Being black in a white school
Former pupils and teachers recall early days of mixed education
I started in grade 7, one of only four black girls in my grade. It was a culture shock. I had never eaten and lived with white people, never tasted chicken a-la-king and had never touched a hockey stick
Yolisa Pasipanodya, MD of Meropa Communications, right
● Communications executive Yolisa Pasipanodya was nine when the Putco bus taking her from a private school home to Soweto was targeted by township thugs and petrol-bombed.
“I remember running with other kids to the back where a sign read ‘Stamp die ruit uit’ (Kick the window out), and so we threw ourselves out and ran home crying,” she said.
The Bantu Education Act of 1953 that entrenched apartheid at school by forcing the separation of races fell away in 1991 with the integration of black students into a few formerly all-white schools.
Pasipanodya was among the first black children to experience this.
The youngest of four children born to an activist couple living in Phefeni was at Mzamo Primary in Dube when her mother decided to put her children into better schools. Her sister went to boarding school, her brothers to La Salle College in Roodepoort and Pasipanodya began grade 3 at St Theresa’s Convent School in Coronationville.
The petrol-bombing upset her family. Pasipanodya was sent to live with her aunt in Coronationville during the week and won a full scholarship from AECI to attend St Andrew’s School for Girls.
“I started in grade 7, one of only four black girls in my grade. It was a culture shock. I had never eaten and lived with white people, never tasted chicken a-la-king in my life and never touched a hockey stick,” she said.
“It was a big adjustment. Some of us managed, others didn’t do so well. We were not allowed to speak our home language, we were given elocution, allowed to run only on the sports field and were taught that ladies don’t sweat, you glow.”
She fought to speak Xhosa but felt betrayed when her mom said, “just speak English, making me feel like she was selling me out”. There were daunting ordeals — learning to swim, playing hockey and losing contact with township friends and cousins because of school commitments.
She earned Transvaal colours for hockey, sang at Eton on a UK choir tour and is now MD of Meropa Communications and chairs the St Andrew’s school board.
At the school a gallery of photographs shows portraits of white men. A new gallery features Pasipanodya’s smiling face — the first woman chair, and the first black chair.
On the other side of education transformation were teachers overseeing the change from white domains to multiracial spaces.
Former schoolmaster Cliff Midgley, 79, started teaching at St John’s College in 1971 and served as a hostel house master from 1979 to 1990.
“We took in our first boys of colour in the mid-eighties, even though at that stage it wasn’t legal. But the headmaster decided it was the right thing to do,” he said.
“One of our first boys was Joseph Oesi who was brought up in London, spoke English, French and Spanish but had no knowledge of Afrikaans or any vernacular language. He came into the hostel, was an enormous success, played good cricket and blended in seamlessly.”
More boys arrived, many from rural areas and townships, some unable to speak good English and most experiencing a culture shock. This, he said, was managed by having the boys repeat a year to adapt, find their way and catch up where necessary.
“We stepped in and managed things as they happened — like black boys not being allowed to ride whites-only buses, or excursion destinations wanting to prevent some of our children overnighting on school tours. Thulani Khanyile was one of the boys in my house. His father was a political prisoner, and so I would take him to visit him in Jeppe on Saturday afternoons,” Midgley said.
Khanyile is now chair of the St John’s school board. Midgley, though retired, still does project work at the school.
Remedial therapist and retired teacher Sue Rowe still gives private lessons at home “in my 51st year of teaching”.
She spent most of her career at Cliffview Primary in Randburg teaching grades 1, 2 and 3.
Rowe, born in Zimbabwe, moved with her parents to South Africa “in the thick of apartheid”, qualified and started teaching at a Rosebank school in 1972.
“I remember one of my [older] colleagues saying, ‘I hope they are not going to start bringing children of colour in here’. I asked why. She said, ‘I can’t possibly kiss a little peppercorn head’. I told her, ‘Then you better leave soon’. You can’t be unhappy because it transfers onto the children.”
The mother of three boys witnessed increasing numbers of black children integrating into Cliffview and the appointment of black teachers.
She was part of the staff selection committee and its decision to appoint Ren Reddie, an Indian woman, as school principal when the last white male headmaster left in 2012.
The first black children forging their path in white schools experienced challenges and resistance, as some whites fought against their presence.
Zweli Mokgata, a widowed single dad living in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs with his parents and six-year-old daughter, grew up in Orlando, Soweto, attending a township school. His father had a high-level job at IBM and his mother decided to go back to university full-time to become a doctor.
Rocketing crime and violence in Orlando and an absent mother during the week prompted the family to move to the suburbs in 1993. Zweli and his brother, Kgomotso, were the first black pupils enrolled at Weltevreden Primary, a government school in Roodepoort, then predominantly Afrikaans.
“It was a huge culture shock. We were not bullied so much as isolated. We were never included or invited to parties. In standard four I made one friend, but that fell apart when he said some racist stuff,” said Mokgata.
His most painful memory, in the library with classmates, was being called “the k word” by a boy. “The kids started laughing and ... chanting. The teacher just looked at me and did nothing. I walked out and sat outside by myself.”
The family moved to the upmarket northern suburbs and the brothers were enrolled as boarders at St John’s.
“The school was more diverse and we could be ourselves. The difference was no longer racial, it was more about class. You had black kids from high-profile families the Mandelas, Kaizer Motaung junior and those who were politically connected. At Welties, white kids only ever saw black people as housekeepers and gardeners while at St John’s they were much more sensitised.”
But the more privileged setting held different challenges. Kgomotso battled starting high school and in 1998, aged 14, took his own life. Zweli, then 17 in his second-last school year, took the loss badly, lost focus and struggled.
“Matric was a blur. I fell in with the wrong crowd, I partied a lot but somehow managed to pass,” he said.
He graduated in journalism and communications, married and become a father. His wife, Pearl, died of Covid in 2020.
He practises martial arts and is head of content for PR agency Tribeca. Like Pasipanodya, he is pragmatic about the wars he fought to get an education, but is grateful for the better situation black children have today.