LAUGHTER AND IDENTITY: A SOCIAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICAN HUMOR, 1910-1961 By Robin Kincaid Crigler A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of History—Doctor of Philosophy 2021 ABSTRACT LAUGHTER AND IDENTITY: A SOCIAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICAN HUMOR, 1910-1961 By Robin Kincaid Crigler The period between South Africa’s unification in 1910 and its departure from the British Commonwealth in 1961 was a momentous period of social change whereby South Africans of diverse racial, cultural and linguistic backgrounds strove with varying degrees of success to realize their aspirations. As the promise of an expanded liberal order turned to the brutal repression of apartheid’s first decade, this study argues that humor served as a primary means through which writers, performers and audiences processed the events of this era. Based on the contention that humor and laughter are intimately related to identity, this study shows both how these phenomena reveal Union-era South Africa’s contested social boundaries, and how a particular cohort of humorists across South Africa’s racial divide contributed to humor traditions that remain integral to South African national identity today. Starting with a comprehensive literature review and an examination of South African humor traditions pre-1910, this dissertation analyzes the work of the journalist-playwright Stephen Black as he sought to engage South African social ills, first through stage comedy and then through a pioneering tabloid newspaper, The Sjambok. Drawing on an array of both familiar and neglected sources, archival and oral, it then reconstructs the careers of humorists whose work was influenced by that of Black, a cohort that includes R. R. R. Dhlomo, H. I. E. Dhlomo, Herman Charles Bosman, Cecil Wightman, and Casey Motsisi. This dissertation is one of the most extensive investigations into South African humor undertaken to date, and has significant consequences for the historiography of South African literature and thought, the history of South Africa’s diasporic links, and postcolonial studies. A brief epilogue challenges scholars to further deepen their understanding of humor history at a time when debates over it loom ever larger in contemporary South African cultural discourse. Copyright by ROBIN KINCAID CRIGLER 2021 For Stephen, who showed me where the bodies were buried. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My journey towards this dissertation began with a nine-hour drive north and west from my home in Virginia, over the mountains. I forked west at the billboard fever-dream of Breezewood, Pennsylvania—following that evocative sign to “Ohio and West”—along the narrow and foreboding Pennsylvania Turnpike. After hundreds of miles of sharp turns and dark woods, I breathed a sigh of relief when, in Ohio, the road became wide, flat, and yardstick-straight. Finally I turned north on US-23, and stopped, late on the second day, at a rest area in Monroe County, Michigan. It was there that I paused for the first time on the ground in that vast, flat state which for me was the antechamber to a very different land, South Africa, almost nine thousand miles away. Even though I had never been, it had occupied my thoughts and dreams for years. I remember the surreality of that moment. How could here be a gateway to there? How could I uproot my whole life for the love of somewhere I had never been? But it was, and unbelievably so. At Michigan State I benefitted from the support and mentorship of brilliant and caring professors who broadened my understanding of the past and shepherded my inchoate enthusiasm first towards a topic area, then towards a topic, and then towards a dissertation. In particular I owe thanks to Glenn Chambers, Laura Fair, Jamie Monson, Stephen Rachman, and Lewis Siegelbaum for widening my understanding of the world and challenging me to refine my analytical and interpretive skills. I am especially indebted to Nwando Achebe for helping me grapple with my own positionality as a student of the African past and pointing me toward ways to infuse that understanding into my methods and pedagogy. As far as pedagogy goes, I am also grateful to the professors for whom I worked as a teaching vi assistant: Roger Bresnahan, Tibebe Eshete, Sidney X. Lu, Malcolm Magee, Javier Pescador, Ronen Steinberg, and David Wiley. In working with them, often in fields far removed from what I imagined as my comfort zone, I came to understand the connections between my work and theirs, expanding my perspective in new and exciting ways. I also benefitted from the essential work of the History Department and African Studies Center’s staff and faculty leadership—Ann Biersteker, Jennifer Desloover, Lisa Fruge, Elyse Hansen, Lisa Fine, Karrin Hanshew, Walter Hawthorne, and Lisa Hinds, among others. My introduction to the beauty and intricacy of the Zulu language was facilitated by Galen Sibanda and Thokozani Langeni, alongside Breana Brill and Clarence George III. Through Michigan State I also benefitted from a number of opportunities for funding and enrichment, including three U.S. Department of Education Foreign Language and Area Studies (F.L.A.S.) Fellowships, History Department and Graduate School conference and summer travel grants, a U.S. Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (D.D.R.A.) grant, the Jeff Rooney Paper Prize, and the Irene Steindler Award. I am also grateful to the M.S.U. Libraries and in particular the Africana Librarian Jessica Achberger Martin, for supporting my project and affording me the chance to work with her and Russell Stevenson on an exciting and intellectually stimulating internship in 2017-2018. Finally, I would also like to thank the many undergraduate students I have had the pleasure to teach over the past six years, whose insightful comments and interest in history— including in my own work—have both challenged and encouraged me. I could not imagine completing my Ph. D. at Michigan State without the extraordinary fellow graduate students with whom I learned—and from whom I learned even more. They include Lyudmila Austin, Joseph Bradshaw, Amanda Brewer, Heather Brothers, Patrick Buck, vii Jasmine Howard, Alyssa Lopez, Anh Le, Aaron Luedtke, Juan Maefield, Moses Massenburg, Shelby Pumphrey, Hannah Slajus, Christopher Shell, and Liao Zhang, among others. My fellow Africanist graduate students merit special recognition for their insights and fellowship throughout the course of my doctoral work: James Blackwell, Katie Carline, Akil Cornelius, John Doyle-Raso, David Glovsky, Katie Greene, Abdoulie Jabang, Eric Kesse, Jodie Marshall, Shingi Mavima, Dawson McCall, Bernie Moore, Tara Reyelts, the aforementioned Russell Stevenson, Elizabeth Timbs, and Chioma Uchefuna. One of the scourges of graduate school is imposter syndrome, and the endemic insecurity that comes from the need to impress people with visions of future work not-yet-complete or even really begun. As a result it is often difficult to be as open or vulnerable with peers as one would like to be. One often feels a powerful temptation to retreat into one’s own work at the cost of solidarity and camaraderie—a tendency that the pandemic has deepened, as most of us dispersed to our respective homes in 2020. Words cannot express the admiration I feel for the work of my colleagues, both collectively and individually, and I long for the day—hopefully not so far off—when I can personally convey the honor I feel to have worked together. It goes without saying that this project would never have gotten off the ground, let alone reached this advanced stage, without the encouragement, advice, mentorship, and—frankly speaking—faith, of Doctor Fútbol himself, Peter Alegi. At some point in the winter of 2014-2015 a strange little statement of purpose crossed his desk. In it, an eager but naïve young person, then working at a school in North Carolina, declared that he intended to take a deep dive into, of all things, the history of South African humor. To this day I can only speculate as to what about this little essay appealed to him, but Peter applied himself energetically to the task of viii forming me as a scholar, and my gratitude for his advice, admonishments, and copious notes—all of which have proven essential to my success—cannot be overstated. From Michael Stamm, an Americanist and another member of my dissertation committee, I learned a great deal about the practice of American history, as well as newspaper and popular culture studies. Just as meaningful, on reflection, was his calm, steady, and always-approachable presence, which carried me through some of the most difficult moments of this long and rigorous process. Edward Murphy challenged me to move beyond “interdisciplinarity” as a mere buzzword and to dive into scholarship from new fields and regions—including Latin America, which is a place seldom mentioned in Southern African historiography despite the rich comparative possibilities it offers. Rounding out my committee, I have been lucky to learn from and be guided by Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi at my second academic home, the University of the Witwatersrand. His counsel and extensive on-the-ground knowledge of South African cultural history aided my project immensely, especially during the fieldwork phase—gifts all the more valuable for being offered on top of his advisory and administrative duties in Johannesburg. In sum, a more supportive and distinguished committee to guide this specific dissertation project can scarcely be imagined, and any errors of analysis or judgement in the pages below are entirely my own. Frankly I have no idea how to introduce the section of these acknowledgements dealing with my experience in South Africa. Anything that I write will necessarily fall far short of the task of doing justice to the ways South Africans have welcomed, encouraged, questioned, advised, and otherwise assisted me. But I suppose I must try, and I must start at the beginning, with the very first time I arrived on terra firma at Durban’s King Shaka Airport on July 1, 2016. On that fateful night I was fetched from the airport and delivered to the home of Mabuyi ix Gumede, her daughter Thalente, her son Njabulo, and her grandchildren Ntsika and Nkosazana. They were the family with whom I stayed while taking Zulu immersion classes under the tutelage of Nonhlanhla Audrey Mbeje, Sindisiwe Lekoba, and Gabi Mkhize. Dr. Gumede (or Mama, as I know her) welcomed me and my fellow student Sophia Clark as her own children, and eased me into the rhythms and rigors of Durban life. In the years since that magical season, her kind words and the memory of her family’s hospitality have continued to lift me up in innumerable moments. On my second trip to South Africa in 2017, I became initiated into the life of the Southern African Historical Society through Prinisha Badassy, the aforementioned Sekibakiba Lekgoathi, Sandra Swart, François Verster, and Schalk van der Merwe, who facilitated an early and very personally meaningful presentation of my work at Stellenbosch University. I am grateful to the dedicated staff of the Johannesburg Central Library, the National Library of South Africa, Pretoria Campus, the National Archives of South Africa at Pretoria, and in particular the extraordinary efforts of Melanie Geustyn and Laddy Mckechnie at the National Library of South Africa at Cape Town in facilitating my work in both 2017 and 2019. In 2017, for the second time I was also able to attend the National Arts Festival in Makhanda, where I first met Phemello Hellemann and Tyson Ngubeni, who have been unfailingly generous with their time and friendship in the years since. In August 2017 I also paid my first visit to the home of one Stephen Gray, whose work on Stephen Black in the 1970s and 1980s quite literally put me on the path to completing this dissertation. It was through Stephen’s work I identified a way into my own work, and after finally receiving a phone number from one of his Rand Afrikaans University colleagues, I cold- x called him from a corridor in Pretoria’s Bloed Street Mall. He was, as he later intimated to me at our first meeting, somewhat skeptical of me in the beginning. Luckily I won his confidence in the course of my first visit to his extraordinary flat in Killarney, where what felt like miles of bookshelves spoke of a life immersed in South African cultural history. In 2019 I had the honor of spending several afternoons with him, exploring his remarkable personal archive, receiving feedback on my ideas, and even attending a birding festival. But my most cherished memory of Stephen was the last day we spent together, driving hither and yon across metropolitan Johannesburg, from Westpark Cemetery to Jeppestown, in search of the city’s literary history. His brilliance and winsome curiosity are qualities to which I aspire, and if they are at all reflected in this dissertation, it is to Stephen that my thanks properly belong. Because he did not use the internet, I was looking forward enormously to discussing my project with him further on a planned 2020 visit that never occurred due to the pandemic. Then, in October 2020 I received the sad news that he had passed away, just as I was preparing to send him a long letter. I am a better scholar and a better person for knowing Stephen. In late 2018 I received an unexpected e-mail from Izuu Nwankwọ, inviting me to submit to a colloquium he was planning as an Iso Lomso Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. That colloquium, which took place in October 2019 was, as far as I know, the first-ever scholarly conference solely devoted to African stand-up comedy, and it was thus through the agency of the good Dr. Nwankwọ that an array of scholars from across the African continent and around the world first became aware of each other, setting the stage not only for the publication of an anthology based on the proceedings of our conference, but for what I expect and intend to be many future collaborations. Special thanks are due to him, as well as my fellow xi African humor scholars for their advice and support since 2019, including Randa Aboubakr, Jennalee Donian, Charles Kebaya, Danson Sylvester Kahyana, Ken Lipenga, Jr., Nohayer Esmat Lotfy, Laura S. Martin, Ebtesam Muhammad and others. With you all I first felt a new and powerful sense of community in the midst of what can sometimes feel like quite a lonely vocation. On my return to South Africa in 2019, my social and professional network expanded greatly as I set about undertaking my main fieldwork. I am, of course, endlessly grateful for the many comedians and others who allowed me to interview and learn from them, namely Gilli Apter, Yaaseen Barnes, Schalk Bezuidenhout, Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Angel Campey, Edgar Dhlomo, Sipho Dhlomo, Phillip Dikotla, Suhayl Essa, Donovan Goliath, Nicholas Goliath, Anne Hirsch, Eric Jansen, Sophie Joans, Mel Jones, Mojak Lehoko, Loyiso Madinga, Nkosinathi Maki, Boitumelo Mkhawana, Mel Miller, Kagiso Mokgadi, Ra-ees Moerat, Obakeng Moroe, Kedibone Mulaudzi, Kwandakwethu Ndoda, Sivuyile Ngesi, the aforementioned Tyson Ngubeni, Dalin Oliver, Joe Parker, Kate Pinchuck, Ntsika Sqhazolo, Gerald Stonestreet, Pieter- Dirk Uys, John Vlismas, Rob van Vuuren, Chantal Venter, and Pius Xulu. I am grateful for my hosts, especially Allison and Chris Terry, and Etienne van Heerden, whose hospitality and conversation proved deeply valuable. I am also thankful for the clergy and congregation of St. Francis, Parkview for welcoming me into their spiritual home while I was in South Africa, and allowing me to make it my own, including the Rev. Paul Germond, the Rev. Diana Lawrenson, the Rev. Cynthia Botha, and all the other Friday morning regulars, with whom I enjoyed many a stimulating breakfast conversation. Critical advice and support was also rendered by Tim Huisamen, Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu, and Corinne Sandwith. I also owe a special thank-you to xii Richard and Adele Grobler Bird and Santa van Bart for organizing my attendance at the 2019 Herman Charles Bosman Weekend. Just before my 2017 pre-dissertation research I benefitted from the guidance of the staff at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. In Pretoria I would like to thank the special collections librarians at the University of Pretoria and the University of South Africa. In addition to my time at the Central Library in Johannesburg I spent many hours poring over newspapers, books, and manuscripts at the University of the Witwatersrand’s Cullen Library, often enjoying the assistance of Gabriele Mohale and Elizabeth Marima. At Stellenbosch University Marieta Buys was instrumental in finding the manuscripts I wished to consult and went above and beyond in her efforts on my behalf. The same can be said of Lynn Grant at the Amazwi South African Literature Museum; Senzo Mkhize, Nomvuyo Cynthia Mkhulisi, and Mbalenhle Zulu of the Campbell Collections in Durban; Wiseman Masango of the Centre for African Literary Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg; the staff of the National Archives Repository, Pietermaritzburg; and Thandeka Ngcobo and Ziningi Ngcobo of Shuter and Shooter Publishers; and Karen du Toit and Vuyelwa Mfula of the South African Broadcasting Corporation Archives. In Michigan before the pandemic, much of my day-to-day work was conducted at the DeWitt District Library, as well as at the Mason branch of the Capital Area District Libraries and the Delta Township Library. This whole dissertation would probably have been written at these three libraries had the coronavirus pandemic not interposed itself. The librarians at these institutions—and all public libraries—have my deepest respect and have often been in my thoughts during the disastrous past year-and-a-quarter. xiii As poignant as that sunset tableau near the Michigan state line remains for me today, there is an important sense in which the journey started much earlier, aided by dedicated teachers at Churchill Road Elementary School, Longfellow Middle School, and George C. Marshall High School in Fairfax County, Virginia, who fed my curiosity and taught me the basics of scholarly interpretation and analysis, specifically Bob Bowdey, Laura Chu, Brian J. Kane, Timothy Kane, Mark Krikstan, Kayne Miller, and Wanlace Yates. These teachers taught me, at the most fundamental level, how to observe and interrogate the world around me. At Williams College I benefitted enormously from classroom experiences with William Darrow, Charles Dew, Benjamin Rubin, Amanda Wilcox, and the late Robert Volz. At the College of William and Mary, my historical skills were further honed by Alexander Angelov, Michael Daise, Maureen Fitzgerald, George Greenia, Ravi Gupta, Kathleen Jenkins, Ayfer Karakaya-Stump, James La Fleur, Kathrin Levitan, John Morreall, Hannah Rosen, Chinua Thelwell, Kevin Vose, Jim Whittenburg, and, of course, by my inimitable thesis advisor Robert Trent Vinson, without whom I would never have applied to Michigan State. The individual impact each and every one of these people have had on the trajectory of my work could easily fill its own dissertation. In conclusion, it is impossible to overstate the influence of family and friends in keeping me focused and healthy on this journey. Love of Africa was instilled in me from an early age by my grandfather Trusten Frank Crigler, former U.S. Ambassador to Rwanda and Somalia, and by my father and his siblings who grew up there. To my mother’s mother Beverly and my mother’s father David, who was born in India in the 1930s and returned there later in life to work, I ascribe my flexibility, my resilience, and my passionate curiosity about the world. My mother and father raised me with these values and, at a more practical level, provided incalculable xiv support during the drafting of this study in 2020 and 2021. To friends as well, some of whom have been supporting me for more than half my life, I owe thanks: to Conor and to Thomas, my once and future comrades; and to Alison, Brett, Kiran, Nicole, Domenic, Jon, Tom, Max, Phoebe, Jenni, Micah, Elyse, Masha, Corine, Kelsey, Boniswa, Lemma, Nomzamo, Jason, Laura, Maren, Ryan, Lauren, Paige, Hanna, Rebecca, Scott, Bryony, Alex, Kyle, Carson, Spencer, Sarah, Emily, Eliza, Robin, Eric, Rashaad, Takondwa, Catherine, Mitchell, and Ang. Finally, I would like to thank Hélandri: knowing you has changed my life and made me a better person. Even while separated by several thousand miles, amid lockdowns, insurrections, load-shedding, and family meetings, I have never felt closer to anyone. Your light never failed to brighten the darkness of a plague year, and it still shines brighter than you know. xv TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................................................xix LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................................xx KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS .......................................................................................................xxi Introduction—Why Humor? Why South Africa? Why Me? ........................................................1 Why Humor? ..............................................................................................................................1 Humor Past and Present ..............................................................................................................3 Limitations .................................................................................................................................7 Outline of the Study ....................................................................................................................9 Historiographical Contribution ................................................................................................14 Note on South African Terminology ........................................................................................18 Note on My Positionality ..........................................................................................................22 Chapter 1—“A Passion That Hath No Name”: Laughter, Humor, and Satire as History .............25 Humor is a Funny Word: Defining Terms ................................................................................27 Laughter in Western Thought ...................................................................................................33 Laughter and Identity in Africa .................................................................................................42 Humor Studies in South Africa ................................................................................................55 Chapter 2—From Kaatje Kekkelbek to Piet Uithalder: Senses of Humor and Settler Dilemmas, 1652-1910 ...................................................................................................................63 A Serious Country: Early European Theatre at the Cape .........................................................66 Spirits of Inspiration: Charles Etienne Boniface and De Nieuwe Ridderorde .........................71 Kaatje Kekkelbek and the Development of Settler Satire in the British Cape Colony ............80 Kaatje Kekkelbek in Transnational Context: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Cordon ................... Sanitaire ...................................................................................................................................88 Sam Sly’s African Journal and Bourgeois Victorian Humor ....................................................92 The Big Bear of Pretoria: Southern Africa’s Debut on the Global Comic Stage .....................98 Abdullah Abdurrahman and “Straatpraatjes”: Reinventing Kaatje ........................................105 Conclusion: Laughing on the Margins ...................................................................................112 Chapter 3—Prizefighter-Playwright: The Times and Thwarted Life of Stephen Black, 1880-1927 ...................................................................................................................................114 From Prizefighter to Protégé, 1880-1908 ...............................................................................117 Lady Mushroom’s Revenge: Love and the Hyphen, 1908 .....................................................123 The Importance of Being Flexible: The Economics of Satire at the Moment of Union ........130 Escape Attempts of a Would-Be Cosmopolitan, 1909-1916 ..................................................139 xvi In Pursuit of £.s.d., 1916-1919 ...............................................................................................163 Back to La Terre: Farming in France, 1919-1926 ..................................................................171 Conclusion: Laughing Out of Turn ........................................................................................183 Chapter 4—Raising The Sjambok: Stephen Black and Multiracial Populism, 1928-1931......... 186 “You Can All Go To Hell”: Love and the Hyphen, 1927-1928 ............................................. 188 Defining the “Thirties Man”: The Sjambok’s Populist Journalism ....................................... 202 “A Zulu’s Appreciation”: R. R. R. Dhlomo and The Sjambok ...............................................216 “Break the Peace into Pieces!”: H. D. Tyamzashe and the Tabloid Model ........................... 224 “Should Natives Discuss Boers’ Love Affairs?”: Black Sjambok Readers Talk Back ...........237 “His Fine Gifts”: Remembering Stephen Black .................................................................... 252 Chapter 5—The Strange Career of Jeremiah Luke M’bene: R. R. R. Dhlomo and Black Newspaper Satire, 1932-1943 .....................................................................................................257 R. R. R. Dhlomo: Background and Context ...........................................................................258 R. R. R. Dhlomo and the New African Movement ................................................................267 Capturing Opinion: South Africa’s Black Press .....................................................................272 Cracking Up the Bantu World: R. Roamer’s Debut ...............................................................277 The Humor of R. R. R. Dhlomo .............................................................................................289 Enter the Editress: Gender in R. R. R. Dhlomo’s Humor ......................................................300 New African Flâneur: Roaming and Expertise in R. R. R. Dhlomo’s Humor .......................309 Chapter 6—Bleeding, Wounded, Falling, Rising: The Gothic Satire of H. I. E. Dhlomo, 1932-1941 ...................................................................................................................................320 The New African and the Captive Theatre: H. I. E. Dhlomo’s Early Career .........................322 Ruby and Frank: Forbidden Loves ........................................................................................334 The Expert: The Horror of White Paternalism .......................................................................341 Men and Women: South African Gothic .................................................................................349 A Vision Thwarted: Remembering H. I. E. Dhlomo ..............................................................362 Chapter 7—Springbok Follies: Herman Charles Bosman, Cecil Wightman, and the Gathering Storm, 1931-1965 ......................................................................................................368 Humorous Native Studies? Confronting White Humor .........................................................369 The Bohemian and His Boer: Herman Charles Bosman’s Humor .........................................375 Comfortable Humor: Cecil Wightman and Snoektown Calling .............................................413 Conclusion: Dueling Traditions .............................................................................................429 Chapter 8—On the Beat: Black Humor, 1943-1963 ...................................................................432 Triumph of the Big Bugs: R. R. R. Dhlomo as Rolling Stone ...............................................440 The Unbreakable Stick: K. E. Masinga as Msimbithi ............................................................456 At Home in the Bloodmine: Casey Motsisi at Drum .............................................................470 Epilogue—From “Fanagalo to Leon Schuster: Notes on Post-Apartheid Laughter ...................493 xvii Talking Back to White Laughter: The Case of “Fanagalo” ....................................................493 Retroactive Talking Back: The Case of Leon Schuster ..........................................................498 Imitation, Recognition, Suspicion, and New Paths ................................................................502 APPENDICES .............................................................................................................................507 APPENDIX A: A Content Analysis of R. Roamer Columns in The Bantu World, 1933-1943 ..............................................................................................................................508 APPENDIX B: An Excerpt from an Msimbithi, Umfana weKhishi Column ........................510 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................513 xviii LIST OF TABLES Table 1: A Content Analysis of R. Roamer Columns in The Bantu World, 1933-1943 ...........508 xix LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: The relationship between humor, satire, and laughter ..............................................29 Figure 2: Stephen Black’s tombstone, Johannesburg ............................................................ 114 Figure 3: Percentage of identifiably black-authored letters to the editor published in Johannesburg’s daily press in August of each year labeled, 1926-1956 ............................... 215 Figure 4: Percentage of identifiably black, Coloured, and Indian-authored letters to the editor published in Johannesburg’s daily press in August of each year labeled, 1926-1956 ........... 215 Figure 5: Percentage of identifiably black, Coloured, and Indian-authored letters to the editor published in The Sjambok over time ..................................................................................... 239 Figure 6: Percentage of R. Roamer columns dealing with three major subject areas over time ...............................................................................................................................................299 xx KEY TO ABBREVIATIONS A.N.C. — African National Congress ASALM — Amazwi South African Literature Museum (formerly NELM — National English Literature Museum) BD — D. C. Boonzaier Diary HRC — Harry Ransom Center for Humanities Research JCL — Johannesburg Central Library MS.— Manuscript NASA — National Archives of South Africa NLSA — National Library of South Africa S.A.B.C. — South African Broadcasting Corporation S.A.N.N.C. — South African Native National Congress (renamed African National Congress in 1923) TS. — Typescript UKZN — University of KwaZulu-Natal V.O.C. — Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company) xxi Introduction— Why Humor? Why South Africa? Why Me? Why Humor? This study is built on the insistence that humor is one of the most powerful and revealing tools societies possess in grappling with the question of difference. It follows the intertwined careers of a multiracial, multilingual cohort of twentieth century humorists in drawing, contesting, and redrawing the social boundaries of the Union of South Africa, a country that scholars and commentators alike have often treated as a uniquely serious place. Built from an eclectic array of sources—neglected newspaper content, magazines, play manuscripts, and radio broadcasts, as well as interviews—it blurs the boundaries of the cultural and the social, synthesizing literary and artistic history with histories of leisure and everyday life. Some figures featured prominently, like Herman Charles Bosman and Casey Motsisi, are relatively familiar names to historians today, while others, like Stephen Black and Cecil Wightman, are virtually forgotten. A third set of humorists are well-known, but not for the contributions that I explore, like the radio broadcasting pioneer King Edward Masinga and the playwright H. I. E. Dhlomo. Masinga’s hugely popular Zulu humor column in the newspaper Ilanga Lase Natal was written under the pseudonym of Msimbithi, Umfana weKhishi (“Msimbithi the Kitchen Boy”) and has been almost entirely neglected by scholars, while most of Dhlomo’s satirical plays were left out of his Collected Works because the surviving scripts are incomplete. My dissertation’s first key argument is that between 1910 and 1961, humor was on the front lines of efforts to negotiate questions of racial, cultural, and sexual difference in the context 1 of an increasingly repressive white supremacist regime. Through newspapers, the theatre, and the radio, the people featured here used humor to advance their respective visions of where South Africa was and where it needed to go. In my epilogue I argue that their efforts contributed to the construction of a “South African sense of humor” that has become integral to the way “South Africanness” is represented in the twenty-first century, both in corporatized media and on social networks. This process, whereby South Africans moved from the margins to the forefront of efforts to humorously represent their country both at home and abroad, began during the period under study, especially in the plays of Stephen Black, and later proliferated through the press via two of his protégés, R. R. R. Dhlomo and Herman Charles Bosman. Another key argument is that, while race looms large the history of South African humor, neither African nor white laughter existed in a vacuum. “Black” and “white” humorists have influenced one another throughout South African history, though rarely in symmetrical relationships. All the figures in this study used humor to struggle with marginality in some way. For black writers like H. D. Tyamzashe, the Dhlomo brothers, K. E. Masinga, and Casey Motsisi, their marginalization within the South African social hierarchy was stark, multifaceted, and deeply painful. Their humor shows a deep sensitivity to this pain and offers the possibility of defusing it through laughter. In turn, their audiences (or putative audiences, in the case of H. I. E. Dhlomo’s unpublished plays) felt their identities and subjectivities affirmed before a world that otherwise refused to recognize both. Humor was not only an escape or a means of coping with this harsh reality, but frequently also a point of departure for imagining a better world, with new opportunities and possibilities. Overcoming by turns a missionary prejudice against humor that was founded on white fear of African laughter, the work of South Africa’s black humorists 2 offers us an extraordinarily revealing look at the state of urban society in the early- to mid- twentieth century. While white South Africans enjoyed the full fruits of racial supremacy at home, within the British Empire and the worldwide community of nations they felt a keen sense of weakness —fueled in no small part by the fact that they were at a significant demographic minority in their own country. In the nineteenth century this sense of weakness rose to the surface in debates over unfree labor and relations with indigenous people, as settlers fumed against a well-organized effort by missionaries and humanitarians to establish de jure legal equality between black and white in the Cape Colony. In the twentieth century, rising international criticism of segregation and apartheid, which culminated in boycotts and exclusion from international organizations, underscored the ideological gulf that separating white South Africans from their counterparts in Europe, North America, and elsewhere. Humor in this context, as deployed by the likes of Monty Wilson and Cecil Wightman, became a means of maintaining group solidarity in the face of this global movement. By reframing South Africa’s abnormalities as the endearing quirks of an offbeat nation, South Africa’s marginality became a point of pride rather than shame. Humor Past and Present While conducting my dissertation fieldwork in South Africa in 2019, I made an effort to immerse myself in two worlds at once. The first world was the world of the archive, of the stately manuscript reading room, for example, at the National Library of South Africa across the street from the Houses of Parliament in Cape Town, or in the vast subterranean corridors of the Johannesburg Central Library. There, in profound and austere silence, I encountered the subjects of this study in letters and newspapers, dutifully recording citation information and passages of 3 interest. While the marvelous tangibility of old documents never failed to thrill my historian’s soul, I could not help but note the contrast between the circumstances of these documents’ composition and circulation, and the circumstances of my reading. This was true even when some of the archives were well-known to some of the authors: The Sjambok reported extensively on the construction of the Johannesburg Central Library building in which it is now held, and both Dhlomo brothers conducted research at Muckleneuk, the mansion in Durban where many of their papers are now held. But the racy, combative Sjambok belongs to the street-corners and trams of central Johannesburg, not the silence of a library. The mouse-bitten pages of some of H. I. E. Dhlomo’s plays too serve as a reminder that while his works may be in Muckleneuk they are not of Muckleneuk—they were born far away from Durban’s leafy Berea ridge. The other world I made a point of seeking out at least two evenings a week, sometimes more. It was the world of modern stand-up comedy and stand-up comedians. It existed physically in clubs, bars, and performance spaces across South Africa, but also on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, where comedians were busy promoting their shows and responding to the events of the day. It was a world populated by an extraordinarily diverse array of people from all racial and linguistic groups, a cohort whose levels of formal education varied widely but who were all engaged in the common task of transforming the pain and contradictions of daily life into words that were at once thought-provoking and pleasurable, fun and astute. Stand-up comedy shows, particularly in Johannesburg, are often occasions of integration in a society where such events are still rare—all the more intriguing because questions of race, gender, class, culture, and justice are discussed out in the open, albeit with the expectation of punchlines. Contemporary South African stand-up comedy also represents an 4 unlikely alliance between fervently entrepreneurial practitioners and moneyed businesses who largely underwrite the careers of comedy professionals through private corporate gigs and sponsorships. As I sought out comedians for interviews, and continued to follow the archival threads of my historical project, I began to feel profound continuities between the period under study in this dissertation and the modern scene. Writing and performing humor in South Africa, then as now, means navigating systems beyond one’s own control, and learning to live with certain contradictions while decrying others. Originally, the interviews I conducted with contemporary stand-up comedians were meant to comprise a chapter in this dissertation. While it later became obvious that jumping abruptly from 1961 to the twenty-first century would pose problems for the overall architecture of the dissertation, the art and insights of the comedians to whom I spoke exerted a profound impact on the shape this study ended up taking. They challenged me to consider humor as both an art and an occupation and offered crucial insights into the thorniest questions I had to ask of my historical sources: where is the line between representation and mockery; where are the boundaries of propriety in a given context and how are those boundaries enforced—not just as a matter of an individual audience’s reception but at a material, structural, and systemic level. Perhaps most importantly, my interviews with comedians kept me grounded, preventing me from becoming too attached to one particular heuristic in my investigation of Union-era humor. I am deeply indebted to my interviewees, who have faced such difficult challenges in 2020 and 2021, and my hope is that this dissertation can serve as a helpful source for them as well as more conventional scholars, affirming that they are the inheritors of a tradition with a deep history. 5 Though the comedians of today may not be intimately familiar with the names of people like H. D. Tyamzashe or Cecil Wightman, it should surprise no one that they are abundantly aware of many of the dynamics I strive to bring forth in the following chapters. As the comedian Suhayl Essa stated plainly in our interview, “talking about South African humor is essential in understanding our history.”1 Laughter is worthy of historians’ attention because of its relationship to power: this is something that comedians have always understood, not some novel intervention on the part of scholars. The Cape Town-based stand-up artist Tumi Mkhawana (who performs as Tumi Mkha’) compared being a comedian to being a pastor: “they don’t know what you’re going to say, right? But you have all this power in your hand, with this mic, to say whatever the hell you want to say…It’s not like T.V., where they can edit it.”2 Or consider the words of Sivuyile (Siv) Ngesi, who parlayed his stand-up comedy into a hugely successful career in South African media: What I’ve seen in a room that has different races, it does the same thing that music does: it makes everyone one, laughing at each other, continuously…When I do corporates [corporate gigs] in offices that don’t get along, it’s always difficult, because they don’t have a common goal…It’s the same as men [who] hate it when a man can make his wife laugh, or his girlfriend, because there’s something quite special about making someone laugh. There’s a togetherness, there’s a unity, that you can’t explain. I’ve had many altercations with men, just because their wives or their girlfriends are laughing and enjoying, you know, what I’m saying.3 Whereas Mkhawana’s words speak to the power of comedy to transgress (and an audience’s active expectation that it will transgress), Ngesi vividly describes the opportunities and dangers afforded by such power. Laughter, as we shall see in Chapter 1, is a highly invasive phenomenon: it possesses the laugher with involuntary sounds and movements. While it can 1 Suhayl Essa, interview by author, Johannesburg, South Africa, August 27, 2019. 2 Boitumelo Mkhawana, interview by author, Cape Town, South Africa, May 20, 2019. 3 Sivuyile Ngesi, interview by author, Makhanda, South Africa, June 29, 2019. 6 coincide with deep feelings of unity and well-being, there is undoubtedly a kind of sexual undertone to it in many contexts, attested by the anger of the men Ngesi describes. The comedian shows vulnerability through performance, while the submissive audience temporarily relinquishes its voice, breath, and muscle movements through the act of laughter. Comedians like Mkhawana and Ngesi recognize that act of laughing or not laughing, and the bonds created or strained through comedy can persist long after the club has closed for the night. Insights like these, informed by direct experience rather than academic contemplation, have informed me throughout my research journey. Limitations If the novel coronavirus had not caused a global pandemic in early 2020, this would be a very different dissertation. I would have been able to return to South Africa in June of that year, to conduct more of the interviews with ordinary Johannesburg residents that were meant to be a pillar of this study—interviews that would provide insight into the impact humor had on audiences as well as the unwritten, unrecorded humor of the past. I was excited to learn not only about people’s memories of the written sources I was exploring, but I also hoped to unpack some of the ways people experienced humor and laughter in their everyday lives—in both positive and negative ways. That work remains to be done, and I regret not having the opportunity to have done so by this juncture. Of course, there are several other important areas in which this dissertation is limited. It focuses mainly on published texts and scripts for the theatre (with some radio mixed in, in the case of Cecil Wightman). While the press had a key, and much under-explored impact on South African society in the period under study, my emphasis on theatre and on the periodical press 7 necessary excludes humor practitioners who never recorded their work for posterity. There is also a very strong urban bias in this study, and specifically a strong Johannesburg bias, though Durban and Cape Town enter the frame at various points. This is partly attributable to the fact that South Africa’s cities—and Johannesburg specifically—were the engine of much of the social changes I trace in this dissertation, but it is important to place those changes in their proper perspective. The total share of South Africans living in cities almost doubled between 1911 and 1960, but still represented well under half of the total population in 1960, with more than two- thirds of the African population still rural at that point.4 This study also largely neglects the Coloured and Indian population of South Africa (with the exception of Abdullah Abdurrahman), as well as the vast universe of Afrikaans- and African-language writing and performance beyond Zulu. A truly comprehensive study would devote significant attention to all these dimensions of the topic, and I intend to follow some of these crucial threads in future work. But by far the largest lacuna in this study is its missing women. As in other male- dominated societies, the humor of Union-era South Africa was deeply entangled with masculinity. In white society, men were suspicious and dismissive of women’s laughter for much the same reason they were suspicious and dismissive of black laughter: such laughter had the potential to reveal a potentially dangerous subjectivity that white men could not be certain of comprehending. As I explain in Chapter 5 when juxtaposing R. R. R. Dhlomo’s work as the editor of the Bantu World women’s supplement with his work as a humorist, the laughter of African women was frequently framed as not only inappropriate, but dangerous. White women had somewhat more room to maneuver in the white press (and Olive Schreiner in particular was 4 See “Statistical Appendix,” in The Cambridge History of South Africa, vol. 2, eds. Robert Ross, Anne Kelk Mager, and Bill Nasson (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2011): 649 8 a devastating satirist), but the full exploration of the intersection of gender, sexuality, race, and laughter in Union-era South Africa demands its own study. This future work would devote special attention to the “battle of the sexes” discourse carried out in the black South African press in the 1930s, as well as the particularities of the relationship between humor and white womanhood in the early- to mid-twentieth century. Outline of the Study Chapter 1 is primarily a critical literature review of existing scholarship on humor. It begins by considering the particularities of terms used in English such as “humor,” “laughter” and related phenomena. It argues that applying these concepts transculturally and transhistorically is a major challenge for humor studies. I choose to approach humor as a phenomenon primarily concerned with the creation, contestation, and maintenance of community boundaries. Battles over humor are thus always battles over inclusion and exclusion—and the ability of the oppressed to laugh and joke among themselves necessarily involves the ability, however temporary, to deflate and destabilize hegemonic social structures. Here I also engage canonical theorists in the Western tradition of humor studies, before moving to the African continent and the specific context of South Africa. I argue that while interest in African humor is growing—especially in connection with oral performance traditions and postcolonial politics—the field remains underdeveloped. This is particularly true with respect to humor’s capacity to exclude, which is a neglected dimension of most humor studies literature globally. Chapter 2 provides context for the main body of the study, exploring the emergence of European-derived forms of humor and satire in colonial Southern Africa. As European culture became hegemonic between 1652 and the outbreak of the First World War, I trace how European 9 settlers and visitors took to familiar genres of humor to depict southern Africa in a fashion that advanced their interests and reflected their social and political aspirations. The comic monologue Kaatje Kekkelbek, which ridiculed the newly free Khoikhoi population, has long been seen as a significant artifact in the development of the modern Afrikaans language, despite being written and performed originally by white English-speakers in blackface. I show how texts like Charles Etienne Boniface’s play De Temperantisten, Kaatje Kekkelbek, and Sam Sly’s African Journal championed British settler civilization against the varied threats of Dutch- speaking whites, meddling missionaries, people of mixed ancestry, and indigenous populations, helping Anglophone settler reconcile their purported racial superiority with cultural and geopolitical marginality. Indulging in humor became a more respectable activity for men in the nineteenth-century British Empire, and I show how Southern Africa’s Mineral Revolution also served as the region’s debut on the global comic stage. The chapter ends with a consideration of the Coloured political organizer Abdullah Abdurrahman’s attempt to use prevailing social attitudes towards humor for the benefit of his own community, re-appropriating previously derogatory comic stereotypes for his own ends in his newspaper A.P.O. The career of the playwright and journalist Stephen Black comes to the foreground in Chapter 3. Born into a poor white Capetonian family, Black dropped out of school at fourteen and spent years as a prizefighter before being discovered by Rudyard Kipling and penning the first of many full-length stage comedies on sensitive South African topics such as interracial sex, urbanization, women’s suffrage, and Anglophone chauvinism. Yet Black’s humble origins both set him at odds with white South African cultural tastemakers and prevented him from making a name for himself in the imperial metropole. Drawing on unique sources, including Black’s 10 voluminous correspondence with the Afrikaner nationalist cartoonist D. C. Boonzaier, this chapter offers an intimate portrait of Black’s entry into and subsequent expulsion from the artistic scene of early-twentieth-century Cape Town. These sources also show why the material dynamics of satire production should never be separated from our analysis of satire itself. Chapter 4 covers the turbulent last three years of Black’s life and explores the innovative newspaper he edited during that time. In 1929, at the behest of the movie theatre mogul I. W. Schlesinger, Stephen Black became the editor of a Johannesburg tabloid newspaper called The Sjambok. Though it survived only two years, this paper would have a profound impact on the future of South African literature, journalism, and humor. Scorning elite liberalism for a thrilling yet contradictory populism, The Sjambok was the first “mainstream” South African newspaper to hire black staff. By examining it closely, one can see how the efforts of Black and his reporters H. D. Tyamzashe and R. R. R. Dhlomo, as well as African Sjambok correspondents, contributed to the development of a uniquely black (in both senses) satirical and sensational interpretation of urban life, unprecedented in the pages of a “white” newspaper. The following chapter charts the rise of a black African satirical tradition in print during the 1930s and early 1940s. It focuses mainly on Sjambok alumnus R. R. R. Dhlomo and his career as assistant editor of The Bantu World, at the time South Africa’s most widely-circulated and commercialized black newspaper. At The Bantu World R. R. R. Dhlomo wrote enormously popular satires on gender, politics, and black urban life under the name “R. Roamer, Esq.”— redeploying characters from his erstwhile employer Stephen Black for his own purposes. These columns, whose content I explore in depth, served as a release from the strictures of respectability discourse and helped expand the parameters of acceptable black speech in the 11 context of a “captive press.” If, as cultural historian Daniel Wickberg has argued, the idea of an individualized “sense of humor” emerged from the vicissitudes of the industrial age, I argue here that the cultivation of a “sense of humor” by Dhlomo’s “New African” generation of black South African men in the 1930s was a crucial means of demonstrating cultural modernity. I also affirm and expand on Corinne Sandwith’s assertion that Dhlomo’s R. Roamer columns mark an important milestone in the treatment of urban space in black South African literature, particularly in the inspiration they draw from segregated transportation and other realities of black urban life At the same time as R. R. R. Dhlomo was honing his craft as black Johannesburg’s most prolific newspaper humorist, his younger brother H. I. E. was striving tirelessly for the cause of high culture. A poet, playwright, short story writer, journalist, and librarian-organizer, the younger Dhlomo is known for many things, but not primarily as a satirist. Yet his contribution to the nascent English language satirical tradition in South Africa needs to be recognized. H. I. E. Dhlomo’s embrace of nineteenth century Romantic and Gothic tropes in his dramas—especially in his last major work, Men and Women—is deceptive, for while past critics have assessed these tendencies as failures, they help illuminate Dhlomo’s relationship with African American writing, as well as his approach to the worsening South African situation of his day. In Chapter 6 I explore how, for H. I. E. Dhlomo, humor and satire served as signs of disturbance signaling the menacing proximity of madness, tragedy, and oblivion. I contend that H. I. E. Dhlomo’s use of Gothic aesthetics marks an important moment in South African literary history, illustrating powerfully the dashed hopes and aspirations of the New African generation within the context of white philanthropic oversight and control. 12 After World War II, amid increasing international criticism of South Africa’s racist policies, white South African popular culture found itself less and less in the shadow of its distant British counterpart. Chapter 7 examines how humor and satire were used to construct white South Africanness during the mid-twentieth century, with case studies of Cecil Wightman’s radio comedy and the humorous fiction of Herman Charles Bosman. Bosman is an enigmatic figure whose deceptively accessible stories of rural Afrikaner life have won him by far the largest audience after death of any of the figures in this study. In his Oom Schalk Lourens stories and other writings he attempted to reconcile the many disconnected parts of his own biography with the seemingly irreconcilable contradictions of the broader South African story, producing a corpus of work that is by turns deeply insightful and frustratingly limited in its outlook. In a strong contrast to Bosman, Wightman wrote humorous sketches for the radio that modeled Anglophone South African patriotism, spinning South Africa’s political problems as harmless fun. By recasting white South African anxieties as points of pride, Wightman helped acclimate the Anglophone white population to Nationalist dominance while unknowingly laying a foundation for later efforts to build white acceptance of a post-apartheid dispensation. The final chapter in this study is also set during the post-World War II era, when constraints on political organization and acceptable speech for black South Africans tightened alongside the consolidation of journalism and the performing arts under paternalistic white corporate oversight. The first full-length films and popular magazines aimed primarily at black audiences represented a powerful new phase of this trend. While still operating largely within these systems, I explore here how black satirists of the late Union period had to toe a fine line between speaking to the realities of daily life and avoiding retaliation for their work. While R. 13 R. R. Dhlomo’s humor from this period reflects the reduced aspirations and ambitions of his cohort, I argue that the forgotten isiZulu satire of “Msimbithi Umfana weKhishi” (“Msimbithi the Kitchen Boy,” likely written by K. E. Masinga) reframed this disappointment by confronting the contradictions of educated African identity and doubling down on the need to maintain dignity in the face of oppression. Finally, I discuss how Casey Motsisi’s “Bugs” and “On the Beat” columns embraced the hedonistic and consumerist possibilities of the city, reflecting Motsisi’s affiliation with a new generation of African writers who had spent their entire lives under conditions of hardening segregation. In the epilogue, the narrative moves briefly to the post-apartheid era, where I interpret a recent debate over the use of blackface by the actor and filmmaker Leon Schuster in light of the late-1950s controversy over the song “Fanagalo.” I do this in order to offer some tentative suggestions about humor’s significance in post-apartheid South Africa, and I also suggest paths for future research. We have only begun to scratch the surface of South African humor studies, I argue, and while the threads I follow here are significant, moving beyond the limitations of the current study will surely yield even richer insights into the dynamics of South African history. Historiographical Contribution My motivation for undertaking this work was shaped in large part by the disconnect I identified between humor’s role in present-day South Africa as a hallmark of national identity, and its virtual absence from accounts of South African history and artistic development over the course of the past century. South Africa in 2021 boast a burgeoning stand-up comedy industry attracting an unusually diverse array of performers and spectators alike. Meme groups on social media with names like “No Chill in Mzansi” (907,000 followers on Facebook) and “Mzanzi 14 Humor” (995,000 follows) repost content from South Africa’s “Black Twitter,” often captioned with a variation on the slogan “I’m leaving South Africa.”5 These pages, whose followers are overwhelmingly young and African, reinforce the idea that South Africa is a uniquely funny place with uniquely funny people. How did this come to be? In a 2017 City Press article, social media analyst Owethu Makhathini describes South African meme culture as a rudimentary expression of humor “heavily influenced by U.S. culture, much like other forms of South African entertainment.”6 The author of the piece, Sihle Mthembu, wonders aloud whether the meme is “a form of expression distinctly suited to the African context because it’s born of open-source sharing and remixing—layering in which old elements are not discarded but treated as the foundation of something new.”7 Did the story of South African comedy and South African memes start solely with America and the democratic transition, or were there lessons to be drawn and links made to the more distant South African past? The 1910 Act of Union seemed like a good place to start exploring this question, because, following the work of scholars like Loren Kruger, it too was a time when questions of identity and inclusion were openly debated (though black, Coloured, and Indian aspirations were left decidedly unfulfilled). More research on humor in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s in order to fully flesh out the relationship between the present and the past recounted here, but my hope is that the following chapters set the stage for such work. 5 These are the figures as of April 23, 2021. See “No Chill in Mzansi,” Facebook page, accessed April 23, 2021, ; and “Mzanzi Humor,” Facebook page, accessed April 23, 2021, . Mzansi (also spelled Mzanzi or Mzantsi) is a nickname for South Africa that derives from the Nguni word for “South.” 6 Quoted in Sihle Mthembu, “Sihle Mthembu Chats to Some of South Africa’s Most Popular Meme Creators,” City Press (Johannesburg, South Africa), November 12, 2017. 7 Sihle Mthembu, “Sihle Mthembu Chats to Some of South Africa’s Most Popular Meme Creators,” City Press, November 12, 2017. 15 This study is the most ambitious consideration of South African humor’s history written to date. It is also ambitious in its effort to consider humor and its consequences across media, focusing mainly on newspapers and the theatre. As such, it sits at the intersection of a number of scholarly literatures that either have not been explicitly connected before or have not been explored in the early- to mid-twentieth-century South African context. It makes an obvious contribution to South African literary and theatrical history in its exploration of the lives of people like Stephen Black and H. I. E. Dhlomo, and intersects extensively with the work of scholars of the so-called New African generation, like Brian Willan, Ntongela Masilela, and Tim Couzens. It also contributes to the history of the South African press, drawing on the work of scholars like Les Switzer, Corinne Sandwith, and Brian Rutledge in order to reconstruct a view of the South African black and English-speaking commercial press that stresses exchange and similarity over viewing the black press as it developed mid-century as a unique project of white capitalist hegemony. Lastly, “Laughter and Identity” aims to contribute to a vibrant and growing literature, described in Chapter 1, on humor studies in Africa and beyond. As I argue in that chapter, humor may be a notoriously difficult phenomenon for scholars to interpret, but its ubiquity and deep entanglement with modernity (as explored by Daniel Wickberg and others) make continued reticence indefensible. A key challenge that many South Africanist historians face is how to avoid reproducing the logics of apartheid and segregation in scholarship. But treating South Africa as a single society with everyone in the same frame is very difficult, if not futile, at a time when legal barriers to inclusion were so prevalent and so powerful. To be sure, even though there are both white people and Africans throughout this study, as I discuss in the “Limitations” section above I 16 cannot claim either cohort of people to be an entirely “representative” sample, whatever that would mean. The helpful thing about following the threads of humor, as opposed to some other more rarified genre of performance or literary production, was that it pervaded society like few other phenomena. Humorous stereotypes are paradoxical in that oftentimes the more divisive they are, the more widely recognized they are in a given society, even and especially by those whom offensive representations are meant to exclude. In fact, people are often more aware of—and more thoughtful about—the humor that is meant to exclude them as opposed to humor aimed at them, precisely because they do not find it funny. And so the point of departure for this dissertation was an effort first to understand the work that such humor does—how did South Africans in the Union period enlist humor in the cause of building, defending, and reframing in- group identity and community? According to authors from Stephen Gray and David Coplan to Mohamed Adhikari, Corinne Sandwith, Robert Mshengu Kavanagh and Bhekizizwe Peterson, they did so in an atmosphere circumscribed by ideologies and systems not solely South African in nature. The philanthropic and commercial capture of black South African media, the challenges of dealing with coloniality and the Union of South Africa’s uncertain position between the colonial and post-colonial words, the Global North and the Global South, are not sui generis problems for South Africanist historians to work out, but add to worldwide debates about race, capitalism, and the (post-)colonial condition throughout the world in the twentieth century. Humor scholarship, especially in the United States, has often had strong nationalist and regionalist associations. This study, though it is in many ways about the construction of the idea of South Africanness, does 17 not aim to show that South Africans were particularly unique in enlisting humor in their various social purposes, but it does argue that the ways they did and did not do so are instructive not only for working out the dynamics of political and cultural life, but also for recovering a sense of everyday life and thought in the past. To echo Njabulo Ndebele’s evocative phrase, I use humor here to rediscover the ordinary—both its ordinary cruelty in the minds and mouths of those who used it to exclude, and its ordinary power in maintaining the subjectivity and affirming the humanity of the afflicted. Note on South African Terminology Given that this is a dissertation dealing with the history of race in South Africa, an explanatory note on certain South African racial labels is warranted. It should be stated from the outset that all the labels scholars use to describe the people of modern-day South Africa are historically entangled.8 None of them are timeless or “natural” distinctions. The divisions they enforce are haphazard, mixing historical, cultural, linguistic, and political differences in ways that suit the goals of the original labeler. In 1652, the history of European settlement in Southern Africa began when the Dutch East India Company (V.O.C. for short, after its Dutch initials) established a permanent outpost at the Cape of Good Hope. During the following century and a half of V.O.C. rule, the European population of the Cape of Good Hope consisted mainly of current and former V.O.C. employees of Dutch descent, as well as a collection of Huguenot refugees from France (this accounts for the large number of French-sounding surnames in present-day South Africa, such as Malan, De 8 See Paul S. Landau, “Transformations in Consciousness,” in The Cambridge History of South Africa, vol. 1, eds. Carolyn Hamilton, Bernard K. Mbenga, and Robert Ross (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 392-448. 18 Villiers and Du Toit). Starting in 1657, the first freehold farms were “granted” by the V.O.C. to settlers who were not employed by the Company. Over time, as their large farms spread further and further away from Cape Town, some of these free burghers became known as trekboers (the word trek meaning “to pull or drag,” a reference to the ox-driven wagons that carried their belongings overland, and the word boer meaning “farmer”). By the mid-nineteenth century, the term Boer was in common use in English to refer to these settlers, and by the century’s end it had become strongly associated with the whites who had left the now British-ruled Cape Colony starting in the 1830s to found the South African Republic (also known as the Transvaal) and the Orange Free State. The so-called First and Second Anglo-Boer Wars (1880-1881 and 1899-1902, respectively) cemented this association, such that Dutch- or Afrikaans-speaking people, who still comprised a majority of the white population of the Cape Colony, began referring to themselves as Africanders or Afrikaners in order to distinguish themselves from English-speaking white settlers born outside the continent. In the twentieth century, Afrikaner became the accepted demonym for this group, a term which claimed a deep identification with Africa as an ethnic homeland, while simultaneously distinguishing Afrikaners from black people. While some Afrikaner nationalist leaders were vague about whether English-speaking whites could ever be included in the Afrikaner fold, others insisted that they could not. Thus, while some authors used Africander/Afrikaner to refer to all Southern African-born whites at the turn of the twentieth century, by the post-World War II era the familiar definition of Afrikaner as any white Afrikaans-speaker had become entrenched (with the obligatory disclaimer that many people identifying as white in modern-day South Africa have varying degrees of indigenous African and Asian ancestry). 19 The word Coloured presents a major stumbling-block for American students of South African history, and remains controversial within South Africa today. While apartheid laws defined Colouredness as an entirely negative category—the quality of being neither white nor black nor Asian—in common parlance the term refers to a particular cultural group centered mostly in the present-day Western Cape province and boasting a mix of African, Asian, and European ancestry.9 Significantly for our purposes, the Khoisan people who went to work on European farms under conditions of de facto slavery starting in the seventeenth century— referred to by the highly offensive term Hottentot in white sources from the time—became classified alongside the descendants of African and Asian enslaved people to form a group that began to be known as “Coloured” in the mid-nineteenth century. This term has caused no end of consternation since that time, as various activists have objected to the stigma of sexual impurity attached to it and the rejection of African identity that it unhelpfully and erroneously implies. The apartheid government’s attempts to legally enshrine Colouredness as an intermediate status between white and black meant that for many years it was popular to avoid the word as much as possible in scholarly writing—adopting imported euphemisms like mixed-race, métis, and Creole instead, putting “Coloured” in scare-quotes, or writing “so-called Coloured” or “classified Coloured” when necessary. The drawbacks to this approach are obvious: mixed-race, métis, and Creole are unfamiliar terms in the South African context, and to qualify Coloured with scare- quotes and “so-called” denies the legitimacy of Coloured experience and the legal particularity of Coloured status under apartheid. In the post-apartheid era many, especially on social media, 9 See Deborah Posel, “Race as Common Sense: Racial Classification in Twentieth-Century South Africa,” African Studies Review 44.2 (2001), 87-113. 20 have reclaimed the term as a positive term denoting a unique mixed culture, though the trend is by no means universal.10 I use the words black and African interchangeably in this dissertation out of convenience. The word Bantu—originally from the Nguni abantu, meaning “people”—appears in twentieth century sources as a term for black South Africans, but, following modern conventions, I use it exclusively in reference to the Bantu languages, which, alongside the Khoisan languages comprise the two major indigenous language families of South Africa (Nguni refers to the subset of Bantu languages that includes Zulu and Xhosa, as opposed to the Sotho-Tswana languages). The term “kaffir” or “kafir” has been retained in quotations, but is extremely offensive; the word “native” as both noun and adjective also appears only in direct quotes. I have tried to be very precise throughout this study in my use of terms. My use of the term “Coloured” in this dissertation (always capitalized and retaining the “u”) does not imply that Coloured people are not African. While Kaatje Kekkelbek, written in the nineteenth century, centers on a Khoi woman (see Chapter 2), the language of the piece and the stereotypes it perpetuates became legible later on in the century as specifically Coloured ones. Every term has its unique benefits and drawbacks: the words “English-speaking” and “Anglophone” are clunky but better than “English” or “British” alone, because they include members of groups like the Irish and Eastern European Jews, who without having any tie to the island of Great Britain, became broadly affiliated with the Anglophone section of the population. At the same time, the 10 See Mohamed Adhikari, “From Narratives of Miscegenation to Post-Modernist Re-Imagining: Towards a Historiography of Coloured Identity in South Africa,” in Burdened by Race: Coloured Identities in South Africa, ed. Mohamed Adhikari (Cape Town, South Africa: University of Cape Town Press, 2009), 1-22; and Samantha Roman, “What Kaaps Brings to the Table: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of the Intersection Between Language, Food, and Identity in Vannie Kaap Memes” (M.A. thesis, Stellenbosch University, 2019): 8-20; Ling Shepherd, “Coloured Culture, Real or Imagined?,” The Daily Vox (Johannesburg, South Africa), September 7, 2020, accessed March 27, 2021, . 21 language spoken by “Boers” or “Afrikaners” in the late nineteenth century presents an intractable dilemma: to call them “Afrikaans-speakers” is problematic because the Afrikaans language itself was not yet standardized nor in official use, yet one can hardly call them “Dutch-speakers” with a clear conscience considering that the vernacular language they spoke was likely much closer to Afrikaans than standard Dutch. Ultimately, the inadequacy of labels should push us toward a deeper appreciation of the absurdity at the heart of racialized oppression, whether in the form of colonialism, segregation, apartheid, or neoliberalism. A healthy appreciation of their inherent limitations is more valuable, in the end, than angst over the need for ever more accurate and precise definitions. Note on My Positionality Following Nwando Achebe’s appeal for scholars to situate themselves more explicitly in relation to their work and their interests, the following is my concise answer to the first and third questions posed at the beginning of this introduction (why South Africa? Why me?).11 I first became interested in South Africa as a teenager, when I encountered an Afrikaans music video on YouTube that seemed so beguilingly familiar and yet so alien that I had to know more. I already loved history, and while I had never been to Africa myself, I felt a strong connection to it through my father’s family: my grandfather T. Frank Crigler was a U.S. diplomat who worked in Gabon, Zaïre, Rwanda, and Somalia over the course of his career. As a result my father spent much of his childhood on the continent. Africa was a place of fond memories and a frequent subject of conversation in the Crigler family growing up, though Southern Africa was a region in which they had never spent time. I was determined to learn all I could. 11 See Nwando Achebe, “Getting to the Source: Nwando Achebe—Daughter, Wife, and Guest—A Researcher at the Crossroads,” Journal of Women’s History 14.3 (2002), 9-31. 22 After two years or so of on-and-off research, often in the form of watching more music videos and clips of South African stand-up comedians like Trevor Noah, Barry Hilton, and Loyiso Gola, I took a course on South African history. It was in this class at the College of William and Mary where I first encountered the work of Pieter-Dirk Uys and Mark Mathabane— the latter not a comedian, but an author whose writing seared a mark on my memory forever.12 I decided to write my honors thesis on American activism during the South African War, where I encountered a great deal of snickering at South African peculiarities from the likes of white American commentators on the conflict like Howard Hillegas, Richard Harding Davis, his wife Cecil Clark Davis, and Julian Ralph. Finally, in 2014, I decided to take the plunge and apply to Ph. D. programs in order to continue my exploration of the South African past. I first traveled to South Africa to study Zulu in 2016, returning a second time in 2017 to conduct pre-dissertation research and then for eight more months in 2019, funded through a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (D.D.R.A.) fellowship. On my very first trip, purely by accident, I had the chance to attend the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown (now Makhanda), South Africa’s premier annual event for performing arts and stand-up comedy. My time there served as a radical confirmation of my decision to take a scholarly interest in humor, though I still was not sure what my plan of attack was going to be. It was not until late in 2016 that I first read Stephen Gray’s edited collection of Stephen Black’s writings that the present study began to suggest itself. All of this is to say that as a white man from suburban Northern Virginia, I come to this topic as an outsider, and as one coming from a place of extraordinary privilege. It is impossible 12 See Mark Mathabane, Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa (New York, N.Y.: Macmillan, 1986). 