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ОглавлениеGovan Mbeki
Colin Bundy
Ohio University Press
Athens
For Eve
Contents
Home comforts and family histories
Township politics
Mbeki as journalist and author, 1955–1963
The road to Rivonia
Cold comfort
Release, retirement – and a modest revolutionary?
Introduction
Intellectual activist – or activist intellectual?
Govan Mbeki was born on 8 July 1910. The Union of South Africa was barely six weeks old: a new state, delivered by compromise and negotiations at a constitutional conference. Political power was vested firmly in white hands: a limited black franchise operated only in the Cape Province. The Prime Minister was Louis Botha, recently a Boer guerrilla general and now an adroit politician.
Govan died on 30 August 2001. The democratic Republic of South Africa was already seven years old: a fledgling state midwifed by negotiations and concessions at a constitutional conference. Its constitution provided for universal suffrage: electoral power for the black majority was ensured. Its second President was Thabo Mbeki, Govan’s eldest son, recently an exiled activist and now an adroit politician.
I like to think that Govan Mbeki might have twinkled approval of the echoes and comparisons in the paragraphs above. A keen student of history, he frequently drew lessons for the African nationalist struggle from the successes of Afrikaner nationalism. An author and journalist who wrote about politics and economics for over 60 years, he enjoyed finding a telling phrase or instructive detail. And as an acutely political being, he was profoundly aware of just how great were the changes brought to South Africa in the final decade of his long life.
Central to those changes was the part played by the African National Congress (ANC); in turn, the most prominent opponent of the National Party, its negotiating counterpart and its political successor. The ANC may have been founded in 1912, but its key shifts took place from the 1940s onwards. Its history spools out in a dialectical relationship with that of the National Party (NP), elected on an apartheid platform in 1948.
The first NP Prime Ministers, D.F. Malan and Hans Strijdom, largely ignored the ANC, even when it first won a mass base in 1952 with a campaign rejecting the ‘unjust laws’ of apartheid. H.F. Verwoerd banned the movement in 1960, locked up its leaders and criminalised its every action. B.J. Vorster and P.W. Botha, through the 1970s and 1980s, demonised the exiled body and its army, infiltrated its ranks and bombed its bases. By doing so, they ensured its iconic status in township streets, in classrooms and lecture halls, in hearts and minds. The surging internal resistance spearheaded in the 1980s by the United Democratic Front (UDF) was increasingly explicit in its adherence to an idealised ANC, so that F.W. de Klerk finally decided that it was safer to legalise the movement. He believed that the collapse of Soviet power also weakened the ANC so that it might be outflanked in a negotiated settlement.
And if the ANC’s history is central to an account of the liberation struggles waged against white minority rule, Govan Mbeki’s politics, career, writings and identity were shaped by a profound commitment to the organisation. Not that he was an apparatchik or uncritical loyalist: far from it. As this biography shows, his long-held and heterodox belief in the political importance of rural people cut little ice in an overwhelmingly urban nationalist movement. Later, his co-authorship of the ‘Operation Mayibuye’ document was a source of acute controversy. Finally, on Robben Island Govan Mbeki and Nelson Mandela fell out. The two were deeply divided on doctrinal grounds and over strategies, and the gulf was widened by contrasting personalities. Despite these strains, and notwithstanding the extent to which Govan’s socialist beliefs imparted a particular spin to his nationalism, he died as he had lived – an ANC standard-bearer. His final request to Dr Mamisa Chabula, his physician and friend, was to be buried in his favourite ANC blanket and cap.
*
I first met Oom Gov in February 1988. Shortly after his release from Robben Island in November 1987, because of his uncompromisingly revolutionary public statements he was subjected to a banning order which restricted his movements and meetings with others. A couple of years earlier, I had written briefly about his political activities in the Transkei during the 1940s; had squirrelled away various pieces of his journalistic output; and was very excited at the prospect of finally meeting, and interviewing, the author of The Peasants’ Revolt. The meeting was set up by Dullah Omar, then a lawyer in close contact with senior ANC prisoners. I flew from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth where I was met at the airport by a youngish man. He drove me from the airport to a second car; it then whisked me off to a house in Korsten. Govan – I was told – had made his way to the same venue by a similarly circuitous route.
We went to a garage at the end of the driveway where two chairs and a small table had been placed for our interview. Govan motioned me to my chair, but sat himself on the floor, back against the wall, long legs straight out ahead of him. ‘I got used to sitting like this on the Island,’ he said apologetically, ‘but do begin.’ And my first memories of the encounter are of the cheap sandals on his feet, which sat oddly with the neatly pressed trousers he wore. That – and his hands: large hands, with long, spatulate fingers, now clasped together as he chased a memory, then alive with gesture, ticking off the points he wanted to emphasise.
