Mamphela Ramphele: A Passion for Freedom. Mamphela Ramphele
contemporaries, I arrived with great expectations in January 1962 at what I anticipated would be a place of higher learning. It was a major step in our lives. Childhood was finally behind us (even though I was only fourteen years old). We were on the road to preparing ourselves for the world of work. But on arrival I was taken aback at the state of the institution.
I was never asked my views of Bethesda, but when our English teacher asked us to write a letter to a friend, telling her about our school and encouraging her to apply for admission, I took off.
Bethesda Normal School
P.O. Kalkbank
Pietersburg
3/4/1964
Dear Friend,
I heard from a mutual friend that you intend to come to this school for your secondary level education. I feel it is only fair that I should give you a sense of what you would be letting yourself in for.
It has been a remarkable last two and a quarter years for me. My romantic vision of boarding school has been dented severely by my experiences here. I shall only focus on a few areas to illustrate my point. First, the dormitories we are housed in are in an appalling state of disrepair. There are bedbugs everywhere, particularly in the hot summer months. The authorities order fumigations only after repeated complaints, and even then the problem gets merely contained for a few months, only to resurface with greater vengeance.
The second major problem area, probably the most important one for young growing bodies such as ours, is the quality of the food. I cannot understand how any responsible adult can expect young people to live on a diet which consists of mainly carbohydrates, occasional meat (often rotten), and little fresh fruit and vegetables. The unchanging and unappetising weekly menu is as follows:
Breakfast – Soft porridge, cooked the night before, often served cold, without any milk, except on Sunday mornings when a quarter loaf of bread with a spoon of jam is served in addition.
Lunch – Hard porridge served with either boiled potato or over-cooked cabbage, and twice a week with meat (often off in the hot summer months due to a lack of refrigerating facilities).
Supper – Hard porridge served with a cup of cocoa with no milk added to it. A quarter loaf of dry bread is served only on Saturday evenings.
It is hardly surprising that the majority of the students, particularly the girls, end up with severe pellagra (a vitamin B complex deficiency). What is even more infuriating, though, is the attitude of the matron. She blames the skin manifestation of the vitamin deficiency disease on the girls themselves. She emphatically denies that it has anything to do with the quality of the food, but claims that it results from the use of skin-lightening creams. Her assertions fly in the face of the diagnosis of the visiting general practitioner, Dr Makunyane, whose opinions she completely ignores.
The quality of education itself is not bad. Most of the teachers are keenly interested in the success of their students. I particularly like my arithmetic and biology teachers, who encourage me to excel. The latter two subjects are my favourites.
Social relations between the students and most of the teachers are a problem area. All our teachers, except those teaching Northern Sotho, are white people, all Afrikaans speaking except our Standard 6 and 7 English teacher. The latter is a kindly old man in his late sixties, Mr Erckels, who lives on his farm, less than ten kilometres from the school. He refers to Serolong8 as his mother tongue, because he grew up in the western Transvaal. We are often taken aback when he says with perfect intonation: Ka se haheso re re ke lengoele (In my language we say it is a knee). Mr Erckels is an exceptionally caring teacher.
The majority of the teachers maintain a ‘them and us’ attitude. This is manifested in a variety of ways: no handshakes, separate entrances even in the local church which we are compelled to attend every Sunday, racist comments particularly from the spouses of the teachers. There is an invisible wall between students and teachers which is very disturbing, particularly from those teachers whom I really like, and whom I would like to learn to know a bit more.
You have to make your own decision in the end, but I would discourage you from coming to this school. Explore other possibilities. I am planning to go to Setotolwane High School next year for my matriculation years, and am already impatient with the slow passage of time. I will certainly not miss this place.
I wish you all the best.
Yours sincerely,
Aletta9 Ramphele
Mr Le Roux, our Standard 8 English teacher, was appalled. How could I misuse a class assignment to complain about school conditions? An interesting question which begs the issue: Would he have complained if I had used the assignment to praise the school? He gave me fifty per cent for it, a marked departure from my average in other assignments and tests of eighty per cent and above. The message was clear. But I was not perturbed in the least, because I had given a true account of life at the school as I experienced it. I was also confident that my exceptionally good academic standing would protect me against further repercussions. It was good to know that the school could not afford to expel me.
The social distance between students and teachers was exacerbated by the system of huiswerk (Afrikaans for ‘housework’), which was a form of forced labour intended to remind students that education was not an escape route from the inferior position blacks were ‘destined’ to occupy. Each student was allocated to a staff member one afternoon a week for about two hours. Most were asked to do the menial domestic chores, such as sweeping the ground around the house, washing pots, scrubbing floors and ironing – a peculiar way to promote good relations between staff and students.
Some of the staff were more pleasant to work for than others. So too they differed in generosity. While several gave food at the end of the afternoon, others remained quite indifferent to the hunger that was a constant companion of the boarders. The principal’s wife, Mrs Grütter, who was also our music teacher, was the most unpleasant of all. She often reminded those students who seemed to her unenthusiastic in their tasks: ‘You were born to work for us.’ But there was a positive side even to this racist. It is to Mrs Grütter that I owe my interest in classical music. She was a pianist who taught music with great enthusiasm.
But how is one to explain that my parents, who had trained at Bethesda in the late 1930s, and had endured the same experiences, let me follow in their footsteps? My mother’s recollection of their life as students at this school differed only marginally from my own experience: the dormitories infested with bedbugs, the poor-quality food, the attitudes of ‘them and us’. The whole ambience of the place did not seem to have undergone much change over the intervening decades. Why then did she not discourage me from making this choice?
Part of the explanation lies in the limited choices available to Africans: there were few boarding schools of quality at the time. There was also a strong conservative ethos which constrained my parents from exploring even the few alternatives open to us. I could have gone to Setotolwane High School from the very beginning of secondary school, but that would have been trail-blazing for a little girl and my parents would have found it difficult to accept. Setotolwane was formerly known as Diocesan College, having been founded by missionaries of the Anglican Church, and its religious ethos reflected its origins. With their conservative Dutch Reformed background my parents would have found it hard to send me there. On top of that, the authoritarian Dominee Van der Merwe at Kranspoort would not have made their lives any easier for letting their daughter ‘go astray’ and be lost to another denomination. It was assumed that children from Dutch Reformed missions would retain their denominational allegiances and go to Bethesda Normal College or Emmarentia High School, a course both my elder sister and brother followed. So the question of a different choice of school did not even arise.
The first few weeks of the 1962 school year were traumatic for me. Initiation was still alive and well at Bèthesda in the 1960s, and we were humiliated in every possible way, as part of the ritual. The intimidating atmosphere became evident from the time we got onto the steam train at