ABSTRACT
Colonisation brought fierce competition over sparse resources of grazing land and water, violent confrontations, decimation of indigenous people, and distinctive patterns of settler colonialism in waves of possession and dispossession. South Africa has a complex and violent history of colonialism long predating apartheid and its history is not amenable to easy labelling. In accounts of colonialism and decolonisation, the end of apartheid is rightly taken to be a watershed moment. Western modernity took shape in the economic, social, and epistemological relationships of colonialism – conditions which are not straightforwardly available for former colonies in the form of ‘development’. Using the broad framework of de/coloniality, this study takes the provision of schooling as its centre point, with the aim of investigating how inequalities take shape, endure, and change over time. Schooling as a social institution has accompanied industrialisation in the West and colonisation in Africa and elsewhere.
