It is noisy and crowded at the 155th birthday of Dale College in King William’s Town. Everyone, even people who never went to school here, are dressed in red and black school colours. The school army cadets march through the crowds with a clatter of boots. All, from toddlers to old men leaning on sticks, head for the CB Jennings rugby field; a sacred place at this school, affectionately known as ‘The Graveyard’ for it is where opposition teams are buried.
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The noise around the field is deafening as the lean and lithe players jog slowly out onto the green grass. This weekend revolves around rugby and this pitch is a cradle of champions. Some of the biggest names in rugby cut their teeth – and probably a bit of flesh – on this ground: All Black Greg Somerville; Springbok wing Bjorn Basson; former Springbok and Blue Bulls hooker Bandise Maku; the first black captain of the Sharks Lubabalo Mtembu; former Proteas bowler Monde Zondeki; Sharks looseforward Keegan Daniel. Makhaya Ntini – the record holding South African test cricket player – also sprinted down the wing on this ground.
Steve Biko – the Black Consciousness Movement leader who grew up in Ginsberg a few kilometres down the road – would have been proud. Biko, who died in police custody just over 40 years ago, was also a rugby player as well as an idealist and activist.
It is likely even Biko would have been surprised by the slow, but sure transformation at this former whites-only elite school.
As the first team prepares for the kick off, Hennie Otto is the only white player. The other 14 are all black. Even the heaving stands that rise up around the pitch are a sign of the times. Each group of reunited former pupils sits together in the same row according to school year. The stands used to be all white. With every passing year a white row is replaced by a black one.
“Out of 550 odd learners, there are about 25 white, colored, Indian and other races. The rest of the learners are all African black, which is a fair representation of the town they come from and the country as a whole,” says Dale College Headmaster, Mike Eddy.
According to Eddy, Dale College took the lead in accepting black African learners in former Model C schools during the early 90s. While the school’s racial demographics may have changed over the years, the first team coach, Grant Griffiths, maintains that the school’s traditions and values have not.
“We’ve kept all our traditions when it comes to sports, especially rugby. The jersey hand out, the sing-songs, the slapping, initiation, and all those things. The learners and players want to keep it from A to Z,” says Griffiths.
Griffiths too was at Dale College. He captained the last unbeaten rugby team in 1993.
This year’s team has beaten all their rivals in the province, and is number one in the Eastern Cape and sixth in the country.
Dale’s coach says while not much has changed in the style of play, compared to the team he captained, the biggest challenge comes with culture.
As a predominantly Xhosa province, the boys have to undergo a month long initiation in the mountain, as part of their rite of passage to manhood.
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“It’s always difficult with the boys having to go to the mountain for initiation school but we’re working around that. The six weeks straight after coming back is the most important. Diet wise, nutrition, gym. We’re never going to be the biggest side in the world but as long as we’re strong and fit, we’ll be able to keep up with the big boys,” says Griffiths.
“People go, they come back and they change. For example, if you are a new cap, when you come back from the mountain you’ll have that mentality of ndingu bhuti ngoku [I’m a man now] so I can’t go around picking up cones. We always manage to work around that though,” says Kwanda Dimaza, who has also been to the mountain and is set to go to one of the country’s top rugby unions, the Sharks, next year. He made the SA Schools under-18 team last year when he was still in grade 11.
Another hindrance to Dale College’s abilities is students choosing more prestigious high schools after primary school. South Africa’s 200-meter national record holder and one of the fastest men in Africa, Anaso Jobodwana, is one of the many who left for the college’s fierce rival, Selborne College in East London. Stormers hooker, Siyabonga ‘Scarra’ Ntubeni, is another who left for King Edward VII School in Johannesburg.
“It’s been difficult over the years but we’ve managed to hold on to more now,” says Griffiths.
Dale Junior headmistress, Patricia Thatcher, the first woman to head Dale’s primary school, says the learners are taught to be the best.
“It is about the commitment and the passion of the staff first of all. With them on your side, you start instilling the discipline and commitment in the kids from grade ‘R’ and once they’ve got it, it’s there,” says Thatcher.
Interestingly, Thatcher doesn’t even know the racial demographics of Dale Junior.
“It’s not even an issue of transformation anymore, it just is. A lot of people ask ‘how do you get it right?’ It’s not a case of getting it right, it’s what comes natural to us,” says Thatcher.
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While transformation remains a thorn in the side of South African rugby, Dale’s first team coach says it has hampered the future of some players he has coached. Griffiths says rugby unions often take players from Dale College and those players, more often than not, spend their time at those unions on the bench.
“A player like Ace Joe for example got lost in the Blue Bulls set up for two years, which is a hell of an important two years for him. I think he got 20 minutes of game time that whole season which basically cost him his career,” says Griffiths.
He says the unions now guarantee the players game time when signing the youngsters.
He hopes to see players like Aphelele Fassi, who has already been offered a contract by the Sharks while in grade 11, Dimaza, who is also set to join the Sharks, and many others with offers at various unions, one day don the Springbok jersey.
“I’ve never seen that being hard. I think the players that come through, if they get looked after, after school like we do at Dale College, with the rugby and the players managed well, as well as given opportunities, I don’t see that ever being a problem.”
So while South African sport struggles against the twin problems of transformation and creating excellence, it could perhaps learn something from Dale College.
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Red, Black  And Covered In Glory

