Marianne and Cornelius Cloete gave up their life in noisy Johannesburg suburbia and moved to a farm in Magaliesburg, the North West, in 1990. The move opened their eyes to the realities of rural living, and not all of them were pleasant.
”Coming from a place where schools are all over, we saw how children struggled here to go to school,” says Cornelius Cloete. ”When we first got here, the children had to travel 15 kilometres to get to school – without having had anything to eat.” Girl learners in particular were at risk, with many of them suffering the horrors of rape from people offering them lifts.
Conditions among the impoverished community and how they impact on these youngsters also struck the Cloetes.
”When they come back from school, many have to deal with drunken parents – most of their mothers are single and have a new boyfriend every week,” says Cloete. ”The children are expected to cook, look after their siblings, and do their homework in one room with six other people and where there is no electricity. How do you expect a child like that to perform at school?” he asks.
The Cloetes didn’t shrug it off as someone else’s problem. Instead, they built a school.
Known as the Magaliesburg Group of Schools, their initiative has grown into an independent school that caters for learners from pre-primary to matric. A total of 275 learners are enrolled, which includes 20 who board at the school. The 12 teachers work on a voluntary basis, live on the farm and are paid a modest R800 per month.
With 12 classrooms (including a computer centre), as well as boarding facilities and a clinic on the farm, these students are luckier than most.
They are also provided with three meals a day. ”Breakfast is served before school, the other meal at lunch time and the last after school,” says Cloete. The local chicken farmer donates chickens to the school on a daily basis, which are also distributed to members of the community.
The goodwill of the broader community not only helps feed the learners, but also makes expertise available that the school otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford. Members of the school community offer their time and effort in exchange.
”For instance, this one guy gives our learners karate lessons, and we clean his house,” explains Cloete.
The students cover the usual learning areas, but there is a strong emphasis on orienting classroom theory to the real world. ”The students will draw up a business plans together with parents who join our agricultural class. It is part of their schoolwork, but the parents can them take the business plan to a bank to get a loan for land they want to buy,” says Cloete.
But the Cloetes took their caring even further. ”We realised that many of these children were from poor families and that their family backgrounds badly affected their school work,” says Cloete. ”So we decided to foster some of them.”
Their first foster child joined them in 1990. Now, between Marianne, Cornelius and their two grown daughters, the Cloetes have 40 foster children, all under the age of 18 and all attending their school.
Cloete gives some insight into the levels of need these children come from in this example of two brothers who joined their massive family: ”The brother’s father had been working for 30 years, and still the only assets they had were a few clothes that fitted into a medium-sized bag.”
While the Cloetes’ unusual efforts raises some people’s eyebrows and others support, it also stirs fear in the more conservative of the white farming community. In fact, some on the far right fringes seem to be worried that Cloete is starting a private black army. ”They told me they don’t want to see any military training going on here, and they don’t want to see people dressed in military uniform,” says Cloete.