University of KwaZulu-Natal on behalf of the South African Education Research Association
Abstract
Linda Chisholm, one of the most talented educational researchers in South Africa, has published on a great variety of topics over the past thirty years and has been one of the most prolific commentators on educational policy and practice. Her most recent endeavour relating to the history of the Hermannsberg Mission Society and its educational involvement in South Africa over a period of a century and a half is therefore to be applauded as a unique endeavour to engage with the complexities and ambiguities of educational policy and practice in a colonial context. It focuses on the continuities and ruptures that were presented to SouthAfrican black education from the 1950s by Bantu Education. This is therefore an important contribution to the literature on the South African history of education to set in the context of the impressive relatively recent collections edited by Hanns Lessing et al. (2012, 2015 on German Protestant missions in Southern Africa and Richard Elphick’s definitive work on Protestant Missions (2012). As Chisholm demonstrates through a careful use of previously neglected sources in Germany and South Africa, this is a complex story that challenges manyof our easy preconceptions about colonial education and it defies any simple categorization of missionaries as agents of colonialism
