“A Separate Path”: Scouting and Guiding in Interwar South Africa

Comparative Studies in Society and History

Volumn 42, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 605-631

  Proctor, Tammy M ^a  

^a Wittenberg University   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 85012568352     PISSN: 00104175     EISSN: 14752999     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0010417500002954     Document Type: Article

References (149)

1. Much has been written on the Baden-Powells and the Scout organization, but little has been done on either the Guides or on gender in either movement. Also, most works deal specifically with the first two decades of the movements, rather than with the interwar period. The major official histories of the Scouts and Guides include Henry Collis, Fred Hurll and Rex Hazlewood, B-P's Scouts: An Official History of the Boy Scouts Association (London: Collins, 1961)
2. Rose Kerr, The Story of the Girl Guides (London: Girl Guides Association, 1954)
3. and Alix Liddell, The Girl Guides, 1910–1970 (London: Frederick Muller, 1970). Robert Baden-Powell has been the subject of several biographies and the Chief Guide, Olave Baden-Powell, has written an autobiography that is quite useful.
4. The best biography is the recent one by Tim Jeal, The Boy-Man: The Life of Lord Baden-Powell (New York: William Morrow, 1990).
5. The analytical works on the movements are limited to work on the Scouts by Martin Dedman, “Baden-Powell, Militarism, and the ‘Invisible Contributors’ to the Boy Scout Scheme, 1904–1920,” Twentieth Century British History 4:3 (1993), 201–23
6. John Gillis, Youth and History (New York: Academic Press, 1974)
7. Robert H. MacDonald, Sons of the Empire: The Frontier and the Boy Scout Movement, 1890–1918 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993)
8. Michael Rosenthal, The Character Factory (New York: Pantheon Press, 1986)
9. John Springhall, Youth, Empire and Society (London: Croom Helm Ltd., 1977)
10. Allen Warren, “Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the Scout Movement and Citizen Training in Britain, 1900–1920,” English Historical Review 101 (1986), 376–98
11. and Paul Wilkinson, “English Youth Movements, 1908–1930,” Journal of Contemporary History 4:2 (April 1969), 3–23.
12. Allen Warren has written several insightful articles, including, “Mothers for the Empire,” in Making Imperial Mentalities, ed. J. A. Mangan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 96–109
13. “Citizens of the Empire,” in Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. John Mackenzie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 232–56
14. and “Popular Manliness: Baden-Powell, Scouting and the Development of Manly Character,” in Manliness and Morality: Middle-class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940, eds. J. A. Mangan and James Walvin (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), 176–98.
15. Good studies of working-class boys are: Michael J. Childs, Labour's Apprentices: Working-class Lads in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Hambledon Press, 1992)
16. and Harry Hendrick, Images of Youth: Age, Class and the Male Youth Problem, 1880–1920 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
17. For the post-World War I period, see: David Fowler, The First Teenagers: The Lifestyle of Young Wage-Earners in Interwar Britain (London: Woburn Press, 1995).
18. Two classic studies of middle-class girls are: Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Routledge, 1981)
19. and Deborah Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1982).
20. For works specifically dealing with American Scouting, see Jeffrey P. Hantover, “The Boy Scouts and the Validation of Masculinity,” Journal of Social Issues 34:1 (1978)
21. and David I. Macleod, Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983).
22. In fact, South Africa has been treated as a unique case in the study of African and colonial history. For one interesting discussion of this issue, see: Leonard M. Thompson, “The Study of South African History in the United States,” International Journal of African Historical Studies, 25 (1992): 27–28.
23. The WAGGGS (London: WAGGGS, 1938), 11 [World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts-General, Girl Scouts of the USA-New York City].
24. Perhaps most useful in this context was Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1967)
25. which dissected in detail the “dependency complex” argument of Dominique O. Mannoni in Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (New York: Praeger, 1964).
26. Frederick Cooper, “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History,” American Historical Review, 99:5 (1994): 1517.
