‘Daisyfield in the crucible’: Afrikaners, education and poor whites in Southern Rhodesia, 1911–1948

ABSTRACT

This article examines the history of Daisyfield School, an Afrikaner children's orphanage and school in Southern Rhodesia. The existence of an Afrikaner school in a self-consciously British settler colony represented a distinctive settler project within the settler state, one supported by the school’s transnational connections and one whose aims often conflicted with the state. These aims centred around the rehabilitation of poor white children, and we demonstrate how non-state institutions engaged in far-reaching interventions into the lives of children identified as poor whites. We also show how the children who were recipients of this treatment could resist it by crossing social and geographical boundaries. Challenges to Daisyfield’s regime produced a kind of solidarity between the school and state to suppress this challenge as the existence of poor whites threatened racial boundaries in the colony.

KEYWORDS:

• Zimbabwe
• education
• settler colonialism
• Afrikaners
• poverty
• poor whites

Acknowledgements

We are indebted to the late Ivo Mhike for his advice when we began the work on this article. We would also like to thank Ruhan Fourie for his assistance and the journal’s anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of our article and generous comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Gustav Hendrich, “Help ons bou” – Die Daisyfield-inrigting en die impak van sendingwerk en godsdienstige bearbeiding in ‘n weeshuisomgewing in Rhodesië (1910–1948)’, New Contree 60 (2010): 2.

2 Duncan Money and Danelle van Zyl-Hermann, ‘Introduction’, in Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa, ed. Duncan Money and Danelle van Zyl-Hermann (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 11.

3 For an overview of the conquest and early aspirations for this territory to be a colony for British settlers, see A.S. Mlambo, A History of Zimbabwe (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014), 36–51.

4 George Bishi, ‘Immigration and Settlement of “Undesirable” Whites in Southern Rhodesia, c.1940s–1960s’, in Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa, ed. Duncan Money and Danelle van Zyl-Hermann (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 59–77.

5 D. Lowry, ‘Rhodesia 189–1980 “The Lost Dominion”’, in Settlers and Expatriates: Britons over the Seas, ed. R. Bickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 124; J.M. Mackenzie, ‘Southern Rhodesia and Responsible Government’, Rhodesian History, 9 (1978): 26.

6 A.S. Mlambo, White Immigration into Rhodesia: From Occupation to Federation (Harare: University of Zimbabwe Press, 2002); Kate Law, Gendering the Settler State: White Women, Race, Liberalism and Empire in Colonial Rhodesia, 1950–1980 (London: Routledge, 2016); Ushehwedu Kufakurinani, Elasticity in Domesticity: White Women in Rhodesian Zimbabwe, 1890–1979 (Leiden: Brill, 2019); Nicola Ginsburgh, Class, Work and Whiteness: Race and settler colonialism in Southern Rhodesia, 1919–79 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020).

7 A.S. Mlambo, ‘Building a White Man’s Country: Aspects of White Immigration into Rhodesia up to World War II’, Zambezia XXV, no. ii (1998): 123–46; A.S. Mlambo, ‘“Some are More White than Others”: Racial Chauvinism as a Factor in Rhodesian Immigration Policy, 1890 to 1963’, Zambezia XXVII, no. ii (2000): 139–60; Josiah Brownell, ‘The Hole in Rhodesia’s Bucket: White Emigration and the End of Settler Rule’, Journal of Southern African Studies 34, no. 3 (2008): 591–10; Ellen Boucher, ‘The Limits of Potential: Race, Welfare, and the Interwar Extension of Child Emigration to Southern Rhodesia’, Journal of British Studies 48, no. 4 (2009): 914–34; Baxter Tavuyanago, Tasara Muguti and James Hlongwana, ‘Victims of the Rhodesian Immigration Policy: Polish Refugees from the Second World War’, Journal of Southern African Studies 38, no. 4 (2012): 951–65. Bishi, ‘“Undesirable” Whites in Southern Rhodesia’.

8 Rebecca Swartz, Education and Empire Children, Race and Humanitarianism in the British Settler Colonies, 1833–1880 (Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019).

9 This conflict was not new. Sarah Duff has pointed out that in the 1870s the DRC and state officials in the Cape Colony had diverging views on education and poor white children. S.E. Duff, Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony: Dutch Reformed Church Evangelicalism and Colonial Childhood, 1860–1895 (Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), 2.

