Race and Identity in Schools: Young South Africans Engaging with a Changing Environment

by Oupa Makhalemele

With Facilitation Report

by Brian Molewa

Race and Citizenship in Transition Series, 2005.

Oupa Makhalemele is a Researcher in the Transitional Justice Programme at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation.

Brian Molewa is a Community Facilitator in the Transitional Justice Programme.

Acknowledgements

This report is one in a series of products in the Race and Citizenship Series. Thank you to the Ford Foundation, Development Cooporation Ireland and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation for generously funding this report and the series.

We are grateful to all the learners who took part in this project and to the schools that so generously hosted us: JG Strydom (now renamed Diversity High), MH Joosub, Reasoma and Westbury High Schools.

The rest of the Race and Reconciliation Project Team: Bronwyn Harris, Brian Molewa and Nahla Valji, made a key contribution towards the success of this project. Brian Molewa gave hours of his enthusiastic and empathetic energy to the project as facilitator. Bronwyn Harris gave leadership, encouragement and guidance throughout the project. This report owes its readable status and some useful insights to Harris and Valji's editorial comments, for which I am grateful. Any shortcomings in this report are the result of my fallibility.

We also had the privilege of securing the help of Noor Nieftagodien, a historian who helped our learners conceptualise oral history as a tool to do research. He also played the role of coaching in the writing of this research report. Serame Masitha patiently helped with the layout. Several staff members at the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation lent their support and expertise to the fulfilment of our project. These include in alphabetical order: Millan Atam, Yvette Geyer, Alice Kgotleng, Moloko Malakalaka, Milicent Maroga, Ereshnee Naidu, Xoliswa Ntintili, Thuto Semoko, Shobna Sonpar, Tracy Vienings and Bheki Zulu.

We dedicate this report to the memory of Bheki Zulu: friend; youth worker; a great individual whose life exemplified the resilience young people in South Africa need in order to take us to a truly just future.

Contents Race and Citizenship in Transition Series Race and Identity in Schools: Young South Africans engaging with a changing environment by Oupa Makhalemele Introduction        Objective        Methodology        A note on the term 'race' Contextual background    Transformation in education    Education for segregation    Desegregation vs. Integration       Insular cultural pluralism       Cultural assimilation       Modified cultural pluralism (Multiculturalism)       Anti-racism Findings    Identity       Racialised violence       Racial dynamics in classroom discussions       Class       Legacy of internalised oppression       Religion, culture and identity       Patriarchy and family       Identity and the school    Citizenship    Reconciliation       Racial integration: is it happening? Gaps and Recommendations    Facilitation – include minority voices    Recommendations    Why do learners leave state schools?    Failure to make connections between the present and the past Conclusions References Facilitator's Report by Brian Molewa Introduction Project Features    Identifying the schools    Launch: the Constitution Hill Workshop    Eight-week Programme    RRP Camp Workshop Evaluation       Response rate       Themes discussed       Activities       What worked well or not?       Facilitators       Have your views changed?       Would you like this project to be taken further? Process Issues    Socio-economic Profile    Gender    Racism in schools    Sample selection Concluding remarks and recommendations    Rollout    Refining the notion of difference and diversity    Evaluation Annexure 1: Constitution Hill Workshop Programme    Objectives    Narrative Report on Proceedings    Who am I? Nahla's Story Annexure 2: Synopsis of eight-week programme    Week 1       Introductions and Identity       Ground Rules       Facilitator's outcome for Week 1    Week 2       Report back and Identity       Homework       Facilitator's outcome for Week 2    Week 3       Oral History and Citizenship       Facilitator's outcome for Week 3    Week 4       Citizenship       My Identity       Facilitator's outcome for Week 4    Week 5       Citizenship       Facilitator's outcome for Week 5    Week 6       Reconciliation       Facilitator's outcome for Week 6    Week 7       Reconciliation       Facilitator's outcome for Week 7    Week 8       Conclusion       Facilitator's outcome for Week 8 Annexure 3: Synopsis of RRP Youth Camp    Day 1       Arrival, room allocations and registration       Supper    Day 2    Day 3 Annexure 4: Youth and the Challenge of Racism by Noor Nieftagodien    Race and Racism in the new South Africa    Apartheid and Racial Discrimination    What is Race?    Identity    Labels

The Race and Citizenship in Transition Series¹

Bronwyn Harris, Nahla Valji, Brandon Hamber and Carnita Ernest

Race and citizenship are extremely complex concepts. In post-apartheid South Africa, they find expression on many different levels, including identity, conflict, nationalism, history, politics and inter-personal relationships. They occupy a spectrum ranging from everyday practices and interactions, to formal political and macro-economic forces. They also overlap with notions of reconciliation, justice and reparation, and, although they are separate notions with different histories, they overlap with each other. This creates an added dimension of complexity. Both race and citizenship can be (and commonly are) articulated and/or silenced to serve particular interests. Both can also feed into certain forms of violence, including xenophobia and racially motivated hate crime. Any analysis of race and citizenship must therefore acknowledge the complexity of their expression, representation and impact. Such complexity in the South African context must be assessed in relation to the country's apartheid history, as well as the processes of reconciliation best captured by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

Apartheid created race as a mechanism for violence. Race, in and of itself, was the social and psychological reality through which repression and violence functioned. Racism was institutionalised, legalised and internalised. South Africans saw the world in 'black' and 'white' terms and violence was commonly used to maintain this status quo. However, during the Mandela era (1994-1999), a new vocabulary emerged to describe the social order. This vocabulary spoke of nationhood, unity, racial harmony and reconciliation. South Africa was described as a 'rainbow nation'. Reference to race entered a sensitive and delicate terrain. This was a positive attempt to give South Africans a new language for speaking about – and to - each other. But, at the same time, it rendered the real, often violent, consequences of race invisible. In the Mandela era, there was little national debate on how race had influenced past human rights violations. There was also little recognition that race continues to shape identity and interactions – violent or not – within the present.

By contrast, the Mbeki era (1999-ongoing) has been characterised by a 'return to race'. This is partly a consequence of different presidential styles and roles – while Mandela had to stress forgiveness and underplay racial issues in order to consolidate a peaceful (and at times precarious) transition, Mbeki, as he stated in his 'two nations speech', has had to deal with economic inequality rooted in past racial practices. Additionally, the 'return to race' has been forced upon the society by violence: through the actions of white extremists like the Boeremag, as well as less political cases of racist hatred. Less violent expressions of/about race have also re-entered popular and political discourse: in 2000, the Human Rights Commission held hearings into racism in the media, and, in 2001, South Africa hosted the World Conference against Racism, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance.

Although race can be read across these two discrete eras - 1994-1999 and 1999-ongoing - it is important not to oversimplify or reduce the differences to how race has been articulated. Despite a general 'return to race' post-1999, there have been numerous contradictions and striking silences on the issue; for example, within the realm of violence and conflict, as well as Mbeki's own discourse (in 1996, he gave his inclusive 'I am an African' speech, which contrasted with his 'two nations' speech in 1999, but at the opening of parliament in 2001, he seemed to discard the two nations analogy in favour of a 'united' South Africa, irrespective of race). Also, while issues of race have partially emerged in the Mbeki era, the notion of reconciliation – particularly racial reconciliation - has become increasing invisible. The TRC finally completed its work in March 2003. Many have interpreted this as the end of South Africa's reconciliation process. However, incidents of racial prejudice, intolerance and violence, both within South Africa and internationally, suggest that the TRC was just the beginning and not the end of a sorely needed social dialogue about racial reconciliation.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)

South Africa did not 'invent' the truth commission. Since 1974 there have been more than twenty-five truth commissions around the world. But it was the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that captured the world's attention. This is partly due to international interest in the fight against apartheid. Also, the TRC was the largest and best resourced commission, and it was afforded extensive media coverage, both domestically as well as internationally. This ensured that the world was exposed to the Commission, and the openness of the process meant that the violence of the past could no longer be denied. The South African model also attracted scrutiny because it promised an alternative way of peacefully resolving entrenched difference through the unique 'truth for amnesty'² deal upon which it was premised. Consequently, the notion of using a truth commission to deal with political conflict has gained momentum and many countries are now holding their own Commissions.

TRC Chairperson Archbishop Desmond Tutu said that without the compromises made during the negotiations to ensure majority rule in South Africa, the country would have gone up in flames. From this perspective it follows that the agreement by the African National Congress (ANC) to grant amnesty to perpetrators of apartheid violence was a pragmatic choice. Amnesty was the price, albeit a costly one for victims, for saving the innumerable lives that would have been lost if the conflict had continued. However, unlike in most transitional countries to date, amnesty in South Africa was neither blanket nor automatic. Conditions applied to the South African amnesty and the TRC was the vehicle for this process.

The TRC process began in December 1995 and finished in March 2003, when the Commission handed over the final 2 volumes of its 7 volume report. 7 116 people applied for amnesty. Almost 22 000 people came forward and told how they were victimised under apartheid. The TRC made a number of recommendations to the South African government regarding financial and symbolic reparations, issues of justice and ways to address relationships between South Africans. It is these issues that still need to be grappled with and addressed.

Evaluating the TRC

The public acknowledgement of past violations was perhaps the TRC's greatest success; as the brutal horrors of apartheid found their way, via the media, into the living rooms of every South African. An undeniable historical record has been created. However, apartheid history still remains contested and fraught with racialised interpretations; for example, many white South Africans continue to deny the impact of apartheid and many dismissed the TRC itself as a 'political witch-hunt' (cf. Thiessen, 1996³). The role of the TRC - in both writing history and as an historical process itself – demands ongoing scrutiny.

At a narrower, more immediate level, a minority of victims did uncover suppressed truths about the past. In some cases, missing bodies have been located, exhumed and respectfully buried. For others, the confessions of perpetrators have brought answers to previously unsolved political crimes – crimes, which the courts, due to expense and inefficiencies, may never have tried. However, for many, the TRC began a process that it was unable to complete. Many of the victims who went before the TRC, with the hope that their case would be investigated, feel let down and no closer to the truth than before they publicly told of their suffering. Irrespective of the feasibility of investigating every case, victims' high expectations of the TRC have been dashed, and in their eyes, this has undermined its credibility.

