As I pack mine and my younger brothers bags in preparation for our vacation to Port Elizabeth tomorrow, I am reminded of the humiliating realities of model-c schools, realities that many of us so-called born frees graduated from with permanent scars. One of the many cruel things that poor working class Black children have had to endure in the hands of teachers at these former model-C multi-racial schools is the My December vacation essay. Every January when schools re-opened, we would be requested to write an essay about what we did during December holidays. The middle-class Blacks and White students would write nice detailed essays about their fun vacations, complete with photographs. Theyd talk about how they went to the beach in Durban, or had Christmas at a lodge in Cape Town and New Years celebrations at Sun City. Of course, some of us would have spent our entire December at home, waking up every morning to play diketo and retiring in the evening after a tiring game of mokoko. New Years Eve would be spent at home, locked in the yard by our protective mothers. If we were lucky, wed have firecrackers to light at midnight, but by quarter past twelve, theyd be finished, because it would most likely be one hundred shooter (which of course does NOT shoot a hundred times), two starlights and one or two bomb. To mask our embarrassment at not being able to afford vacations like other kids, when asked to write about our December vacation, wed make up all sorts of stories about going to the beach in Durban. The more creative students would even claim to have gone to America, though of course theyd never tell you which state they went to. The smarter ones who could lie better would say they went to Disney Land with their parents, and these were often kids raised by single mothers, kids too embarrassed to say they have no fathers like our wealthier friends did. It may sound funny now, but it was not funny then. Being in a model-c school meant kids in the township envied you and thought you had a better life. But it also meant that when youre at that school, as a poor working-class child, youre systematically excluded by the social culture that defines the lives of your middle-class and rich schoolmates. It is a brutal experience to which none should ever be condemned. My brother shall never go through that cruelty for as long as I am alive. Few people understand the psychological impact that poverty has on many Black children. Poverty strips you of your very self-esteem. It leaves you massacred. And without self-confidence, you are beaten twice in the race of life...
Posted on: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 17:30:43 +0000
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