I have spent my life at private South African schools - and something has gone very wrong
Elite schools have become incubators of dark revolutionary ideas.
‘Why is our diversity consultant a transvestite?’
‘Did you know that the transgender model invited to speak at our Christian school regularly posts transgressive and graphic sexual content online?’
‘Why has our guest speaker refused to denounce racial genocide?’
‘Is it appropriate that our sex ed trainer for our youngest students is a gender-less homeopath?’
These are real questions I have found myself asking managers and colleagues as a teacher who has spent over a decade working at South Africa’s most privileged schools.
They are questions I never imagined I would need to ask, questions I never imagined would be possible to ask. Most of all, I never imagined that asking such questions would somehow render me a controversial figure, even a kind of conservative scold, as opposed to the speakers themselves and managers who had invited them in… And always I wondered, why did the parents never speak up against this?
It is a fact not widely known, but the most elite schools in South Africa are moving to the left of the ruling party, the ANC.
This takes some doing. The ANC is committed by its own policies to ongoing revolution, to gay marriage, to abortion on demand, to expropriation of land without compensation, and to the nationalisation of healthcare.
Surely then to be to the left of a revolutionary organisation is impossible?
No, seemingly not.
As the political saying goes, personnel is policy, and the persons being invited to influence elite private schools are in many cases persons who have left the ANC because it is not militant enough. Where policy must thus eventually go is very troubling.
Case in point - disgraced former chief executive of South African broadcasting, advocate Dali Mpofu.
Mpofu famously had an affair with Winnie Mandela whilst she was still married to Nelson Mandela. She also admitted to giving him misappropriated ANC funds.
Later he would become CEO of the SABC, which under his tenure would report a billion rand loss in 2009. He would be paid R14 million to leave. That is all taxpayer money.
Mpofu would leave the ANC to become the chairperson of breakaway party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), which advocates a brand of communism based on black supremacy. Its supporters openly call for Marxist revolution whilst wearing red overalls and berets, singing the struggle song, ‘Kill the Boer, Kill the Farmer’. (Mpofu’s Twitter profile has a quote from Karl Marx pinned to the top.)
Mpofu would also become the personal lawyer of leader Julius Malema, who famously stated, and refused to recant, that he may one day call for the slaughter of white South Africans. Mpofu equally has not renounced his membership of the party or of its Command Council despite its second-in-command famously looting VBS Bank and the life savings of its mostly poor black customers.
Yet such a person is invited to be a guest speaker at one of the country’s most prestigious Anglican schools:
How does this get by parents and teachers? Is this the kind of man who should be placed on a pedestal for future leaders?
Mpofu’s son, Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, is even more influential in elite schools. (His mother was incidentally called ‘a white hag’ by Winnie Mandela whilst the affair with his father was ongoing. The EFF’s headquarters are nonetheless named after Winnie.)
Mpofu-Walsh is famous for leading the Rhodes Must Fall campaign at Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes scholar, and for his activism whilst President of the Student Council at the University of Cape Town (UCT). He, like his father, is also a supporter of Julius Malema, and presumably the actions of his EFF student wing when they engage in thuggery like this at UCT:
In 2016, he returned to his alma mater, St John’s College in Johannesburg, and in a famous speech slammed the school for homophobia, racism, and sexism, without making any substantiated claims.
The school, six years later, appointed him to its Council.
This represents an important pattern where schools deliberately invite in to their structures and spaces radical activists from the worlds of politics and academics.
Parents and teachers are deeply naïve regarding just how radical racial and gender politics have become on campuses. At least, I hope they are naïve. For if not, they are deliberately encouraging their students to learn from activists who have no problems with the language of racial genocide, flinging feces in protest, and who look to overturn the very paradigm of male and female as the basis for human sexuality. This is what is promulgated in schools. There is a deliberate plan to capture the schools in this regard so as to raise up leaders one day who will continue the work of brooking no dissent against these new, radical ideas.
The consultants and speakers come onto the school campus with smiles and hugs - and then the witch hunts begin and the students head to university groomed to accept or encourage calls of violence and social destruction.
Intriguingly, the two schools alluded to above recently had a major clash which played out in the media.
During a sports fixture, a student at St John’s accused an opponent on the hockey field of calling him a racial slur. The entire weekend of fixtures was cancelled.
The charge was flatly denied and never proven but this did not stop the St John’s headmaster, and numerous prominent media personalities, from asserting that it had happened, despite the obvious risks to the accused boy, whose guilt was seemingly presumed by so many.
