Between 1979 and 1988, a child-centred Primary Education Upgrade Programme (PEUP) was initiated in the most unlikely of contexts: a Bantustan. The programme expanded dramatically: from 7 schools in 1980, it grew to 114 in 1981, and 625 in 1983. Two years later, 760 out of a total of 840 schools, i.e. more than 90%, were involved. A decade after it was first introduced, the PEUP was described as having ‘infused primary education in Bophuthatswana with a new spirit and orientation’; it was also perceived to be responsible for this particular Bantustan's superior educational results. This, despite the fact that unemployment was higher in this area than in other rural provinces, and that it had the highest proportion of people without schooling in the agricultural sector.

Hermannsburgers were deeply involved in both the development and provision of education in Bophuthatswana. Central to the implementation of PEUP was Christel Bodenstein, connected by marriage to the Bodensteins of the Hermannsburg Mission, one of whom, Wolfgang, became advisor to Lucas Mangope. Wolfgang Bodenstein had been a doctor at the mission hospital at Appelsbosch in Zululand, and was a close associate of Mangosuthu ‘Gatsha’ Buthelezi, who had recommended him to Mangope. I interviewed Christel Bodenstein and her husband, Hans, in the German Old Age Home in Johannesburg, in 2009. Hans was born into a missionary family, while Christel became a Hermannsburger through marriage. Her public role in education in the Bantustan demonstrates the changing position of women and the possibilities that opened up from the early 1970s onwards.

The driving force behind PEUP, Bodenstein was a self-effacing but energetic and charismatic teacher trainer at nursery and primary school levels in Rustenburg. Born Christel Bokelman in 1926 in East London, she attended the German school in Hermannsburg, where she first met her husband-to-be. She left to do her training at the Pretoria Teacher Training College, which offered a course of study she found inadequate, and from there she went to Barkly House in Cape Town. In 1948, while teaching at a nursery school in Durban, she married Hans Bodenstein. Within the space of ten years, she gave birth to five children. At the same time, during the 1960s, while moving ‘from place to place’, she taught at various nursery and primary schools in Philippi in Cape Town, where she became principal, and also at Hermannsburg and in Johannesburg.