By Lebone Rodah Mosima
Higher Education and Training Minister Buti Manamela has warned against violence targeting African migrants, saying Charlotte Maxeke’s legacy demanded unity, solidarity and education that lifted others.
Delivering the keynote address at the 125th Graduation Anniversary Memorial Lecture of Charlotte Makgomo Mannya-Maxeke, Manamela said Maxeke’s Pan-African outlook remained urgent in a country where poor communities were sometimes turned against one another.
“Charlotte Maxeke carried that conviction across an ocean and planted it in our soil. Which is why it would break her heart to see the poor turned against the poor,” Manamela said.
“To see the African raise a hand against the African who crossed a border in search of the very dignity we crossed oceans to claim. The reactionary violence that flares in our streets — neighbour against neighbour, the desperate against the slightly-less-desperate — is not the anger of a people finding their strength. It is the oldest trick used against us, working still: setting the wretched of the earth to fighting one another while the colour line laughs.”
He said the “energy that toppled Bantu Education” was the same energy that Africa needed to use to power itself, “to manufacture and to trade under our own free agreement, from Cape to Cairo. African unity, African solidarity, African development — wherever we find ourselves — is not a slogan from a dead century. It is the unfinished assignment Charlotte Maxeke handed forward, and it falls now to you”.
The lecture marked 125 years since Maxeke graduated with a Bachelor of Science from Wilberforce University in Ohio, becoming one of the first black women from this part of the world to obtain a university degree.
“One hundred and twenty-five years ago today on the 20th of June 1901, a young woman from this country walked across a stage in Ohio and was handed a degree. A Bachelor of Science. She was the first black woman in this part of the world ever to hold one. Her name was Charlotte Makgomo Mannya-Maxeke,” Manamela said.
“We do not gather to lay a wreath. We gather because the footprint she left that day is the road we are still walking.”
Manamela said Maxeke did not leave South Africa as a scholar, but as a singer with an African choir that travelled through Britain and the United States in the late 19th century.
“We remember her as a scholar. But she did not cross the ocean as a scholar. She crossed it as a singer,” he said.
“She went out with an African choir, a company of young black voices touring the concert halls of Britain and then America in the last years of the nineteenth century, a curiosity to be looked at, a people to be doubted. And somewhere on that journey the singer became a student. She stayed. She enrolled at Wilberforce, the university of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and she did not leave America the way she arrived.”
Manamela said Maxeke returned to South Africa with more than a qualification, carrying ideas shaped by Pan-Africanism, the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the black intellectual tradition of the time.
“So understand what travelled home in 1901. Not a certificate. A consciousness. A diaspora’s worth of ideas, packed into one woman’s resolve, sailing back to a country that had given her nothing and would soon try to give her even less,” he said.
He said Maxeke’s decision to return home should challenge those who viewed education only as a way to escape hardship.
“Here is the thing about Charlotte Maxeke that should shame any of us tempted to treat education as an escape,” Manamela said.
“She came back.
“She could have stayed where her degree was worth something. She returned instead to a land where her qualification was an insult to the order of things — and she put every page of it to work. The education she earned abroad, she spent at home, on her people, for her people.”
Manamela said Maxeke’s life showed that education and liberation could not be separated.
“She built. She founded the Bantu Women’s League and she put women into the streets of the Free State against the pass – years before 1956, decades before the word “march” became sacred to us,” he said.
“When the South African Native National Congress was born in 1912, in the company of Seme and Plaatje and Dube, she was the one woman in that founding room. The scholar and the freedom fighter were never two people. They were one woman, and the two strands of her life — education and liberation — were braided so tightly that you cannot pull one loose without unravelling the other.”
Linking Maxeke’s legacy to Youth Month and the 50th anniversary of the 1976 Soweto uprising, Manamela said young people had inherited an unfinished mission.
“Fifty years ago, in this month, in Soweto, a generation of schoolchildren looked at the education designed to keep them small and they said: no,” he said.
“They had read the lesson Steve Biko would put most sharply that the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed and they refused to hand over their minds. They marched, and many of them did not come home.”
He said the line from Maxeke to the class of 1976 and to the current generation was unbroken.
“The question Fanon leaves for the young people here is not whether the previous generations did their work. They did. The question is the one he asks of every generation in its turn: what is yours?” Manamela said.
He said South Africa had changed significantly since Maxeke’s time, with women now making up the majority of university students.
“The country that refused Charlotte Maxeke a university has become a country in which the majority of our university students are women. Read that sentence slowly. The doors that were bolted against her are the doors through which her granddaughters now pour,” he said.
“That is not an accident of history. It is the work of a democracy that decided education would no longer be a privilege rationed by birth.”
Manamela said the government had built a financial aid system that carried millions of young people into higher education, but said student funding still needed reform.
“We have built a national financial aid system that has carried millions of young people — most of them young women, many of them the first in their families to see the inside of a lecture hall — from the township and the village to the graduation stage,” he said.
“We are not finished, and I will not pretend to you that we are. We are reforming how we fund our students so that the promise is not only generous but durable — so that the child who qualifies in 2040 finds the door as open as the child who qualifies today.”
Manamela also announced the launch of the Charlotte Maxeke Educational Fund, saying it would help young women whose studies were at risk, particularly those pursuing science.
“Tonight, in this very programme, the Charlotte Maxeke Educational Fund is launched: private generosity reaching out a hand to a young woman whose studies are at risk, with a special care for those pursuing the sciences. The same degree Maxeke earned,” he said.
“I want to say to the founders of that Fund, and to the philanthropists and institutions in this room: this is how it should be. The public purse and the private hand, pulling the same young person through the same open door. The education she earned in exile is, at last, working for our democracy at home.”
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