St Cyprian’s Day 2021

Good afternoon everyone and thank you Ms Frayne for that wonderfully generous introduction. Warm greetings to you all - revered clergy, honoured guests, staff, teachers and most of all the girls, here with us today in the chapel and beyond.

It’s an honour both treasured and unexpected to be here addressing you on this special day on this particularly special anniversary. When Yvette Brummer first invited me, I could scarcely believe that St Cyprian’s School was turning one hundred and fifty years old. Partly because it meant that I’d matriculated an awfully long time agotwenty-six years to be exact - but also because it nudged me, not only towards remembering the girls I’d gone to school with, but also towards imagining all the girls who’ve passed through those gates since I left and all the girls who went before me. We must number in the thousands by now, all us girls and women, linked across time and space, touched and turned by this gem of a school in all its rich and complicated history.

For a century and a half, St Cyprian’s School has dedicated itself to preparing young women to take up their place in the world and to assuring them - us - with a combination of open-heartedness, confidence, courage (despite sometimes hostile environments and systems) that what we have to say, what we have to offer, and who we want to be, matters.

It’s a school where students become alive to their collective social responsibilities, where they are encouraged in their individual gifts, and where they are taught that strength and gentleness are not mutually exclusive. And so joyfully in recent decades, it’s become a place that understands that difference, and the ability to welcome it in all its forms, is how we become stronger and better and the place in which we thrive. (It’s also a place in which I had a great deal of fun, because girls are awesome!)

And to stand here today in this chapel, a space I have always cherished, with its wide arches and familiar altar and its one hundred and fifty years’ worth of songs and hymns and announcements and fidgeting and whispering and notes passed in hymn books – well, it’s very precious and beautiful. Because the chapel, I think, is the place that holds the school’s history and future: the past, this moment and the promise of what is to come. And it’s that relationship between a little bit of my then and your now that I’d like to speak about today and I hope so much that you find some of it useful…

In thinking about today my mind turned to St Cyprian’s days that I participated in and a flurry of memories of polished black shoes, mandatory French plaits, navy ribbons, sweetly turned down white socks (and later the sophistication of graduating to blackmail stockings), of assembling on the hockey field, a laundered blazer on the inside arm, the mountain behind us, the stretch of the city and the long walk down to Company’s Gardens ahead, the day always bright and fresh (just as this one is)… The insistence that we walk in height order that sometimes muddled grades so sometimes you found yourself with someone who wasn’t in your class, the bouquets of lilies, the beautiful hoisting of the banners - one for our school’s saint, another for peace, that magnificent burst of song from the school choir of Gloria in excelsis Deo that inaugurated the evensong (and I must tell you that I wept when I heard yours and that your choir-master equals Mrs Erasmus in gesticulation and passion), and then eventually the march towards the Cathedral knowing that once there that we would see our beloved North Star - Archbishop Tutu - in all his glorious joy and gravitas. The march around the Cathedral, itself dazzlingly beautiful - both a place of worship and of extraordinary political and civic engagement… Then heading back to school for a marzipan iced cake (iced within an inch of its life) for some dancing round the tree that we all told each other was deeply embarrassing, but secretly we all loved…

I thought about how this highlight on the school calendar felt then, as it does now, as a marker of a rapid spin towards the end of year, because before you knew it, it was exams, then it was December… But it also always felt, because it was Spring, as though it was the beginning of something. Spring festivals with all their new beginnings always feel as though they’re about hope, and St Cyprian’s Day is no different because it declares over and over again a sense of great hope in the future of its girls. A hope that they will be thoughtful, engaged and caring.

And I know that for some, it may feel as though hope is in short supply these days. I’ve been thinking so much about St Cyprian’s Day today and how it’s different - in terms of gathering and place and what’s possible. And how this time is so different. And I‘ve been thinking about you girls, and what your generation has been through these past eighteen months and I wondered what I could possibly tell you about this time and about what may lie ahead that would be helpful. I thought about all the ways things changed for you overnight - how the classroom, even the classroom! - that solid, predictable, reliable thing, could disappear very quickly, that sport and drama and singing could be rescheduled or cancelled and that suddenly almost all your life could be reduced to a screen. That you were surrounded by adults who were likely - and rightly - frightened of something none of us could see, but that all of us were touched by. It’s been a time that none of us could have imagined and certainly a time none of us would have ever wanted to imagine for any of you, and yet here you all are in your glorious beauty and resilience and creativity.

In all this we’ve been reminded – in ways both small and tragic - that things don’t always work out as planned. And perhaps the only way through this time of upheaval and deep loss for so many, is to meet the moment as best we can, and that in that meeting, to reach for that combination of courage and open-heartedness that St Cyprian’s cultivates in all its precious girls, and to embrace the understanding that transitional periods – however difficult - can be instructive, character building, and that in times of crisis there can be daring creativity, solutions, generosity and insight.

My own years here, between 1988-1995 were also marked by a time of intense transition and change in our country and in our school and I want to tell you a little bit about that time. It’s of course very different to now, but challenging too, in that we didn’t always know what lay ahead and we had to find ways to be calm and nurture joy and resilience in the midst of turbulence. I don’t need to tell any of you that the early nineties in South Africa was a time of profound transformation, that our country was changing from a brutal system of state oppression into democracy, that we were in the process of concretizing a longcherished dream of building an inclusive and just society.

