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

Chapter One: Social Reproduction in the Making of a‘Benevolent Empire’ 1835–1885

18 A WORLD OF THEIR OWN CHAPTER ONE Social Reproduction in the Making of a ‘Benevolent Empire’ 1835–1885 ‘The whole system of schools in this mission needs reforming,’ Henry BridgmanwrotetotheAmericanBoardofCommissionersforForeign Missions on behalf of his American Zulu Mission in 1864. ‘We absolutely need now, a girls Seminary, modelled after Mt. Holyoke Sem. as much as the case will admit. We absolutely need a boys Seminary for training up teachers & evangelists.’1 Bridgman’s call for a school in the African countryside modelled on the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in Massachusetts may seem strange. But the American Zulu Mission and Mount Holyoke were coeval parts of American Protestants’ ‘benevolent empire’.2 In 1835, as the first Americans arrived in Natal, Mary Lyon was raising funds to train women as teachers and missionary wives at Holyoke, which opened two years later. Four alumnae were American Zulu Mission appointees in the 1840s; others, including Bridgman’s wife, Laura, soon followed.3 By the late 1880s, over a fifth of all American Board women came from Mount Holyoke.4 Holyoke women in the United States and abroad ran schools modelled on their alma mater, and they served not only white Americans like the bulk of Board appointees, but also Christian girls in Persia (1843), Cherokee girls in Arkansas (1851) and Hindu girls in India (1853).5 In 1874, two Holyoke alumnae wouldorganisetheHuguenotSeminaryinCapeColonyasa‘daughter school’ for white girls, upon the invitation of a Dutch Reformed Church pastor there.6 Holyoke pedagogies translated unevenly across these institutions, where women’s ambitions often ran up against cultural incompetence, as well as political and financial constraints.7 19 SOCIAL REPRODUCTION IN THE MAKING OF A ‘BENEVOLENT EMPIRE’ ButlikeHolyoke,whichwassoregimentedthatcontemporariescalled it a ‘Protestant nunnery’, these schools encouraged self-discipline and self-sacrifice within practically self-sufficient institutions.8 American missionarieshopedthateachyoungwomantrainedattheseinstitutions would work to forge a new Christian society ‘by the power of her uniform and consistent example’, like a Mount Holyoke graduate.9 Holyoke values broadly complemented the ideals of the man to whom Bridgman appealed, Board Secretary Rufus Anderson. Anderson’s ‘three-self’ theory of evangelism espoused the eventual formation of self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating local churches. But until missionaries were sure that converts would not ‘backslide’ in their faith, the three-self theory demanded a programme of education for ‘native agency’ under the paternalistic authority of American ministers.10 American ministers retained authority over stations that relied upon the labours of many local male and female ‘native assistants’, of smaller numbers of local male preachers – and of missionary wives. Marriage was a prerequisite for the first American ZuluMissionappointees,andAndersonoftensuggestedthatunmarried aspirantmissionariesmarryHolyokealumnae.11 Ministersthroughout the Board’s missions brought their wives to work with women and children, while ministers trained local men as evangelists.12 InandaSeminarywasthusfoundedtoreplicatemissionarydivisions of labour within kholwa (African Christian) families, drawing upon women’s socially reproductive labours to effect a self-sustaining chain of Christian transformations. While men would train as preachers and teachers at the American Board’s all-male Amanzimtoti Seminary, women would prepare to be wives and teachers at a school modelled on that which Henry Bridgman’s own wife had attended. A gendered pair of seminaries seemed ‘indispensable’ to salvaging the Board’s fledgling mission in Natal, as they would ultimately make ‘native agency’ possible.13 Indeed, during Inanda’s first two decades, graduates of Inanda, Amanzimtoti and similar seminaries around the globe sustained the broader American missionary enterprise. In the process, new global and local templates for women’s authority emerged. But even as women assumed roles other than those of wife and mother in anexpandingbenevolentempire,theassociationsbetweenwomenand social reproduction grew deeply entrenched. Women’s professional 20 A WORLD OF THEIR OWN labours as teachers and ‘native assistants’ were structured by a set of familial idioms, through which women were empowered as well as confined. Engendering education for ‘native agency’ The Board had been chartered in 1812 as the first American mission society; early supporters were mostly Congregationalist, and they imagined that citizens of a Christian republic must prepare the world fordivinejudgement.14 ItremainedthelargestAmericanmissionsociety through its first half-century, and it ‘was also, in its combination of breadth with provincialism, an epitome of the enterprise at large’.15 In India (from 1813), Ceylon (1817), the Hawaiian Islands (1819), the Ottoman Empire (1820) and Persia (1820), and with Native Americans (1817), the Board had laboured to reproduce idealised New England socio-religious mores.16 Acculturating youth to...