[imagesource:westerford.co.za]

Cape Town’s prestigious Westerford High School has been dealing with an unfortunate series of deeply racist Instagram posts that popped up about some of its black students recently.

In a statement on Friday, the Rondebosch school said it regrets the racist and hate speech incident that was targeted at black pupils, apologising “unreservedly for the pain and trauma” that was caused to its learners, staff and people outside the school, per TimesLIVE.

Sometime last week, images of slaves popped up on an already deleted Instagram account, named Grade8a_2023, tagging some of the school’s black learners, with a caption reading: “I found your family”.

Another image shows black slaves chained at the hands and neck with a caption: “who wishes all these black people could leave our classes and go back to where they came from”.

The school’s governing body chair, Solange Rosa, and principal, Mark Smith, said that the school is investigating the origin of “offensive, hurtful racist comments”, and have consulted an IT expert to try to identify the perpetrator and establish “whether that person is from within our school community”.

In 2020 the school adopted an antiracism policy statement and a diversity and inclusivity policy “which clearly lays out a process for dealing with racist incidents timeously and effectively”:

“We want to state unequivocally that we take such matters extremely seriously at Westerford. Over the years, we have sought to build a school that actively strives to provide a psychologically and physically safe space, where social equality and antiracism is built into the daily functioning of the school and the ethos of our school community.”

…“We acknowledge that our history of apartheid and the ongoing inequality and racism in our country and globally has wrought broad suffering. We are deeply saddened by this incident and will continue to interrogate the systemic and individual sources of oppression in ourselves, our school, our society and globally.”

The school held a meeting on Thursday last week with the grade 8 pupils to provide counselling to those affected or traumatised by the posts on Instagram. Westerford has also since suspended the entire school programme from June 8 until June 12 “to give learners and staff support and time to process the painful trauma that this has caused, specifically for people of colour”.

“We also established a transformation platform where parents, staff, old Westerfordians and learners can contribute to building an inclusive, safe, nurturing educational space for all. We apologise unreservedly for the pain and trauma that this incident has caused to many of our learners, staff, parents, fellow South Africans and to those well beyond our borders,” the statement continued.

If the perpetrator is a pupil, disciplinary action will be instituted. If the perpetrator is a hacker from outside the school, Education spokesperson Bronagh Hammond advised that Westerford would need to decide what action to take.

The situation is deeply unfortunate, but at least Westerford has handled it with urgency and grace.

[source:timeslive]