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Thabo Msibi 
Crispin Hemson 
Shakila Singh

Editorial 

EDUCATION FOR THE 
“AFRICAN CHILD”: 
DISTANT ILLUSION?
One of the key features of post-apartheid South Africa 
has been an ongoing debate around access to quality 
education. Educational policy experts have decried what 
they have often termed a “dysfunctional” schooling system 
that fails to prepare students adequately for independent 
thinking and future life prospects. Prominent amongst the 
circulating debates have been important, yet peripheral 
issues such as resources, curriculum change and general 
inequality, forgetting the very real and systematic ways in 
which racial ideological thinking came to drive education in 
South Africa during apartheid. 

This call sought to interrogate the construct of the 
“African child” and the educational provisions for African 
learners in South Africa 24 years after the collapse of 
apartheid. Understanding the very violent and embedded 
ways in which racial ideological thought and practice came 
to inform present day schooling practices and experiences, 
we were interested in an exploration of what it means to 
offer basic education to South African learners. In essence, 
we sought interrogate the very notion of what it means to 
offer an education in an African context. A context rife with 
a history of colonialism and apartheid that sought to erase 
indigenous cultural and knowledge systems in ways that 
affected the ways of being, the ways of thinking, the ways of 
knowing and the ways of practice (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2015).

Fully cognisant of the very ways in which the Eurocentric 
gaze continues to marginalise such work, or even view it as 
inconsequential and a rehashing of old ideas, we sought 
to prioritise identity, in particular racial identity, as a critical 
avenue for the study of schooling. We thus intentionally left 
the definition of what we meant by the “African child” open 
to contributor interpretation. We also opened the issue to 
submissions beyond the South African border as a way of 
acknowledging the ambiguous and unintelligible ways in 
which these borders were constructed in the first instance. 
Our view was also informed by the systemic manner in 
which imperialism, colonialism and apartheid shared their 
canon across the African continent. While of course we 



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acknowledge the marked differences in relation to postcolonial practice and experience, we 
also sought to foreground these differences with a view of informing our experiences and 
understanding. 

One of the dangers we faced was that the very term “African child” triggered associations 
and evoked reactions relating to images that have been forged and perpetuated over time. It 
is not enough that Eiselen (1953), himself a child of missionaries and the architect of Bantu 
education, wrote this:

…education practice must recognise that it has to deal with a Bantu child, i.e. a child 
trained and conditioned in Bantu culture, endowed with a knowledge of a Bantu 
language and imbued with values, interests and behaviour patterns learnt at the knee 
of a Bantu mother. These facts must dictate to a very large extent the content and 
methods of his or her early education.

There were indeed submissions to this issue that repeated similar motifs, with similar 
content, differing only in that this complacent Eurocentric perspective was replaced by a 
complacent Afrocentric perspective. In one case, an image of just such a scene was submitted 
with the text. Such racial and cultural essentialism in South African education remains 
pervasive and sometimes barely troubled even by those who profess to decolonise, capturing 
and limiting our sense of imaginative possibility.

It is thus no surprise that some in the education community baulked at the idea of engaging 
with the notion. After all, we run the danger of rehearsing old debates in which heated 
disagreements on issues of language, on issues of access to knowledge, on the balance 
between arts and technology, are on closer inspection revealed to resemble the all too neat 
divisions of yesteryear (Chisholm, 2018). Academics may easily find that their provocative 
and radical stance taken today uncomfortably echoes the stance of some reactionary from 
the past. 

Our intention though was not to rehearse these debates, but to consider how in particular 
history and context have shaped basic education and the young people in it, and how young 
people are developing their own paths through education. We are also unapologetic about 
bringing these debates to the fore, as essentially this is, in part, what a project on decoloniality 
requires. It is for this reason that Mignolo (2011) argues that the central feature of decoloniality 
involves “epistemic disobedience and delink from the colonial matrix to open up decolonial 
options” (p. 9). The intent of this special issue was thus not to revisit these debates, but 
rather to disrupt what has come to be accepted as normal within education, thus opening new 
options.

The first set of articles interrogate the historical construction of the “African Child” in 
education policy and provision in South Africa. They examine the extent to which this identity 
has been problematised and/or pathologised in past and current policy and practice. 

Guluza’s article, “Moving beyond artificial linguistic binaries in the education of African 
Language speaking children: A case for simultaneous biliteracy development”, argues that 
the current implementation of language policy has not been sufficiently problematised and 
that African language speaking children continue to experience racism, as well as an inferior 
education. She highlights the racist ideology behind the policy, showing how it constructs 
African language speaking children as inherently different from English and Afrikaans 
speaking children. Her article challenges the deficit positioning of the African child and shows 
that by moving beyond the false binary of mother tongue or English medium instruction, and 
by teaching bilingually, issues of power and marginalisation, may be addressed. She asserts 
that allowing children to draw on their full semiotic repertoire opens pathways for meaningful 
learning, self-conception and positive identity constructions.



