The events of the past few days have demonstrated just how the ANC-led democratic government has betrayed the born-free generation.
While many South Africans have hailed the brave stance of the girls at Pretoria High School for Girls, who decided to protest against the school’s discriminatory language and hair policies, I could not help but weep for the youngsters, who have been hurled into a war they could have been shielded from if the ANC had the political will to act. Instead of being on the playground enjoying their childhood, 14-year-old girls are being forced to grow up and confront a brutal system that is designed to dehumanise them.
These children whom we have burdened with the responsibility of being revolutionaries are a symbol of a revolution betrayed, an indictment of our government.
Their struggle is neither isolated nor is it new - and perhaps that is part of what makes it so tragic. Many black youngsters, who attended former model C schools, have experienced the same trauma at the hands of white teachers.
We have been forced to straighten our “mane of hair” and to polish our accents to be deemed acceptable in schools that are integrated only in terms of the racial demographic shift, but which remain resistant to change. As a starting point, we must understand the issue is not simply about hair, it’s about power.
It’s no accident that students at the school raise the issue of hair in conjunction with its language policy. According to the girls, they are discouraged from speaking in their native tongue while attending school. The girls are told to “stop making funny noises” whenever they converse in their indigenous languages - a charge that is not made when Afrikaans-speaking students speak their language.
As a tool for liberation and oppression, language is an important weapon of power. To borrow from revolutionary writer Frantz Fanon: “A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.”
The message that is being communicated by anti-black hair policies in historically white schools is clear: black pupil are being accommodated, they are guests who are in that space of whiteness. As such, they must conduct themselves in a manner that is acceptable to the whiteness, which they must aspire to, even though it is unattainable.
Distinguished academic and educationist Mary Metcalfe made a profound contribution to this conversation. She argued that for school policies and codes of conduct to be reasonable, they must have an educational content.
There must be educational content in saying schools must be gun-free and non-violent spaces; pupils must not abuse substances on school premises and should not be late for class.
Something important is being said through such policies.
What then is the educational content of the policy on black hair at the Pretoria High School for Girls? Simply put, what is the school teaching when ruling black hair in its natural state is not acceptable? What is it saying by labelling black African languages as “funny noises” which don’t belong in a learning institution?
It is saying many things and at the heart of them is that black people are a demographic majority, but a cultural minority who must submit to the hegemonic power of a white episteme.
But the question of power does not stop with the language policy and the cultural norms that exclude black pupils. It extends to the equally important question of class in the schooling system.
The reality is that millions of children who go through the public education system in township and rural schools are casualties of an equally brutal war.
The legacy of the apartheid past continues to show its ugly head in the infrastructural and resource inequalities that characterise the public education system.
Poor black students in many township and rural schools continue to be subjected to dehumanising experiences, such as being made to scrub toilet floors and clean toilet basins with limited resources before attending class.
As recently as the early 2000s, when I was a junior primary school pupil in Soweto, Fridays afternoons were dedicated to scrubbing floors, washing windows and cleaning three toilet cubicles that were used by more than a 100 children.
This remains a common practice.
On all fronts - whether in former Model C schools or in township and rural schools - black pupils continue to be the casualties of war.
For 22 years, the ANC government has presided over the violence that is meted out to black pupils by a racist, sexist and classist education system.
With the exception of the Gauteng Department of Education taking the admissions policy issue to the Constitutional Court a few months ago, there has been no will to deal radically with the inherent problems of the education system.
This needs to change.
We must demand that the government cease to treat the transformation of education without a sense of real urgency.
Civil society and all stakeholders must be mobilised to form a pressure group that will compel the government to take responsibility for transforming the curricula, institutional culture and other manifestations of inequality that characterise the education landscape.
We must urge the Minister of Basic Education, Angie Motshekga, to issue a code of conduct. This is being left up to school governing bodies (SGBs) which, in former Model C schools, have proved to have a racial and class bias.
The South African Schools Act 84 of 1996 empowers the minister to intervene on the issue of language policy, among other things, in situations where SGBs have policies that are racist and discriminatory in nature.
We must support organisations and pressure groups that are compelling the Department of Basic Education to prioritise the regulations for norms and standards for basic infrastructure and capacity in public schools - particularly township and rural schools.
Thousands of public schools in townships and rural areas lack basic infrastructure, making them not ideal spaces for learning and thereby disadvantaging black children.
We cannot continue to watch black children being lynched by a racist education system and celebrating them when they rise up.
We cannot be “inspired” when we see black children being violated and treated like animals in a democratic society.
A 14-year-old throwing a fist in the air during a protest against institutional racism is not the Angela Davis of our time.
She is a child who should never have to carry the burden of being a revolutionary.
She is a child who has been failed - a casualty of war.
iOL