The Basic Education Laws Amendment (Bela) Act might be a proxy for more significant issues. The tension surrounding the legislation is a complex and multifaceted issue.
This tension, primarily between the determined and resourceful ethnonationalist Afrikaner leadership complex and the state, is not a simple matter of a shift in language and cultural beliefs among South Africans. It manifests deeper issues rooted in the evolving elite politics.
The capability of those we commissioned, through appointment or election, to transfer economic and social control to “we the people” is the source of the general discontent in an otherwise democratic South Africa. The unfolding tensions and discourse over the Bela legislation foregrounds culture, language, the education system and its infrastructure as a core template of social and economic dominance that South Africa needs to have an honest national dialogue about.
South Africa’s competitiveness is choked by gross underperformance in the education sector, and the contours of inequality are set in the skills deficiencies the education system perpetuates.
A failure in the primary education of a society is an investment in its perpetual exclusion from the global club of innovative nations. It breeds national anarchy as the normative context of nationhood was never inculcated at the primary education level. The South African education system, while nonracial and equal in law, is still etched in the templates of social and economic domination set out in the grand apartheidisation decade between 1950 and 1960.
Society’s choices about what becomes the integration drivers should not only be conceptualised in a hermetically sealed historical context but should borrow wisdom to a future we might never be part of
During this period, education was not treated as a fundamental human right and an enabling right. It was a public good to the extent that it served the public, as defined in terms of the racial segregation policies of the day. In that decade, South Africa saw the promulgation and efficient implementation of a series of acts that would shape the country’s future.
Separate development
These historical decisions continue to cast a long shadow on our present. Separate development was not about developing everyone equally, but separating all for an asymmetrical development of some at the gross expense of others. It morphed into a structural template, which, unfortunately, is still the lens of discourse in most equality matters; this is pronounced in the operations of, and within, the education system.
Those who led the promulgation of Bela argue that the act aims to regulate further the merger or integration of the public schooling system. Integration of schools is an amorphously complicated assignment for a previously state-tormented society like South Africa. Integrating the country’s foremost human custodial institutions and public basic education schools, keeping 19-million to 22-million learners per year for 12 years and assuming a zero-dropout rate, requires extraordinary knowledge about institutional ambidexterity in a historical context.
Society’s choices about what becomes the integration drivers should not only be conceptualised in a hermetically sealed historical context but should borrow wisdom to a future we might never be part of. Going through declarations, position statements, legal arguments, and general discourse against the act points to acute concerns about its implications on language and culture, access to historically gerrymandered education infrastructure, the need for and suspicions about racial integration and social cohesion issues.
Given the ravaging impact of the legal and social engineering of the 1950s and how its benefits continue to project in racial terms growth and development standards spatially, any attempt to recalibrate the education system as a template of social and economic domination or definition would require more than trusting the bona fides of those commissioned into the public service; elected and appointed.
Notwithstanding its gaps and cultural rights insensitivities, Bela directs South Africa to the supply-side dynamics of national human competence development issues. Its provisions interrogate more than legislate the skills, knowledge, and attributional matters of primary education concerning both social cohesion exigencies and the capability of the state and the economy to be globally competitive. The opportunity to dialogue about its implications might be a window to reframe the discourse from what it is settling as.
Beneficiaries of the apartheid system do face genuine threats, including the potential erosion of what apartheid curated as “their” important “social” norms and institutions. As a curated social enclave, they may have long prized “own wellbeing and own values” over the defence of what “we, the post-1994 people”, have defined as our shared values.
The tonality in the documents arguing against the act is to be expected and not understood as a sign of rebellion against the status quo. The own-affairs mentality has morphed into a privately fundable reality, and legislating against it might further polarise an otherwise culturally and socially fragile South Africa. With the identity vote gaining traction among South Africans, as acutely displayed in the May 2024 election outcomes in KwaZulu-Natal, the need for a national dialogue becomes increasingly urgent.
The question is: what is the state’s readiness to address the language and culture issues once African languages demand or reach a science and commerce sophistication the privileged “other” languages have reached?
The mooted national dialogue might be a chamber within which the genuine issues behind Bela could be ventilated, underscoring the urgency of the situation. It is unimaginable that education will not occupy a larger portion of the dialogue. To the extent that South Africa is ready to face the next wave of demons from its past that continue to torment it, several questions about Bela require answers:
Is the act about privileging English over all other official languages? Does this mean that if France or Portugal colonised South Africa, would it be incorrect to assume that the act would privilege those languages?
If most parents choose to enrol their children in a single-medium school and are comfortable with the language, would this translate to exclusion based on language?
To the Afrikaans single-medium defending leadership complex, to what extent is the opposition to Bela a matter of racial purity?
Afrikaans
What is the diversity and nonracialism readiness of the teaching and management school community to the prospect of massifying Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in the event non-Afrikaners embrace Afrikaans?
Will the argument still stand if other ethnic groups elect to have their indigenous languages as a medium of instruction? What affirmative programmes are put in place to advance other indigenous languages into languages of commerce and science?
With the growth and penetration of China, and by default Mandarin, does it mean the thrust of the act might privilege Mandarin, and potentially Swahili, on the strength of majority and demographics inspired access reasons rather than cultural rights rationality?
The elephant question is, are the Bela Act access issues language- or infrastructure-based?
The basis of South Africa’s democratic order is healing past divisions and establishing a society based on democratic values, social justice, and fundamental human rights. Human dignity, equality, and advancement of human rights within a nonracial and nonsexist context of coexistence are values undergirding our society, free of prejudice.
A nation’s worst enemy is not always its contestations on tangibles; the fear that lives within the walls of households about matters such as culture spurs citizens to less expected behaviours. Expectation of freedom, even by those who may have denied others before, is a powerful motive.
Once entitled to what you have, which qualifies as a human right in a freedom-espousing constitutional and democratic order, it will always be difficult to accept losing the entitlement. All too often, society, mainly organised civil society, faces a basic dilemma between what is best for its sectarian interests and what is best for the nation.
This constitutes the paradox of post-liberation or post-conflict society’s leadership, where few to no-one knows all the rules in the playbook of a newfound context of freedom. If honesty guides it, the national dialogue will be the next friend of South Africa’s democratic order.
• Mathebula is a public policy analyst, the founder of The Thinc Foundation, and a research associate at Tshwane University of Technology
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