It is 16 years since Nigeria drew back from the abyss in the former colonial town of Kaduna. In February 1999, 5,000 Christians took to the streets in an anti-Sharia march to protest the introduction of the strict Islamic penal code. Their contention was that Nigeria’s constitution did not allow federation, or state, to adopt any religion.
The march sparked a deadly confrontation between Christians and Muslims. Three days of street fighting left at least 2,000 dead. President Olusegun Obasanjo dispatched troops as conflict threatened to spread. He managed to head off more fighting, but the rumpus around Sharia law did not go away.
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Obasanjo tried to persuade northern governors to hold off on Sharia law; days before, Kano in the north west, signed a Sharia bill. Weeks later, Zamfara State amputated the right hand of Buba Jangebe after a Sharia court convicted him of stealing a cow. Four northern states: Sokoto, Zamfara, Kebbi and Kano have adopted Sharia law since 1999 and Obasanjo’s negotiations.
Many northern politicians felt marginalized by the new republic under Obasanjo. They complained of a southern and Christian bias and latched onto the rigors of Sharia law to boost waning support.
Fast forward to 2015, as the six-year Boko Haram insurgency rages. Boko Haram has condemned northern governors who have adopted Sharia law. The militants believe the brand of Sharia law practiced in the country is not true Islam and have vowed to wage war until the entire country falls under their brand of Sharia. In this struggle, Boko Haram has captured around 20 small towns along Nigeria’s border with Chad and Cameroon. Militants have also taken larger towns like Mubi in the north eastern state of Adamawa.
Boko Haram renamed Mubi ‘Madinatul Islam’ or the City of Islam. Tens of thousands fled as the invaders hoisted their flag in the deserted emir’s palace and warned that ‘true’ Sharia law was now in force. A market thief was convicted by a Sharia court and his hand amputated to make the point.
Seventeen-year-old Aisha Ibrahim recalls the day Boko Haram rolled into town in with armored cars, trucks and motorcycles. She was still in school when the town reverberated to the sound of gunfire. She ran home to find her parents had fled, leaving her grandmother behind. In the fraught weeks that followed, she says, her best friend, Umma, was forced into marriage with one of the militants. She feared the same fate and fled to Yola in the hope of finding her parents and four siblings. Her father has not been found. She is now back in Mubi after the Nigerian army took back the second-largest commercial center in Adamawa State, after Yola.
Mubi is also the largest cattle trading center in Nigeria. The cattle rearing northerners use the Mubi cattle market as an important trading post to sell to traders from as far as Lagos.
These days the southern businessmen fear the trip north and the insurgency appears to be killing the meat trade, which has yet to recover from a recent truck drivers’ strike.
On the other side of the city, Pastor Titi Adewumi, leader of one of the many churches that dot the landscape of the Adamawa State capital, says residents are depressed by all the security checks. All movement between 12AM and 5AM is prohibited as part of a state of emergency. Interestingly, worshippers are searched before they enter their local mosque or church. But while Yola residents complain, they know things could be worse; Boko Haram, at the time of writing, were engaged in a fight to the death for the control of the Borno State capital, Maiduguri, where a total ban on all movement has been imposed.
In Mubi, there is hope. Retired Colonel, Taboyi Elam Dong, says the recapture of Mubi shows that the Nigerian military is winning the war against Boko Haram. Other towns recaptured include Gwoza in Borno State and Potiskum in Yobe State.
Most people here feel the government is not doing enough as hell lurks around the corner.

