BACK TO SCHOOL 2008!!

We will be hosting an education awareness campaign about the value of education, the problems and challenges of education within our community. We're calling it BACK TO SCHOOL.
26 JANUARY 2008 - KWA-JEKI INTERSECTION, FINGO... Free your mind black!

STEVE BIKO 30/30

2007 was the year in which we commemorated 30 Years since the death of Biko.
We organised two events for the community.

We successfully hosted the Steve Biko Commemmorative IsiXhosa Speech Competition with Rhodes University's African Language Studies.
The competition was open to all Grahamstown High School kids.

Click the link to read:
HERALD REPORT ON BIKO SPEECH COMPETITION 2007
http://www.theherald.co.za/herald/2007/09/19/news/n12_19092007.htm

The topic was simply on what the scholars felt the relevance of Steve Biko is today.

It was a wonderful memorable day where the standard of language use was very high.
And of course it was good to see all these young people speaking their minds so passionately and trying out their best.

We hope this event can go on in years to come.

The winning speech was by Mandilakhe Tukulu of Victoria Girls' High School.

One 16 September we kept it street-style by holding a street event in Fingo. There was drama, hip-hop, dance and poets. As usual we held dialogues and debate on Biko with prizes given.



FRSM

Freedom and Fire

The original buildings that made up the Native Secondary School are nowhere on this blog. We were unable to locate archived images of the school. At Nathaniel Nyaluza Public Secondary School today, the oldest buildings date to the mid-1980s when the school was rebuilt after it was destroyed by fire during a student protest.

Students at Nyaluza found themselves at the centre of resistance to apartheid in Grahamstown during the late seventies and eighties. The Fingo high school was particularly affected by student boycotts. Some Nyaluza students were leaders in COSAS, and many more began, in this period, to be politically active.

A timeline of Student Action at Nathaniel Nyaluza Public Secondary School, and other high schools in the Grahamstown township:

1975
Nyaluza students staged a sit-in, refusing to sit their mid-year exams.
Only sixteen students sat for their Matriculation exams.

1977
Nyaluza students participated in marches against Bantu Education.

1980
Students from Ntsika and Nyaluza secondary schools initiated a boycott, which was ended at Mary Waters High School in May.
Government-appointed "Peacemakers" engaged in open aggression with the students.

1984
Students from Ntsika drafted a list of demands; including elected SRCs, curriculum reform and an end to corporal punishment in schools.
New boycotts were called, in honour of Steve Biko, and in response to the issue of police brutality.
Nyaluza students participated in a 500-strong, student led march from Joza to Fingo.
Attendance at Grahamstown schools dropped below 30%.

1985
The government declared a State of Emergency in Grahamstown in July.
Fingo village became subject to a curfew between 10pm and 4am.
Residents of the Grahamstown townships met, and lodged a list of 33 demands to the Government - four of these issues were centred on education.

(all of the information contained in the timeline was drawn from the first two chapters of Ryota Nishino's Honours thesis:
Ryota Nishino, 'The Dynamics of School Protests: Grahamstown School Boycotts c.1984-1987' Submitted to the History Department, Rhodes University, South Africa, in partial fulfilment of the requirements of a BA (Hons) degree in History, Rhodes University, 1999)

The beginnings of a Secondary School

Nathaniel Nyaluza Public Secondary School, in Fingo Village, was the first high school in Grahamstown dedicated to the education of black students. Known only as the 'Native Secondary School', the establishment of Nathaniel Nyaluza was the initiative of the Grahamstown Joint Council of Europeans and Natives. The minutes of the executive meetings between 1936 and 1938, when the school opened its doors, detail the long and involved process of finding and acquiring a suitable location, constructing buildings, and the endless task of fund-raising.

(From the minutes of the executive council, Grahamstown Joint Council of Europeans and Natives)
17th November 1936:
"Arrangements were left in the hands of the Chairman, Secretary and ---, together with ---, who informed the meeting that another concert was to be arranged in the Location for secondary school funds."

Besides staging concerts, the Joint Committee solicited donations and won the support of the local school to reduce running costs.

The decision to establish the Native Secondary School was a progressive step at a time when the advantages and disadvantages of so-called "Native Education" were being widely debated. A speaker addressing the executive of the Joint Committee raised three main objections to "educating the native":

"He becomes cheeky - but that is due only to the wrong type of education. He will compete with Europeans - but wth education his standard of living will be raised. Education is not needed for his work - but then what of the education of those Europeans who do similar work in England?"
(From the minutes of the executive council, Grahamstown Joint Council of Europeans and Natives)
20 April 1937

The Nathaniel Nyaluza school was never intended to provide the kind of education open to students in 'white' Grahamstown. After 1955, the Native Secondary School fell within the mandate of the Department of Education and Training, under the Bantu Education Act 1953, further limiting the scope of the curriculum. However, Nyaluza was still the first black secondary school in Grahamstown. Whatever limitations it did suffer, the establishment and continued operation of the school provided - and provides! - opportunites for further education to the youth of Fingo Village and the surrounding locations.