Taking it personally

Written on Monday 25 July 2011

Watching the disturbing video footage, on SATV news last week, of a Gauteng (a province in South Africa) school principal viciously and repeatedly beating a Grade 8 pupil with a piece of garden hosepipe raised a lot of emotions and memories in me. I became acutely aware of how experiences that we try to sweep under the carpet, file away until we can process them “properly” (if at all), can come back to us with even more ferocity, when triggered by something else.

I was taken back to my eighteen months spent teaching English and some other subjects at a nearby high school. I vividly recalled one particular day when I’d gone to the principal’s office, outraged after my class of Grade 8 pupils had complained about an assault by a teacher on one of their classmates. The teacher had thrown him to the floor, hit him with a walking stick and kicked him, shouting obscenities, in full view of every other child in the class! And then, having meted out this brutality, he’d proceeded to teach his lesson.

The principal listened to me, with a neutral but indulgent expression on his face that gave little indication of what his reaction would be. To his credit, I was further humoured to the point where the teacher was called in and the three of us had another meeting. Once again, I pointed out how inappropriate the teacher’s actions had been, how damaging and humiliating for the child and, of course, that it was illegal! I pointed out that the teacher could face a huge fine, at the very least, but that surely he was putting his future as an educator at risk. The teacher was asked to apologise to ME, but that was not the worst part: the principal’s last words to me were along these lines: “Please don’t make too much of this; today it’s Mr X, tomorrow it could be me.”

At that same school, a certain male teacher would boast, in the staffroom, about how he regularly held boys up against the wall and punched them with his fist. I would express my shock and disgust, and warn the teacher that it would take just ONE pupil to get his parents to take legal steps, for his career to be in jeopardy. He would laugh at me and say smugly, “Daai ouers VRA dan vir my ommie kinders to moer!” (Crude Afrikaans for: Those parents ASK me to hit their children!) So you have so-called ‘middle class’ teachers working at township schools, abusing children physically – and, by implication, psychologically – and capitalizing on the ignorance of many of the parents in those communities, when it comes to children’s rights and the overall provisions of our country’s constitution, with its strong human rights emphasis. I often wonder how – and if – those same teachers discipline their children at home, and how they’d react, were their own children to be on the receiving end of such brutality at school. But here’s the rub: most middle class teachers send their children to better schools, where there IS a culture of learning and there IS a human rights culture. Of course, this is everyone’s right. The continuing disparities in education in our country is a completely separate topic, meriting urgent scrutiny by government and other role players. I really wish teachers were as militant about education-related inequalities as they are (justifiably) about salary-related matters.

It breaks my heart to see fellow teachers, with whom I studied and protested, with whom I sat for weeks on end in mass meetings in the early 1980’s, boycotting lectures in solidarity with others engaged in the anti-apartheid struggle in our country, reduced to what so many of them have become. Every single child in our country deserves an excellent education, by dedicated teachers, teachers committed to lifelong learning, themselves, and teachers actively pursuing lifestyles that their charges would want to emulate.

I remember asking a colleague, when I was newly at that school, what he had done over the weekend. He said he’d sat in his garage. “Oh”, I said, “doing what?” “Drinking!” he said, as though I was stupid for not having known such an obvious thing! I bravely tried to steer the conversation towards sobriety. “What else did you do?” I asked, hoping he’d use the cue to redeem himself. Again he looked at me like I was a moron for not knowing what weekends were all about, and said, “Well, when the beers were finished, I went to buy more beers!” “Oh”, I said again, my optimism flagging, “and did you spend time with any of your friends?” “Ya, of course”, he said (by this time convinced there was definitely something wrong with me), “they came over later in the afternoon and brought a case of beer, so we cooled off in the garage.” I seriously deserve a medal for my belief in humankind, as once again I ventured, albeit a lot more feebly, “So, were you guys watching sport?” “No”, he said, visibly exasperated, “we were watching people walk past my house!”

I was hopelessly outclassed. How would I ever attain such enlightenment?

But the incident that the news footage brought to mind even more painfully was something I witnessed a few months ago. At the time, I intended writing to the local newspaper about it, but I never did. Today I want to write about it.

It was round midday one Saturday, and I was driving along the M3, a scenic route through the southern suburbs, to fetch my son at Jazz Workshop Music School. After passing Chart Farm, I followed the curve of the road and started my climb up the hill behind Wynberg Park. About 100 metres ahead of me, I saw a white vehicle (those family-type 4X4s) parked on the left verge of the road, with a man standing outside, doing what looked like knocking something inside the bonnet. As I got closer, I noticed that his arm movements were big and forceful, and thought I’d never seen anyone hit anything in an engine that hard before. When I got even closer, I realised that he was not knocking something in his engine, but that the side door had been slid open, he was holding a belt in his hand, and he was beating, viciously and mercilessly, shouting (in Afrikaans) like a maniac, a small person cowering inside. It was summertime, and I saw a lot of pink skin, so it must’ve been a child dressed in shorts and a t-shirt.

I was driving alone, and I was terrified. At least one other car’s occupants noticed the incident at about the same time, slowed down, like me, but then, like me, continued driving. Traumatised and confused, and feeling I’d let the victim down, I pulled off on the descending side of the hill, now in Edinburgh Drive, and waited for the vehicle to pass, taking out my notepad and pen to write down the vehicle registration number. A vehicle like the one I’d seen drove by a few minutes later, and I wrote down the number, but couldn’t make out whether it was the same person I’d seen earlier. And then a few more similar vehicles drove past and I decided that I’d lost my moment to do the right thing, and that handing in the wrong person’s number and falsely accusing someone could have serious consequences.

I continued driving to town, switched off the radio and thought about that poor child and what his/her life must be like, and how the rest of the day would be for him/her. I thought about that father and child pitching up at a family gathering, a few minutes later, and the child having to pretend that he/she was happy and carefree, as children are supposed to be. I cried and cried. I thought about all the other children in our city, our country, our continent and the world, who have to endure abuse of any kind at the hands of their ‘caregivers’. I thought about the audacity of the man, pulling his vehicle off the side of a busy public thoroughfare and whacking his child uncontrollably, no doubt acting out a script he’d grown up with. What does he do afterwards - put his belt back on, get behind the wheel and listen to the radio? Does he drive in silence, or is the child then subjected to his verbal abuse, his nagging, his ridicule, and his inevitable justification of his actions? The sickest one is, “I’m only doing this because I love you. Someday you’ll thank me for it.” I don’t think so. All that that child wants is revenge, and the hopelessness bleeds onto successive generations.

Someone told me the other day, when I was expressing an opinion about something, “You really need to stop taking everything so personally.”

I’ve never quite mastered the art of turning a blind eye to injustice.