Legacies of Forced Removals in South Africa: Accounting for Children’s Reflections of Displacement in the Western Cape

This book contributes to an international literature on childhood by providing a variety of lenses through which we can further explore children’s reflections about the worlds they inhabit. Through documentation of the reflections of life in a temporary relocation camp of six children, the research findings show the slippages in descriptions and categories of children and childhood that are further impacted by the violent over-determining histories and current structures of their parents’ experiences under apartheid’s divisive laws. In this way, the book offers testament to the lasting impact apartheid has left on South Africa’s children. The stories explored are thematically organised according to a creative methodology implanted as part of the data gathering design. Through careful analysis of the participatory model chosen, insights into the constructions of children and childhood has been essential in generating research and policy strategies that have positioned children as agential members of society, interacting and reconstructing sociocultural and political locations. The stories of these six children offer testament to a fluidity of identifications and responsibilities that criss-cross notions of what it is to be a child, youth or adult in sites of frequent forced mobility.