In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • A World of Their Own: A History of South African Women’s Education by Megan Healy-Clancy
  • Abosede George
A World of Their Own: A History of South African Women’s Education. By Megan Healy-Clancy (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2014) 328pp. $29.50

Inanda Seminary, the focus of Healy-Clancy’s latest book, was an American missionary institution founded in the mid-nineteenth century to produce suitable wives for new African clerics. Over time, Inanda became a virtual factory for turning out women of unprecedented achievement; its alumnae often rose to the highest possible positions allowed to black women in South Africa’s industries. At the time of Healy-Clancy’s writing, 140 years after Inanda’s founding, the Seminary wore its historical significance confidently, even as the plaster on its walls gave way to time and neglect.

Healy-Clancy’s book proceeds as a study of Inanda’s persistence, largely as an independent school, despite facing several threats of closure. It survived the apartheid state and the formation of the Bantustans, when the school came under Zulu governance. It survived the era of black consciousness, when schools went up in flames in protest against the Bantu education laws. It even survived the end of apartheid, when de-segregation [End Page 620] meant, along with other things, that schools like Inanda would no longer have a monopoly on attracting the brightest black students.

Methodologically, the book creates its portrait of Inanda’s social history through a wide range of sources—missionary documents and records from the Seminary’s own archives, governmental material from the larger region of Kwazulu Natal where the school was situated, newspapers, and family archives. Healy-Clancy also interviewed individuals involved with the school in one way or another—including former students, teachers, and staff—for their life histories. Appreciation for the school’s historical significance, which is actively cultivated through rituals and reunions on Inanda’s campus, has generated an assiduous written record that gave Healy-Clancy access to the voices of students and staff from times past. One of the key challenges that historians face is recovering the voice of youth through the filter of adult memories. Oral histories may be an imperfect tool, but Healy-Clancy’s use of life histories, in conjunction with Inanda’s archival records, manages to tease out what it meant for multiple generations of young South African women to come of age at the school.

A World of Their Own is a valuable addition to the history of young people in Africa largely because it does not omit girls from its purview. Girls are often absent from the history of South African youth, let alone that of Africa in general. South African youth histories grounded in the apartheid era usually focus on male student activists or on young men who resisted the apartheid system by taking to the street and joining gangs—the heroic and anti-heroic youth of the revolutionary era. Longstanding fixation on these subjects has produced a distinct gender bias in the literature because, as Healy-Clancy’s book amply demonstrates, girls tended to be located elsewhere, in schools like Inanda, where they found some success, albeit for the complicated reasons that A World of Their Own ably dissects.

Abosede George
Barnard College-Columbia University
...

pdf

Share