Chris Allinotte, Marketing & Communications Coordinator

Full Job Description

Chris Allinotte, Marketing & Communications Coordinator

Having spent  more than 20  years as part of the maintenance team at  Balmoral Hall S chool,  Richard Ndlovu  has had the opportunity to witness  hundreds  of  BH  girls  enter  the school, grow up, and grad uate.  F or  every one  of them, he’s had time to take a minute or two to talk, to listen,  and  always  to offer a friendly  smile. He’s been like a  cool uncle  to  our students, and his friendship s within  the entire Balmoral Hall community cannot be overstated.

It was  even more humbling ,  then,  in sitting  down to speak with Richard, to learn that in his life  he’s faced and overcome more challenges than most of us will ever enc ounter.  I n 1976, Richard was in Grade 9 in Soweto, South Africa  and h is school just so happened to be  located  across the street from the Mandela household. He recalled seeing Winnie  as she organized demonstrations, and she often spoke with him and his friends.  At that time, Nelson Mandela had already been in prison for  14  years, and  it was a crime to speak his name.

“They didn’t want you even saying his name,” Richard recall s , “ b ecause that would mean you knew who he was. And they wanted him to disappear.  If you knew his name, then you might know something else about what he was doing, and they didn’t want that. ”

For Richard and his friends, one of the ways they felt the government’s control most  directly  was the mandate that core school subjects  be taught in Afrikaans. 

“Most of the teachers weren’t qualified to teach  m ath or  p hysics in Afrikaans. We wanted to learn in English. Afrikaans isn’t spoken outside of Sout h Africa and a handful of other countries.”

O n June  16 , 1976 , when  Richard and fellow  students arrived at school, they  gathered  and  went out into the streets  together  to march against th e government’s edict.  The police responded with  violence and  shot directly at the students. There is a photo  from  that day , the Soweto  u prising,  that  has become very well known ;  in it, a schoolgirl is wal king down the street, holding a boy in her arms, while another  girl –  the boy’s sister – runs along side. Richard was on the other side of the street when that happened. 

By September 1976, some of Richard’s acquaintances were involved in the growing protest movement, and the government was crac king down. Richard’s family worried that he’d be caught up by the police,  who were  looking to  capture these young protestors by interrogating their associates.  That month , Richard left South Africa.

For the next few years, Richard travelled through several countries, staying at refugee camps in Tanzania and Kenya .  He also spent  some  time in Libya training to  serve  in the military.

“It was boring,” Richard  remembers  of the refugee camps . “You couldn’t work . Y ou just had to stay there the whole time.”

In  1986 , he decided to try his luck with resettlement.  “People applied to countries all over the world,” he says. “I applied to Germany, the Scandanavian countries … Canada was the first to take me in.” 

Groups of refugees were  welcomed  into Canada every three months. Ten people mad e the trip with  Richard. Many of them stayed in Toronto, but Richard and three others continued west, eventually settling in Winnipeg.

Richard got to work soon after arriving  here . He finished high school, and  soon  found himself working at a n  all-girls school, where he remains to this day.   When asked about the other refugees he travelled with, whether he kept  in touch  with them , he mentioned that many , especially those  who  were still single, had been waiting to go home as soon as t hey could ,  and, when Nelson Mandela was freed in 1991, many of them did just that.

By then, Richard was married and was  pretty well  established in Winnipeg. He s ought  citizenship , he says,  “so I could be treated with the same rights as a Canadian.” At the time he became a citizen  in 1991 , he was still considering  his return  to  South Africa . Now,  over 20 years later, here he  remain s .

O n behalf of the Balmoral Hall  School  community, and  especially  the hundreds of BH  girls  who  have had their lives enriched by  knowing  this kind, soft- spoken, selfless man, we are  truly  happy he’s  stayed .

Our mission at Balmoral Hall School is to inspire girls’ imagination and the courage to excel, to reach, to lead, to care.

Our mission at Balmoral Hall School is to inspire girls’ imagination and the courage to excel, to reach, to lead, to care.
We are a nondenominational independent day and boarding school, educating students from Junior Nursery to Grade 12.