- And what is it you want, umfundisi?
- Inkosi, I have been to Johannesburg.
- Yes, that is known to me.
- Many of our people are there, inkosi.
- Yes.
- And I have thought, inkosi, that we should try to keep some of them in this valley.
- Ho! And how would we do it?
- By caring for our land before it is too late. By teaching them in the school how to care for the land. Then some at least would stay in Ndotsheni.Footnote 1
In this passage from Alan Paton's famous Cry, the Beloved Country, protagonist Kumalo, an African priest, explains to a local chief his desire to save Ndotsheni, a beautiful but heavily eroded reserve in the southern Drakensberg region losing not only fertile soil, but also young men to the lures of urban centers. Thick with cultural pessimism, Paton's novel nevertheless ends on an optimistic note, as a young demonstrator newly stationed in the area promises to ‘uplift’ the people by teaching them better methods of farming. This vision of a self-improving, prospering African peasantry had considerable appeal among liberals such as Paton, black elites, and administrators in the early decades of the twentieth century. At the novel's publication in 1948, however, it was losing ground to more drastic, intrusive policies for managing South Africa's rural reserves.
This article investigates how demonstration and other forms of agricultural education were used to socially engineer the countryside, a broad international concern that sharpened during the interwar period and still awaits comprehensive exploration.Footnote 2 In South Africa, the discovery of diamonds and gold in the second half of the nineteenth century triggered a process of rapid economic transformation, in which towns and cities sprung from nothing within mere decades.Footnote 3 In a prolonged state-driven process, agriculture gradually caught up with the dynamic mining sector, as privileged groups of farmers adopted new forms of labor organization and technologies, thereby contributing raw materials and foodstuffs to an increasingly integrated national economy.Footnote 4
At the same time, the expansion of commercial farming amid the country's rapid industrialization drove people from the land in great numbers. Consequently, agricultural education came to mean more than training farmers to become commercial producers. It responded to the question of what to do with people who could not transform themselves into successful farmers yet were nonetheless supposedly better contained in rural areas: Africans and ‘poor whites’. In a widely-debated rural exodus, the white rural proportion fell from 51.7 to 38.7 per cent between 1920 and 1931, while the portion of Africans registered as urban doubled, reaching 17 per cent in 1936.Footnote 5 According to widespread official and public anxieties, the cities were dangerous places of racial mixing and competition, thus making South Africa's ‘agrarian question’ at once a ‘native question’. During this period of profound structural change, government officials, experts, and certain groups of farmers – ‘progressive farmers’, as these men, both black and white, called themselves – cast agricultural education as a way to scientifically mitigate both technical-agricultural and social problems.Footnote 6 This article examines the establishment of agricultural education in South Africa from the end of the Second South African War (1902) into the interwar period, arguing that segregation informed the social engineering of a modern countryside by facilitating yet also constraining agricultural planning.
At its height in the 1970s and 1980s, much of the historiography of rural South Africa studied the effects of capital in the countryside. Seminal publications adopted a Marxist-structuralist perspective to analyze the fate of African cultivators and pastoralists during the rise of white-dominated agrarian capitalism: separation from the means of production, primarily the land, and proletarianization. Making use of oral histories, social historians increasingly turned to the lived experiences of historical protagonists, highlighting agency and resistance.Footnote 7 By contrast, the present article does not employ the agrarian transition as an analytic framework, but as a debate among historical actors. Instead of analyzing trajectories of structural change under capitalism and struggles triggered, this article asks how South Africans constructed the ‘agrarian question’, how they proposed to respond to it, and what effects measures taken generated.
This article builds upon rich rural historiography and path-breaking research on agricultural policy, particularly regarding conservation.Footnote 8 Agricultural knowledge and education, however, have received little attention, despite being among the earliest avenues of state intervention in farming and not only in South Africa.Footnote 9 Moreover, agricultural policy's linkages with segregation have not yet been systematically explored, though agricultural production was crucial to territorial separation. Following Saul Dubow and William Beinart's description of segregation as a ‘modernising ideology’ and response to industrialization, I argue that agricultural education was driven by a similar, reformist-preservationist impetus to ‘protect’ supposedly distinct cultures by keeping different groups of people, first, on the land and, second, separate.Footnote 10 Paradoxically, this motivation created ideological space for small-scale peasantries even as the sector was on track for commercialization.
This article charts different visions of rural civilization and the related professional roles – peasant, commercial farmer, demonstrator, farmer's wife – imagined by agricultural education.Footnote 11 While technical knowledge has always been crucial in agricultural production, I bring to the foreground a particular phase during which the generation and communication of agricultural knowledge became embedded in wider networks, including expert and state agencies.Footnote 12 Since similar structures of agricultural education emerged in both black and white communities, this article compares policies, measures, and responses in the Transkei and Ciskei to those in the Orange Free State. At times strikingly similar, emerging contradictions often manifested in tensions between agriculture's lack of prestige and desires for social advancement, in clashes between reformers and the people they sought to educate, and in contested gender attributes.
