State education policy and the social reproduction of the Urban African working class
The case of the Southern Transvaal 1955-1976
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4603948 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jonathan Hyslop (0000-0002-6879-2281, University of the Witwatersrand, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1988 |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 446-476 |
| Publication date | 1988-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Southern African Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0305-7070 • E-ISSN: 1465-3893 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/03057078808708184 |
| OpenAlex | W2064591920 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
| References cited | 15 |
Between its establishment in 1955, and the beginnings of its collapse in the student rebellion of 1976, the Bantu Education system significantly restructured the patterns of social reproduction of South Africa's urban African working class. This paper seeks to examine this restructuring process. It argues, firstly, that Bantu Education has to be understood as a system which helped reproduce differentiated forms of labour power. The system underpinned the gap that opened up between urbanised and migrant labour forces, and in its later years increasingly generated varying types of labour power within the urban work force. Secondly, Bantu Education is not viewed as a static entity, but as a policy which underwent significant changes as the outcome of social conflicts over education. In our chosen period these conflicts predominantly occurred within and between various capitalist interests and various arms of the state. But the dominated classes' expression of their interests in various forms also affected education policy. In recent years, radical analysis of Bantu Education has been deeply influenced by the Cheap Labour Power Thesis (CLPT) developed in the work of Harold Wolpe' and Martin Legassick. 2 To summarise crudely a complex and subtle argument,3 the thesis asserted that the maintenance of pre-capitalist agriculture in rural South Africa enabled urban employers to pay below-subsistence wages to migrant workers, thus providing the basis for a cheap labour system. In this view, the reproduction of migrant workers' families, and of migrant workers themselves, was displaced to the 'reserves' thus freeing capitalists from bearing the social costs of urbanisation. With the collapse of agriculture in the reserves and burgeoning industrialisation in the
Agriculture · Bantu languages · Compulsory education · Economic growth · Economics · Geography · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Reproduction · Restructuring · Social class · Social reproduction · Social science · Sociology · Subsistence agriculture · Working class · Gender Studies · Law · Legal Issues in South Africa
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,18 |
| Citation span | 1998 - 2024 (27) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |