‘Smelly’ teacher has last laugh in court

AN Eastern Cape teacher has been awarded R20 000 after taking her school principal to court for telling her she smelled like a “dead dog”.

This week, the High Court in Mthatha found that Nokwanda Ntshukumbana, principal of Mangqukwana Junior Secondary School in Libode, violated Viola Bikitsha’s dignity through her “humiliating and degrading” comments.

Bikitsha, who has been a teacher for more than 30 years, had asked the court to order both Ntshukumbana and the MEC for education to pay her R1.5-million — R500 000 each for emotional shock, violation of dignity and reputation, and invasion of her privacy.

The incident that caused the stink happened in February 2010 after there was a “persistent and repugnant smell” in the staff room.

The principal decided that Bikitsha, a 58-year-old mother of four, was the source and called her into her office to discuss the smell, which she likened to that of a “dead dog”.

On Ntshukumbana’s advice, Bikitsha left the school to be checked out at a hospital in case she had a medical condition.

When she got home, the teacher confronted her daughter “for not telling her that she had an unpleasant smell”. However, her daughter denied her mother smelled bad and the doctors who examined her confirmed this.

Angered at the realisation that she was not stinking, Bikitsha went to court.

She told the judge that although she accepted that Ntshukumbana was entitled to raise the subject with her, she was humiliated by the manner in which she had done it.

Judge Johannes Eksteen agreed that Ntshukumbana was entitled to address the issue if she had received complaints about it, but this did not give her “the right to abuse the occasion and to subject the plaintiff to degrading and humiliating treatment”.

Although the judge found that Bikitsha did not suffer from emotional shock or an invasion of her privacy, he said her dignity had been infringed.

“The comparison of a human being to the stench of a decaying animal carcass is indeed humiliating and degrading, and any self-respecting person of ordinary intelligence and sensibility would have felt insulted thereby,” Eksteen said.

But the court did not award Bikitsha the amount she had asked for because the insult was not published and the seriousness of the infringement had been “grossly overstated”. This, the court said, justified an award of R20 000, payable by the MEC and Ntshukumbana.

On Friday, Bikitsha, who continues to teach grade nine pupils at the school, said: “I’m happy about the judgment.

“It was a way to show that people should be careful of what they say to others.”