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Agency and Action in Colonial Africa pp 100–125Cite as

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A Christian, Civilized Man: D. D. T. Jabavu of South Africa

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Abstract

Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu was born in the Cape Colony in British southern Africa on 20 October 1885, when a few African men could vote and the prospects for black equality with the ruling whites seemed promising. He died on 3 August 1959, in the Cape Province of the Union of South Africa, 11 years after the apartheid state had begun stripping blacks of their rights and exorcizing the ‘ghost of equality’ with a completeness unparalleled in the country’s history.2. The ‘ghost of equality’ was the last vestige of the Cape liberal tradition — itself best summed up by the dictum ‘equal rights for all civilized men’ — finally erased in 1959 with the passage of legislation that would, the following year, remove from parliament the last elected representatives of Africans.

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Notes

  1. This article is adapted from Catherine Higgs, The Ghost of Equality: The Public Lives of D. D. T. Jabavu of South Africa, 1885–1959 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997; Cape Town: David Philip, 1997; Bellville: Mayibuye Books, 1997), chapters 1 and 3. I thank the publishers for permission to reproduce sections of the text.

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  13. Ibid., p. 111.

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  31. See Tim Couzens, The New African: A Study of the Life of H. I. E. Dhlomo (Johannesburg, 1985).

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  33. D. D. T. Jabavu, What Methodism Has Done, p. 8.

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  34. Ibid.; Elphick, ‘Mission Christianity’, 68. See also J. Dexter Taylor, ed., Christianity and the Natives of South Africa: A Year Book of South African Missions (Lovedale, 1929) pp. x–xi.

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  41. Elphick, ‘Mission Christianity’, 75; Addresses on General Subjects, vol. 8 of The Jerusalem Meeting of the International Missionary Council, March 24–April 8, 1928 (New York, 1928), 1; A. C. Headlam, The Doctrine of the Church and Christian Reunion: Being the Bampton Lectures for the Year 1920, 2nd edn (London, 1920) p. 315; ‘The Reunion of Christendom. – II’, South African Outlook, 1 May 1925, 110.

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  42. ‘Towards Reunion’ and ‘A United Native Church’, South African Outlook, 1 Mar. 1926, 70–1; South African Outlook, 1 Apr. 1925, 75–6; J. Scott Lidgett, ‘Reunion of Non-Episcopal Churches from the Standpoint of Methodism’, South African Outlook, 1 Feb. 1926, 44–7; Taylor, Christianity and the Natives of South Africa, pp. x–xi.

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  48. Ibid., p. 117.

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  55. Ibid., p. 23.

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Authors
  1. Catherine Higgs
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Memorial University of Newfoundland, St John’s, Canada

    Chris Youé (Professor of History) (Professor of History)

  2. Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada

    Tim Stapleton (Assistant Professor of History) (Assistant Professor of History)

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© 2001 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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Higgs, C. (2001). A Christian, Civilized Man: D. D. T. Jabavu of South Africa. In: Youé, C., Stapleton, T. (eds) Agency and Action in Colonial Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288485_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288485_7

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