Almanaka ka 1916’ and ‘Li Almanaka tsa 1916’, Abantu-Batho, 20 January 1916, Coryndon Papers, Rhodes House Library, Mss. Afr. s.633, box 10/1; ‘I Almanaka ngenteto Bantu’, Imvo, 11 May 1915.
243 D. D. T. J[abavu], ‘Kwelipezulu’, Imvo 1, 1 February 1916. By 1918 it was still being sold for 7d by post. For rendering this text and data on Reuben Davies, my thanks to Chris Lowe.
244 ‘IAlmanaka ka “Bantu-Batho”’, Ilanga, 1 February 1918. Grant Christison kindly provided a translation. These portraits helped identify images in the Skota Papers as being from the Almanac.
245 ‘Izindatyana NgeZinto naBantu’, Ilanga, 17 February 1922; ‘Abantu-Batho’, Imvo, 21 February 1922. Imvo (18 March 1913, 10 February 1920) also had an almanac: a Zulu almanac, and commercial and religious ones (such as in Morija) were circulated, but almanacs have received little scholarly attention.
246 D. D. T. Jabavu, ‘Are the Bantu Inherently Inefficient?’, Christian Express, 2 May 1921: 79.
247 Cleopas Kunene to Director Native Labour, 4 June 1915, DNL 144/13 D205.
248 See ‘I-Concert enkulu eGoli’, Ilanga, 21 November 1921.
249 ‘Abnatu[sic]-Batho Ltd’, Ilanga, 23 April 1915, repr. from Abantu-Batho, reports on Letanka, Mabaso and Nkosi and the company, subscribers and agents.
250 Grievances of Natives of South Africa: An Appeal to the People of England against Natives Land Act, 1913 (Sophia-Town: ‘Abantu-Batho Ltd.’, 1914), National Archives UK, CO 551/67, ‘Natives Land Act’.
251 R. W. Msimang, Natives Land Act 1913: Specific Cases of Evictions and Hardships, etc. (Cape Town: Friends of South African Library, 1996), colophon.
252 ‘Cleopas Kunene Sophiatown: Complaint against Pass Office Johannesburg, re Registration of Labourer’, [on Abantu-Batho letterhead, dated 12 January 1915, in DNL 15/15 D80].
253 Skota, The African Who’s Who: 18. Cobley, Class and Consciousness: 176 n. 48 notes Merafe as ‘foreman and machine-man in charge of the printing press in Sophiatown’.
254 A. D. Dodd, Native Vocational Training: A Study of Conditions in South Africa, 1652–1936 (Lovedale: Lovedale Press, 1938): 97, citing Lovedale Students’ Records, 4405.
255 Benson Papers, SOAS, Mss. 348942/1, ‘Skota’: 3–4.
256 Cf., for instance, what we know of the inner workings of The Rand Daily Mail (R. Gibson, Final Deadline: The Last Days of the Rand Daily Mail (Cape Town: David Philip, 2007)).
257 Gerhart Photographs, Wits Historical Papers, A2794/16C.1-3. This appears incorrectly attributed by the History Workshop, who wrote on the back ‘Bantu World-printing works and staff, 1920s’, which is clearly an error, as Bantu World only began in 1932; ‘Sale in Execution’, Rand Daily Mail, 24 March 1916. My thanks to Chris Lowe and Michele Pickover for help on this matter.
258 DNL 1329/14 D48, undated draft telegram by M. Carroll. Cf. SNA to DNL, 2 May 1919, DNL 144/13 D205, attaching copy of Articles of Association of Abantu-Batho and list of proprietary shareholders.
259 Cf. A. Dick, ‘Book History, Library History and South Africa’s Reading Culture’, South African Historical Journal 55, 2006: 33–45, but with little attention to black newspapers.
260 M. Lyons, Readers and Society in Nineteenth-century France: Workers, Women, Peasants (New York: Palgrave, 2001): 156, 160–61.
