A World of Their Own: A History of South African Women’s Education

7/29/2019 A World of Their Own: A History of South African Womens Education

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A World of Their Own

A History of South African Womens Education

Meghan Healy-Clancy


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Contents

List of Tables and Figures viiNote on Terminology and Orthography ixList of Abbreviations xAcknowledgements xi

Introduction 1

CHAPTER ONE

Social Reproduction in the Making of a BenevolentEmpire: 18351885 18

CHAPTER TWO

Domestic Revolutions and the Feminisation ofSchooling in Natal: 18851910 53

CHAPTER THREE

New African Womens Work in Segregationist SouthAfrica: 19101948 87

CHAPTER FOUR

Education Policy and the Gendered Making of Separate

Development: 19481976 120

CHAPTER FIVE

Educated African Women in a Time of PoliticalRevolution: 19761994 163

Epilogue 191


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Notes 200Bibliography 265Index 294


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INTRODUCTION

Introduction

Inanda Seminary stands some fifteen miles north of Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, its verdant campus separated from the township around it by along driveway and an electric fence. Amidst whitewashed buildingsand jacarandas, neatly attired schoolgirls file between classrooms, thedoors to which almost invariably remain unlocked. On the 140thanniversary of the high schools 1869 founding under the auspices ofthe American Zulu Mission of the American Board of Commissionersfor Foreign Missions, these students greeted alumnae who callthemselves Old Girls and who include some of South Africas mostprominent women. Among these alumnae was the then Deputy

President Baleka Mbete, class of 1968, who highlighted her alma matersrole in the struggle that had culminated in the 1994 victory of herparty, the African National Congress. Thinking back to the 140 yearsof this seminarys existence is like walking through the heritage routeof the liberation struggle that brought us our freedom in 1994, Mbetedeclared, as it was out of Inanda that so many activist women hadcome.1

These linkages between mission schooling, nationalist struggle andpost-colonial leadership may seem familiar to scholars of anti-colonialism elsewhere. Like educated elites throughout much of Africain the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, mission-

educated Africans in South Africa found that the skills and expectationsthey had forged in the classroom clashed radically with the constraintsfacing them outside, and many articulated their grievances in nationalistmovements. Yet while their counterparts in west and east Africa wouldachieve national sovereignty in the 1950s and 1960s, educated eliteSouth Africans encountered the elaboration of apartheid. And as theapartheid state introduced the Bantu Education Act of 1953, it closed


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A WORLD OF THEIR OWN

or took over almost all mission schools. As elites elsewhere attemptedto deploy schooling for nation building, black South Africans foundtheir political organisations banned and their children mostlyconsigned to inferior state schools, where youth forged the visionsthat culminated in the Soweto schools boycotts of 1976 and the protestsand reforms that followed.

A profusion of sensitive studies have traced the rise, fall andresistance of educated African men in South Africa.2 But scholars haveinsufficiently explored the remarkable facts that South Africas pre-

apartheid African educated elite was significantly composed ofwomen and that by the end of apartheid, African womens rates ofhigh school attendance outpaced those of African men. As the firstall-female school for black southern Africans, Inanda provides aprivileged vantage point from which to examine South Africascontradictory feminisation of schooling.

This is both the first social history of Inanda Seminary 3 and thefirst book to explore the expansion of black womens education inSouth Africa across the long dure of colonialism, segregation, andapartheid. It asks why black womens educational opportunities

expanded in this perion of racial oppression, and to what ends.This book explains the development of African womens schoolingas an outcome of the politics of social reproduction in South Africa.Building on neo-Marxist feminist analyses, I define social reproductionexpansively as the gendered processes by which workers and childrensurvive and are reproduced.4 The politics of social reproduction inSouth Africa thus refers to the contested social relations surroundingthe sustenance of racialised, gendered people in a capitalist society. Iargue that African womens historical association with core processesof sustaining society opened up space for them to challenge the socialorder during apartheid. Women were able to advance educationally,

not despite racialised patriarchy, but by manipulating the contradictionswithin it producing new gendered contradictions that have shapedpost-apartheid society.