23 for me to read the letters from R. R. R. Dhlomo to Killie Campbell that I describe in Chapter 8 without reflecting on the fact that I have had the backing of a well-funded, extraordinarily well- resourced university behind me in this effort, as well as helpful and encouraging mentors—both things that someone as brilliant as R. R. R. Dhlomo never enjoyed. And unlike Stephen Black, for whom colonial birth was an impediment seemingly at every step along the way of his turbulent life, my American nationality has been nothing but an asset to me throughout this process. Whatever courage and perseverance I have applied to the task of completing this dissertation, it pales in comparison to the strength of will shown by most of the people within its pages. Having only ever lived as myself, I cannot always say how my experiences with this project over the past several years would have been different had I come to this work as a woman, a black South African—or as a white South African, for that matter. Still, this dissertation is unquestionably impacted by my identity. Drafted largely during the 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic, this study is the product of research conducted throughout a particularly unsettled time in both American and South African history. It is no coincidence that this project reflects, for better or worse, a desire to understand the ways humor can influence racial and national identity. With the rise of social media in the twenty-first century, the division between news consumer and news commentator has blurred dramatically, and just as public debates in the world seem to grow ever more bitter and polarized, the importance of being witty has only increased. The attributes that make humor such an attractive tool for reconciliation are the same ones that make it a powerful tool of division. From the beginning of my research, I have aimed to write a dissertation that would take both sides of that dynamic seriously. 24 Chapter 1— “A Passion That Hath No Name”: Laughter, Humor, and Satire as History “There is a passion that hath no name, but the sign of it is that distortion of the countenance we call laughter, which is always joy.” —Thomas Hobbes1 Everyone laughs. Rarely are historians able to say anything so clear, simple, and absolute as that. As long as a person is physically capable of doing so, they laugh. As humans, we begin to laugh in early infancy, long before we can speak. Yet laughter is not merely a physiological reflex; over the centuries its potential to convey and create meaning has fascinated scholars and societies the world over. It contains multitudes, and, for better or worse, in studying it one feels a powerful urge to subdivide and categorize. In the course of my research, people were always asking what kind of humor I was looking at—what I was including and excluding, thematically as well as theoretically. Such a broad study, they implied, could only be built on a strong and clearly-articulated foundation. Historians are notoriously resistant to this kind of thinking. True, I could spend years reading all that others had written about laughter and humor and satire and wit and joking, but was I not supposed to be guided by my sources instead of any imported framework? Theory felt like picking one out of a hundred different kinds of square pegs to hammer into what was inevitably going to be a round hole. Seeking to keep my options open for as long as possible, I undertook my research armed only with a couple of heuristic devices to guide me: (1) that laughter, humor, satire, and related concepts are morally neutral phenomena with the potential to serve a wide variety of social and political agendas, and (2), that humor and identity are deeply interrelated. This approach served me well, and so this study is deeply indebted to the writers 1 Thomas Hobbes, “Human Nature, or the Fundamental Elements of Policy,” in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, ed. William Molesworth, vol. 4 (London, U.K.: John Bohn, 1840): 45. Italics in original. 25 who articulated these ideas before me. In this basic sense theory was actually a terrific motivator for this project, in both its strengths and its many shortcomings. And so, following the footsteps of many historians before me, I am compelled to acknowledge that theory has its place—quite an important place—in this historical investigation. Treating the existing literature as a guide but not a straitjacket, in this chapter I will concisely survey the field of humor studies, paying special attention to Africa and South Africa, in order to make some observations about the state of the literature and point to ways that it could improve. The most important can be stated briefly here: 1. While definitions need not bog us down, the words we use matter, and we need to be especially careful when applying terms with modern, Western origins to historical, postcolonial, and non-Western contexts. 2. While the physical mechanism of laughter is pre-cultural, its practice is historically and culturally influenced. 3. The recent rising tide of scholarly interest in humor and satire correlates closely with postmodern disillusionment regarding the state as a motor of progressive change, and scholars should be careful not to adopt views of humor that are overly celebratory. 4. In South Africa, humor studies has traditionally taken a back seat to studies of more overt factors in social change. This, however, should not deter more thoroughgoing inquiry into the development of South African humor traditions. My goal in the present study is not to define humor or satire in the South African context, but rather to show how South Africans in the twentieth century used these tools to advance their views of what society should be like. While their perspectives were often contradictory, the 26 ideologies and theories surrounding humor could and were frequently held in common, even when the parties involved stood on opposite ends of a political or social dispute. Humor is a Funny Word: Defining Terms We must start by taking a closer look at what we might call “funny words”—most importantly humor, satire, and laughter. In doing so, one becomes immediately aware of the analytical difficulties involved in this work. It is a testament to the idiosyncratic course of history that these words have such disparate etymological origins. By far the simplest to parse is the verb laugh itself: originally pronounced with a hard ending consonant like its German relative lachen, it originally imitated the sound of laughter (its pre-Teutonic root -klak-, with a hard first consonant, suggests this relationship even more plainly).2 For our purposes, it is an elegant thing that the English verb laugh and the Afrikaans lag share this heritage with the Zulu root -hleka and the Southern Sotho -tseha, which are also intended to echo the sound of what the 1971 Oxford English Dictionary defines—in fabulously Oxonian fashion—as “manifest[ing] the combination of bodily phenomena (spasmodic utterance of inarticulate sounds, facial distortions, shaking of the sides, etc.), which forms the instinctive expression of mirth, or of sense of something ludicrous.”3 What better illustration of the potential power of laughter to unite disparate groups than the fact that after thousands of years of isolation from one another, the Germanic-language speakers of Northern Europe and the Niger-Congo-speakers of Southern Africa share essentially 2 “Laugh,” in The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 1 (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1971): 1579. 3 These verbs are perhaps most correctly rendered as roots (i.e., -hlek- and -tseh-, respectively), but doing so here would obscure the onomatopoeic nature of these verbs, which both derive from the Proto-Bantu root -cèka. See entry in “Bantu Lexical Reconstructions 3,” Royal Museum for Central Africa, accessed October 13, 2020, ; and The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 1, 1579. 27 the same word for it? Yet when we turn to humor and satire, the cultural peculiarities of European history disrupt this tranquil scene. Humor comes down to English by a circuitous path from the Latin hūmor meaning wetness or moisture—the same root as the word “humid.” Its original sense in English related to humorism, an ancient theory holding that human health depended on a delicate balance between bodily humors or fluids; humor has roots stretching further back to an ancient Lithuanian word meaning hot-tempered or impulsive.4 Its usage in reference to persons, words, or events that inspire laughter is no older than the seventeenth century.5 Satire also entered English from Latin in a non-straightforward manner (as well as Afrikaans; the words humor and satire are spelled identically in both languages). Long thought to relate to the satyrs—comically lecherous man-horse hybrids found in Ancient Greek theatre— current etymological opinion holds that the word comes from the more prosaic satura (as in the English word saturated), referring to the hotchpotch of topics covered in classical satirical poetry.6 Yet the connection implied between satire and performance—especially bawdy and outrageous displays—need not be cast aside. As a folk etymology widely accepted until recently, the perception that satire derives from scandalous ancient spectacles impacted European beliefs in the period under study, and thus, whether accurate or not, it is a view that we must bear in mind. While satire originally referred specifically to a certain genre of classical poetry, its semantic field has broadened over the centuries to the point where the word “satirical” can refer 4 “Humour,” in Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., last modified June 2014, accessed October 13, 2020, . 5 For a detailed examination of how the meaning of the word changed in early modern England, see Daniel Wickberg, The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998): 13-45. 6 “Satire,” in The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 2, 2642. 28 Figure 1: The relationship between humor, satire, and laughter. to something as large as a novel or as small as a remark or a sentiment. The Oxford English Dictionary defines this broad sense concisely as “a speech or saying that ridicules a person, thing, or quality.”7 The three terms discussed so far might be thought of as a modified Venn diagram (Fig. 1). Laughter is the largest circle, and although most of its domain is concurrent with humor, it is also an involuntary physical response to stimuli like tickling. Humor, however, is best defined in terms of laughter and is entirely contained within it. Satire is the smallest circle, since unlike laughter or humor it must be directed at something; there is no such thing as satire on its own. 7 Of course, the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition by no means exhausts the huge body of scholarly opinion on the question of possible definitions for satire. Edward W. Rosenheim, Jr. in Swift and the Satirist’s Art (1963) advances an important and polarizingly specific definition of satire (“an attack by means of a manifest fiction upon discernable historic particulars”) that says nothing about humor or play. Many scholars, such as Matthew Hodgart and Conal Condren, resist the temptation to rule on the issue and instead opt for “cluster” definitions based on “family resemblance,” or a set of non-necessary, non-sufficient characteristics. Dieter Declercq criticizes this tendency for eroding the integrity of satire as an artistic genre and including “frivolous” expressions within the ambit of satire. See Edward W. Rosenheim, Jr., Swift and the Satirist’s Art (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1963): 23, and discussion in John Clement Ball, Satire and the Postcolonial Novel: V. S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2003): 29-34. See also Matthew Hodgart, Satire (New York, N.Y.: World University Library, 1969): 7-9; Conal Condren, “Satire and Definition,” Humor 25.3 (2012), 375-399; Dieter Declercq, “A Definition of Satire (and Why a Definition Matters), The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 76.3 (2018), 319-330. 29 Scholars are fond of pointing out that not all satire has the aim of provoking laughter, as opposed to indignation or amusement; even so, the question of whether satire can exist without reference to the domain of humor is murky. Contrary to some theorists, I argue that what distinguishes satire from straightforward social critique is its relationship with the element of play found in humor, and while a person’s disposition to laugh at something is usually culturally and historically influenced (at least in part), determining definitively whether something satirical is “humorous” or not is basically a futile task. No one laughs at everything, in other words, but someone can almost always be relied upon to laugh at a given statement or image, no matter how apparently dark or perverse. The question of individual subjectivity in humor, satire, and laughter, is of course a fraught one, and a topic to which we will return below. Three more English words common in humor studies literature are worth briefly tracing, though they are not prominently featured in this study. The word joke shares a common Latin ancestor with the French jeu and the Spanish juego—both words for “game.”8 Indeed, jokes can be usefully understood as a type of game requiring intent on the part of the joker. On the diagram above we would place jokes firmly within the domain of humor, overlapping in part with satire. There is also Sigmund Freud’s favored term “wit” (Witz in German), which derives from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to know”—it shares this root with the Latin verb vidēre, “to see,” which of course manifests separately in the English language in words like “visual.”9 Wit, like satire, often overlaps with humor but is not entirely confined by it. We might say the same thing, finally, with the English word play. This term presents something of a 8 “Joke, n.” in Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., last updated 1989, accessed October 13, 2020, . 9 “Wit, v. 1” in Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., last updated 1989, accessed October 13, 2020, . 30 mystery to etymologists: as a verb it can be traced back to the medieval period, and possibly relates to a Proto-Germanic root meaning “to be in the habit of doing,” related to the word plight, but this is by no means certain (the Afrikaans speelsheid, “playfulness,” originated in a Proto- West Germanic root meaning “to dance”).10 Adding to the confusion, the Zulu verb “to play,” -dlala, derives from -dla, literally meaning “to eat,” with -dlala signifying a broader sense of enjoyment and satisfaction. Unfortunately, the word laugh has not served as a fount for laughter-adjacent vocabulary in English as elegantly as in Zulu, where -hleka means “to laugh,” -hlekisa means “to cause to laugh,” inhlekanhlekane is mutual laughter, an inhlekiso is a laughingstock, an umhlekisi is a comedian and ubuhlekisa is a word for humor—that which causes laughter.11 This has served to make the already difficult scholarly task of writing about funny things even harder (“funny,” for the record, once carried a more sinister sense of insanity or derangement and is of uncertain origin).12 Laugh-causing is an awkward phrase, but the most unfortunate consequence of laugh’s lack of derivative terms is that the opposite of laughter is often understood, by scholars and laypeople alike, to be seriousness. This places the humor scholar immediately on the defensive, as one feels compelled to respond to arguments that are based on a fundamentally flawed dichotomy, in the course of navigating this language problem. Hence the glut of cliched humor studies titles and subtitles in the vein of “no laughing matter” (a crime for which I admit guilt) and “humor/laughter is serious business.” Luckily, if we are willing to resort to a more 10 “Play, v.” in Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., last updated June 2006, accessed October 13, 2020, ; “Spielen,” in Duden Onlinewörterbuch, accessed November 2, 2020, . 11 See Zulu-English Dictionary, eds. C. M. Doke and B. W. Vilakazi, 2nd ed. (Johannesburg, South Africa: Witwatersrand University Press, 1958 [1948]): 326; English-Zulu Dictionary, eds. C. M. Doke, D. Mck. Malcolm, and J. M. A. Sikakana (Johannesburg, South Africa: Witwatersrand University Press, 1958): 84. 12 “Fun, v.” in Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., last updated September 2017, accessed October 13, 2020, . 31 specialized vocabulary, we have a way out: Stephen Halliwell provides the terms gelastic, agelastic, and antigelastic in his study of laughter in the Ancient Greek world.13 Of these, agelastic (i.e., not causing or concerning laughter) and antigelastic (anti-laughter) are especially useful because they enable us to avoid words like serious, humorless, and un-funny where otherwise they would be problematic. To recap, then, embarking on our study of “South African humor and satire,” we are immediately confronted by a forest of terms in different languages with wildly disparate origins whose semantic fields broadly overlap but whose specific deployments often differ from individual to individual and from study to study. Of these, laughter is by far the most attractive since it is the least culturally specific. Yet it is also the most subjective of all these terms, since it describes a response rather than an intention. Humor, quite aside from its own circuitous career in European thought, suffers analytically because of its (very much modern) association with laughter, while studying satire involves all the perils of defining and challenging the boundaries of genre. As Edward James has observed, the boundaries of satire as a genre have been debated in the West for a half-millennium or more, and those who seek strong definitions in the name of analytical rigor risk being “more classical than the classics themselves.”14 Few however, have stated the problem better than the seventeenth century English poet Abraham Cowley, whose “Ode: Of Wit” serves as an apt disclaimer for the lines and chapters which follow in this study, expressed with a clarity of insight and economy of phrase I can hardly improve upon: Correct my error with thy pen; 13 Stephen Halliwell, Greek Laughter: A Study of Cultural Psychology from Homer to Early Christianity (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2009): 5-6. 14 Edward James, “Verse Satire Versus Satire, or the Vanity of Definition,” Seventeenth-Century French Studies 22.1 (2000): 210. 32 And if any ask me then, What thing right wit, and height of genius is, I’ll only shew your lines, and say, ’Tis this.15 Laughter in Western Thought It is a hoary cliché to start discussions of humor with a self-effacing admission that the study of humour itself is not funny, as if this is a fatal obstacle to inquiry. “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can,” runs E. B. and Katharine S. White’s often misattributed bon mot, “but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.”16 The Whites had a point, but the metaphor is not perfect: the frogs are dead long before they get to the scientists. Of course, it is possible to rummage around in the insides of a living thing without killing it; the word for that is surgery. And indeed, that is precisely how the South African comedian Mthawelanga “Tats” Nkonzo frames his comedy. “A joke is like heart surgery,” he explained in a 2019 Instagram post: “in the beginning, you see a knife. And if you’re scared of knives, you run. Next, you see a knife cut through skin. If that scares you, you run. But if you wait long enough for the joke…you’ll see a surgeon change a heart.”17 Here the comedian is performing the operation and the scholar is in the gallery observing. It is not a frog or a joke that is being incised, but a human being. And instead of representing only the cold mechanics of joking, the “innards” are the context in which the joke is told—a grey, undifferentiated slop to the layperson, perhaps, but a richly interconnected system of thoughts, symbols, and lived experiences to the studied eye of the comedian-surgeon. 15 Abraham Cowley, The Poetical Works of Abraham Cowley, vol. 2 (Edinburgh, U.K.: Apollo Press, 1784 [1668]): 118. 16 E. B. and Katharine S. White, “The Preaching Humorist,” The Saturday Review of Literature (New York, N.Y.), October 18, 1941. 17 Tats [Mthawelanga] Nkonzo, “In Defence of My Art,” Instagram post, August 8th, 2019, accessed August 15th, 2019, . 33 Nkonzo’s retelling of what is actually an ancient metaphor (satirist-as-doctor for the body politic) is valuable because it asks us to imagine the dangerous thrill of cutting through skin, as well as the comedic performer’s expert grasp of context—the propriety, vulgarity, values and anxieties of the audience they are striving to entertain.18 It is one thing to see surgery take place live, in a comedy club or an operating theatre; it is much more difficult to try to reconstruct surgeries that happened more than a century ago. Yet just as dissection has its place in the world of medical science, studies of satire and laughter have an important role to play in our efforts to understand the past. Paradoxically, people who dismiss such work as frog dissection seem to suggest that humor should be left alone not because it is worthless but for quite the opposite reason. They imply that what makes us laugh is sacred, “set apart” in a Durkheimian sense.19 We cannot afford to profane it by our pedantry, they suggest, with an ambivalence they might otherwise reserve for discussing the most profound human tragedies.20 Despite this thread of reluctance, there is a large and vibrant interdisciplinary scholarship on humor, laughter, and satire, encompassing work by psychologists, historians, sociologists, political scientists, literary scholars and others. This body of scholarship suffers by its Eurocentricity, and this is well-illustrated by the problematic term “humor studies” (the term “humor” carries such cultural and historical baggage that I strive to apply it as sparingly as possible before the second half of the nineteenth century, when the modern English sense of the 18 The association of satire with medicine is very old. See, for example, Sari Kivistö, Medical Analogy in Latin Satire (London, U.K: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009): 1-31. 19 See Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York, N.Y.: The Free Press, 1995 [1912]): 33-39. 20 Susan Sontag’s discussion of the prurient gaze invited by photographs of war and suffering seems particularly applicable here, albeit on a smaller scale. The (in)significance of a joke through analysis is likened in this discourse to a loss of purity, and, by extension, to destruction of the thing itself, replaced by our own, decidedly un-funny thoughts and preoccupations. See Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York, N.Y.: Picador, 2003): 95-99. 34 word became widespread). A better term, without seeking to erase the role of “laugh-causers” (a literal translation of the Zulu abahlekisi—a far better term than “humorist”), would be “laughter studies.” Its many flaws notwithstanding, scholarship on the basic question of why human beings laugh remains worthy of consideration before going further. Because almost every person on the planet laughs, and has done so (as far as we know) throughout human history, thinking about laughter feels both accessible and familiar; anyone can have an opinion about it. Yet by far the most historically common European stance on laughter —the stance assumed by most classical philosophers and Christian theologians as well as Thomas Hobbes, with whom it is often associated, is that laughter is a vicious and cruel activity which demands strict control.21 Plato’s stance on comedy was that it should be seen only “in order to avoid ever saying or doing anything ludicrous”—and that citizens should never perform it. “We will impose such mimicry on slaves and foreign hirelings,” he proposes in his Laws, “and no serious attention shall ever be paid to it, nor shall any free man or free woman be seen learning it.”22 Hobbes called laughter “sudden glory” and defined it as “sudden self- commendation resulting from a stranger’s unseemliness [ex indecoro alieno].”23 There is no distinction between laughing with and laughing at in this view, which is often called Superiority Theory. Crucial here is Hobbes’s use of the word “stranger”—to laugh at someone, justified or not, is to cut them off from the laugher’s community of peers. It might be permissible to laugh at 21 See John Morreall, “The Rejection of Humor in Western Thought,” Philosophy East and West 39.3 (1989), 243-265. 22 Book VII: 816e, in Plato, Laws, vol. 2, trans. R. G. Bury (Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1926): 97. 23 Thomas Hobbes, Man and Citizen (De Homine and De Cive), ed. Bernard Gert, trans. Charles T. Wood, T. S. K. Scott-Craig, and Bernard Gert (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Publishing Company, 1991 [1972]): 59. Original Latin text from Thomas Hobbes, Elementorum Philosophiæ Section Secunda de Homine (London, U.K.: Andrew Crooke, 1658): 69. Significantly, this work, originally written in Latin and published in 1657, is not the same as English work Human Nature, or the Fundamental Elements of Policy (1650), quoted in the epigraph to this chapter. See also R. E. Ewin, “Hobbes on Laughter,” The Philosophical Quarterly 51.202 (2001), 29-40. 35 known enemies as God does in Psalm 2 of the Bible, but within a local community such laughter presented a danger to all; for this reason Plato’s Laws forbid the “ridicule [of] any of the citizens, either by word or by mimicry, whether with or without passion,” punishable by banishment.24 This harsh rhetoric, of course, needs to be taken with a grain of salt: Ancient Greece was fertile ground for laughter, as the comedies of Aristophanes and Menander ably testify.25 In a 2017 monograph, Sonja Tanner even argues that Plato himself was an accomplished comic writer, citing, among other things, Cicero’s opinion that the Socratic dialogues for which Plato was so famous ought to be grouped with “our own Plautus and the Old Comedy of Athens” for providing examples of “refined, polite, clever, witty” joking.26 As Mary Beard traces in her excellent 2014 study Laughter in Ancient Rome, while laughter certainly has a history, it is impossible to tie up the laughter of a particular context in a neat bow and be done. Laughter in the ancient Mediterranean seems to have been as common, complex, and ambivalent as laughter in our own world, but despite the fact that thousands of years of history place us at an almost fatal disadvantage in understanding Ancient Roman jokes, the tantalizing glimmers of familiarity one can find in them that keep scholars coming back.27 It is a testament to the strange significance of ubuhlekisa or the gelastic domain that writers (without, it must be admitted, ever actually running out of words) seem so often at a loss to describe something so ubiquitous. Starting with Hobbes in the early modern era, and 24 See Psalm 2:4; Book XI: 935e, in Plato, Laws, vol. 2, 463. 25 See Susan Lape, Reproducing Athens: Menander’s Comedy, Democratic Culture and the Hellenistic City (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004); Anna Peterson, Laughter on the Fringes: The Reception of Old Comedy in the Imperial Greek World (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2019); Matthew Wright, The Comedian as Critic: Greek Old Comedy and Poetics (London, U.K.: Bristol Classical Press, 2012). 26 Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis, trans. Walter Miller (London, U.K.: William Heinemann, 1913): 107; see Sonja Tanner, Plato’s Laughter: Socrates as Satyr and Comical Hero (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2017): xv. 27 See Mary Beard, Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2014): 211-214. 36 exemplified in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the writings of Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson, Western thinkers became increasingly interested in laughter’s role in facilitating or impeding social adjustment within complex societies. Their increasingly enthusiastic attitude towards humor has reached its contemporary apogee in what Paul Lewis describes as the Positive Humor Movement—a network of institutions, conferences, and well-compensated consultants (mostly white, often academics) who have made it their mission to extol the virtues of humor as the cure for society’s ills, sometimes going so far as to argue that the physical mechanism of laughter alone is enough to improve well-being, even without a stimulus.28 Figures within both academia and the Positive Humor Movement routinely draw from a canonical set of eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century thinkers, some of whom I have already mentioned, whose work sought to reduce humor and laughter to the ahistorical, acultural language of psychology and philosophy. Besides the Superiority Theory we have already encountered, there is the Incongruity Theory of Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Søren Kierkegaard, which holds that humans laugh when reality refuses to conform to expectations.29 Completing the customary trifecta is the Relief Theory, as expounded by Lord Shaftesbury, Herbert Spencer, and Sigmund Freud, among others, whereby laughter is understood as the 28 Paul Lewis, Cracking Up: American Humor in a Time of Conflict (Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, 2006). 29 See Immanuel Kant, Kant’s Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (London, U.K.: Macmillan and Co., 1914 [1790]): 220-228; Patrick T. Giamario, “‘Making Reason Think More’: Laughter in Kant’s Aesthetic Philosophy,” Angelaki 22.4 (2017), 161-176; Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, vol. 1, trans. R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London, U.K.: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co.: 1909 [1818]): 76-78; Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, ed. Alistair Hannay (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2009 [1846]): 430-439. For a modern defense of incongruity theory, see Elliott Oring, Engaging Humor (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2008): 1-12. 37 physical manifestation of another emotion being displaced or relieved.30 These theories offer certain valuable insights, but ultimately one must recall that they are themselves part of a unique historical process that scholars apply transcontextually at their own peril. In fact, the deepest and most enduring scholarly insights about laughter have a marked tendency to devolve into quasi-theological language. Laughter becomes, as Hobbes said, a “passion that hath no name.”31 It is an intrusion of something unknown and perhaps unknowable upon the ecosystem of the human body; Stephen Halliwell at one point describes the earth’s laughter in a passage from the Iliad as “a complex interpenetration of the human and the natural.”32 It can be defined only by its attributes and effects, as the sixteenth century French doctor Laurent Joubert suggests in a section of his Treatise on Laughter (1579) memorably quoted by Anca Parvulescu: Everybody sees clearly that in laughter the face is moving, the mouth widens, the eyes sparkle and tear, the cheeks redden, the breast heaves, the voice becomes interrupted; and when it goes on for a long time the veins in the throat become enlarged, the arms shake, and the legs dance about, the belly pulls in and feels considerable pain; we cough, perspire, piss, and besmirch ourselves by dint of laughing, and sometimes we even faint away because of it. This need not be proven.33 Joubert’s account of what happens to the body of a laugher is as familiar to the twenty-first century reader as it was the day it was written. It is simple and familiar. Yet it takes Joubert over 30 See Lord Shaftesbury [Anthony Ashley Cooper], Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humor (London, U.K.: Egbert Sanger, 1709); Endre Szécsényi, “Freedom and Sentiments: Wit and Humor in the Augustan Age,” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 13.1-2 (2007), 79-92, especially 86-90; Herbert Spencer, Progress: Its Law and Cause, with Other Disquisitions (New York, N.Y.: J. Fitzgerald, 1881 [1859]): 253-258; Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. A. A. Brill (New York, N.Y.: Moffat, Yard and Co., 1917 [1905]); Sanja Bahun, “The Pleasures of Daldaldal: Freud, Jokes, and the Development of Intersubjective Aesthetics,” Modernist Cultures 12.2 (2007), 249-274; Michael V. Ure, “Stoic Comedians: Nietzsche and Freud on the Art of Arranging One’s Humors,” Nietzsche-Studien 34.1 (2005), 186-216. 31 Thomas Hobbes, “Human Nature, or the Fundamental Elements of Policy,” 45. 32 Stephen Halliwell, Greek Laughter, 14. 33 Laurent Joubert, Treatise on Laughter, trans. Gregory David de Rocher (Tuscaloosa, Ala.: The University of Alabama Press, 1980): 28, quoted in Anca Parvulescu, Laughter: Notes on a Passion (Cambridge, Mass.: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2010): 28. 38 a hundred pages to move from this physiological description through a theory of its origin. For our purposes it is far more useful to approach laughter, humor, and satire in terms of its effects rather than its ever-elusive causes. Published in 2010, Anca Parvulescu’s Laughter: Notes on a Passion eloquently advocates a shift away from the search for origins. “Most ‘theories of laughter,’” she observes, “are not concerned with laughter. They conceive of it as a response to something else, and it is this something else that they are after—the comic, jokes, humor, the grotesque, the ridiculous, the ludicrous, etc.”34 Instead, Parvulescu asks a different set of questions: “What work (or unwork) does laughter do?…What does it mean to be a laugher?”35 Laughter may be rooted in deep in the pre-cultural human brain, but to say so denies neither its immediate context nor its generative potential in the present. She begins her study by quoting the Russian poet Velimir Khlebnikov’s 1909 poem “Incantation by Laughter,” which begins “O laugh, laughers!” and, through nonsense variations on the Russian word for “laugh,” spirals outside the conventional written word and compels the reader to mimic the sound of laughter in their own mind.36 For laughter (and the strategies of ubuhlekisa that cause it) is, for both Khlebnikov and Parvulescu, a kind of incantation, a contagion with mystical undertones. Because laughter is such a dangerous challenge to the regulation of the body and mind, a key focus of Parvulescu’s book is the elite effort to tame laughter. “Smiling and laughing do not occur on a continuum,” Parvulescu writes, “we most often smile when we cannot laugh…in fact, the ‘civilizing of laughter’ is simultaneous with the production of the modern smile.”37 34 Anca Parvulescu, Laughter: Notes on a Passion (Cambridge, Mass.: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2010): 3. 35 Anca Parvulescu, Laughter, 3. 36 Anca Parvulescu, Laughter, 1-3. 37 Anca Parvulescu, Laughter, 7. 39 As the passage above attests, Parvulescu’s work points to the need to historicize laughter and understand its effects in terms of particular contexts. Her work thus follows in the footsteps of the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, whose doctoral thesis Rabelais and His World (written in the 1940s but not published until 1965) marks a watershed in the study of laughter as well as cultural and literary history. The frequently repulsive, scatological, and insulting content in François Rabelais’s sixteenth century novels (which the philosopher Voltaire once remarked would be “abridged to one eighth” in God’s library) are, in Bakhtin’s view, central to understanding their overall significance because they exemplify a unique moment in European intellectual history when “laughter in its most radical, universal, and at the same time gay form emerged from the depths of folk culture” and “appeared to play an essential role in the creation of such masterpieces of world literature as Boccaccio’s Decameron, the novels of Rabelais and Cervantes, Shakespeare’ dramas and comedies, and others.”38 In spite of Rabelais’s elite intellectual pedigree, Bakhtin regards his works as an authentic window into the folk culture of the bygone Middle Ages, a culture which developed as an antithesis to the antigelastic medieval church and was on fullest display in the sanctioned transgressions of the medieval carnival. In such a milieu, Bakhtin argues, “it was understood that fear never lurks behind laughter (which does not build stakes), and that hypocrisy and lies never laugh but wear a serious mask. Laughter created no dogmas and could not become authoritarian; it did not convey fear but a feeling of strength.”39 The power of the grotesque, which served as more than a mere fetish, was rooted in “regenerating ambivalence,” the idea that by bringing the 38 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1968 [1965]): 118; 72. 39 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 95. 40 world down to earth (and even lower) the world is not only degraded but also transformed, since “to degrade an object does not imply merely hurling it into the void of non-existence, into absolute destruction, but to hurl it down in to the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which conception and a new birth take place.”40 Bakhtin’s historical thesis in Rabelais and His World is a bold one, and his conception of medieval (western) Europe as possessing a cohesive, common tradition of folk laughter is well outside remarking upon within the scope of the present study. For us, it is Bakhtin’s fundamental contention that laughter and related phenomena should be studied as historical phenomena subject to change over time that is most instructive. Hobbes and Parvulescu agree that laughter indicates not an emotion but an intrusive passion that precedes culturally-specific ways of thinking even as it is also conditioned by such ideas (often after the fact, as when someone feels they have laughed inappropriately).41 In this messy way, historical processes are often at play in laughter and the circumstances that give rise to it. I stated previously that this study is concerned much more with the effects of laughter than its causes, even though it calls itself a study of humor rather than laughter. This is not by accident. Because it anticipates laughter as a response, humor with all its socio-cultural baggage can be understood—paradoxically—as both a cause and a consequence of laughter. The same goes for satire. And now, armed with a model for understanding of the complex relationship between these inter-related concepts, we can now move to consider more specific historiographies. 40 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 21 41 Anca Parvulescu, Laughter, 6-8. 41 Laughter and Identity in Africa Laughter and identity are intimately related. Because laughter is so often involuntary, the tendency to laugh or not laugh at certain stimuli is understood to provide a clue to a person’s inner life.42 This idea predates the theory of the individual sense of humor: in a context where ridiculousness was thought to inhere in the objects of laughter rather than the minds of the laughers, laughter threatened—and can still threaten—to mark the laugher as ridiculous, alienating them from the fold of the well-adjusted and conscientious. To paraphrase Hobbes, laughter makes friends and strangers. This is why Lawrence E. Mintz, following the counterculture writer Albert Goldman, writes of stand-up comedians as shamans, “leading [audiences] in a celebration of shared culture, of homogenous understanding and expectation.”43 Mintz goes on to describe the American stand-up comedian of the 1980s “as a mediator, as an articulator of our culture, and as our contemporary anthropologist.”44 In order to make audiences laugh, the audience must first come to understand themselves as an audience, and it follows that describing who an audience is involves describing who an audience is not. Even if a joke is on the audience, the joke is still for the audience in any case. To explore the dynamics of what people find worthy of laughter in a given time and place is to gain admission to an extraordinary dimension of social life where the boundaries of identity and propriety are 42 One of the most paradoxical truths about laughter is that familiarity tends to suppress it rather than feed it: hearing the same joke twice will rarely provoke the same reaction, even if one laughed loudly the first time. The task of the humorist is to recall familiar things in unfamiliar ways. Understanding how this is done in the present keeps linguists and rhetoricians busy enough in the present; thinking about this process in history involves considerable further obstacles. 43 Lawrence E. Mintz, “Stand-Up Comedy as Social and Cultural Mediation,” American Quarterly 37.1 (1985): 74. See also Albert Goldman, Freakshow: The Rocksoulbluesjazzsickjewblackhumorsexpoppsych Gig and Other Scenes from the Counter-culture (New York, N.Y.: Atheneum, 1971): 194-196. 44 Lawrence E. Mintz, “Stand-Up Comedy as Social and Cultural Mediation,” 75. Italics in original. 42 explicitly debated and the culture and values of an audience, as understood by the audience itself, are exposed, sometimes in vivid detail. Given all this, it should come as no surprise that boundaries of nation and ethnicity figure prominently in the landscape of academic humor studies. Such studies, however, can obscure as much as they reveal. As the great Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock wrote in 1935, nowhere have nationality and national differences have been worked harder than in the domain of humor. The comic press has long since created a set of national types very largely imaginary except in so far as they had a historical origin and preserve a faint survival of it. The novel, the stage, and the screen help to keep them going, poor mock figures that they are…like a set of scarecrows on a clothesline flapping in the wind.45 To the extent that writing on the history of South African humor (or American humor or British humor or Jewish humor) involves the crafting of narrative from a large, complex body of evidence, it is inescapably a project of flattening, simplifying, and distilling, if not essentializing. My intention in the present study is to show not that South Africans are an uniquely jocular group of people, but rather that, in wrestling with the realities of their unique history and social dynamics, we can recognize revealing patterns and creative trajectories in South Africans’ engagement with humor. Baked into these patterns and trajectories are South Africans’ own ideas about the nature and value of identity, humor, satire, and laughter. My aim is to engage and interpret these ideas rather than construct brand new theories of my own. Between 1910 and 1961, I argue that the various forms of humor and satire that had existed in Southern Africa began to coalesce into the idea of a coherent national humor tradition, one which has only loomed larger and larger in the national consciousness over subsequent decades. While well- 45 Stephen Leacock, Humor: Its Theory and Technique, with Examples and Samples (New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1935): 199-200. 43 worn stereotypes—“scarecrows on a clothesline”—should not be taken at face value, in few countries were the boundaries of identity been more hotly contested than in South Africa during the twentieth century, and as such, the operation of humor and laughter in that context merits scholarly attention. Humor studies is as much a literary enterprise as a social scientific one, and as with the discipline of history, the origin of academic literary studies is inextricably linked to the nationalistic fervor of the nineteenth century. Like flags and national anthems, the possession of a prestigious and coherent written literature was understood as a hallmark of worthy nationhood, a Eurocentric criterion that disqualified Southern Africa’s indigenous peoples. Studies of British, French, German, and American humor abound within this paradigm, and in the South African context F. E. J. Malherbe’s Afrikaanse Humorverhale (1952) represents an effort to secure a foothold for Afrikaners at this level.46 Despite these nationalistic associations, by the twentieth century humor and satire were so firmly entrenched as hallmarks of high culture that both the Soviet Union and Mao Zedong’s China embraced them as tools in the struggle for international communism, with the Soviet Union establishing a Commission for the Study of Satirical Genres in 1931 (the very first in a series of state-sponsored inquiries into literary history).47 In the American context, studies of Southern and African-American humor spun off to comprise their 46 F. E. J. Malherbe, Afrikaanse Humorverhale (Pretoria, South Africa: J. L. van Schaik, 1952). Afrikaanse Humorverhale represented the culmination of an academic project that began with Malherbe’s 1924 doctoral dissertation “Humor in die Algemeen en sy Uiting in die Afrikaanse Letterkunde.” See Sandra Swart, “The Terrible Laughter of the Afrikaner: Towards a Social History of Humor,” Journal of Social History 42.4 (2009): 901-904 47 See Annie Gérin, Devastation and Laughter: Satire, Power, and Culture in the Early Soviet State, 1920s-1930s (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2018): 19-40. See also Li Guo, “Humor, Vernacularization and Intermedial Laughter in Maoist Pingtan,” in Maoist Laughter, eds. Ping Zhu, Zhuoyi Wang, and Jason McGrath (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2019), 105-122. 44 own subfields, and at a global scale this process has repeated more recently with Jewish, feminist, and queer humor studies, among other emerging fields.48 As might be expected, European encounters with African laughter were understood through the lenses of colonialism and scientific racism, and heavily influence by the supposedly carefree equanimity of enslaved people in the New World. By the nineteenth century “good humor” had become so synonymous with civilization that the psychologist James Sully felt the need to refute the idea that “the savage never laughs” in a 1901 article.49 “Uncivilized people,” Sully argued, laughed quite a bit, as a close read of missionary and scientific literature revealed, but their laughter, as he put it, was more similar to that of children than white adults. Yet even this was perhaps starting to change: “a recent visitor to Central Africa,” Sully reported, “regrets that under European influence the deep-chested, hearty laughter of the men is being replaced by 48 Foundational studies of American humor include Jeanette R. Tandy, Crackerbox Philosophers in American Humor and Satire (New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1925); Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (New York, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1931); and Jesse Bier, The Rise and Fall of American Humor (New York, N.Y.: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968). See also Erika Doss, “Grant Wood’s Queer Parody: American Humor During the Great Depression,” Winterthur Portfolio 52.1 (2018), 3-45; Michael Dunne, Calvinist Humor in American Literature (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 2007); and Stephen E. Kercher, Revel with a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Interest in African-American satirical traditions specifically has exploded in recent years, coinciding with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the wake of Barack Obama’s presidency. See, for example, Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights, eds. Derek C. Maus and James J. Donahue (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2014); Darryl Dickson-Carr, Spoofing the Modern: Satire in the Harlem Renaissance (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2015); Lisa A. Guerrero, Crazy Funny: Popular Black Satire and the Method of Madness (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2019); Danielle Fuentes Morgan, Laughing to Keep from Dying: African- American Satire in the Twenty-First Century (Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2020). For Jewish humor, see Arthur Asa Berger, Jewish Jesters: A Study in American Popular Comedy (Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press, 2001); Jeremy Dauber, Jewish Comedy: A Serious History (New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton and Co., 2017); and Joseph Dorinson, Kvetching and Shpritzing. For feminist and queer humor studies, see Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence, eds. Maggie Hennefeld and Nicholas Sammond (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2020); The Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2002); Domnica Radulescu, Women’s Comedic Art as Social Revolution: Five Performers and the Lessons of Their Subversive Humor (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2012); Jenny Sundén and Susanna Paasonen, Who’s Laughing Now? Feminist Tactics in Social Media (Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2020); and Cynthia Willett and Julie Willett, Uproarious: How Feminists and Other Subversive Comics Speak Truth (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2020). 49 Thomas Love Peacock, Crochet Castle (London, U.K.: Cassell and Company, 1893): 31, quoted in James Sully, “The Laughter of Savages,” International Monthly (Burlington, Vt.), July 1, 1901. 45 what is known as the ‘mission giggle’ in the younger folk,” a sure sign of social evolution.50 While most “savage laughter” was based on “infantile gaiety,” Sully argued, “we detect the dim beginnings of that complex feeling or attitude we call humor.”51 His article ended with a “practical reflection” that explicitly tied these insights to the colonial project, drawing on a personal correspondence with the explorer Mary Kingsley: Any civilized officials that take it upon them to manage these “lower races” would surely do well to take some heed of their love of fun…An African missionary, already quoted, writes that in cases where a disposition to quarrel shows itself one joke is worth ten arguments. This is borne out by one who does not take too favorable a view of his savages, when he says of the East African that he delights in a joke, “which manages him like a Neapolitan.” In a letter to me Miss Kingsley writes, “I have always found that I could chaff them (West Africans) into doing things that other people could not get them to do, with blows—I could laugh them out of things other people would have to blow out of them with a gun.”52 While Kingsley endorsed the utility of laughter in facilitating colonial rule, for other Europeans in Africa laughter was a source of considerable fear and anxiety. Joking and hilarity, compounded by linguistic barriers, disrupted hierarchies that set Europeans apart from and above Africans, by excluding them from the bonds that laughter reinforced. Nevertheless, until the founding of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in 1938, ethnologists and anthropologists exerted little energy towards understanding the consequences of colonialism on African cultures. In the 1950s, Phillip H. Gulliver and the Rhodes-Livingstone scholar Monica Wilson wrote on the development of “joking relationships” between ethnic groups compelled to coexist within migrant labor systems, but it would not be until the African nationalist heyday of the 1960s that African responses to colonialism would come into vogue as subjects of substantial inquiry. Even 50 James Sully, “The Laughter of Savages,” International Monthly, July 1, 1901. 51 James Sully, “The Laughter of Savages,” International Monthly, July 1, 1901. 52 James Sully, “The Laughter of Savages,” International Monthly, July 1, 1901. 46 then, the research agenda of the nascent field of African history before the 1970s was decidedly agelastic in outlook. Initially concerned with restoring the prestige of the African past and stressing Africans’ resistance to the colonial project, it was not until the political and economic failures of postcolonial African states in the first decades after independence became evident that scholars began looking for African creativity and resilience in new places, including the popular arts and, later, ubuhlekisa—the gelastic domain. It is not controversial to observe that the travails of the newly independent African states exposed the shortcomings of modernization theory, giving the lie to the idea that the best interests of both rich and poor nations could be equitably served within the existing framework of international markets. It can also be said their turbulent and uneven progress was prophetic of the subsequent economic and political polarization in Europe and the United States. Given the failures of African nationalist governments to follow through on even a fraction of their lofty promises, it comes as no surprise that Michel Foucault and James Scott’s critiques of the state that rippled through the humanities and social sciences from the 1970s onward resonated especially strongly with Africanists.53 Many, reacting (perhaps somewhat unfairly) to the view that Marxist analyses in the 1970s and 1980s had not paid enough attention to culture, eagerly embraced more anthropological methods and enriched the study of African oral traditions pioneered by Jan Vansina and others.54 Leroy Vail and Landeg White’s 1991 Power and the Praise Poem is a powerful expression of this scholarly turn, refuting the idea that “oral man” and non-literate societies lack 53 See William Walters, Governmentality: Critical Encounters (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2012): 9-43; James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008 [1987]). 54 See Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). 47 outlets for political discourse and protest. Vail and White argue that “poetic license”—defined as “the convention that poetic expression is privileged expression, the performer being able to express opinions that would otherwise be in breach of other social conventions”—is crucial to understanding not just Southern African oral literature but politics as well.55 In West Africa too, scholars came to understand popular performance genres as dynamic and adaptable forms. In doing this they pushed back against the old anthropological idea—enunciated by Émile Durkheim, Victor Turner, and others—that ritual provides a kind of stable, predictable center for societies, marked as they are by repetition and the reinforcement of norms.56 Instead, as Margaret Thompson Drewal argues in Yoruba Ritual (1992), “unfixed and unstable, Yoruba ritual is more modern than modernism itself.”57 Released at a time when scholars were fretting over the retreat and collapse of postcolonial states, studies by both Drewal and Vail and White argue that through orature, performance, music, and poetry, non-literate African societies possess the means to protest and deliberate politically—with no need for state structures or Westernized elites. Perhaps, they suggest, non-elite Africans are better equipped for a postmodern world than intellectuals had appreciated. While scholars like Drewal, Vail and White, Karin Barber, David Kerr and others identified the presence of satire within the African performance traditions they centered, humor 55 Leroy Vail and Landeg White, Power and the Praise Poem: Southern African Voices in History (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1991): 319. 56 See Margaret Thompson Drewal, Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1992); Leroy Vail and Landeg White, Power and the Praise-Poem; Karin Barber, John Collins, and Alain Ricard, West African Popular Theatre (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1997); Karin Barber, The Generation of Plays: Yoruba Popular Life in Theatre (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2001); David Kerr, African Popular Theatre: From Pre-Colonial Times to the Present Day (London, U.K.: James Currey, 1995). 57 Margaret Thompson Drewal, Yoruba Ritual, 20. 48 and satire did not emerge as primary subjects of inquiry until later.58 The Ghanaian concert- party, where music, theatre and comedy mixed in marathon nocturnal performances, was first treated by Efua Sutherland and Kwabena N. Bame in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively but Catherine S. Cole in a 2001 monograph centered the genre in an effort to push back against the excesses of postcolonial studies—which, she argued, had a tendency to fixate on the existential crisis of elite writers in English and French while ignoring the continued vibrancy of African languages.59 More recently, Nathan Plageman has examined highlife music as an important mode of satirical critique in both the colonial Gold Coast and independent Ghana.60 As multiparty transitions and democratization initiatives swept across Africa in the 1990s (including in South Africa), manifestations of humor and satire became more visible to scholars outside the continent, no longer the sole preserve of expatriate novelists like Henri Lopes, Dambudzo Marechera, and Sony Lab’ou Tansi, among others. The Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony (2000) lent theoretical heft to this trend by drawing extensively on Michael Bakhtin’s work in his discussion of contemporary African corruption and popular responses to it.61 Mbembe refers to the exercise of official power in colonial and postcolonial societies by the French term commandement, and argues that in the postcolonial context “the commandement seeks to institutionalize itself…in the form of a fetish…officially invested with a surplus of meanings that are not negotiable and that one is forbidden to depart 58 See Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (London, U.K.: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1915): 344-351; 439-445; and Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti- Structure (Piscataway, N. J.: Transaction Publishers, 2011 [1969]). 59 See Efua Sutherland, The Original Bob: The Story of Bob Johnson, Ghana’s Ace Comedian (Accra, Ghana: Anowuo Educational Publications, 1970); Kwabena N. Bame, Come to Laugh: African Traditional Theatre in Ghana (New York, N.Y.: Lilian Barber Press, 1985); Catherine M. Cole, Ghana’s Concert Party Theatre (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2001). 60 Nathan Plageman, Highlife Saturday Night: Popular Music and Social Change in Urban Ghana (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2012). 61 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2001 [2000]). 49 from or challenge.”62 Like the strictures of medieval religious dogma in Bakhtin’s analysis, commandement is hegemonic but must also continually be renewed in ritual and ceremony— including the exercise and spectacle of violence. Under such circumstances, Mbembe argues, African subalterns turn to parody and grotesque exaggeration in order to deflate these ideas and express their own subjectivities. Mbembe’s consideration of the commandement as a gluttonous, lecherous, defecating body adds layers of additional complexity to Bakhtin’s generally celebratory account. If discourses of purity and danger, are mechanisms, as Mary Douglas argues, for pushing ambiguity to the margins, then African popular representations of the indulgent, unclean, and excessive function as a means of bringing such issues back to the center.63 Yet the significance of this tactic, Mbembe argues, cannot be easily generalized: subversion does not necessarily imply a rejection, much less a systemic critique of what is being mocked. For this reason Mbembe describes the relationship between the commandement and its subjects as “convivial”: a “mutual ‘zombification’” in which “each has robbed the other of vitality and left both impotent.”64 Whereas Bakhtin focused on the grotesque and obscene as tactics of the weak, Mbembe insists that the powerful are just as adept at operating in such registers; humor concerning such antics can be explained better in terms of cynical resignation than radical subversion. Recent years have seen a rising tide of interest in humor and satire among scholars of Africa and its diaspora, with political cartoons and contemporary mediatized forms becoming especially popular subjects of inquiry. Ebenezer Obadare’s work on the deployment of humor in 62 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 81. 63 See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, U.K.: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980 [1966]). 64 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 81. 50 Nigerian politics (2016) and Boukary Sawadogo’s exploration of mediatized comedy in Francophone West Africa (2019), along with edited volumes from Peter Limb and Tejumola Olaniyan on African political cartoons (2018) and Ignatius Chukwumah on African jokes (2018), all suggest that African forms of humor and satire are finally starting to receive the attention they merit.65 With the development of vibrant stand-up comedy scenes within African nations and the increasing transnational visibility of stand-up comedians of African descent like Trevor Noah, Daliso Chaponda, and Cécile Djunga, studies of African stand-up comedy are also poised to make a major impact in the near future.66 Against the backdrop of social media hegemony and the global rise of populist movements in the wake of the 2007-2009 global economic crisis, Africans have been on the front lines of transforming the challenges of everyday experience into comedy over large swathes of both the Global North and the Global South. As with any relatively new field, however, there are certain tendencies that need to be unlearned in order to best understand the significance of laughter, humor, and satire in societies 65 Ebenezer Obadare, Humor, Silence, and Civil Society in Nigeria (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2016); Boukary Sawadogo, West African Screen Media: Comedy, T.V. Series, and Transnationalization (East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 2019); Taking African Cartoons Seriously: Politics, Satire, and Culture, eds. Peter Limb and Tejumola Olaniyan (East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 2018); Joke-Performance in Africa: Mode, Media, and Meaning, ed. Ignatius Chukwumah (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2018). Other engagements with Mbembe’s ideas on humor include Adoshina Afolayan, “Hilarity and the Nigerian Condition,” The Journal of Pan-African Studies 6.5 (2013), 156-174; and Alex Perullo and James Nindi, “Teeth Appear Themselves: Laughter and Humor in East Africa,” in Africa Every Day: Fun, Leisure, and Expressive Culture on the Continent, eds. Oluwakemi M. Balogun, Lisa Gilman, Melissa Graboyes, and Habib Iddrisu (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2019), 211-218. 66 See, for example, Jennalee Donian, Taking Comedy Seriously: Stand-Up’s Dissident Potential in Mass Culture (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2020): 85-124; Jessyka Finley, “Irreverence Rules: The Politics of Authenticity and the Carnivalesque Aesthetic in Black South African Women’s Stand-Up Comedy,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 78.4 (2020), 437-449; Amanda Källstig, “Laughing in the Face of Danger: Performance and Resistance in Zimbabwean Stand-Up Comedy,” Global Society 35.1 (2021), 45-60; Amanda Källstig and Carl Death, “Laughter, Resistance, and Ambivalence in Trevor Noah’s Stand-Up Comedy: Returning Mimicry as Mockery,” Critical African Studies (2020); Daria Tunca and Izuu Nwankwọ, “Confronting Race, Colonialism, and Difference in African Diasporic Stand-Up: The Cases of Trevor Noah and Cécile Djunga” (paper presented at the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study Colloquium on African Stand-Up Comedy Practice, Stellenbosch, South Africa, October 10, 2019). Trevor Noah, a South African comedian, became host of the satirical American news program The Daily Show in 2015. Daliso Chaponda, originally from Malawi, came in third on Britain’s Got Talent in 2017 and subsequently hosted his own show on BBC Radio 4. Cécile Djunga, born in Belgium to an Angolan mother and a Congolese father, is both a stand-up comedian and one of the only black presenters on Belgian public television. 51 both within Africa and abroad. The dangers inherent in this work mostly come back to analytical rigor. First, as should already be evident, terminology is crucial. Simply put, we need to know what it is we are talking about. The first section of this chapter has already explained the need to recognize the linguistic minefield scholars face in this work, particularly if writing in English. Furthermore, when applying ideas historically and trans-culturally, we need to pay attention to existing theory without remaining beholden to Eurocentric assumptions developed in dialogue with (and inextricably linked to) the very colonial project that we as scholars are seeking to critique. Most importantly, we need to treat laughter, humor, and satire, as phenomena subject to historical forces, and avoid applying a presentist lens to understanding the past. There is a tendency to play favorites in humor studies, to explore only humor that the author finds particularly brilliant or progressive, to the exclusion of what in contemporary terms may seem clumsy, offensive, or ineffective. Robert Darnton, a historian of France, stresses the importance of this point in his famous chapter “Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint- Séverin,” in which he grapples with how an orgy of violence visited on dozens of felines by a couple of printers’ apprentices in the 1730s came to be remembered by them not as gruesome or cruel but as hilarious, a reliable source of merriment for the rest of their lives.67 Darnton takes our experience of this dissonance seriously, and explains how the apprentices’ outburst served not only as a way of reasserting themselves against poor working conditions, but also drew from a lively civic tradition of mass cat-killing derived from French Carnival culture. As Darnton writes, 67 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, N.Y.: Basic Books, 1984): 75-106. 52 Our own inability to get the joke is an indication of the distance that separates us from the workers of preindustrial Europe. The perception of that distance may serve as the starting point of an investigation, for anthropologists have found that the best points of entry in an attempt to penetrate an alien culture can be those where it seems to be most opaque. When you realize that you hare not getting something—a joke, a proverb, a ceremony… you can see where to grasp a foreign system of meaning in order to unravel it.68 The great dangers of interpreting humor too close to one’s own context are, first, that one will take things for granted and, second, that one will overpromise. As Stephen Olbrys Gencarella has argued, scholars of humor should be “doing more than praising humor and comedy that one finds pleasing or copacetic with one’s own politics.”69 Claims that satire implies particular political affinities often commit the first offense. Take, for example, Eric Rosenheim’s statement that “most successful satirists have strongly tended to be conservative… the voice of the satirist is rarely revolutionary,” against Alison Dagnes’s claim that “satire is an outsider art, the weapon of the underdog who uses humor to criticize those in power.”70 Both statements are both substantially true and substantially flawed, pointing to major potential blind- spots in analysis. It is true that satire is almost always leveraged against people who are perceived to be powerful or threatening (if not, they would not be worth mentioning), but often the most devastating standard that satirists can measure their targets against is their own view of the community’s moral code. The satirical exposure of hypocrisy implies standards of conduct and values that should be broadly shared, according to the satirist, but are not actually practiced by all. In history satire has been deployed just as often in the service of conserving “natural” moral values as “natural” social hierarchies. In both cases what is represented as natural is 68 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, 77-78. 69 Stephen Olbrys Gencarella, “Returning the Favor: Ludic Space, Comedians, and the Rhetorical Constitution of Society,” in Matthew R. Meier and Casey R. Schmitt, eds., Standing Up, Speaking Out: Stand-Up Comedy and the Rhetoric of Social Change (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2017): 240. 70 Eric Rosenheim, Swift and the Satirist’s Art, 185; Alison Dagnes, A Conservative Walks into a Bar: The Politics of Political Humor (New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012): 165. 53 socially constructed, and, if historical, such efforts rarely align with the partisan labels familiar in our own cultural moment. Humor, laughter, and satire need to be considered within their own context as far as possible. A necessary corollary to contextualizing historical humor and satire is the need to consider the social and economic context of humor production. Most humor is ephemeral and unrecorded, forgotten or rendered obsolete by events almost immediately after being told at a party or scrawled on the wall of a public bathroom. When humor and satire gets recorded for posterity, it is always crucial to interrogate the material impetus behind that record. In some recent studies of political cartoons and other humorous media, one would be forgiven for thinking the relationships between humorist and audience exist in isolation, unmediated by newspaper editors, television networks, and social media platforms. In fact, these gatekeepers have a profound impact and on the way artist and audience view one another. Humorists, especially when paid and published, seldom exercise total control over their work, and one often encounters situations like that of D. C. Boonzaier in Chapter 3 of the present study, compelled by his own financial precarity to churn out cartoon after cartoon for the Anglophile South African press, scoring propaganda points for positions diametrically opposed to his own views. It is not enough to consider humor or satire as a depersonalized set of texts; we must examine the lives and circumstances of humorists and satirists as well.71 71 One text that moves in this direction is Moradewun Adejunmobi, “Stand-up Comedy and the Ethics of Popular Performance in Nigeria,” in Popular Culture in Africa: The Episteme of the Everyday, eds. Stephanie Newell and Onookome Okome (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2014), 175-194. My thoughts on this point were also profoundly influenced by Jeffrey L. Pasley’s discussion of printer-artisans in the early American republic and their rebellion against the Democratic-Republican elites for whom they were expected to work as compliant propagandists. See Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 2001). 54 Humor Studies in South Africa Unfortunately there is very little published literature that contextualizes laughter in South Africa.72 What does exist is suggestive of what scholarship might accomplish, but remains under-theorized. In 2002 Zoe Parker published an article entitled “Standing Up for the Nation” in the South African Theatre Journal, which noted the rising popularity of stand-up comedy in South Africa at an early stage of its transition from a mostly white art form to one characterized by extraordinary diversity.73 Parker also drew attention to the small proportion of women stand- up comedians in South Africa—a situation that, regrettably, has not altered much since. Assessing a journalist’s claim that stand-up comedy in South Africa was “the protest theatre of the Nineties,” Parker quoted the comedian Gilda Blacher, who told her that South Africa does not have a strong comedic culture. We come from a tradition of oppression and censorship and we therefore find it difficult to laugh at ourselves. Comedy in South Africa is culturally and economically specific. We may live in a multi- cultural society, but unlike America we do not have a national identity and so there cannot be comedy for everyone, there is no audience for it. Our comedy is years behind and it’s going to take us a long time to catch up.74 More than a decade earlier Thandi Brewer submitted a thesis on “Satire in South Africa” to Trinity College, London. Now a prominent screenwriter, Brewer lamented that 72 There is at least one published anthology of South African humor written for a general audience, but it is now more than fifteen years old. See Laugh, the Beloved Country: A Compendium of South African Humour, eds. James Clarke and Harvey Tyson (Cape Town, South Africa: Double Storey Books, 2003). Stephen Gray shared with me the complete manuscript of an earlier anthology he compiled in the 1980s under the working title Laughing Apartheid to Death, but was unable to find a willing publisher. Also noteworthy is Sarah Britten’s thesis on post- apartheid humor in advertising, sadly unpublished, and her three books on “the South African insult,” which mostly deals with political humor. See Sarah Britten, “One Nation, One Beer: The Mythology of the New South Africa in Advertising” (Ph. D. diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 2005); Sarah Britten, The Art of the South African Insult (Cape Town, South Africa: 30º South Publishers, 2006); Sarah Britten, McBride of Frankenmanto: The Return of the South African Insult (Cape Town, South Africa: 30º South Publishers, 2007); and Sarah Britten, More South African Insults (Cape Town, South Africa: 30º South Publishers, 2009). 73 Zoe Parker, “Standing Up for the Nation: An Investigation of Stand-Up Comedy in South Africa Post-1994 with Specific Reference to Women’s Power and the Body, South African Theatre Journal 16.1 (2002): 10. See also Julia Katharine Seirlis, “Laughing All the Way to Freedom?: Contemporary Stand-Up Comedy and Democracy in South Africa,” Humor 24.4 (2011), 513-530. 74 Zoe Parker, “Standing Up for the Nation,” 10. 55 Black satire in South Africa only exists in the theatre. There is no tradition of a stand-up comic, or even a satirical revue (unless black artists have been used by a white director). However Black Theatre in South Africa has tended to go the way of AgitProp [sic], with the use of the satiric to make political points…And when the theatre is to become part of a wider process of raising political consciousness, the satirists’ voice, unless it is allied to “the Cause” or is “Ideologically Sound,” can become cause for concern.75 For Brewer and Parker, the apparently unrelenting seriousness of South African history posed a formidably obstacle. Neither author was a historian, and both implied that there must be more to artistic expression in South Africa than straight-faced protest. Still, Brewer, Parker, and Blacher all seem to accept a similar framing based the idea that real humor and satire could not exist in an atmosphere of oppression and therefore was impossible prior to the arrival of democracy in 1994. All three also rely on unstated assumptions about satire and comedy. They implicitly suggest that satire and comedy need to be (1) humorous—intended to make people laugh—(2) astute—expressive of meaningful observations about the world (not just ribaldry, scatology, or slapstick)—and (3) socially progressive—privileging the perspective of the weak against the strong. As I have already argued, laughter and the expressions that inspire it have much more to do with identity than progress, and so points (2) and (3) are far too limiting (a joke can fail the test of astuteness and still reinforce a certain notions of identity). In fact, there is a growing body of scholarship that deals with the satirical elements of black South African orature.76 When the American anthropologist David Coplan was banned from the country after publishing In Township Tonight! (1985), his seminal history of black South African popular culture, he undertook an intensive period of fieldwork among migrant 75 Thandi Brewer, “Satire in South Africa” (fellowship thesis, Trinity College [London, U.K.], 1988): 22. 76 Analyses of satire in written literature are more scarce, but one would be remiss not to cite David Jinja Risenga, “A Comparative Study of Satire and Humor as Communicative Strategies in the Poems of Four Tsonga Poets” (M.A. thesis, University of South Africa, 1995). 