Ward 2 Development Forum

From the Farm to the Classroom

Properties3
descriptionHow a child's years from eight to eighteen moved, slowly, from farm labour to schooling in the valley: the contest over children in the 1790s, the apprenticeship law of 1812, emancipation, and the teachers' college of 1838. Tests the Forum's reading of the valley moving from needy to needed.
tagstheme/heritage, theme/youth, theme/2038, lang/en
aliasesFarm to classroom, Needy to needed, Children's years

15 min read

Today most people in the valley take it for granted that a child’s years from about eight to eighteen belong to school. Two hundred years ago the colony’s law said something very different. In 1812 a proclamation let farmers keep Khoekhoe children who had grown up on their farms in unpaid service from the age of eight to eighteen [IC]. This page follows how those years moved from the farm to the classroom in this valley. It starts with the missionaries’ diaries of the 1790s, which show farmers and the mission school already competing for the same children. It ends with the teachers’ training college that opened at Genadendal in 1838, the year slavery ended at the Cape. It then asks whether the evidence supports the Forum’s reading of this story: that the college helped the valley’s people, including those freed from slavery, move from being needy to being needed.

What the letters in square brackets mean

Facts on this page are followed by a tag that shows where they come from.

  • [IC] Independently Corroborated. Confirmed by at least two sources that do not depend on each other, or by an official record such as a law.
  • [MS] Mission-Sourced. Comes from Moravian mission records, including the missionaries’ diaries and reports, and the histories written from them. They have not been checked against sources that do not depend on them.
  • [TBV] To Be Verified. Seems likely, but nobody has confirmed it yet.

Statements without a tag, mostly in the last three sections, are the Forum’s reading of the history.

The diary passages

The evidence from the 1790s comes from new English translations in the Genadendal Diaries repository. They are machine translations that no person has checked yet. Each passage is cited by its Utrecht file number and line numbers. The diaries were written by the missionaries, and they report the words of farmers and Khoekhoe as the missionaries heard them. See The Genadendal Diaries.

At a glance

WhenWhat happened
1793 to 1805At the reopened mission, the school and the farms compete for the time of children and young people [MS]
1809The Caledon Code requires Khoekhoe people to have a fixed home and carry a pass [IC]
1812The apprenticeship proclamation lets farmers keep Khoekhoe children raised on their farms in unpaid service from eight to eighteen [IC]
1828Ordinance 50 repeals these laws and gives free people of colour legal equality [IC]
1834 to 1838Slavery ends. Freed people must first serve four years as “apprentices”, and are fully free on 1 December 1838 [IC]
1837 to 1840Genadendal grows from 1,446 to 2,187 people as freed people arrive [IC]
1838South Africa’s first teachers’ training college opens at Genadendal [IC]
1839 and 1841The Cape sets up an education department, and from 1841 gives grants to mission schools [IC]
1926The government closes the college, arguing that coloured people were suited to farm work and did not need higher education [IC]

The contest over children (1793 to 1805)

The mission school opened on 4 March 1793 [MS]. From its first months it drew children and young people whose time the farmers counted as theirs. The diaries record the struggle in detail.

Farmers holding on to children.

  • March 1793. A farmer kept back the two-month-old child of a Khoekhoe woman who wanted to go to Baviaanskloof to learn. The missionaries sent her with a letter to Baas Teunis, the company’s post-keeper, and she got her child back [MS].
  • October 1793. The missionaries wrote that they “had a good deal to do about some children who go to our school but are kept back by the farmers against their parents’ will, and yet we could not achieve much” [MS].
  • March 1794. A farmer from the Tigerhoek came to take back two girls, the daughters of one of his slaves and a Khoekhoe woman. The diarists wrote that “by the law of the country such children formerly had to serve the owner of the slave until their 25th year”, but that the authorities had abolished this, so the children belonged to their mother and were free. The missionaries appealed to the government’s orders, and the farmer left without the girls [MS].

Farmers against teaching.

  • November 1794. A farmer told a Khoekhoe woman who wanted to go to school: “Stay with me; what do you want there? I will give you a book and teach you myself” [MS].
  • January 1795. A farmer told a Khoekhoe worker that he would shoot him if he went to the school [MS]. The same month the head of the government, Abraham Josias Sluysken, told the missionaries that farmers complained that Khoekhoe who were taught “would get behind their secrets” [MS].
  • July 1795. A rebel burgher of Swellendam told a Khoekhoe man that “the Hottentots must not be made wise, but stay as ignorant as they were”, since “so many children of Christians run about who learn nothing” [MS]. The rebels also asked why the company sent teachers for the Khoekhoe “and not schoolmasters for our children too” [MS]. In 1793 a farmer who could not read a letter had offered the missionaries 50 rixdollars to teach a young colonist to read [MS].

