The Knowledge Crooks

At 8 o'clock one morning last week a neatly dressed Negro in a natty brown suit parked his old Ford in an alley in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, and after glancing furtively around, hurried into a dingy building that had once been a garage Under his arm was a small blackboard wrapped in newspapers; in his pockets were bits of chalk; and awaiting him inside the building were 38 Negro children, sitting silent on wooden benches. Before he turned to them, however, the man first carefully locked the door. He had good reason: his is an illegal school.

Since the South African government put the Bantu Education Act into effect last spring, scores of such schools have sprung up. especially in the area around Johannesburg. Though the Bantu Act did not actually deprive South African Negroes of their regular schools, it imposed a curriculum that was designed to do nothing less than to convince every Negro child that he is inferior. Last April, thousands of students boycotted their schools in protest. The Minister of Native Affairs, Hendrik F. Verwoerd, one of the architects of apartheid, retaliated by closing the boycotted buildings, thus leaving some 7,000 children without any education at all. Partly to take care of these, the African National Congress sponsored its network of secret, classes.

Since then, the Special Branch, i.e., political police, has been kept busy with the strange task of tracking down "knowledge crooks." These are the teachers who assemble small classes in private homes, alleys and backyards and who, if caught, are subject to a $140 fine and six months in jail. The police look for such evidence as boxes of chalk or bottles of ink. Once they hauled in a teacher and claimed they had caught him red-handed "pointing at a blackboard." But so far, such arrests have been few. When their classrooms are raided, the children simply say they are having a party.

Last week the African National Congress and the African Education Movement added a new wrinkle to their bootlegging of knowledge. They started up nine "clubs" where children can gather for lessons. The pupils call themselves "members/' the teachers are "group leaders," the classes are "meetings." By next fall these new clubs hope to have 20,000 children learning their history, geography and languages through quiz games and "talking newspapers," their 3 Rs through songs ("A for Africa, B for Ball. We are happy one and all").

But the teachers who are risking their freedom for the cause know full well that Minister Verwoerd will never rest until every bootleg school, every club and every knowledge crook is put out of business. After all, Minister Verwoerd has a cause of his own. "Natives," he once declared, "must be taught from childhood to realize that equality with the European is not for them."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.