In 1934 Yergan had also begun to impress Govan Mbeki, then a 24-year-old student from the Eastern Cape. Mbeki, a former pupil at Healdtown, had entered Fort Hare as a matriculant in the high school section in 1933. No stranger to radical militancy, Mbeki, at a very early age, had acted as an interpreter for a cousin who organized for the ICU. By 1933 he came into contact with Edward Roux, a botanist who founded the Communist Youth League and edited Umsebenzi (The Worker), the party’s newspaper. Roux had pitched a tent at Sandile’s Kop above Fort Hare and delivered a number of stirring lectures to students. The following year, Yergan and Mbeki, who had met earlier, became close friends. Having formerly known Yergan primarily as a YMCA missionary, Mbeki now became aware of Yergan’s militancy.
The year 1934 was the one in which Yergan returned to South Africa from his second furlough. Mbeki noticed profound changes in him. When Yergan resumed the campaign for the construction of a Christian Union building at Fort Hare, Mbeki noted, “he was no longer the Max Yergan we had known—concerned only with church work.” Mbeki attributed this change to a trip to the USSR allegedly undertaken that same year.107 Yergan’s new persona was quite different from the one he had presented during the 1920s. As Thami Mkhwanazi related after interviewing Mbeki in his prison cell,
Yergan, who remained at Fort Hare for another year, was invited to deliver lectures on communism and fascism to the political science class. At the time, Mbeki was reading the subject as one of his two majors for a Bachelor of Arts degree. Mbeki became friendly with Yergan who, he said, invited him to his home and “fed him” with literature. One of the first books his friend gave him was Lenin’s The State and Revolution.108
Mbeki actually became a protégé of Max Yergan, accompanying him on trips to the countryside, the “study tours” mentioned earlier. In the course of these sojourns, Yergan provided a commentary that made a lasting impression on the youths who feasted on his analysis. In a 1990 interview with Robert Edgar, Mbeki shared his recollection of vivid field trips across the Transkei and Ciskei. When Mbeki first encountered Yergan, the African-American was an extremely religious man. Although he was always a powerful speaker from the pulpit, in the early 1930s the content of his sermons was rather typical—much the same as that of the other preachers at Fort Hare’s chapel. Around 1933, however, Yergan went on leave; upon his reentry, “he was a changed man. He was no longer the Max Yergan that we knew.”
Now, I don’t quite remember how we came to be close together, but on one occasion I do remember that he was asked by—the lecturer who was in charge of psychology and political science and philosophy—he was brought into our lecture room to give us a talk on Nazism. He gave us a comparative talk on Communism and Nazism, and I think it is from that date that he and I took on. After that, he invited me quite often to his home in the evenings, and by then he had a section of his library, say, from here to there—but it was all Marxist-Leninist books there. I remember on one occasion, just shortly before he left Fort Hare, he turned round to say to me, when he left Fort Hare he would donate all those other books, you know, those American books—he would leave them here at Fort Hare— “But, comrade, that portion — that library—I will take with me, because I value it.” That’s what he said.109
Mbeki became a beneficiary of the type of learning laboratory that today would be termed the “open university.” When asked to join Yergan on his circuit, he found himself transported to another realm, one in which even mundane observations contained within them the seeds of profundity. For him Yergan proved every bit as inspiring outside the classroom and beyond the pulpit as his stated reputation. Yergan took advantage of this teaching opportunity. Mbeki recalled,
Now, when he went out on his missions sometimes he took me along as far as Cathcart. We would drive over the[re] [on] horse back—we would drive out over to Cathcart and we would come back with his youngest son who, I think, was Charles, his youngest boy, and all along the road he would be talking. You know, there are big, large expanses of farm land—whether on occasion it was over the mountains—it was, I think, for a mile, or even more than a mile, it was just sheep, sheep, sheep. And he turned around and he says to me, “Comrades, look at that. All of that belongs to one man, and the most [rest?] of the people around here have no land, have no sheep. Why should that be?” And he related it to Marxist-Leninist teachings.110
Perhaps the most telling of these remembrances comes from the time after the merger of the private and public personas, when Max had decided, for good or for ill, to be as consistent as he dared in the exposition of his views. This occurred not only within the context of the classroom but also, finally, in that holiest of holy places, the pulpit itself. Yergan, whose name was often preceded by the title “reverend” in both official records and publications, never outgrew—in fact, did not seem willing to end—his relationship with missionary Christianity. He did, however, consciously seek to alter the ways that the work to which he had dedicated his life should be viewed and understood by those it was intended to uplift. This also appeared inspiring to Mbeki.
