Members of the Sandton Rotary Club were left speechless and shocked following an eye-opening, mind-blowing keynote address by their guest speaker hosted on February 20.
South African educational psychologist Professor Jackie Naudé joined Sandton’s Rotarians in their meeting at the Bryanston Country Club, where she synthesized her day-and-a-half long seminar into a mind-blowing hour of free, quality, decolonised education.
In her presentation, Naudé began by first establishing a shared psyche among attendants by drawing from everyone’s commonalities; Naudé then proceeded to express how the apartheid regime’s goals of socially engineering a divided South Africa had worked, much in disservice of South Africans today.
“When a child is born, they have no preconceived ideas of prejudices, or all these terrible things. Then the child, as with you, starts having experiences through their families, through their societies; and so that creates their reality. What that then does is it creates a way you look at the world. It creates unconscious bias.”
Naudé described ‘unconscious biases’ as preferences which develop in humans from having been raised a specific way. A poignant point Naudé raised was how the apartheid regime, since 1948, had been engaged in a social engineering campaign to keep South Africans separated per racial divides.
Naudé explained. “We were socially engineered to see each other as different. We were socially engineered to see some people as better than, some people as less than. We were socially engineered to be separated from each other. If you don’t know somebody, how can you understand them? How can you even like them? That’s what makes South Africa different from everybody else.
“People like to say apartheid is dead; no, it’s not dead. You can’t socially engineer and divide people in the way they did; then you change a law, or a government, and overnight everything is going to be right.”
Naudé’s presentation had the audiences hanging on every word she spoke. She reflected on how South Africa almost deteriorated into an all-ending civil war, and the extent to which the old regime had been willing to go to if push came to shove.
“I was absolutely shocked by the evil intention the regime had,” said Rotarian Tinashe Nondo in hindsight, following the event. “We still feel the effects of apartheid, and I often wonder how long it will take before we are all free, and all have access to economic emancipation.”
Nonda wasn’t the only Rotarian left speechless by Naudé’s presentation.
“It is so horrific that it seems hard to believe that such regimes, when it is about their power, seem to be able to consider (and do) almost anything,” said Franz Wiehler. “In this case it seems that the good Lord has held his hand over us.”
Infographic of shocking information received from Professor Naudé:
Professor Naudé’s presentation mentioned some of the ways in which South Africa became socially engineered by the apartheid regime:
- “Go into Lenasia, go into Eldorado Park, go into Attridgeville: what’s changed? That was the cleverness of apartheid. We physically lived apart, and we still do.”
- “One of the things they did was form the Afrikaaner organisation called the Afrikaaner Broeder Bond (AWB); then, they also created jobs for white men: the railways and all the parastatals: those are the people who were selected to take over business, education, civil organisation, because it was about power.”
- “Their policy of employment was if a male, Afrikaans-speaking male applied for the job, he was guaranteed the job. You just get the job, and sort it out later. They also created financial institutions to create wealth of Afrikaaners.”
- “They created homelands: the Transkei, Ciskei, Bophuthatswana, all of the homelands. The idea was that black people were supposed to live there. The problem is that they were only prepared to give up 12% of the physical country, but they wanted 80% of the population to live there.”
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