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Education enslaves black minds

OUTSPOKEN: Zandisiwe Radebe, lecturer at Unisa's politics department, believes SA's education remains colonised
OUTSPOKEN: Zandisiwe Radebe, lecturer at Unisa's politics department, believes SA's education remains colonised

The education system has failed to empower black youth to understand their struggles and the history of their country.

Zandisiwe Radebe, a lecturer at the University of South Africa's politics department, argued that institutions of learning were some of the segments of the society that helped to keep white power intact.

"Currently, the education system from kindergarten to tertiary level continues to fail us in as far as teaching us our true history, and thereby unlocking our cognitive imagination from which we can imagine freedom," she said.

"In our 21 years of freedom, we have not seen an education that liberates the mind of the black child. Our education doesn't liberate, but enslaves the black mind. What we have today is an education system that limits our political imagination. In short, what is thought to be education and knowledge production is still very much colonised," she said.

A black consciousness activist, Radebe contended the youth today were sold a dummy in believing that they were free.

The current youth have failed to carry out the work started by the youth of 1976, she said, adding that black people should not define their freedom using the tools designed by white people.

"Young people today have been seduced to accept the limited desires of freedom that have been forced down our throats by the powers that be.

"I think we have failed to carry out the imagination of the youth of 1976."

Radebe cautioned against reducing the 1976 uprising to resistance against the Afrikaans language, but rather a struggle against the whole system of apartheid.

She said to reduce the student protest to just a fight against Afrikaans was like reducing the current fight for transformation at universities such as the University of Cape Town and Stellenbosch to a mere struggle for the removal of colonial and apartheid statues.

Her fellow lecturer, Nompumelelo Motlafi, pictured above, who teaches African politics, echoed the need to transform universities so that young black academics and scholars like herself can be taken seriously and not be undermined because they are black.

She said underestimation of black people was reflected in how the subject she teaches (African politics) is looked down upon. "Even the subject I teach is often the locus of Afro-pessimism.

"Both in universities here and abroad, African politics is a deviant strain of political science; a politics of abnormality and malfunctioning political entities and peoples.

"Yet it is as an academic that I have been in a position to partake in efforts to transform the Euro-centred knowledge economy and to appreciate the role of South African students in this enormous and difficult enterprise."

lThe dialogue was inspired by The Road to Democracy in South Africa book volumes that chronicle four decades of SA history

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