Great teachers give best gift of all

HAVE you ever felt joy that you could not adequately express? You felt, like the Psalmist, that your “cup overflows”. That was how I felt during my perusal of my former teacher’s biography in preparation for the radio show on Bold Moves Radio.

My heart throbbed with reverential fear when I saw my name among the list of Bhekani Ephraim Lowani’s references. I mused: What have I done to merit an honour like this? How do I become a reference point to a person who cradled me in his arms in my childhood?

The Great South African Teachers was published by Professor Jonathan Jansen in 2011. I never summoned the courage to write about the teachers who systematised my thinking. I am indebted to the men and women who moulded and shaped my life. They are Dr Edna Rooth and Lowani. The teachers are to me what Confucius is to Chinese.

Lowani taught me accounting at Lemana High School from 1979 to 1982. He also enacted the role of boarding master. It was at Lemana where great leaders had their cradles. He made the greatest and most lasting impression upon me. He was a great man, the noblest and rarest human being I have been privileged to meet.

Lowani reminds me of Booker Washington’s words when he spoke about his favourite teacher, General Samuel C Armstrong, of Hampton Institute. “I am convinced that there is no education which one can get from books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be gotten from contact with great men and women.”

The lessons I learnt at the feet of my teachers were as valuable to me as any education I have received anywhere since.

Even to this day, I immediately pick up bits of paper scattered about a house or in the streets. I never see a filthy yard I do not want to clean, an unpainted or whitewashed house that I do not want to paint or whitewash, and a button off one’s clothes or grease spot on them or on a floor that I do not want to call attention to.

Rooth used to teach us career guidance before the advent of life orientation. When most of us were groping in the dark about our future careers, she reached into her desk drawer and pulled out a piece of paper containing a quote from Daniel Burnham, a Chicago architect and city planner – words he spoke in 1925.

“Make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realised. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty.”

In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote about the reunion of two siblings after slavery was abolished. The sibling who was moneyed was willing to go the extra mile to assist her brother with material possessions.

He responded: “Give me an education, Emily; that has always been my heart’s desire. Then, I can do all the rest.”

The teachers have given me a gift far beyond that of silver and gold. They made me believe in myself. They gave me a new measure of self-esteem. Indeed, education is the greatest equaliser!