‘To Control Their Destiny’: The Politics of Home and the Feminisation of Schooling in Colonial Natal, 1885–1910

Abstract

This article examines the contradictions that African girls' schooling presented for colonial governance in Natal, through the case study of Inanda Seminary, the region's first and largest all-female school for Africans. While patriarchal colonial law circumscribed the educational options of girls whose fathers opposed their schooling, the head of Natal's nascent educational bureaucracy argued that African girls' education in Western domesticity would be essential in creating different sorts of families with different sorts of needs. In monogamous families, Native Schools Inspector Robert Plant argued, husbands and sons would be taught to ‘want’ enough to impel them to labour for wages – but they would also be sufficiently satisfied by their domestic comforts to avoid political unrest. Thus, even as colonial educational officials clamped down on African boys' curricula – attempting to restrict their schooling to the barest preparation for unskilled wage labour – they allowed missionaries autonomy to educate young women whose fathers did not challenge their school attendance. This was because young women's role in the social reproduction of new sorts of families made their education ultimately appear to be a benefit to colonial governance. As young men pursued wage labour, young women began to comprise the majority of African students, laying the groundwork for the feminisation of schooling in modern southern Africa.

Notes

¹ University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, Killie Campbell Africana Library (KCAL), Inanda Seminary Papers (ISP), File 2a, Robert Plant, ‘Annual Report of the Inspector of Native Schools for 1893–94’.

^* This article comprises a modified version of a chapter from my Harvard University dissertation, ‘“A World of Their Own”: African Women's Schooling and the Politics of Social Reproduction in South Africa, 1869 to Recent Times’. This project was made possible through the generous support of Harvard and the United States Department of Education. Special thanks to Emmanuel Akyeampong, Mwelela Cele, Jeff Guy, Jason Hickel, Eva Jackson, Percy Ngonyama, and participants in the North East Workshop on Southern Africa for their feedback on early drafts.

² On Inanda Seminary's early history, see A.A. Wood, Shine Where You Are: A Centenary History of Inanda Seminary, 1869–1969 (Alice, Lovedale, 1972); H. Hughes, ‘“A Lighthouse for African Womanhood”: Inanda Seminary, 1869–1945’, in C. Walker (ed.), Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945 (Cape Town, David Philip, 1990), pp. 197–220; and M.E. Healy, ‘“Like a Family”: Global Models, Familial Bonds, and the Making of an American School for Zulu Girls’, Safundi, 11, 3 (July 2010), pp. 279–300.

³ See M. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 62–108.

⁴ See T. Waetjen, Workers and Warriors: Masculinity and the Struggle for Nation in South Africa (Urbana, IL, University of Illinois Press, 2004), pp. 33–36; and B. Carton, Blood from Your Children: The Colonial Origins of Generational Conflict in South Africa (Charlottesville, VA, University Press of Virginia, 2000), pp. 22–5.

⁵ See J. Guy, ‘Women in Labour: The Birth of Colonial Natal’ (unpublished paper, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2009).

⁶ See D. Welsh, The Roots of Segregation: Native Policy in Colonial Natal, 1845–1910 (New York, Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 23.

⁷ S. Marks, Reluctant Rebellion: The 1906–8 Disturbances in Natal (Oxford, UK, Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 119.

⁸ J. Guy, ‘An Accommodation of Patriarchs: Theophilus Shepstone and the System of Native Administration in Natal’ (unpublished paper, University of Natal, Durban, 1997).

⁹ Welsh, The Roots of Segregation, pp. 219–20.

¹⁰ Harvard University, Houghton Library, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, African Missions Records (ABC), Series 15.4, Volume 9, Josiah Tyler, ‘General Letter, American Zulu Mission’, 15 June 1877; Volume 49, Mary Edwards, Inanda, to Nathaniel Clark, Boston, 16 June 1880.

¹¹ ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 49, Talitha Hawes, Inanda, to Mrs Hume, Boston, 28 January 1879.

¹² ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 49, Edwards to Miss Orcutt, Boston, 15 July 1881.

¹³ ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 49, Edwards to Orcutt, 15 July 1881.

¹⁴ ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 11, Fidelia Phelps, Inanda, to Judson Smith, Boston, 5 February 1887.

¹⁵ ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 11, Stephen Pixley, Inanda, to Smith, 13 June 1885.

¹⁶ ABC, Series 15.6.2, Volume 1, Edwards to Women's Board of Missions, Boston, 21 February 1886.

¹⁷ ABC, Series 15.6.2, Volume 1, Edwards to Women's Board of Missions, 7 August 1886.

