LACOM and SACHED Story: Alan Ralphs 1982 – 1992 

 In many ways SACHED was a microcosm of the liberation struggle in the education terrain with all its complexity and passion, strengths and weaknesses, joys and sorrows, and this was arguably its most profound contribution to the democratic movement in South Africa and to all of us who worked for it. For although SACHED had a number of very different projects on the go at any one time, the organisational culture and coherence was forged by a participatory and democratic leadership ethos that was infused into the daily, weekly, monthly and annual activities and meetings of the projects and the organisation as a whole. 

It was in this sense that LACOM though different in focus and content to other projects in SACHED, was never separated from the whole and vice versa, or to put it differently, our engagement with labour and community education was never considered ‘separate’ from the principles and vision that drove other projects in school curriculum development (Turret and ASECA), higher education studies (Khanya and Dusspro), and popular education (media). 

Timeline and Roles

1982: Joined SACHED as a writer of Accounting Guides for Turret College but shortly thereafter asked to establish union education programme with FOSATU and CUSA affiliates.

1982-1985. Facilitator of Basic Bookkeeping and Admin Courses for Unions and subsequently appointed project coordinator of new project, inclusive of a focus on community organisations. Established LACOM with Enver Motala (Durban SACHED).

1990 -1992. Rejoined the SACHED exec as an Assistant Director with portfolio responsibilities for LACOM, Regional Centres, the Cape Town-based Teacher Improvement Project (Jean Pease Coordinator), and the Staff Redeployment exercise following the decision to restructure the organization in 1992.

1. What drew you to work with LACOM SACHED?

I was living and working as an Accountancy and Development Studies teacher in Lesotho when I heard about SACHED from Mary-Emma Kuhn. She knew my wife Mary (also a teacher and a Grail member) and suggested that we might be interested in working for Turret College when we returned to South Africa. I was a conscientious objector and had worked as an organiser in the Young Christian Workers (YCW) movement during the period from 1974-1977, so was aware of SACHED’s work and was keen to join when the opportunity arose in January 1982.

Living in Lesotho with a Basotho family was hugely formative for Mary and myself as was our time as teachers at the Mount Royal Secondary School in Hlotse, Leribe. Our first two children spent the first 3 years of their lives there and we acquired a solid working knowledge of the language, culture and politics of the country, as well as its troubled and precarious relationship with the economy and labour markets of apartheid South Africa.

2. What was your particular project/involvement in Lacom?

My first assignment at SACHED was as a writer for the matric accounting course for Turret and there I had the privilege of working with Glenda Webster, first wife of David Webster, who was assassinated by the security police in 1989. 

I did not spend much time on the accounting course as John Samuel had another project in mind, a project that had its roots in the rapid growth of the trade union movement and its national federations, FOSATU and CUSA. I was introduced to unionists Taffy Adler and Bernie Fannarof (MAWU and FOSATU) and Phiroshaw Camay (CUSA) who outlined the urgent need for basic bookkeeping and admin skills for full-time staff, and basic financial management (how to read and interrogate financial statements) for union exec committees. 

Our first assignment was to provide training for staff and exec members of MAWU as they were battling to manage the rapid escalation of their income and expenditure at the time. Other FOSATU and CUSA unions soon followed and our courses quickly took the shape of an intensive five-day long residential programme for union bookkeepers, a three-day course for administrators, and a short two-day programme for exec members on how to read and interrogate their financial statements and audit reports. 

The demand for these courses grew consistently over the next three years, and ‘branches’ of the project were established in Durban, East London and Cape Town together with an expanded training staff in the Johannesburg office that included Eric Kgantsi and Jean de la Harpe. The provision of basic bookkeeping and office admin courses provided the initial platform for building SACHEDs relationship with the growing union movement, a relationship that would see a steady expansion of the range and content of our services and courses including basic shop steward training and ‘train the trainer’ courses for union educators. 

Our work with community-based organisations started on a very different tack and in a very different partnership with the Legal Resource Centre headed by Arthur Chaskelson and Felicia Kentridge. The project was to facilitate the production of a Legal Resource Centre Manual for student interns and paralegal advisors in legal advice centres and community-based organisations. Barbara Hutton was employed onto this project in 1982 and she worked closely with advocates Paul Pretorius, Mohammed Navsa and others at the LRC. The manual was completed and launched in …. See Barbara Hutton Narrative for details of how this project unfolded link

In 1983 we formalised the establishment of the Labour and Community (LACOM) Project in SACHED with funding from Kellogg and Rockefeller Foundation and with a diverse range of programmes and services offered via our Johannesburg, Durban, East London, Cape Town branches. (See Enver Motala and LACOM branch reports). The scope and scale of the work expanded rapidly as LACOM branches responded to the different education and training needs of the unions and a rapidly growing network of community and civil society organisations involved in the struggle on different fronts.  

