THE ANGELLA JOHNSON INTERVIEW
GRACE KHUNOU had barely been in her job as headmistress for five minutes when an angry parent stood up during a meeting and exclaimed: ”But you are only a girl. What can you know? How can you make this place any better after all this time?”
The consensus was that it would take a strong man to restore order where chaos had reigned for so long, not a 33-year-old ”slip of a girl”.
And it did appear an uphill battle. When Khunou arrived at Tsepana Primary School in Orange Farm in January last year, she was staggered by the physical deprivation that confronted her.
”There were no windows in any of the buildings. No doors or electricity,” she says. The toilets were broken, furniture was dilapidated and years of neglect had given the dozen or so single-storey blocks a rundown appearance.
But the biggest problem she had to face was apathy. Not just among teachers, who seemed to have lost their zest for the job, but also among parents who no longer bothered to send their children to school.
For a while she wondered what she had let herself in for. ”The atmosphere among staff members was troublesome: teachers were waging a silent war of attrition against each other.”
Many had formed cliques and worked only when they wanted to. ”There was serious disintegration,” says Khunou, eyes rolling with remembered frustration.
But undaunted, she had looked at the empty classes, eyed the chaos, squared her shoulders and set about implementing changes with a determination that belies her diminutive form.
That was the first thing I noticed about Khunou. Her height. Standing at only 1,54 m, she flashes a beguiling smile as she alights from a car and hurries into the dusty central courtyard. ”Sorry I’m late. Had a very important union meeting which ran into overtime.” The words seem to gush from her as we hurry into the tiny office which she calls her command station: ”I have a meeting with parents and teachers in about an hour,” she tells me. ”Then I have to make my way to Johannesburg for another meeting.”
It is as if a mini-tornado has hit town. I begin to imagine what it must have been like when she first arrived in this isolated dustbowl of makeshift tin shacks in the Vaal Triangle, inhabited by people who must feel that the social revolution has passed them by.
”This is a very low-income area with high unemployment (those who work make the long journey to Johannesburg),” she tells me. ”In fact it is a very isolated community because of the high cost of transportation and there are very few jobs locally, except casual construction work.”
Khunou started her task of rebuilding by tackling her staff, some of whom were openly questioning her authority. ”They said I had only been given the posting as a favour for I was far too young for the job.” She had been branch chairman of the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu), and the rumour was that she had manoeuvred herself into the position.
”As if I wouldn’t have got myself something better than this,” she responds dismissively.
The doubts spilt over to parents, some of whom pulled out their children in protest. That was a low point for her. ”I had to keep reminding myself that it would just be a matter of time. I knew that I had to prove myself in their eyes.”
She set about doing that with the aid of a handful of supportive parents and teachers. They sat down and drew up a plan for the school. The first thing was to get some kind of order regarding outside use of the buildings.
”It was being used as a kind of drop-in centre for the community. Churches would come and have meetings without warning. There was no controlled access. Even during the day groups would just walk in to hold meetings in empty classrooms.”
Next she developed a business plan which was presented to the Department of Education. The department sent in officials to inspect the buildings and soon there was a flurry of activity with a steady stream of carpenters, painters and plumbers traipsing in to spruce up the school. New windows, doors, burglar bars, working toilets and a lick of paint here and there made all the difference. Walls were repaired and old rickety wooden desks replaced.
”Within a few months I saw that it was coming together, even though I had had to drag some teachers along kicking and screaming.”
But why had she taken on such a challenging post? ”Because for so long Sadtu has been getting a bad press for being negative about education, I wanted to show that a Sadtu school could be a good one. That we have truly gone from defiance to reconstruction.”
Change is something this bundle of energy is used to. Born in Dobsonville as the oldest of six children, she lived in Soweto with her grandmother until they moved to Lichtenburg when she started school. But under the government’s forced removal policy Khunou ended up completing her studies in the town of Ramathlhabama near the Botswana border.
She planned to become a nurse, but married in Standard 10 after falling pregnant at 19. ”I wanted my child to be legitimate,” she explains. The couple had two sons – now aged 13 and three – before divorcing 10 years later.
As a young bride she moved to Soweto with her husband where, in her words, she behaved like a good housewife until the mid-1980s. ”I was fed up being at home doing nothing and felt it was time to start learning again. I was only 22, so I didn’t want to sit there and rot for the rest of my life.”
Nursing was her first option, but it involved time away from home in training. ”I talked it over with my husband, but he was against it. He wanted a traditional wife with dinner ready when he came home.” But he agreed to her enrolling at Sebokeng college.
It was not easy to combine studies and motherhood. It meant getting up at 4.30am, preparing herself and making breakfast before leaving at 6.20am to catch the train to Sebokeng where she took a taxi to the college. After school she would rush home, collect her son from a creche, clean the house and begin dinner.
”I had hated teaching but loved nursing. But now I don’t regret the path I took because I get tremendous fulfilment from seeing black children getting a proper education, and parents once again valuing the benefits of education.”
This is precisely what happened at Tsepana Primary. After the renovation pupils returned in droves – the ages varied from five to 23 years. ”Some people are either attending late or returning after a hiatus,” she explains. ”We can’t throw them away. Otherwise many might just end up involved in crime.”
Enrolment went from 600 to 1 279 within six months, exceeding capacity. She introduced gate controls between 8am and 2pm.
”I became like a security guard, trying to get everyone to follow my timetable – both teachers and pupils. There had been no control mechanism: For example no leave-of- absence forms existed for teachers and they would just take time off when they wanted to.”
After six months she knew things were moving her way – especially because of the sea change in the attitude of parents. Parents, who pay R30 a year per child (with concessions for the unemployed), now feel they have a stake in the school. ”It’s a lot of money for poor people, but it helps to make them feel like proper stakeholders in this,” she says.
It has been a satisfying exercise watching the place evolve. ”It’s remarkable,” she adds. ”Parents now come running. We don’t even need a nightwatchman because there’s no more stealing.”
Some might say:”It’s because it is Grace that the authority gave the money for new desks and refurbishment.” But Khunou says it is much simpler: ”It’s because I asked. Other schools sit back with broken furniture and don’t think of asking. I’m proactive. Things don’t just happen, you have to make them happen.”