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Welfare and education in British
colonial Africa and South Africa during
the 1930s and 1940sPeter KallawayPublished online: 06 Aug 2006.
To cite this article: Peter Kallaway (2005): Welfare and education in British colonial Africa and
South Africa during the 1930s and 1940s, Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History
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Paedagogica Historica,
Vol. 41, No. 3, June 2005, pp. 337356
ISSN 0030-9230 (print)/ISSN 1477-674X (online)/05/03029518
2005 Stichting Paedagogica Historica
DOI: 10.1080/00309230500069803
Welfare and Education in British
Colonial Africa and South Africa during
the 1930s and 1940s
Peter KallawayTaylorandFrancisLtdCPDH106963.sgm10.1080/00309230500069803PaedagogicaH istorica0030-9230(p rint)/1477-674X (online)OriginalArtic le2005StichtingPae dagogicaHist orica413000000June2 005PeterKallawayFacultyof EducationUniversityoftheWesternCapePrivateBagX17Bellville7535SouthAfricapkallaway@uwc.ac.za
Contemporary educational policy discourse in South Africa that seeks to serve the poor and address equity
issues needs to engage with the roots of twentieth-century social reform debates if it is meet its goals. One of
the weaknesses of the templates for reform at the present time is that they often fail to engage with progressive
traditions which have a long history. Present-day reforms look to agency recommendations or comparative
examples of successful emergent economies, but often fail to recognize the value and significance of previ-
ous initiatives which sought to address these issues. The long debate over the need for social welfare and
educational reform in British colonial Africa has some significance in this regard. The period between 1930
and 1950 marked a key turning point in such policy in colonial Africa, and significant reform initiatives in
South Africa from the early years of the Second World War provide the benchmarks for such investigations.
The social welfare policies and the educational policy initiatives of the United Party government during the
1940s provide important signposts for such policies. This article attempts to investigate that legacy.
Educational Policy and History of Education
The study of the history of education in relation to policy agendas of the new South
African government has thus far attracted little attention from scholars in the post-
1994 era. The fascination of young scholars in the field of education with history and
its political ramifications that was characteristic of the radical scholarship of the 1970s
and 1980s has been displaced by an avalanche of work on the problems of policydevelopment, management and implementation. Whether by design or default there
is a lack of analysis of the present policy development process in historical context. 1
The initiatives of the post-1994 era educational policy development in South
Africa have highlighted a complex nexus of problems around globalization and
education that are familiar to scholars all over the world. Yet such policy initiatives
1 Our recent collection represents an attempt to address this issue. See Kallaway, P., ed. The
History of Education under Apartheid: 19481994: The Doors of Culture and Learning Shall Be Opened.
New York: Peter Lang/Cape Town: MML/Pearson Education, 2002.
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338 P. Kallaway
often emphasize a wide variety of issues or approaches that are relatively new to
South African educational policy discourse. These include (a) the question of school
governance and the allocation of certain powers to democratically elected school
governing bodies (SGBs) (The South African Schools Act of 1995), (b) the promo-
tion of skills for economic globalization and international competitiveness (the high/skill; low/skill debate);2 (c) qualifications frameworks (National Qualifications
Framework (NQF), (d) the issue of quality and standards (South African Qualifica-
tions Authority SAQA), (e) issues of pedagogy and assessment3 (outcomes based
education or OBE), (f) adult basic education and training (ABET), (g) literacy and
lifelong learning (LLL),4 (h) Curriculum 2005 and its various revisions, which are
now embodied in the General Education and Training Curriculum (GET) and
Further Education and Training (FET) (Schools) curricula,5 (i) the Values in
Education initiative,6 and various higher education and FET (colleges) policy docu-
ments recently unveiled. These are but the most notable amongst a host of policy
documents published in the last ten years.
One feature common to all of the documentation cited above that distinguishes it
from education commission reports and analysis in the pre-1970s era is that there is
very little reference to the historical context which they seek to address. It was a
universal feature of policy development documents in the pre-1980s era to have an
extensive historical introduction that attempted to understand the context and back-
ground that was being addressed. There was a clear engagement with the need to
understand what was wrong with the previous system and how it should be reformed
to meet certain goals. Whether those goals referred to the need for equity in education
between white Afrikaans and English speakers, the need for racial segregation ineducation7 or the need for skill development to meet the needs of the modern econ-
omy,8 the format of research in policy development was standard. After 1994 (indeed
2 McGrath, S., A. Kraak and A. Badroodien. Education and Work in South Africa. Cape Town:
Juta/HSRC, forthcoming.3 Department of Education, Qualifications and Assessment Policy Framework: Grades 1012
(Schools). Pretoria: Department of Education [DoE], 2002.4 Department of Education, Lifelong Learning for the Twenty First Century. Pretoria, 1997.5 Department of Education, White Paper on Education and Training. Pretoria, 1995; Curriculum
2005 Policy Document. Pretoria, 1997;National Curriculum Statement: Grades 1012 (Schools): Over-
view (Draft) 28 October 2002. Pretoria: DoE, 2002.6 Department of Education,Manifesto on Values, Education and Democracy. Pretoria: DoE, 2001.7 Union of South Africa, Report of the Native Economic Commission (Holloway Commission) (UG
22-1932). Pretoria: Government Printer, 1932; Union of South Africa, Report of the Commission on
Native Education in South Africa. (Eiselen Commission Report) (UG53-1951). Pretoria: Govern-
ment Printer, 1951.8 Union of South Africa, Report of the Commission on Technical and Vocational Education (De Vil-
liers Commission) (UG 65-1948). Pretoria: Government Printer, 1948; Union of South Africa, Re-
port of the Commission of Enquiry into Adult Education (UG 35-1945). Pretoria: Government Printer,
1945.
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Paedagogica Historica 339
after the 1981 HSRC (de Lange) report on Provision of Education in the RSA)9 that
historical aspect of policy development disappeared.10
That shift in policy thinking and research which de-emphasizes historical contex-
tualization is not unique to South Africa. It reflects a worldwide trend that has been
noted by many commentators. This reflects what might be described as end of ideol-ogy thinking which rather assumes that international policy discourse is simply an
example of best-practices management implementation, and that the statement of
such policy objectives in the form of official documents and directives will actually
achieve the stated ends of equity in education, effective learning, human
resource development, skill development, and so on. As Stephen Ball has
cautioned, the ability to articulate a well-constructed policy plan is no guarantee of
successful implementation unless the sociological and historical context of implemen-
tation is taken seriously.11 This requires, amongst other things, a consideration of the
necessary political and economic trade-offs for the success of a particular strategy in
a specific context, or a consideration of the implications of shortages of resources for
the potential for successful implementation.
