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THE BOND OF EDUCATION: GENDER, THE VALUE OF CHILDREN, AND THE MAKING OF UMLAZI TOWNSHIP IN 1960s SOUTH AFRICA*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2014

Mark Hunter
Mark Hunter*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto Scarborough and University of KwaZulu-Natal
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Abstract

‘High apartheid’ in the 1960s was marked by intensified efforts to redraw urban areas along racial lines and quash black South Africans' schooling and employment ambitions. The 1953 Bantu Education Act became infamous for limiting African educational opportunities. Yet this article shows how women in Umlazi Township, outside of Durban, schooled their children – despite and indeed because of apartheid's oppressive educational and urban policies. Drawing on oral histories and archival records, it explores the ‘bond of education’, the gendered material-emotional family connections that enabled schooling and resulted from schooling. In the face of increasingly insecure intimate relations, a booming economy, and expanded basic education, mothers' attention to their children's and grandchildren's education grew in importance and scale: education required sacrifices but promised children's eventual support.

Keywords

South Africaapartheideducationfamilygenderhouseholdlawurban
Type
Education, Culture, and Social Change
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , November 2014 , pp. 467 - 490
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Meghan Healy-Clancy for commenting on a draft of this article, and Marijke du Toit, Deborah Posel, Goolam Vahed, and Thembisa Waetjen for sharing sources and insights. The JAH anonymous reviewers made extremely helpful suggestions. The article benefitted from discussions at seminars organized by Africanists at the University of Toronto and historians at the Southern Methodist University. Author's email: [email protected]

References

1 Interview with Precious Mhlongo, Umlazi, Durban, 18 July 2012. Information about her life was also taken from an interview with her granddaughter, Sizakele Mhlongo, in Umlazi, on 18 July 2012 and a second interview with Precious on 2 July 2013 in Umlazi. For a similar view in colonial Zimbabwe, see Schmidt, E., Peasants, Traders, and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe, 1870–1939 (Portsmouth, NH, 1992), 136Google Scholar. As noted later, devout Christians were least likely to oppose girls' schooling.

2 By the end of the apartheid era there were four widely used ‘racial’ categories: African, white, Indian, and coloured. I use the uppercase for African and Indian since the words are derived from geographic places. I use scare quotes conservatively to improve the article's readability.

3 ‘Africans pay more than whites for education’, Natal Mercury (Durban), 11 Feb. 1964.

4 As Jonathan Hyslop argued, this statement needs to be interpreted alongside the state's attempts to channel more highly skilled Africans into ethnic Bantustan structures, a point also noted later in this article. Hyslop, J., The Classroom Struggle: Policy and Resistance in South Africa, 1940–1990 (Pietermaritzurg, 1999), 60Google Scholar.

5 Some of the pioneering texts on Bantu Education include Hyslop, The Classroom Struggle; Kros, C., The Seeds of Separate Development: Origins of Bantu Education (Pretoria, 2010)Google Scholar; and Kallaway, P. (ed.), The History of Education under Apartheid, 1948–1994: The Doors of Learning and Culture Shall be Opened (Cape Town, 2002)Google Scholar. For an insightful 1980s study of education from the perspective of household relations in a rural Eastern Cape community, see Ngwane, Z., ‘“Real men reawaken their fathers’ homesteads, the educated leave them in ruins”: the politics of domestic reproduction in post-apartheid rural South Africa’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 31:4 (2001), 402–26Google Scholar. For a rich and relevant study of Inanda Seminar in KwaZulu-Natal that emphasizes gender and schooling, see Healy-Clancy, M., A World of Their Own: A History of South African Women's Education (Scottsville, South Africa, 2013)Google Scholar. On the former homeland of Lebowa, see Phillips, L., ‘Principals, chiefs and school committees: the development of local school administration in rural Lebowa, 1972–1990’, Journal of Southern African Studies, forthcomingGoogle Scholar.

