Article
Teaching and Learning Paulo Freire: South Africa’s
Communities of Struggle
Luke Sinwell
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2126-6647
University of Johannesburg, South Africa
lsinwell@uj.ac.za
Abstract
This article highlights both the internal educative practices of social movements
and how these practices can effectively link to building Freirean pedagogies
within higher education institutions. At the heart of this possibility lies the
democratic transformation of relations between students and teachers on the one
hand and researchers and activists on the other. I draw from two case studies of
my own research on community-based organisations and workers’ movements
in post-apartheid South Africa, which point to the possibilities and challenges
of developing Freirean approaches within the neoliberal higher education
context. The article suggests that if the goal of education is to challenge systems
of oppression, then social justice and the democratisation of the knowledge
project must be the guiding principles we employ to navigate our everyday
teaching and learning practices both inside and outside the academy.
Keywords: Paulo Freire; problem-posing educator; scholar activism
Education as Change
https://unisapressjournals.co.za/index.php/EAC
Volume 26 | 2022 | #9368 | 19 pages
https://doi.org/10.25159/1947-9417/9368
ISSN 1947-9417 (Online)
© The Author(s) 2022
Published by the University of Johannesburg and Unisa Press. This is an Open Access
article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0
International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)
Sinwell
Introduction
What Did You Learn in School Today Little Boy of Mine?
What did you learn in school today dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today dear little boy of mine?
I learned that Washington never told a lie
I learned that soldiers seldom die
I learned that everybody’s free
And that’s what the teacher said to me
That’s what I learned in school today
That’s what I learned in school
I learned that policemen are my friends
I learned that justice never ends
I learned that murderers die for their crimes
Even if we make a mistake sometimes
I learned our country must be strong
It’s always right and never wrong
Our leaders are the finest men [sic]
And we elect them again and again
I learned that war is not so bad
I learned about the great ones we have had
We fought in Germany and in France
And someday I might get my chance
And that’s what I learned in school today
That’s what I learned in school.
(Paxton 1964)
As the social and economic effects of police and state violence continue to
disproportionately plague the marginalised and oppressed around the world in the wake
of George Floyd’s now infamous murder, Paulo Freire’s (1970) ultimate message rings
as loud as ever: education can never be a neutral process. Instead, it is either a means
by which to reinforce the existing structures of society or a tool with which to transform
the status quo and to create a more democratic and inclusive place in which we can all
live. For critical pedagogies such as those adopted by Freire, the problem of African
American people being killed by the police is not an isolated phenomenon but one which
must be understood in relation to a broader structural and historical context.
The perceived need for profit and economic growth at any cost has created the
conditions for the dehumanisation of African Americans (Taylor 2016). Floyd’s death
was no mistake or accident in an otherwise non-discriminatory Minnesota police
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department. Rather, this was merely one piece of a much larger, ruthless process of the
systemic oppression of racism and capitalism, which function to serve mainly white
people. When the boy in the song above recites to his parent that he learned “policemen
are my friends”, he is reflecting the dominant ideology or what students and indeed
citizens have been conditioned and taught, both inside and outside formal schooling, to
believe. The role of ideology in the construction and dissemination of knowledge cannot
be overstated. It is for this reason that one of the main thrusts of critical pedagogy is to
“help students recognize the social function of particular forms of knowledge”
(McLaren 2009, 63). The police, the boy believes, are there to protect his community,
whereas for social movements such as Black Lives Matter (BLM), the police may
protect the boy’s (read: white middle-class) neighbourhood, but their own communities
are literally under attack. Like the thrust of Freire’s pedagogy, BLM provides an
alternative framework from which to understand society through the lens of the
dispossessed.
South Africa has a long tradition of radical or Freirean practices of adult education
centred around community engagement and social justice or, in other words, a longterm process geared towards “democratising power relations” (Vally 2020, 5). Rooted
in the notion of People’s Education and “mass democratic struggles against apartheid”,
this approach has “increasingly been eroded or disappeared” (Von Kotze, Ismail, and
Cooper 2016, 281). The transition to non-racial higher education in the post-apartheid
period occurred in parallel to market-oriented or neoliberal forms of education centred
on notions of “performance” and outcomes in other parts of the world (2016, 281).
Within this context, Freirean approaches to teaching and learning exist on the margins
of higher education in contemporary South Africa. Peering inside social movements
may provide alternative frameworks through which to explore possibilities for
democratic approaches to higher education. In this way, it is possible to explore “what
social movements are and what adult education and learning means in relation to them”
(Walters 2005, 53), but also how actors within this sphere shape and are shaped by
specific experiments with radical adult education within and beyond the institutional
practices in the academy (Walters 2006).
