With the subtext of South Africa’s racism intruding in these ways into the life of the institution, tensions were sometimes tangible. When they broke the surface they were most often about living conditions and food quality – what today might be called ‘service delivery’. My mother’s duties included supervision of the dining-hall kitchens and the on-site bakery and soon after arrival we were shown how quickly things could go bad. With Dad away one afternoon, the Mission House was surrounded by angry students pelting our windows with stale bread. Someone in the bakery had got the mix wrong and the blame came Mom’s way. Food protests were not new: later we found out that the first at KTI had been led by JB Marks8 in 1917. I soon learned how rudimentary the dormitory accommodations were: discovering that I could make some extra pocket-money on my bike by delivering love letters between the men’s dormitories and the women’s hostel a half-mile away, I had gained access to both. For each student, a bed, some shelves and a metal trunk were more or less all there was. Ablution facilities were also spartan. Kilnerton was providing education and hostel accommodation for a mere £28 per year (around R1 500 today) and there were no luxuries.
Examination season typically brought heaviness and dread. High school principal Charles Jackson, who, it was said, could spot a student with his hands in his pockets a mile off, demanded the highest standards but the best that most of his products could hope for was to go on to the Kilnerton ‘Normal College’ to be trained as teachers under another legendary character, Kenneth Hartshorne. Among the exceptions was Nthato Motlana, who became the first black medical student at the University of the Witwatersrand and a significant community leader in the struggle that lay ahead. Another was Mary Xakane, the first black woman to become a doctor in South Africa. The second president of the SA Native National Congress, later to be renamed the African National Congress (ANC), Reverend Sefako Mapogo Makgatho, was one of the founding teaching staff of KTI; he taught there for 19 years before branching out as a church and political leader. He was renowned for his campaigns against discrimination and for his presidential address of 6 May 1919, in which he declared, “We ask for no special favours from the government. This is the land of our fathers.” Other famous ‘Old Kilnertonians’ were struggle stalwarts Lillian Ngoyi, one of the leaders of the 1956 protest march by 20 000 women on the Union Buildings, and Barney Ngakane, Transvaal president of the ANC, singer Miriam Makeba, and the Robben Island veteran Dikgang Moseneke, who became Deputy Chief Justice in democratic South Africa.
I had to go to school of course, and here the power of custom once more had its way: for a white child to attend Kilnerton would have been unthinkable. So every morning I would walk through the long grass, away from a perfectly good school, to wait for the steam train that would take us to school in Hatfield, the nearest Pretoria suburb five miles away. Two years later, when I transitioned to Pretoria Boys’ High, I swopped the train for a six-mile bike ride in the long hot summers and bitter winters – well worth it for the independence it gave me and the detours past a certain girl’s house on my way home. I was, after all, beginning to explore adolescence.
With the election of the National Party and its policy of specially designed ‘Bantu Education’, places like Kilnerton were doomed: they educated black people too well. It took a while and by the time the axe fell in 1955, my father had been appointed elsewhere, but the intimidation began right after the election. Land had already been expropriated for the massive Koedoespoort railway works across the line and Kilnerton was now described officially as a ‘black spot in a white area’. At night fires were set in our fields by white vigilantes and shots were fired into the mission property. As the first apartheid legislation began to take shape Dad began to confront it in his preaching and in other ways, but he was spared the indignities that came to his successor, Reverend Deryck Dugmore, when the government intervened directly in the institution. Dr Stanley Mogoba9 recalls the day when the Bantu Education inspector came and assembled the entire staff: “The kafferboetie (kaffer-brother) days are over now,” he announced, and began to list a number of draconian changes in the way Kilnerton was to be administered. The response of the students was an immediate strike and for a time the campus was virtually ungovernable, but in the end the state won and KTI’s life as an institution of integrity was over. Curriculum and rules would now be dictated by the apartheid government.
We left in December 1952 for Cape Town, so were gone by the time the takeover happened, but I recall picking up some of the agonised discussions about whether to close KTI entirely rather than hand any part of it to the apartheid administration. My father was of this mind, but the issue was finally decided by the Methodist Conference in response to the pleas of black parents. Their cry was, ‘better half an education than none’. The fact that the church could still offer chaplaincy and supervise the residential, social and spiritual life of the students was a sop that eased the decision, but in reality KTI was gutted. Its tragedy was multiplied all over South Africa as the suffocating hand of Bantu Education fell upon one great mission campus after another. KTI’s life finally ended in 1962.
Almost all of the Kilnerton lands were sold to finance the church’s response to yet another brutal government policy: the forced removal of hundreds of thousands of black people into vast new ‘townships’ outside the cities – places like Mamelodi outside Pretoria and South Western Townships (Soweto) south of Johannesburg. The money was used to build scores of churches for these displaced people in their new, harsh environment, while some funds were husbanded in a trust that continues to resource mission and educational endeavours.
It is impossible to measure the destruction caused by this deliberate dumbing down of black education. Trade union leader Cyril Ramaphosa bluntly expressed the sentiments of millions of black South Africans when he said, “We can learn to forgive many of the terrible things apartheid did to our people, but the worst by far was the Bantu Education Act. It did more long-term damage than anything else. That we cannot forgive.” But while the immediate future was now held to ransom by the apartheid ideologues, they could not undo the past, and because of the Christian mission campuses, a crucial generation of brilliant and increasingly politicised students had already slipped through their grasp. Leaders like Luthuli, Tambo, Mandela, Tutu, Sisulu, Sobukwe and a host of others all owed their school education to the churches. It would show in the quality of their leadership.
A young white lad had also been introduced to black South Africans in a way open to only a tiny fraction of my contemporaries. Instead of encounters always being of a master-servant nature, I was in daily contact with black persons whom I naturally looked up to. However distorted by the customs of the day, the five years on the Kilnerton campus changed my outlook forever and drew an invisible, but real line between myself and other whites of my age.
If you head east these days on the road from Pretoria to Witbank you will find that urban sprawl has obliterated most of the Kilnerton campus. The koppie is built over with pricey white homes, but on the ridge, if you look very carefully, you will see that the stone chapel is there, and alongside the widened road, hidden in tall grass, the stone gate-posts still stand as mute witnesses to an era when fine education and Christian