Biko: A Biography. Xolela Mangcu
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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