From his preliminary materialist analysis, Yergan concluded by confessing the basic impropriety of the work he had been conducting on the grounds that it did not meet the urgent demands of the social and political situation. Instead, the type of cooperation fostered by institutions like the YMCA and the Student Christian Association not only refused to challenge the wrongs of South Africa but also, by its silence, showed complicity, in effect allying itself with the state’s repressive apparatus and leaving him with no other alternative but disengagement:
It therefore seems to me that any organization, movement or institution at work among the natives in South Africa, is necessarily political. Under the circumstances there can hardly be any such thing as practical neutrality. In practice, to varying degrees, of course, most such organizations, institutions, etc., owe their existence to the same forces and policy from which South African governments spring, and therefore, by any real test or analysis, more or less reflect towards native Africans the fundamental political and economic point of view of those who control South Africa.
For me, an alien in South Africa, to be identified with those who constitute the exception and do not reflect the governing South African point of view, would be clearly impossible. This I know from my observation and I see no other conclusion but that I must take the only course which seems to follow.
The service which I could now render to Africans would be considered by government to be of a political nature which it is hardly possible for a South African government, or those institutions under its control, at work in African life, to approve. It, therefore, seems to me that I am not justified in running the risk of possibly embarrassing the International Committee by that course of action in South Africa which I firmly believe to be right and in the interest of the good life for Africans as well as the mass of non-ruling Europeans in that country.136
On the face of it, Yergan had completed a momentous ideological transformation. Having seen the light about the classist and racist South African system, he had outgrown the limited, collaborative neutralism of YMCA work. There was a contrary interpretation of his action, however, this time from Oswin Bull, a Y official instrumental in allowing Yergan to initiate his mission. Bull had had ample opportunities to observe Max closely over the years. Bull conveyed his own reading to the New York office, endeavoring to explain Yergan’s behavior in a rather different context, as he candidly confided:
No doubt this opinion is due mainly to the breakdown of Yergan in his private life. There can be no doubt that the facts of this are more widely known among the Africans than we realise. They will say nothing about it, unless asked point blank, and probably very little even then, but many must know. For instance, for a long time Thamae, who was Yergan’s secretary, was receiving letters from Geneva every week addressed to him, but he was instructed not on any account to open them but to hand them over at once to M.Y. for whom they were intended. That sort of thing does not remain hid even though the man concerned says nothing about it at the time.
I want to stress also the sense of urgency of taking definite action. Our African leaders and the sympathetic White people have been living for so many years on the promises about the development of the Training Scheme and Yergan has done nothing to set it forward, that they are growing sceptical; while at the same time the need for the services of trained Africans is greater than ever. If things had not gone wrong we should have had several trained workers in the field by now and the value of their work would have been demonstrated convincingly.
Yergan himself is a very pathetic figure and my heart is very sore for him. He is taking the line that the basis of the service which he can render must be much more radical than is possible in our conditions, that work under your and our auspices is only palliative and not really Christian. Consequently he has felt compelled to resign. At the same time he talks guardedly to me about expecting to be coming back to work here, under auspices unspecified. As a matter of fact it is most unlikely that the Government will let him into the country again once he has gone. I do not know exactly how much they are aware of it, but his close relations with Communist leaders out here are known, as also his visit to Russia prior to his return last year. I am astonished that he is, apparently, under the impression that he is going to be able to come and go as he likes.
As for Mrs. Yergan, who has done a really first-rate piece of work here, our hearts are very sore. We may be reading the situation wrongly but we anticipate a separation when they get back home. She carries with her the very deep sympathy of those who know anything about the situation in her home, and she has shown a fine dignity through all her bitter experience.
We have been sitting on the top of some very explosive material for some years now and it is God’s mercy that we have not been sent sky-high, work and all.137
Unanswered questions remain after one reads Bull’s analysis of the impasse. While the record provides ample justification for the letter of the charges leveled against Yergan, the justification for their spirit is not so evident.
