A destruction coming in: Bantu education as response to social crisis

Date
1989-09
Authors
Hyslop, Jonathan
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Abstract
The imposition of Bantu Education in the 1950s has often been portrayed as the destructive action of a Nationalist government intent, for purely ideological reasons, on uprooting a successful and largely benevolent mission education system: in this view the missions were, as Edgar Brookes put it, “butchered to make an ideologist's holiday”. (1) But this approach to the issue fails to grasp the essential basis of educational restructuring in the 1950s. The educational policies of the state during this decade were above all an attempt to respond to the crisis of reproduction of the labour force, and especially its urban component, which had developed during the previous decade. I will suggest in this article that the state was particularly concerned to provide the necessary conditions of reproduction for that section of the labour force which was permanently urbanized and reliant upon a wage. As the urban population grew, social reproductive mechanisms which had operated in the 1920s and 1930s began to break down. In the 1940s the combined forces of collapsing homeland agriculture and expanding secondary industrialization, generated rapid urbanization. This placed the existing provision for urban social reproduction under enormous strain. Housing, transport, and wages were all inadequate to meet the needs of the growing urbanized working class. Squatter movements, bus boycotts and trade unionism spread rapidly, as popular initiatives which contested these arenas. In turn these fueled the emergence of a higher and more radical level of oppositional political activity, marked by the emergence of the Mandela - Tambo - Sobukwe generation of leadership in the ANC. Thus the dominant classes were faced on the one hand with levels of poverty which threatened the very physical production of their workforce, and on the other by new political threats. The National Party's policies of the 1950s were largely addressed to resolving this urban reproductive crisis.
Description
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented September, 1989
Keywords
Education. South Africa, Blacks. Education. South Africa
Citation