In the early twentieth century, women travelers, primarily as spouses and students, but more importantly, as missionaries, helped to deepen connections between South Africa and the United States. This paper explores how exposure to American curricula, most often gained through enrollment at black institutions and social activism in the larger sphere, led Charlotte Maxeke and Sibusisiwe Makhanya, two international students from South Africa, and Susie Yergan, an African American, to champion philosophies of self-help and women’s centrality in racial and social uplift. This discussion uncovers complexities that developed in their activism and ideological perspectives as returnees and journeyers to South Africa. More often than not, the focus, aim, and extent of these women’s work was influenced by the South African environment as well as by the tangled relationship between Africans and African Americans as the latter begun to concentrate on domestic issues in hopes of obtaining American citizenship.
As the women in this study continued their work in South Africa, which aimed to guarantee Black South Africans’ progress in a world characterized by European standards, Yergan, Maxeke, and Makanya nonetheless stood in defense of many African customs and beliefs, arguing that the arrival to modernity did not necessarily mean a complete break with the past. By focusing on these female missionaries, who frequently labored without recognition or remuneration, and the ways in which they upheld and contributed to ideas about progress and culture, we discover how women too shaped cultural interchanges and ideological interconnectedness in the trans-Atlantic world.