A tearful comedy of first day at school

It was in 1986. My parents were not there. My father had disappeared in his Toyota Hilux to some place called… Ellisras, maybe, where he worked? My mother had taken the 6 o’clock am bus and had disappeared into the daily dawn to Harrismith where she worked.

I had the luck of looking at my sister, Morongwenyana, for some comfort. She had been going to school for two years already. Plus, my mother had left me in the care of her friend, who was a teacher at our school, to keep an eye on me.

The idea of a new school uniform excited me, but it also frightened me. My mother had done a great job bribing me into liking the damned outfit. While I was trying it on some days earlier, she kept applauding me, kissing me and tossing me around. So I looked forward to the actual day of school.

But why was I wearing the clothes which everybody else was wearing? That dampened my spirit a bit. And what were we going to do at school? I anticipated a lot of playing and eating. We were a bunch of rowdy fellas who ran in all directions, not to mention how the teachers scolded, waved, clapped, sometimes even chased and threatened to slap our behind.

I remember two incidents.

Every child had a rectangular box hung around their chest. There was a string of wool holding it around the neck. My mother had spent a good part of the previous evening designing this thing. On it was something which turned out to be FUSI MOTAUNG. A teacher would look around your chest and, voila. Yes, name tag.

The second incident: We were in the classroom. Mmistrese Mofokeng was initiating us into a world where keeping quiet was more rewarded than speaking up, unless you had been asked to do so. We were also being taught to raise our hands and wait to be picked before we could bark an answer.

Hey, classroom etiquette was that you must raise your hand, wait for Mmistrese to acknowledge you, and then you could say: I need to go piss, or something. This custom did not start off smoothly because some of us ended up with wet pants and dungarees on the first few days. Perhaps this was due to apprehension. And we were clumsy trying to get the hang of these new rules. Anyway…

There was Morena; my neighbour and playmate. Out of the blue, Mmistrese stopped what she was saying, ran her eyes across somebody’s chest and screamed, ‘Morena, o llela eng jwale?’ What Morena said in response is something which plunged me into a real wake-up call. ‘Ke llela ho lo bapala (I am crying because I wanna go play outside,)’ he said. He followed up by letting rip his full wail which he’d been constraining before Mmistrese noticed (acknowledged) him. Tears, mucus, just plain chaos on his face. Morena was bringing it home to us that the pleasures of playing unrestricted in the village were now a thing of the past.

There were those of us who ran away. Many were trying to squeeze themselves through the school’s barbed wire fence – and complete their escape. Among them was Mmamosa who, after being guided back into the classroom, continued to cry. I was reminded of her this morning when I was nearly brought to tears by a small girl who, while crying non-stop, clung to my wife’s dress when we took Boitshwaro to crèche.

There was also a boy at the crèche who cried ceaselessly. A teacher who held him told us that the boy had been crying for every male person who steps inside the classroom. Although my attention was on making sure that Boitshwaro dived into the scene without trouble, I felt like I was letting the other boy down for not whisking him away to the comfort of his familiar surroundings. Mind you I did not even know who his parents were.