P Jordan: Launch of African Literature Project at Adam's College

3 November 2007

Thank you programme director
Your grace, Archbishop Njongo Ndungane
The Premier of KwaZulu-Natal, Mr Sibusiso Ndebele
The Honourable MEC for Education of this province, Mrs Ina Cronje
Your Worship, the Mayor of Manzitoti
Honoured guests
Ladies and gentlemen:

Today's occasion marks the beginning of the public phase of an important
cultural and educational project. One of the most important outcomes of this
project, we hope, shall be the engendering of a renewed pride in black South
Africa's cultural, literary, musical and pedagogic heritage. The Department of
Arts and Culture has been working with his Grace, Archbishop Ndungane and a
small committee of dedicated individuals for the past year to bring it to
stage. We have also involved the Departments of Education and of Science and
Technology, both of which are integrally involved in the realisation of its
objectives.

Educational institutions, the mines and the factories were the portals
through which the post-colonial African was ushered into the modern world of
late 19th and 20th centuries. Our visit here to Adams College is the
celebration of the emergence of this New African, forged in the fires of the
wars of resistance and tempered in the crucible of South Africa's forced march
into the modern era.

It was during the latter half of the 19th century and the early decades of
the 20th century that we saw the establishment, growth and development of a
host of educational institutions inspired by a thirst for modern education and
the desire to master the technologies associated with the modern world among
the African people. Having experienced the immense power at the command of the
industrialised nations of Europe during 100 years of war from the late 18th
century onwards, African communities had come to realise that it was only by
acquiring these same skills and knowledge that Africans could hope to compete
with those who had conquered and dispossessed them of their land on an equal
basis.

The acquisition of a modern education and the proliferation of the
institutions that would impart it thus in many respects became a national
project, as significant for African advancement as political movements.

The establishment of the Native Educational Association, under the
leadership of Rev Elijah Makiwane in 1880, closely parallels that of the first
modern political body, "Imbumba yamaNyama" among the African voters of the
Eastern Cape in 1882. The emergence of a secular African languages press in the
shape of "Imvo Zabantsundu" in 1884 complimented the earlier developments by
offering an instrument for networking among the literate African community.

The schools built in various parts of our country in pursuance of this goal
became the incubators of the first generations of Africans endowed with a
modern education. In a number of instances such schools were the direct result
of community endeavours, in which funds were raised to supplement a grant in
land given to a missionary society to build a school. In others, missionaries
took their own initiatives, and built schools primarily with the aim of
proselytising Christianity. Yet others were built on the initiative of African
educators, like John Langalibalele Dube and Charlotte Maxeke, who were able to
mobilise local and international resources for the purpose.

By 1910, when the white populations of the four British colonies came
together in a union that excluded all black people, a cluster of institutions
stretching from the Wilberforce Institute in Evaton, to Zonnebloem College in
Cape Town had grown up imparting modern science, mathematics, the European
classics and a number of skills to eager African pupils drawn from as far a
field as the then Northern Rhodesia (Zambia).

These historic schools were noted for their ecumenicalism, both religious
and ethnic. On the campus of an institution like Lovedale, until the advent of
Bantu Education and the fanatical racism of the apartheid regime, one could
find African, Coloured and Indian students. At one point in the late 19th
century, even White pupils had been educated at Lovedale! The ethnic origins of
the student bodies at the schools was also mixed, with Xhosa-speakers being
educated alongside Zulu, Sotho, Tswana, Tsonga, Ndebele and Shona speakers.
From the late 1860s there was a sizeable contingent of former slaves from the
region of Lake Malawi who had been rescued from their captors by David
Livingstone at Lovedale.

Thrown together in the same milieu, it was perhaps inevitable that it was
from amongst those first students who passed through these institutions that
the earliest African nationalist politicians came. They continued to be
nurseries for activists in the fields of politics and in education well into
the 20th century when the intervention of Dr Hendrik Verwoerd and his acolytes
put an end to it.

These historic schools emerged as centres of academic excellence both
because of the quality of education they offered but also because of the
dedication and diligence of their student bodies. In celebrating these
institutions we are also honouring the pioneers who established them and the
reputations they acquired. Successive generations of high achievers amongst the
Africans were the grandaunts of these schools, reinforcing their reputations
and establishing challenging benchmarks of achievement for those who came after
them. Our celebration today pays tribute to the schools and scholars whose
subsequent careers rebounded to the honour of their alma maters.

