Peter Dickson
Thieves in Port Elizabeth’s Kwazakhele township this week stole Sophakama High School.
On Tuesday its 11 classrooms were still there, but when pupils arrived on Wednesday morning, they had vanished along with the surrounding security fence. The only evidence the school had ever been there were concrete struts embedded in the foundation.
“I couldn’t believe my eyes!” said principal Nkululeko Klaas, adding the struts had remained only because “they couldn’t get them out of the concrete”. In what Klaas labelled a “masterpiece”, a parade of donkey carts, panel vans and trucks had carted everything away overnight.
“It wasn’t only at night,” Klaas stammered. “People had started coming and hammering away during the day. About 10m or 15m from the school, there are houses and the people there didn’t do anything to stop them.”
While the Eastern Cape Department of Education is “outraged”, Klaas said the community was “devastated”.
In January, vandals went on the rampage before setting the classrooms alight – wiping out the administration block, library and science laboratory along with prized textbooks and stationery (there is a drastic shortage in the province), more than 800 chairs and office and sport equipment.
The school was built in the wake of the mid-1980s township uprising by the Vusisizwe Trust, which set about rebuilding Port Elizabeth schools destroyed in the upheaval.
Since January’s attack, pupils had been using facilities at a nearby New Brighton high school while Sophakama awaited repair and refurbishment. Now they may have to stay there longer, in an already overcrowded education atmosphere in Port Elizabeth’s townships, their future hinging on an emergency parents’ meeting next week.
Klaas, who is also principal of Aaron Gqadu Public School on whose grounds Sophakama had stood – it was taken over when Aaron Gqadu moved into a permanent building in 1993 – says the theft of the fence now makes the main building vulnerable as the school cannot afford security and neither can Bisho.
With hundreds of jobless and poverty- stricken families daily flooding the city from rural Transkei labour pools that had traditionally supplied Gauteng mines which have now closed, Klaas says the school has probably been sold or recycled for shack building.