Let My People Go - Albert Luthuli

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Africa in which they are growing up. In the days when Professor Matthews and I were young teachers at Adams the world seemed to be opening out for Africans. It seemed mainly a matter of proving our ability and worth as citizens, and that did not seem impossible. We were, of course, aware of the existence of colour prejudice, but we did not dream that it would endure and intensify as it has. There seemed point, in my youth, in striving after the values of the Western world. It seemed to be a striving after wholeness and fulfilment. Since then we have watched the steady degeneration of South African affairs, and we have seen this degeneration quickened in the last ten years.

      But our children have been born, with the whole of their generation, into the midst of the triumph of prejudice. Young Africans know from infancy upwards – and the point here is that they know nothing else – that their strivings after civilised values will not, in the present order, ever earn for them recognition as sane and responsible civilised beings.

      The argument behind the idea1 that we Africans need a two-thousand-year apprenticeship has occasionally been uttered, though never very coherently. It goes like this: “It has taken us two thousand years to reach our present civilised state. A hundred years ago the natives were barbarians. It will take them two thousand years to catch up with where we are now, and they will not be civilised until then.”

      It is pure nonsense, of course. The argument does not arise from a survey of history, it arises from the urge to justify a course already chosen. The conclusion (“no rights for two thousand years”) is there before the argument begins. An uncritical assumption (“whites are civilised”) is there too. No account is taken of the fact that there have been both bad and exemplary Christians throughout the whole of the two thousand years in question, and that various societies have produced civilised beings for much longer than that. The argument assumes that, whereas whites can take up where the last generation left off, Africans cannot encounter and absorb anything in the present – they must go back and take each step of the road from the beginning, as though nothing that has happened during the last two thousand years can affect them. Must we really invent the spinning-wheel before we can wear or make clothes? Must we really invent the internal combustion engine before we can drive cars?

      I do not agree that white South Africa, at the end of its theoretical two-thousand-year trek, is displaying at present the high virtues of civilisation, and it is doing a good deal to discredit in African eyes the Christianity which many of its members profess.

      But even if it were being Christian and civilised, its values would not have been invented by white men. The Christian faith sprang from Asia Minor, and to this day it speaks with a Semitic voice. Western civilisation is only partly Western. It embraces the contribution of many lands and many races. It is the outcome of interaction, not of apartheid. It is an inheritance, something received to be handed on, not a white preserve. I claim with no hesitation that it belongs to Africa as much as to Europe or America or India. The white man brought it here, originally, but he brought a lot of other things too. I do not suppress one detail of our indebtedness – and I know of no instance in which the indigenous peoples of South Africa failed to reach out after a way of life whose value they had the sense to grasp.

      Now the cultural gifts formerly offered are being snatched away. Our children are invited to pin their hopes on easier times in two thousand years. That is the extent of the offer. In the meantime, what? In the meantime there is the Bantu Education Act.

      Bantu education came into effect in 1954. It is a specialised type of education designed exclusively by Europeans exclusively for Africans. It is not, as were former educational systems in South Africa, designed simply by adults for children. It is not to be judged on the details of its syllabuses, though what I know of these is shoddy enough. It can be understood only in the light of the declared intentions of its begetters, in the context of other legislation enforcing the master-servant relationship, and by its effects.

      The effect of entirely discarding children who fail examinations twice is to deny to slow starters all access to literacy – for life.

      The effect of placing school control in the hands of local elected boards and committees is to invite people who (however excellent in character) have no clear understanding of education or of their function, to interfere with the normal activities of trained teachers. This in turn produces chronic nervousness in the teachers, who are hired and sacked by the local boards – no reason need be given.2 The principle of School Boards is excellent. In practice, in the present situation, it is harmful – and the African communities involved are never freely represented on them.

      The effect of providing one teacher for a minimum of sixty-five children is to reduce efficiency.

      The effect, in a fast-developing society with a growing population, of limiting (to £6½ million per year) the government money contribution to African education for all time, is to bleed the poorest section of the community dry, and to insure progressive stunting of African education for lack of funds. The effect of forcing African parents to choose between school feeding and school buildings is to impoverish us further. Under the new system state provision of books has disap peared too and that makes us poorer still, even though the government now pays the teachers – a mercy denied to us by the Smuts government.

      The effect of double sessions taught by the same teachers is to overburden them to the point of exhaustion, while the effect of twenty-minute lessons is to waste much of what time there is.3

      At the teacher-training level, the effect of loading admissions in favour of those taking short courses is to produce comparatively poorly-trained teachers – who are paid lower wages. Standards must decline in a cheap-labour system.

      The effect of using only the many vernaculars as media of instruction is to cut children off deliberately and violently from access to outside influences and ideas – and the heritage of much of the civilised world.

      This, of course, brings us to the heart of the matter. African children have previously had some small access to the commonwealth of learning. They have reached out, many of them, after its riches, and many of our African doctors and lawyers and teachers have proved themselves able to absorb not only learning but Western culture, in less than two thousand years. In South Africa this has set up tensions, and evoked the threat of encroachment upon the white standard of living and all-white rule.

      So the door has had to be slammed shut hard in the faces of the younger generation, and a system devised which will recondition us to accept perpetual inferiority and perpetual isolation from Western learning and culture. To isolate us and to convince us of our permanent inferiority – these two motives lie behind much legislation from the Act of Union until now, and the Bantu Education Act is a major means to this end. Whatever may be said in favour of certain altered details of Bantu Education (and I do not deny that here and there is to be found a minor improvement or two), the overall effect of this system is not educational at all, but political. It is a tool in the hands of the white master for the more effective reduction and control of the black servant.

      This is not inference. It has been quite baldly stated. Dr Verwoerd made it plain beyond all doubt, when he introduced the legislation, that the new system had been invented because former education had produced “misfits” and “black Englishmen” who had acquired ideas which did not satisfactorily equip us to be content for ever with a subservient lot. These “misfits” could no longer be allowed to “graze in white pastures”.

      The declared aim of his legislation was to produce Africans who would aspire to nothing in white South Africa higher than the “certain forms of labour” which Dr Verwoerd fixed as the top limit of African aspiration. In order to achieve this end he took over every single African school in the country – even the remaining so-called “private schools” or church schools may teach nothing but his syllabus in his way, and even the informal tuition by one white person of one black child is illegal. If a white employer teaches her African maidservant’s toddler the alphabet, she breaks the law.

      Dr Verwoerd, as is his habit, spoke at great length when he introduced this Bill. When he had finished nobody at all could have been left in doubt that the new education “for Africans only” was intended, from beginning to end, to create Africans anew after his own peculiar image of the “real native”.

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