Then on a special occasion—which was the last time he appeared on a Fort Hare platform, as a preacher, at the [Student] C[hristian A[ssociation] Hall—he preached from there, and I still remember the text of his sermon, to this day. And he says—and again, I’ll try to put it in the accent in which he gave it—he says, “I am come that you may have life, and have it more abundantly.” That was his sermon. And he developed from that to talk about the conditions under which men lived, and especially in South Africa, and the answer he gave was the adoption of Marxist teachings. That was the last time he was allowed to appear on a platform or a pulpit to preach. That was the last time. So that was Yergan.111
Yergan’s changes of mind and heart did not go unnoticed at home. Even Mbeki was aware of the degree to which Yergan and Susie had come to view the world differently and, as an occasional guest, was sensitive to the stress this added to the Yergan household. These recollections revolved around the central question of Yergan’s life thus far, the principles to which it had been dedicated and with which it was linked. In many ways this related to every conflict he had faced since 1928. While this could not have been known to Mbeki, he was observant:
Now I was very often at his house in the evenings. Now there was, his wife—I don’t know if she’s still alive—she used to sometimes talk to me and say, “All right, have your ideas with Max, but why does he discard religion?” Well, I don’t know if in his personal life he had discarded religion, but as far as I knew, that sermon which he preached was the last sermon which he preached at Fort Hare. And I think for some two years after he was at Fort Hare and then never again preached. And then, well, his wife would tell me that—she would first want to discuss religion with me—and, of course, I had no interest; I showed no interest. And then she would start talking to me seriously about that. And so, that’s that. And then Max left.112
It is critical to add, too, that Yergan was also influencing and being influenced by fellow Colored Work Department associates closer to home, some of whose conversations and letters have not surfaced but who were surely in either direct or indirect contact with him through the 1920s and 1930s, among them James Ford, Mordecai Johnson. and the Guiana-born George T. N. Griffiths, subsequently T. Ras Makonnen. Each knew Max from the Colored YMCA days and was about his age. Ford, Johnson, and Yergan shared southern upbringings, had attended Negro colleges, and had then participated in the Great Migration north. Though some particulars of their relationships in the inter-war years are somewhat cloudy, each was destined to interact closely with Max. Each also symbolized the starkly diverging career pathways that lay open to Yergan within and beyond the boundaries of the Black YMCA.
Johnson, an ordained minister, followed Yergan as Colored Work Department traveling secretary in the Southwest, later becoming Howard University’s first Black president. Using Howard as his bully pulpit, Johnson made himself a national figure in Black theological circles. Mo
reover, he consistently carved out a radical position, reflecting his engagé social gospel orientation. Outspoken in opposing segregation and other forms of racial discrimination, Johnson made public pronouncements that were clearly left of center in the interwar era, precisely the time when Max moved in a similar direction. Further, Johnson was one of a handful of left-leaning Black Christian intellectuals devoted to Africa.
In 1928, Johnson appeared on a panel with colonial critic R. L. Buell at Williamstown, Massachusetts. Both lambasted the West for exploiting Africa and Africans. Johnson was later paraphrased as asserting that, apart from a handful of missionaries and other altruists, “up to the present the development of Africa has been dominated by economic and imperialistic groups for the benefit of the capitalist class.” Then, after criticizing the Garvey movement, he was cited as having said the following:
He declared that the conflict in Africa was not between the white and black races, but was the same conflict which exists in every country between a comparatively small group of capitalists and the great mass of people. What he hoped for the development of Africa was that the Christian element of the white world would get the upper hand over the selfish exploiters, so that the natural resources could be developed by modern scientific knowledge for the benefit of the people as a whole, both white and black.113
James Ford represented the other end of the spectrum from Johnson. Son of an Alabama sharecropper and grandson of a lynch victim, he was a scion of the soil and a “colored” college man. Attending Fisk University on the eve of World War One, Ford put off receiving his degree in order to enlist.114 Protesting discrimination while still in uniform in France, Ford returned to a series of dead-end jobs in Chicago’s post office. Frustrated yet fighting for social change, he joined the Communist Party, where he rose steadily in the ranks, becoming by 1932 its vice-presidential candidate, alongside William Z. Foster.115 Yergan knew Ford from his college days. Both had YMCA connections.
Two months after announcing his vice-presidential candidacy, Ford gained notoriety during the July 28 Bonus March, when he and thirty-five other communist veterans were arrested as the alleged ringleaders of the march, under orders issued by Herbert Hoover and carried out by Douglas MacArthur. By then Ford would have been well known to the FBI, having spent two years in the USSR from 1930 to 1932 and reemerged as the second most visible communist functionary in the United States, and Black at that. Both Hoovers, John Edgar and Herbert, undoubtedly fumed.116
Though unsuccessful in his bid for the vice-presidency, Ford rose in Communist Party ranks. In 1936 he transferred his headquarters from Chicago to New York City as the new head of the party’s vital Harlem Section. This was the year planned for a broad-based National Negro Congress, which provided a chance for Yergan to become reacquainted with Ford, whom he had met during his Colored Work Department period.117 A year later Max selected Harlem as his base of operations.
