Peace, violence, and cohesion in poor rural schools in post-apartheid South Africa

• In Event: Peace, by who and for whom? Negotiating peace amid the memories of conflict

Proposal

What explains persistent violence in poor rural schools in predominantly rural provinces like the Eastern Cape in South Africa? How does spatial difference, class, race, generation, and gender shape the ways in which school actors engage in peace-building in arenas of violence? How is peace understood in such contexts and how is violence defined, theorized, and explained?

This paper considers how teachers and learners in a rural province of South Africa operationalize their views on peace and violence in school classrooms and surrounding rural contexts. It considers the ways in which peace is understood in such contexts and analyses how violence is defined and explained in their educational settings.

The illustration and analysis of how teachers, learners, and communities define ‘violence’ and ‘peace’ in South Africa is specifically achieved via research completed in the Eastern Cape Province in 2015. The UNICEF and ESRC-funded project on education and social cohesion in post-conflict societies looked at forms of potential conflict between local communities and schools in two provinces in South Africa around governance, access to forms of representation, post-apartheid identity formations, and different compositions of appropriate, social-cohesion related attitudes and behaviors.

These works allow insight into how current experiences of schooling are both influenced by apartheid-era conceptions of peace and violence, as well as by newer present-day instantiations of peace and violence, in a context framed by rurality and displacement. The main goal is to show the influence of competing conceptualizations of ‘peace’ and ‘violence’ on what happens in Eastern Cape rural classrooms, as well as on what teachers teach, what the conditions are that they teach in, and how this can be philosophically tied to concerns for equity, reconciliation, and social justice in post-apartheid South Africa.

By focusing on competing notions of ‘peace’ instantiated within different forms of conflict within local communities and their schools, the paper shows how they are intimately connected to the ways in which resource inequities and legacies are framed in relation to racialized identities and different levels of lived social trauma. It shows how new and emerging dimensions of violence in post-apartheid rural schooling contexts pose significant challenges for state-initiated peace-building initiatives in South Africa, and sets out to problematize and outline different formulations of ‘peace’.
The paper emphasizes the need for context-and-conflict-sensitive understandings of ‘violence’ and ‘just peace’ in the post-apartheid era; understandings that offer insights for the greater redress of educational inequalities, that promote peace-building, and that contribute to the building of resilient communities in pursuing the transformation of one of the most unequal societies in the world.

In terms of locating the paper in the realm of discussions of ‘education and conflict’, the paper conceptualizes violent conflict as an inevitable outcome when race, class, gender, ethnic, religious, educational status, disability and spatial location inequalities and forms of negative discrimination underpin any lived social realities (Stewart, 2008). It asserts that violent conflict is especially visible under conditions where structural inequalities limit education-opportunity distribution for citizens, and instead foster ongoing conflict and greater social fragility (Smith et al., 2011).

In that regard the paper argues against viewing violence in a very narrow way or that only foregrounds overt violence and its associated manifestations in the visible realm, leaving obscure other forms of violence that encompass structural, symbolic, and cultural modalities. Rather, violence is more fruitfully engaged when its relational dynamics and complex and multilayered natures are recognized, allowing strategies of peacebuilding to give more meaningful effect to positive social transformation. Where violence is understood as diffused across all dimensions of daily lived experiences, interventions aimed at lasting and just peace and social justice in post-conflict contexts are more comprehensible. In that respect, violence is defined in ways that recognize that the savagery and trauma of physical attacks are but one (albeit crucial) iteration or category of violence. As Scheper-Hughes & Bourgois (2004: 4) note:
Violence can never be understood solely in terms of its physicality – force, assault or the infliction of pain – alone. Violence also includes assaults on the personhood, dignity, sense of worth or value of the victim. The social and cultural dimensions of violence are what gives violence its power and meaning. Focusing exclusively on the physical aspects of torture/terror/violence… subverts the larger project of witnessing, critiquing, and writing against violence, injustice and suffering.

The paper suggests that an understanding of the quality of a particular educational experience, in concert with other social structures and actors, helps to understand how ‘violence’ and ‘peace’ is best factored into initiatives that focus on violence and on the reduction or eradication of social inequalities. Access to a good quality of education stimulates and promotes positive student-identities and dispositions in relation to their becoming productive and admired members of society, with good-quality education reducing the possibility of enduring conflict and increasing the promotion of greater cohesion and justice.

The paper captures this tension through narratives of rural teachers and learners in the Eastern Cape, and argues that initiatives to build peace in South Africa require a radical re-appraisal of the value and purpose of force, violence, and fighting within conflicting societies. Any re-appraisal of different forms of responses to potential violence needs to take into account manifestations of conflict in macro-environments, in individualized disputes between individuals and local communities, as well as disputes based on markers of social difference such as class, race, age, and gender.

References:

Stewart, E.B. 2008. School structural characteristics, student effort, peer associations, and parental involvement: The influence of school-and individual-level factors on academic achievement. Education and Urban Society, 40(2), 179-204.
Smith, A. et al. 2011. Education and Peacebuilding in Post-conflict Contexts: Literature Review. New York: UNICEF.
Sayed, Y. et al 2017. Engaging Teachers in Peacebuilding In Post-Conflict Context: Evaluating Education Interventions in South Africa. South Africa Country Report, ESRC/DFID Research Report, University of Sussex, UK.
Scheper-Hughes, N. and Bourgois, P. Eds. 2004. Violence in War and Peace. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing.

Authors

• Azeem Badroodien, UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN

• Yunus Omar, University of Cape Town