Sharpeville fifty years on

I couldn't really let today pass without a mention of Sharpeville in South Africa.
Half-a-century ago and a world away in apartheid South Africa, every black person had to carry passbooks.
This physical everyday shackle of oppression listed the person's name, birthplace, and "tribal" affiliation, contained their picture and serial number, showed whether they had paid their taxes or been arrested, and unless it was signed monthly by their employer, the African could be herded with the other unemployed into a "native reservation".
All Africans had to carry them about their person at all times, and they could (and were) checked at any time by the notoriously unforgiving police, and heaven help you if you didn't have it or there was something amiss.
You could be hauled off to jail, without a word of warning to your family, and fined or imprisoned.

For more than a century blacks had endured this vile system and then following the Gandhian precepts of non-violent action, a mass campaign of non-compliance was started where people were urged to turn up at police stations without their passbooks and demand to be arrested.

At Sharpeville police station, a determined crowd of more than 20,000 Africans gathered demanding to be arrested. The twenty police officers present barricaded themselves inside and sent for reinforcements, hundreds of whom duly arrived, supported by armoured cars, and aircraft buzzing the crowd to try and scatter it.

When that failed, the police began firing with revolvers, rifles, and Sten guns. In two awful minutes, hundreds of blacks lay dead or wounded, many shot in the back.

It is fair to say that the events of that day hastened South Africa's march to pariah state in the world community shunned by almost everyone. And although there were many setbacks along the way, thirty years later and much bloodshed apartheid was defeated and the struggle for freedom by the black majority achieved.

Maatla ke a rona!

John Arlott and The Little Master

Yesterday, Sachin Tendulkar became the first man to hit 200 in a One Day International yesterday, and it made me think of the great John Arlott whose birthday it would have been today.

The man's mellifulous tones were the sound of summer when I was growing up. He had a wonderfully poetic phraseology and had marvellous gift for evoking magical moments in cricket.

The pleasure of watching Test Match cricket, with the sound turned off and the radio on was inestimable.

In the 1940s, he went to South Africa and condemned the apartheid policy. When filling in an immigration form, which required him to declare his race, he wrote "human".

He was a humanitarian and great Liberal standing as a parliamentary candidate for Epping in 1955 and 1959.

Amandla Ngawethu

One of the reasons I joined the Young Liberals as a teenager in the mid-1970s, was the party's stance on South Africa and the condemnation of that stain upon humanity, apartheid, ironically pronounced "apart-hate" in Afrikaans.
I remember the charismatic leader of the Stop the Seventy Tour Campaign, a young man, a Young Liberal, called Peter Hain.

One of the things I learnt about was the African National Congress, its struggle for survival and its resistance to the whites-only regime.
I learnt to admire people like Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Govan Mbeki, Walter Sisulu, Mac Maharaj, Joe Slovo, Ruth First, Bram Fischer, Steve Biko, Trevor Huddleston, Miriam Makeba, Alan Paton, and of course Hector Pieterson whose dying body being carried by a fellow student became the iconic figure of the Soweto Uprising.

Today in 1912, the ANC was founded with a vision of a non-racial South Africa, a vision that took more than eighty years to realise.

One of the reasons the apartheid regime took so long to fall was the succour it received from parties abroad.
One of those was the Conservative Party of Mrs Thatcher, or more correctly the Federation of Conservative Students who used to sport "Hang Mandela" badges.

What a bunch of neanderthal idiots.
Actually I apologise for that last remark. It's an insult to Neanderthals.

So Happy Birthday ANC, and Mayibuye-i Afrika.

Privit edukashen, a waist of munny?

Private schools cheat the taxpayer out of millions of pounds under the guise of being charities, though what good they do society at large has forever escaped me.

The Tory front-bench is famously full of privately-educated bods, as is Boris Johnson the Mayor of London, though it is sometimes difficult to see what good it's done them apart from providing with a social cachet and the ability to spot each other at fifty paces.

Look at the sentence below from the Mayor's warning on business rates. Boris says: "Watching the hoards stream over London Bridge..."Oh dear! Oh dear! Johnson see the beak after class for substandard work.

A hoard is a hidden or secret supply or fund, and in archaeology a cache of valuable objects or artefacts; as in treasure trove. A horde, however, is a wandering tribe of nomadic people (originally Tatars as in the Golden Horde) migrating for the sake of plunder. Generally nowadays used to mean a large number of people.
I suppose we should be grateful he didn't use another homophone, whored.

If I was Boris's dad, I'd ask Eton to return his tuition fees.

There is something fundamentally un-British about private education something grubby where daddy's ill-gotten wealth is used to push junior to the front of the queue.

It's just not cricket!

I am passionate about the best education for ALL our children, not educational apartheid and division based on wealth, faith, or perceived academic ability at age 11.