Magister Artium - MA / The issue of personhood has long been of concern to many philosophers. The primary concern has been about determining the necessary and sufficient conditions for an entity to be a person at a particular point in time. The most common answer in Western terms is that to be a person at a time is to have certain special mental properties such as psychological connectedness. On the other hand, others argue that we can only ever understand the ascription of mental characteristics as part of a necessarily joint set of physically instantiated properties. Most recent contributions to the topic have however cast doubt on these earlier attempts to understand personhood solely in terms of bodily and psychological features. Not only do they suggest a model of personhood that is individualistic, they also fail to make reference to communal and social elements. In particular, many non-Western, specifically African, cultures foreground these communal and social aspects. This is true of the Akan, Yoruba and Igbo cultures. As Kwasi Wiredu and Kwame Gyekye; Dismas Masolo; Segun Gbadegesin; and Ifeanyi Menkiti have shown respectively. However, there is a lack of comparable philosophical inquiry in the Southern African context. The primary aim of this study is to critically explore the metaphysical, cultural, linguistic and normative resources of the Zulu people in understanding what it means to be a person. The approach is predominantly conceptual and analytic, but it also draws on some empirical data with a view to extending the results of the literature-based study. Not only does this extend the field of cultural inquiry to personhood, it also opens up new opportunities to tackle old problems in the debate, including the question of what should be the proper relationship between the individual and the community. Specifically, I argue that rather than focus attention on the priority of the individual or community in relation to each other, consideration of the notion of personhood in Zulu culture reveals that notwithstanding significant communal constraints forms of agency are available to individuals. http://

This thesis examines the work of the American Zulu Mission in Natal from 1835 to 1910. Of the institutions controlled by this mission, the most famous was that known in the 20th Century as Adams College, named after one of the founders of the Natal work, Dr Newton Adams. Although other research work has been done on this institution and this mission in general, this thesis attempts to examine the work in the light of the mission's own view of its educational purpose and the expectations of the Colonial Government of what could be expected of missionary education. To meet this purpose particular stress was laid first on the actual development of the mission's educational institutions, especially when reports and letters assessed the aims of the developments and the ways in which these aims were being met. Secondly, the aims of missionary education were explained through five capital Colonial Government Commissions, which looked, in a number of different ways, at the current position and future of the Zulu peoples of Natal. These Commissions reported in 1846, 1852-1853, 1881-1882, 1892 and 1902. Two major findings emerge from the investigation. The first was lack of clarity, not only on the part of what the mission was trying to do, but also on what the Colonial Government expected it to do. To this absence of clarity must be added the continuous shortage of finance, the reluctance of the Zulu themselves to accept the combination of education (which they wanted) and conversion (of which they were often suspicious). In these circumstances, their slow progress of the 75 years from 1835 to 1910 becomes understandable. Had these years been the total extent of the mission' s contribution to Natal, there would be little justification for any extended investigation, or any reason behind the high prestige which the mission enjoyed. It is shown, however, that from 1902 onwards a new, more incisive and directional policy, especially on the question of education, came from the mission. This emerged particularly under the leadership of Le Roy, Principal from 1903 to 1925. The last part of this thesis assesses this new direction. The detailed investigation comes to an end at 1910 when with the creation of Union, an entirely new organisation and dispensation came into being. In the last years of Le Roy's principalship the promise of the period of 1902 to 1920 came to fruition and in the final chapter a brief summary of these developments are given