If you are sitting in a South African school or university right now, you need to put aside 1948 and "Bantu Education" as a primary target of enquiry--these were little more than steps along a road that was already paved--and study when, where and how your institution came into being in the first place. This book joins the growing body of work (much of it by South African scholars) displacing the many mind-numbingly dull texts loaded with assumptions and logics that, in the case of South Africa, reify a simplified colonial explanation of the past. We must fully investigate the ways in which past and contemporary experiences throughout Britain and the lands it conquered became instructive for this period of South African history.