[The Conversation Africa] When I was a child I went to school in South Africa. This was the late 1970s. At school, the teachers would hit us. It was called getting the cane, the cane being a long, flexible stick. This tradition, exported from a Dickensian Victorian English model, was very popular with some teachers. They were seen as terrors: you didn't want to get the cane from them. There was one teacher in particular who would use the cane a lot. We were all petrified of him, and we hated him at the same time.