And I just wondered how you navigated that and pushed on positively.

Look, I have to be honest that there were moments when I would pull the car off the side of the road as I drove to Stellenbosch after half a day at the school and just cry.

You know, it's impossible to hear one story after another that, you know, my father, in the language of the kids, my uncle did kick my leg until it broke.

I mean, you've got to be ice cold to walk away from that and not break down, you know.

Or I can't go home immediately because my mother, I have to wait for my mother to come from work.

Otherwise, my stepfather will molest me.

And after a while, you know, you became, I just found myself really, really, I'm not one who gets depressed, I'm a Pollyanna of sorts, but I just found myself down, you know.

What does this mean? What do you mean by this? Okay.

... trying to soberly handle a university or a tertiary institution?

Um, [laughs] I think it's much easier to be the Bok coach, um, uh, if you, under the Rassie regime.

I ac- by the way, I th- I, I think we just had a bad day at the office.

We're gonna clobber these buggers, uh, on, on Saturday.

We're a much better team than what we saw.

But anyway, um, I actually think Rassie planned to lose, by the way, just to motivate the guys, you know.

But, uh, we're the champions.

Is, is this also con- a, a, a consequence of, of what some would say was a misaligned, um, not well thought through plan to, to merge institutions?

This, so, so all of the ire, all of the gall which had been held internally spilled out and landed on him.

That is exactly right.

So the racist opportunists, they saw their, their chance, and they piled on.

And, [laughs] and the great irony, one of his biggest critics is a man who believes in race and intelligence, you know? [laughs] That kind of...

Uh, those people came out of the woodwork, you know, and said, "See what happens when," you know.

Um, and I can tell you this as one who spent most of my life in academia, um, uh, uh, plagiarism happens all the time.

And I don't know, uh, of a single white academic between you and me who has ever received this kind of mauling.

... are almost always appointed for diversity reasons and very seldom deserve the appointment they've got, I mean, that, that hangs in far too many people's minds still, and, and this is just going to increase the confidence of, of those who believe, you know, that Black people shouldn't be professors.

So what in the beginning said to you, I'm going to do this?

well i you know my first response was no no no no no when i saw the headline in the newspaper because i have so many commitments with schools universities and so on and then i realized the school is right next to the family home in retreat in which i grew up and my mother appeared to me in the dead of night and say charity begins at home and my late mother and so i i went and um told the Department of Education, you don't have to pay me.

Stellenbosch does that.

The principal was very happy for me to come.

The teachers, some of them sort of, you know, let's see what's going to happen here.

But eventually everything gelled and we got to doing two things.

One is restoring the basic functionality of the school, just make sure it runs well and on time and all that.

It's a scene of utter dysfunction.

Jonathan, would you like to maybe just muse a little bit on what that costs us when we lose the presence of the leader who was appointed to lead the school and lose them to paperwork?

Yeah, I mean, yeah.

In the book, for two years, as you probably know, I sat inside the office of the principal watching exactly what you're talking about.

And it's very clear to me that the provincial departments of education are a major reason for the underperformance of schools.

In other words, they come into schools to pressurize them to perform well, and then they do the very things.

that disable them from doing well.

So last-minute visits, a whole panel of six or seven people coming in, give us this data, we only have one hour.

What else, in your view, needs to happen in order to peel back this admin burden? Do we need to see schools appointing an admin expert to work alongside the principal? And could we even afford that? What else do we want to see happen to free up principals to be principals as they intended to be when they went into the profession?

memory than 49 or 51 and i don't think that improvement for black township black and brown if i'm allowed to use that phrase township kids cape flats kids el dorado park kids has improved much has it

No, it doesn't.

I mean, you know, I gave the Tsitsimashimini lecture in Soweto on Saturday.

You know, I remember he was one of the charismatic leaders of the student movement, you know, and I drove from the airport to Soweto and I said, in any other country, we would be an obstinate, we'd be a revolt, you know, because...

Yes, of course, there's more money for education, but as you know, it's a hell of a ripoff because of corruption embedded in it.

Yes, I cannot go to any school on paper in South Africa until you take a closer look, you use the VAR system for education, and then you see.

you must be white or you must have money with the black middle class.

Is that a route worth following?