The People For Whom  Hell Lurks  Around The Corner

Thirty-year-old Stacey Brewer was challenged by her professors at the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) in Johannesburg to change the education system in South Africa. In January 2013, Brewer and her business partner Ryan Harrison did just that, opening the doors of their first school, and bringing a new learning model to the continent.
“I decided to do my thesis on a sustainable financial model for low-fee private schools to understand what’s happening and I found the whole low-fee private school sector interesting…I didn’t find any innovation, I did find the obvious pay-your-teachers-less, increase-the-number-of-kids-in-class and most of them were heavily reliant on donations. I just didn’t believe it was a sustainable model. We wanted to create a higher model at a sustainable cost but obviously it sounded like an oxymoron, everyone said it’s impossible. And we thought it must be possible,” says Brewer.
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She started researching that possibility, traveling around Africa and India looking for a model that would work. Finally, it was on a trip to the United States that she discovered a concept called blended learning, which had never been used in South Africa’s school system before.
“Blended learning is a combination of what we know, like teacher-led instruction as well as the use of online learning. Online learning allows for extension, review and reinforcement of what’s been introduced, but it also gives the children real-time feedback. The most attractive thing about blended learning is data. Which is strange, schools don’t use data. We know down to micro-objections, how our children are achieving and where they need to be addressed. And this is what drives the high quality,” says Brewer.
Through this unique model and a handful of wealthy South African investors, SPARK was born. The school started with grade R, one and two, and has since added a third and fourth grade.
“SPARK comes from the William Yeats’ quote ‘education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire’, and the aim of SPARK is not just to create that spark or that light in a child but the whole country.”
SPARK achieved desirable results during its first year of operation under the blended learning model and grew in numbers. Today, Brewer and Harrison have opened four SPARK schools in Johannesburg and is targeting their fifth.
SPARK’s core focus is educating learners. While most private schools have top-notch sports facilities and overseas trips, this school has a top-of-the-range learning model, and operates in an unconventional way, with no school bells and no single teacher per class. Children move around from class to class to change subjects, and they stick around after school for an aftercare program.
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“I said to the teachers if you are expecting to finish at two and have lunch with your friends, then SPARK isn’t for you. A big thing at SPARK is our professional development. It’s about 250 hours a year that we develop our staff,” says Brewer.
This year, SPARK has over 1,000 children. The model will continue to evolve, and Brewer’s admission lists are filling up.

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Best In Class

The thatched roof houses and brown earth make Awra Amba, in the Amhara area of northern Ethiopia, look like any African village. But this is no ordinary village.
Here, young girls go to school, and walk short distances from their homes to get to them. Once home, they don’t have to trade their textbooks for chopping boards or babies. Household chores don’t await them. In Ethiopia, less than half the girls don’t go to primary school, but not so in Awra Amba – they all do.
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Take Trissew Fente for instance. She chose not to marry before turning  19. Child marriages are common in the rest of Ethiopia, but not in Awra Amba. Fente opted to marry a man of her generation, and didn’t need to ask her family’s permission for it.
There were no celebrations, no dowry paid. The union was desacralized. Today, 30 years old, she is a mother of three and has opted not to get pregnant again.
Fente uses oral contraception. Awra Amba supports family planning methods, and opposes the practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). The villagers are well aware of the long-term health issues associated with it.
“We don’t inflict [excision] on our daughters because this creates many complications at birth,”
says Fente.
In Ethiopia, excision is punishable by law (since 2005). Yet, it’s believed that more than 70% of Ethiopian women continue to be victims of this practice – the country has one of the worst rates in the world.
“The people in Ethiopia think we’re crazy. Personally, I think their customs are terrible,” says Fente, as she works away on her wooden loom, traditionally an activity men engage in on the continent.
Petite she is, but performs this physically-arduous job just as skillfully as the men.
In Awra Amba, men and women get the same pay. The jobs are not distributed as per gender, but according to skill-sets. Here, women can be seen ploughing the land while men bathe the children and prepare injera, a pancake made out of a cereal grown locally.
“Doing a woman’s job does not change my sex, it changes my ignorance” is one of the mottos of this community created by Zumra Nuru, a 70-year-old illiterate peasant.
Known for his trademark green hat, Nuru founded this exclusive community at Awra Amba in 1972. Village lore has it that he decided to create his own utopia based on impressions from his childhood, when he witnessed the gross inequalities between his mother and father.
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The beginnings were difficult, as Nuru sought to emancipate and free himself and his community of binding religious ties. Today, the community is made up of a hundred families who follow the unique egalitarian principles set by Numra for a self-sustaining society.
Hopefully, his model will encourage Ethiopia – and the rest of Africa – to come up with other more unique and emancipated concepts that benefit their communities – and the women.

