Anti-Colonial Orientations to Place: Unsettling Encounters with South African Educational Landscapes

ABSTRACT

The authors bring together decolonial, place attuned, and critical posthumanist orientations to analyze an event during a residential workshop organized as part of a state-funded research project on decolonizing early childhood discourses in South Africa. An invitation during the workshop to grapple with what might be unsettling by attending to the agency of the more-than-human world and its entanglement with unequal human geographies of place, generated a diffractive photographic image and unsettling stories as a group of early childhood teachers and educational researchers kept re-turning to the data. Working with Barad’s methodology of temporal diffraction as apparatus, we discursively and visually trace entanglements that emerged from this data. We conclude on the mattering of this work for engaging with the potentials and tensions of attending to the more-than-human within highly asymmetrical human relations in the settler colonial context of South African education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This three-year-long research project was funded by the National Research Foundation of South Africa between 2016–2018 and is still ongoing (see www.decolonizingchildhood.org). The overall aim of the DECD project is to investigate what it means to decolonize teacher education, higher education and, in particular, early childhood education (0–8 years). Its location in the South is salient, while at the same time of critical importance to the wider, global debate of how to educate through more-than-human inquiry-based learning for an ecologically sustainable future that includes animals, matter, and children as political agents.

2. The term “apartheid” can be traced to settler colonialism and imperialism dating back to the first Dutch settlement in South Africa in 1652, although the policy of apartheid continued through 1940. Apartheid, which literally means “apart-hood” or “apartness,” actively promoted privileges for white people and, in particular, the Afrikaans settlers, while implementing racial segregation, land dispossession, educational disparity, and numerous other racially discriminatory economic and social conditions for people of color, particularly Black South Africans. The legacies of apartheid oppressions remain in South African society, including through persistent educational and economic inequality.

3. In 1953, the discriminatory policies of apartheid were extended to education. Although Black children were always educated separately from white children, The Bantu Act of 1953 solidified the racially segregated policies of education. South African education was streamed into different curricula for white, Indian, Coloured, and Black people. Each stream was governed by separate departments of education and staff, policies, and unequal funding. These departments, controlled by the state, were required to implement curricula that would enforce the systemic oppression of people of color (Chisholm, 2012; Kallaway, 2012). Schools designated for Black students focused on preparing children for particular menial tasks. Of significance for this article is the deliberate exclusion of Black children from learning experiences with land. Not only were Black children subjected to inferior education, they also were systematically deprived from learning with the land through the Bantu Education Act. In this way education mirrored the dispossession of Black people from their lands. The injustices of apartheid education are still present.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karin Murris

Karin Murris is a professor of Early Childhood Education, University of Oulu (Finland), and Emerita Professor of Education, University of Cape Town (South Africa). Her research is in childhood studies, philosophy of education, and posthumanist and postqualitative research. She has led several internationally funded educational projects.

Sieraaj Francis

Sieraaj Francis is a graduate student at the University of Cape Town, studying towards a Masters in Education specializing in educational technology.

Sumaya Babamia

Sumaya Babamia is currently completing her doctoral research in the School of Education at the University of Cape Town. As a speech-language therapist, her work experience and research interests operate within a transdisciplinary approach to child and childhood studies, disability, early childhood education, and decolonial studies in early childhood education.

Fikile Nxumalo

Fikile Nxumalo is an assistant professor of Early Childhood Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her research examines geographies of childhood, anti-Blackness, and settler colonialism in early learning contexts.

Vivienne Bozalek

Vivienne Bozalek is an honorary professor in the Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching, and Learning at Rhodes University. Her research interests and publications include the political ethics of care and social justice, posthumanism and feminist new materialisms, innovative pedagogical practices in higher education, critical family studies, and postqualitative and participatory methodologies.

Theresa Giorza

Theresa Giorza is a lecturer in the Foundation Studies Division at The University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa). She is involved in research that works across the humanities and the sciences, early childhood and teacher education, the arts and environmental education.