When I look now at the transcript of that first interview, I realise that while he was courteous, Govan was also guarded and cautious. It helped that he was familiar with my book on the history of South African peasants – that was why he had agreed to meet me, even though being interviewed for an intended publication transgressed his banning order – but there were topics on which his responses concealed quite as much as they revealed. In subsequent interviews conducted in Port Elizabeth and in Cape Town, the tenor of his responses became warmer, more open. I used to enjoy mentioning something that I had come across in the archives, prompting his surprise – ‘now, yes, how did you know that?’ – and eliciting that unforgettable, deep laugh. In this book, all direct quotations from Govan are drawn from the transcripts of these interviews; other sources are identified separately.
He was quietly pleased that I was researching his life and wrote to me quite frequently, amplifying remarks he had made, retrieving a forgotten detail, or commenting on drafts of seminar papers. I have to confess that he also used our correspondence to chide me gently, urging me to finish the book. It has taken me a very long time to do so. I hope only that finally it does some form of justice to his life, the life of an activist and of an intellectual, in which activism and intellectualism were not opposites but complementary.
1
Home comforts and family histories
When Govan Mbeki spoke about his childhood, his face softened and he conveyed a sense of comfort, warmth and stability. The family house – in Nyili village, Mpukane ward, in the Nqamakwe magistracy – was ‘a solid house, very well built’ and the furniture was handsomely carpentered, ‘some of the most beautiful furniture I ever saw’. He spoke with a nostalgic pride about the dining-room table, purpose-built for his father. ‘With its extra leaf in, with all its leaves in, it could seat sixteen people – sixteen, all around it. For special occasions, yes.’ Even in its more compact form for everyday use, the table would have been ringed by a good number of chairs. Govan had a brother and three sisters – all older than him – and in addition his three half-sisters made extended stays in their father’s home. It was a house bustling with women, and one can easily imagine the affection and attention directed towards the laatlammetjie. Govan recalled being ‘very close’ to his mother, and told the film-maker Bridget Thompson that when she attended a wedding, she would tuck a piece of the cake into her doek to take home for him: ‘And wherever she went, if she got anything nice, she would always bring something home for me.’ His sisters also helped raise him, teaching him games and passing on songs they learned at school, and recounting Xhosa fables.
Childhood memories are often rose-tinted. It would be difficult to know, based on Govan’s account of his early years, that the family’s modest prosperity was being squeezed around the time of his birth; that his ageing father had been dismissed from his post in disgrace; or that, as he grew up, his family would begin a genteel slide: not into outright poverty, but into more straitened circumstances. But before these pressures began to tell, Govan’s father, Skelewu Mbeki, was unmistakably a member of a ‘progressive’ or modernising peasantry that enjoyed its heyday in the Cape Colony and Transkeian Territories in the second half of the 19th century. And like many others at the upper reaches of this peasantry, the Mbeki family was Mfengu; had converted to Christianity; enjoyed modest wealth through a combination of peasant farming and entrepreneurship; and channelled a good portion of its income into a self-consciously modern lifestyle and the best education available for the children.
Skelewu’s grandfather, Nonkasa, was an amaZizi herdsman: like many others of that clan, he was swept up in the population movements of the mfecane, leaving what is today Bergville district in KwaZulu-Natal. Driven south, Nonkasa was probably among the first few thousand refugees who presented themselves at the Great Place of the Xhosa king, Hintsa, in the 1830s. (When in prison on Robben Island, Govan Mbeki was usually greeted, respectfully, as Zizi – his clan name. But he deflected my questions about the usage, and he consistently sought to underplay references to his ethnicity: ‘I would rather you avoid reference to tribal origin,’ he wrote to me. I realised only subsequently that Govan – like Oliver Tambo – was highly sensitive to the potential discord that ethnic identities might trigger in the nationalist movement.) Nonkasa entered the Cape Colony in 1836 with two sons, Mfeti and Mbeki, and the latter’s seven-year-old son, Skelewu. The family lived briefly near Peddie, then settled close to the Methodist base and school at Healdtown. Here, Skelewu attended school, converted to Christianity, and married another Mfengu convert, with whom he had three daughters.
In 1866 or 1867 Skelewu was among the Mfengu encouraged by the Cape government to move back across the Kei River and settle in the new British protectorate of ‘Fingoland’ between the Kei and Mbashe rivers (part of the magistracies of Nqamakwe, Tsomo, Idutywa and Butterworth). Skelewu was accompanied by a number of his amaZizi clanspeople, and they were allocated Mpukane ward (or location, as it was called at the time). Skelewu was recognised at the time as a leader of the ward. ‘My father was chief and recognised as such by the people,’ Govan Mbeki wrote subsequently. He exercised the authority of a headman for a number of years before his official appointment in July 1890.
