The Social Uses

of Literacy

Theory and Practice

in Contemporary South Africa
 JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
STUDIES IN WRITTEN LANGUAGE AND LITERACY

EDITORS
Brian Street Ludo Verhoeven
University of Sussex Tilburg University

ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Florian Coulmas Daniel Wagner
Chuo University, Tokyo University of Pennsylvania

EDITORIAL BOARD
F. Niyi Akinnaso (Temple University, Philadelphia)
David Barton (Lancaster University)
Paul Bertelson (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
Claire-Blanche-Benveniste (Université de Provence)
Chander J. Daswani (India Council of Education Research and Training)
Emilia Ferreiro (Instituto Polytecnico México)
Edward French (University of the Witwatersrand)
Uta Frith (Medical Research Council, London)
Harvey J. Graff (University of Texas at Dallas)
Hartmut Günther (Max Planck Institut für Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen)
David Olson (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto)
Clotilde Pontecorvo (University of Rome)
Roger Säljo (Linköping University)
Michael Stubbs (Universität Trier)

AIM AND SCOPE

The aim of this series is to advance insight into the multifaceted character of written
language, with special emphasis on its uses in different social and cultural settings.
It combines interest in sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic accounts of the
acquisition and transmission of literacy The series focuses on descriptive and
theoretical reports in areas such as language codification, cognitive models of
written language use, written language acquisition in children and adults, the
development and implementation of literacy campaigns, and literacy as a social
marker relating to gender, ethnicity, and class. The series is intended to be multi-
disciplinary, combining insights from linguistics, psychology, sociology,
education, anthropology, and philosophy

VOLUME NUMBER 4
The Social Uses
of Literacy
Theory and Practice
in Contemporary South Africa

Edited by
Mastín Prinsloo
and
Mignonne Breier

Preface by Brian V. Street

SACHED BOOKS
and
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Copy-edited by Tessa Kennedy and Julie-Anne Justus
Designed and typeset by Steven Naudé
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The social uses of literacy: theory and practice in contemporary South Africa / edited
by Mastin Prinsloo and Mignonne Breier: Preface by Brian V Street.

p. cm. - (Studies in written language and literacy, ISSN 0929-7324 : v.4)

Includes index.
1. Literacy-Social aspects-South Africa. 2. Adult education-Social aspects-
South Africa. 3. Education and state-South Africa. 4. Popular education-South
Africa. I. Prinsloo, Mastin. II. Breier, Mignonne. III. Series: Studies in written lan­
guage and literacy : v. 4.
LC158.S6563 1996
302.2'244'0968-dc20
96-14789
ISBN 90 272 1795 5 (Eur.) / 1-55619-320-3 (US) (Hb; alk. paper) CIP
ISBN 90 272 1796 3 (Eur.) / 1-55619-321-1 (US) (Pb; alk. paper)
ISBN 0 636 02751 1 (South African Edition)

First impression 1996

© Sached Books (Pty) Ltd, Department of Adult Education University of Cape Town
and Centre for Adult and Continuing Education University of the Western Cape.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, micro­
film, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher.

Published by:
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Acknowledgements

The research project that gave rise to this book was funded by the Joint Edu­
cation Trust (JET) and involved two universities: the Department of Adult
Education at the University of Cape Town and the Centre for Adult and Con­
tinuing Education at the University of the Western Cape. The editors, who
were also the co-ordinators of the project, gratefully acknowledge JET's sup­
port. Above all we wish to thank the many people who let the SoUL research­
ers into their personal and collective spaces, shared with us their interpreta­
tions of their lives and literacies and allowed us to develop our own inter­
pretations. Without their co-operation and interest, we would never have
been able to complete this project. We received assistance, encouragement
and criticism from numerous people: from Brian Street in particular, and
also from Allen Feldman, Shirley Brice Heath, Peter O'Connor, Clive Millar,
Shirley Walters, Nick Taylor, Heather Jacklin, Joe Muller, Caroline Long, Jane
Taylor, Mugsy Spiegel, Jonathan Geidt, Joe Samuels and Beverley Thaver. Ivy
Moody, Gale Johnstone, Eunice Christians, Cheryl-Ann Pearce and David
Kapp gave valuable administrative support. Thembiliswe Qolo, Ntombi
Makwasa and Malixole Ngoma and several other people assisted with inter­
views and transcriptions. Josie Egan of Sached Books deserves our thanks
for her efficient and patient co-ordination of the publication process.
Earlier versions of some of the work that appears in chapters in this
book have been published elsewhere:
1. Some of the work that appears in Chapter 1 appeared in a longer paper
on the first South African democratic elections, entitled '"The Fortune is
in the Sky: Both Black and White shall Worship One God": Constructions
of Homogeneity and the Assertion of Difference in the 1994 South Afri­
can Parliamentary Elections'. In E. Sienaert, V Cowper-Lewis and N. Bell.
(1995). Oral Tradition and its Transmission: The Many Forms of Mes­
sage. Durban: Killie Campbell Library, 251-295
Chapter 1 was published, in an earlier form, in G. Kruss and H. Jacklin.
(1995). Realising Change: Education Policy Research. Cape Town: Juta
92-102.
2. Chapter 11 appeared in an earlier form in G. Kruss and H. Jacklin (1995),
81-91.
3. Chapter 9 was published in an earlier form in Social Dynamics, 22 (2)
1996.
vi Acknowledgements

Nomenclature
The authors make use of the terms Coloured, African, Indian, White and
Black without racist intention. These terms continue to have currency in
post-apartheid South Africa. The terms are used in the book consistently
with current local usage, although the authors regard them as social con­
structions rather than essentialist categories.
The term Coloured refers to people of mixed race; African to people of
Nguni- and Sotho-speaking origin; Indian to people of Indian origin; White
to people of European origin; and Black to all people not seen as White, or
who do not see themselves as White.

Photographic credits
Thanks to:
The Argus, for photographs on pages 34, 180 and 220.
Paul Grendon, for photographs on pages 124 and 131.
Willie de Klerk for photograph on page 220.
Mike Hutchings for photograph on page 180.
All other photographs are the property of the individual contributors to this
collection.
Thanks also to Idasa for the copy of the ballot paper, page 38, and the De­
partment of Transport for permission to reproduce the documents on pages
218, 222, 223, 224 and 226.
The document which appears on page 226 is reproduced under Government
Printer's Copyright Authority 10138 dated 20 February 1996.
Contents
Preface 1
Brian V Street
Introduction 11
Mastín Prinsloo and Mignonne Breier

Section 1 Literacies at work 31

Chapter 1 33
Literacy, voter education and constructions of citizenship in
the Western Cape during the first democratic national
elections in South Africa
Mastín Prinsloo and Steven Robins
Chapter 2 49
Literacy, knowledge, gender and power in the workplace on
three farms in the Western Cape
Diana Gibson
Chapter 3 65
Literacy and communication in a Cape factory
Mignonne Breier and Lynette Sait
Chapter 4 85
Communicative practices of the service staff of a school
Kathy Waiters

Section 2 Mediating literacies 103

Chapter 5 105
Literacy mediation and social identity in Newtown, Eastern
Cape
Liezl Malan
Chapter 6 123
Cultural brokers and bricoleurs of modern and traditional
literacies: land struggles in Namaqualand's Coloured
reserves
Steven Robins
 Contents

Chapter 7 141
Literacy learning and local literacy practice in Bellville
South
Liezl Malan
Chapter 8 157
'
We can all sing, but we can't all talk': literacy brokers and
tsotsi gangsters in a Cape Town shantytown.
Ammon China and Steven Robins

Section 3 Contextualising literacies: policy lessons 173

Chapter 9 177
Literacy, migrancy and disrupted domesticity: Khayelitshan
ways of knowing
Phumza Mpoyiya and Mastín Prinsloo
Chapter 10 197
'
We are waiting/this is our home': literacy and the search for
resources in the rural Eastern Cape
Μ.J. McEwan and Liezl Malan
Chapter 11 213
Taking literacy for a ride - reading and writing in the taxi
industry
Mignonne Breien Matsepela Taetsane and Lynette Sait
Chapter 12 235
Literacy practices in an informal settlement in the Cape
Peninsula
Catherine Kell

Afterword 257
Tony Morphet

References 265

Index 275
Preface
Brian V. Street

This book details the findings of a research project investigating the social
uses of literacy in a range of contexts in South Africa. This approach treats
literacy not simply as a set of technical skills learnt in formal education, but
as social practices embedded in specific contexts, discourses and positions.
What this means is made clear through a series of fine-grained accounts of
the social uses and meanings of literacy in contexts ranging from the taxi
industry in Cape Town, to family farms, urban settlements and displacement
sites, rural land holdings and various sites during the 1994 elections, and
among different sectors of South African society, Black, Coloured and White.
Since the view of literacy presented here is so dependent on context, the
book provides not only descriptions of literacy practices but also rich
insights into the complexity of everyday social life in contemporary South
Africa at a major point of transition. It can be read as a concrete way of un­
derstanding the emergence of the New South Africa as it appears to actors
on the ground, focused through attention to one central feature of contem­
porary life - the uses and meanings of literacy.
Nor is this just an academic exercise, important though it is to develop
rigour and clarity in our understanding of the nature of literacy in contem­
porary life. The research and this account of it has immediate and profound
implications for policy - in development as a whole, in education in particu­
lar and with respect to literacy practices more precisely. Indeed, the research
was supported by a South African funding agency, the Joint Education Trust
(JET), in the expectation that it would contribute directly to the formulation
of policy on adult literacy provision. A concern with the latter is a part of the
Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) inaugurated by the new
government on the principles of reconstruction, development and redress.
The authors all address these principles through attention to both theory
and practice: they link the account of everyday literacy practices in South
Africa to contemporary theories regarding the New Literacy Studies (NLS),
discourse and power on the one hand and to precise policy outcomes regard­
ing apprenticeship, mediation and non-formal education in the design of lit­
eracy programmes on the other.
Seeing literacy as not just a single unitary phenomenon attached to
formal education institutions but as a variety of social practices is such a
2 B.V. Street

new and challenging approach that the researchers have found themselves
subject to intense critical scrutiny. This is partly because any new view that
shifts the epistemological ground is open to both misunderstanding and
resistance: old views persist, perhaps unrecognised as we try to make sense
of the new There are also vested interests which depend upon the old views
for their legitimacy and their access to resources. Moreover, it is not always
easy for the epistemological innovators themselves to recall where they
have come from and what assumptions their readers and critics will bring to
the new accounts.
I would like, therefore, to take advantage of my role as both an 'outsider'
- teaching social anthropology in a British university - and as someone
closely involved with the Social Uses of Literacy (SoUL) project to try to
make explicit some of the potential points of misunderstanding and concep­
tual rupture to which the project is subject. In particular, then, I would like to
attempt to clarify three areas of criticism to which the NLS in general is sub­
ject and which have been levied especially at this research, under the head­
ings of Relativism, Romanticism and Relevance - the three Rs.

Relativism, Romanticism and Relevance - the three Rs

Rejection of what I have termed the autonomous model of literacy (Street,
1984, 1995) has led to a relativising of our approach to literacy practices -
the social uses of reading and writing. The autonomous model of literacy
works from the assumption that literacy in itself- autonomously - will have
effects on other social and cognitive practice. For instance, much of the
development literature assumes that as people acquire literacy, so their cog­
nitive functioning will be enhanced, with greater facility in abstraction, lo­
gical thought and meta-linguistic awareness. Similarly, social consequences
are assumed to follow from literacy, such as 'modernisation', 'progress' and
economic rationality, to name but a few. Recent research, however, has chal­
lenged this 'autonomous' view and suggested that in practice it is simply
imposing western conceptions of literacy onto other cultures. The autono­
mous model, then, disguises cultural and ideological assumptions that can
then be presented as though they are neutral and universal.
The alternative, ideological model of literacy, to which many of the art­
icles in the book refer, challenges these claims and offers a more culturally
sensitive view of literacy practices as they vary from one context to another.
Instead of privileging the particular practices familiar in their own culture,
researchers now suspend judgement as to what constitutes literacy among
 Preface 3

the people they are working with until they are able to understand what it
means to the people themselves, and from which social contexts reading
and writing derive their meaning.
In the South African context this has meant recognising as literacy prac­
tices, for instance, the uses of documents and print in squatter settlements
by political activists who may not be able to pass formal tests of literacy but
who have successfully incorporated documentation in their presentations of
cases to committees and politicians. Again, farm workers might seem at first
sight illiterate', but they are able to interpret and use complex instructional
documents, with a mix of diagrams, verbal labels and concrete artefacts, in
order to build and maintain irrigation systems. Taxi drivers too 'get around'
the city and around the accounting and documentation demanded without a
full and formal knowledge of the kind of literacy required in schools. All of
these people and others described in the accounts that follow might have
been labelled 'illiterate' within the autonomous model of literacy and yet,
from a more culturally sensitive viewpoint, can be seen to make significant
use of literacy practices for specific purposes and in specific contexts. These
findings raise important issues both for research into literacy in general and
for policy in Adult Basic Education and Training (ABET) in particular, of
which the South African examples represent a distinctive and 'telling' case.
An important interpretative source for making sense of these local uses
of literacy has been Arlene Fingeret's (1983) work in urban areas of the US,
where she describes the 'reciprocity' associated with literacy: those who
have not extended their literacy skills very far get assistance from those who
have and in return offer skills that the 'literate' may lack, for example in car
maintenance. There is, according to Fingeret, no stigma attached to lack of
either set of skills.
But in many developing contexts today, the arrival of a literacy pro­
gramme together with the associated national publicity about the problems
of lack of literacy, themselves serve to construct 'illiteracy' among people for
whom the term previously had no salience. Winnie Tsotso, who has success­
fully operated in a literate environment for many years as an ANC activist in
Site 5 near Cape Town, for instance, is now being constituted as 'illiterate' by
those in the formal system and indeed by her own children, and has been
advised to attend evening classes to learn literacy (see Kell, Chapter 12).
Similar examples are being highlighted in many parts of the world as
the NLS attends to what people actually do with reading and writing
rather than starting from a set, supposedly universal standard and then
seeing all others as in deficit in relation to it.
4 B.V. Street

Researchers now argue that the 'standard' is itself a cultural artefact,

not a universal given, so that in effect the literacy provision in ABET has
become a way of imposing relatively narrow, often western conceptions of
literacy upon people who have other conceptions (Kulick and Stroud, 1993;
Besnier, 1993). According to that 'standard', the problems such people face
are simply resolved by placing them in appropriate classes, usually defined
by stages of linear development and frequently modelled on school hierar­
chies, however inappropriate for adult learning (Rogers, 1992). The rich,
elaborate and varied meanings and uses of literacy in different cultures
across time and space become marginalised and treated as failed attempts to
access the dominant, standard form represented by western-type schooling.
The real ways in which people like Winnie Tsotso might be assisted in ex­
tending their own prior experience and uses of literacy to adapt to changing
circumstances are lost in formalised and hierarchic procedures that, as Kell
(1994) argues, 'infantilise' them.

Relativism

The culturalist argument could, however, be seen as relativising literacy in

potentially dangerous ways. For instance, it might be seen as celebrating
local practices that are no longer appropriate in a modern, indeed 'post­
modern', condition where high communicative skills are required, including
formal literacy. It might also be seen as leading to potentially divisive educa­
tional practice, in which the literacy of marginal groups is reinforced while
those with access to dominant discourses and power continue to reproduce
the literacy sources of their own dominance. Parents of ethnic minority chil­
dren, for instance, in many countries where 'multicultural' education and
linguistic variation have been promoted, argue that their children are
simply getting a 'second class' education and being denied the genres of power.
This, then, is the critique regarding 'relativism' that may be levelled at
the accounts provided in this book. In fact the authors are extremely sens­
itive to this possibility and have been very careful to think through its im­
plications and expose its flaws.
The problem with the critique is, firstly, that it assumes that the current
genres and forms of literacy are fixed, universal and given, where in fact
they have been historically and culturally constructed. The argument about
'access' to dominant genres disguises the questions about how such genres
become dominant and remain so, which will eventually determine how
many others can in reality access them. For, since the rules of dominant lit-
 Preface 5

eracy genres are frequently quite arbitrary - based on surface features of

language such as formal spelling rules, punctuation, pronunciation, and so
on - they can easily be changed if too many people learn how to use them
and thereby challenge the status quo. In that way, according to Gee (1990),
those in power retain domination while appearing to provide access to the
disempowered.
A focus on change rather than on access leads to a different view An
'ideological· model of literacy begins from the premise that variable literacy
practices are always rooted in power relations and that the apparent inno­
cence and neutrality of the 'rules' serve to disguise the ways in which such
power is maintained through literacy As Luke (1995) argues, there are no
'genres of power' as such, only culturally based ways of knowing and com­
municating that have been privileged in relation to others.
This argument also provides a second important retort to the 'relativ­
ism' critique: the ideological model of literacy only relativises literacy prac­
tices at an analytic level, enabling researchers and activists to recognise and
describe variation where the autonomous model sees only uniformity. It
does not, however, relativise literacy at the level of social power as the cri­
tique suggests. On the contrary, it is termed an ideological model rather than
simply a cultural or pragmatic model precisely because it draws attention to
the unequal and hierarchical nature of literacy in practice. Whereas many
educators and policy-makers see literacy as simply a neutral skill, the same
everywhere and to be imparted (almost injected in some medically based
discourses) to all in equal measure, the ideological model recognises that
educational and policy decisions have to be based on prior judgements re­
garding which literacy to impart and why.
The research described here, then, leads to the policy question of which
particular literacy practices are important for, say, urban squatters, rural
farm workers, city taxi drivers and school support staff, and so on. It does
not suggest that they simply be left as they are on the relativist grounds that
one literacy is as good as another. But nor does it suggest that they merely be
'given' the kind of formal, schooled literacy with which policy-makers are
familiar and which, in fact, many of them have already rejected. 'Delivering'
such formalised literacy will not lead to empowerment, will not facilitate
jobs and will not create social mobility.
This argument is supported not only by more than a decade of intensive
research in different parts of the world (among others Graff, 1979; Heath,
1983; Lankshear, 1987; Street, 1984, 1993a, 1995; Barton, 1994) but also
by the low take-up/high dropout rates on formal programmes (a worldwide
6 B.V. Street

phenomenon, not just in South Africa) which indicate that people them­
selves see this more quickly and acutely than do planners. Formal schooled
literacy practices and the autonomous model on which they are based may
indeed have facilitated power for some. It will not, however, necessarily pro­
vide power for many, when the kinds of literacy needed in their specific con­
texts are often very different and, in a social sense, more complex. Develop­
ing policy and designing programmes to cater for this level of complexity
and 'need' is a more challenging and difficult task than simply 'delivering' a
package of 'neutral' literacy skills through centrally designed programmes.
It is in this sense, then, that the SoUL approach relativises both literacy
and the kinds of educational interventions now seen as necessary. It does so
analytically and by contextualising policy and educational planning require­
ments. It does not, as the critique suggests, relativise in the sense of judging
each literacy as equal in social power: to the contrary, it is better placed than
the autonomous model of literacy on which much planning and policy is
currently based to elicit and analyse precisely that power dimension to lit­
eracy practices.

Romanticism

The SoUL approach to literacy can also be critiqued for 'romanticising' local
literacies. The research described below can indeed indicate the value of
local literacies and help readers and observers to see what they might previ­
ously have missed in the everyday uses of literacy by taxi drivers, farm
workers and political activists. But the respect this entails is not to be con­
fused with romanticism because it does not involve a commitment simply to
the status quo: rather, the researchers are committed to social transforma­
tion - that indeed was the root of the project - and to redress with particular
reference to those whose communicative resources have either gone unre­
cognised or been used to maintain subordination.
Changing the situation of, say, rural workers involves, however, more
than simply providing formal literacy classes. Good educational practice to­
day requires facilitators to build upon what learners bring to class, to listen,
not just deliver, and to respond to local articulations of 'need' as well as
make their own 'outsider' judgements of it. The resultant mix of local/central
is quite different from the romantic vision of rural paradise left pure and
unsullied by urban or modern interference, as the critique from 'romanti­
cism' would have it. The primary difference, however, from hegemonic
centralism is that the model of transformation which follows from the SoUL
 Preface 7

research is more sensitive to context and to local needs and is able to recog­
nise where some local literacy practices - for instance, the interpretation of
documents regarding irrigation or health - are more central to immediate
'needs' (and empowerment) than the imparting of formal primer-based
knowledge and skills. It is the dynamic relationship between local and cent­
ral, between specific literacy skills focused on immediate tasks and generic
skills transferable to other situations that is the focus of policy and pro­
gramme design arising from the research. This is neither to blindly condone
the central, neutralist position nor to extol a naïve romanticism but to pro­
pose a less binary and more subtle starting point.

Relevance

Finally, the critique from 'relevance' has been mainly dealt with in relation
to the other two Rs. The approach advocated here, with its attention to local
practices and meanings of literacy, has been criticised as interesting but
hardly relevant to the needs of the New South Africa. Colin MacCabe
(1993:5,14,93) made a similar critique of a recent collection of articles on
literacy in different cultures (Street, 1993a) where he argues: 'However,
these studies all concern, in different ways, marginal societies that are strik­
ingly linked in that literacy and authority are not -extensive.' He con­
cludes: 'Until we have satisfactorily posed and perhaps begun to answer
questions about how cultural authority is constituted in a complex media
ecology ... the relevance of any of this work to current arguments about lit­
eracy in developed countries is more than moot.' According to MacCabe's
argument, and that of many 'modernisers' in the New South Africa, ac­
counts of literacy practices in rural Namaqualand or squatter settlements in
the Cape Peninsula are equally 'marginal' and not relevant to the develop­
ment of social policy and educational planning in the modern state. As one
researcher noted, 'Winnie's world is changing.'
This argument can itself, however, be criticised as élitist, western and
centralist. Marcus and Fisher, for instance, point out the problems western
theorists have with the concept of diversity:

It is not that people do not believe in the existence of surviving

cultural diversity: rather, from the privileged vantage point of
western societies they no longer believe that cultural differences
or alternative views of the world can affect the workings of a
globally shared system of political economy. (1986:38)
8 B.V. Street

This book can be seen as a case study in demonstrating the continued sig­
nificance of local and different viewpoints and their relationship to the
global economy. The research detailed here does, indeed, offer some an­
swers to MacCabe's questions about the constitution of cultural authority in
global systems (see Prinsloo and Robins, Chapter 1 on the construction of
citizens in the 1994 South African elections).
Against this evidence, the centralist view of 'complex media ecology' is
seen as failing to comprehend the endemic variation and inter-
connectedness of modern society: people in rural South Africa as much as in
urban settlements and middle-class Cape Town are all part of what goes to
make up contemporary communications practices and networks. Township
squatters' (people living in informal housing settlements) are fully aware of
and linked into urban and neo-industrial life, while conflicts over
landholdings in former homelands entail appeals to urban legal procedures
and local traditions of chiefship (see Hofmeyr, 1993) through a variety of
communicative channels - oral, literate, televisual, and so on (see Robins,
Chapter 6).
Even more now, perhaps, than before, attention to the variety of com­
municative practices is essential to coping with contemporary social life and
certainly to understanding it in terms of serious research. Moreover, for the
people with whom this research was conducted, as for others described by
centralist authors as 'marginal', the issue of 'relevance' is not simply a mat­
ter of taking whatever central planners offer them. They make their own
judgements of what is really 'relevant' - this frequently involves rejecting
formal classes and school-based literacy where it is unconnected with local
communicative practices. In many ways, then, the research addresses 'rel­
evance' in a more realistic and grounded way than the programmes and
plans that currently dominate the agenda, based on ethnocentric assump­
tions about 'which' literacy people 'need'.

Conclusion
Relativism, romanticism and relevance, then, need unpacking before being
used as critical tools with which to question the SoUL research. I would like
to suggest a reading which sees relativism in its positive sense as analyti­
cally relative but conceptually sensitive to dominance, hierarchy and power;
romanticism as an ethnocentric conception of the 'local' that deflects atten­
tion from a proper sensitivity to multiple voices and practices; and
relevance as a complex understanding of the variation and inter-
 Preface 9

connectedness of contemporary communicative practices rather than an

assumption of a single, central and ethnocentric account of 'media ecology'.
Interpreted in this way, the articles provide important insights not
simply into South African society at a crucial point of transition, but into the
nature of social transformation in contemporary society generally and the
role of literacy in particular. This book represents, I believe, a major contri­
bution to discussion of these issues at an international level precisely be­
cause of its concrete grounding in specific local practice.
Introduction
Mastin Prinsloo and Mignonne Breier

The studies that make up this book are of literaey-in-use, and set out to
make sense of people's reading and writing practices in local social contexts.
These studies challenge common assumptions in educational and policy
work that adults without schooling are a homogeneous mass of socially
disabled people. They provide details of the ways in which people without
extended formal schooling are able to mobilise local forms of knowledge
and resources and argue that these provide a base for effective education
and development strategies.
The collection arises from a research project intended not only to in­
volve academics in the debate over literacy policy formulation in post-
apartheid South Africa, but also to form the basis for what we hope will
become a substantial research tradition in literacy studies in South Africa.
The research was stimulated by recent policy and planning for adult lit­
eracy provision in South Africa (NEPI, 1992; CEPD, 1994), and by a body of
research literature from outside South Africa that has given direction and
energy, in recent times, to the study of literacy as social practice (among
others, Graff, 1979; Scribner and Cole, 1981; Heath, 1983; Fingeret, 1983; Street,
1984; Levine, 1986; Gee, 1990; Barton and Ivanic, 1991; Street, 1994; Barton,
1994; O'Connor, 1994; Street, 1995; Baynham, 1995).
The paradoxical circumstances that gave rise to this book, and the re­
search programme on which it rests, arose during the early 1990s when
policy proposals were being formulated for mass-scale provision of adult lit­
eracy and Adult Basic Education and Training (ABET) in South Africa. Lit­
eracy agencies, however, were having difficulty in recruiting and retaining
adult students. The case for adult literacy provision was made in largely
symbolic terms: literacy, or rather its lack, was presented as emblematic of
the deprivations produced under apartheid rule, as a mark of the untrain-
ability of the workforce, and as symbolic capital whose state-driven redistri­
bution would constitute redress of the wrongs of the past. These construc­
tions sat uneasily with the low social demand that was apparent 'on the
ground', if attendance at adult literacy classes and night schools was taken
as an indicator of such demand.
Concerns were first expressed in a commissioned study on literacy
policy:
12 Μ. Prinsloo and M. Breier

The figures for illiteracy and literacy training reveal an unusu­

ally low level of 'developmental pressure'. The simple fact is that
illiterate people are not pressing their claims, either explicitly or
implicitly, for training. None of the three sectors (the state, in­
dustry and the non-government organisations) reports the pres­
sure of large numbers of people who cannot be accommodated
in the existing facilities for provision. (Department of Adult
Education and Extra-Mural Studies, 1992)

This anomalous situation, which also applies in other parts of the world
(Amove and Graff, 1987; Wagner, 1987), provided the motivation for the
programme of research and the rationale for its direction. What could theory
and research in the field of literacy contribute to our understanding of this
apparently paradoxical set of circumstances? How far could the South
African example help clarify issues apparent in many literacy programmes
around the world?
This introduction sets the scene for the contextualised studies of
literacies in practice that make up the book. It begins with a brief overview
of the political circumstances that shape the present moment in South Af­
rica. Then it traces the developments in policy construction around adult
education provision that emerge from these conditions. It reviews the theo­
retical framework underlying the approach to literacy and research in the
studies that follow. It then outlines the significant theoretical details which
emerge across the studies and finally sketches the broad implications for
policy that result from the collective research. The book represents, then, an
attempt both to elaborate current theoretical perspectives on literacy and to
begin the process of application.

The political context of literacy in South Africa

Basic conceptions of adult illiteracy as a social problem have changed along
with political circumstances. Whereas it was an issue within oppositional
political discourse before 1990, it is now an issue within a state-sponsored
discourse of social development, with significant implications for policy,
provision and research.
During the apartheid years (roughly from 1950 to the 1990s), the 'prob­
lem of adult illiteracy' was subsumed by the wider anti-apartheid political
discourse. The illiteracy of large numbers of people was read, in these terms,
 Introduction 13

as a sign of their status as victims and as further evidence of the racist mi­
nority government's ruthless suppression of Black South Africans.
Before 1990, the state ran a low-profile, poorly resourced night school
system at (Black) schools around the country, attracting less than 50 000
adult learners at a time. Literacy classes were also run by a non-state adult
literacy movement, consisting of an array of independent small literacy
projects, many of them inspired by readings of Paulo Freire. Although to­
gether they recruited less than 10 000 adults to their classes, they did act­
ively contribute to raising the profile of adult literacy work. Literacy work
also carried on in large industrial corporations, particularly the mining
houses, which had been running company classes for unschooled workers
since the turn of the century (Harries, 1994). This work was largely concep­
tualised as 'social responsibility work' in the industrial corporations which
often sought ways to distance themselves from the extremities of apartheid
suppression of human rights. At the beginning of the 1990s, it was estim­
ated that there were 50 000 learners in company schools countrywide (NEPI,
1992).
The political settlement initiated in 1990 altered the way the 'problem of
illiteracy' was located in wider discourse. The negotiated nature of this set­
tlement, and the incorporation of erstwhile foes into a government of na­
tional unity led by the African National Congress, meant that the legacies of
the past became the collective burden of all present in the new government.
The 'problem of adult illiteracy' became a development issue, which de­
manded working strategies of redress in order to make up the social backlog
that was the legacy of apartheid. Adult literacy concerns thus became a sub­
ject of policy debates and are being rearticulated in new discourses of policy
and development.

The policy context of literacy in South Africa

The years from 1990 to 1994 were characterised by intense policy debate in
anticipation of the work facing the new government (Cosatu, 1992; NEPI,
1993). The key terms that came to characterise the wider debate were those
of reconstruction and development.
The term 'reconstruction' signals the shift from concerns with the injust­
ices and inequalities of the preceding era to the need for practical policies for
the future. In particular, it signals the end of the oppositional politics of the
past and the need for partnership between the major interest groups repre­
senting state, business and civil society. The term 'development' signals the
14 Μ. Prinsloo and M. Breier

end of liberation politics and the refocusing on plans for economic and so­
cial reform (Prinsloo et al, 1995; NEPI, 1993; South African Government,
RDP White Paper, 1995).
Under these conditions the discourse of human resources develop­
ment (HRD) came to prominence in policy work in education generally, and
in adult literacy planning in particular (Kraak, 1992; Cosatu, 1992). The
HRD perspective specifically foregrounds training of the industrial
workforce, as well as training concerns for other groups, including school
children, the unemployed and those working in the informal sector. Train­
ing is seen as a key requisite for economic success, together with focused
industrial planning in terms of strategic sectoral development: policy­
makers look to those societies with substantial investments in skills devel­
opment training (the successful Asian and north European economies) as
role models.
The HRD discourse underlies the proposals for the restructuring of edu­
cation and training put forward in policy debate by the influential Congress
of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu). Within this policy framework, lit­
eracy provision becomes part of Adult Basic Education and Training (ABET)
and is projected as the provision of basic skills.
The ABET proposals call for a large-scale, state-led system of Adult Basic
Education and Training, where literacy is one part of a basic education pro­
gramme, linked through interlocking modular networks of assessment and
standards to both the schooling system and the workplace and vocational
training system. This proposed system would appear to offer, to the labour­
ing classes and the unemployed, the promise of a route for social advance­
ment through a system of state-guaranteed access to further education and
training, accompanied by access to higher level employment.
Within these terms, a target population is constructed:

It is estimated that about 15 million black adults (over one-third

of the population) are illiterate and have had little or no educa­
tion ... The lack of access to basic education, including literacy
and numeracy, has consigned millions of our people to silence
and marginalisation from effective and meaningful participa­
tion in social and economic development. (CEPD, 1994:1; ANC,
1994:87)

The figure of 15 million illiterates is a questionable inference made on the

basis of data on school exits. That such a population exists, with homogen-
 Introduction 15

eous needs for literacy as well as a desire to attend adult education classes,
is seriously challenged in the research, as is the correlation of 'illiteracy'
with 'silence' and 'marginalisation'. Similarly, this conception of adult illit­
eracy assumes a cognitive and performative deficit in adults without school­
ing which is at odds with the complexity of dispositions and capabilities dis­
played by this heterogeneous group.

Implementing new policy

In 1994, the Government of National Unity began to set the framework for
the restructuring of education in the country. While most concerned to re­
dress the racial disparities in the provision of schooling, the government
also began to redesign the assessment framework for education and train­
ing. At the same time, a concern with literacy and ABET was included in the
catalogue of interventions to be overseen by the Reconstruction and Devel­
opment Programme (RDP).
TheRDP,put in place to oversee the inter-ministerial and sectoral re­
structuring of state and social apparatus, targeted a number of key social
areas, such as land reform, housing provision, job development, schooling,
health and social welfare, for the channelling of substantial resources and
attention. Adult literacy was included in this grouping but, to the disap­
pointment of literacy workers, the field was given no direct government
funding initially and was marked in RDP documents as an arena for donor
funding.
At this time the policy field remains at least partially open, the expecta­
tion of a quick fix by way of fast delivery by large-scale programmes having
been subdued. The research documented in this book hopefully comple­
ments a willingness among key planners and developers in adult literacy to
reconceptualise the field.

The theoretical context of this research

The disparities between policy intentions which assumed large-scale de­
mand for adult literacy classes and the reality of adult literacy work 'on the
ground', where such demand was not visible, turned our attention towards
the study of literacy in social context. On what assumptions about literacy
and its social uses were the policy statements based? How did these relate to
the actual practices in real contexts as well as in literacy night schools?
16 Μ. Prinsloo and M. Breier

A review of completed research on adult literacy in South Africa

(Prinsloo, 1995) outlined a particular bias:
1. Studies with literacy as their main concern were mostly about literacy
provision, and successes and setbacks faced by particular interventions.
But this research was remarkably quiet about the acquisition of literacy.
What had people acquired in these classes, and what had it meant and
done for them?
2. Writings on adult literacy focused almost exclusively on the providers of
literacy, on their trials and tribulations, triumphs and failures as well as
their struggles for advantage over one another. Not much was said
about the recipients of literacy provision at all.
The alternative and innovative strategy set out in our research proposal
foregrounded the people who were the typical 'recipients' of adult literacy
work. The proposal made it clear that the focus was to be directed away from
the discourses and practices of policy-makers and providers onto those who
were their objects of attention, people with little or no schooling.

The New Literacy Studies (NLS)

Many theoretical influences have been drawn on in developing a conceptual

frame for the research. These provide the theoretical language for analysing
the research data.
The NLS, a range of independently developed but supportive work pro­
duced over the last fifteen years across a number of disciplines, has been
particularly influential. The work of Brian Street in anthropology, Harvey
Graff in history, Shirley Scribner and Michael Cole in psychology, Shirley
Brice Heath, Mike Baynham and James Gee in socio-linguistics, and
Kenneth Levine in sociology has been formative in this new field. We have
also drawn on the research and arguments of others, including those of
David Barton and his colleagues at Lancaster University, Arlene Fingeret's
influential study of illiteracy and social networks, and Australian workplace
studies, including those of Peter O'Connor and his colleagues.

The 'literacy myth' and the 'autonomous' model of literacy

Popular and prevailing conceptions of literacy equate its acquisition with

positive and unproblematic outcomes. Brian Street's (1984) early and influ­
ential contribution was to characterise the prevailing conceptualisations of
literacy as embodying an autonomous view, where literacy, regardless of
 Introduction 17

context, was seen as producing particular universal characteristics and

giving rise to particular good effects. Implicitly, in the autonomous view,
literacy did things to people regardless of context. For example, it was said
to raise their cognitive skills, enable them to be detached, and develop in
them a meta-cognitive understanding or rational outlook that was crucial
for progress.
The catalogue of consequences that, at various times, have been said to
follow from literacy is lengthy, as Gee's assessment showed:

The literacy myth' is seen to have produced claims that literacy

leads to, or is correlated with, logical and analytical modes of
thought; general and abstract use of language; critical and
rational thought; a sceptical and questioning attitude; a dis­
tinction between myth and history; the recognition of the
importance of time and space; complex and modern govern­
ments; political democracy and greater social equity; economic
development; wealth and productivity; political stability;
urbanisation; lower birth rates; people who are achievement
oriented, productive, cosmopolitan, politically aware, more
globally (nationally and internationally) and less locally
oriented, who have more liberal and humane social attitudes,
are less likely to commit a crime; and more likely to take the
rights and duties of citizenship seriously. (1990:32)

These assumed outcomes of literacy had been suggested by a body of liter­

ature concerned with literacy, cognition and development which empha­
sised the transformative effects of literacy; most notable is the work of
Havelock, Goody and Ong. For Havelock (1963, 1982) and Goody (1977,
1986) it is the crucial social technology of literacy that is at the base of the
shift from primitive to modern mindset.
In popularising these ideas, Ong (1982) made the case for literacy as a
strong and socially determining technology, the pivot around which major
differences between oral and literate cultures are drawn. Ong's perspective
is that writing - commitment of the word to space - enlarges the potentiality
of language 'almost beyond measure' and 'restructures thought'. Similarly,
Luria's (1976) work with Russian peasants, following Vygotsky, concluded
that major differences exist between literate and non-literate subjects in
their uses of abstract reasoning processes.
18 Μ. Prinsloo and M. Breier

The New Literacy Studies' response has been to argue that literacy does
not necessarily lead to any of the social outcomes attached to it by these
writers. Scribner and Cole's (1976) study of literacy among the Vai in Li­
beria, where they presented what they call a 'practice account' of literacy
was a major contribution to this debate. The researchers found three differ­
ent literacies operating among these people, only one of them school-linked:
English literacy (acquired in school), an indigenous Vai script and an Arabic
literacy used for religious ends. Each of these literacies had a particular con­
text of use.
Scribner and Cole found that illiterate adults, particularly in urban
areas, shared some of the skills and attitudes usually only associated with
literate persons. They concluded that cognitive attributes were the outcome
of particular social practices, such as schooling, and not direct results of the
acquisition of literacy.
Sweeping claims for substantial and universal cognitive skills resulting
from literacy have not been sustained by research. In other writings,
Scribner (1987) has extended these arguments, endorsed by the work of
Rogoff and Lave (1984) to suggest that skills acquired in one social context
are substantially different from those acquired in another.
The direction of research developed within the NLS treats the term 'lit­
eracy' as 'a shorthand for the social practices of reading and writing' (Street,
1984:1), and then examines the wider context within which the literacy
practices are framed. Heath's focus in Ways With Words (1983) was on lit­
eracy events', those occasions in which written language is part of particip­
ants' interactions and their interpretative processes and strategies. She was
able to show the divergent orientations to literacy and learning that differ­
ing cultural and communicative traditions produce, particularly by way of
initiating children into 'ways of knowing' that include the incorporation of
literacy in culturally specific ways. Some of these traditions were closer to
the ways of schooling than others, thus giving some children an advantage
over others at school.
Street (1984) expanded this focus into 'literacy practices' as a broader
concept, pitched at a higher level of abstraction and referring to both beha­
viour and the social and cultural conceptualisations that give meaning to
the uses of reading and/or writing. He calls this alternative orientation an
'ideological' view of literacy to emphasise, first, the social nature of literacy
and, second, the multiple and sometimes contested nature of literacy prac­
tices.
 Introduction 19

This conceptual shift moves the focus away from individual, discrete
skills to reading and writing as cultural practices. This formulation is con­
cerned with the extent to which literacy tasks are jointly achieved, and the
implications of collaborative activities in particular social circumstances.
This shift allows the existence of multiple literacies, domains and genres of
literacy. Several people have explored the notion that there are different
literacies, usually in interaction, both school and non-school and both pub­
lic and private (Courage, 1991; Wagner et a., 1986; Barton, 1994; Baynham,
1995). The implication for teaching, Courage suggests, is that we should
examine the various non-school literacies in which people participate and
find ways to bridge the gap between public and private literacies.
The Streets (B. and J., 1991) argued that 'school literacy' tends to define
what counts as literacy, and that this constructs the lack of 'school literacy'
in deficit terms - those who don't have it are seen as being defective at the
cognitive level and suffering from the stigma of illiteracy. This obscures the
presence of literacy in other forms (such as the literacy practices of women
in homes and children outside of school), and perpetuates the notion of lit­
eracy as individual performance only. Street (1995) has cautioned, however,
that a focus on multiple literacies should not suggest that all literacies are
seen as equal, and linked mechanically to their own 'culture'. The broader
focus on literacy practices allows a study of the mix of dominant and local
literacies in social practices in a given context.
Other writers have stressed the valuative and transactive orientations
that are outcomes of schooling, rather than the cognitive. In Bourdieu's
terms (1976, 1986), schooling is where a particular cultural capital is ac­
quired. Schooled literacy is a form of cultural capital. It is institutionally
screened and validated and embedded in the norms of achievement, of inde­
pendence and of bureaucratically appropriate conduct associated with
formal settings of adulthood. There are forms of literacy that do not carry
the same cultural capital. They have been characterised variously as cultural
resources (DiMaggio, 1991), workers' literacies (O'Connor, 1994) vernacular
literacies (Street, 1993:1) and local or social literacies (this volume, and also
Street, 1995; Baynham, 1995).
The research that follows argues for this reorientation towards literacy
practices and its accompanying data. In numerous points the distinction is
drawn between literacies that operate as symbolic or cultural capital and
other literacy practices, including cases where the uses of literacy do not re­
quire the direct capacity to code and decode text. These findings have con­
siderable significance for the activities of literacy provision and planning,
20 Μ. Prinsloo and M. Breier

since they demand a rethinking of the underlying premises on which such

activities are based.

Networks and exchange relationships

An important contribution to the debate was made by Fingeret (1983). She

argued that many non-reading or non-writing adults are far from the stereo­
typical, incompetent individuals associated with the term 'illiterate', and
that individuals create social networks characterised by reciprocal ex­
change. Because networks offer access to most of the resources required by
the individual, it is unnecessary to develop every skill personally. Many so-
called illiterate adults therefore see themselves as interdependent: they con­
tribute a range of skills, other than reading and writing, to their networks.
In the research that follows, particularly in the section entitled 'Mediat­
ing Literacies', these ideas are taken up again through studies of 'cultural
brokers', people who formally or informally mediate the literacies and dis­
courses of outsiders for their immediate associates.
Reder's (1985) complementary research focused on the informal ac­
quisition of literacy skills, and outlines three dimensions of literacy: tech­
nology, function and social meaning. He sees an individual as being
technologically engaged in a literacy practice where that person is directly
engaged in coding/decoding written messages, and functionally engaged
when participating in the practice without personally doing the reading or
writing. (The Social Uses of Literacy [SoUL] research provides examples of
religious leaders making use of religious texts without directly decoding
them.) The third dimension, social meaning, relates to the complex network
of social values and effective reactions associated with literacy practices.
Reder found that literacy practices were organised into domains of ac­
tivities, such as those of the church, school, work, governance, and so on.
Distinct and often conflicting systems of social meanings are seen to de­
velop for the use of writing in each domain: the social roles of the literacy
specialists in the church and in the schools were quite different, for ex­
ample, as were the means by which literacy skills were taught or socialised
by an agent to others. These differences exerted a profound influence on the
choices individuals made about acquiring and then using (or not using)
their literacy skills in certain settings.
Reder's consideration of the practical implications of this perspective
includes the observation that adult educational approaches fail to address
the acquisition of literacy skills by adults outside of adult education
 Introduction 21

programmes. He claims that once we consider adults' literacy development

as a possible outcome of informal acquisition as well as formal instruction,
additional research issues and development concerns start coming to mind,
such as:
• From what types of activities and social contexts do adults learn literacy
skills?
• To what extent could informal literacy training be 'embedded within the
logic of everyday life'?
Our own research frequently returned to these concerns. But to understand
the significance of literacy practices, in terms of their 'social meaning', we
drew from current thinking on language, knowledge and power in the fields
of social theory and socio-linguistics.

Literacy practices and discourse

A key element of our focus on literacy in social practice is its location as

communicative practice. Street and Grillo see communicative practices as
the social activities through which language or communication is produced,
including the way in which these activities are embedded in 'institutions,
settings or domains which in turn are implicated in other, wider social, eco­
nomic, political and cultural processes' (Grillo, 1989). Such a focus requires
attention to 'the ideologies, which may be linguistic or other, which guide
processes of communicative production' (Street, 1993a: 13).
Consistent with this understanding of literacy practices, we use the term
discourse in the following chapters in a specific sense. In linguistics, dis­
course refers to the particular forms of organisation of language beyond the
(grammatical) structure of sentences. In our use of the term, we include
Foucault's understanding of discourses as institutionally generated sets of
systematically organised statements which give expression to specific social
meanings and values. Discourses in Foucault's sense generate ideological
positions, through 'systems of rules which make it possible for certain state­
ments but not others to occur at particular times, places and institutional
locations' (Fairclough, 1992a:40).
'Literacy' and 'illiteracy' are seen here as concepts of signification
within social discourse. Rather than being phenomena 'out there', waiting
to be discovered and described, they are constituted through discourse, and
come into being only as they are understood, explained and incorporated in
social practice.
22 Μ. Prinsloo and M. Breier

Uses of literacy are thus always the shaped products of interested social
action, and not neutral, transparent or technical means of communication.
The notion of 'illiteracy', for example, has to be seen not as an objective
description of social fact, but as an ideological, historically located state­
ment which is a product of specific interests and which constructs a group of
people. When business leaders lament the illiteracy prevalent among the
workforce, it means one thing; when leaders of the Pan-Africanist Congress
complain about widespread illiteracy among their people it means another.
Some of the studies have been influenced by Gee's wider use of the term
'discourse' as:

a socially accepted association among ways of using language,

of thinking, feeling, believing, valuing and of acting that can be
used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful
group or 'social network' or to signal [that one is playing] a so­
cially meaningful role. (1990:43)

Gee takes discourse to mean 'the social', as opposed to the 'natural'. He loc­
ates literacy firmly within this discourse-centred frame, and argues that
there is no literacy learning without the accompanying acquisition of a dis­
course. Gee sees the primary discourse of all humans, barring serious disor­
der, as our socio-culturally determined ways of thinking, feeling, valuing
and using our native language to focus in face-to-face communication with
intimates. We acquire this in our initial socialisation within the family, as
this is defined within a given culture.
Beyond the primary discourse there are the secondary discourses of key
institutions such as schools, the workplace, churches and official offices.
Secondary discourses, Gee argues, involve interaction with non-intimates,
or 'formal' interaction. But primary and secondary discourses, like lan­
guages, interpenetrate each other. The primary discourse of many middle-
class homes, for example, has been influenced by the secondary discourses
of school and business.
Among institutional sites encountered in our studies are the family, the
school, the workplace, the legal system, the church and various systems of
governance, including local government and public administration struc­
tures. Institutions such as these, following the preceding discussion, are
seen as the sources of the key social discourses which shape identity or
'personhood' in society, and are the sites that construct, maintain and per­
petuate the attachment of cultural capital to only some cultural resources.
 Introduction 23

This perspective is also presented in the references that followtogenres

of literary practice and discourse. Genres refer to the particular shaping of
literacy, language and discourse that is the outcome of institutional power.
Like Foucault, we find manifestations of power not only in the apparatus of
the state and other political institutions, but 'rooted in the system of social
networks'. Literacy and discourse are 'the things for which and by which
there is struggle, discourse is the power which is to be seized' (Foucault,
1981:52-3). In our studies of literacy practices in local municipal politics, or
between communal farmers and the courts, or in the workplaces, power was
being structured and negotiated through communicative modalities, includ­
ing literacy.
The concept of 'borderland discourse' has been developed in more recent
work. Gee developed the concept after analysing texts of students from a low
socioeconomic, segregated neighbourhood; O'Connor extended it to deal
with workplace situations. The 'borderland' is characterised by points at
which the secondary 'official' workplace discourses conflict with and are
opposed to the workers' (or students') primary discourse. In these situ­
ations, the workers' discourse, characterised by context-related cognitive,
valuative and narrative orientations, allows continued membership of the
work group, and at least the appearance of acceptance and adherence to the
normative values of the official discourse. At the same time this borderland
discourse makes sense of and maintains some loyalty and allegiance to the
primary discourse. Thus there is tension between resisting aspects of the
workplace which either contradict or are offensive to the 'primary' discourse
(and other 'outside of work' discourses), or contradict the ways that workers
think work can and should be performed (O'Connor, 1994).
O'Connor argues (and our studies of literacy at work support this) that
in most workplaces workers 'quietly resist many official edicts and direct­
ives, as their own experience tells them they won't work, or won't work as
well as they can perform the task' (O'Connor, 1994:267). Thus, workers
employ 'unofficial' or 'theories in use' (or their specialised local knowledge)
rather than the 'official' or espoused theories of the organisation.
Evidence of contextually developed, informal strategies similar to those
of dairy workers in Boston, described by Scribner (1984), adds weight to the
argument that effective work planning could usefully be informed by know­
ledge of the procedures, understandings and practices deployed by workers
in their work, instead of adhering exclusively to management con­
ceptualisation of the tasks.
24 Μ. Prinsloo and M. Breier

To conclude this review, the theoretical developments and concepts

summarised here have both informed the research on which this book is
grounded and in turn been elaborated by it. In the chapters that follow, the
authors will return to these terms and concepts - such as discourse, multiple
literacies, practice - in order to illuminate the data on literacy in South Af­
rica as well as to use that data and experience to develop and enlarge the
concepts themselves.

The Social Uses of Literacy (SoUL) research

Literacy in the following chapters refers to the practices of reading and
writing, or print literacy. While recognising their connections, we exclude
concerns with media literacy, computer literacy and other notions of com­
municative or performative competency.
The studies are of literacy as social practice, as 'concrete human activ­
ity'. The focus is not just on what people do with literacy, but also their
understandings of what they do, the values they give to their actions, and
the ideologies and practices that encapsulate their use and valuing of lit­
eracy. We also extend the concept of literacy practice and link it to defini­
tions of 'numeracy' (Castle, 1994; Baker, 1994; Mathews, 1990) to arrive at
'numeracy practices' - behaviour and conceptualisations related to the use
of arithmetic in daily life.

Methodology

The SoUL research is primarily ethnographic in nature, in the sense that it

involves close and concentrated observation over periods of time, and is
rooted in reflexive theoretical principles (Spradley, 1980; Agar, 1986). Some
of the studies are based on detailed narratives and representations of self,
elicited in unstructured interviews.
The process of narrativisation was seen by the researchers as a central
form of human comprehension, of imposition of meaning and formal coher­
ence on the stream of events (Hutcheon, 1988). As such, the researchers
paid considerable attention to the stories that people told about their lives
generally, as well as to their uses of literacy.
Within the time constraints - studies ran for eighteen months and
longer in some cases, to less than a year in other cases - there were effective
limits to the thoroughness of the ethnographies. Nonetheless, the research­
ers were all concerned with engaging in depth with the 'life worlds' of
 Introduction 25

people, attempting to understand and develop accounts of the 'complex

webs of significance' (Geertz, 1973:5) and develop the 'thick descriptions'
which are the hallmarks of ethnographic research.
The research contexts were selected because they were seen in a loose
sense to typify those social environments from which people are most likely
to be recruited onto adult literacy programmes, while at the same time being
accessible to the researchers who would do the fieldwork. What the research
produces, however, are not accounts which tend to stress the generality of
the context of study, but rather its distinctiveness and particularity.
Misgivings are sometimes expressed about the use of such case material
for analytical, as against illustrative, purposes. As Mitchell points out, how­
ever, the particular kinds of inference drawn from quantitative data are in­
appropriate to case study research:

What the anthropologist using a case study to support an argu­

ment does is to show how general principles deriving from
some theoretical orientation manifest themselves in some given
set of particular circumstances. A good case study, therefore,
enables the analyst to establish theoretically valid connections
between events and phenomena which previously were ineluct­
able. From this point of view, the search for a 'typical' case for
analytical exposition is likely to be less fruitful than the search
for a 'telling' case in which the particular circumstances sur­
rounding a case, serve to make previously obscure theoretical
relationships suddenly apparent. (1984:239)

The material that follows was conceptualised as 'telling' cases in this sense.
The literacy practices described for various sites in South Africa serve both
as indicators of current trends, and as ways of exploring theoretical issues
in the field of literacy studies more generally. Numerous theoretical relation­
ships are made apparent by the research, including the relationship between
literacy and discourse, between literacy and control and between literacy
and power. The research demonstrates that literacy is acquired and put to
use in ways that are neither uniform nor predictable. People take hold of lit­
eracy in ways that are consistent with local understandings and social
practices.
The studies show how literacy practices are actively embedded in wider
discursive and cultural processes. At the level of literacy use and acquisition
they show not only how cultural mediation processes operate to effect
26 Μ. Prinsloo and M. Breier

particular literacy practices, but also the processes of informal literacy ac­
quisition and use that characterise literacy practices outside of formal insti­
tutions. They reveal how the effects of school literacy shape local practices
but also point out the disjunctures between the literacy of the local night
schools and the literacies of everyday local life.

Research and practical outcomes

The SoUL research has confirmed in South African contexts many argu­
ments made in international literature. Among a number of conclusions, we
focus briefly on the processes of informal acquisition of literacy skills in
everyday activities, which we call apprenticeship learning; and secondly, on
the procedures and practices of shared or collective literacy events, where
the processes and skills of literacy mediation are the objects of analysis.
Some important general points need to be made initially. The first is in
relation to the target figure for large-scale adult literacy provision. The re­
search reveals convincingly the unreliability of projected estimates of 'illiter­
ate adults1 drawn from school exit data. The figure of 15 million adults that
has had such mileage in policy advocacy and planning documents in South
Africa is a patently false inference drawn from quantitative research. The
fact that so many people might each have completed less than four or five
years of schooling cannot be treated as evidence that they all either need or
wish to attend adult literacy classes or ABET classes. Such an inference rep­
resents a particular kind of misunderstanding of how the social technology
of schooling comes to have meaning in geographically, historically, cultur­
ally and politically specific local contexts. These case studies show that there
are multiple orientations to further learning among adults, including both
pro- and anti-schooling ideologies, and that the complex motivations for
wanting adult education are not in any way encompassed within views of
'underschooled' adults as a homogeneous population that is socially
defective.
Furthermore, the research points very clearly to the need to disentangle
thinking about adult literacy and further education for adults from ideas
about schooling for children. As cultural processes these are necessarily dis­
tinct. It has been adult education's loss to move in the shadow of schooling
and to attempt to mimic its social processes and effects, despite the flour­
ishes of the past around 'learner-centredness' in adult education curricula.
Adult education and literacy classes have been sensitive to local context
at a political level, often taking the side of adult learners and producing
 Introduction 27

written material which reflects learners' political orientations. They have,

however, continued to work with centralised and hierarchical notions of
what counts as useful knowledge, developing curricula that at their core
assume cognitive and cultural deficit in their learners, rather than develop­
ing a dialogue between local ways of making sense and 'mainstream' ways.
A starting point which is more deliberately rooted in the local can provide
room to move in more formal, certification-seeking directions, but can also
move more realistically back to an engagement with the development of
effective and grounded cognitive and performative capacities. In adult lit­
eracy classes such a reorientation requires a reconceptualisation of literacy
that takes it out of the academy and the school, and into the context of social
practices.