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Ethiopia or Utopia?

Arise O Compatriots! Nigeria’s call obey…” – The well-worn opening phrase of the Nigerian national anthem has echoed from school halls and stadiums.
Firm hand against chest, Nigerians, home and abroad, declare a melodic oath when the occasion permits but how many believe in this allegiance they swear by today?
As Nigeria marks its 54th anniversary, I cast my mind back to when this day simply meant another public holiday and a few headlines in the papers.
Colorful parades and rallies fill the streets of Lagos as a carnival of enthusiastic youth and government convoys paint the town green. Speech after speech, march after march, millions of countrymen sharing momentous camaraderie – one all seemed to take pride in, yet understood so little about.
Beyond the festivities – its meaning still eluded me. Yes, we gained partial independence from Britain in 1960, with an official declaration of independence signed in 1963, but what did Nigeria’s independence really mean? When I looked around, there were large infrastructural bottlenecks, a defective educational system, gross unemployment, maladministration in key structures and a catalogue of unkept promises for a brighter Nigeria. What were we really independent of?
Many years away from home and I began to appreciate the wealth of my country; its wealth of talent. I saw Nigerians in the diaspora in high-powered roles, giving back wholeheartedly to societies that have given them a greener pasture, a new home and a chance to blossom. They were contributing to its enrichment and sustainability while a severe brain drain grew at home.
Each visit home was bittersweet. I had to face the reality that situations had merely altered marginally. While I applaud the racing pulse of today’s Nigeria and celebrate the diverse talent and insatiable drive that this country embodies, the enabling environment remains elusive.
In spite of its challenges, Nigeria has taken mammoth strides. The tide turns as entrepreneurial giants emerge from the rubble and bottlenecks, positioning the country at the forefront of investment and more recently overtaking South Africa as the largest economy in Africa. This inspires new debates; is it an ornamental or functional title? While this has been met with mixed reaction, there have also been some valid causes for celebration. We should nod to how far we have come while locking hands with harsh reminders of how much further we still have to go.
Today, it is refreshing to see an army of Nigerians return to the country, propelled by a daring mind shift, fresh ideas and a hunger to contribute to its growth, just as it’s heart-rending to see toddlers tap at my window while driving through the streets of Lagos, begging for some change when they should be in the classroom.
It is worth a toast to see more indigenous companies take the reins in areas that had once only been entrusted in the hands of expatriates, just as it is undeniably evident that more multinationals are investing in Nigeria as a fertile ground for returns.
As I celebrate Nigeria’s independence, I celebrate in the hope of brighter future, investment and empowerment of its youth. A future with a bigger appetite to harness our bountiful natural resources and build infrastructure. I dream of a Nigeria that invests in its human capital, shatters the glass ceiling in the boardrooms and prides itself in unity. A country that respects and guards the fundamental human rights of the girl and boy child and frowns upon ethno-religious crisis. A Nigeria that attracts all back home and rewards their enthusiasm and skill accordingly.
I might be asking for too much but ultimately, I want a Nigeria whose national anthem I can sing believingly.

What Are We Really Independent Of?

