Internal Frontiers. Jon Soske
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by invoking other criteria such as universal male suffrage in England or the existence of democratic institutions within African societies.15 If a later generation of African intellectuals saw this strategy as insufficiently radical, many contemporaries understood the subversive character of the ANC’s claim: these delegations and petitions performed the African’s right to approach the Crown without intermediary. Such assertions of modern political subjectivity—“the right to have rights” in Hannah Arendt’s well-known formulation—produced full-throated outrage among white settlers.16 Nevertheless, these activities failed to arrest the implementation of racist legislation and the expropriation of African land. In 1919, the ANC leadership expelled its founding president, the Natal educationalist and newspaperman John Dube, on the grounds that he endorsed working within the framework of segregation. This schism resulted in the secession of the Natal congress from the national organization.17 After a brief period of greater militancy, the ANC stagnated during the 1920s. Both the International Commercial Union (ICU), a rural trade union movement influenced by Garveyism, and the Communist Party surpassed the organization in membership and influence. Anthony Butler concludes, “The ANC could easily have died in the 1930s.”18 When the Natal ANC reunited with the national body following Dube’s death in February 1946, the new president was a former leader of the ICU, the formidable operator Champion.
Alongside Ethiopia, Liberia, and (most importantly) the United States, references to India occurred regularly in the writings of early ANC figures. The famous opening line of Sol Plaatje’s 1916 Native Life in South Africa includes a citation, consciously or not, of untouchability: “Awakening on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African Native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth.”19 Across multiple iterations, India served both as a reference point within a common imperial geography and an emblem of the global struggle against colonialism that flared following the end of the First World War. In Abantu-Batho (the ANC’s newspaper of the 1920s), the Amritsar massacre was invoked to show that “there is no moral code among nations” while India’s revolt for national recognition appeared alongside Abyssinia and the Caribbean labor revolts as a warning to empire.20 Other articles invoked Gandhi as the Indian version of Marcus Garvey.21 Attitudes toward South African Indians were, predictably, more varied. Even as writers such as Plaatje celebrated the courage of Gandhi’s 1913 campaign, anxieties regarding Indian migration were a regular theme of African newspaper articles. In Natal, broadsides against Indian exploitation were a staple of ANC articles and speeches, including in statements by individuals who praised the industry of Indians and cultivated personal alliances with Indian leaders.22 In general, a consensus existed that the different political situations of Africans and South African Indians rendered an alliance between the two groups impractical. Writing about Native policy and racial reconciliation in 1930, a young Xuma captured this outlook: “The Indian in South Africa does not fall within the purview of our discussion, because . . . the Indian cannot make common cause with the African without alienating the right of intervention on their behalf on the part of the Government of India.” 23 According to this view, the “Asiatic Question” and the “Native Question” represented distinct problems within the overarching framework of liberal empire.24
XUMA, THE REVITALIZATION OF THE ANC, AND THE POSTWAR WORLD
During the Second World War, the ANC experienced the beginnings of a revival. Tom Lodge has aptly described the 1940s as “a watershed moment.”25 In the year following the armistice, three explosive social struggles shook the country: a national anti-pass campaign coordinated by the Communist Party; the eighty-thousand-strong African mineworkers strike on the Rand gold mines; and the initiation of passive resistance by the Indian Congress for the first time since 1913. As the ANC began to reorient strategically and intellectually, two figures exemplified its search for a new direction: the prim, studious, and determined physician A. B. Xuma and the brilliant president of the ANC Youth League, Anton Lembede. Mandela’s autobiography suggests that the conflict between Xuma, representing the older generation’s gradualism, and the Youth League dominated the ANC during the 1940s. Militant African nationalism, according to this account, confronted and triumphed over the delegation-and-petition school of black leadership.26 However compelling, this narrative obscures the ways in which Xuma, who entered politics some fifteen years after the founding of the ANC, embraced the idea of national liberation and charted an ambitious new direction for the ANC in the context of a rapidly changing international order. Despite their intellectual, strategic, and temperamental differences, Xuma and the Youth League sought to conceptualize the project of African nationalism outside the framework of the Native Question. In different fashions, they drew on the experiences the Indian anticolonial struggle and the event of Indian independence in their efforts to articulate a basis for the claim to nationhood beyond empire and settler civil society.
Born in the Transkei to devout Methodist parents, Xuma’s childhood—like that of many African figures in this book—spanned two distinct worlds: the village life of rural African society and the discipline of the mission school. After training as a teacher, Xuma traveled to the United States where he studied at Booker T. Washington’s famed Tuskegee Institute in Atlanta and the University of Minnesota. Xuma’s American years were marked by periods of financial hardship and efforts to remedy the limits of his earlier education through night school. But he also benefited from the generosity of Christian networks, connections developed through the YMCA, and personal benefactors, including the chair of zoology at Minnesota. Working his way through medical school as a waiter on the Northern Pacific Railway, he passed his exams at Northwestern University in 1925 before proceeding to Hungary and Budapest to specialize gynecology and surgery. In 1927, he returned to South Africa and established his practice in Sophiatown. He named his surgery “Empilweni” (place of healing).27
Xuma entered politics in response to the Herzog government’s 1935 segregationist legislation. Elected to the vice presidency of an organization founded to coordinate black opposition, the All African Convention, Xuma achieved national prominence and became an advocate for independent African political organization. Although he worked closely with liberal whites at points in his long career, he fiercely resented paternalistic efforts at European “guidance.”28 Notably, he convinced the convention to reject an early proposal for unity with the liberal South African Institute of Race Relations. He also declined to stand for the Native Representative Council, an advisory board to the government created by the Hertzog legislation. If US black politics remained a touchstone for Xuma, he followed developments in India closely and concluded that the end of the war would create unprecedented opportunities for the colonized to participate in the crafting of peace.29 As early as 1935, he began weighing the consequences of employing “passive resistance” to gain African rights.30 His papers at the University of the Witwatersrand contain a complete press run of an Indian Opinion supplement on the Indian independence struggle from the mid-1940s.31
In 1937 Xuma returned to the United States to fundraise and consult with the National Association for the Advacement of Coloured People (NAACP), among others. He also met Maddie Beatrice Hall, who married Xuma in 1940. The following year, he studied public health in London, where he cultivated connections with Pan-Africanist circles. After he returned to South Africa, the Reverend James Calata asked Xuma to run for the presidency of the ANC, which he assumed in 1940. As the ANC’s seventh president, Xuma overhauled a collapsing, provincially fragmented, and clique-ridden apparatus. He passed a new constitution, fought to professionalize finances, and worked to create a functioning branch structure. Through these efforts, membership increased from around 1,000 in the 1930s to 5,517 in 1947.32 Xuma explicitly invoked the Indian Congress as a model for his effort to reconstruct the ANC.33 In a fateful move, he supported the unification of the Natal ANC under the presidency of Champion, who brought the province back into the national organization for the first time since 1919. Xuma defended the trailblazing efforts of his wife to revitalize the ANC Women’s League.34 He also embraced equal membership rights for women and sought to build stronger ties between the ANC and black trade unions.35
A younger generation of ANC leaders, such as Mandela, remembered Xuma as an elitist who, despite his important achievements, was caught in a gentleman’s politics