Slow violence,depoliticisation and hope: Cultural landscapes of schooling in Wentworth,South Africa

Abstract

This ethnographic study of environmental learning in a South African township school unravels how formal education can depoliticise young people’s understandings of environmental decay. Conceptualising environmental learning through Rob Nixon’s notion of ‘slow violence’ and Hannah Arendt’s understanding of ‘action’, the article argues that despite the depoliticization enacted through schooling, individual learners and educators articulate subterranean understandings of the environmental multicrisis rooted in informal learning. This helps us understand the potential of environmental learning outside schools.

Introduction

In this article, I report on ethnographic research undertaken in 2017–18 at Durban South Primary School—a fictional name for my fieldwork site in Durban, South Africa—which was part of a multi-sited ethnographic study about young people’s imaginings of possible futures in light of the multiple environmental crises the world is facing. ¹ Durban South Primary is located in Wentworth, a ‘Coloured’ ² township in the southern part of the city of Durban, South Africa’s third most populous, highly ethnically diverse city with large populations of the Zulu people as well as people of Indian and British descent. Wentworth had suffered decades of industrial air pollution and environmental racism (Chari, 2006). My research aimed to understand how two kinds of education—schooling and activism—shaped young people’s political imaginations about the environment. The environmental struggles of the people of South Durban had given rise to activist movements challenging industrial pollution (Aylett, 2010), environmental racism and other related injustices against the local population—notably under the umbrella of the internationally-acclaimed South Durban Environmental Community Alliance (SDCEA)—that I assumed might play an educational role in the community. The combination of environmental decay and community resistance in the form of activism made this site a particularly rich space for an exploration of young people’s imaginations of environmental futures.

This article helps illuminate education’s role in tackling environmental decay through the study of cultural landscapes of schooling in Wentworth and their impact on environmental learning at Durban South Primary. In a space so viscerally affected by environmental destruction, development causes the ‘permanentization of liminality’ (Thomassen, 2009: p. 22); that is, it simultaneously projects the modernist promise of prosperity while importing toxic by-products from the territories where modernity has already established its hegemony. Wentworth is “behind” on the development trajectory but also ahead of its time, as it is already experiencing the dystopia of the environmental ‘multi-crisis’ (Litfin, 2016) awaiting much of the rest of the world as humanity grapples with the climate emergency (Klein, 2014), ongoing mass extinction (Kolbert, 2015), and related existential environmental calamities (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2017). Ours is an age of what Robert Nixon (2011) refers to as ‘slow violence,’ the gradual, “invisible” destruction of the planet and its marginal peoples that lacks the spectacle of the blatant violence we see in the news daily. The consequences of such violence are painfully visible in liminal spaces like Wentworth, where the accelerating slow violence is found in the odor of carcinogenic air inhaled every day by people of colour. We can conceive of Wentworth as a ‘contemporary death-world’, a product of the necropolitics (Mbembe, 2019) that lies at the core of the apartheid of the present, characterised by what Davies, writing about a contaminated town in Louisana, has described as the ‘racialized, uneven and attritional experience of petrochemical pollution’ (Davies, 2018: 1537).

Durban South Primary in Wentworth seemed to testify to the potential of schooling to get in the way of a “radical” sustainability agenda even in a space of direct exposure to environmental threats. The school’s campus consisted of more than four-decades-old “temporary” pre-fabricated classrooms that had far outlived their expected lifespan. ‘You can hardly hang a clock because you can’t drill a hole or you break the wall’, Mr. Naidoo, the principal, told me. The “temporary” nature of the structure housing the school mirrored the institutional liminality of formal education; just as the school is waiting in perpetuum for a permanent facility, so too are the students caught in limbo between promises of prosperity and the realities of life in a township. The learners here were shepherded through the school complex by teachers forming neat chains of bodies. It was as if the school tried to make up with discipline for what it lacked in the world of imagination and physical infrastructure, or as if harsh treatment could address the underlying reasons the learners would “misbehave”.

I wondered where Hannah Arendt’s view on administrative massacre might fit in such a vision of (post)colonial schooling. Her idea—that the more bureaucratic a state and its institutions are the more violent they are likely to be—seemed particularly appropriate. This insight, derived from tracing the causes of the fast violence of 20^th-century concentration camps and gulags, seemed to apply to the 21^st-century slow violence levelled against the planet and its “marginal” peoples. According to Arendt (1970, p. 81), ‘in a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant’. The focus on order, discipline and power in Wentworth pointed in the direction of such tyranny. The utopian idea, reflected in the Sustainable Development Goals to which South Africa is a signatory, that the world can school itself out of the mess of a multitude of planetary-scale environmental crises by teaching young people about ‘sustainability’ ran into the reality of a transgenerational transmission of bureaucratisation. This was accomplished by the very medium of schooling, with its associated testing regimes and apolitical socialisation.

