South Africa's struggle for independent education: the African methodist episcopal church and the history of the Wilberforce Institute

Abstract

The Struggle for African Independent Education focuses on the Wilberforce Institute, one of the first major independent African schools in segregationist South Africa.

It became the epicentre of the independent school movement in the Transvaal in the early twentieth century, demonstrating how newly urbanised mission-educated Africans, despite profound linguistic differences and regional backgrounds, shared far-reaching educational aspirations in the rapidly growing cosmopolitan, gold-driven Johannesburg after the South African War (1899-1902).

The book examines how their common histories of oppression, segregation, displacement, dispossession, as well as despair and disillusionment with the mainstream missionary education, incited the new urban dwellers to wage the struggle for African independent education, and tells the story of how their determination led to the formation of the Wilberforce Institute.