Unsettling the Ranks: 1930s Zulu-Language Writings on African Progress and Unity in The Bantu World

ABSTRACT

While much of the extant scholarship on The Bantu World has addressed the English language content, this article shifts the focus to previously unexplored 1930s Zulu-language writings on African advancement and unity. It makes an intervention into the study of African explorations of the possibilities and limits of progress amidst the abiding challenges and paradoxes of colonial modernity, in a setting characterised by increasing segregation. The Zulu pages, the article claims, enhance our understanding of contributors’ involvement in shaping and expanding the very constituency the editor, RV Selope Thema, sought to create. In particular, Zulu-language letters to the editor, often written in response to editorials and articles, convey ideas neither fully anticipated by Thema, nor fully articulated in the more restrained English pages. Located in the rich body of work on African print cultures, the article first discusses the ideologies behind this multilingual weekly newspaper. It then foregrounds the key place of Zulu-language usage in The Bantu World, as well as the (male-dominated) networks, publics and communities of readers created through the vernacular, which flourished despite attempts to marginalise African languages. An examination of key 1930s controversies over the notions of advancement, entrepreneurship and unity shows that the Zulu pages partly destabilised prevalent elite ideas of progress as intertwined with white patronage.

KEYWORDS:

• The Bantu World
• African print cultures
• progress/unity
• Zulu language (isiZulu)
• readers’ networks

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Judith Irvine and two anonymous readers for their thorough and constructive feedback on earlier versions of this article. Maria Suriano wishes to extend her gratitude to the late Bheki Peterson, who encouraged this publication and offered words of advice and poignant comments at an early stage; to Liz Gunner, who has critically engaged this article and pushed its analytical points; and to Prince ‘MK’ Mkhwanazi, for his generous help with some translations.

Notes

1 The 1930s Zulu orthography differs from the current one, and the article adheres to the original texts. Most of the Zulu texts presented here originally appear in Portia Sifelani’s unpublished MA thesis. The Bantu World (1932–1953), The Bantu Weekly Reader (BWR; April-October 1932), and Thema’s unpublished handwritten autobiography were retrieved from The National Library of South Africa (NLSA), Pretoria, and from the Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (henceforth, WITS-HP). Government reports, Native Commissioner’s reports and correspondence on the African press were retrieved from WITS-HP and the National Archives of South Africa (henceforth NASA), Pretoria.

2 NASA, Department of Native Affairs (NTS), 9715, 803/400.

3 Howard Pim Papers, Political Native Affairs 1905-1934, A881/BL 2, WITS-HP.

4 Pim Letters, Joint Council 1933-1934, A881/DL 4/56-185, WITS-HP.

5 This approach would change: for Jacob M Nhlapo, editor of BW from 1953 until 1956, the leading news should be in English, and educated writers rarely used the vernacular (Couzens 1985, 351; Switzer 1988, 360).

6 NASA, NTS 9715, 803/400.

7 Studies of the politics of gender in South African newspapers, though fragmented, have shown that writings differed along gender lines. Women’s letters in BW reveal ‘the political interpolation of private life’ in 1930s to 1940s public culture (Healy-Clancy 2014b, 8); 1930s amakholwa women’s letters to Ilanga Lase Natal addressed African women in segregated towns, a theme absent from men’s debates (du Toit & Nzuza 2019).

8 Print manifestations of loyalty to the British in Tanganyika were ‘a genuine expression’ of ‘aspirations for self-improvement’ rather than attempts ‘to maintain favour with colonial censors’ (Brennan 2011, 42). In his study of nineteenth century Imvo Zabantsundu, Khwezi Mkhize departs from these dominant scholarly assertions. It was on the grounds of ‘imperial subjectivity’ and as imperial citizens that the nascent black intelligentsia in the Cape promoted colonial inclusion and racial upliftment and negotiated between apparently irreconcilable loyalties like Victorian versus African values (Mkhize 2018, 426).

9 RV Selope Thema, ‘Out of Darkness: From cattle-herding to editor’s chair’ (unpublished autobiography, 1935a), AD 1787, WITS-HP. Compare Cobley (2016) and Switzer (1988, 362). Notably, in the same years a transnational female club movement drawing upon African-American public engagement used BW to contribute to racial progress by articulating a local identity based on racial kinship (Healy-Clancy 2014a, 482).

10 For the emergence of a distinctive Zulu identity in the early twentieth century, see La Hausse (1992), Carton et al (2008). For the complexities of nationalism in South Africa, see Marks (1986). In his discussion of African intellectual traditions grounded in cultural nationalism that would develop into radical nationalism and Pan-Africanism, Toyin Falola (2001) has been influenced by Benedict Anderson’s 1983 seminal work on Europe. For Anderson, languages in print-media were central to the shaping of imagined communities, giving rise to the formulation of a common discourse that generated the emergence of nationalism. Since then, Africanist scholars have confronted this influential view. For an attempt to challenge the applicability of Anderson’s argument to the continent, see Mkhize (2018, 413). For early South African black intellectual thought and race consciousness, see Gerhart (1978), Magaziner (2009), Masilela (2007), Switzer & Adhikari (2000), and Mkhize (2019). For later proponents of the dignity of African languages and their ability to express local experiences, see Neville Alexander (1989) and Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1986).

11 DDT Jabavu, ‘The Findings of the All-African Convention’, AD1715-23-1-1-001, 1935, WITS-HP. Compare Edgar & Msumza (2018); Peterson (2000, 18).

12 For the African press as part of a ‘counter public culture, persisting into the present moment’, see Liz Gunner’s analysis of the Sowetan, deemed a successor to The World (2018, 156–8). BW was renamed The World in 1956 and was banned in 1977 due to increasingly politicisation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maria Suriano

Maria Suriano specialises in East African history. Her research interests include African popular culture and African print cultures, especially Swahili-language periodicals and the involvement of readers-turned-writers.

Portia Sifelani

Portia Sifelani completed a Master of Arts in history at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2018 with a thesis on the Zulu sections of The Bantu World. She is currently a PhD student at the University of Concordia in Montreal.