A World of Their Own

A History of South African Women's Education

Meghan Healy-Clancy

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780813936093
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

The politics of black education has long been a key issue in southern African studies, but despite rich debates on the racial and class dimensions of schooling, historians have neglected their distinctive gendered dynamics. A World of Their Own is the first book to explore the meanings of black women's education in the making of modern South Africa. Its lens is a social history of the first high school for black South African women, Inanda Seminary, from its 1869 founding outside of Durban through the recent past.

Employing diverse archival and oral historical sources, Meghan Healy-Clancy reveals how educated black South African women developed a tradition of social leadership, by both working within and pushing at the boundaries of state power. She demonstrates that although colonial and apartheid governance marginalized women politically, it also valorized the social contributions of small cohorts of educated black women. This made space for growing numbers of black women to pursue careers as teachers and health workers over the course of the twentieth century. After the student uprisings of 1976, as young black men increasingly rejected formal education for exile and street politics, young black women increasingly stayed in school and cultivated an alternative form of student politics. Inanda Seminary students' experiences vividly show how their academic achievements challenged the narrow conceptions of black women's social roles harbored by both officials and black male activists. By the transition to democracy in the early 1990s, black women outnumbered black men at every level of education—introducing both new opportunities for women and gendered conflicts that remain acute today.

CHAPTER ONE

Social Reproduction in the Making of a ‘Benevolent Empire’

1835–1885

‘The whole system of schools in this mission needs reforming,’ Henry Bridgman wrote to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions on behalf of his American Zulu Mission in 1864. ‘We absolutely need now, a girls Seminary, modelled after Mt. Holyoke Sem. as much as the case will admit. We absolutely need a boys Seminary for training up teachers & evangelists.’¹

Bridgman’s call for a school in the African countryside modelled on the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in Massachusetts may seem strange. But the American Zulu Mission and Mount Holyoke were coeval parts of American Protestants’ ‘benevolent empire’.² In 1835, as the first Americans arrived in Natal, Mary Lyon was raising funds to train women as teachers and missionary wives at Holyoke, which opened two years later. Four alumnae were American Zulu Mission appointees in the 1840s; others, including Bridgman’s wife, Laura, soon followed.³ By the late 1880s, over a fifth of all American Board women came from Mount Holyoke.⁴ Holyoke women in the United States and abroad ran schools modelled on their alma mater, and they served not only white Americans like the bulk of Board appointees, but also Christian girls in Persia (1843), Cherokee girls in Arkansas (1851) and Hindu girls in India (1853).⁵ In 1874, two Holyoke alumnae would organise the Huguenot Seminary in Cape Colony as a ‘daughter school’ for white girls, upon the invitation of a Dutch Reformed Church pastor there.⁶ Holyoke pedagogies translated unevenly across these institutions, where women’s ambitions often ran up against cultural incompetence, as well as political and financial constraints.⁷ But like Holyoke, which was so regimented that contemporaries called it a ‘Protestant nunnery’, these schools encouraged self-discipline and self-sacrifice within practically self-sufficient institutions.⁸ American missionaries hoped that each young woman trained at these institutions would work to forge a new Christian society ‘by the power of her uniform and consistent example’, like a Mount Holyoke graduate.⁹

Holyoke values broadly complemented the ideals of the man to whom Bridgman appealed, Board Secretary Rufus Anderson. Anderson’s ‘three-self’ theory of evangelism espoused the eventual formation of self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating local churches. But until missionaries were sure that converts would not ‘backslide’ in their faith, the three-self theory demanded a programme of education for ‘native agency’ under the paternalistic authority of American ministers.¹⁰ American ministers retained authority over stations that relied upon the labours of many local male and female ‘native assistants’, of smaller numbers of local male preachers – and of missionary wives. Marriage was a prerequisite for the first American Zulu Mission appointees, and Anderson often suggested that unmarried aspirant missionaries marry Holyoke alumnae.¹¹ Ministers throughout the Board’s missions brought their wives to work with women and children, while ministers trained local men as evangelists.¹²

