When the past just won’t go away
Vryburg Hoërskool’s new principal believes he can heal the divided school – but not everyone agrees. Julia Grey reports
February this year marked the 110th birthday of Vryburg Hoërskool. It was also the month when 15 ex-learners and parents of white schoolgoers went on trial in the local magistrates court for allegedly assaulting black pupils in 1998.
In many ways, Vryburg Hoërskool has become a symbol of society’s struggle to move beyond the racial segregation and conflict of the past. The school has been the site of several scenes of interracial bloodletting, including the notorious incident of a black learner stabbing a white peer in the neck with a pair of scissors. At the end of last year, another conflict played itself out at the farewell assembly for the outgoing principal, Theo Scholtz: an apparently disparaging remark by a black pupil about Scholtz resulted in insults and chairs being flung between the learners.
One of first tasks for new principal Andries Du Toit was to deal with the disciplinary hearing of the learners involved in the fracas during Scholtz’s farewell. ”At the disciplinary hearing, I told the panel that the parents are willing to take mutual responsibility for their children’s deeds and are willing to forgive. In light of this, I pleaded with the hearing to withdraw the charges against the learners. They thanked me and accepted. Everybody walked out with smiles and sighs of relief. That is a miracle, seeing the history of Vryburg.”
Du Toit, who is a committed Christian (”You can’t be an educator if you don’t believe in a higher hand”), says ”My God prepared me in a very special way to make a difference here. For more than 10 years he prepared me in bringing groups together and making them believe there’s goodwill between us and a future for all of us.”
Du Toit’s background speaks of a man not shy to tackle grim South African realities. After decades spent in various areas of education — including obtaining a docterate in sustainable development — Du Toit ”looked back and saw that I’d used 20 years of my life educating whites. And looking forward, I couldn’t make peace with what I was doing … I decided that if I wanted to make a difference in this country I must see where the needs are.”
His subsequent position as a senior subject advisor for the coloured education system in George gave him ample experience in dealing with strife-torn communities.
”In those days,” says Du Toit, ”I would walk into a school where the pupils were burning down the school. It took me six months to turn the tide, until the school restored a culture of learning.”
The strategy Du Toit was using to build bridges across the polarised school community include making sure that both staff and learners of different races mix, something not particularly encouraged in the past. As with many schools, the Afrikaans language stream is predominantly taken by white learners, while the black learners use English. This had led to a situation where ”the two [language] streams were handled as two schools on one property,” says Du Toit. ”My goal is to break down the barriers and make one school of it.”
He adds that: ”The first thing I realised [when I got here] is that the pupils didn’t know the new national anthem. So I brought that in and our flag as symbols of our united land.”
Another part of his approach is to insist that children are referred to as ”Afrikaans” or ”English-speaking”, and he refuses to use the terms ”black”, ”white” or ”coloured”. This is an aspect of Du Toit’s belief that the way to ”turn a new page and look into the future” is to ”forget the past”. He also rejects the idea of introducing tolerance or anti-bias training, on the basis that ”We must mix things in a natural way. We mustn’t make a fuss and force [integration].”
But anti-racist experts don’t think much of this approach. ”Colourblindness is often more an ‘ostrich in the sand’ approach,” believes Andre Keet, head of the training centre at the South African Human Rights Commission. ”Recognising diversity is one of the best ways of dealing with it.”
He adds that, ”You can’t rely on ‘natural forces’ [to overcome racism] because we are coming from an engineered past which means you need re-engineering to solve the problem. It requires conscious efforts to deal with the issue of race and to create a school community that is integrated.”
Still, Du Toit says: ”I’m no fool living in a fool’s paradise”. He warned the pupils against ”aggressive behaviour” that may arise in response to the ongoing court case, warning them to refer their problems either to himself or Barry Fuleni, deputy principal.
Fuleni places hope for positive change in ”the older learner’s going out of the school after matric. It’ll be a slow change, but relations [between race groups] are improving.” He is also willing to give Du Toit’s ”colourblind” approach a chance.
Across the road from the hoërskool, the Vryburg youngsters who attend Stellaland Primary remember the 1998 violence that bought chaos to their street. Refiloe Kai, now in grade 7, says, ”It’s nice here because we are taken care of by Mr Brandt [the principal] if there’s a problem at the high school.” But she adds that her mother is sending her to a high school in Kimberley because of the ”racist problem” at Vryburg Hoër.
Kai’s mother is not the only community member to have lost faith in the high school’s ability to deal with racial conflict.
Andy Mongale, another parent at Stellaland Primary, says, ”There’s no future for Vryburg Hoërskool because white people don’t want to mix. I don’t think the new principal will make a difference because the school continues to be owned by the white people.”
While Du Toit believes he can ”heal the school in three years”, others foresee another 50 years of struggle before the divided community is trully reconciled.
— The Teacher/Mail & Guardian, March, 2001.
M&G Supplements