A Personal Account

Hello all

Today I am going to share a story with you. This is written by a student from 11B and is part of a community project initiated by Mrs W Wardale, teacher of English at Percy Mdala High School.

The picture above shows the community that Percy Mdala School sits in.

A part history of my area: Concordia by Lunga Skei

My parents arrived here in Knysna in 1979 and I was not yet on this earth. They lived in Oupad when their shack burnt down. In 1999 I was ten years old when we moved from Nekkies and found our own good house in Concordia. Fortunately my parents bought their own house and it was good to move from Nekkies because the crime rate was very high there at the time. I was attending Thembelitsha Primary School and my parents thought it would be a good idea to be near the school. In that area there were only coloured people living there and the land was owned by the old mother of the big family living there. There was peace because that old mother had eight children and they were also mothers and fathers of their own children.

In the year 2000 that old woman died and my mother was the only black woman involved there. After a while problems arose, and they started to discriminate by telling us we were blacks and we did not belong there on their mother’s land. My mother reported this to Sharon Witbooi who was responsible for that area. Then there was peace again. Eventually more and more black people came to live in that area. Then the last and worst problem was that we were told that the place where our house stood was the same place where a road was to be built. So we had to move, but the municipality offered us no compensation.

There were fights between us and the coloured people because they wanted to own everything, like the taps and the roads. Now our community is fun to live in because there is everything: electricity, houses, roads, taps, and democracy. Now we are all equal and we all love and support each other.

We have many more personal accounts and interviews that the learners have done within their own community. We are going to make them into a booklet, with photographs, for the students but, unfortunately, they will have to pay for the photocoping costs if they want to own their own personal copy as the school does not have the resources to provide them for free.

I hope that you have found this interesting and will post some comments or questions.

Claire