School and farm taking turns.

  • Pupils who went to work on a farm had to hand in their school books until they came back [MS].
  • Each harvest, “men, women and big children” went to the farms, and the schools shrank or closed. In November 1794, 17 people went to one farmer alone, and in December 1804 the schools were suspended for the harvest [MS].
  • In August 1803 a schoolboy leading a farmer’s oxen on the road to Cape Town fell from the wagon and was killed [MS].

The school grows. About 80 people, men, women, and children together, were at school in May 1793 [MS]. By the end of 1796 there were 173 schoolchildren, 93 boys and 80 girls, and 188 by April 1797 [MS].

The first local teachers. In September 1794, with about 60 in the women’s school and 60 in the children’s, the missionaries “appointed a woman in the women’s school and a girl in the children’s”, and wrote that “this arrangement works well” [MS]. These are the first residents of the valley recorded as helping to teach. Their names are not given.

Diaries: A363595, lines 2173 to 2211; A363595, lines 3159 to 3187; A363595, lines 6687 to 6732; A363595, lines 6788 to 6835; A363595, lines 7975 to 8006; A363595, lines 10547 to 10562; A363595, lines 11406 to 11433; A363595, lines 12118 to 12171 and 12317 to 12366; A363595, lines 13180 to 13234 and 13680 to 13732; A363349, lines 10303 to 10339; A363596, lines 2019 to 2050; A363349, lines 15714 to 15726; A363349, lines 15977 to 15993; A363597, lines 316 to 326; A363597, lines 1714 to 1725

The law takes the farmers’ side (1809 to 1828)

After Britain took the Cape for the second time in 1806 and ended the slave trade in 1807, farmers looked to Khoekhoe workers to replace the slaves they could no longer buy [TBV]. In 1809 Lord Caledon’s code required every Khoekhoe person to have a fixed home and carry a pass, and to work under a registered written contract [IC]. In 1812 Sir John Cradock’s apprenticeship proclamation let a farmer keep a Khoekhoe child who had been raised on his farm, or who was an orphan or destitute, in his service without pay from eight to eighteen [IC]. The historian Wayne Dooling counts about 2,295 children apprenticed between 1812 and 1823, out of 3,933 born in that time, and writes that the law bound whole households to the farms [TBV].

In the terms of the 1790s, the law settled the contest over children in the farmers’ favour. A Khoekhoe child’s years from eight to eighteen belonged, by law, to the farm on which the child had grown up. Mission stations were among the few places where Khoekhoe families could live without working for a farmer [TBV]. A child born at Genadendal was not born on a farmer’s land.

Ordinance 50 of 1828 repealed the pass and apprenticeship laws and gave free people of colour legal equality [IC].

Emancipation and the college (1834 to 1841)

Slavery at the Cape ended in law on 1 December 1834. People who had been enslaved then had to work four more years as “apprentices”, and became fully free on 1 December 1838 [IC]. The slaveholders were paid compensation. The people who had been enslaved received nothing [IC].

Many freed people came to the mission stations, where they could find land and a home [IC]. Between 1837 and 1840 Genadendal grew from 1,446 to 2,187 people [IC]. The historian Robert Ross Watson writes that residents of the Moravian missions usually had enough land to make an independent living, and that farmers were especially hostile to this “drain on their supply of labor” [TBV]. Mission sources say newcomers were given a plot to build on and were taught a trade, as Khoekhoe families had been [MS].

In the same months, the mission opened the first teachers’ training college in South Africa [IC]. It was founded by Hans Peter Hallbeck, head of the Moravian missions at the Cape, and mission sources date its opening to 12 September 1838 [MS]. It trained teachers for the mission schools, and later pastors as well [MS]. One study notes that the seminary meant that all teachers in the Moravian schools, men and women, were members of the church [TBV]. Its first director, Francke, was a musician who started church choirs at Genadendal and at Mamre [TBV]. Brass playing began at the college, and the Genadendal brass band gave its first recorded performance in 1856 [MS]. See Music of the Valley.

The mission’s schools were already achieving results. In a letter of 27 September 1838, Hallbeck reported that 92 of 97 girls examined in the mission schools could read as well as children of their age in European schools [MS].

The colony soon began to pay for this kind of work. In 1839 the Cape set up a department of education, and from 1841 mission schools could receive government grants [IC]. For the first time, teaching in a mission school could be a paid post supported by the state [TBV].

