Moeding College

Moeding College, Government Secondary School, Lobatse, Botswana

At this time, Moeding College was the only all-boarding secondary school in Botswana. The photograph below shows me with my class, 4c, in 1979. The school's catchment included a large area to the north, including much of Ghanzi and Kgalagadi Districts. About 10% of our students came from those remote areas, including bushmen, the children of Afrikans farmers who had settled the area during the 1930s, such as Ria van Zyl, near the left of the photo and their coloured (mixed race) offspring, such as Elvis, seated at the front. During the late 1970s there were also a number of refugees from pre-independence Zimbabwe, including Robert Ndlovu (to my left in the photo, speaking to his girlfriend).

I started as a Geography Teacher at Moeding in January 1978, six months after graduating in the Environmental Sciences. I had no teaching qualification and my plan was simply to tell the students what they needed to know, in order to pass their exams. This approach went down very well with most of the pupils and because I was seen as helping the pupils, I soon became a very popular teacher. Most of my students faced the harsh reality that they were likely to be herding cattle all their working lives or working as housewives, bringing up children. Their only chance was education and once they realised that I was telling them what they needed to know, they were anxious to listen and to do whatever it took to pass. By the end of my second year at the school, my JC classes (Junior Certificate, the year below Form 4) achieved the highest pass rate in the school. The four classes achieved 143 passes out of 144 pupils.

During my time at Moeding, I was Junior Librarian, helping to reorganise the school library under the Dewey Decimal system. I maintained the school meteorological station, sending weather records to Gaborone. I ran the Table Tennis club, accompanying pupils to at least one tournament in Mahalapye and I ran the school darkroom, teaching pupils how to process black and white photographic materials. A dedicated Geography room became available during my second year at Moeding and I helped to fit it out as an appropriate teaching venue.