What were the effects of Bantu education?

The Bantu Education Act was passed in 1953 in South Africa as a part of a broader set of apartheid legislation in the 1950s including the Population Registration Act (1950), the Group Areas Act (1950), the Suppression of Communism Act (1950), the Bantu Authorities Act (1951), the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (1953), and the Natives Resettlement Act (1954).

The Bantu Education Act aimed to control and limit the education of Black South Africans, keeping them in subordinate roles in society and limiting social and economic advancement.

To achieve this, the act implemented a curriculum in Black schools that emphasized manual labor and only basic literacy. Schools for black children were also notoriously underfunded and overcrowded, often lacking the most basic educational resources. In contrast, schools for white South Africans taught subjects that would lead toward university and professional careers, thus widening the economic and social gap even further between racial groups. The law also served to suppress Black South African cultures by devaluing African history and languages, which were often excluded from the curriculum and actively discouraged.

One unintended consequence of the law was to drive increased resistance to the apartheid government. Organizations such as the African National Congress (ANC), South African Students Organisation (SASO), and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) all actively opposed the law. The Soweto Uprising in 1973 was started by students protesting being forced to learn Afrikaans in school.

The long-term impact of the law was to generate high unemployment, poverty, and inequality in South Africa, which persisted even after the end of apartheid. Even today, the South African government struggles to undo the educational disparities between racial groups in South Africa.