https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8638-7853
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ABSTRACT
In this paper I trace knowledge flows between South Africa and the United States in the early twentieth century. I analyse these flows as parts within a broader white supremacist political project and technology of power. Focusing on the early Union period from the 1910s to the 1930s, I explore links, networks and exchanges within and across imperial and colonial spaces that spanned the Atlantic. These include institutional, financial, intellectual and personal relationships and networks between philanthropic institutions, race relations ‘experts’ and social scientists. In particular, I focus on the South African Institute of Race Relations’ role in importing education models from the American South and shaping narratives around ‘native education’ in South Africa. In this case, positivist science functioned to instil and root a racial order. I argue that attending to the circulation and entanglement of ideas between these global spheres offers new insight into the genealogy of anthropological and social scientific knowledge during the historical conjuncture of the Union period.
Note on the contributor
Anjuli Webster is a Woodruff Fellow in the African history PhD programme at Emory University. She holds an MA in African history from the University of Dar es Salaam and a MA in social anthropology from the University of the Witwatersrand. Her current research engages issues related to empire, law and sovereignty in southeastern Africa in the nineteenth century.
Notes
1 The name agreed on during the meeting, ‘South African Committee on Race Relations’, was later changed to ‘The South African Institute of Race Relations’ to avoid any association with the South African Native Races Committee and other bodies in ‘cognate work’. University of the Witwatersrand, Historical Papers Research Archive (HPRA), SAIRR Collection, AD 843 B97.3, ‘Minutes of a Meeting of a Committee Appointed to Deal with the Grant by the Phelps–Stokes Fund for Inter-Racial Work in South Africa’, 9 May 1929.
2 HPRA, SAIRR Collection, AD 843 B97.3, ‘Preliminary Announcement’, by the South African Institute for Race Relations, May 1929; Letter written by J.D. Rheinallt Jones, January 1929.
3 HPRA, SAIRR Collection, AD 843 B97.3. Letter to J.D. Rheinallt Jones from Thomas Jesse Jones, Education Director of the Phelps–Stokes Fund, 19 October 1928.
4 Y. Gershoni, Africans on African-Americans: The Creation and Uses of an African-American Myth (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 168.
5 HPRA, SAIRR Collection, AD 843 B1.2, ‘The Race Relations Movement’, Rheinallt-Jones, no date.
6 R. Glotzer, 'A Long Shadow: Frederick P. Keppel, the Carnegie Corporation and the Dominions and Colonies Fund Area Experts 1923–1943', Journal of the History of Education Society, 38, 5 (2009), 647.
7 I. Hacking, 'How Should We Do the History of Statistics?’, in G.Burchell, et al. eds, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality: With Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 181–195.
8 K. Gillespie, 'Containing the "Wandering Native": Racial Jurisdiction and the Liberal Politics of Prison Reform in 1940s South Africa', Journal of Southern African Studies 37, 3 (2011), , 499.
9 L. Thompson, The Political Mythology of Apartheid (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); C. Saunders, The Making of the South African Past: Major Historians on Race and Class (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1988). For further discussion of this shift in South African historiography, see P. Rich, 'Race, Science, and the Legitimization of White Supremacy in South Africa, 1902–1940', The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 23, 4 (1990), 665–686.
10 Accounts which have done so include R.T. Vinson, The Americans Are Coming: Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2012); R.T. Vinson, '"Sea Kaffirs": "American Negroes" and the Gospel of Garveyism in Early Twentieth-Century Cape Town', Journal of African History, 47, 2 (2006), 281–303; Gershoni, Africans on African-Americans; Glotzer, 'A Long Shadow'.
11 Willoughby-Herard, Waste of a White Skin. For a discussion of the development of South Africanism following the South African War, see S. Dubow, 'Colonial Nationalism, the Milner Kindergarten and the Rise of "South Africanism", 1902–10', History Workshop Journal, 43, 1 (1997), 53–86. For a discussion of the evolution of dominion South African identity in the 1910s and 1920s, see J. Lambert, 'South African British? Or Dominion South Africans? The Evolution of an Identity in the 1910s and 1920s', South African Historical Journal, 43, 1 (2000), 197–222.
12 Willoughby-Herard specifically discusses the anti-blackness of race relations, arguing that ‘Liberal consciousness almost universally defined race relations as racial accomodation and conciliation by black people to criminalization, dangerous working conditions, crowded and non-existing housing, inferior schools and hospitals, and white-only representation in the halls of the legislature and the judiciary’; Willoughby Herard, Waste of a White Skin, 140–141.
13 C. Allsobrook and C. Boisen, 'Two Types of Trusteeship in South Africa: From Subjugation to Separate Development', Politikon, 44, 2 (2017): 265–285.
14 J. Pierre, 'Anthropology and the Race of/for Africa', in P.T. Zeleza, ed., The Study of Africa, Volume I - Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Encounters (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2006), 47.
