“You can lose everything, but never your education.”
Those words are as familiar as dhal and rice on a Monday in an Indian home. As we look back on these 30 years of democracy, education was one of our nation’s priorities.
Phyllis Naidoo, awarded the Order of Luthuli by the President of the Republic for her stellar role in the Struggle for South African freedom, used to peer out of the window of her ground floor Umbilo Road flat.
“Look at those children with school bags. That is the fruit of our democracy,” she would holler.
Sure enough, millions of children enjoy free and compulsory state school since 1994 which their parents or grandparents were denied. To use the race language which defines our history, the overwhelming majority of those children are black African.
Was it any different for Indian Africans? History is a great teacher in answering that question. The colonial masters on the plantations, mines, railways and domestic service
