I have just finished my preparations for the speech that I will be delivering at the awards ceremony for top performing matriculants (class of 2014) from townships schools in Bela-Bela, Limpopo province, this coming Friday. If I was a motivational speaker, I would stand in front of those students and tell them things like: If you dream it, you can achieve it! But I am not one. I am a person who knows that these kids are about to walk into universities that are anti-Black, where working class children are chewed and spit out like old gum. They are about to come face-to-face with the brutality of institutionalised racism and understand what structural inequality in post-1994 South Afrika means. All I can do is teach them how to remain proud Afrikans in a society where Afrikans are a cultural minority, and to impress it upon them that they are part of the few that have an opportunity to study further. Many Black children will never walk through the corridors of institutions of higher learning, not because they are not smart, but because education is exclusive. So these ones who get to be in these spaces must never relax. Their role is to do well academically and ensure that the purpose of their degrees is not to hang on walls, but to break down walls in which Afrikan humanity is imprisoned. They must not just strive to have degrees so that they can work for themselves and live in vulgar opulence, but so that they can help those they leave behind in the townships to get out. No childs dreams deserves to die in the streets of the ghetto...
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 20:47:28 +0000
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