Education in Africa 
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| Title: | From Ethnography to Social Welfare. Ray Phillips and Representations of Urban Women in South Africa |
| Author: | Berger, Iris |
| Year: | 2006 |
| Periodical: | Le Fait Missionnaire: Social Sciences and Missions |
| Issue: | 19 |
| Period: | December |
| Pages: | 91-116 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | South Africa |
| Subjects: | missions social welfare social work education Women's Issues History and Exploration Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) Religion and Witchcraft Ethnic and Race Relations Urbanization and Migration Historical/Biographical urbanization |
| About person: | Ray Edmund Phillips (1889-1967) |
| External link: | https://doi.org/10.1163/221185206X00076 |
| Abstract: | One of a small group of American missionaries who arrived in Johannesburg in the turbulent years after World War I, Ray Phillips sought to devise a 'Social Gospel' that would confront the era's crime-ridden slums, political turbulence, strikes and racial tension by awakening white South Africans to the country's social problems and providing Africans with alternatives to the radical messages of 'communist' political activists. Working with other white liberals, these urban missionaries launched projects to foster communication between whites and Africans and to 'moralize' the leisure time of African city dwellers. The negative images of African women in Phillips's early writings reflected widespread attitudes that influenced South African political life in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet Phillips also reflected, and may have contributed to, an important transformation in understanding African urban life that occurred in the late 1930s - a change from what might be called missionary ethnography to a more generalized social science and social policy. Under Phillips's leadership, the Jan Hofmeyr School of Social Work opened in Johannesburg in January 1941. In keeping with Phillips's apolitical approach, the curriculum of the school was largely practical and moralistic. It had high prestige within the African community, offering one of the few professional opportunities for Africans, male or female. By the late 1950s, the government started transferring black social work training to the apartheid-created African universities, and in 1959 the Jan Hofmeyr School was forced to close. Notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract] |