1993
Perhaps the dream of contributing to the dissertation of Athlone High School struck me poignantly in 1993.
This was owing to (but not completely) taking part in a History Project organized by the Cape Town Teachers Centre in Molteno Road, Claremont. A few students and I embarked on a journey in which we retold the story of a school that achieved fame when all hope seemed to be lost in the community. We were determined to tell the story of the venerable institution that had conferred dignity on its scholars and had taught them to be resilient despite numerous obstacles. The dream to make a more substantial contribution has been deferred until now. Our centre of learning was and will always be a school of dreams. We had a dream then to rebuild, renew and reimagine Athlone High.
Dreams had to continue in the face of great hurdles and the perception of debasement of education by the state. The 1990s epoch ought to have been a time for the state to invest massively in education. Was it?! The ruling National Party then dropped a bombshell. Owing to the NP bankrupting the country, it announced that they would slash funding to social services such as education. The announcement was met with harsh criticism and repugnance. Various forms of protest action were organized including mass meetings, marches and acts of defiance. The staff members were galvanized into action and many of us participated in the teachers’ march from the school to the education district office in the Athlone CBD to add our voice to the call to retract the plan to cut posts. One of the poster’s words at the march was “Saaiman you are unpossible”. This was a deliberately sarcastic poster, reflecting on what a department official had said with regards to it being “unpossible” to retain posts!
The school organized at least TWO awareness meetings for parents. These meetings were organized to inform the parents about the effects of retrenchments of teachers on school life. The most telling result of teacher retrenchment was of course the increase in class size. Mr Corvell Cranfield explained very eloquently and thoroughly to the parents at a meeting at the Calvinist Church hall in Kewtown about the disastrous effects that slashing posts would have. He borrowed a line from a legal actuality programme on television. He asked the parents to “be the judge” if retrenchments of teachers would lead to an improvement or not in the running of a school and its academic results.
The Good Hope Centre was the scene for a mass meeting of teacher unions, students, parents and members of the general public. We were very proud of the TLSA representative Ivan Abrahams the erudite English and Latin teacher who also kept that union alive at the school. He was one of the keynote speakers and he was scathing in his repudiation of the National Party’s strategy to further destabilize education of the poor in South Africa.
By the end of 1993 the state went ahead with its plan and set in motion the template that would later be used by the ANC- led government in the rationalization of teacher posts. The NP government offered voluntary severance packages which no fewer than three of our golden ladies eventually accepted. Mrs Gwen Hendricks, Mrs Fatima Taliep and Ms Florence Bailey (deceased) opted to take the VSP. It was an indictment on the NP and ANC to have closed teaching posts when the country was crying out for better education with more teachers.