Francine Walls
NOVELIST & POET
Botswana 1972: Idealistic Shashe River School
Queen Anne News. Seattle, WA. August 1, 1973
Shashi River Secondary School sprawls in the northeastern thorn-bush lands of independent Botswana, beside the arid heart of southern Africa, the Kalahari Desert. The school’s job is to educate its 600 academic and vocational students. Its mission is to aid in the development of a country whose illiteracy is approximately 70% and whose annual rural family income is approximately $100. Little more than 37% of Botswana’s youth can begin primary school, less than 1% finish university because there are not enough schools and not enough jobs for those who do complete their education.
Glorious, a student, reads her story.
Shashe River School was founded in 1969 by an Englishman, Robert Oakeshott, several years after Botswana’s 1966 independence from Great Britain. The school's founding principles were those of the nation of Botswana: self-reliance and self-discipline. The goal was to make the school completely self-sufficient and cover every cost by growing their food and building their housing and classrooms. The staff was a mixture of expatriate volunteers, paid a subsistence wage, and regular Batswana, Lesotho, and Republic of South African teachers.
On a tract of land donated by the village of Tonota, near the Shashe River, the school was gradually built by students in the carpentry and building Brigades. Five rectangular buildings of concrete blocks and corrugated metal roofs finally climbed the sloping hillside of thorn scrub and sand. Circles of thatched roof roundavels, round brick huts, were built for the staff and boarding students. Only the barest amenities were provided: one room, one light that shone from 6-10 P.M., if the generator was working. The ablution block with plumbing was often a hundred yards away from a rondavel. With this skeleton, the founder and first principal, Robert Oakeshott, began the school.
Each student was expected to contribute at least two hours of manual labor each week toward improving the school. Staff supervised and worked beside the students on projects such as growing vegetables, painting houses, quarrying rock, making bricks, building walls, and gathering manure (for compost) from the village. In addition, each academic student had a weekly turn preparing food in the open-air kitchen, slaughtering goats, building fires for the iron pots, and stirring the endless quantities of mealie (corn) meal and samp (corn kernels).
The school day began in the heatless hostels at 5 A.M. when the sun came up. If the pump was not working, the girls would rush from tap to tap trying to find any water still in the pipes. Classes began at 6:30 AM without breakfast to beat the devastating afternoon heat. Even the cold mornings of winter would turn into warm afternoons. The breakfast break at 8 A.M. included assembly, class register, and soupy mealie meal porridge. Lunch at 1:30 PM ended the teaching day and began preparation time or "development practical" (manual labor) time for the teachers and students.
The staple food of the Botswana people is mealie meal, cooked as porridge for breakfast with the remainder cooked into hard cakes for lunch and dinner. At noon, the major meal, both mealie meal and butter beans (lima-bean-like) were dipped out into the students’ ubiquitous enamel bowl from one of the four gigantic iron pots heated with wood fires. Goat meat was provided twice a week with bread baked outside in brick ovens, three times a week. Sometimes vegetables from the student-run gardens were added to the diet. All the food was eaten with fingers, the porridge swirled onto two fingers and sucked off. The staff ate the same food as the students.
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The school offers the course needed to take the 9th grade examination, the Junior Certificate. A student cannot continue unless this exam is passed and 50% usually leave school at this point to try to get jobs in the Civil Service.
Caption
The Cambridge examination is taken in the 11th grade with tests sent from an international testing center in England. A pass on this test will give the student a precious chance at one of the few places at the University of Swaziland, Botswana, and Lesotho. Its main campus is in Roma, Lesotho. The university offers a B.A. which is considered equivalent after three years of study to the first year of a British university. A few can study abroad.
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The vocational or brigade students at Shashe River School have practical training as well as basic classes in English and mathematics. The girls participate in the textile or weaving brigade, and the boys participate in the carpentry, building, and farming brigades. Too often, the students in the brigades are taught how to make only one thing, a desk, a handbag, a brick, and not the fundamentals of design and construction. Academic teachers who are already overloaded don’t always like to take on the extra teaching hours. Each brigade, however, tries to be self-sufficient, running its accounts and attempting to cover all expenses by labor.
The school has ceased to be a dream but its reality is not the ideal it was once thought it could be. Students on the academic side still think that working with their hands is beneath them because they will earn more as civil servants than as farmers. This feeling divides them from the brigade students. Fees are rising because of the increasing cost of supplies and salaries. Cost-covering was never a viable option for a school of 600 because there was never enough water to grow the necessary crops.
Caption
The building period was that of the most intense idealism. Expatriate volunteers and students were committed to the schools founding principles, but successive teachers have had different goals. With the leaving of the first principal, Robert Oakeshott in 1971 and the struggle to find a qualified Batswana principal, the school began its decline from experimental to traditional school. Its government board finally obtained a membership with a government-oriented majority and the way began to be cleared to bring the school in line with the rest. Government schools do not have manual labor or vocational training.Shashi River School was and still is in many respects a noble attempt to bring development to an undeveloped land. Self-reliance and self-discipline are laudatory ideas but they required great individual effort. The school caries on, however, although the vision is dimming.
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Shashi River School was and still is in many respects a noble attempt to bring development to an undeveloped land. Self-reliance and self-discipline are laudatory ideas but they required great individual effort. The school caries on, however, although the vision is dimming.