In the years before apartheid, missionaries, state officials andAfricans came to agree upon the centrality of educated African womento social reproduction, in a context of deepening male migrant labourand urbanisation. Within this consensus, however, these parties


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INTRODUCTION

Figures 1 and 2Inanda Township and Inanda Seminary, September 2008. (Photographs bythe author)


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harboured divergent ideas of the typeof society that women shouldreproduce. Mission schools which provided nearly all Africanschooling available before apartheid prepared girls to run homes,schools and clinics on a shoestring, in an arrangement that appealed tothe state. Yet as nationalist movements developed in the first half ofthe twentieth century, educated women encouraged their associationwith social reproduction finding in their work as teachers, nursesand social workers power to shape the future of the race. Whenapartheid officials came to power in 1948, they needed the skills of an

African middle class to govern. But they needed to undermine thisclass politically to rule. These tensions came to a head in the BantuEducation Act of 1953, which sought to resolve them through agendered strategy: officials encouraged African womens training asteachers and health workers, even as they attempted to limit Africanmale-led political agitation by nationalising most mission schools andgenerally limiting curricula to preparation for semi-skilled labour.From the interstices of racialised patriarchy, women used theirschooling to push at personal, professional and political boundaries revealing the limits of separate development.

* * *

Scholarly acknowledgements of southern Africas history of womensschooling are diffuse. In the Cape, site of the earliest evangelising,scholars have documented that more African girls than boys attendedmission schools from at least the mid-nineteenth century.Anthropologist Monica Wilson, the first observer of this trend,attributed it to the post-pubescent marriage ages of Xhosa girls andtheir ability to access paid employment in the colonial economythrough their schooling, and to boys less flexible work schedules in

pastoral societies.5 She suggested that gendered conversion patternsmay also have played a role, as black women tended to be more rapidand fervent converts than black men, prompting mothers espousal ofmission schooling for their daughters but fathers disavowal ofschooling for their sons. The liberal Wilson declared the Capesfeminisation of schooling to be a trend with profound implications:African Christian women assumed significant social influence as they


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INTRODUCTION

laboured to build a civilized society.6 But as radical sociologist JacklynCock has observed, this feminisation was hardly an indication of anincipient feminism. Young women were clustered in the lower gradesand channelled into a narrow range of professions: domestic service,teaching, housewifery and later nursing. Cock saw their schooling aseducation for ultra-exploitability, as it operated in the maincoercively, as an agency of socialization, tying women to subordinateroles in colonial society.7 As missionary schooling expanded acrosssouthern Africa with the mineral revolution of the late nineteenth

century, new migrant labour regimes extended these gendered patterns.While mission schooling catered overwhelmingly to male studentsacross the rest of colonial Africa, historian Claire Robertson notedthat an unusual Southern African complex of girls numericaldominance in all but the highest grades of school emerged out of aneconomic context where boys usually herd and then work in SouthAfricas extractive industries, neither of which requires formaleducation. Bridewealth, which is still important, is increased by girlseducation.8

In apartheid South Africa, a handful of scholars have pointed out

that African womens access to schooling expanded, even as they faceddeepening gendered and racialised constraints (see Table 1). ElaineUnterhalter, who has done more than anyone else to place this issueon the scholarly agenda, has emphasised the contradictions thataccompanied the feminisation of schooling in a profoundly anti-feminist historical context, demonstrating that young womens highrates of access to apartheid schooling did not give rise to gender equality,as they faced school environments shaped by racism, sexism and casualviolence.9 Yet scholars have insufficiently addressed the relationshipbetween gender, schooling and ideologies of separate development.They have dismissed the feminisation of schooling as an ironic effect

of Bantu Education, which unintentionally addressed genderinequalities by producing high participation rates by African girls.10

Moreover, they have not explained why, in such dismal contexts, youngwomen in factpursuedschooling at higher rates than young men.11 Intheir studies of nursing and teaching, however, historians Shula Marksand Deborah Gaitskell have suggested that the expansion of thefeminised professions was a political choice that apartheid officials


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made in their efforts at social engineering.12 As this study will show,this choice made new educational space for young women, withinwhich they could envision and sometimes enact new possibilities fortheir lives.