6 On women in urban areas, see Barnes, T., “We Women Worked So Hard”: Gender, Urbanization, and Social Reproduction in Colonial Harare, Zimbabwe, 1930–1956 (Portsmouth, NH, 1999)Google Scholar; and Lee, R., African Women and Apartheid: Migration and Settlement in Urban South Africa (London, 2009)Google Scholar. For ‘wealth-in-people’, see Cooper, B., ‘Women's worth and wedding gift exchange in Maradi, Niger, 1907–89’, The Journal of African History, 36:1 (1995), 121–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Guyer, J. I., ‘Wealth in people, wealth in things – introduction’, The Journal of African History, 36:1 (1995), 83–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On intergenerational wealth flows, see Caldwell, J., Demographic Transition Theory (Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 2006)Google Scholar.

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8 The article draws on a survey of educational histories of members of 122 households in one section of Umlazi and 106 interviews with household members aged from 18 years to more than 80. A further 50 interviews were conducted in other parts of Umlazi and 10 with former and current Umlazi school teachers. The article also draws from civil court cases and other primary and secondary documents from the 1960s and 1970s. All of the interviews were conducted by the author with the help of a research assistant, transcribed by a research assistant, and translated from Zulu by the author when necessary. All names of informants have been changed.

9 For examples in the KwaZulu-Natal region of how women employed Christianity to counter the authority of ‘tradition’ in the intimate realm, see Hunter, M., Love in the Time of AIDS: Inequality, Gender, and Rights in South Africa (Bloomington, IN, 2010)Google Scholar.

10 Durban Archives Repository, Durban (DAR) Bantu Affairs Commissioner's Court, Divorce Cases 1971, A30, Nosipho Ngubane v. Patrick Kunene (70/71). Nosipho and Jade are pseudonyms.

11 For Natal women's particular legal ‘disabilities’ from which they were required to be ‘emancipated’, see Section 4 of this article and Simons, H. J., African Women: Their Legal Status in South Africa (London, 1968)Google Scholar.

12 Different intellectual traditions converge on this point: Jeff Guy emphasizes labor, Guy, J., ‘Analysing pre-capitalist societies in southern Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 14:1 (1987), 18–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mervyn Jeffreys argues from a legal perspective that ‘lobolo is child-price’, Jeffreys, M., ‘Lobolo is child-price’, African Studies, 10:4 (1951), 145–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and John Caldwell emphasizes children's vertical support for their parents, Caldwell, Demographic Transition Theory. The approach I adopt is influenced by anthropologists who argue that fertility is entangled with multiple social processes, a perspective summarized by Jennifer Johnson-Hanks as ‘vital conjunctures’. Also important to historicizing the relationships among the state, households, and struggles over children is Lynn Thomas's account of the ‘politics of the womb’ in Kenya. My use of ‘value’ therefore differs substantially from the Value Of Fertility (VOF) framework centered on the subjective assessment of children's worth. This, like the common statement that ‘children are highly valued in Africa’, fails to recognize historical change and hence how children are valued for different reasons and in different ways over time. Johnson-Hanks, J., ‘On the limits of life stages in ethnography: toward a theory of vital conjunctures’, American Anthropologist, 104:3 (2002), 865–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thomas, L. M., Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (Berkeley, CA, 2003)Google Scholar.

13 For the return of cattle because a woman was ‘without issue’, see DAR 1/Eshowe(ESH) 2/1/1/2/1, Vanganye v. Makanyezi, 1907.

14 Customary law was central to the colonial (and later apartheid) government's efforts to devolve certain powers to ‘traditional’ institutions in ethnically defined spaces (at various times called ‘locations’, ‘reserves’, ‘homelands’, and ‘Bantustans’). In the British colony of Natal, but not other parts of the future Union of South Africa, the codification of customary law (in 1878) gave it a particular rigidity and male bias well noted by critics and symbolized by women's status as legal minors unless they were ‘emancipated’. See especially Simons, African Women.

