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2019 is a special year for the South African literary world.  Our nation and the world celebrate four literary giants and centennials that were born in 1919.  They are KwaZulu-Natal born author, scholar, and academic – CLS Nyembezi, Nontando (Noni) Jabavu, Peter Abrahams, and Es’kia  Mphahlele.  Given their success and international repute, conferences have been organised in South Africa and across the globe to re-examine their works and honour their legacy. These writers were not only products of our recent, turbulent history of home and exile, belonging and alienation, rootedness and displacement.  In reflecting about their lived experiences and the human condition, they were also at the forefront of imagining and re-imagining a South Africa free from the clutches of racial division, class exploitation, sexism, and injustice. Their works are a crucial reminder that the creative arts were a cornerstone and fountain of the liberation struggle. They challenge us to appreciate that economic emancipation cannot be successfully attained and sustained without a cultural revolution.

One of the fundamental statements to come from the Freedom Charter under the Clause, “The Doors of Learning and Culture Shall Be Opened to All” was the assertion that in a free South Africa, “the aim of education shall be to teach the youth to love their people and their culture, to honour human brotherhood, liberty and peace.”  It was the young, African National Congress (ANC) aligned teacher, Es’kia Mphahlele, who was delegated to lead the discussion on this Clause on the 26th of June 1955. From the 1956 Treason Trial records at Wits Historical Papers, we know that the notorious Special Branch was also in attendance during the adoption of the Freedom Charter and recorded Mpahlele to have said:

Bantu culture is an animal that is formed in Parliament by Dr Verwoerd, the dirtiest thing that you can think of… I refuse to tell my children that they are inferior to the white man… the white man has made a terrible mess of everything… I am looking forward to a day when our culture will so much unify us. We shall no more talk of the Congresses of the People as an organisation of Coloureds, Indians, and Europeans. We shall have one movement. We shall absolutely have no distinction, and we will stand together for a united cause. Our culture…will not be a culture of Indians, of the Africans. It will be the culture of the people of South Africa”

In a July 1990 Open Letter to FW De Klerk, Eskia Mphahlele challenged white South Africans to take responsibility in fixing their mess that they had created over centuries. He wrote,

“You knew, Mr President, thanks also to a lot of prodding from the white media, that you were placing Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress/Mass Democratic Movement (MDM) in an impossible position. If they don’t jive to your reform music, Bush and Thatcher and the rest of the white world may shift the blame to the oppressed peoples for the whole mess created by South African whites. If, on the other hand, Mandela and the MDM follow your lead – for you are in the lead all the time – towards total surrender of the moral principles the masses have fought for all these centuries, something’s going to explode in the near future.”

In his youth, Es’kia Mphahlele was a passionate, devoted teacher who saw education as a powerful instrument for self-emancipation and development for the oppressed black masses.  While teaching at Orlando High School, he became active in the Transvaal African Teachers Association (TATA) which protested against the 1949 Eislen Commission on Native Education.  Mphahlele and his generation foresaw that the miseducation of the black majority would become the backbone of white domination.  At the end of 1952, together with Zeph Mothopeng and Isaac Matlare, they were dismissed and banned from teaching  for their opposition to the introduction of Bantu education. It was Dr Verwoerd who argued,

“There is no space for him [the "Native"] in the European Community above certain forms of labour. For this reason it is of no avail for him to receive training which has its aim in the absorption of the European Community, where he cannot be absorbed. Until now he has been subjected to a school system which drew him away from his community and misled him by showing him the greener pastures of European Society where he is not allowed to graze.”

In 1953, the racist, Bantu Education Act was legislated to ensure racial segregation in South African schools and to guarantee that Africans remained hewers of wood and drawers of water. It was an effective instrument designed to enforce white supremacy, defend white privilege, and normalise the subjugation of the black majority. Mphahlele was appalled by the goal of this education to essentialise African culture and identity and the spreading of the myth of a distinct, separate “bantu society” from the rest of humanity. Bantu Education was also severely under-resourced with white children being subsidised ten times more than African children.

Apartheid was a nightmare. A plethora of racist, cruel, and demeaning laws were promulgated by the National Party government to enforce their grand design of separating the races and entrench the socio-economic exclusion of the black majority. In less than five years in power, the National Party government passed laws aimed at imposing racial segregation.  They included the Population Registration Act (1950), Group Areas Act (1950), Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1950), the Immorality Amendment Act (1950), Bantu Authorities Act (1951), the Separate Amenities Act (1953) etc.

