Alice

“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...

When Sobukwe left Healdtown Mission Institute for the next stage of his education, he found that most of the country’s universities were closed to blacks. Only the universities of Cape Town and the Witwatersrand gave limited access to black students. The premier institute for blacks was near Alice – the South African Native College at Fort Hare.

The college, founded in 1916, was originally intended for blacks, as the title indicated, but also had a small number of white students. Later, there were no white students, but there were coloured and Asian students. The year before Sobukwe enrolled, the college had 324 students - 260 blacks, 29 Asians and 35 coloureds. Only 31 of the students were women, fourteen students came from Basutoland (later renamed Lesotho) and eighteen from other parts of Africa. The teaching staff was overwhelmingly white.

In its time, the college nurtured many blacks who later rose to leadership. Sir Seretse Khama, first president of independent Botswana, was there in 1946. Robert Mugabe, who led the struggle against white rule in Rhodesia and became first Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, graduated in 1941, as did Oliver Tambo, later the President-in-Exile of the African National Congress. And a year before him, Nelson Mandela.

Sobukwe went into the Wesley House photosynthetically, it was supposed to be only for Methodists like him but in practice it drew and accepted students of whatever denomination who hailed from the Eastern Cape, just as Methodists and Anglicans from Johannesburg preferred to go to the...

By the end of March 2018 the 14-member Africa Media Online team resident in Alice, Eastern Cape and working in the National Heritage and Cultural Studies Centre (NAHECS) at the University of Fort Hare, had completed the digital capture of all the material assigned to them in the current phases of the ANC Archives digitisation project.

While the overall project actually started in the last quarter of 2011 and continued into 2012, the current phases of the project kicked off in November 2015 and are due to end at the end of April 2018. By then the team will have digitised the contents of 3,576 archival boxes as well as museum objects, posters, banners and other materials. At one time we had five different workflows running concurrently – one to digitise bound manuscripts, another to digitise fragile manuscripts, another to digitise plain paper, another to digitise photographic prints and the final one to digitise slides and negatives. In all we would have captured close to 2 million pages with over 1.3 million being plain paper, over 300,000 being fragile papers and also over 300,000 being bound manuscripts. We also captured almost 82,000 photographic images and over 3,000 museum objects. The team worked exceptionally hard often operating in two shifts and at times in three shifts around the clock to keep to targets. They not only digitised the archive but ordered and documented it as well.

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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...