56 laborers in nearby Lesotho.77 The difela tsa ditsamaya-naha of these workers (“traveling songs” or “songs of the adventurers”)—by turns humorous, bitter, heroic, and cynical—keenly expressed the pain and hope of a population caught between bleak rural lives at home and the inevitable hardships of labor migrancy.78 Around the same time, Liz Gunner and Mafika Gwala began research into izibongo—Zulu praise poetry—focusing not just on the praises of royals and clan patriarchs, which James Stuart had probed so extensively at the turn of the twentieth century, but on the personal praises of ordinary men and women.79 In Zulu culture, it is understood that “because of the convention that others too may compose and say praises for you, the individual must accept the image of himself or herself provided by others.”80 Gunner and Gwala argued that such “popular praises,” like Coplan’s “songs of the adventurers,” were a way for both individuals and social networks to “mediat[e] difficult, painful as well as exhilarating events and sho[w] them…through performance.”81 As Ashlee Lenta observes, while “authorship” is a difficult concept to apply to many izibongo, they often contain significant ironic and satirical content, even if as a whole they are meant to honor their subject82. Take the praises of Jerome “Vundlase” Dlamini as recorded by Gunner and Gwala: I am short, am I just a (beer) dumpie? I am light complexioned, am I just a White? 77 David Coplan, In Township Tonight! South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre, 2nd ed. (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2008 [1985]). 78 David Coplan, In the Time of Cannibals: The Word Music of South Africa’s Basotho Migrants (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 79 For background on this important and complex source of information on Zulu history and tradition, see John Wright, “Making the James Stuart Archive,” History in Africa 23 (1996), 333-350. 80 Elizabeth Gunner, “Ukubonga zeZibongo: Zulu Praising and Praises” (Ph. D. diss.: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1984): 67. 81 Introduction to Musho! Zulu Popular Praises, eds. Liz Gunner and Mafika Gwala (East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 1991): 29. 82 See Ashlee Lenta, “Reading the Individual in Community: Personal ‘Izibongo’ as Autobiographical Performance,” English in Africa 31.1 (2004), 59-75. 57 Sleep with a virgin, You are ejaculating, ejaculating off target! Sleep with a strange virgin, You slept with the pregnant woman from the Khumalo clan, And Zondi decorated your head with a bush knife!83 This brief passage is full of sarcasm about Dlamini’s personal appearance and sexual misadventures. The irony inherent in mentioning such things in a performance that is meant to represent its subject before both the visible and invisible realms communicates something profound about the Zulu (and indigenous South African) spiritual viewpoint. Both men and women, as Norma Masuku and Noleen S. Turner have explored, deploy scatalogical, sexual and sarcastic wit in Zulu orature as a strategy to call others back to positive social norms, manifestations of carnivalesque and satirical wit readily legible within the Eurocentric understanding of such terms.84 Finally, in the work of Noverino Canonici, one confronts the importance of trickster stories in Zulu folklore, especially those that involve the slender mongoose Chakijana Bogcololo and the human trickster Phoshozwayo.85 The adventures of the latter are recorded in the work of Violet Dube (the nom-de-plume of Natale Nxumalo, originally Nxaba), the first Zulu woman to publish a book in 1935. This is particularly significant as her tale reminds us that despite the strict limitations placed on women’s laughter in precolonial African society (and in mission- educated twentieth century society, which, if anything, was even stricter), women were the chief 83 Musho!, 78; see also Ashlee Lenta, “Reading the Individual in Community,” 70-71. A dumpie is a short, squat beer bottle found in South Africa. 84 See Norma Masuku, “Perceived Oppression of Women in Zulu Folklore: A Feminist Critique” (Ph. D. diss.: University of South Africa, 2005); Noleen S. Turner, “Elements of Satire in Zulu Oral Traditions” (M.A. thesis: University of Natal, Durban, 1990); Noleen S. Turner, “Humor and Scatology in Contemporary Zulu Ceremonial Songs,” Humor 31.1 (2018), 65-83. 85 Noverino N. Canonici, “Tricksters and Trickery in Zulu Folk Tales” (Ph. D. diss.: University of Natal, Durban, 1995). See also Felicity Wood’s discussion of the real-life trickster Khotso Sethuntsa in Felicity Wood, “The Shape-Shifter on the Borderlands: A Comparative Study of the Trickster Figure in African Orality and in Oral Narratives Concerning One South African Trickster, Khotso Sethuntsa,” English in Africa 37.2 (2010), 71-90. 58 storytellers in precolonial southern Africa.86 As such, they were the main keepers of the knowledge of trickster stories. “The Zulu folktale tradition,” according to Canonici, “reflects, with a sense of detached irony, an ethical system based on circumstances: man is the center of the system, but he is forced to fight with all his powers in order to survive.”87 That fight, which is never won without mistakes, in turn affirms the humanity of the subject. Thus Gunner argues that “praises [izibongo] which during a man’s life could be received with respect but also with hilarity and which may have commented on the man in cutting terms, are after death absorbed into a wider religious and celebratory framework.”88 Unfortunately, however, these insights are recorded largely in unpublished theses and dissertations, and have yet to penetrate the fields of South African history and cultural studies in a fashion commensurate with their significance. To date one of the only historians to devote significant attention to South African laughter is Sandra Swart, whose 2009 article “The Terrible Laughter of the Afrikaner” challenges the assumption that before 1994 South Africa was a basically humorless place.89 Swart’s article focuses on the historical importance of laughter among Afrikaners, a group that remains highly stereotyped in South African culture.90 Drawing mainly from soldiers’ diaries and memoirs of the 1899-1902 South African War and its aftermath, when the defeated “Boers” returned home from commandos and concentration camps to face the harsh realities of British postwar 86 Violet Dube and Gerard Bhengu, Wozanazo Izindaba zika Phoshozwayo (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: Shuter and Shooter, 1935). 87 Noverino N. Canonici, “Tricksters and Trickery in Zulu Folk Tales,” 191. 88 Elizabeth Gunner, “Ukubonga zeZibongo: Zulu Praising and Praises,” 68. 89 Two other articles that consider humor in South Africa as a historical phenomenon are Tessa Dowling, “Satirical Strategies in Xhosa Under Apartheid,” South African Journal of African Languages 17.2 (1997), 35-49; and Timothy Johns, “Laughing Off Apartheid: Comedy at the Twilight of White Minority Rule,” Journal of Narrative Theory 39.2 (2009), 211-240. 90 This is perhaps best exemplified by “Van der Merwe jokes,” which reinforce the idea of the Afrikaner man as slow-witted and provincial. Sandra Swart correctly remarks that “the social history of the Van der Merwe joke still needs to be written, with particular focus on the vigor of this stock figure under a range of social conditions and historical moments.” See Sandra Swart, “The Terrible Laughter of the Afrikaner,” 904. 59 occupation, Swart compellingly describes how the buoyant jocularity of the front gave way to a “survivalist strain of dark humor” that fostered resilience.91 Swart’s article includes an interesting discussion of the efforts of F. E. J. Malherbe, an Afrikaans professor at Stellenbosch University, to integrate the Afrikaner sense of humor into a nationalist understanding of the “essential volksoul” of the Afrikaner people.92 Not only does Swart’s article problematize the still-common trope of the joyless Afrikaner, but the parallels she draws between Afrikaners’ dark, escapist and often subversive postwar humor (regarded with deep unease by British occupiers) and the humorous traditions of African Americans under slavery and Jim Crow, take the discussion to an unexpected place. In welcome contrast to the almost uniformly celebratory picture of humour we have encountered so far, Swart is careful to acknowledge the ambiguity of humor’s true purposes, a thorny but potentially rich direction for future theoretical work. “Jokes,” according to Swart, offer the social historian a source for the possibility of a dialectic of submission and rebellion because in there [sic] we have heard a mixture of both quiescent and rebellious laughter. Moreover, whether humor operated as a conservative or a revolutionary force, it is always a form of power and, as such, vital to the investigations of social historians.93 In 1984, the writer and literary scholar Njabulo Ndebele’s address “Rediscovery of the Ordinary” problematized what he deemed a “highly dramatic, highly demonstrative form of literary representation” in South Africa, fixated on the brutality of the apartheid system.94 Ndebele traced the roots of this tradition in literature from R. R. R. Dhlomo through Alex La Guma, even taking his analysis beyond literature to the culture of spectacle in South African 91 Sandra Swart, “The Terrible Laughter of the Afrikaner,” 897. 92 Quoted in Sandra Swart, “The Terrible Laughter of the Afrikaner,” 902. The original Afrikaans is volksiel or “soul of the nation.” 93 Sandra Swart, “The Terrible Laughter of the Afrikaner,” 899. 94 Njabulo S. Ndebele, Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture (Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2006 [1984]): 31. 60 soccer. Yet in analyzing then-contemporary examples of black South African literature, Ndebele could already perceive the beginnings of a shift towards less expository engagement with the apartheid experience. For Ndebele, it was the everyday issues of life, often regarded as sub- political, that provided the bulk of “the essential drama in the lives of ordinary people.”95 While it might seem dangerous to separate these issues, even momentarily, from their political context, Ndebele argued that such analyses could strike at the heart of apartheid’s logic. The system’s high-modern flattening of people into categories, he insisted, should not be reinforced by the foes of the system. More recently, Ndebele’s plea for authors to continue “rediscovering the ordinary” has been taken up by the historian Jacob Dlamini, whose books Native Nostalgia (2009) and Askari (2015) explore stories that fail to conform to contemporary meta-narratives about the apartheid past.96 In Native Nostalgia, which is as much a memoir as it is a historical reflection, Dlamini poses the fraught question of “what it means for blacks to remember their lives under apartheid with fondness,” inviting, among other things, a reconsideration of the popular culture that black South Africans consumed during the apartheid era.97 Dlamini reminds us that, if the apartheid system was designed to promote misery and disempowerment, the misery it produced was never so total as to blot out the diverse spectrum of human experience. Even in an age of misery everyone is not constantly miserable—and as such, joy and laughter can be understood as potentially subversive. To understand laughter this way is not to equate escapism with activism. Laughter might serve explicitly escapist or even reactionary agendas, but when it reaffirmed the 95 Njabulo S. Ndebele, Rediscovery of the Ordinary, 49. 96 Jacob Dlamini, Native Nostalgia (Johannesburg, South Africa: Jacana Media, 2009); and Jacob Dlamini, Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-Apartheid Struggle (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2015). 97 Jacob Dlamini, Native Nostalgia, 15. 61 humanity of people usually denied such recognition in the public sphere, pleasure facilitated perseverance and survival, keeping the possibility of future change alive. It is difficult to understand how a society without pleasure could ever work towards its own liberation, let alone be free. The chapters that follow by no means exhaust the multitude of avenues available to the prospective student of South African laughter, humor, and satire. Nevertheless, they show the ways in which the history of laughter is intertwined with the history of South African society and nationhood. They show that humor allowed South Africans in the twentieth century to wage social and political battles in new ways, to engage and exploit new ideas about citizenship and participation in public discourse, and, finally, to maintain group identities and values in the face of uncertainty, opposition, and oppression. Above all, they show that while it is no longer uncommon to hear South Africa described as a nation of comedians and jokesters, the roots of gelastic culture in the country penetrate far deeper than the rich topsoil of the post-1994 era. Many of them go back more than a century, transgressing the lines of color, class, language, and gender—sometimes imperfectly but always meaningfully. As Herman Charles Bosman, South Africa’s most famous twentieth century humorist, once wrote of laughter, “well, there’s a queer thing for you, now, and something not so easy to understand…The fact is that there are more kinds of laughter than only one sort, and it seems to me that this is the cause of a lot of regrettable awkwardness in the world.”98 98 Herman Charles Bosman, “The Homecoming,” On Parade (Johannesburg, South Africa), March 16, 1949, also published in Herman Charles Bosman, Unto Dust and Other Stories, ed. Craig Mackenzie (Cape Town, South Africa: Human and Rousseau, 2002 [1963]): 58. 62 Chapter 2— From Kaatje Kekkelbek to Piet Uithalder: Senses of Humor and Settler Dilemmas, 1652-1910 For Europeans, the first fact of the region that would become South Africa was that it was far away. What the Portuguese first dubbed the Cape of Good Hope was for centuries seen as the maritime equivalent of a desert oasis: useful for the refreshment it could provide to sailors in transit and little else. Far removed from the burgeoning mercantile cultures of coastal Africa that became crucial to European expansion through the Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades, to the Heeren XVII who led the Dutch East India Company, the Cape was not much more than a remote outpost of the highly lucrative and strategically important East Indies trading network. The perception of being far away produced a deeply-engrained sense of marginality in both white settlers and the emerging majority of people who would come, over the next few centuries, to an awareness of being labeled “South African.” Indeed, it has persisted right through to the twenty-first century, refracted and compounded by membership in the British Empire, the experience of apartheid-era isolation, and, finally, the complexities of 1994’s “global success story” and “rainbow nationalism” as promoted abroad by South Africa’s boosters. Over the decades, this marginality has come to coexist around a seemingly contradictory sensitivity to external scrutiny, producing what one might argue is the worst of both worlds: a nation too small and weak to produce excellence in its own right, yet too large to evade the eyes of the world. It is against this self-contradictory morass that many of the figures in this study felt compelled to struggle. The purpose of the following chapter is to provide an overview of the development of European-influenced humor in Southern African history from the days of the first permanent 63 Dutch settlement at the Cape to the immediate post-South African War period. To tell this story necessarily means probing the origins of journalism and European dramatic forms in the region, as well as accounting for the outsized influence of white foreign visitors in shaping political and social opinion both domestically and abroad. Though the gold and diamond rushes of the late nineteenth century, along with the South African War, focused unprecedented international attention on the region—much of it humorous—the fundamental dynamics of regional marginality did not change, and in some ways intensified with the influx of new arrivals. Thus, unlike in the United States, where a vibrant local tradition of humor writing coincided with the efflorescence of local journalism, in Southern Africa the development of unapologetically local literary traditions stalled, even as modern ideologies equating humor with civilization became entrenched, and activists like Dr. Abdul Abdurrahman turned to satire to advance their own claims to membership in the newly-minted nation whose constitutional future was negotiated by imperial administrators between 1902 and 1910. This chapter is structured as a series of case studies, exploring important moments in the development of humor under the conditions of colonialism. It begins by accounting for the slow development of colonial performance culture at the Cape in the wake of the Dutch East India Company and exploring the first important satirical play in South African colonial history: Charles Etienne Boniface’s De Nieuwe Ridderorde, of De Temperantisten (1832). It shows how that play exemplifies the fraught positionality of the colonial white population as they sought to wrap themselves in the mantle of European civilization while simultaneously rejecting liberal humanitarianism. From there, it turns to one of the most influential satires in South African history, the sketch Kaatje Kekkelbek, juxtaposing it with literature on the rise of blackface 64 minstrelsy in the United States at roughly the same time period. European ideas about humor were in flux in the nineteenth century, and playful racial masquerade served the purpose of establishing a humorous cordon sanitaire between frontier settlers and indigenous people, even as the gentle satire of Victorian organs like Sam Sly’s African Journal reflected the belief that humor was also an indicator of higher civilization and fitness for political participation. In doing so, these comic journals strengthened Anglophone settlers’ sense of membership in a global imperial community even before the Mineral Revolution of the late nineteenth century transformed Southern Africa’s economy and political geography. The discovery of diamonds in Kimberley and gold on the Witwatersrand gave Southern Africans their first taste of global fame, and gave rise to a myriad of comic portrayals of local life by foreign white visitors like Mark Twain. I argue that while most of the outside world forgot about the region soon after the conclusion of the South African War, the stereotypes that crystallized in such representations took on a life of their own in the unsettled postwar period. The last section of the chapter situates the Piet Uithalder character of Coloured political leader Abdullah Abdurrahman within this context, reappropriating well-worn stereotypes about Khoisan and Coloured people in order to unite the Coloured elite and demonstrate the legitimacy of that group’s political aspirations. It will be seen that European-influenced humor in nineteenth century Southern Africa functioned not only as a means of voicing political frustration, but also as a means of negotiating hierarchies within settler society and locating that society in the wider world. The promise of local control over South Africa’s destiny raised the stakes of this process after Union in 1910, but the roots of many ideas we will encounter later on in this study have their roots in the nineteenth century and before. 65 A Serious Country: Early European Theatre at the Cape On April 6, 1652, Jan van Riebeeck and his men of the Dutch East India Company (known in Dutch as the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or V.O.C.), landed at the Cape of Good Hope, inaugurating the first permanent European settlement in what is today South Africa. Table Bay was already well-known as a stopover for European ships on their way to and from India, and had been the site of a lively commerce with the indigenous Khoisan residents of the area for more than a century and a half. Trade between the two groups was often attended by music, going back to 1487, when, as the chronicler of Vasco da Gama’s first voyage to India recorded, local people “began to play on four or five flutes…thus making a pretty harmony for negroes who are not expected to be musicians…the captain-major then ordered the trumpets to be sounded and we, in the boats, danced and the captain-major did so likewise when he rejoined us.”1 It did not take long, however, for the pastoralist Khoi (so-called “Hottentots”) and the gathering and hunting San (“Bushmen”) to become by-words for primitive savagery among Europeans frustrated with their unfamiliar customs and independence.2 Malvern van Wyk Smith, for example, argues that the island of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and its semi-human monster 1 A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama, 1497-1499, ed. E. G. Ravenstein (London, U.K.: Hakluyt Society, 1898): 11. 2 In the modern South African context, the word “Hottentot” is considered highly offensive, equivalent to the word “kaffir” for a black person. The term “Bushmen” is often considered derogatory, especially in South Africa, though it is worth noting that words like “San” and “Basarwa”—often favored as alternatives in English—can be interpreted as equally derogatory. As with many indigenous groups around the world, historically people’s primary identification was with a particular group such as the Jul’hoan or G|ui, instead of a broad racial or linguistic category. For further discussion see William F. Ellis, “‘Ons is Boesmans’: Commentary on the Naming of Bushmen in the Southern Kalahari,”Anthropology Southern Africa 38.1 (2015), 120-133, and “How to Name the Bushmen?,” Survival International, accessed January 21, 2021, . For European impressions of the Khoi and San, see Emile Boonzaier, Candy Malherbe, Andy Smith, and Penny Berens, The Cape Herders: A History of the Khoikhoi of Southern Africa (Cape Town, South Africa: David Philip, 1996): 65-95; Richard Elphick, Kraal and Castle: Khoikhoi and the Founding of White South Africa (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978); Andrew B. Smith, “Different Facets of the Crystal: Early European Images of the Khoikhoi at the Cape, South Africa,” Goodwin Series 7 (1993), 8-20. 66 Caliban owes more to accounts of the Cape of Good Hope than the Caribbean.3 “But if the Cape was a paradisal albeit storm-tossed island,” she writes, “its inhabitants turned out to be the very anti-types of the Edenic.”4 Whereas the pre-1652 Cape had offered seafarers from multiple European lands a chance for refreshment after weeks of weathering dangerous seas, the V.O.C. settlement project was focused on establishing Compagnie control (and by extension, civilization) over a geographical portion of the continent. Hence the planting of the infamous almond hedge in 1660 to mark out the boundaries of the colony, the establishment of a cruel carceral geography centered on the Castle of Good Hope and Robben Island, and the imposition of one of the most austere and heavy-handed chartered company regimes of the Mercantile Era.5 The V.O.C. colony that became Cape Town spread out to include the whole of the Cape peninsula and its immediate hinterland over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Enslaved people were imported to facilitate this expansion, most of whom were taken from Delagoa Bay (modern-day Mozambique), Madagascar, and the V.O.C.’s outposts in the 3 Malvern van Wyk Smith, “Misfits in the Margins: Transgression and Transformation on the (South) African Frontier,” English in Africa 43.1 (2016): 12-14. 4 Malvern van Wyk Smith, “Misfits in the Margins,” 13. 5 For background on the V.O.C. period at the Cape of Good Hope, see Gerrit Schutte, “Company and Colonists at the Cape, 1652-1795,” in The Shaping of South African Society, 1652-1820, eds. Richard Elphick and Hermann Giliomee, 2nd ed. (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2014 [1979]: 283-323; Hermann Giliomee, The Afrikaners: Biography of a People (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 2003): 22-57; Robert Carl- Heinz Shell, Children of Bondage: A Social History of the Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope, 1652-1838 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994); Kerry Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 67 East Indies.6 In 1694 the V.O.C. exiled the Islamic scholar and royal advisor Shaykh Yusuf al- Taj al-Khalwati al-Maqasari from Java to an isolated farm outside Cape Town with a group of fifty followers, unintentionally spurring the growth of Islam and the establishment of its centuries-old intellectual traditions at the Cape.7 By the nineteenth century a tradition of “Arabic-Afrikaans” religious literature flourished at the Cape in manuscript form—the Dutch language having been modified to what later became known as Afrikaans, written in the Arabic script of the Qur’an.8 According to Achmat Davids, Afrikaans did not replace Malay as the main language of religious instruction at the Cape until the nineteenth century, yet Jill Fletcher, citing Stephen Gray, attests to the existence of a remarkable play script written as early as 1740 by a “Malay slave named Majiet…said to be a son of Sheikh Jousuf” in Arabic-Afrikaans.9 This play, which apparently deals with an enslaved woman’s efforts to resist sexual assault by her master 6 For background on slavery in the Cape of Good Hope, see John Edwin Mason, Social Death and Resurrection: Slavery and Emancipation in South Africa (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 2003): 13-36; Nigel Penn, “Casper, Crebis, and the Knegt: Rape, Homicide, and Violence in the Eighteenth-Century Rural Western Cape, Southern African Historical Journal 66.4 (2014), 611-634; Shell, Children of Bondage. Unfree labor, however, was by no means limited to the actual Cape, and the hunger for labor inspired an illicit trade in human beings beyond its borders just as it did starting in the early nineteenth century on the margins of Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique). The precise contours of this traffic are debated but the fact of its importance to pre-Mineral Revolution Southern African history is undeniable. See Julian Cobbing, “The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo, The Journal of African History 29.3 (1988), 487-519; Norman Etherington, The Great Treks: The Transformation of Southern Africa, 1815-1854 (Harlow, U.K.: Longman, 2001): 243-272; 294-299. For critiques see Elizabeth A. Eldredge, “Sources of Conflict in Southern Africa, c. 1800-1830: The ‘Mfecane’ Reconsidered,” Journal of African History 33.1 (1992), 1-35; Martin Legassick, “The Great Treks: The Evidence,” Southern African Historical Journal 46.1 (2002), 282-299. 7 See John Edwin Mason, “‘A Faith for Ourselves’: Slavery, Sufism, and Conversion to Islam at the Cape,” Southern African Historical Journal 46.1 (2002), 3-24; Shafiq Morton, From the Spice Islands to Cape Town: The Life and Times of Tuan Guru (Cape Town, South Africa: National Awqaf Foundation of South Africa, 2018). 8 See Suleman Essop Dangor, “Arabic-Afrikaans Literature at the Cape,” Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 45.1 (2008), 123-132; Saarah Jappie, “From the Madrassah to the Museum: The Social Life of the ‘Kietaabs’ of Cape Town, History in Africa 38 (2011), 369-399; Kees Versteegh, “A Remarkable Document in Arabic-Afrikaans: The Election Pamphlet of 1884,” in The Arabic Script in Africa: Studies of a Writing System, eds. Meikal Mumin and Kees Versteegh (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 214), 365-380. Arabic-Afrikaans is a form of ‘Ajami script like the West African variety treated in depth by Fallou Ngom. See Fallou Ngom, Muslims Beyond the Arab World: The Odyssey of ‘Ajamī and the Murīdiyya (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2016). 9 Jill Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa: A Guide to its History from 1780 to 1930 (Cape Town, South Africa: Vlaeberg, 1994): 15. 68 and his son, was held in a private collection as of 1978 and remains unavailable to researchers.10 It represents one of the earliest examples of “resistance theatre” in Southern African colonial history, and it is a shame more is not known about it. In the long term, contact at the Cape between European, Khoisan, and Southeast Asian cultures would result in the development of a rich creole culture, as the ethnomusicologist Denis-Constant Martin and others have explored.11 Overall, however, the V.O.C. era at the Cape was not a place where humor—or creativity in general—was much encouraged. This is all the more striking because the early modern Netherlands was home to the vibrant tradition of the rederijkers—“middle class men who gathered in chambers of rhetoric or guilds devoted to the practice of vernacular poetry and theatre” alongside heavy drinking.12 When, in the eighteenth century, reports began to surface of V.O.C. soldiers in Cape Town putting on amateur theatricals, the Compagnie command saw to it that their influence extended no further than the Castle walls. Indeed, it was not until 1781, when a garrison of French troops arrived to shore up Cape Town’s defenses, that public theatrical displays at the “Barracks Theatre” became a feature of city life. “Employed in the morning at their exercise, the French soldiers in the evening acted plays [la comédie],” reported the French naturalist François Levaillant in 1783.13 From the beginning, the contrast between the rugged 10 Stephen Gray, “Our Forgotten Drama: Stephen Gray Looks at the Continuity of South African English Drama,” Speak: Critical Arts Journal 1.2 (1978): 15. 11 See Denis-Constant Martin, Sounding the Cape: Music, Identity, and Politics in South Africa (Somerset West, South Africa: African Minds, 2013); Denis-Constant Martin, Cape Town Harmonies: Memory, Humour, and Resilience (Somerset West, South Africa: African Minds, 2017); Robert Ross, Cape of Torments: Slavery and Resistance in South Africa (London, U.K.: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983); Nigel Worden, Elizabeth van Heyningen, and Vivian Bickford-Smith, Cape Town—The Making of a City: An Illustrated Social History (Cape Town, South Africa: David Philip, 1998). 12 Anna-Laure van Bruaene and Sarah van Bouchaute, “Rederijkers, Kannenkijkers: Drinking and Drunkenness in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Low Countries,” Early Modern Low Countries 1 (2017): 2. 13 François Levaillant, New Travels into the Interior Part of Africa by way of the Cape of Good Hope in the Years 1783, 1784, and 1785, vol. 1 (London, U.K.: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1796): xvii. Original French from François Levaillant, Second Voyage dans le Intérieur de l’Afrique par le Cape de Bonne-Espérance dans les Anées 1783, 84, et 85, vol. 1 (Paris, France: H. J. Janzen et Comp., 1795): xi. 69 Cape, so isolated from the cultural centers of Europe, weighed heavily on the minds of white visitors like François Levaillant: These ingenious diversions afforded me, I confess, much amusement; but the idea that most pleased me was to see them transferred to Africa; that is to say, in the neighbourhood of lions, panthers, and hyænas. As for the Creoles, who had never witnessed before anything of the kind, they were absolutely inchanted [sic]. Nothing was talked of in every company throughout the town but the French plays.14 The end of V.O.C. rule and the onset of British colonialism further facilitated the growth of theatre in the colony, albeit along sectional lines.15 In September 1801, during the first British occupation of the Cape, the African Theatre opened its doors at the corner of Bree and Longmarket Street (the building was converted to a church for freed slaves in 1838, and survives to this day). At a lavish estimated price of £2,500, the extravagance of the new theatre reflected poorly on the governor, Sir George Yonge, at a time when military preparedness was an overarching imperial priority, and it hastened his eventual removal.16 That the theatre was a dubious vanity project spearheaded by the city’s new British elites is further confirmed by the fact that the audience was initially seated entirely in boxes, with no pit “to suit the pockets of subalterns,” as the socialite Lady Ann Barnard put it, though this was remedied by 1804.17 14 François Levaillant, New Travels into the Interior Part of Africa by way of the Cape of Good Hope in the Years 1783, 1784, and 1785, vol. 1, xviii. 15 Great Britain first occupied the Cape of Good Hope as part of an effort to secure routes to India in the wake of a French Revolutionary invasion of the Netherlands. The Cape was transferred to Napoleon’s Dutch client state in 1803 under the terms of the Treaty of Amiens (the V.O.C. was dissolved at the end of 1799) but the British invaded a second time in early 1806 and thereafter retained the colony for more than a century. For the early history of Cape Town and the Cape Colony under British rule, see T. R. H. Davenport, South Africa: A Modern History, 3rd ed. (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1987 [1977]): 40-43; Michael Godby, “‘To Do the Cape’: Samuel Daniell’s Representation of African Peoples During the First British Occupation of the Cape,” Journal of Historical Geography 43 (2014), 28-38; Robert Ross, A Tragedy of Manners: Status and Respectability at the Cape, 1750-1870 (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1999): 40-60; Nigel Worden, Elizabeth van Heyningen, and Vivian Bickford-Smith, Cape Town—The Making of a City, 85-150. 16 Jill Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa, 24; 26. 17 Ann Barnard, South Africa a Century Ago: Letters Written from the Cape of Good Hope (1797-1801) by Lady Ann Barnard, ed. W. H. Wilkins (London, U.K.: Smith, Elder and Co., 1910): 252; Jill Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa, 33. 70 Among those who felt the theatre would have a deleterious effect on the city was Lord Wellesley, the Governor-General of India, who wrote to Andrew Barnard (Lady Ann’s husband) that I do not however expect that you will succeed…in teaching the Hottentots either to act, sing, or dance at the Theatre Royal in Hottentot Square.18 Not being able to obtain your Actors and Actresses from Europe, or to dramatize your Hottentots, you will dramatize your Military Mess Rooms, all the young part of your society, and all your young guests from India; and when I require Soldiers, Statesmen, and Merchants, Judges, Ambassadors and Lieutenant Governors, I shall find nothing better than broken Players, decayed Spouters, awkward Harlequins, and ungainly Dancers.19 Ownership of the theatre was divided equally between English and Dutch-speaking shareholders, but having been spearheaded mainly by Anglophones, the theatre soon came into its own as a hub for English-language performance at a time when (white) theatrical endeavors were divided along strong ethnolinguistic lines. Through the early years of the nineteenth century, however, amateur theatrical performances were being given—not only in English and Dutch, but also in French and German; a testament to the eclectic population that the Cape attracted.20 All of these plays, so far, were imported from Europe. But it was out of Cape Town’s French community that the first evidence of settler innovation in the field of drama would come. Spirits of Inspiration: Charles Etienne Boniface and De Nieuwe Ridderorde Almost a century after Majiet, Charles Etienne Boniface was not only the first white South African to publish a stage comedy on South African themes, but can also be described as the first major South African humorist of the colonial era. Like many of the writers we will encounter 18 “Hottentot Square” is an old name in general use for what later became known as Riebeeck Square, where the theatre was located. 19 Quoted in A. M. Lewin Robinson, “Dangers of a Colonial Theatre, 1800,” Bulletin of the South African Library 30.2 (1973): 37. 20 See Robert Ross, A Tragedy of Manners, 9-69; Nigel Worden, Elizabeth van Heyningen, and Vivian Bickford- Smith, Cape Town—The Making of a City, 85-150. 71 later in this study—most notably Stephen Black and H. I. E. Dhlomo, Boniface’s literary talent, linguistic facility, and sharp tongue won him both fame and foes as he became, in the words of Jill Fletcher, “one of the most brilliant and unpopular men the Cape has known,” as well as “his own worst enemy.”21 A child prodigy, Boniface was born in France in 1787.22 According to an 1854 account in the newspaper De Zuid-Afrikaan, his father was the Governor of the infamous Temple prison in Paris, and was exiled to the Seychelles after a prominent British officer escaped on his watch.23 Boniface the younger arrived at the Cape at the age of 19, just as the British were re-asserting administration over the colony, and he established himself as a music and language teacher there. Soon he was leading the French amateur theatre in Cape Town, and in the coming years transformed it into the company “Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pens,” whose eclectic linguistic repertoire contrasted with the English company “All the World’s A Stage” and the Dutch “Tot Nut en Vermaak.” Boniface produced mainly Dutch translations of French plays, which were well- received, but his bombastic personality and recurring financial woes lost him many friends in the upper echelons of Cape society in the 1810s and 1820s. In 1818, another intellectual impresario arrived in Cape Town—a Dutch Jew named Joseph Suasso de Lima—and while the pair were initially friendly with one another, their relationship soon soured into rivalry, with de Lima attacking Boniface’s plays and Boniface reciprocating with shots de Lima’s poetry in such satirical pieces as Limaçon de Dichter (“Snail the Poet”, 1823) and De Twee Slakken: Limaçon Sen. en Limaçon Jun. (“The Two Snails: Escargot Senior and Escargot Junior,” 1825).24 Their 21 Jill Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa, 43. 22 F. C. L. Bosman, Drama en Toneel in Suid-Afrika, vol. 1 (Cape Town: Hollandsch-Afrikaansche Uitgewers- Maatschappij, 1928): 120. 23 “Wylen Dr. Herr Boniface,” De Zuid-Afrikaan (Cape Town, South Africa), January 30, 1854. 24 Slak is the Dutch term for snail, whereas limaçon is French. 72 rivalry was petty, but provided opportunities for Boniface to hone his powers of invective— powers that he would put to full use in his first entirely Capetonian play. By 1832, British colonialism was in the midst of effecting major changes at the Cape. For the first time in the colony’s history, newspapers were allowed to be established without the prior approval of the government (the V.O.C. had banned independent publications on three separate occasions in the eighteenth century).25 While the gradual abolition of slavery in the colony would only begin the following year, in 1828 Ordinance 50 had abolished the pass system for Khoikhoi laborers, along with other coercive practices like summary corporal punishment, and affirmed Khoikhoi property rights.26 The Rev. John Philip, a Scot who had come to the Cape Colony on behalf of the London Missionary Society more than a decade prior, was engaged in fierce agitation for the rights and equality of the Khoikhoi; he was father-in-law to John Fairbairn, whose South African Commercial Advertiser secured his role as “a leading spokesman for the (changing) interests of the Cape merchant class in commercial expansion.”27 This general zeitgeist in favor of nominal racial equality and free labor contributed, later in the decade, to the mass emigration of Dutch-speaking farmers beyond the Vaal River later in the decade, in the so- 25 See Peter D. McDonald, The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences (New York, N. Y.: Oxford University Press, 2009): 2-9; Kirsten McKenzie, “‘Franklins of the Cape’: The South African Commercial Advertiser and the Creation of a Colonial Public Sphere, 1824-1854, Kronos 25 (1998): 90. 26 See V. C. Malherbe, “Testing the ‘Burgher Right’ to the Land: Khoesan, Government and Colonist in the Eastern Cape after Ordinance 50 of 1828,” South African Historical Journal 40 (1999), 1-20. 27 Martin Legassick and Robert Ross, “From Slave Economy to Settler Capitalism: The Cape Colony and its Expansions, 1800-1854, in The Cambridge History of South Africa, vol. 1, eds. Carolyn Hamilton, Bernard K. Mbenga, and Robert Ross (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2010): 269. See also Timothy J. Keegan, Dr. Philip’s Empire: One Man’s Struggle for Justice in Twentieth Century South Africa (Cape Town, South Africa: Penguin Random House South Africa, 2016). 73 called Great Trek.28 Meanwhile, on the colony’s eastern frontier, the Sixth Anglo-Xhosa War loomed, which would culminate in the infamous beheading by British soldiers of Xhosa paramount Hintsa kaKhawuta in 1835.29 This heady atmosphere provided the context for Charles Etienne Boniface’s remarkable play De Nieuwe Ridderorde, of de Temperantisten (1832), the first published satirical play in South African history, and an excellent specimen of anti-liberal invective. “The New Knightly Order, or the Temperantists” is an impractically long play, running to over two hundred pages across four acts. Its theme is temperance societies, whose popularity in 1830s Cape Town was propagated by the same liberal abolitionist elements that were striving so hard on behalf of Khoikhoi rights. The intention of the play was to ridicule these liberal humanitarians as hypocritical ideologues who could not perceive the obvious naïveté (according to Boniface) of their ideas. The Rev. John Philip, accordingly, became Dominee (Reverend) Humbug Philipumpkin, and other prominent figures in the movement were given similarly pejorative names. De Nieuwe Ridderorde is not exactly plot-driven, but the climactic event of the work is the initiation of an“emissary” from the model Khoikhoi mission settlement of Bethelsdorp as a full member of the society. The Khoikhoi characters in the play, who are given names like Hans 28 The movement of Dutch-speaking frontier farmers beyond the legal borders of the Cape Colony between 1836 and 1840 was not referred to as “The Great Trek” until some decades afterwards, and amid the political battles of the first half of the twentieth century it cemented its place as among the most controversial areas of South African historiography. Classic discussions of the Afrikaner nationalist myth-making and liberal backlash surrounding this event include Ken Smith, The Changing Past: Trends in South African Historical Writing (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1989), and Leonard Thompson, The Political Mythology of Apartheid (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985): 144-188. The discussion in Norman Etherington, The Great Treks, 243-272, offers an important revisionist view. See also Hermann Giliomee, The Afrikaners, 88-192. 29 The significance of this atrocity is discussed in Premesh Lalu, The Deaths of Hintsa: Post-Apartheid South Africa and the Shape of Recurring Pasts (Cape Town, South Africa: Human Sciences Research Council Press, 2009). See also Noël Mostert, Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa’s Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People (New York, N.Y.: Knopf, 1992), and J. B. Peires, The House of Phalo: A History of the Xhosa People in the Days of their Independence (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1982): 109-134. 74 Droogekeel (Hans Drythroat) and Griet Drilbouten (Griet Jellybuttocks), are dehumanizing caricatures, while Boniface’s use of the dialect that would later become known as Afrikaans is noteworthy at such an early date.30 The Khoikhois’ impertinence and shaky command of the Dutch language is on display in their first interaction of the play—with Quizz, a lawyer, and Call-his-son, a distiller: GRIETJE: Zyn ander naam hiet Philipapkind, zeg hulle. KALFACHTER: Dat moet daarzoo by die Onion wees. CALL-HIS-SON: O! verkoopt uw mynheer Humbug, onions? QUIZZ, terzyde: Hy zal zeker meenen, kluitjes. KALFACHTER: Ja, Minneer, hulle hat voor ons gezeg, onion. GRIETJE, tegen Call-his-son: Ach, hy is gek:—die Dominee verkoop niks nie, Minneer: hy is maar baas, zeg hulle, over zoo een ding wat zulle Malligheid-Gewerschap noem; weet Minneer? CALL-HIS-SON: Matigheid Genootskap, wilt gy zeker zeggen. KALFACHTER: Reg, Minneer!—Net zoo hiet die spul, reg! En daar moet ons wees. CALL-HIS-SON: Gy moet eigenlyk by de Union wezen! KALFACHTER: By die Onion; ja, Minneer.31 GRIETJE: His other name is Philipapkind, they say.32 KALFACHTER: He must be down at the Onion. CALL-HIS-SON: Oh, does your Mr. Humbug sell onions? QUIZZ, aside: He surely means clods. KALFACHTER: Yes sir, they told us onions. GRIETJE, to Call-his-son: Ag, he’s crazy: the Reverend doesn’t sell nothing, Mister: he’s just boss, they say, over the thing they call the Loony Business; do you know it, Mister? CALL-HIS-SON: Temperance Society, you should rather say. 30 With origins in the slave quarters of the early colonial Cape Town, Afrikaans would not be embraced by “Afrikaner” intellectuals until well into the second half of the nineteenth century, and was not an official language of the Union of South Africa until 1922. The formalization of Afrikaans and its fraught identity as colonial creole- turned-apartheid symbol has inspired an extensive literature. See Mariana Kriel, “Chronicle of a Creole: The Ironic History of Afrikaans,” in Creolization and Pidginization in Contexts of Postcolonial Diversity, eds. Jacqueline Knörr and Wilson Trajano Filho (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2018), 132-157, and Isabel Hofmeyr, “Building a Nation from Words: Afrikaans Language, Literature and Ethnic Identity, 1902–1924,” in The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa, eds. Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido, (Harlow, U.K.: Longman, 1987), 95-123. 31 Charles Etienne Boniface, De Nieuwe Ridderorde, of De Temperantisten (Cape Town, South Africa: P. A. Brand, 1832): 7. 32 “Papkind” (a malapropism for “pumpkin”) is a Dutch word for a small, frail child. 75 KALFACHTER: Right, Mister!—that’s what the thingy’s called, right! And that’s where we should be. CALL-HIS-SON: You should actually be at the Union! KALFACHTER: At the Onion; yes sir. Dominee Humbug (Rev. Philip) is portrayed as a pompous do-gooder and habitual laxative-user who is obsessed with securing positions for his Khoikhoi charges. He brooks no criticism of any Khoikhoi, and cringes after each report of public drunkenness read at meetings of the Society for fear that a Khoikhoi was involved. When the Khoikhoi Manus Kalfachter (Manus Calfbehind) is initiated as a knight—giggling all the while—the Dominee harangues the “settlers” in the audience, calling them “unspeakable, incorrigible, intolerant, shameless, unreasonable, unbridled, thoughtless, cruel and disobedient devil-children of a European race” while wearing ridiculous regalia as the head of the “order”: a South American feathered headdress, leopard skin kaross, a breastplate, and silk stockings.33 His companions in the society’s executive are similarly kitted out in outrageous garb. Reversing the conventional framing of the relationship between temperance, Christianity and civilization, Boniface’s play is therefore an early expression of settler satire in Southern Africa. Boniface was targeting the liberal abolitionist spirit of the 1830s by attacking the outspoken Rev. Philip, whom Boniface accuses of hating the “superior” European race as much as he loves the “inferior” Khoikhoi. But Boniface was also making a less obvious point about white associational life in Cape Town. As F. C. L. Bosman observes, Freemasonry was influential in Cape Town in the early nineteenth century, particularly among the Dutch-speaking population.34 The association between Freemasonry and the Dutch Reformed Church continued 33 “En jij, ongezeglijke, onverbeterlijke, ondragelijke, schaamtelose, redelose, toomloze, onbedachtzame, gruwzame en ongehoorzame Satanskinderen”; Charles Etienne Boniface, De Nieuwe Riddeorde, 165; 148. 34 F. C. L. Bosman, Drama en Toneel in Suid-Afrika, 44 76 well into the twentieth century.35 Boniface’s erstwhile friend-turned-nemesis Suasso de Lima likely used his Masonic affiliation to bounce back after his various financial trials, inspiring further resentment in Boniface. Though De Nieuwe Ridderorde was never actually staged, the elaborately rendered ceremony in Act IV, Scene 3 vividly illustrates how, according to Boniface, the sartorial pageantry of such societies reduced their leaders to the primitive sensuality of their indigenous counterparts, the same sensuality they claimed to be fighting. But if the pretensions of the Rev. John Philip and his ilk are a mark of decadence and civilizational decay, Boniface is also compelled to attack the opposite phenomenon—white settlers whose embrace of the gutter leads them to over-familiarity with the so-called “lower orders.” This is illustrated in Act IV, Scene 8, which is an encounter between the white “novice temperantist” Tommy Sipdrams and the Khoikhoi Dampje Waterschuw (Dampy Watershy). In this scene, Waterschuw has the upper hand as he toys with a very drunk Sipdrams: SIPDRAMS: Zeg eens, Zwarte!—Ben ik nog heel ver van de plaats waar ik naar toe wil? WATERSCHUW: Watter plaats is dat dan? SIPDRAMS: Ja!—Had ik den naam maar niet vergeten!—Het is ook zulk een duivels zware, abracadabrasche ding! WATERSCHUW: De kroeg, misschien? SIPDRAMS: Neen, daar ben ik al geweest[…] De plaats die ik meen is eene plaats… waar men my heeft willen wys maken dat ik veel van jouwsgelyken zal aantreffen. WATERSCHUW: Wel, dan is het de Kroeg!36 SIPDRAMS: First tell me this, Black! Am I still far from the place I want to go to? WATERSCHUW: What place is that then? SIPDRAMS: Yeah! If only I hadn’t forgotten the name. It’s such a devilishly heavy, abracadabra-ish thing! WATERSCHUW: The bar, perhaps? 35 See Franco Frescura, “Symbolic Dimensions of 19th Century Dutch Colonial Settlement at the Cape of Good Hope,” Journal for the Study of Religion 30.2 (2017), 297-329, 351. 36 Charles Etienne Boniface, De Nieuwe Ridderorde, 135-136. 77 SIPDRAMS: No, I’ve already been there[…] The place I mean is a place…where they wanted me to know that I would come across a lot of your kind. WATERSCHUW: Well then, so it is the bar! Waterschuw continues to assert his dominance throughout the scene with questions and asides. When Sipdrams learns that Waterschuw is one of the party from Bethelsdorp, he behaves with a familiarity that Boniface intended to appall his readers: SIPDRAMS: Nu!—Wil je my te regt helpen, of niet? WATERSCHUW: Jy moet liever na de Temprens-kantoor gaan; dat zou beter voor jou wees (Hy wil heen gaan.) SIPDRAMS, hem tegenhoudende: He!…Dat is net, Zwarte! dat is het! Naar de Temperance Society; juist zoo!—Daar moet ik wezen. WATERSCHUW: Ja, maar van daag toch nie? SIPDRAMS: Van daag, ja!—op dit moment.—Daar is van avond wat te doen, weet-je; en zy kunnen zonder my niet klaar raken. WATERSCHUW, verwonderd: Zonder jou, niet? SIPDRAMS: Ik ben immers lid daarvan[…] Wel, sakkerloot, vriendtje! wil-je geloven ik kon het aan te ruiken? WATERSCHUW: Zoo! SIPDRAMS: Ja, ik ben een beest als het niet waar is!—Nu dan, man! dat komt net hoed dat je daar ook heen gaat, want dan kan-je my den weg wyzen. WATERSCHUW: Ach, ik geloof nooit day jy tot die Collesie hoort! Jy wil maar voor my pieren [beheeren]. SIPDRAMS: Ik zeg-je, neen; wy zyn broêrs!—Kom, geef my maar een zoen (Hy wil hom omhelzen.) WATERSCHUW, hem ontwykende: Ja, ik zal jou by zoenen! SIPDRAMS: Nu kom, maat!—Kom, laat ons zamen gearmd gaan (Hy vat hem onder den arm) net als twee waterhoenders.37 SIPDRAMS: Now!—You want to help me or not? WATERSCHUW: Rather go to the Temperance Office; that would be better for you (He wants to leave.) SIPDRAMS, holding him back: Hey!...That’s just it, Black! That’s it! To the Temperance Society; just so!—That's where I need to be. WATERSCHUW: Yes, but not today, right? SIPDRAMS: To-day, yes!—right now.—There's something going on tonight, you know —and they can't get it done without me. WATERSCHUW, surprised: Without you, eh? 37 Charles Etienne Boniface, De Nieuwe Ridderorde, 137-140. 78 SIPDRAMS: After all, I am a member of it […] Well, damn, little friend! Would you believe I could smell it? WATERSCHUW: Is that so! SIPDRAMS: Yes, I’m a beast if it’s not true!—Now then, man! It’s just great that you’re also going there, because then you can show me the way. WATERSCHUW: Wow, I never believe that you belong to that Society! You should rather lead me. SIPDRAMS: No, I tell you; we are brothers!—Come, give me a kiss (He wants to embrace him.) WATERSCHUW, dodging him: Yes, I will kiss you! SIPDRAMS: Come now, mate!—Come, let’s go together arm in arm (he takes him by the arm) just like two moorhens. While elsewhere Boniface shows the liberal activism of the Rev. Philip inverting the civilization it purports to champion, in this scene alcohol is shown to have its own powers of inversion. It reduces an Englishman to the level of a “Zwarte” and feminizes him as well, sexualizing his fraternal feeling. At the same time it raises Waterschuw to the level of a straight man with whom the audience is meant to sympathize. The motif of the ignorant newcomer and the cynical veteran—often mutually caricatured—is prominent in the history of South African satire, and here we encounter a very early example from the perspective of a colonial resident. Waterschuw both figuratively and literally understands the lay of the land in Cape Town more keenly than his drunken acquaintance De Nieuwe Ridderorde is not the first expression of white satire in the history of the Cape —“clandestine placards and orally transmitted doggerel” circulated in the 1820s against Lord Charles Somerset’s governorship, and certainly before as well.38 Still, Boniface’s play is notable for the length and fullness of its critique. If the function of humor—especially political satire—is linked inextricably to the policing of social boundaries, it is noteworthy that the French-born 38 Christopher Holdridge, “Laughing with Sam Sly: The Cultural Politics of Satire and Colonial British Identity in the Cape Colony, c. 1840-1850, Kronos 36 (2010): 32-33 79 Boniface’s white Cape Town is divided not along British and Dutch lines, but along those of the wise and the foolish, the seasoned and the naïve. This is the light in which it should be seen that the three “novice temperantists” in the piece are English, Scottish, and Irish, respectively, while the pro- and anti-temperance sides include a mix of Dutch and Anglo-Celtic names. More fundamentally, however, Boniface’s De Nieuwe Ridderorde shows that the lens of what might be called “settler satire” predates Anglophone artifacts that have received more scholarly attention, namely the sketch Kaatje Kekkelbek (1835) and the periodical Sam Sly’s African Journal (1843-1851). Kaatje Kekkelbek and the Development of Settler Satire in the British Cape Colony Few texts in the annals of South African literature—and none so short—have elicited as much sustained academic interest as the short sketch Kaatje Kekkelbek. Associated with the Scottish farmer and military engineer Andrew Geddes Bain, it first appeared in print in the South African Sentinel of March 4, 1839. “As every Afrikaans-speaking pupil knows,” Stephen Gray wrote in 1979, the irascible Kaatje made “an early and vital contribution to the history of the Afrikaans language”—an idea proclaimed by such intellectual heavyweights as F. C. L. Bosman in 1928 and G. S. Nienaber in 1945, at the height of Afrikaner nationalist ferment.39 Kaatje Kekkelbek, short and informal as it is, offers a classic case study of the difficulty involved in interpreting satire across almost two centuries. Deceptively brief and accessible—despite its linguistic novelty—writers over the decades have sought to understand Kaatje Kekkelbek as something richly significant beyond its appearances. The scholar Helize van Vuuren even holds that “as a 39 Stephen Gray, Southern African Literature: An Introduction (Cape Town, South Africa: David Philip, 1979): 52; Bosman, Drama en Toneel in Suid-Afrika, 506-507; G. S. N. [G. S. Nienaber], Die Huisgenoot (Cape Town, South Africa), October 26, 1945, quoted in P. R. Anderson, “‘The Host of Vagabonds’: Origins and Destinations of the Vagrant in Cape History and Ideas (Ph. D. diss., University of Cape Town, 2007): 37. 80 satirist and humorist,” Bain “laid a foundation for the development of South African literature” with the sketch.40 Leaving aside questions of authorship (Bain was not the sole author), what are the consequences of accepting such a claim? The British, like the V.O.C. before them, were mainly interested in the strategic value of the Cape to the East Indies trading network, but soon got drawn into conflicts on the colony’s expanding borders. From 1657 the V.O.C. had allowed people who were no longer employed by the Compagnie to establish their own farms, steadily pushing the boundaries of European settlement north and east. By the turn of the nineteenth century the Khoi cultures of the present- day Western Cape had been effectively shattered, and the white pastoralist trekboers, as they became known, were encroaching on the Xhosa in the so-called Zuurveld region beyond the Bushman River.41 Tension within this group, which was a loose and contentious hierarchy of various royal houses, further destabilized the situation.42 After a series of armed conflicts in the 1810s opened the Zuurveld to European occupation, the colonial administration of Governor Charles Somerset proposed settling British colonists on land between the Bushman and the Great Fish Rivers to stabilize the area and secure these gains. Yet instead of recreating the culture of the English countryside in Africa, it did not take long for the “1820 Settlers” to adopt many of the very same practices and attitudes of the Dutch-speaking farmers whose recklessness and land hunger the British government had hoped to rein in. It was in this context that Kaatje Kekkelbek 40 Helize van Vuuren, “Andrew Geddes Bain (1797-1864): Op die Spoor van die Blinkwater Monster,” Streek en Teks: ’n Oorsig van Oos-Kaap Literatuur, last modified August 9, 2000, accessed via the Internet Archive September 10, 2020, . Translated by the author. 41 See Norman Etherington, The Great Treks, 45-57; Hermann Giliomee, The Afrikaners, 130-160; N. G. Penn, “Pastoralists and Pastoralism in the Northern Cape Frontier Zone during the Eighteenth Century,” Goodwin Series 5 (1986), 62-68. 42 These tensions are detailed in Noël Mostert, Frontiers, and J. B. Peires, The House of Phalo. 81 emerged—in Grahamstown, the main town of the 1820 Settlers, at the unstable and unsettled boundary of the world beyond white settlement. Kaatje Kekkelbek is, depending on the version, a song of between six and eight verses of eight lines each, performed to the tune of “Calder Fair”, with several lines of patter in a mix of English and proto-Afrikaans between each verse. It was performed for the first time on Guy Fawkes Night, 1838 by a white man in drag and makeup.43 This man may have been Frederick Rex, a probable co-author of the piece—Bain’s son-in-law and the son of the wealthy businessman George Rex.44 Andrew Geddes Bain was not only unsympathetic to the actions of the Cape humanitarians, but personally entangled in the fallout from their ascendancy. In 1835, as P. R. Anderson notes, Bain was court-martialed for the death of a Xhosa warrior outside the Colony’s borders and then lost his farm in the Glenelg Retrocession of 1837 that excised the province of Queen Adelaide from the Cape Colony.45 Damian Shaw further confirms his anti- Liberal sympathies through a survey of Bain’s other surviving writings, including his personal journals.46 In short, when the curtain rises on the eponymous Kaatje Kekkelbek (“Kitty Chatterbox”) of Katrivier (the zone of Christian Khoisan resettlement so passionately advocated by the Rev. Philip and others), we have no reason to believe that Bain intended to provoke his white settler 43 P. R. Anderson, “‘Never Luff to Meddle mit Politics, Sir’: Errant Satire and Historical Gainsaying in A. G. Bain’s ‘Kaatje Kekkelbek, or, Life Among the Hottentots,’” Journal of Southern African Studies 38.1 (2012): 217. 44 P. R. Anderson, “‘The Host of Vagabonds,’” 113-114. 45 P. R. Anderson, “‘Never Luff to Meddle mit Politics, Sir,’” 219-220. 46 Damian Shaw, “Two ‘Hottentots’, Some Scots, and a West Indian Slave: The Origins of Kaatje Kekkelbek,” English Studies in Africa 52.2 (2009): 7-8. 82 audience to anything but ridicule.47 In the sketch, Kaatje gleefully recalls her squandered education (“Myn A B C at Ph’lipes school/ I learnt a kleine beetje/ But left it just as great a fool/ as gekke Tante Meitje”), her life of crime, and her interactions with the scandalously lenient Cape legal system (“The Judge came round, his sentence such/ As he thought just and even./ “Six months hard work,” which means in Dutch/ “Zes maanden lekker leven!”).48 She defends her criminality and drunkenness in terms of the rights granted to her by the colonial government (“But I’ll go to the Gov’nor self/ And tell him in plain lingo/ I’ve as much right to steal and fight/ As kaffir has or Fingoe.”).49 Finally, Kaatje concludes the musical portion of the text by invoking Sarah Baartman, the so-called “Hottentot Venus,” who was cruelly exhibited two 47 For more on Kat River and the Rev. Philip’s missionary efforts, see Timothy J. Keegan, Dr. Philip’s Empire; Roger S. Levine, A Living Man from Africa: Jan Tzatzoe, Xhosa Chief and Missionary, and the Making of Nineteenth-Century South Africa (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2011); Robert Ross, The Borders of Race in Colonial South Africa: The Kat River Settlement, 1829-1856 (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 48 Reproduced in Andrew Geddes Bain, Journals of Andrew Geddes Bain: Trader, Explorer, Soldier, Road Engineer and Geologist, ed. Margaret Hermina Lister (Cape Town, South Africa: The Van Riebeeck Society, 1949): 198, 200. The text is based on the version printed in Sam Sly’s Journal in 1846, and includes two stanzas not found in the version F. C. L. Bosman provides in Drama en Toneel in Suid-Afrika, 541-543. Italics in original. A kleine beetje is “little bit”; gekke Tante Meitje is “crazy Aunt Meitje”; zes maanden lekker leven translates to “six months’ easy living.” 49 “Fingoe” or Mfengu refers to refugees from the Mfecane (“Scattering”) of the early nineteenth century who settled in the modern Eastern Cape and became important allies of the Cape Colony in the Anglo-Xhosa Wars. While European scholars like J. D. Omer-Cooper initially attributed this extended period of dislocation and bloodshed to the violent despotism of Shaka kaSenzagakhona (Shaka Zulu), many contemporary scholars follow Julian Cobbing in connecting the Mfecane to instability caused by settler colonialism at the Cape and the Portuguese slave trade in present-day Mozambique and Zimbabwe. See J. D. Omer-Cooper, The Zulu Aftermath: A Nineteenth Century Revolution in Bantu Africa (London, U.K.: Longmans, 1966); Julian Cobbing, “The Mfecane as Alibi: Thoughts on Dithakong and Mbolompo.” 83 decades earlier in London and Paris (“When drest up in my voersits pak/ What hearts will then be undone/ Should I but show my face or back/ Among the beaux of London.”).50 As P. R. Anderson reminds us, “the great hazard in the criticism of satire is to mistake object and subject.”51 The intended audience of Kaatje Kekkelbek is other Cape frontier settlers and as such its critiques are not directed at the Khoisan themselves but at white policymakers— its subtitle, “Life Among the Hottentots,” makes this point clear in conjunction with Kaatje’s references to her compatriots’ testimony before a sympathetic humanitarian audience at “Extra Hole” (Exeter Hall) in London. Damian Shaw goes even further, suggesting that the sketch draws upon and inverts the genre of the slave narrative—specifically, The History of Mary Prince (1831), which was edited and published in London by none other than Thomas Pringle, a former Cape Colony journalist and poet.52 In Bain’s burlesque, Kaatje Kekkelbek is another piece of testimony, but with a difference: this time Kaatje’s testimony condemns herself and discredits her allies at the same time. If there is a layer of ironic ambivalence in Kaatje Kekkelbek, it is not, as Stephen Gray memorably argued, because there is an undercurrent of authorial sympathy and seriousness in her complaints against the colonial justice system.53 Instead, the chief irony is in the fact that Kaatje 50 Andrew Geddes Bain, Journals of Andrew Geddes Bain, 202. Voersits pak translates to “voerschitz clothes,” a printed cotton material for dresses. Between the third and fourth line of the second stanza quoted, a parenthetical note says “Kaatje here turns round.” Italics in original. The literature on Sara (also known by the diminutive form Saartj(i)e Baartman is extensive and continues to be provoke debate. Sander Gilman’s 1985 chapter on Baartman provoked strong interest from poststructuralist scholars who saw her as a potent illustration of European fear and fascination with black women’s sexuality, while other scholars have pushed back against this view. See Sander Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Towards an Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” in Race, Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1985). For critiques, see Zine Magubane, “Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the ‘Hottentot Venus’,” Gender and Society 15.6 (2001), 816-834; Natasha Maria Gordon-Chipembere, “‘Even with the Best Intentions’: The Misreading of Sarah Baartman’s Life by African American Writers,” Agenda 68 (2006), 54-62. See also Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009). 51 P. R. Anderson, “‘Never Luff to Meddle mit Politics, Sir,’” 221. 52 Damian Shaw, “Two ‘Hottentots’, Some Scots, and a West Indian Slave,” 9-12. 53 Stephen Gray, Southern African Literature, 56-58. 84 is understood to her own best prosecutor—Kaatje, and not a white settler with full racial privileges. For all the sketch’s sarcasm about Kaatje and her friends turning heads in London, it is rooted in a keenly-felt grievance: the Khoisan find sympathetic ears in the imperial metropole, while Bain and his ilk do not. If only, Kaatje Kekkelbek suggests, the Khoisan could be seen in situ by the British public, as the settlers see them, then they would understand the foolishness of liberal-humanitarian policy. Leave aside the fact that by the sketch’s own admission the Khoisan and Xhosa people like Andries Stoffels and Jan Tzatzoe who had gone to London to testify had proven adept at advocating on their own behalf, aided by their white allies. Such was the dilemma of the Cape Colony’s white subjects. While British colonial expansion continued and indeed accelerated over the long term, fully dispossessing the Xhosa of their independence by 1879, the experience of living so far from the seat of imperial power produced feelings of grievance and neglect. While many settlers, in their own minds, were actively seeking the greater glory of white civilization, Christianity, and the British Empire, they found their efforts to advance upon the frontier rewarded with an ever more keenly felt sense of marginality in the eyes of metropolitans.54 For all of its thrilling openness and sense of possibility, the frontier also harbored the threat of degeneracy in almost every area: cultural, racial, sexual, intellectual, and moral. Moreover, according to popular accounts by foreign visitors, the more established Dutch-speaking settlers were an ominous harbinger of the future 54 There is a very large literature on settler politics in the present-day Eastern Cape and various social and political questions related to “frontier life,” much of it pressed into the service of twentieth century debates surrounding segregation and apartheid. See discussions in Ken Smith, The Changing Past. See also The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared, eds. Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981); Noël Mostert, Frontiers; A. D. M. Walker, Pawns in a Larger Game: Life on the Eastern Cape Frontier (Durban, South Africa: Calamaish Books, 2013). An important critique of the use of the term “frontier” in this literature is Denver A. Webb, “Further Beyond the Pale: Decolonisation, Historians, and Military Discourse in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries on the Eastern Cape ‘Frontier,’” Journal of Southern African Studies 43.4 (2017), 681-697. 85 that awaited English-speakers in the hinterland. As early as 1798, the American sailor Benjamin Stout referred to the so-called Boers as “enlightened savages” engaged mainly in cruel violence against the indigenous people of Southern Africa.55 An 1850 account by the British hunter Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming vividly described the level to which the frontier Boer had sunk in an report of his visit to the Karoo farm of a “Mynheer Stinkum”: It being now summer, flies prevailed in fearful swarms in the abodes of the Boers, attracted thither by the smell of meat and milk. On entering Stinkum’s house, I found the walls of his large sitting room actually black with these disgusting insects...When food is served, two or three Hottentots or Bush-girls are always in attendance with fans made of ostrich feathers, which they keep continually waving over the food until the repast is finished.56 In nineteenth century European accounts, Boers were the focus of great ambivalence and confusion. Though racially white, their claim to Christianity and “civilization” was constantly in doubt. Gordon-Cumming’s portrait of filth and patriarchal despotism at Stinkum’s table, like an absurd parody of an Eastern prince’s court, exemplifies this ambivalence. Scholars of the time legitimized these views, developing theories of “ethno-climatology” which held that the removal of Europeans to hot places inevitably resulted in a multifaceted degeneration.57 “When, for instance, the European goes to Africa,” argued James Hunt, founder of the Anthropological Society of London, in an 1863 paper, “he, for a short time, retains his vigour of mind; but soon he finds his energies exhausted, and becomes listless, and nearly as indifferent to surrounding 55 Benjamin Stout, Narrative of the Loss of the Ship Hercules Commanded by Captain Benjamin Stout on the Coast of Caffraria the 16th of June, 1796; also, a Circumstantial Detail of His Travels Through the Southern Deserts of Africa and the Colonies to the Cape of Good Hope with an Introductory Address to the Rt. Honourable John Adams, President of the Continental Congress of America (London, U.K.: J. Johnson, 1798): ii. 56 Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming, Five Years of a Hunter’s Life in the Far Interior of South Africa with Notices of the Native Tribes, and Anecdotes of the Chase of the Lion, Elephant, Hippopotamus, Giraffe, Rhinoceros, &c., v. 1 (New York, N.Y.: Harper and Bros., 1850): 94. 57 For a concise review of the literature on this subject, see Richard Eves, “Unsettling Settler Colonialism: Debates Over Climate and Colonization in New Guinea, 1875-1914,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 28.2 (2006): 307-310. 86 events as the natives.”58 If true, such sentiments were a grim omen for the Anglophone population of the Cape Colony, particularly as they pushed north into warmer and more isolated climes. The fact that English-speaking settlers were living side-by-side with Dutch-speakers, intermarrying, and taking on some of the same attitudes regarding racial hierarchy and government policy did not endear them to the metropolitan government or public.59 Their lived experience was alienating them from the British identity they aspired to, and thus the subtext of Kaatje Kekkelbek is that the worthiness of settlers is best shown not through direct portrayal, but through the representing their antithesis: the Kaatje that the missionaries created, instead of the settler moulded by the frontier. Indeed, if the Cape Colony was anxious ground for “white civilization,” the regions beyond Cape Town’s administrative grasp presented an even greater challenge. The nineteenth century interior was the setting for both significant conflict and cooperation between groups that defy modern labeling conventions. Future “Afrikaners,” (former) slaves, their mixed-race offspring, and various indigenous groupings took on the characteristics of one another, competing and collaborating strategically to stake out a position in the ever-changing “interface of colonial-African contact.”60 In a land where European administration was weak or non- existent relative to other polities, European settlers yearned for the power and security a firmer 58 James Hunt, “On Ethno-Climatology; or the Acclimatization of Man,” Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London 2 (1863): 57. 59 The Afrikaner nationalist movement from its inception in the late nineteenth century pointed to the Great Trek as a watershed in tensions between Dutch- and English-speaking whites, but more recent scholarship points to the eastern Cape Colony as a site of considerable cooperation and solidarity between members of both groups. As Etherington notes, the “Voortrekkers” or emigrant farmers were cheered on by the eastern press and public, who were eager to exploit the Trekker movement as a symbol of the failure of liberal-humanitarian policy. See Norman Etherington, The Great Treks, 340-341. 60 Paul S. Landau, “Transformations in Consciousness,” in The Cambridge History of South Africa, vol. 1, eds. Carolyn Hamilton, Bernard K. Mbenga, and Robert Ross (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2010): 415. 87 colonial presence would bring, while rejecting the idea that their group autonomy should be curtailed, along with their clandestine dealings (which often involved gun sales and raiding in both stock and human beings).61 At the same time, British metropolitan authorities—apart from any liberal or humanitarian tendencies they might have held—often resented the expense precipitated by colonial frontier conflicts. This resulted frequently in a view of settlers (not just in Southern Africa but across the British Empire) as uncouth, ungrateful, and uncivilized. This reputation made its rounds throughout the world. As the American war correspondent Richard Harding Davis wrote sarcastically half a century later during the South African War, the “Natal colonials…are so independent that they charged the Tommies who had come seven thousand miles to fight for them, and who were protecting their dusty, corrugated-zinc town with their lives, a shilling each for slices of bread and molasses.”62 It is in the context of this double-bind —the need to defend settler pride against both indigenous populations and metropolitan disdain —that the sketch Kaatje Kekkelbek, and much of the white South African humor of the next century and a half, needs to be seen. Kaatje Kekkelbek in Transnational Context: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Cordon Sanitaire Scholarship on national humor traditions in settler colonies tends naturally to focus on frontiers and margins. In the United States, for example, there exists a large and thriving literature on the humor of the “Old Southwest”—an area that after the Civil War ceased to be “Western” and now is better known as the “Deep South” and southern Appalachia.63 Indeed, urban areas remain 61 See, for example, Paul S. Landau,” Transformations in Consciousness,” 415-418. See also Clifton Crais, White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-Industrial South Africa: The Making of the Colonial Order in the Eastern Cape, 1770-1865 (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Timothy J. Keegan, Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1996); Paul S. Landau, Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400-1940 (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 62 Richard Harding Davis, With Both Armies in South Africa (New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1900): 40. 63 For a succinct review of this literature, see Southern Frontier Humor: New Approaches, ed. Ed Piacentino (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2013): 3-7. 88 marginal to the scholarship on American humor until the fabled “closure” of the frontier in the 1890s, after which writers and performers from urban and white immigrant backgrounds like Finley Peter Dunne and the Jewish comedians of New York’s Borscht Belt rose to national prominence.64 The same trajectory applies to African-American humor studies, which commonly pivots from the complex birth of the minstrel tradition with its decidedly rural themes to the urbane humor of Chitlin’ Circuit comedians like Moms Mabley and Redd Foxx.65 In a similar vein Dorothy Jones describes (white) Australian humor as primarily rural, an “attitude of fatalistic irony…directed sometimes against an alien, hostile environment, sometimes against the social institutions those in power have sought to impose upon it.”66 One theory that has proven controversial in the scholarship on Old Southwest humor is that of the cordon sanitaire—the idea that the authors of texts dealing with backwoods tall tales and alligator-wrestling hayseeds wrote out of disdain for their social inferiors, in order to establish political and social distance between them and the genteel, sophisticated society they hoped to create.67 Yet even if this is not an accurate way to think about Old Southwest writers 64 See Charles Fanning, Finley Peter Dunne and Mr. Dooley: The Chicago Years (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1978); Joseph Dorinson, Kvetching and Shpritzing: Jewish Humor in American Popular Culture (West Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Co., 2015). 