Apprenticeship learning

An international body of research (Rogoff and Lave, 1984; Heath, 1983;

Baynham, 1995) is exploring the ways in which people acquire literacies
and numeracy through informal apprenticeship learning from peers, relat­
ives or other persons who display and deploy these skills. The SoUL re­
search provides 'telling' cases through which the issues and problems with
this formulation can be made apparent and explored.
Our data indicates that lack of formal training opportunities and socio­
economic pressures in South Africa have led to on-the-job or informal
apprenticeship learning in various work and community contexts. Further­
more, in the context of organised resistance to apartheid over decades,
many people's capacities to operate in organisational, bureaucratic and
legalistic settings have been developed independent of formal schooling.
The research describes examples of discursive competency (skills acquisi­
tion, cognitive development), including forms of literacy and numeracy,
which would normally be assumed to be only available through formal in­
struction. The description and analysis of the learning and cognitive proc­
esses explicit here require further detailed research.
We propose that further research be undertaken, aimed at documenting
and engaging with different forms of apprenticeship learning that adults
with little schooling rely on, both in work and home/local contexts. This
could include further studies of the informal acquisition of literacy and nu­
meracy skills in home, community and work contexts, but would also exam­
ine the development and acquisition of other skills and competencies, and
the relation of such skills to literacy and further learning.
28 Μ. Prinsloo and M. Breier

Mediation

Another area of international research on which this book provides 'telling'

cases is mediation. Literacy tasks are often jointly achieved within peer
groups or social networks; the use of written communication is therefore
not fully or always dependent on individual ability to read and write in a
particular format (see Fingeret, 1983; Barton and Ivanic, 1991; Baynham,
1995).
Various forms of mediation of socially specific literacy skills operate in
these social networks. Adults with no formal literacy who use these social
resources thus have access to institutions which require written interaction.
Rather than seeing these local mediatory resources as problematic because
they promote dependency or lessen motivation for literacy learning, we
claim that a realistic strategy to explore would be enhancement and develop­
ment of these informal resources. Whereas formal literacy classes are often
initiated by outsiders, literacy mediation and social networks are indi­
genous strategies and resources. Their institutional sources are not those of
schooling, but of religious and political movements and practices, the public
media, the community meeting and local government.
Literacy classes have taken on, as an assumption, the concept of person­
alised literacy - that reading and writing are solitary activities. Adult educa­
tion approaches have addressed the acquisition of literacy skills from inside
rather than outside adult education programmes. When informal acquisi­
tion and use of literacy is taken into account, however, new research and
developmental strategies come to the fore. These new strategies, we show in
the chapters that follow, have implications for enhancing the effectiveness
of formal literacy class provision for adults.
The potential for these strategies can be developed and explored in a
number of ways: through attention to institutional and historical sources of
local literacies; through understanding the role of literacy mediators;
through informal apprenticeship learning as a mode of literacy acquisition;
and through the formative evaluation of literacy projects. The latter at­
tempts to put project staff in touch with the contextual realities of literacy
use of which their learners are a part, and to assist literacy teachers to make
use of this knowledge in their curricula and teaching.
These directions should not be read as a naive romanticising of the
local, as Street argues in the Preface. They offer starting points for curricu­
lum development that engage with the important forms of literacy that char­
acterise modern society, besides that of schooling. They highlight the limits
 Introduction 29

of strategies that take the school model of literacy as given, and show the
advantages of recognising the diversities and dynamics of social literacies
whose origin is not necessarily in the school but in other forms of social
practice.
Section One
Literacies at work

In South African adult education policy rhetoric it is generally assumed that

there is a clear divide between literacy and illiteracy and that the one state
brings uniform, positive effects to those who achieve it while the other is
associated with marginalisation from effective and meaningful participa­
tion in social and economic development and inability to participate in and
understand democratic processes (ANC, 1994:87). Women, thought to
comprise a large proportion of the illiterate, are said to be particularly vul­
nerable. The first four chapters of this book challenge all these notions, dem­
onstrating the complex and surprising ways in which literacy is taken up,
circumvented, manipulated, valued and devalued in various social contexts.
The rhetorical divide collapses in the face of complex images of 'illiterate'
people who can perform difficult tasks requiring abstraction, transferral and
spatial cognition, and literate' people, often women, who perform menial
tasks requring none of these competencies and little or no engagement with
the written word.
The first chapter, by Prinsloo and Robins, shows how particular concep­
tions of literacy and illiteracy were at work in the preconceptions of planners
during the 1994 South African parliamentary elections. These preconcep­
tions about the anticipated behaviour of Illiterates' were shown up by the
events themselves. 'Illiteracy' was not found to be the major barrier to know­
ing about the election and participating in the process as planners had as­
sumed. Homogenised assumptions about the behaviour of groups of people
in relation to the election process were displaced by diversified reception of
voter education and media messages by differentially situated social actors.
At the same time, the capacity of people to participate in an institutional
process that took pains not to exclude them provides an example of how
institutional processes can be accessible to everyone.
Gibson's study, on the other hand, finds that literacy practices among
the workers on three farms in the Western Cape are embedded in relation­
ships of power between worker and farmer and between men and women.
'Farm' knowledge is often privileged by both farmer and workers and is in­
herently 'male' and accessible only to male workers. In contrast, 'book' or
'school' knowledge is largely associated with women's activities outside of
work. Female farm workers are more schooled than male workers but do
32 Section One

menial work on the farm and almost never use literacy in the course of their
work. Being literate' is not an important criterion for access to employment,
power or training - but being male is.
Breier and Sait explore these issues of stratification and contestation in
the context of communicative practices around literacy. They investigate the
communication gap between management and workers in a factory where
workers are required to hand-mould products out of material containing
asbestos, a substance that can cause fatal disease if inhaled over a period of
time. Management places the blame for poor communication and industrial
relations problems at the factory on the workers' individual literacy deficits.
Yet the written texts that it produces for the workers' benefit are out of touch
with workers' concerns and interests and designed for purposes of control
rather than communication.
Waiters similarly investigates the relationship between literacy and the
organisation of work among service workers at a small private church
school and finds that workers who have received a basic education are sel­
dom required to read or write in the course of their duties. At the same time,
the literacy practices of the school management are embedded in the dom­
inant discourses of the school. The institution is presented as a kind of fam­
ily with corresponding obligations and controls on the part of its members.
The school principal presents a charitable, liberal image and introduces
written procedures that appear to advance worker interests yet also contain
and constrain worker freedom.
Chapter One
Literacy, voter education and
constructions of citizenship in the Western
Cape during the first democratic national
elections in South Africa
Mastín Prinsloo and Steven Robins

The three days of the South African parliamentary elections in April 1994
were critical moments in the recent moves away from racial oligarchy to
democratic government. Besides the remarkable fact that the elections actu­
ally took place, what struck most people was the sheer scope of participation
in the event. The long, dragging queues that snaked around schools and
civic buildings as people patiently queued to vote were soon constructed, in
private conversations and in the media, as liminal vehicles for the new
South Africa. Blacks reclaimed their dignity and Whites their virtue, equal
citizens at last in the final stage of a rite of passage, from separation into a
cleansed body politic. Much anxiety preceded or was part of the three days,
over whether intensified violence would paralyse the proceedings or
whether Inkatha or right-wing Whites would subvert the event. An addi­
tional anxiety was whether the mass of people, particularly those with little
or no formal education, would want or be able to participate successfully, for
the first time, in the rarefied and abstract performance of ballot-casting in a
multiparty national democratic election.
We studied the election processes with particular attention to how these
anxieties about the capacities and willingness of uneducated people to take
part manifested themselves in policy and educational endeavours on the
part of the election organisers. Elsewhere, we have presented our study of
the role of the mass media in constructing the instant universal citizenship,
whose imagining had to be part of and precede the days of voting (Prinsloo,
Robins and Breier, 1994). In this study we focus on the processes of voter
education that were so important to the final successful mass participation
of the event and look at the constructions of policy in education that were
part of these processes. We focus particularly on assumptions and construc­
tions of subjectivity and identity on the part of voter educators and how
Long queues like this one were a common sight during the South
African elections in 1994.

An elderly voter casts his vote.

 Literacy, voter education and constructions of citizenship 35

these perspectives get embedded in concrete educational transactions and

literacy practices. We aim to show how these assertions and assumptions
encounter a heterogeneous audience, diversely located.
This chapter draws on interviews with a number of persons across
'urban' and 'rural' contexts in the Western Cape, on recorded observations of
voter education sessions, as well as on media reports. The study offers a
perspective on the policy construction processes that have characterised
moves away from apartheid in South Africa. It provides an example of how
focused, qualitative research, drawing on ethnographic research methods
and orientations, can offer a corrective to the 'social engineering' excesses
of policy research based on the superficial surveying of a population before
acting upon it. Against the homogenising tendencies of such policy research
it offers a reading based on localised and contextualised understandings.

The 'problem of illiteracy' as stumbling block

Preparation for voter education was characterised by considerable anxiety
over the inaccessibility, communications-wise, of the masses. A report by
the Media Research and Training Unit of Rhodes University, subtitled 'Com­
municating Electoral Processes to a Low-Literacy Audience' (Pinnock and
Polacsek, 1992), hereafter referred to as the 'Rhodes report', was distributed
to the voter education agencies several months before the voter education
campaigns started. We look briefly now at how the audience for voter educa­
tion is constructed in this report with reference to anxieties over large-scale
illiteracy as a characteristic of the defined population.
The Rhodes report draws major attention to the audience's illiteracy,
referring to their findings in this regard as 'frightening' and 'extremely wor­
rying'. It reviews data on illiteracy and produces shock figures along the
lines of between 63 and 80 per cent illiteracy, involving 15 million people
(out of a total adult population of around 25 million). Newspapers, in the
rural areas and in the 'burgeoning squatter camps', are said to be of 'limited
use', more 'a source of fuel' than a 'source of information', because of the
'high levels of illiteracy' (pp. 1, 2). It is not only newspapers that are of little
use to these people, so are television and 'easy' instructional comics, the
Rhodes report argues, for two main reasons:

Firstly, people who can't read have trouble understanding pic­

tures ... Our visual syntax is premised on literacy and we com­
pose our pictures accordingly. [our emphasis] Self-evident as
36 Μ. Prinsloo and S. Robins

television pictures may seem to the literate, they are surpris­

ingly confusing for people who do not read ... Television is es­
sentially an urban medium and is programmed by literate
people for literate people. (p. 2; and see Chapter 5)

Secondly, television sets are expensive, require electricity and a nearby relay
transmitter, thus, according to the report, making them an urban, luxury
commodity.
The assumptions in the Rhodes report of the incapacity, cognitively and
materially, of 'illiterate' and 'rural' people to participate in such 'normal',
'threshold' practices of modernity as watching television are examples of
the effects of cultural stereotyping that such thinking produces. Our field
research in the Western Cape found television to be remarkably pervasive
and influential in voter education, even in the 'remote' areas. The latest
events and appearances on the news programme Agenda' were on the
minds of many people we spoke to, under remarkably diverse conditions.
These included working-class suburbs, urban squatter camps, remote vil­
lages (where only a few sets were present but shared, running on car batter­
ies where there was no electricity) and farm owners' living rooms into which
were crowded both the farmer and his family as well as his labourers. The
messages were received into busy and collective rooms, the farm owner and
his labourers, for instance, drawing on different social dispositions and
narratives at the moment of interpretation.
Radio in the rural areas is presented in the Rhodes report as the only
reliable source of information, besides rumour. It is hailed as the 'real voice
in the wilderness', supported by figures that nine out of ten Black house­
holds have a radio. The gloomy conclusion is that only a massive literacy
campaign could save the situation: 'The catch is that this is unlikely to hap­
pen this side of majority rule if voting is so skewed by misinformation and
ignorance that no strong government can emerge' (p. 3).
Our own scan of these assumptions around 'illiteracy' was that they are
part of the 'great divide' or 'autonomous' view of literacy that attributes
cognitive and valuative effects to the acquisition of reading and writing, ir­
respective of the discursive embedding of these practices (Street, 1984; and
see the introduction to this book). Literacy is understood in the Rhodes re­
port as a pivotal, uniform, social technology that does particular good
things, in terms of making subjects into responsive citizens. Such isolating
of independent variables which are said to have precise social leverage char­
acterised 'modernisation' thinking in policy research in the 1960s and
 Literacy, voter education and constructions of citizenship 37

1970s and has since been contested. In literacy studies, the social and cog­
nitive attributes often ascribed to literacy' have been shown to be outcomes
of the larger arena of social practices and not of literacy at all. For example,
persons who have not been schooled in reading and writing, but who live in
an environment where the behaviours and cognitive orientations normally
associated with literacy are predominant, display these same behaviours
and cognitive dispositions themselves, regardless (Scribner and Cole, 1981).
And people with little or no schooling are not all the dependants they are
assumed to be in the literature and proposals for 'combating illiteracy' but,
rather, part of interdependent social networks where intermittent needs or
wishes to engage in literacy practices outside of their repertoire can be satis­
fied with the help of others (Fingeret, 1983). 'Literacy', disembedded from
the discursive practices that characterise its use, continues, however, to be a
shorthand way of identifying key features of a target group. Policy and edu­
cational practices based on these assumptions, including calls for large-
scale national campaigns or programmes on the unproblematised assump­
tion that 'literacy' is a good thing and everyone should have it, is bad policy,
we contend.
The fact that only one per cent of the votes cast (about 190 000) were
spoilt ballots, despite the fact that the ballot form was lengthy and complic­
ated, is evidence that the effects of 'illiteracy' were misread in the Rhodes
report. Firstly, the anxiety that millions of 'illiterates' would stay outside the
process, undermining it, was unfounded. Secondly, election publicity and
voter education were successful in specific ways, such as in helping people
to successfully manoeuvre the technical procedures of vote-casting.
The unavoidable pressures of the impending elections, fortunately,
made such calls as are in the Rhodes report for the 'quick fix' solution of
mass literacy campaigns impractical; the voter education organisations
were forced into more pragmatic and realistic attitudes to unschooled
people. The trainer's explanation of the ballot forms in relation to 'illiteracy'
is a substantial advance on the gloom of the Rhodes report (see below), but
it retains a homogenised understanding of 'illiterates' as consumers at the
same urban supermarket:

The reason for all the faces and emblems is that there are many
people that's illiterate in our country. They can't read but they
are actually very good at decoding symbols. They know where's
Shoprite because they know what Shoprite looks like, so that is
The ballot paper used
in the 1994 elections.
 Literacy, voter education and constructions of citizenship 39

why they have done that. (Idasa workshop, Hout Bay, March
1994)

The trainer's understanding of what is and isn't reading has become more
blurred. Certainly there is less dogmatism about Illiterates' being unable to
decode the symbols of literate people. In fact, the ballot form contained a
lengthy, potentially confusing list of symbols and photographs of party
leaders, where people's discursive resources were fully drawn on, to distin­
guish one clenched fist or map of Africa from another, or one photo of an old
man from another. Experienced, educated (White) voters reported brief
moments of panic in the polling booth when the symbols and photographs
seemed indecipherable, their confusion stemming, perhaps, from a less in­
tense engagement in the political debates during the run-up to the elections
than many 'uneducated' Black voters.

Voter education
The South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) survey on voter educa­
tion (February 1994), coordinated by Craig Charney, was broadcast as the
counting of votes was still in process. It presents an overview of voter edu­
cation impact.
The survey claims to be a sample which reports on All Potential Voters'.
It found that voter education in its various forms reached 97 per cent of the
total adult population. The relative reach of the different media were:

82 per cent reached by radio; 66 per cent by friends and family;

63 per cent by TV; 58 per cent by newspaper; 40 per cent by voter
education organisations; and 30 per cent by a political party in
their homes.

When it came to actually knowing how to vote, however, radio slumped and
more interactive forms of engagement surfaced. When people were asked
from which source they had learnt how to vote, they said:

37 per cent from friends and family; 44 per cent by radio; 84 per
cent by TV; 89 per cent by newspaper; 90 per cent by political
party visits at home; and 96 per cent by voter education organ­
isations.
40 Μ. Prinsloo and S. Robins

How so many people could have learnt from processes which, according to
the first set of data, they were not exposed to is not clear in the report, but
perhaps partly explained in the next remark:

The survey found that the more sources people were exposed to,
the more likely they were to vote; and that many people had
been exposed to up to five different forms of voter education.

Our own investigations found that voter education had been extremely
widespread, blanketing all the urban areas, including informal residential
(squatter) areas, rural farms and small towns that we visited, from Cape
Town up to Lambert's Bay The trainers from the Institute for Democracy in
South Africa (Idasa) reported something similar:

The IEC [Independent Electoral Gommittee] went from Cape

Town to the furtherest [sic] point of Western Cape, along the
West Coast; everywhere they went they discovered that the peo­
ple had already had voter education. Isn't that wonderful?
(Idasa workshop, Cape Town, February 1994)

We found significant differences between the programmes run by Idasa, on

the one hand, and those run by the Voter Education and Training Unit
(Veetu) and by the political parties, on the other. Idasa programmes reflected
the most detailed and sophisticated preparation. This included the training
of researchers in interactive, or learner-centred', teaching methods and in
the delivery of a detailed package which included information on electoral
systems and processes, the background to the April elections, the key insti­
tutions involved in running these and a mock voting session where all par­
ticipants got to queue, receive ballots, mark them and deposit them. The
Idasa programmes were the most consciously informed by teaching theory
of the programmes. In contrast, the programmes run by Veetu and by the po­
litical parties - mostly in Xhosa - focused predominantly on making sure of
two things. Firstly, that people could accurately make their mark next to the
appropriate party (always the African National Congress [ANC] in the ses­
sions we observed, but as obviously the National Party [NP] in those ses­
sions which the farmers in the northwestern Cape set up for their labourers)
and, secondly, that they could do it on both national and regional ballot pa­
pers. We will now explore the differing constructions of citizenship impli­
cated here.
 Literacy, voter education and constructions of citizenship 41

Briefly, the studied neutrality of the Idasa programmes constructed a

version of representative democracy which suppressed difference while
stressing the technical procedures of voting and government. The assump­
tions about identity of their target audiences were of those atomised, auto­
nomous and rational agents, whose need was for a clarification of the bu­
reaucratic procedures of western democratic forms of government and
citizen participation. Their image of the appropriate subject of political dis­
course was that of the informed, rational agent of liberal democracy and
they related to their audiences as if they were approximations to this ideal.
The other voting workshops, particularly those run by the political parties,
were concerned with ensuring that the technicalities of voting were accomp­
lished in the pursuit of power. Their constructions of the subject were clearly
shaped by their own location in social movements.
We observed (and recorded on tape and video) several different present­
ers from Idasa deliver voter education workshops to diverse groups:
hospital workers, employees in a motor repair shop, teachers and other pro­
fessional women in a Hout Bay church hall, workers in an engineering fac­
tory and school children old enough to vote in Ravensmead, a suburb in
Cape Town. The trainers had been given a set package to teach in the work­
shop, but were also rehearsed in interactive teaching and encouraging
learner participation. We observed the same package being taught by three
different trainers across these contexts, but they modified their informal and
linking chatter, depending on the audience.
The beginning of each workshop started with a show of learner-
centredness: Any questions you'd like me to address?' Any questions?'
'What fears do you have?' Any fears, rumours, whatever... ?' This would
produce a flood of disparate concerns, reflecting the perspectives and anxi­
eties of the varied audience. The issues raised were listed on newsprint.
They were not to provide the starting point for what followed, however, and
in all cases, we observed, were not drawn on again. Then the formal lesson
would proceed, in the most open and learner-friendly fashion, but none the
less along set lines. Let us use as an example an Idasa session in the Vincent
Pallotti Hospital, March 1994.

Representations of homogeneity and the assertion of

difference in voter education workshops
The distribution of people in the room hinted at divisions. Around the tables
were seated mostly women, Afrikaans and English speaking, mostly
42 Μ. Prinsloo and S. Robins

Coloured and all dressed in pink, skirted and bloused uniforms. At the back
of the room a handful of men in blue overalls, all Black, Xhosa speaking,
were grouped. The first question after introducing Idasa was: 'What lan­
guage would you prefer? English or Afrikaans?' In response to the question
there was a general chorus from the women that both languages were ac­
ceptable. One young man at the back said: 'Xhosa!' The woman trainer re­
plied that her Black colleague would talk later in Xhosa and then asked Any
questions?' The next 15 minutes were spent soliciting questions and state­
ments of concern or anxiety over the voting process. These were written up
on newsprint. At one stage the woman trainer said to her male colleague:
'Can you just ask those guys at the back there?' In response to the only
Xhosa question of the workshop, one man at the back spoke of a confronta­
tion between himself and one of the women present because she had made
him remove a Mandela lapel button. The male trainer then spoke English:

Well, this question is round about intimidation. This man is

saying that this morning he was wearing one of the leaders'
buttons. That is the kind of intimidation we are talking about
because somebody came to him and said: This is not allowed ...
and it was, you know, pulled off ... in a bad manner... that's
what he's saying.

The woman accused of the aggressive act then interjected, defending herself.
The male trainer then closed the topic, firmly:

OK. That's fine. We're not going to accommodate this kind of

thing now. It looks like something that could be negotiated be­
tween the two. But if you want us to accommodate that I'll put it
on my bin [list of trainee concerns] here. I always have a bin
here. I mean, questions like that are not really related to what
we are doing at the moment. We can always come back to that
... (Writes up 'Intimidation' on list.)

The trainer's response to the dispute over 'intimidation' was characteristic

of such sessions. He resorted to a somewhat laboured neutrality, referring to
'one of the leaders' instead of naming Mandela, certainly not just 'one of the
leaders' in most people's reckoning. He refused to attempt any resolution of
the incident, and spoke an élite jargon of bureaucrat-speak, with terms like
'accommodate' (used twice) and 'negotiate' which had the effect of silencing
 Literacy, voter education and constructions of citizenship 43

his audience. He declared the topic out of order ('not really related to what
we are doing at the moment') and relegated it to his 'bin'.
Further concerns were then solicited from trainees and a string of them
poured out:

— Does voting have influence on our churches, religion?

That's a very valid question!
— I just want to know if there's any safety for the working con­
tingent ... Like we nurses, we are supposed to come to work at
these times ... What will you do about us ... to safeguard us?
— Se vir my ... die wat h u l l s ê ...jou huis moet afgelewer...
Staan daar so iets dat hullejou huis kan ... (Tell me ... the
things they're saying ... your house has to be handed over... Is
it true that your house can be ...)
— OK, there's another feeling from this lady... that she feels ...
like that question about the houses being taken away from you,
your work might also be taken away from you ... , OK?
— (Woman) Een, twee guys het vir my gesê: 'Wag net tot die
election is klaar, dan vat ek vir jou ...' (One or two guys said to
me: 'Just wait till the election is over, then I'm going to have
you ...')
— OK, jy praat nou van jouself ... Hulle gaan jou ook vat...
(OK, you're talking about yourself now ... They're going to take
you as well...)
— Ja, they say: Then we do what we want...'
—Hoekom koop die mense daar nou so kos, 'n kersies, 'n stofies
en goedes? (Why are people buying up food, and candles and
stoves and other things?)
— There's rumours going around that you have to stock up!
— There's going to be war!
— Kyk, soos die mense hulle vrees nou, wantjy hoor nou die
ding en daai ding en jy hoor nou die ding wat eintlik nou gaan
plaasvind, en ek wil weet oor die dinge op election dag wat gaan
plaasvind. Ek wil weet gaan dit stil wees op daardie dag of gat
dit aan met die ding? (Look, like the people are scared now,
'cause you hear one thing now, then the other thing next, about
what's actually going to happen, and I would like to know about
the things that are going to happen during elections. I want to
44 Μ. Prinsloo and S. Robins

know, is it going to be quiet on that day, or is there going to be

unrest?)

A list of these concerns was written up, but not returned to in the workshop,
as if the fact of expressing the concerns and the writing of the list had been
an act of exorcism in itself.
The woman trainer then proceeded to present input on the elections,
opening with a statement intended to be both nurturing and supportive as
well as a corrective to the anxieties communicated earlier by the audience:

The next part of the programme, we're going to explain to you,

give you a more positive outlook: Everyone's being negative ...
since we started, nothing positive, just negative ideas. People
are feeling unsure, uncertain, they feel scared, so what I'd like to
do is just affirm ...Almal voel so ... Everybody out there's feel­
ing the same way ... I felt the same way.
Now I'm just going to do a little update for you about what's
been happening since last year. It's not going to be long... (Puts
up overhead:"Pathto the Election'.)

The overhead was a key part of all the Idasa presentations. It was essentially
a time-line, turned lengthways and made to twist from side to side like a
snake' as one trainer said (ironically prefiguring the image of the winding
election queues that became so familiar later), with some months and words
written in at regular points. 'November 1993' was written in at the start of
the line and crucial months and events on the way to the elections were
written in at various points. It assumed a reading from top to bottom, rather
than the conventional left to right of literacy. At the top were epigrammatic
sketches of two or three people in three identical boxes, with the acronyms
TEC, IEC and IMC under each consecutively (representing the Transitional
Executive Committee, the Independent Electoral Committee and the Inde­
pendent Media Committee respectively).
The undulations in the time-line were meant to indicate that the process
had had its twists and turns from the setting up of the multiparty conference
in November 1993 to the final agreement on the double ballot system just
before the elections. But the effect, nonetheless, was to present the process
in a highly abstracted and mediated form, considering the concerns about
Illiterates'. Although the line twisted, the sequence was communicated as
 Literacy, voter education and constructions of citizenship 45

flat, linear, and expert-managed. This was enhanced by the explanation of

the three acronyms. They, it turned out, were the interim authority and the
guarantee of security and fairness in the elections. But what happened in
the presentation was that, through the procedures and effects of time-lines
on overheads and authority in acronyms, a new set of faceless, bureaucrat-
ised, depoliticised institutions was put forward as a new, legitimate author­
ity. Without ever being discussed, the anxieties, concerns and understand­
ings of the voters were relegated to a lesser dimension. This is seen again in
the discussion of electoral systems. The presentation was premised on the
assumption that there is one reality to be read from the South African situ­
ation, and cool, trained and internationally connected minds can see the
right answer:

Firstly, before talking about the structure of the government, I

think it is wise I talk about the electoral system ... Very briefly,
there is a number of electoral systems ... I mean, if you go to the
States, for example, the study of the transition has become a
kind of an industry of its own ... What I'm trying to say is that
there is a number of electoral systems that we can talk about.
But I will just choose to talk about three, and one of them, the
one that has been used in SA for the past 46 or 48 years (I'm not
sure), is the kind of electoral system that has put the NP in
power. This is a system that is known as the Westminster. Some
people call it a constituent-based election, it's a constituent-
based election because ...

This mini-presentation ended with an argument that presented the propor­

tional representation system as being the solution to South Africa's needs at
this time.
The structure of the new government was then presented in some detail,
including the shape of the new parliamentary structure, the size and make­
up of the two Houses, and when they meet together and separately. The les­
son was technical, monologic and soporific. It was followed by an elaborate
role-playing of an actual voting station which was just the opposite - con­
crete, detailed and participatory, an effective apprenticing of the audience to
the various stages of ballot collecting and casting. People acted out showing
their identity document (ID), getting inked and being exposed to ultraviolet
light, and they filled in ballots. Different ways to spoil a ballot paper were
demonstrated. There was considerable gaiety and joking around role-playing
46 Μ. Prinsloo and S. Robins

voters in the voting stations, including those who were drunk or under-age.
The mock election effectively informed the audience of the details of the
voting process and demystified the event for them.
Among more homogeneous audiences, and particularly where they
were middle-class/professionals, the ambience and informal dialogue were
more relaxed but the framework remained unchanged. At a Hout Bay church
(March 1994) the audience was all women, many of them teachers. The
trainers, in this case, assumed a commonality of shared identity with their
audience not visible in the hospital, motor works or engineering factory,
embracing them within their concept of 'good citizens'. The informal com­
ments and illustrative examples of the trainers became more intimate and
more gendered:

Instead of gossiping with Jessica on the phone, do voter educa­

tion on the phone. Discuss issues like democracy, justice, peace!
Because the whole purpose of civil society is that ordinary
people, you and I, can engage in these kinds of discussions,
critically.

When the sample ballot papers were circulated in Hout Bay there was
informal but collective and animated discussion of the colours of the party
insignia and the relative attractiveness of some of the candidates, General
Constand Viljoen getting the thumbs up from this mainly Coloured female
group, for presentation if not politics. Such discussions, which linked the
familiar social banter of women discussing men with the voting event,
clearly brought the process closer to the audience.

Not why to vote, but how and where

At the Xhosa compound in Lambert's Bay, north of Saldanha Bay, we came

across an entirely different situation. Here we attended an ANC voter educa­
tion meeting in a small community hall (March 1994). The meeting began
with a video. The session was organised by Veetu, a University of the
Western Cape-based, pro-ANC but purportedly neutral voter education unit.
After having shown the video, a Veetu instructor reminded the captive audi­
ence that they should look out for 'the wheel and the spear' (the ANC logo)
when they voted. He also went through other issues and procedures such as
documentation, invisible ink, the two ballot system and so on. He said that
the White man/employer was saying that when people voted he would know
 Literacy, voter education and constructions of citizenship 47

how they voted. He assured them that their vote was secret. (Various ac­
counts of this claim that 'the White man' would know how people voted
were in circulation. One version of this story on the farms said that a light
would go on in the farmer's bedroom if a worker voted for the wrong party.)
A colleague observed an ANC voter education workshop in Cape Town and
noticed that people were simply being trained to put their cross in the ANC
box.
We visited a couple of farms near Citrusdal (March 1994). The farmers
would not let us talk to their workers but assured us that voter education
had taken place, organised collectively by the farmers and apparently run by
the NE Assuming a mutual concern, the farmers confided that the farm
workers had been told that they mustn't stray in the upper part of the ballot
form where they could get lost, but must go straight for the bottom, where
the NP was. ('Go for the bottom' was an informal NP slogan which simplified
the whole procedure of symbol identification, but which was subverted by
the late inclusion of Inkatha on the ballot, at the bottom.) If the ANC came
into power, the farm labourers were warned, the farmers would lose their
farms and they would lose their jobs. It was here that the one farmer ex­
plained to us how he required his workers to watch Agenda' (a current
affairs television programme) every evening in his lounge, assuming his
reading of the images and reports to be the same as theirs.

Sameness and difference

We have shown (1) that the election organisers' early anxieties that large
numbers of uneducated people would be out of the reach of the discourses of
citizenship, nation-building and electoral participation were at least partly
unfounded; and (2) that the educational practices of the different voter edu­
cation teams reflected an imagining of the identities of their audiences that
reproduced, more or less, their own self-images rather than their audiences'
heterogeneity. In the first case, a mass of people was constructed as a prob­
lematic 'other' whose characteristic feature ('illiteracy') defined their 'out­
sider' status as well as presenting a base for action. In the second case, that
of the voter education workshops, real differences had to be suppressed in
order to construct a common imagined subjectivity, that of citizens. Taking
a more complex 'social' view of literacy, rather than simplistically designat­
ing large sectors of the population as illiterate, enables us to understand
better how those people dealt with the demands of modern balloting, and
why the outcome was less dire than many reporters had predicted.
Chapter Two
Literacy, knowledge, gender and power
in the workplace on three farms in the
Western Cape
Diana Gibson

Illiteracy is one of the biggest handicaps these people have.

Teaching them literacy will make them full members of the com­
munity. There is so much they do not know. (Mrs A, wife of a
farmer)

The lack of access to basic education, including literacy and nu­

meracy, has consigned millions of our people to silence and
marginalisation from effective and meaningful participation in
social and economic development. This has had a particular
impact on women, who comprise a large proportion of the illit­
erate. (ANC, 1994:87)

Introduction
The above examples of prevalent discourses construct literacy 'as a common
sense social need' (Kell, 1994:7) and label people as literate or illiterate, re­
sulting in their inclusion or exclusion according to categorisations (Wickert,
1992:30) of ability, particularly in the workplace. Through such discourses
the 'illiterate' are portrayed as marginalised and in 'deficit' (Hull, 1994:43).
It is assumed that this deficiency impacts on their work performance and
that the acquisition of literacy skills will both empower and 'develop' them
(see O'Connor, 1994). These discourses also emphasise the need for women
to have literacy skills to participate more fully in the economic, political and
social spheres (Robinson Pant, 1995).
According to Wickert (1992:29), schooling, and by implication schooled
literacy, often functions to stratify society. Many studies reinforce percep­
tions of the 'illiterate' as somehow incapable of full participation in society.
50 D. Gibson

Literacy is then offered as a panacea to open doors to social status and eco­
nomic success (Fingeret, 1983). According to Levine (1986:125), the posses­
sion or lack of literacy skills impacts on occupational issues, yet there might
be variations according to kinds of work and work settings. At the start of
this research I assumed that 'school literacy' would influence the power, sta­
tus and economic rewards of workers. The picture which emerged was, how­
ever, far more complex and contradictory.
By referring to ethnographic research done on three fruit and wine
farms near Worcester in the Western Cape, I will explore the conflicting ways
in which being 'literate' was constructed through discourses in this
workplace. I will also illustrate that literacy/illiteracy per se was not neces­
sarily an indicator for empowerment in this workplace, although it was
linked with power in specific ways. Some male farm workers were not liter­
ate' in the conventional sense, yet their command of certain knowledge gave
them access to power, whereas the higher level of 'schooled' literacy among
the women did not. Literacy practices, then, were gendered in this work­
place and this case study did not necessarily correspond to the prevalent
discourses mentioned earlier.
The theoretical approach of this study views literacy as embedded in
discourse (Gee, 1990). The study ascribes to Street's (1984) ideological
model of literacy which is ideologically and culturally embedded in social
practices. This model distinguishes between the educational claims for lit­
eracy and its significance for specific social groups. It accordingly invest­
igates social institutions, and how they define literacy, including the way in
which they create and uphold associated literacy practices (Grillo, 1989).
The farm workers discussed in this research were so-called 'Coloured',
working class and Afrikaans speaking. The farms were owned by members
of one family in a partnership consisting of husband, wife and son and were
members of the Rural Foundation, a 'conservative' development organisa­
tion. The 79 adult farm workers were not unionised. These farms were fairly
representative of the smaller type of family-owned units prevalent in the
Western Cape. Products were grown and harvested on the farms but pro­
cessed elsewhere.
Although the majority of the farm workers could read and write, almost
a quarter could not, and were therefore categorised as 'illiterate' by conven­
tional literacy discourses. Through a survey of all the workers, I established
that the majority had formally acquired literacy skills through schooling:
there was a fairly similar distribution of men (61,5 per cent) and women
(55 per cent) with some primary school education. From Standard Six on-
 Literacy, knowledge, gender and power in the workplace 51

wards the picture changed - 6 per cent of the men and 20 per cent of the
women had some secondary school education (see Hill Lanz, 1994; Jacklin,
1994).

Men's work: knowledge and power without reading

and writing
In the autonomous model (Street, 1984) literacy is constructed as a univer­
sal, neutral, technical skill (Street, 1990:2, 3) and the 'working knowledge'
acquired by workers (Hull, 1994:52) is negated. Ignorance and lack of lit­
eracy are often presented as synonymous. According to Wickert (1992:31),
'illiteracy and the literate are in effect constructed or "made" in identifiable
political and social interests' in discourse sites like the workplace or class­
room. The use of certain definitions of literacy, especially as 'proof' of cer­
tain abilities, ultimately impacts on the social and economic position of both
the 'literate' and 'illiterate'.
The aim of this research was to gain a better understanding of how 'illit­
erate' people did their particular jobs, the skills they displayed and the ex­
tent to which their abilities were recognised by the employer. Using the per­
sonal narratives of workers, I tried to demonstrate how popular 'literacy'
discourses conflicted with the way in which 'illiterate' male farm workers'
knowledge and abilities were constructed, understood and recognised in the
workplace. Freek Jakobs1, an 'illiterate' farm worker, said:

I cannot really read or write, but I am actually like a person who

can read and write. I know my work. I think something and
when I have thought it I will not forget it again. I keep it in my
head, everything I know, I, how do you say, I file it. Yes, Ifileit
in my head and then I read it again ... My wife is different again
... It is almost as if something does not exist if she did not write
it down and read it again, whether it is work or what happens in
the world out there.

In her study of 'illiterate' adults' perceptions about literacy, Fingeret (1983)

found that they did not view themselves as dependent because they could
not read and write. Freek Jakobs called on a discourse about workers which
constructed the skills needed for effective work practices as not being
equivalent to those usually considered essential for literacy Through such
discourse workers were constructed as possessing competencies not
52 D. Gibson

necessarily similar to the cognitive skills associated with schooled literacy

(see Scribner, 1984).

What a farm needs is people with special skills, craftsmen,

builders, welders, plumbers, mechanics. Normal academic edu­
cation [literacy] is of little use on a farm. (Farmer's son)

Being male and a good worker, sobriety, the ability to get along with other
workers and 'farm' knowledge were considered more important than lit­
eracy, and some of the highest paid farm workers were males who had never
attended school and could not read or write. Thus certain kinds of know­
ledge were privileged, relegating 'school' knowledge and/or literacy to just
another of the many interrelated kinds of 'skills' a worker could use.
'Illiterate' male farm workers stressed their own strengths and the
highly valued skills they had to offer, despite having no 'book learning' (see
Fingeret, 1983). They gained the respect of co-workers and farmer, as well as
status and financial privileges, achieved relatively high levels of independ­
ence in the workplace and expressed feelings of self-worth and satisfaction.
According to Puckett's research in a rural eastern Kentucky community
(1992:139), men's subsistence/business activities are often more important
than literate activities, which are not considered to indicate intellectual acu­
ity and cannot replace the more valued 'common sense'. In a similar way
Luttrell's 1989 research among working-class White and Black women
indicates that 'common sense', a cultural form of knowledge, is as highly
valued as 'school intelligence'. This competency was equally valued on the
farms where I did research, and was not measured by formal educational
standards.
Apart from his other jobs, Migiel Hendriks, an unschooled/'illiterate'
farm worker, made wagons. Hendriks said the owner told him what was
wanted, he thought about it, examined other examples, planned and calcu­
lated accordingly. The complexities of his calculations are illustrated by the
following example.
He showed me the bed of one of his wagons. It consisted of one broad
metal sheet, stretching from back to front. A second sheet, about half its
breadth, was welded to the first from back to front on the wagon. To the
front was another, smaller sheet welded across the width. Hendriks first
measured another old wagon with a measuring tape:
 Literacy, knowledge, gender and power in the workplace 53

The bed was about one-and-a-half metres like this [across] and
about two and three-quarter metres like this [length].

According to Hendriks, the metal sheets he used were available in a number

of sizes. He ordered two sheets of 2 χ 1 metres. He adjusted the measure­
ments to fit the available material:

The wagon will be about one-and-a-half sheets like this

[across]. I cut one sheet in half. Then I have half left. At the top
I used this half and had a small piece left. [To place the beam and
axle] you have to know how heavy the material is and what the
wagon is going to be used for. Like this long wagon, it needs two
sets of wheels, or it is useless. If the weight is not distributed
evenly on it, say it lies too far to the back, then it will lift the
back of the tractor into the air. It is too long to balance properly
without two axles.

I would argue that Migiel Hendriks's competencies tie in with O'Connor's

(1994:278) surmise that workers who regularly perform various complex
physical and cognitive tasks cannot be described as unskilled or lacking
knowledge. Hendricks's calculations also resonate with Scribner's (1984)
research on the skills and knowledge of workers in a dairy. She calls it
'working intelligence', a concept which refers to 'intellect at work in what­
ever contexts and activities those may be and, more narrowly, to the
particular context of... the workplace' (p. 10). Using the kind of 'non-literal'
strategies described by Scribner, Hendriks built another smaller wagon, un­
like any other on the farm:

The boss said what kind of wagon he wanted. I thought about

how I was going to build it. For this kind of wagon, with a
shorter bed it costs less and is lighter if you use one axle. But the
axle must be in the correct place or the wagon will also tip over.
It depends on where you attach the jack, how long and heavy it
is. If the jackie is light, you put the axle more to the back. If the
jack is heavy, the axle must be more to the front. Otherwise it
will tip over or it will lift the tractor. You have to use your com­
mon sense. When I finally made the wagon I knew exactly how
I was going to go about it.
54 D. Gibson

To illustrate his calculations for placing the axle, Hendriks used a wheelbar­
row as example:

If you put bricks in it, it falls over if it does not have this [sup­
port/prop]. If there is just one wheel this happens.

He lifted it up by the handles to show that he was distributing the weight

between his hands and the wheel and then tipped it on its side. 'Or this hap1
pens.' (I deduced that two wheels distribute the weight across the length of
the axle.)

Now look, the wagon (pointing at it). If I load it with peaches and
it has two wheels, then we do not... (sweeps his hand from side
to side to indicate that the load is even). If the jackie is short ...

He put the fingers of his left hand near his right arm, with the little finger at
the bottom and the index finger a short way from the wrist. The left hand's
index finger seemed to represent the axle and the right arm was probably the
body of the wagon, with the right wrist acting as the fulcrum and the points
of the fingers representing the towbar. He bent his right arm (body of wagon)
so that the elbow now pointed to the ground and the fingers (towbar)
pointed into the air. This happens, it lifts the tractor in the air.' He moved
his right elbow up and down to show that the weight of the load at the elbow
would force the hand up into the air. I could clearly visualise the towbar and
back of the tractor being lifted up by the weight of the elbow resting on the
fingers close to the wrist.

D.G. (researcher): And when the jack is heavy?

Hendriks: Then it's like this.

Hendriks moved the fingers of his left hand (axle) from the vicinity of the
right wrist closer to his right elbow (body of wagon). He then pointed the
right hand towards the ground. He moved the right arm up and down once
more, always ending with the fingers pointing to the ground. This hap­
pens.' He then placed the fingers of his left hand, the 'tractor', facing the fin­
gers of the 'wagon' arm. The two middle fingers apparently represented the
fulcrum, with both elbows pointing up into the air and the fingers of both
hands pointing towards the ground. 'You see this?' I deduced that the
 Literacy, knowledge, gender and power in the workplace 55

weight of the long jack would push the towbar of the tractor into the ground
and lift the small front wheels into the air.
Kusterer (1978, cited in Hull, 1994) pointed out that workers such as
bank tellers and machine operators draw on supplementary knowledge to
perform their work tasks. Similarly, Migiel Hendriks drew on an under­
standing of the distribution of weights, leverage, two- and three-
dimensional constructions and spatial thinking. According to Gee's
(1990:153) definition, Hendriks had mastered a secondary discourse in­
volving 'a great many of the same skills, behaviours and ways of thinking
that we associate with literacy', despite not having 'mastery of, or fluent
control over a secondary discourse involving print'.

I may not be able to read or write, but I use something I have

learnt in one case and adapt it a bit to fit in another case. When
I looked at that first wagon, I measured it and calculated how
much I would need to make it. Then I adapted those measure­
ments to the second and third and fourth wagons I made. By the
second wagon I almost always ordered the correct amount of
material. (Migiel Hendriks)

According to O'Connor (1994:270), workers often acquire specialised 'work

knowledge' through enculturation in the workplace. Like Hendriks, many of
the 'illiterate' farm workers stressed that they had learnt their skills from
other workers through collective experience or apprenticeship in the
workplace (see Luttrell, 1989).
Scribner's research in a dairy (1984) indicates that workers display dif­
ferential patterns of skills, including different ways of solving problems.
This resonates with the numeracy skills Hendriks used to calculate the ma­
terial he needed to make burglar bars for the farmhouse. The house had nine
large and three small windows. Being familiar with the standard lengths for
metal bars, Hendriks calculated the bars needed:

It's four, five, ten. That's two. Then fifteen, twenty (slight move­
ments with both hands, as if he is adding first the one, and then
the other while counting). That's four. And twenty-five, thirty.
Six. Thirty-five, forty. That's eight. And forty-five. That's nine.
That makes it forty. Then nine, eight, seven, six, thirty-six. And
two, three, four, five, six. Okay, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Forty
and two. That's it, forty-two.
56 D. Gibson

To calculate the number of burglar bars, Hendriks worked on two bars for a
large window and four for a small one. For the nine large windows he
counted in fives to forty-five, then subtracted nine, by counting backwards
to thirty-six. He counted the bars for small windows on his fingers to get six,
then added it by counting from six to ten (forty). The remaining two made
forty-two.
According to Scribner (1984:39), 'skilled practical thinking is goal-
directed and varies adaptively with the changing properties of problems and
changing conditions in the task environment'.
In a similar way Hans Amos, an illiterate' worker, was able to calculate
how much he had to pay for items bought for R2.99, R3.85, R1.29 and
R2.55 respectively. He calculated as follows:

2.99 is almost three rand. 3.85 is almost four rand. I have four,
five, six, seven rand here. Then I have one cent there. It's eighty-
five, six, seven, eight, nine, it's ninety. That makes five cents
there. And the one cent is six there. So it is ninety there and the
four rand there. That makes ten here and then the six there. So
it's seven rand here and the ten and the six there, the seven and
the ten and the six. It is eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fif­
teen, sixteen. It is the seven rand here and the sixteen cents
there.

Amos added (a) R2.99 + (b) R3.85. He rounded (a) and (b) off to rands. He
added R3.00, leaving one cent change, and R4.00 (a+b). He counted (on fin­
gers) from 85, that is, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, to 90, leaving ten to equal
R1.00. Adding the one, five, and ten cents, he paid R7.00, leaving 16 cents.
To add the R1.29 and R2.55 (c+d), he calculated:

Okay, it is seven, eight, nine, ten rand and the sixteen cents
stays. It's one cent, seventeen and the five. That's seventeen.
The seventeen and then thefive.Ummm, three and the five, that
is six, seven, eight. Eighty. Then the five, it's still there. It's
eighty-five. So I have ten here and eighty-five here. That is al­
most eleven. Let me see, one there, two there, three, four, five,
no, no, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. So I have ninety there and
then one hundred. That's ten (he counts on fingers), eleven,
twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen there. So it's eleven here and
seventeen there. That is twenty there and fifteen there. Yes, and
 Literacy, knowledge, gender and power in the workplace 57

the three. Yes (counts fingers), one, two, three, four, five, six,
seven, eight, nine, ten here. Thirty here. Then five there and the
three. That makes two there. And thirty here. So I will give
eleven rand here and there is the thirty-two cents. They will give
me thirty-two cents.

To add (c) R1.29 + (d) R2.55, Amos added R1.00 and R2.00 to the R7.00,
equalling R10.00. Then he added 30 and 50 to get 80. He added one
(29+1=30) to the 16 to get 17. For (d) he had 55 cents, he added 30 (c) to
get 85. Then he reminded himself of the R10 (a+b+c+d) and he still had 85
to deal with. This was almost R1.00, giving him Rl 1.00. He reminded him­
self of the 17 cents change from a+b+c. The 15 he added to 17 to get 32. He
paid R11.00 and got 32 cents change for a debt of R10.68.
Hans Amos never came to R10.68, the 'correct' amount, yet his calcula­
tions were correct. Ultimately he was concerned with the interaction which
would happen - he assumed he would not have the correct amount on him
and consequently did not bother to calculate it. Amos's calculations par­
alleled the use of an abacus where the processes involving tens and units
are both independent and related (Caroline Long, mathematician, personal
communication).
According to O'Connor (1994:281), work is often collective and the
'work group', which is the focus of skills, should be examined. To illustrate
this I use the example of the irrigation system installed by a team of mostly
'illiterate' male workers on the farm. To do this, they used a diagram and,
without being able to read the names, were able to understand how it repre­
sented a system stretching over a large area on the farm (see Figure 1, page
58). Hendriks explained:

This is thefilter,this is the sluice pipe and here are the taps. This
is the other bigger tap. Here it comes into the filter, goes out
again and branches off. Here are the different branches. These
are the main pipes, and these the branches. This is the first
block [vineyards/orchards]. Here comes the first tap, there is the
second. This is the dowel, the third, the fourth, the last tap. This
is how the rows lie [trees/vines]. You can see where the rows are.
You see where the rows end, then you count from there where
the next one must come. Here are the droppers.
58 D. Gibson

Figure 1: 'Illiterate' farm workers used this complex diagram to install

an irrigation system.
 Literacy, knowledge, gender and power in the workplace 59

'Reading' diagrams, building wagons and other 'illiterate' workers' skills

were constructed as being 'farm literate' by workers and employer alike. As
in Luttrell's research (1989:39), such 'working intelligence' or 'natural intel­
ligence' (farmer's son) made men, even when they could not read or write,
more powerful than women on the farm. 'It also identifies one as masculine,
capable of performing traditionally sex-stereotyped manly tasks' (Luttrell,
1989:39).

Women's work - literacy without power

According to Rockhill (1987:158) literacy is often treated as 'though it is
outside the social and political relations, ideological practices, and symbolic
meaning structures in which it is embedded' and 'conceptions of literacy as
power argue that literacy can empower, through collective action and the
enhancement of individual capacity'. Yet such conceptions do not give atten­
tion to the way in which power is lived through practices and relationships
and how this impacts on women.
Rockhill and Tomic's (1994) research among immigrant Canadian
women shows how the institutionalisation of 'heterosexism' serves to
constitute a woman as a 'spouse', a dependant, thereby constraining her
access to job training and employment. It is assumed that 'women do not
have to work to earn an income' (p. 203). A similar institutionalised gender
bias operated on the farms where I did research: the contract between farmer
and worker stipulated that 'female employees would only be employed if em­
ployment was available'.
Previously women could only work during harvest time, or when there
was plenty of work. They were paid paltry wages to do physically taxing la­
bour during harvest. In winter they were utterly dependent on their hus­
bands or kin, or both. As the farm was also home, women had to leave their
families to find employment elsewhere.
At the time of the research the female labour force was better educated
than the male, yet they could never be anything but ordinary farm labourers.
All women received the same low wages irrespective of schooling, and had
few opportunities to reach positions where they had at least some control
over what they did. For them, academic qualifications and literacy had little
use in the workplace. On the farm a girl's future was uncertain and educa­
tion was often the only way to ensure a livelihood or find work elsewhere,
as 'the farmers do not always give work to us [women]' (female farm
worker).
60 D. Gibson

According to Gerrie Vasvat, a farm worker:

When a woman works, even if she is the only one who earns the
money, a boss never thinks that she can be a breadwinner. Only
a man can be reckoned as a breadwinner.

Through such a patriarchal discourse men were constructed as the 'real·

breadwinners, and gender differentiation and power relations were legit­
imated. The man's wage was regarded as 'income' and that of the woman as
merely supplementary (see Hill Lanz, 1994). For the purposes of the
workplace, women's identities as workers were not recognised, but they
were constructed in terms of their roles in the reproductive and domestic
domains. This was reflected in the legal discourse of the contract which
stipulated that a pregnant woman had to take unpaid maternity leave for
twelve weeks. Except for two crèche supervisors and three domestic
workers, women were also not allowed to work on rainy days and conse­
quently received no wages at such times. According to a female worker they
were expected to: 'Clean our houses, do the washing, cook instead.'
In spite of generally having more 'schooled literacy' than men, farm
women were not viewed as sources of 'official, legitimate, or rational know­
ledge' related to farm work (Luttrell, 1989:40).

The women cannot do that work of the men. (Male overseer)

Women were consequently not constructed as 'real workers' and their eco­
nomic role in the workplace was viewed as largely subsidiary to that of men.
Women usually worked separately from the men and were always super­
vised by one of the local male overseers. According to the farmer's son the
reason for this was that women lacked the strength to do hard physical la­
bour like vine pruning. An overseer asserted that the work was not too tax­
ing, but that women were not given it because they had not been trained: 'If
they should get the training they will definitely be able to do it.'
Four of the women on the farm could drive tractors, but could not attend
courses to obtain licences. A male worker said:

We will never allow it. It's men's work. All men want to drive
tractors anyway, and even now there are not enough tractors.
There will not be a day when the women will be allowed.
 Literacy, knowledge, gender and power in the workplace 61

Thus women were prevented from getting access to the highly valued 'male'
work or farm knowledge. Through patriarchal discourses women's work
was constructed as lying mainly within the domestic domain, and with the
exception of the three domestic workers and the two women in charge of the
crèches on the farms, women doing farm work used no reading or writing in
the workplace, even when they had a high school education. Female farm
workers also did not express a feeling of achievement or of being in control
of their work. The only woman who seemed to have some sense of her own
unique abilities as a worker was Doortjie Karels, an 'illiterate' woman who
could erect fences. Her 'differentness' was emphasised by her working at
what was regarded as 'men's work', for example, assisting with the live­
stock, repairing windows, painting, and so on. Although she earned the
same as other farm women, Karels was acknowledged by the farmer as an
expert on fences. Her skills were reminiscent of those of Scribner's (1984)
dairy workers and, like male workers, she acquired them through appren­
ticeship to her father. Karels gave the following directions on how to erect
fences:

You measure it according to the number of paces. You plant a

corner pole and then you pull a long piece of wire to aim the
poles, where you are going to put the fence [and] on a thousand
yards two rolls of wire are used.

In contrast to Karels, Lissie Pieterse had passed Standard Eight and did or­
dinary farm work. She had previously worked as a shop assistant nearby,
where she wrote out accounts, took stock, ordered items, and was given re­
sponsibility for the money, and so on.

Sometimes when the woman is away, then everything is my re­

sponsibility. It is not like here. See here, when the boss appoints
me, the work is really the foreman's responsibility, because we
women do not really have responsibility here. And that is the
way it stays.

When Pieterse had a baby, she lost her job and had to start working on the
farm. From a job requiring a high level of literacy and responsibility, she
moved to doing work which required very few of her skills: 'They expect so
little from me. I liked it in the shop where I could take charge sometimes'
(Lissie Pieterse).
62 D. Gibson

Being a woman, and not having 'farm knowledge', Lissie Pieterse was
not accorded responsibility, and would probably never be able to attend a
training course.
For the majority of farm women reading and writing was used almost
exclusively outside the workplace: in the home, in shops, government of­
fices, clinics and in the church (see Puckett, 1992; Rockhill, 1987). Accord­
ingly, women's literacy practices closely related to notions of 'school' literacy
and perceptions of women's roles and identities as being bound up with the
family, and, by extension, the religious sphere.
Farm women's reading and writing practices were closely connected to
'local conceptions of women's "place" and cultural identity' (Puckett,
1992:141): the construction of their identities as mothers and caregivers of
the family (Rockhill, 1987). Women helped children with homework, read
stories to them, enrolled them at school, took them to clinics or hospital and
often shouldered responsibility for older kin's pensions or disability grants.
Like most of 'women's work' in the domestic domain, these forms of literacy
nevertheless remained largely invisible (Rockhill, 1987), especially to the
employer.
Women's reading and writing skills also enabled them to control the
household finances and transactions. Both men and women indicated that
it was the women in the family who did most of the household literacy work
and handled finances and bank or post office savings, did shopping, and so
on.

My wife does the shopping. I give all the money to her. She puts
it in the bank. She saves ... She signs papers and so on. (Male
farm worker)

Because women needed literacy to interact on behalf of the family in the

more public sphere of doing shopping, 'illiterate' women expressed greater
concern with their inability to read or write than men. As literacy on the
farm had a social nature they could nevertheless get assistance from a wide
range of people and especially family members (see Fingeret, 1983).
Religion was one of the most important sites of literacy practices in the
lives of farm workers and women's literacy often revolved around religious
activities. According to a farm woman, Katryn Jakobs: 'Most of the reading
and writing I do has to do with the church.'
Although geared towards both the private and public domains of reli­
gion, such literacy practices were constructed largely as an extension of
 Literacy, knowledge, gender and power in the workplace 63

women's identities as caregivers of the family's spirituality. On the farm the

majority of the deacons and elders at the local congregation were women
who used reading and writing extensively as part of their duties. The local
church lacked a full-time minister, and services were almost always con­
ducted by a woman who prepared Scripture readings and led the service.
In a study on the literacies of American workers, Gowen (1994) points
out that workplace structures often contribute to people's remaining in
entry-level jobs. Contrastingly, the church 'exhibits many of the principles of
the "new" workplace' (p. 18) and creatively organises work in such a way as
to draw on the skills of literate and illiterate alike. Unlike their position in
the workplace, farm women were similarly valued and important members
of their church and could use their skills accordingly.

