Shortly after the giant bronze statue of Cecil John Rhodes came down at the University of Cape Town, student protestors called for the decolonisation of universities. It was a word hardly heard in South Africa's struggle lexicon and many asked: What exactly is decolonisation? This book brings together some of the most innovative thinking on curriculum theory to address this important question.

In the process, several critical questions are raised:

• Is decolonisation simply a slogan for addressing other pressing concerns on campuses and in society?
• What is the colonial legacy with respect to curricula and can it be undone?
• How is the project of curricula decolonisation similar to or different from the quest for post-colonial knowledge, indigenous knowledge or a critical theory of knowledge?
• What does decolonisation mean in a digital age where relationships between knowledge and power are shifting?

Strong conceptual analyses are combined with case studies of attempts to `do decolonisation' in settings as diverse as South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania and Mauritius. This comparative perspective enables reasonable judgments to be made about the prospects for institutional take-up within the curriculum of century-old universities. Decolonisation in Universities is essential reading for undergraduate teaching, postgraduate research and advanced scholarship in the field of curriculum studies.

How were whites implicated in and shaped by apartheid culture and society, and how did they contribute to it?

In Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society, historian Neil Roos traces the lives of ordinary white people in South Africa during the apartheid years, beginning in 1948 when the National Party swept into power on the back of its catchall apartheid slogan. Drawing on his own family’s story and others, Roos explores how working-class white peoples frequently defied particular aspects of the apartheid state but seldom opposed or even acknowledged the idea of racial supremacy, which lay at the heart of apartheid society.

This cognitive dissonance afforded them a way to simultaneously accommodate and oppose apartheid and allowed them to later claim they never supported the apartheid system. Ordinary Whites in Apartheid Society offers a telling reminder that the politics and practice of race, in this case apartheid-era whiteness, derive not only from the top, but also from the bottom.

The first history of schooling gathered as a single and continuous text since the 1980s. It is also the first attempt to put together a history of South African schooling from the perspective of the subjugated people.

It attempts to show, as South Africa moves from a landscape essentially marked by encounters of people at different frontiers – physical, geographical, economic, cultural and psychological (where only the first two have previously received real attention) – how education is conceptualised, mobilised and used by all the players in the emerging country from the colonial Dutch and British periods into apartheid.

This book covers the period of the history of South African schooling from the establishment of the first school in 1658 to 1910 when South Africa became a Union. It approaches the task of narrating this history as a deliberate intervention. The intervention is that of restoring into the narrative the place of the subjugated people in the unfolding of a landscape which they share with a racialised white community. Propelled by a post-colonial framing of South Africa’s history, it offers itself as a deliberate counter to dominant historiographic and systematic privileging of the country’s elites. As such, it works on a larger canvas than simply the school. It deliberately works the story of schooling alongside the bigger socioeconomic history of South Africa, i.e., Dutch settlement of the Cape, the arrival of colonial Britain and the dramatic discovery of gold and diamonds leading to the industrialisation of South Africa. The story of schooling, the text seeks to emphasise, cannot be told independently of what is going on economically, politically and socially in the making of modern South Africa. Modernity, as a consequence, is a major theme of the book.

In telling the story of formal schooling in South Africa, the text, critically, seeks to retrieve the experience of the subjugated to present a wider and larger canvas upon which to describe the process of the making of the South African school. The text works historically with the Dutch East Indian experience up until 1804 when schooling was characterised by its neglect. It shows then how it develops a systematic character through the institutionalisation of a formal system in 1839 and the initiatives of missionaries. It draws the story to a close by looking at how formal systems are established in the colonies, the Boer Republics and the protectorates.

Thematically, the text seeks to thread through the conceits of race and class to show how, contradictorily, they take expression through conflict and struggle. In this conflict and struggle people who are not white (i.e., they do not yet have the racialised labels that apartheid brings in the middle of the 20th century) are systematically marginalised and discriminated against. They work with their discrimination, however, in generative ways by taking opportunity when it arises and exercising political agency.

The book is important because it explains the roots of educational inequality. It shows how inequality is systematically installed in almost every step of the way. For a period, in the middle of the 19th century, attempts were made to forestall this inequality. The text shows how the British administration acceded to eugenicist influences which pushed children of colour out of what were called first-class schools into segregated missionary-run institutions.

Multi-layered inequalities and a sense of insecurity has long been the hallmark of South African life. Recently, however, the uncertainties of Covid-19 have led to greater shared experiences of vulnerability among South Africans. This volume of State of the Nation offers perspectives that may help us navigate our way through the ‘new normal’ in which we find ourselves. Foremost among the unavoidable political and socioeconomic interventions that will be required are interventions based on an ethics of care. Care as an essential attribute must be inserted into all of the diverse contexts that structure needs, desires and relations of power. An ethics of care requires us to reconsider relations of domination, oppression, injustice, inequality, or paternalism within the state. In a democratic post-apartheid state that confirms human connectedness, bodies matter and this knowledge must be driven by active citizenship. We are all caught up in webs of power that require of us, as individuals and as communities, the will and understanding to combat and counter poverty and inequality and thus to improve the state of the nation. The effects of poverty and inequality are as insidious as Covid-19 and render the most vulnerable even more powerless in the face of this and similar ravages. Now, more than ever, we need to prioritise an ethics of care.

