THE CHRISTIAN AFRIKANERS - The Works of F. N. Lee

African Republic in 1902, the Cape System of non-Christian statist public education was extended-- even into the conquered territories to the north.At this point, some of the more conservative Afrikaner Christian parents in those areas withdrewfrom the new kind of schools in the public education system. They then re-established ChristianNational Education, but now in a system of private schools separate from the State School System.These new Christian private schools then competed against the State School System -- for the firsttime ever in the history of South Africa.At this stage, these new schools were generally Church Schools -- meeting on church property, andtaught by church personnel. But, from 1910 and 1914 onward, we encounter the unification ofSouth Africa. Yet with each Province then being allowed to do its own thing in the area of StateEducation, and with the emergence even then and ever-increasingly thereafter of dedicatedCalvinist School Teachers consecrating their lives to work for the Calvinistic reconquest of thePublic School System -- the latter became more and more an option. Consequently, the ChristianNational Schools -- the private schools that had grown up after the defeat of the South Africans inthe Anglo-Boer War then began to wilt away.What we then find from 1910 onward, is a separate public education system for each Province --but one in which Christianity in general and Calvinism in particular slowly began to reconquer. Ittook almost fifty years to engineer its complete reconquest. But the Calvinists finally succeeded.Already in the 1920's the University of Potchefstroom for Christian Higher Education was created-- by a private act of Parliament. This enabled a first-rate Christian university to exist in SouthAfrica -- a publicly recognised State University which was thoroughly Calvinistic, and which couldrefuse to employ anyone who would not undertake to teach his own special subjects from a stronglyCalvinistic life and world perspective.It is at this time that Hendrik Stoker, the great South African philosopher, began to teach there.Potchefstroom University started out in a small way -- so let this be an encouragement to you all!Stoker's teaching load in the 1920's was sometimes fifty hours a week.We also find the increasing re-calvinisation of the other universities. The University ofStellenbosch had been strongly Calvinistic since its establishment in the nineteenth century. But ithad to some extent slipped away from that. Now, however, it too became increasingly recalvinised.If you go to Stellenbosch today, you will find the most prestigious university in South Africa - areal ivy-league university steeped in tradition. Nearly all of the students, thousands and thousandsof them, attend Calvinist Church worship services every Sunday. Indeed, a large slice of thestudents are also involved in local missionary work every Sunday afternoon -- in taking the Gospelto non-white peoples not very far from the university, and sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ withthem.I remember the time the famous Oswald Smith of Toronto and later his son Paul Smith -- neither ofthem Calvinists, but both of them Evangelicals -- visited the University of Stellenbosch. They saidthey had never been to any place in the world where they had found so many young peoplecommitted to the extension of the Kingdom of Christ as at that university. Also, Stellenbosch has tothis day by far the largest percentage of students of any university in the world involved inChristian outreach groups. I know of no other situation anywhere else.At some of the younger universities, this is also very pronounced. The Orange Free State