Afrikaans schools: friendship and fury
Principal ‘feels good’ about opening up her classes to other languages
● While Hoërskool Overvaal in Vereeniging refuses to admit 55 black English-speaking pupils, many other Afrikaans schools have become multilingual.
Among the most recent to do so are Hoërskool Jan Viljoen and Hoërskool Riebeeckrand in Randfontein on the Gauteng West Rand. Both will each admit up to 105 English-speaking Grade 8 pupils this year.
Education department officials approached the two schools in November because the only English-medium high school in Randfontein was bursting at the seams.
By Thursday, 67 English-speaking pupils had enrolled at Riebeeckrand and 77 at Jan Viljoen.
Hoërskool Riebeeckrand principal Annelize van den Berg said: “I think it’s the correct decision that we’ve made and I feel good about it. Nobody came to me to say: ‘We don’t like it; we don’t want it.’
“The teachers and other learners are very positive. I am really experiencing a good feeling among the teachers about this.”
New Grade 8 Busisiwe Mabona, 13, said she was excited to be at the school.
“The people are friendly and it’s a nice school. I have a lot of white friends.”
The department delivered 175 tables and chairs to the two schools to accommodate the new pupils. Two additional teacher posts were also created at each school.
Gauteng education MEC Panyaza Lesufi said it “demonstrates the power to persuade rather than impose”.
Basic education director-general Mathanzima Mweli said many Afrikaans-medium schools were now English.
“The progress we have made is phenomenal. Many of them on their own volition have opted to open up and integrate their schools and have done an excellent job. I was pleasantly surprised to see former Afrikaans schools with state-of-the-art infrastructure in the Free State that have now become completely English-medium schools.”
Jaco Deacon, deputy chief executive of the Federation of Governing Bodies of South African Schools, said politicians were turning the Hoërskool Overvaal issue into “a race issue, or even a language issue, while the real problem was capacity, not only at Overvaal but in the whole of Gauteng”.
He did not believe that Hoërskool Overvaal was deliberately trying to keep black pupils out. He said that on December 5, the school had a waiting list of 142 Afrikaansspeaking and 19 English-speaking pupils.
“They are turning children away because they don’t have space. If you don’t build enough schools and create capacity, you will see a repeat of this.
“Race is no longer an issue. It’s a choice of the parent and the learner to be educated in either an Afrikaans, Tswana or English school.
“Out of the 2 000 public schools in Gauteng, only 135 are still single-medium Afrikaans schools and those schools are really full to capacity.”
Fanie Botes, principal of Hoërskool Erasmus in Bronkhorstspruit, about 50km east of Pretoria, said most lessons in grades 10 to 12 were in English and Afrikaans.
Thandiwe Magongwe, 17, a Grade 12 pupil at the school, said she preferred studying all her subjects in Afrikaans because she had been in an Afrikaans-medium school since Grade 1.
“I believe we have to be bilingual. We have to know other people’s cultures and language. You can’t just stay in your own language. It [Afrikaans] is actually quite easier for me to study than English. I find English to be quite complicated.”
Her father, Adolphus Magongwe, 46, said he was “very happy” with the standard of education his daughter was receiving.
“Afrikaans is one of the official languages and she has no problem studying in Afrikaans. When she goes to school, she concentrates on her studies.”
Lesufi said he was not frustrated by the recent High Court case involving Hoërskool Overvaal when the court ruled that the Gauteng education department had issued an illegal instruction by ordering the school to accept English-speaking pupils.
“That’s how democracy works. You present your view and others are also allowed to present theirs. Your view may succeed or fail.”
The department is appealing the judgment.