As the first Executive Director of the Joint Education Trust, along side Nick Taylor, Prof. Manganyi became the champion benefactor to support the establishment of the Funda Community College, as we imagine it today, in 1994.
As a close associate of Prof. Eskia Mphahlele he contributed towards
1. The building of the new Central Administration Office, that we sentimentally call ‘the Round Building’.
Completed in 1993, it won the Joe Noero Architect the Annual Architecture Award of 1993 for its ‘green architecture’ retrofits – accentuating the apparent old Funda features of an assuming green campus (the first in township Architecture)
2. The building of the Eskia Mphahlele Lecture Complex that accommodates 160 students in one seating. This Complex became the seat of the Funda Matric Finishing School that created ‘matric bridging’ programs for access to first year coursee in science, commerce and arts – linked to UJ and Wits University agreements.
3. The rest of the R24M was then used to support executive leadership and programs for five years as seed funding, through to 1998.
Closely associated with Eskia’s Council for Black Education and Research and its Saturday Seminar Series on adult education, Manganyi had a profound understanding the value of Mphahlele’s generation of education and cultural activists.
His decision to invest in the community education prototype, the first unique venture in South Africa, provided the ‘space’ to traverse the dark forests of policy uncertainty and the leadership opportunity to support the City of Johannesburg’s venture on the redevelopment of the Bara-interchange to Orlando Power Station’s planned ‘waterfront’.
Funda’s community education leadership included the building of human development partnership with the now defunct Bara Nursing College and Vista University Campus to create a dynamic student village and business precinct for recreation and tourism.
So goes the story of the Mphahlele’s legacy of Funda, ‘the educational vortex for educational possibilities…’ – the place of ‘becoming’. Prof. Manganyi represents that generation of activist intellectuals, whose value remain in getting things done and not spoken about.
Although we are in our winter of leadership, we remember Mphahlele’s assertion, at the 1984 Opening of Funda, that “there is a crisis of black leadership in the community…” and Funda was the place for the community to innovate fitting solutions.
Meanwhile, another quiet warrior fades in the sunset of our presumptuous imaginations about the coming seasons, and we are no wiser about their ‘art of war’. So SaLute????????
