almost a year before she found out that I had reached puberty. Even then she did not talk to me directly about it. She asked her best friend, Mrs Moshakga, to speak to me. Mrs Moshakga was in turn very indirect in her explanation of what puberty was about and said very little which satisfied my curiosity. She simply said, ‘This monthly flow of blood signals that you are now a woman. You should not sleep with boys, because you will then have a baby.’ But how could I be a woman at the age of twelve? What did sleeping with boys mean? And what was the connection between that and babies? I had to rely on Miriam to respond in detail to my questions, and to interpret some of the innuendoes. My father’s encyclopaedias also came in handy: I could read and follow the biological explanations with the aid of the diagrams.
It is interesting how little the discourse of sexuality between parents and their children has changed over the years, particularly among working-class people. In my work with adolescents in the Western Cape townships I came across the same silences, and the unwillingness of parents to be open to their children about sexuality and their growing bodies. Many young people still have to rely on friends for information about this vital area of life. It is a measure of how deeply entrenched are the mystique of the human body and the ambivalences we seem to have about sexuality. Some researchers have suggested that the incest taboo may have something to do with this silence. Talking about sex may itself be regarded as a sexual activity.
Chapter 5: School, the institution
I DO NOT REMEMBER PLAYING THE FANTASY GAMES OF ‘When I grow up I will be this, that or the other’. Nor do I remember being asked by adults in their usual condescending way what I thought I would become later in life. It may well be that my distance from my peers had a lot to do with my unconcern about a career. But it may also have had to do with the assumption in the village that you automatically became a teacher or nurse if you did well at school, or a policeman or labourer if you did not. Given my academic abilities and the fact that my parents could afford to educate me, my choice of career didn’t invite questions from curious adults. I was destined to become a teacher.
Charles Dickens could well have set his bleaker social novels in South Africa and, specifically, in one of the most important secondary educational institutions in the then northern Transvaal. Bethesda was a teacher training college which was started by Dutch Reformed Church missionaries in the 1930s. It was situated about fifty kilometres west of Pietersburg – now Polokwane – in a mission station known as Rita, which nestles under a beautiful, sharply defined koppie whose name it shares. It had an enrolment of about three hundred students, most of whom were in the secondary school section. There were about three boys to each girl, and the boys’ and girls’ residences lay on either side of the school’s teaching and administrative blocks.
Like many of my contemporaries, I arrived with great expectations in January 1962 at what I anticipated would be a place of higher learning. It was a major step in our lives. Childhood was finally behind us (even though I was only fourteen years old). We were on the road to preparing ourselves for the world of work. But on arrival I was taken aback at the state of the institution.
I was never asked my views of Bethesda, but when our English teacher asked us to write a letter to a friend, telling her about our school and encouraging her to apply for admission, I took off.
Bethesda Normal School
P.O. Kalkbank
Pietersburg
3/4/1964
Dear Friend,
I heard from a mutual friend that you intend to come to this school for your secondary level education. I feel it is only fair that I should give you a sense of what you would be letting yourself in for.
It has been a remarkable last two and a quarter years for me. My romantic vision of boarding school has been dented severely by my experiences here. I shall only focus on a few areas to illustrate my point. First, the dormitories we are housed in are in an appalling state of disrepair. There are bedbugs everywhere, particularly in the hot summer months. The authorities order fumigations only after repeated complaints, and even then the problem gets merely contained for a few months, only to resurface with greater vengeance.
The second major problem area, probably the most important one for young growing bodies such as ours, is the quality of the food. I cannot understand how any responsible adult can expect young people to live on a diet which consists of mainly carbohydrates, occasional meat (often rotten), and little fresh fruit and vegetables. The unchanging and unappetising weekly menu is as follows:
Breakfast – Soft porridge, cooked the night before, often served cold, without any milk, except on Sunday mornings when a quarter loaf of bread with a spoon of jam is served in addition.
Lunch – Hard porridge served with either boiled potato or over-cooked cabbage, and twice a week with meat (often off in the hot summer months due to a lack of refrigerating facilities).
Supper – Hard porridge served with a cup of cocoa with no milk added to it. A quarter loaf of dry bread is served only on Saturday evenings.
It is hardly surprising that the majority of the students, particularly the girls, end up with severe pellagra (a vitamin B complex deficiency). What is even more infuriating, though, is the attitude of the matron. She blames the skin manifestation of the vitamin deficiency disease on the girls themselves. She emphatically denies that it has anything to do with the quality of the food, but claims that it results from the use of skin-lightening creams. Her assertions fly in the face of the diagnosis of the visiting general practitioner, Dr Makunyane, whose opinions she completely ignores.
The quality of education itself is not bad. Most of the teachers are keenly interested in the success of their students. I particularly like my arithmetic and biology teachers, who encourage me to excel. The latter two subjects are my favourites.
Social relations between the students and most of the teachers are a problem area. All our teachers, except those teaching Northern Sotho, are white people, all Afrikaans speaking except our Standard 6 and 7 English teacher. The latter is a kindly old man in his late sixties, Mr Erckels, who lives on his farm, less than ten kilometres from the school. He refers to Serolong8 as his mother tongue, because he grew up in the western Transvaal. We are often taken aback when he says with perfect intonation: Ka se haheso re re ke lengoele (In my language we say it is a knee). Mr Erckels is an exceptionally caring teacher.
The majority of the teachers maintain a ‘them and us’ attitude. This is manifested in a variety of ways: no handshakes, separate entrances even in the local church which we are compelled to attend every Sunday, racist comments particularly from the spouses of the teachers. There is an invisible wall between students and teachers which is very disturbing, particularly from those teachers whom I really like, and whom I would like to learn to know a bit more.
You have to make your own decision in the end, but I would discourage you from coming to this school. Explore other possibilities. I am planning to go to Setotolwane High School next year for my matriculation years, and am already impatient with the slow passage of time. I will certainly not miss this place.
I wish you all the best.
Yours sincerely,
Aletta9 Ramphele
Mr Le Roux, our Standard 8 English teacher, was appalled. How could I misuse a class assignment to complain about school conditions? An interesting question which begs the issue: Would he have complained if I had used the assignment to praise the school? He gave me fifty per cent for
