One can easily deduce that if our father King George has been desirous of obtaining the assistance of his children, the natives, then our Stepfather, the Union Government, must have been certainly misusing the instructions of our father as we have been made to believe that this war is one which has its origins among the white peoples … and the Government is anxious to avoid the employment of natives in warfare against whites; yet after a short space of time we find the very same Government changing its mind …. Still more painful to us, it should be remembered … dogs and beasts were being employed … and also natives from different parts of Africa had a share.155
The paper quoted veterans that the treatment of South African Native Labour Contingent (SANLC) labourers in France was ‘brutal and barbarous’.156 Emboldened by Abantu-Batho’s coverage, they were prepared to ‘corroborate the statements of those who complain of ill-treatment’, specifying ‘compounds where our people were housed’ that ‘were like prison’ and exposing the shooting dead of four African soldiers on 23 July 1917.157 Here, Abantu-Batho clearly functioned as a ‘paper of the people’, providing a forum for dissent.
In these war exposures editors intervened directly. Mvabaza linked the protests to democracy, editorialising that African war sacrifices were made against a back-drop of continual references to ‘democracy and freedom’ by ‘the British and white people of this land’ who ‘should redress our grievances and give the freedom for which we lost thousands of men’.158 Letanka added a defence of African honour: ‘We expect to be rewarded for our work after the war when prizes are distributed to the brave.’159 He wrote – as Grundlingh notes, without naivety – to greet the declaration of the Allies in favour of self-determination of small and oppressed nations as a ‘message of hope that the dawn of freedom is at last breaking forth’.160 Soldiers in France also got hold of Abantu-Batho. Daniel Hafe, a Natal teacher, wrote to Ilanga in 1917 that he was outraged to read reports in Abantu-Batho that some white people were still opposed to black recruitment and that magistrates had called for returning black troops to be replaced by white soldiers.161
Looking back a decade later, the weekly characterised the war as ‘a cowardly, brutal and unholy dog fight into which the black races of the world were drawn’. Now the blatantly unjust policies of Nationalist minister Oswald Pirow meant that South Africa was ‘fast qualifying for the next world imbroglio’. In support, it cited W. E. B. Du Bois, African American editor of The Crisis: ‘Self government for Black People must become the aim’, or else South Africa ‘is going to become an outcast among the nations.’162
Abantu-Batho columns reveal another interesting political influence of the war. A report of July 1918 stated that, following the physical threat of police and hooligans exerted on black strikers, a Congress meeting in Vrededorp would be ‘guarded by our men from France. They will be in full uniform’ under the charge of a sergeant.163 After the war, it reported the inaugural meeting of the Mendi Memorial Club.164 Loyalty themes persisted after the war. Henry Reed Ngcayiya related a history of ‘unswerving’ loyalty in wartime, when Congress had ‘complacently shelved’ all African grievances. Yet despite their war service, the king’s speech to SANLC members in France, when he acknowledged their role and loyalty, and the tragedy of the SS Mendi, the Act of Union remained ‘a great monster against their liberties’.165 In 1926 Abantu-Batho commented that World War I commemorations in France meant that ‘the worthy contribution’ of ‘loyal Bantu subjects of the Crown was not being completely forgotten’.166
SYNTHESIS
The news stories in Abantu-Batho accurately reflected major issues and problems pressing on many Africans – the Land Act, pass laws, World War I – and their political and legal responses in the rise of Congress politics and the allure of Pan-Africanism. This chapter has surveyed how the paper reported and analysed predominant trends in politics, both white and black, across the Rand, South Africa, and beyond, and how it confronted racial oppression through the avenues of political movements, law, and solidarity, and in times of war. Above all, Abantu-Batho sought to engage with these currents and even influence their direction. Across the chapters that follow, we shall see how these political engagements played out in a range of arenas, including the lives of editors, in strikes, Swazi affairs, Garveyism and even in the poetic domain. But if race and politics were ever present in a rigid, highly circumscribed society, all was not politics, even if the political penetrated the civil and private spheres. In the next chapter we examine how Abantu-Batho reported socio-economic life, culture and religion, and the people, famous and ‘ordinary’, who were prominent in these ways of life.
ENDNOTES
1 D. D. T. Jabavu, ‘Native Unrest: Its Cause and Cure’, paper presented to the Natal Missionary Conference, 1920, in D. D. T. Jabavu, The Black Problem: Papers and Addresses on Various Native Problems (Lovedale: Lovedale Institution Press, 1920): 1.
2 Abantu-Batho, cited in Indian Opinion, 6 September 1913.
3 G. Lestrade, ‘European Influences upon the Development of Bantu Language and Literature’, in I. Schapera (ed.), Western Civilization and the Natives of South Africa: Studies in Culture Contact (London: Routledge, 1934, repr. 2004): 126.
4 Abantu-Batho, cited in M. Work (ed.), Negro Year Book 1916–7 (Tuskegee: Negro Year Book Company, 1917): 65. See also Part II.
5 E. Neveu and R. Kuhn, ‘Political Journalism: Mapping the Terrain’, in R. Kuhn and E. Neveu (eds), Political Journalism: New Challenges, New Practices (London: Routledge, 2002): 6–7, drawing on Bourdieu.
6 Something akin to the practice in dedicated squares in Addis Ababa of the 1920s; I owe this fact to conversations with Getahun Haile, an assiduous researcher of Ethiopian history of the period.
7 D. Fraser, ‘The Editor as Activist’, in J. Wiener (ed.), Innovators and Preachers: The Role of the Editor in Victorian England (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985): 121–22.
8 South African Native National Congress Constitution, NTS 7204 17/326 and 1217/14/110. This was published by the printing side of the Abantu-Batho Company; see SANNC, SANNC Constitution (Johannesburg: Abantu-Batho, [1919]), copy in the British Library.
9 ‘S. African Native National Congress’, Tsala, 26 April 1913. Naledi was ‘among the leading advocates in the native press … of the establishment of a permanent South African Native Congress’ and ‘published a circular … distributed over South Africa, inviting native leaders and chiefs to cooperate in promoting it’ (Anon., ‘A South African Native Congress’, American Review of Reviews 45, 1912: 228–29).
10 Transvaal Native Congress Constitution, [c.1919]: 9, copy in NTS 7204 17/326, attached to S. M. Pritchard, Director of Native Labour, to SNA, 17 May 1919, 1217/14/110.
11 T. D. Mweli Skota, ‘African National Congress’, Abantu-Batho [c.4], February 1926, Wits Historical Papers, Skota Papers, 1930–74, A1816, Bc.
12 ‘Notes and Comments’, Abantu-Batho, 20 December 1917, JUS 3/527/17.
13 ‘The Congress’ and ‘Transvaal Native Congress’, Abantu-Batho, February–March 1920: 17. The missionary-style language is a reminder that African churches had been a major focus of black organising.
14 Anon., ‘A Week of the World: African Protestors’, Living Age 322(4174–86), 1924: 247–48. With his predilection for history, the author may have been Thema.
15 S. B. Macheng, ‘Correspondence: The Transvaal African Congress’, Abantu-Batho, 11 September 1930 (the editor added a rider that the paper was not responsible for his views), responding to ‘Ho Morena le ma khlala ohle a Transvaal African Congress’ of 31 July 1930. Aaron was Moses’s brother: Exodus 6.
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