The correspondence between Aggrey and Bull formed a small part of an intense debate over whether to follow Northey’s lead and South African government practice by delaying and at times prohibiting American Negro or other “foreign Native” immigration or to relax the stricture and grant him an exception. In January 1921 this was the subject of conversations involving D. D. T. Jabavu and Hunter at Lovedale Presbyterian mission, members of the Native Advisory Committee, and A. D. Roberts, late of Lovedale and part of a newly named Native Advisory Council whose members also included C. T. Loram, former inspector of Native schools in Natal, and a Transvaaler, General Lemmer. Bull noted that Immigration had recently deliberately delayed AME Bishop W. T. Vernon.37
Bull informed Mott that “there was a pretty strong prejudice in most quarters against the American coloured man,” exacerbated by recent news reports of “Martin Garvey and Co.,” which, he wrote, “has not tended to weaken the prejudice.” Bull himself had mixed feelings about the matter, the source of which he readily identified to Mott:
If Yergan comes he will be doing Pioneer Work in a good many directions and I find myself wondering whether that is quite the best and most acceptable thing. If we had a more highly developed work we should probably find it easier. My own personal hesitancy is perhaps increased by conversation in the past few days w Dr Jesse Jones of the Phelps-Stokes Commission and also w Dr Loram. The latter, as you will gather from what I have written above, occupies a very important position and also represents the modern and advanced element in the Advisory Council. He is eager to develop all sorts of Welfare activities on behalf of the Natives and is anxious for the development of YMCA work amongst them in any centre where opportunity offers. Also he knows something of America.38
Thomas Jesse Jones, a naturalized American of Welsh extraction, had by 1921 maneuvered himself into a career as an “expert on the Negro.”39 Surveying African education for the Phelps Stokes Fund, he traveled to South and East Africa.40 Jones was politically conservative, harboring fears of Black independence. Bull let Mott know that he found C. T. Loram “exceedingly doubtful about lending his support to the matter of inviting Yergan.” Without knowing him Loram had also been swayed by Jones, who was “apparently a little bit doubtful about the attitude of Moreland [sic] and your other Coloured leaders and (perhaps for want of knowing him better) classes Yergan with them.” The upshot of such discussions was that Bull did not foresee a prompt decision.41
The next month Aggrey, landing in South Africa from Angola on the India, met Bull, who asked about Max. Aggrey replied that Yergan was the right man for the job.42 A day later, on March 19, Aggrey joined the Phelps-Stokes Commission led by Jones. In the course of his stay the Gold Coast–born educator delivered some 120 public addresses.43 A fortnight following Aggrey’s entry into South Africa Yergan wrote Tuskegee principal R. R. Moton, along with M. W. Johnson and J. W. Dillard, inquiring about being delayed.44 He also wrote President John W. Davis of West Virginia Collegiate Institute, citing Bull’s February 18 letter mentioning the “strong prejudice there against American colored people” and noting “recent difficulties” in the admission of Negroes. Encouraging Davis and others to act on his behalf, Max was gathering his troops. Telling Davis his rationale for returning to Africa, he delineated these three significant points:
First and primarily, to give our Brethren there the service of the Association and thereby make our contribution toward the coming of the Kingdom;
Second, to attempt to make possible in a larger way than now obtains an outlet for the natural missionary spirit of our people here in America, and
Third, and that which is doubtless the most difficult and remote, namely, to play a part in creating the sentiment on the part of Europeans who govern Africa which will be more liberal toward the Native people of the Continent and less suspicious of the motives of colored people from America who may be sent there as missionary representatives of our churches here.45
A second Yergan note reviewed Bull’s February 18 letter and remarked that Jesse Jones had been sowing doubts “about Colored YMCA leadership in America” and had influenced at least one government official, resulting in “the legitimate missionary inspiration of our Student and City Associations [being] interfered with and its fulfillment … temporarily delayed by a man who has no commission whatever to represent them.”46
