This is not merely a once-upon-a-time story: it is live history.
My wife, a newly-graduated pre-primary school teacher, was hired to establish a pre-primary class at the old Regent Road Primary school in Woodstock, Cape Town, in the early 1980's. It was her first job.
The school was classified as a "white" school, but that area was never amenable to racial classification in Apartheid terms.
She set about establishing her little class without any help from the principal, without a budget, without materials and without support or encouragement. She attacked the project with missionary zeal. She spent hours at night creating her own teaching materials out of scraps and off-cuts, bottles, bottle-caps and whatever she could scavenge from businesses and factories.
It was a valiant effort and she created a beautiful classroom while the old white bugger who pretended to be a principal, stole teaching materials issued to the school.
She totally ignored all racial prescriptions for the composition of her little student group.
She herself was a little protected white girl from a wealthy country community who had never had to contend with any aspect of apartheid, had never given it a thought, and had no idea of what was about to hit her.
One morning just after school had started, there was a knock on her classroom door and she opened it to find two (white) policemen, with the principal standing behind them in the corridor.
None of the three said a word to her - not even a greeting: they brushed past, bumping her out of the way, and the principal silently pointed out two little boys. The police seized the two by their collars and dragged them out of the room. All without a word. The classroom door slammed shut, and it was over. It must have felt like being raped.
The teacher, who later became my wife, was completely traumatized. She was born in South Africa and had lived here all her life, but it was only at that moment that she met South Africa.
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Harry Friedland © Oct. 2022
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