Max Yergan

by Anthony, David Henry, III;

  The world war brought with it an uneasy truce between managers and workers. Yet postwar renewal of trade union activity among Whites, and unprecedented levels of Nonwhite involvement in politics and in campaigns to reduce wage discrimination fueled major incidents featuring civil disobedience. Drawing some inspiration from Gandhi’s passive resistance endeavor of 1906–1913 and supported, in theory, by a few influential White spokesmen of the new International Socialist League, African laborers led several strikes challenging discriminatory pay and unfair working conditions.

  Black sanitation workers laid down their tools in 1918. That year the women’s section of the Native National Congress, led by Charlotte Manye Maxeke, threatened antipass action, protesting extension of the “influx control” system to African women.8 A Black proletarian landmark was achieved in 1919, with the pathbreaking appearance of the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU), founded by Clements Kadalie, a Nyasaland-born clerk. A pioneer labor combination in subSaharan Africa, the ICU led a series of job actions on behalf of African miners. By 1920, police brutally put down one such African mine strike. During the next two years, two African communities, the Israelites (1921) and the Bondelswarts (1922), suffered severe state violence. This level of social strife greeted Yergan on arrival.

  Max Yergan arrived in South Africa on January 2, 1922, together with his spouse, Susie Wiseman, and their son, Frederick. They were met at the Cape Town wharf by Oswin Boys Bull, head of the South African YMCA, and African Methodist Episcopal Church bishop William Tecumseh Vernon. This welcoming party exemplified the multiple worlds into which the Yergan family had entered. Bull, Yergan’s supervisor, represented the largely segregated YMCA, with its English and Afrikaner subdivisions, while Vernon spiritually bridged the African masses and the literate “school people” who made up an elite intellectual stratum. The two overlapped in their connections to the missionary and political establishments.

  By February, Yergan’s coming had been announced in The Intercollegian. In March he told J. E. Moorland that after “several conferences with the South African Student Christian Association,” he had been asked to act as secretary for work in “native and Coloured institutions.” The job required extensive travel, and he embarked upon his first journey, in the Eastern Cape, on March 4. This trip took him as far east as Transkei and introduced him to the Native Affairs Commission. While Susie and Frederick stayed behind in Woodstock in Cape Town, Yergan was on his way in his challenging, largely unknown new field.

  Yergan’s trekking is documented well enough to reveal the similarities between his life as a traveling secretary in America’s Southwest and his travels in South Africa’s rugged conditions of unpaved roads that required resort to lorries, horses, and a bevy of beast-borne conveyances. Letters hint at hitchhiking and walking, but he probably also relied on ox-drawn carts and wagons, along with the more luxurious but not always available or fully reliable motorcars. There is no hint, however, of how often he may have become stranded or even passed up by unfeeling or resentful observers. This scenario is rarely described in any detail in his correspondence or annual reports but can be inferred from photographs taken by himself and colleagues during the inter-war era.

  The Yergans arrived against the backdrop of one of the meanest episodes of industrial action in South African history, the mine strike called the “Rand Revolt.” Covered extensively in local newspapers, this fierce combat among labor, capital, and the state profoundly impressed South Africa’s residents and sojourners alike. Johannesburg-based ABCFM missionary Frederick Bridgman captured the drama of the moment in a letter to a Boston colleague:

  Last week the whites on every Transvaal coal mine went on strike. This morning the 24,000 whites on the Rand’s sixty miles of gold mines went out. This throws about 200,000 natives into enforced idleness. As these natives are so far removed from home, they cannot be let loose on the community, so they must be kept in the compounds and be fed by the mine owners, so this first week of the strike the natives will cost the mines £200,000, with nothing produced to show for it. The outlook is most serious. We shall be fortunate if industrial strife does not drive us into civil war.9

  Starting the week the Yergans arrived in South Africa, the Rand strike framed their vision of what the country faced in the economic, social, and cultural spheres. While Max and his family searched for adequate accommodations, headlines detailing the industrial action were unavoidable. For the next two months white mine labor and their managers faced off in ferocious daily battles frequently marked by bloodshed. Africans were caught in the middle, subject to attacks from both labor and the state. In mid-March, Bridgman brought his stateside office up to date, this time focusing on an understudied dimension of the largely white job action, its effect on Africans. Querying, “But what of the Natives, especially the 300,000 [total African workers] here on the Rand?” he repeated his earlier depiction of a now 180,000 Non-white mine workers as enduring “enforced idleness,” this time amplifying the problem by underlining the words. Then Bridgman asked,

  How have they behaved? The testimony of White Johannesburg is that all natives have conducted themselves in a most exemplary manner. They have suffered many losses and hardships from the strike, but they have kept aloof from the quarrel, have been patient and law abiding to a degree. Even when some of them were wantonly set upon and killed, yet the natives though deeply stirred and though they had it in their power to wipe out the entire white population, still they curbed their promptings for revenge. But the blacks have had another ugly revelation of the savagery of which the whites are capable. An object lesson which will bear horrid fruit some day, even as the four or five outbursts of the “superior race” since we came to Johannesburg have left a deplorable impression on native mind and character.10