It was not only by virtue of office that Skelewu commanded respect in Mpukane. He was also one of the most prosperous men in the ward, and demonstrated this by building a handsome house, built of stone carved by masons at Blythswood mission school. It was (Govan averred) the first stone house owned by an African in the entire district of Nqamakwe. The house stood a few hundred metres from Skelewu’s farmland. He owned about 16 morgen of land (or about 30 acres), held under Glen Grey title, but on a plot about four times as large as most Glen Grey land grants. The land was all fenced. In addition to maize and vegetables for household use and for sale, Skelewu raised pigs and poultry. Like other successful peasant farmers, he invested in livestock, and owned goats, sheep, horses and cattle. His cattle herds were too numerous to graze on his own land, and he ‘leased’ them out in the loan system known as inqoma. Selected cattle were fattened on a friend’s farm in Komgha district before sale at the King William’s Town market. His most profitable enterprise during the 1870s and 1880s was transport-riding. Before the advent of rail and motor lorries, much of the commercial freight in the Cape Colony and Transkei was handled by peasants wealthy enough to own wagons and teams of oxen. Transport-riding was one of the most effective methods of accumulation available to rural households. Skelewu employed drivers who plied his wagons between King William’s Town and trading stores across the Transkei.
In 1893 the widowed Skelewu married for a second time. His new wife, Govan’s mother, was Johanna Mabula, daughter of a Methodist preacher from Healdtown district. Forty years younger than Skelewu, Johanna bore him five children, three daughters and two sons, Sipho and Govan Archibald Mvunyelwa (‘for whom the people sing’). She was an impressive presence in Govan’s early life. Fluent in Xhosa, Dutch and English, she was well known in Mpukane. Because of her husband’s standing, many local people passed to pay their respects – and Johanna would welcome them with liberality. The visitors did not need to say they were hungry (Govan recalled): ‘Whenever you came, the first thing you were offered was food or tea, things like that.’
Headmen like Skelewu were indispensable agents of colonial control, responsible for translating rules and regulations – over land, livestock, travel and taxes – into everyday observance. Their ‘loyalty’ and ‘reliability’ were under constant scrutiny; their performance and shortcomings occupy countless pages in the magistrates’ records. An instance of this occurred in June 1911. The octogenarian headman Skelewu was fined £10 and dismissed after a hearing conducted by the Nqamakwe magistrate, Gilfillan. The details of the case were not disputed. The headman had infringed the East Coast Fever regulations, restricting cattle movements, having driven five beasts over the Kei in order to sell them to a trader in Stutterheim district. Skelewu knew he was breaking the law. ‘I was being pressed for money which I owed. I was tempted by the devil to get the money to pay my debts. I regret my action very much.’ The sincerity of the regret cut no ice with the magistrate. He reported that Skelewu ‘has been of little use as a Headman owing to old age’, and that he had previously been fined for allowing the cutting of trees for firewood with permits.
From the viewpoint of government, the dismissal was a routine episode in the exercise of local authority. But for Skelewu, his demotion must have been a devastating blow. His entire career had combined loyalty to the colonial state, leadership of his community, and a stern ethical code based on his religious beliefs. Skelewu was a devout Methodist, a teetotaller who said grace before drinking even a glass of water, and a regular contributor to church funds. Govan was not sure of the date his father became a Methodist, ‘but the missionaries evidently had great influence on him’. The old man held a prayer meeting every morning at five o’clock, before family members left for school or work; and in the evening the family would gather for an evening prayer, with scripture readings and hymns. One can only imagine the pain caused to Skelewu by the harsh denouement of his career. Govan – who knew nothing of this at the time – remembers spending long hours with his father, whose chair was taken outdoors so that he might sit in the sunshine. ‘And I still have a very good picture of him and I loved him’ – and he added, tellingly, ‘He wasn’t a great talker. The stories I heard from my mother’s side.’
It is not clear how much formal education Skelewu received, or when, but he wrote correct English in the distinctive ‘schooled’ script of his generation. But he patently regarded schooling as crucial for his offspring. All eight of his children received secondary education, attending high school at Healdtown. Six (including Govan) qualified as teachers, and Sipho as an agricultural demonstrator. At his death in 1918, Skelewu left savings in separate accounts, specifically for his sons’ schooling.
Govan first attended school in 1918. In a family that valued education so highly, he might have commenced a year or two earlier, but he pointed out that geography militated against this. The Methodist school he attended was six miles from the family home, and walking there meant an ascent of the hills that rise from the Tsomo River valley. It was more than a round trip of 12 miles that was involved. The eight-year-old was also taking the first steps in an educational journey that would consume the next 20 years and decisively shape his career as intellectual and activist.
Govan’s first educational steps were fortunate in one respect. A government report of 1920 noted that mission schools in Fingoland were superior to most others, a legacy of the days of the first magistrate, Captain Blyth, when ‘school attendance was practically enforced by administrative order’. The Wesleyan primary school that Govan attended from the sub-standards through to Standard 6 was built as a church hall and doubled up on weekdays as a one-room school. It was a simple rectangle, with a corrugated iron roof over whitewashed walls. Its only lighting came through its windows.
