Читать книгу Let My People Go - Albert Luthuli - Страница 10

“No grazing in white pastures”

IT WAS AT ADAMS COLLEGE that I met my wife.

Nokukhanya Bhengu was the granddaughter of a polygamous Zulu chief, Dhlokolo Bhengu of the Ngcolosi, the husband of many wives. It was customary in those days for a chief to nominate his heir late in life in order to protect him from the possible jealousy of rivals. For this reason my wife’s father, although the eldest son of Chief Dhlokolo, was not the old man’s heir. Nevertheless, as we Africans look at it, my wife is of royal blood, while I am a commoner, a circumstance which does not seem to have caused either of us any embarrassment.

With my wife’s father, Maphitha Bhengu, the heathen line ended and the Christian line began. Maphitha was the husband of one wife, and both of them were probably among the early converts at the American Board Mission Station at Umgeni near Durban. Like me, therefore, my wife had a Congregationalist upbringing, first in school at Inanda, and later as a teacher in training at Adams.

At one stage we must have been together in school at the Ohlange Institute, but if so we were not aware of it. I first became conscious of the existence of Nokukhanya Bhengu when, having returned to Adams for the second time to take her first grade Teacher’s Certificate, she became one of my students in Zulu and School Organisation classes. She later taught at the Adams Practising School and acted also as a member of staff at the Adams Hostel for Girls. She resigned from both these posts at the time of our marriage.

After the usual lengthy negotiations between our two families – in true Zulu style – had culminated in our marriage, my wife settled in Groutville.

Behind our decision to live apart right from the first year of our marriage lay the spectre which haunts all Africans in the Union who dwell in cities – the spectre of impermanence and insecurity. It is more acute now than it was then, for that was in the days before the Group Areas Act and Influx Control regulations. But it was present enough, even then. Whatever Adams may have offered us, it was not a permanent home, and so my wife left to establish one in Groutville. For all we knew at the time, this separation might have to persist throughout our lives, since we had no idea that my public duty would ever place me in Groutville. As it turned out, we were fortunate. We lived away from each other for only eight years.

To my ageing mother our marriage brought at last relief from toil. It was a great joy to me that I was able to offer haven to one who had laboured long and unremittingly largely for my sake. We welcomed the opportunity to serve her in our home until her death.

Over the inner reality of our marriage and the depth of the attachment between my wife and me, I draw a veil. But I may say here that I count myself fortunate among men to have married so good a wife, and so devout a Christian woman. Her mother died when she was young, her early years were years of struggle, yet out of the struggle have come qualities of character which I have come to value more and more with the years. I have her to thank for maintaining the dignity of our home, a good deal of the time with little help from me. She has created the one place of relative security and privacy which we know.

I think what I value most about Nokukhanya is her integrity, which expresses itself in everything from her steadfast reliance on God, her devotion to me and our family, right down to such things as paying our accounts without delay or immediately acknowledging herself to be in the wrong if she discovers that she has made a faulty appraisal or has misunderstood a situation.

We do not have many of the things of this world, Nokukhanya and I and our family, and on top of this she has found herself married to a man immersed in public affairs and (except when under some ban or other) given to too much travel. Yet, largely because of my wife’s openness and honesty, we have found our relationship with each other unthreatened and uncomplicated – and I have never known her to grumble over the things we have to forgo.

She has not once intruded upon me, as she might many times have done, the conflict between family and work. She has not said at any time – not when I entered the political battle nor when I became President-General of the African National Congress, or during the Defiance Campaign, or when I was charged with High Treason – “But what will become of the family and me?” Instead, she has created a home, sometimes my background, occasionally my foreground, which has all through been stable and constant and inwardly secure.

I cannot express how grateful I am, especially as I quite literally neglect my family and feel extremely guilty about it. Ungrudgingly she has taken on, since I entered public life, the whole burden of the home and of working our smallholding.

Her contribution has not stopped short at being purely domestic. At one time she rallied the women of Groutville and led a movement for the establishment of a clinic. The women responded well, even being ready and willing to tax themselves to raise the necessary money. But the whole project disintegrated because of apathy and obstruction in the Native Affairs Department, which had the last word. They are accustomed to tell us that we do nothing to help ourselves – it is one of the themes of Baasskap – yet I wonder how much of our recent history is littered by white official frustration of African initiative.

