New histories of education in South Africa: In conversation with Goolam Vahed and Thembisa Waetjen's Schooling Muslims in Natal

Goolam Vahed and Thembisa Waetjen's Schooling Muslims in Natal is an achievement on multiple levels. Over some 400 vividly-illustrated pages, it details the origins, struggles, and significance of a Durban institution that has become a regional centre of social life for South Africans of South Asian descent and for other Muslim South Africans. The Orient Islamic School officially opened in 1960, on an attractive modern campus just outside Durban's Botanical Gardens. It has since educated over 8,000 men and women, many of whom went on to become doctors, lawyers, business leaders, and educators (Vahed is himself an alumnus). The Orient School was a progressive institution: a place where teachers devotedly provided instruction in both Islam and secular subjects, preparing students of colour to engage confidently with a world beyond, at the height of apartheid. Its history is worth telling as an end in itself. But taken together with other recent histories, this study becomes even more interesting, explaining differences and illuminating unexpected similarities between 'Indian' and 'African' education in KwaZulu-Natal's history.

Vahed and Waetjen are among a growing number of scholars who are looking beyond familiar narratives of black student resistance, to also examine how and why increasing numbers of black youth were going to school in the apartheid years. Most of us have addressed this question for African students, and many of us have approached these questions through institutional studies.¹ Here, I briefly place Schooling Muslims in Natal in conversation with my 2013 study on another major school in KwaZulu-Natal: Inanda Seminary, the Congregationalist boarding high school that has educated African girls from 1869 through the present.² Together, these studies suggest a more expansive approach to the history of 'student politics': organised protest was not the only means of subverting apartheid visions of education. Through institutional histories that stretch before apartheid, we see the longer community and individual histories of striving for education that both strategically worked within and quietly challenged apartheid categories.

Schooling Muslims tellingly begins with a scene from the school's April 1960 opening ceremonies, when businessman AM Moolla addressed a crowd of parents, Muslim dignitaries, and government officials. Moolla described the long history that had produced the Orient School, explaining how the Orient Islamic Educational Institute that he chaired had struggled for decades to fund and find a site to build their dream school, facing growing discrimination against Indians. Moolla and his peers – also men from entrepreneurial South Asian Muslim families who had emigrated to South Africa in the late nineteenth century – were inspired by the Aligarh model that had developed in Victorian India. As Vahed and Waetjen explain, this model combined Islamic instruction with a British public school curriculum, by which Muslim men could 'secure high posts in government and the professions so that they could contribute to policy-making, shape their destiny and meet the British as political equals': in other words, its graduates would work through colonial structures to empower themselves and their communities (9). Turning to officials, Moolla made clear that the Orient School also intended to work through state structures rather than rejecting them: he asked for an increase in state aid for this and other schools in the 'Indian Community', and even hoped that government officials would 'eventually take over the whole responsibility of this work that is so essential to the ordering of a sound society' (quoted on 5).

This scene surprised me at first glance, as contemporary dynamics between state officials and school leaders at Christian mission schools for African students were so different. Under the terms of the Bantu Education Act of 1953, most of the mission schools that had fostered a tiny and tenuous African elite for the past century were forced to close, or were taken over by the state. The American Board, which ran Inanda Seminary, resisted this policy forcefully at its schools, as leaders feared that the end of mission schools would mean the end of the visions of Christian equality and black achievement that they...