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Congratulations to Dr. Vusi Khumalo, Senior Lecturer in History at Nelson Mandela University, on his recent publication South Africa’s Struggle for Independent Education: The African Methodist Episcopal Church and the History of the Wilberforce Institute (2022) published by Best Red. The book documents the struggle of twentieth-century urbanised Africans to achieve independent and equitable education through the establishment of the Wilberforce Institute, one of the first major independent African schools in segregationist South Africa.

Emerging out of Dr. Khumalo’s 2018 Ph.D., supervised by Professor Clive Glaser in the History Department, the book is set against the backdrop of the far-reaching educational aspirations of urban African community within the rapidly growing cosmopolitan, gold-driven Johannesburg after the South African War (1899-1902), and their growing disillusionment with the mainstream missionary education and its accompanying oppression, segregation, displacement and dispossession. Described as an “insightful narrative” this work relates “how mission-educated graduates¨Ddespite their profoundly differing linguistic and regional backgrounds¨Dcame together to create the independent education movement” https://www.bestred.co.za/the-african-struggle-for-independent-education-detail.html

South Africa’s Struggle for Independent Education: comes on the heels of two previous publications by Dr. Khumalo, From Plough to Entrepreneurship: A History of African Entrepreneurs in Evaton 1905-1960s (2020), and, co-edited with Benjamin N. Lawrance, a new edition of Dugmore Boetie’s Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost (2020) published by Ohio University Press.

Another Wits History Department alumnus to contribute to the growing scholarship on black political and intellectual history is Dr. Sibongiseni Mkhize - current Chief Executive Officer of the South African State Theatre. His 2019 book Class Consciousness, Non-racialism, and Political Pragmaticism: A political biography of Henry Selby Msinman, 1886-1982, likewise emerged from his Ph.D. research here in the Department. Class Consciousness, Non-racialism, and Political Pragmaticism is the first comprehensive political biography of Henry Selby Msimang (1886-1982), one of the great South Africans of the twentieth century, and draws on a rich array of unpublished sources to tell a multi-layered story of pragmatism, contradictions, and ideals. Msimang was a founding member of the African National Congress in 1912, president of the pioneering Industrial and Commercial Workers Union in the 1920s-1930s, general secretary of the All African Convention in the 1930s, a member of the Natives Representative Council and provincial secretary of the Natal ANC in the 1940s and early 1950s, a prominent member of the Liberal Party in the 1950s and 1960s, a founder and executive member of the Inkatha Yenkululeko Yesizwe in the 1970s.

Dr. Mkhize who completed his high schooling in Pietermaritzburg, the hometown of Henry Selby Msinman, became interested in the rich heritage and contribution of Amakhlowa in the region from the 1850s onwards. With a predominant focus on Durban and on workerist movements, Dr. Mkhize felt this contribution needed to be unearthed, this is how his interest in the topic developed. The rest, as they say, is history.