‘We Know Why We're Here’: the experience of African children in a ‘coloured’ school in Cape Town, South Africa

Abstract With the abolition of formal apartheid in education in South Africa there has been a movement of children classified African into schools which were previously reserved for Indians, ‘coloureds’ and whites. While this development has yielded a number of highly positive outcomes, of concern, has been the difficulty host schools have encountered in dealing with the social, cultural and economic backgrounds which entering children have brought with them. Significantly, host schools previously classified ‘coloured’ have had as much difficulty as white schools in dealing with social and cultural difference. This article is based on research conducted in a working‐class community in Cape Town which has admitted a large number of children classified African. Drawing on extensive interviews with African boys and girls, it looks at the problems which they have encountered and how they have dealt with these problems in giving voice to their identity. The argument which the article seeks to make is that young people develop complex identities in the process of attending schools which seek to pull them into the dominant discourse of apartheid. They recognise the exclusionary strategies in school which seek them to sublimate their Africanness and work with these strategies in the classroom and the playground. While they accede to the dominant messages of school, at the same time they reject the representational structures within those messages.