¹⁸ See Chart 1.

¹⁹ ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 23, Phelps, ‘Report of Inanda Seminary, June 1907–June 1908’; Wood, Shine Where You Are, p. 63.

²⁰ ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 13, Phelps, ‘Inanda Seminary Report for 1895–96’.

²¹ H. Hughes, ‘Politics and Society in Inanda, Natal: The Qadi under Chief Mqhawe, c.1840–1906’ (Ph.D. thesis., University of London, 1995), p. 246.

²² ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 49, Phelps to Mrs Buffum, Providence, Rhode Island, 7 June 1894.

²³ Ntoyi Nxaba, quoted in ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 49, Phelps to Mrs Buffum, Providence, Rhode Island, 7 June 1894.

²⁴ On Nxaba, see also ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 11, Martha Price, Inanda, to Smith, 28 February 1885; ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 9, Edwards to Smith, 7 August 1886; ABC, Series 15.6.2, Volume 1, Edwards to Mrs Fairchild, New Haven, Connecticut, 26 May 1888; ABC, Series 15.6.2, Volume 1, Agnes Bigelow, Umzumbe Home, to the Women's Board of Missions, Boston, 27 March 1893; ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 16, Edwards to Smith, 23 October 1893; and ABC, Series 15.6.2, Volume 1, Bigelow, Inanda, to Miss Fay, Boston, 2 October 1895.

²⁵ ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 9, Edwards to Smith, 27 August 1888.

²⁶ ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 17, Price, Pietermaritzburg, to Smith, Boston, 25 October 1893.

²⁷ As Etherington and Hughes have also astutely warned. See N. Etherington, Preachers, Peasants, and Politics in Southeast Africa, 1835–1880: African Christian Communities in Natal, Pondoland, and Zululand (London, Royal Historical Society, 1978), pp. 95–6; and Hughes, ‘A Lighthouse for African Womanhood’, p. 210.

²⁸ See Chart 2.

²⁹ J. Lambert, Betrayed Trust: Africans and the State in Colonial Natal (Pietermaritzburg, University of Natal Press, 1995), p. 135.

³⁰ Carton, Blood from Your Children, p. 68.

³¹ Hughes, ‘Politics and Society in Inanda’, p. 246.

³² Carton, Blood from Your Children, p. 72; M. Mahoney and J. Parle, ‘An Ambiguous Sexual Revolution: Intragenerational Conflict in Late Colonial Natal, 1879–1906’, South African Historical Journal, 50 (2004), pp. 134–51.

³³ Hughes, ‘Politics and Society in Inanda’, p. 246; Hughes, ‘A Lighthouse for African Womanhood’, p. 210.

³⁴ Carton, Blood from Your Children, p. 72.

³⁵ ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 17, Price, Pietermaritzburg, to Smith, 25 October 1893.

³⁶ Hughes, ‘Politics and Society in Inanda,’ p. 246; Hughes, ‘“A Lighthouse for African Womanhood”’, p. 211.

³⁷ ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 17, Price, Pietermaritzburg, to Smith, 25 October 1893.

³⁸ See ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 13, ‘Inanda Seminary, 1891–1892: Statistics’.

³⁹ Related in ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 13, ‘Inanda Seminary, 1891–1892: Statistics’.

⁴⁰ ISP, File 1a, ‘List of Cases Illustrating the Forced Marriages of Native Girls’, undated (circa 1893).

⁴¹ ISP, File 1a, Herbert Goodenough, ‘Nomnyaka's Case’, 21 March 1893.

⁴² ISP, File 1a, Testimony of Susiwe Bhengu, in ‘List of Cases Illustrating the Forced Marriages of Native Girls’, undated (circa 1893).

⁴³ ABC, Series 15.6.2, Volume 2, Price, Pietermaritzburg, to the Women's Board of Missions, 27 December 1892. See also Hughes, ‘Politics and Society’, p. 245.

⁴⁴ ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 16, Edwards to Smith, 23 October 1893.

⁴⁵ Wood, Shine Where You Are, p. 50.

⁴⁶ On Trappist monks' contemporaneous struggles in Natal, see R. Khandlhela, ‘Mariannhill Mission and African Education, 1882–1915’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Natal, 1993), pp. 86–90.

⁴⁷ ISP, File 1a, Charles Kilbon, Edwards, Price, et al., Amanzimtoti, 28 April 1893.

