The College was founded in the 1850s on the farm Zonnebloem (sunflower) by controversial Cape Governor Sir George Grey in his drive to strip the Xhosa people on the Cape’s Eastern Frontier of their power, and at the same time draw them into the British realm. The College educated the sons and daughters of chiefs imprisoned on Robben Island in the aftermath of the Eighth and Ninth Frontier Wars. With the advent of the Union of South Africa in 1910 – where the racially motivated Afrikaner republics lost the Boer War but won the peace through the machinations of Machiavellian, Jan Smuts – the nominally egalitarian Cape Franchise slowly dissolved and Zonnebloem College and was absorbed into the District Six community as its first institution of learning at primary, secondary and tertiary level. In 1989 the teacher’s training college component closed. When democracy arrived in 1994, Zonnebloem College campus was incorporated into the new CPUT campus. Zonnebloem primary and secondary (NEST) schools are the visible remnants of Governor Grey’s vision for an all-British, all-race utopia ruled forever from Westminster Heaven. There have, however, been reports recently of the imminent closure of the secondary School in the wake of flagging academic results. While there were high-profile reports of imminent closure due to underperformance and building conditions in 2012, more recent reports from 2024 indicate that Zonnebloem Nest Senior School has seen significant academic improvement. It was recently recognised as one of the schools with the highest increase in the percentage of bachelor's passes between 2021 and 2023.
