Apartheid

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Today, there are still many towns, main streets, squares, etc. that commemorate white
supremacists and oppressors, for instance the ‘architect’ of apartheid in the narrow sense,
former prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd. These offensive namings (which, naturally,
contradict official condemnations of apartheid) survive largely because of a lack of
government funds, bureaucratic obstacles and other pressing concerns for the government
such as the AIDS pandemic, mass unemployment and rampant crime levels. Nonetheless, a
few geographic entities have now been given African names, and many more are planned.
This has caused some needless controversy, especially in rural areas, since many Whites are
still opposed to renaming, not only for rational reasons, such as some of those just mentioned,
but also out of a lingering racist motivation. In marked contrast, almost all Eastern European
vestiges of Communism in art as well as the names of geographical landmarks were changed
in a great hurry. 563
Let us now return to language, the most important symbolic system, as a whole. By
1976, most black students in South Africa were learning all or most subjects in English, which
was often perceived as a neutral middle between African languages and Afrikaans, and, of
course, as the most useful language in the world. As tension brewed in the deteriorating and
severely overcrowded township schools, among many other parallel critical developments,
including rising unemployment among Blacks, increasing international pressure against
apartheid and the spread of the Black Consciousness Movement, the government
provocatively and suddenly decided to force all black schools to introduce Afrikaans as a
mandatory language of instruction for half of all subjects, with the rest of the subjects in
English and only music, religion and physical education in the African mother tongue in
primary schools and the lower forms of secondary schools. The highest classes for most black
students, forms 3, 4 and 5 in secondary schools, were not to include any instruction in African
languages at all.
Chaos erupted in the black schools. The students, who had until that time often made a
point out of not learning Afrikaans, the main language of the oppressors, were now often
unable to understand the teachers at all. Many teachers also had severe problems with having
to teach in an entirely new language for them. The teachers and students together launched a
campaign against the decree, but the government would not budge an inch. The Deputy
Minister of Bantu Education, Punt Janson, said: ‘No, I have not consulted the African people
on the language issue and I’m not going to...An African might find that the ‘big boss’ only
spoke Afrikaans or only spoke English. It would be to his advantage to know both languages.’
Another apartheid bureaucrat reacted similarly: ‘If students are not happy, they should stay
away from school since attendance is not compulsory for Africans.’ 564
The school language issue became a wake-up call and a catalyst for many oppositional
Blacks, who then started a South African Intifada that lasted, with short intermittent breaks,
until political liberation 18 years later. As with the Palestinians, another 11 and 24 years,
respectively, after the outbreak of the Soweto uprising, it was mainly children and youths,
armed with little more than rocks and sticks, who challenged a military machinery that would
probably have used all of its vast resources to suppress the uprising, including ABC weapons,
had it not been for persistent media coverage and world public opinion. In the next section, we
will take a look at some of the information and propaganda machinery employed by the
apartheid elites and their allies, but increasingly also by the resistance and its allies in order to
sway that opinion. It is obvious that South African liberation served as an inspiration to
Palestinian liberation, both in general and in more specific regards. For example, children and
youths were to become the heroes of resistance. Stone Age arsenals were used against nuclear
age mass killing devices. The importance of photography, film, and symbolism in general rose
significantly as the media became part of a new kind of desperate struggle in an altogether
563 N.N.: Afrikaner Backlash to South African Name Changes, January 31, 2002
564 Quoted in Bonner & Segal 1998: 82. See also Lester 1996: 166-171