Many examples of such policy documents in the international domain that address
issues of equity and international responsibility for education can be cited. The vari-
ous seminal World Bank policy documents on education which have been fundamen-
tal to policy discourse in the last thirty years,12 UNESCOs otherwise excellent report
of 1996 on Learning: The Treasure Within: Report on Education in the 21st Century,13
and the documents related to the global initiative on Education for All,14 all rely on a
technical statement of the ethical and social or economic problems to be faced and
the solutions to be found without any substantial or substantive attention to thehistorical context or the differences between the context that are being addressed.
The recent PROBE report represents an example of a more grounded critical assess-
ment of educational policy and practice in rural India15 but even here there is little
sense of where these faulty (or successful) policies come from, what circumstances
gave rise to them and what social forces sustained them over time. Or, even more
significant, what political moves would be needed if adequate change was to be
9 Human Sciences Research Council. Pretoria: HSRC, 1981.10 It is not possible to enter into an explanation for this here but the shift to a neo-liberal dis-
course in the field of educational policy development long predated the transfer to power in 1994.
See Kallaway, P. Apartheid and Education. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1984: Part 3; Kraak, A.
Discursive Shifts and Structural Continuities in South African Vocational Education and Train-
ing: 19811999. In Kallaway, The History of Education underApartheid, 7493.11 Ball, S. Politics and Policy Making: Explorations in Policy Sociology. London: Methuen, 1990.12 World Bank, Education Sector Policy Paper (1980); Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (1988);
Primary Education Policy Paper(1990); Priorities and Strategies in Education (1995) (all Washington
DC).13 UNESCO, Paris.14 This is associated with the mass conferences held at Jomtien (1990) and the Dakar conference
(2000).15 The PROBE team, Public Report on Basic Education in India. New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1998.
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340 P. Kallaway
promoted? Whatever the other merits of these reports, the historical specificity of
policy development is ignored in every case. This would seem to explain, in part, the
weakness of such documents and policies regarding questions of implementation. It
highlights the disjuncture between rhetoric and reality in policy discourse. It also
offers a serious challenge to historians to read the implications of particular policiesin context. Historians need to take up the challenge more directly of presenting the
past as a laboratory of educational experience for policy-makers. It is to the credit of
many of the best practitioners in the field that they have seen history of education in
precisely those terms but they are the exceptions rather than the rule and few of
them have written about the international comparative context.16
This apparent pessimism regarding the potential for history of education to illumi-
nate issues in comparative education and comparative policy development seems to
be rather ill-placed at a time when history of education provides one of the few vehi-
cles for providing a wide-angle view of the context in which policy fashions are
shaped. In a world of globalized everything, the policy formulae and mantras of the
World Bank and the IMF and the policy influence of those countries and agencies
that are seen to be successful in the race for high-skill competitiveness have an influ-
ence that seems to erase the value of specific historical experience. There is a need to
re-evaluate how such perspectives can be used in new ways to promote the critical
analysis of policy. In post-apartheid South Africa, despite the rhetorical emphasis on
citizenship, welfare and human rights issues, there has in reality been a great emphasis
on policies that promote the development of skills for competitive entry to the global
marketplace. What has not been sufficiently recognized or acknowledged is that there
is a long history to policy initiatives aimed at the goals of welfare provision and therole of education in addressing social inequalities and economic competitiveness
which might be of some significance to understanding the successes or failures of
current policies. It is hoped that a reflection on the welfare and education policy in
the context of British colonial Africa and South Africa might throw some light on that
issue.
Possible Lessons from British Colonial Africa
The twentieth-century origins of welfare and educational reform in British colonial
Africa are complex. After the First World War the major issue of empire was not
whether to have it or how to secure it, but how best to govern it and in whose
interest.17
16 Among these are: Simon, B. Education and the Labour Movement, 18701920. London:
Lawrence & Wishart, 1965; Tyack, D., and L. Cuban, Tinkering Towards Utopia: A Century of Public
School Reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995; Silver, H. Education as History.
London: Methuen, 1983; Carnoy, M., and J. Samoff. Education and Social Transition in the Third
World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.17 Whitehead, C. Education in British Colonial Dependencies, 19191939: a re-appraisal.
Comparative Education 17, no. 1 (1981): 71.
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Paedagogica Historica 341
The ambiguities, dilemmas and tensions faced by the missionaries and colonial
officials responsible for these issues are seldom sufficiently recognized. The patterns
of demand and provision regarding mass education spread from the imperial heart-
lands to the colonies with great speed, particularly after the First World War. The
international18 missionary conferences that were a feature of the early twentiethcentury especially those held at Edinburgh (1910), Le Zoute, Switzerland (1926),
Jerusalem (1928) to mention but the most significant, were in many ways the
precursors to the large educational conferences hosted by UNICEF, UNESCO and
the World Bank in the closing decades of the century.19 At these conferences hosted
by the International Missionary Council, welfare and education became a central
aspect of colonial engagement and a discourse of policy development in education
was shaped in association with the British Colonial Office (and to some extent the
French, Belgian and Portuguese authorities) and a number of American philan-
thropic foundations, such as Carnegie, Rockerfeller and Phelps-Stokes, which were
active in the field. By the 1930s the new scientists of colonialism the anthropolo-
gists, along with other commentators also had a hand in shaping the discourse
around African welfare and education.20
There is an extensive literature relating to this phase of African educational devel-
opment which cannot be engaged with here due to lack of space, but the key issue I
wish to raise relates to the manner and terms in which the politics of welfare and
education policy came to be contested during this period.21 Questions of access to
schooling and the nature of the curriculum offered were to become increasingly
significant issues for colonial politics. Administrators, missionaries, humanitarian
groups, commentators and spokespersons for native politics often highlighted theirsignificance. Yet until the 1930s these developments did not take place within a
framework of formal social development policy thinking. There was no central policy
driven from Whitehall. It was only with the advent of the Colonial Development and
Welfare Acts (1940 and 1945) that greater opportunities (were created) to influence
the nature of educational progress in the colonies.22
18 International in this colonial context meaning British, European and American.19 The great conferences/jamborees on Education for All held in Jomtien (1990) and Dakar
(2000) are particular highpoints of that tradition.20 There is a lack of systematic examination of this issue of the influence of anthropologists on
educational policy, though there are many pointers. See Kuper, A.Anthropology and Anthropologists.