Years later, Govan recalled it clearly: ‘All the classes ranged up the length of the hall, with the highest classes just below the pulpit. The classes sat on either side of the aisle without desks, except for the three more senior forms. Looking back at those days, I often wonder how we managed with each class carrying on its work in the way it saw fit. It was bedlam. One class recited the alphabet, another a multiplication table, a third sang up and down the scale of the modulator, others would be poring over arithmetic problems. The only advantage in the arrangement was that the principal teacher saw his staff at work all the time without having to leave his own class. But little wonder that I was below average in arithmetic!’
Despite the challenging learning environment being described, the sketch is affectionate, not aggrieved. It is a recollection, we may safely conclude, by one who took to reading and writing (if not arithmetic!) with ease. Relevant to Govan’s later career as journalist and author, he received a thorough grounding in written and spoken English: ‘We started off with English … after passing Standard 6 we talked English according to the grammar book!’
Govan had not completed his first year at primary school when he fell victim to the influenza epidemic that ravaged South Africa. Nqamakwe was hard-hit, and the Methodist Church noted in 1919 of its Mpukane circuit that ‘many have died’. The boy survived his bout, but remembered the severity of his attack: ‘I’ve never been that ill again!’ In a single year, the eight-year-old lost his father, survived a fearsome disease and began the daily uphill trudge to the tiny school. This combination might have made school an unsettling experience, associated with illness and death. Not in Govan’s case: 70 years later, he spoke warmly of his years in the church-hall school. ‘Oh, I enjoyed school. I never played truant! No, I enjoyed it.’
This enjoyment was reinforced by a home life that placed a premium on literacy. Schooling slotted in with the familiar rhythms of the homestead. The daily journey home was downhill; and at its end every afternoon Govan helped herd the livestock into their pens and kraals. Home life and school life overlapped. And at weekends and holidays, Govan and his peers moved with their families’ grazing cattle, swam and fished in the Tsomo and Kei rivers, filling their hours with the haphazard intensity of boys at play. Here was an education with a curriculum far older than that on offer in mission schools. Like other African children, Govan acquired (in the words of D.D.T. Jabavu) ‘a thorough acquaintance with out-of-door sights of Mother Nature, games organized by his fellows, the learning of fables and folk traditions … a systematized training in attitudes and behaviour to all elders and superiors … close first-hand familiarity with wild animals, wild trees, wild edible roots: bird trapping … swimming in ponds and streams, riding on goats and calves, and counting the number of cattle and sheep as they return to the fold at the end of each day.’
Govan himself spoke nostalgically of childhood hours outdoors. He recalled with relish walking in the forests of the Tsomo River valley – ‘there was fruit, fruit available … growing under natural conditions’ – where he heard only birdsong and ‘the rustle of the bush and trees’, until – thirsty – he knelt at the stream’s edge, ‘sucking the water from the stream, beautiful, clear, cold’. What was clearly in many ways a delightful childhood world was also a restricted one. Before he went to boarding school, the furthest Govan ever travelled from home was the neighbouring district of Butterworth. He could list his encounters with white people in these years on the fingers of one hand. He had never seen a train until he travelled to Healdtown. Although Nqamakwe lies only 90 kilometres inland, he did not see the sea until he was a young adult. When Govan Mbeki was in his mid-teens, he left home and entered an educational environment more demanding in terms of formal curriculum and less tolerant of the parallel learning. He went to secondary school, as a boarder – not to nearby Blythswood nor to famous Lovedale, both run by Presbyterian missionaries, but to Healdtown, the flagship of the Methodist mission schools.
2
Healdtown and Fort Hare
Pulled from the front, pushed from behind: Healdtown, 1927–1931
In January 1927 Govan Mbeki left his family home for Healdtown, the school founded by the Methodist missionary John Ayliff in 1855. The Healdtown Institution was successively a base for training Wesleyan evangelists, a teachers’ training college and an industrial school; but in 1917 a high school was added (attended not only by Govan Mbeki, but also by Nelson Mandela, Robert Sobukwe, Raymond Mhlaba, Seth Mokitimi and other distinguished South Africans). It is set in a valley of the Kat River, below the Mankazana mountains, about seven miles from Fort Beaufort. Like other African boarding schools, it was deliberately located away from urban areas.
Govan travelled from King William’s Town to Fort Beaufort by train, its carriages full of students bound for St Matthew’s, Lovedale and Healdtown. Older students greeted one another and teased newcomers: for all of them, the experience emphasised a sense of social and generational identity. At Fort Beaufort station, the luggage of those bound for Healdtown was collected (since 1924 by motor lorry instead of ox-wagon!) and the students walked the rest of the way. Phyllis Ntantala was only 12 when she first attended Healdtown – the year Govan left – and recalls arriving ‘at eleven o’clock or midnight, tired, dirty and hungry’.
