Healdtown

“Located at the end of a winding road overlooking a verdant valley, Healdtown was far more beautiful and impressive than Clarkebury. It was, at the time, the largest African school south of the equator, with more than a thousand learners, both male and female. Its gracefully ivory colonial buildings and tree-shaded courtyards gave it a feeling of a privileged academic oasis, which is exactly what it was.” Nelson Mandela - Long Walk to Freedom.

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"In the soil of the Eastern Cape frontier lie many of the earliest roots of African nationalism in South Africa," writes Andre Odendaal in The Founders, a book about the founding of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC), the precursor to the African National Congress (ANC), in 1912. For most black South Africans, the process of colonization in the 19th century that led to the system of apartheid in the 20th century left them with a poor education, broken social and family structures and little hope of the life they wished for themselves and their children.

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But there were pockets of excellence that offered...

“At a time when the government took no interest whatsoever in our education, it was the church-founded schools who educated us, and conscientised us to the unjust realities of South African society” – Nelson Mandela

When a young Thembu royal first attended school at the ripe age of 15, little did anyone know that he would go on to change his country and the world. Upon the realization that his days were numbered, Chief Mphakanyiswa Gadla solicited his cousin Chief Jongintaba Dalinyebo to look after his only son. Since both chiefs of the Thembu Royal House were committed Methodists, it was inevitable that the boy would be sent to Chief Dalinyebo's alma mater.

The Mandela Statue at the Union Buildings (The Heritage Portal)

Clarkebury Mission School

Clarkebury had been founded by Methodist missionaries, along with the invading British settlers, during the Frontier wars of the early 1800s. In its heyday it was the leading educational institute in the whole of Tembuland. Like most missionary schools, Clarkebury went into a terminal decline when the National Party introduced its Bantu education policy and withdrew funding for church schools in 1950. When Nelson Mandela first arrived at Clarkebury in 1934 his self-confidence took a beating. This was because he found it uneasy to walk in the first pair of shoes he'd...

Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe was born on 5 December 1924 in Graaff-Reinet, a small town in the Eastern Cape known as the gem of the Karoo. He was the youngest of six children and, as was normal at the time, he was given an English name (Robert) as well as a Xhosa name, Mangaliso, meaning ‘it is wonderful’. His brothers who survived were Ernest, born in 1914, and Charles, born in 1922. His only sister was Eleanor.

Sobukwe’s father Hubert worked for the local municipality as a maintenance officer keeping open the furrows that supplied the town’s water. His mother Angelinah worked for several years as a cook at the town hospital and then did domestic work for a white family. Together they earned enough to make sure that the family did not go short for food. The children were given new clothes as Christmas gifts, to be used as Sunday best, and the previous Sunday best was brought into everyday school use.

It was a hard and simple life repeated ten thousand fold throughout South Africa. An extra ingredient, however, was the emphasis placed in the home on education. Angelinah had never been to school, and her thumbprint served as her signature. Hubert had completed seven years of schooling. He had wanted to continue, but his mother was dead and a sister who was bringing him up refused to send him to school. She feared that if he was educated he would ignore her and the family. Hubert`s disappointment lived with him...

"For young black South Africans like myself," Nelson Mandela wrote in his autobiography, "it was Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Yale all rolled into one." Of the hundreds of pages in Long Walk To Freedom, barely a dozen recount Mandela's days at Fort Hare University. Understandably so. He spent less than two years of his 94 years as a student there.

He left Fort Hare University halfway through his studies due to a student strike over living conditions, most notably food rationing. “At that moment, I saw Dr. Kerr less as a benefactor than as a not-altogether-benign dictator", he said.

His mixed emotions were not his alone. The entire enterprise of mission schools stood at an ambiguous, and conflicted crossroads. It was partisan to the colonial project, but yet educated students who were opposed to colonialism. It shied away from political involvement, and yet sanctioned the ideals of equality through its religious teachings.

Fort Hare

in a lecture titled Colonial Education and Missionary Evangelism given at UCT and published in the book Blytheswood: A unique South African mission station, Professor Marlene Caitlin states: "There are two points about viewpoints about missionaries in Southern Africa. Some think of them as agents of conquest, tools of imperialism, tools of a capitalist system, who fastened the yoke on a subject people and sapped their will to resist. Others see them...