London: Routledge, 1983; Moore, S. F. Anthropology and Africa. Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 1994. The work of Lucy Mair,Native Policies in Africa. London: George Routledge,
1936, and Malinowski, B. Native Education and Culture Contact. International Review of Missions
25 (1936): 480515, at the London School of Economics is particularly important in this regard.21 Clatworthy, F. S. The Formulation of British Colonial Education Policy 19231948. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan, School of Education, 1971; King, K. Pan Africanism and Education. Oxford:
Clarendon, 1974; Whitehead, C. The impact of the Second World War on British colonial educa-
tion policy. History of Education 18, no. 3 (1989): 267293; Id. Colonial Educators: The British
Indian and Colonial Education Service: 18581983. LondonNew York: I. B. Tauris, 2002.22 Whitehead. The Impact of the Second World War, 269.
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342 P. Kallaway
By the 1920s there was general recognition of the broad brief for education in the
colonial context. How would decisions be made about who went to school and what
kind of education would be offered? Was the shift in control from the Church to the
state, such a feature of nineteenth century nationalist Europe, to be transferred to the
colonies? What were the potential implications of such a change? How was educationto be funded? Would the provision of education be targeted at the new urban popu-
lations in the cities (skilling for work in the modern sector of the economy) or would
it focus on training for rural life and subsistence agriculture? What role would rural
communities or African voices have in the shaping the nature of that policy? To put
it in the language of another age, was this to be education for citizenship or work in a
modern society and economy or was it to support traditional rural African life in a
colonial context?
Then there was the question of what would be taught in schools. What kind of
curriculum was relevant23 for the majority of Africans? Was the traditional literary,
Western education to continue or be reformed, or was the idea of a modern education
to be linked to notions of vocationalism or indigenous knowledge? What kinds of
education should the missionaries and the colonial office promote? What would be
the relationship between these erstwhile partners?
In much of the writing of the time there was a tendency to homogenize the African
population and see it in terms of descriptors like rural/tribal/community/peasant/
subsistence farmers. Debates over educational needs are then often predicated upon
those rather static social assumptions in an era when colonial history is marked by
fundamental disruptions to the traditional rural society with the ever increasing
engagement of Africans directly or indirectly with the market economy either inthe form of wage labour or as commodity producers. The great debate of the time
was between two policy tendencies outlined below, themselves informed by the
contemporary international debate around the merits of academic education versus
Progressive Education or the child-centred curriculum24 in the colonial context.
The Curriculum
On the one hand there were those who saw the promotion of conventional Western
or formal education in its various forms as the goal of missionary enterprise. This view
upheld the indivisibility of the curriculum and the right of all students to have access
23 A popular term among educational progressives that often led to confusions of meaning.24 The philosophy of progressive education or child-centred education sought to emphasize the
role of psychology and motivation in the process of learning and to define the curriculum in relation
to the social and natural environment in which the child lives. See Dewey, J. Experience and
Education. New York: Macmillan, 1952; Entwistle, H. Child-Centred Education. London: Methuen,
1970. The question of which aspects of progressive education get taken up in the colonial situation
is of considerable significance. Key aspects of progressive education emphasized in Africa in the
1920s1930s included vocational or community education, the question of girls education, the
claims of indigenous languages and cultures on the curriculum, and the need for an appropriate
science education especially biology. It might be important to query what aspects were neglected.
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Paedagogica Historica 343
to the same educational experience regardless of the background from which they
came. It saw knowledge in rather static terms and assumed the great Western tradi-
tion of education to be the only one relevant to the context of the modern world and
to civilization as they called it! Its protagonists, despite the criticism of the Euro-
pean content of the education, argued that such an approach was the only one possi-ble for a religion that sought to promote the equality of individual believers before
God and the right of individual participation in the labour market. It also referred to
notions of social equity in an increasingly modernized world where all citizens needed
to have access to literacy and numeracy, as well as the possibility of further study if
they showed the talent. This education stressed an academic curriculum and English
(or European) language and cultural acquisition. This was also the policy that had
dominated in British colonial India and came to be vilified by many colonial officials
as a major cause of many of the political problems in that context.25
This early missionary model of education, revised in various ways to meet the
changing circumstances of the 1930s, persisted, as it found support from the new
African elite that was gaining increasing influence over the nature of the social and
political change. Although there was little development with regard to mass educa-
tion until after the Second World War, the social and economic value of such an
education in the colonial situation helps to explain the tenacity of this model in
Africa.
On the other hand, during the early years of the twentieth century there was an
attempt to promote curriculum policies that emphasized particular kinds of rural
development and sought to sustain particular notions of rural life and indigenous
culture. Drawing substantially on the experience of rural education in North America with both white communities in the Midwest26 and black communities in the post-
bellum South,27 and on the progressive educational ideas of writers like John Dewey,
such policies were seen to be a useful form of gradual socialization to modern
values and techniques while putting a brake on too-rapid Westernization or
urbanization in an era of increasing political challenge from various kinds of African
nationalism. They emphasized the relevance of education to local development.
While such policies were by no means universal in British colonial Africa,28 they had
a powerful influence on educational thinking from the 1920s.
Adapted education was promoted by many missionaries, colonial officials,
philanthropists and settlers as the solution to African poverty and social fragmenta-
tion.29 It is often forgotten that similar ideas underpinned philanthropic discourses of
25 Carnoy, M. and M. Weiss. Education in Colonial India. In Education as Cultural Imperialism,
edited by M. Carnoy. New York: David McKay, 1974: 78112.26 For rural education in the USA in the 1930s see the work of Mabel Carney at Teachers College.27 Anderson, J. D. The Education of Blacks in the South: 18601935. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1988.28 The Cape Colony, and subsequently the Cape Province, held out against these policies well
into the 1920s.29 Derived from Southern debates over the nature of Negro education with specific reference to
the policies promoted by B. T. Washington and at Tuskegee Institute.
