capital plant. As Chris Lowe shows in his chapter in this volume, a few months after the launch the company was incorporated in Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal) and the new paper inherited a printing press, type, office equipment and supplies. The first merger was in 1912 with Moromioa (Messenger), a weekly Setswana/Sepedi paper founded and published by Daniel Simon Letanka in Johannesburg. It had begun in 1910 as Motsoalle (Friend). Selby Msimang recalled that while it was published in Johannesburg, it circulated ‘exclusively in Rustenburg’,86 suggesting that it may have been assisted by Congress activists in the region, perhaps Chief K. K. Pilane. A second merger, in 1916, was with Umlomo wa Bantu-Molomo oa Batho (Mouthpiece of the People), a weekly English/isiXhosa/Sesotho paper founded in 1910 in Johannesburg by Levi Thomas Mvabaza, with Saul Msane. Its policy was the ‘unifying of all African tribes into one people, and further to improve and expedite the education of the African children’.87 A letter by Xhosa writer Richard Kawa mentions a third Umlomo editor who would join Abantu-Batho, Jeremiah Dunjwa.88 Mvabaza edited the isiXhosa columns and L. M. Ramosime the Sesotho,89 and by 1916 they were based at 10 Kruis Street, Johannesburg, next door to Saul Msane.90 By September the incorporation was completed.91 No copies of the merged papers survive, but extracts were reprinted, such as a 1914 Umlomo article dealing with pass laws in Nancefield.92 If we could establish authorship, these would offer a tantalising glimpse into possible continuities of style of the editors.
Important regional and local forces also bolstered such a bold venture as running a national black newspaper right in the lair of the white Randlords. An emergent black political scene on the Rand, driven variously by ethnic, class or wider nationalist politics (and still in need of its historian), was one.93 Another was the Swazi connection.
Gwamile Labotsibeni Mdluli (c.1858–1925) was Swazi queen regent from 1889 to 1921 and an exceptional political leader;94 Manelisi Genge shows how skilled she was.95 Contemporary accounts attest she was a remarkable statesperson, ‘the most extraordinary native ruler South Africa ever knew’,96 ‘shrewd’,97 with ‘a gift for diplomacy’ and able to extract money from whites – some of which she deployed to help found and sustain Abantu-Batho. Her role in this regard is discussed in the chapter by Sarah Mkhonza, while other aspects of the Swazi connection are discussed by Chris Lowe and Grant Christison. Here I can add that her Zulu ancestry and close contacts with Cleopas Kunene and Robert Grendon provided an opening for Seme, who before too long was hunting and picnicking with Swazi nobles and the queen.98 Ackson Kanduza stresses that Labotsibeni drew on a non-literate intellectualism of Swazi rulers.99 Through her close observation of white politics and her contact with Grendon, she changed her earlier hostility to Western learning to emphasise ‘books’ and ‘money’.