Conceptualising environmental learning through Rob Nixon’s notion of ‘slow violence’ and Hannah Arendt’s understanding of ‘action’ (Arendt’s antidote to bureaucratisation), this study examines several research questions: In what ways does the administrative machinery of procedural learning intervene in intergenerational knowledge transfer about the environment? In what ways, if at all, does historical responsibility shape the process of schooling and who mediates this learning? In what ways might schools act as sites of (de)politicisation of environmental issues? How do young people make sense of slow violence? Is bureaucracy to blame for this slow violence, and how was schooling, as an institution of liminality, playing its part in this violence?

In this article, I argue that in Durban South Primary, formal education acts to depoliticise young people’s understandings of environmental decay and environmental racism. It further argues that despite the depoliticization enacted through schooling, individual learners and educators articulate subterranean understandings of the environmental multicrisis rooted in informal learning. The relevance of these findings is two-fold: they help us understand the pitfalls of environmental learning within schools, while also highlighting the potential of informal learning to ‘politicise the environmental’.

Methodology

Between 2016 and 2018, I undertook three stretches of fieldwork in Wentworth for a total of 5 months of immersive ethnographic fieldwork, consisting of an initial pilot study, the main fieldwork, and a follow-up visit to share findings with interlocutors. The bulk of the findings in this article originates from the main fieldwork, which took place in 2017. The five-month time frame allowed only for a limited immersion in the field site, and was due to the multi-sited nature of the study where fieldwork was split between two research sites.

In my work with adult interlocutors, I relied on a range of conventional ethnographic methods. These included observation of lessons at the school, unstructured and semi-structured interviews with teachers, administrators, parents and community members, and focus groups with the teaching staff. During my time in the field, I visited the school every day and spent much time in the staff room, in the canteen and in school corridors, observing the daily goings-on and engaging in informal conversations with interlocutors, and recorded my observations in an ethnographic diary. The interview data was transcribed, and along with my fieldnotes it was coded and analysed for patterns of thematic convergence and divergence.

I informed all the interlocutors of the purpose of my research study in writing and ensured that informed consent was provided by all who participated in the research. All the data was anonymised and pseudonyms used for individual interlocutors. All participants were given the option to opt out of the study, though none of them exercised this option. When recruiting minors to participate in the study, I organised several meetings at the school attended by the children, their legal guardians and school representatives in which I explained the purpose of the study, the methodology and the expected research outcomes, and answered any questions posed by the children and their families. Informed consent forms were signed by both children and their guardians, and all research activities took place at the school compound in the presence of schoolteachers and administrators.

My methodology for research with students was inspired by the work of David MacDougall (2018a, 2018b), whose approach to participatory videomaking with children seemed to be a methodology that could facilitate just the kind of cultural translation and learning I was hoping to catalyse through my project. This type of research shares some of its goals and approaches with the kind of participatory analysis applied in the context of photovoice (Wang and Burris, 1997) and the visual methods inspired by the anthropology of childhood (Johnson et al., 2012).

What appealed to me about MacDougall’s approach was that it was deliberately “slow,” in that it required a commitment to spending extended periods of time with interlocutors. While participatory videomaking has become an established method in visual anthropology, it often relies on the use of mobile phone cameras or simple consumer cameras that are so easy to operate that they often require little thought about how one is filming. MacDougall, by contrast, stressed the value of slow and careful observation during the filming process and of operating the camera in manual mode so as to have full control over it. This approach helps build rapport between the research participants and the researcher and encourages children to be thoughtful about what and how they choose to record. At a time of widespread instant, effortless videomaking, MacDougall’s approach feels like a bit of a throwback to the era of celluloid, a time when mastering technology meant constantly making decisions about aperture, focal length, focus, and other elements. The deliberate slowness of his process parallels the idea of slow violence—gradual environmental change might be better understood through the prism of a deliberate, attentive, slowed-down gaze.

In this article, I discuss two student films that were made in the filmmaking workshop at Durban South—‘Pollution Kills’ and ‘Wentworth Changing to Progress’. ³ Alongside participant-observation, interviews, focus groups and other visual methods (including mind mapping and drawing imagined past and future worlds), these methods allowed me to explore both the cultural and political landscapes of schooling in Wentworth and the subterranean narratives of a politics of action, which I discuss in the pages that follow.

Context

Exploring the research questions motivating this study in the context of Wentworth meant confronting the disconnect between the democratic promise and lived reality of present-day South Africa. Section 24 of the country’s constitution reads, ‘Everyone has the right to an environment that is not harmful to their health or well-being; and to have the environment protected, for the benefit of present and future generations’ (Republic of South Africa, 2015: 9). And yet, South Africa remains plagued by a myriad environmental issues that disproportionately affect underprivileged populations. This is due in part to the historical legacy of the totalitarian apartheid regime of 1948–1993, in which non-white people were considered disposable; to the country’s neoliberal economic orientation which has seen a massive increase in unemployment and inequality (Russell, 2010); and to the successive governments’ lack of attention to environmental issues (Bond and Hallowes, 2002).

