PeacePlayers South Africa Storybook FINAL - Flipbook - Page 83
the church, to name a few. This enabled Bena and his siblings to switch schools and attend
Addington Primary School where they would get a higher quality education, rather than
their neighborhood school which wasn’t well maintained.
As Bena recalls, while attending Addington, it wasn't easy to navigate through the streets.
The path to school often felt like a walk of hopscotch or walking on hot rocks through
surrounding turmoil. Addington is located in the infamous “Point” area close to South
Beach. At the intersection of Point road and Saint George street, there are "all sorts of drugs,
gang activity and street kids (young kids engaging in crime)," Bena says. Even with his
transition from primary school, there were a variety of temptations at an early age. Bena
recalls primary school kids drinking alcohol due to peer pressure and because that’s what
surrounded them as they walked out the house.
Around this time, South Africa was fresh off the heels of Apartheid. Non-white South
Africans remained cut off from important resources. Certain behaviours arose from
decades of people being systematically denied healthier paths toward opportunity and
prosperity. Let alone being a black foreigner in South Africa, a country where xenophobia
tends to show, especially amongst black South Africans and black foreigners from across
the continent.
II. INTRODUCTION TO PEACEPLAYERS
Luckily, Bena doesn’t recall many bad experiences with xenophobia. Bena credits his role
model and big brother, Elize, for setting the example in not succumbing to the temptation
and negativity that surrounded him. Elize says, "it was never cool for me to follow the
crowd, and I tried to instill that within my little brother." When Bena reached Grade 4 at
Addington Primary School, he met Scott Lunga, who soon became his best friend. They
met through playing basketball on Addington’s PeacePlayers squad. They both had people
around them who taught them to be strong-minded young men who didn’t give in to peer
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