Historical knowledge: In the classroom and in the blood

Given its sensitive nature, I was hesitant to discuss apartheid at the beginning of my fieldwork, unless it was a topic raised by participants themselves. On reflection, my hesitance to discuss certain topics demonstrates how I too drew upon the dominant discourses within Intaba and colluded in the construction of certain silences. While race was frequently and casually brought up without any probing from me, the term apartheid never explicitly arose within conversations. One matric student, Xolani, claimed he had not actually heard about ‘apartheid’, although when I explained what it meant, he told me, dismissively, that he had heard about it but that this had happened a ‘long long ago’ (interview).

The majority of matric students expressed a similar sense that ‘apartheid is over now’ (Cezi, focus group), had occurred before they were born, and had no bearing on their present circumstances.

According to Ferreira, black students desire to disassociate from the role of victim (or ‘affected’) may be motivated by a desire to avoid being positioned as inferior (2013:18). A desire to disassociate with the negativity of the past is in keeping with a desire to frame one’s future in positive terms, as discussed in section 5.3. The racism that saturated ap artheid South Africa and shaped social and educational identities has been erased by a new inclusive ‘multiracialism’ so that looking back to the past was deemed as neither relevant nor helpful (Ferreira, 2013). This was the predominant view expressed by my matric participants as well as several of the younger teachers.

One teacher, Ma’am Grace, even expressed some confusion when interrupting an interview that took place between an older teacher, Ma’am Khutsalani and myself. ‘What are you guys talking about so seriously?’ she inquired. When Ma’am Khutsalani explained, with tears in her eyes, that we had been discussing apartheid, Ma’am Grace was shocked. ‘Aaaaah you remember that stuff?’

she asked, forging a clear distinction between what happened ‘then’ and how life is now. In a later interview she told me that, being born in the late 1980s, she had no memory of apartheid and never thought about it.

Several of the older teachers, while speaking of the influence of apartheid on their own lives, did not wish to dwell on the topic with the students, particularly because they felt it must not be an

excuse for students not achieving at school and going to university. Part of what it meant to believe in yourself and your ability to be whoever you want to be in the ‘new South Africa,’ as discussed in Chapter Five, meant not locating the legacy of apartheid in their lives. Many students expressed the belief that it was destructive to discuss apartheid as it had the potential to ‘make people jealous of one another’ (Simphiwe, interview) and ‘blame white people’ (Petal, interview). In this way, the post-apartheid narrative of emancipation helped fuel the individualising ethos of the school.

As well as the influence of the school upon young South African’s interpretatio ns of the past, the broader community and family play a critical role in passing on an understanding of apartheid.

Jansen (2009) draws upon the concept of ‘knowledge in the blood’ to explain how emotional knowledge of the apartheid years transmits from one generation to the next by parents and adults in society, influencing how the second generation see themselves and how they understand others’

(Jansen, 2009:171). The scope of this thesis is not large enough to interrogate the influence of my participant’s home environments upon how they did or did not locate themselves as racialised subjects shaped by a particular history. However, it is important to note that all of my participants expressed an awareness of living in a world that is socially, politically and technologically radically different from that of their parents’ generation.

Echoing the findings of studies which focused upon how born free South Africans develop a national identity and idea of ‘citizenship’ (Hammett et al., 2009; Ferreira, 2013; Fleetwood, 2012), my participants often spoke about ‘our country’, ‘our history’, ‘our future’ and ‘us South Africans.’ It was common for students to express immense pride in being South African and for some, this pride was often articulated in relation to South African history. This was through the acknowledgement that, in the past, people had endured great struggles in order to bring about the present state of freedom and opportunity. They included themselves among those who have reaped the benefits of this struggle. The past was shaped by people who ‘fought for us’ (Dean, interview) and several people referred to their family member’s political involvements when speaking of overcoming apartheid.