10 This conflation was rooted in the rural depression that pushed many Afrikaners from the land in the late nineteenth century. Moreover, the supposed link with poverty and backwardness was a convenient justification for Britain’s conquest of the region in the South African War. There is a rich literature on ‘poor whites’ and ‘poor whiteism’ in Southern Africa: Rob Morrell, ed., White but Poor; Essays on the History of Poor Whites in Southern Africa 1880–1940 (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 1992); Tifanny Willoughby-Herard, ‘South Africa's Poor Whites and Whiteness Studies: Afrikaner Ethnicity, Scientific Racism, and White Misery’, New Political Science 29, no. 4 (2007): 479–500; Jeremy Seekings, ‘“Not A Single White Person Should Be Allowed to Go Under”: Swartgevaar and the Origins of South Africa’s Welfare State, 1924–1929’, The Journal of African History 48, no. 3 (2007): 375–94; Lindie Koorts, ‘“The Black Peril would not exist if it were not for a White Peril that is a hundred times greater”: D.F. Malan’s Fluidity on Poor Whiteism and Race in the Pre-Apartheid Era, 1912–1939’, South African Historical Journal 65, no. 4 (2013): 555–76.

11 Abosede George, Making Modern Girls: A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014), 8.

12 Carol Summers, ‘Boys, Brats and Education: Reproducing White Maturity in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1915–1935’, Settler Colonial Studies 1, no. 1 (2011): 132–53. Sarah E. Duff, ‘Saving the Child to Save the Nation: Poverty, Whiteness and Childhood in the Cape Colony, c.1870–1895’, Journal of Southern African Studies 37, no. 2 (2011): 229–45

13 For the latter, see Rob Morrell, From Boys to Gentlemen: Settler Masculinities in Colonial Natal, 1880–1920 (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 2001); Rebecca Swartz, ‘“Good citizens and gentlemen”: Gender, Reputation and Identity at the South African College, 1880–1910’, South African Historical Journal 68, no. 4 (2016): 517–35.

14 Duff, Changing Childhoods, 137.

15 Linda Chisholm, ‘Class and Color in South African Youth Policy: The Witwatersrand, 1886–1910’, History of Education Quarterly 27, no. 1 (1987): 1–27. Linda Chisholm, ‘Reformatories and Industrial Schools in South Africa a Study in Class, Colour and Gender, 1882–1939’ (PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1989).

16 Jennifer Muirhead and Sandra Swart, ‘The Whites of the Child?: Race and Class in the Politics of Child Welfare in Cape Town, c. 1900–1924’, The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 8, no. 2 (2015): 229–53.

17 Will Jackson, ‘Immoral Habits: Delinquent White Girls in 1920s Cape Town and the Distribution of Blame’, South African Historical Journal 72, no. 1 (2020): 29–50.

18 Ivo Mhike, ‘Intersections of Sexual Delinquency and Sub-Normality: White Female Juvenile Delinquency in Southern Rhodesia, 1930s–c.1950’, Settler Colonial Studies 8, no. 4 (2018): 575–93. See also, Ivo Mhike, ‘Rhodesian state paternalism and the white working-class family, 1930s–1950s’, in Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa, ed. Duncan Money and Danelle van Zyl-Hermann (Abingdon, Routledge, 2020), 42–58.

19 Gustav Hendrich, ‘Allegiance to the Crown: Afrikaner Loyalty, Conscientious Objection, and the Enkeldoorn Incident in Southern Rhodesia during the Second World War’, War & Society 31, no. 3 (2012): 227–43.

20 Shirley Frances Pretorius, ‘The history of the Daisyfield orphanage, Bothashof Church School and Eaglesvale School between 1911 and 1991’ (MA thesis, UNISA, 1992).

21 Gustav Hendrich, “Help ons bou” – Die Daisyfield-inrigting en die impak van sendingwerk en godsdienstige bearbeiding in ‘n weeshuisomgewing in Rhodesië (1910–1948)’, New Contree, no. 60 (2010): 1–20.

22 Sarah Duff, Children and Youth in African History (Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), 13.

23 Gracie Davie, Poverty Knowledge in South Africa: A Social History of Human Science (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015), 42–3.

