Three types of school. During the 1840s Cape offi cials James Rose Innes and Langham Dale, and Governor Sir George Grey laid the foundation of a modern, secular, English-medium system of education in the Cape Colony. St Andrew’s College (left) represented the pinnacle of the system where children received advanced instruction. Zonnebloem College in Cape Town (second from left) was attended mostly by black and coloured students, but Grey also brought 40 sons of chiefs on the eastern frontier to be educated here. The school on the right, at Elim, was a missionary institution. Almost all coloured and black children and many of the poorer white children received their instruction from such mission schools.
English economic dominance led to English cultural dominance among the white, coloured and black elite. In 1865 the government of the Cape Colony decided that all future instruction in government schools had to be given in English. The few top schools attended by the children of the white elite became bastions of the English cultural influence, among them the Diocesan College (1849) in Cape Town, St Andrew’s in Grahamstown (1855) and the Stellenbosch Gymnasium (1866). In the Republic of the Orange Free State the Grey Institute was founded in Bloemfontein in 1856. In Natal the Pietermaritzburg High School (later Maritzburg College) opened its doors in 1863 and Durban High School in 1866.
But overall the level of white education was very poor. In 1875 it was found that threequarters of white children in the Cape Colony were illiterate. In the republics and Natal it was worse.
Almost all education for coloureds and blacks was in the hands of churches and missionary institutions. Almost without exception they made the teaching of English a high priority. In 1891 a third of the white children in schools in the Cape Colony attended mission schools in which there was no colour bar. Zonnebloem College in Cape Town, started by the Anglican Church, began with white, coloured and black pupils, and later became predominantly a coloured school.
In Xhosa country there were several mission stations spreading English culture, the gospel of work and individual respectability. During the 1850s the Cape governor, Sir George Grey, provided funding for African schools at Healdtown, St Matthews, St Mark’s, Salem, Peelton, Mount Coke and in Grahamstown. Lovedale had started earlier, in 1841, with eleven blacks and nine whites and remained a mixed school until 1878. In 1878 James Stewart wrote: ‘All colours, white and black and brown and yellow are to be found among the pupils. They represent nearly all the tribes of South Africa. There are [Xhosas], Fingoes, Hottentots, Pondos, Bechuanas, Basutos, Zulus, English and Dutch.’
By 1887 more than 2 000 blacks had received a missionary education in Lovedale alone. They became teachers, law agents, magistrate’s clerks, interpreters, telegraph operators, printers and clerks. In Natal the Adams Mission Station (later Adams College) began teaching blacks in 1853. Its reputation for quality education quickly spread.
