Imagine: A Collection of Racial Incidents at a South African Private School
Dedicated to every child who went through racial hell and trauma at the hands of a certain private school.
Imagine the words “I’m sick and tired of you bloody kaffirs” coming from a 12-year-old boy.
Imagine being called a black bitch by an 11-year-old during a rough tackle on the playground.
Imagine the first incident being dealt with with a quiet chat from a teacher and the second one being dealt with with words to your mother about how rugby is a game that brings out emotions in people and so no one was really at fault.
Imagine an 8-year-old of Indian-South African origin being referred to as a “curry muncher” at assembly by a teenager.
Imagine returning from a pilgrimage to Mecca wearing a hijab and long pants, in your religion symbolic of multiple things, and being sent home because your clothes were not appropriate attire for a “Christian” school.
Imagine being called a “coolie” in class and having a teacher laugh about it. Imagine being called that word by the same person again and having nothing done about it.
Imagine asking a member of staff what happened to the quality of her alma mater and her responding, “Well, 1994 happened”.
Imagine being Hindu and being yelled at by teachers when you didn’t mouth along to the Christian hymns at assemblies. Imagine only being grudgingly excused of it, if and when your parents wrote a note saying it wasn’t your religion.
Imagine being forced to greet every white teacher by standing up and calling them sir or ma’am and not even being requested to greet the black members of staff, at that time only seen fit to be wage workers.
Imagine being told on your first day of school that you sound “too Indian”.
Imagine a teacher catching you speaking your native Zulu in the library and yelling at you that “out of respect for those around you” you should either speak English or Afrikaans.
Imagine a teacher asking everyone in the class what they want to be when they grow up — except the two kids of colour in the class. You were delegated roles and were told that you would “never amount to anything more than a teacher”.
Imagine your 2 and 3 syllable names being misspelled and mispronounced every time they wrote or uttered them. In a high school of 100, they couldn’t be bothered to even try and get an ethnic name right.
Imagine confiding to a teacher about your PCOS and her telling you to go against your religion and use tampons to deal with it .
Imagine hearing certain but numerous teachers glorify the days of apartheid and state that for people of color during apartheid “it wasn’t that bad”.
Imagine being informed in your school’s newsletter about every hip ache, illness, and grief the white members of staff were going through but not even having a sentence published when a black member of staff who had worked there for several years died.
Imagine the coveted drama role you slaved through auditions to get, being given temporarily to someone else because you kept saying the words “wrong”. You kept saying “lil” instead of “little” until the teacher angry exclaimed, “What’s up with black people and saying “lil”?! Why can’t you say “little!”.
Imagine being yelled at by your sports coach, a debating team of 3 black girls, because your father was working that weekend and couldn’t fulfill the school’s duty of driving you to represent your region in a tournament you had worked your but off to get to.
Imagine being mocked by your classmates for having an Indian accent and being told to speak “properly” by teachers.
Imagine a group of classmates, with the help of a teacher, turning to you and asking if you’re okay with them using the word “nigga”. A word you’ve never even used yourself.
Imagine being called an animal by kids in your class, because being of South Asian descent you naturally have more body hair. Imagine the teachers doing nothing about this and this inflicting so much trauma that you grow up to have most of your body hair lasered off.
Imagine a boy in your class, one we shall eternally call Johannes, saying “we don’t want them here” after someone “casually” mentioned that there was not a single black boy in your class, imagine your teacher’s only reaction being to purse her lips.
Imagine it being, not just a personal desire, but a cultural inclination to dress modestly, but being given detention and being made fun of by other pupils every time you dared to wear a swim vest and shorts over your swimming costume.
Imagine being mocked so much for your natural accent that at the age of 7, you develop a more “white” sounding one. Imagine letting that accent slip for a few moments in high school and having a classmate call you a “coolie” as a result. Imagine the only repercussion for that classmate being the teacher saying he didn’t like that sort of language in his classroom. As if a racial slur could be compared to any four-letter swear word.
Imagine when your mom packed traditional lunches at you having them sneered at, laughed at, and being asked by your classmates how you could you eat something that looked so “disgusting”. Imagine after eating every lunch them telling you you smell like curry and to stay far away from them after eating. Imagine spraying yourself with deodorant after every class because as soon as you walked in in the morning your classmates told you you smelled like Indian spices. Imagine this affecting you so much that you begin to starve yourself at school and only begin to eat late in the afternoon, after sport, at home.
