'Doing a missionary hard work in the black hole of Calcutta': African women teachers pioneering a profession in the Cape and Natal, 1880-1950

Abstract

In 1917, the typical teacher in black schools in South Africa was supposedly a girl of nineteen with one year of training beyond the elementary syllabus. Lily Moya seemingly confirmed the stereotype in 1950, congratulating herself at sixteen for 'doing a Missionary hard work' in a Transkei primary school, while not really enjoying teaching 'in the black hole of Calcutta'. The article explores whether such youthful desperation was by then more atypical than widespread. After some glimpses of Cape female teacher trajectories from the 1880s and 1890s, periodical sources from the 1920s and 1930s are analysed. Both the magazine of St Matthew's training institution in the eastern Cape and inspection reports in the Natal Native Teachers' Journal from the same era suggest the gradual building up of a more confident, coherent, established workforce of female teachers in the inter-war years. The subsequent phase, when apartheid planners deliberately intensified the feminisation of African primary school teaching, awaits further research.