261 S. Mkhonza, ‘Newspapers in Indigenous Languages and Democracy in South Africa: A Socio-historical Perspective’, paper presented to the Language, Creative Arts and Media conference, University of Pretoria, 22 June, 2008: 11, 14.
262 J. Seidman, Red on Black: Story of the South African Poster Movement (Johannesburg: STE, 2007): 23.
263 On the meaning of the ‘new African’ see Couzens, ‘The New African’, especially 271 ff.
Chapter 1: ‘Only the Bolder Spirits’: Politics, Racism, Solidarity and War in Abantu-Batho
What were the main news stories for Africans between 1912 and 1931? Some themes stand out: the 1913 Natives’ Land Act; Word War I; the rise of Congress, the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU), and Garveyism; and the opening of Fort Hare. Yet many other issues were also of concern, including the pass laws; labour and gender matters; and local events such as concerts, church meetings and sports. In the previous chapter I sketched the broad contours of Abantu-Batho. In this chapter and the following paired one I examine in more detail how the paper reported and analysed such varied subjects. This chapter focuses squarely on the political sphere, emphasising the context of African political movements, especially Congress, and the state in which Abantu-Batho was obliged to operate, as well as closely related themes of race and racism, the law, political solidarity, and the breakdown of politics – war. I show how the patterns of politics and race in South Africa resonated in the newspaper and influenced its content. The next chapter addresses socio-cultural aspects of gender, class, education, leisure and religion. Together, these two chapters paint a broad canvas of the newspaper and its people, form and content, and set the stage for the other chapters, which explore many of these aspects in finer detail.
POLITICS AND THE PRESS: ‘THE BOLDER SPIRITS’
If politics is the art of the possible, then Abantu-Batho raised entirely new possibilities for Africans by its boldness. In 1920, speaking of rising black discontent, which many Africans did not openly articulate, Davidson D. T. Jabavu noted that ‘[i]t is only the bolder spirits who have ventured to give the world this secret by means of their scathing criticism in their press (the Abantu-Batho of Johannesburg being the most outspoken organ), and through their deputations to Great Britain’.1 Different editors might from time to time take a more radical or more moderate tack, but the paper’s boldness was never in doubt. In 1913 it challenged the very discourse of white domination as expressed by Prime Minister Louis Botha. The way to banish the spectre of African rebellion
in so far as the natives of this country are concerned, is not, as General Botha told his backveld supporters the other day, namely that his Government would take no nonsense from the Kafirs, but rather that his Government should take the Kafir and bear his nonsense.2
To many white onlookers, including those who claimed academic expertise in ethnography or African language studies – the adjuncts of colonial rule – the paper was simply a tool of agitators. Professor G. P. Lestrade thought it ‘frankly agitatorial’ [sic] and, together with Umsebenzi, one of the ‘very extreme ventures’.3 Yet the politics of Congress – and, indeed, the politics of Abantu-Batho – were extremely complex.
Political representation was always a high priority for the paper. In 1915 it made clear that Parliament should ‘adopt the immutable principle of justice and equality, as the basis of legislative enactment’, and ‘after the conclusion of the present war, the greatest question within the British Empire will be the proper adjustment of the relations between the White and the Natives Races of South Africa’.4 Staff were political journalists and part of a complex ‘web of interdependencies’ that tended to enmesh journalists, parties and owners and, sometimes, ‘cultural and intellectual milieux’.5 Most editors (Robert Grendon was an exception) were at one time or another political office holders and there is no doubt that they accorded prominence to coverage of ANC politics. Ownership was embedded in politics through the shares of Seme and Labotsibeni or Gumede. Direct political influence on editors is harder to ascertain, for the Congresses that made up the ANC at both the national and provincial levels were a mosaic of trends, pulling in different ideological, regional or tactical directions, and editors did mount attacks on some leading ANC figures. Another dimension to this ‘web’ was audience, as editors pitched content at different language readers and the paper was read aloud at meetings.6 Their role as activists was typical of the urban periodical press and mirrored in the cases of Jabavu, Dube and Plaatje, who each took pivotal positions