GRAAFF-REINET NEWS - "Logging onto Union High School's website, I was struck by an unusual sense of nostalgia. It's been over 20 years since I, as a black nine-year-old boy, set foot at the formerly whites-only school.
This was 1993, the nation's gaze turning away from its gruesome past to the promise of democracy.
But what did kids know about such things? All that rankled me was the grandmother that left me behind with these strange white kids. It was the uncle, an Apartheid activist, whose parting message was: "Anybody punches you, remember, you also have two hands."
Surely the nice prefect, Sean de Stadler was just putting up an act in front of parents? When they left, I figured, the multi-cultural set-up would be shifted and the darker-hued amongst us moved to other dormitories. I waited. Union turned out to be a school ahead of its time.
Perhaps everybody secretly wanted the country to change. Whatever it was, those six years were the best of my life. In those windblown corridors of the hostel, I rubbed shoulders with people whose counsel I often dredge up well into adulthood. "What would Mr Mugglestone do?" I often ask myself. There I learnt to bowl a searing in-swinger, to write a formidable rap verse and, despite a disfigured leg, to score a try against Volkskool.
Fondly, I remember the late-nights spent telling ghost stories when we were supposed to be asleep. The duty-master burst in, looking for the culprits. And one by one the transgressors were lined up for six of the best because nobody wanted to snitch.
Maybe that is what I treasure most about the school – that it bequeathed upon generations of Unionites something I like to call a "manscience". It's not kicking a man when he's down, it's to "fight for right and justice both when need and cause arise" (if memory is correct) as enshrined in the school song. It's being able to stick to your convictions, even at the cost of your own popularity.
When one sees on the news stories of racism at our schools, I wish to point them to Union. There, cognisant of diversity, the powers that be simply decided they would sometimes take a step back, learn rather than impose.
Black girls, for example, had it easy in those earlier years when it came to hairdos. Rather than enforce the rules applicable to whites, teachers understood that the hair types were different and could not be reduced to a one size fits all.
It is with these things in mind, a smoke pursed between my lips and a beer in one hand (sins which were punishable by expulsion) that I have put you through all this insufferable reading only to say: Happy 100th birthday to the gem of the whole Karoo."
'We bring you the latest Graaff-Reinet, Karoo news'
