Power in pedagogy: legacies of apartheid in a South African school

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the profound connection between race, gender, and culture in post-apartheid education at a public Afrikaans dual-language school in South Africa. Illustrating how the residues and remnants of apartheid legacies propagate arcane constructions of whiteness through interwoven racial and gendered stereotypes, this research maps the dynamic motility of local regimes of power that erase students’ individuality, discipline their agency, and influence their identities through their everyday school experiences. Using a critical race theory approach, Foucauldian theoretical frameworks and Bourdieu’s notions of cultural capital, this critical ethnographic case study draws on observations and interviews with students and teachers. Written from the positionality of a US researcher, with the critically reflexive view of an outsider to the Afrikaans culture and the South African educational system, this paper considers the power of remaining constructions of whiteness to dominate, reproduce and fortify demoded and baneful gender regimes and racial hierarchies in educational spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• equality
• racism
• power
• whiteness

INTRODUCTION

Residues and legacies of Apartheid

The historical anchoring of Afrikaans whiteness

The vestige of apartheid in the country of South Africa continues to amass a complex and intricate weave to the modern social fabric of the nation. Twenty-five years after the governmental dissolution of a white-ruled system of racial segregation an exhibition of its heritage and mythologies can still be viewed in some educational settings. While the highly complex history of education in South Africa is beyond the scope of this paper (see Chisholm 2004; Thobejane 2010; Soudien and Sayed 2004) Soudien (2010) suggest that Afrikaans schools were the least integrated of the former White schools, post-apartheid. This fact highlights the power and influence of Afrikaans parents and teachers on the educational system as they represent approximately 5% of the total population of South Africa.

Tihanyi (2006) suggests many Afrikaners maintain levels of unconscious denial regarding the political emasculation of white nationalism through the shifting of their cultural power and dominance to a majority-black government. While the loss of sociopolitical power may imperil illusions of Afrikaans superiority, it also serves as a silent cultural threat, jeopardising the eminence of its language and the distinction of its shared sense of historical identity. Such unconscious fears can permeate and adulterate pedagogic practices as teachers re-centre and promote Afrikaans whiteness as the idealised form of South African citizenship. The social value placed on Afrikaans whiteness can construct a dominant narrative of supremacy against which the understandings and identities of students are forged (Soudien 2010). These powerful narratives can silently compel non-Afrikaans students to align with expectations of dominant white culture through implicit suggestions that their own cultural practices and aesthetics are somehow deficient (Soudien 2010). Such practices, often embedded in educational institutions, serve as vehicles to maintain historic status quo power, silently obstructing and limiting educational opportunities for students who do not meet the full expectations of dominant group affiliation.

Power and education

While education has long been understood as a way to access forms of social power, mobility and material goods, it can also be viewed as a political act which must be explored with a critical eye. Because schools serve as cultural gatekeepers through the social learning embedded in pedagogic practices, it is necessary to consider how cultural bias in our local school communities may be impacting student development. According to Stanton-Salazar (1997) aspirations to educational success are shaped not only by academic learning but also by social learning as students are taught to navigate and decode the discourses travelling in their local cultural environments. Signposts of cultural value and meaning manifest discursively in language influencing classroom practices, school rules, and disciplinary policies. Because of the authority of their social positioning, teachers hold power to normalise their values in local cultural practices. They also hold power to evaluate student performances of cultural navigation. Students who share local cultural values have greater access to positionings of academic success through cultural capital. Students perceived as non-affiliated with the local dominant culture are expected to assimilate, learn, and perform to those values. As successful evaluations of cultural assimilation can provide students with forms of social capital, power and resources and unsuccessful interpretations can result in marginalisation or disciplining punishment, these evaluations become both prescriptive and proscriptive to student behaviour (Farkas et al. 1990). The process of cultural assimilation can effectively erase more complex and intersecting identities, homogenising a culturally conforming student body while reflecting historic apartheid hierarchies (Duncan 2005). The discursive projection of whiteness onto constructions of intelligence, morality and success can produce covert and overt forms of inequality while conflating constructions of difference with notions of deficiency (Lewis 2003). Omi and Winant (2014) suggest that race, gender and other intersectionalities (Crenshaw 2017) can be applied as essentialized concepts to negate the impact of an inequitable social hierarchy. The habitual maintenance and policing of these categorical constructions can silence and erase the more fluid and dynamic manifestations of students’ experiences so necessary to the development of more diverse and tolerant cultures.

This research considers how discourses of cultural disparity can covertly shape students’ understandings of themselves and their place in their community as their bodies are read, coded, and sorted by teachers through habitual, bias-ladened categorisation and boundary maintenance. Social hierarchies can be erected and policed around notions of difference silently obscuring and entrenching systemic inequalities in pedagogic practice. As the social capital of dominant cultures permeates mechanisms of control such as language and discipline, it can become a silent systemic regulatory process that adjudicates students’ autonomy and power based on their perceived cultural-affiliated status. Beginning with an interrogation of terms such as ‘difference’ and ‘inclusion’ to consider how meaning travels discursively in language to construct the very social inequalities that educational policies strive to disrupt, we consider how cultural capital informs social power exploring the complex ways bodies are read and positioned in the local school community. The analysis of our results presents a critical view of how social value and power are shaped by notions of affiliation and difference inform student subjectivities.

