Illuminating Lives

by Vivian Bickford-Smith

  Mr Qengwa could claim none of these qualifying conditions, so he didn’t even dream of asking for permission. But his mother and one of his sisters were in Cape Town. His other sister, who was married, lived in King William’s Town. Of his immediate (and unattached) family, he was the only one not in Cape Town. He longed to join his family, more so now that his education was coming to an end and he would soon begin working. As he recollects, ‘I just wanted to be with my family.’

  But that did not wash with the authorities. Africans couldn’t simply use that as a reason to roam about the country freely. Nonetheless, Qengwa was going to try to do the impossible. Without informing his mother of his intentions, this time, when the Healdtown forms were handed out, in the space provided for destination, instead of Keiskammahoek, which he usually put, he wrote Cape Town – fully expecting to be reprimanded and the form to be returned. It was now 1956 and the young man was leaving school, poised on the brink of entering the world of work. And so, to Cape Town he made his way.

  On his second day there, however, a policeman stopped him and demanded to see his pass. Qengwa showed him his school papers. He was instructed to have his pass stamped or endorsed in Langa. By a huge stroke of good luck, he encountered Themba Matole there, another former Healdtown student.

  ‘What do you want here?’ Themba asked him.

  ‘Ndize kufun’ ipasi. I’ve come to look for a pass.’

  Themba knew that his former schoolmate was no Cape Town boy. Had he been, they would have made the same train trip to and from Fort Beaufort. Back then, Cape Town’s African population had very few young adults who had gone to college. That select few, a small cluster of boys and young men, was an informal club.

  ‘Themba,’ says Mr Qengwa during the interview, ‘talked with another gentleman and, in no time at all, there was a Mr Rogers signing away in my pass!’ One can only imagine how thrilled the young man was. Getting one’s pass made right for any of the urban areas one had not had the great fortune of being born in was nigh impossible. Many went to jail trying to win that prize, and many went to their graves without ever achieving the feat. But that day was one of rare fortuity for the young Qengwa. He walked out of the pass offices in Langa with a valid pass that permitted him to be in the prescribed area of the Western Cape.

  Fearing complications, Qengwa didn’t tell his mother about what had happened to him in Langa. But she wanted him to go back home – back to Keiskammahoek. She feared the police and knew that sooner or later her son would be arrested for being in Cape Town without the right papers, whereas, with luck, he could get a teaching job back in Keiskammahoek. He was, after all, a qualified primary-school teacher, with an additional qualification in physical education – a rarity among African teachers, even today.

  However, Qengwa had no intention of going to Keiskammahoek, or anywhere else for that matter. His mother was in Cape Town. His unmarried sister was in Cape Town. His father was long dead. Why would he want to go anywhere else in the wideness of the country? What would pull him there? Undeterred, he applied for a teaching job with the respective school boards in Langa and Nyanga.

  But it would be two years before he obtained a teaching job in Cape Town. Meanwhile, he secured work at Nannucci Cleaners for the 1956 December holidays as a delivery boy. He took the job because he needed the money, of course. Although disappointed at his failure to get a professional position, he was employed and would have a few coins in his pocket. He desperately hoped that his luck would change, that a dire shortage of teachers would work in his favour. This period of labour was to last for two full years. Nannucci Cleaners was soon followed by a stint with Airflex, a mattress firm. Qengwa worked hard and diligently, earning five shillings a week. At Airflex, he says, he was so regularly out of pocket that his supervisor or boss would, on hearing a knock at their door, answer, ‘Yes, Robert! Come in!’ And before Robert could open his mouth, his boss would have reached into his desk drawer. ‘I asked him for money and was not ashamed to do so. I reckoned he knew he paid me so little, I couldn’t possibly come out right. So, he expected me to ask him for money and I did. I did, without any shame, at all.’

  Then, out of the blue, on a Friday afternoon, a day after his birthday, Qengwa returned from work and found a letter waiting for him at his lodgings. His long-ago application for a teaching position had finally yielded results. He had been appointed to a teaching job at a school in the poor Cape Town suburb of Retreat.

  ‘That was the best birthday present I had ever received, in my entire life!’ he exclaims. ‘Friday, I had been paid my five shillings. Three days later, Monday, I reported for duty at the school in Retreat.’ It was 23 February 1959. A year later, he felt the impact of the Sharpeville crisis, which led to a state of emergency where he lived in District Six. As those events unfolded, he attended a protest meeting in Langa at which he heard an address by Robert Sobukwe, the leader of the Pan Africanist Congress.

  Throughout these tumultuous times, Qengwa had been settling into his first teaching post, at the Retreat Bantu Presbyterian Primary School. He travelled daily to Retreat by train. There, he taught a combined class of Standard Threes – a total of ninety-two pupils in his first year. The next, he taught Standard Five.

  The young man would teach at that school for two years, after which it was closed down. The government’s new housing plans included a ‘slum clearance’ policy, which it put into vigorous practice during this period. Retreat was one of the areas that the authorities had targeted for the forced removal of a category of ‘non-whites’, and the school was therefore forced to close after the African population was moved to Nyanga West, later renamed Gugulethu.