Visit to the Soviet Union
Clearly Bull alluded to the Yergan-Datta “affair” and Yergan’s visit to the USSR to make his point. If the Hertzog Bills and the All African Convention represented two-thirds of the reason for Yergan to resign from the Y, certainly the trip to the Soviet Union completed the circle. Almost no detailed data are currently available on the trip. Like so many other things in Yergan’s life, its timing is in dispute. Colin Bundy, following the lead of the mature Govan Mbeki, has suggested that it took place during 1934. Although this is plausible, the theory seems to rely most heavily upon Mbeki’s own fragile memory of an event from five decades ago that even then would probably have been deeply shrouded in secrecy. He could certainly be forgiven if he was off by a year or two. At this writing there is no paper trail corroborating this hypothetical voyage. By contrast, there survive certain cryptic but much richer references to a trip taken during the months immediately preceding a return to the field in 1935–1936. While no diary or journal references to the trip are found among the documents in Yergan’s Howard University papers, fragmentary written impressions make at least some reconstruction possible. These were latter-day reflections prepared with a very different purpose and for an inquisitional audience. In one instance, for example, Yergan reconstructed this twenty-year-old encounter with a Soviet official:
In the winter of 1936, while living in South Africa, I visited the Soviet Union as a tourist. In a conversation with a Russian official, Mr. Lozovsky, I was naively amazed at his detailed grasp of facts about social and educational conditions in Rhodesia and the Union of South Africa. Although he had probably never visited these countries, he talked about persons in Africa, both European and African, as though he had conversed with them the day before. He really interested me when he described vividly and accurately the condition of the road between Thabanchu, in the Orange Free State, and Maseru, capital of Basutoland. His command of details was astounding.138
However much time Yergan spent with the man many foreign friends of the Soviet Union knew as “A. Lozovsky” or “Lozovskii,” the man was also known as Solomon Abramovich Dridzo (1878–1952). Comrade Dridzo-Lozovskii was in charge of the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU), the policymaking body for the trade union arm of the Communist International. He functioned as something akin to an official greeter for many foreign delegations touring the USSR.
The Robesons and/or Frieda Neugebauer may have had a hand in Yergan’s Soviet sojourn. In 1931 he wrote of conversations with people who had toured the Soviet and had tried, without success, to secure a travel permit. That year he traveled to France with Dr. John Hope (a later visitor to the Soviet Union). By then Yergan had met Frieda Neugebauer, who was familiar with the USSR and who “spoke of Litvinov.”139
About the same time, Yergan and Mbeki rekindled their acquaintance, transforming it into a full-blown mentor relation. Mbeki became more aware of Yergan and the change he was undergoing as Max
became more vocal about socialism and the need for fundamental social change in South Africa. Yet, unless Mbeki was privy to Yergan testimony that no other of his confidants heard, there is no proof that Max visited the USSR in l934. This would seem much too momentous an event for him to have soft-pedaled it and should have surfaced amid a copious corpus of private and professional tricontinental letters. No such missive has so surfaced. But a 1934 trip was by no measure either implausible or impossible. Consequently, it appears that either Bundy or Mbeki, or both, were slightly mistaken about the chronology. However, they are certainly accurate about Yergan’s sensibility, as he had probably been preparing himself mentally years before the actual Soviet trip became a reality.140
Such confusion is understandable. Yergan did make a dizzying series of trips in 1933, 1934, and 1935, any one of which could have led to the USSR. The one most worth considering occurred when Yergan sailed for New York City, arriving there during November 1935. His YMCA record makes it seem that Max kept close to New York through late February, lingering long enough to attend the inaugural meeting of the National Negro Congress. On March 1, Yergan shipped out of New York, arriving back in South Africa by late April. It must have been in this two-month period that he explored the USSR.
