Going Home - Doris May Lessing [32]
But on that day, two months ago, when I saw the little town with its streets of flame trees, in the basin among the mountains, it was its wartime guise that seemed improbable and remote, and it was impossible to remember it full of drunken soldiery and excited, apprehensive wives.
Here I began the business of collecting facts: two of the people I met in Umtali were high in the administration for Native Education, and enthusiastic about Partnership. In the Union of South Africa, they said, opportunities for higher education were diminishing; the Nationalists had said education must fit Africans for their status as inferior beings. But in the Federation things were different. First I must remember, and write truthfully afterwards, that what education the Africans would get was exactly the same as white children got, and that they could work knowing that at the end of their labours there might be a place for them at the university, that the Government secondary schools now being built were as fine as any built for white children.
There is a five-year plan for African education. At the moment about 60 per cent of African children get some kind of an education, but mostly this means three or four years in a kraal school under a teacher with six or eight years’ schooling. Last year, 1955, 5,000 Africans completed Standard VI—that is, what white children are expected to pass at the age of twelve.
The five-year plan will train teachers, some 4,000 of them, so that in the village schools 75 per cent will have teacher-training certificates and so that the children will pass Standard III—that is, five years of schooling.
I was instructed in the importance of this plan, this advance made possible by Federation and the new spirit, for some hours, and I became infected with optimism. In fact, I must confess that for about two weeks I was carried away by Partnership, partly because I wanted so much to believe in it, but mostly because the people who were selling it to me were so convinced by it themselves.
An ironical thing has happened: people who have been known for years as wild revolutionaries, dangerous citizens, are now sucked into Partnership. These two men in Umtali I remember being spoken of as Communists and rebels fifteen years ago; of course they were nothing of the sort; but old-fashioned liberalism in this part of the world is indistinguishable in the minds of the white voters from the extreme forms of sedition. And people who have felt themselves in a minority for so long, people called every kind of Kaffir-lover—how can they not see themselves as crusaders in some kind of a New Deal?
It was not until three weeks later that I saw this education plan in perspective, instructed by another member of Native Education thus: that this trumpeted figure of £12,500,000 to be spent over the five years is only £2,500,000 more than would have been spent in any case. That in presenting this plan to the outside world, the Government speaks of £12,500,000, while in soothing the resentful white people, they stress the £2,500,000. Because the white people resent spending money on African education, the poll-tax has been raised from £1 to £2 a head. This is felt to be unfair by the Africans, since white children are educated free.
Most of the education is still in the hands of the missionaries—without the missionaries there would have been no education at all until just recently—who charge small fees; whereas Government schools are free. So Africans try to send their children to relatives in the town, which is difficult, because the towns are so overcrowded.