By Carol Paton
Over the past five years, Luhlaza Senior Secondary School in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, accumulated more than 500 broken windows. Pupils and teachers accepted this as an unpleasant reality. They shivered through winter, complained to one another and stuck pieces of cardboard over the holes.
Then a small activist grouping popped up in the school in the middle of last year, and rallied students around a demand to the principal that he fix the windows. But the school could come up with only R5,000 — far short of the R17,000 quoted for the repairs.
This didn’t stop the pupils. They petitioned the district office and provincial officials of the Western Cape Education Department (WCED) and launched a public campaign, holding meetings and writing letters to the Cape Times.
Within months (which included some intimidating encounters with local education officials), the WCED came up with what was asked for and more: R700,000 to fix everything.
The victory of the broken windows gave tremendous momentum to the group’s activities. Equal Education, as it is known, now has a core of about 500 members, some from beyond Khayelitsha. They attend weekly meetings and seminars, and run campaigns.
If this sounds reminiscent of an earlier era, when students led the fight for social change, that’s because it is. Modelled on the student & worker organisation of the 1980s, with some changes — everybody is always polite and orderly — Equal Education hopes to rekindle the sense that there is a future worth fighting for.
Zackie Achmat, the founder of the Treatment Action Campaign, which led and won the campaign for anti retroviral treatment for Aids, is the inspiration behind the group and sits on its board. Achmat also enlisted the support of Mary Metcalfe, now the director-general of higher education, and UCT deputy vice- chancellor Crain Soudien, who is also on the board (Metcalfe has resigned since taking up her position in government).
Achmat doesn’t play an active role in organising in the schools. He has recruited two bright-eyed UCT law graduates, Doron Isaacs and Yoliswa Dwane, who share his passion for social change. It was their skills and inspiration that prompted the Khayelitsha pupils to make the move from sitting in classrooms with broken windows to speaking out in a bid to improve their education. With their help, student leaders and activists have quickly begun to emerge.
Phatiswa Shushwana, a feisty and petite grade nine pupil at Luhlazo, is a top student who joined Equal Education at the start of the broken-windows campaign. “My friends were talking about it and since I can see the importance of school, I thought the best thing I could do was to join Equal Education,” she says.
“I didn’t really think we could get the windows fixed, but afterwards I realised that we do have the ability and the power.”
The next campaign Isaacs and Dwane proposed was against “late-coming” at school. In township schools, coming late is so endemic that children have 20% less teaching time than their counterparts in suburban schools.
Says Isaacs: “There was some resistance to the idea, with kids saying ‘why must we come on time?’ and ‘school is rubbish’, but we said that we want to show that we value education and that as well as challenging the system, we should challenge ourselves,” says Isaacs.
So, at 7.30am twice a week from April to June at 12 schools, members of Equal Education sang and danced at the gates, handing out leaflets and urging their peers to arrive on time. During the three months of the campaign, the number of latecomers dropped from 100-200 a day at each school to almost nothing.
Shushwana says that at Luhlazo, coming late remains a problem but the school’s attitude to it has changed. “Now latecomers are locked out and then taken to the hall where they are punished.”
Equal Education’s latest and biggest campaign — for a library in each school — was launched last month.
In Khayelitsha, the five public libraries are packed out after 2pm with queues for computers, books and photocopiers.
Matric student Lwando Mzandisi says he spends a lot of time waiting for a computer. His school does not have a library. “After 2pm the public library is full. If I get into the queue for a computer, I can stand for one or even two hours. I can then use the computer for 40 minutes. And when I look for books, I’ll often find that the pages I need have been cut out by somebody, probably because the photocopier wasn’t working.”
Mzandisi has other problems. At home, there are three children under the age of six, and the noise and activity make it impossible for him to study until everyone is in bed.
Only five of Khayelitsha’s 54 schools have functioning libraries, says Isaacs, and the rest of the student population have to rely on the five public libraries.
It’s much the same in other townships, both African and coloured, and the Equal Education campaign — which has now spread to Kraaifontein and schools in other parts of Cape Town — calls for “one school, one library, one librarian”.
Says Dwane: “We want a functioning library for every school in SA. But a functioning library is not a storeroom or a space in a container. It is a place where young people can come and socialise and learn to love reading.”
In the Western Cape, authorities are already sitting up and taking note. This week, acting head of department Brian Schreuder said there were plans to invest R156m over five years in school libraries in the poorest schools.
While that’s a start, Equal Education’s ambitions are much bigger. Just as public pressure forced a resistant government to introduce treatment for Aids at public hospitals, Equal Education believes public pressure can force another reprioritisation of spending.