Matric rape question explained
Rape is a real issue in this country. We can’t be denialist and choose not to confront it when it is a serious social challenge says department of basic edcuation spokesman, Elijah Mhlanga.
THE department of basic education has defended a controversial question in the dramatic arts matric paper, based on an extract from South African play, Tshepang, which asked pupils to describe how they would stage the raping of a baby using a loaf of bread and a broomstick to maximise the horror of the rape for the audience.
Elijah Mhlanga, spokesman for the department of basic education, said there was certainly, no enactment of rape in the matric exam as suggested by some media reports.
“The question for 15 marks in the paper is based on an extract from the play, which has won both national and international awards, highlights and interrogates a real event that was headlined in the media and that disturbed the nation, the brutal and horrific rape of a nine-month-old baby.
“One of the questions based on the extract read as follows: ‘Describe how you would help the actor portraying Simon to perform line 9 to maximise the horror of the rape for the audience. Line 9, to which the question refers, is a climatic moment in the play, in which the audience is faced with the dramatic arts concept of an action metaphor?’
“Instead of raping a baby or showing the rape or describing the rape, the symbols of a loaf of bread and a broom stick are used to represent and resemble the brutal act of the rape. The horror and aversion the audience feels is achieved without resorting to an actual rape.
“The candidate has to work out the best way to achieve this theatrically and symbolically. Nowhere is it expected of the candidate to have to literally describe the actual act of raping a nine-month-old baby,” he said.
He added the aspects tested in the question are as per the National Curriculum Statement (NCS) and are well within the prescripts of the curriculum.
“The Department, however, acknowledges in examinations, content that invokes negative or adverse feelings or emotions in candidates needs to be avoided. However, given the nature and content of dramatic arts, it is assumed that learners are familiar with such passages and would have been trained to deal with their personal emotions relating to the matter,” he said.
‘We have become desensitised to the word rape’
Michelle Smith from the Vodacom Change the World initiative, aoffers much needed counselling services to the Jes Foord Foundation as a full time volunteer, said she was outraged at the contents of a matric dramatic arts paper.
“We have become so desensitised to the word rape and the pain it inflicts on our children and infants that it can be used so flippantly in an
exam paper.
“This exam paper is totally unacceptable, and as South Africans, parents and caregivers, it is our duty to make sure that pupils are not subjected to this type of content. Whoever set this paper needs to be suspended, as well as apologise to the youth of our country. Let us be agents of change on this matter,” she said.
However, Mhlanga disagrees and said the department took full responsibility for the exam papers and not an individual. “It is a team of people that prepare exam questions. It is also important to note that the external Assurance Council approved the exam paper. So we have done everything right as a department.
“Rape is a real issue in this country. We can’t be denialist and choose not to confront it when it is a serious social challenge. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the questions, it is a dramatic art exam paper. It requires learners to apply the drama, theatre and creative skills taught to them in the classroom. Over and above that the learners are old enough that they would have been exposed to similar content before,” he said.