Inanda Seminary was thus founded to replicate missionary divisions of labour within kholwa (African Christian) families, drawing upon women’s socially reproductive labours to effect a self-sustaining chain of Christian transformations. While men would train as preachers and teachers at the American Board’s all-male Amanzimtoti Seminary, women would prepare to be wives and teachers at a school modelled on that which Henry Bridgman’s own wife had attended. A gendered pair of seminaries seemed ‘indispensable’ to salvaging the Board’s fledgling mission in Natal, as they would ultimately make ‘native agency’ possible.¹³ Indeed, during Inanda’s first two decades, graduates of Inanda, Amanzimtoti and similar seminaries around the globe sustained the broader American missionary enterprise. In the process, new global and local templates for women’s authority emerged. But even as women assumed roles other than those of wife and mother in an expanding benevolent empire, the associations between women and social reproduction grew deeply entrenched. Women’s professional labours as teachers and ‘native assistants’ were structured by a set of familial idioms, through which women were empowered as well as confined.

Engendering education for ‘native agency’

The Board had been chartered in 1812 as the first American mission society; early supporters were mostly Congregationalist, and they imagined that citizens of a Christian republic must prepare the world for divine judgement.¹⁴ It remained the largest American mission society through its first half-century, and it ‘was also, in its combination of breadth with provincialism, an epitome of the enterprise at large’.¹⁵ In India (from 1813), Ceylon (1817), the Hawaiian Islands (1819), the Ottoman Empire (1820) and Persia (1820), and with Native Americans (1817), the Board had laboured to reproduce idealised New England socio-religious mores.¹⁶ Acculturating youth to these mores through schooling had been an early imperative. In 1817, the Board began a school in Connecticut, for ‘the education in our own country of Heathen Youths, in such manner, as, with subsequent professional instruction will qualify them to become useful Missionaries, Physicians, Surgeons, School Masters, or Interpreters; and to communicate to the Heathen Nations such knowledge in agriculture and the arts, as may prove the means of promoting Christianity and civilization’.¹⁷ But this model of education within the United States came to its end in 1827, after two Native American graduates apparently went too far in their acculturation by marrying white women.¹⁸

The Board contended that ‘[t]he best education of youth born heathen, having reference to their success as teachers of their brethren, must be given through the instrumentality of missionary institutions in their respective countries’, although ‘under the paternal care’ of American missionaries there.¹⁹ A model of in-country education was developing in Ceylon, where Americans ran ‘Common schools’ with Tamil instruction for boys and girls and a smaller number of ‘English schools’ for advanced male pupils.²⁰ In 1823, a men’s seminary opened for ‘English school graduates’, and later that year the Oodooville Female Boarding School opened to train ‘more suitable and acceptable companions’ for this elite.²¹ Girls left home between the ages of six and eight, remaining in school until they were married to seminary men; some took on new names, as missionaries named them after family members or supporters. Under an American minister, assisted by American and Tamil women, girls learned to read and write Tamil and English and studied the Bible, needlework, arts and sciences.²²

By the time the Board launched its African missions, then, links between schooling, control over social reproduction and the cultivation of ‘native agency’ were established. The Board selected Liberia and the port of Natal as its initial entry points into the continent because its leaders believed that people there could be rapidly educated to evangelise the interior. ‘Having made a successful beginning among the tribes of the coast, around the colonies, we shall, as our laborers increase, and the roads are opened, advance into the interior with our permanent establishments,’ the Board advised John Leighton Wilson, the Liberian mission leader, in 1833. ‘Wherever we go, seminaries must be founded for educating schoolmasters, catechists, and naive preachers. The language must be learned and reduced to writing. Printing-presses must be erected, and the natives taught to work them. Constellations of Christian schools must be called into being, and shine around these.’²³ John Philip, of the London Missionary Society (LMS) mission in the Cape, assured the Board that the ‘Zoolahs’ – subjects of the Zulu king Dingane and the breakaway leader Mzilikazi – lived in complex societies that were as yet unserved by evangelists; with a little education, they, too, would make ideal evangelists.²⁴ With this espousal, ‘light gleamed unexpectedly from the southeastern shore, and laid open to our view a promising and accessible field’.²⁵

