Following the end of apartheid in 1994, the ANC government placed education at the centre of its plans to build a nonracial and more equitable society. Yet, by the 2010s a wave of student protests voiced demands for decolonised and affordable education. By following families and schools in Durban for nearly a decade, Mark Hunter sheds new light on South Africa's political transition and the global phenomenon of education marketisation. He rejects simple descriptions of the country's move from 'race to class apartheid' and reveals how 'white' phenotypic traits like skin colour retain value in the schooling system even as the multiracial middle class embraces prestigious linguistic and embodied practices the book calls 'white tone'. By illuminating the actions and choices of both white and black parents, Hunter provides a unique view on race, class and gender in a country emerging from a notorious system of institutionalised racism.
1. Introduction; Part I. Racial Modernism, 1950s and '60s: 2. 'Larney' and 'rough and tough' schools: the making of White Durban; 3. Umlazi township and the gendered 'bond of education'; Part II. Marketised Assimilation, late 1970s-1990s: 4. The routes of schooling desegregation: protest, cooption, and marketised assimilation, 1976-2000; Part III. Schooling and Work after Apartheid: 5. From school to work: symbolic power and social networks; Part IV. Racialised Market, 2000s-: 6. 'What can you do for the school?' The racialised market, 2000s-; 7. New families on the bluff: selling a child in the schooling market; 8. Beneath the 'black tax' in Umlazi: class, family relations and schooling; 9. Conclusions: hegemony on a school bus.