It was a defining feature of the Eastern Cape mission schools that they were boarding schools. To attend Lovedale, Blythswood, Healdtown or their like was not a matter of a daily journey, shuttling between homestead and school-room and learning from each. It was a long-term entry into a rigorously planned and regulated environment, submission to its criteria, and rupture with life outside the school. In a real sense, the journey to boarding school was one to a different society: one with its own structure, hierarchy, laws and subjects. The schools were there to give lessons in the three Rs, certainly, but their intentions were more far-reaching. They wanted to alter their pupils, to detach them from their prior identity and equip them with a new one. The Lovedale authorities endorsed the findings of a conference that boarding facilities themselves should help remould their charges: ‘The dormitory should be regarded as a training school in which good living habits, high standards in conduct, efficiency in all activities, an appreciation of the value of time, and the ability to cooperate with others are acquired.’ The Warden of St Matthew’s College (in Keiskammahoek) fretted in 1931: ‘When our students come back after a long holiday … we see a great change in their attitude… We find that when they come back from their holidays … it takes us some weeks to restore that nice tone which we have been accustomed to … We teach them manners.’
Healdtown was equally committed to the task of remaking its young subjects. The Rev. J.W. Watkinson was Governor (school principal) when Govan arrived at the school, and he wrote that it had been ‘a constant endeavour’ to produce a particular kind of boy and girl: ‘The tendency of our day to secularise everything has been strenuously resisted, and it has been sought to emphasise the importance of moral character as well as mental equipment, and to inculcate a regard for the amenities and decencies of civilised life’ in them. A few years later, Watkinson warned against having young Africans travel for schooling to America: ‘They come back with all sorts of subversive and revolutionary ideas.’ Healdtown sought instead to ensure that it sent into the world ‘the choicest of our young Native people as men, as Christian men, and saturated with Methodism’.
How did the school pursue this project? It put its students in uniforms and established a hierarchy of control rising from the smongwanas (new boys) through older pupils and ‘captains’ (later called prefects) through boarding and teaching staff up to the Governor. It ensured that their every hour was ordered. A Healdtown graduate wryly recalled: ‘A rising bell – another for us to line up for breakfast. After breakfast another rang for the commencing of classes – another rang at 11 a.m. to go back to the classes’ – and so on until ‘Supper first bell was before 6 p.m. … evening study commenced 6.45 …’ The students were marshalled into squads for manual work: ‘Window cleaners, sweepers … those who offload the wagon …, quarry workers, road workers, cleaning all round the premises, waiters, bread makers’ were listed by Joseph Coko, at the school a decade before Govan.
But the full extent of control and concerns is best illustrated by a letter – Foucault meets St Trinian’s – written by Watkinson to a Miss Boden the very month Govan arrived at the school: ‘Will you kindly enforce the following rules: No girls are to leave the Boarding Department except for school purposes. They must not pass the middle gate in the Avenue until the clock has struck a quarter past eight. No permission is to be given to visit the Location except under very special circumstances … No girls under any circumstances are to have their meals away from the dining hall … No variation from the prescribed dietary is allowed for any girl … Girls may be allowed to go to Stuart’s shop between four and five on Thursday afternoon and at no other time. No girls are allowed to go to Dick’s shop under any circumstances … All girls speaking any language except English must be reported to the Governor. All shouting and screaming must be rigidly suppressed. No girls are to be allowed through the gate leading to the bottom camp except on the regular washing day. The wash house is available for the girls on Wednesday afternoons and all washing must be done then.’
Yet Govan Mbeki’s own memories of Healdtown were benign. He relished the academic challenge and completed his Junior Certificate. His accounts of those years are couched in warmth and humour. ‘Ah,’ he ended an anecdote, ‘how one has quite – some nice memories of those days.’ Flashes of schoolboy observation and merriment surface in the interviews. He mimicked the delivery of the hard-of-hearing Mr Wellington addressing the students – a heavily stressed ‘Wise men learn before experience, fools after’; and the lilting Welsh cadences of Mr Ball: ‘a native child cannot afford to fail: I am going to pull you from the front and Mr Caley is going to push you from behind. You must pass.’
Govan passed. His Junior Certificate subjects were English, Latin, History, Physical Science, Biology and Xhosa. All the tuition was in English, including the Xhosa lessons. He maintained Healdtown’s successful record in Junior Certificate passes, performing well enough to win a Bhunga scholarship from the Transkeian Territories General Council to proceed to Fort Hare. Yet, even while he buckled down to the demands of the school syllabus, like his contemporaries he was also open to an alternative curriculum. Alongside the pleasures of school life came (as Z.K. Matthews put it) ‘the discoveries, slowly accumulating at the same time, of what it meant to be black in a white man’s world’. Healdtown – like the other leading mission schools – drew students from all over southern Africa. They pooled information so that the country could be mapped anew. Students learned from each other a topography of racial oppression, shading in local details of injustice, tracing the contours of domination, and poring over possible routes of resistance.
