Redressing School Inequalities in the Eastern Cape, South Africa
Author(s)
Lemon, Anthony
Abstract
South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province, which after 1994 included the former African Homelands of the Ciskei and the Transkei, was an economically poor area of the country in the year 2000, including an unemployment rate of nearly 50%. Its schools, racially segregated during the apartheid era, continued to display enormous economic and social disparities. The best schools in the Grahamstown area, the private schools, charged high fees and provided very superior services compared to public schools dependent on state support. The desegregated formerly white and Coloreds public schools charged lower fees and attracted more African students but also provided less and lower-quality services than did the private schools. The formerly all-African township and rural schools, which charged the lowest fees and were most dependent on government funding, often failed to pay their teachers, lacked library, computer, and textbook resources, and suffered from high rates of student attrition and crime.