The sympathetic West Virginia State College President Davis referenced a Du Boisian characterization of Jesse Jones as “the evil genius of the Negro race—a white man,” scoring his action as “certainly an intensified program of suppression which the American white man is promoting. Think of Jones going to Africa interfering with the international rights of an American citizen.”47 Then Davis, incensed, as were several other Yergan familiars and correspondents, concluded with this stinging counterattack:
The immediate program of the Young Men’s Christian Association as well as every thinking Negro is to dethrone Thomas Jesse Jones from his hold on so-called Negro leadership. This will discharge him from his influential position among white people. It is very clear that the white people will have no need for him when he ceases to be a dominating influence among Negroes. I shall be glad to convey to our students the point of your letter.48
In the same time frame Max received similarly sympathetic letters from other leaders.49 With Aggrey in South Africa and Du Bois in the United States, Max’s forces fought on two fronts. On May 3 Aggrey, giving a Booker T. Washingtonian talk to location Africans, found himself severely heckled “by a radical section of the audience.” Meanwhile, a stream of letters and copies of correspondence flooded toward Du Bois from Max and his allies.50
The impasse finally broken in September, Yergan informed R. R. Moton of its end.51 The Tuskegee principal offered his hearty congratulations; others soon followed suit.52 After a stopover with Moorland, Max prepared to leave by late November, sailing out of New York, together with Susie and their five-month-old son, Frederick, on December 3.
With the combined strength of the Talented Tenth, individually and collectively, the decisive journalistic strength of Du Bois in Crisis, and the incessant behind-the-scenes lobbying of Aggrey, Max, the Black YMCA, and his backers claimed victory. It was the beginning of a new chapter in his life and in that of the movement to bring YMCAs to South Africa. Yergan would become the catalyst for these changes. In the rear, protecting his flanks, were scores of administrators and Black YMCA leaders, hundreds of college student branch members, and thousands of city association cadres. He returned to them again and again, by mail, by cable, in print, and in person to do what he felt they had sent him to accomplish, open a pioneer door of “Coloured” Y endeavor.
3
South Africa, Part I
On January 2, 1922, Max Yergan became the pioneer African-American YMCA secretary allowed into the Union of South Africa. The following fourteen years, the span of his missionary service, saw acute ferment within both himself and his mission field. The events he witnessed during his term occurred at a critical stage of the development of modern South Africa. His impressions of that time and place furthered his own political evolution. His gradual acquaintance with South Africa’s social dilemma made Yergan view the world differently, convincing him to pursue social gospel theory to its logical secular conclusion.
Yergan’s South African period must be divided into two segments, 1922–1928 and 1929–1936. This chapter treats the former time frame, while the succeeding one will deal with the latter.
Yergan’s initial six years in South Africa were marked by four major developments: (1) his countrywide connection to the nascent African leadership stratum; (2) his central role in developing interracial work in local Black school and community branches of the YMCA and SCA; (3) his ascent within the YMCA, SCA, WSCF, SVM (Student Volunteer Movement), and allied institutions; and (4) his deepening consciousness as a diasporic African called to return to the land of his forebears.
Yergan brought to South Africa U.S. and colonia
l expertise in inter-racial work steeped in Washingtonian accommodationist “racial adjustment” and YMCA social gospel theory. Influenced as well by the philosophy of African Redemption, the stimulus for much of the “Back to Africa” ideology that shaped both Pan-Negroism and Pan-Africanism, he arrived prepared to devote several years to African service. Carefully constructing intricate social service strategies and becoming a fixture at well-attended public conferences, workshops, and classes at training schools, SCA or YMCA regional branches, and other learning institutions, he realized his dream, meeting black South Africa’s leading lights, from families surnamed Jabavu, Bokwe, Dube, Soga, Matthews, Luthuli, and Xuma. These most advanced exemplars of modernity also held keys to doors opening to the past; most were but a generation away from rural lives they were taught to disdain as “heathen.”
