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The Destiny of South Africa
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19221 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1991 |
4,958 Words |
| Author
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Ralph Slovenko
Ralph Slovenko is professor of law and psychiatry at Wayne
State University in Detroit. He has made several lecture tours
in South Africa. |
What lies ahead for South Africa? What kind of country will the new South Africa be? The future of any country is shaped by its past, its population, its economy, and its role in international relations. What are the hard truths about South Africa? And what are the hard choices that lie ahead?
As everyone knows, apartheid--separation of races by law--has made South Africa the pariah of nations. It has damaged the country in moral, social and economic terms.
In his historic speech of February 2, 1990, President F.W. de Klerk declared an end to apartheid in all its forms, and unilaterally extended a hand of peace to the African National Congress (ANC), and other formerly banned organizations. He made it clear that, beyond the abolition of apartheid, his goal is to create a new constitution, through negotiations with every sector of society, establishing full democracy and justice in the country.
The new South Africa faces formidable social-economic problems of wealth and poverty, and racial and cultural differences. There is no easy solution to the imbalance between the haves and the have-nots. For one thing, the whites have had a superior education and training and hence have superior skills. The majority of the population has been steeped in an underclass culture, and has been let down by an inferior education system. They are ill-equipped for urban life, and are unemployable. Likewise, the returning exiles, almost to a man, have no skills--still they will want to move into positions of control.
Educational problems of blacks are pandemic. Black students in 1991 failed high school graduation examinations at the highest rate in South Africa's history. Only 36 percent of the 233,000 black students who took the tests passed, compared with 42 percent the previous year, and of those, less than a quarter passed well enough to enter a university. The pass rate for whites was 97 percent; for Asians, 95 percent; and for those of mixed race, 79 percent.
Few developing countries in Africa have an established educational tradition in Western terms. Compusory education is largely unknown and the percentage of school-age children at school varies with country. In 1955 in South Africa there were only 35,000 black pupils at secondary school. By 1989 the number had increased to 1,346,403. More than five million black pupils (81 percent of all school-age children) are now at school in both primary and secondary schools in South Africa. The annual
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