This history left its mark on South Durban. The ‘Coloured’ township of Wentworth, my research site, home to approximately 40,000 people (Anderson, 2009: 58), dates back to the early 1960s when, due to the implementation of the apartheid government’s Group Area Act of 1952, many ‘Coloured’ people were forcibly relocated here from across the city and from places as far as the Eastern Cape. Subsequently, according to Chari (2006: 123), the township ‘retreat[ed] into a local world that becomes increasingly parochial, trapping its itinerant population of labourers and their families in a local world of gangs, churches, artisans and a bittersweet affirmation of the ghetto’.

Today, the township, like many others in South Africa, is notorious for crime, gang violence, drug use, teenage pregnancies, prostitution and high HIV rates. Unemployment statistics in Wentworth are alarming: at least one-third of residents between ages 15 and 65 are unemployed, a large number of people cannot work due to disability or illness (often caused by air pollution), ‘an equally sizeable group either chooses not to work or could not find work; and a significant group is comprised of currently unemployed seasonal workers’ (Chari, 2006: 429). This last group’s lot has become considerably worse since a wave of major strikes in the 1980s, when Engen started outsourcing and using labour brokers, many of whom were in fact ex-gangsters. In the words of Chari’s informant Lenny, ‘gang leaders actually became labour brokers. It was a mob thing. It’s not been broken’ (Chari, 2006: 430). While Chari’s findings about the socio-economic realities of Wentworth were published more than 10 years prior to my fieldwork, they resonated with my observations and those of my interlocutors; for example, Megan, one of the teachers at Durban South Primary, talked to me about the economic realities of her students, who, according to her, live in ‘little houses with mattresses in the kitchen, no electricity, no hot water, gas, a little gasket that they use for everything’.

Wentworth is situated directly on the fenceline of Engen, South Africa’s oldest oil refinery, which has a dismal environmental record. Along with other heavy industries situated in South Durban’s Industrial Basin, which has accounted for 8 per cent of the country’s GDP (Aylett, 2010a: 484), its emissions contribute to the ‘toxic soup’ (Chari, 2005b: 428) in which people live. Apart from sky-high rates of thyroid cancer, leukaemia and asthma (Kistnasamy et al., 2008; Naidoo et al., 2013; Nriagu et al., 1999), frequent industrial accidents, including fires and explosions, threaten the residents (Scott & Barnett, 2009). In Wentworth, slow violence is often not so slow after all.

Eclipsing slow violence in a South Durban school

Aruna, my key informant in Wentworth, was crucial to my understanding of the cultural landscape of schooling at Durban South Primary. I met Aruna, an Indian-origin English teacher and head of the social sciences department, through an informal network of self-described environmental educators in Durban. ⁴ Her school was adjacent to Engen, and she indicated that the school would be open to hosting my research. At our first meeting, I had a sense that Aruna was not originally from South Durban, and it turned out she had moved to Durban from a farmland area in the foothills of the Drakensberg mountains. ‘I think the first thing I noticed when I walked into this place was the sky. There was no sky, it was just a thick layer of smoke. I was quite shocked,’ she told me, remembering her first day in Wentworth. It was perhaps due to her multiple frames of reference that Aruna saw the local children as full of potential compared to children from more privileged areas.

In one conversation between lessons, as we were sitting in the teachers’ lounge and listening to the sound of children queuing up for their government-sponsored lunches in the adjacent canteen, she told me that ‘the affluent child’s interest is academic . . . The kids here, they are not so academically inclined again because I think the local community also speak more—they are more politically inclined, they’re watching TV politics, they’re talking about what is happening in the country, they talk about drugs’. As a result, children from impoverished areas like Wentworth are more politically and socially aware. ‘Affluent children read about drugs, but this child here has experienced it, they have seen it, they have felt it, they know what it is. So I admire these children, I really admire them’, Aruna told me. It was rare to hear such comments. Most educators I spoke to during my research focused on the challenges children faced and what they perceived as a lack of motivation or an inability to learn. I initially thought of Aruna as an ‘enlightened’ teacher, an outlier in a system that appeared to crush hope and human potential. That is perhaps why I was surprised when I observed her in the classroom. Children seemed to treat her with both respect and fear; they often kept their eyes down and stuck to the opposite side of the corridor when passing her. This was, I thought, surely at least in part a manifestation of a wider structural landscape, the harsh environment in which students here lived, the many long-standing deprivations (in family support, in food and clothes, in safety), and the culture of deference to teachers. Observing Aruna in the classroom gave me further cues: frequently raising her voice, shaming students (she would call them ‘dizzy’, which I construed to mean mentally disturbed), and often sending pupils out of the classroom, she seemed to maintain her authority through fear. But this too appeared to be structural, for it was not clear what the alternative was in this environment; it seemed that the realities of a township school compelled teachers, even those who genuinely cared about their students, to resort to extreme measures in order to maintain ‘discipline’, which they saw as a precondition of education.

