Cheescutters, Gymslips and Boarding School

by Emily on Jul 8th, 2008

Cheescutters and Gymslips, compiled by Robin Malan, is a delightful collection of short pieces about southern African writers’ experiences of boarding school.

“Boarding school” – the words in themselves conjure up various images and emotions: being a “newbie”, initiation, homesickness, living by rules and reacting to bells, hunger between mealtimes, midnight feasts … all the way through to punishment, miserable unhappiness, even running away. Such experiences, and many more, are reflected in this book – which includes a foreword by that master of boarding school adventure-and-folly fiction, John van de Ruit.

But what kinds of boarding schools are there in southern Africa? For many black South Africans, especially those whose school experience pre-dates 1960, boarding schools were academically elite, mission- or church-run schools, infinitely superior to township or rural state-run schools. An ambitious teenager aspired to attending such a school, teenagers such as former President Nelson Mandela, Professor Z K Matthews, Ellen Kuzwayo and Phyllis Ntantala (later to become A C Jordan’s wife and mother to the present Arts and Culture Minister Pallo Jordan).

Peter Abrahams attended a church-run school in deep rural surroundings near present-day Polokwane, and then the famous St Peter’s School in Rosettenville, Johannesburg, where he was a contemporary of Es’kia Mphahlele. Both say how important their schools were to their development as writers.

For many Afrikaans-speaking children, especially those living on farms, there was no option but to attend the state-run boarding school in the nearest town or city. So, Willemien le Roux and Chris Barnard and Murray La Vita share glimpses of their lives at such schools.

Catholic convent schools have left writers such as Doris Lessing, Ann Harries and Liz McGregor with some bitter reminiscences of hardship and harsh punishment, while South African-born international foodie and novelist Prue Leith OBE makes some startling revelations about the nuns who made up the staff of her convent school.

The conventional South African image of the boys’ private school is examined in distinctly different and contrasting ways by Jonty Driver, Stephen Gray, Anthony Akerman and Imraan Coovadia, as well as being projected in van de Ruit’s foreword.

Guy Butler’s Quaker school at Inchanga was different from the private school Patrick Cullinan’s fictional alter-ego Tom attended, but common to both was the midnight feast – and common to those was condensed milk! EKM Dido’s tin of padkos “disappeared” almost as soon as she got to her new school. She couldn’t tell the other girls that she was crying because she wanted to tell her mother she would be sleeping in a proper bed for the first time. Chris Barnard came upon a schoolmate with his head in his food-locker – he was not stealing Chris’s food, he just wanted to ‘smell his mother’.

Don Mattera found a refuge among the orphans in the children’s home he was sent to in Durban; Bessie Head hated her Durban girls’ home so much she ran away. Brian Chikwava only imagines what would have happened had he run away from his school.

There are also accounts of Zimbabwean writers attending boarding school: people as different as Dambudzo Marechera, Shimmer Chinodya and, more recently, Brian Chikwava, winner of the 2004 Caine Prize for African Writing. There is also Angolan-born Simao Kikamba carrying his mattress on his back to his new school in what was then Zaire.

Alexandra Fuller experienced the overwhelming transformation of her Rhodesian whites-only boarding school into a Zimbabwean school open to everyone. The first black student is peered at and examined with embarrassing frankness: when he wipes his mouth on his table napkin, “I hope I don’t get that napkin when it comes back from laundry,” she hisses to her friend at the table. “Ja, me too, hey,” replies her neighbour.

This book brings together an amazing kaleidoscopic range of views and opinions and experiences, captured and shared by 37 different writers from southern Africa. It is this range of diverse experiences of school life in southern Africa that gives the collection a unique view on our part of the continent.

Because of the personalities represented here, the idea of writing about boarding school becomes much more than a privileged white indulgence: the pieces provide a cross-section of different time-locations, different places, and the different historical, racial and economic realities of the region.

It becomes a valuable document giving an insight into the childhood or adolescent formative experiences of a number of professional writers. The list of writers includes two Nobel laureates, an OBE, an Ambassador, a university Vice-Chancellor and Director of the World Bank, as well as a whole slew of internationally known and southern African professional writers of both fiction and non-fiction.

About the author

Robin Malan has spent his whole working career in teaching and theatre, and making books. He has written a number of novels for young people including The Sound of New Wings, Rebel Angel and The Story of Lucky Simelane, compiled general collections such as Being Here, No Place Like, Leaves to a Tree, The Essential Steve Biko and The Essential Nelson Mandela, as well as major school anthologies such as Inscapes, Worldscapes, and New Poetry Works. Forthcoming in 2008 is his A to Z of African Writers.