A World of Their Own: A History of South African Women's Education

Chapter four: Education Policy and the Gendered Making of Separate Development 1948–1976

120 A WORLD OF THEIR OWN CHAPTER FOUR Education Policy and the Gendered Making of Separate Development 1948–1976 In late 1956, Adams College held its last service. During a storm that pelted the iron-roofed chapel with ominous force, a full congregation tearfully sang ‘God Be with You until We Meet Again’. ‘Two Native women students in the choir stopped singing because they were overcome with emotion. Male students silently bowed their heads as they realised that “the final blow had fallen”,’ the Natal Daily News reported.1 ‘As scores of rich, meaningful Bantu voices rose to the crescendo of the last Amen in the Adams College Mission Church yesterdayafternoon,morethanacenturyofChristianendeavourcame to an end and the political era of the Bantu Education Act came to the College,’ the NatalMercury declared.2 Adams’ principal and his family left the country. The high school continued as the Amanzimtoti Zulu Training School: it was sold to the state on condition that the name ‘Adams’ not be used.3 Students staged a boycott the next year.4 Adams has since served as a metonym for possibilities apartheid foreclosed.5 Under Bantu Education, the state nationalised or closed most mission schools, of which Adams – alma mater of doctors and lawyers, and of the founders and the then president of the African National Congress – was among the most prestigious. With less ceremony, the American Board retained control of its other major educational institution. In late 1957, Inanda Seminary received official permission to continue as a private high school, under which status it would operate through the apartheid years. Although the American Board had struggled to maintain control over its pair of flagshipschools – foundedthecenturybeforeasamatchedsettocreate 121 EDUCATION POLICY AND THE GENDERED MAKING OF SEPARATE DEVELOPMENT transformative African Christian families – the state was only willing to tolerate Americans’ continued authority at their all-female institution. This chapter examines the reasons for, and meanings of, Inanda’s trajectory by situating it within the gendered framework of apartheid education. Scholars have shown that the Bantu Education Act of 1953 sought to bring volatile mission institutions under state control and to bring the majority of Africans who were not in school into state-controlled classrooms: it was a modernising project of racialised state-building and subject-making through a model of mass schooling that left little spaceforthemissionschoolswhereanelitefewhadpreviouslyreceived training. As growing numbers of African students would attend Bantu Education schools, students classified as ‘coloured’ or Indian would go to their own ethnically demarcated schools; for no black pupils was education free or compulsory, and it was in fact grievously underfunded, resulting in overcrowded classrooms staffed by overworked teachers.6 Consumed by the overarching racialised indignities of apartheid education, scholars have neglected how it was also a gendered project. As Bantu Education sought to limit student unrest – unrest that was, as the previous chapter pointed out, most often associated with young African men – it also sought to educate masses of semi-skilled workers – in classrooms that were increasingly headed by young African women. By this gendered logic, the state nationalised most teacher training colleges and restricted their male enrolment.7 By this same gendered logic, officials tolerated Inanda’s continued operation as an elite, all-female institution that prepared young women for careers in teaching and nursing, even as the state consolidated its control over thevastmajorityofInanda’speersinthe1950s.Ontheeveofapartheid, Inanda had been both a calm and academically thriving institution – unlikemanyotherleadingmissioninstitutions,asthepreviouschapter hasshown.AndInandagraduatesrepresentedsomeofthebeststudents at the new post-secondary institutions of the apartheid state in the 1960s.Duringthe1970s,KwaZuluhomelandleaderChiefMangosuthu GatshaButhelezisawInandaasaninstitutionthatcouldcultivateskilled teachers, health workers and secretaries – a black bourgeoisie who could make separate development work for black people. Inanda’s 122 A WORLD OF THEIR OWN role in nurturing black professional women thus obviated the need to nationalise Inanda, even as it became a site that nurtured opposition to apartheid. The apartheid state’s crises of social reproduction The platform of apartheid – separateness – on which the National Party came to power in May 1948 was an answer to crises of the social reproductionofadividedsocietythatAfrikanernationalistsperceived. The policies of cheap black labour on which the mineral revolution had been premised had introduced a series of unmanageable contradictions for Jan Smuts’ United Party: the rapid expansion of secondary industrialisation along with an underdeveloped consumer economy, deterioration of rural reserves, rapid black urbanisation and rising black militancy.8 The United Party and its rival National Party agreed that a more expansive, interventionist state was necessary to manage these contradictions...