Govan also learned a series of impromptu lessons from the counter-curriculum of experience. In 1925 he attended several concerts organised by a Rev. Mr Mhlongo, of the Independent Methodist Church, in Mpukane. These were fundraising events on behalf of the ANC – the first time he heard of the organisation. A couple of years later, home on holiday from Healdtown, the lanky teenager encountered a more radical politics. His cousin Robert Mbeki was sent to the Transkei by the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU) to recruit members and set up branches. Robert opted to speak in English and have Govan, at his elbow, translate his speeches into Xhosa. In 1929 Govan travelled by train to Johannesburg to spend the summer with his half-sister Fanny. It was his first visit to the Rand, his first time outside the rural quietude of the Eastern Cape – and he came face to face with some of the harshest aspects of ghetto life. He saw police raid the yards of City and Suburban for illicit stills and scour the location for pass law offenders. Sixty years after the event, his voice thickened with emotion when he described the menace of the police and the fear of township residents. It ‘aroused my anger as nothing else did and determined me to join the struggle to end such a system,’ he said. When he left Healdtown to do his Senior Certificate at Fort Hare, he took with him these memories as well as his accomplishments in literature, grammar, Latin and science.
Paying attention to politics: Fort Hare, 1932–1937
For half a century, the South African Native College – its official name, although it was always called Fort Hare – was the only university for black South Africans. Its propinquity to Lovedale – a couple of miles away, across the Tyhume River – made the small town of Alice the centre of black education in the Eastern Cape. Fort Hare educated many of South Africa’s best-known black intellectuals and political leaders in the decades before it was eviscerated as a university by Verwoerd; and the campus was a cradle of assertive African nationalism from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s. It shaped Govan Mbeki profoundly, intellectually and politically. His years there gave him the formal skills that fuelled his output as journalist and author; they also politicised him, deeply and dually.
In the 1930s the campus was a modest cluster of buildings, straddling the road before it crossed the Tyhume into Alice. The college grounds – thick with trees and brush – ran to the banks of the river. This was the setting that Phyllis Ntantala evokes: Fort Hare was ‘a beautiful campus, a good and healthy place for young people … I was young; life was good.’ There were about 150 students at Fort Hare, a community small enough for all its members to know one another. As they all lived on campus, it was a close-knit and highly interactive community. Students in the 1930s took their studies seriously, and they also had a range of recreational and social activities. It is unsurprising that those who studied in the 1930s later recalled their Fort Hare days with unmistakable affection.
Govan entered Fort Hare in 1931, his fees covered by a Bhunga scholarship worth £28 a year, initially to study for his matriculation. In 1934 he commenced a Bachelor’s degree. This required eleven courses: Mbeki did two years of Latin, a year each of English, Xhosa, Ethics and Zoology, and he majored in Psychology and Political Studies (Administration). His choice of subject was significant. ‘When we got to Fort Hare students majored in English, most of them in English … Now we became the first group that paid attention to politics, round about 1933, 1934. We ran a campaign against English – against majoring in English – now firstly we attacked the Administration. We said the fellows who taught at Lovedale, Healdtown and of course [D.D.T.] Jabavu at Fort Hare were drawn by the missionaries into their lifestyles so they became sort of black Englishmen … We said fellows must find other subjects to major in, like Political Science.’
Mbeki and McLeod Mabude were the first two students to major in Political Studies. In 1935 Mbeki also completed the requirements for a College Diploma in Education, a post-matriculation teaching certificate. In addition to his studies, Govan served on the Athletic Union, and was secretary of the rugby club. He was very proud of the unbeaten 1935 rugby side, for which he played at lock forward: it was ‘the strongest team from Port Elizabeth to Queenstown!’ He attended music evenings and learned ballroom dancing. Years later, in solitary confinement in North End prison in Port Elizabeth, he exercised by twirling through the remembered steps with an invisible partner on the cement floor of his tiny cell.
Mbeki credits two people for deepening his political awareness, and for introducing him to Marxism. In the winter of 1933 there took place an encounter he regarded as a decisive political moment in his life. Eddie Roux, a member of the Communist Party of South Africa, and his new bride Win set off on ‘a sort of busman’s honeymoon’. They had recently begun to bring out a monthly magazine, Indlela Yenkululeko (The Road to Freedom), which they dispatched to schools and to Fort Hare. Now, with tents and a donkey, they tramped through the Ciskei – pitching camp by the Tyhume River – and held a series of outdoor meetings. The students (wrote the Rouxs) ‘told us of their life in college and of how they were disciplined and treated as schoolboys. We told them of the movement and of Indlela Yenkululeko.’ Among their audience was a rapt Mbeki, won by the clarity and radicalism of what he heard.