  The relocation of the school from Retreat to Nyanga West had not been without its own little drama. The Cape Town Circuit Office planned to place Mr Qengwa at a school in Langa. It looked a not unreasonable placement. After all, he had been travelling to and from Cape Town to Retreat every week. In comparison, Cape Town to Langa was a much shorter and no doubt cheaper commute. However, the powers that be had not reckoned with the principal of the school they were moving from Retreat.

  For Mr Malunga, the principal of the Retreat Bantu Presbyterian Primary School, would have none of it. He wanted Mr Qengwa to join him in the school that he would be starting from scratch in Nyanga West. This, of course, speaks volumes about Mr Qengwa. It would have been an opportune moment for the principal to rid himself of any dead wood among his staff. To the contrary, he explicitly wanted Mr Qengwa and, without letting the other know, fought tooth and nail to have him move as part of his staff complement, while others would be added as necessary. For he would need a larger staff to balance the greatly increased number of pupils that the new school would register. Nyanga West, Cape Town’s then newest township for Africans, would house the collection of all the Africans forcefully removed from areas such as Simon’s Town, Kensington, Athlone, Claremont, Wynberg, Cape Town city itself, Retreat and other areas that the government was setting aside or clearing for habitation by coloureds, in the prevailing apartheid terminology.

  As with other teachers similarly hit by this new governmental decree, the teachers at the primary school on Retreat’s Boundary Road did as they were told and prepared for the move that they knew they could not avoid. Wherever it was that the government was taking them, to whatever school in Nyanga West it happened to be, they prayed and hoped that they could stay together. Then Mr Qengwa got the news that he was being sent to a school in Langa. With the resignation born of experience, he accepted his fate.

  But days before the final day of closure of the school in Retreat, when only two teachers were commuting to teach the combined class of whatever children still remained, the small number whose parents, for whatever reason, had not yet been moved, he got a rather surprising notification. He was going to Nyanga West to join Mr Malunga’s staff.

  One can only imagine his joy. It must have been quite a relief, amid all the turmoil that moving always entails, to hear he would be with
his colleagues, people with whom he had already built a relationship. And, of course, there were the students too. Most of the children who would register at the new school – Vuyani Higher Primary School – would be children who had come from the school in Retreat. That’s why, for years after Nyanga West was established, even after it was renamed Gugulethu, people who had come from Retreat referred to Vuyani as the Retreat School.

  It was established on 16 January 1961, with Mr Qengwa initially teaching Standard Four while also serving as vice-principal under Mr Malunga. Of that gentleman and his wily ways of getting what he saw as best for his school, Mr Qengwa reveals, ‘You know, Mr Malunga never said a word to me. He didn’t tell me he was fighting to retain me and so I went on thinking I would be sent to a school in Langa. Then I get the letter from the secretary of the School Board, Mr Lebaka, telling me I must report for duty at Vuyani Higher Primary School, when schools started. Mr Malunga knew, all this time he knew. But he said nothing to me about what he was doing.’ As to it illustrating Malunga’s high regard for him, Mr Qengwa responds bemusedly: ‘I suppose that was a vote of confidence in me.’

  The move to Nyanga West meant that Qengwa would soon move to the same township as the school, saving him the cost of train travel. This was a real blessing, given that teachers’ salaries, almost the world over, are modest in comparison with those of comparable professions. Moreover, when Mr Qengwa was allocated a house, it was within easy walking distance of the school. His fate, as with others classified as Bantu in the 1960s, was to be allocated a home by the relevant local authority; there was no reason to bother reading the property section of a newspaper, for apartheid laws prohibited non-whites from owning immovable property in urban areas. In the case of Cape Town, Nyanga West fell under the Cape Divisional Council. The new township boasted some recreational amenities, including a tennis court. Not surprisingly, Mr Qengwa, an athlete by nature, resumed where he’d left off as a student and joined the tennis club. He was one of a small group of young men and women in the new township who did anything like that.

  Principled and dedicated, Mr Malunga was a highly respected educator who was meticulous in manner and dress, and who brooked no nonsense. His schoolyard was spotless and its grounds were distinctive in sporting a garden with trees. The school had an air of quiet diligence, even before one stepped inside any of the classrooms or the staffroom or the principal’s office. The children all wore clean and crisp school uniforms, and an observer could not but see that the purpose of forming minds and good character was taken seriously.

  Sadly, in October 1968, Mr Malunga was involved in a car accident and passed away. The news was received with shock and grief by many of the locals, and the city of Cape Town, responding through its Langa offices, announced that some open ground in Gugulethu would be used to build better housing in his honour. Thus, Malunga Park was duly born. Meanwhile, Mr Qengwa was appointed temporary principal of Vuyani. At the beginning of the next school year, he was officially made the principal, a position that he held from January 1969 until December 1996, when he retired. That was a service three years short of three decades in the principal’s seat. To date, he remains the school’s longest-serving head.