15 In Natal, ilobolo had been established by the colonial government at a maximum amount of 11 cows; over time, this came to be seen as the standard payment and could be partly or wholly paid in cash. Themes in this and the following paragraph are given more attention in Hunter, Love in the Time of AIDS.

16 Jeffreys, ‘Lobolo is child-price’.

17 Dlamini, C., ‘Seduction in Zulu law’, Tydskrif Vir Hedendaagse Romeins-Hollandse Reg, 47 (1984), 18–35Google Scholar.

18 On seduction, see Warner, H. W., A Digest of South African Native Civil Case Law, 1894–1957 (Cape Town, 1961), 372Google Scholar; on maintenance, see Bennett, T. W., ‘Maintenance of minor children: a problem of adapting customary law to meet social change’, Acta Juridica, 115 (1980), 115–25Google Scholar.

19 For instance, DAR Bantu Affairs Commissioner's Court, Ntombikayise Emma Mzelemu v. Mqitshwa 328/66 (in strong room but uncatalogued).

20 Domestic worker's salary taken from emancipation case, DAR Bantu Affairs Commissioner's Court, Philepine Nyati, 337/66 (uncatalogued). Teacher salary taken from emancipation case DAR Bantu Affairs Commissioner's Court, Fikile Majola, 336/66 (uncatalogued).

21 Brown, B. B., ‘Facing the “black peril”: the politics of population control in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 13:2 (1987), 256–73CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

22 Moultrie, T. and Timæus, I., ‘Fertility and living arrangements in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 27:2 (2001), 207–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Caldwell, Demographic Transition Theory. Writing specifically on South Africa, Caldwell discussed other reasons for the country's fertility decline including the lowering of child mortality rates. Caldwell, J. C. and Caldwell, P., ‘The South African fertility decline’, Population and Development Review, 19:2 (1993), 225–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Moultrie and Timæus showed that unmarried and urban women have fewer children than those living in rural areas, in ‘Fertility and living arrangements’. Though the old age pension was extended to Africans in 1944, affecting wealth flows, this was a small sum and its impact is difficult to assess. Sagner, A., ‘Ageing and social policy in South Africa: historical perspectives with particular reference to the Eastern Cape’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 26:3 (2000), 523–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Caldwell, J., ‘On net intergenerational wealth flows: an update’, Population and Development Review, 31:4 (2005), 721–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The wealth-in-people literature, referenced earlier, touches on questions of intergenerational support through consideration of households, generational conflicts, and youth. See Guyer, J. I., ‘Household and community in African studies’, African Studies Review, 24:2/3 (1981), 87–137CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Carton, B., Blood From Your Children: The Colonial Origins of Generational Conflict in South Africa (Charlottesville, VA, 2000)Google Scholar; Cole, J. and Durham, D. L. (eds.), Generations and Globalization: Youth, Age, and Family in the New World Economy (Bloomington, IN, 2007)Google Scholar.

25 While, as noted, ‘over-educated’ women were seen as loose, fathers could encourage sons to leave school and herd cattle or find work to supplement the family income. See Mbatha, M. B., ‘Migrant labour and its effects on tribal and family life among the Nyuswa of Botha's Hill’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Natal, 1960)Google Scholar.

26 Interview with Mavis Nene, Umlazi, 13 Sept. 2012. Prominent Christian social worker Sibusisiwe Makanya had difficulty convincing communities of the importance of education: see Khan, U., ‘A critical study of the life of Sibusisiwe Makanya and her work as an educator and social worker in the Umbumbulu District of Natal, 1894–1971’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Natal, 1995)Google Scholar. Makanya was also a key figure in attempts to promote women's ‘purity’ in the 1920s and 1930s; see Khan, ‘A critical study’; and also Marks, S., Not Either an Experimental Doll: The Separate Worlds of Three South African Women (Bloomington, IN, 1988)Google Scholar; Marks, S., ‘Patriotism, patriarchy and purity: Natal and the politics of Zulu ethnic consciousness’, in Vail, L. (ed.), The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (Berkeley, CA, 1989), 215–40Google Scholar. Makanya herself never married, and thus respectability implied but did not necessitate marriage – a point we return to later.

