Willie drove slowly, picking his way through the road strewn with charred tires and smashed concrete slabs. The acrid smoke from burning rubber stung my nose and eyes, even inside the van. Anita slowly said “shame” over and over again as we surveyed the damage.
We were driving through a township (a poor neighborhood outside Port Elizabeth) on our way to drop supplies to soup kitchens and pre-schools in needy areas. Our progress that day had been slow because of the multiple roads blocked by police barricades, which did nothing to stop the plumes of smoke coming up out the valleys. The road we were on now had recently been the site of a protest, but now all that was left was smoldering debris and a couple of police vans on either end of the road.
“What are they protesting?” Claire asked.
Willie sighed and said, “The government is shutting down schools because they say there’s no money for teachers. So they are protesting that, because it’s really just corruption, since our president has enough money for his seven wives and over sixty cabinet members.”
“Who is the ’they’ that are protesting?” I said.
“Teachers, students, parents. Everybody.” Anita said.
Willie nodded and added, “The government doesn’t want them to be educated, because if they aren’t educated then they won’t notice the corruption or know how to change it. So they are trying to take away the schools.”
//
Two weeks later, on our way to a playdate at a creche (pre-school), our van came over a rise in the hill to see the entire road blocked by burning wreckage. It was more protests, students striking against the loss of teachers, teachers striking against the loss of pay, and parents striking against the loss of education for their children.
Later, Meggie asked one of our hosts, Faye, about the causes of the protests. Faye shook her head.
“Some of the conditions of the schools are just awful! They do documentaries on the news, you know, where they go into some of the public schools and show what’s really going on there. Ceilings will be hanging down or just gone altogether, and there will be 60 students in a class, all sharing these little benches. And the government doesn’t pay the teachers enough already, and now they are taking away even more teacher salaries. So yeah, that’s why they are striking.”
After a minute, Faye said, “And you know, there is no other way to get the government’s attention. So in the poor areas, they almost have to strike.”
The protests were shocking to me, not because of the fires or broken concrete, but because what poor South Africans were protesting was a basic right to me. In America, every child is supposed to be guaranteed a public education. While the execution of that right varies wildly depending on if you are born white or black, rich or poor, the basic idea is that because you are born American, you are born with a lawful right to education.
There is no such law in South Africa. Schools charge fees, and poorer students go to poorer schools. It is the poor schools that are being overcrowded and shut down for lack of funds, and the poor students which will be trapped into a cycle of illiteracy and poverty. And these students are overwhelmingly black South Africans.
The conflict over schooling in South Africa is ongoing and many-layers, and as a foreigner, I can’t pretend to understand all of it. I’m also not an educator, and therefore not an expert on education systems (South African or American). But I saw enough parallels in the United States’s education system to wonder if we are really so different from South Africa.
We have vast disparities in wealth of public schools, due to higher property taxes in richer areas funding better public schools. The school-to-prison pipeline overwhelmingly targets minority students in poor areas, and the teachers in poor American public schools are underpaid and overworked. We have less burning tires and smashed concrete, but maybe that’s because we’ve stopped looking.
This isn’t the way to build a nation- neither America nor South Africa. Education is; education for all.