Power, discourse, and social practices

Because pedagogic practices are forms of knowledge, the intimate relationship between knowledge and power is significant in the analysis of this paper. According to Foucault (2013) discursive practices are forms of knowledge, implicit beliefs bound up with institutional practices, that work to discipline and regulate social behaviours. Foucault coined the term discursive fields to refer to forms of associated meaning that travel in language and social practices. Influenced by relations of power, discourses can conflict and vie for the right to establish social truths as these narratives serve the sociopolitical interest of dominant groups. Foucault suggests that power exists in relation to a field of knowledge that presupposes that knowledge power relationship. Discourses of difference and diversity often deployed in educational environments are used to reference those not already centred on local social frameworks.

According to Kress and Hodge (1979) creating racial, class and gender groups allows differentiation between affiliations: operating as an instrument of social control, governing social narratives, and constructing conceptions of reality. The word ‘inclusion’ discursively erects and polices spatial boundaries through relational and antagonistic powers of admittance or exclusion. Represented in dualistic opposition ‘different from’ can become conflated with ‘less than’ (Braidotti 1994) conveying binaries of deservingness and degeneration. Such discursive relationships in language, embedded in pedagogic and disciplinary practices, further complicate understandings of educational equity (Secada 1989; Dixson and Rousseau, 2017).

Cloaked in benevolence, historic colonial discourses permeate ideas of educational inclusion with forms of privilege and power: activating social tensions, anchoring a history of racism and oppression, and blocking students’ attempts at more equitable identity expressions. These outmoded ideologies of difference imbued with notions of inadequacy and illegitimacy serve as handmaidens to maintain historical hierarchies of power. Of interest in this research is what role categorical constructions around bodily markers such as race, gender and religion play in who is privileged to inclusion or problematised as different. By mapping how this school situates the boundaries of affiliation or difference it is possible to locate when identities are being forged against discourses of idealised Afrikaans whiteness.

Power and cultural capital

To further interrogate the influence of discourses of difference on classroom practice, it is useful to apply Bourdieu’s (1990) theories of cultural capital to critique the production of social value and structural power. According to Bourdieu, capital can take the form of education, language, social connections, money, and resources acquired by family and traded as social currency and power. Harris (1993) advances this notion suggesting whiteness is a form of property rights including ‘rights of disposition, rights to use and enjoyment, reputation and status property and the right to exclude’ (p 1735). Afrikaans culture as a specific accumulation of knowledge and skills can be presented as the standard of value and success around which pedagogic practice is organised.

This paper critiques how educational systems, presented as meritocracies can unknowingly centre and privilege dominant cultures through pedagogic practices. We ask the following questions: How is the school’s ethos of cultural inclusion and diversity discursively constructed? How are students perceived, symbolically read, and categorised through gender, race, class, and other intersecting identities? How are markers of difference constructed and boundaries maintained by the school culture? How is Afrikaans whiteness produced and centred and how are the students forging their identities in relation to it? This paper strives to move beyond the context in which knowledge is produced in the classroom to provide a more holistic understanding of the pedagogic process that recontextualizes and disseminates student social learning to reanimate legacies of apartheid.

METHODOLOGY

Research design

This six-month qualitative study of school observations and student and staff interviews utilises a critical ethnographic approach to interrogate and critique systems of hierarchical power and hegemony that are often normalised or taken for granted to create new knowledge and promote social change. Because social practices of epistemologies are not apolitical, this research strives to advance scholarship and develop critical frameworks to deconstruct the reproduction of historic practices of knowledge production in the classroom. Applying perspectives of critical race theory, this paper amplifies alternative narratives of how race, gender, and other intersectionalities become pivotal in the negotiation of power. Ethical permission was granted through the University of KwaZulu-Natal and all ethical procedures were adhered to. Participants were informed of research aims, consent forms were signed by participants and guardians and anonymity procedures were discussed.

Research site

This research was designed to explore gender inequality at Prospect College (pseudonym) an Afrikaans dual language¹ co-educational public-school serving grades 0–12 in South Africa. As the research progressed and gender emerged as one of the intersecting indices of difference constructed in relation to Afrikaans culture this project expanded to better capture the multiple and varying categories and their relationship to power. Prospect College, a historically white Afrikaans language school adopted a dual-medium language policy based on a 1996 government policy to diversify Afrikaans-only schools offering subjects in both Afrikaans and English. The school currently accommodates 659 learners from age 6–18 including a dual language preprimary school. The multicultural student population consists of 286 white students: 176 of which identify as Afrikaans and participate in separate Afrikaans taught classes and 110 of which are white non-Afrikaans or ‘English’ and attend English taught classes along with, 146 Indian students, 106 black students (including Zulu, Xhosa, and Sotho home speaking), 97 coloured² students, and 24 Asian students. The school hosts an average of 15 high school teachers and 16 primary teachers, 2 Indian, 1 black and 28 Afrikaans. Ten white Afrikaans support staff assist the Afrikaans Principle and Deputy Principal along with 10 black grounds employees creating an employment hierarchy that mirrors an apartheid hierarchy.

