“If you don’t have English, you’re just as good as a dead person”: A narrative of adult English language literacy within post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

This article centres on the narrative of Thuli, a 62-year-old black South African domestic worker taking English language literacy classes outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. For Thuli, English literacy is of vital importance because, as she claims, “if you don’t have English, you’re just as good as a dead person”. Drawing primarily on the methodology of narrative inquiry, this article employs human narratives to expose the links between individual, social and political histories. Specifically, it centres on the life narratives of Thuli and the ways in which her stories are integrated into the complex history of language learning and adult education within South Africa. Utilising these coexisting histories and HERstories, the author of this article seeks to understand the multiple forces that impact a learner such as Thuli to become literate in English. By highlighting Thuli’s narrative as well as demonstrating the roles that both the author as the researcher and Thuli as the narrator play in the creation of her narrative, the author attempts to exhibit the power of the narrative in further understanding nuances of language, power and identity. Moreover, the author ventures to expose the ways in which the links between these concepts continue to affect adult learners in postcolonial South African adult basic education (ABE) and language learning. Finally, the author links Thuli’s experience to two of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), namely Quality education (SDG4) and Gender equality (SDG5). In addition, the author attempts to reveal how the links between both goals are missing in policy documents. Using this narrative as an example of the complexity of English within South African ABE, what becomes apparent are the ways in which the desire to learn English is both individually nuanced and laden with historically (re)produced ideologies.