A KEYNOTE ADDRESS DELIVERED BY AZAPO PRESIDENT, CDE MOSIBUDI MANGENA, AT THE NATIONAL STUDENTS CONGRESS OF AZASCO HELD AT THE PENINSULA TECHNIKON: 18-20 APRIL 2003

Programme Director, the NEC of AZASCO and Congress Delegates, Professor Brian Figaji, the Vice Chancellor of the Peninsula Technikon, Distinguished Guests,

In the life of every child, three important institutions play a crucial role in shaping its outlook and future prospects. These are the family, the school and the community. It is these institutions that socialise, inculcate values and norms, as well as anchoring the child. They educate, train and shape the young both formally and informally into a valuable adult.

All of us, therefore, are products of our society. If we are successes in life, we owe that success to our families, schools and society. If we are failures our society must take a certain amount of blame for that.

There is no education system in the world that is culturally, politically and ideologically neutral. Every education system in every country serves the philosophical, economic and cultural needs of its society. But whether or not the service is appropriate in every country, including our own, is a matter for debate.

I have noted with keen interest the theme of your Congress, “Building the Nation through Education”. The choice of your theme reveals the presence of farsighted and creative young minds ready to make sacrifices to realise the goals of our liberation struggle. The concept of “building” imply a process in which there is systematic planning, gathering of required material and hard work to erect the designed structure. When you build a house you do not expect to finish it in one day and occupy it the same day. This venture takes place over a long period of time. The whole exercise brings out of you the virtues of patience, endurance and hard work. The late musician Donny Hathaway must have had you in mind when he composed the tune, “To be Young Gifted and Black”.

Building a nation is a duty more complex and unpredictable than building a house. There are lots of variables involved. Its fluidity makes it difficult to set definite timeframes. Even so, it is an historical duty from which we cannot abscond, especially Black Consciousness adherents like ourselves. Restoring our humanity and value systems, rewriting our history - in short, building the nation - are central to the philosophy of Black Consciousness.

Our slogan “One Azania, One Nation” which sprang out of our experiences in the struggle called upon us to obliterate the myth of many “nations” in one country. In fact, apartheid apologists stretched the myth even further by making us believe that in South Africa we had many “countries” like Bophuthatswana, Transkei, Gazankulu, Venda, etc. So the call you are making through your theme is not confronting us as something new. That call was made right at the inception of the BCM more than 30 years ago. And the education system we had at the time, comprising as it did of Bantu education, Coloured education, Indian education, Christian National Education etc., was designed to poison our minds in such a way that we accept the myth of many nations with different levels of human worth in the same country.

I admire the fact that in urging us to build the nation you also provide us with an instrument through which the envisaged nation could be built. This instrument is education. As a country we can not reach our maximum potential without education. To be able to live and survive, both body and mind must be nurtured from birth to death. Education is food for the mind. You cannot afford to postpone the supply of this food to some future time. Postponement of the supply of education may just mean your mind will either be undernourished or malnourished. Besides, youth is a perishable commodity with a limited shelf life

The family is one social institution without whose mention any talk about nation building would be meaningless. In a sense, education begins in the family which constitutes the first point in the conveyer belt of our belief systems and values. Your family teaches you who you are and what you should not be. A correct environment of warmth, love and means of livelihood is needed if the family is to carry out its social mandate. Otherwise the family might bring forth products that may later degenerate into social misfits. The seeds of anti-social behaviour are more often than not planted in families. In cases where the build-up of personalities in the process of growing up lacks a positive foundation, the result is often socially deficient persons.

The church, another institution in our society, does complement the family in moulding the moral aspect of our lives and purity of our spirituality. The church or mosque, or religion if you want, is not immune from the influence of societal ideology and philosophy. That is why the church under the apartheid era entrenched human relations that were based not on justice, freedom and peace; instead, the church was co-opted to be a servant of the state and gave moral and theological justification to white racism and apartheid. Freedom fighters also used the church to advance the interests of the struggle. Black Theology was a manifestation of efforts of the oppressed to expel false and perverted ideas from the church.