All of Yergan’s previous voyages to South Africa had taken two to three weeks. Even in the roughest weather, in the days of steam, a fortnight was commonly sufficient for a traveler to reach Cape Town. On no account would two months be required. Anywhere from two weeks to a month are unaccounted for, and within that time a European, and specifically Soviet, excursion would have been a distinct possibility for Yergan. In his later elliptical allusion to the trip, he pointed out that he made it in winter 1936.
Leading the small quantity of “evidence” about the tour is the hearsay testimony of journalist Dorothy Gilliam, who provided her perspective on Yergan’s USSR trip, seen from a special vantage point. Her reconstruction took shape in the England flat of the Robesons in 1937 in this flashback:
Among the blacks who came to see the Robesons in London in 1937 were William Patterson, their old friend, whom Essie had met on her trip to Africa a year earlier, and Max Yergan. Yergan, who was destined to have a long, close and ultimately explosive association with the Robesons, had been an official of the Coloured YMCA in South Africa. Shortly after Essie’s visit he resigned that post because he found it “too conservative” and “opposed to the forces of peace and brotherhood.” He returned to New York by way of Moscow, where Patterson said he introduced him to Stalin and Molotov.141
Back in South Africa in the concluding days of April, Yergan wrote Ralph Bunche, briefly mentioning a few subjects that were of concern to him. One was the current situation in South Africa, which he viewed somewhat dismally. Another concerned what appears to have been a recent excursion:
My visit to the Soviet Union was in every respect revealing and infinitely more than I could possibly have thought of before I left America. I regard it as the greatest experience of my life so far as the results of travel are concerned.142
However much he intended to act tight-lipped about this trip, in point of fact Yergan proved quite unable to contain his exhilaration. How else could Oswin Bull have learned about his tour? Even had Yergan not told him, a mutual acquaintance would have. If so, the revelation was less a product of indiscretion than of ebullient naiveté. Other letters from the time betray his pro-Soviet obsession.
If Yergan kept a diary or date book of his Russian tour, it apparently has not survived. It would have been uncharacteristic for Max not to have done so, particularly about such an inspiriting and singularly moving personal travel experience. Moreover, in an era in which letter writing and journal jottings were prized as marks of civilization, he was the type to keep such a record.
Many observers have suggested that if bronzed skin were not the norm in Moscow and environs during the 1930s, Black folk there were not as a rule objects of the scorn so familiar to residents of most southern localities and several northern sites in their natal United States. In outlying areas, whose inhabitants were often olive hued, some Black Americans cited encountering kindred complexions. This absence of overtly racial discrimination, coupled with a cheerful curiosity about the coloring and culture of these atypical Americans, who, most Russians knew, had suffered privation in their homeland, convinced many impressionable sojourners that they had seen the racial future.
Paul Robeson, a notably vocal exponent of this viewpoint, was in no sense alone as an African-American impressed by Soviet experience. Scores of Negro professionals saw Russia in these years, vast numbers of whom neither professed nor embraced socialism but were hard pressed to ignore the power of such race-neutral imagery. Few Black tourists left the Kremlin unmoved. This is palpable between the lines in Yergan’s correspondence with Negro National Congress (NNC) national secretary John P. Davis, whom Yergan met before and during the NNC and with whom an intense working relationship developed very shortly thereafter. Davis was, in early 1936, a friend of the Soviet Union. Yergan impressed him. In January, a few scant weeks before the NNC, Davis invited him to the gathering, reserving a prominent speaker’s spot for him on the program.
