Lecture at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago, the Northeast Workshop on African Studies, and the African Studies Association. Karen Ijumba, Jennie Miller, Sam Appel, and Mariana Arjona Soberon all played critical roles in helping me manage this material and shape it into presentable form.
I am fortunate that colleagues and friends across continents and campuses have contributed to this work and the living that produced it. In South Africa, Cedric Nunn, Elza Miles, Joey Kok (who helped so much with translations!), Berno Schneider, Anitra Nettleton, Laura Phillips, Jacob Dlamini, Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi, Achille Mbembe, Nafisa Essop Sheik, Stephen Sparks, Natasha Erlank, Juliette Leeb-du Toit, Andries Bezuidenhout, Irma DuPlessis, Brown Maaba, Mwelela Cele, Sarah Emily Duff, Shireen Ally, Thembisa Waetjen, Goolam Vahed, Simphiwe Ngwane, Omar Badsha, Clive Glaser, Keith Breckenridge, Catherine Burns, Khosi Xaba, Obenewa Amponsah, Nkosinathi Biko, Julie Parle, Vanessa Noble, Councilor Thulani Shabalala, and so many others were critical interlocutors and friends. While writing this book, I lost my friend and mentor Mbulelo Mzamane; I treasure the memory of describing this project to him when last we met.
This book was conceived and written during a period of personal and professional transitions. The project developed first at Cornell University, and I am grateful to colleagues there who offered advice and encouragement. I need especially to note Salah Hassan, who took the time to tutor me on the history of twentieth-century African art. Support for my initial research was provided by the Society for the Humanities and the Institute for the Social Sciences, both at Cornell.
Since 2011, I have been fortunate to call both Brooklyn and Yale home (with plenty of Metro North in between). I’m grateful to the Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies and the Whitney Humanities Center for supporting my research, as well as to the latter’s Hilles Publication Fund for helping defray the costs of producing this book. A hearty thank you to Ian Shapiro for his support, again and again. Colleagues at Yale have been generous with their time and suggestions; I am grateful to Anne Eller, David Blight, Paul Sabin, Kate Ezra, George Chauncey, Paul Freedman, Francesca Trivellato, Alejandra Dubcovsky, Rohit De, Julie Stephens, Jenifer Klein, Jennifer Van Vleck, Jenni Allen, Albert Laguna, Ned Blackhawk, Rosie Bsheer, Laura Engelstein, Greta LaFleur, Mike McGovern, Katie Lofton, Naomi Lamoureaux, Steph Newell, Louisa Lombard, Kate Baldwin, Jonathan Wyrtzen, Joanna Radin, Michael Cappello, Chris Udry, Richard Anderson, Joshua Rubin, Matthew Keaney, Samuel Severson, Efe Igor, Thuto Thipe, Keri Lambert, Nikita Bernardi, Py Killen, and many others. I offer special thanks to Bob Harms, Alan Mikhail, and Ben Kiernan, each of whom read the manuscript carefully and offered vital interventions. Thanks also to the amazing staff in both the History Department and the Macmillan Center. I am grateful to Dana Lee, Denise Scott, Caryn Carson, Liza Joyner, and especially Lina Chan for her patience with my inept bookkeeping. Beyond New Haven, I have been lucky to be able to stay connected with old colleagues and mentors and to develop new networks. For advice, critiques, assistance, and camaraderie, my thanks to (in no particular order) Tom Spear, Clifton Crais, Jim Sweet, Neil Kodesh, Mark Hunter, Johanna Crane, Priya Lal, Meghan Healy-Clancy, Jill Kelly, Liz Thornberry, Khwezi Mkhize, Anatoly Pinsky, Paul Landau, Laura Murphy, Rian Thum, Jon Soske, Andy Ivaska, Brian Rutledge, Leslie Hadfield, Emily Callaci, Tyler Fleming, Carina Ray, Lauren Jarvis, Robert Vinson, Minkah Makalani, John Mason, Kim Miller, Naaborko Sackeyfio-Lenoch, Elizabeth Perrill, Shannen Hill, Kathryn De Luna, Kristin Phillips, Pier Larson, Butch Ware, Michael Panzer, T. J. Tallie, Marissa Moorman, Joshua Cohen, Chris Lee, Dennis Laumann, Mamadou Diouf, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Sean Hanretta, Noah Tamarkin, Jon Glassman, Jeremy Foster, Michelle Moyd, Jeremy Braddock, Mukoma wa Ngugi, Suman Seth, Mindy Smith, Guy Ortolano, Jenny Mann, and many others. Working with Ohio University Press has been a comfortable homecoming in itself; my thanks to the entire team, including Rick Huard, Beth Pratt, Gill Berchowitz, Nancy Basmajian, Joan Sherman, Samara Rafaert, two anonymous readers, and, of course, Jean Allman, Allen Isaacman, and Derek Peterson. Portions of this book were previously published as “Two Stories about Art, Education, and Beauty in Twentieth-Century South Africa,” American Historical Review 118, no. 5 (2013).
