ABSTRACT
Philosopher children prove critical to decolonisation. In South Africa, second graders in this chapter reimagine H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) largely set in South Africa. Haggard’s novel chronicles the search for treasure in Africa’s hinterland dependent on the tracing of the land, with plants, animals and Africans described in binary. Contrastingly, children highlighted in this chapter map to locate treasure by engaging Viviane Schwarz’s How to Find Gold (2016). To this end, Kai and Patrick’s chapter unfolds through progressive diffractive posthumanist readings. First, they read Haggard’s novel revolving around ‘tracings’ of coloniality as opposed to ‘mappings’. Second, Schwarz, as projected into the classroom by teacher Sara Stanley, presents a different anti-Cartesian geography by diffracting civilized-savage binaries where protagonists traverse difference without surrendering subjectivities. Finally, philosopher children diffract Schwarz’s diffraction. They ultimately demonstrate the potential of affirmative critical politics hinging on an entanglement with and freedom from colonial and apartheid histories.
