There’s a silence that hangs in the air after the confiscation of dagga, knives, pangas and crushed pills from Mpumalanga schools. A silence that speaks louder than the words of concern offered by officials. It’s in the quiet between the rebuke and the reality, a gap that stretches far beyond the school gates.
In the voices of the authorities, the problem is clear: “Learners are bringing weapons and dagga to school.”
The solution? More searches, more random raids, more declarations that teaching and learning must be respected. The words, though urgent, are limited in their focus. They are loud about safety in schools but silent about safety in the homes and communities the learners return to.
When Security, Community Safety and Liaison MEC Jackie Macie speaks of creating a safer schooling environment, his words hold merit – but also reveal a deeper silence. The drugs and weapons found in the searches are treated as anomalies, issues to be nipped in the bud. But there is no mention of the fertile ground outside the schoolyard that allows the weeds to grow in the first place. It’s as if the moment a learner steps beyond the school gates, the problem fades into the shadows.
Yet, what goes unspoken is where the story lies. What circumstances drive a child to bring a panga to school? Why is a learner slipping cannabis cookies into their bag before attending class? The silence in the official responses is a silence of omission a silence that ignores the broken homes, the violence on the streets and the crushing pressures of poverty that the learners carry with them, along with their textbooks.
At the heart of the language used by officials is a distancing from the larger issue, as if to say: “What happens outside school isn’t our problem.”
But it is. The learners walking through the school gates are shaped by the same society that allows drugs and weapons to be commonplace in their lives. The raids will catch the knives and dagga in backpacks, but they won’t catch the trauma, the survival instincts or the sense of abandonment that leads to their presence in the first place.
The learners themselves, who often remain voiceless in the conversations, are left to navigate the silence alone. They aren’t just silenced by the confiscation of their contraband; they are silenced by a system that focuses on punishment rather than prevention, on symptoms rather than solutions. No one asks why they are acting out or where they go when they leave the school grounds.
As officials continue to speak about safety in schools, perhaps we should start listening to what they aren’t saying. Perhaps we should start asking why the language of silence continues to hover over the real questions – the ones that go far beyond confiscating drugs and weapons and into the heart of a broken system.
In the end, what is confiscated might not be just the dagga and knives. What is taken away is the opportunity to understand, to intervene and to break the silence that surrounds the lives of the learners.
Saturday Star