In the mid-1920s, despite diminutive numbers, Moscow’s African-Americans functioned as an expatriate community. Many had some relationship to the Communist Party, though by no means were all “politicals”; one, Emma Harris, the so-called Mammy of Moscow, had actually arrived in tsarist times—for which she was nearly executed after the October revolution. But Harry Haywood [Hall], his brother Otto Huiswoud [Hall], Oliver Golden, Lovett Fort-Whiteman, and Jamaica-born author Claude McKay all spent time in the Kremlin’s shadow. Many of these Black Americans forged friendships with African and Afro-Caribbean militants, typically politicals studying at KUTVU (Universitet Trudyashchiysya Vostoka Imeni Stalina, or the University of the Toilers of the East Named for Stalin). By the mid-1930s this cohort also included émigrés like Frank Goode, brother of Eslanda Goode Robe-son, engineers Robert Robinson and Richard Williams, reporter Homer Smith, and agronomist George Tynes. Some, like Smith, Haywood, Harris, and Coretta Arli-Titz, married Russian spouses. Interwar-era African-American visitors were directed to these folks. They would share the arcane lore of Blacks in Russia, beginning with the great author Alexander Pushkin, telling tales little heard outside the country. However brief his sojourn, Max would have brought back unusual and surprising information from Moscow, facts to give even ardently anti-Soviet listeners pause. Consequently, even while living in the frightful face of Stalin’s bloody purges, several Black visitors found it hypocritical to be shocked at the cruel carnage around them, as neighbors disappeared, given what might await them at home. This may have been on Yergan’s mind when he met Essie Robeson after his Soviet journey.
In 1936, Eslanda Robeson toured Africa, camping down south for several weeks, during which time she and son “Pauli” were guests of Yergan and Dr. Roseberry Bokwe, whose wedding they planned to attend. Yergan and Essie surely exchanged their impressions of the Soviet Union. Each knew people who had been to the USSR, some of whom had met Yergan in London and some of whom Max may have met through Neugebauer and other acquaintances. In 1931, for example, U.S. cadre Eugene Dennis became a Comintern rep in South Africa, where he functioned under a nom de guerre but was revealed by name to local Communist Party officials like Edwin Mofutsanyana, who knew Yergan in this time.143 It is not known whether Max knew Gene Dennis. Finally, Paul Robeson had also traveled to the Soviet Union, and Yergan had to know this well. Essie’s trip held clues to Max’s evolving state of mind.
Eslanda Robeson’s South African Sojourn
Late in 1936, Eslanda Cardozo Goode Robeson, along with her adolescent son, Paul Junior (aka “Pauli”), sailed to South Africa as part of a broader personal fact-finding mission that was also related to her field research in pursuit of a doctorate in cultural anthropology at the renowned London School of Economics. Reaching Port Elizabeth on June 19, she and Pauli
were met by Max and R. T. Bokwe, a recent Edinburgh medical graduate. Almost every day of the next two weeks, Essie and Max spent days sightseeing, shopping, and communicating about Africa and the world, in meetings of the minds uniting Susie Yergan, Z. K. and Frieda Matthews, Dr. James Moroka, Seretse Khama, and others.
Though Essie had heard about Yergan, largely from her spouse, “Big Paul,” she had not herself met him. From the start she, Pauli, and, in her words, “guardian angel” Yergan got on well. Yergan and Dr. Bokwe guided Essie and Pauli through Port Elizabeth, lunched with them at the adjacent African “location” of New Brighton, and went on to Grahamstown and to Alice, site of Fort Hare, where Essie was reacquainted with “Zack” Matthews, his wife Frieda, and their children, alternating between them and the Yergan clan for accommodation and spirited evening conversation. Much of the driving, upwards of two thousand miles, was done by Max in what he rather uncharitably described as his “aged Dodge.”
Yergan took pains to show Essie the full range of South African reality, emphasizing the brutal irony with which Africans purchased a bag of mealies for their own consumption for five times the price the identical quantity would fetch from Whites for cattle feed. Repeatedly she saw not only the effects of racial oppression but also how Africans had to pay for the “privilege” of segregation.
After the daylight sights and sounds of countryside and city, contrasting the hustle and bustle of European Johannesburg and Bloemfontein with the Native townships upon whose labor the city dwellers fed, the nocturnal hours were taken up with discussing prospective solutions to the problems that so fully and sadly occupied their waking hours—solutions not only for Africa but also for the wider, certifiably wilder world outside.
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