Читать книгу The People’s Paper - Christopher Lowe - Страница 22

Permeating much of Abantu-Batho’s editorial comment and campaigns against unjust laws was a keen perception of prevailing racist attitudes and policies. Here I discuss the paper’s approach to race and racism, and to crime and the law.

If white officials formed the butt of its criticism, the paper remained true to the liberal tolerance espoused by Congress that would form the basis of later multiracial alliances. ‘All white men are not unjust’, it editorialised in 1923: ‘We have 18 noble white men in Parliament’ who ‘opposed the Demon of race hatred.’⁷⁷ Over the years it quoted white liberals such as those from the Joint Councils; the Aborigines Protection Society’s John Harris;⁷⁸ Rev. D. W. Alexander, whose letter on ‘Race’ detailed the Lambeth Conference’s resolution on race, justice and equal opportunity;⁷⁹ and the ‘observations from an impartial and unbiased mind’ of Arthur Karney, Bishop of Johannesburg.⁸⁰ There were other approaches to race. A 1930 article focused on ‘African Race and Corporate Responsibility’, an ethical tale of the need to take responsibility.⁸¹

Overall, Abantu-Batho did not miss an opportunity to expose and condemn racism. In 1920 it detailed how the Returned Soldiers’ organ, The Call, ‘represented the Racialists’ by attacking the employment of black labour. It also made clear its differences with the International Socialist League (ISL), who ‘go to the other extreme. In theory, they do not recognise any differences in Labour in regard to Creed or race.’ The solution, the editor argued, was for government ‘to grant the Native a Parliament measure, if modified’.⁸²

A report by the Pietersburg TNC in Abantu-Batho fired a broadside at the editor of The Zoutpansberg Review, who was ‘to be pitied because he suffers from crass ignorance as well as aberration’ in attacking ‘Nigger Associations’ (such as the local TNC). This editor had published the branch’s appeal for higher wages, only to deride them as requiring ‘careful consideration of this stupid and preposterous rigmarole and conglomeration of arrant nonsense’. The blame he placed not on the African, who ‘retains the mind of an ordinary child’, but ‘religious maniacs’, namely (non-German) missionaries. By exposing, explaining and putting in context such prejudices, Abantu-Batho was helping Africans develop a more coherent critique of racism.⁸³ It also drew a connection between racism and ‘black peril’ campaigns, stating that such an

epidemic of native assaults on white women ALWAYS PRECEDES SOME VERY UNJUST PIECE OF LEGISLATION. We still remember the serious outbreak which took place in 1912, and was followed by the enactment of the Natives Land Act in 1913. After this there was practically a lull until the recent outbreak, when the agitation against natives in towns was at its height. … This is striking and should not be lost sight of; Europeans are expert propagandists.⁸⁴

If Abantu-Batho kept up a withering fire on racism, then it also sought solutions.

It stridently condemned anti-black laws. The Land Act was a bête noire. The newspaper lambasted the New Statesman’s claim that Botha would be the saviour of blacks for introducing the Act. Abantu-Batho detailed landholdings and condemned the Act for reducing Africans to ‘penury and want’. The editor likened the prohibition on Africans buying land to serfdom.⁸⁵ The paper also attacked the Native Affairs Bill that ‘hardly advances one step further than the notorious Native Affairs Administration Bill’ and imposed segregation:

We see in Native Councils the breaking of the Bantu peoples into tribes and divisions again in conflict with the people’s desire to be united nationally and politically … to set the people’s clock back so that they will confine their outlook in … the local areas.⁸⁶

It also challenged the legality of the forcible collection of hut taxes.⁸⁷

Correspondents, who often felt the lash of such laws, chimed in. In 1930 ‘Cape Colony Native Visitor’ wrote on the hard life under pass laws on the Rand that saw many youth criminalised. An editorial in the next issue engaged with this story, adding that the anonymous author had written after police had accosted him. The article ‘synchronized’ with a recent lecture by Edgar Brookes, who similarly rejected the pass laws as ‘obsolete and provocative’.⁸⁸ On such legislative matters Abantu-Batho was far less constrained than Imvo or Ilanga. Jabavu supported the Land Act; Ilanga managing editor John Dube could feel constrained by pecuniary or church affairs.⁸⁹ In contrast, Abantu-Batho’s more politically diverse editorial collective would have helped freer expression of opinion.

