My Eastern Cape Experience

I have decided to honour my promise

and blog about my experience of spending four full years in the rural part of the Eastern Cape. And it’s only fitting to write it whilst I’m still on my December holiday in this beautiful land of my intimates. My stay wasn’t planned. I was supposed to study in East London but I had misplaced my report and understandably I couldn’t enrol at a city school on time so I ended up attending the village school. They accepted me with the agreement that my old school would reprint my report card. I’m not going to lie having an aunt that practises her teaching profession there smoothed the entire process. With all that sorted out I could be seen with my new uniform and forward self in the assembly with other kids but I wasn’t singing my lungs out like the rest of them. Back in my previous school in Cape Town, in Gugulethu to be precise, we didn’t sing like them. Later on I would learn it’s not only the singing that’s not alike but the education is a little inferior too. They had a small section in a corner of a classroom that was known as the library and good Samaritans would donate books every now and then. So one Friday afternoon we were called out to polish one mud-built classroom with mud mixed with cow dung (uRhida). Like expected I was lost. I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I just stood aside and watched tjo that was a huge mistake on my side as that draw the attention of one most feared teacher there. She rudely told me to go get fresh cow dung and help out. It’s then it dawned on me that my life has changed. Did I mention that they still practised corporal punishment and they’d assig boys to get a stick/cane in the nearby bushes? In Cape Town, teachers feared beating children because of a law that abolished such harsh punishment. It was often mocked as umthethokaMandela. Adapting at home wasn’t hard. My village is electrified and has running tap water so fetching water from the river was out of question. We occasionally collected wood from the forest. And I enjoyed doing so and I remember my first inyada was so big and I couldn’teven lift it higher than my shoulders and had to embarrassingly remove some wood to make it lighter. I remember my aunt asking meif I’ve stayed in a village before. Mdanstane where I spent some of my adolescent years isn’t a village. There is a book I later read and related with in High School called Comfort Herself. She was orphaned at an early stage in her life and had to stay at an orphanage and later with her grandparents at a different setting but she easily adapted. That was me but the difference is the fact that my father is still alive and I never stayed at an orphanage. Her resilience saw her surviving in new environments and that’s me.Thanks to my upbringing in the Eastern Cape, you can throw me in a deep end and I will learn quietly how to swim like a pro.