Twenty wooden classrooms surrounding a grass patch and flanked by poplar trees constituted the Pretoria Indian Primary School. It was built in the heart of the bustling, thriving, sometimes dangerous and always exciting Marabastad, just outside the Pretoria city centre.
The year was 1964. This was my first school — the site of many wonderful memories where the joy of learning unfolded in an environment that -enabled each of us to thrive and to feel so very important.
Our school was located in the community and was very much a part of it. The teachers, all remarkable men and women, were part of the ordinary struggles of survival the community faced and overcame daily.
Strangely, but perhaps understandably in the times we lived in, the principal Mr Coetzee was white and came from outside the community. He was a pretty decent man, a good leader and inspired the best in his teachers.
I think I was a good student and enjoyed a good relationship with my teachers. Mr Hassan Moosa, my history teacher, made the past come alive, virtually taking us to the great struggles and events that shaped our world. He was also a fantastic artist and a talented musician. In Grade 2, I was hospitalised for eight weeks — Ms Moosa, a family member, would visit me in hospital a few times a week bringing my books and lessons with her to ensure my education -continued.
Mr Reddy, a later principal, inspired us to believe that we were all capable of greatness, of soaring out of the poverty that surrounded us and of being good citizens. The politics of the time impacted on us in many ways. Walking from Marabastad to town, we saw how others lived, the schools they went to and the wonderful services provided for them. We spoke about it at school — not in a militant manner but in a way that questioned why our lives had to be so materially different from others.
I recall a regular Republic Day ritual where the sweets and flags given to us at school would be confiscated and crushed in a heap by the high school learners as protest against the policies of the day. Of course, we parted with our sweets with mixed feelings, but looking back, those were important events that galvanised our -consciousness.
I imagine while we did not speak the language of human rights as we do today, we lived the experience of human wrongs and the school gave us the tools, the space, the opportunity, to imagine a different world. They were some of the best times of my life and even today when I meet some of my teachers from the 1960s, I still call them ‘Sir” or ‘ Madam”, not because I have to, but because of a deep respect for what they were able to do under the most trying of circumstances.
March 21 is Human Rights Day and International Day against Racism