Last year, in a newsletter released on exactly the same day, we were celebrating the return of the daily ringing of the angelus on campus; this year, six weeks into the first term of 2022, this publication is bursting at the seams with news of onsite events and outings, new and old.

The whole of the Junior School entered into the spirit of Twos Day earlier this week, wearing tutus and exploring the implications of this unusually palindromic, ambigrammic date in history. You will see from the images included in the pages that follow that we also took the opportunity to support CHOC’s Flip Flop Day, and to remember the late Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, building on what we learnt about his remarkable life and legacy in our assembly a fortnight ago. I am looking forward with particular interest to the portraits of “the Arch” drawn by the Grade 0s, who took inspiration from an image painted by one of our Senior School girls, Yumna Laher, in 2004, and which is on loan to us from the Seminar Room in The Edge.

While we gratefully acknowledge the return of familiar calendar events – like the Senior Primary inter-house gala, our Reggio workshops for parents, and the Little Saints and Grade 0 wheelathon – we also welcome the introduction of new activities and initiatives. In addition to hosting an inaugural onsite marimba workshop last weekend, we also took a group of Grade 6 and 7 girls to participate in a Kids’ Lit Quiz at Christ Church Preparatory, and the Grade 6s paid a visit to Wits Art Museum (WAM) yesterday to view the exhibition Seen, Heard and Valued: WAM celebrates 40 years of the Standard Bank African Art Collection. As the WAM website informs us (and as I am happy to share with you as an old Witsie), “Wits was the first university in South Africa to include African Art in the Art History curriculum” and “To this day, the collection is deeply integrated into WAM’s exhibition, research and education programmes.”

My hope is that, to revisit the words of writer and cultural critic Olivia Laing quoted in our previous newsletter, our outing to WAM will provide the girls with “material with which to think: new registers, new spaces.” After that, as Laing tartly observes, it’s up to us. Please speak to your daughters about what they are doing at school, extend the new registers and new spaces beyond the classroom, so that their curiosity about the world and desire to think is sustained, and develops into a lifelong habit.

Deanne King and I bring news and “material with which to think”from the ASA and SAHISA National Conference (“Flourishing”) held in Gqeberha this week – but more on that later. In the meantime, enjoy the half-term and the last days of February with your families: read, rest and recharge, and travel safely if you are going away. When we welcome you back onto campus, it will be March…

SARAH WARNER
JUNIOR SCHOOL HEADMISTRESS