Umteteli wa Bantu and the constitution of social publics in the 1920s and 1930s

ABSTRACT

Umteteli wa Bantu, launched in 1920, was much more than the moderate, black newspaper most of its contemporaries assumed it to be. Established by the Native Recruitment Corporation as an exercise in “soft power” through propaganda, the split created between its business and editorial functions facilitated editorial autonomy. Umteteli form, a term taken from Kevin Barnhurst and John Nerone’s work on newspaper history, included the casual and irregular intermingling of social and personal news with all the other paper content. By sewing people and their activities into the fabric of the paper, Umteteli created a niche and identity for itself as constitutive of black sociality in which the constraints imposed by racial segregation no longer impeded upward social mobility. This playfulness and creativity contradict much of what is written about the paper, usually assessed for whether its political content was supportive or not of African nationalism. Also, through ongoing encouragement and exhortation to its readers, the paper drew readers into a status as co-producers, creating commonality through the relationship of readers to the paper where that commonality might not have existed otherwise.

KEYWORDS:

• Newspapers
• history
• South Africa
• historiography
• African writing
• Umteteli wa Bantu

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to the participants at the 2016 “Print Cultures” workshop for their comments on this paper. Lesley Cowling deserves a special thanks for pointing me in the direction of Barnhurst and Nerone. I am also grateful to William Beinart, Colin Bundy and Brian Willan for putting me through my paces. Peter Limb was very generous in sharing copies of Abantu-Batho. Thank you also to Hlumela Sondlo for the Xhosa translations used in this article, including working with me on understanding “Mhleli.”

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of South Africa under the Incentive Scheme for Rated Researchers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Data Availability Statement

I worked with the copies of Umteteli wa Bantu which are available in the TEBA Collection, Special Collections, University of Johannesburg. This collection has been digitised and is available open-access on the institutional repository at: https://ujcontent.uj.ac.za/vital/access/manager/Community/uj:23008.

Notes

1. Black modernity is often identified as present in literary forms and intellectual achievement, for instance as argued by David Attwell (2006) and from a different direction by Ntongela Masilela (2013). I extend its meaning beyond its appearance in black literature and its conscious intellectual use as a counter to European modernity (Masilela 2013) to refer to particular sociabilities, rooted in vernacular as well as other styles of writing. Thank you to my reviewers for pushing me to consider more how African uses of the press might constitute expressions of modernity.

2. The People’s Paper also taps into renewed attention to the black press in South Africa as a result of somewhat over a decades’ worth of digitisation initiatives aimed at making older African newspapers more generally available. Indeed, over the last decade I have moved from reading Umteteli and Bantu World in hard copy to reading it on screen. This paper does not discuss the considerable impact on practices of reading and analysis that the digital shift has had. Digital sources like newspapers shift focus to content over form which is critical for understanding the socially-constitutive world of newspapers like Umteteli.

3. Cut and paste is the term used in the literature on African print culture (Hofmeyr 2013, 13, 17; Peterson and Hunter 2016, 5–6). Passive newsgathering is a term from Barnhurst and Nerone (2001, 15), essentially referring to the same phenomenon. Interestingly, Barnhurst and Nerone make the point that passive newsgathering was considered more refined that the active work of collecting news, which in the nineteenth century was often viewed as scavenging.

4. Ilanga was published independently until bought out by Argus Printing Company in 1934, whereafter it continued as a Zulu newspaper.

5. Trained black typesetters were precluded from working anywhere other than on black newspapers, or for the mission presses. See Adrian Hadland on printing and labour legislation (2005), also Hofmeyr (2013, 37).

6. Switzer and Switzer (1979, 3), identify the author as Jonas Ntsiki, Opland (1998, 240) as Jonas Ntsiko. The translation is Jordan’s. Opland translates the pseudonym as “The musical bow of the nation.”

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation [n/a]

Notes on contributors

Natasha Erlank

Natasha Erlank is a gender historian working on Christianity, gender and sexuality in South Africa. She is completing a book manuscript entitled “Gender, Christianity and Tradition in South African History.” This article is also part of a larger project on the history of Umteteli wa Bantu. She has published in the Journal of Southern African Studies, in Gender & History, and African Studies Review.