ABSTRACT
The history books informed the students that blacks were taken to be enslaved in the cotton fields of the US because they were better able to withstand the heat and the bending than white people. In geography class they studied maps of North America and Europe, nothing about Africa. In the curriculum slavery was not something for which Africans were especially suited but an oppressive mode of produce essential to the process of capital accumulation and industrialization. Education for liberation was ultimately not about the individual but about transforming society through collective, focused, “educated” action, in this instance fighting against the efforts by the global forces of neoliberalism to crush the South African working-class movement. Ultimately, higher education in prison is a bigger project than the colleges, universities, and departments of corrections would have us believe.
