Inanda Seminary, the focus of Healy-Clancy’s latest book, was an American missionary institution founded in the mid-nineteenth century to produce suitable wives for new African clerics. Over time, Inanda became a virtual factory for turning out women of unprecedented achievement; its alumnae often rose to the highest possible positions allowed to black women in South Africa’s industries. At the time of Healy-Clancy’s writing, 140 years after Inanda’s founding, the Seminary wore its historical significance confidently, even as the plaster on its walls gave way to time and neglect.
Healy-Clancy’s book proceeds as a study of Inanda’s persistence, largely as an independent school, despite facing several threats of closure. It survived the apartheid state and the formation of the Bantustans, when the school came under Zulu governance. It survived the era of black consciousness, when schools went up in flames in protest against the Bantu education laws. It even survived the...