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344 P. Kallaway
the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa (from the 1890s onwards) and the
Carnegie Commission (1932) in relation to the saving of rural poor whites from a
life of poverty.30 On the basis of the American experience supporters of adapted
education argued that traditional Western education provided a poor background for
the average African child in dealing with everyday life in the rural areas. In keepingwith contemporary ideas regarding progressive education, there was a call by the
adaptationists to make education relevant to the life and future world of work of
the colonial subject/citizen. This provided a key issue for contest regarding African
education. African rural societies, in the eyes of many potential colonial reformers,
were beginning to fragment under the influence of colonization and modernization,
and many philanthropic whites (and a small group of men drawn from the African
elite such as James Aggrey and D. D. T. Jabavu) felt that the best interests of
Africans lay in the preservation of the rural communities and traditional customs
in the face of these threats. Adequate training in agriculture and animal husbandry,
in Christian morality, in health and hygiene, and the promotion of a healthy family
and community life, were the targets of such endeavours. The first large-scale inves-
tigations of African education under the umbrella of the Phelps Stokes Fund were
driven by this agenda of educational reform.31 Such views were taken up formally in
the British Colonial Offices newly appointed Advisory Committee on Native Educa-
tion in Tropical Africa, in its first policy document, Educational Policy in British
Tropical Africa (1924).32
There has been a great deal of debate and controversy over the motives and
successes of the philosophy of adaptation. In retrospect many writers have seen it as
part of a racist colonial conspiracy to de-politicize Africans by cutting them off froma formal education (modern education) that was associated with the rise of nation-
alism and political opposition. The lessons associated with the pejorative implica-
tions of European education in India were to be learned. Yet the other side of the
argument has been largely discarded in the postcolonial context namely that there
is a need to take seriously the need for an education that addresses the real-life pros-
pects and context of the majority of people who lived in the rural areas.33 In the end
the influence of these ideas proved to be minimal as, despite the rhetoric, little policy
development of this kind took place outside of isolated experimental situations in
30 Carnegie Commission, The Poor White Problem in South Africa: Report of the Carnegie Commission.
Stellenbosch: Pro-EcclesiaDrukkery, 1932. See in particular Vol. III, Malherbe, E. G. Education
and the Poor White.31Jones, T. J. Phelps Stokes Commission reports on Education in Africa. New York: 1922 and
1924; Jones, T. J. Four Essentials of Education. New York: Scribners, 1926; Loram C. T. The
Education of the South African Native. London: Longmans Green, 1917.32 ACNETA. Educational Policy in British Tropical Africa. Cmd. 2374. London: Colonial Office,
1925.33 There is something of a parallel here between contemporary calls for an education for global
competitiveness in countries where there is dire poverty and little opportunity for the vast majority
to participate in such a labour market.
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Paedagogica Historica 345
Kenya, Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland.34 Charles Loram was able to sponsor
such experiments from his position of Inspector of Native Education in Natal35 and
H. S. Keigwin and Harold Jowitt were advocates of Jeanes education in Southern
Rhodesia.36 The most significant experiments along these lines took place in
Tanganyika prior to the Depression.37 In West Africa, and subsequently in Kenya,such policies encountered greater resistance from the new elite and from nationalist
movements as the quickening pace of economic and social change in the 1930s
resulted in mounting criticism of the policy from native and European spokesmen
alike.38 In the end the general neglect of educational policy throughout colonial
Africa in the years of the Depression meant that whatever reforms were mooted very
little was followed through. In other words, in the crucial years of political ferment
and challenge little was actually done to change the patterns of education set up by
the missionaries.
This is not the place to explore the debate over adapted education in the 1920s. A
good deal of attention has been paid to this over the years. For the purpose of the
present paper it is sufficient to acknowledge that there was such a debate over African
education and that there is some dispute over whether it was exclusively a cynical
attempt to dominate and marginalize Africans in the politically volatile times. It seems
much more likely that campaigners such as T. J. Jones and C. T. Loram (and even
J. H. Oldham) had an ambiguous understanding of the merits of these ideas. They
saw them as practical and relevant to the needs of rural Africans and at the same time
they could not have missed their utility in relation to social and political control, espe-
cially in the light of the colonial experience with education in India. Framed through
a complex alliance of missionary networks and influence, American philanthropicfoundations such as Carnegie, Rockerfeller and Phelps Stokes, Colonial Office policy
and officials, and the emergent science of social anthropology, such policies
34 See Mair, Lucy.Native Policies in Africa, for a positive perspective on those experiments. Or
Murray, A. V. School in the Bush. London: Longmans Green, 1929 and 1938 for a critical view.35 C. T. Loram was Chief Inspector of Native Education in Natal from 1906 to 1920 and subse-
quently the head of the standing Native Affairs Commission appointed by the SAP government
(19201929); see Loram, C. T. The Education of the South-African Native; Fleisch, B. The
Teachers College Club. Ph.D. diss., New York, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1995;
Krige, S. Church, Liberals and the State: Secularization and Segregation in African Education,
19301936. MA diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 1994.36 Harold Jowitt was the Director of Native Development in Southern Rhodesia and became
Director of Education in Uganda in 1935 (Mair, L.Native Policies in Africa, 7374, 180). Keigwin
was Director of Education in South Rhodesia from 19191924 and subsequently served as Director
of Education in Sierra Leone. See also Carnegie Corporation of New York, Village Education in
Africa: Report of the Inter-Territorial Jeanes Conference held in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, May 27th
to June 6th, 1935. Lovedale: Lovedale Press, 1935.37 See Mumford, W. Bryant. Superintendent of Education in Tanganyika Territory. Education
and Social Adjustment of the Primitive Peoples of Africa to European Culture. Africa 2, no. 2
(1929): 138159; Buchert, L. Education in the Development of Tanzania, 19191990. Athens: Ohio
University Press, 1996.38 Whitehead. Education in British Colonial Dependencies, 73.