But I also encountered glimmers of a ‘politics of hope’ in South Durban in the form of outlier teachers who brought activist agendas into their classrooms. In some cases, entire schools participated in demonstrations, such as against the demolition of the Clairwood Racecourse (one of the few remaining green areas in an otherwise heavily industrialised South Durban), which took place shortly before the beginning of my fieldwork. ‘There were public gatherings which we attended. I delivered an address at one of the public gatherings and then we stood with placards—a placard demonstration, outside the racecourse’, the headmaster of one South Durban primary school told me, conjuring up images in my mind of fifth- or sixth-graders quietly holding banners outside an industrial construction site. I found it hard to imagine that the community was so desperate to preserve the racecourse that an entire school would participate in a protest, yet it sounded like an impressive feat of courage for the administrators, teachers and pupils to organise such a demonstration.

Despite these glimmers of hope, what I observed on a day-to-day basis was a gloomy reality of the imprints on schooling of exclusion, inequality, neglect and elitist policies. This seemed to have much to do with the context in which the school was operating. A large gap exists between aspiration and delivery in the South African school system. In 2017, the South African government spent 18.73 per cent of its budget, or 6.1 per cent of GDP, on education (UNESCO, 2019)—the sixth-highest percentage in the world. Yet, the political economy of post-apartheid South Africa has led to a grossly unequal distribution of funding across the education system (Badat and Sayed, 2014; Engelbrecht et al., 2016). As a result, a disproportionate share of the resources ends up at the former Model-C schools that served white South Africans prior to 1994 and currently serve the privileged classes.

The government has tried to tackle this educational crisis through a series of education reforms and changing curricula since the mid-1990s, including Curriculum 2005 (based on the idea of outcomes-based education) and the current Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement of 2011 (CAPS) (Kanjee and Sayed, 2013). These curricula have been widely criticised (Cross et al., 2002; Ramatlapana and Makonye, 2012). CAPS is seen as an educational programme reinforcing existing power relations and disempowering both teachers and students (Palmer and De Klerk, 2012), a course of study in need of decolonisation (Smith, 2018) and a policy initiative lacking appropriate initiatives for teacher training that would allow teachers to transition effectively to the new curriculum (Gudyanga and Jita, 2018; Phasha et al., 2016). The government not only fails to provide the children with a quality education, it also obfuscates this failure through artificially inflated pass rates that do not enable children to get a job and escape poverty. This is at least in part reflected in the country’s sky-high youth graduate unemployment rate of 55.2 per cent as of the first quarter of 2019 (Statistics South Africa, 2019), which undoubtedly has risen further due to the pandemic of Covid-19 that hit South Africa particularly hard. The picture that emerges is one of a school system that treats different socio-economic groups very differently, subjecting the underprivileged ones to routinised, punitive schooling that gives children little in return for their participation.

Despite the South African government’s significant investment in education, Durban South Primary is one of many schools facing a precarious financial position. According to Mr. Naidoo, department of education funding only covers teachers’ salaries for the school year and less than 1 month’s operating expense; the rest needs to be raised from parents or donors. Fees are collected from parents, but compliance is typically low, with only one-fifth paying the full amount. Much of the school administrators’ time is therefore spent on securing financing, leaving little time to deal with other aspects of education.

Another factor that constrains the school’s ability to incorporate environmental themes into the curriculum is what Mark Hunter, a scholar of education in Durban, described to me in an interview as ‘the death of the local school’. In the aftermath of apartheid, schools that formerly served only certain racial groups, such as the ‘Coloureds’ in Wentworth, were open to all, in theory. In reality, the racial mixing of students depended on parents’ financial ability to send their children to schools outside their communities. In South Durban, through a sophisticated system of buses, taxis and other shared vehicles (Hunter, 2010), black students from nearby townships (Umlazi in particular) have become increasingly able to commute to schools formerly unavailable to them. During my fieldwork, I came across schools whose student bodies comprised more than 99 per cent Black students, while only 25 years earlier the student population would have been 100 per cent Indian or ‘Coloured’. Mrs. Pillay, the Durban South vice-principal, told me, ‘[our school] is the most fortunate in that if you look at my total percentage of community, Coloured [local residents] versus Black [students who commute], I would say we are 60-40. If you go to the other schools, I would say they’re 90–10’.

