Racial discourses and colonial education policy: The discursive construction of education development at a historically white South African university

Introduction

In settler colonial contexts such as South Africa, the problem of curriculum remains caught in the contradictions of the modernity/coloniality couplet – the Western university gives access to modernity but always via the languages, cultures and frames of reference of the ex-colonial powers. The student protests that erupted on South African campuses (2015-2016) belatedly, challenged the ‘whiteness’ of institutional cultures and the Eurocentricity of their curricula. This generation of ‘born-free’ black South African students were protesting the racism and alienation they experienced on a campuses, historically reserved for middle-class white students, that more than two decades into the new democracy continued to deliver a curriculum designed with the latter in mind. The RhodesMustFall movement’s demands included:

Improve Education Development Programmes.

Much has been written since to analyse the protests (Heleta, 2016; Jansen, 2017, 2019, 2023; Lange, 2021; Long, 2021; Nyamnjoh, 2016; Praeg, 2019) and subsequently they led to a questioning of the legacies of empire in metropolitan as well as settler colonial universities (Hayes et al., 2023; Swartz, 2023). Although efforts to recognise and include indigenous knowledges and cultures in the curriculum are being undertaken, with some success in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia and Canada (Hayes et al., 2023; Keane et al., 2023), the demand to decolonise the higher education curriculum remains challenging and contested (Jansen, 2019, 2023; Naicker and Luckett, 2023; Stein et al., 2021).

The purpose of this article is not to discuss the challenges of decolonising the curriculum, but to zoom in on the first of the RMF’s demands listed above; to ‘improve Education Development Programmes’ (EDPs) ¹ at one historically white South African university. The paper emerges from a particular institutional context - the EDP in the Humanities Faculty at the University of Cape Town (UCT). It seeks to understand how programmes such as this emerged, why they persisted for over two decades after apartheid and why they were ultimately rejected by the students they sought to serve. To do this I first provide a brief case study of the Humanities EDP around the protest period, highlighting its discursive and structural formation in a white settler university, why it was critiqued and how it attempted to respond. In the second section of the article, I draw on secondary sources to trace the discursive formation of colonial education policies in Africa, particularly South Africa, to understand their legacy in the racialised social imaginary of the white reformers who formulated policy ‘solutions’ such as EDPs for black students.

There is also a more intimate motivation for writing this article. I am a white British, naturalized South African female academic who worked for a decade as Director of the Humanities Education Development Unit, University of Cape Town. In this role I witnessed close-up the lives of undergraduate black students from poor families and became increasingly frustrated at the university’s failure to acknowledge their lived experiences, and to recognise and include their identities and cultures in its curriculum. Further, I witnessed how the structural distinction between ‘mainstream’ three-year degree programmes and that of the four-year degrees in the EDP caused ED students to feel inferior and racially stigmatised. My angst around my own complicity in working on a project that had been structurally and discursively framed by a colonial imaginary became acute during the protests. At this time, I witnessed how anger and expressions of hatred of white people by some students divided academic staff. In some cases, white colleagues working in EDPs were also targets of students’ anger. I shared the hurt and shame expressed by some of my colleagues, as many of us had been anti-apartheid activists in the 1970s and ‘80s and had hitherto understood ourselves as ‘on the side of black students’ against a seemingly powerful, elitist and complacent institution. I was struck by our entrapment in the structural contradictions of a not-yet-post-racial settler state that has failed to deliver restitution to black people. The students’ outrage also led me to reflect on Charles Mills’ definition of ‘whiteness’ as an ‘epistemology of wilful ignorance’ (Mills, 2007). This paper is an attempt to begin to lift that veil of ignorance.

The education development project

Mamdani (2016) argues that there have been two waves of reform in African universities post-independence. The first involves the widening of access where, despite the focus on human rights and social justice, the European model of the university and curriculum remain untouched. In settler states this means the integration of privileged white settler staff and students with impoverished black students from poor schools that ‘was bound to be explosive’ (Mamdani, 2016: 72). The second wave of reform involves the Africanisation of the university and its curriculum along the lines of the Dar es Salaam model. This second wave of reform hit South African universities only in 2015 in the form of student protests. It was in the context of Mamdani’s first wave of university reform that Education Development emerged in the 1980s in South African historically white universities, first in the context of apartheid reforms and post-1994, as a means for the new government to widen university access for black students.

