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The Records of the University of Fort Hare*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Seán Morrow  and
Khayalethu Gxabalashe
Seán Morrow
Affiliation:
University of Fort Hare
Khayalethu Gxabalashe
Affiliation:
University of Fort Hare
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Extract

Historians, not just of South Africa, but of any part of what was once British Africa up to and including Kenya, will be familiar with the significance of the University of Fort Hare at Alice, in South Africa's Eastern Cape province. The university is built on the site and retains the name of a British fort that was a major base for one of the first and most bitterly-fought, and certainly the longest, of the nineteenth-century southern African wars of conquest. However, in one of the paradoxes in which South Africa abounds, Fort Hare has become a shibboleth of modern African nationalism, priding itself on its illustrious alumni, which include many of the great names of the modern black elite in southern Africa. The paradox to some extent disappears, and the interest and complexity increases, when it is considered that Fort Hare had its origins in the liberal missionary tradition, with all its ambiguities, and that its products included homeland leaders as well as nationalist politicians, and the functionaries of segregationist and colonial states as well as assertively African political and cultural leaders.

The vicinity of Fort Hare has long been a center of education in the western tradition. From 1841, in the case of Lovedale, with nearby Healdtown and St. Matthew's following later, the great mission-schools of the Eastern Cape, supported by the Lovedale Press, made the area the cradle of the mission-educated African elite. It was from this context that Fort Hare emerged in 1916, being the creation of an interdenominational group of Protestant missionaries and of African leaders such as John Tengo Jabavu, founder of the newspaper Imvo Zabatsundu.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 27 , January 2000 , pp. 481 - 497
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2000

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Footnotes

*

The authors would like to thank the Fort Hare University Registrar, at the time of writing, Dr. I.K. Mabindisa, for his assistance. We would also like to thank colleagues at the Govan Mbeki Research Resource Centre, and especially Nwabisa Vokwana and Brown Maaba; Mr. E.G. Somyo and his staff in the Registry; Ms Yolisa Soul, the Acting University Librarian; Ms Nandi Tom, the Acting Director of Human Resources; Mr. Mbeko Mnyatheli, Deputy Director, Development and Public Affairs; Mr. Nikile Ntsababa, Chief Committee Clerk, and Ms Sandy Rowoldt, the Cory Librarian at Rhodes University.

References

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10 White, T.R.H., “Z.K. Matthews and the Formation of the ANC Youth League at the University College of Fort Hare,” Kleio 27 (1995):,124–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Student Disturbances at Fort Hare in 1955,” Kleio 29 (1997): 115-38.

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20 Among Tabata's publications is his perceptive Education for Barbarism in South Africa: Bantu (Apartheid) Education (London, 1960).Google Scholar

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22 Some of Can Themba's journalistic writing has been collected in Stuart, Donald and Holland, Roy, eds., The Will to Die (London, 1972).Google Scholar

23 For Mancoba see Miles, Elza, Land and Lives: a Story of Early Mack Artists (Cape Town, 1997), 136–43.Google Scholar

24 Jordan is probably most widely known for his isiXhosa novel Ingqumbo Yeminyanya (Lovedale, 1954)Google Scholar, translated as Wrath of the Ancestors (Lovedale, 1980).Google Scholar

25 For further details on Mary Mahlasela see Kuzwayo, Ellen, Call Me Woman (London, 1985): 140, 145-46, 247–49.Google Scholar Our thanks to Brown Maaba for this reference.

26 A study that deals with Stanlake Samkange, his brother, Sketchley, and his father, Thompson, is Ranger, Terence, Are We Not Also Men? The Samkange Family and African Politics in Zimbabwe, 1920-64 (London, 1995).Google ScholarPubMed Two of Stanlake Samkange's works are Origins of Rhodesia (London, 1968)Google Scholar, and his historical drama On Trial for my Country (London, 1966).Google Scholar

27 Our thanks to John McCracken, Stirling University, for this reference.