An Eyewitness News (EWN) report alleging that Curro Foundation School in Roodeplaat was practicing racial "segregation" has provoked a racial uproar on social media on Thursday. The controversy follows the school's decision to place the only six white children, in its initial English-language Grade R intake, along with some twelve other black children. The other two Grade R classes were, as a result, made up of only black children.
According to EWN a group of thirty (black) parents signed a petition demanding "to know why some classes are made up exclusively of black children, while white pupils are kept together. They say separating children at such a young age perpetuates racial and cultural segregation and stunts the nation's transformation."
The article quoted André Pollard of Curro Holdings, the JSE-listed company which owns and runs the school. as saying "that in some grades they have a very small number of white pupils who they try and keep together in one group. He says once they have 12 or more children, they divide them equally into classes. ‘It's not because we would like to segregate the whites, it's just because of friends. Children are able to make friends with children of their culture'."
The school's failure to distribute these six white children evenly across three classes (i.e. two in each class), and instead place them in a single racially integrated class (where they still constituted a small minority), was widely condemned by many of South Africa's most prominent racial thought leaders.
Eusebius McKaiser, Oxford Rhodes Scholar and columnist for the Iqbal Survé group of newspapers, slammed the school as disgustingly racist for "racially segregating" children in this manner:
Disgusting racism at Curro Foundation School, racially segregating children. MEC @Lesufi must come down hard on them like a tonne of bricks.