Prospect College officially opened its doors in the 1970s to meet the need of a growing Afrikaans population in the geographic area. Set in a picturesque suburb of a major South African city, Prospect College promotes a Christian ethos built on traditional core values, and a focus on developing the whole child through academics, sport, and cultural activities. Rated one of the top feeder schools for major university throughout South Africa with an academic pass rate of over 90% for all grades, Prospect College boasts a proud tradition of academic excellence.

Methods

The lead author and researcher conducted 6 months of teacher and student observations in classrooms, sporting areas, passing breaks, teachers’ lounge, and assembly hall along with 11 semi-structured teacher interviews and 31 semi-structured student interviews. Interviews were conducted in English in locations such as classrooms, the marking room, the library, the sporting pitch and the teachers’ lounge and lasted between 20 and 60 minutes depending on the availability of the participants. Open-ended questions like ‘How would you describe the students of Prospect College?’ and ‘What’s it like to be a student at Prospect College’ were used to solicit information regarding how the school knowledge and values were constructed and what meanings the students and staff made of this information. All interviews were audio recorded and transcribed with participant permission.

Positionality

The researcher, a North American, adult, white female, and an outsider to this school and the South African schooling system, was positioned as a non-participant observer and ethnographic tool of data collection with the aim of constructing an authentic representation of localised knowledge production. With the recognition that all research is situated within and influenced by the socio/cultural/political realities of the investigators, the lead researcher was cognisant of the need to interrogate their relationship to the centring and invisibility of white culture and patriarchal hierarchies with the aim of ‘decolonization of research methods’ (Denzin et al., 2008, p 3). With credence to ethical debates around the legitimacy of white researchers attempting to voice the experiences of people of colour and the awareness that bodily identity markers and understandings of identity are never neutral, but rather dynamic, shifting and reactive to relational power, this work was conducted with intentions of continuous reflexivity to how the researchers own identity of whiteness was constructed and how it influenced epistemic privilege around knowledge creation.

While this research aims to contribute to the discussion and crisis in knowledge representation around the centring of representations of white cultures, it does not intend to advance essentialism around race and gender or suggest fixed or universal cultures that are coherently bounded. Instead, we explore how global discursive practices around bodily identity markers such as race and gender can be used to categorise individuals/groups potentially subjecting them to a common spectrum of positionings forged against idealised colonial ideologies of white, western, Christian maleness. Yet we also recognise the ethical concern that the labour of deconstructing the centring of whiteness should not be seen as the sole responsibility of academics of colour.

Participants

All participants were volunteers recruited via informational flyers or participant referral. Because of the significance of notions of difference to this research a sampling representing the diverse intersectional identities of the school population was sought. Of the 11 teachers interviewed 10 were Afrikaans, 1 was Indian, 8 were female, 2 were male, accurately reflecting the school’s teaching demographics. They ranged in age from 25 to 55 teaching a variety of subjects in both English and Afrikaans. Of the 31 students interviewed, 15 were male, 3 of which identified as Afrikaans, 2 as white English, 4 as coloured (one Soto home language) 3 as Indian (1 Hindi), 3 as black (2 Zulu and 1 Xhosa home language). Of the 16 females interviewed 4 identified as Afrikaans, 4 as white English, 2 as coloured, 3 as Indian (1 Hindi) and 3 as black (2 Zulu home language). These demographics effectively represented the student population of Prospect College (Table 1).

Table 1. Demographics of student interview participants

Student participants		White Afrikaans	White English	Coloured	Indian	Black
Female	16	4	4	2	3	3
Male	15	3	2	4	3	3
Total	31	7	6	6	6	6

Analysis

The aim of this analysis is to provide a nuanced, holistic description of how socially constructed discourses of difference may be informing relational power and identity construction in this school environment. Through post-structural theoretical perspectives that suggest people are socially organised through common factors such as language to construct social realities (Ferdinand 2011) this paper explores the relationship between language, subjectivity, and power in the local culture of a South African school. Applying Foucauldian (2013) concepts of discursive fields and notions of relational power and discipline, this research considers the school’s social and pedagogic practices and their impact on students’ identity construction. Utilising thick ethnographic descriptions (Geertz 1973) to give voice to teacher and student experience, these data were analysed for interconnected themes and relational webs of meaning. A contextual analysis of discursive formations (Foucault 2013) was used to identify, code and analyse data themes, combing and grouping them relationally looking for broader and consistent themes that effectively represented the construction of localised knowledge.

