Linda Chisholm, Between Worlds: German Missionaries and the Transition from Mission to Bantu Education in South Africa

Abstract

This is an ambitious book which focuses on the period from the inter-war years to the
implementation of Bantu Education in the early 1950s, although in passing it touches on
the entire colonial period that dates back to the 1800s. Chisholm’s work reveals the
many ways in which the unique historical beginnings of western education and the
implementation of Bantu Education in South Africa were more complex and
complicated than simply a racial analysis of the white colonizer conquering and
socializing the African through education. In this book, Chisholm situates the mission in
its broader Lutheran context and discusses differences between them over their
educational politics. She further explores how power relations shifted between the
mission, the state, and communities and how the mission’s influence was gradually and
differentially eroded in Natal and the Transvaal. Finally, she examines the politics of
continuities and changes in curricular, medium of instruction and textbooks in schools
and teacher training.