South African Student Resistance in the 1960–70s

LEIGH-ANN NAIDOO

In order to understand the historical moment that 2015 has constituted in the South African education system, Leigh-Ann Naidoo argues that we need to study the role of education in the anti-apartheid Black liberation movement in the 1960–70s. She looks more particularly at the South African Student Organisation (SASO) and its impact on Black Consciousness and education.

In South Africa, 2015 was understood by many to be the year when Black university students, critiqued the “post-apartheid” condition of universities, first through the #RhodesMustFall and later the #FeesMustFall protests. In so doing, they revisited the question of what the purpose and role of education was in redistributing power and knowledge after the fall of apartheid. Black students who were allowed into Historically White Universities experienced first hand the ways in which institutional culture, curricula and symbolism remained wedded to the racist colonial project that forged universities. While much has been written about this recent moment of student resistance, I have chosen an earlier moment of resistance and critique in the long history of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa to reflect on student involvement in revolutionary processes. The 1960–70s was a time when Black university students organized themselves into the South African Student Organisation (SASO). In addition to SASO being a Black student formation, they were resolutely drawing on the Black radical traditions of resistance from Negritude and Black Power, to African intellectual activists such as Julius Nyerere, Amílcar Cabral, and Kwame Nkrumah. They were (re)inserting the importance of “race” as central to understanding oppression. They did this while also critiquing the education system they were in the process of being forged by, and built an understanding of education as essential for liberation.

Many highlight the year 1968 as one of the most tumultuous years in world politics with a range of uprisings including student-led protests across the globe—in Brazil, Mexico, Jamaica, Tunisia, Senegal, Pakistan, Japan, the United States of America, England, France, among others. In South Africa, the Apartheid government had been in power since 1948 when the National Party won the elections and speedily implemented a slew of laws that fostered segregation on the basis of race. In 1953, the infamous Bantu Education Act cemented the segregation of education in South Africa on the basis of race, where Black education was deliberately produced as substandard. Similarly in 1959, the Extension of Universities Act allowed for the banning of Black students at “non-racial” universities—these were white English universities that allowed a few Black students entry with requisite government permissions. The act forced Black students into universities catering for students from the Apartheid-invented racial categories of “Coloured,” “Indian,” and then “Black,” further divided ethnically. The Apartheid government wanted to develop a new layer of compliant but slightly more privileged class of Black people. They forced people from a young age into an education system that structured their learning through a fake racial hierarchy and tied this to a hierarchy of labor preferences that was also controlled through elaborate racist laws. 

The broader context of South Africa was that political organizations like the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and the African National Congress (ANC) were banned in 1960. This was also the year of the Sharpeville Massacre, when the Apartheid police killed sixty-nine people injuring hundreds more at a peaceful protest organized by the PAC against restrictive pass laws. The banning of political parties, the violent repression of protests, and the killing, imprisonment, and exile of Black leaders, led to a political leadership vacuum. It is in this vacuum that university students organized themselves. 

A quick search of student resistance in 1968 South Africa will likely reflect the reporting on a sit-in at the University of Cape Town management building by the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS). This was in protest against the Apartheid government’s involvement in the university business of appointing academic staff, when the university made an offer of employment to Black anthropologist Archie Mafeje that they later withdrew because of pressure from the Apartheid government. NUSAS, the first university student organization founded in 1924, was made up of white English-speaking university students. In 1948, even as they remained largely white, NUSAS took an anti-Apartheid stance, purported to be non-racial, adopted the Freedom Charter and tried to keep the white universities “open” to Black students. Some Black student leaders attended the NUSAS conferences. Among them was Steve Biko who was a medical student in 1966–67. NUSAS’s anti-Apartheid, non-racial, Freedom Charter orientation was challenged in 1968 when the University of Rhodes that was hosting the annual conference, refused to allow Black students to stay in the university residences or attend any functions on campus. Black student leaders walked out of the conference realizing when the white NUSAS leaders decided to continue with their conference, that the ‘progressive’ stance taken by NUSAS was not followed through on when it came down to standing in solidarity with Black students. 

This was an important moment of realization for Black student leaders that well-meaning white people and white-led organizations would choose the easier option of criticizing Apartheid and racism in theory and only when it suited them, but not taking principled decisions and actions, which would require sacrifice and tying their fate with those who were oppressed. Forty Black student leaders who attended another non-racial student conference in July 1968 organized by the University Christian Movement, took time to meet as a Black caucus and decided to form a Black-only student organization.

