Dear parents

November is a busy month, made even busier at schools with year-end rites of passage, including academic assessments and valedictory ceremonies. Nationally, we celebrated the last of the Springboks’ victory parades on Monday 11 November when the 2019 Trophy Tour made its way through the streets of Cape Town. Various posts about the Boks have been doing the rounds, including one describing an outing by members of the winning squad to Johannesburg tattoo parlour Fallen Heroes to commission indelible, wearable memories of the Rugby World Cup. Internationally, Remembrance Sunday brought to mind other fallen heroes – those who died in wars. This year’s ceremony in Central London, the 100th of its kind since its inauguration in 1919, is also the first to honour the Gurkha regiments with the laying of a wreath in recognition of their contribution to the British war effort by the ambassador of Nepal.

In the Just Junior last year, I mentioned the massive performance piece created by South African artist, William Kentridge and commissioned by UK art programme 14-18 NOW in commemoration of the centenary of the First World War. Kentridge’s production used dance, projected images, speech, song, pantomime, shadow play, and music to chronicle the hidden history of black African porters in the First World War, those who worked “hauling cannons, munitions, provisions, and even ships across the continent.” According to Kentridge, “This piece, The Head and the Load “ was a way to answer an ignorance in myself.”

One way to understand the daily significance of what we do in schools is the answering of an ignorance in ourselves, a far more delicate, dialectical process than the simple provision of information that some imagine happening in classrooms – to truly answer an ignorance, instead of shutting it down, one first has to recognise it and engage with its contours.

I became aware of the girls’ ignorance of Kentridge in a Senior Primary assembly a few months ago when I referred to his retrospective exhibition at the Zeitz MOCAA: some of the girls knew about the museum; only two had heard of the artist. This lacuna told me less about Kentridge specifically, and more about our general perceptions of art, especially contemporary art, produced in South Africa. The girls’ seeming unfamiliarity with local artists is worthy of exploration in an environment like St Mary’s with our Reggio-inspired interest in visual art and its centrality to the process of learning and knowledge construction. I was delighted, therefore, when our Grade 3, 4 and 5 girls attended an exhibition of contemporary art hosted by the Southern African Foundation for Contemporary Art at Villa Arcadia in Parktown earlier this week.

The girls were exposed to the depth and diversity of local art through the exhibition of the work of 50 established and emerging artists, including: Willem Boshoff, Deborah Bell, Dr Esther Mahlangu, Sizwe Khoza, Philemon Hlungwani, William Kentridge, Blessing Ngobeni, Usha Seejarim, and Banele Khoza. Thirty percent of the proceeds from the live auction concluding the exhibition will go to non-profit fine art organisations like The Bag Factory Artist Studios.

Curator, teacher, mentor, visionary, founding member of the Bag Factory Artists’ Studios and fallen hero of the local art scene, Dr David Koloane (he died in June this year) is credited with bringing black and white artists together, as well as carving out a space for black artists in the global art world. Two exhibitions of his work are running in Johannesburg now and are well worth a visit: another way, perhaps, for us as parents and teachers, to answer an ignorance in ourselves.

Dr Sarah Warner
Junior School headmistress