Sorry again for the the lack of content. As some of you will know, Dave’s mother was taken ill in February and died in May. So between work and two trips to see Dave’s family in the last 3 months, our lives have been pretty full. We’ll post some news in the near future, but for now here’s an inspiring story of something that happened just the other day…
Some days are better than others. Some days are run of the mill. Some days are busy. Some are boring. Others you just want to end. On Tuesday this week, though, I (Dave) had one of those rare and special encounters which will live long in the memory.
For a few months now we’ve been supporting The Warehouse in a weekly project offering tutoring to school children on any subject they need help with. It’s been a real success, with as many as 30 children dropping in each time for help in anything from English to Physics to Afrikaans. This week I offered my services for the first time. It won’t be the last. I was there to offer support with the subject in which I gained my first degree (English). A 16 year-old from Khayelitsha township, who goes to a school not far from us and during the week lives in a home for girls who need extra support, was pointed in my direction.
Her name is Serena. It quickly became obvious that she is intelligent, articulate and highly motivated. We barely touched on English, talking instead about her Geography lessons and the factors behind large-scale population movements. She told me about tectonic plates, which she’d researched for her own interest in her lunch-break that day. Then we moved on to history. She wanted a bit of background on the American Civil Rights movement and the differing tactics of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King (I have to admit, neither of these subjects are high in my knowledge base, but I think we got somewhere). We talked about Nazi Germany and anti-Semitism, something about which I am more confident.
Then we shifted, fairly naturally, to apartheid-era South Africa. She knew some of the history already – not least from her parents – but she had one specific question. She remembered her teacher saying something about riots in Soweto and showing the class a photo of a parent and child. She wanted to know what it was about. This was what will remain unforgettable to me. With the film Cry Freedom fresh in my mind from watching it over Sunday lunch, I told her how, in the mid-1970s, the apartheid regime imposed on all schools that subjects should be taught primarily in the Afrikaans language. For the black school children this was not their first language, or even their second. The anger at being forced to be taught in a language not their own eventually reached a tipping point, and students left classes en-masse to protest. You can read a fuller account of how events developed and tumbled out of control, leaving a still disputed number of people killed, by clicking here or here (this includes the photo to which I think she was referring). The government claimed 23 school students died; other figures suggest 200-600. Thousands were injured: men, women and children; most of them injured in the back, wounds received whilst running away.
So I attempted to do justice to that story to an increasingly open-mouthed and disbelieving 16 year-old girl. I tried to tell her how people her age died, protesting to have school classes in their own languages. She was gobsmacked, I was watery-eyed.
Serena was born in 1994, the year of South Africa’s first democratic election; Nelson Mandela was elected President of a country thought then to stand on the brink of a civil war. Many people really believed the country would be ripped apart by hatred, revenge and anger.
Serena knows that didn’t happen. There are many problems still to overcome – she described her parents’ tin shack to me. Many go without what they shouldn’t have to go without. She, though, demonstrates two things to me. First, we must never stop telling the stories that shape us. I talked about this with our friend and fellow tutor Heidi, and Heidi insisted that Serena must know what has led her and her family to where they now are; that it is the product of an evil system, not their own failing. This is not unforgiveness – that is another issue entirely. You can’t, though, know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve come from. Second, Serena demonstrates hope. She, like many of her age anywhere in the world, wants to learn and grow. She wants to be part of something new. Born the same year as the new South Africa, she already is.
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