THURSDAY, 4.00PM:
TWO pupils have lodged assault charges after being injured in racial clashes at Elandspoort High School in Pretoria West (see below). Police are investigating attacks on a white boy, Chris Janse van Rensburg, and a black girl, Gina Mokabe — Van Rensburg’s nose was broken and Mokabe’s ear was torn after she was beaten with a hockey stick.
Rightwing groups, the Freedom Front, the Conservative Party, and the Verwoerd Vryheidsoffensief, have blamed the government’s education policy for the conflict, and called for a return to separatism in the schools. Conservative Party spokesman Andrew Gerber said “The fact that the school principal had to address black pupils separately indicated a divide between black and white at the school. The school had to fall back on apartheid on Wednesday to save the situation.”
WEDNESDAY, 6.00PM
RACIAL clashes have blown up at a Pretoria high school, closed since Tuesday after brawling when two black pupils allegedly insulted a white teacher. White pupils at Elandspoort High School in Pretoria West were sent home at 10.00am this morning after renewed fighting, and while principal Hennie Breedt addressed the black pupils.
The dispute appeared to have begun on Monday, when a woman teacher was insulted by black pupils after she reprimanded them. Black pupils said the woman’s son, a pupil at the school, began attacking black pupils at random, helped by classmates armed with hockey sticks. Parents appear to have joined in, with one arriving at the school grounds armed with a rifle.
White teachers blamed the decline in classroom discipline since the abolition of corporal pubishment. Black pupils have said they refuse to return to school until the white pupils they accuse of starting the brawls, are expelled.