As I could not bring myself to eat what I considered food unfit for human consumption, I often had to survive from Monday to Friday drinking only cocoa at supper time, with sugar water during the day. My small frame took severe punishment, but my will not to be reduced to an animal kept me going. So when I decided to eat alone, homegirls were dismayed but let me go. Thereafter I occasionally shared some food with them, but it stopped being an obligation.
Bethesda Normal College was like an island of Protestant morality in the Bushveld. The location of boarding schools in remote rural areas had its benefits and drawbacks. The isolated and barren rural setting offered few cultural, intellectual and leisure opportunities. Some adults, however, felt that it was an appropriate environment for taming restless adolescents. The fewer the ‘distractions’ from the learning process, or so it was felt, the better the outcome. The majority of these schools also obliged by laying down rigid rules enforced by autocratic matrons or boarding masters. Bethesda was no exception.
Most of the male students spent their weekends loitering near the school and in the village of Rita. Some of the younger ones were responsible for looking after the herd of cattle which the school relied upon for its meat supply. Fridays and Mondays were slaughter days. The beasts were usually shot by one of the teachers, and the older male students were responsible for skinning, cutting up the meat, and storing it away. The meat was kept in large bath tubs for a day or two without any refrigeration – with predictable consequences in summer.
Female students were under stricter rules. You could only go to the Kalkbank shopping centre if you had permission from the head prefect, who had to be given a list of potential shoppers by midweek for the Saturday morning outing. Numbers were strictly controlled – not more than twenty at a time were allowed. A prefect had to accompany the shoppers. The four-kilometre walk was quite hard for younger, frailer persons like me, but it was fun and a welcome change from the dull surroundings of the boarding house.
Sundays were strictly observed as days of compulsory worship. A morning service was held at the local Dutch Reformed church conducted in Afrikaans with Northern Sotho interpretation for the local villagers. Racial segregation was entrenched in both the entrance points and the seating – after all, it was God’s law to keep blacks and whites apart, and one had to be even stricter in His house in this regard. Men and women also sat separately, presumably to reduce the temptation of being attracted to someone of the opposite sex. We had to be protected from ourselves.
Activities organised by the Student Christian Movement (SCM) and Mokgatlo wa Ba Bacha (MBB) dominated Sunday afternoons and evenings. Varying degrees of charismatic religiosity were in evidence particularly among female students. These tendencies were encouraged by the school authorities, who saw religion as the cornerstone of good behaviour. I found some solace in the various religious activities, particularly the singing, which was a major part of them, and I became a full member of the MBB.
In spite of this gloomy picture, the school had its warm and enjoyable sides too. We developed close friendships among ourselves. I became friendly with a group of three girls in my class: Moloko Laka (a homegirl) with a tall beautiful body, dry wit and a stutter, Mphika Molokoane (from Musina, then still Messina) who was the shortest of the foursome, with a perfect baby face, gentle nature and softly spoken manner, and Greta Mogooane (from Natalspruit, on the East Rand), to whom I was closest. Greta’s attributes stood out as gentleness, neatness and generosity of spirit. She was also physically attractive and petite. She did not keep the unwritten rule that prevailed among urban students not to befriend country bumpkins like myself.
Students from rural areas also kept to themselves. Any association with those from urban areas was viewed as potentially destabilising and polluting, as there was a widely held belief at the time that cities had a corrupting influence on young people. Bana be South ba tla go lahletša (Children from the South – a metaphor for the Witwatersrand area – will lead you astray) were the words of caution uttered by senior homegirls. Boundaries between town and country were evident, and reinforced in social relations at the school.
As a foursome, we operated on the margins of all conventions. We enjoyed sitting next to one another in class, sharing jokes and gossip, helping one another with school work, and occasionally sharing treats, which were few and far between. We were all very different personalities, but enjoyed each other’s company, and complemented each other’s strengths. We referred to one another as ‘Penkop’ or ‘Pennie’, from an Afrikaans set book we were reading at the time. This was the story of a group of mischievous young people who were given the same nickname.
It was hard to part from my friends at the end of our Standard 8 year, when I moved to Setotolwane High School for my matriculation. The class farewell party we organised at the end of 1964 was a great success. Food was in abundance, a rare event indeed. We celebrated our years together, and shared the hope of new beginnings. I was not sad about leaving Bethesda; my only regret was having to leave my friends behind. We kept up a brisk flow of correspondence for the rest of our school days, but lost contact later.
8 Serolong is a dialect of Setswana, spoken in the northwestern part of the country.
9 I used Aletta as my first name until my third year at Medical School when the Black Consciousness Movement challenged us to revert to our indigenous names.
Chapter 6: Matriculation is not a mattress
GENDER STEREOTYPING IN CAREER CHOICES WAS DEEPLY entrenched in those years. All but one of my female classmates chose to proceed to teacher training. Some saw teacher training as a strategy for securing a career before attempting matriculation, while others saw teaching as their final career choice. There was a widely held view that only bright pupils should attempt matric. ‘Matriculation is not a mattress’ was the popular saying, a reminder that only hard work would ensure success. I was one of only two girls among a handful of boys in my class who opted for matric. The other exceptional girl was Hester Motau from Belfast in the then eastern Transvaal, now Mpumalanga. She was older than me and came from a family of teachers that had high expectations of their daughter.
Not only were the three years at Bethesda difficult socially, but I felt intellectually under-stimulated most of the time. Although I came top of my class in every subject, I did not have to exert myself at all. On the contrary, I was bored most of the time, and tended to make careless mistakes. My arithmetic teacher, Mr Henning, used to be frustrated by these mistakes, because he was convinced that ‘I could easily not drop any marks at all’ in his subject if I put my mind to it. With hindsight, I think he should have attempted to teach me mathematics instead of the mechanical arithmetic I found so boring, but Bethesda was not concerned with teaching blacks mathematics. They took very seriously Dr Verwoerd’s words which he had used in motivating the introduction of the Bantu Education Act of 1953: ‘Bantu’ children should not be shown green pastures where they would never be allowed to graze.
Career guidance was non-existent during our school days. Your horizons were not widened beyond the known. The few positive role models for us were confined to the traditional professions of teaching and nursing. There was almost a sense of inevitability about replicating the known from one generation to the next.
Yet I had never entertained the thought of becoming a teacher. I just knew that I had to do something else. I was strongly attracted to science and the world of numbers, but could see no career prospect in science short of becoming a high-school science teacher. I had seen the discrimination against black teachers even at a higher level. I also knew from my mother’s experience that female teachers had even greater barriers to overcome. I would not become a teacher.
What about nursing? My sister Mashadi started training as a nurse at Baragwanath Hospital in 1964. I did not like what I heard from her. The authoritarian rule of seniors