This article builds upon Vally’s (2020, 2) “vision of education for liberation” and his
related conceptualisation of social movements as “laboratories of democracy” (2020,
6). A significant body of literature in post-apartheid South Africa has argued that
inadequate attention has been paid to the internal educative practices of social
movements. A special issue of Education as Change responds to this gap by
foregrounding “activist knowledge, learning and history” (Choudry and Vally 2018a,
2–3). The articles in the issue centre around explicating the political histories of
movements and the lessons learned “about systems of power and exploitation developed
as people find themselves in confrontation with states and capital” (Choudry and Vally
2018a, 3).
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Benson, Gamedze, and Koranteng (2018) offer a detailed case study of the Know Your
Own Continent (KYC) education course, which developed a radical historical approach
to education at the University of Cape Town aimed at conscientising students and
activists. This is done “in order to disrupt the languages and practices of power in the
classroom” (2018, 105). It is important to note that although KYC took place on campus,
it was (like others discussed by Choudry and Vally [2018]) not part of the “official”
academic programme. This article argues that social movements’ experiments with local
democracy are not only important in their own right, but may also provide a basis for
promoting social justice within concrete practices of higher education institutions.
When I first went to Marikana to conduct research on 18 August 2012, two days after
34 black mineworkers were massacred by the police, workers were still on strike. Here,
I refer to the category black as “as signifier of Biko’s idea of the reclamation of dignity
in black lives” (Vally and Motala 2018, 28). The dominant view in the mainstream
media at the time contributed to a picture of mineworkers as violent people intent on
meting out extreme forms of violence against strike-breakers or even the police. Freire’s
(1970) insistence that education and indeed the production of knowledge can never be
neutral processes came into sharp relief as it became clear that my research team and I
would need to choose sides. We soon learned through building relationships of trust
with mineworkers who had experienced the massacre first-hand that, like the police
officers who killed George Floyd, “murderers” do not in fact “die for their crimes” as
the boy was told at school in the poem cited at the beginning of this article. For Freire,
research—and indeed the teaching and learning process—must be underpinned by a
drive for social justice. Social relations do not exist in a vacuum, but within a structural
context of capitalist exploitation and oppression of the vast majority of people in the
world. Hence, there is a need to understand or “read” the world and to place texts, books
and articles, and indeed oral testimonies such as those my research team and I obtained
in Marikana, within their social and historical context (Freire 1970).
This article links my own scholarship and research on activism in community-based
movements and trade unions to Freire’s (1970) notion of the “problem-posing
educator”. The following section explains how I first came across and was drawn to a
Freirean approach in the context of emerging social movements in post-apartheid South
Africa. I then relate this to my scholarly work in Marikana and my ongoing research in
informal settlements, and I suggest that these have deeply informed my own teaching
and learning practices. The next two sections highlight core principles associated with
Freire’s method including the “problem-posing educator” who meets on relatively equal
grounds with his or her students in order to co-produce knowledge. Here, my ideas as a
white man and a Marxist were challenged by postgraduate students who wished to focus
on issues of “race” and gender. Thereafter, I focus on rooting teaching and learning
within the pre-existing knowledge systems of students as well as the experiential
learning process where oppressed groups struggling for their own liberation are brought
into the classroom and where my students undertake fieldtrips to witness the living
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conditions and organisational capacity of the people of Thembelihle, an informal
settlement in Lenasia where I have been conducting extensive research.
Freire’s vision of social justice in education enables students to think critically and to
change the world, rather than only learning about the world. Freire arguably goes a step
further as his framework seeks to democratise the teaching and learning process
altogether. When one reflects on how critical education theory and practice intertwine
in the context of a relatively managerial university with strict quantitative delivery
targets and a diverse student body at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, the
reality becomes far more complex.
Meeting Paulo Freire in Social Movement Research
I first came to know Paulo Freire’s work as an undergraduate during several hour-long
train rides home from college. As a budding social scientist, I was attracted to a social
justice perspective that could illuminate the ways in which the underlying structures of
society perpetuate inequality and poverty, thereby serving to undermine the possibilities
for human beings to reach their full potential. As I read the first several pages of
Education for Critical Consciousness (Freire 1965), my imagination was captured by
his visionary perspective on freedom and liberation. I was inspired by the fact that
Freire’s own direct experiences with poverty shaped the way he saw the world. Indeed,
this had a direct bearing upon the fact that he would develop a holistic, political
approach to education geared towards providing the oppressed with tools to overcome
systemic injustices.
