Serowe at the dawn of the Swaneng era (Part 2)
Tom Holzinger | Wednesday November 20, 2013 11:24
It is late 1962. A determined young white man confronts an ageing Kgosi Rasebolai Kgamane in Serowe’s tribal offices and asks for land one last time. “We are not beggars. We are not asking for land for ourselves. If you do not decide today, we will make plans to quit Bechuanaland at the end of this school term.”
Within hours the allocation is made. Patrick van Rensburg and his provisional school committee have 30 hectares in hand. Lenyeletse Seretse, a rapidly rising secretary to the tribal administration, axes the corners. The land stretches from Serowe’s eastern edge toward the Swaneng Hills. The school, and its name, are born.
As Patrick wrote years later: “Liz and I looked eastwards across the acacia-covered slope, dominated dramatically by two great hills on the skyline. As we did so, a great golden full moon began rising from behind the larger hill, filling the sky and the land with its soft light. There was no sign of human habitation nor sound nor movement of any living creature in this primordial scene. We would never forget it.”
But the planned Swaneng Hill School had no classrooms or any other facilities. There was the promise of a small grant but no money in the bank — and the school had to open in two months’ time.
The newly married van Rensburgs quickly displayed an heroic dedication to hard work and mobilising resources. They called upon a wide network for support.
Their own students at Simon Ratshosa School heard the call first. In the final weeks of 1962, Pat and Liz encouraged their older pupils to help them clear the land and fill in dongas, paying 5 cents per afternoon worked.
Liz writes: “We had two main tasks. The bigger boys hacked away at thorn trees to clear a road from the School to the Palapye road, while the rest of us gathered stones to contain and overcome the terrible erosion — to try to hold the soil and moisture if it should rain again.”
The van Rensburgs had few friends among Serowe’s traders, but an exception was Benny Steinberg. A colourful cattle dealer who kept a lion in the house, Steinberg volunteered to drill a borehole for the school — a precious donation, as the nearest council borehole was half a kilometre away. Fortunately it proved to be a strong well that supplied the school for years.
Outside help arrives
During December 1962 a group of 20 South African student volunteers of all races arrived to help build the first classroom and a rondavel for Pat and Liz. Pat, who had building experience, staked out the buildings and supervised.
Two local artisans, Solomon Matabane and Todd Kuhlmann, directed the bricklaying, while workcampers and local primary students followed instructions and did the heavy labour. Evening social life continued till late, including on one occasion Seretse and Ruth Khama. Although the buildings were not fully completed, the workcamp was celebrated as a grand success.
Students to make history
How to choose students? Because time was too short for interviews, Pat urged the newly formed School Committee to accept the first 30 qualified applicants. Some members wanted to reject two unmarried mothers. “I took a strong stand against their position,” Pat says, “on the grounds that these girls needed education even more than others, to be forearmed against impregnation in future, and to be able to better care for their children.”
Political and ethnic background was another hot potato. Patrick wanted to assist the children of refugees from South Africa. (Later, major donors were to request this too). It was an issue that had to be cleared with the colonial authorities in Mafeking.
Some of the South African-born children were not refugees but had parents from Bechuanaland. At the end of their primary they wanted an alternative to Bantu Education and went to Bechuanaland to look for it. Thus the student group was a mixed one from the start.
On the first day of term, February 11, 1963 almost all the admitted students appeared. Thanks to Joseph Mosedame, most of their names have been recalled: Botho, Caesar, Cynthia, Lekgowa Hastings Dabutha, Flex Keoometse Disejane, Cathrine Gaogakege Gobopang, Kebaagetse, Desire Kuhlmann, Gregory Mapine, Keabilwe Mokoka, Edward Moletsame, Joseph Mosedame, Mary Mosweunyane, Geoffrey Nfila, Omponye, Empson Pheko, Otsogile Pitso, Rebecca Rakgole, Agnes Ratshosa, Majebosigo Seeletso, Christopher Tshipa, ‘Typewriter’, and quite likely Gladys Ramotlwa, Gotlhe Kgamane, and John Moatlhodi, though these last (??? How many?) may have started in the following year.
One of the older students, Typewriter, soon withdrew to work or study elsewhere. Another, Otsogile Pitso, was promptly elected Head Boy. ‘Oates’, as he was popularly known, was to play a crucial role at Swaneng for over 10 years.