65 See Darryl Dickson-Carr, African-American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2001); Terrence T. Tucker, Furiously Funny: Comic Rage from Ralph Ellison to Chris Rock (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 2018); Mel Watkins, On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy from Slavery to Chris Rock, 2nd ed. (Chicago, Ill.: Chicago Review Press, 1999 [1994]); African American Humor, Irony, and Satire: Ishmael Reed, Satirically Speaking, ed. Dana A. Williams (Newcastle, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007). 66 Dorothy Jones, “Serious Laughter: On Defining Australian Humour,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 23.1 (1988): 77. 67 The original articulation of this theory is found in Kenneth S. Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Co., 1959): 64-65. While I find the cordon sanitaire to be a helpful concept for interpreting racial masquerade and Southern African settler humor, the precise applicability of the cordon sanitaire to the Old Southwest is hotly still hotly debated. For a refutation, see James H. Justus, “Introduction,” in The Humor of the Old South, eds. M. Thomas Inge and Edward J. Piacentino (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 1-12. John Mayfield finds some value in the cordon sanitaire, but reframes it as the division between two different ideals of manhood instead of primarily a political or class fault line. See John Mayfield, Counterfeit Gentlemen: Manhood and Humor in the Old South (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 2009). 89 and their white characters, the concept of the cordon may be profitably applied to another crucially important field for settler humor: blackface minstrelsy. For though it goes unmentioned in Chinua Thelwell’s recent monograph on the history of blackface minstrelsy in South Africa, Kaatje Kekkelbek certainly qualifies as an important prototype, predating the arrival of the first professional minstrel troupe at the Cape by a quarter-century.68 With T. D. Rice’s notorious “Jim Crow” character first appearing on a playbill in 1830, it may at first appear as mere coincidence that the first true blackface minstrel performances in the United States, coincided so closely with the first performance of Kaatje Kekkelbek, but this is not quite the case.69 Both performances occurred in rapidly expanding settler societies, in the context of heated debates surrounding slavery and abolition. Blackface minstrelsy, despite its focus on rural Southern aesthetics and themes, was a creature of the Northern cities, and Alexander Saxton notes that ideologically this novel form of mass entertainment was closely aligned to the policies of the Democratic Party in the Jacksonian era: anti-temperance, pro- immigration, pro-slavery, and pro-expansion.70 Interestingly, Saxton draws a direct parallel between minstrelsy’s urban origins and the motif of journeying (often westward) which pervaded the tradition—both involved a “traumatic break with a previous situation” and an ambivalent nostalgia for the white audience’s own pasts which minstrelsy refracted—very disingenuously— as the slave’s longing for the old plantation.71 In his classic work on American blackface minstrelsy, Eric Lott describes the fraught relationship between white minstrels, audiences, and the black culture they imitated and 68 Chinua Thelwell, Exporting Jim Crow: Blackface Minstrelsy in South Africa and Beyond (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020): 38. 69 Chinua Thelwell, Exporting Jim Crow, 18. 70 Alexander Saxton, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology,” American Quarterly 27.1 (1975): 16-23. 71 Alexander Saxton, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology,” 14. 90 exploited as “love and theft.”72 The “theft” part of the equation is readily evident in the way white settlers stole indigenous land in both North America and Southern Africa, how they stole the political autonomy and personal freedom of the people they subjected to servitude, and how they imitated (at least in certain outward appearances) the music, customs, language and gestures of these subjugated people. It is not for nothing that Kaatje enters playing a mouth harp, evoking the Khoisan musical bow. “Love,” however is more difficult to unpack. Certainly, blackface minstrelsy was wildly popular with white audiences for a century, spreading to all corners of the world. Later on in the nineteenth century, the African-American minstrel impresario Orpheus McAdoo and his Virginia Jubilee Singers would take the Southern African subcontinent by storm, galvanizing interest in African-American music and transforming the institution of the Cape Town Carnival.73 This festival, which since the 1830s had celebrated the abolition of slavery at the Cape, in McAdoo’s wake became in part an aspirational homage to African American achievement, with working class Coloured musical troupes (klopse) embracing banjoes, blackface makeup, and overtly minstrel-influenced names like the Broadway Gentlemen Singing Coons and the Alabama Darkies.74 For white audiences in the United States, however, blackface minstrelsy offered liberation of a different kind. Lott quotes Ralph Ellison’s penetrating interpretation of minstrelsy’s thrilling draw—one that we also might apply to the white population on the nineteenth century Cape frontier: When the white man steps behind the mask of the [blackface] trickster his freedom is circumscribed by the fear that he is not simply miming a personification of his disorder 72 See Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, 2nd ed. (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2013 [1993]). 73 See Veit Erlmann, African Stars: Studies in Black South African Performance (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1991): 21-53; Denis-Constant Martin, Coon Carnival: New Year in Cape Town, Past to Present (Cape Town, South Africa: David Philip, 1999): 77-96; Chinua Thelwell, Exporting Jim Crow, 96-182. 74 See Cape Times, January 4, 1937, quoted in Chinua Thelwell, Exporting Jim Crow, 151. 91 and chaos but that he will become in fact that which he intends only to symbolize; that he will be trapped somewhere in the mystery of hell…and thus lose that freedom which, in the fluid, “traditionless,” “classless” and rapidly changing society, he would recognize as the white man’s alone.75 In Africa, expansionist settlers discovered that they were different from both metropolitan whites and members of the humanitarian establishment. Racial humor like Kaatje Kekkelbek fostered settler cohesion just as it did for the working-class whites of American cities before the Civil War, setting up racial others as objects of ridicule whose claims to independence, respect, or citizenship were worthy only of contempt. Yet just as in the United States, the cordon sanitaire that racial humor provided only made sense in a world where its inverse was a looming threat. Poverty, criminality, interracial sex, and theories of inevitable decline were facts of settler life in Southern Africa, and the hostile burlesque of Kaatje Kekkelbek was thus both an escape from and a reckoning with the daunting challenges of its era—challenges intractable enough that the caricature it cemented in the national consciousness lived on to be resurrected in books, plays, newspaper columns, and songs, right down to the present day.76 Sam Sly’s African Journal and Bourgeois Victorian Humor Enter the English-born journalist William Layton Sammons, who shortly after emigrating to Cape Town in 1843, inaugurated Sam Sly’s African Journal, a newspaper with wide-ranging aspirations that ran for the next eight years. By the 1840s, the press in Southern Africa and the British Empire at large functioned not only as a medium for circulating news between colony and 75 Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York, N.Y.: Vintage, 1964): 53, quoted in Eric Lott, Love and Theft, 25. 76 See discussions in Mohamed Adhikari, “God Made the White Man, God Made the Black Man…: Popular Racial Stereotyping of Coloured People in Apartheid South Africa,” South African Historical Journal 55 (2006), 142-164; Vernon February, Mind Your Colour: The ‘Coloured’ Stereotype in South African Literature (London, U.K.: Kegan Paul International, 1981); Henry E. Chen, Devia Bhana, Bronwynne Anderson, and Imraan Buccus, “Bruin Ous are the Main Ous: Memory and Masculinity in a South Durban Township,” Journal of Southern African Studies 46.1 (2020), 73-90. 92 metropole, but as a means of inter-colonial communication as well as lobbying.77 Meanwhile, Cape Town’s theatrical life was at a low ebb: the African Theatre had been sold, and “Tot Nuut en Vermaak” had liquidated its assets and dissolved.78 Sammons, who had first used the pseudonym “Sam Sly” while working as a journalist in Bath, found Cape Town “almost destitute of any enjoyment—not a bell, nor a smile nor any token of a wholesome or a joyous hilarity.”79 Christopher Holdridge’s work on the rise and fall of Sammons has shed much-needed light on the significance of this man and his paper.80 Sammons was the first in a long line of British-born journalists who, over the next century, crafted a vibrant if somewhat derivative tradition of Anglophilic South African humor, using laughter and the cordon sanitaire of racial masquerade associated with it, to preserve and strengthen the ties that bound their chosen corner of the world to the wider British Empire. Though Sammons’ star faded at the end of the decade owing to a 77 As Simon J. Potter has observed, one of the chief problems with newspaper history in the British Empire is that it has historically concerned itself with the emergence of national consciousness in former colonies without acknowledging the significant contributions the press made to imperial cohesion. Though her case studies focus mostly on the twentieth century construction of “interpretive community” among oppressed groups, Madhumita Lahiri’s term “Global Anglophone” reorients us to the ways in which the rise of the modern press connected disparate segments of the world where English was read in addition to stoking nationalist feelings. See Simon J. Potter, News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, 1876-1922 (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2003): 1-35; Madhumita Lahiri, Imperfect Solidarities: Tagore, Gandhi, Du Bois, and the Global Anglophone (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2020). See also Julie F. Codell, “Imperial Co- Histories and the British and Colonial Press,” in Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press, ed. Julie F. Codell (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 2003): 15-28; Paula M. Krebs, Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse and the Boer War (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1999): 1-31. 78 Jill Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa, 67. 79 Alan F. Hattersley, Oliver the Spy and Others: A Little Gallery of South African Portraits (Cape Town, South Africa: Maskew Miller, 1959): 95. 80 Christopher A. Holdridge, “Circulating the African Journal: The Colonial Press and Trans-Imperial Britishness in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Cape,” South African Historical Journal 62.3 (2010), 487-513; Christopher A. Holdridge, “Laughing with Sam Sly”; Christopher A. Holdridge, “Sam Sly’s African Journal and the Role of Satire in Colonial British Identity at the Cape of Good Hope, c. 1840-1850 (M.A. thesis, University of Cape Town, 2010). 93 severe misreading of local opinion on the 1849-1850 Cape convict question, the legacy of his Journal would far outshine its actual circulation.81 As Holdridge notes, both satire and the attitudes surrounding it were changing in the Victorian British Empire.82 In the eighteenth century, both visual and printed satire had played a key role in Enlightenment political discourse. It was also unapologetically masculine, and as such, frequently reveled in grotesque, graphically sexual, and scatalogical content, inviting libel suits and government intervention.83 In the nineteenth century however, the threats of twin revolutions—French and Industrial—alongside the continued growth of the bourgeoisie in power and numbers, combined to enlist humor towards a rather different purpose, as Donald J. Gray has argued. Instead of abusing people and institutions with the intent to destroy, Victorian British humor adopted an altogether different register, where amusement instead indicated good nature, morality, and essential kindness on the part of humorist and audience alike. Its hallmark, according to Gray, was “nonsense,” a form of humor which exulted in incongruity, illogic, and irrelevance, yet was underpinned by technically complex strategies aimed at producing the illusion of an internal logic (the most recognizable example of this form today is probably Lewis 81 The “Convict Crisis” or “Convict Agitation” refers to the local response to an 1849 proposal by the Colonial Secretary to transport a group of Irish convicts to Cape Town. The plan provoked a vehement response among local whites and was eventually scrapped. See Christopher Holdridge, “Laughing with Sam Sly,” 50-52; see also Alan F. Hattersley, The Convict Crisis and the Growth of Unity: Resistance to Transportation in South Africa and Australia, 1848-1853 (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press, 1965); Kirsten McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies: Sydney and Cape Town, 1820-1850 (Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 2004): 171-179. McKenzie makes the important argument that for the Cape’s middle class, the movement against convict settlement had to be couched in moral terms: “Certainly they were aware that prejudice against ‘colonials’ amongst the elite in Britain related partly to the association of colonies with penal settlements. In their search for social legitimacy and political rights, the imperial bourgeoisie could not afford the threat of convicts and they were fully cognizant of the stumbling block that penal servitude had been in the establishment of representative institutions in colonies like New South Wales. As most middle-class colonists could not rely on inherited wealth to establish an appropriate reputation, ‘character’ was of vital importance to their social survival and it was the destruction of character that was deemed the most terrible of threats posed by convict labor” (Kirsten McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies, 178). As we shall see, in Victorian theories of humor, the satirical mode was understood to be at its best when coexisting productively with this bourgeois understanding of “character.” 82 Christopher A. Holdridge, “Laughing with Sam Sly,” 37. 83 See Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth Century London (New York, N.Y.: Walker and Co., 2007 [2006]). 94 Carroll’s poem “The Jabberwocky”).84 This intricate play with concepts of order and chaos, according to Gray, amounted to “an entertainment in which…patrons could look at the things and ideas of their time, and feel happy and safe.”85 The corollary suggested by all this is that all too often the Victorian bourgeoisie did not feel happy and safe, and therefore craved spaces where the dangerous complexities of life were rendered harmless. This is not to say Victorian humor always avoided topicality. It could also be used to attack vices—especially individual vices, as Annabella Pollen’s fascinating work on mocking Valentine’s Day cards attests.86 Yet these abusive cards’ very circulation confirms that the senders and recipients could each locate themselves within a common community valuing harmless fun and bourgeois morality. Defining essences is always a problematic affair. As Sarah Gertrude Millin wrote in The South Africans (1934), the mines of the Witwatersrand which lent Johannesburg so much of its popular reputation, make “a noise no louder in the life of…[the] City than the beating of a heart…in the body it inhabits,” adding that “Johannesburg is essentially and decently bourgeois.”87 In the same way, we cannot reduce the range of humor and satire in the Victorian British world to the maintenance of stuffy, middle-class rectitude: Donald J. Gray’s work deals with bourgeois tastes, and not those of people outside that cohort. Still, the Industrial Revolution and the imperialist expansion of Europe exerted a profound impact on all segments of British and Southern African society. As Sara Lodge has argued, rising economic mobility and dramatic increases in scientific and anthropological knowledge contributed to an interest in the proliferation and permeability of categories, which helps explain the Victorian—and later 84 Donald J. Gray, “The Uses of Victorian Laughter,” Victorian Studies 10.2 (1966): 168-172. 85 Donald J. Gray, “The Uses of Victorian Laughter,” 176. 86 Annabella Pollen, “‘The Valentine Has Fallen Upon Evil Days’: Mocking Victorian Valentines and the Ambivalent Laughter of the Carnivalesque,” Early Popular Visual Culture 12.2 (2014), 127-173. 87 Sarah Gertrude Millin, The South Africans (London, U.K.: Constable and Co., 1934), excerpted in Reef of Time: Johannesburg in Writing, ed. Digby Ricci (Johannesburg, South Africa: Adriaan Donker, 1986): 135, 138. 95 mission-educated black South African—fascination with puns, that infamous form of joke so easily dismissed in our own time as indicating a frivolous and immature mind.88 In the “Prospectus” that introduced his paper, Sammons used the metaphor of an art exhibition to explain its intended usefulness. “He,” Sammons wrote, referring to himself, intends for this purpose to present a striking picture of the Cape; and as everybody is anxious to see his own phiz on canvas, however stupid or ugly it may be, he has no doubt but the whole town will flock to see his exhibitions. His picture will necessarily include a vast variety of figures, and should any lady or gentleman be displeased with the inveterate truth of their likeness, they may ease their spleen by laughing at those of their neighbours.89 As with mocking Valentine’s Day cards, Sammons’ theory of satire is founded on reciprocity: the ability to take a joke confirms one’s claim to membership in the community of respectable, good- humored people. And if this was true of English-speaking whites in the Cape Colony, it was also true of the British Empire, since Sam Sly’s African Journal was part of a worldwide network of English newspapers that were circulated and quoted wherever English was spoken.90 If the respectable white people of the Cape Colony could take a joke, they could claim membership in a wider imperial community; by lampooning and castigating themselves, their claim to this membership was strengthened, rather than weakened. In short, for Sammons and those who succeeded him in Cape journalism, humor had the potential to make the Cape of Good Hope more British—something many desperately desired among the small minority of Anglophone settlers in Southern Africa. 88 See Sara Lodge, Thomas Hood and Nineteenth-Century Poetry: Work, Play, and Politics (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2007): 141-175. 89 The Editor [William Layton Sammons], “Prospectus,” Sam Sly’s African Journal, May 20, 1843, quoted in Jill Kelly, “The Story of Theatre in South Africa,” 68-69. 90 Christopher A. Holdridge, “Circulating the African Journal,” 504; see also Toni Johnson-Woods, “The Virtual Reading Communities of the London Journal, the New York Ledger, and the Australian Journal,” in Nineteenth- Century Media and the Construction of Identities, eds. Laurel Brake, Bill Bell, and David Finkelstein (New York, N.Y.: Palgrave, 2004), 350-362. 96 Comic periodicals like Sam Sly’s African Journal, Cape Punchinello (1851), The Zingari (1870-1875), and The Lantern (1877-1892) fulfilled this purpose in Cape Town towards the latter half of the nineteenth century with varying degrees of success, publishing, among other things, South Africa’s first modern political cartoons.91 These were papers concerned as much with maintaining the cohesion of the English-speaking white population as they were with representing that population to the rest of the Empire. As such, they were usually quite open in their contempt for the black and Dutch-speaking white population, as well as people deemed Coloured.92 These papers facilitated not so much the creation of new identities, but rather the maintenance of an existing British identity threatened by the realities of life at the margins of empire. While the Cape constitution of 1853—with its “color-blind” property qualification- based franchise—was still seen as a threat to the reputation and respectability of the white population, efforts were made in these journals and elsewhere to exoticize Coloureds (especially the Muslim “Malays”) as “local color,” analogous to the Cockney population of London.93 An independent tradition of white racial masquerade à la Kaatje Kekkelbek never emerged, but the popular minstrel shows performed by overseas touring companies in Southern Africa 91 See Ken Vernon, Penpricks: The Drawing of South Africa’s Political Battle Lines (Cape Town, South Africa: The Spearhead Press, 2000): 10-13; Andy Mason, What’s So Funny? Under the Skin of South African Cartooning (Cape Town, South Africa: Double Storey, 2010); Tejumola Olaniyan and Peter Limb, Taking African Cartoons Seriously. 92 For further discussion of the coalescence of Coloured identity at the Cape, see Vivian Bickford-Smith, “Providing Local Color? ‘Cape Coloureds,’ ‘Cockneys,’ and Cape Town’s Identity from the Late Nineteenth Century to the 1970s,” Journal of Urban History 38.1 (2012): 138-139. See also Mohamed Adhikari, “From Narratives of Miscegenation to Post-Modernist Re-Imagining: Towards a Historiography of Coloured Identity in South Africa,” in Burdened by Race: Coloured Identities in South Africa, ed. Mohamed Adhikari (Cape Town, South Africa: University of Cape Town Press, 2009), 1-22, for a more detailed reflection on the fraught cultural politics of the term. 93 Vivian Bickford-Smith, “Providing Local Color?” While the evidence of explicit comparisons to Cockneys given by Bickford-Smith comes from the twentieth century, he notes that the exploitation of Coloured culture for the benefit of South Africa’s tourist marketing efforts began before 1900. 97 periodically incorporated local types like the backveld Boer and Kaatje Kekkelbek.94 Soon, however, some of the world’s most impressive mineral deposits would focus the world’s attention on the region as never before, staking out an enduring place for these caricatures alongside the mine shafts and refuse heaps of Kimberley and the Rand. The Big Bear of Pretoria: Southern Africa’s Debut on the Global Comic Stage Over the course of the mid-nineteenth century, the white settler colonies of Southern Africa did not experience extraordinary economic or population growth, though they did incorporate more and more territory as Africans were robbed of their political independence. Starting in the late 1860s, however, the discovery of diamonds in disputed territory along the Vaal River far to the north of Cape Town, would precipitate a series of rapid changes that politically, economically, and socially transformed the region. In 1870, a full-scale diamond rush broke out at what would become the city of Kimberley—the first city in the Southern Hemisphere to boast electric streetlights.95 At the end of the decade, both the emigrant Boer-founded South African Republic (also known as the Transvaal) and the Zulu kingdom of Cetshwayo kaMpande clashed with British imperial might, meeting with very different fates. After a short war, the South African Republic was granted an ambiguous independence under British suzerainty via the London Convention of 1884.96 As for the Zulu kingdom, after a stunning victory at the Battle of 94 Chinua Thelwell, Exporting Jim Crow, 67-68. While white newspapers generally praised these shows, Thelwell cites at least one apparent testimonial from an African in 1872 complaining about the “mockery” implicit in the minstrel show posters he found plastered around Port Elizabeth on the eastern Cape Colony coastline. See Cape Argus, November 19, 1872, quoted in Chinua Thelwell, Exporting Jim Crow, 68. 95 See Patrick Harries, Work, Culture, and Identity: Migrant Labourers in Mozambique and South Africa, c. 1860-1910 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1994): 86-99; Robert V. Turrell, Capital and Labour on the Kimberley Diamond Fields, 1871-1890 (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1987); William Worger, South Africa’s City of Diamonds: Mine Workers and Monopoly Capitalism in Kimberley, 1867-1895 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987). 96 See Richard Cope, Ploughshare of War: The Origins of the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press, 1999); T. R. H. Davenport, South Africa, 193-200; John Laband, The Transvaal Rebellion: The First Boer War, 1880-1881 (New York, N.Y.: Taylor and Francis, 2005). 98 Isandlwana, it fell to the British by mid-1879 and was partitioned into thirteen chiefdoms before its eventual annexation to the Colony of Natal. With that defeat, all of what is today South Africa had come under white rule—at least on paper.97 Then, in 1886, the world’s largest gold deposits were discovered in the Witwatersrand area of the South African Republic, unleashing a second frenzy of migration to the brand-new city of Johannesburg and its environs.98 Johannesburg’s population grew to more than 100,000 within the first decade of its existence, well on its way to eclipsing Cape Town as the largest city on the subcontinent. Of course, the transition from mining camp to metropolis was not immediate. As of July 1896 European men still outnumbered their women counterparts in the city by a ratio of almost two to one.99 The people who poured into Kimberley and Johannesburg in the late nineteenth century came from all around the world and all racial backgrounds: from the United Kingdom, the United States (an acknowledged center of mining expertise), the Russian Empire, Greece, China, distant parts of Africa, and other British colonial possessions. It was in Kimberley, with the invention of the infamous closed compound, that the systems of African labor migrancy that had existed since the days of Dutch rule were scaled up into the pitiless engine of social destruction familiar to scholars of the apartheid era.100 And it was in Johannesburg, starting in the 1890s, 97 See The Anglo-Zulu War: New Perspectives, eds. Andrew Duminy, Charles Ballard (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press, 1981); Ron Lock and Peter Quantrill, Zulu Victory: The Epic of Isandlwana and the Cover-Up (Barnsley, U.K.: Greenhill Books, 2002); P. S. Thompson, Black Soldiers of the Queen: The Natal Native Contingent in the Anglo-Zulu War, 2nd ed. (Tuscaloosa, Ala.: The University of Alabama Press, 2006 [1997]). For a thoughtful (though older) historiographical overview of South Africa’s colonial takeover, see Shula Marks, “Scrambling for South Africa,” The Journal of African History 23 (1982), 97-113. 98 See G. A. Leyds, A History of Johannesburg: The Early Years (Cape Town, South Africa: Nasionale Boekhandel, 1964); Charles van Onselen, New Babylon, New Nineveh: Everyday Life on the Witwatersrand, 1886-1914 , 2nd ed. (Johannesburg, South Africa: Jonathan Ball, 2002 [1982]); Stanley Trapido, “Imperialism, Settler Identities, and Colonial Capitalism: The Hundred Year Origins of the 1899 South African War,” in The Cambridge History of South Africa, vol. 2, eds. Robert Ross, Anne Kelk Mager, and Bill Nasson (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press. 2011): 67-101. 99 Charles van Onselen, New Babylon, New Nineveh, 110. 100 See Robert V. Turrell, Capital and Labour on the Kimberley Diamond Fields, 146-173. 99 that the white settlers of Southern Africa first found themselves at the center of a brewing geopolitical storm as powerful political and economic actors worked to unite Southern Africa once and for all under British political control. The rise of Johannesburg was so sudden and intense that it took some time for these elements to organize themselves. “At this moment Johannesburg has no politics whatsoever,” a correspondent for the London Morning Post wrote in January 1890, “there is no solidarity of opinion in the polyglot population who govern themselves, aside from a kind of innate respect for law and order.”101 The goal, for most new denizens of the city, was making as much money as quickly as possible. Other realities, however, soon imposed themselves. The 1896 Johannesburg census classified 49.9 per cent of the population as white, 41.7 per cent as black and 4.8 per cent as Indian or Chinese.102 Of the white population, however, just over twelve per cent were born in the South African Republic—instead, two-thirds of Johannesburg whites were British subjects, and 54.7 per cent were born outside Southern Africa (among black Johannesburgers this phenomenon was even more stark; less than two per cent were from the Transvaal).103 Fearful of being swamped by the newcomers, the government of the South African Republic had instituted a high bar for naturalization, meaning that, crucially, only 6.2 per cent of white male Johannesburgers were eligible to vote and participate in the political system of the South African Republic.104 With British business interests overseeing the 101 “The Rise of Johannesburg,” The Morning Post (London, U.K), January 3, 1897. I am indebted to Josh Hutchings for bringing this reference to my attention. 102 “Population of the Transvaal,” The Queenslander (Brisbane, Australia), October 14, 1899. 103 “Population of the Transvaal,” The Queenslander (Brisbane, Australia), October 14, 1899. It is worth mentioning, in addition, that Article 9 of the South African Republic’s 1858 constitution expressly forbade “any equality of coloured persons with white inhabitants, neither in the Church nor in the State,” a clear rejection of the Cape liberal paradigm. See The Constitution (“Grondwet”) of the South African Republic as Approved and Confirmed by the Volksraad on the 16th of February, 1858, with the Thirty-Three Articles, 3rd ed., trans. F. H. Papenfus (London, U.K.: H. MacLeay, 1899): 6. 104 “The Census of Johannesburg,” The Times (London, U.K.), November 18, 1896. 100 burgeoning gold mines of the Witwatersrand, pressure mounted for the Republic to loosen its naturalization rules or be re-annexed by the British Empire—a false choice in a way, because both paths would have led to roughly the same outcome. In late 1895, Cecil Rhodes—the mining magnate Prime Minister of the Cape—fomented an abortive revolt in Johannesburg against the South African Republic, anxious to clear geographical obstacles to his ventures north of the Limpopo River in what was christened “Rhodesia.” While the infamous Jameson Raid (named for Rhodes’s chief collaborator) was a spectacular failure, it set the Pretoria-based government of President Paul Kruger on a collision course with the United Kingdom, and war broke out in October 1899.105 International interest in Southern Africa was spurred first by the diamond and gold rushes, but the prospect of open warfare between Britain and the so-called Boer Republics caught the rest of the world somewhat off-guard. President Kruger’s search for an ally—perhaps Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany—to counter-balance British muscle in the region meant that the conflict threatened to erupt into a multi-continental war. Yet the southern tip of Africa was a place most European and American observers had never been and were only vaguely aware of— indeed, with the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869, travelers to points east no longer needed to refresh themselves with a stop in Table Bay. And so the 1890s re-invigorated the old tradition of Southern African travel writing, this time driven mainly by newspaper correspondents instead 105 The historiography of the South African War is extensive. Classic narrative overviews include Byron Farwell, The Great Boer War (New York, N.Y.: Harper and Row, 1976) and Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War (London, U.K.: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1979). See also The Impact of the South African War, eds. David Omissi and Andrew S. Thompson (New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Bill Nasson, Abraham Esau’s War: A Black South African War in the Cape, 1899-1902 (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Andrew Porter, “The South African War (1899-1902): Context and Motive Reconsidered,” The Journal of African History 31 (1990), 43-57; The South African War Reappraised, ed. Donal Lowry (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2000). 101 of scientists and administrative elites. Among the earliest was the famous American humorist and lecturer Mark Twain, whose account of visiting the region shortly after the Jameson Raid is remarkable not so much for its wit but for Twain’s conscious struggle—common to many of his fellow traveller-cum-pundits—to really understand the atmosphere through which he was journeying. Twain had quipped about Southern Africa earlier in his career. In 1879, as the Anglo- Zulu War raged, he began one of his raciest-ever lectures—“Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism” (that is, masturbation)—with the following bogus quotation: “Cetewayo, the Zulu hero, remarked, ‘A jerk in the hand is worth two in the bush.’”106 Even so, at the start of Following the Equator’s section on Southern Africa (visited as part of a worldwide tour of his signature comic lectures), Twain admits that there were “singularities, perplexities, [and] unaccountabilities about it which I was not able to master,” adding that “I had no personal access to Boers—their side was a secret to me, aside from what I was able to gather of it from published statements.”107 And rely on published statements he did—drawing so heavily from Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883), Robert Russell’s Natal—The Land and its Story (1897), and the American Natalie Harris Hammond’s memoir A Woman’s Part in a Revolution (1897), that one might almost wonder whether he was in the subcontinent at all.108 106 Mark Twain [Samuel L. Clemens], “Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism: Being an Address Delivered Before the Members of the Stomach Club, Paris, 1879” pamphlet (Za C591 952s), pg. 2, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. 107 Twain is remembered today mostly as a writer, but Judith Yaross Lee argues that his performances were an innovative and direct prototype for modern American stand-up comedy, blurring the lines between the serious and the comic, the self and the comic persona. See Judith Yaross Lee, Twain’s Brand: Humor in American Popular Culture (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2012): 32-46; Mark Twain [Samuel L. Clemens], Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World (Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Co., 1897): 657. 108 Ralph Iron [Olive Schreiner], The Story of an African Farm (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, and Co., 1918 [1883]); Robert Russell, Natal—The Land and its Story: A Geography and History for the Use of Schools (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: P. Davis and Son, 1894); Mrs. John Hays Hammond [Natalie Harris Hammond], A Woman’s Part in a Revolution (New York, N.Y.: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1897). 102 His characterizations of the Dutch population, he admits, are culled mostly from Schreiner, and when he embarks on an extended discourse about the First Anglo-Boer War, he compares the Boers to the “Red Indian.”109 The personal anecdotes he tells convey his disorientation and self- confessed struggle to comprehend. At one point, he recounts seeing “a score of colored women” in King William’s Town, and sketches them in terms familiar from both Kaatje Kekkelbek and the minstrel stage: “mincing across the great barren square dressed—oh, in the last perfection of fashion, and newness, and expensiveness, and showy mixture of unrelated colors,—all just as I had seen it so often at home.”110 Transfixed by “their faces and their gait,” he “seemed among old, old friends; friends of fifty years.”111 Yet when he addresses them, “they broke into a good fellowship laugh, flashing their white teeth upon me, and all answered at once. I did not understand a word they said.”112 “I was astonished,” Twain marvels, for “I was not dreaming that they would answer in anything but American.”113 It was no accident that an American like Mark Twain should find Southern Africa so simultaneously enticing and confounding. The South African War began a little more than a year after the Spanish-American War, the United States having just defeated a once-mighty European power and stripped it of its most valuable colonies. The administration of President William McKinley was grateful for Britain’s tacit acceptance of U.S. imperialist objectives, and during the war in Southern Africa he maintained a formal neutrality that masked the enormous logistical benefit that access to American ports and non-lethal goods provided the British army. America’s role in erasing a pair of small white settler republics in Africa from the map caused a moral panic 109 Mark Twain, Following the Equator, 670. 110 Mark Twain, Following the Equator, 693. 111 Mark Twain, Following the Equator, 693. 112 Mark Twain, Following the Equator, 693. 113 Mark Twain, Following the Equator, 693. 103 for many Americans, particularly Irish immigrants and anti-imperialist Democrats, for whom such aid represented a fundamental betrayal of America’s founding principles. Comparisons to historical events in the American past abounded in the press, from the Revolution to the Civil War to the Mormon Emigration and the wars of Manifest Destiny against Mexicans and Native Americans, as writers cherry-picked details from the work of the few authors like Twain, Richard Harding Davis, Poultney Bigelow, Julian Ralph and Howard Hillegas, who had actually been on the ground in Southern Africa.114 Among this group of second-hand commentators were the veteran British newspaperman W. T. Stead, Rudyard Kipling, the aristocratic American diplomat Charles Francis Adams, Jr. and the famed California poet Joaquin Miller.115 Their writings, in keeping with the aloof spirit of Victorian humor, made liberal use of sarcasm, as in Richard Harding Davis’s comment on Natal colonials already quoted, or the anti-Transvaal author Poultney Bigelow’s anecdote about Paul Kruger’s missing thumb, with its clear allusions to the Old Southwest humor tradition: Kruger was shooting one day when his gun exploded and blew away part of his thumb. The surgeon to whom Kruger finally submitted the case found that the flesh had begun to mortify, and advised amputating the arm half-way up. But Kruger said he could not afford to lose his arm, for then he would no longer be able to handle his rifle. Then the doctor said that Kruger should at least allow him to cut off his left hand. But even this was too much for Kruger. The surgeon hereupon told Kruger that he would have nothing whatever to do with the case, and left. Kruger then got his jack-knife and sharpened it carefully, so that it became as sharp as a razor. He then laid his thumb upon a stone, and himself cut off its extreme joint. But, to his great chagrin, the flesh would not heal at that 114 Mark Twain, Following the Equator; Richard Harding Davis, With Both Armies in South Africa; Poultney Bigelow, White Man’s Africa (New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, 1898); Julian Ralph, An American With Lord Roberts (New York, N.Y.: Frederick Stokes Co., 1901); Howard C. Hillegas, Oom Paul’ s People: A Narrative of the British-Boer Troubles in South Africa, with a History of the Boers, the Country, and its Institutions (New York, N.Y.: D. Appleton and Company, 1899). 115 See Joseph O. Baylen, “W. T. Stead and the Boer War: The Irony of Idealism,” The Canadian Historical Review 40.4 (1959), 304-314; Sarah LeFanu, Something of Themselves: Kipling, Kingsley, Conan-Doyle, and the Anglo- Boer War (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2020): 15-40, 87-108, 203-226; Charles Francis Adams, Jr., The Confederacy and the Transvaal: A People’s Obligation to Robert E. Lee (Boston, Mass.: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1901): Joaquin Miller, Chants for the Boer (San Francisco, Calif.: Whitaker & Ray, 1900). 104 point, as putrefaction had gone already too far. Again he laid his hand upon the stone, and this time carefully cut away all the flesh about and above the second joint of the thumbs and this time the flesh healed and his hand was spared. He now uses his left index finger as a thumb, and seizes small objects between the first two fingers of that hand.116 This apocryphal story, with its gory details and aloof narration, might easily describe one of the “half-horse and half-alligator species of men” whose tall tales inhabit the Old Southwest writings of Johnson J. Hooper or George Washington Harris.117 Bigelow himself plays the role of the gentleman narrator who is simultaneously attracted and repulsed by his subject. He sketches Kruger with all the pride, stubbornness, strength and violence of an American frontier type, as well-suited for life in the wild as he is unequal to the challenges of twentieth century civilization. And so, while the student of contemporaneous South African War-era literature will find plenty of amusing and humorous material, nearly all of it was written primarily to wage moral and political battles outside Southern Africa.118 In reading them one learns more about these writers’ intended audiences than about local humor or conditions. Abdullah Abdurrahman and “Straatpraatjes”: Reinventing Kaatje As Twain’s nods to writers like Olive Schreiner and Robert Russell attest, white Southern Africans did participate in the global discourse surrounding the region, though their influence was often indirect. The works of the popular novelist H. Rider Haggard, who spent seven years 116 Poultney Bigelow, White Man’s Africa, 43-44. 117 This common phrase in discussions of Old Southwest literature is from Thomas Bangs Thorpe, “The Big Bear of Arkansas,” in The Big Bear of Arkansas and Other Sketches, Illustrative of Characters and Incidents in the South and South-West, ed. William T. Porter (Philadelphia, Penn.: T. B. Peterson and Brothers, 1843): 14. 118 Bigelow’s perspective throughout White Man’s Africa is that the best possible outcome for the region is a union along American lines, and is constantly comparing Southern African people and places with their supposed American counterparts. According to Bigelow, President Kruger had diminutive eyes “resembling those of a North American Indian,” but President Steyn of the Orange Free State was a dynamic leader who understood the importance of white cooperation and “the doctrine that the earth belongs to those who make best use of it” (Poultney Bigelow, White Man’s Africa, 79; 107). See Robin K. Crigler, “When George Washington’s Ghost Turned Handsprings: South African Conflict and American Identity, 1899-1902” (B.A. thesis: The College of William and Mary, 2014): 70-74. 105 in the subcontinent between 1875 and 1882, as well as Douglas Blackburn, also loomed large. Blackburn was a journalist and novelist who lived in Southern Africa for sixteen years between 1892 and 1908, and he produced two classic satires of the war era: Prinsloo of Prinsloosdorp (1899) and A Burgher Quixote (1903).119 His matter-of-fact first-person narration, designed to simulate the bluntness and simplicity of Boer language, was a key antecedent to Herman Charles Bosman’s famous Oom Schalk Lourens stories of the mid-twentieth century (see Chapter 7).120 Naturally, in the cases of people like Haggard and Blackburn who spent long sojourns in Southern Africa before ultimately returning to the imperial metropole, the facile dichotomy of “South Africans” and “visitors” breaks down. But “South Africanness” is better thought of as a spectrum than a rigid binary, and stereotypes about Southern Africa cannot be said to belong only to the overseas domain. Rather, such stereotypes were imbibed both overseas and within the region, imported by visitors who revised or repeated them, and internalized over time within the societies in question as visitors became permanent settlers—a natural outcome, perhaps, in a region whose people were so aware of their marginality. In short, during the war a set of Southern African ethnic stereotypes gained recognition in the wider world. When news reached Great Britain that the remote town of Mafeking, had finally been relieved from its Boer siege, the ensuing celebrations inspired a new verb, to 119 Douglas Blackburn, Prinsloo of Prinsloosdorp: A Tale of Transvaal Officialdom (London, U.K.: Alston Rivers, Ltd., 1908 [1899]); Douglas Blackburn, A Burgher Quixote (Edinburgh, U.K.: William Blackwood and Sons, 1903). 120 In a series of letters to his publisher William Blackwood, Blackburn boasts of being “accepted by South Africans as the leading literary exponent of the Boer character” whose goal is “to interpret and convey to English readers that strange mental attitude of the Boer which is always so great a puzzle to the newcomer, and leads to so much misunderstanding.” In a subsequent letter he declares that in doing this he will “open up an entirely new literary field.” In equating his humor with social realism, Blackburn rhetorically bridges the gap between his local support, for whom the jokes ring true, and his intended audience abroad, who are interested in learning more about South African conditions. See Douglas Blackburn to William Blackwood, September 29, 1902 (2009.63.1.3.1.2.), Stephen Gray Collection, Amazwi South African Museum of Literature (ASALM), Makhanda, Eastern Cape; Douglas Blackburn to William Blackwood, November 17, 1902 (2009.63.1.3.1.3.), Stephen Gray Collection, ASAML. 106 maffick, meaning “to indulge in extravagant demonstrations of exultation on occasions of national rejoicing.”121 Cash-strapped and politically homeless after the war, General Piet Cronjé (the so-called “Lion of Paardeberg”) parlayed his famous defeat into a massive Buffalo Bill-style spectacle involving hundreds of British, Boer, and “native” re-enactors. It shocked many of his former comrades, but the show was a centerpiece of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, was performed almost 300 times, and toured nationally thereafter.122 In a cartoon printed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Cronjé is drawn as a sad-looking old man, towering over a crowd of fatuous spectators as they call out inane things like “Come over to my kopje and have lunch!” and “Won’t you have a glass of Boer laager?”123 The scene neatly captures the strong but ultimately fleeting nature of Southern Africa’s moment of fame. While memory of the war eventually receded abroad, these stereotypes reflected back on a nation-in-the-making whose trajectory was still far from clear. South Africans, apprehending their own marginality in the years after the conflict, sought to win the peace by turning such representations to their own advantage. The 1902 Treaty of Vereeniging formally stripped the Orange Free State and South African Republic of their independence, thus placing all of present-day South Africa under unambiguous British rule. Yet thorny constitutional issues complicated talk of Union. Where would the new entity’s capital be? Would the Cape Colony’s qualified non-racial franchise be extended to the conquered republics, where political rights were exclusively reserved for white 121 “Maffick” in The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, vol. 1 (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1971): 1690. 122 See Willis L. Clanahan, “Being a Hero 290 Times in Six Months is a Serious Matter with General Cronjé,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, Mo.), August 7, 1904. See also “At Last Cronje Replies to His Critics,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 2, 1904; “Boers and British Come to Battle at Show Ground,” The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, Ga.), March 19, 1905. 123 Kopje (a small hill) and laager (a fighting formation of circled ox-wagons) were Dutch/Afrikaans words popularized by the press during the South African War. 107 men? Land tenure was also a problem: of the four territories to be federated, only the Cape allowed for freehold land ownership by Africans.124 In an atmosphere where so much of the future was an open question, members of groups whose status under Union was uncertain reappropriated stereotypes that had marginalized them previously, for the purposes of fostering group cohesion and crafting a political voice. C. J. Langenhoven, a great partisan in the early twentieth century movement to supplant Dutch with Afrikaans as an official language, was one such experimenter.125 Dr. Abdullah Abdurrahman—Coloured journalist, activist, and politician —also gambled boldly with this strategy, and while he was unsuccessful in achieving his aim of extending the Cape’s non-racial franchise to the entirety of the Union, his efforts to foster Coloured unity through the use of satire established a trend that has persisted through troubled cultural waters right up to the present day. On May 24, 1909, more than sixty years after Kaatje Kekkelbek and less than a year before the Union of South Africa came into being, another Coloured jokester debuted in the pages of the Cape Town press. His name was Piet Uithalder, and like Kaatje, he hailed from the Kat River area: Sir Thomas Smartt, the outspoken leader of the pro-British Unionist Party, was his member of parliament, and he shared a surname with Willem Uithaalder, a leader of the 1850-1851 Kat River Rebellion.126 Yet if Kaatje’s prestige came from a life of vagrancy and 124 See Johan Bergh and Harvey M. Feinberg, “Trusteeship and Black Land Ownership in the Transvaal During the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” African Historical Review 36.1 (2004), 170-193. 125 Langenhoven’s short farce De Water-Zaak, of Engelsch versus Hollandsch (“The Water Case, or English versus Dutch”), was published in the period before Union and deals directly with the cultural divide between Afrikaners and English speakers, as well as the perceived inferiority of Afrikaans to the Dutch of the Netherlands. Interestingly, unlike his many other plays, Langenhoven revised De Water-Zaak twice more as Die Wêreld Die Draai (“The World Turns,” 1912) and Die Laaste van die Takhare (“The Last of the Takhaars,” 1926), expanding it each time. This process of revision, while outside the scope of the present study, offers a fascinating example of satire in the evolution of twentieth-century Afrikaner consciousness. See J. C. Kannemeyer, Langenhoven: ’n Lewe (Cape Town, South Africa: Tafelberg, 1995): 239. 126 This is stated explicitly in “Straatpraatjes,” A.P.O. (Cape Town, South Africa), June 19, 1909. For Willem Uithalder, see Robert Ross, “The Kat River Rebellion and Khoikhoi Nationalism: The Fate of an Ethnic Identification,” Kronos 24 (1997): 101-102, 104. 108 crime, Piet’s came from his attachment to the city and keen observation of colonial parliamentary politics. Crucially, instead of being performed, in blackface, for white settlers, Piet was invented for the entertainment and education of Cape Town’s Coloured elite—the first regular satirical column written by a black or Coloured Southern African. The column—“Straatpraatjes,” Dutch and Afrikaans for “street talks,” began in 1909 and continued to appear on and off until 1920 in the pages of A.P.O., the newspaper of Dr. Abdurrahman’s African Political Organization. In the introduction to an excellent published collection of “Straatpraatjes” columns, Mohamed Adhikari flatly states that the material “holds far greater interest for historical linguists” than for historians generally.127 Yet the fact that Abdurrahman chose satire as a tool in his arsenal to press the cause of Coloured rights is of enormous importance if we are paying attention to the meaning of satire in the early twentieth century British Empire, not to mention the long and painful history of white ridicule directed at Khoisan and Coloured people. In the “Straatpraatjes” columns, Abdurrahman dispenses with the codes of deference by which white political leaders expected their Coloured counterparts to adhere. Instead, his Piet Uithalder character speaks of white politicians with a striking familiarity, commenting wryly on their appearance, habits, and drinks of choice. In oblique language, Piet even identifies which members of the Cape political establishment might be Coloureds passing as white, a particularly grave charge and one that could not be made flippantly.128 Piet Uithalder is also a man of the world, an admirer of Japan’s rapid geopolitical rise, and a savvy visitor to Johannesburg, where he saves the newspaper editor F. Z. S. Peregrino from an altercation with police by claiming that 127 Mohamed Adhikari, “Coloured Identity and the Politics of Language: The Sociopolitical Context of Piet Uithalder’s “Straatpraatjes” Column,” in Straatpraatjes: Language, Politics, and Popular Culture in Cape Town, 1909-1922, ed. Mohamed Adhikari (Pretoria, South Africa: J. L. van Schaik, 1999): 14. 128 See, for example, “Straatpraatjes,” A.P.O., June 18 and July 2, 1910, as discussed by Mohamed Adhikari in Straatpraatjes, 81 and 83-84, respectively. 109 he is a representative of important African tribes on official diplomatic business rather than a Coloured activist.129 His jocular tone and use of vernacular Afrikaans in every case belies a sophisticated understanding of local politics, Southern African history, and global developments. Consider the following excerpt from an October 1909 edition of “Straatpraatjes.” Thomas Smartt, member of the Legislative Assembly, has risen to rebut a speech by another parliamentarian opposing education funding for the Coloured population (all punctuation follows the original printing): Toet die ou klaar het, sta Dr. Smart op. Hij is e Irishman, en julle weet dit is e gevaarlike natie. “What no education for the coloured people,” skree hij. “Praat Hollans” se die ou. “Allright ik shall hollans speak,” se Smart. “No meer erecation voor die coloured people, wat sal then become of Kat River, en al mijn good supporters. No I shall never vote vir it. Look how nice Piet kan schrijwe already in the A.P.O. There sit Piet in the gallerij. Ja da so.” Dr. Smart le so ver oor om ver die ou te wijs wa ik sit lat hij bol-ma-kisie oor die tafel val. Sir Peter het net verbij geloop en gelukkig val hij in sij arme. Order! se die “Speaker” dit is nie die Circus nie en as die member wil bol-ma- kisie speel da moet hij bij Fillis’s circus vor hom gaat verhier. En ek rule die member out-of-order. “Alright” se Smart “kom Peter da gaat ons ma tee drink.”130 When the guy had finished, Dr. Smartt stood up. He is an Irishman, and you know that is a formidable nation. “What no education for the coloured people,” he shouts. “Speak Dutch” says the man. “Alright, I shall speak Dutch,” says Smartt. “No more education for the coloured people, what shall then become of Kat River, and all my good supporters. No I shall never vote for it. Look how nicely Piet writes already in the A.P.O. There Piet sits in the gallery. Yes, just there.” Dr. Smartt leans so far over to show the guy where I sit that he cartwheels over the table. Sir Peter had just walked past and luckily he fell into his arms.131 Order! says the “Speaker” this is not the circus and if the member wants to play cartwheels then he should get himself to Fillis’s circus. And I rule the member out-of- order. “Alright” says Smartt “come then Peter, let’s go drink tea.” 129 Piet Uithalder discusses Japan in “Straatpraatjes,” A.P.O., May 7, 1910, and visiting Johannesburg in “Straatpraatjes,” A.P.O., January 1, 1910. For more on Peregrino, who lived in the Gold Coast, England, and the United States before arriving in South Africa, see David Killingray and Martin Plaut, “F. Z. S. Peregrino, a Significant but Duplicitous Figure in the Black Atlantic World,” South African Historical Journal 68.4 (2016), 493-516. 130 “Straatpraatjes,” A.P.O., October 23, 1909. 131 Sir Peter is Sir Pieter Canzius van Bloemmenstein Stewart-Bam, another pro-British member of the Cape Parliament. 110 Instead of Piet performing for the white elite as Kaatje did, in this scenario white parliamentarians perform for Piet’s benefit in the visitors’ gallery. Smartt’s butchery of the Dutch language is also a wonderful reversal of the Kaatje Kekkelbek-influenced burlesquing of Coloured speech. The added flourish of his cartwheel into the arms of Sir Pieter Bam—Smartt’s political associate—might be seen as an attack on their political reputations, not to mention their masculinities. As staunch Anglophiles, Abdurrahman actually saw both men as imperfect allies: the tableau is meant not so much to portray the Cape Parliament as inept and buffoonish but rather to participate in the ironic political humor of the establishment class. The fact that Piet himself speaks in a stereotypically Coloured manner, and—unlike the overwhelming majority of A.P.O.’s readership—does not understand English, only bolstered this effort. Getting the joke and taking a joke were two sides of the same coin according to the ascendent theory of bourgeois laughter. Paradoxically, then, we can interpret Abdurrahman and his readers’ embrace of a socially inferior character like Piet as an index of the distance they wished to put between him and Piet’s real-life ilk. As claimants to full citizenship, by enjoying “Straatpraatjes” the Coloured elite could demonstrate that were not threatened by such portrayals but were willing to redeploy them for their own purposes instead—a tactic that we will see again in later chapters at the hands of R. R. R. Dhlomo, H. C. Bosman, and K. E. Masinga, among others.132 By bringing Kaatje Kekkelbek into Parliament, perhaps she could be redeemed. 132 Parallels can and should be drawn with the efflorescence of “Afrikaaps” culture in the post-apartheid era after decades where Coloured particularity was frowned upon as retrograde in left-intellectual circles. See Samantha Roman, “What Kaaps Brings to the Table.” 111 Conclusion: Laughing on the Margins The South Africa we will explore in the succeeding chapters was both a very old and a very young society. It was very young in the sense that its constitution was new, and many of its rulers had only been in the country for a small portion of their lives—in 1910 the city of Johannesburg, the nation’s main economic engine, had existed a mere twenty-three years. Even so, measured by the length of contact between its indigenous peoples and Europeans, it was older than the settler societies of the New World, and its complex social relations reflected that. A play like De Nieuwe Ridderorde is almost two centuries old, but its representations of people now known as Coloured will be all-too-familiar to modern observers of South African popular culture. By interrogating not just the subjects but also the meanings of settler humor and satire, more is revealed than just a long, racist history (though that is certainly part of the story). Humor is a unique window into the perspectives of settlers on the margins of empire—people conscious that moving to a faraway place could un-settle their position as citizens of empire, even as that identity meant more on the frontier (in certain ways) than ever before. Moreover, as the satire of Abdurrahman’s “Straatpraatjes” shows, pejorative stereotypes are more than just tools in the hands of an oppressive group: they can be appropriated, reinterpreted and reversed by the ridiculed, even as, to some extent, they are also internalized at the same time. For better or worse, pejorative humorous representations become motifs in the shared life of groups, shaping identities and strategies beyond what we might ordinarily expect from a newspaper item or a late-night entertainment. This chapter has only scratched the surface of the story of pre-1910 European-influenced satire, but has provided necessary context for understanding the developments that would come after the South African War, when a deeply 112 divided, rapidly industrializing Union was forced to confront, more urgently than ever before, fundamental questions about its identity and future. Given South Africa’s history, the path forward was always going to be tortuous. The career of Stephen Black, the main subject of the following two chapters, exemplifies both the promise and the peril of that path. 113 Chapter 3— Prizefighter-Playwright: The Times and Thwarted Life of Stephen Black, 1880-1927 In a neglected section of Johannesburg’s Brixton Cemetery, strewn with broken bottles and untrimmed plant life, there stands a simple, rough-cut gravestone with an inscription so faint it might be mistaken for a natural feature (Fig. 2). The inscription on the stone is simple —“Stephen Black, S.A. Playwright, 1880-1931”—but the man to whom it refers was anything but. Stephen William Black was a sharp-tongued literary scrapper with an irascible personality. He was also an innovative humorist who had a profound influence on South African cultural life in spite of his modest circumstances and unexpected death in middle age. Indeed, though his actual work and accomplishments have mostly been forgotten, Stephen Black remains one of the most colorful and tragic personalities in all of South African literary history. As embittered and pugilistic as he was visionary and energetic, Black was no saint. Like any white South African Figure 2: Stephen Black’s tombstone, Johannesburg. Photograph by author. 114 writer of the early twentieth century, his work was impacted deeply by the social and racial hierarchies of his day and his place within that hierarchy. As a “colonial-born” writer, it is understandable that his struggles against “Home-born” hegemony would shape much of his work, despite his racial privilege. Nevertheless, Black’s biography is a kind of crossroads where the paths of South African satire we traced in Chapter 2 meet and diverge. As one of the first playwrights of the twentieth century to tackle specifically South African topics, as the first South African newspaper editor to employ black South African writers, and as a literary mentor to both Herman Charles Bosman and R. R. R. Dhlomo, the historiographical record has not done him justice. Aside from Stephen Gray’s efforts to resurrect his name in the 1980s—collecting his prose for a special issue of the journal English in Africa in 1981 and publishing (for the first time ever) three of Black’s plays in 1984—Black still languishes as a footnote to a history where he should be considered a key player, an important case study as much for what he failed to accomplish as for his success. The next two chapters of this study reconstruct the life and career of Stephen Black in order to uncover this legacy, and show how Black’s output as a humorist was inextricable from his personal struggles. Having been “discovered” at an early age by Rudyard Kipling, for most of his career Black harbored dreams of becoming another colonial-born literary sensation. Indeed, his eye for local social conditions and conviction that laughter could advance the development of “better South Africans” brought him swift notoriety. Yet Black’s view of a “South Africanism” that rejected both Anglophilic and Afrikaner nationalist nostalgia won him few friends among the nation’s white cultural tastemakers, leading to strong personal feelings of resentment and ambivalence towards his own country. Escape, also proved impossible, whether 115 to England, France, or Southern Rhodesia: Black oscillated between the desire to be acknowledged as South Africa’s chief comedic pundit and the fantasy of establishing himself a bohemian aesthete for whom nations and borders meant nothing. The present chapter traces this uneven path to the cusp of Black’s return from his third unsuccessful European sojourn in 1927, while the next chapter examines his final pivot to tabloid journalism in the last four years of his life. Despite his present obscurity, Black left behind a rich archive of material providing insight into his life and thought. Not only were many of his personal scripts and papers donated to the Johannesburg Public Library after his death, but an entirely separate and even more extensive collection of Black material found its way to the South African Library in Cape Town through the efforts of an unexpected source: the cartoonist D. C. Boonzaier. Though Boonzaier was an ardent Afrikaner nationalist, he was one of Black’s closest friends—“the nearest to perfection as an intellectual companion for me,” as Black once described him. While their relationship ceased shortly before Black’s death, Boonzaier meticulously kept the letters, manuscripts, and typescripts Black had sent him over the years, along with incredibly granular accounts of their in-person interactions within his sprawlingly detailed diary.1 These writings, taken together, provide an extraordinary window into the vicissitudes of creativity and censorship at a time when the meanings of South African nationhood were profoundly unsettled. Both intermittently penniless, thwarted by a partisan media landscape, and trapped in a milieu 1 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, November 30, 1924, pg. 3, MSC. 4 [D. C. Boonzaier Collection], box 11, folder 51, National Library of South Africa [NLSA], Cape Town, South Africa. Boonzaier’s diary was inspired in part by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, French novelists and brothers who co-wrote a meticulous chronicle of bohemian life in Paris between 1850 and 1896. Boonzaier’s choice to embark on a similar mission in Cape Town gives a strong indication of his literary proclivities and his aspirations for Cape intellectual life. See Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, Pages from the Goncourt Journals, ed. Robert Baldick (New York, N.Y.: New York Review Books, 2006). 116 where “colonial birth” was a serious career setback, Black and Boonzaier’s tumultuous friendship sheds light on a little-explored yet highly consequential period in South African creative life. From Prizefighter to Protégé, 1880-1908 Stephen William Black was born to John Henry and Sarah Annie Newton Black on September 22, 1880 in Woodstock, a working class suburb of Cape Town.2 He was the second oldest of nine children, the youngest of whom died in infancy after he had left home.3 Both of his parents and two of his grandparents had been born in the Cape Colony: his paternal grandfather, Captain John Black came to South Africa in the mid-nineteenth century, possibly after serving on the Cape frontier with a Scottish regiment, the 72nd Regiment of Foot (The Duke of Albany’s Own Highlanders), which was stationed there between 1828 and 1840.4 Though Stephen Black grew up speaking English (and his command of written Dutch and Afrikaans was never strong), he had Afrikaans heritage on both sides of his family: Captain Black had married a woman named Johanna Cornelia van Tulliken by 1847, and Stephen’s maternal grandfather Thomas Frederick Newton wed one Maria Anna van Reenen sometime in the 1850s.5 2 Birthdate from the register of baptisms for the parish of St. Saviour’s, Claremont in the Diocese of Cape Town, vol. 2, pg. 124 (baptism no. 1207 on November 7, 1880), AB3208 2.23.1 [Registers of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, 1850-2004], University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa) 3 According to John Henry Black’s death notice, no. 4300 of May 13, 1924, Probate Records of the Master of the High Court, Cape Town Archives Repository [CAR], Cape Town, South Africa. 4 This information comes from a biographical sketch Black wrote about his wealthy uncle Stephen Cope Black: Stephen Black (writing as “Posthumorous”), “S. C. Black: The Paradoxical Pioneer,” The Sjambok (Johannesburg, South Africa), May 9, 1930. See also Richard Cannon, Historical Record of the Seventy-Second Regiment, or, the Duke of Albany’s Own Highlanders; Containing an Account of the Formation of the Regiment in 1778, and of its Subsequent Services to 1848 (London, U.K.: Parker, Furnivall, and Parker, 1848): 53-56. 5 John and Johanna Black’s son Charles John was born on January 11th, 1847 and baptized in Cape Town on March 16 of the same year according to Dutch Reformed Church baptismal records for the Cape Town parish, G/1/8/20, Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa Archive, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Wellington, South Africa. Sarah Anna Newton’s birth is listed as October 9, 1854 in the baptismal records of St. Saviour’s, Claremont, vol. 1, pg. 10 (baptism no. 103 of December 28, 1856), AB3208 2.23.1, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. 117 The infant Stephen was baptized, along with his mother and all of his siblings, at St. Saviour’s Anglican Church in Claremont, the suburb where he spent most of his youth. Today Claremont is a wealthy and sought-after neighborhood beneath the lushly forested slopes of Table Mountain, but in Black’s youth it was economically eclectic, drawing comparisons with the much more densely populated District Six.6 As he explained many years later to D. C. Boonzaier, Black often went hungry during his childhood, and throughout his life faced rumours that he had Coloured ancestry; in one of his letters he related an incident where his sister overheard a group of women at Muizenberg beach discussing his plays: “‘SB him! Why dont you know he’s a nigger—his mother is an old black woman!’”7 In fact, both Woodstock and Claremont had large Coloured populations, including people sharing his mother’s surname of Newton, and boasted a high degree of racial mixing for decades after Black’s death.8 His uncle Stephen Cope Black (his namesake and a witness at his christening) would soon travel to Johannesburg and establish himself as “one of the most prominent men in mining circles on the Rand for about 56 years”—a town councillor, fixture of the elite Rand Club, and charter member of the stock exchange. Even so, young Stephen William grew up in a rough-and-tumble environment, earning a reputation with his fists against both white and Coloured peers.9 Stephen compared his father John Henry Black to the Dickensian debtor Wilkins Micawber, and blamed him for his unhappy upbringing. The failure of his father’s Woodstock bookshop, Black and Co., did not help matters, and while John Henry found later found work as a clerk in a prominent 6 See Wiesahl Taliep, “Belletjiesbos, Draper Street and the Vlak: The Coloured Neighbourhoods of Claremont before Group Areas,” African Studies 60.1 (2001), 65-85. 7 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, October 2, 1920, pg. 7, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 50, NLSA, Cape Town. 8 See Jayne Garside, “Inner City Gentrification in South Africa: The Case of Woodstock, Cape Town, GeoJournal 30.1 (1993): 31; Wiesahl Taliep, “Belletjiesbos, Draper Street and the Vlak.” 9 “Funeral of Mr. S. C. Black,” Rand Daily Mail, January 8, 1945; Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, February 28, 1920, pg. 5, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 50, NLSA, Cape Town. 118 Cape Town financial firm, he filed for bankruptcy in December 1894, declaring just £15 6d. of assets against debts worth £140 4s.10 This dire financial situation is likely what compelled Stephen to leave school after only three years and “face the world to earn his own living as he has done ever since”— he later claimed to have arrived at the burgeoning diamond fields of Kimberley when he would have been only thirteen years old.11 It is unclear what Black did in Kimberley or precisely how long he stayed there, but we know that he was athletically gifted and able to write competently despite his brief schooling. Within a few years he was earning money as a prizefighter and boxing reporter for a Cape Town- based magazine called The Owl (Boonzaier was also submitting cartoons to The Owl at the time, though it appears their paths never crossed).12 Eventually Black quit the sport to become a boxing manager, and a May 19, 1904 item in the Rand Daily Mail describes him as “mentor” to Dan Hyman, who a few months earlier had lost the South African featherweight championship.13 Though he had previous experience in journalism, working as a boxing manager sharpened Black’s skills as a promoter and manipulator of the press, indulging the love for showmanship that he would shortly bring with him to the world of stage drama. 10 “Week’s Insolvencies,” Cape Times (Cape Town, South Africa), December 29, 1894. 11 D. C. Boonzaier diaries [BD], vol.7, pg. 48, MSC. 4, box 2 (November 10, 1910), NLSA, Cape Town; Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, December 30, 1925, pg. 5, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 51, NLSA, Cape Town. 12 The most complete work on the history of white boxing in South Africa is Chris Greyvenstein, The Fighters: A Pictorial History of SA Boxing from 1881 (Cape Town, South Africa: Don Nelson, 1981). The paucity of additional literature on boxing in South Africa is puzzling and unfortunate in light of the sport’s historical popularity. When the lens is widened to the broader British Empire the picture improves somewhat. While British boxing imposed a color bar between 1911 and 1948, boxing served as an important means of assimilation for Jewish men, and a key exception to the White Australia policy. See Neil Carter, “British Boxing’s Colour Bar, 1911-1948,” paper presented at Black History Season, “The Hidden History of Black British Sport,” De Montfort University, November 23, 2011), accessed February 11, 2021, ; David Dee, “‘The Hefty Hebrew’: Boxing and British-Jewish Identity, 1890-1960,” Sport in History 32.3 (2012), 361-381; Martin Johnes and Matthew Taylor, “Boxing in History,” Sport in History 31.4 (2011), 357-362; Rebecca Sheehan, “‘Little Giants of the Ring: Fighting Race and Making Men on the Australia-Philippines Boxing Circuit, 1919-1923,” Sport in Society 15.4 (2012), 447-461. 13 “Boxing,” Rand Daily Mail, May 19, 1904; Chris Greyvenstein, The Fighters, 443. 119 Turning from boxing to journalism and finally to theatre may seem a somewhat incongruous career trajectory, but there was significant precedent in turn of the century South Africa. Boxing was a popular sport among the mining magnates of Kimberley and Johannesburg. When Stephen Black was nine years old, the thirty-five year old Scotsman James Robertson Couper, South Africa’s first heavyweight champion, defended his reputation against the younger Woolf Bendoff in a thrilling match that split punters and was covered extensively overseas (the Randlord Abe Bailey backed Couper, while Barney Barnato masterminded Bendoff’s challenge).14 Couper, who had also founded South Africa’s first legal boxing gym, often used theatres as arenas, and in 1885 he even debuted his own play in Kimberley, a melodramatic romance called Modern Chivalry.15 A few years later, in the early 1890s, he published a novel, Mixed Humanity, which Black glowingly excerpted in the inaugural issue of his newspaper The Sjambok in 1929.16 Couper tragically took his own life in 1897 after a long struggle with depression, but his rise from obscurity to public fame and no small amount of fortune must have fed the young Stephen Black’s athletic and literary aspirations alike.17 After a particular boxing-related windfall Black “obeyed the wishes of [his] mother to ‘turn over a new leaf’” and attended the Diocesan College in Rondebosch for a year “to learn to write English.”18 By then Black was entering his mid-twenties, already (in his words) “a champion athlete & a journalist—of sorts,” and the experience of returning to school left him underwhelmed and humiliated. As he later recalled, 14 See Chris Greyvenstein, The Fighters, 10-35. 15 Chris Greyvenstein, The Fighters, 17. 16 J. R. Couper, Mixed Humanity: A Story of Camp Life in South Africa (Cape Town, South Africa: J. C. Juta and Co., 1892); J. R. Couper, “Bastard Heaven,” The Sjambok (Johannesburg, South Africa), April 19, 1929. 17 Chris Greyvenstein, The Fighters, 35. 18 Stephen Black, “How I Began to Write”, Cape Argus (Cape Town, South Africa), October 17, 1925. 