Conclusions
Farm workers' literacy practices were embedded in power relationships be­
tween worker, farmer, men and women. On the one hand, it was in the inter­
ests of the farmer to employ male workers irrespective of levels of 'school'
literacy, thus ensuring a cheap and stable labour force, which would not
easily find employment in town. Yet by constructing them as 'illiterate', con­
ventional literacy discourses contributed to the disempowerment of such
skilled workers. In contrast, their competencies were acknowledged on the
farm, enabling workers to dispute prevailing discourses which constructed
'schooled' literacy as a social necessity and labelled them negatively because
they had failed to master it.
'Farm' knowledge/literacy was often privileged by both farmer and
workers, was inherently 'male' and could only be accessed by male workers.
This emphasis, and using gender as the primary criterion for employment,
power, or training, helped to reinforce the discourse about and consequent
power of the male breadwinner and the subordinate position of female
workers.
Literacy and power were interrelated in different ways and, where text-
related literacy was increasingly used in the workplace, for example in con­
tracts, it often legitimated gendered discourses. Women's literacy was
largely hidden from the farm workplace and they almost never used it there,
being accordingly constructed as lacking in 'work literacy'.
Women's literacy practices encompassed a wide range of activities out­
side the workplace, yet related closely to the construction of their roles and
identities within the domestic domain. Their reading and writing skills were
64 D. Gibson

valued in these contexts, and in the church were very public, giving them a
great deal of status.
Text-related or school literacy was consequently dominant in the prac­
tices of women and had to some extent become gendered, just as, for men,
work-related competencies and knowledge were interpreted as being 'male'
and served to empower. By contrast, for women literacy in itself did not
automatically empower in the workplace.

Note
1. Pseudonyms have been used throughout this chapter, to protect the identity of
the people referred to.
Chapter Three
Literacy and communication in a Cape
factory
Mignonne Breier and Lynette Sait
This chapter focuses on the uses of literacy in a section of a Western Cape
factory where workers hand-moulded products out of material containing
asbestos. This is a substance known to cause life-threatening diseases if its
fibres are inhaled over a long period.
Although the majority of workers who performed this task had had little
or no schooling, they were surrounded by written texts ranging from signs
designed to protect their safety to complicated performance graphs geared to
motivate production and newsletters and memoranda aimed at commun­
icating management decisions.
At the time of our research, management was concerned about com­
munication at the factory (workers were not reading or understanding its
directives and an oral briefing system involving supervisors and shop
stewards was proving ineffective). The company was introducing a literacy
education programme in the hope that it would help improve worker under­
standing of management communications and thereby increase productiv­
ity, prevent industrial relations disputes and pave the way for participatory
management processes. They expressly excluded the reasons for literacy
education which unions usually prioritise, namely worker empowerment,
advancement and mobility. The following extract from an interview with
two personnel managers makes this clear:

M.B. (researcher): So you would say [your decision to introduce

literacy classes] is more than just a token gesture towards adult
education?
J.B. (human resources manager): It's basically a business decision.
S. W (senior human resources officer): It's a business decision.
It's nothing to do with tokenism or affirmative action or social
responsibility.
66 Μ. Breier and L. Sait

The comments of these managers were similar to those of the personnel

manager of another company whom we interviewed in a separate study,
suggesting that such expectations were not peculiar to this factory alone.
The expectations of these managers appeared to be based on a deficit
model of workers' skills in which the onus for improved communication
(along with improved productivity and industrial relations) lay with the in­
dividual worker's reading and writing skills. They echoed a discourse which
is dominant in other countries. O'Connor in Australia has written about the
'rhetoric of panic and crisis around notions of workers' skill deficiencies',
which seeks solutions for poor economic performance in 'micro-economic
reform grounded in education and training policies' (1994:4). Sheryl Gowen
(1994:125), writing of the United States experience, says this discourse,
which is also prevalent there, leads to 'a casting of blame of the ultimate
flaws in Taylorism and industrialisation and the nation's resultant inability
to compete in a more competitive and sophisticated global economy directly
on American workers and the schools that have educated them'. Yet, Amer­
ican businesses are in trouble for a wide variety of reasons that have noth­
ing to do with worker illiteracy'.
In South Africa the narrative takes a slightly different turn because the
workers concerned often had little or no schooling or a particularly inad­
equate type of schooling, thanks to the inequities of decades of National
Party (NP) rule and an education system that discriminated against Black
children (see Samuel, 1990:17-29). In overseas versions, the workers con­
cerned are sometimes able to read and write in one language but not in an­
other dominant language such as English (see Rockhill, 1993). Or they have
emerged from a considerable period of schooling with low literacy skills. In
South Africa the same can apply, particularly in the case of younger people
who have experienced some measure of schooling. Under the NP govern­
ment's 'Bantu' education system enrolments improved, particularly at pri­
mary school level. However, the quality of the education provided under this
system was low. This factor, combined with the dominance in the market­
place of languages like English and Afrikaans, not the first languages of the
majority of African people in this country, meant that a youngster entering
the job market could be labelled 'illiterate' even when he or she could read
and write in a mother tongue.
But often, in the South African version of this narrative, one is speaking
of a worker who has never been to any kind of school, and who might liter­
ally have to be taught how to pick up a pen and write his or her name. Often
this is an older worker, who comes from Transkei or Ciskei (now the Eastern
 Literacy and communication in a Cape factory 67

Cape) where school enrolments began to increase only relatively recently

(Jacklin,1994). Nonetheless the gist of the narrative is the same: company
performance generally is blamed on the individual worker's educational
deficit.
Such a focus coincides, to some extent, with the interests of workers'
unions which demand educational redress; in their case, however, the dis­
course is of worker empowerment, multiskilling and mobility rather than
company profit, productivity and performance. At the factory we researched,
the union was pressing for adult basic education in work time for all 'illiter­
ate' workers and company financial assistance for all other study. According
to the company's training officer, 65 per cent of the workforce was 'illiter­
ate'. (A worker was considered 'illiterate' if he or she had had little or no
schooling and could not read and write.)
In 'moulded goods' (the name of the section where we did our research)
120 workers were employed to mould garden pots, water tanks and building
products or to perform related functions, such as driving the small trucks
which delivered material to the factory floor or assembling or sorting the
products. One hundred of the workers were African men whose first lan­
guage, mainly, was Xhosa. The remaining 20 workers were Coloured
women whose first language was Afrikaans. As part of the research, a ques­
tionnaire was administered to 76 workers selected on a random basis. Of
these 28 (37 per cent) said they had had no schooling at all. Four of these
workers were Coloured women from the Western Cape aged between 38 and
46 years (average age 42 years) and 24 were African men from the Transkei
aged between 30 and 59 years (average age 44 years). Only 22 workers
(30 per cent) said they had been beyond primary school. The highest stand­
ard achieved was Standard Eight. A total of 26 workers had received pri­
mary school education only, ranging from one to seven years' schooling.
Our research indicated that the relationship between literacy education
and worker empowerment was likely to be far more complex than the union
assumed, just as the relationship between literacy education and worker-
management communication was likely to be far more indirect than man­
agement envisaged. This was because neither had developed strategies to
bridge the gap between management discourses (and their accompanying
literacy and numeracy practices) and workers' discourses (and their literacy
and numeracy practices).
Worker empowerment was going to require not only the ability to make
sense of combinations of letters, to 'read' and 'write' in the conventional
senses of the words, but also an understanding of, and ability to manipu-
68 Μ. Breier and L. Sait

late, the secondary discourses (Gee, 1990) that determined their particular
arrangement. Management did not only want workers to be able to decipher
the particular combinations of letters and white space that it put up on the
notice-board from time to time. It also wanted them to understand and ac­
cept the particular work ethic that lay behind the notices - an ethic that em­
phasised worker productivity even as it deflected attention away from the
very serious health issues that constantly threatened to undermine produc­
tivity.
In this chapter we develop an account of the divergence between man­
agement and worker discourses and literacy and numeracy practices by re­
ferring to some of the texts and terms used in management's attempts to
communicate with workers. We also refer to a written procedure designed to
facilitate worker-management communication on health issues (the safety
representative system) and to workers' own literacy practices beyond their
immediate work tasks.

Management-worker communication: signs and notices

Although management perceived the majority of the workers in the
moulded goods section of this factory as illiterate', it produced numerous
written texts that were ostensibly directed at the workers and displayed on
the factoryfloor.These ranged from safety signs and notices (some of them
accompanied by pictures or colour coded) to complicated performance
charts and graphs and notices and newsletters put up on a notice-board at
the front of the factory floor, often to communicate company rules or de­
cisions. In terms of management's own construction of workers' illiteracy,
many of these texts should have been unintelligible to most of the workers.
In the notice about sicknotes (see Figure 2, page 69), management has
made an attempt to meet worker discourses by translating its message into
Xhosa, the language spoken by 83 per cent of the workforce. However, it has
ignored the remaining 17 per cent who happened to be Afrikaans speaking.
The notice has been written in a formal, bureaucratic style similar to the
style of the employment contracts that Kathy Waiters encountered in her
study of a liberal church school (see Chapter 4). The tone is hostile and the
content ignores, or is out of touch with, workers' ongoing and justified con­
cerns about their health.
Where management did try to address workers' concerns and interests
(in a newsletter that reported on workers' birthdays and marriages along
with news of achievement awards and lessons on quality control), its at­
tempts seemed misguided and ill-informed about their needs and priorities.
 NOTICE

S ICK N O TE S

The company is receiving an increasing number of incomplete and illegible

sicknotes. I would like to confirm a guideline set out by the Medical Council
to doctors and which we also except as standard for a sicknote to be valid.
1. The doctór's name, address and registration number must appear on the
sicknote.
2. The doctor must state the patient's name, the date of consultation,
sickness and the dates for which he has booked off the employee. The
name on the sicknote must correspond with the employee's name on
company records.
Please ensure that the doctor's certificate conform to the above standards.

ISAZISO
ANAPHEPHA OKUGULA

Inkampani ifumana amaphepha oogqirha amaninzi angabhalwanga ngokuzeleyo,

amanye akekho mthethweni (omgunyathi). Ndinazisa nge emit sha cmiesna emiselwe
ngumbutho we zonyango kogqirha.
1. Kwiphephalokugula kufuneka ugqirha abhale igama lakhe, idilesi yakhe
nenombolo yakhe yokusebenza (registeration number).

2. Ugqirha kufuneka abhale igama lesigulani, nomhla ebesibone ngawo

isigulane eso, uhlobo lwesigulo nentsuku ezo ugqirha azinike umguli
ukuba angaphangeli ngazo.
Amagama abhalsiwayo kumaphepha kagqirha kufuneka afane namagama
enibhalise ngawo apha efemini.
NB: Ncedani basebenzi ngiqisekise ukuba qogqirha bayazibhala zonke
ezingcukagca zingenthla.

31 JANUARY 1992

Figure 2: Example of a notice put up by management concerning

workers' absences.
70 Μ. Breier and L. Sait

Most of management's notices appeared to have been produced to satisfy le­

gal requirements or as backups in cases of dispute. We were told that the no­
tices were accompanied by an oral briefing system in which information was
passed on verbally through the supervisors and shop stewards, but that this
did not work well. Workers very seldom interacted with these texts. When Sait
tried to establish why this was so, she evoked defensive reactions. Minnie
Hendriks1, the only female supervisor in the company, was normally confi­
dent and friendly, but when Sait asked her whether she regularly read the
notices in the factory, she terminated the interview abruptly. She said she was
busy and didn't have time to read them because 'I have to be here and I have
to be there and I am always running around'. Yet this same woman, who had
a Standard Six education, spent entire Sundays interacting with religious
texts at her church (sometimes after a six-day working week).
Two workers told us that they looked at the notice-board regularly -
Andrew Mohlaba, who had passed Standard Six, said he looked for employ­
ment advertisements and Tessa Jantjies, with a Standard Eight, said she
learnt of workers' deaths in this way.
Our research showed that most of the workers had acquired the general
gist of the safety signs positioned around the factory floor even if, in some
cases, they could not actually read the words on the signs. The safety notices
were generally in English and Xhosa and sometimes Afrikaans as well. One,
which appeared at several points on the factory floor, urged workers to 'Wet
the floor before sweeping' and was accompanied by a picture of a worker with
a broom and pail. (The wetting process is to prevent inhalation of asbestos
dust.) Workers commented that they liked this one best because of its picture.
The fact that workers did manage to extract information that interested
or concerned them from the safety signs and management notices indicated
that their lack of engagement with some company communications did not
depend entirely on questions of ability (ability to read on their part, and
readability on the part of the notices). Their lack of engagement also indic­
ated apathy - possibly even a degree of resistance - to the content of the
communications that the company management directed at them.

Worker-management communication: the safety

representative system
The safety representative system was an attempt to protect the interests of
workers at the factory. In accordance with national safety regulations, the
workers of each department at the factory had to elect a safety represent-
 Literacy and communication in a Cape factory 71

ative. The moulded goods section had three. The representatives had
monthly meetings with management at which safety issues were discussed
and at which each was given a file which contained a number of blank
check-lists which he or she had to complete a week before the meeting.
The format of the safety check-lists both facilitated and constrained
worker responses. On the one hand, they reminded workers of aspects of the
factory that needed to be checked and provided neat spaces in which they
could place their answers. On the other, by simply providing a list of their
own for the workers to follow, management limited the range of probable
answers and made it difficult for workers to raise new categories or sites for
inspection. Although worker discourses were suffused with narratives
about pain and suffering in relation to the asbestos with which they worked,
the various categories for inspection did not mention the word. The only
category where it might have been appropriate was entitled 'pollution' (see
Figure 3, page 72).
The safety representative who completed this form said that he was ad­
vised on his training course not merely to respond to every category with a
tick. On the form (reproduced in Figure 3) he tried to raise with management
the issue of safety boots at the factory, which protect workers' feet but which
had to be paid for by the workers themselves. Two months later he was still
raising the issue with management, according to the minutes of a safety
committee meeting, and eight months on - when we completed our field
work - workers were still having to buy their own safety boots. His com­
ments and documentation indicated that the system did not necessarily help
workers to achieve their demands, while it certainly helped to contain them.
Union official Lindile Modise commented that the safety representative
system was relatively new and that representatives had not been trained to
comment on dust levels in the factory. Only people who had received special­
ised training were competent to do so. They measured dust levels on the
factory floor and submitted reports which were circulated to various people,
including the union official himself. Breier was permitted to glance at one
such report and found it highly technical and extremely difficult reading.
Modise's response was indicative of the extent to which notions of spe­
cialisation were being used to define and control the terms under which is­
sues concerning asbestos dust could be raised at the factory. The ideas,
which had their origins in management discourses but had been accepted by
union officials too, specified who could speak about the issue (only the spe­
cially qualified) and on what terms (only in the form of specialised, technical
reports).
Figure 3: Check-list completed by safety representative with a Standard
Six education (the equivalent of eightyears' schooling).
 Chapter Three 73

The workers' voice had to be channelled through either the safety or the
union representative and, via them, through a morass of forms and tech­
nical documentation which, at the very least, was not in their own home
language. We were not surprised when Modise admitted that workers had
not raised any issues concerning asbestos in response to the experts' re­
ports. We came across only one attempt to raise an asbestos-related issue
using the safety representative's monthly check-list. In this case the repre­
sentative had written, in the space marked 'pollution': 'much asbestos on
the floor at sections 6021-6022'. This did not seem to be a challenge to
management at all. Given the fact that it was the responsibility of workers to
clean thefloor,the implication here was that the workers were somehow at
fault for the asbestos lying around. Management was not taken to task for
continuing to use asbestos when it was meant to have been phased out of
the factory.2 We do not know management's response. But the worker's re­
port the following month had only this to say in the section marked 'pollu­
tion': 'nothing'.
Workers' complaints about asbestos were expressed in terms entirely
different from those used by management. They could not comment on dust
levels but they could speak of the ways in which their bodies reacted - with
rashes, sores, chest pains and coughs. The following complaint by a worker
to her supervisor, overheard by Sait, gives a sense of the physical and emo­
tional texture of worker discourses: 'My foot is hurting again and there is a
hole in it and in my leg and it's because of the asbestos, your asbestos.'
This worker was asking the supervisor to allow her time off to see a
doctor. She was one of the people who would have benefited from the free
safety boots which the safety representative tried to demand on the form
shown in Figure 3. In the conversation quoted here, the supervisor dis­
missed her complaint with the following comment: 'No, it's Satan, it's
Satan that's doing this to you.' Whereupon the worker said resignedly:
'Just sign my card for me so I can go to the doctor and he will just give me
cream again.'
Now, in the context of the black humour that was typical of workers'
conversations at this factory, and given the fact that this supervisor was
himself a person of colour and once a worker, his comment about Satan was
probably not as heartless as it might seem at first. It was just another exam­
ple of the way in which, at various levels of this company, attention was
deflected away from oral complaints about asbestos.
The bureaucratic procedures and terminologies which management used
to deal with asbestos-related complaints sometimes led to misunderstanding
74 Μ. Breier and L. Sait

and frustration on the part of workers, as the case of moulded goods worker,
Malcolm Radebe, illustrates.
Radebe was a Xhosa worker in his fifties who had been employed at this
factory for 30 years and believed he had asbestosis (an asbestos-related dis­
ease) badly enough to warrant early retirement. In interviews with Sait he
coughed frequently and complained of pains in his 'heart'. He said the com­
pany's nurse told him that she had received a letter from Pretoria (regarded
as the bureaucratic capital of South Africa) saying there was nothing wrong
with him but he had informed her otherwise.

Last year I got a letter from Pretoria straight to me. Pretoria tell
me: You got a dangerous from the 29th of June last year... A
[nursing] sister call me another day. Sister tell me: 'Here is a let­
ter which comes from Pretoria. It tell you there's nothing
wrong.' (Radebe laughs loudly.) I tell that sister, I've got a letter
from Pretoria myself. It tell me I got a dangerous from the 29th
of June 1993.

Radebe then showed Sait a piece of paper (see Figure 4, page 75). It was an
appendix to another document and stated, next to Radebe's name: 'abn. left
- submit as 40%.' Now to qualify for the company's early retirement pack­
age, one needed to be declared to have at least 40 per cent asbestosis in one
or both lungs. Radebe believed, on the strength of this scrap of paper, that
he qualified.
Modise told us later that this was an appendix to a letter from the Work­
ers' Clinic of the Industrial Health Research Group sent to the Workmen's
Compensation Commission in 1993 along with X-rays of the various work­
ers named. In terms of this letter and its appendix, it was recommended that
Radebe be declared '40%'.
Had this been accepted, he would have qualified for early retirement and
disability benefits. However, this recommendation was rejected by the com­
mission, as were the claims of other workers. Modise showed me a copy of a
letter sent to another worker on the list, rejecting that worker's claim, and
said Radebe would have received a similar letter but it had probably been
mislaid. He said that the way in which workers kept correspondence on their
persons often created problems. Documents got lost.
Radebe's 'letter' remained a mystery to us, even after this explanation
from the union. The only thing that seemed clear, after our attempt to un­
ravel his narrative, was the difficulty of translating workers' experience of
 Literacy and communication in a Cape factory 75

Figure 4: Appendix to a letterfromthe Workers' Clinic of the Industrial

Health Research Group, sent to the Workmen's Compensation
Commission in 1993.

pain, 'in the heart' and 'in the chest', sometimes 'all over', into terms accept­
able to a bureaucratic system that was spatially and discursively distant.

Management-worker communication: the bonus system

Although workers protested their physical conditions among themselves, to
their immediate supervisors and to the union, they had not yet gone on
strike because of them. Yet there had been work stoppages around the issue
of pay and, particularly, the bonus system that operated in the moulded
goods sections of all the branches of the factory to encourage production.
The system, which was complicated and caused widespread confusion,
was communicated in terms of 'percentages'. Workers were being allocated
76 Μ. Breier and L. Sait

production targets and were expected to produce at least 90 per cent of the
target amount. If their weekly performance was 100 per cent or more they
would receive an additional amount per hour, added to the standard rates
for their particular grade.
Targets had been worked out according to the 'standard minute values'
of the various products, a technical term to indicate the length of time which
a time and motion study officer declared appropriate for the moulding of
such a product. As products ranged from small pieces of guttering to huge
water tanks the standard minute values varied and so did the number of
products which a worker would be required to mould. A water tank moulder,
for example, might only have to mould one tank per day while the moulder
of small pieces of guttering would have to mould 80 and the moulder of a
medium-size garden flower pot might have to make 30. The standard
minute values were also affected by the thickness of the material used. The
bonus system did not work smoothly and supervisors were constantly hav­
ing to deal with complaints from workers who claimed they had not been
given bonuses they deserved.
Towards the end of our research period the system was altered to a new
bonus system, which operated on a team rather than an individual achieve­
ment basis. This was in response not only to complaints by workers who did
not receive regular bonuses but also to general demands for higher pay.
There was widespread confusion as to the exact details of this system -
management's own documentation on the subject contained contradictions
and conflicting figures. In an interview with personnel management we
gained yet another version. The union was unable to explain the system to
us and workers seemed mystified as to the details of its operation. Once
again it was being communicated in terms of 'percentages'. Our own inter­
pretation of the system went like this: Workers would achieve an 80 cents an
hour bonus once the group to which they belonged had achieved 90 per cent
productivity. They would receive individual performance bonuses once their
work exceeded 110 per cent (or 112 per cent, depending on which manage­
ment document you were referring to - a memorandum gave the first figure,
an agreement attached to the memorandum gave the second).

Understandings of the bonus system

We were intrigued as to how workers, with limited schooling, made sense of

systems that were expressed in terms of percentages, targets, performance
and standard minute values.
 Literacy and communication in a Cape factory 77

Interviews with moulders indicated not only a range of differing inter­

pretations and experiences of the system, but also widespread distrust and a
general sense that, somehow, it worked to the disadvantage of particular
workers. The word 'percentage' did not seem to arouse the same images of
school-learned algorithms and parts of a hundred which they evoked in us,
the researchers. Workers used the term confidently and fluently but in a way
that seemed far removed from the mathematical origins of the term. It was
clear at times that any other unfamiliar word could have been substituted. It
was the numbers that went with it that mattered, the way in which they in­
creased with higher production and greater pay and the mental images of
quantities of products which they seemed to evoke, linking them to particu­
lar work experiences.
Workers spoke of 'seeing' and 'feeling' the amount of work necessary to
achieve a bonus and of pots that had the inherent capacity to provide bo­
nuses while others did not. A certain number of pots of a particular kind
would lead to a bonus, some said, while the same number of another kind
would not. In expressing this understanding, they would borrow aspects of
the company's terminology and speak of 'pots with minutes' and 'pots that
don't have minutes'. This seemed to indicate a lack of understanding, on the
part of certain workers, of the bonus system and the fact that one had to
make more of certain kinds of pots than of others. But others seemed to be
challenging, in their own terms, the standard minute values on which the
bonus system was based. This was William Motsapi's perception of the way
in which it was decided that a particular kind of pot took 15 minutes to
make:

The man [presumably the work study officer] came and stood
next to me and timed how long it took me to make the pot. I
worked fast. I didn't stop. He said it took 15 minutes.

Later Motsapi found it very difficult (swaar) to mould the pot in that time
and therefore to get a bonus even though he kept a watch on the worktable
next to him and timed himself.
We came to the conclusion that two factors were causing the confusion
that surrounded the bonus system:
• The bonus system was based on calculations that were as likely to be in­
accurate as workers' emotional and visual perceptions of their work­
loads.
78 Μ. Breier and L. Sait

• The bonus system was being communicated in terms that were inap­
propriate for a workforce that was unschooled and therefore could
not be expected to know the mathematical meaning of the term 'per­
centage'.
The first of these points was confirmed when management instituted an
investigation to reconsider the standard minute values of the various
products. The second point was confirmed in an interview with Isaac
Mogotsi, the company training instructor, who showed us that, with
some effort, management could communicate percentages or fractions in
terms that were understandable to workers.
Mogotsi said the issue of percentage was a major problem at the fac­
tory: 'Once you talk about the percentage, man, you are just totally con­
fusing them.'
Mogotsi had worked as a process controller in another section of the
factory, where management also tried to communicate with workers
through the use of percentages and graphs. In this section, managers
produced graphs to show the percentage of production that was lost on
rejects. Mogotsi devised a system to illustrate to workers the points man­
agement was trying to get across in a way they would more easily under­
stand. He worked out what the percentages meant in terms of the
numbers of corrugated sheets and ceiling boards that had been rejected.
He then established what these rejected sheets were worth to the com­
pany and entered the various total values, in rands, onto the graphs. In
doing so he was engaging with worker discourses and practices often
characterised by fairly skilled handling of cash and recognition of writ­
ten amounts of money, despite an inability to read and write in other re­
spects (see Breier, 1994).
He said that with this system workers would come to him and say:
'Hey, we did well this month.' And he would say: 'How do you know
that?' 'Because I checked the graph,' the worker would say. And then he
knew that the system worked, and that workers had to 'experience' the
figures.
Mogotsi's system, which was not applied in the moulded goods sec­
tion, illustrates the importance for educators of an understanding of
everyday practice and knowledge in the communication of new concepts
and ideas. It also shows the need for a departure from the deficit model
of workers' skills. The deficit model would place the responsibility for
the communication almost entirely on the worker. It would be his fault if
 Literacy and communication in a Cape factory 79

he could not read the graph, not management's fault for producing a
graph so out of touch with workers' communicative needs.

Workers' literacy practices: at work

In contrast to their lack of involvement with management texts, workers in
the moulded goods section engaged in numerous literacy and numeracy
practices which, while they took place on or around the factoryfloor,did not
relate to their actual work. Workers unable to read or write got help from
colleagues who could, and sometimes reciprocated by buying cooldrinks,
sharing food, helping to clean a work station and even giving advice on how
to mould a specific pot faster. These strategies of reciprocity are similar to
those described by Fingeret (1983).
Weekly payslips were meticulously scanned by workers, schooled or
otherwise. It was common for workers to check each other's payslips and
compare wages. Some took their pay packets home, unopened, and got a
family member to do the checking. Workers' abilities to read their payslips
and deal with money were legendary at the factory.

If they are short maybe five cents they come and tell you there is
five cents short on my wage. So I don't know how, how can they
see, because they cannot read and write. (Minnie Hendriks, a
supervisor)

This confirmed our findings in other research where workers categorised as

'illiterate' were found to have mastered complicated numeracy practices (see
Gibson, Chapter 2).
The workers were also involved in collective savings schemes which,
while they did not necessarily require literacy on the part of individual
workers, certainly required it in a communal sense.
One such savings club worked in groups of six. Every member of the
group saved R100 a month by simply handing the cash to Minnie Hendriks,
the supervisor. Four people from the group took the money to the bank, and
whoever was able to read and write completed the necessary forms and dealt
with the bank officials. At the end of the year, the money was shared equally
among the group members and they each received a lump sum. They also
had a party. Individual workers benefited from the increased interest which
they earned by saving collectively. They also saved on transport (the com­
pany provided transport to the bank). Workers with limited literacy skills
80 Μ. Breier and L. Sait

benefited from the help of those who could read and write; they, in turn,
were not disadvantaged because each worker was presented with written
details of their savings.
The funeral lists which were regularly circulated in the workers' tea­
rooms were another example of workers' literacies. Normally they contained
the burial society's name as well as the name of the deceased. There was a
column for the contributor's name and another for the amount donated. A
person who was able to write would enter the contributors' names on their
behalf and fill in the amount donated - always less than Rl.OO.
Our research at the factory concentrated on workplace literacies but we
did try to gain some insight into leisure-time literacy practices by compiling
literacy diaries over a period of one week for four workers, two with a Stand­
ard Six education and two with a Standard Three. (These standards are
equivalent to eight andfiveyears' schooling respectively.) We were struck by
the importance of religious literacies (such as Bible and prayer readings and
Bible study classes) in the lives of all but one of these workers. Only this
worker reported no reading or writing activities in his leisure time, which
revolved around drinking and sleeping.

Literacy education at the factory

During our research period the company training instructor, Isaac Mogotsi,
was taking a pilot literacy class twice a week. Nine workers, including one
from moulded goods, had been selected from various departments for the
class. The programme used was Brand Knew, a straight-to-English literacy
programme based on 120 common brand names. The classes did little to
improve the workers' ability to read and write - after several months the
only claim management could make on their behalf was that they had
taught workers to write their names. Yet management insisted that they had
improved worker confidence (and, in the case of one worker, also productiv­
ity) and the training instructor said he knew the classes were a success be­
cause of the workers' reluctance to stop them and the way in which other
workers asked to join them.
Our observations of the class showed that it did not encourage workers
to bring their own texts to class or even to discuss issues that were on their
minds. Malcolm Radebe was a member of the beginners' class yet he had not
produced his precious letter' for deciphering there. Instead the learners la­
boured week after week to read words such as 'brand' and 'tick' or 'Omo' and
'Surf'3.
 Literacy and communication in a Cape factory 81

As we write this report, the union and management are finalising plans
for a large-scale literacy education programme in which workers defined as
'illiterate' will be exposed for four hours a week, in working hours, to an­
other adult basic education programme designed to meet the requirements
of a National Qualifications Framework.

Education and mobility at the factory

Although personnel management expressly excluded 'affirmative action' as a
motive for its literacy education plan, there were indications throughout the
factory that education - of a particular kind and at a particular level - did lead
to job mobility within the factory hierarchy The few workers whom we en­
countered who had managed to gain promotion all had at least nine years'
schooling. These included Minnie Hendriks, with a Standard Seven, who
graduated from moulder to supervisor, and Tessa Jantjies, with a Standard
Eight, who moved from moulder to clerk. Isaac Mogotsi, the company training
instructor, who joined the factory with a Standard Eight and was studying for
matric at an adult night school, had progressed from labourer through process
controller to company training instructor. A union shop steward who was
studying for a post-matric personnel management diploma at a technikon
progressed to full-time shop steward during our research period.
We did not observe any promotions within the job category of 'moulder'
during this same period. Although there was provision for upgrading based
on job performance, workers complained that they were seldom upgraded.
We drew the following conclusions from our observations:
• There was little opportunity for job mobility within the category of
'moulder', as that which had been provided was linked to production
output and not educational factors.
• Workers needed a basic education (of at least nine years' schooling) be­
fore they could benefit from the opportunities for job mobility which did
exist in the company
• The possibility of job promotion was an important motivation for fur­
ther study, even out of work hours.

Conclusions
When the personnel management of this factory said it wanted to introduce
literacy education to improve communication and industrial relations at the
82 Μ. Breier and L. Sait

factory, it placed the blame for these problems on workers' individual skill
deficits and concealed its own culpability for designing communications
that were out of touch with workers' interests and communicative needs. In
making this statement, they joined the chorus of voices (O' Connor, 1994:4)
around the globe that attributes declining business performances to work­
ers' individual skill deficits.
There is a difference, however, between this particular factory's version
of this discourse and its international counterpart. In this factory the
workers' concerned are mainly unschooled people who have been deprived
of the education generally regarded as a basic human right. In the interna­
tional versions of the discourse discussions around worker literacy' and
of reading and writing. Sometimes they are people who can read and write
in their home language but not in another language, such as English. Some­
times they are people who have been to school for lengthy periods but still
lack the reading and writing skills considered necessary for particular func­
tions in the society concerned.

Writers such as O'Connor (1994), Gowen (1994) and Wickert (1992)

have poked holes in the arguments presented in the overseas versions of
this discourse. Our own research challenged the theses of this factory man­
agement's version on two fronts:
1. The complexity of workers' literacy practices in spheres beyond their
immediate work tasks suggested that, despite the difficulties many of
them had in reading and writing on an individual basis, they were able
to perform quite complicated literacy- and numeracy-related tasks with
the help of friends and colleagues, in other words, in a communal or
social way. (Communally achieved literacy is also a feature of the taxi
industry, see Breier et al., Chapter 11.) This suggested that the fact that
the workers did not engage with company communications had some­
thing to do with the content of those communications as well as ques­
tions of ability or otherwise to read them.
2. Management presented a contradictory version of the deficit model. On
the one hand, it seemed anxious to introduce literacy education to help
improve communications at the factory and appeared to recognise that
a large proportion of its staff had difficulties reading and writing. On the
other hand, it produced notices, performance charts and graphs requir­
ing an advanced level of literacy, often in a second or third language.
And it used the concept of percentage - familiar only to those with for-
 Literacy and communication in a Cape factory 83

mal school-learned mathematics - to communicate important incentive

bonus systems to workers.
The communication gap between management and workers seemed to
have its origins in conflicting discourses and interests and in ignorance
about the nature and importance of discourse and its relationship to literacy
practices rather than the technical inability of the workers to read and write.
Where management did address issues that directly concerned workers (in
notices about workers' deaths or in safety notices), the workers managed to
get the message - with the help of friends and colleagues if necessary But
mostly management ignored or was ignorant of workers' concerns and
management's notices, in turn, were ignored by the workers.
We came to the conclusion that, if management really wanted to improve
communication at the factory, then it needed to understand and pay attention
to workers' communicative practices and interests and stop insisting that
communication take place on its terms alone, with the onus on workers to
acquire the necessary skills to participate. This meant there was as great a
need for management training that would facilitate understanding of worker
discourses and the limitations of its own as for worker literacy education.
In saying this we do not wish to deny the possible importance of appro­
priate literacy education for the workers of this factory. Our research showed
that literacy education at the factory was unlikely to have the effects man­
agement hoped to achieve. It was unlikely - on its own - to improve worker-
management communication or worker productivity within the job category
of moulder. However, literacy could play an important role in the lives of
workers with religious convictions and, if taken far enough, could provide
the basis for further training and job mobility. Yet personal empowerment
was one of the very purposes which the personnel management expressly
denied when it said it was not introducing literacy education for reasons of
'social responsibility' or 'affirmative action'.
Our research also indicated the difficulty of attaining worker empower­
ment in the presence of literacy practices linked to discourses of specialisa­
tion that specified only certain people could comment on certain things, and
then only in a certain way. The safety representative procedure was an ex­
ample of such a literacy practice. On the one hand, it seemed to offer workers
an avenue for expression. On the other, it contained and constrained their
responses, only permitting them to raise issues around asbestos, for ex­
ample, in a particular way, using terms like 'pollution' and 'ergonomics'
rather than 'dust' and 'worker comfort', and via 'experts' who were deemed
better qualified than workers to comment. In the process, workers' com­
plaints, most easily expressed in emotional, oral terms, were silenced.
84 Μ. Breier and L. Sait

Notes
1. Pseudonyms have been used in this chapter to protect the identity of the peo­
ple interviewed.
2. A South African daily newspaper reported in March 1991 that the company
was planning to phase asbestos out of all its products except water pipes by
October 1992. Asbestos fibres were to be replaced by organic fibres such as
hemp, wood and sisal.
3. 'Omo' and 'Surf' are the brandnames of two washing powders on sale in South
Africa.
Chapter Four
Communicative practices of the service
staff of a school
Kathy Watters

The currently dominant form of discourse around the provision of literacy to

adults in South Africa is linked closely to debates about development and
democratisation. The discourse has shifted from literacy' to Adult Basic
Education and Training' (ABET), and trainers, teachers and course devel­
opers now talk of exemplars and competencies instead of empowerment and
legitimacy.
The change has its origins in the work of the major trade union group­
ing, Cosatu (Congress of South African Trade Unions), who in the early nine­
ties argued that ABE (at that stage without the 'T') needed to be part of a na­
tional framework of education provision. Workers, they argued, needed to
be multiskilled, through a process of linkages between academic and techni­
cal education. This would ensure equity and portability and assist in the
growth of the economy. These arguments are in line with the observations
of O'Connor (1994:10) of a worldwide shift to 'new times' heralding the end
of Taylorism in the workplace and promising an era in favour of autonomy
and industrial democracy.
Cosatu also argued that although provision should ultimately be the
responsibility of the state there must also be significant input from labour
and business. The National Education Policy Investigation (NEPI, 1992) re­
commended that South Africa needed to move from a low participation, low
skill' vocational education training system to a 'high participation, high
skill' system for the economy to grow. Kraak (1991a) argued for an integ­
rated strategy to prevent institutional forces jeopardising the success of the
necessary vocational training. These concepts of Cosatu and NEPI, after a
process of negotiation involving all the major stakeholders, have now been
formalised into policy proposals and await legislature and funding.
In this chapter I contrast the current proposals for ABET provision with
the findings of a small study that focuses on the communicative practices of
the service staff of a private church school in South Africa.
For five months during 1994 I combined my role as parent of a child at
the school with that of researcher, following Shirley Brice Heath's precedent
86 . Watters

for doing ethnographic research in a site in which one is personally in­

volved (see Heath, 1983). My research focused on the communicative prac­
tices of the 46 'non-academic' employees (as the school called them) who
worked in the garden, boarding house, kitchen and laundry or did cleaning
or maintenance work at the school. Some were in supervisory positions.
I used various research methods to develop an understanding of the
communicative practices of these service workers in the workplace. My
methods included unstructured and semi-structured interviews with 14
workers, five first-line supervisors and three senior staff members and also
extensive observation of work processes. I also did secondary research and
gathered information about 28 other schools by means of a questionnaire.
During the initial stages of my research I discovered that the level of
education among the service workers was higher than I had expected. All
the workers had attended school and most had completed at least Standard
Five (about 7 years' schooling). Only two workers could be regarded as lack­
ing basic competence in reading and writing. This level of education com­
pared with the information I received from other schools:

Educational level at other schools based on questionnaire

No schooling: 2,0%
Less than 4 years' schooling (Less than Std 2) · 8,6%
Five to 7 years' schooling (Std 3 - Std 5) 53,7%
Eight to 12 years' schooling (Std 6 - Std 10) 30,3%
More than 12 years' schooling (More than Std 10) 5,4%
Total: 100,0%

This table indicates that only 10 per cent of the people working at the service
level in these schools had less than Standard Two. It would be reasonable to
assume therefore that 90 per cent of the employees had basic reading and
writing skills, this despite the fact that 92,3 per cent of the schools indicated
no education level requirements for jobs in these categories.
In this chapter I consider the dominant discourses of the school and the
communicative practices, specifically the literacy practices, that support
them. I also look at the relationship between communicative practices and
the organisation of work and space.
 Communicative practices of the service staff of a school 87

The fact that most workers had been to school, and had received a 'basic
education' at least, did not mean that they regularly used reading and
writing in the workplace. The way in which work was organised had an ef­
fect on the nature and frequency of literacy practices. I also found that lit­
eracy was part of work procedures used to control, regulate and monitor
workers. This important function of regulation and surveillance is not
among the seven uses of literacy listed by Heath (1986:21) and has been
largely unrecognised in literacy studies.
The study also points to the need for literacy providers and policy­
makers, concerned with successful outcomes, to consider institutional fac­
tors when designing workplace literacy programmes. This shift of focus
from the literacy learner to the context in which the literacy programme
takes place redirects the blame for failed programmes from the 'problem stu­
dents' to the contextual factors which might be critical for success or failure
of literacy interventions. These factors include the dynamics of workplace
organisation and the uses and roles of literacy within these dynamics, that
is, the location of literacy practices within wider discursive processes, such
as management and worker discourses around production, performance
and pacing.
In the next section I look at the literacy practices at the school and the
way in which they were embedded in discourses. I focus on the dominant
discourses in the school and the communicative practices that supported
them. The two discourses considered here are those which I have named the
'family' discourse and the 'liberal' discourse.

The discourse of the family

In the discourses of the teachers, pupils and even parents, there was a recur­
ring narrative about 'belonging to a family'. In this narrative, family mem­
bers were supported and given a sense of belonging provided they behaved
in such a way that the family would be proud. This meant being 'good' and
'moral'. The narrative included the service staff within the ambit of the 'fam­
ily', yet there were indications that they enjoyed a different type of family
membership than the pupils and academic staff.

Allocation of space within the 'family'

The service workers were the only section of the school 'family' that had not
been allocated a communal meeting area. The academic staff had their 'staff
88 . Watters

room', the pupils had their own space to meet and eat, but no formal meet­
ing place had been set aside for the service staff. They did get together
informally but the venues were makeshift: the area surrounding the clock
card system and a table outside the kitchen, for example. Even the meetings
of the newly instituted workers' committee took place in a secondhand
venue: the common room of the 7- to 9-year old boarders.
The workers were also excluded, or excluded themselves, from other
meeting places. New service workers were not included in the annual inaug­
uration ceremony along with the other new members of the 'family'. Service
workers also did not appear in the list of members of staff in the school
magazine. At the same time, workers chose not to attend school functions,
even when they should have attended in the role of parents.
My findings regarding the control and allocation of space in the school
support the work on prisons carried out by Feldman (1994). In his work on
substance abuse treatment centres Feldman found that the social deploy­
ment of space was an effect of discursive production, and a clue to the
nature of the discourses of participation and regulation prevalent in that in­
stitutional domain.

The naming of family members: girls and boys, misters and

mistresses

In the discourses of some of the older service workers, workers without su­
pervisory status were referred to as 'boys' and 'girls', regardless of age. This
is similar to the way in which some White employers referred to Black or
Coloured workers in traditional racial discourses in South Africa. Yet the
workers at the school who used these terms were often themselves people of
colour. For example, a laundry supervisor told me that the maintenance of
the washing machines was not much of a problem in the past because 'the
boys knew how tofixthe old machines, but now I am not so sure as there are
new boys'. Here she was referring to the Black maintenance workers. One of
the boarding house cleaners told me that 'the boys used to carry their bags of
rubbish but Mr Favish1 has stopped it'.
Academic staff and service staff above the first-line supervisor level did
not seem to use the terms 'boys' and 'girls' but they had their own, more
subtle forms of distinguishing status. The rule seemed to be that people at
the lowest level of the hierarchy of jobs in the school were called by their first
names while others higher up were addressed by their surnames preceded
by Mr or Mrs or Miss. In a voter education training session for service staff,
 Communicative practices of the service staff of a school 89

for example, the principal used this system. Pupils of the school also fol­
lowed this rule. They referred to the women who cleaned their areas by their
first names and the housekeeper and day matrons by their surnames. Pupils
themselves were referred to as 'boys' and 'girls' and by their first names.
None of the service staff used Ms or were referred to by this title when at the
school.
In the written form the rule differed slightly If the document was formal,
such as a disciplinary letter or a letter of appointment, the title and surname
would be used; however, the spoken rule applied if the document was less
formal, for example the minutes of a meeting. The following extract from the
minutes of a workers' committee meeting indicated the way in which the
rule worked in practice:

Minutes of the Workers' Committee

on Monday 5 September 1994 at 11 a.m.

Apologies: Mr Favish and Peter

Present: Mr C.H. Strydom, Gail, Agnes, Barbara,

Tilly, Mrs Hall, Valerie and David

Mr Favish was the estate manager, Mrs Hall was the housekeeper and Mr
Strydom was a member of the school council. The remaining people, identi­
fied only by their first names, were all representatives from the various sec­
tions of the service staff.

The family discourse and literacy practices

Literacy practices in the service departments reflected the role of these work­
ers in the 'family'.
A copy of a letter of warning which I saw posted up in the laundry fol­
lows (see page 90). The letter was written formally, formed part of the proc­
ess outlined in the grievance procedure and was the result of a complaint
that clothing returned from the laundry 'reeked of smoke'. The language and
style reflected the power relations in the family. The style was procedural
and dogmatic; a one-way system of discipline appeared to be in force. No
space was visible in the written text for the workers to contribute alternative
90 . Watters

solutions. The use of literacy in this practice was for purposes of control.
(The letter was on a school letterhead.)

19 November 1993

Ρ P.
Μ S.
G G.
V C.

This notice serves to remind all staff in the

laundry that a verbal warning has been made about
the state of the laundry facility.

This facility will be inspected regularly.

There should be neither eating nor smoking taking

place in the laundry. (Tea - 9-9:30 should be
taken in a separate room as per Mrs Carey in
discussion with Mrs Burger.)

Should this instruction not be followed, please

be aware that appropriate and drastic action will
be enforced.

[signed] C. Burger 22/11/93

In contrast, the literacy practices of the service staff were mostly about re­
cording and transporting information. During my observation in the
kitchen I watched one of the service workers writing the following list (spell­
ing has not been altered):
 Communicative practices of the service staff of a school 91

Potatoes
Jackets*
Onions
ranges
Apples
Cauliflower
Lettuce
Parsley
Green pepper
English 
Naartjies
Pumpkin
Squash
Grapes
Span-spek
Cabbage

[*refers to baby potatoes]

After completing her task the worker entered a large cold room and
started to count the items on her list. The items were counted by container
and the numbers entered on the list referred to bags or boxes or some other
form of container. While in the cold room the worker added three items to
her list - carrots, bananas and spinach. Later the supervisor drew my atten­
tion to the list and commented on how beautifully it had been done. She
explained that she had recently started training two staff members to do this
task and that the next term two other people would be trained.
In order to write this list the worker was involved in recognising what
had to be counted, recording the English name of the item and then the ac­
tual counting. The list was created using all the appropriate conventions, for
example, all the words were lined up on the left-hand side and there was a
capital letter for each word. It was also, by omission, a list of items that were
out of stock. As found by Scribner (1984) in her work with dairy farmers, the
drawing up of such a list at first appears a simple repetitive task. On ana­
lysis it is seen to involve a diversity of cognitive operations.
The list was then handed over to the supervisor who took the informa­
tion and worked out what had to be ordered using her knowledge of forth­
coming meals and the quantities required. The supervisor had tried to give
the worker an extra skill, but by withholding this vital information had in
fact deskilled the person as the task had become one of merely recording
information. By modularising information in this way, the supervisor sup­
ported rather than challenged a mode of operation that copies Taylorist pro­
cedures for organising factory production. The process might have been far
92 K. Watters

more powerful if the worker had been taught the reason behind the task and
what to do with the information. However, this would have meant transfer­
ring some of the control of the running of the kitchen from the supervisor to
the worker and would have changed the established pattern of the relation­
ships within the 'family'.
The family' discourse placed the service staff in a moral bind. Many of
them had been at the school for a number of years and appeared to have a
sense of security and belonging, but would have liked their conditions of
employment, particularly their wages, improved. But the 'family' discourse
did not permit them to push for change without incurring the wrath of the
dominant members. The 'liberal' discourse, also dominant at the school, set
up procedures which had the potential to bring about change but were cur­
rently being stifled by the 'family' discourse. The service workers remained
with the dilemma: how to push for change without becoming the black
sheep of the family.

The liberal discourse

The interests of the workers were affected, in an even more complicated way,
by the liberal discourse which also existed in the school. This discourse
spoke primarily through the school principal and was accompanied by pro­
cedures involving verbal as well as written documents that were said to en­
sure workers' rights but also had the effect of constraining and inhibiting
worker freedom.
Since her appointment the principal had formalised employment condi­
tions and created formal channels for the expression of grievance. In the
past the relationship between employer and employee was based mainly on
trust and very little was put in writing. This is how the principal articulated
the new system in an interview:

You see, they didn't have anything at all and I am sure they were
genuinely looked after in a sort of genial manner but I certainly
didn't feel very comfortable with it at all and thought it was im­
portant that we looked at procedures and things like that and I
am not sure if our grievance procedure is watertight or in any
way constitutional. I am happy enough that everybody gets
more than enough hearings ...
 Communicative practices of the service staff of a school 93

The way in which the new relationship would play itself out became clear as
she continued:

... it was with great regret that I had to, at the workers' commit­
tee disciplinary committee, make a very strong recommendation
that Harry K... was actually dismissed because of insubordina­
tion and foul language and abusiveness ... He actually had
some eight warnings and the actual giving him a letter and sev­
erance pay and x,  and ζ and sorting out that he could use me
as a reference on the telephone because he is an excellent work­
man, but work with plants only, literally, urn, it was much easier
than I thought it was going to be ... and I could say, look my
friend, you didn't manage to keep to that one or that one or that
one (pointing to a list), and now I can't keep you. I can't do any­
thing else, you have told me that you have to go. When I ex­
plained it to him like that... it didn't seem to me to be quite as
bad and I at least felt that it was fair, that the guy had more than
enough hearings.

The workers seemed to remain in a win/lose situation. While they would

have greater clarity on their conditions of employment under the new sys­
tem, with some clearly defined rights, they would also be expected to be
more independent. Yet the power relations remained uneven, making it dif­
ficult for them to operate independently. They were not involved in the de­
velopment of the procedures and their access to and use of the documents
was not clear. Some aspects were clearly not in their interests, for example,
the disciplinary code required them to be involved in the disciplining of their
colleagues.

The liberal discourse and literacy practices

The system of drawing up letters of appointment was implemented by the
current principal and was a signal of the attempts to shift the pattern of re­
lationships within the 'family' (see Figure 5 page 94.)
It is obvious that this letter of appointment did far more to serve the in­
terests of the employer than those of the employee. Although the letter re­
flected the written intent of the liberal discourse, it was couched in an alien­
ating bureaucratic style and thus entrenched rather than shifted the family'
relationships. The language was formal and not reader-friendly. Some of the
94 K. Watters

Figure 5: A typical letter of appointment at the school concerned.

 Communicative practices of the service staff of a school 95

details that were essential reading were omitted. Even the assured salary
had a darker side. The employer couldn't pay less than this but there was
also no obligation to update the salary on an annual basis, which is surpris­
ing considering South Africa's inflation rate and the declining value of
money. In return for an assured salary, transport allowance and working
conditions, the employees were obliged to adhere to a disciplinary code
which they would have to make some effort to obtain.
The letter was dated 1993 and referred to an employment relationship
that commenced in 1991. This raises further doubts about the value of the
document for the worker. It is clear that this letter is an example of literacy
for control.
My postal survey of other schools indicated that they had introduced
similar bureaucratic procedures: 57,7 per cent of the schools which re­
sponded stated that they had written grievance procedures; 88,5 per cent
stated they had job descriptions, and 65,4 per cent had written work
contracts which had been signed by the prospective employee. The work
contract is required by law.
The postal survey also revealed that 42,3 per cent of the schools had a
structure such as a workers' committee. The function of these committees
was usually to provide workers and management with a forum to raise is­
sues. At this school a workers' committee was started during the time of the
current principal. The committee was a site for the intersection of the domi­
nant discourses in the school thus providing an ideal opportunity for
analysis.
The workers themselves had high expectations of the committee yet
there were discourses operating in the school that mitigated against the re­
alisation of these expectations. The following account of a particular chap­
ter in the history of the committee, in which it tried to improve the wages of
workers, indicates the way in which these discourses operated and also re­
flects how literacy practices are embedded in discourses.

The workers' committee

Shortly after Peter was elected as the new chair of the workers' committee,
he and the housekeeper from the boarding house, both in supervisory posi­
tions in the school, attended a workshop on Aids. The workshop had an
unintended consequence for the school in that the two used the opportunity
to compare working conditions with those of other schools. As a result, the
chairperson decided that the workers should join a union to strengthen
96 K. Watters

their bargaining position. The workers' committee should also establish the
wage levels at other schools.
At the May meeting of the workers' committee the main issue was still
wage increases. My transcript recorded the following report from one of the
representatives on the committee:

Steven is still waiting for information in connection with find­

ing out what all the other schools are earning in the different de­
partments. We are still waiting, we are still waiting on that per­
son. They never came back to us.

This extract illustrates the workers' dependence on outsiders for help and
their vulnerability in the face of that need.
A few days later I met the laundry representative, Vanessa. I had been
told that Mr Favish, the estate manager and Peter's supervisor, checked
through the list the workers' committee intended bringing to their combined
meeting with the school council and scratched out requests he regarded as
illegitimate. I wanted to confirm this. Unfortunately, the conversation was
not recorded, but this was the gist of it.

K.W (researcher): Did Mr Favish scratch anything out?

V: No, he just let Peter carry on because he knew Mr James [chair of school
council] would say no.
K.W: Mm, so he let Mr James be the baddie?
V: They don't understand, we have been here a long time, we know the
system, the way it works.
K.W: Yes, I guess if you are new then you have to try to find out how things
work and then accept it, try to change it or leave.
V: Mm, leave - it will take a long time to change.
K.W: How do you think it will change?
V: It will change little bit by little bit.

This extract highlights the way in which the liberal discourse of the prin­
cipal was undermined by a supervisor. The first-line supervisors seemed to
be less willing to change than the staff higher up the hierarchy, who were
more comfortable with the liberal discourse. I had seen supervisors resist
and even undermine change in other industries, such as mining and the
building industry; there was a similar potential here.
 Communicative practices of the service staff of a school 97

Supervisors resist change because they perceive they will lose some­
thing in the process - status, perhaps, or even their jobs. In this case the
supervisors' jobs were not under immediate threat, but their authority and
control over information could change. Their resistance was manifested in
actions such as those described. As Foucault (1981) has argued, power is
not only located at the top of a system but diffused throughout it, in every­
day relations.
My next contact with the issue of wages was in the minutes of the com­
bined meeting held in September. The minutes were very brief and indicated
that the meeting lasted 45 minutes. Four of the eight items dealt with service
staff requests to improve their working or living conditions, for example,
'Mr Favish to buy a polisher', 'Steve to fit an aerial in staff quarters'. One
item was a request from the kitchen to clarify weekly and monthly wages.
Another indicated that two service workers would receive letters of warning;
the reasons were not given. Items 2 and 6 are relevant to this discussion and
are detailed here:

2. Peter to present a wage schedule by 3 October,

(to see how much the workers request so we can
discuss it and then it can be put to council).
6. Trade Unions - it was requested that someone
conversant with trade unions be asked in to dis-
cuss the advantages and disadvantages of joining
a union (i.e. attorney working with labour af-
fairs) - it was requested that the meeting be
held at 11 a.m. Mr Strydom to attend to this mat-
ter.

It would appear from the minutes that the problem of wages had become
Peter's responsibility. The process of reviewing the salaries had been de­
ferred until Peter came up with a wage schedule. This seemed a very difficult
task for Peter and reflected the uneven power relations between the workers'
committee and the school council. It would put the workers in an uncom­
fortable position as, if they asked for too much, they might lose out com­
pletely and be labelled as 'black sheep'; and if they asked for too little and
received the amount requested, they might wish they had asked for more.
Peter would have to obtain the trust of all concerned to get each person to
give a figure. The workers would be most powerful if they presented a united
98 . Watters

request but I doubted whether Peter had the organisational know-how to

orchestrate this.
The second item is as interesting. It must be very unusual for a workers'
committee to request management to arrange a meeting for them so that
they can learn about trade unionism. The workers had requested that the
meeting be held during working hours. While this might have been an at­
tempt to obtain some power, it also ensured the possibility of surveillance.
The dominant role of the family discourse was again in evidence as the
workers seemed reluctant to do anything behind the back of the 'parents'.

Literacy practices and the organisation of work

The organisation of work varied between departments, but the kind of work
done by each person within a department was fairly specific, for example,
cleaners worked only as cleaners and only in specified areas. A cleaner was
responsible for cleaning an area daily, irrespective of whether or not the area
required it: one of the cleaners was responsible for cleaning the chapel and
did this daily even though the chapel was only used for half an hour twice a
week. The work in the kitchen, allocated according to the skills of the eight
women who worked there, was divided in such a way that only the super­
visor had a picture of the 'whole'.
The work of the service worker was arranged along Taylorist lines and
was fragmented and repetitive. Taylorism is defined by Mathews (Mathews,
1989; Kraak, 1991b:2) as a 'hierarchical division of labour with jobs that
are narrowly defined and single tasked. The assembly line regulates the
task, and the repetitive routine does not promote a sense of contributing to
a whole, or a sense of learning'. The combination of supervision and control
of information by supervisors is not unusual in such institutions and is re­
cognised by Giddens (1990) as one of the four institutional dimensions of
modernity - he refers to this as 'surveillance'.
Over the years it would appear that the workers in this school had been
deskilled, until they were only required to perform these limited and repet­
itive skills (another aspect of Taylorist organisation of work). There were
isolated examples of training, which indicated the potential for some move­
ment and change, but this training did not appear to be part of an overall
plan of reskilling or multiskilling.
In addition to the fragmentation of work, there was a flattened hier­
archy in each department in which all the workers remained at one level and
reported to one supervisor. Workers stayed in the same positions - in one
 Communicative practices of the service staff of a school 99

case for 26 years - obtaining neither a change in their status nor job
description.
The work of the service staff at the school involved few literacy practices
even though only two of the service workers were functionally illiterate'.
Service workers at this school were involved mainly in the practices of re­
cording and transporting information. They did not use this recorded and
transported information to make decisions; that practice was retained by the
supervisors. For example, the ordering of food and equipment and the plan­
ning of meals and work schedules was carried out by the supervisors. The
way their work had been organised had prevented service workers from
using their literacy skills.
This research supports the work of Gowen who argued, on the basis of
her study on American workers, that:

... the crisis in the American workforce is not simply about lit­
eracy, I would argue but also about the organisation of work
that does not allow workers to use the skills they already pos­
sess. (1994:131)

This view was further confirmed by my observations in the laundry. The

workers in the laundry, unlike those in other service departments, were not
visibly supervised and worked fairly independently. This difference in the
organisation of work was reflected in their literacy practices.
In the laundry the workers were involved in handling lists they had cre­
ated, as well as lists created by their 'clients'. Unlike the kitchen staff, they
used the information contained in the lists. These lists had become a power­
ful form of control for the workers in the laundry - controlling quantities as
well as controlling the pupils. Value was placed on accurately being able to
check linen leaving and returning to the boarding house. The lists had
become very complicated for the function they served. The system was de­
scribed to me a number of times before I was able to grasp the basic ele­
ments. I was assured it was simple once one was used to it. Figure 6 on page
100 is an example of a laundry list.
This type of literacy practice functioned in the school as a form of perma­
nent record as the lists could be used in situations of contestation. A subtle
control was maintained by the laundry for, as long as they were the only
ones who understood how 'it' worked, then they could not be checked. How­
ever, they could interpret the information to prove they had not lost items.
This was the only example I found of servic+ workers using a form of literacy
Figure 6: Example of a laundry list.
 Communicative practices of the service staff of a school 101

for control. I believe it was only possible because of the difference in the way
the work of the laundry was organised and because there was a sympathetic
first-line supervisor in the boarding house.

