Last week, delegates at the first-ever online SAGSA Conference (with the theme ‘INSIGHT: Wellness and Belonging’) had to physically lean into their computers to catch every word of Professor Thulisile ‘Thuli’ Madonsela’s session. The already softly spoken Professor was battling technical difficulties as she addressed us from her home in the Western Cape where she holds the Law Trust Chair in Social Justice at the University of Stellenbosch. In a week in which South Africa’s vaccination roll-out and the Israel-Palestinian conflict dominated news headlines, Prof Madonsela’s quiet but firm assertion that “On many levels, today is better than yesterday” startled us into devout attention.

At St Mary’s and other independent schools, our minds were preoccupied with the temporary suspension of contact sport and amended directions on co-curricular activities, including choir rehearsals and performance. The announcement brought a few weeks of exhilarating inter-school activity and encounter to an immediate end; it also meant that preparations at St Mary’s for this week’s Patronal Festival celebrations had to be curtailed, and that some voices – of the singing variety – could not be featured in our recorded service, as planned. These setbacks are felt keenly by the girls and the rest of our community and it takes an intervention, on the scale of Madonsela, for us to adjust our perspective, train our thoughts elsewhere, and attune ourselves to those non-trivial “many levels”.

This time last year – yesterday in Madonsela’s formulation – we were longing to return to campus. Looking back, our sense of relief is palpable in the words we wrote to our community in the first week of June: “The Grade 7 and matric girls are safely back on campus, and the school is properly awake.” Our country and our school were awake – rudely awoken by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis as well as acts of brutality at home with the death of Collins Khosa in Alexandra – and trying to find each other again across divisions deepened by hard lockdown and the deficient engagement offered by social media.

A year later, we are still on campus, together, doing the necessary work that came out of that time and which informed our own process last year with the advocate’s report on allegations of discrimination, and the Mandate Molefe survey. The Senior School girls as well as senior members of the Board, management, academic and administrative staff have all engaged openly with the first round of racial literacy workshops led by Lovelyn Nwadeyi and her team, and the Board hosted the first of two webinars to connect with parents this week.

In among all of this, we remain committed to the special responsibilities that come with the education of girls and our shared obligation at an all-girls’ institution to learn how to lift each other up. The poem below by English spoken word performer and poet, Kae (formerly Kate) Tempest brought tears to the eyes of a Grade 7 English class last week. I think you will understand why.

The boys have football and skate ramps.
They can ride BMX
and play basketball in the courts by the flats until midnight.
The girls have shame.

One day,
when we are grown and we have minds of our own,
we will be kind women, with nice smiles and families and jobs.
And we will sit,
with the weight of our lives and our pain
pushing our bodies down into the bus seats,
and we will see thirteen-year-old girls for what will seem like the first
time since we’ve been them,
and they will be sitting in front of us, laughing
into their hands at our shoes or our jackets,
and rolling their eyes at each other.

While out of the window, in the sunshine,
the boys will be cheering each other on,
and daring each other to jump higher and higher.

On many levels, today, in St Mary’s 133rd year, is better than yesterday. It is our duty - a duty of love - to keep working on tomorrow, “daring each other to jump higher and higher.”

SARAH WARNER
JUNIOR SCHOOL HEADMISTRESS