A pact to protect, nurture and lead our children

A small-town school illustrates that the right guidance and collaboration create a world in which our youth can do their best

WE city folk like to think we know it all. Jacob Zuma makes an important announcement that he had to make at some stage during his presidency and we have an opinion. The matric exams start and already we see gloom. Julius Malema manages to organise a march of young people and we pray for rain to fall on their parade.

And then, when he and his comrades leave only a messy, litter-strewn city in its wake, we applaud his leadership. We must, always, have an opinion.

But sometimes that all-knowing arrogance is challenged. Last Thursday, after a five-hour drive traversing three of our nine provinces - Gauteng, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal - I found myself in Vryheid, a plattelandse dorpie (rural town).

It is in the heart of Zululand, which, more than a century ago, rang with the sounds of British rifle shots and the thwack of assegais against cowhide shields during the Zulu war.

But on this beautiful spring night I stood before the pupils, parents and teachers of Vryheid High School. In true city arrogance, I had come as a guest speaker feeling compelled to leave something behind that could perhaps touch one child's life.

But less than 24 hours later I drove out of Vryheid with a sense of hope and optimism about our nation's children. I was the one who had been taught a lesson.

As I stood before the pupils of Vryheid I saw pride on their young, innocent faces - unblemished by time and the weariness of our collective disappointment and cynicism - as they sang their school song, written in 1945.

The teenage voices rang through the night air - out of the mouths of young Muslim women with green scarves covering their heads and trousers under their dresses, Afrikaner boys with powerful handshakes who looked like they played first-team rugby, and Indian girls with Lakshmi strings around their wrists.

The prize winners flocked to the stage, their soft hands still unscarred by labour, eagerly reaching forward to accept their scrolls. Row upon row moved forward - every single child a representation of the old and new South Africa.

And in this 125-year-old school I found hope again.

How easy would it have been for the largely white teacher population to keep shut the doors of learning, to artificially keep change at bay. But they did not.

Next year, the head prefect for the boys will be a young African man; two of the girl deputies will be African too.

And although I am sure the school is not unblemished in its dealings with transformation and issues of race, it is evident that it is trying to do good.

These new South African children of Vryheid, who call themselves the multicultural tribe, have discovered something that we, the adults of this nation, have yet to learn. They can coexist with each other, pay their R6000-a-year school fees and produce the province's top matriculant.

This high school is no different from any other apartheid-era white school; it has had the same white headmaster for the past 17 years and most of the teachers are also white.

So how come Vryheid manages to attract pupils from Gauteng and elsewhere?

The answer is simple: the teachers teach. They are at school every day, they stay late to prepare their charges for exams, and for most of them teaching is a profession of which they remain proud.

There is a pact between the parents, school governing body, teachers and pupils - the way it is meant to be.

It is in the leadership the headmaster has offered, steering a steady ship for 17 years - the same number of years during which our democracy has shifted, erupted, settled in a restless pattern of change and contestation.

Driving back to Johannesburg past the flat farm fields with occasional signs of life, watching children coming from school and emaciated cattle grazing on communal land, Vryheid and its multicultural tribe was quickly left behind.

Then it was back to a city preparing itself for the angry march by the other kids of the new South Africa, the discontented and disillusioned ones who were promised so much and received so little.

The difference between our city children and those in Vryheid is uncomfortably stark. Vryheid's children are protected by their small-town lifestyle; our children have been flung into a material world that does not cater for or acknowledge them unless they behave like marauding savages, giving truth to the stereotype that nothing good will come of them.

But, unlike us, our children should not belong to two worlds, be it politically or economically. The gift of freedom offered in Vryheid should be an automatic right for the children of Malema's generation.