Pretoria Girls High has been publicly exposed as another disgraceful bastion of white privilege and ongoing violence against the black psyche.
It joins the universities of Free State, Rhodes, Stellenbosch and Wits, some branches of the Curro franchise and so many other historically white institutions that remind us, and now our children, that we are merely visitors in our own country, and extras in the imperial imagination.
As a mother of two dreadlocked/braided teen girls, I salute these girls who are rejecting the body-shaming that concocts a fiction that Afros, dreadlocks and braids are "dirty and unruly". The policy that does not want African pupils to speak African languages to each other at the school, and the criminalising and policing of their movements on the campus by scrutinising them when they move in groups of more than two amount to cultural genocide.
Having spent the ages of 11 to 15 in armed combat with my hair until it ran off my head in rebellion, I venerate the young women's self-assured insistence of being one with their unruly hair and unbroken spirits. This is about much more than hair however.
There are so many problems that this incident is confronting us with beyond the clearly mono-cultural nature of, supposedly, multiracial and multicultural schools.
Most middle-class black parents across the world are subjecting children to the perils of predominantly white schools. They often bus them out before daybreak to environments that disembowel their identities, and curricula that debase their black centre.
We are grappling with these dilemmas in pursuit of a "good education", a term we, as blacks, need to rethink and reconstruct because most of these schools are not interested in explaining why June 16 is a holiday, or who Zepheniah Mothopeng was.
Even the exclusion is not as visceral as being body-shamed, or being seated alone with no cupcake, like the 19-month-old toddler at a white creche.
It is the erasure from history books, from academic honours, from deserved leadership positions and from the justice of being truly seen and unconditionally loved. It is daunting to rehabilitate.
Many who survived white schools and universities were accompanied by a sense of never being enough, only partly assuaged by "performing acceptance" through sporting prowess, academic excellence or musical talent.
The issue transcends segregated curricula and the violence of cultural coercion and assimilation.
The hair-shaming is essentially about shaming "blackness". It is an ongoing agenda to erase and usurp Africans from rightful spaces socially, historically and indeed from our physical space - the land.
Rhodes, along with his ideological siblings, must be removed from work spaces, media houses and the economy.
The ongoing dismembering of African people's core is not accidental nor is it the imagination of bitter black people who are refusing to stand under the "Rainbow".
Perhaps it is the tyranny of the rainbow that needs to dismantled since it is a rod used to police black anger and dissenting hair.
The violence has manifested early for these girls, and should remind us of the fallacy promoted by many whites in this country. They want to perpetuate the myth that racism and racially skewed social outcomes are a result of African people's inability to forget, forgive and Mandela-ise the brutal realities of dispossession.
These youths have no colonial or apartheid memory to refer to. They do not have first-hand knowledge of the humiliations of pass books, no recollection of broken families that were served to capital in mines and kitchens. They did not watch the Soweto Uprisings in 1976 nor see Biko's corpse.
They were not present when the Sobukwe clause was enacted. Yet they are experiencing a shared lineage with the June 1976 project.
The Pretoria High girls are being baptised by fire, into the struggles of self-determination that were surrendered at Codesa. Compliant hair will not alter the ongoing dispossession of this country by white capital.
This Women's Month was far more meaningful and has done far more to honour the spirit of the 1956 Women's March than most celebrations of the past 15 years. Appreciation to the Khwezi 4, the Marikana widows, Caster Mokgadi Semenya and now, the Pretoria High girls.
The ground is shaking beneath us as the youth refuse to relinquish more ground to conquered imaginations.
Lebohang Liepollo Pheko is senior research fellow and political economist at Trade Collective
Rhodes is falling, Afros are rising
Pretoria Girls High has been publicly exposed as another disgraceful bastion of white privilege and ongoing violence against the black psyche.
It joins the universities of Free State, Rhodes, Stellenbosch and Wits, some branches of the Curro franchise and so many other historically white institutions that remind us, and now our children, that we are merely visitors in our own country, and extras in the imperial imagination.
As a mother of two dreadlocked/braided teen girls, I salute these girls who are rejecting the body-shaming that concocts a fiction that Afros, dreadlocks and braids are "dirty and unruly". The policy that does not want African pupils to speak African languages to each other at the school, and the criminalising and policing of their movements on the campus by scrutinising them when they move in groups of more than two amount to cultural genocide.
Having spent the ages of 11 to 15 in armed combat with my hair until it ran off my head in rebellion, I venerate the young women's self-assured insistence of being one with their unruly hair and unbroken spirits. This is about much more than hair however.
There are so many problems that this incident is confronting us with beyond the clearly mono-cultural nature of, supposedly, multiracial and multicultural schools.
Most middle-class black parents across the world are subjecting children to the perils of predominantly white schools. They often bus them out before daybreak to environments that disembowel their identities, and curricula that debase their black centre.
We are grappling with these dilemmas in pursuit of a "good education", a term we, as blacks, need to rethink and reconstruct because most of these schools are not interested in explaining why June 16 is a holiday, or who Zepheniah Mothopeng was.
Even the exclusion is not as visceral as being body-shamed, or being seated alone with no cupcake, like the 19-month-old toddler at a white creche.
It is the erasure from history books, from academic honours, from deserved leadership positions and from the justice of being truly seen and unconditionally loved. It is daunting to rehabilitate.
Many who survived white schools and universities were accompanied by a sense of never being enough, only partly assuaged by "performing acceptance" through sporting prowess, academic excellence or musical talent.
The issue transcends segregated curricula and the violence of cultural coercion and assimilation.
The hair-shaming is essentially about shaming "blackness". It is an ongoing agenda to erase and usurp Africans from rightful spaces socially, historically and indeed from our physical space - the land.
Rhodes, along with his ideological siblings, must be removed from work spaces, media houses and the economy.
The ongoing dismembering of African people's core is not accidental nor is it the imagination of bitter black people who are refusing to stand under the "Rainbow".
Perhaps it is the tyranny of the rainbow that needs to dismantled since it is a rod used to police black anger and dissenting hair.
The violence has manifested early for these girls, and should remind us of the fallacy promoted by many whites in this country. They want to perpetuate the myth that racism and racially skewed social outcomes are a result of African people's inability to forget, forgive and Mandela-ise the brutal realities of dispossession.
These youths have no colonial or apartheid memory to refer to. They do not have first-hand knowledge of the humiliations of pass books, no recollection of broken families that were served to capital in mines and kitchens. They did not watch the Soweto Uprisings in 1976 nor see Biko's corpse.
They were not present when the Sobukwe clause was enacted. Yet they are experiencing a shared lineage with the June 1976 project.
The Pretoria High girls are being baptised by fire, into the struggles of self-determination that were surrendered at Codesa. Compliant hair will not alter the ongoing dispossession of this country by white capital.
This Women's Month was far more meaningful and has done far more to honour the spirit of the 1956 Women's March than most celebrations of the past 15 years. Appreciation to the Khwezi 4, the Marikana widows, Caster Mokgadi Semenya and now, the Pretoria High girls.
The ground is shaking beneath us as the youth refuse to relinquish more ground to conquered imaginations.
Lebohang Liepollo Pheko is senior research fellow and political economist at Trade Collective
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