Obed Bapela interviewed by David Wiley May 15, 2006 Cape Town, South Africa.
"History, all of a sudden, from being taught in English all these years, in 1975 they switched and taught us in Afrikaans. Mathematics, arithmetic, also ..." [1:30]
Obed Bapela, a tenth grade student in Alexandra township in 1976, explained the change in policy of Bantu Education, to introduce Afrikaans as a medium of instruction.
Born in 1958, Obed Bapela was an organizer in Alexandra, an African township of Johannesburg, from the time of the 1976 student uprisings and through the intense period of repression and the campaign to make the township “ungovernable” in the mid-1980s. He was one of the accused of treason along with trade union activist Moses Mayekiso. He is an African National Congress member of Parliament from the Johannesburg metropolitan area.
