donation ceremony of the book, The Road to Democracy in South Africa
(1960-1970), Orlando West High School, Soweto
14 August 2006
âDedicated to future generationsâ
South African Democracy Education (SADET) Board of Trustees
Representatives from De Beers Consolidated Mines and Nedbank
Principal, teachers and learners
It is a great privilege to play a part in this morningâs ceremony. The
decision to present copies of The Road to Democracy in South Africa, volume 1
(1960-1970) is a positive acknowledgement of this schoolâs place in the history
of our countryâs struggle for freedom.
I am pleased to express my grateful thanks to the trustees of the South
African Democracy Education Trust (whose Chairperson is my ministerial
colleague Dr Essop Pahad). The work that has been initiated by the Trust is
going to make an invaluable contribution to the necessary task of ensuring that
our newfound freedom does not leave us as people without roots, forever
wondering in a bewildering array of assumed identities and unrecorded
experiences.
Much of our knowledge and perception of struggle and freedom is based on
received wisdom and oral telling by our elders and peers.
Along with many newly independent African countries political and
development imperatives have tended to occupy and dominate our immediate
actions and little attention has been given to the place of history in shaping
memory, identity, and destiny.
Yet memory and its place in constructing identity is an essential task in
any transformation of society.
The Trust is making an immeasurable contribution to this important task. The
initiators of the work of the Trust must be congratulated for this work.
The choice of Orlando West as the site for this public donation is also
significant. A township school in Soweto, attended by the poorest in our
society, is surrounded by the expectation that those within it will struggle to
make the grade.
Why choose this specific school? The choice lies in history. The school is
firmly linked to the epoch-making events of 1976. It was here thirty years ago,
on 16 June 1976 when one of the recognised martyrs of the struggle was shot and
killed.
Hector Peterson and those who marched with him were courageous young people
who defied expectation. They challenged and shaped history. They and many
others refused to accept subordinate status, refused to believe that democracy
was a limited commodity and refused to accept racist bondage and fearful
obedience as the inherent fate of black people.
Their resistance and that of many others in our history helped to make us
who we are today.
We hope that this donation will inspire you all to take an interest in
discovering who you are through history.
Our curriculum defines history as âthe study of change and development in
society over time and spaceâ. However, as I have attempted to indicate history
is much more than a study of the past. We use history to promote critical
skills of analysis. To teach young people to be wary of accepting any feature
of life or society as self-evident or inherently accurate.
A brief look at educational history illustrates the point. Many South
Africans believe that all education for black people in this country was
created by the apartheid state and thus was designed for mediocrity.
This is untrue. Black people played a leading role in creating institutions
that would offer credible education opportunity to their children and
communities. Successive white governments and eventually the apartheid state
saw danger in the black pursuit of educational excellence. They intervened in a
deliberate and cruel manner. They did not stop access to schooling; they
diabolically infused black educational opportunity with a destructive
mediocrity and worked hard at eventually eradicating excellence from black
education.
To paraphrase Shakespeare: âthis was the unkindest cut indeedâ.
Those who do not know this history have tended to buy into the notion that
we are by fate doomed to be mediocre in education. This acceptance of such a
label had led many of us to reify failure to act in a way that promotes our
lack of success, our lack of ambition, our lack of critical engagement with the
roles we need to play as dynamic agents of social change in post-apartheid
South Africa. J.T. Jabavu, J.K. Bokwe, S. Plaatjie, W.B. Rubusana and many
others are among the Africans who we need to study as people who refused to be
defined negatively, who refused to accept mediocrity.
The books you will receive today afford you the opportunity to know South
Africa and yourselves. You should use the books to explore history, to study
your community, the entire country, the continent, the world.
The Trust provides a firm basis for such intellectual scrutiny.
It responds to the History and Archaeology Report of the Department of
Education (2000), which called for the publication of history materials that
address the imbalances and the biases of the past.
The book is made excitingly real by the oral contributions and memoirs of
the many struggle leaders who alive today. The book also draws on fascinating
archival records as well.
Another feature is the link between urban and rural struggles against
apartheid.
It is important for learners to link what was happening in the anti-pass
campaign of Sharpeville and Langa in 1960 to what was happening in Mpondo Land
in the Eastern Cape, Sekhukhune Land in Limpopo and Ixopo in KwaZulu-Natal in
the same period.
This volume will assist you in studying the impact of apartheid on our
people.
It will also assist you in the understanding the foundations of our
constitutional democracy.
The Department of Education, through the South African History Project,
initially printed 6 000 copies of this book. It has printed another 3 000
copies for distribution to South African schools offering history.
The distribution process is underway and the books are being sent directly
to schools.
I would like to thank the Royal Netherlands Embassy for giving financial
assistance to the Department of Education for printing this volume.
Finally, the Department of Education would like to thank SADET and De Beers
Consolidated Mines Company for donating copies of the volume to the Department
of Education.
Allow me to close by quoting the words of the President Mbeki, written in
2004 for the foreword of this volume. I quote âIn this year during which we
celebrate ten years of liberation, it is my great pleasure to introduce you to
the first volume of the type of history that will help to ensure that the young
and all future generations do not, once again, allow some to dehumanise other
human beings by defining themselves as the better, and the rest, the
lesser.â
I thank too the school community for sharing this historic moment with
us.
Issued by: Department of Education
14 August 2006