These grand expectations of continental conversion almost immediately gave way to grander disappointments. Early in 1834, the Maryland Colonization Society sent an exploratory mission to Monrovia and Cape Palmas; Wilson returned to Cape Palmas with his wife and an unmarried African American female teacher at the year’s end to launch the mission. Within the next several years, three other white American ministers and their wives joined them, as well as an African American printer and his wife and a single black male minister. Of this group of twelve, four had died by 1843. This unhealthy port was also politically contentious, as missionaries were often at odds with Liberian colonists. The Board opened a new mission on the Gabon River, in a territory that had not yet been claimed by any other missionaries; but soon thereafter, the French military claimed the area. By the late 1850s, there were only twelve members of the mission church, and movement into the interior remained a distant dream.²⁶ Dramatic challenges also met the American Zulu Mission. In December 1834, as the other Americans settled at Cape Palmas, six ministers and their wives departed for Cape Town. From there three couples were to travel inland to establish a mission amongst Mzilikazi’s subjects, while the other three pairs were to sail to Port Natal, whence they would convert Dingane’s subjects up to Delagoa Bay. Following Philip’s suggestion, the Americans came looking for nations to transform into self-governing bodies of Christians that would in turn effect a chain of conversions.²⁷ They came into a region marked by incomplete Zulu hegemony and incipient white settlement, and in which the mass of their potential converts did not define themselves in ethnic terms, but rather by their political affiliations.²⁸ They arrived amidst the immigration of Afrikaner ‘trekkers’ from the Cape, culminating in the trekkers’ 1839 declaration of Natal as an Afrikaner republic, Dingane’s 1840 murder and his brother Mpande’s authority over a smaller Zulu kingdom.

The first agents of the mission ‘to the Zoolahs’ were all quite green. They were also all white, unlike their counterparts in western Africa, where some black American involvement had emerged through the colonisationist movement.²⁹ The inland contingent comprised Southern Presbyterians, and the coastal group New England Congregationalists. Thirty-three-year-old Daniel Lindley, who would found the mission at Inanda, was the eldest, and the only agent with any ministerial experience; he had preached in North Carolina. He was accepted by the Board in late 1833, met Lucy Allen in April 1834 and proposed within three weeks; they married in November and sailed for Cape Town two weeks later. Before meeting her husband, Lucy Lindley had worked as a governess on a Virginia plantation, where she reportedly evangelised to slaves and dreamed of mission work. Her friend Jane Smithey married another of the six missionaries, Dr Alexander Wilson, a North Carolina physician who had trained with Daniel Lindley at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia; Jane Wilson died in Natal in 1836. The Lindleys and the Wilsons travelled inland with Union graduate Henry Venable of Kentucky and his wife. Aldin Grout was in his final year at Andover Theological Seminary upon his appointment. After his wife died in the field in 1836, he returned to his Massachusetts home, then in late 1838 came back to Natal with a new wife, recent Holyoke graduate Charlotte Bailey Grout.³⁰ Andover alumnus George Champion of Connecticut joined with his wife, as did Dr Newton Adams of New York, who had no theological training. The wives were all ‘Assistant Missionaries’.³¹ The upheaval they encountered pushed the Venables, the Champions and Wilson out of the mission. The Lindleys relocated to the trekkers’ capital of Pietermaritzburg to minister to them in 1840, and Mpande pushed the Grouts out of his domain in 1842.³² When the British annexed Natal in 1843, only Adams’ station near the Umlazi River seemed remotely promising. The Board considered abandoning the mission upon the fear that the British would constrain their efforts to cultivate autonomous Christian communities.