In political affairs my wife is with me, although I have never suggested to her that she should be. It is simply a fortunate coincidence, but to me it makes all the difference. She is not a platform orator, though when she speaks in public she has the gift of talking good sense. Most of the time, however, she cannot be prevailed on to make public addresses. She sticks to the Biblical advice to take the lowest seat; and, besides this, she is a shy person.

In private, I may say, Nokukhanya is less shy. She is more forthright than I am, and speaks her mind without hesitation. I am not by temperament a very aggressive person, and I tend when confronted by (for instance) the ill behaviour of others, to extenuate for them and look for the explanations of their conduct. My wife, on the other hand, goes straight to the heart of the matter, always gently and always quite firmly.

We were married in 1927. Between 1929 and 1945 Nokukhanya bore me seven children, of whom the first and the last two were boys.

We pray very hard about our children, most of all because of the South Africa in which they are growing up. In the days when Professor Matthews and I were young teachers at Adams the world seemed to be opening out for Africans. It seemed mainly a matter of proving our ability and worth as citizens, and that did not seem impossible. We were, of course, aware of the existence of colour prejudice, but we did not dream that it would endure and intensify as it has. There seemed point, in my youth, in striving after the values of the Western world. It seemed to be a striving after wholeness and fulfilment. Since then we have watched the steady degeneration of South African affairs, and we have seen this degeneration quickened in the last ten years.

But our children have been born, with the whole of their generation, into the midst of the triumph of prejudice. Young Africans know from infancy upwards – and the point here is that they know nothing else – that their strivings after civilised values will not, in the present order, ever earn for them recognition as sane and responsible civilised beings.

The argument behind the idea1 that we Africans need a two-thousand-year apprenticeship has occasionally been uttered, though never very coherently. It goes like this: “It has taken us two thousand years to reach our present civilised state. A hundred years ago the natives were barbarians. It will take them two thousand years to catch up with where we are now, and they will not be civilised until then.”

It is pure nonsense, of course. The argument does not arise from a survey of history, it arises from the urge to justify a course already chosen. The conclusion (“no rights for two thousand years”) is there before the argument begins. An uncritical assumption (“whites are civilised”) is there too. No account is taken of the fact that there have been both bad and exemplary Christians throughout the whole of the two thousand years in question, and that various societies have produced civilised beings for much longer than that. The argument assumes that, whereas whites can take up where the last generation left off, Africans cannot encounter and absorb anything in the present – they must go back and take each step of the road from the beginning, as though nothing that has happened during the last two thousand years can affect them. Must we really invent the spinning-wheel before we can wear or make clothes? Must we really invent the internal combustion engine before we can drive cars?

I do not agree that white South Africa, at the end of its theoretical two-thousand-year trek, is displaying at present the high virtues of civilisation, and it is doing a good deal to discredit in African eyes the Christianity which many of its members profess.

But even if it were being Christian and civilised, its values would not have been invented by white men. The Christian faith sprang from Asia Minor, and to this day it speaks with a Semitic voice. Western civilisation is only partly Western. It embraces the contribution of many lands and many races. It is the outcome of interaction, not of apartheid. It is an inheritance, something received to be handed on, not a white preserve. I claim with no hesitation that it belongs to Africa as much as to Europe or America or India. The white man brought it here, originally, but he brought a lot of other things too. I do not suppress one detail of our indebtedness – and I know of no instance in which the indigenous peoples of South Africa failed to reach out after a way of life whose value they had the sense to grasp.

Now the cultural gifts formerly offered are being snatched away. Our children are invited to pin their hopes on easier times in two thousand years. That is the extent of the offer. In the meantime, what? In the meantime there is the Bantu Education Act.

Bantu education came into effect in 1954. It is a specialised type of education designed exclusively by Europeans exclusively for Africans. It is not, as were former educational systems in South Africa, designed simply by adults for children. It is not to be judged on the details of its syllabuses, though what I know of these is shoddy enough. It can be understood only in the light of the declared intentions of its begetters, in the context of other legislation enforcing the master-servant relationship, and by its effects.

The effect of entirely discarding children who fail examinations twice is to deny to slow starters all access to literacy – for life.

The effect of placing school control in the hands of local elected boards and committees is to invite people who (however excellent in character) have no clear understanding of education or of their function, to interfere with the normal activities of trained teachers. This in turn produces chronic nervousness in the teachers, who are hired and sacked by the local boards – no reason need be given.2 The principle of School Boards is excellent. In practice, in the present situation, it is harmful – and the African communities involved are never freely represented on them.

The effect of providing one teacher for a minimum of sixty-five children is to reduce efficiency.

