Let My People Go - Albert Luthuli

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Teachers’ Training Course at Adams College. When I had been at Blaauwbosch for two years, the Department notified me that I had been recommended for a bursary (for which I had not applied) which would see me through this course. I took it as a gift from the Almighty. I also suspected the hand of Dr Loram behind the recommendation. I left Blaauwbosch, little imagining that I would be spending the next fifteen years of my life at Adams.

      3.

      Life at Adams College

      THREE DISTINCT DEPARTMENTS, each with its own head, came under the supervision of the Principal of Adams College – a High School, a Training College for Teachers, and an Industrial School. For the next two years I lived uneventfully and busily as a student in the Training College, settling down to the vocation which seemed to have chosen me. The careers open to Africans, then as now, were extremely few – except for manual labour. Besides teaching, very little was open to us beyond the church, and clerical posts with lawyers and (in the third grade only) in the Civil Service. In these circumstances it is not surprising that I had done very little about picking a career, and I took it for granted that I would spend my days quietly as a teacher. I must add that, even had I lived in a country where the colour bar does not impose so restricted a range of careers, teaching would probably have been my choice – either that or law.

      I was fascinated by the horizons which my own education opened up, and eager to be instrumental in helping to educate others. The riches of the land and the material opulence of the cities were not for Africans. All the more, then, did we regard education as a thirsty wayfarer yearns for a water-hole.

      At the end of my student year I was faced with a hard choice. Dr Loram offered me a bursary which would see me through the University College of Fort Hare. To this day I have no doubt that I chose rightly, but I regretted terribly having had to decline. My reply to his offer needed little pondering.

      “I’m grateful for the offer, Dr Loram, extremely grateful. But my mother has been labouring all these years to ensure my education. Now she’s old. For the last two years I’ve been able to do nothing to help her. I must go out to teach again, so that I can release her from work in her old age.”

      I did not, however, go out to teach. I stayed on to teach at Adams. Adams was then leading the way in the experiment of using Africans to train African teachers. With one other African teacher I was appointed to the staff at Adams. The subjects in which I specialised were Zulu and Music, and some years later School Organisation was added. Besides these, there was much general teaching. At the end of my time at Adams, thirteen years later, I had become Supervisor of teachers in training at outlying schools. Throughout these years one job, which I enjoyed immensely, persisted – I was College Choirmaster. It did indeed appear that I was settling in to a teacher’s life.

      When I first joined the staff at Adams, African education in Natal was undergoing a drastic revision. The revolutionary at the helm was Dr Loram, newly appointed as Natal’s first Chief Inspector of Native Education. Previous to his appointment, African education had followed conventional lines. Except in the matter of language, there was not much difference between black and white education, and both conformed to the general pattern evolved in Europe.

      Now came Dr Loram, a vigorous product of the craze for “practical” education which was then in vogue. His driving intention seems to have been, in all good faith, to equip African children for the lives white South Africa decreed they would have to live. Since they had been cast for the role of hewers of wood and drawers of water, their education must equip them to hew wood and draw water. I doubt whether Dr Loram was aware of how cramped a future he was (by implication) predicting for us. In fact, I imagine that he assumed uncritically that we shall for ever be what most of white South Africa says we are, and he set out to make us contented in our mental shackles. He had, I do not doubt, the best of intentions.

      The result of his efforts was that the Three Rs became luxury subjects almost at once, and a disproportion of time was awarded to manual work and menial crafts. Utility was the thing. Standards of attainment in Arithmetic, Mathematics, and English went down-hill at a gallop.

      Fortunately Dr Loram did not stay in his position for long, though it took longer to repair the damage than to inflict it. He did, however, stay long enough to coin the phrase “develop along their own lines” which has become one of the war-cries of apartheid. Whether the Nationalists learned anything from Dr Loram’s educational theory or not, there is some similarity.

      For Dr Loram it can be said that his rash adventure was an experiment in keeping with fashions then current elsewhere, especially in America. Though not judicious, it was a sign of life. Against the present policy of the Nationalists it must be pointed out that they have resuscitated and intensified an approach already tried and abandoned.

      It now seems ironical that at the time I broke a lance in defence of Dr Loram’s revisions. In the African Teachers’ Journal I expressed support of the extension of the vernacular in our schools (Mother Tongue Instruction), though I did not agree with the emphasis on manual subjects. Ilanga laseNatal, a newspaper edited by Dr Dube and published in Zulu, took me severely to task, and there is no doubt that the African community was very strongly opposed to Dr Loram’s reforms.

      I learned a lesson, seeing clearly for the first time the danger of giving such matters purely academic consideration, and of being an enthusiast in the realm of theory. To me, at that moment, and in spite of my disagreement over some things, Dr Loram seemed to represent progressive trends in education. The Zulu community, more wisely, knew that he was cutting off the air supply. Like most young teachers at the time, I did not take into account the political and social context. I was aware of an educational situation, I was engrossed with equipping myself to be of some use in it, and failed to reckon with the setting in which Dr Loram was going to work.

      Life at Adams College contrived to insulate us in some measure from what was happening in South Africa. It was not that restraints were put on us. Rather, in some ways Adams was a world of its own in which we were too busy with our profession to pay more than passing attention to what happened elsewhere.

      It was an extremely busy world. For the first five or six years the urge to master my profession kept me fully occupied in the interludes of a very heavy schedule. When I could spare the time I fitted in haphazard reading – religion, sociology, political philosophy. I must confess that I still have a large gap in my political education: I have read none of the Marxist classics, and now it would be illegal (in South Africa) to do this.

      In 1928 secretaryship of the African Teachers’ Association was added to my voluntary and routine activities, and in 1933 I became president of the same body. Probably the main preoccupation of the Association was not teaching but pay – not surprising, since we were paid something like £120 a year. This work, involving as it did negotiations with the authorities, gave me some training in arts which have since become redundant. South African authorities no longer receive deputations, and they do not discuss their decisions with those affected by them.

      As secretary of the Association I had some practice in organisation, too, and during these years we made our first application of the boycott method. We boycotted Dr Loram’s Winter Schools on the grounds that the money spent on them would be better used to raise our wages.

      But we did concern ourselves – and more wholeheartedly – with more than money. While I was secretary of the Association it became increasingly clear to me that if we were to devote our major attention to conditions of employment and pay we should end up in chronic disgruntlement.

      With this, among other things, in mind, I took the initiative in founding the Zulu Language and Cultural Society as an auxiliary to the Teachers’ Association. I believed then, as I do now, that an authentic, comprehensive South African culture will grow in its own way. This will not be determined by cultural societies, but they may influence it. It seemed to me that African teachers ought to play some part in the process.

      We were thoroughly aware of the meeting of cultures, African and European, and of the disorganisation of both – especially the African – as a result. We did not have the desire of the Nationalists that we should return to the primitive. But we did have an intense wish to preserve what is

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