Teaching the “native”: The foundations of “native” education policy in South Africa, 1900-1936

If you are sitting in a South African school or university right now, you need to put aside 1948 and “Bantu Education” as a primary target of enquiry - these were little more than steps along a road that was already paved―and study when, where and how your institution came into being in the first place. This book joins the growing body of work (much of it by South African scholars) displacing the many mind-numbingly dull texts loaded with assumptions and logics that, in the case of South Africa, reify a simplified colonial explanation of the past.

Generations of students, educators and policymakers have suffered enough through tedious though inaccurate history books disguised as dispassionate, impartial views of “the facts.” Yet as important as new scholarship is to a young democracy just two decades old, it is not enough. What is absolutely necessary is a fundamental reform of the very way in which history is taught in South Africa from kindergarten through graduate school, from teacher training and curriculum design to the policy boards at provincial and Ministerial levels. For if we are to understand how this country, South Africa, came to be the way it is, then the primary documents of its history must be integrated into the curriculum.

Every student and teacher must know the South African Native Affairs Commission, the Act of Union, the policy documents and speeches of Rhodes, Milner, and the actual individuals designing policies for “Natives”. From these documents, a picture emerges of the structures of Empire, the actual ways in which its logics, assumptions and practices operated in reality and purposely supported a system of inequality that has endured for over a century. In the texts and lives of those seemingly dull commissions and acts, the language used by the “Lords” and “Sirs” of the British Empire, the grant proposals and studies, the colonial office memos and meeting agendas, the mountainous data sets from questions asked and not asked, those little daily hegemonic interactions from generations of colonial staff and their international partners, we gain the ability to understand the structures that have made inequality in South Africa so intransigent.