On Saturday 23 May 2026, Johannesburg Heritage organised a tour of Helpmekaar Kollege in Braamfontein for members and friends. The tour was led by Joy Campkin-Smith, architect; Kathy Munro, heritage researcher; and Steve Groenewald, an alumnus and old boy of the school.
Our trio had first visited the school on a normal weekday during term time. Then the corridors hummed with the rhythms of school life: boys and girls moving purposefully between classrooms, pupils gathered around the tuck shop, a drama class in progress somewhere behind half-open doors. A few teachers were at work in the Common Room enjoying a coffee or preparing for their next lesson. The atmosphere was orderly, busy and self-assured — a place where routines and traditions were deeply embedded. School bags and sports gear clustered on parapet walls. We met the acting headmaster and received a cordial welcome. The first impression was that this was a school that valued tradition, orderliness but in a relaxed and natural way.
We also crossed Melle Street to inspect the three remarkable art nouveau imported gates, heavy with rusted iron, embedded in tar and serving a purely decorative purpose. This is the campus of the Rand Girls School or Rand Meisies Skool and it was also part of the story and our planned tour.
This second visit, on a Saturday morning, revealed another side of the institution. A fiercely contested rugby match was under way; it was Monument Hoer School from Krugersdorp versus Helpmekaar. Music pulsed across the campus, the smell of boerewors drifted from the braai fires, and parents lined the sports fields supporting their teams. Parking was almost impossible to find. The classrooms had fallen silent, but the school itself was intensely alive.
It was, in many ways, an ideal day for a heritage tour. Freed from the movement of formal classes, we could pause to study the architecture, sit quietly in the staff common room, examine the honours boards and photographs, and spend time with the trophies, memorabilia and archival displays that collectively form a kind of institutional museum. Everywhere the school presented itself as a place deeply conscious of its own history.
Yet Helpmekaar is more than simply an old school with traditions. Its story opens a window onto the making of Afrikaner identity in Johannesburg: the struggle for language and cultural survival in the rapidly anglicising mining city, the emergence of Afrikaans-medium education, and the creation of enduring urban institutions through which Afrikaners claimed a permanent place in the “City of Gold.”
Johannesburg and the struggle for Afrikaans education
The origins of Helpmekaar lie in the upheavals created by the Witwatersrand gold rush after 1886. Johannesburg transformed the largely rural Boer republic into a rapidly industrialising and cosmopolitan society dominated economically and linguistically by English-speakers. English became the language of commerce, mining capital, administration and urban advancement. Many Afrikaner parents sent their children to English schools in the belief that mastery of English offered the surest route to economic survival. Johannesburg as its history unfolded took shape shifting from mining camp to a more formal town and then city and at the same time became a space for cultural contestation.
As this fraught political backdrop, ministers, teachers and cultural leaders feared that Afrikaner children would simply disappear into the English-speaking world. Schools became the central battleground over language, religion, class mobility and identity.
The early history of Afrikaner education on the Rand was unstable and improvised. Tiny church schools and “opposition schools” appeared and disappeared across Fordsburg, Vrededorp, Langlaagte, Troyeville and the Brickfields. Many operated in poor buildings with limited funds. Some collapsed within months. These early schools were primary schools teaching the basics of the “three Rs” ( reading, writing and arithmetic ). Yet from this fragile educational network emerged the conviction that Afrikaners required permanent urban institutions if they were to survive culturally in Johannesburg.
The South African War accelerated this process. The destruction of Boer society, the experience of concentration camps, and British anglicisation policies after 1902 stimulated the Christian National Education movement (C.N.O.), through which Afrikaners sought to build schools rooted in language, religion and community control. By the 1910s the demand shifted from Dutch-medium schooling to Afrikaans-medium schooling as Afrikaans itself emerged as a language of verve, expression and daily conversation. (Dutch still remained as the “other“ official language alongside English. There was clearly a need for an Afrikaans high school opening doors and delivering on aspirations.
The Founding of Helpmekaar
Helpmekaar Hoërskool had modest but symbolically important beginnings. The school was established in 1921 in Irene Hall — also known as the Irene Church Hall — on the corner of Plein and Hol Streets (today Edith Cavell Street) in Doornfontein, then one of Johannesburg’s important early Afrikaner and middle-class suburbs east of the city centre. Irene Hall, erected in 1898 for the Johannesburg East Dutch Reformed congregation, functioned not only as a church hall but also as a gathering place for the growing urban Afrikaner community. It was in this church-centred environment that Helpmekaar began as the first Afrikaans-medium high school in Johannesburg, initially accommodating both boys and girls. The school’s origins in Irene Hall are historically significant because they reveal the close connection between early Afrikaans education, the Dutch Reformed Church and the emergence of a self-conscious Afrikaner urban community seeking cultural and linguistic survival within the rapidly anglicising mining city.
