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Remarks by Dr Mvulane Moloi, Director, at the Relaunch of Funda Community College, 10 October 2026

To the elders and luminaries in this hall, and I will greet some of you by name shortly. To the artists, to the students who are here and those who are coming, and to the neighbours of Diepkloof, who never stopped believing this place was theirs.

I want to begin with a question. Why did anyone build a place like this?

In 1976 the children of Soweto stood up, and the country shook. Business was shaken too, and it asked itself a hard question: how do we make this city safe for investment? Part of the answer was education. Adult education centres, so that Black urban people could be made mobile, employable and orderly. That is how Funda began, in 1984. The land was given, the money came, and the purpose written on the paper was, let us be honest, not entirely ours.

Before I go further, let me be honest about where this place came from. Funda was founded, and in its first years funded, by capital, and by the people who ran it. I will not pretend otherwise. The truth of this place includes them, and that truth belongs in this hall.

Thanks must go to all of them. But special thanks must go to those who really did the hard work of setting this place up. Outside this auditorium sits a cornerstone, laid in 1982. That first cornerstone is the Urban Foundation, and the name carved on it is Jan Steyn, S-T-E-Y-N, who led the Foundation from 1977. I acknowledge, with respect and without sentimentality, the funding it brought. The land we sit on was given by the Urban Foundation and by IBM.

Behind the Foundation stand names that still carry weight. The Oppenheimers need no introduction: they built Anglo American, and Harry Oppenheimer was the Foundation's founding chair. Anton Rupert stood beside him as vice chair, and the Rupert name is still gigantic in South African business. I thank Rembrandt in particular, for the Arts Centre, and I will tell you in a moment why that matters. Anton's son, Johann Rupert, sat in the room at the White House last year as part of South Africa's delegation, and helped bring that meeting about.

And I thank our first director, Steven Sack, an art educator and an activist, who ran this place before any of us here carried the responsibility, and who also co-led Khula Udweba, an art education project, with Linda Solomon. It is right that I, as director, begin the roll of my predecessors with him: Steven Sack, Charles Nkosi, Motsumi Makhene, and those who followed.

But a place is not what its funders intend. A place is what its people make of it.

Because the person they asked to chair this centre was Eskia Mphahlele. Give a people a building and they will make a school of it. Give them Mphahlele, and they will make a university of the imagination.

Es'kia did not arrive at Funda by accident. Its genesis can be traced to his years across the world. In America he earned his doctorate at the University of Denver, handing in a novel, The Wanderers, in place of a thesis, and he taught at the University of Pennsylvania. He came home carrying what he had learned: that a people must research and write itself.

Here is a story as it is told. When the plans for Funda were put before him, he asked, in effect: you tell me this is a response to the youth of the sixteenth of June, but those youth are creative. Where is the arts centre? The plans had none. It was to be an adult education centre. Money was scrambled together, and it was Rembrandt who came most to the party, so that the Arts Centre was built.

And when the prefab that had housed the builders was due to be dismantled, Es'kia said: please, don't. We will use it. In that prefab was housed the Council for Black Education and Research, where Black scholars, who for so long had served as interpreters for others, were given room to research, write and publish. Out of that work came much of the thinking from which this college was made.

For Es'kia, the imagination was home ground. He let it out like a kite, as far as the wind would carry it, and he always knew how to bring it back. He was a writer. He wrote for Drum and did not much enjoy it. He wrote books that outlived the magazine. The imagination was his beat, and he walked it every day.

In 2024, as this institution turned forty, I gave ten talks on that idea. I called them talks on becoming, because that is what Mphahlele taught. Education is not the delivery of a person into a job. It is a person becoming.

And one phrase kept pulling me back. The dispossessed imagination.

Mphahlele saw that dispossession did not stop at land. It reached inside. Bantu Education, 1953, was not only a curriculum. It was a design, to teach a people to expect little of themselves. Three generations later, what you inherit is not only poverty. It is a deficiency of agency. A quiet voice that says, it is not for us to decide.