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seen against the background of the uneven progress of welfare perspectives in
home politics at a time when the notion of the Welfare State was gradually
emerging from the political contests of the Depression and post-Depression era. In
assessing the significance of these moves, it is important see them in the interna-
tional perspective of welfare policy at that time. What were the particular character-istics of British welfare of the 1930s? To what extent can it be said that the
emergence of a politics of welfare in Europe at this time had any influence on
British colonies in general and those in Africa in particular? What influence did
they have on South African politics and how did they influence educational policy,
if at all?
This new approach was influenced by the tenor of British politics and Keynesian
economics in the wake of the Depression. In the 1920s there had been a strong
emphasis on forcing Africans into the marketplace as producers of primary products
as part of the overall thrust to maximize the economic potential of the Empire in solv-
ing the recurring crises in the home economy. In the 1930s the collapse of the
commodity markets for African exports left large sections of the working population
unemployed and there was an urgent need for government action with regard to the
unemployed and poverty relief. For much of the 1930s social and economic condi-
tions in the colonies were arguably worst than they had been in the previous decade,
not better.43 These conditions fuelled social unrest in the colonies and demanded
state attention.44 The laissez faire economic policies of the 1920s gave way gradually
to a climate of international demand for more active government intervention in the
social arena. The emergence of a discourse of welfare in the colonial context should
not be exaggerated but it is also necessary to acknowledge that there is now significantevidence of new pressures on colonial officials to engage with this area of activity
previously left to the missionaries.45 Those views were promoted by the immensely
influential J. H. Oldham,46 the secretary of the International Missionary Council from
the early 1920 to the mid-1930s. Perhaps even more important was the wider debate
over the nature and meaning of colonial rule and the responsibilities of the colonial
powers towards their wards in Africa, which drew in people of striking ability such
as Norman Leys (Kenya),47 W. H. Macmillan (South Africa),48 Margaret Perham,49
43 Ibid., 229.44 Pointed out clearly by the South African historian, W. H. Macmillan, in his study of the polit-
ical situation in the West Indies: Warning from the West Indies. London: Faber & Faber Ltd. 1936.45 Constantine, The Making of British Colonial Development Policy; Havinden, M., and
D. Meredith. Colonialism and Development: Britain and its Tropical Colonies 18501948. London:
Routledge, 1983.46 King, K. Africa and the Southern States of the USA: Notes on J H Oldham and American
Negro Education for Africans.Journal of African History 10, no. 4 (1969): 659677; Clements K.,
Faith on the Frontier.47 Cell, J. W. By Kenya Possessed: The Correspondence of Norman Leys and J. H. Oldham, 19181926.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.48 Macmillan, W. H. Complex South Africa (1930);Africa Emergent(1938).49 Perham, M.Africans and British Rule. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941.
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Lord Hailey,50 Bronislaw Malinowski51 and Lucy Mair.52 In the context of education
that debate reflected many of the criticisms of the earlier adaptationist approach
which had been articulated so well by A. V. Murray in his monumental study on
African education, School in the Bush (1929).
Increasingly under pressure from the international community the British impe-rial government found itself on the defensive during the 1930s. The earlier philoso-
phy of adaptation so confidently articulated in the Colonial Offices report on
Educational Policy in British Tropical Africa (1924)53 was superseded by a number of
other reports. The most significant of these included Education in African Communi-
ties (1935) and Mass Education for African Society (1943).54 In particular the USA
and the League of Nations Mandates Commission pressed for the liberalization of
the colonial order and the promotion of the rights of the indigenous peoples. In
that context the British attempted to engage with development issues, or at least to
articulate a tentative rhetoric of development with regard to the indigenous peoples
of the colonies. The Labour Party government under Ramsay MacDonald, which
came to power in 1929, with Sydney Webb the notable Fabian leader as
Colonial Secretary, offered the brief prospect of a new approach to the issue of
colonial development, but the Depression and the transition to a National Govern-
ment put paid to any possibility of dramatic changes in policy. The socialist labour
movement of the imperial heartland proved to be as ineffective as the Conservatives
when it came to strategies for the development of welfare policies in the colonial
context.
Yet it was during the 1930s that the foundations were laid for a new approach to
thinking about welfare and education in colonial Africa that was to bear fruit in thepost-Second World War era. Whatever the limitations of that policy it did move away
from many of the conservative formulae of earlier times. One effect of the disillusion-
ment with the fruits of British colonial rule was disenchantment with the doctrine of
protective trusteeship. The notion that British colonial administration ought prima-
rily to preserve colonial peoples from too harsh a collision with Western values and
economic changes (as expressed in the doctrine of adaptation) seemed to be an
excuse for tolerating stagnation, even regression. Demands therefore grew for a more
constructive form of trusteeship, which would repair the neglect of the colonial era,
stimulate economic recovery and improve social conditions. This was the message of
W. H. Macmillan, Lord Hailey and others and increasingly the Colonial office
50 Lord Hailey.An African Survey. London: Oxford University Press, 1938.51 For an excellent survey of Malinowskis work see James, Wendy. The Anthropologist as
Reluctant Imperialist. In Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, edited by T Asad. London:
Ithaca Press, 1973: 5069.52 Mair.Native Policies in Africa.53 Colonial Office, Advisory Committee on Native Education in Tropical Africa (ACNETA),
Educational Policy in British Tropical Africa. London: Colonial Office, 1924. Cmd. 2374.54 Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies (ACEC).Memorandum on The Education of
African Communities, Colonial No. 103. London: HMSO, 1935; ACEC.Mass Education in African
Society, Colonial No. 186. London: HMSO, 1944.
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itself.55 Arthur Creech Jones, a Labour MP who had kept the Colonial Office under
constant pressure for a more systematic approach to colonial development in the
1930s, was able to take these policies forward after 1946 when he became Secretary
of State for the Colonies.