RESULTS

Embedded within the foundations of meritocratic education systems are sexist and racist discourses that influence which power relationships structure classroom dynamics and local hierarchies (Ng, Staton, and Scane 1995). To map how discursive formations of cultural affiliation active in the local knowledge of Prospect College inform power hierarchies in the classroom the following discourses of difference are used to categorise the research findings: race, gender and religion.

Discourses of difference

To provide a contextual analysis of how discourses of affiliation or difference can reproduce remnants of Apartheid rule at Prospect College it is necessary to explore how the school’s cultural ethos discursively shapes positions of agency and achievement. The origins and structure of its local knowledge production are used to map how allocations or limitations of social capital are used to erect local hierarchies of power as the following quote from a teacher illustrates:

Our students are from many different backgrounds and definitely from not so rich a community I would say. There would be like a handful of learners who are quite wealthy but most of all I do not think they have come from wealthy families. I think most of them are very respectful and have been brought up in good homes, but there are the learners who obviously the parents have no control over them. And I do find that the Afrikaans learners in this school have better manners and more respect towards adults and the whole school environment than most of the English learners. It is a big thing in the Afrikaans’s culture. You will see that the whole moral of Afrikaans is way higher standard than the English community. More specifically to us in South Africa. I think they are more committed. I think their parents are more strict and I think there is more set rules and kind of like, there is an expectancy of the parents or the parents expect their children to uphold standards that are set for them. Not as much in the English community but I do find that some of the Indians have higher standards than some of the other learners.Teacher Interview

Mrs. Louw (pseudonym), a 35-year-old, white Afrikaans teacher constructs multiple cultural boundaries around discourses of difference and affiliation in the student body of Prospect College. This quote, a consistent representation of the local school knowledge, examples how Afrikaans cultural affiliation can become discursively conflated with successful students. This narrative has the power to naturalise and reify historic Apartheid ideologies of white ascendancy, funnelling cultural capital and privilege to Afrikaans students. As Mrs. Louw unknowingly organises a social hierarchy with racial and cultural boundaries, she applies discursive notions of cultural difference even within whiteness to relegate non-Afrikaans students outside the privileged group. Constructing notions of successful students and families through white Afrikaans understandings of appropriate manners, respect, and adherence to rules, she binarily positions non-Afrikaans students into ‘non-affiliated’ deficit positionings. By constructing group boundaries monolithically with essentialized characteristics, Mrs. Louw unknowingly disrupts and erases the more complex, intersectional narratives of student experiences in modern South Africa as these dynamic student identities arouse dangerous points of contestation to the cultural centring and reproduction of Afrikaans whiteness. Taylor, a 17-year-old, Indian female explains how such local knowledge, grounded in the pedagogic practices of Prospect College, holds homogenising influence over its students as social actors:

I feel that there’s a lot of stress on minute problems when there are much bigger problems. Like how many earrings you are wearing or the length of your hair for a boy or the color of your hair band. It has to be blue or red only and you can’t wear the colors together. We don’t know why. It’s just a rule. And you can’t wear yellow even though it’s a school color. And the length of your nails. If they are too long they will send you to file your nails. We don’t know why, but they tell us it will compromise our education.

Student interview

As Prospect College demarcates a set of institutional values and beliefs by which social practices are distilled and power is allotted, they legitimise white Afrikaans culture and delegitimize the heterogenous array of sociocultural practices of their students. The students of Prospect College are expected to act out their identities and are allowed their agency in accordance with localised expectations determined by social categorisation, relations and hierarchies. As the social practices of Prospect College are regulated through strict prescription of Afrikaans traditions degrees of freedom and resistance are conferred on individual students based on group affiliation and the perceived needs of enforcing conformity. Often recursive in nature such discourses serve as effectual behavioural reinforcement for the social learning of young people. As the school’s local knowledge works to discursively recontextualize student social realities based on white, Afrikaans values, they hold the power to shape student identities, actions, roles, and performances.

Discourses of difference and race³

Zack, an 18-year-old coloured male describes his experience of social apartheid at Prospect College responding to a question about what he likes best and least about his school.

What I least like about Prospect College is the way that kids of a different race are treated. They are treated like they are seen differently. This school was firstly and originally completely 100% Afrikaans school. And that has changed over the years, of course. I am sure it was a private school before, but that has changed, so basically the Principal of this school is an Afrikaner. She is completely 100% Afrikaans. The Afrikaners who come to the school do have parents who are of course completely Afrikaners. At home, they are teaching their kids differently because of the way things were back then. Kids will come to school who are completely Afrikaners and they look down on you if you are a different race. Like they are higher than you, of course. And like they are the best. And they always try to prove themselves that they are the best and do anything it takes to be first. They are quite racist and it is just the way they have grown up. It is what their parents teach them at home. And I would say, it is not fair.

