Annual report

PALLO JORDAN
MINISTER OF ARTS AND CULTURE

When I first approached His Grace, Archbishop Ndungane, to take charge of this project, one of our earliest discussions was about what exactly we were aiming to restore. How does a Minister of Arts and Culture become the initiator of a project which is self-evidently the remit of the Minister of Education in the first instance?

One is keenly aware of the extremely ambiguous legacy of the historic schools. There are many interesting, moving and disturbing tales that have been told by those who had the experience. Because many of their founders regarded them as institutions for the acculturation of the African child, in many of these schools one was forbidden to speak an African language during the week. African languages were for the weekend or the school recess when pupils went home. Because many of the founders were themselves the products of very authoritarian British, Irish and German boarding schools, that authoritarian culture was usually imported into South Africa.

Was our objective to recreate and revive the schools in the same fashion? I must immediately disabuse anyone who thinks that is the case. Our objective is to revive these historic schools, but not in order to reinvent the authoritarian centres of acculturation to a colonial society they were conceived as, but rather to reaffirm the healthy traditions of scholarship and academic excellence these schools pioneered, but shorn of those Victorian notions of discipline and its associate racist assumptions that African languages were somehow deficient. We are very conscious of the fact that institutions such as Lovedale, Mariannhill and others were also the first publishing houses of African languages in South Africa.

Apart from school textbooks that were then directly employed for teaching by the school and others, an institution like Lovedale published a very long catalogue of other materials – novels, music, hymnaries, poetry – in addition to the journal South African Outlook, which remains one of the best sources of Eastern Cape cultural history.

That brings me immediately to relevance of this project for the Ministry of Arts and Culture. As the incubators and nursery of the earliest literati amongst the African people, these historic schools are very significant cultural institutions. The romanisation of the African languages of our region was usually undertaken at these centres, first for purposes of evangelising the local population, but later for the varied uses that the written word can be applied. This revival is, in that sense, also an act of excavation. Through the revival of these schools we shall also be undertaking an archaeological exercise to rediscover some of the treasures of modern African literary creativity. I am certain this will prove particularly true of an institution like Lovedale, whose entire catalogue of books and other publications deserves to be reprinted and republished. South Africa and the world will be poorer should the works published by Lovedale in more than 100 years of literary activity be lost to us. Rescuing those materials from oblivion is one of the tasks my department will be pursuing with greater vigour during this coming year. To that end, we have already embarked on a private/public partnership between the National Library and an emergent black-owned publishing house.

The Freedom Charter, adopted 51 years ago at Kliptown, proclaims, among other things, that ‘The doors of learning and of culture shall be opened.’ This project to revive and resuscitate the historic schools is one further contribution towards the realisation of that ideal.