On 1 April, 1955, the African National Congress (ANC) urged South African parents to withdraw their children from schools in protest of the so-called Bantu Education Act. Enacted in 1953, the law introduced an inferior curriculum for Black students, further segregating the education system and condemning youths to menial jobs.
The Bantu Education Act imposed a patently lower quality of education on Black South African children. By design it would produce an unskilled or semi-skilled labor force meant only to serve White-settlers.
While schools were restricted to teach Black children Afrikaans and English, lessons were to be delivered in Indigenous African languages, not to empower African cultures but as a means of isolation, to maintain inequality and reinforce an inferiority complex. The end goal? To ensure Black youths could not compete with White-settler youths, preserving white dominance.
The mastermind behind the law and diabolical curriculum was future Prime Minister Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd. At the time he served as Minister of ‘Native Affairs’. Addressing the South African parliament on the need for the act, Verwoerd infamously said there was no place for Indigenous Black South Africans in the European community. Referring to the need to transfer control of mission schools (most of which closed after the passing of the act) to the apartheid regime, he added: “It is of no avail for [the native] to receive training which has its aim in the absorption of the European Community, where he cannot be absorbed. Until now he has been subjected to a school system which drew him away from his community and misled him by showing him the greener pastures of European Society where he is not allowed to graze”
The Bantu Education Act was finally repealed in 1979. However, its negative impact on Black South Africans could not. To this day, schools for Black children and youths remain pitifully underfunded and wealth remains in the banks of thieving White-settlers who ensured such inequality through educational curriculums and other policies that perpetuated racial inequalities.
Sources
https://overcomingapartheid.msu.edu/sidebar.php?kid=163-581-2
https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/anc-protest-bantu-education-act