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In the article, “A transformative exploration of epistemic individual(istic) identity formation 
within a synergistic decolonial student support system”, Maseko explores the merits of 
individualism as associated with professional identity formation within a communal space 
that allows for the individual and collective good. By focusing on the intrinsic complexities 
of the African child who enters the academia with multiple epistemic identity contestations, 
Maseko interrogates the ensuing alienation from cultural displacement. It is argued that the 
African child is kept in a cyclical position of pathologising, subordination and subjugation 
within an unsupportive system. This article presents the Ubuntu philosophical orientation as a 
transformative pathway of transition into the multiple contextual nuances of identity formation.

In “Pseudo-scientific intellectual theories of the African Child during the 20th century”, Lewis 
asserts that even within the current democratic dispensation, in which the development and 
recognition of the whole child is advocated, racist thinking and practices in education persist. 
He examines selected pseudo-scientific racial theories on the mental abilities of the African 
child from a historical-educational perspective and how they were reflected within numerous 
educational policy documents, perceptions, thinking and practices at the time.

A number of articles deal with how the curriculum perpetuates rigid and limiting views of the 
African child but also how young people themselves demonstrate agency in negotiating their 
education. In “Continuing in the shadows of colonialism: The educational experiences of the 
African Child in Ghana”, Adzahlie-Mensah and Dunne draw on detailed observation, analysis 
of texts and interviews to demonstrate how in a Ghanaian primary school a colonial model 
of an African child is reproduced. Using a critical anti-colonial discursive framework, they 
explore how a systematic set of practices, from timetables to physical regimentation, language 
and cultural controls, devalue youngsters in a primary school. Their analysis portrays the 
curriculum as perpetuating epistemic violence. Hierarchies of age, gender and language serve 
to convey the subordination of the child and the subordination of their indigenous language 
and culture. This battery of practices serves to produce the inferiorisation and silencing of the 
African child. Their proposed remedy is to start with the voices of these children about their 
actual experience of schooling, an articulation that serves to portray them instead as critically 
minded and agentic.

Two case studies address a particular research gap: Soudien (2012:230) refers to the 
“insufficient empirical work on what strategies successful learners develop for themselves 
in a South African schooling system that is more notable on for its well-reported failings. 
Hemson, in “Agency, resilience and innovation in overcoming educational failure”, starts with 
a description of educational dysfunction. In contrast to the highly ordered regimentation and 
repression described in the previous paper, the school in this case study seems caught in 
conflict and incapable of enabling much learning. However, the study is an account of triumph, 
as a group of boys turns their failure and that of the institution into the opportunity for a 
remarkably confident demonstration of their own curricular prowess. Teaching themselves, 
each other and finally other classes in the school, through whatever resources they could 
muster, they achieved remarkable success in the matriculation exam and in their university 
studies. This is indeed a case of resilience, but the achievement is more than coping – they 
demonstrate how this marshalling of resources from township culture and formal learning 
leads to deep disciplinary learning and pleasure in intellect. 

Pillay and Ngubane use a study of a single case, a young prison inmate, to break the 
static “single story” (Adichie, 2016) of an African child, in “An African child inmate’s stories 
of schooling and the possibilities for self-change and self-care”. As in the Ghanaian study, 
their focus is in part on the ways in which the lives of children are controlled and regulated, 
in this case through broader economic, social and legal structures. This is however also an 
account of educational agency and triumph in overcoming dislocation and obstacles. Through 
a realisation that his intention was “to help my brothers to live a decent life”, Bakhona focuses 



on learning and then on tutoring as a way of asserting that commitment, echoing the strategy 
of self-development in the previous account of educational success. Through creative 
strategies of narrative enquiry, the authors reveal how his awareness of self and his own 
resourcefulness grew. The implication of these two articles is that schools need to consider 
how learner agency and initiative can best be mobilised.

Reygan challenges the “single story” from a different perspective, in “Sexual and gender 
diversity in schools: Belonging, in/exclusion and the African child”. He provides an account 
of how South African educational thought excluded questions of sexual and gender diversity 
in its framing of childhood, implicitly or explicitly, denying that an African child has any right 
but to be heterosexual. In part, the argument is how, in Southern Africa, “schools function as 
sites for the policing and control of gender and sexuality”. Policies that silence or exclude, 
uncritical textbooks, ill-prepared and uncomfortable teachers and hostile or violent school 
spaces serve to ensure exclusion. The acceptance of sexual and gender diversity requires 
addressing policies, teaching materials, teacher education and the context of the school. For 
a school to be fully inclusive of African children – to make Ubuntu real – requires attending 
to and addressing the multiple forms in which regulation and policing are still informed by 
damaging and oppressive beliefs and structures.

