1.3 Emancipatory Social Work Education: The Power of Biography

Gramsci (1977) saw the starting point of critical elaboration to be the positioning of oneself as a product of the historical process. In a similar vein, Giroux argued that an examination of the historical and social constructs of our lives “…helps to reterritorialize and rewrite the complex narratives that make up [our] lives” (Giroux, 1997:159). Critical and emancipatory pedagogy raises important issues regarding the way we construct our identities within particular historical, cultural and social relations, with the intention of contributing to a more democratic life. For bell hooks (1989), a feminist writer, one’s voice should be the object of theoretical and critical analysis so that it can be connected to broader notions of solidarity, struggle and politics. Apart from the personal-political identity links, the power of biography lies in its potential to reflect how power and/or powerlessness are reproduced in everyday life experiences. My personal biography confirms that emancipatory pedagogy begins with everyday life experiences and in particular the basis of learning, deconstruction and action.

“I experienced my most formative years as a child, adolescent and young adult in apartheid South Africa. Such was the power of the internalised oppression of my mother,  that I grew up in a family setting where the status quo was completely accepted. Here we were made to believe that whites were demigods, to be respected and revered as such. My mother knew no better” (Sewpaul) . “Subjectivities are produced within those social forms in which people move but of which they are often only partially conscious” (Giroux, 1997:158, my emphasis). Thus, we become prisoners of our socio-cultural worlds; “the voluntary imprisonment of the free subject” (Sewpaul, 2013, p. 120).

“Widowed at a very young age, with me, the youngest of seven children – being five months old at the time of my father’s death through suicide, my mother worked as a domestic servant for whites for almost forty years. Hence her sense of gratitude for whites having provided her with a livelihood, or perhaps it was a reflection of Fanon’s (1970) thesis of loving the oppressor. Our subservience to whites was understandable, as the only relationship that we shared with them was one of “master” and “servant”. Group areas and separate amenities legislation ensured that we did not get to know whites in any other capacity, let alone as equals. Such was my mother’s indoctrination that, while walking on the streets where whites lived, we were shushed into silence as children because “whites don’t like noise”. Under such circumstances my capacity to externalise and to understand the sources of oppression and of my diminished sense of self (which was quite acute!) were clearly limited” . (Sewpaul)

At the height of apartheid there were innumerable laws such as the Separate Amenities Act, the Group Areas Act and the Immorality Act that were designed to inform people of colour that they were inferior. On reading signs that said “Whites Only” or “Right of Admission Reserved”, I did not see the problem as an aspect of an oppressive state, but rather I owned the problem and believed that something must have been wrong with me. Yet, I believe that I was more fortunate than most people of colour in South Africa. My experience would serve to confirm Giroux’s claim that the “…mechanisms of domination and the possible seeds of liberation reach into the very structure of the human psyche” (Giroux, 1983:39). The deeper the assaults of structural conditions on the psyches of people, the greater the chance that they will react against these.

In South Africa the discovery of Friere’s (1970, 1972, 1973) method of conscientisation through liberating dialogue and praxis came at just the right moment – during the 1970s when I was in secondary school. At this time Freire’s works, which were banned by the government, found their way into South African black universities and into the South African Student Organisation (SASO). His work, particularly the Pedagogy of the oppressed, had a profound impact on young activists of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) and contributed to the radicalisation and politicisation of education (Alexander, 1989). As a secondary school learner, I was fortunate to have had the guidance of black consciousness activists such as the late Steve Biko, Strini Moodley and his wife Sam Moodley. Sam entered our school as a young enthusiastic teacher bent on politicising us. She would get us engaged in fantasy trips, free writing and drama, replicating in the classroom the forces of apartheid and oppression. On picking up self-blame and messages of internalised oppression that were characteristic of so many of us, she would confront us with the realities and made us see that the real enemy was the apartheid state. The message “it is not your fault” was the turning point in my political awakening. Consciousness-raising strategies were coupled with further action in which as school learners we formed, with the help of the BCM leaders, a theatre group called the Chatsworth Arts and Theatre Organisation (CATO). Through CATO we undertook community political education, wrote Animal farm into a drama script and produced this as a play. These activities did not come without their own difficulties. Within weeks of CATO’s formation we had the Security Branch on us, with threats of suspension from school if we continued our political activities.

Apart from its intrinsic value in helping us recognise our own worth, the activities allowed us to gain a certain measure of control over our lives and over an unrelenting, oppressive system. This control in turn provided us with a sense of hope for change, an element emphasised by Giroux (1997) in Pedagogy and the politics of hope: Theory, culture and schooling. This hope was born out of some community initiatives, for example, successfully but non-violently resisting the authorities when they planned to terminate a vital bus transportation facility that would have severely jeopardised the livelihood of the working-class people in the area that we lived in. It is perhaps this kind of hope, and the vision of possible change among the generation of school and university learners, that culminated in the well-known 1976 Soweto Riots, where the slogan Liberation before education became popularised. In 1976, as a first-year university student in an ethnic institution that fully supported the apartheid status quo, we truly believed as we chanted that “we shall overcome someday.… black man [sic] shall be free someday”. The BCM, which was banned in 1977 provided an invaluable source of support, encouragement and guidance as we organised student boycotts and rallies. It is this background that informs my educational philosophy. Through these experiences and people such as Steve Biko, Strini and Sam Moodley, I realised that I was not a “…passive [victim] of society’s control elements” (Coetzee, 2001:137), and that I had the capacity to reflect and act upon these elements. This realisation informs my interactions with people, and my desired pedagogical, research and practice objectives, thus supporting the insights of bell hooks (1989), who argued that the value of the narrative lies in theorising experiences as part of a broader politics of engagement. I explore these in greater detail below.