The study focuses on the influence of Christian based education on the building of the Afrikaner nation. The children settling with their parents in the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR) after the Great Trek all received Christian based education. The unique way in which both the country and the nation developed was the result of Christian based education. It had a direct influence on the development and functioning of the ZAR resulting in the forming of a Christian country with a Christian based constitution and Christian based laws. Christianity and Christian based education also influenced the social lives, culture and worldview of the people living in the ZAR, leaving a permanent mark on the Afrikaner nation. The stern Calvinistic religion, together with the influences of early Pietism and the worldview of the Romanticism as well as the traditional Christian based education brought from the Netherlands, all worked together to mould the Afrikaners into a unique nation. Religion was the one outstanding factor that determined all aspects of the lives of the Afrikaners, from their character and worldview to their way of speech and the standard of education given to the children. The goal of all education was to enable children to study the Bible - the Handbook to Life - and to become members of the Church. Their faith in and commitment to the Lord, was the force that kept the Afrikaners a unique nation with a strong character despite the extreme living conditions and changing circumstances through which they lived in the short years of the existence of the ZAR. The people living in the ZAR were the carriers of the influence of the Christian based education and the stories of their lives bear witness to the impact their education had on the development of the country and the nation. The legacy of Christian based education, as it was used in the ZAR, is still alive in the hearts and minds of Afrikaners today. The focus of the thesis made it necessary to use material from several different academic fields. Aspects of South African Church history, the general and political history of South Africa and the ZAR, the history regarding the development of education, as well as the social and cultural history of the Afrikaner nation were brought together to give a picture of the impact that Christian based education had on the ZAR. The historical-critical method is used, in order to establish what really happened and to show its significance, both in the historical context and in the present situation. The theoretical framework being used is didactical theological. / Chr Spirit, ChurchHist, Miss / DTH (CHURCH HISTORY)

NOTE FROM THE LIBRARY: PLEASE CONTACT THE AUTHOR AT indisunflower@yahoo.com OR CONSULT THE LIBRARY FOR THE FULL TEXT OF THIS THESIS.... This thesis investigates the trajectory traced from Sarah Baartman, a Khoisan woman exploited in Europe during the nineteenth century, to a contemporary writing workshop with circumcised, immigrant West African women in Harlem New York by way of a selection of African women's memoirs. The selected African women's texts used in this work create a new testimony of speech, fragmenting a historically dominant Euro-American gaze on African women's bodies. The excerpts form a discursive space for reclaiming self and as well as a defiant challenge to Western porno-erotic voyeurism. The central premise of this thesis is that while investigating Eurocentric (a)historical narratives of Baartman, one finds an implicitly racist and sexist development of European language employed not solely with Baartman, but contemporaneously upon the bodies of Black women of Africa and its Diaspora, focusing predominantly on the "anomaly of their hypersexual" genitals. This particular language applied to the bodies of Black women extends into the discourse of Western feminist movements against African female circumcision in the 21st century. Nawal el Saadawi, Egyptian writer and activist and Aman, a Somali exile, write autobiographical texts which implode a western "silent/uninformed circumcised African woman" stereotype. It is through their documented life stories that these African women claim their bodies and articulate nationalist and cultural solidarity. This work shows that Western perceptions of Female Circumcision and African women will be juxtaposed with African women's perceptions of themselves. Ultimately, with the Nitiandika Writers Workshop in Harlem New York, the politicized outcome of the women who not only write their memoirs but claim a vibrant sexual (not mutilated or deficient) identity in partnership with their husbands, ask why Westerners are more interested in their genitals than how they are able to provide food, shelter and education for the their families, as immigrants to New York. The works of Saadawi, Aman and the Nitandika writers disrupt and ultimately destroy this trajectory of dehumanization through a direct movement from an assumed silence (about their bodies, their circumcisions and their status as women in Africa) to a directed, historically and culturally grounded "alter" speech of celebration and liberation. / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil.(English)