History Please click here to read more about our centenary celebrations
The story of the revival
of one of South Africa’s Greatest Schools
By Mark Irvine
(Published in Optima, February 1996)
Presidents and carpenters
There is very little at the Tiger Kloof siding, between Vryburg and Kimberley, to indicate why the train should stop there. No platform, no shelter; only a rusty sign bearing the original Afrikaans name, ‘Tierkloof’. To the west, the veld stretches out flatly to a dusty horizon. But in the opposite direction, beyond a row of stately blue gum trees, stands a collection of splendid stone buildings—redolent of the English home-counties—transplanted incongruously into this severe African landscape. Over the years, passengers must have wondered, “Why here?”
Tiger Kloof owes its existence, curiously, to the London Missionary Society’s (LMS) being over taken by events. In 1882 the missionaries established the Moffat Institute in Kuruman, both as a memorial to Robert and Mary Moffat and in the hope that it would revive that famous mission station. Unfortunately, the LMS had not reconciled itself to the fact that the explorers’ road pioneered by Moffat through Kuruman had by the mid-1880s been bypassed by Rhodes’s great northern railroad one hundred kilometres to the east, running through the Kimberley diamond fields, Vryburg, Mafikeng, Victoria Falls and beyond.
Not surprisingly, the Institute in Kuruman failed to attract sufficient numbers of pupils and by the turn of the century the LMS had to yield to the forces of change. The Institute was sold and with the proceeds the LMS purchased the Tiger Kloof farm, ten kilometres south of Vryburg, with the intention of building a replacement school next to the railway line.
The school’s first headmaster, W C Willoughby, arrived at Tiger Kloof in March 1904 with a borrowed wagon, a bell tent and sundry items of construction equipment. He encountered a featureless landscape (a British battalion stationed there during the Boer War has rendered the surrounding countryside treeless). None the less, as Willoughby later wrote, “Within weeks of our arrival we had between thirty and forty native lads who wanted to learn the building trade ….. Of these lads, some soon tired of industry; but we indentured eighteen of them in due course as apprentices to the building trade.”
Under Willoughby’s direction, the apprentice crew commenced its task with the construction of a stable, then over the next few months as industrial block (replete with workshop, engine room, mill house, meal store, etc.), two dormitory blocks, cattle kraals, a fence around the property and an elaborate network of roads.
A year later he was able to report that: “The boys boarding school started with five pupils, and it will grow every year….. We have Bible teaching and prayers every morning, and services every Sunday."“
Willoughby retired in 1914 and was succeeded by A J Haile, a remarkably versatile man who personified the twin goals of Tiger Kloof to excel at both academic and commercial training. Under his direction, construction of the school’s chapel began in 1925. Formally opened in 1933, it had been built, as Haile declared, “in eight years to last eight hundred”.
Every element of the chapel—which indeed resembles a miniature cathedral—was the work of Tiger Kloof pupils: the pulpit and pews; a magnificent altar tapestry; large slate flagstones and the stained glass windows.
Haile added considerable weight to the calibre of Tiger Kloof as a coeducational academic institution, and it rapidly became the principle centre of education for Tswana people. This in spite of the Batswanan aristocracy, and the Bangwato regent Tshekedi Khama in particular, having taken umbrage at the LMS decision to locate the institution in South Africa not Botswana. For that reason the young Bangwato prince, Seretse Khama, had been sent in the early 1930’s to Adams College in Natal—then under the stewardship of the renowned Dr Edgar Brookes. Seretse, however, on medical advice left the subtropics of Natal for the rarefied atmosphere of the northern Cape where he enrolled at Tiger Kloof in 1937. There his health evidently improved markedly, for his name appears frequently in the Tiger Kloof Magazine as one of the school’s outstanding athletes.
Although Seretse went on to complete his studies at Lovedale College in the eastern Cape (and then at Oxford), Tiger Kloof was to remain with him all his life. Following Botswana’s independence in 1966, Sir Seretse’s first cabinet consisted almost entirely of 'Old Tigers'’- including the Minister of Education, B C Thema, his Setswana teacher at Tiger Kloof.
By 1945, when Haile retired, Tiger Kloof comprised no less than nine schools: a high school; a teachers’ training college; a Bible school for the training of ministers; and industrial schools for domestic science, masonry, carpentry, leatherwork and tailoring.