Between Worlds - German missionaries and the transition from mission to Bantu Education in SA (NEW)

Between Worlds - Germanmissionaries and the transition from mission to Bantu Education in South Africa- LindaChisholm (AFRICANA OUT OF PRINT NEW)

The transition fromapartheid to the post-apartheid era has highlighted questions about the pastand the persistence of its influence in present-day South Africa. This isparticularly so in education, where the past continues to play a decisive rolein relation to inequality. Between Worlds: German Missionaries and theTransition from Mission to Bantu Education in South Africa scrutinises theexperience of a hitherto unexplored German mission society, probing thecomplexities and paradoxes of social change in education. It raises challengingquestions about the nature of mission education legacies. Linda Chisholm showsthat the transition from mission to Bantu Education was far from seamless.Instead, past and present interpenetrated one another, with resistance andcompliance cohabiting in a complex new social order. At the same time asmissionaries complied with the new Bantu Education dictates, they sought tosecure a role for themselves in the face of demands of local communities forsecular state-controlled education. When the latter was implemented in aperverted form from the mid-1950s, one of its tools was textbooks in locallanguages developed by mission societies as part of a transnational project,with African participation. Introduced under the guise of expunging Europeancontrol, Bantu Education merely served to reinforce such control. The responseof local communities was an attempt to domesticate - and master - the 'foreign'body of the mission so as to create access to a larger world. This book focuseson the ensuing struggle, fought on many fronts, including medium of instructionand textbook content, with concomitant sub-texts relating to gender roles andsexuality. South Africa's educational history is to this day informed bynetworks of people and ideas crossing geographic and racial boundaries. Thecolonial legacy has inevitably involved cultural mixing and hybridisation -with, paradoxically, parallel pleas for purity. Chisholm explores how theseideas found expression in colliding and coalescing worlds, one African, the otherEuropean, caught between mission and apartheid education.