NETACT ANNUAL GENERAL
MEETING
4th AUGUST 2011, HOFMEYR HALL, FACULTY OF THEOLOGY,
STELLENBOSCH, SA
50 YEAR celebration IN THE 2OTH YEAR OF
DEMOCRACY IN SOUTH AFRICA
“The South African National Youth
Orchestra is a national asset, a part of the international family of youth
orchestras and making more inroads all the time. Many past members of the orchestra have gone
on to forge international careers in music”.
Sasol has sponsored
the South African National Youth Orchestra’s courses, concerts and tours for
over 35 years since 1979. In 2013 Sasol
won the BASA Award for Youth Development in recognition of its loyal
support.
Bantu Education Act, 1953
From Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia
The Bantu Education Act, 1953
(Act No. 47 of 1953; later renamed the Black Education Act, 1953) was a South
African segregation law which legalised several aspects of the apartheid
system. Its major provision was enforcing racially separated educational
facilities. Even universities were made "tribal", and all but
three missionary schools chose to close down when the government no longer would
help support their schools. Very few authorities continued using their own
finances to support education for native Africans. In 1959, this type of education was extended
to "non-white" universities and colleges with the Extension of University Education
Act, and the internationally prestigious University College of Fort Hare was taken over
by the government and degraded to being part of the Bantu education system. It is often argued that the policy of Bantu
(African) education was aimed to direct black or non-white youth to the
unskilled labour market, although Hendrik
Verwoerd, at the time Minister of Native Affairs, claimed that the aim was
to solve South Africa's "ethnic problems" by creating complementary
economic and political units for different ethnic groups.
The national authorities of the time is
often said to have viewed education as having a rather pivotal position in
their goal of eventually separating South Africa from the Bantustans entirely.
The Minister of Native Affairs at the time, the "Architect of
Apartheid" Hendrik Verwoerd, stated that:
"There is no place for [the
Bantu] in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour. What is the use of teaching the Bantu child
mathematics when it cannot use it in practice?"
The introduction of Bantu
Education led to a substantial increase of government funding to the learning
institutions of black Africans, but it did not keep up with population increase. The
law forced institutions under the direct control of the state. The National Party now had the power to employ
and train teachers as they saw fit. Black teachers' salaries in 1953 were
extremely low and resulted in a dramatic drop of trainee teachers. Only one
third of the black teachers were qualified.
The schools reserved for the
country's white children were of Western standards. 30% of the black schools did not have
electricity, 25% no running water and less than half had plumbing. The
education for Blacks, Indians and Coloureds was not free. In the 70s, the per capita governmental
spending on black education was one-tenth of the spending on white. In 1976, the Afrikaans Medium
Decree of 1974, which forced all black schools to use both Afrikaans
and English as languages of instruction beginning with the last year of primary
school, led to the Soweto Uprising in which more than 575 people died,
at least 134 of them under the age of eighteen. The act was repealed in 1979 by
the Education and Training Act, 1979, which continued
the system of racially segregated education.
Segregation became unconstitutional after the introduction of the Interim Constitution in 1994, and most sections of the Education and Training Act were repealed by the South African Schools Act, 1996.
