South Africa: Iconic Black Schools to Be Revived

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Business Day (Johannesburg)

9 October 2008
Posted to the web 9 October 2008

Sue Blaine
Johannesburg

THE Historic Schools Restoration Project was discussing with Education Minister Naledi Pandor a "third tier" of schools, fully funded by the government but managed autonomously, to add to SA's public and independent schools, Anglican Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane said yesterday.

Ndungane is executive director of the project, which aims to restore "more than 50" of the schools that contributed to the education of black children before the Bantu Education Act was introduced in 1953. The act separated them from the comparatively well-resourced education system for whites.

African National Congress (ANC) treasurer-general Mathews Phosa has said the suggestion "makes a lot of sense" and Pandor had promised the project leaders she would discuss it at a high level, Ndungane said.

The proposal had also been championed "passionately" by businesswoman and former University of Cape Town vice-chancellor Dr Mamphela Ramphele, Ndungane said.

He was presenting the project to a gathering of the Gauteng business community, at which he called on captains of industry to put money into it.

It had an operational budget of R4,5m for the 2008-09 financial year and work had begun "yesterday" on a first phase involving seven schools, Ndungane said.

The first phase was expected to be finished in about three years.

T here is an emphasis on restoring the physical infrastructure of many of the schools, all of which, in their heyday, educated some of SA's premier black leaders before the introduction of the Bantu Education Act.

They are KwaZulu-Natal's Adams College, where the ANC's first president, John Dube, was schooled, as was Nobel prize winner Albert Luthuli, ANC stalwart Govan Mbeki and C hief Justice Pius Langa.

Others were Ohlange and Inanda Seminary; f ormer president Nelson Mandela's high school, Healdtown Comprehensive H igh School, and St Matthews, both in Eastern Cape; Lemana in Limpopo and Free State's Tiger Kloof, which was attended by "almost the entire first cabinet of Botswana", Ndungane said.

The restoration of these schools was "a legacy project" that would help South Africans change their aspirational culture and learn to "make do with what we have" instead of continuously yearning for what was new, said Development Bank of Southern Africa chairman Jay Naidoo.

There had been huge improvements in education and more children were attending early childhood development centres, more were finishing primary school and more were completing matric.

Yet, it was unacceptable that education was so poor in SA that 70% of schools accounted for only 7% of the country's matric passes, Naidoo said.

Pointing to three international comparative education standards reports, all of which put SA's pupils at or near the bottom of the class in literacy and numeracy, Naidoo asked a question that has been asked by many: "Why this state of affairs when we put R121bn into education?"

"Beyond the money, what is the challenge that faces us ...? Many parents, as soon as they have access to money, take their children out of the township (schools). The big challenge for us is taking excellence back to the townships, and the core of that has to be the teacher.

"Somewhere we have lost the passion for development (of our youth) ... and some tough questions have to be asked of the unions. I say that as the ex-general secretary of Cosatu ," Naidoo said.

Teachers and unions had to think hard about the teacher's role in education, he said, because education was something that could not be taken away from those who had it.

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