Scholars have often analyzed missions that seem to have taken advantage of
indigenous people or that demonstrate 'the two-edged sword consensus', that the
missionized used the mission to assert their interests in spite of missionaries'
intentions. Likewise, studies of apartheid education tend to focus on how it maintained
the status quo or led students to rebel against it. There are mission schools, however,
that have created an environment that enabled students to pursue their own goals
through the institution itself.
st. Therese, a mission school in southern Namibia, was such a place for
students who attended it between 1973 and 1976. Through a review of government
and school records and interviews with former students, teachers and missionaries, I
show that many students who attended St. Therese during the mid· 1 970s have lived
professional lives that differ markedly from most of their families and contemporaries,
who struggled to meet their basic needs. I use ethnographic and historical detail to
argue that the school enabled students to break from the status quo and achieve
"success" as they and many others from their background have perceived it. I focus
the latter part of the study on students who became politically active while attending
st. Therese and explain how the school created conditions in which some students
identified with the "struggle", led a strike at the school in 1976 and joined SW APO's
national liberation movement in exile.
Performance is the guiding metaphor of this ethnography, used to contextualise
the 'roles' that St. Therese students played with the social 'scripts' in their possession.
The limitations of and possibilities for former students' performance of their memories
in the present are also considered.