This research study was conducted during the years of South Africa's transition away from apartheid and White minority domination towards a more inclusive democratic future, with the prospect of fundamental change firmly on the agenda. [Apartheid was an ideology of separate development defined and enforced by a variety of Acts from 1948 onwards. The objective was total segregation between Whites and 'others' (HSRC, 1985:19)].
The past cannot be ignored when moving into the future. The reasons for this study are firmly rooted in South Africa's apartheid history and it is therefore important to examine the events that have contributed to the systematic marginalisation of the majority of South Africans from the mainstream of economic activity.
The reasons are succinctly summarised in the Department of Trade and Industry's strategy document (2003) on Economic Transformation and Black Economic Empowerment:
"Apartheid systematically and purposefully restricted the majority of South Africans from meaningful participation in the economy. The assets of millions of people were directly and indirectly destroyed and access to skills and self-employment was racially restricted. The accumulation process under Apartheid confined the creation of wealth to a racial minority and imposed underdevelopment on black communities. The result is an economic structure that today, in essence, still excludes the vast majority of South Africans. It is crucial to understand the magnitude of what took place in our past in order to understand why we need to act together as a nation to bring about economic transformation in the interest of all".
This chapter is a reflection on South Africa's apartheid history and is documented to provide an insight into the present situation. It is, therefore, not intended to be an academic account of the lives of those who have lived under racially oppressive and economic and socially exploitative conditions.
At the end of the chapter an autobiographical reflection is included to assist the reader in understanding my political perspective and awareness of the need for change, which provided the motivation to accept the challenge of 'growing' African managers.
TRANSITION TO DEMOCRACY
Under a new National Party (N.P.) leader, F.W. de Klerk, there was a sharp and decisive change of policy direction for the South African government in February 1990. This led to the unbanning of political groups and the introduction of a radical policy change towards full political rights for all South Africans ultimately resulting in Black majority rule, in a Government of National Unity dominated by the African National Congress (ANC) in 1994. At the time of writing this thesis (2009), the ANC is now in its fourth term as the ruling party.
In my view, this period of transition to a more democratic society was one of the most remarkable in South African history. It was a period where ideologies and firmly entrenched behaviours were brought into in to the open and questioned. It was also the period in which unprecedented political change took place.
It was also a period characterised by efforts to develop new educational policies, significant failures to really transform the South African education system, and a harsh economic situation when sanctions were lifted and South Africa rejoined the highly competitive global economy.
COLONIALISM AND APARTHEID
Colonialism and apartheid resulted in decades of institutionalised inequalities of power and opportunity in South Africa and left a legacy of unacceptable wealth, income and skill disparities that required urgent attention. The backlog in education, health, housing and other social services was large and the new ANC government, despite its good intentions, was not in a position to meet expectations. The prognosis of any significant improvement in the lot of disadvantaged people seemed poor. Today, although there has been significant progress, there are still huge disparities and a number of social problems, particularly poverty and unemployment, which need to be addressed.
Contrary to popular belief, Afrikaner nationalists did not develop racial segregation when they came to power in 1948. They inherited a legacy of race laws developed by successive colonial governments, which they enhanced, formalised and named apartheid (Joyce, 1990).
Apartheid policies were adopted mainly for ideological reasons, to prevent Whites, and particularly Afrikaners, from being submerged by Blacks and losing their cultural identity. For the purpose of this study, Blacks will be taken to mean all non-white sectors of the population, i.e. Africans, Indians and Coloureds (people of mixed origin).
Racial discrimination was a defining feature of the apartheid order and Blacks were increasingly restricted and regulated geographically, politically, socially, educationally and economically through a range of statutory provisions aimed at ending all interaction between racial groups except on a superficial level in the workplace.
These Acts, added to an already impressive body of race laws, further entrenched the dominant and privileged position of the White community and denied the majority of the population political rights, as well as equal social, educational and occupational rights.
APARTHEID LEGISLATION
Amongst the plethora of segregationist legislation were the following:
The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (No 55 of 1949) and the Immorality Amendment Act (No 21 of 1950, Section 16) forbade marriage and extramarital sexual intercourse between Whites and Blacks, Asiatics and Coloureds.
