Principals, Chiefs and School Committees: The Localisation of Rural School Administration in Lebowa, 1972–1990

This article examines the processes driving the making of local school administrations in the Mapulaneng district in the former Lebowa Bantustan. It examines the development of the school as a key site of power struggles, by considering the changing relationship between chiefs, principals and school committee members. I make my argument in three steps: first I show how both the chieftainship and the rural school became responsive to the South African state and, later, the Bantustan administration. I then discuss what this meant for the governance of education in the early Lebowa period, from 1972 to 1980. I conclude with an examination of how the political environment and practices of power produced new forms of governance by the 1980s. By positioning the rural Bantustan school in the changing political and moral economies of the era, I show how Bantustan schools became ‘localised’, with significant effect for a later period of education.