Diversity and inclusion specialist Hani du Toit had just addressed a conference as a keynote speaker when some delegates asked her to go to the kitchen and replace food that had run out during mealtime.
“Because I’m a Muslim woman and was wearing a headscarf, the people thought I must have been a caterer at that function,” she said.
“It is the same invisibility that some black pupils experience at schools. They get accosted by other pupils, assuming it’s the same children they spoke to yesterday. Imagine a child spending five years at high school where she is not seen.
“Then we tell that child, you can make a success of yourself, you must believe in yourself. How will they do that after going through such an experience?
“Then we say, let’s move on in a nonracial South Africa. Who are we serving when we do that? Are we being true to ourselves or do we live in fantasy?”
Du Toit was responding to the outcry about a diversity training workshop at Fish Hoek High School in Cape Town, after facilitator Asanda Ngoasheng “opened a racial can of worms”, allegedly referring to some pupils as white supremacists.
Parents alleged she told pupils whites were the only people capable of being racist as they still held power, and read a poem describing Jesus Christ as “this blue-eyed and blond-haired Jesus”.
The release of the Khampepe commission report last week added to the diversity debate. The report, initiated in May, found while Stellenbosch University had made strides towards transformation, black students and staff members continued to feel unwelcome and excluded. The commission followed a racial outcry after a white student, Theuns du Toit, urinated on black student Babalo Ndwayana’s study material.
Hani Du Toit said what happened in Fish Hoek and Stellenbosch University were a microcosm of the deepening racial polarisation across South Africa, and if this was not addressed, children, the future of the country, would not be able to unshackle themselves from the painful and shameful past of racism.
Du Toit said schoolgoing children were all born free of apartheid, “but we live in a society that has been shaped by apartheid” and not enough was said about whiteness.
“And the success of apartheid lives in this issue playing out this week.”
She said diversity discussions needed to be made part of the curriculum.
“It needs to be part of retraining of teachers as educators as well. It needs to be ongoing. The problem is that it’s been a reactionary measure, when what is unhealed in our schools reveals itself.
“We have not sufficiently spoken about whiteness. We speak about apartheid, and we speak about the underprivileged. We don’t speak about whiteness, yet South Africa’s ugly history is rooted in the false belief of the supremacy of whiteness. So when people like us start to unpack the system of racism the heat gets turned up and becomes uncomfortable to talk about.”
Federation of Governing Bodies of South African Schools CEO Dr Jaco Deacon said it is never too late to talk about diversity.
“We should keep creating opportunities for ordinary people, including pupils, to have these conversations. I think part of any induction programme at a new workplace or when you start at a new university is the culture of the organisation and ‘how we do things around here’. Diversity is part and parcel of that,” he said.
But it is important to make diversity a part of normal conversations, and “discussions should take place before the storm or scandal”, said Deacon.
“We should not shy away from these discussions. I have learnt we need to listen more, try harder to understand and put yourself in the shoes of others before we respond. We would have very boring lives if we were all alike. Part of life is to see and enjoy diversity and to be comfortable enough to embrace every opportunity to grow as a person, as a community and as South Africans.”
Veronica King, global executive coach diversity specialist from Emuthini Consulting, said the backlash against Ngoasheng revealed the fragility of white South Africans, which often led to anger and defensiveness when race and diversity issues were mentioned.
In her experience of conducting diversity workshops at schools, she described Cape Town as “the hardest context to do this work because people think race is a weird thing and children shouldn’t be spoken to about race”.
“If these children are not exposed to diverse groups of people in their personal lives, they will be traumatised when people start talking about race at school because it’s not being normalised in their homes. This reminds me, with deep sadness, that almost 30 years after our democracy, we are still a very segregated society.”
She raised concern about how provincial education MEC David Maynier initially handled the saga.
“The centrality of whiteness is what is evident here. Based on the education MEC’s handling of this matter in which he threatened legal action against Ngoasheng, he’s clearly defending the white parents who said their little darlings had been traumatised. These same little darlings are the ones who say to black teachers, ‘Are you a real teacher’?”
General secretary of the National Association of School Governing Bodies, Matakanye Matakanya, blamed the department of education for not implementing policies such as the South African Schools Act, which encouraged the “redress of past injustices in educational provision and protect and advance diverse cultures and languages”.
“When schools introduce diversity workshops they are not breaking the law, but they are doing what their own policies call for. Education officials should be visiting schools and supervising whether all schools adhere to these policies, but that is not happening.
“Take for instance the incremental introduction of African language policy, which encourages the introduction of African languages at schools to reflect our multicultural population. That, too, is not happening because some racist schools are refusing to implement such policies.
The understanding of diversity, multiculturalism and inclusion needs to start as early as possible within basic education.
— Martin Viljoen, Stellenbosch University spokesperson
“Diversity should not be a question of whether we want it or not. It should be part of the school curriculum. We must continue with these workshops, and they should be addressed at policy level,” he said.
Stellenbosch University rector and vice-chancellor Prof Wim de Villiers has promised swift action on the recommendations of the Khampepe commission report. While he did not give timelines on deliverables, he said implementation of the recommendations would be a priority.
“This is a priority for the university. Some of them [recommendations] may be easier to implement. But I would think this will be a continuing discussion at our council meetings and our senate meetings, our planning, interactions with student bodies, and institutional forums over the next couple of months,” said De Villiers.
Spokesperson Martin Viljoen said while the university would be “working extremely hard” to ensure its values and commitments to transformation filter down and become lived experiences, this work should not only start at university level but schools as well.
“Diversity and inclusivity awareness and training cannot be left to only take place at tertiary education level. The understanding of diversity, multiculturalism and inclusion needs to start as early as possible within basic education,” he said.
“Our students bring into the university cultures and behaviours they have learnt in their communities, schools and families. It is therefore important they are educated on issues of diversity, inclusion and multiculturalism in their schools.”
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