27. Cooper, “Conflict and Connection,” 1545.
28. See for example MacDonald, Sons of the Empire
29. Warren, “Citizens for the Empire,” 232–56
30. and “Mothers for the Empire,” 96–109.
31. For another view of Scout and Guide cultural colonization, see: Deborah Gaitskell, “Upward All and Play the Game: The Girls' Wayfarer Association in the Transvaal, 1925–1975,” in Apartheid and Black Education: The Education of Black South Africans, ed. Peter Kallaway, (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1984), 227–28.
32. Jeal, The Boy-Man, 132–36.
33. Jeal, The Boy-Man, 171–92
34. MacDonald, Sons of the Empire, 62–87.
35. The argument over Baden-Powell's actions seems to have begun in 1966 with Brian Gardner, Mafeking: A Victorian Legend (London: Cassell, 1966). Since then, several historians and biographers have joined the fray, each giving a different reading to the evidence.
36. Two of the best accounts are: Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979)
37. Peter Warwick, Black People and the South African War, 1899–1902 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
38. Chapter six of Jeal, The Boy-Man, 205–312, does a good job of summarizing the various accounts and positions on Baden-Powell's actions at Mafeking.
39. Quoted in Gardner, Mafeking, 200.
40. See the discussion of Kipling's invention of Baden-Powell in Hugh Brogan, Mowgli's Sons: Kipling and Baden-Powell's Scouts (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987), 17–20.
41. Warwick, Black People and the South African War, 1899–1902, 46–49, 103, 165.
42. Jeal, The Boy-Man, 341.
43. Jeal, The Boy-Man, 338–339, 366.
44. Piers Brendon, Eminent Edwardians (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980), 236–237.
45. For an interesting look at ritual and masculinity, see: Keith Shear, “‘Not Welfare or Uplift Work’: White Women, Masculinity and Policing in South Africa,” Gender and History 8:3 (1996), 393–415.
46. Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys (London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1942), 62.
47. Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys, 75.
48. Terence Ranger has noted this interesting “paradox of young Africans being trained into regimental rigidities and young whites being trained in bush-craft” in his article “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa,” in The Invention of Tradition, eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 226.
49. See also idem, “Making Northern Rhodesia Imperial: Variations on a Royal Theme, 1924–1938,” African Affairs, 79:316 (July 1980).
50. Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys, 76.
51. MacDonald, Sons of the Empire, 84.
52. W. J. Batchelder and David Balfour, The Scout's Life of Baden-Powell (London: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1929), 8
53. Marguerite de Beaumont, The Wolf that Never Sleeps: A Story of Baden-Powell (London: Girl Guides Association, 1944).
54. The Oxford English Dictionary, vol. K (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 753.
55. Robert Baden-Powell, “The History of the Koodoo Horn,” (dictated typescript), 1929. TC/42, History-Koodoo Horn 1920–29, Scout Association (SA)-London.
56. Despite Tim Jeal's claims to the contrary, the Scout Association maintains that the wood badge's origin is documented and that the wood beads came from Dinizulu's necklace, obtained by Baden-Powell in 1887. In 1999, the current Lord Baden-Powell donated Robert Baden-Powell's original set of wooden beads from the necklace to the Scout Association. For Jeal's discussion of the necklace, see The Boy-Man, 132–36.
57. R.H. Kiernan, Baden-Powell (London: George G. Harrap, 1939), 254.
58. Robert Baden-Powell to Lord Gladstone, 16 April 1910
59. Lord Gladstone Archive, British Library Manuscript Collection #46069/108.
60. On the Victorian recreation of the Anglo-Saxon myth, see: Robert H. MacDonald, The Language of Empire: Myths and Metaphors of Popular Imperialism, 1880–1918 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 4, 53–54
61. and Kathryn Tidrick, Empire and the English Character (London: I.B. Taurus & Co., Ltd., 1990), 49–50.