According to Shaull’s preface to the landmark classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
Paulo Freire’s thought represents the response of a creative mind and sensitive
conscience to the extraordinary misery and suffering of the oppressed around him. Born
in 1921 in Recife [in Brazil], the centre of one of the most extreme situations of poverty
and underdevelopment in the Third World, he was soon forced to experience that reality
directly. As the economic crisis in 1929 in the United States began to affect Brazil the
precarious stability of Freire’s middle-class family gave way and he found himself
sharing the plight of the “wretched of the earth”. … [H]e came to know the gnawing
pains of hunger and fell behind in school because of the listlessness it produced. (Shaull
1970, 10)
From the end of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, Freire’s work began to have a
profound influence on the Black Consciousness (BC) movement in South Africa. Steve
Biko, arguably the godfather of the BC movement in the country, met Anne Hope, a
scholar who worked with Freire at Harvard (Thusi and Harley 2020, 78). Activists were
then trained by Freirean facilitators who “were clear that their role was not to tell people
what to think” (Thusi and Harley 2020, 78). By the time Freire’s work was banned by
the apartheid regime the tradition had already spread to the trade unions, communitybased organisations and the student movement. When I arrived in South Africa in the
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mid-2000s I was mostly unaware of this history, but I nevertheless carried with me a
Freirean approach to teaching and learning. I was inspired by the observation that when
Freire was 11 he pledged “to dedicate his life to the struggle against hunger” (Shaull
1970, 10). As a white middle-class man (I will return to this identity in the next section),
I have never experienced the “gnawing pains of hunger”, though I was nevertheless
deeply concerned about this injustice. I enthusiastically went to soup kitchens to serve
those in need as a young adult. But it was in the mid-2000s that I became interested in
South Africa’s new social movements and the potential they have to challenge structures
of oppression such as neoliberalism. When Nelson Mandela, the first black president of
the country, was elected into power in 1994, the African National Congress’s (ANC’s)
much-touted Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) brought hope that the
new government would undertake a state-driven, nationwide redistributive welfare
approach to swiftly address the legacy of apartheid. While major gains were made in
terms of sanitation and electricity provision as well as the delivery of free RDP houses,
the latter were often poorly constructed and arguably apartheid’s socio-spatial
geography became even more deeply entrenched (leaving black people in poorly
serviced ghettos with under-funded schools, weak healthcare facilities and low-paying
jobs in the cities). ANC policy effectively shifted from the RDP’s state-driven approach
to a neoliberal, market-oriented policy called Growth, Employment and Redistribution
(GEAR), which reinforced poverty and inequality (Saul and Bond 2014). Radical
political economists termed this process South Africa’s “limits to change” (Marais
1998), an “elite transition: from apartheid to neoliberalism” (Bond 2001), or, more
recently, the country’s “corporatised liberation” (McKinley 2017).
Indeed, the post-1994 honeymoon period did not last long: soon working-class black
communities in the townships felt the effects of neoliberal policies at their doorsteps
and in their homes as evictions and water and electricity cut-offs became widespread.
While community-based movements, or civics, were arguably intended to play a key
role in the conceptualisation and implementation of ANC development plans in the
transition to democracy, in the post-apartheid period it soon became clear that these
movements from below would take a back seat to centralised state decision-making
processes (Ballard, Habib, and Valonia 2006). The weakening of mass democratic
organisations undermined the perceived need for radical education in the post-1994
period.
Like other scholars who witnessed the shortcomings of the ruling party and the
emergence of new forms of organisation from the late 1990s to the early 2000s (see
Ballard, Habib, and Valonia 2006), I increasingly viewed social movements as among
the only viable vehicles through which structural change was possible. Freire argued
that “[i]f true commitment to the people, involving the transformation of the reality by
which they are oppressed, requires a theory transforming action, this theory cannot fail
to assign the people a fundamental role in the transformation process” (Freire 1970,
120). The radical educator was indeed a tireless proponent of the idea that it is not only
teachers, academics or elite policymakers, or for that matter registered students, who
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produce important forms of knowledge. For Freire and other Marxists, social
movements themselves are among the best suited to unpack and explore systems of
exploitation and oppression as they unfold in the process of challenging the authority of
the state and capital.
As Choudry and Vally (2018, 3) have observed, “The educative role of social
movements and social and political activism is often overlooked within adult education
and social movement scholarship.” They further suggest that “movements are not only
significant sites of social and political action, but also … important terrains of learning
and knowledge production” (2018, 3). My teaching and learning approach is intertwined
with my research methodology, which is based on the assumption that social movement
histories are important sites of learning in themselves to the extent that they produce
counter-hegemonic theories and practices. The social function of the forms of
knowledge propagated by radical social movements is not to accept the existing status
quo or systemic forms of oppression, but to challenge them head-on, as in the case, for
example, with Black Lives Matter.
