Shock at matric rape task

ANTI-RAPE activists, education experts and parents are outraged after matric drama pupils had to put themselves in a director’s chair for a rape scene during Monday’s final written exam.

A compulsory question in the Dramatic Art paper asked pupils to: “Describe how you would get the actor portraying Simon to perform this act to maximize the horror of the rape to the audience.”

The question carried six marks and was part of a 15-mark section based on an extract from the South African play Tshepang, inspired by the true story of the rape of a nine-month-old baby.

The extract focuses on a scene in which a character, Simon, acts out the rape of a baby using a loaf of bread and a broomstick.

“Everyone was in shock that we were asked such a question as it was so gruesome and we were not sure how to answer it. We didn’t expect something like that,” a Durban pupil said. She was worried because she did not know if she was permitted to refer to the broom as a penis in the answer.

Another pupil said he “felt a bit sick”. “I wasn’t prepared for that question and it took me a while to answer it because I felt uncomfortable,” he said. He did not talk to his classmates after the paper but was concerned that those who had experienced rape may have been affected by the question.

“I’m sure that someone in my class must have been traumatised.”

The pupil’s mother said too many South African children were directly or indirectly faced with the trauma of rape daily. She believes the question was improper and insensitive as some pupils could have relived what may be going on in their own homes.

“Imagine a child that is still being raped at home. How would she have felt, answering the question?”

Drama therapist and director Warren Nebe said the examiners did not consider that pupils would have experienced fear and said it was “entirely inappropriate to interrogate that subject matter with young people in an uncontained environment”.

“The exam is impersonal. It is a sit-down written examination. It’s not people sitting down and talking through and being facilitated.

“Writing is quite an intimate process. So the examiners have no idea if they have triggered flashbacks or fear.

“We are all affected by rape in SA so it doesn’t matter if that person has first-hand experience or not,” he said.

Nebe said the question was “incredibly complex” to ask a 17- or 18-year-old as the pupils would have to imagine being the actor playing the rapist.

“From a drama therapy viewpoint you are drawing the person closer into the subject and if the intention was to try and get the students to empathise, I think that is the wrong way to go.

“I think the intention was to test them on their theatre skills but there were many other things that they could have tested them on.”

Very few directors were able to work on such a “sophisticated symbolic level with professional actors”.

Education expert Graeme Bloch was also shocked, saying while he understood what the paper tried to achieve, it was “not a good idea” during the 16 days of activism against abuse.

Papers are set by examiners in the Department of Basic Education and moderated by internal moderators.

Umalusi, the quality assurance council for education, then approves the paper. Its CEO, Mafu Rakometsi, said he would first have to ask the subject specialists who approved the paper about their reasoning before he could comment on the appropriateness of the question.

No response was received from the Department of Basic Education.