The effect, in a fast-developing society with a growing population, of limiting (to £6½ million per year) the government money contribution to African education for all time, is to bleed the poorest section of the community dry, and to insure progressive stunting of African education for lack of funds. The effect of forcing African parents to choose between school feeding and school buildings is to impoverish us further. Under the new system state provision of books has disap peared too and that makes us poorer still, even though the government now pays the teachers – a mercy denied to us by the Smuts government.

The effect of double sessions taught by the same teachers is to overburden them to the point of exhaustion, while the effect of twenty-minute lessons is to waste much of what time there is.3

At the teacher-training level, the effect of loading admissions in favour of those taking short courses is to produce comparatively poorly-trained teachers – who are paid lower wages. Standards must decline in a cheap-labour system.

The effect of using only the many vernaculars as media of instruction is to cut children off deliberately and violently from access to outside influences and ideas – and the heritage of much of the civilised world.

This, of course, brings us to the heart of the matter. African children have previously had some small access to the commonwealth of learning. They have reached out, many of them, after its riches, and many of our African doctors and lawyers and teachers have proved themselves able to absorb not only learning but Western culture, in less than two thousand years. In South Africa this has set up tensions, and evoked the threat of encroachment upon the white standard of living and all-white rule.

So the door has had to be slammed shut hard in the faces of the younger generation, and a system devised which will recondition us to accept perpetual inferiority and perpetual isolation from Western learning and culture. To isolate us and to convince us of our permanent inferiority – these two motives lie behind much legislation from the Act of Union until now, and the Bantu Education Act is a major means to this end. Whatever may be said in favour of certain altered details of Bantu Education (and I do not deny that here and there is to be found a minor improvement or two), the overall effect of this system is not educational at all, but political. It is a tool in the hands of the white master for the more effective reduction and control of the black servant.

This is not inference. It has been quite baldly stated. Dr Verwoerd made it plain beyond all doubt, when he introduced the legislation, that the new system had been invented because former education had produced “misfits” and “black Englishmen” who had acquired ideas which did not satisfactorily equip us to be content for ever with a subservient lot. These “misfits” could no longer be allowed to “graze in white pastures”.

The declared aim of his legislation was to produce Africans who would aspire to nothing in white South Africa higher than the “certain forms of labour” which Dr Verwoerd fixed as the top limit of African aspiration. In order to achieve this end he took over every single African school in the country – even the remaining so-called “private schools” or church schools may teach nothing but his syllabus in his way, and even the informal tuition by one white person of one black child is illegal. If a white employer teaches her African maidservant’s toddler the alphabet, she breaks the law.

Dr Verwoerd, as is his habit, spoke at great length when he introduced this Bill. When he had finished nobody at all could have been left in doubt that the new education “for Africans only” was intended, from beginning to end, to create Africans anew after his own peculiar image of the “real native”.

If the outlook for our young people is bitter and empty, they are “native children” – the men who have dreamed up Bantu Education and those who have connived at it feel that it will not injure their children. The laws which govern man’s relationship to man in society will prove them disastrously wrong.

Apart from the shock with which we recognised that the Bantu Education Act dealt a crippling blow to African education, the thing which disgusted us most was the Minister’s glaring refusal to say one word of thanks to the group responsible for initiating all social services among Africans – the missionaries. It was they who started education, health services, social training institutions, the training of nurses, and who were first behind the training of Africans as doctors. Dr Verwoerd dealt bitingly and insultingly with them and then, with no word of praise for their long labour, ejected them. They were at liberty to do no more than hire out their school buildings to his Department for his education. Tragically, they did exactly that, except for the Roman Catholics and the Anglican Diocese of Johannesburg.

By itself the Bantu Education Act was felt not to go far enough. It left the universities untouched. It has therefore been recently supplemented by an Act called (with characteristic hypocrisy) the Extension of University Education Act. We are by it denied access to the established universities. In place of this, provision is made for a chosen few of us to proceed to ethnic colleges. Up to the end of his education the African child and youth is to be kept isolated, sealed right off. Not only must African not meet European, but Xhosa must not meet Bechuana, nor Zulu meet Swazi.

These new Tribal Colleges are set in the culturally stagnant wastes of what are now called “Bantu heartlands” (the reserves). It is as though Cornishmen and Irishmen and Welshmen and Scots were forced by law to go to separate colleges, while only “ethnically pure” Englishmen could go to Oxford or Cambridge. It is as though each of the colleges was remotely set among moors and mountains, and the students in them taught only by staff appointed and dismissed by government authority. Their libraries would be of the dingiest, consisting only of a few censored text books. Discipline would be that of the primary school, and cultural contacts with other bodies would be nil.