The reasons for this underdeveloped scholarship on the meanings ofthe feminisation of schooling are clear: as Bantu Education developed,critical research focused on overarching issues of race and class. So

few Africans had historically enjoyed schooling beyond a basic levelthat the gender composition of an African educated elite seemedirrelevant to early scholars of black education.13 After the Sowetouprising of 1976, a growing share of scholarship focused on the politicsof schooling. Overwhelmingly neo-Marxist, this work was wide-ranging in its theoretical scaffolding, innovative in its methods andbold in its claims.14 But when radical critiques incorporated womens

Table 1 The apartheid-era expansion of womens schooling

Year

Percentage and number of female African students

Lower Higher Lower Higher

primary primary secondary secondary

196048.9% 53% 51.4% 27%

(535 700) (191 300) (23 400) (700)

196548.6% 52.6% 51% 27%

(647 100) (244 600) (29 700) (1 000)

197048.6% 52.5% 54.5% 32%

(917 000) (383 100) (61 800) (2 900)

197548.7% 52.5% 55.3% 39.2%

(1 151 100) (532 000) (161 000) (10 700)

198048.9% 52.2% 55.7% 50.1%

(1 386 600) (640 200) (359 800) (64 100)

198548.8% 52.2% 55.4% 54.5%

(1 597 100) (807 200) (513 700) (145 200)

Source: Elaine Unterhalter, The Impact of Apartheid on WomensEducation in South Africa, Review of African PoliticalEconomy 48 (Autumn 1990): 6675, pp. 7071. Based oncensus figures.


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INTRODUCTION

experiences, they often did so with ancillary notes.15 Post-apartheidscholars have explored apartheid policies as racialised variations on amodern global theme of mass schooling, and they have examinedstudent resistance with nuance. But most continue to neglect thegendered relations structuring missionary and state schooling.16

This book foregrounds the multiple spaces of subordination anddomination that black female students could occupy simultaneously,at the intersections of their gender, race, class and generationalpositions.17 It builds upon three decades of neo-Marxist feminist

scholarship in South Africa, heralded by Belinda Bozzolis 1983 treatisein theJournal of Southern African Studies. Bozzoli argued that colonialencroachments and the late nineteenth-century mineral revolutionintersected with pre-colonial and pre-industrial patriarchal regimes toshape a patchwork quilt of patriarchies.18 Neo-Marxist scholars,most famously Harold Wolpe, had shown how South Africancapitalists exploited African male migrants on the cheap by outsourcingburdens of their care onto women.19But why, Bozzoli asked of Wolpe,was it women who initially sustained the male workforce on the land,while men left home to earn a wage?

Bozzoli argued that in fact the resilience of groups like the Zuluto full proletarianisation partly rested upon their capacity tosubordinate womens labor.20 She explained that African menstransformation from homestead heads fully dependent on theagricultural labour of women, who in turn depended on them forland and protection into migrant wage labourers partiallydependent on the labour of women whom they could not fullyprotect, working on land that they no longer fully controlled occurred through a series of domestic struggles. When men abandonedtheir rural families, or when women moved to the city, they did sobecause of struggles within their families and between these families

and agents of colonial capitalism. Resistance to colonialism andcapitalism may hinge upon the entrenchment or disappearance ofelements of patriarchy. But contestations of patriarchy may reinforceor subvert colonial or capitalist imperatives: The emerging irony ofthe position of women in the patchwork quilt of patriarchies is thatin certain crucial cases their weaknesses are turned into strengths andtheir strengths to weaknesses.21 Linzi Manicom, Sean Hanretta, Jeff


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Guy and Shula Marks have built upon this work, revealing genderrelations as constitutive of pre-colonial, colonial and apartheidgovernance.22 To engage Hanrettas evocative phrase, their work hasbegun to explore how womens power and womens marginality werestructurally linked.23

Bozzoli opened up a new conversation, in which transformationsin production and social reproduction emerged as mutuallyconstitutive. Here she provided the signal South African contributionto a global dialogue. As American feminist sociologists Barbara Laslettand Johanna Brenner said in their classic 1989 statement, Renewinglife is a form of work, a kind of production, as fundamental to theperpetuation of society as the production of things. From this vantagepoint, societal reproduction includes not only the organization ofproduction but the organization of social reproduction, and theperpetuation of gender as well as class relations. 24 Feministgeographers, sociologists and political economists have emphasised howeconomic transformations engender changes in regimes of care. Theyhave zeroed in on this neoliberal moment as a time of growing burdensfor women, as states outsource core functions to households.25 By

considering the politics of social reproduction that drove the expansionof young womens schooling in the most oppressive years of one ofthe worlds most oppressive societies, this book offers a locally rootedhistorical perspective on the global feminisation of education andservice professions.

