Abstract
In South Africa the African-American myth was adapted by both blacks and whites in the country’s tiny liberal movement. Like believers in other parts of the continent, South African liberals looked to America for solutions to the problems created by white rule. The liberal movement was concentrated in the larger towns, especially Johannesburg and Cape Town, where whites and Africans intermingled in large numbers. It consisted of people of both races held together by a general liberal ethos. South African liberals rejected the prevailing social-Darwinist view that consigned Africans to a fixed place on the lower rungs of the social and biological hierarchy and strove to establish a society that would permit Africans social and economic mobility. At the same time, they were essentially a highly moderate movement. They borrowed the slogan of Cecil Rhodes, the Cape Prime Minister who promised in 1897 ‘equal rights for all civilized men’.1 The liberals focused on securing the rights not of all Africans, but of only the relatively limited number of Africans who were civilized, in the sense that they possessed western education and property.
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Notes
H.J. Simons and R.E. Simons, Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850–1950 (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1969), 51.
The formation and activities of the liberal movement are somewhat obscure because of the problem of defining the term ‘liberal’ in the class society that existed in South Africa. The small size of the movement also makes research on its activities difficult. Thus, Shula Marks cautiously confines the terms ‘liberal attempt’ and ‘racial harmony’ in quotation marks. John W. Cell referred to white liberalism in South Africa as the ‘liberal dilemma’. Shula Marks, ‘The Ambiguities of Dependence: John Dube of Natal’, Journal of Southern African Studies 1, no. 2 (April 1975): 163
John W. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 227.
D.D.T. Jabavu, Native Disabilities in South Africa (Lovedale: Lovedale Institution Press, 1932), 16–18.
Quoted in Paul B. Rich, White Power and the Liberal Conscience: Racial Segregation and South African Liberalism, 1921–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 18–19.
A.P. Walshe, ‘Black American Thought and African Political Attitudes in South Africa’, Review of Politics 32 (January 1970): 53–4.
Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery: An Autobiography (Williamstown: Comer House Publishers, 1971), 221–2.
Quoted in R. Hunt Davis Jr, ‘Charles T. Loram and an American Model for African Education in South Africa’, African Studies Review 19, no. 2 (September 1976): 88, 90. Loram’s paternalism in regard to education is clearly evident in his writings. However, his position on political matters, such as enfranchisement and civil rights for Africans, is more difficult to detect.
Quoted in R. Hunt Davis, ‘John L. Dube: A South African Exponent of Booker T. Washington’, Journal of African Studies 2, no. 4 (1975/76): 514.
Quoted in Ken Smith, The Changing Past: Trends in South African Historical Writing (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1988), 134.
John L. Dube, ‘Need of Industrial Education in Africa’, Southern Workman 27, no. 7 (July 1897): 141–2.
R. Hunt Davis Jr, ‘The Black American Education Component in African Responses to Colonialism in South Africa (ca. 1890–1914)’, Journal of Southern African Affairs 3, no. 1 (January 1978): 76.
Quoted in Edward H. Berman, ‘Tuskegee in Africa’, Journal of Negro Education 41, no. 2 (Spring 1972): 102.
J. Mutero Chirenje, Ethiopianism and Afro-Americans in Southern Africa, 1883–1916 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 124–5.
Paul B. Rich, ‘The Appeals of Tuskegee: James Henderson, Lovedale, and the Fortunes of South African Liberalism, 1906–1930’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 20, no. 2 (1987): 275.
D.D.T. Jabavu, ‘Booker T. Washington His Methods Applied to South Africa’, in The Black Problem: Papers and Addresses on Various Native Problems (Lovedale: Lovedale Institution Press, 1920), 25–6, 43.
D.D.T. Jabavu, ‘Native Educational Needs’, in The Black Problem: Papers and Addresses on Various Native Problems (Lovedale: Lovedale Institution Press, 1920), 93–4.
D.D.T. Jabavu, ‘Natives and Agriculture’, in The Black Problem: Papers and Addresses on Various Native Problems (Lovedale: Lovedale Institution Press, 1920), 101, 103.
Colin Bundy, The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry (London: Heinemann, 1979), 113, 115, 127, 135.
Richard D. Ralston, ‘American Episodes in the Making of an African Leader: A Case Study of Alfred B. Xuma (1893–1962)’, International Journal Of African Historical Studies 6, no. 1 (1973): 75–6.
Errol Byrne, The First Liberal Rheinallt Jones (Johannnesburg: Angel Press, 1990), 22–4.
Edgar H. Brookes, The Colour Problems of South Africa: Being the Phelps-Stokes Lectures, 1933, Delivered at the University of Cape Town (Westport, Conn.: Negro University Press, 1970), 15–16.
Ellen Hellmann, ‘Fifty Years of the South African Institute of Race Relations’, in Race Relations in South Africa, 1929–1979, ed. Ellen Hellmann and Henry Lever (London: Macmillan, 1980), 9.
R.D. Heyman, ‘C.T. Loram: A South African Liberal in Race Relations’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 5, no. 1 (1972): 47–8.
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© 1997 Yekutiel Gershoni
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Gershoni, Y. (1997). The South African Liberal Movement and the Model of the American South. In: Africans on African-Americans. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25339-5_7
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