The Population Registration Act (No 30 of 1950) made provision for a central population register in which all people were classified according to race.
The Group Areas Act (No 41 of 1950) augmented the various laws providing for racially segregated areas. It provided for areas to be proclaimed as belonging to a particular racial group, in which no other group could live, trade or own land. Any members of other groups living in proclaimed areas were relocated.
This Act was supplemented by the Natives Resettlement Act (No 19 of 1954) which was intended to eliminate 'Black spots' from White areas.
The 1950 Suppression of Communism Act declared the Communist Party an unlawful organisation effectively destroying the Black trade union movement. This was followed by the 1953 Natives Settlement of Disputes Act that banned Blacks from registered trade unions.
The Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (No 49 of 1953) was the primary source of 'petty apartheid' which enforced segregation of all public amenities from lifts, toilets and parks to hotels, restaurants and cinemas.
The Bantu Education Act (No 47 of 1953) allowed for segregated education and pegged expenditure on Black education to the level of Black taxes. Prior to this there was virtually no government education for Blacks, but a very effective system of mission schools existed. [The 1950 Population Registration Act classified people as White, Coloured or Native - later called Bantu. The word Bantu literally means people. (Ormond, 1985:20)]
The 1979 Education and Training Act replaced this Act. Though less suppressive of non-formal education for Blacks, it still required that all educational centres offering 'formal' instruction to Blacks be registered with the Department of Education and Training.
In 1959, the Extension of the University Act was passed to set up separate 'Tribal Colleges' for Black university students.
Existing laws promoting job reservation were supplemented by the Native Labour Act (No 48 of 1953) and the Industrial Conciliation Act (No 28 of 1956).
BLACK REPRESENTATION IN GOVERNMENT
Black representation was abolished in the early part of the National Party's reign and was replaced by local boards.
The Asiatic Amendment Act (No 47 of 1948) abolished Indian representation as Indians were regarded as visitors who should return home. In 1964, this policy was reviewed and the South African Indian Council was formed.
The Separate Representation of Voters Act (No 46 of 1951) removed so called Cape Coloureds from the White voters roll.
The Bantu Authorities Act (No 68 of 1951) abolished the Native Representative Council of 1936. The promotion of Bantu Self Government Act (No 46 of 1959) abolished Black representation and laid down guidelines for government systems in the homelands. Homelands, commonly called Bantustans, were government designated areas for African settlement to which more than 70% of the South African population was assigned on the basis of ethnic affiliation.
The Act was promulgated to force the country's main Black groups into separate areas and separate development, allowing labour needs to dictate which Blacks could continue to reside in the Union of South Africa (Joyce, 1990:16). In the eyes of the Government, the homelands would progress to independent states, which would reinforce the notion that Africans were 'temporary sojourners' in South Africa.
The National Party slowly became aware that Whites could not rule the country alone and in 1983 it acknowledged this by replacing their exclusively White parliament with a Tricameral parliament into which Indian and Coloured people were incorporated as junior partners. In 1985, it declared that the African majority could no longer be excluded from Central Government, but it also sought to achieve African incorporation on its own terms.
BLACK EDUCATION
Until 1953, the education of the Black population was undertaken by various mission societies and provincial education departments. Following the report of the Eiselen Commission of 1949-1951, the Bantu Education Act (No 47 of 1953) was one of the many retrogressive steps introduced during the National Party's apartheid era. The Act was introduced by the then minister of Native Affairs, Dr H.F. Verwoed, who later became Prime Minister. This Act placed education for Blacks under the control of the Central Government in the guise of the Department of Bantu Education and brought about the closure of almost all mission schools and night schools, thereby entrenching the system of apartheid education. (Christie, 1986:55)
When passing the Bill, Dr Verwoed posed the following question: "What is the use of teaching a bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice?" The object of the Bill was to "... teach our children that Africans are inferior to Europeans" (Mandela, 1965:26), with the ultimate goal being to institutionalise racism and "... to produce a semi-literate industrial force to meet the needs of an expanding economy" (Nkomo, 1981:27).
