Voices from Cape Town Classrooms

The Author: Alan Wieder is an oral historian who teaches at the University of South Carolina. He has done oral history work on school desegregation in New Orleans and is the author of Race and Education: Narrative Essays, Oral Histories, and Documentary Photography (Peter Lang, 1996). This book is part of his ongoing oral history project with South African teachers.

«Alan Wieder's 'Voices from Cape Town Classrooms' provides a breathtaking view into a vital center of resistance during the South African nightmare known as apartheid. Schools in South Africa as elsewhere are contested spaces, arenas of hope and struggle, because schools are where we invest in our children (or not), and project a vision of the future we hope to build. During the anti-apartheid struggle, schools were a powerful center of resistance. Filled with immediacy and urgency, the struggle comes alive in these pages as vital, complex, and nuanced, something trembling and real and lived. The events around the struggle are so huge and so encompassing that they can easily be constructed into a gleaming and unproblematic icon casting a huge, seemingly impenetrable shadow across an otherwise dense and complex landscape. To Alan Wieder's eternal credit, he rescues here the reality of history as lived, paths taken before the outcome is known, difficult choices made in the dark.» (Bill Ayers, University of Chicago, Illinois; Author of 'Fugitive Days')
«Alan Wieder's book opens up new perspectives in research methodology by documenting the life histories of apartheid-era teachers in the Western Cape. Wieder's approach allows these teachers to speak for themselves and to re-create the world of apartheid education for the teacher/educator. He manages to demonstrate the tension and the excitement as well as the very real dangers of the political and the pedagogical challenges that presented themselves in Coloured schools in the 1980s and allows the reader to glimpse the realities of everyday life for activist educators. It seems that the moment was right for this work to be done and that Alan Wieder, as an outsider with unique skills, was able to persuade these teachers to share their stories with a wider public in a way that had not seemed possible earlier. This book provides a blueprint for much-needed further work on the key role that many teachers played in opposing