Marika Sboros on the Roedean and King Davids saga

Key topics:Roedean cancels tennis match over King David girls’ Jewish identityLeaked calls reveal parental and political bias behind cancellationSchool faces antisemitism accusations, PR spin fails to repair trust.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Marika Sboros.Roedean once prided itself as a “finishing school” for South Africa’s future leaders.Some pupils have become strong, principled, polished young women, academically formidable and able to negotiate the frays of petty prejudices and party politics. The gloss on Roedean’s reputation has been dimming for years. Roedean is now mired in accusations of gross antisemitism after its failure to honour a scheduled tennis match against King David Linksfield girls on February 3, 2026. Leaked recordings of phone calls between King David principal Lorraine Srage and Roedean head Phuti Mogale are revelatory. Mogale says that the failed fixture began with pressure from Roedean parents. They did not want their daughters playing against King David girls because this did not align with the ANC government’s anti- Israel stance.And when a startled Srage asks whether the parental objection is just because the King David girls are Jewish, Mogale simply says: “Yes.” That a group of supposedly well-educated, socially and politically influential parents would treat the ANC’s foreign-policy posturing as a moral compass is a plot twist even Kafka might have rejected as implausible. This is the same ANC that refuses to condemn its close ally, Iran, for slaughtering in the streets more than 30,000 of its own people, many of them teenagers. Roedean has turned to PR spin doctors to handle the fallout, do damage control and vigorously deny any antisemitism. They have wasted their money..Read more:.TCS: Roedean School and the lingering legacy of elite antisemitism.Roedean claims that the tennis match was cancelled due to “prior school commitments” and “compulsory academic workshops”. The most it will admit to and apologise unreservedly for (apart from poor timetable management) is “miscommunicating” those “prior commitments” and “compulsory academic workshops” to King David Linksfield. That is disingenuous as the recorded conversation shows. Roedean clearly communicated to King David the day before the match that contentious issues were resolved and the match would go ahead.On that basis, King David girls turned up to play tennis against Roedean. On arrival, an empty court greeted them.Mogale hasn’t helped herself or Roedean’s cause by claiming that the girls themselves didn’t want the match to go ahead because they were still “distressed”, even “traumatised” after a visit to the King David campus last year to play tennis.That instantly raised the question: what could possibly have happened on King David campus to cause Roedean girls distress and trauma? Srage posed precisely that question. Mogale is heard saying (to a presumably gobsmacked Srage) that the sight of armed guards outside at King David Linksfield school entrance disturbed them.She would have been wise to stop there. Instead, she explained the source of the girls’ “trauma”: posters on the school’s campus. Posters of Israeli hostages, including children, babies and the elderly, still held in captivity in Gaza after the horrific terrorist attack by Hamas against mostly civilian targets in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.One might reasonably have expected Roedean’s tennis coach to have been able to soothe the girls’ ruffled, sensitive feathers with non-distressing facts, such as: King David schools don’t post guards at their gates because they want the optics of men and women in civvies carrying semi-automatic rifles; antisemitic attacks are a real threat to Jews worldwide; and the presence of armed guards outside Jewish schools signifies that South Africa, like many countries, has become a dangerous place for Jews. One would also reasonably have assumed that Mogale would have avoided the absurd hyperbole of the word “trauma” to describe emotions that the posters evoked in the girls. After all, any real trauma was to the hostages themselves and their loved ones. Not the Roedean girls. Such moral inversion is as mystifying as it is a common driver of antisemitism worldwide. National director of the South African Jewish Board of deputies Wendy Kahn says it’s clear that what happened on Roedean campus on February 3: an act of antisemitism. In a Facebook post, Kahn defines antisemitism as “prejudice, hatred or discrimination directed against Jewish people, identity or institutions”. The recorded phone conversations make it clear, she says, that Roedean did not fail to honour the tennis fixture because of any scheduling mix-up and “prior academic commitments”. Roedean’s principal admitted that it had become a “Jewish day school issue”. Roedean, therefore, cancelled the tennis fixture “on the basis of the religious identity of King David High School”, Kahn says.Like other faith-based schools, King David’s identity is based on the