What the college made possible

The college trained teachers for almost ninety years [IC]. Its teachers and the people of Genadendal wrote for De Bode van Genadendal, the mission’s monthly journal from 1859, which is part of the story of how written Afrikaans began [TBV]. See Benno Marx. The college is the root of the valley’s tradition of training teachers, which the Valley of Grace Learning Campus proposes to revive.

In 1926 the government closed the college [IC]. It argued that coloured people did not need higher education, because they were suited to work as labourers on farms [IC]. One source says teacher training ended in 1937, and that Emil Weder Secondary School opened in its place in 1938 [TBV]. See Emil Weder Secondary School.

Needy to needed: what the evidence shows

The Forum’s research describes the valley’s aim as moving “from being needy to being needed” [MS]. This section tests whether the story of the college supports that reading for the people freed from slavery.

ClaimWhat the evidence showsStatus
In the 1790s farmers claimed children’s time for work, and the mission claimed it for schoolShown in detail by the diaries, 1793 to 1805Supported [MS]
The law of 1812 gave the farmers’ claim the force of lawShown by the proclamation and by historiansSupported [IC]
Freed people came to Genadendal after emancipationShown by population figures from 1837 to 1840Supported [IC]
The college trained people of the mission community as teachers, a skilled and respected roleThe college trained teachers and pastors for the mission schools from 1838 to 1926Supported [IC]
Teaching became a role the colony needed and paid forGrants to mission schools from 1841Likely [TBV]
Freed slaves, or their children, trained at the college and became teachersNot yet shown. The sources used for this page do not say who the students were or where their families came fromNot yet shown
The state later tried to push the valley back to farm labourThe closure of 1926, and the reason the government gaveSupported [IC]

The Forum’s reading. The evidence supports the arc of the story. In the 1790s, the years from eight to eighteen were contested between the farm and the school. In 1812 the law gave them to the farm. After 1828 and 1838, the mission turned them back towards the school, and in the college it began to turn its own people into the teachers the whole colony would come to need. Those it trained were needed, as teachers, choir leaders, and writers, in the valley and in the mission villages beyond it. The closure of 1926 shows the same contest returning, with the state using the argument the farmers had used in 1795: that the valley’s people should stay as labourers.

What is not yet shown. The sources used for this page do not show that people freed from slavery, or their children, were among the college’s students. The college’s students came from the mission community, which by 1840 included many freed people. The link is likely, but it needs the college’s own records to confirm it. Until then, the Forum should present the college as creating valued roles for the mission’s people as a whole, freed people among them, and not yet as a proven path for the freed people in particular.

Reading it through TIME

This section is the Forum’s interpretation.

In the 1790s the diaries show three forms pulling at the same children. The Tribes form held them in families and kraals. The Markets form, in the farmers’ hands, wanted their labour, often paid in goods or in debt. The mission, an Institution, offered them school. In 1812 the Institutions of the colonial state sided with the farmers, and made a child’s labour something the farm could hold by law. After 1828 and 1838 the balance shifted. The mission’s school and college built a different kind of Institution: one that turned learning into skills the colony needed, and that the state began to pay for. Teaching became a way into the Markets form on better terms, as a skilled and paid role. The closure of 1926 was the state’s Institutions turning against that path again.

What is still open

  • Who the college’s students were, where their families came from, and whether any had been enslaved or were children of enslaved people.
  • How many teachers the college trained between 1838 and 1926, and where they taught.
  • Whether children at Genadendal were apprenticed to farmers under the law of 1812, or whether mission residence protected them.
  • The names of the woman and the girl appointed to help teach in 1794.
  • Whether the rule the diarists described in 1794, that children of slave fathers and Khoekhoe mothers served the slave owner until 25, had in fact been abolished, and when.
  • When teacher training at Genadendal ended: 1926 or 1937.

Where the evidence could be found

  • The Moravian Periodical Accounts for 1838 to 1845, which printed Hallbeck’s reports and those of his successors.
  • The records of the college and of the mission, held by the Moravian Church in South Africa and at the Genadendal Mission Museum, and the Moravian archives at Herrnhut.
  • The apprenticeship registers of the Caledon and Swellendam districts, 1812 to 1828, in the Western Cape Archives.
  • Pieter Boon’s study of Hallbeck, and Bernhard Krüger’s The Pear Tree Blossoms.

Have your say

If your family has records, photographs, or stories of teachers trained at Genadendal, or of ancestors freed in 1838, contact the moderators via How to Submit.

References

Graph View

Backlinks