20 years since...

[Fudzy]

Theirs was an exceptional story from the apartheid era, when South Africa's white-minority government used a tangle of legislation to classify every citizen by race – a category that determined where people could live, what they could study, where they could work and whom they could marry.

The repeal of the last laws took effect 20 years ago Thursday, a milestone on the road to the first all-race elections won by Nelson Mandela in 1994.

Ngwenya circumvented the apartheid system, thanks to the determination of his mother, a farm worker in KwaZulu-Natal province, who saw that the “Bantu education” given to black South Africans would never lift her children from poverty.

“They were saying a Bantu child is not smart enough for that. If you teach a Bantu child mathematics, it cannot use it. It is like a dog,” he said.

“That was the doctrine that we had to emancipate ourselves from.”

His mother sent him to nearby Swaziland to live with relatives and receive a better education.

His own efforts won him a scholarship to the University of Calgary in Canada, where he earned an engineering degree and met Joan, who was studying medicine.

They married, and she followed him back to Swaziland where he was offered a job and they started a family.

Across the border in South Africa, families like theirs were impossible. Isaac would have been classified as black, Joan as white, and their children as coloured.

The notorious Immorality Act equated sex with someone of a different hue with bestiality, and was strictly enforced.

Couples suspected of breaking the rules could land in prison, their underwear and bedsheets confiscated and combed for pubic hairs, which were then used in court as evidence.

http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-afr...ial-sa-family-grew-during-apartheid-1.1090843

The bit about bantu education probably gives a good idea of what **** the education system is in now.

 

[LazyLion]

The repeal of the last laws took effect 20 years ago Thursday

and yet, there are still vestiges of it riddled throughout the other existing legislation.

 

[BigBullBully]

Wow imagine that, if you study and work hard you can succeed, wow what a concept !

 

[porchrat]

The bit about bantu education probably gives a good idea of what **** the education system is in now.

LOL yea except now NOBODY can do mathematics

YAY no more racism. Now all the children are equally ignorant. Go SA go!

While I joke what has happened to our education system does indeed make me very sad. Entire futures are being ruined by these idiots in the education department.

 

[Alan]

and yet people are still being classified by race...

Equality includes the full and equal enjoyment of all rights and freedoms. To promote the achievement of equality, legislative and other measures designed to protect or advance persons, or categories of persons, disadvantaged by unfair discrimination may be taken.

His mother sent him to nearby Swaziland to live with relatives and receive a better education.

His own efforts won him a scholarship to the University of Calgary in Canada, where he earned an engineering degree and met Joan, who was studying medicine.

Odd I recall reading an obituary of some famous black fellow who got a law degree from the university of Zululand during Apartheid