The ANC and the Liberation Struggle in South Africa

Essential writings

Thula Simpson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781315459592
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

The history of the ANC, which is the oldest liberation movement on the African continent, is one that has generated a great deal of interest amongst historians in recent years. Gone are the days when the history of African nationalism could be relegated to the margins of the study of the South African past. Instead, with the ANC having ascended to the helm of political power, a position it has maintained for over twenty years, there can be no question that its history occupies an important and permanent place in the history of the nation.

This volume gathers together some of the most important contributions to the literature on the ANC's role in South Africa's struggle for liberation. Besides important themes such as gender, ethnicity, and healthcare, contributions from leading historians also address why the ANC decided to engage in armed struggle; what role the South African Communist Party played in making this decision; how the ANC External Mission contributed to the upsurge of mass protest in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s; and the ANC's contribution, relative to the other components of the liberation struggle, in ensuring the eventual demise of the old racial order. The chapters in this book were originally published in the South African Historical Journal, the Journal of Southern African Studies, and African Studies.

Dialectical Dances: Exploring John Dube’s Public Life

HEATHER A. HUGHES

University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK

Abstract
This article investigates the relationship between biographical subject and author. By using the example of John Dube, it traces the changing fortunes of the ‘the life’ at the hands of various writers, during his life but more particularly after his death. It culminates with a discussion of the recently-published first full-length biography of Dube.

Introduction

John Langalibalele Dube, the founding president of the South African Native National Congress one hundred years ago, has only recently become the subject of a full-length biography. Yet he has by no means been neglected in the historiography of twentieth-century African nationalism in South Africa. Several competing images of him emerge. One – perhaps the most striking – posits a clear trajectory to his public life: that he started out with a radical mission, upsetting colonial officials and missionaries in the process, but along the way made compromises and ended his career politically emasculated and a supporter of segregation. Another version, by contrast, stresses his consistency as a moderate voice; yet another finds his ambiguity, his multiple voices, most in evidence.

Eric Hobsbawm devised the notion of a ‘dialectical dance’ as a way of characterising those who, in times of profound change, had neither a vested interest in maintaining the status quo nor in completely overthrowing it.¹ At various times they danced between different ideologues and extremists; on balance, they tended to be politically moderate. Early twentieth-century South Africa was possibly such a setting: in the aftermath of the South African War, there were sharply competing ideas as to who should be included in and excluded from a state-building project that sought to consolidate the interests of a modernising industrial economy, whose leaders were themselves divided into squabbling factions. Was someone like John Dube one of these dialectical dancers, balanced awkwardly as a moderate,² or else unable to hold a position, swayed by his own constituency as well as those keen to minimise his influence?

The notion of a dialectical dance simultaneously brings the relationship between subject and scholarship into focus: it may be the case that it is choreographed not so much through a public life as outside of it and/or afterwards, as different writers survey the evidence and come to their own various conclusions. Marks alluded to this phenomenon with specific reference to Dube: ‘On the whole, American scholars have heard the voice of Booker T. Washington, British liberals that of Victorian liberalism.’³ The theme of this article, then, is the ways in which Dube’s public life has been understood and interpreted in the historical/biographical record. It draws inspiration from the work of Lucy Riall, who made a strong case for the need to understand how ‘a life’ is constructed in retrospect and over time, in her study of the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi.⁴

In terms of the sources that have been drawn upon, written sketches and more discursive treatments in which Dube is the clear subject are the most important. Reference is also made to selected historical texts which have shaped our image of him, despite the fact that he plays only a bit part in them. Discussion concentrates on published texts, although it should be noted that at least two of Dube’s contemporaries, G.G. Nxaba and R.R.R. Dhlomo, both had intentions of producing biographies and had begun to make sketch notes which survive in the archival record;⁵ likewise, there are unpublished theses that have exerted an important influence and merit inclusion for this reason. In addition, reference is made to a certain amount of oral evidence, where this has had some influence in shaping perceptions about Dube’s life.

The making of John Dube’s reputation to 1946

By the time of his death in 1946, John Dube had acquired a towering reputation as a leader of his generation. He had of course enjoyed considerable prominence in public life, most notably as founder of Ohlange (1901) and Ilanga (1903), and then as inaugural president of the African National Congress (1912–1917), but three decades had passed since the last of these achievements. Moreover, half of his presidential incumbency has been marked by inactivity, and he had had to relinquish control of both Ohlange and Ilanga in the 1920s. While he had remained active at the helm of nationalist politics in Natal and Zululand, he had fallen out with detractors both within and outside Congress and his acceptance of a position on the Natives Representative Council in 1937 divided opinion. How, then, had his unrivalled stature been established?