Justice also remains a burning issue. Politicians may be able to justify the exchange of formal justice for peace, but it was difficult for victims to watch while the perpetrators received amnesty. Not only were many perpetrators 'let off the hook', victims feel let down and disappointed by the government's response to the TRC. Regarding financial reparations, the Commission recommended that the government should pay those victims identified through the TRC process R3 billion, in annual installments over a 6 year period (this total figure represents 0.001% of the country's annual R300 billion budget, which translates into R136 000 per individual). However, the South African government has only agreed to pay R30 000 per individual, in a once off payment. The Commission also recommended that business and other apartheid beneficiaries should pay a once-off wealth tax and that the country's inherited apartheid debt (which accounts for approximately 20% of the government's annual budget) should be restructured in order to free up money for development and redistribution. Again, the government chose to ignore these recommendations. This has left victims feeling betrayed. It also does not bode well for long-term reconciliation. As CSVR researchers, Polly Dewhirst & Nahla Valji (2003) note,

The 'miracle' of a new SA is hardly sustainable if it is built without restoring the dignity and humanity of the majority of its citizens, nor if it fails to address the economic inequalities which fuel social conflict.⁴

There are also debates about the broader merits of the TRC. At the very least the reconciliation project, with the TRC at the helm, has brought South Africa through the transition period with relative political stability. The humanist approach of Mandela and Tutu brought compassion to a brutalised country. Despite the horrors revealed by the TRC, glimmers of humanity shone through and provided hope for the future.

However for some, despite the merits of the TRC, 'reconciliation' is merely a euphemism for the compromises made during political negotiations - compromises that ensured continued white control of the economy. From this perspective, reconciliation is meaningless without structural change. A related, more cynical view is that the rapprochement between the old and new regimes was a strategy to consolidate a new black elite under the banner of reconciliation.

Many argue that the TRC missed the bigger picture by defining victims only as those who suffered intentional violence. Because the TRC focused on victims of gross human rights violations, such as torture and murder – it did not include the 'ordinary' victims of apartheid – the millions of South Africans who suffered from land removals, forced displacements, the migrant-labour system, Bantu education etc. As such the TRC did not engage directly with the institutionalised, structured ways in which racist policies affected and victimised people on a daily basis. Those who suffered more broadly from the economic ravages of apartheid and were not victimized directly by political violence were excluded from the TRC. An important question to ask is: what mechanisms do those, excluded from the apartheid state and then from the TRC, have for defining and consolidating a sense of citizenship in the 'new' South Africa?

Similarly, the degree to which the TRC used race as an explanatory variable in its understanding of the abuses it investigated remains questionable. In some cases, 'race' was generally collapsed into 'political motive', as exemplified by the amnesty decisions in the Amy Biehl, Chris Hani and St James' Massacre cases. However, this was done inconsistently and the relationship between race and politics was not clearly defined. Overall, the reconciliation process engaged less with 'black and white' issues then with inconsistent 'political' definitions of perpetrators and victims. This has had the after-effect of divorcing race, and racial identity, from the violence of the past. It similarly keeps race separate from understandings of violence in the present.

A related point is that, as a transitional justice mechanism, the TRC accepted and legitimated certain explanations for the violence of the past. In this way, it has played a key role in influencing the society's moral reactions to violence. This is specifically evident in the area of amnesty. The question needs to be asked, despite the compromises made to set up the TRC, has amnesty undermined South African citizens' sense of morality? Has it contributed to ongoing violence and impunity? Has it impacted upon how different race groups see each other? There have been various evaluations of the TRC, but none have taken into account the ways in which it has explicitly addressed race, morality and citizenship as components of past human rights violations and factors in contemporary social relations. It is precisely these questions that the Race and Citizenship in Transition Series has sought to address.

The different perspectives surrounding the TRC demonstrate the complexity of dealing with oppression and violence – and how past events shape the process of reconciliation.

The TRC was not alone in its attempts to build reconciliation in South Africa. A number of other institutions were set up to deal with the legacy of the past. These included for example the Land Claims Court and the Human Rights Commission. Other structures, such as the Independent Complaints Directorate, were set up to monitor ongoing abuses by the police. However the degree to which these institutions, and the TRC can be said to have consolidated reconciliation and effected transformation can, at best, be described as ongoing but desperately incomplete. There are ongoing police abuses, young people still express feelings of marginalisation, racism and racist incidents continue to take place, and the poor have not substantially benefited from the changes in the country.

Levels of Reconciliation

The process of reconciliation can be said to operate on a number of levels, i.e. the political, community and individual levels.

At the political level, reconciliation has been embodied in the compromises that lead to a political peace. This process can be said to be broadly successful, as it has brought political stability to South Africa.

At the community level, despite some successes by the TRC, reconciliation is largely incomplete, with many of the old racial and political divisions remaining in place. This is evidenced through high levels of residential segregation between black and white South Africans residentially. It is also expressed between different groups divided along political affiliation, such as ANC and IFP supporters, and xenophobic hostility between South Africans and foreigners, particularly those from elsewhere in Africa.

At the individual level, the question is far more complex and is bound to how individuals feel in relation to the process of reconciliation. Many individual victims feel that their needs have not been met by the TRC. At the same time, many of those who benefited from apartheid are still denying their complicity status. This is linked to the many who refuse any responsibility for reparations and redressing the past. There is also an expectation that the next generation will somehow begin with a 'clean slate' (Oakley-Smith⁵). The ongoing impact of a racist and violent past continues to play out through incidents of racist hate crimes and expressions of xenophobia. Hostility towards foreigners, particularly black Africans, commonly results in violence and is spurred on by overly zealous views of nationalism in the 'new' South Africa. In addition, many South Africans are finding themselves questioning their role in the country. This could be linked to the many young people who are leaving the country as they feel there is no future for them in South Africa.

A Crisis of Citizenship

We would like to suggest that there is a 'crisis of citizenship' in South Africa at present, which threatens the genuine reconciliation begun through processes such as the TRC. This crisis manifests itself in ordinary people asking where they belong in the new society. This crisis suggests that there is much work that needs to be done to consolidate the process of reconciliation and a sense of inclusive citizenship. The Race and Citizenship in Transition Series is a space for exploring this citizenship crisis, along with the related issues of race, reconciliation, violence and identity in South Africa. Key issues to be examined include:

• Racially motivated violence. To what extent does race continue to impact on patterns and trends of violence? How relevant is the concept 'hate crime' to the South African context? What challenges does the criminal justice system face in dealing with racially motivated violence?
• Race and the TRC. As a key instrument of transition, how did the TRC engage with the racism of South Africa's past? How has this impacted on the telling of history and contemporary understandings of racial relations?
• Lessons from Guatemala. There are many parallels between Guatemala and South Africa: historically, both countries were based on racist political systems, which resulted in racialised inequality and conflict. Both countries set up truth commissions to address their pasts and engage with citizenship in the future. Both countries continue to be marred by violence. What lessons can South Africa learn from the Guatemalan transition?
• Young people and race. How do young people conceive of citizenship, identity and racial reconciliation? The views expressed by the younger generation provide a means by which to evaluate the degree to which South African society has, or has not, transformed; as well as the longer-term influences of transitional processes.
• Institutional transformation and the legacy of racism. What recommendations and findings did the TRC make about transformation in the South African Police Services, schools, and efforts to address racism in South African institutions?

The Race and Citizenship in Transition Series is funded by the Ford Foundation, Development Cooperation Ireland and the Charles Stewart-Mott Foundation.

Series Editors

Bronwyn Harris
Nahla Valji

 

Introduction

This report is based a research that the Race and Reconciliation Project (RRP) team embarked upon during 2003 in order to establish how young South Africans are engaging with issues of identity, citizenship and reconciliation, ten years into the country's democracy. One core area of focus was how, if at all, instruments of history, justice and relationship-building, such as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), have impacted upon high school learners in relation to these themes.

Over a period of seven months the RRP team made weekly visits to four schools based in Johannesburg in the Gauteng Province, where we engaged learners in Grades eight, nine and ten in activities and conversations on their perspectives on identity, citizenship and reconciliation.

We used the three key themes – identity, citizenship and reconciliation – to begin conversations around transition in the schools and in the country in general from the point of view of young people. The concept of 'race' was the cross-cutting theme throughout these discussions.

A participant observer methodology was used, whereupon we made regular interventions during discussions which covered this range of topics. These topics included xenophobia and other forms of exclusions that this group of young South Africans experience both as victims or perpetrators thereof.

Our project targeted youth for particular reasons. Many analysts are hopeful that youth, in contrast to older generations, will more easily and successfully achieve national reconciliation. For example, research has shown that one of the obstacles to achieving the goal of reconciliation in South Africa is the refusal of most adult whites to accept that they have benefited from apartheid and therefore their failure to see the need to make concrete contributions towards redressing the imbalances caused by apartheid (Leggasick, 2002; Macdonald, 2000). Also, adults can be stuck in their positions. Black⁶ adults for example, having experienced first hand the pain of apartheid, may tend to be less inclined to forgive white people. White adults on the other hand may harbour a sense of guilt for apartheid, having perpetuated and benefited from the system. There are similarly those who refuse to change their views about racial segregation, and continue to resist efforts to foster reconciliation.

By contrast young South Africans did not experience apartheid first hand, and live in an environment that allows for interracial contact that is far greater than their predecessors. For these reasons they are a good constituency through which to gauge the future success of integration. At the same time, since South Africa's past has left residues which impact on the present day society, young South Africans are a vehicle through which a break with the country's divisive past can be facilitated. A proper appreciation of the long term impact of apartheid and colonial rule can, we believe, open young South Africans up to the possibility of taking mutual ownership of the country's future, by facilitating dialogue about their history, differences, common goals and aspirations.

Objective

Our school work was a pilot, sub-project within the Race and Reconciliation Project (RRP). RRP set out to analyse and evaluate the impact of structures such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on issues of race and reconciliation, racial identity and racial violence during the country's transitional period. Our ultimate aim was to develop intervention programmes for preventing racial violence and enhancing constructive feelings of citizenship. The overall objective of the project has been to consider the implications of changing dynamics of race, citizenship and violence in post-apartheid South Africa. A more nuanced appreciation of these dynamics can help in the development of policy and intervention strategies aimed at promoting reconciliation, entrenching a human rights culture, and preventing violence. Our specific aim was to design and implement a pilot intervention programme that would focus on the ways in which youth deal with the apartheid past and how they integrate this into current understandings of reconciliation, citizenship and violence.

Our decision to work with youth in high schools was informed by a few considerations. Firstly, we were interested to find out how these young people were experiencing the changes in education as these were taking shape. We worked with learners in Grades Eight to Ten (previously known as Standards Six to Eight), who are between 14 and 16 years old. Given that South Africa had its first democratic elections in 1994, these learners never experienced apartheid education in its raw sense, i.e. before education was overhauled through legislation to be in line with the democratic principles of equality and dignity for all. We shall discuss the reforms in education later in the report.

