Emily Hobhouse and the Koppies Lace School, 1908-1926

In 1908 the British pacifist and suffragist Emily Hobhouse (1860–1926) set up a lacemaking school at Koppies in the Orange Free State of South Africa. This was part of her wider Boer Home Industries (BHI) scheme, intended to address socio-economic hardships in Boer communities in the aftermath of the 1899–1902 South African War, as well as to inculcate moral and racial values at a time of white insecurity and challenges to the racial order. In this chapter, we focus on the lace as object as well as symbol, concentrating on its making and its use and value as it passed between the women of Boer families, female consumers in an international charity market, and buyers, collectors and curators in South Africa at a time of emerging Afrikaner nationalism. This focus on materiality and practice allows us to examine the making of international welfare schemes and nationalist politics in post-war South Africa. We also consider the role of women’s networks of sociability in this cultural nationalist project. This reorientates an understanding of humanitarianism from being purely philanthropic towards an appreciation of its racial and gendered modes of cultural and economic production, as well as collaboration and negotiation between local and international actors.