The trio’s third member, George Griffiths, revealed a subtler side of Yergan’s personality but a vital part of his persona, his Christian inter-nationalist-cum-Pan-Negro-nationalist charisma. This had been critical to his success in South Africa as a source of inspiration to fellow Blacks of widely differing backgrounds. Griffiths, like other foreign-born Afro-Caribbean and African sojourners in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s, had depended on the Colored YMCA for lodging and fellowship, and there occasionally heard Max in appearances at Black college campuses. Until about 1934 Griffiths viewed Yergan only from a reverent distance. That year, however, the two had a memorable encounter, later recounted to Kenneth J. King. Noting the rise of radical interwar thinkers in the YMCA, Griffiths stated,
He told me something of the tragedy of the Bantu students, and possibly when he met these great thinkers in the “Y,” and saw the drift of the period, he expected some really powerful support. Quite likely it was the contact with the rebel element in the churches—people like the Presbyterian A. J. Muste, that made him more rebellious on his return to South Africa, and helped to bring about his break from the YMCA as international secretary.118
Griffiths’s re-creation dovetails nicely with Govan Mbeki’s for a similar period, giving both testimonies added weight. Taken together with Johnson’s profile, their remembrances show Max’s deepening involvement with a liberation theology he shared with John Hope and George E. Haynes.
The end of Yergan’s 1933–1934 furlough was marred by a series of professional setbacks. His efforts to fund the projected Fort Hare social work study course met considerable opposition. J. D. Rheinallt Jones of the Joint Council Movement and the South African Institute of Race Relations criticized Yergan’s proposal for a social service institute for Africans as too elaborate and ambitious, too costly, and inconsistent with extant realities. The idea for an African Social Service Center marked a concretization of a previously more generalized social concern animating his Y work. Reasserting faith in Christianity, Max advocated altering teaching policy to respond to the immediate necessities of African students, whom he viewed as being in need of grooming, if not for eventual control at least for some sort of leadership role in South Africa. This necessitated unusual boldness:
I believe strongly that in our policy and service of the present and future there will be required certain changes of emphasis and points of view. These changes will make our movement less respectable in the conventional sense, may make us less popular with those in authority and may cut us off from some of our present friends. That I think would be taking the way of the cross; and it seems to me to be the only way consistent with the meaning of the life and death of Jesus.
Whether or not these changes were indeed consistent with “the way of the cross,” they did, in fact, contribute to a loss of respect, not so much for the YMCA movement as a whole as for Max Yergan the man—at least within conservative church circles, for reasons that were probably rooted in the crisis of confidence that appeared in his WSCF controversy. Yergan had begun to reveal even more of himself. His public and private identification with radical, uncompromising, leftist friends and comrades was becoming embarrassing to some of his White South African YMCA associates, who had come to feel that the charismatic Black American was exceeding the limits of tolerance.
Since 1932, a year after Yergan had begun to confront his own need to delve more deeply into social theory, he had contemplated a new program designed to inspire social consciousness by means of a course curriculum emphasizing the teaching of sociology. The curriculum would address changes in the African “family and custom, the techniques of social surveys in African communities, [and] African urban life, examining the effects of industrialisation upon African communities and economies,” each of which topics seemed valuable additions to his usual recreation and religious instruction. He justified the need for such a curriculum by referring to the report of the 1932 Native Economic Commission, quoting the following passage:
“[The curriculum] should aim at freeing the mass of Natives from their reactionary conceptions—animism and witchcraft, certain phases of the cattle cult, the ‘doctoring’ of lands as an alternative to proper cultivation, the insistence on a large amount of leisure, and all the mass of primitive fears and taboos, which are the real reason for their backwardness. The removal or transformation of these is the first great problem of Native education.”
The commission’s report had been careful to add, however, that such measures did not seek to make “the Native” dissatisfied with his background. Rather, they were intended to help individuals build upward from the foundations of “Native society,” developing within themselves a sense of pride in their people and a desire to improve what was good in their own traditional institutions, pointedly adding, “and of this there is a good deal.” Yergan’s plan was not implemented. The reasons for this are not entirely clear, a fact whose significance grew over the next few years and may have had some bearing upon Yergan’s subsequent decision to pursue a very different career path.
Alfred Bitini
Xuma
For at least a decade Max Yergan corresponded with Alfred Bitini Xuma, one of the most famous opposition figures in interwar South Africa. Considerably more militant than Jabavu, Xuma presided over the African National Congress (ANC) in the years of its rejuvenation, when a revitalized Youth League permanently altered the direction of the organization. Yergan’s relationship with Xuma shows old patterns of caution, caused no doubt by his lengthy surveillance experience. The Yergan-Xuma correspondence brims with cryptic encoded references to mutual acquaintances and ostensibly sensitive conversations. Yet it is virtually impossible to detect from what survives of the letters of these two men how either felt about the ANC between 1928–1945.
The earliest available letters from Max Yergan to Dr. Xuma date from June 1928. Written to respond to two of Xuma’s letters—one of June 4 and another of June 7—they accepted the doctor’s invitation to friendship. The physician was asking for the Yergans to help him find a spouse.119 (This they did, though it took some eighteen months to finish the task, with Xuma’s marriage to Amanda Mason in October 1931.) Though Yergan promised to write Xuma again within a few days, there is a break in the surviving correspondence of almost two full years. The next available missive, dated June 1930, concerns the upcoming Bantu-European conference at Fort Hare, to which Xuma had been invited to make a presentation on “The Christian Approach to the Race Question.” Max had also asked Edgar Brookes to discuss the same subject, but Brookes wished to do so from a psychological and religious point of view, highlighting ways in which Christianity might combat race prejudice. Xuma was asked for something else.
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