PEASANTS AND DEMONSTRATORS: AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION IN THE TRANSKEI AND CISKEI
The fate of South Africa's black peasantry before and during the ‘agricultural revolution’ – a highly uneven process of commercialization – has been the subject of intense scholarly debate. State measures in terms of finance, marketing, transport, tariffs, and labor shaped the emergence of a European capitalist class and kept many struggling white farmers in business, while discriminating against African producers.Footnote 13 In his seminal The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry, Colin Bundy argues that following ‘a virtual “explosion” of peasant activity in the 1870s’, when groups of wealthier farmers expanded and innovated in response to new urban markets, African producers became increasingly marginalized.Footnote 14 Bundy's narrative has since been critically reassessed from different angles. Among other topics, scholars have qualified the periodization and extent of the African peasantry's fall, arguing that only in the second half of the twentieth century did significant numbers of families in the Transkei become entirely dependent upon wage labor.Footnote 15 Recent revaluations of the infamous 1913 Land Act, which restricted African ownership to 7–8 per cent of the Union's land and prohibited sharecropping and cash-renting on white-owned farms, have pointed to the Transkei's resilience in subsistence production and to the legislation's regionally diverse, frequently prolonged impact.Footnote 16 Despite overcrowding, soil erosion, and discrimination, as Beinart argues, some families continued to ‘maintain some smallholding agricultural production’ and ‘remained actors even when the way that they were acted upon severely constrained their economic and political options’.Footnote 17 Though data used for this study cannot yield any quantitative evidence supporting either direction, they do speak to the persistent visions of rural progress promoted by such actors, who constituted a minority significant enough to be of official and public concern. I show that agricultural education gained momentum, despite white farmers' protests, due to a partial convergence of interests between these better-off African agriculturists and government administrations.Footnote 18 Their ideas for reform, however, did not enjoy sustained appeal among the addressed – that is, young men in the reserves.
Though starting slowly under the auspices of the Transkeian General Council in the late 1900s, reform efforts gained momentum in subsequent decades.Footnote 19 Certain groups of agriculturists – chiefs, headmen, and progressive farmers – actively engaged with the idea of ‘scientific agriculture’, invested in machinery and better stock, and organized on a cooperative basis.Footnote 20 In 1905, the Council opened an apprenticeship farm at Tsolo that transformed into an agricultural school in 1913 and by 1930 was running two additional agricultural schools (Teko near Butterworth, Flagstaff in Pondoland), four experimental farms, a vernacular agricultural journal, and several cooperative societies.Footnote 21 Most centrally perhaps, the Transkeian Council instituted a demonstration program in 1911 that rapidly expanded and was eventually adopted in the Ciskei, Natal, and Basutoland.Footnote 22
In the Ciskei, agricultural education was pushed by an African-American missionary from Alabama, Reverend James East. From his base near Middledrift, East toured the Ciskei to display the use of horses and ploughs, harrows, and other tools and in 1919 was hired by the South African Native College Fort Hare as a ‘travelling demonstrator’.Footnote 23 Another key protagonist was Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu, a prominent member of the Ciskei's formally educated Christian elite who would become the first African professor at Fort Hare. In 1918, East and Jabavu founded the Keiskama Valley Native Farmers' Association, a body whose members were primarily teachers, clergymen, chiefs, headmen, and more affluent farmers and that supported many agricultural initiatives in subsequent years, including the establishment of a ‘native agricultural school’ at Fort Cox in 1930.Footnote 24
The two chief pillars of the agricultural education system were thus the demonstration service and the agricultural schools, later called colleges. Having completed a two-year diploma course and a period of practical training at one of these colleges, a demonstrator would be stationed at a specific location to work sections of resident farmers' fields and let the results speak for themselves. He would moreover answer individual requests for advice, deliver lectures, establish school gardens, and encourage cooperative ventures.Footnote 25 In turn, the agricultural colleges were organized along similar, albeit ‘less elaborate’, lines as their European counterparts.Footnote 26 A diploma course provided general training via both theoretical and practical instruction that supposedly aligned closely with the local system of farming, though seems to have often failed in this regard. The colleges sought to reach beyond the limited number of students by offering short courses for adult farmers, organizing agricultural shows, hosting meetings of farmers' associations, writing articles for the African press, and answering individual requests for advice.Footnote 27
Sources suggest that these measures met with considerable response. Though starting slowly, the colleges attracted more and more applicants once the demonstration service, hence employment opportunities, for graduates expanded.Footnote 28 Local administrative records contain numerous requests from farmers' associations and individuals for demonstrators to be stationed in their areas, and document communities' keenness to cooperate with their demonstrators.Footnote 29 The 1930s Native Economic Commission even spoke of ‘enthusiastic supporters’.Footnote 30 Such comments by officers reporting about the relevance of their own work should be read with great care and require differentiation, as these educational services benefitted mostly the more affluent.Footnote 31 Moreover, it is questionable whether communities used these services in ways intended, since local records contain several complaints that demonstrators were being viewed as a source of free labor while plot owners would pursue different affairs or even wander off ‘to the mines’.Footnote 32