Secondly, the high school environment is a useful site for studying youth identity. This is because the age group of the learners is the period in their lives where they begin to form their own identity. Also, given that identity formation is context bound (Dawson, 2003) the school is a critical space in shaping identity among youth. On average youth spend one third of their time in high school (Dawson, 2003).

Thirdly, we contend that schools in South Africa are both sites of memory as well as sites for change. This is because, as with many other facets of life in apartheid-era South Africa, schools were designed to express and entrench an exclusionary ideology which informed school policies and practices (Christie, 1985, cited in Dawson, 2003). We shall discuss the issue of schools as conduits of apartheid ideology later. In the present milieu of social transformation in South Africa the school again assumes a site of social construction, this time the goal being to encourage inclusiveness.

Methodology

Our research method involved a qualitative appraisal of young people's experiences of changes taking place at the school and in communities in which they live and study. From an initial list of fifteen schools within Johannesburg, we eventually selected four schools in which to run the project (see attached Facilitator's Report for details about the selection process). The four schools were deliberately chosen for their different backgrounds and demographic profiles:

School A: is situated in Soweto and has an exclusively African student-body;

School B: is situated in Lenasia in a predominantly Indian working class suburb with a mixture of Indian, African and colored learners;

School C: is situated in South Hills, a former white working class area with a mixture of African, white, Indian and colored learners;

School D: is situated in Westbury, a colored area with a population of African and colored learners.

We had also envisaged working with a school with a high concentration of refugee learners. This was because we wanted to glean the learners' experiences of going to school amongst/or as foreign learners in the context of xenophobic attitudes that are prevalent in South Africa (Harris, 2003). Unfortunately the school's participation was conditional on the project engaging with all classes. This was not possible with only two facilitators and as a result the school was dropped from the project but we recommend a process that includes refugee learners within the future.

We used a participant observer methodology. The project team facilitated discussions and debates in the classrooms. Care was taken not to be too prescriptive in our comments, the aim being to elicit as many opinions and views from the learners as possible in a non-threatening environment. However, whenever we felt necessary, such as when debate became heated or particularly negative attitudes were being expressed, we made interventions. In these interventions we would challenge broadly held stereotypes and enforce the code of conduct as agreed at the beginning of the process.⁷

We recorded our sessions and made transcripts of these recordings. The products of the recordings were useful during the stage of writing the research report. They augmented the notes taken during the sessions and created raw material to use for the research report. Without transcripts it would have been difficult to recall how the discussions had transpired. This is particularly so because we visited four schools per week and collected a huge volume of information. In addition, one of the schools could only give us access to the learners after school hours. We committed to arranging refreshments for this group and transport back home. The logistical responsibilities for this added to the work we needed to do in addition to preparing for the sessions. It would have been difficult therefore to recall the classroom discussions without the aid of recording.

We chose an oral history method as a useful tool for the learners to collect stories of their schools' and communities' histories. An introductory session on oral history was given to the learners at the start of the project by Noor Nieftagodien, a historian based at the University of the Witwatersrand (see Facilitator's Report for information about the initial workshop). The presentation showed participants that there are many stories that can be told about one event. It also helped learners to appreciate the fact that some of the rich stories that form part of our history are stored in people's memories. Memory is an important tool that can be tapped into when documenting history. Similarly the shortfalls of oral history were also discussed, such as the simple fact that memory is not perfect. It is therefore always critical to corroborate stories told and to present findings in a way that indicates that the events related are people's subjective accounts of the said events.

A note on the term 'race'

Although we use the term 'race' in this report, we are mindful of the fact that this is a problematic term and that the idea of racial difference has no basis in science. Racism, being based on the idea of different races, has however become part of the reality of much of the world we live in today. In South Africa racism became a key feature of society with the advent of colonialism, first by the Dutch and then the British (Nieftagodien, 2003). When the Nationalist Party came to power in 1948 they consolidated racial discrimination by introducing racial-based discriminatory laws. The effect of this history in South Africa has been that one's 'race' determined one's position in life. (Dawson, 2003, p. 6) Acknowledging this reality is not, however, an endorsement of the idea that there are different races in South Africa, or elsewhere; rather using apartheid's racial categories is a useful tool to understand how race is embedded in people's identities, and lived experiences.

Contextual background

This section will discuss the context within which changes in schools are taking place. It will sketch out the historical and contextual background to help illuminate some of the challenges at play as schools grapple with these changes.

Transformation in education

Transformation in the education sector was formally legislated in the 1996 South African Schools Act (SASA). In the preamble the Act declares that South Africa

[R]equires a new national system for schools which will redress past injustices in educational provision, provide an education of progressively high quality for all learners and in so doing lay a strong foundation for the development of all our people's talents and capabilities, advance the democratic transformation of society, combat racism and sexism and all other forms of unfair discrimination and intolerance .… 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. (South African Schools Act, 1996, available online).

This Act repealed all apartheid legislation pertaining to schools, codified compulsory education for children between the ages of 7 and 15 and provided for a unified schooling system (Vally and Dalamba, 1999).

Since the early 1990s there has been a sharp increase in the number of African learners enrolling into previously 'white', 'Indian' and 'coloured' schools. Table 1, drawn from the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) report by Vally and Dalamba (1999) on the desegregation of public schools, illustrates this increase.

Table 1: Percentage of Gauteng learners by 'race' groups

	Ex-DET* 'African' (A)				Ex-TED* 'White' (W)				Ex-HOR* 'Coloured' (C)				Ex-HOD* 'Indian' (I)
	A	W	C	I	A	W	C	I	A	W	C	I	A	W	C	I
Grade 1	100	0	0	0	16	75	2	6	9	0	91	0	61	0	22	17
All Grades	100	0	0	0	22	72	3	2	31	0	67	0	45	0	5	50

(Source: Gauteng Department of Education, 1996/1997, Annual School Survey, p. 39, 1997 figures, quoted in Vally and Dalamba, 1999)

* Under apartheid legislation different racial groups were assigned different education departments. DET – Department of Education and Training - Africans TED – Training and Education Department - Whites HOR – House of Representatives - Coloureds HOD – House of Delegates - Indians

As Table 1 illustrates, coloured, Indian and white learners formerly located within apartheid education departments have not moved to previously African-only public schools, whereas African and coloured learners have moved steadily to previously white and Indian public schools. Africans in particular have moved in great numbers to previously white, Indian and coloured schools. This is indicative of the history of education in South Africa where education for Africans was accorded the least resources and was fraught with numerous problems. Hence those parents who have the means have opted for schools in the formerly white, coloured and Indian suburbs for their children's education. While the focus of this report is not the racial enrolment into public schools, this data is illustrative of the trends that have developed, and tells of how schools previously shaped by an apartheid ethos have been forced, through recent legislation, to accommodate population groups with different cultural backgrounds.

Legislation alone was not adequate in order to bring about fundamental transformation of the schools. Issues such as the long history of an education policy designed with the intention to entrench and consolidate racially based hierarchies in public education have to be taken into account in order to devise policies that will bring about real change.

Education for segregation

When the Nationalist Party (NP) came to power in 1948 it introduced a slew of legislation whose primary aim was to foster segregation and arrange a pecking order of beneficiaries of state policies that favoured whites over blacks. Its education policy was built upon the foundations of Afrikaners' resistance to attempts at Anglicisation by the British which were at the centre of the South African Anglo-Boer War fought in 1899 – 1902 (Kallaway, 2002). Known as the Christian National Education (CNE) movement, this policy institutionalised the already segregated education system. In 1953 the Bantu Education Act removed education for blacks from missionary control and placed it under government control (Kallaway, 2002). A dual medium system was put in place, which catered for English and Afrikaans speakers. Although primary school education for Africans was taught in their mother tongue, much of their secondary education was delivered in either English or Afrikaans (Kallaway, 2002).

These were not the only defining characteristics of the new education policy. Government spending on black education was much lower compared to white education. This discrepancy persisted for much of apartheid's lifespan. For example in 1986 government spent R2 365 per capita for whites and R572 for Africans (Vally and Dalamba, 1999). Rural black education received even lower financial injection from government (Vally and Dalamba, 1999). This reflected the Nationalist Party's aims of fitting black people into subordinate positions in relation to the white population. Other factors contributed to educational inequality, such as poorly qualified teachers, overcrowding in classes, and the general demoralisation felt by teachers in African schools. Even amongst the 'black' groups, government encouraged unequal treatment, with Africans receiving the least resources compared to coloureds and Indians.

The new political dispensation in South Africa has given rise to a different discourse; one that breaks with a divisive past and in its place seeks to engender equality and mutual respect between 'races'. Schools are thus amongst a number of important 'testing sites' for such experimentation. The education legislation and the subsequent desegregation of schools should therefore be treated not as an end but a means to an end. In this context the legacy of the country's history ought to be acknowledged, such as the readiness, or willingness, amongst educators to work towards goals that are discordant with the ethos they have cultivated and worked within for decades.

Desegregation versus Integration

The acceptance of black learners into schools that they were previously barred from needs to be interrogated. Often the fact that black learners are enrolling into previously white-/coloured-/Indian- only schools is portrayed as an indicator of how well South Africa as a society has fared in terms of nurturing reconciliation and acknowledging diversity amongst youth of different racial and cultural backgrounds. However, when one examines the quality of this desegregation a different picture emerges. Desegregation on its own does not amount to integration.

The current attempts to infuse values of non-racism and human rights in schools present challenges to schools that are grappling with integration processes. Public schools in South Africa have historically been characterised by racial segregation. This means that the education systems here were vehicles of an exclusivist ideology. Geyer and Moat (2002) state that 'education systems, curricula and education methodologies convey a society's values to learners in a structured and planned manner' (p.14). This means that when responding to the new paradigm of inclusiveness, schools ought to take full stock of their respective ethos and practices. Some theories have been advanced to give typologies of different approaches to diversity in schools. These have been organised as: Insular Cultural Pluralism, Cultural Assimilation, Modified Cultural Pluralism (Multiculturalism), and Anti-Racism (Dawson, 2003).

Insular Cultural Pluralism

Insular Cultural Pluralism, states Marger (1994), generally refers to encouraging diversity while maintaining group boundaries (cited in Dawson, 2003). Dawson explains that 'this may be reinforced either through geographical separation or through residential segregation' (Dawson, 2003, p. 35). Legislatively, the physical separation of different 'racial groups' has been repealed for more than a decade. However, these apartheid patterns continue to largely persist, with the majority of the different racial groups remaining in their apartheid-era residential areas. Increasingly though, schools are moving away from this kind of separate co-existence.