The ED project was conceptualised within a liberal, anti-apartheid, humanitarian discourse that aimed to develop a skilled and professional black middle class by giving access to ‘world-class’ white universities to ‘talented black students with potential to succeed’ (Scott et al., 2005: 265). However, early on a tension developed between the desire to admit black students and what this would mean for ‘standards’ (Scott et al., 2005: 265). It soon became apparent that access to elite white universities would become a ‘revolving door’ for black students, labelled ‘disadvantaged’, ‘underprepared’ or ‘at risk’, schooled at a chronically inadequate public schooling system, unless some kind of ‘catch-up’ curricular provision was made (Boughey, 2007; McKenna, 2003). The attempt by well-meaning white liberals to return to an integrated or assimilationist model of university education, after a generation of Bantu Education, proved unworkable. So it was that separate, remedial, and compulsory Academic Support Programmes (ASPs) ² were established to assist small minorities of black students to ‘cope’ with an English-medium, Eurocentric academic curriculum, that had been designed by and for native speakers of English from privileged middle class settler backgrounds. True to colonial discourse that assumed true knowledge of ‘the native’, the problem was initially located in a racialised deficit model of the black student in a manner that individualised and decontextualised the problem, obscuring its structural causes (Boughey and McKenna, 2016).

In the 1980s, the discourse of ‘academic support’ that constructed black students as victims of apartheid in need of help, elicited pastoral care from mostly white female ASP practitioners who tended to position themselves on the side of black students against uncaring and powerful white academics and managers. This allowed ASP staff to ride on the high moral ground of the anti-apartheid ‘struggle’ and human rights discourse. Early generic ASP courses such as English for Academic Purposes focused on teaching decontextualised generic skills such as note-taking, reading and writing and English syntax and grammar. During this period ASPs were confined to the micro-practices of teaching add-on non-credit-bearing courses with minimal impact on mainstream curricula. Apart from stigmatising black students, this model left the curriculum designed for white students unchallenged ³ , which unsurprisingly, high numbers of black students continued to fail.

Chatterjee (2011) argues that in the colonial era it was the ‘imperial prerogative’ to declare ‘the colonial exception’; the colony was seen as the exception to universal (European) norms on grounds of biological, cultural and moral difference. As described above, the declaration of an exception opens up a pedagogical project in which the colonisers are obliged to take responsibility for educating and disciplining the colonized, to bring them up to European norms. Chatterjee’s work on India shows how this paradigm of measuring the colonized against European norms outlives colonial rule and gets taken up in similar ways by post-colonial developmental states (Chatterjee, 2011).

The persistence of coloniality and racialised discourse

Since 1994, in a context of a competitive neo-liberal global market and a very low tax base, the new South African state has attempted to provide extensive forms of social welfare, including education; but it soon became evident that the new state had neither the resources nor the capacity to deliver mass quality education. In higher education the state first had to restructure and integrate a system divided by ethnic groups before attending to widening access for black students. In 1993 African participation in the HE system was less than 1%. On coming to power, the new state followed global trends by adopting a ‘new public management’ approach to ‘steering’ HE via mechanisms such as planning, funding and quality assurance. This involves comprehensive mandatory reporting to the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET); whereby ‘transformation’ is measured by comparing demographic data for the four main race-groups (for purposes of redress and equity) ⁴ .

Post-1994 the ED model was retained because it offered a hard-pressed state a seemingly inexpensive means of widening access (on lower admission scores) for black students to the best universities. From 2003 the state provided funding for EDPs for ‘foundational provision’, ‘additional to the standard curriculum’ to equip ‘underprepared students with academic foundations that will enable them to successfully complete a recognised HE qualification’ (Department of Education, 2006). It was hoped that this provision would ‘widen access in a responsible manner’ that enabled ‘talented but disadvantaged students’ to ‘realise their potential’ (Scott, 2012).

However, quantitative research on student performance patterns by race showed skewed results (Scott et al., 2007). Of the overall 2006 undergraduate cohort only 35% had graduated 5 years after entering a three-year programme; only 20% of African or Coloured students had graduated from a 3-years degree in regulation time, while the figure for white students was 43% (Council on Higher Education, 2013). For the past decade, closing this ‘racially skewed achievement gap’ has become a preoccupation for university leaders and ED units, especially in historically white universities. To address the persistence of high attrition rates in the national HE system, researchers – mainly based in ED units, notably the Director of AD - compiled a proposal that would take the ED model to scale. It was proposed in 2013 that the 4-years degree should become the norm for the now black majority whom statistics had shown needed more time to complete their degrees, while the 3-years degree should remain a minority option in a flexible curriculum structure (Council on Higher Education, 2013). The proposal failed (UCT did not support it), while the Minister could not be persuaded that it would be cost-effective. Since then, high attrition rates have continued as has the ED model of curriculum and academic support.