27 B. Bozzoli with Nkotsoe, M., Women of Phokeng: Consciousness, Life Strategy, and Migrancy in South Africa, 1900–1983 (Portsmouth, NH, 1991)Google Scholar.

28 Mbatha, ‘Migrant labour’, 140.

29 Pass laws required Africans to carry and produce on request a legal document of identification that demonstrated a right to be in an urban area. The uneven way these laws were implemented and circumvented makes any consideration of influx controls more than simply a matter of listing legislation. A key moment, however, was the 1952 Natives (Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents) Act that introduced a single pass and prevented male Africans from staying in urban areas for more than 72 hours unless they had urban (Section 10) rights.

30 ‘Enlarged Labour Supply’, talk given by S. Bourquin at the Conference on ‘Literacy, Its relevancy and urgency in this decade’ on 22 June 1970, Killie Campbell Collections, Durban (KCC) Bourquin Papers, Killie Campbell Manuscripts (KCM) 55158. I recognize that a fuller account of Durban requires an analysis of ‘white’, ‘Indian’, and ‘coloured’ workers and their livelihoods, although space does not permit it here. For information on the Indian working class, see Freund, B., Insiders and Outsiders: The Indian Working Class of Durban, 1910–1990 (Portsmouth, NH, 1995)Google Scholar.

31 Maasdorp, G. G. and Humphreys, A. S. B., From Shantytown to Township: An Economic Study of African Poverty and Rehousing in a South African City (Cape Town, 1975), 9–10Google Scholar.

32 For example, see Pauw, B. A., The Second Generation: A Study of the Family among Urbanized Bantu in East London (Cape Town, 1963)Google Scholar; Preston-Whyte, E., ‘Between two worlds: a study of the working life, social ties and interpersonal relationships of African women migrants in domestic service in Durban’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Natal, 1969)Google Scholar. Today, more commonly used terms than matrifocality are ‘women-headed households’ and ‘multigenerational households’. For an influential discussion on how kinship-centered terms can limit social analysis, see Schneider, D. M., A Critique of the Study of Kinship (Ann Arbor, MI, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an incisive argument on the need to historicize ‘matrifocality’ in Cape Town, see Lee, African Women and Apartheid. A similar point has been made about the concept of ‘motherhood’: see Walker, C., ‘Conceptualising motherhood in twentieth century South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 21:3 (1995), 417–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a more recent discussion, see Moore, E., ‘Transmission and change in South African motherhood: black mothers in three-generational Cape Town families’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 39:1 (2013), 151–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Pauw, The Second Generation, 163. For information on unstable urban relations, see also Posel, D., The Making of Apartheid, 1948–1961: Conflict and Compromise (Oxford, 1991), 32–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Population estimates range widely, one reporting numbers from 60,000 to 120,000 people, KCC, Bourquin Papers, KCM 55204, ‘Extract from a report of the inter-departmental committee of inquiry in connection with the disturbances and rioting at Cato Manor, Durban on 24 January 1960’, Feb. 1960.

35 Preston-Whyte, ‘Between two worlds’, 217.

36 Ibid. 381.

37 Cock, J., Maids and Madams: A Study in the Politics of Exploitation (Johannesburg, 1980), 18Google Scholar.

38 On racial maternalism, see Ally, S. A., From Servants to Workers: South African Domestic Workers and the Democratic State (Ithaca, NY, 2009)Google Scholar.

39 On racial paternalism, see van Onselen, C., ‘The social and economic underpinning of paternalism and violence on the maize farms of the south-western Transvaal, 1900–1950’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 5:2 (1992), 127–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Interviews with Thulane Mkhwanazi, Umlazi, 23 July 2012; Lungile Nxumalo, Umlazi, 31 July 2012; Rebecca Palozi, Umlazi, 25 Sept. 2012; and Thandeka Mhlongo, Umlazi, 21 Nov. 2012.

