“The most patient of animals, next to the ass:” Jan Smuts, Howard University, and African American Leadership, 1930

Abstract

Former South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts’s 1930 European and North American tour included a series of interactions with diasporic African and African American activists and intelligentsia. Among Smuts’s many remarks stands a particular speech he delivered in New York City, when he called Africans “the most patient of all animals, next to the ass.” Naturally, this and other comments touched off a firestorm of controversy surrounding Smuts, his visit, and segregationist South Africa’s laws. Utilizing news coverage, correspondence, and recollections of the trip, this article uses his visit as a lens into both African American relations with Africa and white American foundation work toward the continent and, especially, South Africa. It argues that the 1930 visit represents an early example of black internationalism and solidarity, reflecting a shift from sociocultural connections between Africa and the diaspora to creating political movements on behalf of African people. To contextualize this visit, we assess events surrounding a meeting that the Phelps-Stokes Fund organized for Smuts at Howard University, using this as a lens into the two disparate, yet interlocked, communities.

Keywords:

• South Africa
• United States
• Jan Smuts
• Phelps-Stokes Fund
• W.E.B. Du Bois
• Howard University

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Robert Vinson, Michael Winston and Saul Dubow and several anonymous readers for the journal for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of our piece. We also benefitted from feedback from presentations at the Concilium on Southern Africa at Duke University, the African History Seminar at Georgetown University, and the African Studies Association in San Diego, California.

Notes

¹ Time Magazine, January 20, 1930.When Smuts’s comment was reported in some of South Africa’s white press, it was toned down to the “Negro” being “the most patient of creatures” (Natal Mercury, January 11, 1930).

² Lake and Reynolds, eds. Drawing the Global Color Line, 1.

³ Plummer, Rising Wind, 36; von Eschen, Race Against Empire; and Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans.

⁴ For example, Margaret Macmillan and Richard Holbrooke write in Paris, 1919 that white imperialist concerns played a large role in brokering treaties to end World War I. These leaders themselves well understood the implication of their language on self-determination and were aware of the gap between their own rhetoric and intentions.

⁵ Skinner, African Americans and US Policy Toward Africa; Adi, Pan-Africanism and Communism; Guridy, Forging Diaspora; and Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom.

⁶ Vinson, The Americans are Coming!

⁷ Anthony, Max Yergan; and Johnson, “Re-thinking the Emergence.”

⁸ Darwin, The Empire Project, 405. See also Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 36.

⁹ For a broad survey of black internationalism historically, see West and Martin, “Contours of the Black International,” 1–44.

¹⁰ Featherstone, Solidarity and Resistance, Space and Political Identities.

¹¹ Scholarly assessments of Smuts’s views on race include Garson, “Smuts and the Idea of Race”; Marks, “White Masculinity”; and Hyam, “Smuts in Context.”

¹² Smuts, Africa and Some World Problems, 47 and 74–6.

¹³ Ibid., 63–7.

¹⁴ Ibid., 93.

¹⁵ “Gen. Smuts Visits Boston on Jan. 6: Ex South African Premier to Speak Here,” Daily Boston Globe, December 29, 1929, 5.

¹⁶ Smuts speech to the Empire Parliamentary Association in London on January 28, 1930 provides his own assessment of his speeches in the US on the Commonwealth and the League of Nations. van der Poel, Selections from the Smuts Papers, vol. 7, 439–52.

¹⁷ “Smuts, In Farewell, Sees a New Era: Looks for United World, With Disputes Settled Around the Conference Table,” The New York Times, January 18, 1930, 3.

¹⁸ For example, Richard M. Donovan, “Jan Smuts: Afrikaner and World Statesman,” The Christian Science Monitor, January 6, 1930, 18. Not all the American press welcomed Smuts. Because of its opposition to the League of Nations, the Hearst newspaper syndicate attacked him for “violating the hospitality of the United States” and called on President Hoover to send him home (African World, January 18, 1930, 3).

¹⁹ African World, January 11, 1930, 525.

²⁰ “Gen. Smuts Visits Boston on Jan. 6: Ex South African Premier to Speak Here,” Daily Boston Globe, December 29, 1929, 5.