An independent inquiry would later recommend the boys mediate in private. After initially agreeing, and then refusing, the accuser agreed to this mediation and avoided further formal inquiries.
But what will happen the next time? Will an accused student be able to keep his name out of the press? Will a school with such people on its Council allow for cool heads to prevail?
I doubt it. This is not the way of revolutionaries.
Richard Wilkinson has made a point of taking up the issue of this current madness in South African schools. His write-up of the above incident was virtually the only honest and open accounting of the strange event.
In short, he, not a parent, is looking out for these kids who are being bombarded with rhetoric and lessons about race and gender revolution - a movement he has named ‘school capture’.
Wilkinson explained to me last week what drew him to this cause:
I noticed a pattern of allegations of racism being made against prominent schools and being amplified in newspapers. I looked into it and found it very difficult to actually identify what the outcome of the investigations was. At school after school, the allegations appeared to be baseless. I noticed a network of consultants, journalists and academics which appeared to be fairly self-referential, and I was concerned about the ethics of how they were operating. I then made contact with various teachers and parents and was disturbed to hear about what was going on inside various schools.
The nebulous nature of these attacks is something I also noticed when a school I once taught at, Cornwall Hill College in Irene, became the site of protests by senior members of the ANC government. Instead of specific charges, a litany of vague ‘micro-aggressions’ are listed as evidence for systemic injustice.
Wilkinson has pointed out something similar having happened at St Stithian’s College in Johannesburg, where 66 accusations were made in the strange festival of Floyd, yet none were found to have any substance by outside legal investigators. That did not stop the school from apologizing and instituting diversity and sensitivity training for its staff - despite there being zero evidence that diversity workshops do any good at all, as even the BBC admits.
St Stithian’s has also since begun admitting transgender kids to their single sex schools on their wider campus, stating that “the considerable diversity in gender expression and identity among our staff, our students, parent community and visitors to the school… brings enormous strength to our College.” Diversity is such an asset that this school employs the following vast arrays of senior managers and school directors to direct their transformation programme:
Wilkinson recounts similar stories at St Mary’s DSG in Pretoria, where the school went so far as to suspend seven teachers who were all later exonerated.
I can confirm this is happening all South African private schools, and probably all schools throughout the Anglosphere - Britain, the US, Australia, and Canada. New toilets, new genders, big money consultants. It is Year Zero.
But where is this all coming from?
Wilkinson’s theory:
The root cause is basically the culmination of decades of work by the Marxist Left to promote this agenda across education. They captured the humanities and law faculties and radicalised their students who went on to capture the media and the HR departments. This has now trickled down into schools.
Of course, the proximate cause for the escalation of protests was also the George Floyd insanity that took the world by storm in 2020.
I agree with Wilkinson that there is, of course, Marxism lurking behind all of this, but it is equally clear that the gatekeepers at these schools are by no means Marxist.
These schools are traditionally governed by business and legal elites. Such people are not Marxists. They are liberals. It is, in fact, the liberalism of elites, who have no backbone, no reservoir of deep belief, who simply want to ‘get along’, that is ultimately responsible for the madness threatening schools and universities.
This weakness in turn empowers the dark emotions of resentment and anger which have taken hold of the broken lives of the activists, politicians, and journalists behind this present darkness. This, to my mind, is what truly drives activism, and not any grand belief or ideology.
(But perhaps liberals are not just weak but merely seek to try to put a bourgeois face on Marxism, whilst sharing their affinity for destroying culture and tradition in the name of progress by means of an enlightened revolutionary vanguard. After all, Klaus Schwab, of World Economic Forum and the Great Reset fame has a statue of Lenin in his office.)
And this is now the endgame of so-called affirmative action and BEE in which the gentler, gateway language of opportunity yields to revolution and violence - not to fulfil any grand vision or a smiling Rainbow Nation of empathy, but to ensure patronage and power as society collapses.
At the moment, parents and students who disagree with this madness simply go along with the destructiveness out of fear they will be singled out by the mob. This is foolish. Such people are only eaten last. Instead, action needs to be taken now before too much is lost.
Do not be deceived.
The people in schools calling for equity and diversity are not your friends.
Beneath the purple hair and the faux-hip clothes, they are deeply inimical to Christianity, the ideal of normal family life, or the notion that white people are not collectively inferior to other races. They are grooming a whole generation content to watch western culture burn.
Just as a powerful minority began to say no to the covid insanity, we must do the same to the cultural revolution in schools.
Chris, you have accurately described the environment at America's Ivy League universities in this essay.