Transition tricks? Policy models for school desegregation in South Africa, 1990‐94

Abstract

Abstract Political transition in South Africa has proved to be a contradictory, contested and faltering process. One of the sites of greatest social conflict and breakdown since the mid‐1970s has been the apartheid education system. Yet, during the three years following De Klerk's historic moves towards a ‘new South Africa’, there were no fundamental attempts to address the overall education crisis through policy change. A key issue in the educational dispensation is the future of the comparatively small number of well‐resourced, well‐functioning historically white schools. This article analyses the desegregation of these schools to illustrate trends in state policy which are likely to influence the future educational settlement. It argues that the De Klerk government's policies around school desegregation exhibit a complex mix of privatization and devolution as part of a strategy to protect vested interests in the historically privileged sector of white education. The policy shift towards desegregation itself reflects the contradictions of the transition as well as the resourcefulness of the apartheid state in securing patterns of privilege at a time of political transition.