The Black education system was administered both separately and differently to the White education system and was inferior in all aspects, for example, lower teacher qualifications, higher density classrooms and irrelevant syllabi (African National Congress, 1995:4). This separation also prevented people of different races from learning to understand one another's language, customs, hopes and fears.
As Bernstein and Young, amongst others, have provocatively maintained, the structuring of knowledge and symbol in our educational institutions is intimately related to the principles of social and cultural control in a society. Apple asserts that schools 'process' both knowledge and people:
"In essence, the formal and informal knowledge is used as a complex filter to process people, often by class and at the same time, different dispositions and values are taught to different school populations ... In effect, schools latently recreate cultural and economic disparities" (1979:33).
Education was certainly used as a political tool in South Africa to sustain disparities. Most White children had compulsory schooling and went to neighbourhood schools where just about everything was paid for by the State.
Black children were not as fortunate. Unequal government expenditure - the government was spending 18 times more on a White student than on a Black student in 1968 (Kane-Berman, 1990:8) - meant that Black parents had to pay school fees and buy exercise and text books out of, on average, far smaller incomes than Whites.
Education was unaffordable for the majority of Blacks, schooling was not compulsory and it is therefore not surprising that Black males spent an average of 4,8 years at school in 1985, up from 1,9 years in 1960, but still well below the 11,3 years for White students.
According to UNISA's Bureau of Market Research (BMR), in 1991 there were 14 million Blacks of school going age (6 to 20 years old) in South Africa, i.e. 75 percent of the school going population, of which 7,3 million were at school. The remaining 6,7 million had either dropped out or had never attended school at all (Business Day, 8 January 1991).
In addition 60 percent of South Africa's Black adult population could be classified as illiterate and innumerate. Of every 10000 Black school entrants, only 113 passed their final school leaving exams, of those a mere 27 percent entered university and only 1 percent with exemptions in mathematics or science (Business Day, 8 January 1991).
All this resulted in a Black education and skills crisis of frightening proportions as illustrated in Table 2 below.
TABLE 2
Claimed levels of education among African adults aged 16 and over (as %)
1985
No school
22
Some primary
32
Primary completed
12
Some high
28
High completed
5
Some post matric
2
SOURCE: South African Institute of Race Relations, Race Relations Survey, 1992
Despite some belated efforts by Government to improve Bantu education with extra expenditure, it eventually collapsed under the weight of its own inefficiency. Black schools in general and African schools in particular, became key sites of resistance to the oppressive social and economic policies of the National Party government.
The Department of Education and Training lost control and credibility with a resulting crisis of authority and a disintegration of the learning environment. These factors led to the student revolts in 1976 and the emergence of the so called 'lost generation' of Black youth. The words 'Black education' and 'crisis' became inextricably linked.
From 1976, Black students boycotted classes; clashed with the South African police and South African Defence Force; burned down schools and began shaping township politics. By 1986, student, youth and community structures had begun to develop a concept of "Peoples Education for Peoples Power" thereby welding the struggle in the schools to an overall strategy of "Liberation before Education".
Many unfortunately did not heed Sonn's warning that:
"There will be no freedom in the new SA for the uneducated and the unskilled, and no degree of protestation that education was sacrificed for a bigger cause will ameliorate the sense of having been sidelined and left to languish in poverty". (Sonn, 1993:4)
Bantu education, one of the most important generators of poverty, was Verwoed's dream - today it has become our nightmare. It is unlikely that the institutions of formal education (schools, colleges and universities) will be capable of responding effectively, either to the scale or to the nature of the problem in the short term. Because of the inadequacies of past education and the disruption of schooling since 1976, there is now a huge need for effective adult education.
In 2006, Moleke noted that:
"There are still concerns about the quality of education received by most black South Africans, which is reflected in the small proportion of those passing the senior certificate with endorsement, the small numbers of students that pass mathematics and science at secondary-school level, and the low throughput rates of blacks at tertiary level, particularly in the science, engineering and technology-related fields".
