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African Initiatives

If it be granted that either the white man or the black man must rule, and that joint action for the common weal, except upon specified and restricted lines, is not possible, and the question is then asked as to which race ought to rule, no white person having a knowledge of the subject would feel any hesitation in answering. Cecil Rhodes, then Premier of the Cape Colony, said: "I will lay down my own policy on this native question. Either you receive them on an equal footing as citizens, or call them a subject race. Well, I have made up my mind…that we have to treat the natives, where they are in a state of barbarism, in a different way from ourselves. We are to be lords over them…The native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise." Contributing his share to the deluge of demeaning racist insults, General Smuts said: "natives have the simplest minds, understand only simple ideas or ideals, and are almost animal-like in the simplicity of their minds and ways… They are different not only in colour but in minds and in political capacity, and their political institutions should be different, while always proceeding on the basis of self-government."

Bearing in mind numerical disparity, it was undeniable that the unfettered enfranchisement of the natives would involve government by the natives, and such instances of native rule as Hayti and Liberia can scarcely recommend themselves to White people of the day as a political ideal for South Africa. No fertility of invention could devise educational, pecuniary, or any other stipulations to avert such a result in the long run, if the qualifications for the franchise were fairly applied, alike to white and black aspirants. No compromise under such conditions would be possible; the natives would rule. It is, therefore, obvious, if that situation is to be averted, that it must be specifically declared that the natives were a subject race.

The final quarter of the nineteenth century was marked also by the rise of new forms of political and religious organization as blacks struggled to attain some degree of autonomy in a world that was rapidly becoming colonized. Because the right to vote was based on ownership of property rather than on race in the Cape, blacks could participate in electoral politics, and this they did in increasing numbers in the 1870s and the 1880s, especially in the towns. In 1879 Africans in the eastern Cape formed the Native Educational Association (NEA), the purpose of which was to promote "the improvement and elevation of the native races." This was followed by the establishment of the more overtly political Imbumba Yama Nyama (literally, "hard, solid sinew"), formed in 1882 in Port Elizabeth, which sought to fight for "national rights" for Africans.

In 1884 John Tengo Jabavu, a mission-educated teacher and vice president of the NEA, founded his own newspaper, Imvo Zabantsundu (Native Opinion). Jabavu used the newspaper as a forum through which to express African grievances about the pass laws; "location" regulations; the unequal administration of justice; and what were considered "anti-native" laws, such as the one passed in 1887 by the Cape Parliament at Rhodes's behest that raised the property qualification for voters and struck 20,000 Africans off the rolls. Through these organizations and newspapers, and others like them established in the late nineteenth century, Africans protested their unequal treatment, pointing out in particular contradictions between the theory and practice of British colonialism. They called for the eradication of discrimination and for the incorporation of Africans into colonial society on an equal basis with Europeans. By the end of the nineteenth century, after property qualifications had again been raised in 1892, there were only about 8,000 Africans on the Cape's voting roll.

Africans sought to bypass what they considered the discriminatory practices of the established Christian churches (which often preached to segregated audiences and seldom promoted Africans within their ranks) by founding separate organizations of their own. Starting in 1884 with Nehemiah Tile, a Thembu (Tembu) Methodist preacher from the eastern Cape who left the Methodists and established the Tembu National Church, Africans built their own churches throughout South Africa. Many of these churches were termed "Ethiopian" by their founders, on the basis of the biblical prophecy "that Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands to God," and because for centuries an African-run independent Christian church had existed in Ethiopia.

A strong influence on these churches in the 1890s and the early 1900s was the United States-based African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), which sent missionaries to South Africa and trained many blacks from South Africa at its own institutions in the United States. Up to 1886 the white and colored ministers in the Wesleyan Church had met together in their district meetings. In that year the color line was drawn and each side was required to meet apart from the other; yet the colored brethren were compelled to have a white chairman and secretary. The Ethiopian Clmrcb was organized by Rev. M. M. Mokone with about fifty members in Pretoria, on Sunday, November 20, 1892. At the third session of the Ethiopian Conference, held in Pretoria, March 17, 1896, it was resolved to unite with the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Members of these independent churches called not so much for the elimination of racial discrimination and inequality as for an "Africa for the Africans," that is, a country ruled by blacks.

Undoubtedly the intervention of the Americans endowed the movement at the beginning with a political as well as a religious significance, and the cry of "Africa for the Africans" was disseminated among the natives. Moreover, it is alleged that the Ethiopian Church, as directed by its prototype in America, excluded any white man from the fold. Both these provisions are distinctly hostile to the white man; the first, if it means anything, suggesting his expulsion or annihilation. It is impossible to say how far these insidious suggestions may have penetrated among the natives, because their intercourse is carried on with extraordinary secrecy; but in the face of the decreasing power of the chiefs, and the breaking down of the barriers that have separated the various tribes, any attempt in the direction of unifying native thought and possibly native action was deprecated by the Whites.