Student Interview

According to Omi and Winant (2014) theories of racial formation suggest that racial categories are ‘created, inhabited, transformed and destroyed’ (p 55) as a form of technology that connects the socio-political to individual bodies. Because racialised bodies are always under dynamic construction, it is necessary to focus on how race is being dynamically deployed, represented and institutionalised in the school knowledge. The school’s desire for a consistent and homogenous Afrikaans culture is historically normalised to present this inequitably stratified social hierarchy as a meritocratic process. The cultural privileging of whiteness erases the multiple and varying assets and strengths brought to the school community by non-Afrikaans students like Zack. When asked what he would change about his school Zack answers the following:

If I could, I would change the governing body. Too many whites. Too many Afrikaners. Why cannot there be another race involved in this programme. Why does it always have to be whites? I understand that not everybody involves themselves in this and that is why they are getting more favoured. So, if everybody just took more notice of what is actually going on things would be a little better.

Student Interview

Zack speaks to the historic, systemic nature of these inequitable hierarchies reinforced by a concentration of Afrikaner power and domination in the school’s governing board. Without a more accurate representation of the school’s cultural diversity the social capital of Afrikaans whiteness goes unchallenged and unchecked to permeate pedagogic and disciplinary practices and dominate and silence alternative narratives. Taylor, a 17-year-old Indian girl states the following in response to the question of what she would change about her school:

Apartheid is not over. It may be illegalised but it is not over. Basically, what this school does is it tries to maintain the attachment to the Afrikaans language but it is not actually an Afrikaans school. It is actually an English school. A good 85% of the schools are English. If you go to the school website or Facebook page you will see that most of the pictures was majority white Afrikaans kids.

Student Interview

Taylor explains how Afrikaans whiteness is overtly centred and discursively reproduced through pictorial representation at Prospect College. She goes on in her interview to describe the privilege provided by the small Afrikaans class size and student/teacher ratio pointing to the clear educational advantages provided to the Afrikaner students. Taylor explains that because Prospect College is a dual medium school, each grade is organised by three sets of classes per grade. In Group A (referred to as the Afrikaans class) all classes are taught in Afrikaans language to white Afrikaans students of Dutch descent. These classes range in student number from 1 to 10 per classroom. In group B and C (referred to as the English classes) all classes are taught in English to an array of non-Afrikaans ethnicities including black, coloured, Indian and white students of British descent. These classes range in student number from 28 to 35 students per classroom and vary in home culture, language, class, and religion.

While the term ‘English’ was often used at Prospect College to divide whiteness into two separate cultures by creating a category of white non-Afrikaans students assumed to be of British rather than Dutch descent, the term ‘English’ was also used to refer to all non-Afrikaans students regardless of race who attend Groups B and C classes taught in the English language. The historical bifurcation of the category of whiteness at Prospect College created a notable binary between the Afrikaans culture and all other cultures as the Afrikaans language itself becomes a tool to erect privileged boundaries around the Afrikaans students and teachers. Because the number of non-Afrikaans students is more than three times the number of Afrikaans students, the classrooms are inequitably balanced in numbers and resources. Researcher observations revealed significant inequalities in student teacher ratio, interaction and classroom practices based on these inequitable numbers mirroring essentialized racial and cultural categories of Apartheid hierarchies.

Differing disciplinary expectations were often observed by the researcher at Prospect College. During one observation, the researcher was seated in the teachers’ lounge which is off limits to students. An Afrikaans girl confidently and comfortably entered the room explaining to the staff that she was sent on an errand by her teacher to collect a book the teacher left in the staff lounge. The student was cheerfully greeted by two teachers who allowed her to enter the room to search for and collect the book while praising her recent sporting success. Later that day a coloured girl came to the doorway. She hesitated then took a few steps in to get the attention of a teacher sitting at a computer, to whom she had been tasked by her teacher to return a set of keys. The teacher got up and grabbed the student by the shoulders, walked her backward to the door, admonished her for stepping past the threshold and threatened her with detention for any future transgressions. Such examples of contrasting behavioural standards erected around cultural affiliations serve as small, habitual, micro-aggressive, disciplinary vehicles for a larger web of institutional racism and inequality in this Afrikaans school.

Ruth, a seventeen-year-old, coloured female provides a heartbreaking example of how a classroom reading lesson turns into instruction on the value of whiteness at Prospect College. She translates the poem called ‘Lottie’s Wish’ from Afrikaans to English, explaining that a teacher instructed Ruth’s little sister, who has dark hair and skin, to stand in front of the class and read:

There was once a girl. Her name was Lottie.

Lottie didn’t like herself.

She had black curly hair and she didn’t like her brown eyes.

And she wished that she could look different.

One day Lottie went to the park and a beautiful white dove came and sat on her shoulder and

said you can wish for anything.

One wish for that one day.

And then you can decide if you want to keep that wish forever.

Lottie is so happy.

She says to the dove ‘Lovely dove I will really rather have long blond hair and blue eyes.’

And the next moment she looked different. And now she had long blond hair and blue eyes.

Student Interview

Ruth shows the researcher the ending illustration of a blond haired, blue-eyed white girl and stated:

My sister, as a coloured female who doesn’t look like a little white girl had to read this in front of the entire grade class. So now my sister all of the sudden came home and said, ‘Is there something wrong with me because I don’t have light skin, blond hair and blue eyes?’ and she hated herself for such a long time because she didn’t look white. She felt really badly about herself because she is not white. At grade 4 they are very impressionable.

