Chapter 6 - Umpumulo: From Teacher Training College to Theological Seminary

Summary

Histories of mission education and schooling seldom acknowledge that, alongside primary schooling and teacher training, the training of pastors was an integral component of mission educational endeavours. This history is often simply excised from accounts of the role of the missions in education prior to the takeover by the state. On the other hand, it is acknowledged that during apartheid few positions were open to African people who had some form of higher education, other than teaching, preaching and positions within the Bantustan bureaucracies. Countless studies of the mounting student, civic and worker resistance to apartheid from the 1970s onwards document the leadership role played by clerics such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Father Smangaliso Mkhatshwa, Bishop Manas Buthelezi, and Professor Barney Pityana, to mention but a few. Indeed, Daniel Magaziner's recent study of Black Consciousness has shown that ‘religious and primarily Christian ways of thinking’ underpinned the emergence and development of the Black Consciousness Movement in the 1960s and 1970s. He goes on to argue that, in 1976, ‘as with the broader movement, a particular religiosity informed high school political rhetoric’. Studies such as this begin to prise open the links between apartheid, the rise of Black Consciousness, and religion – or the persistent influence of missions in education during the apartheid era.

The next two chapters show how the rise of theological education and Black Consciousness were intimately connected to the responses of mission societies to apartheid and the takeover of their schools and teacher training colleges. This is to some extent argued by Philippe Denis and Graham Duncan in their history of the tragic fate of Fedsem, the Federal Theological Seminary established in Alice by Presbyterians, Anglicans, Methodists and Congregationalists in 1963. They show that the establishment of the seminary was a direct response to the closure of educational institutions at Tiger Kloof, Adams College, Rosettenville, Fort Hare and Modderpoort, as well as a report by the International Missionary Council (IMC) recommending a united seminary to address previous failures to train pastors and the proposal by the Department of Bantu Education in 1961 to relocate the theological education of Africans to the University of South Africa (Unisa).