Conclusions
In this chapter I have studied the communicative practices within the ser­
vice departments of the school. I found that the way work was organised as
well as the way space was allocated had a significant impact on the dis­
courses and the communicative practices that supported them.
The service staff of this school operated in a low skill· mode. The work
of the service departments was fragmented and had been reduced to small
repetitive tasks, usually without significant involvement of reading and
writing. Workers remained in the same positions for many years doing the
same tasks daily without prospect of advancement. This resulted in the re­
duction of both the quality and quantity of literacy practices.
The principal had some interest in trying to alter this situation but there
seemed to be a number of factors mitigating against significant change.
Firstly, the current system worked sufficiently well for the 'real' work of the
school, that of the education of children, to continue: this would obviously
reduce the principal's motivation to implement changes. Secondly, the first-
line supervisors in most of the service departments would resist change.
They operated in such a way that they controlled significant chunks of in­
formation, with the result that workers were only able to carry out specific
tasks. The third and probably most significant factor concerned prevailing
discourses at the school. The discourse connected to the power base of the
school was that of the 'family', linked to a discourse of Christian morality.
The recurring moral imperative of this discourse was that one must be good
and loyal to the family. It was this 'family' discourse which seemed to have
worked against service workers who want to change their working condi­
tions. To do this they would have run the risk of incurring the wrath of the
family and of God.
Change at this school is unlikely to come about without an integrated
strategy. This would need to address the role of the dominant discourses and
also to analyse first-line supervisors' need for control and the role of literacy
in perpetuating that control.
In conclusion, this research points to some major implications for lit­
eracy in the workplace and for policy-makers. Firstly, it would appear that if
one is involved in developing literacy capacity one must create
102 . Watters

opportunities for literacy practices to occur. By saying this I am not referring

to the kind of initiatives usually introduced in workplace programmes, for
example, where mentors are appointed to speak to trainees in English.
Rather there is a need for significant changes in the overall modes of com­
munication used in the workplace. Reader-friendly letters of appointment
would reflect the kind of shift to which I am referring.
Secondly, by looking more closely at institutional factors and literacy
practices in the contexts in which they occur, one would be better able to
understand failed (or successful) literacy programmes and not seek the
simple solutions of the failed student, facilitator or programme independent
of contextual location.
Finally, this research indicates that decontextualised literacy and basic
education programmes that ignore institutional factors are doomed to
failure.

Note
1. Names have been changed to protect the identity of informants.
Section Two
Mediating literacies

The articles in this section focus on the mediation of literacy by cultural

brokers of various kinds. The concept of literacy mediation as explored in
these articles builds on the work of a number of scholars. Anthropologists
(Wolf, 1966; Geertz, 1966) have done early work on cultural brokerage by
individuals involved in local and national cultural worlds. Arlene Fingeret
(1983) claimed that literacy practices were often performed within social
networks rather than by individuals. She argued that adults without
schooled literacy engage in reciprocal exchange relationships within these
networks and are therefore not as dependent and marginalised as they are
often thought to be. Wagner, Messig and Spratt (1986) refer to those social
actors who take on literacy tasks on behalf of others as literacy mediators.
These literacy mediators engage, according to Baynham (1994), in code- and
mode-switching between oral, written, visual and other sign systems, be­
tween languages and between different literacies.
Different literacies are described in the chapters that follow as embedded
in local and dominant discourses; that is, they form part of the complex of
conceptions, classifications and language use that characterises local cul­
tural life in the streets, houses and alleyways of these communities, as well
as those of bureaucracy, school, church and other formal institutions. The
boundaries between these discourses and their literacies are porous and
constantly changing.
In her study of literacy mediation and social identity in Newtown, a Col­
oured settlement in rural Eastern Cape, Malan analyses different forms of
code- and mode-switching that mediators between local and dominant dis­
courses engage in. Literacy mediation is described not as an alternative
neutral literacy 'technology' but as a social process which contributes to the
formation of social identity in Newtown and to the contestation of power be­
tween the agents of local and dominant discourses.
Chapter 6 concerns the mediating role that non-government organisa­
tions played in the struggle of communal farmers in Leliefontein, Northern
Cape, against central government's attempts to introduce individually
owned plots. Robins describes how activist brokers mediated legal and bur­
eaucratic literacies while also using face-to-face encounters to create space
for oppositional political mobilisation. He also analyses ways in which
104 Section Two

largely unschooled residents of Leliefontein asserted their local knowledge'

in resisting the authority of educated officials. Instead of using bureaucratic
discourse, residents used personal and religiously inspired style and content
in their correspondence with officials.
Contestation between the uses and valuations of discourses of learning
(schooled literacy) and everyday literacy practices in Bellville South, a
working-class Coloured area in the Cape Peninsula, is the focus of Chapter 7.
Malan looks at various everyday literacy events which people participate in
and then discusses two literacy classes. She concludes that people's
orientations to discourses of learning and those of everyday life are inter­
connected and determined by their social positions, the spatial construction
of the events and the combinations of communicative practices participants
engage in during the events and not by people's literacy levels'.
In Marconi Beam, an informal housing settlement (squatter camp) in the
Cape Peninsula, China and Robins encountered contrasting narratives of
residents: for some, their apprenticeship in the discourses of struggle pol­
itics made it possible for them to occupy their positions as local cultural
brokers. Their ability to mediate dominant development and political dis­
courses and bureaucratic literacies to unschooled local residents facilitated
their access to social power. For others in the gangster underworld of Mar­
coni Beam, schooled literacy and mastery of dominant discourses had no
personal currency.
Chapter Five
Literacy mediation and social identity in
Newtown, Eastern Cape
Liezl Μalan

This chapter looks at different types of literacy mediation and their relation­
ship to the formation of social identity in Newtown, a Coloured area of a
rural town in the Eastern Cape.1 Myfieldworkexperience of Newtown con­
firmed the findings of other ethnographic studies that situate literacy in
social practice and describe it in context. Assumptions about the social and
economic deficits resulting from 'illiteracy' have motivated supporters of the
South African liberation struggle under the previous regime to make claims
such as: '(illiteracy is an impediment to democracy and the participation of
all our people in the control of their lives. It needs to be wiped out in an
urgent, massive programme, as has been implemented in socialist states'
(Suttner and Cronin, in French, 1990:3).
Ethnographic studies have indicated that a lack of schooled literacy may
in practice be less of an impediment than has been assumed. Arlene Fingeret
(1983) argues that literacy practices are often not performed by individuals
but within social networks characterised by the exchange of resources:
those with highly developed literacy skills will take responsibility for com­
plex literacy tasks while others will, for instance, share their technical
expertise with members of the social networks. People who engage with lit­
eracy tasks on behalf of others are called literacy mediators (see Wagner,
Messig and Spratt, 1986).
Fingeret's skills-oriented understanding of literacy networks under­
plays the role of agency and power relations in literacy mediation, and con­
sequently runs the risk of presenting literacy mediation as one alternative
'technology' to individual literacy. Based on my study of Newtown I argue
for a differentiated understanding of literacy mediation which takes into
account that the agency of literacy mediators is invested with varying de­
grees of social power. The critical development of literacy mediation strate­
gies which already exist in areas like Newtown, I argue, could provide con­
text-sensitive 'ways of stimulating adults' informal acquisition of literacy
skills', as suggested by Reder (1985:19).
106 L. Malan

An important aspect of literacy mediation is that it often involves code-

switching (between languages) and mode-switching (between oral, written,
visual and other sign systems) (Baynham, in Street: 1993a). Inhabitants of
Newtown participate in events which involve shifts between 'Cape
Afrikaans', an informal variety associated with Cape Coloureds, and stand­
ard Afrikaans used for formal written communication (Prinsloo, 1991:9).
The forms of literacy mediation in this context involve not only shifts be­
tween varieties associated with setting, purpose, region and ethnicity, but
are also part of discursive shifts. Discourse is understood not simply as
chunks of language larger than a sentence but as 'the complex of concep­
tions, classifications and language use that characterise a specific sub-set of
an ideological formation' (Street, 1995:165). I therefore prefer to talk about
code-switching rather than style-shifting in relation to literacy mediation in
Newtown.
I have found Mikhael Bakhtin's description of the dialogics of commun­
ication (1981) useful in analysing the relationship between literacy media­
tion and power in Newtown. Bakhtin distinguishes between centripetal
tendencies towards the integration and unification of meaning, and cen­
trifugal forces which open space for dialogue. The centripetal forces further­
ing monologic meaning in Newtown, described here as the social domains
of local government, schooling, the legal system and the church, used
formal written Afrikaans during the time of the study. Local social practice
in the streets, houses, cafés and churches of Newtown acted as centrifugal
forces creating space for dialogue and heteroglossia (multiple voices). These
discourses mostly made use of local variations of informal Cape Afrikaans
and other ways of signifying that require an 'insider' understanding of
Newtown social life.2
Newtown was established under the Group Areas Act as the Coloured
area of Fort Beaufort in the citrus-producing Kat River Valley. Many of the
3 000 inhabitants work as seasonal labourers for the citrus co-operative to­
gether with workers from surrounding African townships (more than
17 000 inhabitants). For the rest of the year large numbers of the working
class live off welfare grants because of unemployment and the prevalence of
diseases such as tuberculosis. My own multiple roles as co-ordinator of a lit­
eracy project in Newtown, academic, White Fort Beaufort inhabitant and
friend have necessarily framed the narrative about literacy mediation in
Newtown I am about to present. In mapping what reading and writing gets
done by whom in Newtown, it became clear to me that the tracks often lead
 Literacy mediation and social identity 107

to central Fort Beaufort where the municipality, post office, banks and gro­
cery and furniture stores are gathered around the town square.

The experts writing for 'the other'

In much, if not most, of the literacy practices in which people of Newtown
are involved, the clerks play a vital mediating role. These experts are, in
Giddens's terms (1992), the 'facework commitment' of the dominant, face­
less' institutions people in Newtown deal with - supermarket and furniture
store networks, banks, the post office, the municipality, the legal system
behind the magistrate's court and local government. They are often 'outsid­
ers' to Newtown culture, living in 'White' Fort Beaufort (except in the case of
a shop steward or post office clerk who comes from Newtown or one of the
townships).
For the largest part, the form of literacy mediation these experts practise
is writing (speaking) for another. Schiffrin (1994) shows how experts in
formal codes and modes of communication do the reading and writing for
clients, and relates this process to a particular 'self/other alignment' which
defines communicative roles. As representative of dominant institutions
and gateway to their resources, 'outsider' literacy mediators have a particu­
larly authoritative voice (see Weinstein-Shr (1984) for a discussion of the
gatekeeper role of literacy mediators).
Government departments, banks and other formal institutions make
use of standardised modes and codes of communication such as forms and
documents. The clerks and shop stewards in Fort Beaufort are experts at
translating the heteroglossia of language varieties from Newtown and other
townships into the formal written registers of these institutions. As ex­
amples of these processes and of how these new approaches to literacy en­
able us to see aspects otherwise hidden, I describe now, from my fieldwork
impressions, the role of the clerk in the magistrate's office and the sales­
woman in the pharmacy.

The magistrate's office

The magistrate's clerk (a White Afrikaans woman) was helping some clients
who wanted a letter of permission to visit the district surgeon when I arrived
to interview her. An elderly man, assisted by his wife, was next in the queue.
The clerk filled in his form while asking his name, surname and address.
Afterwards she told me that the clerks complete 70 to 80 doctors' applications
108 L. Malan

on behalf of clients in a morning. She indicated one section at the back of the
form which they have to fill in, and explained that most of the elderly people
get their children to do this for them. The only writing required of the client is
the signing of the declaration at the end of the form. The signature implies
that the client has read and understood the written declaration. In practice,
the clerk said, she explains to clients what the declaration means:

I explain that last section. Some of them understand, they can

read this section, but they will not understand what this is
about. Then I just explain that you are confirming that every­
thing you have said is true, and then they say Tes'.

At their own request, the clerk also fills in the forms of clients who can read
and write. One reason for this is that filling in state forms requires not just
literacy in the abstract sense of being able to encode and decode words, nor
simply a mastery of the formal bureaucratic writing appropriate in this con­
text. The self/other alignment in this communicative situation gives rise to
the clerk, as expert of bureaucratic communication, writing for the other
('the other' being the client who assumes a passive/receptive position in re­
lation to state as provider and ruler). In contexts of literacy use like these,
the nature of clients' participation depends on their subject position and not
on whether they possess schooled literacy

The pharmacy

The pharmacy in Fort Beaufort is visited frequently by people of all ages and
language groups, one of the major reasons being that they have a simple
system for allowing clients to buy on credit. The saleswoman, who has
worked in the pharmacy for 11 years and is Afrikaans speaking, explained
how crucial it is for her to understand the way clients communicate. While
she was talking, a child from Newtown entered and presented her with a
scrap of paper on which her mother had written a few words to indicate
what she wanted to buy. When I expressed interest, the saleswoman showed
me a collection of these notes she had received from clients. Some notes
provide elaborate descriptions of the article the customer wants to purchase.
The saleswoman explained, for instance, that a note saying '1 yellow strip
for flies which lasts for 3 months' indicates the fly-catching strips that
people hang in their homes in Newtown. Often local terms are used, such as
 Literacy mediation and social identity 109

Jagspille ('horny' or 'randy' pills) and 'special confidence 6 pep me up' for
aphrodisiacs. The saleswoman then selects the appropriate medicine.

Figure 7: Examples of notes sent to the local pharmacy.

In both the magistrate's office and the pharmacy, literacy mediators inter­
cede between the institutions they represent and the clients whose needs
they have to meet. Communication with clients is mostly oral, and demands
large amounts of code- and mode-switching from the mediators. The prac­
tice of 'writing for the other' is an integral part of social transactions be­
tween dominant institutions and the people of Newtown, not only for these
linguistic reasons but also because of the specific social positioning of offi­
cial mediators versus clients in these discursive contexts. Theflowof know­
ledge between institutions that make use of formal written communication
and their clients could be democratised through the recognition and devel­
opment of the mediating skills of employees and through making processes
of code- and mode-switching more transparent for clients and mediators.
This would involve, in the case of the magistrate's clerk and the sales­
woman, official recognition that their expertise as literacy mediators lies not
only in their mastery of formal written procedures but also in their under­
standing of the forms of expression their clients use. At the same time, lit­
eracy mediators should have some accountability for the gatekeeping roles
they often fulfill.

The logics of survival

There are different ways in which people in Newtown participate in literacy
events around the magistrate's court and other institutions that use formal
written registers; these relate to their social positions and to the discursive
resources they employ. In the next section I look at respectability as discur­
sive resour+e, and here at the logics of survival. Many people in Newtown
110 L. Malan

participate in literacy practices through the selective appropriation of the

discourses of local government, gambling with the benefits granted to them
or refusing to read monologic written communication. For many, these tac­
tics are a matter of survival.
Hofmeyr describes the way Ndebele tribes in the previous century select­
ively appropriated the discourses of literate bureaucracies. She explains
how 'many letter-writers also reshaped bureaucratic language to their own
ends and according to their own understandings' (1993:59). I have found
similar patterns of the appropriation and reshaping of official codes and
modes of communication in Newtown.
People in Newtown have developed a local 'bureaucratic' vocabulary
which reflects an acceptance of the social position of 'outsider' literacy me­
diators while at the same time claiming the benefits of their own subordin­
ate position. Pensioners refer respectfully to the clerks at the magistrate's
office who handle all formal correspondence as 'the ladies at the office' and
(still) talk with reverence and expectation about Kleurlingsake (the old De­
partment of Coloured Affairs). The way the various state grants are referred
to indicates that state support is seen as a normal form of income to which
pensioners have as much right as an employed person has to a salary. A
child who receives a child welfare grant is seen as having an income (Mina3,
about her youngest son: 'Now those things I had to fix so that my youngest
son could also receive an income, madam'). Verbs are often changed to
nouns, a linguistic affirmation of this right to receive. Receiving pension
money is called 'paying'. State grants are all referred to as pensions, a little
pension, a help, or more specifically as sick pay or the disability.
Behind this public representation of participation in the dominant dis­
courses of local government there are layers of communication and cultural
practices which are encoded and thus 'hidden' from the official gaze. There
are gambling games in shacks made of wastebags, marijuana exchanges in
a house only 'insiders' can identify, and graffiti on the walls expressing local
cultural identity. At times these local cultural practices and hidden literacies
lead to clashes with formal institutions. The local administrators of state
grants, concerned that the intention of these grants is being 'misread', have
identified 'culprits' who are not given cash but are instead required to pro­
duce a written list of groceries for the month. The administrator scrutinises
the list, scratching out what she considers unnecessary, until it totals the
amount allowed. The pensioner takes this list, together with a letter with a
formal stamp of approval, to the local grocery store. Despite these measures,
members of the 'sip 'n drink' group (so-called because of their drinking
 Literacy mediation and social identity 111

This graffitti is one expression of the many 'hidden' literacies in

Newtown.

habits) have confessed to me that back in Newtown the groceries are ex­
changed for cans of beer and zolle (marijuana).
A common tactic people in Newtown use in response to the authorit­
ative voices of officials is keeping quiet or being absent. For Bakhtin (1981),
silence is always a form of being in dialogue, and most often a way of con­
fronting the monologic voice of powerful institutions (such as, in this case,
local government structures). It is a centrifugal force, which challenges the
authority of the monologic voice and creates space for different voices, or
what Bakhtin calls 'dialogised heteroglossia'.
A clear example of this pattern in Newtown is the fact that official
correspondence, such as notices and newsletters sent out by the Manage­
ment Committee on behalf of the Fort Beaufort municipality, is either not
read or the content is simply ignored. Since there is no legitimate space for
different voices to be heard in the public forum, the monologic voice of the
municipality/Management Committee is challenged through silence: the re­
fusal to read or acknowledge written notices. Silence or absence is also a
112 L. Malan

way of responding to literacy classes. In a door-to-door survey conducted by

me and other members of the committee, more than a hundred people
expressed a need for a literacy class and even voiced their selective appro­
priation of discourses of schooled literacy. However, when the class started
only a handful attended. Like local government, schooling represents a pow­
erful discourse which people in Newtown subscribe to while realistically
evaluating the social gains that may follow from participation in adult edu­
cation classes.
Thus far I have described the relationship between local 'survivors',
'outsider' literacy experts and dominant discourses. There are various other
discursive resources people in Newtown draw on in positioning themselves.
One of the consequences is the diversification of local literacy mediators and
the proliferation of multiple literacies that defy interpretation by means of
the 'autonomous' model of literacy.

'High society' in Newtown

A select number of people in Newtown occupy most of the leadership posi­
tions. The 'high society' of Newtown, as they are sometimes referred to lo­
cally, consists mostly of school headmasters, teachers and ministers - often
from families whose social identities have over time become embedded in
the dominant discourses of school, law and local government. They are im­
portant local literacy mediators, able to translate local forms of communica­
tion into the formal written language of dominant institutions.
Mr Oliphant is an example. He comes from an educated family, has chil­
dren with university degrees and completed his own degree later in his life.
Like many of the 'respectables' in Newtown, he has White ancestors. He is
headmaster of a primary school in a nearby town, chairperson of the
Newtown Management Committee, a local school committee and the Child
and Family Care Unit, member of a church council and director of the local
Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) branch. When he is at home, he spends hours
helping neighbours, friends and anyone else from Newtown who ap­
proaches him to fill in forms and read documents, varying from advertise­
ments, contracts and tax forms to identity document (ID) application forms
and welfare claims.
There are a number of ways in which local people strive to situate them­
selves as part of 'high society'. The factors at stake are, in order of signific­
ance, racial identity, schooling and the acquisition of a mediating role. In his
study of 19th-century Canada, Graff (1979) shows that literacy alone did not
 Literacy mediation and social identity 113

guarantee social and economic mobility; social position was a much more
powerful form of cultural capital. In the South African context racial identity
has historically been the most valuable form of 'cultural capital' (Bourdieu,
1981). Schooling, and the schooled literacy associated with it, offered a fre­
quently unfulfilled promise of access to economic and social power.
People in Newtown were well aware of this. Consequently, many
Coloureds in Newtown aspired towards the 'White' side of their identity. A
story is told how one of the local ministers reprimanded his congregation
for being 'potato-Christians': they were always digging for their White roots.
Being White meant belonging to 'high society'; it was the most powerful
form of cultural capital.
Next to 'having White blood', education was the best way to become
part of 'high society' in Newtown. Mrs Arends explained this to me. Her
grandfather was Black, but her grandmother - Maria Magdalena - was
White. One half of Mrs Arends's family managed to 'go through as White'.4
They moved to Johannesburg, found financial security and married into
'high society'. As she explained to me: 'If you are White, you'll easily find
employment... and many did, they married, also for security, Miss, because
it's Jews and eye specialists and the like.' Their side of the family stayed in
the Eastern Cape and devoted themselves to their own and their children's
education. 'We are the team who studied, and they didn't learn that far, Miss.
We would say: Saved by the colour of their skin.' She proudly states that her
daughter, who has a university degree, married an educated man; the two of
them, she says, have moved from 'the rabble' (of Newtown) to 'high society'
(in Fort Beaufort).
Despite the promise education offered, the social reality of South Africa
under apartheid saw to it that race remained an all-powerful social signifier.
This was signalled to me by Mrs Adonis. When her daughter moved to Fort
Beaufort, she taught various White children mathematics and looked after
White toddlers. This ended abruptly one day when friends of one of the
White families whose children she looked after asked them why they left
their children with a 'Coloured meid'. White Fort Beaufort has subtle ways
of reserving social and economic power for itself.
The third, and least powerful, strategy for gaining access to the social
goods of 'high society' is acquiring a mediating position. While being part of
a family embedded in the discourses of schooling and local government is
one way of securing your position as a respectable literacy mediator in
Newtown, there are also ways of acquiring these discourses. Mrs Spogter
explained to me how her deceased husband, unschooled like her, taught
114 L. Malan

himself to read and write and acquired an understanding of the discourses

of local government. Mrs Spogter says that he managed to work his way up
into 'high society' where he became a broker between Coloured Affairs and
its dependants:

He helped here in [dealing with] Coloured Affairs and he was in

high society to help people who needed clothes and food and
pensions. And if that man wrote to the magistrate's offices, he
always succeeded.

Mr Spogter's perseverance in mastering the formal written Afrikaans of

local government, and the mediating role he could consequently fulfil, made
him a respected man in Newtown. However, the fact that his family is still
living in one of the poorest areas of Newtown is evidence that his local me­
diation role afforded him a less powerful position in relation to dominant
discourses than being White or having qualifications would have done.

Local legitimacy as mediator

Whereas acquiring the dominant discourses of schooling and local govern­
ment could give someone respectability and an important literacy mediating
role, it is only those whose identities are grounded in the local realities and
forms of representation used in Newtown who can say they have local legiti­
macy. The need for local legitimacy, without which one can at most have the
authority of an 'outsider', is a reason why the 'respectables' tirelessly engage
in literacy mediation on behalf of the locals. But it is also possible to have
local legitimacy without belonging to 'high society'; lay preachers are a good
example.
Almost every church in Newtown has a system whereby certain indi­
viduals are given the authority to lead religious meetings. The position of
lay preacher is given to those who are believed to have special spiritual wis­
dom and understanding. Lay preachers are seldom highly schooled people
and use the local varieties of 'Cape Afrikaans' and the vignettes of everyday
life shared by people in Newtown, as well as the formal register and narra­
tives of Scripture. The mediating role of officials and clerks mostly entails
translation from the regional varieties of speech or writing clients use into
the official linguistic styles and formats of formal institutions. The lay
preacher's mediating role, however, requires him to shift constantly be­
tween formal and local language registers and narrative styles, giving
 Literacy mediation and social identity 115

weight to each as the occasion demands. (I found similar patterns in reli­

gious events in Bellville South [see Chapter 7].)
I attended a Sunday morning service at the Congregational Church dur­
ing which this ability was aptly displayed. The service offered ample space
for congregational participation through singing and prayer which at times
became quite emotional and animated. The polyphony of singing and pray­
ing voices created space for carnival - the moment when authorial voices
give way to a plurality of independent and unmerged voices (Bakhtin,
1968).
Order was restored first through the reading of the Scriptures and again
through the authoritative voice of the lay preacher. He was a man of small
stature but an excellent performer, dressed colourfully in a yellow shirt with
a green jacket. During the sermon he moved around between the congrega­
tion and the Bible, which he occasionally touched or looked at. Kierman's
description of Zionist services (1991) and McEwan's study in this book
(Chapter 10) confirm that the signifying or symbolic power of Scripture
rather than the actual words is often what carries authority in local church
services. At the same time the lay preacher drew on the authority of Scrip­
ture with formulaic utterances: 'My brother and sister, the Bible says ... 'In
his sermon he skilfully picked up and employed scriptural images in the
construction of his own narratives which carried the multiple messages he
brought to the congregation. This process opened up a degree of polyphony
in the service: the impressionistic combinations of images and meanings
having an almost dizzying effect.
After introducing the sermon's theme through the reading of the parable
of the lost son, the lay preacher told a story about an orphan who was pun­
ished for the sins of her malicious friend, and then called to God to take the
role of the parents she did not have. While resonating the experiences of
women and children in Newtown who do not have the support of a core
family, the lay preacher's vignette clearly taught that justice was to be found
with God.
From this vignette the analysis of the biblical parable followed. The lay
preacher's interpretation of Scripture consisted of the dramatisation of the
passage where the son leaves his father, enters the world and eventually
longs to feed himself with the food of the pigs. He raised his voice to a com­
manding and excited tone, used frequent repetition, mixing religious dis­
course with local expressions (Then he began to hang out with pals who
tread with their feet on the good word. Who do just what they want to do').
At the climax of his message he enacted the scene where the son sits down
116 L. Malan

to eat the pigs' food. The congregation, which had been following the ser­
mon in silent anticipation, burst out laughing while also making approving
sounds. This interpretation of the message thus created space for carnival,
and by so doing confirmed the boundaries of the congregation's identity: in
laughing about the young man who left his father, members of the con­
gregation distanced themselves from worldliness and confirmed their
shared valuing of the Christian family.
The lay preacher could be described as a successful model for literacy
intervention. Local legitimacy alongside respectability is, I suggest, a pre­
requisite for both formal interventionists like literacy teachers and informal
literacy mediators who act as resources in the community. The example of
the lay preacher makes it clear that local legitimacy as literacy mediator re­
quires an insider understanding of local discourse and the ability to reshape
the intentions and style of formal written discourse.
One of the consequences of this transaction is that communication pro­
cedures are drastically simplified by local literacy mediators. I mention one
example. Because of the high rates of unemployment, the Department of
Health from time to time makes money available for food parcels for the
most needy. This money is administered either by the Congregational or the
Catholic Church, which is then responsible for handing out the parcels. In
order to qualify for a food parcel, a person has to provide the 'church sister'
in charge of the parcels with some basic information. Most people in
Newtown know each other, and the church sister (a term used to refer to a
devoted female member of the congregation) is likely to know most appli­
cants. Consequently, the information exchange can happen in an informal
and unstructured way. Sometimes applicants come in person, orally provide
the information the sister needs, and wait for her to write their names down
in her book. Otherwise they send scraps of paper on which they have written
only the information the sister would not have: name, number of children in
the home, applicant's ID number.
In comparison with the procedure for applying for a state grant, the
written communication around the food parcels is elliptical, providing only
information not known to the sister. For instance, she may know the name
and address of the applicant, how many children there are in the home, and
whether they have any source of income, and may only need an identity
number to formalise the procedure. Another factor, besides the fact that the
sister as local literacy mediator knows the applicants, is that the process of
decision-making about money happens at a relatively low level with the
 Literacy mediation and social identity 117

Λ church sister at home,

proudly displaying her
family's diplomas and
certificates.

church having the authority to decide which of the applicants have most
merit.
The higher the level of literacy mediation, the more formal and less
elliptical the literacy practices. At the same time, the more formal the process
becomes, the more likely it is that 'writing for the other' by literacy medi­
ators of dominant discourses will be the appropriate form of negotiation.
Competency in the use of literacy, even at the level of acting as literacy
118 L. Malan

mediator, is therefore context and discourse specific and is dependent on the

social position of the mediator rather than the possession of de-
contextualised literacy skills'.

Local literacy mediators coming to power

The balance of power between local and dominant discourses, and the posi­
tion of the literacy mediators of each, is not stable. This became evident in
Newtown with the establishment of the Newtown Democratic Forum (NDF)
just before the national elections of 1994. The NDF committee, elected
during a carnival-like mass meeting, claimed they had legitimacy as a local
authority, in contrast to the Newtown Management Committee which they
described as a mere tool of the Fort Beaufort municipality. The chairperson
of the NDF, a White lawyer and academic, introduced the forum to the
authority of letterheads and legal letters. At the same time she organised
marches where visual displays and 'the voice of the masses' proved to be
powerful negotiating tools. With local government elections sure to follow
the national elections, the municipality realised its position would be threat­
ened if it did not develop legitimacy in the Coloured and Black townships.
Political change led to discursive change. In this way the NDF set itself up as
a literacy mediator speaking on behalf of local Newtown to dominant insti­
tutions of state.
Towards the end of 1993 the chairperson of the NDF wrote a formal
letter to the Management Committee and the Fort Beaufort municipality re­
questing a meeting to discuss changing government legislation about hous­
ing as the mass media had reported that new legislation was under way to
make it possible for people renting municipal houses to become home
owners. The town clerk responded to the request in writing, set a date for the
meeting and requested an agenda. The members of the NDF received a thick
pile of documents to read in preparation for the meeting. The vice-chairper­
son of the NDF lived in a clay house without electricity, but he read through
most of the documents before the meeting, which was held in the upper
room of the City Hall. In a long preamble to the agenda drawn up by the NDF,
the town clerk described the formal procedures for getting a housing scheme
approved. This included lists of procedural writing: a detailed needs survey,
a new waiting list to replace the existing waiting list for houses, followed by
standardised plans for the housing scheme provided by the Department of
Housing, and official written guidelines for the execution of new housing
regulations.
 Literacy mediation and social identity 119

The first response of the vice-chairperson of the NDF to the town clerk's
description of formal procedures around housing was to emphasise the im­
portance of 'meeting with the masses' rather than just using monologic
written communication:

All we have received was a pamphlet of August saying that be­

fore the people can get their houses, they have to pay their over­
due rent. Then we held a meeting with the masses, and they
asked us to find out - that is why we insisted on this meeting -
to find out what is happening with the handing over of houses
in Newtown.

When the town clerk defended the municipality's position by saying they
had to receive official written guidelines before they could 'talk to people on
the street', the vice-chairperson of the NDF changed his style. He produced
and read a document he had obtained addressed 'To all local governments,
to committees, division heads and divisional heads of the Department of
Housing'. The document stipulated the procedures to which the town clerk
was referring. This sudden display of the NDF's unexpected mastery of strat­
egies around the use of official documents caught the municipality by sur­
prise. The town clerk explained they had to write 327 purchasing letters in
response to the demands of this thick document. 'We did not drag our feet,
sir, we acted as fast as we could with these documents.'
This meeting was part of the process whereby the NDF positioned itself
in relation to the Newtown Management Committee and the Fort Beaufort
municipality and established itself as a body to be reckoned with through its
strategic use of local and dominant discourses. The members acquired an
understanding of the vocabulary and strategies of local government and
used this as a power base. At the same time the NDF presented itself as the
voice of the people, speaking local language, insisting on oral communica­
tion and challenging the monologic voice of written bureaucracy.
Whereas the NDF initially acted as a centrifugal force deflecting
monologic communication, they soon became a new centripetal force in
local politics. Not only did members of the NDF challenge the authority of
local bureaucracy's discourse, but the leadership position the NDF had as­
sumed also threatened the polyphony of local voices in Newtown. This
became evident during the rent boycott which preceded the NDF's meeting
with local government.
120 L. Malan

In 1994 the Management Committee sent out notices charging all inhab­
itants to pay 'rent' (rates and taxes) without explaining the reason for this
new demand. People in Newtown responded to this written directive by ig­
noring it. Consequently, the magistrate's office sent out court summonses to
everyone who did not pay their rates. The chairperson of the NDF spread the
word that they must ignore the summonses, which caused major conflict in
the minds of local people. Mrs Jacobs, one of the first inhabitants of
Newtown, was among those who received a court summons. Although out­
spoken about the unfairness of the new 'rent', the threat of imprisonment
was a strong incentive for her and many others to pay their rates. Argu­
ments don't really pay' she said. The people will say it causes division. It's
better to keep quiet.'
On the other hand, the chairperson of the NDF had come to play a vital
role as literacy mediator between local and dominant discourses. There was
some anxiety about the way she would respond to their failure to heed the
NDF's call for solidarity in resistance. Inevitably, some people did pay their
'rent', and then the rest had to follow. The violently disapproving reaction of
the chairperson of the NDF confirmed that the forum had assumed a posi­
tion which not only challenged the monologic voice of local government,
but also the heteroglossia of local discourses.

Implications
In the social networks of Newtown, a variety of literacy mediators inter­
vened between local and dominant discourses. In fact, most of the reading
and writing in Newtown was done by mediators. The nature of the code- and
mode-switching literacy mediators engaged in depended on their discursive
position and not simply on their possession of autonomous literacy 'skills'.
The relationship between local and dominant discourses, formal and infor­
mal codes, and written and oral modes of communication is not fixed, and
depends to a large degree on social contexts. When the balance of power
between discourses shifts, so do the positions of literacy mediators. Like lit­
eracy itself, literacy mediation is not a technology with autonomous and
universal meaning.
People in Newtown made use of various discursive resources, such as
respectability and survival strategies, in negotiating their social position in
relation to local and dominant discourses. These, more than their posses­
sion of schooled literacy per se, impacted on their orientations to and uses
of different literacies. While casting some doubt over assumptions about the
 Literacy mediation and social identity 121

cultural capital people in Newtown could gain through acquiring schooled

literacy in adult literacy classes, this study suggests that existing literacy in­
terventions such as those of literacy mediators could be fruitfully developed
as alternative strategies. Facilitators trained as literacy mediators should be
available as resources in contexts of real literacy use. Their training would
involve the acquisition of flexible tools for the teaching of literacy in con­
text. Training should also involve reflection on, and in-depth studies of,
local and dominant discourses of the communities where trainers would be
acting as literacy facilitators.
There are, however, limits to the impact that existing or alternative lit­
eracy interventions can have. At some point the 'empowerment' of people
depends on institutional change rather than literacy learning. Formal insti­
tutions could democratise their relationships with their clients in a number
of ways: by addressing the communication strategies of their officials acting
as literacy mediators, the format of communication between institutions
and their clients and the available channels for communication. These
changes may not always be possible. The point is that, without institutional
change on a much larger scale, adult literacy classes in areas like Newtown
are not likely to have a marked effect on social inequality and disadvantage.

Notes
1. Thefieldworkon which this article is based was initially made possible by the
University of Fort Hare, Department of Afrikaans-Nederlands. Final fieldwork
and writing up formed part of the SoUL research.
2. All quotes from interviews used in this chapter have been translated from
Afrikaans.
3. Pseudonyms have been used in this article to protect the identity of the people
referred to.
4. Under apartheid many 'Coloured' people were able to cross the colour bar and
pass themselves off as 'White'.
Chapter Six
Cultural brokers and bricoleurs 1 of
modern and traditional literacies: land
struggles in Namaqualand's Coloured
reserves
Steven Robins

We are depending on schools and education to break people

away from this [traditional] culture of [communal tenure]. The
children are leaving [Namaqualand] and seeing other parts of
the world and then they do not want to come back easily. They
stay in the cities and buy themselves plots [because] they see
that it is impossible to get away from these traditions [that is,
communal tenure]. ('Hannes Smit', retired Coloured school
principal in Namaqualand)2

Eric Wolf (1966) and Clifford Geertz (1960) produced some of the earliest
anthropological work on cultural brokerage in their studies of individuals in
Latin America who connected local with national cultural worlds (see Paine,
1971; Vincent, 1971). The brokers they identified were usually found in
small towns and rural communities where they occupied interstitial and
interhierarchical structural positions at the frontiers of the modern world
system and expanding capitalist economies. They tended to be missionaries,
storekeepers and officials (Bailey, 1957) and the educated political élites of
newly independent African countries (Bond, 1976). For example, in George
Bond's study of social change in post-independent Zambia these rural-
based brokers were the 'New Men' whose access to formal education allowed
them to establish connections with the political centre and thereby chal­
lenge the authority of village chiefs and headmen.
This study of cultural brokers in contemporary South Africa focuses on
their role in mediating legal and bureaucratic literacies and anti-apartheid
discourses in Leliefontein, one of the six rural 'Coloured reserves'3 of
Namaqualand in the Northern Cape. In contrast to most studies that identify
124 S. Robins

The majority ofNamaqualand residents are livestock producers.

cultural brokers as agents of modernity, this study focuses on brokers who
display ambivalence towards the modernising agendas of Namaqualand's
educated élites who, like Hannes Smit (see p. 123), advocated private own­
ership of land rather than 'traditional' communal forms of tenure.
In the mid-1980s, Leliefontein communal farmers, with support from
non-government organisations (NGOs) and anti-apartheid activists, chal­
lenged central government's attempts to introduce individually owned plots
('economic units'). Advocates of economic units represented communal ten­
ure as a 'backward' feature of traditional Nama (Khoi) culture that would in­
evitably have to give way to modern forms of private property. However, in­
dividual tenure was opposed by livestock farmers not able to afford to buy
these individual plots and who therefore stood to lose access to common
rangelands. This opposition to the privatisation of grazing land was ex­
pressed in rates and tax boycotts and culminated in a 1988 Supreme Court
decision that reinstated communal tenure in the Leliefontein reserve.
Throughout this period, Cape Town-based development workers and
activists mobilised local residents against the economic units and manage­
ment boards, the local institutions of the apartheid state. Activists brokered
 Cultural brokers and bricoleurs of literacies 125

an anti-apartheid discourse in a rural setting that had been more or less

insulated from national political struggles, and where the fear of state re­
taliation for anti-government activities was pervasive.4 The mid-1980s
witnessed severe state repression and renewed states of emergency, and
preparations for the Supreme Court case of 1988 provided activists with an
opportunity to mobilise politically under the guise of imparting apolitical
'technical' and legal advice, that is, by providing unschooled Leliefontein
residents with access to legal and bureaucratic literacies.
In preparing for the court case, activist brokers not only mediated legal
and bureaucratic literacies, but also constructed hybrid and intertextual
oppositional narratives that spliced together disparate discourses on Nama
cultural identity, anti-colonialism, Christianity, legality, the national libera­
tion struggle and democracy. Whereas primarily written modes of commun­
ication were deployed in preparing the legal documentation for the court
case, 'off-stage' (Goffman, 1971) face-to-face encounters between activist
brokers and Namaqualand communal farmers provided the space for
oppositional political mobilisation. These interventions probably contrib­
uted significantly to the African National Congress (ANC) victory in the
Northern Cape during the April 1994 democratic elections.

Local and 'official' literacies and challenges to the

hegemony of educated élites
The Leliefontein case study shows how unschooled, small-scale livestock
rearers were able to mobilise social networks and resources to protect their
'traditional' rights of access to communal grazing land. These defensive
strategies included establishing contacts with Cape Town-based NGOs, act­
ivists, journalists and lawyers. Through such tactics they successfully chal­
lenged attempts by the state and local, educated élites to privatise communal
rangelands.
Despite the fact that many of the applicants in the Supreme Court case
were unschooled, they were chosen to represent Leliefontein residents be­
cause of their social position as respected and established small-scale com­
munal farmers and local leaders. Whereas in the past local politics tended to
be dominated by educated élites, for example, school principals, local offi­
cials and business people, through access to cultural brokers unschooled
residents were legally able to challenge these élites and in the process win
back their land. Far from being helpless and powerless, by deploying
126 S. Robins

cultural brokers unschooled livestock farmers were able to engage success­

fully with complex legal and bureaucratic literacies and practices.
Fingeret (1983) has pointed out that unschooled people are able to de­
ploy networks in order to overcome problems they may encounter with spe­
cialised literacy practices, for example, legal and bureaucratic literacies. She
also found that many unschooled people are in possession of social re­
sources and/or skills that are reciprocally exchanged for the services of local
literacy experts'. Workmates and neighbourhood and kin ties are other
means through which unschooled people are able to gain access to literacy
expertise. In Leliefontein in the late 1980s, ANC activists and NGO personnel
fulfilled similar roles by brokering legal literacies that enabled the commun­
ity to win the Supreme Court case. The court case victory gave activists
legitimacy and moral authority that allowed them to canvass support suc­
cessfully for the ANC when the organisation was unbanned in February
1990.
The success of the mobilising tactics of ANC and NGO cultural brokers
in the 1980s and early 1990s was largely due to their skill in constructing a
bricolage of the narratives of anti-colonialism, national liberation and local
discourses on Nama cultural identity. Through these composite ideological
bricolages, NGO cultural brokers were able to mobilise communal farmers
against the apartheid state and its local allies. These activist bricoleurs con­
nected local cultural and discursive worlds to national political discourses.
They also privileged face-to-face (oral) interactions with Leliefontein
residents rather than the impersonal, bureaucratic written forms of com­
munication emanating from government offices in Cape Town and Pretoria.
So, apart from championing struggles for the retention of communal tenure,
these activists deployed communicative genres embedded within local cul­
tural identities and histories. In a later section I will show how 'Chris
September', a Coloured cleric and ANC activist, connected local, everyday
knowledge and cultural identities with national anti-apartheid political and
cultural struggles.

School versus local, everyday knowledge: a generational

conundrum?
Cultural brokers operating in Leliefontein encountered the ambivalence of
many older residents towards schooling, 'book knowledge' and the local
educated élite. This ambivalence and antagonism were heightened during
the land struggles of the late 1980s. Whereas the educated élite embraced
 Cultural brokers and bricoleurs of literacies 127

notions of modernisation, individual competition and self-reliance to sup­

port their arguments for privatisation, most communal farmers opposed
this initiative on the grounds that it would deny them access to traditional
grazing lands. Local antagonism towards the modernising, educated élite
facilitated activists' attempts to mobilise local residents against economic
units.
In attempting to straddle the divide between 'school' knowledge and
local, everyday knowledge, cultural brokers ended up privileging the latter
in order to facilitate their access to local farmers.5 Yet, the power of school
knowledge was not entirely eclipsed. After all, the discursive worlds of the
brokers themselves were embedded in political and development discourses
that drew on 'school knowledge' as well as modernisation and development
ideas that were at times at odds with local knowledge and practices. In the
following pages we set out to discuss these issues without romanticising
local knowledge, 'tradition' and cultural authenticity.
Some of the older, relatively unschooled Leliefontein respondents did
indeed assert their everyday 'common sense' understandings as a form of
local knowledge superior to the book or school knowledge of the schooled
youth. Pensioner and livestock owner 'Hendrik Brandt' was one such 'self-
made man'. Brandt had attended school for three months before he was
'hired to a White man' in 1939. Although he had virtually no formal school­
ing, he later taught himself numeracy and to read and write.

I only went to school for a very short time ... But at least I can
sign my name and I can count money so that nobody can catch
me out when it comes to money ... I learnt to read by myself
when the young White man I worked for gave me old newspa­
pers. If I did not understand a word I would ask him and he
would spell it for me. I taught myself to read the newspapers
from 1940 until 1949. (Hendrik Brandt)

Like many older respondents I interviewed, Brandt viewed contemporary

schooling as having failed to instil in pupils discipline, obedience and re­
spect for the law and their parents. The benefits of modern schooling were
fundamentally questioned in Brandt's account. He claimed that the
educated youth were generally ill-disciplined and without a vocation or live­
lihood. They were not interested in livestock rearing and often ended up
moving to the cities where they joined gangs and consumed alcohol and
drugs. According to Brandt, unlike the schooled youth, the older generation
128 S. Robins

remained rooted in the agricultural and moral economies of the original

Leliefontein Mission Station.

Today's children do not have respect. They will complete Stand­

ard Eight or Ten and then walk around here the whole day doing
nothing. In the past our parents would hire us out to the White
man to go and work on the farms. You can forget about it today
because if the man does not hire himself to the Whites, it's all
over. I worked for only R76 per month, today's child works for
Rl 500. But what happens to this money? It just gets spent on
drinking and bad manners. They do not see where the money
goes. I have a four-roomed house yet the man who earns a lot of
money has only a two-roomed house ... We know better than
the children because all they have is book education but we have
life education. They have never struggled like us. We can under­
stand things and talk about things that we experienced our­
selves. Today I have a good living, I do not suffer any more and
my common sense which God gave me is still functioning well.
(Hendrik Brandt)

Brandt's narrative has to be seen within the context of the gradual decline of
the Namaqualand livestock economy and the increasing role of labour mi­
gration and urbanisation. In such a context, rural livelihoods become less
viable and schooling becomes even more crucialin terms of access to formal
employment. Yet even a school completion certificate is no longer a guaran­
tee of employment in the highly competitive job markets of the Western Cape
and Northern Cape.
Another Leliefontein pensioner, Gert Basson, also recollected the lost
paradise of his youth with a trace of nostalgia. Basson spoke of the negative
attitude of educated youth towards agriculture and manual labour, and in­
terpreted this as the outcome of the Janus-faced nature of education: it can
'build one's character' or it can turn youths against hard manual labour and
into unemployed drunkards and gangsters.

People who are qualified are looking for jobs to sit in the offices,
for writing jobs. My children can adapt and are working in [the
fields] and with the goats. But there are a lot of children walking
around here doing nothing. (Gert Basson)
 Cultural brokers and bricoleurs of literacies 129

Despite being rural-orientated and unschooled, many of these older genera­

tion communal farmers were far from powerless traditionalists lost in a
modern world. As I discuss later, they were able to engage with the complex
legal and bureaucratic literacies of the 1988 Supreme Court case.
Brandt claimed that 'wisdom and common sense' and access to transla­
tion, rather than schooling, enabled him to participate in the court proceed­
ings:

Brandt: Literacy does not matter for me ... You see, we had a big
court case. We were not educated but we went so far as to have
a court case. I was one of the applicants ...
S.R. (researcher): When you were in court was it not a problem
when the lawyers were using fancy language when they spoke
about the laws?
Brandt: Sir, the person who led our delegation was a teacher
and he assisted us at times when we could not understand. He
also told them that we couldn't understand the fancy language
and they must speak the proper language for us to understand.
This is how we got through the court case. So it was not educa­
tion, it was our own wisdom and common sense that got us
through the case. The reason we won was because we were not
afraid to talk and we were not afraid of the laws ... We decided
that life is about truth and not skelmness [gangsterism] and
politics.

Before discussing the case itself, it is necessary to sketch briefly the histor­
ical background of the Coloured reserves.

The making of Namaqualand's Coloured reserves and the

land tenure struggles of the 1980s
The inhabitants of Namaqualand are directly descended from Khoikhoi
peoples who have lived in the region for over a thousand years. The history
of land dispossession in Namaqualand can be traced to the two Khoikhoi-
Dutch wars in 1659-1660 and 1673-1677, and a smallpox epidemic in
1713 that devastated the population (see Steyn, 1989; Boonzaaier, 1987;
Sharp, 1977). In 1816, Rev. Barnaby Shaw of the Methodist Missionary
Society established a mission station in Leliefontein, which provided the in­
digenous population with some degree of protection from the trekboers
130 S. Robins

(Dutch settlers) who were encroaching onto Namaqua territory at the time.
In 1909 the Mission Station and Reserves Act established the reserves as
communal areas in which tax-paying indigenous Nama people of aboriginal
descent were entitled to graze their animals and cultivate their fields.
Namaqualand is a sparsely populated, semi-arid region of 47 700
square kilometres situated in the Northern Cape. It has a population of
60 234 and comprises 14 small urban settlements, six Coloured rural areas
and vast tracts of either White-owned or mining company land. Almost 50
per cent of the population is employed on the diamond and copper mines,
while 9 per cent are farm labourers on White farms. However, fluctuations in
the mining industry have meant that workers are periodically retrenched in
large numbers, and in recent years the situation was exacerbated by the clo­
sure of smaller mines (Steyn, 1989). In addition, a significant section of the
population are employed in the service and manufacturing sectors of the
Western Cape as migrant labourers. The majority of Namaqualand residents,
including absent migrant labourers, derive income from the land, primarily
as livestock producers. While wheat, barley, rye and oats are grown, the
backbone of the agricultural economy is small stock, namely goats and
sheep.
The communal land tenure system in Namaqualand's reserves has
meant that residents {burgers) have guaranteed access to grazing and arable
land. This has provided security for migrant workers who continue to de­
pend on the reserves, both as a place to retire to, and as a safety net in the
event of retrenchment.
In the early 1980s, central government attempted to introduce indi­
vidual tenure in Leliefontein's communal reserves for those who could
afford to hire these 3000-5000 hectare plots with an option to purchase
them at a later date. The common grazing area was divided into 47 econ­
omic units (camps) which were sold or hired to individuals who qualified in
terms of the following criteria: 250 head of stock or R3 000 in assets. Of the
30 camps leased in 1985, 18 were hired by people with off-farm sources of
income, for example, shop-owners, teachers, pensioners and bureaucrats
(Steyn, 1989:420). As a result, grazing land was allocated to a relatively
small group of people who qualified to lease the camps. This posed a serious
threat to the majority of communal farmers who stood to face serious graz­
ing land shortages.
Economic units initiated intense conflict between a relatively small
group of 'modernises' who supported individual tenure, and a considerably
larger group of communal farmers who demanded the retention of the
Community meetings around land issues, Namaqualand, 1986.
132 S. Robins

communal tenure regime. While the 'modernisers' claimed that individual

tenure was a solution to overgrazing and environmental degradation in the
reserves, Leliefontein farmers responded by taking the matter to the Su­
preme Court and winning the case on technical grounds. As a result, com­
munal tenure was reinstated throughout Namaqualand's reserves.
The 'economic units' proposal had been the outcome of government at­
tempts since the 1960s to promote the growth of a class of better-off, edu­
cated, small-scale commercial farmers. Unschooled communal farmers, by
contrast, were represented by the government as environmentally destruct­
ive, unproductive and an obstacle to modernisation. Whereas the more
schooled and wealthier advocates of individual tenure relied upon dis­
courses of modernisation, individual competition and self-reliance, their
opponents (communal farmers, activists, NGOs and lawyers) drew on indi­
genous (Nama) land claims and discourses on community, legality, demo­
cracy and the national liberation struggle. By focusing on fears of land
dispossession they addressed the needs of the less educated majority (the
communal farmers) rather than the schooled élite who traditionally domin­
ated local politics.
'Ben Bezuidenhout', a retired school principal, represented the Lelie-
fontein of his youth as a consensual community in stark contrast to the
rural differentiation, power struggles and land conflicts of Leliefontein in
the 1990s. Bezuidenhout also noted that, whereas in the past school princi­
pals and the educated élite had controlled local management councils, in the
1980s younger men challenged this hegemony. The 1980s also witnessed
younger militant activists defying the authority of management boards that
they claimed were undemocratic and illegitimate apartheid institutions. The
mid-1980s witnessed the spread of anti-apartheid politics throughout
Namaqualand and this encouraged Leliefontein farmers to challenge eco­
nomic units and the authority of the management boards through court
applications and tax and rates boycotts. The following section shows how
this process compelled relatively unschooled Leliefontein residents to en­
gage with complex legal and bureaucratic literacies.

Letter writing in Namaqualand: brokering bureaucratic

messages and inscribing local identities
During the preparations for the court case, legal literacies, procedures and
tactics were mediated by NGO personnel by means of formal and informal
correspondence, workshops and field visits. Letters from the Leliefontein
 Cultural brokers and bricoleurs of literacies 133

Community Committee (LCC) secretary to Lala Steyn (Surplus People's

Project) and Lee Bozalek (Legal Resources Centre) indicate that, by the late
1980s, legal language and procedure were already part of the committee's
communicative repertoire.
In one such letter the committee secretary claimed that the local tax boy­
cott was legal because the committee already had a constitution that pro­
vided for this type of protest action. The secretary also noted that 'private
property rights is one of our grievances that pierces the head [and] is against
our laws and regulations'. The secretary stressed that the LCC was not an­
tagonistic towards modernisation and development: 'We do not reject devel­
opment, but it must be done in a just and proper manner.'
In contrast to the more formal, legalistic and bureaucratic style of the
LCC secretary, the letters of Leliefontein pensioner, 'Japie Kloete' - a commu­
nal farmer and outspoken applicant in the Supreme Court case - reveal a
personal and religiously inspired style and content. In his letters to Lala
Steyn, Kloete deploys a relatively intimate style of expression, in contrast to
the impersonal and distanced style of LCC correspondence. In an undated
letter written to Steyn, he begins by declaring that the Management Board is
an illegal and illegitimate institution, and asks Steyn for the address of
House of Representatives Minister Hendriks, so that he can take this matter
to higher authorities. He concludes the letter with the following words: 'may
the eyes of God see you triumph ... Sleep well, dream with peace and feel
fresh [fit, alive], and think of me. Yours J.A. Kloete.' In another (undated)
letter, Kloete begins and ends his letter with a reference to his Christian God:
'By the will of the Father, I am still well ... With thanks and joy and may
God's blessing triumph in you.'
Japie Kloete's letters also draw on an oral historical narrative whereby
Queen Victoria had entered into an agreement that Namaqualand's com­
munal reserves would become Crown Trust Land reserved for the exclusive
use of the Nama people. This agreement, according to Kloete, rendered land
title deeds of neighbouring Whites null and void. In a letter to Lala Steyn
dated 17 June 1988, Japie Kloete writes that he has sent a letter 'to the [Brit­
ish] ambassador for the Queen of England' because 'the laws of the [South
African] Republic [have] made war against the Coloured people and the Eng­
lish Government... The Republic believes that it is an enemy of the Coloured
people. Now it is exploiting us without consulting us.' Kloete also writes
that 'the law of the Nationalists' has 'turned Coloureds into slaves'.
Another letter from Japie Kloete to Steyn (28 November 1989) repro­
duces this historical narrative of colonial conquest and land dispossession,
134 S. Robins

this time with the intention of buttressing the case for Nama land claims.
The British Crown and the United Nations Organisation are called upon to
intervene on behalf of dispossessed 'Nama tribesmen':

We want the Queen t o give Namaqualand, which has been

given as a Trust, to us because the lawe of the Whites are
pushing us out. Jan van Riebeeck's laws drove out slaves and
the Republic drives out squatters. Namaqualand is only for
native tribesmen ar\d not Whites.