24 Pretorius, ‘History of the Daisyfield Orphanage’, 32–4.

25 As in settler states in the region, white poverty was seen as something unusual and threatening to the racial order, while African poverty became normalised as a kind of natural state of affairs. Muirhead and Swart, ‘Whites of the Child’, 236.

26 The British Government retained control over foreign policy and had a veto over legislation that might negatively affect Africans. Mlambo, History of Zimbabwe, 105–6.

27 David Kenrick, Decolonisation, Identity and Nation in Rhodesia, 1964–1979: A race against time (Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2019), 32–33. Gustav Hendrich estimated that Afrikaners constituted almost 25% of the total white population in 1944. Hendrich, ‘Allegiance to the Crown’, 230.

28 Mlambo, ‘Rhodesian Immigration Policy’, 149–50.

29 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006), 56.

30 Bob Challis, ‘Education and Southern Rhodesia’s poor whites, 1890–1930’, in White but Poor; Essays on the History of Poor Whites in Southern Africa 1880–1940 ed. Rob Morrel (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 1992), 162.

31 Boucher, ‘The Limits of Potential’, 926.

32 Southern Rhodesia House of Assembly Debates, 29 October 1937.

33 Shirley Francis Pretorious, ‘A history of the Dutch Reformed Church in Zimbabwe with a special reference to the Chinhoyi congregation’, (PhD thesis, University of South Africa, 1999), 87–107.

34 Ibid., 16–17.

35 Though Tiffany Willoughy-Heard reminds us that to remain aware that the Orange Free State was ‘Afrikaner in terms of political and state power but never in terms of the actual constitution of labour, demography, land ownership, and social make-up’. Willoughby-Herard, ‘South Africa’s Poor Whites’, 483.

36 Eyrie, Eaglesvale, 2001, 6; Eyrie, Eaglesvale High, 2002, 2.

37 Hendrich, ‘Help ons bou’, 13; Daisyfield Orphanage, Commemoration of the Twenty-First Anniversary of the Institution 1914–1935 (Bulawayo: Philpott and Collins, 1935), 2.

38 The Eyrie, 1998, 36; Pretorius, ‘History of the Daisyfield Orphanage’, 37–39.

39 J.S. Blackwell, A brief history of European education in Rhodesia (Bulawayo: Argus Print & Publishing, 1918), 5.

40 Daisyfield Orphanage, Commemoration, 2.

41 The Eyrie, Eaglesvale High, 2002, 2.

42 The exception, of course, is dependence on Africans who were employed in care roles for white children.

43 P. Stigger, ‘Minute substance versus substantial fear: white destitution and the shaping of policy in Rhodesia in the 1890s’, in White but Poor; Essays on the History of Poor Whites in Southern Africa 1880–1940, ed. Rob Morrell (Pretoria: UNISA Press, 1992), 130–50.

44 Will Jackson, ‘An Unmistakable Trace of Colour: Racializing Children in Segregation-Era Cape Town, 1908–1933’, Past & Present, 238, no. 1 (2018): 165–195. Mhike, ‘Intersections of Sexual Delinquency’.

45 Daisyfield Orphanage, Commemoration, 1.

46 Eyrie, 1998, 35.

47 National Archives of Zimbabwe, Harare (hereafter NAZ) S246/231, Department of Education, Southern Rhodesia to Colonial Secretary, 7 August 1925.

48 NAZ S246/231, H. Barrish, Presbytery DRC to the Colonial Secretary, 16 September 1925.

49 NAZ S246/231, Director of Education to the Colonial Secretary, 25 September 1925.

50 NAZ S824/703/1-3, Chief Agriculturalist to the Director of Education, 20 July 1929.

51 Money and van Zyl-Hermann, ‘Introduction’, 10.

52 Will Jackson, ‘‘The Shame of Not Belonging: Navigating Failure in the Colonial Petition, South Africa 1910–1961’, Itinerario 42, no. 1 (2018), 86.

53 Similar cases of disciplinary issues in the 1930s were common at other schools and reformatory houses in the colony, S824/15 Child Welfare Society, 17 March 1932.

54 NAZ S246/231 Daisyfield Raising of Status, 7 April 1931.

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid.

