Teens on tenterhooks search papers
Night-time vigil turns into shouts of celebration or stunned silence at failure
BOTHO MOLOSANKWE, THERESA TAYLOR, POLOKO TAU
ANXIETY WAS written all over their faces. They weren’t going to be able to sleep without knowing how they had performed in their final exams.
Hundreds of Soweto matrics started converging at garages across the township from as early as 10pm yesterday and spent the night there waiting for newspaper delivery trucks.
Entrances to Southgate were shut from about 10pm and metro police maintained a strong presence to prevent the disorder of previous years.
Back in Soweto they sang and danced, blew vuvuzelas or stood around in groups.
The first newspaper batch arrived at about 2am at a few garages, and were sold out before they reached the shelves.
Outside a petrol station in Mofolo North, a group huddled around a single newspaper on the ground, searching for their names.
Then one of them, Sibusiso Mashinini, 19, suddenly sprang up and started screaming and running around.
He passed with distinctions in maths, life orientation and physical science.
“I have worked hard and sacrificed a lot, and it took a lot of discipline to achieve all this. I spent most of my time studying in the past year,” said a beaming Sibusiso, from Bhukulani Secondary School in Zondi.
“I have been accepted to study at the University of Cape Town but I can’t at the moment even afford airfare to Cape Town. My mother is an unemployed single parent,” he said.
Celebrations continued across Soweto till dawn, with pupils, some partly dressed in their school uniforms, ecstatically running up and down the streets clutching newspapers.
While pupils from Silver Oaks Secondary School in Eldorado Park crowded the corridors celebrating their achievements, two pupils battled to come to terms with failure.
They paced up and down the buildings, not believing it.
When they couldn’t find their names published in the newspaper, they went straight to their school, hoping there had been a mistake.
“I looked for my name and did not see it, yet people who had not been doing well passed. My heart was very sore. I was expecting a pass because I had worked very hard,” said a despairing 18-year-old Eldorado girl who declined to give her name.
“I expected to fail geography but not English. The whole year I passed English, so how can I fail now?”
The other teenager, from Chiawelo, said her mother is a domestic worker, and she lives with her grandmother. She fell pregnant in matric, and had vowed to work hard and pass to make up for the disappointment and hurt she had caused her grandmother.
Now she was reluctant to go home.
“This is shocking and saddening. What will my grandmother say? But I will register again,” she said.
The shattered pair’s relieved classmates shrieked with joy.
“Daar’s hy, daar’s hy!” (“That’s it, that’s is”) Terryn Ferguson, 19, screamed at Jamil August to look at her name listed among those who had passed.
Jamil, who also saw his name, jumped up and down. He achieved a university entrance pass.
“Yes,” he kept saying. He put the paper on the pavement, looking at it with disbelief, smiling and talking to himself.
Across the city, at Greenside High School, Barush Pillay counted his seven Bs, which should be enough to keep his place on the Wits engineering programme.
His classmate, Marvin Lubbe, wants to join the navy, while Nupur Sachdeva, with eight distinctions, plans to do medicine at Wits University.
“I’m relieved its over,” Marvin said. “I knew maths was going to get me. I don’t think I want to see it ever again.”