Promising student 60 Minutes met at Cape Town magic school in 2022 died last month
In a Nutshell
A Cape Town magic school transforms underprivileged students like Duma Mkhorki and Nkanyezi Ntome by teaching performance skills alongside life skills, helping them escape township violence, poverty, and social isolation through disciplined practice and imagination-building. The non-profit institution, founded by Dean David Gore, provides scholarships to 130 diverse students who spend six years developing not just magic techniques but also social confidence, skepticism, and creative thinking that extends beyond traditional academics. The core message shows how magic education serves as nation-building, using wonder and performance to bridge South Africa's economic divides while giving students practical pathways out of hardship.
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60 Minutes visited the College of Magic in Cape Town, South Africa, a non-accredited school that functions as a real-life Hogwarts. The school serves students aged 10 to 18 from diverse backgrounds, including both privilege and poverty. Students learn sleight of hand, juggling, ventriloquism, and card tricks, but the core teaching is rethinking the limits of possibility through magic as a superpower.
The campus features Gothic architecture with a diverse student body and core curriculum balanced with electives. Students must be both tacticians and technicians to master magic, requiring practice, application, and discipline. While students attend regular academic school during the week, they come to the College of Magic after school, on weekends, and during holidays. It takes 6 years to earn a diploma.
Sinethemba Bawuti is a teacher, graduate, and practicing magician who shows students the tricks of the trade. He explained that he wants to pursue magic as a career to put smiles on people's faces, make them happy, entertain them, and break ice, but it has become a way to support himself and feed his family. The school teaches honesty, humility, and respect, and Bawuti described it as a "college of life" rather than just a college of magic.
Dean and founder David Gore left his law practice 40 years ago to open the College of Magic in Cape Town. The school is the only institution of its kind devoted to wonder. Gore clarified that he doesn't see magic as deception but rather as illusion and wonderment. His encyclopedic knowledge of magic fills the halls with contraptions and memorabilia tracing the history of illusion.
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