Includes bibliographical references.This study is based on interviews and recorded word-lists from 44 young (under 25) black South Africans who have been educated in the former white school system, studying at the University of Cape Town. It considers their life experiences, particularly as regards their schooling. It also investigates their attitudes to language, both English and their ‘home languages’, as well as analysing their accents, and attempts to find correlations between accents and attitudes. It first provides an overview of how this demographic is represented in the literature and the media, and then examines the history of black education in the country in order to explain why a ‘white school’ background and accent have become desirable now that they are attainable. Thus it shows how black education was for decades made deliberately inferior to white, so that the ‘opening’ of schools to all races in the early 1990s meant that those black parents who could afford it sent their children to the former white schools