Cultural Assimilation

Cultural Assimilation refers to the idea that schools expect the diverse minority groups to assimilate the existing cultural traits, values and ways of life of the dominant group (Dawson, 2003). Geyer and Moat state that 'when people from groups that do not conform to this racial and religious profile enter such schools, their cultures and belief systems are ignored and possibly undermined and ridiculed' (Geyer and Moat, 2002. p. 14).

Modified Cultural Pluralism (Multiculturalism)

Dawson notes that the Modified Cultural Pluralism approach is premised on the acknowledgement of socio-cultural diversity of learners (Dawson, 2003). This approach encourages learners to be proud of their heritage. The school's curriculum should also reflect the diversity of its learners. On their own, however, such measures are inadequate in fostering a multi-cultural ethos. Dawson suggests that 'teaching practices and social interaction within and beyond the classroom should also embody multicultural principles' (Dawson, 2003, p. 37). These could be achieved through such methods as inviting speakers from diverse backgrounds and taking the school to excursions that expose them to different cultures (Dawson, 2003).

Anti-Racism

Although more progressive than the first two approaches, the Modified Cultural Pluralism paradigm is criticised on the basis that it could reinforce racial stereotypes. This becomes possible especially when learners are required to express their different cultural identities, which presumes racial homogeneity among different 'racial groups'. Instead an Anti-Racism paradigm is suggested. This is the view that urges schools to confront the fact that racism does exist and it should be constantly challenged. It sees racism as an assumption of the superiority of one race over other inferior races (Dawson, 2003).

Part of the anti-racist perspective in education therefore involves equipping learners, teachers, parents and all members of staff with the tools to understand and recognise racism in all its forms, particularly its most subtle and covert manifestations, and to use these tools in the eradication of racism. (Vally and Dalamba, 1999, p. 35; Macdonald, Bhavnani, Khan and John, 1989, p. 347, quoted in Dawson, 2003. p. 38)

Of particular relevance to contemporary South Africa is the anti-racism paradigm's pre-occupation with the insidious and pervasive nature of racism. Refusing to see racism as a white-on-black phenomenon, the anti-racism paradigm encourages people to question their own assumptions of superiority of their ways and inferiority of the others regardless of race. This is relevant in the current environment of xenophobia in South Africa. Xenophobia was a much talked about issue in our study. Being a widely held practice amongst black South Africans especially against black foreigners from other African countries, xenophobia has caused learners to consider this issue in-depth.

The current desegregation of schools is in urgent need of careful management. Schools ought to be awake to the challenges that come with opening their doors to learners from other races, religious groups and cultures. The SAHRC study on desegregation in South African schools summarises this imperative thus:

Many research studies describe desegregation as a mechanical process which involves simply establishing the physical proximity of members of different groups in the same school, without interrogating the quality of the contact. (Vally and Dalamba, 1999, p. 22)

In the SAHRC study the majority of respondents in ex- TED (white); HOR (coloured); and HOD (Indian) schools answered 'no' to the question: is there racial integration at the school? Often the respondents noted that integration only happened in classrooms, and that once outside the classroom people grouped themselves along racially linked cliques of friends (Vally and Dalamba, 1999).

One concern is that schools demand that new population groups assimilate into the school's existing (and thereby racialised) culture and ethos. The effect of this approach is that learners of other racial and cultural backgrounds trade off their identities for a place in these 'hosting'⁸ schools.

Adding to this dilemma is the question of many decades of stereotypes and inequalities that have shaped the way society (including schools) views people from different racial, religious and cultural backgrounds. This is the context within which our project sought to understand young people's experiences of transformation in schools.

Findings

In this section we shall discuss and analyse the findings that came out of the activities run throughout our project. For a week-by-week account of the facilitated process, please see the attached Facilitator's Report and Annexures. For the purpose of the analysis, the findings are organised in terms of the three main themes around which we facilitated the introductory workshop, youth camp and 8-week in-school process. These are the themes of identity, citizenship and reconciliation and they proved to hold great significance in the daily experience of the learners in the school environment as well as in broader society. The school environment alone was not sufficient a 'laboratory' to test how learners perceived these concepts. It was important to also investigate how factors 'external' to the schools were impacting on the learners' perceptions on these themes.

It is important to reiterate the fact that our strategy had been to rather let the learners express their perceptions regarding these issues. We were careful not to be too prescriptive in our facilitation of the discussions on these themes.

Identity

In order to get the learners to start thinking about and engaging with the issues of identity, the facilitators presented questions to help the learners through the process. The questions were:

1. What shapes your identity?
2. How do we define our identity?
3. How do you express your identity?
4. How do you see yourself?

Questions were also asked about how the learners saw themselves vis-à-vis their immediate environment both in the school and outside. This was informed by our observation that the school environment alone was not enough to understand the factors that shape learners' sense of self. This external environment is manifested in different forms, including race, class, religion and culture. We organised discussions around such aspects through asking these questions:

1. How do others see you?
2. How do you see your future?
3. What are your hopes and your fears?

In terms of what shapes their identity the learners cited, among other factors, personality, abilities, values, strength nationality, or religion. 'I am a beautiful black girl!' said one girl. Another identified herself as 'a Muslim living in South Africa'. One learner said she defined her identity in terms of age and physical appearance, as being a beautiful young girl, and another mentioned clothes as a defining characteristic of her identity.

These statements support Marcelle Dawson's argument that:

At times 'race' is important, and at other times, in different settings, religion, language or age, for example, become more significant identity markers used by learners in their daily interactions. (Dawson, 2003)

As shall be shown in later discussions about our conversations with the learners, aspects other than race were raised as important 'markers of identity'. Race, however, remained an overarching identity marker. Much of the experiences that the learners related to us were cast in a racialised backdrop. This is not surprising given that South Africa is only ten years into a non-racial democracy. With race having been reified by law, and people's daily lives having been affected accordingly, it will take a long process of interrogation and self-reflection before a significant shift is made in this regard.

Racialised violence?

Most African learners in our project who attend formerly white, coloured or Indian schools commute from the townships daily. The trip often takes an average of thirty minutes to an hour each way. Because of this, and owing to the country's history of racial separation, African learners are seen as outsiders in the communities where these schools are situated. In one of these schools learners said there were sporadic physical attacks on African learners by coloured youth who see themselves as belonging to a different race in the community surrounding the school. The attackers, local youth out of school, often attacked the African learners as they made their way to the taxis to travel home.

In another school the apparent racial attacks seem to have been sparked off by such things as African boys going out with girls of a different race. A case in point was when the white members of the community that surrounds this school attacked African learners. These kinds of conflicts are complex, and they cannot be explained in simplistic terms. It would be naïve, however, in the context of South Africa with its racial history, to discount race as at least partly responsible for such attacks. One learner lamented:

There is some other problem; actually, coloured boys at this school are quite jealous man. When you ask a coloured girl out, and then she goes out with you, then after school there must be a fight… Ten of them against one, just for a girl. And when they ask a black girl out, we don't go after them. Why?

This highlights the issue of the continuities and transmutations of violence in post-apartheid South Africa. Bronwyn Harris points out that although characterised as 'post-conflict South Africa', in our society 'we still hear of racial polarization and hatred within communities' (2003, p.1). This problem of racialised violence, together with other criminal activities in and around the schools, was highlighted as particularly worrying by learners of all racial groups attending these schools. Another learner shared this:

To me it says that the community is bad… and it's got a bad influence on the kids too. For instance there is a primary school up the road and if the kids see that they might do it one day, fight against each other… yes, we had a big fight here on Friday, people came with cars and all to fight against the [African] children of the school… but then they took it somewhere else and they went away with the fight… but that was a bad thing because we are also afraid of the coloureds, the coloureds have guns… it's not that funny because we saw the gun and we all ran into the school… all of us.

It is important to note that the learner was making a generalisation about 'coloureds', that 'they have guns', inferring that it was 'a coloured thing' to have a gun. Again, even though the learner attends a school in a 'coloured area' and thus has the opportunity to interact with 'coloured' learners, that has not happened to the extent that the learner could move beyond the stereotype that the carrying of the gun in the fight is not necessarily a typical thing in the area.

Racial dynamics in classroom discussions

Another noteworthy but not altogether surprising aspect was the manner in which the learners of a racial minority (i.e. numerical minority) in a class tended to group together. Of concern was the tendency for the minority groups to keep quiet, even in the face of, or perhaps because of, scathing challenges towards people of their race by the majority group. As discussed in the section on the history of the schools, African learners have increasingly become a majority group in schools that were formerly designated for 'other' race groups. For our project, Africans were the majority population group in all but one 'integrated' school, which has a fifty-fifty split of African and coloured learners. By contrast, the school in the African township has a hundred percent African learner composition.

It is not easy to suggest exactly why this situation, of 'minority silence', played itself out. It could be that the learners of a minority racial group were either intimidated to speak out against the strongly held views of the African learners who were the majority in the group; or that they somehow harboured some sense of guilt for the things their racial group did to black people; or that the class did not provide a safe space for the learners to express their opinions freely. The following quote reveals some of the deeply felt feelings amongst learners which may not be necessarily expressed openly. Perhaps there is an unspoken agreement (by black and white learners) that there is a line that will not be crossed lest these feelings of anger are laid bare:

I think when we look back at the 1980s… remember those years. I think when we start looking at documentaries and read books about what happened, I think many of us become bitter to see what the Afrikaners used to do to us blacks or maybe the coloureds or the Indians. We have been oppressed too much. It is sad when you see footage from the past when a white boy, not even twenty years old, beating up a granny. It becomes very painful and it's very hard to forgive and reconcile. Even if it didn't happen to you, but you think you are also part of the African nation. So I think it is going to be very hard for us to reconcile and come to terms with what happened… It is very hard.

One learner said the following when we asked why there was so little apparent mixing of 'races' in the group:

[Y]ou can't just expect us to change the way we were before… you know like [finger snapping]. Because we haven't really reconciled yet… we haven't grouped together as human beings. Some of us are still called "them boertjies", some of us are still called "blacks" and some of us blacks are still called "kaffirs". It takes time.

Nevertheless, there is a possibility that our facilitation methods could have better allowed for minority views to be expressed, by creating a more enabling environment. In its current form, our approach might have allowed the more dominant participants to bully their way over the process and thus make it difficult for the quiet types in the groups to be forthcoming (see also Facilitator's Report).

