Q) How could a historian make use of Sources 3 and 4 together to investigate how apartheid used
education to achieve its aims?
The Afrikaans word for “separateness”, the main aim of apartheid was indisputably the separation of
the varying racial groups within South Africa – most significantly, the Bantu from the Afrikaners
through segregation and separate development in the Bantustans; the two sources, in combination,
highlight three facets of this central aim which the National Party hoped to enforce through changes
to Bantu education: separate development and the establishment of physically, economically and
culturally isolated Bantustans; the establishment of a subservient workforce to supplement the
white-dominated economies of the urban areas; and to stunt anti-apartheid feeling through
preventing the growth of African culture. Indeed, the stark differences in origin, nature and purpose
of the sources means that, when used together, Source 4 is incredibly useful not only in
contextualising Source 3, but exposing the more implicit, ‘sinister’ intentions of the National Party in
using education as a means through which to establish a deeply-ingrained and long-lasting sense of
white superiority within the country.
Arguably the most overt means through which the National Party sought to utilise education to
implement and consolidate apartheid was, as described by Source 3, through the systematic,
pragmatic establishment of Bantustans – separate regions in which African education and culture
could be contained and developed apart from white-dominated regions, with ‘both feet in the
reserves’. Indeed, Source 4’s contextualising of Source 3 through the Bantu Education Act, which
established the separate Native Affairs Department, removed state subsidies from mission schools
(which had provided the vast majority of education in African communities) and implemented a
limited, vocation-based curriculum. Source 3’s justification for the implementation of this curriculum
is stated through a quite patronising tone of self-righteousness as it suggests that the ‘[African]
school system’ ‘misled [African people]’. It is certainly indisputable that the National Party aimed to
use education to underscore the fundamental separation of races which defined apartheid, with ‘no
place for [Africans] in the European community’. The passing of the Native Laws Amendment Act in
1952 and the Bantu Self-Government Act in 1959 served to compound this division and signify the
National Party’s aim of exerting total control over the governing of the country and the
establishment of the Bantustans. However, the source’s nature, origin and purpose all cast it in an
