Let’s not strive for mediocrity
● I have a bittersweet memory of spending a few intense days judging youth with Eusebius McKaiser.
It was not what you may imagine — some kind of flared nostril “age before beauty” exercise in judgment. We sat on the panel to judge the Gauteng region’s most inspiring and gifted high-performing youth in a rigorous multistep process on the path to awarding the Rhodes Scholarship.
Eusebius himself was deeply committed and experienced in the process, having won what is considered one of the world’s most prestigious scholarships, to study whatever his heart and mind desired at Oxford University over two years.
South Africa sends nine scholars to Oxford annually. The kind of person who gets chosen is the complete package — academically excellent, socially conscious and driven to make a positive impact on the world. Eusebius was the real deal and so is advocate Ndumiso Luthuli, the national secretary of the South African Rhodes Scholarship.
He is not from “that” family, but to answer Shakespeare’s question — there is something to the name. He oozes the kind of inspiring leadership that promises change. It is something to do with his self-deprecating humour, or as he puts it “not drinking your own Kool-Aid”, something he learnt in his lifechanging days at Oxford.
As it happens he is drinking Coca-Cola and I have convinced him to order the outrageously good Parmesan chicken at the Corner Café in Craighall Park. I love this place — it gives great pavement! And it benefits from its proximity to Delta Park — making pre- or post-prandial walks a joyful possibility.
A hundred scholarships are awarded annually the world over. In the US, I am told, high-performing youths are professionally coached in the hopes of winning it. Some people consider being shortlisted a plus for their CV — enough said. Despite the freighted history that comes with the provenance of the funds, the long-term positive impact on scholarship and leadership the world over has been enormous. It is something Ndumiso is acutely aware of. But it is his own story that defines his thought process about the scholarship and what it means for South Africa.
Luthuli’s path, from Ndwedwe in rural KwaZulu-Natal via Inanda — an informal settlement where his mother, a domestic worker, had gone to seek work closer to the city — back to the village for high school to avoid the violence of the late ’80s and early ’90s, and on to the University of Natal for his LLB, is inspirational.
“I matriculated in ’93 and not much has changed in the village, or my high school. I call them holding pens because they’re not really schools. They just hold the children until they’re 18. And then they go on to be security guards and domestic workers.
“It was one of those typical rural schools. Not much happening. No running water, no electricity. We lost our maths teacher in grade nine. And so I didn’t do maths at high school. No-one was really expected to do anything significant beyond being maybe a teacher or a policeman.”
I ask him if it was luck or determination that forged his path. “It’s actually all of the above. I remember growing up as a young kid, my family situation, my circumstances, and I instinctively knew I did not belong. I didn’t know where I belonged. But it wasn’t there. I was going to get out. I had no idea how. I was sure in my mind that I was going to get out of that situation, and I would help my family to get out.
“And so there was that steely determination, unstructured and unguided. And then you combine that with an element of luck, because we still had disciplinarians who taught in that school. We still had people who, in those circumstances, did their best.
“We had teachers who used to take a twohour bus trip to come to school, and the bus would sometimes stop kilometres away and the simplest thing to do would be to actually turn around with the bus and go back, but they literally got off the bus and walked the rest of the distance to get to the school.
“So you lie awake at night and say, OK, I don’t want to disappoint these people who were actually walking in the rain, in the mud to get to school so that I can have a fighting chance. So you sort of try to give something back to them.”
What does he say should be done for the education system today? “It is infuriating, infuriating! I think there are certain basic things that we can do that will get us quite far. It is infuriating that the colonial and then after that the apartheid model was centred on under-educating the black child, so that you could force these people to actually go and sell their cheap labour.
“You would have thought that education is the one thing, even if we fail at anything else, which we cannot afford to fail at. Let us invest, even if the country has to borrow, let us invest in our future. We must educate our children so they can be globally competitive. We can pay the teachers better, we can invest in training the teachers better, we can invest in trying to make the conditions under which our teachers teach and our children learn better. This is a no-brainer.
“And so when you look at the educational space, for me, there’re certain things that you look at. South Africa used to follow the Cambridge system. Most of the countries in the region continued [with it]. And whether we like it or not, they’ve had better results than us. You say, therefore, it’s a no-brainer to say we can’t go it alone in the region.
“So society is broken. The family structure is broken. To leapfrog, perhaps we need to have more boarding schools, where we can take kids and at least put them in these facilities where you have a structured environment, where you can hopefully for the next two generations or so make a difference. We need to break the cycle of this thing. For me it’s education, education and education.”
He is hard-pressed to stay positive. “We have shot ourselves in the foot. As a country, it seems as if we adopted as a policy that we will nurture mediocrity no matter what. I sit in those Rhodes Scholarship interviews and I’m inspired by what I see. But what always hits me hard is how many people are we missing? How many people are we leaving behind? So many people don’t even get a fighting chance. You can’t fix it at that level.
“If you ask anybody, everybody knows what the building blocks are. Early childhood development, that’s where we start. And then we move on to primary school education. And then we move on to high school education. Everybody knows what the building blocks look like. Why are we not building that house?”
Everybody knows what the building blocks look like. Why are we not building that house?