Which school is really our oldest?

The announcement that Hans Coetzee will be going to Hoërskool Durbanville as a rugby coach (and that’s great news for him and the school) included the line that they are building towards a successful 200th Anniversary year in 2026.

That got some people doing arithmetic and they found it means the school was established in 1827, which puzzled a few associated with Cape Town’s SACS, the school that most people (me included) refer to as our oldest school – established in 1829.

On their website, Durbanville say they are SA’s second-oldest school, without saying who the oldest is, which makes SACS only the 3rd oldest, and that confuses matters even more.

It’s an old can of worms, one that I've researched before and I found then that the origins of most schools are shrouded in the mists of time and often a bit dodgy.

SACS is accepted as the oldest, but its early days were tied to UCT - they even have the same badge - and Paul Roos, similarly, was part of Stellenbosch University.

Jeppe and KES are both Milner Schools (established in 1903), yet Jeppe's Centenary was in 1989 and KES celebrated theirs in 2002, which means they both claim to have been founded prior to Lord Milners’s 1903 proclamation. They, like many of our older schools,  trace their ancestry to earlier institutions (some of which can only loosely be called schools) from which they evolved.

Muir College's Website has their establishment date as 1822.  But, according to Wikipaedia, Uitenhage’s first Free Government School was opened in 1822. In 1875, the school, then known as the Public Undenominational School moved to Park Avenue and in 1892 the school’s name changed to the Muir Academy. Go figure!

It looks, from the history of the school on their website that Durbanville was once Pampoenkraal and a primary and high school were established there in 1827, so I suspect that they have taken that as the beginning of the current Hoërskool Durbanville.

Someone sent me a list of some 20, mainly primary, schools that were established before SACS, and Durbanville but I couldn't find any of them still operating under the names given. I suppose the test of a school's age should be how many years it existed as the school that is is known as now .

It's not important really, our traditional schools have all stood the test of time.

And Hans Coetzee was, at Monument, the most successful school rugby coach Gauteng has ever seen. Durbanville will be good in 2026, not matter how old the school may or may not be.