While it might appear that attending a school in Wentworth was a positive consequence of the end of apartheid for Black children, I realised that the situation was far more complex. Even as the state formally desegregated schools and opened up new opportunities for Black students, it allowed the quality of education in schools taking on Black children to deteriorate. The death of the local school meant that many schools were no longer embedded in a community, which separated social and political struggles from the lives of the learners. South Durban became, perhaps more than ever before, a site of institutional liminality that promised upward mobility and an opportunity to obtain a superior education, even if it came at the cost of asthma or thyroid cancer. It was as if the cloud of toxic air hovering above the school was drawing people in because it represented economic prosperity, rather than repulsing them because it represented death (as it did to me).

Given this backdrop, it was not surprising that the school did not aspire to bring up generations of environmental activists or that perhaps it was, in Appadurai’s (2013) words, beyond the school’s collective ‘capacity to aspire’ to set such a goal. Rather, what I frequently encountered in my interactions with educators was a particular conception of childhood in which learning about environmental racism and slow violence would happen further downstream in children’s education trajectories. The children were considered too young to understand politics, thus it was not the place of a primary school to educate them about environmental justice or historical responsibility. In Aruna’s words, ‘I think maybe primary schools are not involved a lot in these political and environmental issues because the kids are far too young to even understand what an activist is.’ The reality of the South African education system is that many children never make it past primary school (Branson et al., 2014) and those who do are unlikely to focus on environmental justice in their secondary schooling, where it is often not covered by the curriculum. The primary school remains the key institution through which the state can cultivate (or constrain) the political imaginations of future generations, but my findings from Wentworth suggest that, in the South African education context, it is set up to fail at this task.

The spectacles of fast violence

Wentworth suffers from major social issues, including poverty and unemployment, drug abuse on a mass scale, both petty and organised crime, gang warfare, a high prevalence of prostitution, alcoholism, domestic and gender-based violence, a breakdown of family structures and high HIV rates. Wentworth is, in other words, a site of fast violence whose spectacles can easily overtake the slow violence of environmental injustice and racism as the top concern of children and their families. When I asked Collin, one of the students who made ‘Pollution Kills’, to tell me about his life in Wentworth, his response revealed a powerful sense of spatial containment and fear:

My life living [sic] in Wentworth has been fine but at the same time it’s been dangerous because of the gang violence here in Wentworth. There was been [sic] two gangs. It’s where I stay and just up the road from where I stay, those two groups were fighting so like every time when you want to go to the shop it’s not like you can even go because the shop is above. So, like when you walk up the road you don’t know when you’re going to get shot. So, it’s very dangerous.

The sense of danger is a central theme in ‘Pollution Kills’. In one scene, for example, a boy takes a quick break from playing soccer to talk to the film crew about violence in Wentworth. He casually talks about murders, drug use and violence among children without breaking his smile, indicating that this is ‘normal’ here. When I asked Mrs. Pillay how much importance young people, in her experience, attach to their health, she told me ‘I think just doing today, basic needs become a more important struggle. A struggle to survive is more important’.

This has profound implications for schooling in Wentworth. The teachers cited spectacles of fast violence again and again as the main obstacles to education and key challenges for students and teachers alike. In the words of Megan, one of the mathematics teachers, ‘you stand in front of them [pupils] and you try and teach them four times two plus six minus one, and they are still in shock over the fact that my father beat my mother up . . . I think our teachers are counsellors more than anything else’. My observations of school lessons were consistent with this comment. Some of the lessons I observed, in particular in the life orientation, or LO, classes, almost felt like group counselling sessions in which the teacher was trying to give students advice about how to deal with the harsh realities of living in Wentworth. In other classes, teachers struggled to keep control of the students and were often ignored. These teachers’ frustration was palpable. Megan further reflected on my questions about environmental themes in the education offered by the school:

To be honest with you, I said to a teacher at school—I said I wonder what this guy is thinking, I wonder if he looks across the road and he sees the litter and the houses that have paint that is peeling and the state of the Wentworth area and he must think these people are uncultured and they are uncivilised and they are such pigs. But they literally don’t see it. Because the struggle is so intense, that nobody is interested in keeping the grass short or why’s there so much of erosion on that bank and we need to plant grass. No . . . I’m saying that people are not there yet. Life is complicated far beyond environmental issues.

Megan’s attempt to defend the community and explain why environmental issues are given low priority is striking, as is her definition of these issues. Environment here is connected with aesthetics, as reflected in the ‘no littering’ signs throughout the school that students captured in ‘Pollution Kills’.

