Race for Education

In 2015 a wave of protest swept South Africa’s university campuses as students demanded free higher education, a decolonised curriculum and the dismantling of apartheid- and colonial-era symbolic structures—in particular the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes from the centre of the University of Cape Town campus. To understand this moment, which has reverberated around the world, and in particular here in the United Kingdom, Mark Hunter’s study of primary and secondary schooling in the city of Durban should be required reading. It is no accident that education became the issue over which young South Africans chose to express their discontent with the wider pace and direction of post-apartheid change. Hunter’s book reveals the ways in which education in South Africa was not just shaped by racial laws but was ‘formative’ of apartheid (p. 32) and that ‘apartheid segregation subsequently became the terrain on which [a] marketised education system developed’ from the 1990s

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