Public meetings of Afrikaners demanded equal treatment for Afrikaans-speaking children, proper Afrikaans schools and Afrikaans-speaking teachers. Church leaders such as ds. W.M. Nicol became powerful advocates for mother-tongue education. Helpmekaar emerged directly from this movement.
The move to the permanent Braamfontein campus in 1925–26 marked the transition from a fragile church-based educational initiative to a substantial state-supported institutional presence within Johannesburg’s expanding civic and educational core.
From the beginning the school catered for both boys and girls. Only in 1941 did the institution divide formally into Hoër Seunskool Helpmekaar and Hoër Meisieskool Helpmekaar, with the girls’ school established opposite the boys’ school on the corner of Empire and Melle Streets, at the northern edge of Braamfontein on a rocky site of a Witwatersrand ridge. The northern boundary of the two schools was Empire Road.
The split reflected the growing confidence and consolidation of Afrikaans urban education in Johannesburg. By the 1940s an Afrikaner middle class had firmly established itself in the city, and separate boys’ and girls’ schools reflected educational models associated with both English public-school traditions and emerging Afrikaner institutional culture. But both schools were state schools run by the Transvaal Department of Education and supported with public taxes. The buildings of the two schools by the 1940s had achieved a permanence and a formal presence in a settled Johannesburg.
Helpmekaar looked across the valley towards the English state school, Parktown Boys High. A mile eastward was Johannesburg Girls High School (Barnato Park) in Berea. Rodedan school close to the Wilds offered an English private girls education On the Houghton Ridge there were the schools for English children – King Edward VII Boys schools – a state school and St Johns College, a private Anglican church school. The Johannesburg school system offered a broad spread of choice, of schools – private and public, but only for white children. This practical point is a significant element that should not be forgotten when we review the changes in education since 1994.
Architecture as Declaration
The permanent Braamfontein buildings of Helpmekaar opened in 1925 — significantly, the same year that Afrikaans replaced Dutch as one of South Africa’s official languages. The foundation stone was laid by General J.B.M. Hertzog, Prime Minister of South Africa in the newly elected PACT government. The school was linked directly to the broader political and cultural ascendancy of Afrikaans nationalism within the Union of South Africa.
Interestingly, the Artefacts architectural database records the school building as dating from 1926 rather than 1925. The discrepancy is probably explained by the distinction between the ceremonial laying of the foundation stone in 1925 and the practical completion or occupation of the building in 1926 — a common occurrence in public building projects of the period.
The Artefacts entry also supplies valuable architectural detail:
- the original school was designed for the Transvaal Public Works Department by J.S. Cleland;
- a hostel and further additions were designed by A.O. Fischbeck in 1945;
- and a hall together with additional classrooms was added before 1956 by E.W.N. Mallows.
The original buildings of Helpmekaar Kollege emerged during an important phase in South African public architecture associated with John Stockwin Cleland, Chief Architect of the Union Public Works Department from 1920 to 1932. Cleland helped shape what became known as the “Union” or “PWD” style, blending Herbert Baker influences with restrained classicism, red-brick craftsmanship, tiled roofs, arcades and carefully proportioned civic forms suited to the South African climate. Under his direction, the Public Works Department became an important patron of architecture, sculpture and decorative craftsmanship, giving public buildings a dignity and permanence intended to express the aspirations of the young Union of South Africa. The architecture of early Helpmekaar thus formed part of a broader programme of educational and civic building on the Parktown ridge during the 1920s. Cleland’s influence can also be seen in several other notable Johannesburg schools of the same era, including Parktown Boys' High School and Parktown High School for Girls, as well as Jeppe Girls High, still extant and all associated with the Public Works Department building programme that helped define the architectural character of educational Johannesburg in the early Union period.
With reference to the additions, and the hostel designed by August Otto Fischbeck; Fischbeck was a German-trained modernist architect who settled in Johannesburg after fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s and brought European functionalist design principles to South African public architecture. At Hoër Seunskool Helpmekaar he was responsible for alterations and additions to the school in 1945, extending the original 1926 Public Works Department complex designed by John Stockwin Cleland.
Fischbeck’s work formed part of the post-war expansion of Afrikaans-medium education on the Witwatersrand and reflected his skill in adapting and modernising established educational buildings while remaining sympathetic to their original architectural character.
