Babalwa Dikeni
Response to The price of admission to ‘white schools’ too high for black kids
Lwando Xaso has touched a nerve that will unsettle those steeped in the arrogance of aeons of white-settler advantage. Those who refuse to accept that they are part of a small elite pale-face minority in a majority black country will froth and fume, insisting that any black learner who enters the toxic fields, halls and gardens of white privilege needs to yield to the superiority of European culture and European traditions and just live with it.
It is for this very reason that I will not inflict a private school education on my children ever again.
I realised that I was imposing my false idea of a better education on my son by sending him to a private school, which hired only white teachers who turned a blind eye to a culture of bullying and intolerance of difference. They were happy to take black money, but not to teach a black language.
It is time for us black people to stop aspiring to the trappings of whiteness as if everything white is superior to everything black. It is this inferiority complex that lies at the root of a whole host of our problems, including corruption to feed the huge gaping hole in our souls that says we are nothing if we do not have all the cars, bling and big houses that we think make white people better than us.
Lwando said exactly what is wrong with our aspirations as black people when she wrote: “We attend these schools hoping they will take us as far as white people.” This is our biggest folly. There is nothing that white people have as human beings that is better than what we black people have. Nothing.
We do not need to scrimp and scrape, own, buy or steal our way to a seat at the human table. We are there already and have been there for centuries. Look at the ancient civilisations of Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe, Egypt and Timbuktu.
There are many government schools run by skilled and inspiring teachers from all cultural backgrounds, some mostly black, some a mixture. These hard-working government school teachers teach majority black kids and a scattering of white kids whose parents are non-racist enough to not see the need to flee a school when the learner body is majority black.
The black middle class is bigger than the white middle class. Yet we spend our hard-earned money on overpriced institutions like white private schools that often do not value our humanity or appreciate our culture.
Why don’t we just let our money talk and walk away from these institutions, which do not appreciate us? Why don’t we support good government or indeed private schools that espouse our values and affirm our children rather than trying to turn them into coconuts with “black skin” and “white masks”, as Frantz Fanon called them? Power to change racism in institutions is really in our hands. And feet. And wallets.