It’s curious, and almost incongruous, to see Juste Chisenga, the Grade 1B teacher at the Kasisi Primary School, give a lesson in a neat black suit and checkered tie in the Zambian language of Bemba.
It’s hot and sweaty under a rusted tin ceiling that has been around since 1924. The classroom walls are full of cracks and its light blue paint is peeling. Dozens of curling educational posters hang, yellowed with age.
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The children look as worn out as the building they are in. Some have walked as far as 14 kilometers to get here. Their uniforms are mismatched and layered in red dust.
This is the last place you would expect to see a teacher wearing a suit. Chisenga looks like a man from another time.
It’s also the last place you would expect to see children staring at a slideshow on a solar powered projector instead of a blackboard.
It’s even more bizarre seeing the same seven-year-olds sitting on uneven wooden desks and pulling out several smart tablets from a cardboard box to continue their lesson.
This is the brainchild of entrepreneur Mark Bennett. His idea is to help educate young Zambians by making a tablet part of their school curriculum for their villages.
“We decided to do something about the way teaching is done in Zambia&#8230; These days everyone has access to a cell phone. What’s more, in the rural areas they know how to work it; without being able to read. So we designed something that could be translated into several different languages&#8230; We’ve spent around $6 million developing the software with the help of 250 designers from around the world animating it. So far, we have had 2.3 million words translated into local languages and a quarter of a million sounds,” he says.
Bennett first came to Zambia in 1985 on a two-year contract to work at a computer center at the University of Zambia. He left the job twelve years later after the university figured out he was still on its payroll, he jokes. From there, he spent years bringing the internet to Zambia. He became a household name when he sold his Zambian internet service provider, AfriConnect, to Vodacom in 2005.
Wondering what to do next, Bennett’s idea for iSchool came seven years ago while sitting next to Clare Stead on a plane.
“We started by asking what would we do in education differently in the bush. What would you do to teach better,” says Stead, who is now the E-Learning project director for iSchool.
“The internet is a great learning tool but not for Africa. It’s not contextual. We found that children in rural areas didn’t understand why Elmo from Sesame Street would need to hang washing up between two skyscrapers in Seattle. Our first step was designing an education program suited for the rural people of Africa,” she says.
With overwhelming class numbers of between 60 to 100 children at a time, teachers in Africa are overworked, underpaid and lack organization, says Stead.
“With the ZEduPad, children can engage with the tablet and find answers faster than a teacher asking the same question 60 times over. We were also able to devise a curriculum plan for teachers to help them set goals for the week, for the month and for the whole year.”
It’s not always been smooth sailing. The team has encountered a number of hurdles including the Zambian government that passed a law to allow children to be taught in their mother tongue. It meant Bennett’s team had to write out whole new languages, including the first dictionaries for a number of dialects.
Regardless of the difficulties, Bennett remains resolute. Now in its second year, the project has distributed 7,000 tablets across Zambia.
The tablets are solar charged meaning they can go pretty much anywhere in the county, says Bennett. The children find them fun to use and, thanks to the language changes, easily understood. It makes learning easier than staring at a blackboard and far more interactive, says Stead.
The results according to teacher Chisenga have been amazing. His grin is as wide as the tablet he helps his grade ones complete their basic maths with. A man in a suit that looks as out of place in the classroom as the tablets.