Activists or Marxists who join academia are likely to experience a tension between the
requirement to produce academic publications that are written for a small and relatively
elite audience and activist forms of writing that tend to be more accessible to the public.
One can rarely, in fact, get credit for such outputs at an academic institution.
Nevertheless, I strove to find a balance by attempting to undertake research that is useful
to movements. I agree with Croteau that “[t]heorists without significant connections to
social movements can end up constructing elegant abstractions with little real insight or
utility” (Croteau, Hoynes, and Ryan 2005, xiii). It is often difficult to find this balance
since academics must publish, supervise, teach, and, especially women, need to look
after their families. As Du Plessis has pointed out, “research traditions followed in
higher education institutions become entrenched in safe zones of accreditation and
incentivisation, where outputs are published, [and] passed in performance audits for
promotions” (2019, 3). It is perhaps little surprise that in this context movements rarely
serve as subjects of knowledge production capable of contributing directly to the
dialectic of teaching and learning at higher education institutions.
Early on in my career, as a white middle-class man and Marxist, it was relatively easy
for me to emphasise class at the expense of other important relationships of power, such
as those embedded in gender and “race”. Indeed, the study of social movements in postapartheid South Africa is replete with examples of how white middle-class academics
benefit personally by exercising authority without reflecting upon their own privilege
both inside and outside the field (Hlatshwayo 2015; Mdlalose 2014). It is important to
point out here that Freire has been criticised for anointing himself as possessing the
antidote for oppression and thereby being the sole or genuine liberator of the oppressed.
Esteva, Prakash, and Stuchul (n.d., 4) offer a penetrating critique of Freire’s praxis.
Within Freire’s paradigm, they argue, the oppressed are incapable of achieving
liberation on their own: “They [the oppressed] need an outside critical intervention”
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(n.d., 4). The outsider, educator or change agent embodies “the secret formula of a
power to which they [the oppressed or student] must be initiated” (Rahnema 1992, 123).
Within this conceptualisation of empowerment, A has something B does not have: it
must be given to them. Rasmussen (2008) has argued that Freire’s thinking undermines
the oppressed, rural peasants in particular, since it assumes that they themselves cannot
fully comprehend the historical and structural processes that led to their very condition.
“The hub of the problem”, according to Blackburn (2000, 12), is that “any predetermined vision of liberation introduced from the outside is ultimately paternalistic,
since it presupposes that the oppressed are incapable of determining their own
endogenously produced vision of liberation”. Blackburn warns that “the particularist
notion of power in Freirean thought can all too easily lead to manipulation by educators
[or agents] with other agendas” (Blackburn 2000, 3). Early appraisals of Freirean
approaches were already touching the surface in the late 1970s and early 1980s as
authors pointed to the need to “demystify Freire” (Kidd and Byram 1982). As we shall
see below, I initially came with my own class-based analysis that I imposed on students,
but through the dialogical supervision process I came to realise the ways in which my
own ideological views were being imposed upon my students.
The foundation of Freirean thinking and practice is the idea that knowledge is important
not only because the oppressed as well as students learn “about” the world, but also
because of the extent to which it can potentially enable learners to act “in” the world in
order to transform or reshape structural and social processes that serve to exclude the
poor and the working class. These collective contributions are not only scholarly but
directed towards building communities of struggle or what may be called social
movements. I am a student of social movements and in turn this socially and politically
engaged grassroots research has rubbed off on my students, and in many cases directly
informed their areas of study. This suggests that social movements themselves are
taught and learn indirectly from their own experiences in struggle, and it is through their
lessons that researchers may then have the privilege to offer their students an alternative
or radical lens through which to understand contested meanings of transformation in
society. But, as several of my postgraduate students have demonstrated through detailed
investigations, there are other relationships of power besides those determined by class.
Supervision and the “Problem-Posing Educator”
The students whom I have supervised have often built upon my research by taking theirs
into new directions. From this perspective, the teaching and learning framework is
guided by the notion that there exists a dialectical relationship between student
knowledge (and their interests) and the knowledge one possesses as a supervisor.
