Not White Enough, Not Biko Black Enough: The Othering of Coloured Identity in the South African History Classroom

In post-apartheid South Africa, history education was hailed as constructing a new national narrative that foregrounded racial justice and human rights. Absent from it however was any mention of the Coloured community, a racial group who claim ancestry from various populations inhabiting the region. Instead, motivated by racialized unity, and drawing from conceptualizations developed by the Black Consciousness Movement, Coloured people were considered “Biko Black”—a term used to refer to all formerly disenfranchised groups. Drawing on 10 months of classroom ethnography in Cape Town, this chapter explores how Grade 9 students who racialize themselves as Coloured, are othered by the absence of a distinctive Coloured history in their curricula. It suggests that the inability to identify themselves in the curricula means that they fail to recognize the important contribution that Coloured people made to the anti-apartheid struggle—a struggle that their teachers and textbooks present as “Black vs White”. Crucially, this form of othering is not undertaken to discriminate, but intended by teachers and textbook authors to foster a collective sense of Black identity and pride. This research thus uncovers subtle processes in which history teaching and racial politics combine to other in ways that prove socially destructive.