Tablets  that ease the learning headache

The year was 1994. South Africa’s political climate was changing; a new president promised democracy and opportunities for all. For Romeo Makhubela life was just beginning. After years of teaching, he decided to register at business school. He put down the chalk and left the classroom, and today he is the CEO of a 100 percent black-owned investment company, a world away from high school teaching.
This epiphany turned him into one of the country’s emerging financial services providers. The reason Makhubela was in the classroom in the first place was no surprise. For most black South Africans at the time, that was the highest you could reach. You could either be a policeman, nurse or teacher.
It wasn’t that he didn’t like teaching. He had studied for a Bachelor of Commerce degree and topped it with a teaching diploma, which led him to become a commerce teacher for final year students, in the North West province of South Africa.
“The most exciting part as a teacher, especially a high school teacher, is when the [matric] results come out, and you realize that the investment that you made [has paid off]. I remember one year ‘I’ had a lot of distinctions and for me that was so fulfilling because you could see people going to university, some are now working and you know that you were part of that product,” says Makhubela.
“I started teaching in 1990… Around 1992 or ’93 I started noticing that a change was coming in South Africa and clearly businesses would start transforming and there would be huge opportunities, especially for people who had a Bachelor of Commerce qualifications,” says Makhubela.
It was never easy, amid the political turmoil of his country. During his university studies, Makhubela was also politically active.
“I matriculated in 1983. Things were quite tough at that stage; I think the upheavals were starting… It was terrible in those days and I had [to take] a break in ’84, then in ’85 I started doing my Bachelor of Commerce degree ’till around ’88. There was one year where we didn’t write exams because of the [political] problems.”
“Politics then was something that you just couldn’t avoid because there were a lot of injustices in this country… Especially at [university] because you started seeing the world and seeing that certain things weren’t correct… The way some lecturers conducted themselves, I can tell you one example; [In our first year] the one [lecturer]… just came and said ‘Look this is such a big class, I’m not used to teaching [so many people] and I can assure you that in third year 80 to 90% [of you] will be gone’. And you sit down and say ‘How could you make such a statement?’.”
Today, he is no longer in politics; he sits at the head of Vunani Limited. The eight-year-old company was launched in 2004 following a management buyout from African Harvest. In 2007, the company listed on the JSE AltX Exchange raising R175 million ($21.4 million). They currently have offices in Johannesburg and Cape Town, in South Africa and Harare, Zimbabwe.
He worked his way to the top, starting out at an insurance company as a graduate trainee, then he became a financial analyst for an asset management company and after around six years in the asset management field, he was recruited as chief investment officer for a life insurance company. And now he is heading Vunani Limited, an emerging company that wants to leave its mark as South Africa’s leading black-owned financial services provider. Vunani Limited is listed on the JSEAltX; it is currently listed 19th in the financial services sector, with R204.5 million ($24.96 million) of market capitalization. The company has a diverse portfolio, which consists of Vunani Fund Managers; Vunani Capital; Vunani Technology Ventures; Vunani Securities; Vunani Capital Markets and Vunani Properties. Now it is going up against the best in the financial services industry and is forging its own way. One challenge they, like many other companies, are facing is growing the industry.
Makhubela’s focus now is on getting his countrymen to start putting away more for a rainy day.
“One of the biggest gripes about South Africa is that if you look at our saving ratio, it’s quite low and clearly that tells to the culture or the environment from which people [come from]. My sense is that, maybe in the white culture it’s much better because at least that kind of information was instilled but in the broader black community… the kind of savings that you generally see within [them] would be pension funds, which is forced, because when you work you get your pension fund automatically.”
Last year, South Africa’s minister of finance, Pravin Gordhan, said that South Africa’s savings rate was low and that it “needed to increase its saving rate if it were to become the ‘China of Africa’”.
Makhubela agrees.
“Savings are critical… look at the Chinese for example. The savings rate there is extremely high—but you could argue that it’s influenced by a number of facts because they don’t have a proper social system… But that helps because if you look at the global crisis we are experiencing now… the Chinese have played an important role in terms of lessening the impact of the global crisis because of their savings.”
According to The South African Savings Institute (SASI), South Africa is the lowest ranking member of BRICS when it comes to saving.
“The International Monetary Fund (IMF) statistics show that since 2001, compared with its BRICS counterparts, SA’s rate of national savings has remained flat… In China, gross savings are over 50% of GDP, in Russia 30% and Brazil over 18%. In South Africa that figure is about 16.5%… It’s 72nd in the world behind Algeria (3rd), Morocco (25th), Nigeria (27th), Zambia (32nd), Namibia (34th), Botswana (42nd) and Lesotho (62nd)”.
The poor argue that saving is the last thing on your mind when you are living from hand-to-mouth, while the middle class chooses to splash out, so where does that leave the future of the fund management industry?
Makhubela says that when the rate of unemployment decreases, and more people start earning and being forced to save, then the tide will change. But while there is no growth in savings right now, Makhubela and his team are looking beyond borders, with Zimbabwe under their belt, they are also currently setting up in Namibia.
From marking exam papers to signing off millions, Makhubela is trying to teach one of the greatest lessons in life—how to save even when it hurts.

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