According to Hugh Macmillan, the Swazi royalty’s financial commitment to the paper remained quite strong until the late 1920s.100 From their side, Abantu-Batho editors made numerous trips to Swaziland, and Mabaso, Letanka and Kunene went out among ethnic Swazi in places such as Bethal and Davel to find subscriptions.101 Swazi leaders were repaid in political kind. Besides articles opposing incorporation in the Union of South Africa, their quest for money to fund land deals was carried in advertisements and leading articles asking every Swazi male outside the kingdom to contribute £5. A poster for Labotsibeni in 1914 forcefully declared ‘the Queen Regent desires that they shall work this year because … in the coming winter, the Swazis are to go to one side and the whites to the other’.102
As would be the case with Umkhonto we Sizwe operations several decades later, the ‘Swazi connection’ functioned on both sides of the colonial border. Kholwa (Christian converts) in Natal faced relentless pressure on their land and political rights. Their response was to mobilise in the Natal Native Congress (NNC) and search for allies and resources. Seme and other Abantu-Batho dramatis personae were active in NNC politics and land deals in Natal, and the paper’s final owner, Josiah Gumede, would find a solid base in the Natal ANC from where to launch his successful drive to the ANC presidency in 1927, just as A. W. G. Champion, an editor in 1930–31, was active not just in the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU), but also in the Natal ANC. All of these connections came together around the editorial table in Johannesburg, where, as La Hausse de Lalouvière shows, the Natal Congress tradition had been transferred.103
TRANSLATION AND ENGAGEMENT: JOURNALISTIC AND NATIONALISTIC CONTEXTS
In times of change, as Benedict Anderson and others have shown, newspapers could influence or connect to the public sphere, politicise people and interpret new ideas; in this way they could be ‘distinctly subversive’. They could also show the way to alternatives to the status quo.104 Abantu-Batho would do just this, posing alternatives to white rule in liberalism, African nationalism, socialism and Garveyism, and so helping ignite new African identities and dreams for the future. Like journalists the world over and despite their lack of training, its editorial staff were skilled ‘word weavers’ somewhat akin to literary writers and carriers of an oral tradition that had been gradually incorporated into a press format.105 Indeed, one editor, Grendon, was an accomplished poet and, as Figure 3 (and Jeff Opland’s chapter) intimates, another poet, Nontsizi Mgqwetho, may well have been a fleeting staff member. In this section I focus on translation, engagement and nationalism; in chapter 11 I elaborate the journalistic aspects of the ‘People’s Paper’.
Editors, lacking access to expensive white commercial news agencies, developed their own processes of gathering news, locating and maintaining sources, selecting and laying out stories, and writing for a wide audience. In doing so they forged distinct relationships to politics and to modern cultures, and played a major role in building a new national identity. Simultaneously, they maintained old identities and links to indigenous cultures, for implicit in a multilingual structure was the dilemma of how to communicate in the vernacular and retain solidarities forged on regional or ethnic bases while at the same time constructing African nationalism.
Translation played an important part in these processes. With four or five languages, there may at any one time have been the same number of independent editors. Some articles appeared in different versions that offer variant interpretations of the same event (see Paul Landau’s chapter in this volume), but what exactly went on is only partly known. One process in play was cultural resistance. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o argues that close examination of colonialist pressure on African cultures can reveal pride in African languages; Lorna Hardwick shows that developments in translation allowed classics to be appropriated by imperial subjects to help challenge colonialism and represent histories of African resistance.106 What might linguistic analysis of Abantu-Batho reveal?
The paper was attempting a creative adaptation of language and culture aimed at socio-political transformation. In his chapter in this volume, Jeff Opland shows that poets used its pages to interpret and encourage such transformation, and we can see this engagement with regard to the vernacular and adaptation of works of English literature such as those by Shakespeare.107 There was a sort of hierarchy of languages in Abantu-Batho. English tended to be relegated to the middle pages as ‘The Empire Writes Back’, although it may have served to bind some readers. A column count using random samples of complete issues from 1928 to 1931 suggests attempts to balance languages, but that Sesotho and isiZulu may have been dominant, at least in letters and advertisements, which is logical, given the main audience on the Rand. The ‘languages question’ may not have been fully settled at the start. In 1912 Kunene (backed by Plaatje) had earlier proposed the new SANNC adopt an African language name, such as Imbizo Yabantu (Bantu Congress, or Congress of the People),108 and contemporary African newspapers bore vernacular names. In December 1912 the precise mix of languages was still ‘a matter for discussion’.109
Publishing in so many languages aimed to reach wide audiences, and part of this was undoubtedly conveying the political message(s) of Congress. Undoubtedly, the paper sought to mobilise politically both kholwa strata and chiefs, and at times it also published direct appeals to workers and women. However, these messages were by no means singular, as was evident not only in the differences among provincial Congresses, but also the rise and fall of political leaders over a short span of time. There