It was out of this experience, and the critical reflection, thinking, reading and writing of students in SASO, that the political philosophy and theory of a South African version of Black Consciousness was developed. I will now focus on the kind of study that SASO undertook that built the organization and the tradition of Black Consciousness that strongly influenced many people in the Anti-Apartheid movement, especially young people. 

Biko’s famous saying that “the most important weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed,” epitomizes how SASO understood the relationship between thinking and doing. They were interested in liberating Black people first from the psychological oppression by themselves, or their own complicity with the hegemonic power relations, followed by the physical oppression coming out of living in a white supremacist society. Their commitment was to understanding study as necessary to radically change peoples’ minds and in so doing to radically change the society in which they lived. I will highlight five pieces of the work they did in the beginning years of the organization that expanded what the idea of study meant.

The first thing SASO did was to establish an Education Portfolio Committee that did research on the education provision by the Apartheid government, producing a seven-page report. In this report, they identified education as the most important weapon for bringing change in society. They also insisted that they were not fighting for education equal to the white Apartheid education, but wanted an education that would counter the negative effects that formal education had on the Black majority. Their analyses identified the formal education system as producing subservient Black people who were fearful and lacking the will to fight for their freedom. This motivated them to develop their own educational projects alongside the formal education they were part of. A central part of SASO’s education projects and the idea of study was to build the critical consciousness of student cadres. Part of how they fostered a commitment to self-education was during the design of a literacy campaign and the appreciation of the role of reading, writing and publishing.

A number of SASO leaders, who came through the University Christian Movement, were exposed to the ideas and writings of Brazilian radical pedagogue Paulo Freire. After identifying the need for more Black people to learn to read and write, a dozen SASO leaders went through a process of Freirean literacy design training. This pushed them to think critically about how to engage with written text especially when teaching adults to read. A key idea being that the content that one learns to read needs to be connected to one’s life and experience of struggle. That there is a relationship between the reading that everyone is doing all the time when making sense of what is going on around them, and the reading of literary texts. Also, that there is more than simply the selected written content of any curriculum inside or outside of formal educational institutions.

SASO was committed to reading from various resistance writings on the continent and also the broader colonial world. They were interested in what they were reading and studying and made more directed choices about what they were reading. Even as they were more selective about what they were also interested in and understood the importance of how one approached and engaged both the content selected but also the form of the engagement. They were committed to understanding, critiquing, and changing the material world, but were also committed to an engagement with ideas and the theoretical, and particularly the relationship between ideas and practices of freedom. They systematically engaged with writings from different movements for freedom and recontextualized them and experimented with the creation of concepts from the South Africa context. They had a commitment to writing that is evident in a number of archival materials. The first of these was the way they kept minutes of their engagements including the writing of reports and reflections on a range of activities and ideas. The official organ of the SASO executive was the SASO Newsletter, which was meant according to an editorial note, to be informative—sharing information about the organization and a range of events and activities—but also to be educative—having contributions that ranged in style and topic but that contributed to the broader education of Black communities.

There were a few consistent sections in the newsletter including the Africa Series, which was exploring the history and engagements of African States as a counter balance to the Western and South African-centric writings that formed the mainstream and the academic texts they were exposed to. There were also always poetic contributions reflecting on the Black life. Most famous was the section “I write what I like,” which was penned by Steve Biko under the pseudonym of Frank Talk. When following the reporting and minutes of the various events where ideas were discussed and debated one can see a link between what was discussed by the collective or key debates, and what became popularized by Biko through the reflective opinion pieces written under this section of the newsletter and much later published posthumously under Steve Biko’s name. The newsletter was amplifying particular voices and debates and was seen as an important educative tool to encourage reading and engagement. These all were vital archiving of the thinking, acting and reflecting work done by SASO over a period of time. 

In addition to publishing this organizational newsletter, SASO, which incubated the Black Consciousness Movement, had leaders who were part of a range of publishing projects from community newspapers to Black journals. These emphasized the importance of producing and sharing information about Black life to counter the negative representation of Black people that was the norm. There was a Black Review published annually from 1972 to 1976, which documented Black life written by Black people, as well as occasional journals such as Black Perspectives, Black Viewpoint, and Creativity in Development. The production and dissemination of these publications expressed and evidenced the revival of cultural, political and literary activity within the Black community dispelling the notion that intellectual work was not the terrain of Black people.

