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Steve Biko in the Intellectual History of the Eastern Cape

The African Elite and European Modernity

“Take your place in the world as coloured,

not as white men, as Kafirs, not as Englishmen.”

TIYO SOGA, 1870

Most works on the life and work of Steve Biko locate his thought within the politics of the 1960s, particularly the rise of black consciousness in the United States and decolonisation movements in Africa. Steve himself acknowledges the role of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) in the United States:

At this time we were also influenced by the development of a Black Consciousness Movement in the United States. There were differences, of course, because the political context simply was not the same. The conflicts in South Africa were – and are – much sharper . . . I do want to acknowledge the indebtedness of the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa to the development of black thought in the USA in the 1960s.[1]

In this book I take a different tack from the dominant tendency to reduce black consciousness to the events of the 1960s. I endeavour to place Steve Biko in a longer time span of black political and cultural thought in South Africa, in the aftermath of the late 18th-century African encounter with European modernity. This modernity in South Africa “was constituted through violence: colonial conquest, dispossession, slavery, forced labour, the restriction of citizenship to whites, and the application of violent bureaucratic routines to the marshalling, distribution and domination of the black population.”[2] It was also imported through mission schools and churches. I argue that one has to delve into the traditions of African thought in the Eastern Cape and in his own community in Ginsberg township to understand why figures such as Frantz Fanon would make sense to Steve at a later stage of his life. In short, he did not come to politics as a blank slate, and neither did he slavishly follow a particular political text. Noel Mostert has this to say about Steve’s historical antecedents:

Biko, himself missionary educated, represented the last African generation to be the beneficiaries of that tradition. He personified through his lack of anti-white sentiment, his gentleness and articulate rationality, so many of the characteristic attributes of the missionary-educated African elite which had assumed African leadership after the last of the frontier wars exactly a century before; yet he embodied as well a rupture with that tradition.[3]

Daniel Magaziner makes a similar observation that the Black Consciousness student leaders were “descendants of previous generations of African thinkers whose ideas figure prominently in works that examine the history of African theatre and poetry, journalism and academia”.[4] Cornel West captured the same theme:

Quality leadership is neither the product of one great individual nor the result of odd historical accidents. Rather it comes from deeply bred traditions and communities that shape and mould talented and gifted persons.[5]

In this chapter I trace the traditions of African thought that preceded Steve back to the differences between two great Xhosa chiefs, Ngqika and Ndlambe, and their respective prophet-intellectuals, Ntsikana and Nxele, in the 19th century. I argue that Steve Biko’s philosophical outlook should be located in this broader intellectual history. Instead of a rupture with traditions set by earlier African leaders, I speak of continuities and discontinuities, not only within African leadership traditions but also in the encounter with European modernity as well as the shifting alliances with the Khoi and the San people. Africans were never entirely free from other cultures, nor even from the ones against which they fought. Frantz Fanon captures the inextricably intertwined identities of the coloniser and the colonised in The Wretched of the Earth. First he points to the existential confusion wrought by colonialism on the educated elite:

Yes the first duty of the native poet is to see clearly the people he has chosen as the subject of his work of art. He cannot go forward resolutely unless he first realises the extent of his estrangement from them. We have taken everything from the other side; and the other side gives us nothing unless by a thousand detours we swing finally round in their direction, unless by ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks they manage to draw us toward them, to seduce us and to imprison us. Taking means in nearly every case being taken: thus it is not enough to try to free oneself by repeating proclamations and denials. [own emphasis]

And the educated elite cannot resist the seduction by simply returning to a romantic and pure past in the name of the people:

It is not enough to try to get back to the people in that past out of which they have already emerged; rather we must join them in that fluctuating movement which they are just giving a shape to, and which, as soon as it has started, will be the signal for everything to be called into question. Let there be no mistake about it; it is to this zone of occult instability where the people dwell that we must come; and it is there that our souls are crystallised and that our perceptions and our lives are transfused with light.[6]

In characteristically dramatic language, the writer Lewis Nkosi describes black nationalist movements as “bastard children of Western modernity”.[7] Nkosi argues that in their efforts to liberate themselves from the “civilised decorum” of Western culture, black writers “were obliged to make use of the weapons which that culture had itself furnished” – mostly education and religion.

Bheki Peterson notes that the educated elite often joined protest and rebellious movements because of their own frustration with the contradictions between the promises of European modernity and their exclusion from the fruits of that very same modernity. Their participation in struggle was an attempt to show up and correct this contradiction. The more conservative among these educated elites relied on moral persuasion to get the European colonisers to extend political rights to Africans. Here is the legendary African intellectual DDT Jabavu on the prospects for change through moral persuasion – and see the importance he attaches to the two central features of European modernity – education and religion:

It is our belief that with the spread of better understanding in Church and college circles the future of South Africa is one we can contemplate with a fair degree of optimism in the hope that Christian influences will dispel illusions, transcend the mistaken political expedients of pseudo-segregationists and usher in a South Africa of racial peace and goodwill.[8]

Peterson further notes that even the more progressive elite such as John Dube and Pixley kaSeme tended to be accommodating and deferential towards colonial authorities. And yet, “it was precisely in occupying the intermediary ground, a diffuse, marginal space, that the kholwa were compelled to forge profoundly new forms of African identity in response to modernity”.[9] This is not to say that the hybridisation of modernity – and the making of new African identities – was a uniquely elite affair. Far from it. As David Attwell notes, “modernity is experienced ‘objectively’ as much by the migrant labourer as by the writer-artist . . . in oral popular genres and in the African independent churches, for example. It is true, nevertheless, that elites are, indeed, deeply involved in such work of interpretation and re-inscription.”[10] While the elites may lead this process, this is not a one-way street. One of Fanon’s major contributions was a recognition of the tensions that would emerge between the African elite and the working people at the moment of freedom as they each sought to define their identities and find their place in the post-colonial world. This is “the struggle over post-coloniality” that we see in South Africa today as the wealthy elite lead lives that are at a far remove from the masses of people – politically, economically and culturally.

The fact that the elite historically came from European institutions – educational and religious – explains why the leaders of the various liberation movements were all educated in the mission schools: Nelson Mandela and Robert Sobukwe at Healdtown, Chris Hani and Steve Biko at Lovedale. Ian Macqueen observes that “as men schooled in the liberal crucible of Lovedale and, for Pityana, at Fort Hare College, they [BC leaders]were well-placed to judge the gulf between liberal ideals and actions”,[11] just like their 19th and early 20th century predecessors. And it is no surprise that the BC movement was born within the bosom of European modernity – the white universities in South Africa.

I argue that Steve Biko did more than any other political leader to form a political movement whose primary aim and achievement was to challenge the intellectual foundations of European modernity while engaging with that modernity itself through the weapons it had itself furnished. Attwell argues that the Black Consciousness Movement fashioned a response to European modernity that would be on the terms of black people themselves, by drawing on the diaspora: “for the invasive effects of racial capitalism were such that intellectuals such as Steve Biko and his followers were, to a degree, culturally disenfranchised at home.”[12]

As shall become apparent in Chapter 5, the reframing of Christianity through Black Theology was one of the signal achievements of the Black Consciousness movement.

Macqueen takes the liberty of saying that Biko was describing his personal experience when he wrote that “no wonder the African child learns to hate his heritage in his days at school. So negative is the image presented to him that he tends to find solace only in close identification with white society.”[13] However, I shall stop short of making Biko “a subjective projection of the mind of the biographer”.[14] It is indeed the temptation of many psychobiographers to seek to explain leadership in terms of some crisis that the individual must have undergone, either within the family or in the community. In my research, I never once found evidence that somehow Steve had a troubled youth, therefore explaining his leadership. As I shall argue in Chapter 5, Steve’s writings about religion may be as much of a window into his identity as it may be an attempt to reinterpret Christianity in the South African context.