Steyn's correspondence with the LCC, of which Japie Kloete is a member, is

both informal and friendly, as well as directive and concerned with
strategising, mobilising and gathering and disseminating information in
preparation for the upcoming court case. Her correspondence with the LCC
makes no reference to God or Queen Victoria. Instead, she is primarily con­
cerned with technical and bureaucratic matters in preparation for the im­
pending court case. She tries to sensitise the LCC to the fact that the land
struggle is going to be about legislation, affidavits and bureaucratic proce­
dures rather than Queen Victoria's unfulfilled promises. This is brought
home when preparations for the court case get under way. In a letter dated
12 October 1987, Steyn warns the LCC that the introduction of new legisla­
tion could jeopardise Namaqualanders' access to land.

Dear Committee,
I hope things are going well with you. I was ill for a week but am
back on my feet again. I have sent you coplee of questions
asked in Parliament. I have made markings on the paper. The
one point that concerne me is t h a t they are speaking about
new legislation. They could possibly plan in such a manner to
take away land. That is why it is so important to proceed ae
quickly as possible with the Supreme Court caee ...

Another pensioner, Gert Basson, writes official letters that at times appear to
emulate the formality of bureaucratic correspondence, yet end up deviating
from this format. Basson's correspondence with T.J. Bothma, an official of
the Department of Coloured Affairs, illustrates the slippages that occur
when Basson attempts to write letters in the impersonal bureaucratic form.
In response to the introduction of economic units, Basson claims that 'the
 Cultural brokers and bricoleurs of literacies 135

wires' (paddock fencing) and Improvements' (economic units) have been

established in 'a treasonous manner' that violates an agreement signed by
'the Church of England of Queen Victoria' that was meant to ensure that
Namaqualand 'citizens' (Nama people and Coloureds) would not lose their
'inheritance' (land).

Sir, we ae citizens can not have this scheme [individual

tenure] because it provides for only one man. And we ae
colourede are acknowledged on this \and by the Church [of]
England of Queen Victoria ... Sir, we ae citizens are unsatisfied
that our inheritance [communal grazing land] can be sold
and our livelihoods taken away. These are rights we inherited
from our forefathers as Leliefontein residents ...

In contrast to Basson's letters to Bothma, his affidavit, prepared by lawyers

from the Legal Resources Centre (LRC), conforms to a legal format that forces
the respondents (the Management Board and Coloured Affairs officials) to
take his testimony seriously In this affidavit, LRC lawyers draw on interpre­
tations of statutes and administrative procedure to argue their case. As was
to be expected, the case was decided not on questions of aboriginal land
rights and agreements with Queen Victoria but on technical questions relat­
ing to administrative procedure. The impersonal, legal language of Basson's
affidavit privileges his identity as a juridical subject, a citizen and Supreme
Court applicant. This contrasted with Basson's own letters which inscribed
his identity as a descendant of Nama tribesmen, a Coloured and a Christian.
The affidavit begins with the following statement:

I, t h e undersigned, G e r t Basson, hereby s t a t e t h e

following under oath. I am t h e first applicant in this
matter. The first respondent's sworn s t a t e m e n t was
read and explained to me and I want t o respond a s
follows ... I deny t h a t the Administrative action referred
to, is not limited to the stipulations a s s t a t e d in Article
41 of Regulation 1 of 1979.

The choice of Basson as first applicant added legitimacy and credibility to

the Leliefontein community's court application for a number of reasons. He
136 S. Robins

was an elderly, distinguished-looking and articulate local farmer who was

born in Leliefontein, where he had spent most of his life. Although Basson
had only attended school for a few years, he was a successful livestock
farmer who had been at the forefront of the resistance to economic units.
His life history, as he related it in the court affidavit and oral interviews,
conveys an image of Nama cultural continuity. Yet, at the same time he em­
braces a mission Christian identity that is completely silent about Nama-
ness.
While the LRC lawyers primarily engaged with technical interpretations
of legal documents, journalists' accounts indicate that the courtroom was
also exposed to visual, written and oral representations of 'authentic' Nama
cultural identity. In other words, although Basson and his co-applicants
won the case on a technicality, Nama cultural identity was a cultural prop
throughout the courtroom hearings - a sign of aboriginal land rights and
cultural continuity that could not be ignored. Yet, in interviews, Basson
seemed more comfortable with his identity as a mission-schooled Christian
than a 'Nama tribesman'. These examples of the intertextual resources of
identity construction testify to the hybrid nature of local identity narratives.
For Basson there is nothing inconsistent or contradictory about being both
an Afrikaans-speaking Christian and claiming rights to traditional grazing
land on the grounds of Nama ancestry.
Basson's (oral) narrative-style resonated with a Christian discourse on
self-reliance and independence of mind that, where necessary, called for
opposition to the government in order to defend community interests. He
claimed in an interview that the Bible had taught him that to keep silent
about grievances was a sin against God:

I told the guys here when we were in the struggle [against eco­
nomic units], that when the Lord told Moses that he could not
see Canaan, Moses told Him that he simply had to see it. And the
Lord let it be ... My mouth is my weapon for the road ... The
Bible says that which needs to be said must be said. If there is
something you want to say and you don't, it is a sin ...

However, rather than focus on Basson's religious identity, journalists' ac­

counts represented 'Oom Gert' as a nomadic pastoralist who was the living
embodiment of Nama cultural continuity. He was represented as a descend­
ant of aboriginal 'Little Namaqua and Baster tribes' who have lived in the
area 'as long as living memory' and whose rights to land in the reserves
 Cultural brokers and bricoleurs of literacies 137

were granted by Cape colonial governor Sir George Grey in 1854. These
media representations of idyllic rural life supplemented the technicist and
formalistic legal representations.

Oom Gert Basson's face is round and wrinkled as a sun-dried

raisin, testimony to the harsh Namaqualand sun under which
he has farmed for more than 40 years. His life used to follow the
pattern set by his father and grandfather - a nomadic cycle fol­
lowed by the hundreds of small-livestock farmers in
Namaqualand's six 'coloured rural areas' ... The land belonged
to everyone [and] grazing was communal ... Oom Gert could
hardly believe the letter telling him to destroy the buildings on
the land he'd farmed for 47 years. But one day when he came
home, there was a fence across his land and his harvest had
been destroyed ... ('Oom Gert Arrives Home To Find A Fence
Across His Lands', Weekly Mail, 4-10 December, 1987)

These representations of Nama cultural identity were also incorporated into

the oppositional narratives elaborated by ANC cultural brokers who sought
to incorporate Leliefontein residents into broader national political
struggles. They drew on accounts of colonial conquest, land dispossession,
Nama historical memory, Christianity and the national liberation struggle.
These oppositional narratives gained considerable local currency following
the 1988 Supreme Court victory and during the run-up to the April 1994
elections.

Brokering local and official literacies, and forging new

political identities
The letters and affidavits written during preparations for the court case pro­
vided little trace of ANC activists' efforts to reinvent or revitalise Nama iden­
tity during and following the case. The legal tactics deployed by LRC lawyers
did not allow much space for references to Nama historical identity. By con­
trast the 1994 election campaign speech of 'Chris September' - a 30-some-
thing Coloured ANC activist - at a meeting in the Leliefontein reserve
stressed connections between the experiences of oppression of Black South
Africans and the history of the Nama, Khoikhoi and San. In his speech, Sep­
tember had to deal with the fact that the majority of Namaqualand residents
have lost almost all traces of their Nama ancestry and have over the years
138 S. Robins

come to see themselves as Coloureds or Bruin mense (Brown people). In re­

sponse to this 'collective amnesia' September sought to reawaken this
deeply sedimented historical memory:

We have suffered a great injustice during the years of apartheid

and colonialism. Number one, we lost our language. And lan­
guage is a powerful weapon because it binds people and makes
them one. We lost our language. In the old Khoikhoi language
there were about 20 dialects or regional languages which we
spoke with 16 clicks ... The Xhosa people got their clicks from
us ... The White people came, they took our language away
from us, and with that they took the greatest part of our culture
from us. The second thing they took was our land. In the old
Khoikhoi tradition no person owned land ... The land belonged
to all of us ... (Chris September)

September then went on to provide a history of the Khoikhoi and San people
and described how colonialism and apartheid had destroyed their religion,
culture and language. His account of the legacy of colonial conquest at­
tempted to revive collective memory among a people who appeared to have
lost sight of their Nama past. It sought to 'reinvent' a local Nama identity
and splice it onto a national liberation narrative:

Comrades, the struggle against White people, or the struggle

against injustice, isn't a struggle which began yesterday. It is a
struggle which began when we lost our culture and our land,
when we lost our cattle, when we lost our humanity. And that's
what happened when they came to take over our land ... (Chris
September)

The rest of September's speech resonated with (anti-apartheid) 'struggle'

rhetoric. He explained why the ANC launched the armed struggle, and as­
sured Namaqualanders that the Bill of Rights protected the property, cul­
tural, religious and language rights of all citizens·. 'So should someone call
you a Hotnot [Hottentot], you can take him to court.' He also assured every­
one present that no inkommers (outsiders) had a right to interfere in local
agriculture and land matters: 'Nobody will touch our ground. No one
touches our herds.'
 Cultural brokers and bricoleurs of literacies 139

Conclusion
To conclude, these NGO and ANC cultural brokers and bricoleurs drew on
local, hybrid cultural identities and discourses to mediate both the literacies
of officialdom and the oppositional discourses of the national liberation
struggle. The court case had provided the opportunity to make connections
between local land issues and national political and cultural struggles. In
other words, the brokering of legal literacies during the court case facilitated
an 'off-stage' mobilisation process that linked local to national political
arenas.

Notes
1. The term 'bricoleur' was first used by the social anthropologist Claude Levi-
Strauss. The term means, literally, a jack-of-all trades, someone who makes
things out of odds and ends. Levi-Strauss (1962:17) used the term in the context
of mythical thought which he said was a kind of 'intellectual bricolage' in that it
expressed itself by means of 'a heterogeneous repertoire which, even if exten­
sive, is nevertheless limited. It has to use this repertoire, however, whatever the
task in hand because it has nothing else at its disposal.' Derrida (1972:256) uses
the term in the context of discourse to dispute the notion of centre or origin.
'Every discourse is bricoleur. ... A subject who would supposedly be the absolute
origin of his own of his own discourse and would supposedly construct it "out of
nothing".'
2. All names in this chapter have been changed to protect the identity of the inter­
viewees.
3. Labelling these people as 'Coloureds' disguises the complex and contested nature
of identity constructions among a population who identify themselves as Bruin
Afrikaners (Brown Afrikaners), Blacks, Kleurlinge (Coloureds), Nama (Khoi),
Namaqualanders, South Africans, and so on.
4. Prior to the April 1994 democratic elections, observers and polls claimed that
Namaqualand's Afrikaans-speaking Coloureds would vote for F.W de Klerk's
National Party because of their traditional political and religious conservatism.
The fact that the ANC won the majority of votes in the Northern Cape challenged
these stereotypes of the conservatism of Namaqualand's Coloureds.
5. The local farmers with whom the cultural brokers were working during the
preparations for the court case were mostly older generation, male, small-stock
owners. The younger generation of Namaqualanders are more likely to leave the
rural areas for Cape Town and neighbouring rural towns upon completing their
schooling. For the older generation, education, which they acquired at Methodist
schools at mission stations in Namaqualand, usually centred on learning to read
the Bible.
Chapter Seven
Literacy learning and local literacy
practice in Bellville South
Liezl Malan

In this case study I compare the uses and valuations of literacy in discourses
of learning (around adult literacy classes) to that of everyday literacy prac­
tices in Bellville South, a working-class Coloured area in the Cape Peninsula.
I discuss three elements of social practice in Bellville South. The first two -
space and social position - can, in isolation, be described as nondiscursive
elements, whereas the third - communicative practice - is discursive in na­
ture. I show how the nondiscursive elements are taken up in the process of
establishing discursive formations. Distinguishing between these three
elements of discourse makes it possible to see more clearly what the role of
literacy practices (as one form of communicative practice) is in relation to
other discursive elements. The social construction of space often provides a
determining context for literacy practices. Literacy practices are not seen in
isolation but as social practice involving agency and social power.
The distinction between literacy as taught at school and literacy as used
for other purposes was first made by Scribner and Cole (1981) in their sem­
inal work The Psychology ofLiteracy (see Introduction). Brian Street (1984)
distinguished between the literacies of modern schools, the traditional
'maktab' schools and that used for commercial purposes in Iran. The 'ideo­
logical· model of the New Literacy Studies describes different literacies as
embedded in contextual practice (Gee, 1990). This marks a clear shift from
Jack Goody's universalising theory (1977) which stated that literacy is an
autonomous technology of modernity which leads to the rational, psycho­
logical and cultural transformation of people.
Bellville South, the site of this study, was established under the Group
Areas Act as a residential area for Coloureds who were removed from White
areas and many others who flocked from farms and rural towns to the Cape
Peninsula. Under Coloured labour preference policy they found work in fac­
tories, state institutions and in the homes of White employers. Today
Bellville South is surrounded by schools, technikons and universities which
offer employment to the middle classes; at the same time, over the years, it
142 L. Malan

has been home to a surprising number of literacy classes initiated by

churches, political parties, old age homes, employers and schools.
The literacy learners with whom I first made contact graciously invited
me into their homes and opened the doors of the neighbourhood to me. I
was conscious of their perception of me as 'the other': the young 'Whitey' in
a Toyota from Gauteng, even perhaps an amateur politician or a literacy
teacher. In time I became accustomed to the life rhythms of working-class
Bellville South. It became clear to me that behind the public face of literacy
learners here there were people who made considerable use of literacy mat­
erials and were participating in a variety of everyday literacy events.

Literacy practices and everyday life

In the daily life of Bellville South, people changed faces and roles all the
time: mothers and fathers became shift workers in factories and later 'broth­
ers' and 'sisters' in church services. Grandparents changed from unem­
ployed pensioners into breadwinners (supporting families with their state
pensions) and 'parents' raising their grandchildren. For those who worked
in factories, this work was a significant domain of literacy use; Sait and
Breier (see Chapter 3) look at literacy practices in a factory work environ­
ment. I focus on literacy practices in neighbourhood settings, in dealing
with local government and in church practices. The uses and valuations of
literacy, I argue here, are context specific. In situations where literacy prac­
tices are invested with social power, such as pension pay-outs and church
services, the value of literacy is foregrounded. Neighbourhood discourses,
in contrast, afford no special status to literacy practices. Nevertheless, they
play a supportive role around events where written texts are more signi­
ficant.

Literacy practices in the neighbourhood

There was a public display of writing and reading all over Bellville South.
Children wrote letters to each other on the walls of the flats, youth 'gangs'
spray-painted shop walls with their symbols, men occasionally sat on the
stairways of flats reading a newspaper or pamphlet. Between the shacks in
people's backyards lay piles of discarded magazines and newspapers. Even
so, teachers and headmasters of schools in Bellville South said that hardly
any reading or writing happened in the area (apart from religious and bu­
reaucratic practices). It seemed that the literacy practices of the neighbour-
 Literacy learning and local literacy practice 143

hood were 'hidden' to the gaze which relates literacy to the linguistic codes
and formats associated with schooled literacy.
On the other hand, it should also be said that these literacy practices
were 'hidden' to the people themselves. The reason for this, I propose, was
the relatively low value literacy (and particularly reading) had in neighbour­
hood life. The same pattern can be seen in a number of studies in this book
and elsewhere.
Perhaps the most significant reason why reading was often a 'hidden'
practice in Bellville South was because it was done mostly by women at
home. Reading at home was to a large extent a gendered practice in Bellville
South, similar to Rockhill's description in her study of gender, language and
the politics of literacy (Rockhill, 1993). Men of all ages were to be found in
the streets or yards, but seldom inside the houses. Severely limited space in­
doors was often also a reason why men spent their time outdoors. Tekkies1,
who had lost his leg and received a disability grant, said that he had decided
not to sit at home and feel sorry for himself; he ran a successful rugby club
for young people, and in his free time sold vegetables from the self-con­
structed corner shop in his yard. Most unemployed men seemed to share
Tekkies' sentiment that the inside of the house is not the place for a man to be.
At the same time, being inside the house is a way for a woman to 'cover
herself' in respectability. Behind the curtains women's worlds are a hub of
activity and filled with narratives. At the back of Tekkies' house lived his
unemployed and drug-addicted brother and his wife, Nora. When I visited
her, Nora was cooking some food on a hot plate while doing the washing
and watching a soap opera on television. While we talked, she looked for a
magazine under a pile of washing and found it under the mattress of her bed
(which, together with the cupboard and television, filled the entire room).
She also produced a pile of hard cover large-print romance novels which she
had taken out from the library
Because reading is seen as a trivial feminine pursuit, Nora emphasised
the educational qualities of the books. Articles in popular magazines, she
said, helped her with the education of her children. She showed me an arti­
cle on giving birth: 'I want to show it to them [the children] so that they can
see how the little babies come into being, all about ovicells, you see?' Nora
was a keen romance reader, and she defended this practice by emphasising
the relationship between fiction and reality. 'When the man says: "You read
a lot", then I say it gives me more experience.'2
Nora's reading practices bear witness to the intertextual quality of
neighbourhood literacy practices. Julia Kristeva (1986) coined the term
144 L. Malan

intertextuality to describe the interdependency of texts. The texts of Bellville

South were not only written, but also visual, for example, television stories,
and oral, such as neighbourhood gossip. These texts co-constructed each
other; I often found it difficult to distinguish whether a conversation I over­
heard was about neighbours, television characters or a book someone had
read. This intertextual quality of neighbourhood communicative practices
was partly responsible for the fact that literacy practices were not valued or
noticed more than other forms of exchange in neighbourhood conversation
- the literacy dimension was seldom drawn attention to.
Also, literacy practices were often communal events which did not re­
quire participants to read or write. The following incident serves to illustrate
this: I was visiting Ria, an old woman who bought the newspaper daily,
when her friend Kay arrived. While Kay paged through the paper, Ria told
her about an article she had read about a famous politician who had alleg­
edly rejected her infant child. At one point Ria asked me to read the article.
There followed a discussion involving previous articles and television re­
ports about this event, and later Ria recounted an item she had read about
another mother who had rejected her child. Eventually the discussion led to
the present, where Ria asked Kay about mutual friends of theirs who had
adopted twins. During the whole discussion, neither Ria nor Kay read any­
thing; since neither of them had been to school and as I came from a univer­
sity, there was an assumption that it was appropriate that I should do the
reading. However, in this intertextual literacy event we were all equal part­
icipants in the discussion in terms of turn-taking and topic rights.
These kind of literacy events, however, often took place inside homes or
on the streets of Bellville South. It was in the more formal, public literacy
events like pension pay-outs and church services that the relationship
between literacy practices and social power was apparent.

Pension day as literacy practice

Much of the reading and writing in Bellville South was done in relation to
local government. The use of formal documents is central to the ordered
functioning of such institutions. Douglas writes in this regard:

The more fully the institutions encode expectations, the more

they put uncertainty under control, with the further effect that
behaviour tends to conform to the institutional matrix: if this
 Literacy learning and local literacy practice 145

degree of coordination is achieved, disorder and confusion dis­

appear. (1986:48)

While being aware of the significance of literacy practices during bureau­

cratic events, state subjects also realise that reading and writing are mostly
the tasks of officials. Also, neighbourhood discourses around bureaucratic
practice relativise the significance of literacy. I found this evident during
pension day.
Pension day was a highlight on the monthly calendar in Bellville South.
This was the day when the old age pensions, disability grants and various
other forms of state support were paid out. Pension pay-outs were in the
first place state events with a structuring logic characterised by the clear
ordering and classification of spaces, roles and practices. The pay-out took
place in a hall in the municipal grounds, a visibly bureaucratic space in
Kassasvlei Road, the main road leading to the residential areas. The hall
was filled with rows of orange chairs. As the queue inside moved forward,
people exchanged chairs until they were at the back of the hall; then they
joined the standing queues. Procedures were clearly structured by means of
rows, queues, cards and stamps, which not only simplified matters for the
officials, but gave the recipients the security of knowing that the system
would work. As one woman told me: 'If it [the system] is going to change,
then we will have to wait again.'
Literacy practices around forms, pension books and notices played an
important structuring role during the event, but there was a clear hierarchy
in participation. Officials played a significant role as'gatekeepers' in the
pension pay-out as literacy practice as can be seen in the following quote
from my field notes:

I position myself behind the first desk, where two officials with
glasses are seated; people are aware of me but continue as nor­
mal. The officials take the pension books and look for the
computer-printed green card with the pensioner's details on.
The cards are numerically ordered in piles. The woman at the
table at this time has two pension books; her own and her hus­
band's. The official searches very slowly and for quite some
time, but does not find this man's name on the list. The woman
gives him the letter from 'Coloured Affairs', which he initially
only glances at, and later, when she mentions 'back pay' which
she has to collect, he looks at the date - 1/3/1993. He explains to
146 L. Malan

her that the pension should have been paid out from that day;
she obviously knows this and has tried repeatedly to get the
money. He looks in a different pile, but with no success. The
woman takes her own card, signs this, saying 'but then they
must have not sent it [her husband's pension money] yet', and
moves on to the second counter.

At the second counter the woman put down her pension book and the slip
she had received at the previous counter. These were stamped quickly and
efficiently. Where someone received pension for someone else, a letter from
Coloured Affairs had to be produced. Then the money was counted rapidly
and given to the person.
Pensioners did not actually need to be able to read or write in order to
receive their pension. One old woman in the queue told me that she was
'blind' (an image often used to describe themselves by people with little or
no schooling), but when I asked her how she dealt with the pension pay-out,
she said with great confidence: 'Very easy. Like anything else. What I don't
know, I ask someone who knows. If I hear about something, I go to those
who can [read and write]. And now that person has to read to me what I
want to know. That is how it works.' It did not matter to her that she could
not even sign the form: '[I] just make a cross,' she said. Then they [the offi­
cials] chap, chap [they stamp the form].'
Even around this bureaucratic event, the neighbourhood was present
and successfully overwrote the official intention of the event with local prac­
tice. The informal and almost opportunistic organisation of space was a
confirmation of local and neighbourhood identity All around the hall,
people were selling fish, home-made clothes and packets of candies and bis­
cuits. Old people met and exchanged news outside while waiting for those
inside to finish. The social hierarchy of the bureaucratic event was replaced
by reciprocal family and neighbourhood relationships. Grandchildren and
children waited outside to share in the pensioners' money; in turn they as­
sisted them in filling in the forms when they paid the man from the burial
society In all the transactions around the pension pay-out, written commu­
nication was kept to a minimum. When clients were unable to provide the
burial society representative with an address, they explained to him where
they lived in relation to other clients.
A similar relationship existed between religious and neighbourhood
discourses at religious events such as funerals.
 Literacy learning and local literacy practice 147

Funeral services as literacy events

During funeral services the relationship between formal and local

understandings of literacy practices was particularly clear. During my
research, there were numerous funerals in Bellville South. I attended the fu­
neral of Jacobus McCloud who burnt to death in his shack in May 1994.
McCloud, locally known as Kosie, was a loner and to some extent an out­
sider in the neighbourhood. As is the practice, three services were held for
the funeral: one at the home of the deceased, one at the church and one at
the graveside. The discursive shifts between them reflect the interaction be­
tween religious and neighbourhood discourses in religious events.
In the discussion of the funeral it will become clear that literacy practices
are valued in religious discourse because of their symbolic value; literacy
practices act as ritual signs, or as display. However, as with events like the
pension pay-out, participation in religious literacy practices does not re­
quire being able to read or write. McEwan (Chapter 10) found the same pat­
tern in a Zionist church service, where written texts act as forms of display
for a largely unschooled congregation. In my study of Newtown (see Chapter
5) I also describe how unschooled lay preachers make extensive use of Scrip­
ture narratives in performance.
When someone dies in Bellville South, it is traditional for a service to be
held at the home of the deceased before the procession moves to the church.
The spatial organisation of the home funeral service confirms local or neigh­
bourhood identity. When I arrived at the house where Kosie's service was to
be held, the tiny room was already packed with family members dressed in
black surrounding the huge coffin in the centre. I was surprised to find the
walls covered with family photographs. The family made room for me in­
side; people from the neighbourhood who could not fit into the house stood
outside in the garden. It was an opportunity for friends, family and neigh­
bours to participate, through their words, their singing or simply through
their presence, in the parting with the deceased.
Scripture was given a significant place in the event. Symbolic artefacts
such as the Bible formulate, according to Clifford Geertz (1973:89-90), 'a
basic congruence between a particular style of life and a specific (if most
often implicit) metaphysic, and in doing so, sustain each with the borrowed
authority of the other'. In the same way, the metaphysics of religious dis­
course and the style of life formulated by neighbourhood discourse sustain
each other in Bellville South. Family and friends were together as peers for
the home funeral service, but a special position was given to the lay
148 L. Malan

preacher, referred to as Brother Smal. Brother Smal was no different from

the rest: he was Kosie's neighbour, and had little schooling himself. From
where I stood, he could only be distinguished from the congregation
because of his dramatic movements. He was given the role of lay preacher
because he had acquired a mastery of religious text through religious
practice.
In his sermon, Brother Smal drew together religious and neighbour­
hood narratives. He first comforted the family with a vignette meant to
confirm that McCloud had finally become a believer. He described in an
animated way how Kosie had always sat on the pavement reading the news­
papers when he, Brother Smal, passed by with a Bible under his arm on his
way to church. McCloud, he said, promised on the evening before his death
that he would join Brother Smal on his way to church. Then Brother Smal
turned to the narratives of Scripture. He read John 14:2: In my Father's king­
dom there are many houses. The implication of the reading in this context,
and of the brief interpretation that followed, was that Kosie, who had lived
as an outsider in the street and in the shacks of Bellville South, had found a
home in heaven. It is customary that the coffin, as last home of the body on
earth, be opened for the family; Kosie's body, however, had been turned to
ashes in the fire. Picking up the metaphor, Brother Smal compared Kosie to
Lazarus who sat on a garbage heap outside the gates of the rich man's
house. When the devil wanted Lazarus, God said to him: You can take his
body, but I want his soul. Two biblical figures - the beggar Lazarus in front
of the rich man's home, and Job, who sat in ashes after the devil had taken
all that God allowed him to - are combined in Brother Smal's tale of chang­
ing roles and identities.
The nature of literacy practices can change dramatically, even within a
single event like a funeral. In the formal service in the Unified Reformed
Church, held after the home service, neighbourhood discourses shifted to
the background and the emphasis was on formal religious discourse, situat­
ing the funeral in the church as formal institution. The church was a huge,
silent space within which the people became almost insignificant. The social
hierarchy between the minister as mediator of formal religious discourse
and the congregational members was more marked here than it had been in
the house. In contrast to Brother Smal, the minister had been formally
trained, had a degree in theology, wore a black cloak and delivered his ser­
mon from behind a pulpit elevated above the congregation. The minister
also employed Biblical narratives - in this case the story of Samson who got
honey from the bear's carcass - but where Brother Smal used the narrative
 Literacy learning and local literacy practice 149

to talk specifically about the deceased, the minister developed around the
narratives of Scripture an abstract argument about the mortality of human
life. He employed studied exegesis and made references and cross-references
to various passages from Scripture.
The graveyard service was a confirmation of the importance of neigh­
bourhood discourse in religious practice. The open space in front of the fu­
neral parlour was crowded with buses and cars and the voices of preachers
became indistinguishable from the sounds of many different choirs and
hailing funeral bands. There was much crying as the last songs were sung
and flowers were thrown over the lowered coffin. The reading of Scripture
lost its specific meaning in this context, but as symbolic gesture it repres­
ented the relationship between everyday reality and the metaphysics of
Christianity.

The discourses of literacy classes

The literacy practices of everyday life in Bellville South can be distinguished
from literacy as taught at schools or.in literacy classes. However, schooled
literacy is just as embedded in local contexts as are religious, bureaucratic or
neighbourhood literacy events. The way cultural perceptions and practice
impact on local understandings of schooling has been illustrated by Maurice
Bloch (1993). He describes how the schooling of the young in a Zafimaniry
village, which potentially posed a threat to the cultural authority of older
generations without schooling, was incorporated in practice to confirm
their notions of age and wisdom. I describe in this section how the relation­
ship between local understandings of social practice and formal literacy
learning in Bellville South caused one literacy class to continue and another
to be terminated.

Literacy, school and development: the successful literacy project

The most active literacy classes in Bellville South were those of the Bellville
Development Project (BDP). The success of the classes, I argue, was due to
the hierarchical structuring of the learning discourse, similar to the hierar­
chical relationships between officers and pensioners or members of the con­
gregation and the minister. At the same time, the literacy classes were envel­
oped in supportive neighbourhood discourses.
The huge white building of the BDP was situated both in the neighbour­
hood, yet also distinctly apart. The surrounding concrete slabs and high
150 L. Malan

fences stood out between the rows of yellow flats and the busy streets of
USA. USA was a local name given to the area where the municipality built
the first rows of flats. These 'modern' flats, which replaced the squatter set­
tlements, reminded people of the USA. USA became one of the poorest areas
of Bellville South. The people of the area had in different ways claimed the
BDP building as their own: children played around it, members of youth
gangs had sprayed the walls with graffiti and some of the neighbourhood
women made use of the closeness of the centre to attend flower arranging
and literacy classes.
Only women attended the literacy class, corresponding with the gender
preference in neighbourhood literacy practices (a literacy classroom would
not be a respectable place for a man to be seen). A number were older women
who saw the literacy class as a way to spend their time constructively once
they had raised their children and had retired. Most came from farms where
the farmer did the reading and writing and farm workers' children worked
rather than attending school. For some, like Daisy, the discursive shifts they
had to make in moving to the city led to a sudden 'realisation' of being 'illit-

Literacy learners of the Bellville Development Project (BDP).

 Literacy learning and local literacy practice 151

erate, not having been to school'. This sudden change in perception of per­
sonal literacy/illiteracy is similar to that of Winnie Tsotso, described by Kell
(see Chapter 12).
Like the pension hall, the space where the literacy class was held re­
flected an ordering and disciplining logic. The morning literacy classes were
presented in a room which looked like an empty school classroom. The walls
were white and high; one had a large old blackboard. There was one table
and a row of old wooden school chairs stacked against the wall opposite the
blackboard.
The classes had been running for two years and had developed a social
life of their own for these women who also knew each other as neighbours
and church sisters. The women walked into the room with its high white
walls and large old blackboard with the respect the space seemed to require.
They sat down on the row of old school chairs lined up against the wall.
Soon the atmosphere thawed and they enthusiastically started exchanging
local news about visits to family and events in the community. Before the
teacher arrived, they arranged the chairs around the table. One woman
complained about illness, and the group started discussing local herbal
remedies. The teacher entered, formally dressed with high heels, a brief­
case, silver hair and an authoritative but warm smile. The women greeted
her respectfully, and she continued the chatting for a while by asking them
questions related to their lives. They moved to the table. The teacher asked
the woman who had spoken about herbal remedies whether she had been to
the local health clinic to ask for information, and when she replied nega­
tively the teacher made a disapproving comment.
The women became quiet and took on the role of literacy learners. One
of them opened the class with a prayer: 'Father, you know how difficult it is
not to know about anything. Thank you for the people you brought to bring
us wisdom. Come teach us more about yourself.' After the prayer, the teacher
welcomed the students and asked 'Rietjie' to write the date on the board.
Rietjie, a lively 80-year old grandmother, asked around for the date and
walked sheepishly up to the blackboard, turned around and looked help­
lessly at the teacher who then told her exactly what to write on the board.
She went through the drill a few times when Rietjie hesitated. Rietjie pains­
takingly made the first figure, which was wrong: she wiped it out and
started again. The teacher left her and continued with the English reading
lesson using photocopies of children's books. When, at the end of the les­
son, with much help, Rietjie had succeeded in writing the date on the board
152 L. Malan

correctly, the teacher initiated loud applause from the learners; Rietjie re­
sponded with a mixture of embarrassment and confused excitement.
After the closing prayer, the friendly chattering started again as the
women packed up their books. I travelled with Rietjie to the backyard shack
where she and her grandsons lived.'in the interview which followed, it be­
came evident that throughout her life Rietjie had engaged in literacy prac­
tices that were far more complex than those required of her in class. She
read the Bible fluently, had written letters on behalf of her grandmother
when she was alive, paid her own accounts and had managed to apply for a
house. When I asked Rietjie how she managed to perform these tasks, she
said that she did not know how this came about, but that I should not tell
the teacher. 'I want the teacher to teach me starting at the beginning.'
For Rietjie, attending literacy classes was motivated by a desire to ac­
quire the attributes associated with schooling: schooling is a linear process
which 'begins at the beginning' and leads to a layered recognition of ability.
The social distance between the literacy teacher and the learners was a vital
element of this process. Much adult literacy teaching done in South Africa
by non-government organisations (like the BDP) in solidarity with the
people's struggle has subscribed to learner-centred and Freirían literacy ap­
proaches. It is ironic, therefore, that the success of the BDP literacy classes
was the result of the school-like, structured and organised discourse in
which it was embedded.
The pension pay-out illustrated how people assimilated the discourses
of local government because they had to some extent become dependent on
the reward (pension money). Similarly, people like Rietjie held on to peda­
gogical notions of literacy because of the promise of social transformation
they associated with schooling: a progression from darkness to light, igno­
rance to knowledge, truancy to self-respect. The social investment Rietjie
made in literacy classes far exceeded the rewards she could realistically ex­
pect. Adult literacy educators would do well to confront the unrealistic ex­
pectations of their students and to see to what extent the classes depend
on these desires.

Literacy and neighbourhood discourse: the 'failed' literacy class

The second literacy class I wish to discuss is one of a number of classes

which have been terminated in recent years. In contrast to the BDP classes,
which are learning' spaces in the first place, the literacy class of the old age
 Literacy learning and local literacy practice 153

group had to compete with neighbourhood discourses which were dom­

inant in their meeting place.
In Stilwanie, the subeconomic municipal area of Bellville South, where
many retired factory and municipal workers lived, the minibus of the
Crowncork old age group fetched people every morning and transported
them to the old age home. Pensioners in the Stilwanie area did not always
find it easy to attend, as they were often responsible for looking after their
grandchildren at home and for other domestic duties.
Nevertheless, they enjoyed the activities of the old age home, and meals
served there were an attraction. This was also a space where pensioners
could meet and socialise. The few men grouped together in one corner, sepa­
rate from the women who, according to them, talked too much. When I
visited, one woman was helping another to fill in a raffle ticket. There was
only one person in the group who could write, so no one felt embarrassed
about being illiterate. Tamakkies', the self-elected leader of the group, gov­
erned with an authority unshaken by the fact that she had never been to
school. The pensioners accepted this as a continuation of her position as the
voorvrou (head woman) in the chicken factory where most of those present
used to work.
Once a week, a retired teacher presented literacy classes to this group. At
the beginning of the class, the men and women would remain dutifully
seated at the tables where they had been eating and exchanging news before
the teacher's arrival. But before long, the writing on the blackboard which
the teacher brought with her would cease to capture their attention. The
men would disappear outside to the garden - their particular project - while
the women would trail off to the heater where they sat knitting and chatting.
Only one or two individuals would remain at the table.
The teacher reported her disappointment with the class to the social
worker responsible for the old age group, who gathered the pensioners
around the table and asked them whether they were still interested in the
project. Apart from one woman who admitted that she had no interest at all
in learning, the pensioners wholeheartedly stated that they wanted to learn.
The social worker then told them that they had to remain seated around the
table while the teacher was present if they were interested, or otherwise they
had to indicate that they did not wish to have the classes. Apparently, the
group answered with a respectful silence.
However, at the next lesson, the same scene was re-enacted and soon
after that the classes faded away. When the teacher no longer came, the pen­
sioners decided to start their own 'class'. The group appointed Mrs Adams,
154 L. Malan

the one woman among them who could read, as the teacher; she accepted
this task with pride, and wrote the Lord's Prayer on the blackboard. The
social worker was not sure how much the 'class' had learnt, but these events
certainly created much mirth in the group. Later Mrs Adams was asked to
read the newspaper to them during this period; they enjoyed this because
there was information about television programmes in the newspaper
which could be used to plan their viewing.
The establishment of a literacy class aimed at learning that modelled it­
self on school learning had not succeeded in the Crowncork hall because the
social space had already been defined in terms of peer relationships and
neighbourhood practices. In creating their own 'class' the group simulated
neighbourhood models of literacy events: a women's Bible study with one
sister taking the lead in teaching (like the lay preacher, at the funeral ser­
vice); neighbours gathering around a newspaper with one reading and oth­
ers relating the items read to their knowledge of other 'texts' such as televi­
sion programmes. In this situation, the written word was not made a fetish
of or invested with social power; there was also not as great a social hierar­
chy between readers/writers and other participants as there was between of­
ficials and pensioners.

Implications
These vignettes from everyday life and literacy learning in Bellville South
have implications for those concerned with the 'problem of illiteracy'. In­
stead of clear distinctions between literates and illiterates they suggest that
people are differentially positioned in relation to literacy practices. In some
literacy events, like the pension pay-outs, literacy practices clearly relate to
hierarchy and social power. However, the official's authority is defined not
by literacy but by discursive position. For pensioners, it is more important to
understand how the discourse works than to be 'literate' in the use of bu­
reaucratic writing. Institutions of civil society too easily blame the indi­
vidual and his/her 'illiteracy' for their marginal institutional identities. In
contrast to the pension pay-out, the intertextual nature of neighbourhood
literacy events does not necessarily invest written texts and their readers/
writers with more authority than other texts and participants. In everyday
practice it seems there are few situations where not having schooled literacy
is a clear social deficit.
At the same time it must be said that there are individuals in Bellville
South who persevere in attending literacy classes because these simulate
 Literacy learning and local literacy practice 155

schooling and are associated with the social and economic benefits of
schooled education. Adult literacy classes should be planned for this group
- but taking into account the numbers of learners that can realistically be
expected, and with an awareness of learners' sometimes unrealistic expecta­
tions.
There are, however, spaces of literacy use where the informal acquisi­
tion of literacies could be enhanced - such as a group of women reading the
newspaper in one of their homes, Bible study classes or weekday services
and even the activities in and around pension pay-outs. These situations
lend themselves to the enhancing of literacy use in relationships with more
or less social distance between the participants: in the Crowncork old age
group women could support one another in reading and writing, whereas
lay preachers and government clerks fulfil special functions. Literacy inter­
vention in spaces of informal literacy use and learning like these would re­
quire the training of facilitators who understand the discursive uses of lit­
eracy in the domains where they are employed.

Notes
1. Pseudonyms are used throughout this chapter.
2. All quotes from interviews have been translated from Afrikaans.
Chapter Eight
'We can all sing, but we can't all talk':
literacy brokers and tsotsi gangsters in a
Cape Town shantytown
Ammon China and Steven Robins

You see, illiteracy is a problem, Rasta1. It is a big problem ...

When I study at school I can know everything that I sign for. For
example, you see, if someone hasn't got schooling he may some­
times buy V,buy a CD, buy a video. Now those things come
into the house. If I'm not educated and my wife is educated,
then she signs [for the goods], you see ... So [when] I part with
that woman, whose things are those? ... If I signed for myself
my possessions would still be mine. Because you don't know
how to sign for it, mos. What can you do but work and fill up
your house [with goods]. But that day when you separate from
that woman she will take everything ...
... I read Xhosa books in prison, but here outside, I don't
read ... If I'm in prison I have a chance to read. ('Buli', 28-year-
old male, Xhosa-speaking gangster, Marconi Beam, 19 August
1994)2

This chapter investigates the meanings of social literacies in the lives of

cultural brokers (see Robins, Chapter 6) and petty gangsters in Marconi
Beam or 'Cukutown' (place of trouble), a Coloured and Xhosa-speaking
shantytown settlement in Cape Town. For the local cultural brokers we inter­
viewed, the mediation of dominant development and political discourses
and bureaucratic literacies for unschooled local residents facilitated their
access to social power. By contrast, for petty gangsters (tsotsis and skollies)
such as Buli, being able to translate and mediate bureaucratic literacies had
no currency in a gangster underworld of pimping, drug trade and petty theft.
As the opening quote suggests, for Buli being literate meant that he could
protect himself from being cheated or conned. In other words it had a nar­
rowly utilitarian function. While his reading habits in prison had kept him
158 A. China and S. Robins

occupied in a space of confinement, isolation and loneliness, in the busy

and crowded streets of Cukutown he was seldom on his own and there was
no need or opportunity for reading or writing. Unlike the local cultural
brokers who mediated bureaucratic literacies, reading and writing had no
symbolic or utilitarian value on the hard streets of the violent and danger­
ous tsotsi underworld of Cukutown.
One of the major problems with literacy interventions is that providers
assume that their understanding of literacy's utility will correspond to that
of an imagined uniform and homogeneous 'target population', with similar
circumstances, needs and aspirations. This paper aims to disaggregate con­
ventional notions of a homogeneous population of adult illiterates by iden­
tifying the complexity of local material and cultural circumstances, and
literacy needs. We focus on the different understandings of literacy held by
local cultural brokers and petty gangsters in Marconi Beam in order to con­
vey the cultural complexity that literacy programmes would have to address
in attempting to reach these culturally differentiated groups of people.
The presence of 'anti-schooling' tsotsis in Marconi Beam does not mean
that there is no need or demand for literacy provision but that this demand
has to be demonstrated rather than assumed. In other words, literacy pro­
grammes would have to be designed to meet the very specific needs of such
culturally diverse 'target populations' and should be channelled to areas
and communities where there is likely to be an already existing demand for
such programmes.
Our findings suggest that stable working-class communities are likely to
be more suitable environments for literacy interventions than overcrowded
shantytowns such as Marconi Beam, which are characterised by household
(domestic) fluidity and instability and high levels of mobility of individuals
constantly searching for work in Cape Town and elsewhere (see Mpoyiya
and Prinsloo, Chapter 9). In addition, the fact that Marconi Beam is likely to
undergo dramatic transformations in terms of a major housing develop­
ment project makes conditions there particularly unstable.
Our findings also indicate that 'target populations' do not consist of
blank slates or empty vessels but of people with diverse cultural practices,
identities and life experiences. Our focus on the 'marginal' and 'deviant'
cultures of self-styled tsotsis and skollies in Marconi Beam aims to draw
attention to the implications of these cultural (under)worlds without
exoticising them. We suggest that literacy interventions would have to find
their place within pre-existing, locally grounded universes of meaning,
 Literacy brokers and tsotsi gangsters 159

including what may appear to be the anti-schooling ideologies of 'tsotsi

resisters'.
We do not claim that tsotsis are representative of the Marconi Beam
community. We also interviewed many pro-schooling youths, especially
younger women who struggled against enormous odds to further their edu­
cation. This again indicates that there is no homogeneous community with
uniform common cultural practices, identities and understandings. Instead
there is a variety of 'communities of interests', each comprising clusters of
individuals with distinctive and conflicting agendas, needs and under­
standings. We draw on the voices of cultural brokers and tsotsis to argue for
a recognition that cultural identity shapes orientations to and away from
schooling, and this needs to be addressed when planning literacy
programmes.
The major difference between the brokers and the tsotsis is that whereas
the former deploy their communicative competence in bureaucratic
literacies to connect their local world with the 'political centre' (in the form
of local government and development agencies), the latter seem to discon­
nect and disengage from the dominant culture and bureaucratic state power.
We will show that Marconi Beam tsotsis developed their own cultural iden­
tities and everyday social practices that were relatively insulated from bur­
eaucratic literacies and the culture of the state. Before addressing these
questions, let us briefly situate Marconi Beam spatially and historically.

Beaming in on Marconi Beam

Marconi Beam is a squatter settlement within the formerly White suburb of
Milnerton. Having officially come into existence in 1991, it has over the past
few years grown into a sizeable settlement of over 3 000 people. This dra­
matic expansion has occurred despite concerted efforts in the early 1990s by
White Milnerton ratepayers groups to have the settlement demolished and
residents relocated. Throughout the 1980s the settlement experienced police
raids and attempts to evict squatters from this illegal bush settlement (die
bos). The political reforms of the 1990s finally provided for official recogni­
tion of the settlement, and in February 1995 President Nelson Mandela
launched the Masakhane ('Let's build together') housing scheme at the set­
tlement.
Mainly Coloured squatters stayed in the bush prior to 1990, when they
were joined by thousands of Xhosa-speakers from the former 'Bantustans'
('homelands') of Transkei and Ciskei. In addition, there is also a relatively
160 A. China and S. Robins

sizeable population of residents from other language groups, as well as from

neighbouring African countries. This movement into the area was a result of
a combination of factors including the collapse of influx control in the late
1980s, drought and poverty in the rural 'homelands', and the suspension of
police raids on 'illegal squatters' in 1990 following negotiations between
the government and the ANC.
The proximity of Marconi Beam to employment sites in the city centre
and the neighbouring White suburbs means that instead of having to travel
over 30 kilometres to and from townships such as Khayelitsha to the city
centre, residents are within walking distance of places of employment. Apart
from reducing transport costs, other advantages include the fact that its
numerous shebeens (beer halls) and sex workers are close to clients from
neighbouring factories and employment sites. Shebeens are busy at all
hours every day of the week, and a lucrative trade in Mandrax and dagga
(marijuana) also thrives in the relatively 'anarchic' social environment that
has emerged in this recently established settlement. Tsotsi youths also
spoke of the advantages of being close to factories, supermarkets, suburban
homes and other targets of their 'redistributive' activities, that is, theft.
For women, however, Marconi Beam is a dangerous place where murder,
assault and rape are common. In addition, the chronic overcrowding, un­
sanitary living conditions and pools of stagnant water produce disease and
illness. Women struggle to raise their children in such conditions and tuber­
culosis () and other airborne diseases are rife.
The time and energy bound up in daily struggles for survival in the face
of crime, disease, unemployment, fires, flooding and searching for work
pose serious problems for participation in literacy programmes. The loud
street sounds and activities also prevent any escape into the private worlds
of reflection and study that characterise the idealised contexts for conven­
tional literacy classes. For adults struggling to survive under such condi­
tions literacy classes must surely be a remote and alien project. However, all
this could change if the proposed Masakhane housing project is successful,
as it would provide stable living conditions with more opportunities for
peace and privacy.3
The cultural diversity and socioeconomic differentiation in Marconi Beam
renders standardised adult literacy programmes extremely problematic. In
addition, we identified a range of potential barriers to literacy provision in­
cluding household fluidity and residential mobility, inadequate infrastructure
(for example, lighting and physical structures), shortages of reading and writ­
ing materials and chronic overcrowding. Yet, even if these barriers were
A Marconi Beam resident disseminates copies of a report by DAG
(Development Action Group), an NGO spearheading the Masakhane
housing project. Her photographfeatures on the cover of the report.

Informal activities thrive in Marconi Beam: here traditional healers

offer township residents advice and traditional remedies.
162 A. China and S. Robins

eliminated, the 'anti-schooling' cultures of social groupings such as tsotsis,

as long as they continued to live in the neighbourhood, would probably con­
tinue to keep many residents away from literacy classes.
The following pages examine the divergent orientations of local cultural
brokers and tsotsi youth to schooling, bureaucratic literacies and state
power. Whereas the brokers on whom we focus our discussion constantly
engage with and mediate these dominant state literacies, tsotsis such as
Buli, while capable of reading and writing, spend most of their time shun­
ning the cultural worlds of classrooms and state bureaucracies.

Cultural brokers and literate bureaucracies

Bureaucratic literacies have always been a part of urban Xhosa-speakers'
experience. Xhosa-speakers in the Western Cape, for example, have had to
deal with official documents of surveillance and control such as the dompas,
the notorious pass law document of the apartheid era. Upon arrival in the
cities from rural Transkei and Ciskei, Xhosa-speakers had to learn a complex
repertoire of tactics to evade and circumvent this system of social control.
Not surprisingly, for millions of Black South Africans, their experiences of
the tyranny of bureaucratic literacies meant that literacy was by no means
unambiguously liberatory. Instead, it was experienced as a Janus-faced tech­
nology, both the chain and key.
For literacy interventions to succeed they would need to engage with
these past experiences of encounters with 'papers' and the dompas. This
was dramatically illustrated during recent attempts to encourage voters to
register for the 1995 local government elections. Throughout the country
there were reports of mass refusals to register by voters convinced that voter
registration would be used to track down and evict those who had fallen
behind in rent and service payments. This suggests that for many Black
South Africans post-apartheid bureaucratic literacies continue to be experi­
enced as practices of surveillance.
Clearly, millions of Black South Africans do not approach bureaucratic
literacy as a blank form or clean slate. In fact, we all encounter literacy
events and practices with the baggage of our past experiences. For example,
during preparations for the 1994 national elections it was widely reported
in the media that in many parts of the Western Cape and Northern Cape Col­
oured and Black farm workers were sceptical of assurances from voter edu­
cators that their vote would be secret. Farm workers claimed that White
farmers would know who they voted for by virtue of 'bleepers' and other
 Literacy brokers and tsotsi gangsters 163

electronic equipment kept in their homes. Farm workers' everyday experi­

ences of surveillance and social control on White farms, which often
resemble what Goffman has referred to as 'total institutions' (see Du Toit,
1993), may have led them to doubt the secrecy of the ballot. In other words,
this example suggests that local practices of surveillance can have an enor­
mous influence over the ways in which what appear to be standardised lit­
eracy events such as elections are understood by differentially situated indi­
viduals and groups (see Prinsloo and Robins, Chapter 1).
Kell's essay (see Chapter 12) shows how bureaucratisation of the
African National Congress (ANC) since it was unbanned in 1990
disempowered competent ANC activists, such as Winnie Tsotso, who sud­
denly found herself labelled 'illiterate' although she dealt with ANC
membership forms and documents on a daily basis. Kell draws attention to
the ways in which these 'hidden' literacies have been rendered socially
marginal and 'invisible' with the participation of the ANC in state bureau­
cratic structures and practices. In Marconi Beam we found that the
bureaucratisation of local politics excluded many while at the same time
providing local cultural brokers with opportunities for social mobility and
power.
Access to local state power in Marconi Beam required a variety of
attributes including social position and disposition, the acquisition of
dominant political and development discourses and language competen­
cies and school literacy. By 'school literacy', we refer to the widespread
association of literacy with learning and pedagogy, 'with what teachers
and pupils do in schools' (see Street and Street, 1991:143-163).
Our findings indicate that school literacy alone cannot provide access
to dominant discourses of the state. In other words, school literacy is not
an autonomous technology of empowerment as many literacy pro­
grammes imply Instead, we found local brokers who managed to access
bureaucratic literacies were able to do this through exposure to apprentice­
ship learning in political and labour organisations.
They were also adept at brokering and switching codes between
local and bureaucratic literacies. In the following sections we discuss how,
through a process of networking and apprenticeship learning, local
brokers attempted to mediate local and bureaucratic literacies and straddle
the divide between their local community constituencies and 'outsider'
patrons within the state, private sector and non-government organisa­
tions (NGOs) (see Grillo and Rew, 1985).
164 A. China and S. Robins

Brokering dilemmas of local and bureaucratic literacies

'Sipho Mpetha', a Xhosa speaker in his mid-30s, grew up in the rural East­
ern Cape town of Cradock. A controversial AÑC activist and community
worker, in 1994 Mpetha became project co-ordinator of an NGO job-creation
scheme in Marconi Beam. His ability to speak English and Afrikaans and his
rudimentary grasp of dominant development discourses enabled Mpetha to
establish and cement relationships with various wealthy and influential
White patrons including local industrialists, the Milnerton Liaison Forum
chairperson and NGO personnel Even though Mpetha was ousted from of­
fice in the local ANC branch, his contacts with influential outsiders and
wealthy White patrons provided him with resources and status within and
beyond Marconi Beam.
Mpetha's relationship with White patrons such as 'Michael Hamilton', a
wealthy industrialist and chairperson of the Milnerton Liaison Forum, was
fraught with ambivalence. While Mpetha's communicative repertoire facil­
itated his rapid entry into the sphere of local politics, he resented the hier­
archical relations and exclusionary mechanisms that relegated him to a
relatively powerless position in the White-dominated sphere of Milnerton
municipal politics. This experience of White paternalism and his own
powerlessness expressed itself in Mpetha's ambivalent account of his rela­
tionship with Hamilton. As described later, Mpetha was especially critical of
the impersonal and physically and socially distancing modes of commun­
ication deployed by Hamilton.
Isabel Hofmeyr's (1993) study of oral historical narrative of a Tswana
chiefdom in the northern Transvaal (now Northern Province) suggests that
one of the tactics deployed by Tswana people since the mid-19th century has
been to ignore or feign ignorance of written directives from administrators.
This forced colonial officials to visit remote rural areas personally, where
they were more vulnerable to being challenged by villagers. Hofmeyr writes
that, through such tactics, 'a literate and bureaucratic colonial government
is forced to resort to rule through personal audience, oral message and pub­
lic meeting' (1993:14). Similarly, Mpetha challenged the authority of the
distancing modes of communication such as telephone calls, faxes and let­
ters deployed by his White patron. Instead, Mpetha insisted that the latter
personally visit him at his home so that he could 'come and see how I live':

I have a strong, strong man in the Milnerton Liaison Forum by

the name of Mr Michael Hamilton, [but] he is used to oppressing
 Literacy brokers and tsotsi gangsters 165

the kaffir... I don't have money, but at the same time, he must
come down to the level of the poor man. I'm a poor man, but he
must listen to me ... Our problems here are very serious. Now
the rain is coming down and we are being flooded. I am also
flooded in my own shack. So I do not accept to be represented by
somebody who is living in luxury. He can only represent me if
he comes to me and sees how I live and asks me, 'Sipho, what
are your problems?' Not over the telephone or over the fax or
the written letter. But he must come and see how I live ...

We attended a Milnerton Liaison Forum meeting and discovered that Ham­

ilton was indeed a key player in municipal politics. We also found out that
Marconi Beam civic and ANC activists were marginalised and silenced by
the legalistic and technical nature of the debates, and 'bureaucratese'. This
occurred despite the fact that the entire Marconi Beam delegation was
schooled. 'David Smith', a White Tableview resident and member of the
local ANC branch, was well equipped to engage with these technical de­
bates. An English-speaking university graduate and insurance broker,
Smith was familiar with the legal language, cultural nuances and hidden
messages of a form of development-speak that appeared designed to con­
vey to the Marconi Beam squatter leadership that they were inexperienced
and ill-equipped minor players in broader Milnerton municipal politics.
They did not have access to the technical language and English proficiency
necessary to engage with the White lawyers, property developers and
planners of the Milnerton ratepayers association groups and the
municipality.
By accepting the rules of the (language) game, the Marconi Beam del­
egation found themselves in a subordinate and marginal position during
the Milnerton Forum debates and proceedings. Smith hinted that in future
ANC representatives might insist on translation. What the meeting demon­
strated quite powerfully was that literacy on its own cannot impart social
power.
Instead, issues of social position, discursive repertoire and commun­
icative competence are crucial in shaping the outcomes of these discursive
power plays. While the Marconi Beam delegation had decided to 'drop' a
local ANC leader deemed 'illiterate', their own discursive 'illiteracy' pre­
vented them from actively engaging in technical and legalistic forum de­
bates. In the following section we again examine the relatively limited role
of school literacy in terms of accessing local social power.
166 A. China and S. Robins

'Learning on the job': from herder in Transkei, to

policeman in Egoli (Johannesburg), to trade unionist
and cultural broker
The story of 'Chris Nkomo' also draws attention to the ways in which ap­
prenticeship learning in factories and political and labour organisations
enabled him to gain access to legal literacies, that is, labour law. These sites
of informal learning, rather than schooling, enabled Nkomo to become a
local cultural broker and trade union organiser.
Chris Nkomo was born in Tsolo District, Transkei in 1963, and spent
most of his early years living at his maternal grandparents' home. Nkomo's
father was away working in town during his youth and his mother worked
as a domestic in Cala, Transkei. As the eldest of six children living with his
grandparents, Nkomo was responsible for herding their approximately
60 cattle and 50 sheep and also for cooking meals and collecting water. He
recalled that while able to memorise the content of lessons, owing to domes­
tic duties he had no time to read or write at home.
When Nkomo left rural Tsolo to attend secondary school in a Transkei
town he was initially intimidated by the 'sophisticated' ways of city people.
However, by observing and imitating the social practices of his teachers and
fellow pupils he acquired some of the dominant practices of the urban, as­
pirant middle class. This constituted one of his first of many encounters
with apprenticeship learning.