57 James Maxwell, ‘Some Aspects of Native Policy in Northern Rhodesia’, Journal of the Royal African Society 29, no. 117 (1930): 477.

58 NAZ S246/231 Daisyfield Raising of Status, 7 April 1931

59 NAZ S246/231, Director of Education to Governor Northern Rhodesia, 4 May 1931.

60 Ibid.

61 NAZ S246/231 Daisyfield Raising of Status, 7 April 1931

62 Allison Shutt, Manners Make a Nation: Racial Etiquette in Southern Rhodesia, 1910–1963 (New York: University of Rochester Press, 2015), 78.

63 Donal Lowry, ‘Rhodesia, 1890–1980’, in Settlers and Expatriates: Britons over the Seas, ed. Robert Bickers (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010), 124. See also Mlambo, White Immigration into Rhodesia, 53–59.

64 John Pape, ‘Black and white: The ‘perils of sex’ in colonial Zimbabwe’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 16, no. 4 (1990): 699–720.

65 George Bishi, Jospeh Mujere and Zvinashe Mamvura, ‘Renaming Enkeldoorn: Whiteness, Place, and the Politics of Belonging in Southern Rhodesia’, Journal of Historical Geography, 77 (2022): 60.

66 Takawira Shumba Mafukidze, ‘Towards Inevitable Conflict: An Examination of the Political Effect of the 1923 Award of Internal Self-Government to the Colony of Southern Rhodesia’ (MA thesis, Duquesne University, 1973), 3.

67 Mlambo, ‘Rhodesian Immigration Policy’, 147.

68 Sol Plaatje made a similar point about Indians in South Africa, noting that the colonial government of India occasionally pressured South Africa to modify anti-Indian legislation in the interests of imperial harmony. He contrasted this to Africans, who possessed no outside authority to appeal to so their interests ‘could comfortably be relegated to the regions of oblivion’. Sol Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa (Picador Africa: Johannesburg, 2007 [1916]), 182.

69 NAZ S824/703/1-3, Daisyfield Grants, May 1928.

70 Challis, ‘Education and Southern Rhodesia’s poor whites’

71 For more on the South African War, see for example, Andrew Porter, The South African War and historians’, African Affairs, 99, (2000), 633–48; Bill Nasson, The war for South Africa: The Anglo–Boer War 1899–1902 (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2010).

72 Patrick Furlong, Between Crown and Swastika. The Impact of the Radical Right on the Afrikaner Nationalist Movement in the Fascist Era (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1991)

73 George Bishi, ‘“Filthiest Gangs of Thugs”: Anti-Fascism and Anti-Nazism Perceptions in Southern Rhodesia, 1930s to 1940s’, South African Historical Journal 74, no. 1 (2022): 110.

74 The Herenigde Nasionale Party was a hard-line Afrikaner nationalist party. NAZ S482/194/41, Godfrey Huggins to J.C. Smuts, 9 December 1941.

75 NAZ S517, Afrikaans Nationalism Reports, 11 November 1949.

76 ‘The Colony’s Schools and Racialism’, The Bulawayo Chronicle, 27 July 1945.

77 NAZ S482/194/41, A.G. Cowing, Chief Education Officer to the Director, Daisyfield Orphanage, Rev Botha, 3 October 1941.

78 NAZ S482/194/41 Rev. P.J Piennar, Chief Secretary Synodical Committee for Care of the Poor Dutch Reformed Church to J.C. Smuts, Minister of External Affairs, 11 November 1941.

79 NAZ S482/194/41, Hannie Botha to the editor Die Kerkbodt, Cape Town, 19 November 1941.

80 S482/194/41 J.C. Smuts to Godfrey Huggins, 17 November 1941.

81 S482/194/41 Godfrey Huggins to J.C. Smuts, 9 December 1941. Emphasis in the original.

82 The Eyrie, 1998, 35.

83 The school still exists today as a private Christian boarding school in Harare. The school was renamed Eaglesvale School in 1982, though the Dutch Reformed Church retained overall responsibility until 2010. Eaglesvale School traces its origins back to Daisyfield and publicly refers to itself as ‘one of the oldest schools in Zimbabwe.’ ‘Eaglesvale School’, available at http://www.eaglesvale.ac.zw/wp/, retrieved February 20 2023.