Re-collecting the Musical Politics of John and Nokutela Dube

Abstract

On the occasion of the ANC’s centenary this article analyzes the musical contributions of founding president, John Langalibalele Dube and his first wife, Nokutela Dube. Through an analysis of the sonic metaphors the Dubes used in their speeches and letter-writing I show that the idea of transcribing music was essential to imagining freedom, modernity, and a relation to transnational black struggles. Close readings of their collection of secular songs, Zulu Songbook, and John Dube’s novel UJeqe reveal how their political and educational endeavors informed their writing, as well as the continuities and disjunctures between their intellectual labor and that of contemporaries such as Solomon Plaatje, Pixely ka Isaka Seme, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington.

Keywords:

• Dube
• SANNC
• Music
• Transcription
• Education
• Zulu

Notes

¹ Gevisser, Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred, 253.

² Switzer, South Africa's Alternative Press, 46.

³ Much attention has been devoted to Orpheus McAdoo's Virginia Jubilee Singers, who first arrived in South Africa in 1890 and to the South African touring choirs they inspired. Veit Erlmann has done the most substantial work on the ensemble, particularly in African Stars and Music, Modernity and the Global Imagination. His examination of self-representational writing amongst these musicians has been particularly generative for this study. Other important work on these connections in the early twentieth century include Ballantine, Marabi Nights; Coplan, In Township Tonight!; Couzens, “Moralizing Leisure Time”; Masilela, Database on New African Movement; and Titlestad, Making the Changes.

⁴ Ntongela Masilela has done extensive work to document what he terms the New African movement, a South African counterpart to the New Negro movement in the US. His on-line documentary history archived and continually updated at http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/NAM/ is a valuable step in broadening access to this scholarship. While my use of “new African modernism” is informed by his frame, I refer in this article to a body of work published between 1899 and 1930 which is a narrower period than his use of New African Movement. This period overlaps with north Atlantic modernism, and my usage also marks the fact that South Africans were responding to the same world-historical factors that triggered the aesthetic and political innovations of other modernisms, and it is fitting to read these African works with the same attention and nuance assigned other, equally challenging contemporaneous world literature.

⁵ See Hughes, The First President. This is not to suggest that Dube was previously completely neglected by scholars. Manning Marable's dissertation on Dube, “African Nationalist” (1976, UMD) is the most complete source. See also R. Hunt Davis, Shula Marks, Heather Hughes as well as Cherif Keita's film Oberlin-Inanda.

⁶ A few years before, Magema Fuze had inaugurated Zulu literature with a lively chronicle, Abantu Abamnyama, Lapa Bavela Ngakona (trans. The Black People and Whence They Came), but Insila ka-Shaka (trans. Jeqe, the Body-servant of Shaka) is the first work in isiZulu that can properly be called a novel. I count it as a novel in spite of its relative brevity (about 100 pages depending on typesetting).

⁷ Seme was an accomplished rhetorician, and as a student at Columbia University in New York, he won the 1906 Curtis Medal for the best oratory by a graduating senior. Heather Hughes points out that Seme may well have been a home-boy of Dube's, rather than a blood relative, but he claimed many members of the Qadi chieftancy as “cousins.”

⁸ Seme's colleague Solomon Plaatje also quoted from the writings of Du Bois (In Native Life in South Africa), demonstrating that Booker T. Washington was not the only secular African-American leader who held sway over South Africans.

⁹Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk.

¹⁰ Washington, Con. 978 BTW Papers DLC.

¹¹ Jabavu, The Black Problem, 37.

¹² “Sisho kumSuthu, kumXhoza, kumShaka, kumNyembane, eZambezi” (Dube/Rycroft, 8) [Yengwa and Rycroft's translation: “We say so to the Sotho, to the Xhosa, to the Shakan, to the Mozambican, by the Zambezi”].

¹³ Biographical accounts often dwell on the complexity of parsing Dube's ideological position within the context of his times. The official ANC website, for example, contends that “What should be noted is that Dube's strategy and ideology were outflanked by the times. He had not changed from being a radical to being a conservative as Eddie Roux suggests in his debatable book “Time Longer Than Rope.” He died believing in racial equality; demanding justice and striving for African unity. These were revolutionary goals directly challenging the basis of white power and he believed in this to the end of his life. He fought all his life for the unity and liberation of the Africans - a unity and liberation he saw as coming through education, through working with sympathetic whites, through adoption of Christian values and, more importantly, through political organisation under the umbrella of the ANC.” See http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/people/dube.html (accessed 7/24/10).

¹⁴ Muller, Focus.

¹⁵Ibid., 326.

¹⁶ Dube, Insila kaShaka is an innovative experiment with the historical novel form, ripe for critical attention not just because it is the first piece of vernacular language fiction published in South Africa, but because of its formal and narrative style.

¹⁷ Hughes, First President, 97.

¹⁸ Dube, “Africa: The Story of My Life,” 110.

¹⁹Ibid., 112.

²⁰ The exact date of publication is not indicated in the original booklet, but it was advertised for sale in Dube's Ilanga Lase Natal in June 1911, indicating it must have appeared around this time.

²¹Dube and Dube, A Zulu Song Book, xiii.

²² Erlmann, African Stars, 59.

²³ See chapter 12, “Home Music Making and the Publishing Industry” in Crawford's America's Musical Life.

²⁴ IsiZulu original in Rycroft's contemporary orthography: “awokuqala amagama abantu ngaphandle kwawenkolo alendelo imusic yabeLungu. Le eyamaZulu”(xiii).

²⁵ ibid., trans. “ … sifisa ukuvusa ubumgoni nobugagu kubantu bakithi, baqambe.” (xii).

²⁶Dube and Dube, A Zulu Song Book, xiii.

²⁷ The Dubes's facsimile differs from Rycroft's version as it does not italicize “music” and “crudest cacophony”): “Be si kwelene ne ngwangqane ku lo msebenzi, amazwi emiqana mibili, emelwe ku pindwa, se melwa uku wandisa. Kwe zinye izindawo imusic ibingeza the crudest cacophony nxa iculwa nje ngo kwa baqambi. Ngako no bona umahluko kwa manye,” 2. I would argue that the uniform type-face smooths out distinctions between Zulu and English, suggesting an easy shifting between cultural and linguistic registers consistent with the Dubes's intercultural work throughout their careers.

²⁸ Ramsey, “Secrets, Lies and Transcriptions: Revisions on Race, Black Music and Culture,” 24–36.

²⁹Ibid., 27.

³⁰ See http//.isiZulu.net/ (accessed July 18, 2010).

³¹Szendy, Listen, 36.

³² One slight variation worth noting is that the original volume does not introduce Nokutela Dube as “Mrs.,” but rather presents her full name as a co-author following alphabetically after John Dube. In so doing it gives full credit to her creative work in the project rather than framing it through the mediating and enabling position of her husband. In other words, Nokutela Dube did not sign off as her husband's “better half,” Mrs. Dube, but as an artist in her own right.

³³Dube and Dube, A Zulu Song Book, xii.

³⁴Ibid., xiii.

³⁵ I thank my students in Modernism Across Borders (Spring 2011), and particularly Don James McLaughlin, for insightful contributions to this reading of kinship.

³⁶ Dube (tr Boxwell), Jeqe, The Bodyservant of King Shaka, 34.

³⁷ Dube, Jeqe, The Bodyservant of King Shaka, 60.

³⁸Ibid., 100.

³⁹Dube, Jeqe, The Bodyservant of King Shaka, 100.