Information is not merely transmitted from the lecturer, from the top down, into what
Freire refers to as “an empty vessel” or the student’s knowledge bank (1970, 52). This
process, however, does not happen magically or with the flip of a switch. Students’ own
ideas for research emanate from their own diverse, lived experiences and may challenge
those forms of knowledge or understandings of the world that the lecturer holds dearly
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to himself or herself. While initially I personally impressed upon students a Marxist
analysis focusing on the working class, I later learned from them the need to identify
other relationships of power that, as several of my students have demonstrated through
their research, are contextually specific and play a significant role in reinforcing systems
of oppression. Within Freire’s paradigm, teachers, in this case lecturers, are not the
foremost authority when it comes to disseminating knowledge. Instead, both the teacher
and the learner bring their own valuable experiences to the classroom. Freire calls the
teacher who enacts this philosophy the “problem-posing educator” or one who
constantly re-forms his [sic] reflections in the reflections of the students. The students—
no longer docile listeners—are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher.
The teacher presents the students the material for their consideration, and re-considers
his [sic] earlier considerations as the students express their own. (1970, 68)
For more than a decade, I have done research that develops oral histories of social
movements and also supervised and taught students who research social movements at
a postgraduate level. There is in South Africa arguably a triple-pronged movement of
students, workers and communities (however disconnected they may be from each other
in practice). These are the community-based movements in townships often associated
with service-delivery protests over water, electricity and housing as well as the
#FeesMustFall movement, which began in October 2015 at Wits University and then
spread across the country that year and into 2016 after the then President Jacob Zuma
announced a zero per cent increase in fees. I am also a student and teacher of the
workers’ movement that witnessed the police killing of 34 mineworkers in Marikana on
16 August 2012 and culminated in the longest strike in South African mining history in
2014 (under the banner of the independent Association of Mineworkers and
Construction Union [AMCU]).
Ngwane has conceptualised these three dynamic forms of resistance as expressions of
“insurgent democracy” (2019). In his view, the liberal democratic order is “under siege”
(Ngwane 2019, 229) and scholars and activists should therefore look to “postapartheid’s freedom fighters” who arguably provide alternative forms of democratic
politics rooted in traditions of grassroots militancy. I have engaged with these
movements, following Vally (2020), as “laboratories for democracy”, looking mainly
at how self-organisation of the working class can mobilise collectively to challenge
existing class relations (Sinwell and Mbatha 2016). My students have extended beyond
this limited vision by investigating the internal dynamics of movements and the
significance of identity politics, “race” and gender. In other words, students transformed
a seemingly top-down imposition by the teacher into a dialectical and relatively
democratic process characterised by a fusion of both teacher and student knowledge.
In the lead up to the national student movement associated with the period between
2015–2016, I coordinated student activities within and beyond the research centre where
I was based, including during the tumultuous period of #FeesMustFall. Our
postgraduates and post-doctoral fellows began at this time to study the emerging
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movement, including problematising the meaning of decolonisation and undertaking
ethnographic research on how students collectively exercised power from below. In the
mid-2010s I began to consolidate my role as a proactive, engaged supervisor, but it took
time before I began to adopt feminist and intersectional approaches to the study of social
movements, something which my research tended to ignore. In addition to engagements
with my own students, informal conversations with women activists opposing genderbased violence and racism including those involved in #FeesMustFall also shifted my
thinking and led me to extend beyond an isolated conceptualisation of class oppression.
I was convinced that alternative forms of research were not only necessary, but could
also provide valuable contributions to the available scholarship. Students wished to
explore dynamics of intersectionality, “race”, and especially gender within social
movements. Initially I resisted, but during informal discussions over a long period of
time, including over wine after seminars, students impressed views upon me, and I
became open to the ideas. It was both necessary for me to trust and genuinely seek to
understand the perspective of the students, but also for them to feel empowered enough
to put forth their unique voice. In line with Freire’s alternative, democratic approach we
were able to partner in a meaningful quest to co-produce knowledge rooted within the
students’ own interests, experiences and knowledge systems. Whereas my work tended
to obscure the significance of gender and power within social movements, for example
with a focus almost exclusively on men mineworkers, one of my students named Bridget
Ndibongo (2015) undertook ethnographic research on women in the platinum belt. This
scholarly work adopts a feminist lens to understand the events that culminated in the
longest strike in South Africa’s mining history, which took place in 2014. She employs
ethnographic research methods and in-depth interviews, including autobiographical life
histories, in order to point to the central role that women in Marikana, including wives,
sisters, and aunts, played in the strikes. Ndibongo argues that they were not mere
extensions of men, but instead enacted, from their own distinct ideological vantage
points, changing forms of individual agency and collective mobilisation.
During the five-month-long strike, women and men who had depended upon the
breadwinner salaries of the mineworkers were beginning to go hungry. It is perhaps no
coincidence that Ndibongo, who was conducting fieldwork during this period, heard
complaints from the women of Marikana about the people’s empty stomachs and
responded by initiating a food drive. Her research activities soon became directly
engaged with the labour and women’s movements in Marikana.
