Changing lives of blacks in S.A.

Press, 12 August 1985, Page 12

Changing lives of blacks in S.A.

By

ALAN COWELL,

of the “New York Times,” in

Dunnottar, South Africa

Each morning, at about the same time, although in different places, the two men report for work and find, after months of unrest in South Africa, that their lives have changed, probably irrevocably. One man, Sergeant Joel Msibi, is a black policeman, chased finally from his home in a township near here called Duduza by black youths who firebombed his home three times before he gave up on unequal struggle and left. The other, who asked in an interview not to be identified, is a black teacher who goes to his school each day but finds no pupils there because they, as militant in their own eyes as their peers in Duduza, are boycotting his classes in a township near Port Elizabeth. If they have one thing in common, it is that both have been touched and altered by the township violence that the Government gave as its reason for declaring a State of Emergency in 36 magisterial districts around Johannesburg’s industrial sprawl and in the Eastern Cape. What divides them, however, is their interpretation of youthful revolt that confronts black South Africans increasingly with this question: Are you for the system, or against it? “If we were to say to them, go back to school,” the teacher, in his 50s, said, “We would be eaten up by the cyclone.” Yet he seemed to suggest in a long interview that, after many years of dealing with South Africa’s racially segregated educa■tional system, his sympathies lay with his students rather than with those who oppose their many political demands. Because of this, he has secured a sense of safety and identity in his community that is denied to the policeman. Since his home was attacked and he and 120 other black policemen were evacuated from Duduza, 30 miles east of Johannesburg, Mr Msibi said, “all my friends are standing far away from me.” “They do not even want to greet me because if they greet me, they will be called informers,” the plain clothes policeman, 31 years old, said. Both men’s lives have been changed by the same kind of protesters: young black activists, the torch-bearers of a perceived revolution that has grown, in part, from the classrooms.

Education disputes were at the core of South Africa’s unrest when it began to take root early in 1984, before the dramatic conflicts of the townships erupted in Sharpeville in September, for the second time in the nation’s tortured history. A report published last month by the South Africa Foundation said that, on avprage over a year, “220,000 black pupils were boycotting classes at any one time” out of a black school population estimated in 1983 at 7.6

million and expected to grow to 11 million by the year 2000. “If there was a political party for blacks,” the teacher said, “there would be something to take the steam out of it.”

Black political parties are banned, he said, so high school students ar increasingly talking classroom politics instead of academics, and that presents the teachers with a problem. “The essence of education is not to politicise the children,” the teacher said. “It is not us, it is the students politicising the children. We are under pressure to get to politics straight away, but our conditions of service say no politics.

“The real issue is power sharing” between the black majority and the white minority, he said. “There is no compromise on this. Education is just a microcosm, and as a result the students do not think anyone should distance himself from it because we are all in it together.” The words seemed to hang in the corridors of an empty school, where only the teachers had arrived, and Where a vista of small homes was glimpsed through shattered windows.

The problem, the teacher said, began in the 19505, when Hendrik Verwoerd, apartheid’s grand designer, conceived the notion of “Bantu education,” which held that there was no point in educating blacks beyond a menial level. “It made no pretenses about the inferiority of black education,” the teacher said, adding that “education reversed instead of moving forward” and that the legacy, 30 years later, is unrest. In recent years, the authorities — 13 separate authorities run education within South Africa’s traditional borders — said they had sought to improve black education. Spending on black education is said to have increased 20fold since 1973. In 1980, the annual average amount spent on a black child’s education, according to official figures, was 88 rand. Now. it is 214 rand. The current exchange rate is roughly 2 rand to the United States dollar.

Still, there is a failure and drop out rate among the growing black school population that educators call alarming. “It is not because the black child is stupid,” the teacher said, and he went on to recite the grievances. About four-fifths of black teachers, he said, are inadequately trained as a result of “Bantu education.” White schools, he said, have many teaching aides but black schools do not. The spending on one year’s education for a white child was still seven or eight times higher than the amount spent on a black child.