The African response to European modernity has historically been multiple and multi-vocal, characterised by all manner of shifting alliances. Of relevance here is the social fissure between the Red People, those Noni Jabavu called the Ochre People[15] – the amaqaba; and those who accepted the civilising ways of European modernity – the amakholwa. Even on this point it is important to avoid watertight opposites. There were often alliances between the amaqaba and amakholwa. Jabavu writes: “I belong to two worlds with two loyalties; South Africa where I was born, and England where I was educated. When I received a cable sent by my father, I flew back to South Africa to be among my Bantu people, leaving my English husband in London.” She later lived in East Africa, and describes her book as “a personal account of an individual African’s experiences between East and South Africa in their contact with Westernization”.[16]

Sometimes the conservative elite joined forces with traditionalists for political reasons, as happened when John Dube – when challenged by a younger ANC leadership in 1917 – decided to join forces with the Zulu royalty. Indeed, Solomon ka Dinizulu had a close if ambiguous relationship with both Dube and Seme. One of the outcomes of the relationship between the educated elite and the Zulu royalty was the formation of the Inkatha Movement in 1924. The more radical elite joined up with the peasants against the colonial system, as happened in the case of the Bambatha Rebellion against the imposition of the poll tax.

Earlier in history, elders who did not entirely accept Western “civilisation” did not necessarily prevent their children from adopting Christianity or obtaining an education. Even as he remained sceptical, Tiyo Soga’s father, Jotelo Soga, allowed his son to be taken in by the missionaries to be taught at Lovedale College. The same is true of amaNtinde chief Kote Tshatshu, who allowed his son, Dyani, to be trained by missionaries at Bethelsdorp under the tutelage of James Read and Johannes van der Kemp (known to the Xhosa as Nyengane).[17] Donovan Williams is thus mistaken in saying that Tiyo Soga was “the first black missionary among Africans”.[18] Dyani was taken in by Read and Van der Kemp when he was still a ten-year-old boy in 1804. He briefly returned to his father but in 1810 went back to the mission to become a full-time missionary.

According to Levine, “by serving the mission, Tzatzoe operates from within the ambit of colonial society, and preaches in part as its representative. He makes the Word available. When he claims its power he does so on behalf of the mission, and not for himself, as individuals like Makana appear to do.”[19]

Dyani Tshatshu retained relationships with the Xhosa chiefs, who were angry at him for collaborating with the white church. He was at once a collaborator and an ally. Thus, unlike the earlier Soga who had refused to read to Maqoma the colonial letters the chief had acquired, Tshatshu maintained good relations with the chiefs. He even participated in the great Xhosa uprising of 1834-1835 – known as the Sixth Frontier War. He is reported to have said in response to colonial provocation, which included the shooting of Maqoma’s brother Xoxo: “Every Xhosa who saw Xo-Xo’s wound went back to his hut, took his assegai and shield; and said it is better that we die than to be treated thus . . . life is no use if they shoot our chiefs.”[20]

His earlier deference to Europeans notwithstanding, the later Tiyo Soga, mission-educated himself, admonished those who created a gulf between the Christians and the “heathens”: “You Xhosas, Thembus and Fingos who have accepted the word of heaven should not be accused of lack of respect to those who deserve respect as chiefs or lack of honouring those who deserve honour.” Soga disapproved of the use of foreign words in Xhosa, and he warned against “the Xhosarising of foreign words – especially in relation to addressing chiefs . . . we would suggest that words like molo – ‘good morning’, rhoyindara – ‘goeie dag’, rhoyinani – ‘goeie nag’ . . . should be eliminated from our language.”[21]

My concern here is to trace in this history of the Eastern Cape encounter with European modernity the lineaments of Steve’s political and intellectual thought – the continuities and discontinuities with the leadership tradition that developed over time between the educated elite and the people, without falling into the romantic search for a pure African past that Fanon warns against. Mostert observes how both Ntsikana and Nxele embraced Christianity but sought, each in his different way, to reframe it to serve their people: “While both Nxele and Ntsikana looked westward to colonial society for their initial inspiration, each in his different way began serving the emergent Xhosa nationalism.”[22] Before I go further into Steve Biko’s intellectual heritage, I want to draw a connection between the struggles of the Eastern Cape frontier waged by Xhosa chiefs and earlier struggles that were waged by the Khoi and San people in the Northern Cape frontier in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Steve Biko’s political articulation of Black Consciousness is reminiscent of the solidarities forged by the Xhosa and the Khoisan in the 17th and 18th century Northern Cape frontier and the Xhosa on the 19th century Eastern Cape frontier – in short, between Africans and the diverse communities that go under the term “Coloured”. Black Consciousness sought to overcome all of these separate identities and construct a hybrid political identity that included Africans, Indians and Coloureds. The creation of this common identity was yet another important achievement of the movement. We shall see in Chapter 7 how Steve was opposed to the formation of the Black People’s Convention because there had not been enough consultation with the Coloured and Indian communities. Steve Biko’s writings and new philosophy of action in the 1970s distinguish him; according to Magaziner he was “this era’s most famous political thinker”.[23]

And so, even though this chapter is primarily about Biko’s inheritance from the Xhosa warriors, both coloniser and the colonised were building on past precedents of oppression and resistance. It was in the 18th century that the “commando system” of cattle raiding was created by the Dutch, and later developed with force and ferocity by the British on the Eastern Cape frontier in the 19th century. In other words, the Northern Cape frontier was the training ground for the perfection of a brutal system of domination. Equally, it was in the San resistance to colonial attacks that we see the beginnings of Maqoma’s “guerrilla warfare” – which would later be adopted by decolonisation movements in the 20th century, drawing of course from the experiences of other countries as well. The earlier history foregrounds the formation of Xhosa-Khoisan alliances and identities. As Levine observes, “the amaNtinde have had a significant degree of integration with Khoisan groups”.[24] The missionary station of Bethelsdorp was “a thriving centre of Khoisan life”, and there were many visitors from Xhosaland because of “the preponderance of Khoisan kinship ties among the Xhosa”.[25] Indeed, the amaGqunukhwebe, which to all intents and purposes is a Xhosa clan, has its origin in intermarriage between the Khoisan and the Xhosa. Martin Legassick describes the Kat River settlement as “an area of intermingling of all the peoples of the Eastern Cape (save whites), including Maqoma”.[26] In his biography of Tiyo Soga, Donovan Williams describes the same settlement as follows:

Between the Amatole and the Great Fish River lay an area which, by the early nineteenth century, was the last cushion for absorbing the increasing European thrust from the Cape colony. Therefore it was worth fighting for. It was also rich in cultural diversity: amaXhosa and Mfengu mingled with European missionaries, traders and travellers, administrators and military. To the northwest of the Amatole lay the Kat River valley. After Maqoma had been expelled from it in 1829 it was filled with Hottentot (Khoi) and Coloured farmers, a sprinkling of European missionaries, and after 1851, white farmers.

