Showing how youth from one of the poorest and most violent neighborhoods in Cape Town, South Africa, learn differently in three educational contexts- in classrooms, in a community hip hop crew, on a youth radio show-this book illuminates how South African schools, like schools elsewhere, subtly reproduce inequalities by sorting students into social hierarchies linked to assessments of their use of language. Highlighting the voices and perspectives of young South Africans, it explores how language is linked to cultural mixing which occurred during colonialism and slavery and continues through patterns of global mobility, and how language and learning are bound to space and place.