The principal approved the plan as long as nobody would be harmed. The teacher, Moloko, and the senior boy students organised boy volunteers to hunt for any accused perpetrators in the township. And the hunt began. Every Monday there would be announcements of scheduled hunting of the rapists. The violated girl would accompany that group of 20 or 30 boys to identify the culprit. The culprit would be arrested by the group and brought to school to face the teachers as a consequence for the crime they had committed. Most of these bad boys would end up apologising but some would try to thwart and fight the student mob. In most cases they would lose the fight as the boy-students beat them to pulp and dragged them to school badly injured! That exercise stopped the harassment of the girl students donning the Naledi High School uniform abruptly. Personally, I stopped participating in these programmes to protect abused girls when one girl student falsely reported rape, when in actual fact, the boy was her long-time boyfriend and they actually had a child together. That matter was handled by the deputy-principal at the time, and after listening to the badly injured man, he investigated and discovered that the girl was lying and she was suspended from school for three months.
The tendency at the time was to be ridiculed if you objected to such bad , despicable behaviour of the boys . As we grew up and moved into senior primary school, we became conscious about boys and girls, the differences and the interactions between us, and our relationships with the opposite sex evolved. One thing that stood out about me was that I would not fight or harm a girl. As a boy, I always felt that fighting with or beating up a girl was an act of cowardice. I would feel disgusted when my peers would boast, using slang like,“hesha” or “2-5s” or “two-fiveing” a girl, all euphemisms for rape at the time. My fledgling conscience would ask why a boy would not simply propose to a girl instead of imposing himself on her against her will. The tendency at the time was to be ridiculed if you objected to such bad, despicable behaviour of the boys. Moving to Naledi High School in the ‘70s, the school that was to be famous for being at the These boys, colloquially referred to as ‘tsotsis’, prowled on girl students, especially on Fridays, for their weekend pleasure. It was not until a certain teacher called Moloko, driving his much revered Hi- Ace minibus painted ‘Fingerlings’, pleaded with the principal, Mr Molope, to approve the protection of the Naledi High girl students from these thugs. forefront of the 1976 national students’ uprising in later years, something remarkable occurred, long before the students’ riots. For years, girl students in Naledi High School were harassed and violated by local boys who were either not attending school or not working.
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November 2023 | Collective Action Magazine
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