I was also a supervisor of a research Master of Arts (MA) dissertation by Thembelihle
Maseko (2017), which looked at intersectionality within a woman’s movement in a
township to the south of Johannesburg called Freedom Park. The study of social
movements tends to be written through the lens of men, and where women are discussed,
the focus tends to be on their public lives. Both avenues had not been explored in my
own research in an in-depth way and my student took the initiative to spend a great deal
of time with women in their homes and at public meetings. As Freire’s paradigm
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suggests, the teaching and learning process, and therefore supervision, goes both ways.
It is not primarily about the lecturer or the student on his or her own, but centrally about
how they can work together and develop a mutual relationship based on trust.
I was the supervisor of another young student named Kgothatso Mokgele (2018). His
MA dissertation looks at the shifting nature of student identities within a student
movement at one of the universities in Gauteng. The dissertation sheds light on the
changing nature of individual students’ identities that resulted from their involvement
in the events related to the #FeesMustFall movement. The dissertation’s theoretical
approach is well-developed as he draws upon Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (1989) work on
intersectionality, the lived experiences of “race”, class and gender, to provide a nuanced
understanding of the changing nature of individual activist identities in relation to the
movement that they helped construct. I have sought to demonstrate how my students
became “critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher” (Freire 1970, 68). The
learner is not an empty vessel to be filled by the teacher, but rather someone who comes
with important knowledge since it is based on their own experiences. This approach has
assisted me in extending beyond my own man-centred or patriarchal bias as well as to
challenge the centrality of class relations. Empirical studies of social movements
became the foundation for teaching and learning in a pedagogy geared towards
challenging existing forms of oppression in a critical pedagogic framework. This may
contribute to building the foundation for a cohort of postgraduate students to co-produce
relatively unique and neglected forms of knowledge in the areas of feminism,
intersectionality, and social movements.
Experiential Learning and Social Justice
Freire consistently reminds us that the education process is never a neutral one: it either
functions to maintain the status quo or to challenge it (Freire 1970). The political or
ideological vantage points of compulsory readings as well as the selection of guest
speakers and the nature of field trips must be carefully considered when designing a
module. It is no accident that students who register in my modules learn to see through
the lens of the oppressed and, building upon my own research on social movements, the
curriculum is designed to look towards the possibilities for popular agency to transform
aspects of social relations. Through guest speakers and a field trip to Thembelihle, an
informal settlement in Lenasia consisting of about 25,000 residents, students in my
postgraduate modules learn to engage directly with housing activists at the margins of
society.
The case of Thembelihle is arguably one of the quintessential “laboratories of
democracy” in the post-apartheid period. The civic organisation in the area, the
Thembelihle Crisis Committee (TCC), is often cited as a radical and autonomous
attempt by ordinary people to control local democratic processes in the post-apartheid
period. According to Tselapedi and Dugard (2013) of the Socio-Economic Rights
Institute (SERI), the TCC “reclaims power” from a top-down state bent on excluding
the poor from decision-making processes. The settlement, through the TCC’s
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leadership, “offers hope that with sustained active citizenship, the state can be made to
respond to collective demands and democracy can be consolidated” (Tselapedi and
Dugard 2013, 63).
A more recent MA dissertation from Wits University also engages directly with the
question of popular participation in Thembelihle. It argues that the state must begin “to
recognize the agency of all citizens and is [or should be] open to alternate ways of
creating spaces of participation” (Lourenco 2018, 54). It is incumbent upon us “to look
to organisations like the TCC to discover the ways in which this is possible” (Lourenco
2018, 55). The TCC is best understood as a homegrown, organic attempt to participate
in decision-making and local governance processes. Participation in Thembelihle
requires not only institutional means through which to enact change, but also noninstitutional means or contentious politics. The “People’s Parliament” is a term used by
residents themselves to describe a process of genuine citizen control, but it also occurs
in the form of a mass meeting that takes democratic decisions; it requires taking control
of one’s destiny and the destiny of one’s own community.
A democratic social arena that is a genuine representation of a relatively large group of
the dispossessed may be called the People’s Parliament. It is mostly well-attended and
takes on a militant character during times of crisis. Its “social space”, discursive rules
and boundaries are directly constituted and defined by ordinary people at the margins
of society with aspirations and dreams of improving their own lives. At times it is
literally a matter of life or death. For the residents of Thembelihle, participation is often
about extending beyond the bare minimum needed for survival in a corrugated iron
shack, but it also means engaging in broader struggles, campaigns for workers’ rights
and confronting xenophobic and gender-based violence.