⁴⁸ ISP, File 1a, Kilbon, Amanzimtoti, ‘To Missionaries and Others in Natal’, 12 August 1893. German Lutherans of Hermannsburg and Berlin Missions, Swedish Lutherans of the Church of Sweden, Anglicans of the Bethany Zulu Mission, and Presbyterians of the Free Church of Scotland all replied with dramatic tales of court cases that upheld patriarchal authority. See ISP, File 1a, H. Hormann, Emtombeni, ‘To the Petition Committee of the American Zulu Mission’, Amanzimtoti, 18 May 1893; G.A. Stielan, Noodsberg, to Kilbon, 19 September 1893; and Mr and Mrs J.J. Haviland, Bethany Zulu Mission, Estcourt, to Kilbon, 30 August 1893.

⁴⁹ ISP, File 1a, ‘To the Honourable the Legislative Assembly of Natal, A Petition on Behalf of Kraal Girls’, undated draft (circa 1893).

⁵⁰ Pietermaritzburg Archives Repository (PAR), Archives of the Secretary for Native Affairs (SNA), I/1/186, 650/1894, Dale, Natal Missionary Conference, ‘Petition on Behalf of Kraal Girls’, to the Colonial Secretary, Pietermaritzburg, 5 June 1894.

⁵¹ Pietermaritzburg Archives Repository (PAR), Archives of the Secretary for Native Affairs (SNA), I/1/186, 650/1894, Dale, Natal Missionary Conference, ‘Petition on Behalf of Kraal Girls’, to the Colonial Secretary, Pietermaritzburg, 5 June 1894

⁵² SNA, I/1/186, 650/1894: Circulation Paper, No. 2664/94, Note by Attorney General, 16 October 1894; Note by Colonial Secretary, 7 November 1894; Note by Secretary of Native Affairs, 2 November 1894.

⁵³ ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 17, Phelps to Smith, 18 July 1894.

⁵⁴ ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 17, Phelps to Smith 18 July 1894; Phelps to Smith, 3 May 1895; Price to Smith, 5 February 1895.

⁵⁵ ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 13, Phelps, ‘Inanda Seminary Report, July 1897 to June 1898’.

⁵⁶ ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 13, Phelps, ‘Inanda Seminary Report for 1895–96’.

⁵⁸ ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 23, Phelps, ‘Annual Report of Inanda Seminary,’ June 1904 to June 1905.

⁵⁷ SNA, I/1/301, 1679/1903, ‘Mrs. Malcolm, Umzumbe Mission Station: Arrest of Two Native Girls, Named “Dosie” and “Nobuhlungu”, at Umzumbe, Under Section 289 of the Code’.

⁵⁹ ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 23, Phelps, ‘Annual Report of Inanda Seminary,’ June 1904 to June 1905

⁶⁰ For a discussion of this, see PAR, Colonial Secretary's Office (CSO), 1121, 1887/727, Frederick Bernard Fynney, Inspector of Native Education, ‘Report of the Inspector of Native Education for 1886’, p. 49.

⁶¹ For this phrase, see S. Berry, No Condition Is Permanent: The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in Sub-Saharan Africa (Madison, WI, University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), pp. 24–5.

⁶² Natal Superintendent of Education Russell, 1895, cited in Welsh, Roots of Segregation, p. 270.

⁶³ Natal Superintendent of Education Russell, 1895, cited in Welsh, Roots of Segregation, p. 270

⁶⁴ ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 14, John L. Dube, ‘The Zulu Christian Industrial School and a Plan for the Evangelization and Civilization of Africa’, undated (circa 1899). See also M. Marable, ‘John L. Dube and the Politics of Segregated Education in South Africa’, in A.T. Mugomba and M. Nyaggah (eds), Independence Without Freedom: The Political Economy of Colonial Education in Southern Africa (Santa Barbara, ABC-Clio, 1980), pp. 113–28.

⁶⁵ PAR, American Board Mission Collection (ABMC), A/3/49, H.D. Goodenough, ‘Reply of the American Mission Reserve Trustees to Lands Commission Report: Mis-Statements Exposed’, undated (circa 1903).

⁶⁶ See KCAL, Karl Robert Brueckner Papers, File 3, A.E. Le Roy, The Educated Native: Fact vs Theory: A Paper Read Before the South African General Missionary Conference (Dundee, Natal, Ebenezer Press, Church of Sweden Mission, 1906), p. 5.

⁶⁷ See Chart 2.

⁶⁸ ISP, File 29, Russell, ‘Report of the Superintendent Inspector of Schools for the Year 1896’.

