Bantu Education Act

Bantu Education Act, South African law, enacted in 1953 and in effect from January 1, 1954, that governed the education of Black South African (also called native or Bantu by the country’s government) students. It was part of the government’s system of apartheid, which sanctioned racial segregation and discrimination against nonwhite people in the country.

From about the 1930s the vast majority of schools serving Black students in South Africa were run by missions and often operated with state aid. Most children, however, did not attend these schools. In 1949 the government appointed a commission, headed by anthropologist W.W.M. Eiselen, to study and make recommendations for the education of native South Africans. The Eiselen Commission Report (1951) urged the government to take charge of education for Black South Africans in order to make it part of a general socioeconomic plan for the country. In addition, the report stated that the schooling should be tailored toward the needs and values of the cultures of the communities in which the schools were located. The prescriptions of the commission were generally followed by Act No. 47 of 1953, the Bantu Education Act, which was assented to on October 5, 1953, and came into effect on January 1, 1954.

Under the act, the Department of Native Affairs, headed by Hendrik Verwoerd, was made responsible for the education of Black South Africans; in 1958 the Department of Bantu Education was established. The act required Black children to attend the government schools. Teaching was to take place in the students’ native tongue, though the syllabus included classes in English and Afrikaans. Instruction was mandated in needlework (for girls), handcraft, planting, and soil conservation as well as in arithmetic, social studies, and Christian religion. The education was aimed at training the children for the manual labor and menial jobs that the government deemed suitable for those of their race, and it was explicitly intended to inculcate the idea that Black people were to accept being subservient to white South Africans.

Funding for the schools was to come from taxes paid by the communities that they served, so Black schools received only a small fraction of the amount of money that was available to their white counterparts. As a result, there was a profound shortage of qualified teachers, and student-teacher ratios ranged from 40:1 to 60:1. An attempt by activists to establish alternative schools (called cultural clubs because such schools were illegal under the act) that would give children a better education had collapsed by the end of the 1950s.

The government’s education policies became a significant focus of resistance during the apartheid era, spurring Black students to boycott classes and hold larger protests. One of the most prominent examples of this is the 1976 uprising in Soweto, which began when Black students in Soweto township planned a peaceful march on June 16 to protest against the government’s imposition of the Afrikaans language as the medium of instruction for some classes in schools for Black students. It escalated into a violent clash with police officers that day and also spread to other locations in the country in the following days.

High schools were initially concentrated in the Bantustans, reserves that the government intended as homelands for Black South Africans. However, during the 1970s the need for better-trained Black workers resulted in the opening of high schools in Soweto, outside Johannesburg.

At the university level, nonwhite students were barred from attending open universities (those that had admitted both white and nonwhite students) by the Extension of University Education Act (1959). The act also provided for the establishment of separate university colleges exclusively for Black and other nonwhite students.

The Bantu Education Act was amended several times before being repealed and replaced by the Education and Training Act of 1979. Mandatory segregation in education ended with the passage of the South African Schools Act in 1996, but decades of substandard education and barriers to entrance to historically white schools had left the majority of Black South Africans far behind in educational achievement by the beginning of the 21st century.