Dutch Rule and the Khoisan Resistance: 1657-1806

When the Dutch East India Company settled at the Cape, they immediately sought to establish a farming system that would provide them with food and meat. The Company thus settled the Cape with free burghers (independent farmers) who would provide passing ships with food supplies, which was itself a recipe for disaster given the existence of Khoi-Khoi communities with cattle in the area. In fact the Dutch governor Simon Van der Stel had feared that the free burghers could not be trusted not to encroach on the Khoi-Khoi by force, and in the process jeopardise the steady supply of food and meat to the settlement. He also feared that “in place of a class of sedentary agriculturalists, there would be created a class of roving herders, continually in search of better nourishment for their animals”.[27]

Van der Stel’s son Willem Adriaan succeeded him in 1699, and encouraged the free burghers to practise pastoralism, and the colony spread to places such as Stellenbosch, Franschhoek, Paarl and Tygerberg. As the older Van der Stel had feared, that was the beginning of interminable wars between the free burghers and the Khoi-Khoi for the first half of the 18th century – culminating in the ferocious 1739 Khoi-Dutch war. According to Nigel Penn there was a respite in the fighting between 1700 and 1740, as the free burghers moved further and further into the interior, reaching the escarpment. The vast escarpment with its little rainfall and a sparse population meant that the colonists – or trekboere as they were now called – did not meet much resistance as they forayed and foraged into the interior. They were in no mood to stay as they could not sustain pastoral farming in such an inhospitable terrain. They had their eyes on the better-watered lands of the Eastern Cape. But first they had to reckon with one more obstacle – the unanticipated existence of the San people in the Sneeuberg region of the Karoo. The trekboere had simply assumed – as colonialists tend to assume to this day – that there were no people in the area. But, according to Penn, “the entry of the trekboere into the region was to inaugurate the most violent period in the colony’s history”.[28]

Unlike the Khoi-Khoi, the San could not be brought under the control of the free burghers because they were of no economic value to the Dutch pastoralists – they could not be forced to labour as pastoralists. When they had cattle, it was with the intention of eating instead of herding them. Central to colonial pastoral farming was what was arguably its most important institution – the commando system, whereby a group of armed men would violently put under their control those whose land and cattle they raided. The San were not easily conquerable by the commando system because they could not be put to use. And so the free burghers approached them with a shoot-to-kill policy. The San also seemed to come from a mystical world that was completely foreign to one of the fundamental aspects of Christian societies – the idea of a settled, sedentary life. The differences between the Khoi-Khoi and the San did not, however, prevent the emergence of a strong Khoisan resistance, leading to pleas by various commandos for government assistance as the loss of livestock was becoming intolerable – the San ate the livestock, making its recovery by the pastoralists a moot point. In 1774 the colonial government decided to put all of the commandos under one general command – the General Commando. The San became the target of the most genocidal campaigns precisely because they could not be caught with the cattle or be captured and put in service of the pastoralists. What frustrated the burghers most was that they could not easily win against the San:

The San were not passive, unsuspecting victims of colonial aggression. The General Commando was, after all, an attempt to crush a most threatening and no doubt concerted campaign of resistance. Nor was this resistance overcome by the General Commando. Although the great numbers of casualties suffered by the San and the negligible losses suffered by the colonists would seem to suggest that the commando had been an overwhelming colonial success, this was not in fact the case. The struggle was far from decided and for many years the colonists were unable to find a military solution to the most effective guerrilla war that was being waged against them.[29]

Penn further notes that:

. . . on the eve of the British occupation, there was little to indicate that conditions in the Roggeveld were conducive to peace negotiations between the trekboere and the San. Neither side appeared to be defeated, though it is possible that both had come to realise that there was no military solution to their conflict. [30]

It is to the entry of the British into the Cape and their encounter with the Xhosa people that I now turn. Here we see the antecedents of what Steve Biko would later achieve when he forged an identity of Blackness that included Africans, Coloureds and Indians. To be sure, there were wars between the Xhosa and the Khoi and San people. War between pastoralists and hunter-gatherers is inevitable because the latter want to eat what the former want to preserve. Equally, though, there were also efforts by warriors from both sides to bridge the gap and stand together against the trekboere. This unity was to be of crucial importance in the ensuing resistance to the British who, unlike the Dutch pastoralists, now sought to entrench a more elaborate administrative system over the colony. Their aim was to anglicise what was still a Dutch-dominated colony by bringing their language and culture to bear on the entire landscape. According to Mostert,

the British were indeed to do all these things, to impose their language, their currency, their legal system and their political concepts and to bring the single greatest alteration in the course of South African affairs since the Dutch East India Company’s sanction of permanent settlers in 1657.[31]

British Colonial Rule and the Xhosa Resistance: 1779-1909

Events in Europe at the beginning of the 19th century changed the pattern of colonial rule in the Cape. Napoleon Bonaparte dominated Europe and occupied Holland, which meant that the Cape was an indirect colony of the French, except for one factor: England retained “mastery of the seas”[32] and was able to inflict severe damage on the French navy. According to Georges Lefebvre, France had 1 500 vessels in 1801 but this number had been reduced to a mere 179 in 1812. In 1806 Britain had 36 000 French prisoners and the number increased to 120 000 in 1815 – “a large part of them captured by the British sea forces”.[33] Britain’s naval supremacy guaranteed her control of maritime trade, and at this point colonial conquests were secondary to British interests: “England, mistress of the seas, was now in other parts of the world the only nation capable of imposing the authority of the white man. It was a task to which she was not so much disposed . . . the example of American colonisation did not encourage further colonisations.”[34] It would seem, then, that Britain’s wrestling of the Cape from the Dutch in 1806 was motivated first and foremost by commercial interests. “In January 1806 Popham, Baird and Beresford landed at the Cape and forced Janssens to surrender”,[35] an event apparently witnessed by the Xhosa chief and missionary Dyani Tshatshu together with Read and Van der Kemp when they were all in Cape Town.[36] What mattered most to the British was control of the sea trade, including the Cape, which from 1806 they controlled. Their entry broke the stalemate between coloniser and colonised.

From then onwards the colonial enterprise consisted of a double assault on the humanity and dignity of African people – military conquest in the 100-year wars of resistance, otherwise known as the frontier wars; and cultural indoctrination primarily through religion and education.

This is not to underplay the role played by some missionaries in giving sustenance to the Xhosa warriors. (For instance, James Laing, who lived in Burnshill, looked after Maqoma’s children while the latter went out to fight the colonists.) On the whole the contrasting responses to colonialism at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century by Xhosa chiefs Ndlambe and Ngqika laid down the contours for African politics for the coming generations, all the way to the era of the Black Consciousness Movement in the 1970s. To trace this resistance to the Xhosa is not to deny the role of other groupings in South Africa – for they would also play just as crucial a role as the Xhosa. We may simply attribute the role of the Khoisan and the Xhosa to a historical and geographical coincidence – that is where these groups were when the colonialists landed. We also see the emergence of contrasting ideological responses by two prophet-intellectuals, Ntsikana and Nxele, advocating submission – and resistance.

The encounter with Europeans coincided with what the historian Jeff Peires has described as “the most significant feature of Xhosa internal politics in the second half of the eighteenth century”.[37] This was the split in the Xhosa kingdom at the turn of the 19th century. Because Xhosa chiefs had polygamous marriages, the tradition was that the heir to the throne came from the Great House, and it was often the eldest son. At times the son from the more junior Right Hand House usurped power, often because the rightful heir was regarded as too weak to lead the nation.

For example, around 1600 Chief Tshawe from the junior house of his father Nkosiyamntu usurped power from the rightful heir, Cirha. Cirha enlisted his brother Jwara to resist Tshawe but the latter enlisted the even more powerful and numerous amaMpondomise and amaRhudulu. To this day the Tshawe are regarded as the legitimate chiefs of the Xhosa. Almost a hundred years later, Ntinde and Gwali, who were from the Right Hand House of Tshiwo, sought to usurp power from the rightful heir Phalo, who was too young to take over at the time. The usurpers were fended off by Mdange, who was the regent holding the chieftaincy until Phalo came of age. Phalo in turn had two sons, Gcaleka from the Great House and Rharhabe from the Right Hand House. Instead of attempting to usurp the throne, Rharhabe separated from Gcaleka’s kingdom because of the latter’s decision to become a traditional healer. Rharhabe thought this was unbecoming of a Xhosa king and he asked for his father’s permission to leave. According to SEK Mqhayi, Rharhabe had no match in terms of wealth, generosity and courage and “these were convincing reasons for him to attract many people to himself and he welcomed them all. The Ntinde, Hleke, Mbalu and Dange formed independent chiefdoms, but at his kingdom they recognised his authority and held him as their paramount chief.”[38] His father Phalo agreed with him and they crossed the Kei River into what is now known as the Ciskei.

