Читать книгу The People’s Paper - Christopher Lowe - Страница 10

Many writers mention in passing the appearance of Abantu-Batho, but the date of its first issue has left few traces. Such uncertainty¹⁵ is typical of many aspects of its history, from its printing presses to the date of its demise. But contemporaries took note of its arrival. In 1917 the young S. (Seetsele) Modiri Molema, studying medicine in Glasgow, wrote a book (not published until 1920) remarkable for its time in which he mentioned the birth of ‘Abantu or Batho … edited and published by a competent staff comprising Messrs. Kunene and Soga¹⁶ at Johannesburg’.¹⁷ Other contemporaries also noted its significance, claim to be a nation-wide paper and forthrightness. Charles Dawbarn spent a year in South Africa in 1920 and it was clear to him that Abantu-Batho was ‘under no illusion’ of the hypocrisy of labour relations: ‘The causes of the [1920] strike are neither mysterious nor under-hand; they are perfectly plain and self-evident: namely, the high cost of living.’¹⁸ By 1926 Edwin Smith, literary superintendent of the British and Foreign Bible Society, recorded the newspaper’s assertion to be the largest circulating African-language paper in the land.¹⁹

Young communist Eddie Roux, himself a journalist on the South African Worker, ‘called often at the office of the Abantu-Batho, the organ of the African National Congress. There I met two educated Africans, Dunjwa and Letanka. With them I could converse with ease.’²⁰ After retiring from left-wing politics, Roux wrote a short article on the black press, stressing that Abantu-Batho was ‘perhaps the most interesting’ of all, its name ‘a happy Nguni-Sotho bilingualism’.²¹ His points about its achievements carried over into his influential book, Time Longer than Rope (1948), in which he heralds its formation as ‘one of the most outstanding’ achievements of the ANC. It unified many small papers; attracted outstanding journalists; achieved ‘wide popularity’; ‘did more perhaps than any other organ to break down tribal barriers’; ‘popularized various national slogans’; and played an important part in struggles against the Land Act and ‘led the victorious fight against the women’s pass law’.²² Many of his ‘facts’, such as a claim of a capital injection of fully £3,000 from Swazi Queen Labotsibeni, amalgamation with Umlomo wa Bantu in 1913 and a 1935 demise would be uncritically adopted by later writers.²³ Writing soon after Roux, Eric Rosenthal echoed this evaluation, adding a little more data on editors (for five years Kunene ran it with ‘considerable success’, Seme’s prestige assisted greatly and Mvabaza’s growing support of the ANC helped ‘bring the paper into temporary prominence’), and concluded that it was ‘noteworthy because of its efforts to reach a higher standard of literary and production quality’.²⁴

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 Mbeki, in a subterranean Robben Island missive, remarked how after the ANC failed to keep Abantu-Batho alive, it had to rely on word of mouth or leaflets.⁴⁷ Lionel Forman was keen to track down copies, roping in Mac Maharaj to search London libraries, to no avail. Lacking access to early issues, he repeated S. P. Bunting’s condescension, claiming that Abantu-Batho was ‘never noticeable for its militancy’, but he recognised its significance.⁴⁸ In 1960 Bunting’s son, Brian, also a journalist and activist, characterised it as ‘vigorous and militant’.⁴⁹ The ANC-in-exile kept alive its memory in histories of the ANC by Jack and Ray Simons and Francis Meli, and in Mayibuye and Sechaba.⁵⁰ Jack and Ray Simons saw the ‘great achievement’ of the early ANC to ‘develop a national consciousness through joint action and the medium of its paper’.⁵¹ Meli emphasised it was ‘national in character’, as seen in its multilingualism, and different from the previous black press in that it was the first to be founded by leaders of a national black organisation.⁵² The ANC had keenly felt the loss since the paper’s demise. As James Zug writes, ever since it ceased, Congress had sought to replace it:⁵³ the ANC’s 1937 annual conference resolved to find a replacement.⁵⁴ In the 1940s, ANC president Alfred Bitini Xuma and Govan Mbeki saw the need to resurrect a national organ and gave some consideration to Inkundla ya Bantu. Xuma pulled back, writing in 1948, ‘[m]y fear is that if such a paper is owned by Congress, it will suffer from mass control. It will be everybody’s business and nobody’s business. … The last Abantu-Batho suffered and died from that.’⁵⁵ In 1955 the ANC still dreamed of its own paper, lack of which was a ‘very serious weakness’.⁵⁶ Even today a need is sometimes felt for a replacement. In 2010 the Nkoane Maditsi Youth League secretary mused that the ANC had founded ‘an organisational newspaper, Abantu-Batho …. A similar newspaper is much required now at the worsening stage of “communication breakdown”.’⁵⁷ In December 2010 a new paper, New Age, did appear, in some ways claiming its mantle.

In studies of the South African press Abantu-Batho is often mentioned, but usually only in passing. Shaun Johnson describes 1880 to 1930 as the ‘golden age’ of the ‘elitist press’ – a period when Abantu-Batho ‘clearly articulated the concerns of Congress’. The paper ‘collapsed under the combined weight of serious financial and organisational problems’, although the knockout blow, as Switzer more accurately observes, was the power of its rival, Umteteli wa Bantu (The Mouthpiece of the Native Peoples).⁵⁸ In the pages of this rival, Jeff Opland uncovered the presence of a 1920s poetess and critic of Abantu-Batho⁵⁹ – our research now reveals she first wrote in the latter paper. There have been studies of other papers, including The Guardian and Inkundla ya Bantu. There are few published memoirs of early black journalists, although fragments of the lives of Plaatje and Dube have been rescued by John Comaroff, Brian Willan and Heather Hughes, while D. D. T. Jabavu wrote a short biography of his journalist father.⁶⁰ Plaatje and Skota left collections of personal papers, but these do not reveal much of their journalistic lives, although Skota did reminisce to Benson and Couzens on aspects of Abantu-Batho (see below). Another editor, A. W. G. Champion, recalled three decades later that it ‘had a fiery effect. It cooperated with the African National Congress and was written by outstanding men.’⁶¹ There is also the valuable unpublished autobiography of Thema, in which he touches on the paper, but scant traces survive of other editors such as Seme, Saul Msane, Grendon, Letanka, and Mvabaza, although its last owner, Gumede, has been the subject of a study.⁶²

Only a handful of authors have focused directly on the paper. Chris Lowe, in unpublished papers and his doctoral thesis, presented a detailed account of aspects of the paper’s early history and drew attention to the problematic nature of much of this historiography, which often flows from a superficial reading of sources.⁶³ In several chapters of a recent book I analysed in some depth the reporting of Abantu-Batho as it related to labour, political and women’s struggles.⁶⁴ Literary scholars have also returned to an interest Couzens pioneered 30 years ago. Grant Christison has admirably detailed and explained not just the web of Swazi networks, but also the twists and turns of editors, and especially the important role of the editor-poet, Robert Grendon; and drawing on his work, Catherine Woeber points to the way in which decades of black journalism culminated in the ‘independent national press’ of Abantu-Batho.⁶⁵