Nationally, from 2014 to 2015, the matric pass rate fell by 5.1%. This is clearly an educational crisis. It requires a collective effort to overstep, hence the idea of Imbewu. The government is failing to provide free decolonial socialist education. As students hailing from a prestigious university, University of Cape Town, we are taking it upon ourselves to supply the service that will seek to ov
erstep those educational ills. Two weeks back, Simamkele Seti sought a post on Facebook by Masiphumele Mene that stated, “Maybe we also need to advertise .” Simamkele contextualised and put this notion forward to us, Ethni Yonga endorsed it. A network was then built amongst people that were anticipated to be interested in such ventures. Imbewu was born in a space of two days. The organisation went to schools around Mowbray to pitch the campaign, the schools did not show seriousness and dedication. The organisation then went back to schools in Khayelitsha, schools we went to in our high school years, responses were positive as anticipated. The organisation only had a skeleton of what Imbewu wanted to do that time, hence the idea of bringing grade 12 learners to the 2016 UCT Open Day. The communique was sent to the schools, some schools responded to the call, then on the 16th of April 2016 we saw learners from various high schools in Khayelitsha coming to UCT for the open day. Over and above the fact that Imbewu had only one week to prepare for the day, the turnout was good, we had over 100 learners for the day. Imbewu is basically a mentorship, tutoring and a power studying program. Ours does not solely speak to tutoring. The program directly challenges the education system itself and how it is manifested in our societies. Moving forward with the campaign: Firstly, a structured a mentorship program that will serve as a university exposure to township learners, around this, Imbewu will have motivational talks and actual physical visits to the university. Secondly, Imbewu wants to do tutoring, this is straight forward, Imbewu wants to tutor learners on all learning areas that are spotted as problematic to them. Lastly, Imbewu wants to groom learners into independence, equally so, we want them to live with a sense of socialism amongst themselves – the culture of sharing information amongst themselves and helping each other. Imbewu aims to strengthen the learner, teacher, parent and the education of the child relationship. Before the inception of Imbewu we, as the people that planted Imbewu, had programs that spoke to the same cause as Imbewu. We are disbanding those programs. Also, in place, there are programs that are speaking to the same cause as us. We just had a sense that those programs are exclusive, it’s either they charge ridiculous amounts of fees and/or they select a niche group of students. That is foetal. We want to be inclusive as much as possible. Imbewu does not subside under any political badge. We are solely working with high school learners and making sure that we get township learners to somewhere, even if it’s not university. We cannot blame the learner when there is a teacher and a parent.