It was the amaRharhabe, and those chiefdoms which had preceded them across the Kei River, who would now take centre stage in the century-long sequence of anti-colonial wars, first against the Dutch trekboere and then against the British. Divisions arose, however, when Rharhabe’s eldest son, Mlawu, died before his father. The rightful heir was Mlawu’s Great Son, Ngqika (c. 1770-1829). However, Ngqika was too young to rule and Mlawu’s brother Ndlambe acted as regent. In 1795 the young Ngqika pushed his uncle aside and seized the throne. Ndlambe regrouped to avenge his humiliation by his nephew, aided by the house of Gcaleka in the Transkei. But Ngqika’s formidable army defeated the Gcalekas as well, following which Ngqika declared himself the paramount chief of all the Xhosa. This usurpation bred resentment in all Xhosaland for not even Ngqika’s grandfather, Rharhabe, had claimed such authority over the Gcaleka – choosing instead to leave and cross the Kei. Mqhayi describes Ngqika’s calumny as follows:

. . . the reader must understand that Xhosa kingship passes down in a direct line and minor princes assume their appropriate rank – no one usurps another’s rightful place. For this reason no one was much impressed with Ngqika’s prowess in battle.[39]

But Ndlambe did not just roll over and allow Ngqika to assume authority. He rallied his allies, Tshatshu of the amaNtinde, Kobe of the amaGqunukhwebe and Bhotomane of the imiDange. They were incensed that Ngqika had declared himself paramount chief over them – and in alliance with the British colonial governor, Lord Charles Somerset, with whom he was now openly collaborating against his own people, giving away much of their land for a pittance or alcohol. His uncle Ndlambe lamented Ngqika’s betrayal thus: Lo mfo wam selegqibile ukusithengisa kumzi wasemzini – “This chap of mine has already sold us out to a foreign nation.”[40] And so it was that in 1818 Ndlambe and his allies launched an all-out attack on Ngqika in what became known as the Battle of Amalinde – in reference to “the saucer-like cavities” that characterised the valley of Debe at the foot of the Amathole Mountains.[41] In retreat, Ngqika was forced to call upon Governor Somerset to come to his aid, something the latter had always cherished. The victorious Ndlambe chiefs were ferociously put down by a commando led by Lieutenant-General Brereton, an event which led to Nxele’s calamitous revenge assault on Grahamstown.

Aligned to Ngqika and Ndlambe were two influential prophet-intellectuals – Ntsikana and Nxele (aka Makana) respectively. Ntsikana was one of the first African leaders to embrace the new Christian religion. He claimed to have had a vision in which the rays of the sun shone on his favourite ox’s horn. A whirlwind sprang up when he attended a traditional ceremony, whereupon he went to the river to cleanse himself of all that was impure, taken to mean the “heathen” traditions of his people. He authored one of the most popular hymns in isiXhosa, UloThixo Omkhulu, which urged his people to submit to the will of God. Ngqika himself was only stopped by his counsellors from formally converting to Christianity. We should be careful, however, not to assume that Ntsikana had no religious or spiritual anchor before the missionaries came. Mqhayi was sceptical that Ntsikana was converted by Christianity:

What do people say today? They say Ntsikana was influenced by the first missionaries, that they converted him. Who are those missionaries? Because Williams is the first missionary, apart from Van der Kemp, who did not stay long at any one place in our country. I say who are those missionaries, because the first missionary Ntsikana met is the one who dropped to his knees before Ntsikana, confessing guilt. My fellow countrymen, this opinion should not be spread, because it does not fit the facts, even though the missionaries have already published in books the opinion that Ntsikana was their first convert. I would not say this unless the missionaries had the power and authority to make the sun rise through Hulushe, unless they could control and direct the winds, so that they could stir them to rage, on the day Ntsikana grew anxious and could not dance, so that he gave up, washed off the ochre and went home. And so it seems to me our fathers the missionaries are making too much of this, they are robbing God of his power, the power to convert someone without them, without their intervention. That is a grave error, because it is written “Render unto God the things that are God’s”.[42]

AC Jordan was not entirely convinced by the mysticism surrounding Ntsikana in Xhosa folklore. For example, there is the story that Ntsikana prophesied the arrival of white people with a coin on one hand and a Bible on the other. Yet this had nothing to do with Ntsikana’s prophetic powers. As one of Van der Kemp’s earliest converts in Bethelsdorp, Ntsikana drew on his direct experience with the missionaries and on the Bible. Jordan also argues that in Ntsikana’s world divination was not uncommon, and could not be reduced to the influence of white missionaries. More importantly, Jordan offers a secular interpretation of Ntsikana’s significance, and it is within this intellectual trajectory that I seek to place Steve Biko. In his own way, Steve was, as Mostert observed, a beneficiary of a long tradition started by Ntsikana but also a critic of that culture. Here is how Jordan describes Ntsikana’s enduring legacy:

The importance of Ntsikana lies not in the smitings by the shafts of sunrise, or in the rising winds and readings from karosses. The fact that his Hymn of Praise is the first literary composition ever to be assigned to individual formulation – thus constituting a bridge between the traditional and the post-traditional period – is of great historical significance. Even more important than this is the fact that, through his influence, a few young disciples were introduced to the arts of reading and writing, and that, inspired by his exemplary life and teaching, these men became the harbingers of the dawn of literacy among the indigenous peoples of Southern Africa. [43]

The differences between Ntsikana and Nxele were more political than spiritual. When Ntsikana attempted to proselytise Ndlambe, the latter cautioned that “each ear will hear a different thing because I am still listening to Nxele”.

Nxele, Ntsikana’s chief rival, preached in a more innovative idiom. After an unsatisfactory dalliance with Christianity, and through increasing dissatisfaction with white cattle-raiding, Nxele rejected the concept of a white God in the heavens and preached that Mdalidiphu under the ground was the true God of the Xhosa. He subsequently led the Xhosa army in the Battle of Grahamstown (1819) where the Xhosa suffered severe casualties – estimates of casualties range from 1 000 to 2 000. Incarcerated on Robben Island, he participated in a prisoner break-out but the boat in which he was travelling capsized and he was drowned in the cold Atlantic Ocean. He had promised his people that he would come back, and in apparent fulfilment of that promise he died trying to escape from the island by swimming across the Atlantic. Today the Xhosa people speak of ukuza kukaNxele – the return of Nxele – to mock a failed promise. Noel Mostert is of the view that “victory for Nxele at Grahamstown would have seen the collapse of the frontier as the colonists fled westwards towards the Cape, as they usually did on such critical occasions”.[44]

According to Peires, notwithstanding the differences between Ntsikana and Nxele, both individuals were grappling with adapting to the “irruption of the European”:

Nxele’s nationalist theology emerged as a result of white hostility to his version of Christianity and to his patron Ndlambe, whereas Ntsikana’s pacifism was due to the political circumstances of his sponsor, Ngqika . . . Their attraction depended not on their charisma or their supernatural abilities, but on their power to reinterpret a world which had suddenly become incomprehensible. They are giants because they transcend the specifics to symbolise the opposite poles of Xhosa response to Christianity and the West: Nxele representing struggle, Ntsikana submission. [45]

Peires argues that after the Xhosa were subdued, particularly around the Fourth Frontier War of 1811–1812, the political leadership passed from the chiefs to the prophet-intellectuals. People hoped that they might answer the questions: “Who were these white people? What did they want? What should be done about them?”[46] These existential questions went to the heart of Black Consciousness in the face of white racism in the 1970s. In the early 1800s the answers to these questions were not so clear – they ranged from submission to various forms of resistance. After Nxele (aka Makana), subsequent Xhosa chiefs found themselves confronted with the same questions – not only in response to the colonial government but also to the missionaries. And here we can see the parallels with the questions that the Black Consciousness Movement was faced with in the 1960s – not just how to deal with the colonial government but also with those who sympathised with the cause of black people, whom the founder of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), Robert Sobukwe, called abelungu abasithandayo – “whites who love us”.

