White and Black Women under the Same Roof? The Early History of Montebello’s Black Sisterhood (1922–1939)

Abstract

In 1922 four young Zulu women expressed the desire to join the Oakford Dominican Sisters, a congregation of mostly German Catholic religious women based in Natal. They were accepted to the novitiate in 1926 and subsequently took vows. This raised the issue of whether they should be fully part of the Oakford congregation or form a separate congregation for black sisters only under the guidance, at least for a while, of white sisters. In other words, should the Oakford congregation follow the segregation model in use in other Catholic religious congregations and most Protestant churches in southern Africa? The paper describes the battle that opposed, on this issue, the black sisters and their novice mistress, Sr Euphemia Ruf, on one side, and Archbishop Jordan Gijlswijk, the envoy from Rome, who wanted to maintain the unity of the congregation, on the other side. In the end, the argument that Zulu people were ‘too different’ from white people to live with them prevailed and a separate congregation of diocesan right, based in Montebello, where the black novitiate for black sisters had been established, was created in 1939.