A quarter of a century ago, in 1995, the year following the end of apartheid, I undertook a lecture tour of the Republic of South Africa with my friend and colleague Dave Hill. I was particularly keen to go, because I had been told by a South African friend and fellow academic that my work on antiracism had been smuggled into the country during the apartheid era. One of the many highlights of the trip was, quite by chance, bumping into a young black student. He was sitting on the floor of the university library reading one of my edited collections, Education for Equality: some guidelines for good practice (Routledge, 1990), prompting a brief informal tutorial for his forthcoming essay.

Being asked to review Mark Hunter's book, therefore, is most welcome. It has given me the chance to compare my anecdotal impressions, subsequently published in the Times Higher Education Supplement (<https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/dons-diary/94356.article>) with Hunter's much greater depth of knowledge about that unique country that I only ever visited that one time. He has provided a fascinating and detailed account of the relationship between ‘race’, class, gender and education in South Africa, both historically and in the present, from which I have learned a lot. I would like to take the opportunity to ask Mark seven questions based on what I saw and heard while I was in South Africa.

Dave and I gave a talk at Soweto College of Education on politics and education in Britain and its relevance to the new South Africa. In the ensuing discussion, those students who spoke unanimously expressed the need to overthrow the capitalist economy as a starting point for a new teacher education system. As a socialist, my first question is: how prevalent would such a view be in South Africa today? Second, is there a mood for socialism in the country any more? If so, where is it coming from? I got to know a young unemployed man from the township of Khayelitsha, who was selling shoelaces in the Waterfront area of Cape Town. He was as well versed in Marxist theory as I was at the time, and he invited me to the township where I bought beers for the locals, and where I was asked for my views on Marx's Grundrisse. Third, therefore, where would he have acquired his extensive knowledge of Marx (he had read Volumes 1–3 of Capital in addition to the Grundrisse)? I was told that I was the only white person to have ever visited the shebeen. My fourth question is: would this still be likely to be the case?

My aforementioned visit to Soweto College of Education was arranged by Sharanjeet Shan, who, with Dave Hill and me, edited Promoting Equality in Primary Schools (Cassell, 1997). The contributors to this book analysed issues of ‘race’ and racism; sexuality; gender; disability and special needs; and social class in primary teacher education and in Key Stages 1 and 2 of the National Curriculum of the time. I don't recall having read a discussion of incorporating these issues in teacher education or in the school curriculum of South Africa in Mark Hunter's book. Doing this has great potential to stem the growth of racism, homophobia and transphobia, as well as sexism and misogyny, and of disablism, all of which are, of course, prominent features of fascism. My fifth and sixth questions, therefore are as follows: has any of this occurred since the end of apartheid? And what are your views on having these issues central to the education system?

I attended seven venues on my tour. In addition to politics and education, we discussed teacher education; ‘race’, social class, gender and sexuality; disability/special needs in primary schooling and in primary teacher education; and ‘liberalism, Marxism and postmodernism’, all from a socialist perspective. The talks all went down well with black people in the audiences, but the whites were far more cynical. The fact that I had spent most of the trip with black revolutionary socialists considerably helped me cope with the scepticism. So my seventh and final question takes us back to the essence of my first about the appetite for structural change. I am currently writing a paper for a conference in China entitled ‘Climate change and the end of Planet Earth?: Public pedagogies, the fourth industrial revolution and the case for ecosocialism’. What resonance would this have in South Africa, as we hurtle into the third decade of both the twenty-first century and post-apartheid?

In these times of increasing political polarization, the normalization of racism and the terrifying resurgence of fascism, I believe that my questions take on a highly significant degree of urgency.