Introduction

Summary

The question of transition is central to how we understand educational change in moments of rupture. South Africa's great moments of rupture, change and transition in the twentieth century occurred in 1910, in 1948 and in 1994. Each transition was accompanied by dramatic processes of social and educational change. The first, Union in 1910, created a unified system of state control and provision for white education. Mission education was increasingly directed and financed by the provinces on vastly inferior terms to those for an expanding white system. The second, the shift to apartheid in 1948, brought mission education under full state control. This change officially ended more than a century of provision by a number of different mission societies which had become a growing power in the land. By 1994, the third moment, when apartheid was officially dismantled and a democratic state brought into being, new crises borne of inequality were tearing the society apart. A democratic state set about resolving these tensions. The process of this transition has been fraught, its results an apparent failure, the continuities with the past still painfully present.

This book focuses not on the ‘why’, but the ‘how’ of educational change over time. It does so by addressing this historically, at another moment of great rupture and change, and specifically, through the experience of one mission institution involved in change. The period of change is that of the transition from segregation to apartheid, from mission to Bantu Education. The transition from mission to Bantu Education was a traumatic process with long-term consequences. It is commonly understood as constituting a deep break between liberal segregationism and apartheid. Yet what it meant for specific missions and schools in practice is poorly understood.

This book approaches the question of the transition from the perspective of how the transnational, colonial project of mission education was, perhaps paradoxically, both part of, and transformed, during the apartheid period. The project crossed geographical, national and racial boundaries. Notably, the casestudy is not the larger, well-to-do and prominent mission societies and schools whose opposition to apartheid was vocal, but rather the smaller, less-visible German mission schools of the Hermannsburg Mission Society in Natal and the Transvaal. The Mission was active in providing education in KwaZulu- Natal and the Transvaal from the time of its arrival in South Africa in 1854.