Relationships with Missionaries – Friends or Enemies?

In his book The Struggle for the Eastern Cape, Martin Legassick describes missionaries as “the main mediators of colonial politics and culture among the Khoisan and the Xhosa”. Early missionaries such as Van der Kemp were opposed to the racist and murderous policies of the colonial government. One of the early exponents of liberatory theology, Van der Kemp believed that God would intervene on behalf of the oppressed. He immersed himself in the life of the Khoisan – ate their food, wore their clothes and married a slave girl. He established his mission in Bethelsdorp as “an imperium in imperio – a place with its own moral code” – an example of non-racial co-existence among the different races. Although he had been sent to civilise the “savages”, Van der Kemp protested the evil among the Boers and the British who enslaved them. He warned the colonists – a warning that would fall on deaf ears for the better part of the next two centuries – that “there is no way of governing this country other than by the government doing justice to the natives. In no other way can the Boers escape the hand of Providence than by acknowledging their guilt.”[47]

Even after Van der Kemp’s death in 1811, his contemporary James Read – called Ngcongolo[48] by the Xhosa – continued to insist on humane treatment of “the natives”, and opposed the expulsion of the Xhosa from the Zuurveld. As pointed out earlier, Governor Somerset had succeeded with his divide-and-rule policies by buying off the Xhosa chief, Ngqika. He corralled the missionaries who followed Van der Kemp and Read to be on the colonial government’s side. Missionaries were expected to be the government’s “eyes and ears” among the Xhosa, enabling the government to enforce its policy of punishment by reprisal. This entailed the burning of crops and the raiding of cattle in retribution for one transgression or another. An increasingly racist policy of extermination was now in place in Britain and was being enforced with the utmost ruthlessness by colonial governors and some of the missionaries, who evangelised in support of Britain’s growing imperialism.

And here one begins to see the emergence of a patronising attitude among the missionaries towards the “natives”. John Philip, superintendent of the London Missionary Society, for example, rejected slavery but only because he saw a potential consumer market among the Khoisan and the Xhosa. What was needed was to “elevate” them to a level of cultural development more aligned with missionary and European norms. We see the same condescending but ultimately contemptuous approach as that adopted towards the Khoi and the San in the preceding century. Philip’s mission was to:

. . . raise uncivilised and wandering hordes, which formerly subsisted by chase and by plunder, to the condition of settled labourers and cultivators of the soil, to lead them to increase the sum of productive labour and to become consumers of the commodities of other countries, to convert such as were a terror to the inhabitants of an extended frontier into defenders of that frontier against the inroads of remoter barbarians. [49]

By the 1820s this “humane” approach was increasingly supplanted by a portrayal of the Xhosa as lazy, libidinous and thieves. Philip, who had written that “the Caffres are not the savages one reads about in books”[50], was replaced by the openly racist Henry Calderwood. And here we see the church laying the seeds of the prohibition of inter-racial relationships:

The radical evangelism of Van der Kemp and Read, which allowed and even encouraged interaction with the proselytised to the point of marriage, was being replaced by a conservative, culturally chauvinistic and racially charged ideology that demanded, above all, that its agents adhere to accepted norms of British respectability that would not allow for marriage with Khoisan or African women, and certainly not condone adultery. [51]

The chiefs were already critical of the missionaries for taking decisions on their behalf by amending treaties with the British government. While the Xhosa gave a modicum of respect to missionaries such as James Read and John Philip, they treated racists such as Robert Moffat and Henry Calderwood with disdain. Read succinctly remarked to Philip that “as for Calderwood, they hate him”.[52] As Legassick puts it:

. . . humanitarian liberalism had given way to utilitarian liberalism for which results were more important than the state of people’s souls, in which efficiency and discipline were necessary for progress and coercion could be employed to impose them.[53]

In an early precursor of the Black Consciousness critique of the commitment of white liberals to the struggles of black people, Xhosa chiefs increasingly questioned missionaries’ intentions. Neither James Read nor John Philip could resist the stampede of their more conservative brethren and they threw in their lot with the whites in the 1846 war against the Xhosa. Increasingly, the Xhosa chiefs regarded the missionaries as legitimate targets of war. One can see the antecedents of the Black Consciousness critique of white liberalism in the language they used.

The question Steve Biko posed: “Can our white trustees put themselves in our place? Our answer was twofold: ‘No! They cannot’,” had been posed by his ancestors more than a century earlier. Just as Steve Biko said: “As long as the white liberals are our spokesmen, there will be no black spokesmen . . . the white trustees would always be mixed in purpose.”[54] Chief Maqoma said this about the duplicity of the missionaries:

You are a teacher. You say it is your object in coming among us to teach us the word of God. But why do you always give over teaching that word, and all leave your stations and go to military posts when there is war? You call yourselves men of peace; what then have you got to do at any of the forts, there are only fighting men there? I am doubtful whether any of you be men of peace. Read, I think he is, but look at Calderwood; what have you to say about him? Now he is a magistrate, one of those who make war.

Maqoma’s younger brother, Sandile, described the collusion of the missionaries as follows:

I have always spared the teachers, but now I will kill them too. What do they do? Only teach men that they are not to fight even though their chiefs be in danger. The white men! The white men put the Son of God to death although he had no sin: I am like the Son of God, without sin, and the white men seek to put me also to death.[55]

The Modern Intellectuals from Tiyo Soga to Steve Biko

It is often assumed that the colonial conquest of the Xhosa was a clean sweep. In fact, it was the colonial government’s failure to completely subdue the Xhosa that led to a rethink of policy and the colonial government’s decision to introduce a qualified franchise. All adult males who earned 25 pounds could vote. Legassick argues that the introduction of the franchise was an effort to restabilise the colony in the wake of the 1846 Frontier War, to incorporate as many whites as possible into the political system in Britain and in the colony, and to recruit many of the Khoisan who had thrown in their lot with the Xhosa. All of this was too late to stop the emerging solidarity among the Xhosa and the Khoisan, transcending more localised tribal and ethnic identities rooted in the previous century. For example, Maqoma’s brother and rightful chief of the Rharhabe, Chief Sandile (1820–1879), worked hard to forge a unified identity among the Xhosa and the Khoisan. He promised to re-establish the Khoisan dynasty if they should switch their allegiance from the British to the Xhosa:

I see that notwithstanding all the assistance you have given the government to fight against us in every war, you are still very poor . . . you have been . . . starved and oppressed . . . If you join me . . . you shall be completed with cattle and all that a man should have.[56]

It was only in 1865, when the so-called “British Kaffraria” was united with the Cape Colony, that significant numbers of Xhosa men began to qualify for the franchise. By this time a handful of Xhosa intellectuals had emerged, the most prominent of whom was Tiyo Soga, described by his biographer Donovan Williams as “the father of black consciousness”.[57]

Tiyo Soga: The Father of Black Consciousness?

