A Tea Cozy and a Zulu Chieftainess: South African Apartheid Administrators and the Wooing of White American Women

The South African apartheid state was unquestionably a male domain in which a shared Afrikaans hegemonic masculinity emphasizing patriarchy, dominance, and obedience masked a collective sense of inferiority and exclusion from the West. Apartheid South Africa’s racial and imperial policies increasingly clashed with global trends toward racial equality and decolonization and resulted in international blackballing beginning in the mid-1950s, leaving the United States as one of South Africa’s only, and rather unenthusiastic, allies. This paper focuses on two case studies to argue that the Afrikaner men of the apartheid state attempted to bolster grass-roots support in the US by courting white American women. In the first instance, state officials went out of their way to provide a mid-western Women’s Sunday School class with a doll of an African woman, which doubled as a tea cozy, revealing Afrikaner men's ideals surrounding domesticity and the racial hierarchy. In the second case, the government took a female American anthropologist on a carefully managed tour of KwaZulu in hopes that she would publish a favorable report on apartheid. Though these examples by no means suggest a coherent policy, they nevertheless reveal state agents’ perceptions of white women as potential avenues to foreign aid, even if these women transgressed the structural gender barriers that were as essential to the apartheid framework as its racial divisions.