By Daluxolo Moloantoa – Rise up and Go, Sisters of the Holy Cross, Southern African Province – An Account of their Communities and Ministries – 1980–2022 by Sr Maureen Rooney invites readers into the long, complex, and often heroic story of a religious congregation whose life and mission have been deeply entwined with South Africa’s history, from mission stations to urban townships, from schools to hospitals, from colonial times through apartheid to democracy.
The Sisters of the Holy Cross are part of a global congregation founded in Switzerland. Their charism from the start was “to bring education and care to the poor and vulnerable wherever the need exists.” According to their historical records, on 9 June 1883, under the guidance of the missionary Abbot Franz Pfanner of Mariannhill, a group of five Holy Cross Sisters left Southampton, England and arrived in Durban on 12 July 1883. After a long ox‑wagon journey, they reached Umtata (Mthatha) on 24 July 1883, where they settled in three huts, their first convent.
From those humble beginnings, the Sisters embarked on expansive missionary work. Over decades, they established schools, orphanages, hospitals, convents, elderly‑care homes across the country, responding to needs in education, health, social welfare and community development.
One vivid chapter of this work unfolded in the early 20th century under the pastoral leadership of Fr Camillus De Hovre OMI, a Belgian‑born Oblate priest who arrived in South Africa in 1912. He became a key church‑builder in what is now Gauteng. Among his early projects was the founding of the St Hubert parish in Alexandra township, north of Johannesburg. In 1920, he established, with small resources, a modest church and a two‑roomed primary school. Recognising the need for qualified, committed teachers, he invited the Holy Cross Sisters to staff the convent and the school.
Not long after, noticing serious social and pastoral needs in Pretoria, especially among poor and black communities in townships and “locations,” Fr De Hovre again called on the Sisters. In 1929, he and the Sisters established a mission in what was then the area of Lady Selborne, north of Pretoria, starting with a corrugated‑hut classroom that had 43 pupils, swelling to 220 before the end of the first term. More land was bought, and by 1930 a double‑storey convent was built, with classrooms on the ground floor and Sisters’ quarters above. This mission became known as Little Flower Mission.
Their role in founding schools and hospitals, most notably the Holy Cross Nursing Home at Little Flower Mission, illustrates how faith and service can challenge injustice, provide stability, and nurture hope. In 1932, they opened a modest “tin‑shack clinic” to serve the township and surrounding areas, anticipating more than just schooling but holistic care for a vulnerable population. Over the years, this clinic developed into the much‑loved Holy Cross Nursing Home, a maternity hospital where thousands of Pretoria-area babies were born, and where midwives and obstetric trainees, even from the University of Pretoria (UP), were trained.
“Holy Cross Nursing Home was more than a clinic, it was a beacon of dignity and hope for communities often marginalised.”
Among those whose lives reportedly began under the roof of Holy Cross Nursing Home are people remembered in national life. Many stories remain unrecorded, but among names frequently associated with the Nursing Home are Jody Kollapen, appointed in 2022 to South Africa’s highest court, and Bob Mabena, the renowned radio and media personality. Their inclusion reminds us that from those maternity wards emerged citizens, future leaders, public figures, ordinary lives, shaped, perhaps unconsciously, by the quiet care, dignity and solidarity practiced by the Sisters.
At the same time, the educational mission of the Sisters spread across the country. Their schools were often founded where state provision was lacking, in remote areas, in townships, in communities affected by poverty or neglect. In Cape Town, for example, Holy Cross High School (Maitland) stands as a testament to their commitment to quality, inclusive Catholic education. The congregation opened that school to offer primary and high school education, especially for girls, during a time when many lacked access to schooling. Their work sometimes survived tremendous challenges, including during apartheid when funding was cut. Even then, the Sisters kept the school running by relying on their own resources until eventually, due to declining numbers of Sisters, boarding closures and staff changes required lay leadership.