Discussing the issue of race is fraught with emotions and never an easy one to facilitate, as shown by Nytagodien (2003) in his account of a Portland State University class on restitution in the context of claims for reparations in South Africa and the USA by apartheid victims and the descendants of slaves respectively. It is an environment that requires negotiation between participants (Nytagodien, 2003). Whilst we negotiated ground rules (see Facilitator's Report) to govern our conduct during the process at the beginning of our visits, often these rules were forgotten in the heat of the moment.

The changes in population demographics in schools make for interesting speculation. For example, today black learners constitute a large number of learners in schools that were previously white. According to learner accounts, the reason black learners have suddenly become the majority in schools situated in areas formerly out of bounds to blacks is in part due to the exodus of white learners, whose parents have opted to take them to private schools. When we asked them why, most learners said it was because the parents were not happy with having their children going to the same school as black children. The issue of the 'drop in standards' was also mentioned, with some learners claiming that parents felt that with the introduction of black learners in these schools the standards were 'bound to drop'. These are perceptions and explanations as given by learners who 'remain behind'. Although it fell outside the scope of our research, and was thus not further explored, exploring this issue with those who 'have left' would have enriched this research.

Class

Our survey of the socio-economic profile of the African learners reveals that those who attend these better-resourced schools are in a position to do so because their parents can afford the costs that accompany such a choice. In other cases parents make sacrifices in order to put their children in these schools, sometimes affording only the taxi fares and not the school fees. Many parents believe that formerly white schools are the next best option for quality education after private schools, which charge school fees that are beyond the means of these parents. Compared to formerly DET schools, formerly white schools are far better resourced and the educators in these schools are generally better qualified. Although South Africa is ten years into its democracy, and many efforts have been made to redress apartheid inequalities in education, the contrast between formerly white and formerly black schools are still largely unchanged, forcing parents into a situation where they send their children to schools outside townships.

Even in cases where the resource 'gap' is not as large between schools, perceptions and stereotypes about what comprises a 'better education' may still inform parents' decisions when choosing schools. To elucidate this point, we look to a public school situated in a middle-class area in Soweto. The school has a record of high pass rates; dedicated teachers and participative parents. Yet most of the learners that go to this school are not residents of this community, they commute from surrounding poorer areas. The area being middle-class means most parents who reside there can afford to take their children to private schools or government schools outside of the township (especially those in formerly white areas).

Whereas in the past black parents had limited choices in terms of which school their children could attend, black parents today can – legally and in principle - take their children to any school in the country. This has led to class, and less so race, being a key determinant in parents' choices for their children's education (Although as with most aspects of life in South Africa, race and class are often intertwined).

Concomitant to this are perceptions of 'standards'. Although we did not ask parents for their motivation in their choice of school for their children, one can infer that they feel that expensive private schools are better placed to give their children quality education than poorly resourced public schools.

This gives rise to a sense of class difference amongst learners, which is intertwined with race. For example, African and Indian learners in School B expressed resentment towards black learners attending a school that previously only catered for whites. They claimed that learners from a 'white town' think that they are better than them. At the same time, however, these same learners expressed a sense of being better off than their African township school-attending counterparts. The 'better off' sense was not just about resources. Rather, it also conveyed a sense of 'better than'. For example one learner said township schools produce poor results because African people do not have a work ethos, and that teachers and learners do not put effort into their work.

A coloured learner said the same about coloured people:

I think… last week I fought with this person at my mother's work. The thing is the people who are really trying to make a good life for themselves academically are blacks (by the term 'blacks' the learner here is actually referring to Africans). I'm speaking as a coloured, but we are lazy and we are not doing anything. If you go to universities you see the majority of blacks and whites and I'm impressed with blacks… we are not doing anything for ourselves.

In this way our participants demonstrated how the legacy of apartheid manifests itself through the perceptions about 'standards' and 'work ethos' and the way that learners of all races still position themselves and others on the 'race ladder'. However, there is a lack of awareness of the impact of South Africa's history on present circumstances. Thus there is no connecting the history of discrimination and that of apartheid's social engineering that produced these present day circumstances they complain about.

Legacy of internalised oppression

The point discussed above led us to contemplate about the continuation of racial stereotypes that remain largely unproblematised. The learners did not always make connections between their present circumstances and South Africa's recent history. Instead, they tended to individualise and racialise performance outside of the historical context of resource allocation. For example an African learner in School B said that she was happy to be in a school outside of the township, as teachers in township schools are 'lazy and the learners do not push themselves to pass well.' Learners in this group spoke about the conditions in township schools of overcrowded classes and under-qualified teachers and yet failed to make connections between those conditions and the rate of success (of lack thereof) in the township based schools. As discussed in the general overview, historically the allocation of resources for education favoured white education and black people were educated for the sole purpose of subjugating them to racial domination by the former. Many decades of inequality and stereotypes continue to persist in how these young people perceive their world.

Religion, culture and identity

In addition to the above components of identity including gender and race, learners discussed religion as an important point of reference when talking about their identity, as shown in the poem reproduced in the attached Facilitator's Report (Week 4: Citizenship).

The poem elicited discussion on religion as a marker of identity. The line: 'I'm a girl with a religion that sets me apart from the rest of the world' carried two equally important meanings for the participant who wrote it. She spoke of how people treated her differently at her school because of her religion (Islam), where Muslims are a small minority in a largely Christian school. She also spoke of how Muslims were being viewed with suspicion after the September 11, 2001 attacks on America.

In the following excerpt a learner concludes that religion does not determine many people's identity, yet she simultaneously attributes the actions of Muslims vis-à-vis their religion to circumstances directly linked to their religion. Of note is the fact that during the period of this research the war in Iraq was a topical issue, often raising issues of war over identity and religion.

Learner: 'Well, religion does determine my identity, but it also doesn't determine many people's identity… because some people don't really want people to know their religion. Like say in today's society, in 2003, many Muslims are hiding away from America. Many Muslims don't even want to enter America because they are afraid that America is going to banish them... that they are going to persecute them. So… Like now in school I used to stand up to a lot of people because of how I look, my actions, now many people think I'm arrogant because I'm wearing a scarf… just because I stand up for myself.'

It was interesting to note how participants spoke of culture and religion interchangeably, yet sometimes they were keen to see these in two separate ways. The following participant insisted that her coloured colleague has to find and observe those cultural practices practiced by her African ancestors. This reflects a common view amongst Africans in South Africa that culture is defined in terms of those traditional practices that Africans observe. Although this is beyond the scope of our research we suggest that many years of missionary indoctrination that emphasised the shedding of African cultural traditions and the adoption of 'Western civilisation' and the Christian ways may have caused people to see culture and tradition as African traits that are non-existent, if not long ago abandoned, in Western societies.

Participant I: 'Don't you think that as a coloured there is a certain [culture] that you have to follow because there must have been someone in your family who was Zulu, Xhosa or something like that.'

Participant II: 'Yes, there are people in my family but I say that I don't have a culture, I have a religion and I follow the culture of my religion.'

Participant III: 'Okay I don't consider myself coloured because my mother's side she is Shangaan and my grandfather came from Maputo, he was Portuguese. If I look at my family's history… there were people from all over. So I don't know which religion or culture to follow. Being a coloured you don't have a specific culture to follow… So I don't really follow any particular culture.'

That learner III above does not 'consider myself coloured', when her grandfather is Portuguese and mother Shangaan, may seem like a contradiction. This shows, however, the idiosyncrasies of coloured identity in South Africa. As noted earlier in this report, coloured identity, like other racial categories, is politically laden. As with other racial categories, it was arbitrarily imposed, and consolidated as a separate identity through the Group Areas Act and other race- specific benefits (such as a preferential – relative to Africans – allocation in the state budget etc.). This participant's life history, however, is different from the experiences of many of those who were classified as coloured and subsequently placed in spatial and material conditions that consolidated that identity – namely being separated from their African ancestry while not being integrated within the white identity. Our participant, by contrast, was brought up by her Shangaan mother in an African township where she experienced a life different from South Africans who lived as coloureds in coloured townships. Even to live within a coloured township does not guarantee a common experience as there were several categories of 'coloureds' under apartheid. (Nieftagodien, 2003)

Patriarchy and family

Marcelle Dawson (2003) points out that while some may believe that individuals are passive recipients of fixed identities, others argue that people play an active role in shaping and maintaining their identities. Our discussions with learners highlighted the issue of personal choice in determining one's identity. We argue that this 'personal choice' is negotiated within the context of power dynamics existing in the environment where individuals are located. Participants occasionally repeated patriarchal notions and highlighted the issue of power dynamics in family life when it comes to determining cultural identity. This is illustrated through this exchange:

Participant I: 'I have a question. Isn't it that if you take your father's surname, mustn't you also take your father's religion?'

Participant II: 'I'm not answering your question, but I know that in the Jewish culture they believe you do inherit the religion. But you don't have to follow, you can be a Christian but as long as you have Jewish people in your family, then you're a Jew.'

Participant III: 'My family have different religions…. my mother is a Catholic, so we followed her religion.'

Participant I: 'Black religion is like that, if you take your father's surname you also have to take his culture and religion…'

In a patriarchal society such as we live in, it is not surprising that the learners are expressing views such as those reflected above, especially with regard to adopting one's father's religion and culture. In most families wives take on the customs and tradition of the husband. (Mamdani 2001, cited in Palmary, 2003)

Caregivers (commonly mothers), as primary agents of their children's socialisation, often transfer these customs and tradition – through a patriarchal lens - in that they nurture their children to conform to the customs and tradition of the father. Thus children are bound by family rules to the family's religious or cultural identity. They remain so until they begin seeking their own identity as they grow to be teenagers. Other factors also contribute to this flexibility. Urbanisation or exposure to different cultures does influence to a certain extent how fully people conform to these cultural identities. Sapire and Eales (1989) show how people in urban areas adapt to the lack of stable networks of family, kin or ethnic groupings, and create new forms of identity which substitute for the absent networks. While it does not totally erode ties to ethnicity-based culture, urbanisation does open up spaces for culture to be malleable. Two participants claimed:

Participant I: 'I took my mother's surname but I don't follow her religion. They practice Xhosa but I don't do that. First of all I don't how Xhosa came about… for me it is like I'm just living a normal life and I'm not too much into culture.'

Participant II: 'I think the thing is that as you grow up into being teenagers and so on we choose what we want to follow. There were people in my class who were Muslims and as they grew up they decided to become Christians.'

Having discussed some of the 'external' factors that help shape youth identity in schools, we shall now turn to 'internal' factors, that is, the school environment.

