‘Your Mind is the Battlefield’: South African Trainee Health Workers Engage with the Past

Abstract

A key problematic in any post‐conflict society is how to account for the injustices of the past, while at the same time making a space for the development of a shared future. In South Africa, there is an increasing demand for health and social service workers, who are required to address the impact of an unjust past upon individuals and communities. Educators of health and social service workers are thus faced with the complexities of finding pedagogical practices that would allow students to recognize these past injustices and their impact on present problems. This article looks at data taken from a teaching project across two South African universities, where students from three professions engaged in online discussions about their personal, social and future professional identities. During some of these discussions, students spontaneously entered into disagreements about the relevance or irrelevance of the past in modern‐day South Africa. The data indicates considerable reluctance on the part of some students to talk about the past and its relevance to the present. The authors suggest that while talking about the past is both difficult and potentially painful for students, it is nevertheless the responsibility of educators to facilitate such discussions among trainee professionals.

Keywords:

• South Africa
• Students
• Apartheid
• Race
• Interdisciplinary Collaboration
• E‐learning

Acknowledgements

This work is based upon research supported by the Stellenbosch University Fund for Innovation and Research in Teaching and Learning; the Vlaamse Interuniversitaire Raad (VLIR); the South Africa Netherlands Research Programme on Alternatives in Development (SANPAD); and the National Research Foundation. The authors would like to thank Linda Biersteker and the various facilitators for their involvement on this project.

Notes

1. In South Africa, under apartheid, the population was classified into different racial groups and registered under the Population Registration Act No 30 of 1955. Every South African citizen had to be classified and registered as White, Coloured, Indian or African. ‘Coloureds’ refers to peoples of a mixed‐race heritage. Superimposed on these categories were rules about social relationships and where people could live—the Group Areas Act, for example, designated all areas as particular to particular population groups. These categories continue to be used in modern day South Africa as a way to describe groups of people. The authors make use of them here, but recognise the negative connotations of these terms, and that the categories imply a particular history under apartheid. We use the term ‘black’ to refer generically to all formerly disenfranchised South Africans; some students use the term coterminously with ‘African’.

2. Quotes have been minimally changed for ease of reading. Following each quote, a descriptor of the student is given indicating the reference number allocated to each student for the purposes of data analysis; as well as from which university the student is from, their course of study, their gender, age, home language and race.

3. At the start of the module, students were required to draw a map of their community and share the drawing and discussion about their community with the rest of the members of their workgroup (see Rohleder et al., 2008b).

4. The Group Areas Act was one of the cornerstones of apartheid, regulating the segregation of physical spaces by race—race determined, for example, where one could live and where one could do business.