The disappearance of Enoch Mpianzi from Parktown Boys’ School orientation camp in the North West province and the subsequent discovery of his drowning last week has shaken the country.
The account of what took place by one of his peers (voiced by a Radio 702 staff member to protect the boy’s identity, and broadcast last week) made me want to weep.
The boy described how he had just met Enoch (13) and they struck up a friendship. He claimed no roll call was taken before the boys left the school or on their arrival at the camp at the Crocodile River.
They were instructed to build a stretcher and to pretend that one of their group was injured.
When they reached the river he said no life jackets were issued.
They were asked who could and who could not swim and Enoch indicated that he could swim.
The river was strong and the stretcher capsized. The boys scrambled to hang on where they could.
“At that moment, I felt as if I was going to die,” recounted the child.
The boy said he saw Enoch struggling to keep his head above water as he was swept downstream.
“The current was so strong that it was impossible to swim. We could all have been swept away.”
The kids were pulled out of the river by the camp facilitators but Enoch was not among them.
What really disturbed me is how the boy described how he was constantly rebuffed and dismissed by authority figures when he tried to raise the alarm.
“The person doing the roll call said he thinks Enoch did not come to the camp, but I told him Enoch was at the camp and the last time I saw him, he was struggling in the river.”
This person dismissed him saying that there were groups where the headcount was higher than before and that Enoch may have joined one of these groups. This happened again and again.
Whether the boy’s death should be blamed on the camp facilitators or the school and its teachers or both is up to a judge to decide.
But what strikes me (beyond the obvious issues of roll call and life jackets) is that adults often dismiss children, thinking they know better simply because ‘I am an adult and you are a child’.
Truth be told, children often have a far superior assessment of what is going on then we give them credit for.
Too many children are ignored when they look for help from abuse by adults.
That this unnamed boy might blame himself for not ‘doing more’ is a sickening thought, when it is the adults who were responsible.
My heart goes out to Enoch’s mother, his family.
Their pain is the type that is too awful to look at straight on because it is every parent’s worst fear realised.
We may also be tempted to demonise this school and the camp facilitators but I think what is more frightening – although not to excuse what was done to Enoch in any measure – is just how easily the same could happen at our own schools.
My own experience of school camps bears witness.
In Grade 7 my class visited a wilderness camp where we slept in bungalows, went on orienteering hikes, crawled through the mud and abseiled down cliff faces.
It was awesome. One night we were herded out in the dark quite a long way from camp for a game of ‘Stalk the Lantern’: you are divided into teams and the objective of the game is to get as close to the lantern as possible, without having a flashlight shine on you.
We scattered into the bushes and – fast forward a few hours – I suddenly realised it was very quiet. . . too quiet. In fact, I was alone.
Then I found another little girl who had been hiding nearby.
We called and called but it quickly became clear that we had been left behind. So much for roll call. Being quite plucky young girls we laughed (nervously) and slowly traced our way back.
I clearly remember walking into camp thinking how everyone would be so relieved to see us (and feeling proud that we did not get lost).
No such luck.
No one had even realised we were gone and we were now in trouble for not coming when called.
As a goody-two-shoes who never broke a rule I was quite offended at the unfairness of it all.
Now I realise those teachers were simply embarrassed by their own oversight and frightened by the thoughts of what might have been.
A grade 10 camp was perhaps more disturbing but for different reasons.
We were in the ‘Berg’ at a rather ordinary facility that also catered for adult team builds because they had a bar.
Once the teachers were asleep an arrangement was made with the barman and half the grade were completely sloshed before morning.
I remember sitting in my cabin with my eyes as big as saucers after bumping into a very drunk fellow pupil on my way back from the bathroom.
I knew that some kids sneaked into nightclubs with fake IDs on the weekend, but at a school camp?
I was mainly horrified that the teachers were so oblivious.
Ratting my peers out was not an option because that would have haunted me for the rest of my school career (high school is hard enough without committing social suicide).
You might laugh and call it mischief, but what if a teen had stumbled drunk into water or down a bank?
Then there’s peer pressure.
Kids potentially being pressured into drinking by other kids while their parents think they are being supervised in a safe environment.
As parents we need to start asking hard questions from our children’s schools when we release them into their care. Tragedies do happen but many could just as easily have been avoided.
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