Over the past four decades the ED project has grown from a marginal pedagogic project to one that has researched and undertaken pedagogic, assessment, curriculum, staff and institutional development and delivered excellent and creative pedagogy, although mainly in foundation or first-year courses ⁵ (Boughey, 2021). However, when measured by student performance data, the project’s outcomes remain disappointing. With some exceptions, the gains made at the end of first year are lost in later years when students drop out, are academically excluded and fail to graduate; the barriers to academic success that were seemingly removed through ED interventions, re-appear in senior years (Shay, 2017). For example, recent statistics from UCT’s 2020 Teaching and Learning Report show that although there have been slight improvements, a racialised achievement gap persists - 26% of UCT’s black undergraduates qualified at the end of 2020 for postgraduate study compared with 44% of white students (University of Cape Town, 2021).

Crisis in the humanities education development programmes at the University of Cape Town

Here I present a very condensed ‘case study’ of the Humanities EDP at UCT to capture selected events and contexts around the protest period. I draw selectively on three data sets: essays written by students on the Humanities EDP about their experiences studying at UCT before the protests; one-on-one interviews I conducted with student activists during the protest period, 2015–2017 ⁶ ; thirdly extracts from documents that recorded processes put in place by the Humanities’ Faculty to respond to the students’ demands during and after the protests. These include the Self-Review Portfolio (2016) and Review Report (2017) from the Dean’s Review of the Humanities EDP conducted in 2016. I also draw on personal and professional experience.

The Humanities Education Development Unit (HUM EDU) was officially constituted in 2013. It was housed in the Humanities Faculty Dean’s Office and also reported to the Centre for Higher Education Development (CHED). Its central function was to run the Humanities Extended Degrees Programme (HUM EDP). The original aims of the programme were to increase the numbers of black South Africans in the undergraduate cohort (especially those from disadvantaged schools and backgrounds); work with Humanities departments and CHED to provide curricula and pedagogic interventions that facilitate ‘epistemic access’ to the disciplines for ED students; build a learning community for students on the EDP that affirms student agency, provides a ‘home base’ on campus and ‘social access’ to the academy; work through Faculty structures as well as informally with academics, teaching assistants and tutors to improve the educational quality and appropriate contextualization of undergraduate curricula and pedagogies in the Humanities (Humanities Education Development Unit, 2016).

In any 1 year, between 40% and 50% of the Humanities’ Faculty’s undergraduate cohort is black South African of whom about 30% are placed on the EDP. The Humanities EDP works as an access programme to the faculty by admitting annually about 300 black students with school-leaving points scores well below regular admissions requirements. ⁷ Registration on the 4-years degree (the EDP) is a condition of their admission to the faculty. In order that the faculty qualify for ‘ear-marked’ state funding to run the programme, students on EDPs must remain registered on separate extended programmes throughout their academic careers and receive at least one semester’s worth of ‘additional teaching input’ during their degree (Department of Higher Education and Training, 2012). This state policy puts the faculty and its EDP in an unenviable position. On the one hand the faculty wishes to increase its intake of black South Africans from public schools and working-class backgrounds ⁸ . On the other hand, it must deal with a high attrition rate (about 15% (n = 750) of its black South African undergraduate enrolment were failing p.a.). In addition, insufficient numbers of black South African students were achieving the 65% in their majors required to enter postgraduate studies (Humanities Education Development Unit, 2016).

Students and staff on the Humanities EDP were caught in a contradictory situation. The South African public schooling system cannot adequately prepare the majority of its school-leavers for university-level study at a research-intensive university where native proficiency in English is assumed and students from privileged homes and schools remain the curriculum norm. Rather than address the need to transform the inherited curriculum, the state’s funding requirements have perpetuated the compulsory and racialized structure of the EDPs that have endured as a policy ‘solution’ to a structural problem.

Below are some of the most poignant extracts I could find written by Humanities EDP students before the protests in essays about their early experiences at UCT,

Particularly in first-year, I swam in self-defeatism, self-doubt, and low self-esteem.