You see, to attend school you are learning a lot, not only from
the book, but from the manners of other societies or other com­
munities or other families. Because at school you are not only
listening to the principal or the teacher, you are supposed to lis­
ten to and watch your colleagues too. (Chris Nkomo)

Nkomos's life story illustrates the importance of apprenticeship learning

both at school and in the workplace. He left school during matric and went
to Johannesburg where he signed up with the South African Police but
resigned, he says, after witnessing the racism and brutality of White police­
men.4 In 1985 he found work, first as a security guard and later as an
employee of OK Bazaars, a nationwide departmental store. It was here that
he began his 'apprenticeship' into trade union and ANC politics.
 Literacy brokers and tsotsi gangsters 167

I worked for OK for about three years. I joined Saccawu [South

African Commercial and Catering Workers Union], and within
three months I was elected as a senior shop steward for OK Ba­
zaars, and it was great for me ... It is where I improved my po­
litical education. Cosatu makes [sic] workshops for us and
sometimes we used to meet ANC cadres. And this is how I im­
proved my political [education].

Nkomo was dismissed from his job in 1990 after having been held respons­
ible for the actions of OK workers who 'hijacked' a bus to take them to the
rally celebrating Mandela's release. To escape political violence in Johannes­
burg, Nkomo, by then married, left for Cape Town where his wife had relat­
ives. He settled in Khayelitsha where political violence again forced him to
relocate, this time to Marconi Beam. Here he opened up a spaza shop (a
small general dealer store). In 1994, he was persuaded to become a trade
unionist for workers at Milnerton Racecourse.
The literacy practices Nkomo learnt at school were elaborated and ex­
tended by the apprenticeship learning he acquired in the workplace. It was
this combination of learning experiences that enabled him to become a trade
unionist and cultural broker in Marconi Beam. Schooling alone did not pro­
duce these communicative competencies.
From his earliest school days in urban Transkei, Nkomo sought to ac­
quire and emulate the dominant cultural practices of the urban middle class.
This contrasts dramatically with Bull's orientation away from the dominant
culture and his embrace of an alternative tsotsi identity. While Buli may
claim that schooling is necessary and desirable, his own gangster life style
has no place for its discipline and middle-class aspirations to respectability.
Neither is Buli concerned with mastering bureaucratic literacies. He has in
effect 'delinked' from the political centre and located himself at the social
margins.

Tsotsi identity and the delinking from the politics of the

New South Africa
When we met Buli he told us that in the 1980s he had been a member of the
'Young Lions', the militant comrades (amaqabane) of the anti-apartheid
struggle. In our interviews he displayed the political sophistication one has
come to expect from these former youth militants. However, with the 'demo­
bilisation' of the Young Lions in the 1990s, youths such as Buli found
168 A. China and S. Robins

themselves alienated from the politics of governance in the New South Af­
rica. Without any prospect of gaining access to a position within the new
state bureaucracy, Buli sought refuge, resources and power within the
tsotsi underworld.
Buli had arrived in Cape Town with his mother when she separated from
his father. He then studied at Langa until Standard Six (8 years' schooling),
at which point, he claimed, he had to leave school to help his mother finan­
cially. He also claimed he left school so that his three younger sisters could
complete their education, and he anticipated that one day he too would ben­
efit from the fruits of their schooling. For Buli schooling and literacy prac­
tices had a purely practical and material utility. Being able to read and write
meant he was streetwise and able to avoid being conned. While he had read
books in prison, as a petty criminal he seldom needed to read or write. How­
ever, he was aware of the utility of literacy and schooling: To become a mil­
lionaire you must first go to school/ However, his past experiences fighting
the police and army with 'Molotov cocktails' (petrol bombs) and stones, and
his present life on the streets as a pimp, petty thief and drug trader, had dis­
tanced him from literacies of classrooms and the state.

.: You see, Mandela, what does he say? He says we must all
study. I mean, I don't criticise him - that we must all study... We
can all sing, but we can't all talk. You see, those who were study­
ing, we were helping them as well [in] the struggle ... killing the
Boers at that time, you see ... If we all went to school who would
have worried about the Boers? ... If we all were at school and
not worrying about the struggle would Mandela have been out
[of prison]? Never! The reason Mandela was released was be­
cause there were people [like myself] outside causing havoc so
the Whites had to release him, you see. Now Mandela is out of
prison he says we must go to school. Some of us are old already
... I'm 28 years old. What am I going to do at school when I'm
this old? Youfinda White kid who is 21, 22, having his own car.
Whether it's a Sprinter, whatever, BMW two-door. They have
their own car and then I still don't have a car. Even my father has
never had a car... Now, how am I going to get a car when my
father has never had a car? You see, thieves are a result of things
like that. We wouldn't have been stealing if we had beautiful
things. Would you steal from someone else if you had your own
things?
 Literacy brokers and tsotsi gangsters 169

Bull's world is caught up in the compelling world of fast cars, money,

women, dagga, mandrax and drink and has no place for school or the mun­
dane drudgery of menial labour. The following account reflects an insider's
view of the powerful and gripping cultural world of petty gangsterism.

.: If I go out with him [a male friend] and a 'cherry' [girlfriend]

and I don't have money but he has money what happens? Let's
say it's Friday today. That cherry won't notice me, she'll be with
him. He buys her beer, brandy, whatever. So, I think about my
own things ... So, I find that the cherry doesn't notice me. So I
get angry and I want that woman. He stands up trying to stop
me, then I stab him. Meanwhile, I'm wrong. I was focusing on
that woman ... It's money that causes trouble.
 (researcher): Do you think education can help?
.: Education would help me. [People] say 'go back to school'.
But now, if you are not going to study people say you should
simply grab a spade and work on a contract. So you'll be the one
who works for the Council, sweeping the street. What kind of
work is that? Here your wife and children pass by and you are
digging in the street. They have to board a taxi because you
don't have a car to give them a ride ... Leave Mandela, education
is all right, because that is your actual wealth. In order to be a
millionaire you must first go to school. Then you'll be respected
... So, if you haven't gone to school, who are you? ... People
who are not educated don't even respect one another.

Buli regarded himself as urbane, schooled and worldly, a man firmly within
the indigenous cultural category of amakholwd (believer), a term used to
refer to Christian and westernised African 'progressives' whose world con­
trasted to that of the unschooled rural-orientated 'traditionalists', often re­
ferred to by Xhosa speakers as amaqaba, a derogatory term (Mayer, 1980;
Mpoyiya and Prinsloo, see Chapter 9). Although Bull's words seem ambival­
ent about schooling, he identified himself as an educated person. At the
same time, however, he openly displayed his identity as a tsotsi - written on
his body with tattoos, knife wounds and scars. This tsotsi identity is also
inscribed and ritualised in his dagga and Mandrax smoking habits, clothes,
style of walking and talking, and by the knife he carries wherever he goes.
He prefers to steal money rather than commodities because money has no
permanent owner - it constantly circulates and is difficult to trace. This is
170 A. China and S. Robins

certainly not the voice of a reluctant gangster forced into this (under)world
by historical, impersonal social forces and 'strategies of survival· in an age
of structural unemployment. Instead, Bull's narrative can be viewed as that
of an ex-Young Lion alienated from the politics of the 1990s.
The tsotsi underworld has managed to capture the imagination of youth
such as Buli in ways that indicate continuities with a tsotsi culture going
back to the fifties. Clive Glaser (1990) claims that tsotsi gangs of the fifties
'developed their own distinctive leisure time activities, social norms, hier­
archies, language and means of subsistence' (1990:7). These youth 'rejected
job discipline, hard work and "respectable" employment' during a period of
rising unemployment and family instability, domestic fluidity and residen­
tial mobility that resulted from processes of rural impoverishment,
proletarianisation, urbanisation and the migrant labour system. Yet, as
Bull's account suggests, this tsotsi culture was considerably more than a
mere reflection of existing socioeconomic conditions.
Tsotsi culture in the 1990s is located within the historical context of the
emergence of Black student militancy since the 1960s, the massive expan­
sion of education in the 1970s and 1980s, and a decline in employment
opportunities for school leavers. However, contemporary tsotsi identity is
also the product of a long history of innovative and creative cultural politics.
Glaser's work suggests that in the fifties the ANC's Youth League made
minimal inroads in terms of organising tsotsi youth. For a brief period in the
1960s, tsotsi culture 'helped to fuse youth politics with an anti-establish­
ment aggression that was virtually absent in 1950s liberation politics'
(1990:13). By the 1980s, the phenomenon of the militant 'comtsotsV
(commde-tsotsi) youth was evident in South Africa's Black townships (see
Bundy, 1985). Bull's narrative suggests that for many of these former
comtsotis and Young Lions, the political demobilisation and bureau-
cratisation of the organisational structures of the former liberation move­
ments during the 1990s have resulted in their alienation from formal poli­
tics. In response to this alienation many have located themselves within the
localised underworlds of street gangs.
In conclusion, Bull's story reflects upon the continuities and changed
circumstances of his generation of militant youth. It is a commentary on the
unlikely possibility that youth 'dropouts' will all return to school and also
on the problems likely to be faced by literacy campaigns aimed at the 'lost
generation' of Young Lions of the 1980s. For Black youths such as Buli,
school and bureaucratic literacies have no place except perhaps in their en­
counters with the state in hostile courtrooms, reformatories and prisons
 Literacy brokers and tsotsi gangsters 171

(Pinnock, 1984). Instead, the '28' prison gang tattoos inscribed on the bod­
ies of youths such as Buli are perhaps the most tangible signs of a literacy
of defiance' that challenges the currency of the bureaucratic literacies so
valued by local cultural brokers such as Mhlaba and Nkomo.

Notes
1. 'Rasta' refers to Ammon China who conducted most of the interviews in Marconi
Beam. China's Rastafarian identity and appearance often provided a point of
entry for communication with gangsters such as Buli who perceived him as also
living on the social margins.
2. Names have been changed to protect the identity of informants.
3. It is quite possible that the housing project will only benefit the better-off, em­
ployed sections of the Marconi Beam population. Even with the housing subsidy,
many residents are unlikely to be able to afford formal housing.
4. Nkomo recollected that he received his first real 'political education' as a police­
man while guarding a beerhall in the early 1980s. He was attacked by students
who poured sulphuric acid over his face leaving clearly visible scars. He did not
understand why this was done to him at the time. In 1984 'MK comrades'
launched an attack on his police station and Nkomo decided to resign from his
job.
Section Three
Contextualising literacies: policy lessons

The four chapters in this final section of the book are similar to the preced­
ing work in that they are detailed studies of local literacy and communicat­
ive practices. Together they present a study of local literacies, or literacy in
use across diverse South African contexts, rural, urban, work and residen­
tial. They share a concern with the implications of this research for policy
and provision in adult education. In each case, the local uses of literacy and
local forms of acquisition are shown to be at variance with standardised as­
sumptions of literacy acquisition that have the formal learning procedures
of the school in mind. A common focus on literacy practices as being cultur­
ally and discursively embedded in concrete activities shows what a
grounded view of literacy can illuminate. They show up the frailty of the
homogenised conceptions of illiterates' and their needs, and the problems
of conceptualisation of adult literacy provision not yet addressed by provid­
ers, or by planners of the national Adult Basic Education and Training
(ABET) system in South Africa.
In Chapter 9, Mpoyiya and Prinsloo, through a series of interviews with
people living in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, examine diverse orientations to
literacy and schooling. The development of attitudes towards and away
from schooling are analysed, as are the details of local literacies and their
embedding in particular historical, geographic, cultural, political and eco­
nomic realities. Particularly, complex shifts across generations, genders and
groups of people in relation to schooling, religion and literacy are traced
with direct implications for policy and provision.
McEwan and Malan, in Chapter 10, focus on the contested values asso­
ciated with schooling and literacy in two neighbouring rural contexts in the
Eastern Cape. While for young people, schooling and qualifications are act­
ively sought for the status and promise of rewards attached, for older people
these rewards are desired more for their children than themselves. The so­
cial practices and literacy of schooling are in contrast to local ways of know­
ing and communicating. Local uses of literacy are most often as display, or
symbolic statement, in contrast to the analytic orientations of school lit­
eracy. Expectations of comparable social rewards to be obtained from adult
education, as from schooling for children, are low among older people, who
live off the resources provided by family members in the city and through
174 Section Three

state pensions. The study shows up the inadequacy of national policy plan­
ning that identifies strategic groups of people 'most in need' of literacy pro­
gramme intervention, through criteria of homogenised assumptions of defi­
cit and deprivation, without attending to the cultural and contextual reali­
ties within which these groups of people live out their everyday lives. It con­
cludes that resources spent on investment in adult education and literacy
programmes in this context would be better spent on schooling for children.
In Chapter 11, Breier, Taetsane and Sait present a study of literacy and
communicative practices within the South African minibus taxi industry.
This industry has become a source of employment for people - especially
men - with little or no schooling, despite the many literacy demands associ­
ated with owning or driving a taxi. (The learners' licence test is based on
information presented in book form. In their daily work they have to read
traffic signs and deal with numerous forms and legal documents.) This
chapter explores the strategies unschooled operators employ to deal with or
circumvent the literacies of their work and the discourses and narratives
that support these strategies (including apprenticeship learning, the use of
mediation and support networks and informal education). It proposes a
model for adult education initiatives in the industry that recognises and
builds on these strategies even as it provides opportunities to learn others.
In Chapter 12, Kell's study of literacy practices in an informal settlement
in the southern Cape Peninsula is concerned with the ways in which literacy
practices operate within discourses to exclude or include people and there­
fore to consolidate or fracture power relationships. Literacy practices in the
domains of development and of the night school are contrasted with literacy
practices in everyday life. As the informal settlement becomes incorporated
into local government, English essay-text literacy becomes dominant and
power relationships shift. The local night school's attempts to promote lit­
eracy result in a specific set of literacy practices emerging which are encap­
sulated within the domain of the night school itself. The study explores
insularity between domains, and suggests that literacy practices promoted
within the night school are not transferable to other domains. The promo­
tion of this highly pedagogised night school literacy has unintended out­
comes which contradict the providers' intentions. Current dominant ABET
discourses conceptualise literacy in terms of mobility, and position literacy
as the unproblematised entry point to formal adult education provision.
This study confirms the thrust of much of this collective research, that such
a redress strategy (in which learners' needs are homogenised) may not be
 Contextualising literacies: policy lessons 175

appropriate for those residents of this informal settlement who have been
most marginalised by the apartheid experience.
An alternative line of policy development to that of bringing adult edu­
cation closer to school education is proposed. Rather than focusing on the
standardisation of certification and assessment across schooling and adult
education, this proposes the focused articulation of education initiatives
with the actual literacy practices of local communities.
Chapter Nine
Literacy, migrancy and disrupted
domesticity: Khayelitshan ways of
knowing
Phumza Mpoyiya and Mastín Prinsloo

The construction of adult illiteracy as a problem

Policy formulation for adult literacy provision in South Africa has
worked with aggregated figures of underschooled adults to construct a
population of adult illiterates 'in need'. Recent policy studies estimated
that 15 million people need Adult Basic Education (and Training) (ABET),
drawing inferences from questionable data on school exits from primary
schools (NEPI, Adult Basic Education Report, 1992).
Little attention has been paid to trying to understand the context-
specific ways in which the practices of reading and writing (and calculat­
ing) occur outside of schooling; or to their location in particular com­
municative practices, institutional dynamics and political realities.
Accordingly, present policy and planning, as manifest in the Education
White Paper (1995) and in the plans of the Reconstruction and Develop­
ment Programme, take certain common assumptions as given.
These are that people without certain, arbitrarily determined levels
of attained schooling are functionally disempowered in that they are
unable to take part in the characteristic behaviours and transactions of
modernity, which are assumed to require a literate orientation' and the
accompanying capacities; and that some months in part-time night
schools will somehow reproduce the effects in middle-aged individuals
that sustained full-time schooling is said to produce in (middle-class)
children.
These assumptions around 'the problem of adult illiteracy', however,
are unable to explain the occurrences of very low attendance at those
adult night schools that are available, the high dropout rates character­
istic of adult literacy work and the low levels of achievement in curricu-
lar terms.
178 P. Mpoyiya and Μ. Prinsloo

Ways of knowing
In this chapter, through a series of interviews with people living in
Khayelitsha, Cape Town, we examine diverse backgrounds and orientations
towards and away from schooling, as well as experiences of learning that
are varied and distinctive, often violent or traumatic. Khayelitsha is an ap­
propriate site for research of this kind, because of the large concentration
there of people who are the likely target of adult literacy training interven­
tions - people who have little schooling, are poor or unemployed and yet are
living in an environment where active involvement in varieties of literacy
practices is part of daily living.

Background to Khayelitsha
Ten years ago Khayelitsha was open bush scrub scoured by huge bulldozers,
and dotted with toilets. Khayelitsha suddenly appeared in the mid-1980s, as
a government effort in its battle to reconcile the unstoppable movements of
people in search of jobs and resources with its commitments to retain con­
trol of Black movements to and within the urban areas. In 1990 there was
an estimated population of 500 000 people living there in accommodation
ranging from construction-built, four-roomed houses to metal and card­
board shacks clustered close together. Today there are considerably more
people: practically every open space between constructed houses is occupied
by shack dwellings.
Unemployment in Khayelitsha as a whole was said to be 60 per cent and
more in 1990. It cannot be less than that now. The most common forms of
formal employment are, for men, as labourers in the construction industry
and, for women, as domestic workers. There is a developed informal sector
- people hawking vegetables, meat, entrails, cool-drinks - but with such
competition that these are hardly viable forms of living. Sewing is a com­
mon source of informal income for some women in the area. More success­
ful informal industries are the spaza shops (cafés) and shebeens (bottle
stores/drinking houses) run in people's homes.
Despite its apparent drawbacks, Khayelitsha attracts people to its shack
areas, some of whom leave the more orthodox dwellings of their families to
make a space of their own. The people interviewed for this study live mostly
in Site  - a site and service shack area set up in 1985 to accommodate resid­
ents of Old Crossroads (known as the 'Cathedral squatters' because of their
occupation of St George's Cathedral to protest the government's denial of
 Literacy, migrancy and disrupted domesticity 179

permanent resident rights for them in Cape Town) - as well as in Site , 

slightly upgraded site and service shack area.

Doing the research

The interviews for the Social Uses of Literacy project were carried out by
Phumza Mpoyiya. A resident of Khayelitsha, she set up interviews on a ran­
dom basis, with the aim of talking at length to a range of people with vary­
ing levels of formal schooling, both men and women. Her concern in these
interviews was to elicit life history accounts. The interviews, all of them in
Xhosa, were tape-recorded and translated, sometimes by herself. We have
worked with the transcripts of her interviews together with her field notes.
The data is mostly in the form of life history narratives. We present brief
extracts from our data so as to analyse the variety and complexity in
people's representations of their relationships with schooling and literacy.
The life history narratives we solicited were full of details of disruption and
dispersion across geographic spaces, together with the struggle to deploy
resources across those spaces, that characterise a group of people struggling
to survive in the face of a declining rural base and a system of migrant la­
bour that restricts them to the lower end of formal-sector work, or to in­
formal activity.
We wish to emphasise that many of the activities of the people of
Khayelitsha have a literacy dimension, even though a number of the resid­
ents might not be formally literate, or might not notice the literacy aspects of
their activities. In this chapter we examine the accounts of mainly older peo­
ple in Khayelitsha of their schooling, childhood and entry into adulthood,
and contrast this with current perceptions of schooling and literacy.

Orientations to schooling: roots into the colonial past

Some of the older residents of Khayelitsha we spoke to had memories of
their families as being either 'school· or 'red' people. A simple explanation of
these terms seems to be that they describe a broad division of people in the
rural Transkei between the educated and the illiterate: people who sent their
children to be schooled, on the one hand, and people who dressed in blan­
kets, carried out their customary social practices and rituals (including
wearing red ochre on their faces) and rejected the modernising institutions,
on the other. Although the terms were familiar to everybody, they featured
strongly in some people's accounts and were completely lacking in others.
Khayelitsha, Cape Town.

A resident surveys the rubble that was once his home.

 Literacy, migrancy and disrupted domesticity 181

We have therefore come to see the terms 'red' and 'school' as unstable, con­
tested categories to do with the formation of political subjects at a particular
historical moment. They illustrate how the modern terms 'illiterate' and liter­
ate' are similarly socially constructed dichotomies and not technical or precise
descriptions of fact. This is how 'Mtshengu'1, a man in his mid-70s, living in
a shack in his daughter's yard in Khayelitsha, described his parents:

Mine were school people. I was born in a house of school

people, wearing clothes like you, like you and me.

His parents, it turns out, had relatively little schooling. More important than
being schooled was their orientation towards a schooled identity. His
mother left school in Standard Four (after 6 years' schooling), and his father
substantially earlier, 'at low classes', but 'he could also write for himself,
read for himself', he insists. His emphasis on the differences between the
two groups of people is reproduced in his discussion of clothing:

Among red people, women wear traditional dresses, it's just cut
out and left like that, it's not sewn together, it's wrapped around
the waist ... among young people, the girls wear those small
dresses; the little ones go naked, they wear something which is
called ' [underwear], made up of a plant with broad fleshy
leaves.

Of particular interest is the detail with which the 'red'-ness of the people he
described is inscribed on their bodies, through their dress. He presented
going to school as the determining social action which signified member­
ship of the alternative group, but the symbolic rather than the material effect
of this is clear from his insistence on the display associated with being
'school' people over any material or economic distinction. He stressed that
his parents were 'schooled' people both in their actions and in the outward
signs of cultural display:

No, they did go [to school]; to an extent that even their marriage
was a white one; they never married in that traditional way.

Mtshengu's construction of 'school' people in terms of their display - the

clothes they wore every day and the form of their weddings - is paralleled in
modern constructions of literacy with all sorts of (inner) social attributes
182 P.Mpoyiyaand Μ. Prinsloo

equally distant from the located practices of reading and writing. Literacy
has been correlated at various times with a host of positive social character­
istics that have little to do with the located practices of reading and writing.
These associations of various social attributes with literacy are what some
writers have come to characterise as the literacy myth' (Graff, 1979). Simi­
larly we can subvert the mythical description of 'red people' by looking more
closely to see if and where the description fits.
'Nowowo' is a 54-year-old woman living in Site  She identifies her
parents as 'red' people but for her the critical difference between the two
groups was not school but religion. Her parents were not converts to
Christianity, and were not schooled themselves. Nowowo and her sib­
lings were all sent to school, however, to be taught by the missionaries
and they even attended Sunday School given by the same teachers. When
Nowowo was older, her parents converted to Christianity, under the in­
fluence of an uncle returned from living in the city who finally convinced
them of the material and spiritual benefits which might follow from con­
version. As manifest in Nowowo and her family, the division is certainly
less sharp than was suggested by Mtshengu and we have to seek an ex­
planation for this.
Beinaert and Bundy (1987) provide some help in understanding how
these apparently vehement cultural divides emerge: by their account, the
distinction between 'school' and 'red' people is the inhabitants' own way
of describing the turn-of-the-century division between 'loyals' (to the
colonial power) and 'rebels' (those resistant to it) which later was
redescribed as that between 'progressives' and 'traditionalists'. Shaping
these divisions was the strength of the colonial power and its ideology of
progress, modernisation and Christianity, but the divisions were real,
between differently situated African peasants and emerging migrant
workers as they struggled over resources in relation to the dominant
power.
While the rewards for being 'loyal' were soon lost, and the divisions
between these groups became increasingly hard to determine, the dis­
tinctions endured, so that they still have currency today, 'red' or 'blanket'
people meaning 'country bumpkins' in the eyes of some urbanites even
now. Under these changes, we can surmise, hybridisation of identities in
relation to schooling, religion and literacy emerged, not just as reflec­
tions of the larger political and economic processes but as cultural devel­
opments with their own transformative effects.
 Literacy, migrancy and disrupted domesticity 183

Schooling, religion and identity

It is in the context of the declining fortunes of the 'progressives' that more
Africanist versions of Christianity developed, for example, without the earl­
ier correlation of church with mission education and often with anticolonial
sentiments attached. Thus the correlations between church, school and lit­
eracy became refigured. The story of 'Mxolisi' is illustrative: clearly not a
'red' person, he is nonetheless unschooled, although he does not fit the
standard mould of 'the illiterate' either. Raised as a Christian, the narrative
of his life reveals the forging of an identity that reshapes the formative influ­
ences of his childhood. The son of Methodist converts, he recalls that his
parents were too poor to send him to school. He had to work instead:

At school, I am like someone who did not go, because I was the
shepherd. I looked after the cattle of that whole village because
at home there were no cattle. I was like a servant. Then my
father would fetch me and take me home because I stayed at
other people's houses. We [children] were many, so he placed us
here in these houses as if we are cows of milking.

His story reflects a common circumstance among the Transkei peasantry in

decline, where poorer families hired out their children to work for better-off
families. Mxolisi is now a middle-aged man living on his own in a three-
roomed, unfurnished shelter in Site B, and, from a distance, would seem
ripe material for an adult literacy campaign: a labourer on building sites,
without significant job prospects. He doesn't, however, fit the stereotype of
the deficient, socially incompetent illiterate. Whether or not he can read or
write in the schooled sense, he has a successful career, in his own eyes, as a
Zionist minister. Accordingly, his repertoire of cognitive, social and perform­
ative skills must far transcend the limits normally associated with 'unskilled
labour'. Literacy is part of Mxolisi's life and features in his conversation, as
would be expected from a churchman. The following extract from an inter­
view with him illustrates this point:

M. (researcher): Where is your wife?

Mxolisi: At home. At SaPhukantonga [in the Transkei] ... She is
staying there, the girl of Nyawuza, with my family
M. (researcher): Is this not home?
Mxolisi: Which one?
184 P.Mpoyiyaand Μ. Prinsloo

Μ. (researcher): Where we are now.

Mxolisi: The book of the Bible says we are visitors here. It is
home because I shelter my head to wake up and go and work.
M. (researcher): What about that one, where there is your wife?
Mxolisi: That one, I am forced that during holidays to leave this
one where I work and go to the one where I was born.
M. (researcher): The wife, your wife, how does she communicate
with you, how do you know her well-being now?
Mxolisi: That's right, that question of yours is good. As, here in
the city, we receive [our payment] on Friday, if I am receiving on
Friday, I am forced on Sunday, as things [transport] go up to Port
Elizabeth on Sunday, I would give money and the letter to some­
body, asking after my children's health, how are they staying
and how is she staying. I am forced in December, bad or good, to
go and see her with my natural eyes.

His fascinating reflection on 'home' illustrates both his migrant and reli­
gious identity. But of interest here are the different literacy practices that are
part of Mxolisi's life, both religious/symbolic and the letter-writing practices
that feature in a migrant worker's life when his family and resources are
distributed across different sites, great distances from each other. Whether
he writes the letters himself or uses someone else to do the writing is not the
issue here. What is clear, though, is that if Mxolisi was to participate in a
formal adult education class, which seems unlikely, it would need to add
something to his literacy repertoire not already available in his letter writing
and Bible reading. It would also have to be a setting which did not under­
mine his sense of his own status. His enjoyment of the status he holds in his
church is evident in the following extract - whether he exaggerates this sta­
tus or not, we have no way of knowing.

M. (researcher): So, what position are you holding at church?

Mxolisi: , your question is good, because there is no place
without a leader, this question is good; there in Zion I am a
minister.
M. (researcher): Oh, is it you who is the minister?
Mxolisi: It is me who is the minister of Zion. But now, as I am
talking to you, I am not a minister, as I am talking to you. I am
up, on the tops. Yes, I am up, child of Tsele, on the tops. I am one
of the Bishops, I am in charge of all the Zionists ... When I come
 Literacy, migrancy and disrupted domesticity 185

in the girls would say [singing], 'Yangeni Mongameli' (There

comes a Bishop'), that is me who is entering at that time.
M. (researcher): Mm.
Mxolisi: Yes, I would be wearing my three-piece, girl.

His pride in his three-piece suit and his assertive addressing of the inter­
viewer as 'girl' are indicative of this sense of status. Mxolisi's attitudes to
literacy-in-practice illustrate the theoretical arguments that have been made
in the research literature on literacy practices: particularly Fingeret's (1983)
discussion of shared literacy skills in social networks and Reder's (1985)
analysis of the technical, functional and social dimensions of literacy prac­
tices (see Introduction). In Mxolisi's case, on the one hand he can participate
authoritatively in the literacy practices of his church without directly decod­
ing the words of the Bible, because the structuring of church rituals does not
direct him towards literal reproduction of text, but rather towards creative
use of the discursive resources of the Bible, drawing on his skills in oral
narrative construction. His letter-writing practices, on the other hand, are
an important part of his migrant status and he shows no discomfort with
this practice, though he understandably favours his 'natural eyes' over long­
distance communication. His narrative reveals little sense of his suffering
from the stigma of being illiterate, and in this is similar to those of other
older people we interviewed. Their narratives provided further details of
how written texts were part of the lives of unschooled people. We now look
briefly at 'household literacy' as it features in people's memories and current
practices, and then we trace accounts of the literacies of schooling as well as
their social effects, particularly as they relate to the conditions and literacies
of work.

Household literacy and numeracy

Outside of school, written communication in peasant/migrant households
in the Transkei 50 years ago was rare but still routinely a part of social prac­
tice. To illustrate this we provide details from a 'red' household, to underline
our point that literacy has long been part of most people's lives, even those
caricatured as illiterates.
As Nowowo recalls, adults such as her parents who were without
schooling would do the shopping and handle the financial transactions
themselves and would not permit their school-going children to carry out
these tasks on their behalf. Before starting school most children would have
186 P Mpoyiya and Μ. Prinsloo

to work for the family, developing among themselves methods for monitor­
ing cattle or goats and identifying missing animals. The various ingenious
methods of counting and checking animals developed by these young chil­
dren are evidence of localised numeracy practices and skills which devel­
oped independently of school mathematics.
Children could be sent with verbal messages to relatives but mostly they
were merely asked to send for so-and-so who would be given the informa­
tion in person. An older child, usually a daughter, would be called on to
write letters when needed. From her schooled perspective Nowowo remem­
bers the transgressions of letter-writing norms that occurred. The mother
would dictate the letter. There would be no conventional salutation. The let­
ter would start with an account of the state of the household (the health of
the members, farming news and the weather), and would not go much fur­
ther than that, ending with a request or a directive for money to be sent.
There would be no formal closing or signature. The mother would not ask
for the letter to be read over to her and would apparently lose interest in it
almost at once. The older daughter would again be called on to read letters
received. Sometimes the letter would be a response to the last one sent off,
and would seem like a continuation of a conversation. Telegrams, when
they were received, were in English because the post office officials were
English and then an interpreter (a relative or neighbour who could speak
English) would be brought in. Other interviews with people in Khayelitsha
revealed similar details of the sharing of literacy and language skills among
family members.
What is evident here is that literacy has been part of the procedures and
repertoire of family life for decades, even in remote areas. Parents were able
to take part in the literacy and numeracy practices of their everyday lives,
such as purchasing goods and handling money, and made use of the reading
and writing abilities of their children for those practices where they lacked
specialist skills - such as in the writing or translating of letters - without
experiencing a sacrifice of authority. The social practice of letter writing be­
tween migrant workers and family members is, indeed, a genre of literacy,
distinct from schooling and the schooled and individualised conventions of
'proper' letter writing, and deserves further attention by educators and re­
searchers. Nowowo's observations of the transgressions of formal letter-
writing practice carry echoes of studies of letter writing elsewhere in the
world. Besnier (1993) and Kulick and Stroud (1993) have argued that the
apparently elliptical and obscure letters they studied in Papua New Guinea
and in the South Pacific actually required sophisticated understanding of
 Literacy, migrancy and disrupted domesticity 187

local social knowledge for their illumination, that what was left out of these
letters was what did not need to be said if you had insider knowledge, and
that the specific work that letters did was already culturally enscribed in that
context.
It is interesting, in conclusion to this discussion of household literacy,
to compare Nowowo's description of the literacy practices of her Transkei
family with her description of her own home literacy practices as a 54-year-
old woman living in Khayelitsha. Born in the Lady Frere district of the
Transkei and now living in Site C, with four of her six children and six
grandchildren, she heads her household and works from home as a seam­
stress and tailor, making clothes and doing alterations for a small clientele.
She is one of many women from Khayelitsha who have no formal-sector
work and earn a small income through sewing. Although she is schooled,
and can read and write, she says she seldom does. Her work, it is obvious,
includes a number of activities incorporating reading, writing, calculating
and measuring activities (such as following patterns, measuring clients and
recording details, handling her finances) but these are not counted in her
understanding of literacy and numeracy. In this she reflects the extent to
which school has constructed literacy as being those practices around 'es­
say-text literacy' - the literacy practices of women, in particular, in the
course of their daily work, are not registered as literacy at all (Rockhill,
1993; see also Malan's similar findings in Bellville South in Chapter 7).
Nowowo seldom reads for pleasure, she says, though she might read the
occasional magazine. In this she reflects the common features of an envi­
ronment where text is everywhere - in the form of newspapers used to paper
the walls of shacks - but the practices of book and magazine reading are not
common. Under these conditions it becomes problematic to describe people
without literacy skills as necessarily being in deficit, despite the very high
value attached to being schooled.

The literacies of schooling

For those who went to mission schools in the Transkei, as did many of the
people in Khayelitsha who are in their fifties or older, the order and dis­
cipline of the schools stand out, as does the focus on English. We were in­
terested i n the particularities of people's representations of their school
experience in their accounts, what part it plays in their present sense of
themselves, and the relation between the literacies of school and later life.
Another point of interest is the particular embedding of literacy practices in
188 P Mpoyiya and Μ. Prinsloo

the context-specific practices of schooling, as a way to question the univers-

alised assumptions of what it is schools do, and what the frame of literacy is
that they deliver.

Mtshengu: Yes. Eh, the education of that time was very good, it
was easy to catch. You know, English, we spoke it while in
Standard Four [6 years' schooling]. The child of Standard Four
would not speak Xhosa at school, within the school yard. If he
was seen by the teacher [talking Xhosa] he would get punish­
ment, those are lashes, or he would be punished by standing on
one leg. So everyone made mistakes as they were trying to
speak English ... It helped us because the child would become
clear and perfect in English when he is in Standard Eight and
Nine [10 or eleven years' schooling]. I am far better than Stand­
ard Six [8 years' schooling] of today, as I am sitting here ... If
you were reading an English book, you would read it, and ex­
plain it in Xhosa when you have finished that paragraph you
have read; change it to Xhosa by yourself. After you have learnt
that, after he has done that, he would ask you one day to ex­
plain to him what the recitation is saying. No one could win that
test, and, my friend, the teachers who taught us could beat! I al­
ways look back at those things and say, 'Nothing is done to chil­
dren now.' No, no, no. Being a school child now you can say,
This one, I do not want it, I do not want to do it', then you do
not do it. No, with us, there would be nothing that you do not
want, saying that you do not want it. If you have to sing first
part you would sing first part.

The moral economy of mission schooling, with its forcible insistence on the
things of 'civilisation', including English, and its equating of all else with
backwardness and heathens, produced a strong response among many of its
adherents. Mtshengu's tinged admiration for the strict discipline of mis­
sionary schooling is an echo of Lily Moya's passionate identification with
missionary education in the Transkei in the 1940s, in her correspondence
with Mabel Palmer, as presented in Shula Marks's (1987) editing of the let­
ters. These edited letters present an evocative account of a young Transkei
woman's faith in schooling's power to liberate her, and her bitter disap­
pointment. From the Christian peasant élite in the Transkei, and a passion­
ate believer in education's 'civilising' role, Moya wrote to Palmer, an influen-
 Literacy, migrancy and disrupted domesticity 189

tial Durban-based adult educator/social activist, and persuaded her to

organise a scholarship for her to the prestigious Adams College, in order to
continue her schooling and escape the threat of a forced marriage. But Moya
couldn't cope with the switch. As Marks describes it:

For the devout Lily whose entire life had been bound up with the
Anglican church and its schools, the transition to the interde­
nominational Adams clearly transgressed highly significant
boundaries. Her experience of the Anglican schools with their
high academic standards and their sense of order and decorum
may also have lain behind her bitter disappointment with the
more open and democratic Adams tradition.

The contrasts between the letters of Moya and her patron are remarkable in
their different literacies: Mabel Palmer, with her 'no nonsense', Fabian-influ­
enced commitment to doing good is appalled by the emotional intensity of
Moya's letters, as well as the familiarity and intimacy that Moya assumes
between her and her patron. For Palmer, Moya's letters clearly transgress her
conception of the appropriate discourse and social distance that should be
operative, while for Moya the role of loving daughter is the appropriate dis­
cursive framing for communication between her and one on whose support
she must so depend. Neither is able to read the other as was intended be­
cause they lack the contextual knowledge to make sense of each other. Moya
is similarly unable to adjust to the changes her move to Durban brings, and
Palmer cannot grasp her problems.
Marks sums up one of Lily's letters to Palmer as 'an exceptionally bitter
diatribe against the indiscipline, lack of morality and "education which is
barbarism under a camouflage" of Adams College'. The tragic narrative of
the letters traces the decline of a girl rebuffed by the persons and institutions
in which she invested so much hope, and her subsequent breakdown.
Adult education students have expressed a related disappointment with
literacy classes that fail to follow the decorum of the schools they remember
from their youth. There is also much anecdotal evidence from the experi­
ences of literacy practitioners that the 'learner-centred' and 'interactive'
principles of a great deal of adult education practice have less appeal for
many people than those centres more 'school-like' and hierarchical in their
methods. In contexts where the practices of schooling are so ritualised and
so different from the activities outside the school, the identification with
schooling must always be a complicated one.
190 P.Mpoyiya and Μ. Prinsloo

There are messages here for adult literacy provision which can be ex­
plored in numerous ways. We will confine ourselves to pointing out that the
focus on 'skills' and their transmission in adult education classes should
not blind educators to the cultural framing and discursive messages embed­
ded in the particular form of adult education they offer. A reflection on the
wider values embedded in particular educational forms, and how they en­
counter the life trajectories of people with located understandings of school­
ing, will give educators a fresh perspective on their activities. In particular,
the universalised good associated with literacy provision for adults is un­
dermined by these insights, and the pressure on educators to make sure that
their activities connect with local and lived realities becomes strong.

Leaving school
Our concern here is to challenge the assumption that people who have had
little schooling as children will automatically aspire to participating in an
alternative form of education when the opportunity becomes available to
them as adults. We suggest they will not do so unless they have internalised
constructions of themselves as being in deficit'. Such internalising of a
view of themselves as being in deficit is by no means inevitable or universal
among adults with little schooling. We explore these concerns in studying
the reasons people give for having left school in the first place.
For young men in the Transkei, migrant work has, for decades, repres­
ented an entry into manhood, as well as a source of personal power inde­
pendent of family strictures. Their ready departure from school, sometimes
in the face of resistance from their parents, and their embracing of the life of
('unskilled' and 'semi-skilled') labour presents a variation of the process
described by Paul Willis's Learning to Labour (1977), where working-class
English boys construct a counter-identity to that being offered by the school.
This oppositional identity displays their resistance to the hegemony of
schooling ideology and simultaneously consigns them to a working life as
poorly paid labourers. Adult educators who assume that a pro-schooling
ideology is unproblematically widespread among all those who left school
early should consider the multiple possibilities of counter-tendencies and
their articulation with wider cultural processes of identity construction.
For such young men, taking up migrant worker contracts on the mines
has been part of a cult of masculinity, an extension of the painful perform­
ances of male initiation and circumcision, after which one emerges as a
man. A period of such labour had become a prerequisite for access to the
 Literacy, migrancy and disrupted domesticity 191

initiation rituals. Their impatience to leave school and gain entry to man­
hood clashed frequently with their parents' ambitions for them, but they
were realistic about the work opportunities open to them, almost all in the
'unskilled' job categories.

M. (researcher): What happened that caused you to leave

school?
Mtshengu: No, the thing that took me out of school was I looked
for my peers ... the boys with whom we were growing up. I saw
there were very few in our group who continued. I am sure that
at our village there were only two went forward to Standard Six.
So we both left and followed each other to Johannesburg. While
I was still at school in Standard Six, when I was with those
other boys who were already men, out of school, we would go
together, sit together, they would not isolate me, because I was
their age. Even the teacher would stop beating me when I was in
Standard Six. I could see that he was embarrassed. Ha, as he
was not beating those boys [who left school to work], me too, he
would not beat me.

It was not uncommon for young boys to defy their parents in setting off for
Johannesburg:

Mtshengu: After leaving school, I went to Johannesburg, be­

cause my father did not want that.
M. (researcher): Without permission?
Mtshengu: No, my father did not want that. Yes. So much so that
he only heard about it when I was gone! He was told when the
train was passing by... The old man was very shocked. 'Hhi! He
ran away! No, leave him! On his coming back he will go to
school!' But then I stayed in Johannesburg until the joining
[contract] was over.

Mxolisi's parents were similarly unhappy at his departure:

They wanted me to continue [schooling], to the extent that my

mother said that when I finished that nine months [contract] I
must go back to school, she cannot stay with a raw heathen.
192 P. Mpoyiya and Μ. Prinsloo

The mother's association of schooling with sanctity and progress is

noteworthy here, evidence of the association in her mind of the literacy and
practices of schooling and religion. There is thus some irony in Mxolisi's
later church career, despite his not returning to school
It is not uncommon for men with similar backgrounds to associate the
practices of schooling with women and children, but not with grown men.
For such people, where literacy interventions are appropriate, forms of
learning which do not correspond to the formats of formal schooling and
their association with childhood are more likely to succeed than those
which mirror schooling.
For young girls, schooling and youth were frequently terminated by
early arranged marriages, though they often stayed in school slightly longer
than their brothers. As married women their school learning would often be
undervalued or discounted, particularly if they were not working. One effect
is that the literacies deployed by such women are not even identified as such
by themselves. Women with several years' education would tell us they
made no use of literacy in their day-to-day lives, whereas a detailed exam­
ination of their occupations would reveal an array of activities including lit­
eracy and numeracy (for example, Nowowo's sewing activities).

Literacies and labour

Older men's accounts of the links between their (mission) schooling and
their working lives are notable: Mtshengu's accounts of his working life are
interesting because of the role he gives to his abilities in English, acquired
under duress in the mission schools. His school-acquired abilities in list-
making and form completion, as well as his drilled acquisition of English,
always led to him getting a softer job on the work-site after a while, but
never to any career advancement above a ceiling of semi-skilled contract
work. He started work as a miner underground but soon got a preferable
surface job after being injured underground and writing a request for the
transfer from his hospital bed.

Mtshengu: I left underground, no longer carrying a shovel. I

came to the surface, me, too, I had my chair.
M. (researcher): What were you doing really?
Mtshengu: We wrote tickets ... When they [the Black miners] go
down, you write who went down, when. When they come up
they pass by you ... you tear that piece and give it to him. You do
 Literacy, migrancy and disrupted domesticity 193

that so that with that piece you gave him he would go and have
a meal at the kitchen.

A later job in Cape Town was as a labourer on a building site, throwing up

bricks. He says it was 'Hell!':

When I was a few days there, there was a White, of whom I

think he was the one who was the manager. He said, 'No, do not
kill him, you are killing him when you do like this. He must
come here, to make tea in the kitchen.' Hurrah! I went to the
shop to buy for the workers, bread and so on. 'Dο you know how
to write?' Tes.' It was said, 'It is done.' Huu! There I do not
speak Xhosa, I am speaking English with this White. So there I
stayed until the year was over, working there. You know the
building companies, when they finish, they move on to another
place.

A friend got him a job in the delivery department at a food processing

factory:

This guy described me before I arrived. He explained, 'No, this

man can cope with any work and he is educated.'

Mtshengu's work involved accompanying the driver on delivery rounds and

checking orders and schedules. He learnt to drive the truck over time and
was appointed to drive by his employer who disregarded his lack of a driv­
er's licence.
His working life, which fluctuated unpredictably between 'carrying a
shovel' and 'having a chair', finally stopped when the company where he
had worked for 15 years went bankrupt leaving him without benefits or
savings and too old for the job market.
It is clear, finally, that Mtshengu's fluency in English and his skills in
making notes and lists gave him an edge, relatively, in a particular, racially
segmented job market, but did not provide the route out of that insecure
market of semi-skilled contract labour into work with more benefits and
security.
Nowowo, a woman with more schooling than Mtshengu, on the other
hand, was never able to get employment beyond domestic labour, and she
has struggled to set herself up as a seamstress.
194 P.Mpoyiya and Μ. Prinsloo

Intensifying migrancy, disrupted domesticity and local

literacies
We have presented selective details from our wider interview data on the
narratives of people living in Khayelitsha to demonstrate the complicated
social trajectories of persons from Transkei who have come to live here.
Children of earlier generations of peasant/migrants, they all experienced
childhoods in Transkei. Younger generations of people living in Khayelitsha
gave us equally differentiated accounts of childhood and schooling. But
their accounts span multiple settings to an even greater degree. As the im­
poverishment of the rural base of people proceeds apace, the utilisation of
people as resources, and the maintenance of extended family networks, be­
comes part of a process of managing by the deployment of resources across
large geographical spaces.
The conditions of migrant labour, of extended family relationships
across town and rural areas, have produced a fragmented and dispersed
family life for the majority of people we spoke to. We were told repeatedly of
details of people who had been raised by only one parent, more commonly
by grandparents and sometimes by more distant relatives or even by non-
family members.

Conclusions
This paper has illustrated that for people in Khayelitsha literacy is not a
homogeneous and autonomous technology with neutral and universal
value. Instead, its meaning is embedded in specific institutional, historical,
economic and geographical sites. Likewise there is no such category of per­
son as the 'illiterate out there', to be distinguished from others only on a
sliding scale of literacy level attained.
We have indicated that what is commonly referred to as literacy' is in
fact 'schooled literacy' rather than literacy as it occurs in social practice, and
also that schooled literacy does not have universal meaning, nor is its
meaning in the first place derived from its functionality. We have looked at
how school literacy changes shape across different socio-historical contexts,
while continuing to act as powerful social signifier and site of symbolic
capital. We have also discussed patterns of identity formation which con­
struct different orientations to literacy and schooling among people living in
Khayelitsha. We attempt to summarise what we have found and to draw
conclusions for the provision of adult education:
 Literacy, migrancy and disrupted domesticity 195

1. A group of people identified somewhat disparagingly as 'red people' by

others were initially people who resisted for a while the impact of the
colonial power - at least at a cultural level - a hundred or so years ago.
At first they withstood the proselytising efforts of the missionaries, in­
cluding their schools and western dress. But this term is not a precise
cultural description of a group of people in that many of their children
landed up in school anyway, because of the cultural capital that came to
be attached to schooling.
In Khayelitsha the notion of 'red people' exists mainly as an element
in the formation of people's personal histories, or as a disparaging term
for 'uneducated country bumpkins'. The reality, though, is that such
people are likely to have had varying exposure to schooling. The interest
of the unschooled children of such people in acquiring schooling as
adults depends on their personal histories and circumstances.
2. The powerful forces of Christianity and colonial rule produced a histori­
cal orientation of people who were both pro-schooling and religious
converts. For those older people with an orientation to mission-based
schooling, there was a clear separation between the literacies of school­
ing which were morally based and concerned with the teaching of Eng­
lish, and the literacy practices of home.
3. Those adults whose identities have been shaped at some distance from
the formative influences of schooling, in whatever form (they might in­
clude people from either groups - see points 1 and 2), have an orienta­
tion to the use and valuing of literacy which is context specific, relating
to its embedding in their concrete or symbolic practices. The practices of
night school literacy work, as it is conventionally constructed, will prob­
ably not impact on those practices to any extent.
4. Finally, younger generations have been exposed to increasing degrees of
schooled education, and the symbolic value of school qualifications has
escalated dramatically. At the same time they have been grappling with
disrupted educational careers and family lives. While many are disillu­
sioned with the rewards to be had from schooled literacy, for others it
remains an ideal to further their schooling.

In conclusion for all of these people, it is inappropriate to assume they will

share adult educators' assessments of their need for literacy. It is necessary
for individuals to internalise others' conception of them being 'in deficit'
before they will present themselves to adult night schools, as presently con­
stituted. The ability of such night schools to teach literacy skills that connect
196 P.Mpoyiyaand Μ. Prinsloo

meaningfully with people's actual practices will depend on their developing

their understandings of contextually situated literacy practices, rather than
assuming that the model of 'school literacy' is in itself of value and direct
application.

Notes
1. All the names of the interviewees in this chapter are pseudonyms.
Chapter Ten
'We are waiting/this is our home':
literacy and the search for resources in
the rural Eastern Cape
Μ.J. McEwan and Liezl Malan

Education advantages, it gives you the green light. It disadvan­

tages, it makes you forget your tradition.

This controversial statement from a high-school student in Zola in the rural

Eastern Cape reflects the contested values associated with education and lit­
eracy in that setting. These words of a rural resident can again be juxta­
posed with the statements of educational policy-makers. The African Na­
tional Congress (ANC) has suggested the massive and centralised delivery of
Adult Basic Education and Training (ABET) as a strategy to counter the
'marginalisation' and 'silencing' of 'millions of our people' who lack basic
education. It identifies as a priority grouping for provision in the longer
term 'the most disadvantaged sectors of society educationally, socially and
economically such as the poorest regions of the country, women in rural
areas ...' (1994:21). They proposed a rural women's ABET programme in the
Eastern Cape, and suggested that this would have an impact on the per­
ceived social and economic disadvantage of women in these areas.
This paper focuses on Tentergate and Zola, two settlements in the East­
ern Cape ideally suited to this description of a priority grouping for ABET
provision. The research on which this paper is based was an exploration of
attitudes and orientations to literacy held by people living in these settle­
ments and how these would impact on the feasibility of adult literacy classes
in these areas. Conclusions were twofold. Firstly, the identification of a
target group for ABET in terms of dichotomies of disadvantage (women as
opposed to men, adults as opposed to youth, rural as opposed to urban
dwellers) has the danger of frustrating the very aspirations of those people
it is meant to empower. Secondly, an exclusive focus on schooled literacy
without an understanding of local perceptions and uses of literacy could
further alienate adults targeted for ABET interventions.
198 M.J. McEwan and L. Malan

Similar approaches have been taken by anthropologists concerned with

adult literacy elsewhere in the world. Brian Street, referring to his study of
literacy practices in rural Iran, wrote: 'Rather than seeking to impose a par­
ticular literacy or ideology on rural life' observers should look at 'how the
villagers themselves perceived the different literacies to which they were
exposed and how they made pragmatic adaptions to serve their particular
interests' (1987:60). This paper on literacy in rural Eastern Cape sets out
with a similar aim, linking literacy specifically with the search for resources
in these areas.
Street's use of the term 'literacies' deliberately implies that literacy is not
a homogeneous concept (see Introduction). In particular, one can distin­
guish between literacies that are dominant or school-based and local or
community-based. Schooled literacy involves the learning of conscious
knowledge through explanation and analysis and the attaining of some de­
gree of meta-knowledge about the subject. Local literacies are acquired
through social practice in settings where they are meaningful and func­
tional (Street and Street, 1991; Baynham, 1995).
In the South African context, the National Qualifications Framework
can be described as a standardisation of schooled literacy, based on
understandings of generic skills and competencies. Little is known about
local or community-based literacies. This paper explores both orientations
to schooled literacy and the nature of local literacies in Tentergate and Zola.
We show that the value of literacies is associated with the cultural and eco­
nomic resources which these literacies represent. The research contributes
to the filling of the gap in our knowledge of local literacies as identified by
writers such as Street and Gee.

Waiting for resources

The research was conducted in two settlements around the Eastern Cape
farming town of Tarkastad. Zola, the township of Tarkastad, was created by
the Department of Bantu Affairs in the 1960s. Many of the 3 000 people who
live in Zola have, over the years, moved there from various farms in the
Tarkastad district and continue to do so, usually because employment op­
portunities on farms are limited.
Tentergate consists of a group of four villages not far from Zola. After
the 1994 national elections, McEwan asked the local head of the ANC in
Tentergate, Mr Mangiya, where the name of Lindlela (the area of Tentergate
that was the focus of her research) originated. He replied:
 Literacy and the search for resources 199

Typical home in Tentergate, Eastern Cape.

The Lindlela means the place where we are waiting for some­
thing. Ja, we are still waiting, but now we have decided not to
adopt that [name] because Khayalethu means 'this is our
home'. Ja, this is our home. We are not waiting for anybody. For
whom must we wait? But we are waiting just for the govern­
ment to come and upgrade and develop this place.

An estimated 2 000 people (mainly Xhosa-speaking women and children)

live in Tentergate. Many have their roots in Herschel in the northeastern
Cape. With the incorporation of their hometown into Transkei, many
Herschel residents were lured into resettling in Ciskei, then under Sebe's
government, where they were promised fertile land, beautiful four-roomed
houses and new schools and clinics. Older people who experienced the re­
settlement said they were transported by bus to Thornhill, where instead of
houses they were supplied with plastic tents ('plastic bags with zips'), and in
place of peach trees there were dusty thorn bushes. Since then they had been
moved to Tentergate, where they were still waiting for Sebe's promises to be
fulfilled. Those who, like Mr Mangiya, believed that the new Government of
National Unity would supply them with the resources they needed had
200 M.J.McEwanand L. Malan

accepted the name 'Khayalethu' instead of Lindlela as a sign of their trust.

Life in Tentergate and Zola was framed by this waiting for resources. In this
context, literacy became a resource to be used opportunistically.
As the daughter of one of the White Tarkastad farmers, McEwan was
initially perceived as someone with access to resources. However, she found
herself quickly accepted by the women of Tentergate who took it upon them­
selves to tell other curious people that she was not a 'charity' but, rather,
that she was interested in meeting and speaking to people, with the inten­
tion of learning about their lives at Tentergate.