In what would become one of the most consequential decisions in Xhosa history, the prophet-intellectual Ntsikana approached Ngqika’s counsellor Jotelo Soga and asked if he could bring Soga’s son Tiyo into his church. Jotelo could see the benefits of the new religion and education for his son. In his book Zemk’ Iinkomo Magwalandini, WB Rubusana argues for a direct link between Ntsikana and the Soga family. He writes that the last line in Ntsikana’s hymn UloThixo Omkhulu is a reference to Ntsikana’s invitation to the Soga family to join in his crusade. In the recorded text the line reads: lo mzi wakhona na siwubizile, which does not make sense in that context. Rubusana argues that it was a misprint and should have read Lo mzi kaKhonwana siwubizile –“we have invited Christ to the house of Khonwana, ancestor to the Soga family”. Rubusana writes in isiXhosa:

Kukho indawo esinqwenela ukuyilungisa kulo eli culo likaNtsikana kuba ayivakali into eliyithethayo. Le ndawo kumgca wokugqibela ithi, “Lo mzi wakhona na siwubizile” iyimposiso. La mazwi ebefanele ukuthi, “Lo mzi kaKhonwana siwubizile.” Lo Khonwana wayethetha yena nguyise boJotelo noJiyelwa nabanye; yinto yasemaJwarheni, kaMtika, yomlibo wakwaSoga. Lo mzi wayewumemela enguqukweni kuba ubulumelwane oludala lwamaCirha olwalububukhwe bakhe, kuba umkakhe wasekunene, unina kaMakhombe wayengumJwarhakazi.[58]

The rough translation of this would be:

There is a place we wish to correct in this rendition of Ntsikana’s hymn because it does not make sense. The part in the last line that says, Lo mzi wakhona na siwubizile is false [and indeed not translatable into English]. It should actually read as follows: “We have also called the house of Khonwana.” The Khonwana he was referring to was the father of Jotelo (Tiyo Soga’s father) and Jiyelwa and others; he is a man of the Jwarha clan, a Mtika, from the line of Soga. Ntsikana was inviting this house to the gospel because they were from the amaCirha, and his in-laws because his wife from the Great House, Makhombe’s mother, was also from the Jwarha clan.

Tiyo Soga would become the most influential Xhosa intellectual of the 19th century.[59] He was taken in by Presbyterian priest William Chalmers who educated him at Lovedale College, the mission school established by the British John Bennie in 1841 to “civilise” the natives. The college was closed during the Frontier War of 1844. Fearing for his protégé’s life, Chalmers took Soga along to Scotland. They returned to South Africa in 1846 and Soga worked as a teacher and a missionary at Uniondale in Keiskammahoek.[60] Soga refused to be drawn into the Xhosa resistance. For example, he declined Xhosa warrior Maqoma’s request to translate the contents of letters that the chief had confiscated from the British. He told the chief that “he would not mix himself up in a context which carried death to his fellow creatures”.[61]

When another war broke out in 1851, Soga and Chalmers left for Scotland again to return only in 1856. While in Scotland, Soga enrolled for a theology degree, was ordained as a minister and fell in love with a Scottish woman, Janet Burnside. In keeping with Christian teachings Soga dissociated himself from African cultural traditions and rituals. He did not undergo circumcision, which was the rite of passage from boyhood to manhood in Xhosa custom. In his writings and teachings Soga extolled European culture and values, and yet he implored black people to self-reliance:

As men of colour, live for the elevation of your degraded, despised, downtrodden. My advice to all coloured people would be: assist one another; patronise talent in one another; prefer one another’s business, shops etc.[62]

Soga’s political outlook took a radical turn when he read a newspaper article written by his childhood friend John Chalmers in the newspaper Isigidimi SamaXhosa. Chalmers wrote that black people were indolent and inevitably drawn to extinction. Soga wrote a response which is worth reproducing at length – it has been described as a precursor to the development of black consciousness and Pan Africanism:

Africa was of God given to the race of Ham. I find the Negro from the days of the Assyrian downwards, keeping his “individuality” and his “distinctiveness”, amid the wreck of empires, and the revolution of ages. I find him keeping his place among the nations, and keeping his home and country. I find him opposed by nation after nation and driven from his home. I find him enslaved – exposed to the vices and the brandy of the white man. I find him in this condition for many a day – in the West Indian Islands, in northern and South America, and in the South American colonies of Spain and Portugal. I find him exposed to all these disasters, and yet living, multiplying and “never extinct”. Yea, I find him now as the prevalence of Christian and philanthropic opinions on the rights of man obtains among civilised nations, returning unmanacled to the land of his forefathers, taking back with him the civilisation and Christianity of those nations (see the Negro Republic of Liberia). I find the Negro in the present struggle in America looking forward – though with still chains on his hands and chains on his feet – yet looking forward to the dawn of a better day for himself and all his sable brethren in Africa.[63]

In addition to preaching self-help and inspiring African churches through his hymns, Soga counselled his children, on the eve of their departure to study in Scotland, to regard themselves as black, despite having a white mother:

I want you, for your future comfort, to be very careful on this point. You will ever cherish the memory of your mother as that of an upright, conscientious, thrifty, Christian Scotchwoman. You will ever be thankful for your connection by this tie to the white race. But if you wish to gain credit for yourselves – if you do not wish to feel the taunt of men, which you sometimes may be made to feel – take your place in the world as coloured, not as white men, as Kafirs, not as Englishmen. You will be more thought of for this by all good and wise people, than for the other. [64]

A proud man, he once lamented that “this ‘morning sir’ of the Xhosa people whenever they see a white face is very annoying”[65] – Biko would make a similar point about how black people would grin and smile even as they were insulted by white people:

I had a man working in one of our projects in the Eastern Cape on electricity; he was installing electricity, a white man with a black assistant. He had to be above the ceiling and the black man was under the ceiling and they were working together pushing up wires and sending the rods in which the wires are and so on, and all the time there was insult, insult, insult from the white man: push this, you fool – that sort of talk, and of course this touched me; I know the white man very well, he speaks very well to me, so at tea time we invite them for tea; I ask him: why do you speak like this to this man? And he says to me in front of the guy: this is the only language he understands, he is a lazy bugger. And the black man smiled. I asked him if it was true and he says: no, I’m used to him.

Then I was sick. I thought for a moment, I don’t understand black society. After two hours I came back to the (black) guy, I said to him: do you really mean it? The man changed, he became very bitter, he was telling me how he wants to leave any moment, but what can he do? He does not have any skills, he has got no assurance of another job, his job to him is some form of security, he has got no reserves, if he does not work today he cannot live tomorrow, he has got to work, he has got to take it. And if he has to take it, he dare not show any form of what is called ‘cheek’ to his boss. Now this I think epitomises the two-faced attitude of the black man to this whole question of existence in this country.[66]

David Attwell would later observe that “Soga was indeed ‘a man of two worlds’, but he was also a transitional figure within Xhosa history, marking a choice that subsequent generations would have to remake for themselves”.[67] Soga’s biographer Donovan Williams described Soga as placed in the cross-tide:

. . . caught in the cross-tide of cultures, as a navigator his responsibilities were enormous. Yet he had no precedents and struggled alone trying to plot a course through the restless seas which were to try the skill and patience of others for the next hundred years.[68]

Soga’s radical turn notwithstanding, the tension persisted between the politics of submission passed down from Ngqika and Ntsikana, and the radical defiance passed down from Ndlambe and Nxele, such that by the end of the 19th century there had evolved what Ntongela Masilela describes as conservative and radical modernisers. Among the former group would be the early Tiyo Soga, John Tengo Jabavu and his son Don Davidson Tengo Jabavu, the editor of the influential Bantu World, RV Selope Thema, and the man who would become the first president of the South African Native National Congress (later named the African National Congress), John Dube. The conservatives had been exposed to the self-help principles of the conservative African-American leader Booker T Washington when they were studying in the United States. Dube was studying at Oberlin College when Washington started the Tuskegee Institute. The radicals came under the influence of WEB du Bois and, to a lesser extent, Marcus Garvey. Masilela points out that Selope Thema was vehemently opposed to any radical nationalist influence in South Africa, particularly the Garveyist movement:

Selope Thema could not accept in many ways that the philosophy of his master, Booker T Washington, had evolved and taken the mantle of Garveyism. To conservative modernisers such as Dube and Selope Thema, the black radicalism of Garveyism was viewed as a threat to their conservative and middle class construction of African nationalism.[69]

The battle between the conservative and radical modernisers played itself out in many ways. The leading and arguably the most influential African leader of his time in the Cape was John Tengo Jabavu. He was one of Soga’s successors as a leading opinion maker in black society. He was the proprietor of the black newspaper Imvo Zabantsundu, and was also one of the people behind the establishment of the University of Fort Hare as the first institution of higher learning for black people in South Africa. Imvo Zabantsundu became the single most important mouthpiece for African rights. He used the newspaper to launch protests and call for a conference against the Parliamentary Voters Registration Act, which sought to nullify tribal tenure as a basis for the property qualification. According to André Odendaal, the conference authorised Jabavu to call for the creation of a national organisation to represent Africans on a political basis.[70] However, Jabavu refused to do this mainly because it would take away from his personal leadership but also because he felt this would alienate whites “and stimulate racial distinctions instead of promoting practical non-racialism”.[71] The philosophical foundations of a cautious non-racialism were indeed laid in that period, despite Jabavu not responding to the call of national leadership.

