“College girls don't faint”: The legacy of elsewhere

Abstract

Summary This article is an attempt to pursue a localised cultural history of private girls’ schooling in Natal during the apartheid era. Using an autobiographical lens, it looks at the traces of Victorian rhetoric and its codification within a feminine/feminist militarism evident in the speeches and songs as well as social and cultural practices of Durban Girls’ College, a Presbyterian school in Durban. Using archival material and memory, my own and others’, to trace the signs of “Englishness” in the formation of identity in white girls coming from mainly privileged backgrounds, I direct a self‐reflexive gaze at the effects of such schooling on attitudes to race and culture prevalent at the time. In parallel, however, I also examine some archival material from Inanda Seminary, College's “sister” school, which has a different provenance, but which also catered for the privileged members of Zulu society. While I do not pretend to engage in a fully developed comparison of these schools, I hope to show that similar expectations about conduct and class were brought to bear on white and black girls in Natal during a specific historical period.