Student Interview

This poem saturated with archaic notions of idealised whiteness is used as a discursive teaching tool to inform students of the value of Afrikaans whiteness in Prospect College. While suggesting whiteness as the ultimate attainment, it also teaches non-white students that they should loath their own bodies and wish for the divine transcendence of their difference from whiteness. Ruth’s little sister’s body is marked as different and coded as defective and illegitimate in a demoralising reading lesson she is unlikely to forget. Ruth explained to the researcher that after this event her parents removed her sister from Prospect College and placed her in a private school. Ruth chose to remain and serve as a Prefect to work towards positive cultural change.

Discourses of difference and gender

The local social practices of Prospect College are permeated by naturalised discourses of white male supremacy. According to Durkheim and Mauss (1963) Afrikaner males, as a social grouping, have enjoyed the historic privilege to harness the power of affiliation, naturalising and reify their own dominance in society. Emanating from a genealogical history rooted in the white, male power of Apartheid, these outmoded beliefs of affiliation and difference actively construct archaic racialised privileges and limitations onto the bodies of its students.

Dominant Afrikaans Masculinities:

Hierarchies of localised social power in Prospect College were constructed with white Afrikaans maleness at the apex. Positions of agency and power were discursively produced as the legitimate right of white males. Acts of agency by non-white males were regularly constructed as rebellious and problematised as embezzlement of social capital. It was often noted in observations that Afrikaans males were allowed privileges such as: leaving classrooms without permission and using hallways and stairwells that were off limits to other students. In asking why the boys were not held to the same rules as the other students the researcher was informed by a female Afrikaans teacher that the school staff was confident the boys would not abuse this privilege because they have been raised to be respectful by the Afrikaans culture. Mrs. De Beer a 50-year-old white, Afrikaans teacher further explains this male-privileged social structure and how it is reinforced by Christian patriarchy:

The Afrikaans peoples got this that the male is the patriarch – how do I say – is the main figure and everybody listen to him. It’s a way of upbringing and the religion. Like the man is the head of the home and I think that has an influence. They’ve got a Christian ethos at this school, so I think that’s got an influence.

Teacher interview

The privileging of white Afrikaans males was often noted in field observations:

11^th grade Group A (Afrikaans students) dance class:

I am struck by the difference in class size. This Afrikaans class has 11 students while the previous two English classes had 28–30 students. I am also struck by how many of the Afrikaans boys are allowed to opt out of the dancing. While all students grade 8–12 are required to participate in a performative dance class as part of athletics, three of the four Afrikaans males were excused from dancing and allowed to leave the classroom. While numerous boys in the previous classes had requested exemption only one on crutches was allowed to not dance.

Field notes

Mrs. Snyman a 28-year-old white, Afrikaans teacher, explains further how dominant masculinities in Afrikaans culture pervade classroom practices constructing hierarchical differences around non-hegemonic perceptions of queerness and femininities:

Boys are not very keen on writing. They would rather do something physical. But if you tell them to do a drama in front of someone, they would typically say it’s gayish, girlish behaviour. So, men in the Afrikaans culture are very still … I don’t want to say anti-gay, but they still think of the feminine action are seen as gay and they don’t want to come forth as feminine or soft.

Teacher Interview

Bianca, a 17-year-old, white, English female student describes how legacies of patriarchal power are unknowingly reproduced by teachers in daily pedagogic practices at Prospect College:

The boys are not being gentlemen because of the male influence at this school. I’ll give you an example: there is a male teacher at this school that told one of the girls in our class that the most she will amount to in life is being a domestic worker. He straight up in words said that, and everybody took a face. And if he, as an adult, is supposed to be influencing the rest of the young men in the school, is speaking like that to young woman, they are not going to learn anything.

Student interview

Passive Afrikaans Femininities:

Mrs. Snyman goes on to position girls as passive, docile, and dutiful subjects through ‘pet’ femininities in combination with more neoliberal notions of girls as hardworking, empowered learners:

Girls are a lot easier to teach because they are very driven and committed when it comes to work. They are kind of … all the girls in the Afrikaans culture are we would say in Afrikaans a ‘Pliggie’. A ‘Pliggie’ is a word for a teacher’s pet. I think it’s where the women in our community, as mothers, we tend to strive for our girls to be the best that they can achieve. Whereas it’s also important for a girl to be well adjusted and well educated. It’s not I think about being submissive to her husband for the rest of her life. It’s being able to empower her and encourage her to be the best. I think that’s why the girls are very, very driven – task driven and they are actually well achievers. Most of the girls are 70–75% achievers, sometimes 80–90%. You get the most distinctions out of the girls than the boys.

