Thesis Type:

Abstract:

A profusion of sensitive studies have traced the rise, fall, and resistance of educated African men in South Africa. But scholars have insufficiently explored the remarkable facts that South Africa’s pre-apartheid African educated elite was significantly comprised of women—and that by the end of apartheid, African women’s rates of high school attendance outpaced those of men. As the first all-female high school for black southern Africans (founded by American Zulu Mission women outside of Durban in 1869), Inanda Seminary provides a privileged vantage point from which to examine this history.

Through the first complete social history of Inanda Seminary, this study examines how rising numbers of African women came to attend school, and the meanings of their schooling in the making and unmaking of a racialized state. The mission schools that provided nearly all African schooling available before apartheid prepared girls to run homes, schools, and clinics on a shoestring, in an arrangement that appealed to officials. Yet as nationalist movements developed in the first half of the twentieth century, women from Inanda and peer institutions found in their work as teachers and heath workers power to shape the future of “the race.” When apartheid officials came to power in 1948, they needed the skills of an African middle-class to govern. But they needed to undermine this class politically to rule. These tensions came to a head in the Bantu Education Act of 1953, which sought to resolve them through a gendered strategy: officials encouraged African women’s training as teachers and nurses, even as they attempted to limit African male-led political agitation by nationalizing most mission schools and limiting their curricula to preparation for semi-skilled labor. From the interstices of racialized patriarchy, the most talented African female students at Inanda and other high schools used their schooling to push at personal, professional, and political boundaries—belying the gendered assumptions of “separate development.”