I had thought that you could be a bit more personal by making known to the gathering some of the disabilities which we as an educated class live under. I had thought also that it would be possible for you to make a number of constructive suggestions which would show to the Europeans who will be present how we may cooperate in removing both the causes and the manifestations of race prejudice. Here, of course, you should be free to deal with various aspects of the cause of such prejudice. I thought also that you might bear your witness in regard to your belief in the power of Christianity to displace prejudice between the races. While I do not wish to have you restricted in regard to what you are to say, it does seem to me that an address along the lines I have indicated, coming from your own cultured personality, will go a long way towards inspiring our own students who will be present, as well as towards helping the Europeans who will be present to acquire an altogether different idea of an educated, cultured black man. I might add that in my own address I have the same thing in mind.120
Two years later, Xuma was inviting the Yergans to visit his family. Even more than had been true for the Jabavus, an American connection was a feature of Xuma’s education and personal life. Xuma had received some schooling in the United States before becoming a medical doctor in Scotland. Upon the premature death of his first wife, Xuma married Madie Hall, an African-American socialite. For these reasons, a close relationship was a logical possibility, something that Xuma suggested, expressing his hope that Mrs. Yergan, Xuma, and educator and social worker Charlotte Maxeke live as neighbors. Yet Yergan replied that his wife was “still very tired and in need of a change.” Susie Wise-man’s schedule appears to have been impossible, as she was raising a third baby and “teaching the children with no break in their school period” while also remaining involved in a club she had started—the Unity Home Maker’s Club. Yergan hoped she might be able to visit the Xumas in Johannesburg the following month.121
The tenor of Yergan’s Xuma letters changed very profoundly by 1935, obviously affected by the gravity of the Hertzog Bills and local reaction to them. Evidently unable to conceal the full intensity of his revulsion to these, he used guarded, cryptic, stifled prose.
I note your reference to our conversation here relative to what is passing through my mind both with regard to what is happening in South Africa and my attitude towards these developments. While I had a reason for talking in some what extreme terms with you I am very glad and appreciate the fact that you recognize that I should do nothing rashly and that I shall consider all sides before I take any action.122
Having been treated to Xuma’s hospitality shortly before the letter was written, Yergan indicated his intention of visiting them in Johannesburg “within the next month.” Obviously combining business with pleasure, their respective families, including children, were able to spend an enjoyable time together, leaving the Yergans exhilarated. After pointing out the many ways in which serious and frivolous matters had been combined during the visit, Yergan reassumed his confidential, cabalistic tone:
With regard to your personal matter, which we discussed, I appreciate the confidence which you placed in us which led you to take up so vital a matter with us. With regard to the person in New York whose name I first mentioned to you and about whom you so correctly understood me as being very much impressed I am frank to tell you that I consider that person a very splendid person indeed, and it was for that reason that I was so emphatic in what I said. I wonder if you wish me to take the liberty of writing there? With regard to the other two, I shall send you whatever information I can get you about them and I shall be glad to advise you in any possible and desired way. So please feel free to call on me and in the meantime I shall keep my own mind at work on the matter.123
By October 1935 Yergan had seen Xuma again, informing him that he planned to leave the country around midmonth.124 By then, having been helped considerably by Yergan over the years since their first contact, Xuma was now in a position to reciprocate. Xuma’s reply came in a deeply compassionate five-page handwritten letter in which he tried to reassure his African-American friend of the value of his work. Writing with the utmost candor, Xuma spoke directly with keen insight. Filled with sage advice, the letter ranged from the avuncular (“Keep friendly with all even those with whom you may differ in opinion and outlook”) to the brotherly:
You know, Max, your position here is a diplomatic one. It is not a mere personal matter that ends with you. You have the reputation of a rising great people [American Negroes] who must use their most meagre opportunities to serve their African cousins most guardedly.
Then he waxed eloquent, writing,
Your last ten years in this country have not been in vain. You won the confidence and good will of many intelligent people. From time to time your mind may shift to different directions and to different camps but you must remain courteous and friendly even with those with whom you may not see eye to eye. … Many of us may not see eye to eye with you as far as you see, now, and even for my own part it may be best and wise that they do not. I say that because any extreme action at the present juncture would only tend to victimize the African. In other words, it would be only destructive for us with nothing to gain or in its place for the benefit of our people. It would do much worse than even that. It would give our high authorities here [an excuse] to stand firmly in the way of any minister giving permission for Afro-Americans to enter this country for service. That would be used as an excuse of branding them all as radicals who incite hostility between black and white.125
The next months brought travails, making letter writing difficult. Those written were often terse and hurried. Their principal purpose was to inform Xuma of Yergan’s return and to express the wish that the two would have an opportunity to meet soon.126 The next month, May, found the two trying to arrange a meeting, showing even greater urgency than before, again due to the dizzying pace of the Hertzog Bills. At this time, Yergan abandoned customary caution:
I am most anxious to talk with you, aside from personal matters, about the convention which meets in June. I have heard something of what has already happened and I have taken the trouble to acquaint myself with the actual state of affairs with regard to the Bills that were passed. What I am most anxious about, however, is the steps which the proposed convention may take with regard to the bills and it is this I wish to talk about with you. In case it is not your plan to visit Alice en route to the Transkei or on your return to Johannesburg, I will send you a note to inform you of the time I shall come to Johannesburg.127
From then on, the key feature of their correspondence is its attention to politics, first concerning the All African Convention and later concerning Max’s work in the International Committee on African Affairs.
