It was producing qualified graduates and skilled tradesmen—’presidents and carpenters’- in great abundance; by the 1950’s its alumni body had grown to more than three thousand individuals.
Among these were Sir Ketumile Masire, the current president of Botswana, and Ruth Mompati, MP and the present leader of the ANC in the North West.
Aubrey Lewis, the young and spirited headmaster who succeeded Haile in 1945, looks back on those years with considerable nostalgia:
“The school, with between 600 and 700 people living on the property, was prosperous; there was never any great need for money.
Some of the more senior vocational students were almost self-financing, even turning a profit fro Tiger Kloof through the sale of their handiwork, and we were able to build everything ourselves—a new building each year at one stage. Electricity came to the school in the early 50’s. I recall very clearly the first film show in the dining hall, and thinking to myself: “Truly, we have now joined the modern age'.”
This was a school which, with so many others, was to be destroyed by the Bantu Education Act of 1953.
“VERWOERDIAN HELOTS”
In the LMS archives at Moeding College near Gaborone is a document written by Aubrey Lewis in 1954. It is a memoir which sets forth in a single page his heart-wrenching decision, on behalf of the LMS, to close Tiger Kloof. There is a pencilled comment on the reverse side of the page, written by Patrick Duncan (son of Souht Africa’s last governor general, and arch-critic of apartheid): “You are absolutely right not to collaborate in producing Verwoerdian helots.”
In the great catalogue of apartheid crimes, the indiscriminate closure of mission schools in South Africa, under Bantu Education, ranks high.
Prior to the commencement of Bantu Education, most black South African schoolchildren attended mission-run institutions (which were generally state-subsidised). It was a far from perfect system: there were way too few schools relative to the population, and many of these lacked resources and provided a poor standard of (usually only primary) education. Accordingly, there was justification for the state to introduce a system of mass schooling—but it was schooling indissolubly linked to broader political purposes which South Africa’s new apartheid masters had in mind.
Despite the problems in many mission schools, there existed a handful of church-run institutions in the 1950’s that were respected centres of learning from which a class of thinkers and doers—anathema to Verwoerd and others—was emerging. It was the very substantial amount of technical training which took place at these schools which the new government found particularly threatening. On this subject, Michael O’Dowd offers the following comment: “Dr Verwoerd was perfectly happy that blacks should study social sciences, languages and philosophy but he was determined that they should not study mathematics or engineering, and that they should not receive technical training.”
The Bantu Education Act itself did not state directly that mission schools had to close down. But it introduced a number of conditions which made it extremely difficult for the schools to remain open and independent. Mission-run teacher training schools were the first to be targeted: they simply had to be handed over to a government which knew that this would rip the heart out of the leading institutions—Tiger Kloof included. The Act then allowed churches to retain control of their primary and secondary schools, but with a greatly reduced state subsidy. (It soon became clear, moreover, that the subsidy would be in place for a limited period only—following which they would have to register as government schools.) Other churches, which chose a third, financially crippling, option of unaided independence did so under the constant threat of their schools being zoned as “white areas” under the Group Areas Act, and closed anyway. That left the final option: to rent or sell their schools to the government or its ‘Bantu Community’ agencies.
These were the cruel dilemmas which Lewis agonised over in his document. One can sympathise with his difficulties. Most churches opted to close their schools rather than implement a system of education whose purpose was to prepare the great mass of the black population for lives as “hewers of wood and drawers of water”.