Introduction
The politics of gender and sexuality within the contemporary state of all-girls missionary schools is sedimented by a complex colonial history. Through autoethnographic techniques, I wish to inspect my high school and primary school experience at an all-girls Catholic missionary school in East Gauteng by reframing my daily life through a sociopolitical lens of investigation. I was a closeted, white transgender non-binary person living under a dead name in an upper middle-class suburb less than ten minutes away from my school. I attended 13 years of gendered, “women only” English Catholic schooling from the early 2000s till the late 2010s.
First I wish to elaborate upon how conservative sexism and racism are given political power within a missionary school environment due to an unaddressed colonial history and unreformed Christian ethos that empowers “post-racial”, neoliberal forms of patriarchy. Secondly, I will reflect on the classifications of productive and reproductive labour within the academic and social spheres to unpack how power was maintained within the school by the staff and students. I develop what I see as the ultimate hyperfeminine Christian woman persona that thrived in this neocolonial social environment to fully illustrate what was expected of students.
History
Precolonial education on the African continent varied across language and ethnic group, as people lived in vastly different social, economic, and political systems which affected their relationship to knowledge and how they passed it on. (Ezeanya-Esiobu, 2019) Commonalities persisted, such as a strong sense of community, all the members of whom were partly responsible for raising children. From the age of six children were slowly depended upon by adults to complete tasks and play a role in the “social aspects of their future lives” (Moumouni quoted by Ezeanya-Esiobu, 2019). There were no formal learning institutions, only traditions that changed according to what group you were born into. There were gender expectations, as women would tend to domestic work and young men would be more inclined to cattle rearing and other more physically demanding duties (Ezeanya-Esiobu, 2019), but there were also roles that transcended gender, such as becoming a Sangoma (Mail and Guardian, 2018). This means that people who were not male were given spiritual authority. These structures differ greatly to the entrenched hierarchy that formulates the Christian church.
Once Europe had begun colonizing African land and trafficking its people in the 1500s for its own profit and development, they attempted to envelop Africa as a limb of the larger European capitalist system. Rodney quotes Marx in his How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, stating that “what was good for Europeans was obtained at the expense of untold suffering by Africans and American Indians.” (Rodney, 1973) Even once the slave trade stopped, they only acceded after “they made the discovery that it would better benefit them if they allowed the African to stay in their land to plant the crops needed by Europe” These are the words of David Livingstone, one of the first missionaries in Africa. (Lawuo quoted by Ezeanya-Esiobu, 2019) He was both missionary and explorer, religious missionaries were often at the point of contact for Europeans violently entering the continent. Just how wealthy the state of England could become was always at the heart of advancement of Western education into African lives. After slavery was abolished, a workforce was needed so that black labour could be fully exploited by European states. As such, missionary schools provided the prestige of European (white) education through imparting literacy, mathematics etc, but instigated a colonial educational program aimed to orient African children away from African tradition and indoctrinate them into an elaborate work force machine. If indigenous people succumbed to the optionless fate of being educated in white practices, at the very least their access to their own land and histories could be maintained. This came, however, at the unimaginable expense of sacrificing one's own selfhood and religious mana. Access to land was also limited, as they had become tenants in their own countries. (Chidester, 2008)
As missions began settling into the African continent in the 1800s with help from government funding (Ezeanya-Esiobu, 2019), it was clear that these schools aimed not only to bring education from the western world into the lives of indigenous African people, but they proposed themselves as having the ability to provide salvation unto them. Racist beliefs morphed into pseudoscientific racism in the secular age of the mid 1800s, and in order to establish a narrative in favor of white people not as barbaric murderers and colonizers, but as purveyors of wisdom and an alternative truth, members of the church embarked on faraway travels to bring their religion to the “new world” (Aronson, 2017). This was how they saw the world and themselves in it, as people who were closest to their own envisioning of God. They were people who will only become holier and thus more indebted a luxurious afterlife the more that they give to others. What they give, is the word. They give knowledge and enlightenment. They are the gatekeepers of heaven, and you must follow their rules to enter.
“Civilizing” is a tool of white supremacist ideology. Fanon describes in Black Skin, White Masks, the experiences of black students in France, the black man “is a savage, whereas the student is civilised” (Fanon, 1967. 50). Here, Fanon associates closeness to white education to the perception of closeness to a more advanced state of being, and at a pointed distance from precolonial black personhood. This was supported by Victorian preclusions that there exist hierarchies of intelligence, and thus there exist levels of development necessary to achieve enlightenment. This, contextualised in the Catholic missionary school, means that to be close to “whiteness” means to be close to heaven, to achieve an utterly holy lifestyle. Catholicism and Science upheld one another as tools of racism, and tools of cultural demolition.
