If South Africa’s education system can be compared to a volatile river, then schools in Stellenbosch are distant streams, meandering separately, at a pace of their own.
The schools reflect the town. Issues of transformation and integration surface only occasionally, briefly interrupting its otherwise peaceful flow.
Or so it seems. A recent protest at Stellenbosch University, led by black students against the administration’s policy of offering lectures predominantly in Afrikaans, has highlighted the issue of integration in a town that on the surface appeared impervious to the grittier aspects of educational transformation.
There are, however, evident shifts towards diversification on all levels. To a large extent, Stellenbosch’s state schools reflect the shifting racial and cultural demographics in what used to be an enclave of white Afrikanerdom. Many are striving to promote an awareness of South Africa’s rich cultures, with eclectic religious assemblies, debates and cultural clubs. Some attempt to promote more interaction with less advantaged schools through outreach projects and twinning programmes.
Staffing is one obvious area that needs to reflect diversification, and Stellenbosch schools in general have extended a tentatively enthusiastic hand to teacher integration.
Making one’s way from the manicured, estate-like schools of Rhenish and Paul Roos to the dormitory facade of Luckhoff Secondary School in the coloured township of Ida’s Valley and on to the cramped campus of Khayamandi High, it becomes all too evident how much has changed in Stellenbosch – and how little.
Begin at Rhenish Preparatory School, the only state-run English-speaking institution in the town. Like its older sister school, Rhenish Girls High, the preparatory school has long been at the forefront of moves to integrate learners. Even before the new dispensation, back in the 1980s, Rhenish was humming a multicultural song.
Today the primary and high schools – as well as the kindergarten – are fully integrated. Kids from Malawi, Germany and Korea frolic with learners from Khayamandi township. In fact, in the past few years Korean learners have been scooping all the Xhosa prizes.
Cultural integration inevitably intersects with issues of race, religion and language – and of course economic status. In fact class, rather than race, is increasingly dictating parental decisions about where their children school. In our increasingly market-oriented education system, it is a case of how much parents can afford.
‘But children do not think in terms of those categories,” says the principal of Rhenish Preparatory, Bruce Nyland. ‘Here we form opinions about each other as individuals. Rhenish’s approach to integration also extends to learners with disabilities. Special-needs students are encouraged to interact with mainstream learners.”
He adds: ‘Ours is a caring environment.”
Yet despite its open-door policy, admission is inevitably still reserved for those who can afford it. Admittedly the school governing board has embraced the Education Department’s cross-subsidy scheme whereby wealthier parents help cover the cost of fees for economically disadvantaged children. But with annual fees in the region of R10 000 a year, Rhenish Girls High remains out of reach for many.
Something similar may be said of Paul Roos Gymnasium, which consistently features in the Sunday Times’s survey of South Africa’s top 100 schools. Straddling a vast, pastoral estate, Paul Roos is, in many respects, the Stellenbosch equivalent of Bishops – Cape Town’s prestigious private boys’ college.
Like Rhenish, Paul Roos is a former Model C school. Unlike its English neighbour – Rhenish, Paul Roos and Bloemhof Girls are positioned in the same suburban block – Paul Roos is a dual-medium school. In fact it’s the only boys’ high school in Stellenbosch offering English as a language of instruction, in conjunction with Afrikaans.
Two-thirds of the learners at Paul Roos speak Afrikaans as a first language, one-third English. Sixteen percent are learners of colour. While it does not pose a problem for white and coloured learners in Stellenbosch, this dual-language policy effectively excludes the overwhelming majority of Xhosa-speaking learners for whom Afrikaans is their third language.
Paul Roos principal Jock de Jager acknowledges the disparity, but he emphasises the school’s efforts towards greater diversification, in terms of both student and staff intake. ‘We are a state school and therefore principally serve the needs of our community,” he explains. ‘Our sole criterion for admission is that learners come from Stellenbosch. We’re not interested in asking about race or academic marks.”
The school also accepts a smattering of students from outside regions such as Eerste River and Hottentots Holland. In these cases, criteria for admission are, in order of importance, academic, sporting and cultural achievements. Outreach programmes include the Paul Roos Academy that runs for a week every holiday, during which five schools from black communities and seven farm schools interact with learners from Paul Roos.
The aim, says De Jager, is not to pull the elite from other communities into Paul Roos, but ‘to empower them to take skills back into the communities and change classes from within”.
While these initiatives are laudable – and by many educators’ accounts have proven successful – an underlying anomaly remains. Schools all too often adopt an ‘assimilationist approach” – expecting children of other cultures and regions to fit in with the dominant culture. And, true integration is a privilege that only former Model C schools can afford. Despite the imperatives of injecting specialised human resources back into the communities, the academic crème de la crème – often the progeny of community leaders – inevitably opt to study outside their communities, resulting in a chronic brain drain.
Intercultural influx into schools such as Khayamandi and Luckhoff rarely occurs.
But there are initiatives to reverse this trend. For example Stellenbosch High School – another of the Sunday Times’s top 100 schools – has twinned with the coloured Cloeteville High School to engage in a variety of cultural exchange programmes. The affluent, exclusively Afrikaans high school is at the forefront of the trend towards a more integrated school system.
Therein lies one of the paradoxes of cultural integration. The predominance of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction inevitably predetermines access. Yet despite its volatile history in the classroom, Afrikaans is a medium that has managed, to some degree, to transcend boundaries of class, colour and creed. Even at traditional bastions of Afrikanerdom, like Stellenbosch University, there are definite shifts towards diversification, largely thanks to the efforts of vice-chancellor Chris Brink – an unapologetic proponent of transformation.
To many, Afrikaans still represents the language of oppression but it has become tinged with the verligte aura. Many Afrikaans state schools are providing value for money. Though their fees are relatively low they are maintaining high academic standards, while pursuing the path of integration.
And if schools are microcosms of society – which they inevitably are – then an understanding of Stellenbosch’s history helps to highlight the complexity inherent in the term cultural integration. Largely a stable, affluent enclave, Stellenbosch almost succeeded in dissociating itself from the overtly brutal aspects of South Africa’s recent past. The government might have been verkramptes but Stellenboschites were moderates.
In many respects the town has always managed to avoid the
powder-keg politics of race. Yet this also meant that fundamental change has been slow in spreading through the town’s pristine, polite colonial edifices.
‘The New South Africa reached Stellenbosch late,” says educator Mohammed Cassiem. ‘It is almost as though the town thought the new dispensation had nothing to do with it.”
Yet, as Cassiem points out, horrendous acts perpetrated in the name of apartheid were taking place in Stellenbosch streets. One such casualty was Luckhoff High School. It was shut down in 1964, in terms of the Group Areas Act. Barely three months before finals its students were unceremoniously evicted from the building and forcefully relocated – along with students from various church schools – to a cramped, barracks-like building in the township of Ida’s Valley.
For more than 25 years educator and activist Pat William, who is headmaster of Luckhoff, has watched with despair how the engine of change has moved in fits and starts. Together with community stalwarts Moegamat Kara, Rolf Stumf, Simon Adams, John Abes and Isgak Pool, he has embarked on an epic project to rewrite the history of Stellenbosch and to document the trajectory of cultural dispossession experienced by the communities of Ida’s Valley and neighbouring Cloeteville. This, he hopes, will instil in his students a sense of pride in the heritage of which they have been robbed – thereby helping to heal the wounds of a fractured history.