On the social‑welfare side, the Sisters’ legacy continued beyond maternity and education. When the Holy Cross Nursing Home closed as a maternity hospital in 1984, they responded to new needs by converting it into a frail‑care centre, now known as Holy Cross Home, to care for the elderly, the sick, those affected by destitution, and later, in the face of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, offering hospice and home‑based care. The facility opened its doors to all races and people of all denominations. From 1994, it admitted its first Black resident as apartheid ended, and thereafter committed itself to providing holistic, compassionate care to the vulnerable, irrespective of race or background, including our aging clergy.
Yet despite the breadth and depth of their ministries, much remains untold. Institutional archives and book‑length accounts, like Rise up and Go …, document convents, schools, hospitals, closures, transfers, but often omit the human, intimate stories: the births, the baptisms, the first days of life, the children educated in rough, early classrooms, the midwives trained, the elderly cared for, the displaced families, the parents who lost homes, the students who opened new chapters for their families. The institutional skeleton exists, but the flesh of lived experience remains largely invisible.
This absence is not trivial. It represents lost memory, uncelebrated lives, fading dignity. For every Jody Kollapen or Bob Mabena we might name, there were thousands more: mothers whose labour‑room prayers remain unknown, children whose names are long forgotten, families uprooted by forced removals, elders given dignity in their last years, young girls given hope through education, communities lifted by care and solidarity.
The story of the old maternity hospital, in particular, from its beginnings as a tin‑shack clinic in 1932, through decades of birth and hope, through apartheid, forced removals, social upheaval, to its transformation into a frail‑care home and hospice, is a richly layered saga. It intersects with the history of apartheid’s spatial injustices, of black, coloured and Indian South Africans’ struggle, of Church and mission response, and of human dignity sustained in hardship. That alone merits a book of its own, a “people’s history” of Holy Cross Nursing Home / Little Flower Mission, not just institutional history, but a deeply human and personal history of birth, life, removal and resilience; a social‑historical work rooted in oral histories, personal testimonies, photographs, archival records etc. A book that situates the Sisters’ work within the heart of South Africa’s history of dispossession, resistance, and renewal.
In recent years, that legacy has found new life in Alexandra township. On the grounds of St Hubert’s Church, the building of the old Holy Cross School has been revitalized and transformed into the Alexandra campus of St David’s Marist Inanda School, located in nearby Sandton. The St David’s Marist Inanda Alexandra Campus opened its doors in January 2023 with a pioneer Grade 8 class, reviving the commitment to Catholic education in Alexandra that the Holy Cross Sisters had once begun.
This reopening was not simply logistical, but symbolic: a restoration of heritage, an act of restorative justice for a community long subjected to the injustices of apartheid and neglect. The project had been in discussion for years, since 2014, before the school community and church parish finally secured the title deeds of the property and committed to renovating the derelict campus. The first group of boys, mainly from Alexandra, arrived, full of hope, marking a new chapter in the community’s history.
But even as the old school building takes on new purpose, the grander story remains: the network of ministries, of service, care, education, hope, anchored in faith and compassion, that the Holy Cross Sisters began more than a century ago.
As the book shows, their work extends far beyond bricks and mortar. It is found in the lives shaped, the families supported, the communities uplifted, and the countless acts of quiet devotion that transformed ordinary spaces into places of dignity, learning, and care. From the classrooms of Alexandra to the wards of the Nursing Home and everywhere else were they toiled, the Holy Cross Sisters’ legacy is lived in human stories of resilience, courage, and hope that no single history can fully capture. This book offers a foundation, yet also points clearly to the deeper narratives that await full recognition and celebration.
Rise up and Go, Sisters of the Holy Cross, Southern African Province, An Account of their Communities and Ministries, 1980–2022 can, and should, be the foundation, but not the conclusion. What remains to be done is deeper, to recover, remember, record, and celebrate the lives lived, the births, the education, the care, the service. A commemoration not just of institutions, but of people, ordinary, humble, resilient. May the compassion, faith and commitment of the Sisters, and the countless lives they touched, continue to inspire, and may those whose lives were changed by their ministry receive the honour of being remembered.
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