The Patchwork Quilt

Jody Claassen is arguably the best tennis player produced by this school. Matriculating in 2009, he finished off his school career as the U18 national champion, leading the Wynberg tennis team to sweep all opposition off the courts of the Western Cape during his tenure at the school. One afternoon during this time, I received a call from Ray Connellan, who wanted to know if he could come round and watch this tennis prodigy play.

'The 1st tennis team is practising this afternoon,' I said. 'I will see you at the courts.'

We stood together in our picturesque thatched tennis pavilion. 'Which one is Jody?' asked Ray as we watched two boys, Jodi and Emmanuel Germanis, warming up.

Before I could reply, a boy sitting on the steps of the pavilion, turned round and said, 'He is the one in the blue shirt.'

I thought nothing more of it until we were walking back to Ray's car.  As he opened the car door, he remarked, 'You know that boy could easily have said that Jody was the coloured boy...'

As his tennis opponent, Emmanuel Germanis, was a white boy, this would have been a perfectly logical statement to make. I suspect that 99.99% of the world's population would have pointed out to the casual spectator that Jody was 'the coloured player' on the court.

To the youthful spectator at that moment, Jody was just a Wynberg boy playing tennis. That delightfully naive throw-away comment gave us a brief glimpse of what could be in this country.

Over the last month, we have looked on with horror at the racial polarization resulting from the statue shenanigans at UCT. We have shaken our heads with disbelief at the sheer crudity and viciousness of the xenophobic attacks around the country. We are left wondering what could have been if our sports teams could just be left to get on with it. A Proteas cricket team winning a World Cup would have resulted in thousands of youngsters wanting to play the game and to emulate their heroes.

A destructive ‘us and them’ mentality is now becoming more and more evident in all these incidents.  Our Rainbow Nation is teetering. In every debate, both sides in these issues claim the moral high ground.  Those of us who are responsible for bringing up the next generation of young South Africans hold a weighty responsibility to display leadership and to show that there is a middle path between growing as a nation and transformation.

For years I have driven down Oswald Pirow street in Cape Town. His name must surely be up there with the more noxious names of South Africa’s past.  He boasted of meeting Hitler in the 1930’s while he was travelling in Germany and he certainly delighted in spreading the Fuehrer’s insidious beliefs here in South Africa through his Ossewa Brandwag organisation during the Second World War.  Every time we drove down the road, normally on our way to Artscape, I ensured that I never missed the opportunity to remind my son about the neo-Nazi after whom this street was named.  I do have a twinge of regret now that it has been consigned to the dustbin of street names. Our ongoing absorbing debating opportunity is not so readily visible on a street sign.  All is not lost though, as his replacement, Dr Christiaan Barnard, also had a somewhat colourful past – mainly from a social point of view - but thankfully he was not mired in suspect politics.

I am currently in the throes of interviewing hundreds of twelve-year-old boys and their parents. Every boy submits a handwritten letter outlining his reasons for wanting to be considered for acceptance into the school. Most letters are written along the same lines, but every now and again a gem falls out of the pages:

‘An important reason to attend Wynberg is for the traditions.  I would like to take my hat off to the person who established the traditions 174 years ago.  My mother says that being a gentleman is your best tradition and if you know my mother you won’t dare to be ungentlemanly.  A really good tradition is that everybody is regarded as equal – it doesn’t matter where you come from, what colour you are or what your father does, you are all part of a giant patchwork quilt.  Coming to Wynberg means that all the different patches are just as important as one another and are sown together to make up one quilt.

There are a number of points coming out of this extract from his letter.  I have a sneaking suspicion from the trend running through the letter that the boy thought I started those traditions 174 years ago. What is more noteworthy than that, is there is no doubt that every boy deserves to have a mother like that.  However, the significant premise shining from this extract is that this twelve-year-old boy has intuitively understood the real meaning of transformation.  Transformation should not be defined as obliterating or transferring the forgettable (regrettable?) events of our past.  All too easily we play the transferring game -   be it  transferring one statue to the plinth of another or one person into another’s place in the team.

Transformation is not merely replacing one set of objects or people with another.  Essentially it is changing people’s perception of another’s culture.  It is an understanding of where they come from and what has shaped them.  If we follow the injunction of our twelve-year-old letter-writer, then the quilt becomes stronger when every patch brings another skill, extra expertise, an exciting talent or a different culture.

Debates about transformation must be ongoing in the classroom – but the process must go further than that.  The process must be lived out in the hearts, minds and actions of everything we do in the school.  As usual, Nelson Mandela put it best when he said in a speech to Parliament marking Holocaust Remembrance Month in May 2000:

Nelson Mandela

‘As South Africans let us focus on what unites us rather than what divides us. As Jew and Muslim, white and black, Christian and agnostic, rich and poor, let us focus on our similarities rather than our differences in building a nation in which greed, selfishness and status are replaced by service, sacrifice and commitment. Motivated by our common heritage of suffering and pain, let us build a nation, a continent and a world of which we can all be justly proud.’

During this time of xenophobic madness and statue insanities, we once again need leaders to remind us of what this country stood for twenty years ago.

I read out parts of the letter from that twelve-year-old boy to the school assembly some time back.  I told the boys that eight hundred individual patches on their own would be useless.  However eight hundred patches sewn together, can create a quilt of beauty in this school from which everyone can benefit.  I suggested to them that if we learn to make a quilt here at Wynberg, then in time they can all take the concept into their communities and society as a whole.

To take the quilt metaphor further, we cannot wish away our past.  We proudly boast that everyone’s patch blazes forth boldly on the quilt as important as the one next to it. Our Wynberg quilt is colourful, exciting, energetic, vibrant and filled with character.

Our past in this country has been troubled – now it is beholden on us to remember our history, learn the lessons from it and move forward to help create a better society for the next generation.  We have to teach our boys to ignore the extremists and to recognise the dangers of emotive language while at the same time understanding the pain and hurt of the past.  Our expectation of parents and teachers is that they discuss Rhodes and Pirow in the context of their time – without judging them.  In that way, we will come closer to understanding, but never condoning, the excessive actions of the EFF, the RMF campaigners, the xenophobic rioters.

It is a real teaching moment for us adults, as we strive to show our children that it is the middle road which is the hallmark of a maturing society.