However cautious the moves and however slow the pace, the emergent discourseof welfarism in the Labour Party could not be entirely denied in the colonial sphere,
any more than it could at Home. Such policies had increasingly to be reckoned with
in a context of unprecedented sensitivity to international, including American, crit-
icism of British colonial rule which could be detected by the end of the decade.56 It
was clear, as Havinden and Meredith point out, that the social conditions in the colo-
nies provided ammunition for Britains enemies, and the consequence was that
during the 1940s the Colonial Office achieved in wartime what was probably beyond
its reach in peacetime, that is a greatly enlarged measure of colonial development and
social service.57 And this led to a commitment to extend activities in the field of
education that had not been allowed in the 1929 Act. The detailed study of the strug-
gle for secondary education in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) by Trevor Coomb
provides an excellent insight into the emerging pressure from the Colonial Office on
a reluctant colonial government at this time regarding the provision of state-spon-
sored secondary education.58 This work reveals the tensions over educational policy
and welfare development between the colonies that were under the direct control of
the colonial office (the West African colonies, Tanganyika, Nyasaland etc.), those
that had settler legislatures but were subject to the constraints of a governor and the
colonial office (Kenya, Northern Rhodesia), and the relatively independent settler
governments of Southern Rhodesia and South Africa. As part of the new deal forthe African colonies wrought as part of the political, economic and social transition
that came with the Second World War, and the renewed emphasis on the significance
of developing secondary industry and a new class of modern sector workers, there was
an implication that the social welfare and education needs of the population would
have to be recognized.59
Implications for Welfare and Educational Policy in South Africa
From the 1930s onwards, social welfare activities in the Union of South Africa were
influenced greatly by developments in Europe and America as the state assumed
more and more responsibility for initiating and conducting social welfare services or
supporting voluntary welfare agencies of one kind or another in the context of the
worldwide Depression and the emergence of Keynesian economics. Although those
55 Constantine, The Making of British Colonial Developmental Policy, 232.56 Ibid., 232.57 Havinden and Meredith. Colonialism and Development, 204.58 Coombe, T. The Origins of Secondary Education in Zambia. Parts 13. African Social
Research, 4 and 5. Lusaka: University of Zambia, Institute for Social Research, 19671968.59 Freund, B. The Making of Contemporary Africa. London: Macmillan, 1984: 194199.
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services were predominantly in line with the policy of racial segregation and aimed at
the upliftment of poor whites, they gradually came also to have a wider impact on
social policy.
The National Conference on Social Work held in Johannesburg in 1936 was
attended by over a thousand delegates and set the tone for these initiatives. Theestablishment of a social welfare section in the Department of Labour in 1935 was
indicative of the emergence of state involvement. This was followed by the estab-
lishment of a separate Department of Social Welfare in 1937. The Joint Councils
and the South African Institute of Race Relations were instrumental in ensuring
that such welfare provision was in part extended to Africans, Coloureds and
Indians. The Secretary of Social Welfare announced in 1943 that a product of this
evolution in public thought has been the further recognition that social welfare is a
definite and important function of national government.60 This marked a signifi-
cant shift in policy, reflecting the trend already noted in Great Britain from the
1930s.
The South African Institute of Race Relations, established with the assistance
of the Carnegie Foundation in 1929, played a key role in these events. Its Handbook
of Race Relations in South Africa (1949)61 is an excellent, if much neglected, source of
data on welfare, health and education policy developments. It reports on a range of
welfare initiatives being promoted by the United Party government in the 1940s,
which promised a whole new welfare dispensation. When the subject of social security
came before parliament in 1944 the Social and Economic Planning Council asked the
government to consider the advisability of introducing a comprehensive programme
of legislative and administrative measures concerning the subjects of the provision ofemployment, social security, housing public health, nutrition and education, such a
programme to constitute the peoples charter as the outcome of the war.62 It recog-
nized that such extensive reforms could only be part of a comprehensive economic
plan that would ensure economic prosperity for the nation in general. Emerging at the
time that it did, such moves must be seen in the light of the Beveridge Report (1942)
which set out the blueprint for the welfare state in the UK after the Second World
War, and the rise of a tentative political lobby within the ruling party headed by
Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, Jan Hofmeyr, in support of welfare
reform.63
The tone of the Rheinallt Jones chapter on social welfare mirrors many of the global
debates of the twenty-first century.64 In recording and recommending initiatives
60Jones, J. D. Rheinallt. Social Welfare. In Handbook on Race Relations in South Africa, edited
by E Hellman. London: Oxford University Press, 1949: 413441.61 SAIRR (Oxford, 1949).62 Report of the Select Committee on Social Security, S.S. 10, 1944 cited by Jones. Social
Welfare, 421.63 Paton, A. Hofmeyr. Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1964.64 Legum, Margaret. It Doesnt Have to Be Like This: A New Economy for South Africa and the
World. Cape Town: Ampersand, 2002.
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relating to welfare it supports the view that a range of services is needed with regard
to social security, the establishment of a national health scheme, food subsidization
and the provision of housing. It is recognized that these moves would not in themselves
be able to eliminate poverty. It argues that that the only real solution to these problems
would be found if, parallel to welfare provision, a simultaneous increase be effectedin the output and earnings of the low income groups.65
In that context the question of educational provision is directly linked to the overall
plan to address poverty for all sectors of the population a significant break from the
dominant discourse of the 1920s and 1930s, which had often seen the problem from
the perspective of saving the poor whites through educational upliftment66 or
seeking to impose the harshest form of segregation in the field of education, which
would ensure the exclusion of blacks from direct competition with whites in the
labour market.67
In that context the issue of education and training policy was seen to be of the
utmost significance. Edgar Brookes had made a dramatic statement in this regard
as early as 1930 when he published his short monograph on Native Education in
South Africa.68 In this he challenged much of the conventional wisdom regarding
the topic contradicting his earlier position set out in Chapter XX of his classic
work on the History of Native Policy in South Africa, where he favoured the adap-
tationist policies of the Phelps Stokes reports and C. T. Loram in Natal.69 In the
later book he was concerned to emphasize that any attempt to frame a policy in
this field that treated blacks as having distinct needs fell short on political and
economic grounds. Whites would only punish themselves in the long run if they
deprived their fellow citizens of education or tried to promote a separate form ofeducation for them, as this would not only be blatantly unjust in the emerging
context of international politics but would prove to be politically and economically
irrational in the context of the emerging economy.