Duncan describes the learned behaviours of Christianity embedded in the educational programs of the mid-1800s as a “hidden curriculum” which asserted itself as a “civilizing” agent, which would lead to conversion to Christianity and a devotion to a white god through intertwining education, Christian ethos, and European culture. (Duncan, 2006) The black populations were seen by missionaries as people in need of salvation from “superstitious” cultural practices that Europeans did not engage with beyond anthropological fascination (Chidester, 2008). In a statement regarding his newly established school in the Eastern Cape in 1891, Anglican Principal and Reverend William Govan said, “Place first the native’s becoming a Christian. Education....rank(s) second...where there is Christian character, other things - education, fitness for responsibility, and civilization - will follow.” (Quoted by Duncan, 2006) This statement clearly encapsulates the systems of personhood and success that founded these kinds of private educational structures within Africa, and South Africa more specifically. Missionary school educators hailed from places like Ireland, England etc. and placed themselves in the position of saviours of the African people. They constituted a significant component of the global expansion of Europe through colonialism which cataclysmically altered the Southern and Eastern Hemisphere. As the European economy was able to take over the rest of the world, so too did missionary schools cement themselves as pivotal in the indoctrination of Western values in Africa. These schools functioned to spread ideology for corporate gain. The presence of Christianity within the continent is inextricably linked to white supremacy.
Post-racial South Africa
My own school was a missionary school founded in 1940
by a group of Irish nuns who arrived from the Missionary Sisters of the Holy
Rosary. The first class was entirely white but it is assumed that, along with
the rest of the Catholic Church, that the Bantu Education Act of 1954 which
aimed to segregate existing mission schools was rejected by the Catholic
church. (Collins and Gillespie, 1994. 23) Catholic schools were never
officially classified as white (Collins and Gillespie,1994), but remain overwhelmingly
so. (Chisholm and Sujee, 2006) The school caters to upper middle class white
families who remained silent and prospered during the Apartheid regime, as well
as Black minorities and other families of colour who can afford the exorbitant school
fees.
Despite the passing of over a hundred years of history, and my existence as a so called “Born Free”, the plumes of white supremacy are forever shedding from generations passing and regrowing their ideology in children. Insidious in their infancy, Kealeboga Ramaru describes educational institutions as the “creature of the state” about universities, but it is the very same with secondary education (Ramaru, 2019). Schools are purveyors of white male educational initiatives. White men are here the “primary knowledge makers,”(Ramaru, 2018) and, in a same-sex girls school, where the only man in the room is a shirtless image of a white Jesus on a cross, glowing in a halo, these unaddressed value structures have spiritual magnifications that reflect what we value from women as reproductive and productive labour force members.
Gender and Christianity
The godly is masculine, but to be feminine means to be constantly subservient to the word of man. The gender binary played a large role in disciplining children in my school. We had pinafore dresses, later replaced by button up, knee length uniforms which had to remain clean and orderly. You were not allowed to wear your socks folded improperly, let alone take off your shoes at play time. Uniforms were inspected every morning at line-up, at which point register was taken and a prayer was said to begin the school day.
In this environment, school leaders are anointed under god. The principal, teachers and curriculum are justified as extensions of god’s teachings, and thus to defy teachings means to defy god himself. In After the Death of God the Father Mary Daly postulates that a finite definition of god’s corporeal form, that being his son Jesus in a body depicted as white, blue eyed, rugged and brave, “functions to legitimate the existing social, economic and political status quo.” (Daly, 20. 82) Theologians and educators are then able to “proclaim women’s subordination to be god’s will” (Daly, 20. 82) By ignoring the gendered hierarchy replicated in Christianity, educators are able to reinforce gendered roles under the episteme of god’s word.
We were taught maths, science, biology, English, Afrikaans, computers, geography and history throughout primary school and given these subjects as options in high school. Always an evolving subject was art, which began as Design and Technology in middle school years, where art-like instruction took place, but always in the interest of completing a skill-based task. In this class we learned how to sew, the only hand craft we were taught. These classes were mixed in their educational scope, and sometimes would result in free periods. Drama and music were mandatory until grade seven, and art provided as a real option in grade 10, upon which each pupil was made to pick one for two more years. Drama classes focused heavily on articulation, projection, breathing and group exercises. Students were pushed extremely hard at a young age to write and act in their own dramatic performances. These were stressful and time consuming, and if done well, were a way of demarcating oneself as special, as “Eisteddfods” were held across the Christian schools to pit one choral verse against another, or one prose poem-professing child against another. Eisteddfods are a welsh tradition of arts festivals and a European import of measuring creative capacity across schools.
Economic Management Sciences was the closest subject to Business management we were given. The grade seven class had to establish a fair stand at the end of the year at which to make a profit selling something you had made. No such subject was given in high school, the closest class was Consumer Sciences which trained pupils how to cook and bake, as well as understand various pseudoscientific dietary practices, such as the food pyramid. Life orientation classes were almost entirely ineffectual, and even lost footing to Religious Education, which was not so much an exploration of broader religions but was instead an hour-long session of Catholic principles relayed through worksheets, bible studies and tv-movies about god and the Bible. The same teachers taught RE and LO and would switch the curriculum according to some unknown precedent.
