Find out what works and then get paid for attacking the whites working there. This seems the latest business opportunity in the highly lucrative industry of white guilt. This thought was prompted in me by two dreadful bits of news this week about South Africa’s stricken educational system.
First, I heard that 81% of our Grade 4s (eleven-year-olds) cannot read with understanding. This was the result of a recent testing of children around the world by “Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS)”, an international project. South African children were shown a few basic paragraphs in their home languages and asked simple questions about them. 81% of them could not answer. 57 countries were tested around the world. South Africa came last. We were lower than Brazil, Egypt and Morocco. This has devastating consequences for our young people and our economy.
Second, in the same week, I read horrible reports on what is now known as “school capture”. This is where rich activists in “diversity and transformation” invade schools and get paid a fortune to stir up racial animosity and indoctrinate the white pupils into thinking they are evil racists even if they don’t know it, and the black pupils into thinking they are useless, inferior victims of white racism, who cannot fend for themselves.
The question is this: do the diversity warriors invade the schools that fail to teach poor black children how to read and write, or do they invade the schools that succeed in teaching rich black children how to read and write? Sorry, a silly question. Of course, they only invade the rich elite schools. This is because they can make lots of money from the elite schools and none from the poor schools, and because they are interested in attacking whites, not helping blacks. So they invade those schools that teach black children well and get good matric results for them. These are private schools and Model-C schools, with mainly white teachers.
The diversity gang is not interested in the appallingly bad schools in the townships and rural areas where poor black children are cheated of a decent education and of all good prospects. A four-year-old black girl dies in a pit latrine at a township school: the diversity warriors yawn. A white teacher at an elite school makes a remark about a rich black 16-year-old pupil’s hairstyle: the diversity warriors leap into furious action. Black Lives Matter! Systemic racism! The hurt, the pain of the rich girl! Three centuries of imperialism, colonialism, patriarchy, oppression – all that sort of thing.
There is not the slightest doubt as to why the South African educational system fails the vast majority of black children. Our cruel and stupid Covid lockdown made things worse by locking down schools (despite the fact that children were hardly affected by Covid-19 at all), but the schools were terrible before Covid.
The reason our education is so bad is that the ANC has deliberately ruined it to please its powerful political allies. In the name of affirmative action, employment equity, BEE and transformation, most of our state schools have mainly black teachers, often without the proper qualifications or experience, and most of them belong to the despotic teachers’ union, SADTU, which in effect controls education in at least six of our nine provinces. SADTU has not the slightest interest in the children it teaches, only in the wages and conditions of its teachers.
ANC ministers, forever espousing black affirmative action and employment equity, never send their own children to schools where 92% of the teachers are black (the percentage of blacks in the whole population) – they don’t want affirmative action teachers for their children. Instead they send them to private schools or Model-C schools, where most of the teachers are white, all appointed on merit. SADTU teachers do the same. So do all the diversity warriors, who make sure their own children go to elite schools with white teachers – and then accuse those teachers of racism.
Terry Oakley-Smith, who is white, and who runs “Diversi-T”, and Lovelyn Nwadeyi, who is black, and who runs “L & N Advisors”, might be of different races but they belong to the same morally superior class, and are in the same business of extorting lots of money from the guilty, handwringing, upper-class whites. (Neither was born in South Africa, which is interesting, and might or might not be relevant.) Guilty rich whites are a goldmine for the diversity fortune-hunters. Some of the schools they have invaded and intimidated include Roedean, St Stithians and St John’s in Gauteng, St Anne’s in KZN, and Herschel, Bishops and Westerford in the Western Cape. (They also tried it in Fish Hoek High, where I was schooled, and came a bit of a cropper there, because the white parents there are not upper-class hand-wringers.) In all these cases, and there are many more, the diversity warriors encourage the black pupils to come up with tales of white racism, which are never substantiated in the court, but which cause permanent damage to the reputations of white teachers, many of whom are driven into resignation. Every spoilt black teenager is encouraged to blame her every disappointment or pique or failure on systemic white racism. (All teenagers, black and white, are easily persuaded that others are to blame for their own failings.) The schools are poisoned with racial rancour where none existed before. Morale is dropping like a stone at our elite schools, and fear is growing.
