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Education for Refugees in Durban, South Africa: The Challenges of Inclusion

Joanne Hunter, Forced Migration Studies Program, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
mollyohardy@mail.utexas.edu

Since the democratic elections of 1994, the simplified profile of South Africa has been transformed from being a “refugee producing” country into a “refugee receiving” country. Despite changes in Refugee Acts and attempts to streamline and change the language of the government towards refugees, xenophobia remains a major problem. More than half of South Africans in Johannesburg consider non-South Africans as the root cause of the city’s high crime rate. At the same time, South Africa struggles with the challenges of educating South Africans in the aftermath of apartheid’s unequal policies. In attempting to include all South Africans, a sense of non-racial non-ethnic national identity has been put forward in the spirit of a new egalitarian human rights approach. However, this struggle does not bring non-South Africans into the fold. My research asks, how do teacher’s include or exclude non-South Africans, and how does this exclusion impact non-South African learners and, in turn, reflect back on South African ideology?