Among my participants there were varied responses to how apartheid should be addressed within school, from those who felt it should not be taught or discussed at all, and those who valorised the past and regarded it important to know ‘where they came from.’ Most of the matrics, post-matrics and teachers fell into this latter category. An analysis of the responses I received to the question

‘Do you think born free South Africans should learn about apartheid history?’ was generally confined to formulaic expressions, whereby I was repeatedly told that it was necessary to ‘know the past in order to build a future’ (Phil, focus group) and ‘we must know the past so history does

not repeat itself’ (Sam, focus group). The majority of responses from both teachers and students, displayed a clear separation between the past and the present. This echoed existing studies of the born free generation failing to make a connection between their current circumstances and the apartheid past (Swartz et al., 2012).

The ambivalent responses regarding how to discuss race in the classroom is echoed in the enduring debates to have occurred regarding the subject of History in South African schools (Masooa and Twala, 2014). After 1994 there was sensitivity and even denial with regards to apartheid History, to the extent that ‘a debate took place among textbook specialists, teachers and parents on whether the past should be taught at all in schools’ (Hopken, 2006:21). Years of propagandist History mandated by the apartheid government led many to disdain the subject and when the ANC government took power in 1994, the sentiment among many was that it is better not to have any History than to have that kind of History again (Sieborger, 2000).

The devaluing of History as a school subject in South Africa is reflected through the vast, although undocumented, number of schools across South Africa, such as Inyoni, which do not offer History as an independent subject for students to take until their matric year. The majority of schools not offering History as a senior subject are those with a predominantly (if not entirely) black student body whereas the enrolment of History at more affluent schools remains stable. For schools that do not offer History as an independent subject, it falls under the subject ‘Social Science’ that is compulsory for students to take until Grade Nine. Social Science is a product of OBE, and combines History and Geography. Unless a student had the inclination and the school was able to support them in taking History post Grade Nine, they would be provided with only a rudimentary his torical basis. This means that, particularly in the context of rural townships, students can complete their schooling without a solid grasp of what apartheid was and how they are located within its legacy.

While matric students displayed little to no animosity towards white people, several of my post-matric participants expressed an awareness of how their race and rural upbringing had positioned them at a disadvantage in relation to their white peers. There are several reasons why the post-matric group may have presented a counter-narrative to the post-matric group. The first is that they were older and increased life exposures may have taught them about the lingering injustices of ‘history’

in a way that the relatively sheltered environments of the school and the township did not. Another reason is that, having built a relationship with me which had begun several years prior to my fieldwork, this was the group that was more comfortable talking to me about sensitive topics.

Four out of eight post-matrics I spent time with spoke to me about how they felt the effects of apartheid negatively on their lives, with Morris even going so far as to tell me that ‘apartheid is still there’ and we just do not talk about it because it is too painful to acknowledge. He discuss ed this with me at length in an interview.

‘Most black people think that white people are better than black people because they have cars, they have beautiful houses, they live in towns while African people live in rural houses where there is no water. White people are more educated and when blacks see white people they see things they will never have, they see things they will never achieve, things that they can only achieve through white people. Most parents come from rural areas and go to the suburbs to work for the white people… that makes us feel white people are more clever than blacks. And according to me, white people do understand life more than black people. The only thing that black people think about most of the time is having fun and they do not think about the future, they think only about the present. When I have money, I want to spend it now. When I have money, the only thing that comes to mind is expensive clothes, liquor or partying, things like that, while white people think of investing their money in certain things which will make a profit for them, which will help them in the future, black people just think of the present.

This passage speaks to several of the themes discussed in this thesis so far. Echoing the findings of Chapter Six, Morris notes how black people have been positioned as ‘rural’ and may desire to move to ‘towns’ and acquire the beautiful houses and possessions associated with white rather than black lives. He touches on the affective intensity of race discussed in this chapter, whereby the realisation that it is typically black people who work for white people fuels a belief in white superiority and black subordination. Yet while Morris indicated a greater political awareness than the views expressed by the majority of my matric participants, he too shared a belief in black inferiority, in which white people ‘understand life’ better than black people and thus, black people are partly to blame for their seeming lack of success. He constructs black people as hedonistic, in ways that resemble the moral discourses that Skeggs (2012: 278) highlights in her discussion of the hedonism often associated with working class lives. This demonstrates how affect intertwines with cultural circuits of value as some people get marked out as disgusting and others as exemplifying modern virtue (Ahmed, 2004).