In response to feedback like this, as Director of the Humanities EDU, I raised a substantial amount of soft funding that enabled staff of the unit to launch small-scale projects that attempted to destigmatise the programme and make the students feel more ‘at home’. This included the appointment of a dedicated writing consultant and student counsellor as requested by the ED Student Council that we had established to advise us on student grievances and curriculum reform. We also established mentorship programmes - one that paired up first-year students with senior undergraduate students and later a second that employed PhD students to mentor promising 3^rd year ED students into postgraduate studies. Soft funding enabled us to employ black teaching assistants and tutors in most departments to run ‘Plus Tuts’ in the majority of first and second-year courses. We encouraged ED TAs and Tutors to use South African indigenous languages in their teaching whenever possible. The Plus Tuts were open to any student wanting extra teaching input and help with assessments, but students on the EDP were required to attend at least three to meet state funding requirements. We continued to run TA and Tutor training programmes across the faculty. We strengthened other services to students such as curriculum advice, assistance with securing financial aid and residence places, lap-top provision, computer literacy classes and career guidance. Despite these initiatives, it became clear that our efforts were ‘affirmative’ rather than ‘transformative’ of the structure and norms of the UCT culture and curriculum (Luckett and Shay, 2020). ED students continued to resent the fact that they were compelled to take 4 years to complete their degrees as well as two additional ‘foundation courses’ (not credit-bearing for the mainstream curriculum) and the three Plus Tuts mentioned above.

In March 2015 student protests first broke out on the UCT campus. Unsurprisingly, several prominent student leaders of the RhodesMustFall movement were on the Humanities EDP. Two explained their reasons for protesting,

The life of black people is a life of nervous condition. This is true at UCT for all black people … It is this life of nervous condition that drives me and many others either to go mad or commit suicide … We are fearful of what will happen to us while we are in the White world if we were to radically disrupt white power. (Interview, 2015)

In August 2015, the Dean called a Humanities Faculty Assembly on Transformation to hear student grievances. Black staff and students called for radical change including,

an Afrocentric Southern Curriculum; implementation of a multilingual language policy; student participation in curriculum and pedagogic processes; small group dialogues on institutional racism and sexism; the promotion of black South African academics; the renaming of spaces and acknowledgment of the land of indigenous people on which the university is built. (Faculty of Humanities, 2015: 4)

The Humanities EDP was severely criticised,

the main concern was the separation of ED students from the mainstream students in foundation courses and plus tuts – deemed “pathologising, ghettoizing” and a form of “structural racism”.

Instead, it was suggested that,

The Faculty should teach a first-year writing course compulsory for all students to destigmatise ED students. (Faculty of Humanities, 2015: 5)

In response to these critiques, the Dean set up Review of the Humanities EDU and EDP. A key finding of the Review Report was,

(T)he recognition of the tension that exists between separation and integration. That is, the separating out of a cohort of students requiring academic support, versus the need for integrating these students and their needs into the Faculty. (Faculty of Humanities, 2017: 1)

The Review Report noted student grievances related to the racialised structure of the EDP that ‘sets apart only black students for special treatment’ on a ‘marginalized and marginalizing operation’ (Faculty of Humanities, 2017: 2). Instead, it recommended that,

Questions of student support, curriculum change, and the renewal of teaching and learning should be addressed at Faculty and University level. Alongside this, crucial questions of student support should be more fully integrated into the Faculty and its respective departments, as the core business of all involved in teaching and learning in Humanities. (Faculty of Humanities, 2017: 3)

The Review Report concluded,

This review has allowed panel members insight into the broader challenges, contexts and constraints related to the provision of academic support in the Humanities Faculty. The members of the unit have demonstrated huge commitment to the work of offering such support alongside the challenges they face related to the requirements of meeting the externally-driven criteria for Foundation Grant funding as well as the difficulties related to attempts to integrate concerns about student support into departments across the Faculty. Fundamentally, the question of academic support should not be housed in a small, separate unit within the Faculty but should be integrated into the wider project of teaching, learning and transformation across the Humanities. (Faculty of Humanities, 2017: 5)

