Читать книгу The People’s Paper - Christopher Lowe - Страница 25

The news stories in Abantu-Batho accurately reflected major issues and problems pressing on many Africans – the Land Act, pass laws, World War I – and their political and legal responses in the rise of Congress politics and the allure of Pan-Africanism. This chapter has surveyed how the paper reported and analysed predominant trends in politics, both white and black, across the Rand, South Africa, and beyond, and how it confronted racial oppression through the avenues of political movements, law, and solidarity, and in times of war. Above all, Abantu-Batho sought to engage with these currents and even influence their direction. Across the chapters that follow, we shall see how these political engagements played out in a range of arenas, including the lives of editors, in strikes, Swazi affairs, Garveyism and even in the poetic domain. But if race and politics were ever present in a rigid, highly circumscribed society, all was not politics, even if the political penetrated the civil and private spheres. In the next chapter we examine how Abantu-Batho reported socio-economic life, culture and religion, and the people, famous and ‘ordinary’, who were prominent in these ways of life.