Crime and gang violence fears in the notorious townships on the outskirts of the South African city of Cape Town have reportedly forced some parents to enroll their children in former white-only schools.
“Thugs would go into the school carrying guns threatening teachers, forcefully taking their laptops in front of the learners,” a mother named Sibahle Mbasana said to the BBC about the school her sons previously attended in Khayelitsha, the biggest town in Cape Town filled with violence.
“Imagine your child experiencing this regularly. There’s hardly any security at the school and even if there is, they are powerless to do anything.”
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More than 30 years have passed since the end of white-minority rule in South Africa, yet there are still black students who have to endure the vast inequalities the racist system of apartheid presented.
To Mrs Mbasana, her three children are the inheritors of this legacy – particularly affecting her oldest son Lifalethu who was schooled in the town between the ages of six and 10.
The Bantu Education Act of 1953 was one of the apartheid era’s main laws, which was geared towards preventing black children from reaching their full potential.
It meant segregated schools with less funding and fewer resources for those in poor areas, and to this day, it has led to overcrowding and suffering on the part of kids from the fallout of high crime, drug use and violence.
Mrs Mbasana grew up in Eastern Cape province and moved to Khayelitsha when she was 18.
She decided she had no option but to transfer Lifalethu, who is now 12, and her other son Anele, 11, to a state school some 40km (25 miles) away in Simon’s Town, situated on a picturesque bay on the Cape Peninsula which is famously home to South Africa’s navy, per the BBC.
Joining the boys is their seven-year-old sister Buhle at the school, as the institution presents better facilities and smaller class sizes.
“I told myself [that] Buhle was not going to that [local] school because I already endured so many things with the two boys when they were at that school,” said the 34-year-old clothes designer.
“We don’t want to live in the township, but we have to live here because we can’t afford to move out,” she said.
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“Speak to anyone in the township and they’ll tell you they would move out at the first opportunity if they could.”
