Episcopal Press and News
School Shows Way In South Africa
Episcopal News Service. November 12, 1987 [87230]
NEW YORK (DPS, Nov. 12) -- Apartheid has pillaged all of life in South Africa but no area as dramatically as black education. Throughout the country there are areas where children have not gone to school for months because of the recurrent strife and also because of the vast distances, the breaking up of families and the education policies of the state toward black schooling.
As bleak as the picture is, however, one can find in it -- as in much of South African life -- bright signs that the people are already trying to take charge of their own destiny and future. One such sign is St. Mark's School in the remote Transvaal, a school run by Peter Anderson. Anderson, a white South African lay Anglican, moved his family out of a comfortable school master's berth in the city to be a part of this small bright sign. He was in New York recently to brief Church Center officials on the school.
Jane Furse is a bleak village in an impoverished black "homeland" known as Lebowa. It lies some 300 kilometers northeast of Pretoria and is named for the daughter of a former Anglican Bishop of Pretoria. Here in 1984, a group from the parish of Sekhukhuniland, remembering the education that existed before passage of the Bantu Education Act, approached Bishop Richard Kraft of Pretoria about starting a nonracial, Christian school independent of the state.
The education act is the focus of much of the current unrest in South Africa. It closed private schools which had operated effectively for years and replaced them with a system of state education that is designed to teach young blacks only as much as is needed to continue the economic and political dominance of the white minority. One irony of the generally-despised "homeland" system is that it did free up the people in Jane Furse -- many of whom remembered with pride and affection their own Anglican schooling 30 years ago -- to seek an alternative to the state system.
St. Mark's opened in 1985 in a run-down missionary building in Jane Furse, welcoming 65 seventh grade boys and girls, both day-pupils and boarders. The plan is to grow one grade a year, becoming a full-fledged secondary school in 1990. They now are up to grades five, six, and seven and have plans for a dormitory and library. Still to be developed are grades eight, nine, and 10.
"Although we have battled to provide amenities ever since (the pupils and faculty share bread and tea for meals when that is all that is available), the school has never looked back," said Anderson. "Our nonracial policy, unique in South Africa, is a source of strength. Our Christian foundation is a freedom from lobbies of the right and left, and our independence allows us to develop each day as we learn from the day before."
They have also been able to make a small mark in the surrounding communities. Their older students spend part of their free time tutoring students from the few state schools in the homeland. The school also runs training programs in such skills as welding and tool making for the communities. They make their books available to the community and they offer moveable science studies and primitive lab facilities at neighboring schools.
"We have a four-part mission," says Anderson. "First, by our very existence, we are an affront to apartheid." The student body is about 90 percent black although the admission policy is open and the faculty is about evenly split. "We seek to lift the black traditions, to have the western ideas adapt themselves to the culture, not the other way around.
"Through our remedial tutoring and skills training, we fill a need that the state education system and rural circumstances can't. We are filling the basic educational goal of training for future leadership and we are a Christian presence in a largely pagan setting.
"We have work to do on all four fronts," he concluded.
St. Mark's has determined community support. The "alumni" families who pressed for the school to open are still the core element. But the popularity of the school grows daily. "When we announce a new class of 65, we have a thousand applicants and, although we are inexpensive compared to similar schools, we are very expensive to a poor rural family. Yet, they send their children to us steadily."
And those children, in turn, bring a new wealth to the communities. "Not necessarily in money. Our graduates are able to find jobs. Some will qualify for further education. But what we hope they carry with them is the sense of this joyful, peaceful place."
The jobs the students go to are not glamorous. They work in the local bakery, in shops and garages and, Anderson noted, many will find work as carpenters because making coffins is a growth industry in a strife-torn, third world region where life is short.
Will many become Christians? Anderson isn't the sort to push hard sell evangelism but he notes that each time there is a child's party, it begins and ends with prayer and the students ask for that. He also points out that "no work for the Gospel is ever wasted. In some cases, the people who remembered and wanted again a church school had not been part of such a thing for thirty years. The flame never goes out!"