I experienced persecution when I was at Pretoria High School for Girls, writes Christine Emmett
Like me, many of the PHSG old girls that I know were ultimately unsurprised by what has come to light over the past few days regarding racism at the school we attended.
It was with sadness and consternation that we heard about current pupils speaking of blatant racism and how the school disregarded and ignored their complaints.
I experienced persecution when I was at Girls’ High, where I was treated as a delinquent by many of the staff. I write this knowing that as a white woman, the persecution I experienced is minor compared to what has been experienced by black pupils.
But even though I did not face the same discrimination, I have experienced the institution and can recognise the difficulty of going up against an institution which upholds dominant forms of whiteness and penalises anything which diverges from this “norm”.
Listening to the girls’ testimonies, I recognised the names of teachers who were mentioned.
They were the same people from whom I and some of my classmates had experienced persecution.
These are the same people that for more than 10 years have been able to act with impunity. Indeed, the ridiculous rules concerning hair remain unchanged, and many of the testimonies I heard today echoed those of my classmates in 2004.
Like many of our schools, PHSG’s institutional character has always been authoritarian and disciplinarian. What I realised today is that the kinds of persecution experienced in these institutions are initially always experienced on an individual level.
In school, pupils are singled out for infractions, whisked away to the principal’s office and isolated. Complaints are disregarded and silenced. You end up not realising that your experience might be shared by your peers.
In my final year at the school, I complained about the behaviour of one of the teachers. I spoke to another teacher whom I generally found to be sympathetic, but who disregarded my complaint. Your opinion, I was basically told, is just not important; you are a delinquent who is being “difficult”.
It is not an exceptional thing to be called “difficult” in a school like that. There are so many arbitrary rules, and such vigour for policing them, that any divergence is pathologised.
In fact, most of the initiatives of the school were policed with threats of detention. There were “minor” infractions regarding hair, wearing name badges and carrying hymn books (in a secular institution?).
But also, there were those that coerced girls into participating in extra-curricular activities, like the Spring Fair.
It was familiar to be threatened with a two-hour Friday detention if you didn’t “willingly” contribute your time and effort to these events, which were used to bolster the school’s reputation. I have never understood what the purpose of the school’s “reputation” actually was.
This kind of institutional character is almost certainly inherited from the school’s colonial background – inscribed when it was opened in 1902. In this, Girls’ High is certainly not exceptional among former Model C schools.
What is dismaying is that no one has questioned the exclusionary and authoritarian nature of many of our older educational institutions. Why are pupil complaints still being disregarded?
Why do we select the most ambitious and driven pupils, and then make their primary job the policing of other pupils?
Why do pupils all over the country still have their time wasted in detention?
Can we not appreciate how important our youth are – and that this is no way to educate them?
I hope the MEC of Education will consider that a lack of transformation as we’ve seen in Girls’ High is the result not just of individuals but of the disciplinarian character of the school. An institution that does not value the diversity or autonomy of its pupils will never change, because opposing voices are silenced as a matter of course.
At PHSG, we were always told that we were receiving the best education. For a long time that has seemed a very dubious claim.
Here an education was an attempt to churn out docile and homogenous girls, to discipline them so that they could fit a very narrow definition of respectability.
But perhaps PHSG has, in spite of itself, done something right.
Because the pupils who are now courageously standing up for themselves are actually Girls’ High pupils.
They are the unintended products of this institution. And it’s these pupils’ courage and determination to speak out that has, for once, made me proud to be associated with it.
* Christine Emmett is a 2016 Commonwealth Fellow. She matriculated from Pretoria High School for Girls in 2004, and will begin her PhD in Comparative and Literary Studies at the University of Warwick in October.