Abstract
Since the democratic transition of 1994, South Africa has pursued far-reaching reform of its educational system, guided by a body of legislation committed to equity and inclusion. The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (1996), the South African Schools Act (1996), and White Paper 6 on inclusive education (Department of Education 2001) articulate a vision of schooling that is accessible and affirming for all learners. However, in practice, the distance between what these policies promise and what unfolds in classrooms remains troubling – nowhere more so than for the marginalised and indigenous communities of South Africa. Among these, the San peoples of the Northern Cape occupy a distinctive position: groups such as the !Xun and Khwe, who live predominantly in Platfontein on the outskirts of Kimberley, are the inheritors of one of the most ancient cultural traditions on the continent, yet their knowledge systems, identities, and daily realities are conspicuously absent from the formal school curriculum. This study explores the extent to which San cultural elements are present in the characters, settings, and themes of the Grade 12 Afrikaans Home Language prescribed novel Onderwêreld by Fanie Viljoen (2008), a novel widely used in schools in the Northern Cape, including Bamba Combined School in Platfontein where many San learners are enrolled.
The study responds to several pressing and deeply interconnected educational concerns: curricular inclusivity, the position of Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) within formal schooling, and the need for teaching and learning practices that are sensitive to cultural differences. At the heart of these concerns lies a fundamental right: the right of indigenous learners to be educated in ways that honour, rather than erase, their cultural heritage. For San learners at Platfontein, the challenge is compounded by a double form of estrangement. Their home languages are !Xun and Khwe, with Setswana occupying a secondary position; Afrikaans, the exclusive medium of instruction, is the mother tongue of only 12 percent of San students at the school. The prescribed literature portrays a social world that bears little resemblance to their lived experience. The consequences of this double alienation are stark: dropout rates among San learners are as high as 70 percent, with the majority failing to complete Grade 12.
The theoretical foundation of the study is Lev Vygotsky’s social constructivism. For Vygotsky, knowledge is not constructed in isolation; it is fundamentally a social and cultural process. Central to his framework is the concept of the zone of proximal development – the space in which meaningful learning occurs when learners are supported in connecting new ideas to what they already know, culturally, linguistically, and experientially. When learners are asked to engage with texts that are entirely foreign to their world, this connective bridge collapses and learning becomes difficult to sustain. Complementing this theoretical lens, the study draws on the Indigenous Knowledge Systems framework as a secondary critical perspective. This framework proceeds from the understanding that indigenous knowledge is inherently holistic, context-dependent, and relational – and that formal education systems, typically shaped by Western epistemological assumptions, have tended to marginalise or disregard it.
The study adopts a qualitative research design, with document analysis as its primary method. The main text, Onderwêreld, and the accompanying official Mind the gap study guide (Department of Basic Education 2016) were subjected to systematic content analysis. Various policy documents were also examined: the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement for Afrikaans Home Language (Grades 10–12), White Paper 6, the Constitution, and the Declaration of the United Nations on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007). An analytical framework was developed from a substantial body of ethnographic and academic literature on San culture, drawing on categories derived from well-documented San cultural elements: the nomadic way of life; click-sound languages, specifically !Xun and Khwe; trance dancing and related spiritual practices; egalitarian social organisation; communal decision-making; rock art traditions; and distinctive relationships with land and death. These categories guided a close, systematic reading of how, or whether, such elements appear in the characters, settings, and themes of the novel. Throughout the research process, reflexivity was carefully maintained; the researchers acknowledge that they are not themselves members of the San community, and they call for future research to involve community members directly.
