SACHED Archiving Project

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The South African Committee for Higher Education (SACHED) was launched in 1959 by a small committee. At the time it supported black students that were excluded from white Universities by the Extension of Universities Act of 1959, which regulated racially and ethnically separate Universities. From these early beginnings, SACHED extended its work in distance education, and to reach those communities who were being denied basic educational access - workers, women, rural people, marginalised youth and the unemployed. In the 1970s it supported adults studying at secondary school level, especially teachers, and developed unique support programmes for tertiary level students at the University of South Africa (UNISA). From 1981 SACHED played a role in supporting mass-based organisations in their resistance to Apartheid. Educational programmes were developed with trade unions and community organisations, while SACHED's educational media aimed to build a learning culture among South Africa's youth.

The South African Higher Education Trust (SACHED) was an activist and alternative adult and community educational organisation that operated in South Africa during the dark days of apartheid. The importance of SACHED’s role and contribution, over the thirty years of its existence, to the struggle to build a just and democratic education system for all South Africans should not be underestimated. But this contribution has never been recorded and shared, as adult education took a back seat in the new South Africa and quality, innovative resources and hard- won victories were reversed.

The SACHED Archiving Project is driven by a collective of former members of SACHED and other role players , mainly the Wits History Workshop, the UWC History Department and archives at the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of the Western Cape.

The main aim of the project is to make the materials that were published by SACHED accessible, so that an engagement with, and critique of its theories and practices could make a major contribution in the present context of South African adult and community education, in order to:
• Record the history of an adult education organization that actively opposed apartheid education and developed and implemented vibrant, quality, educational alternatives.
• Provide a platform and basis for interventions into present and future adult education theory and practice

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