Teaching environmental education in the context of spectacular fast violence was a tall order. It was clear that it was deemphasised and taught in ways that individualised responsibility (Maniates, 2001) and eschewed the wider social implications of sustainability. Within CAPS, environmental education is seen as a cross-cutting issue and does not have an allocated subject, as it is meant to permeate the whole curriculum (Schudel, 2017). The subject with the most environment-related content is life orientation, although its focus on environmental issues is limited, as one LO teacher at Durban South told me. ‘There’s a section on environmental awareness, but even there it’s maybe 3 weeks just on environment. You teach them on soil degradation and all that comes up is the issue of environment’. According to the teacher, this is insufficient. ‘What does the child do with that? Write an assignment. You cannot go back and talk to them about it and it’s over and forgotten. It’s done with’. When I asked one of the Wentworth LO teachers to tell me about the environmental content taught at the school, his response was, ‘I think there is something that deals with the environment there, respecting the environment, caring for the environment . . . When I say respecting it, for example, if you go to a picnic and making sure that the place is clean, using products that would not harm the environment’. This response was particularly astounding, given that we were looking at smokestacks releasing toxic substances into the air as we were talking. It reminded me of a shot from ‘Pollution Kills’ in which the school gardener is seen wielding a bin full of trash with smokestacks rising above him, as if humans were powerless to challenge industry, their agency limited to ‘beautifying’ the micro-environment of the school.

This was consistent with what I had observed at the school—a preoccupation with cleanliness. The first thing virtually everyone mentioned when I asked about the school’s environmental education was the student litter monitor programme, which combined individualised responsibility for the environment with a focus on discipline and surveillance. When probing with a social science teacher whether the subject of polluted air ever came up in her lessons, she replied,

I haven’t found a situation where we really truly just sat down and discussed how the refinery affects the air around us . . . Like, what would you as a school do—there are people who are provided jobs there, who live in the area so if you are saying the refinery must move, it must move where? And who’s going to work and what happens to all these people who are employed there who are breadwinners for their families . . . It’s a vast and quite an intricate thing to just even think about how do you even begin to tackle that.

This complexity was afforded no space in the curriculum which meant that teachers were not discussing it in their classes. One school principal in South Durban called the curriculum ‘straitjacketed' and noted that ‘environmental justice is not part of it’. Any attempt to bring the “radical” agenda of sustainability into the schooling process would be considered subversive.

The educators made it clear that the curriculum, or at least the way they interpreted it, emphasised development over the environment. Aruna, my key informant in Wentworth, said to me, ‘If I look at all the subjects, like I said it is all about money. How much of money can we get. What can we sell, what can we buy’. The school appeared to be aligned with an informal economy of township entrepreneurialism that shaped young people’s imagined ideals. ‘Obviously, if you tell the child we need the trees and plants to give us food, then the child will say in order to get the food, we need money to buy the food. So again, it’s industry development over nature’. This commodification suggests an underlying assumption that the natural environment is to be exploited for its economic benefits in the name of development.

Another element in the ideological landscape of schooling was the narrative of the self as capable of rising up against all the odds. Perhaps the best example of this tendency came up in my interview with Mrs. Pillay, who told me that, to inspire students, she uses herself as an example. ‘We lived in a room where half the divider was the lounge and that was the bedroom, two bunks, four children’. Mrs. Pillay has since ‘made it’ in Wentworth, which she attributes to making the right life choices. ‘All they just see is [Mrs. Pillay] driving this Mercedes, living on Treasure Beach, ⁵ having these children that also have their own cars’. That’s why the students are often surprised when they learn of her background. ‘It’s hard work, it’s sacrifice, and it’s having a strong will that has brought me to where I am . . . You can get out of this, you can’. This narrative individualises the dreams attached to the constitution and eschews the state’s inability to deliver on the promises of equal opportunity and environmental justice. Such a vision, which was echoed in many of my interactions with teachers and administrators in Wentworth, takes the collective element out of politics and leaves behind a depoliticised theory of action devoid of any notion of historical responsibility.

Schooling thus acted to commodify and depoliticise spaces of freedom. Educators here sought to cultivate children’s aspirations to an abstract notion of national development and a personal goal of winning the race for a ‘good life’. The rituals of discipline and the symbolism of schooling for development sought to mould political narratives of selfhood into homogeneous, shapeless forms. They were doing this by suppressing political imaginaries, eschewing historical responsibility, undermining civic equality and advancing an anthropocenic myopia of slow violence. The borders of learning were designed to be firm and impermeable, and to hinder action or the start of anything anew (Arendt, 1998). These spaces of institutionalised liminality painted state-sponsored lies of meritocracy disconnected from past and present as the destiny of educated citizens. Rather than contributing to development, they spread bureaucratisation and took humanity further away from taking action in response to the environmental challenges of the Anthropocene.

