(Inspired by the recollections of Don MacRobert)

How did it all start?

Every great institution begins with a moment that refuses to fade. For St. Mark’s, that moment was the grief of Bishop Furse, who, after losing his daughter Jane, transformed sorrow into service. In a quiet corner of Limpopo, he built a hospital, a primary school and a vicarage, as if constructing both memorial and promise. What stood there was more than stone. It was intention, waiting for its next chapter.

The Community of the Resurrection Fathers carried that intention forward. They raised the stone buildings still standing today, shaping classrooms and chapels out of rock and prayer. Yet history’s winds turned severe. Apartheid legislation tightened and one by one the mission’s functions fell into state hands. The hospital. The primary school. Eventually, silence settled over structures once alive with purpose.

But some silences are merely pauses before renewal. In the early 1980s, at a Synod meeting in Pretoria, Father Johannes Manaswe called for the revival of the deserted Jane Furse Centre. His appeal stirred something deeper than administrative duty. It awakened memory, responsibility and possibility. Bishop Kraft and Don MacRobert were tasked with imagining what a school could become amid ruins. As Don later recalled, “There was something worth saving there, even if it did not look like it at first glance.”

Committees formed, priests joined hands and the work of resurrection began.

Selecting the headmaster

No school exists without a core and so the search for a headmaster became a journey into character as much as competence. Candidates arrived polished and metropolitan, their suits and shoes expressing a confidence that faltered against Jane Furse’s dust. One candidate’s wife famously stepped into the rural heat wearing high heels.

Peter and Elisabeth Anderson arrived differently. Their veldskoen and khaki attire announced an understanding not taught in interviews. They recognised that leadership here required simplicity, service and courage. Their appointment was less a decision and more an inevitability.

But leadership alone could not anchor the school. St. Mark’s needed the people whose soil it occupied. Meetings under trees, in halls and in homes affirmed that the community embraced the school as its own. Chiefs, elders, parents and donors stood together in shared anticipation. The school was not being built for the community; it was being built with it.

Building and fundraising

The early years unfolded like a tapestry sewn from urgency, ingenuity and collective will. Students from Anglican universities arrived during holidays, sleeping in the abandoned stone rooms while repairing them. A fundraising committee met not in offices but in living rooms, driven less by resources than by conviction.

Then came the legendary dormitory. Plans were sketched in the sand with the heels of shoes because paper, time and architectural drawings were luxuries. The builder followed those lines faithfully, even if he later grumbled that the roof wobbled. The first pupils slept in the chapel while the dormitory settled into its new purpose. It was makeshift, imperfect and entirely miraculous.

Under the Andersons, momentum gathered. Volunteers from abroad, retired teachers and donors found themselves drawn into the orbit of a school that seemed to grow by sheer determination. Meanwhile, pupils arrived from Soweto and beyond, seeking education unavailable elsewhere. Demand outpaced walls. Classrooms multiplied in tents, their canvas flapping in the wind as dust settled across exercise books. Yet learning persisted like a flame refusing to be extinguished.

The late 1980s: a difficult time

The school did not grow in peaceful times. The late 1980s swept across South Africa with political unrest, raids and fear. Security police arrived unannounced, searching staff homes and confiscating books. St. Mark’s became both sanctuary and target.

Then came the paradox: while the student movement COSAS closed schools across the country under the slogan “liberation before education”, they insisted that St. Mark’s remain open. Its relationship with the community shielded it in ways that defied the times.

But even resilience has its daily burdens. When the water reservoir ran dry, pupils and teachers relied on buckets and containers scattered around the mission. Still the school refused to falter. Its strength was no longer in its buildings but in its shared resolve. 

Achivements and growth

Out of hardship emerged excellence. The academic results shimmered with promise. Among the earliest stars was Mamogae Mahlare, who topped the Lebowa Science Olympiad in 1990 and represented South Africa in London. Her path to Wits and Harvard echoed the quiet truth of St. Mark’s: brilliance can rise from unlikely soil when tended with care.

Institutionally, the Diocese of Pretoria was divided, leading to the creation of the Diocese of St. Mark’s. Bishops Kraft, Ruston and le Feuvre each played their part in shaping the school’s governance as it grew.

And then there was the music.
The choirs of St. Mark’s were not merely voices; they were testimony. Songs like Lerato la Jesu and Santa Morena filled the air with harmonies that seemed to lift the very walls. As Don wrote in his reflection, the singing “could make one’s hair stand on end.”

The legacy that endures

St. Mark’s was not built by wealth or convenience. It was built by hands that repaired broken windows, by feet that traced architectural lines in the sand, by teachers who arrived with nothing but hope and by a community that believed education could rise from stone and struggle. Its beginnings were humble, its challenges immense, yet its spirit proved larger than both.

The school’s foundations are not merely cement and rock. They are sacrifice, courage, faith and an unbroken thread of human determination. These are the materials that held the walls together when resources were scarce, that kept the classrooms open when the world outside was unstable and that carried each generation forward with a sense of purpose.

And that is why St. Mark’s still stands. It was never only a school. It was a promise. A resurrection. A declaration that even in the quietest parts of the country, greatness can be born and carried into the world. Its story is woven into every stone, every voice that once rose in song and every alumnus who walked out into the world stronger than they arrived.

Forty years on, the echo of that original intention still rings across the valley. St. Mark’s was built to rise. And rise it did.