Although Brookes was in part concerned with justice, the debates of the 1930s
and 40s were framed more in classic liberal economic terms. In a manner quite
familiar to the policy discourses of the 1990s, educational provision was not solely
defended in terms of human rights but there was a distinct emphasis on the need for
a workforce that was globally competitive. Breaking with the established assump-
tions concerning the inevitability of colour-bar restrictions on the training of blacks
in technical and vocational skills, the Social and Economic Planning Council argued
that: the Union cannot allow itself to be exposed to a losing competitive struggle
65Jones. Social Welfare, 420.66 As seen in the Carnegie Commission Report of 1932. See Malherbe, E. G. Education and the
Poor White in South Africa: Report of the Carnegie Commission. Stellenbosch: Pro-Ecclesia, 1932.67 This was set out systematically for the first time in a government document in the Native
Economic Report of 1932 though it was not immediately implemented. UG 22-1932. Also see
Doxey, G. V. The Industrial Colour Bar in South Africa. Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1961.68 (Pretoria: van Schaik, 1930). See in particular Ch. VIII on Administrative and financial
difficulties.69 (Cape Town: Nasionale Pers, 1924).
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352 P. Kallaway
against the mentally-developed labour of Western nations, against the awakening
Eastern races, and even against other parts of Africa, by withholding adequate
educational facilities from the Non-European population. In that context it asked for
the provision of ten years of free education for most coloured, Indian and African
children by 1960.70This was an extremely radical position, especially coming as it did from govern-
ment quarters. It revealed the deep differences of approach that characterized the
United Party government, with its parallel commitment to racial segregation and
the reservation of many modern sector jobs for whites. It put forward a proposal to
extend the scope of African mass education and state support for such education,
while promoting a common curriculum for all. This was in some ways ahead of
the thinking in many British African colonies. It meant that for the first time
adequate funding for African education was being put on the table, at least in rela-
tion to urban areas. These views gained considerable credibility during the 1940s.
There is also evidence that government was contemplating a drive towards
vocational, technical and adult education to assist with the overall desire to
produce a more skilled and motivated workforce. Of particular significance in this
regard were the blueprints for education mapped out in the Commission of Enquiry
into Adult Education (the Eybers Commission) in 194571 and the Report of the
Commission of Enquiry into Technical and Vocational Education (the De Villiers
Commission) in 1948.72 In the event all of these initiatives were stillborn as the
1948 election swept the United Party from power and opened the way for the
apartheid era.
School Feeding as an Index of Welfare Policy
From the 1930s there was a clear change of tone with regard to welfare policy in the
West in an attempt to meet some of the social challenges highlighted by communism.
This was part of a shift to Keynesian economic policy in the context of the Great
Depression and its aftermath. In the UK this was demonstrated by a dramatic shift
towards the welfare state as part of post-Second World War reconstruction. In South
Africa, despite the continuation of segregationist politics, the collapse of the Fusion
government over the question of entry into the Second World War had the effect ofstrengthening reformist forces under the leadership of Jan Hofmeyr. There is clear
evidence that this led to an effort to extend welfare policies. These policies, which had
initially been launched in the context of poverty relief for poor whites, were now
tentatively extended to the whole population. The proposals for the expansion of
70 Second Report of the Social and Economic Planning Council, para. 8. Cited by Jones. Social
Welfare, 420.71 UG 35-1945 .72 UG 65-1945.
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welfare in South Africa during this period were to be found in the fields of state medi-
cal care,73 child welfare74 and educational reform.
A particular index of the attention given to these issues during the 1930s is to be
found in the area of school feeding, in which notions of welfare and school attendance
are joined. The Nutrition Committee of the British Empire was established by theColonial Office in 193675 and it paid considerable attention to issues of child nutrition
and the need for school feeding. I have not been able to trace critical studies of the
follow-up to this report. What is clear is the fact that the renewed initiatives regarding
the provision of school meals in wartime Britain provided a significant template for
welfare and education reform at the time. These reforms in welfare policy would seem
to have been a key influence on the development of Hofmeyrs policy in South Africa
from 1941. Though the initiative in South Africa was initially directed at poor whites,
the real significance of Hofmeyrs wartime move was that it did not hold to the traditional
racial barrier on welfare policy but made provision for school feeding for all pupils in
government schools. When it was launched it provided a landmark in welfare legislation
as it provided for European, Coloured and Native primary school children.76 These
meals were not intended to replace the childrens home meals but were to be regarded
as supplementary meals made from foodstuffs chosen for their value in terms of first
class proteins, vitamins and mineral salts, as these were judged to be the substances
most often missing from the meals the child gets at home. By 1945 the state expenditure
on school feeding was estimated at 600,000.77 This rose to 2,063,111 in 19471948
with nearly half of that amount being allocated for Natives. This amounted to some-
thing like twelve million meals a year or the feeding of something like 700,000 African
children the extension of one form of welfare provision to about 20% of the totalpopulation of African between the ages of five and fourteen.78
73 Marks, S., and N. Andersson. Industrialization, Rural Health and the 1944 National Health
Services Commission in South Africa. In The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa, edited by
S. Freidman & J. M. Janzen. Berkeley: UCLA Press, 1992, 131161; Gale, G. W. Health Services.
In Handbook on Race Relations in South Africa, edited by E. Hellman, 387412.74 An index of that reform can be calculated in the field of extended welfare services for children
at risk. See: Chisholm, L. Reformatories and Industrial Schools in South Africa: A Study of Colour,
Class and Gender, 18821939. Ph.D. diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 1989; Badroodien,
A. A History of Ottery School of Industries: Issues of Race, Welfare and Social Order in the period
19371968. Ph.D. diss., University of the Western Cape, 2001; Jones, Rheinallt, Social Welfare,
430, 434.75 See Report of the Economic Advisory Council (193839), Committee on Nutrition in the Colonial
Empire, BPP, Part I, Cmd. 6050, Part II, Cmd. 6051. CO 852/58/15282; CAB 58/199.76 The grants payable by government were as follows: 2d. per meal per pupil (one meal per
school day); an initial grant of 5s. for essential equipment and accommodation; 1s. per pupil per
annum for the replacement of equipment.77 Gordon-Brown, A. The South and East African Year Book and Guide. London: Sampson Low,
Marston & Co, 1948: 5354; Jones. Social Welfare, 433; also see Kallaway, P. Policy Challenges
for Education in the New South Africa: The Case for School Feeding in the Context of Social and
Economic Reconstruction. Transformation 31 (1996): 124.78 Hellman, E., Handbook on Race Relations, 16.