Before 1956 the architect Edward Wilfrid Nassau Mallows (E.W.N. Mallows) designed a substantial new hall and classroom addition for Helpmekaar, reflecting the school’s rapid mid-century expansion. The hall, still in use today and lined with honours boards, occupies a somewhat unusual elevated position reached by several short flights of stairs, suggesting that it may have been inserted into the existing sloping campus rather than conceived as part of the original 1920s layout. Its awkward access and later placement raise the intriguing possibility that the school may once have possessed an earlier, smaller assembly hall nearer the main entrance before the larger post-war facility was constructed.
These successive additions reveal how the institution expanded physically alongside the consolidation of an urban Afrikaans-speaking middle class in Johannesburg. The addition of the hostel is particularly significant because it confirms that Helpmekaar was already evolving beyond a purely local neighbourhood school into a regional institution attracting pupils from across the Witwatersrand. Today the school runs a fleet of buses bringing Afrikaans children from distant parts of Johannesburg and the Witwatersrand to the school.
The original building itself speaks eloquently of its historical moment. Designed by the Transvaal Public Works Department, its rust coloured brick walls, sandstone dressings, Romanesque arches and disciplined symmetry project permanence, seriousness and civic respectability. This was not an improvised church hall or a fragile community venture. It represented substantial public investment in Afrikaans urban education.
Equally striking is what the architecture does not do. There are no Cape Dutch gables, no overt Voortrekker imagery, and little romantic rural symbolism. Instead, the school adopts the language of modern institutional architecture: restrained, ordered, urban and authoritative. It resembles a courthouse, college or municipal institution rather than a nostalgic nationalist monument. Overall it is remarkable how the language of Johannesburg public school architecture of the early 20th century reflects civic purposefulness, pride, and a traditional view of what a school should look like and hence how it should function.
Helpmekaar was never conceived as a retreat from Johannesburg. Rather, it was an Afrikaner claim upon Johannesburg. The school announced that Afrikaners belonged permanently within the modern city and intended to participate fully in its intellectual, professional and civic life.
In Architecture in the Transvaal, edited by Roger Fisher, Helpmekaar Boys’ High School is identified as “another building by the official branch of the Baker School.” Designed under the direction of J.S. Cleland in 1925–26, the school was executed in a restrained Neo-Georgian idiom associated with official Union-period architecture. The deeply recessed roof eaves, carefully composed brickwork and modest Wren-like tower linked the school stylistically to the broader civic architecture of the state. Although Helpmekaar arose from the Afrikaner struggle for linguistic and cultural recognition in Johannesburg, its architectural vocabulary drew heavily upon the institutional traditions of British imperial educational architecture.
In From Mining Camp to Metropolis, G.M. van der Waal situated Helpmekaar within the broader civic landscape of Braamfontein. He observed that both the Johannesburg College of Education and Helpmekaar Boys’ High School were designed in the “Traditional Style,” with Helpmekaar standing prominently upon its hill west of the hospital complex. The school formed part of an important ridge-top cluster of educational, medical and governmental institutions — including Wits University, the hospitals, the Fort, and later the Civic Theatre and Constitutional Court precinct — all established on former government land and together shaping Johannesburg’s civic and intellectual core.
In this setting, Helpmekaar became more than a school. It became an architectural declaration that Afrikaners intended not merely to survive in Johannesburg, but to belong to it, shape it and leave a permanent imprint upon its institutional and cultural landscape.
The making of a cultural institution
Over time Helpmekaar became part of the infrastructure through which a new Afrikaner urban middle class was formed. The school’s emphasis on discipline, achievement, sport, responsibility, aspirational ideals and institutional loyalty reflected wider Afrikaner confidence during the twentieth century.
The sporting culture became central to this identity. Rugby especially embodied ideals of masculinity, teamwork and leadership associated with Afrikaner nationalism, while swimming, gymnastics and netball reinforced notions of disciplined physical development. The honours boards and sports photographs lining the corridors are more than decoration: they are instruments of institutional memory and continuity.
The name Helpmekaar comes directly from the Afrikaans expression meaning “help one another” or “help each other.” The phrase has deep roots in Afrikaner cultural history and became strongly associated with mutual support and self-help movements in the years after the South African War (1899–1902). The word carried connotations of collective upliftment, cooperation, and community solidarity — ideals that were especially important to early Afrikaans-speaking communities establishing their own educational and cultural institutions in Johannesburg.
The school motto, Komaan, is linked to the well-known Afrikaans patriotic poem “Komaan!” by the poet Jan F. E. Celliers. At Helpmekaar the phrase evolved into the fuller spirit of “Komaan, helpmekaar” — effectively “Come on, help each other.” The motto expressed encouragement, perseverance, unity, and communal effort, and became central to the identity of Helpmekaar Kollege as Johannesburg’s first Afrikaans high school.
