Realising The Dream, Crain Soudien

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the dream
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Unlearning the logic of race Crain in the South African school Soudien
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Published by HSRC Press Private Bag X9182, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa www.hsrcpress.ac.za First published 2012 Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za ISBN (soft cover) 978-0-7969-2380-6 ISBN (pdf) 978-0-7969-2381-3 ISBN (e-pub) 978-0-7969-2382-0 2012 Human Sciences Research Council The views expressed in this publication are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Human Sciences Research Council (the Council) or indicate that the Council endorses the views of the author. In quoting from this publication, readers are advised to attribute the source of the information to the individual author concerned and not to the Council. Copy-edited by Lisa Compton Typeset by Laura Brecher Cover design by Michelle Staples Printed by [Name of printer, city, country] Distributed in Africa by Blue Weaver Tel: +27 (0) 21 701 4477; Fax: +27 (0) 21 701 7302 www.oneworldbooks.com Distributed in Europe and the United Kingdom by Eurospan Distribution Services (EDS) Tel: +44 (0) 17 6760 4972; Fax: +44 (0) 17 6760 1640 www.eurospanbookstore.com Distributed in North America by River North Editions, from IPG Call toll-free: (800) 888 4741; Fax: +1 (312) 337 5985 www.ipgbook.com
Contents
Tables vi Foreword vii Preface xi Acknowledgements xiv Abbreviations and acronyms xv Introduction Hey you black man, hey you white woman: Calling race 1
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Social difference and its history 31 The obdurate nature of race 54 Creolisation, multiplicity, education and identity 81 The racial nature of South African schooling 96 Constituting the class: Integration in South African schools 126 The asymmetries of contact in the South African school 158 Reconstituting privilege: Integration in former white schools 175 The complexity of subordination in the new South Africa 193 Structure and agency: Young South Africans struggling against history 225 Thinking and living our way forward 240
References 247 Index 261
Tables
Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 5.3

Extent of changes in selected schools in five provinces (percent) 139 Gauteng learners by race groups in formerly race-based schools (per cent) 139 Gauteng learners by race groups in public and independent schools (per cent) 140 Learner demographic profiles 140 African learners in selected KZN schools (per cent) 141 High schools by performance in Senior Certificate (Grade12) mathematics 228 UCT graduation rates, for cohort commencing studies in 2006 and graduating in 2009 (per cent) 229
Table 5.4 Table 5.5 Table 9.1 Table 9.2
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Foreword
No one could have foreseen the many and complex ways in which racial integration in schools would unfold in the wake of the long period of colonialism and apartheid from which South Africa emerged in the 1990s. Those who studied schools quickly recognised the difference between desegregation and integration. Researchers discovered ways in which social class recast race and the racial experience inside schools. A few found that the walls of schools were highly permeable, as powerful experiences gained in cities, townships, homes, churches, peer groups, youth political organisations and other forming influences carried seamlessly into the ways race took on meaning inside institutions formally established for learning. Others found dominant cultures subduing incoming cultures and, at times, not without the ready participation of the newcomers seeking mobility in a country and a world that privileged particular languages, customs and ways of thinking. For those who studied schools, the many faces of school integration required new and courageous theorising that went beyond the application or borrowing of well-trodden concepts and methods from other settings. Enter Realising the Dream and it will not surprise the reader that Crain Soudien is regarded as South Africas foremost theorist of school education. Trained in the sociology of education and with an impressive exposure to leading thinkers in comparative and international education, Soudien brings into conversation some of his, and others, most important writings on race, class and education since the early 1990s to track the ways in which race, especially, takes its meanings in the experiences of post-apartheid schooling. The versatility of the author in drawing on a vast range of conceptual frames from post-colonialism through new race theories of school and society is breathtaking. That said, Realising the Dream does not make for easy reading, for it requires deep reflection and the revisiting of common sense in our understanding of race, education and society. This is tricky terrain. How, for example, does one talk about race without assigning to it an essentialist and enduring meaning after apartheid? The book takes on this dilemma squarely, and here the interaction between Soudien and Paul Gilroy is especially illuminating in the recognition and deconstruction of race. To take another example, how does the eloquence of theory and its
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languages capture the complexity it tries to describe? Here again the author is brutally honest: our theories will always fall short of the realities they seek to encompass. And how does one account for what appear to be progressive laws and policies only to find them working against system-wide change to benefit the poor and the disadvantaged? In response the author takes us through a stunning array of cases of schools grappling with policy on the ground and gives an almost ethnographic sense of how things change, and stay the same. In some ways the cases constitute the centre of the book, and anyone initiate into schools research in this country who is looking for a ready collection and bibliography of the major writings on race and education since the early 1990s would find it neatly contained in this outstanding volume.
There is no voluntarism here, but a nuanced account of the choices we make as politicians, policy-makers, parents and students. This sounds harsh, but Soudien is right: African parents, educators and learners were complicit in what he calls the structured exclusion of black children from the broader social and academic achievements of the school. The question is, why? One cannot dismiss the choices of black parents in favour of English, for example, as simply a false consciousness; that would not only assume the researcher has true consciousness, it is also just sloppy analysis. In a world that privileges English as the language of access, opportunity and status, I find it patronising for the black middle classes to insist that the poor honour mother-tongue education while the well-off happily ensconce their own children inside the cotton-woolled and polite English-medium schools. But Soudien takes another brave step in this regard by not simply accounting for black-into-white school integration but also throwing a critical eye over that other difficult conversation: the ways in which African students experience and appropriate education in former coloured and Indian schools, and how all black students are included and excluded in former white schools. The politics and economics are different depending on which cases of integration you choose to focus on, and this is where even more research needs to be undertaken. This book is also a timely contribution since at the time of writing this foreword High Court Judge Boissie Mbha decided that a former white school in Johannesburg must admit a single black student on grounds that the school cannot use its admission policy to exclude black students. The capacity of the school, ruled the judge, rests with the government even though the admissions policy might rest with the school governing body. However, on closer
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inspection the issue is much more complex. First, the school has an enrolment of nearly 50 per cent black students already, so the exclusion argument is thin. Second, the governing body has power over admissions subject, of course, to constitutional values and this must be respected. Third, admissions serve in part to determine how many not only which students to admit given a set of educational goals (e.g., smaller, more manageable classes). The counterargument is raised in some detail in the Times of 15 December 2011. My point is this: as schools become more integrated, at what point does exclusion shift from numbers admitted to cultures recognised, from parent control to government interference, from access to quality, from race to cosmopolitanism? More importantly, how does human integration happen inside schools in ways that embrace children, their histories, traditions, beliefs and commitments, behind a powerful model of democratic education? This surely must be the central question in deciding what the common project should be around which we rebuild schools and society. Soudiens corresponding research programme demands lengthy descriptiveanalytical accounts of daily life in schools of the Philip W. Jackson variety on the hidden curriculum but this book at least pushes us in that direction with a guarded optimism revealed in the title, Realising the Dream, and, in a memorable turn of phrase, a personal stinger: Ways of being are not in our blood. Here one of the challenges, recognised briefly by the author, is to trouble whiteness a little more, and certainly beyond the dismissal of race-thinking in schools as white supremacy, a charge so common in angry writing. What about white woundedness, anxiety, fear and retreat? The white evil versus black good narrative of history has run its course, and we need to ask new questions about serious issues such as white guilt and what Chabani Manganyi calls the politics of the defeated. Take, for example, what has happened in many schools where integration became resegregation, such as the case of an all-white school, nervously embracing the project of open access, becoming an all-black school with low education standards and brutal modes of discipline against pseudo-gangsters on the playground. The most prominent media example of such a school is the former J.G. Strydom High School, renamed Diversity High by the progressive Afrikaner principal. The now black principal in a black school was caught brutalising a black student, beating and kicking the child on the floor of his
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office. Is this the endgame for integration in working-class white schools like Diversity High? The related challenge offered by Soudiens work is to explain how the logic of race manifests itself in white progressive politics compared to white conservative politics and everything in between. And in this pursuit, the comparison cannot be reduced to English versus Afrikaans school cultures. Finally, in this regard what gives the logic of race such continued currency, with all shades of the epidermis? The answers to these questions are not all found in this book, but Realising the Dream is without doubt a reliable launching pad for deeper inquiry along these lines.
The author will no doubt brace himself for a familiar criticism that in focusing on integration the attention is limited to a small number of schools; sheer race demographics imply that the vast majority of South African schools will remain black. That is true, but some of us choose this focus because it is such a powerful barometer of the state of race and race relations in our country, and such a convenient place replete with children to try to foretell the future. But here is an interesting challenge for the next generation of race research, and a subject on which the author has advised in the anti-xenophobia film on youth, Where Do I Stand? That is, how are children integrated or not with respect to national origins, and with respect to various ethnicities within the black community? We cannot ignore such studies because of the obvious divide-and-rule ideology of apartheid that made many of us as social and educational researchers not pay attention to what were then called the inevitabilities of tribal conflict. Here too the conceptual table is laid by Soudien for productive inquiry in these directions by focusing on how racial identities are formed and deformed, and can in fact be reformed in school. In the end, schools are about learning and the democratic project about unlearning, as Soudien puts it, the received logics of race. This is the task set in this intriguing new book which every student teacher and teacher educator alike must read. Professor Jonathan Jansen December 2011
Preface
This book comes out of an ongoing engagement with the issues of equality and education. It was conceived as a text in the closing months of 2008, after a conference in Adelaide, Australia, on the state of race and education. I used the occasion of the meeting to develop an argument for why race as an idea is so ubiquitous, why it is so dangerous and why we have to discard it altogether. While I had allies at the meeting, there was also resistance and puzzlement. The resistance came from two sources. First was a response from a young person who found the thought of having to give up her whiteness and the standing that it represented completely nonsensical. Why did she have to give up what clearly was so good for her? Why couldnt others become like her? The second response was different and was perhaps not even resistance. It came from a group of people who were about to have their own global gathering of indigenous peoples and who, understandably, thought they would find in us and in our meeting a group of people who were sympathetic with and kindred in their view of the world. They asserted a powerful sense of their own separate identity. In an implicit rebuttal of what I was suggesting, the strategic point they sought to make was that they could not sacrifice their own identities at the very moment that a sense of their full historic dignity was possible. They couldnt and wouldnt sacrifice their distinct identities even for the cause of dismantling white privilege. A version of this politics also produced the puzzlement that circulated in the gathering. How was it possible to live without race? The realities of us and them were too deep. I learnt a great deal from this meeting in Adelaide. False as race is as an idea, it is viscerally inscribed in our heads and in our bodies. I learnt how disorientating the idea of racelessness is, and that this disorientation disempowers people. I came away from this experience sobered and want to thank all my colleagues and friends who shared those few days with me. They may never know how much I came to understand the importance of living in community and of our dependence on one another. I want to insist, however, that a sense of our community cannot be constructed simply on the basis of what we look like. If it were, if we automatically and instinctively see connection based on similarities of our appearances, we would be crafting our world in the most arbitrary of terms. It would be a world of whim, caprice and thoughtlessness.
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Our world has to be much more than that. We must make community more deliberately. Values and conscious commitments must be the basis on which we give our allegiances to one another. And, in many ways, it wasnt race that my colleagues in Adelaide were defending. They were defending a world of meaning another world. And it is this that we need to make clear as we think of how we describe each other. I thank my colleagues for this stimulus. More directly, many friends and members of my family have been extremely helpful in getting this work ready for publication. It has been read in part or in whole and commented on by Alan Wieder, Nita Hanmer, Mokubung Nkomo, Zimitri Erasmus and Jonathan Jansen. I am grateful for all the help they have provided. Alan was the first to see the text. As long ago as early 2009, I told him that I had put the manuscript together and, as is his wont, he said, Let me see it. And so I sent it off to him in Portland, Oregon, and month after month he methodically sent me very helpful comments. Nita, my sister-in-law in Sydney, Australia, read the next draft of the manuscript and was ruthless, as a good editor should be. She cut through my verbiage, demanding clarity and felicity of expression. She would sit at her desk surrounded by all the latest dictionaries she could find and would say that the Collins dictionary doesnt have this word. Please use another. I have tried hard to meet her exacting standards. I know that my writing can be difficult and I appreciate how much her editorial skill has improved the text. To Mokubung, Zimitri and Jonathan, I extend my deepest thanks. You all have been great comrades. I have appreciated having you just a phone call away. It is a source of great comfort to know that we can just talk about the difficult things our country is going through but also about the endlessly wonderful things that make this such an extraordinary place and time in which to live. The intellectual affinity we have is very important to me. Indeed, I have come to depend on it. I also wish to thank the staff at the HSRC Roshan Cader, Fiona Wakelin and especially Inga Norenius. Roshan began the publication process with me and then handed it over to Fiona and Inga. Out of this came an understanding of what many who are experienced authors know but perhaps dont talk about sufficiently loudly: you cannot write a book by yourself. The HSRC appointed a number of peer reviewers for the manuscript. These reviewers were enormously helpful, providing an intellectual view of the text and sharp and insightful comments that allowed me to refine and improve the presentation. Inga then handed the manuscript over to an editor who subjected it to a linexii
by-line copy-edit, which further benefited the text. I would also like to thank the designer for all her wonderful skill in producing the cover for the book. Speaking of the cover, my daughter Carla worked with the initial thoughts I had and came up with a great design concept. Thank you, Carla. The text used on the cover comes from contacts all over the world and has come to generate a series of minor linguistic debates. I asked friends and colleagues around the globe to translate the title Realising the Dream into languages with which they were familiar. My request stimulated a flurry of questions and responses, often with people asking to see the manuscript so that they could render an accurate translation of the title. My great thanks to you all for the effort and kindness you put into this.
And, of course, it needs to be emphasised that notwithstanding all of this help, any problems that remain with the text are mine alone. Finally, a few people make my life many times more manageable than it would be without them. Ingrid, Jenny, Amie, Carla and Lyn, I am grateful for your love and support.
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Acknowledgements
Some of the chapters in this book are revisions of previously published journal articles. The author and the publisher gratefully acknowledge the following publishers for permission to include them here.
Southern African Comparative and History of Education for Chapter 3, which is a revision of Creolisation, education and identity in the Southern African Review of Education 2 (2002), pp. 517. Faculty of Education, University of the Free State for Chapters 4 and 8, which draw on an article co-authored with Yusuf Sayed, A new racial state: Exclusion and inclusion in education policy and practice in South Africa in Perspectives in Education 22 (4) (2004), pp. 101115. Taylor & Francis for Chapter 6, which is a revised version of The asymmetries of contact: An assessment of 30 years of school integration in South Africa in Race, Ethnicity and Education 10 (4) (2007), pp. 439456. John Wiley & Sons for Chapter 7, which is a revision of The reconstitution of privilege: Integration in former white schools in South Africa in Journal of Social Issues 66 (2) (2010), pp. 352366.
Chapter 5 is a revision of Constituting the class An analysis ofthe process of integration in South African schools, which waspublished in L. Chisholm (2004) Changing class: Education andsocial change in postapartheid South Africa, Cape Town: HSRCPress.
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Abbreviations and acronyms

ANC DET HIV/AIDS HOA HOD HOR NED SASA SGB African National Congress Department of Education and Training human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome House of Assembly House of Delegates House of Representatives Natal Education Department South African Schools Act (No. 84 of 1996) school governing body
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Introduction
Hey you black man, hey you white woman: Calling race
For a long time South Africans believed that South Africa was the most important country in the world. Colonial rule followed by apartheid embodied incomprehensible evil. On the South African people lay a special burden that of exemplifying for the world what it meant to oppose the depredations of the heart and the soul. Giving this self-perception weight was the extensive exposure the country enjoyed in the international media: Nelson Mandelas stoic composure in the face of his relentless humiliation, its peoples willingness to forgive. South Africans were a chosen people. Looking back at this attitude, one cannot help but remark on its navet and its narcissism. As navet it betokened a simple lack of awareness of the complexity of world politics. As narcissism it came down to a conceit that the South African question deserved political and moral eminence over all other human rights indignities anywhere else in the world. With South Africas readmission into the international community after 1994, it quickly became clear that while apartheid and racism were reprehensible (they remain so), they were by no means of greater (or lesser) scale than that of many other conflicts and cases of inhumanity taking place in other parts of the world. For somewhat different reasons, almost two decades after becoming a democracy, the question of South Africas importance for the world is back on the agenda. South Africa is once more a place of global interest. Questions have been raised about the success of the post-apartheid project and about the countrys capacity to deal with the basic human entitlements of dignity, safety, shelter and the right to adequate health and education. In this new context it can be argued that South Africa presents itself as an important focus of global attention. Deserved as the questions are about the success of its so-called great miracle the avoidance of a racial bloodbath and the achievement of a form of reconciliation between its erstwhile enemies there are more serious reasons for why the country merits international attention. Chief among these is that South Africa is one of the worlds major social laboratories. What makes it such an important laboratory?
REALISING THE DREAM
The central significance of South Africa is that it poses the question of being, of ontology, the capacity to feel, to know and to be aware of oneself, with an intensity not easily matched elsewhere in the world. What it means to be a human being to have the choice to exercise the full panoply of ones rights and, critically, to accord that choice to others, or, to put it more starkly, the right to full recognition and the unspeakably difficult task of gifting that right to others is a question that arises in South Africa with an immediacy and complexity rarely found in modern history. The question is simultaneously philosophical, economic, political, sociological and, in elaboration of the latter, ontological and practical in its nature. With respect to the ontological nature of the question, there are two great puzzles that living in South Africa and being a South African throw up. The first, in the maelstrom of everyday South African life, with all its racial, gendered and classed sound and fury, is about how one holds on to and cultivates a sense of ones humanity. How does one cultivate the capacity, as Foucault (2001: 10) explains, not simply to know oneself, but to actually take care of oneself? Particularly for those who find themselves in a middle class which believes that it can do without the other and that the other is a category which is not material for its own survival, how does one come to understand the full complexity of ones personal and social history? The second puzzle has to do with how this capacity to care for oneself might come to include and be premised upon an unqualified appreciation of the humanness of all those other to oneself. How does this sense of care come to include the awareness that ones well-being is completely dependent on the well-being of others, others upon whom one will inevitably have to call when ones imagined self-sufficiency materially and in terms of well-being of the mind is shown to be impossible? And critically, beyond the limited circles of imagined ontological autonomy however those who find themselves in this situation understand their ability to live without others how does one install this sense into the South African psyche? These issues are significant for a number of reasons. They are significant in so far as South Africans, like people elsewhere in the world, have the obvious challenge of comprehending the reality of their social interdependence. But there is an intensity to these issues that sets South Africa apart. I argue in this book that this intensity is simultaneously social and individual. We as South Africans have the extraordinary privilege of our pasts, our contemporary experiences and our futures all coming together in such a way that we cannot evade the great question that has faced many great societies in the past: what
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INTRODUCTION
kind of human beings do we wish to be? In facing this question we face our history, tradition and culture as they take expression in raced, gendered or classed ways and are asked how we will build a future for ourselves as individuals and together as a society that is fair and just. We have here the wonderful challenge, not only of how we will live together as people, but also of how we will develop our individual capacities and gifts beyond all the limiting prohibitions that our varied histories and legacies throw in front of us. It is how we manage our freedom as individuals and, at the same time, demonstrate the capacity to live with each other that is important. This is the promise we as a society represent. We have the opportunity here of demonstrating how we might take real joy in the endless differences which make us human and of showing that we realise that our differences are the resource upon which the survival of the human race depends. It is in realising that we resolve our differences, whatever they might be, and celebrate our achievements in very similar ways that our oneness as a human race is asserted. For that we should rejoice. We express sadness, relief, expectation and humility in very similar ways. How then do we sublimate secondary calls on our identity, such as the claims that culture makes on us, to the greater ideal of our common humanity? These questions lead logically to the question of what an inclusive ontology premised on the idea of a common humanity might look like. What is the content of a modern self-aware ontology? To put the question in ordinary terms, how does a human being live his or her life in a state of full awareness of his or her individual rights and the rights of others around him or her? Should a question such as this have limits? This book is not about ontology. Perhaps it should be. That, unfortunately, has to be left for another time. But the reason for emphasising ontology is that the world finds itself in a constrained time. The general rule for how people should live the ways in which they should manage themselves and their relationships with one another and to what they should look forward is dominated by the example provided by Europe and North America. Europe and North America, through the historical role of Europe in the colonies and the domination of the United States on the world stage, have come to supply the world with the guidelines for how it should be conducting itself. At the individual level this comes down to prescribing behaviour, relationships and the life-determining choices people should be making. This is the ontological example that the dominance of the north represents. It has come to supply the central narrative of being, of what it means to be human, especially in the way in which one engages the relationship between subjectivity and truth. The full history of this discussion
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REALISING THE DREAM
and particularly how it inflects identity is crucial. I undertake an exploratory analysis of this in Chapter 3 of this book. The reason for raising this issue here, however, is to emphasise that the European example of what it means to be a human being is by no means the last word on the matter the events of just the last 100 years in Europe and particularly the horrors of the First and Second World Wars are testimony of this and that South Africa represents an opportunity for rethinking the questions of how-to-be and how human beings can be-together in ways that few other societies in the world are doing. To highlight the significance that South Africa represents, this book is written in a deliberately reflective way. It seeks to address whether the self-limiting prejudices of everyday South African life can be broached and then bridged to make it possible for South Africans to live beyond the destructive appeals of their exclusionary pasts and whether they can imagine a future in which the value of being human is primary. The question is at one level what has been called the national question. But it is so only in a strategic and not an essentialist sense. I am not interested in a project of nationalism, but I do seek to understand how the histories which purport to explain the discourses of self and other can be surfaced, faced and engaged with, for the purpose of realising the dream of our common humanness and of our simple equality that this entails, despite my awareness of the factors which stand in the way of this realisation. I come to this question of realisation of our potential as a sociologist of education and as a scholar interested in those things of the everyday that, on the one hand, attract and seduce us and, on the other, repel and disgust us our comfort and/or discomfort in atavism, in rituals of form, including birth, death, sexuality, the rites of passage to manhood and womanhood and ask what these do to our capacity to actually see and embrace the wonder of our infinite differences. I am regularly and repeatedly inspired as I come across people who have a real sense of awe and respect for what makes human beings so different but yet utterly and fully human. I am inspired by the desire in them to find the potential in others and the passion they have to enhance the ability in us to expand our sense of responsibility for each other. I am also dismayed by the proclivity within many of us to tear down and to denigrate and to see others through lenses of conceit and superiority. These qualities of desire and repulsion constitute the heart of the human condition. I want to suggest that their South African variations, the configurations that they take here, in their concentration and breadth and depth of social difference, make the country worthy of attention and possibly even a special case.
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INTRODUCTION
South Africa: another way of seeing it

Conventional accounts of South Africa present it as a long-range racial project. Most histories of the country begin with the fateful meeting between the seafaring Portuguese and Dutch merchant empires and the indigenous peoples of South Africa. The general style in which this encounter is narrated is that of high civilisation encountering the primitive periphery of the world. I approach the question differently in this book and suggest that the binary representation of this encounter of a homogenised, civilised white and European identity on the one side and a childlike, simple and immature Africa on the other side is inadequate. I shift the discussion to focus on the common experiences of what being human is all about. The approach I take is to argue that the question of what it means to be human in South Africa is obviously shaped by our history but that this history is about a great deal more than race. The substance of our humanity is an immense psychosocial question and arises directly out of how we as South Africans have conquered and subjugated each other; our migration into, out of and around spaces we have declared to be ours and only ours; our rights and abilities to settle and build livelihoods on the landscape and the violent removal from us of our rights to these; our habitation of and displacement from spaces; our conceits of superiority and inferiority in all their inflections racial, class, gender, sexual, culture, language, age, religion and tradition; our notions of what is valuable about our pasts, our narratives of who we are, our yearnings for progress and a new future; our desires to heal our divisions and, crucially, our intense desire to be safe from the ravages of crime and violence; and finally, our confusion about why we should be dying as young people when our whole futures are supposed to lie ahead of us. South Africa is a country which is simultaneously about integration and segregation, tradition and modernity, being safe and unsafe, being well and unwell, and which brings these all together into an ensemble of inexpressible tragedy and beauty, a country which is almost unique as a space in which people are called upon to be human. The intensity of being fully alive awake in the deepest human sense is an experience that South Africa makes important. The United States, in a different combination of these issues, is one society where a similar intensity is evident, but even it has not had to deal with the ever-present existential sense of malaise and possibility which has come to both afflict and bless South Africa. While I begin this discussion with an appeal to complexity, I do want to emphasise how crucial the race discussion is to the countrys future. Complex
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and multifaceted as South Africa is, it has had to deal with the extraordinary social reality that one part of its story, race, has literally devoured all its contiguous social narratives. Race has come to vacuum out the salience of the social, cultural, economic and psychological density of many peoples life stories, both as individuals and in the solidarities and affinities they have created for themselves, and replaced it with the single logic of their racial identities. Race has come to assume the special status in South Africa of a master signifier. A signifier is the physical form that a word or term or concept takes on. Race as a master signifier is held up and invoked explicitly and implicitly the often ineffable elephant in the room to explain the mundane to the mysterious, from the carriage of a white man in a social space of diverse people to the distress of crime in the streets and suburbs of the country. Most critical about race as a signifier, even in denying its salience apartheid is over, it is said is what it actually activates in conversations between people and in their relationships with one another. I suggest that it is rehabilitated and often silently validated in the unproblematised gestures of recognition within and among discrete groups of people. The almost unique practice of South Africans, even those presenting themselves as politically progressive, of introducing themselves as I am a white South African or I am a black South African speaks to the insidiousness of the ideological hold of race in the country and its psychologies of desire and comfort and shame and unease. Meant as a statement of awareness of ones privilege or, conversely, ones subordination, it has come to constitute a barrier to thinking beyond the simple acknowledgement of one kind of positionality. The hegemony of racial identity has made it extremely difficult for people to imagine and build for themselves, as they do in racial terms, identities which take their points of departure from senses of self which begin in the endless list of differences which actually constitute who they are. Recently Helen Zille, the Premier of the Western Cape, the countrys southernmost province, made the comment at a conference that race had become what she called a default identity. She asked how this could be when we held so many different identities: why should we default to race?1 The point she made is an anti-essentialist one. Our identities are not essentially this or that. As much basic sociology now routinely explains, as human beings we have multiple identities, but we simplistically, almost everywhere in the world, reduce all of the complexity embodied in our multiplicity to the singular factor of race. This is what essentialism is. Another reason for working with race is to emphasise to and for ourselves how much it is a learnt value. As a master signifier, race is approached by many of
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INTRODUCTION
us with a sense of the sacred, even when we seek to reject it. It is unspeakably important especially for those of us who live in South Africa and the United States but, actually, virtually everywhere in the world. In looking around us, it is the basis on which we make sense of space and the physical environment. We read our worlds through the lens of race. Its power is almost without parallel in our relations with one another. Only the caste system in India approaches anything like the hold it has on our imaginations. And yet, as I seek to show in this book, race is something we have learnt. That one has to say this after all these years of sensitivity training and the endless workshops we have all attended around discrimination and how it works is an incredible testament to its seductive appeal to our senses. As a sociologist of culture, of learning, of how ideas come to settle in our imagination, I cannot accept as real that which is patently not real in an empirical sense. It is astonishing that the intellectual world which I inhabit can make such a fuss about proof, warrant and the evidentiary base in how we make arguments and yet not see how the phenomenon of race is an ideological smokescreen. I stand squarely with Gilroy in saying that the old, modern idea of race can have no ethically defensible place (2000: 6). I take another step in this text in expanding the bounds of our ethical imaginations. I suggest that it is through education that we come to an awareness of the full possibility of what it means to be human, and that this education is only fully realised when the learnt prejudices and false certainties of race and gender and indeed all our unproblematised conceits about who and what we are, are unlearnt. I acknowledge the awkwardness of the expression unlearning the logic of race that I use in the subtitle of this book, but suggest that it is central to our becoming fully human. I argue that such an unlearning will release us from the false captivity of imposed belief and flawed logic in which we find ourselves and will allow us to come to be that which we consciously choose to be, to make the communities we seek to build much more conscious ones to be fully awake. One is, therefore, only in a qualified or provisional way that which society says one is, be it a member of this or that tribe, kin grouping or community. One is not any of those things attributed to us in the primordial sense. Ways of being are not in our blood. It is from a desire for attaining this state of awakeness that the title of this book, Realising the Dream, comes. The promise of education is fundamentally that of bringing to sight that which ideology obscures. Awakeness as the other side of dreaming is about bringing into reality that which is in our imaginations. We
7
REALISING THE DREAM
dream of a better world. Education has the capacity to make real, in our will and desire, this possibility. Education is the deliberative act of working with and in our consciousness in a way that is fully open. In its fullness it has to be alert to everything. It is here that the promise of education lies. The promise is that within us, as reasoning subjects, resides the capacity to engage with obfuscation, with ideology and with mystery in all their wiles. I am enough of a materialist, however, to recognise how much this process of engagement is also a practical process of political and economic struggle. Education is important in carrying out that struggle.
Race
The obfuscation, the ideology and the mystery of race are what I focus on in this text. Race is a thing we have made up. Moore, Kosek and Pandian argue that both race and nature are what they call historical artefacts, assemblages of material, discourse, and practice irreducible to a universal essenceNature appears to precede history, even as it wipes away the historical traces of its own fashioning (2003: 23). The genetics discussion is important because it has brought us to a point where the singularity of the human race and its indivisibility is now beyond question. This is real. We have the empirical evidence for it. The significance of the human genome is that it has shown how genes have travelled and how population groups everywhere in the world can be linked. We are all related. Two challenges remain to the proposition of our connectedness. The first is in the ways in which many geneticists continue to give modern sociological and political descriptions to groups and individuals who lived during times when these contemporary labels had no significance whatsoever (see Abu El Haj 2007). In the South African context, the description of particular groupings as African, or more precisely as Khoisan, Indian, and so on, presents biological histories in racialised terms. There are difficulties, of course. There is a discussion among geneticists around labelling and social description, but there is not sufficient awareness of the issues of sociology. Attributing modern labels to ancient communities is incorrect. In southern Africa, for example, a significant debate has begun about the Lemba, a group of people who live in Zambia and Malawi whose cultural practices are very similar to those of the Jewish faith. The question, are these people a long-lost Jewish tribe? has gone out. And in deciding it, several rounds of genetic testing have been undertaken. The results have been ambiguous. It is not, however, the ambiguity that is significant; it is
8
INTRODUCTION
the idea that biology-as-race is what ultimately counts. The biological nexus will finally state whether they are of the fold or not. In this view race and biology are insistently conflated, and in the process the complexity of biology itself is missed. Instead, it is reduced to the visible markers of pigmentation and physiognomy, which geneticists repeatedly emphasise constitute less than a single percentage point of ones genetic make-up. The rest of a human beings biological complexity carries no social significance. The reality, however, is that the insignificant fraction of a per cent of our genetic variation that we have come to acknowledge the markers of colour, nose and lip shape, hair has come to be of great consequence. Such markers have come to be real with real effects for many of us, and we should not for a moment evade that truth about the value the world in which we live places on our outward attributes. When we confront the reality that African people remain at the bottom rung of the ladder of world opportunity, the provision of services and the recognition of ability, talent, virtue, beauty and every other human attribute we might think of, the very particular nature of this racism must be faced squarely. The simple truth is that there is nothing inherent in who or what the person deemed to be African is that predisposes him or her to any kind of status at all. If we recognise this, and the enormity of it as a cognitive event in our heads is great, we come to the realisation that it is the thing behind the oppression or the exploitation which we need to be getting at. That thing is racism. What activates it, what material or psychological interest it feeds off and promotes, is what we desperately need to come to terms with. If we fail to do this, we then actually declare race itself a real thing. How to counter racism strategically is, of course, contentious. This book argues that education of the deep kind, one that refuses to work with symptomatic expressions of reality of what things appear to be is the most effective way of achieving that goal. The book unapologetically holds on to the promise of what our Enlightenment inheritance has sought to teach us: that as human beings we are all capable of analytic thought and that we have among us a variety of cognitive routes to apprehending and making sense of reality in both superficial and deep ways. None of us, either as individuals or as members of social groups, is automatically because of who we supposedly are superior in the ways in which we live or think. The potential for the most sublime, or indeed the most ridiculous, exists among us in equal measure. We can, in these terms, become a post-racial world. Such a world already exists in small circles and cells in and around us. Many of us are in it. We live it. The prize it
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REALISING THE DREAM
represents for the world, for taking it beyond the small circles of familiarity, is enormous. This book is therefore offered as an intellectual and practical response to the dangers that come with the ubiquity of race, race-thinking and its attendant dangers of suborning and subsuming within it virtually all other social complexity. Its objective is to engage with the situation in which some of us see too much, where we invoke at every contretemps the so-called race card, and others of us too little, in our complete lack of self-awareness about the dominance and power of our whiteness and all its inflections European, Caucasian and Aryan, or indeed our sense of being chosen in other parts of the world. In terms of this latter possibility, I think of a Han consciousness in China, in which ethnocentric thinking presents itself as a reality which is not available for deconstruction, or of a Brahmin conceit which is beyond any form of secular interrogation. Without minimising the pervasive reality of racism, this book seeks to make a contribution to the process of retrieving the complexity of social difference in South Africa, and indeed in the modern world, and the possibility it presents of expanding our capacity to be better and more generous in how we think of ourselves and of all those around us. Its focus is education but not the pedagogical. It is aware of and will occasionally address the role of pedagogy and learning and teaching in the social arena, but it focuses on how we might learn to live together, on how we might make community in ways which do not depend on ascribed and imposed values. Important commentaries which have sought to recover the lineaments of an argument for working with this greater complexity need to be acknowledged. There is a tradition in the social sciences in South Africa which has sought to make a deeper examination of the nature of the societys fractures and divisions (see Lekgoathi 2004; No Sizwe 1979). There is work, for example, which argues that the divisions, alliances, conflicts and communalities in the country, which have often been presented as manifestations of race, take their impulse from a much more diverse set of factors. In these accounts race is by no means absent but is always contextualised and situated in close or distant proximity to a range of other contingent factors (see Davenport & Saunders 2000; Hall 1990; Saunders 1988). What is valuable about the analyses described above is their interest in unveiling the articulated nature of social difference and their attempt to account for the reality that social difference is never a single-factor phenomenon. It is always constituted in the presence of and in response to a multiplicity of factors.
10
INTRODUCTION
Moreover, these factors depend on each other. It is also important to draw attention to the work of colleagues with whom I have collaborated. Strikingly, Erasmus and De Wet (2003), Lalu (2009), Rassool (2001, 2009) and Rassool and Prosalendis (2001), inter alia, have attempted in their various fields of scholarly engagement not only to separate out the questions of race from those of culture but also to present them in their articulated nature. A great deal of this work, and other work I have not cited, is located in a searching intellectual zeitgeist. Meaning and its construction are never read, retrieved and interpreted symptomatically. Moreover, the material conditions of the world, and their foundations in the structures and instruments of capitalism, are not outside this analysis. The power of capitalism, as a world system which makes possible the alienation of wealth and, more complexly, the consciousness of humans about themselves (see Marx 1967), is directly material in the making of the real and cognitive processes surrounding the experience of racism. The gloss that I put on the recognition of capitalism, however, is to admit the possibility that racism can take form outside the material conditions within which the specific process of capitalist exploitation arises. It is the articulated nature of this experience that I wish to hold on to in analytic terms. Turning to the South African discussion of these matters, there is no doubt that while there is a global consistency in how race is understood, there is a distinct difference in the range of vocabularies and languages of description used to deal with race in South Africa. Among the registers and vocabularies are the dominant biologically minded ones. Included in these are those approaches which say that race is real and matters; those which say that race is real but does not matter; those which say that race is not real and should not matter; and, finally, those which say that race is not real but has to be engaged with as an ideological phenomenon. This latter approach is taken by the anti-racist group. In the South African setting, the anti-racists have historically coalesced around a black consciousness position. At the core of this position, ground out of intense debates in the 1970s and 1980s, is a rejection of the negative term non-white that had come into being to describe people who were classified as not being white (see Biko 1997; Dlamini 2009). A principled position developed by the anti-racist movement was to promote the use of the term black deliberately and insistently to counter the divisions that colonialism and apartheid had sought to foster among people of colour. It therefore rejected coloured, Indian and Bantu as the terms of a divide-and-rule mindset and put forward the term black to include everybody not deemed to be white. This term, moreover, was presented as a deliberate political construction, as
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REALISING THE DREAM
opposed to all the other bio-engineered terms of colonialism and apartheid. Strikingly, this explicit anti-racial register anti-racial in the sense that social and political movements have emerged and organised in the country around the idea that race is a nonsense has not found the same resonance elsewhere in the world.2 Despite the fact that important scholarship showing how race and racism function has been developed, particularly in the United States, this scholarship has struggled with the idea of breaking with the imperative of racial solidarity and unmaking its essentially divisive logic. In a recent exchange with a visiting American scholar to South Africa, I remarked how the recidivism of racial essentialism seemed to haunt the social sciences. I was describing essentialism as that analytic approach in which a phenomenon, whether social, economic or cultural, is understood in terms of what are thought to be its essential properties. Without these essential properties the phenomenon is not what it is purported to be. In understanding essentialism and its uses in the social sciences, critics such as Lyotard (1984) have questioned the tendency in descriptions of challenging social phenomena to account for social reality in terms of the essential, particularly in ontological terms. Central in the sights of critics such as Lyotard is that social phenomena such as race and gender cannot be explained by essentialist ideas of what supposedly lies behind them. There is no such thing, therefore, as a typical black person. Referring then to Giyatri Spivak, a leading post-structuralist scholar, my American colleague replied to my question about recidivism by saying that it was important to recognise the necessity of strategic essentialisms. I concede this point. South Africans have had to and still deliberately invoke the identity of black as a way of registering their political opposition to white racism. It remains necessary today here in South Africa and indeed in countries such as Brazil and the United States to fight for the stronger representation of marginalised groups, even those that are defined in racial terms, in the workplace and in institutions of learning. It is a necessary space from which to counter the edifice of whiteness. Nonetheless, the point is still controversial, on three grounds. The first reason for the controversial character of strategic essentialism is that it precipitates the question of why a black consciousness might be encouraged but not a white one. The answer, of course, is that white supremacy is such a totalising experience that its infection of the body, the physical world, the symbolic economy, requires a direct and focused response. The extent to which the world has been encoded in racial terms is extraordinary. This, as
12
INTRODUCTION
a world development, calls for responses. The way in which the strategically essentialist moment has developed, however, is important to understand because it is a fundamentally self-aware essentialism in the sense that it is an essentialism not-for-itself . The difference in the South African use of black consciousness, such as it was developed by Biko in particular (1997), was that blackness is not an essentialist idea. The key lesson which South Africans learnt in the process of developing the idea of black consciousness was the necessity and even the urgency to develop an ear for how the idea of race was transacted on a daily basis. They placed themselves on full alert to how it was inflected in general discourse. As a result they came to have an acute sensitivity to naturalised glosses of race. What they would remain resolutely opposed to was being complicit in the resurrection of race as a biological idea. By contrast, the kind of black consciousness that manifests itself in many parts of the United States remains, sadly, dependent on a biological essentialism in which attributes of culture are inflected in biological ways for example, the ways that musicality and movement are represented as qualities which are inherent. The South Africans were deliberately constructing a political understanding of what bound them together. Black was not an attribute of phenotype or physiognomy. It was a state of mind.3 The new and insightful work of Gqola (2010) helps to emphasise the urgency of the point. In explaining why she wrote the book What is Slavery to Me? Gqola says that she was concerned with how claiming slave ancestry matters today for white communities whose identities were predicated on disavowal of such ancestry (2010: 6). More importantly, in responding to this she argues for the importance of identifying with blackness rather than erasing it and so denying the agency with which they [black subjects] were invested with new, conflicting meanings by subjects thus classified, and self-identifying, over 350 years (2010: 16). The second reason for thinking of strategic essentialism as being controversial is that it homogenises whiteness. Cole (2009) argues that the problem with idealist forms of Critical Race Theory which have white supremacy as their focus is that they incorrectly conclude that all people deemed to be white are privileged. The complexity of this is important to keep in sight. The third reason for the controversial nature of strategic essentialism is that it has given rise everywhere in the world to forms of ethnic separatism which are questionable on a number of grounds. The appeal to ethnic solidarities in places like South Africa and the United States, such as a coloured or isiXhosa consciousness in South Africa or a Latino/a solidarity as distinct from other
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REALISING THE DREAM
communities in the United States, is politically dangerous, especially in the ways that these appeals invoke racial/biological claims to difference. In the United States, this is especially puzzling when Latino/a scholars emphasise that their use of the label Latino/a is not a racial one. The qualification that Latino/a scholars make is important. It raises the significance of the cultural. But the explanation is often offered of how even the idea of Latino/a is an empty one. If it is empty, then the question strategically has to be asked why the idea has to be filled in an exclusionary way. Why can it not be filled in ways that transcend the frameworks of dominance instead of only being framed in opposition to whiteness? Why can it not be filled in ways that are open-ended and inclusionary?
It is in these terms that we must take serious offence to any form of cultural marginalisation. The loss of the distinctive ways in which people celebrate important events in their lives and the wholesale devaluing of peoples traditions that white supremacy promotes has to be fiercely resisted. But one has to fight for the recognition and the legitimacy of differences that count and which are critical for the dignity of people. When difference is disguised, and particularly when culture is robed in the clothes of skin and endowed with physical attributes, such as a Latin temperament or ideas of an innate African musicality, it is then that strategic essentialism has to be used carefully. It is against this backdrop that policy initiatives such as affirmative action need to be understood. Affirmative action is of value if it redresses the effects of the mechanisms and social structures that produce disadvantage. If it is redressing racism or sexism and so engaging the structures in society that produce these forms of discrimination, it is crucially important. In these ways, it is valuable in so far as it provides a pathway to many for positive self-regard. The psychological strategies necessary for affirming this sense of self-respect must not be underestimated, particularly against the complexity of whiteness. If, however, it simplistically uses the shorthand of race to make perfunctory corrective decisions, without regard for the processes of structural marginalisation and discrimination, it presents itself as nothing more than a form of tokenism. Much more is required. It is because of this that the return of apartheids racial labels and the ease and comfort with which they are both appropriated and inhabited is a disturbing turn on the South African landscape. It is almost as if the country did not go through the searching debates and analyses of the 1980s in which black consciousness effectively challenged the normative language of apartheid.
14
INTRODUCTION
It is for these reasons that strategic essentialism, and this is how affirmative action and interventions such as employment equity need to be seen, must be recognised for what it is. It must be recognised as a politically induced intervention to disrupt the power of racial supremacy. Black consciousness, therefore, is a powerful point of entry into disrupting a white-centred understanding of the self and the social environment in which it finds itself. And yet, if this view of what affirmative action and strategic essentialism stand for is accepted, their complicity and concurrence with the very logic they are attempting to disrupt must be brought into view. We need to be learning new logics. The cognitive act of doing this must be recognised for the power that it holds. It must be recognised how easily strategic essentialism invoking the learnt value of race, in this instance hardens into defensive postures that are unable to recognise the essentially constructed ways through which they came into being. It must be recognised also how this constructedness comes to operate ideologically for many. It is completely naturalised and, in the end, presents itself in a way which is impervious to any form of critique and deconstruction. Blackness, whiteness, and their derivatives of Zuluness, Indianness, Germanness, Britishness, and so on, are all taken on by those who have been seduced by this logic as features of who they are and for which they will lay down their lives. Unlearning this logic opens one up to seeing the world in entirely new ways. What this critique of affirmative action and essentialism leads to is the question of what exactly is being affirmed when affirmative action is invoked. Is it the biology of race? Clearly it often does not begin there. But the awful tragedy and horror of this form of self-identification is that it often ends up there. If this is the case, and I venture to say that much of the concealed substrate of thought in even careful and politically correct attempts to circumnavigate the subject of race remains composed of a hardened biological view of life, what does this say about our understanding of race? In emphasising the point, important theorists such as McCarthy and Crichlow (1993), Miles (1993), Omi and Winant (1994) and Pinar (1995) show how entangled in the United States, and elsewhere where race is an issue, the factors of race, class and gender are as social constructs in determining social difference and its dynamics, and how often the imbricated nature of identity and the forms that animate it are reduced to an essential truth. This American work has been crucial, in the sense that it supports the much earlier thinking of key South Africans; Alexander (No Sizwe 1979) and Wolpe (1988) are central here.
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REALISING THE DREAM
While the theoretical insight of McCarthy and Pinar, inter alia, is important, it needs to be emphasised that particular South African theorists of race have brought a political dimension to the discourse which is unmistakably distinct; Alexander (2002) has been at the forefront of this tradition. They have insisted, in a way which has made their South African and American colleagues uncomfortable, on carrying through in their political work, and in how they have managed their personal identities, the personal challenge of what it means to be anti-racial. They have insisted that the politics of working with race and racism requires a level of personal vigilance which is alert to the wiles and seductions of race. This has meant having to articulate a position with respect to race which has placed them, problematically, in the same political space as colour-blind liberals. Predictably, this has involved being burdened by the colour-blind, race-denialist epithet. Demonstrating that they occupy a completely different theoretical and practical space around the politics of these developments is one of the multiple objectives of this book. The anti-racism of South Africa, I suggest, is important for the world to take note of precisely because it speaks to how the dream of enlightenment (beginning with the ancient wisdoms of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Aristotle and Plato and renewed formally in the Enlightenment of modern Europe) a commitment to the idea that all human beings have within them the capacity to surpass the cages of their histories and to be full human beings is being realised in the practice of individuals and groups. Central to this anti-racial practice in South Africa is an awareness of how racism works and, as a result of this, a fundamental realisation that the fight against it has to be strategic. This fight cannot proceed on the assumption that racism remains constant. Racism is infinitely creative in the guises it takes and the justifications it makes. Struggle against it must be prosecuted on the basis of an awareness of how it insidiously inserts itself into the everyday. A central task is to recognise its capacity for reinventing itself. Understanding racism in this way is recognising that it is not simply a problem of personal behaviour but also a problem of the knowledges that authorise it. In these terms it is both ontological and epistemological. Important South African social and intellectual projects, such as the District Six Museum in Cape Town, have as their mission the unlearning of the logic of race. Important for the Museum, as it is for me, is understanding the modalities and practices which surround the reinvention of race. In the Museums work, and this book is intended to support its project, is a constant
16
INTRODUCTION
search to understand and fight against racial categorisation and the normative truths that supposedly inhere in this categorisation. The Museum comes to this work against the background of the forced removal by the apartheid government of over 60 000 people of colour from the city of Cape Town from the 1960s to the 1980s. It also understands, however, how the political order that led to the destruction of District Six was also the product of several hundred years of racial science and racial knowledge. In struggling against the full complexity of the racism that gave rise to the removals, the District Six Museum is therefore cognisant of how apartheid, its spatial ordering, its embossing on the mind from birth the category of race, has come to poison the popular consciousness by making it believe that race is a timeless and permanent reality. People forget that a time before apartheid existed, when life was lived differently. While race as an idea was certainly not absent, it wasnt embodied in the way racial ghettoisation influenced peoples self-identities and the identities of others during apartheid. Against this embodiment, the Museum has worked hard to recover older memories of how its denizens were able to live in a much more creative relationship with the dominant logic of race and racial apartheid. It has at its disposal an alternative history of community. Its South Africa is not per se a racial South Africa. Of course race as an idea was there. But it was an idea which the ruling authorities in the state and the universities consistently had to spell out and assert, as Dubows work (1995, 2006) makes clear. The academy, as Dubows Scientific Racism (1995) shows, was in the forefront of the campaign to demonstrate this authority. The way in which processes of self-identification were evolving is a dense story of give and take seduction and charm on the one hand, but also brutal power involving crude forms of masculine force on the other that has yet to be written in its fullness. The modern dependence on the formalisation of the category of race constitutes for institutions such as the District Six Museum an important affront and object of attack. Crucial in comprehending this existing alternative sociology of South Africa is its awareness of the drift towards the objectification and neutralisation of race in a range of fields of study and practice where it is assumed that simply making a commitment to the equal treatment of people, irrespective of race, is the central task and achievement of the modern struggle for equality. What I do in this work, in agreement with anti-racist colleagues in South Africa, is argue that the invocation of race as a category is a crucial device in the process of maintaining the kind of hierarchy which gives privilege and marginality its modern character. Race is the final frontier of racism.
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REALISING THE DREAM
In taking this position, and I recognise its awkwardness for contemporary discourse, I wish to acknowledge the important work which is being done to help us understand the dimensions of the countrys complexity. Dimensions being opened up in this corpus include: the social environment, reflecting issues such as language, race ethnicity, , social class, income levels, religion, educational status, political orientation, gender and sexual preference (Hoad et al. 2005; Seekings & Nattrass 2005); the historical or temporal dimension, drawing attention to the ways in which differences between traditional and modern and that which is of apartheid and post-apartheid continue to influence peoples perceptions of the world (Comaroff & Comaroff 1991, 1993); the spatial order, referring in particular to the ways in which regional and global differences, urban or rural status, mark people as being either insiders or outsiders (Mamdani 2000); and the epidemiological character of society, referring to an individuals age, disability and health status in relation to diseases such as tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS and which determine ones degree of social acceptability (Watermeyer et al. 2006). My own work in relation to this scholarship is to suggest that, in order for us to pierce the opacity of the South African condition, we now need to bring this work together to understand the multifarious nature of modern identity and the social differences it catalyses. I am suggesting the need to bring these elements of the complexity together to show that social phenomena are not pristine, detached and occurring in isolation. As experiences they are always, so to speak, in the company of each other; they are synchronous, recursive and compounding. They are, moreover, experiences that are personal but always social. They are experienced in embodied kinds of ways but also in externalised spatial realities. Bodies are encoded, as are spaces. Black bodies are thus assumed to be fundamentally different from white bodies. The interrelationship of this multiple coding is itself an extremely important feature of how meaning is made for the self and for the self in community. Taking note of these complexities, Chipkin, a leading social theorist, asks, does a South African exist? (2007). His approach is essentially political, but the challenge is greater than simply thinking about the political. On an ontological level it is about thinking through the problem of how the primacy of being human can shape what it means to be a South African, as opposed to thinking about how being South African makes one human. The logic has to be inverted. It would be helpful in terms of the problems that South Africans
18
INTRODUCTION
face to begin with what they have in common. Thinking this problem through is difficult for many South Africans. It is not enough to invoke rainbowism in the superficial way much popular commentary does. It demands intense headwork in which both the individual and the wider community are required to come to terms with the numerous calls on their identity. It is the headwork dimension of this challenge that makes the field of education such an important one. Schooling and, more broadly, education are fundamentally about headwork and its management. The problem, however, is that very little work has been done in South Africa which recognises the centrality of education as a space of constant contradiction, and especially the contradiction of ideas of self, other and community. The result is that it has been particularly difficult for those who work in and inhabit the school and the world of education to approach the questions of identity with clarity. Instead, the school and the space of education more generally have been overrun by dominant ideology in relation to race and identity. Thus it remains difficult for teachers to actually understand who the people are in front of them. More disconcertingly, and this is said with respect, they seldom recognise the difficulty in front of them, especially now in the new environments they face which no longer have that putative cultural, social and economic homogeneity they imagined was there in the past. School, where the headwork in relation to belonging plays itself out every day, is thus an enormously crucial space. Notions of community, of who is deemed to belong and not belong and of responsibility for others deemed to fall outside of ones supposed nation, tribe, race, clan or ethnic group are fraught with difficulty. It is a difficult space especially for students who receive little guidance from their elders. Their elders themselves have trouble interpreting the shifting boundaries in front of them and so cannot clearly explain to them, never mind justify, how some within their immediate group of contact belong or not within the circle of the school. In this moral climate, a key issue is that of how South Africans might live together, accept each others differences, treat each other with respect, understand and engage with the histories and myths about themselves that individuals and groups bring to their relationships with one another, and, critically, how this diversity can be crafted into a resource.
Educations grasp of social difference

In seeking to interpret this landscape, especially the variegated terrain of education, scholars interested in social difference have tended to focus on
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REALISING THE DREAM
issues that one might broadly describe as the cultural. Out of this has emerged the general idea that the challenge that teachers and their students face is one of multiculturalism and its constitutive elements of race and racism. This is not a surprise. It remains a reality that the predominant form of discrimination in the country pivots around race supremacist ideas of self and other. It is not entirely satisfactory, however, that the discussion remains at this level. It is critical that the capacity is developed within the social science community to take the discussion to a higher level. This higher level, I suggest, is about bringing to the surface the infinitely variegated and articulated nature of social difference in the country and showing how much more there is to the question of hierarchy than race and racism alone. It is necessary to show how demanding the experience of these is and how, within it, advantage and disadvantage take nuanced forms and how these nuances are produced and reproduced educationally. The critique with which to begin this discussion is that much of the educational discussion on social difference has taken a classic multicultural route, has used what many would now regard as essentialised, stereotypical and impoverished understandings of difference, and has tended to focus on the received wisdom the common sense of what culture is. As scholars such as Bennett (2000) have argued, much of the multicultural discussion has been anaemic and focused on a fixed, often ahistorical idea of culture. The argument needs to be deepened. Too much of the multicultural discussion depends on concepts and ideas which have had leached out of them the factors of dominance and power. Prominent approaches essentially work with difference as apolitical, ahistorical and natural phenomena. Moreover, their essential stratagem is to recruit the idea of culture to do the work of race. Culture is invoked as an embodied idea in which physiognomy, taste, deportment and behaviour are read and interpreted through notions of a naturalised self. So, for example, as the literature around diseases such as HIV/AIDS clearly demonstrates, concepts of African sexuality enjoy an extraordinary credibility. Culture is, as a result, an essentially biological idea. The essential disguise being effected is, for one reason or another, glossed over. It is not apparent to most in using this strategy how much they have simply come to substitute culture for race. This substitutionist approach takes a number of forms. It subsists on the symptomatic or what is there in front of one, the optically obvious cant you see? and is rendered in the classic and seemingly innocent question
20
INTRODUCTION
of What is your heritage? or Where do you come from? In this approach of the symptom, the initial posture is supposedly about acknowledging and affirming the difference of another (the other) but ultimately is unquestionably a matter of racial biology. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) talk about the phenomenon of faciality. It is not the body, they argue, that is the sign from which interpretations are made, but the face. Recently I was asked the question of my heritage by a class of what would be regarded otherwise as insightful American students. Seeking to bring some of the hidden assumptions behind the question to the surface, I responded that I was a European. This caused consternation and even suspicion is he a fool, a poseur, a fraud? In taking on the discourse of multiculturalism, it may be concluded that race, as a term of anxiety, has been substituted by that which is less dangerous and seemingly more benign culture. But the approach is well established in the two-part manoeuvre prevalent in many multicultural presentations, where the obligatory statement is made about the constructedness of the idea of race in a first move that is then thoroughly undone, ignored and in fact replaced in a second in which all the biological attributes used in racial stereotyping are rehabilitated. The sad fact of the matter is that the essential idea of race has not only remained but has come to settle in the popular imagination as an entirely neutral concept. Many are attached to it. In this respect social constructionism is used as a discursive alibi. It is waved in front of what is often actually a straightforward biologist view of difference. Awareness of how social constructionism works is declared but not actually demonstrated. In the process race is presented as a neutral ideal. But what is racial neutrality? What is the purpose of the idea of race if it is supposedly neutral? If it is neutral, what is it supposed to denote? What work is it supposed to do? Is it aesthetic? If so, what are the calibrations and metrics of this aesthetic? How does it come to hold significance, especially after one accepts that the idea of race has no scientific validity and only represents what particular groups think about it? If one is to take seriously the now old work of Stephen Jay Gould (1984) and the modern work of any number of geneticists which has shown explicitly that race has no validity and denotes nothing, what function is the idea of race supposed to serve? It is at this point that one needs to be aware of how ideology works. Ideology depends on the currency of particular beliefs and ideas and the necessity for finding ways of sustaining these ideas and beliefs, even and especially when they have been proved to be untrue. Sublimated within the semiotics of race
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REALISING THE DREAM
as an idea are hidden conceits and beliefs. These range from the genetic to the aesthetic. Within each lies a calibrated value schema, which goes along the following lines: having so much of this or that (and here one can insert the fetishes of race: straight hair, chiselled features, voice quality, body type, and so on) means something. From this emerges an effective normativising regime which specifies what is of greater or lesser worth. The ideological disguise which gives race discourse its character is that it pretends not to be there, feigns ignorance, eludes identification and seeks alibis when it is in fact and pervasively present and active. As a consequence, the effect is to underplay the degree to which race discourse then determines the basic social character of the space it occupies. To this extent it plays a racist role because it belies and obscures the ideology of superiority and inferiority and ones location on the hierarchy of human worth. The way these semiotics work comes to depend on that which is now no longer mentionable the fiction that our race is in our biologies, and its corollary, pervasive but now no longer politically correct to acknowledge, that culture is in the blood. I seek in this book to challenge the seeming innocence of the idea of race to allow us to get at its inherent and intrinsic racist presumptions (Derrida 1985: 291). With this argument an unmasking of the apparent innocence of the idea of race my intention is to argue that much multicultural analysis which works in the semiotic conflation of race and culture is superficial. Seen from a particular angle it is benign and logically correct. Its superficiality, however, disguises the danger that lies within it. What does this mean for teaching and learning? There is, it needs to be noted, great interest in discussions on how many images of black children there might be in a teaching text or, more searchingly, how othered people are represented. But the discussion of social difference in relation to teaching and learning must move to the level where the social world that is dominant in our imaginations and its modes of representation and mediation are also brought into the teaching and learning framework. In these terms, it is at the first level a question of content, but at the second level also a question of the mediational assumptions underlying the content, how one is taught to teach. Are there black styles of teaching, or are Muslim children intrinsically different in the way concepts have to be put across to them? Central to this question is how education is used or becomes a site for the production of difference. There are larger puzzles in considering these questions, such as the validity of concepts such as race or the relationship between race and culture debated
22
INTRODUCTION
in the school. Can one introduce into the school curriculum the question of how racism works in relation to the big questions of the nature of knowledge? Can one pose the question to students about what particular approaches to knowledge and its reproduction do for understanding the historical relationship between different parts of the world, or how it is that particular forms of European knowledge have become so dominant? What is the role schooling plays in promoting this dominance? Or, to go beyond the simple binary, and even make the complicit move to thinking about a Europe to an Africa as empirical realities, can one pose to young people the question of the correctness of thinking of knowledge in the racialised way that we do of an actual European body of knowledge that is completely distinct and sealed off hermetically from African or Asian knowledges? These are difficult questions but they are by no means so difficult that they cannot form part of the school curriculum. In relation to these issues I want to make the argument here as a sociologist that much of the challenge lies in the nature of the academic disciplines themselves. For example, our sociology and the consciousness we invest in it is inadequate and insufficiently aware of its epistemological and even ontological framing. Sociology is unable to locate itself historically. It is to this difficulty that I now turn.
Sociology, the social sciences and their limitations