3. What do you see as the major highlights, achievements and strengths of the work you did when in Lacom?

The 1980s saw a massive escalation and mobilisation of working class, school, church and community-based organisations involved in the struggle against apartheid. Our strength in this context lay in our ability to develop and make available the necessary training resources and personnel to support these organisations a) in building the systems and capacity to manage, administer and sustain the funding and income they received from donors and membership fees, and b) in expanding the capacity, knowledge and skills they needed to run their own membership training programmes and struggle campaigns as the need arose.

There were multiple challenges and highlights associated with this work in LACOM: from the design and development of the programmes and learning materials, to the large scale and flexible delivery of the training to a constituency of learners and organisations that were operating under very difficult conditions. We were fortunate to have the leadership, funding, administrative and logistical support of SACHED to do this work – inclusive of a formidable editorial, layout and printing unit – and take it to scale across the country as the need arose – and it certainly did escalate in the mid to late 80’s. 

Building a good programme and set of learning materials required a sound knowledge of the disciplines (accounting, law, adult education methods, trade union history etc.) as well as the organisational systems, cultures and personnel who made use of the training. The challenge was not only to tailor and contextualise the learning programmes to constituency needs and specifications, but also to provide follow up support as participants applied their newly acquired knowledge and skills on the job in their organisations e.g. Eric Kgantsi provided invaluable on-the-job support to numerous union bookkeepers who did the basic book-keeping course with LACOM over the years. 

4. What were the key debates, issues of contestation and challenges in the work you did?

SACHEDs engagement with the struggle for democratic education in South Africa coincided with the flourishing of competing historical and emergent ideologies within the union movement (workerist, socialist, conservative and liberal) and their relation to different strands of the liberation movements (charterist, black consciousness, other) and civil society organisations (civics, social justice, human rights etc.). Not surprisingly, these differences found shape and form in the voices, debates, and decisions that came to characterise the rich diversity and character of the organisational culture and its different projects. For the most part we were able to hold and contain these differences in ways that advanced our programme of work, but there were times where the intensity and contested nature of these differences made it very difficult for staff to work together or to meet contractual obligations without breaching the political/ideological integrity of the organisations we served. 

(See report by Enver Motala, Shireen, Coco and Judy for more details on how these tensions played out in the period between 1986 and 1987.)

This was not initially the case when we first established the project in 1982 as the focus was solidly on basic bookkeeping and admin courses and not on the ideology or affiliation of the unions concerned. Not surprisingly, the more the programmes and services grew and diversified across the centres, the more the question arose as to how we could sustain the training whilst at the same time building the capacity of the unions to run their own programmes in future. This debate gave rise to a strong focus on the ‘train the trainer’ orientation and subsequently, a programme that sought to combine the content and methods of progressive popular education programmes such as Training for Transformation (Anne Hope and Sally Timmel) with more formal adult education diploma programmes offered at UCT (Tony Morphet and Clive Millar) and the University of Natal Pietermaritzburg (John Aitcheson et.al). 

In many ways SACHED was a microcosm of the liberation struggle on the education terrain with all its complexity and passion, strengths and weaknesses, joys and sorrows, and this was arguably its most profound contribution to the democratic movement in South Africa and to all of us who worked for it. For although SACHED had a number of very different projects on the go at any one time, the organisational culture and coherence was forged by a participatory and democratic leadership ethos that was infused into the daily, weekly, monthly and annual activities and meetings of the projects and the organisation as a whole. 

It was in this sense that LACOM though different in focus and content to other projects in SACHED, was never separated from the whole and vice versa, or to put it differently, our engagement with labour and community education was never considered ‘separate’ from the principles and vision that drove other projects in school curriculum development (Turret and ASECA), higher education studies (Khanya and Dusspro), and popular education (media). 

In retrospect, it was this vison and praxis of an integrated model of alternative education that profoundly shaped my consciousness of what a democratic education policy and system would require, and hence my career and life choices after I left SACHED. 

5. How do you see what was achieved in LACOM/SACHED as having impacted or shaped your own personal career and contributions to social justice efforts in SA and social justice in educational contexts and with respect to curricula and pedagogical practices more broadly?

My time at SACHED/LACOM and on the Exec had a profoundly formative impact on my work, identity, and career at the time, and subsequently through my work in formal education (Grantley School, UWC and Cornerstone Institute), in adult education (Joint Education Trust and UWC) and in different institutional and national policy forums, including Catholic Education in the mid 90’s and the Recognition of Prior Learning from 2002 onwards (SAQA 2002 & 2013 and Umalusi 2021/2).  

