Current debates about race are not always successful in capturing issues of materiality which were a strong feature of social history and Marxist work twenty and thirty years ago. In this paper we approach the issue of race and the way it is experienced by exploring the life narratives of teachers in South Africa. In this exercise we show that race was experienced within material contexts which were themselves characterized by racial inequality and by material inequalities. The result of this overlapping set of factors and power relationships is to be found in the memories of childhood of three black teachers. In his article, ‘Race, articulation and societies structured in dominance’, Stuart Hall used South Africa as a case in point for his (then) Althusserian approach to understanding racism
