Physical Education at the Colleges

Teacher training institutes in the Western Cape, with the exception of the Genadendal Training School, were mission schools based on the English classical model. This was a model where, publicly, book learning was held to be of great value for personal advancement but privately “the emphasis was very much on the body and sports and not the intellect”. Consequently, many community physical culture clubs were led by college-trained teachers. This was also true of colleges outside the Western Cape. For example, a Harmonie Physical Culture Club was established in Kimberley in 1940 under the direction of Ms A. Jacobs and S. Krieger, both teachers at the Perseverance Practicing School. Teaching institutions were also models whereby children and student teachers had to adjust to the requirements of the school and not vice versa. With few exceptions then, the management of teacher training institutions for coloured people made a point of emphasising that graduates “would become leaders of their community [emphasis author’s] and as such, a great responsibility would be upon them”. In the British colonies, provinces and dominions, however, an ambivalent relationship existed between coloniser and colonised, where colonised subjects ‘mimicked’ the colonisers. Therefore, many physical education students at black institutions adopted and internalised colonising cultural habits, assumptions and values. This has led to generally held, often negative, perceptions of missionaries and the education that they provided. One such perception was expressed by a writer in the Educational Journal in 1947: “The job of the training schools is to give practical and theoretical training in the art of teaching… but the administration of these schools makes [them] fall too supinely in line with the general low level of education prescribed for [blacks]”. But the result of colonisation is never a simple reproduction of those traits. What makes the relationship between colonisers and colonised ambivalent is the potential for the colonised to redefine this relationship.