This is a photo that I took at a school presentantion, while I was working at Observatory Primary. The child was dressed in his cultural regalia, a little boy from the townships of South Africa dressed like a long distant ancestor. The kids are strange, half westernised and half deeply ingrained native beliefs. His people are the Xhosa of Southern Africa, once great enemies of the Zulu nation who roamed Africa before the Europeans arrived.

For generations now his people have lived in shanty towns on the borders of the cities. The school that he is attending is made up mainly of Xhosa speaking children, watched over by slightly panicked white school marms...We don't know how to command their attention in most classes. We don't understand what they remark to each other as we reprimand them.

Their culture regards a raised voice as a sign of respect. They clamour to out-shout each other as if they were still communicating in the open savannahs. We tell them to sit down, be quite. Look at me when I'm talking to you! How was I to know that looking someone in the eye in their culture is the same thing as challenging someone to combat?

All my life they existed only on the periphery, until I spent time being a teacher to them. Learning that our inability to communicate stemmed from something far deeper than the colour of out skin. It stemmed from different worlds. Theirs, a strange and uncomfortable blend of Western consumer culture and traditional African heritage. Mine a struggling and frustrated rejection of Western consumer culture, and a longing for a deeper heritage of my own.

I won't go back to teaching again. Not within the education system as it now stands. This country has a very long way to go in terms of serving the needs of the public. But the time that i spent there was invaluable.