Speech at Roedean School
Sim Tshabalala

Mrs Kruger, Mrs Williams, ladies, gentlemen, Roedean girls and Roedean matrics of 2015.

Buenas tardes, bon soir, sanibonani, goeie naand, good evening – and thank you all very much for inviting me to speak to you this evening. It’s a great honour and pleasure to be here.

I must say that your invitation to speak came at an excellent moment. I was sitting in the departure lounge at Minneapolis airport, half way through a business trip. My time in the US was nearly over, and I was – rather glumly – contemplating the fact that I now had to get on a plane to Atlanta, then another plane to Lima in Peru, spend two days in meetings there, then haul myself onto a five-hour flight to Brazil, sit through yet more time in the airport in Sao Paolo, all topped off with an eight-hour flight to get back to Jo’burg. I was feeling jet-lagged, tired, and rather homesick.

So when the call came through from a certain extremely persuasive individual – who happens to be related by marriage to your Chairman – I was absolutely delighted to be able to start thinking about this great school, and what I might be able to say when I got back home to Jo’burg. The main theme came to me immediately – and I started planning to speak about well-educated and affluent women – the kind of women produced by Roedean – and what they can do to make South Africa a more prosperous, fairer, and better society.

But what do I mean by a good society? Well, I said that I was homesick in Minneapolis – but I was also deeply impressed. Minneapolis is a good society. It’s dynamic and prosperous, inclusive and fair, safe, sporty and cultured. It’s not a very big city – the total population of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area is about 3.7 million – well under half the number of people who live in the greater Johannesburg area. However, it is headquarters to 25 of the 500 largest companies in the US, making it the most important corporate centre, by population, in the country. Its public schools are very good, and extremely diverse, educating children who speak 90 different home languages. Its public university is ranked 22nd-best in the entire world – and fourth in mathematics. It is home to the Mayo Clinic, a not-for-profit doctors’ cooperative which is widely considered to be the world’s best hospital. It has the most vibrant theatre scene in the US outside New York. Its ice hockey and American football teams are much loved and very successful. Its art museum – admission is free – is packed with cultural treasures from all over the world, donated by generations of philanthropic Minnesota millionaires. A confession: I would happily travel all the way back there to eat at their excellent steak restaurants and to drink their great craft beer.

In fact, I almost certainly will go there again, and not just to enjoy myself. There are a couple of Minneapolis-based businesses that are getting increasingly interested in Africa, our continent, and who are bringing their characteristic mix of brave entrepreneurship, corporate efficiency and public–spiritedness to our continent. I plan to do everything I can to encourage them.

Good societies don’t have to be modern and rich like Minneapolis. There are lots of examples of good societies, large and small. As mentioned, I was on route to Peru, which by all appearances is also a pretty good place to live. And closer to home, the history scholars among you will know that the pre-colonial societies of southern Africa were by most accounts remarkably peaceful and fair-minded places, where people lived contented lives.

I don’t rule out the possibility that there might be some free-marketeers in this audience, so let me hasten to add that good societies don’t have to be social-democratic, like Minneapolis or Sydney or Stockholm. New York and London and Singapore are all very free-market places, but nobody could deny that they are all good societies. So it’s not about great wealth, and it’s not about whether the public sector is relatively small or relatively large.

Nope, being a good society is about dynamism, and openness and fairness and security and culture and fun. Here’s my definition: A good society is place where, if you study hard, and work hard, and play by the rules, you will be able to enjoy a good quality of life – no matter where you were born, or who your parents were, or what the colour of your skin is, or whether you are a man or a woman.

South Africa, ladies and gentlemen and girls, has made great progress since 1994 – and has immense potential to do even better. But it is still a very long way from being a good society.

Girls, you can help change that.

By the way, I do know this is turning into the traditional ‘lecture to the girls.’ Don’t worry – your parents are next.

But, first, back to the matrics: Girls, I really do know that many of the people who have spoken on this platform, on this evening, have reminded you of how privileged you are and how that privilege brings with it great responsibilities. It’s getting a bit tedious, isn’t it?

Well, too bad. It’s entirely true, and extremely important, and its worth repeating.

I’d like to add something new, however, to that message. Thanks to your heritage and your culture, Roedean girls are exceptionally well placed to help transform South Africa into a good society. This is because Roedean is a school rooted in courageous, cosmopolitan, outward-looking and – let’s face it – upper-class feminism.

Consider your founders, Miss Lawrence and Miss Earle. Again, you’ve heard this story before. But please pause for a moment to think about what they did. We’re talking about two young single women, living in a very sexist time, who got on a boat and travelled 10 000 miles into what was still a warzone to set up a school. And not a mission school, or a charity school, but an expensive, academically demanding and socially exclusive private school designed to educate young women to fight for gender equality among the upper classes. How brave – and how crazy – is that? But here’s the thing – it worked. Roedean has produced some of the most distinguished South African women of the last century, including the artist Maud Sumner, the author Lauren Beukes, the anti-apartheid activist Sheena Duncan and the Kabul-based environmentalist and feminist Belinda Bowling.