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This study draws upon official, institutional and personal archivesfrom the United States and South Africa. The archives of the American

Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions at Harvard Universityoffer reams of missionary correspondence, reports and meeting minutesas well as correspondence by Inandas students, their families and SouthAfrican staff, with strongest holdings for the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries. I also explored the papers of Lavinia Scott, Inandasprincipal from 1937 through 1969, at Northwestern University inEvanston, Illinois. More critical to this project were South African


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INTRODUCTION

official, institutional and personal archives. In the Natal Archives inPietermaritzburg, I found legal documents, petitions, reports andofficial correspondence relating to Inanda and to the prominent kholwa(African Christian) families involved in its history before the 1910formation of the Union of South Africa. These enabled me to tracethe institutional milieus and familial connections of Africans at Inandain far greater depth than did the more missionary-centred AmericanBoard papers at Harvard. In the Native Education Papers at theUniversity of Cape Town, I explored official sources from the early

years of apartheid the trove of reports and discussions that made upthe proceedings of the Eiselen Commission, the committee that wouldcraft the Bantu Education Act. At the University of the Witwatersrandin Johannesburg, I examined the evidence and report of theCommission of Enquiry into Disturbances at Native EducationalInstitutions, a key document shaping the Eiselen Commissions work.Papers in the national archives in Pretoria and in the UnitedCongregational Church of Southern Africas collection in

Johannesburg provided further insights into the schools nationalposition during the apartheid years. The key archive for Inandas

history between its founding and the 1960s remains the CampbellCollections of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, where Iexplored a collection of Inandas papers and an incomparable range ofother materials on South African political life and public culture. Asimportantly, the Campbell Collections boast an incomparablelibrarian, Mwelela Cele, who took a professional and personal interestin my project from an early stage: professionally, he is a historian ofthe Bantu Mens Social Centre, an American Board institution foundedin the interwar years; personally, he is a descendant of multiple Inandagraduates and grew up, in the 1980s, with a strong sense of the schoolstraditions. He connected me with several Inanda affiliates.

The Campbell Collections materials on Inanda after the 1960s arelimited, however. For records from this period, I relied primarily onthe small archive on Inandas campus. There Dumi Zondi, a librarianwho had served as Inandas principal between 1974 and 1976,generously shared a range of archival materials from the 1930s throughthe 1980s, some of which were displayed in the archive and others ofwhich filled boxes in his office; these included minutes of Inanda


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Seminary Governing Council meetings, fund-raising appeals, staffmeeting minutes, news clippings and correspondence. As importantly,the time I spent at the Inanda campus archive enabled me to observeand participate in contemporary campus life, which features frequentinvocations of the schools past. Stories of the tenacity of foundingprincipal Mary Edwards in the face of patriarchal and colonialopposition to African girls education loomed large in the schoolsAt Home reunion, which takes place each year in October, and at its140th anniversary celebrations in March 2009, where Mbete and other

luminaries underscored the schools uniqueness during apartheid. Inthe school archive, through which student volunteers now guidecampus visitors, and in their classes and daily chapel services, studentslearn of Inandas distinguished history and they hear repeatedly thatas Inanda girls they bear a special responsibility to improve theirsociety. The current principal, a South African woman named JudyTate, speaks with pride of her grandmother, a teacher at Inanda; andthe school chaplain, the American Reverend Susan Valiquette of theUnited Church of Christ Global Ministries, lives on campus with herhusband, the Reverend Scott Couper, who took over the campus

