The People’s Paper
A Centenary History & Anthology of Abantu-Batho
EDITED BY PETER LIMB
Published in South Africa by:
Wits University Press
1 Jan Smuts Avenue
Johannesburg
Published edition © Wits University Press 2012
Compilation © Edition editor 2012
Chapters © Individual contributors 2012
First published 2012
ISBN 978-1-86814-571-3 (Print)
ISBN 978-1-86814-850-9 (Digital)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.
Cover images: Abantu-Batho print works and staff, ca. 1920, courtesy Wits Historical
Papers A2945 E
Edited by Alex Potter
Cover design by Hothouse South Africa
Typesetting by Pamset
Printed and bound by Paarl Media
Contributors
GRANT CHRISTISON’S 2007 University of KwaZulu-Natal PhD was on Robert Grendon, an Abantu-Batho editor, on whom he has also published a chapter in Grappling with the Beast: Indigenous Southern African Responses to Colonialism 1840–1930 (Brill, 2010). He is currently preparing an edition of Robert Grendon’s epic poem Paul Kruger’s Dream and has recently published on reading practices in colonial Natal in English in Africa.
PAUL LANDAU is an associate professor of History at the University of Maryland and a research fellow at the University of Johannesburg. He is the author of Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400–1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and The Realm of the Word: Language, Gender and Christianity in a Southern African Kingdom (David Philip, 1995).
PETER LIMB is an adjunct associate professor and Africana bibliographer at Michigan State University. His recent books include A. B. Xuma’s Autobiography and Selected Works (VRS, 2012), The ANC’s Early Years (Unisa Press, 2010), Grappling with the Beast (Brill, 2010) and Nelson Mandela: A Biography (Greenwood, 2008).
CHRISTOPHER LOWE is the only scholar to have written a PhD (Yale University, 1998) dealing substantially with the history of Abantu-Batho. He has published on Zulu and Swazi political history and ethnic politics, including in the Radical History Review.
SARAH MKHONZA is African writer-in-residence at Cornell University. She edited Democracy, Transformation, Conflict and Public Policy in Swaziland and, with Ackson Kanduza, Issues in the Economy and Politics of Swaziland since 1968 (OSSREA, 2003) and has published five literary works. She is writing an historical novel on Swazi queens.
SIFISO MXOLISI NDLOVU is executive director of SADET. He has a PhD in History from the University of the Witwatersrand and is author of The Soweto Uprisings: Counter-memories of June 1976 (Ravan Press, 1998), and several chapters in the SADET series, as well as school history textbooks. His research includes pre-colonial history and the history of football, on which he has published in such journals as the South African Historical Journal and History and Theory.
JEFF OPLAND, visiting professor of African Language Literatures in the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and visiting professor in the School of Languages, Rhodes University, is an acclaimed scholar specialising in Xhosa literature. His recent works include The Nation’s Bounty: The Xhosa Poetry of Nontsizi Mgqwetho (Wits University Press, 2007) and editions and translations of the work of Isaac Williams Wauchope (Van Riebeeck Society, 2008) and S. E. K. Mqhayi’s historical and biographical writings (Wits University Press, 2009).
CHRIS SAUNDERS is an emeritus professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. He has published on many aspects of Southern African history. His many books include The Making of the South African Past (1988) and (with T. R. H. Davenport), South Africa: A Modern History (2000; new edition forthcoming). He is one of the few to have written on the founder of Abantu-Batho, in an article in the South African Historical Journal (1991).
ROBERT TRENT VINSON is a university associate professor for Teaching Excellence in History at the College of William and Mary. His recent books include The Americans Are Coming! Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa (Ohio University Press, 2012), Crossing the Water: African Americans and South Africa, 1890–1965, with Robert Edgar and David Anthony (forthcoming, Ohio University Press) and Shaka’s Progeny: Zulu Culture and the Making of the Modern Atlantic World with Benedict Carton.
Acknowledgements
A book as complex as this has required the assistance of many people. For translations, extracts, or comments, I wish to thank Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi, Sekepe Matjila, Chris Lowe, Grant Christison, Brian Willan, Jeff Opland, Pamela Maseko, Sarah Mkhonza, Sifiso Ndlovu, Betty Sibongile Dlamini, Heather Hughes, Paul Landau, Robert Trent Vinson, Chris Saunders, Dag Henrichsen, Diana Jeater, Mwelela Cele, Paul la Hausse de Lalouvière, Robert Edgar, Robert Hill, Jeff Peires, Ray Suttner, André Odendaal and John Lonsdale. The perceptive and helpful remarks of three anonymous reviewers added still further to the text. Always vital in digging out fragments of this lost newspaper was the help of archivists and librarians at: the National Archives of South Africa, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe; Campbell Collections of the University of KwaZulu-Natal; Wits Historical Papers (especially Michele Pickover); Pitts Theological Library at Emory University; Rhodes House, Oxford; and the School of Oriental and African Studies Libraries. Chris Lowe was a real sleuth on photographic identification. Some material from Robert Trent Vinson’s chapter appeared in The Americans Are Coming! Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa (Ohio University Press, 2012), and some sections of Peter Limb’s chapter 2 appeared in The ANC’s Early Years (Unisa Press, 2010), included with permission from those two presses.
The deeper origins of this book go back to scholarly communications between Les Switzer, Chris Lowe and myself at a time when the Internet was young, and to more recent urgings by Paul la Hausse de Lalouvière; and of course to the inspiration and stimulation over many decades of the national liberation struggle in South Africa.
Preface
For much of the period before the end of the apartheid era the history of the South African press was the history of the white commercial press – the newspapers, magazines, and newsletters that were owned and controlled, produced, and consumed largely on behalf of those who ruled. And yet beneath the surface of this mainstream media lay hundreds of publications that sought to represent the anxieties and fears, interests and needs, hopes and desires of those who had no voice in white South Africa – the Africans, Coloureds and Indians who made up the vast majority of South Africa’s population.
The first publications in African languages – produced by missionaries working in communities of Bantu-speaking Africans in the Northern and Eastern Cape – stem from 1836 or 1837.1 This was only 12 or 13 years after the first newspaper owned by a white colonist was published.2 For most of the period between the late 1830s and the early 1990s, however, the black non-commercial press,3 like the white commercial press, was a sectional press. Black publications were aimed at or intended for separate African, Coloured and Indian communities, just as the European community was the primary consumer of the mainstream white press.
The archive of periodicals representing these subaltern communities – arguably the oldest and largest in sub-Saharan Africa – was virtually unknown before the 1960s/70s,