62. For instance, in 1923 the London South African Girl Guide Association agreed to fund a translation of Girl Guidinginto Afrikaans. Girl Guide Association, Annual Re-port (London: GGA, 1923), 282. This was an astounding innovation of Guide and Scout literature-the Bible was only translated into Afrikaans in the 1920s.
63. Ann Laura Stoler, “Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 31:1 (January 1989): 134–161
64. and “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Southeast Asia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34 (1992): 514–51. Although Stoler's work deals with Dutch Sumatra, her study has larger implications for the study of imperialism. She hints at the connections with examples from South Africa, India, Barbados and Malaya.
65. Also useful is a work on white identity and class in the United States: David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991).
66. Robert Davies, “Mining Capital, the State, and Unskilled White Workers in South Africa, 1901–1913,” Journal of South African Studies 3:1 (October 1976), 41–69
67. and idem, “The 1922 Strike on the Rand: White Labor and the Political Economy of South Africa,” in African Labor History, eds. Peter Gutkind et al. (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1978), 80–108.
68. For a classic Marxist study of the problem, see: F.A. Johnstone, Class, Race and Gold: A study of class relations and racial discrimination in South Africa (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976).
69. Robert Baden-Powell report on South African tour, 1931. TC/9, SA-London.
70. Tom Atkinson to J. D. Rheinallt Jones, RE: Lovedale Pathfinders, 24 November 1931
71. Canon S. P. Woodfield, “How did the Pathfinder Movement Start?” n.d., TS
72. South African Institute on Race Relations records, Organisations-Pathfinders-Correspondence, AD843/RJ/Pp1.3.4, Misc.1044, Yale University. Hereafter this archival material will be listed as Yale SAIRR records.
73. E. W. Grant to J. D. Rheinallt Jones, 21 January 1936, Yale SAIRR records, AD843/RJ/Pp1.2.
74. The Pathfinder, 2:7 (October 1934), 2
75. Box 1229/South Africa: Native Affairs, Wayfarers/Pathfinders file, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London.
76. Memo on Girls Wayfarers' Association, TS, n.d., 2. Box 1229/South Africa: Native Affairs, Wayfarers/Pathfinders file, SOAS, London.
77. Olave Baden-Powell, “Brief History of Guiding in South Africa,” October 1930; Girl Guide Association (GGA)-London.
78. Olave Baden-Powell's notebook marked “Dominions and Colonies 11/1930,” GGA-London.
79. Janice Brownfoot, “Sisters under the skin: imperialism and the emancipation of women in Malaya, c. 1891–1941,” in Making Imperial Mentalities, ed. J. A. Mangan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 46–73.
80. Robert Baden-Powell thought Scouting possessed an “assimilating power” that would be proven in the South African case, and in the international realm in general. See: Robert Baden-Powell and Olave Baden-Powell, Report on the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides in South Africa (London: Boy Scouts Association, 1927), 9.
81. Robert Baden-Powell to J. D. Rheinallt Jones, 9 December 1931
82. TC/South Africa, Pathfinders file, SA-London.
83. Edgar H. Brookes, R. J.: In Appreciation of the Life of John David Rheinallt Jones and His Work For The Betterment of Race Relations in Southern Africa (Johannesburg: The South African Institute on Race Relations, 1953), 2–3.
84. J. D. Rheinallt Jones to D. D. T. Jabavu, 10 August 1931
85. Yale SAIRR records, AD843/RJ/Pp1.2.
86. Olave Baden-Powell to Lady Blankenburg, 26 November 1930
87. South Africa file, GGA-London.
88. The Pathfinder, 1 (February 1931), 2
89. Box 1229/South Africa: Native Affairs, Wayfarers/Pathfinders file, SOAS, London
90. Deborah Gaitskell, “Upward All and Play the Game: The Girls' Wayfarer Association in the Transvaal 1925–75,” in Apartheid and Black Education: The Education of Black South Africans, ed. Peter Kallaway (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1984), 227. Jean and John L. Comaroff have published several useful works on the making of colonial hegemony and the meaning of “uplift” in South Africa.