Addressing the ANC Cape Provincial Conference on the 15th of August 1953, Professor ZK Matthews listed these various discriminatory and oppressive laws and raised concern about “the deepening crisis in race relations”. Speaking of a multiracial, national gathering which would adopt the Freedom Charter, Matthews said:

“I wonder whether the time has not come for the ANC to consider the question of convening a National Convention, a Congress of the People, representing all the people of this country irrespective of race or colour to draw up a Freedom Charter for the democratic South Africa of the future.”

The Cradock conference believed that “such a conference would serve to unite all the democratic forces in South Africa among all races into a front against the dangers of fascism; and would enable the ANC to demonstrate in a practical manner its policy for the solution of the problems of the country.” The ANC agreed that the Congress of the People should demonstrate a clear break from the Union government which was ushered in 1910 on the foundation of racial exclusion. Matthews’ proposal of the drawing of the Freedom Charter by all South Africans was endorsed by the Annual ANC Conference in December 1953 in Queenstown. To collect demands for the Freedom Charter, the famous “Call to the Congress of the People” was drafted. In part, it said,

Let us speak of the wide land, and the narrow strips on which we toil.
Let us speak of brothers without land, and of children without schooling.

Let us speak of the light that comes with learning, and the ways we are kept in darkness.
Let us speak of great services we can render, and of the narrow ways that are open to us.

After a year and half of campaigning for the demands of the Freedom Charter, on the 25th and 26th of June 1955, about 3000 freedom delegates assembled in Kliptown to adopt the Freedom Charter. The delegates were drawn from the ANC, the South African Indian Congress, the South African Coloured People’s Congress, the South African Congress of Democrats, and the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU).

It is interesting to note that while the language of multiracialism  was popular in the divided South Africa of the fifties, Mphahlele was already espousing the radical ideas of non-racialism. He envisioned the possibility of a common South African identity grounded on human dignity, human solidarity, and the philosophy of African humanism. Given the persistent challenges of racialized poverty, unemployment, and inequality, we find today individuals and groups who seek to reject non-racialism for narrow, self-serving interests. These developments point to the need to support accelerated, radical economic transformation to avert the violent explosion that Mphahlele warned De Klerk about in 1990. This programme of redress must simultaneously be underpinned and sustained through a state-led programme of education, skills development, and increased support for  the arts.

Since the democratic breakthrough in 1994, the ANC-led government has worked tirelessly to ensure that it transforms the education landscape and position it to serve a pro-poor, developmental agenda. It has championed concerted efforts aimed at deracialising the education system; unify it, and increase access for the majority black and poor. Today South Africa has achieved near universal access to education for children aged 7-14 years. Ninety percent of public schools have become no-fee paying schools, and learners are benefiting from school feeding schemes and subsidised public transport. This has contributed to the increase in school attendance from 51% in 1994 to 99% today.

Under the ANC, two new universities were built and today there are over two million students in our institutions of higher learning.  In KwaZulu-Natal, the provincial government awarded bursaries worth a total of R1.8 billion to more than 16 000 students between 2014 and 2018. KZN has also delivered 43 new schools since 2014. Over the past five years, more than 47 000 learners in 320 schools in KZN, benefitted from the learner transport programme. Today, no less than 74% of children in KZN are attending Grade R, and the matric pass rate has increased from 69.7% in 2014 to 76.2% in 2018.

In 2018, the ANC began implementing the historic demand of fee-free higher education at our tertiary institutions.  The National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) increased to nearly R15 billion in 2018 from R70 million in 1994. Recently, government allocated   R967 million to universities to pay toward the historical debt of students. The ANC is on course to ensure that by 2024, all undergraduate students will be fully funded by NSFAS.

From its formation in 1912, the ANC’s principal aim was to unite all South Africans and to create a truly non-racial, non-sexist, equal, and prosperous society. The millions of South Africans that will give the ANC a decisive mandate at the polls on the 8th of May believe in economic redress, equitable access to land, and social transformation. They will vote for the ANC because they share in the belief that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white. The ANC remains popular among South Africans because it is the only organisation capable of uniting all South Africans behind the just cause of equality and non-discrimination.

Written by  ANC KZN Chairperson, Sihle Zikalala