Not Either an Experimental Doll by Shula Marks [New]

ISBN: 9780869805428 / 0869805428 - Not Either an Experimental Doll by Shula Marks. Published by UKZN Press, 1987. Softcover. New. 236 pp.

If, for most of the past in most parts of the world, most women have been 'hidden from history', black women in South Africa have been doubly hidden, both as women and because they are black.

Three women - two of them black - meet in the pages of this unusual book. Lily Moya was a Transkei schoolgirl growing up in lonely and alien surroundings. She sought help with her education from Mabel Palmer, an elderly white academic, then Organiser of the Natal University College's Non-European Section. The third was Subusisiwe Makhanya, a remarkable Zulu woman and a pioneer social worker.

Their letters illuminate more of the South African condition than the majority of history textbooks; the generosities, yet humiliations, of white liberalism; the nature of mission education; the socialisation of black girls; and the dilemmas they confront. They also reveal the separate worlds which we all inhabit, but which are made more frightening and more separate by the divisions of age, ethnicity and race.

But for all their differences, it is their passion for education which brings the three together across the chasms of class and age and race and destiny. As a result, this book addresses, in part, what is a burning issue in contemporary South Africa, the nature of black education and educational institutions.

With the sensitive editing of Shula Marks, this unique and moving collection of letters also addresses the singular experience of women and their interrelationships with one another within the broader social structures that make up the complexities of the South African reality.

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