  He is fondly remembered by those who served under him as a man of integrity and fair play. People still speak of his spirit of community. His school was used seven days a week, as it remained open during weekends for many adults who were studying by correspondence and receiving assistance from the South African Committee for Higher Education (SACHED), an organisation that emerged to counter the apartheid government’s 1959 Education Extension Act – a misnomer, if ever there was one. This legislation curtailed the education of non-whites by barring their entry into the country’s nominally open English universities. As a substitute, the government then authorised inferior tribal universities for each racial group: Africans, coloureds and Indians.

  Thanks to SACHED, however, many students who embarked on correspondence studies rather than attend a tribal institution by choice or through force of circumstance were aided in their studies with tutorials to supplement the paper lectures. It was people such as Mr Qengwa who provided students with a proper place to meet for group work, additional classes and study groups – whether in the evenings or over the weekend – and helped those in the townships to better their lot, despite apartheid. Space, especially a space with electricity, was a huge help and saved valuable fare and time, which were both rather scarce commodities for township residents. Mr Qengwa would even help to supervise these studies and similarly allowed sports teams to practise on the school grounds. This was a real opportunity for players, since the township had a paucity of sporting facilities.

  As a teacher, Mr Qengwa took his commitments very seriously. After his first year at Vuyani, he taught Standard Five until 1968, when, with the passing of Mr Malunga, he took over the Standard Six class. All the while, he regarded his role as principal to be a defence against the authoritarian Department of Bantu Education. He had to protect his teachers. However, that doesn’t mean that he covered up their wrongdoings. That sort of behaviour he would not tolerate. Vuyani Higher Primary School had been a highly respected school under Mr Malunga, and Mr Qengwa had every intention of keeping that reputation intact. And that he did.

  Remembering his own humble beginnings and how others had given him a helping hand – his mother, his grandaunt who had rescued him from ‘Pharaoh’s house’ – Qengwa sees the conviction to do what is right as central. ‘If you do the work, even when you are outspoken and the threat of victimisation looms large, you can take most things … as long as you are right.’ He feels that was the best shield against abuse from the Education Department.

  It needs to be remembered that Qengwa’s teaching world was one in which the country’s education system was divided, financed and organised on the basis of what was known as Christian National Education, a philosophy of racial segregation. Dedicated to the exclusive and inferior education of the African child, with a budget to match, came the Department of Bantu Education. As late as the mid-1980s, less than a decade before the country rid itself of the hideous legal system of apartheid, the white child, the coloured child and the African child laboured under a massively disproportionate racialised allocation of the education budget. A consequence of this, as Mr Qengwa says, was that wages for black teachers were peanuts: ‘We were graded as third class!’

  Qengwa was married on 14 June 1965 to Thobeka Makhuzani, uMaradebe. Her marriage name is Thobeka, and they have four children: Pamela, Phaphama, Philani and Phumeza. Her husband is not only the father of those four fortunate young people, but such was his love, discipline and dedication to the children and pupils under his care that, into the present, hundreds of professionals, tradespeople and entrepreneurs all around Cape Town also claim him as their father because of the teachings they received from and through him. Ms Pamela Mxwele, an undergraduate student majoring in anthropology and history, is just one of his former students who declares that because of how he looked after and protected his pupils, she is amazed today when she hears news of teachers abusing learners. That would never have happened at Vuyani Higher Primary – ‘Never!’ – a conviction supported by approving nods and grunts from others in her company.

  Mr Qengwa was a strict principal and was viewed as stern by his students. But they also knew that he was fair, and he had the respect of his teaching staff. Those teachers behaved in the manner we wish all teachers would emulate: respectful towards the children under their care, whom they are supposed to guide as well as teach; conscientious in applying themselves to their tasks; and punctual without watching the bell. As another young lady recalls of her years at Vuyani, ‘Our teachers didn’t leave school at three sharp; no, they didn’t. They stayed in at the staffroom, poring over their books, preparing their lessons.’ Exemplary discipline and conduct applied to both teachers and pupils of Vuyani Higher Primary School – at all times.

  Penelope Magona, an advocate of the Hi
gh Court of South Africa and member of the Cape Bar, says that throughout her studies, even at university level, she used some of the techniques she had acquired in Mr Qengwa’s primary school. ‘We didn’t wait for the teacher to come into the classroom but opened our books and looked into them, getting ready with questions or comments when the teacher arrived,’ Penelope emphasises, adding that one participated in one’s learning at Vuyani. ‘You were not just a passive parcel to be spoon-fed.’

  Another former learner, Mrs Andiswa Mazoko (née Gaika), an occupational therapist, affirms what her former schoolmates say. From Mr Qengwa’s teachings, she says that she acquired values such as discipline and respect for other people, irrespective of their status, gender, national origin or age. Today, she is able to respect all humanity. Mazoko says the following of Mr Qengwa: ‘He was a dedicated teacher with a huge love for the African child whom he sought to teach values that would enable her to weather the storms he knew awaited her in life: disadvantaged, by law, under apartheid.’ His own life had taught him to be hardy and self-reliant, and this is a quality that he imparted to his charges.