first educational steps were fortunate in one respect. A government report of 1920 noted that mission schools in Fingoland were superior to most others, a legacy of the days of the first magistrate, Captain Blyth, when ‘school attendance was practically enforced by administrative order’. The Wesleyan primary school that Govan attended from the sub-standards through to Standard 6 was built as a church hall and doubled up on weekdays as a one-room school. It was a simple rectangle, with a corrugated iron roof over whitewashed walls. Its only lighting came through its windows.
Years later, Govan recalled it clearly: ‘All the classes ranged up the length of the hall, with the highest classes just below the pulpit. The classes sat on either side of the aisle without desks, except for the three more senior forms. Looking back at those days, I often wonder how we managed with each class carrying on its work in the way it saw fit. It was bedlam. One class recited the alphabet, another a multiplication table, a third sang up and down the scale of the modulator, others would be poring over arithmetic problems. The only advantage in the arrangement was that the principal teacher saw his staff at work all the time without having to leave his own class. But little wonder that I was below average in arithmetic!’
Despite the challenging learning environment being described, the sketch is affectionate, not aggrieved. It is a recollection, we may safely conclude, by one who took to reading and writing (if not arithmetic!) with ease. Relevant to Govan’s later career as journalist and author, he received a thorough grounding in written and spoken English: ‘We started off with English … after passing Standard 6 we talked English according to the grammar book!’
Govan had not completed his first year at primary school when he fell victim to the influenza epidemic that ravaged South Africa. Nqamakwe was hard-hit, and the Methodist Church noted in 1919 of its Mpukane circuit that ‘many have died’. The boy survived his bout, but remembered the severity of his attack: ‘I’ve never been that ill again!’ In a single year, the eight-year-old lost his father, survived a fearsome disease and began the daily uphill trudge to the tiny school. This combination might have made school an unsettling experience, associated with illness and death. Not in Govan’s case: 70 years later, he spoke warmly of his years in the church-hall school. ‘Oh, I enjoyed school. I never played truant! No, I enjoyed it.’
This enjoyment was reinforced by a home life that placed a premium on literacy. Schooling slotted in with the familiar rhythms of the homestead. The daily journey home was downhill; and at its end every afternoon Govan helped herd the livestock into their pens and kraals. Home life and school life overlapped. And at weekends and holidays, Govan and his peers moved with their families’ grazing cattle, swam and fished in the Tsomo and Kei rivers, filling their hours with the haphazard intensity of boys at play. Here was an education with a curriculum far older than that on offer in mission schools. Like other African children, Govan acquired (in the words of D.D.T. Jabavu) ‘a thorough acquaintance with out-of-door sights of Mother Nature, games organized by his fellows, the learning of fables and folk traditions … a systematized training in attitudes and behaviour to all elders and superiors … close first-hand familiarity with wild animals, wild trees, wild edible roots: bird trapping … swimming in ponds and streams, riding on goats and calves, and counting the number of cattle and sheep as they return to the fold at the end of each day.’
Govan himself spoke nostalgically of childhood hours outdoors. He recalled with relish walking in the forests of the Tsomo River valley – ‘there was fruit, fruit available … growing under natural conditions’ – where he heard only birdsong and ‘the rustle of the bush and trees’, until – thirsty – he knelt at the stream’s edge, ‘sucking the water from the stream, beautiful, clear, cold’. What was clearly in many ways a delightful childhood world was also a restricted one. Before he went to boarding school, the furthest Govan ever travelled from home was the neighbouring district of Butterworth. He could list his encounters with white people in these years on the fingers of one hand. He had never seen a train until he travelled to Healdtown. Although Nqamakwe lies only 90 kilometres inland, he did not see the sea until he was a young adult. When Govan Mbeki was in his mid-teens, he left home and entered an educational environment more demanding in terms of formal curriculum and less tolerant of the parallel learning. He went to secondary school, as a boarder – not to nearby Blythswood nor to famous Lovedale, both run by Presbyterian missionaries, but to Healdtown, the flagship of the Methodist mission schools.
2
Healdtown and Fort Hare
Pulled from the front, pushed from behind: Healdtown, 1927–1931
In January 1927 Govan Mbeki left his family home for Healdtown, the school founded by the Methodist missionary John Ayliff in 1855. The Healdtown Institution was successively a base for training Wesleyan evangelists, a teachers’ training college and an industrial school; but in 1917 a high school was added (attended not only by Govan Mbeki, but also by Nelson Mandela, Robert Sobukwe, Raymond Mhlaba, Seth Mokitimi and other distinguished South Africans). It is set in a valley of the Kat River, below the Mankazana mountains, about seven miles from Fort Beaufort. Like other African boarding schools, it was deliberately located away from urban areas.
Govan travelled from King William’s Town to Fort Beaufort by train, its carriages full of students bound for St Matthew’s, Lovedale and Healdtown. Older students greeted one another and teased newcomers: for all of them, the experience emphasised a sense of social and generational identity. At Fort Beaufort station, the luggage of those bound for Healdtown was collected (since 1924 by motor lorry instead of ox-wagon!) and the students walked the rest of the way. Phyllis Ntantala was only 12 when she first attended Healdtown – the year Govan left – and recalls arriving ‘at eleven o’clock or midnight, tired, dirty and hungry’.
It was a defining feature of the Eastern Cape mission schools that they were boarding schools. To attend Lovedale, Blythswood, Healdtown or their like was not a matter of a daily journey, shuttling between homestead and school-room and learning from each. It was a long-term entry into a rigorously planned and regulated environment, submission to its criteria, and rupture with life outside the school. In a real sense, the journey to boarding school was one to a different society: one with its own structure, hierarchy, laws and subjects. The schools were there to give lessons in the three Rs, certainly, but their intentions were more far-reaching. They wanted to alter their pupils, to detach them from their prior identity and equip them with a new one. The Lovedale authorities endorsed the findings of a conference that boarding facilities themselves should help remould their charges: ‘The dormitory should be regarded as a training school in which good living habits, high standards in conduct, efficiency in all activities, an appreciation of the value of time, and the ability to cooperate with others are acquired.’ The Warden of St Matthew’s College (in Keiskammahoek) fretted in 1931: ‘When our students come back after a long holiday … we see a great change in their attitude… We find that when they come back from their holidays … it takes us some weeks to restore that nice tone which we have been accustomed to … We teach them manners.’
Healdtown was equally committed to the task of remaking its young subjects. The Rev. J.W. Watkinson was Governor (school principal) when Govan arrived at the school, and he wrote that it had been ‘a constant endeavour’ to produce a particular kind of boy and girl: ‘The tendency of our day to secularise everything has been strenuously resisted, and it has been sought to emphasise the importance of moral character as well as mental equipment, and to inculcate a regard for the amenities and decencies of civilised life’ in them. A few years later, Watkinson warned against having young Africans travel for schooling to America: ‘They come back with all sorts of subversive and revolutionary ideas.’ Healdtown sought instead to ensure that it sent into the world ‘the choicest of our young Native people as men, as Christian men, and saturated with Methodism’.
How did the school pursue this project? It put its students in uniforms and established a hierarchy of control rising from the smongwanas (new boys) through older pupils and ‘captains’ (later called prefects) through boarding and teaching staff up to the Governor. It ensured that their every hour was ordered. A Healdtown graduate wryly recalled: ‘A rising bell –