How can we teach in a time of genocide
Given South Africa’s history of colonialism and apartheid, learners are asking why Israel is called an apartheid state but teachers have been told not to talk about power, oppression and resistance
As we watch a genocide unfold in Gaza, delivered to our phones from news channels, social media and Tiktok videos, how is this crisis being mediated in Cape Town’s classrooms and assembly halls?
Learners come to school with questions for their teachers. They bring their emotions, their concerns and their confusion, expecting their teachers to help them make sense of what is going on. Having learnt about apartheid and colonialism, and now hearing the comparisons to the Israeli state, they want to understand this connection.
They have been taught the stages of genocide, the call for “never again” and have been encouraged to take a stand against injustice. They see posters that show Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu’s solidarity with Palestine. They share photographs of war, violence and protest, alongside statistics of rising death tolls in Gaza. They show their teachers fake news posts.
Yet, many teachers have been instructed not to talk or teach about the war.
As educators, we believe that this is a teaching moment. It is a time for critical discussion and reflection in classrooms. It is a time to talk about power, oppression and resistance, and how the plight of the Palestinian people relates to our liberation struggle in South Africa.
In this article, we foreground the experience of teachers at the chalkface; we contrast this with teaching under apartheid in South Africa; we highlight how constitutional ideals are subverted to silence teachers and we consider what kind of teacher is envisioned in school policy.
Over the past month, we have been hearing from teachers across the city, particularly from those employed in historically white schools, about their experiences of being silenced when talking about Palestine. They are knowledgeable and agentic educators. They care deeply about their learners and are committed to social justice and decolonising the educational spaces in which they work, but they are under fire.
As one teacher told us: “It’s so hard to teach this the way they [the school management] want it to be. To find a way to balance it ‘neutrally’ or present it palatably is to remove the facts. No matter my objection, I was overruled. Eventually, I just had to listen in silence while older white men laid down the law. When I think of how I was ‘politely’ silenced for ‘my own sake’, I mostly just remember the bloody aftertaste of biting my lip so hard so I wouldn’t say something that would get me fired.”
In a number of staff rooms, teachers have been told to avoid this “sensitive issue”, and to close down conversations initiated by learners’ questions. When teachers have facilitated discussions about Palestine or allowed their students to express solidarity by lighting candles and writing messages of support, grief and remembrance, they have been sanctioned.
When displaying Palestinian flags or wearing keffiyeh, they have been accused of “hate speech”, creating an “unsafe space” and “pushing an agenda”. This raises questions of whose voices may be heard and whose knowledge counts.
Teachers have been called to the principal’s office for “a chat”, to find themselves facing a panel of senior management team and school governing body members and left feeling bullied, threatened and silenced. In many cases, these are young teachers who are precariously employed on temporary contracts.
This informal and internal discipline renders them vulnerable and highlights the asymmetry of power relations in schools. It also sidesteps more rigorous public debate about the role of the teacher in a time of genocide.
Fortunately, this has not been the experience in every school. Elsewhere, teachers have joined learners and parents in demonstrations of solidarity, calling for an immediate ceasefire and an end to occupation. They are holding brave spaces in which learners are encouraged to take part in conversations and un/learn difficult knowledge. They are encouraging their learners to participate critically with sources of information, to analyse social media discourse and to recognise how the “facts” used to tell this “story” differ from one outlet to another.
They have also held space for teachers and learners’ emotions. These teachers, mainly from schools in working-class areas, have been enabled to teach critically.
As Ganaan Kloppers at Modderdam High School in Bonteheuwel explains: “Three weeks in, one learner came to me to tell me Hamas or the Palestinians are beheading babies. So information at my school takes very long to also reach the learners … And then obviously I have to sit down with them and explain. In working-class communities, we’re very much in our own bubble. The information shared is on Whatsapp but then again we need to verify but that’s not being done by our learners.”
The stories of teachers who have been intimidated and silenced should ring alarm bells for us in South Africa with its long history of colonial and apartheid oppression and long list of teachers banned and
imprisoned for speaking truth to power. In response to such teacher victimisation, campaigns such as Hands Off Our Teachers in the 1980s garnered popular support from teachers and school communities. Now, as then, teachers are wanting to take a stand against apartheid.
