The plan was as follows — My mom and I would fly South African Airways from Julius Nyerere International Airport to O. R. Tambo International Airport. We would spend a few days in Johannesburg with my mom’s best friend since childhood. We would go buy clothes, bedding, and everything else I might need. Then, later that week, we would return to O.R. Tambo and take a school bus to the South African-Swazi border. The journey would end with the two of us at the boarding school where I would spend the next seven years.
We arrived at O. R. Tambo in January 2008 to photos of President Thabo Mbeki posted around the airport. My mom had promised to take me McDonalds for the first time and as soon as we landed, I demanded we go. Patiently, she suggested that we start by passing by the MTN store so that I could get a SIM card for my Motorola PEBL and eager to text my friends, I obliged. We walked in and a young, white man with a crisp Afrikaans accent eagerly asked me if I needed any help. Curiously, I looked around and questionably replied with a yes. He looked at me with a polite pause and I cautiously continued by explaining that I needed a SIM card. He smiled, called me “Miss,” and started to search behind the counter, and I realised that I had never been served by a White person before.
South Africa, even just at the airport, was a different world. Less than a decade and a half after the end of Apartheid, the country really did look like Archbishop Tutu’s Rainbow Nation, with Black, Afrikaans, Coloured, and Indian South Africans co-habitating. There were high-end fashion stores with all the labels I had seen on Gossip Girl and CD shops stocked with all of my favourite artists from TRL. From inside, I could marvel at all the highways leading in and out of the airport, reminding me that even though I was only a few countries away, I was, in fact, far from home.
As kids near the midpoint of their academic careers, a new parental anxiety kicks in. The preteen and teenage years bring peer pressure and college prep and suddenly, whatever school, neighbourhood, or city that may have been home for the first five years of school doesn’t look like the best option after all. For many families, across all contexts, the school search begins again.
This process plays out similarly in the circles of certain subcultures of African elites. When the grandparents of my peers and I entered their early adulthood in the 1960s, they inherited recently independent African states and went into various political and bureaucratic careers. When they enrolled our parents to schools in the 70s, they sent them to high-quality government schools, holdover colonial institutions, or abroad to British or other Western countries. Then our parents had us in the 1990s, sent us to private international schools in our respective major African cities, and then started looking around for where we would go next.
The landscape of private schools in post-independent Africa reveal the underlying tensions and opportunities at work in larger political and philosophical conversations around the future of the continent. As our parents looked for where to send their children, they wrestled with the question of the purpose of education in Africa, less than 50 years after the end of de jure colonialism. Was the purpose of education to send us as far away as possible to Western colleges and careers, or to keep us in Africa to continue the still nascent work of nation-building? Was the purpose of education to integrate and diversify the White only-institutions upholding inequality, or to develop and expand the home-grown schools already established to educate Africans? Who was this next generation of Africans going to be and what role was education going to play?
Both of my parents had gone to boarding school and enjoyed it, but I went back with what I wanted. The first two Avril Lavigne albums had radicalised me into a moody teenager before the age of ten, and I was both itching to leave home and resentful of my parents for having me go. Regardless of my inner conflict, I took an entrance test, passed it, and with the certainty that I would be going to Eswatini came acceptance and excitement.
Before leaving for school, I had never been to Southern Africa. I new little about Eswatini, but I knew some about South Africa. My dad loved watching cricket and rugby so I regularly heard about how great South African sports were. A few years earlier, Tsotsi had won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and it felt like the film industry was going to go international. And there seemed to be a South African version of everything — MTV Base, South African Idol, the South African Edition of Oprah Magazine.
I had no idea where I was going but I knew enough to know that it would be different. And for my parents, different was good. They wanted me in a new environment where I could grow, and they wanted that growth to happen in an educational institution with a history that they could trust. They asked around and looked at schools and treated alumni like crystal balls into potential futures until they landed on where I would go next.
By the 2000s, the nationalistic spirit that had achieved African political liberalisation had made way for economic liberalisation in an era of global neoliberalism and unfettered and unquestioned capitalism. Education became less of a political priority and more of an economic opportunity as private schools grew in number and popularity, and as the number of Black Africans willing and able to pay whatever school fees rose. But what were these schools and what were they promising? What did an education mean to them?
For many private schools in post-colonial Africa, the goals remained the same. Education remained a tool of assimilation, upholding European ideals through everything from the sports that they played to the books they taught. When done right, this assimilation was rewarded with a social capital allowing entry into institutions of higher learning and careers and industries around the world. Then came the schools looking to disrupt. Many of them had African names and explicitly mentioned goals around investing and developing the continent. Many of them were younger schools or had undergone changes in recent years. For them, the purpose was to promote the growth a new African identity and future.
But of course, it was not, is not, and could not be that binary. All of these private schools needed to be responsive and realistic. Schools could not be as White and European as they used to be, not because it was politically incorrect, but because there was money to be made through expansion and diversification. Schools could also not ignore that regardless of their longer term goals for their children, many parents central goal and metric for success was admission at a college or university in the U.S. or the U.K., and students needed a Cambridge or International Baccalaureate often just to be considered. Schools needed to be able to provide students with the skills to be globally competitive for if they wanted to live or work abroad, whilst also pushing students to think about the ways that they could professionally thrive at home. The post-colonial purpose of education was a constant tug of war between the future and the past, as schools, parents, and students all sought to prepare for a world still being created.
My mom and I completed everything on our to-do list and even added a new one when she tried in vain to teach me how to sew so I could attach the fabric name tags she had made. I remember some of what else we did and even less of what we spoke about in those days leading up to me starting boarding school, but I got to spend all of it with my her, and although I was a preteen and could therefore never tell her, it meant everything.
As was the plan, after a few days, we got on a bus back at O. R. Tambo and were off to the border. They stamped our passports and we got back on. The landscape changed and became expansive, lush, and green. The bus then started to climb up bends and curves, and then it stopped.
We were here.