All of these women – like all Roedean girls – have been inspired by Miss Lawrence and Miss Earle’s example. All have proved that they can be at least as excellent as the best-educated and most privileged of men – including, of course, your friends on the other side of Houghton Drive. As the feminist philosopher Simone De Beauvoir put it, ‘Women are as capable of choice as men, and thus can choose to elevate themselves beyond the constraints placed upon them, reaching transcendence, a position in which one takes responsibility for oneself and the world, and chooses one’s freedom.’

Note that De Beauvoir encouraged women not only to demand freedom, but also to take responsibility for changing the world. In other words, once upper class feminists have secured equality and respect within their own social environment, they should use the power they have gained to try to create a good society for everyone.

As it happens, another twentieth century French feminist, the novelist Marguerite Yourcenar, wrote my favourite book on how power can be exercised to achieve good. This book is called The Memoirs of Hadrian – and I encourage everyone to read it. It’s a fictional reconstruction of the life and thoughts of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, one of the greatest of the Roman Emperors. Hadrian was an architect, a poet, a philosopher, and a tough-as-nails general, who renounced aggressive wars, but who fought with great skill and great ruthlessness to secure peace within the existing borders of the Roman Empire. Yourcenar’s prose is equally skilful and equally tough. According to one old-fashioned – and probably male – critic: ‘in her work, one does not find those often charming weaknesses . . . by which one identifies a feminine pen. The hand does not yield, it does not caress the paper; it is clasped by an iron gauntlet.’

This critic makes one important point, but misses two others. Yes, women can be powerful thinkers and tough, pragmatic doers – but there is certainly no contradiction between being feminine and being powerful. Equally, women’s capacity for empathy and for seeing issues in human terms is not a ‘charming weakness’ but exactly the opposite – it is a source of moral strength and political wisdom.

Another French woman provides an excellent illustration of these points. The reason I went to Lima was to attend the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund – an international agency that one can think of as the police force of the global economy.

The Managing Director of the IMF – the top cop – is a French lady called Christine Lagarde. I had the privilege of hearing her speak at a small meeting. She’s an extremely skilful and engaging speaker and she has the steely mind and powerful will of a great leader. However, Madame Lagarde is also entirely charming and feminine.

And – rather more importantly – Christine Lagarde makes the point that the trends and cycles of the world economy matter not for their own sake but because of their effects on people. When economies stumble, or shrink, or distribute their output inefficiently or unfairly, hope is destroyed and people go hungry.

This may seem obvious to you. Sadly, however, there are still a lot of people in the financial world who don’t remember this fact. In Lima, for instance, I went to a gathering of extremely powerful investment bankers and finance ministers – fierce men in dark suits – who still think and speak only in terms of abstract numbers. They need shaking up by hard-nosed, thoughtful and humane women like Christine Lagarde and – in a few years – like you.

What’s more, in addition to your leadership of international and African finance, I would love to see you debating in Parliament, deciding things in the Union Buildings, building great businesses from Jo’burg to Lagos to Cairo, making amazing discoveries at UCT and Harvard and in the Cradle of Humankind, leading and inspiring our religious communities, writing the Great African Novel, winning Oscars, and, when you are Mayor, making sure that we’ll never see a pothole or a broken traffic light in the streets of Jo’burg.

Of course, if you choose to become a mother, you will also be playing a crucial role in creating a good society. In fact, literally nothing and nobody is more important to creating good societies than well-educated, politically empowered mothers with the will and capacity to make a better world for their children.

Talking of education, I’m prepared to bet that most of the matrics – and all of the parents – here this evening have been thinking about what you should study next year. Well, as it happens, Madame Lagarde raised the question of what ambitious people should do when they finish high school, and got two very interesting answers.

Incidentally, this is another illustration of the advantages of having a woman running the IMF – I very much doubt that a male IMF managing director would ever deliberately bring the conversation round to education.

Anyway, Larry Fink, who is the CEO of Blackrock – the world’s largest asset management firm – said that his company particularly likes to hire philosophy majors, because they’ve been trained to tackle difficult problems and to think for themselves. Axel Weber, chairman of UBS – the biggest Swiss bank – said that he encourages people to do a practical job for a while before studying. The best engineers, he says, are those who have worked as artisans for a few years – they invariably go on to do PHDs. Both Mr Fink and Dr Weber, in other words, encourage people to learn how to work and how to solve problems independently. Neither regards the liberal arts as the kiss of death, and neither thinks that it’s imperative to study commerce or finance at university.

At Standard Bank, we’ve also been thinking a great deal lately about the kinds of skills we are going to need over the next several decades. Some of our conclusions are exactly what you’d expect: we need people with advanced mathematical skills to be CAs and actuaries and quantitative analysts and traders; we need the best coders and data scientists we can find to create an increasingly digital bank; we need intelligent, energetic and brave entrepreneurs to run our businesses; we need engineers to look after our physical infrastructure and to understand and support our clients’ businesses; we need lawyers to set up our deals and to safeguard our interests. In other words, all the usual ‘safe bets’ are still safe bets for Roedean girls thinking about what to do after school.

