arrival, the Swiss missionaries, educators and medical doctors who had come to this part of the country must have banked on a long stay at Lemana and at the Elim Mission, Elim Hospital and Valdezia, some kilometres to the north-east of Lemana. The old buildings at Lemana Hill, including the superintendent’s residence, as well as the forest plantations along the edges of the hill continued to create an atmosphere of serenity. Even after years of neglect the campus remains remarkably steadfast and visually engaging. I felt that my old school was like a sanctuary waiting for a second coming.
While the vulgarity of Bantu Education was creeping into our classrooms in 1958 and 1959 at Lemana and elsewhere, Afrikanerdom was bringing a splendid educational chapter to a close and, along with it, the intellectual bounty of excellent teachers. My Lemana teachers found me ready for demanding studies in English higher grade, history, geography, Xitsonga and Afrikaans. I left each lesson with the distinct feeling that the teachers knew what they were doing. What I needed to do was to take full advantage of what was on offer.
By the time of my solitary visit to Lemana I had learnt a lot more than I had known as a schoolboy about the history of the school’s founders and about Elim Hospital, where I was circumcised, where I received my first pair of spectacles and where I worked in close proximity to medical doctors, doing odd jobs during school holidays for the first time in my life. Experiences at Elim Hospital opened the doors for my appreciation of what could be achieved with a good education, beyond teaching and missionary work. Little did I know at the time that hospitals and healing would play such an important role in my professional life.
Before my visit to Lemana I had read Patrick Harries’s book Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa. This helped me to understand the role of Swiss and other missionaries in the development of education in the north-eastern part of our country. One of their aims was to harness the combined potential benefits of belief in God and the discoveries of science. We learn from Harries’s account that a farm named Klipfontein at the headwaters of the Levubu and the Letaba rivers became home to several thousand early Christian converts. The missionaries named the station Valdezia. A few kilometres from Valdezia another mission outpost, called Elim, was established. The point at which this history touches my own life arises with the establishment of Lemana and Elim Hospital, both of them about 80 kilometres from Mavambe. During the four years I spent at Lemana as a student not even a hint of this interesting colonial history was given to us.
Harries also tells us that
missionaries normally erected their houses on hills from where they can cast an organizing gaze on the land below. From this vantage they conceived cleanliness as their major defense in the battle against the dark forces attached to the land; they obsessively washed themselves, particularly their children.9
I confirmed this choice for myself as I walked at different times over the hills at Lemana, Elim Mission and Elim Hospital.
My years at Lemana did more than expand my world educationally. I also gained an understanding of the connection between education and life choices. To me, education meant more than reading, writing and being able to calculate. I was exposed to some of its practical outcomes when I was given an anaesthetic by a doctor at Elim Hospital before my circumcision. About two years later, during my holiday work as a gardener for doctors at the hospital, I watched them at work in the wards in their white coats, stethoscopes hanging around their necks.
At Lemana itself one was given a peep into the world of knowledge through the school subjects, which, apart from Afrikaans, were taught at high levels of mastery. I worked hard, not only because I was expected to, but also because I enjoyed reading the prescribed texts that our English teacher, Mrs Hill, so confidently took us through during our senior years. Socially, culturally and intellectually my experiential horizons expanded at Lemana.
A substantial number of students at the school came from urban areas such as Pretoria and Johannesburg and many different African languages were spoken. In addition, there was an array of excellent and seasoned teachers, mostly black, with a sprinkling of white ones. Interestingly, what I remember most vividly about my days at Lemana has very little to do with play and entertainment. Most memorable to me are the teachers who made us laugh in class; those instructors, such as our geography teacher, Miyeni, who gave masterful performances in the delivery of their subject matter; and the self-restrained lifestyles and expectations of the missionaries.
In 1958 and 1959, my last two years at Lemana, the National Party occupation of African schools began in earnest. The sudden appearance of government-appointed senior white officials to take charge of our school was a sinister precursor of what was to follow: the nationwide closure of excellent schools such as Lemana. First, the Reverend Bill, the missionary and overall head of the school, was suddenly replaced by a Mr Endeman, a government appointee. Soon Mr Witkop, the well-liked and revered principal of the secondary school, was summarily removed. A former senior police officer, a Mr De Beer, was appointed second in charge. He also became our Afrikaans teacher in matric.
While the chief concern of the missionaries had been about relationships between male and female students on campus, naked attempts were made – by De Beer in particular, during our Afrikaans lessons – to indoctrinate us to become supporters of the tribal homelands that were soon to be established throughout South Africa. My classmates and I were dragged into apartheid and separate development politics during our final year at the school. Most of us in that matric class of 1959 received a foretaste of the kind of future that Afrikanerdom was busy concocting for us, both in our institution and in South African society as a whole.
Pupils at Lemana wrote the Joint Matriculation Board examinations instead of the National Senior Certificate examinations written by those at government schools. A friend of mine, Mike Sono, and I passed well enough to qualify for university admission, but our misfortune was the year in which we did so. For on the first day of August 1959 the University College of the North (popularly known as Turfloop, after the farm on which it was situated) was proclaimed by the minister of Bantu Education. This ‘ethnic’ university was to function under the watchful eye of the University of South Africa (Unisa) in Pretoria.
The university was brought into being through the promulgation of the Extension of University Education Act (Act No. 45 of 1959). The first rector was a short, strong-boned man, Professor E F Potgieter, who took his seat at the new institution on the day it was proclaimed. The college itself opened its doors to students on the day of my arrival, 2 March 1960. I was student number 11 in the college register, which recorded that there were fewer than 100 students at the university. From the start the college authorities made sure that unauthorised student meetings were forbidden on campus, so we held them behind the bushes on some of the prominent hills.
The first Student Representative Council (SRC), of which I was a member, was elected in 1961. I had been a member of the first dissident class at Lemana and had the requisite political consciousness to become involved in student government and its unavoidable politics. Our class was, in all likelihood, the last group to have escaped the introduction of Bantu Education.
Apart from Professor Potgieter, who came from Unisa, there was, among the white members of staff, a notable mix of overseas-educated academics and those who had come from some of the country’s Afrikaans-language universities. Short in stature as Potgieter was, in presence and intellect he towered over most of his colleagues and was a very effective speaker. Although we left some room for guarded suspicion in our relationships with him, the brightest among us could not help according him the respect he was due. Together with the less academically outstanding Afrikaner academics was a small group of carefully selected African intellectual upstarts who had a great deal to learn about what it meant to be an academic. They had been carefully hand-picked from the Bantu Education inspectorate corps to serve in disciplines such as education and the region’s African languages – namely, Sesotho, Tshivenda, Setswana and Xitsonga. In time, some African staff members became the most visible beneficiaries of the emerging Bantu Education
