The Records of the University of Fort Hare

Abstract

Historians, not just of South Africa, but of any part of what was once British Africa up to and including Kenya, will be familiar with the significance of the University of Fort Hare at Alice, in South Africa's Eastern Cape province. The university is built on the site and retains the name of a British fort that was a major base for one of the first and most bitterly-fought, and certainly the longest, of the nineteenth-century southern African wars of conquest. However, in one of the paradoxes in which South Africa abounds, Fort Hare has become a shibboleth of modern African nationalism, priding itself on its illustrious alumni, which include many of the great names of the modern black elite in southern Africa. The paradox to some extent disappears, and the interest and complexity increases, when it is considered that Fort Hare had its origins in the liberal missionary tradition, with all its ambiguities, and that its products included homeland leaders as well as nationalist politicians, and the functionaries of segregationist and colonial states as well as assertively African political and cultural leaders.The vicinity of Fort Hare has long been a center of education in the western tradition. From 1841, in the case of Lovedale, with nearby Healdtown and St. Matthew's following later, the great mission-schools of the Eastern Cape, supported by the Lovedale Press, made the area the cradle of the mission-educated African elite. It was from this context that Fort Hare emerged in 1916, being the creation of an interdenominational group of Protestant missionaries and of African leaders such as John Tengo Jabavu, founder of the newspaper Imvo Zabatsundu.