Looking Back: Dominican Education in SA

This year the Dominican order celebrates its 800th anniversary. The order’s influence on Catholic education in South Africa has been profound, as Dominican Father MARTINUS BADENHORST explains.

During the 800 years of the Dominican order’s existence, education has stood central as its ministry. This arises from the order’s mission, which is “Preaching and the Salvation of Souls”.

The Dominican order achieves this through traditional preaching and all the other forms of announcing the Kingdom of God in Christ to the world.

The order also does its work through praising and blessing. The Dominican motto—to praise, to bless, to preach (Laudare, Benedicere, Praedicare)—sums up its prophetic task.

Prophets are not just called to announce God (preach), they are also called to bring to people’s lives an experience of what they preach, which is God’s joyful justice breaking into the world.

In 1863 the first six Irish Dominican sisters arrived at the Cape to establish schools. This was a scant 26 years after the first bishop—Raymund Griffith, a Dominican—had been allowed into the Cape Colony as its Catholic leader.

At that time the missionary priest was really a sort of Indiana Jones carrying a missal. Missionary work was seen as bringing the light of both faith and culture to unyielding pagans. This age saw the great sacrifices made by the missionaries and thought their work must be honoured. At the same time there were also judgments based on a sense of European cultural and moral superiority.

This made the role of the religious women as a counterbalance to the adventurer priest so important. As women they suffered under some of the clerical extremes of the adventurer priest and bishop, and because of this chafe, they were deeply focused on the empowering of local people.

It comes as no surprise then that the Irish Dominicans, or Cabra Sisters, opened a school for the deaf within a short while of extending their mission to the Eastern Cape.

Whereas they had come for the education of colonial girls, they soon opened schools for all children, to empower and support them in the face of the judgments of racial inferiority which infected the colony and its political successors.

Later they also spearheaded the opening of private schools to all pupils in 1979 when the government demanded the separation of all schools on racial grounds.

Sr Mauritia Tiefenboeck and her companions arrived in 1877 from a foundation of Dominicans in Augsburg, Germany, that had its roots stretching back to 1335.

Established in King William’s Town, the sisters quickly expanded their educational ministry and also reached out into the deaf community, bringing them the dignity of an education which placed them on an equal level with hearing people.

Sr Tiefenboeck sent her counterparts to assist Fr Louis Mattieu OMI on the farm Oakford, near Durban, in March 1889.

Fr Mattieu had the care of former slaves from Zanzibar and the farm had become a major mission outreach.

By 1890 the sisters had made great progress in establishing educational facilities for all the people in the district. On request from King William’s Town they voted to establish themselves as a separate Dominican group and the Oakford congregation was born.

 

By 1890 a group of the sisters from “King” were also bound northward for the region which would later be called Zimbabwe. They established both hospitals and schools and assisted the Jesuit priests in their mission in the territory, opening their first school for black girls at Chishawasha Jesuit mission in 1898.

Sr Rose Niland, daughter of an Irish refugee, joined King in her 20th year in 1880. She moved from King to Oakford in 1891 and was chosen to make a new foundation of the congregation in Newcastle, KwaZulu-Natal. When the school established there did not do well, Oakford decided to withdraw.

Under the urging of the bishop, who wanted the sisters to stay, an arrangement was made that sisters wishing to return to Oakford could do so. Five, including Sr Rose, chose to stay and become the founding sisters of the Newcastle

Dominican Congregation, inspired by the call to educate.

By the 1920s there were already legal hurdles to prevent whites and others living in proximity. This impacted religious life and the Montebello congregation grew out of Oakford to answer the needs of Zulu women feeling the call to the life of study and witness which marks the Dominican order.

Under the leadership of Sr Euphemia Ruff of Oakford, the Montebello congregation started with three postulants in 1925 and was eventually affiliated to the Dominican order in 1940 as the Montebello

Dominican Congregation. Through the evangelical witness and educational work of the Montebello sisters many women in rural KZN have been empowered.

The Dominican men arrived from England in 1917, becoming established in Springs and then in Stellenbosch.

The Dutch brethren arrived in 1932 to work in the Free State. The brethren concentrated on the education of clergy and adult laity.

They assisted the diocese of Cape Town in the early years, providing seminary education and later responding to the needs of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference in staffing St Paul’s in Hammanskraal, near Pretoria.

They not only formed indigenous priests, but were also mentors to bishops chosen from those men. It is with particular fondness that the late Dominican Fathers Oswin McGrath and Bernard Connor—the latter a former Southern Cross editor—are remembered by many clergy and bishops.

Present in these spheres of education, Dominicans in South Africa have provided people with hope, empowerment, understanding and dignity. Providing people with an experience of the Kingdom of God, they fulfil their mission to preach and save souls.