Race-ing class ladies: lineages of privilege in an elite South African school

Abstract

This paper draws on fieldwork done in Greystone School in South Africa, a single sex girls' school. I explore how the legacy of coloniser and colonised is reconfigured through the history of the school and the particular racialised politics of South Africa, where race and class have always been imbricated in differently nuanced ways before, during and after apartheid. The young women have, for the most part, been produced and produced themselves as white young ladies – with the politesse and habitus that this implies. Thus, despite the current intake of a significant number of black girls from further north in Africa, some local Indian (in South African terms) pupils and a very few local black (African) young women, the school continues to support the production of whiteness and (middle) class amongst their students. Throughout, I show how global colonial and postcolonial narratives of whiteness have (and have had) their own particular form and relationship to narratives of whiteness in the changing South African context.

Keywords:

• apartheid
• South Africa
• change
• whiteness
• class
• gender

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following people for their comments on earlier versions of this paper: members of the research team, Aslam Fataar, Rebecca Boden and Penelope Ciancanelli.

Notes

1. The daughters of the wealthiest South Africans (mine-owners and the like) are more likely to be found in elite independent schools in the UK or the USA than in South Africa.

2. Botswana and Namibia, like South Africa, have significant numbers of white citizens.

3. All names are pseudonyms.

4. This is a pseudonym.

5. Though even before the end of apartheid there were some African, Coloured and Indian professionals and even a few rich entrepreneurs.

6. The GINI coefficient is the best measure of inequality in one country that we currently have. Accessed 23 June 2013. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI.

7. White on the inside, but with a brown skin, so a black person who behaves like a white one is a coconut.

8. In other schools in our study the ‘scholarship student’ also loomed large in the imagination of adults associated with the school even though there were few actual scholarships given and, especially, few scholarships to young people from poor backgrounds.