Identity and the school

As mentioned earlier, schools, like all other facets of life in apartheid South Africa, were configured to fulfil a particular goal. In general, this goal entrenched racial separation and inequality. White learners benefited from better resources, while African learners received the least material support and their school experience was characterised by crises brought on by bad conditions and poorly trained teachers, amongst other factors. Education for whites was meant to instil feelings of superiority, while the opposite result was desired for blacks (Dawson, 2003).

This historical context is helpful when looking at the quality of experience that learners from different racial groups enjoy in contemporary South African schools. One of the challenges in our project was that all the groups we spoke to were overwhelmingly African. During discussions the minority racial groups did not participate to the extent we had hoped. This deprived us of the opportunity to find out how other racial groups (coloured, Indian and white) were experiencing changes in schools. The result is that much of the views heard were those articulated by African learners about their experience in the schools.

Learners in this project reported that many white parents and Indian parents sent their children to private schools because 'They didn't want their children to go to the same school as black children.' (Learner in School B) In one formerly white only school, situated in a working class community, white learners constitute less than 55 percent of the learner population. As discussed above, parents tended to move their children to other private schools as soon as black learners started enrolling in them in large numbers. Many comments have been made in public forums about this phenomenon. Recently a white panellist in a radio debate on SAFM about the integration of schools remarked that when her school first desegregated, parents sent their children out of the school, mainly as a response to black teachers being introduced to the school. She claimed that later white parents began sending their children back to the school as the initial anxieties dissipated with evidence that there was no drop in standards as a result of black teachers becoming part of the teaching staff at the school.

In part these anxieties have their roots in racism that was borne out of colonialism as well as from apartheid history. The legacy of colonialism, which placed whiteness at the apex of excellence and positioned Africans (in the context of Africa) as barbaric and always in need of the master's grace and tutelage, continues to shape relationships between different races. As such the potential of Africans to carry out their work with efficiency is always doubted. In addition, education for Africans in South Africa has for decades carried out the task of deliberately under-educating this section of society. In line with the apartheid education policy the African teachers were generally poorly qualified. As such, generalisations that African teachers are automatically under-qualified abound to this day.

This backdrop forms the framework that informs daily interactions between learners and between educators and learners. It is a backdrop that manifests itself insidiously with deeply felt consequences for learners. The school leaders in the schools we worked with demonstrated enthusiasm to accommodate us. They expressed a deep desire to expose their learners and educators to our project. For example, Schools D and C assigned us a Life Orientation teacher each; with the aim of furthering the work we were doing in these schools. The principals in all the schools gave us support.

Yet despite this institutional support for our work, learners painted a grimmer picture about their daily experience of integration. It is important to have a constant appraisal of the school's performance in terms of its success to deal with radical changes in attitudes. This is because prejudices that people bring with them to any environment can hamper success if not consciously checked. Institutional racism does not require overt acts of racism. Spears (1978) writing of the United Kingdom, defines institutional racism thus:

It is in its most profound instances covert, resulting from acts of indifference, omission and refusal to challenge the status quo. Thus, an individual need never have wilfully done anything that directly and clearly oppresses minorities; she/he need only have gone about business as usual without attempting to change procedures and structures in order to be an accomplice in racism, since business as usual has been systematised to maintain blacks and other minorities in an oppressed state. (Quoted in Vally and Dalamba, 1999, p.3)

Black learners often expressed frustration over white teachers' unwillingness to accommodate those cultural activities that learners wished to partake in, insisting on the traditionally (white) performed activities. For example, a learner claimed that his proposal to bring his band from Soweto for a fundraising concert at his school had been turned down by the school board. He said the board was concerned about bringing a band to play music that was unfamiliar to the intended audience – namely white parents who are used to attending plays and choral music played by the schools' choir for fundraisers. These frustrations hamper learners' willingness to seek reconciliation and stand in the way of mutual understanding, as they feel they are being assimilated into the 'hosting' school culture as opposed to the purported integration.

This view is echoed in Amanda Gouws' (2003) contribution to the debate on how South Africa is faring in the drive towards achieving reconciliation. Evaluating a South African university's initiatives to engage with greater diversity of race, language, religion and sexual orientation, Gouws concludes that the problem is that:

[T]he university is still 'the host', welcoming 'the other' to an institutional culture where minority students have to accept the rules of an existing culture and where their voices are easily silenced. (Read mere toleration). (Gouws, 2003, p. 6)

While this research did not enquire as to what the learners' understanding of the school culture was, and while it would be presumptuous to imagine that all learners in a school (white learners included) will find activities that cater to all tastes and preferences, it was apparent from the black learners' comments that they felt marginalised. They felt pressured to assimilate into the culture already established in recently desegregated schools. One black learner lamented during a discussion at a camp outing with the participants:

Teachers don't seem to want to listen to us. We don't have fun activities in our school. It's like "come to school, learn and go home". There is no sense of fun, nothing. I think our principal could be more outgoing, and not scary. I think he scares the hell out of the students, so we can't approach him.

This response can be interpreted as a venting of the frustration these learners experience as a result of not feeling part of the broader (i.e. outside the formal) activities in the school. The teaching community's failure to understand this frustration also reflects the assertion that not acting on such concerns is often not seen as an anomaly, since the status quo is not interrogated when it favours the hegemonic culture (Gouws, 2003).

Citizenship

Our discussion on citizenship was very limited, in that we engaged participants on their understanding of citizenship, the key point of intervention being to familiarise them with the general rights and obligations of citizenship. The discussions that came out of this theme helped us explore other related issues from a human rights' perspective. Participants explored their own understanding of issues such as refugees and xenophobia. This provided us with the opportunity to challenge some of the prejudices and ignorance demonstrated.

Although not unexpected, the discussions on citizenship were often steered around the issue of xenophobia, around who is not a citizen. For example, learners stated that Nigerians were responsible for drug trafficking in South Africa. We talked to the learners about recognising and avoiding generalisations when speaking about groups of people. We also talked about Nigerians, as well as other African foreigners, that make a positive contribution to South Africa, mentioning doctors, accountants and entrepreneurs who create employment in South Africa.

The discussion during this session helped learners to reflect on their own assumptions about foreigners, which reflect the attitudes held in broader South African society. Some of the learners highlighted the issue of ignorance and asked for empathy.

Participant: 'I don't believe that foreigners take our jobs because they create their own jobs here. They make their own shops so they are not taking anything from us. They are trying to make a better life for themselves. So we as SA we look at the negative side of foreigners. [But] We need to know them, we need to understand them.'

Other learners, however, insisted that foreigners should set up businesses in their own countries and that they contributed to the overcrowding of hospitals and were taking up space in 'our' cemeteries.

This discussion highlighted the need for education on matters pertaining to foreigners and xenophobia in general.

While we were unable to learn from the white learners how they felt about foreigners a series of research findings by the Southern African Migration Project (SAMP) has shown that the hostility towards foreigners is not an exclusively black South African phenomenon (SAMP, 1999). White people also seem to hold xenophobic attitudes towards foreigners from other African countries.

Reconciliation

We opened the discussion around the theme reconciliation by asking the participants for their views of public holidays aimed at promoting reconciliation in post-1994 South Africa. Public holidays have been used since democracy in 1994 to promote reconciliation amongst South Africans.

Since our project was focused on young people's appreciation of the changes around them with regard to reconciliation, we chose 16 June as the national holiday upon which we focused our discussions. 16 June is a day that commemorates the 1976 Soweto student uprising. It commemorates the role youth played in relation to education, a matter that affected them directly, and set in motion a series of events that would precipitate the end of apartheid. Opening a discussion on this particular holiday was a way of sharing awareness about this day and its significance. Discussing the events of the day would help us gauge how much information the participants had about the day, and to fill the gaps in their knowledge. Most importantly, we wanted to start conversations about reconciliation and memorialisation.

16 June was declared a public holiday in commemoration of the school pupils' uprising on that day in 1976 against the imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction for all subjects (except vernacular) taught in African schools. A peaceful demonstration opposing this imposition ended tragically when policemen shot into a crowd of schoolchildren. This triggered a wave of violence, which led to the death of many children. The children retaliated by attacking symbols that represented apartheid control.

Thus school buildings, beer halls (seen to corrupt morality amongst African men), police vehicles, and other objects seen to represent apartheid control in Soweto, were attacked. Also, the youth leaders articulated their frustration with apartheid education, and expressed a rejection of Afrikaans – seen generally as the language of the oppressors.⁹

After a democratically elected government was put in place under Nelson Mandela in 1994, 16 June commemorations were renamed 'Youth Day' as part of a drive to make all national holidays meaningful to all South Africans (Boddy-Evans).¹⁰ It was hoped that through inclusion in these memorialisation events South Africans of all races would be encouraged to take collective ownership of the past and adopt a common purpose of ensuring that the racialised divisions of the past do not recur.

Within this project, it was surprising to learn just how little information the participants had about 16 June and its significance. However, some learners did reflect knowledge about the events and frustration over how their peers celebrate the day:

I think Youth Day must be celebrated, but the way it is celebrated now is very wrong. Because you go out, it is [social] parties and people die in the stadiums. I don't think it is right. They must teach us what they were doing in 1976… not celebrating as in parties because there are car accidents and people get drunk. They think it's a party.

Amongst those that showed an appreciation of the significance of this day, there were strong expressions of the notion that remembering these tragic events does not help reconciliation. They said that these kinds of holidays, instead of helping people reconcile, open old wounds and make people resent each other for the role they played in the past.

In general, there is an ambiguity in the responses from the learners about the need for days of memorialisation. This ambiguity itself poses a challenge to memorialisation processes. While the learners feel that they want to move forward and leave the painful past behind, the same learners simultaneously recognise the need to remember and honour and mourn those who died in the anti-apartheid struggle. The learners contributed to our discussion on this topic thus:

Participant I: 'The public holiday that I like is Youth Day because it is sort of like our past. We have to focus on the past to move into the future.'

Participant II: 'Mine is also Youth Day because we see examples of the past that we shouldn't do in the future as the present generation. I think what happened in the past hurts and we should actually feel sorry for the families that lost their loved ones and mourn again and again. But I don't think it is necessary to celebrate Youth Day because we are bringing back all the bad memories.'

Participant III: They say we should forget about everything that happened in the past, but now they are coming up with the Apartheid Museum. Now how can we forget about that if we are still reminded about that?

The learners failed to make linkages between present day race relations with the past, even though we had raised the relationship between the past and present while discussing the theme of Identity.