At the same time, demonstration and the agricultural colleges seem emblematic of a certain administrative style that gave some leeway to reserve farmers and accommodated their visions of social uplift and material betterment. In arranging the services, Council officials in charge envisaged demonstration to be a slow, long-term process. No more demonstrators than ‘people actually want’ were to be employed, the Council director of agriculture explained in 1931, since the population would only be ‘led, not driven’.Footnote 33 Administrative records stressed proximity, ‘knowledge of and sympathy with the peasantry’ and for demonstrators to ‘devote as much time as possible to moving about among the people’.Footnote 34 White officers were thus gradually replaced by Africans; by 1938, the Council employed 131 black demonstrators.Footnote 35 Judging from their monthly reports, demonstrators indeed spent most of their time working closely with individual farmers – plowing and harrowing fields, planting crops, erecting fences, and castrating livestock.Footnote 36
This consultative approach seems in line with scholars' descriptions of the Native Affairs Department's (NAD) administrative style before and during the interwar years. Echoing the paternalistic British colonial service tradition, officers were reluctant to use overt repression, emphasizing instead personal contact, persuasion, and the idea of a ‘civilized’ black elite.Footnote 37 Official documents described agricultural education as a form of social progress – yet one that would proceed along separate lines. Graduates of the diploma courses were expected to remain within the reserves, put their knowledge into practise, and thereby effect broader rural uplift by their positive example – a notion that found support among liberal intellectuals such as Howard Pim or J. D. Rheinallt Jones.Footnote 38 The emerging system thus reflected early liberal segregationist thought and its ambivalences as a flexible, collaborative approach that accommodated notions of progress, yet rested upon an understanding of differentiation and white superiority. Rural romanticism, as Dubow and others have shown, was integral to this variant of segregationism.Footnote 39 In this light, agricultural enlightenment provided Africans with an opportunity to reform their ‘distinct’ culture from within and shield it from the dangers of a supposedly alien, urban industrial world.
Africans promoting agricultural education framed their aims differently. Farmers' associations occasionally protested state discrimination, particularly the lack of access to land, and expressed commercial ambitions that exceeded the confines of the reserves, even envisaging ‘oversea markets’ and ‘export in bulk’.Footnote 40 Yet, there was also common ground upon which they and NAD officers could collaborate. Jabavu and other African farmers described a vision of social uplift based upon agriculture and manual labor that resonated with the paternalist, anti-urban rhetoric of administrators: ‘The true mine of our wealth was not the Rand but the soil on which we live at home.’Footnote 41 By keeping particularly young men on the land and rebuilding local communities, agricultural progress supposedly constituted a refuge from white society and the foundation of a distinctly African civilization. A former student of Fort Cox Agricultural School summarized this connection, stating that graduates of the agricultural colleges would be ‘the leaders of … their race thus blowing the blast of liberty and independence amongst their own people by way of showing them the modern methods of agriculture – the only industry that can make us hold our own’.Footnote 42
African agricultural modernizers thus advocated a material concept of emancipation, an independence to be gained by seeking first ‘the kingdom of mealies’.Footnote 43 For this, Jabavu and other progressives drew inspiration from the southern United States, notably the Tuskegee Institute and philosophy of African-American educator Booker T. Washington. Having visited Tuskegee in 1913, Jabavu promoted the former slave and social reformer's gospel that ‘blacks everywhere must keep in touch with the soil, however small the land’.Footnote 44 Jabavu's investment in rural reform reflects how members of the African elite also saw opportunities in separate development. As Beinart and Dubow argue, Africans' attempts to preserve rural lifestyles ‘were not segregationist in the sense that whites understood the term’, but could be ‘compatible with elements of segregation in certain respects’.Footnote 45
Tuskegeeism however did not convince graduates of the agricultural schools. Over time, it became evident that the majority would not return home to foster broader rural uplift. Instead, agricultural leaders in the Ciskei regularly chastised Fort Cox graduates for their ambition to gain employment in the mines and towns instead of taking to local farming and serving their communities. Speaking at the 1933 graduation ceremony, Mr Peteni of the Keiskama Farmers' Association scolded ‘one boy who had passed through Fort Cox and who was now walking about the streets of King William's Town, looking for high-class employment … That boy's place was assisting his father in the location.’Footnote 46
It was the prospect of becoming demonstrators, not peasant farmers, that increasingly attracted young men to the agricultural colleges in the 1920s and 1930s.Footnote 47 However, when most positions in the demonstration service were filled by the early 1940s and graduates failed to obtain such employment, the rate of applications plummeted. In 1948 – a time when the white Glen College in the Free State was turning down ‘hundreds of applicants’ every year – two Transkeian colleges even closed.Footnote 48 According to statistics, only 1 per cent of the c. 400 graduates who had left Fort Cox by 1941 had become farmers. While a higher number had found employment as demonstrators, the majority was engaged in non-agricultural employment or else unemployed.Footnote 49
Given the scarcity of land and capital, obvious material reasons justified students' reluctance to seek their fortune in farming. Even the Director of Native Agriculture admitted that returning to the locations ‘to eke out a mere pittance under very adverse conditions’ was hardly attractive for someone with two or more years of higher education.Footnote 50 Only students who were sons of chiefs or headmen could expect to make a ‘decent living by farming’.Footnote 51 In addition, most graduates were young, unmarried, and thus ineligible to apply for land, dooming them to return to their fathers' fields.Footnote 52 Calls for students to ‘start out in life from the very bottom’ and ‘“make a living out of small 6-acre and 10-acre plots”’ clashed with their expectations of upward social mobility.Footnote 53 Administrative records from the 1930s resound with officials' disappointment that the education provided did not benefit the people ‘most in need of agricultural training’ – the so-called ‘red natives’ – but rather attracted the sons of teachers and other employees who used their degrees merely as stepping stones.Footnote 54 The attempt to engender agricultural enlightenment for the masses hence clashed with a key division among rural society – one by which the formally educated and Christianized distinguished themselves from the ‘red’ traditionalists – that had emerged under colonial influence and become part of local self-categorizations.Footnote 55
