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Throw Madam From the Train is the delightful working title of lifelong teacher and educationalist Nandipha Gantsho’s submission for a memoir that has been chosen as one of the five finalists in the biennial City Press Tafelberg Nonfiction Award. The winner, to be announced in mid-March, will secure a publishing contract with Tafelberg and R120 000 to take time out to write their book.
The proposed book highlights the challenges facing the education sector as a whole, and teachers in particular, by drawing on hard-won experience in the field. Gantsho, born into a family of teachers, started out as a novice teacher in a rural school in the Eastern Cape.
“Moving to Johannesburg and teaching in a predominantly Indian school in 1995 was a real litmus test for me,” she told City Press this week. “The challenges of working in an education system transitioning from a racially divided past was particularly trying for me. Later I went to teach at a high school in Soweto.”
The title is obviously a riff on the movie, Throw Mama From the Train, but there’s much more to it.
As Gantsho says: “It represents a number of issues covered in the memoir. First, the title ‘madam’ was how female teachers were addressed in ex-HOD [formerly white] schools as opposed to ‘mistress’ as commonly found in ex-DET [black] schools. Second, my daily commute between Lenasia and Soweto was mostly by train which was a harrowing experience at times, having to run to Orlando Station to catch the early train.
“Of course, the word train is a pun on the ‘gravy train’. The 1990s was a time when words like ‘tokenism’ and ‘window-dressing’ were bandied about and an appointment of a black person to a high position was viewed with suspicion. As a black teacher I was constantly faced with the same scepticism and prejudice and was challenged to prove my worth and had to struggle to earn the respect of the pupils I taught, their parents and my colleagues.”
Today Gantsho has a master’s degree in applied English language studies and she is studying towards a PhD in language education at Wits University. She has worked as a language curriculum specialist, in curriculum policy development and mediation, and co-authored numerous textbooks. She lectures English at the University of Mpumalanga and is perfectly poised to become a published author of nonfiction.
Asked how she hopes Throw Madam From the Train will help the education conversation in South Africa, she says: “First, I intend to give hope and inspire resilience and confidence in up-and-coming teachers by drawing on my first teaching experience. It is disheartening to find that the debate about racism in education still continues more than 24 years after the advent of democracy in our country.
“Second, I hope that the book will contribute to the debate about the crisis with regard to language policy, which is central to the challenge of poor pupil performance in national and international literacy benchmarking tests. English still enjoys a hegemonic status despite the existence of a national language policy that advocates equal language rights and the promotion of multilingualism. The decolonisation of our education system, at both basic and higher education level, is a pertinent issue that I hope the book will address to some extent.”
Gantsho’s book also highlights the bad rap teachers are given in the face of a system that is simply not supporting them properly.
Her submission is also notable for its rich and colourful writing style and that’s because Gantsho is a devout consumer of literature.
“Books have always been that source of entertainment, inspiration, comfort and escapism from quite early on in my life. In my years in boarding school I read anything I could get my hands on from Mills & Boon to teenage novels and the fast-paced James Hadley Chase,” she says.
“As my taste matured, I began to read the works of female writers like Jane Austen and Doris Lessing. Being a literature student has shaped my reading interest and raised my consciousness about universal issues, such as imperialism, colonialism and decoloniality.”
She lists Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat and Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born among her lifetime faves. She is now reading Frantz Fanon, Chris van Wyk and Ellen Khuzwayo, and is inspired by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Tsitsi Dangarembga.