Much of our thinking in the social sciences cannot see the role that the disciplines might play in discourses and practices of inclusion and exclusion. In the South African context it has been nave in relation to the appropriative seductions of dominance. Its most glaring weakness has been its inability to see the role it plays in the reproduction of racial hegemony through the unquestioning stance it takes to racial description. This is a crucial flaw in our attempts to come to terms with the nature of South Africa. This problem reflects itself most forcefully as a problem of social analysis, but it is present in virtually every field of representation in the country. It is there too in the world of photography, painting, sculpture, music and dance. Our sociological work generally, and I am acutely aware of my own field of speciality, is unable to grasp the challenges of what it means to make a life for oneself in the country at the moment. Extending the critique that it is not enough that one knows something but what one does with that knowledge that is important, the problem we confront in the area of race is that many are
23
REALISING THE DREAM
able to articulate an insightful social analysis of how it works but are unable to demonstrate in their personal lives the significance of what they know. Exceptions, of course, exist (see Alexander 2002; Erasmus 2010; No Sizwe 1979; Steyn 2001). Our sociology operates in frameworks and paradigms that are unequal to the variegated contours and profiles of our social environment. What we have tended to do, because the nature of our knowledge-production regimes works like this, is to demarcate social experience in South Africa in terms of what we imagine the issues are and so, as a consequence, come to present it in its partiality. Important work has been done on inequality, domination, social relations, social order and social cohesion. But it is often too segmented. It is interested in and will often make an argument for the priority of race, class, language, culture, occasionally gender and sexuality, sometimes religious belief, but little of it dares to understand how these great social questions come together and are interpolated. So in the end we dont have enough to bring us to a point where we might begin to prise open the incredibly diverse processes of sense-making, meaning-making, the taking of agency, the will to act, the ways in which South Africans are coming to terms with their individual and social and communal understandings of themselves, and, critically, how they might, and often, begin to reimagine themselves in and through the social spaces they inhabit. If our sociology is not getting at the fullness and multiple nature of our society, what should it be doing? What would a sociological approach which is more self-aware look like? I by no means have a fully worked-out answer, but there is need for a great deal more conversation about a new critical sociology. In imagining what this critical sociology might be, there is important new work being done in the visual arts, in the field of dance, where the nature of the countrys social space is being explored in important new ways which suggest the outlines of an alternative kind of sociological practice. I recently had the opportunity of opening an exhibition of the work of two key South African artists, photographer Mikael Subotsky and artist Bernie Searle, at the University of Cape Towns Centre for African Studies. Both artists are interested in the questions of identity and belonging and have deliberately focused their work on the relationship of the South African subject to his or her immediate world. In Searles case the work is autobiographical and seeks to articulate her own historicised thinking about her body and its representations. I suggested at the opening that we have to come to terms with the ways in which domination
24
INTRODUCTION
essentially race domination, but by no means only that has sought to order space and our physical selves. I deliberately used the verb sought in addressing the relationship between people and their social environments because neither space nor our bodies is wholly determined and indeed even determinable. It is true that the marks of domination sit heavily on both ourselves and our landscape. The city of Cape Town, for example, has been habituated by domination. Domination is not just a cartographic reality; it is a reality that is powerfully exemplified by the induced embodiments of domination and subordination. These have empirical substance. Not only is the post-apartheid city of Cape Town now primarily marked by race and class, but so are we, the subjects who subsist on its landscape. Apartheid is in the bodies of many. There is indeed a deep apartheid groundedness in the relationship between middle-class and largely white subjects of the city and the suburbs in which they live. One can say the same about the relationship between working-class black people and their townships. Space and subjectivity are in a deep symbiotic relationship. In the suburbs the marks of dominance take expression not only in the kinds of gardens people keep, their aesthetic and particularly architectural preferences, but in the ontologies they have imagined for themselves. Dominance is at once fused in the interrelationship between the ways in which the physical environment has been domesticated and the social practices to which habituated bodies give expression. One can elaborate a similar argument about space and body in the township. There is a distinct repertoire of performative styles masculine swaggers that a particular terrain almost beckons that one will see in the township. The forms that space has taken are coded for the kinds of bodies that operate in it. As a result, apartheid space and the bodies that occupy it present a distinct unity or coherence that makes contemporary South Africa visibly and experientially different from many other parts of the world. One can therefore develop a description of a racialised, classed, gendered South African space and embodiment. It needs to be said, however, that there is always much more to this supposed unity or coherence. That suburban air of control of self and of social space is a social construction as partially representative as the macho look-here-Icome bump of the township amagita or street-smart guy. Those images of body and space exist, and to that extent the structuring power of apartheid and its class reinforcements is real. The suburban madam and the township amagita their ideological provenance notwithstanding exist and have
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REALISING THE DREAM
real consequences. This is what race really means. It is the constructed performativity of the everyday that is elevated and incorporated into the reality of the empirical, of statistical representation, and then reified in policy. But this regime of analysis by no means completely captures the nuance of either the self-constructed suburban femininity or the township production of a supposed unquestionable masculinity. If we were to take our sociological analysis and visual representation to another level, we would need to do so by recognising the limitations of our reliance on segmentation. We have to withstand the segmentation that goes with the temptation for the single-factor race, class or gender analysis. Recent critiques of work which attempts to stitch together social factors must include the passionate defence of Marxism made by Cole (2009). He argues in his Critical Race Theory and Education that idealist type of explanations of race which focus on words, symbols, stereotypes and categories cannot see how much material factors, such as the capitalist mode of production, are actually responsible and behind the phenomenon of racism (2009: 25). I take the approach in this text that the economic base of capitalism is indeed fundamental in making sense of racism, but that it is not always determinative. It may be so, and may even be so in the majority of cases, but it is not so ipso facto. The very durability of the idea of race around the world, and its manifestation in the modern socialist histories of Cuba in particular, never mind the Soviet Union and China where supposedly the new man (sic) was being inaugurated call for much less essentialist views of what lies behind race and racism. In terms of this logic, we also have to withstand the temptation of thinking about these factors outside of space. It is therefore necessary to imagine human subjects with complex and contradictory identities operating in relation to complex and contradictory social spaces. If the need for singlefactor analysis arises, and it may on occasion, we have to understand that this is so only episodically and under extreme circumstances. On all other occasions we need to recognise and even look for the ways in which phenomena are linked, articulated, overlapping or in contestation with each other. In Searles and Subotskys work are important illustrations of how this articulatedness might be pursued. Both have made it their lifes work to think about bodies and spaces Searles images of her own body and Subotskys of those on the margins of our country. In both Searles and Subotskys work, there is quite extraordinary attention paid to body and space in ways that are both familiar and unfamiliar. As I
26
INTRODUCTION
use that couplet I recognise its clichdness, but let me get to the point about why I hope that it is not the clich that I am recovering. Searles work is at first glance a hymnal protest against the ways dominance has marked her body. Much of the work is about the other and othered modes of speaking about and describing herself to which she has had access. She uses her body as a deliberate space upon which she expresses the complexity and even contradictoriness of her own agency. It is a gendered body, it has been provided with a range of attributions (aesthetic, political, and so on), but it is a body and heres the significance of the work in relation to space a body which is neither an entirely subordinated subject of space nor one which is wholly free of it. The red-bleeding images in her video About to Forget, for example, can be interpreted as human subjects on a landscape with which they are fused. This landscape is driven by forces which are productive and filled with energy storms, fires, volcanic surges but the human subjects, simply because they are human, retain their capacity for interacting with it. Searles Waiting series is similarly evocative and can be read in a number of different ways to show space as an element which is simultaneously dangerous, supportive, inhabited but never controlled, and a human subject, characterised by excess, permeating it. Subotskys Die Vier Hoeke is populated with lots of people men in prison. The photographs, as they are intended, are about the crush of bodies in the circumscribed space of the prison. They convey a sense of the interpolated nature of the space, but they also show, significantly, how the space has been humanised. Intimacy, even as an inmate goes through the pain of having his forearm tattooed, is evident in the ways people touch each other and create for themselves a space that is, in a strange way, beyond the encodedness of dominance. It is in these moments that one sees how much bodies and spaces will always be marked by dominance, but what is available for us to see, if we want to, is always much more than that. It is this quality the much more, the wide-awakedness to which we need to be alert. It is important if only to help us think through our categories of description which seduce us into thinking in simplistic terms. And this is why I believe that the project of engaging with the dominance of race as a part of our social reality in our lives is so crucial. We have the opportunity now for exploring complexity of identity in the country with significantly more sophisticated frameworks of analysis. It is this complexity that I suggest eludes us in the work we do in much of our sociology.
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REALISING THE DREAM
Overview of the book

The logic behind the structure of this text is an attempt to surface some of the complexity of race and racism. The structure of the book reflects its twofold approach. The first few chapters argue for an approach to social difference that is not reductionist, essentialised or simplified, while the latter part of the book focuses on South Africa. The first few chapters are deliberately theoretical. In them I try to bring to the fore the kinds of ideas their history and their content that are used in the latter chapters of the book which draw on work I have conducted in the field. Chapter 1 examines the global ubiquity of difference. It is written deliberately for the purpose of showing how little attention our history of the world has paid to the empirical reality of our wide social differences as a defining feature, everywhere, of society. Our histories are histories of very limited forms of difference. We have yet to write histories that explore how we come to be human through our endless differences our differences, to emphasise the point, of mood, of sadness, of joy or of lovemaking, or our differences of intention and agency, how we actually construct our lives. The assumption is that these forms of power and capacity, or even incapacity, are of no consequence. The only power deemed to be important is that which celebrates brute domination. And so war and its modes of managing human relationships is effectively the major framework within which we describe ourselves. The second chapter, in part a response to the first, shows how large the question of race is in the ontologies of modernity. Chapter 2 is written as a reflection on the ways in which a great deal of contemporary social analysis and policy-making has chosen to prioritise, and in the process reify, the factor of race. It analyses how this has happened in the face of, and despite, the significant advances that have taken place in both the natural and the social sciences. The nature of social reality, Chapter 3 argues, is in actual terms much more varied and diverse than the reification which is critiqued in Chapter 2. The purpose of the chapter is to introduce the idea of hybridity of identity. The chapter works with the contributions of a range of theorists to make the argument that hybridity is an important feature of everyday life and needs to be theoretically explained and brought much more clearly into our social analysis. From Chapter 4 the book moves onto the second phase of the discussion and
28
INTRODUCTION
introduces the subject of race in the South African context. This second part of the book is based on empirical work colleagues, my research assistants and I have been carrying out for more than two decades. My own work has been elaborated in two projects. The first, to which I refer regularly in Chapters 7, 8 and 9, is a sequence of several cycles of study of young people. It is based on interviews and surveys conducted among the youth of South Africa. The series began in the early 1990s and continues into the current period. I have conducted over 300 in-depth interviews with young people about growing up in South Africa, about their experience of school and, more latterly, about their experience of sexuality and gender. The second project to which I refer is the Inclusion-Exclusion Project (INEXSA). This project researched the school inclusionary and exclusionary effects of race in South Africa and caste in India. I use the South African data for this book and look at the inclusion and exclusion dynamics in 14 schools spread between the Western Cape, Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal provinces of the country. The schools are described in Chapter 5. The sequence of chapters from Chapter 4 explains how race is instantiated into the South African school and, critically, how this preoccupation with race is responsible, on the one hand, for obscuring the important new manifestations of identity that are evolving in the country and, on the other, for inadequately engaging with the new ways in which dominance, much of it continuing to draw on racial sensibilities, is emerging in the country. The chapters look specifically at the ways in which race has been welded on to the South African landscape and the role of the school in this process. A brief historical description of this process is presented, followed by a discussion of the evolution of the multicultural option in the country. This discussion shows how this development happens in conversation with the broader multicultural discussion that is taking place elsewhere in the world, but how the local context inflects it in particular kinds of ways. Most significantly, the discussion attempts to explain the politics of this inflection. Thereafter the discussion moves to a focus on the impact of this development on understandings of privilege and subordination in the country. The book closes with an attempt to position the discussion of race on new ground and to suggest what a deconstructive agenda of race might look like. The discussion is deliberately open-ended but seeks to restore the validity of a form of reasoning that is not grounded in an anthropology of exclusion.
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REALISING THE DREAM
Notes
1 2 Comment made at the Summit of Hope Student Leaders Conference, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, 13 August 2011. I use in this text the racial terminology that is familiar to South Africans and those who know South Africa. The terms white, African, Indian and coloured are immediately intelligible to most South Africans. They do, however, have an ambiguous status in the country, especially after the intervention of the anti-racist movement in the 1970s and 1980s. As the entire substance of this text suggests, the validity of these labels as scientific categories has repeatedly been shown to be dubious (see Hall 1988; Miles 1989), and while I concur unconditionally with the point of view that race does not exist, racialisation as a social process is a reality. I recognise that in using the terms African, coloured, Indian and white, I am complicit in entrenching the racial meanings surrounding their use. Opening up this argument raises the question of the permissibility for people to take identity and to describe themselves as they choose. Is self-identifying oneself in categories that historically have patently troublesome origins, such as coloured or Malay, acceptable? At one level, people clearly have the right to identify themselves as they choose. This right is inalienable. What is important, however, is that the history and the consequent implications of these identity choices are always clear. Of particular consequence is the role identification plays in ordering and ranking social groups and the bases on which these forms of ordering implicitly or explicitly come to be validated and incorporated into social policy. What, therefore, constitutes Malayness and how much awareness of explicit values and qualities is there in a Malay consciousness?
30
Social difference and its history
My purpose in this chapter is to explore recent developments in society which have come to shape cultural identity and to describe the ways in which the social sciences have engaged with and also influenced these developments. The first part of the chapter is analytic and concentrates on the particular forms cultural identity has taken and the forms of its description in the era of modernity the last 300 years or so. In this section I focus on both dominant and alternative approaches to social identity. In the second part of the chapter I examine emerging and important developments in relation to the politics of the dominant and alternative approaches.
The complexity of identity

Cultural and social identity is a social construction. It is never natural. It does not proceed automatically from nor can it be read off ones physical attributes or what one looks like. It develops instead out of the articulation of the economic, the social and the personal dimensions of everyday life. On the one hand, there are the factors that surround the subject or the individual: for example, the determinative forces of the economy which position him or her in one or another social class position, and the range of ideological pressures which seek to have him or her enter into and play one or another role relating to religion, race, gender, culture, and indeed many more factors. On the other hand, there is also the individuals agency, his or her capacity to engage with these forces in the economy and in the ideological realm. This agency is the capacity that is available to make choices and to act on them. This articulation of social factors and ones agency is invariably framed by the dynamics of the time and place in which it is experienced. It is about an individual living in creative tension with the compulsion of his or her time and place. Identity is therefore always an artefact of time and place, or, more accurately, an artefact of what one might refer to as a situated history. However, it is never situated history itself. Time and place are obscured qualities. They are covered over by layers of meaning that are not immediately self-evident. These layers are, of course, the expression of a variety of events that take their origin from a range of different sources. These sources include serendipity,
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REALISING THE DREAM
historical accident, long-range events that play themselves out over extensive periods of time, and so on. But they often also include stimuli which are deliberately inserted into this situated history, such as the determination of a dominant figure to impose his or her view of the world on the people around them. These stimuli are, especially in relation to the making of identity, conscious creations. In a famous essay, Ernest Hobsbawm explained how this process of identity making happens: [i]t is clear that plenty of political institutions, ideological movements and groups not least nationalism were so unprecedented that even historic continuity had to be invented, so for example by creating an ancient past beyond historical continuity, either by semi-fiction (Boadicea) or by forgery (Ossian) (1983: 1). Flowing from the idea of identity as a phenomenon that is produced, a consequent point is that identity is always plural, multiple and nuanced. This plurality is an unavoidable feature of the presence of and peoples engagement with the multiple systems of meaning which surround them, such as gender, language, belief and social grouping: meanings that themselves are the subject of constant rupture and recomposition. This is a feature of all societies. It is a feature of traditional societies; it was present in classical antiquity, Rome and Greece; and of course it is present in, and is in fact presented as the defining feature of, contemporary identity. India is an important illustration of this concept in the contemporary era. It is a society in constant reconstruction. It is attached to its pasts. Those pasts, however, are never fixed. They are constantly remade. Moreover, they are remade in the bewildering vortices of desire and repulsion which send the idea of India into a social zone of meaning that is utterly fragmented. South Africa is no less fragmented. It takes its complexity from multiple impulses, many of which remain as yet unnamed and unidentified. In terms of this explanation of how identity is made, we do not yet know what there is to learn about our past. Stasis as an idea is therefore completely unsatisfactory. The claim that some of us make that our identities are fixed, permanent and imperturbable is obscured by much strategic feigning and posturing. What such a claim denies is that everything in life is temporary. It is so because everything in the society is dependent on everything else. There is an unavoidable ecological interdependence about life. Society is about human beings behaving like human beings, exercising their agency, becoming aware of their circumstances, intellectually and practically. To acknowledge
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SOCIAL DIFFERENCE AND ITS HISTORY
a Latourian insight (see Latour 2004), it is also about their response to the physical and natural world. Everything is in motion and always in change. The world, composed as it is of human beings many filled with the hubris that nothing is beyond their control and a natural order which observes its own rhythms and its own internal combustive possibilities, is an immensely incendiary space. As a result, it is constantly making and remaking itself. Familiarities inside it are only that familiarities. They are not constants. Because the world is always renewing itself, meaning is always on the move. Certainty is not within its horizons. An important dimension of this remaking and renewal is the modes or modalities of description and self-description to which identity has recourse. Clifford Geertz (1973) describes this dimension as interpretation. Like identity itself, its description is also a construction. Geertz calls for readers to be very clear on what this is all about. He argues: What [this] means is that descriptions of the Berber, Jewish, or French culture must be cast in terms of the constructions we imagine Berbers, Jews, or Frenchmen to place upon what they live through, the formulae they use to define what happens to them. What it does not mean is that such descriptions are themselves Berber, Jewish, or FrenchThey are, thus, fictions:in the sense that they are something made. (1973: 15) These construction-interpretations sit in a hierarchy of orders with, by definition, only a native mak[ing] first-order ones: its his [sic] culture (1973: 15). This relationship between what is and how it is told is not straightforward because, as Geertz insightfully remarks, in the study of culture, analysis penetrates into the very body of the object that is, we begin with our own interpretations of what our informants are up to, or think they are up to, and then systematize those [emphasis in original] the line betweenculture as a natural fact and culture as a theoretical entity gets blurred (1973: 15).
Dominant notions of cultural identity

What is cultural identity? There are, of course, any number of approaches to and definitions of cultural identity. One can go back to the classical texts of ancient Greece where cultural identity as an idea is used in stereotypical ways. Aristotle, for example, spoke disparagingly of various barbarian nations, of Europeans being unsociable and unintelligent and, by contrast, of Asians
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REALISING THE DREAM
being intelligent, docile and able to be enslaved (Ward & Lott 2002). Almost 2 000 years later, American sociology and anthropology in the last 50 years have generated, in a timbre which is not dissimilar, the concept of ethnicity to refer to groupings which have a collective sense of self-identity based on cultural qualities such as language, heritage, social practice and, often, ideas of common origin. To avoid the ways in which ethnicity has come to serve as a proxy for a number of different strategies of domination, I adopt a looser approach to facilitate a discussion which shows how cultural identity is invariably situated within the distinct politics of one or another timeand-space conjuncture. The discussion focuses on the most critical social developments of the last 300 years and the modes of description that have evolved for these social developments.
Against this introduction, it is important to recognise that how people come to express, make and be given identity is always a matter not easily reducible to simple explanation. In modern times, from the late 1400s, this complexity took shape in the context of the great voyages of exploration out of Europe to the east, west and south, where contact was made with people who were not white. This contact itself, needless to say, had a prior history in the medieval and premedieval eras in which notions of value were already attached to differences of colour blackness with evil and whiteness with virtue (Goldberg 2002). What evolved out of colonial contact, however, was the systematic subjection of people who were not white to oppression and exploitation. Initial explanations for this treatment were essentially based on the supposed primitive cultures and religious beliefs of the colonised (Marger 1997). Interestingly, in the early stages of this contact, conversion to Christianity facilitated the assimilation of the colonised into the social structures of the colonisers. Later, particularly in the late 17th and 18th centuries, this assimilation was to become more difficult. Ideas of difference became much more fixed. Why this was so can be attributed to multiple and often articulating causes. These included, on one side, the material factors of slavery and the emergence of class-based economies. On the other side were ideological factors such as the continued presence in Europe of theories of social difference, such as climate theory which sought to explain racial character, and, controversially, the urgency of the new empirical sensibility of modern science to put things in their proper place. The impact of these developments, particularly the last, on modern understandings of identity is great. They come to imprint the language and discourse of cultural identity with a racial character which is extremely obdurate.
34
Social Darwinism
A few words about the process through which this racial character is institutionalised are necessary. During the transition from feudalism to capitalism, social relations recomposed and took new forms. There was a shift from social divisions that had their basis in birth to the objective divisions of social class. This shift signalled in the Enlightenments humanist climate in which individual ability was celebrated a move to a society in which, at least in theory, it was individual worth that determined ones appropriate place. The world saw the dawn, even if it was in theory only, of a new meritocratic order. This meritocracy arrived, however, at the very moment when colonial contact produced not only a visibly different group of people with whom Europeans came to interact, but also people who appeared to be manifestly inferior in their culture and civilisation. Against the backdrop of the rapid European conquest of these people their relatively quick submission to European power the question then arose in intellectual circles whether the different people of the world belonged to a single race (Ward & Lott 2002). A suggestion was made, reviving an earlier theory, that human groups might have multiple evolutionary origins. The publication of Charles Darwins Origin of Species (2008) effectively put paid to this idea. Darwin showed that differences among human beings were superficial and that there was in fact only one human race. His proposition, however, that evolution was a process of natural selection in which only the fittest survived was held on to and recontextualised to explain the dominance of white people over all other groups. This approach came to be known as social Darwinism. The significance of this particular appropriation of Darwins work is large in European and world history. While social Darwinism has been challenged and comprehensively refuted scientifically, it remains current and active in social discourse. Work in physical anthropology, archaeology and linguistics has led most scholars though by no means all to abandon the idea that race, culture and language are linked (Skinner 1973). The work of Franz Boas (Stocking 1982), for example, was powerful in showing that there is no evidence for the claim that there are differences in mental ability among people of different groups and that where differences are evident social and cultural factors are much more important (Marger 1997). This development notwithstanding, the belief persists among laypeople, and indeed also among some scientists, that social, cultural and psychological characteristics have a racial basis. As William Newman has observed, ironically, science itself created the myth of
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REALISING THE DREAM
race that it is today still attempting to dispel (Marger 1997: 34). There is to be seen, therefore, among wide swathes of the general public everywhere, even in black communities that have suffered under this regime of ideas, the resilience of the idea that white people are biologically and culturally superior. How this comes to shape the evolution of the idea of cultural identity is discussed in the next section.
The racial state

For the purposes of my discussion, the importance of this history of identity construction is the durable nature of race and racism towards which it points. Even more pertinent, however, is the inflection this history has placed on identity-formation processes. David Goldberg has written extensively on identity formation and race and, towards an explanation of these matters, has argued that the durability of the race idea, and racism, owes much to the conditions surrounding and giving character to the emergence of the modern state. His basic point of departure is that a key function of the modern state is that of crafting a national identity for itself. In undertaking this task, the state has access to a limited repertoire of signs for projecting itself. Predictably, these take the form of religion, language, race, gender and class. His argument, against those theorists of the state who see it as a neutral set of institutions that are either captured by particular interests or deformed epiphenomenally by them, is that the modern state is marked by these signs (Goldberg 1997: 7). Gendered, made religious, classed and coded linguistically as the state is, it is the racial to which Goldberg calls attention. He suggests that the racial marks on the state are seldom categorical, in the sense that the racial state is a ubiquitous modern institution that takes the same form wherever it arises. These marks might even be contradictory, but there exists inside the state the power to define the terms of its representations, its social identity. In a dense argument to which the discussion here does not do full justice, the challenge that arises for this state is to construct a national identity for itself. The work of Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (2006), is important in this context. Imagined Communities describes how many European nations had to invent national traditions. Colonialism, especially with respect to race, produces a social order which, in its diversity, constitutes a challenge to the national identity-building project of the modern state and the traditions it has had to invoke. This challenge became almost a crisis when slavery was abolished in Britain at the beginning of the 19th century and towards the end of the same
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century in the United States, and when the upheavals in Europe accompanying the industrial revolution set loose mass migrations on a scale not seen in world history to that point. Into the world of Britain and the United States, imagined as pristine and pure white states, enter people from all over the world with histories and stories about themselves that are fundamentally at odds with the dominant narrations that the British and the Americans have of themselves. The state, almost everywhere, became a state constituted in difference. Goldbergs work moves in important directions for the identity discussion from this point on. It shows how state power, for the purpose of containing the new difference it has within its view, pivots on the capacity to include and exclude, to define who belongs and who does not. This power, he argues, is evident and is exercised in the face of the assertion of post-slavery difference in the United States. It is also evident in the colonial world when signs of rebellion begin to become manifest among the colonised. State power is now mobilised towards the project of building the idea of a coherent national identity, and offers the artifice of internal homogeneity to [its] population. Here race and nation are defined in terms of each other in the interests of producing the picture of a coherent populace in the face of potentially divisive heterogeneity (Goldberg 1997: 10). As the contact processes of modernity produce heterogeneity, it falls to the state to recover a sense of homogeneity: [A]t precisely the time rapidly emergent and expanding social mobilities produced increasingly heterogeneous societies globally, social order more locally was challenged to maintain homogeneity increasingly and assertively (1997: 10). The relevance of Goldbergs work is that it provides an explanation for why, in the face of the findings of modern science, the identity idea retains its racialbiological inflection. One sees, as a result, that understandings of what the nation is are inseparable from the idea of race. The nation becomes intensely racially ordered. While there is much work in sociology and anthropology which suggests that this ordering and the racial ideas that accompany it are aberrations, what Goldberg does is to show, instead, that these are not aberrations but features of the modern order. What does one take away from this line of thought for the purposes of this discussion? Two points are important. The first is that this period of modernity marshalled by state formation, operationalised by the growing capitalist economy and substantiated by science yields the idea of homogeneous identity and makes it clear that processes of state formation, state development and state coherence require coherent identities. As a result, social
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coherence is equated with homogeneity. Or, more accurately, homogeneity is the essential precondition for the attainment of social coherence. The second is that this homogeneity comes to be normativised around race, and also, if we are to acknowledge the full complexity of these developments, gender and class. In this period, therefore, what needs to be homogenised is the racial order of the society. The effects of this homogenisation and ways of talking about it are important for understanding the hegemony of race. They not only bring society, almost everywhere, to a point where it is assumed that unitary and stable raced identities are prerequisites and conditions for the development of the state, but they conjugate homogeneity in the language and substance of normativised ideas of race. It is important to recognise what these normativised ideas are. One sees, to make the point clear, the emergence of a white aesthetic that is infused into the interstices of the everyday. Whiteness becomes a preferred state of being and so gives our contemporary ontology our sense of ourselves as human beings its basic grammar and form, what it means to be civilised and, therefore, how we disport ourselves as individuals and as members of communities. Being white calibrates, everywhere, taste and desire: [whiteness and dominance] rationalized, legitimized and made ostensibly normal and natural (Frankenberg 1997: 3). They, the phenomena of taste and desire, become the technologies holding together and steering identity making at all levels of power. With respect to the emerging states of Europe, these normative ideas define national identity. This is evident in the Herrenvolk conceits among the aristocracy and the emerging political elites of Britain, Germany and a number of key European countries. By the turn of the 19th century, for example, barely 50 years after the new nation states of Germany and Italy came into being, one sees the emergence of high-minded and racially charged expressions of national identity. Early instances of this are evident in the work of German Romantic Johann Gottlieb Herder, who spoke of the Kultur of the German people their spirit consisting of a supposedly shared value system, shared cultural repertoires, as that which has to be passed on, virtually intact and coherent, from one homogeneous generation to the next. They are passed on through a series of intellectual and cultural figures and stand for the essences of national identity. Charles Taylor has spoken of this as a social imaginary. This social imaginary, distinct from the theoretical voice of social theory but often dependent on it, is comprised of how ordinary people imagine their
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social existencehow they fit together, the expectations that are normally met and images [emphasis added] that underlie these expectations (Taylor 2004: 95). It is evident in John Stones descriptions of the adaptation that white British immigrants make after living in South Africa for a number of years. He discovered how their opposition to racism prior to their immigration is dramatically altered once they settle in the country. He says: We are not witnessing the attraction of bigoted racialists to a segregationalists dream, rather we are observing how ordinary people, confronted by a particular social structure, will tend to conform to the attitudes, values, and norms implicit in it (Marger 1997: 95). The point is crucial because it emphasises the shifting nature of the idea of race and the significant ways in which it is taken on and, in the South African case, embodied. The embodiment and naturalisation of race through the ideas of culture are central concepts in my discussion throughout this book. This period of human history, marked by state-formation processes, comes to produce a framework, a form and a language for the making and describing of modern identity. This framework is inscribed in and constructed with the historical material of the age. Whiteness and the ideal of preserving a homogeneous form become, in the early years of the 20th century, a central driving impulse in the making of this history. Goldberg argues that from the closing decades of the nineteenth century the making of whiteness flows in and through and out of the state (2002: 176). This project is evident in a number of countries around the world. It is evident in the colonies themselves. As illustrations of this point, at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century, white workers in Australia protested violently against the immigration of Asian labourers, showing the degree to which whiteness had become not just a racial but also a national identity. The Australian government, in response, passed the White Australia policy, which prohibited all immigration into the country of people who were not white. In South Africa, a country with a majority black population, labour laws were passed in the early 1920s making the definition of worker applicable to white people only. But this racial project is also at the heart of the very centres of power in the world. In the United States, the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 privileged northern and western European migrants over those from the south and east and especially sought to keep out Jews. Earlier, in 1882, the Congressional Act explicitly forbade the naturalisation of Chinamen, a restriction later extended to Japanese people as well. In Britain, the Aliens Restriction Act was passed
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in 1914 to deny entry to people who were considered not to be in the public good. These included Germans, as well as Africans from the former German colonies, but increasingly, just Africans generally (Goldberg 2002: 178179). In Germany itself, the idea a conceit of the Herrenvolk developed: the fateful prelude to the Second World War and the ultimate idea of Aryan superiority. This led to the genocide of millions of human beings who were not considered white enough. This trajectory and framing produces other forms of fixity too: the fixities of submission, of opposition, of complicity. Out of this social process emerge the racialised subordinate identities of the other black people, Indian people, Chinese people and every variation one might think of. People enter new forms of identity that are the direct product of these social, political and economic processes.
The intellectual nature of this project is examined in the next chapter, but a word here about the intellectual temper of this history is in order. One sees in these developments the extent to which identity making is not just a social process but also an intellectual one. Identity making takes shape in the emergence of new disciplines such as anthropology and political studies with vast new technologies of description (Baker 2006). JanMohamed has described this emergence in the following way: Instead of being an exploration of the racial Otherit simply codifies and preserves the structures of its own mentality (1995: 1823). In this discourse of singularity, the identities of subordinate people come to be presented in homogeneous terms too. One sees, for example, in varying degrees of intensity, singularity taking shape racially with the propagation of the idea of the world as being constituted of different racial groups, as well as taking shape nationally and in religious terms. In response to the way the dominant framing of whiteness operates, one sees identities which are allowed to emerge, largely and often only, in terms that are commensurate with those of domination. The nature of this process effectively serves to reify subordinate identity (Miles 1989). There is a great deal of literature on this subject showing how the identities of the colonisers and the colonised have been made in response to the symbolic systems of Europe. The work of Edward Said is pivotal here. He shows how the intellectual authority of Europe is mobilised to produce the authentic Oriental subject (Miles 1989; Said 1978). While there is a great deal more diversity in the way the Orient is projected after the 18th century, what is important to understand is the confidence with which this identity is rendered. Moreover, this confidence is mobilised to capture the difference of the Oriental subject variously projected as childlike, irrational,
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depraved, and so on and therefore to assert the necessity for European domination. Reflecting on his Orientalism, Said explains that this distilling of the subordinates character into essentials could [not] have happened without institutionsthe French School of Orientalism[t]he Germancolleges of Oriental Studies, and so on and so forth (2002: 5). The purpose of this form of talking, explains JanMohamed, is to dehistoricize theconquered world, to present it as a metaphysical fact of life (1995: 22). The thrust of this discussion has been to argue that particular ways of expressing identity have come to dominate in the recent time of modernity. In this process one sees, as Goldberg has argued, the deliberate construction of homogeneous and singular identities and the building of dominant and subordinate notions of what identity is. This deliberate construction gives modernity a distinctly raced character. This character is informed both structurally and ideologically. It is structural in the sense that there are real forces at work in modernity which locate people in identity positions, such as economic relations, poverty or wage labour. It is also ideological to the degree that discourse creates subjects, through processes of socialisation and education and in which people themselves might be complicit.
Challenges to the state of fixity and the assertion of complexity

Even as the events of the last 300 years push society and the general language used to describe it towards coherence and stability, there are, at the height of these processes of homogenising, countervailing processes that insistently produce difference. Against the social developments and their modes of presentation described above, it is important to emphasise how obscured from view are experiences of difference and multiplicity that actually exist in society. In this section I argue that the processes and discourses of difference, enacted by the state, authorised by dominant language and affirmed by social process itself, are almost impossible to fulfil because they constantly exceed the limitations imposed on them. The everyday world is a world which cannot be contained and captured by the language and the rules imposed on it by those who are in authority. As a consequence, this everyday ruptures the bounds of the totalising impulse of dominant discourse. In beginning this discussion it is necessary to make the point, contrary to much sociology that has the present only as its focus of interest, that multiplicity
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of identity is not a modern phenomenon. There is now a vast body of literature which makes clear how deep and pervasive plurality, complexity and multiplicity were as features of everyday life even in antiquity. An important conference on identity in ancient times that took place at the University of Bristol in January 2005 was advertised in the following way: One of the most exciting developments within the study of classical antiquity in the last decade has been the move from considering identities in terms of polarities (man/ woman, Greek/Roman, civilised/barbarian) to thinking in terms of pluralities.1 Similarly, colloquia that took place at Princeton and Oxford in 2001 sought to explore the idea that the great schism of Jew and Christian is a modern idea and that from late antiquity to the medieval period the boundaries of religious identity between them were often quite unclear. Important new work to demonstrate the empirical substance of these claims is evident in the scholarship of Hall (1997), Muhlberger (1996) and Talalay (1993). A similar development is evident in studies being conducted about traditional societies. Hodder (1982), for example, argues that the singular, coherent and timeless primordialism of ancient African societies (his work looks at Zambian, Kenyan and Sudanese examples) is a fiction which almost consciously overlooks the plurality of cultural identity within each of these groupings.2
Great narratives and their weaknesses

A number of events took place in the course of the 20th century that have played a large role, singly, together and sometimes in tension, in loosening the dominance of the racial and cultural framing of the world. Many of these events have their origin deep inside the ambiguities of the project of dominance itself and take shape both in the heartlands of the project in the capitals of Paris, Vienna and Berlin and on its spatial periphery in the colonies. Key events in the 20th century at the social level include the two World Wars, the Russian Revolution of 1917, the deepening of colonial resistance (in fascinating ways in the South African Boer War, but much more substantially in the struggles of Indian nationalists) and the emergence of the working class as a social force. Alongside these there was an eruption of new aesthetic sensibilities in architecture, painting, literature and music, as well as distinctly new explanations for human subjectivity. It is not my intention here to discuss the causal or dialectical relationship between these twin developments. It is necessary, however, to speak to their impact on cultural identity. The argument has been made in the previous
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section of the chapter that the dominant forces of modernisation steer the making of identity towards homogeneity. These forces are simultaneously social and intellectual. In the period immediately after the turn of the century, the world went through a thoroughly radical shake-up through the events described above, which reconstitutes the terms upon which this social order and its intellectual descriptions can be managed. One might argue that this period represents a new stage in the longue dure of modernity. Scott Lashexplains that one is seeing in it a breaking away from an anchoring (1990: 207). He describes it as a movement that unfolds in four parallel developments: A rejection of history manifest particularly in painting and architecture in which one sees a break with preceding historical or historicist style. This amounts to a rejection of historical generations, a decentring of national and individual identities and scepticism with respect to order, authority, stability, consonance and repose. Urbanisation and the disruption of a stable sense of time and space through the building of vast new transport networks reorder time and space, dramatically increasing the range and quality of stimuli experienced by any one person. The id and the ego in the psychoanalysis of Freud and the philosophy of Nietzsche fundamentally invert the early modernist model and ideal of consciousness and human identity as a rational and ordered process to show how formative instinct and contingency are. The challenge to the bourgeoisies hegemony with the rise of the working classes and popular culture onto the political and social scene repeats the process of decentring and scepticism of authority seen in the art and academic world. This loosening is given impetus by a number of key developments which began in the middle of the 20th century. Central among these is the racial horror of the Holocaust. In tandem with this, and in some ways informed by it, one sees the rise of anti-colonial movements in Asia and Africa. Following these, in the 1960s, are the civil rights disruptions in the United States and the Paris 1968 revolt. Another wave of dramatic events takes these developments to a new level at the end of the 1980s. First there is the break-up of the Soviet Union, followed by the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa modernitys most stubborn experiment with racial ordering. With these twin developments, two important laboratories of the Western social imagination come to an abrupt end the first quintessentially European and class-based, and the second that of South Africa and race-based. The final element in this succession of events
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is globalisation, which social theorist Anthony Giddens (1990) famously defined as time-space distanciation, the development of global networks of communication and production which diminish, all over the globe, the grip of local circumstances over peoples lives. For the purposes of my discussion, globalisation is the constitutive phenomenon of the period. Coming at the end of the 20th century, globalisation takes all of history and presents it, fundamentally, as bricolage, or the reappropriation from anywhere and everywhere of what is useful, a resource for the imagination of self and other. It is also, however, underscored by persistent contradiction. McGrew has described this contradiction in terms of its contingent and dialectal nature, and, following Giddens, he explains that globalisation does not bring about a generalized set of changes acting in a uniform direction, butin mutually opposed tendencies (1992: 23). These opposed tendencies include universalisation versus particularisation, homogenisation versus differentiation, integration versus fragmentation, centralisation versus decentralisation, and juxtaposition versus syncretisation. The significance of this for understanding cultural identity is large, as the discussion below makes clear. Out of it emanates identities that are invariably multiple and contradictory, even when they are presented and present themselves in fundamental terms. An important example of this is the Taliban movement in Afghanistan which, even as it calls for a return to the authenticity of an Islamic identity and rejects the symbols of modernity, continues to prosecute its war with modernitys most destructive instruments of war. This epitomises Giddens notion of the contingent and the dialectical.
New complexities
The cumulative impact of these developments, climaxed by the frenzy of globalisation, is to usher in a long period of contestation which takes place initially at the heart of European modernity but later also in what has been described as the periphery the colonies and the economically less-developed parts of the world. This contestation produces intricate outcomes. In some places, it results in a questioning of the claim of stable and singular identity. In others, it produces new versions of older forms of certainty, or even parodies of certainties fixed and supposedly incontestable ideas that would have been constructed for purposes quite different from those to which they get put to use in the contemporary period. The grip of modernity is not broken with these developments, but it is certainly loosened. As the social fabric of Europe
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begins to recompose, with working-class people visibly taking to the streets and challenging the hegemony of genteel civility and beginning to organise themselves independently, the ideal of singularity and homogeneity crafted in the rules and aesthetics of the dominant classes is no longer something which can be taken for granted. Taken-for-granted ideas surrounding the dominant approach to identity and identification, and particularly the conflation of nation with race, are placed in question. The upshot of this history is to produce a world which is imagined, experienced and described in increasing complexity. Out of it come new ways in which both collective and individual identities are expressed and imagined. One sees identities that have been homogenised in both everyday discourse and in academic descriptions, such as white and black, rich and poor, urban and rural, young and old, and how individuals and groups to whom these labels apply have worked with their identities in imaginative ways. As a result, terms such as white and black work only at the most general level. They do not capture the complexity that actually constitutes individuals and groups lives. The word imagination has been used several times in the last paragraph. A defining feature of the contemporary period is the way in which imagination is, so to speak, freed up by the loosening of the grip of modernity. It is important to recount two versions of this process. The first is that described by Arjun Appadurai (1996) and is used here to shed light on the degree to which this is a social development experienced widely in the world. The second comes from the work of Anthony Giddens (1990) and focuses on the extent to which these processes reconstitute the relationship between the individual and his or her communities and solidarities and come to inaugurate dramatically new conceptions of the self. Both versions work with and within the fertile space of globalisation. Appadurais argument is that these developments are brought to a climax by globalisation. What globalisation precipitates, argues Appadurai, is the breaking loose of the imagination. Imagination which had been almost deliberately located within the special expressive space of art, myth and ritualhas entered the logic of ordinary life from which it had largely been successfully sequestered. Behind this development is the proliferation of what he calls global cultural flows. These flows have five dimensions and can be termed as (a) ethnoscapes, (b) mediascapes, (c) technoscapes, (d) financescapes, and (e) ideoscapes. These scapes are the building blocks of whatI would like to call imagined worlds [emphasis added], that are constituted by
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the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe (1996: 33). Appadurai emphasises that this shifting landscape does not mean that there are no longer stable communities and networks of kinship, friendship and work, but that the warp of these stabilities is shot through with the woof of human motion as more and more groups deal with the realities of having to move or the fantasies of wanting to move. The era is intense given the scale of what is playing out: What is more, both these realities and fantasies function on larger scales, as men and women from villages in India think not just of moving to Poona or Madras but of moving to Dubai and Houston, and refugees from Sri Lanka find themselves in South India as well as in Switzerland. International capital is driven by a similar restlessness constantly relocating it and its technologies. Framed by these conditions, moving groups can never afford to let their imaginations rest too long, even if they wish to (1996: 34). And so, Appadurai argues, ordinary people have begun to deploy their imaginations in negotiating the terrain of the everyday. More people than ever before have begun to imagine the possibility of their children moving to and working in places other than where they were born. It is also true, he says, that there are people in the refugee camps of Thailand, Ethiopia, Tamil Nadu and Palestine who have been dragged into new settings. The point is that the impact of these migrations, forced or voluntary, projects imagination as both a memory resource and a desire into new regimes of possibility: They move the glacial force of the habitus into the quickened beat of improvisation for large groups of people (1996: 44). The critical outcome of this freeing up of the imagination, and crucial for the argument of this book, is the expression of agency, of the individual being able to act. This agency, however, is always expressed through a process of negotiation. An important illustration of how it takes place is provided in the work of Pat Ahluwalia (2001) on the impact of globalisation on identity making in Africa. Drawing on Stuart Hall, Ahluwalia explains that the culture of the West remains central in African societies. However, the centrality of the West does not mean recreating it. Instead, the global and the local operate simultaneously to intensify cross-cultural negotiation: [the] multiplicity of identities which we all embody, with allegiances to kin, group and nation, has meant that we are always negotiating and putting forward different identities at different times (Ahluwalia 2001: 120). Ahluwalia
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could, needless to say, have added religious commitment, aesthetic preference, sexuality, leisure tastes and a whole range of other variables to his list. But his basic point is correct: that while identities were, at one time, largely based in a single nation-state, the process is now more complicated, due to the changes in global cultural processes, rapid economic changes, communications, travel and migration (2001: 120). He provides an interesting example taken from the work of Goonatilake to show how this works: Thus one may be born in country A, get primary socialization through religion B, secondary socialization through predominantly European science C, military training D on Chinese military strategy, work in country E, have as employer an internationally traded company F, upgrade or change the profession through a new training G, receive a transnational global package H through radio and television, and travel in country J. Todays self is encroached upon dynamically by many shifting cultures. (2001: 120) If there is one lesson to be taken away from these developments, argues Ahluwalia, it is that in the broad shape of this circulation of cultures, it is surely that we are all already contaminated by one another, that there is no longer a fully autochthonous, pure African culture(just as there isno American culture without African roots) (2001: 120124). The effect of this is what he describes as hybridisation. In bringing this discussion of Appadurai to a close, the notion of hybridity requires brief explication. Hybridity is regularly presented as either a borrowing or the outcome of benign choice. Homi Bhabhas approach to the matter is critical here. He says that hybridity is not simply imitation or mixture but also a remaking, which brings back the notion of agency embedded in the discussion of imagination above. In this remaking of a ritual or an act, meanings are reconstituted and in the process cast anew, such that they no longer bear the intelligibility or the clarity of their origins (Bhabha 1994). Individuals and groups, faced with intense strategic choices, such as Johannes Fabians (1998) Jamaa community in the Congo, adopt elements of European mythology but recruit it for gaining a moment of freedom from the grip of dominant culture it is taking strategic advantage in their negotiations with each other. It is in acts such as these that complex identity comes to full expression. It is not simply either a good or a bad thing. It is, in the contextual moment in which
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it takes expression, always a matter of contingency. What might have been, for example, European is now, in the recontextualised space of an African city, a new practice. A bicycle, for example, is reconstituted into an object that is distinctly African. Difference emerges with a radical rephrasing of that which was supposedly familiar and makes new what was, and might even remain, vaguely recognisable. It is this newness which the identity discussion needs to take seriously. This newness is not just what Bhabha calls the mimetic composition of a self (where the individual simply copies what he or she sees) but a self that is working to reconstitute Taylors social imaginary the social space in which meaning is able to be taken for granted. The social space is constantly proliferating in terms of the characters within it. It is constantly taking new forms and shapes. Sometimes these forms act in simple imitation; at other times, as the post-colonial discussion has helped us see, they are autonomous; but they are always inventive. It is this that makes the stereotyped discourses of multiculturalism, with their conceptions of fixed, stable and reproducible identities, so unsatisfactory. They are unable to see how processes of identity are new forms of individual and collective work, or how moments of contingency propel into play the full spectrum of dimensions which characterise human agency choice, compulsion, dissimulation and pretence and so constitute the making of identity as a process which is simultaneously one of opportunity and risk. At this point it is appropriate to discuss the second version of the globalisation narrative introduced above. The social theorist Anthony Giddens is well known for his explanation of the impact of modernity on everyday life. Particularly important for the purposes of this discussion is how he talks about modernity and identity. Unlike Appadurai (1996), who locates his discussion at a relatively abstract level, Giddens (1990: 56) shows how the conditions of globalisation introduce what he calls an elemental dynamism into human affairs. Giddens argues that it is important to understand globalisation because, in addition to all its other effects on identity-making processes, it has reconstituted traditional systems of trust. While anxiety is not a condition peculiar to the current era, what is distinct is the intensity of modern anxiety. In older and more traditional communities and societies, identity transitions, such as a move from adolescence to adulthood, involved processes that were clearly staked out. Things stayed more or less the same from one generation to
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the next. What globalisation has done, Giddens argues, is break the protective frameworks provided by community and tradition and replace these with larger and more impersonal frameworks: [t]he individual feels bereft and alone in a world in which she or he lacks the psychological supports and the sense of security provided by more traditional settings (1990: 33). The processes of identity making in these conditions are challenging because they require the individual to think to imagine him or herself anew. He or she realises that the old securities and comforts that tradition might have provided certainties are no longer equal to the challenge of the contemporary. In coming to this realisation, the individual looks to, and makes, new networks in which he or she can find a sense of community. In doing so, he or she continually asks what it is that these new networks stand for. For those who can afford to extract themselves from real relationships, there is a decided move towards what Giddens calls abstract systems of authority. The new network is not the like-minded neighbour or co-worker but, for example, the psychiatrist who will counsel one on how to engage with ones problems. Whether it is the neighbour or the discrete professional counsellor, the decision to enter these new networks is an act of creativity, of remaking oneself. It is out of this creative involvement with others and with the object-world that psychological satisfaction and moral meaning is generated, and that new identities arise (Giddens 1990: 41). These processes shift the centre of gravity of identity making from its taken-for-granted and narrow definition of culture and the social institutions of this culture. They reposition identity and, simultaneously, the whole meaning of culture. Culture is now, much more fundamentally than ever before, that which is selfconsciously made. It is no longer a sacrosanct space. It remains a constructed space, but that process of construction is now one in which the subject plays a much more deliberate role. In this process, values and commitments are central. The value of Giddens for understanding identity is recognising the extent to which modern subjectivity the taking of identity involves reflection about the things in the everyday that matter, such as relationships, choices, values and commitments, and rearticulates them into propositions that now give culture an entirely different meaning. No longer is identity that bounded virtue that is expressible only in the narrow language of race, nation, tribe and people. It is now able to enter the world of social engagement as a resource which is expressible in a considerably wider linguistic range.
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Some large caveats

The purpose of the discussion above is to argue that the events of the 20th century, beginning with the Great War of 1914 and continuing with the eruption of globalisation, loosen the tight grip that early phases of modernisation have on possibilities for identity making. However, the impression must not be given that a complete unmooring takes place or that the world moves into a phase where cultural identity is, so to speak, up for grabs and that people everywhere begin to look around and, in their heightened anxiety, decide that they will be this or that. Contrary to popular and journalistic discussions of these developments, identity making as a process is not in the ubiquitous shopping mall of the worlds major and minor capitals. It is not for sale. The reality is the opposite, as Grossberg (1997) has argued. The forces of history, inaugurated in the great march of modernity, continue to hold much of the world in their ideological thrall. Identity making is still largely defined in terms of nation, race, ethnicity, religion, class and language. This much is evident in, for example, the modern wars taking place in the Middle East, which are being fought with and on the basis of tight, restricted and homogenised identities. While their causes are multiple and complex and are not worked with here, the language of civilisation versus barbarism invoked mainly, but not only, by the axis of freedom led by the United States permeates the mobilising strategies used by the parties to the conflict. Samuel Huntingtons phrase clash of civilizations rings powerfully in rallying the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia the great English-speaking white world together with a number of other nations as the upholders of the dream of modernity (Huntington 1993). Elemental in the way in which the dream is packaged on one side is the superiority of whiteness. On the other side is religion. Never explicitly invoked, race nonetheless animates the cri de cur of the West. For Huntington the failure of countries outside the West, and particularly those in the Islamic world, is their culture. In imaging their culture one sees everything that the civilised West is not, a primordial predilection for intemperateness, instability and violence. The job of the United States in world history is to uphold the dream of modernity and to staunch any threats against it. Sampson describes this version of globalisation as a new form of messianism [m]any otherwise sober business and political leaders in the United States have been carried away by theseclaims and quotes Hannah Arendt in describing its oneeyed zeal: [t]he fact that the white mans burden is either hypocrisy or racism
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has not prevented a few of the best Englishmen from shouldering the burden in earnest and making themselves the tragic and quixotic fools of imperialism (Johnson 2005: 261).
Describing the new possibility

In this section I briefly discuss the ways in which these developments around identity making play themselves out in the arena of knowledge production. I attempt to show the innovativeness of new ideas in gender studies, sociology and, in particular, cultural studies, and the impact of these on epistemological developments in the academy and on everyday life.
Grossberg, one of the most important theorists of the new cultural landscape in which the world finds itself, acknowledges how significant the becoming conservative of everyday life and politics in the United States is, but cautions that it would be a mistake to see this landscape as being uncontested (1997: 14). The visibility of the contestation has been made possible by important developments in the social sciences. These developments have taken root in fields such as sociology, anthropology, history, the arts and political studies. French philosophy and British sociology and history have been crucial in the unfolding of these developments. In France, drawing on the inspiration of the neo-Marxist revival in Germany the Frankfurt school a number of writers began to challenge what Grossberg calls the romantic-aestheticethical conceptions of culture as the product of specific disciplining and governmental strategies of the modern nation-state (1997: 14). Feeding off similar roots, British sociology comes to a climax with the work of the Birmingham school led by one of the leading theorists of modern times, Stuart Hall. The rediscovery of the works of Antonio Gramsci adds further impetus to these developments on either side of the English Channel. In France, drawing on the work of scholars such as Michel Foucault (1970), critics of the singular notion of cultural identity began to show how this singularity was achieved as part of a larger apparatus of power. Introducing the idea of discursive regimes, Foucault described the influential power of the academic disciplines in the making of identity. Pierre Bourdieu (1984), in a series of important anthropological studies, reconstituted these ideas in the arena of social relations and, recalling the work of Gramsci, showed how domination was instituted through processes of socialisation and education. In England a bottom-up view of history, often described as social history,
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was introduced by E.P. Thompsons The Making of the English Working Class (1983). This study was preceded by the path-breaking work of Raymond Williams (1958), which challenged the appropriation of the process of cultural production by the dominant classes and the crafting of the nation state in its image. Williams effectively separated culture from class and came to inspire a new genre of writing which sought to reinsert culture into the study of the everyday life of people. It is from these sparks that new approaches to the study of identity took off in the 1980s with the field of cultural studies emblematically leading the way. By 1979 womens studies was an established field of study bringing into perspective the gendered nature of social description and, in the process, revealing important new understandings of maleness and femaleness. The Birmingham school in England introduced a scepticism into the social sciences about the legibility of culture, arguing that the singular and homogeneous figures of modernity were fictions of the totalising impulses of hegemony largely white, male and metropolitan and that in the processes of the everyday, involving the resistance of subjects against their inscription by society, one needed to recognise how much multiplicity and plurality were the actual substance of identity. Running in conversation with these were important new arguments being made for cultural autonomy in marginalised groups such as African people, native groups in the colonies, and in communities everywhere in the world (Benhabib 2002). With the work of scholars such as Derrida based on the infinite deconstructability of the sign a trajectory influenced by developments in linguistics notions of multiplicity, plurality and complexity of identity have come to be firmly part of the repertoire of social description. In the process, fields such as cultural studies have made a powerful contribution to understanding, and even influencing, the changing conditions of identity-making processes. The contradictory impulses that run through this period are important in understanding the scale of the transition that the world went through from the making of the two world wars, to the politics of the cold war, to the heightened forms of globalisation that mark the 1980s to the current period. The project to universalise and homogenise cultural practice around and in relation to the ideal of Western, European and white identity is searingly persistent. At the same time, however, there emerges from within the Western project itself and deep into its periphery the understanding that the world can be
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experienced, indeed is experienced, in plural and multiple forms. The effect of this simultaneity of people being required to rethink their own positions in relation to a whole range of what one might call legacy certainties, such as community and race is an important development in world history. The world reaches a moment of crisis around processes of identification. Its effect is to make some question their traditional allegiances and solidarities. However, it is important to assert how much the hold of singularity persists. While multiplicity begins to become more visible, dominance, which depends on singularity, continues to shape the ways in which people enter into and take identity.
Conclusion
This chapter has sought to show how challenging the process of making cultural identity is. The first part of the discussion sought to put into perspective how modern state-making processes took shape around the ideas of social cohesion that were racial. These processes emerged in response to the new conditions of heterogeneity and the need to project the nation in singular terms. Out of these processes emanated the raced nation and raced identities. The second part of the chapter argued that even as singularity takes hold and persists as the dominant mode of articulating cultural identity, one begins to see, as a result of important social developments that unfolded during the course of the 20th century, and as globalisation brings these developments to a climax, new and important expressions of cultural multiplicity. The significance of the approach articulated here for South Africa and especially for South African education is addressed in later chapters. The next chapter sets the scene for that discussion by looking at the obdurate nature of the concept of race. In doing so it explains how the idea of race is conceptually naturalised and so made into one of the modern worlds great default explanations of how human behaviour and its differences can be accounted for.
Notes
1 2 http://www.afid.bris.ac.uk/Crossing Cultures. Rangers Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa (1992) also speaks about the notion of the African tribe as an invention.
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The obdurate nature of race
Why biological notions of race remain so resolutely the basis of modern social explanation of what makes human beings different is the focus of this chapter. The discussion is deliberately broad but is framed in theoretical terms. Its approach reflects a concern with how race has been conceptually validated and reproduced, but it does not work with actual everyday struggles around identity. A discussion in that vein is undertaken in Chapter 3, where the hybrid and culturally mixed substance of everyday life is explored. The discussion here begins with the philosophical claim that the world has reached a highwater mark with respect to inclusion, especially in its languages of description as these are embodied and incorporated in the law. It moves on, however, to show how this language of inclusion is consistently reconstituted to mark and actually legitimate social hierarchy and exclusion.
A new inclusive world?

