Challenging university complicity and majoritarian narratives: counter-storytelling from black working-class students

Low completion rates amongst students from Black working-class backgrounds remain a persistent challenge to post-apartheid university transformation in South Africa. Notions of universities as colour-blind, meritocratic, and post-racial have developed around a deficit and victim-blaming majoritarian narrative that individualises educational under-achievement, blaming victims and downplaying the complicity of universities in reproducing inequity. This article analyses the narratives of a group of Black working-class students, and academics on their in-depth experiences of educational success and failure in post-apartheid South African universities. Counter-storytelling is employed to foreground and promote the voice and lived experiences of those who often go unheard; and to highlight their narratives as valuable and critical in understanding persistent inequity in higher education. This article looks beyond the fixation on what students from marginalised communities are perceived to lack to reassert a place for institutional context in studying their experiences, to minimise the de-contextualisation of such experiences; and to illuminate areas of universities’ complicity in reproducing untenable educational experiences and outcomes for those already in the margins. Participants’ counter-stories are presented to deepen our understanding and theorisation of Black working-class students’ lived experiences in a manner that enriches the work of researchers, policy makers and practitioners.