New histories of education in South Africa: in conversation with Goolam Vahed and Thembisa Waetjen's Schooling Muslims in Natal: Identity, state and the Orient Islamic Educational Institute

The articles in this section are revised versions of papers presented at a panel called 'Beyond Soweto: new histories of education in South Africa' held at the African Studies Association's (hereafter ASA) meeting in San Diego in November 2015. The panel was organised for two reasons: to discuss Goolam Vahed and Thembisa Waetjen's recently published book Schooling Muslims in Natal; and to reflect on a renewed interest in the history of education in South Africa, of which participants' work forms a part (Vahed and Waetjen 2015). In the months leading up to the ASA meeting, however, protests at South Africa's higher education institutions – challenging the slow pace of transformation and proposed fee hikes – provided an added impulse for the critical consideration of schooling and society.

Apartheid's grossly unequal education system attracted the attention of several generations of scholars who combined activism, schooling/teaching, and critical writings: to name some notable figures, Linda Chisholm, Pam Christie, Jon Hyslop, Jonathan Jansen, Peter Kallaway, Bernard Magubane, Robert Morrell, Es'kia Mphahlele, Isaac Tabata, and Elaine Unterhalter. The diversity of writings on educational issues, in form and approach, challenges the view that there was some kind of singular apartheid-centred way of framing knowledge production that scholars today can somehow transcend with new approaches. However, if we include popular culture and media, and recognise important exceptions, we can note that educational studies did gravitate toward a series of prominent themes. These included the 'loss' of mission schools after the 1953 Bantu Education Act, the 'crisis' in schooling after the 1976 Soweto uprising, in the sharp differences between (rather than connections between) 'white' and 'black' schooling, and the nationally (rather than transnationally) constituted forces shaping educational practices and politics.

Here, panelists emphasised different educational themes and placed these in conversation with Vahed and Waetjen's beautifully written study Schooling Muslims in Natal. Mention must also be made here of panelist Meghan Healy-Clancy's book A World of Their Own which, among things, helps us to rethink from a gendered perspective the apparent decline of mission schools and the connection between these and the workings of the KwaZulu homeland (Healy-Clancy 2013); and then soon to be published Dan Magaziner's unique book on the history of art education in twentieth century South Africa, The Art of Life in South Africa (Magaziner 2016). Clive Glaser was not part of the panel but his recent work on the rise and fall of schools in Soweto throws new light on the township that led the 1976 student protests (Glaser 2015).

Schooling Muslims is valuable to my own current work that traces the long history of schooling marketisation in Durban. My project takes as its departure point the affinities between Group Areas era racial segregation and modern zoned (ie catchment area) approaches to schooling in the 1950s and 60s. Here, Schooling Muslims gives unparalleled attention to the formative role of schools in the drawing of racial boundaries in Group Areas South Africa. Most of the schools operating in Durban today are in fact built after – and thus cast spatially in the mould of – the 1950 Group Areas Act. This holds true not only for schools built in giant new townships like KwaMashu, Umlazi, or Chatsworth but even for privileged white schools: between 1952 and 1962 the number of white high schools more than doubled, from 7 to 15 (see Hunter 2016).

The Orient Islamic school was originally planned to be built in south Durban. In 1943 the Orient Islamic Educational Institute, the book's main protagonist with financial and cultural ties that crossed the Indian Ocean, purchased 80 acres of land at Durban's Bluff. Yet as Orient's male leaders prepared to lay the first bricks of the new school, city officials forced the shelving of these plans citing the necessary expansion of white housing. As the authors cite, AI Kajee, prominent leader and trader, responded that what was happening at the Bluff was not so...