The most persuasive argument for the view that hierarchy has finally been expunged from the normative frameworks of what it means to be a human being, as represented by national constitutions and charters of human rights, is made by the philosopher Charles Taylor (2004). Looking at the state of the discussion around the world, he argues that modern definitions of social order have moved away from explanations dependent on the Platonic idea of how the natural order in the world is constituted: the modern order gives no ontological status to hierarchy or any particular structure of differentiation (2004: 12). It must be understood that Taylors argument remains within a humanist cast. It is the human being that is at the heart of his attention. In this humanist cast, the normative paradigm is fundamentally premised on the idea of reciprocal relations in which one human being stands in a constant state of dependence and obligation to another. Human life is about individuals and their debt of mutuality to each other. The significant difference about this reciprocal positioning of human beings to each other, argues Taylor, is that it has infiltrate[d] and transform[ed] our social imaginary. In the process what is originally an idealization grows into a new and constantly developing
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imaginary through being taken up and associated with social practices (2004: 2829). He suggests that this development has arisen through a multiplicity of initiatives including the efforts of educated elites, such as the Enlightenment philosophers in the 18th century, the struggles of the trade union movement in the 19th century, and so on. The result of these stimuli, Taylor explains, has been a significant enlargement of what he evocatively calls the social imaginary the very consciousness people have of themselves, how they deal with questions of belonging and not belonging, how they manage relations between themselves in terms of who is friend or foe, how they come to develop expectations of each other, and, holding all of these in a single space, the normative and regulatory ideas and practices underpinning these. In coming to these conclusions, Taylor takes recourse to history and finds there one example after another of how whole segments of our supposedly modern society remained outside of this social imaginary, such as the French peasantry late in the 19th century or women in the family, and of how excluded and marginalised groups have been brought to visibility, given voice and so incorporated into the social fabric of the polis in a number of parts of the world. The discursive platform from which Taylor makes his point is important. It necessitates, for a moment, a return to the objective of this text. The platform upon which this text is built is a politics of hope. This hope is founded on a belief in our capacity as human beings to overcome and transcend the imposed narratives of our subjectivities. In Foucauldian terms, it is the capacity to develop an ethics of self-awareness. I am aware, however, of how my own hope is socially constructed and engage this discussion with the ambition of bringing to the surface the historiographies of how this hope is still one-eyed and exclusionary. So, the stuff behind the realisation of my own dream is presented here as a paradox. This was made clear by Foucault (2001) in his discussion of the ethics of self-care. The idea of the care of the self to which Foucault refers has ancient roots in the history of thought and particularly in its Greek and then European Enlightenment forms. The idea is powerful in facilitating an awareness of how we come to understand ourselves, our location of ourselves in the world and, methodologically, the ontic claims of this for how a sense of being human is constituted. The clarity provided by this approach is great. But it still is blinkered. The problem with this particular account of the self lies in the normative and formative way it comes to be understood as the universal basis
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of a human ontology. The question that should be posed to this development, as Foucault does (see Anderson 2006), is what the price of this thought is. As Foucault argues, the price is evident to the degree to which individual or collective experiences [come to] depend on singular forms of thought, that is, on that which constitutes the subject in its relation to truth, to the rule, to itself (Anderson 2006: xxii). Foucaults question is searching in its scope. It puts into perspective the power of the representational strategies of the world and, in relation to representations of race, the degree to which the European explanation of this is sufficiently capacious for the rest of the world. It is the way in which we have been held in check by this foundational move in the history of thought that I explore in this chapter. I hope, however, that the basis of the optimism that is inherent in this platform is not entirely eviscerated in my attempt to engage with these developments. So what is this platform? The platform is the Enlightenment as it took what I shall argue is renewed form in Europe from the 1600s onwards. I suggest a renewal as the trope for projecting this Enlightenment only to emphasise the point that enlightenments have happened several times before in human history. The single most obvious case is, of course, the emergence of Buddhism in India happening at the same time that Plato and then Aristotle were beginning to lay the foundations for modern European thought. The Buddhist idea about the self, captured in the Dhammapada in the 6th century BC, provides one with a sense of how issues of transcendence were embedded in understandings of the world long before what we have come to understand as the Enlightenment. The Buddha taught in the Dhammapada that even though a man conquers ten thousand men in battle, he who conquers but himself is the greatest of conquerors (Dhammananda 2002: 39). The extraordinary significance of the European version of this renewal and the real renaissance it represented is that it came to a particular understanding of the human subject. It emphasised the individual and, in this humanist impulse, liberated the individual from the restraint of time, place and order. Human possibility lay in the extraordinary capacity of the individual to transcend his or her history. To be sure, this point is made in other ways in the great texts and teachings of people everywhere, but it is articulated with a political sense in the transforming Europe of the 1700 and 1800s. There the possibilities of becoming fully human and seizing the full birthright of being human are framed in a way which recognises how society is constructed to impede and prevent this becoming.
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T H E O B D U R AT E N AT U R E O F R A C E
Power and the ways in which power is appropriated politically, culturally and economically are what distinguishes the European Enlightenment from other beliefs and practices speaking to the possibility of transcendence. Being and subjectivity are deliberately constituted in political terms. Human beings engage possibility in the real world of experience and are called upon to struggle their way out of their limitations through a recognition, awareness and, ultimately, a confrontation of how constraint oppression and exploitation is instantiated in their lives. Their transcendence of their histories is through a deliberate act of engagement with the conditions of their contexts. This is a distinctly social as opposed to religious (religious in its emphasis on individual redemption) explanation of transcendence. It constitutes a major break in world thought. It speaks to the relationship of one human to another on the grounds of sociality, social rights, social cohesion and equality. It asserts the incontrovertible and inalienable right of human beings to the rights of equal dignity, equal opportunity and equal freedom, within the context of their dependence on each other. In the gendered invocation fraternit, this human being is represented in distinctly new terms a new sense of self and a new sense of his or her sociality.
And yet, racism is alive and well

The point has to be made that the world remains an unhappy and discriminating space on critical fronts. Thomas and Clarke (2006) draw attention to the ways in which globalisation has attenuated the discriminatory dimension of experiences such as ethnicity, gender and sexuality. They argue that precisely because modern social science analyses have taken an anti-essentialist turn, there has been a tendency to render insignificant a macroanalytics of racialization (2006: 2). To make assertions about race in relation to globalisation is perceived as essentialising it that is, making it a simple thing stripped of its complexity because once we have gone global race cannot hold local epistemological purchase, except insofar as individual instantiations of race in specific locations can be exposed as fictions when bumped up against other iterations of race and racial difference (2006: 2). A conclusion to draw from their argument is that this line of logic fails to acknowledge the multiple ways in which race has continued to be consequential in ordering relationships in the world and the dangers of ignoring the ways in which it has come to be rearticulated and reinstantiated into the relationships of power. The danger which the anti-essentialist turn signals is a reluctance to confront power in its social density and, instead, to focus attention on the struggle of
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the individual to break loose from the compulsions of the grand narratives of history and culture that surround him or her. Such narrow conceptions of freedom underplay the degree to which the social experience continues to be explained in terms of large forces. Racism and its vocabulary of race is one of these. It remains obdurate. It presents itself as a space of meaning-making and social experience that is resistant to deconstruction. The important insight that we have gained from science that race, in and by itself, however its proponents represent it, counts for absolutely nothing is an insight that appears to have no purchase whatsoever. Instead, what we are seeing is the opposite. Despite the most far-sighted improvements that are being made in the discourse of human rights, despite the incredible breakthroughs that are being made in fields such as genetics and cognition, the idea remains alive that the world is ordered in a hierarchy of ability and capacity determined by our biologies, and that, in the great chain of being, black people unambiguously sit at the bottom of that biological order. What this suggests is that the very concept of race might be a racist act. It is for this reason that Derrida stated that the concept of race belonged to a whole system of phantasms, to a certain representation of nature, life, history, religion, and law (1985: 294). On the basis of this I appropriate his phrase the most racism of racisms (1985: 291) to suggest that the concept of race itself is the final hurdle to overcome in the struggle against racism. The difficulties through which black people are going in the United States and, less well known to an English-speaking audience, also in countries in Latin America (notably Brazil, which has the second-largest population of black people in the world after Nigeria) are powerful indictments of the state of the world in this respect. One might speculate even further and suggest that the misery experienced in large swathes of Africa, where leaders treat their citizens with contempt, is not unrelated to the internalisation of the sensibilities of race. Farred makes the argument that notions of race are still present in the global reconfiguration of rights and justice and that race and racism are fundamentally central to the new universalism (Thomas & Clarke 2006: 23). I argue in this chapter that despite the impressive developments that have taken place around the world and the winning of major victories in both the body politic and the academy, the world remains entranced by race. Extraordinarily, almost half a century of outstanding research about race and racial difference, peaking at moments in the work of Boas and Gould and brought to a fine point in the field of genetics, the important methodological deconstructive
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insights brought to us by post-structural scholars such as Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze, and the powerful analysis of white supremacy by Gilroy and Hall appear not to have dented at all common-sense ideas about race. As important as the field of genetics is in confirming that racial genes do not exist, the idea that race is real and that it defines in objective ways the basis of social relations between people, especially those deemed to be white and those of colour, remains powerful. Garuba, a scholar of literature, presciently remarks: the success of the concerted assault in the academy on essentializations of race has ensured that at every mention of race, everyone from the indifferent graduate student to the glib talkshow host is able to say, without reflection [emphasis added], that race is a social constructThis response has become a clich that inhibits thinking about the various ways in which race is articulated historically and in the contemporary moment. (2008: 1644) The primary objective of the discussion in this chapter is to get behind this obdurateness. Why are we so completely tied up by the idea of race? Why is it, as Abu El Haj (2007) also asks, that our theories of racelessness, both in our sociological and biological analyses, are so hard to convert into personal behaviour, into the kinds of social analyses that dont automatically defer to the naturalness of race? Why is it that people routinely disclaim the categories of race and then systematically recuperate and even revel in them? Most critically, and to place the discussion squarely within the Taylorian discourse, why have these theories struggled to enter into our social imaginaries? Bruce Baum, in reflecting on the persistence of a term such as Caucasian, asks a similar question: Why has the idea of a Caucasian race stubbornly persisted if, ultimately, it has no greater scientific validity that [sic] the idea of an Aryan race? (2006: 7). Some attempts to answer these questions have already been made. I suggested earlier in the text that the subordinated are themselves making choices and are using what is called strategic essentialism to fight against racial hegemony. Other explanations have been made too and attempt to account for the persistence of and even in some ways logical reasons for the use of race. In a conversation recorded in 2008 on the relationship between biology, genetics, health and race, Troy Duster, Jay Kaufman and Pilar Ossorio talk about the circumstances under which race might be studied. The agreement to which they come is that race is not a genetically definable or biologically fixed set of categories, but to the extent that it is constructed as a distinction (in different ways in different parts of the world) of hierarchy it is real. Kaufman says, for
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example, that makes it very real in peoples lives without [it] being part of the natural world (Duster et al. 2008). The workings of this process of making race real are what I seek to elucidate in this chapter. In a previous attempt to explain how this process worked (Soudien, forthcoming), I suggested that a game was being played in which we are all complicit. I now extend that discussion, building on the resources I began to use there. The discussion here is different from my earlier foray to the extent that my current focus is the procedure of distinguishing difference. The reasons for the obdurate nature of race do not come down to a single factor. They are multiple but include two levels of influence and determination. The first is the level of what Foucault calls our general history of thought and which Deleuze has described as state philosophy (Massumi 1987: x), and the second is our general history of politics. With respect to the first level, I look at the discussion about subjectivity and focus on its methodological forms, namely dialectics. I do this to emphasise how conflicted this discussion is and how its ambiguities present themselves as the surfaces upon which an ontology of privilege, in this case white privilege and superiority, is developed. With regard to the second, I show how this general discourse of thought is expressed historiographically. The chapter is brought to a close with an attempt, using Bhaskar, to recover a procedural approach to dialectics which does not begin from a point of priority of what dialectics, the central methodological approach of dominant philosophy, describes as the thesis or the first idea, over the antithesis, the second idea. Taking the discussion forward then, it needs to be acknowledged that we in the world have moved towards a greater sense of our commonness and connectedness. Our social imaginary has undoubtedly been expanded. We now have, almost everywhere, legal regimes where discrimination on the basis of any form of distinction, especially race, is no longer recognised. And yet, in relation to these developments, othering remains the norm in many contexts, even legally. The example of people in many African countries who identify themselves as homosexuals and who continue to experience great discrimination and persecution is a case in point. Another case is the intolerance of many European countries to Muslim women choosing to cover themselves up. The trend, nonetheless, is towards a greater sense of inclusion. Deeply significant as these formal developments are, it is the persistence of informal practices of exclusion, harassment and discrimination, informed by beliefs and practices of behaviour which are premised on the very opposite
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of the formal, that must worry us. I want to suggest, as Baudrillard and Guillaume (2008) do, that we find ourselves in a big game. This game is the game of representation. We speak one way but behave in another. The game consists, as they explain, of the displacement of law by rules. The rules are in fact where reality resides.
Game playing
In his conversation with Guillaume on the nature of the social games we play, Baudrillard introduces the question of the possibility of human social existence beyond the apocalypse. He uses the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to make the argument that Japan represents the possibility of a transgression against this finitude of the apocalypse (Baudrillard & Guillaume 2008: 52). How the society has done this, he argues, is through assimilating cutting-edge technology which produces artefacts, simulacra and automatons that give the illusion of circumventing reality and its constraints (time, space, the body)In the end it is a rapture, an escape from the world, an escape from reality (2008: 5355). What this has made possible is the survival of the Japanese through the instantiating in the everyday of formalised values that are completely empty of any human content in the historical sense (2008: 57). The nature of this survival is critical for answering the question whether the world can remain human and avoid becoming animal while accepting the end of history (2008: 57). Guillaumes answer is largely positive: And the Japanese may still think a world is possible where everyone thinks: I prefer the rules of the game In this sense it is a world of seduction (2008: 5960). Baudrillard offers another, possibly more helpful, way to look at the formalism suggested by Guillaume: [W]e could replace reality and game with two other words: law and rule. Perhaps seduction comes from no longer recognising the authority of the law or from moving everything from the realm of law, or the reality principle, the economic, moral, political, historical, etc., principle to something arbitrary like the rule. The seduction is simply that we have gotten rid of the lawBut the fact that there is a transmutation that makes us pass to the other side of the law is a way of showing that it is possible to live as the image of the Other, somewhere other than in the law, on the other side. (2008: 60) There is great value in how Baudrillard and Guillaume set up the problem and especially how they characterise the process of the game as a seduction. In the other text in which I work with this idea (see Soudien, forthcoming),
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I emphasise the seductive nature of this development. Here I use it to delve deeper into the factors behind the playing of the game. Baudrillard and Guillaumes explanation is valuable in that it locates us within games, but they dont sufficiently explain what is behind the deference to the rule and the authority of the rule. In what follows, I try to explain how this deference to the rule has taken place. To do this I suggest that the value of social constructionism, as the methodological outcome of the great history of rationality which, as a major feature of the European Enlightenment, sought to explain what life was all about, as opposed to what life appeared to be, can be understood to have been neutralised through a process of seduction. In terms of this seduction we utter the law but perform the rule. We invoke our deep deconstructive modes of thought when we analyse, but in our behaviour we slip back into the superficial and comfortable explanations of how life works that come from our everyday worlds. Social constructionism, following Berger and Luckman (1966) and taken up in more than 40 years of creative sociology, anthropology and cultural studies scholarship, has come to refer to explanations of social life which are supposedly grounded in reality but are in fact understandings of reality. It has come to be understood as an invention or a creation of particular groups or individuals shaped by the specific social, economic and historical circumstances in which they find themselves. In relation to the notion of groundedness, through placing emphasis on the idea that phenomena are really representations, as opposed to actual self-evident phenomena independent of social determination, an important contribution to social explanation that comes with the idea of social construction is that things, events, ideas do not have an essential meaning. This is what the critique of essentialism is. Phenomena or, for the purposes of this work, identities are given essential qualities and characteristics which define them unequivocally. The process of social construction argues against this process of reducing again the concept of reductionism the meaning of anything to a basic thing. Phenomena dont have essences that can be distilled and held up as the basis for interrogating their significance. When Berger and Luckman developed the term social construction, it was certainly new. But the ideas behind it had been part of and indeed very much in the philosophical orbit of at least those who were familiar with the Frankfurt school of thought for a great deal longer. What Berger and Luckman did was to bring these ideas together in a way that was amenable for use in social analysis and even popularise them.
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It is in this process of being popularised and becoming a popular concept that the term social constructionism is transmuted. It is transmuted undergoes a certain kind of seduction by the instantiating power of the rule of the everyday to be accommodated and neutralised to fit in with the hegemony of common-sense understandings of difference. We say one thing but actually mean another. This is especially so with respect to the social construction of race. Its seduction takes place through the transmutation of its meaning a process of displacement of its law-like features, which are to understand the genesis and the sociological nature of the way a term comes to be used; a deep deconstructive process, to the rule, which is essentially about accommodating it within the rules of the game of conventional wisdom, to pass, so to speak, to the other side of the law. It is the rule and how it works that we need to be clear about here. However much developments in our knowledge of phenomena grow and expand and open up to us new insights, we prefer the comfort of what we know. What we are comfortable with, as opposed to what has been demonstrated to us as a credible explanation of how things work, informs our behaviour. Our behaviour is thus simply all about playing the game. Social analysis in education has been particularly susceptible to game playing. Looking at fields of social activity in and through pedagogy, social policy and educational history, social analysis in education has generally addressed the issues of social construction perfunctorily. Gestures are made to the notion of social construction, but the analytic substantiation that social constructionism requires is regularly foregone. The major arena where this might be seen is the field of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism has turned into a classic site for the reproduction of and in fact seduction of dominance. The effect of this process is that the law around the idea of the social construction of race is invoked as a kind of mantra but is seldom decomposed or deconstructed to understand how it works. Hacking has argued that when social constructionism is used to define a concept or explain a phenomenon, it is never clear what is being targeted in the accusation of essentialism or determinism. In the process the virtue of social constructionism is neutralised (1999: 23). How this neutralisation has happened is what the rest of this chapter examines. For understanding social construction with respect to race, it is important that the idea of race is decomposed to understand how rule works. However, to take a different line to that of Baudrillard, its instantiation is not arbitrary. It has its own history and sociology, alongside that of the law.
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A general history of thought and its problems

The discussion which follows shows how dominant histories of thought have come to elide and marginalise on a racial basis. The same could be said with respect to gender. Rosalind Miles, for example, in a different methodological approach to my own, undertakes in her Womens History of the World (1993) a full account of the actual visibility, presence and determinative role of women in the structures of the everyday. Rejecting the patriarchal order of accounting for human progress and human development, she shows how the originary figure in the stories of many peoples around the world, in both its god-making and people-making sense, is female. She carries on in this text to show how these histories are subverted and turned into myths.
The critique I develop here is different. It emphasises the methodology of the explanation of the human subject, and so what follows is an attempt to highlight several key moments/moves in our philosophical and sociological accounting of being human that have come to play a role in how apparently insightful analytic approaches such as social construction come to develop blind spots. The discussion focuses on the central methodological approach used in modern European philosophy namely, that of dialectics and then attempts to show how this foundational approach is determinative in the way fields of thought, such as history in particular, work.
The grand story: dialectics and its uses and abuses

Gilles Deleuze is an important scholar in the discussion on dialectics. Taking an extremely critical view of Hegel, he makes the essential observation that dialectics with its positive postulation of the first proposition, the thesis the self and its negative view of the second, the antithesis the other is the monster in Enlightenment philosophy (Massumi 1987). In this chapter I suggest that it is not necessary that this monstrous view persists and attempt a recovery of its generative possibilities. I hold on to the unqualified belief, as Foucault (2001) points to in the argument he makes in his first lecture to the College de France on the Hermeneutics of the Subject, that the capacity of the self to act on itself and so achieve transcendence is available to all human beings. Gilroy suggests that Foucaults anti-humanist arguments were diminished by his failure to link them to an explicit consideration of racial slavery and the brutal exclusionary character of Western humanism (2000: 65). This is correct, but it is important to hold on to the promise it makes of facilitating the self to
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find its fulfilment: by which one takes responsibility for oneself and by which one changes, purifies, transforms and transfigures oneself [emphasis added] (Foucault 2001: 11). This is the unconditional right of everybody. But this right, however, is withheld from significant groups of people even as it becomes popularly available. In explaining the historiography of the self, Foucault argues that the recovery of Greek and particularly Hellenistic thought in the Enlightenment is marked by a critical parting of the ways in what he calls the Cartesian moment (Davidson 2001: xxv). In this Cartesian moment a disconnection takes place between philosophy and spirituality. At that moment the line of possibility in which subjectivity, truth, spirituality and transcendence come together, as in the work of Spinoza, is systematically terminated and finally effaced (2001: xxv). Spirituality is jettisoned. What takes its place? It is the belief that knowledge of the self is effected through cognition alone. The cognitive turn came into its own between the 17th and the 19th centuries, when the rising European middle class began to explore its power. This exploration played itself out in a collection of important movements which we have come to describe as the Reformation, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Outraged by the arbitrariness of religious and political authority embodied in the church and the monarchical state, key philosophers began to examine the intellectual basis upon which the mass of the people in Europe were kept in a state of oppression. Amidst a veritable flowering of creative political and philosophical analysis in which the nature of truth, virtue and beauty was investigated, they took it upon themselves to explain the nature of human beings and their differences and similarities. In the process they refined a methodological approach to difference and similarity which, Deleuze suggests, sought to render representation infinite (orgiastic) of allowing representation to conquer the obscure; of allowing it to include the vanishing of difference which is too small and the dismemberment of difference which is too large. The purpose of this effort, Deleuze argues, was to become orgiastic and to conquer the in-itself (1994: 262). Deleuzes work in explaining how this effort of conquering difference played itself out is a powerful moment in comprehending the story and history of being and subjectivity. The work is important in understanding the politics upon which self and other come to be predicated. It encapsulates and provides a template upon which to understand who is to be included, who is the same and who is different. It is the methodological and procedural line of analysis
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to which we need to pay attention. In terms of this methodological possibility, Deleuzes notion of difference and similarity offers, in its orgiastic potential, the opportunity of infinite possibility. This is the moment at which the world holds its breath. The moment is characterised by a sense of expectation awaiting birth, out of the orgiastic is the unknown and the unknowable. The enormity of the methodological line of analysis is its demand for unconditional acceptance of the complexity of human identity. This is the gift that Deleuze presents to the world, a kind of thinking that is not beholden to anything. It is, however, in the struggle to represent this infinity that the idea comes up against challenges. Its representational modalities, its cogito complex in seeking to call on and rely on a particular kind of cognition to manage difference, the dismemberment of difference which is too large, are what we need to unpack. For understanding the phenomenon of difference, the moment is of great consequence. In the metaphor of Deleuzes orgiastic thinking, it opens up the possibility of infinite difference. The productive tension and how this tension is managed is what makes scholars such as Deleuze and iek crucial. They argue that the moment presents itself as a moment of transcendental possibility but fails. Deleuze says that Liebniz and Hegel drive this tension in a particular direction. Post-structuralist thought Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze in particular in the 20th century and imaginative scholars such as iek in the 21st restores to this tension its productive nature. In his own work, Deleuzes purpose is to think difference in itself independently of the forms of representation which reduce it to the Same, and the relation of different to different independently of those which make them pass through the negative (1994: xix). Where does this negative come from and what is it about? The issue to which philosophers thinking about difference had to apply their minds reached an intense point in the ferment of the changes through which Europe was going in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Old certainties no longer applied. A future beckoned, one in which new experiences, new vistas of possibility opened up for people. But how could the difference the difference of social class in the main, but also the difference of people, their cultural practices, their social values, their aesthetics and their relationships with their environments be made sense of? How could difference be rescued from its maledictory state (Deleuze 1994: 29)? How could difference be determined? It is in this space that the solution of reason comes into its own and presents itself as a way of relat[ing] determination to other determinations within a
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form (1994: 29). Deleuze explains that there are four principal aspects to reason in so far as reason offers itself as a medium within which difference can be represented: identity, in the form of the undetermined concept; analogy, in the relation between ultimate determinable concepts; opposition, in the relation between determinations within concepts; resemblance, in the determined object of the concept itself (1994: 29). A stage in this classificatory process of what the difference constitutes is critical for whether the difference might be contained conceptually or, as Deleuze suggests, inscribed within the concept in general (1994: 27). To keep it within, it has to be asked whether the differences are Large or Small (Deleuzes capitalisation). The interesting point about this methodology is that it begins from the premise that the quality of difference, whether Large or Small, is not naturally attributed to the One, the First, the thesis, but is only applied to that which is different. In this procedure of measuring the difference, the question arises of how far the difference can and must extend to assess whether it remains within the limits of the concept. As this discussion progresses one can see the foundational significance it has for comprehending difference such as race. Must difference, Deleuze continues, have been mediated in order to render it both liveable and thinkable (1994: 30)? The challenge was that difference had to leave its cave and cease to be a monster, or at least only that which escapes at the propitious moment must persist as a monster, that which constitutes only a bad encounter (Deleuze 1994: 29). This is the testing moment for what Europe offers to the world. Can its methodology for talking about and making sense of difference express the wonder and the infinitude of the world? Can its discourse of reason encompass north and south, east and west? I remain with Deleuze to assess how well this moment fares. Deleuze argues that Hegel appears to push the idea of difference to the limit, but this path is a dead-end which brings it back to identity, making identity the sufficient condition for difference to exist and to be thoughtThe intoxications and giddiness are feigned, the obscure is already clarified from the outset. Nothing shows this more clearly than the monocentricity of the circles in the Hegelian dialectic (1994: 263). Deleuze suggests that this monocentricity arises through strategies of representation, the mode of talking of difference in European thought which follows the Platonic attempt to distinguish between essences and appearances. He argues that representation is a site of transcendental illusion which comes in four interrelated forms that correspond to thought, sensibility, the idea and
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being. I concentrate on the third, the idea. In explaining the idea in Hegel, Deleuze says that the original idea the origin is a genuine objectivit[y] which is made up of differential elements that amount to what can be called a problematic. This original problematic precedes all affirmation, but is none the less completely positive (1994: 267). Its negative is the shadow cast upon the affirmations produced by a problem a powerless double. Hegel puts it this way: Difference implicit is essential difference, the Positive and the Negative [emphasis in original]. The Positive is the identical selfrelation in such a way as not to be the Negative, and the Negative is the different by itself so as not to be the Positive. Thus either has an existence of its own in proportion as it is not the other. The one is made visible in the other, and is only in so far as that other is Either in this way is the others own other. (1977: 171172) It is here that the methodology expresses its fatal flaw. The trouble begins, Deleuze explains, when these affirmations are represented in consciousness because problems-ideas are by nature unconscious [emphasis added]If we attempt to reconstitute problems in the image of or as resembling conscious propositions, then the illusion takes shape, the shadow awakens and appears to acquire a life of its own (1994: 267). In the process each affirmation or idea has sense only through reference to its negative and so a generalised negationtakes the place of the problemThus begins the long history of the distortion of the dialecticThe dialectic instance is now defined by a non-being which is the being of the negative (1994: 268). The problem with this, says Deleuze, is that all of this would not amount to much if it werent for the moral suppositions and practical implications of such a distortion (1994: 268). iek says that one has here the gesture of universalisation. The act of knowing portends towards the obliteration of particular differences but, in the end, fails: the form of abstract universality [in the subject] as such is not gender-neutral, but inherently masculineCogito effectively stands for the white upper-class male patriarchal individual (iek 1999: 117). In coming to understand the normative world which Charles Taylor describes, the foundational fixing inside this gesture requires us to be extremely cautious about how we proceed. iek draws our attention to the patriarchal proclivities of the cogito. For our purposes, as much needs to be made of the racial proclivities of the cogito. There are a number of commentaries about Hegels statements about race (see Appiah 1996; Hegel 1977). These are important,
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but they dont engage with the deeper internalisation of othering within the foundational procedures employed by Hegel, the fundamental othering the attribution of non-being which is embedded in the dialectic. The relevance of this is evident in the way even the most progressive scholars of difference, particularly Marx, struggled to break out of the inherently othering logic within the dialectic as it confronted vanishing difference. Hegel abandoned the rigour of the dialectic when he came face to face with African difference: The peculiarly African character is difficult to comprehend, for the very reason that in reference to it we must give up the principle which naturally accompanies all our ideas [emphasis in original] the category of universality (Gilroy 2000: 65). One cringes and wants to weep for these our intellectual forebears. But it is equally hurtful when Marx opines in ways dismissive of India. Not even the assuaging observation that Marx was a product of his time is sufficient justification for letting him off the hook. Marx, for example, saw the emergence of the modern state in the colonies as an instrument that was, at once, actuated by the vilest interest (Gilroy 2000: 65). And so, yes, he saw how feudalism and its oppressions were structured into the fabric of Indian society, but even he succumbed to the general racialised othering implicit in the dialectic. He argued that modernity would fulfil the mission of the annihilation of old Asiatic society (Goldberg 2002: 5152). This old Asiatic society, as Marx put it, had always been the foundation of Oriental despotismthey restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compassenslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies (Goldberg 2002: 5152). Embedded in Marxs views, and expressed even more extremely by Hegel and Mills, is a racial sense of rationality (see Appiah 1996 on Mills and Hegel). In characterising the emptiness of the other in these terms, one has the evidence of the failure of the cogito: Only the shadows of history live by negation: the good enter into it with all the power of a posited differential or a difference affirmed[In the process] differences are not resolved; they are dissipated by capturing the problem of which they reflect only the shadow (Deleuze 1994: 268). Deleuze calls this development the history of the long error (1994: 301). The substance of the error is that difference is always derived from and only possible thinkable within a pre-existing sameness. To the original is posited the possibility of multivocality positive difference while the different is univocal dependent on the original. He suggests that if this game of difference is to be played properly, in terms of the divine if necessary, then recognition must be made of its difficulty: impossible to deal with in the world
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of representation. First there is no pre-existent rule, since the game includes its own rules (1994: 283). Deleuze, of course, is not talking about race. It is the Other, broadly defined, that he is describing. Vital in this description, however, is the world of the raced, the gendered other. What he provides is a crucially important deconstruction of the representational devices of modern philosophy and its sorting and ranking impulses. The significance of this strategy of representation and its effects on the social sciences are visible in the limited ways in which much social description has engaged the discussion of difference. While much of the social sciences seldom works with Hegel in ways which allow it to engage its complexity, it is the spirit of Hegel which infuses modern work where the antithesis is normalised as the other and in the process dominance is inscribed into representation. Representations strategic routines are embodied in the attribution of the negative to the antithesis. As Quayson and Goldberg argue: all binary oppositions are valueladen, with the first term implicitly assumed to have an ethical or conceptual, normative or indeed logical priority over the second (2002: xii). In the process the seduction is performed of concealing the project of power and hegemony in representations strategic approach. And so the racial other is inscribed into philosophy. Philosophy becomes, sadly, an anthropology of race. ieks assessment of the procedural power of the dialectic confirms how much it is structured in a kind of inevitabilist and, again for purposes of our discussion, racist logic. The work of Bhaskar is crucial in understanding how this methodology might be used in more inclusive ways. This discussion and the alternatives suggested in Deleuzes rhizomatic approach are engaged in the concluding sections of this chapter. What remains is to show how the long error is perpetuated in the disciplines. Gilroy suggests that the methodology of the Enlightenment and its pretensions towards universality were punctured from the moment of their conception in the womb of colonial space (2000: 65). How this puncturing comes to work is particularly important to track in the field of history.
History and its others

The site of history is the most critical arena in which the effects of these pretensions towards universality manifest themselves. Gilroy (2000) is helpful in setting the scene. In an explanation of how the process of modernity shapes and conditions the world, its rapid penetration into the personal and social space of individuals and people everywhere, he shows how a special
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formula for the relationship between territory, individuality, property, war and society evolved (2000: 55). This special formula is epitomised in the founding myth of Robinson Crusoe the primogenetic figure of European identity. He presents and represents the virtues of frugality, self-awareness, ingenuity, industriousness and clear-mindedness. But he is also man enough. He knows his place and responsibility in the world. It falls to him to act with the appropriate sense of his relationships with his subordinates around him. He therefore fully comprehends the necessity, in the interests of the greater good, of taking the lives of the natives whose barbarous customs were their own disaster (2000: 55). Presaging the figures of Columbus in the Americas and Van Riebeeck in South Africa, the great white saviour of world history is introduced. It is his role in life to imagine for his people the limits of civilised possibility. His example, says Gilroy, helps to demonstrate how the reach of the European world and its distinctive resources of violence emerge in this consideration of modernity as a major issue, not only for the history of capitalist commerce, but also for historical understanding of national government and the geopolitical projection of states as discrete cultures arranged in antagonistic national units. From this perspective, modernity can also be used to introduce the problems posed by the relationship of capitalism, industrialism, and democracy to the emergence and consolidation of systematic racethinking. The concept frames these enquiries into the connection between rationality and irrationality by directing attention towards the links between racial typologies and the heritage of the Enlightenment. (2000: 55) This process produced a fateful common sense ideas of truth, race and identity. Race became the axis upon which a differentiation took place between Europe and the rest of the world. The standards of power, virtue, beauty all came to be measured against a comparative imagination informed by the absolute precedence of Europe. In the process dominant groups could enlist the momentum of history on their side and treat their anachronistic subordinates as if they belonged to the past and had no future (2000: 57). I continue to draw on Gilroy in the next few paragraphs if only because he makes the argument I wish to make so much more elegantly. He explains how ideas of race existed before modernity and that many historians say that race is not an automatic principle of differentiation. He quotes the work of Eric
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Voegelin, which emphasises that the race idea is not a theory in the strict sense of the word but one has to be cautious in dismissing it because it has been conscripted to assist in the very constitution of reality (2000: 57). In this process of constituting reality, Gilroy argues, the modern sciences, especially anthropology, geography and philosophy, undertook elaborate work in order to make the idea of race epistemologically correct. This required novel ways of understanding embodied alterity, hierarchy, and temporalitythe close connection between race and modernity can be viewed with special clarity if we allow our understanding of modernity to travel (2000: 58). In allowing our understanding of modernity to travel, as Gilroy suggests, it is very evident how explicitly history itself has been used to account for the new global arrangements that were taking form at the beginning of the 19th century (see Ranger et al. 1996; White 1999). Goldberg, for example, has argued that for countries such as England and France the racialisation of rule was seen as the outcome of history, domination ordained by the hidden hand of historical development, the fact of historically produced superiority (2002: 83). This racial rule informs and in some ways provides the script for history. In the hands of scholars and political analysts from John Stuart Mill to Marx, the model subsists on a developmental conceit about the improvability of native and colonial people, chaperoned into the future by Europeans. In the narratives of Europe the child races of the world have a model of how they might themselves develop. But they also have visible evidence of the justness, the legitimacy, of the greatness of Europe in the European peninsulas history. Essential to this history are notions of authenticity and purity. It is on these foundational characteristics that the virtue and ingenuity of Europe lay. How this history works is important to understand. Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) provide us with a critique of the invented nature of this history. Its function in the discourse of superiority and inferiority is essentially to demonstrate the reason the legitimacy behind Europes dominance. The substance of the argument rests on the neo-Darwinian claim to biological superiority. The fittest have not only survived but have come to prevail. The point of this invention is essentially to keep in place the fiction of a raced notion of nation. The nation is itself the product of a long and uninterrupted reproduction of purity. These ideas perversely spawn their analogues all over the European world. They begin in England but are invented in similar register in Germany, Italy, France, Spain, and so on. In the Americas, the anti-monarchist version is presented in the figures of the Puritan Founding
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Fathers silver-grey-haired males immaculately transposed into the barbarism of the American continent. They are then taken up in the non-metropolitan world, with ideas of India, China, and so on, and within these of smaller subunits such as Hindus in India, or those of the Zulu and the Xhosa in South Africa. The displacement of notions of race and their reconstitution through ideas of ethnicity is an important development to take note of because the naturalisation of race, without ever having to own up to its use in language, persists. The terms themselves are dehistoricised and are rendered naturally as if their content and meaning are self-evident. As signifiers they are invested with social properties that are assumed to authentically attach to them. America as white, India as Hindu, South Africa as black are concepts that are produced as constructs of nature. Space is claimed lebensraum in racial ways. The striking feature of this historiography is that it acknowledges simultaneously the idea of the singularity of the human race and the reality of the difference of lived experience. Africans, for example, are improvable in this argument, but there is need to recognise the actual superiority of Europe. This superiority is evident in the obvious histories of different parts of the world. History therefore lends itself as a logical, value-free template upon which all social development can be modelled. As Goldberg says, It could be arguedthat racial historicism similarly informs contemporary neo-conservative commitments to colorblindness, in the US, South Africa, Britain and Europe (2002: 86). How does this historiography work to reinforce racial hegemony? Any number of examples can be used to illustrate the point. The example of South Africa itself is crucial, and in a subsequent chapter I illustrate how the process works there. The most developed explanation of its uses is evident in the work of the subalternist scholars in India. The value of their work lies in asserting the autonomous nature of the local and how extensively the local experience, with all its virtues, warts and barnacles, has to be engaged to understand better human complexity. They have not been entirely successful in escaping critique. The criticism that one can make is that they remain within the compass of a modernist European sociology. I want to suggest that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with that. It demands of all of us that we work even harder in coming to a sense of that which isnt easily visible in our lives. But the subalternists can be used to show us how the teleology of race functions in dominant accounts of history. I draw particularly on Ashish Nandys work (2005) on Gandhi.
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The value of Nandy is that he focuses on the importance of the life and works of Gandhi for the project of working across social difference. He helps us understand, through Gandhi, the teleological nature of modern history. Narratives of this modern history present historical development as an inevitable story of progress which requires a pathway from primitivism to modernity, and from political immaturity to political adulthood, which the ideology of colonialism would have the subject society and the child races walk (Nandy 2005: 55). In this narrative, understanding or public consciousness is seen as the causal product of history. The present emanates out of an unfolding teleology of a long and unchanging past. For Gandhi, however, this past is anything but unchangeable. It is a variable construct. It is not, to use Nandys terms, one-way traffic which pre-empts where the future might go. It is, in its configuration as myth, a resource which one can use to widen rather than restrict choice and agency. Myths widen human choices by resisting co-optation by the uniformizing world view of modern science (2005: 59). At the core of Gandhis critique of Western notions of history is the postmedieval and Enlightenment era understanding of time, which chose to place emphasis on causes rather than structures why as opposed to what and the rationality of constant adjustment to historical reality pragmatic behaviour rather than the rationality of a fundamentally critical attitude towards earlier interpretations (Nandy 2005: 59). He rejected the idea that historical societies were the true representatives of mature human selfconsciousness and especially its corollary that the more human beings were able to historically objectify the past through fact the more control they would have over their consciousness or their egos. He inverted that argument by saying that the more one understood ones ego, the closer one would be to managing the processes of the id brain processes. Gandhis commentary on the Gita is important here. He writes to his people in his ashram: desire is insatiable like fire, and taking possession of mans senses, mind and intellect, knocks him down. Therefore first control your senses, and then conquer the mind. When you have done this, the intellect will also obey your orders (Gandhi 1968: 279). Significantly, in this argument lies the opportunity for individuals and the communities to which they belong to choose their own futures without, as Nandy argued, high drama and without a constant search for originality, discontinuous changes and final victories (2005: 62). It is in this search for originality that the ultimately dubious
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substance of this teleology lies, precisely because behind it lies a conception of the great European bermensch who provides for the child races the path that they need to walk. In this conception or telling of how history works, history is pre-eminently a European experience because it describes, logically, rationally and normatively, how communities grow up. The other has no history. He only has stories, myths and fables. His whole life is framed in the mystery of the fabulous. Unlike Europe, there is no science there. Baudrillard comments, for example, that we in the West are doomed to think that everything comes from us (Baudrillard & Guillaume 2008: 69). The power of this seduction and the pusillanimous ripostes to it in our historiographical approaches are beyond reckoning and have come to limit our ability to recognise how much we have been captured by such narrations of our history. Race remains the unspoken virtue in this framework, almost never having to declare itself. This approach of race never having to declare itself is evident in contemporary conflicts. The current crisis in the Middle East presents a prime example of how race works. Huntingtons The Clash of Civilizations (1993) is often referred to in terms of understanding the current challenge of racism between the West and the East. The importance of this work is that it has almost singlehandedly come to provide the justification for the kind of intolerance one sees in many parts of the world. Behind it, of course, lies the idea of civilisation versus barbarism. Europe and America and their allies, representing the West, stand for civilisation. The Muslim world, represented by Iraq and Iran, stand for barbarism. Powerfully in terms of this narrative, each of the protagonists is easily represented: the West as white and virtuous, the rest as coloured and questionable. Race might never be declared but it is the route through which the protagonists reveal themselves.
Beyond the negativity

Scholars such as Flecha et al. (2006) are pessimistic about the ways in which modern inheritors of the Enlightenment have worked with ideas of social difference. The suggestion is made that the particular direction in which deconstruction has been led is to retain an interest in the ideas of difference but not those of equality. These ideas of difference leave the door open to forms of authoritarian difference: From a relativist approach, whereby every culture can only be understood and judged from within, there is room for the appearance of some authoritarian groups that strive to impose their own views on the rest of the members of that cultural group (2006: 235).
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The challenge these scholars have not fully confronted is how susceptible ideas of difference are to co-optation. Multiculturalism is one such space of co-optation. Outwardly benign, multiculturalism has at its core a project of dominance. In the way that it essentialises identity, and particularly conflates race and culture, it strips away difference in all of its wonder. It constitutes and congeals difference in the vocabulary and language of description belonging to hierarchy and dominance. It exemplifies Hegels positivity and negativity. The positive, that of the hegemonic, determines how far the negative can be tolerated. In presenting itself as a paradigm of difference, multiculturalism succumbs to the rules of Baudrillards game the rule of race, nation and culture and its sorting and ranking impulses. The possibility within it of working with difference in creative ways is systematically rejected. Instead, the identities of dominance such as whiteness that people are asked to inhabit for the process of disavowing them are more fully habituated. The cry I am a white woman or I am black and I am proud becomes not an opportunity for deconstruction but a statement of certainty. Quayson and Goldberg argue with respect to this process of representation that it is afflicted by the fact that it has to claim an object of academic study which it is obliged, simultaneously, to disavow. The claim and disavowal are constitutive of its very object of study (2002: xiii). They show how this has happened in feminist studies. But the same is the case for studies of difference of race. It is here that the insidiousness of difference finds its true expression because it is immobilised at the very moment that it is being called upon to be recognised and so deconstructed. The power of dominance is played out at this moment. The categories of difference that are invoked are not made the subject of questioning. The opposite takes place. They are reified.
Race and the end of racism?

Where does all of this leave us? Can the gift of deconstruction be recuperated? Against this apparatus of distinction and analysis, how can one begin to imagine a social world that is determined differently? How can the teleology of race be broken? In recuperating the methodology of distinction and taking it beyond the negativity it projects, it is necessary to recognise and acknowledge how much room there remains for building a theoretical approach to racial difference that is not tendentious in the way the Hegelian method is, nor defeatist in the ways the individualist approaches of some postmodernists have taken the discussion.
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There are two stages to thinking about a methodological process in going forward. The first is reconstituting the power of the dialectic and the second is to use it to develop an approach to race which is not prefigured in the determinative vocabulary of biological or cultural superiority. In order to recover a fuller dialectical methodology, I draw on Roy Bhaskar (2008). Bhaskars Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom is an important elucidation of how the logic of absence in the dialectic can be reworked. The purpose of Bhaskars work is to counter what he calls Western bourgeois triumphalism. He goes further, however. He takes in the advances made in the postmodern discussion and acknowledges the critique it offers of universality and the insights it offers, through deconstruction, into difference and diversity, but strongly critiques it for its rejection of any kind of universality (Hartwig 2008: xvii). As Hartwig says, while Bhaskar acknowledges the value of the postmodern critique for its ethical insistence on identifying power, his own work seeks to engage, unapologetically, with the project of elaborating an ethics grounded in truth. Bhaskars general theory begins with the critique that Hegel and his followers developed an approach to meaning which was founded on a fallacy. This fallacy was based on what he called irrealism, a non-transcendental realism. It de-ontologised and de-negativised the world by prefiguring it in a primal squeeze (Hartwig 2008: xxiv). How this primal squeeze works is effectively to begin from a monovalent determinant the original thesis. This monovalency determines the trajectory of the discourse of difference: on ontological monovalence you can talk about the world, but in a way that rules out absence and change (2008: xxv). Bhaskar himself argues that what is needed to invest in the dialectic its real transcendental possibility is to begin with real negation: Real negation or the absent [emphasis in original], whether in the guise of the inexplicitor the merely incomplete [will] drive the Hegelian dialectic on, andwill drive the dialectic past him (2008: 38). His essential move is to make his first point of departure less determinative than that expressed in the Hegelian logic. It may be not only as large or small as is naturally possible but indefinite and/ or open (2008: 39). The significance of this is great. It does not begin in the utterly determinative way which inheres in Hegels dialectic where the first sense is positive, and wholly complete. In his critically realist framework, Bhaskar argues that this is necessary to avoid the narrative of causality implied in Hegels attempts to reveal difference and movement: It is my intention
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to maintain(1) that we can refer to non-being, (2) that non-being exists and that (3) not only must it be conceded that non-being has ontological priority over being within zero-level being, (4) but, further, non-being has ontological priority over being (2008: 39). The reason for doing this is of real importance. He seeks to foreground the contingency both epistemological and ontological of existential, not least human existential, questions which the tradition of ontological monovalence screens. I shall contend that this exercise is necessary for that emancipation of dialectic emancipation (2008: 40). The methodological inversion he achieves is intense. The first in the dialectic no longer enjoys ontological priority. It does not begin with the presupposition of a factual positive. For our purposes, in thinking of social difference, it does not begin with a positive Europe. If anything, the point of departure, as the referent, could begin anywhere, and it could begin as a partial or incomplete statement. The effect is to produce a much more intersubjective relationship between the first the thesis and whatever else the antithesis is to follow. This comes to produce what Bhaskar then describes as an adequate theory of truth, as opposed to one which is absolute or incontrovertible. We have here the pervasive presence of absences: Reference to absence is quintessential to non-idealistic dialectic (2008: 43). It is non-predicative and less propositional than the traditional approach a counter to the fixism of the traditional. The human agent in this approach must be able to affect the source of the given. So ontic changemust occur in a world containing human agency We must envisage dialectic as the great loosener,structural fluidity and interconnectedness (2008: 44). The significance of this approach for thinking about difference is great. It rejects monism, reductionism, essentialism and fundamentalism, including the ideas of unique beginnings, rock bottoms and fixed foundations, all of which smack of anthropic cognitive triumphalism (Bhaskar 2008: 45). It opens up a world which is open-ended. History in this approach can no longer be approached teleologically. It cannot begin with determinants that have any presumptive value. Using this approach, I want to suggest that we can look at history in a much more productive way. Macedo and Gounari (2006) emphasise how important it is to begin the process of historicising the concept of race. In relation to this, it is important to recognise how much social constructionism in its captured use plays into the reproduction of race and its attendant problems. Central to this captured use is an occluded social constructionism a social
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constructionism which lacks unselfconsciousness and so, following Bhaskar, is unable to recognise its failure to identify the absences and incompletenesses within it. This kind of social constructionism pivots on the dehistoricising of racism and its disarticulation from political struggle (Macedo & Gounari 2006). It leads to a failure to see how tellings of social genesis and social formation, the story of domination and subordination, trade in and subsist on ideas of authenticity and the national principle, but also the elevation of race to a determinative position in theories of history, thus naturalising them. Pedagogy is, needless to say, central to elaboration of this approach to social constructionism. As Dimitriades and Carlson (2003) argue, critical pedagogy, drawing from Paulo Freire, the Frankfurt school and the work of a generation of critical scholars such as Henry Giroux, has been valuable in preserving the promise that education holds. But even it has been held at bay. It has been held at bay, I suggest, because the work we do is at every step of the way political. It never ceases to be so. The emptying out of the political in social construction is, however, not about the espousal of the political as in the citation of one or other causes, but the personal politics of the self and the self-awareness that is currently absent in the work of social constructionists. In this, history and the making of the historical present is everything. Social constructionist pedagogy is aware of the politics of its own production. It seeks to bring to the surface, to make available for introspection and for study, the content and trajectory of that which is to be mediated. In thinking how this might be achieved, Said refers to Hugh of St Victor, who could have been talking to a practice of dialectics which refuses fixity, priority or authenticity: It is therefore, a source of great virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about invisible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether. The person who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is his native soil is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong person has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his. (Said 1994: 407) Awerbuck, Said explains, cited this passage as a model for anyone man and woman [emphasis in original] wishing to transcend the restraints of
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imperial or national or provincial limits (1994: 407). Said argues that it is only through such an attitude that the historian can begin to grasp what he calls the human experience in all its diversity and particularity. His argument as it unfolds is important to trace. The strong or perfect achieves his or her status not through rejection and disavowal of ones attachments but by a process of working through them. Exile, Hugos place of extinction, is a place marked by the existence of love and a bond with ones native place, but inherent in each [exile] is an unexpected, unwelcome lossthe [recognition of this] actual condition makes it impossible to recover that sweetness, and even less possible to derive satisfaction from substitutes furnished by illusion or dogma, whether deriving from prideor from certainty about who we are (Said 1994: 407). What is critical about the argument is the recognition of how much the certainty and singularity the dogma of bound identities limit the possibility or the opportunity of the individual to recognise the illusions, the fabrications, the constructions that hold certainty up and even make it possible. Saids argument is to move beyond the assurance of labels, which he describes as starting points, and to imagine the possibility that each story has its own narrative economy in which imagination and dreams, or even the recuperation of them, operate as vehicles of agency and vitality in the making of identity. Seizing hold of these and recognising them as stories moves them beyond the certainties of space and place. They take on lives of their own. It is there, towards that vitality, that a pedagogy of dialectics needs to seek out and to move. It needs to be aware of the process of making the narrative and what its constructionist weaknesses and strengths are.
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Creolisation, multiplicity, education and identity
The previous chapter was deliberately conceptual. It sought to show that much of the vocabularies and languages of description is often pre-scripted. The words we use to describe our worlds are never new but are captured, so to speak. I drew on Deleuze to show how this has come about and offered a Bhaskarian perspective to suggest what alternative views of describing the world we could look to. In this chapter my intention is to highlight how messy, even licentious, the world is as a space of ideas, beliefs and practices. It is irredeemably hybrid. In contrast to the hegemonic presentation of the self and his or her worlds, which worships at the feet of purity, I celebrate the looseness of life. I get there, however, indirectly. I begin with a discussion of education and look at how it is positioned in relation to the complexity of this looseness.
Formal education and its compulsions

Almost everywhere and irrespective of the level at which it takes place, formal education tends to be the terrain on which the forces of domination work out their ideological strategies. Whether one is talking of working-class Britain or remote Eritrea, which believes that it has been able to withstand the forces of globalisation and to maintain the integrity of its tradition and history, formal education has essentially been the medium through which the hegemony of modernity has been mediated. What is important about this mediation is its investment with very specific kinds of conceits, which have made it, at least formally so, a particularly intolerant cultural project. It has not been able to provide space for other ways of being or of knowing. Instead, it has sought to shut out other cultural practices and shut down other ways of doing things. This may well have been the case with other imperialistic epistemological approaches, such as the imposition of Roman culture on the world during the early centuries of the first millennium. But in reference to the time and space of modernity, it is important to recognise how much modernity, formally speaking (and I emphasise formally because I wish to show later that modernity has other unintended consequences), does not have the capacity for
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engaging with other ways of knowing, other epistemological or ontological approaches to life. Having positioned the modernist project in this way, we can then ask, what are the intersections or articulations between the experiences of creolisation and education? The answer is by no means obvious. It does not come in a blinding flash. However, there is a good deal to say that does not need at all to make this occasion a forced or manufactured moment produced somewhat artificially. In some ways, much of the discussion around creolisation is about education and stands in an implicit relation to it. In emphasising how much this discussion is about the formal dimensions of education, we need also to be mindful of the need to hold a broader view of what education is. I dont want to speak about education in a way which limits it to those transactions that happen while one is in the school or the university. Of course, a great deal of it is about that, but I want to talk about education in terms of its transactional value, both inside and outside those immediate spaces, as it is used as a means of identification. I am therefore interested in its social location, its social value, what it does to one and what one does with it. There are several things I am attempting to do in this contribution. I am, in the first instance, interested in mapping the educational discourse in relation to questions of power, identity and culture. What is this discourse saying about hybridity, multiculturalism, creolisation, syncretism, and the whole family of concepts that deal with difference? What spaces exist within formal education for working with and managing difference? In the second instance, having argued successfully, I hope, that dominant discourse can produce space and spaces, I seek to show that opportunities for asking hard questions about (one) self and the other do exist within the project of modernity, and that therefore, in a sense, modernity is not a pre-scripted text. This leads, if you like, to a third instance, in which I talk to the creolised space that follows education, especially if one works with the notion of education as being the handmaiden of modernity.
The dance with the other

In an article that is now more than 30 years old, entitled Education and Neocolonialism, Philip Altbach (1995) begins as follows: The old colonial era, some say, is dead. Evidence? Most formerly colonial areas are now independent nations. He goes on, however, to show how entrenched are the practices of colonialism, particularly as they might manifest themselves in education. Altbach, of course, understands colonialism (and neocolonialism)
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in a particular way. In his accounting, it is a political structure developed and implemented as a planned policy of advanced nations to maintain their influence on developing countries. We would understand neocolonialism slightly differently today. We would see it less conspiratorially, not so much as something that the rich or indeed rich nations do to the poor. While it may have features of that, it is rather a system of ideas and practices that is embedded within the structures of the entire modern world. It might, in the symbolically more contested world of the colony and the post-colony, appear to be writ large, but it exists also in the developed world itself, where processes of a kind of internal colonialism are playing themselves out and are embodied in the symbolic and cultural systems of that world. This qualification of Altbach notwithstanding, the important point in pursuing this line of thinking is to emphasise that the colonial model of formal education is now nigh universal. It is not only nurtured and reproduced everywhere, but is indeed celebrated everywhere. Curricula in most countries, and I cannot think of a single exception, work almost entirely within the logic of the colonial model. While systems might present nuances in their detail, in their broad design and their implementation they differ very little from the hegemonic script. With this reliance on the colonial model, indigenous systems of education everywhere have been destroyed or totally decentred, marginalised and trivialised. The basic model for displacing indigenous systems of education emerged during the period of British domination in India. The British introduced structures and systems of education in India which were replicated in the rest of the world, particularly in the English-speaking world. What is called Native education in Africa, Australasia, Asia, the Middle East and North America are all adopted or adapted versions of this model. Central to it was the violent displacement of indigenous forms of socialisation or of induction of young people into adulthood. In India, it involved the physical separation of the young from their parents. The children of the Rajah were sent to England, and the children of the lesser classes were packed off to boarding schools. When the British began to think about education, their purpose was to find a way of civilising the Hindoo, as they put it. They quickly came to the conclusion that they could not afford a mass education system and so sought instead to establish a class of interpreters Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect, as described by Lord Thomas
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Macaulay, colonial bureaucrat in British India in the mid-19th century. To this class was and still is accorded the great responsibility for making the mass of the population fit and improve itself. How then stands the case? Macaulay asked. We have to, he said, educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue. We must teach them some foreignlanguage. The claims of our own language it is hardly necessary to recapitulate. It stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the westThe question now before us is simply whether, when it is in our power to teach this language, we shall teach languages in which, by universal confession, there are no books on any subject which deserve to be compared to our ownshall [we] countenance, at the public expense, medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier, Astronomy, which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school, History abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns thousands years long, and Geography, made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter. (1995: 428429) What is important about this approach is its basic presumptions, its conceits, to use a fashionable term, and also its modalities. It is not just the curriculum which makes the point about the way domination works but the attitude which surrounds it. English and English culture are unquestionable virtues. Education in these terms is at the heart of making the colony and the empire. The process through which this happens is clearly complex and much more involved than I can do justice to here, but what emerges out of it is crucial for the British Empire. Farish, a British official in India in the 1830s, makes the point: The natives must either be kept down by a sense of our power, or they must willingly submit from a conviction that we are more wise, more just, more humane, and more anxious to improve their condition than any rulers they could have (Viswanath 1997: 113). In other words, the process leads to domination by consent and the emplacement of the educated subject as a part of the colonial apparatus. As Ashcroft et al. put it: Education becomes a technology of colonialist subjectification in twoimportant and intrinsically interwoven ways. It establishes the locally English or British as normative through critical claims to universality of the values embodied in English literary texts, and it represents the colonised to themselves as inherently inferior beings wild, barbarous, uncivilised. (1995: 426)
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A significant point about this process is its early presence in the unfolding narrative of modernity and its deployment and reproduction in education systems almost everywhere. As mass education systems are established around the world in the late 1800s and early 1900s (and only, as we recognise, in many African countries by independence in the mid-20th century), it is this established model inherited from British India that is replicated. I am not able to explore this history here, but there is an important issue that needs careful fleshing out because it involves, especially in the English capitalist world, the coming into being of an approach to education in the presence of the subordinate, whether we are talking of the Americas or of what is known as the Far East. What is central to this education system, invoking similar or adapted characteristics wherever it goes, is the recitation that the young learn about their identities. Using the same curriculum, the children of the privileged, invariably white, and the children of the subordinate, invariably those of colour, learn the politics of position. In this politics, self is universalised as whiteness and other is about the condition of not being white. Of course, it is a great deal more complicated, but the fundamental fissure involving the couplet of race and education is worked out through these politics. There are many points to work with, key among them being that at the heart of modern education is a system of signs and symbols whose goal is the objectification of inequality or what one might describe as the naturalisation of inequality. All learn what their roles and places are. Differentiation is deep and decisive. It leaves, in the English-speaking world, white people in power and people of colour, with, of course, particular variations and permutations of this story, languishing at the receiving end of power. The key variation, and in some cases overdetermination of this, is, of course, social class. In many parts of the world, class and colour have to be managed. In the colonial world, class and colour often run together and one sees how the interests of class are managed through race and colour. But the important quality of this complexity must not be underplayed. In all the contexts where class and colour coexist or race and class coexist, privilege and oppression operate in a dynamic and shifting set of relationships. This is the context into which education, virtually everywhere, at least in the English-speaking world, speaks and through which it has to manage the contradiction of its message of possibility and even egalitarianism and the insistent urge of elites to mark the worlds they govern through the attributes of race and class. It is a world which is infinite in terms of where it can go. It is at this point that we turn to looking at how this extraordinary inheritance has been confronted. What possibilities and approaches exist to deal with this
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education system? By way of getting there quickly, because, again, there is a much larger conversation to be had with a large literature, it is important to note that an interest in these questions in education only really takes off in the 1970s. Before that, there are cultural activists who fight for the survival of their languages and cultures, and many more who fight for a place in the mainstream. In South Africa the defining point about resistance in education is that it is essentially a resistance against the provision of inferior education. People struggle not for the acknowledgement of their own histories but for their inclusion in the educational universe of the dominant classes. By and large the cultural subordinate exists in a state of thralldom in relation to dominant culture. Only in the 1970s does a discussion in the mainstream begin about cultural difference and about different histories outside of the mainstream. Very quickly, this discussion crystallises into a debate about multiculturalism. What passes for multiculturalism, however, and what comes to constitute the dominant approach to difference, as the attempt to deal with this history of difference, is now in many places recognised as some kind of anodyne. There is a great deal of literature related to this discussion, but the overwhelming critique essentially says that the dominant form of multiculturalism appropriated by educational authorities is based on a patronising approach framed by a trade in stereotypes samoosas, saris and steel bands. That is essentially where the multicultural project has landed. There are, however, many more serious attempts within education to engage with the question of this dominance in education. One such attempt, beyond the ineptitude of much of what passes as multiculturalism, comes from Lawrence Grossberg (1994). In an inaugural lecture to the Waterbury Forum for Education and Cultural Studies at Pennsylvania State University, he speaks of four kinds of pedagogical responses to dominance, the first three of which he is critical of and the last which he offers as a new way to get at what he calls the double articulation between pedagogy and culture (pedagogy as cultural practice and pedagogy of cultural practice). The first response assumes that the teacher already understands the truth to be imparted to the student. As Grossberg says, while this approach might achieve emancipatory outcomes, it assumes that the teacher understands the real meanings of texts and the power relations embodied within them, and the real interests of the social groups in the classroom and the wider society. The second response is what is called the dialogical approach. This approach aims to allow the silenced to speak. Its problem, as Grossberg says, is that it assumes that the students are not already speaking. Implicit in this, as he suggests, is the impossibility of hearing what
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the student is already saying. The third response is what Grossberg calls a praxical pedagogy, in terms of which people are offered the skills that would enable them to understand and intervene in their own history. Like the second approach, this approach also assumes that people are not already doing this. What is important about all three of these approaches, and they represent what critical pedagogy has to offer in terms of thinking of difference, is, as Grossberg says, their complicity with dominance. As radical as they might be, they remain in the grip of contemporary forms of power. They remain located within the dominant aesthetic sensibility. They emanate from a dominant sensibility somewhat uncomfortable with the attempt to invest in pedagogy the possibility of working with and inside the other. They always, however, remain defined by the dominant. In reaching for a fourth approach, Grossberg talks of a pedagogy of articulation and risk. While such a pedagogy does not abandon claims to authority, it moves in the direction of Deleuze and Guattaris (1987) rhizomatic methods of multiplying connections between things that apparently have nothing to do with each other. Kobeena Mercer (1992) sees this pedagogy as an attempt to speak to conditions of exile and displacement, homelessness and restlessness, as an attempt that refuses to assume that either theory or politics can be known in advance, as an attempt that neither starts with nor works with a set of texts, but deals with the formation of the popular, the cartographies of taste, stability and mobility within which students are located (Grossberg 1994: 18). While I am sympathetic to the positions presented here, including Grossbergs renewed version, I want to suggest that one cannot but be aware of the deep despair within all the approaches. They are suffused with a sense of defeat (and possibly even guilt). Their language, as opposed to the language of the establishment, is exaggeratedly combative and polemical. At some moments it is almost incantatory in its appeal to the troops. A major spokesperson of this movement is Peter McLaren. He says: [o]ne of the most crucial issues for criticalists working in the field of literacy is to rethink the conditions of possibility for the subaltern to speak, to escape the labyrinth of subjugation, to make critical counter-statements against the logic of domination that informs the dominant white supremacist ideology of patriarchal capitalism and to transform the ideological precepts that make up the imponderability of everyday life where social relations of power and privilege are naturalised through the curriculum. (1995: 158)
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Repeatedly invoked in these positions is the mantra of possibility. What are we to make of this cri de cur? What I think we are looking at here is an extraordinary desperation and, critically, an implication that the subaltern does not know his or her own oppression.
The dance with the self

It seems that in order to see possibility, the work to be done is not simply and only to imagine what possibility might mean, but to actually show it. Instead of only invoking it, one also has to work with it as it is already there. At this point I suggest that the approach to education and cultural production and reproduction embodied in much of the critique is limited by a particular sense of its enunciation. I dont want to be misunderstood here about where this line of thought is going. I am not making the argument that only insiders can speak for and interpret what one might call the people or the community, whatever those things might mean. But there is a sense in which the voice of engagement with the challenge of difference needs to understand very clearly its own politics of enunciation. This is largely about dealing with, as Grossberg himself says, the issues of complicity ones relationship to the structures, discourses and practices of domination or, put differently, the issues of ones own position (importantly, not only physical) in these. In terms of this, I venture the opinion that sitting in the heavily sequestered ideological spaces of the academy in the United States, where people like Grossberg are located, the stance one has to adopt is that of the combative. Because in the physical architecture of the everyday the dominant discourse is so overwhelming and in some ways even palpable in its coding of the present, it is necessary to trumpet the notion of possibility. Homi Bhabha (1994) is helpful here. He makes the comment that the linguistic difference that informs any cultural performance [and here Id like you to read education too] is dramatized in the common semiotic account of the disjuncture between the subject of a proposition [the you] and the subject of enunciation [the I] (1994: 34). The drama of the moment, however, is in the act of interpretation, where the I cannot address its history in its own words and is not conscious because of the general conditions of language and discourse of the strategies that are mobilised in the moment of enunciation. It is important to grasp this ineffableness. It points to ambivalence, or, better, an instability, deep in the heart of the moment of enunciation. Bhabha goes on to show how talk of inherent originality and inherent purity, and let me
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add integrity, of culture is untenable. As he says, [this moment], though unrepresentable in itself, constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation and ensure[s] that the meanings and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricised and read anew (1994: 34). An important point that we can take away from this discussion, and it hopefully threads together the apparently incommensurate Bhabha and Bhaskar, is the idea, as Bhabha says, that performance or enunciation is a moment of the assimilation of contraries and produces what he has famously described, quoting Fanon, as that occult instability which presages powerful cultural changes (1994: 38). This assimilation of contraries is an important idea driving home the point about the nature of this cultural ensemble that we each have in front of us and have to work with. What is significant about this line of thought is its colonial and/or postcolonial provenance and, as a consequence, the need to recognise, as Bhabha says, not the diversity of cultures, nor the exoticism of multiculturalism, but the inscription and articulation of cultures hybridity [emphasis added] (1994: 38). Read here, again, educations hybridity. The significance of this reading of difference and the instantiation of difference in society, in juxtaposition to the three approaches (perhaps less so the fourth, offered by Grossberg), is that it moves into a position where the teacher is him- or herself involved in a process of education that is inscribed in ambivalence. In this position, there is less of a sense of having to marshal ones forces to find a passage through the labyrinth of hegemony. Education as a site for cultural production is not, in this sense, only a space for working out an idealised opposition to hegemony, outside the space of hegemony. It does not operate in that binary way. Rather, it is a question of exploring the many factors at work in oneself, including the hegemonic, and asking how one might work with these. It allows one to begin thinking not about origins or purity but about the internal settlements one is making and asking oneself what these are all about. Here culture (and again, read education) is not, as Bhabha might then say, essence handed down but, as he says elsewhere, culture crossed by diffrence.
Towards a productive understanding of hybridity