120 There I sat, often among other boys of half my age, in theory not knowing a noun from a verb, and sometimes I would work with the B.A. class at literature (arid and bitter in the mouth to-day it tastes—that ‘literature’); but I was earnest enough…Why did nobody show me Walter Pater, George Moore, Balzac, de Maupassant…?19 Black supplemented his income at this time by writing for the Cape Argus newspaper as a sports reporter, but as the list of controversial nineteenth century authors above suggests, he remained restless, frustrated by the conservative curriculum of his school. Soon, however, Black transformed the decidedly unglamorous work of court reporting into a platform for his literary ambitions. Assigned to the lowly job of reporting on petty crime and misdemeanor cases, he began to embellish his accounts with crude character studies of the impoverished Capetonians at their center. A representative 1907 report shows the degree to which Black had begun to regard the spectators’ gallery of the courtroom as a gallery of the urban grotesque, inspired by the French literary flâneur tradition of Charles Baudelaire and others: It is with considerable sorrow that one has to announce a serious decline of that lively interest in matters forensic which has justly made famous the occupants of the back rail in the Wale-street Police Court. This morning there could not have been above 50 of these worthy citizens following the cases. And what is still worse, the fifty seemed at time to be bored by the proceedings: to be unable to raise one good hearty laugh, or to fight for position as the prisoners entered the straight that leads to the judge’s box. They didn’t care “wedder it snose, blose or freesis.”20 Black’s “break” came when Rudyard Kipling, who wintered at Cape Town for health reasons almost yearly between 1898 and 1908, discovered Black’s caricatures of Coloured 19 Stephen Black, “How I Began to Write”, Cape Argus, October 17, 1925. In “How I Began to Write,” Black writes that he was 23 when he began at the Diocesan College, but in a letter written several years earlier he says he was 24. This would place him at Diocesan College in 1903 or 1904. See Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, March 28, 1916, pg. 7, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 48, NLSA, Cape Town. 20 “Wale-Street Police Court,” Cape Argus Weekly (Cape Town, South Africa), December 24, 1907. The classic literary exposition of the flâneur is Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in Charles Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P. E. Charvet, 2nd ed. (New York, N.Y.: Penguin, 2006 [1972]), 390-436. See also The Flâneur Abroad: Historical and International Perspectives, ed. Richard Wrigley (Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), and Urban Walking: The Flâneur as an Icon of Metropolitan Culture in Literature and Film, eds. Oliver Bock and Isabel Vila-Cabanes (Wilmington, Del.: Vernon Press, 2020). 121 defendants. According to Black, Kipling called at the Argus offices demanding to know “who is it that has awakened us to the existence of Johnnie Hendricks, Sanie Snuifbek, and Achmat Samsodien?”21 Black was invited to take tea with Kipling at the Woolsack, a cottage specially built for his family on the grounds of Cecil Rhodes’s Groote Schuur estate, and the two struck up a correspondence. Financial difficulties led Black to auction six of these letters in London in November 1927, but the letter Kipling sent just before his departure for Britain in April 1908 survives: in it he provides eleven different premises for “City Studies” that Black might consider, several of which we know he faithfully attempted.22 Rudyard Kipling’s biography provides a thought-provoking counterpoint to the path Stephen Black took in life; the parallels were surely not lost on either writer when they met. Born in Bombay in 1865, the son of an art teacher, Kipling famously claimed to “thought and dreamed” not in English but the “vernacular idiom” that surrounded him in British India.23 Packed off to England for schooling at the age of five, Kipling returned to India eleven years later to work on the staff of the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette. Reporting for this paper between 1882 and 1887 allowed him, like Black in Cape Town, to experience Lahore in a way few of his Anglo-Indian contemporaries were able to. “Observing accurately, getting the facts right, listening to the poor, the outcasts, the driftwood and pariahs of civilization,” in the words of William Dillingham, Kipling “amazed those around him with his knowledge of India at all levels.”24 S. S. Azfar Husain goes further to argue that Kipling’s impressive knowledge of Urdu 21 “Horace”, “Stephen W. Black,” Rand Daily Mail (Johannesburg, South Africa), January 12, 1909. 22 Record of the auction is given in “First Day’s Sale,” unknown clipping, November 24, 1927, M. F. Cartwright Collection, MSB 809, box 2, folder 8, NLSA, Cape Town; Rudyard Kipling to Stephen Black, April 10, 1908, published in The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, vol. 3, ed. Thomas Pinney (London, U.K.: Palgrave-Macmillan, 1996): 316-318. Some of the stories Black wrote on Kipling’s advice, notably “The Cloud Child,” were republished in Stephen Black, “Stephen Black: A Selection”, ed. Stephen Gray, English in Africa 8.2 (1981), 67-94. 23 Jan Montefiore, Rudyard Kipling (Tavistock, U.K.: Northcote House Publishers, 2007): 32. 24 William B. Dillingham, Rudyard Kipling: Hell and Heroism (New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005): 22. 122 idioms came not from his early childhood nor from the educated Indian population of Lahore, whom Kipling held in contempt, but from the prostitutes of the city.25 Though Black had a weaker claim to English respectability than Kipling, having little education and no experience of Great Britain, Kipling saw in Black a potential protégé. He sympathized with Black’s aspirations, and encouraged him to keep writing just has he had done in his Indian days. Later in life, Black would often recall Kipling’s warning, before his departure from South Africa in April 1908, that “no power would come to [him] save from his native land.”26 Rudyard Kipling would never return to the Cape, but it was a prediction that would prove stubbornly prophetic.27 Lady Mushroom’s Revenge: Love and the Hyphen, 1908 Perhaps Black’s background as a boxing promoter was what attracted him to the idea of writing a play. Actors and companies came and went throughout the last century, but Cape Town had not harbored any playwrights of note since the days of Boniface and Suasso de Lima; an original play with a local setting could be a highly lucrative novelty. Black began reading excerpts from the script to friends in the city in the second half of 1908, and it is at one of these readings that we first meet him in the pages of D. C. Boonzaier’s diary, hamming it up with the enthusiasm of a man already well-versed in showmanship: This afternoon Stephen Black, a reporter on the ‘Cape Argus’ who has written a South African play for production at the Tivoli called to read the piece to D & myself. I listened to it in my room & laughed heartily at some of the scenes…Black was obviously very pleased with himself & read with much gusto. He accompanied nearly every line with a gesture in which I could detect neither meaning nor grace, and when he read the 25 S. S. Azfar Husain, The Indianness of Rudyard Kipling: A Study in Stylistics (London, U.K.: Cosmic Press, 1983): 14-15. 26 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, November 30, 1924, pg. 4, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 51, NLSA, Cape Town. 27 Renée Durbach, Kipling’s South Africa (Cape Town, South Africa: Chameleon Press, 1988): 109. 123 lines of an army captain he invariably rose from his seat & acted the character. The play is certainly very promising when one remembers that it is the work of a beginner.28 And so it was. Black’s Love and the Hyphen opened at the Tivoli Theatre at the corner of Plein and Darling Street on November 16, 1908, causing an immediate sensation. The Cape Argus critic, perhaps not an unbiased commentator, referred to it as “South Africa’s first play,” and though this was far from true, it speaks powerfully to the mood surrounding the play’s release.29 On opening night Black addressed the audience at the curtain call, saying that he had written it “hoping that the play would make some South Africans better South Africans.”30 What, we may ask, did he mean? Though its proceedings were kept strictly secret, Love and the Hyphen debuted just one week before the National Convention charged with designing a constitutional framework for a united South Africa convened in Cape Town for its second session.31 At stake were fundamental questions about South Africa’s course for the future—not just specific issues of language and voting and parliamentary structure, but world-historical quandaries. As Olive Schreiner wrote in a famous 1908 letter to the editor of the Transvaal Leader, the problem of the twentieth century had to do with the “interaction of distinct human varieties on the largest and most beneficent lines,” and South Africans were on the front lines of solving it.32 “If it be possible,” she continued, 28 BD, vol. 4, pgs. 20-21, MSC. 4, box 1, NLSA, Cape Town. “D” is Alfred D. Donovan, editor of a journal called The Cape for which Boonzaier wrote cartoons at the time. 29 “‘Love and the Hyphen,’” Cape Argus Weekly, November 25, 1908. 30 “‘Love and the Hyphen,’” Cape Argus Weekly, November 25, 1908. 31 Edgar H. Walton, The Inner History of the National Convention of South Africa (Cape Town, South Africa: T. Maskew Miller, 1912), 199. For more on developments in the years between 1902 and 1910 see also Shula Marks, “War and Union, 1899-1910,” in The Cambridge History of South Africa, vol. 2, 164-210; and Leonard M. Thompson, The Unification of South Africa, 1902-1910 (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1960). 32 Olive Schreiner, “Closer Union,” The Transvaal Leader (Johannesburg, South Africa), December 22, 1908. 124 for us out of our great complex body of humanity (its parts possibly remaining racially distinct for centuries) to raise up a free, intelligent, harmonious nation, each part acting with and for the benefit of the others, than we shall have played a part as great as that of any nation in the world’s record. And as we to-day turn our eyes towards Greece or Rome or England for models in those things wherein they have excelled, nations in the future…will be compelled to turn their eyes towards us and follow our lead, saying, “Hers was the first and true solution to the problem.”33 While Black’s play may not seem to match the lofty spirit of Schreiner’s words, both texts exemplify a common desire for white South Africans to discover their national genius and identity in a world where they will be measured no longer against other colonies or the imperial metropole, but the other great nations of the world. Coming so soon after the end of a massive and devastating war, the stakes of the so-called “Closer Union” process were understood to be momentous. Love and the Hyphen is a broad farce which primarily skewers Cape Town’s social elite and their dismissive attitude toward all things “colonial.” In its cynical views on marriage and love (the “hyphen” of the title refers to the cachet of marrying someone with a hyphenated name, like the fraudster Captain Hay-Whotte of His Majesty’s Muddlers), the play drew inspiration from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)—something Black acknowledged explicitly by naming two main characters Cecily and Gwendoline. Yet the play was no mere knock-off; Black fully adapted it to the setting of his home city, incorporating a range of local types. There is the lovable but thick-headed civil servant Gert van Kalabas, who despite a thick Afrikaans accent pretends to have patrician English roots. There is also the Coloured servant duo of Sophie Wijnbek (whose surname translates to “wine-trap”) and Frikkie Schaapkop (“sheep- head”), who not only provide snide commentary on the “upstairs” action but pursue their own 33 Olive Schreiner, “Closer Union,” The Transvaal Leader (Johannesburg, South Africa), December 22, 1908. 125 parallel subplot, with Sophie just as dead-set as the De Cad sisters on marrying a white man from the army, despite Frikkie’s advances: FRIKKIE: Hole on. Gif er man er chance. I get now two poan ten in der munt & I want to merry you—we make our little grey home in der West34 SOPHIE: Where’s dat? FRIKKIE: Dere in Chiappini Street SOPHIE: Certainly not—for me it’s eider Wynberg near der kemp or Henobel Street near der Castle FRIKKIE: Jij’s alte lief fer die soldaare wat!35 SOPHIE: I got a white bloke for my sweetheart. I’m engaged till Christmas by Corporal Smit FRIKKIE: My face is black but my heart is white SOPHIE: I don’t care. My heart belongs to der regiment!36 In the 1908 version of the play none of the women, black or white, manages to land a British soldier.37 Sophie settles for Frikkie and Lynda—Gwendoline’s sister—ends up with Van Kalabas the kind-hearted buffoon (“just like the ivy I’ll cling to you,” he tells her).38 In some ways the most important subplot of the play—something Black must have been alluding to in his speech on opening night—was the relationship between Cecily Mushroom and her suitor Robert Austin, the son of a prosperous local farmer. The dowdy Lady Mushroom objects to the union because of Austin’s colonial birth, despite the fact that her husband was a friend and business partner of Austin’s father. Lady Mushroom’s “noble” father, we learn from her husband Sir James, was actually a spendthrift ne’er-do-well whom Austin’s father “saved…indirectly from 34 Chiappini Street is in the more “respectable” Bo-Kaap, a historically Muslim area on the west side of central Cape Town, whereas “Henobel” (Hanover) Street ran through notoriously seedy neighbourhood of District Six, which was demolished by the apartheid government starting in the late 1960s. 35 In standard English, “you’re too in love with the soldiers, hey!” 36 “Love and the Hyphen” TS., Act III, pgs, 20-21, S. W. Black Collection, MSB. 70, box 3, folder 4, NLSA, Cape Town. 37 Black’s revisions to Love and the Hyphen two decades later are discussed in Chapter 4 below. 38 “Love and the Hyphen” TS., Act III, pg. 27, S. W. Black Collection, MSB. 70, box 3, folder 4, NLSA, Cape Town. 126 insolvency” in the Kimberly diamond fields.39 Black’s harshest satire is thus directed towards those at the top of the ladder who automatically deride all things colonial by virtue of their origin. If Sophie Wijnbek is at fault for pursuing an interracial union (still legal at the time), it is only because, according to the logic of the play, she is emulating the craven behavior of her social betters; a fish rots from the head. Like Kaatje Kekkelbek, Love and the Hyphen attacks imported ideas—Anglophilia and snobbery this time, instead of abolitionism and humanitarianism. In Love and the Hyphen, Black shows both white and Coloured falling prey to these corrosive notions, and, unlike Bain’s Kaatje Kekkelbek, he holds out the possibility of redemption. Becoming better South Africans, Black suggested, meant giving up trying to imitate Britain in every sphere, but jettisoning class and culture prejudice within the white population and embracing the promise of the new South Africa still taking shape. This position formed the core of Stephen Black’s politics and influence his work and writings for the rest of his life. “Seldom have I heard people laugh so heartily at the Tivoli,” Boonzaier wrote of opening night, “the play had several faults but its satire was so trenchant & telling, its characterisation so brilliant even if a trifle exaggerated that one was ready to forgive every thing.”40 True to his Afrikaner nationalist sensibilities, he added that “the two Cape coloured servants were wonderfully true to nature, but the old dutch lady [Van Kalabas’s mother] was an offensive burlesque.” While not impressed by Black’s revision of the play a few months later, Boonzaier reported that “the house was packed to suffocation” and that Black might draw a profit of £1,000 39 Stephen Black, Three Plays, ed. Stephen Gray (Johannesburg, South Africa: Ad. Donker, 1984): 76. This edition of three of Black’s plays harmonizes the various typescripts that are preserved in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Where Gray’s edition does not depart from the NLSA typescript already cited, I have cited Gray. The typescript likely dates from Black’s revival of the play in January 1909. 40 BD, vol. 4, pg. 39, MSC. 4, box 1 (November 16th, 1908), NLSA, Cape Town. 127 with a successful tour.41 Yet that play which reflected so much of Kipling’s influence, with its Cape setting and dialect (including Van Kalabas’s maladroit attempts at “the king’s English”), led to the abrupt termination of his mentorship by one of the world’s most famous authors. Rudyard Kipling’s friendship & influence which were withdrawn when I foolishly told him about who Lady Mushroom was. He wrote me gravely about my putting on the stage the faults of a woman in need of sympathy & kindness; I replied defending my right to deal with the sins of anyone I chose. That ended our friendship. He never communicated again with me. I had before enjoyed an invitation to spend a week at Batemans (his home) whenever I visited England. The week itself was cancelled automatically.42 On a casual reading of Love and the Hyphen, the vain and uptight Lady Mushroom appears to be little more than a stock figure, yet Black was adamant that the woman he had in mind was all too real: Helen Juta. She was the husband of Sir Henry Juta, a politician and former speaker of the Cape House of Assembly. Sir Henry, in turn, was descended from Jan Carel Juta, brother-in-law to Karl Marx, who founded a publishing business at the Cape in 1853. According to a 1930 London Times obituary, “their home, Mon Désir, Kenilworth, a beautiful place, with lovely gardens and magnificent views of sea and mountain, was the scene of much gracious hospitality”—Black, meanwhile, places the Mushroom estate in nearby Wynberg.43 In fact, Black would rail against the Juta family in letters for the rest of his life, particularly in the 1920s as their daughter Réné sought to establish a reputation as a writer in England. This goal, as we shall see, eluded Black himself many times. Kipling was eager for Black to capture the sights, languages and rhythms of the Cape. With respect to politics, however, in Kipling’s view South Africa could have only one proper 41 BD, vol. 4, pg. 80 (January 3, 1909) and 85-86 (January 8, 1909), MSC. 4, box 1 (November 16th, 1908), NLSA, Cape Town. 42 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, December 1st, 1925, pg. 7, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 51, NLSA, Cape Town. 43 “Obituary: Sir Henry Juta,” The Times (London, U.K.), May 22, 1930. 128 future, and that was British. While Black (unlike Boonzaier) was a supporter of Louis Botha and the South African Party, Kipling’s social circle in Cape Town was a who’s who of arch- imperialists from Leander Starr Jameson to Alfred Milner to Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes, an especially close friend, died on March 26, 1902, while the Kipling’s family was wintering in the city. “I feel as though half the horizon of my life had dropped away,” Kipling later wrote of the funeral.44 In 1906 Kipling was even invited to contest a constituency in the Cape Parliament as a candidate of the pro-British Progressive Party, which he turned down. As the decade wore on and the tide began to shift in favor of South African Party, Kipling became disillusioned and pessimistic about the region’s future. The success of Louis Botha for Kipling represented “the handing over of a higher civilisation to a lower, “ as he put it, “a heart-breaking job.”45 Kipling’s views on South African politics are not only essential to understanding his rejection of Black, but also exemplify his own solution to the problem of colonial birth. “He is not wholly of England: indeed, India is the place where he really belongs,” writes his biographer Bonamy Dobrée, “but he is not an Indian, he is an Englishman; therefore, to be an integral part of the whole, he must at all costs make England and Empire one.”46 Though Kipling never actually saw the play, Black’s Love and the Hyphen functioned as a cutting critique of this view. British supremacy in South Africa, according to the play, had, in practice, brought about nothing but unjustified snobbery and only the thinnest veneer of cultural elevation. Furthermore, as Black would explore directly in his 1920 novel The Dorp, hierarchical divisions within the white 44 Lucile Russell Carpenter, Rudyard Kipling: A Friendly Profile (Chicago, Ill.: Argus Books, 1942): 68, quoted in Renée Durbach, Kipling’s South Africa, 83. 45 Charles Carrington, Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work (London, U.K.: Macmillan, 1955): 389, quoted in Renée Durbach, Kipling’s South Africa, 98 46 Bonamy Dobrée, Rudyard Kipling: Realist and Fabulist (London, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1967): 45; quoted in S. S. Azfar Husain, The Indianness of Rudyard Kipling, 6. 129 community posed a particularly urgent danger in a country where white people were such a small minority. Though Black insisted it was a chance disclosure about Lady Mushroom that caused his split with Kipling, perhaps it was only a matter of time before more profound political differences would produce the same result. The Importance of Being Flexible: The Economics of Satire at the Moment of Union It is important to stress that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the playgoing population of Cape Town was both segregated and multiracial. Unlike during the apartheid era, when mixed theatre audiences were officially banned, around the turn of the twentieth century such policies were carried out on an informal, venue-by-venue basis, though segregated seating within theatres was widespread.47 As early as 1877 the Cape Times commented approvingly of “the Malay audience to be seen every evening in the gallery” of Cape Town’s Theatre Royal, “keenly attentive…to the proceedings on the stage and interested in the action of the play.”48 Seven years later, an African student at the famous Lovedale Mission would give a firsthand account of the atmosphere “among the rowdies and low characters of Cape Town who had gone to pass their time in the gallery…With the majority of those present, the lower the tone of the play, the better it took, and the higher the tone was raised, I fear, the less paying it would become 47 More research needs to be carried out on the state of theatre segregation in the early 1920s. Different provinces had different policies; the Transvaal had worked with African Consolidated Theatres to essentially ban “native and coloured persons” from seeing films alongside whites as of 1926, yet in Natal Gairoonisa Paleker notes that “one of the four ‘European’ cinemas…had facilities for mixed audiences.” Details are lacking on the state of affairs in theatres fifteen years earlier staging live shows. See Gairoonisa Paleker, “The State, Citizens, and Control: Film and African Audiences in South Africa, 1910-1948,” Journal of Southern African Studies 40.2 (2014): 317; 318. In 1958 mixed white and black audiences were banned from cinemas without official permission and in 1965 this was applied to “any place of entertainment.” See Robert Mshengu Kavanagh, Theatre and Cultural Struggle in South Africa (London, U.K.: Zed Books, 1985): 51. 48 Cape Times, August 3, 1877, quoted in Jill Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa, 100. 130 to the managers”—suggesting that this audience was not incidental but essential to the calculus of Cape impresarios.49 By the time Black began his theatre career, both blackface minstrelsy and the practice of placing actual black and Coloured performers in bit and ensemble roles was also well- established. While more rigid forms of exclusion were practiced in rural areas and outside the Cape, the number of multiracial cinemas operating in the city by the 1920s attests to the persistence of a multiracial show-going tradition well into the twentieth century.50 Play reviews that referred to “the laughter of the gods”—that is, the laughter of the high balcony seats—were often thus acknowledging the presence of patrons in the theatre who were not white. Indeed, commenting on a play at Cape Town’s lavish Opera House called Japie’s Courtship (a 1911 Stephen Black knockoff by the pseudonymous “Mowbray Kloof”) Boonzaier himself reported that the gallery was “composed of low blacks” who “roared at the author’s feeble attempts at humour.”51 Black’s all-white theatrical companies portrayed the widest-ever array of South African characters seen to date on the stage. In Helena’s Hope, Limited (1910), Black debuted the first mission-educated African to be seen on the South African stage, a character he himself performed in blackface. That character, Jeremiah Luke M’bene, encapsulated Black’s ambivalent perspective on the progress of industrial modernity and British-style “civilization” on 49 H. W. J. Picard, Grand Parade: The Birth of Greater Cape Town, 1850-1913 (Cape Town, South Africa: Struik, 1969): 60, quoted in Jill Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa, 103-104. 50 See Jacqueline Maingard, “Cinemagoing in District Six, Cape Town, 1920s to 1960s: History, Politics, Memory,” Memory Studies 10.1 (2017), 17-34. It is also worth noting that at the same time as Black was off touring Love and the Hyphen in the middle of 1909 the prominent Coloured politician and activist Abdullah Abdurrahman debuted the comic characters Piet Uithalder and Stoffel in his political newspaper APO. See discussion in Chapter 2 above, and in Mohamed Adhikari, Straatpraatjes. While it is unknown whether Abdurrahman, who was a city councillor at the time, ever saw Love and the Hyphen, he certainly would have been familiar with Black’s earlier sketches for the Argus. 51 BD, vol. 8, pg. 76, MSC. 4, box 2 (February 11, 1911), NLSA, Cape Town. 131 the very cusp of the Act of Union, which came into force on May 31, 1910.52 From the “gods” in the gallery to the dignitaries in the boxes, Black’s early audiences must have been an impressive sight. Prominent members of the governing South African Party were happy to be seen at his plays; F. S. Malan, Cape Minister of Agriculture and a former newspaper editor—who had been imprisoned during the South African War for his anti-British views—was present at Love and the Hyphen’s opening night.53 J. W. Sauer, minister in the first Union cabinet, was also a fan, and several warm letters from Louis Botha’s wife Anne survive in Black’s personal papers.54 Yet Black’s efforts to smuggle populist, “South Africanist” political perspectives into his plays under the cover of farce often were met dismissively by the critics who dominated the English- speaking press, the majority of whom were born abroad. Thus, while The Transvaal Leader’s critic reported that “the determination of the gallery to be amused somehow was almost pathetic, and the laughter with which it greeted the mention of Ferreirastown, Vrededorp, and the allied towns almost struck a sword to one’s heart” at the debut of The Uitlanders (1911), as early as April 1909 Boonzaier was puzzling in his diary over “how [Love and the Hyphen] could have attracted such large audiences when apparently most of those who saw it formed such a poor opinion of it.”55 Black had a thin skin for criticism, and the matter came to a head with the debut of The Flapper in Johannesburg on October 23, 1911. The “flapper” of the title is a teenager named Kitty, living unhappily in the very conservative Transvaal town of Potchefstroom, who falls in 52 See Robin K. Crigler, “No Laughing Matter? Humor and the Performance of South Africa,” South African Theatre Journal 31.2-3 (2018), 155-171. 53 “Love and the Hyphen,” Cape Argus Weekly, November 25, 1908. 54 See MSA 77, folder 7, JCL, Johannesburg. 55 “‘The Uitlanders,’” The Transvaal Leader, November 14, 1911; BD, vol. 5, pg. 44, MSC. 4, box 1, (April 9, 1909), NLSA, Cape Town. Vrededorp and Ferreirastown were inner city slums of Johannesburg, associated with poor housing and racial mixing. 132 love with George, her much older art teacher. Yet George is already in a relationship with a woman his own age, and Kitty also has to fend off the affections of Dick (another art student) and the Van Kalabas-esque Klaas Dikkop (his surname translates to “thick-head,” an insult). The play is full of local allusions and humor is mainly provided by the Afrikaner Klaas and the prudish old Du Plooy sisters, who are scandalized when, for example, Kitty is seen painting a little boy: LOUISA DU PLOOY: Are you quite sure it was a man, Johanna?… JOHANNA DU PLOOY: 5 or 6 years old ANNIE SMIT [a white maid]: Why a baby! Who was it? JOHANNA: The son of Piet Viljoen… LOUISA: Annie, you are not afraid of naked men:—go in the garden and call Kitty… [Later:] KITTY: Well what’s wrong about that? The statues are naked. LOUISA: They should not be. KITTY: Why[?] The Kafirs are naked. LOUISA: Kafirs are the work of the devil!56 Black was coy from the beginning about the authorship of the play, printing his name in the programs and then having it scratched out in pencil. Reviews from opening night damned the show with faint praise. The Star’s critic “Till.” wrote that “the failings of ‘The Flapper’ are generic, its modest merits are individual,” and “local colour is applied with an astonishingly heavy touch” but “the humour is so-so.”57 Still, reported the Rand Daily Mail, “continuous bursts of merriment from every part of a well-filled house bore ample testimony to the fact” of the play’s success, even if the accents were not always spot-on.58 “In South African drama,” grumbled Till., “it is evidently the audience that makes the play.”59 The Transvaal Leader’s critic was more positive, calling the play “a psychological study of the South African girl” in 56 Stephen Black, “The Flapper” typescript, Act 1, pg. 12; 14, MSA 67, JCL, Johannesburg. 57 Till., “His Majesty’s,” The Star (Johannesburg, South Africa), October 24, 1911. 58 “The Flapper,” Rand Daily Mail, October 24, 1911. 59 Till., “His Majesty’s,” The Star (Johannesburg, South Africa), October 24, 1911. 133 which one “perceive[s] the pen of the philosopher and the serious critic of South African society.”60 Just a couple of days later, however, the truth came to light: the play was in fact an adaptation of La Gamine by Pierre Veber and Henry de Gorsse, which had debuted about six months earlier in Paris. Black had obtained an English translation of the play, transferred the setting to South Africa, and then marketed the play as a wholly original “South African comedy.” Newspaper advertisements told nothing about the plot but instead teased the locations of each of the four acts: Potchefstroom, Johannesburg, Johannesburg, and Durban, respectively.61 The press pounced. Black had been caught in a lie, plagiarizing the work of prominent French dramatists. Had he even bothered to obtain performance rights? The whole play was now suspect: far from being a timely “psychological study,” wrote “Vanguard” in The Star, “a quite acceptable comedy has been spoilt by the admixture of of what is supposed to be genuine South African humour and characterization. If this conception of our national life and character be right, they are not only devoid of all the finer qualities, but they are merely contemptible.”62 Elements of South Africanness, which seemed to please the audience heartily on opening night, actually served only to degrade an otherwise “quite acceptable comedy”: Stephen Black was a lazy and presumptuous fraudster. For his part, Black replied that the ruse was intentional, intended to expose the bias of his critics once they took the bait. He insisted that he knew in advance that the press would dismiss The Flapper automatically if he was thought to be the author, so he lured them into panning a successful play, which had starred Geneviève Lantelme as the eponymous gamine— 60 “New S. African Play,” Transvaal Leader (Johannesburg, South Africa), October 24, 1911. 61 The Flapper advertisement, Rand Daily Mail, October 26, 1911. 62 Vanguard, “Drama and Criticism,” The Star, October 26, 1911. 134 then widely considered to be the most beautiful actress on the entire French stage.63 “If these critical snobs and uitlanders knew that the play had been written by celebrated authors they would at once have praised it and so kept the public away,” he wrote in his defense: South African tastes and the taste of imported Fleet Street journalists were mutually exclusive.64 In fact, negative assessments of his work in the English language press had started taking a toll on Black within weeks of Love and the Hyphen’s original debut. In January 1909 Black responded to critics of Love and the Hyphen in a long article for The Cape, a journal edited by his erstwhile friend A. D. Donovan. According to Black, tastemakers’ belated criticism of the show could be attributed entirely to the fact that the colonial-born rabble seem to have enjoyed it. Responding to the Cape Times critic, Black wrote that Unconsciously…he paid me a compliment by saying that if Wynberg ladies talked in the manner I made them, ‘God must have given them brains as an afterthought.’ Of course, this was the very thing I had been trying to make my audience understand… Here, indeed, was a complete volte-face. The independent organ of the S.A. Party (and of the S.A. People!) had evidently regretted its, perhaps, too laudatory remarks upon my work, for instead of finding the ‘At Home’ and ‘Out Here’ element objectionable and a proper target for ridicule, it was convinced that the satire on these fetishes would have been worthless without the coloured characters.65 In other words, once it became clear that Black was writing for a South African public rather than a “British” one, the knives came out for his work. Not even the South African Party of the former Boer general Botha could be trusted to stand up for the interests of the African-born majority of the white population. 63 See Raoul Aubry, “Théatre de la Renaissance: La Gamine,” Le Théatre (Paris, France), April 15, 1911. 64 Stephen Black, “The Flapper,” The Transvaal Leader, October 27, 1911. 65 Stephen Black, “My Critics,” The Cape (Cape Town, South Africa), January 15, 1909. Black and Donovan would drift apart subsequently over the latter’s pro-British stances. Ellipsis in original. 135 Black, still new to the cultural whirl, was learning what his friend D. C. Boonzaier had long known to be true: that pro-British dominance in the literary and journalistic spheres made satire an illusory kind of freedom. Though today Daniël Cornelis Boonzaier is a more famous name than Black’s, his was not an easy path.66 Born in 1865 in the Carnarvon district of the Cape Colony, Boonzaier is remembered today primarily as “the man who killed Botha” as chief cartoonist for Daniel François Malan’s hardline Afrikaner nationalist newspaper De (later Die) Burger.67 Though Boonzaier was fifteen years older than Black, it was evident to both that they had much in common. Both were born and bred in the Cape Colony and had received little education: Boonzaier had no formal artistic training at all, and by sixteen had left school to work in the Colonial Office in Cape Town. It was not until 1899, at the age of 34, that Boonzaier would leave the civil service to pursue a career in journalism and cartooning.68 Though he is credited with paving the way for the South African Party’s defeat in 1924, Boonzaier was more than just D. F. Malan’s attack dog, as his massive diary (kept religiously from 1906 to 1945) attests. Surprisingly, it is written entirely in English. Even more surprisingly, it reveals an entirely different set of interests from those suggested by a study of his cartoons. Where one might expect to find a conservative, provincial character, in Boonzaier’s diary one instead encounters a consummate bohemian. Indeed, Boonzaier was a theatre critic for various Cape Town newspapers, as well as an amateur actor and a voracious reader of continental literature in English translation. In October 1894, Boonzaier became one of the 66 There is a considerable amount of material on Boonzaier available in Afrikaans; most notably J. du P. Scholz, D. C. Boonzaier en Pieter Wenning: Verslag van ’n Vriendskap (Cape Town, South Africa: Tafelberg, 1973); D. J. Kotze, “Die Spotprente van D. C. Boonzaier in De Burger, 1915-1924: Politieke Kommunikasie deur Spotprente uit ’n Historiese Perspektief,’M.A. thesis, (University of Pretoria, 1988); François Verster, Die Groot Drie: ’n Eeu van Spotprente in Die Burger, 1915-2015 (Cape Town, South Africa: Penguin Books, 2016). 67 The change in orthography reflects the newspaper’s transition from Dutch to Afrikaans in 1921. 68 D. J. Kotze, “Die Spotprente van D. C. Boonzaier in De Burger, 1915-1924,” 2-3. 136 charter members of the prestigious Owl Club (and, notably, the only one with a recognizably Afrikaans surname).69 His diary reads like a who’s who of Cape Town artists, from Edward Roworth to Sarah Gertrude Millin to Moses Kottler. Much like Thomas Nast’s work in the United States, Boonzaier’s cartoons remain staples in texts on South African politics, but as his acquaintance Johannes du Plessis Scholz wrote, When he became a permanent associate of the newly-founded Nationalist daily, he was a man of almost fifty years and long one of the most well-known personalities in the Cape. There was no politician or person interested in politics, no lover of literature and the stage, no artist or art collector of note that did not know him and did not respect—and often fear—his influence and judgement.70 Even so, by 1910 Boonzaier was experiencing a career crisis of his own: drawing cartoons for various pro-South African Party publications then withering on the vine due to factionalism, in the middle of the year he abandoned his diary for three months. When he returned to it in September he was still hard-up for money after the failure of The New Nation, a journal he had founded with A. D. Donovan; the following month he was reduced to asking Black for a relatively modest emergency loan of £15—a sum that Black produced on the spot from his breast pocket, flush with the recent success of Helena’s Hope, Limited.71 Boonzaier’s deep bitterness at this time is apparent in his diary: My staunchness to the cause of the Dutch has brought me no recompense, and encouragement in my work has not been received from those I had a right to expect it from. One certainly does better work (at least I have found it to be the case ) when exploring a cause in which one believes but should a Cartoonist carry his political convictions to the length I have carried mine[?] The artists on ‘Punch’ have certainly never intruded their own ideas or been permitted to carry them into execution and who 69 W. E. Ranby, The Owl Club, 1894-1950 (Cape Town, South Africa: The Owl Club, 1952): 1. 70 J. du P. Scholz, Oor Skilders en Skrywers (Cape Town, South Africa: Tafelberg, 1979): 74. Translated by the author. On Nast, see Fiona Deans Halloran, Thomas Nast: The Father of Modern Political Cartoons (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012); John Chalmers Vinson, Thomas Nast, Political Cartoonist (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2014 [1967]). 71 BD, vol. 6, pg. 199, MSC. 4, box 1 (October 4, 1910), NLSA, Cape Town. 137 shall say that the work has suffered in consequence[?] Had I held aloof from politics I would be in a very different position today pecuniarily. When ‘The Cape’ comes to an end I abandon the idea of being a ‘Party Cartoonist[’]. This cursed poverty I have endured in the last ten years has deprived me of all the pleasure I used to derive from literature, music, & other arts…The knowledge that I am a stranger to material prosperity is ever with me, tainting even the smallest pleasures of my daily life.72 Unwilling to leave Cape Town for the Rand, and frustrated by the need to toe an Anglophilic line to succeed in the parochial world of South African journalism, such passages account for the vigor with which Boonzaier pursued his later work for De Burger. Yet even as his reputation began to flourish at that newspaper, however, he hedged his bets by submitting cartoons to the Argus and Donovan’s resurrected Cape, often under the pseudonym “Nemo” but still bearing hallmarks of his unmistakeable style. Writers like D. J. Kotze and François Verster make no mention of this side-line, but Boonzaier’s diary is full of commentary on it, as in this wonderful account of his weekly schedule from 1915: On Monday afternoons I discuss the ‘Burger’ cartoon (which is to appear in the Wednesday’s issue) the actual drawing being done on Tuesday, before mid-day, the hour at which the picture must be handed to the block mater at the ‘Argus’, which this work is done. On Tuesdays I discuss ‘The Cape’ cartoon & caricature with A.D. [Donovan.] The caricature (called ‘Men who matter’ in the paper) must be ready by Wednesday morning: the cartoon late in the afternoon, or early—before 8 a.m.—on Thursday morning. On Thursdays two cartoons are discussed—one for the Argus, & the other for ‘De Burger’. As both these drawings appear on the Saturday, Friday becomes with me the busiest day in the week. The ‘Burger’ picture having to appear a few hours earlier than the one in the ‘Argus’, is done first, and usually reaches the block maker at noon on Friday—the ‘Argus’ drawing follows between 3 & 4 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays I have free and one may well claim a rest after such a strenuous week. But the brain is never at rest in such circumstances: the coming week cannot be ignored—ideas present themselves as one looks through the papers and you cannot resist the temptation to mould these into cartoons. Mentally I have reverted to the days of the ‘South African News’ when I only looked at things with the idea of extracting cartoons from them. I am not referring to the ‘Argus’ & ‘Cape’ since I am, politically, entirely out of sympathy with 72 BD, vol. 6, pgs. 28-30, MSC. 4, box 1 (May 27, 1910), NLSA, Cape Town. 138 these papers, but rather to the ‘Burger’ with whose views I find myself so completely in accord.73 Escape Attempts of a Would-Be Cosmopolitan, 1909-1916 Though we know little about Stephen Black’s early life, his teenaged sojourn in Kimberley suggests that he always had a thirst for adventure. Black’s ancestors on both sides had taken a huge leap of faith in coming to South Africa from Europe, and throughout his life Black continued in their spirit. Black, however, was seeking to escape the southwestern tip of Africa. One way to do so, without getting the money together for a berth on the Union-Castle Line, was to mix in the more exotic sections of society that his new identity as a dramatist had opened to him: the worlds of theatre and high culture, such as they existed in early twentieth century South Africa. A short trip to Great Britain in the latter third of 1909 only whetted his wanderlust. His marriage, at the end of 1910, was not as straightforward a journey, but it exerted a much more profound influence. Andrée Judlin was about five years younger than Black. The daughter of a “well-known diamond expert,” she came from a French family, spent part of her childhood in Paris, and was active in Johannesburg’s Petit Cercle Français.74 Like Stephen Black, she was a woman of paradoxes. Her grandson Gerald Stonestreet recalls visiting her small, dark flat at the corner of Twist and Van Der Merwe Street in Hillbrow as a child in the 1950s, and how it contrasted with her outspoken personality and flair for flamboyant dress.75 Given the admiration Black held for French authors, especially Zola, Alphonse Daudet and Guy de Maupassant, the fact that she 73 BD, vol. 15, pgs. 63-64, MSC. 4, box 4 (October 3, 1915), NLSA, Cape Town. 74 Denis Godfrey, “A Different Sort of Honeymoon,” Sunday Chronicle (Johannesburg, South Africa), May 30, 1965; Our Lady Correspondent, “‘Le Petit Cercle Francais,’” Rand Daily Mail, July 14, 1909; “Mr. Stephen Black Dead,” The Star, August 8, 1931. 75 Gerald Stonestreet, interview by author (by telephone), March 1, 2021. 139 could hold her own in discussions of French literature (as Boonzaier confirms), must have counted in her favor. When they first met—as Black’s company toured Love and the Hyphen— Andrée was already married to Fernand Philippe Ernest Pellat, a “good-looking idler” from Belgium who was found drowned in a Johannesburg park in July 1910, a few days after Andrée told him she no longer loved him.76 Black, who was in Cape Town at the time, felt honor-bound to marry Andrée and raise her five year-old daughter Simone as his own, over Boonzaier’s warning that “his own future career should be considered before everything.”77 In November 1911, Andrée and Stephen had a child of their own, Yvonne.78 The couple had a penchant for arguing in public, and Boonzaier’s diaries are filled with a number of anecdotes narrating in minute detail various spats and reconciliations that, one gathers, comprised an ordinary part of their marriage from the start. In 1946, Ernest Lezard, who had known Black before his death, interviewed Andrée Black for Africana Notes and News. A certain play script (never produced) which survives in Cape Town today, inspired the following answer from Mrs. Black: E.L.: Did he ever produce a play entitled A Matter of Fat? A.B.: He did and simply to annoy me! He threatened me when I married him that if I ever got fat or put on too much weight he would divorce me. Well I did put on weight, but he didn’t divorce me, he wrote the farce entitled A Matter of Fat and got it off his chest that way, although annoying me, and each time it was produced I simply lost pounds in weight…He was at times a most difficult man to live with, and many times I felt that I could murder him easily, as he always wanted his own way, in fact, he demanded his own way. He was a great worker too and all who associated with him had to work—I used to call him a slave driver. But the one great thing about Stephen was that he was never a bore, always truthful and 76 BD, vol. 7, pg. 54-55, MSC. 4, box 2 (November 10, 1910), NLSA, Cape Town. Pellat’s death in Eckstein Park (modern-day Zoo Lake Park) is reported in “City Suicide,” Rand Daily Mail, July 5, 1910. At the time he died he was Managing Director of the Advertising Billiard Co., Ltd.; the article above refers to unspecified “financial difficulties.” See also “A New Minister,” Rand Daily Mail, November 30, 1907. 77 BD, vol. 7, pg. 57, MSC. 4, box 2 (November 10, 1910), NLSA, Cape Town. 78 See “Estate of the Late Stonestreet Yvonne Stephanie Joan,” MSCE-LEER-0-01-3582/1965, Pietermaritzburg Archives Repository [PAR], National Archives of South Africa, Pietermaritzburg. 140 interesting. I think there are few who can truthfully say, as I can, that in twenty- one years of married life I was never once bored.79 Perhaps no single event better exemplifies Black workaholic attitude than the couple’s honeymoon in Que Que, Southern Rhodesia—yet another effort to break the confines of his Capetonian heritage. Black named his ill-fated gold claim Helena’s Hope, after his successful play. Unlike the farm in the play, however, according to Andrée the only gold to be found at Helena’s Hope was “gold from boxing and athletic medals Stephen had won, melted down and ‘planted’ there.”80 Truly it must have taken a certain kind of person to stand by his side for more than two decades. By November 1911, Black was back in the Union, attempting to recoup his losses by producing more plays. While Southern Rhodesia may have been a step too far, he increasingly gravitated towards Johannesburg as a source and outlet for his creative energy. His efforts to shape the discourse remained vigorous as well. In that month Black presented on his political perspectives in a lecture at the newly-built Grand Theatre in Johannesburg.81 The theme of the lecture was “Uitlanderism.” As discussed in Chapter 2, the term “Uitlander”—Dutch for “foreigner”—evoked the era preceding the South African War, when gold was first discovered in the Transvaal and immigrants flooded what had previously been a small, culturally homogenous community of white settlers. Like the Americans who flooded northern Mexico earlier in the century and precipitated Texan independence, Uitlanders were seen by the South African Republic’s government as dangerous interlopers, in a place but not of a place, interested in 79 Ernest Lezard, “Stephen Black,” Africana Notes and News 4.1 (1946): 16-17. 80 Ernest Lezard, “Stephen Black,” 15; Denis Godfrey, “A Different Sort of Honeymoon,” Sunday Chronicle, May 30, 1965. 81 See Mark Latilla, “Theatres and Bioscopes in Early Johannesburg,” Johannesburg 1912—Suburb by Suburb Research, last modified January 2021, accessed February 5, 2021, . 141 exploitation rather than real progress. Speaking in a setting that in many ways represented the ultimate triumph of the Transvaal Uitlanders, Black insisted that the success of the new Union depended on making efforts to purge the spirit of Uitlanderism from the land. “Moral Uitlanders”, according to Black, were people “entirely out of sympathy with the country which [they] had adopted.”82 Reiterating his key stance from Love and the Hyphen, He regarded the man who spoke continually of home, ‘home’ meaning any part of the world—Russia, Holland or anywhere else—as an Uitlander when South Africa, properly speaking, should be regarded by him as his home. They wanted people here who would not be disposed to take everything they could get out of the country, and then leave it; they wanted people to settle down in it, and not be ashamed of it.83 Black placed blame for this state of affairs squarely at the feet of the commentariat. Having experienced the ignominy of working at the Argus with little formal education and no experience abroad, Black felt that the snobbery he decried in his plays was aggravated at every turn by “the absence of South Africans on the African press—a necessity due to the inability of the local man to step in, and to the need of importing men.”84 He complained that when it was revealed that The Flapper was a translated adaptation of a French play, the South African press pounced, demanding to know whether he had obtained permission from the authors, and whether the authors were aware of his less-than-honest promotion strategy. Yet when Black’s own plays were plagiarized by local hacks—such as in the unfortunate Japie’s Courtship discussed above, an uproar never arose on his behalf. “If they had more South Africans…upon the staffs of South African journals,” he suspected, this situation would cease.85 82 “Extraordinary Criticism”, Cape Argus, November 23, 1911. 83 “Extraordinary Criticism”, Cape Argus, November 23, 1911. 84 “Extraordinary Criticism”, Cape Argus, November 23, 1911. 85 “Extraordinary Criticism”, Cape Argus, November 23, 1911. 142 It was the Jewish population of South Africa, however, that bore the brunt of Black’s resentment in the long-term. Black’s issues with Jews were already evident in Helena’s Hope, Limited, whose evil financier character, Abraham Goldenstein, swindles a credulous Afrikaner family into poverty when he buys their mineral-rich farm for a pittance. In his 1920 novel, The Dorp, Black would attempt to write Jews out of the “new South Africa” entirely, equating the Jewish pedlar Schlimowitz (a pun on the Afrikaans slim, meaning clever or deceptive) with his Indian rival Mahomet because of their mutual goal of outcompeting and exploiting the Dutch/ Afrikaans and English-speaking people of the “dorp” of Unionstad.86 So much for a fictional town, but in the real world of Cape Town and Johannesburg the prominence of Jews in almost every sphere of civic life was not so neatly dismissed. In his 1911 lecture one can detect Black was taking to have it both ways: to communicate his hostility towards Jews to those who were receptive while operating under the guise of humor to avoid giving offense: Since he had been risen to address them he had been struck by the fact that the Jews were the greatest Uitlanders in the world. They settled down in a country, they made money in it, but they never assimilated themselves with it, somehow. In his plays he had satirised the Jew, but he felt that the Jew was often a very admirable man, and that he (the speaker) owed a great deal indeed to the Jewish sense of humour. No Jew could tell a story against himself so well as the best kind of Jew, and Mr. Black proceeded to relate a few for the benefit of his auditors.87 Certainly Helena’s Hope, Limited would not have broken the record for the longest run of a play in Johannesburg (65 consecutive nights) without the support of the Jewish community, which had swelled from just 4,000 in the whole country before the Witwatersrand gold rush to almost 47,000 by 1911. The overwhelming majority of these new arrivals were Litvaks, hailing 86 A “dorp” is Dutch/Afrikaans for a small town or village, and carries the same connotations of parochialism and backwardness as the word “podunk” in American English. 87 “Extraordinary Criticism”, Cape Argus, November 23, 1911. 143 from the region around present-day Lithuania, but a considerable proportion of the Uitlanders who made incredible fortunes out of the mineral rush were British Jews: famous names like Barney Barnato, Alfred Beit (Cecil Rhodes’s chief business collaborator), and Solomon “Solly” Joel.88 Just as Jews had been prominent in the South African boxing fraternity during Black’s youth (including Black’s onetime client, Danny Hyman), many were also key cultural tastemakers in the “New South Africa.” J. Langley Levy, who arrived in South Africa to take up the editorship of the Johannesburg Sunday Times in 1910, would remain at the post until 1942, reviewing plays under the nom de plume “Gadabout.”89 Black would regard him as a thorn in his side for much of his career, just as he would later see Sarah Gertrude Millin (née Liebson), a daughter of poor Litvak immigrants who rose to fame as a novelist and critic in the 1920s. Evoking a generous Jewish sense of humor provided a useful alibi for Black that facilitated the success of his post-Love and the Hyphen plays despite their anti-Semitic content. From his correspondence with Boonzaier, however, we know that Black had a deep contempt for most Jews. He felt free to vent these feelings to Boonzaier, whose most famous cartoon stock character was Jewish capitalist “Hoggenheimer”—a corpulent, hook-nosed millionaire originally adapted from a British musical comedy called The Girl From Kays. When the show toured South Africa in 1904 the character, originally an American industrialist, was rewritten, in the words of the Rand Daily Mail, as “a distinct local type.”90 Though Boonzaier was careful to never make Hoggenheimer’s Jewishness explicit, the implication was as obvious 88 “The Plays of Stephen Black” (pamphlet, 1911), pg. 1, in William F. White scrapbook, MSB 516, NLSA, Cape Town; Gideon Shimoni, Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (Cape Town, South Africa: David Philip, 2003): 2-3. 89 “J. Langley Levy Dies; Transvaal Editor, 74,” The New York Times (New York, N.Y.), May 13, 1945. 90 Richard Mendelsohn and Milton Shain, The Jews in South Africa: An Illustrated History (Johannesburg, South Africa: Jonathan Ball, 2008): 62; “‘The Girl from Kay’s,’” Rand Daily Mail, September 6, 1904. 144 to his contemporaries as it is to modern viewers, and as a result many scholars have taken Boonzaier’s anti-Semitism for granted. Yet while at one point in his diary Boonzaier wishes he “could tell these Rand Jews to go to the devil & get their work done by someone else,” he is far outdone in his vituperations by Black, who throughout the 1910s and 1920s would complain that South Africa was “controlled by Jews,” and that “the Yidden control…public opinion.”91 Perhaps most callous and shameful, in the wake of the architect J. M. Solomon’s death by suicide in 1920, was Black’s warning to Boonzaier: “dont forget he was half a Jew & a Jew values artistic & intellectual achievement only for the material profit it brings.”92 Black and Boonzaier's’ feelings were in step with a rising tide of anti-Semitic currents in Western intellectual life in the first half of the twentieth century—though their mutual idol Émile Zola had been an unlikely champion of the Dreyfusard cause against anti-Semitism in 1890s France.93 Given Black’s fragile class position, the roots of his anti-Semitism may have been instilled at an early age. According to the historian Gideon Shimoni, English-speaking immigrants were the main propagators of anti-Semitic rhetoric in early twentieth century South Africa. He quotes a regular correspondent to the Polish Hebrew newspaper Hatzfira in 1895, who observed that while the upper-class were “generous and good,” middle and lower class English-speakers in South Africa “try with all their might to hinder the Jews at every turn…even teach[ing] the Blacks to speak badly of Jews and to curse Israel.”94 For an Afrikaner nationalist like Boonzaier, the involvement of the Jewish Randlords in the destruction of the Boer republics 91 BD, vol. 9, pg. 73, MSC. 4, box 2 (June 30, 1911), NLSA, Cape Town; Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, November 30, 1924, pg. 4, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 51, NLSA, Cape Town; Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, February 10, 1928, pg. 9,MSC. 4, box 11, folder 51, NLSA, Cape Town. 92 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, October 2, 1920, pg. 10, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 50, NLSA, Cape Town. 93 See Alan Schom, Émile Zola: A Biography (New York, N.Y.: Henry Holt and Company, 1988): 161-190. 94 M. D. Hersch, quoted in Gideon Shimoni, Jews and Zionism: The South African Experience (Cape Town, South Africa: Oxford University Press, 1980): 67. 145 sufficed to breed suspicion.95 For both men the cultural pragmatism and economic success of prominent Jewish figures threatened identities that had been hard-won and were already imperiled, in their own minds, by the presence of a durable black majority in the region. Yet people of Jewish descent were an unavoidable presence within the business and artistic circles in which Black and Boonzaier came to move. Both men enjoyed meaningful personal and professional relationships with particular Jews throughout their lifetimes. For example, they were both close friends of Bernard Lewis, a Cape Town-born intellectual who was also De Burger’s first arts critic (under the nom-de-plume “Brander”) and a great advocate for Afrikaans literature—in fact, Lewis was the first translator of an Afrikaans novel into English.96 Lewis and his wife were present at almost all of the private readings Black gave for his plays and short stories which Boonzaier reports attending, including one for Helena’s Hope, Limited in September 1909, several months before its debut; Lewis at the time deemed it “superior to ‘Love & the Hyphen’ in every way”97 In a letter of late March 1916, written during Black’s second sojourn in London, Black refers to Lewis as “the only decent Hebrew I have ever proved.”98 In addition, even as he continued drawing Hoggenheimer cartoons for De Burger, from 1917 on Boonzaier became the artistic mentor and near-constant companion of a twenty-one year old Litvak artist named Moses Kottler, who was destined to become one of midcentury South Africa’s most renowned sculptors and painters. This was, in fact, a pattern for Boonzaier: in the 95 Edna Bradlow has traced how widespread pro-Nazi sentiment among Afrikaner nationalists contributed to rising anti-Semitic rhetoric in the 1930s. Even so, she argues that it was not until the 1920s that anti-Semitism became distinguished from the more general anti-Uitlander bias of earlier decades. See Edna Bradlow, “Anti-Semitism in the 1930s: Germany and South Africa,” Historia 49.2 (2004), 45-58. See also Hermann Giliomee, The Afrikaners: Biography of a People, 416-418; Gideon Shimoni, Jews and Zionism, 61-96. 96 See “Lewis, Bernard,” Standard Encyclopaedia of Southern Africa, vol. 6, ed. Dirk J. Potgieter (Cape Town, South Africa: Nasou, 1972): 603. 97 BD, vol. 5, pg. 84, MSC. 4, box 1 (September 4, 1909), NLSA, Cape Town. 98 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, March 28, 1916, pg. 18, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 48, NLSA, Cape Town. 146 same way that his diary began to fill with anecdotes and accounts of his time with Stephen Black in 1908, from 1917 through the 1920s Boonzaier took the same kind of interest in Kottler, especially after the death of his friend Pieter Wenning, a Dutch-born painter, in 1921. A stubborn, hidebound, and dour figure in his personal life, Boonzaier became increasingly unwilling to leave the Cape Peninsula as he aged, content instead to live vicariously through mentees like Black and Kottler. Without eliding the fact that in honing the Hoggenheimer stereotype Boonzaier both spread anti-Semitic ideas and laid a foundation for the propagation of pro-Nazi sentiment in South Africa ahead of World War II, his intense and long-lasting friendships with prominent Jewish figures like Bernard Lewis and Moses Kottler must also be reckoned with in any account of the cartoonist’s life and ideas. For an artist whose professional life was already a study in ideological compartmentalization, perhaps it should not surprise us that Boonzaier was so successful in maintaining this contradictory position. As for Stephen Black, his animus deepened in 1912 as a result of financial and legal troubles. In September of that year Black debuted a play called I.D.B., a tale of the early days of the Kimberley diamond fields.99 Playfully evoking the controversy over The Flapper, Johannesburg audiences were teased with advertisements posing as newspaper articles titled “Stephen Black Arrested” and “Stephen Black in Trouble” that went on to say that old Kimberley had “arrested the attention” of Black to the extent that he was mounting a new play.100 On September 10 the play, full of more action and drama than Black’s previous works, opened to full houses at the Standard Theatre and positive reviews in the press—the Rand Daily Mail critic 99 “I.D.B.” is an acronym for the crime of “illicit diamond buying.” 100 I.D.B. advertisements, Rand Daily Mail, September 6, 1912. 147 called it “strong and virile…a drama which is full of life and movement.”101 One week later, however, Black was served with a letter demanding the cancellation of the play or £1,000 in damages for copyright infringement.102 The letter was written on behalf of Theodore J. Holzberg and Israel K. Sampson, two journalists who claimed I.D.B. was a slightly revised version of a play called The Verdict Black had rejected for production by his company some months earlier. Black replied that this was impossible because I.D.B. had been written at Cape Town more than two years before. If D. C. Boonzaier had been in Johannesburg, he might have shared portions of his diary that proved this, but Black never made such a request; Boonzaier privately worried that, even if untrue, the accusation “would do him a great deal of harm as a playwright.”103 Holzberg and Sampson’s lawyer was H. D. Bernberg, a powerful member of both the Johannesburg Town Council and Transvaal Provincial Council. In typically belligerent fashion, Black used his platform at the Standard Theatre to fight back. On October 3 and 4, Black, whose company was then reviving Helena’s Hope, Limited, used his urban African character Jeremiah Luke M’bene to launch broadsides at Bernberg (the parentheses indicate the actors playing the roles): M’Bene (Defendant): I am going into the Town Council. I will sit next to my friend, Mr. Bernberg. Harrison (Wetherell) [Jeremiah’s boss in the play]: You will want boxing gloves (or boxing lessons). M’Bene (Defendant): No, I will take a big jar of Jeye’s Fluid. Harrison (Wetherell): What is that? M’Bene (Defendant): That is carbolic acid. That is what they want there.104 101 “‘I.D.B.’ at Standard,” Rand Daily Mail, September 11, 1912. 102 “Rand Stage Sensation,” Rand Daily Mail, September 17, 1912. 103 BD, vol. 8, pg. 123, MSC. 4, box 2 (March 8, 1911), NLSA, Cape Town; BD, vol. 11, pgs. 85-87, MSC. 4, box 3 (September 24, 1912). 104 “Black’s Libel Cases,” Rand Daily Mail, October 29, 1912. 148 Bernberg saw this joke as grounds for libel: Black was accusing him not only of being dirty (carbolic acid is a disinfectant), but of being dirtier than than a black person, which the Civil Court judge T. G. Macfie agreed was an aggravating circumstance as he ruled in favor of Bernberg to the sum of £25 plus costs on October 28.105 The original plagiarism allegation was dropped and Black was able to obtain £25 in a separate libel suit against an acquaintance who repeated the accusation. Yet his financial position was still terribly fragile after the failure of his mine in Southern Rhodesia, and on January 14, 1913 his estate was sequestered to pay Bernberg the sum of £44 5d.106 By then Black had returned to Cape Town, but Boonzaier reported that his troubles did not end there. In fact, Black owed nearly £500 to various creditors, including £300 to his rival Leonard Rayne.107 The years since his discovery by Kipling had been an extraordinary run, and now it seemed that the whole ride might be screeching to a halt. Ever true to his days in boxing promotion, Black spent the next few months concocting various dubious moneymaking schemes before finally collecting enough to return to England. Bernberg died of apparent poisoning about six months afterwards—he was only 27—just after Black’s arrival in Great Britain.108 Black felt the whole experience was proof of Jewish duplicity, though Boonzaier saw it more clearly as the result—at least in part—of Black’s own conduct: his over- sensitivity in the face of criticism and recklessness in the pursuit of publicity. Black would grumble about the Bernberg affair for the rest of his life. Black’s first visit to the metropole in 1909-1910 was a brief one, only about three months in length. He chronicled his experience in a series of articles titled “Letters from an Afrikander 105 “Black’s Libel Cases,” Rand Daily Mail, October 29, 1912. 106 “Stephen Black’s Estate,” Rand Daily Mail, January 15, 1913. 107 BD, vol. 11, pgs. 157-158, MSC. 4, box 3 (December 28, 1912), NLSA, Cape Town. 108 “Tragedy of the Night,” Rand Daily Mail, June 21, 1913. 149 Abroad” for The Cape. In them the internal conflict of a cocky young colonial visiting the imperial metropole for the first time is evident. “Here in London is the Press of the world, the Stage of the world, the Literature of the world, the food of the world,” he gushed.109 Yet Black found a great deal that disappointed him, from the weather to the rains to the sullenness of theatre audiences. In September 1913, after a whirlwind marriage, failed mining venture in Southern Rhodesia, and his subsequent bankruptcy, Black sailed for England a second time. This time, Black’s goals were more ambitious: following in the footsteps of Rudyard Kipling before him, Black was looking to produce his plays and work his way into the British Empire’s most prestigious literary circles. His first communication to Boonzaier from London, dated October 10, 1913, was full of enthusiasm: “More confident than ever that Success Must Come in the End,” he wrote at the head of his ten-page letter.110 Yet success proved elusive. “So far he has only seen people of note and influence,” Boonzaier wrote skeptically in his diary.111 Indeed, Black’s letter of October 10 is packed with optimism about putting faces to famous literary names, from Arnold Bennett and Joseph Conrad to Oscar Wilde’s confidant Robert Baldwin Ross and the actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Black mentions that Solomon (probably the aforementioned J. M. Solomon) had written a letter of introduction to Ross on Black’s behalf; however “as he has the reputation of being one of the most ardent advocates of the Wilde cult in London,” Black admits that he is “looking forward with trepidation to the interview”—even though he had heard nothing yet from Ross himself.112 Facilitated at least in part through the offices of his theatrical rival 109 Stephen Black, “Letters from an Afrikander Abroad, No. V”, The Cape, December 10, 1909. 110 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, October 10, 1913, pg. 1, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 47, NLSA, Cape Town. 111 BD, vol. 13, pg. 75, MSC. 4, box 3 (November 2, 1913), NLSA, Cape Town. 112 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, September 27, 1913, pg. 4, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 47, NLSA, Cape Town; Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, October 10, 1913, pg. 6, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 47, NLSA, Cape Town. 150 Leonard Rayne, who was also staying in London at the time, Black adds excitedly that “to- morrow night I read my plays (or describe & read them) to a friend of GB [George Bernard] Shaw’s who is mixed up with the Stage Society.”113 Thus we see that Black’s entry into London’s artistic circles was arranged largely by people he personally resented and attacked in private (Black also mentions writing to Kipling, but he never reports any reply). Is it any wonder that his efforts were not successful? Given his plebeian background, colonial origins, and loose tongue, Black was unable to cultivate personal relationships with the top tier of London writers and found himself mingling instead with West End actors and fellow South African expats like Margaret “Scrappy” van Hulsteyn, the future wife of Prime Minister J. G. Strijdom. Reminiscent of his origins in Cape Town journalism, he found a job as boxing correspondent for the Daily Mail, a position that at least afforded him the opportunity to travel to France and Belgium and cultivate an acquaintance with the Nobel Prize- winning Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. Just like his work at the Argus, however, the job was menial and arduous. It left him almost no time to pursue the goal of getting his plays produced, and also strained his relationship with Boonzaier, who took offense at the infrequency of his letters. In January 1914, an increasingly defensive Black issued a long and exasperated rebuttal to Boonzaier’s insinuations: Just as you show in your letters your utter inability to adapt yourself to a new environment so you show an utter incapacity to realise what working in London means. You think that because I haven’t gone daily pottering about 2nd hand bookshops that I fear to lose a few lousy shillings. Let me tell you once again that I have no time for my own pleasures here, that my working hours average 12 per day & often 14, & that in any case I hate & always have hated writing letters. There has never been any concealment of this: I have made it a stipulation with people like the Lewises that they expect no letters from me… 113 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, October 10, 1913, pg. 10, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 47, NLSA, Cape Town. 151 Much of your letters [sic] is so insulting in tone that if I were the best fellow in the world & the most regular writer I should be discouraged. What right have you to tell me time & again that I am a boastful, optimistic idiot who will fail in the end just as everyone is bound to fail? You have never once praised or even admitted my little measure of success in London & I for my part have ceased to say anything of myself as it only invites your philosophic nature.114 Disagreement over Black’s prospects for success in London simmered over the course of the next year and a half. Black was making a strong effort, but adverse circumstances continually impeded his progress. At some point in April or May 1914 he received news that his older brother Henry, a sign writer, had died of “alcoholic poisoning” in Johannesburg at the age of 35.115 In one letter from July 1915 Black concedes to Boonzaier that “I was for the first six months a slave” at the Daily Mail, adding that “you have no idea of the tyranny of that office.”116 Things had improved in the interim, however: Black reports that he has just finished A Matter of Fat.117 He relates a mildly raunchy anecdote about one of his “discoveries,” the actress Mabel Morton, then living in London and performing domestic duties for the artist Phyllis Maureen Gotch “in the hope of ‘Helena’ going up,” and Black insisted that Helena’s Hope, Limited was immediately accepted for a late 1914 production by managers at the Lyric and Comedy theatres on the West End.118 By August, however, war had broken out, and any plans to produce Helena’s Hope, Limited, were put on hold. Sensing an opportunity in war reportage, Black parlayed his command of Dutch into an assignment in the neutral Netherlands, writing 114 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, January 11, 1914, pgs. 1 and 3, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 47, NLSA, Cape Town. 115 Henry Newton Black's form of information of a death is no. 4561 of April 10, 1914, Civil Death Records of the Transvaal, National Archives of South Africa [NASA], Pretoria, South Africa. 116 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, July 29, 1915, pg. 5, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 49, NLSA, Cape Town. The first four pages of this letter are correctly filed in folder 48, but the second half of the letter is erroneously filed in folder 49 with the description “incomplete [end 1914?].” 117 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, July 29, 1915, pg. 9, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 49, NLSA, Cape Town. Interestingly, Black refers to it as “the Cartwright play,” implying a less personal inspiration for its premise—their mutual acquaintance Albert Cartwright, a journalist. Given Andrée Black’s comments above, perhaps Black wanted to conceal the play’s true motivation. See “Cartwright, Albert,” South African Who’s Who (Social and Business) 1927-1928, ed. Ken. Donaldson (Cape Town, South Africa: Cape Times, Limited, 1927), 47-48. 118 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, July 29, 1915, pg. 5, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 49, NLSA, Cape Town. 152 dispatches for the Daily Mail from Rotterdam between late August and October 1914. Contrary to his bullish sentiments at the time, Black later explained how his time on the continent ended: “I fell out with the people I had to write with in Rotterdam, & got so depressed & disgusted that I threw up my job after a row & settled down to spend a year on pushing my plays.”119 Clearly Black was not an entirely reliable narrator of his experience in England. Still, Boonzaier was also smarting at the time from the consequences of a poor career move. Driven by financial necessity, in late 1913 Boonzaier relocated to Johannesburg to work as a cartoonist for the Sunday Post and compile a book of caricatures that would hopefully match the success of his earlier Owlographs collection. Rand Faces was a success, but Boonzaier hated almost every moment of his time in Johannesburg. Daily lunches with the young painter Enslin du Plessis (another protégé) constituted, according to his diary, “the one agreeable hour of the day.”120 “Nothing can diminish my misery in this awful place,” he wrote in April 1914, “I find it impossible to settle down to work and cannot even read in my present surroundings.”121 This unhappy sojourn marked his only departure from the Cape over the course of his friendship with Black, and, while the apparently offensive letters Boonzaier was writing him do not survive, one may infer that a more personal dissatisfaction contributed to his bitter attitude. Over more than a decade Boonzaier had built up a formidable reputation as a cartoonist, yet despite his talents he was still dogged by money troubles and exploited by editors—not to mention the need to separate his own political convictions from those of his clients. If Boonzaier could be so maltreated after all this time, what chance did a newcomer like Black have in a city like London? 119 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, March 28, 1916, pg. 8, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 48, NLSA, Cape Town. Theatres initially closed in London with the outbreak of World War I but re-opened once it became evident that the war was not going to be brief. 120 Quoted in J. du P. Scholz, Oor Skilders en Skrywers, 76. 121 BD, vol. 14, pg. 97, MSC. 4, box 3 (April 16, 1914), NLSA, Cape Town. 153 Experiencing a version of what Benedict Anderson referred to as the “cramped pilgrimage” of the colonial creole, Black would come to understand through the lens of the Great War something that before he had only perceived from one vantage point: the enduring relevance of his identity as a white English-speaking South African and colonial-born British subject.122 Since his initial dispute with Boonzaier over his chances of success in London, the desire to pre- empt Boonzaier’s admonishments pervades his correspondence. Black kept writing boxing- related articles for the Daily Mail until the end of January 1915, long after he had returned from Rotterdam, and he never succeeded in mounting any of his plays or transcending his position in at the margins of London’s literary scene.123 Yet Black still maintained that London was an atmosphere of greater freedom than what he was used to in the Cape. A staunch critic of British military strategy, in one wartime letter he recalls an encounter with someone “as English as they make ‘em,” the actress Amy Coleridge, who simply raved about the incapacity of her people in a way that would get her into trouble with the flag-wavers of Cape Town. You see it is the same everywhere—people who have been abroad see the hollow sham of our supremacy, our Empire, our King!