Abstract
The pedagogical documentations or narratives about the ‘phenomenon’ of children in the preschool and park are entangled with the complexities and challenges relating to equitable early childhood education provision in South Africa and to the availability of adequate play spaces for children in the blighted urban landscapes of Johannesburg. Multiple stories connect materially through space and time through a series of events that occur on a day in September in an urban park. The author’s own ‘becoming’ as learner-with-the-park, researcher and writer draws her to become witness to the violent pasts that are folded into the present and into the spaces of the city. This diffraction-as-method makes visible the on-going reverberations and fault lines of colonialism and apartheid in the social, spatial and economic formations affecting children today.
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Notes
- 1.
The trekboere were farmers of predominantly Dutch descent who migrated away from British control that had been imposed on the Cape by the end of the eighteenth century.
- 2.
Bob Gosani’s photograph shows the courtyard of the Number four prison which is part of the old fort complex in Braamfontein. Initially a Boer fort, it became a British and then an Apartheid prison. The photo was taken in 1954 during a Drum magazine photoshoot on the roof of an adjacent building. The shoot was set up ostensibly to photograph the Johannesburg skyline, but actually for the purpose of gaining access to a view prison yard. The Drum team’s cunning ruse involved a white secretary posing as photographer and distracting the building’s caretaker while Gosani did his work (Sampson, cited in Gillespie 2015).
- 3.
Kyoko Hayashi (2010) From trinity to trinity, Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press.
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Giorza, T.M. (2021). B(e)aring Wit(h)ness. In: Learning with Damaged Colonial Places. Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1421-7_7
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