Abstract
This paper reports on aspects an ethnographic study carried out in six newly integrated schools in post-apartheid South Africa. It presents evidence that these schools are sites of struggle between competing discourses that construct, maintain and change social identities in those communities and the wider society. It suggests that South Africa's former limited bilingual policies and current multilingual language policies together with discourses at the micro-level that are congruent with them serve to construct quite different South African national identities: hegemonic, exclusive and conflicted on the one hand, and egalitarian and inclusive on the other. Finally, it speculates on the outcome of the struggle between the competing discourses, that is, on the prospects of South Africans being able to negotiate a truly multicultural national identity.
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