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

Abstract

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.