Hendrik Verwoed spelled it out very clearly that these teachers needed to be trained in such a way that they produced a black child who would not aspire to any station in life above specific levels of labour.
"And so the education was designed such that teachers were very poor in mathematics and natural sciences," Motlanthe said.
He said it is through the process of natural attrition and political targeting of teachers who were also politically active that all the old school teachers were weeded out of the system. "And once this process of producing a new cohort of teachers got to reproduce itself they never had to do anything ever again."
Speaking about the damage done to black people under the apartheid government, Motlanthe said everything else paled in comparison to the impact of the Bantu Education system which we are still grappling with now.
"Of all the vices and accesses of the apartheid system, everything else that they ever did, pales into insignificance. The most serious crime of apartheid was the introduction of Bantu Education and that's what we are still grappling with today," he said.
Motlanthe's hope for the black child is that a new generation of teachers can salvage the situation and empower the African child because the majority of the people of South Africa are Africans and to improve the economy those black children need to be educated.
"I hope that with modern means of communication it may be possible to fast track the production of a new cohort of teachers for the African child. Africans are in the majority in this country and for as long as basic education is weak as the statistician general indicates the economy of this country will forever remain weak," he said.
Motlanthe says Edgar Brookes alludes to this in his book when he says that Bantu Education was a unique system of education, because it is the only system of education in the world which aimed to produce people who would not be active in the economy and people who would not be productive economically.
"So critical thinking therefore is a function of basic education, and that is where it should be inculcated. I live in Johannesburg and when I was growing up Bantu Education was introduced just as I was into my first year in school and those days it wasn't called Grade R it was called Dom A, that's what it was called," he said.
Motlanthe said there were many schools in Alexandra township where he grew up and he was a pupil at St Michaels, which was an Anglican school.
"When Bantu education was introduced the church had to give up the school, including the school buildings, so I remember we were one school, but one class would be in another part of the township in a garage and another one in another part of the township in a church and another one under a tree in a back yard somewhere else in the township, but the church retained the schools for the white community and so just across, a walking distance from Alexandra township in Waverley there's still a beautiful church school.
It's now a private school, it's St Mary's for Girls, it's still there. All you have to do is visit that school and go to the township to understand the damage of Bantu Education," he said.
In his talk Motlanthe also spoke about values based leadership in the South African political arena, the concept of Ubuntu as a ethno-philosophical ethos and African values systems. The talk was organised by the Rhodes University Business School.
Makgoba, Bishop of Grahamstown Ebenezer Ntlali and Rhodes Vice Chancellor Dr Sizwe Mabizela also attended the lecture.
anele@grocotts.co.za
