This is a special edition of the Khanya journal on education struggles in post-apartheid South Africa. Over the last few years students in schools and universities have begun to respond to the persistence of inequality in South Africa’s educational system. With the exception of isolated and sporadic struggle against lack of access to education, the first decade of democracy saw a decline in struggles aimed at improving the provision of quality education for the black majority in South Africa. Many of the struggles that took place during this period took place in universities, and focused on issues around financial exclusions. The decline in the education struggles, which had been a prominent feature of South African political life for more than 30 years, was due mainly to the democratic transition in South Africa.
Consistent with the important place occupied by education in the anti-apartheid struggle, the new constitution has enshrined the right to “a basic education and to equal access to educational institutions”. As many contributions in this edition show, the dream of a free and quality education for the majority of the black population is beginning to fade, and in response to this black students in schools and universities are again beginning to organise. June 16 1976 is now a central part of South Africa’s folklore of struggle. It is generally accepted that the democratic transition is unthinkable without the student uprising of June 16 1976. June 16 did not just happen and was certainly not only about resisting the introduction of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in Black schools. Factors that contributed to the uprising included overcrowding in schools and the resultant drop in the quality of education; a growing unemployment among Black communities; a drop in living standards; soaring inflation and food prices; and struggles for national liberation in neighbouring countries. These struggles inspired and deepened the urgency of challenging the apartheid state. The early 1970s also witnessed an unprecedented growth of unionised Black workers, starting with the strike of 1973, and the rise of Black Consciousness Movement.
For these and other reasons this special edition on education struggles is meant to coincide with commemorative events for June 16, 1976. And the coincidence is not due to the date, or to historical nostalgia alone. Of more significance is the fact that June 16 2004 will mark the first organised and coordinated attempts in years to hold commemorative events in many parts of the country. This is testimony to the organising initiatives currently underway among students in schools and universities. This special edition is testimony to this spirit of reawakening in yet another way. All the contributors in this edition are activists involved in struggles in education. Indeed, the majority of them, as can be seen by the issues they take up, are activists in schools.
What are the driving forces of this reawakening? Up to now the dominant political culture in South Africa, and indeed internationally, has been to define student and youth concerns either in terms of ‘fashion’, consumerism or (as one ANC Youth Leaguer would have it), fun. On the other hand, student and youth issues were defined as ‘problem issues’, meaning drugs, sex, and wanton violence. All these are issues relevant to the student and youth of today. In this edition, however, these issues are located in their historical perspective, and in the broader analysis of the social conditions that give rise to them. The first article in this edition looks at June 16 1976, and reflects on its significance for us today. As Vally argues, the significance of June 16 for today lies in the fact that the issues that led that generation to revolt are still with us today. This can be seen in the first batch of articles in this edition. Student activists take a look at the range of ways in which the crisis in education manifests itself today.
Ramadiro, Mashaba, Radebe, Lukhele, Nqeno and the APF look at issues ranging from school uniforms, the high cost of education for the poor, the cultural crisis facing young people today, the failure of education policy in post-apartheid South Africa, neoliberalism and the privatisation of education today, and unemployment. Education has not escaped the destruction wrought by the government’s neo-liberal political and economic programme – the Growth, Employment and Redistribution Strategy. A key component of this programme is privatisation. Nearly all articles note that for a large number of the poor and the unemployed there are devastating consequences as a result of the quasi-privatisation of public education. This includes the embrace of the user-fees model for school financing and a labour market of educators where richer schools who charge high school fees are able to employ additional educators to those provided by the state. The net result has been an increase in racial and class segregation of children within the public schooling system.
The challenges facing students and young people in education today go beyond issues like school uniforms, fees, and textbooks. Nqeno, Motha, Weekes and Hjort take up issues relating to violence against students and girl children in particular, to sexual harassment in schools, as well as HIV-AIDS. In these various contributions the writers highlight the fact that girl-children and female students bear the brunt of neoliberalism, violence, war and lack of access to education. In their contributions Motha and Weekes give an international perspective on the problems of girl- children and female students in the contexts of war, sexual violence and sexism in general.
Part of the dominant view of students and youth today presents them as helpless, disorientated, or a ‘lost generation’. For the powers that be, this is a convenient view, and it tries to reinforce passivity in the face of enormous social problems facing students and youth. Indeed, a lot has been said and written about the apathy of young people of today. The truth is that young people have not lost interest in politics but only in politicians. Many young people did not participate in the last general election (the ANC effectively got about 36% of the votes of the eligible voting population), but that does not mean they are apathetic. Articles in this edition show that increasingly young people connected to social movements are involved in a myriad of local struggles and organisations.
In this issue Ndlovu, Lukhele, Nqeno and Velaphi, Madalase, Tsalong and the Concerned Learners Committee from the Vaal/Sedibeng take the opportunity to reflect on their struggles, to test, in the course of these struggles, old ideas and to introduce new ones. The articles they have written also demonstrate that they indeed possess a sense of how their specific concerns are a part of the concerns of the new social movements in South Africa today. Although young people writing in this journal are mainly involved in local and national struggles, there is a strong appreciation that ours is an international struggle. This is exemplified by an article on xenophobia and schooling; on Palestine and the right to education; and on the impact of armed conflict on the education of girls or women in the Africa and other parts of the world. From the point of view of organisation and mobilisation, many of the students now active view their struggles as part of the broader international struggles against globalisation and neoliberalism.
In our regular features the Special Edition features documents from contemporary struggles in education. Two documents from Students Against Financial Exclusions at the University of the Witwatersrand give a glimpse of the kind of issues facing students at tertiary institutions, and they also give an idea of the approach to struggle being adopted. We also feature documents from the history of education struggles. The Khanya Working Class History Programme Mondli Hlatswayo, Lebogang Mashile and Oupa Lehulere compile these documents. At the end of the section on organising we feature an overview of who got organised, and what they stood for. As we indicate, the South African Student Organisation (SASO) is probably the most important student organisation in South Africa’s history of resistance. In this edition we feature SASO’s policy manifesto of July 1971. The next document gives us a sense of the politics, strategies and tactics of the students who initiated and led the June 16 uprising. High school students have always tended to set the pace in student resistance in South Africa. The formation of COSAS in 1979 was an important event, and it introduced a new conciousness about class, and the issues of links between workers and students. Two documents in this edition are from COSAS. The one is its policy manifesto, and the other is its call to workers to support student struggles in the contexts of the Vaal uprisings in the mid-1980s. The last document is a extract from Zwelakhe Sisulu’s address to the National Education Crisis Committee, formed in 1986 to coordinate struggles against Bantu Education. The extract from his address focuses on the concept of “People’s Education”, as well as on the strategies adopted by the anti-apartheid education movement.
Our next regular feature, the Barometer of Resistance, focuses on student struggles from 1968 to the present, and on the events of June 16 in particular. For many activists, especially those currently active within the education movement today, the history of student struggles in South Africa is not only a source of inspiration, but also provides an opportunity for critical reflection on that history with a view to charting new perspectives and strategies in present-day struggles. As with the first article by Vally, the Barometer provides a link to the generation of 1976. A few writers in this edition talk about the death of the dream of free and quality education. But like the generation of 1976 they are saying “Mobilise! Don’t Mourn! guest Editors: nerisha baldevu, nina benjamin, molefi ndlovu and brian Ramadiro.
The Special Edition is a joint venture between the Khanya college and the Education Rights Project (ERP)
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