When Albertina Luthuli visited the 154-year-old Adams College near Amamzimtoti in KwaZulu-Natal three years ago she was in tears.
The school where she was a standard seven (grade nine) learner in 1946, and where her father, ANC president and Nobel laureate Chief Albert Luthuli, spent his academic life as a student teacher and lecturer in the 1920s and 1930s, had turned to dust.
Colleges such as Adams College were the hope of the oppressed people, but they were targeted after 1948 [when the Nationalist government came into power and the Bantu Education Act was adopted]. So we lost institutions that were producing excellent leaders for black people, she said this week.
Restoring Adams College, she added, was the correct thing to do.
This is about to happen as part of the Historical Schools Project. The project was launched early this month at Adams College, targeting about 20 institutions considered to have served as intellectual centres for African education and as being instrumental in producing South African leaders.
Adams College, which was a teacher training, nursing and theology college and a school, had former ANC leaders, such as John Dube, ZK Matthews and Govan Mbeki, as learners or teachers. Foreign minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, Chief Justice Pius Langa and Inkatha Freedom Party president Mangosuthu Buthelezi also attended the college.
Another institution that will benefit is Lovedale, today Lovedale FET College, established in 1856 between Grahamstown and East London in the Eastern Cape. President Thabo Mbeki and the late Chris Hani attended the school.
Also identified are Tiger Kloof in North West, with alumni such as Botswana presidents Seretse Khama and Ketumile Masire; Pax College in Limpopo, where the likes of Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota and director general of the National Treasury Lesetja Kganyago completed their schooling, and Morris Isaacson Secondary in Gauteng, which played a key role in the Soweto uprising of 1976.
The project came about after Arts and Culture Minister Pallo Jordan, together with then Anglican Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane, held a brainstorming session in August this year in which they discussed restoring historical schools; mission schools in particular.
The ministry will work closely with the department of education and Ndungane, who is the executive director of the project and its key driver.
Sandile Memela, spokesperson for the ministry, said the government is hoping the private sector will participate in the initiative, which will be funded by the ministry and the department of education.
The department of education has made a financial contribution of R600 000 to the project in this financial year, while schools will continue to receive their subsidies as part of the public schooling system.
The project is expected to benefit schools from infrastructural improvements such as the restoration of buildings and the provision of libraries, laboratories, learning and teaching support materials, but will also benefit from initiatives to improve the management and governance structures of the identified institutions.
Gugu Ndebele, deputy director-general of the social and school enrichment branch in the department of education, said the department expected the project to revitalise the schools as centres of educational excellence, preserve them as historic sites and promote indigenous languages and the culture of reading in those languages.
Schools will be encouraged and assisted in their role of encouraging educators and parents to expect and promote excellence. Teachers will be assisted in recapturing their status and role as exemplars, whether as a source of inspiration, or more generally for their dedication and support of excellence and quality learning. Schools will be encouraged to view diverse backgrounds of language, group and faith as part of the broader curriculum and as the basis for developing the skills and attitudes needed to interact in a continental and global context. Similarly schools will be assisted and encouraged to promote a broader curriculum that includes the role of a moral ethos, sport and team games, extra-curricular activities of music, drama and other pleasures such as reading and debate, said Ndebele.
Schools involved have high hopes for the project.
Thulani Khumalo, principal of Adams College, said the project came at the right time for the school, which was trying to persuade alumni to become involved.
Adams College has been peoples source of light. But the standards are not the same. We have to restore the culture and traditions and ensure that the legacy lives on, Khumalo said.
Tiger Kloof principal Gail du Toit said the school had been visited by Ndungane, who explained the project, but the school had not yet decided what its priorities were.
Lesiba Ledwaba, principal of Pax College, said the schools governing body would meet soon to identify what it needed. Some of the schools building were constructed 80 years ago. Ledwaba hoped infrastructure upgrading would make the schools priority list.