Racial Segregation In South Africa Essay

racial segregation in South Africa was applied at every level and governed everything, from where we could live, go to school, work, what type of jobs we could do, who we married. Mixed marriages were a punishable offence under the Immorality Act which although was at first exclusively an act that prevented any relations between blacks and whites, had been amended to include a ban between white and any other racial group. The most evident form of racial segregation however was in the education system. Black schools were the least funded. Very few had electricity, running water or indoor plumbing. None had facilities such as libraries, laboratories and even our sport fields were nothing more than empty grounds on which we played different sports. Those

The lack of qualified Mathematics and Science teachers led to a cycle of inadequate instruction in these subjects which churned out teachers that were less qualified than their predecessors. Some areas did not have high schools thereby not offering pupils an opportunity to progress beyond 9 years of learning; in farm schools, even less. It was therefore every black parent’s dream for their children to move beyond the basic education offered in black only schools to the broader education offered to other racial groups. The school I was attending had been a coloured school, hence all learning was still in English. But with the establishment of Bantustans and Umzimkhulu declared to be in the Transkei, therefore outside the borders of South Africa proper, the schools was declared outside the bounds of South African state funding; dropping the level to that of a black school. We still did all our subjects in English and somewhat followed the coloured school curriculum, as far as we could, but that was the only reminder of the school’s non-black heritage. Apart from our school principal, all our teachers were black and we had at most three non-black students in the entire