HEIDI HARPER, Class 10A of 1990, reflects on the foundations laid for her at Livingstone High School and why other alumni should get involved to ensure an ongoing legacy of excellence…
Having noticed the Livingstone High School Alumni Association developments on Facebook over the past year or so, many of us may be feeling a twinge of guilt or even one of benign neglect?
High school is a tough journey, and so many of us stepped into who we really are only after matric, after working, after tertiary education, after achieving the things we needed to pursue … the things that make us tick, or so we thought.
But the Alumni Association is not about the past. Today Livingstone needs an Alumni Association to support the staff and the learners. Participation may be about nostalgia for some but for others like me it’s only going to work if it’s true purpose is social activism.
Many of us still feel it, that sense of gratitude… that deep respect. Before liberation, those activists who were the Livingstone teachers, were armed with a badass attitude, values, text books (and often banned books), collar, and tie and sometimes the world’s amount of patience. (And sometimes limited tolerance for our BS).
I remember being taught an earlier version of the first verse of what is now our national anthem in a German lesson in 1986. What a rich history, what a deep privilege it is to have been a student of those intellectual giants.
We are the trees of their collective efforts, their sacrifices and energy - those teachers who scattered and nurtured the seeds which grew. We grew because of them, and sometimes in spite of them. Thank God for Liberation. Some teachers will never and have never seen the fruit of their labour. Maybe it’s a relief, and maybe it’s a tragedy.
Livingstone is no longer the often reviled, often admired, historically significant petit bourgeois school it was, once. It was a significant force to be reckoned with for most decades of its almost 100- year existence.
Advancement was its ethos. If you were lucky, you left those gates with a firm sense of self and sense of purpose, a foundation of values, entrenched in a doctrine of socialism, egalitarianism, and gender equality. And since liberation, I have come to deeply appreciate the wisdom of those teachers.
There are many schools in South Africa with a similar narrative, in small towns, villages, rural areas and sometimes, in cities. These schools must be cherished, nourished, and advanced, in the face of growing pressure. Livingstone is like any other government school in 2024. It is under pressure, under-resourced and lacking in the support structures required to develop young minds. We can change that, we can help.
It’s time for us – as the liberated generation of Stonians – to step up. Advancement is as relevant today as it was when we matriculated, even if we had not found the need to return to the school. If you have the inclination, the time and energy to support that advancement, please invest. Invest in the work of the Alumni Association to ensure that there are more trees whose shade we may never enjoy. Invest in Livingstone to ensure that it will once more be a beacon of academic excellence - excellence which is grounded in values, in community and positioned towards critical thinking and the development of the youth as leaders of themselves, and others.
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