An Education

There’s an internal war to be waged if your parents raised you right.

If they used a self-selected stick to brand a respect for elders so deeply into your backchatting buttocks that you look over at a large German woman collapsing into a tiny chair and think about giving up your sprawling Brewed Awakening’s booth as due deference on a scourge of a Saturday morning.

At first I just keep sipping my red wine like I’ve just completed a master class with Kermit the ‘But That’s None of My Business’ Frog.

I sip my wine, I eat my chocolate cake but I can’t tune out the squirming toddler the woman has trailed in with her and who is currently giving her the kind of fidgeting grief any lesser woman would drown in barbiturates so…

“Excuse me, are you comfortable? I’m here by myself and I wouldn’t mind swopping seats?”

Bewildered, the woman looks over her shoulder to ask the ether whether courtesy still exists. And when she doesn’t get any answer from the parking lot behind her, she looks back at me and politely declines.

“No, thank you. I appreciate it. But sometimes you have to sit in a big booth by yourself, eat your piece of cake and just treat yourself.”

I like her already.

But as it does when you say more than what is necessary to strangers, it gets a little awkward and we both turn inwards and away until she asks me how I came to speak such easy English.

The short story is by attending UCT via Rustenburg Girls High School via Oranjemund Private School via an infant obsession with ‘Sesame Street’ and she nods her head knowingly.

“Yes, I could tell you weren’t from here. You express yourself very well. It must make things easier.”

At this, I begin to bristle. Something about the comment makes me harden a little. Because I take it to mean that speaking English in a way that satisfies and even beguiles white people must make me more acceptable among them and afford me opportunities.

I’m annoyed until I accept that it probably does and that my education doesn’t just make me more employable by white people but also by black people bent on putting a seemingly proficient foot forward.

It’s a privilege and this isn’t news to me, just another strange and fleeting episode of guilt about being lucky.

As I join her grandson in a little squirming of my own, I drown my issues in a sip of Pinotage and tune back into the German woman.

She’s just ordered the kid a plate of chips and fishfingers and she’s leaning across the space between our tables and telling me a good education is a ticket to a great life.

Most people in Namibia aren’t lucky enough to have one.

She knows this because her husband was a long-suffering public school teacher who got so frustrated by the lack of resources, teaching materials and the slew of broken administrative promises that he began using their savings to buy things like a data projector so he could elevate the education in his classes.

You can see that she’s proud of this but that it may also have caused some strain.

Later she mentions she’s a Christian so I understand the stoicism but I also understand her frustration when she speaks about how she is a teacher too and that the issues regarding education are dire.

A plague of absent teachers who clock in two days a week while their pupils sit around hopefully and are later awarded pass marks without being taught a thing, teachers who have only completed Grade 10 and answer children’s questions with a shrug of the shoulders or admonishment about being facetious, educators who abuse their position and lead little girls astray and teachers who want to do good in public schools but who can’t afford to pick up the financial and resource slack so guiltily thank the heavens when they are offered something private.

The woman is one of the latter.

But she continues her crusade with desperate pleas to newspapers to make it their mission to give young people someone to look up to through role model series highlighting the importance of education, sobriety, family values and morality.

The first newspaper she tries sneers and says: Who would read that?

The recollection of the searing apathy of the snub brings her to tears.

As does the government seemingly turning a blind eye to the fact that providing a good education to every Namibian should be the highest priority because it gives individuals the tools to build a bright future.

As escalating crime rates, as a disenchanted, ineffectual society with a low self-esteem fleetingly buoyed by booze, dysfunctional relationships and self-harm.

The reality, the projected future and the fact that she had to step out and on to do her best for her own family brings her to tears and I get up to give her a hug, offering cold, clumsy comfort.

For once, I have nothing to say.