In response to the review, in 2017 the Humanities EDU initiated a series of dialogues for launching a suite of new Africa-centred ‘Introductory Courses’ with enriched content and pedagogy to be offered to all first-years students in the faculty. In October 2018, the Humanities Faculty Board approved the EDU’s proposal for the development of such courses across the faculty. The stated aim of these courses is to offer multilingual and translanguaging forms of pedagogy and critical content that engages students’ lifeworlds; to introduce the discipline in ways that that are cognizant of our African location, the historical development of the discipline and self-reflexive about the privileging of canonical texts and hegemonic perspectives. The proposal included the ruling that all students in the faculty should take two Introductory courses; those with weak English scores were to be encouraged to take the academic literacies course, those with weak Maths scores the numeracy course and importantly, those without communicative competence in an African/indigenous South African language were to be encouraged to learn at least one such language. By 2019 the first six Introductory Courses had been developed and approved, through a process that demonstrated the benefits of working in collaborative curriculum teams with course convenors, lecturers and ED Teaching Assistants and students. The recent appointment of several young black academics in the faculty, willing to take on the task of curriculum transformation, also contributed to the policy’s implementation. The COVID pandemic and restructuring of the unit considerably delayed the anticipated roll-out of further such courses but this has recently resumed.

In response to the student protests, the Department of Higher Education and Training belatedly initiated a process to review its Foundation Grant policy. This too was stalled during the pandemic and has only recently been resumed. At the time of writing, a new policy will soon be out for public comment that hopefully will permit the funding of more flexible and responsive curriculum models that centre the majority black student as the curriculum norm.

To sum up, even as it tried to move away from the separate ‘adapted model’ of curriculum that had been established to facilitate poor black students’ integration into the university, the Humanities ED project remained trapped in the structural contradictions of its founding white settler social imaginary in a vastly unequal society. As long as black students were seen to deviate from white norms, ‘colonial difference’ meant ‘not good enough’ and ‘not as good as us’. Historically the South African ED project has failed to question the power and norms of the disciplines and the inherited Eurocentic ‘knowledge regime’ (Jansen, 2019) on which the curriculum was based; nor did it succeed in challenging the whiteness of institutional cultures, the hegemony of English, or the managerialist power on which it depended for its legitimacy, authorization and resource base (Clegg, 2009). Thus, it was not surprising that the project came under attack from students protesting for a decolonised university. It took students to protest for the adapted ED model to be undone and for the very foundations of the old knowledge regime to be questioned. It is premature to make any judgements about the nature, reach and impact of the curriculum change that the protests triggered in this Humanities Faculty.

Colonial education policy and knowledge regimes

In a recent survey of the historiography of empire and education, Swartz notes that,

What connects the recent protest movements, and this kind of scholarly work is a recognition that the imperial past shapes the present, in terms of the kinds of institutions we build, relationships between individuals and ongoing societal inequalities. (Swartz, 2023: 458)

In this section I briefly trace the discursive formation of the ED project to better understand how the colonial past made its racialised structure possible. To do so, I employ Jansen’s concept ‘knowledge regime’ (Jansen, 2019: 51) which he defines as the dominant, official form of knowledge that gets authorised and imposed in a particular historical period, usually by state policy for a national curriculum. Jansen (2019) emphasises that control of curriculum knowledge is an outcome of political power, such that curricula always get taught and learnt within hierarchical power relations. Knowledge regimes get embedded in the routines, rules and norms of educational institutions, which are resistant and slow to change. ⁹ Although invariably contested from below, the legacies of previous knowledge regimes tend to persist in institutionalised curriculum practices, even after a political transfer of power.

Jansen (2019) identifies four knowledge regimes in the colonial history of South African education: from the 1650s, religious education for slave converts by the Dutch East India Company; throughout the 1800s in the British colony, missionary education for African Christian converts; after the Act of Union (1910), segregated education under a united settler regime; from the early 1950s, Bantu Education for Africans under apartheid. Since the 1990s a fifth knowledge regime that he calls ‘democratic education’ is being established (Jansen, 2019: 56-57).

In tracking the discursive shifts across these knowledge regimes through time, it is evident that there was ongoing debate around two major models of curriculum. The first was a discourse of gradual assimilation of a ‘native’ elite into universalised European ‘civilized’ norms, including a Eurocentric academic curriculum. The second was a discourse of trusteeship that justified a model of separate, inferior education, ‘adapted’ to meet the needs of ‘natives’ and supposedly to preserve their tribal traditions and customs. Both discourses were founded on truth claims about racial difference generated by colonial discourse. During apartheid racial difference was elevated to race science and below I look briefly at the role of white universities in the production of the apartheid ‘knowledge regime’ that legitimated ‘separate development’ including Bantu Education. In the 1980s during the demise of apartheid, I locate the discursive formation of the Education Development project in the English-speaking Cape Liberal political tradition that wished to reform apartheid and grow the economy by creating a black urban middle class.

