Inequalities of Education in Rural South Africa
Published 10/31/2022 in Scholar Travel Stipend
Written
by Caitlin Zellers |
10/31/2022
I am incredibly grateful to have had the opportunity to participate in this program and deepen my understanding of the need for increased access to educational capital in sub-Saharan Africa. That understanding is more valuable than all of the photos that I took of lions, elephants, giraffes, and sand dunes combined.
Last year I spent the first day of fall term on a 24-hour journey from Los Angeles to Johannesburg, South Africa. I was embarking on an 11-week journey through South Africa and Namibia studying conservation and human development with 15 fellow Dartmouth students, 2 professors, and a few teaching assistants. This was not the typical study abroad program by any means. We were not connected to a university in either South Africa or Namibia and our “classes” were not based on lectures but instead on field based experiences anchored by literature analysis. As an environmental studies program I had expected this trip to be an immersion into the challenges of wildlife conservation and its consequences for human development in sub-Saharan Africa. I had envisioned coming home with stunning photos of the Namib Sand Sea and savannah wildlife and a reinvigorated drive for promoting conservation. A year later, although those two visions did become true, what stands out the most in my memory is not related to the environment or conservation in any way. Instead, the vision that returns time and again is a brief 5-minute conversation with a teenager in the rural region of Hamakuya in Venda, South Africa. This conversation challenged me in ways that I had never before encountered and will forever influence the ways in which I think about global prosperity.
About two weeks into our trip in South Africa we were told that we would be staying with a host family in the rural village of Hamakuya for 3 nights to gain a more in-depth perspective on the challenges of rural life in an environmentally challenged area. Groups of four students stayed with four different families and a translator and helped with daily chores like cooking and cleaning, with particular attention paid to their agricultural practices. Each day we would take a walk around the village to visit other families and to look at their gardens. It was on one of these walks that we stopped while our host mother chatted with a friend. Not being able to communicate with most of the people in Hamakuya, our group naturally began chatting amongst ourselves. A young woman, nearing the end of her secondary school education, walked up to us. I turned to her and introduced myself, which was unnecessary as she knew exactly who I was and what I was doing in her village. Without hesitancy or fear she looked straight into my eyes and asked how she could come to our country and do exactly what we were doing. She had learned English in her school, a few hours away in the city, and wanted to find a way to continue her education in the US. This seemingly simple question took me by surprise. We had been warned that a conversation like this would occur but I hadn’t understood what it would really be like in that situation. I didn’t know what to say. I mumbled some vague answer about finding a computer and submitting online applications but knew that I had not answered her question or really helped her in any way. I wanted to end the conversation as quickly as possible because it had made me incredibly uncomfortable to suddenly be faced so bluntly with my incredible educational privileges. These privileges had allowed me to enter into her village to further my own education based on an exchange of a relatively small amount of money between my institution and our host; an arguably unequal trade. I had no way of meaningfully reciprocating what she and her neighbors were teaching me. Even though no one in our group explicitly brought this up, it was clear to us all how our education disparities had occurred purely by chance. It was chance that I was born in the US and not Venda, South Africa and have access to an immense amount of educational capital unlike this bright young woman.
As I thought about this moment a year later, I realized how it was a perfect example of the importance of the mission statements of the Milken Institute “to increase global prosperity by advancing collaborative solutions that widen access to capital, create jobs and improve health” and of the Milken Family Foundation “to discover and advance inventive, effective ways of helping people help themselves and those around them lead productive and satisfying lives.” There are millions of other young adults in South Africa alone that have the same drive and energy as this young girl does to increase their prosperity through education. Because of stark inequalities, however, they do not have access to the capital necessary to achieve that goal. The young woman I spoke with was not asking for sympathy or favors. She was asking for the tools with which she could help herself grow beyond the borders of her village. We, as an institution, should not have been asking how we could fix the challenges related to conservation and human development in South Africa but instead should have been asking how we could help provide the capital that South Africans need to create sustainable and productive lives. The young woman I spoke with, if given the same educational and capital opportunities, is many times more qualified than I, or anyone else in our group, to address the environmental issues of her country. This, in fact, was the prompt to include “human development” as a partial focus of our program; however, it’s importance was not made clear until we arrived in Hamakuya. It wasn’t until that moment that I truly understood the meaning of “human development.” I understood the person behind the definition, the life beyond the literature. I gained more through that 5 minute conversation than I have through numerous hours of analyzing literature.