Public schooling ought to make a major contribution by providing appropriate education. This it can do provided it is anchored in the philosophical and cultural ethos of its society. Unfortunately, in our case it is not quite so. Our education system is still culturally alienating to Black people. That I am speaking to you in English is just an immediate indication of this assertion. Despite this, I am confident that if we could get education right we could solve all other problems that exist in our society such as crime and unemployment. More often than not, schools are a reflection of the communities in which they are located. If the surrounding community is stable, the school may enjoy some degree of stability. Because public schools are essentially community schools, these schools have to play a direct role in the development of our communities. Parents and community organisations must be involved in the organisation of school life.

The public schooling system and adult education have to confront a challenge that threatens to reverse or slow down the process of nation building. About 6 million of our citizens cannot read and write. This unfortunate situation has and continues to disadvantage our people in their quest to better the quality of their lives. Unless we help our people out of this quagmire, our efforts at nation building will be severely hampered. Illiteracy excludes our people from the mainstream activities that are geared towards building the nation. They become marginal to the nation building project. That is why the much-vaunted deepening of democracy becomes mere idle talk if the supposed participants can hardly do a simple act like voting without being helped. Have you ever thought of the humiliation and helplessness visited upon our people by being unable to read and write? This imposes on them a condition of perpetual dependency.

To break the backbone of illiteracy is a mammoth task that requires commitment and dedication from all of us. Otherwise the noble project of nation building is immensely weakened.

Increasingly, our institutions of learning are becoming dens of drugs that have damaging effects to unsuspecting and vulnerable young people. Many of our promising future leaders are fast succumbing to the negative influences of narcotics. A number of factors such as peer pressure, actions and influences of the ruthless drug lords, lack of supportive family and social structures, contribute to the persistence of this malaise. All of us in this society need to commit ourselves to the fight against drug abuse. Here in the Western Cape, the killing by stray bullets of young children is a frequent occurrence. The stray bullets that are invading the playgrounds of our children come from the guns of gangsters that are under the influence of drugs. I can assure you that attending to the social welfare of gangsters and drug addicts would not achieve much if not coupled with education.

I am told that you have dedicated this Congress to the memory of the young and brave AIDS activist, the late Nkosi Johnson. This is just great; it’s wonderful. The scourge of AIDS presents itself as yet another challenge whose backbone we must break and whose skull we must crush as we progress towards building the nation. The problem of HIV/AIDS is real and we need to respond to it creatively. Last year I was invited to a conference of the United South African Association of Professional Teachers (USAPE). One speaker there elaborated upon the seriousness and magnitude of this scourge. We must educate our sexually active population about the manner in which this disease spreads. The gist of what he said amounted to the admission that the use of condoms is not foolproof against infection.

Preaching condoms alone will not stop the spread of the disease. We have to go back to the basics and try to convince our people about the efficacy of good behaviour. Apart from faithfulness to one partner, sexual abstinence seems to be the most reliable method of protection against infection.

I am inclined to believe that as a student organisation of your calibre, you can help address some of these challenges through your social action programmes as you expound the message of Black Consciousness on the various campuses and schools. It would be very good if at the close of this Congress, you shall have identified a few key projects to help address some of the social ills in our society.

The instrumentality of education in nation building is no where encapsulated so well as it is in one of AZASCO mottoes, “Education a Viable Instrument for Transformation”. The process of nation building presupposes the prevalence of progressive transformational values. In one of my addresses I have made the point that, “Out of education comes the human capital that has the capacity and responsibility for conducting research to assist us to find solutions to pressing national problems. As long as we do not prioritise the improvement of our knowledge base and skills, we will continue to be exploited by other nations that have woken up to the importance of developing human capital”.

Having marched on this thorny road and finally paid with his life, Steve Biko has arguably the most authoritative views on nation building:

We have set out on a quest for a true humanity, and somewhere on the distant horizon we can see the glittering prize. Let us march forth with courage and determination, drawing strength from our common plight and brotherhood. In time we shall be in a position to bestow upon South Africa the greatest gift possible – a human face.

One Azania!

One Nation!