41 On ‘native nostalgia’ for apartheid, see Dlamini, J., Native Nostalgia (Auckland Park, South Africa, 2010)Google Scholar.

42 For details on ‘class compression’ that resulted from township building and Bantu Education, see Crankshaw, O., ‘Class, race and residence in black Johannesburg, 1923–1970’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 18:4 (2005), 353–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 Maasdorp and Humphreys, From Shantytown, 64 and 67.

44 ‘Self respect’, Daily News (Durban), 25 Nov. 1964. On the size of houses, see ‘Umlazi officially opens’, Bantu (Pretoria), Sept. 1965, 342. On vehicular access, see National Archive Repository, Pretoria (SAB) Secretary of Native Affairs (NTS) box 3362, 2169/307(A), ‘Meeting held at Pretoria on the 19th February 1954, in the conference room, Native Affairs Building in regard to the urbanization of Umlazi’.

45 For information on swimming pools, etc., see ‘Umlazi officially opens’, Bantu, Sept. 1965, 342.

46 These Durban Bantu Commissioner's cases are held in the strong room of the Durban Archives Repository but are not catalogued in the inventory. Around half of the approximately 500 Bantu Affairs Commissioner's Court Cases that are present in this archive (covering 1966/7) are emancipation cases.

47 DAR Bantu Commissioner's Court, 327/66, Winnifred Mhlongo v. Fabian Mhlongo.

48 DAR Bantu Commissioner's Court, 383/66, Nesta Msomi v. Ex Parte.

49 The classic account of how apartheid urban policy was made through gendered contestations and compromises is Posel, The Making of Apartheid. Accounts from Johannesburg and Cape Town suggest that women in these cities faced more intense controls than those in Durban, although East London also seems to have had a somewhat lenient policy toward women accessing township houses. For Cape Town, see Lee, African Women; for Johannesburg, Posel, D., ‘Marriage at the drop of a hat: housing and partnership in South Africa's urban African townships, 1920s–1960s’, History Workshop Journal, 61:1 (2006), 57–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for East London, see Pauw, The Second Generation.

50 Before this act, Durban already had extensive plans to segregate the city. One reason for this, as Brij Maharaj discusses, was intense anti-Indian sentiment among white residents. Maharaj, B., ‘The “spatial impress” of the central and local states: the Group Areas Act in Durban’, in Smith, D. M. (ed.), The Apartheid City and Beyond: Urbanization and Social Change in South Africa (London, 1992), 76–88Google Scholar.

51 Posel, ‘Marriage at the drop of a hat’, discusses ‘house marriages’ in Johannesburg.

52 KCC Bourquin papers, KCM 55174, letter from Department of Bantu Administration to the Town Clerk, Durban, 16 Mar. 1959.

53 Edwards, I. L., ‘Mkhumbane our home: African shantytown society in Cato Manor Farm, 1946–1960’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Natal, 1989), 232Google Scholar. This thesis is an excellent source on the destruction of Cato Manor.

54 Morris, P., A History of Black Housing in South Africa (Johannesburg, 1981), 74Google Scholar. During Eleanor Preston-Whyte's research with domestic workers in Durban (1962–6) there was no compulsory registration of African women, but by 1969 regulations seem to have tightened: Preston-Whyte, ‘Between two worlds’. Doug Hindson and Deborah Posel also argue that although passes were officially extended to women in 1952, local authorities were relatively lenient to women until the 1960s: Hindson, D., Pass Controls and the Urban African Proletariat in South Africa (Johannesburg, 1987)Google Scholar; Posel, The Making of Apartheid.

55 KCC Port Natal Administration Board microfilm KCF66, letter S. Bourquin to Mrs Knight, 27 Sept. 1968.

56 KCC KCM 39275, Black Sash File 367, Case number 47, 27 Nov. 1973, Biziwe Boqo.

57 I make this estimate based on interviews with Umlazi residents and records of township houses being sold off to renters (most found in the National Archives since Umlazi was administered by the Department of Bantu Administration and Development until it fell under the KwaZulu homeland).