A politics of hope

But longer immersion in Wentworth allowed me to see that there was more to schooling at Durban South than these institutional trends I identified. As time went by, I started seeing the teachers as more rounded, more complex, more closely tuned into the experience of slow violence than I initially realised. While spectacles of fast violence and other factors that contributed to the individualisation of responsibility at the school were front and centre in my fieldwork, I also started noticing departures from the dominant trends. These originated with what I came to call outlier teachers, educators who sought to inject themes of environmental justice and historical responsibility into their teaching despite the limitations of the curriculum. I started noticing that the direct exposure of both learners and educators to pollution and its health effects led to an experiential awareness, and a tacit critique, of slow violence and the kind of politics that enabled it.

In some cases the critique was explicit. One headmaster in the area told me, ‘We talked about the threat of nuclear [power] in this school. We’ve talked about the Clairwood Racecourse and the traffic that it’s bringing in and the kind of effect it will have in the community’. While such examples were not common, and teachers often reported that schools failed to take part in protests due to industries’ greenwashing efforts, this points to the possibility of synergies between spaces of schooling and spaces of activism. Individual educators also engaged in similar ‘transgressions’. Ella, a teacher, told me that she goes well beyond the CAPS curriculum in her teaching and incorporates what she calls ‘hidden education’ that mostly revolves around ethics and building up the children’s self-confidence. ‘Where I can, I will teach my child and create my child to be confident, to have that self-confidence in yourself that you can stand up for yourself. That is not in our syllabus. So I teach that in the class because I want my learner tomorrow to be an activist, you know whether it is politically, whether it is . . . being an environmentally friendly activist or being in parliament . . . so that tomorrow they can stand up for what is right and they have a voice’.

Ella’s approach contrasts starkly with the apparent dominant narrative of ‘the good life’ in Wentworth. This particular teacher taught 2^nd-grade students at the time and shared with me her worries that principles of confidence and standing up for what is right might be lost on students, due to the discipline-oriented approaches of more conventional teachers in higher grades. I had to agree with this concern, based on my observation of what went on in these classes. But there were exceptions; Lee, a 7^th-grade history teacher, once shared with me that he ties the history of South Durban into his lessons. ‘We looked at the political situation then where they just stuck this [factory] here and they didn’t care because it didn’t affect the Whites at that stage’. This teacher was, in effect, taking the experiential learning of the students living in Wentworth and applying it to a historical narrative stressing the environmental injustice caused by decades of apartheid.

It was clear that the students were relying on such narratives in their understanding of their community’s social predicament and in their imagining of the future. In the early days of the filmmaking workshop with children, we collectively brainstormed and drew mind maps on the blackboard to depict what was unique about Wentworth and how this uniqueness could be captured visually. The children initially came up with ideas that showcased their community in a mostly negative light and reflected the dominance of fast violence in the lives of local residents. But they also mentioned themes of slow violence, historical injustice and hope. Some students were critical of Wentworth’s predicament and pointed to local civic groups and individuals whom they saw as working to alleviate the suffering of local residents. This double approach manifested itself in the films the students produced—‘Pollution Kills’ about the impact of the Engen refinery on the health of Wentworth residents and ‘Wentworth Changing to Progress’, a cinematic tapestry of individuals and organisations working to improve the community.

Many scenes in the films showcased individuals, both alive and deceased, who left a significant mark on the community. In the opening of ‘Wentworth Changing to Progress’, for example, the children filmed Uncle Lala, a local retiree who spends his afternoons directing traffic outside the school. They asked him why he does this and captured his response on video. He said that he, too, has children and therefore cares about the pupils’ safety.

In the film the children also incorporated footage of Dance Movements, ‘an organisation that children from Wentworth can go to so that they have something else to do like dance so that they’re not sitting at home and becoming gangsters and doing drugs and stuff like that’, as Cheryl, one of the student filmmakers, explained. Another group captured in the film was the Keith ‘Skido’ Joseph Foundation, a civic organisation dedicated to the memory of an activist and MK [uMkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress] fighter from Wentworth. ⁶ In Cheryl’s words, ‘it’s a foundation that helps people get jobs and does a lot of things like to prevent corruption and stuff’. Zooming in on the foundation’s slogan, ‘The legacy lives on’, the children connected the debt to the dead to a hopeful future—a temporal arc (Ricœur, 1984) built over a gloomy presence that nevertheless expressed the hopefulness of pluralistic politics.