Imagine being forced to go to school on what were considered “black” holidays. Imagine having to sit in class on June 16th and even having to write your Afrikaans exam on that day. A day where multiple children were massacred for protesting their right not to be taught in Afrikaans.
Imagine a teacher telling you, an immigrant, that there was no way you could live in South Africa without learning Afrikaans.
Imagine being the only black boy in a rugby team and anxiously waiting for the ball to be passed to you only to be told by a boy who would later be chosen to represent the school as prefect and then as head boy to “Please get away from here, you kaffir”. Imagine then being kicked and hit by a supporting teammate while getting called “a black piece of shit”, imagine knowing you can do nothing about it because they, the white parents and the white teachers, simply outnumber you.
Imagine, after your mother wrote a sincere note about the situation, being told that your extra classes for your Hindi exams were not a “good enough reason” to miss sports practice and getting kicked of the team the next week for “having a bad attitude”.
Imagine being given a farewell cruise at the end of high school and all the white girls being allowed to choose their cabin partners, but the girls of colour all being delegated and segregated to one room.
Imagine making your provincial athletics team, making your tiny school and yourself proud, and being awarded half-colours for it …only to find out that the previous year a white boy who made the team with half your running time was awarded full-colours for the same feat. Imagine complaining about this injustice and having a lecture in an assembly dedicated to you because of it, because after all — you were at a fault.
Imagine a little money going missing and even though the only two black kids in the class weren’t in the classroom when it happened, having two girls go to the front of the class and asking anyone who “took” the money to return it whilst conveniently looking at only the two of you.
Imagine a teacher in her 20s saying to you that affirmative action wasn’t necessary as black people had been going to school with white kids for as long as she’d been alive.
Imagine a teacher referring to the groundstaff as “the black staff” instead.
Imagine every time the school traveled to another city to compete in extracurriculars, all the black kids not being chosen by host parents and being relegated to stay in the boarding establishment. Imagine talking to the headmaster about this and him not having the gall to call or say anything to those schools in order to protect his black students. But wow, were the white kids protected whenever they used racial slurs.
Imagine a teacher’s husband saying in full view of two other teachers and right in front of your melanated face when discussing moving school equipment, “Ya, we’ll get a few of those blacks to do it. You know these blacks love cheap and easy labour”. Imagine this coming from a man whose only qualification being that he was straight, white and male. Imagine nothing being done or said about that statement even though it was said right in front of a Head of Department.
Imagine being so unwilling to go through another day, another onslaught of heavy racism that you spend your teenage afternoons searching forums on the internet to find ways to make yourself so physically sick that you would be able to escape the mental stress for a day or two. That you began to hate school. That you stopped going altogether. That you didn’t even attend your graduation ceremony.
This was our reality, this is what we went through…and more. But imagine the fact that incidents like this still happen in the present, according to people who have younger relatives at Wembley.
Way back in the day, when I was an avid debater, I used to walk around with a copy of the constitution and rebutted nearly every point my opponents made with the fact that what they were suggesting was unconstitutional. It was as simple as looking at one of the free-est and fairest constitutions in the world to know that that that shit wouldn’t fly in South Africa. However, I have come to realise after writing these articles that these rules don’t apply to everyone. In a private institution, you don’t just live in South Africa. You live in the confines of the institution. And it’s a utopia for some and a dystopia for others, unfortunately, at Wembley what side of wonderland you land on seems to be largely determined by the colour of your skin.
Initially, when I started this series my intention was to open a dialogue with Wembley. I do not want to do that anymore. Wembley College, as a school you should not exist. You deserve to be reported to the Department of Basic Education or anyone who can take this further because I have neither the time nor the inclination to sit down, have tea and entertain a dialogue with people who are making parents pay tens of thousands of rands only for their daughters and sons to be called “Kaffirs” and “coolies” and “curry munchers” without consequence.
I have no time for a culture of racism so deeply ingrained that when pointed out it is met with confusion as opposed to an attempt to understand.
Wembley College, let’s not have that chat.
Part of a series of articles that include:
Wembley College, We Need to Have a Chat
and
I Tried to Confront My Old School about Racism, this was their Response