Teacher Interview

Traditional constructions of white femininity were common at Prospect College, but available mainly to Afrikaans females who were awarded forms of social value based on successful performances of sweet and complaint white girls. A narrow and rigid position of white Afrikaans femininity requiring performances of passivity and dutiful service is presented discursively as how girls will be valued and rewarded with power in this school culture. Performing as a ‘Pliggie’ can earn girls social capital to enter the hierarchy after the Afrikaans boys. Unfortunately, this social capital is not as accessible to non-Afrikaans girl and works as a form of behavioural bait to homogenise their performances. Constructions of white Afrikaans femininity as chased, pious, innocent, and deserving of protection from the more dangerous sexuality of non-Afrikaans students were common in the local discourse of Prospect College. Mrs. Van Lingen provides an example:

In our Afrikaans’ culture it’s not like the girls are very open and flirty saying, ‘Hey, how are you?’ They are very reserved and shy. And the boys are also not this … how do you put it … these hormone driven boys. They are active and funny and stuff like that, but they are not hormonal in the sense of they are just thinking of girls, girls, girls, girls and sex and that. They are still very innocent. So, putting them together boy and girl they wouldn’t just easily interact and flirt. It makes them more focused. But it’s not like … I don’t know how to explain it. It’s more like a culture thing. Like if you go to English girls and you seat a boy and a girl next to each other they would easily chat and there would be a lot of flirtation and stuff like that. Whereas in Afrikaans girls are taught still today you are reserved. You are well-behaved girls to become well-behaved woman. And then boys are also taught you respect a girl, and you respect a girl’s body. So, there is nothing vulgar always going around. Like some of the English kids would be busy putting their hand up a girls’ skirt or something like that during break. You don’t see the Afrikaans kids do that because they are taught in a certain way that you respect a girls’ body, as a boy and a girl can behave herself. You are not going to be a little slut running around.

Teacher Interview

While claiming higher moral standards for the Afrikaans culture this teacher frames non-affiliated bodies as hyper-sexualised, dangerous and in need of control evoking historic colonial legacies of racialised sexualities. According to Bhana (2017) understandings of sexualities can become racially fused and essentialized to position masculinities and femininities through gendered relations of power. Intersections of race, sexuality and gender collide in this school culture as the students of Prospect College must forge their romantic identities and personal agency on the limiting and rigid cultural binaries of virtue or vulgarity. In discursively awarding notions of authenticity and sexual purity to Afrikaans students Mrs. Van Lingen effectively disrupts and mutes the multiplicity of expressions of young sexualities. Instead, she situates it as a fixed biological process rather than a dynamic and complex social process charged with meaning and power (Bhana 2017). Such discursive acts of cultural boundary maintenance relegate the non-Afrikaans, non-white, non-Christian girls to intersectional hierarchical downgrades of social power. Fewer opportunities for leadership and agency appeared available to non-Afrikaans girls as such performances were outside the teachers’ understandings of normal; challenging their interpretations of cultural norms, power and the ‘word of God.’ Instead, the school’s knowledge essentialized gendered categories to secure the hegemonic frameworks of white Afrikaans masculinity.

Discourses of difference and Religion

Historically, religion has been used by dominant groups to claim divine deservedness and superiority (Jacobs and Carmichael 2004) while drawing binary distinctions of moral and spiritual deficit to objectify and vilify those perceived as non-affiliated. Used to establish and police the boundaries of true affiliation and social decency, Christianity can be employed to avert outsider threats of perceived cultural or racial impurities. According to Durkheim 1995) religion can be weaponised drawing on interpretations of ‘Gods will’ to allocate power to those perceived as pious and deliver retribution to those deemed as profane. Religious beliefs often deployed as divine tools of social control and vehicles of reinforcement dominate socio-political beliefs (Jacobs and Carmichael 2004) as teaching staff wield the doctrinal power to delineate and adjudicate acts of right and wrong (Savelsberg 2004). Mrs. De Beer who has worked at Prospect College for more than 20 years constructs a normalising and legitimising narrative around notions of traditional, white, middle-class Christian families:

I also find when there is an absent father in the house the children, the boys and the girls, suffer. If they’ve only got a mother raising them, they’ve got more discipline issues. Especially if the father is missing. I find those children have usually got problems. They’ve got concentration problems or emotional problems. And the children who gives me the most problems are the children whose parents are divorced, or remarried, or only the mother. There’s only one household one parent household. Difficult for the mother to handle everything. She can’t mother and father everything. That’s why God gave a child a father and a mother.

Teacher Interview

As this teacher constructs notions of strong and righteous traditional patriarchal Christian families she marginalises the majority of the school population. Reserving the ideal positioning of ‘healthy’ and ‘loving’ families for traditional patriarchal structures she binarily position all other forms of family to discourses of inadequacy limiting understandings of how love, support, and group resources are shared (Hooks 2000). Bianca a 17-year-old white English female expands on how Prospect College’s centring of Christianity through religious discourses and pedagogic policies results in further exclusion and erasure:

There is a lot of this ethic issues. I don’t know if you know henna or mehndi. Where, okay, I’m a Christian so I don’t personally need this, but it’s a religious thing for weddings or you know, functions and you are not allowed to have that on your hand as a cultural thing … we don’t even get days like Eid off or Diwali off. It’s really just the Christian holidays.