Programme director,
Honoured guests,
Ladies and gentlemen,

When I first approached his Grace, Archbishop Ndungane, to take charge of
this project, one of our earliest discussions was about what exactly we were
aiming to restore? How does a Minister of Arts and Culture become the initiator
of a project which is self-evidently the remit of the Minister of Education in
the first instance?

One is keenly aware of the extremely ambiguous legacy of the historic
schools. There are many interesting, moving and disturbing tales that have been
told by those who had the experience. Because many of their founders regarded
them as institutions for the acculturation of the African child, in many of
these schools one was forbidden to speak an African language during the week.
African languages were for the weekend or the school recess when pupils went
home.

Because many of the founders were themselves the products of very
authoritarian British, Irish and German boarding schools, that authoritarian
culture was usually imported into South Africa.

Was it our objective to recreate and revive the schools in the same fashion?
I must immediately disabuse anyone who thinks that is the case. Our objective
is to revive these historic schools, but not in order to reinvent the
authoritarian centres of acculturation to a colonial society they were
conceived as, but rather to re-affirm the healthy traditions of scholarship and
academic excellence these schools pioneered, but shorn of those Victorian
notions of discipline and its associate racist assumptions that African
languages were somehow deficient.

We are very conscious of the fact that institutions such as Lovedale, Marian
Hill and others were also the first publishing houses of African languages in
South Africa. Apart from school textbooks that were then directly employed for
teaching by the school and others, an institution like Lovedale published a
very long catalogue of other materials such as novels, music, hymnaries, poetry
in addition to the journal, "South African Outlook," which remains one of the
best sources of Eastern Cape cultural history.

That brings me immediately to relevance of this project for the Ministry of
Arts and Culture. As the incubators and nursery of the earliest literature
amongst the African people, these historic schools are very significant
cultural institutions. The Romanisation of the African languages of our region
was usually undertaken at these centres, first for purposes of evangelising the
local population, but later for the varied uses that the written word can be
applied. This revival is, in that sense, also an act of excavation. Through the
revival of these schools we shall also be undertaking an archaeological
exercise to rediscover some of the treasurers of modern African literary
creativity. I am certain this will prove particularly true of an institution
like Lovedale, whose entire catalogue of books and other publications deserves
to be reprinted and re-published. South Africa and the world will be poorer
should the works published by Lovedale in more than 100 years of literary
activity be lost to us.

Rescuing those materials from oblivion is one of the tasks my department
will be pursuing with greater vigour during this coming year. To that end, we
have already embarked on a private/public partnership between the National
Library and an emergent black-owned publishing house.

Today's celebration will therefore also be the starting point of a sustained
campaign. Our intention is to actively promote a culture of reading amongst
South Africans. Literature can be a source of knowledge but it can also be
recreational, a source of amusement and relaxation. We, as a society will only
impress this on our people by widening their access to literature in the
languages they have the greatest facility in. To achieve this will require
partnerships among publishers, writers' associations, our historic schools, and
the Department of Arts and Culture.

The Freedom Charter, adopted 51 years ago at Kliptown, proclaims, among
other things, that "The doors of learning and of culture shall be opened." This
project, to revive and resuscitate the historic schools, is one further
contribution towards the realisation of that ideal.

Academic seminars and conferences, as well as school oriented projects will
be embarked upon to stimulate further research and to popularise the contents
of the project among school going youth, and through them, the wider
population.
In addition to publications arising from the conferences, etc the Department of
Arts and Culture will generate a number of creative information tools to
reinforce public awareness and participation.

The Department of Arts and Culture envisages appointing a research
co-ordinator, who will appoint a team of researchers, cultural historians,
post-graduate students and others to implement the project. It should provide
employment opportunities for unemployed graduates, students at university and
lay researchers in a project that will have social and cultural significance
and earn participants valuable research experience that can enhance the
marketable skills they possess.

I thank you.

Issued by: Department of Arts and Culture
3 November 2007
Source: Department of Arts and Culture (http://www.dac.gov.za)