Swaneng's 50th Anniversary�A hance to ask and to debate

Sandy Grant | Monday March 3, 2014 14:54

Anniversaries always give us the opportunity to re-think and re-assess and this one challenges us to get to grips with the school’s remarkable founder, Patrick van Rensburg and with the policies he advocated.

Patrick, as now fewer and fewer remember, was responsible for establishing in Serowe a secondary school (Swaneng), a primary school, numerous Brigade projects, cooperative societies and an inter-linking production project known as Boiteko. 

 From his Serowe base he established new secondary schools with Brigades at Shashe and Mahalapye and was largely responsible for triggering an extraordinary burst of developmental energy throughout much of the country which resulted in the establishment of perhaps 30 Brigade Centres.

When he left Serowe and moved to Gaborone he established a Trust, Foundation for Education with Production, which campaigned widely for the adoption of his alternative educational model which, he maintained, was better fitted to the needs of the young. He re- launched Mmegi as a modern, commercial newspaper, which had been a modest newssheet produced in the early days at Swaneng, and established pioneering projects in South Africa. 

The extraordinary dynamism which propelled this astonishing burst of activity was, as might be expected, a response principally to South Africa’s horrific apartheid system and secondarily to this country’s situation as it attained Independence in 1966.

Today, it can perhaps be argued that the nature and detail of that response is of little interest because apartheid has mercifully gone and the country is no longer one of the world’s poorest countries. The difficulty about this, is of course, that whilst the country has been so dramatically changed in the last 40 or so years, the problems that van Rensburg so quickly recognised has become a great deal worse.  It was central to van Rensburg’s thinking in the 1960s that the system of education at the time offered a guaranteed route to a life of privilege for a tiny percentage of the population, and nothing at all for the rest. 

Seemingly, that situation has altered but not very much. It would be of much interest to compare the number of the young who had no chance of further education or of obtaining jobs in in 1966 with those in a similar situation today. Pick up any newspaper article or comment on education today and the same concern is repeated again and again, as in last week’s Guardian, ‘Our Education Needs a Paradigm Shift’,  its ‘Doing More With Less’ or Mmegi’s ‘Paradigm Shift Needed in Our Public Education’.

Yet van Rensburg’s brave attempt to achieve that paradigm shift was ultimately doomed to failure, not least because income from diamonds was responsible for creating dream world notions far removed from his determination to confront the bleak realities.

Diamonds also enabled the government to build orthodox schools for the first time whose role was to turn out white-collar graduates.  

In some ways, this outcome was surprising because apart from St Joseph’s, Kgale and in 1965, Gaborone Secondary School, there was no obvious model which the government could adopt. 

 In contrast, van Rensburg was able to build on the practice long ago established at Tiger Kloof of combining academic education with the attaining of productive skills. 

Because so many of the country’s new leaders had been educated there, not least Seretse and Quett Masire, it was to be expected that van Rensburg’s updated Tiger Kloof was exactly what the country then needed. 

In addition, it would have been surprising if in the early days, the Bangwato in general and its tribal leadership, in particular, Seretse himself, Lenyeletse Seretse and then Leapeetswe Khama had forgotten how the London Missionary Society had abandoned them when it left Old Palapye for Tiger Kloof and effectively dumped them and their dreams of a new national secondary school.

With such a disappointment in the past, van Rensburg’s arrival in Serowe could have seemed like the realisation of that lost dream.  

Yet it didn’t quite work out the way that might have been expected.  Somehow, the long accepted and familiar tradition of combining education with production was eventually set aside as the country’s preferred educational formula, and even the idea left to wither.

Why this happened is still not entirely clear to me. On the other hand, it has now become routine to claim that the system that came to be preferred has itself failed.  But the March anniversary does provide an opportunity both in Serowe and in our newspapers to open up the topic for serious debate.

It also provides us with an opportunity to try and reassess van Rensburg and his extraordinary achievements in the context of the time.  It may not be sensible to suggest, without careful thought, that the solutions he then advocated might be automatically relevant to today.  

But we do need to ask questions and we do need to recognise how much this country and so many of those who were then young owe to this giant of a man.