The politics of black education has long been a key issue in southern African studies, but despite rich debates on the racial and class dimensions of schooling, historians have neglected their distinctive gendered dynamics. A World of Their Own is the first book to explore the meanings of black women's education in the making of modern South Africa. Its lens is a social history of the first high school for black South African women, Inanda Seminary, from its 1869 founding outside of Durban through the recent past.

Employing diverse archival and oral historical sources, Meghan...

This book examines the African home as a key site of struggle in the making of modern KwaZulu-Natal, a South African province that instantiates in extreme form many of the transformations that shaped the colonial world. The book's essays explore major themes in African and global history, including the colonial manipulation of kinship and the exploitation of labor, modernist practices of social engineering, and the changes wrought within intimate relationships by post-industrial decline. Ranging from the rural to the urban and the pre-colonial era to the presidency of Jacob Zuma, the book...