Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Pupils of distinction defy the odds to come out ahead
MANY kids from poor homes drop out of school, but Weekend Argus met some inspiring youngsters who, despite facing many challenges, stayed in the classroom, convinced education was their best chance of changing their lives.
Eighteen-year-old Songezo Kenene from Makhaza in Khayelitsha recently passed matric at the Centre of Science and Technology with six distinctions. He is the secondlast of six siblings and the first in his family to reach matric.
“None of my older siblings finished school because after they failed Grade 10 a couple of times, they realised they could no longer continue and had to try find work, but they are struggling with that, too.” But Kenene has high hopes for the future, having been accepted by UCT to study actuarial science.
Sitting on his threequarter bed in a two-room shack at Kanana informal settlement near Gugulethu, Anele Siyotula outlined the difficulties of living in an informal settlement where mob justice is rife and drug and alcohol abuse high.
He also had to contend with bullying and gangsterism during his first few years at Heideveld Secondary High.
He lives next door to a shebeen which plays loud music until the early hours of the morning. “I ended up using the beats to help me remember the material I had studied,” Siyotula said.
Having grown up with an absentee father who “came in and out of our lives”, Siyotula said the bad situations he’d experienced had helped him to “focus more and realise that the world does not owe me anything despite the gang violence around my school, as well as the bullying at school”.
“”I want to study and hopefully one day open my own black-owned asset management firm,” he said. This year he is beginning to study towards a BCom degree, majoring in accounting, at UCT.
Rose Mazwembe, 19, has for the past six years cared for her three younger siblings in the absence of her parents. The former Siphamandla High School pupil passed matric with four distinctions and said she could not wait to begin her audiology classes at UCT.
“I want a profession in the field because it is not something common in our communities and I want to show my peers that there is more to life than your circumstances,” she said.