National Liberation, Neoliberalism, and Educational Change: The Case of Post-Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

It is extremely informative to read recent World Bank reports concerning higher education in the so-called developing countries. (1) Although the prescriptions were firmly committed to promoting core neoliberal values, such as the curtailing of government spending and the reduction of unnecessary duplication of public educational services, a subtle turn of sorts has occurred: an equity agenda has been carefully interwoven into the Bank's more traditional recommendations to downsize the state, as well as to enhance competition, efficiency, and accountability in higher education through privatization. In Africa, this shift involving the notion of equity is in part an expression of the failure of socialist projects to rid nation-states of entrenched poverty and deep-seated class, religious, and racial-ethnic cleavages. The vacuum created by this failure to sustain radical economic programs in Africa has been filled by supranational or organizations that have seized the moment to articulate an equity agenda in higher education that is no longer viewed as anathema to a free market ideology. South Africa furnishes a good example of this kind of sea-change in perspective, insofar as in the volatile days of protest against the Nationalist Party regime prior to the fall of apartheid the Communist Party promised to nationalize banks and mines. This has given way to the African National Congress (ANC) government's endorsement of fiscally conservative macro-economic policies, such as the Growth, Employment, and Redistribution Strategy (GEAR). The equity agenda in the new South Africa must therefore contend with competing priorities that often compel the ANC government to construct a social justice platform with the sort of formulas for development that correspond to what the World Bank and other supranational organizations considered appropriate strategies for South Africa's economic survival and growth in the age of globalization. In this essay the governmental policies for transforming higher education in South Africa will serve as the primary landscape to explore the complex relationship between the country's national liberation struggle to overcome its racially divided history, and its post-apartheid future. It will examine the progressive reforms that contributed to the end of apartheid and the emergence of an equity agenda spearheaded by the ANC government. This case study of the University of the Western Cape (UWC) describes its radical transformation from a so-called bush college created by the apartheid state for the education of Coloured or mixed-race peoples to South Africa's first non-racial, ANC-aligned, open admissions institution. The historical lessons we can learn from UWC's transformation should inform the debate over the ANC government's recent decision to reduce the number of South African public higher education institutions. Influenced by the World Bank's neoliberal prescriptions for post-secondary institutions in developing countries, the restructuring of the South African higher educational system has centered on the neoliberal objectives of the global economy that emphasize the importance of fiscal restraint, standardization, efficiency, research productivity, and competition. (2) COLOUREDS AND ANTI-APARTHEID PROTEST IN THE WESTERN CAPE Until recently, the Coloureds were considered a somewhat obscure element in South African history. There are several reasons for their relative obscurity. The problematic designation Coloured has a distinctive meaning in the U.S. context; indeed, for many African Americans the term conjures up painful and humiliating memories of U.S. Jim Crow laws and the enforcement of separate and inferior public facilities in the southern states. Yet an examination of the experiences of the people designated as Coloureds in South Africa's province of the Western Cape furnishes critical insights into a number of political and economic conditions that are essential to understanding South African history. …