What this suggests is that in memorialisation processes these linkages should be carefully incorporated. Equally important, days and sites of memorialisation should be used creatively to highlight these linkages while openly encouraging reconciliation. They should aim to form bridges between former enemies and show the need for a common vision for the future. Memorialisation should, therefore, be an acknowledgement of the past that is forward looking. Thornton notes:

We have to be careful about memorials dividing sentiment. We need to create a unified country. [Memorials] must look towards the future. They must be future directed even though they are rooted in some historical event or set of events or set of contradictory events like we have here. (Thornton, Interview by author, 2002)

In these terms memorialisation should be designed for the purpose of bringing everyone behind the goal of national reconciliation, by facing directly the ugly past the society is trying to move away from. To this end, government departments charged with memorialisation projects ought to work closely with NGOs and communities to construct positive meanings about our history. By involving themselves in the construction of memorialisation processes, not only will communities claim 'ownership' of these processes, but they afford themselves the opportunity to learn more about the events being commemorated. Community led memorialisation projects that involve youth participation could go a long way in educating young people about the significance of important days in the calendar.

Racial integration: is it happening?

One of the areas of concern to observers of the transition in South Africa is the slow pace of racial integration between young people of different races. This can be seen in various social cultural spaces. One example is how some popular radio stations that target the 14–30 year age group pitch their marketing campaign along racial identities. For instance one of the leading national radio stations recently ran a promotional campaign with the selling line: 'Black by popular demand'.

On the other hand, there is also a counter phenomenon – namely 'urban youth culture' that assumes (and maybe speaks to) a racially integrated audience within the urban areas. This trend can be observed in the youth culture and in shopping malls across urban centres in Gauteng, amongst other places. Although this observation is not based on 'scientific' research, it is important to note what could be organised as a typology.

1. They often happen amongst urban middle class youth
2. Often members of such groups have gone to the same private schools
3. The language spoken is often English (however colloquial in character)
4. Black-members are accused of ascribing to whiteness at the expense of their own background where it threatens to 'expose' them as part of the black community¹¹ (conversations with a group of black private school learners, 2003)

While it is laudable that black and white youth are interacting more, it is the quality of this integration that worries those who seek to see a more thorough integration based on mutual recognition and respect.

Talking about the role of youth in promoting reconciliation Martin Legassick, professor of History at the University of the Western Cape, says:

Non-racialism has got to be built through the youth …. So long as there is poverty in the country, the conditions for racism will be reproduced. For example so long as most blacks live in townships and most whites live in suburbs, so that even at school they don't come together, then you're reproducing the conditions under which people misunderstand each other and they can't become reconciled. (Legassick, 2002, interviewed by author)

White South Africans continue to deny their position in South Africa as beneficiaries of apartheid. This is a tacit refusal to accept their responsibility to contribute to the social development of the victims of apartheid. Macdonald (2000) argues that a majority of white South Africans are not interested in contributing to the process of nation building. (Macdonald, 2000) She argues that failing to do so will render reconciliation meaningless.

So while young people express the desire to move on and attain racial reconciliation, there are factors that stand in the way of achieving this goal. If left unattended, these will sabotage the goal of achieving reconciliation.

Gaps and Recommendations

This section will discuss the shortcomings of our research methodology. An appraisal of these limitations will be followed by suggestions as to how these can be overcome in future research.

Facilitation – include minority voices

The most frustrating aspect about our visits was the failure of racial minority groups in the classroom discussions to vocalise their concerns and points of view - especially around issues of race, identity and reconciliation. Since our research was aimed at assessing how young South Africans are experiencing the environment of integration and transition at the schools and broader societal levels, the gap left by this silence was a major loss.

African learners are becoming a majority in formerly white, Indian and coloured schools, and this was reflected in the racial demographics of our participants. A large majority of our participants in the historically Indian and white schools were African, with a small minority of Indians and whites participating in our research process.

While we had agreed on and established ground rules that would govern our behaviour (such as not interrupting a person while they are speaking, and agreeing to listen to all points of view even when not in agreement with them), often there were moments when the debates got heated and emotions ran high. In these heated debates the African learners would articulate racial stereotypes about Indian and white people, and make accusations of their complicity in the oppression of Africans. In such instances the white and Indian participants failed to respond, leaving us with only speculations as to why they were not responding.

Our guess is that the white and Indian learners could have felt intimidated to challenge views that were being expressed with such force by the majority in the groups. The other possible explanation as to this reluctance to partake in the plenary sessions could be that white and Indian learners in our groups could be harbouring some guilt for the things "their forefathers did to black people". We observed that when we discussed memorialisation and reconciliation, white and Indian learners tended to be more vocal and often emphasised the need to forget about the past and to move on to create a better society.

Contributing to this lacklustre participation from the said group could be our facilitation process. Since this was a pilot project and our anticipation of what might transpire during our school process was limited, we were ill-prepared to deal with some of these developments as they happened. We feel that it would help us to be prepared for these kinds of 'disengagements'. It could also be that failing to make appropriate interventions earlier in our initial visits, such as discouraging participants from shooting down unpopular views as they were being articulated, led to some participants choosing to pull away from the process as they felt that they were being vilified.

Recommendations

It has been noted in South Africa and the United States that whenever a sensitive topic such as race is discussed, often emotions run high (see Nytagodien, 2003). Nytagodien suggests that 'negotiating a space' with participants is critical when undertaking such debates. This means it is imperative to be sensitive to the possibility or inevitability of emotions running high. In a course looking at race in the past and its impact on the present, both in the contexts of South Africa's colonial and apartheid past; and that of America's slavery, there is a disclaimer written in bold letters. This disclaimer declares that 'the purpose of the course is not to level blame at individuals or to offend anyone' (Nytagodien, 2003). He further warns that this negotiating of a space is a continuous process, requiring an ability to keep that space accessible and fair while not hampering spontaneous discussion in order to foster engagement and learning (Nytagodien, 2003).

Another important part of facilitating engaging debates on the issues we discussed with the learners is that of providing homework reading material. Nytagodien (2003) explains that this is a key tool which Portland State University uses to get their students to think seriously about issues of race. For our project we were aware that because we targeted young learners in high schools it would be unfair to add to their schoolwork load by giving them large volumes of literature to read. While this is so, it is important that participants and facilitators have a common text or homework exercises on the themes, upon which to draw. They could then complement this with their own personal experiences.

As part of the preparation before the initial visit, the facilitators might consider creating several scenarios and role-playing them with colleagues. This will allow everyone to suggest responses to some of the difficult issues that might arise in the classrooms.

The initial visit, while essentially an introductory and ice-breaking exercise, should be used by facilitators to scan for various sets of indicators. This should involve a quick scan of:

• The number of participants
• The gender of participants
• Where they come from (social background)
• The domineering personalities in the group
• The quiet personalities in the group
• Whether there is a tendency for 'groupings by race'

It is imperative for the facilitators to reassure all participants that their views are important, that they should articulate them and that they will be protected through the code of conduct.

Furthermore, it is important to identify from time to time examples of positive role models - amongst white, coloured and Indian people - who actively opposed human rights violations and apartheid. By the same token we recommend citing a few examples of black people who actually were clients of the apartheid system and who supported its institutions. By doing this the facilitators will be conscientising the learners to individual vs. social agency in political and historical processes. By showing learners that it is individuals and groups of individuals in certain societies who make history, the learners will be made to recognise their own personal role in challenging or promoting the status quo.

Why do learners leave state schools?

Another important area our research could have covered to a greater degree was with regard to the exodus of white and Indian learners from schools where African learners are enrolling, a phenomenon that has seen some of these schools becoming predominantly African, albeit only in numerical terms.

When speaking to learners in our control group about this issue, they gave several reasons based on word of mouth accounts. The main reason cited was the issue of the 'drop in standards'. Some learners claimed that parents felt that the introduction of African learners in these schools would lead to a drop in standards.

Further research into what precipitates this exodus of white and Indian learners needs to be made, in order to understand this phenomenon and to begin thinking of ways to react to it. It would also be useful to talk to those who have left, to find out from them what this means. This is crucial because the choice of where parents take their children to school is based primarily on the self-interest of parents to give their children the best education they can afford. This is so with parents of all races. However, where these decisions are made based purely on un-interrogated perceptions, for example that black learners or educators cause a drop in standards, they can only further entrench the colonially derived notions of innate white superiority and, by the same token, innate inferiority of blacks. This is hardly in line with the values and principles enshrined in the South African Constitution, which respect the equality of all the country's citizens and the right to be treated with dignity and respect.

Failure to make connections between the present and the past

Another manifestation of the fallacy of white supremacy and black inferiority is played out in how learners explain certain phenomena in their surrounding. An example of this was when we had a discussion about what motivates parents to send their children to formerly white, Indian and coloured schools, away from African township schools. An African learner said township schools produce poor results because African people do not have a work ethos, saying that teachers and learners do not put effort in their work – hence the imperative to send African learners away from township schools.

It does seem that there is an implicit acceptance of the 'race ladder' that the colonial and apartheid social constructions perpetuated. Learners continue to attribute much of the culpability for the poor results produced in African schools to the people who are by all intents and purposes, victims of systematic policies of subjugation – the African teachers and their learners.

Conclusions

South Africa's transition to a society built on the foundations of a human rights ethos is a long process that requires constant reflection. Depending on how they engage with their world, young South Africans growing up in a society where apartheid laws have gone, present an opportunity to develop a model of tackling the legacy of apartheid. There are two reasons for this. Firstly they are presented with greater opportunities to interact across past racial barriers. Secondly, because they are personally not perpetrators of the country's shameful past, they are more likely to work towards mutual understanding.

Schools act as sites of memory as they are living monuments of segregation in education, one of many areas of segregation in pre-democracy South Africa. However, schools are being entrusted with the task of becoming agents for change. Without fully acknowledging this dual role, schools can only frustrate efforts to build a democratic and equal society. Given the decades of working within an exclusivist ethos, role players in education ought to consciously reconfigure their respective schools in line with the goals of integration where diversity is truly recognised.

Another challenge this young democracy is facing is with regard to xenophobia. South Africa has been noted to exhibit highly xenophobic attitudes mainly against Africans from other parts of Africa. In the context of political conflict and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, and the fairly recent returning of South Africa into the international community, the flow of foreigners into South Africa is likely to continue. Job losses especially amongst unskilled working class South Africans, precipitated by the global economy, are likely to be with us for some time to come. In this context, there is an urgent need to educate South Africans about global citizenry, and to align this with those institutions concerned with refugees. School-based programmes should be put in place, where understanding and attitude change is encouraged.