religious, cultural and historical life of the community it serves, she says. Excluding pupils from Jewish day school from a sporting fixture based on their Jewish identity “constitutes an antisemitic act and is discrimination based on religion”. It also violates South Africa’s constitution.Section 9 of the constitution, as Kahn notes, provides that “no person may be unfairly discriminated against, directly or indirectly, on the grounds of religion, belief or culture”.You’d reasonably have expected Roedean’s leaders to know that. You’d be wrong.Roedean's tennis-match scandal does not exist in religious, political isolation. In 2023, it invited the Umah Al-Rahma madrassah to provide religious programming on campus for Muslim pupils. Umah’s public record and associations had already drawn criticism and concern. The madrassah and leadership has been accused of expressing sympathy and support for Hamas, including sharing or endorsing material aligned with Hamas and other jihadist causes.That represented, as attorney and essayist Richard Wilkinson has argued, “school capture”. Roedean was not simply accommodating Muslim pupils within a pluralist, school-controlled framework. It was outsourcing part of its religious curriculum to a “fundamentalist Islamic provider”.Critics warned of the perils of combining “woke”, diversity rhetoric with a hard-line madrassah, and of allowing reactionary, radical religious politics to shelter under the language of “true inclusivity and belonging”, while narrowing the space for dissenting or minority views – particularly Zionist or even just openly Jewish ones.It doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to work out where that path likely leads. It’s where ringing calls in South Africa to “globalise the intifada” have brought us.Appeasing a particular worldview, including one openly sympathetic to a terrorist organisation, is not a smart move for any school. Bringing a Hamas-aligned group onto any campus normalises rather than challenges a climate in which Jewish pupils are already vulnerable, and in which ANC-style, anti-Israel agitation can quickly, easily slide into open antisemitism.Roedean tried spinning the madrassah initiative as a gesture of inclusivity, a way to signal its alignment with fashionable political currents. Instead, it signalled something much darker: a willingness to outsource moral judgment to the loudest ideological faction in the room. To its credit, Roedean allowed the partnership with the madrassah to peter out. It has undone that good work by failing to honour a simple tennis fixture with Jewish schoolgirls.That puts its credibility and moral scruples again under a microscope. Roedean’s latest statement, distributed by its PR company, Flow Communications, is a study in obfuscation, euphemism and sophistry, starting with the opening line: “We will put the best interests of young people first.” Roedean has not placed the interests of its own “young people” first. It has trampled over the interests of King David’s young people who came onto its campus in good faith to play sport..Read more:.What lies behind UCT’s battlefield against ‘pesky’ Jews?: Marika Sboros.It has put the interests first of the bigots among its staff, parent body and student body who don’t want to play sports against Jews.Repairing that damage will require more than facilitated dialogues and public-relations-spun messaging. It will require acknowledging plainly what occurred, apologising without qualification, and saying unequivocally that prejudice, discrimination and antisemitism – whether dressed up as politics, “distress”, “trauma” or scheduling confusion – will never again decide who is allowed onto Roedean’s sports fields.Sport should be a crucible where differences are put aside. Women’s tennis, in particular, has a rich history of breaking barriers and fostering respect across lines of class, race, religion and nationality. To see that ideal undermined by a narrative that says “we don’t want to play against you because of who you are, your religion and what you think” is to witness the descent of sport into the very tribalism it should transcend.Tennis is a relatively simple game. Serve, rally, score. It requires focus, the ability to reset after a lost point and, crucially, respect for your opponent. In contrast, Roedean’s handling of this fixture was all fault and no reset – a series of clumsy, unforced errors in strategy, empathy and communication.That leaves Roedean with a scrambled linguistic egg on its face that has spawned a satirical, informal verb: Erodean. It is defined as “stripping credibility from an institution by knowingly recasting antisemitic exclusion or hostility as a neutral, administrative error, while shifting responsibility onto the Jewish person affected, despite clear, contrary evidence”.An example of common usage: “Watching institutions attempt to erodean their way out of accountability has become a disturbingly familiar pattern.”

Marika Sboros on the Roedean and King Davids saga

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