Lutho Mkwabana, a 16-year-old from Delft, a township in Cape Town, is talking about magic. “When you’re on stage, it’s like you’re in this world [where] it’s you alone, where you can control everything,” he says. Now in his final year of study at a local college for gen-Z magicians and wizards, the skilled juggler with excellent sleight-of-hand skills is dreaming of a bigger stage.
It’s a dream born in a storybook atmosphere. The school is housed in a red-brick Victorian mansion, a sense of history and wonder baked into its winding staircases and ornate verandas. “A real-life Hogwarts,” someone says, walking around the garden.
Every Saturday and weekday after school, the gates of this 120-year-old converted house open to around 150 students, who gather to learn secrets passed through centuries, in a building that – like the diverse group of kids who attend the college – is shaped by the history of South Africa.
It has been decades since founder and director David Gore burst into Cape Town’s Newspaper House with a colleague at 19 years old in a top hat and coattails, to declare that he was opening the College of Magic. The stunt earned them press and 34 students, who enrolled at the college for its opening at Resden House, in the suburb of Southfield, on February 23, 1980. In the ensuing years, the school took up residence at various locations across the city before settling at 215 Imam Haron Road, in
