The history of Pietermaritzburg College goes back even further than 125 years, beginning with the arrival of the first group of British traders to Port Natal in 1824. The next group of whites to arrive in the region was a small party of Voortrekkers, in 1837, in the Tugela Basin in the heart of Zulu territory.
A year later they proclaimed the Republic of Natalia with the village of Pietermaritzburg as its capital. It was not long, however, before the British annexed Natal and the majority of the Voortrekkers, deprived of their Republic, began their move north over the Drakensberg.
Official involvement in the colony's education became a reality only in July 1849 when the first government school was opened in Pietermaritzburg, in a thatched schoolroom on the corner of Longmarket and Chapel streets. The fortunes of Pietermaritzburg's government school ebbed and flowed.
When in 1857 the newly convened Legislative Council began meeting in the schoolhouse, thus disrupting classes, the school moved to a new site in upper Church Street. The modest little schoolroom became known, rather grandly, as Parliament House.
In 1859 the first Superintendent of Education, Dr Robert J Mann, provided the initiative for the establishment of a high school in the town ...
In 1889 the College burst into flower: enrolment stood at a high of 157, with, as Clark remarked, it becoming a 'fashionable craze' (Haw and...