Jabavu’s Achilles heel was that he was beholden to his white financiers. He made two fatal mistakes, politically speaking, that cost him support among Africans. The first was his support for the Afrikaner Bond which threatened to bring Cecil John Rhodes’s government down in the 1898 elections. Going into those elections the Afrikaner Bond, under the leadership of JH Hofmeyr, wooed African supporters by promising them the vote, and Jabavu threw in his lot with them against his erstwhile liberal supporters, including Rhodes. The second mistake Jabavu made was to come out in support of the Land Act of 1913. This earned him the ire of one of the leading radical modernisers of the time, Sol Plaatje. Plaatje was a well-known author and edited Koranta ea Becoana – The Bechuana Gazette. He had been elected secretary of the South African Native National Congress (later the ANC) in 1912. Plaatje challenged Jabavu to a public debate, offering to travel all the way from Mafeking in the north to Jabavu’s home in King William’s Town:

Now I challenge Imvo or Mr Tengo Jabavu to call a series of three public meetings, anywhere in the district of King William’s Town. Let us both address the meetings from the same platform, or separately, but on the same day and at the same place. For every vote carried at any of these meetings, in favour of his views on the Act, I undertake to hand over 15 pounds to the Grey Hospital (King William’s Town) and 15 pounds to the Victoria Hospital (Lovedale), on condition that for every vote I carry at any of the meetings, he hand over 15 pounds to the Victoria Hospital (Mafeking) and 15 pounds to the Carnarvon. That is 30 pounds for charity.[72]

As if to demonstrate that he would not stoop to respond to Plaatje, Jabavu asked someone else to reply on his behalf with a pithy but characteristically arrogant response:

I am instructed by the editor of Imvo to acknowledge the receipt of your letter, and to inform you that as he has not been reading and following your writings etc., he cannot understand what you mean by it. In short, to let you know that he takes no interest in the matter.

Plaatje regarded Jabavu as nothing less than a sell-out:

God forbid that we should ever find that our mind had become the property of someone other than ourselves; but should such a misfortune ever overtake us, we should at least strive to serve our new proprietor diligently, and whenever our people are unanimously opposed to a policy, we should consider it a part of our duty to tell him so; but that is not Mr Jabavu’s way of serving a master. Throughout the course of a general election, we have known him to feed his masters (the SA Party), upon flap doodle, fabricating the mess out of imaginary native votes of confidence for his master’s delectation, and leaving them to discover the real ingredients of the dish, at the bottom of the poll, when the result has been declared.[73]

Jabavu’s other nemesis was the highly respected teacher and priest Walter Benson Mpilo Rubusana, who, in 1909, became the first representative of Africans in the Cape Parliament. In 1914 he lost in a three-way race to a white candidate – mainly because Jabavu chose to enter the race and split the black vote. Rubusana and a number of more radical modernisers such as Allan Kirkland Soga – one of Tiyo Soga’s sons – had broken away from Jabavu to form Izwi Labantu – The Voice of the People – in protest against Jabavu’s politics. However, as Frantz Fanon warns, we should be careful not to overlook the contradictions that come with fighting modernity – for Izwi Labantu was financed by none other than Cecil John Rhodes, who was bitter at Jabavu for breaking ranks and siding with the Afrikaner Bond in 1898. Not only did Rhodes finance Izwi but he also entrusted its finances to CP Crewe, a member of the Cape Legislative Assembly. That did not stop Izwi from calling for a national convention to support the Progressive Party while also becoming the springboard for the formation of the South African National Convention (SANC) under the leadership of Rubusana – 14 years before the formation of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC). By this time Rubusana had “eclipsed Jabavu as the leading Cape African politician”.[74] The SANC sent a delegation to protest the passage of the South Africa Act of 1910, consisting of Thomas Mapikela, Daniel Dwanya and WB Rubusana – who was picked over AK Soga, to the latter’s enduring bitterness, swearing to the end that he would oppose any form of unilateralism.

Perhaps the one individual who would come to symbolise a more radical African nationalism was SEK Mqhayi – the founding genius of Xhosa literary culture. Mqhayi was a man of many talents. As a journalist he served as editor of Umteteli waBantu and Imvo Zabantsundu; as a novelist he wrote uDon Jadu and the classic Ityala Lamawele; as a non-fiction writer he wrote the biographies of several prominent African leaders including Rubusana; but it was for his poetry that he was best known, earning himself the title of Imbongi Yesizwe Jikelele – The Poet of the Nation.

Mqhayi was unusual in that even though he graduated from Lovedale College and qualified as a teacher, he spent a great deal of time at his father’s kraal in Centane, where he learned the rituals of his people. This gave him an enormous amount of self-confidence and pride in himself and in the history of his people. For instance, he refused to write in English. Presaging Biko’s call for African people to study their history before they can begin to define a new course for themselves and their new nation, Mqhayi enjoined the Xhosa to study the history of their people. The great writer AC Jordan had the highest praise for Mqhayi, calling him “the soul of his people”: “Mqhayi takes the highest place in Xhosa literature.”[75]

In his autobiography Nelson Mandela remembers a display of cultural nationalism by Mqhayi at his college in Healdtown:

There was a stage at one end of the hall and on it a door that led to Dr Wellington’s [the headmaster’s] house. The door itself was nothing special, for no one ever walked through it except Dr Wellington himself. Suddenly, the door opened and out walked not Dr Wellington, but a black man dressed in a leopard skin kaross and matching hat, who was carrying a spear in either hand.

To Mandela’s surprise, Mqhayi proceeded with a blistering critique of white racism despite the presence of Dr Wellington himself. Mqhayi said:

. . . we cannot allow these foreigners who do not care for our culture to take over our nation. I predict that one day, the forces of African society will achieve a momentous victory over the interloper. For too long we have succumbed to the false gods of the white man. But we will emerge and cast off their foreign notions.

Mandela concludes:

I could hardly believe my ears. His boldness in speaking of such delicate matters in the presence of Dr Wellington and other whites seemed utterly astonishing to us. Yet at the same time it aroused and motivated us, and began to alter my perception of men like Dr Wellington, whom I had automatically considered my benefactor.[76]

Although Mqhayi falls squarely among radical modernisers such as the later Tiyo Soga, WB Rubusana and Sol Plaatje, it is important to keep in mind that all these individuals were complicated. They were part of the very modernity they were contesting, and thus their lives were often characterised by contradictions. AC Jordan reminds us, for example, that Mqhayi had a “double loyalty”:

As a Xhosa he was loyal to the Xhosa chiefs and their ancestors, and as a British subject he had to be loyal to the British king. A poem written during the Anglo-Boer War in the Izwi Labantu of 13 March 1900 shows how very sincerely Mqhayi had accepted British guardianship. Each stanza has a refrain, SingamaBritani – We are Britons.[77]

It was only in the 1940s that a younger generation of radical modernisers emerged through the formation of the ANC Youth League under the leadership of Anton Lembede, AP Mda, Robert Sobukwe, Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo. To this day the Unity Movement claims it was the first to preach non-collaboration with government institutions, which became an important plank in the Black Consciousness Movement. An even more radical group of modernisers arrived on the scene with the breakaway of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) from the ANC in 1959. As we shall see in the following chapter, this breakaway would have a direct bearing on Steve Biko’s life in Ginsberg Location. In his brilliant summary of Steve’s testimony, Millard Arnold notes that “there was no indication in his childhood or early background that Biko possessed the political genius that would lead him to develop an ideology and a mode of action that would irreversibly change the course of history in South Africa”.[78] Yes and no. As a young child he was not particularly interested in political life – which he left to his older brother Khaya – until he left Ginsberg for Lovedale College. As Khaya put it: “Then the giant was awakened.”

