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3 April 2004

Comrade chairperson, Executive Mayor of the City of Tshwane, representatives of the government of Tanzania and of other countries and organisations that supported SOMAFCO, ex-students, teachers and administrators of SOMAFCO, comrades, ladies and gentlemen.

I have been to many book launches. They are pleasant events, taking place in that calm moment when work has been done but before the carping reviews start to appear. They are generally polite affairs, where we stand around and say nice things about the book and the authors over some wine and cheese or the like.

This however is not an ordinary book launch, as witnessed by many graduates and teachers of this extraordinary school who are here today, and the array of international representatives and political leaders and activists. The school about which Seán Morrow, Brown Maaba and Loyiso Pulumani write was not an ordinary school. It was a people's school that was committed to an educated, critical and self-confident South Africa. And this was at a time when the future at times seemed bleak indeed.

The staff and students of the school did not just talk theory about the shape of South African education and society, they lived it, tested it, explored it. SOMAFCO drew on energies of a people who were battered by oppression but who reacted with creativity and imagination.

Bantu Education

One of the greatest crimes is to attempt to deform the mind of a young person. We come from a history where this attempt was official policy, where there was a conscious attempt to choke whatever limited education the mass of the population had available, and to substitute "Bantu Education", the crude scrapings from the bottom of the educational barrel. Mathematics and science were downgraded; history was manipulated and censored; creativity and imagination wilted under the heavy hand of authoritarianism and narrow educational ideology of Fundamental Pedagogics.

We should not underestimate the destructive power of this attack on education. In a country like Zimbabwe, for all its heritage of colonialism and oppression, the basic structures of a reasonable educational system survived. In South Africa we witnessed war against the minds of our young people and against progressive teachers. We witnessed an attempt to isolate black education at every level from whatever progressive forces there were within the country, and from international currents of educational thought and practice. And this was an attack on white education also, which was cocooned in a nest of ignorant and self-deluding privilege.

This is why the Ministry of Education has recently called for submissions on apartheid education. We want to examine this desperate inheritance, confront harm that it has done, and identify areas of maximum damage. When we have understood this intellectual battlefield, these traps and ambushes deliberately laid in our minds over many years, we can begin to clear the minefields, and repossess the intellectual freedom that is the right of every South African.
But we have models to work from. Within the country, thoughtful educationists battled in the 1980s against tremendous odds to create new ways of looking at schools and education. Outside, there was SOMAFCO. Even the very name was symbolic of a different education, different possibilities.

History

Education in Exile is a work of history. At SOMAFCO, as the book shows, history of the struggle and a historical view of South Africa and South Africa in Africa were at the heart of the curriculum. Though in some ways it could ill afford to do so, the school released one of its most talented teachers, John Pampallis, for a year in England to write a history text. The school and ANC realised that there had to be new texts for a new age. The curriculum opened their history to students.

Today also, we want vigorous texts that do not oversimplify, that are not afraid to argue a case and that put people of this country and continent at the centre of their narrative and argument. This was what was done at SOMAFCO, and it is what we are doing. We want a South Africa that is critical and self-aware. We want South Africans with a solid understanding of the past, so that we can argue through many issues that confront us informed by real knowledge of where we collectively come from. Through the History Project we are nurturing this historical consciousness in our schools.

In exile, we were involved in a grim fight against a ruthless enemy. It would have been easy for our struggle to mirror the narrow fanaticism of those that we were combating. This did not happen. We have a history of non-racialism, of mature and tolerant secularism, of cultural inclusivity. Our consciousness of this history saved us from becoming trapped, even at the height of conflict, in the mental world of our oppressors.

We stood for fraternity with progressive forces throughout the developing world. And not only in the developing world: we stood in international solidarity with progressive forces wherever they might be, east, west and south. That is why trade unionists, civil society and many religious and cultural groups supported us from an early stage, and, for example, came to the assistance of SOMAFCO, in many cases long before their governments committed themselves to our cause.

Exile

I, and many of the people here, experienced exile from this country. We suffered the outrage of exclusion from the land that belonged to all of us. We watched South Africa from a distance, built ties with the societies that gave us shelter while never forgetting our homeland. To the Irish of the early Christian era, 1,500 years ago, exile was "white martyrdom", next only to the "red martyrdom" of death for the faith. South Africans also experienced exile as a desperate tribulation with, as it often seemed, no possibility of return. Readers of Andre Brink's Dry White Season will remember the crackling, fragile, vulnerable telephone call towards the end of the book, linking London and Johannesburg, but emphasising rather than reducing distance and separation.

There have been excellent books reflecting on the South African exile experience. Yet the extent of the South African diaspora and its contribution to the freedom of this country still needs to be emphasised and given its proper place. We are talking about political exile, but also cultural and educational exile. The Hugh Masakelas, Abdullah Ibrahims, Christopher Hopes and many others kept the true soul of South Africa alive. We think of the terrible price that this could exact: of, for example, the tragic deaths of the writers and poets Nat Nakasa and Arthur Nortje in New York and London. The fight against this alienation of the spirit, against the attempt by apartheid to throttle the flow of inspiration, overwhelmed some, amongst them the most creative and sensitive South Africans of their time.

In the bleakness of exile, SOMAFCO created a world of tomorrow. The teachers and students of the school did not allow themselves to weaken under stresses of exile, but rather imagined a new South Africa and worked to create it.

