“The death of four-year-old Langalam Viki in a pit toilet should never have happened”

March 20, 2023 by Leave a Comment

“Suffer little children, and forbid them not”

A boy-child was forced to drown in shit.
The Elders expressed shock, then promised
Change, then did nothing, less than and worse
Than nothing. Then a girl-child was forced
To drown in shit. The Elders expressed
Shock, promised great change, and did nothing.
Less than and worse than nothing. This month
A girl-child was forced to drown in shit.
The Elders expressed shock, then promised
Change, then did nothing, less than and worse
Than nothing. This poem, this story,
This song, we call this education.

In the Daily Maverick, Zukiswa Pikoli wrote, “The death of four-year-old Langalam Viki in a pit toilet should never have happened. The people who work for the Department of Education at the school, provincial and national level, who are responsible for this negligence and neglect should hang their heads in shame.”  Another South African, Melanie Verwoerd, wrote, “Thinking of the fear these little children must have felt and their desperate struggles for air in the last minutes of their lives is almost unbearable. Of all the things the government has neglected to deliver on, this is without doubt the most shameful.” On Saturday, March 18, in the town of Buffelsdoring in the Eastern Cape, four-year-old Langalam Viki was laid to rest. Langalam Viki drowned in a pit latrine at her school. When Langalam Viki did not show up at her home, her mother, went looking for her. Langalam Viki’s body was finally located and “retrieved”. What else is there to say?

On January 20, 2014, when five-year-old Michael Komape drowned in a pit latrine at his school, in Limpopo, James Komape, Michael’s father, said, “They should have helped. My son was going to school. I did not send him to die.” I did not send him to die, and yet he was sent to his death, by a State that refuses to replace the certain death sentences of schoolhouse pit latrines with safe and secure school toilets.

On March 12, 2018, when five-year-old Lumka Mketwa drowned in a pit latrine at her school, in the Eastern Cape, Lumka Mketwa’s family had serious questions. They asked who was responsible for their daughter’s death? They asked, who is responsible for children’s education, safety, wellbeing, when they are at school?  They asked, why is this not a national emergency? How many more children must die, how many more families must be haunted? Michael Komape’s family is haunted. Lumka Mketwa’s family is haunted. The State is not haunted. If it were, it would have acted.

Since the unending tragedies of Michael Komape and Lumka Mketwa’s respective and combined deaths, studies have “strongly argued for the total eradication of pit latrines in all South African schools, especially those located in the rural areas and informal settlements.” Anything less would be a gross violation of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa. Others have noted, with a sense of urgency, “The right to basic education of a child is a requirement of human dignity. South Africa, through its new dispensation and conformity with human rights laws, is expected to transform and be consistent with the provision of the Constitution of 1996 that promotes and protects the best interest of the child.” Pit latrines are not in the best interest of the child. Meanwhile …

Zukiswa Pikoli concludes, “The name Langalam means “my sunshine” in isiXhosa. The Department of Basic Education should hang its head in shame for taking away grieving mother Nangamso Viki’s sunshine.”  The Ministers lie, the children die, the parents ask why … and the world, such as it is, moves on, and the cycle we pursue begins and ends in shame, or at least its invocation.

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Image Credit: Lady Skollie: “Papsak Propaganda III: And I Was Really Far Out And You Thought I Was Waving, But I Was Drowning” / Everard Read)

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England’s seclusion rooms form a landscape of atrocity and shame

October 21, 2018 by 21 Comments

In 2017, New Zealand banned schoolhouse seclusion rooms. On Friday, a report came out indicating that across England primary and secondary schools are routinely using “seclusion rooms”. The report suggested that both the scale and frequency of use is much higher than expected: “Many schools use them as part of an escalating set of disciplinary measures. Our research found over two-thirds of the country’s largest academy trusts have schools that use some form of isolation, although with varying labels from `inclusion units’ and `consequence booths’ to `time-out spaces’ and `calm rooms’.” The isolation cells are used from the first year. Primary school students can stay in for a day at a time; secondary school students can stay in for five consecutive days. The torture of solitary confinement clothed in the language of inclusion, consequence, time-out and calm is the lesson children across England – and Canada and the United States and beyond – are learning in an age of expanding and intensifying zero tolerance. While A Critique of Pure Tolerance once inspired a generation of activists to action, today we need A Critique of Zero Tolerance. We need it, and, even more, our children and grandchildren need it … now.

In August, a report noted that exclusion, or out-of-school suspension, was rampant in secondary schools across England. 45 schools suspended at least 20% of their students, with some schools topping 40%. In September, a follow up report noted the rampant use of isolation booths, variously referred to as “consequences rooms” or “internal exclusion.” The line from “internal exclusion” to alienation to abnegation to death-in-life to lifelong trauma is direct.

August, September, October, another month, another discovery … of a phenomenon taking place all over the country. Founded in 2013, the TBAP Multi-Academy Trust “supports learners who are experiencing difficulty with or have been excluded from mainstream education.” The people at TBAP Multi-Academy Trust know that seclusion rooms don’t work and, equally important, are bad for all children and all learners. Last year, TBAP Multi-Academy Trust Chairman of the Board Paul Dix wrote, “A room with isolation booths is the bleakest sign of an institution giving up. It shouts ‘we don’t know what to do’ at children who often don’t know what they’ve done wrong. Look around inside any isolation room where children are separated for long periods of time from the rest of the school, and I would lay good money that more than 80% of the children in there have additional needs. Some will have a diagnosed special educational need or disability, others will be struggling with hidden that are all too obvious to those who work with them every day: trauma, anxiety, attachment, grief, or plain old-fashioned neglect. The sins of the adult world are soaked up by a minority of children. Then we stick them in a booth and call it education. The booths are a shame on all of us, not the children who are forced to sit in them.”