Coming out of this discussion, I use Fanon and Bhabhas term occult instability occult here meaning something that has been cut off from view to work with or develop an understanding of how groups to which the label creole in
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South Africa has been attached function. Creolisation is generally framed or presented in much of the literature as a process emanating from the asymmetric fusing or coming together of cultural experiences. I am wary, as I think many are, of the essentialising tendencies within this form of talking, and will argue, following Bhabha and E.P. Brandon (2001), who writes about the Caribbean, that perhaps we all are creoles and that the processes of our appropriations of our pasts cannot be defined in terms of that mode of discourse which attaches proprietary values to culture. I accept, however, that taking the approach that we are all creoles poses the danger of emptying the concept of its analytic value. Nonetheless, I argue that the cultural negotiation implied in the term allows us to get at very specific processes that play themselves out in different spaces and that produce very specific kinds of outcomes.
To make this argument, I acknowledge that there is a dominant view that says South Africa is defined by the presence of what one might call creole cultures and also what one might call older, more rooted cultures. In terms of this view, those who bear the cross of the creolised invariably bear the cross of the tragic other. They do not have the cachet of an old culture when put into social spaces alongside others. I want to shift the terms of this discussion somewhat to suggest, using Bhabhas approach, that there are processes of homogenisation and essentialisation inherent in this approach and to appeal for an understanding that sees the cultural landscape of South Africa as being crossed by difference and to open up the possibility that the so-called creole subject is as susceptible to difference as any other. The homogenisation of the creole takes away possibilities for seeing the new and different ways in which individuals relate to their environments. As Erasmus (2010) has argued, one can begin to see in creole communities, in their encounter with the hegemonic project of modernisation, a range of social responses that articulate closely with the possibilities that emanate from Bhabha and Fanons description of the occult instability. In terms of this, it is somewhat unsatisfactory to talk about a generalised creole space. Instead we need to be arguing for a view of creole space as fractured, divergent and contradictory. Two examples of this divergence/difference within a difference interest me. The first is that of the educated elite among people of colour in the Western Cape. The second is that of a group of young educated men going through initiation processes in the Eastern Cape. In terms of the educated elite I am talking here of people who are described as African, Indian and coloured. This group is, of course, capable of being
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segmented, grouped and cut in many different ways. Within it, however, there are quite distinct ways of responding to modernity and to the hegemony of the old culture. Very little historical work has been done in this area. What has been done has sought to understand individuals and groups only within very narrow racialised logics. I contend that even this work has failed to understand the contradictory appropriations of difference within these groups. I am particularly interested in those radicals within this not-so-large group of educated people of colour who begin to assert themselves from about the 1930s within the political space of the Western Cape, and indeed in many other parts of the country. The majority of these radicals find themselves in various Trotskyist groupings in the city and elsewhere, but they also become members of a range of other political, trade union and cultural movements in the city. In response to characterisations of their coloured identity, they are, therefore, hardly a group in the sense that there is a self-identification among them of a single and particular group membership. What is significant about this assembly of radicals is the posture that it takes towards history, towards the present and the future. In my own work with this group of people, and this is where Bhabhas discussion about how hybridity works is crucial, it is interesting how differently they begin to articulate their identities in relation to a whole range of factors and social causes. The more I begin to explore with colleagues, with my students, by myself, the identity formation of individuals and sub-formations within this group, the more I begin to realise how inadequate our frameworks of description are for the people and the formations within these putative groups. There are many stories to tell here. Hopefully the work of one of my students, Yunus Omar, like that of my colleague Ciraj Rassool on I.B. Tabata, will begin to help us see identification as a process that takes us way beyond the rather pre-emptive discourses we currently use. Within this assemblage of individuals is a powerful commitment to, not lure of, modernity. Modernity is an intellectual logic that is embraced by people within this group. In this line of thinking formal education is celebrated. In a sense, these radicals, much more so than most other moderns, push the logic of modernity to its ultimate boundaries. Identification is utterly, and uncompromisingly so, with a transnational, transracial self. This is not modernity parodied but modernity internalised. This is not the Freetown, Sierra Leone, or Mumbai elite swanning off to the mail ship to display their Englishness at high tea. Rather, this is an elite discoursing not only about
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themselves but about the state of the world. The cultural clubs in District Six, the Stakesby-Lewis Hostel and the Liberman Institute, were places where, for decades, people like I.B. Tabata, Saul Jayiya, Ben Kies, Dick Dudley and Goolam Gool, the major intellectuals to emerge from this community, assert their identity as modernist intellectuals. They push notions of self, with embodied notions of self, beyond the limitations of everyday racial discourse in how they live, how they bring up their children, their work as teachers in classrooms, their everyday lives as political activists to what they believe to be their rightful destiny as human beings. It is almost as if they had swallowed Hegel alive, but in a regurgitative way, not simply in Marxs inversion of him. They take his method and they make it much more self-conscious. In their analysis is an awareness of the absence in the dialectics first, in the thesis. This absence is Europes racial conceit, an absence that they use in productive kinds of ways. Significantly and even hubristically, they present themselves as legitimate claimants to the mantle of the Enlightenment in its most daring ways. There are any number of rejoinders one can make to what I have just said. I therefore want to acknowledge, as I have elsewhere (see Soudien 2007a, 2007b), that this appropriation of modernity has consequences that are a matter of some concern. Critical to assessing this experience for the purposes of this book is working with the acceptance here that we are not dealing with a kind of false consciousness, that people who take this line of thought have a deluded sense of their identities, or that they are denying their pasts. I do not find that line of thought productive precisely because it goes in the direction of privileged rights to particular cultural forms and practices. There are, of course, blind spots in their views of the world and of themselves, but they are not the blind spots upon which European supremacy comes to present itself as the template for the future of humanity. The second case I look at is based on a study by Zolani Ngwane (2002) of intergenerational conflicts that took place between older and younger men in 1996 in a small rural community of about 1 500 people called Cancele, which lies 30 kilometres west of the small town of Mount Frere in the Eastern Cape province. Ngwanes work is about the community in which he grew up and is entitled Apartheid under Education: Schooling, Initiation and Domestic Reproduction in Post-apartheid Rural South Africa. His interest is in what he calls the transitional moment in South Africa and his argument is based on a premise
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similar to mine. He argues that dominant representations of South Africa in which the old and the new and resistance and compliance are framed in opposition are too limiting. Instead he paints a picture in which the institutions of modernity are themselves sites of struggle. The struggle in South Africa is not about access to the institutions of modernity, like the school; it is about what one does with the institutions of modernity and tradition. In his study Ngwane argues that the conflict was initially triggered by rising rates of unemployment. Critically, however, a concomitant rupture in the symbolic relationship between the school and the initiation rite enhanced this conflict. He shows how the local hierarchy of older men manipulated the symbolic structure of the initiation rite to brand young men with the markings of home and to induct them, as young men with specific rights and responsibilities, into the order of the local hierarchy. The purpose of the ritual is to offset the ideological threat to the hierarchy and its social reproduction that school and modernity represent. As he says: Thus, from being a ritual transformation of local boys into local men, initiation became, in time, a means of resocialising schooled, thus potentially translocal, subjects. By putting a local mark on schooled youth the pedagogical focus of initiation came to rest on preparing them for the world of work, emphasising the cultural imperative of converting the proceeds of their labour into traditional forms of value. (2002: 281) Economic and social conditions, however, worked against the appropriation of young mens bodies and ideologies in the way that the local authorities were able to achieve through the older initiation rites. Ngwane explains that once economic relations, shaped by the migrant labour system and the distinct division of labour which left women in dependent positions inside the village, began to collapse as a result of unemployment, thus eroding the power of older men, young men were forced to look from within the community for resources of self-construction. This created a space in which power relations within the village and the symbolic order which marked it were destabilised. In a short period of time the control of the older men over the symbolic import of the school/initiation relationship was gradually wrested away from them. This the young men achieved by reconfiguring the initiation experience. Rejecting their subordinate status what Ngwane calls infantilisation by local politics of gerontocracy the young men established an alternative space of masculinist collective identity by seizing control of the initiation rite. They
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did this through the importation of rituals associated with another group not familiar to the local elders and the use of the Hlubi language, which the local elders generally were unable to speak. Furthermore, and critical for our argument about the zone of occult instability, central to the new processes which the young men introduced was an emphasis on self-articulation, selfpresentation and self-construction. Unlike the older initiation practices that were constructed around ritualised practices, in the initiation school of the young men was a preoccupation with the rhetorical. Young men had to be able to hold their own in argument. As Ngwane observed, the Hlubi system was geared at constructing speaking subjects with well-developed rhetorical skills (2002: 283). Central to the change was a shift from the regulation of the body to a regulation of subjectivity or identity. The new process was thus geared towards creating a modern speaking masculine subject. Young people were encouraged to take voice, as opposed to the older system that called on them to defer voice. Ngwane argues that this new appropriation made it possible for them to merge the attributes and qualities associated with being a schooled subject translocal, self-reliant, self-presentation with those associated with the initiation rite exclusively masculinist, socially marginal and, indeed, for a man, potentially dangerous. As Ngwane shows in his work, it is significant that school played a central role in this evolving struggle. While at some levels school had been taken for granted, at other levels its significatory power in rearticulating identity and local subjectivity was recognised in the struggle which began to play itself out between the local authorities and the new authority among the youth. It was evident in the anxieties of older people, and particularly those in the chiefly court, who were losing the ability to define roles and identities in the political economy of the village. What we have here is a challenging encounter between the old and the new. The uses of the concepts of school and proper masculinity by old and young men expressed a deeper sense in which the two institutions had become disarticulated from one perspective and alternatively rearticulated into modernity. The implications of this for understanding how school stands in relation to many other idealised communities are social and educational. What both these examples and the ways in which I have tried to articulate them provide is a way of thinking quite differently about creolised space, one
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that takes us away from Grossbergs idealisation of subject position. In this perspective, one is not ever the ideal victim or the ideal object of dominant discourse, or even the ideal subject of these discourses. Rather, one is in a position that is always productive. Ones identity, how one identifies and how one is positioned, contradictory as they sometimes might be, is always in a productive space. It is here that one can begin to think quite differently about creolised spaces. The difference with Grossberg, however, is important to flag. Productivity, as a fourth possibility, is not in itself a virtue. There is creativity about it. Subjects think their way through their puzzles. The places towards which their thinking goes are, however, unsettling spaces. The best exemplification of this is offered in Yvette Christianses important book Unconfessed (2007). The value of Unconfessed, written as it is against the teleology of the colonial archive, is that it goes looking for human agency in a zone which is seminally independent of structural subjectivity. The main character in this text is able to retrieve a sense of herself which is autonomous. Of course it is never disconnected from the politics of her everyday world, but she sets out to prise a level of meaning for herself which has nothing to do with her present world. The way she reaches the level of transcendence is powerfully productive. In this instance, however, it is brutal. To get there, she has to kill. It is in working with this complexity that we need to move away from an idealised way of thinking about hybridity and begin to see in it all the density of the world. Such a view, recalling Bhaskar, is not ipso facto good or defined presumptively by goodness. It may be more or less determinative. This is the nature of its complexity. And it is the manner in which it is determined that awaits our discovery. This act of discovery, through an intersubjective process, is the liberating moment. This is what education is for.
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The racial nature of South African schooling
This chapter recovers elements of the history of race in South Africa that are addressed in the closing sections of the last chapter. It attempts to explain how race is introduced and embedded through education. As a sociological space, the school is South Africas most significant arena for the mediation and management of the different kinds of knowledges a child will need in becoming an adult: the abstract knowledge of reasoning, the social knowledge about relations and relationships, the practical knowledge required to manipulate the physical environment, the personal knowledge of the self and the general knowledge required to navigate ones way into adulthood. While the family (however it may be defined) remains the central space for shaping a childs values, the realisation of the range of potentials a child has is pre-eminently the terrain of interest of the school. How the school does this, as many will acknowledge, remains almost everywhere in the world a challenging question. The situation for us here in South Africa is no different. In some ways, given the discussion in the previous chapter, where I suggest that school and education are crucial sites for managing identity, the challenge is even greater. In relation to this, the question has to be asked, what role is school playing in shaping who our young people are? Can school, as it is constituted, play as constructive a role as we would like, should it be given the brunt of this responsibility, or, if we are sceptical about its capacity to produce the kind of young men and women society desires, what role should we be according it? The purpose of this chapter, using this line of thought, is to elucidate the social forces at work in how school influences the way in which the young grow up and how it helps or hinders them in developing their personal and social identities. Posed in the specific terms of school and identity, the discussion of youth development is relatively novel. It is only in the last 20 years or so that scholars have taken an interest in how school influences and shapes the identities and self-perceptions of those who inhabit it. But in its general terms, the question is a much older one and is shaped by normative understandings of what school and education are for. Normative propositions are important. They provide a point of reference in a society for conversation and dialogue about what is appropriate and good for it. They can, however, also be used inappropriately. A category mistake often occurs when normative pronouncements, often of a
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political nature, of what a society wishes its young to be are transposed into other things. In philosophy, for example, issue has been taken with statements such as [a]t the heart of the educational process lies the child. No advances in policy, no acquisitions of new equipment have their desired effect unless they are in harmony with the nature of the child (Straughan & Wilson 1983: 17). The problem, say philosophers Straughan and Wilson, is that conceptual claims are made in statements such as these about what is thought to be desirable. Who is this generalized, ideal childand how do we decide what is in harmony or out of harmony with it? they ask (1983: 17). I raise a similar question here from a sociological point of view: what are the social characteristics invested in this ideal child? In asking the question I am aware of how our norms and wishes might be turned into social facts. The statement quoted above (from a United Kingdom government report) illustrates the process by which this happens. The normative ideals projected in educational texts are appropriated as social virtues (such as virtue, innocence, diligence, punctuality and so on), which are then used to constitute the ideal social subject. The problem with this mistake is obvious. Firstly, it misrecognises the actual subject and his or her identity. It provides a way of understanding the subject through the distilled and aggregated characteristics that inhere in a decontextualised and asocial ideal. Secondly, and more pertinently for us as sociologists, the authority that comes with the norm prevents one from understanding what the relationship between school and identity actually is. It forecloses on the possibility that identity and its making is a process and that the process involves complex relationships between people and people and between people and structures. The theory behind the making of identity was set out in Chapter 1 of this book. Structural issues were referred to, but the discussion pivoted on the active role of individuals in making choices and constructing their own identities. This chapter focuses on the other side of identity, that of its relationship to structure. It attempts to show how authority, as expressed in the states official agenda, has shaped the character of the South African schools and their objectives for young people. The chapter therefore analyses the states changing vision of the ideal citizen and how, consequently, individuals are included or excluded from full citizenship. The crucial argument that is made in this discussion with respect to the character of the citizen and his or her subjectivity, following the work of Goldberg (2002), is that the modern state, everywhere, in addition to the other
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work it does, especially that of serving the economys interests, is essentially constituted around an identity project. This project, as Goldberg argues, is invariably racial. The state has in its collective mind an image of itself. This image is, I argue, frequently cast as a phenotype. It is also substantively filled with what are thought to be national characteristics. The core of this argument, as I discussed in Chapter 2, is that the Enlightenment has inscribed into the structure, objectives and workings of the modern state an ideal subject. This ideal is rational, endowed with the forms of cultural capital celebrated in the triumph of the French Revolution, the American Revolution and the great processes of state unification that happened around Italy and Germany, and, as a package, is unmistakably European in his (not her) habits, tastes and aesthetic dispositions. The entire apparatus and machinery of the state is geared to producing this ideal in its citizens. Of course, this project takes different forms and is contested over its long, 200-year history, and sometimes this contest pivots on the economic nature of the subject, but the basic project is essentially the same. At its heart is a European identity. The post-apartheid South African state is projected and constructed around this very same set of idealisations and hegemonies. Strikingly, these now give shape, structure and content to education and endow it with its defining identity-making character. School in this view is not an innocent medium for the mediation of a universal goodness, but is premised on a particular understanding of who its subject is. Fascinatingly, we see this teleology at work in the history of the South African school. The chapter begins with a description of the South African school, interrogates its official purposes (one might call these its hidden curriculum) and moves on to respond to the questions of what objectives it has for itself and what the research tells us, in general terms, about the kinds of people it has produced. In terms of the first section, it is not the purpose of this chapter to rehearse the South African schools 350-year history in any detail. A brief recounting of its highlights is necessary, however, for placing into perspective how the social logic race and class of the current South African school has come to be constituted and what its dominant ideological legacy consists of through an examination of the origins of schooling during the first Dutch colonial period and of the succeeding British authority which essentially put in place the modern South African school. This will be followed by two major sections, one which describes how the apartheid government redeveloped and re-engineered this system. This is followed by a concluding section which focuses on the post-apartheid context and the attempts of the new democratic government to
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infuse the school with a different set of ideological motifs where one sees one official narrative of the self and citizenship replaced by another. The chapter lays the groundwork for Chapters 5 and 6, which look in detail at how the South African school operates as a space in which social identity is offered and imposed on the one hand, and taken and worked with on the other.
Early schooling initiatives

As important an arena as schooling and schools might be theoretically, their role in South Africa from a point of view of common citizenship has been less than auspicious. From their first formal entry into the pages of history in 1658 (see Molteno 1984) to the present, schools have been dogged by the controversy of inclusion and exclusion, their use as an instrument to sort and rank, and their amenability for the purposes of othering. When Commander Jan van Riebeeck, writing in his diary on 17 April 1658, thought about establishing a school for the Dutch East India Companys male and female slaves brought from Angola, he had this to say: The sick-comforter1 Pieter van der Stael of Rotterdam has been entrusted with the task of giving them [male and female slaves] instruction in the morning and the afternoon, besides his duties of visiting the sick, particularly because he reads Dutch well and correctly. To encourage the slaves to attend and to hear or learn the Christian prayers, it is ordered that after school everyone is to receive a small glass of brandy and two inches of tobacco. All their names are to be written down and those who have none, are to be given names, paired or unpaired, young and old. All this is to be done in the presence of the Commander, who will attend for a fewdays to put everything in order and subject these people to proper discipline, signs of which are already apparent. (Van Riebeeck 1954: 258) Right from the beginning, as Molteno argues, the Dutch East India Companys intentions were to prepare slaves to serve their masters more efficiently: They would have been able to do so more efficiently if they understood the language of their mastersThe slaves were driven physically and psychologically into their masters world (1984: 4546). It is important to emphasise the manner in which this was done because out of it was to emerge the ideological foundations upon which the character of education in South Africa has been built. Not only was the kind of education provided elementary in quality, but at
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its core was the objective of resocialising the slaves into a status of subordinate subjects. Young slaves, such as they were, were required to unlearn everything that they had brought with them from their communities and to acquire the Dutch view and the Christian religion. In 1682 the Dutch East India Company passed a requirement that all slave children under 12 years of age had to attend school and that older ones had to go for instruction twice a week (Molteno 1984: 48). While these regulations were honoured more in the breach than in the observance partly because they limited slave-owners ability to extract labour time from their chattel and partly because they introduced into the slave mind the possibility of manumission they highlighted the intense discussion taking place among the colonists about the place of the slave other within the emerging European community at the Cape.
In contrast to the relatively liberal and tolerant attitude to difference that existed in Amsterdam itself (see Goldberg 2002), the colony-to-be (it was still a refreshment station) of the Cape was a case study in colonial othering. The early colonial rulers were anxious about upholding standards and holding at bay the danger of slave presumption. Central to their anxieties were concerns about whether slaves would imbibe enough cultural literacy to operate within the colonial community without acquiring also the illusions of living as equals with themselves. As a result, their identities had to be managed: respect for new superiors and a new authority was beaten in (Molteno 1984: 46). While ambiguity around the degree of enculturation of the black subject remains a feature of the formal education process right into the late decades of the 20th century, and it manifests itself again in the next period, what is key about the attitude of the authorities to people of colour in this period is their heedlessness and even brutality. In subjecting slave youth to physical and psychological abuse, we see the emergence of a particular pedagogical approach in this period. The slaves, as subjects, were configured in degraded terms. In the quotation from Van Riebeecks diary above, it is assumed that their attraction into the world of civilisation can be secured only through humiliation and violence, and through what comes to be characteristic of the South African psychology of domination: inducing them into a state of alcoholic dependence. The importance of this latter strategy is that its residues persist into the modern South Africa as masters find ways of keeping their subjects from reflection and self-reflection. Psychologically they were stripped down and reassembled by their masters. Their previous histories brought with them from other parts of Africa and the East were generally, although not always, of little consequence.
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There were occasions, for example, when it suited the colonial authorities to turn a blind eye to the practice of Islam among the slaves. The broad approach, however, was that of psychological oppression. Van Riebeeck even assumed that among the people he addressed there would be some who had no names. They were, so to speak, colonial tabula rasa. Their responses, of course, made clear that this was far from being the case: their histories and pasts remained in their hearts and minds. Anticipating the response of young people three centuries later, a significant number among these early ancestors of the country that was to become South Africa showed how powerfully they were indeed thinking and sentient human beings. As Molteno (1984) explains, many a time there was when young people voted with their feet and fled into the foothills of the mountains surrounding the Cape in an attempt to escape their humiliation.
Interestingly, while the initial schools were integrated, it didnt take long for the children of the colonists to be separated from those of the slaves. By 1676 clear signs of segregation were emerging to the extent that by the 1680s there were two separate trajectories for black and white education. The education of the children of colonists was grounded in different assumptions about their identities. In contrast to the education of the slaves, theirs was an education which aimed at reproducing and reinforcing the position of European civilisation and culture in Africa. The land, as Malherbe, the pre-eminent historian of preapartheid educational history, put it in an inadvertent Freudian slip, awaited its break[ing]-in by pioneering young white men. He explained it thus: While on the one hand, it is due to the strong church [Calvinistic] influence that education often deteriorated into mere formalism, it gave the people, on the other hand, a type of education which was perhaps as well suited to their needs at the time as any we could devise today. It did not cultivate erudition, yet it produced pioneers men who had to break-in [sic] the country. From their earliest youth boys were practised in the use of firearms till they probably became the best marksmen in the world. This type of education helped to preserve them against spiritual as well as physical dangers. (Molteno 1984: 47) While the general quality of formal education in the early years of white settlement was weak and uneven in its provision, white children were groomed for control. Slave children, by contrast, were prepared for servitude and docility. The period was marked by callousness and disregard for the identities and histories of the slave people. This was its dominant characteristic.
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The mission era

Many features of the initial efforts to build a school culture and a schooling approach carried over into subsequent periods. A second school was established for slaves at the Cape in 1663. In 1714 the Chavonnes Ordinance was passed, which sought to lay down a framework for a system of education in the Cape. The first school for Khoikhoi children was established at Baviaanskloof (to become Genadendal) at the beginning of the 18th century. The purpose of this school was clearly that of subjugation: The Hottentots were forced to forego their nomadic way of life, and made to realize the need for discipline and regular habits (Molteno 1984: 48).
As white settlement penetrated more deeply into the southern African hinterland, these initiatives were followed almost 80 years later by the establishment in 1799 of a school specifically for Africans in what was to become King Williams Town (Molteno 1984). Several more schools were to follow: a school in the Orange Free State in 1823, one in Natal in 1835 and another in the Transvaal Republic in 1842. Through these the second phase of education in the country was put in place. Important as the early initiatives were, they were nonetheless isolated. The general pace of educational provision remained tardy. This tardiness partly reflected the ambiguity of the colonial state with respect to the effects of education on people of colour. It also had to do with the practical reality that schooling was not yet central to the colonial economy. A rudimentary education was sufficient even for white children. It was only in 1839 that a Department of Education was established in the Cape Colony. In attempting to characterise the nature of education in this second period, it is important to recognise the ambiguity carried over from the first. Critically, even as the economy exploded in size and complexity and brought modernity into full cry, the colonial government continued to anguish over how the indigenous people were to be civilised and in the process controlled. Mass education was not yet necessary, as it was to be in the middle of the 20th century, for the expansion of the South African economy. In thinking about education and the necessity thereof, economic issues were ever present. But so too were questions about belief and faith. Some of the more far-sighted colonial administrators, however, understood the link between culture and the economy. Sir George Grey, for example, understood that for as long as African people were able to sustain an independent living on the land, they
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could ignore claims to their attention, including the colonial requirement that they should subject themselves to the authority of the British Empire. As long as they had independent access to the land, they had the ability to live outside of the economic and cultural universe of the colonial intruders. And so it was that even as the last frontier wars in the Eastern Cape and the Northern Transvaal came to an end in the second half of the 19th century and the political defeat of the indigenous people was celebrated, what remained starkly incomplete was the project of erasing the culture of the local people. School was critical for this subjugation to take place. The approach taken in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to achieve this subjugation was to drive a wedge between African people and their culture. Practically, this was achieved in a number of ways. One way, as letters written to the Governor of the Cape in the middle of the 19th century illustrate, was to disrupt the traditional chieftainship. The Queens administrators on the Eastern Cape Frontier were influential in shaping the kinds of strategies that the Cape government was to take in this respect (see Du Toit 1963). Suggestions made by the Queens officials included the banning of red ochre (the painting of faces), the termination of the practice of bestowing gifts on chiefs and the distribution of useful instruments such as ploughs. Notable among all of this was the idea of creating a small educated elite that would begin to create an alternative authority and respect structure to that of the headmen and the chiefs. Molteno explains how this was intended to work: steeped in the conquerors ways of seeing, converted to their religion, and generally accepting of the new order, the schooled corps could help disseminate a system of ideas, values, loyalties and authorities which were consistent with the colonists interests (1984: 50). The role of this schooled corps would be to win the African people away from their tribal loyalties and, more critically, to wean them off the ideological independence their relationship to the land provided them. The significance of this moment in South African history cannot be stressed sufficiently. While earlier colonialist arguments about education continue to assert themselves, such as the need for discipline among the natives, the need for socialising black people into mindsets which would see the value of the capitalist economy, and even arguments about the need for the pacification of the natives, it is the argument about countering the natives ideological independence that is important to understand for making sense of the colonial project. This elite would provide what J.C. Warner, a Wesleyan missionary writing to the Governor at the Cape in the mid-19th century, called an ocular demonstration (Du Toit 1963: 55) for the local people. Writing at
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the same time, an Eastern Cape colleague of Warner, one A. Bonatz, proposed that an ocular example a Schoolmaster needed to be placed at the heart of the cultural universe of the African: a Schoolmaster [should]reside at the great place [of every Chief] to instruct the children of the chief and great Counsellors, and I think the poor people would soon be more desirous to get their children instructed likewise (Du Toit 1963: 65). Following the formal establishment of education at the Cape in 1839, this missionary approach continued for much of the next century. Variations on the elite argument developed with the establishment of vocational-type schools. Characterising the period, Molteno says: It was not as equal individuals that blacks were brought into the colonial order but as a subordinate category which was integrated economically while kept outside politically (1984: 52). While this description captures the political-economy aspect of education, it misses the very kernel of the experience to which Molteno himself draws our attention. Central in this are the ongoing cultural wars over the soul of the African people. Defeated as the African people might be militarily, culturally they continue to fight for the integrity of their customs and social practices. These struggles persist into the 20th century (see Mayer 1971; Soudien & Nekhwevha 2002), when significant segments of the African community continue to resist, even as mass education is introduced, the blandishments of European education.
Modern capitalism and the coming of apartheid

The discovery of gold and diamonds in the 1870s and 1880s in the northern parts of South Africa is a significant event in the countrys history. Within a period of 20 years the South African landscape was completely resculpted. Present as the military pride of the British Empire might have been in various reaches of the country in attempts to subdue the African people, nothing could have prepared the local population, both white and black and everyone else in between, for the avalanche of interest in their countrys supposedly fabulous riches. Virtually overnight, and for a brief moment in time, South Africa became one of the worlds most significant objects of fascination. Johannesburg grew from a few isolated farms on the Highveld to a modern global city within the space of 30 years. African people were wrenched out of their pastoral worlds and violently transformed into a modern working class. As Molteno accurately points out, education was not the most important factor in the making of this working class or in the fashioning of the new state.
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It did, however, ha[ve] some bearing on the way in which capitalist relations emerged (1984: 59). The Interdepartmental Committee on Native Education in 1936 gave clear notice of how these relations were to be established: The Native is becoming Europeanized by more contactOne cannot stop the processAll that can be doneis to direct and control the process. The problem is, therefore, to devise a type of education which will tide the black man over the period during which his tribal sanctions are weakening, and before he feels the force of the sanctions of European civilization [W]e must give the Native an education which will keep him in his place if the Native is to receive any education he should have as his aim the idea embodied in Dickens version of the ancient prayer Oh, let us love our occupations, Bless the squire and his relations Live upon our daily rations, And always know our proper stations. (Molteno 1984: 6162) Unambiguous as the booming economys demand for labour was in the post World War II period, the ambiguities around black education persisted. The question of how African peoples assimilation into European society might be managed was still unresolved. Aware of the political hazards which came with increased participation in the white economy, the Nationalists were determined to put in place a policy of containment of black aspirations. They had noted with concern the rise of militancy among black people with the establishment of the African National Congress Youth League and left-wing organisations such as the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) in 1944 and, critically, the anger in the 1946 miners strike (see Molteno 1984; OMeara 1983). Their response was that the repression of revolts and the suppression of political organization could not in the long run suffice to save the racist structures of exploitation and domination (Molteno 1984: 91). A more sophisticated approach was required which would forestall the hopes and desires of black people. For African people to think that eventual integration and equality in mainstream white society was possible was completely unacceptable. It was partly in answer to this problem that the Eiselen Commission was established. A companion to the Tomlinson Commission of 19501954, which investigated the viability of dismembering South Africa territorially into Bantu homelands, the Eiselen Commission essentially laid out the philosophic and
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organisational foundations for the controversial Bantu Education Act (No. 47 of 1953). Widely perceived as providing the blueprint for apartheid education, it recommended, for example, that African pupils and students be separated from other communities, arguing that Western culture had given them a false sense of their destiny one which could not be fulfilled. The future of African people was to be found in the safety of their own environment, a sociocultural space autonomous from but subordinate to European society. Thus the education of black people had to change from its missionary and European forms to prepare them for participation in this separate society. Where the previous policy and practice of Native Education might have trained the civilised Natives gaze towards the mainstream of European society, and even intimated the possibility of his or her incorporation into it, Bantu Education, coming as it did in the wake of the major miners strike of 1946 and a rising sense of expectation among radicalised young Africans, sought to divert the attention of African people from the prize of assimilation into white society. It was to avoid this possibility that the Eiselen Commissions recommendations urged that the locus of African socialisation, through schools, churches and so on, be shifted right out of white society and placed in the confines of a social environment which was unmistakably Bantu. The impact of these recommendations in a world unambiguously signposted by Western and Eurocentric route-markers was, not unexpectedly, interpreted by people of colour, and others, as an attempt to maintain and perpetuate the subordinate status of African people. What the Eiselen Commission achieved was the fundamental remaking of public education in South Africa. The report of this commission provided the justification for the passing of the Bantu Education Act in 1953. In the same year the government established the Commission on Coloured Education under the leadership of De Vos Malan. This led to the passing of the Coloured Persons Education Act (No. 47 of 1963) and the Indian Education Act (No. 61 of 1965). Bantu Education was officially introduced into schools in 1955, Coloured Education in 1964 and Indian Education in 1966. The immediate consequence of the Bantu Education Act was the termination of missionary education. Control of African education was taken out of the missionaries hands and transferred to a separate racial education authority. Schools were allowed to operate only after having received approval through a formal process of registration with the government. The new government significantly expanded the provision of basic education in the country. Although its commitment to the building of new schools was not initially
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spectacular, it introduced the platoon (double-shift) system and thereby doubled the enrolment. Important normative measures accompanied the introduction of this racialised form of education. The state transformed the basic curriculum and, in keeping with the report of the Eiselen Commission, which urged that African people remain connected to their own culture, required that schooling commence in an indigenous language (up to Grade 5). Thereafter instruction was supposed to take place in English and Afrikaans. The state also required that the curriculum stressobedience, communal loyalty, ethnic and national diversity, acceptance of allocated social roles, piety and identification with rural culture (Molteno 1984: 89). The syllabi in coloured and Indian schools were also adjusted, especially for the languages and subjects such as history, to teach people deemed coloured and Indian their own cultures. Those classified coloured were to discover their own separate cultural integrity and to learn that theirs was a nation in the making. What was significant about the system was not only that it comprised 15 separate administrative units but that these units were defined for the deliberate construction of racial identity. These administrative units sat within ethnic political structures the bantustan homelands and the racially framed administrative apparatus that came into being for people deemed to be white, coloured or Indian. In 1964 and 1965 the Department of Coloured Affairs and the Department of Indian Affairs, respectively, came into being to look after the educational interests of children who were so classified. White education was managed by a national Department of Education which devolved authority to the four provinces of the Cape, Natal, the Orange Free State and Transvaal. This devolved authority located the management of white education in structures that had long histories, such as the Cape Education Department which had come into being in 1839, the Natal Education Department in the 1880s, and the Orange Free State Education Department and the Transvaal Education Department in the 1890s. In the mid-1980s the apartheid government introduced the tricameral parliamentary system for whites, coloureds and Indians for the purpose of preserving the authentic cultural identity of these ethnic groups. The basic infrastructural arrangements that were in place for these groups remained intact but were effectively brought under the aegis of the appropriate racial parliamentary chamber. Three new ministers of education were appointed, one for each ethnic group. Ostensibly independent as these administrative units were, they took their direction from the notorious
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Christian National Education Act (39 of 1967) in terms of which syllabuses, textbooks and examination questions reflect the particular perspective of Afrikaner nationalism (Taylor & Methula 1993: 300). The essential features of this perspective, as Du Preez argues, were that whites were superior to blacks; the Afrikaner has a special relationship with Godand that the Afrikaner had a God-given task in Africa (1983: 73). The entire ideological thrust of this period was to entrench the racially separate identities of South Africas different peoples. This had to be accomplished, however, within the confines of the capitalist economy and its almost insatiable demand for compliant labour. As the work of Cameron (1986), Horrell (1970), Lodge (1984) and Soudien (2002) shows, popular responses to these developments were wide-ranging in their variety. Political organisations and teacher unions in particular were vociferous in their rejection. In the 1950s, when the basic idea of apartheid education was introduced, which led to the closure of the mission school system, groups of people around the country rallied against what they decried variously as the barbarism of education, the bantuising of education, and so on. The African National Congress (ANC) launched the Bantu Education Campaign alongside its Defiance Campaign (started in 1952) and received particular support for this initiative in the Eastern Cape and the East Rand.2 Elsewhere in the country support was more sporadic. The ANC advocated a school boycott and attempted to start its own alternative schools. In the Western Cape and Eastern Cape organisations such as the Cape African Teachers Association (CATA) and the Teachers League of South Africa, affiliates of the All-African Convention (AAC) and the NEUM, advocated a different line. Their essential approach was to remain within the system but to undermine it from within. They refused to collaborate with their oppressors and so gave only the most minimal degree of cooperation to officials of the authorities such as inspectors. The schools which they led became sites of alternative education. In the face of a state campaign to overwhelm the educational system with the message of racial separateness, these schools succeeded in maintaining the ideal of non-racialism (see Soudien 1998). The protests against apartheid education, however, were effectively quelled in the long suppression which followed the Sharpeville uprising in 1961.3 Organisations such as the ANC and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) were banned. Others, such as the NEUM, went underground. It was only in the changed circumstances of the mid-1970s, when the combination of international opprobrium, the rise in worker consciousness and the emergence of new and independent political formations such as the Black Consciousness
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Movement opened up space for protest, that the possibility of countering the government could be contemplated. When the possibility exposed itself, it quickly expanded into a full-blown uprising. In June 1976 the young people of Soweto initiated a new era in South African education. Rejecting a move by the apartheid authorities to make Afrikaans a compulsory medium of instruction, they set in train a series of school boycotts which would roll on into the 1990s and effectively transform the terrain of education. Behind the uprising was a complex set of political demands which came to inform the character of popular discourse in the country.
Putting in place a new education state

Given the heat of the uprising and the crippling effects of the international boycott which came to be instituted against South Africa, apartheid was unsustainable. Within a very few short years, petty apartheid, which consisted of restrictions on where one lived, schooled and enjoyed oneself, was abolished. By the late 1980s, South Africa was a distinctly more liberal country than it had been in the middle of that same decade. In education, as the government and its opponents squared up to each other, a flurry of initiatives, explicitly in contestation for the moral and educational soul of South Africa, took shape. In the liberation movement, the National Education Coordinating Committee (NECC) was established, giving birth to what was called the philosophy of Peoples Education, and later the National Education Policy Investigation (NEPI), which was tasked to develop a policy framework for the struggle against apartheid (Jansen 1999a). The private sector put its weight behind a number of structures, most notably the Private Sector Education Council (PRISEC) and the Education Policy and System Change Unit (EDUPOL) overseen by the key social agency of business, the Urban Foundation. The National Party government itself committed its Department of National Education to look into the issues. The trade union movement, motivated by concerns about the failure of the countrys training system, also entered the fray decisively, we shall see. Peoples Education was a broad programmatic initiative which gathered together the anti-apartheid movements response to the curriculum and asserted the fundamental principles with which the ensuing reforms in the country would be branded. These were given definition and detail in the NEPI proposals and emphasised non-racism, non-sexism, democracy, equality and redress. The contribution of PRISEC and EDUPOL, as Jansen (1999a) explains, lay in its emphasis on questions of school governance and teacher education. The
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apartheid government put forward two proposals, one called the Education Renewal Strategy and the other A New Curriculum Model for South Africa. It was against these developments that the new and democratic South Africa stepped on to the world stage in April 1994. Throwing off its pariah status, it presented itself in the classic dress of a modern, free and enlightened state, standing for everything which its recent apartheid past had sought to disallow and to deny: the inalienable right to freedom, equality and justice; the physical commonality of the human race; and the possibility, made material in the life of Nelson Mandela, of avowed enemies being able to live alongside each other with dignity, humility and a sense of responsibility for each others welfare. Where the imagination and the ego of the old order was animated by psychotic illusions of loss the engulfment of white identity by hordes of savage black bodies and a fear-crazed anxiety about white supremacy, the new South Africa projected itself as the prototype of a new multicultural order emblazoned in the language of inclusion, mutual recognition and social solidarity. The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (Act No. 108 of 1996) was in many ways its certificate of human rights excellence. As a result of an alliance between academics working within the NEPI process and intellectuals in the trade union movement, a broad policy platform for education was developed which came to be firmed up in two significant initiatives. The first was aimed at addressing the divided and hierarchical nature of the South African education system, and the second sought to deal with the racialising nature of its curriculum. These developments took place over three distinct periods: 19941997: In this period the new bureaucracy was put in place. The most important task was to establish a single, unified, democratic and accountable educational system that was participatory in terms of its policy development and responsive to the needs of the previously disenfranchised and oppressed. Thus, the key imperative following the elections of 1994 and the constitution of the new national and provincial departments of education was to integrate the previously fragmented and racially and ethnically divided education system. It meant the absorption of the badly disadvantaged and poorly functioning bantustan system and the equally fragile Department of Education and Training (DET) system, which catered for people classified African in the urban areas, into a new, single and unitary system. It also meant the dismantling of the Models system that the former white Department of Education under the House of Assembly
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had brought into being in the late 1980s. Under this Models system, white schools had to decide how open they would make their admissions. The process leading up to the adoption of this system is described in detail in Chapter 6, but, in brief, a school could become private and retain its right to limit admissions to whites only. This came to be known as Model A. A school could also open its admissions on particular conditions. In terms of these conditions, it retained the right to stipulate admission requirements and to determine the language policy for the school and the level of fees that it would charge. The schools in this category received a subsidy from the state and had the right to levy fees to make up the remainder of their budget costs (Lewis & Motala 2004). This was initially known as Model B but later came to be known as Model C. Having been chosen by most former white schools, this approach became the norm. The creation of a unified education required setting in place new structures and processes as well as the appointment of new officials. But the ability to reconstitute and recompose a new educational system was constrained by a number of factors. These included a Sunset Clause which emerged from the multiparty negotiations process. It protected the employment of officials who had served under the previous system and made their replacement difficult (see Sayed 1999). 19971999: The second phase was essentially marked by the construction of new policy. A range of far-reaching commissions and investigations were established to look into key aspects of the education system. These provided the new post-apartheid government with its most critical policy frameworks and guidelines. The most significant of these were the White Paper on education and training (DoE 1995a), which provided the basis for the National Education Policy Act (No. 27 of 1996); the National Commission on Higher Education (1996); the Hunter Committee (DoE 1995b); the South African Qualifications Authority Act (No. 58 of 1995); the National Qualifications Framework (1996); the South African Schools Act (No. 84 of 1996); and the Higher Education Act (No. 101 of 1997). 19992004: This phase of development was marked by attempts on the part of the new Minister of Education, Kader Asmal, to move from policy development to concrete action. The issue confronting the system was that of how to actually improve the quality of schooling for all young South Africans. (For a full discussion of these developments, see Sayed et al. 2007.)
The post-1994 period saw a flurry of explicit policy development, much of which focused on racial discrimination in society and in education. Ending
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racial discrimination and effecting inclusion became the leitmotif of the new resurgent state. The particular aspects of this period which deserve attention are the following: An emphasis on the achievement of equality in schools. Inclusion thus became part of an agenda that sought to end all forms of disadvantage based on arbitrary distinctions of race. A strong groundswell of support from a range of stakeholder groupings for the reform of education. This made it possible for the South African state to enact and establish structures that aimed at the achievement of equity and bringing to an end racial discrimination. Crucial in understanding this commitment on the part of the state is recognising the conditions which accompanied the creation of the new postapartheid government. The basic limiting factor confronting the new state was the conditions it agreed to in the compromise it struck with the old apartheid order. Central in this compromise was the agreement to leave intact many features of the old system, such as the rights to our own cultures. These were enshrined in the South African Schools Act (SASA) and are discussed below in greater detail. Among these were the rights of a school to determine its medium of instruction, to charge fees and to determine its staffing composition. In confronting its diverse constituencies, the state needed to mediate the discordant and vested interests of these different groups that had participated in the pre-1994 compromise. It did not have a free hand to end discrimination in ways that were totally of its own choosing. For example, in schooling the new state had inherited a large number of ex-white schools where power was vested in school governing bodies (SGBs). The ability of the state to set a course of action was seriously constrained (and still is) by its capacity to act and implement. For example, the Sunset Clause referred to above ensured that many bureaucrats of the old order were still in place in 1994 and were able to remain until such time as they chose to retire or when their posts were made redundant. In short, the state had the political will to effect inclusion, but found itself heavily constrained by an existing set of settlements, agreements and entrenched interests. It would be unfair, however, to minimise the significance of the new legislation that the post-apartheid state had brought into being. Key among these were the following: White Paper on education and training: Providing the fundamental guarantees of free and open access to basic education for all, the South African
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Constitution requires that education be transformed and democratised in accordance with the values of human dignity, equality, human rights and freedom, non-racism and non-sexism. The fundamental policy framework of the Ministry of Education was set out in the first White Paper: Education and Training in a Democratic South Africa: First Steps to Develop a New System (DoE 1995a). This document served as the principal reference point for subsequent policy and legislative development. The National Education Policy Act (No. 27 of 1996) (NEPA): This Act set out in law the policy, legislative and monitoring responsibilities of the Minister of Education. It also formalised the relations between national and provincial authorities. The NEPA embodied the principle of cooperative governance, elaborated in Schedule 3 of the Constitution, and the principle of guaranteed fundamental rights with regards to equal access to education, protection against discrimination and protection of language rights. The Act also established national sovereignty over education policy, so that the national policy had precedence over provincial policy. Equity and redress, in relation to race and gender, were specifically noted as central principles. The South African Schools Act (No. 84 of 1996) (SASA): Also promulgated in 1996, this Act sought to promote access, quality and democratic governance in the schooling system. Described in greater length below, this Act sought to ensure that all learners would have the right of access to quality education without discrimination, and made schooling compulsory for children aged 7 to 14. It provided for two types of schools: independent schools and public schools. The Acts provision for democratic school governance through SGBs is now in place in public schools countrywide. The school-funding norms outlined in the SASA prioritise redress and target poverty in funding allocations to the public schooling system. National Norms and Standards for School Funding (NNSSF): The NNSSF is a key mechanism to achieve redress through distribution of the education budget. Passed in 1998, this policy provided a framework for allocating non-personnel recurrent costs on the basis of need. It required each provincial education department to produce a resource targeting list informed by physical conditions, available facilities, the degree of crowding of the school, educator : learner ratios, the availability of basic services, and the relative poverty of the community around the school. The main effect of the revised formula is that the poorest 40 per cent of schools receive 60 per cent of the provincial schooling non-personnel budget allocation, and the least-poor 20 per cent receive 5 per cent of the resources.
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Early Childhood Development (ECD): The proposals set out in the fifth Ministry of Education White Paper, on early childhood development (DoE 2001a), detail the approach taken by the department to early childhood education. ECD refers to a comprehensive approach to policies and programmes for children from birth to nine years of age with the active participation of their parents and caregivers. Its purpose is to protect the childs right to develop his or her full cognitive, emotional, social and physical potential. The strategic plan outlined in the paper as a means of achieving a solid foundation for the lifelong learning and development of South Africas youngest citizens focused on the delivery of inclusive and integrated programmes, with a particular emphasis on the development of a national curriculum statement, practitioner development and careerpathing, health, nutrition, physical development, clean water and sanitation, and a special programme targeting four-year-old children from poor families with special needs and those infected by HIV/AIDS.
Other significant Acts that promoted inclusion beyond basic education included the Further Education and Training Act (No. 98 of 1998) and the Higher Education Act (No. 101 of 1997). Both attempt to effect inclusion and equity in post-basic education. With the passage of time, a strong special needs education lobby emerged which argued that the existing policy framework ignored the needs of the sector in effecting inclusion. To this end, the Ministry of Education published its sixth White Paper, on special needs education (DoE 2001b). This paper dealt predominantly with special needs education and the building of an inclusive education and training system. Concluding that specialised education had only been provided for a small percentage and usually on a racial basis, the paper argued that the curriculum and education system as a whole had failed to respond to the diverse needs of the learner population. In the light of these findings, the paper recommended that the education and training system should promote genuine education for all and foster the development of inclusive and supportive centres of learning. The principles guiding the broad strategies to achieve this vision included the acceptance of principles and values contained in the Constitution; human rights and social justice for all; participation and social integration; equal access to a single education system; access to the curriculum; equity and redress; community responsiveness; and cost-effectiveness. As an outcome of these developments, the 15 racially defined administrative systems for education were abolished and united under a new Department
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of Education, which in 2009, under the new Jacob Zuma presidency, became the Department of Basic Education, leaving higher education under the aegis of a new Ministry of Higher Education and Training. Pivotal in the establishment of the new department was the opening up of schools on a non-racial basis. Provinces retained their administrative control over schools but were subject to the central authority of the Department of Education. The SASA was the legal cornerstone of the new education system and affirmed the centrality of education in the building of the new democratic South Africa. Where the apartheid government used education, through structures like school committees, to protect state interests and preserve white privilege, the purpose of the SASA is to place the control of schools in the hands of parents and to empower parents to determine, within the framework of the national Constitution, what is in the best interests of their children. The SGBs that the SASA brought into being were given responsibility for a range of issues, including the following: providing quality education for all learners in the school; adopting a constitution for the school; and adopting a mission statement that sets out the goals and the shared values of the school. The SASA is the framing document for school education in South Africa. Its various chapters include, inter alia, the following: The Learner; Public Schools (this chapter describes the public school in its ownership dimensions, its governance provisions, and who has responsibility for what aspects of managing and governing the school); Funding of Public Schools; and Private Schools (these became known as independent schools). The Act discontinued the automatic support through a subsidy system that private schools had received in the past and in place of this developed a much more finely calibrated system, based on fee levels, to assess the needs of the independent school. The broad intention of the Act was to provide a general and comprehensive framework for the management of the restructuring of South African education. It emanated principally from a Commission of Enquiry conducted under the leadership of Peter Hunter, an academic at the University of the Witwatersrand. In the Preamble to the Act, broad general principles were set out. The Act was presented as a statement of the new states intentions to provide an education of progressively high quality for all learners and in so doing lay a strong foundation for the development of all our peoples
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talents and capabilities, advance the democratic transformation of society, combat racism and sexism and all other forms of unfair discrimination and intolerance, contribute to the eradication of poverty and the economic wellbeing of society, protect and advance our diverse cultures and languages, uphold the rights of all learners, parents and educators, and promote their acceptance of responsibility for the organisation, governance and funding of schools in partnership with the state (emphasis in original). The central political preoccupation of the Act was the restoration of the form of the new South African school it is [t]o provide a uniform [emphasis added] system for the organisation, governance and funding of schools. Apartheid had distorted the form, and even the substance, of schooling. This distortion had been amplified in unexpected ways by the school boycotts. The school as the new system had inherited it was not only designed for inferiority but had also become dysfunctional in many parts of the country. Explicitly embedded in the Preamble of the SASA was the process for moving the system to its new form. It would not only be equal but would also have an orderliness which teaching and learning required. The Preamble described the shape of the old system and presented it as having been consigned to history. With respect to the curriculum, the government embarked on a radical new plan through the establishment of a National Qualifications Framework (NQF). Out of this emerged a new curriculum which had at its heart the principle of integration of skills and competencies, of disciplines and of South Africas diverse peoples. In terms of education and training and its skills development platform, the NQF sought to harmonise the personal and the social. In aiming towards the establishment of the new South Africa, it had to address the thorny question of how the historically disadvantaged could be accommodated in a globalised high-skills world. Essentially, it sought to make allowance for learner progression through a multiplicity of routes by developing a notion of equivalence of disparate bodies of knowledge and training. Theoretically, a student coming out of a non-formal training background could have elements of his or her experience/knowledge/competence recognised in a formal setting. What the approach sought to facilitate was the recognition of competence irrespective of where it came from. Difficult as this approach was, it left behind the vocabulary and discourse of competence. It is this discourse that drove the countrys blue-ribbon curriculum reforms at the school level. Curriculum 2005 (C2005) was
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launched in March 1997 by the then Minister of Education, Sibusiso Bhengu. It was described as a strategy for moving away from a racist, apartheid, rotelearning model of learning and teaching to a liberating, nation-building and learner-centred outcomes-based one. As with Peoples Education, it committed the new education system to the values of democracy, non-racialism and nonsexism. Against a clamour of voices complaining about the technical complexity of the curriculum, the new Minister of Education, Kader Asmal, appointed a Ministerial Committee in 2000 to review its applicability and appropriateness. The committee recommended that strengthening the curriculum required streamlining its design features and simplifying its language through the production of an amended National Curriculum Statement. This Draft Revised National Curriculum Statement for Grades R9 (Schools) was made available for public comment on 30 July 2001 and subsequently adopted. It kept intact the principles, purposes and commitments of C2005.
Assessing the post-apartheid landscape

