The truth is out at last. Those most affected by that truth cannot read this editorial, but there is at least reason to believe officialdom is about to act on the national emergency of adult illiteracy.
The 11th year of our democracy is late in the day for the national government to have noticed that about 40% of South African adults — eight million to 10-million people — cannot read or write, and so face bleak futures. This is especially strange in the light of the constitutional injunction that everyone has the right to a basic education, including adult basic education, and to further education, which the state, “through reasonable measures”, must make progressively available and accessible.
The national Department of Education has been claiming for years that it has been combating adult illiteracy with stunning success. But no one with first-hand knowledge has believed for one moment the ridiculous figures the department has flourished to back its claim.
Among these was the oft-repeated canard that the department’s literacy projects have “reached nearly two million learners”. The former education minister, Kader Asmal, proudly trumpeted this as recently as March last year.
Interrogated again this week, the department sheepishly admitted that it has reached nowhere near that number. We were told, bafflingly, that the two million claim “needs to be viewed in the context of this being one of [the former minister’s] last speeches as minister of education”.
What does that mean? Has it now become acceptable to use your last speeches as a public official to mislead the public?
But let us not dwell on the damage done to individuals and the economy by 10 years of official misrepresentation. This week the national department came clean: its figures have been thoroughly unreliable for years.
That is a start. And when the education department completely drops its pretence that it, and it alone, can tackle the scourge of illiteracy, we shall have more reason for optimism. The Department of Labour, trade unions, business, NGOs and academics are among those the department should join forces with.
So we applaud the KwaZulu-Natal government for its decisive commitment to improving the lives of the nearly two million people in that province who cannot read or write. We agree with Premier S’bu Ndebele’s judgement that illiteracy amounts to a provincial “state of emergency”. We also know that the emergency is a national one.
The KwaZulu-Natal government this month brought together all those players who can, in collaboration, make a difference. Its undertaking to eliminate illiteracy by March 2008 is one the rest of South Africa should emulate.
He turned with the tide
It is an act of simple humanity to wish that Allan Hendrickse, who died unexpectedly on Wednesday, rests in peace. We also extend our sympathies to his family.
Death should, however, not trump the truth. It would be dishonest to honour Hendrickse as a soldier in the fight against apartheid or to mourn “the loss of a South African patriot” as the African National Congress did this week.
News reports on Wednesday also paid tribute to his alleged involvement “in the fight against apartheid for more than three decades”. Such homages serve to airbrush out the historical reality — that Hendrickse collaborated with apartheid’s masters.
A teacher and priest, Hendrickse studied at Fort Hare University, the home of African nationalism. After graduating, he worked for a time for the radical Unity Movement. But in 1975 he joined the Coloured Representative Council, his first foray into the coloured nationalist politics that came to define him.
In 1984 he took the Labour Party into elections for the racially defined tricameral Parliament — PW Botha’s doomed attempt to maintain white political control by dividing the disenfranchised.
His party dominated the coloured House of Representatives and Hendrickse himself sat in the President’s Council, where coloureds and Indians were supposed to share executive power with whites.
The shallowness of his opposition to apartheid was highlighted in 1987 when he objected to emergency regulations and protested against beach apartheid by taking a dip in the whites-only surf. When Botha threatened to turf him out of his tricameral Cabinet job, he meekly apologised.
Ever the opportunist, he disbanded the Labour Party and moved towards the ANC before the 1994 election, ending his political life as an ANC senator. Anxious to win the coloured vote, particularly in the Western Cape, the ANC welcomed him into the fold. As a Uitenhage man, however, he was not well known on the Flats and did not bring with him a mass base of any size.
Hendrickse was awarded the Order of Baobab last year for his contribution to the struggle against apartheid. But for the coloured activists who really made sacrifices and took risks in the bad old days, he is remembered as a man who valued power over principle, and who probably retarded the fight for democracy in South Africa.
Allan Hendrickse, born October 22 1927, died March 16 2005.