Mustafa Eroğlu, general secretary of the Horizon Educational Trust, reflects on the human meaning behind Horizon and Star Colleges’ academic success.
South Africa’s 2025 matric results once again placed Horizon and Star Colleges, under the Horizon Foundation, among the country’s high-performing educational institutions. Headlines speak of distinctions, provincial top achievers and impressive pass rates. But these results did not begin in an examination hall.
They did not begin in Durban, Johannesburg or Cape Town. They began decades ago, within an education-centred service movement that first emerged in Türkiye and later spread across the world — a movement built on a simple but demanding belief: serving humanity through education is one of the highest callings.
From that early vision grew an understanding that schools are not businesses, but spaces where character is formed, and that teachers are not simply employees, but carriers of responsibility across generations.
The success of Horizon and Star Colleges today is the visible outcome of a long, mostly unseen history — a history marked by sacrifice, displacement, endurance and quiet perseverance. This is not primarily the story of top students. It is the story of the people who stood behind them.
It is the story of teachers who graduated from some of the finest universities in their countries. Many of their classmates went on to become executives, directors and corporate leaders, building wealth and living in comfort. These teachers chose something else.
They chose classrooms over boardrooms. They chose communities on the margins over corporate centres.
They chose uncertainty over personal security.
They did so without building financial plans, without calculating future comfort, without guarantees. What they chose was simpler — and heavier: children, students and service.
In KwaZulu-Natal, some served in schools near areas such as KwaDabeka and Clermont, close to Pinetown.
In Cape Town, others worked alongside informal settlements such as Khayelitsha and Philippi, where poverty and possibility exist side by side.
They did not come for salaries.
Nearly 20% of learners in these schools are on full bursaries — students who pay nothing. Many come from deeply disadvantaged backgrounds. Some are orphans. Some have no stable home environment. Most began life already far behind.
Horizon and Star institutions are non-profit schools. After staff costs are paid, there is often little left. There are no shareholders, no dividends and no surplus to distribute. What remains is the responsibility to continue.
They came to teach.
They stayed to raise children who were not their own.
For many, this was not even a freely chosen path. Political realities turned their lives into something closer to exile than migration. Some could not return home. Many lived with long separations from parents, siblings and children.
One of the deepest wounds was this: these devoted teachers, later turned into scapegoats, received no support from official diplomatic missions.
No documentation.
No assistance.
No protection.
There were years of legal uncertainty, financial strain and emotional exhaustion. Still, they did not leave.
Over time, the ground beneath their feet became homeland.
The schoolyard became belonging.
The students became family.
And it is here that the meaning of success changes.
Success is not a certificate.
Success is a teacher who, after the final bell, does not go home, but goes to a student’s house.
Success is not knowing what weekends are.
Success is extra lessons given without pay and without expectation.
Success is carrying the emotional weight of young lives and slowly turning it into confidence and hope.
For this reason, the 2025 results of Horizon and Star Colleges are not merely academic outcomes. They are human outcomes.
They reflect thousands of unseen decisions: to stay instead of return, to give instead of accumulate, to place character above career.
The students who stood this year holding distinctions are carrying something heavier than paper. They are carrying the labour of teachers who gave their strongest years not to titles, but to people.
Perhaps the essence of this story lies in a simple question:
What is the most beautiful feeling in this mortal world?
Maybe it is this:
After you have left this world, somewhere, one person says,
“He was my physics teacher.
My mathematics teacher.
My social sciences teacher.
And he was a good human being.”
That is success.
Mustafa Eroğlu is the general secretary of the Horizon Educational Trust. He is a philanthropist.