The official, overall goal of "Bantu" Education in South Africa is to direct the education of Africans so as to meet the needs of an economy dominated by a white racial oligarchy and to train African personnel to manage the various administrative sectors of the "homelands" and ethnic institutions in the "white" areas in furtherance of the policy of separate development. This policy is a result of ten years (1949-1959) of a systematic effort to realign the educational system with the racial and economic policies of the newly-installed (1948) Nationalist Party. The recommendations of four commissions--viz. Eiselen, Tomlinson, Holloway and de Wet Nel--resulted in the development of a racially segregated education system, elementary-through-university, which was integrated with the "homelands." The passage of the 1959 Extension of the University Education Act and the University College of Fort Hare Transfer Act completed this process of ethnic fragmentation in education. An examination of the principal legislation, subsequent amendments, the ethnic/racial personnel composition, structures, curriculum and expenditures in this effort indicates the promotion of an official institutional culture seeking to impose an "Afrikaner orientation" and to produce sycophantic graduates who will conform to the Afrikaner world-view.
The twin theses of this study are: (1) that this carefully designed African ethnic higher education has inadvertently developed a distinct student "culture of resistance" which contradicts the intentions of official policy, and (2) that there are a set of factors external to the formal university structure and curriculum which influence students as much as--if not more than--the impress of official institutional factors.
There appears to be no immediate prospect for an end to the prolonged crisis that has beleaguered the ethnic African universities since their inception in 1959. As instruments for ideological indoctrination these institutions have largely failed to execute their intended task. They have instead become terrains of struggle over larger political issues and increasingly appear to play, in tandem with other forces, an important role in posing a serious challenge to the apartheid education system.