Paper’s worth the read

A YEAR or two ago, I terminated my more than 20-year-old subscription to a morning newspaper and a national Sunday newspaper, but I am delighted I retained my subscription to your excellent, home-delivered Saturday Argus.

I am writing to commend your editors and journalists on regularly producing an informative, wellbalanced newspaper which doesn’t appear to have any particular political axe to grind, but usually reflects an objective approach to local, national and international news.

In your edition of February 4, the articles by Kashiefa Ajam, Nicky Willemse, Selena Victor, Henriette Geldenhuys and Sameer Naik – among a number of others – were absorbing. And Andrew Donaldson, William Saunderson-Meyer and Ryland Fisher are invariably controversially challenging – and satisfactorily so! However, in my opinion, it is Michael Morris whose articles are always totally engrossing.

His piece on the Jameson Raid and Rhodes, Harold Macmillan, and the impact of FW de Klerk’s speech in Parliament on February 2, 1990, was especially riveting.

Remembering that speech transported me back to my years as headmaster of the oldest independent school in this country, St George’s Grammar School, founded in 1848. With the exception of Catholic schools, St George’s had been the first “white” school to admit pupils other than white – in 1978. And in 1985, the Board of Governors resolved that acceptance of pupils would be on a truly non-racial basis.

Government demands on racial quotas would be ignored (and thereafter, I spent ages at the Department of Education attempting – eventually successfully – to persuade government, first, not to cancel our licence to operate as a school, and, second, to get them to restore our independent school’s subsidy, which they’d cancelled).

On the morning of February 2, 1990, I had a “free period” and rushed to my television at our home on campus, as we’d heard that De Klerk was going to make an important announcement in Parliament.

I sat there transfixed. FW, as Morris has described, announced the unbanning of the ANC and other illegal organisations, the imminent freeing of Nelson Mandela, and, in essence, the death of apartheid. Even now, I can remember the ultraconservatives of (Conservative Party leader Andries) Treurnicht’s group shouting “skande, skande” as they stormed out of Parliament.

My next lesson was teaching English to the matric class. I related to the multi-cultural group of pupils what had transpired. I stressed that for all of them, life outside school would change enormously. Expectantly, I waited for questions and excited comments, thinking that serious discussions would be forthcoming.

In the back row, a coloured boy (the school’s tennis champion who will remain nameless), tentatively raised his hand. “Please sir,” he asked, “does this mean that us coloureds will have to do two years’ army training in future like the white guys?”

Thus is one brought back to earth, to normality, to the reality of daily life.

Skande!