HERITAGE
The National Heritage Council of South Africa (NHC), an agency of the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture, has initiated a process of declaring the Wilberforce Institute as a heritage site.
HERITAGE OF A WOMAN’S DREAM Bonner Hall at Wilberforce Insitute
T
he popular proverb which has almost become a cliché “… if you educate a woman, you educate a nation” has become a living truth that can be traced back to what started a hundred and thirteen years ago at the Wilberforce College. This modest ‘institution’ was established by Charlotte MannyaMaxeke and her husband Reverend Marshall Maxeke in 1908 in the humble neighbourhood of Evaton, outside a town called Vereeniging in the Gauteng Province of South Africa. This year, the South African
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Municipal Focus
nation pays tribute to the remarkable contributions Charlotte Maxeke has made to humanity by celebrating her 150th birthday. Charlotte was born on 7 April 1871 and this year, to commemorate her birth, President Cyril Ramaphosa addressed guests in Fort Beaufort, the town of her birth, to mark the beginning of a yearlong programme dedicated to recognising her works. Her family heritage, which she never forgot, is in Botlokwa, a village not far from the city of Polokwane. With the
funding assistance from the Traditional Leader she started a project to build a school in this village. She also lived in Kimberly and Kliptown to mention just a few places that characterises her as a global citizen. She passed on at the age of 68 on 16 October 1939. The Wilberforce Institute has been the bastion of Black liberation in South Africa. While other mission schools were enjoying government funding from the apartheid government, Wilberforce was solely funded by the African Methodist
