South Africa says goodbye to their ‘favourite teacher’

I was very sad to hear that William Smith died yesterday.

I can’t remember where exactly I would have watched him – whether they featured him on Namibian TV when I was growing up or if it was just in the two years that I spent at boarding school that I would have seen him, but I definitely know that I did watch his TV maths lessons – apparently not often enough though or I would definitely have done better at maths.

If the outpouring on social media is anything to go by, he was a part of everybody’s life. Dubbed South Africa’s favourite teacher, he was just one of those people who everyone loved and remembered. I never knew though that he actually came up with the entire idea for his TV lessons himself and pitched it to the SABC, rather than having been hired for the job – his daughter says he did it to try to even the playing field by giving disadvantaged kids access to free extra classes – which just makes him even more lovable.

What I think I like most about William Smith is that in this day and age where so many of our heroes get exposed and turn out to have had clay feet, he just seemed to be genuinely unproblematic – he’d been honoured by the President and given an honourary doctorate  but I remember watching an interview once where he said that what mattered the most to him was hearing from the people’s whose lives he’d touched.

Oh, and as an aside – I never knew until today though that his father was the man who proved that the coelacanth wasn’t extinct. I actually remember going to see the stuffed one they had in the J.L.B Smith Institute of Ichthyology in what was then still called Grahamstown (now Makhanda) when I was studying at Rhodes University.

It is a very strange looking fish and getting to see it like that was very cool!