Launching a New Year with Thoughts of Service, Inclusion, and Belonging

Groton School Headmaster Temba Maqubela opened the first full day of classes on Tuesday morning by addressing the community, emphasizing his focus on three essential concepts: service, inclusion, and belonging.

Using Groton’s Circle, around which the campus is built, as a metaphor for inclusion, he said, “All points in the Circle are critical in order to make the Circle whole.”

In his first Chapel Talk since he began as headmaster July 1, Mr. Maqubela drew parallels between Groton’s focus on service and the service ethos ingrained by his own family: as a member of one of the few educated families in his South African village, by age 8 he was reading and writing letters for neighbors who could not read.

The new headmaster also discussed the sacred nature of St. John’s Chapel, and its importance at Groton as “a place where we affirm freedom of, rather than freedom from, religion. The emphasis,” he noted, “is on freedom.” Mr. Maqubela recalled that when he was trying to escape persecution in apartheid-era South Africa, the only safe place to plan his escape was the chapel. St. John’s seems to have followed him throughout life: in South Africa, he took refuge in St. John's Chapel; he was married in St. John’s Cathedral in Botswana; and he attended high school at St. John’s College. “Therefore, it should come as no surprise that we feel quite at home here,” he said.

Mr. Maqubela concluded his Chapel Talk and inaugurated the new School year by saying, “Let us live according to these high ideals of service, inclusion, and belonging and make this an outstanding year for everyone.” He then topped off his talk with an aphorism in Xhosa, then translated it to English: "Umntu ngumntu ngabantu. I am, therefore you are; you are, therefore I exist."

Read the full text of Temba Maqubela's first Groton Chapel Talk here.

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