In effect, while strands of early segregationist thought had promoted the idea of African agricultural progress, the realities of segregation – foremost limited access to land and capital to make farming a career – rendered agricultural education unattractive to young men in the reserves. Furthermore, the case offers insights into how shifts in administrative ideology played out on the ground. Evans and Dubow have analyzed how the NAD was reorganized and centralized in the 1920s to emphasize ‘efficiency’ and comprehensive planning.Footnote 56 The resulting tensions manifested in an administrative debate in the early 1930s, when R. W. Thornton, recently appointed National Director of Native Agriculture, lambasted the colleges and demonstration services as being largely ineffective.Footnote 57 While several Transkeian officers defended the current system and its incremental approach, others agreed with Thornton that ‘only drastic action can save things from becoming appalling in a few years [sic] time.’Footnote 58 Such ‘drastic action’ ultimately came from the state, not via the collaboration of educated farmers.
Changes also appeared in the aims that officials attached to agricultural education. Whereas cotton production received some attention before and after the First World War, there were few other efforts toward cash-crop production for export.Footnote 59 Instead, food shortages and starvation amid ever-growing anxieties about soil erosion took center stage in agricultural policy, initially during the First World War and throughout the 1920s and (post-)Depression period.Footnote 60 The overriding concern with food production and the new preoccupation with nutrition – a discourse that linked agricultural production with bodily health – exemplifies what other scholars have established more generally: that policy in South African's reserves was much less an ‘attempt to “civilize” Africans by boosting agricultural production and commercial exchange’ for an integrated market than in other British colonies.Footnote 61 Instead, increased official attention with preserving a healthy migrant labor force speaks to how reserve development became entrenched in the ‘narrowly exclusionist’ take on segregation characterizing the Hertzogite period.Footnote 62 In a 1929 conference paper, Thornton clarified the link between this restrictive vision and agricultural policy, explaining that segregation meant that ‘[a]griculturally … , the native must develop within his own reserves.’ That is, to avoid hunger and unrest, African peasants had to be taught to produce more within set confines.Footnote 63 Officers in the Transkei and Ciskei thus faced the task of cultivating a separate, reproductive agricultural economy that could feed the reserve population and ensure labor for white industry and farms.
At the same time, labor migration itself – the fact that a significant part of the male population oscillated between mining or other forms of employment and their rural homes – frustrated agricultural development, as it was ‘very difficult to make a progressive peasant out of a man who is away from his land the best part of the year’.Footnote 64 Despite men's long spells of absence, agricultural education was gender exclusive and premised on a model of the nuclear, monogamous household that scholars have linked with the increasing influence of Christianity.Footnote 65 Only men could attend diploma courses and seek employment as demonstrators. The few services available to women, including short courses at the colleges or special sections during agricultural shows, typically targeted the domestic sphere, encompassing subjects such as food preparation, nutrition and health, ‘home beautification’, and childcare.Footnote 66
In his study of a cotton education scheme in colonial Togo, Zimmerman has drawn similarly gendered ascriptions, showing how German administrators and teachers from Tuskegee promoted a model of the ‘patriarchal monogamous household’ that overrode existing labor divisions and compromised the relative economic power of local women.Footnote 67 Likewise, the Transkeian and Ciskeian schemes that were premised on peasant households headed by men and a clear separation of the field and the feminine home contradicted realities in South Africa. While men had become somewhat more involved in cultivation in the nineteenth century, their increasing labor migration later meant that women became re-entrenched in their traditional role as subsistence providers.Footnote 68 Administrators were not blind to women's central role in food production.Footnote 69 On the contrary, they explicitly described progressive farming as an attempt to offset the trend. Agricultural officials, all men, styled themselves as protectors of African women, whose overly heavy workload they could help to redistribute more evenly. By introducing new techniques and by increasing prospects of material success, agricultural education sought to attract men and ‘break down the prejudice to the effect that the production of food is the women's province or that the educated man need not soil his hands’.Footnote 70
The attempted remolding of gendered labor divisions did not go unquestioned. A delegation of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) visiting the Transkei and Ciskei in 1938, for instance, queried whether administrators were targeting the right people: ‘[S]hould it not be the Native women who are trained in new agricultural methods?’Footnote 71 Indeed, women's responses to the few educational services available to them seem to justify this question, as administrative records resound with comments on women's eager participation in agricultural shows, short courses, and women's organizations.Footnote 72 In 1939, the principal of Fort Cox even suggested that ‘the training of women would probably yield greater results in the development of the locations than the training of men’. His proposed agricultural school for women, however, never materialized.Footnote 73