[1] Steve Biko (1977). Interview with Bernard Zylstra. “The Struggle for South Africa”, An Interview With Steve Biko, 1978.

[2] Michael Burawoy and Karl von Holdt (2012). Conversations with Bourdieu: The Johannesburg Moment (Johannesburg: Wits University Press), 122.

[3] Noel Mostert (1992). Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa’s Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People (London: Cape Publishers), 1278.

[4] Daniel Magaziner (2010). The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968-1977 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press), 6.

[5] Cornel West (1993). Race Matters (New York: Vintage Books), 56.

[6] Frantz Fanon (1963). The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press), 226-227.

[7] Lewis Nkosi (2006 [1981]). “Negritude: New and Old Perspectives” in Lindy Stiebel and Liz Gunner (eds) (2006) Still Beating the Drum: Critical Perspectives on Lewis Nkosi (Johannesburg: Wits University Press).

[8] DDT Jabavu (1928). The Segregation Fallacy and Other Papers (Alice: Lovedale Press). Cited in Gail Gerhart (1978). Black Power in South Africa: The Evolution of an Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press), 35. Jabavu was the first black professor at the University of Fort Hare and later became president of the South African Institute of Race Relations and the All African Convention. Like his father John Tengo – discussed below – DDT became a towering force in black political and intellectual life.

[9] Bhekizizwe Peterson (2000). Monarchs, Missionaries and Intellectuals (Johannesburg: Wits University Press).

[10] David Attwell (2005). Rewriting Modernity (Scottsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press), 23.

[11] Ian Martin Macqueen (2011). “Re-imagining South Africa: Black Consciousness, Radical Christianity and the New Left, 1967-1977”, PhD thesis, University of Sussex, 24.

[12] Attwell, Rewriting Modernity, 20.

[13] Biko cited in Macqueen, Re-imagining South Africa.

[14] Hitchens, Arguably, 41.

[15] Noni Jabavu (1963). The Ochre People: Scenes from a South African Life (London: Murray). Noni Jabavu was one of DDT Jabavu’s daughters.

[16] Noni Jabavu (1960). Drawn in Colour: African Contrasts (London: Murray).

[17] In his book A Living Man From Africa, Roger Levine calls the chief Jan Tzatzoe. Here I use the Xhosa version of his name, Dyani Tshatshu, except where it is in a direct quotation from Levine.

[18] Donovan Williams (1983). The Journal and Selected Writings of the Reverend Tiyo Soga (Cape Town: AA Balkema).

[19] Levine, A Living Man from Africa, 54.

[20] In Mostert, Frontiers, 653.

[21] Williams, The Journal and Selected Writings of the Reverend Tiyo Soga, 172-173.

[22] Mostert, Frontiers, 463.

[23] Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets, 23.

[24] Levine, A Living Man from Africa, 13.

[25] Levine, A Living Man from Africa, 24-25.

[26] Martin Legassick (2010). The Struggle for the Eastern Cape 1800-1854 (Johannesburg: KMN Review Publishers), 59.

[27] Nigel Penn (2005). The Forgotten Frontier (Athens: Ohio University Press), 28.

[28] Penn, The Forgotten Frontier, 113.

[29] Penn, The Forgotten Frontier, 123.

[30] Penn, The Forgotten Frontier, 227.

[31] Mostert, Frontiers, 1992, 480.

[32] Georges Lefebvre (2011). Napoleon (New York: Routledge), 306.

[33] Lefebvre, Napoleon, 307.

[34] Lefebvre, Napoleon, 47.

[35] Lefebvre, Napoleon, 308.

[36] Levine, A Living Man from Africa, 12.

[37] Jeff Peires (1981). The House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa People in the Days of Their Independence (Johannesburg: Ravan Press), 53.

[38] SEK Mqhayi (2009). Abantu Besizwe: Historical and Biographical Writings, 1902-1944 (Johannesburg: Wits University Press), 286.

[39] Mqhayi is here enunciating the principle and not the reality of usurpation. As stated above, the practice of usurpation was not unheard of among amaXhosa.

[40] Mqhayi, Abantu Besizwe, 312-313.

[41] Mostert, Frontiers, 465.

[42] Mqhayi, Abantu Besizwe, 212.

[43] AC Jordan (1973). Towards an African Literature: The Emergence of Literary Form in South Africa (Los Angeles: University of California Press), 50-51.

[44] Mostert, Frontiers, 480.

[45] Peires, The House of Phalo, 83-84.

[46] Peires, The House of Phalo, 75.

[47] Martin Legassick (2010). The Struggle for the Eastern Cape 1800-1854: Subjugation and the Roots of South African Democracy (Johannesburg: KMM Review Publishers), 8.

[48] A ngcongolo is a reed, which suggests Read may have been a tall man.

[49] Legassick, The Struggle for the Eastern Cape, 25-26.

[50] Legassick, The Struggle for the Eastern Cape, 38.

[51] Levine, A Living Man From Africa, 74.

[52] Legassick, The Struggle for the Eastern Cape, 73.

[53] Legassick, The Struggle for the Eastern Cape, 66.

[54] Interview with Bernard Zylstra, 1977.

[55] Legassick, The Struggle for the Eastern Cape, 90.

[56] Legassick, The Struggle for the Eastern Cape, 101.

[57] Williams, The Journal and Selected Writings of the Reverend Tiyo Soga, 5.

[58] Rubusana, Benson Walter and SC Satyo (2002 [1906]). Zemk’Iinkomo Magwalandini (Cape Town: New Africa Books), 4.

[59] Levine (2010), A Living Man From Africa.

[60] This Uniondale is not to be confused with the one in the Karoo.

[61] Quoted in Mcebisi Ndletyana (2008). African Intellectuals in 19th and Early 20th Century South Africa (Cape Town: HSRC Press), 20.

[62] See Donovan Williams (1978). Umfundisi: A Biography of Tiyo Soga, 1829-1871 (Alice: Lovedale Press).

[63] Tiyo Soga’s reply to Chalmers under the pseudonym Defensor, King William’s Town Gazette and Kaffrarian Banner, 11 May 1865.

[64] John Chalmers (1877). Tiyo Soga: A Page of South African Mission Work (Edinburgh: Andrew Elliott), 430.

[65] Williams, The Journal and Selected Writings of Tiyo Soga, 175.

[66] Biko, I Write What I Like, 113.

[67] David Attwell (2005). Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History (Scotsville: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press), 46.

[68] Williams, Umfundisi, 125.

[69] Masilela, interview with Sandile Ngidi, 2000.

[70] André Odendaal (1984). Vukani Bantu!: The Beginnings of Black Protest Politics in South Africa to 1912 (Cape Town: David Philip).

[71] Odendaal, Vukani Bantu!, 15.

[72] Sol Plaatje (2007). Native Life in South Africa (Johannesburg: Picador Africa), 165-166.

[73] Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa, 162-163.

[74] Odendaal, Vukani Bantu!, 15.

[75] AC Jordan (1973). Towards an African Literature: The Emergence of Literary Form in South Africa (Los Angeles: University of California Press), 116.

[76] Nelson Mandela (1994). Long Walk to Freedom (Little, Brown), 35-36.

[77] Jordan, Towards an African Literature, 113.

[78] Millard Arnold (ed.) (1979). The Testimony of Steve Biko (London: Maurice Temple Smith), xv.