As I set my foot in the prison cell I am confronted by five young boys who seem to be between seven and 13 years old. I reach up to them in horror and assure them of their safety as long as I am around.
As I set my foot in the prison cell I am confronted by five young boys who seem to be between seven and 13 years old. I reach up to them in horror and assure them of their safety as long as I am around.
I ask them why are they are in prison and not at school.
They tell me that they dropped out because their parents are unemployed and broken, that the school is short of teachers: those who are employed there spend most of their time outside the classroom. They tell me that they were arrested for burglary, caught eating inside a house.
I wake up crying. Yes this was a dream. A nightmare that is all too real in this country where the lives of people who are poor and black count for nothing – this country where strikers are massacred by the police, people die trying to find work, people die in shack fires year after year, lesbians are raped, beaten and murdered and activists are chased from their homes by the thugs of the ruling party. And millions of children are denied a decent education and condemned to lives of unemployment or occasional bits of degrading, exhausting and always precarious work.
In 1953 the government introduced the Bantu Education Act, a cornerstone of apartheid. It was meant to reduce every black person’s life to being nothing more than a kind of a slave to white people.
But in those days, we had some committed teachers. To them, teaching was not a career but a calling. They had a passion for the future of black children. They were deeply respected in our communities. Yes, we defied the odds. As a result we produced accountants, mathematicians, lawyers. Teaching was revered. The school belonged to the community.
The writing was on the wall that apartheid was soon going to be defeated. That writing was not written by MK. It was written by the black women who kept our families together and the black teachers who gave our children dignity and hope.
The apartheid state condemned us to a life of inferior racist education and we emerged on the opposite side, with our fists high, committed to the fight for a just society. We watched Hendrik Verwoerd tossing and turning in his grave. Yes, he was defeated.
There was also a time that was marked with controversy caused by the ANC’s reckless slogan of ‘Liberation Now and Education Later’. The ANC saw poor people as cannon fodder to be exploited in their march to power. The black consciousness movement, arguing for education for liberation, thought every black person was important.
After the dawn of political independence in 1994 the nation had hope that from the ashes of apartheid, and the ANC’s exploitation of the people in its march to power, a new nation was to be born. The government and the nation knew that trying to address the inequalities in education was going to play a critical role.
Eighteen years later, the ruling party has made it easy to pass, to create the impression things are improving. Now a child is said to have passed when they get 30%. This is smoke and mirrors.
We still have a two-tier education system. Those in former white schools get a good education. Those in former black schools get one of the worst in the world. And because most teachers in former white schools are still white, black children are growing up thinking that only whites can teach us.
Our education is in a state of what Charles Dickens called the worst of times, the age of foolishness, the season of darkness. We have nothing before us but unabated colonialism and slavery for the majority.
There are kids in this day and age who are learning under the trees, who don’t have electricity, libraries or toilets in their schools, who wait the whole year for textbooks that never get delivered, who miss the first two periods because their teachers must first drop off their kids at white former Model C schools, or who are attending Sadtu [South African Democratic Teachers' Union] meetings during teaching time.
More than 100 000 learners in the Eastern Cape lose their daily nutrition because R10 million rand has gone into the black hole of corruption. Principals are inflating the number of learners because they want to a certain percentage to go into their pockets. Education has become a site of plunder, when it should be a site of care and nurturing.
This is the politics of contempt.
Yes I acknowledge the frustrations of teachers – but they have something in common with this government: both deny the black child his or her fundamental right to education, his future. They are perpetuating the life of slavery, a life of subordination to a white master, a life of misery and poverty. This government holds the poor and working class black child in the same contempt as did Verwoerd.
We are living in a world where education is a must. The space for manual labour is quickly closing down. The only way to survive in this new world is through education. Children in India and China are being prepared for the future. Our children are being prepared to be turned into waste – to never find work – or, if they are ‘lucky’, to be exploited in low-paying and insecure jobs.
We are engaged in a struggle for an egalitarian society, a struggle to be full human beings.
For all this we need education that will help us connect with our culture and values. Through it we will liberate our country and continent from corruption, patronage, power through impunity, hatred for humanity and nature, profit and greed.
The ANC, like most liberation movements in Africa, is committing atrocities: there is such a high unemployment rate, there is a high rate of curable diseases like TB, there is rampant corruption. Like most liberation movements in Africa, the ANC is under the thumb of the IMF and the World Bank. They have no regard for the poor and working-class.
We can no longer fold our arms and close our eyes while the future of most black children is destroyed and their dreams are cruelly dashed.
Let Africa's children torment us in our graves for our indecisiveness to take action and our refusal to take their side against the tyrant of capital and its managers who are bleeding our country. We need to stand against Zuma, as others stood against Mobuto, against Mubarak and against Idi Amin.
*Ayanda Kota is a member of the Grahamstown-based Unemployed People's Movement