The tireless efforts of his remarkable mentor, William Wilcox, are of some significance. Wilcox often enters the story of Dube’s life as the missionary under whose auspices the young John Dube travelled to America to study in the late 1880s, but then as often departs from it, never to reappear. In fact the two men stayed closely in touch, collaborating on issues as diverse as orthography, mission station rents and the launch a self-help scheme (the Zulu Industrial Improvement Company). In 1909, in order to assist Dube with a fundraising mission abroad, Wilcox wrote an article for the Missionary Review of the World.⁶ Entitled ‘John L. Dube, the Booker Washington of the Zulus’, it stressed Dube’s Christian duty and achievements at Ohlange. Wilcox and his wife were forced to return to the States in 1918, penniless and defeated in their independent endeavours to set up self-help Christian communities in South Africa.⁷ Yet they never gave up their support for Dube. Wilcox produced another article on Dube’s work in 1927, just months before he died. This time, Dube had been elevated: ‘The story of John Dube, the Booker Washington of South Africa’. Again, it was written to assist his protégé on a mission abroad to raise funds for a trades building at Ohlange; again, it was certain to attract attention in one of the most widely-read Christian magazines of the time.⁸

Wilcox’s 1927 article, written when its subject was 55, contains an outline biographical narrative, beginning with Dube’s struggle with faith and conversion to Christianity at school; his pleading with Wilcox to be allowed to travel to America; the hardship he faced there in his attempts to be educated; his breakthrough as a public speaker and early success on the fundraising circuit; his return to Natal and founding of Ohlange and Ilanga and his fortitude in keeping them afloat, despite a severe lack of resources; his presidency of the African National Congress; and his continuing power as a public speaker before numerous influential audiences. The youthful episodes in this account, presented in minutely-detailed direct speech, feature far more prominently than the later adult life.

‘Well, John’, I asked him, ‘what troubles you?’

‘Nothing much’, he replied, ‘only I want to be a Christian, and you asked us all to come and have a talk with you.’⁹

Wilcox’s own sense of achievement was intimately bound up with Dube’s, particularly his role in setting the young man on the path that led to subsequent greatness. He thus presented his narrative as a heroic battle with, and eventual conquest of, darkness and adversity, and of fame well-earned. It is an account, moreover, that carries the stamp of great authority, given the closeness of the two men. Lastly, since it recounts Dube’s early years in such detail, it has been one of the most important sources of information about this youthful period in his life ever since.

It is of interest that apart from the title, there is no other mention of Booker Washington in this article. By the time of his death in 1915, Washington had become a byword for responsible African American accommodation within the status quo. Dube had sought Washington’s endorsement for his work in South Africa as early as 1898; this had finally been conferred in 1910. Although both Dube and Wilcox had tended to rub against the grain far more than Washington had ever done, they undoubtedly admired his achievements (and since both had been bitterly thwarted in their endeavours for want of cash, were perhaps even a little envious of the resources he was able to command). In any event, they were clearly prepared to ally themselves with his memory for present and future purposes.

Whoever penned Dube’s entry just a few years later for The African Yearly Register (possibly the general editor himself, T.D. Mweli Skota, or another prolific contributor, H.I.E. Dhlomo)¹⁰ did not refer to him in these terms at all. The Register is interesting as an example of how the biographical sketch can be used not merely to convey ‘factoids’ of information about the subject but also to present that subject as he (and in a few rare examples, she) was viewed by contemporaries. Manganyi saw the historical significance of the Register as the first attempt by black South Africans to exploit the biographical form for purposes of declaiming a new identity, ‘part and parcel of the attempt at creating the New African’. This was an intellectual non-starter for him, because the concept of the ‘New African’ embraced the ideology of the coloniser and denied the possibility of what he called ‘cultural improvisation’.¹¹ Nevertheless, the only two editions of the Register that ever appeared, in 1930 and 1932, together sold 12,000 copies...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Dialectical Dances: Exploring John Dube’s Public Life
• 2. ‘A Member of the Race’: Dr Modiri Molema’s Intellectual Engagement with the Popular History of South Africa, 1912–1921
• 3. Women and the Problem of Family in Early African Nationalist History and Historiography
• 4. The African National Congress in the Western Transvaal/Northern Cape Platteland, c.1910–1964: Patterns of Diffusion and Support for Congress in a Rural Setting
• 5. The Lasting Legacy: The Soviet Theory of the National-Democratic Revolution and South Africa
• 6. The Genesis of the ANC’s Armed Struggle in South Africa 1948–1961
• 7. The African National Congress (ANC) Underground: From the M-Plan to Rivonia
• 8. ‘The Road to Freedom is via the Cross’: ‘Just Means’ in Chief Albert Luthuli’s Life
• 9. Emasculating Agency: An Unambiguous Assessment of Albert Luthuli’s Stance on Violence
• 10. Secret Party: South African Communists between 1950 and 1960
• 11. The ANC, MK, and ‘The Turn to Violence’ (1960–1962)
• 12. Armed and Trained: Nelson Mandela’s 1962 Military Mission as Commander in Chief of Umkhonto we Sizwe and Provenance for his Buried Makatov Pistol
• 13. Transformations in the ANC External Mission and Umkhonto we Sizwe, c. 1960–1969
• 14. Healthcare in Exile: ANC Health Policy and Health Care Provision in MK Camps, 1964 to 1989
• 15. Main Machinery: The ANC’s Armed Underground in Johannesburg During the 1976 Soweto Uprising
• 16. ‘Umkhonto we Sizwe, We are Waiting for You’: The ANC and the Township Uprising, September 1984 – September 1985
• 17. Sex in a Time of Exile: An Examination of Sexual Health, AIDS, Gender, and the ANC, 1980–1990
• Index