THIS WON'T GET ME DOWN

Gauteng headmaster Noko Selepe tells of the day he was gunned down in the corridors of his beloved school

- NOKUTHULA ZWANE-EJIKE

HE STRIDES though the corridors with a broad smile, greeting pupils and staff which is what he's done throughout the years he's worked at this school.

But for Noko Selepe, the principal of Primrose Primary in Germiston on the East Rand, each day he goes to work is all the more special now. For four months he was absent, recovering from two bullet wounds that ripped through his abdomen he was shot by a Grade 6 learner.

Noko missed the kids at the school and when he finally returned at the start of the third term many of them ran up to him and hugged him.

"They just wanted to look at me," he says. "I was pleading with them to go to class and assuring them I'd come and visit them in their classrooms. I could see they missed me too."

Noko, standing at the spot where he was attacked as he was coming out of the restroom that fateful day, remembers what happened as if it was yesterday.

He asked the boy why he wasn't in class and his only response was to point a gun at him and squeeze the trigger. Noko was knocked off his feet and fell to the floor.

"The boy came closer to finish me off but I pretended to be dead. He looked at me for a while and he could see I wasn't moving or blinking. Then he walked away."

Investigations revealed that Noko, his deputy and the boy's class teacher* had all been on the learner's hit list but after shooting the principal the 13-year-old fled the school.

Noko says he was unbelievably lucky: the bullets did no serious internal damage and were successfully removed in surgery.

"The next morning I was eating breakfast," he says. "My intestines and kidneys weren't touched by the bullets. To me it was just a miracle."

He was in hospital for two weeks before being discharged to complete his recovery at home.