Wembley College, We Need to Have a Chat
Little is said about the racism that children of colour experience in South Africa’s elite private schools. This is my story and many others.
When I was 10 years old, I had a racist teacher.
I didn’t know it at the time. I mean her walls were filled with bible verses, she made us sing songs about loving God and all mankind as you loved yourself. But she was a racist, I realise that now.
I realise that when I look back and remember her turning to me, one of only 3 kids of colour in her class, asking what my favourite fruit was and suggesting that it was bananas.
I realise that when I look back on her trying to explain the delicate news to us that one of our classmate's families had been involved in an armed robbery and the reason she gave was “a black man” came into their house
I realise that when I look back to the time, I anxiously went to her desk because my stomach hurt so badly and she looked coldly at my 10-year-old face and told me that this was something I should talk to my parents about.
When I was 11 I had a more racist teacher. It feels wrong to say that. Racism is Racism. But there are extremes to it and Mrs Gander took things as far as any teacher employed in a new democracy could. Every morning without fail, after our obligatory scripture reading, she would launch into a rant about how things were done so much differently and so much better under “the white government”. Everything wrong with the country — the crime, the corruption and the sin could all be traced not to the fact that we had poor leadership but the fact that we had black leadership. She proclaimed one day about our new democracy “this flag means nothing to me”.
When I was 14, 15, 16, 17. By this time I was in high school and had different teachers for each subject, but there was always a racist among them and never one who was too scared to express their views, even if the room they were in had a child of colour or two. My classmates had now grown to the extent that they were now old enough to express their own racial views and given that they had grown up influenced by the likes of Mrs Gander as well as my fourth-grade teacher, for the most part, the news wasn’t good. I remember getting into a political argument with Sabrina Wellman and her response being “Without us you’d still be running around naked with sticks”.
I heard about the word being said now and again, that dreaded k-word but if and when something was done about it was always to hush it, to minimize, to cover it up. To save the aggressor rather than the hurt.
There is one particular first name that will haunt me for the rest of my life — let’s call him Johannes. Johannes was a disgustingly racist teenage boy and would never miss the opportunity to snicker or make a comment when race was in the picture. Now every time I hear that name, I flinch, I do not associate with that person. But it wasn’t just that Johannes was racist, it was that Johannes was allowed to be racist. When he spoke of his disgust over my black brother having a white girlfriend, the teachers said nothing. When he made derogatory comments about black people in general the teachers said nothing, in fact throughout my five years of schooling with Johannes only one teacher had the gall to say anything to him about his views.
But to attack one racist is not enough, as I said, I went to school with many and the thing about privilege and about racism is it doesn’t talk, it screams; every day for 8 years I prepared myself for the daily onslaught. From the time I was too young to know what racism was to the time I was old enough to accept and even convince myself of the fact that as long as I lived in South Africa this was going to be my reality.
I was wrong. Even living in the conservative city of Pretoria I have never experienced incidents of racism like I did in that school. Even going to the whitest spaces, I have not experienced racism like I did in that school. And only when I graduated and went through years of therapy did I realise the complex traumas it inflicted on me.
You may say everyone is not guilty, but everyone was. I believe it was Martin Luther King who said “In the end, we will not remember the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends”. In this case, the silence of our supervisors, the teachers, the parents, the board, can I hold any of them non-complicit?
Can I not question them for allowing me to go around with the nickname “Mop” for three years because I had the audacity to come to school with an unapologetically black hairstyle; because I had the gall to enter a white space with my box braids in a bob. That is racist.
It reached the point in my days in Mrs Gander's classroom that I began to wish I was white. Maladaptive daydreaming can become the comfort of any anxious child but boy did I wish to be Afrikaans, blonde-haired and blue-eyed just so the woman would like me and as a child, all you want is to be liked. Even if I was too young to understand what racism was I knew she didn’t like people like me.
I am not saying this to harm. I am saying this to protect. To protect the 10-year-old unsuspecting girl that walked into that classroom and all the 10-year-old unsuspecting girls and boys of colour that have walked in since. ‘
When Mr Wilkinson said he thought interracial dating was not something to be done by adults I kept quiet.
When Mr Henderson asked us to raise our hands if we would date someone of the opposite race I kept quiet.
When Johannes made a gagging sound of disgust when he found out my matric dance date was white, I kept quiet. But I am saying something now.
Wembley College, we need to have a chat.
Part of a series:
I tried confronting my old school about racism, this was their response
And
Imagine