…The Hay-Whotte class is dying out—nearly 5000 of the Moerschonds killed in this war alone up to now.124 Black continued this analysis in a further letter: “From here the white heart of colonial patriotism seems so very peculiar; there is no burning desire for Imperialism in England, & the king is much less to London than Vrededorp. One can say & write things in England that would horrify the loyalists in Cape Colony.”125 Even failure in London could prove instructive. 122 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London, U.K.: Verso Books, 2006 [1983]): 57. 123 Stephen Black, “Scots Boxing Champion,” Daily Mail (London, U.K.), January 26, 1915. 124 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, July 29, 1915, pg. 9, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 49, NLSA, Cape Town. “Moerschonds” is a Dutch rendering of the highly vulgar Afrikaans moerskont, literally a “mother’s cunt.” 125 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, August 26, 1915, pg. 4, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 48, NLSA, Cape Town. 154 World War I not only interrupted Black’s plans to produce his work, it accelerated structural changes in the British theatre industry that would soon be felt all over the empire. According to the critic James Agate, the years before 1914 saw “the greatest dramatic energy in [England] since the Elizabethans.”126 London theatres closed at the beginning of the war, but re- opened once it became clear that peace would not be returning quickly. Once open, they were compelled to cater to new wartime audiences—soldiers and women working outside the home— as well as compete with the burgeoning motion picture industry. The conventions by which theatres had run for generations in the British world began to change rapidly. In the Victorian and Edwardian eras the actor-manager had been king in both Britain and Southern Africa, with one person controlling the theatre, the programme, and the company. Arthur de Jong, builder of the Tivoli Theatre in Cape Town, was Black’s co-manager for Love and the Hyphen’s first run and a veteran within this paradigm. Fearing that without major restructuring live theatre would be supplanted altogether by film, during the war years outside entrepreneurs and financial speculators began to buy up London theatres in order to stage people-pleasing, profit-minded shows.127 The industry was being disrupted, and after more than a year abroad, and Black might have thrown himself wholeheartedly into the changing scene, but he was torn. One letter, probably from November 1915, refers to a “proposal…to go out to S.A. & write cinema plays for a year,” with Black sternly ordering Boonzaier not to tell anyone about the affair.128 At that point it must have started to dawn on Black that he had no chance of real success in England while the 126 James Agate, A Short View of the English Stage, 1900-1926 (London, U.K.: Herbert Jenkins, 1926): 68; quoted in Thomas Postlewait, “The London Stage, 1895-1914” in The Cambridge History of British Theatre, ed. Baz Kershaw (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2004): 45. 127 Maggie B. Gale, “The London Stage, 1914-1945” in The Cambridge History of British Theatre, 147. 128 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, date missing [probably November 5, 1915], pg. 11, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 49, NLSA, Cape Town. The first half of this letter is in Folder 48. 155 war still raged, yet he was equally averse to the idea of facing his enemies in South Africa again. In December 1915 he sent Boonzaier another agonizing meditation on his position: I hope I shall not return soon to South Africa. Recently I was tempted, but one peep at the Argus Co’s reading room in Fleet St was enough & I have not again been near the people who wanted my service. No, like the Boers in 1902 I’ll hold out until there is nothing else to do. The conviction has grown stronger & stronger of later that I love everything of S Africa which is really of the soil. I love the raw Kafirs, their languages, customs, ornaments; I hate the bastards who are nothing; I love the Boers better than the other white races because they have fitted themselves by time into the scheme of things. Do you know that I think English is unsuited as a language to write in properly of South Africa[?] Read all the books & poems that have been written—how many suggest one ray of African sun or one throb of the veld? Those disgusting names like East London & Henley-on-Klip—what abortions! They are like Neame’s ‘Letters for Home’ or Levy’s literary odour of fatty Semitism. Really if I wrote the Taal I should feel much more hopeful of doing something good about South Africa. And so you see I feel all the time the call of my country, & pushing against that is the dread of meeting all the horrible people—neither really primitive & African nor civilized & European. God knows if I shall ever be able to face the going-back until I have enough money to slink into the veld & live as I like without worrying about work. Over here it is at least one thing, & one can live one’s life without interference or inquisitiveness. And I’ll sooner live on £3 a week here than in Cape Town. There is much more kindness & honesty—none of that horrible envy which is the curse of little communities & minds.129 The passage above is so rich with insight into Black’s position that it is difficult to unpack comprehensively here. Perhaps what first stands out is Black’s litany of petty hatreds: against the expatriate white South Africans in the Argus reading room, the “bastards” (that is, Coloured people), J. Langley Levy (and by extension his Jewish colleagues), and finally “all the horrible people” by which he appears to mean Anglophone colonials. His love he reserves for two groups—“raw Kafirs” and “Boers”—that he had almost no direct experience of, save perhaps from theatrical tours and the few months he spent in Southern Rhodesia on his mining venture. There is a tacit admission that his time in London had not been as lucrative as he had hoped, and bittersweet commentary on language dynamics in South African literature (like 129 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, December 3, 1915, pgs. 3-6, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 48, NLSA, Cape Town. 156 Kipling with Urdu and Hindi, Black had an ear for colloquial but not literary Afrikaans—the “Taal” of which he writes). Here Black’s rhetoric against “Uitlanderism” has been refined into a darker and more romantic vision of South Africa’s essence, one reminiscent of the Afrikaner nationalist position. British “civilization” and mixing has only degraded South Africa as a cultural field; the real South Africa stands, therefore, in opposition to the atmosphere of the lively creole city and its mixed lower classes on whom Black had cut his literary teeth. Black and Boonzaier had a mutual friend, an English-born painter named Edward Roworth, who settled in Cape Town after the South African War.130 As a three-time president of the South African Society of Artists, his mountain landscapes and unpopulated Cape Dutch farm scenes set a rigidly conservative tone for South African painting over the course of subsequent decades. Now, like the Roworth paintings he knew well, Black was stricken with nostalgia for a South Africa that was more fantasy than reality. Ultimately Black’s views are worth remarking on because they amount to a rejection of his own heritage and literary beginnings: he is describing South Africa through eyes that are not really his, even as he rails against the mistreatment of South African themes by the British. Black would share more of the “cinema play” proposal with Boonzaier in January 1916, once he had definitively rejected the idea, intimating that it could be a scoop for De Burger or The Cape. It had entailed work on behalf of I. W. Schlesinger, an American citizen who emigrated to South Africa from New York in 1894, and built a fortune in the insurance business, citrus fruit, and newsreel production.131 In 1913 Schlesinger obtained a monopoly on film 130 See “Roworth, Edward,” in Esmé Berman, Art and Artists of South Africa: An Illustrated Biographical Dictionary and Historical Survey of Painters, Sculptors, and Graphic Artists since 1875, 2nd ed. (Cape Town, South Africa, A. A. Balkema, 1983): 368-370. 131 “I. W. Schlesinger Dies; A Leader in South Africa,” New York Herald Tribune (New York, N.Y.), March 12, 1949. 157 distribution in South Africa under the aegis of his company African Theatres Trust, Ltd., and began building up a studio complex in Killarney, Johannesburg.132 Alongside a now familiar barrage of anti-Semitic slurs, Black spoke of a vast initiative by Schlesinger for a series of films on South African history, to be written up by another American, Lorimer Johnston. J. Langley Levy, one of Black’s nemeses, was slated to receive £10 a week as “literary advisor” while still holding the editorship of the Sunday Times. In the letter Black referred clearly to what became the silent epic De Voortrekkers (1916, known as Winning a Continent in English), as well as films of the life of Cecil Rhodes, Paul Kruger, and the 1913 Rand mine workers’ strike. These, Black snarled, were to be “served up for European consumption by American-cowboy producers, helped by an abominable ‘literary-advisor’ like Levy.”133 Black’s fundamental objection, however, was the prospect of working under both Johnston and Levy, instead of “the proper thing, i.e., engag[ing] a a competent, South African literary man to have absolute discretion as to what is filmed.”134 Put more frankly, they should have hired Black to run the whole thing. Black professed concern about the political significance of re-enacting the Boer victory over the Zulu at the Battle of Blood River for the screen, but fundamentally he felt that his gifts and expertise, as an representative of white South Africa and a pioneer of local arts, he was being overlooked and undervalued yet again: The A.A.T. [Africa’s Amalgamated Theatres, a predecessor of the African Theatres Trust], declare they have Botha’s support (which I disbelieve) & will be allowed to manoeuvre 25,000 armed Kafirs about, rekilling all the Boers they ever killed. I hinted to L.J. [Lorimer Johnston] that all this was impossible for S.A., the incidents too near & relating to things of today, highly dangerous politically, but he knew better… 132 Martin Botha, South African Cinema, 1896-2010 (Bristol, U.K.: Intellect, 2012): 23. 133 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, January 1, 1916, pg. 11, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 48, NLSA, Cape Town. 134 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, January 1, 1916, pg. 13, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 48, NLSA, Cape Town. 158 The real point is this:—you may not see the films in S.A., so the producers will be under no restrictions whatever of local criticism. The cowboy Boers will be exported & shown to the world mown down by Blacks & Britons, for you may be sure they wont let the Englishmen appear to disadvantage.135 Black was still quite interested in film, however, as surviving typescripts in the National Library of South Africa attest. Parrying Boonzaier’s probing, in October 1915 Black maintained that he was waiting for Prime Minister Botha to announce a visit to England before mounting his South African plays, and that he was writing “kinema scenarios” in the mean time.136 One, titled “The Yellow Streak,” is a story about a gifted but cowardly African American boxer in the thrall of an unscrupulous Jewish promoter, who induces him to impersonate the world champion Jeff Corbett before the real Jeff Corbett arrives in London (Corbett is a clear stand-in for Jack Johnson, whom Black interviewed for the Daily Mail in June 1914).137 The other scenario is a feature-length adaptation of his play I.D.B., in which the villain is also a dishonest Jew.138 The irony, after all of Black’s fulminations, is that Schlesinger did end up drawing on a “competent, South African literary man” for De Voortrekkers—Gustav Preller, the Afrikaner nationalist historian and propagandist, who co-wrote the screenplay with the American director Harold Shaw.139 Black was also prescient on the topic of inter-racial violence and its sensitivity in colonial Africa; authorities in Southern Rhodesia poured cold water on plans for a “life of Rhodes” film that would feature battles between the British and Ndebele.140 135 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, January 1, 1916, pgs. 12-13, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 48, NLSA, Cape Town. 136 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, October 13, 1915, pg. 13, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 47, NLSA, Cape Town. 137 Stephen Black, “The Yellow Streak” typescript, MSB. 70, box 5, folder 3, NLSA, Cape Town; Stephen Black, “Jack Johnson in Training,” Daily Mail, June 22, 1914. 138 Stephen Black, “I.D.B.” typescript, MSB. 70, box 2, folder 5, NLSA, Cape Town. 139 Neil Parsons, “Nation-Building Movies Made in South Africa (1916-18): I. W. Schlesinger, Harold Shaw, and the Lingering Ambiguities of South African Union,” Journal of Southern African Studies 39.3 (2013): 647-651. 140 James Burns, “Biopics and Politics: The Making and Unmaking of the Rhodes Movies,” Biography 23.1 (2000): 110. 159 By late March 1916, things were finally starting to improve for Black: he had begun writing articles on South African affairs for London’s Sunday Times, and was meeting with success selling stories to American magazines. He intimated to Boonzaier that a new play of his called The Brute might go up in June if a theatre could be found—Matheson Lang, a prominent English actor, had already agreed to the play the leading role.141 The first half of May brought terrible anxiety, however, as Britain’s Parliament prepared to amend the Military Service Act to allow for the conscription of married men. Because he had been living outside South Africa since 1913, Black was at risk of going to war as an able-bodied man “ordinarily resident in the United Kingdom.”142 Despite all the sniping with Boonzaier about his career choices, ahead of the new law coming into force on May 25 Black’s letters become desperate appeals to lobby the South African government on behalf of himself and other expatriates to secure a general exemption from the draft. Evoking the memory of the South African War, Black sought to appeal to Boonzaier’s better angels by identifying himself as a Boer: “we are going to be forced into khaki & to fight for those & with those who killed our people a few years ago,” he wrote, somewhat disingenuously.143 Black, who earlier had declared his joy at being far away from the jingoism of Anglophone South Africans, now feared that their ignorance would seal his fate: My dear friend, this is what they have done, turned my poor old father, who was nearly locked up in 1902 as a rebel, into a raving Jingo. He writes me letters that make me weep. I saw this Bill coming long ago, for things are in a most damnable state over here (meer kan ik niet se) & wrote him as I did you about getting me protected. He writes back last mail saying ‘by the time compulsion comes in the Germans will all be dead’ or words to that effect. He also talks piffle about ‘crucifying Zeppelin crews on the banks of 141 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, March 28, 1916, pgs. 10-11, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 48, NLSA, Cape Town. 142 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, May 5, 1916, pg. 2, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 48, NLSA, Cape Town. 143 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, May 5, 1916, pg. 2, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 48, NLSA, Cape Town. For further discussion of the Military Service Act, see David Littlewood, “‘Willing and Eager to Go in Their Turn’? Appeals for Exemption from Military Service in New Zealand and Great Britain, 1916–1918,” War in History 21.3 (2014), 338-354. 160 the Thames’. Poor fatuous man, the pity is he means so well. But that daily dope (which is Reuter’s work of ‘national importance’) has completely stupefied him. Now you, I know are sane, & you must see that men such as I are not turned into soldiers. It is your duty as it is the Union Govt’s. Are we not entitled to as much consideration as Americans & Greeks?144 Black’s indignity was compounded by the fact that W. P. Schreiner, the South African High Commissioner in London, was refusing to vouch for his South African domicile despite the fact that Black was not able to vote in the U.K. Always eager to draw historical comparisons, Black likened his case to that of the non-voting “Uitlanders” conscripted by Paul Kruger to fight in the Malaboch War of 1894.145 Boonzaier does not seem to have been impressed. He refers curtly to the receipt of Black’s letters in his diary, reflecting gravely that “all efforts on his behalf coming from here would be futile”—including in the pages of De Burger.146 At the same time, however, Boonzaier noted “the success of a feeble little play called ‘Jannie Kortbroek,’ written by the proprietor of a music shop” and mused that if Black managed to obtain a passport to return to South Africa all signs pointed to the idea that a “new South African play would be enthusiastically welcomed.”147 Though not set in South Africa, Black had in fact just finished writing The Brute, which, he bragged to his friend, “as a work of dramatic power is far ahead of anything I have produced.”148 Perhaps frustrated at the way comedy had obscured his meaning in layers of irony and allusion, in The Brute Black sought to make his point in a serious and directly ideological way, incorporating distinctly proto-fascistic notes. The play celebrates the military adventurism of 144 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, May 5, 1916, pg. 7, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 48, NLSA, Cape Town. “Meer kan ek niet se” is imperfectly written Afrikaans for “I cannot say more.” 145 See T. J. Makhura, “The Neglected Role of the Boer-Bagananwa War as a Factor in the Jameson Raid,” in The Jameson Raid: A Centennial Retrospective, ed. Jane Carruthers (Johannesburg, South Africa: The Brenthurst Press, 1996), 110-129. 146 BD, vol. 15, pg. 183, MSC. 4, box 4 (May 16, 1916), NLSA, Cape Town. 147 BD, vol. 15, pg. 185, MSC. 4, box 4 (May 28, 1916), NLSA, Cape Town. 148 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, May 15, 1916, pg. 10, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 49, NLSA, Cape Town. 161 Rob Dalton (the titular “Brute”) against German interests in the African interior, and was written, in Black’s words, to show “the glorification of primitive force over artificial intellect— Krugerism versus Jutaism if you like.”149 Indeed, like other intellectual nationalists of his day, the former boxer’s chest-thumping rhetoric in “The Brute” seems to indicate a turn away from measured critiques of the British social system to a more strident rejection of liberal democracy. Dalton argues in the play that “our institutions have made us jealous of power and action;…we have too little discipline, too much liberty, too many rights…we are becoming an over-civilised race of brainy and bloodless ‘supermen.’”150 Inspired by the examples of both Cecil Rhodes and Paul Kruger, Dalton concludes that “our British institutions & humanity & freedom are beautiful in conception, but they are for a world of gentlemen; far before their time, utopian, impossible in an age where men still have so much of the brute in them”151 Two and a half years away from home had deepened the notes of both longing and loathing in Black’s view of South Africa. Black sought a South African future that celebrated masculinity and muscularity, professing to reject the artifice of refinement and cosmopolitanism even as he continued to live abroad and immerse himself in continental European literature. It was an outlook that moved him to praise the Afrikaner Nationalist leader J. B. M. Hertzog at the end of his letter—a man whose public deployment of the word “Afrikander” or “Afrikaner” did not necessarily exclude English-speakers.152 For Black, Nationalists like Hertzog provided an alluring ideological counterweight to the Anglophilic English-speaking cultural establishment— one that was actually committed to building up a uniquely South African drama and literature.153 149 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, May 15, 1916, pgs. 10-11, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 49, NLSA, Cape Town. 150 Stephen Black, “The Brute” typescript, Act III, pg. 25, MSB. 70, box 1, folder 3, NLSA, Cape Town. 151 Stephen Black, “The Brute” typescript, Act III, pg. 25, MSB. 70, box 1, folder 3, NLSA, Cape Town. 152 See discussion of the term “Afrikan(d)er” in Hermann Giliomee, The Afrikaners, 369-370. 153 See Hermann Giliomee, The Afrikaners, 364-369; Isabel Hofmeyr, “Building a Nation from Words.” 162 And yet, as Boonzaier understood through his work on behalf of D. F. Malan, Black’s heritage meant that he could never really be accepted into the Nationalist fold—they were not going to embrace a man like Black just because he found them useful as a foil. In Pursuit of £.s.d., 1916-1919 In a letter dated exactly one day after the new conscription rules came into place, Black announced that he had, in fact, obtained a passport after all. He was also at work on a new play. It was a comedy this time—inspired, he insisted, on the further mishaps of Love and the Hyphen’s buffoonish civil servant Gert van Kalabas (Black’s comic novel The Adventures of Van Kalabas, serialized in the Johannesburg Sunday Post in 1913, had already introduced Van Kalabas to the world of print). By mid-July 1916, Black was back in Cape Town with bold plans for reviving his theatrical career. From a house in Feldhausen Avenue, Claremont, he dove into the work of writing and revising, as well as organizing a theatrical company and a tour to the interior. Given Black’s continuing financial woes, all of this had to be done on the tightest of shoestring budgets, driving Black, in Boonzaier’s words, “ to fall back on the services of several disreputable mummers—the dregs of our stage.”154 Perhaps Van Kalabas Does His Bit could have been a success, but an unforeseen calamity sealed its fate days before opening night. With a note of foreboding on October 27, Boonzaier observed that Charles Leonard (one such “dreg”) had “in some mysterious way become a member of the Black household,” Black maintaining that he ‘must be kept under lock and key’ because of his ‘dissolute habits.’”155 Sure enough, the very next night Black received word that Leonard had been involved in a bar room brawl, and he was dead by the morning of the 29th. 154 BD, vol. 15, pgs. 269, MSC. 4, box 4 (October 20, 1916), NLSA, Cape Town. 155 BD, vol. 15, pgs. 276-277, MSC. 4, box 4 (October 27, 1916), NLSA, Cape Town. 163 The loss was devastating. In Black’s words, South Africa’s “few actors and actresses had been painstakingly impersonating costers, lords, English solicitors, stage Frenchmen” and “Irish begorraboys”—Leonard had a rare talent for playing local types.156 Before playing Van Kalabas in the original 1908 Love and the Hyphen, Leonard had been “touring the platteland with ‘Afrikander’ impersonations, conjuring, bell ringing, Japanese juggling, chapeaugraphy and xylophone playing,” a lowbrow repertoire both poorly compensated and physically taxing.157 Love and the Hyphen had established Leonard as a comedic force to be reckoned with—“a whole vaudeville company in himself” according to the Rand Daily Mail—and so his sudden absence was a terrible blow to Black’s comeback ambitions.158 After being left in the lurch by Bob Mathew, another veteran of his previous plays, Black took the part of Van Kalabas himself, and results were mixed. Debuting at Cape Town’s lavish Opera House before moving to “The Proteum” (really the Cape Town Railway Institute, renamed by the winner of an Argus reader contest Black orchestrated), Van Kalabas Does His Bit divided both audiences and the press. Stephen Gray called Van Kalabas Does His Bit Black’s funniest play, and truly out of all Black’s plays it is the one that has probably aged best.159 Gert van Kalabas of the Tape and Wax Department, Cape Town, is described as being “on the fringes of society” in the dramatis personae of Love and the Hyphen, but in Van Kalabas Does His Bit we see him in his natural habitat: a lazy, simple-minded paper-pusher who cares only for rugby. The play shows what happens when he decides to go “off Home” to fight—not out of patriotism but in order to avoid 156 Stephen Black, “Discovering South African Stage Talent,” The Outspan (Bloemfontein, South Africa), September 14th, 1928, reprinted in “Stephen Black: A Selection,” Stephen Gray, ed., English in Africa 8.2 (1981): 89. 157 Jill Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa, 133. The platteland (Afrikaans for “flat land”) is a common slang shorthand for remote white agricultural areas. 158 “Amusements,” Rand Daily Mail, December 13, 1910. 159 Stephen Black, Three Plays, ed. Stephen Gray (Johannesburg, South Africa: Adriaan Donker, 1980). 164 debts to his tailor, washerwoman, and the office fruit-seller. While “awaiting his commission” in London, he is arrested for assaulting an Indian student at his boarding house, and also accused of espionage by the police, who are suspicious of his German-sounding surname, strange accent, and frequent visits to the War Office. In the final act he returns to his office in Cape Town, having decided that without a commission it would not suit him to enlist as a private. He tries to convince his colleagues that the student he assaulted was “a gigantic brute as big as Jack Johnson,” but they snicker, having already learned the truth from Van Kalabas’s love interest Trixie, who had been pursuing an acting career in London while he was there.160 Well-worn racial stereotypes are reversed, as the Coloured characters around Van Kalabas’s office and the Indian student Prince Samaramy are played straight, as foils for Van Kalabas’s idiocy, and there is also no Jewish villain, as in so many other Black works. Yet the play was staged at an inauspicious time for jokes about the war effort: between July and mid-November—ending just ten days before the play’s debut—the disastrous Somme offensive had claimed 620,000 Allied casualties, including many South African troops.161 The world had been at war for more than two years with no end in sight: Black himself confided to Boonzaier in October 1916 that he believed “the Germans will never be beaten” and “France is doomed in any case.”162 The timing was not ideal for a light-hearted comedy about the war. Still, “Treble Violl” of the Cape Times (the pseudonym of veteran critic Olga Racster) called the first night’s performance at the Opera House “wonderfully successful,” and the Argus 160 Stephen Black, “Van Kalabas Does His Bit” typescript, Act IV, pg. 4, MSA 732, Johannesburg Public Library (JPL), Johannesburg, South Africa. 161 Fred R. van Hartesveldt, “Somme Offensive (1 July-19 November 1916),” in The Encyclopedia of World War I: A Political, Social, and Military History, vol. 4, ed. Spencer C. Tucker (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2005): 1103. 162 BD, vol. 15, pg. 269, MSC. 4, box 4 (October 20, 1916), NLSA, Cape Town. 165 critic agreed that there were “many roars of delighted laughter.”163 The latter implied, however, that Van Kalabas was a victim of his own success, no longer a novel caricature. Moreover, the style in which Black played the part seemed to undercut any serious commentary on South African society: One should not take Stephen Black too seriously. He evidently does not intend it himself, for his ‘scenes’ both on this side of the water and the other are the broadest caricature of the life they are supposed to depict… Stephen Black attempts only to hit off surface peculiarities; he is not concerned with character-study or any niceness of psychological analysis. If, therefore, he shows the young South African as lazy, selfish, vulgar, conscienceless and mean, we must not take the indictment as seriously intended.164 Boonzaier appraised the play as a failure when he went to see it on December 5 at the “Proteum.” His critiques were twofold: first, that “there is no humour whatever in his [Black’s] acting,” and, second, that owing to his tight budget the whole production was undertaken in a slipshod and mercenary way, with a cast consisting mainly of amateurs, in a space with terrible acoustics.165 “As soon as I enter[ed] the vestibule I experience[d] that depressing atmosphere which settles on a theatre where the audience is meagre,” he wrote, “I [did] not catch more than a third of what Black…sa[id].”166 Ultimately, Van Kalabas Does His Bit played for only eleven nights in Cape Town before being replaced on the bill by another Love and the Hyphen revival. By the end of the month, after a short tour to Paarl, Black was fantasizing about leaving for America, reportedly calling South Africa “the most rotten country on God’s earth.”167 In 1917 Black took his plays to the 163 Treble Violl [Olga Racster], “Mr. Stephen Black’s New Comedy,’” Cape Times, November 30, 1916; “‘Van Kalabas’ Again,” Cape Argus, November 30, 1916. 164 “‘Van Kalabas’ Again,” Cape Argus, November 30, 1916. 165 BD, vol. 15, pg. 325, MSC. 4, box 4 (December 5, 1916), NLSA, Cape Town. 166 BD, vol. 15, pgs. 324-325, MSC. 4, box 4 (December 5, 1916), NLSA, Cape Town. 167 BD, vol. 15, pg. 354, MSC. 4, box 4 (December 28, 1916), NLSA, Cape Town. 166 Transvaal, and at some point during that year collaborated with Cecil Kellaway on a full-length musical comedy called Love and Altitude, which satirized the hedonistic ways of Johannesburg society but was apparently never performed.168 The tour was a modest success, though again Black operated with enormous thrift, casting his wife in nearly every production to save money (and making the necessary adjustments to justify her heavy French accent). For about two years from early 1917 his correspondence with Boonzaier dropped off; he was likely stung by the latter’s brutal honesty regarding Van Kalabas Does His Bit. In February 1919 D. C. Boonzaier decided to stop drawing cartoons for the Cape Argus. “In spite of all my efforts to ignore the political policy of the paper and to regard myself as a craftsman only, who is there to execute and not to question the work,” he wrote, “now that the war is over, and the paper is beginning to concern itself more and more with domestic politics, [it] grows more and more hateful to me every day.”169 This decision to live by the courage of his convictions, come what may, stands somewhat in contrast to Black’s decision, taken in 1918, to start work as the editor of a muckraking tabloid called L.S.D. (for “Life, Sport and Drama”, a pun on the monetary acronym £.s.d.). It was owned by Rupert Theodore “Rufe” Naylor, an Australian-born boxing promoter turned theatre magnate whose biography bears a striking resemblance to Black’s—two years his junior, he was the son of a manual laborer who dropped out of school at the age of twelve to work in a mine.170 Unlike Black, however, Naylor had built up a fortune in movie theatres. Bought out by I. W. Schlesinger in 1913, he worked in London until 1917 as Schlesinger’s overseas agent; it was probably Naylor who approached Black about 168 Stephen Black and Cecil Kellaway, “Love and Altitude” typescript, MSA 77, JCL, Johannesburg. 169 BD, vol. 19, pg. 124, MSC. 4, box 5 (February 27, 1919), NLSA, Cape Town. 170 John O’Hara, “Naylor, Rupert Theodore (Rufus),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 10, eds. Bede Nairn and Geoffrey Serle (Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 1986): 668-669. 167 the prospect of working on “cinema plays” in 1916. The aims of L.S.D. were to promote Naylor’s extensive casino and horse racing interests upon his return to South Africa in 1917, as well as his political ambitions. Editing L.S.D. provided Black with a steady paycheck but not much creative scope for someone who strove to be taken seriously as an intellectual. An issue from the week of February 22nd, 1919, towards the end of Black’s editorship, is representative. Almost the entire front page of the paper is given over to jokes—twenty-six in all, some of which were submitted by readers. The second page out of eight is dominated by a column called “After Dark” by the “Night Patrol”—perhaps Black himself—composed entirely of anonymous innuendoes about marital infidelity and the immorality of Cape Town chorus girls. There is a theatrical column and a women’s column, and a page entirely on racing, along with a handful of more serious articles: an editorial on the fate of German colonies in Africa, a brief exposé on abuse and overcharges by nursing homes, and a report, based on court testimony given by Rufe Naylor himself, on different methods of defrauding the Delagoa Bay lottery. Buried deep within the paper there is a short poem, “Dream-faring,” by the poet T. H. van Beek, a friend of Black’s; next to it the conclusion of a serialized article on “‘Bolshevism’: Its Origin and Meaning.” Yet these ostensibly more sophisticated items are mixed among what can really only be described as vulgarity. One piece begins with a quote from an overseas cable about Germany: “the Spartacists are again indulging in shooting in the newspaper quarter of the city,” to which is appended, in the voice of the editor, “we sometimes wish Reuter could send a similar cable about the newspaper quarter of Johannesburg.”171 171 “A Reuter Cable,” L.S.D. (Johannesburg, South Africa), February 22, 1919. 168 As sleazy as it was, L.S.D. granted Black a platform from which to churn out a heady mix of populist muckraking, with intellectual fare mixed in only occasionally. Biographically speaking, in Naylor Black had found a kindred spirit (though Boonzaier called him “a thorough scoundrel according to all accounts”), which held open at least the possibility of further advancement. Tellingly, Naylor the colonial-born scrapper got to his present position in large part by allying with Schlesinger, who was busily extending his South African cinema holdings into a general monopoly on South African stages, buying up almost all private theatres and controlling the process by which overseas theatre companies gained access to South Africa.172 Schlesinger was the embodiment of all Stephen Black had railed against over the past decade— not only a foreign-born interloper (and a Jew at that), but a monopolist in the vein of Rhodes, who ultimately sought to control all theatres, cinemas, and broadcast media in the Union (in 1927 another one of Schlesinger’s companies, the African Broadcasting Corporation, was transferred to the state—the direct ancestor of today’s South African Broadcasting Corporation). Even so, as odious as this all was Black, the fact was inescapable that Schlesinger was where the money was, and in early 1919 Black confided to Boonzaier that Schlesinger had offered him a post in London. He was ready to try his luck a third time. He described Schlesinger’s job offer as essentially a sinecure: Now he [Black] is going to undertake what he describes as ‘publicity work’ and from what he tells me of the nature of this new occupation he will continue to be associated with people who regard the public as legitimate prey. “I am assured an income of £1000 a year, and will have plenty of time in which to turn my attention to literary work as well: that may also bring in something. At all events I’m well fixed up for the next two years.”173 172 BD, vol. 20, pg. 4, MSC. 4, box 5 (March 18, 1919), NLSA, Cape Town; Jill Fletcher, The Story of Theatre in South Africa, 124-125. 173 BD, vol. 20, pgs. 4-5, MSC. 4, box 5 (March 18, 1919), NLSA, Cape Town. 169 On April 5, 1919, Stephen Black left South Africa for his third and final sojourn abroad. For the past two weeks he had been staying in Cape Town with his parents, and had met Boonzaier several times, along with the artists Anton van Wouw, Edward Roworth, and Moses Kottler. The night before his ship sailed Boonzaier lamented the depth to which he felt his friend had fallen: Poor Black! He can only talk of Naylor & Schlesinger, even during these final moments in which we are together. It is sad, but having at his time of life fallen into such company I fear all hope of a literary career must be abandoned. We walk together to the gate of his house, and there, in the fast gathering dusk, continue talking for a while without having anything particular to say to each other. “No one can predict what his future will be. I may return to South Africa, perhaps I shall never see it again. Nothing is certain.” Those are his last words.174 As we have already seen, Boonzaier was a man well-acquainted with hardship and temptation over the course of his long career. In 1904, before beginning his diary, Boonzaier had rejected a bribe offered to him by members of the pro-British Progressive Party to stop his attacks on them in the South African News.175 Yet despite his trademark stubbornness—Stephen Black’s phrase “pachydermatous Boer” seems particularly apt—Boonzaier’s cartooning career to 1919 had been full of pragmatic and not always principled choices.176 In this way Boonzaier’s loud lamentations over Black’s fate served to obscure, perhaps unconsciously, misgivings over his own path. The stakes had been just as high for Boonzaier as they were for Black. “How sick I am of these war cartoons!” he himself had complained before severing ties with the Cape Argus: “misrepresentation, lies, distortion[;] you have to be a party to it all, unless you wish to sit 174 BD, vol. 20, pg. 18, MSC. 4, box 5 (April 4, 1919), NLSA, Cape Town. 175 J. du P. Scholz, Oor Skilders en Skrywers, 79. 176 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, June 11, 1914, pg. 5, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 47, NLSA, Cape Town. 170 still and starve.”177 As far as the English language media were concerned, white South Africans with pretensions to artistic talent were expected to fall in line. Back to La Terre: Farming in France, 1919-1926 Once in London, Black and his family settled into what must have been fairly expensive lodgings at 54, Westbourne Terrace, Paddington. Alongside his work for I. W. Schlesinger and a renewed push to finally produce his plays in the metropole, Stephen Black’s flagship vehicle for success on his third trip to England was a novel. Though he had serialized The Adventures of Van Kalabas back before the war, Black was interested in articulating his views on the South African future through a more highbrow work of literature, while still remaining satirical. The result was The Dorp, Black’s account of a fictitious South African small town riven by conflict between supporters of the National Party and the South African Party during World War I.178 The Dorp contends that the only true South Africans are white and South African-born. While most of the white citizens of Unionstad are of Afrikaans descent, the plot revolves chiefly around the unlikely love story of Anita van Rhyn, daughter of a Nationalist shopkeeper, and Ned Oakley, the son of a jingoistic competitor. Whites must stand together, Black argues, and set aside petty differences to resist the threats posed to their young country by outsiders: O’Flinnigan, a cowardly Irish newspaper editor and the unscrupulous traders Schlimowitz and Mahomet (Jewish and Indian, predictably). Even more menacing, however, is the demographic peril posed by the burgeoning black and Coloured population of Unionstad—and, by extension, the country. This population—the majority of Unionstad residents—barely figure in the plot except as a vague and undifferentiated horde. It is the definitive expression of Stephen Black's 177 J. du P. Scholz, Oor Skilders en Skrywers, 83. 178 Stephen Black, The Dorp (London, U.K: Andrew Melrose, 1920). 171 pre-Sjambok political beliefs, a passionate plea for a definition of South Africanness that reconciles the two largest sections of white society while emphatically excluding Africans, Coloured, Jews and the foreign-born.179 Black’s first surviving letter to Boonzaier from this third trip, dated August 19, 1919, appraises the situation in Britain very negatively, insisting that, the postwar economic depression “there is no work being done—nothing but insolent robbery, murder & theft.”180 He mentions the race riots led by returning soldiers that shook Cardiff in June of that year, adding that “there would have been no riots but for a few of ‘Botha’s Boys’, who could not endure the juxtaposition of black & white genital organs”—clearly approving of the sentiment, if not the violence.181 In Van Kalabas Does His Bit he had skewered South African racial fanaticism, though in other writings Black made the case that white South Africans’ racial views emerged naturally from and were appropriate to their context.182 Given that he had started writing The Dorp at the beginning of August with a view to winning over British critics, it is clear that these events were on his mind. Another key objective in writing The Dorp was to attack South African journalists, in particular his former friend A. D. Donovan. In the same way that René Juta loomed larger in Black’s thinking when writing Love and the Hyphen as it probably did to most of the people who saw it, in Black’s letters to Boonzaier the novel’s potential to embarrass his perceived foes in South Africa rises almost to the level of an obsession. In his very first disclosure of the novel’s existence he bragged that it “should about end ADD,” and in letters from early 1920 Black 179 See Robin K. Crigler, “No Laughing Matter?,” 162-165. 180 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, August 19th, 1919, pg. 3, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 49, NLSA, Cape Town. 181 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, August 19th, 1919, pgs. 4-5, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 49, NLSA, Cape Town. 182 See, for example, Stephen Black (writing as “A South African”), “The Brown Man Problem,” Daily Mail, November 14, 1913. 172 repeatedly oscillates between asking Boonzaier to tell his friends that O’Flinnigan was directly based on Donovan and warning Boonzaier that such a disclosure could provoke a libel suit.183 All the while Black flattered Boonzaier by praising his cartoons of “the ‘Jingo Pers’ journalist— whom you really created for me in a way,” and begged him to have the book reviewed in De Burger, though Boonzaier had already made it clear that he was not impressed.184 Though desperate to escape the strictures of the Anglophone press, Black’s correspondence with Boonzaier became bogged down in discussing the various Afrikaans spelling mistakes Black made. Lurking behind this tedious sniping, however, was the harsh reality that Boonzaier had essentially given up on Black’s artistic prospects. In addition, as an English speaker, there was always reason to question Black’s sympathy with Afrikaner nationalism. Despite Black’s claim to “Afrikander” identity, there was lively debate within Boonzaier’s political circles about whether Anglophones like Black could really be part of a restored South African republic.185 While D. C. Boonzaier’s attachment to Cape Town deepened throughout the course of his life, Stephen Black spent his career in search of ways to escape his origins. Marrying into a French family and cultivating an interest in French and Russian literature served as a psychologically valuable counterpoint to the Anglocentrism of his incomplete formal education and occupational milieu. Though his third attempt yielded no more success in producing his plays, in London he soon found work as a theatre critic for the National News in addition to his duties on Schlesinger’s behalf. This already represented an improvement over his second trip, which was sabotaged largely by geopolitical events outside his control. Yet London was 183 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, August 19, 1919, pg. 3, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 49, NLSA, Cape Town. 184 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, January 15, 1920, pg. 2, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 50, NLSA, Cape Town. 185 See Hermann Giliomee, The Afrikaners, 369-370. 173 crowded with strivers like Black, and it would not be long before Black forsook the United Kingdom entirely for greener pastures, both figuratively and literally. During these years distance again strained the correspondence between Black and Boonzaier. While during Black’s second overseas trip much of this latent hostility was channeled into passive-aggressive grousing about payment for books Boonzaier asked to be sent, Boonzaier’s growing interest in netsukes, a kind of Japanese miniature sculpture, aggravated this dynamic further on Black’s third trip. Though Boonzaier had a few contacts in Cape Town who could augment his growing collection, Black soon fell into the role of Boonzaier’s overseas purchasing agent, and as it became more and more obvious that the latter’s respect for Black’s work had fallen off considerably, this arrangement became a sink for displaced resentment. For Black, Boonzaier’s unwillingness to leave South Africa was also frustrating: once again, while we do not have any letters from Boonzaier to Black, it is clear that Black was dismayed at his friend’s “resignation to not seeing the world.”186 This morose disposition also informed Boonzaier’s later refusal to allow his son Gregoire to study art abroad, a key factor contributing to their estrangement in 1932 (Gregoire Boonzaier subsequently did go abroad, and went on to become one of the most celebrated South African artists of the twentieth century).187 What right did Boonzaier have to belittle Black from afar, when he had never even left the country? By the end of February 1920, Black was fed up: For weeks you have sneered & jeered at my love for writing of my own work, yet no sooner do I—for a purely business reason—confide to my father that there are prospects of ‘H H Ltd’ being produced in London & fail to inform you of the fact that you want to know why! I’ll tell you why. I feel that no real sympathy is to be expected from you. All my hopes & fears, all my struggles for the one end, a hearing in London—are 186 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, February 5, 1920, pg. 3, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 50, NLSA, Cape Town. 187 “Boonzaier, Gregoire,” in Berman, Art and Artists of South Africa, 67-69. 174 misunderstood by you & received without a sympathetic emotion. Had I said ‘I have hopes of ‘H H’ being staged’ you would have sneered—‘optimist’, & reminded me of all the other unrealised hopes of my life, yours & God knows whom else’s. To you the safe arrival of a netsuke means far more than news of my success in London. You would even resent my success, for Schadenfreude is your greatest joy, you have pleasure in unhappiness. Dont answer this—if you do you only provoke more discussion & lessen your prospects of getting netsukes, as naturally I have to give a certain amount of time to other problems of life too. Does it interest you to know that John Le Hay [a veteran West End comic actor who toured South Africa in 1903] is to play Goldenstein? That is if & when the play goes out.188 Yet such complaints did not yet completely overshadow their friendship. In the same letter quoted above, Black asks Boonzaier to provide him with a sketch of the Van Knaap farm from Act I of Helena’s Hope Limited, “for the scene painter to work on.”189 By now Black was looking well beyond the English-speaking world to fulfill his ambitions. In 1919 Black boasted of having Helena’s Hope, Limited translated into Dutch by the playwright Herman Roelvink and played in the Netherlands, though there is no record of this actually happening. Clearly he had similarly international hopes for The Dorp: he repeatedly asked Boonzaier about possible Afrikaans translators, and in July 1920 bragged that “a leading Norwegian firm” had asked to buy Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian translation rights for the novel for £25. Sure enough, a Danish translation of the novel appeared in 1922 (titled Boer og Britte, or “Boers and Brits”).190 The English language edition of The Dorp was released by Andrew Melrose, a well-known London publisher, and so Black’s claim that it was only “the second [of Melrose’s novels] wanted for translation” is quite an impressive feather in his cap.191 Through translation into a more minor European language where in which limited information 188 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, February 28, 1920, pgs. 1-3, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 50, NLSA, Cape Town. 189 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, February 28, 1920, pg. 3, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 50, NLSA, Cape Town. 190 Stephen Black, Boer og Britte (The Dorp), trans. Knud Poulsen (Copenhagen, Denmark: H. Aschehoug and Co., 1922). 191 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, July 1, 1920, pg. 4, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 50, NLSA, Cape Town. 175 about South Africa existed, Stephen Black sought to finally establish himself on a path to becoming a respected interpreter of his country to the outside world. The feminist Olive Schreiner, who had commanded such status for the past half-century, died the year The Dorp was published. Perhaps Black could succeed her. The Dorp was a modest success. The English edition was advertised in major British newspapers, boasting a blurb from The Glasgow Herald: “No one interested in imperial problems can afford to neglect this remarkable book.”192 In a brief review, The Sunday Times (of London) added that “the characterisation of Mr. Black has the sure touch of the French realists,” praising his picture of the “half-drunken Irishman, O’Flinnigan…an unscrupulous opportunist, yet appreciative of Yeats, Flaubert, and Gautier”—comments that must have gratified Black immensely.193 According to Black, the book went through two editions and sold about 3,800 copies in English.194 Though hardly a bestseller, it satisfied Andrew Melrose enough to ask for another manuscript—a novelization of his play I.D.B. called The Golden Calf. Obscenity concerns compelled Black to seek another publisher for his second novel, and in late 1925 it was accepted and released by T. Werner Laurie’s publishing house, which was more comfortable with provocative texts.195 Yet the book’s muted reception in South Africa frustrated Black. Reviewers for the Afrikaans press focused on his use of obsolete Dutch spellings (Roelvink, he boasted, had helped him with the language) and the “overdrawn” quality of some of the incidents in the plot (“how 192 “Andrew Melrose’s Distinctive New Books,” advertisement in The Saturday Review (London, U.K.), March 27, 1920, pg. 311. 193 “New Fiction,” The Sunday Times (London, U.K.), March 7, 1920. 194 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, December 1, 1925, pg. 6, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 51, NLSA, Cape Town. 195 Stephen Black., The Golden Calf (London, U.K.: T. Werner Laurie, 1925). 176 can a satire be literal?” he wrote in response, exasperated).196 Boonzaier felt that there was too much dialogue and not enough description. Enslin du Plessis, fourteen years younger than Black and employed as a critic for the Johannesburg Star, wrote a review that Black felt was particularly impertinent and offensive, patronizing him as “a promising writer who has disappointed his friends.”197 Having spent his career trying to pursue fame, critical recognition, and a semblance of material comfort, Black’s patience with his lot was wearing thin. At one point, upon being compared unfavorably to Anton Chekov by Boonzaier, Black threw up his hands in resignation, once again indulging in pastoral fantasies: As for all the psychological touches that go to the making of a Tchekov, these things are for the elect only—Tchekov is read only by the elect of England; if I tried to emulate his flashes of genius I would not have succeeded in satisfying these people because they would never have read me to find out, & I should have lost all hopes of a less eclectic audience. Writing good books is a luxury I will indulge in as soon as I am known. The best short story I ever wrote ‘A day in the country’…which you compared with Daudet & Maupassant I cant get published at all. It has gone round the world & come back to me… I am getting old & tired of poverty. Obscurity to me is nothing, except that it means lack of comfort. And after all what in life is so important as food, sleep & clothes? Frankly if I had no responsibilities I would go out to Zululand or the Transvaal & live half naked in the veld. It is in the end, the only thing a sensible man can do after he sees the world as I do today. Then I could write as I know I can express myself regardless of the British Public for whom not even you have as much contempt as I have.198 Andrée Black reportedly refused to go back to South Africa, and Black had become fed up with “the prospect…of being messed about by the theatres until all our savings were exhausted.”199 Black was in between a rock and a hard place, and the time was ripe for another change. 196 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, May 13, 1920, pg. 2, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 50, NLSA, Cape Town. 197 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, May 20, 1920, pg. 4, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 50, NLSA, Cape Town. 198 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, January 21, 1920, pgs. 10-11, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 50, NLSA, Cape Town. 199 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, November 30, 1924, pg. 4, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 51, NLSA, Cape Town. 177 Never one to reject a strong impulse, Black bought a fifty-acre farm in the south of France sometime in the first half of 1921. It was called Le Brasq, and it sat just outside the village of Carros in the hill country northwest of Nice.200 In her childhood memoir, Yvonne Black Stonestreet remembered her father and mother fighting the night before he told them of his plan. “I’d like anything better than throwing everything up and going into the wilds,” she recalls her saying, but, echoing their earlier sojourn in Southern Rhodesia, her husband was undeterred.201 Like his earlier fantasies of life in the African bush, Le Brasq was supposed to put Black at a distance from his many enemies, and, as an added bonus, he would be following in the footsteps of his French literary heroes Alphonse Daudet and Guy de Maupassant. Yet if Black was no prospector, he was no farmer either. He spent his remaining Schlesinger money on an ambitious plan to keep goats, rabbits, sheep, pigs, and fowls, in addition to tending olive trees that were already planted on the property. “My wife cannot be said to like the life,” Black admitted in a letter to Boonzaier from early 1922, “though in her loyal & competent way she has fallen into it & done more work than any of us…our two girls are deliriously happy, though the younger goes without schooling & is growing up like a wild olive tree, only much faster, for the olive is a slow growing plant.”202 Yvonne, however, remembered their time on the farm differently. Her father was capable of tenderness and care, she remembered, but was also liable to fly into rages with little provocation. On the farm he “dressed in extremely eccentric fashion,” and seems to have comported himself to the locals like a Provençal Van Kalabas, at one time “soundly berating a peasant girl for allowing her cows to 200 See also Stephen Gray, “Stephen Black, Man of Letters,” Contrast 17.4 (1989): 73-80, for a firsthand account of a visit to this homestead more than half a century later. 201 Yvonne Stonestreet, “My Father, Stephen Black” TS., pg. 7, MSB. 70, box 8, folder 4, NLSA, Cape Town. 202 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, January 28, 1922, pg. 2, MSC. 4, box. 11, folder 50, NLSA, Cape Town. 178 wander on to his land, while on his head he wore a straw had adorned with cherries belonging to a female member of the family, and some sort of shawl was over his otherwise bare torso to keep off the flies.”203 Even worse, Black “seemed to take his South African ideas to France with him,” and the peasants took a very dim view of his attempts to exercise baaskap.204 As farm labour became harder to secure and money became tighter, members of the family were obliged to pick up more and more of the slack—neither of the Black children attended school, though Yvonne was less than twelve years old. Hence the decision to employ a woman named Marjorie Cohen, who became Black’s mistress, along with a Canadian who soon quit because of Black’s anger problems. In order to keep the farm afloat, the Blacks took in a lodger as well, a woman named Gertie who was, according to Yvonne, “natural, gay and outrageous.”205 Marjorie Cohen (also known as Margaret) is one of the more mysterious figures in Black’s life. On his deathbed in 1931 Black left her his entire literary estate, and it is she who donated his manuscripts to the the Johannesburg Central Library, where they remain today.206 Cohen arrived in the Black household sometime in 1922, under the pretext of working as a “farm hand.”207 “This girl is well off and intellectual,” Yvonne recalled her father explaining, “she’s young and healthy and she says as strong as the average man. Bit of a suffragette…She is a Jewess, believe it or not, and her parents are wealthy. It’s an experiment, of course, but it’s worth trying.”208 Cohen had an intellectual bent, and gave the children “a new and fascinating insight into literature.”209 As we shall see in the next chapter, back in South Africa she also 203 Denis Godfrey, “The Eccentric Mr. Black,” Sunday Chronicle, July 11, 1965. 204 Yvonne Stonestreet, “My Father, Stephen Black” TS., pg. 15, MSB. 70, box 8, folder 4, NLSA, Cape Town. Baaskap is Afrikaans for “boss-ship”—supremacy over subordinates. 205 Yvonne Stonestreet, “My Father, Stephen Black” TS., pg. 26, MSB. 70, box 8, folder 4, NLSA, Cape Town. 206 “Last Will and Testament of Stephen Black,” 2008. 49. 2. 8. 2. 6., ASALM, Makhanda. 207 Yvonne Stonestreet, “My Father, Stephen Black” TS., pg. 17, MSB. 70, box 8, folder 4, NLSA, Cape Town. 208 Yvonne Stonestreet, “My Father, Stephen Black” TS., pg. 18, MSB. 70, box 8, folder 4, NLSA, Cape Town. 209 Yvonne Stonestreet, “My Father, Stephen Black” TS., pg. 20, MSB. 70, box 8, folder 4, NLSA, Cape Town. 179 wrote articles for The Sjambok, Black’s weekly newspaper. According to Yvonne, who was about eight years old when Cohen arrived, it was only after Black’s unexpected death that she understood that Marjorie Cohen was, in fact, her father’s mistress.210 Lacking detailed commentary from Boonzaier, we know little about the relationship between Cohen and Black. Was it based on love, or just indicative of a midlife crisis? Marjorie never left any account of their liaison, but clearly the relationship had some staying power— notable because of Black’s erratic and impulsive personality. Black periodically communicated his views to Boonzaier on women’s intellectual limitations, but it is likely that he looked to Cohen for some level of intellectual companionship, just as he had done earlier with Andrée. Further complicating matters is the obvious fact that Cohen was Jewish, which complicates the anti-Semitic screeds we often encounter in his letters to Boonzaier. Given the limitations of the surviving sources, it will have to suffice to say that Black generally distinguished between Jews as a group, whom he envied and resented for what he saw as their easy cosmopolitanism, and Jewish individuals like Bernard Lewis and Marjorie Cohen, who were his friends and supporters. As months turned into years, it became clear that Black’s plans in France were unsustainable. For one thing, he was not writing nearly as much as he had hoped to. In 1923 he offered the performance rights for all of his existing plays to his rival, the actor-manager Leonard Rayne, at the relatively small sum of £100 for four years or £250 in perpetuity (the plays were never staged, and Rayne died in 1925).211 He composed an article about his experience with Rudyard Kipling a decade earlier, and was able to locate and interview Guy de Maupassant’s 210 Yvonne Stonestreet, “My Father, Stephen Black” TS., pg. 33, MSB. 70, box 8, folder 4, NLSA, Cape Town. 211 Stephen Black to Leonard Rayne, October 22, [1923], MSA 77, folder 7, Johannesburg City Library [JCL], Johannesburg. This sum was significantly less than the £500 Black offered Rayne for his plays a decade earlier when he became a bankrupt. At the time Rayne rejected the offer. See BD, vol. 11, pg. 177, MSC. 4, box 3 (January 9, 1913), NLSA, Cape Town. 180 valet, which he managed to publish in John O’London’s Weekly.212 In the summer of 1925 he rubbed shoulders with the African American musical sensation Paul Robeson in the nearby town of Villefranche-sur-Mer, who asked him about “Bantu melodies he could sing in public” (Robeson was increasingly interested in African culture at the time and would be soon involved in one of the first antiracist film documentaries about South Africa, My Song Goes Forth).213 Black did not write anything about this meeting until long after he had returned to South Africa. Bad news kept coming, however. The Golden Calf was mangled by Andrew Melrose, who demanded that almost a third of the manuscript be cut and then balked at publishing it anyway—imperiling an £80 payment that Black sorely needed.214 Black’s third novel Limelight, on theatrical life in “Judasberg,” never made it to the presses at all and exists only as a typescript in the Johannesburg Central Library.215 A fourth and “bigger novel dealing with the interior of Africa,” in Black’s words, “a novel I have nursed for 20 years” was never finished and does not survive.216 In a letter of September 7, 1925, Black admitted that “at these times I long to be back in South Africa to start my own weekly paper & scourge these scoundrels [on the South African press] as they deserve,” perhaps teasing the fact that he was already in talks with I. W. Schlesinger about just such a scheme.217 212 Stephen Black, “How I Began to Write” Cape Argus, October 17, 1925; Stephen Black, “Maupassant’s Boswell” John O’London’s Weekly (London, U.K.), September 3, 1927. 213 “The Editor of The Sjambok,” “Natives—Don’t Ape White Men!,” The Sjambok, November 14, 1930. For the circumstances of Robeson’s 1925 stay in France see also Eslanda Goode Robeson, Paul Robeson, Negro (New York, N.Y.: Harper and Brothers, 1930): 112-116. Robeson never visited South Africa, but in the 1930s the liberal novelist Ethelreda Lewis strove hard to arrange a visit and wrote a book, Wild Deer, whose protagonist is a thinly-disguised Paul Robeson who visits the Union. See Tim Couzens, introduction to Ethelreda Lewis, Wild Deer (Cape Town, South Africa: David Philip, 1984 [1933]): v-vi; xxvi-xxvii. 214 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, December 10, 1925, pg. 1, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 51, NLSA, Cape Town; Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, June 23, 1924, pg. 2, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 51, NLSA, Cape Town. 215 Stephen Black, “Limelight” typescript, MSA 74, JCL, Johannesburg. 216 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, October 2, 1925, pg. 6, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 51, NLSA, Cape Town. 217 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, September 7, 1925, pg. 7, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 51, NLSA, Cape Town. 181 By 1925, Stephen Black’s tortuous path of the previous fifteen years, a tale of multiple thwarted attempts to escape the strictures of South African cultural life, was looking more and more like a dead end. In a highly revealing passage of a letter written at the end of that year, he looked over the arc of his career and concluded that it had been doomed from the beginning: As for my ‘gift for making people talk’ you helped to develop that by your ill-judged ravings in ‘The Cape’ 15 years ago upon the wonderful dialogue of ‘Love & the Hyphen’. All that nigger gossip, which any journalist born in Cape Town could produce after a dose of salts. you described as the work of genius. Dont talk nonsense about Kipling, old friend; let me be honest too & tell you that if I had listened to him & not to you & all the people who tried to turn my head over ‘Love & the Hyphen’ I might today be writing the sort of thing you have learned to admire & what you are advising me to write. (Only, by the time I have caught up with the last of your changes, which are almost feminine in their frequency, God knows where we shall both be. You preached gloomy sex & sordidness during your Zola years & now that I have caught up with that you cry out for the joy of life! You used to condemn English writers because they never described the sexual act. Now D. H. Lawrence does that & you want me to be one of the angels to twang a harp string with you & [Bernard] Lewis).218 What would it have meant to “listen to Kipling”? Kipling was an extraordinary storyteller who dedicated his life not to literature as an abstract, rarified quantity but as a practical and highly political medium. Rooted in his journalistic background, Kipling became the voice of Tory populism before World War I. Children were a key constituency for this effort, as William Dillingham has noted, since a key concern of Kipling was the need to produce younger generations worthy of the empire they would inherit.219 Perhaps if Black had focused longer on establishing himself as an inoffensive, people-pleasing writer, as Kipling had before the South African War, he would have built a greater audience and people would have taken him more seriously if he ever did choose to pivot to more serious political and artistic matters. Unlike Kipling, Black pursued the path of literature and punditry at the same time, and by his 218 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, December 30, 1925, pgs. 1-2, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 51, NLSA, Cape Town. 219 See William B. Dillingham, Being Kipling (London, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 182 own estimation he had failed. While his denunciation of Coloured dialogue ignores the fact that Kipling was a great exponent of precisely this kind of dialect writing, really Black’s complaint has to do with patience. With his early writings Black had identified a largely unexplored field for literary endeavor—and Kipling’s advice had been to “peg out your claim and work it for all it’s worth.”220 But Black, young and ambitious, could not wait to move on to what seemed like greener pastures. Now well into his forties, the fact of Black’s failure was staring him in the face. By the end of 1926 it was clear that Black hoped to leave France soon. He disclosed to Boonzaier that he wanted to be with his mother in her old age, and that Andrée had consented to his traveling alone.221 Still, it took a while to get everything in order. On August 31, 1927, Black finally announced that he would be returning to his homeland after almost a decade away.222 “You can answer this to my face if you feel like it,” he said, after years of strained long- distance correspondence.223 Conclusion: Laughing Out of Turn Why spend so much time reconstructing the biography of a man who today is barely remembered, who fell far short of the goals he set for himself in his own lifetime? Stephen Black was emphatically a product of his times, and, as we have seen, his career seems to have been dominated by erratic, often self-defeating decisions and petty resentments. D. C. Boonzaier —no model careerist himself—lamented often, both publicly and privately, his friend’s inability to settle in a particular line or reconcile himself to the essential harshness of the world. Few of Black’s works have aged gracefully, suffused as they are with the racism of the time as well as 220 Stephen Black, untitled article typescript [probably mid-1920s], MSB 809, box 2, folder 1, NLSA, Cape Town. 221 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, December 5, 1926, pg. 1, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 51, NLSA, Cape Town. 222 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, August 31, 1927, pg. 1, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 51, NLSA, Cape Town. 223 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, August 31, 1927, pg. 1, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 51, NLSA, Cape Town. 183 with his more idiosyncratic bigotries against Jews and long-forgotten public figures. Yet his story is illustrative of the experience of a certain strain of artistic entrepreneur in the South African Union period. Combative, unapologetically populist, and underappreciated in death, Black transgressed the boundaries of taste and propriety in what passed for intellectual life in early twentieth century South Africa. In examining Stephen Black’s life and work the uncertainty and hidden fault lines of the early Union period become apparent, especially as regards race, class, and birth. The great paradox of Black’s life is he was tied to the working-class, multiracial communities of Cape Town in a way virtually none of his occupational peers were, yet that very connection was what estranged him from them. As he wrote in 1916, There is no doubt that the three hundred years in Africa have created a [white] race with all the craft & cunning & low suspicions of the blacks. Do you never realise what a curse this transplantation of white races to a black man’s country is? I feel it daily. In me are the most widely-diverse sentiments, likes & dislikes. Nothing pleases me wholly—if a primitive smell or sound gives one delight, a wholly civilized taste snatches down the fabric of pleasure. I have bits of character in me that are English, others that are Dutch; some Scotch & some Kafir. You know I was suckled by a Xosa woman, & my mother was frightened by a Ringhals [spitting cobra] while she carried me. The consequence of the latter incident was that I was born with a snake’s shape on my chest & a horrible fear of snakes in my heart.224 “Civilized” here refers not just to whiteness, but the whole range of “disreputable” things Black held at close quarters during his life—his lower class background, his boxing, his scheming, and above all his antipathy for elite tastemakers and imperial patriotism. Black believed fervently that he was the “New South African” who was supposed to flourish under Union, yet he never enjoyed the respect to which he felt so entitled. The reasons are complicated: like any artist his talent had genuine limits, and his unpredictable personality probably impeded his success as 224 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, January 16, 1916, pgs. 3-4, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 48, NLSA, Cape Town. 184 much as the opposition of his foes. Even so, the first two decades of his literary career did leave a legacy. By laying bare the contradictions of the social world through satire, Black hoped to inspire the birth of a genuinely national theatre that would inspire South African audiences to question the world as it was presented to them by elites. It would take a half-century after Black’s first play—and a very different political landscape—for playwrights like Gibson Kente, Adam Small, and Athol Fugard to match and surpass this vision, but it did happen. But Stephen Black’s contributions to South African culture do not end there. As we shall see, the last years of his life would prove influential in a different and even more profound way, as he revised his plays one last time and was installed as the editor of one of South Africa’s most important tabloids, The Sjambok. 185 Chapter 4— Raising The Sjambok: Stephen Black and Multiracial Populism, 1928-1931 Though many aspects of Stephen Black’s social and political thought remained consistent throughout his life, his final sojourn in South Africa between 1927 and his death in Johannesburg four years later constitutes a unique phase. Though he retained the boundless energy and restless mind that had so attracted D. C. Boonzaier two decades before, by the time he returned from France Black was thoroughly disillusioned with intellectual striving in general, and South African intellectual life in particular. It was clear that he was not going to be another Kipling, Bernard Shaw, or D. H. Lawrence. He loathed the elites of South African literature and journalism as much as ever, but his hatred was now less raw and more calculated: he knew he could not destroy his many enemies in one fell swoop. Yet when the opportunity came along to edit his own newspaper, once again at the behest of the Schlesinger empire, Black poured almost everything he had left into the work. The present chapter, which chronicles the final years of Black’s life, explores the innovative direction these endeavors took. The Sjambok was South Africa’s first general-interest newspaper to openly court a multiracial readership. Black published letters from black, Coloured, and Indian correspondents were published at rates much higher than in any of Johannesburg’s major white newspapers, raising for the first time in the South African press the possibility of a multiracial public sphere. The Sjambok also became a platform for both black fiction and black journalism, publishing R. R. R. Dhlomo’s early short stories as well as investigative reports from H. D. Tyamzashe, a leading trade unionist and ally of Clements Kadalie. Crucially, the paper provided urban Africans with a platform where they could express themselves far more assertively—and 186 satirically—than had hitherto been possible in Johannesburg’s mainstream (white-edited) press. Black’s friendship with Boonzaier disintegrated over the course of the paper’s run and unfortunately this means we have far less insight into Black’s private motivations during these years than we do for earlier spans of his career. What one can say with confidence, however, is that Black did not act out of liberal or paternalistic concern for the swelling ranks of the urban black petty bourgeoisie. To the contrary, he was motivated by populism and personal grievance —an overpowering desire to put the hoi polloi of South African punditry and taste-making in their place. By exposing the corruption and hypocrisy of Johannesburg’s most respectable people, and by inviting the scorn not only of whites but of all races along the way, Black reproduced in newsprint the atmosphere of the pre-apartheid theatre. With The Sjambok, Black used “the laughter of the gods” to drag Johannesburg’s leading lights down to earth. Today, The Sjambok is most often mentioned as a footnote in the biography of Herman Charles Bosman, as the journal that published his first post-prison writings. Bosman and his friend Aegidius Jean Blignaut would profess to carry Black’s torch for years after his death, publishing a string of racy tabloids with “L.S.D.” and “Sjambok” in their titles throughout the 1930s. Bosman and Blignaut brought their own unique brand of bombast to these efforts (see chapter 8), and Bosman would later establish himself as one of the most well-regarded writers South Africa has ever produced. Still, the original Sjambok and these later papers were different in one major respect. For all their norm-flouting and devil-may-care bohemianism, Bosman and Blignaut left no ambiguity about the fact that their papers were intended for whites only, and the fact that this was not true of the original Sjambok is far more significant for our purposes than any fleeting Bosman connection. 