One student withdrew because of pregnancy. Pat hoped that she would return, but the Committee and the local Education Officer opposed him. She did not come back.
All subjects were divided between the original three teachers: Pat, Liz, and Mokhutshwane Sekgoma. Mokhutshwane, the son of a prominent elder, had just received his Cambridge Certificate. The subjects included English Language, English Literature, History, Geography, Mathematics, Science and Setswana.
Liz was already pregnant, so she and Pat both decided to quit smoking. As always, a fearless approach.
But was the classroom ready? Some say yes, whereas Joseph Mosedame states that the first week or two were spent under a tree. All agree that there were no desks, just makeshift planks and boards on top of bricks.
“The day that the desks arrived from Bulawayo,” Mosedame says, “was one of our most exciting days. We celebrated like little kids. Remember that we were just a small group. We were really a family that year. We did everything together, we walked to school together from town.” Most of the 28 (??? There are 25 names listed for students, who are the remaining three not mentioned?) lived near the centre of Serowe, a distance of some six kilometres, and no one had a vehicle for transport.
Finding finance
Pat’s life as diplomat and anti-apartheid activist had acquainted him with hundreds of prominent people. In late 1962 he put this knowledge to good use: “At night, after marking and preparing the next day’s lessons, I wrote letters in careful longhand to all the people I’d ever met, asking for funds for the school, before crawling exhausted into bed.”
The first donations came via Liz’s family in Wales: £500 from an uncle and $5,000 from the uncle’s American friend. In early 1963 the Bakgatla Tribal Council sent money — long before the Bangwato did! By the end of the year the van Rensburgs had received sufficient donations large and small, local and foreign, to assure the school’s future.
It had been much on their minds: “Kgosi Rasebolai was not alone in doubting the capacity of these two whites with limited resources to build the sort of secondary school that the Bangwato expected. I too wondered whether we would be able to meet our promise. Despite that, we took a lot of risks and support did come. Seretse Khama, as the Tribal Secretary, made sure nothing was put in our way.”
At Swaneng, students work hard
“Can you make us a sports field, please, Sir?” Oates asked Patrick early on in the term. “Well,” Pat answered, “We have just so much money and much to do. If we spend the little we have employing people to do that job, there’ll be less for desks and books and lunches, and less to employ more teachers.”
The students had already elected a Student Council. Oates took the issue to them. They decided to make the sports field themselves, on their own time, cutting and destumping thorn trees. They began work the next day, a Saturday, adding this task to the other voluntary work. They hoped that a government grader would level the field after they’d cleared it.
The students’ willingness to work for the common good impressed Patrick. “This response from our first students, so early in our history, planted an important seed that gave us the first hint of the co‑operative, self-reliant attitude to problem-solving that would define our School,” he wrote later.
He was a keen observer of technique: “The boys roped the lower branches of these acacias tightly together, forcing them upwards, so that they could dig deeply around the trunks without harm from the vicious thorns.
Having exposed the roots they hacked at them with axes, and if they were too thick, made fires in the holes they’d dug, to burn them. Then they cut off the branches which girls removed to use as temporary fences or firewood.”
From the building work and the sports field came the Swaneng tradition of voluntary work, usually on Saturdays.
In the early years most students participated, and thus a large amount of construction was accomplished at low cost. The huge school hall (now the dining hall) was primarily built with voluntary labour.
Did the students know the Ngwato tradition of regimental civic labour, established by Khama III and exploited by Tshekedi? Yes. The primary schools in central Serowe, built by successive mephato, were the very schools that they had attended. (Sometimes disgruntled elders, remembering the enforced labour at Moeng, advised Swaneng students not to work for free!) On balance the old tradition probably supported the new. Patrick soon proposed to extend student work to other activities, including cooking, cleaning, gardening, and the manufacture of desks and beds.
Oates and other senior students helped him to win general student consent, a consensus that held for at least the first five years.
By the end of the first year, Pat spoke often of the ‘School Policies’ of self-help and voluntary work. He gained support for them from the School Committee but not the local Education Office. (Fortunately the Director of Education in Mafeking took Pat’s side). The word ‘policy’ may have helped to win student consent — no one wanted to be left out of the family.