91. One particularly relevant work is: “Home-Made Hegemony: Modernity, Domesticity, and Colonialism in South Africa,” in African Encounters with Domesticity, ed. Karen Tranberg Hansen (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 37–74.
92. An excellent article exploring the “maternal imperialist” ideology is Jean All-man's, “Making Mothers: Missionaries, Medical Officers and Women's Work in Colonial Asante, 1924–1945,” History Workshop 38 (1994), 23–47.
93. Deborah Gaitskell, “Female Mission Initiatives: Black and White Women in Three Witwatersrand Churches, 1903–39” (Ph.D. diss., University of London [School of Oriental and African Studies], September 1981), 287.
94. “Scouts and Guides,” Berrow's Worcester Journal, 23 March 1929; TC/243 (Eton College, v. 1, p. 42–43), SA-London.
95. Scout-Pathfinder Relations, TS, Points made by J. D. Rheinallt Jones in conversation with F. Raleigh and P. Whiteley on 10 September 1935; Yale SAIRR records, AD843/RJ/Pp1.2.
96. “The Pathfinder Movement,” Ikwezi le Afrika 5:86 (5 September 1931), 2
97. TC/South Africa, Pathfinders file, SA-London.
98. A. M. E. Exley to Olave Baden-Powell, 24 November 1930
99. Olave Baden-Powell to Lady Blankenburg, 26 November 1930
100. South Africa file, GGA-London.
101. Charles Martin to J. D. Rheinallt Jones, 24 April 1934
102. Yale SAIRR records, AD843/RJ/Pp1.2.
103. Charles Martin to J. D. Rheinallt Jones, 24 April 1934
104. J. D. Rheinallt Jones to Charles Martin, 4 May 1934
105. Yale SAIRR records, AD843/RJ/Pp1.2.
106. See for instance: Janet Aldis, A Girl Guide Captain in India (Madras: Methodist Publishing House, 1922).
107. Olave Baden-Powell, “Resume of Guide-Wayfarer situation,” (confidential report) 20 January 1936
108. TC/South Africa, SA-London.
109. Deborah Posel, “The Meaning of Apartheid before 1948: Conflicting Interests and Forces within the Afrikaner Nationalist Alliance,” Journal of Southern African Studies, 14:1 (October 1987), 123–39.
110. R. Baden-Powell and O. Baden-Powell, Report, 1927, 24.
111. Also, the idea of “inventing tradition” is theorized in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
112. For a good general review of some of the literature on gender and empire, see: Malia Formes, “Beyond Complicity versus Resistance: A Review of Recent Work on Gender and European Imperialism,” Journal of Social History, 28:3 (March 1995), 629–41.
113. Some particularly useful works include: Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class Under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and their Critics, 1793–1905 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980)
114. Helen Callaway, Gender, Culture and Empire: European Women in Colonial Nigeria (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987)
115. Nupur Chaud-huri and Margaret Strobel, eds., Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1992)
116. Julia Clancy-Smith and Frances Gouda, eds., Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998)
117. Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” History Workshop, 5 (1978), 9–65
118. Ann Stoler, “Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th Century Colonial Cultures,” American Ethnologist 16:4 (November 1989), 634–60.
119. Robert Baden-Powell Memorandum to all Commissioners, October 1926; TC/65, SA-London.
120. For an excellent recent study of issues of race, cleanliness, and morality, see: Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).
121. Ray E. Phillips, “The African and the Cinema,” Race Relations, 5:3 (August 1938), 61–64.
122. Olave Baden-Powell to anonymous correspondent, 9 December 1929; Box 1229/ South Africa: Native Affairs, Wayfarers/Pathfinders file, SOAS, London.