PROGRESSIVES AND POOR WHITES: AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION IN THE ORANGE FREE STATE
Historians' assessments of white agriculture have been marked by ambiguity. On the one hand, studies refer to the period discussed here as South Africa's ‘agricultural revolution’, when the total value of output of white farms rose from £29 million in 1911–12 to nearly £200 million in 1948. A net importer of food, South Africa developed into an increasingly important exporter.Footnote 74 The ‘revolution’ particularly impacted the Highveld. In the decades following unification, the Free State, though a latecomer next to the early enclaves of export-oriented production in the southwestern Cape, the Eastern Cape, and in Natal, developed into the ‘agricultural heartland of twentieth-century South Africa’.Footnote 75
On the other hand, research has emphasized the ‘incompleteness’ of the agricultural revolution, which was prolonged, highly differentiating, and possible thanks only to massive government support.Footnote 76 Though in place before 1924, state measures assisting white farmers with finances, marketing, transport, tariffs, and labor intensified under Hertzog's Pact government and its receptiveness to white populism.Footnote 77 Despite controlled markets and subsidies, however, many white farmers continued to struggle. A key theme in the literature is how commercialization pressured whites unable to turn themselves into successful capitalist producers – mostly Afrikaans-speaking smallholders and landless bywoners – and drove them from the countryside in large numbers.Footnote 78 The case of agricultural education, however, instead speaks to the inclusiveness of agricultural policy and its attempts to bridge social and cultural-linguistic divisions. Well into the late 1930s, keeping people on the land was a priority in related administrative discourse, along with making farming a profitable pillar of the national economy. The following section shows how the project of white nation-building allowed this version of agricultural policy-cum-rural welfare to continue, even against contrary experience and expert advice.
When agricultural planning resumed in the Free State after the South African War (1899–1902), the newly instituted provincial Department of Agriculture faced a highly differentiated rural community. Timothy Keegan has depicted how Afrikaner and African subsistence and pastoral communities on the Highveld were radically transformed by the emergence of new internal markets from late nineteenth century onward. Early commercial production, largely based on sharecropping and black peasant production, was in the hands of a landowning, English- and partly Afrikaans-speaking elite.Footnote 79 At the other end of the spectrum, scores of Afrikaner families struggled with labor and capital shortages, periodic depressions, land divisions, and shrinking fields. In time, the South African War and the destruction caused by the British scorched-earth policy left many completely destitute.Footnote 80 Agricultural education reflected these socioeconomic divisions, as argued in the following, as well as an attempt to bridge them.
The Free State's new agriculture department targeted a profit-oriented type of farming able to supply the colony's needs, while also taking advantage of the ‘very profitable oversea market’.Footnote 81 From the start, systematic research and training were integral to its approach. The different divisions of the rapidly expanding department established two experimental farms and used lectures, bulletins, and correspondence to teach farmers how to improve their stock and crops, implement new methods of cultivation and harvesting, and organize into associations.Footnote 82 Only in 1919, however, did the department open its own agricultural college.Footnote 83 Glen Agricultural College near the provincial capital of Bloemfontein then made rapid headway in educating young men who wanted to farm professionally and in becoming a center of locally generated knowledge. Like its sister institutions in Natal, the Cape, and the Transvaal, Glen College had fields of specialization adapted to the types of agriculture practised in its region, an area of about 100,000 square miles in the Free State and part of the Cape Province.Footnote 84 Its diploma course for ‘the prospective land-owner-farmer’ encompassed what were considered to be the most important local branches, including irrigation and dry-land farming, along with dairy, poultry, sheep, and wool production. Similar to those at African colleges discussed above, the course was not specialized but general and aimed at combining theoretical instruction and practical work.Footnote 85 In the 1920s and 1930s, it gained a good reputation and attracted far more applications than it could accept.Footnote 86 Unlike in the declining African colleges, there were outlets for the ambitions of young men who graduated from the college. Though the majority returned to their parents' farms, students without that option seem to have found attractive employment easily, typically in higher positions on commercial farms, as experts in government departments, or as instructors at agricultural institutions.Footnote 87
Glen College furthermore extended to the agricultural community more broadly. By way of research and experimentation, staff members generated knowledge attuned to local environmental conditions that they communicated through both writing and personal contact. In the academic year of 1931–2 alone, Glen staff conducted nearly 2,000 farm visits and exchanged almost 5,500 letters with individual farmers. Agricultural shows, farmers' days, and competitions attracted increasing numbers of people, as did short courses for practicing farmers. Moreover, a one-year teachers' course ensured close contact between the college and rural schools.Footnote 88 As in the Transkei and Ciskei, another major component of agricultural instruction was on-the-spot demonstration. Glen's so-called ‘extension service’ became organized and further developed when the Union government established the Division of Agricultural Education and Extension in 1924.Footnote 89 Its ambitious head, Col. Heinrich du Toit, aimed to reach out to the rural ‘masses’ and convert each farmer to scientific agriculture.Footnote 90 Traveling lecturers and extension agents visited farms and provided public demonstrations on a range of topics, including fertilizers, improved seeds, and stock management. Glen's staff also worked with the Agriculture Department's ‘demonstration train’, an ‘“agricultural school on wheels”’ equipped with pamphlets and exhibits.Footnote 91 Using rhetoric not dissimilar to Transkeian and Ciskeian authorities, agricultural bureaucrats stressed the importance of face-to-face contact and empathy with the allegedly conservative population. Field officers were expected to develop a deep understanding of the difficulties farmers confronted in their respective regions and communicate these back to the Agriculture Department.Footnote 92