Assimilation under missionary education

The British took control of the Cape in 1806 and in 1833 slavery was abolished in the British empire. Meanwhile inland on the Eastern Frontier, mission schools were failing to attract converts and pupils. It was only through military conquest (the Nonqause Cattle killing of 1857) and land dispossession (consolidated by the Glen Grey Act of 1894) that collaboration with missionaries offered a viable option to some African groups.

The missionaries sought to ‘civilise’ Africans in their own image. While mission schools offered literacy to converts and their children, they also imposed the moral and social codes of capitalist nineteenth century Victorian Britain and denounced African customs and beliefs as irrational and inferior. Conversion to Christianity involved accepting a package of European norms (a social hierarchy, private property, the nuclear family, the nation state, and capitalist forms of production). The 19^th C Christian ethic of offering charity to the poor allowed missionaries to focus on alleviating the symptoms of colonial conquest rather than challenging the system. It also meant that the promise of gradual assimilation into the European civilising project could be permanently deferred until ‘the natives’ were ready. The missionaries’ compliance with colonial administrations meant that the ideal of assimilation was invariably trumped by imperial and settler demands.

The liberal humanitarian discourse embedded in 19^th C missionary education included the ideals of the equal moral value of all humanity, democratic rights and consent of the governed. It did not take mission-educated Africans long to see through the hypocrisy of the missionary project. Early records of African writing illustrate that the new African elite were well aware of the contradictions and ambivalence that missionary education posed for them (Attwell, 2005). For example, in 1885, William Wellington Gqoba published a poem titled ‘Ingxoxa enkulu yemfundo’ (the great debate on education) in ‘Isigidimi samaXhosa’ (“The Kaffir Express’), in which he sets up a debate on the value of missionary education between two groups - a ‘grateful’ group and an ‘ungrateful’ group. The grateful students have bought into the promise of assimilation and discarded their own traditions, while the ungrateful students are critical of the hypocrisy of the colonial mission and challenge the demand to renounce indigenous knowledge and practices. Soudien (2010) argues that the black elite demonstrated great wisdom in their attitudes towards to colonial education – they wanted their own traditions to be recognised and respected but at the same time embraced literacy to use it for their own ends.

Adapted education under white trusteeship

By the late 19thC the Christian missionary assimilationist model for native converts was challenged by colonial policies now justified by social Darwinism ¹⁰ . Supported by the British Colonial Office’s policy of indirect rule, whereby the colonies were administered via the preservation (and invention) of indigenous tribal authorities (Kallaway, 2020; Kallaway and Swartz, 2016), colonial administrators and religious leaders began to favour an ‘industrial’ or ‘adapted’ curriculum for ‘natives’. This entailed low skills development better suited to supposed inherent racial inferiority and to protect tribal structures and customs from the ‘vices’ of modernity (Kallaway, 2020).

Unsurprisingly, this adapted approach was favoured by white settlers because it provided a rationale for segregated schooling and for preserving skilled jobs for whites. After the Anglo-Boer War and the Act of Union in 1910, the united settler state adopted a new ‘modernising’ approach to education that aimed to placate the Dutch/Afrikaner settlers through recognition of their language and culture in state schools. This focus on building a white settler nation reinforced segregation between settlers and natives in the colony.

In Europe, after World War 1, the validity of the Christian ‘civilising mission’ was questioned and instead a secular version of development overseen by the League of Nations was adopted. In the context of transferring former German colonies to the Allied powers, the League of Nations insisted that colonial powers exercise their ‘mandates’ under international law via the concept of ‘trusteeship’. This included overseeing ‘the moral well-being and social progress’ of the ‘natives’, including some provision for their education, health and welfare (Kallaway, 2020: 36). Colonial administrations sought the cooperation of the mission churches and schools to assist with the implementation of this development project, now framed as the ‘social gospel’. This was justified by a new developmental welfarist discourse intended to prepare colonised peoples for future self-government – and to counter the threats posed by modernisation, urbanisation, Communism, Fascism and African nationalism (Kallaway, 2020).

From the 1930s, the adapted model of education was promoted by the New Education Fellowship (NEF) as a means of development and economic growth in the colonies. There was a quest to base education policy on the findings of ‘scientific’ research conducted by ‘experts’. In 1938 the Royal Institute of African Affairs published an ‘African Research Survey’ that proposed rural development as the solution to stabilise African communities in the wake of the destruction caused by colonialism (Kallaway, 2020: 114). Likewise, US philanthropic societies such as the Carnegie and Phelps-Stokes foundations funded educational research in Africa that produced findings that supported the need for adapted education.