Student Interview

Despite a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious student population Christianity is presented in this school community as the backbone of Afrikaans culture to define dominant group values. Often deployed as a tool by which cultural capital is placed completely outside the grasp of everyone but white Afrikaans students (Haidt 2012; Davis 2018) it is used to categorise and discipline student bodies. Ruth goes on to explain how the power of religious unity consolidates cultural control at Prospect College to direct and advance white Afrikaans social practices:

I mean, let’s just be honest. This school is a family-run business when the meetings are held in the Dutch Reform Church every Sunday. That is where all the staff management go, most of the Afrikaans students go. They all come from there. That’s where the Chairperson goes. A couple of teachers are pastor’s wives there. Everyone is connected. It’s a family business. … You can’t wear hijab here. Apparently, it’s a Christian ethos school but according to me Christian people shouldn’t behave like that and should be accepting and love everyone.

Student Interview

It is important to critical pedagogy to highlight here how teachers’ unconscious prejudicial feelings can act as tributary streams that feed the river of systemic domination and subjugation that institutionalise white, colonial domination in educational settings (Hooks 2000). Students at Prospect College are making meaning of their own cultural and spiritual values and virtues based on relational feedback of their local school community. These students are fundamentally connected to the dominant narratives of social efficacy based on the frameworks of an educational system that still harbours the oppressive and exploitive messages of Apartheid. As racial and religious discourses are used to reproduce forms of neo-colonial white supremacy around racial integration a form of institutional social apartheid is evoked to colonise student minds at Prospect College (Hooks 2000).

Conclusion

The data collected from Prospect College examples how student identities can be shaped by social value constructed around idealised notions of whiteness embedded in classroom practices (Soudien 2010). As teachers at Prospect College unknowingly serve as cultural gatekeepers reading, categorising, and placing students’ bodily markers into social hierarchies with Afrikaans whiteness at the apex, it becomes possible to map how teachers’ evaluations of students’ assimilation become behavioural incentives (Farkas et al. 1990). As magnetic fields of relational power (Foucault 2013) expand and contract in dynamic agitation around students intersectionalities (Crenshaw 2017) white hegemony becomes electrified to illuminate the detritus of apartheid.

The narratives in this paper are used to critically excavate problematic knowledge production around the invisibility and centring of historic legacies of colonial whiteness. This work contributes to our understandings of how cultural knowledge permeates classrooms confounding and disrupting our pedagogic policies designed to support meritocratic education. Further research is needed to excavate deeply embedded and normalised inequalities in classroom practices. As the bearers of hegemonic discourses, teachers must be provided with sufficient training to empathically occupy the subjective position in order to learn to recognise their own bias and disrupt their role in upholding white supremacy (Hooks 2000). Teachers must be able to effectively identify when they centre their own cultural values and beliefs and work to emulate acts of cultural fusion to advance classroom equalities and teach students to develop these pro-social skills (Mazrui 2013). The process of decolonising classrooms requires a true commitment to hearing and respecting dissenting voices through direct, authentic communication where change is not perceived as a dangerous threat to power and control. It also requires that the dominant group-affiliated educational practitioners are willing to give up their privilege and the material benefits of that power to create new paradigms and models of social change (Hooks 2000). Colonial forms of paternalism must be dismantled, and decision-making must be shared by those who have historically hoarded power.

Prospect College represents the promise of educational and social advancement to many of its students and their families – the opportunity to travel paths blocked to their ancestors by law. Yet if that education is based on a history of oppression silently embedded in pedagogic practice, students will remain stymied by a system that reproduces the racism and Eurocentric bias despite the pedagogic policies designed to eradicate those inequalities. Such systems can influence students’ internalisation of racism with significant political ramifications and psychological trauma. We suggest that schools have an ethical responsibility to reflect on how they construct and politically deploy understandings of student success and difference around historic notions of whiteness to the abatement of more complex, intersectional, and fluid forms of culture. In order for South Africa to rise to the challenge of educational equality, schools like Prospect College must be equipped to prepare students to build a modern South Africa founded not on the fear of difference, but on the strength of it.

Declaration of interest statement

This work is based on the research supported by the South African Research Chairs Initiative of the Department of Science and technology and national Research Foundation of South Africa grant number 98407.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Prospect College offers full curriculum enrolment in both English and Afrikaans language.

2. A term established during apartheid to define one of the four main racial groups (Black, White, Indian and Coloured) to impose white supremacy and maintain racial divisions. Established in Apartheid law, people categorised as ‘Coloureds’ are an ethic group with diverse ancestral backgrounds which can include European colonisers, indigenous Khoisan and Xhosa people and slaves imported from the Dutch East Indies. This group does not necessarily share discernible identities in the form of religion, social habits or physical characteristics.

3. For the purpose of this paper ‘racism’ will be used to identify the culturally sanctioned beliefs travelling in the school discourses that inform how power operates around constructions of racialised identities to effect historically disadvantaged minority or ethnic groups.