Critical Identity and Ethical Consciousness in the South African Indian Diaspora

British imperialist rulers aimed to prove the ethnic pre-eminence of their race. In response, indentured labourers arriving in Natal as part of the Indian diaspora established and developed their own ethical standpoint. By analysing historical and literary elements, it is possible to trace the emergence of a critical identity and ethical consciousness which were shaped by the experiences of the South African Indian diaspora community. Such identity is memorable and transferable to the country as a whole, and of considerable value in nurturing social/ist consciousness for countering current challenges of racism and materialist indifference. This paper falls into two broad sections, the first deals with the history and context of South African Indian diasporic writings; the second section deals with diaspora identity

Literacy teaching in disadvantaged South African schools

This article analyses the experiences of teachers of literacy working in underprivileged communities in the Western Cape, South Africa. The purpose is to provide teachers in poorly resourced schools within economically deprived areas an opportunity to voice their experiences of teaching literacy. The article is based on an empirical study using interviews and classroom observation with a sample of 10 teachers. A descriptive account of the observation data was followed by an interpretive analysis. The content analysis of the interview data led to the development of themes and patterns for the discussion. The study reveals the social complexity of literacy education in a post-apartheid and multilingual society and focuses on teachers in Grade 4 classrooms, which is the grade when learners switch from mother tongue (mainly isiXhosa and Afrikaans) to English as language of instruction. Key factors for literacy underachievement include lack of resources, parental support, lack of teacher knowledge, changes in the curriculum, absence of cognitive activities and the social complexity of poverty. The article recommends that a new model of literacy that challenges inequality and provides strategic and sustained teacher support in disadvantaged schools is crucial in a society emerging from oppression and racism

‘Voices’ of school dropouts about the use of illicit drugs on the Cape Flats, Western Cape

The social concerns of communities on the Cape Flats in the Western Cape, are perpetuated by the lack of schooling and it contributes to higher unemployment figures. This article aims to provide a voice for school dropouts on their perspective of the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem and macrosystem that forms the different levels of influence on their lives. The research was lodged within an interpretive paradigm in order to gain in-depth understanding of what is meaningful and relevant to illicit drug users. The study used a qualitative approach to explore the perceptions of school dropouts on the use of illicit drugs. Six semi-structured interviews were conducted with respondents to obtain detailed descriptions of drug abuse. Data was analysed using a deductive content analysis approach. We argue the need for a stronger intervention approach to support the microsystem, in order to alleviate the social concern in communities on the Cape Flats. The theoretical underpinning of the study makes use of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model. The article engages with the concepts of family, friends and school within the construct of microsystems. In the construct of the mesosystem we engage with the linkages and processes between the concepts of the microsystem. The concept of community is interrogated within the construct of the exosystem and social values within the macrosystem.DHE

A Holistic Approach towards Personal Transformation of Youth not in Employment, Education or Training

This article explores how young people experienced a holistic approach to personal transformation by participating in a three month residential pro-gramme for youth not in employment, education or training. The study deployed an ecological perspective that served to illuminate the influence of relationships and contexts on the development of youth. A phenomenological approach was used to understand young peoples’ perceptions and experiences of a holistic approach. The methodological framework leaned on narrative enquiry to explore the views of five youth respondents. The data was analysed using thematic content analysis. The findings illustrated that a holistic approach as one particular philosophical and developmental approach to personal transformation, has the potential to enhance the psychological capital of young people, facilitate connection with self and family and provide the impetus for them to remain on a positive developmental trajectory. As 7.5 million youth in South Africa are not in employment, education or training, a status with the propensity to foster disengagement and disconnection from self, family and social, economic, political and cultural activities, the findings offer hope that credible and innovative strategies do exist to disrupt the current NEET crisis

Discourse(s) of Identity: Precarity and (In)visibility in Farida Karodia’s Daughters of the Twilight

Apartheid South Africa witnessed the forming of cultural and sexual identities within political strategies that were designed to categorize and regulate “non-white” individuals. By dealing with interactions between white men and black women, South African literary works in the penultimate years of apartheid demonstrate apartheid’s structural viciousness and gendered hierarchy through certain innovative deviations. Daughters of the Twilight (1986) by Farida Karodia is one such text that not only sheds light on the masculine, racialized, and patriarchal apartheid structure of the male gaze, but also inherently disallows the female characters of Karodia’s narrative to inhabit neither day nor night, as implied by the term “twilight,” and relegates them to a territory somewhere between, due to their categorization as well as racial-sexual implications. Considering these dynamics of gaze and racial segregation along with Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of hybridity and Judith Butler’s concept of precarity and vulnerability, this article intends to show how statutory racial exclusion adversely affected the emotional well-being of the family in Karodia’s narrative. Thus, the article demonstrates how politics, culture, and gendered mechanisms work as matrices under which the women characters negotiate attributes of their agency. the purpose of this article is to interrogate sexual violence and to illustrate how the intersection of sexual and racial hegemony under apartheid silenced subaltern voices. The article then indicates how Karodia employs “South Africanness” to destabilize the socio-cultural and political discourses of women by rendering them visible in the hegemonic cartography of apartheid

Fatima Meer’s ‘Train from Hyderabad’: Diaspora, Social Justice, Gender and Political Intervention