58 For the disproportionate number of Christians in Langa Township, see Levin, R., ‘Marriage in Langa Native Location’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Cape Town, 1946)Google Scholar. As early as the 1920s, when the small Lamontville Township was built in Durban, city officials viewed respectable Christian couples as the most likely candidates for housing; see Torr, L., ‘Lamontville – Durban's “model village”: the realities of township life, 1934–1960’, Journal of Natal and Zulu History, 10 (1987), 103–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 ‘They break up marriages’, Bona (Johannesburg), Feb. 1965, 25.

60 Wilson, M. and Mafeje, A., Langa: A Study of Social Groups in an African Township (Cape Town, 1963), 26Google Scholar; Kuper, L., An African Bourgeoisie: Race, Class, and Politics in South Africa (New Haven, CT, 1965)Google Scholar.

61 Moller, V., Schlemmer, L., Kuzwayo, J., and Mbanda, B., ‘A black township in Durban: A study of needs and problems’ (Durban, 1978), 54Google Scholar.

62 For information on marriage statistics, see Hunter, Love in the Time of AIDS, 253. See also ch. 4 on how townships helped to reconstitute a respectable masculinity centered on family houses.

63 Interview with Zama and Mpume Jobe, Umlazi, 23 July 2012.

64 This was found by surveys undertaken in both Umlazi Township and KwaMashu Township in Durban. See Moller, Schlemmer, Kuzwayo, and Mbanda, ‘A black township in Durban’; May, J., A Study of Income and Expenditure and Other Socio-Economic Structures in Rural KwaZulu, Volume 7, Umlazi (Durban, 1986)Google Scholar.

65 R60 a year taken from ‘Africans pay more than whites for education’, Natal Mercury (Durban), 11 Feb. 1964.

66 ‘Education – Africans must pay’, Star (Johannesburg), 29 Oct. 1965. This was based on costs in Soweto Township.

67 ‘Africans pay more than whites for education’, Natal Mercury (Durban), 11 Feb. 1964.

68 For information on soccer as an example of a male leisure activity, see Alegi, P., Laduma! Soccer, Politics, and Society in South Africa (Scottsville, South Africa, 2004)Google Scholar.

69 Ferguson, J., ‘The bovine mystique: power, property and livestock in rural Lesotho’, Man, 20:4 (1985), 647–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 Mbatha, ‘Migrant labour’, 279.

71 Interview with Lungile Nxumalo, Umlazi, 1 July 2013.

72 Unterhalter, E., ‘The impact of apartheid on women's education in South Africa’, Review of African Political Economy, 17:48 (1990), 66–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Healy-Clancy, A World of Their Own.

73 Thomas, D., ‘Education across generations in South Africa’, American Economic Review, 86:2 (1996), 330–4Google Scholar.

74 Interview with Phindile Dlamini, Umlazi, 2 July 2013.

75 Interviews with Mandla Shange, Umlazi, 14 Aug. 2012, 17 Aug. 2012, and 3 July 2013 (quotation taken from the third interview).

76 May, A Study of Income, Volume 7, Umlazi, 49.

77 Interviews with Nolwazi Shobede, Umlazi, 21 Nov. 2012 and 2 July 2013.

78 Hughes, H., The First President: A Life of John L. Dube, Founding President of the ANC (Auckland Park, South Africa, 2011)Google Scholar.

79 Inanda Seminary, the flagship mission school for girls, retained autonomy from the state, unlike men's mission schools, not only because of the actions of teachers, parents, and pupils, but also because the nursing and teaching vocations it encouraged were thought to be necessary to bolster ethnic ‘homelands’ to which the state devolved significant power in the 1960s and 1970s: Healy-Clancy, A World of Their Own. Meghan Healy-Clancy also pointed out to me that fathers often encouraged the education of women who attended this institution (personal communication, July 2013).