Learning the sciences, from natural science to physics and chemistry, as well as taking “core” maths over applied maths, was seen as a way of establishing intellect against fellow pupils. All these subjects have a fundamental basis in establishing a member of an economically productive society, as well as engendering a devotion to the technology of the west. The more devoted to academics, namely the sciences, the more validated one was by the school. Academics weighed heavily next to what were called “culturals”. End of year academic assemblies were practiced for a month in advance by lining up the children who were invited in order of their achievements. The top ten in the grade were called out one by one during rehearsals and breakdowns amongst students regarding their placement was not uncommon.
The more one chose to defy and critique the state of academics at the school, the more likely you were to be singled out by the staff as a trouble maker and an underachiever. A culture of silence was strongly founded by the student body, and there were no student representative councils that were not explicitly approved and partially voted for by teachers and other staff.
A hyperfeminine archetype was implicitly expected of each student. This was a woman who excels academically, pushes herself to participate in cultural and sport extra curriculars, runs for student body representation, has a dedicated masculine boyfriend with whom she abstains, has a large friend group and always maintains community tranquillity. This means, she does not start fights or protest teachers’ actions. She does not speak up when wrong is being done. Even better if she participates in church, perhaps as an alter server.
This archetype can be better understood by detailing the closest thing we had to sex education in high school. We attended, in grade 10, what the Life Orientation teachers called Life Program. It was a weeklong religious retreat at which we were shown an archive of various fear mongering tv shows, YouTube clips and movies. One was a breakdown of every kind of STI one could elicit from sex using outdated computer graphics. Another was a woman passionately stamping up and down a stage relaying that sex inevitably leads to unplanned pregnancy, STIs and the Lord shaming you. She also forebodes abortion as an ultimate carnal sin. A movie was shown to us called Trust, about a teenage girl who is sexually assaulted by a middle-aged man she meets in an online chat room. They were effective in correlating sexual desire with destruction, fear, and abuse. There was no engagement with homosexuality, as this was already firmly disregarded as a possible identity for a student at this school. At sixteen, these were developing years for our sexualities, and the school did whatever they could to shame and stunt us.
They did, however, want us to find men to love. They had to be the right men, however. There was an all-boys school that was affiliated with ours, and at the end of our matric year, they organized a mandatory mass and breakfast at which they mixed up all the students from both schools to instigate socialization on their terms. This was apparently okay, because these were designated appropriate men, and we had all reached eighteen. We also were expected to bring men as partners to our matric dance, at which we were disallowed from wearing any colour other than pure white. A year prior to this dance, I had met with the principle of the high school to enquire about bringing same-sex partners. She was discomforted and thoroughly put off by the question. She told me that she would have to convene with the Parent Teacher association, whose board included nuns, before making her decision. She took this opportunity to tell me her personal thoughts regarding the behaviour of lesbians and their condemnation by the Bible. She said that they may exist, but that to be intimate with another woman is a sin in the eyes of god. This was completely outside of what I had enquired of her and emphasizes the suffocating heteronormativity and conservative values which permeated through their disciplinary methods. They could not leave the personal as private, but rather saw it as their Christian duty to guide these “Young Women” toward a brighter, more heterosexual, and implicitly white supremacist future.
Conclusion
The complex history upon which same-sex Christian schools are founded is rife with violence and silencing. What springs forth from their contemporary landscape is a contradiction of ideologies and unaddressed colonial hangovers that maintain discipline and punishment within their walls. Race, gender, and sexuality intersect with white supremacist imaginings of intellect and aptitude that disregard and quieten those who thrive outside of it and set forth to coral these perceived Other categories back into a consumable package of femininity. The hyperfeminine personae they wish to rip from the bodies of each student cannot attest to a lived reality but can only swallow up what makes their body different. The neoliberal landscape further serves to commodify aspects of the self for performance within a success-based learning environment that developed from an unreformed Catholic ethos which still harmfully guides the school. The lack of decolonial ideology turns the same-sex school into a white cultural hub that breeds students aimed at a nebulous and outdated definition of success, power, and family.
Reference List
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Chisolm, L and Sujee, M. 2006. Tracking racial desegregation in SouthAfrican schools. Journal of Education, 40: 1, 141-159
Daly, M., In Rycenga, J., In Barufaldi, L., Morgan, R., & Hunt, M. E. 2017. The Mary Daly reader.
Duncan, G. 2006. Winning Hearts and Minds: character formation in mission education with special reference to Lovedale missionary institution. Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae, 32: 1, 1-47
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Rodney, W. 1972. How Europe underdeveloped Africa. London: Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications.
Staff reporter. 2018. Legacy of a lesbian sangoma. Mail and Guardian. Accessed at https://mg.co.za/article/2018-06-06-legacy-of-a-lesbian-sangoma/ [February 2020]
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