How many more times must we “discover” that throwing children into seclusion rooms, no matter what they’re called, is wrong? Why do we need to discuss whether the rooms “work” or are too “costly”? What about the cost to children’s lives? What about the cost, as well, to the very concept of education? What does a child learn when exclusion is called inclusion, terror is called calm, and a war on children is called education? We should all be ashamed. Are we?

(Photo Credit: Cambridgeshire Live)

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Jamaican Christine Case, 40, died on Sunday at Yarl’s Wood

April 2, 2014 by 19 Comments

Jamaican Christine Case, 40, died on Sunday at Yarl’s Wood. Nothing to be seen here; move along; just another Jamaican woman in Yarl’s Wood. “One more dead body behind the walls of Britain’s detention centres.” One more dead woman. That’s all.

Officially Christine Case died of a massive pulmonary thromboembolism, but fellow prisoners tell a different story. They say Christine Case was denied medical assistance. It’s also been claimed that local National Health Service doctors who offered assistance to distressed prisoners after Case’s death were turned away.

Serco runs Yarl’s Wood. Serco claims they have “24-hour, seven-day urgent medical cover on site at Yarl’s Wood.” And yet … Christine Case is dead.

Some say Christine Case called for help, as she was feeling severe chest pains, and that the `care’ she received was paracetamol, a mild analgesic for minor aches and pains. Not for severe pains, and especially not for severe chest pains.

Emma Mlotshwa, of Medical Justice, noted: “We are shocked but not surprised to hear of this tragic death. Any death in immigration detention is avoidable as immigration detention is optional. Our volunteer independent doctors have seen an alarming number of incidents of medical mistreatment. The only thing we are surprised about is that there have not been more deaths.”

People have questions. The immigration minister promises, yet again, yet another investigation.

Meanwhile, Yarl’s Wood is in lockdown. Yarl’s Wood is a house of women’s fear and women’s mourning … and women’s solidarity.

Four years ago, almost to the day, women prisoners, asylum seekers all, at Yarl’s Wood organized a massive hunger strike. 35-year-old Jamaican asylum seeker Denise McNeil was identified as a `ringleader’, moved to another prison, and placed in solitary. The Yarl’s Wood women hunger strikers took the calculus of violence and turned it on its head. They said they are better than that, they are women, fighters used to fighting, peacemakers used to making peace, and no one decides that it is right for them to be slaughtered.

The world paid attention … for a minute.

Twenty-one years ago immigration officers killed Jamaican Joy Gardner, 40, as her five-year-old son and her mother watched. What has changed since then? The killing now takes place behind walls and bars.

For some, the handling of women asylum seekers at Yarl’s Wood `puts the UK to shame.’ It does, but it does more than that. It shames the world, where this is the allotted fate for far, far too many women. Black women. Immigrant women. Women.  A woman died that night.

 

(Photo Credit: Handout / BBC)

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Alabama’s shame is the United States’ shame

October 12, 2011 by 1 Comment

Last week, five women from Bessemer and Birmingham met outside the Hugo L. Black U.S. District Courthouse in downtown Birmingham. They look like a pretty diverse handful of women. They stood there, alone, with their children and their placards, and explained that they are all U.S. citizens, that their children are U.S. citizens, and that their partners are undocumented residents. They appealed to the better conscience and the better consciousness, not to mention the common sense, of the State and of the Court to overturn HB56. They explained that without their partners’ income, they would face desperate times: “If you don’t want to pay for our kids, repeal HB56.”

Quite a few women in Alabama are expressing similar concerns. Lana and Jamie Boatwright run a tomato farm on Chandler Mountain, in Alabama. The tomatoes are ready for picking, but the workers have fled, mostly to Florida where the fieldwork is better and, thus far, the laws are less hostile.

And it’s not just farmers who are suffering, already, from the culture of the law. Contractors, already squeezed by a deep and long recession, now can’t find workers. Teachers, school nurses and school systems report that the children are beginning to disappear. Foley Elementary School, with a 20% Latina/o population, already reports absences, withdrawals, and, even more, a climate of fear, sorrow, pain and suffering, trauma. Those are children. Not that it should matter but it needs to be said, those are children who are mostly U.S. citizens. What is the name for that curriculum, the one these children experience and study?

And the mothers are gathering and organizing, as they do. Mothers who are undocumented residents, like Trini, Erica Suarez, and so many others, are organizing power of attorney for their kids, should “the worst” occur. Mothers with proper papers or with citizenship, women like Rosa Toussaint Ortiz, are agreeing to take care of the children, should “the worst” occur. And activists, women like Monica Hernandez and Helen Rivas, promise to continue to take care of the women, men, children, not to forget, to continue the struggle.

The situation is shameful.

Alabama’s shame is the United States’ shame, and it has a familiar ring to it. What is the name of the shameful system that is emerging in Alabama? First, terrorize a racially or ethnically identified minority population. The terror did not begin with the passage of the law. The terror began with the first mention of its possibility. Then criminalize that population. Then put the “newly minted” criminals in prisons, and if those prisons could be private, as they will be in Alabama, all the better. Then, and here’s the kicker, when businesses, and in particular when farmers and contractors “discover” that the labor well has gone dry, provide them with prisoners, at rock bottom prices, of course. That’s what John McMillan, commissioner of the Alabama Department of Agriculture and Industries, suggested. The State is looking into short- and long-term solutions to the labor problem and is feeling “optimistic.”

Optimistic?

What is the name of that system of shame that Alabama is dutifully re-enacting? Some call it slavery, and perhaps they’re right. What would you call that shame, that shameful system, which haunts the United States?

 

(Photo Credit: al.com)

 

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