Frieda L. M. Neugebauer
As stated earlier, around 1929 someone else came into Max Yergan’s life who was to make a lasting impression. Frieda Neugebauer was fully equipped to teach zoology at Fort Hare during Yergan’s final years in South Africa but appears not to have done so. Instead, she appeared somewhat suddenly as Yergan’s stenographer. Who she was and where she sprang from seem the stuff of mystery. Rumors abound. Some thought Neugebauer to be of Jewish extraction.128 If so, she might have emigrated to South Africa seeking refuge from Germany during the early Nazi period, as many Jews did. What this tale did suggest, along with the impressions of a more simpatico Black contemporary (Don M’Timkulu), was that she was much more favorably disposed toward dealing with Black people in general and Black males in particular than commonly was the rule for any White women in South Africa, even and perhaps especially for those who worked at Fort Hare Native College, for whom a proper social distance between the races seemed de rigueur.129 More daring is the fact that she appears to have been brought to Fort Hare expressly to assist Max Yergan as a corresponding secretary, a role she was to fill for several years thereafter on both sides of the Atlantic. During the 1930s and afterward she was very close to the Communist Party of South Afri
ca. Neugebauer had earned a B.S. in zoology from the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 1933 and an M.S. in 1936, and was briefly employed at UCT as a demonstrator in the Zoology Department from May 1, 1936, until the end of January 1937. Also in this period she taught at Fort Hare, where it is likely that she met Yergan. The two became fast friends and occasionally were observed in each other’s company. Their relationship would have turned heads anywhere but raised eyebrows not only due to its interracial character but also because Max Yergan was a person whose every move was already noted.
Neugebauer is recalled as possessing a vibrant, very confident, even willful personality, as being strikingly militant, and as being unwavering in intensity. She talked of the USSR and in particular of Litvinov. Quite possibly once associated with the Guardian, a progressive Cape Town–centered weekly formerly edited by Brian Bunting, Neugebauer often confided in Mary Dick, an erstwhile staff member at Fort Hare whose septuagenarian sister, Nancy, later lived in the United Kingdom. Nancy Dick credited Neugebauer with changing her from a “confused liberal to a radical” and starting her on the path of committed trade union activism. Although Nancy did not recollect Neugebauer having mentioned Max Yergan, her sister Mary told her that they “had a close relationship.”130 Among mutual acquaintances it was almost an article of faith that Neugebauer had played a decisive role in Yergan’s radicalization, some claiming that she steered him to the left. This hints at Frieda’s extreme orthodoxy, particularly if she had genuinely extolled Litvinov.131 Even if Frieda lit the spark to kindle the flame, however, it would be wrong to ignore the fact that Max had been gathering fuel since the 1920s.
The Neugebauer-Yergan relationship persisted well beyond the American’s departure from South Africa. Neugebauer not only joined Yergan in New York, assisting him in brainstorming about what later became the Council on African Affairs but also, on some occasions, was a traveling companion. She aided Ralph Bunche in facilitating arrangements for travel and accommodations prior to his 1937 fact-finding South African tour. That April she dined at Bunche’s London flat in Yergan’s company. In his diary, Dr. Bunche cited Neugebauer as Yergan’s “South African girl friend,” a highly perceptive notation.
Although a moderately shadowy figure, Neugebauer’s linkage with Yergan became notorious among people within his orbit. Gossip must have caused each of them great discomfort because informants who survive from that time almost invariably mention it critically. Only two did not do so: Nancy Dick and Govan Mbeki, probably because each had high regard for both partners personally and politically and may, therefore, have seen something beneficial in an unconventional, deeply idealistic coupling of suspect moral value. It was, of course, no secret that “Reverend” Yergan was a family man. Whether motivated by curiosity or other exploratory urges, the relationship lasted far longer than most casual affairs, well into the early 1940s. The persistence and character of their association, however, illustrate that much more was going on between this pair than met the icy eye. From 1937 until some time in 1942 Yergan and Neugebauer acted as each other’s alter egos, undertaking most work efforts cooperatively, she drafting his letters, both giving lectures and interviews together.132
When Yergan’s relationship with Neugebauer is considered alongside his collegial bonds with Rena Datta and Lena Halpern (yet another leftist woman who was to have a lasting impact on Yergan in a subsequent period), it is safe to state that his relations with partners, whatever forms these took, affected Yergan politically. It is not necessary to inquire into the nature of these relationships to find evidence that substantiates this hypothesis. The chronological sequence alone, coinciding as it does with quantum leaps in thinking and behavior, shows definite and direct links to women Yergan knew. How this articulated with Yergan’s marriage to Susie Wiseman is not easily ascertainable at this time; our only evidence is indirect, drawn from those who knew each of them, primarily during their Fort Hare years, undoubtedly a most challenging venue for anyone’s marriage.133
All African Convention
The most significant event during the period following Yergan’s return to South Africa was the promulgation of a draconian draft of legislation that would fundamentally alter reality for Black South Africans. In 1935 J. B. M. Hertzog introduced the subsequently named Hertzog Bills. Prime Minister Hertzog’s strategy was built on furthering processes that had their origins in the time of the Native Land Act of 1913, the foremost piece of expropriational legislation in the modern era, forcing 85 percent of the African population to reside on 15 percent of the land. The Native Land and Trust Act of 1936 extended African residential segregation. Then, a Native Representation Act struck Africans off the Cape common electoral roll, substituting a fully revised polling system for “qualified” Africans to “elect” three White “Native” representatives, annihilating the vestigial “Cape liberal tradition.”