  Bridgman’s dire prediction was no exaggeration. It was echoed in the initial report Yergan filed following his first year in-country. In a reflective memo he wrote home,

  In the gold mining industry it had become uneconomic for some of the mines to work on the basis of pay which white miners had drawn since the early days of the war when they took advantage of the situation to press and achieve their demands. Early in 1922 the mine owners resolved to remedy the situation by two methods: (1) to utilize more black workers (they are hired cheaper) for semi-skilled positions; and (2) ultimately to reduce the pay of whites. One can appreciate the fear of loss of work and pay on the part of white workers (though it was fairly clear that those laid off, if any, would be absorbed in other branches, and though their pay, the highest in the world for labor, could stand reduction, in fairness). Well, the white miners went out on strike, the nearly 200,000 Natives remaining at work. The strike led to open rebellion and finally to what has been termed “the revolution.” For remaining at their posts Native workers were fired upon by whites. For weeks this thing dragged on. At a meeting of strikers the government was repudiated and a declaration for its overthrow and the substitution of a republic carried. Representatives of the police, mine officials, and citizens were fired upon. It was war. Government troops were called, martial law declared and steps taken to quell the rebellion. Here are the results: Government troops called out: 19,924; government troops killed: 61; wounded: 199. On the other side and including peaceful citizens who had the misfortune to get shot during the operations, 138 were killed and 287 wounded. 31 Natives were killed and 67 wounded. Total casualties 783!! Sounds like war doesn’t it?11

  Clearly sympathetic with the African majority, Yergan was not yet fully supportive of militant labor when it confronted agents of the state and the Chamber of Mines. An extension of his view toward labor in general, this attitude was informed chiefly by the nonantagonistic stance of Washingtonian accommodation. A cardinal rule in “racial adjustment” strategy, this conservative cautiousness helped define Yergan early on.

  African YMCA Work in South Africa

  It would be difficult to overestimate the magnitude of the task that lay before Max Ye
rgan. Although South Africa had been a site of YMCA branch work since 1865 when Andrew Murray founded the first Cape Town association, little attention was given to extending the movement to the majority of indigenes spread across the length and breadth of the countryside and swarming in steady streams into the urban areas, Johannesburg on the Great Gold Reef of the Rand chief among them.

  At its outset the YMCA, while imported from England, was dominated by Afrikaners. For them the struggle for control over their own institutions with the Anglophone settlers and government functionaries who ruled over them was almost as immediate and intense as had been their competition with the Africans who had preceded them in peopling South Africa’s lengthy, lavish, frequently lush landscape. Patterns of informal and formal racial exclusion toward Nonwhites practiced by both Afrikaans and English speakers only served to further complicate the growth of YMCAs among the nation’s Black and Coloured communities.

  Although there are isolated references to YMCA-type activity among non-Europeans in South Africa during the nineteenth century (including an indeterminate number of associations in Basutoland), these are sporadic and rare. Not until the much acclaimed 1896 world tour of Donald Fraser and Luther Deloraine Wishard heralding formation of the World Student Christian Federation did this alter, and then only haltingly. Wishard, an American, and Fraser, a Scot, included in their South African stops the University of Stellenbosch near Cape Town and the premier African training facility, Lovedale Institute in Alice in the Eastern Cape, thereby setting the stage for a racially separate “Bantu” or “Native,” i.e., Nonwhite, Student Christian Association section. Later Fraser wrote John Mott,

  The most serious problem before the Executive will be the position of Associations in Kaffir institutions. The feeling of a great separation between these Kaf[f]ir students and the Whites naturally and most reasonably exists. I say this as a missionary and advocate of native rights. Most of the Kaf[f]ir students were themselves, a few years ago, savages, dressed with nothing but red clay and a piece of string. The intellectual and social gulf that must therefore separate them for a generation or two is necessary. There is yet little affinity of thought and ambition between the two races. The problems of the two types of institutions are poles apart—at least in the kind, and in the methods of solution. The position of the Kaf[f]ir is wholly different from that of an Asiatic. I give this as my mature judgment. After a close inspection of both classes, I think that the missionaries and certainly all the students, will agree with me. But the Kaf[f]ir field is a great and almost untouched one.12

  Fraser went on to inform Mott that out of the five or six institutions he visited, he was only able to do organizing in two. Though he did not name them, he had in mind Presbyterian Lovedale and the Wesleyan-run Healdtown. What impressed Fraser was the size of the half-dozen Native schools he saw, which each had “a much larger population than most of the White colleges.”13 He omitted dozens.