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This was an extremely important indication of welfare policy development which
followed the trend that had been established in the context of the development of the
Welfare State in the UK where school meals had become part of the provision of mass
schooling by the 1940s. Such provision was not widespread in the African colonies
but in South Africa these moves were hailed by many as the beginning of a new initia-tive in social policy. They seemed to promise a new era in welfare and new directions
for education and training.
Some Conclusions
This work indicates ways in which elements of welfare policy manifested themselves
in British Colonial Africa and South Africa in the years prior to 1948 and indicates
aspects of policy that would seem to have great relevance to the present time. The
tensions around welfare policy and education which emerged internationally as a
result of the Great Depression and the advent of Keynesian economics were also
reflected in the African context. Taken together these shifts in welfare and education
policy at a key moment of change in the politics of the twentieth century would seem
to indicate that some of our general conceptions regarding the role of education in
African colonial history need to be re-examined. The stereotyped vision of education
as a complement to imperial economic policy simply does not hold water for the
simple reason that there was no single model of economic growth or educational
policy for the British colonies in the twentieth century. Such policy as there was orig-
inated less in clear strategic directives from Whitehall than from empirical decisions
made locally.79 The point needs to be stressed that it was only from the late 1930sthat the idea of the state replacing mission control of education was seriously mooted.
Even then the weak colonial state was usually in no position to provide a definitive
policy framework, comprehensive access or a standardized curriculum.
Research cited earlier conducted by Stephen Constantine (1984) and Havinden and
Meredith (1993) demonstrates that there was a complex play of politics in relation to
the formulation of imperial social and development policy. From the early 1930s this
policy was contested both in the forum of home politics and in the increasingly
confrontational colonial contest between business interests, nationalist movement,
settler elites and the imperial government. Out of that situation came an embryonic
vision of a new colonial order that embraced aspects of the welfare state. In the post-
Second World War era there were a host of policy initiatives in the welfare, health and
education fields to hastily provide the fundamentals of such services before the moment
of independence arrived. Welfare policies thought suitable for postwar Europe and the
Marshall Plan were to provide the backdrop to policy discussion of the decolonization
era. Nationalist programmes everywhere embraced aspects of welfare policies and
these had to be accommodated in the plans for policy development.80
79 Whitehead. Education in British Colonial Dependencies, 72.80 Pearce, R. D. The Turning Point in African British Colonial Policy 19381948. London: Frank
Cass, 1982.
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Paedagogica Historica 355
Within the context of such policies the question of educational reform assumed a
significant role, both with regard to access to schooling and curriculum reform to
equip the citizens for democratic society and skill the workers needed for the massive
growth in industrialization anticipated. These initiatives were embodied in the 1944
Education (Butler) Act in Britain. To what extent such welfare and educationalreform impacted on British Colonial Africa is still not sufficiently researched but there
are clear indications of a shifting focus of declared policy. The Colonial Welfare and
Development Acts (1940 and 1945) finally consolidated the policy initiatives that
been germinating in the previous decade but the question of implementation
remained vague. In education the publication of the Colonial Office papers onMass
Education for African Society (1944) and the Report of the Commission on Higher
Education in the Colonies (1945) complemented the Butler Act.
The history of South African education has usually been viewed in total isolation
from the history of African colonial education. There is no single volume since the
Phelps Stokes Commissions reports (1922,1924), and A. V. Murrays (1929) The
School in the Bush that has considered the issue of South African educational develop-
ment in the context of the growth of colonial education in Africa. This makes little
sense as missionaries, philanthropists and government officials participated in
missionary conferences and educational debates where their shared understandings
of these issues were communicated and used to frame policy. Until the era of apart-
heid the clear separation of the history of education in African and South African
contexts would not have been conceivable. The policies followed for African educa-
tion in both areas were essentially shaped at the same forge.
What is interesting about the 1940s in South Africa is that the war and the adventof the United Party government did give some opportunity for alternative forces to
emerge that aligned the government in part with broader notions of welfare and
development internationally, even if these policies were simply added onto the segre-
gationist policy of an earlier era, which was to prevail in the long term. This article
has attempted to demonstrate how these links were made and how such policies
attempted to grapple with the complex issues of social policy in an emergent indus-
trial economy. Prior to the election of 1948 and the advent of the apartheid era there
were a variety of initiatives aimed at the promotion of policy reform in the above
areas. These proposals seem to provide an extremely significant, if neglected, foun-
dation for contemporary policy investigations, which seek to reverse the pernicious
effects of40 Lost Years81 of apartheid dogma. The neglect of that significant heritage
of policy development at the present time can only weaken our understanding of
policy needs in the post-apartheid era.
81 OMeara, D. Forty Lost Years: The Apartheid State and the Politics of the National Party,
19481994. London: James Currey, 1996.
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Appendix 1: Welfare and Education Initiatives in Colonial Africa and
South Africa: 18901948
Dates Britain British Africa South Africa
From late 19thC DRC welfareschemes/state support (e.g.
Kakamas)
191418 First World War
1917 C.T. Loram, Native Education in
South Africa
1920s Phelps Stokes Commissions on
Education in Africa
1925 DEPRESSION ACNETA Educational Policy in
British Tropical Africa
Jeanes Schools in East & Central
Africa
1929 Colonial Development Act1929 A.V. Murray, School in the
Bush
1932 Carnegie Commission on Poor
Whites (SA)
Native Economic Commission
1935 Memo on Education in African
Communities. No 103
Inter-territorial Jeanes
Conference (Salisbury,
S. Rhodesia)
19356 Inter-Dept Commission
on Native Education
1936 Nutritions Committee of
the British Empire1937 Report on Higher Education
in E Africa
1939 Second World War
1940 UK Colonial Development &
Welfare Act
1941 School Feeding policy in
South Africa
1941 Ottery School of Industries
established.
1942 Beveridge Report
1943 Report onMass Education in
African SocietyNutrition Committee the Br
Empire
1943 Report of the Commission
on Adult Education
1944 Select Committee Report
on Social Security
1944 Inter Dept Report on
Common Social Security
1944 National Health Services
Commission
1945 Report of the Commission on
Higher Educ ation in the Colonies
1948 Report on Education for
Citizenship in Africa
1948 De Villiers Commission
on Technical and VocationalEducation in South Africa