Middleburg: Going to School in Apartheid South Africa

By M. J. Poynter

Middleburg is a coming of age memoir recollecting the authors childhood experiences of growing up in a small town in apartheid South Africa. M. J. Poynter provides a scathing attack of the apartheid regime as seen from the perspective of an English immigrant who finds himself growing up in a culture of conflicting values. The novel breaks new ground in terms of providing an examination of oppression from the perspective of a white minority. Here the instruments of apartheid are viewed from the experiences of someone who is not segregated in terms of race but who is excluded by nationality and culture. Told through a series of amusing anecdotes the novel documents many of the events taking place in South Africa during the 1980s and provides an insightful observation of the popular culture relating to that period. His recollection of events captures a sense of morbid nostalgia in which themes of horror are contrasted with images of the comic and the bizarre. Set against a backdrop of brutal oppression this rights of passage demonstrates how the human spirit can at least find the resolve to laugh in the face of adversity!

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jul 16, 2007
• ISBN: 9781467011723

M. J. Poynter

M. J. Poynter is an English writer who grew up in apartheid South Africa during the 1980s. He lived in the small coal mining town of Witbank situated a hundred miles east of Johannesburg in what was once called the old Transvaal. From 1976-1988 M. J. Poynter completed his primary and secondary school education during what he often refers to as the thirteen wasted years. In 1989 he moved down to Durban where he completed a three year National Diploma in Theatre Technology at the Natal Technikon. At the beginning of 1992 his family decided to return to the UK where they currently reside in the county of Lincolnshire.

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MIDDLEBURG

Going to School in Apartheid South Africa

By

M.J. POYNTER

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© 2010 Mark Poynter. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 3/9/2010

ISBN: 978-1-4343-1952-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4670-1172-3 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

Contents

Introduction

1980

1981

1982

1983

1984

1985

1986

1987

1988

1989

Epilogue

About The Author

MIDDLEBURG

Going to School in Apartheid South Africa

This story reveals some of my childhood experiences of growing up in a small provincial town in apartheid South Africa during the 1980’s. The events take place a hundred miles East of Johannesburg in what was called the Old Transvaal. While the names of people and places have either been changed or displaced in order to conceal their true identity all of my recollections are based upon real events that actually occurred!

M. J. Poynter

Introduction 

As an English immigrant growing up in a small conservative Afrikaner town, I had to cope with being a minority - within a minority - within a minority. I was a minority in so far as being white in a country that was overwhelmingly black. I was a minority in the sense that I was an English speaker in a town that was predominantly Afrikaans and I was a minority in that I was English and everyone else was not! The English have always had to endure a strong sense of dislike from their fellow man it’s the price that one pays for having once been a great colonial power. But nowhere is this dislike for the English stronger than in South Africa where the horrors of the Boar War still survive. Here the English immigrant is viewed with a sense of contempt and disgust. It was under these difficult conditions that I grew up in a town that offered very little in terms of prospects or opportunity.

The 1980’s were in effect the last decade of the apartheid era. For most people, apartheid represented a brutal form of racial discrimination in which the majority of South Africans lived as second class citizens and were denied the basic rights and freedoms that many of us take for granted. But for the ordinary white South African who was somewhat ignorant as to the governments’ atrocities South Africa provided a stable and predictable way of life. For years the government had partly managed the economy, its commitment to nationalized industries had provided stable employment for millions of South Africans and created a sense of social wellbeing. For middle-class white South Africans these may not have been the boom years but they were still good years in which everyone had a job and could enjoy a reasonable standard of living. For people living in the small provincial towns of the Eastern Transvaal, such as, Middleburg, Bethal, Ermelo and Hendrina, life may not have been utopia but at least it was manageable.

In contrast Britain’s nationalized industries had suffered from years of underinvestment and were no longer deemed to be cost effective. Being unable to cope with the twin evils of high inflation and rising unemployment, Britain had become known as the sick man of Europe. When Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, she broke with the consensus politics of the past and embarked upon a programme of free-market reforms. These reforms were designed to create a more competitive society whose entrepreneurial skills would lead to the creation of wealth. But for many ordinary working-class people who had worked all their lives in Britain’s nationalized industries these economic reforms would result in social disaster. Suddenly, they found themselves as being surplus to requirement and tens of thousands of people lost their jobs!