According to the Rome Statute, apartheid is defined as “crimes of humanity committed in the context of an institutionalised regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime”.
The actions of the state of Israel have met this definition and include the illegal annexation and occupation of Palestinian territories, the segregated restriction of movement through the use of checkpoints, the construction of a separation barrier inside the West Bank, the blockade of the Gaza Strip which blocks the entry of important supplies including medicine, food, fuel and water into Gaza, continued settler colonial violence, and the recent bombings and lands invasions which Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has described as an incremental genocide.
Against now overwhelming criticism of the state of Israel, the silencing of teachers may be understood as a futile attempt to co-opt education for the purposes of reproducing the ideology of the powerful, as was done under South Africa’s apartheid. The difference now is that our president has condemned Israel’s actions in occupied Gaza and the West Bank. Rather than the silencing of teachers coming from the state, it is taking place at the level of the school, where the power of money and privilege reign.
Another trend we have noticed is that the language of inclusion and diversity is being co-opted and deployed as a tool for silencing teachers and students. One teacher told us: “It is strange to see how this has weaponised the language of justice and resistance to defend genocide. ‘Diversity’ and ‘inclusivity’ policies that fail to protect black learners could suddenly be correctly employed to protect those who feel harmed by this moment.”
An example of what the teacher describes is evident in a recent letter to parents at Camps Bay High School, where an analysis of power and historical context is neglected and subsumed into “differing opinion”, and expressing “political views” is alluded to as “divisive” and “hurtful”.
What is promoted instead, is a form of unity in diversity that is devoid of accountability.
Such attempts to redefine freedom, inclusion and diversity fall short of the spirit of the Constitution, which concerns freedom for others and a commitment to justice and fundamental human rights — the kind which Palestinian people are being denied in their own land.
Ironically, the post-apartheid South African curriculum is based on the principles of social justice and “active and critical learning rather than rote and uncritical learning of given truths”. It aims to produce learners who “demonstrate an understanding of the world as a set of related systems by recognising that problem solving contexts do not exist in isolation”.
Part of the goals of the history curriculum, in particular, concerns “encouraging civic responsibility and responsible leadership, including raising current social and environmental concerns” as well as “promoting human rights and peace by challenging prejudices involving race, class, gender, ethnicity and xenophobia”.
When learners ask their teachers why Israel is being called an “apartheid state”, or on what basis people across the world, including United Nations Human Rights lawyers, are calling the unfolding situation in Gaza a “genocide”, they do so having encountered these concepts in their history lessons, where they have been encouraged to ask critical questions and think systemically.
The goals and hopes for education in South Africa, from White Paper One on Education and Training, through to the South African Schools
Act, recognise teaching as an intellectual, social and political activity, and understand that what happens in classrooms is inextricably linked to what happens outside the school gates. In fact, the preamble of the Schools Act opens with the need to “combat racism, sexism and all other forms of unfair discrimination”.
When we penalise teachers for confronting injustice through education and call on them to be neutral in situations of oppression, then we are asking for a teacher without a soul and a pedagogy of indifference.
This is inattentive to the violence, anxiety and trauma that young people are experiencing and leaves them ill-equipped to navigate the complexities of our contemporary world.
Rather, we need knowledgeable, brave and agentic educators, and would do well to heed this teacher’s words: “Even as we pray for the dust to settle in the wake of a ceasefire, we are wary of the issues raised being swept under the rug to focus on the business of education.
“If we are committed to freedom and justice for people everywhere, from the Congo to Palestine, we must take a stand now against schools who attempt to silence meaningful education.”
Ashley Visagie is a PHD student at the University of Cape Town supported by the Canon Collins Trust. He is also a member of the Political Economy of Education Research (PEER) Network Africa Hub, and a youth worker at Bottomup.
Hannah Carrim is a teacher and PHD candidate in history education at the University of Cape Town. She is a Canon Collins scholar. Her work includes discussions with teachers about their experiences in schools. Kate Angier is a history education lecturer at the University of Cape Town, and is the convenor of the Post Graduate Certificate of Education and chair of the Newly Qualified Teachers Programme.