This book is about seven African nurse pioneers in KwaZulu/Natal from 1920 to 2000. The author captures the early nursing activities of the 1920s to 1970 and then moves to nurses that entered the health services in the 1950s. The author also presents two nurses that worked outside South Africa i.e. did their pioneering nursing in Saudi Arabia and the United States of America. The author does not scoop nursing out of its context but creates a narrative that resonates in lived experiences in a world dominated by the Africanization of poverty, the feminization of poverty, globalization, racism and xenophobia.

In rural South African clinics, Black nurses were charged with administering life-saving health care measures despite a lack of equipment and personnel, often while navigating the intersections of traditional African healing practices and changing gender relations. A Bold Profession is an homage to their dedication to the well-being of their communities.

Contingent Citizens examines the ambiguous state of South Africa’s public sector workers and the implications for contemporary understandings of citizenship. It takes us inside an ethnography of the professional ethic of nurses in a rural hospital in KwaZulu-Natal, shaped by a deep history of mission medicine and changing forms of new public management. Liberal democratic principles of ‘transparency’, ‘decentralization’ and ‘rights’, though promising freedom from control, often generate fear and insecurity instead. But despite the pressures they face, Elizabeth Hull shows that nurses draw on a range of practices from international migration to new religious movements, to assert new forms of citizenship. Focusing an anthropological lens on ‘professionalism’, Hull explores the major fault lines of South Africa’s fragmented social landscape – class, gender, race, and religion – to make an important contribution to the study of class formation and citizenship. This prize-winning monograph will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, development studies, sociology and global public health.

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2014! 2014 winner of the American Association for the History of Nursing’s Mary M. Roberts Award for Exemplary Historical Research and Writing! The Routledge Handbook on the Global History of Nursing brings together leading scholars and scholarship to capture the state of the art and science of nursing history, as a generation of researchers turn to the history of nursing with new paradigms and methodological tools. Inviting readers to consider new understandings of the historical work and worth of nursing in a larger global context, this ground-breaking volume illuminates how research into the history of nursing moves us away from a reductionist focus on diseases and treatments and towards more inclusive ideas about the experiences of illnesses on individuals, families, communities, voluntary organizations, and states at the bedside and across the globe. An extended introduction by the editors provides an overview and analyzes the key themes involved in the transmission of ideas about the care of the sick. Organized into four parts, and addressing nursing around the globe, it covers: New directions in the history of nursing; New methodological approaches; The politics of nursing knowledge; Nursing and its relationship to social practice. Exploring themes of people, practice, politics and places, this cutting edge volume brings together the best of nursing history scholarship, and is a vital reference for all researchers in the field, and is also relevant to those studying on nursing history and health policy courses.

The politics of black education has long been a key issue in southern African studies, but despite rich debates on the racial and class dimensions of schooling, historians have neglected their distinctive gendered dynamics. A World of Their Own is the first book to explore the meanings of black women’s education in the making of modern South Africa. Its lens is a social history of the first high school for black South African women, Inanda Seminary, from its 1869 founding outside of Durban through the recent past. Employing diverse archival and oral historical sources, Meghan Healy-Clancy reveals how educated black South African women developed a tradition of social leadership, by both working within and pushing at the boundaries of state power. She demonstrates that although colonial and apartheid governance marginalized women politically, it also valorized the social contributions of small cohorts of educated black women. This made space for growing numbers of black women to pursue careers as teachers and health workers over the course of the twentieth century. After the student uprisings of 1976, as young black men increasingly rejected formal education for exile and street politics, young black women increasingly stayed in school and cultivated an alternative form of student politics. Inanda Seminary students’ experiences vividly show how their academic achievements challenged the narrow conceptions of black women’s social roles harbored by both officials and black male activists. By the transition to democracy in the early 1990s, black women outnumbered black men at every level of education—introducing both new opportunities for women and gendered conflicts that remain acute today.

Autonomy is either relational or it does not exist at all. All life is irreducibly relational and human personhood is helplessly engaging and being engaged by all life. Significant as individual personal consciousness is, consciousness of others as fellow selves is a higher form of consciousness. It is the other selves that define and affirm the autonomous individual. Relationality is the basis of autonomy. This work claims that autonomy should not undermine relationality and that individual good is based on common good. Overemphasizing autonomy may lead to moral relativism, hence ethical anarchism. Veracity ought to be the proto-principle of bioethics.

Ubuntu and Buddhism in Higher Education theorizes the equal privileging of ontology and epistemology towards a balanced focus on ‘being-becoming’ and knowledge acquisition within the field of higher education. In response to the shift in higher education’s aims and purposes beginning in the latter half of the 20th century, this book reconsiders higher education and Western subjectivity through southern African (Ubuntu) and Eastern (Buddhist) onto-epistemologies. By mapping these other-than-West ontological viewpoints onto the discourse surrounding higher education, this volume presents a vision of colleges and universities as transformational institutions promoting our shared connection to the human and non-human world, and deepens our understanding of what it means to be a human being.

This is a history of the religious, health, medical and political contexts of Natal and South Africa from the late 1800s to the 1970s.

A socio-economic history of medical practice from the first voluntary hospital to national health insurance.

Between 1838 and 1888 the recently formed Zulu kingdom in southeastern Africa was directly challenged by the incursion of Boer pioneers aggressively seeking new lands on which to set up their independent republics, by English-speaking traders and hunters establishing their neighboring colony, and by imperial Britain intervening in Zulu affairs to safeguard Britain's position as the paramount power in southern Africa. As a result, the Zulu fought to resist Boer invasion in 1838 and British invasion in 1879. The internal strains these wars caused to the fabric of Zulu society resulted in civil wars in 1840, 1856, and 1882-1884, and Zululand itself was repeatedly partitioned between the Boers and British. In 1888, the old order in Zululand attempted a final, unsuccessful uprising against recently imposed British rule. This tangled web of invasions, civil wars, and rebellion is complex. The Historical Dictionary of the Zulu Wars unravels and elucidates Zulu history during the 50 years between the initial settler threat to the kingdom and its final dismemberment and absorption into the colonial order. A chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, maps, photos, and over 900 cross-referenced dictionary entries that cover the military, politics, society, economics, culture, and key players during the Zulu Wars make this an important reference for everyone from high school students to academics.