“You will look out beyond the township,” the teacher said, “you

will see a nice school. “That is for coloureds,” the teacher said, using the South African term for people of mixed race. “Then, in the distance, you will see a shining school. That is for whites.” His voice suggested more resignation than resentment. In black classrooms, according to recent studies, there are 43 students for each teacher. For whites, the number is 20. Black education is not compulsory, and parents must find cash for fees. White schooling is compulsory and free. “The white child will go home to somewhere nice to do his homework,” the teacher said. “Here, in the townships, there will be a paraffin lamp or a candle for the homework. The child would have to wait until everybody has gone to bed. The conditions are very crowded. It’s almost impossible.” The grievances, however, have taken a far more political turn, so students at his school, he said, are boycotting classes now — and have been doing so for months — to press demands that include the creation' of a democratically elected students’ representative council that will have a say in running the schools. So, yes, the teacher said, their schooling will be damaged and their lessons will be forgotten, and they might grow up with barely an education. “But they are in the kamikaze mood now,” he said. “They would rather commit suicide than swallow what’s being offered them.” In Dunnottar, the closest white town to Duduza township, in a police station guarded by palms and wire fences, Mr Msibi acknowledged that his child, too, was not going to school; but, he said, the reasons were different. “I have been threatened,” he said discussing the plight of his nine-year-old boy. “They are after my blood, so he cannot go into the location. If they don’t get me, they’ll pay me back by taking him.”

Mr Msibi is a lean man with hard eyes. In the waistband of his trousers, he wore a heavy pistol, and he seemed to applaud a reporter’s suggestion that, to judge from his enthusiastic description of an 11-year career combating “murder, theft, rape and so on,” he might be nicknamed the Clint Eastwood of Duduza. He is also, however, at the centre of a harsh conflict between the black activists of the nation’s townships and those they consider the stooges of white authority. Since unrest took root, according to a police spokesman, the homes of about 400 black policemen have been attacked, and 360 of the homes have been destroyed. “About a dozen” black policemen, the spokesman said, have been killed — rare casualties in a conflict that has now taken more than 500 lives, most of them shot down by the security forces. Black policemen, particularly those

brought to riot areas from other . places, are sometimes accused of being among the harshest against black unrest. Mr Msibi is one of about 18,000 blacks in South Africa’s 45,000member police force and, like the teacher, his life is not what it was before unrest broke out. In the old days, he said, he had an eight-room house — bigger than most — and the threat was not so clear.

“I’m a policeman,” he said, “and no one likes a policeman.” In February, people came and stoned his home and threw petrol bombs at his bedroom and living room while his mother, wife, and child were in the house. “I was not even at home,” he said, with some indignation. The second time, the arsonists hit the kitchen and two bedrooms. The third time, he said, everything burned. “All my possessions were destroyed,” he said. In his politics, the sergeant seemed to echo the views that emanate from the white-led authorities. As the teacher seemed to have thrown in his lot with his students, so the policeman seemed to have been predestined by his choice of career to identify with their opponents. “They say they want liberation?” he said of fellow blacks among the townships activists. “Then they must go through the right channels. They can talk to the President.”

The white authorities, he said, “are trying their level best to bring the situation for the blacks in an equal position as that of the whites.”

Sometimes, his comments seemed to show the preoccupations of those on opposing sides intermingle, in one case with tragic results. He had, he said, been the investigating officer who sought to interview the brother of Maki Skosana in connection with a theft. Maki Skosana was the 23-year-old woman burned to death in front of television cameras at a furneral in Duduza the day the ‘state of emergency was proclaimed. She had been accused by a, crowd of being a police informer.

Mr Msibi said she was not an informer and had been been burned by mistake — an assertion initially confirmed by some black activists in the township who later revised their version of events to say she had, indeed, been an informer.

Her brother, the black detective said, had been “a naughty guy,” wanted on charges of theft and of causing grievous bodily harm. So, before he arrested him, Mr Msibi had visited their home three times to look for him.

By the accounts of some activists, those visits were the events that fueled suspicions against Maki Skosana and resulted in her sentencing by a kangaroo court. Her execution was described by onlookers as brutal. She was beaten, kicked, set afire, and kicked again while she was burning. her televised incineration did much to convince white South Africans, previously inured to some hard realities of township life, that a State of Emergency was a justifiable act to restore law and order.