South Africa -- Description and travel; South Africa -- History -- 1836-1909; South Africa -- History -- To 1836
The material part of the Institution consists of a church, and four
large school-rooms, and of the pastor’s residence. There are also other
school-rooms attached of older date. The church has been built
altogether by contributions from the coloured attendants, and is a
spacious handsome building capable of containing 900 persons. M. Esselin
told me that his ordinary congregation amounted to 500. I went to the
morning service on Sunday, and found the building apparently full. I
think there was no white person there besides the clergyman, my
companion, and myself. As the service was performed in Dutch I did not
stay long, contenting myself with the commencing hymn--which was well
sung, and very long, more Africano. I had at this time been in various
Kafir places of worship and had become used to the Kafir physiognomies.
I had also learned to know the faces of the Hottentots, of old Cape
negroes, of the coloured people from St. Helena, and of the Malays. The
latter are not often Christians; but the races have become so mixed that
there is no rule which can be accepted in that respect. Here there were
no Kafirs, the Kafirs not having as yet made their way in quest of wages
as far west as Worcester.[9] The people were generally Hottentot, half
negro,--with a considerable dash of white blood through them. But in the
church I could see no Europeans. It is a coloured congregation, and
supported altogether by contributions from the coloured people.
The school interested me, however, more than the church. I do not know
that I ever saw school-rooms better built, better kept, or more cleanly.
As I looked at them one after another I remembered what had been the big
room at Harrow in my time, and the single school-room which I had known
at Winchester,--for there was only one; and the school-room, which I had
visited at Eton and Westminster; and I was obliged to own that the
coloured children of Worcester are very much better housed now during
their lessons than were the aristocracy of England forty or fifty years
ago. There has been an improvement since, but still something might be
learned by a visit to Worcester. At Worcester the students pay a penny a
week. At the other schools I have named the charges are something
higher.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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