As much as these developments undoubtedly represent an advance, one must be mindful of the scale of the challenge inherited from the apartheid government by the new authorities. (The role of the Department of Education in the unfolding of the challenge is, it needs to be said, a subject of some controversy. A key issue which is not pursued here is the contribution of the department to what many see as the degradation of the fabric of the teaching and learning landscape and particularly the dire demoralisation of the teaching corps. For some of this discussion, see Hall with Altman et al. 2005; Phurutse 2005; and Shisana et al. 2005.) Two major challenges continue to bedevil the system. The first relates to access and the second to issues of quality. On one level, the question of access to education is straightforward. As indicated above, legislation is in place (SASA) which stipulates that every child has a right to school access, even if the child cannot pay the fees of that school. Work carried out in three provinces by Soudien and Sayed (2004), the work of Fiske and Ladd (2004) and the large study commissioned by the Nelson Mandela Foundation (2005) on education in rural communities make clear how issues such as access, while projected in progressive terms in the headings of the legislation, find themselves compromised by the detail of subsidiary clauses. The argument being made here is that the law itself is structured in
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ambiguity and lends itself to reactionary use and thus for exclusionary racial and class projects. Drawing on data from a study conducted in 14 schools in the Western Cape, the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, Soudien and Sayed (2004) show how schools used mechanisms in the new policy, such as the powers devolved to SGBs, to sustain, and in some cases to modify, old privileges. This study and that of Fiske and Ladd (2004) show that while no schools were overtly discriminating on the basis of race, class or gender, in practice all of these factors were in use as schools, using the room provided to them by the law, introduced language tests through interviews and entrance examinations, and consistently pushed up their fees to maintain good standards. The decision of the Cape High Court and the Appeal Court in the Western Cape, for example, where the judges upheld the Mikro Primary Schools claim that, in terms of the SASA, providing instruction in English would have, as the judge put it, a profound influence on the schools modus vivendi, customs,4 showed how amenable the law is to exclusionary work. In analysing these kind of data, it is important to recognise that legislation by itself is never a sufficient lever for promoting social change. The response of the Department of Education to developments such as these has been of a band-aid nature, such as, for example, the suggestion by the minister that the role of the principalship should be strengthened5 and, by implication, the powers of the SGB restricted. These kinds of approach fail to deal holistically with the problems of social change and development. The Soudien and Sayed study (2004) suggests that, with respect to social class, there was a domino effect playing itself out within the school system. When the apartheid system began breaking down, previously excluded African, coloured and Indian children began to move in large numbers into schools from which they had been kept out. African children began to move into formerly Indian and coloured schools and black children in general made their way into formerly white schools. Naidoos work (1996) suggests that the process of integration followed distinct socio-economic paths in KwaZulu-Natal in both ex-Natal Education Department (NED) (former white) and ex-House of Delegates (former Indian) schools. Fiske and Ladd (2004) also talk extensively of the classed nature of the social change, with the high costs of travelling to the more stable schools really being an option only for more affluent people. The process of integration has taken a distinct class character, with the poor not having the same access to the openness of the new system as their more financially stable counterparts. For African and coloured people in particular,
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there has been a flight of the more economically stable elements from their communities, leaving those schools largely with the poorest and most vulnerable members of the community. The Department of Educations response to this has been to create no-fee schools for the poorest communities. In lieu of the fees that they would have collected, the department has suggested the possibility of subsidising these schools at R400 per annum per learner (DoE 2003). It needs to be emphasised, however, that the benefits of these developments have not yet impacted on the schools of the poor, which have come to acquire distinct socio-economic characteristics. As relatively better-off families have left their communities, the schools have fallen into what one might call sinkhole syndromes and become the dumping grounds of the larger system. Events in recent years in the Western Cape, where principals have battled to keep criminality outside of their schools (Cape Argus 28 July 2005), have emphasised how strong the impact of poverty in the community has been on these schools. Related to this discussion of access have been new perspectives on established data which have sought to describe the poor throughput rates within the system. Sourcing data from the official Census and Department of Education statistics, Soudien and Gilmour (2005) calculate that of the Grade 1 cohort of 1666 980 learners who started school in 1995, only 932 151 made it to Grade7 in 2001, leaving 734 829 learners unaccounted for. In general, for every 100 children who began Grade 1, only 52 made it to Grade 12. There is a large dropout rate in poorer rural communities (Nelson Mandela Foundation 2005). In contrast to some official statistics that speak of full enrolment in the system, these anomalies suggest that children are in fact falling out of it. Overall there are two noteworthy dimensions of these results which point to the core of the South African situation. The first is that relative to other countries with similar socio-economic profiles, South African children are performing distinctly more poorly, and the second is that children from black middle-class backgrounds in South Africa perform more like their black working-class than their white middle-class counterparts. The upshot is that black children continue to suffer discrimination and, controversially, new forms of othering. This insight needs to be remembered, particularly in light of the comments that I make in Chapters 5 and 6 about the fragility of identity among elements of the nascent black middle class. It is important to come to terms with the form that these developments have taken, and in this regard the discussion about the state needs to be brought into full relief. We have seen in this chapter how the character of the South
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African school has taken shape over a 350-year period. Ever present as this development unfolds is the spectre of race. The school is instituted, at its moment of birth, as a site for reinforcing the subordinate identity of black people. Elaborating the arguments of Goldberg (2002), I suggest that when democracy arrived in 1994, the imprint of race and division in the South African education system was too deep to remove by legislative fiat. Moreover, race remains as a cartographic reality as children make their way to their schools every day. Their streets, their homes and their suburbs are raced. Their modes of transport are raced. Their teaching staffs are raced. Little about the new school, governed as it might be by new laws, alters the basic geography of their racialised worlds. In addition, the education bureaucracy operates inside a legal framework that tolerates race. While the legal framework defining schooling changes, its substance largely remains intact. How is this done? In The Racial State, Goldberg (2002) argues against two predominant conceptions of the modern state, especially with respect to race. The first view projects the state as a purely autonomous political entity distinguishable from other social, economic and political structures and processes in society. The second view constructs the state as an epiphenomenon of any one or a combination of a range of social forces. Drawing on but critiquing theorists such as McKinnon (1989), Goldberg argues that the state is neither an instrument of external social forces nor a reflection of an inner internally coherent logic, but a structure that is inherently contradictory and internally fractured, consisting not only of agencies and bureaucracies, legislatures and courts, but also of norms and principles, individuals and institutions (2002: 7). He develops the argument, however, by suggesting that representatives of the state in a loose sense form a class, internally diverse, fractured, but in modern terms racially patterned (2002: 8). Struggles take place within this class and with other contestants outside the state over the form the state is to take. In terms of this, the state is a more or less coherent and discrete entity in two related ways: as state projects underpinnedby a self-represented history as state memory; and as state power[s] (2002: 9). With these powers, the state has the power to exclude both within itself and from itself. Having the power to exclude from itself, the state is able to determine who enjoys its protection and who is excluded from its protection. Given these powers, the state lends itself conceptually to be defined as a racial or gendered formation with the power to exclude and by extension include in racially ordered terms (2002: 9). The extension of Goldbergs argument, for the purposes of revealing his Racial State thesis, is that the state stitches its social exclusions into what he calls
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the seams of the social fabric and by so doing achieves the naturalisation of exclusion (2002: 10). The larger effect of this is for processes of social exclusion to mark social belonging and identification in the state that is, either enfranchisement or disenfranchisement, citizenship or subjection. This power of definition and delimitation, Goldberg continues, offers the modern state the artifice of internal homogeneity where the status of inclusion is equated with that of membership of the nation and heterogeneity a threat that has to be placed outside the state. Much of Goldbergs argument is directly pertinent for understanding apartheid, but whether it works for a post-apartheid South African state is another question. Is the artifice of internal homogeneity an object of desire for the new South Africa? Clearly not in the precise terms he is postulating. As clichd as it sometimes is, much of the talk of the new South Africa about the rainbow nation, about unity in diversity, and so on is ostensibly about the development of a discourse of difference and the accommodation of otherness. But the substance of Goldbergs argument about the state, as a state of projects operating off its ability to represent itself historically and to constitute an official memory around this self-representation which it will mobilise as state power(s), does hold powerfully. The argument I make here is that the principle at the core of the new states governance arrangements is that of decentralisation. This decentralisation is at once a project for democracy but also a mechanism for the management of racialisation and racial difference. I acknowledge that these observations are controversial, but they allow us to see how a racial project (or indeed any other project of differentiation) actually works. In terms of its democratic intentions, it is about managing the countrys heritage of difference and the inequality that went with it, and is therefore an explicit project for heterogeneity (conceptually about homogenising the rights that come with difference). At the same time, however, the principle of decentralisation permits, if not the reproduction of key racial features of the old order, then certainly the remaking of those old features in new forms. In these terms, decentralisation is a deep racial project and the state remains a racial state. This argument is central to the logic of this book. Against the backdrop of South Africas racial apartheid legacy, I try to show how decentralisation, as a means of promoting democratic participation in schools, is constructed in racial, and indeed also class, tension. These tensions derive from and are inherent in the nature of the new state. The new state takes its character structurally from
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the coming together of the old bureaucratic apparatus of apartheid and the new political administrative leadership installed by the new government, and politically from a Risorgimento ANC government, formed out of the political settlement that was struck between the ANC and the apartheid National Party, seeking to unite the disparate and often ideologically contradictory elements that make up the South African political landscape. These two developments have given rise to a new state that is, in Goldbergs terms, a loose and internally fractured site of power, with considerable power to make policy vested in administrative leadership which is, nonetheless, consistently compromised by the nature and composition of the implementing agents beneath it. As many familiar with the new government will recognise, this loose unity of the state is readily evident in the rhetorical consistency of the discourse of the state. Even those remnants of the old bureaucracy that continue to hold office in the new order have learnt the speak of the new democracy. This speak consists of a number of signature commitments, such as the need to deliver a more just and humane society in a climate of rising expectations; the commitment, in an acknowledged climate of increasing globalisation and financial austerity, to providing the conditions for stimulating economic growth and development; the commitment, in the context of different peoples group rights, to national unity; and a commitment to the deepening of the processes and practices of democracy. The fractured nature of the state is also evident in the almost incommensurate functions it has to fulfil: namely, delivering a society that is just and humane, providing the conditions for capital accumulation and ensuring the conditions for the development of national unity (Offe 1984, 1996). These fractures sit at the heart of the contradictions of the new state and, in some senses, constitute the dilemmas of the country as a modern economy. Less visible, is the social as opposed to economic inflection of this state of fracture. As the state emerges as a new modern state, with obligations to the global order, its management of issues of justice and social development forcibly raises the question of race and the racial heritage with which the country has to work. What strategies ought a globalising and modern emerging economy take with respect to the countrys divided racial past? It is in this respect that decentralisation offers the new state a mechanism for looking both to its past and to its future, ostensibly towards framing the nation in singular terms, as a community of communities, defined constitutionally by equality, but at the same time in respecting the global imperatives of free markets and unfettered
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choice, giving communities the structural means to operate with a relatively strong degree of autonomy. As I have argued elsewhere (see Sayed & Soudien 2005), these developments are not very different from what has happened elsewhere in the world. Dale (1997) suggests that the modern state can be considered to have undergone a form of hollowing-out, with some state activities taken up by supranational (and supra-international) agencies while others are lost downwards to subnational or non-state bodies. He further suggests that this implies not so much a loss of state power or its withdrawal as much as a disaggregation of the state and a redefinition of what the state is. The hollowing-out of the state as an upward and downward loss (or, more accurately, a redefinition of roles) is constituted in a very particular way in post-apartheid South Africa. The new post-apartheid state is, as a conditionality of the negotiated settlement, internally reorganised into a national state at centre and dispersed, decentralised states at sites (provinces). The semi-federalist, decentralised Constitution involves different activities and mechanisms of coordination between the centre and the sites. With respect to education, the national centre is responsible for the funding of the sites but is not involved in the management and control of schools within the sites. In Dales terms, the state funds but does not deliver and provide. I suggested above that the legislation defining this condition is a constraining as opposed to controlling mechanism to manage the actions of internal state actors and that this constraint produces a particular kind of political ambiguity that lends itself to juridical resolution. This has been particularly evident in the growing body of litigation between schools and the provincial governments.6 A key case in point is that of the Grove Primary School v. the Minister and others (1997).7 In the Grove case, a former Model C school successfully challenged the power of the provincial Department of Education to take away its right to appoint teachers. In terms of the regulations, provincial schools were compelled to appoint off a list, provided by the provincial Department of Education, of teachers considered to be in excess and whom the department sought to redeploy. The courts finding for Grove did not bring an end to disputes between SGBs and provincial education departments about the employment of educators. Following this case, there have been a number of cases where the courts have found in favour of schools. The courts have generally strongly safeguarded the right of schools to take on only those educators whom they have recommended to the department for employment.8
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Aside from the contribution of Jansen (1998), not enough attention has been paid to the identity-making implications of these developments. From an identity-making view, what these developments point to is the continued amenability, and indeed availability, of the new policy for racial work for mobilising certain public structures and institutions, such as schools, along racial lines and for deploying public resources along racial lines. As the court discussions have demonstrated, the argument can be made that there exists in the new policy hidden racial codes and practices which lie latent in the ambiguity of the text. These codes and practices are easily deployable and cannot readily be discarded. These are important insights with respect to the nature of the new school system and are pursued in the chapters that follow. What we have as a result are schools that continue to be organised as racial projects. Using the rubric that I introduced in the previous chapter of the official, the formal and the informal, we see how the official comes into view within the orbit of the school, is appropriated and in the process is recomposed as the formal. In the process of its recomposition, however, it is transformed. The complexity of these structural forces and their tension is central for understanding how social identity is produced in the school. The discussion in the following chapters is deliberately premised on the argument that the racial project remains a powerful driver of social mobilisation inside schools. Despite the intentions of the SASA and we need to recognise how much school has changed in the last 10 years race remains at the forefront of the pedagogical imagination and its work and the social expression it takes in schools. I make a distinction between those schools that are sites for the production and reproduction of dominant identities and those that are sites for subordinate identities. In making this argument, however, I move away from the conflation of white with dominance in an attempt to capture the shifting character of domination in South Africa with the elevation of class as a crucial factor in the redefinition of race. In doing so, the analysis also seeks to recognise the distinctions, contradictions and even antagonisms that are beginning to emerge within the hegemonic classes. Chief among these, of course, is class. In similar vein, I show how subordination is also a distinctly fractured and fracturing experience. While class factors push people previously classified coloured and African (and occasionally Indian and less so those classified white) into similar positions of unemployment and social immiseration, their apartheid histories and experiences make it difficult for them to see these commonalities. Their commitments to the racial identities bequeathed to them by apartheid remain powerful. As a consequence, they
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struggle to realise the possibilities for a common social destiny. This is an important point to take into the discussion that follows. We need to recognise the long shadow of our countrys history as it continues to darken the corners of our minds as we work out who we are and how we relate to each other.
Notes
1 Officials appointed by the Dutch East India Company to minister to the ill, to promote, as Van Riebeeck explained in his diary, greater devotion and better discipline among the crew (1954: 145) and, subsequently, to provide religious instruction to the children of company employees. The Defiance Campaign was a joint campaign launched in 1952 by the African National Congress, the South African Indian Congress and the Coloured Peoples Congress against the battery of laws introduced by the new apartheid government in 1951. The campaign mobilised thousands of volunteers to defy the countrys unjust laws. In 1961 the Pan Africanist Congress led a demonstration against the countrys pass laws that required people classified African to carry a special document that indicated they had permission to be outside of their homelands. The heart of the protest took place in Sharpeville. Over 60 people were killed by the police in the demonstration. http://www.lrc.org.za/Judgements/judgements_highcourt.asp. http://www/education.gov.za/mainmedia.asp?src=mvie&xsrc=898. There have already been about 20 instances where schools have taken the state to court. Whether litigation between the formal authority of the province and the formal authority of the state is possible, particularly when the state and the provinces are under the control of different political parties, is an interesting question. Jansen describes the Grove Case as one of the most complex, controversial and contested legal cases in the history of South African education (1998: 5). See, for example, Douglas Horskool en n ander v. Premier, Noord-Kaap en andere, 1999, (4) SA 1131 (NC); Gordon Harrison and another v. Minister of Education and Training and another, 2002, High Court, Pietermaritzburg, Case No. 4295/98; Laerskool Gaffie Maree and another v. MEC for Education, Training, Arts and Culture: Northern Cape Province and others, 2002, High Court, Northern Cape Division, Case No. 1240/01; Settlers Agricultural High School and another v. Head of Department: Department of Education, Limpopo Province and others, 2002, High Court, Transvaal Provincial Division, Case No. 16395/02; Destinata School and another v. Head of Department: Department of Education, Gauteng and others, 2003, High Court, Case No. 10207/2003. 125
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4 5 6
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Constituting the class: Integration in South African schools
The previous chapter emphasised the racial history of the South African state. It sought to show how much the ideal of race was instituted into the content of governance and management. In this chapter, the discussion is extended to examine what I described in the closing sections of the last chapter as the intervening and articulating complexities of South African society. The point might be made that South Africa is a long-range racial project. Hopefully what I do in this text is to show how the question of race is always in a nuanced relationship of give and take a dialectic of multiplicity with a range of other social factors. In this chapter I explain what these contiguous and intervening factors are. In writing about the process of integration (or unity) in South African schools, what it means, its scope, the role of individuals and groups, the social forces within it and the problems surrounding it, the inclination to follow the route of racial conflict and racial unity is seductive. After all, South Africas history is, most would say, the history of race. How the races are getting on is not, in these terms, an unreasonable question to ask. It is salutary, however, to remind ourselves of E.H. Carrs famous injunction to those who work in the broad terrain of history and, by implication, the social sciences. Before you study the history, he said, study the historian (Carr 1964: 44). At the core of Carrs concern is the understanding that history is a constructed field. It is constructed by historians who manifest in their writing the historical and social influences and forces that have been central to their intellectual development. Historians are themselves historical subjects. In this respect all histories, all works of history, have their own narratives of formation their own histories, so to speak and are fundamentally potential objects of critical analysis. Having made the point about social construction in an earlier chapter, it is almost gratuitous in an age where deconstruction has become commonplace, and has gone far beyond the intellectual imagination of Carr, to make the point that what we write is imprinted with our own histories. It needs to be emphasised, however, that any discussion that seeks to delve into issues such as community, integration, the nation, and so on cannot but begin with this
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caution. Whether one takes the approach of consensus and leans towards what has come to be understood as the liberal view of society namely, that of a presumptive sense of coherence and asks what constitutes the community, how the nation is imagined, what divisions and fractures exist within the nation, group or community, and what is to be integrated or unified, or the more critical approach of rights and justice and asks how rights are to be distributed or redistributed, will always depend, as Carr would have said, on who the historian or the social commentator is who is asking the question. Conceptions of the past, the constitutive elements, the determinative events, the narrative structures and the groups and individuals within that past are central to what the social commentator might draw upon in attempting to describe the world or society he or she might be addressing.
The implications for beginning this chapter on school integration with this reminder may be obvious to many in South Africa who write about the issues of race, class, gender and social change. But they are not necessarily always remembered. We forget, or perhaps are forced to forget, that what we speak and even how we speak the ways in which we characterise fields of knowledge and the ways in which we define objects within these fields have a direct bearing on the arena of social and political practice. Helpful in engaging these problematics is understanding the implications of what Homi Bhabha (1994) refers to as the language of theory. What does this mean? At issue in the ways in which we engage and present ourselves theoretically are the prickly questions of whether or perhaps the better way to put it is to say to what extent our languages or our discourses are collusive with the colonial and neocolonial projects and strategies of the hegemonic political and economic institutions of the world, at the heart of which remains social, political and economic domination. Central to this domination, keeping it in place, is the need to differentiate between self and other and to inscribe into the everyday consciousness a sense of who belongs and who does not, who is with us and who is not. In light of this, how does the language of theory we use relate to this project? Taking the question further, as Homi Bhabha asks, are our theoretical languages complicit, or less insidiously amenable for use, in the new ways in which the dominant classes and groups operate in society? My own response to this question Bhabha poses is to suggest that our languages of description for South Africa, in the ways in which they recruit us as individuals into one or another position and in the ways they work with notions of hierarchy, distance and, critically, our individual subjectivity,
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are eminently mobilisable for the project of hegemony. In the South African context of the 2000s, in some ways unlike the more critical political and ideological moments of the 1980s and the 1990s when the possibility of an anti-racist project seemed possible, we easily accede to the dominant and no doubt comfortable languages that put us into boxes and categories. What are these languages of description and how do they correspond to the cut and thrust of the countrys everyday experiences?
Languages of description
The mainstays of our languages of description in South Africa are obviously those of race and, to a lesser degree, class. These languages or theories draw on the relatively short history of South Africas modern experience. They pervade the world of scholarship, politics, and popular representation through the media. In the ways in which they have been taken up, whether it be in the academy, the world of politics or the media, they have come to provide a framework for the stabilisation and fixing of meaning, and for its reproduction and legitimation. Their recursive use permits and produces a familiarity and a certain sense of verisimilitude but also conditions the ways in which the field of social relations is addressed. Retreat or departure from this familiarity is to enter a zone inhabited by the unreal, the nave and even sometimes, as the charge might be put, the new reactionaries.
The language of race

The racial discussion in South Africa, and virtually everywhere else in the world, conceives of race in one of two ways. The first way, that of the biological essence of race, is the conservative view. In this view race is primordial, inscribed in our genes, and produces, in the language of particular kinds of anthropologists, hard-wired characteristics that determine our physiognomic, physical, intellectual and, in some versions, even cultural characteristics. Escape from the race reality is impossible. More progressive sociologists of race, as I noted in Chapter 2, think of it as being socially constructed. In this explanation, the second way, science, inter alia, is mobilised to show the impossibility of race. However, holding on to the primacy of race as a social reality, the argument is made here that race has a materiality at the level of politics and ideology that conditions social relations. Central to this argument, and relevant for my discussion on approaches to difference in
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South African schools, is the idea of race as cultural artefact. Race as difference is produced in the cultural constructions and negotiations of understanding of self and other developed by particular groups. While race is not immutable, as in the primordialist approach, the cultures of particular groups enjoy a certain durability in so far as they provide and stabilise meaning for people in and across a whole range of social settings. In this approach, race is about groups manifesting themselves through distinctive cultures. In more extreme versions of this argument, race is culture. There is, therefore, a white culture, an African culture and, in the South African context, coloured and Indian cultures.1 This is related to but different from the way the term ethnicity is sometimes used, where ethnicity is thought to connote a cultural grouping. Often, however, as many will realise, the term ethnicity is used as a synonym for race.
In both the primordialist and the social-constructedness explanations, race is understood to be the primary force within the social structure. As Wolpe says, the social structure is described and theorised on the basis of individual subjects and groups who owe their formation, their unity and their homogeneity to a single racial origin (1988: 8). In determining understandings of us and them, relationships between groups and the solidarities that govern their behaviour proceed from the premise that the groups are internally coherent and undifferentiated.
The language of class

Class-based theories proceed from the premise that all individual and group relations in society take their character from the imperatives of the economy, particularly its mode of production. In this description as it relates to South Africa, it is the capitalist mode of production which determines, specifies and gives content to the character of the great classes in society: the owners of the means of production, the capitalists, and the operators of the means of production, the workers. In most variations of these theories, the interests of the two groups are fundamentally and dialectically opposed to one another. In Marxist terms, the capitalists always seek to extract more surplus labour from the workers, while the workers always seek to wrest control of the means of production away from the capitalists. The importance of this approach for this study is how it positions and describes individuals and groups. It assumes that classes and the individuals within them take their formation and their identities directly from their relationship to the means of production. Outside of their objective class positions, everything else is secondary.
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Race, class and notions of difference

One of the most important scholars of social difference in South Africa, Harold Wolpe, argues that neither the race-based nor the class-based approach by itself or in combination with the other is capable of explaining the nature of the South African social formation and the ways in which privilege, power and position are distributed. Neither is able to grasp the entire story of social division, the hierarchies that operate within society and, critically, how rights accrue or are denied. Explaining South Africa and seeking to resolve the injustices and inequalities would require more than working through race and/or class. Wolpe (1988) makes the crucial point that the formation and maintenance of racial groups and division in South Africa is a process that takes place in specific contexts that are subject to both centrifugal and centripetal pressures. Allied to these is the crucial element of politics, which operates often independently from other factors but always in some form of articulation with them. This combination of the instances of race, class and politics produces effects and outcomes that are ongoing and always in flux. They produce differentiations within groups, fracturing their homogeneity. Privileging race as a category of analysis therefore underplays the ways in which a whole range of conditions and processes influences the sense of cohesiveness and fragmentation within groups. Class analysis too, Wolpe argues, suffers from a similar insularity and reductionism. As a result of this reductionism, little room is allowed for non-class effects. It is clear, says Wolpe, that this analysis provides no conceptual basis for an analysis of the specific conditions in which racial categorisations come to provide the content of class struggles and/or the basis of organisation of interests in a manner which both cuts across class divisions and yet may serve to sustain, change (for example, racialisation or deracialisation) or undermine them (1988: 15). While recognising the presence of race (and class), Wolpe is seeking to show that race is hardly ever a singular, stable or even coherent sign. Within it are the unmistakable presences of a whole host of cross-cutting and intervening factors. The value of Wolpes work and I show below what possibilities it opens up is that it calls into question the ways in which discourses of race and class have been mobilised to understand South Africa. In his text Race, Class and the Apartheid State (1988), he implicitly argues against the dominant iconographic systems of South Africa, particularly those of race, and looks to more searching ways of understanding social difference in the country. In attempting to analyse post-apartheid South Africa, there is much to work
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with here because the essential system of referencing and marking the social landscape remains. The racial discourse of apartheid has been sustained and carried into the new South Africa as the new state has struggled to assert itself. Looking upon South Africa, this mode of address, in directing the new reform agenda, has remained firmly within the language of race. This language is manifest in policies of affirmative action, immigration and social renewal. While recognising how and why the language of race retains its pertinence in social description, what is of concern in thinking about the school integration process is the question of how the theory we use is able to engage with and even displace the power/knowledge couplet of race (and even class). How do we write in ways that will subvert the power that comes with the language of race? How do we make race and class objects of both analysis and purposive action? How do we move beyond seeing our words as epiphenomenal utterances as expressions that follow pre-given realities and begin to realise that our words are themselves discursive events and that reality does not exist in a primordial sense awaiting our description of it? And, critically, how are we to avoid the mobilisation of our work for the maintenance of the hegemony of race and class? Part of an answer is recognising and this is extending Wolpes discomfort with reductionist notions of race and class that our explanations of the realities we confront will always be grasping or incomplete. They construct and constitute the reality as we speak it. They hold versions or interpretations of what is out there and present these as the truth. They are unable to recognise the multiple social contingencies that enter our processes of making meaning. Instead, our statements of what reality is depend on unproblematised portmanteau theories that are allowed to define and to normalise what clearly is partial and incomplete. Forgotten are the stratagems and artifices of our representational modalities within these grand theories; forgotten are the multiple conscious and unconscious positions of privilege we call upon as we pronounce and enunciate.
Towards a new space

In attempting to move to a more self-conscious theoretical stance, one which is aware of how we take position within the structures and narratives of our own social analyses, it seems that we need to develop a social criticism that is alert to the shifting relationship between cultural difference, social authority and political discrimination and that can deal with the dominant rationalisations of self and other. Such an approach would need to be aware of how much the ways in which we speak and our theories and languages of description are
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mobilisable for the dominant project of race and class. It has the potential of opening up ways of seeing that take us beyond the stereotypical ways in which difference is understood. Critically, it unmasks the arbitrary ways in which the mark of the stereotype is assigned to each of us, particularly the racial, class, cultural and gender values that are supposed to define who we are. It has the potential for helping us work in new productive spaces in which we are able to confront processes of social and individual meaning-making culture in our lives; to recognise how those processes, in their innovativeness, continually produce new forms of oppression and emancipation; and how and this is an important point each of us is implicated in these processes. From such a position we can develop a project of emancipation that is fundamentally conscious of the ways in which we are positioned and how we position ourselves. We can begin to see each other in our heterogeneity and to deal with, and not disavow, the proclivity within us to other as we socially identify. The power of such an approach is to force us to realise the limitations of consensual and collusive theories of community embodied in notions of race, class, gender, culture, and so on. Taking this into thinking about the questions of unity or integration in South Africa, we clearly have a long way to go. If we are seeking to enter a new social space in which notions of unity and integration are what drive social policy, it is critical that we ask what realities we are to unify and to integrate. Can it be any reality? All realities? And once we have unified or brought them together, what notions of self and group do we use that will remain just and fair, sensitive to the multiple ways in which individuals and groups seek to be represented and yet at the same time alert to and critical of the political and ideological artifices that go with building polities? In offering a way of speaking to this situation and the problematics within it, we need to recognise a number of points: Our theories will always fall short of the realities they seek to encompass. Always present in our languages of description and our theories of society will be notions of self and other. As we include, or integrate and unify, so we create hegemonies that will always create new others. Our languages or theories define and come to constitute what is the norm and what is not. We need to develop approaches to dealing with difference in all its multiplicity that will engage with the dominant theories of the day, particularly as they are appropriated by social policy.
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Working with notions of integration: integration scapes

In terms of the arguments above, I suggest that there are two ways of proceeding. The first is to develop an approach that tries to work with the notion of multiplicity and brings together, as far as is possible, the range of factors that can be identified within a given context. The second is to work with the dominant languages of description in their attenuated form, or in so far as they attempt to articulate with other ways of seeing. The first approach could be described as the contingent model and the second as the dominant-factor model. Elements of both models were used in the Education Inclusion and Exclusion in India and South Africa Project reported in an IDS Bulletin.2 The contingent model clearly carries more possibilities in terms of its aims of uncovering the complex and multiple forms of identification and identity that would have to be revealed and would need to be mediated in a common social space. The second is more limited in so far as its logic tends to insulate the major factor, even when its dominance is in doubt. For pragmatic purposes, however, I elect to work with the dominant-factor model simply because there is available material to work with. At this stage, attempting to work in an integrated framework is not viable, if only because the existing material on integration, as it has been understood and assembled, does not readily lend itself to thinking of complexity and contingency. It does not, for example, easily work with the idea that children in a classroom cannot simply be read or understood in terms of what are thought to be the main attributes which define them. Each child is always a collection of things his or her looks, interests, desires, aspirations, and so on and how these things come together is complex. What integration does in its general approach is to erase this complexity. As a result, each child is homogenised and made into the type invariably racial and thereby cultural which is assumed to explain him or her. Having made the decision to use the dominant-factor approach, I propose that a suitable way forward might be to work in a number of what one might call scapes where the dominant factor can be seen to be at work. Scapes are used here as ways of seeing. They frame the objects that come into view in particular kinds of ways. Reality and explanations of what constitutes reality are defined in relation to the dominant factor. Having assembled these scapes, we might then see how we can reach towards a contingent model by articulating the different scapes in an integrated analysis.
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The importance of such an approach is the following: It acknowledges, in its very genesis, its limitations and the possibilities for being recruited into use by the dominant project. It proceeds from the recognition of its dependency on certain representational strategies, chief among which are reductionism and essentialism. In terms of the foregoing, it declares, as an approach, its culpability as a discursive framework for defining reality. What are the scapes that we can describe? The most obvious are those of race, class and gender. Allied to these are also cultural scapes, language scapes, religious scapes, age scapes, sexual orientation scapes, physical ability scapes, intellectual ability scapes, nationality scapes, health scapes (including HIV/ AIDS) and a whole range of others that have yet to be specified. Taking this approach is not without its difficulties. While it attempts to suggest a way through the thickets of the school integration discussion, there are certain immediate challenges that it throws up. Predictably, the first and most important is that of attempting to develop a series of ways of seeing in an analytic space in which particular perspectives have been privileged and others disallowed. How does one ever get to see the role of sexuality in determining individuals and groups in a society that has rendered sexuality utterly invisible and banished it to the unspeakable reaches of the private? As is to be expected, what this privileging produces are public facts and private desires. As a consequence it is only from the former that the real emanates. Everything else belongs in the realm of the unprovable or the unknowable. Given this, we have to accept that some scapes will be considerably fuller, better constructed and more accessible than others. Other scapes will be, in their turn, either darker or emptier. This clearly suggests opportunities for developing new lines of research and investigation. The next section of the chapter works with the idea of the scape. The discussion draws partly on work carried out by others a range of researchers, many of whom are colleagues and work associates but principally from work that I have been doing around identity construction for many years. The approach taken is to look at how the factors, particularly those of race and class, have been used in imagining integration. Studies to which I have had access have often worked with both race and class, some in a more self-consciously articulated way than others. For the purposes of exposition, I will work with the race analysis extensively and the class analysis less so, and, where possible, I will suggest how other factors might be approached.
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The race scape

The race scape is, of course, dominant within the repertoire of school integration analyses and studies both in South Africa and elsewhere in the world. In many ways, the South African discussion has depended on that which has unfolded in the United States and to a lesser degree in the United Kingdom. In the United States the genre has grown significantly, attracting both the best and the worst theorists of schooling and equality. In South Africa it has achieved prominence in a field that remains frustratingly slim, underresearched and heavily dependent on American terminology, typologies and modes of analysis.
South African studies that take race explicitly as their focus include the work of Dekker and Lemmer (1993), the work of Lemmer and Squelch (1993), a study published by the Education Policy Unit at the University of Natal arising from a masters thesis by Naidoo (1996), a doctoral study by Tihanyi (2003), a landmark study conducted for the Human Rights Commission by Vally and Dalamba (1999) and Zafars (1998) study of integrating public schools. A larger corpus of work which looks more generally at school relations rather than race only is also available in the work of Carrim (1992), Carrim and Soudien (1999), Christie (1990), Gaganakis (1990), Soudien (1996, 1998) and Soudien and Sayed (2003). Other studies, such as that of Hofmeyr (2000), touch on the subject. There are undoubtedly many more studies and commentaries on the matter. Those listed here, however, represent the most significant in the field. The dominant theoretical approach within this body of work is that of social construction. As is to be expected, no studies in the South African literature explicitly approach race from the primordialist perspective (even though those beliefs may exist, and may parade as social constructionism). In relation to social construction, positions vary from the Marxist to those leaning towards what was earlier described as contingency theory. As noted above, approaches based on the social construction of race have as their point of departure the idea that race emerges in the process of making meaning and is therefore embedded in the realm of the cultural. Thus race is a cultural idea. Groups have different conceptions of themselves and each other that arise out of their cultural universes. These universes are symbolic arenas in which they are able to see and place themselves and others. In a sense, it is this that produces among many social construction theorists the idea that race is an unavoidable reality.
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The consequence of this approach is to understand integration and its opposite, desegregation in distinctive kinds of ways. As Naidoo says, integration requires fundamental changes inpersonal attitudes and behaviour patterns. It requires major changes of deep-seated attitudes and behaviour patterns among learners and teachers of minority and majority groups (1996: 11). In this approach, integration is when groups with their cultures come together. The interesting thing for this discussion is not what happens when bodies meet but that which occurs when the cultural auras or cultural universes around people come into contact with each other. People are assumed to be carrying their universes around them as they engage and negotiate with each other.
How they deal with each other, carrying these universes with them, is the interest of those who work with race. Following the work of sociologists and psychologists, integration occurs only when positive interaction occurs (see Rist 1979). Again, as suggested above, it is not physical contact that matters; what counts is how yielding and open to engagement are the universes people carry around with them. As Naidoo puts it, the current ethos of a school, the nature of the interaction and existing patterns and institutional features and policies of school may limit or facilitate such integration (1996: 11). These orientations make possible three different kinds of approaches to integration: assimilation, multicultural education and anti-racist education. From the perspective of equality and justice, these approaches represent a continuum of possibilities in which one can see degrees of accommodation and integration. The least accommodative and integrative is the assimilationist position. In this position the values, traditions and customs of the dominant group frame the social and cultural context of the school. Everything in the school (and the wider society) is measured in relation to the dominant. Integration in this context is blending into the dominant framework. It is assumed that subordinate groups and individuals, in order to integrate, have to learn and become competent in the languages, the values and the cultural repertoires of the dominant group. School plays a crucial role in this setting in so far as it comes to be the major medium for helping the subordinate to assimilate the ways and manners of the dominant. Drawing from Gillborn, Naidoo (1996) explains that key to the assimilationist project are the following presumptions: that subordinate groups represent a threat to the standards of the dominant group and that the dominant group is culturally superior.
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Under these presumptions, the encounter with the subordinate group leaves the dominant project intact. Those in dominance do not see the need to make any adjustments to the ways in which they manage themselves and their relationships with others. By contrast, the consequences of assimilationism for subordinate groups are dire. They are expected both to give up their own identities and cultures, and, critically, to acknowledge the superiority of the culture and, by implication, the identities of the groups into whose social context they are moving. Intense processes of self-othering ensue with consequences for how young people relate to their pasts, their affiliations, their values and the assessments they make of themselves. Unless they have access to other forms of support, young people invariably leave assimilationist contexts with feelings of alienation and discomfort. In response to the oppressiveness of assimilationism, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom, a more accommodative policy was developed called multiculturalism. Central to multiculturalism was the idea that the school had to accommodate the different cultures brought into it. Arising in response to the demands of politically subordinate groups, multiculturalism essentially sought to make the point that all cultures were equally valid and had to be respected in the school context. Not unexpectedly, multiculturalism drew the ire of critics from both the right and the left. Right-wing critics, such as Hirsch (1987) and Ravitch3 (1990) in the United States, argued that it undermined the inclusivist nature of the great American culture and sought to infuse into it inferior standards. Critics on the left saw it as, inter alia, a weak, and in the end racist, alternative to real democracy in so far as it paid lip service to the rights of the subordinate, and was also a way of continuing to shore up inadequate and stereotypical notions of culture. These criticisms notwithstanding, it has come to be accepted as the only way to deal with difference in school. For those who support it, it is supposed to awaken new understandings of others, challenge prejudice, recognise diversity, promote equity and transform the school environment away from the single-minded criteria of value encoded in the dominant culture. While multiculturalism has gained the high ground and become very much part of the rhetorical arsenal of the mainstream, its critics have argued that its essentially liberal character leaves untouched the major premises of the
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dominant system namely, that different groups have different cultures and that cultures are neutral. They make the point that the possibility needs to be entertained that the production of particular ways of doing things might raise some difficulties. They argue that the so-called respect for other cultures fails to engage with the challenging ways in which individuals and groups develop attitudes to one another. While cultures are celebrated, the processes through which those cultures are delineated and then rank-ordered never come into view. These critics call for a perspective that engages directly with processes that make meaning. Theirs, they argue, is an anti-racist programme that directly attacks the othering implicit and embedded in dominant culture. These three approaches are evident and have been used in most studies working in the race scape in South Africa. Interestingly, most studies come to much the same conclusion: namely, that the integration process in South Africa has followed a decidedly assimilationist route. In what follows an attempt is made to show how these studies reached this conclusion. Before this is done, however, a point of clarification about the empirical strength of the data available to us is necessary. As things stand, essentially because the new government has officially abolished racial categories (although this policy is inconsistently followed), not all schools or provincial authorities collect statistics about their learners in terms of race. (Where information is collected in this way, it has happened, one hopes, as a result of individual decisions at schools, and thus with the consent of parents and learners.) Official statistics that reflect the racial demography of schools are not uniformly available. As a result, annual reports of provincial governments do not systematically include integration as an aspect of schooling experience. While the reports might make mention of racism and racial incidents at schools, they do not deal with race as a demographic factor. The result of this is that we do not know in a precise and accurate way what has happened in terms of racial integration in South African schools. One source of empirical data is a research-led body of evidence on learner migration carried out by the Human Sciences Research Council (Sekete et al. 2001). Another is a set of statistics provided to the Human Rights Commission study (Vally & Dalamba 1999). Fleshing out this picture are a number of studies where estimations of integration have been made based on a number of sources. The Sekete et al. study (2001), based on a survey of 120 schools (79 returns)
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Table 5.1: Extent of changes in selected schools in five provinces (per cent)
None Enrolments have changed in termsof their racial composition The schools admission policy has changed to accommodate learners from different residentialbackgrounds The number of learners coming from other than the schools immediate neighbourhood haschanged
Source: Sekete, et al. (2001: 33).
Minor 16.1 11.4
N/A 16.2 10.8
Moderate 31.2 27.7
Major 29.3 39.7
6.8 10.4
5.2
19.3
6.1
36.2
33.1
in five provinces in 1999 and 2000, showed that enrolments had changed dramatically. In response to the question of the extent to which changes had occurred in their schools, schools reported as shown in Table 5.1. If one accepts that almost 75 per cent of schools are former Department of Education and Training (DET) schools and that, as is argued below, very little change would have happened in these schools in terms of demographics, the extent of the changes signalled in Table 5.1 is considerable. In response to all three questions about the extent of change, more than 60 per cent of the respondents acknowledged that either moderate or major changes had taken place in their schools. In the Gauteng region, the Vally and Dalamba study (1999) shows that the number of children classified African in 1998 was significant across the former House of Assembly (HOA) schools that served pupils classified white, the House of Representatives (HOR) system that served pupils classified coloured, and the House of Delegates (HOD) system that served pupils classified Indian; see Table 5.2. The point will be elaborated below, but the strength of the movement into the former Indian and coloured schools is clear. These
Table 5.2: Gauteng learners by race groups in formerly race-based schools (per cent)
Ex-DET African A W C Grade 1 All grades 100 0 100 0 0 0 I 0 0 Ex-HOA white A 16 22 W C 75 72 2 3 I 6 2 Ex-HOR coloured A 9 31 W C 0 0 91 67 I 0 0 Ex-HOD Indian A 61 45 W C 0 0 5 I 50 22 17
Source: Vally and Dalamba (1999: 18).
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Table 5.3: Gauteng learners by race groups in public and independent schools (per cent)
All public schools A Grade 1 77 All grades 71 W 16 21 C 5 5 I 2 2 Independent (subs.) A 55 57 W 37 35 C 2 2 I 6 5 A 80 86 Independent (non-subs.) W 18 12 C 2 1 I 0 0 A 76 70 Total W 17 22 C 5 5 I 2 3
Source: Vally and Dalamba (1999: 18).
statistics need to be read in conjunction with those shown in Table 5.3, which gives the breakdown of learners by race in the entire system for Gauteng.
Other studies support the trends noted in Gauteng. The first of these is that of the Inclusion and Exclusion Project (Soudien & Sayed 2003), which looked at 14 schools (all the names are fictitious) located in the provinces of KwaZulu-Natal, the Eastern Cape and the Western Cape. Based on estimates provided by school principals in 2001, the schools demographic profiles are given in Table 5.4.
Table 5.4: Learner demographic profiles
Enrolment (%) Name of school Ruby Primr Lagaan Primary Bass Secondary Dover High School Amazon Secondary Marula Primary Basildon Primary Divinity Technical Ex-Dept. HOR HOD HOD HOD HOD HOD DET DET Total 300 800 1 200 900 1 000 520 414 700 1 001 1 020 600 700 600 800 0 A 60 15 80 80 80 60 90 100 100 100 60 20 40 10 90 90 10 10 0 70 10 W 40 5 80 20 20 20 20 C I Medium of instruction Social context Afrikaans English English English English English English English English English English English English Afrikaans Poor working class Middle class Stable working class Middle class Stable working class Poor working class Middle class Stable working class/ lower middle class Working-class poor Working-class poor Upper middle-class boys Middle class Middle class Middle class
Bongalethu Secondary DET Siyafika Secondary Eastdale Primary Oasis Senior Primary Valley Primary North City High Afrikaans DET HOA HOA HOA HOA
Source: Sayed et al. 2007: 41.
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Much of the subsequent discussion in this chapter will refer to these schools. What is interesting about them, as the data in Table 5.4 reflect, is how different schools population mixes became. While the national evidence of the nature and extent of the movement of South African boys and girls across their apartheid divides is not available, the assumption that the strongest movements have occurred from African to white schools is open to question. Based on the evidence, it would appear that the movement from formerly African schools to formerly Indian and coloured schools has been as strong as, if not stronger than, that of Africans into formerly white schools. African students have been migrating into Indian and coloured schools closest to their homes and convenient for purposes of travel. In the Cape Town area, for example, it is apparent that former Indian and coloured schools located on bus and train routes from the townships have been the recipients of considerable numbers of African students. While anecdotal evidence seems also to suggest that there has been a domino effect in this process, with coloured and Indian students moving further up the transport line to former white schools, the reality seems to be that the demographic profiles of former coloured and Indian schools have changed significantly, with some schools pupil rolls being up to 50 per cent African. This evidence is supported by Naidoos work (1996) in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), which shows that the percentages of children classified African in former Indian schools are more than twice that in the former white schools; see Table5.5. Naidoo suggests that the levels of integration in smaller towns are lower than those in the metropolitan areas. In both smaller towns and the metropolitan areas, however, the large enrolment of children classified African in former HOD schools is evident.
Table 5.5: African learners in selected KZN schools (per cent)
Ex-Dept. School Area Medium of instruction
Port Rich. High Primary Total Dbn PMB Newcastle Shep. Bay Total Eng. Afrik. Ex-NED Ex-HOD Total (average) 17 41 29 10 28 19 14 35 24 17 35 26 10 35 23 15 38 27 30 30 30 10 30 30 12 35 23 21 N/A 28 <1 <1
Source: Naidoo (1996: 33).
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Hofmeyrs work in the Carletonville area, carried out in the late 1990s, shows evidence of large movements from former DET schools. She explains: We visited eight public schools, four ex-Model C schools and three African schools for this study. The visits to the schools revealed all the features of pupil migration referred to earlier [in her report]. Over the previous five years the two English-medium primary schools had become predominantly black. In 1998, they had ratios of 53 and 69 per cent black pupils. By contrast, the two Afrikaansmedium primary schools in the town were much less integrated at 39 and 7 per cent black. In the case of the high schools, the same pattern was evident: the English-medium high school was 56 per cent black as opposed to 8 and 15 per cent black in the Afrikaansmedium ones. (Hofmeyr 2000: 8) What is interesting about Hofmeyrs study (2000), and also suggested in the studies by Soudien and Sayed (2003) and Tihanyi (2003), is that former white schools have not uniformly become majority black. While this is certainly not the basis for making definitive statements, in both Soudien and Sayeds and Tihanyis studies it appeared that English-speaking former HOA schools were more popular among African learners and parents. Hofmeyr explains why this might be so: Higher levels of integration in English schools are a common phenomenon in ex-Model C schools because of the overwhelming desire of black parents to have their children learn English, as the route to jobs and higher education. Fear of racism in Afrikaans schools and hostility to Afrikaans as the language of the oppressor during Apartheid also drives black pupil migration to English schools. A principal told us that black parents who could only speak Afrikaans, the predominant language underground in the mines, would use an interpreter to speak to him and enrol their children in an English school. The growing numbers of black pupils in the English-speaking schools were especially evident in the lower grades, where in grade one it was common to find only four or five white pupils. In the higher grades, there were often still a majority of white pupils because the schools were steadily integrating from the bottom up. This pupil demography is amazing because, as the one headmaster reminded me, the town is renowned as a conservative stronghold
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where five years ago we were still in separate queues in the Post Office! (2000: 5) The actual patterns of migration as suggested by these studies are important to track and to make sense of. Clearly, learners and their families are making important decisions about what they perceive to be in their best interests. What is noteworthy about these statistics are the following: Paramount is noting the flight of students out of former African schools. As all the statistics in this chapter show, there has been no movement whatsoever of children classified coloured, white and Indian into former African schools. The schools that are integrating, therefore, are all the nonformer DET schools. Children classified African constitute a larger proportion of the total school population in former Indian and coloured schools than in former white schools. Children classified African, it would appear, are not entering Afrikaansspeaking former white schools in significant numbers. Why these particular patterns are arising deserves more detailed study than is possible here. Briefly, however, it is clear that the flight of African children out of the former DET system has much to do with the recent history of turbulence within that system and, as many commentators suggest, the perception of higher standards in the other systems (see, for example, Sekete et al. 2001). This is especially the case with regard to the former HOD schools. While former white schools are regarded in the same light, the perception that they are expensive has limited the movement of students into them. It is therefore true to say that particular kinds of schools are not attracting large numbers of previously disqualified learners. Why this is so undoubtedly has to do with issues of physical, financial and linguistic access. These issues were explored in the Soudien and Sayed study (2003) and will not be pursued here. One further point to note before looking at the outcomes of the studies is the fact that the teachers in many of the integrating schools remained white, coloured or Indian. Soudien and Sayed explain: Significantly, while the schools in the study had all become integrated, with some, such as Oasis [a school in the study] completely changing their pupil profile, the teaching staffs at all the schools remained largely what they had been during the apartheid era. At former Indian schools, the staff held their original profile, as did the former white schools, which only appointed a very small
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number of teachers from other groups. This fact is important in understanding how processes of inclusion and exclusion work. (2003: 45) Having outlined the patterns of movement in the system, it is now necessary to make some comments about what is happening in these schools, on the basis of the studies that have been done. In none of the studies is there evidence of what the literature calls the antiracist school, or the kind of school which explicitly makes racism and the idea of race itself the object of its attack. Instead, as all the studies referred to concur, pre-eminent in the schools of the country is a distinct tendency towards assimilationism. This is even the case in the examples of politically conscious schools my own work has looked at (see Soudien 1996). While these schools promote a strong non-racial ethos, and present themselves as schools for people and not schools for coloureds or schools for Africans, they fail to engage with the identity issues that the young people bring with them from their broader social experience. Much of their talk about race is polemical rather than substantial and interrogative. As a result, the schools end up working with identity in unsatisfactory ways. In many instances young people are simply required to follow what their teachers say. Naidoo (1996) comes to the conclusion that all the schools in his study followed an assimilationist approach, and the Vally and Dalamba study reaches a similar finding: [T]he predominant trend in school desegregation is the assimilationist approach, or as one student emphasised: I feel that if pupils from other races want to come to our school then they must adjust to the culture and norms of the school (1999: 24). The kind of assimilation which these non-racial schools project is certainly more aware of racial domination than the kind of assimilation in evidence in the schools of their white counterparts, but it is assimilationist nonetheless. Vally and Dalamba suggest that some schools have begun to espouse a multicultural perspective. The evidence for this is manifest in the attitudes of the teachers with whom they worked in their study. One such teacher comments: We are fortunate to have a rich diversity of cultures in our school. We respect and recognise the different cultures and ethnic groups and promote tolerance and understanding amongst them. In the beginning we had problems, mainly due to preconceived perceptions and judgements amongst different cultures, a general insecurity in the community and a lack of experience of how to deal with problems. (1999: 32)
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Testimony in this vein is abundant in many of the studies. What it points to is that multiculturalism enjoys a great deal of respect in some schools and might even inform their practice. Tihanyi, for example, chose to place two of her schools in a category she referred to as Deracialized Multiculturalism. She comments: [T]wo former Model C schools and the private school I visited [Acacia and Main Street Highs and Table Mountain Grammar School] use the language of multiculturalism and inclusivity to describe the process of racial integration: it is important that everyone celebratesdiversity and be proud of being Coloured or black, and these are the things from my culture that Im proud of and not feel inferior to any culture in any way, and not sort of think that this one is better than the other. It isnt that at alltheyre different, and one should be proud of the differences (Personal interview with the principal of Table Mountain Grammar School) My first impressions, indeed, validate this statement: I saw faces of many colors among the well-dressed and seemingly cheerful students, who, as they chatted and laughed with one another, gave a picture of relaxed race relations. Unlike Mountain Side, which had no whites, in these schools white students are the majority, usually followed by a sizeable group of Coloured, and a few black students. Most white students say that race relations are good at their school even that race does not exist. Some students of color share this opinion, while others notice subtle signs of what they see as racial discrimination on the part of teachers and fellow students. When it comes to recess, a look at the school yard showed me the clear lines of separation that keep students in racially divided groups. However, students insist that this has nothing to do with race; it is cultural, they say, people who share the same culture feel comfortable with one another. (2003: 15) In assessing this testimony, I suggest that many of the forms of multiculturalism we are seeing are in effect variations of assimilationism. They are rooted in the presumption that the dominant culture is an unquestionable good. The incoming children might be allowed to perform in their so-called native guises for special occasions, but they operate under the protection of the dominant culture. A principal in the Vally and Dalamba study makes the point very
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clear: I wish South Africa could visit us and see how things should be done We are a veritable United Nations. You have taught us about your cultures we thank you that you have lead [sic] us unscathed into the new South Africa (1999: 32). In closing my discussion of this scape, I suggest that assimilationism is overwhelmingly hegemonic as a practice of integration in schools. In attempting to develop a framework for understanding schools under this rubric, I note that there are a number of different kinds of assimilationism that exist in schools. In developing this typology, I identify assimilationism as it plays itself out in a variety of ways in the challenging environment of former Indian and coloured schools; in English-speaking former white schools that have remained largely white; in English-speaking schools that have become majority black schools; and in Afrikaans-speaking former white schools. Former African schools, because they have not experienced the movement of new constituencies into their classrooms racist, of course, as this reality might be clearly fall outside the scope of the discussion in this scape. As the work of Naidoo (1996), my own work on so-called African children in a so-called coloured school (Soudien 1996), the Soudien and Sayed survey (2003), the work of Tihanyi (2003) and the study by Vally and Dalamba (1999) suggest, there is a deep resentment present in many schools with respect to the so-called newcomers. This manifests itself in the ways children play, in formal ceremonies at school and in pedagogical practice, and amounts to what I call aggressive assimilationism. This kind of assimilationism is brusque, characterised by high degrees of intolerance and often violence. Less aggressive are the forms of assimilationism evident in schools with political histories, such as former Indian and coloured schools, where issues of race are seldom addressed. This form of assimilationism I refer to as assimilationism by stealth. My own study of a high-profile former coloured school with a strong political pedigree (see Soudien 1998) describes the particular conceits that circulate in schools such as these where the incoming so-called African children are recruited into new non-racial identities that have never been opened up to inspection. It is assumed that, without there being real discussions about these issues, children will all accept the dominant narrative of race in the school. The final form of assimilationism is most evident in former white Englishspeaking schools and is what I call benign assimilationism. This form of assimilationism looks like multiculturalism because there is an attempt to
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acknowledge the cultural diversity of the schools learners. The schools in this category deliberately have cultural evenings, unlike the schools in the two previous categories, and present themselves as self-consciously inclusive. I am suggesting here, however, that the intent of this policy, in so far as it leaves the dominant relationships in the school untouched, is an assimilationist one.
The class scape

Given the trajectory of my argument in this book about identity being an articulated phenomenon, untangling race from class in the South African context is clearly undesirable. There are, however, distinct ways in which schools behave that can be perceived to be and understood to be the actions of class agents rather than simply those of race agents. Few studies on school integration (or desegregation) or school as a site for social cohesion approach the matter from an explicitly class perspective. This is essentially because, following the work of theorists such as Bowles and Gintis (1976), class has been used in education for making sense of the school as a medium for social differentiation. In this explanation, school allocates people to specific class positions. It is a sorting agency rather than an integrative agency. While this use of class makes sense, there are critical ways in which perspectives based on class underestimate how class structures and class influences, as both an objective force (in determining ones objective social position as either a capitalist or a worker) and an ideological force, work to maintain, in an integrating way, the cohesion of society. The work of Althusser (1971) is crucial here. He tried to explain how ideology works in society through what he called ideological state apparatuses that transmit ruling-class ideology and maintain the subject class in its subordinate position. Moving from this point of departure, I contend that using class provides an important framework for understanding how integration is being conceptualised and effected in South Africa. As I argued above, central to the race scape is the project of assimilationism into the cultural universe of the dominant order. What the class scape offers is a way of understanding how domination is being rearticulated in an extra-race way around integration. Integration in this approach is decidedly not unity and social harmony. It is not the assertion of the cultural values of the dominant group that is important to understand, but the modalities of the dominant group as it seeks to maintain its hold on the social order. For this order to survive, it is important that the dominant group wins people over to the class project. Critical, therefore, is
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its attempt to construct a social consensus in which classes occupy and accept their places. Social cohesion is important. Based on the dominance of the socially privileged or the elite class, the social objective of the class project is the shaping and reconfiguration of society. This dominance, however, is not that of the so-called whites, but that of a new elite comprising the core of the old white elite and selected elements from among the former subordinate black groups. School in this project is about nurturing this class and its interests, in the face of threats to the hegemony of the class. In the racial scape it is possible to show the dimensions of the integration process among different racial groups. How integration manifests itself in terms of class is less obvious. What one can say, however, is that a distinct realignment of socio-economic groups is taking place in the schools, with the large-scale exodus of middle-class black parents and their children out of the former DET and HOD and HOR systems into the former white systems. Evidence from the Soudien and Sayed study (2003) suggests that there has been a domino effect playing itself out within the school system. When the apartheid system began breaking down, the flow of children within the system took place in fairly predictable ways. Previously excluded African, coloured and Indian children moved in large numbers into the formerly white schools. African children also began to move into formerly Indian and coloured schools. For African schools, this amounted to a flight of the more economically stable elements within their midst, leaving those schools largely with the poorest members of the community. This amounts to class following its own interests. Naidoos work (1996) provides support for this line of thinking. He suggests that the process of integration followed distinct socio-economic paths in KwaZulu-Natal. In both ex-NED and ex-HOD schools, he says, especially in the larger metropolitan areas, there was a bigger African learner population at schools located in lower socioeconomic areas. For example, Brettonwood in Umbilo had an African population of about 60% while Westville Girls High ranged between 5 and 10%. Ex-HOD schools like Ganges and Silver Heights, in lower socio-economic areas had an African population of about 60% while ex-HOD schools in higher socio-economic areas like Reservoir Hills, had 20% or less. (1996: 27) As the work of scholars such as Naidoo suggests, the socio-economic level of the area surrounding the school has had a significant influence on the
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processes of integration, in that it has affected attitudes towards integration and the kinds of policies that are followed. In higher socio-economic and more elite or exclusive suburbs of both ex-white and ex-Indian residential areas, the degree of integration is definitely lower than in other areas. Crucial in these explanations is the wide range of ways in which class supplants and displaces race as a means of determining the social character of schools. The relatively low numbers of black students entering elite schools and the high numbers entering poor schools reflect, one might argue, the objective and ideological situations in which the different classes find themselves. It is not possible, for reasons that are explored below, for poorer children to move into wealthier schools in large numbers, even if the system is supposed to admit any child if a place exists for him or her. Many things happen in wealthy schools that conspire to keep out the poor child. What this suggests is the bedding down of new class processes or new social alignments within the schooling system that are producing new and distinctive class forms. It is out of these that one can say that there is a reconstituting of the class. How this process is happening is important to understand. It happens, I suggest, around what Marxists call the objective forces that are active in society and around the ideological mechanisms that the middle class has at its disposal. In terms of objective forces, the social and economic resources to which families have access is a major structural determinant in where they send their children to school. While it is true that, as Sekete et al. (2001) point out, the flight from township schools has a great deal to do with the search for better education, it also has to do with costs and with what parents know. Black parents were choosing to send their children away from the township, but in the majority of cases they sent their children to modest former white, coloured and Indian schools. School fees were a major determinant in guiding parents decisions. In all of the schools in the Soudien and Sayed study (2003), finances proved to be either exclusionary or inhibitory. A whole range of filtering mechanisms was used in these schools. Before children were admitted, even in the elite black schools, parents were often required to pay a deposit of 50 per cent of the annual fee. Where parents were tardy in paying, a variety of shaming devices were used. In places school reports were withheld until fees were paid. Aside from these mechanisms, fees were often pitched at extremely high levels. In the case of Eastdale, a school in the Soudien and Sayed study (2003), parents had to be able to afford it in order for their young ones to be part of the school.
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As Sekete et al. (2001) suggest, parents also depend a great deal on their own children for making these decisions. Their children would have heard about the class devices at schools and would have urged them not to risk the kinds of embarrassments that went with being poor in a more wealthy school. By contrast, these factors do not operate for middle-class parents. Middle-class parents spare little cost in the decisions they make about their childrens schooling. As the Vally and Dalamba (1999) statistics show, people classified African have become the largest constituency in both subsidised and nonsubsidised independent schools in the Gauteng province. They constitute 57 per cent of the total in subsidised independent and 86 per cent in nonsubsidised independent schools. While there may be a flight of people classified white into the independent school sector, one could similarly say that there has been a rapid increase of black middle-class numbers in non-DET schools. This increase has, of course, been facilitated by the abolition of the Group Areas Act (No. 41 of 1950), which mandated residential segregation in urban areas on the basis of race. Middle-class former white areas have experienced significant inflows of black people. In the case of at least one private school in the Johannesburg area, the governors actively encouraged black parents to buy property in the area of the school. In all the former African schools, virtually every single teacher had his or her children in a former white or coloured or Indian school. As reported by Soudien and Sayed (2003), at the Bongalethu School in Mdantsane, Eastern Cape, teachers spoke explicitly to the class decisions they had made for their children. They could not be expected, they argued, to keep their children in the conditions that existed in townships. The drift towards a new middle-class alignment has also been facilitated by the direction being taken in the policy domain. Central in this large body of legislation and policy directives is the South African Schools Act (SASA) which was passed in 1996. By the time the new government came into power in 1994, governance infrastructures in black schools had all but collapsed. As I explained in the preceding chapter, as part of the process of rebuilding the school system the government passed the SASA as an attempt to give parents the responsibility of managing the schools their children attend and to officially legitimate parental participation in the life of the school. The Act required that schools establish school governing bodies (SGBs) which were to be composed of parents, teachers, students (in the case of secondary schools) and members of the school support staff. This structure was required to develop school policy across a whole host of areas and to ensure that the school managers would carry out this policy. Achieving this, however, was
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compromised by the way in which the new legislation framed identities in the schools, particularly parental identities. The Act projected parental identity around a restrictive middle-class notion of who parents were and how they functioned. Central to this notion were particular understandings of how time is used, what domestic resources are available for the schooling process, how much cultural capital parents can draw on in relating to school, and so on. The upshot of the practice was that in black schools SGBs continued to be dominated by their principals or their teachers. In formerly white schools, middle-class white parents dominated. This approach by the state was complemented by practices that were emerging in schools, especially in the area of governance. In the Soudien and Sayed study (2003), many instances were documented where the schools not only retained but nurtured practices that effectively sidelined poorer people. One Cape Town school, called Valley Primary, maintained its middle-class character through the invocation of gender and the deployment of gender identities within the school. This allowed the school to draw on existent and strongly encoded social structures within the school, many of which were not as familiar and accessible to parents who were not white and middleclass. For example, the Mother Programme and the Catering Committee were exclusively run by women. This assumed that most mothers who had children at the school were not working/should not be working. Projecting these approaches as family orientated allowed the school to assimilate newer parents, and even non-middle-class parents, into its social project. Poorer parents thus had access and rights of way in the school, but decidedly on the schools terms. The situation was similar at Eastdale College, an elite Eastern Cape school in the Soudien and Sayed study (2003). The school had effectively assimilated parents into a middle-class settlement based on a particular image of what the school stood for. This was especially clear in the consistent and seamless representations of responsible parent identities. At a former white Durban primary school in the same study, parents were convinced by the school that they were buying into a way of doing things that was in their childrens interests. The school convinced them that the package it was offering effectively a commodity was what their children needed to succeed in the world of work. What this discussion suggests is that a particular kind of class settlement is taking place in schools that is being actively driven by the middle class. Conscious of its position within the new South Africa, this class is constructing
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a new concept of integration and even a new concept of its identity around the notion of good schooling. Largely led by the old white middle class, this class operates on the basis of buy-in of the new middle classes into the new settlement. This buy-in comes with the acquiescence of the new elite. Soudien and Sayed describe the situation at a former middle-class white primary school (called Oasis) in Durban where the settlement pivoted on the maintenance of standards: At Oasis in 1991, the school accepted the first persons of colour, 22 Indian and three African learners. These learners were carefully selected. We took the cream of the crop, said a teacher (2003: 39). Though parents and learners racial identities and religious and cultural backgrounds were different, their socio-economic status was very much the same. Among parents, there was an agreement about what constituted good education and where good education could be obtained. For the class, the priority would be to preserve the character and traditions of the good schools for the maintenance of what they perceived to be quality. What is significant about this new settlement is the way in which the position of the poor and their schools is fixed. Given the stipulations of the SASA, particularly its discursive constructions of the ideal parent, and the ways in which the wealthy have erected barriers to entry for the disadvantaged, poor schools have by and large accepted the modus operandi of the new system. Driven as the new settlement has been by the new and enlarged middle class, the poor have, one could say, also bought into the way in which the system operates. It is appropriate at this point to look at other scapes within the discussion. Important among these are the scapes of gender and language.
The gender scape

Of all South Africas modes of social differentiation, gender has received the least attention. There are very few studies that look at how schools have been constituted as sites of gender construction. Apart from Rob Morrells work (1991) which looks at masculinity in particular kinds of schools, a study conducted by the Gender Equity Task Team for the Department of Education (Clarke & Martinez 1997), and the odd graduate dissertation, the area is conspicuously thin. As a result, the nature and character of the gender map in education are not known. This is not to say, however, that gender is absent as a marker in the definition and reconstruction of schools and schooling in South Africa. In the Soudien and Sayed research (2003), for example, issues of gender repeatedly manifested themselves in processes of social distinction.
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Following this work, some comments can be made about the ways in which gender is instantiated into the fabric of school life and, at some levels, is even reconstituting it. Two such ways can be pointed to. The first instantiation of gender in schools might be found in the multiple ways in which schools sort, position and rank boys and girls. It is evident in the social structures of the school and its curriculum. In the Soudien and Sayed study (2003), gender identities at the Valley Primary School in Cape Town are discursively drawn around idealised notions of what it means to be a mother and a father. In the same study, at a Durban school, Amazon, males and females are steered towards what are perceived to be gender-appropriate curricular choices. While there were boys in the home economics class, 75 per cent of the physics class consisted of boys. This pattern is repeated at another Durban school, Divinity, where boys were treated far more favourably than girls. Part of the attempt at reconstituting the integrated class in a gendered way is suggested more overtly in the examples of elite male and female schools. In their genesis and operation, these schools conceive of gender and relationships between males and females in very particular kinds of ways. Specific notions of what it means to be a man and a woman underpin how these schools operate. In the Soudien and Sayed study (2003), the boys school of Eastdale deliberately promoted itself as a school of preference for elite boys, boys who would become the leaders of the country. Black parents bought into the idea that the school was preparing their sons for leadership in the world of politics, business or sport, and so they, like their white counterparts, wanted the school to remain an exclusive school. Interestingly, symbolic as the school was of the regions deep colonial tradition, a tradition that was scorned politically, it was the schools celebration of particular kinds of masculinity that made it attractive to parents. Because so little work has been done in this area, strong claims about the kinds of gender reconstitutions that are taking place are hard to make. Nonetheless, given the flourishing of elite male and female public schools, it cannot be discounted that a process of realignment around gender is taking place around the country.
The language scape

