Interestingly, and by contrast, another tutor who went to school in neighbouring Lesotho at the same time noted that there, ‘issues of race and gender were silenced. It was academic knowledge based on curriculum which lacked relevance to the lives of the learners… learning in school seemed like a fiction’. The same tutor remarked that he saw little teaching of controversial issues when he supervised teaching practice in schools, either by the student teachers or by teach- ers themselves, a point reinforced by other tutors. One factor in this was, he suggested, that the students themselves had not experienced the discussion of controversial issues in their own schooling