HomeKhanya Winter School: 25 Years of Movement Building

Khanya Winter School: 25 Years of Movement Building

Introduction

This year Khanya College celebrates 25 years of its Annual Winter School for Activists, a small but significant moment of movement building in the struggles of social movements for an egalitarian society in South Africa; and the dynamic relationship between Khanya College and the movements. This also provides insight into changes and impact within the working class under the government’s neoliberal programme. After 30 years of democracy, South Africa is still the most unequal society in the world.

Since 1986, and throughout its history, Khanya College has committed to build solidarity within the working class, to strengthen citizenship and social justice through Education for Liberation. Khanya is committed to remake the world peacefully and all the College’s programmes strive to create readers and writers, empower through skills development, organise and build organisations and effect feminist social change.

Khanya’s Strategic Perspectives

The past 25 years have been a learning curve for Khanya College’s movement-building theory and strategies, and these were summed up in the All College Conference in 2014. The ACC is a consultative meeting with constituencies to map out strategic perspectives for the College for the next five years. The Findings of the ACC 2014 meeting were particularly significant in summing up a cycle of struggle running from the 1970s and that this has now come to an end. The ACC identified the historic period as the making of a new cycle of struggle and the need for a new cadre. These perspectives are contained in Khanya College’s Strategic Perspectives …

3 Moments of Social Change

Since 2014 and Khanya’s All College Conference, Khanya’s movement building has been influenced by the college’s Strategic perspectives, and the need for a new cycle of struggle and a new cadre. Khanya believes that a new generation of activists and leaders will need to take forward the social justice struggle. Khanya’s role, and the role of progressives, is to assist in the transfer of knowledge, organizing and organizational skills and memory and continuity for a new generation.

The Strategic Perspectives of the ACC (2014) have informed all Khanya’s Winter Schools since then and all it’s programme work. In January 2022 the Khanya Board of Trustees confirmed Strategic Perspectives for the next five years.

The Strategic Perspectives can be summed up as 3 coterminous moments necessary for progressive social change. These are:

  1. A social class needs to be organized and mobilized;

  2. There is a need for a common understanding, theory and analysis, of the common sources of the problems and how to resolve these challenges; and

  3. The need for continuity and memory of past struggles, to inform the current struggles, to draw on the lessons of the past and to build on these and

Aims of the Winter School

Popular Education Methodologies

Participants at the Winter Schools

Women and Feminism

A More Concentrated School

Key Struggles That Shaped the Winter School

Resources for Movements

Communities Rescue the Winter School (2010-2017)

We Are All Marikana!

The Social Movements Indaba (SMI)

Winter Schools Over The Years