In Balfour, Mpumalanga, there are black learners who believe they are better off now that they no longer attend school with white learners.
‘I took the decision in my life to hate each and every white I came across – not only the elders, but also the kids.”
Grade 11 learner Sizwe Shabalala made this decision after two years of schooling at Ho’r en Laer Skool Balfour. He is one of 10 black learners who left this former model-C school because of what they call “unequal” treatment.
They are now schooling at IM Manchu Senior Secondary, an all-black school just a few blocks away from Ho’r en Laer Skool Balfour.
They were not victims of racial violence, but claim that their daily experiences at the school smacked of racial discrimination.
Take transport, for example. “On the bus from Greylingstad,” Manuel Radebe remembers, “they [the white learners] threw tins at us and said ‘We don’t want kaffirs here’. The teachers on the bus said nothing.”
More subtle, but no less offensive to these learners, was that “There were specific seats for us to sit on in the front of the bus,” says Edward Radebe. “The ‘kaffirs’ could not sit at the back.”
They believed they were marginalised in assembly as well. “The prefects would make us form our own line to go into assembly,” says Mandla Nkosi. “Say you were doing grade 9, you couldn’t stand with your class. We had to stand together like a ‘bunch of darkies’ – that’s what they called us. We had to sit together in seats reserved only for us.”
Language was also experienced as a source of exclusion by these learners. Even though Ho’r en Laer Skool Balfour is a parallel medium school (with blacks almost exclusively being taught in English, and the white majority in Afrikaans), Afrikaans dominated school life. The learners claim that principal Willem Viljoen only addressed the school in Afrikaans – unless “something was lost or broken, then the principal would start speaking English in assembly,” says Themba Shabalala. “The blacks would be asked to stay behind.”
The tuckshop was also an issue. “They wouldn’t allow us to be served first,” says Nkosana Madonsela. “We had to be last.”
The learners have bitter memories of a school concert. “We practised our gumboot dance for two weeks,” recalls Sizwe Shaba-lala, “and even had costumes specially prepared.” The concert was taped on video – but their performance was not recorded. The camera was facing the audience while the black pupils did their dance on stage.
Likewise with the photographs of the concert: “We had money to pay for photos [of our performance] but there were none of us,” says Nkosi. “We were very disappointed.”
Interracial relations between girls and boys were also fraught with tension: “The principal said black boys should stay away from white girls,” complains Lucas Mokoena. “He was promoting it.” Nkosi adds: “A white girl called Jennifer was my friend. The principal called her into his office. Later she told me he had a problem with her being my friend.”
The learners claim they were given little support or understanding from the school leadership. Typical responses from Viljoen would be that their complaints were “nonsense” or “rubbish”, say the learners.
Only a few of these learners passed at the end of the year. At I M Manchu, they are progressing far better. Nkosi believes that Ho’r en Laer Skool Balfour was an obstacle to his learning: “That school left me with the impression that if a black boy goes there, he is going there to fail. I got the impression that a black man is stupid. They said: ‘If ever you want to hide something from a black, you put it in a book’.”
But most of the learners have made some form of peace with their bad experiences. While Desiree Ngubeni says she still “hates that school with all my heart”, Sizwe Shaba-lala has managed to overcome his anger towards whites.
Madonsela has this philosophy: “We have to love them, because if you hate someone it doesn’t help you to understand life. Some of [the white learners] learnt it from their parents. But they are also people and they’ll learn that we’re all equal.”
– The Teacher/M&G Media, Johannesburg, June 2001.