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When I drove into Steenberg for lunch at Bistro 1682 and Roberto Pharo was driving out – telling me how hilarious Alex de Bruin’s Southern Suburbs rugby article was – I knew things had gone pretty viral. If you missed the tongue-in-cheek article, be sure to check it out here.

The joke asks how you can tell someone went to Bishops, with the punchline being ‘they tell you’. This is why actual Bishops kids (in real life) avoid mentioning their school at all costs. They shouldn’t need to, really. I mean… it’s all there. Hygiene, manners and a vocabulary including phrases like ‘tally ho!’.

That was a joke – something we seemingly need to start pointing out on these pages…

Anyway, the result of being the butt of the ‘they tell you’ joke is the response when asked where we went to school is often evasive and something like ‘in the Southern Suburbs’. When further pressed as to where in the Southern Suburbs, the follow up might be ‘in Rondebosch’. After that, all is revealed, but not without a fight.

*Cough* The same is true for pilots.

The same is NOT true for some Bishops parents, as has become quite apparent.

As someone who went to both SACS and Bishops, I personally don’t give a toss which school you went to. In fact most people don’t. The ‘type’ of person that comes out of each school has a lot to do with common sense, upbringing and their group of friends, not the school. But we make jokes that reference stereotypes that have been created over decades and centuries. Nobody really cares, and one thing most Southern Suburbs schools do share is a sense of humour. Everyone is happy to take or receive a cheap shot. It builds camaraderie.

Rob Fleck went to Wynberg before Bishops and laughs along at the classic ‘you can take a boy out of Wynberg, but you can’t take the Wynberg out of the boy’ chirp. And any Wynberg student or parent that takes offence to that joke needs an Urbanol or a gummy. Or both. Similarly, any Bishops kid that takes offence to the ‘Bishops boys tell you’ joke.

By the same token, (and in an attempt to build friendly rapport with our new friend) I’m more than happy to take the mickey out of the generic stereotypical Bishops parents. These are often first-generation Bishops parents who take themselves terribly seriously. They haven’t really settled into the role and will not only wear Burberry to rugby games, but will take genuine offence and vigorously defend their position in the written word, as a response to a clearly tongue-in-cheek article teasing them for wearing said Burberry attire.

The irony is that Burberry and other overly detailed references were probably included gratuitously for added flavour.

And so, without further adieu, please enjoy the below, sent in response to Alex de Bruin’s fantastically amusing piece.

* We have left the article as it arrived (First IX et al). It is quite clear the writer didn’t go to Bishops, as if they did they’d know to give it a read-through before sending.

Maybe they went to Rondebosch? 😉

In response to Alex de Bruin’s musings:

Courage and Affection at SCHOOLBOY rugby in the Southern Suburbs
By Caitlyn King

While I don’t tend to use the 19th-century term bourgeois, neither do I tend to go to Afrika Burn. And while the Tankwa experience is filled with far less judgement than attending my child’s schoolboy rugby match on a Saturday, I find myself taking courage and standing on the side of the field to affectionately support and encourage his passion. I have with me an umbrella I did not purchase because people of means are always given free stuff when they spend money. Evolution would suggest that I use the term privilege rather than bourgeois, but perhaps that is not the point I’m trying to make.

Can I say that magic mushrooms are far too obvious to be in your tea and seeing as we are South African, we drink coffee on the side of the rugby field (well anyone who sees colonialism for what it really is). I’d love to be able to apparate and disapparate, but, alas, I am not British (not by birth anyway), nor a wizard, just a middle-class mom on the side of the rugby field in the southern suburbs. I would not, by the way, wear gumboots, Hunter, Barbour or otherwise to the Cheltenham Races because everyone knows that spectators don’t wear gumboots to that event.

Anyway, are we pretending we star in Made in Chelsea to allow us to discriminate against any Made in Essex parents and would that make us upper class? Or just mean? So confusing, and completely unrelated to rugby in South Africa, schoolboy or otherwise. And perhaps it is not immediately obvious that equestrian relates to horses and schoolboy rugby involves boys and an oval shaped ball. SA Rugby Magazine is a good read (do real South Africans actually read the end pages of Horse and Hound?). Falkenburg is a state-run mental health medical facility, but with our ‘free’ umbrellas comes our private healthcare which we are sufficiently privileged to afford. Interestingly, I wasn’t aware that a straight jacket stopped a person from shrieking. My understanding has always been that the voice comes out of the mouth, with nasal sounds involving the nose. I have never known of any vocalisations to emanate from the arms and hands – so the straight jacket reference, besides being offensive, has lost me a bit.

A bit of South African history: Cape Town was under Dutch rule from 1652-1795 and again in 1803-1806. So we Capetonians, Southern Suburbs included, have a strong Dutch influence, which means that we and our ‘Afrikaner Brethren’ are made of tough stuff, even without brandy. This, among other things, enables us to participate in multiple daily events, never mind weekend events. Let me explain- we typically use the early morning to cycle, swim, run, ride or do our sport and even fit in a coffee (or tea) before we shower and head off to watch our children and the children of our friends play schoolboy rugby (or our daughters’ hockey and soccer). Seeing as most of the southern suburbs schools are quite traditional and that’s what we bought into as parents, we, and our children, stay to support the First IX.

That match finishes at around 2pm, so there is still time for an afternoon nap or social activity or the all-important ‘own sport’ or professional sports match and we can do supper at 7 if we so wish. All rather dynamic and we get to show this to our children (‘Monkey see monkey do’ is a derogatory saying that originated in Jamaica, in the 1800s around the time the term bourgeois was coined, although that is of French origin). Jamaica is a Caribbean Island that is part of the Continent of North America. France is in Europe. Just so everyone knows where they are, in case some magic mushrooms made it into their tea.

Describing a child as ‘run-of-the-mill’ may feel reasonable to some, but leading experts who have research and evidence-based practise to support them may argue against that. Good parenting, including developing your child’s self-confidence, means not believing that any child is ‘run-of-the-mill’ (and ‘run of the mill’ is a term relating to manufactured goods anyway).

While talking- and hearing about your own and other children may seem relentlessly dull, in the southern suburbs of Cape Town, we – bourgeois, proletariat, working class, middle class, upper class- parents prefer not to discuss misogynistic tyrants who pay porn stars for sex. Yes, our gutters may be clean here in the southern suburbs, Cape Town being the best-run city and all, but our minds still don’t go there. Also, there is a civil war in Sudan (on the continent of Africa, like South Africa) which has resulted in 25 million people needing humanitarian aid, 14 million of those being children. 9 million people have been forced to flee, creating the largest displacement crisis globally.

But that would not be news to a schoolboy attending Bishops. They were, among other high rankings, the top Maths and Science school in 2023. That’s in addition to the Bishops scholar who ranked first in the world (maybe planet?) in his Cambridge exams for History, English Language and English Literature and first in South Africa and second in the world for Economics. Thank you for the heads-up on the importance of education though. Bishops schoolboys can thankfully multi-task and excelling at their education and playing rugby are not mutually exclusive. And more importantly, it is a school that works on fighting misogyny, homophobia, racism and please G-d, small-mindedness.

“A zooming lens allows you to quickly frame your shot and experiment with different options of the same scene without physically needing to move away from or closer to your subject”