⁶⁹ C. Robertson, ‘Women's Education and Class Formation in Africa, 1950–1980’, in C. Robertson and I. Berger (eds), Women and Class in Africa (New York, Africana Publishing Company, 1986), pp. 92–116 (quotation on p. 96). D. Gaitskell, ‘Race, Gender and Imperialism: A Century of Black Girls’ Education in South Africa', in J.A. Mangan (ed.), ‘Benefits Bestowed’? Education and British Imperialism (New York, Manchester University, Press, 1988), p. 151, also notes that girls generally comprised the majority of schoolchildren throughout the future Union of South Africa, in a reversal of the usual male dominance in African colonial schooling, but she does not explain why.

⁷⁰ In 1889, an anonymous woman wrote a letter to the Natal Mercury defending ‘book learning’ as well as domestic training, against the protests of Mariannhill's Father Pfanner that African girls needed only to be trained to labour and pray. She substantiated her case by pointing to Inanda: ‘Should the visitor consider that they are spoiled by this education, and taught to despise manual labour, let him, led by the cultured lady, who is herself an example of the dignity of labour, visit the broad acres of Inanda, cultivated by these “spoiled” girls under her direct supervision’. See S.L.H. from Mapumulo, ‘Natives and Book Learning’, Natal Mercury, 22 October 1889, p. 5.

⁷¹ CSO, 1253, 1890/1603, ‘Minute on Native Education’, in Plant, ‘Report of the Inspector of Native Education for 1889’, p. 42.

⁷² The state opened Zwaartkop for boys in 1886, but it closed as an unpopular and expensive failure in 1892.

⁷³ CSO, 1253, 1890/1603, ‘Minute on Native Education’, in Plant, ‘Report of the Inspector of Native Education for 1889’, pp. 43–4.

⁷⁵ CSO, 1253, 1890/1603, Plant, ‘Report of the Inspector of Native Education for 1889’, p. 26.

⁷⁴ ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 17, Phelps to Smith, 11 March 1889. Emphasis in original.

⁷⁶ Quoted in Hughes, ‘Politics and Society in Inanda’, p. 249.

⁷⁷ See D. Gaitskell, ‘At Home with Hegemony? Coercion and Consent in African Girls’ Education for Domesticity in South Africa before 1910', in D. Engels and S. Marks (eds), Contesting Colonial Hegemony: State and Society in Africa and India (London, British Academic Press, 1994), pp. 110–28. See also J. Cock, ‘Domestic Service and Education for Domesticity: The Incorporation of Xhosa Women into Colonial Society’, in Walker (ed.), Women and Gender in Southern Africa, pp. 76–96.

⁷⁸ See D. Gaitskell. J. Kimble, M. Maconachie and E. Unterhalter, ‘Class, Race and Gender: Domestic Workers in South Africa’, Review of African Political Economy, 27/28 (1983), pp. 86–108.

⁷⁹ ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 9, S.C. Pixley, General Letter of the American Zulu Mission, 26 June 1889; see also ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 17, Phelps, Inanda, to Smith, Boston, 24 February 1890.

⁸⁰ The state initially gave Inanda a grant for the laundry following Plant's advice that it would qualify girls ‘for an especially useful branch of service’, and it competed successfully with washermen in Durban until commercial laundry work grew in the early twentieth century. See SNA, 1/1/112, 27/1889, Memo from Secretary for Native Affairs, 1 July 1889; ABC, Series 15.6.2, Volume 1, Edwards to Women's Board of Missions, Boston, 3 April 1893; and Hughes, ‘Politics and Society in Inanda, Natal’, p. 248.

⁸¹ ISP, File 29, Plant, ‘Report of the Inspector of Native Education of the Government Aided Native Schools for the Year Ending June 30, 1891’, p. 32.

⁸² ISP, File 29, Plant, ‘Report of the Inspector of Native Education of the Government Aided Native Schools for the Year Ending June 30, 1891’, pp. 48–9.

⁸³ In 1893–1894, for instance, Inanda received the largest grant in the entire colony – nearly 350 pounds. See ISP, File 29, Plant, ‘Annual Report of the Inspector of Native Schools for 1893–1894’.

⁸⁴ R. Plant, The Zulu in Three Tenses: Being a Forecast of the Zulu's Future in the Light of His Past and His Present (Pietermaritzburg, P. Davis and Sons, 1905), p. 105.

⁸⁵ Plant, The Zulu in Three Tenses, pp. 125–29.

⁸⁶ ABC, Series 15.4, Volume 17, Phelps to Smith, 18 July 1894.

⁸⁷ Lauretta Ngcobo, interviewed at her home in Musgrave, Durban, by M. Healy, 19 March 2009.