STORY 91
A community is what its schools make of it. Not entirely, families matter, churches matter, the land and the climate and the economy all leave their marks. But the schools are where a community’s children spend their days and the schools are where the community’s values are transmitted, contested, confirmed and occasionally subverted. To understand the Helderberg, you need to understand its schools.
The history of schooling in the Helderberg is inseparable from the history of language, race and religion in South Africa. That cannot be avoided. The schools were shaped by the same forces that shaped everything else in this country, the division between English and Afrikaans, the systematic exclusion of Black and coloured children from the institutions that served white children, the church’s role in education, the state’s role in enforcing separation. Any honest account of the Helderberg’s schools has to hold that history clearly, because the people who were educated in those schools and the people who were excluded from them are all still here.
Hoërskool Strand, HS, is one of the oldest Afrikaans-medium secondary schools in the Helderberg. Founded in the first half of the twentieth century, it served the Afrikaans-speaking communities of Strand and the coastal settlements with particular intensity. The school produced farmers, teachers, predikants, civil servants, rugby players and soldiers, the full range of roles that the Afrikaner community filled in the South Africa of the mid-twentieth century. Its alumni network was tight and its influence on the character of Strand ran deep.
Hottentots Holland High School, HH, as everyone called it, served the English-speaking community of Somerset West and drew from a wider catchment that included the farms and the newer suburbs. The school’s name preserved the oldest European name for the mountains above the valley, the Hottentots Holland range, named by the VOC for the Khoikhoi people who had grazed their cattle through the pass. It was an English-medium school with all that implied in the South Africa of the apartheid era, a particular relationship to British educational traditions, a particular social profile, a particular sense of its place in the community.
Somerset College is the institution that changed the educational landscape of the Helderberg most dramatically in the post-apartheid era. Established as an independent school, fee-paying, non-racial from its founding, it offered an alternative to the government school system and drew families from across the demographic spectrum who could afford the fees and wanted something different. Its growth tracked the growth of the Helderberg’s professional and managerial population in the 1990s and 2000s. It built facilities that the government schools could not match. It attracted teachers from across the country.
The existence of Somerset College changed the conversation about education in the Helderberg, sharpened the questions about what resources went where, what outcomes different children could expect, what choices were available to families with money and what was available to families without it. Those questions are not resolved. They are the same questions South Africa is still arguing about at a national level, concentrated into one valley.
The primary schools that fed these institutions, Somerset House, Somerset West Primary, De Hoop Primary, Hendrik Louw Primary, Lochnerhof Primary, Gordon’s Bay Primary and many others, did the foundational work. They are where children learned to read, where they learned the landscape around them, where they first understood that they lived somewhere with a particular character and a particular history. The teachers in those primary schools, largely unsung, largely anonymous to any history of the region, spent their careers transmitting the Helderberg to the children of the Helderberg.
There were, of course, schools for the communities that apartheid excluded from the white institutions. The schools that served the coloured community of Somerset West and Strand, often underfunded, often overcrowded, often staffed by teachers who were themselves products of an inferior system, produced people of remarkable quality in spite of everything. The people who went to those schools and built careers and raised families in the Helderberg did so against a headwind that the children in HS and HH never felt.
That headwind was deliberate. It was policy. It was enforced by law. Acknowledging it is not a distraction from the history of the Helderberg’s schools. It is the history of the Helderberg’s schools.
The schools that exist today, state and independent, primary and secondary, Afrikaans and English and dual-medium, are more integrated, more diverse and more equitable than the institutions of fifty years ago. They are not perfectly equitable. No South African school system is. But the children sitting in classrooms in Somerset West and Strand today are sitting in the same rooms, more or less. And that is not nothing.
Between You and Me:
That headwind was deliberate. It was policy. It was enforced by law. I have written several sentences in this book that I think are important, but those three might be the ones I would want a reader to slow down for. It is easy, when writing about schools, to drift into a tone of gentle nostalgia, uniforms, motti, rugby fixtures, the warm fog of memory. All of that is real and all of it is in this book. But none of it can be allowed to obscure the fact that the educational landscape of the Helderberg was, for most of its history, deliberately unequal by design and that the people who lived on the wrong side of that design are still here, raising families, in the same valley, under the same mountain. The schools of the Helderberg are a shared history. They were never a shared experience. Both things are true and the second does not cancel the first.
Historian – Harmen Bockelenberg
Next week: before there were school buildings, there were church halls the first classrooms of the Helderberg.
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