Abantu-Batho carried crime reports, in one case providing details of the dress of a murdered woman to help identify her,⁹⁰ and select court cases, especially those on racial discrimination or involving Congress leaders. A successful 1915 defence in Germiston Court by Alfred Mangena of an African charged with indecent overtures to a white woman was reminiscent of a court victory by Nelson Mandela decades later. The woman refused to reply to questions from Mangena because he was black. The paper reprinted letters of two white women who supported the accused. It criticised as pernicious the Sunday Post’s racism: ‘These two sections of the community have got to live together and are destined to do so …. It is therefore against all ethics for a responsible newspaper to goad society to do things that are in no way conducive to its welfare.’⁹¹

In 1917 the paper published an account of Sol Plaatje’s arrest by a railway conductor at Park Station, Johannesburg when, in Plaatje’s words, after being refused a ticket, he was ‘charged with infringing half a dozen of the multifarious regulations by which Natives are surrounded in this country’. He countered with his own charges.⁹² Abantu-Batho closely followed the 1918 case against TNC and Industrial Workers of Africa leaders, including its own editors, charged over the June strikes, and its reports dealt chiefly with statements of the venerable Dr Krause, representing the judge who characterised the charges as political persecution.⁹³ Over the next two issues it continued to report Krause, and Patrick Duncan, who remarked that South Africa would never be a white man’s country like Australia, given the large indigenous population: ‘it is wonderful to hear that Duncan said the same words as Bunting.’ As they awaited judgment, the editor called for collections to defray costs.⁹⁴ The exoneration of the accused led him to call for the abolition of work contracts, and he called for letters from readers on how and where to coordinate action to this end.⁹⁵ Another case reported was the exoneration of TNC Eastern Transvaal organiser S. H. Thema of charges of inciting ‘public violence’ at meetings in Pietersburg. The state had changed the charge and the court found meetings had not even taken place when stipulated; Abantu-Batho rued ‘the sorrowful spectacle’ in which the Crown evidence was ‘a mere fabrication’.⁹⁶

Abantu-Batho often reported cases affecting African’s rights. One report provided enough detail of court proceedings to throw into doubt the state’s case against a head police ‘boy’ charged with homicide over a so-called ‘faction fight’, and it is likely editors sought to thereby intervene on the side of justice.⁹⁷ Another case, launched against Benoni Municipality by M. J. Malela, who was charged over lack of a building site permit, saw location regulations declared ultra vires due to a lack of state consultation with the advisory board. The Abantu-Batho report dwelt at some length on the ruling by Supreme Court judges Solomon and Krause.⁹⁸ A different case report involved Abantu-Batho editor Letanka on the victory of his appeal to the courts versus the Commissioner of Inland Revenue that declared the Poll Tax Ordinance 1921 ultra vires as it applied to Africans.⁹⁹

Still another case report, translated from a Sesotho article in Abantu-Batho for the benefit of Ilanga readers by ANC Corresponding Secretary Selby Msimang, concerned an African youth accused of setting fire to a farm in Kilnerton. Abantu-Batho commented that his declaration in court, ‘I say I know nothing about the fire but what else could I say since I have been accused’, was rendered by an interpreter as ‘[t]he prisoner pleads guilty’, pointing to the need for more African court interpreters.¹⁰⁰

The paper often invoked justice against racial discrimination. In 1918 a correspondent drew attention to a magistrate’s judgment in favour of an African plain-tiff who had accused a police officer of assault over a pass law interrogation.¹⁰¹ A 1930 leader article argued that not just the Department of Justice, but ‘nearly every’ government department ‘teems with acts of the grossest injustice’. The editor went on to detail relevant court cases. In one, a jury rejected a verdict of guilty in a police assault on black prisoners despite clear summing up by the judge to the contrary. In another, a ‘not guilty’ verdict came in Potchefstroom against a man apprehended in the act of shooting a black person.¹⁰² Other cases also featured. An African tenant, Jackson Motiki, in arrears with his rent, was awarded damages from the Johannesburg Municipality for unlawful arrest and seizure of his property. The practice was common, with advisory boards powerless to intervene: ‘this system is rotten’, concluded the editor.¹⁰³ The acquittal in Vryheid of a young farm worker, Silwane Magaba of murdering a foreman who had flogged him was a warning that the imminent passage of the Native Service Contract Bill that would legalise the whipping of workers would drive them to use force in self-defence.¹⁰⁴