Unlike the gender scape, a clearer discussion can be had about how language is working and being used to reconstitute the integrated school. Significantly,
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the findings of Naidoo (1996) as well as the findings of Soudien and Sayed (2003) and of Vally and Dalamba (1999) all show that language is key in the recomposition of the South African school. Much of this literature is, of course, about school inclusion and exclusion, but it is also strongly suggestive about the nature of the platform upon which integration is being constructed. Despite the provisions of the South African Constitution which protect the countrys 11 official languages, central in the new South African landscape is the position of English. In the Vally and Dalamba study (1999), all the schools used either English or Afrikaans or both as media of instruction. None of the schools used an African language for instruction and learning. Within this domination of English and Afrikaans, many former Afrikaans-only schools are also introducing English as a medium of instruction, as the Sekete et al. study (2001) suggests. Significantly, even where schools are parallel-medium that is, offering English and Afrikaans as separate streams within the school African learners are indicating a preference for English. This trend is supported by Naidoos research (1996). He found that towns in KwaZulu-Natal which had a large representation of Afrikaans-medium schools had significantly smaller numbers of children entering from previously disallowed constituencies. In these towns, for example, children whose first language was not English were expressing a preference for English-medium ex-HOD schools over Afrikaansmedium former Natal Education Department schools. In the schools in the Soudien and Sayed study (2003), the fact that most of the learners were non-English-language mother-tongue speakers made very little difference. Few of the schools made any efforts to use the learners first language in a formative and affirming way. English was dominant everywhere. Signage was invariably in English and sometimes in Afrikaans. Classrooms contained charts written in English (and a small number in Afrikaans). As a consequence of this, English was the dominant language at the schools. A learners competence was invariably judged on his or her ability to write and read and speak English well. Flowing at least partly from this, a large number of African learners struggled at school. Few excelled or achieved very high pass rates. This resulted in the structural exclusion of English second language (ESL) learners in the school and the representation of achievement as an Indian and coloured characteristic. Africans did not achieve academically or achieve full participation in the lives of their schools. They were excluded from extramural activities, particularly debating contests and other speech-based activities, that required fluency in English.
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Interestingly, this structured exclusion was a process in which African parents, educators and learners were complicit. At Marula, African educators who were interviewed spoke of the importance of speaking isiZulu to ESL learners. Yet these same educators did not appear to use code switching or multilingual techniques in their classrooms. While this may have been an effect of being observed by the researchers in the study, the teachers appeared to go out of their way to emphasise to the fieldworkers their competence in English without realising how this contributed to the exclusion of ESL learners. Compounding this situation, the parents at most of the schools made it clear that speaking English properly was their major motivation for sending their children to these schools. Often it was African educators who were the subject of their complaints and African educators whose teaching competence they doubted. In many cases these parents requested that an Indian educator and not an African educator teach their children. Learners were themselves not innocent bystanders in these processes. African educators complained about the ridicule to which they were subjected by African learners who criticised their African-accented English and the way they spoke English. What these preliminary findings point to is the significant degree to which the schools in which integration is taking place are defined by English. English is clearly an important conditioning factor for both schools and parents. For schools, it is a mechanism for controlling and, in some instances, for retaining the character of their institutions. Integration is defined in these terms as fundamentally an English thing. This is validated by the support of parents who are willing to risk the failure or, more optimistically, the delayed gratification of the success of their children. The effect is to produce school environments that are experiencing new forms of internal segmentation and even, as some put it, segregation (see Vally & Dalamba 1999).
Conclusion
I have argued in this chapter that we are constrained by the dominant languages of description that exist within our sociological imagination. These dominant languages predefine what can and cannot be seen. Thus there exist multiple ways in which society experiences difference, but within these certain ways are privileged. As they are elevated in importance, they become normative and so come to condition how social differentiation in everyday discourse is approached. As a result, race becomes the almost unchallenged lens through which South African difference is understood. By using scapes,
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Ihave sought to work with a recognition of this form of discoursing and to point out some of its limitations. Reality, however, does not operate in scapes. It exists in the world of relationships in a swirl of events and phenomena which language seeks to tame or to call to order. Language, in this sense, is a device which seeks to approximate the facts of experience. Recognising this, the challenge is how we might begin to talk to encompass as efficaciously as we can the complexity of this swirl that surrounds us and is who we are. In relation to the social reconstruction process taking place in South African education, it is necessary to say that while our languages will always be inadequate and while we might demur at the reductive and essentialising discourses of race, class and gender, we cannot but acknowledge the large role these forces play in our everyday lives. Although the discourses displace complexity, there are ways in which we can see patterns of what one might call contingency emerging. One can argue that race, class, gender and language in South Africa are implicated in a complex of signs that are part of a process of social realignment in the country. This realignment is not simply a racial or a class or a gender realignment but is pivoted on the contingencies of the new post-apartheid landscape in which dominance is reinterpreting itself and is being reinterpreted. These contingencies are forcing groups and individuals to re-evaluate and reposition themselves in relation to the range of social differences which surround them and in relation to the problem of having to work out new positions of power and authority. Emerging out of this is a reconfiguration and in some instances a reworking of hegemonic practices. In working through the scapes of race, class, gender and language, it is critical to recognise how much dominant practices in each of them have essentially remained as they were and how apposite the notion of assimilationism is for understanding the social processes under way in each. The story of education in the new South Africa is, in these terms, essentially a story of the reconfiguration of dominance in relation to race, class, gender and language. Dominant practices have adjusted to the contingencies, but the presumptions upon which they have been premised have remained unchanged. Dominant racial groups, dominant classes, dominant genders and dominant languages have had to make space for new constituencies, but they have done so on their own terms. In understanding the contingencies, it is important to recognise the political dynamics, the strategic occupation of space agency by particular groups, especially previously excluded groups, and the strategic
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yielding of space by others. The continuation of domination is always a contingent moment. Using this argument, integration in education in South Africa can be argued to be a process of accommodation in which subordinate groups or elements of subordinate groups have been recruited or have promoted themselves into the hegemonic social, cultural and economic regime at the cost of subordinate ways of being, speaking, and conducting their everyday lives.
Notes
1
This is, of course, the moment of crisis for many social theorists in South Africa who are called upon to navigate their way through the challenge of thinking about a post-apartheid situation. What approach should be taken to the question of the relationship between the concepts of race and culture? If one accepts the categories of white, black, coloured, Indian and African, does one accept the corollaries that these groups have distinctive cultures? If one follows this line of thinking, how does this position one in relation to the basic premise of apartheid which emphasised cultural separateness? In attempting to deal with this, many theorists have preferred to talk of unity in what I am arguing is an unproblematised way. The ANCs Four Nations paradigm, for example, is simultaneously a biological and a cultural construction. It segues one concept into the other and does not come to show distinctly how each can be separated out from the others. IDS Bulletin 34, no. 1 (2003). Diane Ravitch has gone through a rebirth. She has changed her views about inclusion significantly.
2 3
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The asymmetries of contact in the South African school
As previous chapters have sought to make clear, the ethos of separation in South African schools takes its origins from the very earliest efforts at formal education in South Africa. When the first formal school is established in the Cape in 1658, shortly after the arrival of the Dutch settlers in 1652, it begins on the basis of a sense of the otherness of slave and black communities. Much of this sense of otherness, as we saw earlier, has religious undertones but is essentially predicated on the racial need to civilise the other sufficiently for him or her to enter the world of colonial servitude. Moments arise in the middle of the second half of the 17th century and again during the first 50 years of the Cape Education Department (from 1839 to the late 1880s) when education is available to children of colour within the schooling system. During these moments schooling is provided on an open basis, leading to children of colour and their white counterparts sitting in the same class, but for the most part the almost 350-year-long history of schooling is characterised by separation and white supremacy. When South Africa becomes a democracy in 1994, one of its first formal tasks is to address the legacy of racial separation. How it does so, however, is not without its challenges. To begin with, and not without reason, the new government makes legislative reform its priority. In terms of this it introduces policies such as the South African Schools Act of 1996 and Curriculum 2005 which have as their foundation the principle of equality. Practical questions of how to deal with the challenges of teaching children from different social, cultural and economic backgrounds in socially and culturally integrated educational spaces are not given much attention. The essential presumption behind this policy approach is that formally reconstituting the educational system as one which is open and free subsumes and so deals with the very practical legacy of the racial educational experience. While almost 20 years of work in the Open Schools movement established by the Catholic schools in Johannesburg in the mid-1970s, when they defy the apartheid government by admitting children of colour, is available as a body of learning, little serious engagement with the significance of this experience is undertaken. As a consequence, when the state declares schools open as part of the process of
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institutionalising democracy, it does so without reference to this experience. The legal arrangements defining education are changed to make schools free and open, but the practical realities their location in townships, suburbs and rural areas, all of which carry strong apartheid signatures; the composition of their personnel, which is racial; and in some ways what they teach are not rigorously transformed. The result is effectively to keep in place the habits of the old hegemonies inherited from the previous system. The purpose of this chapter is to assess integration as a process in the South African school over the last 30 years and to highlight the conceptual and practical challenges that the process encounters. It deliberately reaches back before 1994 to include, and so also to acknowledge, the significant efforts that are made to open schools up from the middle of the 1970s. It draws on a body of work that of colleagues and studies I have undertaken myself which has attempted to document and describe the integration process. Central to a critical assessment of integration is understanding the intellectual and political climate in which it takes place and the kinds of strategies that are developed to manage it. How is integration conceptualised and understood and, critically, how do notions of the self and other that circulate within these conceptions shape the integration process? I will argue that integration moves through three significant phases from 1976 to the present: namely, 1976 to 1990, 1990 to 1994, and 1994 to the present. This characterisation of integrations timeline is based on the white school experience. A privileging of this experience can correctly be criticised for ignoring how processes of opening up take place in the Indian and coloured school, where there is evidence of African migration into those public schools from 1976 already, long before it happens in large numbers in the white school. It is the white school, however, which symbolically carries the torch, and the burden, for racial domination, and which almost of necessity has to be the focus for understanding how integration takes place in South Africa. In looking at the three phases described above, one can discern in each a distinct politics in which forms of knowing the other percolate and out of which certain dominant practices come to prevail. It is important to understand what this knowing consists of, bearing in mind the countrys 350-year legacy of separation and white supremacy. Knowing is essentially the exercise of power by those who determine the conditions of knowledge and its production and reproduction in a particular context. While there are other forms of knowing which exist alongside the dominant form, including oppositional forms of knowing, it is
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that which is dominant that determines how relationships inside the school come to be managed socially and culturally. In the South African context, and, indeed, most places elsewhere, these relationships are framed by the process of assimilation, the unproblematised assumption that Western forms of culture and cultural practices (or more precisely, certain forms of these) are superior to others and therefore have to constitute the basis of interaction between different people. In terms of this asymmetry, subordinate groups are required to give up their own cultural practices in favour of those of the dominant. In the South African context, this dominance is primarily that of white people over people of colour, but may also take the form of coloured over African, Indian over African. Other permutations of this relationship can also arise for example, Indian over coloured, or vice versa. Importantly, when this asymmetry is perceived to be threatened, such as when the number of black children in a school reaches a particular proportion of the enrolment, or when too many teachers of colour are appointed to a school, and what is thought to be white cultural dominance is challenged, white parents (and also, let it be said, parents of colour, including African parents who agree with their white counterparts) withdraw their children from those schools. Similar trends are evident in coloured and Indian schools when these tipping-over points arrive. These dispositions point to the deep and pervasive presence of what one might call racial knowing. Interesting as its subordinate manifestations might be, such as the content of racial consciousness in African communities, it is, for the purposes of this chapter, white racial knowing that is most significant because it is this knowing which is most consequential. As a discourse it conditions the possibilities of engagement in the country between people of different backgrounds. While the notion of assimilation is useful as a rubric for explaining the kind of knowing which underlines the contact between white and black children in South African schools, it does not say very much about the content and politics of assimilation. What shapes assimilation as a form of knowing, its character, the resources it draws on, and how it positions self and other in the moment of engagement are not self-evident questions and in some ways have been overgeneralised. Sociologically speaking, there is a need to locate knowing within the conditions of its production. One needs to see it as a construct that emerges in relation to the context in which it finds itself. This chapter therefore operates on two levels: the first is to delineate in broad strokes the history of integration and the phases through which it moves; the second is to attempt an engagement with the epistemological assumptions that are made about contact between people of different backgrounds.
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T H E A S Y M M E T R I E S O F C O N TA C T I N T H E S O U T H A F R I C A N S C H O O L
The integration debate during apartheid: 19761990

Even during the height of apartheid integration continued to take place. Many schools in a number of cities in the country that operated under the aegis of the Departments of Coloured and Indian Affairs continued to admit children who were not of the racial group to which the school supposedly belonged. Schools such as Livingstone High School in Cape Town refused to use race as the basis for registering children and, as a result, children who may have found themselves consigned to their own peoples school continued to attend schools such as Livingstone. St Barnabas College in Johannesburg, however, from the point of its establishment in 1961, came into being as a deliberate non-racial initiative. In these terms, during the apartheid era it was the countrys first explicitly non-racial school. Its students were drawn from across the policed categories of race. Race was never a factor in who attended the school as students and who taught within it. Not unexpectedly, in its early years it did not have children who were classified white. This development would take place later, during the 1970s, when a small group of so-called white children began to enter the school. The school was successful in cultivating among all of these children an ethos of complete openness. As an experiment in non-racial education it remains without parallel. Aside from St Barnabas College, which was part of the Anglican Church, the first systemic moves to integrate schools begin just before the 1976 student uprising in moves made inside the Catholic Church.1 Elements within the church, influenced by, inter alia, black consciousness, bring pressure to bear on their establishment to open its schools to black children. This pressure never translates into ascendancy, but it briefly opens up a space for a deep discussion around notions of self and other that is almost unparalleled in the white community in South Africa. While the Black Consciousness Movement is taking stock of its role in the South African struggle, for a short while important interlocutors in the Catholic Church raise questions of white consciousness and its relationship to the other. What does it mean to be white in South Africa and what might it take for white people to see themselves as part of and instead of standing at the head of humanity? In the wake of this development, key role players in the church take a view to a growing discussion about the admission of black children to white private schools that is keenly aware of the critique of culture and power then circulating in black theological circles. An important player, Sister Louis Michael, urged an approach to integration that would keep these issues in mind:
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Do we mean by integration the admission of a few numbers of other races into existing White schools, expecting them to conform to the way of life of the White pupil, to adopt his attitudes and values? If we do, then we should think more deeply on this matter There is another possibility of course. The creation of a completely new type of schoolwhere each race meets the other [quoting James Cone, a black American theologian] on equal footing with no race possessing the power to assert the rightness of its style over the other. (Christie 1990: 22) This perspective did not come to prevail. It did, however, introduce into the integration debate a powerful awareness among school people in the church of the problems of assimilation and what came to be known as enculturation. The most significant elaboration of this approach was made by Brother Neil McGurk in a series of interventions that drew attention to the mechanisms of protection of this culture [of domination] [which] are mainly psychological, but [also] tied to power and privilege (1990: 24). At the core of McGurks argument were a number of propositions which sought to challenge the teleological inevitability of a modernity framed in the hegemony of the white experience. Arguing for a more inclusive approach to modernity, he explained that there [was] an urgent need to inculcate a sense of his or her [the white South African] participation in a common historical process based on the unity of the human family (McGurk 1990: 111). What was crucial in this analysis was a critique of versions of Enlightenment and modernist conceptions of the individual as a subject, and specifically the investment in these conceptions of the infinite potential of the human subject of the ability to take control of his or her environment and to make of it what he or she chose. The inflection which this modernist idea takes in South Africa, and indeed in many parts of the colonial world, is to appropriate the notion of potential as a white preserve. (For comparative purposes, see the eminent domain debate about Lockes understanding of Native Americans and their cultural immaturity in relation to land dispossession, and why it was therefore justifiable for the white colonists to take ownership of the land [Squadrito 2002; Uzgalis 2002], and Goldbergs The Racial State [2002].) In some post hoc justifications for colonial domination, such as the survival-of-the-fittest argument, this idea emerges as a trope for white supremacy. In South Africa, for example, while the Eiselen Commission of 19481949 acknowledges the humanity of African people, it places their cultural practices outside of the orbit of the Enlightenment. Human as they might be, they are a different kind of human and need to go
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through an enlightenment at their own pace. The requisite strategy, therefore, is to manage their integration into the hegemonic order. A particular form of knowing issues from this approach, which essentially comes to provide the model for the integration process in South Africa. As I pointed out above, the radical line of thought during this phase of integration does not hold sway. Hegemonic voices in the Catholic Church not only resisted the radicalism of McGurk and Louis Michael but succeeded in pushing it to the side. The outcome of this contest was that this first phase of integration was essentially managed on assimilationist premises central to which were assumptions that open schools would offer white standards of education to a small and select number of black pupils (Christie 1990: 25). This dominance was not complete. Alternative approaches did take root. Some Catholic schools, notably Sacred Heart in Johannesburg, made a serious attempt to take the provocation of people like McGurk into their curricula and the way in which they managed their schools. Out of this experience emerged some of the most far-reaching initiatives in formal education in South Africa, many of which persist in key Catholic schools in the country. And while elements of these projects have been found to be questionable (see Christie 1990), they still remain, in so far as they opened up a dialogue between whites and blacks, the most significant exemplars of contact in South Africa.
The Piet Clase years: 19901994

Significantly, the second phase of integration took a decidedly different turn. While public debate during this phase was vigorous and heated, it lacked, in contrast to the first phase of the integration process, the introspection urged by McGurk and Michael, as well as any awareness of the particularity of South Africa. The discussion took direction from mainstream and conventional approaches to multiculturalism and never quite came to grips with the politics of the larger social context of South Africa. The form of knowing the other that emerges in this phase is clothed in the language of tolerance that characterises the international multicultural discourse but is essentially animated by old colonial-style narratives of white paternalism. The apparent generosity surrounding its invitation to black people masks deep anxieties about the dangers that come with closer proximity to them. Interestingly, the second phase of school integration brought the white community into a public discussion about education to a degree not seen in the country before or since. Over a period of months in 1991, hundreds of
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thousands of white parents around the country found themselves in public meetings talking about the future of education in the country. The impetus for the discussion came from two related directions. Firstly, there was a growing public awareness of the initiative taken by the Catholic and other religious schools (and even isolated high-profile public schools, such as the South African College School [SACS] in 1986) to open their admission procedures. In the context of the black students revolt and their demand for a democratic schooling system, the example set by the churches required the public school sector to take a stand on the matter. Secondly, enrolments in white schools, as white families became increasingly middle-classed, began to fall. In 1990, for example, there were 177 225 unoccupied spaces in public white schools throughout the country (in contrast to a calculated shortage of 159 849 places for African children); 58 white schools were no longer being used (Folb 1991). In response to these twin pressures, the Minister of Education and Culture Administration, P.J. Clase, placed three models in front of white schools as options for dealing with the admission of black children (A for retaining their current exclusive status, B for opening up partially and continuing to receive state financial support, and C for opening up and continuing to receive subsidy for teachers salaries but assuming responsibility for some expenses). As Folb explains, by early 1991 more than 200 English and Afrikaans schools countrywide had elected [Model C status] to open their doors to pupils of all races (1991: 1). To make this decision schools would have had to attain the support of 75 to 80 per cent of their parent body. While this period was important as a stage in the democratising of schools, it was surrounded by a politics of anxiety and the consolidation of a particular form of knowing the other. Unlike the earlier period, when participants in the debate used the opportunity to subject white identity to scrutiny, the preoccupation of white parents appeared to be about preserving their advantage. When the opportunity arose for white schools to talk about deracialisation with civil society initiatives in the black community, they backed off and chose not to. For example, the South African Teachers Association (SATA), representing largely English-speaking white teachers, failed to sustain a discussion begun with the Western Cape Teachers Union, a grouping of radical teachers, largely black, that had been established to organise teachers to oppose the apartheid government and its educational policies (Folb 1991). Given that white people were still in power in the country, they could determine the parameters of what they would and would not permit in their schools. The most progressive organisation to emerge in this
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period was the Open Schools Association (OSA), an initiative of SATA. SATAs high moment in this discussion came in 1989, when it issued a provocative document entitled Educating for a Democratic Non-racial Society (SATA 1989). This document attempted to provide guidelines to schools for the process of opening their admission and reforming their curricula. Drawing on the influence of an important Canadian/South African social theorist, Kogila Moodley, who had a great deal of experience in the multiculturalism movement, it spoke to the issues of democracy, non-racialism and human rights. Progressive as this document was, it demurred at a critical point. It called for caution in the face of what it euphemistically called the deep-seated fears among the First World Sector [sic] of society of being overwhelmed by the Third World Sector (SATA 1989: 7). This anxiety was moderated by an awareness of the rights of others, but in the end it expressed itself as only a more liberal version of the reservations preying on the minds of many parents. As Folb (1991) explains, parents were concerned that, inter alia, their traditions should be preserved, a racial balance in favour of whites should be protected, strict admission criteria should be applied, and only black children from the neighbourhood of the schools should be admitted. When the victory of opening their schools was celebrated by many white parents around the country, it is significant that what was being celebrated was the maintenance of, if not white supremacy, then certainly white certainty. While there were many in the white community who understood that an important dent had been made in the wall of white supremacy and who found some cause for optimism in this development, more important for most was the fact that white standards were being safeguarded. Evidence for this was available in what parents were doing and in the actions of the education authorities. Three instances substantiating this are discussed below. At SACS in Cape Town, where the first murmurings of the need to open up the public system were mooted, teachers reportedly had to work hard to manage their parents misgivings about what the threat of opening up posed to the legacy of the school (Folb 1991). In Natal province, the Superintendent of Education undertook a survey in 1991 on what he called Open Schools, with the purpose, he said, of helping schools deal with the difficulties they were going to confront (NED 1991). In this survey the identity of the new children entering the schools was crassly prefigured. The survey was introduced with the following question about the new pupils: Have your pupils of colour shown any of the problems indicated below? Please tick in
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the appropriate column. (The columns were headed Have been noted, Many times and Seldom.) Aside from the imputation that the childrens problems were biological in nature (the pupil does not see at all what others see), it was also assumed that they brought with them inappropriate and even dangerous language use (the pupil not having the ability to interact appropriately with others, not using accepted rules of conversational interaction and listening behaviour). At public meetings across the country where the issues of opening up the schools were being discussed (such as a Federasie vir Afrikaanse Kultuur meeting attended in 1991 by myself and a colleague on behalf of the university at which we taught), the importance of striking a compromise between what was described as economic and social imperatives on the one hand, and the specific needs of particular groups on the other, was frequently emphasised.
When the second phase had reached its peak, culminating in the move to according all white schools automatic Model C status, an important settlement had occurred in the minds of white parents about their schools. This settlement pivoted on the assurance that the essential character of their schools would remain intact and that if any change was to be made it had to come from those entering the schools. The significance of this development was its modes of representation and the strategies for justification it invoked. For example, task teams were established in the OSA to help schools deal with the changes they were experiencing. These teams had to hand the discourse of multiculturalism taking root in the United States and the United Kingdom. They took from this discourse an awareness of questions of difference and an acknowledgement of the right to be different. This awareness, however, was never radicalised to include difference in its full multiplicity. It was only racial difference that mattered. Moreover, this difference was not grounded in the specific social dynamics of the African and South African question. In contrast to the earlier phase, one saw little evidence of an interest in what black people thought. There was, as mentioned before, little evidence of a dialogue about what multiculturalism might mean. While McGurk in the earlier period had rooted his analysis in the specificities of inequality in the country, leading to his suggestion of the need for privileged South Africans to rethink (he even mentions the possibility of sacrifice) their identities for the construction of the greater social good, little such acknowledgement was evident in the second phase. With schools taking their cue from mainstreamed policy initiatives around race in the United Kingdom and the United States, a South African multicultural discourse, in a very short period of time, was to be heard everywhere and
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drawn upon as justification for a range of complex and often conservative approaches undertaken by schools. Reflecting the complexity, the OSA insisted that schools should not maintain registers by race. Schools were encouraged to adopt the language of tolerance, to accept all cultures, religions and backgrounds. This seeming inclusivity, however, belied a conservative edge, as have dominant multicultural discourses elsewhere in the world. As reflected in the SACS and Natal Education Department (NED) examples above, distinctly insular and self-serving conceptions and understandings of culture underpinned the approaches to integration developed in the schools. For instance, it was taken for granted that the way in which the white school functioned what happened inside it and how it related to the rest of the world constituted the standard. This presumption, moreover, was not a matter for discussion and debate. In the gathering storm of democratisation, all that was now required of the white school, in the discourse of multiculturalism, was to help black children fit in. Schools needed to recognise that these children did not have the necessary cultural, social and economic capital to operate within the school, and so efforts, as in the NED example above, had to be made through the provision of specifically designed induction programmes and extramural activities to assist their entry into the school. The discursive amplitude of this sympathy or generosity was rooted in deficit notions of the other. Thus the key feature of the multiculturalism of the second phase is an assurance about the correctness of the white project and, as a consequence, a propensity to stereotype the other. The self as white is invested with a homogeneous uniformity not requiring any form of deconstruction, while the other is preconfigured as a site for diagnosis around a repertoire of dangerous and threatening characteristics. As a result, knowing operates around a pathologising of the identity of the other. The other is negotiated with and engaged with only through the filter of the vicarious attributes associated with his or her othered identity danger and contamination. Knowing, then, is about reducing the danger quotient and decontaminating the otherness of the deficit child. In attempting to characterise the kind of contact emerging from this form of assimilationism, what emerges is a knowing that effectively denies the specificity of the identity of the other. While this knowing is a consolidation of the countrys legacy of white certainty, in the context of the 1990s and particularly in the context of the struggle for democracy, it appears to take on an assertive and exaggeratedly confident tone. As a consequence, the other is read in hyperbole.
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The onset of democracy: 1994present

The year 1994 is a distinctly ambivalent moment in South Africas history. It is, of course, a break with the past, but at the same time it is also characterised by continuity with the old. Two features of this ambivalence are important to note. Firstly, the agreement between the African National Congress and the National Party leaves largely intact the bureaucratic apparatus of the state. While the personnel of this bureaucracy is gradually overhauled through processes of early retirement and restructuring after 1994, the residue of people, modes of operation and policies inherited from the apartheid state is sufficiently influential to destabilise the new welfare project of the post-1994 government. In the context of the social nature of the country remaining largely intact marked as it is by an obdurate social topography articulated by race and class the upshot is that while the new government works hard to reposition itself ideologically, it has to adapt to the reality that social differentiation within the country continues to operate largely on the terms of the old order. Secondly, to show the full complexity of the period, white people are no longer in political control. The loss of this political control places the question of other forms of control in society under a certain amount of scrutiny. In the absence of this political control, the cultural dominance of earlier periods has to find new forms of expression and new justifications. Taken together, these two points modify the kind of assimilation pursued during this period. Schools are central in the struggle between the old and the new. For the new government, they represent the premier site for the reconfiguration of social relations. For white communities, their schools constitute a terrain on which to defend their positions of privilege. As a result, an intense process of struggle ensues between the new government and white schools. What is at stake in this struggle, however, is initially by no means clear to everybody concerned. At one level it is about access, but at several other levels it has to do with the racial and cultural character of the school and the standards assumed to signify this character. Critical in this period is the role of the new government in attempting to give character and shape to the schooling system. It assumes control over the system by passing the South African Schools Act (SASA) in 1996 (see Sayed 1999). The Act, following the Constitution, outlaws discrimination and obliges schools to open their admission procedures to all. At the same time as declaring all schools open, however, it reflects the compromise of the 1994 political negotiations when the African National Congress and their
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opponents, the National Party, came to an agreement about the nature of the new state. Central in this agreement was the protection of many of the rights enjoyed by people who were classified white in the apartheid era. Among these were the rights of schools to determine their own medium of instruction and their policies with respect to extramural activities, and also the power to shape their teaching staff and to raise school fees to supplement the subsidy they received from the state. Interesting as the politics of this development are, critical for our purposes here is how the schools, governed as they are by this new legislation, deal with the process of integration. Based on work that colleagues and I have carried out (see Soudien & Sayed 2004), there is evidence that the entry of schools into the new phase is marked by passivity, especially within the black community. This passivity is not unique to education. It manifests itself in many areas of social activity where a form of demobilisation of civil society takes place. In this demobilisation, organisations not only cede their authority to the new government, but also assume that the government will take the lead in shaping the social agenda. The manifestation of this process in education is compliance among schools with the new policy framework. In contrast to earlier phases of the integration process, there is very little public debate about the future direction schools should take. Compliance does not mean, however, that there is no struggle. Moreover, compliance takes different forms in black and white schools. Intense struggle takes place at the level of former white schools over what compliance means and how they should deal with their new open status. Black schools, essentially because they identify themselves with the new government, relinquish their initiative and effectively assume a posture of dependence on the state. They expect the state to tell them what to do; they dont see the need to make their own policy with respect to integration. White schools, in contrast, while maintaining postures of compliance, work the spaces provided them by the new legislation and proceed to determine policy with respect to issues such as admissions, language and fees. Ironically, this produces new and complicated forms of resistance to political authority. Where anti-apartheid resistance was constructed around the principles of freedom and justice, a form of post-apartheid resistance emerges among white communities that is essentially built on the preservation of privilege. I have argued elsewhere that this resistance arises because of the policy of decentralisation (see Soudien & Sayed 2004). Decentralisation makes it
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possible for the local school to embark, legitimately, on a range of oppositional courses of action to the broad objectives of the state. In many former white schools, one sees the legitimation of race-recidivist type activities, such as the entrenchment of their cultural characters through the formal and the informal curricula. When these initiatives are challenged by the government, because it perceives these schools to be behaving in exclusionary kinds of ways, the schools use the policy of decentralisation to defend themselves. They mount, for example, a number of influential court actions against the state to defend their actions. In one such notable action, Mikro v. the State, the judge finds in favour of a school defending its right to define itself as an Afrikaans school and therefore to withhold admission rights to English-speaking black children (see Soudien 2005). The effect of this policy development is to condition the process of inclusion as stipulated by the SASA. Through their language policies and through the use of indirect mechanisms such as school fees, schools control whom they will admit into their schools. The problem of this period is that the government is trapped in what Jansen (1999a, 1999b, 2001) calls symbolic mode. Policy as symbolism as opposed to practice characterises the politics of the new policy regime. It does not have the capacity to drive through the intentions signalled in laws such as the SASA. As a result, the ambiguity in its own text allows former white schools to promote what can be perceived to be exclusionary agendas. In characterising these developments in relation to the question of contact, what effectively happens is that the government declares policy but, through decentralisation, leaves its implementation to the local level. The central government takes no measures, other than adding more policy, such as in its Values Manifesto in 2001, to assist schools. The effect of these developments is that integration becomes the concern of former white schools only. Not unexpectedly, what these schools do is to work with what they know, and what they know, unfortunately, is only that form of multiculturalism that they inherit from their past. Their approach to integration and contact in this last phase is thus based on the inherited but almost unexplored assumptions which govern relationships between white and black people. While it is true that new relationships are forged between white and black children in schools, their parents continue to define the conditions of these relationships. In white schools these relationships continue to be based on paternalistic attitudes to black children. Black children continue to be projected and managed as deficient subjects.
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White hegemony, embodied in the apparatus of the school, is, however, in a different position from that in which it found itself during apartheid. White schools can no longer justify their actions by invoking the authority of the state. They now have to find other grounds on which to do so. This they do through using the law in a defensive way. The law, as is argued in the Mikro case, authorises their right to be different, and if black children wish to enter the former white school they know what it is that they are choosing to subscribe to. In taking this line of argument, however, they find themselves in a substantially more demanding and, in some sense, weakened position. The loss of their political authority makes them less certain of themselves than they would have been in the previous two phases. While they continue to manage black children as deficient subjects, they now have to find new arguments for justifying their dominance. Justification comes in a number of forms and includes demands for the right to their culture. Crude versions of this demand assert the importance of Afrikaner cultural purity and the need for it to take expression in autonomous and socially separate institutions and spaces. More sophisticated versions recognise that Afrikaner children will be entering the global order and, if they are to survive, will be requiring the best that their culture has to offer. When the argument is made for separate identities, it is at its weakest. A good example of this is provided by the Vryburg High School, a historically white Afrikaans school in the north-west part of the country. The school became the site of intense conflict between its historic Afrikaans white community and the local black community which sought admission to a school with good facilities. In making the demand for admission for their children, the black community made clear that they did not wish their children to be taught through the medium of Afrikaans. Reluctantly conceding to the demands of the black community, the school essentially reorganised itself. It created a new, separate English-medium track, effectively constructing two schools on one site, one for whites and another for blacks. The experiment was not successful. Contact was managed through an old-fashioned form of white supremacy. The young people fought with each other. A black male student stabbed a white counterpart with a pair of scissors. White parents converged on the school and physically attacked some of the black students as they were leaving. Schools such as Vryburg are in a state of fragility. The schools are susceptible to constant interference from inside and outside. Parents, both black and white, realise what is happening and act in ways that exacerbate conditions. The authorities themselves have little insight into the complexity and often
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take action too late or in ways that do not provide for the long-term future of the school. In analysing the range of responses of white parents, it is clearly the extreme conservatism which attracts popular attention. But it is the more sophisticated response, especially that which invokes globalisation, that is more important. In a context in which political justifications for racism are deligitimated, schools (parents and teachers) turn to the global order for rationalising what they do (see Macedo & Gounari [2006] for an interesting discussion about the situation in the United States). Dominance is extrapolated from its local context and from the politics that hold it in place and is reinstantiated as a globalising project. Knowing continues to mean reading the other in deficit terms, but is prosecuted now on the basis of a universalised cosmopolitanism. Instead of the political authority of the state, the white school now turns to the authority of the global market. Implicit in this manoeuvre is an unspoken identification of the global market with whiteness. Global success, evident in a collage of images of a democratic, free-market world, is represented by the achievements of the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and the new unified Europe. These countries provide the template for modern progress. Unarticulated but ever present is a teleology of global white domination. In white achievement euphemised as the West the rest of the world has available to it the role model for its own development. The strategy of the school that invokes the conditions of globalisation is to argue for the retention of what it does because its cultural orientation and the habits and relationships it fosters are consonant with the requirements of the globalised subject. And so what it does is offer its current social and cultural repertoires as the means by which a cosmopolitan identity is acquired. It now projects itself not as a white South African school but as an internationally benchmarked institution of learning. There are strong evocations of this, of course, in higher education. The institution projects its job as that of producing the cosmopolitan subject with an XXX education you can go anywhere in the world. And their young people often do, encouraged by their parents and their teachers to find their identities elsewhere. The response of young white learners to their identities, explained a young woman to me recently, is that of what she called South African but-not-for-long. To this cosmopolitan identity is counterposed the identity of the deficient other. Whiteness and its terms of engagement with the other are redefined in this process. What happens in this process is an acknowledgement on the part of many white schools of the shifting of the terrain and the need for them to locate
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themselves in a wider hegemony, a wider sense of their certainty, beyond that of South African politics. In contrast to earlier forms of assimilation, what one now sees is the relocation of whiteness from its South African context into a global framework. The purpose of school is thus to insert the learner within a global network. Contact and its attendant imperatives of assimilation are thus rearticulated. They retain their basic features but, being inserted into a different political dynamic, are driven by new modes of articulation. The significance of this moment for understanding the place of South African whiteness in a larger global white dynamic is important. Whiteness, of course, is not a homogeneous phenomenon. But the ways in which it is articulated and the politics of its global articulation require an analysis and understanding of important sites of its production such as South Africa. The white South African community is, in global terms, small. But it is significant for understanding how whiteness comes to be expressed and what the contours and shifting horizons of its patterns of inclusion and exclusion look like.
Conclusion
Using the motif of assimilation, this chapter has attempted a characterisation of the nature of contact between white and black in South Africa. The essential argument is that contact begins with fundamentally asymmetric relations of knowing between groups in the country. The effect of these relations is to draw politically and culturally weaker groups into the world of the dominant but in a consistently subordinate position. What is significant, however, is that distinct repertoires of knowing the other develop when contact takes place at the level of the school. The discussion here draws attention to the problems with the appropriation of hegemonic forms of multiculturalism assimilation for explaining how contact and knowing are managed in the South African school. This hegemonic discussion fails to recognise how contact and knowing are conditioned by the political conjuncture in which the country and its society find themselves. Different phases through which contact moves are distinguished. The first experience of contact (19761990) between white and black at the level of the school is essentially managed on the basis of white paternalism but, as a result of the influence of a variety of social forces including black consciousness, is punctuated by moments during which a radical questioning of white subjectivity takes place. The second phase of contact (19901994), when the public school system becomes the focus of integration, sees the emergence of
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a more strident form of assimilation. In this phase white schools are aware of and in some instances invoke the arguments of a pluralist multiculturalism. Multiculturalism at this point provides the dominant framework in many parts of the world for managing contact between diverse groups. The essential approach white South African schools adopt is to work with the black child through restricted stereotypes of black identity and culture. The most recent phase (1994 to the present) sees contact largely being managed on the basis of the knowledge that white schools have of multiculturalism but with a recognition on their part that their political authority has been stripped away. Among the strategies that schools invoke to maintain their dominance is the relocation of the terms of engagement with black people from the local to the global. Assimilation and contact are then managed through the invocation of cosmopolitan identities.
Note
1 On 16 June 1976 high school students in Soweto, Johannesburg, took to the streets to protest against a decision of the apartheid government to make the Afrikaans language compulsory as a medium of instruction. The protest set off a two-year-long boycott of schools and came to be important in shifting the balance of forces in the struggle of oppressed people against the apartheid government.
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Reconstituting privilege: Integration in former white schools
This chapter argues that the arrival of democracy in South Africa in 1994 has produced new conditions for the distribution of power in the country and, in particular, new relations of privilege and subordination. These are manifest in a range of social sites and institutions, but they take acute form in the setting of the school. While race has remained the dominant factor in the making of social privilege in South Africa, the new conditions of democracy or better, what Nolutshungu (1982) would call the politics of democracy have brought race into a much more dependent relationship with other factors, among which, of course, class is central. While race mapped closely onto class during the height of apartheid and easily contained most of the social dynamics of class, this is less so now in the post-apartheid era, in which one is beginning to see class operating with its own set of imperatives. Black people still overwhelmingly provide the working class with its character and its numbers, but significant proportions 2 million out of 22 million adults (Cape Argus 10 July 2006) have ascended into the ranks of the middle class1 and into circumstances of privilege. Privilege is presented in this chapter in discursive rather than empirical terms. It is understood as the advantage that accrues to individuals and groups as a result of their superior access to economic and social choice. The privileged that are observed in this study are largely made up of the more established white middle class and the expanding black middle class described above. As a group this black middle class places a high premium on their childrens education and their ability to speak English. It is their interaction with the school that is discussed. While a small, black, unfranchised middle class existed under apartheid, the new conditions of possibility facilitated by post-apartheid democracy have injected into South Africas ranks of privilege a complex group of people with a variety of attitudes to political, economic and social questions. The classic social institutions inhabited by the middle class have thus become very different from what they were during apartheid. This is especially the case with respect to the school, which is now a decidedly more diverse institution (see Fiske & Ladd 2004; Soudien 2004).
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During the apartheid era the schooling system was strictly segregated by race, with people who were classified white having access to well-resourced schools and those classified African to the least resourced. People classified Indian and coloured found themselves in intermediate situations. The work of Sujee (2004) provides some sense of what this change has meant in Gauteng province. His analysis supported by the work of Vally and Dalamba (1999) and Zafar (1998) on a national scale, Naidoo (1996) in KwaZulu-Natal, Sekete et al. (2001) in five provinces, and Soudien and Sayed (2003) in three provinces shows the extent to which schools have become racially integrated. In Gauteng in 2002, only 5 per cent of former Indian schools, 4 per cent of former coloured schools and 34 per cent of former white schools were deemed to have low levels of integration. Even if the last figure is relatively high compared to the other two, it is clear that a systematic shift is under way in the schools of the country. Focusing on the former white school, this chapter asks, how does this new privilege express itself? What attitudes are being expressed by this newly constituted group of youth, especially those who would have been regarded as black in the old apartheid South Africa? The data drawn on in this chapter are primarily sourced from extensive and ongoing work colleagues and I have conducted with young South Africans over the last 15 years. This work, essentially but not exclusively focused on the Western Cape, is based on approximately 150 interviews, dozens of observations, at least 10 focus groups and 2 surveys. For the purposes of this chapter, however, it concentrates on a set of approximately 50 individual and four focus-group interviews conducted in the last seven years in four high schools in the greater Cape Town area and three schools in Johannesburg between 2005 and 2007. All the schools are former white schools and now have students from across the countrys racial spectrum. With respect to the Cape Town schools, one is a prestigious former white Afrikaans-medium public school, the second is an academically high-performing former white Englishmedium school, the third is an elite private girls school and the final one a public girls school which is less selective than the other schools. All three Johannesburg schools are co-educational (male and female) former white English-speaking schools of established middle-class standing. Aside from five young male coloured students in the Afrikaans school, the students were essentially an even mix of white and African and male and female students. The data for the study were extracted from transcribed interviews that were subjected to a coding exercise using a qualitative software programme. The themes, especially those of different kinds of privilege and whiteness, emerged
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from an analysis of the transcripts but are related to themes that have emerged in previous studies, such as those of Dolby (2001) and Steyn (2001). The themes are explored in greater detail in my book The Making of Youth Identity in Contemporary South Africa (Soudien 2007b). In seeking to make sense of how privilege presents itself in these new conditions, and specifically for young black people, I use the arguments of No Sizwe (1979) and Wolpe (1988) as points of departure precisely because they attempt to work with race and class in creative ways. They both suggest that South African relations of domination and subordination exceed explanations rooted in monocausal frameworks of understanding. Instead, domination and subordination take their character from the interplay of a whole range of factors in which race and class are significant but are supplemented, and on occasion overdetermined, by factors such as gender, time, religion, place and language. This chapter is divided into two sections. The first section provides a short sketch of the ways in which old privilege is reconstituted in the new post-1994 circumstances of the country; the second section looks at how privilege is taking shape among groups and individuals who would have been described as disadvantaged under apartheid.
The reconstitution of white privilege

Three discourses of privilege are presented below which attempt to capture the spectrum of ways in which young white privilege is being managed within the society and the directions it is taking in the new South Africa. It is recognised that these discursive frameworks have limitations and can easily become caricatures in themselves. Important about them, however, is that they bring together the most critical themes of youth discourse in the country today. Taken together, these frameworks represent the nature of the debate that is taking place among young white people. The first framework, briefly described in the previous chapter, is referred to as global whiteness an association with successful white middle-class lifestyles elsewhere in the world and a disassociation from black South Africa and has come to be associated particularly, but not exclusively, with English-speaking white South Africans. Ambiguity of identity is a persistent theme in this group. Levels of identification with Africa were found to be low among this group (see Eaton 2006; Soudien 2007b). Elements of this attitude
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do exist among other groups. For example, they take acute form among elements in the coloured and Indian middle class for whom emigration to Australia, Canada and New Zealand over the last 50 years, fascinatingly under-researched, is a phenomenon almost as well entrenched as it is among English-speaking whites. Yunus Mukuddem, a young person of colour at the high-performing academic school in Cape Town, commented: [My] parents have always encouraged [me] to emigrate and thats what [I] will probably do after university (Cape Argus 17 June 2002). But it is young white privilege that is important to highlight here. An articulate young woman, a one-time head girl of the academically high-performing English-medium school, described the attitude of her peers to the idea of South Africa and Africa: They do say they are South Africans, but definitely notdont see themselves as Africans. A lot of white people would see themselves as Europeans, definitely. Wouldnt say African, South African, yes, but South African-not-for-long (Soudien 2007b: 55). The importance of global whiteness is its emergence outside the formality of school. Formally, this high-performing English-medium school, and indeed all the others in the study, have clearly articulated rituals and practices, such as their anthems and observances at official functions, which promote national pride. In addition, they all follow the official curriculum faithfully. But what happens outside of school is crucial. A white teacher at the school commented that young, white, English-speaking South Africans were brought up to leave the country. Several young people in this same school referred to the encouragement they received from parents to consider emigration. What this points to is the large influence of what one might call home discourses. The second privilege grouping is referred to as old-new South African whiteness. There remains in place a strong sense of what it means to be white, and particularly Afrikaans, in South Africa. Unlike English-speaking white South Africans, Afrikaans-speaking white youth have fewer global connections. South Africa is their home, as the work of Tihanyi (2003) and Soudien (2007b) has shown. But as this work also shows, there is a distinct reserve about the new South Africa. Tihanyi characterised young, white, Afrikaans-speaking South Africans as being in denial about the fact that the country is now led by a majority-black government (2003: 164), while Steyn used the more forgiving moniker of whites are doing it for themselves, suggesting that they were attempting to lead their lives as independently of the new state as they could (2001: 8687). My own review of the integration
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landscape (Soudien 2004) and the literature describing it suggests that Afrikaans schools were the least integrated of the former white schools and that this had a great deal to with the fact that Afrikaans remained the medium of instruction in these schools. While the study I conducted (Soudien 2007b) shows how important it is to recognise movement and fluidity in the thinking of these young people, to the extent that they are conscious of their prejudice one sees how contact with black people in spaces of privilege, not outside of them, has unsettled them. Significant in understanding this, and evident in the testimony of young people in this category, is the challenging relationships young Afrikaans-speakers have with their parents. Particularly difficult for young Afrikaans-speaking South Africans is the lack of help provided by older people such as parents and teachers to young people for understanding the complexity of the new South African situation (see Soudien 2007b). Growing up, they were required to mimic the ways of their parents without properly understanding why they had to do so. This unselfconsciousness points to the absence of formal induction processes into the new social arrangements of South Africa, producing among young Afrikaansspeaking whites a lack of literacy about the new country they inhabit. This was very evident in the orientation stories related by more than 10 young white students at a Cape Town Afrikaans school (see also Soudien 2007b). Instances of bullying among males, for example, appeared to be deliberately overlooked by teachers who saw these as important toughening-up experiences essential for making boys into men. Absent in their education are the outreach and interact clubs to which privileged, young English-speaking whites have access, as will be seen below. As a consequence, it was not surprising that relationships between white and black students at this school were delicate. While there were many cross-cultural and cross-race friendships, the terms of these were often asymmetrical. The coloured youth had to fit in with what their white friends required. A white girl at this school said to one of my research assistants: Some of them can be very good, theyre very smart, they know how to behave themselvesThey dont come out of very good homesThats what the difference is. Comments of this nature were common. The final form of engagement with the new conditions of the country is described as new South African whiteness. It is important to stress how fluid issues of identity making and identification are in the South African context. In contrast to global whiteness, there are distinct new identity configurations coming into being, bringing whiteness and a sense of African place into a
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much more interesting dialogue. Out of this, there is emerging in the postapartheid landscape a new South African whiteness that is characterised by a sense of history, a consciousness of the role of privilege in the making of South Africa and, significantly, a commitment to the country (see Soudien 2007b). This development, in some of its manifestations, is encouraged by the school and particularly by institutions that are informed by a commitment to middleclass decency. Teachers who operate in these schools are critical discursive agents of the new South Africa. Bristle as they might about its crime, standoffish as they might be on occasion to the state and still paternalistic and patronising, they are at the same time aware of the need to put something back into the country. The process through which teachers come to emphasise the responsibility that comes with privilege is central to this development. Where this process operates optimally, young people are inducted into an idea of community, with the idea that they belong to concentric communities the school itself, the wider neighbourhood community and then the nation. In the advantaged schools and the privileged girls school and the academic Cape Town school are good examples young people have access to a large number of extramural activities and societies. In contrast to the teacherabsent Afrikaans-speaking intergenerational environment, these schools see themselves playing the important social role of reproducing responsibility. They are tightly managed intergenerational spaces. Older people occupy and present themselves in the life-worlds of young people. They lead and guide. When young people at the privileged girls school and the academic school in Cape Town were given or took leadership roles, the moment was not only formally celebrated, it was also given content with workshops and seminars. In these schools young people, in turn, learn, follow and then are required to step out on their own. This group of people is important and, although it is small, plays a powerfully mediating function in the space of the new South Africa. Its most important role is to appropriate the full amplitude of South Africas history as a history which is theirs and to begin to engage with all of its complexity. A recent talk by acclaimed South African actress Janet Suzman which I attended reflects this attitude: this damned country of ours, she cries as she explains how much it means to her. She talks of it being in her blood, of embracing all the memories, the good and the bad. Evidence of this attitude emerged, particularly in the Cape Town schools, in the more than 20 interviews I conducted.
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Newly privileged and black

