Ashraf Jamal, Xolela Mangcu, Hlonipha Mokoena and Crain Soudien debate race in post-apartheid SA.

A Critique of Crain Soudien’s Realising the Dream: Unlearning the Logic of Race in the South African School

by Mbali Baduza, 2012

Crain Soudien’s “Realising the Dream: Unlearning the logic of race in the South African school” is a book whose publishing could not be more relevant to the current South African reality. He poses a question that is not uniquely modern, but a question that has been faced throughout the centuries: “what kind of human beings do we wish to be?” (Soudien, 2012: 2-3).  Although, a seemingly simple question at first, when we take seriously the factors and implications which confront it, it becomes a question pregnant with meaning. This is because, I argue, it calls into question what we mean by being human. Soudien says and I quote at length (2012: 2):

“What it means to be a human being – to have the choice to exercise the full panoply of one’s rights and, critically, to accord that choice to others, or, to put it more starkly, the right to full recognition and the unspeakably difficult task of gifting that right to others – is a question that arises in South Africa with an immediacy and complexity rarely found in modern history. The question is simultaneously philosophical, economic, political, sociological and, in elaboration of the latter, ontological and practical in its nature.”