The hero in the struggle against all this is the IRR’s own Richard Wilkinson. Much of the stuff I have written above comes from Richard, who has investigated this menace to our education bravely and thoroughly. He has recently published online a shocking but informative essay: https://www.school-capture.com/lovelynandeusebius His essay is much better than my article here, and I think it is essential reading for anybody, black or white, who has children in South African schools. He begins the essay on a long radio interview between Eusebius McKaiser of Radio 702 and Lovelyn Nwadeyi.
Our mainstream media, including 702 Radio are, of course, all behind the racist nonsense of systemic white racism. Even though they all send their children to schools with mainly white teachers; they love telling stories about white racist teachers and white racist parents. Wilkinson then gives example after example of the racist corruption of our leading schools by the diversity fortune-hunters.
Wilkinson tries to give some of the economics of Ms Nwadeyi’s visits to Roedean in Gauteng. Nwadeyi gave several diversity “workshops” there. Each workshop lasted about an hour, and seems to have consisted of a PowerPoint presentation of slides copied and pasted from “Critical Race Theory” presentations in the USA. (Critical Race Theory or CRT is racist nonsense dreamt up by some rich Americans who try to persuade blacks that they are useless and doomed, and whites that they are inherently racist because of the system. Rich guilty whites love it. Black criminals love it too, because they can blame the whites when they terrorise the majority of decent, law-abiding blacks.) Wilkinson asked teachers at Roedean what Ms Nwadeyi charges per one-hour slide show. They said R70,000 – “at least”. He asked the school authorities to confirm or deny this figure. They refused to do so. Ms Nwadeyi gave seven slide shows at Roedean. So, if those teachers are correct, it meant R490,000 was handed over from the fee-paying parents of Roedean to the welcoming pockets of Lovelyn Nwadeyi. I’d love to ask her if she thinks this money was better spent on her rather than, say, eliminating pit latrines at our poorest black schools, and thereby saving the lives of little children.
I have spoken to teachers at various elite and semi-elite schools in Gauteng and Cape Town. Everything they said tallies completely with what Wilkinson has written. One teacher at a semi-elite school in Cape Town told me that their diversity invader (not Nwadeyi but another rich woman) charged R90,000 for each of her workshops.
I appeal to somebody (like, for instance, Richard Wilkinson) to draw up an audit of all those schools in South Africa who have invited the diversity warriors to indoctrinate their pupils, and then publish this list so that the public can see what is happening. Parents might find this list useful when they are selecting a school for their children. I want fee-paying parents to know how much each school is paying for this indoctrination.
I cannot emphasise this loudly enough. These diversity social justice warriors and the “Black Lives Matter” brigade care nothing – absolutely nothing – about black suffering. All they care about is white sin. They are obsessed with whites. They hate whites but they insist on having their children taught by whites, and then they insist on accusing the white teachers of racism, and then insist that the whites feel apologetic about the charge.
It is a strange, perverted psychology, which affects only the black elite, who demand white repentance, and only the rich white elite, who are only too eager to repent. The great mass of ordinary blacks ignore this rubbish, and the great mass of ordinary whites are oblivious to it. “White fragility”, to quote the title of a silly book by Robin DiAngelo, a silly member of the cosseted white elite in America, does not apply at all to the white working classes. They feel no white guilt; they are not fragile at all; and they couldn’t give a damn about CRT, which they’ve probably never heard of and would laugh at if they had.
I notice that Lovelyn Nwadeyi comes from Nigeria. It so happens that Nigeria has some of the worst racial problems on Earth, problems between the large number of mutually hostile black races – or nations or tribes or ethnic groups (call them whatever you like). This is natural since the Bantu people, probably the most biologically important people of all modern humans (whites being the least important), originated in West Africa. The British colonists did Nigeria a terrible disservice in their “unite and conquer” campaign of forcing them all together in one artificially-constructed country. After independence, Nigeria fell into a bloody civil war between the Igbos in Biafra and other powerful races in the north, in which over two million people were killed or starved to death. I should appreciate Ms Nwadeyi’s insights into this and perhaps her proposals for a CRT workshop in Biafra.
Finally, I must ask the question I ask over again and is never answered. I ask this to Lovelyn Nwadeyi and Terry Oakley-Smith and all the other diversity warriors, and all the ANC ministers and EFF commanders: if you think whites are such racists, and systemic white racism is such a problem, why don’t you send your own children to schools where there are mainly black teachers?
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