123. The Girls Wayfarers Association in South Africa, undated pamphlet (probably about 1927)
124. South Africa file, GGA-London.
125. Dorothy Maud, “The Church at play in Johannesburg,” S.P.G. Mission (February 1929)
126. Box 1231/South Africa: Education, Education of Women and Girls, SOAS, London.
127. The Wayfarer laws are quoted from the Girl Wayfarers Association, Handbook of Rules and Organisation “Upward” (Revised November 1926), 1
128. Box 1229/South Africa: Native Affairs, Wayfarers/Pathfinders, SOAS, London.
129. The Guide Laws are quoted in Robert Baden-Powell, Girl Guiding (London: Girl Guides Association, 1921), 90.
130. Pathfinders figures are taken from a report by J. D. Rheinallt Jones to the International Missionary Council, 23 October 1936, 3; Box 1230/South Africa: Race Relations, Correspondence: J. D. Rheinallt Jones, Secretary (Institute of Race Relations), SOAS, London. Wayfarer figures are quoted in Gaitskell, “Upward All …,” 227.
131. J. D. Rheinallt Jones to Edgar Brookes, 9 June 1933; Yale SAIRR records, AD843/RJ/Pp1.2.
132. J. D. Rheinallt Jones to Edgar Brookes, 9 June 1933; Yale SAIRR records, AD843/RJ/Pp1.2.
133. J. D. Rheinallt Jones to Robert Baden-Powell, 14 July 1933
134. J. D. Rheinallt Jones to H. Legat, 28 July 1939; Yale SAIRR records, AD843/RJ/Pp1.2. I have not been able to pinpoint a specific reason for the denial of passports to the two Pathfinders. Rheinallt Jones merely notes that the action was taken “by the order of the Minister of Native Affairs.”
135. E. B. Rheinallt Jones, “Seven Points Which Seem to Me Fundamental in any Discussions as to Wayfarer Reorganisation or Affiliations,” February 1934; Yale SAIRR records, AD843/RJ/Pw1.
136. J. C. MacNeillie to Lettice Hill, 8 April 1934; South Africa file, GGA-London.
137. Five divisional commissioners resigned as well as a whole local association. Mrs. J. C. MacNeillie to Lady Reed, 26 February 1936; TC/South Africa, SA-London. According to Deborah Gaitskell, after the split the largest numbers of Wayfarers remained separate from the Guides. About twenty-two thousand members were recorded in 1939, while only about ten thousand new Wayfarer-Guides were recorded in 1936.
138. See Gaitskell, “Female Mission Initiatives,” 297–98.
139. “Scout Council Proposals,” The Natal Mercury 2 March 1936; SAIRR records, AD843/RJ/Pp1.3.9.
140. Robert Baden-Powell memo on 1935–36 tour, 4–5; TC/10, SA-London; Points made by J. D. Rheinallt Jones (Chief Pathfinder) in conversation with F. Raleigh and P. Whiteley, 10 September 1935; TC/South Africa, SA-London.
141. “Description of the Native Trust and Land Bill,” and “Description of the Representation of Natives Bill,” Race Relations 2:4 (August 1935), 3–4, 24–25.
142. Robert Baden-Powell, “Federation” memo, 12 March 1936. TC/10, SA-London.
143. Robert Baden-Powell, The Great Trek of the Early Scouts of South Africa for Rovers, Patrol Leaders and King's Scouts (London: Jackson and Co., 1936), 19.
144. Lord Clarendon to Robert Baden-Powell, 21 July 1936; TC/South Africa, SA-London.
145. 14th Coventry Rovers to Lord Somers, 27 March 1941; 4th Swindon Rovers to H. Legat, 27 February 1944; Arthur Brown to H. Legat, 24 April 1945; TC/65, SA-London.
146. Girl Guides Association, Annual Report (London: 1945), 29.
147. Bulletin to IHQ Speakers, 19 March 1948; TC/65, SA-London.
148. For a good discussion of South African segregation and Lugard's ideology of indirect rule, see: John W. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 204–29.
149. “Report of the Scout Pathfinder Joint Advisory Committee,” sent to Baden-Powell 31 December 1935; TC/South Africa, SA-London.