The students working on ‘Pollution Kills’ included not only shots of smokestacks in Wentworth and interviews with local residents suffering from pollution-related health issues but also their interactions with environmental activists. The students met Desmond D’Sa, the chairman of the activist South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA) whom they filmed demonstrating various techniques for measuring air quality. At one point in the film, as Desmond explains that factories must meet pollution levels set by the government, the student behind the camera asks what happens if the industries ‘don’t listen’. Desmond responds that, in such a situation, the student should let him know and SDCEA would take up the issue. While on camera, Desmond reassured students that activists have the power to bring the industry to task, but his frankness in one of our conversations betrayed a more nuanced answer to the student’s question: ‘From the once striving country with the most progressive constitution in the world, the most progressive environmental laws and the best equipment . . . used to give them [municipal officials] the evidence [of pollution], . . . is now been [sic] destroyed. It tells you a lot from [sic] where we come from and what the vision was of our forefathers and the people that came after them’. This differentiation between the forefathers—who symbolise the promise of a different kind of politics—and the country’s contemporary leaders points to an intergenerational liminality of action, a collective paralysis which meant that SDCEA could keep trying to revive the politics of old but the odds were stacked against it. ⁷ Perhaps it was this liminality that the student instinctively recognised when he asked what happens if the industries ‘don’t listen’.

By exposing these dynamics, the film paints a layered picture of a troubled community that is not without hope and that rallies around air pollution as a shared enemy. Put differently, the students’ film captured much of the complexity of the activist struggle and the community-activist relationship that took months for me to grasp during my field research. The film reflected a degree of awareness and engagement with environmental justice that went well beyond the school curriculum, as well as an openness to learning about the state, justice, race and environment through a collaborative ‘agonism’ over assembling a short film. Ultimately, the film had a political agenda, as Collin shared with me on my last day at Durban South Primary: ‘Our goal with the film was to like show them that pollution is killing us. It’s not just the pollution is here and the pollution is going to go. It’s like to show them that the pollution is destroying our community that we’re living in’.

When we showed both films to Mr. Naidoo, the school’s principal, and several teachers on my last day at Durban South, I could not help but feel after the screening that some among the school staff questioned their beliefs about these students. Rather than representing walking bundles of social problems, potential troublemakers or clean slates to be filled with state-sanctioned knowledge, these young people showed both motivation and an aptitude for articulating counter-narratives to what they were taught at school. They quickly engaged with and mastered a medium of storytelling and expressed a pluralistic vision of their community. They saw and understood slow violence and avoided the trap of fatalism in their narrative, suggesting that they were confronting the environmental multi-crisis in real time.

Landscapes of oppression, landscapes of hope

As these findings have shown, the schooling provided by Durban South Primary is more likely to be an enabler of than a counter-force to slow violence. It could feel like the people here (learners and teachers alike) were being sold the false idea that the speed of slow violence is beyond their reach. The school often appeared to advance the sustainability of the socio-political status quo rather than of the planet and its natural environs. Sustainability was about shallow time, whose horizons extended no further than an individual lifespan or at most the lifespan of the current civilisation, rather than about deep geological time with its associated questions of the debts to the dead and unborn, planetary stewardship and our survival as a species (Davies, 2016).

Such schooling advances an imaginary that equates freedom with control or extending the reach of individual agency. Hannah Arendt, however, teaches us that we are only ever free in connection to others; she sees freedom as participation (Tlaba, 1987). It is arguably the lack of connection (both to humans and non-humans) that precipitated our environmental crisis. Tagore saw the flaw in modernity’s promise of “freedom” long ago and expressed his concern with the elegance of a poet: ‘An automobile does not create freedom of movement, because it is a mere machine. When I am myself free, I can use the automobile for the purposes of my freedom’ (Tagore, quoted in Shrivastava and Kothari, 2012: 246). ⁸ While the car for Tagore is a means to an end, for the anthropocentric imaginary it is an end in itself because it allows humans to overcome the ‘limitation’ of only being able to walk on foot. When making a product becomes its own goal, the world of Homo Faber (preoccupied with what Arendt calls work) dominates the worlds of thought and politics and disconnects us not only from others but from significant parts of our own selves.

And yet, the young people and educators alike also inhabit a different landscape—that of hope. While ‘hope’ in this context may not take the form of Arendtian action and may operate instead as emotion within the ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams, 1977), it still has the potential to challenge the ‘practiced ignorance’ (Arendt, 2006) advanced by the school system. The sources of the students’ reimaginations and symbolic acts of resistance echo visions of a more environmentally just world that go well beyond the depoliticised curriculum.

Within the next few generations, or perhaps sooner, we could become the only known species that chose to become extinct and took many other species down with us. This moral predicament, unparalleled in human history, is universal. One could rightly object that many parts of the world—not accidentally, those carrying the most responsibility for the environmental crisis—are better positioned to cope with the impact of anthropocenic violence than others who have lost or will lose everything. It is indeed true that everyone is and will be impacted differently, based on geography, wealth, collective and individual resilience and a plethora of other factors, but there is at least one way in which everyone is involved: we now all carry the burden of responsibility for the fate of life on earth. Perhaps the ‘landscapes of hope’ I experienced in Wentworth might be a building block of a more constructive approach to formal education in the context of slow violence.