Further, the role of Oates in building support for Pat’s ideals cannot be overestimated. (Student labour was not a Swaneng innovation. At both Tiger Kloof and Moeng, students did compulsory work that gave them practical skills. The Protectorate’s mission schools often assigned student chores. When opposition to student work later appeared, it came first from Education Officers worried about academic excellence. This was not a student concern).
Overseas volunteers
In 1962 Bechuanaland had only a handful of local secondary school teachers. Swaneng Hill School and its brigades relied on overseas volunteers for a full 10 years. This source of inexpensive teachers was suggested almost by accident: “Out of the blue, we received a letter from International Voluntary Service (IVS) in London, offering volunteers and enquiring what skills might be of use. Liz responded immediately, ‘These people are exactly what we need! We must write to them.’ We made our request for teachers without delay.”
There was a pressing reason: Liz was more and more pregnant and would not teach much longer. (In fact Masego Thomas van Rensburg was born on September 9, while his father was away on a political errand in Lusaka). Fortunately friends of friends had heard of the school and were on their way.
The first UK volunteer, Christopher Gore-Booth, paid his own fare. Shortly thereafter Don Baker and his family did the same. The first IVS teacher, Michael Hawkes, arrived in mid-1962. He was to spend a number of productive years in Botswana and later became Madiba School’s first Principal. The success of these early volunteer teachers encouraged Pat and Liz — and IVS too — so that beginning in 1963 there was a steady rotation of new volunteers through the staff rondavels.
Other overseas organisations, some of them quite new, also wished to send volunteers. Thus the issue of staff quickly became one of matching talent to need, and coping with misfits. Just as with students, incoming staff had to learn the ropes. First meetings, then one-on-one explanations from Pat and/or Oates about the school’s self-help policies. Newcomers almost always responded enthusiastically. In hindsight, by almost any measure, Swaneng’s use of volunteers while waiting for Batswana to be trained was wildly successful.
Responding to community needs
With students and a considerable building programme on site, Swaneng School became a significant purchaser in Serowe. Pat and Liz quickly learned the prices of everything from sugar to cement — and they were far higher than wholesale prices in Bulawayo or Johannesburg. First, local traders offered credit, increasing their costs. Second, they colluded to keep prices and profits unnaturally high.
Pat wrote: “I wondered whether we could start a consumers’ Co op here. I had a meeting with our workers one afternoon to tell them about co-operatives in England. If people were interested, I would hold meetings at the School on Saturday afternoons to explain how a co-op worked. The following Saturday about 15 villagers turned up. We fixed a joining fee of 50 cents and several insisted on paying immediately.”
The traders — except for Steinberg and Billy Woodford — heard about the proposed co-op and threatened Patrick with expulsion from the Protectorate. The new Co-op Committee went ahead and started a bulk-purchasing project based in the School. The District Commissioner ordered it to stop.
The students went to their families and neighbours. “We addressed kgotla meetings in many parts of the village,” recalls Mosedame. “There was some resistance. An old man in Ratshosa ward told a story about being cheated in the 1950s. He spoke so badly about our proposal! But most people were receptive.”
The Committee went to Palapye to apply for a licence. The traders managed to block it. Seretse Khama joined the Co-op and took a symbolic stand on the people’s side. When the year ended, the Co-op was poised to take the struggle to the highest level, the Resident Commissioner in Mafeking.
Lessons of the first year
After the year-end examinations, Pat and the other teachers realised that some of the older students had done well enough to attempt the JC Certificate after one more year. Thus the second-year students would be in two groups during 1963. The classrooms had advanced sufficiently to allow two groups of Form 1’s as well. It would be a considerably bigger Swaneng after the holiday. When the 1962 school year finished, the students were elated that they had accomplished so much. Likewise, of course, Pat and Liz, who finally enjoyed some peace and quiet with their little son.
Over Christmas Patrick began to draw out the lessons from the year. He would apply them to the future. “We needed to equip our students not only with the commitment to tackle the problems facing their country,” he wrote later, “but also with the skills to do so.” Another strand of the Swaneng story was about to take shape.
* Tom Holzinger arrived in Botswana in July 1967 as an independent volunteer. For the next six years he worked on various Swaneng-related projects: the School, the Serowe Farmers’ Brigade, the Serowe Youth Development Association, and the Boiteko cooperative. In 2004 he returned to Serowe, where he works on a number of community projects. He may be reached at tom_holzinger@yahoo.com.