For thousands of these semiskilled people living in the North of England, South Africa offered the opportunity of a new life in which one could enjoy years of stable employment and a better standard of living. During the late 1970’s to the early 80’s thousands of English working-class families settled in South Africa. For many, this was a land of milk and honey, a land in which they could aspire to a middle-class standard of living and enjoy the finer things in life. But for many the land of lovely sunshine and cheap beer was nothing more than a living hell of alienation and despair. Many immigrant families had previously lived in close communities surrounded by family and friends. They had been influenced by the more liberal and permissive attitudes of the post-war years in which the consumer culture of the swinging sixties had shaped their attitudes and ideas. But now they found themselves trapped in an oppressive society that was uncompromisingly conservative and hopelessly ill-equipped to accommodate them. Faced with these new social surroundings many immigrants simply withdrew into a private world and became increasingly detached from their social surroundings. Many would bitterly complain about being stuck in South Africa and would romanticize about returning to the UK. As the years went by memories of England would become frozen in time, trapped inside a bubble of the 1970’s characterized by pop songs, television programmes and superficial memories. It was in this world of social exclusion that the English immigrant would be condemned to an existence of boredom, cigarettes and alcohol.

1980 

1980 seems like a long time ago now but at the time I was ten years old and in my fourth year at Parkhurst Primary. Parkhurst Primary is a state school situated in the centre of a small industrial town called Middleburg. As a town Middleburg really lives up to its name, in that its white population are typically lower middle class, its ideals and aspirations are middle of the road and it is situated right in the middle of nowhere. In fact Middleburg is typical of many small towns in South Africa in that it possessed absolutely nothing of interest and was ideally suited to feeling depressed. Parkhurst was a modern school that boasted a great sense of tradition. But in all of my years at this nasty little piece of hell-on-earth, the only great sense of tradition that I ever saw was a concerted effort to propagate fear, ignorance and stupidity. For some reason many people still insist that your school days are the best days of your life. But for me school was nothing more than a catalogue of misery and misfortune. Those so called best days of my life still leave a bad taste in my mouth.

My very first recollection of 1980 takes me back to a Monday morning assembly in which the principal Mr Lynch was addressing the school. Although assembly was a complete waste of time this ritualized gathering would take place every Monday morning in the school hall. Mr Lynch was a thin wiry man who always wore the same crumpled up suit and a worn out pair of shoes. Although the top of his head was now completely bald he insisted on combing the hair from the left side of his head to cover the top. The result was a greasy looking thatch of black strands covering a sweaty orb of Brill cream. He was from a generation of men who could get away with such acts of incredulous stupidity. After all he was the principal of a primary school and in a town where everyone was renowned for being nothing – he was something. As he stood behind the podium which was placed to one side of the stage, he spoke to us earnestly about the dawn of a new decade that was now upon us.

The 1980’s, he said is the beginning of a new era that will change your lives here in South Africa!

We diligently sat on the floor in front of him in complete silence and listened with a sense of ignorance and apprehension. For me the beginning of the 1980’s was marked by a deep sense of concern and anguish that I would be destined to spend yet another year in a classroom with a teacher who was mentally unstable. For days, weeks, months I would be compelled to endure the torments of a sexually frustrated Afrikaner woman whose only emotional outlet would be the physical chastisement of young boys. But apart from that I did not regard the 1980’s with any real sense of interest or optimism. As long as the 1980’s didn’t prove to be any worse than the hell I had already endured I didn’t really care what happened, and after all, I was only ten years old. For me life consisted of going to school in a town called Middleburg and the 1980’s probably wouldn’t happen for at least another twenty years.

Everyone has somebody that they idealize and in my class it was a boy called Bruce Palmer. Bruce was a short and rather ordinary looking boy. There wasn’t really anything all that exceptional about him except that he could walk on his hands and for small town boys like us that made him a god. Bruce was also one of the first boys to come to school wearing a digital watch. It was an extremely complicated looking device with four protruding silver buttons that could perform a variety of amazing functions. But Bruce was not my friend so I never got the chance to play with his