At the start of the twentieth century, newly urbanized South Africans struggled with mainstream missionary education and its associated oppression, segregation, displacement, and not least, disillusionment. They shared far-reaching educational aspirations in the rapidly growing, cosmopolitan Johannesburg in the aftermath of the 1899–1902 war.

Vusumuzi Kumalo's insightful narrative relates how mission-educated graduates—despite their profoundly differing linguistic and regional backgrounds—came together to create the independent education movement, and how their determination led to the creation of the Wilberforce Institute, one of the first major independent African schools in segregationist South Africa.