This chapter traces the transformation of the school from the site for instilling ideas about racial and class-based separate development during the colonial era into the key mechanism for ensuring African political and economic development today. Formal schooling introduced during the colonial era contributed to racial and economic divisions by promoting the idea of separate development and segregation. Missionary and colonial education institutionalized the assumptions about racial difference embedded in the development episteme. Colonial educators faced a conundrum; they sought to “civilize” Africans in Western academic traditions and at the same time to reinforce ideologies of racial difference that undergirded colonialism and the development episteme. This conflict was complicated further as schools became a place for challenging these ideas and generating African nationalist ideas of development. Some postcolonial reforms recentered African epistemologies in the schools. Today institutions and scholars of the global north still claim to be the experts in technology, science, and medicine, the sciences necessary for solving development “problems.” Nonetheless, African institutions and scholars are at the forefront of development innovations designed for their own communities including in the expansion of innovative university practices.

This chapter surveys the South African state’s engagement with the international normative languages which emerged after 1945. Its focus is on the sustained effort to reconfigure apartheid into a form compatible with the lexicon of human rights, self-determination, and multicultural pluralism. Beginning in the early 1960s, apartheid, rebadged “separate development,” was interlaced with norms on self-determination, identity, and economic development. Apartheid was reset in a form which deferred to the prevailing ideals of the period, an effort that was never convincing, but was, in broad terms, disturbingly coherent. Drawing on South African archives and underutilized public relations tracts, it demonstrates that National Party ideologues were conversant in the new internationalist phraseology. Their agility remains a powerful example of how discourses of human welfare and freedom hold ample capacity for subversion into authoritarian instrument. Apartheid, a project of essentialist, racially determined nationalism, could be, and was, translated into various emancipatory and internationalist dialects.