Tanzania

Another of apartheid's attacks on the soul of South Africa was to attempt to separate us from our African inheritance. We still hear people talk of going "to Africa", as though South Africa was not an intrinsic part of the continent and as though there is a perilous and unbridgeable gulf between Johannesburg International Airport and Heathrow. But we need to clear our minds on this: South Africa was and is African, as the President frequently emphasises and as South Africa's international stance emphatically demonstrates.

Since the second half of the nineteenth century, the mineral and agricultural wealth of South Africa was made accessible by the labours of countless Mozambicans, Malawians, Basotho, Zimbabweans and many others. Politically, the African National Congress has been part of the overall struggle for freedom of Africa: remember the vivid gesture of the ANC, pulling together its forces in the aftermath of repression and banning in 1960, when 20 nurses, members of the movement, arrived in January 1964 to work in newly-independent Tanzania. Some are still there, living witnesses to South Africa's solidarity with the people of Africa.

The nurses remind us of something else: our solidarity with Africa was not just one of gestures and speeches. Solidarity was as much a question of the welfare of ordinary people.

And Tanzania has a particular place in the history of our struggles, as indeed does Morogoro, the provincial town near which SOMAFCO operated, the venue for important meetings of our movement. In the bleakness of exile we were buoyed up and heartened by the warmth and solidarity of the people and government of Tanzania. They supported us and took risks on our behalf in a way that this dignified, poor country could in many ways hardly afford. One of the greatest of Tanzania's commitments to the freedom of their fellow-Africans was to host and support SOMAFCO. Mazimbu, where SOMAFCO was built, and Dakawa, were on Tanzanian soil and Tanzanians laboured with South Africans to build these centres of education and development for a future South Africa.

As the book we are launching shows in fascinating detail, South Africans and Tanzanians interacted on many levels. They married and had children. They drank together. South Africans consulted Tanzanian indigenous healers. Some co-operated in various shady deals. There were certainly tensions, they are illustrated in this book - and urban South Africans cut off for so long from the continent of which they are a part were sometimes slow to understand the ways of poor rural communities. But what I want to emphasise is that for all the stresses and tragedies of exile, creativity and resilience of South Africans and of the movement turned it also into an experience from which a tremendous amount was learned.

In exile our values were tempered and tested. We emerged stronger, standing together with our comrades from Tanzania and other African nations. We interacted with our hosts and forged lasting alliances and friendships that created in us a profound sense of a South African identity that respected and appreciated those of our hosts.

Fraternal support

Another of the lessons of exile was that issues that affected Africa and South Africa were not concerns of Africans and South Africans alone. Exile damaged us, but it also enriched us. One way in which it enriched us was that it enabled us to realise that we were not alone in our struggles. We had support all over the world, and even where some governments and states kept us at arms length, solidarity movements and individuals gave us outstanding support. I, for example, experienced hospitality of Ireland and the Irish people. SOMAFCO became remarkable educational institution that it was not just because of the physical resources that it received from those organisations and countries anxious to express their solidarity with South African liberation movement, but because of the teachers and other workers who left comfortable lives in often prosperous and peaceful countries, and risked malaria and even the possibility of attack from South Africa to work with the students who had been forced to flee their country. They brought with them traditions of progressive education that greatly enriched our experience and helped make SOMAFCO an exciting educational laboratory.

Lessons of SOMAFCO

The book that we are launching does not preach at us. It is a historical work that carefully teases out the experience of SOMAFCO and leaves us to draw our own conclusions about its significance. However, I am not similarly constrained, and I want to say why this school needs to be read about and thought about by every South African who is interested in education. Surely that is every student, every teacher, every parent, every woman and man who cares about the future of this country.

SOMAFCO is important because it showed that ANC was a movement that was not just interested in overthrowing an unjust and despicable regime. The ANC had a vision for the future, crucially an educational vision, of young South Africans of all races and backgrounds learning together on the basis of a common humanity and of a common loyalty to the nation. It showed that our common values transcended the divisions so carefully nurtured by the apartheid regime. It showed that diversity was strength, not weakness, and that ANC embodied that diversity.

It is important because it demonstrated that education could be an exciting exploration, and not a mindless repetition of unquestioned and unquestionable formulae. An excellent library opened a window, in this provincial Tanzanian town, to the intellectual riches of Africa and the world. And windows were opened through history, literature and geography that remained tightly shut in South African schools. Mathematics and science were stressed. The attempt was made to combine academic and practical education and remove the unjustified sense of superiority that tends to cling around the more classroom-based subjects.

It is important above all because it provided a model for our educational future. It demonstrated that we could draw on the best progressive educational traditions from all over the world, while developing a truly South African educational institution. That is why this book is so significant, because it thoughtfully considers this remarkable experiment, and gives us means to align it with progressive, often embattled, educational experiments that were occurring within the country. In a field often occupied by theory divorced from the real problems that confront educational practice, this book shows us in concrete detail what was achieved in this South African school. We are applying these insights to our own situation, different though the scale may be. The educational heroes of SOMAFCO take their place with Luthuli, Tambo, Mandela, Sisulu and the others. We follow in their footsteps. We will not let them down.

I thank you all.

Issued by: Department of Education
3 April 2004

Source: Department of Education (http://www.education.gov.za)