'Not Either an Experimental Doll'. The separate worlds of three South African women. Correspondence of Lily Moya, Mabel Palmer and Sibusisiwe Makhanya

(Durban and Pietermaritzburg, Killie Campbell Africana Library and University of Natal, 1987). 205 x 145 mm; laminated pictorial wraps; pp. 217 including index; black-and-white photographs. Small pen notation inside upper cover obliterated with deletion fluid. Very good condition. "Three women - two of them black - meet in the pages of this unusual book. Lily Moya was a Transkei schoolgirl growing up in lonely and alien surroundings. She sought help with her education from Mabel Palmer, an elderly white academic, then Organiser of the Natal University College's Non-European Section. The third was Sibusisiwe Makhanya, a remarkable Zulu woman and a pioneer social worker. Their letters illuminate more of the South African condition than the majority of history textbooks; the generosities, yet humiliations, of white liberalism; the nature of mission education; the socialisation of black girls; and the dilemmas they confront. They also reveal the separate worlds which we all inhabit, but which are made more frightening and more separate by the divisions of age, ethnicity and race. But for all their differences, it is their passion for education which brings the three together across the chasms of class and age and race and destiny." .