Recently, Sedgefield suffered a period of 9 days, only one day of which served up electricty to this Garden Route Paradise.

It proved to be a feast of two things for me:

• Flute Practice
• Thinking

Flute? At 81? Yes, messieurs et mesdames, it is easier to lift than a sackbut. Old trombonists never die, they just can’t lift their butts. So they learn flute. Every player of large instruments - think: Hammond organ - has said, with great feeling, at one or other gig:

In my next life, I will be a piccolo player 🤬

Normally, I sleep from around midnight to sun-up. But with lengthening nights, and rudimentary, load shedding style lighting (and eventually, no light at all as all the powerbanks and water taps ran dry), I found myself with many more hours on a bed than I am used to. And it rained and rained! I found it difficult to kick Tommy Steele out of my mind:

Except, I didn’t sit down and think, I lay down and thought. I did sit for flute, though. Who knew how challenging it is to play flute while supine? Thunk, I have to say, is a better word for thinking about music. It sounds like one of those deep, Gretsch rose-wood Grady Tate rim-shots, far better than “thought”, which is a sort of torturous. Hmmm, is “thoughturous” a word? [hums ‘melodious thunk’].

In the early days of the first outage, Maeder Osler phoned. We are committed stoep-talkers, and phoning via messaging apps bumps this into a sort of superannuated cyber-stoep gaan aan - well, while there is power. When there isn’t, I find myself longing for the old party lines:

ring-ring-ring-ring: “Lyn besig? O, ‘skiestog, tannie Miems… “

But, as usual, I digress. Maeder and I have long traded thoughts about stokvels, and one development finally moiled into a Writer Stokvel, and …

Learner Stokvels

This was my old hobby-horse.

In early democracy days, there was resistance from black families against paying school fees. Their point was that these were government schools, so why the fees?

Explaining that government schools almost everywhere in SA asked parents to pay fees, met with tight-lipped resistance. Only when parents realised that government had not paid for swimming pools, science labs, in fact had paid for nothing other than a school hall, toilets and class rooms, did the point sink in: schools like Maritzburg College got their facilities from parents paying fees.

Most African families I spoke to back then in the mid-nineties were bitter about this issue. One man even sneered “how much of that school fee money did the staff eat along the way”? He was very sure of himself. He and several parents sat with the headmaster, and apparently it was quite the debate. The headmaster had all the books, going back decades, showing exactly what money had been collected, and what it had been spent on. The middle class African parent was incredulous, but a walk around the school grounds sorted things out: he was shown the swimming pool, changing rooms, science labs, sports fields, a gymnasium, a computer lab, a stadium, roofed bicycle parking.

Grumbling and muttering, they coughed up the fees. A generation later, we have many prominent stars from such schools. For South Africans overseas, it was a revelation to hear cricket and rugby captions speak with our shared “model C” accent! Whites generally were unaware of stokvels, but had the headmaster been able to explain the scheme as a ‘stokvel’, the parents would have had no qualms at all.

I am sure there are school stokvels out there, but for elderly whites my age who are unaware of what a stokvel is or can be, what follows explains how such a scheme could work.

Very simply, everyone pays the same amount for the same number of weeks as there are people in the stokvel, and one member gets all the money once in the cycle. So, for 20 leaners paying R10 per week, one learner gets R200 each week. That’s the principle.

The first thought I had was “there 40 learners in a class, and 40 school weeks in a year”, which makes for a very easy calculation, but it doesn’t work for larger or smaller classes. Well, one has to start somewhere. So, by tying the size of the stokvel exactly to the number of weeks in a semester, the math is clear, the rotation works well, and the cycle wraps up neatly before the long winter or summer holidays. In South Africa, the Department of Basic Education structures the public school calendar into four terms, which naturally pair up into two semesters:

• Semester 1: Term 1 + Term 2 (January to June)
• Semester 2: Term 3 + Term 4 (July to December)

Government plans these dates well in advance - looking at the actual gazetted and projected calendars for South African public schools: (based on inland public school calendars):

Semester Breakdown (2026 – 2028)

• Summary Table for Quick Reference

Why This Works Beautifully for a Classroom

By shifting to this dynamic, semester-defined model, you gain some incredible advantages:

1. Perfect Clean Slates: When the semester ends, the stokvel ends.
2. No obligations hang over the winter or summer holidays.
3. If a learner changes schools or a new child joins the class in July, they can easily be accommodated in the Semester 2 cycle.
4. The “Double Circle” Solution for Large Classes: Since a typical South African classroom has about 40 to 42 learners, a single 20-week semester is too short for everyone to get a turn if it’s one payout per week. This model is so clean enough that a teacher can simply run two identical, independent circles at the same time (Circle A and Circle B) in the same classroom.

The App

We could create a phone app¹ with a “School Calendar Template” dropdown. When the user selects “2026 - Semester 1,” the app could automatically configure the cycle length to 21 weeks and calculate the payouts instantly, and allow the prefect, teacher or captain to liase with parents on the amount. Some parents may feel that R10 per day is good, working out to R50 per week. I chose R10 and R20 to keep things simple.

• 42 learners are split into two groups of 21.
• Every Friday, two children go home with R210 each.

The same take-home at R50 per week would be R1050. As “The Arch” used to say “we do not live in an ideal world”, and there are always people who exploit, skive etc, and a pandemic would crash things instantly. People are smart enough to agree on what to do about those things, and every stokvel will make its own way.