15 For example, R. Vigne, Liberals Against Apartheid: A History of the Liberal Party of South Africa, 1953–68 (London: Macmillan Press, 1997); M. Shain, Opposing Voices: Liberalism and Opposition in South Africa Today (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2006); M. Lipton, Liberals, Marxists, and Nationalists Competing Interpretations of South African History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2007); D. Everatt, The Origins of Non-Racialism: White Opposition to Apartheid in the 1950s (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2009).
16 See E. Maloka, Friends of the Natives: The Inconvenient Past of South African Liberalism (Durban: 3MS Publishing, 2014); J. Soske, 'The Impossible Concept: Settler Liberalism, Pan-Africanism, and the Language of Non-Racialism', African Historical Review, 47, 2 (2015), 1–36; N. Dladla, 'Contested Memory – Retrieving the Africanist (Liberatory) Conception of Non-Racialism', Theoria, 64, 153 (2017), 101–127.
17 Dladla, 'Contested Memory’, 106.
18 C.T. Loram, 'The Phelps–Stokes Education Commission in South Africa', International Review of Missions, 10, 4 (1921), 496–508.
19 J.W. Horton, 'South Africa’s Joint Councils: Black–White Co-Operation between the Two World Wars’, South African Historical Journal, 4, 1 (1972), 29–44.
20 Loram, 'Phelps–Stokes Education Commission', 496.
21 C.G. Woodson, 'Thomas Jesse Jones', The Journal of Negro History, 35, 1 (1950), 107–109; S.M. Jacobs, 'James Emman Kwegyir Aggrey: An African Intellectual in the United States', The Journal of Negro History, 81, 1/4 (1996): 47–61.
22 B. Hirson, 'Tuskegee, The Joint Councils and the All African Convention’, Institute of Commonwealth Studies Collected Seminar Papers (London, 1981), 67.
23 Gershoni, Africans on African-Americans, 169.
24 Vinson, 'Sea Kaffirs’.
25 For a more detailed discussion of Thaele, see Gershoni, Africans on African-Americans, 169.
26 Ibid.
27 National Archives of South Africa (NASA), National Archives Repository, UOD 2 PS40/1/D, ‘Report for the Carnegie Corporation of New York’, South African Institute of Race Relations, 1934.
28 R.F. Alfred Hoernlé, South African Native Policy and the Liberal Spirit (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1945).
29 Ibid. See Soske, ‘Impossible Concept’, 6, for a discussion of the reception of Hoernle’s work in South Africa and more broadly.
30 Paul B. Rich. 1984. ‘White Power and the Liberal Conscience, Racial Segregation and South African Liberalism 1921–60.' Manchester: Manchester University Press.
31 HPRA, SAIRR Collection, AD 843 B1.2, ‘The Race Relations Movement’, Rheinallt-Jones, no date.
32 Maloka, Friends of the Natives; P. Rich, 'The South African Institute of Race Relations and the Debate on "Race Relations", 1929–1958’, African Studies, 40, 1 (1981), 13–22.
33 Rich, White Power and the Liberal Conscience.
34 Willoughby-Herard, Waste of a White Skin.
35 Rich, 'Race, Science, and the Legitimization of White Supremacy’, 666.
36 Willoughby-Herard, Waste of a White Skin, 2–3.
37 Glotzer, 'A Long Shadow', 623.
38 J.D. Reilly, Teaching the 'Native': Behind the Architecture of an Unequal Education System (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2016), 135–136.
39 Ibid., 127.
40 Ibid., 130.
41 For a discussion of the appropriation of Tuskegee’s industrial education model to the German colony of Togo in West Africa, see A. Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
42 Glotzer defines ‘key men’ as ‘highly qualified individuals able to mobilise their respective educational communities and public and governmental opinion in favour of educational innovation and reform … . They were conduits into government, universities, served as gate keepers for Carnegie grant and travel programmes, trained students and conducted research’. See Glotzer, 'A Long Shadow', , 621.
43 Glotzer, 'A Long Shadow', 622.
44 R.D. Heyman, 'C.T. Loram: A South African Liberal in Race Relations', The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 5, 1 (1972), 41–50.
45 Charles Templeman Loram. 1917. ‘The Education of the South African native'. London: Longmans, Green, and Co.
46 Gershoni, Africans on African-Americans, 159.
47 Loram, Education of the South African Native, 12.
48 Gershoni, Africans on African-Americans, 158–159.
49 Heyman writes that ‘By 1930 Loram felt himself being libelled and misused by the Nationalist government. He opposed its proposals regarding the African, although never going so far as to oppose racial separation publicly or privately, and he represented foreign interests which some thought were interfering in the Union’s domestic affairs’. Heyman, 'C.T. Loram: A South African Liberal', 45.
50 HPRA, SAIRR Collection, AD 843 B1.2, ‘The Race Relations Movement’, Rheinallt-Jones, no date. See also Gershoni, Africans on African-Americans, 173.
