In 1978, Rajie Tudge from Durban was offered a promotion, as head of Afrikaans at a Cape Town school only six months into her teaching career.
“I was a Hindu woman teaching Afrikaans, and was being offered a HOD post at a school in Cape Town where the pupils were Afrikaans speaking,” she told an audience at the Adam Small Literary Festival in Pniël on Saturday 22 February.
“I didn’t know why I was being offered that promotion. I didn’t even think there was an ulterior motive. It was only when I arrived in Cape Town that the penny dropped.”
Her book, published in earlier this year, is entitled Teaching the Canna Bush: My journey through apartheid and beyond.
As Tudge (née Pillay) approached the school on her first day she saw young people standing at the gates holding placards aloft reading “Durban teachers go home. Pillay go home.” She said the school principal and two vice principals explained the “bitter problem” the school had.
“Rylands is the first designated Indian area in Cape Town, like Mitchells Plain is the first Coloured area [sic],” reads an extract from Tudge’s book. “The school is only allowed to enrol Indian, Cape Malay and Asian pupils… Before the school was built, Indian children attended Coloured schools in Cape Town….
“Your contract with the Department (of Indian Education) makes discussing politics in class, a dismissible offence. Steer clear of discussing this matter with your pupils. These students are not like Durban students, Ms Pillay. Firstly, they are much older, some in their 20s, some from India, repeating the standard for the second or third time because they failed Afrikaans.”
Other topics Tudge explores in her memoir include the problems she and her late husband faced as a mixed-race couple who had a son at the time of the Immorality Act, Mixed Marriages Act and “apartheid police peeping through your window”.
“To pen a coherent story I had to delve into my own circumstances of growing up,” she explained.
Tudge was the eighth-born of 14 children, sandwiched between two brothers. “My elder sisters didn’t want to share with me. The younger ones thought my ideas weren’t good enough. I had to find my own devices to keep myself occupied.”
The title of the book stems from one of the ways in which she kept herself occupied.
“We had an outside toilet – the bucket system,” she related. “Along the path to the toilet grew some Canna plants – the Canna Bush. I used to stand there with a ruler and teach this bush whatever I learnt at school, whether it was cities of Africa, geography or parts of the body I learnt in biology. I used to come back and teach this bush. This archetype of teacher is a common thread that runs through my book.
“I found the more I wrote the book the more I wanted to tell. The more cathartic it was for me to express these bottled-up emotions over the years. Not just the sorrows, but the joys I had suppressed over the years. That, for me, was finding my voice and I found my voice at last.”
When she wrote her book she didn’t think she would be a speaker at the Adam Small Literary Festival, even though she does include a quote from the late writer in the book.
According to Tudge, as head of Rylands High’s Afrikaans Department she had to do the prescribed lists of reading, literature and poetry for Grade 10s.
“I decided that I wanted to include coloured academics, writers and poets in the syllabus. The inspectors from the Department of Indian Education were very clear: they choose the syllabus and you stick to it. But I included Adam Small’s work, among others.
“So when inspector Venter came to my class to evaluate me and my department I had already planned to do Adams Small’s poem ‘Oppie Parara’ with the Grade 10B class. The students brought it to life with the reading in the vernacular voice and the dramatisation of the Grand Parade, the flower sellers and fruit vendors.”
Teaching the Canna Bush: My journey through apartheid and beyond is available from Adams Bookstores. Tudge can be reached at rtudge@telkomsa.net.
