In Honour of Comrade John Pampallis

Teacher of the people, freedom fighter, and architect of education for liberation

The OR Tambo School of Leadership bows its head in sorrow and lifts its fist in salute. We have lost our comrade and founding board member, Comrade John Pampallis, a man who understood long before it was fashionable to say so that the chains of apartheid were forged not only in prisons and pass laws, but in classrooms deliberately designed to keep a people small. He spent his whole life proving the opposite, that education placed in the hands of the people is a weapon of freedom.

The teacher in exile

From 1980 to 1989 Comrade John served at the Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College at Mazimbu in Tanzania, the school the ANC built in the heart of exile to educate the generation that had fled the bullets of 1976. There he taught History and English, led the Social Science Department, and rose to serve as Deputy Vice-Principal, helping to run an institution that dared to imagine a free future while that future was still being fought for. Cde JP did not only teach inside that school, he thought deeply about what it was for. At a cadres workshop in Lusaka in 1988 he argued passionately for the place of politics in people’s education, insisting that learning and liberation can never be torn apart. Long before exile, he had already carried his craft through classrooms in South Africa, Botswana, Canada and Tanzania. He was a teacher wherever the struggle happened to need one.

Architect of democratic education

When freedom finally dawned, Cde JP refused to rest on the romance of the struggle. He rolled up his sleeves and set about designing the education system of a democratic South Africa. He worked as a researcher and then as Director of the Education Policy Unit at the University of Natal, and from 1997 to 2009 he led the Centre for Education Policy Development, the think tank the movement founded in 1993 to dream up the policies a free nation would need. As a member of the influential Hunter Committee, his hand helped shape the South African Schools Act of 1996, one of the cornerstone laws of our democratic education. In 2001 he built lasting bridges between scholars by establishing the Education Policy Consortium. In later years he served as special adviser to Minister Blade Nzimande, where he helped steer the renewal of higher education and of the technical and vocational college sector. From a freedom college in the bush of exile to the corridors of a democratic ministry, the thread of his purpose never once broke.

The scholar who armed us with knowledge

Cde JP believed that a people who do not know their own history can be ruled by anyone. So he picked up his pen and handed that history back to us. As a young history teacher, frustrated that no proper textbook told our story, he wrote Foundations of the New South Africa so that learners could at last study the long road their own people had walked. He followed it with A Brief History of South Africa, with accessible portraits of giants such as Sol Plaatje and David Webster. Together with Enver Motala, with The State, Education and Equity in Post-Apartheid South Africa, they produced a clear-eyed examination of whether our young democracy was keeping its promises to the poor. He democratised knowledge itself, writing not for the applause of the academy but for the teacher in a rural classroom and the activist in a branch meeting.

A comrade of this school

It is fitting that Cde JP devoted his later years to the OR Tambo School of Leadership, serving on the inaugural board alongside our chairperson, Comrade Kgalema Motlanthe. Our mission, to build agents of social change through political education, was the labour of his entire life. He gave himself to this school because he believed in its people, and because he never stopped believing that a movement renews itself by teaching its cadres well. Every comrade who passes through the doors of the school now carries a little of his conviction, whether they know his name or not.

What his life teaches us

Comrade John Pampallis leaves us lessons far too important to bury with him. He teaches us that solidarity is measured by what you are willing to surrender, not by where you happened to be born. He teaches us  that revolution is built in the classroom and on the printed page as surely as it is built in the street, and that organisational renewal begins with comrades who know their history and think for themselves. He teaches us that the most radical act available to any of us is to teach, patiently and without thirst for glory, until a whole nation can stand firmly on its own feet. We will honour him best by opening a book, sharpening a pencil, and continuing the lesson he gave his life to.

Hamba kahle, Comrade JP. Your classroom is the whole country now. The struggle continues.

 -ENDS-

Issued by the OR Tambo School of Leadership

For enquiries contact:

Lerato Ndlovu on +27 611648742, email: info@ortamboschool.org.za