Honourable readers, I too fear f*k*l. If you grew up on the Cape Flats, you learn early on how to dodge gangsters, avoid dangerous areas, walk sideways with a swinging arm and, most of all, project strength. The slightest hint of fear on your face and you’re toast. So, like my president, nothing scares me. Until two weeks ago.
There, on Twitter, was a video of a young man dragging and running off with the traffic lights. I lie to you not. That long, heavy yellow traffic light pole with the light fixtures on the end. He was huffing and puffing as he ran, coming up for air at regular intervals as he stopped to regain his energy. Then he took off again along the pavement of a busy road as someone’s camera tracked the robot thief. “Steal till there’s nothing more to steal” reads one of the captions commenting on this startling event on Twitter.
Only a few days before, one of our leading journalists posted a photo from a relative’s home showing a set of thieves uprooting a bus stop shelter and loading it onto a waiting bakkie. In broad daylight. We all know one of the reasons suburban trains and even luxury trains stop running from time to time: people literally lift the rails from their tracks for sale at a nearby scrap dealer. Lines like this from TimesLIVE are now so commonplace in reports that we barely notice: “The railway tracks were stolen from a decommissioned line, while the transformers and palisade were stolen from a working substation.”
The old school had burnt down. The new school felt like a prison as I walked through a series of heavy metal gates similar to what I experience when I go to Pollsmoor prison to do motivational talks for prisoners.
A principal of a primary school in one of the areas where I grew up (Steenberg), insisted that I visit his school. So, I went there last week and for the first time in my life I experienced something that felt like depression. The old school had burnt down. The new school felt like a prison as I walked through a series of heavy metal gates similar to what I experience when I go to Pollsmoor prison to do motivational talks for prisoners. Except, this is a primary school.
On the outskirts of the school, I saw the thin grey figures of young men watching the building. They were the vultures. Feral dogs, an academic friend calls them. Tik-koppe (crackheads), says a relative. In the absence of anything, the school is a resource to be stripped every night and every weekend, even though there is quite literally nothing to steal. Well, almost nothing. Once the school had planted grass to beautify this site of education. Thieves slipped over the sagging fence to dig up the grass for sale somewhere else.
What broke my heart was how hard the school tried to make something of nothing. The principal out of his own pocket painted his office a bright green to give some sense of colour to the place. The teachers, with 37 grade one children in one class, shared what sounded like good news in these seriously cramped spaces: 11 children were absent. Outside on the flat, grey tarmac older children played dodge ball, sweating in ill-fitting school uniforms, while the PT teacher hung her ample form over a chair that threatened to collapse at any moment, but still gave intermittent instructions with one arm on a warm day. Two beautiful, painted vases were placed at the entrance to the school; one disappeared.
The problem is not the principal or the teachers and certainly not the children. What you have here is a school that gave up trying to fight a system that had not only forgotten them but in time had overwhelmed them. They seem stuck in a time loop and will only get out of there through external intervention.
So, I called up six influential and accomplished friends who grew up in this and similar areas, including one of the country’s leading professors who once attended this school. We will sit down with department officials and school leaders at a long table in the middle of the school and imagine a very different space for living and learning. We will conjure up a plan to turn the school around. Those actions might well include bringing the community back in, halving the early grade enrolments per class and, ultimately, removing those forbidding steel gates. The way to deal with fear is to face it and to act on it.
The other day I saw a video of a tortoise that had landed on its back. It’s short, stumpy, padded feet moved vigorously in the air to no effect. There was certainly no lack of effort on the part of the chelonian. Then another tortoise came along and bumped its mate over to land on its feet again and together they strolled off.
You get the idea.
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