All
this past week, Ronnie, the program coordinator of the HIV/AIDS awareness
workshop project that I’ve been assigned to work on, visited the primary and
secondary schools in Delft and Atlantis that we will be holding the workshops
at. We introduced ourselves to the principals and life skills teachers at each
of the respective schools and confirmed the dates of our workshops. We were
joined this week by some of the other interns as well since this project is
supposed to be all hands on deck. It gave them another opportunity to be in the
area and communities that they will be working in and for all of us to get to
know one another better as we drove from school to school. We had awesome
conversations and good food during the drives. Who says that your work can’t be
fun?
However,
there were a few things that I noticed during our visits to the different
schools. Many of the schools are structured like American prisons. The walls
have the cement brick texture; some schools had it painted as bright colors
while others left it in its natural stark white state. The entrances to the
hallways had floor to ceiling gates attached to them, and the second floor
railings were similar to prisons as well. The areas of the school are sectioned
into blocks (ie. Block A or essentially Cell Block A). The most disturbing part
for me though was their alarm. The school alarm that told them it was time to
come inside from break or change classes was akin to the type of alarm that one
would hear at an American maximum security prison if an inmate was attempting
to escape. It sent chills down my spine. I voiced my concern to one of the
principals at the school and he informed me that all schools in the area had a
similar alarm like that with some tonal differences so that students from each
of the schools in the area (because many of the schools are located nearby one
another) would know when it was their school that was in transition. The fact
that to him and the students, this was a normal sound to hear during their day
to day interactions deepened my disturbance. Most of the schools we visited
also had barbed wire wrapped around them. It was explained to me that the
barbed wire was to keep gang members from jumping over the fence and trying to coerce
students into joining their gang but I still don’t find its presence at a
school conducive to the learning process. If you treat children like criminals
and have their environment be a replication of a prison, how do you expect them
to learn? How do you think they will see themselves? In my mind, the barbed
wire only increased the parallels I was making between South African township
schools and American maximum security prisons.
Primary
and secondary schools in the inner cities are structured like prisons as well,
which feeds in to the school to prison pipeline issue. But I was utterly
shocked to see a similar system replicated in South African schools. Once
again, the places where Black and brown children live and work and grow are
under resourced. Their youthful antics that in White neighborhoods are shrugged
off are criminalized. No matter where you go in the world, anti-blackness is
there to greet you with the stark reality that Black men, women and children
are placed at the bottom of our social sphere and are not expected to be
successful at anything but remaining in poverty and filling our prisons. Why do
we do this? Why do we purposefully always try to keep Black people down? I know
the answer to the question, but it kept repeating in my head with every new
school we visited that had the same characteristics. Why? How? It’s just
unacceptable. Many people in South Africa talk about how powerful the U.S.
influence is on their culture and practices, but this is something that I wish
had never made its way across the ocean and equally important, did not exist in
my own country.
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