Albeit impossible to measure the degree to which such activities enhanced commercial success, the outreach and training activities organized through Glen College clearly helped to connect Free State farmers with each other and the national Department of Agriculture. Themselves members of important associations, officers assisted producers in organizing, while shows and competitions became social events that brought people into contact.Footnote 93 Traveling staff facilitated flows of information throughout the rural Free State, while extension officers were, according to an official memorandum, the Department of Agriculture's ‘“eyes and ears”’.Footnote 94 Education and collaboration, as Beinart has shown, remained central to the latter's method. Well into the 1960s, officials were reluctant to adopt a more compulsory approach toward farmers, though expert discourse became increasingly urgent in calls for greater state involvement in curbing soil erosion and the perceived over-exploitation of the country's natural resources.Footnote 95
The Free State's education and extension activities moreover speak to the larger context of state-sponsored scientization, which, as Dubow points out, was part and parcel of Anglo-Boer reconciliation and white nation-building politics after the South African War and formation of the Union in 1910.Footnote 96 Besides infrastructural and technical investments, including windmills, dams and railways,Footnote 97 official attention focused on knowledge as a factor to enhance productivity, with research and education constituting two of the Union Agriculture Department's main functions.Footnote 98 Next to the agricultural colleges with their generalist diploma courses, their services to practicing farmers and research activities, the government operated experiment stations and collaborated with individual farmers for instance in testing new seeds or analyzing soil types.Footnote 99 Agricultural research and training at university level started in 1917, with the establishment of a faculty of agriculture at the Transvaal University College in Pretoria.Footnote 100 Contributing to a ‘South Africanization of science’, these institutions generated knowledge locally and provided the young nation with a class of homegrown agricultural experts.Footnote 101
Agricultural scientization was exclusive on the basis of skin color, but became more inclusive within the category of whiteness. Glen College admitted only whites, while employing Africans as laborers, and even declined colored and black farmers' requests for scientific advice.Footnote 102 At the same time, according to the account of a former instructor, the institution ‘Afrikanerized’, especially after Gen. Hertzog sent his son there in 1924.Footnote 103 By the 1930s, the training, once conducted in English, was bilingual, and most students hailed from the Free State.Footnote 104 Meanwhile, the social composition of the rural community and administration changed more generally. Though commercial farming had first been driven by a primarily English-speaking group including absentee landowners and recent settlers of British or other colonial origin, the expanding grain and maize production increasingly involved Afrikaans speakers.Footnote 105 Similarly, the agricultural bureaucracy incorporated more young Afrikaner men.Footnote 106
While agricultural education clearly helped to ‘whiten’ commercial production and make it more inclusive on the basis of skin color, sources indicate that it nevertheless missed government expectations. By the mid-1930s, all of the Union's agricultural colleges turned out only 200 young farmers annually, thus falling far short of the 4,000 that the Department of Agriculture deemed necessary.Footnote 107 The institution expressed concerns that Glen's fees were ‘excessive’ and ‘beyond the means of the average farmer’ and that it encouraged a farming system that was too capital-intensive for the majority of the population.Footnote 108 Consequently, the college experimented with several programs for the sons of poorer parents, albeit to limited success.Footnote 109 The situation mirrored the experiences of du Toit and other officials of the Extension Division, who tried to address the white rural majority but always found it easier to work with the more affluent sections.Footnote 110
Behind these concerns was a long tradition of conceiving agricultural progress and rural welfare in conjunction. As in other national contexts, structural change in South Africa was accompanied by experiences of loss and upheaval that found an outlet in anti-urbanist sentiments, cultural pessimism, and agrarian romanticism.Footnote 111 A hotly debated crisis phenomenon was the exodus of economically deprived groups of bywoners and smallholders to the nation's cities. The ‘poor white problem’, a way of conceptualizing poverty in terms of a racial collective and as a question of public concern, emerged in the late nineteenth century and became highly politicized in the early decades of the twentieth.Footnote 112 Echoing arguments advanced by liberal intellectuals and administrators regarding the value of rural life for Africans, the natural place for poor Afrikaners was seen to be the countryside. In intellectual and newspaper discourse, the city was where both groups confronted each other in a downward spiral of competition for low-skilled work, racial ‘mixing’, and ‘deterioration’.Footnote 113 Education played a central role in both explaining poor whiteism and proposing solutions. A 1908 commission of the Orange River Colony reasoned that the low standard of education and its lack of adjustment to rural conditions were pushing young men and women to towns. Education that would teach whites ‘to help themselves' and relinquish their snobbery toward manual labor, by contrast, would prevent them from ‘sink[ing] below the level of natives’.Footnote 114 Two decades later, an influential report of the US Carnegie Corporation echoed the earlier study's logic, judging that the low level of education – 60 per cent of poor farmers' sons who entered agriculture each year had not finished primary school – and ‘maladjustment’ to rural life were major components of the poor white problem.Footnote 115