51 Willoughby-Herard uses the term ‘global whiteness’ to ‘denaturalize the existence, spatiality, and temporality of the white settler colonial nation, and to insist, as black radical movements do, that addressing racial politics as if it can be confined to national borders is a point of departure at best … . Thus global whiteness and the mechanisms and processes by which it is sustained and mobilized can be better understood as the geographic contiguity that results from shared and enduring commitments to white nationalism as well as attempts to deny those commitments’. Willoughby-Herard, Waste of a White Skin, 3.
52 John David Shingler. 1973. ‘Education and Political Order in South Africa, 1902–1961. Yale University PhD Thesis.
53 Ibid., 186.
54 Rich, 'Race, Science, and the Legitimization of White Supremacy', 683.
55 Pierre, 'Anthropology and the Race of/for Africa'.
56 Saul Dubow has examined the rise of ‘South Africanism’ following the South African war, arguing that the development of colonial nationalism was an integral part of the ‘rapprochement’ and closer union between the settler populations and securing white supremacy in South Africa in the first decade of the twentieth century. Dubow, 'Colonial Nationalism'; S. Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility, and White South Africa 1820–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
57 Dubow, Commonwealth of Knowledge, 178.
58 Maloka, Friends of the Natives.
59 The ‘kindergarten’ was constituted by a small group of Oxford graduates, working in Alfred Milner’s administration, who conceived and defined policy on the future of the Union of South Africa. For a closer discussion of education policy, see Reilly, Teaching the 'Native'.
60 Dubow, Commonwealth of Knowledge.
61 C.J. Allsobrook, 'A Genealogy of South African Positivism', in Peter Vale, Lawrence Hamilton, and Estelle Prinsloo, eds, Intellectual Traditions in South Africa: Ideas, Individuals and Institutions (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2014), 96–98.
62 Dubow, Commonwealth of Knowledge.
63 HPRA, SAIRR Collection, AD 843 B 97.4, ‘International Aspects of Race Relations’ – Address by J.D. Rheinallt-Jones, Johannesburg Rotary Club, 17 December 1946.
64 B.K. Murray, Wits, The Early Years – A History of the University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg and Its Precursors, 1896–1939 (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1982), 125.
65 The University of the Witwatersrand had several predecessors. Byrne writes that the university ‘grew out of the Transvaal Technical Institute which opened in Plein Square Johannesburg (The site of the present Technikon in 1903) […]. When the Institute opened, the Kimberley School of Mines moved up to Johannesburg and the two colleges amalgamated. By May, 1904 the Institute had over 200 students, the majority of them from Kimberley. The Institute changed its name a couple of times, first to Transvaal University College, then to the S.A. [South African] School of Mines and Technology and finally to University College, Johannesburg before becoming the University of the Witwatersrand in 1922’. E. Byrne, The First Liberal: Rheinallt Jones (Johannesburg: Angel Press, 1990), 17.
66 A. Bank, Pioneers of the Field: South Africa’s Women Anthropologists (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2016), 34.
67 David Hammond-Tooke suggests that the journal ‘was renamed African Studies in 1942 to reflect its widening scope, but not in response to objections to the terms “Bantu”, “Hottentots” and “Bushmen”’. W. D. Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters: South Africa’s Anthropologists 1920–1990 (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 1997), 20.
68 Bank, Pioneers of the Field, 35.
69 Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters, 34–35.
70 Ibid., 35.
71 Ibid., 34.
72 NASA, National Archives Repository, UOD 2 PS40/1/D, ‘Report for the Carnegie Corporation of New York’, South African Institute of Race Relations, 1934.
73 NASA, National Archives Repository, UOD 793 E23/25, ‘Minutes of the Tenth Meeting of the Committee Held at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, on Friday, February 24th, 1939 at 9.30 a.m.’, Inter-University Committee for African Studies, 24 February 1939.
74 Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters, 35–37.
75 Bank, Pioneers of the Field, 36.
76 Hoernle cited in Bank, Pioneers of the Field, 27.
77 Bank, Pioneers of the Field, 46.
78 A.W. Hoernlé, 'The Indigenous System of Social Relations (1934), with an Introduction by I. Niehaus’, Anthropology Southern Africa, 38, 1–2 (2015), 76.
79 Bank, Pioneers of the Field.
80 A special section of the conference chaired by Rheinalt-Jones was devoted to the ‘study of problems of African education’. See ‘New Education Fellowship Conference, Johannesburg (1934), African Section’, Africa, 8, 1 (1935), 110–111. Hoernlé, 'Indigenous System of Social Relations', 78.
81 Hoernlé, 'Indigenous System of Social Relations’, 78, emphasis added.
82 ‘New Education Fellowship Conference, Johannesburg (1934), African Section’, 110–111.
83 Hoernlé, 'Indigenous System of Social Relations', 85.
84 Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters, 38.
85 Willoughby-Herard, Waste of a White Skin, 4.
86 Rich, 'South African Institute of Race Relations'.