Back in 2000 when I first attended Wynberg Boys High School, there were already signs that the place was going to the heap where moldy peaches go to rot.
This kid once sold me old moths in the Junior School. I was looking for silk worms but he sold me the moths. I thought the moths would have eggs and therefore worms, But that didn't happen. Someone told me you need special conditions for that to happen. You need a mulberry tree in short. I didn't own a mulberry tree. He was a dishonest SOB. He never understood the fundamental concept of an honest business deal. I was impressed by the beautiful pink and yellow cocoons
But all he wanted was the money.
But that wasn't when it was going to the dogs though.
It really went to the dogs when I was in high school. That's when the kids from certain craven areas below the railway line in Cape Town I'm not allowed to mention for political reasons, made the class so raucous that the Math teacher from Britain had to leave and go to a better school. It was like oil and water. Their crassness couldn't contend with his class. And vice versa.
We still had class then, and we had people who spoke in posh accents and spoke of many arcane facts of the school's heritage. These people were of all colors. The breed I'm talking about it has family members who never lived down their underdog status in apartheid. They'd never risen to the Malaysian heritage they were blessed with but sank to the perpetual underdog world with the jackasses in the favella and the crackheads in the bronx.
They were just ridiculous stupid young jackass men who used to chirp the teacher and blurt out low-class swear words and think they were smart. Words like Massapewwwws and Naaier. It was the low culture of the historically poor neighborhoods come to a school with a mighty legacy. Glebe Cottage and all the rest of it. Again, this isn't about class. It's about how high or low you decide to rise or sink.
One kid's name was Darsey. He was the greatest idiot in the room. Reminded one of a breighing donkey. Huge fat teeth in front with a fat lip and a lot of stuff the school had never had to contend with in his household.
Darsey not of Pride and Prejudice fame but of street culture fame. The very opposite. These were a special brand of idiot. Especially because they considered themselves smart. Because they and their families had decided they were products of the apartheid idiocy with an axe to grind, and because instead of rejecting that idiocy, they'd imbibed it. Made an identity out of it. A victim complex, a gangster slang, a whole obnoxious way of behaving. The in-crowd slang of run-down neighborhoods who'd swallowed their own rundown-ness. I don't want to bore you with the details. Their color is just incidental. I believe in culture as the main progenitor of idiosy. These were halfwits by choice. Worshipers of idiot, lowest common denominator culture. These were the ones who represented the outlier with none of the courageous aspects of the outlier. The jackasses of the country. The neighing, breying mules with bak-tande and bak-oore who exaggerated the former and never the latter features of their being.
I stare down at you Darcey, down at you and your whole way of seeing the world. It represents everything I am not. The Hyperintelligence and vigilance of Martin Luther King, the class of great Egyptian kings. It represents the voice box without a brain attached to it. It represents death of society. You and your mindless shouting over Mr Robinson the British man who'd dropped his well-paid job in Britain to teach in South Africa.
I spit on your effect on the school and those like you. Your praise of the lower rungs of kapse taal. One day we'll look back on history and all spit on you and your in-party slang.
During that time, I also remember knife crime increasing on and near the school grounds. These were the gangsters Darcy and friends were trying to imitate. We should all be calling that culture out.
But we aren't. 27's, 28's, Americans. West side. We should have banded together and worked them out of the school. The gentile aspects of WBHS weren't ready for such culture, such prestige, these wild dogs would destroy it.
Lovers' walk had become skid row. Shakespeare and The Victorian era had been eaten away by Staggie met a buhger en tjips. Wynberg was becoming trashy.
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