New histories of education in South Africa:Authors' reflections on Schooling Muslims in Natal Thembisa Waetjen (bio) and Goolam Vahed (bio) A few weeks after Schooling Muslims came into print in July 2015, a local Durban newspaper announced its publication and reproduced a selection from the text in its pages. That section was drawn from our conclusion, which briefly considers twenty-first century transformations and developments. Among other significant changes, we drew attention to shifting urban social geographies and noted that Durban's mosques and madrassas, established over a 100 years ago by the city's Muslim 'founding fathers', now provided religious sustenance for new immigrant diasporas and new converts to Islam. Our point was to indicate the continued vibrancy of Islamic spaces in a port city that has nurtured transoceanic community-formation despite formal exclusions through colonial, segregationist and apartheid strategies of division. While pleased for press attention, we were distressed by the article's headline: 'Today Mainly Migrants Worship at Urban Mosques'.1 Our concerns were related to the climate of xenophobic tensions and lethal violence – reminiscent of the horrors of 2008 – that, in April of 2015, compelled many immigrants to leave the Durban city centre and set up camps of refuge on its outskirts. Against these realities, the headline not only failed to reflect our point but also appeared to lay open a possibly dangerous misreading. We thus, here, wish to reflect further on the current relevance of the story we tell in this book. Xenophobia and racism have dogged 'Indians' from the late nineteenth century, when colonial policy in Natal amalgamated [End Page 66] South Asian migrants of diverse religious, cultural, linguistic, class and caste origin into a 'population group', later incorporated into apartheid classifications. Such race ideology continues to be affirmed as normative in ongoing public debates about whether 'Indians benefited from apartheid',2 or in calls by fringe groups for Indian South Africans to 'go home'.3 Accusatory declarations about 'Indian' educational privilege have also threaded through recent university student protests, the #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall movements. Reflected in quotas, and in other race-based university admissions policies, is the idea of the relative advantage possessed by South Africans of Indian ancestry, when compared with students subjected to the horrifying legacies of Bantu Education. Yet cries of 'privilege' and 'benefit' are ahistorical and lack explanation. They are at best expressions of frustration about persistent social inequalities and, at worst, politically expedient claim-making that pushes a new, exclusive identity politics. They cannot tell us how social inequalities were historically created nor through what structural or ideological engines they continue to be reproduced and maintained. Schooling Muslims provides an important backstory in this regard. Education is a significant driver of social mobility but also of class entrenchment. Understanding education history in South Africa can potentially establish grounds for a more effective and unified strategy of educational – and social – change. That the reviews in this forum are notably generous and collegial does not (we are aware) reflect on our work as being without many elements that deserve criticism and debate. It rather highlights the extent to which researchers who share an interest in histories of schooling are passionately united in the recognition of how very much this past matters for understanding the present educational predicaments and for shaping South Africa's future. If it were merely that this history confirmed the current and prominent discourse that works to establish 'degrees of victimhood' under apartheid, there would be little more to say. Indeed, what is evident from public debates about 'Indian privilege' is how much of a trap group-think and the comparisons it invites can be. Accusation breeds defense and invites a chronicling of the hardships and depravations underpinning the Indian South African experience as a means to demonstrate belonging and entitlement to civic recognition.4 Such arguments reinforce a conception of apartheid oppression mechanistically, as strata of suffering, rather than [End Page 67] a political and economic system built through uneven and changing relationships and out of diverse social fields. Histories of education are particularly valuable for revealing formations of power across generations of change and the structures and actors, ideas and forces, that produce and...
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Jun 21, 2017
Lawrence Mzukisi Madikizela + 1
Open Access