Apartheid

From the second and third centuries AD there are examples of Greek
translations or adaptations of Egyptian literary works which is an
important clue to the existence of a Greek-speaking readership,
perhaps one of which a part had some demotic ancestral memory. This
in itself does not quite constitute a merging of Egyptian and Greek
literary traditions, but it points the way forward to the role of Coptic
literature, much of which uses the themes and substance of Christian
material written in Greek. 513
225
Still, there were cases of people manifestly able to write Egyptian, who were
nevertheless officially declared illiterate by the Greek-speaking state bureaucracy. It is
obvious that Greek writing was considered by those in power to be not only superior but in
another league than Egyptian writing or whatever it was that Greeks regarded Egyptian
writing to be. 514 We will return to this theme in the following two sections.
7.2. Bantu Education and Baasskap
The apartheid system of segregation and oppression in South Africa secured its power
through its educational systems, which were created differently for the four racial groups,
White, Black, Colored and Asian. Educational systems depended primarily on race, with the
white schools being the most privileged ones. The average ratio of state expenditure between
a white and a black student during the apartheid years in the narrow sense was ten to one. 515
From 1948 onwards, the National Party felt that it was necessary to limit the Black
people’s education, perhaps mainly so that they would not become too ‘enlightened’ and
demand more rights or even revolt against white minority rule. School attendance for Blacks
was not mandatory and Whites did what they could to keep as many Blacks as possible in
school as briefly as possible, or even altogether out of school. Afrikaans universities were
already closed to Blacks, and from 1958, English universities were also closed to Blacks. As
in other apartheid societies, education in South Africa in general had the effect of radicalizing
the oppressed indigenous majority, the Blacks, and of making apartheid defenders and
apologists less radical. 516
Even though apartheid professed to aim at separate yet equal developments for all
races, the government was spending much more attention and money on the improvement of
white schools. In the 1950s and the 1960s, the number of black students doubled, without
additional governmental spending in comparison with the increase. The Bantu Education Act
of 1953 led directly to the number of technical colleges for Blacks falling from 54 in 1953 to
21 in the following year. 517 Less qualified teachers, inadequate facilities and a syllabus, which
513
Ibid: 164
514
Ibid: 159. See also below, Chapter II.9.1.
515
Fedderke, de Kadt. & Luiz: Uneducating South Africa: The Failure to Address the Need for Human Capital –
a 1910-1993 Legacy, 1998: Fig. 9
516
Iliffe: 1995: 283; Mandela 2002 (1965): 32. This is almost certainly also the case in Israel. The settlers in the
Occupied Palestinian Territories are mostly recruited from the latest waves of immigrants and from other
relatively poor and uneducated Jews. Palestinians with higher education, in contrast, tend to become radicalized.
In a way, this fact in itself ‘proves’ the moral inferiority of apartheid to less oppressive societies. The more you
know the more you try to overthrow. There even seems to be a parallel in Ptolemaic Egypt, where education was,
after all, probably more ideological than in any other apartheid society (see Chapter II.9.1, below, and also
footnote 35, above). The famous mathematician and geographer, Eratosthenes, who actually led the Museum in
Alexandria for a while, argued for an end to the separation between Greeks and Barbarians, i.e. ‘foreigners’. He
is more famous however for other things, such as his ingenious calculation of the circumference of the earth,
which he achieved with amazing accuracy. See Leuteritz: Hellenistische Paideia und Randgruppen der
Gesellschaft: Herrscher und Frauen, “Bildungspolitik“ und Eukosmia, 1997: 151.
517
Lester 1996: 113f, 159