History of Amasango Career School

Grahamstown is a small University town in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. With little industrial development, the sprawling township has unemploment figures soaring over 50%. Extreme poverty is commonplace and is a breeding ground for many social ills including alcoholism, drug abuse and violence. This abject poverty and social disintegration has led to an acute streetchildren problem, exacerbated by South Africa’s AIDS crisis. Hundreds of children are outside the schooling system and live on the periphery of society, begging outside shopping centres and rummaging in dustbins for food. They are always hungry and are often victims of physical, sexual and emotional abuse, some are even used as drug runners.

Without specialised intervention, children growing up in extreme poverty have little hope of not being sucked into a vortex of crime, prostitution and drug dependancy. Children who grow up emotionally stunted with no sense of self-worth or any vision of hope for the future will almost invariably grow into angry, violent adults who will, at best, perpetuate the cycle and, at worst, become violent criminals.

Jane Bradshaw, who previously worked with street children in East London, identified the need to intercede on these children’s behalf and started the Grahamstown Amasango Career School in two shipping containers donated by the Daily Bread charitable trust in the grounds of Eluxolweni Shelter, off Anderson Street in April 1995. These containers were boiling hot in summer and bitterly cold in winter. They were so crowded that learners had to walk over the tops of the desks in order for the teachers to mark their work.

The Department of education was quick to recognize the needs and rights of these children to receive relevant education and re-registered the Amasango school as Special Needs school as early as January 1996.

Later, as the curriculum was extended, one small room and the dining room at the shelter were also used as teaching areas. By 1997 the school was up to Grade 7. At this initial stage only the 25 children who lived in the shelter attended the school. In 2001 Mrs Bradshaw was given the opportunity to take over the lease of buildings in the station yard from the railways at a nominal rental, and so in May 2001 the school was moved to its current premises and numbers began to increase.

Amasango continues to have a good working relationship with Eluxolweni shelter as all its residents are refered to Amasango school. Amasango currently caters for 140 former street children. There are, however, thousands of these children all over the Eastern Cape and, indeed, the country.