English Language Teaching in its Social Context

SAFE-TALI< 235Ogbu (198 l), too, while not denying that micro-ethnographic studies have a role inexplaining how interaction acts as an immediate cause of a particular child’s failure, arguesthat it is essential also to study how these classroom events are built up by forces emanatingfrom outside these micro settings.Influenced by such thinking, I concluded that my micro-ethnographic analysis of theepisode from the mathematics lesson needed to be informed by a macro-ethnographicaccount of the schooling provided for black students in KwaZulu.This account, along linessuggested by Ogbu (1981), would be one that showed how the school system was relatedto social organisation, economy, political organisation, belief system and values, change andso on.In the section which follows, I provide information about the macro context ofschooling for blacks in South Africa during the apartheid era, which I identified as potentiallyrelevant to the reinterpretation of this episode. Since the lesson occurred in a Senior Primaryschool (fourth to eighth years of schooling) I focus on this phase of the schooling system. Ifocus also on the role of English as medium of instruction, since research suggests (see, forexample, MacDonald 1990) that difficulties associated with the transfer from mother tongueto English in the first year of this phase constrain classroom behaviour in powerful ways.The macro context of schooling for black people in apartheidSouth AfricaAs most people are aware, apartheid, an Afrikaans word meaning literally ‘apartness’ orseparateness, refers to the policy of the Nationalist Party, which, subsequent to its comingto power in 1948, was implemented as a massive programme of social engineering. Racialsegregation had been a feature of South African society ever since the arrival of whites inthe 17th century. However, after 1948, segregation on racial and even, within racial groups,on ethnic lines, in every sphere of life, was implemented on a scale unprecedented in humanhistory. Not merely were separate institutions such as educational institutions establishedfor different race and ethnic groups, but geographical separation was attempted throughthe creation of ethnic ‘homelands’, of which KwaZulu was one.Exemplifying as it does the classic divide-and-rule strategy, the apartheid policyadmirably served the goal of the Nationalist Party of consolidating and increasing the newlywonhegemony of Afrikanerdom. Segregation also served to maintain and increase theprivileged status that whites had enjoyed since the 17th century, by facilitating the systematicdiscrimination against people of colour.In education, systematic discrimination was evident in the differential per capitaexpenditure on education for the various population groups. Towards the end of theapartheid era, there were attempts by the government to narrow the gaps between theprovision for the various groups. However, as recently as the financial year 1986/7, the percapita expenditure on education for whites was R2508.That for blacks (i.e. Africans ratherthan Asians or so-called ‘coloureds’) was only R476, whilst that for blacks in the homelandswas still lower; for example, in KwaZulu it was only R359 (South African Institute of RaceRelations (SAIRR) Survey 1987/88).One ofthc consequences of this differential expenditure, which probably played a rolein determining what styles of interaction were possible, was differential teacher-studentratios. In 1987, whereas the student-teacher ratio for whites was 16 to 1, that for blacks inso-called white areas was 41 to 1, and for KwaZulu primary schools 53 to 1 and KwaZulusecondary schools 37 to 1 (SAIRR Survey 1987/88). It is very difficult for teachers, who