Racial discrimination protest held at Pretoria school
"The school management claims to be in support of black lives and yet they are not standing up for black learners."
A protest broke out at Pretoria Girl’s High on Thursday morning after a group of learners boycotted class, taking to the staff room and demanding an end to alleged racial discrimination.
The demonstration was reportedly sparked by the principal’s call for learners to wear black clothes in honour of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, pupils told Rekord on the day.
One matric learner and activist said they were shocked and believe that the school “pretends to care about black lives” when there were “unresolved issues of systematic racism at the school”. According to the protesting learners, this includes that their highly publicised 2016 opposition of the school’s hair policy has not been met with change.
“The school management claims to be in support of black lives and yet they are not standing up for black learners,” she alleged.
“We have been silenced since 2016. We have been threatened and mistreated by teachers.”
“We are told that if we want to raise our concerns we should ‘breathe out our anger’ and remain silent otherwise we would be suspended.”
Singing and chanting at the school, learners held up signs calling for their demands to be heard.
Learners demanded, amongst others, that the school does away with a “discriminatory hair policy, offer isiZulu as a subject choice and a review of the employment to add diversity in the staff body, especially in top management”.
“All headmistresses are white, Christian and heterosexual. We demand that three out of five headmistresses should be black,” statement read.
In 2016, a protest broke out at the school after black learners claimed they were being discriminated against based on their hair. They then called for a review on the policy.
“This has been happening since the year 2016 and no one has done anything about it.”
“The hair policy remains a problem at our school and nothing has been done. Teachers are mistreating us.”
She said learners are refusing to live in silence.
Another learner told Rekord there was no equality at the school.
“We want equality,” she said.
“They only treat white children with respect and mistreat those of other races.”
“We are valid. Our voices deserve to be heard. We learners who have recently been victimised and hurt, deserve justice.”
A few other learners also said the language policy at the school also had elements of “oppression”.
“My friends and I were speaking our home language Xhosa and one of the teachers told us to ‘stop with the ridiculous click sounds and stick to English’,” a learner said.
Rekord approached the school for comment. None was provided by the school or the student governing body (SGB), but was directed to the Gauteng education department instead. The Gauteng education department’s Steve Mabona said the issues raised by learners stemmed from 2016 and all the concerns raised since were attended to. “Parents through SGB are empowered to craft and amend a code of conduct of their children at school. And as such the SGB must lead the process to amend the code of conduct accordingly.” he added.
Mabona said the timing of the protest was bad given that learners had work to catch up on.
“Our focal point should be on the recovery of our curriculum due to time lost. Learners must bear in mind that in no time, they will be expected to write their trial examinations,” he said.
“We would like to appeal to parents to assist us to instil discipline in their children and remind those learners about the curriculum time lost and dangers of violating lockdown regulations,” he said.
“Indeed, Covid-19 is real and we are all encouraged to adhere to protocols for our safety.”
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