BLACK LABOUR MOBILITY
Much of the overtly political legislation enacted between 1948 and 1960 was directed at controlling Black labour. Black mobility was restricted by pass laws, they could only live and work in designated White areas if they had documents enabling them to be there, and by the creation of Bantustans (later called homelands). Until well into the 1970's it was government policy to neglect or even depress development for Blacks in the industrialised common area of the country in the hope of encouraging them to identify with the separate homelands set aside for them.
The Group Areas Act resulted in Blacks living long distances from workplaces, shops and facilities and created areas where masses of people are locked into rural slums. The Migrant Labour System disempowered both the workers and their families and contributed to the disruption of family life and social cohesion.
LABOUR LAWS
During this period a number of labour laws were introduced restricting Blacks to menial jobs, "... mainly to allay Afrikaner's fears of Black competition in the unskilled and semi-skilled labour markets" (Lipton, 1986:36).
In the area of employment the most telling legislative measures designed to afford racial privilege were those laying the basis for the policy of job reservation, namely:
The inappropriately named 'Civilised Labour Policy' of the pact government (National and Labour Parties) during the 1920's was specifically designed to uplift poor Whites at the expense of the Black worker. Civilised labour was defined as 'all work done by people whose standard of living conforms to the standard of living generally recognised as decent from a White person's point of view'.
S77 of the Industrial Conciliation Act of 1924 which excluded Blacks from Industrial Council legislation. This was repealed by Act 94 of 1979.
The Mines and Works Amendment Act of 1926 which tightened job reservation on the basis of colour. This was repealed by Act 38 of 1987.
The Apprenticeship Act (No 37 of 1946) ensured that standards required for acceptance into an apprenticeship were such that no Black person could qualify.
By the end of the 1960's an oversupply of unskilled 'illegal' labour existed side by side with a shortage of skilled labour in the cities. Following the reports of the Wiehahn and Riekert Commissions in 1979, which investigated industrial relations and labour requirements respectively, job reservation was scrapped.
Cheap labour policies and employment segregation concentrated skills in White hands. Although legislated elements of racial discrimination have been removed many South African workplaces are still characterised by sharp inequalities of power, wealth and skill along racial lines.
In the 1960's Bantu Education maintained Africans in an inferior social position and reproduced them as ultra-cheap, unskilled manual labour. Economic growth was high and labour markets were easily able to absorb black school leavers into low grade jobs. However, as the decade turned, Bantu Education could not supply industry with the trained operators, skilled workers and white collar employees that were increasingly needed.
Since the early 1970's, regular panic over labour force reorganisation, technological adaptation and the urgent formation of skilled black operators, propelled both the State and business to look to vocational training.
More than a decade after the removal of job reservation laws there was still a very slow entry of Blacks into management positions. Although this can be partially attributed to the problems of social mobility and an inferior education as outlined above, it is seldom acknowledged that the attitudes and expectations of employers and managers may have contributed to the problem. According to Day (1991:95):
"The paradox is clear: the success of management development of currently excluded groups depends on the group, who for the most part, still believe that they are more capable because they are white and male".
A number of inter-related laws aimed at achieving social upliftment and transformation in the workplace have been introduced since 1995, notably the SAQA Act (No 58 of 1995); Basic Conditions of Employment Act (No 75 of 1997); Employment Equity Act (No 55 of 1998); Skills Development Act (No 97 of 1998); Skills Development Levies Act (No 9 of 1999); Promotion of Equality and Prevention of Unfair Discrimination Act (No 4 of 2000); and Broad-based Economic Empowerment Act (No 53 of 2003).
Despite this legislation, according to Moleke (2006):
"The poor quality of education accessed by the majority of the population undermines all efforts to undo the injustices of the past. Many new black workers still lack the education to take advantage of the increasing employment opportunities for skilled labour. At the same time, demand for unskilled labour is declining, leaving these new entrants with fewer job opportunities".
