Globe-trotting Head for Generation Schools Hermanus

Writer Elaine Davie

Nikki Malcomess, the newly-appointed Campus Head at Generation Schools Hermanus could well have made an old John Denver melody her theme song: I'm leavin' on a jet plane / Don't know when I'll be back again… But this peripatetic educator who has lived all over the world has finally come home to roost – at least for now.

Certainly no event in her life could better illustrate her response to happenstance than her presence in this place at this time. Up to March this year, she had been heading up a school in Mauritius. Then her husband, Andy’s father passed away in Durban. Literally at the eleventh hour they managed to get four tickets on a flight to South Africa. They threw together hand luggage for themselves and their two children, Amelia, aged seven and James, five, and left early the next morning, 14 March, intending to be back in a week or so.

Unbeknown to them, it was the last flight out of Mauritius before it closed its borders against Covid-19. And they were locked out.

They spent some time with Andy’s mom in Durban and then, bringing her with them, they decamped to Hermanus where Nikki’s New Zealand-born mom and step-father lived. Hermanus was Nikki’s happy place, having spent many memorable holidays here, even while living abroad.

Nikki Malcomess (circle and above), the new Head of Generation School Hermanus with son, James on her lap, is mobbed by his small classmates. At the back is teacher Deandre Etalla.

As time passed and they had no way of knowing when they would be able to return to Mauritius, she felt it was important to get the children into a school in Hermanus as soon as restrictions were lifted, and to find a home of their own, instead of continuing to camp on her mother’s doorstep. She notified her school in Mauritius that she would not be returning, they found a home to rent and she looked around for a school for her children to attend.

Mainly because the school follows the Montessori curriculum and offers a Cambridge school-leaving pathway, she settled on Generation Schools Hermanus. This turned out to be not an end, but a beginning.

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