Forever bound but never ‘board’
An innocuous post about life in boarding school in the 1980s and 1990s ended up being a wall of remembrance by fellow ‘inmates’
What do Nelson Mandela, Thabo Mbeki, Robert Mugabe, “Terror” Lekota, Steve Biko, Zanele Mbeki, Judy Dlamini, Marumo Moerane, Mavuso Msimang and Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka have in common? I’ll tell you. At some point in their lives, they were all “inmates” at a missionary boarding school.
Even before the ingenious minds that conceptualised apartheid were out of diapers, the formal education of “the natives” was a hot potato the country grappled with. Even when certain “civilised, educated and reasonable” Africans were granted the vote in the Cape Colony and “exempted” from being “uncivilised savages ”— and therefore allowed to own land, wear breeches, speak Victorian English and ride horses with partitions in their hair — successive governments struggled with the idea of educated Bantus. This was a gap Christian missionaries tried to close when they created the likes of Healdtown, Lovedale, St Francis College, Ohlange High, Inanda Seminary, and my own alma mater Inkamana High, among dozens of other institutions.
My birthday this year coincided with the 40th anniversary of my arrival at Inkamana High. The day after my birthday, I needed to fly to Durban. When I got to the Slow Lounge at OR Tambo, I ran into a lifelong friend I’d first met as a preteen at the same school, some 40 years ago to the day. During our hurried breakfast, we managed to reminisce about our time in Vryheid in the mid-1980s. That breakfast was special because three months prior to it I had found myself in the middle of a memory-fest I’d instigated on Facebook about the KwaZulu-Natal black boarding-school culture. I’d posted what I’d thought was an innocuous message about life in boarding school in the 1980s and 1990s, but it ended up being a wall of remembrance as boarding school folks weighed in with their personal testimonies.
Anyone who went to one of these boarding schools will tell you we were all required to have a trunk. Indeed, it was compulsory at Inkamana. There was even a room in the dormitories entirely dedicated to housing these metal boxes, which were about 90cm by 50cm by 40cm in size. These oblong entities were where we kept our canned food, Oros, mayonnaise, tomato sauce, Choice Assorted biscuits, other non-perishables, and anything we deemed valuable, including cash.
That room was named with astounding creativity — it was called “the box room”. During my third year at Inkamana, in 1986, a “situation” ensued. We started getting whiffs of something seriously foul in that room. After three days, it smelled like someone was hiding a corpse in there. Our head boy, Sandile (Justice Pius Langa’s son), decreed that every trunk in the room be opened to identify the source of the rotting-carcass aroma. As it turned out, one of the standard 6 (grade 8) boys had forgotten about a leg of pork his mother had packed for him. I’ve never witnessed a maggot infestation that severe.
Life for an initiate to the boarding-school environment was intense. Even the names we used to refer to the newbies were telling. When I arrived at Inkamana, I was referred to as mshana, the Zulu word for nephew or niece. The designation meant I had to address anyone in standard 8 or older as umalume (uncle). For a whole calendar year, I had to address a bunch of 15-year-olds as if they were uncles.
There were many other ridiculous boarding-school antics. Every former inmate of these boarding schools will tell you each mshana had to do his best Peter Drury impersonation by broadcasting an imaginary live game between Chiefs and Pirates. As a “fresher”, you were placed inside a metal locker and instructed to provide commentary for an imaginary Soweto Derby. Easy enough, right? Not so fast. Your tormentors would be split between the Buccaneers and the Mighty Amakhosi, and woe betide you if your commentary made one team a victor (a draw was prohibited).
Enter a fresher from my Hammarsdale hood in my matric year, Vukile “Donsie” Madonsela. In the middle of his “broadcast”, he got animated. In his best Koos Radebe (a legendary Radio Zulu sportscaster) voice, he suddenly said: “There’s a hectic hailstorm raining down over Ellis Park right now. The ref has called off the game for the safety of the players.” From that day on, he became a favourite of the matrics and was never made to endure initiation rituals again.
In the comments below the Facebook post prompting this column, I discovered that other boarding-school survivors shared similar quirky tales. We were dependent on strawberryflavoured Nesquik, All Gold tomato sauce, Crosse & Blackwell tangy mayonnaise, and Rama margarine for sustenance. If you’ve never enjoyed an egg-and-mayo sandwich, there’s a good chance you didn’t go to boarding school in the 1980s.
One of my high school friends, Sibusisiwe Myeni, is the founder of an incredible private education initiative, the Imbeleko Foundation, which sends rural children from KwaNyuswa in Botha’s Hill to black legacy boarding schools, many of which outperform traditional bastions of academic excellence. Academics and educationists have tried to come up with explanations for why these schools work. But if you find yourself sending your offspring to one of these schools, just remember one thing: don’t place a leg of pork in their trunk.