Polly Hope

Polly Hope is a television and radio researcher working in London.

Can-do Rhodie: African childhoods

Polly Hope, 8 August 2002

In 1983, when I was 11 and living in South Africa, I went to veldskool along with about twenty other girls from one of Johannesburg’s ‘liberal’ private schools. Veldskool – a compulsory annual week in the bush – was part of the national curriculum, for private schools as well as state ones. Despite privations we’d never faced before (cold group showers,...

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