Fatima Meer’s memoir, Prison Diary: One Hundred and Thirteen Days, 1976 (2001), and the short story ‘Train to Hyderabad’ (Meer 2010) as an anthologised entity drawn from it, symbolise women’s isolation under male scrutiny, male rage at female autonomy and the compulsion to gag female critique of male government whether domestic, provincial or national. Behind the historical fact of colonial pseudo-slavery termed indenture, which was not gender-specific, lies the surviving, wide-spread and less-recognised phenomenon of female subjugation which may be termed female indenture. This reading of ‘Train to Hyderabad’ re-enacts a liberatory process: freeing the text in a way which reflects Meer’s own scripting of her work in a pattern of self-denial and socialist concern for the oppressed about her

The Ambivalence of Indianness in Ahmed Essop’s The Hajji and Other Stories

This article explores the ambivalence of Indianness in Ahmed Essop’s debut collection of short stories, The Hajji and Other Stories, 1978, against the contested discourse of the nation. The article is underpinned by Bhabha’s theory of nation and narration, specifically the authenticity and context of cultural location and representation. The image of cultural authority, like that of the Hajji, is ambivalent because it is caught in the act of trying to compose a powerful and religious figure, but stuck in the performativity of typical South African racial, class and religious prejudice. Essop’s ambivalent narration evokes the margins of the South African space, the Indian minority; it is also a celebratory or self-marginalisation space. The ambivalence of the characters resonates across the collection—the insincerity of the Fordsburg community towards Moses and the two sisters; the deceitful Hajji Musa, the hypocrisy of Molvi Haroon seeking refuge with the perpetrator of blasphemy against the Prophet, Dr Kamal’s pretence of having virtues and the charade of the yogi. In essence, the characters display virtues of Indianness and Muslim/Hindu piety that they do not actually possess

A genealogical study of South African literature teaching at South African universities : towards a reconstruction of the curriculum

The colonial history of South Africa and its legacy of cultural and linguistic domination have resulted in a situation where the. literatures of the majority of South Africans were relegated to the margins of institutional, social and cultural life. Exclusion (of local writings) was the principal mode by which power was exercised within university English departments. It is within this context that this study posits lacunae and challenges for the reconstruction of the South African literature curriculum. Although various approaches have been used by English departments during this decade to include South African literature in the curriculum (pluralism, inter-disciplinary studies, alternate canon formation, canon rejection, eclecticism, elective programmes, etc.), the curriculum continues to repeat the established norms and values of colonial/apartheid society, it avoids confronting the ideological construction of traditional English literature and is a revamping or upgrading of the programmes offered during the colonial/apartheid era. The genealogical study uncovers the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements, decentres discourse, and reveals how discourse is secondary to systems of power. Chapter Four explores both theoretical and methodological underpinnings for the reconstruction of the South African literature curriculum deriving from the critical educational approaches of Freire, Giroux and Apple, the discursive approach of Foucault and the post colonial reading strategies of Zavarzadeh and Morton. The teaching of South African literature would best be served by working within a critical paradigm, having as its objective the goals of critical educational studies. Chapter Four also includes a review of the curriculum in local practice through a curriculum impact study using empirical research based on the 1996 English literature syllabi of South African universities as well as the findings of the surveys conducted by Malan and Bosman in 1986 and Lindfors in 1992. Chapter Five posits recommendations for curriculum reconstruction with the main focus on the intervention of radical strategies that would lead to a new conflictual reading list. The objective is to put the canon under erasure by problematising the concept of literariness. Such an approach also reveals the power/ knowledge relations of culture, ideologies that dominate the discipline and the institutional arrangements of knowledge.Curriculum and Instructional StudiesD.Ed. (Didactics

Humiliated consciousness in Ronnie Govender’s The Lahnee’s pleasure and Ben Okri’s In Arcadia

Ronnie Govender entitled both his major play (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1977) and his later novel (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2008) The Lahnee’s Pleasure, articulating that life was, and still is, a pleasure ground for a privileged minority in South Africa. Over a period of three decades, spanning both the periods before and after apartheid, his assessment of political conditions in the country of his birth remains as valid. Lao, in Ben Okri’s In Arcadia, reveals how much of life in Europe today remains a “fairground for the favoured” (London: Head of Zeus, 2014, 108) and how little pampered and privileged people such as Jim, the director of the film project in this novel, see or comprehend of what is so often a secret ordeal for a person of colour. Okri writes of conditions and perceptions in contemporary Britain, while Govender writes of South Africa up to the present time; yet despite the many differences in their social contexts, their delineation of conditions that surround a person of colour living in British or South African society shows that interracial equality and brotherhood are still distant ideals in both countries. Both writers, however, do hold out a measured degree of hope in their depiction of Wordsworthian figures of humble labour: Mothie in Govender’s novel and the train driver in Okri’s

Extraction and Environmental Injustices: (De)colonial Practices in Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were

Environmental degradation, climate crises, and ecological catastrophes effect the countries of the tropics distinctly from those of the Global North, reflecting the ramifications of colonial capitalist epistemes and practices that sanction extraction, commodification, and control of tropical lands and peoples. Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2021), set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, bears witness to the history and presence of ecological disaster in the African tropics through issues related to extractivism, environmental injustices, and structural racism that are ongoing under the mask of capitalist progress and development. Mbue, a Cameroonian-American novelist, recounts Kosawa’s decades-long struggle against the American oil company Pexton. This article focuses on the critical aspect that Mbue’s discourse reveals—that there is a need to map environmental injustices with other forms of structural injustices and the prevalence of neocolonialism and its manifestations through racial, economic, and epistemic practices. The article further explicates how the ordinary people of Kosawa become subjected to “slow violence” and “testimonial injustice” and foregrounds the necessity of “epistemic disobedience” demonstrated in the novel through the madman’s intervention and Thula’s sustained resistance to the exploitative agendas.