Beyond the Chalkboard: A historical inquiry into the naming of schools in the Dukuduku area, KwaZulu Natal, South Africa
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20214260Keywords:
Dukuduku forest, dispossession, heritage, identity, resistance, namingAbstract
Naming is a significant social and cultural practice through which communities articulate identity, memory and power. Names are far from being neutral labels. They encode historical experiences, political struggles and collective aspirations of families, groups or communities. What drew me to this study is the particular history of Dukuduku, a place where schooling emerged not from state provision but from communities fighting to remain on their land. This article examines what the names of those schools reveal about that history and the symbolic work that naming performs in a community shaped by forced removals, land dispossession and sustained resistance. It uses a qualitative interpretive-historical approach and draws on secondary historical literature, place-based analysis and oral historical knowledge derived from the author’s long-term involvement with the Dukuduku community to interpret and analyse the meanings embedded in school names. The analysis foregrounds naming as a political and cultural practice by colonial and apartheid legacies, post-apartheid negotiations and local assertions of identity. What emerges from the analysis is the striking contrast between two naming worlds. Schools rooted in the forest carry names born from struggle, resistance and local leadership. Those built in Khula village, the resettlement area, speak a different symbolic language, one of light, progress and nature, reflecting the ideological work of conservation and relocation discourses. These schools do not simply provide education, they have become spaces where history is inscribed, contested and transmitted across generations. This article speaks to ongoing conversations in post-apartheid South Africa about decolonisation, memory and education justice. I argue that school names in Dukuduku are not administrative trivialities. They are living historical documents authored not by the state but by the people themselves and deserve recognition as such.
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