But the adapted model was rejected by the black elite. For example, Donald M’timkulu, in a submission from the Natal ANC for the African Claims document (1942) wrote:

We reject the conception that there is any need of a special type of education for Africans as such, and therefore we demand that the African must be given the type of education which will enable him to meet on equal terms with other peoples the conditions of the modern world. (Kallaway, 2020: 170)

To sum up – the discursive formation of the knowledge regime that emerged from the social and political conditions of early modernity was founded on a belief in racial difference as biological and cultural, and evident in phenotype (Skinner, 2006). In the late 19thC and early 20thC, social Darwinism was used to explain and rank human difference as biological, innate and fixed. This discourse of ‘race science’ was used to govern and control human populations, particularly in the colonies. Soudien (2010) claims that this discourse of social and racial difference has been a key driver of curriculum development in South Africa; but this racialised curriculum was received by black South Africans with profound ambiguity.

Racialised power/knowledge production under apartheid

The role of British and US early 20thC Anthropology was significant throughout the inter-war period for legitimating the adapted model of education as based on innate racial difference. Anthropology’s structural-functionalist model of traditional societies emphasized a bounded, timeless and essentialised understanding of African culture and society. The idea of ‘culture contact’ was used to emphasise the negative impact of European culture and modernisation on colonised peoples. Anthropologists such as Malinowski advised colonial administrators to preserve the customs and social fabric of tribal communities to counter the political unrest and social ills caused by urbanisation and market economies. For example, at an influential NEF conference in 1934, Malinowski (Chair of Anthropology at UCT from 1921), critiqued the imposition of European culture through mission education. Instead he supported the adapted model that would ‘regenerate African agency’ and assist Africans to manage their transition to modernity. Malinowski’s 1934 papers ‘provided a near perfect rationale for what was later to become “Bantu Education,” in South Africa after 1948’ (Kallaway, 2020: 78).

Post-World War II, it was clear that the model of the welfare state pursued in Europe was too expensive to implement in the colonies. Instead, with the exception of resistant settler colonies, independence was granted and the development of the newly independent African states was taken up by the United Nations and the World Bank with foreign aid from former colonial powers. In this context, the British Colonial Office proposed a policy of ‘partnership’ with the new African states to deliver mass schooling as a means of national development, to manage the decolonisation process and produce a viable African middle class to work with.

In 1948, to keep the threat of African self-determination at bay, a majority of the white South African settler population voted the Afrikaner Nationalist Party into power. It is important to read the imposition of Bantu Education by the Apartheid regime in 1953 in this global context. Bantu Education ostensibly served a dual purpose, the provision of mass schooling for national economic development coupled with the racial elaboration of the adapted model to ensure white supremacy. A South African Commission of Enquiry into Native Education (1949-1951) was set up to formulate policy for ‘natives’ as an ‘independent race’ in which their ‘inherent racial qualities, their distinct characteristics and needs are taken into consideration’(Healy-Clancy, 2016: 178). Unsurprisingly an adapted, differentiated model of education based on the principle of ‘separate development’ was recommended. Kros (2010) argues that it was this policy for Bantu Education that laid the foundation for grand apartheid - a cynical ploy to offer Africans pseudo-citizenship rights and self-determination in separate, ‘independent’, ethnic states.

Since the 1920s, Afrikaner anthropology termed ‘Volkunde’ had been developed at Stellenbosch University. Post-World War II, Afrikaner intellectuals in this school were aware that apartheid could no longer be justified on the basis of biological difference. They redefined the concept ‘ethnos’ away from biology, to mean ethnic, cultural, cognitive and spiritual difference that could still be used to support a social hierarchy that prescribed each ‘race group’ its rightful place (‘ethnogenesis’) in a naturalised, divinely ordained hierarchical ontology (Dubow, 2015). This Afrikaner knowledge regime was used to justify the maintenance of racial purity and ‘separate development’ under grand apartheid – a massive exercise in social engineering that articulated ethnic group with space to ensure white racial domination in South Africa.

Internationally, after World War II the science of race had become discredited. By now it was clear that science could not prove the validity of classifying humans into separate groups based on physiological features (Soudien, 2013). In progressive circles race was now viewed as a socially dangerous concept. In 1973 the United Nations declared apartheid a crime against humanity.

