Need a conversation about transformation in schools
“DON’T panic” is etched onto the cover of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (the fictional guide in Douglas Adam’s tale about navigating life, the universe and everything) and it remains the best one-line adage for surviving our modern world with our sanity intact.
The South African edition, however, would add the line, “hang on to your false teeth; it’s going to be a bumpy ride”.
We’re 24 years into our democracy, and while we take hope in the change of leadership and the sudden bounty of commissions tracking Range Rovers masquerading as dairy equipment, our smart phone screens are still awash with panic alerts of our imminent demise.
We struggle to see past colour – we confuse our red flags with our red herrings. All we see is red.
On the first day of the school year, standing outside the Afrikaans Hoërskool Overvaal, with tyres burning and SAPS hippos (riot control vehicles) as backdrop, ANN7 reporter Valerie Robinson goes live to interview Cosas treasurer General Bethuel Zunguza about the protest.
After sounding off on various issues, Zunguza goes for broke, “Everywhere where we meet a white person we going to moer him, this is our country, they must run”.
Robinson doesn’t run. Instead she calmly thanks him for his input and resumes her live coverage.
A little later, as she’s commenting about police not doing anything, the public order police (Pops) in the background can be seen getting into formation with their shotguns raised.
A volley of rubber bullets follows, Robinson ducks out of camera in surprise and chaos erupts.
Images abound of people running for cover, hiding under cars, police giving chase, two people bleeding from rubber bullet injuries and Zunguza being bundled into a hippo.
He is one of the 11 people subsequently arrested.
The Cosas treasurer’s claim to YouTube fame is further enhanced by scenes of him leading a toyi-toyi on the same day chanting the repeat loop of “White man, you must die, shoot to kill, voetsek white man”.
It goes viral – those who argue blacks hate whites have their red flag moment – if you rate ANN7 news and Cosas-in-the-moment as representative.
It’s the stuff live television (and social media) lives for and the honey pot for every bear in the wood: EFF, Cosas, Sadtu and Afriforum all see red flags.
The SA Human Rights Commission rushes to the scene, the SA Council of Churches comes to mediate and pray.
Finally, Education Minister Angie Motshekga (after initially thinking it would all settle down) arrives and takes charge.
Stressing that children’s access to education should not be interfered with and that those who were unhappy about the ruling could approach the courts, she punches straight: “They [pupils] are not involved in adult matters. There should be no violence, nor singing in front of the schools.
“So we are appealing to everybody to say there is a process that is quite clear . . . They must not bring the battle to the school.” Cosas is quick with its response. Its greater Johannesburg regional chairperson, Penual Maduna, is emphatic: “We don’t condone violence or racism at all. The treasurer-general . . . was out of order to call for all white people to be attacked, and we are going to take him to a disciplinary hearing and action will be taken against those remarks.”
But, he added, “we cannot have a school that only uses Afrikaans while there are no schools with African languages”. Is Afrikaans perhaps the real red flag? Hoërskool Overvaal is an Afrikaans single-medium (previously Model C) fee-paying school within the Sedibeng East school district (Vereeniging).
There are six schools within the district – three English, one dual (both languages) and two Afrikaans-only schools (Overvaal being one).
All of the schools are within 6km to 8km of Overvaal.
Two days prior to the protests, the school had succeeded in its urgent application to the High Court (Gauteng Division) to prevent the Department of Education from placing 55 English-speaking pupils in the school.
The school successfully convinced Judge Bill Prinsloo that the department hadn’t followed procedure and had tried to bully it into taking pupils that the school did not have the capacity, nor the capability, to deal with.
The district – in its written submission to the High Court – doesn’t believe the capacity claim.
It sees it through a similar lens to Cosas: “It is unbelievable and/or unfortunate that even until today . . . we still have a society that sees nothing wrong with a language that was used as a tool of segregation and discrimination during apartheid . . ; a language whose legacy is sorrow and tears to the majority of whom it was not their mother tongue. Today . . . we still fight the same separatist language exacerbated by denial of transformation by certain sectors of society.”
Of the 23 719 public schools in South Africa, only 1 279 are Afrikaans single medium.
Afrikaans (as a home language) is spoken by about 6.8 million South Africans (isiZulu 11.6 million and isiXhosa 8.2 million), of which 3.4 million are coloured people, 2.7 million whites and 600 000 blacks.
English is only spoken by around 4.9 million people as a home language, but it is the language of choice for schools.
Given its colonial past, why is English not the bugbear? Why not go with isiZulu?
Because, despite the advantage of schooling in a home language, the economics of publishing textbooks and materials, training teachers and preparing pupils for the global village means pragmatism trumps pride.
Perhaps the red flag worthy of our collective energy is this: the Overvaal staff (from its website) is entirely white.
Of this year’s intake of 142 new children, only eight are black.
The school achieves close to a 100% pass rate.
What is transformation and how do we measure it? Is transformation only about ratios?
Or is transformation about attitude and the quality of the learning environment?
In a set-up whereby some schools do very well and some fail dismally, every single parent will do his or her utmost to ensure his or her child receives the best education he or she can afford and support. Can you blame the parents who want access for their children or the parents who want to protect what they have?
It’s a bumpy ride. We shouldn’t panic, but to survive the landing we need to look past the anger and reject the dressed-for-YouTube entertainment that masquerades as protest (on both sides of the riot fence) but delivers no solutions. And we need to talk. What does a transformed school look like and what does it practically take to make it happen?