African Studies Institute - Seminar Papers

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Author: search.filters.author.Krige, Sue

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    "Trustees and agents of the state?": Missions and post-union policy formation towards African education 1910-1920
    (1998-04-26) Krige, Sue
    During the first decade after Union, African education was the subject of syllabus reform initiatives in three out of the four provinces. The control of African education was also an issue which was debated as part of these reform initiatives, and was touched on by commissions of enquiry into the provincial system as a whole. It is the task of this paper to analyse the nature of policy making and reform regarding African education in the first decade after union, and to focus on the role of the missions in this process. It argues that the process of syllabus reform in the Transvaal, Natal and the Cape was informed by a general need to respond to critiques of existing education, but that there are important regional imperatives which fashioned each province's particular rationale and content adaptations. It indicates that the reforms cannot be seen as directed at the African working class in order to meet the needs of capital. Instead it argues that much of the "education makes better workers" type of justification for change, and the content change itself was really rhetoric designed to allay white hostility. The target of the reforms was the educated African elite, whose ambitions needed to be shaped in a direction which did not challenge the existing social order. However, only the Cape reforms appear to have moved beyond rhetoric in providing a concrete syllabus for agricultural education for an elite modernising peasantry and ancillary administrative staff. In this sense, to some extent the reforms were compatible with emerging segregationist ideas and policies. However, it is far fetched to link the reforms with any grand design of Native policy or with the "needs of capital". ...This paper stems from a dissatisfaction with the existing literature's failure to grasp the complexities of the relationship between church, state, education policy and the broader political economy in the early years after Union. In doing so, it addresses a number of problematic areas in the literature of this period. … This paper ends in 1920, a year which marks the first real attempt to consider African education from a national viewpoint. This came with the establishment of the Native Affairs Commission in 1920.
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    Segregation, science and commissions of enquiry: The contestation of native education policy in South Africa 1930-36
    (1996-04-29) Krige, Sue
    This paper focuses on debates around African education which emerged from two State initiated commissions and an education conference in the period 193 0-193 6: the 1932 Natives Economic Commission (NEC), the 1935-6 Interdepartmental Committee into Native Education (Welsh Committee) and the New Education Fellowship (NEF) Conference of 1934. The paper highlights the responses of the English-speaking Protestant missions to two major and intermeshing trends which affected African education during this period, secularisation and segregation. In the history of South African education, a clear but neglected theme which emerges in the period after the First World War is the desire of the mission churches to resist State control, and to retain control of their schools in terms of administration, appointment of staff and curriculum content. Implicit in the struggle over control of African education were important issues such as the location and nature of expertise, what constitutes worthwhile knowledge, the most appropriate schooling system for imparting knowledge and the political consequences of such policy. Through the lens of debates around African education, global and colonial trends such as the rise of science, the secularisation of knowledge and the concomitant emergence of the "expert" can be seen. This paper argues that church responses to these trends incorporated more than merely an outdated reliance on nineteenth century Cape liberalism and notions of assimilation. They drew on an emerging critique of segregation and the illiberal use of science and expertise which emerged both from South Africa and from the British colonial experience elsewhere in Africa.