Back to Bantu

South Africa has a unique solution to the problem of separate but equal education for races. Under the recently passed Bantu Education Act, natives will get education so unequal it is almost primitive. The Act will place natives in segregated schools run by the Native Affairs Ministry, whose avowed purpose is to teach only the "agrarian arts": soil care, cattle herding, and health. Somewhat more important is the implicit aim of teaching the native to accept his role as an inferior creature.

The new law will obliterate what has been the finest native educational system in Africa. South African missionaries, who run over ninety percent of the native schools will probably continue teaching, but the curriculum, now dictated by Daniel Malan's Native Affairs Ministry, must change from education to propaganda for acceptance of segregation policies. To prevent any inter-racial mingling, the government will stop teaching any of the European tongues used in South Africa. This will no doubt widen the color gap, but it will leave teachers struggling to make the few texts written in Bantu fulfill their needs. And in this language, advanced or technical works are non-existant.

The Act also gives the Government an effective means of suppressing native leaders. All requests for higher education must be passed by the Native Affairs Ministry, which may use this power to force submission from parents who want a decent education for their children.

The Bantu Education Act will no doubt achieve its purpose as a tool of South African segregation, but only at the expense of education. Ignorance will only further the separation of the native community, leaving it easy prey to the same kind of nationalism erupting in Kenya. To this extent, the Act is largely self-defeating. But in a larger sense, the new policy is an attempt to set back a force which cannot be stopped. In the same way that segregation in American schools is doomed, the progress of education and the enlightenment it brings makes its constant advance a necessity. Soothing as it is, Malan's dream of the happy savage will not cure his internal disorders; the Union has offered the natives real education too long to force them to accept mere subsistence knowledge from their schools.