One of the forms of study that SASO drove was programs they organized for different sections of the Black community. The first and central of these were what was called “formation schools,” which were self-organized study spaces for university students to develop or form (as the name suggests) student cadres or leaders. These schools committed time and space at Black universities and then later between them, for critical reflection on a range of topics. After the running of the first formation schools, SASO developed leadership training for high school students and youth groups in 1972, that were based on the formation school model. Because the thinking was always to build individual attendees and the collective, these leadership training contributed to the formation of  regional youth organizations and a national organization in 1973 (called the National Youth Organisation, or NAYO), as well as the South African Student Movement (SASM) made up of high school students. SASO and the BCM’s influence is undervalued in understanding the Soweto Uprising of 1976, where primary and high school students ignited a revolt against education reforms, which scared the Apartheid government into killing hundreds of children. This was a key moment that reinvigorated local and international resistance to the violent Apartheid regime as young people took up the anti-Apartheid fight in communities and contributed to the internal resistance movement.

When looking at the formation school reports, which are detailed written reflections on the schools that were organized, one can see an openness in relation to the topic to be focussed on, and an emphasis on the school as a place for participants to practice self-development and foster confidence in reading and debating. Here was another simple but powerful way that radical study countered the silencing and diminishing effect of formal education. It also indicates that the school was a place to go beyond simply developing individual critical consciousness and confidence but also to think deeply together about the organization’s development and especially the group projects that SASO would organize and run. 

The Black Community Programmes (BCP’s) came directly out of the study and planning of the formation schools with the first school in 1969 developing a report titled “Fieldwork by SASO,” which detailed that work in communities was to be a primary focus. SASO studied a community development model called “Action Training” and selectively recruited and developed what became known by 1972 as ‘Community Action and Development.” There were some key adjustments to the model they studied that recontextualized and injected some of the principles they were putting forward. The SASO archive reveals how ideas were researched, discussed, applied in the context of formations schools, and then modified creatively and implemented through explicit health, physical labor and education projects. These projects were engaging in what could be considered welfare work and were also developing self-help projects for Black people by Black people, fostering at a very practical level the principle of self-pride, self-love, and power. They were involved in building clinics, schools and daycare centers across the country. They set up the Zimele trust to help families of political prisoners and those released from prison with start-up funding for work, with particular success with a brick making scheme. They set up home-based industries and cooperatives in rural areas. 

SASO was committed to study that changed the world. From its inception, it took the position that the ideas and dreams they were building through engagement with each other and with Black people beyond the university and beyond South Africa, were only as strong as the practice that these ideas inspired and planned. This is why the Black Community Programmes run by SASO were so pivotal in forging the kind of young people that were committed to the advancement of the broader Black community. This solidarity was what countered the Apartheid government’s plan to incubate a slightly more educated class of Black people along the lines of separate development or separateness. SASO took a firm position that refused the category “non-white” or “non-European,” which were blanket terms for those excluded from white European settler society and positioned people as the negative of whiteness. Instead, it put forward the category “Black” as an all-inclusive, political positionality that brought together everyone discriminated against by race, and refused the hierarchical and idiotic differentiating logic of skin color. The Black caucus they were growing was pulling away from the collective effort to unite people against Apartheid under the name of a placid non-racialism. Black Consciousness was understood as necessary to counter white supremacy that mostly benefited and was reproduced by white people but also potentially with Black allies that Black Consciousness named “non-white.” SASO was committed to the resolution of this antagonism between white supremacy and Black Consciousness, towards a unified non-racial society, but one where Black people were free from racism and its capitalist underpinnings and white people were also freed from their excessive privilege, consumption, and miseducation.

SASO and the Black Consciousness movement and orientation built and enhanced Black pride, assertiveness, and solidarity. Their work emphasized self-reliance, expressing a defiance of the existing social order while building a hope for a better, more just, future for Black people, and ultimately for all people. They saw and critiqued the diminishing effect of formal education and built radical education and opportunities for study that fostered participation and democracy. The 1970s were a time of immense political action and writing by Black people because of the linking of education with the project of liberation or freedom.

SASO contributed to the process of radical change of both peoples’ minds and the society in which they lived. It is no wonder that when student resistance emerged almost fifty years later in 2015 #RhodesMustFall (RMF), which formed part of a Black student movement “post-Apartheid,” that Black Consciousness along with Pan Africanism and Black Radical Feminism was a major organizing force to confront the legacies of white supremacy in post-Apartheid, and the assimilating force that education was playing in the democratic dispensation. ■