The Gift of Prophecy
The Eastern Cape village of Alice, where Fort Hare Native College was situated, was the community the Yergan clan chose to make their domicile between 1924 and 1936. It bore the banners of two parallel, alternately competing and intersecting prophetic spiritual traditions. The first was an autochthonous brand of revelatory wisdom, built upon men, women, and youths seeking guidance in dreams and visions and answering “calls”—supernatural signs of inspiration—providing direction for earthly behavior. These practices gave rise to a long line of indigenous avatars from Nxele and Ntsikana to the dramatic and apocalyptic sequence of events annunciated by prophetess Nongqawuse. The second was the arrival of overseas-based biblical emissaries of Christianity, beginning in the late eighteenth century and contributing to a period of unprecedented sociocultural change. In aligning himself with the latter trend Yergan also had to come to terms with the former.
The Eastern Cape province generally and its Ciskei district in particular produced legends of prophetic revelation that predated, initially competed with, and eventually absorbed, assimilated, and incorporated Christianity. So it was that a lustrous line of isiXhosa-speaking seers—Nxele, Mlanjeni, and Nongqawuse—articulated with early Christian converts like Ntsikana, legendary composer of hymns fusing sonorous isiXhosa praise songs with faith in the Christian God, some of which hymns survive to the present in John Knox Bokwe’s Ntsikana’s Great Hymn and Ntsikana’s Bell. While cleavages arose pitting converts against conservatives, producing antinomies between “school” and “blanket” or “red” people, by the twentieth century several generations of Eastern Cape dwellers had become both Christianized and isiXhosa speaking (like their isiZulu-speaking counterparts in Natal or their Sesotho-speaking coreligionists in the High Veld). In literal and figurative lineages amaqoboka (converts) claimed spiritual descent from Ntsikana and his latter-day devotees, Tiyo Soga (1829–1871) and John Knox Bokwe (1855–1922). At virtually the same time when George Williams founded the YMCA in London, his countryman, William Govan, headmaster of Lovedale Seminary in Alice, Ciskei, a Free Church of Scotland institution, afforded every denomination access. Using a written examination he opened up two student vacancies, one filled by Tiyo Soga, son of Nosutu and “old Soga,” who earlier attended Tyume Mission eight miles away but now became a Lovedalian. Upon his graduation, the memorably scholarly pioneer African Christian Soga studied in Scotland, marrying Janet Burnside to found a Presbyterian dynasty whose descendants gained prominence in South African letters. Max Yergan met one, Alan Soga. These transformations came as isiXhosa-speakers encountered mission-based Christianity.
The Legacy of the Mission
During the first half of the nineteenth century, Christian missionary influence and the drafting of a nonracial constitution in 1853 brought about a limited albeit substantial franchise among mission-educated Africans in the Cape province. This advance stood in striking contrast to the racially exclusionary policies of the “Boer Republics” and Natal. The Cape franchise in turn gave rise to a stratum of mission-trained Africans, or “school people,” as many came to call them. Designated variously as amaqoboka1 or amakholwa,2 they often appeared to threaten the so-called red or blanket people, Xhosa traditionalists cleaving to pre-Christian cultural practices, principally rural-based but also migrants in towns.
School people felt mixed emotions regarding the Christianity that provided them with educations and livelihoods, yet restrained them from acting upon their own authority. Kholwa (converts) could face opposition from hierarchs heading the denominations they had joined. Where folkways and customary beliefs and values of the converts’ aboriginal communities contravened mission and church teachings, conflicts arose. Even so, by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, mission-educated Africans, securing jobs in government, law, commerce, teaching, journalism, and printing, began freeing themselves from both missions and chiefs to act as religious, social, or political leaders in their own right. In ways Yergan recognized from his post–Civil War South, the ascendant educated stratum behaved as a class in itself.
