After Anton completed Standard III, Sibeko encouraged him to continue his education. He worked for a while in a kitchen at Escombe in order to buy books and pay school fees at Umbumbulu Government School, where he completed Standard VI with a first class pass. Then, Hamilton Makhanya, a local school inspector, assisted him in securing a scholarship at nearby Adams College.
ADAMS COLLEGE
Established in 1849 to train African assistants to European missionaries, Adams College had by the 1930s become one of the premier schools for African students from all over southern and central Africa.6 Adams had three divisions: a high school which took students through matriculation; an industrial school for training students in carpentry and building; and a teachers’ training college, opened in 1909. A new teachers’ course introduced in 1927 prepared students for the Native Teachers Higher Primary Certificate (later renamed the T3), which allowed a teacher to apply for jobs in Intermediate Schools, High Schools and Training Colleges. This was the course for which Lembede enrolled in 1933.
Lembede left indelible impressions on his classmates at Adams. First, there was his abject poverty which was apparent to everyone because of his shabby dress: his patched pants and worn-out jackets. Jordan Ngubane, a classmate and one of the founders of the ANC Youth League, described Lembede as the “living symbol of African misery.”7 Girls were embarrassed to be seen with him in public. Lembede was “very stupid in appearance,” one female classmate recollected. “If any girl ever saw you, even if Antony [Anton] was innocently talking with you, then you’d become somebody to be talked about for the day.”8
But there was another side of Lembede that his classmates consistently commented on, his brilliance and dedication to his studies. Edna Bam, who later taught in the faculty between stints at the National University of Lesotho, drew a comparison between Lembede and J E K Aggrey, the Ghanaian-born educator who had addressed an Adams audience in April 1921 when he visited South Africa as part of the Phelps-Stokes delegation investigating African education.9 Aggrey was touted as the role model for all aspiring African students. Bam and other Adams students were told stories about Aggrey being so dedicated to his schooling that in the middle of winter he studied with his feet in a bucket of hot water. And that was the image that came to mind when she remembered Lembede.
Lembede excelled in learning languages. At Adams he picked up Afrikaans, Sesotho and Xhosa as well as German from German nuns residing near Adams, and he began studying Latin. Learning Afrikaans was even then regarded sceptically by black students. But Ellen Kuzwayo recollected an occasion where Lembede spoke before a group of students preparing for a debate with students at Sastri College, an Indian school in Durban. He started off his speech in English, but then switched easily to Afrikaans.
In one of his student essays in the Adams’ publication, Iso Lomuzi, Lembede advised that the best way to learn new languages was to combine the techniques of learning grammar with reading elementary readers.10 In that same essay, he maintained that studying foreign languages allowed one to understand other people and that contributed to lessening racial hatred. However, he also supported blacks learning languages other than their own in order to put them in a position to challenge whites who had established a monopoly over African languages through their control of orthography and publications. “It speaks for itself,” he stated, “that we want educated Bantu men who have studied various Bantu languages, and who will be authorities on them.”
Two other student essays, “The Importance of Agriculture” and “What Do We Understand by Economics?”, provide a glimpse into Lembede’s thinking on political and economic issues.11 In them, he placed responsibility for black poverty on the African people themselves. He charged that poor farming techniques and the laziness of black farmers were directly responsible for their failures. Instead of drawing a connection between government policies and land shortages, he faulted black farmers for reducing themselves to the level where they had to seek work on white farms for a pittance. Lembede’s own father had been forced to supplement his family’s income by periodically going out to work on the farms of neighbouring white and Indian farmers.
Lembede’s solution was an education that taught people an appreciation for manual labour and applied modern agricultural techniques. His role model was Booker T Washington, the black American educator, whose ideas on industrial education and self-help had been transplanted to Natal in the early twentieth century by an American-trained Zulu, John Dube. Washington’s principles permeated Dube’s own school, Ohlange Institute, and they had a significant impact on the thinking of those in charge of education throughout South Africa in the following decades.
Lembede’s student views are a pointed contrast to his criticisms of the government in the mid-1940s, but they highlight themes that consistently surface in his later writings – that Africans had to rely on their inner resources to overcome inequities and that spiritual beliefs were a necessary component of economic and political advancement.
The fact that Lembede’s essays were not overtly political is not surprising since descriptions of Adams generally agree that the school did not have a politicised environment. Although Adams teaching staff included Albert Luthuli and Z K Matthews, who were to become prominent figures in the ANC, its administrators and teachers carefully insulated students from the political currents circulating about them. There was nevertheless one aspect of Adams that possibly influenced Lembede’s nationalism of later years, a conscious effort on the part of Adams administrators to defuse ethnic tensions between students.
In this regard, a highlight of the school year was Heroes of Africa Day, set aside to celebrate heroes of the African past. The campus had recognised Moshoeshoe Day and Shaka Day in the past, but when Edgar Brookes took over as Adams’ principal in 1934, he created a Heroes’ Day on 31 October, the eve of All Saints Day, when “heroes” of the Christian faith were honoured.12 On Heroes’ Day, students wore their national dress and gathered at an assembly to pay tribute to noted black South African figures. An Adams student, Khabi Mnqoma, has described the day’s significance:
The day is set aside to sing praises to heroes of South Africa, and to attempt to recapture the mode of life of our ancestors. As Adams College is what one might term cosmopolitan, the various students contribute towards drawing a picture of primitive African life.13
Ellen Kuzwayo recalls her feelings about the day:
We crossed the tribal division on that day … If I was Tswana, I had a freedom to depict my hero in another community in that cultural dress. Because I lived very near Lesotho, my grandfather’s home … and I saw more of the Basotho people, saw their traditional dresses, their traditional dances, everything, and I would be nothing but a moSotho … And I think we didn’t realise it … but it kept us as a black community without saying, “You are Zulu. You are Tswana. You are Xhosa.”14
TEACHING AND THE LAW
After leaving Adams in 1936, Lembede took up a series of teaching posts, first at Utrecht and Newcastle in Natal and then in the Orange Free State at Heilbron Bantu United School, where he taught Afrikaans, and Parys Bantu School, where he was headmaster.
His thirst for education never stopped. Over the next decade he steadily advanced himself through a series of degrees, all through private study and financed with his meagre personal resources. He passed the Joint Matriculation Board exams in 1937, taking Afrikaans A and English B and earning a distinction in Latin. In 1940 he studied for a BA, majoring in Philosophy and Roman Law, through correspondence courses with the University of South Africa. He then tackled the Bachelor of Laws (LLB) through the University of South Africa, completing it in 1942. Finally, he registered for an MA in Philosophy in 1943 at the University of South Africa, submitting his thesis entitled “The Conception of God as Expounded by, or as it Emerges from the Writings of Philosophers – from Descartes to the Present Day” in 1945.15 Considering the fact that only a few black South Africans had attained graduate degrees, A P Mda’s tribute to Lembede on completing his MA was well-deserved: “This signal achievement is the culmination of an epic struggle for self-education under severe handicaps and almost insuperable difficulties. It is a dramatic climax to Mr Lembede’s