South Africa's future is increasingly tied up with that of India. While trade and investment between the two countries is intensifying, they share long-standing historical ties and have much in common: apart from cricket, colonialism and Gandhi, both countries are important players in the global South. As India emerges as a major economic power, the need to understand these links becomes ever more pressing. Can the two countries enter balanced forms of exchange? What forms of transnational political community between these two regions have yet to be researched and understood? The first section of South Africa and India traces the range of historical connection between the two countries. The second section explores unconventional comparisons that offer rich ground on which to build original areas of study. This innovative book looks to a post-American world in which the global South will become ever more important. Within this context, the Indian Ocean arena itself and South Africa and India in particular move to the fore. The book's main contribution lies in the approaches and methods offered by its wide range of contributors for thinking about this set of circumstances.

Peter Clarke and James Matthews were born within days of each other. Clarke on 2 June 1929 in a stone cottage overlooking False Bay. Matthews eight days earlier, across Table Mountain, in a Bo-Kaap tenement building facing the city bowl. These two boys, from similar backgrounds, grew into young men before they met and formed a friendship that would last a lifetime. They became 'almost more than brothers'. Yet they are complete opposites: Clarke is charecterized by his dignified reserve and meticulous order, Mattthews by his forthrighteness and bohemian disorder. Over a period of more than forty years both became well known in their respective disciplines--Clarke became a poet, short-story writer and primarily a painter; Matthews sharted out writing short stories and novels, before establishing himself as the dispatcher of raging Black Consciousness poetry. This book is a tribute to two fiercely independent artists. It is liberally illustrated with the work of both artists in b/w and color photographs.

South Africa is ready for a new vocabulary than can form the basis for a national consciousness which recognises racialised identities while affirming that, as human beings, we are much more than our racial, sexual, class, religious or national identities. The Colour of Our Future makes a bold and ambitious contribution to the discourse on race. It addresses the tension between the promise of a post-racial society and the persistence of racialised identities in South Africa, which has historically played itself out in debates between the 'I don't see race' of non-racialism and the 'I'm proud to be black' of black consciousness. The chapters in this volume highlight the need for a race-transcendent vision that moves beyond 'the festival of negatives' embodied in concepts such as non-racialism, non-sexism, anti-colonialism and anti-apartheid. Steve Biko's notion of a 'joint culture' is the scaffold on which this vision rests; it recognises that a race-transcendent society can only be built by acknowledging the constituent elements of South Africa's EuroAfricanAsian heritage. The distinguished authors in this volume have, over the past two decades, used the democratic space to insert into the public domain new conversations around the intersections of race and the economy, race and the state, race and the environment, race and ethnic difference, and race and higher education. Presented here is some of their most trenchant and yet still evolving thinking.

In 1937 a group of young Capetonians, socialist intellectuals from the Workers’ Party of South Africa and the Non-European Unity Movement, embarked on a remarkable public education and cultural project they called the New Era Fellowship (NEF). Through public debates, lectures, study circles and cultural events a new cultural and political project was born in Cape Town. Taking a position of non-collaboration and non-racialism, the NEF played a vital role in challenging society’s responses to events ranging from the problem of taking up arms during the Second World War for an empire intent on stripping people of colour of their human rights, to the Hertzog Bills, which foreshadowed apartheid in all its ruthless effectiveness.

The group included some of the city’s most talented scholar-activists, among them Isaac Tabata, Ben Kies, A C Jordan, Phyllis Ntantala, Mda Mda and members of the famed Gool and Abdurahman families. Their aim was to disrupt and challenge not only prevailing political narratives but the very premises – class and race – on which they were based.

By the 1950s their ideas had spread to a second generation of talented individuals who would disseminate them in the high schools of Cape Town. In time, some would exert their influence on national politics beyond the confines of the Cape. Among these were former minister of justice, Dullah Omar, academic Hosea Jaffe, educationist Neville Alexander and author Richard Rive.

This book is a testament to how the NEF was at the forefront of redefining the discourse of racialism and nationalism in South Africa.

The papers for this special issue were selected from a pool of nearly 700 presentations which were made at the 10th Congress of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies (WCCES), which was held in Cape Town, South Africa, from 12 to 17 July 1998. The congress was hosted by the Southern African Comparative and History of Education Society (SACHES) and held on the campuses of the University of the Western Cape and the University of Cape Town. The papers were selected by the convenors of the conference's standing commissions, which provided a significant focus for the conference proceedings. These commissions were on the following themes: Teachers and teacher education Curriculum - Higher education - Lifelong learning - Language, literacy and basic education - Gender and education Policy - Theory and theory shifts Basic education in Africa Peace and Justice Dependency European Education Policy Research in Africa Culture, Indigenous Knowledge and Learning The papers presented, as the discussion below makes clear, ranged widely in subject matter and theoretical perspective and addressed issues of concern both to individual countries and to regions of the world. While some of the papers use comparison as an approach, it remains a matter of concern that the comparative perspective is so little in evidence. It is hoped that the com parative research approach will be more in evidence in the future."

Realising the Dream: Unlearning the Logic of Race in the South African School is an intellectual and practical response to the dangers that come with the ubiquity of race, race-thinking and its attendant propensity to subsume the nuances of all other social complexity. Beginning with a comprehensive scoping of the theoretical literature on race and social difference, the book delivers a meticulous examination of how the 'logic of race' is played out in the lives of post-apartheid South African school students. Based in two decades of empirical research, this compelling and insightful analysis reveals how the ongoing preoccupation with race not only obscures but also prevents the evolution of new ways of understanding privilege and subordination. We dream of a better world. The fundamental promise of education, the author argues, is to develop the capacity to make real, in our will and desire, this possibility. However, the dream can be fully realised only when the learnt prejudices and false certainties of race, gender and indeed all our unproblematised conceits about who and what we are, are unlearnt. Written by one of South Africa's foremost theorists of school education, this book is as brave as it is challenging - an inspiring, essential read for education practitioners and students in particular, and social theorists more broadly.