Marika Sboros: The Roedean and King David saga

Key topics:

• Roedean cancels tennis match over King David girls’ Jewish identity

• Leaked calls reveal parental and political bias behind cancellation

• School faces antisemitism accusations, PR spin fails to repair trust

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By Marika Sboros

Roedean was once considered a “finishing school” for South Africa’s future leaders.

Some of its 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. It is now mired in accusations of antisemitism after failing 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 senior school head Phuti Mogale are revelatory.

Mogale clearly 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 because the King David girls are Jewish, Mogale simply says: “Yes.”

To her credit, Mogale does say that she told the parents that Roedean is “apolitical”. That clearly didn’t sway the parents.

That a group of supposedly well-educated, socially 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. They have wasted their money.

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Roedean denies antisemitism and 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 is “miscommunicating” this to King David. 

That’s disingenuous.

The phone conversations show that Roedean communicated clearly to King David the day before the match that all 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 by claiming that the girls themselves didn’t want to play the match as they were still “distressed”, even “traumatised” after a visit to King David’s campus last year to play tennis.

That raised the question: what on earth happened on King David campus to distress and traumatise Roedean girls? 

Srage posed precisely that question. 

Mogale is heard saying (to a presumably gobsmacked Srage) that the sight of armed guards outside at King David’s school entrance disturbed the girls.

She’d have been wise to stop there. 

Instead, she said the girls were “traumatised” by posters on the school’s campus – of 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.

There was nothing at all distressing or traumatising about the posters. 

They were not images of bloodied young women dragged by terrorists by their hair, of children and babies in their pyjamas, torn from their parents’ arms and homes.

They were photographs of happy, smiling people before their kidnapping on October 7, supplied by families to raise awareness of their plight. 

One might reasonably have expected Roedean’s tennis coach to have easily soothed the girls’ ruffled, sensitive feathers with non-distressing facts, such as: 

King David schools don’t post guards at their gates because they like the optics; antisemitic attacks are a real threat to Jews worldwide; and armed guards outside Jewish schools signal that South Africa has become a dangerous place for Jews. 

One would also reasonably expect Mogale not to have absurdly, hyperbolically described emotions that the posters evoked in the girls as “trauma”. 

The only real trauma behind those posters was to hostages and their families. Not the Roedean girls. 

Such moral inversion is as mystifying as it is a common driver of antisemitism. 

National director of the South African Jewish Board of deputies Wendy Kahn says it is clear that the incident on Roedean campus on February 3 was antisemitic. On a Facebook post, Kahn defines antisemitism as “prejudice, hatred or  discrimination directed against Jewish people, identity or institutions”. 

Roedean’s principal admitted in phone conversations that the tennis fixture had become a “Jewish day school issue”. Therefore, Roedean cancelled it on the basis of King David High School’s “religious identity”, 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. Roedean’s refusal to honour a sporting fixture based on the players’ Jewish identity, therefore, “constitutes an antisemitic act and is discrimination based on religion”. 

That 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”.

Roedean’s leaders should have known that. 

Its tennis-match debacle does not exist in religious, political isolation. 

In 2023, Roedean invited the Ummah Al-Rahma madrasah to provide its religious, spiritual programming – Ummah Heart – on campus for Muslim pupils. It tried spinning the initiative as a gesture of inclusivity, a way to signal alignment with fashionable political currents.

Instead, it signalled something darker: a willingness to outsource moral judgment to the loudest ideological faction in the room.

The madrasah's public record and associations had drawn significant criticism and concern. It was 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 argued, “school capture”.  

Roedean was not just 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, 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.

Appeasing a particular worldview, including one openly sympathetic to a terrorist organisation, is not a smart move. 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 quickly, easily slides into open antisemitism.

It doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to work out where that leads. It’s where ringing calls to “globalise the intifada” have brought us.

To its credit, Roedean allowed the partnership to peter out. 

It has undone that good work by failing to honour a simple tennis fixture with Jewish schoolgirls. Its credibility and moral scruples are again under a microscope. 

Roedean’s statements, prepared and distributed by its PR company, Flow Communications, are a study in obfuscation, euphemism and sophistry, starting with the opening line in its February 10 offering: 

“We will place 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.

The only interests it put first are those of the minority of staff, parent body and student body who don’t want to play sport against Jews.

Roedean says it has “engaged an independent party to review allegations”. It may regret adding that it has also engaged “an independent facilitator to work with our students to resolve their concerns fairly and respectfully”.  

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Either it genuinely did not honour the tennis match because of scheduling error and academic workshop commitments or because its students wouldn’t play King David girls because they are Jewish. 

Both can’t be true. If it was just a scheduling error, then why does it need an “independent facilitator” to resolve students’ “concerns”? 

If it was because some Roedean girls don’t want to play tennis against Jews, they may have a problem: there are Jews in private schools other than King David. Presumably, its girls won’t be asking every schoolgirl opponent whether or not she is Jewish?

Repairing the damage from this sorry saga will require more than facilitated dialogues and public-relations-spun messaging. 

It will require acknowledging what occurred, apologising without qualification and saying unequivocally that prejudice, discrimination and antisemitism – 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 won’t play against you because of who you are, your religion, what you think” is to witness the descent of sport into the tribalism it should transcend.

Tennis is a 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 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”.

Here’s an example of common usage: “Watching institutions attempt to erodean their way out of accountability has become a disturbingly familiar pattern.”