Chaos in S. Africa Schools Stirs Fears of New ‘Lost Generation’

SOWETO, South Africa —  The school doors are locked, armed soldiers patrol the grounds, and the teachers are being transferred. Oliver Tambo High School has been closed.

“This government wants us to grow up stupid so the whites can continue to rule,” a student leader, Ellen, 17, says to the cheers of her classmates in an impromptu street-corner rally across from the school, one of 33 the government closed last month.

“But the government should know that we are going to grow up angry, very angry, and in a few years we will be ruling, not these whites. We will come back then and reopen our school as a people’s school.”

Behind the bitterness and the bravado of Ellen’s words, there was a desperation about her life. Would she ever get back to Oliver Tambo High, which the students named in honor of the president of the outlawed African National Congress? Would she ever go to college to become the social worker she hopes to be? Without an education, what future would she have, even in a “liberated” South Africa?

“I am really torn,” Ellen said later at her home nearby in the Meadowlands section of Soweto. “I would die for the struggle, I would gladly give my life if it would help end apartheid. . . . But then I ask myself, would it? Is what I am doing going to change anything? Or will my efforts be futile and my life a waste?”

May Be ‘Lost Generation’

Already known as the “angry generation” after two years of continuing civil strife here, South Africa’s militant black youths are now in danger, many here feel, of becoming the country’s “lost generation” as well.

“A ‘lost generation’ of black youth is a very real and very frightening prospect,” said Saths Cooper, president of the black-consciousness Azanian People’s Organization and a lecturer in clinical psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. “Many of these kids have been out of school for two years and won’t be back in class for at least another two, and maybe never for some.

“Their frustration, their anger, their desperation are already growing daily. There are no jobs for them now, and without an education their prospects for employment in the future are minimal. How are we going to reintegrate them into society, particularly a new society we want to build?”

Black students began to boycott classes two years ago to protest a variety of grievances--rent increases, the fatal shooting of demonstrators by police, detention without trial, the inferior quality of their own schooling, the whole apartheid system of racial separation and minority white rule. In doing so they quickly became the vanguard of the heightened struggle against apartheid.

Only Youngest in Class

But their one- and two-day protests quickly turned into weeklong, monthlong and even indefinite boycotts of school. When they did attend classes, high school students would spend the morning in political meetings and in singing “freedom songs” and then leave before noon, taking their protests into the streets. Only the youngest pupils attended class regularly.

As a result, many black teachers, even those in primary schools, no longer even pretend to teach. Virtually all told stories of colleagues chased down the street by their 10- and 11-year-old students, of others who hid in classroom cupboards to escape rampaging children and of some teachers ordered by their pupils to “pass one, pass all”--or be burned alive.

The danger that Cooper and others now see is a “Khmer Rouge syndrome” in which thousands upon thousands of black youths, angered by apartheid and alienated from society by years of violence and brutality, attack even their own communities, much as the young Khmer Rouge soldiers did after the 1975 Communist victory in Cambodia.

“ ‘Liberation now, education later’ is a good slogan, but it is based on the illusion that apartheid can be ended with a final push, that this government is about to crumble,” the Rev. Stanley Magoba, the secretary of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa and a prominent anti-apartheid activist in his youth, said not long ago. “I also question seriously whether we should make the schools the front line of our struggle against apartheid. . . .

Can’t Afford Illiteracy

“Liberation will come, but it may still be 10 years away. What are these kids going to do until then? . . . Can our post-apartheid society afford hundreds of thousands, millions even, of uneducated, perhaps illiterate adults? No, obviously not.”

Few, even among the most militant youths, would dispute the need for black children, many of whom have not attended school regularly for two years, to return to class. But few issues are more contentious here than the conditions for the students’ return and their continued education.

Under the four-month-old state of emergency, the government has adopted strict, and highly controversial, measures to ensure “a return to normality” for the country’s 7,366 urban black schools.

Under a presidential order, black pupils were required to re-register and to accept whatever placement they were given, even if it meant demotion. Security was strengthened around all schools, often with combat troops stationed on the grounds. Outsiders entering a black school could be arrested.

In addition, students were required to carry identity cards, and they were not permitted to be outside their schools during class hours. School officials were given additional powers to discipline and expel students. And the school day was lengthened so that some of the missed work could be made up before year-end examinations.

Explains Measures

In a recent interview, Job Schoeman, chief public relations officer of the department of education and training, which runs the urban black schools, explained why the government imposed these measures.

“Conditions in many schools had long since become chaotic, and in some places the schools were the focus of the unrest,” he said. “A few radicals were able to disrupt a whole school. Teachers and principals as well as pupils were being subjected to increasing intimidation ,and little effective education was taking place.