The new African leadership—educators, ministers, and other Black and mixed-race (i.e., “Coloured”) professionals—was most prominent in groupings established within the 1870s and 1880s especially in the Eastern and Western Cape, respectively. African organizations in this period, while often reflecting the ethnic predilections of their historical chiefs and elders, increasingly advocated a “nontribal” African consciousness. Even so, race, “tribe,” and clan complicated realization of this goal. Although the recent history of wars of dispossession made the most advanced African leaders urge the pursuit of common goals, “tribal” affiliation was reinforced both within local communities and by a government alive to the potential power of the rising Western-educated Nonwhite stratum. Thus Zulu speakers, descendants of the great martial tradition of Shaka and Dingane, were at once lauded for prior military prowess and blocked in subsequent attempts to revive it.
Even more daunting was the Mineral Revolution, ushered in by discoveries of gold and diamonds between 1866 and 1886. Concurrently, the quelling of African primary (military) resistance and a rise of competing nationalisms, White and Nonwhite (i.e., Black, Asian, and “Coloured”), led to a complex and confrontative political landscape. Faced with the emergent force of the educated elite of the Nonwhite majority, expressed in nascent political organizations, propaganda, and the vote, conservative Whites, within and without government, explored even stricter methods to curb a rising tide of Black assertion.
By the turn of the twentieth century, the South African War (1899–1902) an Act of Union (1909), and a subsequent Natives Land Act (1911) made clear that African ambitions to participate in a nonracial political process would not be realized. This catalyzed a fresh territorial initiative, influenced to some degree by African-American precedents, but mostly home grown. Fired by the Land Act, luminaries of hoary “red” and novel “school” elites gathered inside Bloemfontein in 1912 to found a countrywide Native National Congress. Many who mounted that campaign were among those welcoming Yergan to South Africa. As they met, the transatlantic trajectories of their respective social formations converged. In the interwar era Yergan made his mark upon South Africa, Europe, and the United States.
African-American Influence in South Africa
African-Americans played a major part in helping to stimulate Black South African consciousness. Their influences took many forms. Exceptionally significant was the role of Afro-American missionaries associated with various Black-dominated Christian church movements, chiefly those within the African Methodist Episcopal tradition, whose zeal to broaden its base encouraged AMEs to provide support to the inchoate separatist Zionist and Ethiopianist Churches arising during the final two decades of the nineteenth century.3
AME interest in South Africa was part of a larger African-American thrust of missionary outreach for Africans. James Mata Dwane, leading a secessionist Ethiopian Church of South Africa, enjoyed a brief association with the AME during the late 1890s. Eventually Dwane’s concern about American control over finances won out over his desire for linkage with the overseas church.4 Dwane�
��s curiosity and race pride were piqued by a whirlwind six-week 1898 tour taken by Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, who, in unprecedented mass baptisms and ordinations, left a legacy of Black affection and White opprobrium that was reenacted whenever Negro American clerics sought official sanction to enter the country.5
In 1904, for example, the General Missionary Conference of South Africa set forth the opinion that “Ethiopianism is largely a misdirected use of [the] newborn energy of [the Africans].” It also accused the Ethiopianist and AME members of displaying “an utter disregard for the principles of Christian comity.”6 F. B. Bridgman, a Johannesburg-based member of the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions, was one of the participants. He was instrumental in determining Yergan’s fitness for South African service. By 1916, fear of AME fury had been augmented by even greater anxiety about the Garvey movement. But even more disconcerting for government as a whole was working-class insurgency. This included both white and black labor and brought with it the specter of Bolshevism. Like AME church leaders, Black American representatives of the Baptist Church were also closely scrutinized. North American “Colored” YMCA secretaries had ties to both.7 Yergan knew from representatives of these churches about government opposition to Negroes.
The Aftermath of World War One
Following the European armistice, Prime Minister Jan Christiaan Smuts pursued policies geared to counter labor shortages, particularly in mines but also in cities. Smuts sought to induce Nonwhite males populating outlying rural districts to move into urban areas to serve industry. The measures taken to achieve this goal, however, were involuntary, effected by coercive legislation alienating thousands from their land, effectively disenfranchising, residentially segregating, and occupationally ghettoizing Africans, who were also subjected to a pass system. The besieged populations resorted to radical activism in response to these oppressive stimuli.
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