And Mphahlele refused it, with Khabi Mngoma, with Peter Matlare, with Zeph Mothopeng. They said no to implementing it, and they paid for it. That refusal is the foundation of this college.

Now let me tell you what Funda became when it was allowed to be itself.

Between 1994 and 2004 this college grew from a fledgling into something formidable. It was opened by the Minister of Education, Sibusiso Bengu. By those years it could print a brochure that made you proud, with courses designed to articulate. A student who started here could pass into the tertiary system, and arts students could go from this campus straight into first or second year at Wits. That is access, and it is why I am glad that Professor David Andrews, who has served on the board of Funda and is today at the University of the Witwatersrand, is with us today.

Also with us is Charles Nkosi, elder and executive director, who for decades ran our visual arts department and then the whole college. Ntate Nkosi, thank you.

And Babu Stan Sibeko, who was Es'kia's right hand, the man who drove the administration. He was also one of the first to embrace technology, in corporate business and here at Funda Centre. He saw early that our people should be at the keyboard and not only in the queue.

It paid off. This place produced people who went on to do remarkable things. Sello Mtshali was headhunted by SAP, and he was the architect of the computer system at SARS under Pravin Gordhan. Now, I know. We may not love him for it. That system pickpockets all of us. But it makes sure that everyone who should pay taxes does. And if we pay ours, and if we then use our resources well, perhaps it is fine. So, reluctantly, a round of applause for Sello Mtshali.

But what made Funda different was never only the brochure. It was the people. Sibongile Khumalo. Maishe Maponya. Zakes Mda. Babu Sibeko. And two great portals that fed this place: Soyikwa, under Matsemela Manaka, and Madimba, under Motsumi Makhene.

I want to make noise for Matsemela Manaka, because the Zibike Imaginerium will resurrect his plays, and they will be staged here, on this campus.

Soyikwa and Madimba were praxis. They learned by doing and did what they learned. That is the resilience Funda once had, and it is the resilience we are bringing back.

Then came the hard years. Between 2004 and 2008 the trouble began, in the middle of our success. I will offer a speculation, and you may argue with me afterwards. Perhaps it was complacency. When institutions succeed, the elite who run them can forget why they are there, and power begins to corrode.

Let me put it a different way. We Nguni people have a word, iziziba. Deep pools, where the water gathers and the rock meets the water. They are sacred. We believe some of our ancestors live there, and guard them. A pool like that is still, but it is alive, because it is fed and stirred by the spring, by the rock, by the whole living relationship of the elements, what we call ubudlelwano. A dam is different. A dam interrupts the ecosystem.

Funda was an isiziba. The arts and the music, the restlessness and unpredictability of a place on the edge of the township, were what stirred it. When a pool stops being stirred, it does not stay sacred. It stagnates.

And then, in 2008, Eskia Mphahlele left terra firma.

Whether by accident or by spirit, that was when the invasion came. At the worst of it, Funda Centre was reduced to the prefab, where you will see an exhibition today. Buildings were taken, including this very auditorium. When it was under siege, the windows were blackened, and behind those windows something I will not dignify with a name was done.

The library was emptied. The books were thrown out. One of our students, who fought to take the library back, told me that what he found was a single book. That book mattered. But so did all the others that were thrown away. And I am proud to say that donations have come in, and the books are returning.

The season of reclamation did not begin in a single day. It began with the centenary of the founding father, in 2019, and it came in stages. Then in 2022, the centenary of Khabi Mngoma, Es'kia's confidant and friend. This year Mngoma was honoured with the Order of Ikhamanga in gold, alongside Molefe Pheto, who was his student at Orlando High, and Oscar Mhlongwa.

That school was known as "the Rock." And the poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, in "Things and Times," imagines a rhythm, greener and more dread than glory's gods can bless, rising out of rock. For us, that rock was Orlando High. And the rhythm is here.

I am glad the families are in the house. Khabi Mngoma's eldest son, Babu Lindu Muzi Mngoma, is with us, and his wife, MaGwande Mngoma. So is Molefe Pheto's eldest son, Bra Gibo Pheto, with his wife, Sis Nana.