It was an extraordinary time, and it is impossible for me to separate out that time from my time at St Cyprian’s. It was here, in this parking lot when I was twelve years old that my mother collected me and my sister one hot February afternoon, that I got in the car to find her quietly crying with joy because she’d just heard on the radio the announcement that key anti-apartheid organisations had been unbanned and that true change was imminent. It was on St Cyprian’s Day in 1991 at the concert that five students, just 13 years old, announced that for their performance they’d be singing the national anthem and promptly got up and sang only Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika. We were three years from democracy; in its own way it was an astonishing and courageous moment, as it also was to see that there were some teachers who stood up and sang with them.

That time, long hoped for, long fought for, long sacrificed for, paid for by some with their lives, was not easy nor was it simple. It was a jubilant time - we were often wild with joy and hope for what was to come - but it was also a slippery time, mercurial and uncertain.

There were many stretches of continued darkness, of unrest, of staggered negotiation, of deep woundedness and betrayal, of violence and hurt and the threat that everything could go badly off course. It could be a stressful and scary time to be young and the arguments in the country were often mirrored in the arguments in the school - how could they have not been? And it felt very often as though we, as young people, had very little control over what might happen, even though our lives and our futures depended on democracy coming into being. And into this cauldron of uncertainty and worry, stepped the remarkable Tessa Fairbairn, principal from 1990 - 2008.

Tessa Fairbairn did so many thing to guide us through. She was a model of compassion, of inclusion, of leadership, of womanhood and integrity… She was also, we were all convinced, in possession of secret powers because she seemed to know something specific about each girl and she had the uncanny ability of appearing at precisely the moment you might be getting up to something naughty. She’d materialise around a corner and say something like, ‘Ah, Miss Davids, Miss Jowell, Miss Mangaliso, Miss Dyers - I’m sure we can find a better use of your time and energies’. I won’t dwell too much on Miss Fairbairn’s supernatural powers, but I do want to talk about two things Tessa Fairbairn did that helped us to build community, ameliorate our fears and find a sense of connection and togetherness during that time, despite the fact that we’d come out of a country where everything and everyone was split.

She introduced a prayer and invited us to begin a practice of peace.

Each day, for several years, she had this chapel bell rung at noon. The teacher would stop the class and the girls would rise from their desks and for a full minute, we would stand in silence, and into that silence we were asked to offer up a prayer for peace for our country. It’s difficult now for me to fully describe what those moments were like - the textures of that silence, how into that quiet - hundreds of minutes spread across a number of years…So many things were put into that silence: I knew then that those silences held fears and hopes and a clutch of bright wishes for tomorrow, but perhaps they held grief for families who had lost people and time and homes and livelihoods and opportunities to oppression and to the struggle against it. And perhaps the silence held confusion and concern and remorse for those affiliated to anyone who’d done the hurting. What I did know was that the minute granted us all the grace to turn inwards and in turning inwards to not think only of ourselves, but about the community of the school and the country to which we all belonged and the kind of future we wanted to manifest and take part in. That was Tessa’s practice of peace.

The introduction of the prayer held equal importance and she would recite it at every assembly and so we heard it at least three times a week, The Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi and I share it with you here:

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

Where there is injury, pardon;

Where there is error, the truth;

Where there is doubt, the faith;

Where there is despair, hope;

Where there is darkness, light;

And where there is sadness, joy.

Grant that I may not so much seek

To be consoled, as to console;

To be understood, as to understand;

To be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned; And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

The tremendous beauty and power of this prayer - the radiance of its poetry, the belief embedded in it that decency, kindness, and a sense of community were the building blocks of peace, held me then and they hold me today.

It was not of my faith and yet it gave me faith, a great faith in people’s capacity to do good - to cultivate that ‘peace, hope and light’. It offered me guidance in how to to be of use in the world, to think about how I could ‘console, understand, love, pardon’ - not things I am always able to do, but I am learning, trying and it’s an endless process. It is, I understand now, a prayer that contains a set of instruction about how to cultivate a degree of selflessness, of deep care, that makes for a healthy society, in a country that is so unhealthy and so profoundly unequal in every way.

In an age when we are flooded with new ways of thinking about how to be mindful and how to go through many rituals of self-care, I find it as inspiring, comforting even, that this prayer, named after a 13th century saint, with its call for peace could hold so many of the lessons, and ones I could return to again and again. So I want to say to you girls today that the gift of this school, the gift of St Cyprian’s is that you may not always know what you’ve learned at it, until you’ve left. I think of the teachers I had here and how what they gave me was an understanding of not only how to think, but how to be - We teach not for school, but for life.

The world is a difficult place to inhabit right now, perhaps it’s always been so, and so much needs fixing, improving and radical remaking. And so much emphasis is placed on busyness and success and public selves and while action and doing is essential, so too is the understanding that change is also forged in stillness. Stillness - and prayer is a kind of stillness - is the gift of being able to go in, it is the place in which we can imagine different futures and commit daily towards building them.

The wonderful activist and novelist Arundhati Roy sums this up in one of her mesmerising sentences when she asks us to consider what can be found and what can be heard in stillness -

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

I can think of no better way of describing those minutes of silence here at St Cyprian’s all those years ago.

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

Thank you.

Nadia Davids Class of 1995