S.A. schools where apartheid has been secretly killed

Press, 11 December 1982, Page 17

S.A. schools where apartheid has been secretly killed

ALLISTER SPARKS,

the London

“Observer” correspondent in South Africa, who is this years winner of the Valiant for Truth Media Award.

On a grassy slope 10 miles north of ’ Johannesburg’s outermost suburbs is a small co-ed boarding school where half the 236 pupils are black.

Woodmead School is the foremost example of a remarkable anachronism in the land of apartheid. Private schools throughout the country are quietly integrating in complete conflict with one of the most basic tenets of the Government’s racial ideology.

“We must be breaking at least nine laws,” says Woodmead’s youthful headmaster, Peter Nixon, “but somehow the Government has come to accept it. There must be several thousand black pupils in private schools around the country ”

Businesses, especially multinationals which are anxious to have something to show disinvestment lobbyists back home, are offering scholarships for black youngsters whose parents cannot begin to afford the fancy privateschool fees.

Trust funds are springing up. One, called the New Era Schools Trust, is raising money to build a chain of multiracial schools. What makes this so remarkable is that, next to the race classification law itself, and the laws prohibiting interracial sex and marriage, separate education is probably the most fundamental feature of the apartheid system. One of the Afrikaner Nationalist Government’s first actions after coming to power in 1948 was to take over all the mission schools for blacks and stop further black entry into what were called the “open” universities. | Fearing that modern edu-

cation would undermine the system it was intent on establishing, the Government was determined that African education should be rooted in tribal culture. Tribal people were seen as less of a threat to “white civilisation.” It instituted a state-run “Bantu education” system, with a curriculm different from the white schools, and built tribal universities in remote rural areas.

Now the apartheid Government is permitting the private schools to reverse that process. The numbers may be minuscule when set against a black population of 21 million, but a Government that has always been hypersensitive to the emergence of a black elite must be aware of their potential, significance.

Nearly the whole of the African National Congress leadership today is made up of people who were educated at the old mission schools and at Fort Hare University before the Government took them over.

Black leadership potential was stunted after that by “Bantu education.” Now a new group of young people with the self-assurance that a good education brings is beginning to emerge. “I can give you a list of names of people I reckon will be involved in leadership roles one day,” Nixon says. “Put the list away for 15 years and I believe 50 per cent of those names will mean something.”

What pleases Nixon particularly is that these black leaders of the future are growing up in an atmosphere of non-racialism rather than that of apartheid’s embittering ghettos. “In spite of the tensions in the society around us, or perhaps because of it, there is an incredible atmosphere of tolerance • here at Woodmead,” he says. Why is the Government permitting it? Mark Henning, chairman of the Headmasters Conference, an organisation of private school heads, thinks it is part of the ideological confusion that has overtaken Afrikanerdom in recent years. Something was allowed to begin that became difficult to stop. . Nixon believes the starting point was when South Africa opened diplomatic relations with Malawai’s maverick President Kamuzu Banda. The Government had to find a school that the black ambassador’s children could attend. It couldn’t be a state school. So the Government had to go cap in hand to the private schools to ask them to help out.

After that the Americans sent a black diplomat. Then whole embassy staffs arrived when four tribal “homelands” were granted nominal independence. Thus Pretoria, hardline capital of the apartheid State, provided the country’s first examples of integrated schools — at Government request.

“That blurred the lines and gave us an initiative which

we took,” Nixon says.

Not the least remarkable aspect of this anti-apartheid revolution is that it is taking place in discreet silence. The one thing that has been made clear is that if it ever becomes a public issue that is politically embarrassing to the authorities, it will be stopped.

Even the South African press is part of the conspiracy. Six years ago, while I was editing a newspaper here, Dr Piet Koornhof, then Minister of National Education, invited all the country’s editors to a background briefing at which he put to us the basics of' a deal that has been observed ever since.

The Government had a problem, Koornhof explained. The churches were under pressure to integrate their schools. If integrated private schools became a public issue the Government would have to stop them, but then “there wiU be one hell of a confrontation with the churches which will be bad for South Africa.”

So wouldn’t we be good chaps and keep quiet about it in the national interest? And didn’t we “liberalists” want to see a bit of integration anyway?

This last was said with an indulgent smile, for Koornhof never imagined. any white schools would want it to extend beyond a token few black admissions.

The editors agreed.

So it comes about that at a time when bogus changes to the apartheid system are being expensively advertised in newspapers around the world, the one change which happens to be genuine is taking place in silence. Copyright — London Observer