She returned to Africa for research on a new book and ended up with a teenage son. Carol Lee, British journalist and author of the newly published book A child called Freedom, is one of the initiators of The Soweto Project, aimed at bringing education to poor children in the famous township south-west of Johannesburg.
When she visited the Sowetan informal settlement of Motsoaledi in 2003, Lee was struck by the conditions the people lived in, even though she had travelled in many poor parts of Africa before and spent some of her childhood years in this continent.
There was the sharing of the toilets, the tiny shacks, but most of all she was struck by one child. Freedom lived on the other side of the settlement with his father and older brother. He was serious, inquisitive and hungry. Lee spoke to him, bought him and others some fruit, had her picture taken, but later could not shake the image of the slender Freedom from her head. She had to do something. Knowing very well that she was in no position to feed all the hungry children in the world, she made an effort at helping this one.
In the process of finding the best way of helping Freedom and his family, and coinciding with the interviews for her book about the Soweto Uprisings of 1976, a wider plan emerged. Together with businessman Martin Cairns, whom she met at the Hector Pieterson Museum, Lee thought of a way to help today’s children of Soweto.
“The Soweto Project grew directly out of my book,” she says on the phone from her home in London. “Martin said to me: ‘You have all the contacts on the ground, but how is best to help?’ We were wondering if the big charities were the best way to go. Why didn’t we just do something we know worked?”
The original plan was to raise funds to send 320 underprivileged children, as many as there were estimated killed by police violence in the early days of the 1976 uprisings, to school by June 16 2006. That way the project would commemorate the 30th anniversary of that history changing event. Things turned out slightly different.
“It proved very difficult to administer on the ground,” Lee says. “We have now switched to the emphasis of supporting one particular school in Soweto, Inkwenkwezi Primary School.”
It is the same school Freedom went to.
“The school brings in children who do not get a proper education. I know the headmaster, Skipper, and trust that the money is well spent because he is very community based and a good man. He takes out food parcels to people in the nearby squatter camps, he’s built a vegetable garden at the school and a kitchen. Skipper understands that for young people to learn they have to believe that the people surrounding them are positive.”
On the internet site of the Soweto Project people are encouraged to donate money for school fees and school uniforms. Old computers are also welcomed. The money that has been sent to Inkwenkwezi has helped bring dozens of children into the school so far.
“Skipper is now also buying books for the library with our money and some musical instruments,” Lee says enthusiastically.
Carol Lee finds it a grateful project to run.
“I got a phone call from Skipper the other day. He was in tears. I thought there was something wrong but he told me how a mother and a father had walked miles and miles and miles to say that Skipper had to phone me straight away to thank me from all their hearts for putting their boys through school.”
Upon that call Lee started crying as well and she told Skipper to please tell them that it is her pleasure to help where she cans. “I am partly an African child myself and I love to help. I also told him to say that these people must never ever walk all those miles again!”
The Soweto Project does not stop after June 16. It will keep running and more children will continue to be brought into Inkwenkwezi Primary School.
“Unfortunately, 30 years on education is still not free,” mourns Lee. “There are so many children that can’t go to school and there are so many children that go to school hungry. That is also what the people from the Class of 1976 I interviewed remember: going to school hungry.
“We are not talking hundreds of children here, we are talking tens of thousands. We are not talking about a tiny minority. In 1976 the students had an ideal that in a free South Africa education would be free, and until the government takes up responsibility we must help wherever we can.”
Carol Lee’s book ‘A child called Freedom’ (Random House) is available from bookshops.