Schooled literacy and the moral economy of the family

This paper focuses on orientations to schooled literacy in Tentergate and
Zola. We begin with a case study of Nosinod Xameni1, one of the women in
Tentergate who would qualify as an ideal candidate for adult literacy
classes. McEwan talked to Nosinod while she was baking bread and looking
after the daughter of her neighbour, Paulina Madikane, who had gone to
Tarkastad for the day. She provided McEwan with the following details of
her life:
She has six children, four of whom work in Cape Town. Her daughter
has passed Standard Ten (this is equivalent to 12 years of schooling, and is
known as matric), is married and is studying with the aid of a bursary. Her
one son matriculated in 1990 and is now working for a printing company in
Cape Town (Nosinod was not certain where he worked but she checked the
details with someone else). She brought out some papers pertaining to this
son: a copy of his matric certificate, a brief testimonial from his headmaster,
a baptismal certificate from the Full Gospel Church of Power, and a rejection
letter from a teachers' training college in Crawford - this letter in particular
she wanted McEwan to translate. The letter was dated 1991 - apparently he
has been reapplying to training colleges ever since he left school. The two
youngest children lived with Nosinod at Tentergate - the little boy was in
Standard Two and the little girl was in Standard One.
Nosinod herself was a 'little' educated - she left school in Standard
Three (5 years' schooling). Two schoolgirls who drifted in during the course
of the day teased her about her education and suggested that she should
carry on studying during the day - perhaps at a night school. They teased
her that she too would get beaten by the teachers when she failed. Nosinod's
reply was that she no longer wanted to study - she was now too old
(McEwan judged her as somewhere between 40 and 50) and, besides, she
 Literacy and the search for resources 201

was not well enough - her high blood pressure had made her memory poor.
Nosinod did not have a husband, she did not work, and from what McEwan
gathered, she relied solely on money sent to her by her children. She claimed
that they did not send her enough money on a regular basis, particularly
since she had many expenses - school fees, uniforms, and so on. Neverthe­
less, McEwan noticed a TV set, a hi-fi system, and so on, which her children
had brought her. These operated off a car battery, by then flat.
Nosinod's case addresses important aspects of orientations to schooled
literacy of mothers in Tentergate and Zola. Nosinod and most other mothers
living in these areas valued schooled literacy highly as a form of cultural
capital, a gateway to resources. She expressed a sense of loss at not having
had much schooling herself, similar to Paulina who said: 'We are suffering
and if we had studied we would not be struggling.'
While the words of people like Paulina elevate schooled education as the
technology which would have saved them from the hardships they are now
suffering, few actively aspired towards it. McEwan met a number of adults
in Tentergate and Zola who have at some stage attempted to attend literacy
classes, but their efforts were, with few exceptions, short-lived. Schooled lit­
eracy has become an alternative source of cultural authority in the hands of
the schooled youth, and parents are constantly confronted with this 'deficit'
in their lives. During the opening of the high school in Zola in 1994, the
largely unschooled parent audience was told by the minister that 'illiteracy'
had been the downfall of Africa, and that it should be prevented from
'spreading' in South Africa. Youth leaders such as Bellion, who had returned
to Zola after years in struggle politics and a tertiary education in Cape Town,
were advocating schooled literacy as the key to true democracy: 'People of
the new generation that is coming now, we need to ensure we are spreading
the gospel of education that plays a role ... so that people can fully
participate.'
It is within this context that the schoolgirls in the case study had the
authority to tease Nosinod about her lack of schooling. It is apparent from
what they said that attending night school would not 'cleanse' her of this
'deficit', but instead lead to her infantilisation; she would take on the role of
a child liable for punishment by a teacher.
The case study of Nosinod is comparable with Hanlie Griesel's study of
women in a literacy class in the rural community of Mboza (1986). Griesel
found that their motivation for literacy learning was directly related to the
symbolic significance rather than the functional use of literacy. For the older
women literacy was a novelty which would improve their social standing.
202 M.J. McEwan and L. Malan

Nosinod, however, stated explicitly that she did not regard herself as fit to
study at her age. During a later conversation on the topic her friends agreed
that they would not start studying at their age even if they had the oppor­
tunity.
For the younger women in Griesel's study, on the other hand, schooled
literacy was of crucial significance: without it they saw themselves 'having
no future' (1986:18). In Tentergate, being able to read makes it possible for
older women to fulfil functional roles which make little difference to their
social status (see the discussion of the Zionist service later). Younger
women, however, are expected to acquire schooled literacy; a young
unschooled woman in Tentergate who is not employed or attending literacy
classes is called a 'tsotsi' by her peers, meaning that she lives the undirected
life of a gang member.
By stating that they were too old to study, Nosinod and Paulina were
affirming their roles within the moral economy of their families. Nosinod
valued schooled literacy as the property of a different time and place, that of
her children who had left to work in the city. Her social responsibility was
being where she was; by remaining in Tentergate, raising and seeing to the
education of her children and grandchildren, she was making it possible for
them to find employment in the cities. She paid for the school uniforms and
fed the younger children. The older children, in turn, were responsible for
sending some of their earnings back 'home'. Although these earnings often
did not arrive as such, the TV and hi-fi brought back by Nosinod's children
were representations of the cultural and material resources of the cities and
as such were regarded by the children as ways of 'paying back'.
Schooled literacy is associated not only with material resources but with
cultural identity, as reflected in the distinction between 'Herschelers' and
'non-Herschelers'. The 'non-Herschelers' see themselves as being from here'
and become quite indignant if it is suggested that they moved there from
Herschel. In the opinion of 'Evelina', a middle-aged woman 'from here', the
Herschelers were ignorant, uneducated village people. Evelina herself had
passed Standard Three. By distinguishing herself from the 'uneducated vil­
lage people', Evelina has not made a statement about her schooled educa­
tion; she has situated herself in a modern world associated with education
and the resources of the cities. This association was made possible through
her children who extended her identity to the cities and the world of the
educated.
For Nosinod the schooled education of her children was embodied by
the pile of letters and documents she presented, 'proof' of her children's
 Literacy and the search for resources 203

claims to further qualifications, employment and financial resources. They

were also her reference to the abstract reality of her son's life in the city The
papers ironically also represented the frustrated attempts of a qualified son
who had failed to be accepted for further studies despite having the papers;
Nosinod wanted to interrogate them to see where their hidden power lay
During a discussion between McEwan and senior students from Zola's
high school, one of them made the statement that 'education advantages, it
gives you the green light. It disadvantages, it makes you forget your tradi­
tion'. The youth, supported by their families, had come to see schooled edu­
cation as the 'green light' to the cash resources of the cities. At the same
time, this student expressed a concern that the gains of schooled education
would lead to the loss of 'their tradition'. When another student denied that
schooled education had anything to do with the loss of cultural identity, a
third student restated the original position, referring to changed social
patterns:

It has, in this way, if you are educated, you move away ... you
tend to forget your language, like Xhosa. To me even in that
place the ancestors will come to you. They will see now, no, this
child is no more of us, you can't talk to ancestors of yours in
English ... When you are educated you tend now not to care for
other peoples ... the Black people as I see them now, their neigh­
bour, they don't even know it.

Studies have indicated a relationship between the economic marginalisation of

the rural periphery (through the impact of resettlement and wage labour) and
the erosion of kinship and neighbourhood as social resources (Sharp and
Spiegel, 1985). The relationship is neverfixedand is dependent on social con­
text. The Zola students' comments are explorations of what they sense to be the
relationship between receiving schooled education and the loss of social and
cultural resources - their language, cultural practices and social networks.
While city life and schooled education are perceived as individualising
forces, the mothers who stay behind in rural villages are crucial for creating
continuity between old and new social identities, and for sustaining the social
networks of family and community. Ramphele (1990) has indicated that the
success of development projects for rural women depends on the risk involved
in the transformation of interpersonal relationships resulting from them. If
Nosinod had aspired to the acquisition of schooled literacy in order tofindem­
ployment in the cities, this would have had a decisive impact on the moral
204 M.J. McEwan and L. Malan

economy of her family. From what she said, Nosinod did not appear to have any
such plans.
Reciprocity between youth and parents, urban and rural dwellers, those
with and those without schooled education involves an exchange of economic
and cultural resources. In these social networks rural women have central and
powerful positions; although their authority may at times be challenged by the
schooled youth, these same youth are dependent on the cultural resources of
their unschooled parents.
While acknowledged as vital within their social networks, the cultural
knowledge and local literacies of the mothers of Tentergate and Zola remain
'hidden' to the official gaze. These local literacies can therefore be described as
examples of the 'hidden' literacies which this book aims at uncovering. It is be­
cause she perceived her local literacies as not being noticed that Paulina re­
marked, in comparing her knowledge to that of school children: There is proof
in the education they have. The kind of education I have, one cannot see.'

Local literacies and cultural knowledge in Tentergate and Zola

The cultural resources of people living in Tentergate and Zola included
forms of knowledge and local literacies acquired through practice and ap­
prenticeship and not learnt at school. These cultural resources were keys to
status and authority which adults could not hope to gain through acquiring
schooled literacy at night schools, whatever functional gains that might
have led to.
This was apparent in the case of Mr Manyana. After having attended a
night school for five years, he was barely able to write his name, as he ex­
plained to McEwan: 'I can put the name here (points to a sheet of paper), you
can see. Yes, with this Standard A of mine! Standard A, not B! I think next
year I will go to Standard B.'
Mr Manyana, however, was a minister in the Zionist Church, and pos­
sessed cultural knowledge and local literacies which far exceeded the value
of his schooled literacy (similar to the example given in Chapter 9). Despite
his performance in the literacy class, Mr Manyana had no problem reading
the Bible: 'Whooa, I can read the Bible very well! God works very nice with
me to teach me. Sometimes, the chapter I'm dreaming. Yes, that's what I do.'
Mr Manyana's description of himself 'dreaming' the interpretation of
the Bible related to an understanding of knowledge and wisdom which dif­
fered from that of schooled education. In the dream he acquired the meaning
of the text, and the fact that he had dreamt the interpretation (rather than
 Literacy and the search for resources 205

coming to it through studied exegesis) was a sign of divine inspiration.

As opposed to the analytical orientation of schooled literacy Mr Manyana's
interpretation of the Bible was a display of cultural authority in contexts of
meaningful use.
In the context of local religious practice in Zola, Mr Manyana's cultural
resources were far more significant than the schooled literacy that he
lacked. Mr Manyana said that he did not need to read the Bible during a
service because there would be someone else to do this. Reading served a
functional purpose here; even though Mr Manyana did not do the reading
himself, he was still recognised as the one who interpreted and revealed the
meaning of the words.
The other signs of his authority that Mr Manyana referred to were his
character and his beard. Wisdom is associated with age and gender here.
Maurice Bloch (1993) describes how this same established notion that wis­
dom is a property of age is upheld in a Zafimaniry village despite the chal­
lenge of schooled education. Similarly, Andrew', a Standard Ten (twelve
years' schooling) student who went back to school in order to become a min­
ister, was frustrated by the limitations of his age. He said that people did not
yet trust him as a minister. Despite his schooled literacy they said: 'You are
young, you cannot tell us what to do.' The fact that Mr Manyana was a man
contributed to his authority in religious and cultural life. Regardless of
whether she possessed more schooled literacy than the man, a woman
would only be allowed to preach in the absence of men. Women believed
that men had superior knowledge in this regard; Betty, a middle-aged
woman, said women did not preach because 'maybe it is too heavy [difficult]
for them'.

Literacy as display
Local uses of literacy were most apparent in two domains, namely church
activities of the kind Mr Manyana described and economic practices. Here
written texts are used asforms of display. In the case of church activities,
written texts, together with other forms of display, serve as symbolic repres­
entations of cultural resources used in the construction of social identity.
There are few ways of 'earning' money in Tentergate and Zola: we describe
later how the displays of formal documents by igqirhas (herbal doctors) and
pensioners were used as representations of financial resources which they
claimed as their own.
206 M.J. McEwan and L. Malan

A Zionist church service

McEwan attended a Zionist church service on Good Friday, 1995. Her

fieldnotes reflected on the use of written texts as forms of display around the
service. While in the home of the friends with whom she was going to the
service, she noticed a hymn book being passed around for everyone to see
before they left, although none of them could read. The passing of the hymn
book was a symbolic gesture which introduced, while still in the home, the
event which was to follow.
The house in which the service was held was defined as religious space
by means of a display of written text: a green banner on the wall announced
the name of the minister and that of the church - 'the Apostolic Misson [sic]
in Isizion'. Members of the congregation were distinguished from one an­
other according to their seniority by the colours of the robes they wore. The
shared sign of their membership of the church were the green sashes with
The Apostolic Mission in Zion' embroidered on them. McEwan comments:
The spelling and the spacing of the words varied greatly - spelling mis­
takes; also the words in many cases appear to be 'just letters', for example:

theapost
olicmiss
ioninzion

Of importance here was not the literate' meaning of the written words, but
the symbolic representation of religious identity which they embodied. The
words fulfilled a similar function to the colour of the robes. For this reason,
the spelling of the words and the separation of letters into different words
were of little significance.
The service took place around three Bibles on the table which served
mostly as artefacts of display. During the service no one read from them
except the minister's wife, who read a very short verse, one line at a time.
The minister then repeated each line to the congregation, much louder than
she had read them. As in the case of Mr Manyana, the minister's authority
was not affected by the fact that his wife did the actual reading from the
Bible. The Bible was significant at the service as an artefact which symbol­
ically anchored the religious identity of the gathering. Its significance as a
form of display was evident from the fact that one of the ministers posed for
a photograph with the Bible after the service.
 Literacy and the search for resources 207

There was no privileging of reading during the service. The minister

delivered his message with constant participation of drums, bells and a
shaker and the sermon was interrupted at appropriate stages with song.
Many of the songs were repetitive; everyone seemed to know these words
even though they were not written - where people were not sure of the
words, they harmonised in chorus.
Some of the proceedings involved discussions about buying a sheep for a
special meal. Here again the use of written texts as representational artefacts
was illustrated. A woman who was not present had sent a note and R20 to­
wards the purchase of a sheep. A man conveyed what he said was the wom­
an's message and then handed the note to the minister's wife who 'read' it,
repeating precisely what the man had said. The note is significant not because
of its content, but because it represented the words of the woman who had
written it. In fact, it was the oral message that was repeated.
The use of written texts as forms of display can be seen as semiotic acts
which both challenge conventional understandings of the authority of writ­
ten texts and transform them in the enactment of local cultural identities.
Written texts here are not significant as encoded messages which receive
meaning through their analytical decoding (linear 'reading'). They are arte­
facts of performance, forms of display which as such carry symbolic
meaning. Jean Comaroff, in writing about South African Zionists, refers to
the written word (together with money, linear time, the universal God) as
'forms of generalised media exchange', part of the prevailing sign system
which 'fails to provide a model for their subjectivity, for their meaningful
and material being'. She argues that Zionism reverses the dislocation
caused in this way by means of the reintegration of spirit and matter
(1985:252). Consequently, written texts derive their symbolic meaning not
from their abstract and analytical interpretation, but as material embodi­
ments of meaning. Needless to say, for this purpose the cultural knowledge
Mr Manyana has is more significant than his lack of schooled literacy.
The uses and values of written texts are contextually specific. Whereas
they served as representations of religious identity during the church ser­
vice, they represent the promise of financial resources in the following
cases.

Economic practices

Due to the erosion of local economic resources in Tentergate and Zola, most
people there were in some way dependent on financial support from local
208 M.J. McEwan and L. Malan

government. Oupa Gqozo, who became president of Ciskei after a military

take-over, initiated the building of a town which was to become the flagship
for his African Democratic Movement in the area. The fact that the town,
which literally consisted of two tarred streets, half a dozen street lamps, a
magistrate's court, a post office and an education office, was more com­
monly known as 'Barcelona' is evidence of the little faith the majority of
people had in Gqozo's promises. The town was also the place where pen­
sions were paid out.
Applying for and receiving pension money were two of the very few lit­
eracy events that people participated in regularly in this setting. For the pen­
sioners, however, the actual reading of documents or filling in of forms was
of little significance, except as part of a bigger performance which was ritu-
ally re-enacted until it succeeded. Paulina said that people who applied for
pensions and were unsuccessful would see this only as a sign that they have
to apply again: They go around asking, in Barcelona, until they all get, they
don't all get at one time, it is necessary for others to go again.' Those who do
not succeed will get their share through social redistribution: These people
live off their sisters and brothers because they get a pension.'
In most homes in Tentergate and Zola there was at least one calendar on
a wall; besides them there were few written texts around. Calendars were
brought by children working in the cities to their parents, mostly with the
exclusive function of reminding them when it was pension day. They served
as a symbolic display of the government's promise of resources, but as
Paulina explains, the pension pay-out dates were not as reliable as the cal­
endar suggested: 'Now you can't go by looking at that thing [calendar, for
pensions at Tentergate] ... There are things that we don't know, we are ba­
boons, others who are learned might know something, but we don't.'
Paulina's tongue-in-cheek remark about being a baboon reflected how
the blaming of 'the illiterate' has become a powerful way in which formal
institutions such as local government have circumvented their own respon­
sibility. By saying 'others who are learned might know something, but we
don't', Paulina was admitting that the mere re-enactment of the bureaucratic
ritual, even with the authority of those written texts representing the gov­
ernment's promise, was not enough. What was needed was some form of
symbolic capital (she mentioned education) to give the state subject author­
ity in communicating with local government.
With the approaching of the national elections in 1994, posters of Nel­
son Mandela, with subscripts urging 'Vote for Mandela', started appearing
on the walls inside people's homes. These texts came to represent a new
 Literacy and the search for resources 209

Initiation ceremonyforamagqirha - traditional healers.

imagined origin of resources to replace that of the old bureaucracy. The im­
age of Mandela had, through media representations, attained iconic status
in the eyes of people in Tentergate and Zola who were still waiting for the
government to fulfil its promises. Again, the meaning of these texts (the
Mandela posters) was not extracted through analytical decoding but by
reading them as acts of performance and display with symbolic significance.
210 M.J. McEwan and L. Malan

The representational authority of written documents did not remain re­

stricted to the domains of public institutions such as government - it was
also used as a resource in local cultural practices, for example, by igqirhas.
In the rooms of many of these herbal doctors there were certificates ac­
knowledging their professional skills. Apprenticeship in the art of being
an igqirha was a lengthy process destined only for those who had been iden­
tified by the ancestors, through illness or dreams, as future igqirhas. This
description of the art was given to McEwan by Annie, who had at that stage
been under the guidance of a 'big igqirha" for seven years. This form of ap­
prenticeship differed significantly from that of formal schooling. Asked by
McEwan why certificates would have any significance in this practice, Annie
said: 'Because when you are finished being taught you are given a licence,
so that you do not cheat people.'
Traditional· cultural practices and the cash economy of cities and mi­
grant labour have become so intertwined that licensing' had become an
additional resource through which igqirhas signified their professional au­
thority in an industry becoming increasingly competitive. While this was so,
Annie also stated that the authority of 'certificates' was superficial com­
pared to the ritual markings which have traditionally proven the cultural
authority of igqirhas:

No, you see this place that I have been cut over here (points to a
scar), it shows that I'm a doctor. A certificate does not help be­
cause you can buy one.

It was only the select few, however, who made a living as igqirhas. For most
people financial resources originated from local government and from fam­
ily members in the cities who sent them money through letters or postal or­
ders. During one of McEwan's visits, Paulina mentioned that she had had a
stabbing pain in her side all day. She explained that this was nothing to
worry about - in fact it was a good sign: a letter or perhaps even a money
telegram would arrive for her soon. The way in which Paulina anticipated
the meaning of the letter or telegram was similar to Mr Manyana's
interpretation of the Bible through his dreams. Clearly, written texts had
become part of a culture of performance and symbolic display. Educational
policy aimed at providing formal schooled literacy to adults in places like
Tentergate and Zola is therefore likely to work with understandings of the
nature and uses of literacy which differ substantially from those literacies
which form part of the social practices of their target populations. For lit-
 Literacy and the search for resources 211

eracy provision to have a positive impact, these discrepancies will have to be

taken seriously
The women who stayed behind when their men and children left to work
in the cities were well aware of the authority of written documents, and
made use of them with controversial but powerful effect. When, for ex­
ample, Eleanor asked the magistrate to issue a written court order against
her husband working in Namibia, this for his failure to provide adequate
maintenance for his children, women in Zola questioned her for 'going
against the grain'. Nevertheless, she went ahead and since then several
other women followed her example. These subtle changes in gendered
power relations and the uses of literacy in everyday contexts were happen­
ing despite the fact that women in Tentergate and Zola were still not inter­
ested in acquiring schooled literacy

Conclusions
In conclusion, while it can be said that, for some, schooled literacy is becom­
ing an ever more pressing desire in Tentergate and Zola, it is associated with
the youth and the cities, spatially and generationally 'the other' who supple­
ment the social identities of adults living here. The mothers and grandmoth­
ers who keep the home fires burning desire education for their children, and
in the main do not see schooled literacy as part of their personal life mis­
sion. For them literacy is seen (as in the case of the calendar or the writing
on Zionist cloaks) as a representation of ideas, artefacts of display: that the
government owes us pensions, that we are part of a religious community,
that schooled literacy is supposed to bring us wealth. In many cases it is not
the seeming inability to 'decode' the letters, but the realisation that these
texts might not deliver what they promise that is the real problem people
here see themselves facing. It is therefore doubtful whether women in rural
areas such as Tentergate and Zola would perceive adult literacy classes or
other forms of formal education as a key to their 'meaningful participation
in social and economic development' (ANC, 1994:1). Instead, what these
women need is institutional change in the practices of local government and
better chances for their children to succeed at their education and at finding
employment. Financial investments in formal education should be focused
on the youth rather than their parents. However, well-designed, non-formal
interventions might have value here, such as those to do with primary
health care and child health, given that these women are often responsible
for the raising of children.
212 M.J. McEwan and L. Malan

The use of written texts as display in everyday practice represents an

orientation to literacy which differs significantly from the analytical orienta­
tion of schooled literacy. The implication, therefore, is that literacy classes
working with a schooled literacy model (however much adapted to 'adults'
rather than children) will contradict and deny local uses of literacy, are not
likely to be transferred to contexts of everyday use and will consequently be
of little value to those women who stay in rural towns as keepers of the 'tra¬
ditional' cultural resources of their families.
Suggestions for adult literacy provision in this context are twofold. For
those women who do aspire to move out of their rural contexts, formal adult
literacy classes should be accessible. This implies not only that such classes
should be within the spatial and financial constraints of these women, but
also that they should take seriously those local literacies which are part of
their everyday social practices. Furthermore, literacy providers should real­
ise that literacy is likely to remain a second-order priority for women who
choose to stay in rural areas. Rather than denying the social power of lit­
eracy, we conclude from this statement that literacy interventions should
engage, either through educational or institutional measures, with the
literacies that are actively part of social practice.

Notes
1. Pseudonyms have been used in this chapter to protect the identity of the inter­
viewees.
Chapter Eleven
Taking literacy for a ride — reading and
writing in the taxi industry
Mignonne Breier, Matsepela Taetsane and
Lynette Sait

Driving and education do not relate properly as I look at it. The

one who is educated feels that there is nothing which can dis­
turb him. He knows that if he meets the traffic cops he will be
able to speak English. He then drives in whatever manner he
likes because he will be able to speak for himself. We who are
not educated drive carefully bearing in mind that if the traffic
cops come, we will not be able to understand them ... We will
not be able to answer them. (Zondi1, Khayelitsha taxi driver
with a Standard Two2 education)

Introduction
The South African minibus taxi industry has become a source of employ­
ment for people - specifically men - with little or no schooling. This is des­
pite the fact that taxi work involves numerous written texts, including the
books of traffic rules and signs that drivers are required to learn to obtain a
licence, the forms they have to complete to get a permit to carry passengers,
the written tickets and summonses they receive when they clash with the
law and the many traffic signs they encounter daily.
The relationship in the industry between driving skills and education is
complex and, as the above quotation illustrates, concerns issues around
language and attitude as well as reading and writing. This chapter explores
that relationship and tries to document some of the strategies used by
unschooled operators to navigate their way through the literacies of their
profession. It also draws out the larger implications of its findings for lit­
eracy studies and policy.
214 Μ. Breier, Μ. Taetsane and L. Sait

The relationship between literacy and power (Street, 1995) is a particu­

lar concern in this chapter, as is the notion of literacy networks (Fingeret,
1983). A distinction is drawn between personally-achieved literacy which is
emphasised in adult literacy programmes and the communally-achieved lit­
eracy which we argue is common in the taxi industry.
The chapter opens with an account of the discourses about power, vio­
lence and exploitation that dominate the industry. It then considers the con­
struction in discourse of the illiterate' taxi driver, the practices of such driv­
ers when confronted with tasks that involve reading and writing and their
own discourses about literacy and education. It argues that educational
policies need to differentiate between three main interest groups within the
industry. Among the associations (which represent owners) we found little
demand for personal literacy education that was not embedded in the con­
text of more highly prioritised training needs (management or business
training for example). Some drivers expressed similar demands. These
tended to be drivers who saw a long-term future for themselves as taxi driv­
ers. Where there was a demand for decontextualised education, it was often
accompanied by a desire to move out of the industry and expressed by driv­
ers at the bottom of the hierarchy of power relations within the business.

Discourses about power, violence and exploitation

Public discourses about the minibus taxi industry tend to construct it as a
symbol of Black power. Whether this is seen positively or negatively, the
industry is presented as vast and burgeoning. The Minister of Transport,
Mac Maharaj, recently put the number of operators in the industry - which
he described as the 'pride of empowerment of the Black community' - at
120 000 (television interview, 8 January 1995). In the same vein, Boetie
Letsoela, chairman of the Organised Taxi Industry, which aims to unite the
industry, boasted that the industry 'represents about 15 per cent of the coun­
try's total budget, moves 70 per cent of the total number of commuters in the
country and consumes 108 million litres of fuel a month' (interview,
24 November 1994). These discourses emphasise that the industry came
about in opposition to the National Party (NP) government's policies which
confined Blacks to townships far from their work and then failed to provide
them with adequate transport.
In other public pronouncements, the industry is presented as a hotbed
of violence and danger. Its accident rate (59 952 in 1993 alone), its violent
 Reading and writing in the taxi industry 215

feuds and displays of protest are a constant source of newspaper headlines

and television footage {Cape Times and Argus, 1992-1995).
In our research we found a few operators, mainly minibus owners who
had entered the business some time ago, who were involved in efficient,
profitable undertakings. Many more (mainly African men from the former
homelands) were struggling to survive. They spoke of the impact of feuding
and rivalry on their own daily lives and of the experience of poverty and ex­
ploitation within an industry said to be worth billions of rand.
Not one of the drivers whom we interviewed was paid a regular salary.
The lucky ones were working on a commission basis. The unlucky ones were
obliged to pay a fixed sum to the owner each day - usually R150 to R200.
Anything which they earned above that was theirs, but if the vehicle broke
down, or they had to appear in court on a traffic offence or they were sick,
they were in trouble. It is not uncommon for taxi drivers to get up at 3 a.m.
or to sleep in their vehicles overnight in order to gain a favourable position
in a taxi rank. Their days end long after dark. The effect on their family life?

You arrive while the children are asleep and leave while they are
asleep ... Sometimes when you arrive you hear your child is
dead. (Nyanga taxi driver, Thabo)

It is in the context of these dominant discourses - of power, on the one hand,

and exploitation, on the other - that discourses about 'illiteracy' within the
industry should be viewed. By constructing literacy' as our object of study,
we were obliged to focus on and give prominence to statements about edu­
cation but in the context of everyday life in the industry they are obscured by
issues around violence and survival.

Strategies for survival in a world full of literacies

For some people within the taxi industry (notably the traffic officials and the
taxi association executives) there is a category of person called 'illiterate' or
'uneducated' who is considered unable to read or write. The Goldstone Com­
mission inquiry into taxi violence, for example, was told that 'many taxi
drivers are completely illiterate whilst others are only partially literate'
(Goldstone 1993:93). In an interview, the chairman of the Soweto and Jo­
hannesburg branch of the SA Black Taxi Association estimated that 55 per
cent of its members were 'illiterate'. In life history interviews with 25 drivers
we found most had had little or no formal schooling yet our observations
216 Μ. Breier, Μ. Taetsane and L. Sait

showed that they were constantly dealing with situations which, on the face
of it, seemed to require reading or writing. A central question became: How
do they do it? Our research indicated four major strategies.

Official assistance

Unschooled drivers were assisted in the first place by the traffic authorities
themselves who offered oral instead of written tests for 'illiterates' and
helped them to complete forms. The oral test system was justified by offi­
cials who claimed that unschooled drivers often had a better attitude and
were safer drivers than those with formal education. It was also supported
by research conducted by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC)
among 197 Black drivers in Soweto, Pretoria and Middelburg which con­
cluded that 'less literate people' should not be prevented from obtaining
learners' or drivers' licences.
The 'less literate people' who were also the older, more experienced
drivers in the study were found to have been involved in fewer accidents
than the 'more highly literate group'. The HSRC report recommended that
'less literate people' should not be prevented from getting licences pro­
vided that provision be made for people with no schooling or a schooling
level of Standard Two or lower to be trained orally in the material required
for licensing.
That there are other bureaucratic views on the relationship between
education and safe driving was obvious from a comment by a former
Bellville testing officer, who had moved to another branch of that traffic
department. He told a researcher that he regarded the presence of 'illiter­
ate' drivers as 'a big risk'. He recounted how a truck driver lost his life
because he could not read a sign directing motorists to change gear before
going down a hill. He said that driver had done very well in his test but
could not 'read' signs.
Perhaps the tolerance expressed by some officials and by the HSRC re­
search should be viewed in the light of a highly controversial Department
of Transport policy since the late 1980s in which there was a 'relaxation of
strictness' in the granting of applications for permits in order to legalise
pirate operators (Goldstone, 1993:35). The policy has been accused of
causing the market to become flooded with taxi operators, leading to over­
crowding at ranks, exacerbating tensions and making the trade even more
uneconomical than it was already (Goldstone, 1993:35-36).
 Reading and writing in the taxi industry 217

Operating illegally

In the taxi industry there are close associations between the written and the
legal. Written materials (application forms, licences, permits, books of traffic
signs, traffic tickets, legal summonses, and so on) are used to regulate ac­
cess to and exert power over an ever-expanding industry Vast numbers of
operators (50 000, according to Mac Maharaj) resist the power exerted in
this way by simply operating without the necessary paperwork. There are
forms of resistance that incorporate writing - forged licences and permits,
for example, and the buying of licences with bribes - but we found it was
more common to resist by avoiding the written altogether (see also McCaul,
1991:74 and Goldstone, 1993:31-32).
In our research we met drivers who were operating without a drivers'
licence, let alone a public driving permit. Nyanga taxi driver Sipho was one
of them. Aged 34 years, he had left school in Standard Two to go to Tanzania
to train as an MK soldier3. He has been working as a taxi driver since 1979
but did not have a licence.

You see, if you do not get a job in the firms and you do not have
a licence and such things, but you are able to drive, you get de­
pressed ... You just decide to take a risk and drive ... That is why
you find people without licences driving taxis: because a person
is hungry and needs something to eat before sleeping ... and
also so that a person can wake up the following day and work
... I can say that the previous government oppressed many
people so that many did not have jobs and some became robbers
and killers ... [By becoming a taxi driver] a person could avoid
this ...

In the discourses of unlicensed drivers, the driver without a licence was de­
picted as safer and more competent than the driver with a licence.

A person without a licence drives thinking ... that if I knock

against another car, I can be locked up. And then I would have to
be bailed out of jail. Because I will always be in the wrong ... If
you drive carefully, you will not have accidents ... you will never
be arrested. You will only be given fine tickets. (Luyanda, a Cape
Town driver with a Standard Five education, who failed his
learners' licence test and did not try again)
Figure 8: One part of the applicationform which drivers are required to
complete when applying for a permit to drive a taxi.
 Reading and writing in the taxi industry 219

Support systems

It is common for taxi drivers and owners to enlist the help of colleagues and
family when they need to perform tasks involving reading and writing. In this
way they achieve literacy in a social or communal way There seems to be rela­
tively little stigma attached, thanks to a discourse about exploitation and
oppression which situates the blame for educational disadvantage in the
apartheid system rather than the individual. Our findings in this regard con­
firm the work of Fingeret (1983) on the social networks of illiterate adults but
differ from the findings of other South African literacy research in which dis­
courses about respectability were found to construct illiteracy as a shameful
condition and prevent people from asking for help (See Breier, 1994).
Pheto, a 38-year-old Sasolburg owner-driver who had never been to
school, said he relied on his passengers to assist him with direction signs.
He had learned to read signs but he had to bring his vehicle to a standstill to
read them. This took time and could cause accidents. He recalled running
into difficulties during one trip to Transkei when the passengers who were
helping him read the signs fell asleep. He found he could not read the names
of places on his own. He had no alternative but to park his car and sleep too.
Pat Miller and Vladis Servas, former transport officials of the Council for
Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) who, as private consultants, had
trained about 800 taxi owners in business skills, said that taxi businesses
were very often family run, with the taxi owned by the oldest male in the
family and the wife or daughter, or someone at home who had some school­
ing, 'actually running the business', writing applications, letters (Khosa,
1994, also found this).

Miller: Often on this course we get requests 'I am a taxi owner,

may I bring my wife or my daughter or my son with me.' Then
you know this is an illiterate, or a barely semi-literate person.
We always say Of course', if they are involved in the running of
the business. And then we treat them as one unit.

Informal education

In our study we encountered only one person who was attending a night
school. Taxi driver Zonwabele already had a Standard Seven education and
was going to a class in Khayamandi, near Stellenbosch, to improve his
Reading traffic signs is an essential part of a taxi driver's daily work.

Taxi rank in Bellville in the Western Cape.

 Reading and writing in the taxi industry 221

English. Two other drivers had experienced night school but were no longer
attending. Mpho had moved successfully from Standard One to Standard
Five by studying at a night school. Pheto had left after three months. On the
other hand, we encountered numerous examples of informal education:

Coaching by colleagues

Drivers who could not read the books prescribed for the learners' licence test
often got family members or colleagues to help them learn traffic rules by rote.
Sasolburg owner-driver Pheto had never been to school. It was largely
thanks to a colleague with whom he was working in Botswana that he ever
gained a drivers' licence.

In the evening he taught me the road signs and how to read that
book. He would tell me the names of the road signs and what
they stood for. Then he would ask me questions. After every ses­
sion he would ask me to repeat what he had said ... and I would
say the same as he said.

Later, a fellow taxi driver taught him how to read and write. Together they
were required to transport a group of children to school.

After delivering the children, that person, who was driving a

van, taught me how to read and write. I was gaining a lot but
one weekend, instead of returning the van on Friday, that driver
went away with it until Sunday. He was expelled from work.

After his colleague's departure, Pheto tried attending night school, but
lasted only three months. He said the night school did not meet his expecta­
tions and it was clear from his account that it made no attempt to accommo­
date his particular needs. The lessons were aimed at students who could
already read and write and involved blackboard work which Pheto could not
follow. His experience underlines the findings of other studies within the
Social Uses of Literacy (SoUL) research.

Rank talk

Basil Nagel, owner of five taxis and chairman of the Taxi Task Team for the
Western Cape, an organisation set up to liaise with government and bring
 Figure 9: Common prohibition traffic signs, from a book produced by
the Department of Transport (1994).

about unity in the industry, said much of the learning in the taxi industry took
place at the ranks in a very informal way, in the form of 'loose talk' as drivers
'killed time' during lull periods. Here they would have discussions about vari­
ous topics including working conditions, driver testing, and so on.
Figure 10: Examples of direction signs, from a book produced by the
Department of Transport (1994).
5.3 IMIQONDISO
YOKUQHUBA
Xa umqhubi afuna ukumisa,
ukujika kwintlangano
yeendlela, ukuguqukela kom-
nye umgaqwana wendlela,
okanye ukusuka ekhohlo
endleleni aye ngasekunene,
kufuneka enze umqondiso
ocacileyo obonakalisa injongo
yakhe ukuze alumkise ezinye
izihamba-ndleleni.
Imiqondiso yokuqhuba
iboniswa ngezalatha-cala
nezibane zokumisa zesithuthi. Ukujika ngasekhohlo
Ngokuthi kudanyaziswe
izalatha-cala zasekhohlo
umqhubi ubonisa ukuba un-
cwase ukujikela ngasekhohlo.
lzalatha-cala zasekunene
zlsetyenziselwa ukwenza
umqondiso wokujikela
ngasekunene.
Xa kunyathelwa umcephe
weziqhoboshi ziyakhanyiswa
izibane zeziqhoboshi
ngokunokwazo ukubonisa
ukuba u m q h u b i ubamba

Ukujika ngasekunene

iibleki yaye unciphisa isantya.

Kumiselwe imiqondiso
yesandia kwezo zithuthi
zingenazalathacala. Imiqon­
diso yesandla ingasetyen-
ziswa kuphela xa imeko
iyeyengxakeko kuhola
kayivulele.
5.4 UKUMISA
Umqhubi unokusimisa
kuphela i s i t h u t h i sakhe
Ukumisa
34 XHOSA

Figure 11: A page from Imoto, published by the Directorate of Traffic

Safety (1993)for the benefit of learner drivers. This book is available
in all the official South African languages.
 Reading and writing in the taxi industry 225

Our observations at taxi ranks produced numerous examples of this

kind of informal education. In Tumahole, Parys, a researcher found new­
comers to a taxi rank were required to buy litres of soft drink for their fellow
drivers as a kind of initiation procedure. After this symbolic gesture the old-
timers taught them the routes they would have to use and how to commun­
icate with traffic officers. They explained that the taxi industry did not
operate like the corporate world. Even if there was a queue of people
standing waiting for a taxi, they might not 'lift' those people if they had not
been zoned to work on that line. The drivers knew that people outside the
business regarded this as stupidity but to them it was a way of avoiding con­
flicts and regulating the industry.

Trial and error

We found evidence of informal learning in the courts where taxi drivers

adopted similar methods to argue their cases, telling almost identical stories
of family hardship and unemployment in mitigation of sentence. Outside
the courtroom some admitted the stories were lies. Appearing in court was a
normal part of a taxi driver's life, they said. The competition in the business
forced one to run up fines for stopping or parking in no-go areas, doing
illegal U-turns, overloading, and so on. But one could not afford to appear in
court to argue each case. Instead one let the fines mount up, and then the
summonses to appear in court, and finally the summonses for contempt of
court. Eventually, one took a whole day off and went to court where one told
a long story about being unemployed, staying at another address and hav­
ing numerous children to support.
Taxi operators also seemed to have gained their understanding of court
procedures informally. Magistrates would explain procedures, such as the
option to give a statement under oath (which could then be cross-
examined), or an unsworn statement from the dock (which could not), in a
rapid, singsong kind of way. But other terms, such as 'What do you plead?'
or 'Have you anything to say in mitigation' went unexplained. Yet most of
the drivers whom we observed seemed to know what these terms meant or,
at least, how to respond to them. We came to the conclusion that this knowl­
edge, too, had been gained by taxi operators from each other, by trial and
error, as it were.
Our courtroom observations indicated that one needed to master a
range of discourses to challenge the courts: literacy was only one of them.
Ideally one should also speak English and/or Afrikaans, know one's rights
Figure 12: An example of a summons. This one was issued to a taxi
driver who allegedly had one too many passengers in his vehicle.
 Reading and writing in the taxi industry 227

and act assertively. Mediation in the form of representation by someone (not

necessarily a lawyer) who had mastered these other discourses was a help
but some operators managed well without it. (For further discussion of the
role of mediators see Robins, Chapter 6.)
For example, we saw Isaac, a middle-aged Khayelitsha taxi driver with a
Standard Seven education, challenge a charge of overloading on the
grounds that his certificate of fitness stated he could have 15 passengers
whereas the charge sheet said 14. In his view, he was not overloading by
carrying 16 passengers. Fifteen were legal and the sixteenth person was a
small boy whom he employed to open the door which was faulty. The court
accepted his argument.
Pheto advised a researcher that if he wanted to beat the authorities he
needed to check the tickets or papers he was given for any omissions or
errors and then mention these to the magistrate. He told how he challenged
a charge of doing a U-turn against a barrier line by insisting on an inspec­
tion in loco. Then he showed the magistrate that there was a broken rather
than solid barrier line at the point where he had been accused of doing a U-
turn.

Learning by observation and apprenticeship

Thabo, who had a Standard Four education, said he learned the meaning of
road signs by observing the behaviour of motorists.

I did not first drive, I first observed 'Why does this car stop
here?' I would then check and notice that perhaps there is no
sign post. Then I look down on the road and find that there has
been written there: 'Stop'. You go on and on in this way and you
find that there are times when they stop at a yellow sign. 'Why
does the car stop here?' You find that there is a person, (a sign
with) persons holding each other ... to tell you that pedestrians
cross at this point.

Luyanda, who left school in Standard Five, said many of the drivers and
owners who worked their way up the ranks of the industry, learnt to drive in
this way.

They are not taught. You know, when you are working with a
vehicle, as a conductor, you see what the driver does and how he
228 Μ. Breier, Μ. Taetsane and L. Sait

does it. You see that this is the first (gear), this is the second, this
is the third, this is the fourth. You also see how he applies the
foot pedals ... I was never taught how to drive ... never told 'My
brother, sit here, do this like this and like this ... ' That was
never done to me. I just worked for one man who was a
mechanic in Khayelitsha. I assisted him. When we tested the car
to see whether it could go, I would watch how he did it. I noticed
that this person applies the accelerator, and then the clutch and
puts the gear off [into neutral] and then starts the car. Then he
would put it at the first gear, he would slowly put his foot off the
clutch and the car would move. I stayed and stayed until one day
he told me to drive a car out of the garage. I drove it out.

Operators' discourses about education, literacy and

driving
In the unstructured conversations that were part of our research, the possib­
ility of further education sometimes arose spontaneously, sometimes it was
introduced by the researcher. Invariably the interviewee would indicate a
desire to complete his formal education and then offer various reasons why
he had not been able to do so or would not be able to in future.
Many, like Sipho quoted here, said taxi owners did not give time off for
education.

... you want your education to continue but there is no chance.

The daily starting time is 4.30 in the morning or 3 o'clock ... If
you tell the owner of the taxi that you want to go to school, that
you will work maybe from 6 o'clock to 2 o'clock [in the after­
noon], then he tells you to drop the car at his yard and he will
look for another person to drive it, someone who will do the job
better than you.

Others believed their 'learning years' had passed them by (as one owner put
it) or that the circumstances of their lives made it impossible for them to
study in a formal setting. For example, Zola, a Khayelitshan driver, was de­
termined to educate his two children even though he himself had to leave
school in Standard Two. Asked if he would attend a school for adults, he
said:
 Reading and writing in the taxi industry 229

Zola: If I were to go to school, I would not be able to work be­

cause it starts at 8.00 in the evening and comes out at 10.00 ...
I will only get home at midnight and at 3.00 I have to be up. I
could not cope. It would hit me straight.
Interviewer: So what do you think would be a solution for
people like you who want to study?
Zola: I can, from time to time, buy myself some books, in Eng­
lish because that is where I think I experience some problems.
My wife [who has Standard Seven] ... can teach me the words
that are difficult.

Some expressed their desire for further education in the context of a further
desire - to escape from the industry.

I am not enjoying working in the taxis because the violence that

is taking place is very bad. I want to keep on working while I
study after hours. Then, when I see that I have got some educa­
tion, I will leave the taxi job ... The money is okay but my life is
in danger. (Mpho, Sebokeng taxi driver with a Standard Five
education from a night school)

Words like these found resonance in the discourses of researchers who

worked on this project. M.T. was a university graduate but he was also the
son of a taxi owner with a Standard Three education and had worked as a
taxi driver himself. In an interview with the project co-ordinator, M.T. said
education was like a 'weapon' for him when working in the taxi industry -
it enabled him to know his rights and to speak the language of the traffic
officials. At the same time it had allowed him and some of his siblings to
escape an industry which had brought them hardship and violence, even as
it had provided them with a living and school and university fees.
From our discussions with the taxi association executives we compiled
a list of educational priorities for the industry - basic reading and writing
was only one of many priorities and usually embedded within the context of
another educational need such as 'record-keeping'. The most popular de­
mand was for training that would help new entrants to understand the busi­
ness, increase profitability and improve relations between drivers and pas­
sengers. This was endorsed by passengers who complained that taxi drivers
did not treat them in the way 'normal business people' treat their clients.
230 Μ. Breier, Μ. Taetsane and L. Sait

The association's educational priorities for drivers were: road safety,

driving behaviour and advanced driving skills; first aid; record keeping;
vehicle maintenance; literacy in so far as it would assist these skills; nu­
meracy skills that would assist the other priorities and also help drivers to
work out their costs; environment, health, social and welfare issues; and
education about human behaviour and communication to assist customer
relations.
The priorities for owners and association executives and employees
were: management skills; record keeping; vehicle maintenance; marketing;
communication; office behaviour and literacy and numeracy, in so far as it
would assist any of these skills.
In the discourses of most of the drivers and owners we spoke to (as op­
posed to the discourses of their associations and of officialdom), the word
'literacy' did not feature. This was partly because the two African languages
encountered in this research - Xhosa and Sotho - do not contain words for
literacy' or 'illiteracy'. Instead there was talk about 'education', about being
'educated or 'uneducated' and the terms usually implied a period of school­
ing and proficiency in English and Afrikaans. Their use was similar to that
of the Afrikaans word gelerendheid4 in other research (see Breier, 1994:44).
The implication is that education is an important issue, while literacy is not.
Entwined in the discourses of taxi operators, and complicating them,
was a narrative about the relationship between education and driving
which was expressed in the quotation at the start of this paper. It was sim­
ilar to the narrative on the relationship between legality and driving: the
greater the disadvantage, the safer the driver. The common denominator
was fear: of being caught without the necessary papers (in the legality dis­
course) or in a situation where one could not converse with the traffic officer
(in the education discourse). As a result of this fear one did not take risks.
In contrast, Zonwabele, 27, who has passed Standard Seven and has a
licence and some English, felt free to enjoy the powers and dangers associ­
ated with driving fast:

We as drivers sometimes boast: 'With this car that I am driving

no other car can run in front of me. That one of yours is a ghost.'
So a person will boast in this way to someone else. Now, when
they meet on the road, they will be in a race. They forget that
there are other people in the car. They just chase each other be­
cause they know that they made a debate about who would be
left behind.
 Reading and writing in the taxi industry 231

Conclusions
This study supports the general findings of all workplace research within
the SoUL project - that there is a need to understand the internal dynamics
of an industry or organisation before attempting educational interventions
within it. In this case, it means understanding the complex power relations
within the taxi industry, the conditions under which people work and the
relationship between discourses around education and literacy and more
dominant discourses around violence and survival.
In the process of exploring these dynamics, we found less of a demand
for personal literacy (among drivers, owners and associations) than might
be expected, given the fact that the industry has become a source of employ­
ment for people with little or no schooling. Traffic departments make it pos­
sible for people who cannot read or write to gain the licences necessary to
drive a taxi through oral procedures, and operators with limited schooling
have various strategies for dealing with the literacies of their work.
Drivers and owners who are managing to make a reasonable living see
a need for literacy education in the industry but often seem to position it in
a subordinate relationship to some other more important training need. We
came to the conclusion that literacy education could be introduced where
appropriate into classes on business skills, for example, or advanced driving
training, but it was unlikely to attract large numbers of learners on its own.
At the same time we encountered people within the industry who would
be attracted to decontextualised education within a formal system. These
were often, but not always, the people who wished to escape the industry,
the people who were the most exploited or subject to the greatest danger.
They believed that education - and by this they usually meant a second
chance at schooling - provided the only possibility for escape. The irony is
that, because of the conditions under which they worked, they were also the
least likely to be able to access formal classes.
Any adult education initiatives in this industry would have to be pre¬
ceded by extensive consultation and negotiation with the taxi associations
that dominate the industry These negotiations would be necessary to en­
sure safe access to the industry and owners' support of drivers' attendance
at classes. Adult educators might have to conduct their classes at the ranks
during drivers' lull periods (usually late morning). Special arrangments
would have to be made to meet the needs of long-distance drivers who can
be away for weeks at a time.
232 Μ. Breier, Μ. Taetsane and L. Sait

Educators will need to prioritise the education needs which operators

themselves have identified and, in doing so, should recognise and build
on the strategies and informal education procedures which unschooled
drivers and owners have developed to survive in a world saturated with
literacies.
This is not to say that curricula have only to be based on recontext-
ualisations of operators' everyday knowledges and practices. The work of
Dowling (summarised in Muller and Taylor, 1994 ) and Baker (1994) has
shown the limits of an approach which assumes that everyday practices
have direct relevance for school curricula and school mathematics has di­
rect application in the world of social practice.
The strategies used by unschooled taxi operators have their limita­
tions, and such operators can usefully be familiarised with more efficient
or conventional methods. However, we believe that an understanding of
everyday knowledge and practice is essential to facilitate communication
and provide appropriate starting points within the learning context.
In summary, we envisage a dual approach to education and training in
this industry. On the one hand, there should be a range of context-specific
courses offered to meet the needs prioritised by the associations, with lit­
eracy education put in its place as it were and introduced where appropri­
ate, in context. On the other hand, there should be an initiative to ensure
access to more formal, decontextualised education for those operators
who want it.
Recognising that these are the people who might have the greatest dif­
ficulty getting to classes, adult educators should consider either bringing
the classes to them (that is, to the ranks) or entering into negotiations
with taxi associations to ensure that employees are allowed to attend
night school without reprisal. At the same time it should be recognised
that some people in this industry might choose to continue to operate
without literacy as it is conventionally understood.

Notes
1. The names of taxi drivers and owners who were not executive members of
associations have been changed. It will also be noted that only first names are
used. In order to gain access to drivers who were operating illegally, research­
ers asked only forfirstnames and assured informants that these would be
changed in publication to protect identity. Interviews in Xhosa, Sotho or
Afrikaans were translated into English for the purposes of this chapter.
 Reading and writing in the taxi industry 233

2. At the time of our research, several different systems of naming school stand­
ards were in operation in South Africa. In this chapter, we name school stand­
ards according to the system most often referred to by interviewees. Accord­
ingly the first year of schooling is called Sub A, the second year Sub B, the
third year Standard One, the fourth year Standard Two, and so on.
3. MK refers to Mkhonto we Sizwe the military wing of the ANC.
4. The word 'gelerendheid' comes from the formal Afrikaans word geleerdheid
which means learning or erudition. Breier found that in the Coloured township
of Ocean View near Cape Town, 'gelerendheid' is used to refer to the package of
skills, qualities and status which a person might gain after several years of
schooling. The number of years of schooling necessary to qualify as a person
with 'gelerendheid' varies according to time and place.
Chapter 12
Literacy practices in an informal
settlement in the Cape Peninsula
Catherine Kell

I am sitting in Winnie's wood-and-iron shack. The relentless

wind is blowing, whipping up the sand and sending it back in­
side the houses through holes in the iron and plastic roofs. In
the darkened room, while I talk to Winnie a stream of people
come in and out of the house, asking for things. It is difficult for
me to understand them as all the conversation is in Xhosa, but
I can follow when Winnie goes to the cupboard, takes out a tin
containing numerous documents and riffles through the papers
in it. 'No,' she says, 'your identity document has not yet arrived.
... Is this your clinic card? ... Here is your ANC membership
card.' Winnie Tsotso plays the role of unappointed and unpaid
community advice worker, yet to my surprise she is in the local
night school class for those who cannot read and write, classi­
fied as a 'beginner'.

Winnie Tsotso1 lives in an informal settlement outside Cape Town, where I

did research in the period prior to the elections that brought the African
National Congress (ANC) into power and ended minority rule in South Af­
rica. While doing this research I was asked to run a workshop for a literacy
non-government organisation (NGO), dealing with their 'delivery system'.
The organisation was worried about the dwindling numbers of learners at­
tending classes. I asked the participants at the workshop (who were Black
and White literacy practitioners) to draw a picture of the organisation's de­
livery system in groups. This was a cognitive mapping exercise. Most of the
groups drew the way they saw the structure of the organisation with its dif­
ferent departments and staff portfolios. All drawings showed the central of­
fice (or centre) with various ways in which its work extended into the com­
munities (periphery). But they all stopped short at the literacy venue. None
of them conceptualised their delivery of literacy going beyond the classroom
236 . Kell

and into the lives of the learners. The learners were ciphers in the box of the
classroom, beyond that was the black box of the ghetto.
I tried to draw little strands of meaning beyond the classroom, with
questions attached to each. How did that learning move into the streets,
organisations, backyards and shebeens of the learners' lives, and what did it
come up against? In my research I returned over and over again to this im­
age, puzzled as to how to understand it. Despite the fact that many literacy
practitioners in South Africa have worked within Freirean approaches
which start off with contextualising literacy, it seems that they have
problematised social issues in South Africa at the expense of problematising
literacy itself. In my own previous work as a literacy practitioner I would
probably have drawn a similar diagram. As a researcher I needed to prise
myself loose from the discourses constructing literacy as a 'given', and its
recipients as empty boxes.
Rockhill's research (1993) seemed to speak to my problem:

In the process of establishing literacy as a universalistic formula

through which equality can be realised, literacy is treated as
though it occurs in a vacuum ... literacy is established as an
isolatable, measurable, uniform thing, a skill or a commodity
that can be acquired if only one has the necessary motivation to
participate in literacy programmes. That is, literacy is treated as
though it were outside the social and political relations, ideo­
logical practices, and symbolic meaning structures in which it is
embedded. (Rockhill, 1993:162)

During and beyond South Africa's interregnum new discourses of human

resources development and of redress have converged, forming a compel­
ling ideological matrix within which literacy has started to be treated in the
way that Rockhill (1993) critiques. Just prior to the national elections of
1994, policy-makers with links to the liberation movement had started to
develop proposals which envisaged an integrated national system of adult
education and training, with national standards, accreditation at all levels
and core curricula, all set within a National Qualifications Framework
(NQF). The establishment and expansion of these opportunities is an at­
tempt to redress the historical disadvantages of apartheid.
Literacy is being seen by practitioners and policy-makers as desired and
needed by all those denied education by apartheid, and needed by the coun­
try for the development of its human resources. Literacy is being
 Literacy practices in an informal settlement 237

constructed as the unproblematised entry point to the new national system.

In this process a monologic meaning is being established for literacy
(Bakhtin in Morson, 1981), that is, that literacy is simply the beginning of
further formal education. The research reported in this chapter opens up
this meaning to scrutiny and explores the embedding of literacy 'in the so­
cial and political relations, ideological practices and symbolic meaning
structures' (Rockhill, 1993) of a community marginalised by apartheid, a
small informal settlement on the outskirts of Cape Town called Site 5. In this
I show that, although new Adult Basic Education and Training (ABET) poli­
cies are emerging within discourses of redress, the very people most in need
of redress may benefit least from the proposed system.

Setting sights on Site 5

Site 5 was established in 1993 after decades of struggle by its Black, Xhosa-
speaking residents for the right to live and own land in what had been pro­
claimed a White area of the Cape Peninsula. While living in the bush in an
attempt to avoid surveillance, people were constantly harassed. In 1987, the
National Party (NP) government sent the police in to break up small squatter
settlements in the area. Houses were bulldozed, people's possessions were
loaded onto trucks and tents were put up for them in a Black township 40
kilometres away. During these years of struggle, residents' associations had
been formed, and some local leaders had emerged, especially a group of
women, including Winnie Tsotso, whom I quoted at the beginning of this
chapter. Anti-apartheid NGOs encouraged these women to take their case to
the Supreme Court, and they won the right to stay in the area. In 1989, the
government announced that land would be found for the squatters, and the
search for a suitable site began.
Five years later the chunk of land granted the squatters still has a raw,
barren quality. The new roads and street lights sit uneasily on swathes of
sand, and all around the settlement the bush has been pressed back to create
dense boundaries clearly demarcating Site 5. The cleared land speaks of
haste, urgency, newness, but the shacks that sit on the land speak of age,
reuse and poverty. People's words and gestures are about surviving, trying
to create a decent life with few resources.
Up until the involvement of the anti-apartheid NGOs (in about 1985) the
squatters never really had a voice or an audience outside their own group­
ings. Their actions spoke for them - their refusal to leave the area, the con­
stant rebuilding of their shacks. When the NGOs became involved with the
squatters, some sort of oppositional public voice started to be heard;
238 . Kell

factsheets, pamphlets and press statements were written. In the legal pro­
ceedings, many important documents were produced by the lawyers and
NGOs acting in consultation with the squatters. These texts were all in Eng­
lish; they gestured towards the powerful.
From about 1985 onwards the anti-apartheid NGOs started to bring the
squatters together with other groupings facing similar problems. In these
meetings there was little reliance on text. Problems were voiced out, some­
times expressed through drama. Sometimes memoranda were drawn up to­
gether, but the discourse of the NGO intellectuals mediated between speaker
and audience. A sort of separation developed in which communication be­
tween squatters was oral, in Xhosa, and largely face-to-face; communica­
tion between squatters and the dominant groupings generally involved texts
written in English, through the mediation of the NGO staff.
As the current post-apartheid process of incorporating Site 5 into formal
governance moves on, something of this separation is starting to live on
and become stabilised in the different institutions formed to 'organise' this
process of incorporation. With the legitimisation of democratic civic asso­
ciations as forums for local government, the squatters (now called residents)
and bureaucratic officials are brought face-to-face more frequently, and the
NGOs are seldom called upon to mediate. Now new tensions are thrown up.
The exercise of power becomes concentrated within the now highly differen­
tiated uses of language and literacy What language is used, who can speak,
and how? Further, who can write or read, how and to whom? This research
shows that literacy practices associated with the new, modernising South
African state may be implicated in a process of rapid social stratification
through the mobilisation of individuals' cultural capital, in a community
previously marked by almost total absence of internal social stratification.

