DUNDEE, South Africa — On weekdays, 14-year-old Luyanda Hlali gets up before dawn to fetch firewood and cow dung to start a fire and boil water before her four siblings and parents wake up.
The mornings are a hive of activity in their home, in the tiny village of Stratford in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province. Once her chores are done, Luyanda embarks on a 6-mile walk to her school.
There are no school buses. There is only the long, dusty road where thieves and bad men can accost her.
Luyanda is one of tens of thousands of children in South Africa’s poorest and most remote rural communities who still face long walks to the nearest public school, nearly 30 years after the nation ushered in democratic change.
The hardships underscore the children’s unequal access to education; the lack of government-funded school transportation has exacerbated myriad dangers.
Girls face the threat of assault, and robberies are rampant. Parents, local leaders and activists say the situation perpetuates already existing inequalities in a country described by the World Bank as the most unequal in the world.
In KwaZulu-Natal, campaigners and activists are pressing authorities to provide transport for over 200,000 schoolchildren like Luyanda — kids who have to walk 2 miles or more to school.
That distance, under President Cyril Ramaphosa’s government policy, requires authorities to provide transportation for the students. But with poverty soaring and unemployment in the country of 56 million people at over 25 percent, school buses are low on the list of priorities.
Psychologist Melinda du Toit says the lack of school transportation is indicative of the socio-economic realities of South Africa and its inherent inequality. Those who cannot afford to live in urban areas will continue to lack basic services.
A 2020 Amnesty International report said children’s experience in South Africa “still very much depends on where they are born, how wealthy they are, and the color of their skin.”
‘The legacy of apartheid’
South Africa’s education system, the report said, “continues to be dogged by stark inequalities and chronic underperformance that have deep roots in the legacy of apartheid, but which are also not being effectively tackled” by the government.
In KwaZulu-Natal, where more than 30 percent of the province’s 12.4 million people are unemployed and on welfare, many say they have to choose between buying food or paying 350 South African rands, roughly $19, each month for public transport.
“Sometimes these children go to school without eating breakfast,” said Bongiwe Nhlangothi, Luyanda’s grandmother.
She says she fears the most when her grandchildren are on the road.
“There are drug addicts around here. When they come across the children in the early hours of the morning, they rob them of their phones, threaten them with knives and try to rape them,” Nhlangothi said.
A school principal in a village about 31 miles from the coal-mining town of Dundee recounted his struggle to get more school buses approved after some of his female students were raped by local thugs.
“The bus was full, and they had to walk to school,” the principal said.
The school has two old buses, but they can take only about 65 of the more than 400 students in his school. The principal said he fears one of the buses could permanently break down — or crash.
In September 2022, 18 students were killed in the province when their overcrowded minivan crashed on the way to school in the town of Pongola.
Matthew Ngcobo, a councilman in the municipality of Endumeni, took The Associated Press to a ravine where children have to cross a shallow but rapid river on foot.
“Imagine children having to go through this daily to get access to education,” Ngcobo said.