But after another intervention by Philip of the LMS, the Board decided to stay. While the decade before Philip had encouraged the Americans to build a ‘civilized community’ from the people of sovereign, ‘powerful chiefs’, in 1843 he encouraged them to make the best of the stability that British rule might provide.³³ The Cape governor appointed Grout and Adams official missionaries to Natal Africans, while he appointed Lindley to Natal’s Afrikaners.³⁴ In 1846, Lindley and Adams served on the Locations Commission with ‘Diplomatic Agent to the Native Tribes’ Theophilus Shepstone, delimiting land for African occupation.³⁵ The next year, the Lindleys assumed residence on the Inanda location, land then occupied predominantly by the amaQadi. The Qadi, a chiefdom within the Ngcobo paramountcy of the Thukela Valley, had been one of the first groups that Shaka kaSenzangakhona had incorporated into the Zulu state in the late 1810s. Then in 1837, Shaka’s successor, Dingane, murdered Qadi Chief Dube, pushing his subjects south to Port Natal; Dube’s son and successor, Dabeka, died the next year in an expedition against the Zulus. When the Lindleys arrived at Inanda, the Qadi were living under Dabeka’s son Mqhawe, who regarded them with suspicion in light of these struggles with usurping authority.³⁶ Daniel Lindley, who had been unable to examine the Inanda location until its boundaries had been set on account of floods, complained that ‘a more broken, worthless region could hardly be found’, claiming to have ‘wasted a small vocabulary in grumbling at Government, for allowing the natives to have a settlement in such a wretched region’.³⁷ But he stayed on, and the colony soon granted the Americans an 11 500-acre ‘mission reserve’ – land to be administered by resident missionaries.³⁸ Such would become the American Zulu Mission’s pattern in colonial Natal – rueing colonial policies but seeing colonial order as conducive to their work.³⁹

The mission had hoped to convert Dingane’s and Mzilikazi’s followers in one generation, leading to their rapid conversion of the rest of the ‘Zoolah race’ as the missionaries construed it, thence to the glorious conversion of the interior.⁴⁰ But the Americans were unable to accomplish much amidst the political chaos of the 1830s and 1840s. Where stations were established, they were unable to sustain interest beyond initial curiosity in most African communities, as conversion and its cultural trappings demanded ontological transformations few were willing to make. Polygynous homesteads comprised the fundamental social, spiritual and economic bases of African societies in the region. Missionaries demanded that their converts transform, or break with, kin and ancestors that sustained these homesteads to enter into new and uncertain communities, predicated on a new and uncertain god. Christianity thus appeared inviting only to those with few other options.

Fortunately for the Lindleys, one of these desperate people around Inanda was a Qadi royal widow. Early in 1849, Chief Dube’s widow Mayembe took refuge at the Lindleys’ station to escape an ukungena marriage – marriage to her late husband’s brother, a custom that would cause much hand-wringing amongst missionaries in years to come, and enable many more conversions. Baptised Dalida Dube, the royal widow engendered such hope in the Lindleys that they formed a church around her. She was their second convert, after Shaka’s former soldier John Mavuma; the third was Dube’s nineteen-year-old son, Ukakonina, baptised James. Uncle of Chief Mqhawe, James Dube would grow close to Daniel Lindley, who charged him with teaching in Inanda’s school and ordained him in 1871.⁴¹ Upon the Lindleys’ 1873 retirement, James Dube would replace Daniel Lindley as Inanda’s pastor. Dube’s wife, Elizabeth Nomanzi Dube, did ‘more than any other person’ in the community to educate youth, with help from her nine children.⁴²

This model of ‘native agency’ remained exceptional, however. James Dube was only the third African to be ordained in the mission. After Grout’s expulsion in 1842, Americans would not return to work in the Zulu kingdom until British control extended north following the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. By 1880 there were fewer than 10 000 amakholwa in Natal, less than 10 per cent of the colony’s African population; in Zululand, amakholwa numbered in the hundreds.⁴³ The Americans plainly had not been able to convert a nation in one generation. And half a century into their mission, they were not alone in their exertions. They were instead sharing one of the densest evangelical fields in the world with a range of British and European Protestants and Catholics – a far cry from the open landscape that Philip had conjured.⁴⁴ By this time, others had also come to Natal: Indian indentured workers first arrived to work on sugar plantations in 1860, followed by free Indian immigrants. Yet the Americans did not evangelise or educate Indians, seeing these tasks as the domain of British missionaries.⁴⁵

In the mid-nineteenth century, then, the Americans were struggling in a colony character...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Note on Terminology and Orthography
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One Social Reproduction in the Making of a ‘Benevolent Empire’: 1835–1885
• Chapter Two Domestic Revolutions and the Feminisation of Schooling in Natal: 1885–1910
• Chapter Three New African Women’s Work in Segregationist South Africa: 1910–1948
• Chapter Four Education Policy and the Gendered Making of Separate Development: 1948–1976
• Chapter Five Educated African Women in a Time of Political Revolution: 1976–1994
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index