187 The Sjambok only existed for two years before I. W. Schlesinger decided to terminate its libel insurance and stop the presses. From Schlesinger’s perspective, The Sjambok’s mission was narrow: to combat a competing movie theatre conglomerate, Kinemas, Ltd. With its heady mix of sophisticated criticism and sleazy muckraking, The Sjambok was a quintessential Stephen Black creation, and an effective one as well, but the litigation it provoked was too risky for a self-made monopolist who was anxious not to provoke too much hostility. Yet in tracing the development of black South African literature over the course of subsequent decades, it becomes clear that The Sjambok’s two years in print constitute a remarkable moment in the history of this tradition, a moment that directly foreshadowed not only the efflorescence of the black commercial press, but the kinds of voices that press would amplify. “You Can All Go To Hell”: Love and the Hyphen, 1927-1928 When Stephen Black returned to South Africa in early November 1927, he immediately called on D. C. Boonzaier at his office. Resuming an old habit, he proceeded to talk his friend’s ear off. “He had not aged or changed the least,” Boonzaier reported, though “despite this discursiveness Black is never boring: only the things I really wanted to know I had to drag from him.”1 Black said he planned to be in South Africa for at least six months, and brought back several netsukes for Boonzaier’s collection. He stayed in Cape Town for about a month, preparing a series of articles for the Argus on his impressions of South Africa after being gone for the better part of a decade. The most interesting of these dispatches appeared on December 17, 1927: “How South Africa is Being ‘Americanised.’” 1 BD, vol. 28, pg. 39, MSC. 4, box 6 (November 7, 1927), NLSA, Cape Town. 188 Unlike his protégé Herman Charles Bosman, Stephen Black does not seem to have been much impressed with or influenced by American writers. Across hundreds of pages of literary commentary in his letters, one struggles to find a single reference to an American, although of course The Yellow Streak has two African American boxers at its center. Like Jews, Black seems to have envied and resented their seemingly easy success (and I. W. Schlesinger, we might recall, was both an American and a Jew). Subtitled “Short Lunch a Short Road to Race Suicide!” Black’s article observes that, in the years since World War I, America has come into vogue, especially with Afrikaner nationalists who regarded it as superior to the United Kingdom. Interpreting lunch as a microcosm of the South African condition, Black states the problem in hyperbolic terms: These ‘over-civilized barbarians’ are so intent on money-making that their queer lives have been adjusted to fit in with the ideas of get-rich-quick. ‘These old-time Yurrupeans take too long over their food,’ they decided many years ago. ‘Say, kid, a feller should be able to have a swell eat in five minutes. Atta boy! Look at that dorg! Get a line on that hog! Say…don’t they pull a rain-proof coat over the ham of an ox in sixty seconds flat?’ And from the moment that the U.S.A. began to think thus dates the world’s dyspepsia. This lapping up of every transatlantic morsel, this imbecile worship of whatever Uncle Sam chooses to spit out of his loud-speaker, will lead to a race of apes and parrots, incapable of thought or judgement. We are doing on a large scale what we would be furious at on a small.2 Skillfully deploying absurd American slang and faux chumminess, Black argues that in a country like South Africa with a Mediterranean climate, people should be taking more time at lunch, not less, in keeping with the Latin practice of the siesta. Yet there is also a racial dimension to the Yankee peril, which, Black suggests knowingly, is propagated through the cinemas: 2 Stephen Black, “How South Africa is Being ‘Americanised,’” Cape Argus, December 17, 1927. 189 If we heard that a school teacher in one of our large State schools was preaching jazz and black-bottoms in the language of Gertrude Stein, would we allow our children to attend? No! Not yet, at all events… I am particularly amazed at the Nationalists who have taken over the administration of this country. So busy have they been straining at the British gnat that they have all but swallowed the American camel. There is only just time to eject him. But won’t it be too much trouble?3 These observations would shape Black’s revisions to Love and the Hyphen. Before attempting to revive his theatrical reputation, however, Black’s freelance gig for the Argus took him north, through Southern Rhodesia to Victoria Falls. Here, just as on his ill-starred honeymoon, Black was able to indulge his frontier fantasies. His published impressions of the country were rapturous: Rhodesia was “a vast and glowing hymn of praise to the Rain God” and a “land of the future”—in contrast to sleepy, nostalgic Cape Town and the frenetic, present- obsessed Rand.4 He was full of praise for traditional African art, dismissive of African agriculture, and saved his harshest words for black Rhodesians who had adopted the trappings of European material culture, from corrugated iron roofs to the “dirty white singlets” worn by “nearly all the natives.”5 For a while Black and his family stayed with one of his brothers near Gwanda in the south of the country and from here a letter to Boonzaier shows that he was still uncertain about his next move: Have you a benevolent government or rich patron of the arts who will give me a pension or find me a soft spot in a library in order to keep me alive in my native land? Or have you an editorship yawning at me? My tastes are simple (if the taste for a wife & two children may be called so in these days of Jan Jutaism & Lesbianism) but none the less a certain amount of mealie pap is necessary. Where in the Cape Peninsula can I find enough money to live on? In Jhburg there is room always for a newspaper & the hope ever before us of finding some rich idealist to put up the money. But in Cape Town….! 3 Ellipsis in original. Stephen Black, “How South Africa is Being ‘Americanised,’” Cape Argus, December 17, 1927. 4 Stephen Black, “When the Rain God Favours Rhodesia,” Cape Argus, February 4, 1928. 5 Stephen Black, “‘Smoke-That-Sounds’ at the Victoria Falls, Cape Argus, February 9, 1928. 190 Now I will confess to you something—I entered into provisional arrangements with your dear friends of Ashb[e]y’s Galleries [an antique dealer] to take over the old theatre they are in, with a view to running it as a high class play-house &c. But two new theatres are announced for Cape Town & the Opera House companies, as it is, play invariably to empty benches. It would be a brave man who counted on the revenue derived from Lady De Villiers & her set, even with £40 a month rent! If the old Loop St theatre (they say it is that, only one enters from Long St) were in the centre of things one could try, but will people who lust after the lights & noises of cheap, Greek cafés, go to an out-of-the-way place to hear Tchekof & Ibsen? If I were unmarried, life today would be simple—I’d stick here in the veld among the Kafirs.6 Though prospects for the kind of “high class” theatre to which Black referred were not at all certain, ultimately he did decide to revise and revive his old work, after more than a decade’s hiatus. The most important alterations were reserved for his old flagship, Love and the Hyphen. Though still set before 1910, Black wrote a new final act that brought the play into the present- day and showed the ways that South Africa had changed in intervening years. He also wrote a new “prologue” that dramatically increased the importance of the Coloured characters Frikkie and Sophie to the play as a whole. Love and the Hyphen was revived under very different political conditions from its original debut, when a united South African constitution was still being written. The National Party leader J. B. M. Hertzog was now prime minister of the Union through a coalition with the mainly Anglophone Labour Party, presiding over the so-called “Pact Government.” The fortunes of the Afrikaner nationalists had increased greatly since the early days of Union, and Black’s changes to the character of Gert—now “Gerald”—van Kalabas reflect this. Reminiscent of the 6 Ellipsis in original. Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, February 10, 1928, pgs. 1-2, MSC. 4, box 11, folder 51, NLSA, Cape Town. Lady de Villiers is Adelheid Selma Hélene Koch, Baroness de Villiers, the husband of Charles Percy, the 2nd Baron de Villiers. His father John de Villiers came from an old Cape family and, after serving as Chief Justice of the Cape Colony for more than a quarter-century, was raised to the peerage in the same year as the Act of Union, 1910. Given all this it becomes easy to see why Stephen Black would take such a dim view of their intellectual tastes. See Burke's Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage, 107th ed., vol. 1, ed. Charles Mosley (Wilmington, Del..: Burke's Peerage, 2003): 1118-1119. 191 lowly servant Jan’s transition into the stately Jeremiah Luke M’bene in Helena’s Hope, Limited, in Black’s new epilogue Van Kalabas re-enters the fray as South Africa’s Commercial Ambassador to the United States, having traded his buffoonish Afrikaans persona for a no less risible American one: V[AN] K[ALABAS](nasal accent): Gee, but I’m glad to see the old home again. Some surprise, hey? Hoe gaat dit, mense?7 (Van Kalabas goes round greeting). L[ADY] M[USHROOM]: Gerald van Kalabas! I beg your pardon…Sir Gerald! VK: Don’t give yourself brain fag over my title, Lady Mushroom. Knighthoods are three a penny in this old town. The sir stuff goes big in the United States, but it don’t cut much ice in South Africa. How do.8 Van Kalabas is dressed just as gaudily as he was at the Tape and Wax Department back in 1908, but whereas the joke back then had to do with his claim on Britishness, twenty years later he confronts a world where Afrikaans is now ascendant: VK: Don’t I know it? Here I come back from America, Commercial Ambassador of the Union, and they write me letters in a language I can’t read. Ek kan nie meer Hollands praat nie.9 AUST[IN]: They call it Afrikaans now—not Hollands. Kêrel, pas op vir Oom Tielman.10 Despite professing to have forgotten Dutch, Van Kalabas is extremely bullish on the United States. There, he gushes, people remember and admire the valiant Boer effort in the South African War. In America, unlike at home, South Africans can finally feel proud of themselves. VK: Say boy, the Americans were just pie for me. They thought I was the original Oom Paul. Now and then I chucked ’em a “Wag ’n bietje” and an “Allemag” and they 7 Afrikaans for “how are you folks?” 8 Stephen Black, “Love and the Hyphen” typescript [1928 or 1929], “Epilogue or P.S.,” pg. 19, MSA 76, JCL, Johannesburg. 9 Afrikaans for “I can’t speak Dutch anymore.” Afrikaans joined Dutch as an official language of the Union under the Official Languages of the Union Act passed under Hertzog’s premiership. See Hermann Giliomee, The Afrikaners, 376-379. 10 Afrikaans for “Buddy, watch out for Uncle Tielman.” This is a reference to Justice Minister Tielman Roos, an influential member of Prime Minister Hertzog’s cabinet. Stephen Black, “Love and the Hyphen” typescript [1928 or 1929], “Epilogue or P.S.,” pg. 20, MSA 76, JCL, Johannesburg. 192 just ate it.11 Atta boy!…Say, old trout, you’ve heard tell about Marcus Garvey? He’s got a slogan, “Africa for the Africans”—well, I’ve got a better one —“America for the Afrikanders.” Here I spent my early life trying to talk like an Englishman when five minutes in the States covered over the sins of my fathers like a porous plaster. Send our Dutch jongs to the States for a vacation and that’s all there is to it.12 And whereas in the original Love and the Hyphen Van Kalabas’s youthful hobby was limerick writing, he comes back to Lady Mushroom’s garden with a much more lucrative prospect on his mind: the patent on a Prohibition-busting flask that holds mixers for six different cocktails at once. “Before you turn the cap of the flask the ingredients that produce alcohol are separate and non-alcoholic,” he explains, “I calc’late to make 50,000 dollars a year with it.”13 Black’s critique of the Nationalists is clear: imitation is still imitation, no matter what is being imitated. The British come off only a little better. The fop who masqueraded as Captain Hay- Whotte in 1908 is now a genuine general under his real name, in a backhanded swipe at Britain’s performance in the Great War. General Watt has come back to Cape Town to marry the middle- aged Gwendoline, and dazzles the assembled group with his command of Dutch. He explains that, in addition to marrying, he is interested in exporting Cape wines to Europe. Then, as if things were not already topsy-turvy enough, Van Kalabas then asks General Watt for a favor— and receives extraordinary news: VK (Finding a letter): I’ve been so damn busy I haven’t had time to read my correspondence. Here’s a letter I got today—(Opens it)—Dutch again! What’s this country coming to? General, can you read this for me? H[AY]-W[HOTTE]: Certainly. (Does so) I say! VK: What’s wrong? 11 Afrikaans for “wait a bit,” and “Lord Almighty,”—stereotypical Afrikaans idioms. 12 “Jongs” is Afrikaans for “boys.” Stephen Black, “Love and the Hyphen” typescript [1928 or 1929], “Epilogue or P.S.,” pg. 20, MSA 76, JCL, Johannesburg. 13 Stephen Black, “Love and the Hyphen” typescript [1928 or 1929], “Epilogue or P.S.,” pg. 25, MSA 76, JCL, Johannesburg; Stephen Black, “Love and the Hyphen” typescript [1928 or 1929], “Epilogue or P.S.,” pg. 21, MSA 76, JCL, Johannesburg. 193 H-W: Don’t you know what’s in this letter? VK: No. H-W: Your old aunt, Mrs. Anne Klappers, has died at Kalabas Kraal. VK: Served her damn well right. H-W: She’s left you all her money. VK: Gee, she was darn rich. H-W: You inherit everything—on condition… VK: What? H-W: That you marry and have children and that your children are brought up to speak Afrikaans only.14 Van Kalabas asks Lynda to marry him and she accepts enthusiastically, her husband Spavin- Glanders having perished in the war. Whereas previously the play only mocked South Africans’ efforts to seem British, now the tables seem to be turning. Even so, Black argues, a South Africa led by sycophantic Americophiles is no closer to discovering its own authentic cultural genius Yet Black’s most important additions deal not with the white characters in Love and the Hyphen, but the Coloured ones—that notorious pair Frikkie and Sophie who caused such a sensation in the original production. The purpose of the show’s new prologue was to flesh out Sophie’s claim, quoted in the previous chapter, that she had successfully seduced a white man in His Majesty’s Muddlers. Frikkie, her Coloured admirer, is humble and well-meaning, while Sophie is ambitious, lascivious, and vulgar—a true heir, as Stephen Gray has observed, to Kaatje Kekkelbek (see Chapter 2; all ellipses in original): SM[ITH]: Has your old man [Frikkie] gone? S[OPHIE] (Scornfully): Dat’s not my old man. SM: Your bloke, I spose SOPHIE: My bloke? My bloomin foot! You tink I keep me up wid er blek men? SM: Well there’s no need to, a nice girl like you…How about putting out that light? S: Ach I couldn’ trus’ myself alone in der dark wid you. SM: Why not? S: Because I tink you’se werry hot stuff. 14 Ellipsis in original. Stephen Black, “Love and the Hyphen” typescript [1928 or 1929], “Epilogue or P.S.,” pgs. 27-28, MSA 76, JCL, Johannesburg. 194 SM: ’Ere I say, I’ll be losing me reputation. Turn off that light. (Looks for the switch) S (Singing): Die man hy kom, [The man he comes, En die man hy kom, And the man he comes, En die man hy kom al weer, And the man he comes again, Om te lê, lê, lê, To lay, lay, lay Om te lekker, lekker lê To nicely, nicely lay] SM: What’s that? S: No, soemaar er song.15 SM: What’s it all about? S: Ooo, Got if I tell you dat…! SM: What’s it…Dutch? S: No, soemaar a song. (Sings again) Here, I sing another one: “My kombers…”16 SM (with ludicrous accent): May Kombays… S: En jou mattras.17 SM: And your….’ere chuck it!18 The passage gives a sense of Sophie’s dialect and is packed with bawdy innuendoes. The first song she sings refers to a man coming again and again “for a nice lay”; the second is from a South African War song known as “Marching to Pretoria” in English and “Daar Lê die Ding” in Afrikaans—the original soldierly sense of “my blanket and your mattress” taking on a novel and salacious meaning. Through it all the smitten Corporal Smith exhibits the same British lack of color-consciousness that Black had previously lampooned in Van Kalabas Does His Bit. At the end of the prologue Frikkie finds the two in flagrante delecto, and threatens to hand Corporal Smith over to the military police for trespassing. At the dramatic climax of their subsequent scuffle, Smith removes his belt to whip Frikkie—and his trousers fall, ending the scene. The tableau is full of symbolic significance. In threatening to whip Frikkie (who is, after all, the descendant of slaves) Corporal Smith reasserts his whiteness but is immediately undercut in a way that reminds the audience of the sexual weakness suggested by interracial sex. 15 “Soemaar” is Afrikaans for “just.” 16 “Kombers” is Afrikaans for “blanket” 17 Afrikaans for “and your mattress.” 18 Stephen Black, “Love and the Hyphen” typescript [1928 or 1929], “Prologue,” pgs. 4-6, MSA 76, JCL, Johannesburg. See Stephen Gray, Southern African Literature, 58-61. 195 Black’s intention was not just to pad out the script with more comic relief, but to introduce topical and tragicomic elements into the work. By the twentieth century, the liberal consensus that had held sway in the Cape Colony for the better part of a century was coming under unprecedented attack. Though Prime Minister Hertzog’s push to remove Cape African voters from the common voter’s roll failed in the 1920s, bills expanding the power of the Native Affairs Department over African lives and curtailing Africans’ ability to negotiate the terms of their employment boded poorly for the future.19 Indeed, the fear of interracial sex and racial mixing more generally inspired acute white anxiety and violence in many parts of the world in the years after the Great War. In 1927 the Pact Government succeeded in banning sexual intercourse between white and black people (but not Coloureds) on a national scale. The novels The Dark River (1920) and God’s Step-Children (1924) by Sarah Gertrude Millin and Turbott Wolfe (1925), written by a twenty-one year old William Plomer, confronted the topic of interracial relationships in the South African context.20 Plomer and Millin’s books also drew considerable international interest, juxtaposing the simplicity and naïveté of interpersonal love with the unyielding censure of broader society and the latent suspicion—never totally dismissed—of African racial inferiority. Meanwhile, in the United States, the 1920s saw both the rise of the Harlem Renaissance and the resurgence of the 19 See T. R. H. Davenport, South Africa, 292-297. 20 Sarah Gertrude Millin, The Dark River (New York, N.Y.: Thomas Seltzer, 1920); Sarah Gertrude Millin, God’s Step-Children (London, U.K.: Constable and Company, 1924); William Plomer, Turbott Wolfe (New York, N.Y.: Random House, 2003 [1925]). See also Peter Blair, “That ‘Ugly Word’: Miscegenation and the Novel in Preapartheid South Africa,” Modern Fiction Studies 49.3 (2003), 581-613; J. M. Coetzee, “Blood, Taint, Flaw, Degeneration: The Case of Sarah Gertrude Millin,” English Studies in Africa 23.1 (1980): 41-58; David Rabkin, “Race and Fiction: God’s Step-Children and Turbot Wolfe,” in The South African Novel in English: Essays in Criticism and Society, ed. Kenneth Parker (London, U.K.: MacMillan Press, 1978), 77-94. An important rebuttal to Coetzee’s critique of Millin is Lavinia Braun,“Not Gobineau But Heine—Not Racial Theory But Biblical Theme: The Case of Sarah Gertrude Millin,” English Studies in Africa 34.1 (1991), 27-38. 196 Ku Klux Klan, robed in more “respectable” (though no less violent) trappings.21 Black and other South African whites became increasingly aware of Harlem through film, the worldwide diffusion of jazz music, and popular novels like the white author Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven (1926).22 We have already seen how these developments impacted Black’s life: how he met the African-American boxing champion Jack Johnson while working for the Daily Mail before the war, and sketched a Johnson-esque character for his short story-turned-film scenario The Yellow Streak (though, interestingly, Johnson’s well-publicized relationships with white women do not feature in the narrative). Now, in rewriting Love and the Hyphen, Black brought the scandalous liaison of Sophie and Corporal Smith to its “logical” conclusion—a child (cheekily named Camellia) who, though she can pass for white, resents her lowly upbringing and lives in fear of being exposed as Sophie’s daughter.23 Sophie and Frikkie also have a son together, Frederick Arthur, a taxi driver who takes after his humble, hard-working father. When, in the epilogue, Corporal Smith returns to the Mushroom’s estate as General Watt’s chauffeur, he once again confronts Frikkie, though he does not immediately recognise him. Whereas in the prologue Corporal Smith is hoist with his own petard, in the epilogue it is Frikkie and Frederick Arthur who are humbled. In an 21 See Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (New York, N.Y.: Liveright, 2017); Felix Harcourt, Ku Klux Kulture: America and the Klan in the 1920s (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 22 The popularity of jazz within segments of both white and black society is attested in Christopher Ballantine, “Music and Emancipation: The Social Role of Black Jazz and Vaudeville in South Africa Between the 1920s and the Early 1940s,” Journal of Southern African Studies 17.1 (1991), 129-152. See also Emily Bernard, Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012); Jacob Hardesty, “Moral Outrage and Musical Corruption: White Educators’ Responses to the ‘Jazz Problem,’ History of Education Quarterly 56.4 (2016), 590-617; Carl Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2000 [1926]). 23 The racial and sexual connotations of the camellia flower are numerous, with the white camellia often signifying white feminine purity—or availability, as in the novel and play La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils (1848), revived and re-adapted numerous times over the course of the next century. See Alexandre Dumas fils, The Lady of the Camellias, trans. Liesl Schillinger (New York, N.Y.: Penguin Random House, 2013 [1848]). 197 excruciating exchange, Smith recounts his erstwhile romance with Sophie, whom he describes as “a big voluptuous creature with dark-eyes like a Spaniard,” conceding that “I can only imagine one thing sillier” than to fight over her—actually marrying her.24 Boxed in by racial etiquette and repressed bitterness, Frikkie responds to each part of Smith’s reverie with a single syllable —“yes”—repeated twenty times in a row for maximum poignancy. Later, when Smith meets Sophie and Camelia for the first time, his ardor is rekindled: they invite him to the cinema to meet Camelia’s new Welsh boyfriend, Llewellyn. He accepts. In the final tableau, Sophie’s things are loaded into her son’s taxi as she prepares to move in with Camelia. Her visibly Coloured son literally chauffeurs her into the white society she has always coveted—abandoning him, Frikkie, and racial subordination, forever. Frikkie ends the play by delivering the bitterest and most pathos-rich line to be found in any of Stephen Black’s works: Soph[ie].: All right. If anything has been left behind I can come back tomorrow. Frik[kie].: No, no, I’ll send it. Don’ come back. Soph. (going): No well then, au rewar. Frik.: Goodbye! (Sophie goes out.) Well Freddy, aren’ you going? I thought you drive the taxi? F[rederick ]A[rthur]: Yes, I’m going. I just want to tell you before I go, pa, that you haven’t played the bloody game with me. Frederick Arthur goes out. Frikkie sits down on the wheelbarrow and watches the motor car leave. Frik.: You can all go to hell. Curtain.25 The 1928-1929 additions to Love and the Hyphen show Black at his best—unrepentantly farcical, reveling in the incongruity of social relations while seeming to sympathize with all sides. The play is a far cry from the bitterness and resentment that characterizes so many of his 24 Stephen Black, “Love and the Hyphen” typescript [1928 or 1929], “Epilogue or P.S.,” pg. 34, MSA 76, JCL, Johannesburg. 25 Stephen Black, “Love and the Hyphen” typescript [1928 or 1929], “Epilogue or P.S.,” pgs. 39-40, MSA 76, JCL, Johannesburg. 198 letters, and, to a modern reader, it shows Black’s considerable sophistication as a dramatist. Frikkie’s insistence on maintaining dignity within the existing racial hierarchy results indirectly in his abandonment by his own flesh-and-blood, introducing a stinging note of tragedy into the production. Critical acclaim, however, was not universal. The Cape Times reviewer (likely Olga Racster, one of Black’s least favorite critics) called the play’s new epilogue “a great chance missed.”26 After praising Black’s presentation of “the general diffusion of a South African patriotism” through Robert Austin, General Watt, and Van Kalabas, the reviewer wrote that “it is much to be regretted that, along with all this, Mr. Black should have quite unnecessarily introduced in so marked a way some very disagreeable matters connected with his coloured characters. The play would have all its old attractiveness, and be more delightful than ever if this unpleasant element were deleted.”27 This is a serious misjudgment of the epilogue’s significance. As Stephen Gray argues, “Black saw miscegenation symbolically as part of a larger upwardly mobile social drive”—less a sin of the fathers than a manifestation of the same impulse that motivates the De Gadde women to pursue bachelors with hyphenated surnames.28 Furthermore, in contrast to the “color question” novels of Sarah Gertrude Millin and so many others, in the 1928-1929 Love and the Hyphen it is not the offspring and accomplices of race- mixing that are punished, but those left behind. Indeed, there is significant parallelism between the situation with Frikkie, Sophie, and Corporal Smith and the future Black wrote for the De Gaddes and their men in his epilogue. 26 “Stephen Black Season,” Cape Times, January 24, 1929. 27 “Stephen Black Season,” Cape Times, January 24, 1929. 28 Stephen Gray, Southern African Literature, 61. 199 Like Frikkie, Lynda and Gwendoline de Gadde initially reject the buffoonery of Captain Hay- Whotte and Van Kalabas, who pretend so much to be what they are not. Fraud, however, is consistently rewarded: the fake “Captain Hay-Whotte” becomes the real General Watt despite his grifting, through the ineptitude of the British army. Likewise Van Kalabas becomes a wealthy official without ever receiving his comeuppance, simply by switching the focus of his mimicry from England to the United States. Meanwhile, Lynda’s genuinely hyphenated husband is killed in the Great War through the incompetence of General Watt’s beloved British army and Gwendoline resigns herself to life as an old maid. Everywhere in the new Love and the Hyphen, artifice and striving win the day over integrity and self-respect. And after almost two decades of dominion status and “Ever Closer Union,” Black was suggesting that South Africa remained a nation of sycophants and caricatures, unequal to the historical moment and determined not to blaze a new trail in the world. Black’s focus on the importance of authenticity and its absence is one we have already encountered throughout this study. From Kaatje Kekkelbek’s purported exposure of humanitarian misrepresentations to Douglas Blackburn’s exposition of the Boer psyche through humor, the authentic representation of South African conditions remained an urgent creative concern post in 1928 and beyond. Black, for his part, was influenced by Kipling in his zeal for representing Southern African dialects faithfully. Subsequently, judging by his letters, he was influenced even more fundamentally by the French naturalist tradition. This movement, which reached its high-water mark with Émile Zola’s twenty-novel Rougon-Macquart cycle (1871-1893), entertained the idea that novels and stories could de designed to resemble scientific experiments concerned with the long-term effects of hérédité (heredity) and milieu (social 200 environment) on individual lives.29 South Africa, with its bloody history and fractious population, seemed to Black and others like a natural laboratory for such efforts, while, as Horst Zander has written, in subsequent generations the need to document the reality of South African social struggles through fiction came to be seen as much as a burden as an imperative.30 Of course, it is one thing to extol the virtues of “naturalism” in literature and drama and another to attempt its execution. If authenticity was the most common yardstick against which Black’s revived plays were measured, he made out rather well, in spite of his “disagreeable” revisions. George Paget and Dolly Sinclair’s blackface Frikkie and Sophie were universally acclaimed by critics for their verisimilitude. Die Burger’s critic (perhaps Black’s friend Bernard Lewis) remarked that while “you do realize Coloureds talk and act like that in everyday life, yet to put it on a stage like that, so undiluted [so onverwater], makes you squirm in your chair sometimes.”31 Black himself was acclaimed for reprising the role of Jeremiah Luke M’Bene in Helena’s Hope, Limited, though Vere Stent of The Pretoria News criticized Black’s makeup as being “a bit too Christy Minstrelly.”32 “Anyone who closed his eyes and listened to a sentence or two of [Jeremiah’s] would swear that he was listening to the conversation of a real native. This part alone as now played might well be enough to make any new play,” gushed Guy Gardner of The Sunday Times, a statement that elides the fact that most white patrons of the play would not really have been able to judge such “conversation”—being largely ignorant of African languages.33 Meanwhile, 29 See Brian Nelson, “Émile Zola (1840-1902): Naturalism,” in The Cambridge Companion to European Novelists, ed. Michael Bell (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 294-309. 30 See Horst Zander, Fact—Fiction—“Faction”: A Study of Black South African Literature in English (Tübingen, Germany: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1999). 31 “In die Skouberge,” Die Burger (Cape Town, South Africa), January 19, 1929. Translated by the author 32 Vere Stent, “A Night with Stephen Black,” The Pretoria News (Pretoria, South Africa), August 30, 1928. 33“G. G.,” “Helena’s Hope, Ltd.,” Sunday Times (Johannesburg), September 2, 1928. Guy Gardner was the assistant editor of the Sunday Times in 1928; see Joel Mervis, The Fourth Estate, 40. 201 Afrikaans critics were anxious to protect the dignity of their readers. “There is nothing in ‘A Backveld Boer’ that is offensive to any of the white races in the country, although the ‘backveld Boer,’ as Stephen Black has sketched him,” Die Volkstem’s critic insisted, “is nowhere to be found in the Union today—not even in the backmost backveld!”34 Thirty-year-old white men were no longer illiterate in South Africa, or sporting foot-long beards, or, as Die Burger’s critic added, “using the word ‘allemagtig’ in every little sentence.”35 Defining the “Thirties Man”: The Sjambok’s Populist Journalism According to Andrée, Black’s departure from the world of theatre came through coercion. In 1927, I. W. Schlesinger’s monopoly on South African movie houses through his company African Theatres, Ltd. was threatened by a new company, David and Sidney Hayden’s Kinemas, Ltd. As early as November 1927, just five months after the company was registered, the two companies became entangled in litigation. Kinemas sued African Theatres for promoting a motion picture called The Somme against a similar but separate film to which Kinemas had secured the license, arguing that advertising placards failed to properly distinguish the two films.36 I. W. Schlesinger offered Black the editorship of a new paper aimed at crushing the enterprising Hayden brothers, and, when he initially demurred, Schlesinger threatened to bar Black’s company from appearing on any of the stages he controlled.37 This was a trump card, given his theatrical company’s enduring monopoly over the live stage. And so it was that, for the third time in his life, despite his personal animus against everything Schlesinger represented, 34 “A Backveld Boer,” Die Volkstem (Pretoria, South Africa), August 28, 1928. Translated by the author. 35 “Tivoli,” Die Burger, January 24, 1929. Translated by the author. 36 “Rival Cinema Firms,” Rand Daily Mail, November 1, 1927. 37 Andrée Black, unpublished interview with Tim Couzens and Pat Laker, 1974, Johannesburg, South Africa, cited in Leon de Kock, “The Sjambok Era: Johannesburg’s Popular Press in the 1930s,” A.U.E.T.S.A. Conference Papers (1988): 363. 202 Black assented to Schlesinger’s offer. At the very least, editing a weekly newspaper promised a steady paycheck and a large platform, if successful, through which to reach Johannesburg’s newspaper readers and raise his profile. Black felt it necessary to depict a diverse sampling of society in his plays, and his success in doing this drove much of their popularity. Still, as the press reviews of his revised plays attests, showing a reality so onverwater, was a perilous proposition. Probably Black himself was not aware in the beginning of the novel direction his editorship would take. In any case, he was determined to make the paper successful. As he admitted to Boonzaier with some sarcasm, “we cater to a much lower intellect than the intellects that let ‘The Nation’ die, also ‘Voorslag’ and several other high-brow publications.”38 Instead of designing a highbrow literary vehicle or a vapid, middlebrow magazine like The Outspan, The Sjambok would test an eclectic, unabashedly populist strategy, mixing more intellectual content with muckraking and smut.39 In using the term “populist,” I follow the definition of populism adopted by Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell: “an ideology which pits a virtuous and homogenous people against a set of elites and dangerous ‘others’ who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity and voice.”40 Why must the people be “homogenous”? For populists, negotiation is an inherently suspicious political method that tends to be favored by people without a visceral stake in 38 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, April 25, 1929, pg. 2, MSC. 4, box 12, folder 52, NLSA, Cape Town. 39 For more on the significance of Voorslag, see Michael Sharp, “Back to Africa: Roy Campbell’s Voorslag,” in Global Africans: Race, Ethnicity, and Shifting Identities, ed. Toyin Falola and Cacee Hoyer (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2017), 143-152. The Outspan, a Bloemfontein-based magazine founded in 1927, was South Africa’s most popular English language magazine for most of the mid-twentieth century. It has so far escaped scholarly attention in its own right, though Stephen Gray cites it several times for its Hollywood coverage. See Stephen Gray, “Noel Langley & Co.: Some South Africans in Showbiz Abroad,” Current Writing 24.1 (2012), 16-26. 40 Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell, “Introduction: The Sceptre and the Spectre” in Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European Democracy, eds. Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008): 3. 203 outcomes. Such pragmatism bespeaks an amoral universe of material incentives: the people have common sense, not politics, and the elite is all too eager to sell them out. In South Africa in the early twentieth century, whiteness was an obvious seemingly natural quality around which to constitute a populist newspaper. The Sjambok, however, came to orient its own populism around the moral homogeneity of “the people”—blacks and Coloureds, it held, could understand as well as whites the ways the rich and connected were selling them out. Notwithstanding the fact that I. W. Schlesinger was both an elite and possibly a “dangerous other,” The Sjambok addressed its readers as citizens, even if not all of them possessed the rights and privileges of citizenship. Without being an antiracist or even a non-racist paper, its view of the South African body-politic was nevertheless novel and attractive to legally marginalized readers. To date the only serious work of scholarship dealing Stephen Black’s Sjambok is a published conference paper entitled “The Sjambok Era: Johannesburg’s Popular Press in the 1930s,” presented by Leon de Kock in 1988. Writing in the final years of apartheid, De Kock laments that the brief efflorescence of a white alternative press in Johannesburg in the 1930s has received so little attention from scholars. Considering Black’s Sjambok alongside the motley band of Bosman-Blignaut scandal sheets that followed its death under the name (New) Sjambok, Ringhals, or L.S.D. on and off until 1939, De Kock discusses these papers’ appeal to the “thirties man”—a white counterpart to the “New African” Tim Couzens had so deftly sketched a few years earlier in his seminal biography of H. I. E. Dhlomo.41 According to De Kock, the “thirties man” was 41 Tim Couzens, The New African: A Study of the Life and Work of H. I. E. Dhlomo (Johannesburg, South Africa: Ravan Press, 1985). 204 peculiarly a product of his times: he was nationalistic in outlook and highly illiberal, demonstrating perhaps that liberalism is strongly dependent on affluence. His rigid adherence to social codes of manliness and moral propriety betrays insecurity and a deep fear of transgression, especially in the area of sex, where colour and the unconscious threaten to merge dangerously…Finally, the ‘average man’ of the thirties was poor, and was therefore deeply suspicious of officialdom in all forms, reserving his spite for petty officials suspected of corruption…42 In fact, De Kock’s “thirties man” had been around for a while, as Stella Viljoen’s 2019 article on ADAM magazine attests.43 ADAM, which Viljoen styles as “the first South African men’s magazine” was published in Johannesburg between 1920 and 1922, and was emphatically not the first “men’s magazine” in South Africa. Most magazines in South Africa to that point presumed an overwhelmingly male readership and promoted similarly misogynistic ideas to those Viljoen details. Yet Viljoen’s main argument, that ADAM “represented single women as independent and confident of their sexuality” while simultaneously “sexualis[ing] and commodif[ying] this independence through the joyous reiteration of the vapid but glamorous flapper” is important for understanding the ways in which male reactions to jazz-age female sexuality mingled titillation with anxiety.44 Magazines like ADAM embraced “modern womanhood” to the extent that it satisfied male heterosexual desire, without affirming women as equals in any other sphere. Readers were enticed by the prospect of women’s sexual availability but also threatened by the possibility of their agency, and the people behind ADAM deftly harnessed this cocktail of lust and fear in order to appeal to the very same reader De Kock describes as the “thirties man.” 42 Leon de Kock, “The Sjambok Era,” 361. 43 Stella Viljoen, “ADAM: The First South African Men’s Magazine and the Sex Appeal of the Flapper!”, South African Historical Journal 71.2 (2019), 197-220. 44 Stella Viljoen, “ADAM,” 220. 205 This lower-middle to middle-class demographic, white and fluent in English if not actually British in heritage, was the same audience Black initially courted with The Sjambok. The inaugural Sjambok appeared on April 19, 1929 and was priced at 2d., the same as a single edition of one of Johannesburg’s daily newspapers. As the first issue, it was padded heavily with brief articles and jokes, but also promised recurrent features that traded on sexual and racial transgressions, respectively: “The Diary of a Gold-Digger” by “Betty Blond”— detailing the exploits of a flapper girl similar to articles in ADAM —and “The Telephone Conversations of Jeremiah,” written by Black under his own name. Originally one of the breakout sensations of Helena’s Hope Limited, in the previous chapter we saw how Black used his educated African alter ego to pour contempt on his enemies before World War I. Now that Gerald van Kalabas was off selling flasks in America, Black turned to Jeremiah as a mouthpiece for his populist commentary—now without segregated seating. Moreover, the fact that Jeremiah Luke M’bene’s words were circulating among thousands of people each week would certainly boost the prospects of any future plays Black might choose to mount. The great sensation of the first Sjambok was the fallout from “the Nafte case,” and the first installment of Jeremiah's “The Telephone Conversations” was devoted to the topic. On December 28, 1928, in the rural Transvaal, a white farmer, Jack Nafte, and his foreman, Johannes Jacobus van Niekerk, stripped, bound and brutally assaulted a black man named Sixpence Temba whom they testified had been threatening Nafte and “causing trouble” on the farm.45 Temba’s clavicle as well as two of his ribs were broken, and the doctor who performed his postmortem testified that Temba received forty to fifty hard blows to his back prior to death. 45 “European Fined £25 or Two Months,” Rand Daily Mail, April 3, 1929. 206 Van Niekerk argued he had been afraid to disobey Nafte’s orders; he received a £25 fine for common assault while Nafte was found guilty of culpable homicide and sentenced to seven years’ hard labor and ten lashes—a sentence Nationalists saw as unacceptably harsh, and one that Prime Minister Hertzog himself intervened to postpone.46 In classic populist fashion, both Black’s “Telephone Conversations of Jeremiah” and his unsigned editorial on the Nafte case primarily focused on critiquing the behavior of perceived elites rather than discussing the merits of the case. On page 18, across from a D. C. Boonzaier caricature of the justice minister Tielman Roos, Black offered an article entitled “Afterthoughts on the Bethal Case.” Here, Black laid out his arguments for why Nafte’s sentence should be mitigated. Black criticized the press for being “bloodthirsty,” reasoning that “Sixpence, the dead native, was not a pleasant person” and while Temba is no longer in pain “Nafte’s sufferings will be of long, long duration.”47 Rather than whipping Nafte, Black said the state should exact a heavy fine and donate it to Temba’s family. Predictably, Black made Justice Solomon’s Jewishness an issue as well, accusing him of adopting an “eye-for-an-eye philosophy” which his namesake King Solomon would have rejected, given that “up to the time of this cruel and passionate act,” Nafte “had a clean record.”48 More interesting, however, is Black’s castigation of the newspapers’ disingenuousness towards black people: Go to the columns of the Press and see how much space is accorded to the tragic death of a black man or of twenty black men. The death of two or three white men is “a splash story,” the death of double the number of blacks is a paragraph stuck away on a back page. These are the relative news values of black and white skins. If a black man be killed do the papers say “he left three wives or ten children”? We all know perfectly well that the values are not the same. The pretence of the Press that they are is the most 46 “Nafte Sentenced to 7 Years and 10 Lashes,” Rand Daily Mail, April 6, 1929. 47 “Afterthoughts on the Bethal Case,” The Sjambok, April 19, 1929. 48 “Afterthoughts on the Bethal Case,” The Sjambok, April 19, 1929. 207 nauseating and futile humbug. What about the Employers’ Liability Act…are natives compensated at the same ratio as white men?49 Black’s full meaning here is not obvious without context. Black here is agnostic on the actual value of black lives vis-à-vis those of whites, but readers would have understood that Black was indirectly attacking the Johannesburg Star’s ties to mining capital as a member of the Argus group.50 Elite Anglophone opinion in South African cities tended to focus on atrocities towards blacks in rural areas, ignoring the daily miseries of black migrant workers employed in the mines that they themselves owned. As a farmer, Black argued, Nafte served as an easy stand- in for rural South African barbarism, but the equally gruesome deaths of black mineworkers through negligence or apathy had never excited the interest of The Star or its readers. This was just another case of urbane Johannesburg whites looking out for their interests, when in reality they had no business feeling superior. But Black did not stop there in driving home his point. On page 10’s “Telephone Conversations of Jeremiah”, one encounters a tableau familiar to anyone who had witnessed a performance of Helena’s Hope, Limited. Jeremiah, the mission- educated African, is sketched chatting happily on his employer’s telephone to his friend Joshua (often spelled “Josuah”). This first edition of the feature is subtitled “Nigger Heaven,” and this reference to Carl van Vechten’s famous novel of Harlem life serves multiple purposes in the text. “Nigger Heaven” for Joshua is shorthand for Johannesburg’s burgeoning black population: the “Jazz bands and gayrls and skokiaan and much else beside,” as opposed to “the old heaven they teach us about in the school.”51 For the more erudite Jeremiah, however, “the real Nigger 49 “Afterthoughts on the Bethal Case,” The Sjambok, April 19, 1929. 50 See John Lambert, “‘The Thinking is Done in London’: South Africa’s English Language Press and Imperialism, in Media and the British Empire, ed. Chandrika Kaul (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006): 37-54. 51 Skokiaan is illegal homemade liquor. Stephen Black, “The Telephone Conversations of Jeremiah: ‘Nigger Heaven,” The Sjambok, April 19, 1929. 208 Heaven is the Heavenly Star itself nowadays”—that is, The Star newspaper—“with all those beautiful letters about yourself and myself and ourselves.”52 He continues: I ask you, my dear friend, what are such things as the Special Pass, dancing, flirting and leequid consumption compared to columns and columns and columns and columns of sympathetic letters upon the case in Bethal?…Very beautiful worlds there printed about the qualities and character of the Bantu people. In the ordinary way such obituaries are printed only after man is immortal, but now we have the joy and exceeding benefit of perusal before our regrettable demise.53 In other words, the outpouring of sympathy for Sixpence Temba by Star letter-writers had turned the paper into a “Heaven” in its own right. But Jeremiah objects to a letter from “Machamson” praising the harsh sentence passed down by Justice Saul Solomon. Praise for Justice Solomon, Jeremiah insists, conflicts with his own experience of Jews, which returns the conversation to Van Vechten’s sense of the subtitle: Fancy putting in such one-sided applause for the Jewish race. Why, my dear Joseph [sic], as you know, it was a Jew not far from the portals of Nigger Heaven, the Star office, that sold me a pair of riding breeches for ten bob and these the very first time that I went in the Black Bottom ruptured themselves with a most equivocal sound…Fortunately for me Joe, the lady I partnered in the Black Bottom was broad in her mind also, and passed the episode as if the noise came from the band. She also gort a needle and cotton and stitched up the aperture in my lower regions. Indeed we had quite a joke about the whole indaba, for the needle slipped into my flesh and he got very saucy in a flirting way…54 In this excerpt, the joke is both on Jeremiah and the Jew he bought from: the latter perhaps cheated him by selling an inferior product, but tight riding breeches are also meant to be an absurd thing to wear to a dance, particularly one in “the Black Bottom” where, it is implied, very strenuous dancing takes place. In the last part of the paragraph Black stresses the sexually 52 Stephen Black, “The Telephone Conversations of Jeremiah: ‘Nigger Heaven,” The Sjambok, April 19, 1929. 53 Indaba is Zulu for a story or a matter. Stephen Black, “The Telephone Conversations of Jeremiah: ‘Nigger Heaven,” The Sjambok, April 19, 1929. 54 Stephen Black, “The Telephone Conversations of Jeremiah: ‘Nigger Heaven,” The Sjambok, April 19, 1929. Ellipsis in original. 209 charged intersection of black culture (as understood by whites) and jazz dancing (to which whites were also susceptible). The final section of the column is worth quoting at length: “But to revert Joe to the Nigger Heaven. I shall write to-day to the Editor of The Star and protest against the one-sided publication of these pro-Jewish letters. Oh yes, of course, my letter will go in…I had a column inserted the other day and all the solecisms were put right in that solar system known as the editorial sanctum. When my epistle appeared it was signed ‘Pro Bono Publicos,’ but it might have been ‘Shakespeare,’ the English was indeed so beautiful. Yes, I will protest. They must not print any more of these partisan letters on behalf of the Jews.” “Quite right Jeremiah, quite right. By the way…what is your opinion about the Bethal case? What do you think of all the indaba?” “My dear Joseph I don’t think much about it at all, because this boy Sixpence, the one they talk about so much, was only a sort of half Basuto and not one of our peeple at all. They are a cheeky race but not very strong, and one night that I recall at the Bible Class a Transvaal specimen that I encountered made me so angry that I hit him with a metal clasp, and his whole jawbone was thereupon broken like the ass. So then my friend William, the local preacher, fell also upon this Basuto and threw him outside the church and… [But at this stage the conversation was terminated abruptly by intervention from the Telephone Exchange. Jeremiah hopes to resume it in time for the next issue of “The Sjambok”]55 The racist tropes at work here will be familiar to students of South African history. The whole conceit of Jeremiah and Joshua as a comic duo channels white anxiety regarding Africans occupying urban spaces, performing “white work” (in Helena’s Hope, Limited Jeremiah is employed at a white newspaper), and using “white” technology like the telephone. In the passage, the horrific violence visited on Sixpence Temba is waved away: Africans do not care about it, Black tells his audience, because they do not see themselves as a single collective. Moreover, Jeremiah’s final anecdote betrays the thin veneer of civilization maintained by literate urban Africans as fraudulent. Violent urges and unrepressed sexuality win the day, even in the 55 Stephen Black, “The Telephone Conversations of Jeremiah: ‘Nigger Heaven,” The Sjambok, April 19, 1929. All brackets and ellipses in original. 210 context of a “Bible Class.” Deflationary humor like this was in keeping with the tone of the original Helena’s Hope, Limited source material and assuaged potential discomfort surrounding African male voices, even voices imagined ultimately by a white author. In Jeremiah’s discussion of his letters to The Star there is something further at play. If even the possibility of the autonomous black voice required the accoutrements of racial inferiority—malapropisms, mispronunciation, and self-deprecating anecdotes—to avoid provoking racial disquiet, how much more dangerous were real black voices? If anonymous letters to the editor of The Star might be written by black people, and not white people with citizenship rights (for the Transvaal had no franchise at all—not even a qualified one—for black, Coloured or Indian men), how could “the people” trust the integrity of the press public sphere?56 If the letters vilifying Jack Nafte and praising Justice Solomon were indeed written by self- interested Africans (despite the fact that, according to Black, Jeremiah cares nothing for Nafte’s victim), The Star’s claim on being a newspaper of record for a “white man’s country” was illegitimate. Certainly, Black suggested, in that case The Star could not possibly represent the authentic voice of the “thirties man.” But was it really true? Were black people really submitting letters to The Star under the cloak of anonymity? Anonymity in journalism had been a controversial topic in the British Empire for almost a century by the 1930s. As the public spheres enabled by greater literacy spread around the world from the era of the Enlightenment on, anonymity came to be seen not just as a tactic for eluding censure by the authorities but as a principle that ensured the free 56 White women did not gain the right to vote in South Africa until May 1930, a development explicitly justified as a means of diluting the black and Coloured vote in the Cape Province. See Pamela Scully, “White Maternity and Black Infancy: The Rhetoric of Race in the South African Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1895-1930,” in Women’s Suffrage in the British Empire: Citizenship, Nation and Race, eds. Ian Christopher Fletcher, Philippa Levine and Laura E. Nym Mayhall (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2000), 68-83 . 211 exchange of ideas within such spheres.57 As Dallas Liddle has argued, anonymity not only allowed a variety of people (most notably women) to contribute to periodical literature without compromising their personal positions, but also facilitated the newspaper’s transformation from a peripheral to a central institution of public opinion and moral arbitration.58 In 1865, inspired by the French Revue des deux mondes, The Fortnightly Review became the first important British publication to require signed articles, and as the decades wore on, policies that required authors to disclose their identity became steadily more popular.59 While this trend was primarily framed as a means of promoting accountability and preventing slander, it also provided an additional safeguard against “the wrong voices” expressing themselves in print. Coinciding with other reform initiatives in the English-speaking world, like the introduction of the so-called Australian ballot in the United States, people close to the margins of the democratic process became disfranchised in the name of “honesty” and “integrity.”60 Still, anonymous and pseudonymous writing continued to flourish—not only in South Africa’s black press, as we shall see, but among Africans across the continent, as Stephanie Newell has explored.61 By 1929, anonymity remained a hallmark of most South African letters 57 My use of the word “public sphere” alludes to the work of Jürgen Habermas and the voluminous and ongoing literature surrounding his treatment of the concept. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1989 [1962]). See also discussion in Geoff Eley. “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, eds. Nicholas Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry Ortner (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 289-339, and Graham Law and Matthew Sterenberg, “Old v. New Journalism and the Public Sphere; or, Habermas Encounters Dallas and Stead,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 16 (2013), accessed February 19, 2021, . 58 See Dallas Liddle, “Salesmen, Sportsmen, Mentors: Anonymity and Mid-Victorian Theories of Journalism,” Victorian Studies 41.1 (1997), 31-68. 59 Juliette Atkinson, “Continental Currents: Paris and London,” in Journalism and the Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. Joanne Shattock (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2017): 228. 60 See, for example, Daniel C. Reed, “ Reevaluating the Vote Market Hypothesis: Effects of Australian Ballot Reform on Voter Turnout,” Social Science History 38.3-4 (2014), 277-290. 61 Stephanie Newell, “Something to Hide? Anonymity and Pseudonyms in the Colonial West African Press,” Journal of Commonwealth Literatures 45.1 (2010), 9-22. 212 to the editor, though the “Answers to Admirers…and Others” column in The Sjambok makes clear that letters would not be published unless the true identity of the writer was disclosed to Black’s satisfaction. Black, of course, was not constrained in this way, and by writing under multiple pseudonyms he could artificially inflate the size of his newspaper’s staff, as well as incite reader responses if he chose through the planting of provocative anonymous letters. Anonymity might seem like a potentially powerful tool in the hands of literate black, Coloured, and Indian South Africans, and we know that the marginalized petty bourgeoisie followed the white press closely, from the quantity of their commentary on it in their own newspapers. Yet in the early to mid-twentieth century it was very rare to encounter a letter in the daily English language press from someone identifying—either anonymously or under their own name—with one of these groups.62 Ultimately we have no way of knowing whether any of the pseudonymous letters printed in Johannesburg’s daily Anglophone press were written by people across the color line, unless they made some indication to that effect—and even if they did, there is no way to verify such a claim. It is clear, however, that even if people used anonymity to participate in discourse from which they would otherwise be excluded, they were not doing so as members of their communities, but as anonymized claimants to a default white identity. That in itself is significant, and suggests that whiteness was a clear prerequisite to commenting on topics of general interest. Just how rare was it to find black, Coloured or Indian voices in the daily English press? In August 1926 The Star published 126 letters and the Rand Daily Mail published 44. A large 62 By “identifying anonymously” I mean someone who does not sign a letter with their own name, but indicates membership of a particular racial group either within the body of the text or in a pseudonym (i.e., “Coloured Schoolteacher”) 213 percentage of these letters were submitted under pseudonyms, but of these 170 letters, only one —an obituary for a white Wesleyan missionary penned by the Rev. H. D. Hlabangane in the Rand Daily Mail—is clearly authored by a person of color. In 1931, the year Black died, the situation had not changed at all: out of 345 letters to the editor published by the two papers collectively during the month of August, only one definitely came from an African (the trade unionist and future Sjambok author H. D. Tyamzashe) and one from an Indian—a tiny 0.6 percent of the total. In August 1951—a full two decades later—one still finds only three letters out of 245 in the Rand Daily Mail that were definitely written by black and Indian correspondents (1.2 percent). Numbers were better in The Star, however, which published ten such letters out of 210 that month (4.8 percent), including one from former African National Congress (A.N.C.) president A. B. Xuma. In fact, letters from black correspondents were a frequent object of derision in white newspapers. The first issue of The Sjambok was no exception, publishing “A letter from ‘Nigger Heaven’” on page 25, ostensibly written by a Peter Matthew Mogane, asking “a business man of [Black’s] acquaintance” for a job in ridiculous purple prose.63 Letters like this, whether authentic or not, were published purely as entertainment and do not represent any kind of meaningful participation by Africans, Coloureds, or Indians in the press public sphere. It was not until thirty years after The Sjambok folded that Johannesburg’s white newspapers began to openly court black readers, and even then they did so with extraordinary caution. Joel Mervis, a veteran of the South African press in the mid-twentieth century, relates in his history of the South African Associated Newspapers the extent to which newspapers feared 63 “A letter from ‘Nigger Heaven,’” The Sjambok, April 19, 1929. 214 Rand Daily Mail The Star 7 5.25 The Sjambok (1931) 3.5 The Sjambok (1929-1931) 1.75 0 1926 1931 1936 1941 1946 1951 1956 Figure 3: Percentage of identifiably black-authored letters to the editor published in Johannesburg’s daily press in August of each year labeled, 1926-1956. The reference lines represent the same figure for The Sjambok over the course of its full run (1929-1931) and in 1931 only. Rand Daily Mail The Star 12 9 The Sjambok (1931) 6 3 The Sjambok (1929-1931) 0 1926 1931 1936 1941 1946 1951 1956 Figure 4: Percentage of identifiably black, Coloured, and Indian- authored letters to the editor published in Johannesburg’s daily press in August of each year labeled, 1926-1956. The reference lines represent the same figure for The Sjambok over the course of its full run (1929-1931) and in 1931 only. 215 losing advertisers if they published too much “black news.” In the late 1960s, when papers like the Sunday Times and Rand Daily Mail began publishing “township supplements,” great care was taken to ensure that these extra pages would be distributed exclusively in black areas, not in suburbs or city centers.64 The Rand Daily Mail as late as 1977, despite boasting a 64 per cent black readership and a reputation as the most liberal daily newspaper in the country, maintained a policy whereby so-called “black news” was prohibited from appearing before the seventh page.65 Not only that, but apartheid laws prevented the mixing of white and black reporting staffs —“township” reporters were required to use a separate suite of offices within the Rand Daily Mail headquarters, under the supervision of their white editor, Benjamin Pogrund.66 As we shall see, the Sjambok formula of mixing “black” and “white” news freely remained ahead of its time even forty years after its closure. “A Zulu’s Appreciation”: R. R. R. Dhlomo and The Sjambok The first sign that The Sjambok was destined to chart a different course from other Johannesburg newspapers appeared on July 26, 1929 under the heading “A Zulu’s Appreciation of Jeremiah.” It was a letter from R. R. R. Dhlomo, a clerk at the City and Suburban mine. At the time, Dhlomo was also the only black South African to have published a novel in English—a brief, moralistic work called An African Tragedy.67 It is impossible to know whether the letter was his first communication with Black, or whether it was written at Black’s behest after the two had already met. In any case, just two weeks later, Black started publishing Dhlomo’s short stories (see Chapter 5). 64 Joel Mervis, The Fourth Estate: A Newspaper Story (Johannesburg, South Africa: Jonathan Ball, 1989): 454. 65 Joel Mervis, The Fourth Estate, 478; 460. 66 Joel Mervis, The Fourth Estate, 455. 67 R. R. R. Dhlomo, An African Tragedy (Alice, South Africa: Lovedale Institution Press, 1928). 216 Understanding the full significance of The Sjambok in the history of South African journalism, literature, and humor, means interrogating closely the ways Stephen Black and his African correspondents communicated in its pages. In the highly race-conscious atmosphere of Johannesburg at the turn of the 1930s, their interactions were governed on both ends by elaborate subtextual codes and expectations. The rhetorical strategies of understatement, irony, and sarcasm that Black, Dhlomo, and other contributors deployed at different times in the pages of The Sjambok reflect the scale of the gulf that had to be bridged to enable sentiments and ideas to be exchanged in print across the color line. They also reveal how Black, for reasons unrelated to racial justice, permitted the bridging of this gulf, inadvertently influencing the growth and trajectory of the black South African written word for decades to come. Of course, talented African writers had been asserting themselves in African language newspapers and political organs for decades by 1929; it was inevitable that such material would reach the mainstream white-edited press eventually. What The Sjambok affords us is an early and extraordinary close- up look at how black commercial journalism in South Africa started to come into its own. Dhlomo’s initial Sjambok letter establishes a valuable baseline, exemplifying the obsequious tone black South Africans were compelled to adopt in their correspondence with white newspapers: I am a native, and were it not for that fact, sir, I would have written you long ago and expressed my thanks and admiration for your sparkling, energetic weekly. What impresses me is the way you, a white man, handle so magnificently “The Telephone Conversations of Jeremiah.” The way you use quite accurately the Zulu words in the “talks” simply warms my heart towards you; for I am a Zulu. Although, perhaps, you may not care for a mere native’s good wishes, etc., I venture to extend same to you. May your brave and unflinching paper live until it finds something to say for the bottom dog—the native!68 68 “A Zulu’s Appreciation of Jeremiah,” The Sjambok, July 26, 1929. 217 Every sentence of this brief letter is suffused with deference for Black, with Dhlomo even adding that he had demurred for a long time in writing, believing that “you may not care for a mere native’s good wishes.” Dhlomo highlights Black’s correct use of Zulu while ignoring the many pejorative malapropisms he puts into the mouths of Jeremiah and Joshua. He also says nothing about the actual content of the “talks”—despite the fact that, in Dhlomo’s later career as a humor columnist in the black commercial press, some of his bitterest satire involved news of “accidents” on farms involving the deaths of Africans.69 It seems unlikely that Dhlomo agreed with Black’s editorial stance on the case, that Nafte’s punishment was too harsh. Even so, Dhlomo studiously avoids saying anything that might be interpreted as a step beyond his station. Instead, he is all flattery: The Sjambok is “sparkling,” “energetic,” “brave,” and “unflinching,” even before it has said anything substantive for the real “bottom dog.” Careful to beg permission to speak, Dhlomo frames his one potentially critical suggestion as an optative statement— concealing the subtext that if Black were really serious about speaking up for the most downtrodden, he would devote more space to the issues of urban Africans. Black’s response matches Dhlomo’s performance of mannerly, deferential blackness point for point with measured, paternalistic whiteness: Among the many letters of appreciation that have come my way, few have given me such pleasure as this from a well-known Zulu, for it shows that I have succeeded in presenting the native with some truth, though in the vein of humour, and that I have pleased and amused both black and white. As for saying something on behalf of the under-dog, I hope it is clear to any intelligent man that strident Negropholism [sic] by reaction does the native more harm than good. Satire accomplishes more than preaching; and the Telephone Conversations of Jeremiah, I hope, will get more sympathy for and understanding of the native than a thousand sonorous leading articles.70 69 See, for example, “R. Roamer Talks About….South African Guns,” The Bantu World (Johannesburg, South Africa), January 12, 1935. 70 “A Zulu’s Appreciation of Jeremiah,” The Sjambok, July 26, 1929. 218 The most interesting aspects of this exchange have to do with things that are left unsaid: Black’s description of Dhlomo as a “well-known Zulu” acknowledges the latter’s literary accomplishments without referring to them outright, thus avoiding the charge of “Negropholism” that might come from dwelling on Dhlomo’s public reputation at greater length. Dhlomo’s deferential pose required him to avoid speaking about the content of the “Telephone Conversations”; he confines his compliments strictly to the Zulu language, the rare field over which he could claim some authority as a Zulu. Yet if Black’s response were the only thing to go by, one would think Dhlomo had praised Black’s humor—indeed, Black says nothing about the Zulu language at all, but writes only of the power of satire to amuse and instruct both black and white, and this in a rather self-righteous way as well. Did Dhlomo really mean to compliment the substance of the “Telephone Conversations”? Was Black wrong to interpret his letter as a ringing endorsement? In fact, Black was almost certainly correct to interpret Dhlomo’s words the way he did, and we can infer this not only because Black would shortly begin publishing Dhlomo’s fiction in the paper. The whole exchange is illustrative of the fraught reality of navigating white public spaces as a black man in South Africa. Though on the surface Dhlomo was merely engaging in a fulsome endorsement of Black’s Zulu, his very fulsomeness suggests something else on Dhlomo’s part—praise that he could not express openly in the pages of a newspaper because it would have been unseemly for a black man to compliment the jokes of a white man. Such a message could be only smuggled sub-textually through strategically deferential language. Yet the substance itself remains a problem. Why would Dhlomo endorse ridicule directed squarely at him and his peers? I hold 219 that the latitude of interpretation afforded by satire allowed Dhlomo to interpret the “Telephone Conversations” in a different way than Black and his white readership intended, but first we must tackle the problem of black laughter. White people were supposed to command respect in early twentieth century South Africa. They could laugh at Jeremiah Luke M’bene, but not the other way around. In the throat of a black, Coloured, or Indian person, laughter implied mockery. This is vividly clear in the literature of the 1920s. In God’s Step-Children (1924), Sarah Gertrude Millin describes the “Hottentot” charges of the Rev. Andrew Flood as mental children in the bodies of adults. “They were, in the main, stupid and indolent,” she writes, “but they really made efforts to discompose their pastor,” peppering him with insincere questions about Christianity and greeting his earnest answers with “loud, derisive laughter,” once they were out of earshot.71 It was worrisome enough that, unlike actual children, such people had fully developed bodies capable of violence; even more worrisome was the suspicion that their inner lives were fully developed too. Such unease is also obvious in the way the eponymous protagonist of William Plomer’s Turbott Wolfe (1926), sketches a Coloured servant woman: She used to wait at table in better clothes than Mrs. Fotheringhay had seen for many years, and I was fascinated to find on her face as she snaffled the dishes off the table a smile acuter than Voltaire’s, the expression of a fixed and mordant cynicism. I followed her movements carefully for some time, and came to note that as soon as she left the table her sneer faded, coming back as soon only as she herself came back. It was the fatuous face of one without a heart, whose place it is to serve lunatics; the face of an empress washing the feet of beggars; the confident delightful mien of the forewarned victim of a practical joke.72 71 Sarah Gertrude Millin, God’s Step-Children, 29; 30. 72 William Plomer, Turbott Wolfe, 24. 220 Plomer’s narrator finds this woman’s face especially noteworthy because of her position as a servant and an observer of white life. She has much more access to the details of her employers’ lives than they do to hers, casting her knowledge in a sinister light. In the same way the very publicity of the public sphere was a source of anxiety for white South Africans, whose internal fractiousness could not be hidden from literate Africans, despite the fact that in the Transvaal they could not vote or exercise the rights of citizenship.73 Black was certainly not the first white South African commentator to be sensitive to this kind of African gaze. He was nevertheless was one of the first to imagine this gaze from the perspective of a black person, and not, as in the Millin and Plomer passages above, through a white narrator. Black’s “Conversations” column of June 7, 1929, subtitled “On Votes and Polygamy,” is devoted almost entirely to this phenomenon: Well, dear friend, I am somewhat septical because all the white men say they are fighting about our souls and our spirits and the good times of future, but meanwhile methylated spirits cost 1s. 3d. for a pickled bottleful, and another shilling to give the white man who gort it against the law. And we can’t go out to a bioscope or a theatre or ride in a tram or enter a cafe or travel in the primary and secondary reserved railway accommodations, but the General Hertzog say he is going to make us all vaery happy in the Big Game Reserve of the native people, the future Nigger Heaven, and the General Smuts say he will make us still more happy with a special pass forevermore amen. But last night, my dear friend, I had no special pass and because I exceeded the time limit by half a minute to say hamba gahle to my darling Constantina in Yeoville, the Majohnny came along and I had to hide away behind a all or he would bamba me.74 73 One is reminded here of a story which spread through the Xhosa-speaking areas of the Eastern Cape in 1855-1856, to the effect that a black Russian army was at war with the British and would soon help sweep the settlers out of Africa. This rumor, which was based on distorted reports about the Crimean War, contributed to the millenarian spirit of the disastrous Cattle Killing of 1856-1858. If the African population now had more accurate information about white politics and global geopolitics, their knowledge was no less dangerous. See Sheila Boniface Davies, “Raising the Dead: The Xhosa Cattle-Killing and the Mhlakaza-Goliat Delusion,” Journal of Southern African Studies 33.1 (2007), 28-29. 74 Stephen Black, “The Telephone Conversations of Jeremiah: On Votes and Polygamy,” The Sjambok, June 7, 1929. Italics in original. Hamba gahle (modern Zulu kahle) translates to “goodbye” (literally “go well”), a Majohnny is an African police officer, and bamba means to grab or arrest. 221 Jeremiah’s speech scorns both whites and blacks: he bungles the English and language and provides a glimpse at his illicit love life, but white people come out just as badly, if not worse. Of course he and Joshua retain their signature malapropisms and mischievous natures, as the references to illegal alcohol and a furtive visit to a domestic worker in the white neighborhood of Yeoville attest. But Black does not neglect to show that white people are behind every issue Jeremiah describes, from their involvement in the illicit liquor traffic to their exclusion of Africans from city facilities—Joshua’s reply to Jeremiah is that “the white man is skelm kakulu,” a splicing of Afrikaans and Zulu which translates as very crooked, dishonest or nasty.75 Both Hertzog’s plans for a “Big Game Reserve of the native people” and Smuts’s support for a “special pass forevermore amen” are ridiculed as equally impractical. Thus, in keeping with the populist tone of The Sjambok, the duplicity of politicians lies ultimately at the root of everything. Black’s willingness to allow African characters to convey this cynical perspective almost certainly contributed to Dhlomo’s appreciation of the column, though it would not do to say so in public. As long as African writers had to rely on white patrons and editors to publish their work, they were compelled to submit to a hyper-deferential code of etiquette. Take a letter from H. D. Tyamzashe regarding interracial sex, published in the Rand Daily Mail in 1924. Tyamzashe, as we shall see, had a penchant for fiery rhetoric in his own journalism, and, as a confidant of Industrial and Commercial Union (I.C.U.) leader Clements Kadalie, was one of the most astute African voices of his time. The rules regarding the daily press, however, were different than those of labor movement advocacy. Tyamzashe’s letter opposes a legal ban, but he never states 75 Stephen Black, “The Telephone Conversations of Jeremiah: On Votes and Polygamy,” The Sjambok, June 7, 1929. 222 this outright. In fact, he begins by praising the Rand Daily Mail, writing that “for years you have rightly held that natives and coloured persons should be kept in their own social spheres.”76 Instead of stating that the paper’s editorial position is wrong, Tyamzashe demurs that “you have almost overlooked the fact that there are two sides to this question.”77 Tyamzashe argues that, since the overwhelming majority of “mixed” children have white fathers, people must recognize that “there is only one ‘colour bar’ that may keep South Africa ‘white,’ and that is the ‘social colour bar.’”78 The tone of his letter seems all the more incongruous in light of the fact that Tyamzashe was himself the product of a mixed marriage, a fact he does not mention.79 But even excerpts of Kadalie’s speeches rarely appeared in white newspapers: these rules of decorum had to be followed. Writing in 1946, R. R. R. Dhlomo’s brother (the equally illustrious H. I. E.; see Chapter 6) lamented that “despite the progress and proved ability of the African, it is difficult to imagine a European journal employing an African on its regular staff.”80 Yet this is exactly what he says Stephen Black did more than fifteen years earlier. From August 9, 1929, R. R. R. Dhlomo’s short stories on black life began to appear in The Sjambok, and, according to H. I. E., “as a staff journalist” many other items he wrote for the paper were published anonymously.81 From the 76 H. D. Tyamzashe, “Mixed Marriages,” Rand Daily Mail, September 27, 1924. 77 H. D. Tyamzashe, “Mixed Marriages,” Rand Daily Mail, September 27, 1924. 78 H. D. Tyamzashe, “Mixed Marriages,” Rand Daily Mail, September 27, 1924. 