“Thembile goes walking. Thembile was a little boy and he was walking to school. He met three little birds and he said, ‘Good morning little birds, may I play with you?’ ‘Oh no’, said the little birds. ‘We are too busy, we are learning to fly.’ And they all flew away!”
While not verbatim, this is a near accurate excerpt from my Sub B (grade 2) English set book, English Through Activity.
I suspect that the Bantu Education architects had designed the text as a comprehension passage for young girls and boys so they could understand instructions such as: "Your enamel cup and plate are on the veranda, Johannes. You can put the spade down for 10 minutes to enjoy your cup of black Pitco tea and two thick slices of bread with Blossom margarine and strawberry jam. And then go back to tend to my azaleas."
Back then, in 1978, school teachers seemed to be armed only with a few books, some chalk and certain ‘teaching aids’, including thick bamboo canes and any other weapons the education department deemed appropriate to whip obviously difficult-to-teach black pupils. Oh, and rote learning. The reason I kind of remember the passage is because it is indelibly printed in my brain.
It is customary for every generation to make jokes about how their parents embellish just how much worse they had it on the arduous journey from home to school. And how much worse their schools were. Every January, it has become a predictable journalistic trope to highlight the fact that there are still schoolchildren who have to navigate dangerous rivers and ravines to get to school. And that’s a moral blight on the collective careers of the education ministers who have got us here.
My sandwiches sometimes earned me hot klaps because our tormentors’ palates were not educated in the subtleties of Marmite, fish paste and dhal sandwiches
However, this is not a whinge about government column. This is about the preponderance of TikTok, Facebook and Gram clips from GenZ mocking my generation for allegedly embellishing our struggles to get to school. Maybe we should have bought these entitled muesli-and-yoghurt munching freeloaders fewer PS5 consoles and subjected them to hundreds of hours watching Kunta Kinte, Sarafina and Cry Freedom instead.
On the day I was unleashed into an unsuspecting Bantu Education system in 1977, I was bathed, smeared with Vaseline Blue Seal from my shiny cheesekop to my toes, dressed in khaki shorts and shirt and told to follow Mazwi, my elder brother wherever he went. By 1983 I lived 4km from my school courtesy of my parents’ socio-economic upward mobility. I will not spread false rumours about my folks, Rosemary and ‘EB’ Ngcobo to score unearned BEE points. They were excellent providers of the bare essentials, including bus fare and lunch. Where things got complicated is that none of my schoolmates thought that using public transportation was cool. So, every morning, around 5.50am, I was outside Sifiso Mkhize’s house, belting out our secret whistle to let him know that we had to go. We started school at 6.30am in 1983.
To say that journey through Mpumalanga Township, Hammarsdale, on foot was a perilous daily trek is an understatement. We didn’t dare use the infamous Five Rand street, so named because a notorious gang demanded that amount to allow anyone to use it. However, there were booby traps on many of the detours. For instance, at the border of Unit 2 and Unit 1 South, Sifiso and I had to fork out two sandwiches each to gang of thirteen-year-olds. My sandwiches sometimes earned me hot klaps because our tormentors’ palates were not educated in the subtleties of Marmite, fish paste and dhal sandwiches.
The conclusion to the most illuminating literary masterpiece about Thembile was him saying: "Oh dear, everyone is learning. I must hurry up to school. And he did that, as fast as he could go."
The moral of the lesson was, of course, that all wholesome, God-fearing African boys were meant to forget about taking care of their families’ cattle and goats so as to learn their ABCs — so they could contribute to society as messengers, maids, gardeners and, if they were bright enough, become policemen, nurses, court interpreters, teachers or even attorneys or doctors for sick African people.
But also, the point is to tell my children that nothing is embellished about what it took for us to get an education and maybe they should ease up on judgment for having Maggi noodles for supper in their luxurious Parktown apartments masquerading as university residences.
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