SOCIO-ECONOMIC FACTORS
Socio-economic factors are still a cause for grave concern. Unacceptable wealth, income and skill disparities compound the problems of poverty, rising unemployment, rapid urbanisation and a lack of housing. This has led to the creation of urban ghettos with millions of black South Africans living in squatter settlements, backyard shacks and a range of makeshift shelters in and around the towns and cities.
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REFLECTIONS
The foundations for South Africa's socio-economic and political woes were laid long before my time and growing up as a privileged white South African I was unaware of the harsh realities of life and in particular the hardships and injustices that were endured by people relegated to the status of 'second class citizens' by an apartheid ideology.
I attended an 'elite' all girls private school where the only time that the issue was alluded to was when we contributed to the charity box for "black babies" every Friday. Politics and power struggles were never discussed and even the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, when 69 people were killed and hundreds of others injured while protesting against pass laws on our doorstep, resulting in the proclamation of a state of emergency was hushed up at school and at home so as "not to upset us". In fact, the only real antagonism I was aware of was that between English and Afrikaans speaking white South Africans.
The Rivonia Treason Trial in 1963 and subsequent imprisonment of Nelson Mandela and the other co-accused Umkhonto weSizwe cadres in 1964 had little impact on my life at the time other than creating the notion of 'Swart Gevaar' (literally translated as Black danger), a propaganda slogan introduced by the then ruling party. It was only years later, on reading Mandela's statement from the dock, that I realised that all they were fighting for was dignity, decent livelihoods, and equal rights.
"Africans want to be paid a living wage. Africans want to perform work which they are capable of ... Africans want to be allowed to live where they obtain work, and not be endorsed out of an area because they were not born there. Africans want to be allowed to own land in places where they work ... Africans want to be part of the general population and not confined to living in their own ghettoes. African men want to have their wives and children with them where they work ..." (Mandela, 1964)
I became more politically aware during my undergraduate years at the beginning of the 1970's, mainly due to the multiracial political activity of the liberal National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) on campus, but remained uninvolved and, for the most part, uninformed as my day-to-day life remained unaffected.
My first real reaction to apartheid and Government policies was in 1976. I was working in the Radiology department at Baragwaneth hospital in Soweto on the fateful day of the student uprising, where they were protesting against the insistence by the educational authorities that mathematics and social sciences be taught in Afrikaans. It was then that I realised that we were indoctrinated, being treated as idiots and in fact being lied to. I was observing and treating the horrific results of police brutality and listening to the reports on the handheld radio of the policeman sent to protect me, while at the same time listening to Government censored radio broadcasts that bore no resemblance to the actual situation.
I left South Africa the following year, shortly after Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko's untimely death, angry and disillusioned at being powerless to effect any real change in the lives of an oppressed majority. My political education began in earnest when I befriended a group of ANC activists and political exiles living in London and on my return home two years later I became more involved in opposition politics and more determined to be involved in the process of change.
In 1990 I enrolled in the MBA programme at Wits Business School where for the first time I was exposed to a 'normal' multiracial educational setting. I was fortunate to be in a syndicate with two black gentlemen, now leaders of large business corporations in South Africa, who taught me that talent and potential, although it may be dormant due to circumstances, is always there and can be developed.
This belief in human potential and my anger and frustration at the inhumane injustices of the apartheid system positioned me to readily accept the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of the four black women who were not as fortunate as I was.
Emerging from my reflections on our history was a strong feeling that power, abuse and imposed values had contributed to social and political injustice and a lack of equality and that in the aftermath of apartheid all South Africans, but in particular business leaders, had a role to play in bringing about positive change.
"The specific problems of urbanisation, mass unemployment, low education base, high population growth and social conflict will all create a set of challenges that will impact powerfully on business". (Binedell, 1998 : 8).
CONCLUSION
Regardless of the causes of socio-economic inequality, the end result was unacceptable. The picture that emerged was that a black person was less likely to be in employment and less likely to hold a managerial, technical or professional position than a white person. This occupational order reflected the disadvantage experienced by black people more widely in society.
It is now generally acknowledged that special attention should be paid to the development and advancement of those people deprived of resources, choices and power by past discriminatory laws and practices.
