“Under colonialism, there’s a tension between the missions and the colonial authorities,” said Dr. Taiwo, author of the 2010 book “How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa.” “There was a missionary idea that black people could be modern. And most churches cannot come out and say some people are not human. So you might have a patronizing attitude, but if you don’t think Africans can benefit from education, why would you set up schools?”

Certainly, the model of mission education was not unique to Africa. White American missionaries played a similarly complicated role as emblems of both modernity and noblesse oblige in China before the Communist revolution. Many mission colleges in South Africa modeled their practical courses in industry and agriculture — a curriculum known as differentiated education or adapted education — on those of black schools in the United States such as Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute.

In whatever form it took, mission education was virtually the only formal sort available to black Africans for much of the colonial era. The first mission school in Nigeria opened in 1859, 50 years before the first government school, according to Dr. Taiwo. In the mid-1920s, mission schools in South Africa were educating far more Africans (about 215,000 compared with about 7,000) than were state schools, by Dr. Elphick’s calculations.

“For young black South Africans like myself,” Mandela wrote about Fort Hare in his autobiography, “it was Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, all rolled into one.” Before his rancorous departure, he studied Latin and physics, joined the drama society, ran cross country and lived in a hostel for Methodists like himself.

Just as important for the person Mandela would become, Fort Hare put him in a multiracial community, said Daniel Massey, author of “Under Protest,” a history of political activism at the college. Mandela’s classmates included Indian and “colored” students, and even some white children of faculty members. The black students were drawn from across tribal and linguistic lines.

For all those reasons — academic, religious, cultural — mission schools like Fort Hare were anathema to Afrikaner nationalists. Speaking in 1938, the political leader Daniel Malan warned about the growing number of “civilized and educated nonwhites who wish to share our way of life and to strive in every respect for equality with us.”

In the dozen years after winning a majority in South Africa’s 1948 elections, Afrikaner nationalists exerted state control over mission schools, imposing apartheid’s segregation by racial category and tribal identity and pushing for education in African languages rather than in English. Fort Hare, over the protests of its students, was subsumed under the government policy of “Bantu education.”

Like so much else in South Africa, that changed with Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and the transition to majority rule. In October 1991, Mandela’s political ally, law partner and college classmate Oliver Tambo was named chancellor of Fort Hare. In his installation speech, even as he acknowledged the strife during his student years, Tambo intoned the college motto: “In your light, let us see light.”