A less likely impetus to left-wing politics came from Max Yergan. Yergan, an African American, worked in South Africa between 1922 and 1936 as an employee of the YMCA. His biographer has argued that Yergan underwent a ‘shift from evangelical Protestantism to revolutionary socialism’ in the early 1930s, living ‘a double life’ (although in later life he became an ultra-conservative and apologist for apartheid). The political conversion may have been later and shallower than in this account. What is clear is that in 1934, on furlough, Yergan visited the Soviet Union and shifted suddenly – and briefly – leftwards. He preached a sermon at the Fort Hare Sunday service, on the text ‘I have come that ye may have life, and have it more abundantly’ (John 10:10), illustrating this with his impressions of Soviet material progress. Govan grew ‘very close’ to the black American – who lent Govan books from his holdings of the Little Lenin Library, starting with State and Revolution.
Mbeki’s interest in socialism – kindled by Roux, fanned by Yergan – became more systematic during his final years at Fort Hare. It took various forms, from student friendships to the distribution of Party literature. For weeks after the Rouxs’ al fresco addresses, a small group remained gripped with enthusiasm. Mbeki grew particularly close to a student a year ahead of him, Ernest Mancoba, a gifted artist and witty iconoclast. It was he who took Govan to hear the Rouxs; and afterwards Govan saluted him as ‘Comrade Number One’. The pair of them were at the centre of a handful of students who considered themselves socialists: ‘it was a small group … but we were very vociferous.’
Mbeki not only read whatever Marxist material he could lay hands on, but also began distributing it. He bought pamphlets during his summers in Johannesburg, and others were sent to him by Johnny Gomas, a Capetonian and Party member. Such material circulated mainly on campus, but Govan also drove with Yergan into the Ciskeian countryside to spread the word more widely. His visits to Johannesburg brought Govan into contact with Edwin Thabo Mofutsanyana, a leading member of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), whom he greatly admired (and later honoured by naming his oldest Thabo). But he did not join the Party. He explained this to me in terms of his theoretical heterodoxy at the time: his belief that organisational efforts should be primarily in rural areas. ‘That was my approach. Let’s go and organise in the Transkei, let’s go and organise in Zululand, so that when they come to Jo’burg they are already reached – we are able to guide them to take certain actions.’ Mofutsanyana (editor of the Party newspaper) was more orthodox, favouring work among urban workers. And (Govan added) ‘we used to debate and debate and debate’.
Deciding our future course: New Africanism in the mid-1930s
Govan’s interest in socialism and links with individual Party members placed him in a tiny minority at Fort Hare. But this was only one of the political roads he travelled while a student; and in his nationalist excursions he was accompanied by many of his peers. Among his contemporaries were others who left their mark upon South African public life: Nana Honono, A.C. Jordan, Victor Mbobo, Manasseh Moerane, Godfrey Mzamane, Paul Mosaka, Selby Ngcobo, Wycliffe Tsotsi and Benedict Vilakazi. All of them, including Mbeki, were affected by the political culture on campus in the mid-1930s, which reflected a broader phenomenon, a burgeoning sense of African identity, African grievances and African demands. This ‘New Africanism’ was articulated by members of a black intelligentsia more numerous but less submissive than their parents’ generation and structurally distinct from it.
The interwar years saw the growth of an African petty bourgeoisie in South Africa. Proportionately, their tally remained tiny; but in absolute terms they were numerous enough to generate awareness of shared identity and interests. African teachers, clergymen, clerks, nurses and journalists formed professional associations in the 1920s and 1930s. They experimented with new modes of cultural expression, social practice and political self-reliance – and they did so precisely at a moment, in the mid-1930s, when they felt threatened. Immersed in a world of literacy, learning and modernity, they saw the doors of opportunity previously opened by such immersion being slammed shut. They were alarmed by the loss of the Cape franchise, angered by the growth of segregation embodied in the Hertzog Bills, and frustrated by the impotence of gradualist liberal alternatives and missionary moralising. Their parents had sought through education to win full citizenship in the modern state; but the terms of membership were being rewritten.
The crucial ideological response by African intellectuals to these changes was a re-evaluation and reclamation of the resources and symbols of traditional African culture. The historian Alan Cobley proposes that ‘By the 1930s leading members of the black petty bourgeoisie, who, a generation earlier, would have been proud of their attributes and achievements as “black Englishmen”, were seeking to affirm their African identities.’ This was ‘essentially an effort to bring their social origins and their aspirations into harmony with their “African-ness”’. This was not a simple reversion to ‘custom’ or ‘tradition’, but attempts to rework African cultural forms and values in 20th-century ways. Thus Albert Luthuli founded a Zulu Language and Cultural Society at Adams College, not from a wish ‘to return to the primitive’ but ‘to preserve what is valuable in our heritage while discarding the inappropriate and outmoded’. Similarly, Z.K. Matthews and Paul Mosaka proposed an African Academy, which would promote ‘the serious study of Native problems’ as well as produce books on African music and legal systems.