One leading activist named Siphiwe Mbatha has limited formal education but is
incredibly knowledgeable about grassroots democracy in South Africa. We met in 2011
in the Democratic Left Front (DLF) as we collectively sought to unite worker and
community-based organisations. By being involved in solidarity actions and attending
community meetings in Thembelihle, and even visiting activists in jail at times when
they were unjustly arrested, a relationship of trust developed between us. Moreover, I
recruited Mbatha to be the core researcher on my team in Marikana (see below), which
led us to co-author work together (see Figure 1). Mbatha and I have developed a longstanding friendship and he not only takes students from my Urban Sociology class on
tours of his community, but also continues to do research with me and to organise in the
same activist circles, including most recently Kopanang Africa Against Xenophobia
(KAAX), which was formed in February 2022 and seeks to challenge the right-wing
politics associated with Operation Dudula.
Thembelihle has been the site of some of the most militant and sustained protests since
the early 2000s when the government attempted to forcibly evict residents. For my
postgraduate class on urban politics, students spend a day in the settlement taking notes
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and listening to community leaders after reading scholarly literature about the
settlement. The relationships and collective purpose that exist between myself and the
people of Thembelihle facilitated a situation in which when I brought my students to
Thembelihle they were welcomed with open arms. An exercise in experiential learning,
their assignment is to link theories of participatory governance and in situ upgrading to
what they have observed in the settlement. In contrast to the conventional “banking”
approach to education, the exercises in this module are geared not towards finding the
answers to abstract questions with no application to reality, but to understanding the
urban world as something that is socially constructed and therefore in flux. It is
dependent upon existing power relations and, as is demonstrated through the case of
Thembelihle, reality can be transformed by collective action. According to Freire,
“reality is really a process, undergoing constant transformation” (1970, 61).
According to Du Plessis (2019, 5), “interlocutors” such as research assistants “belong
to, and never transcend, subordinate positionalities in the knowledge-production
process. They are hardly acknowledged as co-creators of knowledge with autonomous
epistemic agency.” As academics are squeezed tight for administrative, teaching, and
research outputs and increasingly required to raise their own funds, it may not always
be feasible to carefully link teaching and learning in the classroom to one’s ongoing
research. But we must continue the quest even if only on a small scale. Between 2018
and 2019, I held a National Research Foundation (NRF) Incentive Funding grant
whereby I undertook research that details a 20-year history of popular resistance in
Thembelihle.
As in Marikana, the people of the area experience state repression when they engage in
contentious politics, including the occupation of roads and marches to local authorities.
Siphiwe Mbatha, who moved to the settlement at the age of 13 so that he and his mother
would have a place to call “home”, has also been a victim of police brutality. In 2011,
during a peaceful demonstration, he was shot with a rubber bullet in the kneecap. His
neighbour, who stays in a shack across the road, had his front teeth shot out by a rubber
bullet during a protest against the government’s attempt at evicting the residents in 2002.
Repression paradoxically sprang these and other activists to life. Since the community
came in their thousands to resist forced removals, they have sustained an anti-capitalist
and radically democratic TCC, which is the subject of a draft of a book manuscript that
I am completing. As Freire would certainly have it, the voices of the oppressed and their
collective actions to liberate themselves from systems of oppression are both the
protagonists and researchers of the book, and they also teach my students how to change
the world.
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Sinwell
Figure 1: Siphiwe Mbatha, furthest right, is facing and addressing the students in one of my
postgraduate modules that deals with the politics of urban space on the outskirts of Thembelihle
informal settlement in Lenasia
My teaching and learning approach is embedded within aspects of the community of
Thembelihle as I have given presentations at meetings of the TCC about my research
and other subjects, and written press statements in consultation with activists in the area.
Activists have become teachers of my students. Scholars must move towards a situation
whereby we not only extract information from grassroots organisations, but also train
activists to write, research, and undertake public presentations.
I have taught an urban politics (Honours) module each year since 2017 (one year prior
to joining the Department of Sociology). Among others, for the purposes of space it is
useful to point to three hallmarks of this module: 1) it entails a field trip and essay; 2)
students present and lead lectures through group work; and 3) it involves an independent
research project, which serves as the final examination. The module itself also involves
a great deal of student participation as students are expected to (and marked) based not
only on their involvement in the class overall but in presentations that they give in
groups for a specific lecture that is assigned to them. The qualitative independent
research project, which tends to focus on issues such as access to health, crime,
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Sinwell
evictions, electricity cut-offs and different forms of public housing, serves as the final
examination. Over the years, students have tended to choose to conduct their research
in urban areas or spaces with which they are familiar, or perhaps townships where they
live or grew up. In line with a Freirean framework, with their pre-existing knowledge,
students begin with a topic they are interested in and then they share this with me and I
assist with co-constructing a research topic and specific central research questions.