Again, what I say is not fanciful. It is said by the authorities. As I write the University College of Fort Hare, for long a bright light among us, has been seized, eight members of staff have resigned and seven have been dismissed – not in any case for professional reasons.

Now, Fort Hare is not placed in a “Bantu heartland” (the Nationalist government did not choose the site). But the new regulations set out to create a vacuum all the same. All students must live in hostels. No student is allowed to have any visitor whatever without the prior consent of the Principal himself. No student is allowed to possess any vehicle without official approval. All women students must be in their hostel by 7 p.m. There is a general curfew at 10 p.m. Students are permitted to make no statement to the press, and are allowed to produce no magazine, pamphlet or news-sheet without official approval. Only Xhosa students need apply for admission. Others go to their “own” colleges elsewhere.

Students must apply yearly for “permission to report for registration”. The normal understanding that, unless they are expelled, they will be allowed to finish their courses is removed. And if a student complies with every condition laid down, still the Minister4 may debar him if he so chooses. No reason need be given.

Again, the aim is beyond doubt. The present Minister of Bantu Education, Mr Maree, speaking in support of this destructive measure, told his listeners that the aim of the Act was “to produce native leaders who will accept and propagate apartheid”.

There it is – the naked intention to indoctrinate, to which all else must be subordinated. That is why some of our most eminent African scholars, Professors Matthews and Nyembezi, and Mr Selby Ngcobo, resigned. Yet, confronted with all the evidence, many white would-be sympathisers tell us uneasily: “Oh, come along, surely it’s not as bad as you make out. It can’t all be negative!”

It is worse than they seem able to imagine. It was some small comfort to us to see the way in which world universities, and South Africa’s formerly “open” universities, demonstrated against the Act. But they were too late. This Act’s foundations were laid much earlier, when the Act applying to school education was passed. The Nationalists were not deterred. They have already set about the task of breeding up in their “Tribal Colleges” their new kind of blueprint African – as they think.

Take these Acts in the context of all other Apartheid-Baasskap Acts, and it is not difficult to see that we are in for brainwashing on the grand scale – or, rather, the attempt is going to be made. It will not succeed, this attempt to enslave the minds and spirit of ten million people. But it will wreck African education, such as it was, and I predict that it will be carried over before long into European education. It will have to be. Men so manifestly insecure as South Africa’s rulers cannot afford to stop short of absolute power. So they will go on until they drop.

One of the deep-seated intentions of this type of education is to erase all African leadership. I cannot help wondering how the Nationalists would have felt if, after the Boer War, the British had introduced this type of indoctrination for Afrikaners. We hear echoes of how English-speaking South Africans react now that the Nationalists are preparing to take over the education of their children by means of a system called “Christian National Education”. But the erasure of African leadership is felt to be a good thing by nearly all whites, who want leaders who will not lead, and that is why they have consented to the emasculation of our education. They are requiring our teachers to help enslave the hearts and minds of our children.

The ethnic grouping principle in education and throughout other spheres of life is significant. Africans were very painfully beginning to shed themselves of purely tribal allegiances. Even in the most backward areas they were beginning to see themselves as part of a larger African community, and many made the step of expressing allegiance to South Africa as a whole, and to the family of mankind.

But the Nationalists and their fellow travellers start off with the principle of disunity. Where bonds have formed, they must be broken. The only allegiance they recognise is allegiance to disunity, apartheid. Now not only in education but throughout our lives ethnic grouping must apply. They eagerly impress on us our differences – a Xhosa must not even sleep in a Basuto suburb. The evils of suspicion, hostility, and disunity were going. Now a host of evils is cynically and mischievously welcomed back. It suits the white man’s book, so he thinks. If their motive were paternal and protective, as they claim it is, would they set brother against brother, as they do?

What an appalling world these men have made for our young ones! In my own family I have been relatively fortunate, for most of my children have been old enough to miss the worst of this, though they do not escape altogether. And our own fortune serves only to make my wife and me more acutely aware of the terrible misfortune of others, of those whose children are younger and must, if the white sickness has its way, be subjected to a life of indoctrination, of tribal pettiness, of subordination – and of very little real education. In former times our children were carefully instructed in the customs and traditions of the tribe. Subsequently they were offered an education on the white pattern which at least attempted to nurture and expand the personalities of real people. Now there is nothing but this cruel deformity.