The African majority’s response to these dire measures, most evident within the elite stratum, was shock, outrage, and wide-scale mobilization. As had been true when the Draft South Africa Act of 1909 was being promulgated on the eve of the creation of the Union, mass meetings were mounted across the nation to discuss and counter the Hertzog Bills. According to W. M. Tsotsi, Yergan played a behind-the-scenes role in this agitation, the most visible outcome of which was seen in a new All African Convention. The historical parallels between the anti-Union movement of 1911 that sparked formation of the Native National Congress and the emergence of the All African Convention were clear. By now, however, the political landscape had narrowed considerably, and had at the same time become muddier.
Though the African National Congress had sustained itself in the decades since Union, protesting injustice and otherwise catering to its essentially petit-bourgeois Black professional constituency, it was not prepared for a salvo of such an enormous magnitude as Hertzog’s, even though there had been signals from 1926 on. Native replies to Hertzogism, therefore, required a coalition. Despite ethnic, linguistic, and regional cleavages, the South Africa of 1909 had been one in which Africans could raise, with effort to be sure, a national congress that might represent a wide range of authoritative personal opinions on the vexing “Native problem”—opinions that were based on daily life. Such an organization contrived ways of accommodating antinomies of commoners and royals, Christians and pagans, and educated and uneducated, and, over time, it even began to pay at least some attention to problems of gender relations and economic democracy. However, the world may have been far simpler in 1909.
The South Africa of 1935 was racked by worldwide depression. Wretched poverty, earlier the exclusive province of Africans and so-called Coloureds, plunged into the heart of Afrikanerdom. Indigent Boers joined persons of color in homelessness and abject penury. In a world increasingly challenged by a rising fascism that complemented the Herrenvolk philosophy of what T. Dunbar Moodie has termed the “Afrikaner civil religion” as well as the hundredth anniversary of the “Great Trek,” government was susceptible to a host of new pressures that no one opposition organization could possibly counteract alone.
Appealing to the frustrations of Afrikaners cast adrift by forced migration from their rural countryside farms to cold, cruel cities like the vastly overcrowded Johannesburg, Hertzog promised to uplift his benighted Boer brethren by debasing Blacks. The spate of legislation fashioned to achieve this end was presented in 1935, to take effect in 1936. It must have provided added impetus to Yergan’s desire to visit the Soviet Union. It convinced Max that his effectiveness in South Africa was coming to an absolute end. Hertzog’s disfranchisement of the besieged “school” stratum was the last straw.
Departure from South Africa
The 1935 furlough, with its secret Soviet interlude, was topped off by the stateside emergence of the National Negro Congress. From its inception this umbrella organization caught Yergan’s attention. Its guiding light, John Davis, issued Yergan an invitation to participate in its inaugural meeting in February 1936, less than a month before his
South African return. Such a concatenation of events proved decisive.134
On May 8, 1935, Yergan, back in South Africa, met with F. P. Keppel of Carnegie Corporation in Durban as a belated in-person followup to Keppel’s letter to Yergan of May 29, 1934, relating the series of recommendations offered to revise his Fort Hare–based African Training Institute proposal by the South African Advisory Committee.
In March 1936, following upon two of the major events in his life thus far, implementation of the 1935 Hertzog Bills and the deepening of his magnetic bond with Paul and Eslanda G. Robeson in London, Yergan reassessed his situation, concluding that it was now time for a change from the sacred cause to which he had devoted the last fifteen years. After great and apparently painful reflection he submitted a letter of resignation to YMCA headquarters in New York. This is how it began:
The government in South Africa is not only not interested in the development of Africans but is quite definitely committed to a policy which is destructive of any real growth among Africans of that country. This I believe to be true not only of the present government but of any government expressive of the basic political and economic principles upon which South Africa as a state is founded. I believe the serious evils to which I refer are inherent in the type of imperialism and its local manifestations operating in South Africa. In terms of the effective arrangements operating there both the material resources as well as the great mass of the population are exploited by and in the interests of the overseas imperialist power, Great Britain, and the local governing class. To make this possible, Africans have been robbed of their land, deprived daily of their labor with exceedingly inadequate compensation and are being reduced to a level worse than serfs. And the business of any government, representative of the theory and practice of imperialism and the deeply rooted convictions of the dominant class in South Africa, is to maintain the status quo.135
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