According to Freire, the learning process is “impossible without a relation of mutual
understanding and trust” between the learner and educator (Freire 1970, 102). In this
way, teachers may prompt students to research something they already have an
experience with or a degree of knowledge about, thereby building upon their own
experiences and potentially offering insight and new forms of knowledge about specific
aspects of their living, working, or studying environment. Instead of imposing one’s
assumptions and frameworks about the teaching and learning process that should ideally
take place, a Freirean approach suggests a careful engagement with existing experiences
and practices. In this way, students are not merely required to regurgitate knowledge on
a student sheet, but to think critically about the world in which we live by applying
theoretical concepts to practice, and also reflecting on the ways in which social
movement practices develop or enable us to reinterpret theory. This is an element of
Freire’s “education for critical consciousness”.
Conclusion
Vally urges us to consider the possibilities for building a radical orientation among
students in higher education institutions. “Individuals in many universities are able,” he
suggests, “to connect with community organisations and social movements, and they
can accomplish valuable counter-hegemonic work” (2020, 15). In this way, higher
education is conceived as “a public good and a space for critical democratic citizenry”
(2020, 15). In practice this means creating democratic spaces for social justice that
challenge the fundamental values and culture that drive individual incentivisation.
As I delved into my permanent post in my department, I have tended to move further
away from grassroots movements in an attempt to consolidate my own mainly singleauthor manuscripts and monographs. The danger is that, in mainstream academic
research, building grassroots movements becomes an afterthought, rather than one of its
core characteristics. For example, while I am in touch with the workers of Marikana
(whom I have published extensively on), my work continues to be cited, while their own
living and working conditions have not improved substantially and the vast majority
cannot access my publications. It is in this context that one must be weary of Freire’s,
or Freire-like, approaches that appear on the surface to be participatory and inclusive
yet run the risk of being co-opted and manipulated by authorities (and even lecturers
themselves) at various levels within and outside academic institutions.
As higher education funding continues to be cut as the economic crisis is exacerbated
by the Covid-19 pandemic, we must consistently strive towards constructing democratic
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Sinwell
or egalitarian engagements with communities and between students and academics.
These engagements are not static, but various and in flux. At one time relations may
reflect authoritarian tendencies, but these can be democratically transformed. It also
requires in practice a delicate balance between supporting democratic approaches to
teaching and learning on the one hand, while on the other ensuring that the university’s
strategic visions are being realised. This will undoubtedly involve a thoughtful and
dedicated training of researchers and other learners to not only inculcate our own biases,
interests, and interpretations but to engage with the diversity of the students’ interests
and provide the possibility to extend beyond one narrow and static approach.
One of the key lessons is that “activism and adult education work within the academy
… [are] not mutually exclusive as both targe[t] change” (Von Kotze, Ismail, and Cooper
2016, 290). Scholars must continue to create spaces for the study of resistance and
liberation as well as the prospects of forging alternative ideologies and radical discursive
frameworks such as those that emerged in Marikana and in other working-class
communities such as Thembelihle. We must also take the lead from a new generation
of critically engaged scholar-activists including Benya and Jeni (2022, 73), who
partnered with women in Marikana and with farmworkers in Umgungundlovu in
KwaZulu-Natal in order to “co-develop local feminist [and other ideological] registers
and grammars and conceptual vocabularies” in a way that is “locally grounded, but
outward looking”.
Extending beyond the limits of my own work, students have not only investigated and
shed light on the mainly black working class in South Africa and other places around
the world (as Freire would have it), but also the prospects for women to create individual
and collective avenues through which to challenge oppressive systems of power and
authority. But, we must also recognise that students bring to the table their own
prevailing assumptions and lived experiences, which often reflect the dominant world
view. In practice there exists no linear path whereby teachers simply learn positive
lessons from students. This is particularly the case in a context where teachers must
navigate students’ needs for individual mobility alongside or against a social justice
approach that may result in fewer career opportunities.
Walters’ (2006) suggestion that scholar-activists must embed transformative practices
within the academy beyond individual courses or research agendas remains instructive.
She argues that a “life-long learning” approach is necessary so that these become part
of the core values of higher education institutions. This suggests that no single or
isolated practice or technique in the classroom or field can reflect a Freirean approach
on its own. If the goal of education is to challenge systems of oppression, then social
justice and the democratisation of the knowledge project must constitute the guiding
principles or compass we employ to navigate our everyday teaching and learning
practices both inside and outside the academy.
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