archive in 2010 after earning his doctorate in history.At the October 2008 reunion and the March 2009 anniversary,hundreds of alumnae who had attended Inanda from the 1930sthrough recent years convened on campus. Many of these womenwere regular visitors to their alma mater. Some had become morepersonally involved since the school faced financial crises and academicdecline in the late 1990s, when alumnae came together to mobilisesupport from the state and industry to restore Inandas physicalpremises and to hire new staff members espousing a renewedcommitment to making Inanda an exceptional academic institutionfor African girls. My presence on campus enabled me to connect with

several of these highly active alumnae, but I also hoped to speak withformer students, staff and other affiliates outside of this core networkwho might convey a broader (and possibly more critical) sense of theInanda community. Beginning with affiliates I had met at the Octoberand March events and moving outward to reach a broader networkthrough referrals from these affiliates, current Inanda staff, colleaguesand friends, I arranged interviews with forty-one affiliates, whose


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INTRODUCTION

personal or familial connections at Inanda stretched from the schoolsfounding through the present.

Thirty of my interviewees were alumnae, the oldest of whomattended Inanda from 1934 to 1936. Fourteen of these alumnae hadattended Inanda prior to 1976, and sixteen had attended after 1976.Five of these alumnae returned to Inanda as teachers or principals.Additionally, I interviewed nine former staff members: four Americanmission appointees who worked at Inanda between 1946 and 1985,including the first white male principal (19701973); Dumi Zondi,

the first African male principal (19741976); the Governing Councilchair from 1965 to 1981; and three South African teachers, servingbetween 1954 and 1984. I also interviewed Mwelela Cele and AndileHawes about the role of Inanda Seminary in their families pasts; theinsights of the latter into the life of Talitha Hawes, a member ofInandas first class of students and an early teacher at the school,particularly inform my first chapter.26 These interviews took place inEnglish, in which all of my interviewees were fluent first- or second-language speakers, although some moved into isiZulu at moments.

In addition to spending between one and three hours speaking

with me, several interviewees shared photographs, correspondence,course materials and genealogies. Most of my older interviewees alsooffered me tea. Alumnae from the 1930s through the 1950s remarkedon Inanda graduates domestic prowess, while former staff referredto the racial politics of staff tea rooms at Inanda and other schoolsduring apartheid. Alumnae from the 1960s through the 1980s wereless likely to stress the domestic aspects of their education; severalproudly emphasised that Inanda alumnae tended to be weak in thedomestic arts. But all were exceedingly warm. While conducting herresearch on South African womens clubs in 1993 and 1994, DeborahMindry also reflected upon her interviewees teatime rituals,

emphasising the common gendered values that such exchangesembodied.27 Although she was a white South African woman based atan American university, she found that her black interviewees oftenassumed that she was American, as they imagined that white SouthAfrican women would never travel as she did and relate to them on abasis of equality. The context has changed since Mindrys research,but in my case, too, my unusual social position seemed to ease my


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interactions with my black and white South African and whiteAmerican interviewees. I was clearly both an outsider in South Africa a young, white American woman, but not a missionary and an insider,as I shared my knowledge and questions about the schools survivaland significance. With their pots of tea and recollections of Inandasrole in their lives, my interviewees welcomed me into the schoolstransnational extended community.

With alumnae, I conducted directed life history interviews, askingabout their experiences at Inanda and in their broader lives.28 Sixteenof these interviews were one-on-one, and the others took place in apair, one group of three, one group of four and one group of five.The group interviews took place at the request of participants, andthey were conducive towards my goal of cultivating conversationsrather than inquisitions, as the interviewees shared and contested theirmemories together. Staff interviews were one-on-one, and my questionstended to centre more on their work at Inanda than on their lifehistories. But they pushed me to see that staffs time at Inanda mayhave been as formative for them as for students, as the school offeredsuch a distinct community.

Across all Inanda affiliates interviews, core themes emerged. First,all emphasised the distinct intimacy of Inandas community withinthe broader landscape of South Africa. Students who attended after1953 underscored this point particularly. Staff and students frequentlyintroduced this point through stories of travel between school andhome, and the inequities and indignities of which it reminded them.Second, most emphasised the sense of order underlying thiscommunity students were made acutely self-conscious of their roleas social models and the need for respectability and, particularly,sexual restraint that such a role demanded. Students who attended

prior to 1953 and under the 19801986 principalship of ConstanceKoza the first black woman in the post and a proud alumna of theclass of 1941, whom I also interviewed emphasised Inandas strictnessparticularly, and reflected upon it in both positive and critical termsthrough discussion of routines, labour and sexual crises. Third, despitetheir teachers emphasis on discipline, restraint and routines, mostalumnae highlighted the liveliness of debate and discussion that took


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INTRODUCTION

place connecting their protective campus to a changing worldbeyond, and empowering them with a sense of self-efficacy to facethat world, and to change it. Students who attended in the 1960s and1970s emphasised this most searingly.