The school’s carefully curated memorabilia similarly function as a cultural archive. Helpmekaar consciously preserves its own history, presenting itself not merely as a school but as a custodian of tradition. One is struck by the degree to which the institution seems to operate almost as a self-contained world — ordered, ceremonial and buffered from the surrounding city.
Even the straw boaters reveal this complexity. Borrowed originally from English public-school traditions, they demonstrate how Afrikaner institutions selectively adapted aspects of British educational culture while simultaneously resisting anglicisation. Helpmekaar’s uniforms, sports culture, prefect systems, honours boards, hostel life and ceremonial traditions owe something to English elite-school models, even while serving a distinctly Afrikaans institutional identity.
The post-1994 divergence
The democratic transition of the 1990s produced a major divergence in the histories of the two Helpmekaar schools.
Around 1993, Helpmekaar Kollege underwent a major transformation during South Africa’s educational restructuring of the early democratic era. Often described in the context of the emerging “Model D” approach — schools moving away from direct state control toward private governance and fee-supported independence — Helpmekaar went further than many former Model C schools by becoming one of the country’s first Afrikaans-medium independent high schools for boys and girls, from Standard 6 to Matric (5 years of high school). This enabled the school to preserve its Afrikaans language, traditions, and cultural identity while adapting to the changing political and demographic realities of Johannesburg, repositioning itself as an academically ambitious co-educational institution drawing pupils from across the Witwatersrand rather than only from traditional Afrikaner neighbourhoods.
This transformation was not merely administrative. It represented a deliberate strategy of institutional preservation in a changing South Africa. By becoming independent, the school insulated itself from many of the pressures affecting public education:
- changing language policies,
- financial constraints,
- demographic shifts,
- and uncertainty over institutional autonomy.
The school today serves not simply the local area but a much wider Afrikaans-speaking constituency across the Witwatersrand. Extensive bus services transport pupils daily from distant suburbs and communities. Helpmekaar is no longer fundamentally a neighbourhood school; it has become a regional Afrikaans institution sustained by a dispersed cultural community.
Across the road, however, the former Helpmekaar Meisieskool followed a very different path. Remaining within the state system, it evolved into Rand Girls High School: a multicultural English-medium public school serving largely the surrounding inner city — Braamfontein, Hillbrow, Berea and downtown Johannesburg.
Yet what is striking is that both schools appear numerically successful. Each accommodates roughly 1,200 to 1,300 pupils. Johannesburg clearly continues to sustain demand for two very different educational models:
- a fee-paying Afrikaans independent school built around continuity, tradition and cultural identity;
- and a public urban school serving the democratic city through the state system.
Two schools, two urban futures
The contrast in resources is nevertheless visible. Rand Girls shows clear signs of financial strain. Maintenance of buildings, gardens and infrastructure has become difficult within the limitations of state funding and the economic pressures facing many families in the area. Beautiful historical elements — including the surviving Art Nouveau Friedaura gates rescued from a demolished Parktown mansion — now stand amid visible wear and deferred maintenance.
The second part of our visit took us to Rand Girls to find these gates. There is a story behind the survival of these gates, the only visible survival of that Parktown Mansion designed by the Architect Hermann Kallenbach in art nouveau style in the early 1900s. It was a house that stood at the corner of Victoria Avenue and St Andrews Road. I have written the story of that house in an earlier Heritage Portal article (click here to view). It is a curious story of the recognition of beautiful craftsmanship, former grandeur and now survival as a memento. Friedaura towards the end of its life was the hostel of Helpmekaaar Meisies Skool and it was clearly a valiant heritage effort that saved at least the gates to be admired by some six decades since demolition. The gates are incongruous and are now purely ornamental but here is a slice of old Johannesburg still there for admiration and a nostalgic tear.
Back to the present. It would, however, be entirely wrong to interpret the school simply through decline.
Evidence from the school itself suggests a remarkably strong institutional spirit. Rand Girls projects discipline, pride, energy and achievement. School events appear vibrant and well supported; academic seriousness remains evident; and sport continues to play an important role in school identity. The emphasis on wearing a uniform , neatness, orderly behaviour and collective belonging echoes many older educational traditions inherited from its origins as Helpmekaar Meisieskool.
Thus, the two schools reveal not a simple opposition between “success” and “failure,” but rather two divergent responses to post-apartheid Johannesburg:
- one protected through privatisation, regionalisation and cultural continuity;
- the other adapting publicly and locally within the changing social realities of the inner city.
Standing opposite one another across Melle Street, the schools embody two parallel histories of institutional survival in democratic South Africa.