The Carnegie study, a document central to the consolidation of segregation and ‘state racism’,Footnote 116 became a point of reference throughout the 1930s, as severe droughts and the Great Depression precipitated ‘a widespread feeling of social and moral crisis’.Footnote 117 The destitution of many rural Afrikaans-speaking families challenged the self-definition of Boer (farmer) society and raised the specter of ‘degeneration’ and racial mixing.Footnote 118 Couched in eugenics-oriented language of ‘intelligence’ and heredity, scientific, official, and newspaper debates projected anxieties about lower-class rural others who at once belonged to the shared category of whiteness.Footnote 119 In response to the rural exodus, officials and intellectuals, including influential educator and Carnegie report author E. G. Malherbe, celebrated farmers as the ‘back-bone of the South African nation’ and connected agrarian romanticism to pleas for educational reform.Footnote 120 Drawing upon earlier ideas, experts proposed a ‘differentiated’ curriculum for the platteland. During a ‘Rural Education’ conference in Cape Town and Johannesburg in 1934, a major gathering of prolific national and international experts, South African educators campaigned for ‘less academic’ approaches adapted to farm life.Footnote 121 The idea of an agricultural bias for country schools also ranked high on the agenda of agricultural bureaucrats, including Glen College's principal.Footnote 122
Attempts to protect white supremacy by tying ‘endangered’ classes to the land, however, did not resound with their target audiences. Numerous sources reveal parents' objections to differentiated curricula that seemed to predetermine their children's careers and prepare them for a future of manual labor. Judging from agricultural modernizers' complaints, many rural parents expressed higher ambitions, desiring a full ‘academic education’ for their children.Footnote 123 In the late 1940s, the Free State's director of education reported about people's fierce resistance against the government's plans to establish agricultural instruction in rural primary schools.Footnote 124 In the question of an agricultural bias in country schools, class and racial delineations intersected. While a so-called adapted curriculum stressing practical over intellectual instruction sought to uplift poor whites from their unsettling economic proximity to Africans, agricultural instruction was at the same time associated with ‘labor education’ and ‘Kaffir work’.Footnote 125
Protest also came from expert circles. Rheinallt Jones criticized the government's attempts to ‘make our “poor whites” into independent farmers’ when modern agriculture required a small group of skilled, capitalized specialists.Footnote 126 In a similar vein, W. H. Hutt, Chair of Commerce at the University of Cape Town, argued at the abovementioned conference that the drift toward towns was a natural phenomenon in any country experiencing economic growth. Agricultural education could even accelerate urbanization, since more efficient techniques meant that fewer people would be required to meet the country's agricultural needs.Footnote 127
It took the government a long time to fully confront the fact there was not much space for its poor white constituency in the commercializing countryside and that it had better chances in the expanding industrial sector.Footnote 128 However, in a 1947 letter to Farmer's Weekly, a leading agricultural journal, the director of Agricultural Education and Extension made explicit that he would concentrate on a small group of specialists:
It is stated, without fear of contradiction …, that modern agriculture, conservation farming and stability in the farming industry demand a high level of intelligence and ability … The ideal, therefore, which the Department feels must be set … is a body of farmers, drawn from the higher intelligence groups of our population, with a fundamental training in the vocation they have chosen … [T]here is little or no place in South Africa for peasant farmers.Footnote 129
This educated ‘body of farmers’ consisted of men and rested on the ideal of a patriarchal nuclear family. Compared with the Transkei and Ciskei, however, the gendering of agricultural work in the Free State seems to have been somewhat more aligned with Afrikaner families' actual social organization. As Belinda Bozzoli has shown, Afrikaner households centered on the paterfamilias whose subordinate wife's role in food production was generally less dominant than that of African women.Footnote 130 State efforts to extend rural education to girls and women – few in the first place – again targeted the farmer's wife instead of the woman farmer. In 1920, Glen College appointed two ‘home instructresses’, who traveled through the region teaching women about family health care, thriftiness, and cultural esthetic tasks such as interior decoration.Footnote 131 Similar issues of general housewifery were at the heart of Glen's Home Industries Branch established in 1932, as well as of special women's sections in agricultural shows and magazines.Footnote 132
Such training of women for the social and cultural reproduction of the rural family must be seen alongside the fact that particularly young, single Afrikaner women were leaving for cities and towns at the time. Scholarship has elaborated anxieties about women's migration and the Afrikaner volksmoeder (mother of the people) idea – a notion of rural domesticity and motherhood that extended beyond the family and was framed in nationalist terms.Footnote 133 Similar notions of an extended domesticity into the national family also reverberated in discourse about rural education for women. In fact, the Free State Women's Agricultural Union argued in 1938 that domestic science should become an obligatory school subject for girls in order to foster ‘a healthy family life for our volk’.Footnote 134
Some Free State women pushed the sphere of women still further. In the mid- and late 1920s, teacher Esther Bell Robinson and her followers successfully campaigned for women's admission to Glen College's full diploma course, reminding the government that women with inherited or shared farms should be helped toward becoming successful producers.Footnote 135 Similarly, Boschetto Agricultural College in Harrismith, the only agricultural college for women in the entire Southern Hemisphere, trained young women in the core subjects of agriculture, thereby preparing them to become independent farmers or assume positions of higher management.Footnote 136 For white Free State women, the separate rural domestic sphere seems to have been slightly more permeable than for their Transkeian and Ciskeian counterparts.
