Geoff Mamputa, Gugulethu
In a moving ceremony, the matric class of 2025 at Fezeka High School were awarded the 60th anniversary commemorative ties.
Parents were requested to put on the commemorative ties and share with their children the journey they had travelled together up to that moment.
They had to share the joys and challenges they had faced and overcame. They shared their hopes and dreams with their children while dressing them up.
The moment was reminiscent of the pupils’ first year at school, while they were in their last year of schooling.The were very few dry eyes as parents and their children hugged and cried on each other’s shoulders.
It was a moment that also reflected the struggles that Fezeka had gone through in the past 60 years.
Struggles of recognition by the Apartheid government. Struggles of classes not taking place because teachers had been arrested for not having their dompass with them. Struggles of being the lead school in umbumbumbu- the 1976 uprising.
Struggles of having the entire student leadership arrested in the 1980s.
This school has faced much, and the matrics of 2025 carry the hopes of this community, dumped and abandoned on the sandy wastelands of Gugulethu to waste and poverty. Though that the school has produced outstanding members of society, ranging from ministers to professors, doctors, ambassadors and generals in the army.
Fezeka High School was established in 1965 through the efforts of committed teachers who together with the communities that they lived in realised the effect not having a high school had on the youth of the day.
This was a community that had been forcibly removed from, Simon’s Town, Athlone, Retreat,Tramway Street,in Sea Point, District 6, Elsies River, Retreat and all other parts of Cape Town, through the notorious Group Areas Act.
Young men and women who had passed with flying colours at the schools that they had attended at District 6, Parow, Elsies River and other schools in those mixed communities, suddenly found themselves with no alternative but to join a life of crime, drugs and drink because they could not further their education.
The pioneer teachers led by the ever diligent Mr Ngambu and Ndandani, started the school in a zinc and iron structure at NY43 before moving to the current building in 1974.