However, as the digital revolution keeps accelerating, it is creating two large new categories of safe bets for bright kids. The first will be jobs in which people ‘race with the machine’ to achieve things that no human or computer could do on their own. I know this sounds far-out and science-fiction-y, but it really isn’t. Think, for example, of the on-line courses offered by Khan Academy. These combine the creativity and entrepreneurship of one teacher with the processing and networking power of computers to deliver vastly more good-quality teaching and learning than either a human teacher or some sort of robot teaching machine could do on their own.

For the second category of new safe bets, think of the world’s largest and coolest company – Apple. The leading figures at Apple these days are not the CEO or the coders or the accountants, but the artists and designers. Processing power is a commodity. What’s irreplaceable is deep insight into what humans need and want – including beautiful smartphones, engaging narratives, fun apps, and affordable and secure banking services – and finding ways to deliver these things to them reliably and elegantly. In other words, good qualifications in the pure sciences, the humanities and the fine arts are also going to be safe bets.

Therefore, girls, if you want to study pure maths and physics rather than ‘actuarial,’ please do. If you want to major in psychology rather than marketing, please do. Parents, if you have a daughter who insists on history and history of art, surely that’s really ok? And, Mrs Williams, if there are any Roedean girls who want to be industrial designers, I’d be sure to keep them happy if I were you. One day soon, they’ll pay for your new AstroTurf.

Girls, if you want to be teachers, go for it! It’s really cool. It is my conviction that teaching is amongst the most important of professions. In the brave new world that you girls are going into, great and heroic teachers will be required. I say ‘brave new world’ deliberately to evoke Aldous Huxley’s allegory about the dangers of elite arrogance and unfairness. Indeed, in the immortal words of James Hamilton, the writer of that superb novel about the gentle art of teaching, Goodbye, Mr. Chips: ‘If I had a child who wanted to be a teacher, I would bid him Godspeed as if he were going to war…For indeed the war against prejudice, greed and ignorance is eternal, and those who dedicate themselves to it give their lives no less because they may live to see some fraction of the battle won.’

What’s more, please do go and study overseas, or work there for a while. Become a citizen of the world as well as a South African, a Motswana, a Zambian or a Congolese. Leaders need to be as comfortable in Minneapolis as they are in Jo’burg; as certain of their values in Soweto as they are in Sandton; and as confident in Lagos and Lima as they are in London.

But let me blunt: don’t emigrate – even to Minneapolis. Right now, I think that would be ill advised. In your lifetime, Africa is going to be the breadbasket and the factory of the world. Stay here. Help to make your country a good society. It’s going to be very cool – and you are going to able to make it even cooler.

OK, that’s enough demands on the girls. Let me turn my attention to the Board, Head, parents and teachers.

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m worried that top schools like Roedean are turning out too many over-entitled ‘gilded youth’ – kids who plan to drift through life on their trust funds or who seem to believe that they’re entitled to a degree and a cushy job whether or not they choose to study.

Some – mostly white – gilded youth become utterly detached from South Africa’s realities, apparently hypnotising themselves into the belief that they live in an unusually sunny part of London. This amounts, I’m sorry to say, to a kind of sophisticated racism.

And, depressingly, there are other gilded youth – mostly black – who are much more explicit and hard-edged in their racial prejudices, often adopting a crude and ignorant ‘anti-colonial’ position.

I find it painful to contemplate how far all these privileged young people, black and white, appear to have drifted from values of the great anti-apartheid, civil rights and black consciousness leaders of the 60s, 70s and 80s – people like Steve Biko, Bram Fischer, Ruth First, Oliver Tambo, Albertina Sisulu, Helen Suzman and Nelson Mandela – men and women, black and white, whose dedication to the political liberation of black South Africans was hewn from the same rock as their commitment to women’s liberation, to equitable economic development, and to universal human rights.

So I think that all of us – school boards, teachers and parents – need to be much clearer that ‘entitlement’ is totally unacceptable. Nobody – white or black, male or female – is entitled to anything on the basis of their identity alone.

Further, I think we need to consciously set ourselves the task of developing a coherent, non-racial, anti-racist generation who are able to believe in each other’s good faith and who can take a wide and generous view of South Africa’s and our continent’s interests. We need you to produce new generations of women who understand that there’s no substitute for hard work, who are comfortable about their whiteness, proud of their blackness, understand the strange, rich tapestry that is their heritage, and value the common humanity that they recognise in each other.

We need you, in other words, to educate the girls who will become urbane, tolerant and cosmopolitan citizens of South Africa, the continent, and the world. You don’t have to make them into life-long friends. You absolutely shouldn’t try to make them think alike. But you should aim to ensure that they are confident in themselves and with each other; that they understand each other’s assumptions; that they are equipped for careers that can span the public, private and educational sectors; and, above all, they all feel part of a shared grand project – the project of making a good society.

With that, matric class of 2015, I bid you Godspeed as you go out there and do your bit to make South Africa a more prosperous, fairer, and better society.

Ladies and gentlemen, girls, thank you for listening to me.