The A C V V and Afrikaner Education

Such a policy would have had educational implications. From before Union there had been attempts in the Cape to enforce the attendance of white children at school, and immediately after Union in 1910, a committee of the Cape Provincial Council inquired into the problem of attendance in the poverty-ridden northwest Cape where the population was highly dispersed.^[88] In the Cape there were two approaches: one was to set up single-teacher day schools to meet the needs of a few farms, which had the advantage of limiting the demands on daily transport; the other was to develop 'central' schools outside of town, a device to keep children in the countryside, but to achieve some concentration of pupils—50 to 100—by building hostels where children were to receive some agricultural training and to work on the school farm in the afternoon, hopefully to supply the hostel with its vegetables and dairy products. Two such schools were established in the Cradock district, one twelve miles to the west at Kaalplaats founded in 1916, the other thirty miles to the east at Elandsdrif and founded in 1927. In addition, in 1930, at Marlow, six miles north of Cradock, an agricultural school for boys was founded, presumably to train the skilled labour, and particularly the foremen, for South Africa's white owned and managed farms. In all three cases, the cause had been advanced by Izak B. van Heerden, the owner of Kaalplaats, a farm of 3084 morgen (8000 acres), and member of a genuinely notable family which had been granted farms when two of their holdings at Cradock had been expropriated in 1812 to provide for the new town.^[89]

A further device had been used—the urban hostel—to give children access to the even larger schools in the town. In Cradock were two Goeie Hoop (Good Hope) hostels, one, Toekoms (Future), for boys; another, at Cypressenhof, for

girls. These two hostels, extremely spartan institutions, made possible the attendance of boys and girls at the Wilson School where no fees were charged but education stopped at Standard 6 for boys, the end of primary school, and Standard 8 for girls. The boys' hostel was run by a committee of men from the Kerkraad (the all-male church council), and the girls' hostel by the ACVV, both of them subsidized by the Cape Education Department. In 1926 an inspector commented with some asperity on the contrast between the girls' hostel—excellently run—and the boys'. The crestfallen Kerkraad invited the ACVV to take the boys' hostel over, which they agreed to do.^[90] But when the Elandsdrif central school opened in 1927, the Kerkraad, with the support of the School Board and the Cape Provincial Administration, appealed to the ACVV to close the boys' hostel down because they feared that there would not be enough boys. The ACVV bestuur refused: there were, they said rather tartly, enough poor whites to go round.^[91]

Behind this debate was not only a difference about the nature of the future facing Afrikaners, i.e. an urban or a rural one. There was another, related to the preservation of jobs for whites. At first, Afrikaner men and women in this debate in Cradock looked to place whites in jobs already being done by blacks and coloureds. In the early 1920s, the ACVV had planned to open a school of domestic science for girls and later received some land from the Town Council for it.^[92] Thus in 1926, Elizabeth Jordaan appealed to white employers to use Afrikaner girls as domestic servants, especially as nannies, in a straightforwardly racist appeal not to leave the raising of white children to blacks.^[93] The whole 'civilized labour' policy carried within it an implied recognition that Africans were competitive with whites and involved the actual displacement of blacks in jobs they already held. In agriculture, this meant that the employment of whites on farms would at least be stabilized, perhaps even expanded, at the expense of blacks.

The women of the Cradock ACVV seem to have seen earlier than the men that education for an urban future in fields then largely held by English-speaking whites was the more realistic and sensible policy. Specifically, they realized that there was no future in South Africa for the white nanny, in town or country, except in the homes of the very wealthy. Whatever jobs were available in the countryside for young white males who were not in line to inherit a farm, there was virtually nothing available for young white women.^[94] Young white men on farms were seldom placed in the ambiguous position which faced the white nanny in the farm kitchen. As one speaker protested at the ACVV Congress in Cradock, in April, 1926: '[white domestic servants] are treated on the same footing of equality and during the lunch hour are forced to have their lunch in the same room [as non-Europeans] or go into the street'.^[95]

This muted conflict over education policy did not take place in a vacuum. The women of Cradock were members of a Cape-wide organization which was linked with the Afrikaner women's organizations in other provinces, and of the Vroue Nasionale Party (Women's National Party).^[96] The Carnegie Commission in 1932 drew attention to the far greater mobility of young women than young men out of the rural areas, especially from the 1920s onwards; frequently it was daughters who preceded the males in the shift of a family to town.^[97] Furthermore, the Commission noted the strong preference of young women for factory work over domestic service because of the shorter working week, and the greater freedom in leisure time.^[98] From the mid-1920s, these married women in small towns showed an interest in, indeed anxiety over, the fate of young women in the cities, and became aware of the difficulty of finding work for the young women of rural

origin, who were not well qualified for nursing or for teaching, and who even lacked the skills for adequate housekeeping. By 1924 the ACVV had appointed its first full-time social worker and a leading member, M.E. Rothmann, was a member of the Carnegie Commission on the poor whites which reported in 1932.^[99]

The new Nationalist government in 1924 faced major problems in education largely because of the impending breakdown of the system which left the financing of education to the provinces. To relieve them, the Union Department of Education, established in 1910 to look after education other than primary and secondary, had taken over technical and vocational education in 1923, and in 1925 expanded its role to include agricultural schools for boys.^[100] The policies adopted by the Nationalist government provided for intervention by the central government in local communities through subsidies for 'technical' and 'vocational' education, which included shorthand, typing and bookkeeping—fields important for women. And it may have helped the cause in Cradock that in 1927 Dr S.F.N. Gie, Elizabeth Jordaan's son-in-law, became Secretary for Education.^[101]

Coincidentally or not, in 1927 the Cradock ACVV turned its attention to the founding of a handelskool, a commercial school, initially offering evening classes to give those already in clerical work a chance to improve their qualifications in shorthand, typing and bookkeeping.^[102] There is some evidence that some of the impetus for this school came from the fact that the only commercial education available in Cradock was at the Dominican convent for white girls: in December, 1928 the Cradock ACVV passed a resolution for its coming Congress drawing attention to the ' Roomse gevaar' ('the Roman danger').^[103] The school opened in mid-1929 and by August it had 30 pupils, and 'full time day' as well as evening classes.^[104]

In general then, the ACVV devoted its major energies to the future of poor Afrikaner youth, helping them to get to school in town, providing for commercial education and for some feeding of children at school. Presumably, in school feeding the ACVV had its eye particularly on the poor children at the Wilson School who were not in the ACVV hostels but who lived in Cradock, and were poorly fed.^[105] The activities in relation to the children went further: the ACVV pressed for state medical assistance to the poor; arranged with Dr Stewart, a specialist in Port Elizabeth, for free eye testing; persuaded Gert Jordaan, Elizabeth's husband, to provide transport; and paid for the spectacles.^[106] It is important to emphasize that all this work on behalf of the children was not done with an explicit and public ethnic objective. The fact that schools and school feeding were subsidized would have precluded that. But because of the structure of white poverty in Cradock and its district, the beneficiaries were almost entirely Afrikaans-speaking.

This is, then, the story of a group of bourgeois women, urban and rural, taking on some of the problems of poverty within their own ethnic group, reaching across the gulf separating the poor from the well-to-do, and adopting policies which in retrospect appear to have been appropriate to the ends they had in view. Those ends were not only the mitigation of the consequences of landlessness and poverty: the ACVV was concerned with the preservation of 'people, church and language', and their activities contributed to the heightened sense of ethnic awareness that at all levels of Afrikaner society was so crucial in the election of 1948. It was a maternalism that concentrated on their 'own', a concentration which necessarily implied attitudes to the 'others' in South Africa; it is to that broader context that we now turn.