The return to assimilation by the Cape Liberal tradition

The Cape Liberal Tradition is a two centuries-old minority white settler tradition that has mediated between two dominant ethno-nationalisms – Afrikaner and African (Dubow, 2014). I argued above that the Education Development project emerged from this political tradition. Classical 18^th and 19thC liberalism stood for political rights such as freedom, equality, democracy, consent of the governed, the rule of law and the right to private property; economically it supported a free market and laissez-faire governance. Historically, in the Cape, liberalism was most evident in civil society - churches, universities, law and the media. In the context of the Christian mission project in the 19^th C, it supported the ‘civilising mission’ and gradual assimilation of the colonised into an egalitarian society.

The discovery of minerals in the 1880s followed by industrialisation and the need for cheap black labour shifted this liberal discourse from one of paternalism and assimilation to one of ‘trusteeship’ and segregation legitimised by an ideology of racial and cultural difference. This meant that the universal political and civil rights, promised to citizens in classical liberal theory, were deferred until colonized peoples were ‘ready’. In South Africa, ‘trusteeship’ was also applied to space and land; black people were to develop in separate places as well as at their own pace (Friedman, 2014). By the 1930s, Cape Liberals had failed to defend black people’s rights to land, property and franchise and allowed a white supremacist state to offer them collective rights in tribal reserves instead.

In the 1970s and 80s, the South African economy was facing a skilled labour crisis and by the 1980s the apartheid regime was shaken by internal uprisings and international sanctions. Liberal economists viewed apartheid and the state’s determination to curtail African urbanization as key obstructions to economic growth. A new Democratic Alliance was formed between white liberals and progressive Afrikaners to build a multi-racial democracy that would protect private property and a market economy from radical Marxist or socialist influences in the African National Congress. A key strategy was to grow an urban black middle class with rights to live and work in the cities.

During apartheid the regime brought universities under control via the 1959 University Extension Act which established ethnically exclusive universities for different ‘population groups’. The three ‘open’ English-medium universities opposed the Extension Act, asserting ‘academic freedom’ and ‘university autonomy’ as liberal rights linked to the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. Despite their protests, they adhered to the state’s regulations whereby they could admit only a small handful of black students via a state-controlled permit system; it was illegal to employ black academics, to promote Communism, or allow black students into university residences (Martinerie, 2022).

Under pressure from white business, the De Lange Commission (1981) recommended that greater numbers of black students be admitted to ‘open’ English-medium universities – but controlled through a system of racial quotas. In this context of apartheid reforms, white business set up the Urban Foundation and later the Independent Development Trust (a public-private partnership) to fund black urban development projects.

It was in this context that the Education Development project was established at historically white universities. Initially it was funded by private sector business and liberal anti-apartheid philanthropic organisations, by the 1990s it was funded by the Independent Development Trust. Given its discursive formation in the white settler Cape Liberal tradition, perhaps it was not surprising that, although its goal was (eventual) assimilation, the means it adopted to get there could only be imagined through the old liberal ideologies of ‘trusteeship’ and paternalism.

Conclusion

South African society remains obsessed with race and racism because it is fuelled by inequality and its material, psycho-social and ideological effects. There are good reasons for the enduring legacy of ‘racial realism’ in the ‘common sense’ of South Africans that will not go away until material inequalities are addressed (Everatt, 2012). Soudien argues for a ‘redemptive racial realism’ that retains the concept of race only for challenging white supremacy (Soudien, 2013: 27). This is an important insight for deconstructing white culture and Eurocentric curricula in South African universities, especially because the concept of race remains inadequately theorised ¹¹ and understood in public discourse. While the RMF movement rejected the fake assimilation of white liberal and non-racial discourses, it retrieved black radical and Black Consciousness discourses to reassert racialised political difference and the significance of the black lived experience. In such discourses it is tempting to give race a cosmological, metaphysical or ontological weight that inverts the dualisms of colonial discourse (Hull, 2022; Naicker, 2023). A challenge for anti-racist education, including contemporary decolonial curriculum projects in South African universities, is to acknowledge difference while deconstructing its essentialist premises – biological, ethnic or cultural. A key point to make is that we need an anti-racist education that mobilises ‘difference’ differently and further that such ‘curriculum enrichment’ should be driven by black staff and students and compulsory for all students, some of whom could be deemed ‘underprepared’ to live in a plural society.