Ports as Portals: D. D. T. Jabavu’s Voyage to the World Pacifist Meeting in India¹

1 I wish to thank Isabel Hofmeyr who first alerted me to the existence of D. D. T. Jabavu’s travelogue and who generously shared her thoughts on its significance. I am also deeply grateful to Catherine Higgs who kindly sent me the English translation by the late Cecil Wele Manona. This she had commissioned in the late 1980s when she was a PhD student. Her PhD culminated in the publication of the insightful biography of Jabavu The Ghost of Equality. The Public Lives of D. D. T. Jabavu of South Africa, 1885–1959.

Abstract

Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu’s travelogue of his four-month-long trip to India to attend the 1949 World Pacifist Meeting contributes to the rich archive of thinking about the intellectual and political flows of influence between Africa and India. Existing scholarship on African-Asian encounters has focused prominently on the trajectory from Asia towards Africa and hence exhibits a tendency to minimize African agency. This article offers a brief reading of the English translation of D. D. T. Jabavu’s travelogue E-Indiya nase East Africa (published in 1951 in isiXhosa) in order to reflect on his particular brand of transnationalism, which deeply informed his contribution to South African politics in the first half of the 20^th century. A keen observer of the landscapes and waterscapes around him, Jabavu’s sense of embeddedness in local and translocal networks – rather than the space of the nation – contributes to an understanding of transnational historiography of southern African studies. The article focuses on selected passages to suggest that with historical hindsight, the travelogue offers much beyond Jabavu’s gradualism which has relegated him marginal in the dominant narrative of anti-apartheid nationalism. Jabavu engaged in the quixotic and often painstaking labour of developing alternative intellectual and political networks in the pursuit of equality. In these networks, ports function as significant literal and figurative sites of exit and entry.

Keywords:

• World Pacifist Meeting of 1949
• D. D. T. Jabavu
• travelogue
• networks of solidarity
• conferencing
• India
• Fort Hare
• Gandhian politics of non-violent resistance

ORCID

Tina Steiner http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3083-778X

Notes

1 I wish to thank Isabel Hofmeyr who first alerted me to the existence of D. D. T. Jabavu’s travelogue and who generously shared her thoughts on its significance. I am also deeply grateful to Catherine Higgs who kindly sent me the English translation by the late Cecil Wele Manona. This she had commissioned in the late 1980s when she was a PhD student. Her PhD culminated in the publication of the insightful biography of Jabavu The Ghost of Equality. The Public Lives of D. D. T. Jabavu of South Africa, 1885–1959.

2 Jabavu was born in the Cape Colony in 1885 and died in 1959 in the Union of South Africa. He was the first black professor at the University of Fort Hare teaching Latin and African languages from its inception in 1916 until his retirement in 1944.

3 OWAAH. http://owaahh.com/there-was-once-a-ship-called-ss-karanja/. 2015. Accessed on 15 May 2017.

4 It had twice been postponed: the first time because of Mahatma Gandhi’s death (the original intention of the conference was to offer international pacifists a meeting with Gandhi) and a year later in 1948 because preparations for the conference had been significantly delayed. Because of these postponements, the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin did not attend the meeting. He had set sail for England in October 1948 on a speaking tour when he heard of the second postponement. He continued to India nonetheless and met with political and Gandhian figures on his own accord.

5 The transnational and oceanic turn in fields of study in the Humanities and Social Sciences has seen an emerging body of scholarship on port cities and their importance in global trade and imperial maritime conquests (Hofmeyr, Dhupelia-Mesthrie and Kaarsholm 381).

6 The source for these definitions is the etymological online dictionary (http://www.etymonline.com). Accessed on 19 April 2017.

7 Here the Online Etymology Dictionary:

1. Port (noun 1): ‘harbor’. Old English ‘harbor, haven’; Old French ‘harbor, port, mountain pass’ – both from the Latin root portus: ‘entrance, passage’, figuratively ‘place of refuge, asylum’.

2. Port (noun 2): ‘gateway’. Old English port ‘portal, door, gate, entrance’, from Old French porte ‘gate, entrance’, from Latin porta ‘city gate, gate; door, entrance’, from PIE (Proto-Indo-European) root *per- (2) ‘to lead, pass over’.

3. Port (noun 3): ‘bearing, mien’ c. 1300, from Old French port, from porter ‘to carry’, from Latin portare ‘to carry’, from PIE root *per- (2) ‘to lead, pass over’.

8 Throughout his life, he argued for social change by emphasizing gradual assimilation in the mould of the Cape liberal tradition, with its promise of ‘equal rights for all civilized men’ (meaning educated and Christian and male) who would be judged on merit and not by the colour of their skin (Higgs 20–21).

9 Jabavu also acted as the first chairman, elected in 1943, of the Non-European Unity Movement [NEUM], though he was increasingly sidelined, as his political views were perceived as ineffectual and too accommodating, given the rising tide of African nationalism. His role seems to have been to act as ‘peacemaker’ trying to ‘find a middle ground acceptable to the NEUM, the AAC and the ANC’, and with the 1948 win of Malan’s National Party with its clear segregationist agenda, Jabavu’s elitist gradualism had lost its political teeth (Higgs 139; 143).

10 In this he departs radically from his father’s view: John Tengo Jabavu had made the mistake to welcome the Act.