A civic landscape of Johannesburg
There is another dimension to the Helpmekaar and Rand Girls story, briefly mentioned earlier, that became increasingly apparent during the tour. Both schools stand within one of Johannesburg’s most remarkable institutional landscapes — a dense cluster of civic, educational, medical and governmental buildings created over more than a century on what was originally publicly owned land.
Within a relatively compact area stand:
- Constitution Hill and the Old Fort prison complex,
- The School of Arts ( formerly the Teachers Training College)
- The Johannesburg Civic Theatre,
- The Metro Centre,
- The great early hospitals of the Hillbrow ridge,
- The Transvaal Memorial Hospital ( the old TMI) and the old Queen Victoria Maternity Hospital ( now the Transnet Workers Accommodation)
- The University of the Witwatersrand
Together they form one of the city’s great civic precincts: a landscape where Johannesburg consciously built its institutional heart.
This part of the city tells the story of Johannesburg at its most ambitious — the effort to create permanence, order, public culture and civic identity in what began as a rough mining settlement. Here architecture, education, medicine, law, government and culture were physically concentrated into an urban core intended to serve the public life of the city.
These institutions and spaces have continually adapted as Johannesburg itself changed socially, politically and demographically. Within a few blocks one encounters:
- the history of mining capitalism,
- segregation and apartheid,
- Afrikaner cultural assertion,
- constitutional democracy,
- public education,
- migration,
- urban decline,
- and urban reinvention.
The juxtaposition of Helpmekaar Kollege and Rand Girls High School becomes part of this wider urban narrative. Their differing trajectories after the 1990s reflect broader questions about language, class, public investment, educational inequality and institutional survival in democratic South Africa.
And yet both schools remain active contributors to the civic life of Johannesburg. Both continue to educate large numbers of young people; both sustain strong school cultures and traditions; and both remain embedded within one of the most historically layered and institutionally significant parts of the city.
For all its contradictions and inequalities, this precinct still represents something important about Johannesburg at its best: a city that repeatedly attempted to build enduring public institutions capable of carrying successive generations through profound historical change.
Beyond nostalgia
It would be easy either to romanticise Helpmekaar or dismiss it simply as a relic of Afrikaner exclusivity. Do we have a school in a bubble and another school (Rand Girls School) more alert to social inequalities. Neither interpretation is sufficient.
Helpmekaar school represents something historically important: the successful creation of an urban Afrikaans institutional world in a city where many once believed Afrikaners would disappear into anglophone modernity. It helped shape generations of Johannesburg Afrikaners and played a major role in preserving Afrikaans language and culture within the metropolis. It was a school that produced five University Vice Chancellors and many influential political leaders.
At the same time, Helpmekaar raises difficult contemporary questions about belonging, memory, privilege and identity in democratic South Africa. Its strong cultural coherence can appear both admirable and exclusionary. The institution preserves a very particular historical tradition — one that does not necessarily speak easily to a broader South African identity.
Yet perhaps that tension itself is part of Johannesburg’s story: a city of overlapping historical worlds, unequal continuities, competing memories and parallel institutions occupying the same urban landscape.
Helpmekaar Kollege remains one of the most eloquent surviving architectural and institutional expressions of the Afrikaner attempt to make itself permanently at home in Johannesburg.
Kathy Munro is an Honorary Associate Professor in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand. She enjoyed a long career as an academic and in management at Wits University. She trained as an economic historian. She is an enthusiastic book person and has built her own somewhat eclectic book collection over 40 years. Her interests cover Africana, Johannesburg history, history, art history, travel, business and banking histories. She researches and writes on historical architecture and heritage matters. She is a member of the Board of the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation and is a docent at the Wits Arts Museum. She is currently working on a couple of projects on Johannesburg architects and is researching South African architects, war cemeteries and memorials. Kathy is a member of the online book community the Library thing and recommends this cataloging website and worldwide network as a book lover's haven. She is also a previous Chairperson of HASA.
References
- Stals, E. L. P. (ed.), Afrikaners in die Goudstad, Vols. I & II, HAUM, Pretoria, 1978–1986.
- Van der Waal, Gerhard-Mark. From Mining Camp to Metropolis: The Buildings of Johannesburg, 1886–1940. Pretoria: HSRC / Chris van Rensburg Publications, 1987.
- Fisher, Roger C., Schalk le Roux and Estelle Maré (eds). Architecture of the Transvaal. Pretoria: UNISA Press, 1998.
- Artefacts website for information on architects
- Munro, Kathy The Gates of Friedaura- a Portal to Parktown’s Past, The Heritage Portal
