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Prefects‖ and participated in the ―Council of Prefects.‖ In addition to the roles listed in the Student Handbook, a list was published each academic year, and posted on bulletin boards on campus, outlining names of students assigned to various other on-campus tasks. This list, entitled,
―Students Allocation of Responsibilities,‖ included responsibilities such as ―mail,‖ ―gardening,‖
―store-room,‖ ―television,‖ ―spouses,‖ and ―milk.‖170 Job descriptions for ―Head Prefect‖ and
―Prefects‖ suggest roles that facilitate communication and maintain and improve campus life:
a. Head Prefect: (1 person) to promote the close working and living relationships within the community; to act as a facilitator, ensuring that the concerns of the community are dealt with in a fair and timely manner; to preside over the school leaders weekly meeting. In other words, to serve as a ―channel‖. The HP reports major problems, concerns, resolutions and suggestions to the Director.
b. Prefects: (2 from each school) are liaisons within the community and between the community and the administration. They assist in resolving problems and needs of the community (i. e. wood-cutting, damaged buildings, care of water tank, and general problems arising from the close living quarters.
Prefects and other campus positions were decided in elections that took place about one month after the opening of the school each academic year. One election procedure which does not appear in the Student Handbook, but that occurred each year I was at MTS, was that the Director mandated that one officer from the previous academic year (he suggested who this would be) would automatically receive a post in the current academic year. Many students with whom I spoke indicated that they felt this limited their choice of leaders. Prefects and campus governance in general, including the roles of the instructors and Director, were topics of inquiry in my interviews with students, pastors, church leaders, and key informants.
As was the case with the discussion about the worship life of the campus community, presented above, former student perceptions about Prefects and their particular roles on campus seem to change somewhat for students who attended MTS sometime during the late 1990s.
―Thabiso,‖ a pastor who graduated between 1995 and 2000, recalls strictness in the roles and responsibilities of Prefects, and seems to relate it to behaviours of students who had attended the seminary before his time. He also, though, seems appreciative of the ways in which Prefects helped to maintain order:
J: Now you just mentioned the prefects, did you find the system of prefects to be helpful at the seminary?
170 Milk (Sesotho – ―lebese‖) was sometimes a bone of contention for students with whom I spoke. The Director of the Seminary raised dairy cattle and produced milk. His cattle grazed all over the seminary grounds. Students were not allowed to have animals at the seminary, and many contracted with the Director for milk. Students often complained to me privately that they did not feel they were allowed to purchase milk from other possible suppliers; that they felt the Director‘s prices were higher than those of other suppliers; and that the Director was inflexible when students fell upon economic hard times – in fact demanding payments and refusing to stop delivering milk. Though I heard these complaints from many students, I did not work to systematically confirm whether the complaints represented actual situations or merely the students‘ perceptions.
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T: Yes, I found that helpful, really, Ntate. Because if we don‘t have someone who is in charge, everybody maybe will do the things because another thing that I have seen when I was there, because of those prefects, maybe the prefects who were the prefects when I was there, maybe he was so strict to the extent that the things that I have seen when I arrived there. Some of them they were trying to be normalized even.J: I see. So they were strict.
T: Yes, they were so strict, really – about that bad behaviour that the students have done, yes. Because sometimes when – he also organized some meeting of all the students maybe once a month. Then we meet together, then we pass what we think about the school, then we recorded all these things. Maybe he is going to discuss them with the director sometime, what the students maybe needed and all these things with him maybe that are happening at the school, really.
J: I see, so some things had happened before you arrived…
T: Yes.
J: …that had made the prefects feel that they needed to be more strict.
T: Yes, Ntate.
J: I see. What kinds of things were they?
T: They were things like the students maybe going when we like, not attending the classes, maybe some drinking the beer, some maybe smoking the dhagha, you know these things were there when mohlomong [maybe] we were there. But those things he tried to normalize that and behave that you are here as a leader of the Christian, when you pass this school, you must behave like a minister or an evangelist.
J: I see, and so you think the prefects were helpful…?
T: Yes, they were so helpful, really.
J: OK, good.
T: Yes, because maybe it is helpful even to the director maybe and to the teachers because we are not living with the teachers, so when we have these problems, we want someone who will aware you that what you have done is not good. Behave like a person.
J: I see.
T: …not like the animals or something.
(P 3.4; Thabiso; 199; 127-158)
Pastoral interview participant ―Carol,‖ who attended MTS in the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, also indicates strictness on the part of Prefects, and indicates some dissatisfaction with the style of leadership practiced by the Prefects of her time. Note that Carol remembers that Prefects seemed to have, in her opinion, inordinate authority (or poor leadership discretion – or both). She also seems to believe that the Director of the Seminary was not always aware of the decisions and actions of the Prefects. Carol further suggests that there were unwritten rules –
―amendments‖ – to which the students were required to adhere:
C: I think our everyday life, our schooling, was not so easy. I can say in the seminary there is something – we have prefects sometimes they forget that they are
still students and they I think the way they do things is the way – maybe they are given too much of the authority.171
J: I see. Can you give an example of that?
C: Sometimes you can see that if someone is a student like me, he forgets that he has to do the same thing I have to do in the seminary, but he uses his power over me too, too much power.
J: I see. Where do the prefects get their power?
C: I think it‘s from the authority.
J: The authority – so what is the authority?
C: Maybe the director.172
J: OK. And did you as students elect the prefects?
C: Yes, Ntate.
J: OK. And if you didn‘t like the way that they were treating you, in the next year could you choose to not elect them and elect new prefects?
C: [laughing] It was not easy.
J: You‘re laughing. Why do you say it was not easy?
C: [laughing] You see, I think in the church there is a bad way of people, you know they do what we call canvassing always. And that makes it a little bit hard for everybody to choose for himself or herself.
J: So the prefects, once they became prefects, were canvassing so that they could be re-elected.
C: Yes.
J: I see. And how did they do this canvassing?
C: Maybe through other students.
J: And did they just try to convince the other students or did they offer them gifts or threaten them – how is this canvassing done?
C: I think they tried to convince them.
J: I see, and so it made it difficult for a new person to be elected.
C: Yes, Ntate.
J: OK. Did the rules that the prefects had make sense to you and were they clearly written rules that you could see?
C: They were written rules but I think the amendments were not written.
J: Amendments.
C: Yes.
J: So sometimes there would be amendments to the rules that you had not seen because they were not written?
171 The bottom of page four of the MTS Student Handbook contains the bold sentence: ―ALL RULES APPLY TO ALL STUDENTS AND ALL PREFECTS.‖ Perhaps this is in response to the notion Carol suggests, that Prefects seem to have forgotten ―they are still students.‖
172 Most students and former students with whom I spoke echoed that the Prefects derived their power from the Director. This, of course, fits the structure of the school in general, and represents, in some ways, the structure of embedded hierarchical authority common in Sesotho tradition, where, for instance, a village headman‘s authority derives from a regional chief, and so forth, all the way to the paramount chief as the apex and centre of authority.