Privilege is a complex phenomenon. In acquiring its character in the new South Africa, it has to reckon with the astonishingly quick arrival of the black middle class on the front of the social stage. These socio-economic developments find interesting expression at the level of the school. An important manifestation of this is the flight of students out of township schools to former white, coloured and Indian schools. While there are black families who have moved into the suburbs, and some of their comments appear below, many of the new educational migrants continue to live in the townships. A Sunday Times (10November 2002) article describes the daily migration in the following terms:
It is 3.30pm. Johannesburg Station in the citys concrete heart, is abuzz with schoolchildren. The blue, red and grey of their uniforms blend with the rainbow of colours on the murals that lead to the platforms where they will catch their rides home. They spend their days in schools in the city, but as soon as the last bell goes the pupils head for the trains that will shuttle them to Soweto, Tembisa, Katlehong, Mohlakeng and other townships on the fringe of South Africas industrial hub [This] phenomenon emerged a decade ago when racial laws ceased to force black parents to stick to black schools. The new freedom set in motion a massive flow of pupils between schoolsSome opted for the mushrooming private schools in the city centre. Others chose former Model C schools and their extensive facilities. Fees of R3000 and upward and a 100 km round trip were preferable to the R100-a-year school down the road. This situation is now replayed in every major city and town in the country. Parents have made it clear, like parents everywhere else in the world, that they will stop at little to give their children what they think is the best education that is available. In looking at these young people, a simple two-way division is used in which attention is drawn to young black children from more secure middle-class backgrounds and to those from emerging working-class homes making the transition into the middle class. The first group of young black people worked with in this study what one could call here the previously disenfranchised elite came from economically
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comfortable backgrounds in three different schools, two in Cape Town and one in Johannesburg. Being relatively economically privileged in the old South Africa, they now also have access to the countrys power establishment, its social, political and cultural institutions. They either lived in the white suburbs or came from coloured and Indian middle-class suburbs. Their parents desperately wanted their children to succeed. A boy in a cohort from the leading academic former white Cape Town school reported to my research assistant and myself that his own first choice of high school had been the leading black school in the city (a school with a strong academic record, including that of being one of the University of Cape Towns main feeder schools). He says that his father suggested that I should rather come here because school X wont give me [the same opportunity]. Now that I think about it, I wouldnt have liked school A. Im better off here. De Klerk, who worked with a cohort of similar young people in the Eastern Cape in 2002, says of these young peoples parents: [they] are actively and knowingly promoting [the] shift from Xhosa to English in their children. For political, economic and educational reasons, they want their children to be assimilated into a single unified national culture which will probably be Western to the core (McKinney 2007: 10). It is significant that, by and large, the schools in which these young people found themselves were hospitable to black children and students were proud of them. A Muslim boy at the prestigious academic Cape Town high school described his school to us as brilliant academically. [It] has a very good academic record. People want to come herewe only take the bestThe teachers are very friendly towards you, they want you to go to varsity. If you fail they think they havent done their jobs properly. It is also significant that although the schools have subjects like isiXhosa, isiZulu, Sesotho, and so on, the countrys largest indigenous languages, their formal and informal curricula are geared to producing young people who are expected to be confident, worldly and familiar with the cultural capital that is dominant in the Western curriculum. In this respect, for the most part the schools have the same expectations of the young black people that they would have had for young white people. The schools take on the responsibility of rounding off and finishing their pupils. At one of the Johannesburg schools, for example, an English teacher told her Grade 11 students that you will travel upon finishing school. Their cultural referents are little different from those of good schools anywhere else in the English-speaking world. The young people in them are prepared for the world of achievement and for presenting
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themselves properly within it. This formal preparation is accompanied by wellworn leadership preparation traditions. The prefect systems practised in many, especially where peers decide who the prefects should be, provide many young people with a strong sense of affirmation of their status in these institutions. At the prestigious private girls school in Cape Town, a young African woman who was elected prefect felt a sense of pride in what had happened. She told us: What made it so special, was because people actually elected me because of who I wasI wont say that its a special thing because Im black because I dont think even if I were whitepeople wouldve elected me because of who I am and the person that I am towards them, ja. Another African girl, in Tihanyis Afrikaans Cape Town school, who was also selected as a prefect, echoed much of what the previous girl had to say:
When I got here in Std 6 [Grade 8] it was very difficult. In my primary school, people were very racist. When I got here, it was exactly the same. If you dont work your way up, itll always be like that. If you stay in the background and let them come down on youbut now, sometimes people almost forget that Im black. Im on the pupils council and I have leadership positions and people forget that Im black, and thats how it should be. (Tihanyi 2006: 75) The extramural activities at many of the schools are similarly aligned behind the leadership project: their purpose is to induct the students into particular responsibilities and identities. The young African girl at the prestigious Cape Town girls school had been appointed the head of the schools outreach programme. In addition to this, she participated in a number of other community activities: [M]ost of the times, its over the weekends, umm, street-collecting, helping with the Argus [a big cycle race] things like that As places which nurture habituses, as Bourdieu (1984) uses the term, the schools are powerful cultural machines. Language is the central mechanism in this process. Formality presents itself as the domain of English. Another African girl at the prestigious Cape Town girls school spoke to us of her English classes: and jain English we have hectic [meaning intense] discussions, umm, about everything, and so those are important to me But what happens in the informal spaces in which these young people find themselves? Is the informal the world of the unstructured everyday dominated by their peers, in alignment with the cultural project of the school? In some ways it is, with young people circulating in the limited class world of
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the privileged, black as it might be. In many ways, however, there is a great deal more to the phenomenon. It takes a range of forms. One sees it in the deliberate cultural groupings that take shape in the school. In all of the schools in which I worked, it manifested itself sharply around religion, with Muslim youth, male and female, particularly making it clear to everybody who cared to notice that it was their religion that mattered most to them. They frequently dressed in ways which were different. In each of the schools in the study, the most frequent observation both my researchers and I made was how much one found racial groups congregating in particular spaces, but also how Muslim and Christian sat apart from each other. But its most articulate form emerged in language use, and this is even more marked among the less economically well-off young people described below. Despite attempts by the schools to discourage young people from using their mother tongues, young people loudly and deliberately showed their solidarity networks in their language groupings. There was often a sense of defiance about this. The identities that young people in this category were to develop, however, were by no means neat and coherent. They were neither neatly assimilated nor rebellious subjects. One quickly became aware, for example, of complex attitudes among the youth. This complexity was reflected in what it is that they appeared to be aware of and unaware of. They were very aware, for example, of what it meant to be a student at a former white school. This awareness partly arose out of the intense scrutiny under which they found themselves outside of their schools. Nomathemba Mtshali, a matric pupil at Eden Park Secondary School in a town east of Johannesburg, said in 2002 that she had come under tremendous fire from her township peers for attending a school outside of the township: Even if you live in a shack but attend school in town, people resent you and call you funny things like Miss Kellogg (Sunday Times 10November 2002), referring to white breakfast tastes. At the same time, many appeared to be oblivious to the social critique floating around them or rather chose to ignore it. There is an apparent navet about them in terms of race. Apartheid, for example, appeared not to hold significance for them. Here at school, a black child told a reporter from the Mail & Guardian, we only use race jokingly, not in a bad way. A boisterous boy, Tshabalala, tells the reporter that affirmative action is weird. I dont like itWe need to be equal (Mail & Guardian 28 April 4 May 2006). Predictably, then, the attitudes of some of these young people are ambivalent with respect to who they think they are and to which social groups they
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belong. Among the most aware there is even a delicate self-consciousness. A young African girl at a prestigious Cape Town girls school reflected on the entry of black girls into the school, making the following comment to us: I think coming to X is a big thing for them, its very niceto come to such a wonderful school, but I think sometimes because of their attitude, I mean you come from the township and most of the time your attitude is I dont care, and sometimes when you come here, youre expected to work really hard, they dont really do that and they dont take opportunities, its only a number of people who are like that, but because of those handful of people, we all getthat label. Young people such as these are conscious of how they are labelled and grouped. Many simply want to be the way they think everybody else is just normal. Normal, however, is a difficult position to occupy. It demands embracing the dominant discourse of the school and all its attendant complexities with respect to colour and class. Some who do, lose all perspective. A young African Grade7 student, about to enter Grade 8 at a prestigious Eastern Cape small-town school between East London and Alice which was involved in our inclusion and exclusion project, was asked in June 2002 to talk about his ambitions. Without any hesitation whatsoever, he said to us that he would proceed to Oxford when he finished matric and that he would become the Governor of the South African Reserve Bank one day. This same young man also declared, again without any sense of irony, that these other people [he meant poor and black] mustnt come to our school if they cant afford it. But it was perhaps Tihanyis African girl, described above, who goes furthest in this respect and demonstrates a fascinating degree of distancing, even self-alienation, from the community with which, putatively at least, she would have been associated. She says, for example: Nowadays, the word kaffir doesnt mean the same thing as it once did; now its more like if someone broke into your house, people would immediately say, it must be a black person, it must be a kaffir, but it doesnt mean they generalize to everybody. If they called someone else a kaffir when I was around, theyd say were not talking about you, were talking about the indecent people (Tihanyi 2003: 72) But ambivalence isnt always or only a negative experience. Many young people emerge from these spaces with a heightened sense of awareness: they take little for granted. This awareness emanates out of the realisation that
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they are both insiders and outsiders of the multiple worlds they inhabit. As a consequence, many develop into potent critics, critics of the peculiar injustices of their supposed traditional worlds their roots and of the worlds of modernity and achievement into which they are expected to step. The same young African girl referred to above who spoke of the privilege she had of leading a student society, and who, incidentally, stood up to a teacher who referred to the poor African Cape Town township of Khayelitsha as shackland, spoke to us of her identity in the following way: Im extremely proud to be South African, Im proud to be black and Im proud of where I come from, and, itswhen you find people saying, ja, Im leaving South Africa, Im going to Australia, America, wherever, I ask them why and they say no, because South Africa, its not safe and theeconomy is not good, and its so sad because we, our generation and younger generations are actually meant to make everything better, and when were gonna run away, thenTheres actually definitely no hope for us andit says a lot about their character, because you know, if theres a problem, then theyre just gonna leave and when theyre not happy andthey want to find an easy way outApartheid, its important to me My dad, he once showed me his pass and its so sad to know that if you didnt have a pass, that you know, youre like not allowed to be there, when its actually your, originally your land and its your homeI think a lot of us wouldnt have become the people we are because of that I know that if it were other ways, I, I mean, if we were all equal thenI think I wouldnt be the person I am nowits been significant as, its helped me to be who I am What this discussion has shown are the possibilities that come with being black and privileged. On the one hand, there is the full monty, where the uniqueness of ones location born black but with a silver spoon in ones mouth puts intensified self- and social awareness within ones reach. As in this girls case, one sees school with all its challenges, such as her teacher represents, working in her favour. Critically, she has her parents behind her. On the other hand, privilege can also dull the senses. Once inside its cocoon, one does not want to know, like the global white subjects above, other peoples troubles. Self-gratification is really all that matters. But what happens when one is trying to cross the barriers of both race and class? What happens when one does not live in an upmarket area as some of
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the subjects above do, and does not have the same easy access to the symbolic world of privilege as they do? Does hardship, and this is by no means a new question, automatically bless one with the third eye? It is argued above that being young, black and privileged provides one with immense possibility. When ones home environment is in alignment with school, many possibilities open up for one. As the discussion below makes clear, these possibilities are less clear for those who are in transition socio-economically. It is to this second group that the discussion now turns. This group is referred to as the newly emerging elite. Many of the young people we interviewed for this study who fall in the less wealthy group came from the Cape Town Afrikaans city school, some from the public Cape Town suburban girls school with a good but not front-rank reputation and some from one of the Johannesburg schools. Fernwood, the school in Durban studied by Dolby (2001), would have been a similar institution. Socio-economically speaking, many of these young people came from coloured communities that were themselves in states of fragility, such as the lower-middle-class or working-class suburbs and townships of their cities. Significantly, a number of children in this category had parents who sent their children to schools such as these because they, the parents, worked in the area. Many of these young people travelled into school from the townships. What is significant about many of the youth in this category is the different way in which the formal world of the school and the informal environment of home configure for them. There is a decided disjunction between the middle-class formality of school and the working-class ambience of their communities. The trip between home and school is a metaphor for the dissonance they experience. A coloured boy at the Afrikaans Cape Town school who lives in Bonteheuwel, a poor Cape Town township, explains to us his journey home in the following way: [N]ot everybodybut you then you get people thats like their children, theyre rude. They swear then they go on. Now my friend were standing here talking, and theres other children down there under alland the children is likeIt doesnt smell properly there. People just doesnt care. It breaks my heart actually because Im living there. They can mos [just] clean. Now we must like go through their dirt He has to go through their dirt to reach the prize of school. The prize, however, shapes up as a multifaceted place of desire. In the testimony of
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many of the young mainly coloured people, it simply is an okay place. For all four of the Cape Town Afrikaans school students interviewed for this study, despite real issues they were experiencing in the school, it was normal. Asked if there was anything about school that he would change, a boy from the rural Cape town of Morreesburg told us: No, everything is like normal here The teachers theyre hard and sometimes were hard too These students take what it offers and, in interesting ways, in the informal spaces of school, normalise it. One boy described a particularly brutal initiation experience during which he had been kicked in the ribs and had water thrown over him all of this in full view of a teacher who was sitting there snortingyes, yes, yes, this is the tradition. But he had learnt, as he said, to toughen up and had become one of them: Most of them are rough and stuff. I dig them because theyre good and stuff. School does not seem to be the same switched-on place academically as it is for the economically better-off children. It doesnt resonate in their heads in the same intellectual way as it does for the more wealthy children. There appears to be a great deal more strain and tension in the way these young people are negotiating the terrain of the school and particularly the formal and the informal aspects. They appear to have to work harder socially. As a result, the urgency of fitting in socially appears to eclipse the importance of doing well academically. The affirmation that seemed to most excite one of the coloured Cape Town Afrikaans school boys happened when a teacher said to him, Yes, H, youre a man. He told us that his response was, Ja, cool[if I] play and tackle, and if [I] playroughlythey tell me Im a man A number found school challenging academically. Only one girl, when we asked, responded that she took the competition in maths tests with another boy in her class seriously. All the boys, when asked if they considered themselves smart, replied emphatically and without a moments hesitation, no. When the young people at the Afrikaans school were asked what their most memorable and important experiences at school are, the response invariably related to friendships and friendship groupings. Among the boys, the friendships were constructed around interests and histories. Significantly, these constituted both the axes across and the frames within which their identities were resourced. In terms of the former, one could find individuals across race and class who would make common cause. At the Afrikaans school in Cape Town, for example, a number of the boys spoke of having friends of all kinds, coloured, whiteall over with whom they shared books and stuff.
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Books like Harry Potter. Movies. All kinds of stuff. Interests allowed them to build bridges between themselves and the white kids at school. One of the boys explained what happened when he first came to the school: They come to me the first time and they play with me and take me round in classesThey asked me what sport I do and I tell them rugby and so they said, okay, youre in my team. Theyre very nice and thats all. Movies too took them into the homes of white children. The boy from Bonteheuwel related the intriguing story of going to visit at a white friends house the only time that he did so and discovering that this family wasnt so different after all. These rearticulations are present in the schools in this category too. But hovering over much of the space is the spirit of class. The Bonteheuwel young male student didnt reciprocate the invitation to his white classmate because, as he said, Im very shymaybe they think that type of teanow Ive got Red Roses. Thats why Ive got a lot of that thoughts in my mind sometimesI wont. This same youth, when asked whether more students of colour should be enrolled in his school, replied: if you had to bring more of coloureds maybe like there are some coloureds thats very rude here and then you get so thats why leave thisIt depends, good coloureds, like me, yes One sees here how class inserts itself into the equation and destabilises the okayness of the equilibrium at school. These young people are aware of how different their histories are. They either shield and hide away those parts of their identities that might lead to embarrassment, or they act out, like the boy referred to earlier who earned his acceptance by fighting back when he was bullied. In contrast to the Cape Town Afrikaans school which had remained largely white Afrikaans, the less-prestigious Cape Town girls school had become more coloured and the Johannesburg school more African. In these schools, assimilative to a middle-class orientation as they were in their large formal objectives, and therefore little different from the Afrikaans school in Cape Town, the terrain of the informal was a swirl of countercurrents. For example, one saw in the girls school the defiant valorisation of language by isiXhosaspeaking girls who were angry that the school had completely prohibited the use of the vernacular. One girl explained to us: [Y]oure only allowed to speak English in the classes. Black students hate the rule, they hate it. They dont obey it. They still speak it. They speak in loud voices just to prove to the teacher that they dont care. In the Johannesburg school it wasnt just defiance. There, as McKinney (2007) explains, creativity was emerging in the ways in which young people played
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with their different languages. They were ironic and playful and increasingly showing that they could deliberately shift from one identity position to another and that none of the positions was sacred. They laughed at both the African accents rumbling around them and the pretentious English turned on to impress others. An extract from McKinney shows how this playfulness works: Gugu: I can change the way Im speakingIf I were to leave school nowI can be more tsotsi-taal [township dialect]as all of themif I were to go to Sandton [an upmarket place] I can be a niggerif I go to the Eastern Cape, I will be as Xhosa as XhosaI am one of those individualsI can be different from everybody else (2007: 18)
The significance of this for the broader discussion is that one is seeing a much more stimulating engagement with the social structures of race and class in this Johannesburg school than was the case with the coloured students at the Afrikaans school in Cape Town. There are, as McKinney (2007) points out, interesting exaggerations of an essentialised black identity declared by these young people many around them are condemned as coconuts, white inside and black on the outside. In the work of Nongogo (2007), in these same Johannesburg schools there is also the claim made of purity Im pure Pedi, says one student in response to another who invokes an equally essentialised identity. But McKinneys (2007) argument leads us to a recognition of the performative dimension of what these students are doing. They perform purity as easily as they might the playfulness that marks their hybridity.
Conclusion
The character of privilege is infinitely more complex than common-sense understandings would have it. It should already be clear how much social class has begun to determine the character of social space for young people. It has imposed on them the intensely individualistic values of the hegemonic consumer world. Their social context with all of its racial symbolism, however, remains ever present as they attempt to express their identities. The way in which young people in this new conjuncture present themselves suggests that there are distinct issues that arise for them. Social structures carrying the multiple messages of the past, primarily in the form of race, and the present, as it is encoded in the deeply individualistic terms of choice, are powerful influences. But young people are not simply the products of these structural forces. They work with them. One of the central features, then, of
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the identity-making process, as a consequence of this work they do, is the intense headwork it requires. Young people are having to think deeply. While the social stratum of privilege that they are now a part of can be described in empirical terms, it is the forms of consciousness within it that are most significant. It is therefore important to recognise the unavoidably multifaceted ways in which race and class are being rearticulated in the space of privilege. The key framing device for this rearticulation is the intergenerational relationship and the capacity of older people to mediate the complexity of the new South Africa for young people. Young people who are in strongly mediated environments, especially those where school and home are in alignment, have considerably resourced identities. This group of young people, both those deemed to be black and those deemed to be white, are often impressive young people. They demonstrate an ability to reflect critically on their environments and, most significantly, the ability to locate themselves within it. Moreover, their take on the other, those marked by the disadvantage of race and class, is informed by an ability to read themselves in the social relations of the country. The observation to make about their consciousnesses is the appropriation of a description of themselves framed in the language of the self. It is this individualising impulse which exceeds the descriptive repertoires of race and class that any rethinking of the narrative of privilege in South Africa needs to engage with. To forestall the sense that the analysis in this work focuses only on these new young subjects of hope, it must be emphasised that there remains in most young peoples understanding of their world the strong influence of the social structures in which they find themselves. This is markedly evident in the ways in which they position the other. The other is insistently positioned in their discourse in a state of dependence dependence on their sense of goodness and charity. Not unexpectedly, in these positionings race and class are influential. In the case of the extremely privileged, those of the globalised whiteness discourse, the view of the world which they assemble for themselves is distinctly monochromatic. They avoid shades of grey, seeking that kind of racial and classed certainty that holds their privilege in place, and are focused on the gratification of their self-interest. The world is produced for them as a permanent playground in which they have permanent rights. If those rights are not to be fulfilled in South Africa, they will be fulfilled elsewhere. For those born into less comfort but who are still privileged nonetheless the newly emerging elite there is considerable ambiguity about their relationship
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with the world around them. They either flee from those things which seek to join them to their raced and classed pasts, or they play in the space of their ambiguity. Aware of the other around them, and less able to extract themselves from the need to relate to the other as their more wealthy counterparts are able to do they struggle to bring the other into their worlds, even when the other is within them. One sees, for example, emerging black privileged groups struggling to articulate their identities in relation both to white people and to poorer black people, among whom they often live. As they make their way into privilege, it is this turbulence that it is critical to note for further analysis. It is critical because from it comes a whole range of social forms of behaviour for which we empirically have no explanation. The kinds of acting out we see in young people of all backgrounds the forays they make into and even their habituation of stereotypes are important identity categories with which we need to come to terms in much more nuanced ways. The new work of Swartz and Bhana (2009) and of Bray et al. (2010) is important here. In the latter work, for example, the extensive vignette of a young woman called Veronique from the depressed township of Ocean View in Cape Town illustrates the contradictory ways this turbulence plays itself out. Veronique struggles in her school and her family, but she is searingly insightful. She demonstrates agency of a kind which many in her age group, irrespective of the cultural or social group out of which they might come, would take years to develop. The turbulence they confront is thus productive for them. Productivity, however, is a decidedly mixed phenomenon. In Veroniques case, for example, she actively agitates to break up her family. She cannot stand the attitude of her father. She sees in him all the problems of her world. He is responsible for her own unhappiness and the unhappiness of her mother. If he is going to be trapped and caught in the determinative conditions of his raced and classed world, she wont be. The example is extreme. But there is enough new emerging evidence in work of this kind to show how much growing up in these new spaces demands a level of social analysis which is able to recognise the dimensions of the immediate environments in which young people find themselves.
Note
1 www.researchsurveys.co.za.
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The complexity of subordination in the new South Africa
The previous chapter showed how identities of privilege are taking shape among particular groups of young people in the new South Africa. We saw new and complex configurations emerging. How different is the situation for young people who are not privileged, those who are black and disadvantaged? How are they thinking their way through the process of growing up? What role is school playing in this process? Are the benefits of the new South Africa evident in any way in the identities that disadvantaged South Africans are making for themselves? More pertinently, are the conditions of peace and stability, on the one hand, and economic prosperity, on the other, translating into meaningful effects on their lives? As South Africa presents itself as a state of new possibility, do we see, commensurately, a sense of this in the identities of young people? In setting the scene for this discussion it is appropriate to quickly highlight an enduring puzzle which is manifesting itself on our social landscape. Although the country has made immense strides in moving away from its apartheid past, responses to the new South Africa are decidedly ambiguous. While most South Africans are positive about the new democracy, according to the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation Report (LoveLife 2000), they are simultaneously finding it difficult to realise the non-racial identities struggled for in the fight against apartheid. Thus there is a gap between our citizenship and identity practices to coin a phrase and the ideals inscribed into our founding documents such as the Constitution. Reflecting this gap, there appears to be a ubiquitous nostalgia, not so much for apartheid itself (few in the country would admit to that), but for the certainty which the old order provided. Even among subordinate groups that were victims of apartheid, notably those who have come to be known as Africans, Indians and coloureds, there is evidence manifested repeatedly in recent elections where Indian and coloured voting patterns projected a sense of anxiety about the prospect of being lumped with African people of a yearning for an idyllic identity and the social positions of the old South Africa (see Bickford-Smith et al. 1999; Jensen & Turner 1996).
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There is a kind of racial recidivism which appears to be alive and well among subordinate South Africans. While there are those who are more positive, and who are expressing a growing consciousness of being members of a wider African community (the African Renaissance movement, for example, has called on all South Africans to commit themselves to the African continent [Mgxashe 2000]), there is, however, a difficulty in seeing themselves beyond the identities bequeathed to them by apartheid. I suggest that the origins of these difficulties arise in the dense workings of the most critical social spaces which we as South Africans inhabit, principal among which have to be our institutions of socialisation, such as religious organisations and our schools, colleges and universities. They are in many ways unconscious hothouses of racial identification. Even when individuals inside of them believe otherwise, they produce the basic conditions for the reproduction of themselves as coloureds, Indians and Africans. What this chapter will show is how this racialisation impedes the ability of young people to emerge from their subordination. We will see how the habituses this racialisation represents embodied in both the formal spaces of schools and the informal spaces characterised by play and leisure continue to hold peoples identities in a state of thraldom. This chapter, like the previous one, is based on observations and discussions with young people in a number of different school settings. It arose out of an awareness that very little empirical work was being done on the impact of the apartheid and post-apartheid school on young peoples identities. Aside from Christie (1990) and Gaganakis (1991) in the pre-apartheid era and Carrim and Soudien (1999) in the post-apartheid period, there is little published work on the relationship between school and identity. The new work of Aslam Fataar (2007) is opening up this space, thankfully. Moreover, similar to what we found in the previous chapter for the schools of the advantaged, there is little work which seeks to understand how young people are coping in their new settings, particularly how young people are dealing with the new conditions of democracy. There is a whole range of school contexts to be studied in South Africa namely, the continuing African school, the integrating Indian and coloured schools, and those schools which remain predominantly Indian or coloured. The consequence is that a limited understanding of the relationship between school and identity dominates the discussion and has been reproduced in a range of analyses (see Dean 1983; Mokwena 1991). The idea that the apartheid
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and post-apartheid school reproduces the identities and dispositions required by capitalism and the race-class system is central in this understanding. In this chapter I argue that the relationship between school and identity is more complex. This complexity applies to both the period of apartheid and the post-apartheid era. In the apartheid era, young people emerged from schools clearly marked by the experience of racial separateness. They were the whites, the coloureds, the Africans and the Indians that the system wished them to be, but they were also more than that. The official ideology of the postapartheid government is to promote non-racialism and a new, inclusive South Africanism. The identity construction tensions in the new system, however, have not disappeared. Schools, and the students and teachers inside them, in the new South Africa continue to struggle with the disparate messages about who they are and who they ought to be. It is here that Fataar (2007) is valuable in showing the relationship between young people and their spatial realities. The work shows how schooling practices do not stem from policy per se but from the localised practices arising out of networked relationshipsthat are constructed out of the multiplicity of social relations across spatial scales, from the global scale, through to tentacles of national political power, to the social relations within the town or settlement (Fataar 2007: 600601). The approach I use here to show how the apartheid and the post-apartheid systems operate as sites of both reproduction and contestation of identity is based on the three arenas of the official, the formal and the informal. The official is the space of legislation and regulation as defined by the dominant public authority. The formal is the authority of the local context where the dominant conventions, customs and habits of the context are played out. The informal is the arena of the unregulated where everyday behaviour takes shape and form and is characterised by whatever is popular. The first is the terrain of the state and its ancillary orders of local and provincial government. The second is the domain of those who are in formal control of the local, and the last is the space of those without the official or formal power to determine what is acceptable or not at a high level. These arenas provide a working interpretive space for individuals and groups and are fluid and changeable. None is stable or internally consistent and coherent. The Official Discourse, as an example, is the product of intense contestation and arises out of the struggle for political hegemony. It is dominated, however, at any one moment in time by the ideologies, views and perspectives of whichever political group is in power. When this study was begun, South Africa was still in the grip of apartheid. The Official Discourse of apartheid was played out in the prescribed curriculum, in
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the official policy laid down by the government and in the physical ordering of everyday life through a range of policing, regimenting and sorting-andranking mechanisms. Schools created as African, coloured, white and Indian physically materialised and reproduced this discourse. When the new antiapartheid government came into power in 1994, it sought to rewrite the Official Discourse. This it did through promulgating a Constitution framed in human rights and passing a series of laws aimed at outlawing all forms of discrimination. Schools could no longer discriminate on racial grounds. Significantly, however, much of the physical landscape and the curriculum remained in place after the new government came into power. Thus the Official Discourse did change, but it did so within the context of the physical and curricular grip of the old order. This is an important elaboration to make for the purposes of understanding the world of subordination. Hegemonic as official discourses are, they are always surrounded by other, often less effective discourses, some of which are oppositional and many of which complement the hegemonic discourse. These discourses lurk as potential points of contradiction within the dominant discourse itself, but are more often outside of the Official Order and represented in a range of public and private forms of behaviour and thought. Two such discourses which are relevant here arise in schools and are referred to as the Formal and the Informal Discourses. The Formal Discourse of a school is that to which the school as a community seeks to commit itself. The Formal is distinct from the Official in that it is a stance or an approach which the school itself develops as a mission for its educational work. The Informal Discourse is the world of social relationships which young people inhabit and is made up of their social, cultural and leisure interests. While elements of both the Formal and the Informal may be oppositional, they might also collude with the Official Discourse, thus producing discursive complexes made up of a variety of ideals, aspirations and desires which are seldom stable, continuous or seamless. The discursive map of South Africa is thus an intricate web of sometimes discrete and discontinuous themes, sometimes overlapping and synchronous ideals, and frequently contesting and contradictory notions of self and other. While I speak of the Formal and the Informal Discourses as singular structures, I do so only in so far as they are arenas or environments. Inside of those arenas or environments are nuances and sub-discourses and even contesting discourses. I speak, for example, of the Formal Discourse in the school. This Formal Discourse is, however, a contested ideology and is
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frequently dominated by racial chauvinists who overturn more open-minded approaches inside the schools. Similarly, the Informal Discourse has a diverse range of mindsets and dispositions. In this chapter I show how dominant and oppositional forms of identity are reproduced in young people. I work with their experiences of school and attempt to portray how the different moments of the school experience the official embodied in the symbolism of the state, the formal as represented by the curriculum and regimen of the school, and the informal where young people operate outside of the formal structures of school offer intensely challenging opportunities for young people to receive and make identity. This process of receiving and making generates identities which are heterogeneous, contradictory and susceptible to change.
The research context

The bulk of the data for this chapter is drawn from the same research studies referred to in the previous chapters. I have also used work conducted by my students and data from colleagues working in the area. My specific study of subordinate identity began in my doctoral work in two school settings that I describe below (see Soudien 1996) but has since evolved into an ongoing research project involving a range of contexts. Included among these are schools I worked with in the inclusion and exclusion project I described earlier, and also descriptions culled from the work of colleagues. The three schools I most frequently draw on here are based in Cape Town, and I bring together insights from over 50 interviews two colleagues and I conducted over a number of years and from regular interactions with the principals, teachers and pupils at these schools. I worked with children classified African entering a formerly coloured school, and with another cohort of largely coloured students, but also Indian, in a formerly coloured school. These interactions took place in the mid-1990s and then again in the period 20012002. I also worked with a group of students in an African school in an old Cape Town township during the period 20022004. I conducted interviews with individual students outside of these three schools and continue to conduct interviews with students in the present. I have also recently completed a new round of interviews with 20 young women, some at school and others in their first year of study at university, from both Johannesburg and Cape Town. I am fully aware that I am privileging the urban setting in this text and that the rural experience gets short shrift. This is not satisfactory. I
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should have found a way of bringing into the discussion the specific ways in which rurality overlays, and even possibly overdetermines, the issues I raise here. The nature of this problem is raised in the work of the Nelson Mandela Foundation and in particular in their publication Emerging Voices (2005). While the narratives used in that report, such as that of a Grade 6 learner from Sekhukhune, show how fine the line of difference is between the urban and the rural experience, in the sense that both are similarly marked by poverty, one sees in them how location distance from facilities and resources and simply floating out of the official imagination produces extreme forms of want. The sociologies of these conditions are not interrogated here. The students I interviewed and worked with for my study were for the most part what the old apartheid government, and indeed many in the new government, would classify as African and coloured. The students who were interviewed for the study were evenly divided in terms of gender. The focus of the work is, however, racial identity.1 It seeks to follow the development of young peoples assessment of their place in the new South Africa. The political context in which this work has taken place has changed significantly between 1993 and 2011, the period during which I have worked in this arena. As I indicated earlier, the apartheid school officially ceased to exist in 1994, when the new government was elected (although, it must be said, schools had already begun to open up during the last few years of the apartheid era). The new government passed the South African Schools Act in 1996. This Act, as I have said before, laid down the policies, the frameworks and the modalities for the new non-racial, non-sexist and equitable education system on the basis of equal funding for all schools. Crucially, however, while the policy terrain changed, the material realities of race, class and gender remained in most schools. For the most part, schools for the poor remained mired in their pre-1994 difficulties. The three contexts highlighted here were all contexts of disadvantage. I differentiate, however, between degrees of disadvantage and recognise how differently colour and race are experienced in the settings of coloured, Indian and African schools. There is currently a debate playing itself out in the media around the historical experience of being African as opposed to being coloured and the relative degrees of difference of oppression experienced by people who were so classified in the apartheid era. The most absurd manifestation of this is the encouragement given by Jimmy Manyi, spokesperson for the
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government, to people regarded as coloured to move out of the Western Cape because there is an oversupply of them. My position, as I hope is consistently evident in the approach taken in this book, is that the invocation of race and racial classification, even the implicit forms used by the post-apartheid government, are matters of concern.2 In this context race is a material thing that one can define and classify. This approach plays into and entrenches the insidious falsehoods about race race as biology or race as culture on which supremacists of whatever kind thrive and conveniently trade. The official perpetuation of this vocabulary is therefore worrying. The problem, however, is that racism continues to be part of peoples everyday experience. I dont resolve the conundrum here of disavowing race but at the same time fighting its manifestations in racism, but I attempt to make a distinction in the kind of power call it power of identity that individuals and groups are able to draw on in dealing with their subordination, and particularly their racial and class subordination. Access to this power of identity and its history is embedded in the divide-and-rule strategy of the apartheid state has made possible very differentiated senses of peoples identities. To come to grips with these different resources of power, I discuss disadvantage in three categories in this chapter. I start by talking about the most powerless. In the current context this approximates those who were most disenfranchised and most exploited under apartheid. They are largely African. But even this characterisation could lead one to stereotyping what powerlessness might mean. The school that I worked with in this context of powerlessness understood its positioning very well and attempted to engage with the fact that its young people came from extremely impoverished settings. This school came into being during the height of the struggle during the 1980s as a conscious attempt to work with the disempowering effects of the school boycotts. It deliberately recruited young people who were struggling with the intensity of the disruptions, the break in the youths learning, and attempted to create a stable learning environment for them. It wasnt, therefore, simply another space in which victimhood was being rehearsed for the world of work and adulthood. Relative to other social spaces in the township, it was a place of possibility. I identify two more groups of people who have access to more resources material and psychological and who have moved or are already outside of the zone of powerlessness inhabited by the first. These two groups include young African men and women who now are at coloured and Indian schools and are attempting to come to terms with the new social power dynamics which
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take racial forms in the spaces into which they have moved, and also young coloured and Indian men and women who, historically, were allowed more freedom under apartheid. The latter spaces, because they were structured in ambiguity in the sense that they offered access to more power and yet were not privileged, are intensely contradictory spaces. To give a context in which to understand the identities produced in these environments, the two schools I worked with were extraordinary struggle schools. The poorer of the two schools, referred to here simply as SS High, was located in a working-class coloured area near False Bay. This school was heavily involved in the student uprisings of the 1970s and 1980s. Many students went on to become well-known student militants. The school was the first coloured school in the Western Cape to introduce isiXhosa as a subject. It was for this reason that many African students chose to go there when schools started opening up in the mid-1980s. These students came from outlying African townships such as Gugulethu, Nyanga, Langa and Khayelitsha in train journeys that began early in the morning and often ended late in the afternoon. The other school in the study, CC High, a more middle-class school, served a community that had been broken up by the apartheid governments Group Areas Act of 1950. The Act classified physical space in racial terms. Areas came to be designated as white, African, coloured and Indian. In terms of the law out-groups, invariably those of colour, were forced to move out of areas that belonged to a distinct racial group into their own group areas. Because of the Group Areas Act, CC High students did not live around the school. They came from middle-class coloured suburbs dotted around the city, such as Walmer Estate, Woodstock and Kensington. The school had a formidable staff with strong academic and political credentials. Many members of staff occupied leadership positions in the citys political and cultural organisations. The school produced young men and women who went on to become outstanding leaders in many areas of life in the city and the country. It is important to make the point, however, that while all three schools had strong anti-apartheid teachers, also present in these schools, particularly in SS High, were many teachers who displayed the obvious comportments of the apartheid subject they were racist and discriminatory in their behaviour. Ironically, the abolition of the racial restrictions on schools and the opening of admissions to all children during the late 1980s and the early 1990s had
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a major negative impact on the three schools. Parents who could afford to do so removed their children from these institutions and sent them to formerly white schools.3 The exodus of middle-class families from the schools introduced strains into the schools that they had not previously had to deal with. Thus, in the new regime these schools serving the disadvantaged become even more disadvantaged.
Youth identity: certainty and ambiguity

An important theme that recurs throughout this study is that the identities young people develop are internally divided and that their subjectivities are unavoidably the products of a series of intersecting encounters with the Official, the Formal and the Informal Discourses. These encounters leave them, in Flaxs (1993) terms, in a number of different positions at different times and places. Their identities are, by definition, incoherent and discontinuous. They are of their apartheid past but simultaneously against it. Identity formation in school is a process in which young people bring resources, find new ones and constantly work to make sense of their positions relative to others. In the apartheid school this work is conducted as a series of rhetorical manoeuvres in which young people constantly engage with that which they are racially, and in other ways, supposed to be. It is this engagement which produces what Bhabha (1994) calls recognition and disavowal. The very act of going to school is a form of recognition or, in my terms, an owning up to the racial labelling of the social system. At a particular level, children own up to being the coloureds or the Africans or the whites or the Indians the apartheid order or the social environment says they have to be to attend that particular school. The act of owning up is, however, never a straight admission but a response to a series of social compulsions. Young people are forced to acknowledge the call of apartheid in their lives, much like, as Althusser (1971) explained, one is forced to acknowledge ideology. Some of the compulsions carry more authority than others, and so one ignores them at ones peril. One ceases to exist, for example, if one chooses to operate outside the Official Order. It is the strategic and rhetorical manoeuvres around these compulsions that are explored below.
Subordination and the paradox of comfort

A number of texts have looked at what it means to be young in the apartheid era. The work of Cross (1992), Lodge et al. (1991) and Straker (1992) provides evocative accounts of the political milieu in which young people grew up in the
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1980s. Crosss work is important in showing the intersection between politics and gang culture. In an attempt to explain the resistance subcultures that developed in the townships in the 1980s, he makes the point that resistance in the classroom can properly be understood only when situated within the broader social context of the structure and aims of Bantu Education and related to hegemonic culture and political economy (Cross 1992: 95). He shows how gang cultures emerge against the context of a society which has effectively abandoned them: They represented an attempt to resolve the contradictions which remain unresolved in parent culture, such as unemploymentor to retrieve some of the socially cohesive elements destroyed by their parent culture, such as family care and [traditional] solidarities (1992: 96). This analysis is far-sighted in so far as it brings into focus the nature of the informal world in which many urban young African people find themselves. We see there how what Cross calls street-gang cultures take their shape from older parent cultures which value physical strength and tolerate aggression and offer black youth the opportunity to sublimate their feelings of hunger, failure and insignificanceTheir focal concerns involve the assertion of masculinity, a desire to create immediate excitementTheir activities include law-breaking, burglary, rape, drugs and alcohol abuse and violent behaviour (1992: 96). Strakers work (1992), constructed around biographies of young people, some of them politically involved, demonstrates exactly what Cross is talking about. One sees in the lives of her young subjects an intersection between the world of the gangster and the world of the aspirant- or already-politician. Out of this intersection emerge new forms of behaviour where politics and antisocial thuggery come together, often mimicking each others discourses and taking on elements of each others vocabularies. One often sees gangsters talking like politicians and people in politics deploying the tactics of the gang. These are critical ingredients to seize hold of in making sense of how young people grow up in the township. But they arent the whole story. For every young man and the characterisation in these discussions is dominated by the trope of masculinity who is seduced by the immediatism of criminality (and, one might suggest, even the fatalism involved in it), there are several other youth males and females who are not and whose world is defined by the bonds of family, religious life, sport and music, politics and a great many other attractions. Dlaminis ethnography (2005) of a group of young people in Pietermaritzburg in the 1980s and early 1990s shows the nuance and the diversity among young people. He identifies key social groupings which emerge in the townships,
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one of which is a group he calls Tsatsatsa. These were young people, boys and girls, who aligned themselves with the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the ANC. Fascinating about his biographies of these young people, however, is their unpredictability. They are not township automatons, simply following the party line or the injunctions of their peer groups insisting that they behave in this or that way. We see them in this text having to make choices and sometimes making choices which are, for that time, quite surprising. His first subject is Lunga Mlaba. This young man, committed as he is to the UDF, makes a deliberate effort to find a high school that had not closed down in the previous five years because of political unrest. As politically conscious as he is, he recognises how much politics limits his own generativity. The example is important because it shows up the limitations of the intimacy that he draws on in his association with his political peers. In these descriptions of young people, there are also a number who operate on the margins of Tsatsatsa because, as Dlamini says, they want to be judged by their cultural behaviour and not by their political affiliation (2005: 104). Tsatsatsa is a desirable affinity to make because it is also led and populated by cool people. The space of the Tsatsatsa was open, open to mixing with other races and open in that they admitted into their lifestyles many non-township ways of doing things. Moreover, in the midst of all of this they were fiercely opposed to criminality. The portrait that Dlamini paints of Lunga is multidimensional. One sees the young man adhering strongly to the values and ideas of his group, but he never loses sight of his individuality. At one point Dlamini asks him why he does not protest, as his peers do, about being ordered about by older women at the shop where he is employed as a casual worker. His reply is as follows: I know that they ask me to do thingsbecause they trust me, and they treat me like their own children. The other boys I work with usually tell them to go do these things for themselves. I think thats disrespectful (2005: 138). Juxtaposed to the Tsatsatsa were the Mampansula, who were much more influenced by concepts of blackness and black consciousness. They deliberately cultivated forms of deportment and dress which stamped them as being black dreadlocks, reggae music and indigenous culture. There were also groups of sports fanatics and churchgoers. In his description of the soccer group, Dlamini explains that this group of young people deliberately chose to become members of soccer clubs because they saw in it possibilities for social mobility. The soccer club was a zone of self-help: players often spoke about what went on in their schools and classrooms, and they often sought advice and ideas regarding schooling from their coaches (2005: 161).
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The value of Dlaminis work, to which Seekings (2006) draws attention, is its insiderliness. One of Dlaminis subjects, who is strongly religious and who had also failed Standard 9 and so was a repeater, is capable of making insightful diagnoses of the conditions of life in the township, despite all the sociological baggage he carries of the fundamentalist church to which he belongs. For many in his church community, politics has to be eschewed because it is the afterlife that counts. It is there that their rewards will be given. Life on earth, with all its suffering and misery, is as God has ordained it. The young man, in reflecting on his parents understanding of the violence of the township and their hostility to violent movies, which Dlamini finds him watching late one night, says that they concluded that everything that depicts violence also causes it (Dlamini 2005: 169).
I have recovered what I think are some central insights from Dlaminis work. Important about it is its disruption of the image of danger almost irretrievably attached to young African people, especially males. It is this that I take into making sense of the African subjects experiences I work with in the Cape Town schools. But how might one explain the essential frames in which young African people in the township now find themselves? To begin to answer this question, I work through the frames or arenas of the Official, the Formal and the Informal. The African school in contemporary South Africa is a mixed bag of experiences. In relation to many others, the school I focus on here is, as I suggested above, considerably stable. It is managed reasonably well and has disciplined teachers who are relatively on task. Critically, it enjoys the support of the community and so has been spared the kind of vandalism that is evident elsewhere in schools like it. It stands in contrast to the school in New Crossroads, Cape Town, visited by Ramphele in the mid-1990s, which she described as a caricature of what an educational institution ought to be (2002: 92). When she attempted to visit the school she discovered that the principal had been forced out by militant teachers. Teachers and pupils were simply standing idly around the premises: The school building was relatively new and reasonably well equipped, but it looked run down. A pile of broken desks had been dumped in the open space between classrooms adding to the untidy appearance of the placeMy meeting with the teachers confirmed my worst fears. They were a demoralised group of people. Many of the women teachers were grossly overweight. Some of the men
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had visible signs of heavy alcohol abuse. None of them could clearly express themselves in English in spite of the requirement that they should teach all content subjects in English. How they managed to communicate with pupils, let alone add value to the learning process, is a mystery. (2002: 9293) What was attractive about the school in which my subjects found themselves was the fact that it was constituted in almost direct opposition to the conditions described by Ramphele.4 It came into being as a result of initiatives taken by leaders in the township community who approached a church to provide tuition for people whose education was being interrupted. It had a library which served the whole community and it actively encouraged young people to take an interest in wholesome activities beyond school. In contrast to the school described by Ramphele, its formal structures were relatively intact. It operated off a mission and a vision which most people in the school could recognise and would have paid respect to. Critically, it also saw itself as an institution that could make a contribution to the new South Africa. It took on the responsibility of being an extension of the official apparatus of the state. It worked observantly with the official curriculum. Its teachers were well versed in the new requirements of this curriculum. They were aware of the states language policy, its policy on the new history. In these terms, the schools Official and Formal Discourses were in strong alignment. It sought, in its own terms, to empower its learners. These advantages notwithstanding, the young people from this school find themselves, like their peers in all the categories evident in this book, struggling to make their way through their adolescence. As the interview excerpts in this section of the chapter make clear, their speech and deportment carry traces of all the disparate and incommensurate influences swirling around them, many of them rooted in the turbulence of their informal lives. Present is the immediatism of the gangsters, the dreams of Dlaminis Tsatsatsa and the aimlessness of those who bend whichever way the wind takes them. All the young people interviewed from this school were surrounded by different degrees of hardship. While none of them was destitute, as is the case for many young people in townships, they didnt have the space to play around with their identities in the same way as their middle-class peers, black and white. The families out of which they came were modest. Most struggled financially. One girl who lived in the vicinity of the school came from a reasonably stable home. She was able to depend on a regular and structured programme. When school finished in the afternoon, as she explained, [t]hen I go home, I eat, I clean the
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house, I sleep. And then I do my homeworkI watch Days [Days of Our Lives, an American soap opera], I cook, then I sleep until the next day. Much of this struggle through which these young people were going was evident in their narratives. In broad terms, many young people understood their immediate environments. They could describe the geography of their streets and the character of their families. But they had difficulty in projecting and imagining themselves beyond the familiarity of the small space of the township. They also had difficulty in developing the ability to project themselves beyond the challenges of the everyday. Much of the presentation of themselves was concerned with survival. Their discourse was, if anything, a discourse of survival. As a consequence, this put them on the defensive. Even when they were commenting critically on the conditions in which they found themselves, and decrying the apartheid and post-apartheid environment which had made them struggle, the anchor element in their representational strategies was that of defence. Of course, this was not all there was. There was also, as there is anywhere, the capacity for real joy and sadness. People have the capacity to be fully human and to be able to work through the full repertoire of emotions which make them human. One of the girls, for example, told a pained story about her boyfriend leaving her for another girl. Their lives were as ordinary as one might find anywhere else in the world. But their material circumstances often forced them onto the back foot. When drawn into conversation about themselves, they dwelt on the difficulty and the challenge. How this defensiveness manifested itself is important to understand. One saw it in their descriptions of their schools and their relationships with people inside school. One saw it in their portrayals of their homes and neighbourhoods. The way they brought relatives, friends and significant figures into their stories was through a kind of discursive normalisation. In this normalisation and the problem may be that this particular group of students werent speaking in their first language and so were having to translate everything they wanted to say into codes and words which were comprehensible they and everybody else were invariably projected as inhabiting a world of immediate needs, a world symbolically marked by Maslows (1954) first three levels of need: biological and physiological needs, safety needs, and belongingness and love needs. Among them, obviously, were those who were able to think their way out of these conditions. Rampheles Bulelani is one such character. She says of him: [he] handled a difficult place and time with great ingenuity and a sense of humour. He told me how he managed to convince his
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peers that his move to Rhodes High [a former Model C school in Cape Town] was not in any way a reflection of his weakening commitment to the struggleHe suggested to them that by going to a better school he would become a resource for them by tutoring them over weekends. He laughed as he told the story. (2002: 51) This dependence, wonderfully turned around in Bulelanis explanation, demonstrates how much the young, even when they havent got the full range of words to explain themselves, manage the condition of need which defines their social spaces. One sees it clearly in the ways in which they narrate school. In relation to their needs, school for many was almost by definition a hostile place. It was comprehended in relation to whether one was able to contract basic relationships inside it and in relation to whether school would give them what they wanted. I quote a lengthy extract from the transcript of a young woman, N, in which she takes one of my researchers, Meghan Greeley, through her experiences: N: I started, like school, in a school called S, the school next to T High. I was doing Standard A there up to Standard 2. And I liked the school and my teachers and I enjoyed my schooling there. And from there, I passed from the Standard 2 and I wanted to study in [inaudible] from Standard 3 to Standard 5. I also like that school. And I passed Standard 5 there. Oh, what I hate in schools is the beating, when you get something wrong they beat you. And, what else? And I started my Standard 6 to Standard 10 in Z Comprehensive school where NW was teaching. So, in education, I experience a lot. Teachers, how they teach, they teach in different ways. They are [inaudible] and I hate beatings in school. To be late in school, teachers are beating you if you are late. And the school I was going to, they would beat you if you were late, quarter past eight, then you are going to be beaten. Or, if they didnt beat you, then they are going to say that you must clean the dirty toilets, um, then I think in matric I went to study at F [inaudible]. And that was the school that I liked best because they dont beat us. And there are no uniforms, we are wearing our casual clothes. And teachers, there are different teachers and I like, my favourite teacher, my English teacher, Mrs. H, oh, shes a very good person. Thats all. M: Can you tell me more about what the school is like, the language you speak, the teachers that are there.
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N: Well, F, Xhosa, they are teaching in Xhosa, and English they are teaching in English. Although, other students they dont understand the English teachers, like the white teachers, and they are hard, but there are other black teacher that is teaching English so, she, he translated the English books into Xhosa because other students didnt understand English books when they are teaching English. So, I was also helping them in my class, like in English. I was also helping them like in poems, translate them, also the teacher, translate what she is talking about, what she asks to do in class, and especially in poems. Uh, teachers are different, some are black and some are white, so they are teaching differently. Oh, the students that are there, oh there are too many students there. So, some they understand, some they dont understand their subjects, some they dont, some they do. So, what they do is the people that understand their subjects, they help them and so that they can understand what the teacher is talking about and when they are going to write tests. They ask, When are we going to be writing our tests, what we are studying and how much the [inaudible]. Important about this narration is the regularity with which the interviewee, N, returns to the issues of need. When asked the same question, many of the other students immediately developed similar responses. Another female at the same school, NNN, described a single teacher about whom she wished to speak as the teacher that is teaching the computer, they help. Another, N3, describes her English teacher, Mrs A: I like her because she help us improving our symbols in EnglishThen my economics teacher, he was also nice, because when I dont understand things in my class, I used to go to him to askAnd he used to tell me, this you must do this way, that you must do in that way. What is clear about this situation in which the young people found themselves is the real sense of disadvantage that has dogged them at every step. Interestingly, when the formal context of school required them to move out of the discourse of being helped and to take initiative themselves, there was a sense of discomfort. N3, who spoke above of how much she liked Mrs A, made it clear that Mrs A was fine when she was helping, but when Mrs A sought her to be more independent and to work harder, then school was no longer alright: What I dont like of her, is when she give us a lot of homework, especially when its on Friday. We must do the homework through the weekend. Then she is boring me. Then, my economics [the
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same nice one above]and what I dont like with him is that he gives us too many work like Mrs A like to do for homework and the coming test. Like he give us 50 questions, which is a lot workAnd when you didnt do your homework, then hes going to throw you out of the class. When the students were asked what they thought of school, the immediate experience that came to mind for many was the experience of being beaten. Whether school was good or not depended on how those Maslow-like first three conditions of need were being addressed. Being black in the townships of the city, therefore, meant dependence on those immediately around one. Given the structure of most families, peers assumed great importance in their lives as mediators and co-mediators of meaning. These friends helped them to make sense, sometimes incorrectly, of the common space they inhabited. A young girl, for example, when asked what was important for us to know about her, spoke of the importance of friends around her: [Y]ou must know the people where you are staying. Like, to know your neighbours. So if you have a problem, then you can go to your neighbour and talk to your neighbour. Their friendships were intense, as the testimony indicates, and they were crucial in helping them find a way of navigating through the intricacies of the space in which they found themselves.
Being African in the new South Africa

The Official Order of apartheid encompassed and embodied the everyday world in which the subjects of South Africa found themselves. This order continues to permeate the new South Africa and has a material existence in many schools today. It continues to confront young people as they seek to establish their identities. When the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) commissioned a study of desegregation in 19981999, it discovered that at least 15 formerly white schools had no black learners or only what it called a token few (Vally & Dalamba 1999: 28). Many features of these schools sought to reinforce the whiteness of the school. The report makes the assertion that [a]lmost all the learners questioned in this school [referred to as School 206 in the study] expressed similar sentiments. The sentiment referred to was a quote from a learner who said, There is too much racial mixing. I do not like this. Go back to apartheid (Vally & Dalamba 1990: 29). At the same time, of course, given that integration is happening only in Indian, white and coloured schools, most schools in the country which were
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established as African schools continue to be only African and the students in them know only their schools racially exclusive realities. For young people African and coloured owning up to these realities is a fragile and continuing experience of ambiguity. For African children, the act of going to integrated schools outside of their townships is both a break with and an acknowledgement of their apartheid subjectivities. In leaving their township schools, they are signalling their rejection of the ensemble of meanings associated with their apartheid pasts. Leaving is leaving behind Bantu Education for the previously forbidden vistas of the white or the halfway-white coloured world. The process of leaving is decisive. For these children it has the impact, as Gaganakis (1991) has said, of separating themselves, culturally and spatially, from those with whom they grow up. With respect to their pasts, their entry into formerly white or coloured schools is thus a contradictory statement of betrayal and recognition betrayal of the township in leaving it and recognition of their affiliation with it in meeting racist coloured children. At the same time, for a few students and the significant division of opinion within their number must be emphasised going to a white or coloured school is unequivocally the expression of a desire to relinquish the township altogether. Township students thus stand before and in relation to the Official Discourse with considerable ambiguity. It seeks to have them acknowledge their African separateness, and in ways which remind them of their subordinate status. Their response, however, is to emphasise why they are taking this step of moving away. They want the status which comes with going to a better school. Their identities are very much divided between the attractiveness of the outside world the new school and the familiarity of their inside worlds the township. A divided self thus manifests itself in its participation at school. For many of the students from the township, the decision to go to a school that was not African was initially a distressing experience. Against the background of their apartheid-organised lives, making the social adjustment proved to be emotionally painful. A student, P, who had previously attended a coloured school in the city of Port Elizabeth on the south-eastern seaboard of South Africa, made the following remarks about what she had felt like when she first arrived at SS High in 1992: P: [hesitation] Its like I was a visitor here. A visitor now here. Its like the blacks are the visitors, but the coloured children are not
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allbut the coloured children are not allThe coloured children some of them are alright to the black children. They are not doing funny stuff to them. Several features of the school were intimidating for the students, not least of all having to speak in a language which was not their own. Two young women from Gugulethu, N and NN, were particularly vocal about this experience. Ns lack of Afrikaans placed her at an immediate disadvantage. She suspected people of gossiping about her. NN found having to speak in class particularly frightening because the coloured children laughed at her English. The structured environment of her English class, for example, made her particularly anxious:
Sometimes it will happen atin English class, because there we talk. So it happened there and teacher didnt like that. He usually shout at them, but now they stop. But they dont do it in front of the teacher[i]ts not so bad now, like the first time I saw it. In time most of the students came to accept SS High as their school. They had learned to live in it. Nonetheless, their membership of the school community remained brittle. In their experiences in the classroom and in their encounters with teachers outside of the classroom, they learnt that attendance at SS High called for social navigational skills which they had to acquire quickly. In the course of being a student they came across repeatedly perhaps not every day but certainly regularly both minor and traumatic incidents in which they either had to assume a particular status themselves or accept a status conferred upon them by the Official Discourse. The contexts in which status assumption and status referral occurred at the school were varied. Embedded in many of these ordinary experiences, however, was an ideology of othering both camouflaged and obscured in the cultural and linguistic presumptions of the official curriculum of the school. As Z, also from Gugulethu, explained in describing her difficulties with Afrikaans, teachers were frequently oblivious in the assumptions they made about the differences of students, particularly their linguistic competencies and cultural backgrounds. The teachers unconsciously premised their work on the model of what they understood a coloured child to be. Obviously, many thought that SS High children had to be able to speak Afrikaans. Z said: Ja. My Afrikaans teacher doesnt explain anything. He just, I mean, I speak Xhosa, so I find it difficult to speak Afrikaans, because
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Afrikaans is a very difficult language for me. He just tells us to page in the textbook, and do this work, and then he sits there He doesnt explain, and then one day he was checking our books and found that I didnt do much work. He asked me why, and then I told him that I didnt understand the workSometimes, youre scared of him. You just dont go to his classes. The full weight of the old Official Discourse lay on the African students in situations such as these. Even though the students were in a post-apartheid school, the school still operated as a coloured school. Its teachers were coloured and most of the students were coloured. This experience of having to cope with a world in which different assumptions about student competence were the rule was one that many students had gone through. Not all of those experiences were as culturally veiled as Zs. A, whose English was even weaker than Zs, spoke of trying to ask a question in a class: And teacher dont understand me. Now I start to thinkI ask the teacher, n [you know]? I ask the teacher toI dont, I ask the teacher[he cannot find the word and then speaks in Xhosa][Long pause]hey, this nameAnd the teacher dont want to [word in Xhosa]. And then shout [at me] Behind much teacher talk appeared to lie the official ideology of apartheid. The students were aware of this. T, backed up by his fellow students, explained: Theylets say with the school fees, with school fees, issues like that. They dont tend to look like whats the situation at home and all that. But they will rather tell the child in the class, you must bring your school fees. But they dont know whats going on at home. So they must help us more on that also. In that because now the child feels, This teacher thinks I dont want to bring the money. I dont have the money, she doesnt even ask. Okay, maybe she ask, but in front of the whole class, why dont you bring your money? How can I tell her then? It was hard for students to avoid being bruised by the encounter with the racial-ideological discourse within the school. While individual teachers were aware of this discourse, coming as many did from anti-apartheid histories and therefore deliberately raising the matter when it was appropriate to do so, the discourse of the other tailed African students every move in the school. Many teachers used in language and gestures which the students did not fail to notice approaches which had the effect of setting these students apart. The
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students did not accept this othering. They often simply avoided going to the classes of those teachers who were particularly offensive or, when they felt that the school was being blatantly racist, challenged these forms of behaviour. By 2000 little had changed in the school. The new Official Discourse certainly had made inroads into the school. The school had a new principal who had been a popular anti-apartheid activist, but he was acutely aware of the contradictory situation in the school. In 2000, concerned with the extent of the problem, he asked that I come back into the school to work with issues of racism among students and staff. These experiences in these two schools show how difficult it was for students to evade the racialising structures within which they found themselves. These structures constantly served to remind students that they were Africans and coloureds. Students were strongly aware of what the Official Discourse wanted them to be and would have been able to describe how this discourse had changed after 1994. The response of the African students at SS High was essentially that of strategic compliance with this Formal Discourse. They took the insults but made it clear that they did not accept them. They refused to be the kind of Africans the apartheid-minded school wanted them to be. The students at CC High, as we shall see below, also rejected the Official Discourse which branded them as coloureds but struggled to shake off its effects entirely. The Official Discourse with its strong racialising thrust did not operate unimpeded in schools. It is important to emphasise how much, in fact, it had to operate alongside of and to accommodate other discourses which influenced and shaped young peoples perspectives and identities. It was particularly in the interplay between the Formal and Informal Discourses that one could see how much of a mistake it would be to read off student identity from the Official Discourse. The argument I want to make here is that these discourses function alongside of and in articulation with the Official Discourse in a multiplicity of ways. For African children at SS High and indeed at other schools, elements of the Formal and Informal Discourses colluded in seeking them to acknowledge their inferior and subordinate positions. This collusion took place in the context of anti-apartheid discourses which sought to take them towards more open identities. For coloured children at CC High, the relationship between the Formal and the Informal Discourse was also structured in contestation. The Formal Discourse used terms which positioned them as human beings and as subjects beyond apartheid, while much of the Informal Discourse
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grounded them in the separate lived reality of apartheid that required them to accept their colouredness. At SS High, the Formal and Informal Discourses constituted a medium, or media, in which young Africans were called upon to signal and affirm their relative position to the coloured children they met at school. They were constantly called upon to accept the fact that their histories were signs of an inferiority that was irremediable. Their blackness was testimony of it. Their responses to these invocations, however, revealed the full range of their rhetorical strategies. Sometimes they were submissive and acquiescent; at other times they were strident, defiant and proud.
Many of the African students deliberately sought to project themselves beyond the stereotypes framed by the official environment of the apartheid order. D, a student at SS High in 1994, said of his coloured peers attitudes to being African: I mean they dont accept the name African. They dont regard themselves as African. They always say, D, African man. And I told them, No, we are all Africans because our roots is here in Africa, whether were white, whether were coloured, whether were black. Another student, Z, went out of her way to cultivate friends beyond the African community. She explained her relationship with a coloured friend: [S]hes always with me, and wherever I go, shes there. We go to outings, and she also comes with usWe went to Sandvlei [a waterside area] I remember, for the school holidays. While such events in the lives of most other students were not frequent, students were undoubtedly keen to move beyond the limits of their traditional circles. They enjoyed the same music their coloured friends liked. In a group discussion with students in Grade 12 at a Gugulethu high school, the students explained that their favourite music included modern pop icons such as Mariah Carey. Of all the students, P spoke most fluidly and easily about his friendships at school. For him, with whom he associated was entirely a matter of choice. He said, Ive always been involved in these school things, school teams. I wont say that Ive been lonely at this school. Ive never been rejected at school. Besides that, Ive excluded myself [his own emphasis]. There were teachers at the school who played a big role in shaping these attitudes. M explained: Altogether, like at our school theres a lot of nice teachers who understand the students. And always tries toom humanity in hulle in te preach en so aan [to instil humanity into them, and so
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on]Really, I like them. I like die activities wat hulle somtyds het, al is dit so baie min. But dis fine, dis lekker. Hulle stel belang in nlike, me now. Hulle sal altyd vir my [I like the activities they organise, even if they are rare. But its fine, its enjoyable. They take an interest in me. Theyll always ] like Im involved in drama and that theyll always like encourage me, like in my schoolwork. MTs story confirmed Ms: theyre alwaysand if maybe theres something that you dont understand, they canthey help you out. Ja. Theres this teacher I actually like. Out of all of these teachers, my Afrikaans teacherhe can maybe provide extra classes for you so thatso he can help you out with your work. Even on Saturdays, shell ask you to come to school, just to come and help you. And shell take you back home. [As a second-language English speaker, MT sometimes substitutes male and female pronouns.] MT explained: [A]ctually, the only thing I like is to go to school with a different person. Different colour, like [she means to] mineso that we can communicate, for communication. To learn how to speak her language, and so she also or he also must make an effort to understand my language. Zukiswas explanation for this was similar: Yes, it is exciting, because Im around different people. I just love the people Phyllis continued the theme: We get to know other people which we didnt even now, then to make friends with. Teachers who say things like you people leave them feeling frustrated because they want to make friends. Rebelling against school and teachers is, however, not an option which is able to gain them ground. Occasionally, of course, the agenda becomes unbearable and they either take stands by themselves, as MT did, or they rally together as the boys did when they were about to be punished for an infraction which they considered not to have been their responsibility. As the work of Kapp (2000) makes clear, the desires of young African people, particularly their preference for English over their home languages, are activated by a number of factors, many of them contradictory, but, as Mgxashe (2000) says, there is a conscious debate taking place among many African youth about their exposure to foreign cultures. He quotes Lindi Jordan, who says: when we start talking about the African Renaissance we are not necessarily talking about living strictly in accordance with our
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traditional valueswe are more bent towards African values which are a kind of hybrid of all our exposures and experiences. (2000: 11) What it means to be African in the city is thus bound up with young African men and women working out new ways of expressing their Africanness. This Africanness, as the Kaiser Family Foundation Report points out (LoveLife 2000), cannot be separated from their wish to be modern young men and women. The report, while not constructed as an account of the attitudes of youth to modernity, is suggestive of how much young Africans invest in being modern. To be sure, there is much that reminds them that they are African, but they are remaking this Africanness as they spend much of their time tuning into popular radio and television shows.
The work of Ngwane (2002), to which I referred in Chapter 3 when discussing the development of new cultural forms and styles among African youth, is even more emphatic. He talks of how young men who leave the city to go to the rural areas for initiation ceremonies use their education to displace older, more oral-based traditions and practices during initiation. In these situations young men reject the tradition of their elders as the traditions of what they call the ignorant and invest them with new forms of masculinity based on the ability to argue and reason. NL, a young woman from Langa, interviewed late in 2000, commented that living in the city placed a heavy strain on young peoples sense of being African because they dont care. They just throw away their traditions. The point to emphasise, however, is not that young people are throwing away their traditions but that they are remaking them. Most of the students interviewed at SS High between 1993 and 1995 and those whom a research associate interviewed in 2000 make it emphatically clear that they want a better life. For NL, this better life is simple and no different from that of young people elsewhere. She says, I want to see myself get educated, and having my own house, and having my own family. At the same time many, like NL, remain attached to their African past: We must know about [our] ancestors, and [our] traditional things. Being an African in the city is thus about living with complexity. For many of the young people in this study, this complexity is bound up with who they are. African students choose to make the long journey across the city each day. They want to go to schools such as SS High because they believe that it will help them improve themselves. They anticipate the difficulties they will encounter in entering schools such as these and so come to the conclusion that they must deal with the slights and hurts they will
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receive. Many students say to themselves like D, a student from Gugulethu interviewed in 1995 that I like school because it keeps me away from bad things MD explained that when bad things happened to him at school, I just ignore things like racism. Only what Im concerned about is my studies. African students had learnt to live with the racism around them.
Being coloured in the new South Africa

