Change That Matters
When I wrote Bloodlines, I knew how important good teachers were to the future of South Africa, but I couldn’t have known how long the shortage of good teachers would last; or how long it would take to train enough of them to fill every classroom.
One of the main characters in Bloodlines, a Zulu named Mandla Mkhize, is a schoolteacher, a man who believed that the best chance his people had was a good education. But he found, as many of us do, that we are only partially the directors of our own lives; that events beyond his control conspired to make teaching irrelevant. The children he taught were proscribed from reaching the academic levels they aspired to, and he knew that in the expectations he was helping them to create, he was only preparing them for failure. So teaching became a pointless exercise.
If he could not teach, he would turn his energies to changing the system so that one day perhaps he would be able to return to what he loved. He became a freedom fighter, a leader in the struggle to bring justice to his country. And so the man of peace and of books became a man of the knife and the rifle; and he turned his teaching to strategy and the politics of revolution.
All stories have a beginning and an ending in time, and where a story begins and ends determines whether it is a comedy, a tragedy, or something in-between. In Bloodlines, our character lives long enough, and enough change is brought about so that he’s able to return to the classroom. He does find himself able to make a difference in the lives of children, and he is relieved to give up the role of fighter and return to being the voice of reason and logic. His experience gives him the moral standing to extol the virtues of peace and forgiveness, of thought and thoughtfulness, of the life of the mind. There are plenty of committed young people in South Africa who desire to be trained as teachers—all that’s needed is sufficient infrastructure and training. We hope that the day is not too far off when every child in South Africa has the opportunity to learn from men like Mandla in small intimate classrooms where each child is recognized as the face of the future.
Photo: Synergos Institute/Flickr