Book of the Month: KES and Tell

 

The book KES and Tell should not be confused with the movie Kes (see here) or the book Kestrel for a Knave (see here) that inspired it which were about a young boy and his bird of prey. The KES in this book is King Edward the Seventh School in Johannesburg, South Africa.

In 2020 to mark 50 years since they matriculated (graduated) school Old Boys shared their memories of being at the school in the 1960s. KES was a school for elite whites during a period when South Africa was an apartheid state and Blacks had no rights.

KES was styled on the elite ‘public’ schools of England and their traditions, which included a liberal use of corporal punishment, which was often vicious.

As the book, which runs to more than 500 pages, reveals, ‘The infractions which resulted in caning were many – or none. As a result, every boy at school maintained a high level of vigilance, like impala carefully approaching a waterhole, because one never knew where the stick might strike, or for what reason. Caning took place in open classrooms or closed offices, in boarding house dormitories or on the sports fields. It should be understood that the teachers were not sadists or, by any standard of the time criminals (except for a few hated individuals). They were simply practicing a traditional form of officially sanctioned punishment. Today, most of us harbour little resentment - except against those who crossed the line into abuse.’

Here’s one (of many) anecdotes from the book In this extract boys have been instructed to attend the auditorium for extra choir practice but our hero and two others decide not to. Now read on …

About and hour and a half later, B____ [the master who is named in the book] arrived at School House in an absolute rage, yelling in a combination of broken English and Afrikaans which I hardly understood: “How dare you not obey my instruction to go to the auditorium! You will get severely punished for this!” I was absolutely petrified at this stage.

Then B____ pulled me into a small room. I’m not sure if it was a prefects’ room or a store-room, but a desk stood in the middle. Lying on the desk was a thick, crooked old peach tree branch. He forced my head under the desk, grabbed the tree branch, and proceeded to flap [beat] me four with all the strength he had. I could not believe that anyone would be so deranged as to use a tree branch to do this!

We were getting used to the pain of flaps from masters and prefects at school, but I must confess that this assault was the most painful I ever experienced.

[The two other boys were beaten in a similar way.]

Afterwards we gathered in the shower area to recover, and to discuss and show off our wounds. My behind was bleeding from the assault, caused by the roughness and crookedness of the weapon used.

One of the wisest things I did next was to phone my Mom later that evening and tell her I would not come home on Sunday. I needed to make sure that she did not hear about the incident or see the condition I was in. I think if she had, she would have taken things further.

Later the three of us accepted the circumstances and the part we played in the transgression, although we thought B____ was nuts. In subsequent times, and even now, we wear the incident as a badge of honour. There was no apparent longer term consequences for us, and how many people do you know can say they were beaten with a tree branch?

KES and Tell, King Edward VII School 1965-1970 The Untold Truth, edited by Tim Haynes and others, ALH Projects.

To read an overview of the book from The Daily Maverick (an online newspaper based in South Africa, click here).

 

Traditional School Discipline

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