Book one was bylined Ithaca, book two Brooklyn, and it is better for it. This commuter’s gratitude to the New York City Africanist community overflows. I am grateful for the time, ideas, inspiration, and support of Julie Livingston, Fred Cooper, Hlonipha Mokoena (whom NYC misses terribly), Shobana Shankar, Ben Talton, and Greg Mann. Frequent lunches with Sean Jacobs have sharpened my conception of this book and the politics it articulates. Through him, I have been able to learn so much from the wider Africa Is a Country community, of which I am proud to be a part. Friends and family in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, California, and beyond have stepped in to help Katy and me walk the razor’s edge of two jobs, unforgiving schedules, little kids, and a dog. I’m so thankful to the grandparents, neighbors, nannies, babysitters, and teachers who made this possible.
I was fortunate to write most of this book in the home I share with Katy and Liya, while listening to new addition Micah learn first to crawl, then walk, then run (and fall) upstairs. As a historian, I cannot help but be keenly aware of the passage of time; I lost my last grandparent while writing this book; I welcomed my nephew Rafa Henry; and I watched my baby girl become a prototeenager who dances, swims, and loves to build and draw. She will be able to read these words, which freaks me out. Time passes and things change, but Liya Reba and Micah Leon always bring me joy beyond words.
And to Katy . . . again, words just will not do. This book began with us together in Johannesburg and Durban and continued with us together in Ithaca and Brooklyn. It began in school and ended with you at work, so able, so passionate and skilled and smart. It has not always—or often?—been easy, but I believe with all my heart that this process has been and will be worth it. Together, we keep the balls in the air, across cities, train lines, and continents. Our family is a refuge of love and joy. Everything I have ever written has been for you, but this book is truly yours. I dedicate it to our lives together, to our future, and to you, my love.
Brooklyn, NY
May 2016
PROLOGUE
Handwork
IN 1926, Fred Sithole was a teacher at the Lurani Government School, outside Bulwer in the Union of South Africa’s Natal Province. Lurani was one of a few dozen schools that the Natal provincial government ran without the aid of the country’s ubiquitous Christian missions. In the years since World War I, Natal’s education department had embarked on an ambitious program of school building and curriculum overhaul. The percentage of African students who attended schools was small—only between 7 and 15 percent during the 1920s—but those who were in schools experienced new pedagogical imperatives that spoke of education for the sake of “life,” not just for learning. Such new ideas grew out of decades of debate about the role Africans were to play in South Africa’s schools and the colonial economy. These debates would likely have seemed quite abstract from both the teachers’ and the students’ perspectives. For Sithole and his students, new educational theories boiled down to the real, material fact that children devoted at least an hour of their school day to manual work.1
In his presentation to his fellow teachers in Bulwer, Sithole noted that some schools did a good deal more, citing one in which “two-thirds of the time is devoted to Manual Work.” He was not suggesting such a dramatic overhaul for Lurani, even if his research indicated that their students would have supported such measures. Like many of his colleagues, Sithole had been educated under the old dispensation, when missionary education had focused on classical instruction—primarily the three Rs, which he referred to as “school subjects.” But that was then; now, in the mid-1920s, he surveyed his students about whether they preferred to spend their time on school subjects or on manual work. Their response was unequivocal: “I think Manual Work must be given more time,” wrote one. “Between these two, myself I choose Manual Work,” added another, reasoning that school subjects “will not help us much when we are old. Manual Work makes us better people.” Manual work took some of the mystery