The article by Nxumalo and Mncube, “Using indigenous games and knowledge to 
decolonise the school curriculum: Ubuntu perspectives”, takes an interesting approach 
in exploring how indigenous games can be drawn into the school curriculum in ways that 
promote Ubuntu. Here we shift to the teacher’s perspective, in terms of the resources available 
to bring about change. The readers’ interest may in particular be on the ways in which the 
cultural expressions surrounding such games communicate specific values and meanings. 
The authors write that these games promote Ubuntu philosophy in the school curriculum, 
which “has been shown to stimulate critical thinking, creativity and promote collective values 
in learners”.

A different perspective is taken in an article that asks what needs to be done in teacher 
education to bring about decolonisation in schooling. Pillay and Swanepoel, in “An exploration 
of higher education teachers’ experience of decolonising the Bachelor of Education honours 
curriculum at a South African University”, take the stance that decolonisation in schools 
requires decolonisation in teacher education. They provide an account of lecturers at honours 
level who speak of their struggles in an attempt to decolonise and how this leads to a rethinking 
of what “curriculum” means. This struggle with meanings parallels some of the tensions and 
possibilities that teachers in schools need to engage with if they are to pursue decolonisation. 
They write, “It is only through critical examination and questioning that teachers will embody 
the skills to speak to the needs of the African child without the distorted lenses of Western 
influence; and in turn critically engage with the need to develop multicultural skills and 
competencies to cater to the African context.”

The last two articles can broadly be defined as having a policy focus. In the first article, De 
Wet and Osman, through an article entitled “Ecological approach to childhood in South Africa: 
An analysis of the contextual determinants”, focus on the educational attainments of African 
learners. Arguing that post-apartheid education reform and research has largely centred on 
individual and policy-level determinants of child development and educational outcomes in 
South Africa, the authors seek to foreground the role played by community and household 
composition on the attainment of learners. In particular, they focus on understanding the 
influence of socio-economic and demographic composition of communities and households 
on the repetition of grades by South African learners. Their data illustrates the intersecting 
ways in which race, gender, age and class come to influence grade repetition. The study 
concludes finds household and community poverty as negatively affecting learner progress in 
South African schools.

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The special issue aptly concludes with Soudien’s article entitled, “Making a new South 
African Learner: An analysis of the South African Schools Act”, which essentially seeks to 
unpack the relationship between the South African Schools Act (SASA) (Republic of South 
Africa, 1996b), and learner identity. Understanding the centrality of history, memory, social 
and cultural institutions and power apparatuses in shaping identity, and indeed policy reform, 
Soudien critically unpacks the various ways in which SASA conceptualises a learner in the 
new South Africa. In particular, Soudien seeks to reflect on what the policy says about the 
South African learner, as well as its expectations of what a learner ought to be. The article 
seeks to develop an “understanding of the symbols and signifiers which are privileged in the 
formal and legal prescripts which surround the process of [identity] mediation. Importantly, 
Soudien asks us to reflect: “What significance this holds for the achievement of equality and 
justice in South Africa”. 

1. Conclusion
Reading this special issue from the concluding article backwards, and taking into consideration 
the accounts in which various authors have sought to highlight the colonial “wound” present 
in the daily experiences of African children, and of South African children in particular, it is 
important for a moment to ponder on the net effect of these wounds on the range of social 
crises that characterise our present day experiences. The papers presented here raise some 
ghosts from the past, debates that may have felt settled, but were not, with ongoing implications 
for the identity and experiences of learners in basic education. Essentially, we have to ask 
ourselves whether the disruptions that were sought via the SASA have been accompanied by 
the correct epistemic and socio-historical understandings to enable a disruption of old ways 
of thinking, thus opening up the possibility of a new order that humanises all our learners in 
the education system. 

References
Chisholm, L. 2017. Beyond worlds: German missionaries and the transition from Mission to 
Bantu Education in South Africa. Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand Press. https://
doi.org/10.18772/12017111746

Eiselen, W. 1953. Report of the commission on native education. 1949–1951. Pretoria: 
Government Printer.

Mignolo, W. 2011. Epistemic disobedience and the decolonial option: A manifesto. 
Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 1(2), 
44–66.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S.J. 2015. Decoloniality as the future of Africa. History Compass, 13(10), 
485–496. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12264

Soudien, C. 2012. Realising the dream: Unlearning the logic of race in the South African 
school. Cape Town: HSRC Press.

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https://doi.org/10.18772/12017111746
https://doi.org/10.18772/12017111746
https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12264