In 1971  I left Bryanston Primary to start high school. Bryanston High was some six miles by bicycle from my home in Eaton Avenue. I survived four years there, Standard 6 up to Standard 9 when I left, aged 15. One year before my University entrance year.  The reason I left abruptly before completing my schooling in the Government school system  was because;  for me, Bryanston High was as dreadful institution in which the currency was miseducation and misinformation.  A facility governed by Neo Nazi Christian fascists who represented the qualities I recognized from my first day at Bryanston High as  as being singularly offensive by every metric by which we judge educational value.  The staff at Bryanston high remain to this day one of the most odious bunch of Nazi fascist racist goons I have ever come across. A select group who, with one sole exception, relished their opportunity to abuse the students in their custodial care.   The sole exception was the English teacher, Mr Bam, who understood the challenge teaching represents and took teaching seriously. The worst of this ragged bunch of child abusing miscreants was the principal, Meneer Viviers, a mean spirited Afrikaner who harbored deep resentment towards the English. Who clung to a Religious Afrikaner belief system, predicated on a love of Rugby and a misplaced devotion  to discipline by violence.

When one of the boys in my Standard 8 year reacted to his nasty daily abuse of our student group at daily morning assembly by writing ‘Viviers is a Cunt‘ in bright green paint on the school wall, furious vengeance befitting a Nazi Kommandant in a death camp followed. That day the entire school was kept standing in assembly until the culprit owned up.

“You vill all stay standing here until ze culprit owns up.”

No one did. For the next six hours – our entire day of lessons, we stood in that assembly hall. No breaks for sitting. No respite from the galring accusatory eyes of the Nazi in chief, marching in short goose steps along the lines of student s gazing accusingly into each boys eyes in turn. By three o clock everyone was exhausted. And terrified. This guy was not going to stop until someone paid the ultimate price for encunting him in green on the school wall.

I didn’t know who did it, but I had enormous respect for whoever it was.

The next day when we arrived for morning assembly the message was the same. “Until ze kulprit confesses you will all stand here at attention. For as long as it takes until we find out who did it. If you know who did it tell me. Save yourselves a lot of pain.”  The entire school stood all day again with the same outcome.

On day three when I arrived at assembly rumours spread that the culprit had been caught. He had killed himself. The school conducted a nail inspection the previous day. Each boy was made to show their hands. Apparently, the rumour mill claimed, one boy in my year, John, who lived in the flats opposite Nichol Highway, had traces of green paint under his nails. He was taken to Vivier’s office. That night he ended his life in the flats opposite the school where he lived with his Mother.

You didn’t mess around with Viviers. Certainly you couldn’t call him a cunt in large green letters painted on the school way even though that was both obvious and the optimal colour choice for this character description.

My memories of confrontation with this apocryphal vestibule of odium are many. The apartheid government chose well when they allocated their appointments to enforce the Nazi creed d their racist educational curriculum represented.

So much so that shortly before final exams in my Standard nine year I walked out of Bryanston High never to return. In a spoiler alert, I did go on to finish school thanks to Damelin college, the best Private School in South Africa in 1977, where for the first time I experienced professional unbiased tuition  motivated solely by the desire to educate rather than indoctrinate.  The last straw in my always unpleasant relationship with  Headmaster Viviers came on the day of the hair inspection. Sometime in September 1976.

I was reminded of this day reading the BBC today where there is a feature about a boy the age I was then, rebelling over a Hair Inspection at Bryanston High 40 years later and a liberation from Apartheid racist government later, Bryanston High shows how little has changed. This rebellious young pupils name is Dylan Reynders.

The BBC article is Here

The hair inspection story that led to me leaving school before finishing  is included in my book The Emergency Bouzouki Player 

The Principal of Bryanston High School, Mnr. Viviers, was a sour-faced Afrikaner in his mid-forties who spoke English as if it caused him physical pain. His appointment seemed to me more an opportunity for the Afrikaner to take revenge on the English than to advance any educational agenda.

An outstanding example of Principal Viviers’ ingrained meanness of spirit came one Wednesday morning before the day’s assembly when it was announced that there was to be a surprise hair inspection; something which had never happened before.

This involved each boy being scrutinised as they filed into the hall by the examining teacher who placed a finger above the top of the child’s ear. If the hair touched or extended over the teacher’s finger that child was sent to the ‘failed’ group. By the end of this exercise, of the 500-odd boys who attended Bryanston High only one had passed the test. Johannes van Schalkwyk, an Afrikaans boy who was the proud possessor of a dog-bowl haircut, stood alone as having conformed to the previously unenforced regulation.

Principal Viviers announced gloatingly from his pulpit that the punishment for boys breaking the hair code law was a caning.

“Four of the best!” he intoned with lascivious relish in his thick Afrikaans accented English. But not before the daily recitation of the Lord’s Prayer as was required to begin every day at Bryanston High. After our mass prayer chant, we were instructed to make our way after assembly in an orderly line to the Principal’s office where we were expected to bend over and receive our four strokes of the cane.

By 11 o’clock that morning no lessons had started at Bryanston High School. Instead, all educational resources were directed towards one objective; the dubiously motivated assault by one bitter individual on the buttocks of 499 of the 500 young male pupils placed in his care. I was 15 at the time and felt incensed by what I considered to be a disgusting abuse of office for apparently homo-erotic gratification by as nasty a piece of work as I had yet encountered. Certainly Principal Viviers did little to disavow me of the growing impression that Afrikaners in general were a base and vicious lot, drawn to serve the darkest impulses under the guise of Christian moral rectitude.

I never joined the beating line as directed, deciding instead to walk home as quickly as possible rather than spend the day waiting in a queue to offer my 15 year-old posterior to be beaten with a cane by a grown man with lustful intentions. He would have to make do with only 498 bottoms on this day.

In a short space of time I applied for and was accepted by Damelin college where I completed my matric year before entering Wits medical school.

After the hair inspection walkout I never returned to lessons at Bryanston high. My mother agreed with the school that I would be allowed to attend the Standard nine examinations the following month. I would arrive at the exam room at the given time and leave directly after. I never saw Viviers again. I don’t believe I have ever enjoyed more benefit from never seeing an individual again than I experienced with Viviers. I don’t know his first name. And that’s as it should be.

The word in green on the school wall in 1976 is good enough for me.

Dedicated to the memory of John. The schoolboy who lived in the flats opposite Bryanston High, who died in 1976 with green paint under his fingernails

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The Emergency Bouzouki Player is a first-hand account of the unwilling forced conscription into South Africa’s Apartheid army in 1979, of an 18 year old Greek medical student and musician at the height of the 33 year long ‘Border War’.
An anti war polemic underpinned by dark humor. With well researched facts about South Africa’s history, including the two Anglo Boer Wars and the introduction of British racist legislation. Includes  personal experiences like meeting the Apartheid leader, PW. Botha, and the lasting legacy of undiagnosed PTSD  for an entire generation of South African conscripts.