I have also tried to integrate my interviewees words into thisnarrative as fully as possible. Although these interviews contributedmost significantly to my reconstruction of the years that affiliateswere personally involved with the school, several interviewees addedto my knowledge of earlier periods, as their mothers, aunts and

grandmothers had attended Inanda. Researchers may access interviewtranscripts at Inanda and Campbell Collections, or on my website.

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This book combines a historical ethnography of Inandas formal andinformal (or hidden) educational culture with a broader analysis ofthe changing gendered politics of black education; it charts thedisjunctions within Inandas community, and between Inanda and theworld beyond its campus.29 To deconstruct the making of gendered

categories and the politics of social reproduction in apartheid SouthAfrica, the first three chapters treat the years before 1948. Chapters 1and 2 examine how Africans, missionaries and colonial authoritiescame to a working consensus on African womens centrality in socialreproduction in the nineteenth century, and how this consensusengendered the regional expansion of young womens schooling amidstthe transformations of industrialising southern Africa. Chapter 3 turnsto the roles of educated African women in segregationist South Africa,charting the politicisation of social reproduction in a context ofdeepening African nationalism.

Chapter 1, Social Reproduction in the Making of a Benevolent

Empire: 18351885, demonstrates how, in the global Protestantmission movement as in southern Africa, evangelisation hinged uponself-replicating domestic transformations in which women foreignand local played central roles. Through a study of the exertions ofInandas founding missionaries, the women and men of the Boston-based American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, thischapter shows that missionaries looked to young womens education


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to enact evangelical transformations because they believed that womenpossessed a deeper familial and social influence than men. This beliefwas rooted not only in missionaries experiences in the industrialisedsocieties whence they came, but also in womens apparent abilities toinhibit or encourage conversion in southern Africa and in otherevangelical fields. Upon Inandas 1869 founding as a southern Africanversion of the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in Massachusetts,African Christian families from across Natal sent their daughters toschool to enable their familial social mobility: educated daughters could

earn salaries as teachers, marry professional men and enhance theirfamilys security. So, too, did a small number of traditionalist familiesand a few chiefly royals, who sought to empower their children withliteracy to navigate a changing society.

Chapter 2, Domestic Revolutions and the Feminisation ofSchooling in Natal: 18851910, examines the period in which colonialencroachment, agricultural crisis and male labour migration wroughtdomestic turning points that impelled rising numbers of young womento seek schooling at Inanda and other mission schools. While sometraditionalist families and chiefs supported them, others opposed girls

schooling vehemently. Angry patriarchs presented a profoundchallenge to a colonial system predicated on an interlocking web ofpatriarchal authority. Thus officials deferred to fathers authority indeciding which young women could attend school, resulting inspectacular cases of kraal girls forced to leave school against theirwill. At the same time that the legal exigencies of patriarchal colonialgovernance circumscribed the educational options of girls whose fathersopposed their educations, however, the head of a nascent educationalbureaucracy argued that African girls education in Western domesticitywould be essential in creating different sorts of families with differentsorts of needs. In monogamous families, the Native Education Inspector

imagined, husbands and sons would be taught to want enough toimpel them to labour for wages but they would also be sufficientlysatisfied by their domestic comforts to avoid political unrest. Even asofficials clamped down on African boys curricula attempting torestrict it to the barest preparation for unskilled wage labour theyallowed missionaries more autonomy in the education of youngwomen, whose role in the social reproduction of new sorts of families


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INTRODUCTION

made their education appear to be a benefit to governance. As youngmen pursued work in Natal, the Cape and the booming goldfields ofthe Witwatersrand, young African women began to outnumber theirmale peers in mission school classrooms, except at the highest levels.They pursued a narrow range of professions domestic service forthose who did not progress very far in school, and teaching for thosewho went farther.

