Mediating Active Citizenship and Social Mobility in Working-Class Schools: The Case of Equal Education in Khayelitsha, Cape Town

Abstract

Although the Equal Education (EE) social movement is focused on improving public education in South Africa, it is part of a much wider network of community-based organisations in Khayelitsha that are concerned with active citizenship issues relating to health (especially HIV/AIDS), sanitation and human rights awareness and litigation. The long-term objective of these partner organisations is to develop youth leaders that will drive the formation of a national rights-based, working class-focused, social movement in townships throughout South Africa. These organisations have emerged over the past decade, beginning with the formation of the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), an organisation established in 1998 to fight for HIV treatment (see Robins 2008). The mode of mobilisation of the partner organisations strongly reflects the influence of TAC’s highly effective brand of AIDS activism. In fact, a number of the key activists in EE, and those in the Social Justice Coalition (SJC), honed their activist skills with the TAC.