In the 1960s and 70s Naledi High School was the pride of the sprawling, poor, western-most townships of Soweto. This was a school of students who saw themselves as people who would one day play a key role in uplifting black people. Mr Rudolph Mthimkhulu, the founding principal of Naledi, had instilled in them a sense of purpose, ambition, drive, self-love, and a vision of the possible. His belief in the capability of all children, irrespective of their socio-economic background, was infectious. Mr Mthimkhulu was not going to let any one of us feel comfortable about making excuses for Bantu Education. He insisted that it was precisely because of Bantu Education that we needed to prove ourselves and demonstrate to all that we could do it.

My dream as a young kid at Zola Primary School had been to proceed to Naledi High School, which was in a neighbouring township five minutes’ walk from home. Instead, after finishing primary school, we were marched to a new school named after Dr BW Vilakazi. I hated the school and it was far away, about an hour's walk from home. We suspected that the reason we were marched to Dr Vilakazi was a continuation of the infamous government policy of ‘divide and rule’. Naledi High School was in Naledi township, a predominantly Sotho community, while Dr Vilakazi High School was in a Nguni township – the government discouraged any mixing of the ethnic groups.

When the Department of Bantu Education first had the ridiculous notion of teaching black children through the medium of Afrikaans in 1974, Mr Gqibithole, the principal at Dr Vilakazi, was among the first to agree to implement and test the policy. That first year we all tried very hard to learn. We struggled together with our teachers, who ended up teaching in English and examining pupils’ performance in Afrikaans. Heaven knows how they managed to mark the examination scripts! Many of us failed that year, and we did everything we could to transfer to Naledi High School. This was difficult, because Naledi prided itself on academic excellence and could not take a group of failed students.