By Samuel G. Freedam
 |
Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, second from left, attended a graduation ceremony at the University of Fort Hare in 2003. Associated Press/Alan Eaton |
Of
the hundreds of pages in Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, “Long Walk to
Freedom,” barely a dozen recount his college education at the University of Fort Hare, established by
white Christian missionaries. He spent less than two of his 95 years there.
Most obituaries made only a brief mention of that period.
Mandela left Fort Hare
partway through his studies during a conflict with its leader, a Scottish
evangelist named Alexander Kerr, about a student boycott of college elections.
“At that moment, I saw Dr. Kerr less as a benefactor than as a
not-altogether-benign dictator,” Mandela wrote in his memoirs. As for himself,
a 22-year-old at that point in late 1940, “I was in an unpleasant state of
limbo.”
The
mixed emotions that Mandela expressed were far from his alone. The entire
enterprise of mission schools in Africa stood at an ambiguous, contested
crossroads. It was part of colonialism, yet it educated students who opposed
colonialism. It avoided political involvement, yet inspired the quest for
racial equality through its religious ideals.
In the aftermath of Mandela’s death, in the
fullness of time, mission education has earned a more positive re-evaluation.
Mandela himself did ultimately receive his bachelor’s degree from Fort Hare by
taking courses off site, and in 2006 was photographed beaming as he wore his
college blazer.
Whatever flaws they had — condescension, timidity,
elitism — schools like Fort Hare produced not only Mandela but an array of
Southern Africa’s black leaders. Fort Hare educated Oliver Tambo of the African
National Congress, Chris Hani of the nation’s Communist Party, Mangosuthu
Buthelezi of the Inkatha Freedom Party and Robert Sobukwe of the Pan Africanist
Congress. (A less celebrated alumnus is Robert Mugabe, the dictatorial
president of Zimbabwe.)
Lovedale, another missionary school, taught Thabo
Mbeki, who would become post-apartheid South Africa’s second president. Steve
Biko, later the leader of the Black Consciousness movement, went to a Catholic
boarding school, St. Francis. Albert J. Luthuli, the Nobel laureate, both
studied and taught at Adams College, which had been founded by American
missionaries.
The accomplishments of mission schools were both
intentional and not. Their founders and faculties clearly parted ways with
colonial leaders by believing in the educability of black Africans and their
capacity to be saved through Christ. Yet those beliefs were a long way from
liberation theology.
“I’m not making missionaries heroes,” said Richard
H. Elphick, a historian at Wesleyan University in Connecticut and the author of
“The Equality of Believers,” a book about Protestant missionaries in South
Africa. “Missionaries and other white Christians were alarmed by the idea that
the equality of all people before God means they should be equal in public
life. But the equality of believers is an idea they dropped into South Africa.
And it was constantly reinforced in the schools. And that made it a dangerous
idea.”
Olufemi Taiwo offered a similarly nuanced
endorsement, and he did so from two perspectives: as the product of a mission
education in his native Nigeria and as a Cornell University professor with
expertise in African studies.
“Under colonialism, there’s a tension between the
missions and the colonial authorities,” said Dr. Taiwo, author of the 2010 book
“How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa.” “There was a missionary idea
that black people could be modern. And most churches cannot come out and say
some people are not human. So you might have a patronizing attitude, but if you
don’t think Africans can benefit from education, why would you set up schools?”
Certainly, the model of mission education was not
unique to Africa. White American missionaries played a similarly complicated
role as emblems of both modernity and noblesse oblige in China before the
Communist revolution.
Many mission colleges in South Africa modeled their
practical courses in industry and agriculture — a curriculum known as
differentiated education or adapted education — on those of black schools in
the United States such as Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute.
In
whatever form it took, mission education was virtually the only formal sort
available to black Africans for much of the colonial era. The first mission
school in Nigeria opened in 1859, 50 years before the first government school,
according to Dr. Taiwo. In the mid-1920s, mission schools in South Africa were
educating far more Africans (about 215,000 compared with about 7,000) than were
state schools, by Dr. Elphick’s calculations.
“For young black South Africans like myself,”
Mandela wrote about Fort Hare in his autobiography, “it was Oxford and Cambridge,
Harvard and Yale, all rolled into one.” Before his rancorous departure, he
studied Latin and physics, joined the drama society, ran cross country and
lived in a hostel for Methodists like himself.
Just as important for the person Mandela would become,
Fort Hare put him in a multiracial community, said Daniel Massey, author of
“Under Protest,” a history of political activism at the college. Mandela’s
classmates included Indian and “colored” students, and even some white children
of faculty members. The black students were drawn from across tribal and
linguistic lines.
For all those reasons — academic, religious,
cultural — mission schools like Fort Hare were anathema to Afrikaner
nationalists. Speaking in 1938, the political leader Daniel Malan warned about
the growing number of “civilized and educated nonwhites who wish to share our
way of life and to strive in every respect for equality with us.”
In the dozen years after winning a majority in
South Africa’s 1948 elections, Afrikaner nationalists exerted state control
over mission schools, imposing apartheid’s segregation by racial category and
tribal identity and pushing for education in African languages rather than in
English. Fort Hare, over the protests of its students, was subsumed under the
government policy of “Bantu education.”
Like so much else in South Africa, that changed
with Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and the transition to majority rule.
In October 1991, Mandela’s political ally, law partner and college classmate
Oliver Tambo was named chancellor of Fort Hare. In his installation speech, even as
he acknowledged the strife during his student years, Tambo intoned the college
motto: “In your light, let us see light.”
Email:
sgf1@columbia.edu; Twitter:
@SamuelGFreedman
Source: http://www.nytimes.com
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