The findings are unambiguous: San cultural elements are systematically and comprehensively absent from Onderwêreld. The novel is embedded in a social world that is overwhelmingly Western, urban, and economically privileged – one that is remote from the realities San learners inhabit. The protagonist, Greg Owen, is a teenage boy at an elite private school in Johannesburg whose inner life revolves around academic competition, social standing, and the demanding expectations of an achievement-oriented father. These are values that stand in sharp contrast to San principles of egalitarianism, communal approaches to child-rearing, and the active discouragement of competitive behaviour within the group. No characters in the novel speak click languages; there is no trace of traditional ecological knowledge or the use of medicinal plants; no spiritual practices, such as the trance dance, appear; and no egalitarian or communal social arrangements are depicted. The settings – suburban Johannesburg, a well-appointed private school, and the Drakensberg Mountains as a recreational destination for the privileged – are entirely removed from the San learner’s frame of reference. This last point carries particular weight: the Drakensberg is home to one of the world’s most significant collections of San rock art, comprising more than 35 000 individual paintings and recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The novel does not refer to this heritage. The themes of the novel, centred on individual identity, competitive achievement, cybercrime, and Western notions of loss and mourning, contrast sharply with San cultural values of communal decision-making, reciprocity, non-competition, and spiritually inflected relationships with the natural world.
The analysis of the Mind the gap study guide reveals that it deepens, rather than alleviates, the cultural exclusion embedded in the novel itself. The guide treats the world of Onderwêreld as if it were self-evidently universal, offering no contextual scaffolding for learners who may be encountering this social milieu for the first time, no acknowledgement that the setting of the novel may be profoundly unfamiliar to learners from different backgrounds, and no invitation for San learners to draw on their own cultural knowledge as an interpretive resource. In this way, the study guide compounds the epistemological exclusion enacted by the novel itself. The study draws on Rudine Sims Bishop’s (1990) well-known metaphor of books as “mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors” to argue that, for San learners, the current curricular arrangement functions exclusively as a window and always as a window framed by Western assumptions – never as a mirror. The research literature is consistent: learners whose experiences, languages, and cultures are reflected in the texts they study tend to develop stronger academic identities and greater motivation. The absence of this reflective dimension is therefore not merely a representational shortcoming; it constitutes a tangible obstacle to academic success.
In response to these findings, the study presents a range of concrete pedagogical strategies that classroom teachers can draw on to bridge the cultural distance between the novel and the lives of San learners. These include pre-reading activities designed to orientate learners culturally; comparative cultural analysis tasks that invite learners to consider the world of the novel alongside their own; multimodal response options that create space for San visual and narrative traditions; critical literacy approaches that encourage learners to interrogate whose voices and experiences a text makes visible and whose it silences; and community engagement, including inviting San knowledge holders into the classroom. The study also highlights the urgent need for teacher education programmes to incorporate dedicated modules on Indigenous Knowledge Systems, the history and contemporary circumstances of San communities, culturally responsive pedagogy, and strategies to support multilingual learners whose home language differs from the medium of instruction. In schools such as the Bamba Combined School, where some members of staff are themselves San, there is a distinctively valuable pedagogical resource that deserves active support and sustained research attention.
The article is careful to situate its critique appropriately. Onderwêreld is recognised as an award-winning and aesthetically sophisticated literary work; the concern raised is not with the novel’s literary merit but with the assumptions embedded in curricular selection and the absence of broader cultural diversity in the prescribed text list. The study does not advocate for the removal of Onderwêreld from the curriculum, but calls for curriculum developers to approach the selection of prescribed texts with greater intentionality regarding cultural inclusivity, ensuring that the full range of South Africa’s cultural heritage, including indigenous perspectives, is represented. The study concludes that, for truly inclusive education, learners of all backgrounds – San learners included – must be able to see themselves reflected in the texts they study, and that their knowledge, values, experiences, and perspectives must be recognised as integral and valuable contributions to the educational environment, rather than as absent or invisible. The tension between the ideal of inclusive education, as expressed in South African policy, and the reality of a curriculum that remains largely Western-centred calls for urgent and sustained attention from curriculum developers, teachers, teacher educators, and policymakers alike.
Keywords: curricular inclusivity; inclusive education; Indigenous Knowledge Systems; literary teaching; Onderwêreld; San culture
- This article’s featured image was created by Alexandr Ivanov and obtained from Pexels.
Lees die volledige artikel in Afrikaans
San- kulturele elemente in Onderwêreld: ’n ondersoek na kurrikulêre inklusiwiteit