“At the Expense of Its Own Soul”: Bantu Education’s Threat of Closure to Inanda Seminary

Established in 1869, the Congregational American Board’s Inanda Seminary was the first, and is therefore the oldest, all female boarding high school in southern Africa. In 1944, Inanda Seminary became the first school in South Africa to offer a matriculation course for black females. Inanda Seminary is also the only historic Protestant mission school serving Blacks to survive apartheid and the implementation of the National Party’s Bantu Education in the mid- 1950s. The latter claim to fame came as a result of tense negotiations and brinkmanship. For Inanda Seminary, the mid-1950s was a time of limbo, inducing great uncertainty and anxiety; its very existence was in peril. Unlike other faith traditions, such as the more hierarchical and financially endowed Roman Catholic Church, Congregationalists were less able to effectively mobilise the political and financial salvaging of private education. The highly democratised and predominately rural Congregational mission in Natal had a comparatively weak denominational polity with which to absorb the title wave that was the government’s take-over of ecclesiastic schools. Just as the founding of Inanda Seminary “was nothing short of revolutionary”, its survival is nothing short of miraculous. Throughout the succeeding decades until the new century, the school repeatedly found itself on the verge of closure. The following narrative chronicles the beginning of many potential ends of the school due to the National Party government’s implementation of Bantu Education.