The legacy of the past presents a huge challenge in the endeavour to effect meaningful reconciliation between different races. There is an urgent need to debunk the myths that have been built about African, coloured, Indian and white identities over centuries, and to consciously promote the ethos of the equality of humanity. Constructions of memory, especially of national memory, should therefore seek to promote fair representations of the peoples of the country and their history. Curriculum development that is designed for this purpose is thus crucial and should be supported. Such a form of curriculum development has to be owned by, and seen to be representative of, all the country's peoples' experiences. It requires a combination of a serious engagement with people whose stories have been silenced and a critical reappraisal of the documented history of South Africa.

A fair appraisal of our history will go a long way in bringing about a fuller appreciation of how our past continues to impact on our current lot. Interrogating our past, inside and outside classrooms, can also have an impact on how our society views the issue of reparations and the reconstruction of our society. This appraisal should be linked with a full acknowledgement by beneficiaries of apartheid and a commitment to contribute towards rebuilding a desired society.

References

Boddy-Evans, A. (accessed on 24 October 2003) South Africa's National Holidays: A look at the significance of South Africa's seven national holidays.

Bonner, P. and Lodge, T. (Eds.) (1989) Holding their ground: Class locality and culture in 19^th century South Africa. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.

Chisholm, L., Vally, S. and Motala, S. (1998). Review of South African education 1994-1997. Sandown: Heineman.

Gerhart, G. M. (1978). Black power in South Africa: the evolution of an ideology. Berkeley: California University Press.

Gouws, A. (2003, June) 'The host' who welcomes 'the other'. The South African reconciliation barometer: tracking socio political trends, 1 (2). Cape Town: Institute for Justice and Reconciliation.

Harris, B. (2003). Espacios de violencia, lugares de miedo: conflicto urbano en la Sur África post apartheid. In J. Alvarez (Ed.), Violencias y conflictos urbanos: un retoparalas politicas publicas, pp. 15-38. Medellin: Instituto Popular de Capacitacion.

Karris, T. and Gerhart, G.M. (1997). From protest to challenge: a documentary history of African politics in South Africa, 1882-1990. Pretoria: Unisa Press.

Kallaway, P. (Ed.). (2002). The history of education under Apartheid: 1948–1994, Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman.

Legassick, M. (2002, February 14) Professor, History Department, University of the Western Cape, personal interview.

Macdonald, H. (2000). It's time white South Africa came to the party. Cape Argus.

Malakalaka, M. (2002). Race and reconciliation: Youth and schools in focus – an overview of the TRC's report on children and youth. Unpublished paper, Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, Johannesburg.

Manzo, K. A. (1996). Creating boundaries: the politics of race and nation. London: Lynne Reiner Publishers.

Nakasa, N. (1964, June 20). It's difficult to decide my identity. Rand Daily Mail, in Karris, T. and Gerhardt, G. (1997). From protest to challenge: a documentary history of African politics in South Africa, 1882-1990. Pretoria: Unisa Press.

Ndlovu, S. (1998). The Soweto uprisings: counter-memories of June 16 1976, Randburg: Ravan Press.

Nytagodien, R. (2003. October). Classroom confrontations: racism in South Africa and the United States. Safundi: the journal of South African and American Comparative Studies, available online: http://safundi.com.

Palmary, I. (2003). Negotiating nationalism: women's narratives of forced displacement. Codesria conference paper, Gaborone, Botswana (18-19 October).

Spears, A.K. (1978). Institutional racism and the education of blacks. Anthropology and Education 9(2). Available online: http://www.polity.org.za/html/govdocs/legislation/1996/act96-084.html.

Thornton, R. (2002, January, 9), Professor, Department of Social Anthropology, University of the Witwatersrand, personal interview.

Vally, S. and Dalamba Y. (1999). Racism, 'racial integration' and desegregation in South African public secondary schools. A report on a study by the Human Rights Commission (SAHRC). Parktown: SAHRC.

Valji, N. (2003). Creating the nation: the rise of violent xenophobia in the New South Africa. Unpublished Masters Thesis, York University, Canada.

 

Facilitator's Report: Race and Reconciliation Project

Brian Molewa

Introduction

South Africa's transition is hailed as a benchmark for national reconciliation, non-violent political transition and the construction of an inclusive, diverse cultural identity. However the institutions tasked with effecting this miraculous transition have come under scrutiny regarding the permanence of these values in the national psyche. The question obviously asked in response to this criticism is whether any transitional structure is able to reorient such a cumbersome object as the national psyche.

In order to respond to this debate it is important to understand the extent to which conciliatory values and appreciation of cultural diversity as a world-view has been inherited by the generation of South Africans for which the realities of apartheid are only known through history textbooks and their elders' tales.

As its contribution to the debate, the Centre for the Study of Violence (CSVR) developed a project titled Consolidating Citizenship and Reconciliation in the Post-Apartheid Period, nicknamed the Race and Reconciliation Project (RRP).

The project sought to achieve three key objectives:
(a) Evaluate the TRC's engagement with race, citizenship and the morality of violence;
(b) Investigate how different sectors of South African society conceptualize race and citizenship;
(c) Based on the implications of (a) and (b), to develop policy and strategy that promotes reconciliation and prevents violence.

The youth were identified as key sector for the study particularly since it is believed they will play a major role in sustaining non-violence, reconciliation and citizenship in the future. The broad aim of the study was to elicit views from youth on their own perspective on the three themes of the programme, namely, Identity, Citizenship and Reconciliation.

It goes without saying that the manner in which such an activity is conceptualized and implemented is of critical significance. Process issues become pivotal in achieving the objectives of the activity particularly because the content of the study is precisely about process … South Africa's democratization process… and its long-term impact on societal relations. In short, "Process" (with a capital P) in this study is inextricably linked to content and vice-versa, hence the need to further understand and explore the methodological aspects of the activity.

The purpose of this report, therefore, is to provide a detailed view of the process issues in the Race and Reconciliation Project as it relates to the objective of 'consider(ing) implications of changing race, citizenship and violence in post-apartheid South Africa for the development of policy and intervention strategies aimed at promoting reconciliation and preventing violence' (Project proposal, 2000¹²).

The report reflects on these process issues as they relate to one activity or project in the programme namely, a pilot intervention programme that focuses on the ways in which youth deal with the apartheid past and how they integrate this into current issues of reconciliation, citizenship and violence' (Project proposal, 2000).

Project Features

The project consisted of three main activities or processes:
(1) Preparation, Initiation & Launch
(2) 8 Week Programme
(3) Youth Camp

This chapter will outline the features of these three main activities from a process perspective. Essentially this chapter will provide the facilitation methodology.

Identifying the Schools

The first activity in the process was the identification of schools. Initially, the Project team was required to identify and invite ten schools around Gauteng to participate in the development of a pilot programme and establish a reconciliation working group in each of the ten schools. Identifying the schools and building the credibility of the project was a long process which required the following steps:

• Securing a list of all Gauteng Government Schools from the Gauteng Education Department.
• Identifying fifteen schools with which to make contact. The schools were identified mainly for their diversity in socio-economic profile.
• Contacting school principals and explaining the purpose of the project and the anticipated methodology.
• Developing a detailed plan of the work to be conducted with learners and suggesting a meeting to present the purpose and form of the intervention.

Five schools responded positively and meetings were conducted with the principals who then referred us to the Life Orientation (LO) teachers. CSVR met with the LO teachers and most supported their schools participation in the project. One school finally withdrew, the details of which will be discussed in the section titled Process Issues below.

As a final step to secure an agreement from the four schools, we were asked to make a presentation to each school's management team. A school management team consists of the principal, deputy principal, various heads of departments and learner representatives. Upon completion of the presentation, all four schools agreed to commit themselves to the project formally.

Launch: The Constitution Hill Workshop

Before CSVR started the intervention within the four schools it was believed to be appropriate to launch the project with the target audience, the learners. At this stage the project team was interested in exploring the responses of the learners to the themes of the project. This would assist the project team to establish their knowledge, perceptions and interest in the issues. This data would become a baseline against which to measure the impact of the intervention.

The workshop was also an opportunity to impart information about oral history as a methodology - as this was a key aspect of the intervention. Five learners and one teacher from each school were invited to represent the rest of the participating class to a one day workshop at the Constitution Hill. An oral history practitioner and lecturer from the History Department at Wits University, Noor Nieftagodien, attended the workshop. CSVR was represented by a team of nine people who facilitated the process. See Annexure 1 for the Constitutional Hill Workshop Programme.

Eight-week Programme

The project covered three key themes as mentioned earlier: Identity, Citizenship and Reconciliation. Race was a fourth cross-cutting theme. The objectives of the intervention were three-fold:

• To elicit information over time in relation to detailed conversations about each theme;
• To impart knowledge, educate and fill in gaps on these themes from a human rights perspective;
• To challenge prejudice and stereotypes in relation to the themes.

The project team designed an eight week program which engaged the learners on the themes of the project. Each session was interdependent and built on the preceding session therefore the sessions flowed from each other organically. A schedule was drafted for the process and each week dealt with some aspect of the three key themes. Weekly activities with the learners included plenary discussion, group activities and homework exercises. The aim of the plenary discussions was to understand how the learners were engaging with these issues in an open minded environment. With the homework and group activities the aim was to:

• Test their knowledge and understanding of oral history research.
• Develop their presentation skills, self-confidence and build a culture of mutual respect through working together.
• Promote participation and give the learners an opportunity to know more about each other and, value one another.

The following table indicates the methodology of the 8-week programme:

Week	Theme	Input	Output	Outcome
1	Introduction	Icebreakers	Information sharing; displaying commonality across different backgrounds	Trust building
		Ground Rules from learners	Common understanding of un / acceptable behavior	Social compact in the group horizontally among learners and vertically with facilitators
	Identity	Family tree methodology	Learners mapping their identity	Greater openness to parameters of identity construction
2	Identity	Family Tree Homework	Homework assignment to construct family tree	Greater understanding of difference and commonality regardless of diverse backgrounds
		Facilitated discussion on identity	Different constructions of identity and in partic. race among learners	Broadening of the debate between identity and group membership and individuality
3	Oral History	Group School History homework	Presentations on school history	Greater understanding of oral history research Learners working as a team Learners developing their presentation skills
4	Citzenship	Facilitated debate on citizenship	Different constructions of citizenship, identification of further issues to be explored	Greater understanding of citizenship broadly and appreciation of different views on citizenship
5	Citizenship	Facilitated debate on Xenophobia	Exploration of stereotypes and human rights and civic responsibilities	Greater understanding of Xenophobia as discrimination, refugees and rights and responsibilities of foreigners and South Africans
6	Reconciliation<