The African Struggle for Independent Education focuses on the Wilberforce Institute, one of the first major independent African schools in segregationist South Africa. It became the epicentre of the independent school movement in the Transvaal in the early twentieth century, demonstrating how newly urbanised mission-educated Africans, despite profound linguistic differences and regional backgrounds, shared far-reaching educational aspirations in the rapidly growing cosmopolitan, gold-driven Johannesburg after the South African War (1899-1902).