CHAPTER 10: Building Towards Democracy in Apartheid South Africa: A Pioneering Partnership for Training Black School Leaders, 1989-95

By 1989, South Africa—and South African education—was in a state of crisis. Both international and internal opposition to the apartheid regime had reached unprecedented levels. International sanctions and boycotts were exerting pressure on both the South African economy and White South Africa’s collective psyche. Internal resistance had led the government to declare yet another state of emergency, the third time it had implemented this repressive policy. Disruption and violence rocked many of South Africa’s urban Black townships, including Black schools, as Black students by the tens of thousands joined the front lines of the antiapartheid struggle. Groups ranging from the banned African National Congress (ANC) inside South Africa to USAID abroad recognized that reform of the educational sector was critical to any effort to undermine apartheid and to create a truly democratic South Africa, not just because schools and universities germinated the seeds of the grassroots resistance, but because the vast majority of the country had been systematically denied access to learning.