New Every Morning: Memories of a South African Childhood

In this personal memoir Margaret Bond (1911-1985) recounts the story of her missionary family in Southern Africa, and her memories growing up in in the Cape after the Boer War. Margaret Bond was the grand-daughter of the Rev. James McLaren, the Scottish principal of Blythswood Educational Institution in the Transkei, who authored the first Xhosa-English dictionary and first Xhosa grammar. She was the daughter of William Bond who -- after an education at a British public school and Oxford -- went out to the Cape Colony as school principal and subsequently school inspector. Bringing education to South Africa involved arduous travel by horseback over the South African Veld, setting up schools and colleges from scratch, and living in sometimes very remote locations far from other Europeans. The education these pioneers brought to Africa was very much that of the Victorian era -- English language and grammar, European history, English literature, an understanding of the rules of the British Empire. But these committed educators also took a keen interest in the indigenous Xhosa population among whom they lived, recording the vocabulary and grammar and providing it with with the written form that exists today. Bringing education to the colonies was above all an Imperial task. The backdrop to Margaret Bond's memoirs is the late summer blooming and fading of Empire, as Britain's far-flung colonies gained increasing self confidence and impatience for self rule and as Britain itself was weakened by the Great War. It was to end with the Second World War. This historical and personal record covers the period 1870 through 1920.