Despite its significance, there is remarkably little written directly about the paper. Beyond the obligatory reference to its founding, knowledge of the content of Abantu-Batho has not been integrated into histories of South Africa and we know little about it. Like Zulu amateur historians of the 1920s, it has slipped into obscurity.25 This is chiefly due to its elusive archive: only a two-year run, 1930–31, survives in libraries. There are reprints in part or full of a few articles in other contemporary papers, especially Ilanga and Tsala ea Batho, but also Imvo, Naledi ea Lesotho and even the Afrikaans Die Volksstem,26 as well as periodicals such as Tuskegee’s Negro Year Book, and from West Africa (both testament to emerging networks of solidarity), The Christian Express and The Missionary Herald. Passages were cited in some contemporary books.27 There are clippings, translations, extracts, and the odd individual issue in archives in Pretoria, Lobamba (Swaziland), Durban, Harare, Oxford, Atlanta and Moscow. A few selected extracts appear in published collections such as Outlook on a Century: South Africa 1870–1970, the Garvey Papers and the Karis-Carter volumes (see Part II).28
Writers have often lamented this lacuna. In 1948 Roux mused that it ‘is a blot on the South African archives that no file of this paper is to be found anywhere in the country’.29 Les and Donna Switzer, in their magisterial bibliographic survey of the black press, concluded: ‘Although it was possibly the most influential of the black protest journals of this era, virtually no copies have survived’, which meant that its quality ‘cannot be assessed’.30 Tim Couzens is equally clear: ‘It is a tragedy for South African social history that copies of Abantu Batho … exist only for 1930–31. A crucial link in literary history is certainly missing.’ Elsewhere he laments, ‘the absence of a complete picture of its effects on black social and intellectual life is a major gap in the study of the history of black South African literature’; Abantu-Batho was ‘the first really successful black Reef newspaper’; its lost archive is ‘the saddest gap’, and prevents telling in full ‘the early rise of writing activity in Johannesburg’.31
The impact of this hidden archive on writings about Africans in this period has been marked. Most studies of the ANC fail to penetrate the internal life and complex policies apparent in the columns of Abantu-Batho, while those few who have written of the socio-intellectual life of Africans tend to elide Johannesburg and the associational life around the paper, thus missing a major formative period of black politics and culture. In its place, a sanitised version of history privileging the institutions and press of white liberals and their black acolytes has held sway in South African historiography of this period.32 I rectify this lacuna in chapter 11 on associational life.
Also reflecting this occluded archive, Les Switzer’s extensive work on the black press (and the work of his students) focused on other papers.33 Yet his research suggested much on the context and staffing of Abantu-Batho. He listed many (although not all) of Seme’s ‘talented colleagues’ and observed that ‘many black political slogans were coined and popularized in this newspaper – including the famous “mayibuy’ i Afrika” (Come back, Africa)’.34 But the limited archive also brings uncertainty, such as the month of the first issue and the claim that it incorporated Umlomo wa Bantu in 1913.35
Given the paucity of sources and writing on Abantu-Batho, it is perhaps inevitable that conjecture and differences of opinion creep into the historiography. In analysing these questions, we owe much to the pioneering work of Tim Couzens and Chris Lowe. Long focused on problematic aspects of Abantu-Batho history, such as its precise composition of share issues, the dates of mergers, Swaziland connections, the ethnicity and class composition of its staff, and whether or not it was an ANC organ, Lowe was the first seriously to rethink its history.36 He is sceptical that Abantu-Batho (at least at the start) was really the ‘organ’ of Congress and suggests that Seme sought to keep legal control over it rather than give it to the ANC. Lowe shows that many popular preconceptions about the paper are rooted in the writings of Roux, Skota37 and others who often drew on memory. He also adds a corrective to the view that Queen Labotsibeni (see below) provided all or the bulk of the £3,000, and problematises its national nature, stressing it was above all a Johannesburg paper, even if it sucked in news and stories from afar.
We do have some documentary proof of formal affiliation, namely the TNC constitution of 1919 and J. T. Gumede’s assumption of control of the ANC paper in the late 1920s. These affiliations reflected the ANC’s regional structure that consisted of a national Congress meeting annually and Native Congresses in each province. Yet the ANC had multiple mouthpieces. The African World of the Cape ANC in 1925 was obliged by Abantu-Batho to restate its slogan, noting: ‘We are very much indebted to our contemporary the Bantu-Batho for the following correction: “That the African World is the only National organ published in English and African languages”.’38 Nevertheless, Abantu-Batho had a more sustained multilingual focus than other papers, with Letanka the bedrock of Sesotho and consistent coverage in isiZulu and isiXhosa, whereas Ilanga and Imvo were more grounded in regional or language communities. We can even imagine separate mini-papers within the newspaper. A 1920 report noted: ‘There is no responsible editor. The holder of one block of shares being responsible for Sesuto, another for the English column, and the other natives running the Xosa [sic] and Zulu columns; and they appear to be working entirely separately.’39
Research for this book has literally uncovered or rediscovered more fragments from this lost archive. Chris Lowe, more than anyone else, shows just what happened in terms of financial support. Paul Landau, as he relates in his chapter in this volume, chanced upon scraps from a 1926 issue used as wrapping paper in the Skota Papers. In Rhodes House Library at Oxford I peeled back three pasted layers of clippings from other newspapers to locate more sources, some overleaf. We hope the book will stimulate further research and linguistically focused scholarship, and possibly uncover more fragments.
Writers have touched but briefly on the history of the paper. In 1949 A. J. Friedgut, summarising Roux’s work, echoed his view that it was ‘perhaps the most interesting of all Bantu papers’. ‘Radical from the outset, it later developed a Leftwing line’ and ‘led a victorious fight, campaigning in English, Xhosa, and Sotho against the pass laws for women.’ While he thought that no files remained, ‘memories of it are still vivid in the minds of the older generation of Bantu leaders’.40 A decade later, Gwendolen Carter characterised Abantu-Batho as ‘the most vigorous and interesting’ publication of the black press.41
In the first major attempt at a history of the ANC, Mary Benson emphasised Seme’s ‘enthusiasm and energy in planning this mouthpiece for the national organization’, which gained support of the ‘public-minded’ queen regent of Swaziland sympathetic to black unity. She cites a later editor, Mweli Skota, as stating that ‘we were dreaming of changes, of the day when Africans would sit in Parliament and would be able to buy land’.42 André Odendaal noted the decision of the first ANC executive to launch Abantu-Batho and that it became the most widely read African paper with an educative effect.43 Peter Walshe and Philip Bonner pointed to the role of a radical group around the TNC and the paper, which became its official organ in 1917, in moving Congress to the left.44 Walshe and Alan Cobley detailed the trends that led to its decline; to Walshe, Abantu-Batho was ‘part of a fragmented, unstable newspaper world’.45 Many more general histories of the ANC and the country have largely neglected Abantu-Batho.46
Writers associated with the Congress Alliance, which from the mid-1950s brought together the ANC and its political partners the South African Indian Congress, the Congress of Democrats and the South African Congress of Trade Unions, also commented. Govan