Abstract
I was only in my third year at school when the Bantu Education Act came into effect in 1956. By the time I went to university in 1967, segregated universities, which had been established in terms of the Extension of University Education Act of 1959, were already a fact of life. In this article I have set out to examine the relevant acts and their application, to show how the system affected me and my contemporaries and how reaction against the system set in among us.
The Bantu Education Act was passed in 1953, a year before the Supreme Court of the USA decided against segregation in American schools. ‘My department's policy is that education should stand with both feet in the Reserves and have its roots in the spirit and being of Bantu society,’ Dr Verwoerd, as Minister of Native Affairs (which took over the control of African education), told the all-White Senate in 1954. There is no place for him (meaning the African) in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour.