Education in the new South Africa: While apartheid still rules on the platteland, Soweto schools stand half empty as pupils move to the suburbs
The week after white parents barred black pupils from Potgietersrus Primary, Justin Pearce found apartheid to be a fact of life at many Northern Province schools
Grey-haired, bespectacled headmaster Hennie Berg looked suspiciously at the journalists who had come to find out how racial integration was coming along at Laerskool Eugene N Marais in Naboomspruit. `If a child can speak Afrikaans, we would admit him,’ Berg said. The consequence of this policy is a school which remains 100% white. Take a photograph of the tranquil school grounds where fair-skinned children play amid the green lawns and subtropical trees, and it would be difficult to tell whether the photo dated from 1996 or 30 years earlier. This Northern Province town, best known as the home of the Venter trailer, is only 60km from Potgietersrus, where last week khaki-clad parents blocked black children from entering a primary school. But here in Naboomspruit, no such desperate measures are necessary to preserve the scene of racial and cultural exclusivity. `There is no racial conflict in the school or the community,’ says school committee member Hennie Potgieter. `We are not expecting anything like what happened in Potgietersrus.’ He says the school has had no applications from `anderkleurige kinders’ (children of other colours), which he attributes to the fact that black pupils do not want lessons in Afrikaans. Ask black residents of Naboomspruit where their children go to school, and they look suprised to be asked such an obvious question, waving a hand in the direction of the
`There is still a lot of apartheid here’ says one man. Naboomspruit is by no means unique in the Northern Province, where white Afrikaans schools are confident they will stay that way, and black schools are impatient for change which has not happened. In the village of Mahwelereng, effectively a township serving Potgietersrus, a patch of bare earth hacked out of the kameeldoring bush forms a sportsfield for the pupils of Nochimudi Higher Primary. Children race back and forth under the supervision of Motlatso Selomo, a sports-mad remedial teacher who describes her job as `a calling’. `Look at this — track events but no track,’ she says in exasperation. `We could do so much if we had the
School principal Fikizolo Maraba is similarly frustrated about the lack of a library, science laboratories, an overhead projector — even textbooks for the new syllabus. Selomo admits not much has changed since the days of the Lebowa homeland administration which used to run the school. Her own children attend an English-medium school in Potgietersrus, which was formerly only for Indians and which now accepts pupils of all races. She has no interest in enrolling her children at any of the white Afrikaans schools in town — she believes it is more important for them to be conversant in English, since it is an international language.
While facilities at Nochimudi may be inadequate, its pupils are still better off than many in the province, for whom school means a patch of shade under a tree. The vast gap in resources between the historically white and black schools in the province has posed a dilemma for the provincial government. Laduma Thembe of the Northern Province’s education department asks: `Do we concentrate on a few schools to make them equal to the (white) Transvaal Education Department schools, or do we stretch our resources as far as possible?’ The province has chosen the latter course, and the R253-million allocated to the department this year is to be spent on building classrooms for those children who are currently studying in the open air. At Potgietersrus’s Waterberg School, genial deputy principal Mynhardt Maree is busy explaining to black parents how to register their children, where to buy school uniforms, what time school starts in the morning. But he spares five minutes to explain his school’s history and its mission. Waterberg was once a `clinic school’ for problem children from all over the former Transvaal, controlled by the Transvaal Education Department. Only white pupils were ever referred there. Faced with closure, it was reinvented as a non-racial English-medium school a year ago. Reborn under the auspices of the post-apartheid Northern Province Education Department, Waterberg is free from the weight of tradition. The mostly Afrikaans staff members inherited from the previous school have applied themselves to the task of teaching where education is needed, disregarding prejudices about language and culture. The idea of non-racialism has taken longer to catch on among Potgietersrus’s white parents, though. Of the school’s 430 pupils, only three are white. Most of the white children in the town go to schools like Potgietersrus Primary, where a video camera scrutinises visitors before they are admitted through the security gate in the three-metre fence. Inside, the foyer is furnished with elaborate riempie furniture, and decorated with pupils’ drawings of endangered animals with the slogan `gee jy om?’ (do you care?). The principal is unavailable — a secretary says brusquely that the school will not talk further to the press. She denies that any ugly incidents have taken place at the school. (This was the week after white parents barred black pupils from entry and locked visiting journalists in a courtyard.) `This is not about racism. It is about Afrikaans language and culture,’ the secretary insists — a common excuse which provincial government representative Jack Mokobi describes as `a smokescreen for racism’. According to the provincial education department, Potgietersrus Primary is a parallel medium school, and has an obligation to offer classes in English as requested by the black pupils who tried to gain admission.
Warmbaths is not the most likely setting for a new South Africa reconciliation story, but this small spa town boasts a phenomenon rare in the Northern Province — an Afrikaans school which is well on the way to being racially integrated `They are together in the boarding house, they are together on the sportsfield — we are a very happy family here,’ says Tom Beukes, principal of Laerskool Warmbad, which has about 100 black pupils among its total enrolment of 640. In other towns, Afrikaans school authorities assume — sometimes with good reason — that black pupils are not interested in Afrikaans-medium education. In Warmbaths, black children are attending the school in the absence of an English-medium alternative. Beukes believes the smooth change to a non-racial policy can be attributed to the positive attitudes of his staff, and to the fact that sports competitions between black and white schools over the past few years have helped to break down the prejudices that exist elsewhere in the province. The example of Warmbaths is one which other Afrikaans schools in the province may well have to follow. With pupil-teacher ratios as high as 100:1 in some black schools in the province (the provincial average is about 45:1), no amount of extra funding is going to equalise the situation unless white schools abandon their dream of exclusivity.