Desarrollar los planes de ventas, tanto el estratégico como el táctico

Boesak (2009), in his book Running with horses: reflections of an accidental

politician, focuses on three issues, namely, his past, present and future political

activism and career in South Africa. The book is divided into four parts with each part opening, to varying degrees, a window on different episodes in the struggle for liberation in South Africa.

Boesak landed back in South Africa just one month after the Soweto Uprising in 1976. The whole country was on fire. The wave of dissatisfaction started in Soweto but it became a nationwide phenomenon. Afrikaans was at the centre of the Soweto Uprising although the whole system of education was in question. Education for the so-called non-whites was inferior in every sense and underpinned by sinister ulterior motives. With his doctorate from the hub of Reformed theology in the Netherlands, as Mohammed Bouazizi’s self-immolation had triggered the Arab Spring in December 2010 and Rosa Parks who has played her role in starting the Civil Rights Movement, Boesak was the man “for such a time as this” (Esther 4:14). He participated in a movement that had started without any personal influence on his part. However, the moment had come and he became one of the movement’s most ferocious spokespersons.

There often comes a time in history when a people are no longer prepared to endure the injustices of an oppressive political system. When this moment comes the will to survive supersedes the fear of death. It is an unexplainable spirit which arises from the depth of one’s being to take back one’s humanity from those who have conferred upon themselves the right to own one’s very soul. Boesak was thrown into such a moment.

He had already a background in Reformed theology from the University of the Western Cape but the Calvin he met at Kampen was the direct opposite of the Calvin to whom he had been introduced in the theological corridors of the Coloured university. The Calvin at Kampen was both a radical and a theologian of public life while the other Calvin at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) had been intended to transform him into a “geleerde hotnot” (Boesak, 2009: 23, 35). The Kampen experience was overwhelming, to say the least. It provided him with some answers to the penetrating existential questions asked by Aunt Meraai Arendse earlier in his ministry.

Boesak’s pre and post Kampen experiences highlight an interesting aspect in relation to the reason why Soweto had rejected Bantu Education. Education for black people in South Africa was part of a bigger programme of what Paulo Freire (1970: 27) termed dehumanisation. Every class held was intended to fulfil Dr Hendrik Verwoerd’s well-known vision for the so-called Bantu, articulated as early as the 1950s (Boddy Evans n.d).

There is no place for [the Bantu] in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour … What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? That is quite absurd.

Education must train people in accordance with their opportunities in life, according to the sphere in which they live.

Verwoerd had decided – the Bantu were inferior culturally to white people and the best way to inculcate this into the very essence of their being was through education. Coloured people suffered a similar fate although the apartheid government also tried in various ways to instil in them a sense of superiority over Africans. Don Mattera (1987) captures in vivid ways how black people were dehumanised and, in most instances, resorted to seeking expression in the dangerous streets of the African and Coloured townships.

The process of inculcating inferiority into black pupils was not an overnight phenomenon and, instead, it was a long-term project. As a qualified psychologist, Verwoerd must have known that the best way to seal the fate of the oppressed was through education. Steve Biko later reiterated this conclusion. Verwoerd’s move to target education was strategic, beginning with a black child’s formative and developmental years and then extending into high school and tertiary education.

The fortunate ones who progressed to what others called glorified high schools or bush Universities know how difficult it was to obtain an examination entrance grade, let alone pass a science related subject. If, for some reason, a black person had sufficient self-confidence to want to pursue mathematics or physical science related careers, they had to obtain ministerial consent to do so. In the case of Africans, it was the Minister of Bantu Education himself who had to approve such your ill-considered aspirations and an individual’s dreams could be destroyed at the stroke of a pen.

If well implemented the final product of Bantu Education would be a well-polished black person prepared to play a subordinate in the white economic system. In Verwoerd’s mind, black people were created to serve white people. Occasionally, blacks could benefit from the crumbs that fell off the master’s table. Like biblical Lazarus of old, black people grew accustomed to watching the rich man’s table for food scraps they could not afford.

However, for the blacks, there was nothing particularly wrong with these crumbs because, somewhere in their subconscious, they had accepted their place as “oorskiet-mensies” (Boesak 2009:11). Verwoerd’s experiment was gradually yielding the expected results.

Some picture would occasionally question the system but this was dangerous. From the majority of the townships emerged great stalwarts of the struggle against these dehumanising psychological images. Men such as Godfrey Pitje, Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo are known for their fight against Verwoerd’s psychological warfare. However, for most African adults, it was far easier better to just get drunk on a form of African beer known called “skokiaan” or have some “skop-die-donner” than fight battles that could never be won. Opposing apartheid meant rising above certain forms of ontological fear; even the fear of death.

The Soweto Uprising represented a moment in history when it was if a one small movement in the icy mountains of oppression became a catalyst for a roaring and overwhelming avalanche of social change. The national youth insurrection of 1976 was triggered by a “business-as-usual” statement made by the government about Bantu Education (Boddy-Evans, n.d.), namely, “It has been decided that,

for the sake of uniformity, English and Afrikaans will be used in our schools on a 50-50 basis”. The schools in townships referred to black schools while uniformity meant a law had to be passed to balance the use of English and Afrikaans in the schools as the medium of instruction in most schools was English. For the children in Soweto the question was, Uniformity for whom, and who decided? With these questions in mind, the point of no return had been reached. The children of Soweto hated Afrikaans and its implications in respect of their oppression. The majority of the Coloured communities in South Africa spoke Afrikaans, except perhaps in Natal where most Coloureds spoke English. As Boesak and others later came to demonstrate in the Black Consciousness Movement, the language was not the issue, instead the bigger problem revolved around the oppression of so-called non-white communities by the apartheid government. The language issue in Soweto sparked off a deep and hidden resentment against apartheid as a political system, whether African, Coloured or Indian.

As if everything that had happened was not enough, the apartheid government now wanted African children to speak its language. It was almost as if they were being asked to participate in their own oppression. The children responded that they will reject the whole system of Bantu Education whose aim is to reduce us mentally to hewers of wood and drawers of water.

That statement, made by the Soweto Students' Representative Council, reversed the tide in Verwoerd’s vision as the children in Soweto had cracked his secret code of oppressive deception. As mentioned earlier, Afrikaans was not the problem but the whole apartheid system’s racist and sinister motives were.

Soweto in 1976 was a catalyst of how a courageous youth throughout South Africa rose up to reaffirm and take back their humanity. Their parents and great- grandparents had raised similar concerns in various ways long before they had been born but Soweto was the final indignity.

When history determines to overthrow its tyrants, there is no force that may turn back the tide. No one is able to explain or claim to know how it happens. Instead, it is all determined in what Reinhold Niebuhr called “the wider scheme of things”. In the case of Boesak – as had happened with Martin Luther King – the hour had met the man! Nothing had been planned but the processes of history were unfolding.