  The problem Fraser described remained largely unaddressed until a decade later when John Mott, head of the YMCA, and his English colleague, Ruth Rouse, both leaders of the WSCF, toured South Africa from April through June 1906.14 During the visit Mott held special meetings at Lovedale where he urged White SCA colleagues to address the problem of association work among Africans. Mott had been invited annually since 1898 to the only field he had not visited. By June he had seen, among other places, Cape Town, Stellenbosch, Paarl, Wellington, Grahamstown, Lovedale, Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Pietermaritzburg, and Durban.15

  In his chronicle of the journey Mott noted that “the claims of the native African students naturally commanded our attention.” The Mott-Rouse delegation visited three African institutions, Lovedale being the most significant. Healdtown sent some fifty souls to a gathering of Lovedale’s 600-strong student body. In two days of revival meetings, “150 African students indicated their desire and purpose to accept Christ as their Saviou[r] and Lord,” some fifty-seven from Healdtown and Lovedale declaring willingness to become “ministers, evangelists, catechists and teachers.”16 On the basis of the meetings and conferences held with missionaries, a decision was made to “extend the Student Movement to the native colleges and schools of South Africa.” The aim was to send a secretary in order to undertake this work “in the not too distant future.” Arguing that “Africa can never be evangelized by white men alone or chiefly,” Mott contended that key to this effort was “native Christian agency.”17

  Mott’s visit was memorable for the many African converts attending it, some witnesses crediting it with changing their lives. In his first year Max Yergan wrote,

  In reference to the visit you and Mrs. Mott made to South Africa in 1906, I am sure you will be interested in learning that among the most helpful and dependable native African friends I have is one Mr. Njokwene, instructor at Healdtown Institute, Fort Beaufort, South Africa, and vice-president of the Native Teacher’s Association of the Cape Colony. He is one of those men one can never forget, being more than six feet tall and having a voice equally as commanding as his height. His personality is one which makes a favorable impression upon almost any one. When I asked him, a few days ago, when he acquired his deep interest in the religious life of students, he informed me that it was during a visit which you made to his institution during your visit to South Africa, at which time he was a student.18

  The person ultimately chosen to fulfill Mott’s wish was Oswin Boys Bull, a Cambridge graduate with Canadian experience, sent out in 1906 following tours of several historically Black colleges in the United States. By early 1908, after staying in Natal during Christmastide, Bull wrote Mott of his frustrations in the new field:

  Something must be done to counteract the ignorant and unreasoning prejudice against missionary work that is almost universal in this Colony. I was prepared for something bad, but it is far worse than I had expected. The whole question of the relation of the white and black races is, as you know, the problem above all others in Natal, and with no one in the country worthy of being considered to be a statesman, and this strong prejudice in addition, the prospects are not exactly promising. I doubt if the world contains a more intricate or difficult problem, but we ought to be able to make a valuable contribution towards its solution.19

  Nominated as general secretary, Bull soon realized the magnitude of the task before him. By 1915, actively searching for an African traveling secretary, Bull acted upon unanimous recommendations of missionaries across the Eastern Cape when he selected the popular Xhosa-speaking journalist, evangelist, and composer, John Knox Bokwe (1855–1922). Bokwe was not merely a subject of history; he was history. A spokesman for his people, he was among the second generation of converts to Christianity. When he practiced composition he paid homage to revered 1815 Xhosa convert and choral master Chief Ntsikana (Sicana) Gaba. Already a sexagenarian when he began, Bokwe was a volunteer escort for Bull on his tour in 1915 and worked for him in a formal capacity from 1916 through 1920, when forced to retire for health reasons.

  In South Africa Yergan projected himself as an author, speaker, and organizer. Here the African-American was in every sense a pioneer, bending and breaking the color barrier. Yergan’s nascent writing career flourished within YMCA-affiliated print media both locally and internationally. These aptly mirrored his growth as a critical commentator on Christian-dominated South Africa—its proud peoples and their profound range of problems.

  In February 1922 The Intercollegian told readers of Yergan’s South African mission.20 In the same month he let his American associates know his ideas about labor issues facing African miners and efforts at improvement by union organizing and protest:

  The most interesting and significant development in the life of the African workers has been what is called the “ICU,” the Industrial and Commercial Union. This is a sort of inclusive trades union which has been developed to a remarkable degree by an African of Nyasaland, Mr. Clements Kadalie. In spite of many difficulties, he has achieved something worthwhile and his wo
rk marks the beginning of organization among African workers. I do not agree with all of his methods, and I certainly do not countenance all of his utterances but I do give him credit for having dared and partly succeeded in a field of great need and opportunity.21

  In April, AME bishop Vernon joined the chorus of print voices welcoming Max to South Africa. Praising Yergan’s selection as a triumph of liberal enlightenment supporting the “uplift” of “the native and colored people of South Africa,” Vernon declared that “this courageous and humanitarian element has opened up a new avenue of progress, which can be a means of social regeneration for our people so long in need of such opportunity and aid. God is moving in the hearts of men.” Writing to the AME membership, he continued:

  He will study the field, plan and direct this new movement for the betterment of native and colored men. The Young Men’s Christian Association of America, through him, will bless our brethren here. All honor to them! We welcome this reenforcement. All these forces mentioned, with kindred agencies, will contribute their share in accelerating the coming of a new and necessary vision for Africa’s sons, and bring to them the correct and just estimate of their relation and duty to their fellow men and to God. When this larger day comes, our spirits will have joined the silent muster roll beyond this life’s hour. What matters it? The price we pay in money, sacrifice, hardship and even death, will be small when compared with the returns in souls unfettered, in manhood and womanhood redeemed.22