On the desk in the principal’s office of South Africa’s Qondokuhle primary school is the picture of a little schoolgirl who died last August of Aids. The child’s mother had died of Aids a few weeks earlier. In the school courtyard a newly planted sapling has been named after the girl. “She was a short one like this tree,” says Mantombi Nala-Preusker, the head teacher. “At least we could tell her granny this is a reminder of her.”

Head teaching posts in inner city schools are never sinecures. But in South Africa’s township of Umlazi, a sprawling settlement of lower middle class corrugated iron-roofed bungalows mixed in with shacks and shanty dwellings, such assignments are more emotionally taxing than most – even if the enthusiastic Ms Nala-Preusker would never admit it.