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By the time the Bantu Education Act set out to reshape African education in South Africa in 1955, the Methodist mission institution of Healdtown in the Eastern Cape resembled a small village. Its multiracial staff, presided over by a Christian minister, taught nearly 500 primary and over 400 high school pupils, while more than 300 students were training as teachers. The church hoped that school sport, clubs and Christian associations, along with regular chapel services, would cement mission pupils’ faith allegiance. From 1945, Healdtown’s school magazine, The Eagle, not only published student essays on a variety of topics but also reflected activities outside the classroom. Alongside examination results,  reports of school leisure pursuits and alumni news, photographs of pupil groups and new buildings might occasionally be included. 

In the Northern Cape, notably smaller and more isolated than Healdtown but similarly organised and just as pivotal for later Tswana leadership in church and society as the Methodist school was for its largely Xhosa-speaking constituency, the London Missionary Society institution at Tiger Kloof produced from 1920 the (more prosaically named) Tiger Kloof Magazine.  

Using comparative research on boarding school magazines this study notes the shared distinctive appearance of The Eagle and the Tiger Kloof Magazine, and analyses the range of student writing produced, reflecting on its significance for their future. Both publications also set out to develop an educated elite mission network cemented by alumni loyalty to their alma mater and promoting ‘civilised’ Christian standards in teaching and African life generally. 

Reading school magazines in their wider historical and educational context, the paper argues, can provide a fruitful way into student experience of Christian mission schooling, especially in that vital last decade before the apartheid government changed the goals and ethos of African education in South Africa.



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