80 M. Du Toit, ‘“Anginayo ngisho indibilishi!” (I don't have a penny!) the gender politics of “native welfare” in Durban, 1930–1939’ (unpublished paper presented to the WISER Seminar, University of Witwatersrand, 28 Oct. 2013).

81 T. Waetjen ‘School days in the city of our childhood’ (unpublished summary narrative for the Local History Museum, Durban, 2007), 3.

82 Waetjen, ‘School days in the city’, 10; H. Carrim, ‘Women, race, class and culture in Durban's Indian and African Family Municipal Barracks: the significance of education and employment circa 1940–1970’ (unpublished Honours Thesis, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2009); Institute for Social Research at the University of Natal, Baumannville: A Study of an Urban African Community, Natal Regional Survey, rept. no. 6 (Cape Town, 1959).

83 On urban bias in homeland education, see H. Jacklin and J. Graaff, ‘Rural education in South Africa: a report on schooling systems in the bantustans' (unpublished report prepared for the National Education Coordinating Committee's National Education Policy Investigation, 1992). The sheer weight of urban population numbers meant that even a funding formula hugely weighted towards primary education enabled the opening of some secondary schools in urban areas. In 1971 in Umlazi, 14,300 children were in lower primary school, 8,200 senior primary, 3,100 form 1-V, and 442 in vocational: Maasdorp and Humphreys, From Shantytown, 99. Regulations in 1958 deemed that neighborhoods with 151 to 800 families have only one lower primary school; 801 to 1,600 families, two lower and one higher primary schools; 2,400 families were needed to trigger a single secondary school: NASA SAB Department of Native Administration and Development (BAO) box 1860, A20/1171/12, letter from Department of Native Affairs to all local authorities in the Union of South Africa, regional directors of Bantu Education, inspectors of Bantu Education, Bantu school boards and Urban Areas Commissioners, 21 Mar. 1958. For further information on the funding of Bantu Education, see especially Hyslop, Classroom Struggles.

84 Hyslop, J., ‘State education policy and the social reproduction of the urban African working class: the case of the Southern Transvaal 1955–1976’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 14:3 (1988), 461CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85 Indeed, one strategy followed by migrant workers in the 1940s was to invest in a house in Durban that children could use as a base for schooling: Callebert, R., ‘Livelihood strategies of dock workers in Durban, c. 1900–1959’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Queens University, 2011), 124Google Scholar.

86 ‘A Daily News inquiry’, Daily News (Durban), 26 June 1968. In contrast to KwaMashu Township, constructed on former sugarcane farms, Umlazi was built on native trust (‘tribal’) land by Durban City on an agency basis for the national government. Umlazi's location on tribal and not ‘white’ land also meant that freehold rights were available to residents, one reason it was promoted as the country's ‘most modern African township’. KwaMashu had an ownership scheme but families could still face eviction, an insecurity felt by township dwellers elsewhere. ‘Most modern township’, Daily News (Durban), 6 June 1961. Most houses in Umlazi and KwaMashu (both of which fell under the newly-established KwaZulu government in the 1970s) were sold off to occupants in the 1970s on relatively favorable terms; it was only in the 1980s that what was dubbed the ‘big sell-off’ took place in townships like Soweto: see Morris, A History of Black Housing.

87 Interviews with Phindile Dlamini, Umlazi, 23 Nov. 2012 and 2 July 2013.

88 Tilton, D., ‘Creating an “educated workforce”: Inkatha, big business, and educational reform in KwaZulu’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 18:1 (1992), 166–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

89 May, A Study of Income, Volume 7, Umlazi, 17.

90 Crankshaw, O., Race, Class, and the Changing Division of Labour under Apartheid (London, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

91 Ferguson, J., ‘Declarations of dependence: labour, personhood, and welfare in southern Africa’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19:2 (2013), 223–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

92 Magaziner, D., ‘Two Stories about art, education, and beauty in twentieth-century South Africa’, American Historical Review, 118:5 (2013), 1406CrossRefGoogle Scholar.