I work in a small village called Shiluvane on the outskirts of Tzaneen in the Limpopo province.
I teach at Shiluvane Primary, and the buildings there date all the way back to 1876 when the missionaries built them. But it’s no problem for me working at an old school. And even though we don’t have enough teaching resources, I am able to develop my own material from whatever objects I find in our surroundings.
One day in 1995, I woke up as usual and went to work. As on every Monday morning, when all of us have arrived at school we are bound to cleaning the classrooms before we can start with our lessons. The reason for this is that the classrooms have no doors. Whenever the school bought and fixed the doors in the past, they were stolen even before the week ended.
Therefore, every morning — and especially Mondays — we found the classrooms and the schoolyard dirty. Not just dust and mud, you understand. I mean the awful mess left by the goats that some community members keep in the classrooms over the weekend, and even human faeces as well.
After prayers in the school’s square on this particular Monday, I went with my Grade 4s to my class as usual. But instead of going in to the classroom, they just stood outside.
‘Why are you not going in?”, I asked. They replied, ‘Because it stinks in there.” Guess what! As I set my foot into the classroom, human faeces were smeared on the chalkboard in the form of the letters ‘ANC”, and under that my own name. That wasn’t all. Even the table was smeared with faeces.
I went out of the class, mouth shut tight. I didn’t know where to start or who was going to clean up this revolting mess.
While the principal looked at the situation, I spoke to my pupils. I told them it was bad, but that there was no option but to clean it up. They didn’t like it, but they understood.
It was a lot of work for all of us. Pupils staying near the school had to go home and get buckets and other containers to fetch water in. Then to get the water, they had to walk almost a kilometre to and from the school. There was a lot of coming and going under the very hot sun.
It just happened that the area manager visited our school that day. Just one look at the frown on his face and you could see how cross he was. He went straight to the principal and asked why the pupils were all walking around and making a noise. But even from where he was standing, it was clear that there was something very wrong with the Grade 4 classroom. ‘These are the conditions we have to work in nearly every day,” the principal explained to the area manager.
Personally, I couldn’t eat for the whole of that day, because whenever I tried to, I felt like I was eating human faeces.