African Activist Archive

Contents: What is "Bantu Education"? • Black Demands for Equal Education • Students as Refugees and Exiles • How You Can Help • What are the Prospects for a Free South Africa Without Education? • What is SAFTE's Mission? • SAFTE is a new organization formed as a grassroots response to the educational crisis in South Africa and Namibia. Its mission is to arrange college scholarships in the U.S. for refugees and exiles from Southern Africa. SAFTE is the first Southern African scholarship program working with community colleges; Laney College in Oakland, California is the site of our pilot project. The brochure describes "bantu education," the South African policy that systematically denies black South Africans and Namibians access to a decent education. Bantu schooling is completely inadequate, both in absolute terms and relative to that provided whites. Blacks have long protested their inferior education; this resistance reached a turning point with the Soweto Student Rebellion of 1976. Some 40% of the 30,000 people arrested during the latest period of unrest were students under the age of 18. Students, teachers, and parents formed the National Education Crisis Committee (NEEC) in 1985; before it was banned in 1988, the NECC was developing a "people's curriculum" as an alternative to bantu education. Undoing the effects of bantu education will be one of the primary tasks for future democratic societies in South Africa and Namibia. Many young people have been forced to flee South Africa and Namibia to escape persecution, and thousands of South African and Namibian students are now refugees or exiles living in the Frontline States, enduring difficult conditions of refugee camps while seeking to continue their interrupted educations. South African and Namibia students in Zimbabwe are under constant threats from cross-border attacks by South African security forces. The brochure includes a quotation by Dean T.S. Farisani of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in South Africa.

African Activist Archive

SAFTE Supporting Leadership Development for a Free South Africa and Independent Namibia

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