In this regard, we can ask, pace Bonner on the 1930s, whether ‘ethnic politics’ were, in fulfilment of Seme’s injunction to the inaugural Congress, entirely banished in its pages or whether they persisted. Bonner sees in TAC politics of the 1930s ‘a new kind of non-traditionalist ethnicity … rooted in the countryside and played out in the towns’ between an ‘Eastern Transvaal’ bloc around Makgatho and a ‘Sotho-Tswana’ bloc around S. P. Matseke. These rivalries were rooted in the influence of chiefs and generational change, and the impact of economic depression, land hunger and class.106
In a society increasingly based on ethnic divisions, it was hard to avoid commenting on ethnic politics. When laws requiring permits to enter the Transkei were used to deny entry to representatives of African organisations such as ICU officials, the editor asked if the Bhunga was ‘a mere cackling shop of witchdoctors and Barbarians, or is it a Native sub-Parliament? Surely the Bhunga cannot look on in silence while the natives are thus bagged in their own territories.’ Sadly, it was a case of a ‘Bhunga white elephant’.107
Abantu-Batho’s language columns may have mirrored ethnic divisions, but editorial policy followed Seme’s call for national unity, although by the 1920s both Seme and the black press had in some ways abandoned this purity for more regional or ethnic predilections. The language columns also spoke to the genuine regional interests of readers. This might take the form of Chief K. K. Pilane writing in from the north-west on TNC business, a brief note on the arrival in eGoli (Johannesburg) of Prince Sobhuza or Chief Victor Poto, or commentary from The Zoutpansberg Review on Hertzog and the National Party.108
Transcending colonial-imposed boundaries to roam across the sub-continent, the wider continent and the African diaspora, the paper articulated a growing Pan-Africanism and even Black Consciousness. An early and potent form of this wider identity was Garveyism, the focus of Robert Vinson’s chapter in this volume, and some Abantu-Batho extracts are in the Garvey Papers.109 It is germane to mention here some additional aspects of South African Garveyism as they relate to Abantu-Batho. As early as 1919 Champion commented on the slogan ‘Africa for the Africans’ and Abantu-Batho.110 Thema, when still working for the paper in 1920, gave Garveyism a boost.111 In November 1920 a leader supporting Garveyism appeared.112 Yet there were earlier connecting threads. From the start the paper expressed a strong broad Pan-African line. It published the views of white sympathisers with African self-rule. In September 1914 it printed a letter by Joseph Booth (see Part II),113 the English missionary who wrote Africa for the Africans in 1897 and influenced John Chilembwe’s 1915 Nyasaland rising and may also have influenced the paper’s founder, Seme.114 Booth had moved to South Africa in 1902, where he was a regular contributor to the black press, promoting his British Christian Union and British African Congress. In 1913 he sought funds from readers of Plaatje’s Tsala ea Batho to print 50,000 copies of a speech of Saul Msane to distribute in Britain. He also befriended Congressmen Dube, Plaatje and Thomas Zini, and in August 1914, as possibly the only white delegate, received loud applause at the SANNC’s Bloemfontein gathering.115 In 1913 Booth had been interviewed in Mvabaza and Msane’s Mlomo wa Bantu (which in 1916 merged with Abantu-Batho) in which he clearly supported the black franchise and representation.116
The same issue of Abantu-Batho that published Booth carried poems by Charles Garnett, who had supported a 1907 black South African delegation to London and probably influenced the thinking of Garvey, perhaps meeting him in London in 1913; this suggests an even earlier tangential Garvey link with Abantu-Batho. Garnett spent seven months in South Africa in 1909, founding a branch of a body called New Fraternity.117
It was, however, from late 1919 that Garveyist influence really began to be felt on Abantu-Batho. Part of the attraction was black solidarity and prospects of mutual aid. The conservative press was appalled that Abantu-Batho should ‘waste space’ on a report of funds from Garvey to support black resistance.118 Connections between Garveyism and Abantu-Batho extended to Rhodesia and South West Africa. Several letters reached Abantu-Batho from Zimbabweans (some based in South Africa) in 1923,119 perhaps reflecting greater coverage of Southern African affairs in the paper. Some of the letters have been previously published in the Garvey Papers, but in Part II we reproduce others hitherto unpublished. In one, Ernest Dube heralded the formation of the Rhodesia Bantu Voters’ Association. Just as black South Africans looked for inspiration and material aid to African-Americans, so black Zimbabweans ‘hope[d] with the help we will get from our brothers in the South of Africa things will right themselves’. Garveyism could be a conduit for this Pan-African solidarity.
Branches of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Society formed in South West Africa and in 1922 a South West ANC sought SANNC affiliation.120 Abantu-Batho probably circulated there. In 1922 Lüderitzbuchter Zeitung translated extracts that Die Volksstem in Pretoria had quoted from Abantu-Batho’s editorial of 20 July, which clearly advocated a Garveyist or African nationalist policy:
The white press always shall scream, once and for all, that ‘white South Africa’ is our country. Why do we have to remain silent and not claim a ‘Black South Africa’?– Our slogan must now be: ‘Black South Africa’. And then, in order to make a start, we need 2,000,000 half-crowns. The Congress has already requested this. … Mr Gandhi is sentenced to 6 years in the hole because he wants to have India for the Indians. Mr Marcus Garvey will also be prosecuted because he works for the interests of Black workers in America. The same holds true for the cases of Egypt and Ireland. Recently fighting took place with the Hottentots in Southwest Africa for the same reason. Here these nations fight for their rights. So there is no prior reason why we should not demand a ‘Black South Africa’! We hope that we will soon find a way to get to a Black South Africa!
The extract continues: ‘Elsewhere, Abantu-Batho portrays in a provocative manner the crackdown on the Bondelswarts’ and then says:
Do General Smuts and his Cabinet really think this is the way to solve the great ‘Black Problem’? Must machine-guns and warplanes accompany every black revolt? If so, heaven help the small white population in South Africa in years to come, when Blacks have learnt the lessons of scientific warfare and revenge.121
There are other interesting instances concerning Abantu-Batho and Garveyism. Perhaps inspired by Garvey, in 1923 Western Cape ANC leader James Thaele criticised Abantu-Batho’s ‘too optimistic’ approach to black history.122 In 1930, with Garvey banished to Jamaica, Abantu-Batho reprinted articles from Garvey’s Negro World on his predicament,123 and highlighted his minor legal victories (‘indeed a dangerous man for all the great powers that are exploiting Africa’) and his portrait. Garvey was ‘carrying out the command of God’ as a vital symbol (‘If Italy has a Mussolini, if India has a Mahatma Gandhi, why should not Africa have a Garvey?’).124 For his part, Garvey cited Abantu-Batho on how the white power structure was wooing Coloured125 people in the Cape by presenting ‘a beautiful picture of what one intends to do’, but their ‘real object’ was to create ‘a buffer between the Africans and the Europeans. As a buffer, the Cape coloured people can never have the same rights as whites.’126
Influenced by Garveyism and the Paris Peace Conference, Abantu-Batho articulated a growing Pan-African solidarity and anti-colonialism. In February 1920 Thema contributed a first-hand report written the previous July on victory celebrations, detailing a march through London of diverse contributors to the defeat of German militarism, but then turning to the millions from ‘Alexandria to Cape Town’ suffering not ‘under the cruel claws of the German Eagle but under the Union Jack’.127 In May the editor pointed to the hypocrisy of imperialist policy, whether in Turkey