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Schools hair outrage represents disturbing trend

The Pretoria High School for Girls and San Souci Hairdo Crisis (PHSGSSHC) has been overshadowed, and quickly forgotten, by the ongoing university fees crisis, and other really important matters of national interest. 

Whereas the PHSGSSHC has the all hallmarks of a bad hair day a good stylist and colour job will sort out chop-chop (puns intended because it was a joke from start to finish), the fees crisis, which began last year, has lasting, serious consequences for higher education, particularly should universities not be able to complete the 2016 academic year.

Of universities, Jonathan Jansen, who wisely is doing a runner to Stanford U, asked if this was the “final nail in the coffin”.

Without knowing the facts or having the remit to interfere in school governing body matters, Gauteng’s and Western Cape’s education MECs exacerbated the respective situations by immediately jumping into it with their PC and Gucci-shod feet. 

Length of hair, hairstyle and hairstyle accessories are personal choices, not cultural or racial practices. I’m not aware of San Souci’s hair code, but PHSG's, an extract of which I read, is actually generous and lenient of cultural preferences, if some choose to deem cornrows, braids, beads, etc that way.

This PC storm-in-hair salon is another example of the execrable and dishonest practice sweeping SA relating to "blackness" and alleged limitations of "black" freedom, however the black individual defines it, even if it counters values of his/her own family, cultural/racial group and broader society. Particularly, it's elevated to national outrage if it's a case of alleged white prejudice (in these cases, school principals and governing bodies) against black.

Imagine if Afrikaners took to wearing outrageous mullets and kappies with ribbons in the colours of the old SA republics to school and work, claiming its cultural?

In line with a disturbing new trait of “democratic” DA, and contrary to justice and fairness and not guilty of anything, Debbie Schafer suspended San Souci’s principal as a sacrificial lamb to the politically correct (PC) gods – the witch hunt brigade comprising hysterical lefty journalists, vapid media including formerly respectable, respectable publications, venal politicians and errant members of society, including students, who have fully embraced the “rights without responsibility” ethos that brought universities to their figurative knees.

When the San Souci story broke and before the facts were known, a CapeTalk presenter sententiously stood in judgement and ominously noted along these lines: "We asked the school to comment.  If they don't, well, tut tut … (that is, to us it confirms their implied guilt)".   

When a caller, I thought trying to bring balance to the few facts that were known, told of reverse, black-on-white racial intolerance, the presenter, ignoring journalistic practice of first-hand reportage, brushed it off as "gossip”. 

In this vein, the same lefty – they’re not liberals – individuals, journalists, politicians, academics, etc who praised Chumani Maxwele and RMF last year for bringing down Rhodes’ statue, this year have either quietly distanced themselves from FMF and their building and book burning and intimidation, or are in denial.  Despite the evidence, some still defend protestors and ignore the fact these protests are about more than fees, and have taken an ominous turn.  For example, UCT academic and office-based activist Pierre de Vos wrote in the once independent, but now PC, Daily Maverick, “Student protests (I assume including the destruction) are staunchly defended by the constitution”.

This is what these media houses and individuals have become – part of a brigade that’s serving a nefarious agenda.  

That was the last time I listened to that CapeTalk show, and since then I infrequently listen to the station, until I no longer will do so.  As I told him and CapeTalk’s station manager in an email, hypocrisy like this disturbs me and makes me feel ill.  It has nothing to do with fostering national constitutional values or consensus, except for those values these panderers interpret for themselves.

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