Durban - A young woman who was recently filmed getting beaten by her schoolteacher simply wept when asked on Tuesday how it made her feel.
“It never happened to me before,” the emotional 21-year-old said. The woman, whose identity has been withheld, was speaking to the media at Prince Tokotoko High School near KwaNongoma - where the incident took place in April.
Despite the school holidays, teachers, parents and pupils descended on the school to engage with a high-level delegation from KwaZulu-Natal’s Department of Education, which visited to address the issue. That was after The Mercury last week reported the caning incident and that the video had gone viral on Facebook.
In the video, the teacher is seen pulling five matric pupils to the front of the class and hitting them on their legs and palms with a stick.
The footage was filmed by a classmate.
Soon after the beating, the young woman started experiencing abnormally heavy menstruations, which she believed were a direct result of the trauma she suffered.
She was being punished by her teacher for doing badly in a geography test.
As some of the other pupils who were hit explained, everyone in the class who got below 80% got hit that day.
Her aunt, with whom the orphaned young woman lives, said the teacher had been too severe. She tried to comfort her niece, but she too struggled to contain her emotions.
Corporal punishment is nothing new at the school.
It emerged on Tuesday that after an incident last year, the school governing body had been forced to intervene.
And after some gentle encouragement from the newly appointed Education MEC, Mthandeni Dlungwane, one of the pupils came forward and said they did get hit at school.
The teacher involved in the most recent incident was also not the only culprit, another pupil later told The Mercury. The teacher who caned pupils in the April incident was apparently sick on Tuesday, but she has been suspended, pending a disciplinary inquiry.
However, neither the pupils nor their parents said they wanted her fired.
She had a reputation as a good teacher whose pupils received good marks and, as one woman said, there was a serious shortage of teachers in the area.
“It is the middle of the year. If she is fired I am scared my marks will suffer,” a pupil said.
But the matter is now in the hands of the department, which Dlungwane said on Tuesday adopted a zero tolerance approach to corporal punishment.
“This act is disgusting. We don’t want this. The beating of children was stopped ... It is not allowed. We have told the teachers we want our classrooms to be centres of teaching and learning. They cannot be where our children are being abused. That is why we are here,” he said.
The Mercury