For H.I.E. Dhlomo, ‘The new African knows where he belongs and what belongs to him; where he is going and how; what he wants and the methods to obtain it … [He is] Proud, patriotic, sensitive, alive, and sure of himself and his ideas and ideals …’ Cultural initiatives like these provided material from which a more assertive nationalism could be built in the 1930s and 1940s. The new form of nationalism – announced by the All African Convention (AAC) of December 1935 – was premised on action by Africans for Africans, and not in deferential alliance with white liberals. The new nationalist discourse appropriated the universal terms of liberalism but spoke them with an African accent. It was the language of intellectuals whose politics had been shaped not only in mission schools but also in reaction against them.
Unsurprisingly, similar tendencies were in play at Fort Hare during the 1930s. Govan Mbeki and his contemporaries were less patient and more critical than Jabavu or former ANC Presidents Mahabane and Seme. Their anger peaked during 1935 and 1936. The passage of the Hertzog Bills, the end of the right of African men in the Cape to qualify for the vote, Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia and excitement about the All African Convention were the issues that seized the young men and women at Fort Hare. In an obituary for one of his classmates, Benedict Futshane, Govan wrote that 1936 was ‘a year that decided the future course of most of us then at Fort Hare’. Like many of his classmates, Govan became a member of the ANC in that year. They were (he said) ‘absolutely moved’ as these events ‘whipped up so much feeling’. The intimate geography of Fort Hare meant that students could debate and argue over meals, in the dormitories, between classes, and in hastily convened meetings. ‘And those of us who were already drawn into political life’ (commented Govan), ‘well, during holidays we were taking part in meetings – especially in Jo’burg.’
The New Africanism found various expressions on campus. Students protested successfully against a segregated entrance at the Alice post office, and, with staff members, challenged segregated seating at a Lovedale athletics meeting. A.C. Jordan wrote a poem in Xhosa denouncing the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. Paul Mosaka led a protest against the employment of white women as domestic workers when there were so many unemployed African women in Alice. And alongside these overtly political forays, Mbeki and his peers set out to reclaim and rework elements of African culture. They travelled to Ntab’ozuko near King William’s Town, to hear the famous Xhosa poet S.E.K. Mqhayi recite izibongo. I asked Phyllis Ntantala to explain the enthusiasm of her Fort Hare circle for Xhosa epic poetry: she replied that they were engaged in a broader project of cultural reclamation. They ‘were beginning to question some of the myths on which they had been fed, and beginning to see the old people in the villages to find out what happened this year and that’. Although Govan Mbeki loved English and Latin poetry, he venerated Mqhayi. He started a novel while a student, and completed a play which he submitted to the Lovedale Press. Both were written in Xhosa. His favourite Latin poet was Catullus: ‘I found it so interesting and started very quietly translating into Xhosa.’
Latin poetry and the Little Lenin Library. Wordsworth on Westminster Bridge and Mqhayi on his hill-top. Secretary of the rugby club and in the same year a new member of the ANC. These were just some of the elements that constituted Govan’s experience of Fort Hare. He was representative of a new strain in Fort Hare’s student politics. He and others sought to reconcile their education and their aspirations with their frustration and their Africanism. Their fluency in English – says Cobley – carried implicit social, cultural and political attitudes, ‘but the framework of meaning was provided by their experience as an emerging class in racist South Africa’. Command of the colonial language (which was also the language of colonial command) was one element in their repertoire. Calling upon an African national identity (which meant identifying with the call of nationalism) was another, indispensable component.
Skelewu Mbeki, as we have seen, was determined that his younger son should be educated; and Govan was gripped by education and its pleasures. But his own ties to Mpukane seem to have worn thin during his years at Healdtown and Fort Hare. He spent more time on the Rand than in the Transkei. He and his brother Sipho had fallen out, over the expense of Govan’s education. In 1935 his mother died. Yet when he can have least expected it, village matters impinged on his life. A new headman was to be appointed in Mpukane ward. While a sizeable faction of amaZizi villagers favoured having another Mbeki as headman, they knew that the Nqamakwe magistrate did not favour Sipho Mbeki. And so they nominated Govan for the post. The magistrate was dubious. He considered Govan too young and believed that ‘it is very doubtful whether he would take up the appointment’, but approached Govan, by then teaching in Natal. Govan made a trip home; spoke to some of the elders; and tried unsuccessfully to persuade the magistrate to appoint a regent until Sipho’s son was old enough to take the reins. He had no desire to take the post himself. He had a degree (he pointed out) and was earning more than the pittance paid to a headman.
The episode was not an important one in Govan’s life. He never mentioned it; and laughed, surprised, when I raised it in an interview: ‘Yes, that was – how did you get that?’ Unimportant, perhaps; yet as one contemplates the pattern of his life, it is a telling moment. It coincided with his move from formal education to employment; it demarcates the difference between his father’s horizons and his own; and it reinforces the sense of how the young graduate had been shaped by school and university. The magistrate was right to suppose that Govan was unlikely to accept the post if it were offered to him. He had been schooled beyond it: emotionally, intellectually and politically.
3
Permanent persuader
Mbeki in the Transkei, 1940–1952