²¹ John Harding to Miss Richardson (secretary to Smuts), January 2, 1930 (Jan Smuts Papers, National Archives of South Africa (NASA), Pretoria, vol. 44, 5).

²² Ibid.; Cape Times, January 6, 1930.

²³ The students had been members of a choir group who had been stranded in Ohio after their tour manager ran out of money. The African Methodist Episcopal Church sponsored them at Wilberforce.

²⁴ Du Bois, “Worlds of Color,” 401–2.

²⁵ Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois, 426. See also Vinson, The Americans are Coming; Campbell, Songs of Zion; and Skinner, “Rescuing Black South Africans,” African Americans and United States Policies, 181–214.

²⁶ Dean, The Pedro Gorino.

²⁷ “Gen. Jan Smuts Pictured as Greatest Oppressor of Native South African,” New York Amsterdam Daily News, January 8, 1930, 1.

²⁸ “Negro Rebukes General Smuts,” New York Sun, January 10, 1930, 7; New York Age, January 18, 1930. Rev. James Henderson, principal of Lovedale Institution in the eastern Cape, had invited Moton for a visit in March 1924. Although Smuts and other government officials initially endorsed his trip, Hertzog, Smuts’s successor as Prime Minister in June 1924, turned him down. The Secretary of Native Affairs informed Henderson that “such a visit … would hardly commend itself to public opinion at the present time, and might indeed give rise to misunderstandings amongst certain section both of Europeans and Native” (Secretary of Native Affairs to Rev. James Henderson, July 15, 1924. NASA, Pretoria, Native Affairs (NTS) 7602 19/328). Moton was invited again in mid-1930, but there is no record of what the government decided in the end.

²⁹ “Smuts’ Tour of America Inspires Disclosure of South Africa’s Situation,” Philadelphia Tribune, January 25, 1930, 9. Smuts’s speech on “Africa and the United States” at the Foreign Policy Association the same day was in keeping with his Town Hall remarks. He characterized “the negroes of Africa as ‘child peoples.’ They are happy, he said, and do not feel the burden of life like the white man; neither do they brood over their grievances. They live their immemorial lives, whereas we continue our discontented and forward looking march”, New York Times, January 11, 1930; Cape Times, January 11, 1930.

³⁰ “Smuts’s Talk Stirs Anger of Negroes,” New York Times, January 11, 1930, 10.

³¹ Walter White, telegram, to Jan Smuts, January 10, 1930 (NAACP Papers, Box C406, folder 17, Library of Congress, Washington, DC); W.E.B. Du Bois to Fred Moore, December 23, 1929 (W.E.B Du Bois Papers (MS 312), Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts, Amherst).

³² Cape Times, January 10, 1930.

³³ “Smuts’s Talk Stirs Anger of Negroes,” New York Times, January 11, 1930, 10.

³⁴ Ibid.

³⁵ Anson Phelps-Stokes to J.C. Smuts, November 27, 1929 (Anson Phelps-Stokes Papers (APS) (MSS 299), Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut, Series III, Box 179, Folder 121).

³⁶ Phelps-Stokes to Jones, December 11, 1929 (APS, Series 1, Box 28, Folder 448).

³⁷ Ibid; Phelps-Stokes to James Weldon Johnson, January 3, 1930 (Ibid.).

³⁸ A reason why Phelps-Stokes took such an interest in South Africa was because one of his wife’s grandfather, Daniel Lindley, had been an early American Board of Foreign Missions missionary to both the Voortrekkers and Zulus in the nineteenth century and had played a role in the founding of the Inanda Girls’ School. Her sister had married Charles Molteno, the son of the first prime minister of the Cape Colony.

³⁹ See King, Pan-Africanism and Education and Berman, “Education in Africa,” 230–60.

⁴⁰ See Andrew Zimmerman’s study, Alabama in Africa, on Booker T. Washington’s attempt to export the Tuskegee model to Togoland.

⁴¹ Jones to J.H. Oldham, January 17, 1930 (APS, Box 22, Folder 2).

⁴² Ibid.

⁴³ Ibid. In a short book Oldham was about to publish, he took issue with Smuts’s contention that Africans lived a child-like existence and that their health and welfare benefitted wherever whites settled in Africa. See Oldham, White and Black in Africa and Clements, Faith on the Frontier, 247–9.

