Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Winter 2004
As representatives of the foundation that had been created by Andrew Carnegie, one of the world’s most respected philanthropists, during their month-long visit to all four provinces—Cape Province, Orange Free State, Transvaal and Natal—Keppel and Bertram were feted in all the major cities by the country’s highest level offi cials, from Prime Minister J.B.M. Hertzog and former Prime Minister Jan Smuts, to the white South African elite in business, education and politics.
Dr. Keppel would not have met with members of South Africa’s native population, but it is likely that their disadvantaged position would have been hard to ignore, as was the sensitivity of the South African government to criticism of its racial policies.
Although this was the first formal visit of Corporation officers to South Africa, prior to the establishment of the Corporation in 1911, Andrew Carnegie had made generous gifts to several South African communities, among them Vryheid and the town of Harrismith, for the construction of libraries, an endeavor that became a hallmark of Carnegie’s world-wide philanthropic efforts.
Despite the glaring inequalities in opportunity for whites and blacks that he witnessed, Dr. Keppel, upon his return, recommended to the Corporation’s board of trustees that $500,000 (more than $5 million in today’s dollars) be appropriated for education grants in East, Central and South Africa, with the largest share of the funding going to programs in the Union of South Africa. The first grant, made in 1926, helped to establish a school in Kenya dedicated to the practical training of Africans as supervisors in rural education. In South Africa, where Corporation funding was already support-ing technical education for “coloured” and Asian students, whites would be the benefi ciaries of these grants, but Keppel, not unmindful of the needs of South African blacks, expressed the hope that early support for white advancement would produce “resulting goodwill and associations which would help to legitimize and make more effective what ever work the Corporation might do on behalf of black advancement.”
The Corporation had established an impressive record of grants to black colleges in the American south. Andrew Carnegie was an enthusiastic and generous supporter of the famed black educator and founder of Tuskeegee Institute, Booker T. Washington. But while support for projects sup-porting the improvement of the degraded lives of Southern blacks was to become a recognized and signature effort of the Corporation, Keppel’s hope for the foundation’s role in South Africa would not be realized for nearly sixty years.
The Carnegie “Poor White Study”
The Corporation’s work in South Africa through the mid-20th century had the effect of earning Carnegie Corporation enormous credibility with the white minority South African government, but the relationship was purchased at the expense of the black majority. Indeed, the fi rst major program supported by the Corporation in South Africa symbolized the inher-ent contradictions and tensions that existed between the foundation’s actions and its offi cers’ hopes for a brighter future.
The Carnegie Commission of Investigation on the Poor White Question in South Africa—which produced a report known as the “Carnegie Poor White Study”—began its work in 1929, and was at that time the largest and most complex social science study ever conducted in Africa. More than a sociological inquiry, this investigation was to become a watershed event in South African social and political history.