Makhanda unites for children’s rights

“Makhanda’s child protection systems are pretty strong — the problem is they haven’t been working together.”

Child protection researcher Dee Blackie is the founder of community engagement programme, Courage. It is designed to empower communities around SA to deal with child protection challenges and support participants to develop and implement child protection strategies in their own communities.

Blackie, who lives in Johannesburg, was in Makhanda during Child Protection Week in June 2021 to run a Courage workshop with schools and NGOs sponsored by the Kavod Trust.

“I saw the commitment of child protection officers in the region.  However, I was absolutely devastated to listen to Deon Wiggett’s Season 2 of his podcast My Only Story about Thomas Kruger and the clear signs of grooming and abuse that led to his death in 2018,” Blackie said. “Thomas was at junior school with my son, and we felt his loss deeply.”

The harrowing eight-episode News24 series that launched in September 2021 led to an inquiry that four months later saw retired judge Dayalin Chetty find that former St Andrew’s College water polo coach David Mackenzie was grooming boys at the school. Headmaster Alan Thompson has since resigned and Thomas’s family has sued the school for R62m.

“At the time, I remember people commenting that Thomas was a 'troubled child', and thinking, children are not born troubled, it is society and their environment that creates this reality for them. Deon’s podcast brought this into stark relief for all of us.”

Courage is the model for the new Children’s Rights Coalition launched at St Mary’s Day Care Centre (DCC) in Makhanda on Thursday.

Representatives from five local schools, Child Welfare, the SA Police Service, Rhodes University Community Engagement (RUCE), the Makhanda Circle of Unity, Grahamstown Business Forum and local media platform Grocott’s Mail participated in the inaugural meeting.

“However, we have invited all primary and high schools and the coalition is open to everyone and all organisations interested in realising children’s rights,” said co-ordinator Alex Talbot. The Rhodes University master’s student is a volunteer at St Mary’s DCC.

More than 5,000 participants across the world have engaged in Blackie’s inspirational Courage workshop and Talbot used those tools to set a collaborative, problem-solving tone for the new local coalition.

In addition to meeting regularly, the coalition would hold workshops, support interest groups and run media campaigns, Talbot said.

“I was very happy that the Makhanda community were committed to standing up and doing something about this issue,” Blackie said in the lead-up to the launch.  “All child protection challenges happen in a community context and we can’t solve these problems by just dealing with the individual victims or perpetrators. We need to address them holistically and at a community level.”

Blackie ran her 2021 workshop pro-bono and sponsored tool kits to start the process of stakeholder engagement in Makhanda.

“It’s only when we all work together — government, police, education, health, social development, and community members — that we will start to address these issues and hopefully prevent them from happening again.”

RUCE programme co-ordinator Anna Talbot said while the harm documented in My Only Story was not unique to Makhanda, nor private schools, My Only Story had elevated an urgent call to action for child protection in SA schools and the community at large.

Quoting Blackie, she said, “Child protection is not only something that happens in townships. It needs to happen at every level of society ... it’s one of those things that cuts through.”

Alex Talbot (the community activists are sisters), said, “The Makhanda Children’s Rights Coalition will be a network for capacity building, shared learning and new kinds of collaboration, demonstrating how a city can unite for its children.”

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