On the face of it, when Johannesburg’s elite Roedean School cancelled an inter-school tennis match against King David School Linksfield, it seemed ordinary, but once you scratched the surface, the pus of festering religious bigotry oozed out.
The match wasn’t cancelled because of rain or injury or a genuine scheduling conflict. It was cancelled because a clique of parents demanded that their daughters not play against Jews.
This was not whispered bigotry; it was explicit, and Roedean was too scared to deal with its internal demon. Roedean’s head of senior school, Phuti Mogale, in a telephone call to King David’s principal Lorraine Srage, was candid: some parents were applying “significant pressure” not to play “a Jewish school”.
This was religious and ethnic discrimination in its purest form – Jewish children excluded from a children’s sporting event solely because of who they are and what they believe. Under any honest reading of the Constitution, this is unlawful. Mogale did not know how to deal with the issue. That she should have been left alone to solve the problem reflects very poorly on the Roedean school board. They had not grappled with this intolerance and seemed to have no desire to rebuke the parents urging this boycott.
The real culprits, the bigots, would remain completely untouched: no identification, no sanction, no public shaming, no mandatory re-education, nothing. They, as part of Roedean’s fee-paying ecosystem, would remain protected while the school pretended the problem was administrative. Money talks, but big money talks louder.
Roedean conducted itself shamefully. In two separate statements, crafted days apart, and published by Flow Communications – a supposedly sophisticated PR firm that should know better – the school peddled outright fabrications: “prior school commitments,” “compulsory academic workshops,” “scheduling clashes,” “miscommunication.”
The second release on 10 February even wrapped itself in virtue-signalling piety: “We will place the best interests of young people first.” It promised an “independent review” and a “facilitator” for vague “student concerns,” all while studiously avoiding the non-kosher elephant in the room. These were not clumsy errors. The audio clip of the telephone conversation between the two school heads has gone viral. These statements deliberately gaslighted the Jewish community, buying time, shielding the real perpetrators, and they deceived the South African public, casting aspersions on King David and indirectly the entire Jewish community.
Flow allowed itself to participate in laundering antisemitism using nice polished corporate language. This was not benign PR, this was Bell Pottinger-style propaganda. It tapped South Africa’s religious sensitivities; it suggested that King David, the Jewish school, was lying. It disseminated falsehoods, it resulted in public social media attacks on Jews and Zionists, and it ignored the humiliation of the young Jewish tennis players and amplified the school’s denial.
Indisputably false
The truth was on the audio clip between the two school heads. The statements were indisputably false. And at this stage Roedean’s house of cards collapsed. A reluctant school board was finally forced to take the first steps in confronting its religious intolerance.
A grudging written apology admitted that its actions were “deeply hurtful to the Jewish community” but studiously avoided any suggestion that its actions had been antisemitic. Phuti Mogale was under the bus: probably pushed, but officially resigning. In fact, she was the only person who tried to address this discrimination. She didn’t invent the excuses. She was not part of the deception. Somebody had to take the fall, and she was the convenient scapegoat. An unwitting high-profile non-Jewish African victim of an antisemitic incident, not of her making.
Let us not forget the deafening silence of the guardians of equality enforcement; the Gauteng Department of Education and the national Department of Basic Education — lightning-fast when a racist WhatsApp message from white pupils surfaces — didn’t utter a single word. No statement. No investigation, no precautionary suspensions, no public statements, no condemnations, no equality court referrals to ISASA, the independent schools’ body. It was just as culpable. It too, remained mute.
All the parties one expects to know better were on show, and displaying selective tolerance of antisemitism. The pattern is both unmistakable and shameful. South African institutions have normalised the exclusion of its Jewish citizens in the name of “Palestine solidarity”.
The South African Rugby Union banned Tel Aviv Heat from participating in a tournament in 2023. Cricket South Africa stripped David Teeger of his Under-19 captaincy because of his Jewish identity and views. Universities like UCT have blacklisted Israeli academics. The climate of passive discrimination has created environments where Jews conceal their identities and opinions to avoid harassment. Forced declarations of anti-Zionism to join groups are now in vogue. What is framed as “principled politics” is really rank discrimination. But the principled politics of boycotting has been seen to work, and the Roedean parents simply followed the national playbook.
King David Linksfield and Lorraine Srage have shown what actual moral courage looks like: they recorded the call with consent, refused to accept lies, demanded truth, and ultimately accepted an apology, so that the girls could play tennis without politics poisoning the court.
On the other hand, Roedean, its school board, Flow Communications, the bigoted parents, the mute authorities all displayed a spineless cowardice and a disregard for what is right. This cannot be accepted as normal politics. This is discrimination by another name. One instance of religious intolerance was nipped in the bud at school-level, but the rot will spread.
Not an outlier
The Roedean incident is not an outlier, it is not an aberration. It is the logical outcome of a society that has decided that some bigotries are more equal than others. Until parents face consequences, until PR firms are held to account for lies, until school boards stop tolerating intolerant organisations that claim to teach about religious tolerance, until educational institutions take a strong constitutional stand for what is right rather than submit to the ethnic and religious prejudices of fee-paying parents, and until authorities enforce equality without fear or favour, and people and organisations stand up and oppose bigotry, the guarantee of human dignity in South Africa is worthless. Dignity should not be negotiable, and that applies to Jews as well.
[Image: Detail from a gravestone in the Jewish cemetery of Ferrara, whose long Jewish history faced violent repudiation under Italian fascism in the 1930s and 1940s. Arno Senoner on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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