In retrospect, it was clear that his time at Ndaleni had been special. Abednego Dlamini was a student at the South African government's school for the training of African art teachers for two years,―1959 and 1960. He had come to Ndaleni after completing a teacher-training program at Mapumulo, where he had excelled in art and earned a recommendation that he pursue a specialist art teacher's course. At Ndaleni, Dlamini sculpted wood and studied art history; he developed a close relationship with his fellow students and their instructor, a white South African named Peter Bell. From Bell, Dlamini learned the technique of mixing bees’ wax with oil paint to ensure that his murals could endure the elements. Before leaving campus at the end of 1960, Dlamini erected a ladder in a covered breezeway and painted a riotously colored depiction of life at the Ndaleni art school. Four students tend to the wood-burning kiln in which art students fired their clay creations; behind them, a painter looks away from his easel to observe their labors. He is painting a landscape: a tree, a curved road, an open field. Moving left, the figures become indistinct. There are more than a dozen of them, swirling with energy: students read, they chat together, smiling, arms companionably draped over shoulders. They shake out large pieces of fabric (perhaps for batik?) and bend at work over a lathe. There are flowers, a blue sky, hills, and trees.

Twenty years later, Dlamini remembered his mural: ‘On entering the corridors you will observe long strips of mural painting, shimmering with harmonious and contrasting shades of colors in oils and beeswax. The medium of oil and beeswax was used by students under Mr Peter Bell.’ He was wistful. To think about Ndaleni was to be ‘revived artistically [by] the beauties my mind can carry and remember’. The impetus for Dlamini's remembrance was the apartheid government's decision to close the Ndaleni Art School in 1982. But in truth, he had long yearned for Ndaleni.