‘We are not ready’ – contradictions and contestations in basic education organising in South Africa at the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article reflects on our participation in two efforts at education organising at the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic – the national C19 People’s Coalition, and the Progressive Organisations Formation (POF). We suggest our experiences as participants in these movements reflect a broader political climate in South Africa in which large-scale, organised resistance is absent in the ‘post-1994’ basic education context. Using Gramsci’s concept of ‘interregnum’ and Gentili’s ‘crisis-as-dispositif’, we examine both collectives and their power relations to ask why we could not coalesce into legitimate, self-sustaining organising efforts, despite unviable conditions in basic public education in South Africa. We theorise the dispositif at work as captured resistance in the C19 People’s Coalition, where the process of NGOisation was evident, and nostalgic resistance in the POF, where the theory of change amongst an older vanguard of teachers had not yet reckoned with a ‘post’-apartheid political subjectivity in schools. What our direct experiences suggest is the state of unreadiness of South African education organisations, to both respond to unexpected exogenous shocks or sustain protracted struggles on any given issue. The original declaration of the C19 People’s Coalition Basic Education working group, ‘We are not ready!’, could not have been more ironic.