“We had to restore order if normal teaching was to become possible again,” Schoeman said. “We had to prevent the radicals from disrupting the schools. We had to make up the missed lessons to the extent we could. And in the few places where we could not restore normality, we decided there was no point in keeping the schools open with teachers coming each day to empty classrooms.”

Schoeman said the new measures have worked well in most areas of the country. Except for Soweto, the sprawling black ghetto outside Johannesburg, and the long-troubled eastern Cape region, daily attendance is now well over 80%, teachers are covering missed material and disturbances are rare, he said.

Pushing Reform Program

The government is also pushing ahead, he added, with its 10-year reform program of separate-but-equal education aimed at giving black children the same schooling given whites, a massive undertaking that President Pieter W. Botha has pledged will be a priority.

“The vast majority of schools are now back to normal,” Schoeman said, “and after the trouble of the past two years, that is a very major achievement. Many parents and even some students have come to thank us for this.”

But about 100,000 of the department’s 1.8 million pupils failed to re-register in July, effectively ending their schooling. Among those 100,000 were 15% of the nation’s black high school students. Now, the figures have been increased substantially by the government’s closure of 33 secondary schools, each with about 1,000 pupils.

These political dropouts, Ellen and her classmates at Soweto’s Oliver Tambo High School among them, could be the start of that “lost generation.”

“A ‘lost generation’ is unfortunately true, or close to it, in parts of Soweto, the eastern Cape region and a few other areas,” Schoeman said. “Black parents there have lost control of their children and are even threatened by their children.

“We also have a generation growing up today who have seen by the time they are 7 or 8 years old more violence and worse violence than a man should see in his entire life. . . . We are not talking about a whole generation of black youth being ‘lost,’ to be sure, but there are far too many, and it was to save those we can that we implemented the new policies.”

‘Jackboot Approach’ Decried

But the government’s get-tough measures, like other steps taken under emergency rule, have been widely criticized as “a jackboot approach” and “counterproductive.”

Franz Auerbach, the respected director of Soweto’s Funda educational center, warned bluntly: “You can’t enforce school attendance at the point of a gun. You may succeed one day in one place, but in the end, attendance depends on students and parents wanting the schools open.”

The National Education Crisis Committee, an organization of black parents, teachers, students and community leaders, who had been negotiating with the government since December to improve black education and resolve school problems and at the same time to develop a broader political dialogue, angrily rejected the new measures.

“The government seems hell-bent on destroying what remains of our education,” the group said. It sought but failed to get a court order invalidating the new regulations.

The criticism increased when the government closed the 33 secondary schools in the eastern Cape region and in Soweto and warned of similar action against other schools where boycotts continued or classes were disrupted.

‘Aggravated These Problems’

“There are obviously complex problems that need to be resolved, but the unilateral and heavy-handed tactics adopted by the department of education and training have aggravated rather than alleviated these problems,” said Ken Andrew, a member of Parliament from the white opposition Progressive Federal Party and its spokesman on black education.

Black parents, educators and community leaders sharply dispute Schoeman’s contention that “there is a growing return to normality” as a result of the new policies.

A high school teacher in Sharpeville, south of Johannesburg, complained: “Teaching has ceased to have any meaning. Students come or don’t come, and learn or don’t learn, more or less as they want. If they want to hold a political meeting instead of having class, they do; if the police then come, they leave. . . .”

In Meadowlands, Ellen’s mother, Elizabeth, pulled her daughter and a dozen friends into the safety of their small house when the police fired tear gas canisters to disperse the students who had gathered across from the closed school.

“The government says it closed the school because the children didn’t go to class,” Elizabeth said. “Well, they are right about that--the students haven’t gone regularly for months and months. But they would go if they got a decent education. The children say that accepting this apartheid education means accepting apartheid, and that they won’t do. . . .

Ready to Die for Cause

“And what does the government think these kids are going to do now? I’ll tell you what they are going to do: At 15, 16 and 17 years old, and maybe with nothing but stones in their hands, they are going to try to launch the revolution right here in Meadowlands, Soweto. And if they die, they don’t care because they think ending apartheid is worth their lives.”

Negotiations between the National Education Crisis Committee and the government appeared to be making progress on a number of issues, most of them related to school management but some with political implications. But the talks were broken off when President Botha imposed the state of emergency June 12 and the police detained without charge several key committee members. Now, efforts are underway to resume the talks.

“When the committee stuck to education issues, we were able to talk,” Schoeman said, “but when it moved into the political arena, we were stuck. Although we are still talking with local groups, we are not going to let education and politics become entangled.”

But Fanyana Mazibuko, executive secretary of the University Preparation Program, which tutors black candidates for college admission, sees education as “inextricably part of the political power game.”

“The government in its present strategy is simply asserting its position in the political power struggle,” he said. “Full control of education, including the ability to define the context and process of education, and to ensure that this sticks, is the nub of the matter.”