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I did my high school at St Christopher’s High School in Swaziland between 1989-1993.

Would love to establish contact with other ex-students from the same institution, you might have went through earlier or later that’s a non-issue.

During my early years, the school experienced serious water issues, which forced us to bath at a nearby water canal.

Though we had ongoing infrastructure problems, during those years the school was well respected for producing impressive academic results and amongst the best basketball schools in the country.

I was one of the VERY unruly pupils, luckily I managed to finish my studies (in one piece) and outgrow all those bad habits.

The boarding master was Mr “Mdzimane” Shongwe who used to give a very thorough beating to all hooligans like myself. He left the school (not sure the year) and was replaced by Mr ‘Rise’ Dlamini, an old folk with serious drinking issues. He was way too relaxed to police teenage boys. We were a law onto ourselves during his tenure.

Mr ‘Fire’ Simelane was the captain driving the ship and he is still at the helm even today…I guess he’ll retire there.

Mr Ngaki, was our deputy principal…a very strict ‘xhosa native’…who used to have a field day on my buttocks, every Mondays. He taught me science at form three where we all passed the subject not because we love it, but were all scared of him.

Jamaica a bushy area closer to the school garden was where all the illicit activities were carried out. Smoking, drinking, slaughtering of school rabbits, chickens (you name it) was all done there.

Eish enough now…tell me of your tofa/topher days!

A bit of interesting history about my former school i didn’t know titled Christian Education in Swaziland researched by Musa Shongwe:

The Methodists missionaries were followed by the Anglicans and Lutherans, who started building schools and churches, especially in clustered settlements. King Mbandzeni, who was leader and King of the Swazi nation at the time, gave Rev. Joe Jackson of the Anglican Mission a place near the Great Usuthu River to build both a church and school, which was intended to educate the young Bhunu, who was later to become King of the Swazi Nation.

Today, the school the Anglicans established has gone up to Form 5 or matric, and it is known as St. Christopher’s High School. During the sixties and seventies, the school became popular. In the southern Africa region it became the educational home of not only prominent Swazi, but also South Africans, Zimbabweans, Tshwana’s and Sotho’s, to name a few.

More history about St Christophers involving Nelson Mandela’s late son Makgatho letters from prison correspondence with his sosns

Makgatho’s visits became irregular after 1983 and then stopped. ‘I just got lazy,’ he explains. He resumed his visits to his father only in 1987. The reason perhaps went deeper than laziness. It was basically that he could not cope with father’s persistent exhortations to return to school. Speaking about his education, Kgatho says:

I wrote my standard nine at St Christopher’s and passed, but I could not return to write my matric. The fact is that I was expelled. We had organized a strike. I stayed with Mr M. B. Yengwa in Manzini for three years, and then started schooling in Orlando. Mama paid. She got help from the Institute of Race Relations.

More dose of history involving Prof Njabulo Ndebele:

Could you tell us about the literary environment which nurtured your interest in writing? To what extent did it entice you to explore the form and write about the themes you first chose to deal with?

Part of this question has already been answered. What I would want to add now is the excitement of discovering black writers. This happened in my home, but also took on greater dimensions while I was a student at St. Christopher’s school in Swaziland in the sixties. As students, we discovered Ezekiel Mphahlele, Nat Nakasa, Lewis Nkosi, Alex la Guma, Can Themba… Later, when I went to University in Lesotho we came across Achebe, Soyinka, Okot p’Bitek, Gabriel Okara, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and others. In a traditional English literature curriculum devoted to Shakespeare, Dickens, Wordsworth, Robert Browning, and others, this ‘unofficial’ world of African writing was extremely uplifting. The process of decolonisation was also underway. Discovering these writers gave me some role models who looked encouragingly familiar.