Student Name: Karyn De Freitas Student ID: 809000325 Course: GEND3031- Sex, Gender, and Society Title: Burning

schools- Education as Resistance

The schools are your only chance. - School principal, Sarafina!

The film Sarafina the musical of the same name which was written by Mbongeni Ngema. Ngemas musical tells the story of the Soweto Riots which began in 1976. These riots began as a reaction to a decree that mandated teaching in all-black schools to be done in Afrikaans and English. Increasing resentment towards a weakening apartheid meant that students were not as accepting of the decree. The resulting riots led to the deaths of more than 180 students and countless injuries. The film captures the story very well as it follows Sarafina, the protagonist. Apart from the artistic rendering of historical events, the film raises questions about the nature of oppression, struggles for freedom, and gender roles. In the movie, many social institutions are depicted, the church, the family, the community, the police, education, the economy, the military. Those who fought for freedom and the abolition of apartheid were often faced with aggressions from many of these social institutions within South African society. Insitutions such as the military, the police, were forceful antagonists, while insitutions such as the family, the church, and education were more equivocal. This equivocality often left room

for various forms of resistance. In Sarafina!education is seen as having a dual nature: it can either maintain or resist oppressions. Education, as a social institution, is often the most open to change and revolution. According to Verwiebe, a social institution is a system of behavioral and relationship patterns that are densely interwoven and enduring, and function across an entire society. [] Institutions regulate the behavior of individuals in core areas of society. Education is considered a social institution because it satisfies the criteria stated above and it is a primary source of socialisation. Outside of the family, the school is one of the main places where children will learn socially acceptable behaviours and attitudes from their peers and educators. Education, as an institution, is responsible for how people think and how they interact with the world. It informs societies on many other social institutions. It is within the institution of education that ideas about gender roles, race, and sexuality are developed and reinforced. Education can decide ones future identit y and social status. As an institution, education is highly powerful. It is filled with the potential of open and inviting unshaped minds. It is no surprise, then, that education is often the epicentre of a great battle between freedom and oppression. Education is responsible for how societies think; future generations depend on what is taught to current generations. As such, the duration of ones education and the extent of ones knowledge holds a great deal of weight in society. Highly educated people are often placed on pedestals as beacons of progress, less educated people are ridiculed for not achieving those standards. For as long as education has been a social institution, various agents have sought to harness its vast potential. Many resistance movements began in educational institutions. Many governments were able to control their populations through censorship, propaganda and tightly controlled syllabi. Within the historical context of the film, students led riots about the way in which they were going to be taught. They viewed it as an attempt by the government to directly control the way they related to their peers, their communities, and the whites of South Africa. Their attitudes had been informed by Black Power movements in the United States,

and when the decree was made, they were able to speak and act out against it. This highlights a crucial aspect of education as an institution that is often undervalued: education is highly self-critical and selfaware, moreso than other institutions. This self-awareness and ability to be critical of itself as an institution contributes to the dual nature of education. In Sarafina!it becomes evident that there are two opposing symbols of education: the school principal, who can be viewed as a symbol of education as a means of maintaining the status quo, and Mary Masombuka, who can be viewed as education as a means of resistance and revolution. Throughout the movie, the principal is portrayed as collaborating with the police and the military. He pleads with Mary Masombuka to follow the syllabus and teach the children what has been deemed as necessary for their education. Mary Masombuka, on the other hand, teaches the children what she considers their history, she desires to know more about themselves than what the white government will have them know. The conflict between these two opposing ideologies is best portrayed in the classes on the Napoleonic War: Mary Masombuka teaches the children that it is the people of Moscow who defeated the French by burning the city, while the substitute teacher teaches a more apathetic slant. The children, realising this difference, rebel and scare the teacher out of the class. This image of students as agents of resistance is one that is recurrent in various societies. From student protestors in Ukraine today, to student protestors against the Vietnam War, to student protestors against the destruction of the Creative Arts Centre at the St. Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies, and to the students in Sarafina! who protested about a decree that sought to separate them from their community, students have often been revolutionaries and visionaries. It is difficult to identify why students are so often catalysts and agents of change. Perhaps it is their youth, perhaps it is the process of education that often renders one more open-minded than when one began the process, but students can often make or break the struggle against oppression. The difficulty lies in their sympathy to ones cause. They are well-aware of what those older than them

think and feel, but they are also in the process of making their own judgements. Often, students take a more humanist and liberal view, and, without the influence of government propaganda, they often take the sides of anti-government forces. An example of these divergent views can be seen in how the school principal and Sarafina both react to the burning of the school. The school principal, who views teaching as his vocation and a means of social mobility, says The schools are your only chance. and Burn the schools and you have no future.On the other hand, Sarafina, while she acknowledges that burning schools are not necessarily beneficial, she understands the need for action instead of passive inaction. She participates in the execution of Sabela even though she views the use of fire as having no future. She expresses this before Sabelas execution when she says ...I like him. Except he burns down schools. Whats the future in that? Hell take me to the movies and then hell be in prison for 20 years. Sarafina sees a future in education, but she also sees a need for action. Her views, in this way, align with those of Mary Masombuka, who she looks up to. Mary Masombuka, is a highly influential character in the film: she helps the students realise that they have a part in history. She encourages them to look for themselves in history, to be able to plot the trajectories of their futures. Even her imprisonment and death motivate the students to take some sort of action. She encourages the students to question everything that they have been taught. She even encourages the students to question traditional gender roles. When Sarafina proposes a musical about Mandela being freed and asks to play the role, instead of rejecting the idea, Mary embraces it and encourages it. She does not want the students to limit their thinking about themselves and what they can do. In this way, Sarafina! is brilliantly intersectional in that it is able to touch on topics of race, power and gender at the same time. That the narrator of the story of the Soweto Riots is a young girl instead of a young boy, further serves to illustrate the feminist nature of the film. Sarafina! and other films of a similar bent, films that portray historical revolutions, especially revolutions carried out by People of Colour, often tackle several issues at once. The intersectional

nature of revolution should not be ignored, as oppression does not work alone a single plane, but along several axes. Persons who benefit from one from of oppression often utilise other forms of oppression to further their domination. It is for this reason that one should not separate struggles to further ones cause. The fight for ones oppression while oppressing others is a highly counterproductive and often destructive one. To quote Audre Lorde, There is no hierarchy of oppression. I cannot afford the luxury of fighting one form of oppression only. I cannot afford to believe that freedom from intolerance is the right of only one particular group. And I cannot afford to choose between the fronts upon which I must battle these forces of discrimination, .wherever they appear to destroy me. And when they appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to destroy you.

Works Cited

Lorde, Audre. "There is no hierarchy of oppressions." Bulletin: Homophobia and Education 14.3/4 (1983): 9.

Verwiebe, Roland. Social Institutions Encyclopedia of Quality of Life Research. Ed. Alex Michalos. Dordrecht: Springer. 2014.