The South African Student Exchange Program: Anti-Apartheid Activism In The Era Of Constructive Engagement

After the Soweto Uprising and the murder of Steve Biko, activists in South Africa and the United States created the South African Education Program (SAEP) in 1979 to bring black South African students to the US for university education to prepare them for leadership in post-apartheid South Africa, bringing over 1,500 students by 1995. Some of these students were activists in South Africa; others encountered the liberation movements for the first time at the orientation in the US. Many of them contributed, along with other South Africans, to the divestment movement on US campuses. SAEP students also gained intellectual confidence from their US studies, with alumni now playing prominent roles in transforming post-apartheid South African society. While this program did not directly contradict the Reagan policy of Constructive Engagement with apartheid South Africa, it enabled personal liberation and activism that contributed to ending apartheid. The SAEP provided a space for American universities to contribute to South Africa's democratic future and nurtured young black South Africans in the history of apartheid and the struggle against it and provided them with language to speak truth to power.