In 1960 the Swedish missiologist Bengt Sundkler published a book that addressed the position of the pastor in Africa, and the question as to what a theological college should be. This was a year of great change in Africa. Even as apartheid was being consolidated, no less than 17 states gained independence during the course of that year, ‘and the cry “Africa for the Africans” [could] be heard everywhere’. A professor at the University of Uppsala, Sundkler was married to a South African woman, and had spent time teaching at the Lutheran Theological College at Oscarsberg in Rorke's Drift in the early 1940s. In 1948 his book Bantu Prophets in South Africa secured Sundkler's ‘international reputation as an Africanist’. His appointment as research secretary of the International Missionary Council enabled him to conduct the survey for the IMC Commission on Theological Education in Africa in 1953, 1955 and 1957, which also provided the basis for the book published in 1960. The IMC survey results were widely disseminated and discussed in South Africa, and formed an important part of the background to the establishment of both Fedsem and Umpumulo.

As suggested in the previous chapter, this provided missionaries who were losing their schools to the state with a substitute, enabling them to re-direct their energies. Sundkler sketched a vision of an alternative educational project which aimed at raising the standards of a hitherto neglected theological education. He argued that this could be achieved by addressing both the Eurocentric content and also the dull and uninteresting teaching methodologies of existing educational approaches. To succeed, it was necessary to create an atmosphere in which education was experienced as ‘the enjoyment of good company’, and to teach African Church History in a way that would bring out the creative tension between national and universal dimensions of education. Rather than this history being taught as ‘a catalogue of names and dates’, it should bring out ‘the main trends, the great ideas and movements’. The tendency to treat Church History as a catalogue of unrelated data, or ‘historical facts’ was, he argued, a reason why students found Theology so difficult to learn. For this reason, too, thorough research and the study of local history needed to be a central element of the new theological college. Sundkler's vision inspired, and was also visible, in Umpumulo's approach to the curriculum.