Babu Lindu, Bra Gibo and Babu Makhene were part of a cohort of young people who made up arguably the first Black orchestra, together with Victor Masote, whose son, Kutlwano Masote, is a prominent broadcaster and a champion of the classical music that these young people, his father included, made popular in the townships. That is a lineage of music-makers, and it is the lineage we are restoring.

I came into the fray in 2024, with those lectures, and as board chairman. And on the 26th of May, the work that you are standing inside of today began.

So hear me clearly. Funda has been through hard years. The lights that went out. The salaries that came late or not at all. The programmes that closed, music, theatre, dance, each one a small death. Those who stayed did not stay for pay. They stayed because they knew what this place was for. I want to thank them, and I ask this room to do it aloud.

But we did not gather to mourn. We gathered to relaunch.

The relaunch is a turnaround, running to 2031, and it rests on three promises.

First: the arts come home. Music, theatre and dance return to Funda. A college that trains only the eye, and not the ear, the voice and the body, has forgotten what Soweto is. This is the township of the toyi-toyi, of protest song and yard theatre. Our imagination was never silent. We will give it back its instruments.

Second: heritage is the currency of the future. Soweto's story, the one the world comes to buy in pieces, belongs first to those who lived it. We will train our own people to tell it, to archive it, to guide it, to own it.

Third: less talk for talk, but talk that walks.

We have had enough speeches. Including this one. From today, the measure of this college is what walks out of the room: the graduate, the archive, the performance, the business.

A young generation is watching us. Sibusiso Nxumalo, who has given forty years of media work to the voices of Soweto's youth, says these young people did not fall out of the sky. They have a lineage. They carry questions about the world after COVID, about work, about dignity, about a future that keeps being postponed, and those questions are the same ones asked in 1976, in 1953, and long before. They are asking us to equip them to answer.

The calendar is already speaking. On the 19th of this month we mark Black Wednesday, when the voices of this country were banned and detained. Turn the 9 upside down and 19 becomes 16. They could ban a newspaper. They could not ban a date. And in December we hold the Festival of Original Sound, so that this campus rings again.

Mphahlele would not want to be remembered with a plaque. He would want a classroom that is full.

But there is one more thing, and it is about the year we are standing in.

This is a year of Jubilee. Fifty years since 1976. And the Jubilee is older than all of us in this hall. In the book of Leviticus, every fiftieth year, the trumpet sounds. The enslaved go free. The land returns to those it was taken from. Debts are released. The ground is allowed to rest. It is not charity. It is a reset, a way of saying that a society cannot stay healthy while a few hold the water and everyone else goes thirsty.

Those who came into this place in the name of faith carry this teaching too. I do not say it to accuse. I say it because the Jubilee does not belong to one side of any fence. It is a promise that an ecosystem out of balance can be rebalanced, if people are willing.

We have our own word for this. Mafisa.

Many of you know it. The one with many cattle lends a beast to the one with none. The borrower tends it, drinks its milk, and works with it. The herd grows, and what grows belongs to both. It is not a handout. It is a trust that makes two families richer. From those with much, some must come. That is mafisa, and it is the Jubilee in a kraal.

And we have a second word, letsema. We till together.

Now let me tell you what we are lending, and to whom.

There is a Zulu saying: inkunzi isematholeni. The bull is found among the calves.

Look at the young people in this hall. Each one of them is a calf today. They need the pen, the mentors, the long grass and the water. They need each other, because the young learn best beside the young. But the bull is already among them. The one who will lead this community, the one who will keep this archive, the one who will stand on this stage in thirty years, is sitting here already, and does not yet know it.

Our work is to be worthy of that bull. We lend, we tend, and we do not forget who is growing in the herd.

So let us fill the classrooms. Let us make this campus, from the gate to the Arts Centre, from the piazza to the library, a place where a young person from Diepkloof can walk in with a dispossessed imagination and walk out with a restored one.

Funda is not reopening today. Funda is returning.

Ngiyabonga. Ke a leboha. Thank you.