At CC High during the 1990s, the engagement of coloured students with the Official Discourse is considerably different from that of their African counterparts. While the Official Discourse of the apartheid era places them somewhat higher up the hierarchy of social privilege, their encounter with hegemonic thinking in the country is no less bewildering than that of their African colleagues. Central in this engagement for many, although certainly not for all, was a rejection of what the Official stood for. This Official Discourse in its old apartheid form, and even in some ways in its post-apartheid form President Nelson Mandela, for example, came to CC High in 1995 to honour the contribution of coloureds to the struggle sought to create among people described as coloureds a sense of their separateness as a race. The curriculum developed by the apartheid Coloured Affairs Department (which had administrative responsibility for coloured matters) sought to instil in people a coloured identity. Students at CC High rejected this identity in its official manifestations. This rejection derived from the strong non-racial Formal Discourse of the school. During the dark days of apartheid, and even after the new government came into power in 1994, the school had assumed a fierce non-racial stance with respect to the curriculum and the everyday politics of education. When the apartheid government introduced separate schools and separate educational departments for coloureds in 1964, many of the teachers in the school participated in protests against the racialisation of schooling. In line with this, the school rejected racial attributions of any form. The teachers made it clear that they were teaching under protest and refused to collaborate with the apartheid government. Only where it was absolutely essential for the good of their students did they acknowledge the Coloured Affairs Department. As a result, the school worked hard to banish racial talk in the school. When the new government came into power in 1994, most teachers in the school remained critical of the continuing valence of race and racial designations within the new states policies. For example, some members of staff boycotted Mandelas
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visit because of its racial overtones. This approach to South African social and political life had a powerful impact on students. Many students emerged from CC High with strong ideals about issues such as equality and racism. Consistent with this powerful Formal Discourse, students claimed that race was not an important feature in the making of their judgements about social relations. Many rejected the coloured label. TTT, an 18-year-old student interviewed in 2000, commented: [W]e dont use that term around here. Were not coloureds. In reality, there was a good deal more to the situation. Race pervaded the students everyday worlds. While racial terms such as kaffir a highly obnoxious term were taboo in the school, the reach of race was something from which they could not escape. When asked whether racism still existed in South Africa, DDD, a girl from Walmer Estate who was much admired for her style, said: Definitely. A lot[Take] myself for example. If I sit in the bus and a so-called coloured, old woman or aged, comes into the bus then I automatically get up. But if its a so-called black woman then I dont. Sometimes, without me really wanting to do it, then Id like hesitate to get up because its as if, because its been put to us so that black peoplearent human. Try as they might, students had difficulty in dismissing the coloured label which was placed on them. While many rejected the term, they found the certainty and familiarity it offered hard to ignore. Their teachers were largely coloured. They came from townships and suburbs which were constructed for people described as coloureds only. Even when they saw their teachers playing out their non-racial beliefs, they saw them doing so, as AAA, a leading student in the school in 1995, said, as courageous coloured leaders, willing to stand up for their communities. This is not how those leaders themselves might have chosen to be seen, but the power of the apartheid states social engineering surrounded the students. AA, from the township of Kensington, commented: Yes, I would [describe myself as coloured]. The reason being that me and [indistinct noise on tape] had endless arguments about this. And actually that girl Michelleshell tell me, but youre black, man, and I say, no, Im coloured. So then shed tell me why?, and Id say like, because theyre [he means politicians] always telling you that coloureds and blacks fall under the same
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coloureds fall under blacks, right. Youre not black, and youre not white. Youre coloured. Youre in the middleI dont think Id want to be called black actually. And I dont think Id ever be called white, so coloured is fine. AAA was to make an even stronger intellectual argument for using the term coloured. Prefacing his comments in the politically correct formal address of CC High by describing himself as South African, he then switched his line of thought: I look at myself as a South African, as a human being. I dont look at myself as coloured. Okay, I admit it, Ive grown up used to being called coloured. Im coloured. And my neighbourhood (is a) coloured neighbourhood. Ive grown up with it. What can I do? Its going to be in me, no matterIts no use Im going to try and get it out of me, like some people are trying. Also, there are things that I am proud of as a coloured person. The schools formal understanding of race clearly played a big role in moving young people beyond the limitations of this discourse, but even this nonracialism could not ignore the deep imprint and the pervasiveness of the discourse of race. Even though the Official Discourse of apartheid was displaced after 1994, the depth in which the education system and its schools were rooted in racial terms made it difficult for the school to fully live up to its non-racial ideals. In 1998 the school employed a teacher who would have been classified as an African in the apartheid era. The school struggled to find ways of making her feel accepted. It sought to introduce a class where the teacher could teach isiXhosa. The teacher left after little more than a year. A student interviewed in 2000, SSS, described the reactions of students to the teacher: I liked her a lot. I know they were hoping to have her teach a Xhosa class, but the students werent interested. I suppose that was a definite race issueThere was still the issue not only in our school but everywhere of no, Im not going to speak their language. Even though I was open to the idea, I didnt go to the classes. For coloured children the play between the Formal and the Informal Discourses was equally messy, but it had different and also ambiguous results. The formal environment of their school tried hard to get them to the point of rejecting the salience of race. MMM, a student at CC High in 1999, explained:
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we were taught all these terms, we didnt actually experience them first-hand. We know about it. And if you say that a class is multiracial means youre accepting the fact that there is more than one race. And that more than one race issue has brought along too many problemsThe issue of multi-race we dont accept it any more Ironically, several years into the new post-apartheid era, the informal environment in which many young people classified coloured operated appeared to have shifted. Where earlier non-racialism occupied a strong space in the perspectives and the lives of young people, this appeared to have receded by 2000. In the middle of the 1990s the informal environment at CC High was represented by almost equal numbers of students whom I describe as the Cools, the Straights and the Floaters. These students operated in a lively space in which the Cools sought to assert their dominance with their interests in nightclubbing and partying. The Straights, by contrast, epitomised the ideals of the school, dominated the Student Representative Council and contributed to the intense ethos of non-racialism at the school. Floaters moved in and out of both groups as their interests dictated. Critically, however, the Straights served to hold in place the hegemony of the schools formal commitment to its political ideals. AAA, the student referred to earlier, speaking of the influence of his history teacher, demonstrated this commitment: I can point to one person, Mr A, my history teacher. He actually made me feel good about myself, because I have a great knowledge of general thingsI read the newspapers a lot. And he told me thatthat didnt actually make me a nerd, and I shouldnt be afraid of expressing things. Straights used these relationships to build a vibrant cultural life at the school. They wrote poetry, performed and danced, and sustained through a number of cultural societies and outreach projects a strong presence in the school. While Straights certainly did not have everything their own way in the school and had to deal with the allure and the easy authority that the Cools commanded, they offered strong role models in the school. Their fellow students looked up to them. Into the new millennium, the situation in the school had changed. Political activity in the school, as in the rest of the country, had shifted away from the strident protest of the early nineties. Students were beginning to enter CC High in less awe of the place. In addition, perceptions had begun to take root
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in the coloured community, as in the white community, that their skin colour counted against them. They were not dark enough when it came to the job market. These perceptions provided the space for the balance of forces in the schools informal environment to change. Being political and accepting the ideals of non-racialism were now less attractive. In these circumstances, a sense of colouredness grew in the student community. While the teachers remained committed to the high-minded ideals of the Formal Discourse, the students were more aware of the racialising process than ever before. The Informal Discourse, as FF, a CC High student of the 1999 cohort explained, had the effect of holding their colouredness in place: [W]e just had coloureds in our schoolSo there was one way of thinking and one way of actingwe all had the same way of actingI was one of them you know [and] you had this sense of belonging. Another student, AAAA, interviewed in 2000, concurred with FF and explained how a fashion show held at the school brought out the smallmindedness of some of the students. She said: I went to the fashion showa few months ago. And they were playing this African song and people were like really laughing at it and stuff. A friend, ZZ, interviewed with her, agreed and said: [W]e all had the same social norms and we were common [like that] with just about everyone at the school. The school principal had tried to deal with the fact that African students sat apart from the other students during intervals, but found it difficult to change students attitudes. ZZ commented: I think like no matter what, there is still subconsciously in everyones mind that apartheid is still kind of there and like its not just something that you can think of it as the laws are gone, and everyone would be equal to each other. Thats why I think that a lot of the coloureds mindsmaybe theyve been thinkingdifferent cultures should be separate from each other. Resurgent as this coloured identity was in the school, there were many students who continued to hold fast to a broader sense of their identity. RRR, a student from the 1999 cohort, explained that she and her friends did not subscribe to colouredness: [W]e dont use words like that. We try to avoid them. We care more about character. People in our class were different but it was based on character that people liked them or not. This issue of many races, it caused some of our best teachers to be taken away from us. We dont accept that stuff . In a discussion about music, SS explained that her culture was mixed: I think its a mixture, its like Im going through things, Im just borrowing. I feel that I
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should try and be as unique as I want to be. You know I dont wantto be the stereotype of a coloured person who goes to clubs with coloured peopleIm into the alternative types of music. It is in working with these different interpretations of the world around them that students develop what Flax called troubled identities (1993: 95). Troubled in Flaxs terms refers to the persistence of doubt in peoples minds about what is important in working out who they are and where they belong culturally, racially and in a variety of other ways. At the heart of this trouble is the considerable weight of the Formal Discourse which requires young people to own up to a universalism which the school constantly flourishes in front of them. Against this stands the Informal Discourse which insistently calls on them to cut loose and concentrate on being themselves and even being coloured. What this at-homeness or familiarity with the Informal Discourse of colouredism set up was that CC High students were able to present themselves as subjects able to project two distinct sides to their subjectivities. They were unmistakably the products and the producers of both the Formal and the Informal Discourses. Evident in their lives were the clear signs and markers of these discourses. Students reveal themselves to be, like people with multiple subjectivities elsewhere, adept in several, often discontinuous environments.
Conclusion
Important in bringing this chapter to a close is recognising how differently the discourse configuration serves the African and coloured students observed at SS and CC Schools. The discourses which swirled in and around African students lives offered them constrained and qualified opportunities in the new South Africa. They were constantly reminded of their blackness as a sign of inferiority. The discourses which served coloured students provided them with more space. They were able to invoke a sense of the inclusive new South African identity more easily than their African counterparts. They remained, however, unsure of their place in the new polis. School is an important site for symbolic work, and it is not just a conduit for ruling-class aspirations. What the chapter has revealed is how complex school is as an experience for young people. It has not only argued that school is a contested terrain; it has also tried to show the nature of the discursive contestation as a dialectic in which collusion, contestation, agreement and
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dissonance constantly operate in peoples lives. Willis talks of the unintended and contradictory importance of the institution of the school (1980: 146). He says that aspects of the dominant ideology are defeated there, but that the defeat is pyrrhic. Elements of the apartheid ideology and residues of this ideology in the new South Africa are, to be sure, defeated on the school campus. African children find in school the material for their dreams of a better life. Coloured children see themselves painted differently from the portraits embossed for them on their birth certificates. But, in equal measure, apartheid and the racialising ideology of apartheid which continues to exist in the new South Africa have more than held their own. Their ways and tastes remain evident in the behaviour of children. The children emerge with identities that are the end products of a form of social compromise. They are manifestly the products of their oppositional worlds. But they are also the children of apartheid; their parentage is unmistakably imprinted with its characteristics. What this conclusion points to is how difficult it is to read off from the school a meaning of the larger society. School and education are sites in which young people, as active subjects, measure what they can and cannot do. In making strategic choices, they explore dimensions of their subjectivities which the racial order seeks to close down. They emerge from their schooling experience with the ethnic badges of coloured and Xhosa culture, and invariably they are conscious of the racial hierarchies which surround them. They are, however, considerably more than the stereotypes that the hegemonic racial discourse prepares for them. The African students in this study find themselves invited inside the social order and often shut out. In dealing with it, they are simultaneously submissive and combative. In reading their environments, they make strategic decisions about when they will comply with the order around them and when they will resist. The configuration of discourses holds them in a constant tension. For coloured students the complexity is of a somewhat different order. The discourses which circulate around them position them as in-between people. Their responses to this are those of a disorientating ambiguity of self. The imperative of most of the discourses that inhabit the South African ideological terrain is to name, point and fix using phrases which are deemed to be reality in and for eternity. The intention is to produce a synchronic essentialism based on signifiers of stability, such as Africanness or colouredness and so on. Stable as the projection of these signifiers might be,
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instability and ambiguity are their persistent features, as Stuart Hall (1988) has shown. Black, says Hall, is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category, which cannot be grounded in a set of fixed and trans-cultural or transcendental racial categories and which therefore has no guarantees in nature (1988: 28). The testimony of students suggests that terms such as African and coloured (and also, I venture to say, those of Indian and white) are recognisable at particular levels of meaning. The effect of the discourses operating within South Africa is to construct median categories such as white, coloured, African and Indian, but always to provide opportunities for those categories to subvert themselves.
Notes
1 While I have begun to orientate my recent interviews to include a gender analysis, this was not the case at the beginning of the study. Thus gender does not form a significant part of the reporting of this study. I make a distinction between the argument I am attempting to hold up here and the race-blindness and even the race-denialist approach so despised among many who work in the anti-discrimination field. The point I am making is that we reify this thing of race that we are now able, finally, to say categorically doesnt exist. And yet we continue to invoke it as real, even when we qualify our use of it by talking of it as a social as opposed to a biological reality. The previous chapter portrays some of these young people, including, for example, the students in the newly emerging black elite category. The African township school that Tihanyi (2003) works with was similarly orientated. Her school, which she calls Mikko, was run strictly. The gates were closed after a certain time in the morning and those who had not arrived on time were locked out. The school also attempted to keep in place strict rules about behaviour.
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Structure and agency: Young South Africans struggling against history
While the experience of being young in South Africa is in its general features much as it is for young people elsewhere, it is distinct in significant ways. What makes it distinctive are the ways young South Africans manage the challenge of learning, especially in school, and the ways in which they deal with the challenge of their relationship with the broader environment in which they find themselves, including their relationships with each other and those who are older than themselves. This chapter focuses on these twin difficulties.
Consequences of history?
In setting the framework for this chapter the central issue that arises is the relationship of young people with their history. Much of the discussion in the book has pivoted on the large role of structures on young peoples lives. Predictably, much of the youth experience takes its character from the countrys history and has much although not everything to do with race, class and gender and with permutations of these in the form of language, culture, religion, and so on. But is the experience of growing up in South Africa entirely determined? Have apartheid and the structures that sustained it and that persist in the physical cartographies of race and class so shaped what the countrys youth are capable of that our policy approaches to the past should be rethought entirely? To illustrate what is at stake, has it determined how well children of colour will do at school? Are young white learners going to be doing better than young black children at school for the foreseeable future? Will the socialisation that young white and black children receive in family and social settings the structures of the informal world continue to produce race as the default identity? Moreover, will this race identity continue to reflect the psychosocial conceits and complexes of superiority and inferiority? In this chapter I argue that there is sufficient evidence to show that the structural order is not automatically reproduced in the minds of young people. They continue to demonstrate a sense of agency the capacity to act on their situations but this capacity is heavily constrained. This constraint manifests itself most directly in the
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experience of learning. This is not, however, the case in the arena of culture. There, a creativity exists among young people. Why this is so is the key concern of this chapter. The first part of the chapter focuses on learner achievement. While the lack of achievement is well recognised, the discussion here shows that achievement is framed by a particular set of social dynamics. The second part of the chapter moves to a focus that does not enjoy the same level of recognition namely, that of social literacy and citizenship. I see social literacy and citizenship as the ability of people to understand themselves and their environments and to develop a sense of compassion and sensitivity about others. I use these two foci to explore the effects of race and the experience of structural discrimination on young peoples lives and their capacity to respond to it. In terms of the capacity for agency, I draw on a new phase in my work on masculinity and violence to reveal the possibility of initiative taking shape that exists among many young people. My objective is to show how, in the face of the difficulties many young people face, there is a capacity to think through and to act upon the nature of the world they encounter.
The grip of social structure

Having looked in previous chapters at what is going on in young peoples heads regarding their relationships with each other and with the new South Africa, we may ask, how does their academic performance speak to the issue of their ability to deal with the past of apartheid and racism? A striking feature of learner performance in the country is the general low level of attainment of the countrys youth at all levels of the schooling and university experience. The dimensions of this have recently come into clear perspective through the following: the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) carried out in 19941995 (Howie 2001); the Southern and Eastern African Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ)1 tests carried out in two waves first among a number of countries in the region in the late 1990s without South Africa, and then between 2000 and 2003 (SACMEQII) with South Africa; a national Grade 3 cohort analysis looking at attainment rates for literacy and numeracy; and several iterations of attainment tests for Grades 3 and 6 in the Western Cape since 2002.
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The TIMSS studies are most relevant for this discussion as they deal with Grades 8 and 9 level study and involve older children and teenagers. South Africa was one of 41 countries in the 19941995 TIMMS study and the only African country on the list. The study was carried out on approximately 15000 students in over 400 schools around the country and was repeated in 1998, when the number of countries in the international component of the study dropped to 38 (TIMSS-R). While an important core of countries remained from the first phase of the study, the second involved a number of countries with developing-economy profiles similar to that of South Africa. The study placed Grade 8 South African learners 44 per cent below the mean scores of all participating countries. Moreover, South African learners came last on the list of 38 countries and attained a mean score of 275 out of a possible total of 800 marks (Howie 2001). Significantly, the best-performing learners in South Africa scored at the level of the mean of learners in leading countries on the list, such as Singapore. Fewer than 0.5 per cent of South Africas learners featured in the international top 10 per cent benchmark (Howie 2001). Other studies involving younger learners have produced similar outcomes. In the Monitoring Learner Assessment (MLA) study for Grade 4 learners, South African learners attained an average numeracy score of 30 per cent, placing it last among the 12 participating African countries (Taylor et al. 2003). These scores were repeated in the SACMEQII evaluation for Grade 6 learners, which showed that relative to the predetermined mean of 500 points as a benchmark for the project, South African learners scored below this value for both mathematics (486.2) and reading (492.4) (Moloi & Strauss 2005).2 The study found that the modal competence level for reading for Grade 6 learners in South Africa essentially stood at Level 3 (Basic Reading). This was achieved by only 19.1 per cent of the learners in the study (Moloi & Strauss 2005). Only 26 per cent of the learners could read above a Level 4 standard (Independent Reading). In mathematics the modal level of attainment for Grade 6 learners was Level 2 (Emergent Numeracy), which was attained by 44.4 per cent of the learners: [i]n addition, there were 7,8 percent of the learners who achieved only Level 1 (Beginning Numeracy). Altogether this left less than 50 percent of the learners reaching competence levels higher than Emergent Numeracy (Moloi & Strauss 2005: 6869). What about the countrys Grade 12 Senior Certificate examinations? There was a marked decline in the pass rate from 1994 to 1999, from 58 per cent to 49 per cent. Only 12 per cent of the candidates qualified for university entrance in 1999. Since then there has been a largely unexplained increase. In
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2003 the pass rate increased to 73 per cent and the university entrance pass rate increased to 19 per cent (Taylor et al. 2003). At the higher education level, not only do participation rates of young people remain low (16 per cent), but of even greater concern is the fact that attrition rates for those entering are high, exceeding 50 per cent in the first year of study. Success rates, moreover, are poor (Scott 2010). In a cohort analysis of students entering the higher education system in 2000, Scott found that of the 69 636 African students who entered the system, 40 713 had dropped out by the end of 2003. At the end of their first year of registration alone, 21 096 did not return. Only 13394 were able to graduate within that time period. The rest remained within the system without having completed their studies. Based on these results Scott came to the conclusion that the system was what he calls a 5% system (2010: 233). For the purposes of this discussion it is what lies behind the 5% description of the system that is important. What the aggregated descriptions above conceal is the persistent racial and class nature of educational performance in South Africa. At every level of education in the country, privileged white learners and students are performing considerably better than their counterparts of colour. At the school level the data from the Western Cape Grade 6 benchmarked tests reveal clearly that children in former Model C schools, designating former white schools in this case and so a proxy indicator for race, perform at significantly higher levels than their counterparts in black schools. In each of the several iterations of the test for mathematics, while over 60 per cent of the children in former white schools could do sums successfully at their own Grade 6 level, only 0.1 per cent of children in former African schools and 5per cent of children classified coloured were able to do so (Soudien 2007a). The work of Taylor (2006) bears this out in a comparison of mathematics results for high schools; see Table 9.1.
Table 9.1: High schools by performance in Senior Certificate (Grade 12) mathematics
Formerly privileged highschools 380 254 600 1 234 African schools 34 573 4 277 4 884 Proportion oftotal (%) 7 14 79 Proportion of Higher Grade maths passes (%) 66 19 15
Category Top performing Moderately performing Poorly performing Total

Source: Taylor (2006: 65).
Subtotal 414 827 4 877 6 118
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Table 9.2: UCT graduation rates, for cohort commencing studies in 2006 and graduating in 2009 (per cent)*
Mainstream Commerce Engineering Science 63 72 70 White 70 82 78 SA African 60 56 64 Extended programmes 60 50 40
Source: Compiled by the author from faculty throughput data. * The columns in the table should be read as follows: Mainstream refers to all students who are admitted into the university on the basis of having met the minimum entry requirements for the programme. White refers to the subset of white students within the mainstream. SA African refers to those deemed to be African within the mainstream. Extended programmes refers to all the students who are admitted into the university on special conditions such as achieving less than the mainstream minimum admission points required but falling into a designated group such as a person from a historically disadvantaged community. Students in this last category would have minimum entrance requirements that are lower than those of the mainstream group.
While the overall weight of poor performance is striking in Taylors analysis, with more formerly advantaged schools performing poorly than performing well, it is the distribution of high performance that is pertinent for this discussion. Only 34 disadvantaged schools are able to be included in the countrys 414 highperforming schools. These patterns persist into higher education. Statistics from the University of Cape Town (UCT) projecting graduation rates based on recent trends in three key faculties illustrate the challenges starkly; see Table 9.2. While discrimination in the country is no longer only racial, given the degree to which the black middle class has entered former white schools (see Soudien 2004), the countrys racial experience continues to be determinative. The significance of this racial dimension is evident in the way in which the emerging black middle class has not been able to use its advantage in the schooling process. This can be seen, for example, in the Western Cape, where an analysis of schools by income quintile shows clearly that children in Quintile 4 perform much more closely to their poorer counterparts in Quintiles 13 than to the established middle class in Quintile 5 to which it is closest in income terms (Soudien 2007b). This, I suggest, is a function of the extent to which their past experience of discrimination has not been attended to and thus constitutes a racial effect. This emergent middle-class community has struggled to shake off the older racial connotations attached to it. Looking at these data, Van der Berg says that children in poor [historically black] schoolswith a middle-class background perform as poorly as their less welloff fellow students (2005: 65).
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In analysing higher education enrolment trends and student registration figures, Cooper and Subotzky came to the conclusion that neither the steering effect of government policies, nor the individual institutional policies and practices, have in themselves created the necessary conditions for these changes (Cooper & Subotzky 1999: 231). Looking at the differential experience of African and white students, Cloete and Bunting argue that many of the legacies of apartheid are still firmly in place (2000: 31). In terms of this it can be argued that social structure is clearly determinative. But does this level of determinativeness definitively point to a victory of structure? Does the evidence prove that the grip of apartheid and the countrys racial past effectively conditions how young people of colour will perform at school? Where is the agency of young people in response to this? The question of academic agency is important. Unfortunately, there is insufficient empirical work on what strategies successful learners develop for themselves. There is discussion (see Soudien 2007a) that shows young peoples desire for education and their ambition to succeed. Fataars work (2007) on how young people in Delft township, Cape Town, traverse the modern city to find schools that will work for them is important. I have described in an earlier text the lengths to which South African youth go to achieve an education (Soudien 2007a). The story of a young man I call Z in that work describes how he uses social encounters in his home to deliberately fashion an academic trajectory for himself. One instance of this is when his angry grandmother scolds him in English and so, not understanding, he deliberately sets himself the task to learn this language in which he is being abused and thus teaches himself to read English. But a great deal more work needs to be done in this area. Moreover, any conclusion to which one could come about academic agency among young people would have to factor in the multiplicity of both positive and negative influences in their learning lives that are significant for the learning decisions they make and how much of this complexity of the positive and the negative is actually about the countrys racial past. It would have to be clear about which of the elements in the structural conditions that surround young people relate to apartheid and the effects of apartheid. The argument can be made, of course, that almost everything one sees in the current school system how it functions, its pedagogical routines and its educational horizons can be related to the past. Caution, however, is needed in how one comes to attribute cause. Still, there is enough in the performance data that have been generated to show the presence of the past in young peoples lives.
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Youth, social literacy and citizenship

A large-scale longitudinal study conducted by the Centre for Social Science Research at the University of Cape Town, called the Cape Area Panel Study, emphasises the point about the impact of social structure on young people. The studys lead authors explain: Almost two-thirds of African households are in the bottom third of the income distribution, whilst more than three-quarters of white households are in the top third. The coloured population, however, spans a wider range of incomes, from the very poorto the rich. Of the 10% households in Cape Town that can be said to be living in deep poverty, more than one quarter are coloured (and the rest are African); of the additional 15% of households who might be said to live in mid poverty, about four-tenths are coloured (and the rest African). (Lam & Seekings 2005: 20) I now consider how these structural realities translate into social behaviour. I ask whether the challenges one sees in the academic arena repeat themselves in the social. The empirical work on which I have drawn in this book, as well as the discussions in the chapters on the making of youth identity and privilege and subordination, brings to light the particular nature of the social difficulty that young people in South Africa are experiencing. This difficulty is not immediately recognisable as difficulty. It involves not only black but also white young people. The problem is essentially that of young people struggling with relationships: of young white people though not all having to work at how to deal with the presence of black children in their midst; of young black men and women struggling to work out how to live sociably among themselves and with older people. The issue that this problem raises is their sense of citizenship and their literacy about who belongs and who does not. With respect to the manifestations of this, there was a distinct social ineptness among young Afrikaans-speaking white men and women who were involved in my study. At a particular Cape Town school, when we asked young white Afrikaans-speaking students whether they would like more children of colour at their school, many said explicitly that they would not. One young boy said: Personally I wouldnt actually like it, you know. Its not my own people and as I said, theyre not that good at academics and things
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and so we cant talk much about academics and things. Theyre a bit different to us in that way, ja, theyre a bit different to usIve tried to get through school and tried to do it good so I can actually be successful so if the academic thing drops here at the school, then it wouldnt be good for meSo I think I prefer white than black in the classroom. This view was shared by a number of students. Another student was of the opinion that the majority of the black or coloured people they dont do that well because I think why? ... because I think they think differently and they dont think as fast as us. They dont think clearly. They are more likeIt is actually bad talking about them, but I think they are a bit more dull than us in a way. They were very aware of race and racial difference and spoke of their own distinctive whiteness much more unselfconsciously than their more politically correct English-speaking peers elsewhere did. This unselfconsciousness, however, belied the absence of formal induction processes into the new complexity of South Africa. These students were not literate in the official ways of the new South Africa. Absent were the outreach and interact clubs that existed in the English middle-class environment and which gave these young people some insight into the nature of South African society. Tihanyis work (2004) confirms this. Referring to an Afrikaans high school in Cape Town with a handful of black children, she comments: issues of race and racism seem to evoke discomfort, especially in the adult members of the school community. Students told me that discussions on such sensitive issues were simply off-limits: [in class] I dont talk about the government, were not allowed to speak politics at all. The teachers would stop the conversation, said Piet, while his classmate, Linda [the only black student], added: The teachers would feel awkward and uncomfortable [talking about race], and theyre afraid the kids might fight in class, especially with me there, because Im the only black child. (2004: 71) This ineptness, however, was not restricted to Afrikaans-speaking whites. It was present among young English-speaking white people as well as among coloured and Indian youth. Many of the English-speaking learners in a class discussion at a Durban school presented themselves similarly. In this
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discussion they specifically named parents as a reason for their attitudes. With respect to learners principles and values, the school principal commented that the racism and prejudice they exhibited were developed by their parents. One teacher added that this parental influence had a big effect at school: If children are taught at home that everyone should be treated equal, then it would be much easier for them to interact. [Integration] is a slow process because children tend to remember what theyre taught at a young age. They tend to think what their parents taught them is gospel. Its a huge problem. Another teacher said that even when the learners are interested in breaking stereotypes, they are often discouraged at home: Many kids are positive [about racial integration], and then they go home and talk to their parents. Then their parents tell them, Ive lived through apartheid, dont try to tell me [these people] are not like what I think they are. Poor young black people are in social trouble too. Examples of this trouble abound in local newspapers with numerous stories and reports highlighting the extent of young peoples involvement in serious criminal activity. Recently Cape Town experienced the shock of the tragic killing of a baby by a group of young people who had been hired off the street by another young woman. The alleged killers were a boy of 16, another just over 18 and an older male. The woman who allegedly hired the young men was only 23. Complicating the story was the fact that the young woman was white and the alleged killers unemployed black men (Soudien 2007a). In another recent incident, two young boys were killed in a Cape Town township by a gang said to be in their mid-teens (Soudien 2007a). In July 2005 an eyewitness to the killing of a young boy, allegedly by other teenagers, told a reporter that the shooters did not even bother to run away from the scene: They just walked away, and took a shell from the gun and threw it into the road (Cape Argus 29 July 2005). In 1999 Tony Weaver and Sarah Borchert described the situation for young people as follows: Youth under the age of 35 are responsible for more than half of reported crime in South Africa. In the Western Cape alone, 65 percent of all youth are classified as being disorganised: meaning they are not attached to any educational, social or cultural institution. At least 60 000 young people in the region owe allegiance to gangs. More than 2 600 youth, aged 7 to 17, are in jail across South Africa on charges ranging from petty theft to gang rape, hijacking and murder. An enduring image, seen repeatedly in the local media, is of a tattooed young person with a Doggy Dog leering at the camera exuding evil.3
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These issues are compounded by the structural realities of urban and rural life in South Africa. Young people under the age of 19 currently make up half of the South African population (Reddy et al. 2003), and those under the age of 35 make up nearly 70 per cent of the population. President Jacob Zuma commented in his 2010 State of the Nation address: We are a youthful country. Everything we do must answer to the needs of our children and those of the youthUnless we appreciate this reality and understand its implications well not be able to make the correct policy choices and pursue the most appropriate development path. (Cape Times 17 February 2010)
The make-up of South African households, dominated as they are by young people, shows that the ratio of older to young people in poor communities drops as low as 1 : 10 in some instances (Soudien 2007a). The implications for the socialisation of young people in these circumstances are dire, with youth lacking access to significant older figures who are able to pass on to them the social mores that define their community and social identities and thus they fall prey to the kinds of situations described above. In a recent interview with a young woman in a Cape Town township, the scale of this generational problem was made clear. The young woman told me that she could no longer trust her mother because every time she brought male friends into their house her mother attempted to seduce them. Moreover, the degree of vulnerability experienced by very poor people continues to percolate and to be reproduced in the lives of the emergent middle class. It remains a fact that these children, especially black middleclass children, retain their social and physical proximity to the historical malaise of apartheid. Despite being middle class in socio-economic terms, the psychosocial and cultural realities of working-classedness continue to define their worlds. The cultural capital of this working-class life, often celebrated in visible shows of disdain for the perceived snobbery of the middle classes (theyre playing white), and which brings with it a preference for the outward signs of wealth, such as cars and clothes, continues to enjoy pre-eminence and is taken into the schoolyard. Thus the emergent middle-class youth bring to the privileged school new modes of speech, new tastes in music and new attitudes to relationships, and so make it an extremely dynamic space. While elements of these young peoples lives might have improved materially, these youth must still deal with the immediate proximity of stressed family structures and support networks which, in turn, produce the kind of
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vulnerability experienced by the very poor (Soudien 2004). Their problem is exacerbated, however. Often alone in the suburbs, they dont have the organic systems that have come into being in the townships to deal with lifes challenges. The teachers of the middle-class school, and also the university, have little comprehension of the complexity of their lives and see them only through the stereotyped tropes of their supposed racial selves. With the collapse of systems of care in the townships, the large-scale dislocation that has occurred between generations as a result of urbanisation and migrant labour in South Africa, and the massive impact of globalisation, young people have lost the security of identity that would have come through stable family and generational structures. This security has been replaced by peerdetermined social structures, significant among which are the gangs discussed above. Gangs have come to provide young people with important opportunities for finding a sense of solidarity. Needless to say, the gangs are hostile to school and its ideals. Unarticulated disaffection is rampant. Central in the pathways gangs make available for young people are the values of instant gratification. Character is valorised through and in excessive masculinity with the great role models of success drawn from the entertainment worlds cult figures TKZee, Tupac, and so on. Thus young people fail because their material, cultural and social environments are at odds with the orderliness of the school. The kind of existential urgency that they see in their role models the passage from having nothing one day and then seemingly everything the next does not find any resonance in the deep message of school which is about self-control and a requirement that they build a life for themselves. It is out of this dissonance that a more encompassing explanation for academic failure might emanate. Through the development of a new youth sociology that is aware of the intense headwork that young people have to undertake, we might begin to understand how to start the long process of recovery for South Africas youth. If the country is to understand why its children are failing, it needs to understand much more closely and deeply who they are. At present the system is defined to misunderstand young people and their needs structurally. There is a need to come to terms with the deep and often perplexing conditions that produce the kinds of life-worlds that young people are experiencing. I suggest that what we are seeing in their stories, and in their achievement or lack thereof academically and as human beings, are new forms of identity confusion. What is the substance of this confusion? Symptomatically, we have read this confusion through the apartheid-induced language of race. In terms of this
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confusion, belonging is only able to be rendered in the language of race. Young white men and women, particularly those who are English-speaking, have immense difficulty in connecting to a notion of Africanness. African young people are being called upon to rediscover their traditions and in the process to reaffirm their apartheid tribal identities. The middle groups in this problematic coloureds and Indians (and now people of Chinese descent) are called upon to make up their minds and to declare their loyalties: Are you white or black? The confusion, however, goes deeper. Acutely experienced in contemporary South Africa, but manifest in many places elsewhere in the world as well, the reduction of the challenge of modern identity to its racial or, more politically correctly, its ethnic base is part of the trend to quickly, easily make sense of complexity. Derrida described this tendency as a kind of shadow-writing: Im wondering if traditional logocentric writing (or thinking) represents a meansfor taking shelter from the sun whose face cannot, on pain of blindness, be directly stared at. Because if so, if writing does represent such a means then it is evident that the writing can be nothing but black, a shadow-writing, writing for protection. Its clarity derives from that which it excludes, that which is withdrawn, removed, outside of it, which is separate. (1979: 21) Excluded in the clarity of the logocentricity of race is the dense synchronicity and interpellated nature of identity and its fluid foundations. Pushed to the margins but always evident is a range of psychosocial forces. Among the most prominent of these is masculinity. In recent interviews with young men, it has become clear to me how important the vector of masculinity and its attendant meaning-making processes have been and continue to be in the shaping of the nature of the modern South African person. Working with the stories of these young people has led me to the realisation that we now have before us a generation of extremely vulnerable young people. This vulnerability is evident in the lack of school attainment, but it is also evident in the extreme forms of social anomie that one sees among young people. Looking at the phenomenon of violence, I read from these interviews an immense struggle among young men to speak against the history of their narrativisation as men. The examples of how they should be are dominated by violence. But an important qualification needs to be made: there are sufficient instances in the interviews I have conducted that show how even here, in the darkest corners of the countrys history, hope is able to arise.
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At this point I turn to the new work that I am doing on gender and masculinity and femininity. This work has grown out of my interest in how young people are making their own identities. In what young people have shared with me, I have come to find the hope in the complexity to which I have regularly referred in this book. Against the dominant message of intolerance, violence and aggression that has surfaced regularly in this work, I have been struck by how vital the initiative and the agency that many young people demonstrate is for the future of South Africa and the sense of possibility it presents to the world. The work of an important new organisation, the Sonke Gender Justice Organisation (SGJO), provides one illustration of how men are managing the insidious encounter of neoliberalism with the patriarchies of apartheid and what is thought of as African culture. Mbuyiselo Botha, an SGJO leader from the historic township of Sharpeville, near Johannesburg, tells the story of how his male peers taunt him with the accusation that he is letting the side down: [T]hey say I am opening them up for criticism by their women. They say what were doing is EurocentricA man must be toughWe have entered a new terrain of struggle (Khumalo 2010: 1). Botha understands what is going on in the heads of people who criticise what he does. A young university-educated woman tells him after he has given a talk that what I had said was quite interesting and noble, but nobody would take it seriously because it came from me. I asked her what she meant. And she said: You are not a real man to me you are still living in the township; you dont even drive a carGo and get a car, and then come and inspire me. You see, thats the mentality (Khumalo 2010: 2). The mentality Botha is speaking of is without defences in the face of modern liberal ideology which demands that men do what it takes to assert their manhood: Yes, thats the culture bling bling by any means necessary Toxic masculinity (Khumalo 2010: 2). In this explanation of their identities, the humanity of many men is bound up in their supposed independence from each other. They do not need others, except when blood relations are involved. Botha, in contrast, offers a way out of this syndrome of compulsions. When his elder brother was arrested for rape, Botha refused to bail him out of jail: He hated me after thatHe said I was an educated, confused black man and I couldnt even stick with my own brother (Khumalo 2010: 2). What Botha is doing here is crucially important. He is confronting the entire weight of his racialised history. The initiative he takes his agency is activated by a deep sense of the history out of which he comes. He is speaking to a history which demands that he behave in particular kinds of ways. In the
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South African context this history presents men in particular kinds of ways. They are the path-breakers. They are ontologically called upon to rule. It is their birthright. It authorises them to do whatever is necessary. Many have a by whatever means necessary mentality. They are, as a result, that which they imagine their histories wish them to be. The intersection of this with race is strong. If they are white, the teleological compulsions of their historiographies make it extremely difficult for them to see their full potential because the only language of description they have to draw on is that of race. The violence which they demonstrate is racial and not located in the density of its gendered entailments. As white men this entailment is their civilisational right. White men come into the world to save it from itself. That is their destiny. The story for black men is similar and trapped in the same logic. It is their destiny to be aggressive. It is this that Botha rejects. Many young men, however, cannot do what Botha is able to do. Perpetuating these difficulties of being young is the structure of the sociological and psychological world created for young South Africa. At the core of this structure is the tragic reality that many young people are alone. They essentially have to figure out by themselves how they might fit into the new South Africa. As the interlocutors of the past, the present and the future, parents, both black and white, are themselves in a state of confusion. The sheer scale of physical deprivation, the absence of emotional intimacy and the extent to which these come together impede the learning of everyone. We must acknowledge how much these basic realities limit young peoples opportunities for social improvement and older peoples capacity to retrieve and work critically with the changing world around them. Hungry children cannot learn. Emotionally alone children have difficulty in seeing in the school a source of hope. The physical realities that surround children hound them as they make their way from the impoverished worlds of their townships to the equally impoverished surrounds of their schools. That they do not have access to the kind of intimacy in their lives which makes experimentation with their potentialities reasonably safe is a matter we need to acknowledge repeatedly. But we need to be constantly aware of the critical reality that they remain agents capable of interacting with their social circumstances. They retain, simply because they are human, a capacity to intervene and make choices. Their destinies are never entirely scripted by the social forces which characterise their societies. Therefore, in attempting to foster among our youth a desire and indeed a capacity to comprehend and act for themselves in the new South Africa, it is important that we understand what and how they are thinking.
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Notes
1 2 http://www.sacmeq.org. The process of conducting this test, such as the development of the sample, and analysing the results can be found in the report by Moloi and Strauss (2005). However, the full results are available on the SACMEQ website: www.sacmeq.org/ indicate.htm. http://www.cyc-net.org/cyc-online/cycol-0999-youthjustice1.htm.
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10
Thinking and living our way forward
Where does the assessment that we in the new South Africa are in some difficulty leave the discussion? How do we begin the long journey of reconciling what Botsis (2010) refers to as the vectors in which we work with the ideas of social difference? Recalling the work of Le Fevre and Massey but bringing to it a stronger psychosocial immediacy, Botsis suggests that the vectors of the everyday are the literal and figurative spaces in which an individual moves and operates. What is critical about these vectors is that they are suffused in the ways in which they represent, receive, channel and feedback meaning with the discursive repertoires of the everyday. Among these repertoires lie the determining orders of hegemony in all their variation patriarchy, racial supremacy, cultural domination alongside of and in constant articulation with the elusive and evasive ways of the marginal, the displaced, the subordinate and the politically, culturally and economically subaltern. Sentient, the vectors themselves pulse with life. How then do we rewire these vectors so that they have encoded in them a post-racial current and then through these currents begin the long process of a reconceptualisation of ourselves and of our others which resists the seductions of race and indeed those of all our other superior selves? In working towards the revitalisation of these vectors we have to understand how much they require the active engagement of the self to be working at the level of the structural and the personal. This insight was grasped by the great philosophers of the Enlightenment (see Bronner 2004) and has been taken up by important social theorists of the modern age such as iek. The point of this insight is that ideas by themselves the arena of the intellectual cannot change the world. Current discussions of the nature of social difference, which take their provenance from the dream of the Enlightenment and which have had to be constantly expanded in recognition of the need for greater and greater practices of social inclusion, have to be seeded into social struggle and there made even deeper. Ideas by themselves are not sufficient for guiding the behaviour and practice of society. Bronner (2004) argues that the error we make in invoking the Enlightenment is that we leave out the life example of the philosophes and concentrate on their texts. In the texts of Voltaire, Rousseau, and so on, themselves no longer fashionable, is an emphasis on the importance
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of social movements and their values. A sense of the political and its historical narrative is central to the unmasking of the strategies of power that inhere, implicitly or explicitly, within ideology. What Bronner (2004) calls for is a recognition of the degree to which current theorising has avoided considerations of the political in all its complexity, that of the self and the collective (see Dimitriades & Carlson 2003). The point that this book seeks to make is that there is in modern philosophy powerful insight into how the individual might divest him- or herself of the constrictions of history and work towards transcendence. This insight has deep roots in European thinking (see Said 1994). At key points over the last 100 years it has repeatedly manifested itself. It showed itself during the dark days of the 1930s, when the fate of being deemed Jewish portended a barbarism and death on a scale which the world had not yet seen and when the much-vaunted civilisation of Europe showed its total emptiness. It showed itself again in the collective blindness of the dominant West in the 1960s, when the colonised world of colour appealed for inclusion in the structures of power in its own right and not as a ward of Europe. It shows itself once more in the very present, in the invalidation of peoples right to religious freedom in the contesting fundamentalisms of East and West and the terror-filled wars in the Middle East. In each of these historical events, at their most perilous moments, an articulation of the self was presented which sought to project beyond the raced self, beyond the self trapped in narrow patriotism and narrow nationalism. This articulation described a world which was anchored in the simple vision of the oneness of the human race. And so, poignantly, philosophers have been on hand who have been able to clarify the nature of the struggle for individual transcendence. From Levinas in the 1930s to iek and Nussbaum in the current period, they have generated important texts describing how the individual might find his or her own redemption in the project of an individualising self able to overcome the seductive lure of his or her imposed solidarities and to construct solidarities rooted in reason and deliberation. But beautiful as these voices are, they remain whispers in the wind. Haunt our imaginations as their songs do, we, those of us who walk in the face of the wind, struggle to awaken from the slumber in which we find ourselves. We sleepwalk through our humanity and fail ourselves. It is the direness of this state which demands that the work of the philosophers along with the example of those struggling in the streets has to be deployed, as the thinking of the philosophes was during the 18th and 19th centuries, behind a deliberate project of inclusion.
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In order to promote such a project, we have to cultivate a politics which is ceaselessly engaged in a process of deconstructing the conditions, and their reinforcing ideologies, of exclusion and oppression and struggling to imagine and realise alternatives to them. This will mean developing new political analyses with new political vocabularies. This politics must be committed to the making of a post-race society in which race is not only neutralised but actually done away with. Making such a politics possible requires a full awareness of the nature of the ideological apparatus which keeps race and racism alive and the preparedness to engage this apparatus in order to dismantle it and build anew the material and ideological structures which sustain and feed the ideas and conceits which people hold of themselves and those around them.
How does one undertake this process of building a post-race society? Key in the process of building a new social consciousness in South Africa is working with the constitutive elements which lie inside of Bronners social imagination. Critical in Bronners argument is that imagination and its reasoning are the products of recursive, iterative and mutually engaging social forces. Imagination and reasoning have the social structure of their contexts imprinted on them. This social structure is represented in the institutions of the official, the formal and the informal. To name it epistemologically, it is the world of the sociological, the family, the school, the media, the church, our peer networks, and so on. But, as this book has sought to make clear, we do not only live in a world which is determined for us by the forces of dominance. We always retain the power, by virtue of being human, to intervene in the processes which seek to determine our fates. Our agency our will to act will always carry a value, small or great, in shaping what becomes of us. It is this combustive reality of structure and agency that we need to be recognising and dealing with. In building a post-race society, we have to begin with an acknowledgement of the scale of the problem confronting us. As suggested earlier in this book, one might take the view, as Taylor has, that the official struggle for social inclusion is well advanced and might not need the kind of attention that is urged here. Taylor argues that the modern order gives no ontological status to hierarchy or any particular structure of differentiation (2004: 12). Our achievement in coming to recognise social difference in its multiple variations notwithstanding, it is nonetheless clear that the struggle for equality remains as vital as ever. As the experiences of affirmative action in countries everywhere
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in the world show and the contrasts represented by India, the United States, Malaysia, Brazil and South Africa are important many societies remain conflicted about who belongs and in what order of precedence and preference. What this situation leaves us with is the challenge of how to translate the norm of the law into the norm of our everyday behaviour. How does one make constitutionalism the very air which we breathe? How do we come to transform how we imagine our social order and then actually live it in a way which brings us into a much closer alignment with the legislative commitments we make? If we are to be a non-racial, non-sexist, non-classist order, how do we actually get there?
The critical significance of living in a constitutional state is that it has the capacity to protect us against those who seek to infringe on our rights as citizens. The constitutional order, however, is not the social order itself. This is exactly where we find ourselves in the new South Africa. We continue to struggle to realise the full gamut of human possibilities promised in our Constitution. Most disturbing about our social order are the particularistic recidivisms within it that of race most obviously, but also the other claims to superiority of one kind or another which regularly come to darken our landscape. Our Constitution is important in determining the formal structures which give form and character to our lives. But it is not what our actual living moments, our encounters with one another, the decisions that we make are all about. What is critical is that we use it to help us deliberately and self-consciously come to agreements about what we want our living moments to be all about and what it is that we put into our conversations and our engagements with one another. The key point about the new South Africa is that the transition to democracy was not framed as an experience of public education. It was not seen as an opportunity for the new state to open up to public debate the nature of the new social order it sought to create. What happened instead was that the responsibility for imagining and then making the new social order was ceded to the state. The state, using its instruments of deliberation such as Parliament itself, came to constitute itself as the public. In the process, debate came to be constituted in a narrow party political process. Movements which have a broader understanding of how the public is constituted and a sense of the critical urgency of infusing the spirit of the law into everyday life now need to come to a clear realisation of what their task is. They need to recognise that they remain in an ideological struggle around the high points of modernity. They need to recognise that the promise of
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Taylors dream of no ontological status [for] hierarchy must be fought for. The ideological structures of modernity, such as the school, the universities, the media, are structures that need to be won over. They need to be won over to a politics which is self-conscious, in which ideas are not only simply proclaimed but actually lived. Following this line of thought, it is appropriate to ask what a lived politics which disavows whiteness and all its ancillary conceits including, controversially, blackness might be. What would it mean to exemplify the idea of a radical way of living in an inclusive way? Fundamentally it would mean making the official understanding of inclusion, ostensibly there in the law, come alive in the formal and informal worlds. This would require movements which are prepared to hold themselves and their individual members to full account: How did we get to this moment, I as an individual and we as a collective? What do our commitments privilege and disprivilege? What am I, what are we, taking for granted? What are we not seeing? How do we construct for ourselves the methodologies of analysis and the modalities of action which help us, wherever we might be, to build fully self-conscious movements which will relentlessly hold to account our definitions and practices of our commonality as human beings? And what then might this mean for how we learn? Is learning to be fully human possible in the face of racial logics which assail us at the point of entry into institutions, in our habitation and habituations of the institutions, and which mark us upon our exits from these institutions? Can we learn against the logics of domination? I have tried in this book to show how racial logic works. I have also tried to show that the primary goal of education must be to bring each of us to a deep sense of self-awareness. This self-awareness, as Touraine (1999) has argued, is ecological. It is about locating oneself in ones environment and coming to a real sense of ones dependence on those around oneself and the dependence of others on oneself. It is this idea which education is best able to bring to life, not as a religious commitment but a commitment of the head. Education has the capacity to bring each of us to a rational understanding of the urgency of reciprocity. It is able to do this through literature, and it matters little in the end what the provenance of that literature is. Okri is as powerful a gateway into the complexity of the human consciousness as Moliere, Dante, Morrison or Rushdie is. It is able to do this through history, and, again, let it be said how dangerous a small, enclosed and self-referential history is. It is able to do this through the power of mathematics, mathematics
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inscribed symbolically or in other ways, leading us to a clear and conscious understanding of our frailty and vulnerability on the one hand, and our utter and almost limitless potential on the other. It is education alone that has a dispassionate interest in developing our capacities simultaneously and both for who we are as individuals and for the good of the much wider worlds we inhabit. Education alone can deal with the paradox of building us up while always holding up to us how our future and our capacity to flourish depend on others who have all our interests at heart. This is the promise it represents.
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259
Index
A absence 7778, 92 access to schooling, post-apartheid 117 seealso integration aesthetics 21, 22, 38 affirmative action 1415, 131, 242243 African National Congress (ANC) 105, 108,168 Africanness 215216 African people and categories of disadvantage 198200 and genetics 9 identity 4647, 9395 leaders 58, 9394 schooling, capitalism and apartheid 104109 schooling, mission era 102104 status of 9 and tradition 9395, 216 see also black people African schools 204209 corporal punishment 207 defensiveness of learners 206 and dependence 206209 as hostile 207 and needs of learners 206209 African students and apartheid 209210, 212 entry into coloured and white schools 210217 leaving township schools 210211 in the new South Africa 209217 othering of 212213 Afrikaans people language and integration 142143, 154, 170, 171 in post-apartheid SA 178179 social ineptness of youth 231232
agency academic 230 and imagination 46 individual 31, 46, 241242 of young people 225226, 237238 Ahluwalia P 4647 alcohol dependence and domination 100 Alexander N 1516 Altbach P 8283 ANC (African National Congress) 105, 108,168 Anderson B 3637 anti-essentialism 6, 5859 anti-racism 138 and District Six Museum 1617 education 136, 144 and enlightenment 16 scholarship 1112 apartheid and affirmative action 14 and blackness 1112, 14 and District Six Museum 1617 integration debate during 161163 persistence of discourse 14, 131, 193194, 198200, 201, 217 apartheid education and capitalism 104108 opposition to 108109 see also education, post-apartheid apocalypse 61 Appadurai A 4546 assimilation and knowing 160 assimilationist approach to integration 136137, 144, 146147 Australia 39 authoritarianism and difference 75
261
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B Bantu Education Act (No. 47 of 1953) 106107 Baudrillard J 6162 belonging 19, 121 Berger P and Luckman T 62 Bhabha H 4748, 8889, 127 Bhaskar R 7779 Biko, Steve 13 biological essentialism 13 biology and race 89, 21, 58, 128 black consciousness 1115, 161 Black Consciousness Movement 161 black middle class 175, 181182 blackness 13 black people 9, 58, 175, 181182, 198-200 see also privileged blacks in schools Boas F 35 body, the and domination 2527 Botha, Mbuyiselo 237238 Brahmin 10 Bronner S 240241, 242 Buddhism 56 C capitalism and racism 11, 26, 71, 103105, 129 care of self and the other 2, 55, 235 Cartesian moment 6566 Catholic Church and integration 161163 Christian National Education Act (No. 39 of 1967) 108 Christianse Y 95 citizenship 193, 226, 231238 class and colour 85 and integration 147152 language of 129 and newly emerging elite 187190, 234 and race 130131, 148149 cogito 66, 68, 69 cognition 6566 colonialism 34 262
and domination 7071, 8485, 162163 and formal education 8285 and national identity 3637 colour-blind liberals 16 Coloured Affairs Department 217 coloured people and apartheid education 106, 107 and categories of disadvantage 198200 identity 217222 labelling of 218219 radicals 91 students in new SA 187189, 217222 Coloured Persons Education Act (No. 47 of1963) 106 competence 116, 154155, 212, 227 complexity 9, 18 of identity 3133, 34, 4149 constitutionalism 113, 114, 243 co-optation 76 corporal punishment 207 courts 118, 123, 125n6, 125n7, 125n8, 170 creolisation 8990 and education 82, 9395 and modernity 9195 see also hybridity criminality 202, 233234 critical pedagogy 79, 87 Critical Race Theory 13, 26 Cross M 202 cultural identity and Bantu Education 107 and colonialism 34 dominant notions of 3334 new scholarship on 5153 see also identity; social identity cultural performance 8889 culture and education 8889 and modernity 4849 semiotic conflation with race 2021, 22 and social difference 20 curricula 83, 84, 107, 116117, 182, 195196
INDEX
D decentralisation 122123 and white privilege 169170 defensiveness of learners 206 Deleuze G 64, 6570 Department of Basic Education 115 Derrida J 52, 236 desire and repulsion 4 dialectics 64 and othering 64, 6870 reconstituting 7780 difference and authoritarianism 75 and dialectics 6570 and race 13 and race and class 130131 social difference 2023 disadvantage 208 categories of 199200 discourse see Formal Discourse; Informal Discourse; Official Discourse District Six Museum 1617 Dlamini S 202204 dominant-factor model of integration 133134 domination 25, 177 and alcohol dependence 100 and assimilation 136137 and the body 2527 and class 147148 and colonialism 7071, 8485, 162163 and contingency 156157 and education 8388 and history 7175 and knowing 159160 and multiculturalism 63, 76 and schooling 99101, 102, 171173 and space and bodies 2527 dropout rates 119 Dubouw S 17 Dutch East India Company 99101 E Early Childhood Development (ECD) 114
education 78 and culture 8889 and dominance 8688 and dominance, India 8485 formal 81-85 and identity 19 and initiation rites, E Cape 94 and multiculturalism 86 Native education 83, 105106 and pedagogy 10 and post-race society 244245 and racism 9 and social difference 20, 2223 see also pedagogy; under schooling, South Africa education, post-apartheid challenges in 117125 implementation 111112 initiatives toward 109110 legislation 112116 and race 120125 and racial discrimination 111112 see also integration; schooling, South Africa Eiselen Commission 105106, 107 elite, educated 9092 English language and colonialism 8485 and integration 142143, 154155, 182, 183 as medium of instruction 118, 142, 154155, 182 Enlightenment 9, 16, 55, 5657, 240 and the Cartesian moment 65 and colonial domination 162163 and dialectics 64 enlightenment 9, 16, 55 enunciation, politics of 8889 essentialism 6, 12 biological 13 and globalisation 57 and social constructionism 62 strategic 1214, 15 263
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ethnicity 34, 73, 129 ethnic separatism 1314 Europe, dominance of discourse 34, 7172 exclusion 117121, 149151, 154155 exile 80 F fixity, challenges to 4142 Formal Discourse 196, 205 and African students in coloured schools 213214 and coloured students 217218 formal education 8185 Foucault M 51, 5556, 6465 friendships and school 187189, 209 G game playing 6163 Gandhi M 7374 gang culture 202, 233, 235 Geertz C 33 gender 64, 152153, 237238 see also masculinity gender scape and integration 152153 generational dynamics 4849, 234235 genetics 89 Giddens A 44, 48 Gilroy P 64, 69, 7072 globalisation global whiteness 177178 and identity 4449 and race 5758 and white dominance 172173 Goldberg D 36, 37, 39, 120121 Gqola P 13 Great Britain colonial education systems 8385 and whiteness 3940 Grossberg L 51, 8687 Group Areas Act (No. 41 of 1950) 200 Grove Primary School v. the Minister and others (1997) 123 Guillaume M 6162 264
H Han consciousness, China 10 headwork 19 Hegel G 64, 6770 see also dialectics hegemony of modernity 8182 and official discourse 196 racial 23, 38, 171173 and schooling 171173 Herrenvolk 38, 40 heterogeneity see homogeneity and heterogeneity hierarchy 20, 54, 58, 93, 242 history and othering 7075 rejection of 43 and social construction 126127 transcendence of 5657 and young people 225226 Hobsbawm E 32, 72 Hofmeyr J 142143 homelands 105, 107 homogeneity and heterogeneity 3738, 45,121 hope 55, 237 humanism 54, 64 humanity, sense of 24, 5 Huntington S. Clash of Civilisations (1993) 50, 75 hybridity 47, 8995, 190 see also creolisation I identity Africans 4647 ambiguous 177178 ambivalent 184186, 210 and citizenship 193 coloured people 217222 confusion 235236 and education 19 and ghettoisation 16 global 177178
INDEX
multiple 6, 32, 4244 national 3641 and official, formal, informal spaces 195196 privileged blacks 181192 and race 6, 16 and schooling 9698 South African 1819, 177180 whites in South Africa 177180 see also cultural identity; social identity identity formation 36, 40 and knowledge production 5153 and modernity 4450 and race 36 ideology and race and racism 7, 22 imagination 3839, 4546, 5455, 242 independent schools 115 India Brahmin 10 colonial education systems 8385 and identity 32 and Marx 69 Indian Education Act (No. 61 of 1965) 106 Indian people, South Africa and apartheid education 106, 107 and categories of disadvantage 198200 Informal Discourse 196 and African students in coloured schools 213214 and coloured students 219222 initiation rites, E Cape 9395 integration 159 19901994 163167 1994present 168173, 209210 assimilationist 136137, 144, 146147 and class 118119, 147152 compliance in 169 contingent model 133, 156157 data on 138140 debate on during apartheid 161163 dominant-factor model 133134 and the gender scape 152153 and knowing 159160
and the language scape 153155 and the law 170, 171 and multiculturalism 137138, 144145 privileged blacks 181190 and race 120125, 135147 resistance to 169170, 209 school enrolment 139141, 139147 whites in South Africa 177180 see also subordination J Japan, post nuclear bombing 61 K knowing and integration 159160, 167 knowledge 23, 65, 96 L labelling 185 and coloured people 218219 language African and integration 154155 of class 129 of description 128132 mother-tongue 84, 154, 184, 189190 of race 128129 of theory 127128 language of instruction Afrikaans 142143, 154, 170, 171 Bantu Education 107 English 118, 142, 154155, 182 and integration 142143, 153155, 189190 language scape and integration 153155 Lash S 43 Latino/a solidarity 1314 law and rule 6162 leadership preparation 183 legislation 39, 106, 108, 111117, 150151, 200 Lemba people 89 long error 69, 70 Lyotard J-F 12 265
REALISING THE DREAM
M Mampansula 203 marginalisation, cultural 14 Marx K 69, 129 masculinity and initiation rites, E Cape 94 and schools 153 township 2526 and youth culture 202, 236238 McGurk, Brother Neil 162163 McLaren P 87 meritocracy 35 Michael, Sister Louis 161162 migration 37, 46, 178, 181, 186 Mikro v. the State 170 Miles R 64 Ministry of Higher Education and Training115 Models system, schooling 110111, 164, 166 modernity and African students 216 and cultural elite 9092 and cultural identity 34, 37, 39 hegemony of and education 8182 and initiation rites, E Cape 93 institutions of and struggle 93 loosening of racial, cultural framing 4244 and national identity 36 and race 17, 7072 see also globalisation Molteno F 99105 monovalence 7778 mother-tongue 84, 154, 184, 189190 multiculturalism and dominance 63, 76 and education 86 and integration 137138, 144146 in schools 86, 166167 and social difference 20, 48 Muslim learners 184 N Naidoo J 136, 141, 144, 148 Nandy A 74 266
National Education Policy Act (No. 27 of 1996) (NEPA) 113 National Education Policy Investigation (NEPI) 109, 110 National Qualifications Framework (NQF)116 nation, the 3641, 7273 Native Education 83, 105106 negation 7778 neocolonialism 8283 NEPA (National Education Policy Act) (No.27 of 1996) 113 NEPI (National Education Policy Investigation) 109, 110 Ngwane Z 9293 NNSSF (National Norms and Standards for School Funding) 113 non-racial society 910 non-white label 11 normativity 38, 9698, 167 North American and European dominance34 NQF (National Qualifications Framework)116 O occult instability 89, 90, 94 Official Discourse 195196, 205 and African students 210214 and coloured students 217 and Formal and Informal Discourses 195196, 213214 official, formal and informal spaces 195196 ontology 24, 38 Open Schools Association (OSA) 165 orgiastic thinking 6566 OSA (Open Schools Association) 165 othering and care of self 2 and dialectics 6869 and history 7075 as the norm 60 in schools 99, 119, 137, 167, 211213 and slave education 100
INDEX
P parental influence 115, 149152, 155, 164166, 171172, 178179, 202, 233 paternalism 163, 170 patriarchy 64, 68 pedagogy 10 and dominance 8687 and social constructivism 79 Peoples Education 109 phenomena 62, 63 philosophy as anthropology of race 70 and spirituality 65 plurality of social identity 32, 42, 52 policy as symbolism 170 political activism 203, 108109 political, the and social constructionism 79 politics and gangsterism 202 positivity and negativity 64, 68, 76 see also dialectics possibility 5153, 66, 88, 187 post-apartheid SA, attitudes to 193194 see also integration; education, post-apartheid praxical pedagogy 87 prefect system 183 privilege 175177 white resistance to erosion of 169170 see also privileged blacks in schools; white privilege privileged blacks in schools 181190 and class 189 and identity 184-187 and leadership 183 newly emerging elite 187190 school and home 186187 psychoanalysis 43 purity 7273, 190 R race 8 and biology 89, 21, 58, 128 and class 130131, 148149 construction of 15, 21, 3536
as cultural artefact 129 and the end of racism 7680 and genetics 8 and globalisation 5758 historicising 7879 and history 7075 and homogeneity 3738, 45, 121 and identity formation 36 language of 128129 as a learnt value 67 as master signifier 6 and modernity 17, 7072 naturalisation of 15 and post-apartheid education 120125 post-race society 240245 race-denialists 16, 224n2 racial neutrality 21 the racial state 3641, 120121 and racism 17, 22, 58 and reason 69 scholarship on 1019 semiotic conflation with culture 2021, 22 and social constructionism 21, 63, 135136 teleology of 7375, 76 race, South Africa 6 and class and difference 130131 as default identity 6 and education 78 hegemony of 6 as ideological smokescreen 7 as a learnt value 67 as master signifier 67 racial classification 30n2, 198200 see also education, post-apartheid; schooling, South Africa racial and cultural framing, loosening of4244 racism 9, 12, 20 and capitalism 11, 26 end of 7680 and genetics 9 persistence of 36, 5761 267
REALISING THE DREAM
and race 17, 22, 58 in schools 142, 172, 217218, 232233 see also anti-racism radicals of colour, Western Cape 9092 Ramphele M 204205, 206207 reason 6667, 69 representation 6566, 6768, 70 repulsion and desire 4 resistance to apartheid education 86, 108109 to erosion of white privilege 169170 Robinson Crusoe 7071 rule and law 6162 and social constructionism 6263 rural areas 92-93, 197198 S SACS (South African College School) 165 Said E 4041, 7980 SASA (South African Schools Act) (No. 84 of 1996) 112, 113 SATA (South African Teachers Association) 164165 scapes 4546, 133134 scholarship on race 1019 school governing bodies (SGBs) 115, 118, 150151 schooling, South Africa access 117125 and capitalism and apartheid 104109 and competence 116, 154155, 212, 227 and daily migration 181 dominance 171173 and domination 99101, 102104 early initiatives 99101 and economics 102103 exclusion of poorer children 149150 extramural activities 183 and identity 9698, 101 independent schools 115 and initiation rites, E Cape 9495 and knowledges 96 268
learner performance 119, 226230, 228229 mission era 102104 Models system 111, 164, 166 and multiculturalism 86, 166167 and normativity 9698, 167 prefect system 183 racial integration in 101, 105, 139141, 139147 as a racial project 124 resistance 86, 108109, 202 school as hostile 207209 see also education, post-apartheid; privileged blacks in schools; under integration Searle, Bernie 2425, 27 seduction 6163 Sekete P, Shilubane M & Moila B 138139, 149, 150 Sharpeville uprising 108, 125n3 signifiers 6 singularity 40, 45, 51, 5354 slavery and education, SA 99101 and identity 13, 36 and the other 100 social coherence and homogeneity 3738 social construction and essentialism 62 and history 126127 occluded 7879 and pedagogy 79 and the political 79 and race 21, 63, 135136 and rule 6263 social Darwinism 3536 social difference 2023 see also difference social identity 31 complexity of 3133, 4149 dominant notions of 3334 and globalisation 44, 4549 and homogeneity 3738, 45 impermanence of 3233
INDEX
intellectual nature of 4041 and interpretation 33 and national identity 3641 plurality of 32, 42 and the racial state 3641 and situated history 31 and social Darwinism 3536 and subordinate identity 4041 see also cultural identity; identity social imaginary 3839, 5455 social interdependence 23 social literacy 226, 231238 social sciences 2327, 70 social structure and young people 226230 Sonke Gender Justice Organisation (SGJO) 237238 South African College School (SACS) 165 South African identity 1819 South African Schools Act (No. 84 of 1996) (SASA) 112, 113, 115116, 150, 168169 South African Teachers Association (SATA) 164165 Soweto uprising 109, 174n1 space 2527 special needs education 114 spirituality 65 state, the and decentralisation 121, 122123 discourse of 122 hollowing out of 123 and the ideal subject 9798 as racial 3641, 120121 St Barnabas College 161 Straker G 202 strategic essentialism 1215 subalternists 7374 subjectivity 2527, 49, 65 subordinate identity 4041 subordination Africans in coloured schools 209216 coloured students in new SA 217222 and the paradox of comfort 201209
Subotsky, Mikael 24, 27 suburban spaces 2526 survival discourse 206 symbolism, policy as 170 T Taylor C 3839, 5455, 242 teachers and integration 143144 teleology of race 7375, 76 Tihanyi K 145, 178, 232 tokenism 14 townships 2526, 181, 184187, 202206, 210 Tsatsatsa 203 U United Democratic Front (UDF) 203 United States black consciousness 1314 scholarship on race 12 and whiteness 39 universality 68, 69, 70, 77 urbanisation 43, 235 V Vally S & Dalamba Y 138, 139, 144, 209 Van Riebeeck, Jan 99 vectors of social difference 240 violence 71, 236237 Vryburg High School 171172 W white consciousness 12, 161 whiteness 1213 and dominance 10, 12, 38, 7175, 171173, 238 and education 85 and globalisation 172173, 177178 and Islam 50 and the state 39 and virtue 34 White Paper on education and training 112113 269
REALISING THE DREAM
white people 10, 13 and dominance, schools 171173 as normative 38 public debate on education 163167 as saviours in history 71 and the state 38, 3941, 71 white privilege Afrikaans people 178179 and global whiteness 177178 and new South African whiteness 179180 reconstitution of 177180 resistance to erosion of 169170 white superiority 1213, 14, 7273 Wolpe H 130 Z Ziek S 66, 68, 240
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