Reflecting back on some of the most important formative dimensions of my time in LACOM and at SACHED, I would include the following;

• My induction into the core vision, values, principles and praxis of democratic education which characterised the DNA of a critical and reflective discourse at SACHED, and which gave shape and form to everything we did across the entire organisation and its relationship to the struggle for a democratic South Africa. 

This challenge was explicitly encouraged a) through our own internal SACHED and LACOM workshops and reading resources (intellectual leadership and a fantastic resource library) and b) supplemented through postgraduate level study (BEd and MEd) with a formidable pool of progressive academics, some of whom (Pam Christie, Linda Chisolm, Crane Soudien, Tony Morphet) also did consulting work on SACHED’s projects.

• The creative challenge of designing and implementing innovative non-formal programmes (Basic Bookkeeping, Office Administration, Train the Trainer) that were both epistemologically sound and pedagogically effective in meeting the applied education and training needs of the organisations that were constantly on the frontlines of struggle and transformation. I loved the innovative nature of this work, the diversity of organisational bookkeeping and office management cultures and practices, the experimental nature of our curricula and learning materials, the artistry and discipline required to plan, deliver and account for the effectiveness of what was done. 

In retrospect,it was this exposure to the principles, values and practices of alternative adult education within a supportive and critically reflective SACHED and LACOM, that laid the foundations for my subsequent specialisation in the field of RPL policy and practice. 

• An exposure to a model of organisational leadership that was without any doubt the most progressive and effective I have experienced throughout my career. John Samuel and Jennie Glennie with Neville Alexander and Enver were simply exemplary in their ability to inspire, mentor, encourage and accompany all of us, at all levels, to give and to grow not only as individuals or separate projects, but as a connected and dynamic community of alternative education, through what was arguably the most intense decade of conflict and struggle against the apartheid regime. They worked incredibly hard and inspired most of us to do likewise – a period in my career (I turned 30 in my first year at SACHED) where I would often describe myself a ‘economic meat to be eaten alive’! 

I should add that it was a privilege in 1988 to join John, Jenny, Helene, and Thandi as an Assistant Director in what would prove to be a particularly exciting and demanding time in the organisation’s history – most notably after the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990. It was during this time that we were exposed to a rapid acceleration in policy debates and turbulent organisational change, and once again it was the exceptional leadership of John and Jenny, with all of SACHED’s project and centre leadership, that managed to hold and guide us into a profoundly important last chapter in the organisation’s life i.e. our contribution to the transition to a constitutional democracy in 1994. 

I have particularly strong and valuable memories of the strategic planning and organisational restructuring exercises we (the exec) led during this time, wonderfully supported by the likes of Phil Glaser and Attorney Raymond Tucker whose knowledge and skills in facilitating organisational learning and change I have used time and time again in my career. 

6. What contributions did this work make to contemporary SA and current educational challenges?

LACOM and SACHED provided all of us who worked there, and those we served, with the opportunity to develop and test alternative models of adult and popular education provision with a distinctive commitment to personal and organisational learning and change. Our work was rooted in the values and principles of critical theory and the role of strong social movements in a democratic society. LACOM and SACHED alumni are still to be found in the hallways and policy forums of NGOs (local, national and international), schools, colleges, universities, and organs of government, not always as effective as we might like to be, but clearly active in the ongoing project of social, political and educational change in South Africa. Examples from my own experience and other alumni I know would include: 

• In schools, colleges and universities as teachers, lecturers, researchers – often on the leadership and innovative edges of these institutions and projects and predominantly in the social sciences, adult education and work-integrated learning programmes; 
• In shaping/evaluating the implementation of new post-school education and training policies and practices, most notably those concerned with Open Learning, Community Education and Training Colleges, Adult Educator Qualifications, Recognition of Prior Learning. 
• Building new qualifications and articulated learning pathways for the recognition, certification and professionalisation of workers in the informal economy and related labour markets for example:
  • The design and implementation of a national survey of the prior formal and experiential learning of community-based paralegal workers, in preparation for the launch of a formal RPL platform into the new B.Paralegal Studies programme at CPUT;
  • The design and development of a 6 month long RPL programme (in progress) for child and youth care auxiliary workers seeking access with exemption into the new Bachelors degree in Child and Youth Care Work  at the Durban University of Technology;
  • The revision of Umalusi’s RPL and CAT Policies (in progress) to accommodate new adult learner qualifications (NASCA and GETCA) on the General and Further Education and Training Qualifications Sub-Framework;
  • Contributions to the design and delivery of a 6 month long MOOC for RPL practitioners and specialists, funded and distributed by the International Labour Organisation – first intake with 2500 participants in February 2022
• Supporting popular education and training programmes linked to established and new social movements and NGOs, and to a lesser extent to the programmes of community colleges in the 21 Century post-school education and training system.

AMR 03/04/2022