A Crooked Path to Apartheid Education: Segregating the University of Natal, 1936–1959

This article examines the implementation of a form of segregated higher education at the University College of Natal (later the University of Natal) between 1936 and 1959. It argues that this programme became an exemplar as a pathway to segregated higher education for the apartheid government before it moved to implement fully ethnically segregated universities in 1959. Yet the origins of the ‘Non-European Section’ (NES) at Natal were ideologically rooted in a liberal project, one that had connections to expanding education for women and workers as well as black South Africans. The structural constraints of providing higher education for black South Africans under segregation meant that liberal reformers and apartheid policy makers sometimes converged on a crooked path to apartheid education, despite their fundamentally different ideological positions. The article argues that the peculiar trajectory of the NES was shaped by contingency at every step – from its ad hoc formation and early years running out of Sastri College to its expansion and establishment on its own campus at Wentworth and its eventual championing by the government’s Holloway Commission. The NES was also directly responsible for the establishment of the Natal Medical School, South Africa’s first segregated facility for training black doctors. The article argues that, through these two institutions, the University of Natal was pivotal in shaping early apartheid educational policy before the turn to a more fully realised university apartheid after 1959.