Over The Back Wall

My One & Only Time Voting in Apartheid-Era South Africa

Signs like this were everywhere.

When I was 14, I would climb over the back wall of our school each morning.

It was less than two blocks from our front door — but to get to the school entrance would have taken at least another ten to fifteen minutes to walk all the way around.

Sliding down off that back wall let me in right beside the workers compound, where the groundskeepers, gardeners, maids, kitchen staff, and wood-shop assistants, all lived.

Big John was the head cook for all the kids who lived in the of course much nicer accommodations of the boarding school section of this Anglican church property.

It was private, and expensive, and the main reason my parents scraped together the cash each year to send my brother and I to St. Martin’s was because it was one of only a handful of schools in South Africa that legally educated black and white kids together —and the only one on the wrong side of the tracks, where we lived.

This was 1984; Apartheid was in it’s 36th year, and the explicitly white supremacist National Party had been in power that entire time.

Most mornings Big John would be smoking a giant joint with his significantly large rear-end sat on an upturned steel industrial drum, looking…