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  • New histories of education in South Africa:In conversation with Goolam Vahed and Thembisa Waetjen's Schooling Muslims in Natal
  • Daniel Magaziner (bio)

The Orient Islamic Educational Institute opened its doors in 1960, near the Durban Botanic Gardens. Its building had been carefully designed to suit a preeminent institution of Islamic education for Natal's Indian community. 'A building is the image of the character of its builders', asserted AM Moolla, the prominent businessman who had chaired the Orient Institute's long quest to build its home. The building was indeed revealing. Its central and rightmost sections – housing the administration block and the school hall – demonstrate two essential aspects of mid-twentieth century South African modernism. The former is a modern edifice through and through: concrete and glass, a neat, well-proportioned box of strong verticals, framed with a flat, unornamented roof and a sunshade extending above street level. Indeed, the brise-soleil of recurring circles that adorns the school's entrance would not have looked out of place in a post-colonial Africa that was then building such structures with abandon. (See, for example, the similarly adorned administration block then under construction at the University of Nairobi.)1

But it was the low-slung hall, immediately adjacent to the administration block, that revealed the school's distinctly South African modernist credentials. Here, the roofline was rounded and less severe and the cement façade broken up by geometric patterns executed in brick. As Goolam Vahed and Thembisa Waetjen describe it in their marvelous new book, Schooling Muslims in Natal: identity, state and the Orient Islamic Institute, 'the dramatic frontage of the school hall was designed in a motif of stylized Kufic lettering […] "reproduced from Persian manuscripts"'. [End Page 61] The homage to classical Islamic antecedents was reinforced within the hall itself. Like the overall building, the hall boasted a state of the art AV system and fixtures, while also proudly proclaiming its sectarian and religious identity on its doors, above which 'a framed section of Ka'bah covering, bearing an inscription […] with rounded letters from the Qur'an' greeted students as they filed in for school functions (213). If this building revealed the character of its builders, then it was apparent who they were: proud Muslims, proud Indians, proud modernists, confident that in this artfully designed building future generations of the same would be prepared to face the challenges of their future.

Which is what the apartheid government aspired for them as well. One of the conceits of apartheid modernism was that each community – whether Bantu, European or 'Asiatic' – needed to develop 'modernity' on its own terms.2 As the Natal administrator put it at the ceremony marking the Orient Institute's opening, the government and the community common purpose was 'to preserve intact, even if we add to, the legacy of the past' (185). Over the past few years, education historians have revealed how interwar South African educationists laid the groundwork for the apartheid education system by calling for the country's mission-derived education system to be 'adapted' to the needs of its various population groups. Building off of the work of George Armstrong and Booker T Washington in the American South, as well as experiments elsewhere in the colonial world, educational theorists argued that schools ought not to be homogenising machines, but instead tools with which different communities might preserve their unique 'cultural genius' amidst colonial modernity.3 Education for difference was largely abandoned in the wake of World War II, as restive colonised populations began to demand equivalence, not particularism, and only the rare African country pursued such a course in the wake of independence (here Senegal and Tanzania are notable). Yet as apartheid stretched into its second and third decades, its theorists and supporters kept the old dream of sectarian education alive.4

This story about African (and to some extent, white) education in South Africa is relatively well known. Vahed and Waetjen's rich and compelling study considers the Indian and Muslim variant of this story, while also doing so much more. My colleagues (see other reviews in the review forum section of this edition) have already noted that one of this book...

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