The literacy practices of an'illiterate'community leader

Winnie Tsotso is one of the key leaders in Site 5, having lived and worked in
the Noordhoek Valley since she was 16 years old. Now middle-aged, she is
an organiser in the local ANC branch, and is one of the longest-standing
members of the squatters' Civic Association. She is also a member of the
local health and preschool committees, and of the Catholic Welfare and De­
velopment (CWD) committee. Under the auspices of CWD, she runs a soup
kitchen from her shack for old-age pensioners, which involves buying the
supplies and cooking and dishing out the food five times a week. She
 Literacy practices in an informal settlement 239

is involved in innumerable other activities in Site 5 and more broadly. Over

a period of 10 consecutive days when I visited her house I counted 11 meet­
ings or functions that she attended.
Her house is a rambling 'mansion' of a shack in which 10 people live.
The walls are papered with recent newspapers. A pile of eight books sits
under a table: two torn children's books, one spy thriller, Hamlyn's True
Adventures, Recipesforthe Heart, one romance and two booklets on health
issues and ANC matters. Tsotso keeps her tin of ANC documents, ANC mem­
bership book and the invoice book for her soup kitchen in a cupboard. Once
she brought out a box of papers from the ANC - agendas, resolutions and
minutes (mainly but not solely in English). This was by far the highest
number of texts I saw in any house in Site 5 (most houses had no visible
texts except the newspaper 'wallpaper').
Tsotso was born in Namaqualand. Her mother was a Coloured and her
father a Xhosa, as she puts it. She considers Xhosa her first language, but is
fluent in Afrikaans and English. She can also speak Sotho, Zulu and
Tswana. She didn't go to school at all. There was a school, but:

... my mother came to Cape Town with my father and then I stay
with my Granny. And then my Granny she didn't have no money
... I was always looking after my Granny ...

Tsotso could possibly have got a job as a community worker of some sort,
since she is a community leader, but:

Like I've got a job, nice job, but I must read and write - 1 can't -
I can't get that job. Like now I'm always working with [the clinic
sister], and [a CWD employee] was phoning for the people and
they must come and take me for a First Aid course and they
come - OK, now I know how to do First Aid. At night people
come and wake me up and there's blood everywhere and I just
take my sheet, I just do that work. There's no pay. If they want
somebody must do that job ... you must can read and write, now
I must going aside and another people must come and do that
job ... on a long round they going to have a social worker ...
those, those people's going to be ... got nothing after all this
time.
240 . Kell

One day a delivery man from CWD arrived with the vegetables and a gas cyl­
inder she needed for her soup kitchen. Tsotso brought out her invoice book,
and the delivery man wrote down what she had bought. Afterwards she told
me that she owed R200. She told me exactly how she was going to pay this
back and when. She said that her daughter, Portia, would check what he had
written. I showed her a few of the words on the invoice and we sounded
them out. She could read about half of them, and more with a bit of help. As
I left Portia entered the room, picked up the book without a word passing
between the two of them, and ran through the page very quickly.
Tsotso's ANC branch meetings function on a largely oral basis. The zonal
meetings have typed agendas which she brings home for her daughters to
read, and she then remembers the items and raises them at her branch meet­
ings. She also goes to regional and national meetings.

Maybe I must come and give the report to the people here ...
Sometimes I'm doing that by memory, but if I'm going far like
Johannesburg [1 000 km away], I must take somebody with me
(what can read, you know, and write all those things there). But
if I'm going here I don't forget them, I remember the things.

During the research period I attended three meetings of a recently estab­

lished organisation in Site 5 called the Development Forum (DF), which
brought in a number of outsiders from NGOs, welfare organisations and
interested individuals from neighbouring White suburbs. Tsotso was also
present at these meetings and I was puzzled that she only spoke three sen­
tences, although compared with many other Civic representatives she was
highly fluent in English.
One night she told me that she had to attend a commemoration meeting
for an ANC marshal who had died in a fire in a nearby squatter area. I heard
subsequently from a colleague that Tsotso gave a speech in Xhosa, and that
photocopied sheets were given out with the words of the national anthem
'Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika' on them. The next day I asked her about this. She
said the speech was about the person that died: 'I said they mustn't cry be­
cause it's only God's work. Only God knows what day he will call people.'
Regarding the photocopies, she said that one day two senior ANC offi­
cials had arrived and been upset to find that people in Site 5 didn't know the
words of the anthem. 'So we took a copy to the ANC office [in Fish Hoek] and
made other copies, to give to the people.'
 Literacy practices in an informal settlement 241

Winnie Tsotso, her daughter Mhinzi and grandchild.

Another day Tsotso told me that she was worried because the preschool
staff had come to her demanding a bonus (it was close to Christmas). She
said, 'I know it had not been written on that thing [conditions of employ­
ment].'
Tsotso is constantly involved in literacy practices like this, even initiat­
ing and organising them, yet she sees herself as illiterate. She is in the be­
ginners' class in the local night school, where I watched her night after night
writing out her name and sounding out syllables. Her performance in the
context of the preschool meeting and the funeral can be contrasted with her
performance (discussed later) in the three DF meetings.
242 . Kell

Tsotso is able to exercise considerable power in certain areas of her life,

but not in others. Within the welfare and political domains, for example, her
role is that of a leader and an authority. Despite her own inability to decipher
much print, she plays a very important and highly valued role as a literacy
mediator. In a process of reciprocity, she draws on her well-developed
networks of support (Fingeret, 1983) and also on the extensive knowledge
and skills she has acquired informally through apprenticeship and guided
participation (Rogoff, 1988) in liberation politics and the welfare bureauc­
racy. Her mastery of certain hegemonic discourses during the period of
oppositional struggle in South Africa has also contributed to the strength of
her position. She combines the charitable and religious discourse of the
Baptist Church with the 'welfarism discourse of the less political NGOs and
with the militant oppositional discourse of the liberation movement.
However, the new politics of development and reconstruction have
shoved new discourses (particularly the human resources development dis­
course) into prominence. These discourses have a technical edge to them, a
modernising and individualising thrust, qualities that do not always sit eas­
ily with the earlier communitarian and almost millenarian discourses of the
liberation movement. In my view, the shift has been swift and harsh. Tsotso
is marginalised in certain domains. Literacy practices play a large part in
shaping the way in which her role is created or constrained. For those in­
volved in promoting literacy in South Africa there is a choice: do we build on
her existing and diverse literacy practices or do we reject them in favour of
the particular textual interpretative processes currently being canonised
within the new accreditation system?
I wondered why Tsotso struggled to find a voice to contribute to the DF
meetings. When I considered her history and scrutinised the DF proceedings
more carefully, however, it became clearer. Tsotso gained her confidence and
fluency in the discursive situations referred to earlier - workshops among
squatters, in ANC gatherings and Civic Association meetings. Communica­
tion was largely in Xhosa and there was little reliance on text. Events like
these would have been dominated by oppositional discourses where an
ethos of democratic, collective participation would have prevailed. Tsotso
would have drawn on her great strengths in face-to-face communication -
her expressions, body postures and gestures, and her reliance on prosodie
devices and narrative. In the DF, in the politics of the 'New South Africa', the
oppositional discourse is disallowed in the cause of reconstruction. In the
context of the rapid formalisation of Site 5, its incorporation into main­
stream governance, its dependence on outsiders for resources and the ur-
 Literacy practices in an informal settlement 243

gency of reconstruction, communication between squatters and dominant

groupings has been rapidly naturalised. This has led to great difficulties for
those representatives like Tsotso without the type of literacy or English now
so quickly becoming dominant in such forums.
It should be remembered, however, that Tsotso's range of literacy prac­
tices is fairly unusual in Site 5 where literacy practices in different domains
are few and far between. There is very little print, and very few incidental
words, in the public environment of Site 5. Street signs and place names are
currently being erected - stop signs on the streets are frequently obliterated
by the windswept sand. ANC posters can only be seen now and then.
Moving beyond the public spaces and into the houses the impression is
that, apart from Tsotso's house, there are few texts about. Text, apart from
the Bible, is not woven into people's lives. In most houses the walls are
papered with recent English-language newspapers, but no one that I met in
Site 5 ever bought a newspaper to read. In 10 consecutive days during which
I visited Khumbula Ngade (like Tsotso, 'a beginner' at the night school), she
had only one encounter with a text (an Aids pamphlet handed out at a com­
munity function). Although she had now learnt to write her name, she had
never had a chance to write it outside night school classes.
I did not find any literacy practices which involved a function of substi­
tuting for oral messages, or a memory-supportive function (Heath,
1986:22). A very limited number of literacy practices were news-related. The
remainder of literacy practices that I observed could be seen as having an
instrumental function, such as checking an invoice, filling in a poster or
reading an advert for a meeting. Others could be seen as having the function
of provision of permanent record, such as applying for identity documents
or clinic cards for babies, or keeping membership lists of the ANC.
Many of the literacy events and practices I observed were highly specific
to particular social interactions in Site 5, for example filling in a poster ad­
vertising a meeting to be held in the settlement. Many interactions, which in
other areas may involve literacy, were done verbally in Site 5. Written mes­
sages were never sent from the local school to parents, they were delivered
verbally by the children. Notices of meetings were announced orally by a
person walking through Site 5 and using a loudhailer.
In marked contrast with these domains, however, the development do­
main was saturated with literacy practices. These largely had an organisa­
tional function which Heath (1986) associates with schooled literacy. The
other obvious domain in which literacy practices were very evident was the
night school - these literacy practices were strongly related to school-based
244 . Kell

uses of literacy. I explore literacy practices in these two domains in the fol­
lowing sections.

'It's all right when we're alone': literacy practices and

development in Site 5
So said the new, young and articulate chairperson of the democratically
elected Civic Association, Richard Klaas, mulling over the fact that the
committee members have plenty of confidence in Civic meetings and other
local gatherings, but that this confidence disappears when faced with White
officials. This candid utterance contains traces of the process of identity
formation of the place, the community and the people of Site 5. It admits to
something of the loss involved in becoming legalistically incorporated into
governing structures, to a history of marginalisation and domination.
One example from the proceedings of development meetings will clarify
how the valuing of literacy practices is shifting, and how old roles are being
challenged and new ones created. At the time of the research, three main
organisations were involved in development in Site 5: the Civic Association;
a working group (WG), which involved representatives of the Civic and of
the local wing of the minority government; and the loose grouping called the
Development Forum (DF). The proceedings of DF and WG meetings were all
in English, as were numerous texts referred to in DF meetings.
The item concerned involved the erecting of a fence around the primary
school. A Mrs Brown from a neighbouring White suburb had been very in­
volved in establishing the primary school which had been erected by her
builder husband. She had organised many resources for the school through
her hard work and contacts in the wider area, and she played an active role
in the DF. She had now organised for roll-on lawn to be put down and for
fencing poles to be donated and she wanted a few of the men from Site 5 to
erect the fence. (It should be remembered that there are few fences and very
little grass elsewhere in Site 5.) The issue was raised by Mrs Brown in the DF
and referred to Richard Klaas to take to the Civic. There was no response
from the Civic. In one meeting the issue was minuted (in English) by one of
the White neighbours in the following way:

4. Education: Community to assist with erecting fencing for

school, school committee to progress. Need for liaison between
school and civic committee stressed.
 Literacy practices in an informal settlement 245

Klaas later reported that the men would only do the work if they could be
paid, but Mrs Brown indicated that she was not prepared to raise more
money for this. Eventually at a DF meeting Mrs Brown asked exasperat-
edly why the men couldn't just do it, when it was clearly to the advantage
of their schoolchildren. For a few minutes there was an electrifying
silence, then Miriam Ntantiso, the Site 5 preschool's co-ordinator,
explained:

The men are angry that they should contribute to the school,
when the community has been deprived of education and facili­
ties for so long. They feel the DET [government education
department] should be taking over the school and providing
these things.

Tsotso added:

And also the people are angry that they have to pay a lot of
money to use the school for meetings.

Mrs Brown replied that the community would have to wait forever to get the
DET to do anything. Tsotso's comment was slapped down by a White neigh­
bour who said that the issue of fencing should not be mixed up with the
issue of payment for the use of the venue. The Site 5 representatives re­
mained silent, inscrutable. A few weeks later a young community leader told
me (gesturing up at the school building): Tes, the community feels that this
whole school has just been dictated to them.'
The highly bureaucratised literacy and language practices which 'organ­
ised' the DF meetings clearly made participation difficult for Tsotso and oth­
ers. Her comment about the costs of hiring the primary school was seen as
'inappropriate'. Mrs Brown wanted to demarcate the space of the school, to
claim it for her ordered and civilising mission in which literacy must play a
crucial role (see Hofmeyr, 1993, for a discussion on fencing in South Africa's
colonial era as a political literacy). Tsotso knew no such mission as Mrs
Brown's; she wished to claim the first large space in Site 5 and inhabit it
with her alternative literacies - political meetings, oratory. Space became
discursively constructed within the conflicting discourses of upliftment and
political opposition.
Contact with resources in the wider area was made in English and in
text form through the DF, which played the role of a literacy mediator.
246 . Kell

(Complex power relations involved in taking on the role of literacy mediator

are explored further in this volume, see Malan, Chapter 5.) The reliance on
texts in the DF led to a greater Visibility' for the items concerned and to the
profile and authority of the organisation. The lack of written communica­
tion between this forum and the Civic, and the fact that the latter's meetings
were after dark and exclusively in Xhosa, reduced the profile of the Civic.
The enshrinement of particular issues in particular types of text seemed
to render them inaccessible to the Civic. But the DF (possibly in collusion
with Klaas) seemed to create this process of 'rendering inaccessible' by its
position and role. It acted as a filter for the contacts and resources (initially
introduced in text form) which came into Site 5. Only certain of these got
through to the Civic and could therefore be claimed or owned by that organi­
sation. A situation of dual, separate power structures (the Civic and the DF)
was emerging, with Richard Klaas acting as a broker between the two,
although the former was the elected and accountable body. Bureaucratic lit­
eracy and language practices played an important role in maintaining this

Figure 13: A mapping of dominant discourses in Site 5.

 Literacy practices in an informal settlement 247

dual power structure, greatly disempowering the older community leaders,

many of whom had never attended school at all. This was confirmed by the
fact that they no longer attended the WG meetings, their places being taken
by younger, more educated representatives from the Civic.
From this it should be clear that literacy cannot be a 'given' as suggested
by the literacy practitioners in the workshop discussed earlier. The valuing of
literacy shifts according to historical and contextual processes which become
discursively constructed. In order to situate such shifts historically, I at­
tempted to map the dominant discourses in Site 5 (Figure 13, page 246). The
primary discourse (Gee, 1990) is the discourse of survival, but this is overlaid
with the oppositional discourses of the liberation movement (as in Site 5 the
very act of survival was an oppositional act).
Charitable and upliftment discourses become overlaid on the survival dis­
course, and sometimes conflict with the oppositional discourse. All of these
discourses originate in the apartheid/liberation antagonism so utterly domi­
nant during the 1980s, and converge, becoming nominally subsumed into the
new narrative of reconstruction/development which becomes prominent in
the interregnum.

'Maybe next year we might ... be able to answer back in

English': the construction and value of night school
literacy
An extract from an interview with Adelaide Dikeni (community leader, night
school learner and Winnie Tsotso's friend) follows:

Dikeni: I saw you [at the DF meeting] and there were other
Whites too. I can hear English now that I attend the evening
classes, what I still don't understand is Afrikaans. My problem
now is to answer back in English even though I can understand
it... I even told Winnie to stop translating for me because I can
understand it.
C.K. (researcher): OK. What do you think the most important
thing is that people get in the classes?
Dikeni: What we get there is assistance to be helped to learn
because I wouldn't have understood the bit of English I under­
stand now. Maybe next year we might understand more and be
able to answer back in English.
248 . Kell

Dikeni's last sentence qualified the more positive feelings she expressed in
the earlier part of the excerpt. It implied that the situation she is talking
about is not a dialogue as she cannot currently 'answer back'. Yet she has
told Tsotso she no longer wants translations in important community meet­
ings. There are highly contradictory processes in operation here. In this
section I try to understand these contradictions by analysing the kinds of lit­
eracy and English that are being introduced by the night school in Site 5,
and what impact they have.
I attended the night school for 22 evenings. On my first night there I was
surprised to see that Winnie Tsotso was in the beginners' class where she
was learning to read and write in Xhosa (in line with current policies in the
ABETfield).There was also a beginners' English class for those who could
already read and write, as well as an advanced class in English. The teachers
all came from Site 5 and had received some training from the English and
Literacy Organisation (ELO) in central Cape Town where they were em­
ployed. The classes were held in a cold, rickety shack attached to the primary
school. The learners sat around one or two children's desks - the type that
sloped - so that for some the surface of the desks was angled away from
them.
The learners worked exclusively from photocopied materials produced
by two different English and literacy organisations in Cape Town. The lit­
eracy group mainly seemed to do word-building from syllables on the theme
of personal information, and I watched Tsotso writing out her name over
and over again. I never saw any materials being brought into the classes
which were not part of the pre-planned curriculum: not one text, or even one
written word from the context of the learners' lives entered the classroom.
Reasons for attending the night school were widely divergent. Tsotso
felt she deserved a job doing community work, but was prevented from get­
ting one by her lack of literacy. She could, however, speak six languages and
was totally aufait with a wide spectrum of literacy practices. Khumbula
Ngade wanted to be like the others she saw in the classes, and felt that Eng­
lish would help her get a job. A member of the beginners' class, she had not
yet learnt any English, Adelaide Dikeni wanted to be able to answer back in
development meetings. Paulina Mdoda didn't really want to learn, but en­
joyed the support and company of the other learners. Nomatyala Nkonzo (at
64 years of age) believed that knowing English would help her get rich.
Primrose Selepe wanted to be able to read the Xhosa and English Bibles sim­
ultaneously. Eunice Mandla wanted to speak English because she was
ashamed of only reaching a low school standard earlier in her life. Mxolisi
 Literacy practices in an informal settlement 249

Nzwane hoped to get his matric, but could not afford to travel outside Site 5
to formal night school. Only Mhinzi Tsotso (Winnie's 17-year-old daughter
who had been no further than Standard Two - the equivalent of 4 years'
schooling) was really hoping that her attendance at night school would gain
her access to the formal system.
In interviews with two teachers, both expressed anxiety about whether
they were doing enough for the learners:

I don't feel we give the people enough. OK, they go from literacy
to English ... Where will they go after that? ... The young ones
still have a chance to go to school. But the old ones it seems as
if they are wasting their time. The work is so scarce. Sometimes
they'll tell you, I was going to look for food.

Over a long period of time I observed about 12 regular learners altogether. One
group started off with about 22 learners - at present there are only three regu­
lars. Towards the end I noticed that Winnie Tsotso and Adelaide Dikeni were
hardly attending at all, although new learners had joined in the new year.
There is definitely a gap between the policy-makers' intentions for the
proposed system, and the potential literacy learners' needs and desires. How
is this gap created and sustained? In discussions with the ELO staff, they
indicated that these problems had arisen in Site 5 as a result of inadequate
teacher training, and lack of funding or personnel to monitor the classes
there. But I felt convinced that the problem was a deeper one relating to con­
ceptions of literacy What became clear to me was that a very particular type
of literacy was being promoted in the night school - it has been called
schooled or essay-text literacy (Scollon and Scollon, 1981) - and that this
literacy did not articulate with the existing literacy practices in the commun­
ity, or with any of the learners' more specific reasons for wanting to attend
night school. This dawned on me as over and over again I probed into what
the learners would actually read and write in their lives. I came across ex­
tremely few texts in Site 5 - those there were, were highly specific to certain
cultural, religious or political practices. Further, these texts generally in­
volved very few words (for example, political slogans on posters) or sen­
tences which did not have strongly structured relationships to each other,
sometimes with a highly formulaic quality, like formal invitations, pro­
grammes or adverts.
It was very clear that outside of the night school the learners were only
reading their schoolwork, and that what they were learning there was
250 . Kell

highly encapsulated. Again and again I noticed how the work the learners
were doing in the classroom was defined by the framework of schooled lit­
eracy. In a lesson used with the beginners' English group the topic was 'Why
did people have to leave school?' The lesson opened with a story:

I never went to school because my father did not care for educa­
tion. I helped my parents to plough and look after cattle and
sheep. The water was very far. I woke up very early to go and
fetch water. Before, education was not like nowadays. People
did not like it. They just liked cattle. By Betty Sesedi.

This was followed by comprehension questions on the issue of causation,

like 'Betty never went to school because ... (fill in)'. Then listing the things
Betty did to help her parents, followed by looking deeper into Betty's story'
and discussing questions like 'Why were cattle important when Betty was
young?' and 'When did school education become important to you?' The
learners then brainstormed and drew a spidergram (mind map) of different
reasons why people did not attend school.
In a 'Checklist of language and learning skills developed' on the basis of
the curriculum the ELO lists things like:
• Presenting information in a short aural text in a different form, for ex­
ample a table, diagram.
• Identify main points.
• Understanding relationships between paragraphs.
• Understanding relationships between sentences in a paragraph (cause/
effect, general statements and so on).
• Ranking items in order of importance.
These points are all derived from the discursive practices of schooled lit­
eracy. I do not wish to deny the validity of the effort to give access to essay-
text literacy, but I do want to prise open exactly what tensions may be
implicated in this giving of access.
Firstly, it seems to me that this night school literacy is insulated from the
literacy practices of the other domains I identified in Site 5. This has crucial
implications for the possibility of teaching generic skills which can be
transferable to other contexts. Literacy practices are deeply embedded in dis­
courses, and take shape in ways which are highly specific to these dis­
courses (Walkerdine, 1988:92). What seems to be indicated is more a sense
of the necessity for discursive transfer or translation (Evans and Harris,
1991) than transfer of disembedded cognitive skills.
 Literacy practices in an informal settlement 251

Secondly, access to essay-text literacy means access to mainstream

school-based literacy practices. Heath (1983) has suggested that for a non-
mainstream social group to acquire mainstream school-based literacy prac­
tices, individuals must 'recapitulate' the sorts of literacy experiences the
mainstream child has had at home. This involves apprenticing the indi­
vidual to a school-based literate person. In a context like Site 5 where
schooled literacy only really exists in one domain (that of development),
apprenticeship models for the acquisition of literacy have not been consid­
ered, and learners attend classes for an average of four hours a week, the
type of recapitulation Heath talks about is going to be extremely difficult.
Thirdly, the discursive insularity of night school literacy promotes ped­
agogical practices which are very new to the learners (since they have had
no opportunities to be socialised into these practices in the other domains of
their lives). In the exercises that follow Betty's story the first task is 'Betty
never went to school because ... (fill in)'. The learners found this task ex­
tremely difficult. I think the reason for this is that it makes a set of assump­
tions about learning which may not necessarily be shared by the learners.
The idea of a written comprehension itself may be completely unintelligible
to those who have never done one before - its ground rules come from
schooling. The curriculum tries to introduce these new practices to learners
through the recontextualisation of everyday material into the content of the
curriculum. In Betty's story, this process is duplicated rendering the material
extremely difficult for the learners I observed. The story is recontextualised
in the curriculum which is being used in the night school, but it is already a
reworking of the real Betty's story in that she constructed this story within
the expectations of a curricular transaction somewhere else at some other
time. The style, tone and topic of the text are supposed to render it accessible
to the learners. However, although the relations between the sentences are
not very logical (in an essay-text framework), the learners are being asked to
accomplish exacting, logical and analytical tasks about the text.
It seems to me that reading, writing and English have a dual reality in
the classroom; on the one hand, they are there as the signs of fulfilment of
a yearning for education and are therefore unquestioned; on the other hand,
the particular types of reading, writing and English are mysterious, without
any reference to their function or value in everyday life. The generality of
what the learners are learning is only appropriate to the generality of their
yearning for the unspecified education they felt they were always denied;
that desire that can hardly be fulfilled even after many years of full-time
252 . Kell

schooling. Most of their more specific reasons for attending the classes are
not being met.
Despite the best intentions of the ELO, I argue that what I saw happen­
ing in Site 5 amounted to the promotion of an autonomous model of literacy
(Street, 1987:48). I also argue that this model is promoted through an ideo­
logical process or mechanism whereby literacy becomes pedagogised: 'the
pedagogisation of literacy' (Street and Street, 1991:144).
In Gee's (1990) theories of literacy, literacy has to be bound up with
the acquisition of other discourses. In the area of Ocean View nearby Site
5, literacy comes tied up with acquiring discourses of religion and respect­
ability (Breier, 1994). In my own work in Crossroads in the early 1980s,
our teaching of literacy was embedded in the acquisition of oppositional
discourses related to the struggle against apartheid. In Site 5 night school
literacy is bound up with discourses related to what schooled literacy can
do for one, and with becoming socialised into the procedures of schooled
literacy itself. This is accompanied by redress discourses which stress the
disadvantage and denial of opportunities that people experienced under
apartheid. So the learners are actually acquiring the discourse of being an
adult learner. I suggest that (in the absence of an accompanying emphasis
on conscientisation and educational mobilisation by the night school
itself) this results in the acknowledgement, confirmation and internal-
isation of deficit on the learners' parts. I suggest that this may result in
disempowerment and subjection, the exact opposite of what the literacy
practitioners desire. Winnie Tsotso illustrated this vividly when she said
that for a long time her children didn't know that she couldn't read or
write:

But now they know. The one is going to school at Kalk Bay. He
laugh now, he say 'Mama, are you Sub A [first year of formal
schooling]?' Sometimes I'm sitting here and write my things
and he say, 'Oooh, look my mother, she's Sub A. Come, come
and look.' I close my - if he roep [calls] their friends, I just close
my door.

I do not wish to deny that professionalisation is important, or that the

pedagogisation of literacy is always inappropriate, or that there is a
place for much of what I have described above. But I argue that that place
is not Site 5 and the kind of learners I now know. There are potential
learners in Site 5 who will fit into an adult education system like the one
 Literacy practices in an informal settlement 253

being proposed: these include a portion of the younger residents who are
mobile, already have a little schooling and are less integrated into com­
munity and family networks. They will also be the ones who somehow
have enough money and few enough commitments to travel out of Site 5
to a larger centre where night school is a highly formalised institution
with adequate resources.
For learners like Tsotso, Dikeni and Ngade, and potential learners
like some of the other young women I met, far more responsive, informal
and grassroots ways need to be found to help them acquire skills which
will be meaningful in their lives. Provision in a formalised institution
outside Site 5 is not going to work for them. A formalised institution
within Site 5 might not generate enough learners to give it the formality
it needs, and it might intimidate learners like the ones mentioned. My
guess is that there are far more potential learners like Dikeni and Ngade
than there are like the youngsters who are already starting to go off to
the night school in a nearby township every night to get their General
Education Certificates.

Articulation versus delivery: implications of the research

for the provision of literacy
A framework for modelling Adult Basic Education (ABE) provision, contain­
ing some important conceptual advances, was developed by the Department
of Adult Education and Extra-Mural Studies at the University of Cape Town
(1993). This framework suggests that three measures are necessary for an
ABE system to be successful. They are:
1. (ABE system models) must be able to construct their intake points in
such a way that they present themselves to learners as a 'natural' and
unproblematic part of the general 'informal· system.
2. They must be able to make available a carefully graded and rapid set of
transitional learning pathways to connect the informal and formal sys­
tem contexts.
3. They must be able to provide 'output' points to connect more or less di­
rectly with the formal systems of education and employment.
It appears that much of the current adult education work in South Africa
will contribute to the development of points 2 and 3 above. If adult literacy
provision is to make any impact on the scale of the problem in South Africa
and do it in a way which does not disempower or marginalise people, it will
have to address point 1 far more creatively than current costly and ineffi-
254 . Kell

cient programmes. The major impact of such programmes seems to be the

socialisation of learners into the ways of schooling, rather than enhancing
their already considerable skills in dealing with the world around them.
Learners will shun night school, or drop out and become disillusioned,
when the programmes homogenise their diverse needs and desires into
competencies which only make sense within the framework of essay-text
literacy itself.
At the moment the literacy programmes of the NGOs are falling between
two stools - they are not pedagogised enough to anchor those learners who
could make a go of it in the formal system, and they are too pedagogised to
address the diversity of learners' needs at grassroots. An important implica­
tion of the research described in this book is the necessity for formal oppor­
tunities (such as the existing night schools located in secondary schools in
the suburbs near Site 5) to become far more institutionalised and
professionalised; and more importantly for a new layer of informal oppor­
tunities to be created which is entirely de-institutionalised and articulated
with the existing literacy practices in communities. This is an important
policy outcome of our research. It needs further elaboration, but I would like
to conclude by suggesting some of the directions this might take, in a con­
text like Site 5.
A two-pronged approach as suggested earlier means that NGOs could
offer their teachers two options: to become professional adult teachers
working within formal institutions, or to become literacy activists working
within communities. Development workers could also play the kind of role I
suggest, and be trained to work with existing literacy practices and critical
language awareness activities (Fairclough, 1992b). These could be taken
directly into the community itself, rather than constantly mediated through
the classroom and the curriculum (Rogers, 1994). Awareness of interactions
between children and their parents around literacy could become a focus for
the development of programmes (drawing on precedents developed in fam­
ily literacy programmes in other countries) rather than a source of shame as
these interactions are currently viewed.
There has been a tradition of community-based advice offices, playing
multiple mediating roles, in many parts of South Africa. It is possible that a
new ABET initiative could be housed within an advice office, rather than a
school classroom. Literacy workers based in such an advice office could co¬
ordinate assessment and referral for learners who are beyond the intake
point. They could also possibly undertake or co-ordinate work related to the
accreditation of prior learning. They could advise about a range of educa-
 Literacy practices in an informal settlement 255

tional resources for both formal and informal education. Their more impor­
tant task perhaps would be to become outreach workers to engage with resi­
dents like Tsotso, Ngade, Dikeni, and so on. Here, the approach may need to
take Gee's (1990) distinction between acquisition and learning into ac­
count. He suggests that literacy is a product of acquisition, not learning and
that it requires exposure to models in natural, meaningful and functional
settings, and that overt learning may even get in the way. From my overview
of the place of literacy in Site 5 it seems that there are many settings in
which the acquisition of literacy may be promoted by outreach workers who
articulate with existing social practices in various domains. An orientation
towards development and its politics may be more fruitful than an orienta­
tion towards a view of literacy simply as the entry point to further formal
education.
In a place like Site 5 literacy outreach workers could raise awareness
within development forums around power, literacy and language. They
could suggest the use of Xhosa, at times, or help others insist on translation.
Acting against the individualising commodification of literacy, they could
develop family literacy approaches. They could attempt to stimulate the pro­
duction of texts within the community along the lines of those already pro­
duced. It may be appropriate to set up classes for specific purposes, like a
Bible literacy class, or a class for working on the drivers' licence test or
handling the oral and literacy requirements of a DF meeting. It is quite con­
ceivable that this kind of informal literacy training could be integrated into
an initial qualifications framework through the demonstration of compet­
encies implicated in all these types of work. However, I stress that this
should not be done in a classroom with a preplanned curriculum. Rather,
such accreditation could be an integral part of the training needed to imple­
ment the Reconstruction and Development Programme. Here literacy need
not be the dominant component of the training, but skills acquisition for
income-generation (like bricklaying, carpentry and sewing) should be.
Such proposals imply a different approach to assessment and evalua­
tion than that presently being promoted in thefield.The approach currently
becoming dominant gives priority to assessing whether learners have be­
come socialised into the ways of schooling, and this is very evident from the
nature of the examinations now being developed by the Independent Exam­
inations Board to standardise levels of achievement for ABET. Within the
framework of ideas suggested earlier, assessment will need to be congruent
with the personal and local literacies of the learners.
256 . Kell

There is an urgent need to draw on resources outside the current cycles

of funding and projects. A media-based literacy awareness campaign could
promote the need for institutional change as opposed to labelling people as
deficient. Literacy could be promoted as a two-way process: just as literacy
learners need access to the discourses of those in power, so those in power
need to learn to 'read' with understanding the discourses of those who have
been marginalised. Some of these suggestions have been made in policy
proposals released prior to the national elections. However, current funding
shortages in the ABET field have prevented any such work from being un­
dertaken.
To return again to the literacy practitioners' diagrams and to my ques­
tion about them - does one simply conceptualise the problem as the end part
of the delivery system which has been forgotten, or does one erase the whole
delivery system and start from scratch in among the little strands of mean­
ing in the streets, shebeens and backyards?
This book and the research on which it is based offer the beginnings of
an answer to this question, which may only be appropriate in Site 5 but
which may also have wider implications for literacy work in other sites and
other countries. The idea of delivery is much more suited to the 'throughput'
and 'output' points of an ABET system. I envisage these being consolidated
in a (future) expanded and formal institution like the nearby night school.
The 'intake' concept so crucial to the proposals I have made needs to be
embedded analytically within the streets, shebeens and backyards, and
linked into notions not of delivery but of articulation and acquisition
arrived at through detailed analysis of local specificities. The term 'intake'
itself may not be appropriate here since the valuing by learners of their
learning may certainly not be orientated towards further learning but rather
towards the enhancement of the positive roles they already play in their
families, homes and communities. Such an approach need not be exclusive
of providing access to further formal learning, and if it does, all the better.
This view, and the policy implications arising from it, may provide a
way of linking research and practice, both for the researchers who have
written this book, the potential and frustrated learners from whom they
have acquired new knowledge, and the many practitioners who have ex­
perienced doubts and frustrations about their attempts at delivery.

Note
1. I have used Winnie Tsotso's real name with her consent. However, all the other
names in this chapter are pseudonyms.
Afterword
Tony Morphet

This afterword stands in place of a conclusion to the book. It is written from

a position outside of the research itself but in contact with the concepts and
goals of the project. Its purpose is to propose a point of temporary closure to
the work. This unusual procedure is made necessary by the fact that the
book has no formal conceptual limit; the research is, in every sense, work in
progress, and it is set to continue in the years ahead.
The text, and the work that it presents, remains open principally be­
cause the terms of its generation are serial and continuous. The individual
cases themselves do not close, and each case invites another as its exten­
sion. The result is an extending and thickening web of interpretation which
threads its way through the lives and conditions of ordinary South Africans,
many of whom are living at the margins of the schooled sectors of society.
This openness is surely wholly appropriate to the time and place of the stud­
ies since even the most basic framework of the society has not yet taken on
a fixed form. It is scarcely more than five years since the old tight bounds
were broken and it will take time before something as basic as a new consti­
tution can set in place new frames and limits.
The central thrust of the work is towards uncovering the conditions of
meaning in the lives of people who might be thought of as 'unschooled' or
'illiterate'. Its basic procedure is to turn towards individuals in their familiar
everyday surroundings and to put a question which is simple in form but
powerful in implication: 'How do you communicate?' For the answers, it at­
tends to people as they tell their histories and describe their lives and it
records and interprets the terms and conditions in which they make and
exchange meaning.
But the openness of the text also comes out of a conceptual break in
thinking about literacy. Mastin Prinsloo and Mignonne Breier's Introduction
makes brief reference to its genesis in a founding question. In essence this
was an inversion of a familiar 'policy' issue. It turned the ubiquitous ques­
tion 'What can we do about illiteracy?' (in which the 'we' are the literate and
the competent) into 'What are unschooled people doing in relation to print
literacy?'
The inversion sprang from the fact that it had become plain and com­
mon knowledge that one thing unschooled people were not doing was going
258 . Morphet

to classes to learn to read and write. The question posed the 'failure' of lit­
eracy programmes as evidence of something other than poor organisation,
weak pedagogy or difficult work. It put forward the hunch that people were
not coming to literacy classes because they were doing something else
which to them was more important - or, at the very least, more attractive.
The question opened a conceptual space by shutting off, at least tem­
porarily, the twin literacy' discourses of social failure and curative action.
Within this empty arena the researchers gathered the body of international
scholarly work identified under the generic title of the New Literacy Studies.
This formed the second part of the conceptual break and provided the guid­
ance system for the new forms of enquiry required to find answers to the
original hunch. The conceptual and methodological authority of this body of
work is attested to throughout the book and its impact served to reconstitute
the meanings of literacy and illiteracy. The ways of thinking about the issues
of literacy were translated from a technical to an anthropological frame¬
work.
The anthropological turn secured ethnographic study as the methodo­
logy that would take the enquiry forward. The problem was to find the
means, within a short period of ethnographic fieldwork, to specify the ac­
tual presences which effectively filled the conceptually vacant space signi­
fied in the word 'illiteracy'. To put the point directly - it was hard to find the
most productive 'angle of enquiry' because it was conceptually difficult to
know what would count as critical data. The problem was one of bound­
aries; of recognising what did and did not count as 'literacy'. The con­
sequence in the field was an unusually open form of enquiry and study.
The results as they are presented in the book demonstrate the success of
the strategy. Once the classificatory grid of the so-called 'great divide' of Lit­
eracy/Illiteracy was removed, a far more complex range of communicative
practices became visible and available for interpretation. The different
papers show how these practices were in fact studied in the field - both
across a wide range of social sites and also as they were found embedded
within private, group and collective social practices.
The collective instance I am referring to appears principally in Chapter 1
in the account of voter education and election practices, but it also emerges
through the issues which gather in several places in the book, around the
social processes of 'development'. In these cases the ethnographic approach
makes it possible to focus the impact of the extending pressures of historical
change within very localised contexts. In the more private contexts (for ex­
ample in Gibson's account of the wagon maker on a Western Cape farm in
 Afterword 259

Chapter 2; or McEwan and Malan's descriptions of the healers in Tentergate

in Chapter 10) the communicative practices and their cognitive processes
are more deeply embedded through customary usage. There the habitat (the
material realities of everyday life) and the habitus (the social dispositions
and tastes), to use Bourdieu's terms, are intricately enmeshed and the focus
of the ethnographic interpretation is on the detailed interactions of communi­
cative practices and the local discursive contexts.
One of the first effects of developing this extended ethnographic account
of embedded communicative practices is to change the status and definition
of text literacy as a universally valued social good. As it becomes relativised
within the multiple discourses which carry the broad streams of social life, it
loses its absolute, symbolic character. The formal text takes its place among
a host of other ways of constructing equivalent 'goods'.
Yet at the same time that school literacy comes to stand, not for some
generalised form of cognitive capacity, but for particular and quite narrowly
defined forms of practice, so does it begin to emerge as a marker of the fault
lines of social power. One of the most striking aspects of the book is the
shadow of power which is shown stretching across all the cases. It becomes
visible in several of the chapters as the socially constructed and managed
line of exclusion and inclusion. Framed in this perspective the discourses of
literacy provision disclose their profoundly ideological character. They va­
lidate and entrench the external, visible performance measures on which
access to power is to be allowed or refused, and at the same time they serve
to construct and distribute differential subjectivities to successes and fail­
ures. Thus although conventional literacy work at the line of division serves
to carry a few chosen souls from 'darkness to light', its more pervasive con­
sequence is to leave the many with stunted interpretations of their own
identities. Despite the recurring dream of the grand campaign there is in fact
no way in which the many can be carried together over the literacy line'.
The problem is not technical ineffectiveness but political structure.
'Illiteracy' is a constructed category of power and control.
These are some of the sobering reflections that emerge from the studies
and it is in this context that the research makes its careful moves towards
propositions about the issues of learning and power. The Prinsloo and
Breier introduction draws attention to, and provides descriptions of, the in
vito processes through which the researchers found people actually learning
to read and write text. These they name as 'apprenticeship' and 'mediation'.
It goes without saying that neither the learners themselves nor their
'teachers' would recognise their activities within these terms. These are
260 Τ Morphet

metaphors brought in to generalise the character of a process. They provide

illuminating descriptions of the slow processes of exchange and transaction
between individuals through which skills - both cognitive and technical -
are transferred from one person to another. The cardinal difference that
these terms bring into the discussion of the ways that text literacy is learnt
is that they give sharp focus to the transactive procedures involved. It is this
which places the work represented in this book in tension with what Street
in the Preface describes as the 'neutral technology' of conventional literacy
provision. Apprenticeship, it hardly needs to be pointed out, was, and re­
mains, the most significant 'pre-technological' form of learning; and the
natural site of mediation is, following Vygotsky's descriptions, the family.
Thus what the research in this book shows is the fact that learning text lit­
eracy is for adults analogous to learning the practices of a craft, or the dis­
positions of familial relations.
This is an enormously important case to have made - and to have made
so clearly and strongly - because it redraws the baselines upon which lit­
eracy provision needs to be considered. The effect of this is to question the
long-standing and unexamined homology between schooling practices and
literacy learning. The social technology of the school, it would appear, is not
able to provide an adequate set of procedures within which the apprentice­
ship and mediation processes can be lodged.
However, the logic of the work in the book makes it just as plain that
there is no escape from the fact that some form of social technology for lit­
eracy learning is required. It is above all the asymmetry in the power rela­
tions across the literacy line (as it is socially constructed at any given time)
that establishes the necessity for concerted social action. Thus the work
turns back towards its origins in policy questions.
Policy work, however, belongs to a universe of discourse as distant from
ethnography as it is possible to be. Policy is obliged to look to the general
and the universal. It has to abstract, to look for the generic forms, to quan­
tify, to balance claims and make choices across different categories of
interest. The pressure of the book, however, is towards uncovering the
conditions of the particular; thus its claim on policy lies in its delineation of
the grounding conditions on which policy interventions need to be built.
Mediation and apprenticeship are the two markers which the research
places in the policy terrain and they operate there as metaphors for essential
learning processes operating in the lives of people with little or no school­
ing. These two metaphors initiate policy thinking in two significantly differ­
ent directions.
 Afterword 261

The implications of mediation reach down into the intricacies of family

relations but they extend in the opposite direction as well - upwards to­
wards the more generalised forms of public communication. Here the case
study of the 1994 general elections has a most important point to make. The
voting procedures adopted for the ballot show an instance where the literacy
line was (temporarily) abolished; the major institutions of the state were
effectively organised on the basis that text literacy would not operate as an
inclusion/exclusion mechanism. What had previously been taken for
granted as a necessary practice was revised in the light of a different concep­
tion of the needs of the occasion. The business of government was effect­
ively mediated through an inclusive form of communication. The episode
identifies an area of major potential change.
The public communication policies and practices of the apartheid state
were conventionally conceived and implemented as lines of connection be­
tween the parts of the White élite. Others were permitted to participate only
in so far as they could command the languages and the literacy of the two
official European languages. This is now beginning to shift. The recognition
of 11 official languages, including all of the major African vernaculars, is a
part of a commitment to changing the basic terms of the policy. So too is the
rising importance of 'translation' as a state responsibility. This is already a
form of 'mediation' being developed at the points where the state institu­
tions intersect with the local and regional life contexts. One of the implicit
arguments of this book is that the conception of this form of work needs to
be expanded to include extended forms of coded communication which do
not rely solely on the written text. There are many examples of the practices.
For example, they can readily be seen in situations where it is imperative
that everyone should understand a common meaning - as in the symbols
for danger zones, fire exits, access for disabled people, and so on - as well as
in the circulation of goods in the international market where the languages
of symbols and signs have been developed to convey complex information
regarding uses and procedures. The washing instructions which are now
universally attached to all garments are certainly the simplest and most ob­
vious example, the most complex probably the symbolic languages associ­
ated with the computer. All of these are significant forms of mediation which
serve to weaken the strict definition of the literacy line and reduce its
exclusionary power.
The second policy direction is encapsulated within the metaphor of ap­
prenticeship. The research demonstrates a variety of forms of apprentice­
ship - the examples given in Breier's account of the taxi industry (Chapter
262 . Morphet

11) are particularly sharply focused and illuminating but there are many
others with a broader focus which show people enrolling themselves in a
body of practices which initiate them in reading and writing.
The two key conditions of an apprenticeship are that it is context-bound
and that it is concerned with acquiring a holistic skilled performance; it is,
in short, about learning the requirements of a life role from the terms of the
context. The context may be directly mediated by some other person (a
'master' of the role) or it may be learnt, as with the person who learnt to
'read' the road signs by observing the activity of the traffic, by direct induc­
tion from the performance required by the context.
These descriptions should not surprise, since from one point of view
this is the way all learning takes place. Learning a role is the same as acquir­
ing a discourse. Even schooling, which appears to be so different, follows
this role-entry pattern, the sole difference being the form of the scholar role.
The difficult question that this perception of apprenticeship places be­
fore the policy analyst is how to systematise and generalise something
which by definition can always be only context-bound. Schooling solves this
problem by making the school itself the binding context in which the scholar
role is embedded. This move is not available in the case of adults, and even
where it is attempted, as in the literacy class' it fails because the context
cannot be made powerful enough to stabilise the role. Thus what the policy
analyst needs to consider are the generic role situations in which text lit­
eracy is a performance demand and then to examine the ways in which the
context can be enriched through a system of supports which can sustain and
direct the apprenticeship process.
The research produces a rich array of site examples but it cannot
produce the generic formulations necessary for policy abstraction and quan­
tification without further, more focused, ethnographic study. However, the
chapters do generate important guidelines for the kind of situated support
which will sustain and direct apprenticeship learning. One of these guide­
lines focuses on the nature of literacy texts; the other on the literacy
'teacher' or 'master'.
Literacy teaching of the traditional kind has naturally relied on specially
prepared textual materials and there is a wide range of examples available
on the market. What the concept of apprenticeship makes clear is that to be
effective the texts need to be 'context rich' as opposed to being constructed
as generalised messages from the official mainstream pedagogy. It suggests
that so-termed 'easy readers' and 'development pamphlets' (on health,
 Afterword 263

housing, and so on) need to be directed from within the localised discourses
as embedded messages.
If possible they need to be produced from within that context, by the
people involved. This formulation may, at first glance, seem whimsical and
more than a little absurd since, by definition, what illiterate people cannot
do is produce text. Yet this is of course not the case. Evidence from a previ­
ous research project conducted by University of Cape Town in the Montagu
area of the Western Cape clearly demonstrates that unschooled people have
an interest in and indeed are capable, with support, of producing their own
texts for their own use. What such people require are the social technologies
and supports to enable them to do so. This is not the place to go into detail
on the specifications of the technologies; what is needed is a redrawing of
the basic parameters of the literacy learning event' in order to produce the
specifications.
The research repeatedly shows learner and 'master' (however gendered)
engaged in a common task situation. The textualised master is someone
who is in full control of the life role to which the learner is apprenticed, or to
use Gee's description (1990), someone who is fluent in the discourse. The
important point is that this is a different position from that of a teacher. (It
is worth recalling that many of the interlocutors in the studies indicated a
strong orientation away from schooling.) The master figure is someone who
is doing the job rather than talking about it - the learner apprentice is al­
ready present and involved in the life world rather than preparing for it.
Central to the definition is the fact that the master and apprentice are both
already present and active in the context, on the site - and that it is there
that the situated support is required.
Such a form of situated support is not foreign to conventional social
policy discourse. It is in fact the foundation of all good community health
and social work - and it is likely to form the policy basis for the provision of
'development' workers in the future. What is defined is a form of outreach
work. This is not work done by literacy teachers as such, but by people who
live and work in the target communities, who have the additional training
and the links with some form of literacy centre which will enable them to
identify and provide support for literacy learning in situ. Literacy outreach
work will need to be focused on the literacy line' and its goals will be de­
fined in terms of the fostering of both mediation and apprenticeship. To
make policy propositions in this form does not cut across the concept of pro­
vision of basic education programmes; it sets in place a crucial connection
264 . Morphet

point between such programmes and the people whom they have in the past
been unable to reach.
The goal of this final passage in the book was to propose closure to the
present research. It has not been an easy brief to fulfil since, as the com­
mentary shows, the research insists on pressing forward beyond its
boundaries. It is a measure of the richness and variety of the work that it has
gained a generative energy which pushes towards both new formulations of
social practice as well as new areas of research. In this it shows how suc­
cessfully it has taken on the challenge to make literacy studies - new.
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Index

The alphabetic order of the entries in this index is letter by letter. Page refer­
ences in italic refer to illustrations and photographs.


ABET, see Adult Basic Education and ballot paper 37-9, 38
Training borderland discourse 23
Adult Basic Education and Training bricoleurs 126, 139
(ABET) 173 bureaucratic literacies
framework for provision of 253-4 and development discourses
in RDP 15 244-7
in taxi industry 231-2 experts mediating in 107-8
policy issues in and proposals for letter-writing response to 132-7
3, 11, 14,85, 197,237 pensions day as 162-5
'standard' literacy provision in 4, silent responses to 110-12
174-5 see also official literacies
statistics for 177

adult literacy provision
after 1994, 15 class
barriers to 160-2 literacy not linked to 125, 157
before 1990, 13 literacy mediation determined by
in taxi industry 231-2 105-21
policy formulation on 1, 11, coded communication 261
253-6 code-switching 106, 163
reorientation for 26-7 collective saving schemes 79-80
statistics for 14-15, 26, 35, 177 communal literacy 144, 198, 214,
suggestions for 212, 253-6 219,221-8
see also literacy classes/pro­ communicative practices 8, 21, 32,
grammes 258
apprenticeship learning 26, 27, and political power 164-5, 242-3
259-62 in taxi industry 174
amongst farm workers 55 in workplace 65-84, 86-102
at school 166-7 letter writing as 132-7
in politics 163, 166 management-worker 6 8 - 7 0 ,
in taxi industry 227-8 75-9, 69, 89-90, 89, 90, 93-5, 94
in workplace 166-7 naming practices and 88-9
anthropology 258 worker-management 70-5, 72
276 Index

Congress of South African Trade Un­ worker empowerment and 49-64,

ions (Cosatu) 14, 85 65-8, 83
Cosatu, see Congress of South Afri­ see also school literacy
can Trade Unions education levels
cultural brokers 20, 103, 104, 123-5 factory workers 67
and bureaucratic literacies 162-5 farm workers 50-1
social power and 157 school workers 86
see also literacy mediators taxi drivers 215
cultural capital 19, 113, 201, 238 elections
cultural heterogeneity 47 local (1995) 162
cultural homogeneity 46 national (1994) 34, 35, 162
cultural identity 136-7, 202 ethnographic study 24, 258-9
education and 179-82
cultural practices 210,
F
Freirean approach 236
D
G
discourses 103
anti-apartheid 125 gangsters, see tsotsi identity
definition of 21, 22 gender
family 87-91 and power 193, 211
liberal 92-8 literacy practices and 62, 192
literary practices and 21-4 value of literacy and 4 9 - 6 4 ,
mapping of dominant 246, 247 143
of learning 104
of literacy classes 149-54 Η
patriarchal 60 household literacy 185-7
public, about taxi industry HRD, see human resources
214-15 development
E human resources development
(HRD) 14, 236-7, 242
education
ambivalence towards 126-9 I
and social position ideology 236
colonial roots of 179-82 illiteracy
formal 228-30 and voter education 31, 35-9
informal 219-28 in taxi industry 215-16
in taxi industry 228-30 problem of 177
job mobility and 81, 192-3 statistics for 14-15, 26, 35
mission 188 stigma of 201-2, 219
orientations to 173, 179-82 worker empowerment despite
rejection of 167-71, 190-2 51-9
 Index 277

L motivations for participating in

201-2, 248-9
land tenure struggles 129-32
success of 149-52
literacy
literacy events 18, 208
and communication 65-84
literacy mediation 26, 28, 259-62
and power and control 259
by activists 126
as display 205-12
by NGOs 103-4, 126
as symbolic capital 19, 208
in taxi industry 216, 219
autonomous model of 2, 5, 16-20,
social identity and 103
36-7, 141,252
literacy mediators 103, 105
communally achieved 82
and power 244-7
definition of 24
experts as 107-9, 145-6
genre approach to 4-5, 23
family members as 186, 219, 240
ideological model of 2-3, 5, 141
illiterate community leader as
informal acquisition of 20-1
238-4
in taxi industry 174, 213-33
NGOs as 237-8
letter writing as 184, 186, 188-9
see also cultural brokers
orientations to 173
literacy myth 16-21, 182
policy context of 13-15
literacy outreach work 254-5, 263-4
political context of 12-13
literacy practices 5, 18
social context of 15-16, 181-2
and development 244-7
universal standard of 3-4
and discourses 21-4
value of for tsotsis 157-8, 167-1
and empowerment 31-2, 49-64
without power 59-63
and organisation of work 98-101
see also bureaucratic literacies:
and power relationships 174
communal literacy; household
as matter of survival 109-12
literacy; local literacies; multi­
cultural brokers as 123-39
ple literacies; night school
literacy; official literacies; economic resources and 207-11
personally-achieved literacy; family discourse and 93-5
school literacy; text literacy funeral services as 147-9
literacy classes/programmes 174, intertextual 143-4
262-3 in tsotsi world 167-71
leisure-time 80
at factory 80-1
liberal discourse and 93-5
construction and value of 247-52
local legitimacy and 114-18
cultural diversity and 158-9
neighbourhood 142-4
delivery system of 235-6
of illiterate community leader
discourses of 149-54
238-44
failure of 152-4, 177, 189-90,
of the illiterate 3
258
of women 62-3
in taxi industry 219-20
pension day as 144-6
management's reasons for 65-6
278 Index

political power and 118-20 NLS, see New Literacy Studies

religion and 62-3, 80, 114-16, NQF, see National Qualifications
147-9, 183-5, 204-5, 205-7 Framework
social identity and 105-21 numeracy practices 52-7, 79-80,
social meaning of 20-1 180,185-7
social position and 112-14, 125

workplace 79-80
literacy teaching 262-3 official literacies 125-6, 137-8
local knowledge 126-8 ignored by illiterate 217
local literacies 125-6, 137-8, learnt by trial and error 225-7
164-5, 173, 194 see also bureaucratic literacies
and cultural knowledge 204-5 oral communication 216, 238, 240,
definition of 198 242
Μ Ρ
media pension day
and illiteracy 35-6 as literacy event 208
and voter education 39-40 as literacy practice 144-6
mediation, see literacy mediation personally-achieved literacy 214
mode-switching 106 power 214, 217, 238, 259
multiple literacies 19 communicative practices and
political 164-5, 242-3
N
cultural brokers and social 157
National Education Policy Investigation education, workers and 49-64,
(NEPI) 85 65-8, 83
National Qualifications Framework gender and 193, 211
(NQF) 198,236 literacy, control and 259
NEPI, see National Education Policy literacy without 59-63
Investigation literacy mediators and 244-7
networks 2 0 - 1 , 103, 105, 125-66, literacy practices and 3 1 - 2 ,
163, see also literacy mediation 49-64, 174
New Literacy Studies (NLS) 1, public communication 261
16-21, 141,258
relativism of 2-6, 259
R
relevance of 2-4, 7-8 RDP, see Reconstruction and Development
romanticism of 2-4, 6-7, 28 Programme
see also Social Uses of Literacy reciprocity 3, 2 0 - 1 , 79, 103, 126,
research 204, 242
night school literacy 247-53 Reconstruction and Development
night schools, see literacy classes/ Programme (RDP) 1, 13-14, 15,
programmes 177.242.255
 Index 279

religion squatter settlements

literacy as display in 206-7 Khayelitsha 178-9, 180
literacy practices of 6 2 - 3 , 80, Marconi Beam 159-62, 161
114-16, 147-9, 204-5, 206-7 Site 5, 237-8
mediating role in 114-16
schooling, identity and 183-5
Τ
taxi industry 214-15
S
illiteracy and survival in 215-28
schooling, see education text literacy 259, 260, 262, 262
school literacy 19, 163, 187-90, tsotsi identity 167-71
194,249-53, 259
and moral economy of the family
V
200-4 voter education 39-47, 162-3
definition of 198 ANC workshop 47
orientations to 200-4 Idasa programmes for 40, 41-6
value of 104, 126-9 NP run 47
see also education SABC survey on 39-40
Social Uses of Literacy (SoUL) Veetu programmes for 40, 46-7
research 1, 24-9, 179, 258
see also New Literacy Studies W
SoUL research, see Social Uses of working intelligence 53
Literacy work knowledge 55