⁴⁴ Wolters, New Negro on Campus, 70.

⁴⁵ In 1929, Congress appropriated Howard $600,000 and, in 1930, $1,249,000.

⁴⁶ Holloway, Confronting the Veil, 48.

⁴⁷ Muse, Jr., “Howard University and the Federal Government during the Presidential Administrations of Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt,” 1 and 11.

⁴⁸ On Johnson’s Howard years, see Williams, In Search of the Talented Tenth, 40–79.

⁴⁹ Phelps-Stokes to Jones, December 26, 1929 (Mordecai Johnson Papers (MJP), Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University).

⁵⁰ “Howard’s Explanation,” The Baltimore Afro-American, February 15, 1930, 6.

⁵¹ Ibid. The newspaper noted that perhaps one reason Howard students were not allowed in was because they had recently grilled a former white southern land overseer when he spoke on campus, Baltimore Afro-American, February 1, 1930.

⁵² Ibid.

⁵³ “Negro Press is Barred at Smuts Conference: Twenty-Five Race Leaders Attend Meeting at Howard; Only White Press Admitted,” Philadelphia Tribune, January 30, 1930.

⁵⁴ “Shoosh Black Press at Howard Meeting,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 8, 1930, 3.

⁵⁵ Jones to Phelps-Stokes, December 23, 1929 (MJP).

⁵⁶ The most complete account of the conference and Smuts’s response appeared in Alain Locke’s piece, “A Notable Conference,” published four months later based on notes that Thomas Jesse Jones provided. Locke, “A Notable Conference,” 137–40. See also Kelly Miller. “As To General Smuts,” The New York Amsterdam News, January 29, 1930, 20.

⁵⁷ Locke, “A Notable Conference,” 139–40.

⁵⁸ Ibid.

⁵⁹ “Gen. Smuts Heard at Howard,” The Chicago Defender, January 25, 1930, 15; Amsterdam News, January 22, 1930.

⁶⁰ Jones to Phelps-Stokes, January 16, 1930 (APS, Series 1, Box 2, Folder 449).

⁶¹ Phelps-Stokes to Charles Loram, January 27, 1930 (APS, Series 1, Box 31, Folder 512).

⁶² Editor, African World and Cape Cairo Express, London to Jones, January 20, 1930 (Phelps-Stokes Fund Papers (PSFP), Manuscript Collections, Schomburg Library, Box 22, Folder 2).

⁶³ Cape Times, January 27, 1930; Sunday Times, January 26, 1930.

⁶⁴ Ibid.

⁶⁵ Smuts to Jones, January 20, 1930 (PSFP).

⁶⁶ Lewis, “General Smuts and the Negro,” 141–2. On Lewis and Horn see Couzens, Tramp Royal. In the late 1920s, she also became a confidant of the trade union leader Clements Kadalie and advised him to break from communist influences. Her views on black people were not that different than Smuts. Writing Winifred Holtby on the capacity of black leadership in trade unions, she questioned whether one could “systematically apply himself to a cause … for more than a few years because they are still, despite the opinion of many who know the Native intimately, children; easily wearied, easily led astray, easily depraved by civilization” (Ethelreda Lewis to Winifred Holtby, June 22, 1931 (Industrial and Commercial Worker’s Union, Historical Papers Research Center, Witwatersrand University)). On Lewis, see also Tim Couzens’ introduction to a 1984 edition of Lewis’s Wild Deer.

⁶⁷ Lewis, “General Smuts,” 142.

⁶⁸ Ibid.

⁶⁹ Kelly Miller, “Thinking,” Pittsburgh Courier, January 30, 1930.

⁷⁰ The Carnegie Corporation considered sponsoring Locke on a trip to visit South Africa in 1929, but nixed the idea after hearing from C.T. Loram that “anti-Native feeling” in the South African government “is strong at present and it would be difficult to persuade people that Locke was not a propagandist.” Heyman, “C.T. Loram,” 44.

⁷¹ Locke, “A Notable Conference,” 137.

⁷² Locke to Jones, March 11, 1930; Jones to Locke, March 13, 1930 (Alain Locke Papers, Moorland Spingarn Collection, Howard University, Box 164-42, Folder 2).