CONCLUSION
In the first decades of the twentieth century, agriculture became a concern for the South African state, which in turn played a key role in boosting the sector's productivity. As in other national contexts, knowledge and education were among the first avenues through which the state shifted agriculture into public terrain, attempting to coopt rural dwellers into playing predefined roles in the national economy. In South Africa's agrarian historiography, education and rural social engineering have not been systematically examined. This article applied agricultural education as a lens to capture how officials, experts, intellectuals, and groups of farmers navigated the perceived transition from a pastoral trekker society to a modern nation by reforming and hence preserving the countryside in the face of rapid urbanization. Related programs were both inextricably intertwined with the emerging policy of segregation and intersected by delineations of class and gender.
The ideological construction of distinct racial communities both enabled and restricted agricultural development. African leaders in the Transkei and Ciskei situated rural improvement within a racially-defined collective and projected visions of black small-scale farming as a path to material progress and self-determination. The model of the ‘American Negro’ was a point of convergence between government officials and African progressives, exemplifying more broadly shared ideological terrain of African elites and liberal segregationists in the early decades of the twentieth century. Agricultural education was a manifestation of a cooperative administrative style emphasizing self-help. However, faced with land scarcity, a lack of capital, and labor migration, graduates of South Africa's agricultural schools found few possibilities for social advancement outside the demonstration service. Chaffing against actual consequences of segregation policy and failing to get the necessary collaboration on the ground, the earlier approach eventually yielded to more top-down, drastic interventions, most extremely under the banner of ‘betterment’.Footnote 137 The case of declining agricultural colleges in the Ciskei and Transkei exemplify how the ‘suffocation of African rural capitalism’ not only played out at the level of hard economic history, but also pertained to professional identities, social aspirations, and the prestige – or lack thereof – attributed to specific occupations.Footnote 138
By contrast, the ambitions of graduates from Glen Agricultural College found an outlet in the expanding commercial sector. In the Free State, agrarian reform bolstered economic reconstruction and helped to accommodate Afrikaans-speaking farmers, at least sections of them, in the larger framework of a white nation. At the same time, agricultural policy for whites struggled to reconcile the parallel desires to increase output and keep as many people on the land as possible. The construction of a white collective partly accounted for these welfarist aspects of agricultural policy. By the 1940s, however, the Agriculture Department explicitly endorsed a more exclusive stance, acknowledging the scarcity of space for poor whites on the commercializing platteland.
In both areas, agricultural reform was pushed by elites, but it could appeal more broadly depending on a family's social and educational background. Bureaucrats' and leading farmers' frustrations with ‘red natives’ and ‘poor whites’, however, indicate that the poorer strata of rural society fell from the framework of agricultural progressivism. The idea of a differentiated curriculum for rural children particularly aroused suspicions among parents who did not associate agricultural work with social progress. In both cases, progressive farming addressed men, rested on the nuclear family as an economic unit, and implied a separation of the field and home, with women's work being relegated to the latter. At a time when especially young Afrikaner women were streaming into the cities, romanticizing discourse cast rural women as guardians of white civilization. The projected sharp division of labor contradicted reality in the Free State and even more so in the Ciskei and Transkei, where agricultural modernizers wrestled with the fact that a large proportion of its male population was engaged in migrant labor.
South Africa's agrarian history is one of economic and social exclusions that has resulted in today's split sector, with commercial and subsistence farming existing side by side and with 80 per cent of households classified as ‘non-agricultural’.Footnote 139 That we know the end of the story, however, should not prevent us from inquiring into rural alternatives that South Africans imagined, engaged with, and rejected along the way.
