The University of Fort Hare is a public university in Alice, Eastern Cape, South Africa. It was a key institution of higher education for black Africans from 1916 to 1959. It offered a Western-style academic education to students from across sub-Saharan Africa, creating a black African elite. Fort Hare alumni were part of many subsequent independence movements and governments of newly independent African countries. In 1959, the university was subsumed by the apartheid system, but it is now part of South Africa's post-apartheid public higher education system.