In 1923 Z.K. Matthews (1901– 1968) became the fi rst student to graduate from Fort Hare College. A school for missionaries at a military fort in the town of Alice was turned into the South African Native College in 1916, later called the University College of Fort Hare. Matthews was on the staff for many years. As a member of the ANC, he played a major role in African politics and in the dialogue that took place in the 1920s between whites and blacks on the Joint Councils and the Bantu-European Conferences. Alan Paton, the biographer of Jan Hofmeyr, considered him at least the intellectual peer of the latter, and described him as a man who could mix diplomacy and bluntness with the greatest urbanity. He went into exile in 1960. His son Joe served as deputy minister in the fi rst democratic government, and his granddaughter Naledi Pandor was appointed Minister of Education in 2004.
English writer Pauline Smith (1882 – 1959). Both Smith and Herman Charles Bosman (1905 –1951) produced remarkable short stories that evocatively depicted the life of the rural community. Smith’s short story ‘The Pain’ (1924) and her novel The Beadle (1926) revealed what a literary critic called a ‘strange, austere, tender and ruthless talent’. The most memorable character in Herman Charles Bosman’s short stories is the shrewd and folksy Oom Schalk Lourens. The fi rst of these stories appeared in the early 1930s. After the war the stories were republished in four volumes, of which Mafeking Road is the best known.
Between the mid-1920s and the mid-1930s the African ability to exert pressure seemed to be slipping. The ICU, the only mass trade union, had collapsed and the ANC had lost its coherence. Whites drifted into the increasing acceptance of the Hertzog bills that demanded comprehensive segregation. Yet despite the Depression, black intellectuals had not abandoned the basic framework of the capitalist system and, more particularly, the core value of economic individualism and the belief that any individual could succeed through education, hard work and self-help. Instead of turning to socialism, most of them believed whites would reconsider the demand for black representation if they could back up their demand by black economic success. Yet success was impossible without good education, not to speak of equal education.
Z.K. Matthews, the first graduate from Fort Hare and an alumnus of the Yale and Harvard universities, remarked that education was the ‘prime means of solving the problem created by the juxtaposition of White and Black’. But the state did not have a nonracial vision of education and was not prepared to move spending on white and black education towards parity.
All blacks paid taxes, but spending on education was limited to a fixed sum and a fixed portion of a general tax they paid. In 1930 Dr A.B. Xuma charged the government with grossly discriminating against blacks in spending. He argued that a common education brought out the best in white and black. While the government spent over £8 million on the education of the children of one and a half million whites, it committed only £500 000 for the education of children of five million blacks. Most of the money was taken from a tax imposed on blacks, (See Dr Xuma’s charge).
As a result, black education was in a serious state of neglect. By 1928 only a quarter of black children received any schooling. Less than 1% were above the level of the first two school years. In the Cape Province, where education for blacks had reached the highest standards, two-thirds were without any school experience in 1939 and classes of 105 children per teacher were not uncommon.
There was some improvement in higher education. Before 1923 Lovedale was the only institution where black children could advance up to Junior High School, but missionaries subsequently established several new schools. By 1929 the number of children receiving junior certificates exceeded a hundred for the first time. Six years later the figure had jumped to 19 000. For a long time Fort Hare was the only institution where blacks could prepare for matriculation. Between 1916 and 1925 a total of 42 got their matriculation certificates, rising to 130 in 1931–1934. Three students enrolled at the University College of Fort Hare in 1916. By 1935 enrolment had risen to 156.