Chapter 3, New African Womens Work in Segregationist SouthAfrica: 19101948, demonstrates how educated African women drew

upon their schooling to establish gendered social authority within aracialised patriarchy, and it illuminates the stakes of this authority inthe development of the segregationist state. Between the Union ofSouth Africas 1910 formation and the 1940s, African women assertedtheir leadership in a growing range of social service professions. Asthe state sought to ensure the reproduction of a black labour force ona shoestring, it depended significantly on the labours of women at alleconomic levels. And as the degradation of rural African reservesmade total segregation an impossibility and African urbanisation aninexorable fact, the state relied particularly on the labours of educated

women working in social service professions: teaching, nursing andsocial work. While the state had long outsourced core responsibilitiesof African education and medical care to missionaries, missionariesand state officials relied increasingly in this period upon the professionalwork of African women. As black men grew more deeplydisenfranchised in the 1930s, they, too, looked to womens socialleadership to keep their communities resilient and resistant. Whitemissionaries and educated African men regarded African womens rolein social uplift with both appreciation and some trepidation, as Africanwomen asserted their autonomy from maternalistic female missionariesand paternalistic African men. But agents of the segregationist state

did not see African women as a serious political threat. Rather, asAfrican male students and young adults grew more politically assertiveduring the Second World War and in its aftermath, state officialscontinued to see African female students and teachers as stabilisingforces.

By the eve of apartheid, Inanda Seminary had become the largestand most prestigious all-female high school for African students in


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the country. Chapter 4, Education Policy and the Gendered Makingof Separate Development: 19481976, demonstrates why, as apartheidbureaucrats elaborated a system of mass African education thatexcluded most of the missionaries to whom the state had long delegatedresponsibilities for black social welfare, they would retain a space forInanda and its socially useful graduates. This chapter underscores thatBantu Education sought to cultivate complacent masses of semi-skilledblack workers male and female. But for Bantu Education to work indeed, for apartheid to work schools also needed to train a smaller

professional stratum of teachers and health professionals to sustainsegregated social institutions. Like missionaries before them, thearchitects of Bantu Education looked to African women to serve asnurses and teachers seeing women as intrinsically nurturing, andblack women as uniquely equipped to tend to black bodies and minds.Black women also made appealing helping professionals because theywere systematically paid less, and officials deemed them more politicallytractable particularly when isolated from the malevolent influenceof activist men in all-female institutions. In other words, educatedblack women seemed both less politically threatening than educated

black men and more socially necessary. By this gendered logic, thestate nationalised most teacher training colleges and then restrictedtheir male enrolment. By this same gendered logic, officials toleratedInandas continuation as an elite, all-female school, which grew moreprestigious and cosmopolitan as Bantu Education foreclosed Africanstudents options for a quality education elsewhere.

After the Soweto students uprising of 1976 rendered apartheidschooling a central site of political struggle, educated African womenseized the limited openings that a reformist apartheid state made in itsefforts to co-opt a black bourgeoisie. Chapter 5, Educated AfricanWomen in a Time of Political Revolution: 19761994, examines how

African women availed themselves of new opportunities to attendhistorically white universities and to work in an expanding range ofprofessions particularly medical and corporate work and used thesenew opportunities to push for transformations in their lives, and intheir country. But at the same time that the African educated elitefeminised, schooling became a site of political crisis and gender-linkedviolence became epidemic. This chapter explores the tensions and


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INTRODUCTION

possibilities that accompanied the expansion of young black womensschooling in the late-apartheid state, from Inandas vantage point.

The Epilogue examines Inandas position since South Africasdemocratic transition, situating its resilience within the context of thebroader appeal of historic mission schools and single-sex womensinstitutions. The appeal of single-sex boarding schooling to students,their families, state officials and benefactors reveals the contradictionsaccompanying the coeval feminisation of schooling and poverty inSouth Africa. In a time of expanding female access to education, but

also deepening unemployment and gender-linked violence, Inandasmodel of schooling seems to suggest solutions to ongoing crises ofsocial reproduction.

Documents

A World of Their Own: A History of South African Women’s Education