⁷³ Locke, “A Notable Conference,” 140.

⁷⁴ Handbill (Robert Moton Papers, Tuskegee University Archives, Box 146, File 1156). Although we have found documentation about the activities of the Native African Union of America in the Moton and NAACP papers, we do not have any direct evidence of communications between them.

⁷⁵ A, Keers. CID, Western Division (Cape) to CID, Cape Town, March 31, 1924 (NTS 2,709 79/301). The brother of I.B. Nyombolo, editor of the African Voice, Eli had been a school teacher at Burghersdorp, Eastern Cape, before leaving for the US.

⁷⁶ “Smuts Branded as ‘Greatest Enemy,’” Amsterdam News, January 22, 1930, 9.

⁷⁷ Ibid.

⁷⁸ “Smuts Insult Rapped by Native Africans,” Chicago Defender, January 25, 1930, 12. A fuller account of the rally is contained in “Reported by Samuel Bess” (Robert Moton Papers, Box 146, file 1156).

⁷⁹ White to Moton, January 16, 1930 (NAACP Papers, Box C406, folder 17).

⁸⁰ White to Phelps-Stokes, January 23, 1930 (Ibid.).

⁸¹ White to Johnson, January 27, 1930 (Ibid.).

⁸² Moton to White, February 6, 1930 (Ibid.).

⁸³ White to Moton, February 21, 1930 (Ibid.).

⁸⁴ Smuts to Jones, January 23, 1930 (APS, Series 1, Box 179, Folder 123).

⁸⁵ Smuts to Moton, January 23, 1930 (Ibid).

⁸⁶ Du Bois, “Smuts,” 63.

⁸⁷ Du Bois, “Patient Asses,” 101.

⁸⁸ Motsi, “General Smuts’ Return,” 379. Similar to Nyombolo Motsi had entered the US in August 1930 under AME auspices to do a missionary course at Wilberforce University. Eventually he completed a MA in Social Work at Atlanta University. (NTS 2709 78/301).

⁸⁹ Phelps-Stokes letter to friends and family in the United States, September 13, 1932 (PSFP, Box 34, Folder 20). See the laudatory coverage of Phelps-Stokes visit in the Bantu World, September 10 and 17, 1932. African American visitors to South Africa also felt the need to tout African American achievement to inspire black audiences. See Campbell, Songs of Zion, 157 and 328–9 and Edgar, An African American in South Africa, 23–5.

⁹⁰ Ibid.

⁹¹ Jan Smuts to S.M. Smuts, November 18, 1929, vol. 7, 424.

⁹² Phelps-Stokes to Smuts, November 27, 1929 (APS, Series 1, Box 179, Folder 119).

⁹³ White to Jones, January 16, 1930 (NAACP Papers, Box C406, folder 17). Mordecai Johnson, for instance, became a staunch opponent of Smuts and later the apartheid regime. In the late 1930s he lent support to the Council of African Affairs and, in 1952, he was a leading figure in the formation of Americans for South African Resistance which raised funds for victims of South African repression during the Defiance Campaign. See Meriwether, Proudly We Can be Africans, 112 and 191.

⁹⁴ For a discussion of the relations between Africans and African Americans at the San Francisco conference, see Sherwood, “There is No Deal.”

⁹⁵ Quoted in Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize, 38.

⁹⁶ Hancock, Smuts: The Fields of Force, 473.

⁹⁷ Mazower, The End of Empire, 19.

⁹⁸ Sherwood, "There is No Deal."

⁹⁹ Dubow, “Smuts, the United Nations.”

¹⁰⁰ S.A. Haynes, “Smuts Racial Segregation Formula May be Accepted,” Baltimore Afro-American, May 19, 1945.

¹⁰¹ Rayford Logan, “Smuts Invited to U.S., Move Called ‘Blunder’,” Pittsburgh Courier, August 10, 1946. Logan had been chronicling Smut’s pronouncements. See his “Smuts Speaks of Africa, 1917–1942” that appeared in The Crisis (September 1942), 264–267 and 278. Logan was one of a group of Howard faculty who in the 1930s and 1940s were critically examining how racism sustained imperialism. See Vitalis, White World Order.

¹⁰² Pillay, Albert Luthuli, 96.