79 Tyamzashe’s father was a black Xhosa-speaker, the Rev. Gwayi Tyamzashe. The sources are not clear on the actual identity of H. D. Tyamzashe’s mother. A biography of his brother Benjamin, published in 1968 and drawing on personal interviews, names her as “Rachel MacKriel, the daughter of a colonial.” “Of Scottish and French descent,” it continues, ‘she was also a missionary,” with the implication being that she was white. Yet T. D. Mweli Skota’s 1932 African Yearly Register contains an entry for “Mrs. Gwayi Tyamzashe,” gives her maiden name as Daniels and states that her mother was Coloured and her father was a French Huguenot. Either way, the Tyamzashe brothers were the products of a multicultural, multiracial union. See D. D. Hansen, “The Life and Work of Benjamin Tyamzashe: A Contemporary Xhosa Composer” (M.A. thesis, Rhodes University, 1968): 43; The African Yearly Register, 2nd ed., ed. T.D. Mweli Skota (Johannesburg, South Africa: R.L. Esson and Co., 1932): 97. 80 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Three Famous African Authors I Knew: R. R. R. Dhlomo,” Inkundla ya Bantu (Verulam, South Africa), second fortnight, August 1946. 81 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Three Famous African Authors I Knew: R. R. R. Dhlomo,” Inkundla ya Bantu (Verulam, South Africa), second fortnight, August 1946. 223 very beginning R. R. R. Dhlomo was useful to Black’s own battles against the white literary world in South Africa, which accounts for why Black introduced Dhlomo’s first Sjambok short story, “Fateful Orders,” with a long editorial on the pretension of Afrikaans fiction.82 Whereas the new wave of Afrikaans authors, according to Black, were “self-elected pedants who are ‘educated’ in England, in Germany, in America, in France, in Scandinavia,” Dhlomo’s work embodies “a spirit that belongs entirely to the natives…written with simple and direct force because he has not copied the establishment models.”83 If Black’s own background made him the wrong kind of writer in the eyes of the commentariat, how much more embarrassing to them would it be for a black mine clerk like Dhlomo to win an audience among the working people of the Rand? “Break the Peace into Pieces!”: H. D. Tyamzashe and the Tabloid Model In H. D. Tyamzashe, Black saw not only literary acumen, but also the same pugilistic spirit that had animated him throughout his life. A week after introducing Dhlomo’s fiction, Black turned his attention to New Africa, a paper edited by H. D. Tyamzashe aligned with the section of the I.C.U. that remained loyal to Kadalie after a split with his white advisor W. G. Ballinger.84 A far cry from his earlier correspondence with the Rand Daily Mail, in Tyamzashe’s acid-tongued salvos against Ballinger’s faction Black clearly perceived a fellow fighter. Of Ballinger’s Workers’ Herald, Tyamzashe writes: The ‘come-back’ of this once powerful journal is a pitiful one. In style, literature, make- up and all, it looks as if it had been handled by a baboon suffering from St. Vitus’ dance…When ‘Journalistic Ballinger’ once starts messing about with a newspaper, its 82 “Literary Movement in South Africa,” The Sjambok, August 9, 1929. 83 “Literary Movement in South Africa,” The Sjambok, August 9, 1929. 84 See Les Switzer, “Moderate and Militant Voices in the African Nationalist Press During the 1920s,” in South Africa’s Alternative Press: Voices of Protest and Resistance, 1880s-1960s, ed. Les Switzer (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 154-155. 224 own mother would not know it. He generally produces full-sized plagiarism, a farrago of frigid nonsense, a mountain begetting a mouse, [and] a sprinkling of the bairn’s wee mind —all rolled into one.85 In the preceding paragraph, not only do we see an African editor openly refer to a white man as a baboon; we also see the same white man creatively insulted for publishing a slipshod newspaper. Attacking Ballinger’s motives or strategy as an ally of the African working class was one thing, but to call him incompetent as a journalist was an attack on his expertise. This is a very different kind of public criticism than one would usually encounter at the time, even in the black press: it directly asserts the inferiority of a white man. Drawing on our understanding of his previously-stated views, we might expect Black to be appalled by such a statement (although it did not hurt that Ballinger was an imported British do-gooder whom Black felt got what was coming to him, rather than a Nationalist politician). Yet here Black seems to have seen an opportunity. The same week Black also devoted the “Telephone Conversations” to a discussion of New Africa, with Jeremiah describing Tyamzashe as “a very learned man who writes fast when you talk slow.”86 The columns ends with Black gleefully quoting another paragraph from New Africa where Tyamzashe compares Ballinger to a hippopotamus. Over the next several months the proportion of items in The Sjambok related to black and Coloured issues steadily increased. On October 25, Black published a long letter from Tyamzashe—essentially an article—against farmers who used flimsy verbal contracts to trick black people into working in virtual slavery.87 Two weeks later, Joshua and Jeremiah’s weekly conversation revolved around efforts to deport Clements Kadalie back to his native Nyasaland. 85 “The Sjambok Flicks,” The Sjambok, August 16, 1929. 86 Stephen Black, “The Telephone Conversations of Jeremiah: About Hubert Ballinger and Hubert the Hippo. With Divigations on the Dead Giraffe, etc.,” The Sjambok, August 16, 1929. 87 H.D.T., “Slave Driving on the Farms,” The Sjambok, October 25, 1929. 225 It was a discussion that showed signs of Tyamzashe’s influence even as Black excoriated both sides: Jeremiah: Uh! Very categorical. Kadalie must now baas op for his pick and choose.88 Josuah: And Ballinger? Jeremiah: Do ditto. Josuah: What is your own opinion, umfundisi?89 Jeremiah: Public or private? Josuah: Private? Jeremiah: Very private? Josuah: Yebo.90 Damn private! Jeremiah: My opinion wetu is this one…send Kadalie back to Nyasaland, or even to the Sequestrator, if you like; put Ballinger in ballast for Glasgow or North Pole…so long as you give us black people the right to talk about our own business.91 We didn’t bring Mr. Ballinger out from Scotland, or import Clements Kadalie from the Warm Place. The one they sent away from Scotland because he was spending too much money on letter-paper and stamps; and the other was putting out so much hot air there in the Warm Place that the thermometers were going above Bloody Boiling heat, and the climate became sulphuric.92 The column then turns to a newspaper report that the Sunbeams, a black girls’ scouting organization, had raised £40 for a fund for destitute white children endorsed by Princess Alice. This touching, if irrational, expression of altruism Black then contrasts with a Rand Daily Mail headline on “STRICTER LAWS & Communism Among the Natives”—showing the gratitude with which black loyalty was repaid in South Africa.93 In this way Black charted a middle path between the foreign-born activists Kadalie and Ballinger, positing that many black South Africans did not feel represented by either faction, and furthermore stood to suffer by association with Kadalie, as the Rand Daily Mail’s inflammatory headline suggested. Black South African 88 A pun on baas (Afrikaans for “boss”) and pas op (Afrikaans for “watch out”). 89 Umfundisi is Zulu for “Reverend” 90 Yebo is Zulu for “yes” 91 “Wetu” comes from Zulu umfowethu, meaning “brother.” 92 Stephen Black, “The Telephone Conversations of Jeremiah: 3,200 Tickeys from the Black Sunbeams,” The Sjambok, November 8, 1929. 93 Stephen Black, “The Telephone Conversations of Jeremiah: 3,200 Tickeys from the Black Sunbeams,” The Sjambok, November 8, 1929. 226 readers, it occurred to Black, might be regarded as “thirties men” in their own right, also tricked and exploited by self-appointed leaders. The same logic could also apply to Coloured people; elsewhere in the same issue Black ran an exposé by “Educationist” subtitled “Cadging for Whites from Half-Starved Coloured Children,” about the same Princess Alice-affiliated charity.94 The race of “Educationist” is left unspecified. On December 13, 1929, Black published a full-page article from Tyamzashe in The Sjambok signed with the initials “H.D.T.”—nowhere indicating that he was an African. Titled “The Liquor Law is a Farce—Black Boozers are Victimised,” Tyamzashe details how ambiguous the law against “possession” of liquor was as a criminal offense. He accuses European police of planting liquor in black people’s residences during raids, and even imagines a courtroom dialogue between a police sergeant and a defence attorney (not neglecting to give the black defendants ridiculous names like a white writer would be expected to do—“John, Sixpence, Breakfast, Satan and Ofisi.”95 Articles like this, authored by Africans, were virtually unprecedented in the mainstream white press of the 1920s and directly anticipate the work of black journalists like Henry Nxumalo and Nat Nakasa more than three decades later (see Chapter 8). H. D. Tyamzashe’s contributions to The Sjambok over the course of its brief life are also highly significant from a historical perspective. This is not only because he was among the first —if not the first—black South African to regularly contribute to a mainstream white newspaper, 94 “Educationist,” “Our Children’s Day Collection,” The Sjambok, November 9, 1929. 95 “Ofisi” is a Zuluized form of the word “office.” H.D.T., “The Liquor Law is a Farce,” The Sjambok, December 13, 1929. 227 but because of the latitude Tyamzashe was able to claim as a reporter.96 Breaking the timid mould of the rare black contributor to the daily press, Tyamzashe was able to write articles on topics just as salacious as any of the other content in The Sjambok, from Coloured “sheiks” (sexual harassers) to dirty so-called pastors in separatist churches. The following passage, based off of the eyewitness testimony of a “Native servant girl,” is illustrative of his sensationalistic, risqué style: The girl, quite confident in the honesty and purity of this rogue and beast, did as he suggested. After the candle was put out, Umfundisi talked religious matters to her deep into the night until she fell asleep. In the small hours of the morning the obliging but unfortunate girl suddenly woke up to find Umfundisi in her bed…Instead of raising the alarm, the girl cried softly and asked him to leave…97 In his 2010 study Tabloid Journalism in South Africa, Herman Wasserman explores the popular tabloid newspapers in the post-apartheid era like The Sun, Son, and the Daily Voice. In twenty-first century South Africa, he argues, tabloids have filled the void vacated by the anti- apartheid “alternative media” and found ways to successfully reach people—especially members of the black, Coloured, and Indian working class—who otherwise feel excluded from a “quality press” catering to the tastes and interests of suburbanites. Even so, “while issues like gangsterism, drug use, and related social ills that pertain to the daily lives of tabloid publics are dealt with more extensively and from a different approach than in the mainstream print media,” Wasserman concedes that “the moral authority implicit in the outrage articulated in these stories mostly remains that of the establishment and the state, often linked to class.”98 Despite the fact 96 The Drum alumnus Nat Nakasa is generally credited as the first black South African columnist at a major white newspaper, though he held his post at the Rand Daily Mail for less than a year starting in March 1964. See Ryan Lenora Brown, “A Native of Nowhere: The Life of South African Journalist Nat Nakasa, 1937-1965,” Kronos 37 (2011): 51; 53. It was not until the 1970s that white-edited English language newspapers in South Africa began to feature black columnists, like Mbuyiseni Oswald Mtshali and Obed Musi. 97 H. D. Tyamzashe, “Native Religious Humbugs Too,” The Sjambok, February 20, 1931. Ellipses in original. 98 Herman Wasserman, Tabloid Journalism in South Africa (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2010): 89. 228 that readers trust the tabloids they read to a very high degree—much more so than in Britain, for example—Wasserman reckons with the fact that tabloids usually punch below their weight politically. Why is it that people stay loyal to tabloids when more critical newspapers, with voices that might provide guidance in challenging the corrupt status quo, fail to launch? The history of black periodicals in South Africa has been a tortuous one, oscillating between periods where highly political, movement-oriented publications were popular and periods dominated by organs pushing a “sex-crime-and-sports formula,” as Mojafela Moseki of The Sowetan has derisively termed it.99 Les Switzer dates the first such shift to the 1932 launch of The Bantu World, a paper that signified the birth of a “captive black commercial press” following the demise of many movement-oriented black papers in the Great Depression (see Chapters 5 and 8).100 Yet it was not until after World War II that the white-controlled commercial press began to fully embrace the sensationalistic, tabloidized recipe for black newspapers that would later become so infamous.101 Critics stress that this formula reflected white managerial efforts to redirect and mute black criticism of an oppressive regime. In the 1920s, however, the only attitude towards the city a literate African was permitted to assume in the white-controlled media was that of his (or, more rarely, her) missionary mentors. If the rights of citizenship were denied to them, so were the fantasies of consumerism and the pleasure of sensation, however fleeting or illusory. 99 Mojafela Moseki, “Black Journalists Under Apartheid,” Index on Censorship 17.7 (1988): 23. 100 See Les Switzer, “Bantu World and the Origins of a Captive African Commercial Press,” in South Africa’s Alternative Press, 189-212. 101 J. D. Froneman lists the following seven salient features of a tabloid: “strong visuals,” “snappy headlines,” “sex and sensation,” “sport and T.V.,” “informal, easy to read text,” “populist politics,” and “tips for getting on with life,” and with the exception of television coverage, white-owned black newspapers as well as magazines like Drum and Zonk! exhibited all these traits in the postwar era (television was not introduced in South Africa until the mid-1970s). See J. D. Froneman, “In Search of the Daily Sun’s Recipe for Success,” Communitas 11 (2006): 26-27. 229 One need look no further than R. R. R. Dhlomo’s African Tragedy for evidence of the painful constraints of this status quo. Weighing in at a mere forty pages, it is not difficult to see why An African Tragedy is usually consigned to a footnote in the development of black literature in South Africa, despite its status as the first published English “novel” by a black South African (Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi was written first, but not published until 1930). More of a religious tract or allegory than a novel in the aesthetic sense, Horst Zander details at length in his study Fact— Fiction—“Faction” how An African Tragedy mixes fictional and journalistic signifiers in order to serve as a “political exhortation” on what Dhlomo calls “The Evils of Town Life.”102 Zander interprets Dhlomo’s doomed protagonist, Robert Zulu, as a “South African Everyman, who both benefits and suffers from the conditions whites have created in the country.”103 This is a very generous reading of Dhlomo’s work. In fact, An African Tragedy is an unrelenting moral attack on black life in Johannesburg, presented without irony or ambivalence. The binary between rural missions like Robert Zulu’s birthplace and the evil city is absolute: there are no morally upstanding black people in Johannesburg to delay or arrest his moral downfall. The city, according to Dhlomo, is to be avoided at all costs; the only legitimate pretext for Robert Zulu to go there is for lobola (bridewealth) money, a custom whose survival among African Christians Dhlomo harshly criticizes. In a preface, Dhlomo claims that his purpose was “to investigate some of the causes which seek to undermine the peacefulness and blessedness of the newly-founded homes of the young married people,” and if we take him at his word, his solution is simple: lobola should be abolished so that young men are never induced to leave their prosperous mission communities, thus thwarting the twin urban threats of alcoholism and 102 Horst Zander, Fact—Fiction—“Faction”, 298. 103 Horst Zander, Fact—Fiction—“Faction”, 298. 230 venereal disease.104 Though An African Tragedy portrays social problems similar to those of Tyamzashe’s Sjambok articles, Dhlomo’s narration is rooted firmly in a rural missionary perspective, treating Johannesburg as a spiritual destination (akin to Hell or the biblical Babylon) as much as a physical place. In contrast, Tyamzashe’s articles for the white-edited Sjambok were revolutionary. In adopting a tabloid-style tone comparable to the other items in the paper, they presume Tyamzashe’s civic belonging—his right to speak. Tyamzashe dispensed with the elaborate etiquette governing admission to the white public sphere and wrote about sex and vice in an unflinching, matter-of-fact style. In so doing, he asserted a moral stake in urban life analogous to Stephen Black’s, despite his lack of political rights. After all, even if not a voter, Tyamzashe could still construct himself as a taxpayer, and participate in what John Fiske refers to as “a skeptical laughter which offers the pleasures of disbelief, the pleasures of not being taken in”—a laughter that is “the historical result of centuries of subordination which the people have not allowed to develop into subjection.”105 Stephen Black had a keen enough editorial sense to realize that such a perspective would sell papers, especially as his white working class readers shared a common opponent with Tyamzashe: municipal government. As the following excerpt from a report entitled “Crossing a River of Kafir Beer!” shows, Tyamzashe’s accounts of mismanagement made for scintillating reading: In this same location, after a police raid for liquor, the gutters are simply rivers of Kafir beer and skokiaan, because the raiding police, who are either too stupid or too lazy to cart 104 R. R. R. Dhlomo, preface to An African Tragedy, unpaginated. 105 John Fiske, “Popularity and the Politics of Information,” in Journalism and Popular Culture, eds. Peter Dahlgren and Colin Sparks (London, U.K.: SAGE Publications, 1992): 48. 231 away their ‘finds,’ simply upset the barrels in the gutters or in the yards. I have seen a donkey ‘paralytic tight’ from drinking the stream of Kafir beer and eating the malted corn sediment. I have also seen pools of Kafir beer in the gutter in front of decent, law-abiding, church-going residents’ houses on a Sunday morning, and in such quantities that the occupants of the house had to bridge the Kafir beer stream with a plank so as to prevent little children from getting drowned in this “Vaal River!” In a certain large location on the Rand, all the muck from the Johannesburg City sewerage is deposited only a short distance off. The effect of this callous act upon the wretched inhabitants can be better imagined than described. For years the natives of this location have made complaints to the Council and in the Press, but with no results. Yet should an epidemic break out the blame would be attached to the “dirty natives,” and it would be said that they are a danger to the health of the European community.106 In “A Painful Picture of White Stiffs,” which appeared in January 1931, H. D. Tyamzashe’s authorship is concealed, probably due to his audacious choice of subject matter: drunken whites on the streets of the poor Johannesburg slum of Ferreirastown. In this article, the ordinary power dynamic between “Europeans” and “Natives” is reversed and the reader is left with a vivid picture of white abjection. “These drunken ‘tramps’ of Ferreirastown are mostly quite peaceful and harmless,” Tyamzashe writes, deploying words ordinarily used by whites in reference to black people, “and to their credit I must say that I have on few occasions seen them quarrel among themselves; neither have I seen them interfere with Native men or women, except to ask for ‘the price of a meal,’ or a bottle of wine for 2s. 6d.”107 The particular irony of a white drunk pleading for wine from black people would not have been lost on readers, black or white. Tyamzashe then shames white readers even further, with graphic reference to bodily functions, before pivoting to a discussion of the law regarding Africans and liquor: Their “headquarters” are in Fox Street, from the vicinity of the Communist Party Hall, down the street into the heart of Ferreirastown, where they sit in groups drinking a bottle 106 H. D. Tyamzashe, “Crossing a River of Kafir Beer!” The Sjambok, December 19, 1930. 107 “A Native,” “‘A Painful Picture of White Stiffs,” The Sjambok, January 9, 1931. 232 of sherry or methylated spirits mixed with ginger-ale, after which they lie like beasts on the pavement or in doorways. They seem to have no sense of shame. The functions of Nature are performed in public and where those beings life, or sit about, are invariably streams of liquid and ejections upon the pavement. Some of them go back to the baby stage and often need napkins badly… In the morning when these people emerge from their Salvation Army “Home,” or from some Native lavatory, they look more miserable and sick than any pen can describe. All they do, and all they say, is a disgrace to “the superior race.” Yet the thing is allowed to go on unchecked. The parsons, predikants and bishops fill the papers with a farrago of nonsense, by which they attack Mr. Pirow for advocating liquor in reasonable quantities to Natives; yet here a few hundred yards from their chapels and cathedral, helpless white men are committing slow, but sure suicide, physical, moral and racial.108 But perhaps the most significant single composition of Tyamzashe’s in The Sjambok was his piece “Christmas in Bantuland is a Hectic Day of Peace and Pieces!” which appeared under his own name on Boxing Day in 1930.109 Scholars of South African literary history have long been interested in the ways black authors’ portrayals of Johannesburg have changed over time. Corinne Sandwith, in a 2018 article on R. R. R. Dhlomo’s journalism, correctly observes that, despite the shortcomings of An African Tragedy, Dhlomo was at the forefront of the transition from blanket condemnation to Drum-era identification with city ways.110 Yet “Christmas in Bantuland” predates Dhlomo’s satires of Johannesburg by three years, and abandons overt moralism entirely—it is perhaps the such first piece of English writing by a black South African to be published. Indeed, Tyamzashe’s item was intended as a one-off replacement for Black’s humorous “Telephone Conversations,” as it was published in one of the only issues in which Jeremiah and Joshua did not appear. 108 Bold in original. “A Native,” “‘A Painful Picture of White Stiffs,” The Sjambok, January 9, 1931. 109 H. D. Tyamzashe, “Christmas in Bantuland is a Hectic Day of Peace and Pieces!”, The Sjambok, December 26, 1930. 110 See Corinne Sandwith, “Reading and Roaming the Racial City: R. R. R. Dhlomo and The Bantu World,” English in Africa 45.3 (2018), 17-39. 233 “Christmas in Bantuland” provided white readers of The Sjambok with an unprecedented view of the violence occurring yearly in black areas of Johannesburg around Christmas, a frequent cause of consternation in the black press.111 The crimes and curiosities Tyamzashe describes are each subtly tied back to the realities of white rule. For, as Tyamzashe explains, “Bantuland is not the home of the Bantu alone,” but is “also the permanent abode of certain white stiffs and other won’t-works, who flounder about in the gutter.”112 Bantuland is the Rand’s shadow-self, a domain which is both opposed to everything the “civilized” city represents and its logical consequence. “These contortionists and acrobats,” Tyamzashe continues, “contribute in no small degree to the gaiety of the carnival,” adding cheekily that “this year I think it will be part of their duty to hiccough the Moochi!”—a supposedly African-inspired jazz dance whose popularity among white youth was then causing a stir.113 While some “devout Christians spend most of the day in prayer and supplication, with the Apostolics and Zionists howling and rolling in the dust after the style of Pastor Jeffreys,” a Welsh evangelist who had recently toured South Africa, “the ‘rank and file’ of Bantuland…believe in getting every ounce out of ‘kisimusi’ [Christmas],” according to Tyamzashe.114 What did this mean? 111 The description of Christmas in Johannesburg as an orgy of lust and violence is not confined to “Bantuland,” as attested by Herman Charles Bosman’s unpublished story “Johannesburg Christmas Eve,” written sometime after 1940. It describes the festival atmosphere of the city in the early 1920s, and ends with a black man, beaten within an inch of his life by a gang of rowdy white youths, urinating on the drunken ex-deputy mayor of Johannesburg on Christmas morning. See Herman Charles Bosman, “Johannesburg Christmas Eve,” in Young Bosman, ed. Craig Mackenzie (Cape Town, South Africa: Human and Rousseau, 2003), 162-191. 112 H. D. Tyamzashe, “Christmas in Bantuland is a Hectic Day of Peace and Pieces!,” The Sjambok, December 26, 1930. Italics in original. 113 H. D. Tyamzashe, “Christmas in Bantuland is a Hectic Day of Peace and Pieces!,” The Sjambok, December 26, 1930. Though it was first introduced in England, the Moochi’s popularity in South Africa provoked several Sjambok articles in late 1930 and even drew interest in the foreign press. See Eric Rosenthal, “South Africa Aroused Over Moochi Dance,” The China Press (Shanghai, China), February 9, 1931. 114 H. D. Tyamzashe, “Christmas in Bantuland is a Hectic Day of Peace and Pieces!,” The Sjambok, December 26, 1930. 234 Now the creed of the rank and file of Bantuland is that on Christmas Day there is no law. They believe that the constitution of the land has been suspended, and that this is a day on which all records should be smashed to pieces. On that sacred day all “cases”—criminal or civil—have to be settled with dop, bicycle chains or carving knives…or even a splash of petrol and the application of a lighted match. Yi kisimusi akuko tyala. (“It is Christmas, there is no crime,” they say.) The festival generally begins in the morning with the drinking of brandy and skokiaan, and the older the day gets, the bolder the madodas become.115 Or, as the Dutchmen would say: “Hoe laater, hoe kwaater.”116 At this rapid rate Christmas Day often ends up in a small war, with a murder or two thrown in for luck. That’s nothing, of course, because Christmas day is a day on which to break the peace into pieces! The Moochi dancers of the Summer and Pride Mine choose this day to go out and challenge in mortal combat the Xosas of the Ship’s Anchor G.M. It is on this day that Satana will walk from Springs to Randfontein and ask Devil why he had robbed him of his wife. There is so much to do on this day that in some cases a whole week’s work is crowded into 24 hours. It is simply hustle and bustle like America. There is no time for talk. If you argue the point when a question is put to you, you will be left standing like Lot’s wife.117 There are many different satirical strategies on display in this passage. Among the most obvious is Tyamzashe’s deft use of multiple languages, Xhosa but also Afrikaans (the language of the Nationalists in government as well as most of the white working class) to describe drunken anger. There is also the incongruity of settling “cases” with liquor, knives, and bicycle chains, the stereotypically humorous names “Satana” (Satan) and Devil, the improbability of Satana’s fifty-five mile walk between Randfontein and Springs, and, finally, the wonderfully understated comparison to America at the end. Tyamzashe turns the familiar cliché of a Christmas busy with visits on its head: such visits do not indicate “goodwill toward men,” but rather violent score- settling. Crucially, Tyamzashe asks the reader to identify with this “rank and file”—his adoption 115 Amadoda means “men” in Zulu and Xhosa. 116 Afrikaans and Dutch for “the later, the angrier.” 117 Ellipsis and italics in original. H. D. Tyamzashe, “Christmas in Bantuland is a Hectic Day of Peace and Pieces!,” The Sjambok, December 26, 1930. 235 of a satirical tone does not require him to explicitly denounce what he is writing about like Dhlomo does in An African Tragedy: In Bantuland, on Christmas Day, if you turn the corner and walk into a new war, don’t ask questions. Take off your coat and go for the nearest man; strike anybody and everybody, because it is not a fight of two sides, it is a mix-up in which nobody knows who is friend and who foe. If your brains are scattered on the pavement it is nothing; it is merely translating Christmas peace into Christmas pieces. And, moreover, even if you don’t fight, you’ll still get Merry Christmas “hell!” Yi kisimusi akuko tyala. It is Christmas…118 That embrace of moral ambiguity, just as much as its unapologetic sarcasm, is what makes “Christmas in Bantuland” so important. The suggestion that Bantuland is not so much a specific place as a dimension of Johannesburg’s geography, also inhabited by down-and-out whites, directly challenges the axiomatic idea of Johannesburg as a white city. Bantuland is more than a neighbourhood or a group of people: it is a burlesque of the values and traditions of the dominant culture, inverted along the axis of the color line. The pandemonium that prevails there during the festive season is a natural result of this division—“peace” into “pieces.” For Tyamzashe to condemn these scenes in agelastic terms would have exposed him as a “respectable” African consigned to the margins of the white world, an object of charity no less than the white drunks of which he writes. Instead, Tyamzashe identifies with the squalor in order to demand attention from his readers and momentarily force them to confront their prejudices. Here, then, we can already perceive in the early 1930s the cynical, sarcastic mood that writers like Casey Motsisi and Dugmore Boetie would deploy to such devastating effect decades later.119 As with Black’s “Telephone Conversations,” ambiguity was also a key part of Tyamzashe’s 118 Ellipsis and italics in original. H. D. Tyamzashe, “Christmas in Bantuland is a Hectic Day of Peace and Pieces!,” The Sjambok, December 26, 1930. 119 See Chapter 8 of the present study, below, and Dugmore Boetie [Douglas Mahonga Buti], Familiarity is the Kingdom of the Lost, eds. Vusumuzi R. Kumalo and Benjamin N. Lawrence (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2020 [1969]). 236 strategy in appealing to The Sjambok’s eclectic audience. “Satire accomplishe[d] more than preaching” because segregationist whites were free to ridicule Tyamzashe’s portrait of black life without confronting “Negropholism,” while sympathetic readers could still be scintillated by his boldness. In a movement-focused paper such ambiguity would not have been helpful, but The Sjambok was a tabloid, and either interpretation would bode well for its bottom line. “Should Natives Discuss Boers’ Love Affairs?”: Black Sjambok Readers Talk Back Black’s pursuit of urban African readers did not mean that The Sjambok did not continue to publish ardently segregationist contributions.120 Yet the paper published more and more letters from black correspondents as time went on—including several from very prominent figures in African politics. P. D. Segale, secretary of the Johannesburg branch of the Transvaal African Congress, was a regular correspondent.121 R. V. Selope-Thema, later R. R. R. Dhlomo’s boss as editor of The Bantu World, contributed an article on liquor policy (“Tots for Natives”) that Black declined to use on the grounds that the topic was not newsworthy enough at the time.122 In his efforts to cater to The Sjambok’s eclectic readership, Black was ever willing to stir the pot of controversy, playing bigoted white readers, Africans, and other demographic groups off of each other in order to boost the paper’s circulation. The letters of ardently anti-black writers like “Regop” of Vryheid could be relied upon to inspire spirited responses from black readers, in a self-sustaining cycle. To cite one illustrative example, Regop’s letter of October 17, 1930 referring to “native umfaans and ‘isifebes’” (boys and whores), for example, received a 120 See, for example, W. S. Chadwick, “What is this Native ‘Uplift’ Business?,” The Sjambok, January 16, 1931. 121 Segale’s first published letter to The Sjambok objected to the use of the word “savage” to characterize African workers involved in riots at Crown Mines, rebutting Black with examples of white killers. See “People’s Forum,” The Sjambok, February 7, 1930. Biographical information on Segale can be found in “Memorial Service to the Late P. D. Segale,” The Bantu World, July 10, 1937. 122 “Answers to Admirers…and Others,” The Sjambok, January 16, 1931. 237 strong response two weeks later from Edward Q. Solo, the editor of the A.N.C.’s African Herald newspaper, who excoriated Regop in audacious terms: The abusive word isifebes used by your correspondent ‘Regop’ readily marks him as a specimen of the so-called ‘linguist.’ Doubtless the word is beyond your correspondent’s comprehension: otherwise he would surely not (with the hope of making his letter impressive) have used it. It is absurd, if not impudent, of anyone to suggest that the mere going about of natives and their women-folk, should subject them to insult like this. Hatred of natives is, with ‘Regop,’ a tradition, a passion, and a religious duty. The presence of natives is gall and worm-wood to him…I would to God that he could take the place of the native for a day, after which he would be sadder but wiser.123 More significant than Solo’s principled objection to Regop is his insinuation that—under the guise of giving him the benefit of the doubt—Regop used the word isifebe without understanding it merely to impress his readers. This is an inversion of the charge (stretching back to Kaatje Kekkelbek and perpetuated by Jeremiah and Joshua in the “Telephone Conversations”) that literate Africans’ educations were shallow and that their ideas were not to be taken seriously. Following this with a reference to Regop’s history of hateful letters, Solo confronts Regop much more assertively than would be permitted in The Star or the Rand Daily Mail. In 1929, the “People’s Forum” of The Sjambok published four letters out of 346, or just over one percent, from correspondents identifying themselves as black. In 1930 this percentage rose to almost three percent (3.6 percent if Coloured and Indian letters are included). In the first three months of 1931 (the final months of the paper’s history), 6.9 per cent of letters were from black, Coloured, or Indian correspondents—still a small fraction of the total, but almost an order of magnitude ahead of the English language daily press, which would not achieve such levels 123 “The People’s Platform,” The Sjambok, October 31, 1930. A letter from Solo soliciting funds for his newspaper appears in The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, vol. 10, ed. Robert A. Hill (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2006): 548-549. 238 Black Black, Coloured, and Indian 7.00 5.25 3.50 1.75 0.00 Apr.-Jun. 1929 July-Dec. 1929 Jan.-Jun. 1930 July-Dec. 1930 Jan.-March 1931 Figure 5: Percentage of identifiably black, Coloured, and Indian-authored letters to the editor published in The Sjambok over time. until the 1950s (Fig. 5). It is impossible to know how wide readership of The Sjambok was among Johannesburg’s literate Africans, but by the spring of 1930 it was clear that they made up a considerable fraction of the paper’s readership. Parallels with the post-apartheid South African tabloid landscape are hard to miss. The Daily Sun, the biggest newspaper in the country by circulation, is supported by an overwhelmingly black readership. It was founded in 2002 by Deon du Plessis, “a white hyena, gun loving boer,” who, according to fellow journalist Mandy de Waal, “gave SA’s blue collared hordes news worth reading—a tabloid every flailing newspaper’s trying to copy”124 Like 124 Mandy De Waal, “Deon du Plessis: A Man Truly Larger Than Life Goes on the Great Sabbatical in the Sky,” Daily Maverick (Johannesburg, South Africa), September 12, 2011, accessed February 23, 2021, . 239 Stephen Black, Du Plessis also enjoyed the backing of one of South Africa’s biggest corporates —Naspers, the direct successor of De Nasionale Pers Beperkt, which first published De Burger in 1914. Yet ties to apartheid South Africa’s most infamous media house proved no impediment to the Daily Sun’s success, for, as Herman Wasserman put it in his 2010 study, a level of trust in the tabloids that one might expect to be reserved for public institutions like the police, the courts, and the government. Readers’ claims that they would phone the tabloids with matters concerning crime and/or social evils confirm tabloid editors’ remarks that readers would call them before they would call the police—resulting in tabloid reporters often arriving at crime scenes well before the authorities would.125 This trust did not mean that all items in a given tabloid were accepted at face value by readers, but rather reflected the perceived familiarity of the tabloids with readers’ everyday lives. Wasserman even suggests that dividing fact from fiction in papers like The Daily Sun—often a convivial social experience—can be both a source of pleasure and a form of empowerment, allowing readers to “gain a certain measure of control over news narratives.”126 With this in mind, perhaps we can take seriously another letter from Edward Q. Solo, who wrote in February 1930 that “each time I read The Sjambok it brings to memory the Day of Vengeance foretold in the Bible…It is further stated in the Sacred writings that some shall awake to shame and contempt as they will be seen in their true colours…for this, The Sjambok in Africa seems to be the paper specially selected as a forerunner of the critical period.”127 For the first time, a commercial paper in South Africa was devoting significant weekly space to writing by black people—fiction, letters, and reporting; even satire. 125 Herman Wasserman, Tabloid Journalism in South Africa, 139. 126 Herman Wasserman, Tabloid Journalism in South Africa, 143. 127 “People’s Forum,” The Sjambok, February 21, 1930. 240 The white press in Johannesburg had hitherto been doggedly opposed to any kind of rights for Africans, either in public or professional life. Moreover, the situation in South Africa was worsening with time, rather than improving. When John Tengo Jabavu, the founder of the Cape-based Imvo Zabantsundu, joined South Africa’s Newspaper Press Union (N.P.U.) in 1892, he was admitted unanimously and attended N.P.U. congresses regularly over the next decade.128 In 1912, however—without Jabavu present—George Kingswell of the Rand Daily Mail introduced a motion banning any “coloured or native newspaper proprietor” from N.P.U. membership.129 The resulting colour bar remained in place until 1975.130 Now, as an already fractious and unsettled South Africa entered the Great Depression, a populist white editor was throwing caution to the wind, inviting black voices to weigh in on some of Johannesburg’s most sordid secrets. The praise lavished on The Sjambok by Africans like E. Q. Solo proved enduring. As remembered by H. I. E. Dhlomo, The Sjambok “recognised neither class, colour, race nor rank. High and low, rich and poor, black and white meant nothing to this once famous and well- feared journal. Wrong was its enemy, its red rag for attack; right its guiding principal and ideal.”131 Nowhere, however, was the novel tenor of the dialogue between Stephen Black and his African readers more noticeable than in their discussion of Solomon (Sol) Tshekisho Plaatje’s novel Mhudi in late 1930.132 In contrast to the rest of the white press, which almost totally ignored Plaatje’s novel, Black devoted significant space to Mhudi, provoking revealing 128 Joel Mervis, The Fourth Estate, 34. 129 Joel Mervis, The Fourth Estate, 34. 130 Joel Mervis, The Fourth Estate, 35. 131 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Three Famous African Authors I Knew,” Inkundla ya Bantu (Verulam, South Africa), second fortnight, August 1946. 132 Sol T. Plaatje, Mhudi (Alice, South Africa: Lovedale Press, 1930). 241 comments from African correspondents about the boundaries of black expression.133 Their letters made explicit a number of themes we have already encountered in this chapter, and the discussion was followed closely by many literate Africans who were shortly to feature prominently in the pages of The Bantu World, the premier black South African newspaper of the 1930s. “I remember it as if it were but yesterday,” wrote H. I. E. Dhlomo, of the day in 1930 when Plaatje visited Black’s office to receive feedback on his novel.134 Though it is unclear why H. I. E. Dhlomo was at The Sjambok’s offices for this particular meeting (nothing of his ever appeared in The Sjambok, at least under his own name), the younger Dhlomo would go on to become one of the first and most prolific black South African playwrights (see Chapter 6), rendering the tableau all the more notable in hindsight. In late October “The Telephone Conversations of Jeremiah” featured a discussion of Sol Plaatje’s newly published novel Mhudi. A straight review appeared two weeks later under the heading “Natives—Don’t Ape White Men! What I Think of Some “Black Art.’” In the “Telephone Conversations” Jeremiah describes Mhudi as “a first class book,” whose “bad points are like the pale side of a bastard…from the white part of the family,” a statement mixing flattery with a sober appeal for Plaatje to respect the limits of his literary capacity, as determined by his race.135 For Black, the chief shortcoming 133 Brian Willan discusses Black’s treatment of Mhudi in The Sjambok in his authoritative biography of Plaatje, though he does not discuss Sjambok readers’ responses. See Brian Willan, Sol Plaatje: A Life of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, 1876-1932 (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 2018): 503-504. 134 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Three Famous African Authors I Knew,” Inkundla ya Bantu (Verulam, South Africa), second fortnight, August 1946. 135 Stephen Black, “The Telephone Conversations of Jeremiah: The First Full-Length Bantu Novel,” The Sjambok, October 30, 1930. If this position on Mhudi’s merits seems somewhat confused, it appears to have been genuine. In a private letter to W. C. Scully written in October 1930, Black admits that he read Mhudi “with great interest and a good deal of pleasure,” but also maintained that it was “crude.” See Stephen Black to W. C. Scully, October 23, 1930, W. C. Scully Papers, (A1312.bf3), Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, quoted in Brian Willan, Sol Plaatje, 503-504; 539-540. 242 of the book was Plaatje’s attempt to emulate a “white” style of writing, and the inclusion of a romance among white characters. For Black, the idea of a black male writer imagining the romantic life of a white woman was an unseemly act of voyeurism, as well as a reminder of the ubiquity and danger of the silent African witness to white life. This results in an ironic sequence of dialogue, given Black’s personal history with Kipling: Jeremiah: Where Sol Plaatje followed his native line of thought his book is very good. But he has tried to please the white people and “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” Josuah: Is it? Jeremiah: Now you know that white men do not write us as we are. Josuah: Still, some of them, like Rider Haggard, are very funny. Jeremiah: The way the white men write about natives reminds me of what an Indian once told me about Rudyard Kipling. Josuah: Who is that one? Jeremiah: The great English Indian writer. But the Indians laugh at him because he sees them only from outside. Now this is the way of white men with ourselves. They only see the outside…the black skin, the smoky eyes, the wooly head… Josuah: Yebo. Jeremiah: And so Sol Plaatje sees the white men! He sees their white skin and blue eyes and hair like itshoba, but he does not see into their hearts.136 Jeremiah goes on to observe that the white love story is “silly…like white men’s books,” and that “some of the white people will not like it” because of that, advising Plaatje to devote more space to his black protagonists, Mhudi and Ra-Thaga. In the end he appeals to Joshua: “let us give up ape-ing the white man and be more addicted to ourselves.”137 In his November 14 review, Black quotes several passages of Mhudi where he felt “the white-wash brush of the white man” had overshadowed Plaatje’s story, although he maintained that “nothing that Sol Plaatje has written is 136 Stephen Black, “The Telephone Conversations of Jeremiah: The First Full-Length Bantu Novel,” The Sjambok, October 30, 1930. Ellipses and italics in original. An ishoba (in modern orthography) can mean an animal’s bushy tail but most commonly refers to the switches, topped with long tail hairs from cattle or antelope, traditionally carried by Zulu diviners—a somewhat obscure reference that would have been lost on most white Sjambok readers. See Axel-Ivar Berglund, Zulu Thought-Patterns and Symbolism (Cape Town, South Africa: David Philip, 1976): 184-185. 137 Axel-Ivar Berglund, Zulu Thought-Patterns and Symbolism, 184-185. 243 so ridiculous as the school of Bertram Mitford-Rider Haggard used to give us.”138 Black’s accusation that Plaatje’s prose was somehow “too white” both broadly reflects the segregationist tenor of the few other initial reviews of Mhudi by white authors and anticipates later scholarly debates over censorship by Lovedale Press and the authenticity of Plaatje’s text as published.139 Yet unlike the reviews of Mhudi published in the University of the Witwatersrand’s Bantu Studies journal and the London-based Times Literary Supplement, Black’s comments were published in a South African paper aimed at the general public.140 Black South African literature had never before enjoyed such a platform. The most interesting contributions to the discourse on Mhudi, however, came from black Sjambok readers, who read Black’s review in a different way than he had perhaps intended. On November 21, under the headline “Should Natives Discuss Boers’ Love Affairs?” Black published two long letters—one from a close friend of Plaatje’s, David M. Ramoshoana of Hopetown, and the other from a Mr. F. Mokalia (probably a misspelling of Mokaila) of Mafeking. Both letters address what the authors understood as the meat of Black’s criticism— that an African author had no right to describe a love story between white people in his book. 138 Betram Mitford (1855-1914) and H. Rider Haggard (1856-1925) were popular English writers of colonial romances and adventure novels in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. See Stephen Gray, Southern African Literature, 93-132. “The Editor of The Sjambok” [Stephen Black], “Natives—Don’t Ape White Men!,” The Sjambok, November 14, 1930. 139 In the late 1970s, the manuscript of an early version of Mhudi was rediscovered and released through the efforts of Tim Couzens and Stephen Gray, who charged that the 1930 “Lovedale edition” had been censored and bowdlerized, separating the text from its roots in the oral tradition (almost precisely what Black argued, albeit in less academic terms). Brian Willan discounted this interpretation in a 2015 article, arguing that Lovedale Press records record no sign of pressure being exerted on Plaatje and stressing that the revisions in the earlier manuscript were made by Plaatje himself. Regardless of which side is in the right, the debate speaks powerfully to the role of white cultural gatekeepers in influencing and assessing “black literature” in South Africa. See Tim Couzens and Stephen Gray, “Printers’ and Other Devils: The Texts of Sol T. Plaatje’s Mhudi,” Research in African Literatures 9.2 (1978), 198-215; Brian Willan, “What ‘Other Devils’? The Texts of Sol T. Plaatje’s Mhudi Revisited,” Journal of Southern African Studies 41.6 (2015), 1331-1347. 140 See Brian Willan, Sol Plaatje, 503-504. 244 Their method of rebutting Black, however, involved stressing their expertise as students of South African history. Ramoshoana’s letter is longer than Mokaila’s, and strikes a more playful tone. First, he critiques both “eminent” and “third-rate” white writers’ “nasty caricatures” of black people.141 “Mhudi’s references to Europeans are all based on historical facts—but not all the facts,” he coyly concedes: “Mhudi on pp. 129 and 130, should have given us a few more ugly truths about ‘her husband’s friends’”—that is, the Voortrekkers.142 Then he embarks upon something of a flourish. In a winking parody of white rhetoric, Ramoshoana dismisses Jeremiah as “a town bred native with very little knowledge of rural life,” and tells a story about a farm worker who returns from “Bleskopfontein” (“Bald Head Spring”) to convince his young “master” to marry “not Johanna, nor Petronella, but Magdalena” who lives on a farm in that district.143 Ramashoana’s story, though presenting a romanticized view of rural race relations, illustrates the fact of black people’s involvement in the love lives of whites while invoking comical Afrikaans names and the stereotype of large Boer families. Ramashoana concludes with an anti-segregation message that demonstrates a knowledge of South African history far beyond the ken of the average white Sjambok reader: It is all very well for Jeremiah to say to a native author, using English ink, pen and stationery, should not mention Europeans in his English book. Separate development may have been practicable at Gondokoro, in the 17th century, but it will not answer to- day in South Africa… When Mhudi was born, Moffat was busy printing native spelling books at Kuruman, the Cambells and Chapmans were trading at Tlhakalothou; Commissioner Melville was planning the spread of British Dominion among Griquas and Bechuana; and traders were shooting elephants in Zululand and Bechuanaland. Mhudi and her husband 141 “Should Natives Discuss Boers’ Love Affairs?,” The Sjambok, November 21, 1930. 142 “Should Natives Discuss Boers’ Love Affairs?,” The Sjambok, November 21, 1930. 143 “Should Natives Discuss Boers’ Love Affairs?,” The Sjambok, November 21, 1930. 245 dodged Europeans through bush and veld; and finished up by finding Hodgsons and Archbells preaching a white man’s religion to her people in Thaba Ncho, where she was soon to see crowds of Dutch-men first as trekkers and later as refugees.144 Ramashoana thus makes the case that Black has erred on historical grounds, not appreciating the extent to which the lives of white and black were already entangled in the Southern African interior by the mid-nineteenth century. By suggesting that Plaatje has a deeper understanding of the past than Black, he not only challenges the notion that historical awareness is a purely European competency, but re-centers the historical narrative on an already dynamic Southern African interior—a place Boers fled to as refugees, rather than a space that they penetrated as settlers. Mokaila’s contribution also invokes history, applauding Plaatje for rebutting the notion that “we natives are interlopers in this land.” But whereas Ramashoana’s letter adopts a more detached tone, Mokaila makes a more visceral, emotional appeal: In these days of trams and telephones, Mr. Editor, how can anyone, unless he moves with his eyes closed, avoid mentioning white people in a South African book? We hurry off to work in the morning to the white man’s service, trot around all day, from office to his garage, and his emporium, read his newspapers when we get the chance; and, at the close of day, wonder if we have earned enough to finance the administration of the Government of ‘White South Africa!’ Even on pay day the predominant anxiety is the white man’s poll taxes and pass fees! At night, the last thought in our minds is the white man’s orders for the next day; and, when asleep our best dreams are about white people, and our nightmares too; so that a South African story without white men is no story.145 The irony of Mokaila’s letter is bitter, and, as we shall see, speaks eloquently to the tensions inherent in Black’s project. Mokaila exposes the ideal of literary segregation for what it is: a fantasy, just like segregation in other spheres of life. South Africa’s economy and social 144 “Should Natives Discuss Boers’ Love Affairs?,” The Sjambok, November 21, 1930. 145 “Should Natives Discuss Boers’ Love Affairs?,” The Sjambok, November 21, 1930. 246 institutions rested on the assumption that white and black comprised two completely separate groups, with separate capacities, values, and ideas about the good life, while in reality black people were aware of their essential role in maintaining the infrastructure of white life. Like Ramashoana, Mokaila boldly asserts black subjectivity, and implicitly argues that if Stephen Black finds the African mind and soul opaque, Africans who spend their lives navigating white spaces and structures do not necessarily experience white people in the same way. Black’s response to both men was defensive. Maintaining that his intention was never to argue that it was unseemly for Africans to write about white people, lovers or otherwise, Black confined himself to purely literary ground: the subplot was a distraction from the main thrust of the story. In doing so, he took a shot at one of the mainstream magazines he loathed: There are about five times as many natives in South Africa as there are white men, yet that popular paper “The Outspan,” has a stern law against the introduction of any natives into the matter printed in its pages! This policy is justified by the words: “Our people are interested in their own problems and emotions.” Now we don’t agree with “The Outspan” in this matter at all; indeed we violently disagree! But the fact remains that “The Outspan,” on this policy, has built up what is perhaps the largest circulation in the Union. So that apparently the majority of people who pay for popular fiction, find it quite easy to read about one-fifth of a nation that never meets the other four-fifths! Surely then Mhudi and the Basutos a century ago could have been written of without the introduction of a pair of white lovers?146 In other words, if Outspan writers could write about Africa without mentioning black people, it would be only fair for Plaatje to neglect white people. Black was attempting to catch Mokaila and Ramashoana off-guard, spinning his latently segregationist stance as something radical and progressive. Yet the pair were not silenced. 146 “Should Natives Discuss Boers’ Love Affairs?,” The Sjambok, November 21, 1930. 247 Ramoshoana replied to this last statement of Black’s in a letter published December 5, 1930. “I know that magazine enjoys a wide circulation amongst our people, he insisted, “largely because it is one of the few South African journals which spell ‘Natives’ with a capital N.”147 Given Black’s fondness for the word “Kafir,” we may interpret this as a subtle dig at Black as well as praise for The Outspan.148 Moreover, Ramoshoana wrote, The Outspan did publish stories featuring black characters. Black in his reply maintained that he was “Editor of the first and perhaps the only white man’s paper that has tried to help Mr. Plaatje and his book,” yet conceded Ramashoana’s point. “It has presumably repented and altered its ways for the better since the time its brilliant editor rejected one of my best short stories purely on the grounds of the Native interest,” Black wrote.149 It is an exchange that reveals black readers’ definite presence in South Africa’s periodical audience, as well as the modest expectations they had for these publications. But instead of eliciting unqualified gratitude from African readers for his various efforts, Black was held accountable by correspondents like Ramoshoana in a way that would never have made it to the press in other “white man’s papers.” To understand this is to appreciate the complex position of The Sjambok in the history of South African journalism and literature. The debate over Mhudi went to the heart of Black’s paradoxical enterprise. One of Black’s lifelong bugbears, after all, was the need to South Africanize South African journalism, just as he had sought to South Africanize the South African theatre with his plays. That meant 147 “The People’s Platform,” The Sjambok, December 5, 1930. Bold in original. 148 In a representative item from December 1929, Black exhorts Africans to embrace the word “Kafir” in the original Arabic sense of meaning an “unbeliever.” “Let them not only accept it,” he argued, “but glory in it and what it stands for…scepticism, unbelief, doubt in regard to the white man. Let them take it as a word with which to challenge the hypocrisy, the injustice, and the illogicality of the superior race in some of its dealings and attitudes.” See “More Sjambok Flicks,” The Sjambok, December 27, 1929. Ellipsis in original. 149 “The People’s Platform,” The Sjambok, December 5, 1930. Bold in original. 248 more than merely representing black characters like Jeremiah and Joshua. It meant stirring the pot in a fundamentally unprecedented way. In The Sjambok Black opened up space for people of all races to contribute to a paper that was sometimes exciting, sometimes sleazy, but always interesting (at one point he even toyed with the idea of starting a “Sjambok League” to fight social ills).150 Meanwhile, Africans read The Sjambok because it afforded them new opportunities to express themselves and demonstrate their moral membership in urban society. White people, however, still read The Sjambok because Black still stood for white supremacy and most forms of racial segregation—it was a pro-Pact publication and one Nationalist candidate even bought full-page advertisements in the paper.151 The more these groups sparred with Black or with each other, within reason, the better for Black’s bottom line—and that of his boss I. W. Schlesinger. By actively and effectively courting an audience of literate Africans alongside working-class white readers, Black subverted structures of racial segregation and white supremacy—not out of a liberal or left wing position, but because it sold more newspapers. There was at least one important casualty of Black’s experimentation with multiracial populism: his relationship with D. C. Boonzaier. Originally a contributor to the paper under the pseudonym “Nemo,” Boonzaier was no longer on speaking terms with Black by March 1930. While he was initially thrilled to have another income stream publishing caricatures in The Sjambok, Boonzaier continued to write long and unwelcome letters (sadly lost) begging Black to turn away from what he saw as “low and degrading” subject matter.152 The two began squabbling over payments for caricatures almost immediately after The Sjambok’s launch, and 150 “The Sjambok League,” The Sjambok, May 2, 1930. 151 See, for example, the back page of The Sjambok, March 21, 1930. 152 BD, vol. 31, pg. 185, MSC. 4, box 7 (March 21, 1931), NLSA, Cape Town. 249 eventually Black asked Boonzaier to direct all correspondence to his business manager, closing their personal correspondence for good. It was the end of an era. Boonzaier’s disappointment is the constant subtext of Black’s final letters, Black having previously boasted that his paper “word for word carr[ied] more weight” than the daily press, and was “read by nearly every member of Parliament.”153 In his final surviving letter to Boonzaier, Black’s exhaustion with the latter’s intellectualism is apparent. The severity of his fatigue is underscored by an uncharacteristically resigned reference to Schlesinger: After a life of struggle, I have come to realise the utter uselessness of any pose or any form of snobbery, intellectual or otherwise; & now I find pleasure in the society only of simple people like Kafirs, or animals, & above all I find the pretensions of artists & so- called ‘intellectuals’ boring & irritating. What they think about my journalism or views on life…is exactly what I should not think. So please avoid telling me your views or their views. I have enough strife & work & enemies without leaving my ribs open to knife thrusts from the people who should reciprocate good-will instead of hostility…I am well paid to do a job in a certain way & it is the opinion of South Africa that I do it well. I am not here to run a paper to the desires of anyone but my employers & myself; I am not trying to emulate The Cape or The Outspan or The Nation, & any time wasted on arguments is robbery of my employers. If I let myself be irritated by my personal ‘friends’, & my work suffers, it is unfair to my employers.154 Given his reputation for exaggeration, it is tempting to speculate on why exactly Black steered The Sjambok in the direction he did. Perhaps, after decades of setbacks and disappointment at the hands of South Africa’s elite cultural tastemakers, Black was simply out to embarrass them at all costs. Perhaps he no longer cared. Certainly the last year of his life seems to resemble a blaze of glory in retrospect: reckless behavior followed by a pile-up of libel cases, followed quickly by his dismissal and a rapid decline in his health. A doctor, James Peter Coetzee, sued Black, The Sjambok, its printers, and its distributors for two separate stories that 153 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, January 30, 1930, pg. 3, MSC. 11, box 4, folder 54, NLSA, Cape Town; Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, July 11, 1929, pg. 2, box 4, folder 53. 154 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, March 15, 1930, pgs. 1-2, MSC. 11, box 4, folder 54. 250 implied malpractice, with one involving the death of a patient; he was awarded £1,500 at the end of December 1930.155 Charlotte Girdlestone of the Gloria Lighting Company did the same over a story claiming her company’s agent had extorted a Johannesburg family; she sued for £7,000 and settled for £650 after Black’s death.156 Louise Mvemve, a famous traditional healer, also sued Black over a story he ran, and the case had proceeded to discovery by the end of April 1931.157 But the final straw was a suit brought by Sydney Hayden of Kinemas, Ltd., the company that The Sjambok had been founded in large part to harass.158 Black had run a series of stories in The Sjambok accusing Hayden and his brother David Heydenreich of dodgy business dealings, and once it appeared that their actions had a reasonable chance of success, Schlesinger elected to pull the plug on Black’s libel insurance. The suit was for £25,000, and the Witwatersrand Local Division found Black personally liable for £4,500, cutting off all avenues of hope for his paper.159 By the end of March 1931 The Sjambok was a thing of the past, and Black, still harried by litigation, was once again out of a job. “By then,” Stephen Gray relates in his biography of Herman Charles Bosman, “Black reeked of whisky; he was so far gone with cirrhosis of the liver that he could only put down avocado pears mashed with a teaspoon.”160 It was an ignominious end, by any measure. 155 See James Peter Coetzee vs. Union Periodicals, Ltd., Stephen Black, The Central News Agency, Ltd., and The Technical Press, Ltd. (WLD—LEER—0—01—543/1930), NASA, Pretoria. 156 See Charlotte Elizabeth Girdlestone vs. Union Periodicals, Ltd., Stephen Black, The Central News Agency, Ltd., and The Technical Press, Ltd. (WLD—LEER—0—01—351/1931), NASA, Pretoria. 157 See Louise Mvemve vs. Union Periodicals, Ltd., Stephen Black, The Central News Agency, Ltd., and The Technical Press, Ltd. (WLD—LEER—0—01—435/1931), NASA, Pretoria. For more on Mvemve, see Catherine Burns, “The Letters of Louise Mvemve,” in Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self, ed. Karin Barber (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2006), 78-112. 158 See Sydney Hayden vs. Union Periodicals, Ltd., Stephen Black, The Central News Agency, Ltd., and The Technical Press, Ltd. (WLD—LEER—0—01—57/1931), NASA, Pretoria. 159 The case is also summarized in Stephen Gray, Life Sentence: A Biography of Herman Charles Bosman (Cape Town, South Africa: Human and Rousseau, 2005): 156. 160 Stephen Gray, Life Sentence, 157. 251 Even in death, however, The Sjambok influenced the history of the South African press in numerous ways. Despite severing his relationship with Black, Schlesinger invested in another audacious tabloid, The Sunday Express, in 1934. Though he was convinced to sell it on the eve of World War II, his actions reflect a continued belief in the power of populist journalism to make money and influence public opinion.161 Furthermore, as we shall see in the next chapter, black journalists who interacted with The Sjambok in its day—writers like R. R. R. Dhlomo and R. V. Selope-Thema—would go on to build reputations as pillars of black politics and journalism in South Africa for decades to come. The black South African commercial press that emerged later in the 1930s allowed Africans to express themselves creatively and intellectually like never before under white rule, as integral members of the urban whirl, as well as participants in consumer culture—developments The Sjambok directly anticipated. Yet just as The Sjambok was ultimately beholden to Stephen Black and I. W. Schlesinger, these new artistic vistas existed at the mercy of white managers and financiers. The post-Sjambok black commercial press was be more colorful but not necessarily more free than what it replaced. “His Fine Gifts”: Remembering Stephen Black Stephen William Black succumbed to liver cancer on August 8, 1931, just a month shy of his 52nd birthday. The rented house where he died at 38 Webb Street in Yeoville still stands, but bears no commemorative plaque, unlike the house just three blocks away, where Herman Charles Bosman shot his step-brother in 1926.162 Black's funeral on August 10 at St. Aidan’s Anglican Church was attended by many of Black’s compatriots from the theatre, including George Paget, 161 According to Joel Mervis, some members of the Jewish Board of Deputies felt that Schlesinger’s continued ownership of the paper was contributing to anti-Semitic feeling amid a very volatile political atmosphere. See Joel Mervis, The Fourth Estate, 222-223. 162 Stephen Black’s form of information of a death is no. 4090 of August 8, 1931, Civil Death Records of the Transvaal, NASA, Pretoria, South Africa. 252 who had acquired the nickname Frikkie from his character in Love and the Hyphen all the way back in 1908.163 His uncle Stephen Cope Black sent flowers, as did his mother and several of his siblings back at the Cape. One person who did not send flowers was conspicuous: Die Burger’s famous cartoonist, the great Cape Town intellectual D. C. Boonzaier. His diary entry for August 15, mislabeled as August 5, opens with the following news: I am sitting before the fire in the drawing room about dusk when Rene [Boonzaier’s daughter] enters saying: ‘You will never guess who is dead’. As I do not reply she adds ‘Some one you know well’ As there is still no reply she pronounces the name—‘Stephen Black’. And suddenly the harsh, disagreeable & ugly side of his life melts away and there rises up in my mind only the good that was in him—his fine gifts which he might have put to so much better use. But there was something in his character which stood in the way of his ever reaching the position which his exceptional mental equipment so fully entitled him to. And now the end comes in this unexpected way.164 Boonzaier remembered how just a month before Black had been in Cape Town, and “asked several times after me at Markham’s Cafe, which I no longer frequent regularly.”165 There was no reconciliation and their paths never crossed. Perhaps overcompensating for the melodramatic scene of a forlorn Black waiting to reconcile with his friend after yet another disaster, the account ends simply and coldly: “My final association with him proved only too clearly how widely our natures differed and how impossible it was for me to adjust myself to all he did. Only for a time did we drift together on the river of life.”166 Stephen Gray called Stephen Black “the first self-consciously ‘South African’ writer,” and, in 1981, while South Africa was still very much in the thrall of apartheid, he mounted a multiracial production of Black’s play Helena’s Hope, Limited in Durban and Johannesburg.167 163 “Funeral of Mr. Stephen Black,” Rand Daily Mail, August 10, 1931. 164 BD, vol. 32, pg. 68, MSC. 4, box 7 (August [1]5, 1931), NLSA, Cape Town. 165 BD, vol. 32, pg. 68, MSC. 4, box 7 (August [1]5, 1931), NLSA, Cape Town. 166 BD, vol. 32, pg. 69, MSC. 4, box 7 (August [1]5, 1931), NLSA, Cape Town. 167 Stephen Gray, Free-Lancers and Literary Biography in South Africa Atlanta, Ga.: Rodopi, 1999): 89. 253 Fifty years after the playwright’s death, it was the first and so far the only time one of Black’s plays has been staged since his death. In rediscovering Helena’s Hope, Limited, Gray said he was captivated by a “world-view” that was “all-inclusive,” lamenting that “the children of apartheid, several generations on, no longer know that the land could have had a sense of being one democratic totality, and that its theatres could have reflected this spirit as found.”168 Gray’s multiracial revival of Helena’s Hope, Limited was performed during one of the first years such a production would have been possible since the 1960s, and Gray recounts at length in his introduction to Black’s Three Plays the challenges that recreating Black’s performance style entailed, emanating from a “liberal humanist revue tradition that had no valency in [the performers’] lives, and had to be recreated step by minute step.”169 One of the most difficult obstacles to grapple with was Black’s indulgence in racial caricature at a time when a viciously racist government justified censorship on the grounds of promoting harmonious relations between racial groups. “His plays are studded with blatantly offensive racial insults,” as Gray put it; “almost no line is devoid of rudeness, implied or enunciated.”170 This, he surmises, “is explained by more than just the fact that colonial days were very racist”—to the contrary, he argues, it was a conscious strategy on Black’s part “to exorcise racial feelings by indulging in a carnival of racist terminology.”171 Indeed, in doing so, Gray saw Black as providing a potential positive blueprint for South Africans in the early 1980s, an early iteration of an argument that one encounters constantly in contemporary discourse on South African humor: The children of apartheid have been born into an age of circuitous euphemism in which the very words of racial contempt are now taboo, inarticulable. Black’s simple anecdote 168 Stephen Gray, introduction to Stephen Black, Three Plays, 30. 169 Stephen Gray, introduction to Stephen Black, Three Plays, 31. 170 Stephen Gray, introduction to Stephen Black, Three Plays, 32. 171 Stephen Gray, introduction to Stephen Black, Three Plays, 31. 254 to this—making racism of all shades and degrees sound funny—has not been applied on the South African boards for a long time. The near-hysterical shrieks of recognition from audiences at the Durban try-outs for the revived Helena’s Hope attest that there are still untapped nervous energies in South Africa yearning to call a spade a spade. In that respect, the effect of Helena’s Hope has not dated at all. Black’s comedies depict the most uncouth hotchpotch of peoples, positively glorying in their own genial use of deprecatory opprobrium.172 It should be clear from the the foregoing analysis that this assessment is flawed. Stephen Black was not a liberal, and he was certainly no foe of racism as we would understand it today. Rather, Black was a populist who loathed elite tastemakers and gloried in their humiliation—he “hate[d] all Jews like poison” by his own admission. His satire did not always conceal grudging affection the way Gray wished it to.173 Sometimes malice and ridicule need to be taken at face value. The best we can say is that Black, via a tortuous route, was an accidental champion of the African literary scene. He elevated African voices for his own purposes. Once elevated, however, these voices refused to return to silence and the old obsequious ways. Yet Gray was certainly right about the “carnival.” Black may have been intellectually grounded in the tradition of French naturalism, with its commitment to systematic inquiry through art, but he was also a man with a strongly anarchic streak, deeply skeptical of most fantasies of order. He was interested in how “nature,” upbringing, and circumstances conspired to manifest the South Africa he knew and wrestled with, not to bring it all into line but rather to help it along the path to a riotous maturity. His multilingual puns and his representation of black and Coloured characters were not just methods of adding local colour; they were necessary if South African life was to be represented onstage. Chaos was more fun, and potentially more profitable than order. 172 Stephen Gray, introduction to Stephen Black, Three Plays, 31. 173 Stephen Black to D. C. Boonzaier, January 1, 1916, pg. 7, MSC. 11, box 4, folder 48, NLSA, Cape Town. 255 By the end of his life, Black seems to have conceded—at least implicitly—that educated urban Africans were not one-dimensionally pitiful or ridiculous figures. Like white writers of a more liberal bent such as Ethelreda Lewis and William Plomer he was intrigued by the intellectual promise of literate black South Africans as they became more and more numerous on the Witwatersrand. Yet while Lewis and Plomer were anxious to guide this nascent “New African” cohort gradually towards a safe and respectably Anglocentric worldview, Black’s theory of human development was always pugilistic. Though for much of his life he insisted on the necessity of white unity against racial threats, by his Sjambok period, Stephen Black’s choices suggest that some part of him wanted to see Anglophone South Africa either reckon with its own shortcomings or be destroyed in the face of an ascendant black South Africa. Differences needed to be confronted. And indeed, even though The Sjambok lasted barely two years, in that brief span it became a platform where black readers and writers could spar with their white compatriots, and be recognized as worthy intellectual opponents. In this way, it may be argued, Stephen Black got the last laugh over the people who dismissed him in life. His tombstone may be humble, but its shadow is long. 256 Chapter 5— The Strange Career of Jeremiah Luke M’bene: R. R. R. Dhlomo and Black Newspaper Satire, 1932-1943 This chapter charts the rise of a black African satirical tradition in print during the 1930s and early 1940s, rooted in both African and European understandings of orality. It focuses primarily on the Sjambok alumnus R. R. R. Dhlomo and his career as assistant editor of The Bantu World—at the time South Africa’s most widely-circulated and commercialized “black” newspaper. At The Bantu World Dhlomo wrote enormously popular satires on gender, politics, and black urban life, reinventing characters created by his erstwhile employer Stephen Black in order to appeal to The Bantu World’s almost exclusively black audience. Though he was conservative by nature and largely refrained from political activity, at The Bantu World Dhlomo accelerated the movement of black writing away from the strictures of kholwa moral discipline towards a far more relaxed and cynical view of urban life. This chapter argues that, even in the context of what Les Switzer has referred to as a “captive press,” Dhlomo’s columns served as both a novel front and a rare release from everyday struggles for both survival and political advancement. Neither a pugilist nor a populist nor a romantic, Dhlomo remained deeply connected to traditional Zulu culture throughout his life and regarded the rapid changes in black South African politics and culture before World War II with a caution and skepticism that aged poorly as scholars sympathetic to the anti-apartheid struggle sought out stories of radicals and revolutionaries. Yet just as Stephen Black’s work inspired developments that Black did not necessarily intend, Dhlomo’s humor nourished the roots of black protest literature over subsequent decades, even as that the younger generation’s attacks on the system came to surpass his own. 257 R. R. R. Dhlomo: Background and Context R. R. R. Dhlomo was a complex man with a long career in both journalism and literature. As a result, the few studies of Dhlomo that do exist are fragmentary in nature, focused on selected facets of Dhlomo’s career rather than its full sweep. His early effort at an English “novel,” An African Tragedy (see Chapter 4), depreciated his literary talents in the estimation of many critics, most of whom lacked the linguistic ability to assess his much more substantial literary efforts in Zulu: novels like Indlela Yababi (1946) and UNomalanga kaNdengezi (1947) as well as biographies of Zulu kings such as UShaka (1937) and UCetshwayo kaMpande (1952).1 For decades the premier (almost the only) published scholarly source about Dhlomo was a 1975 special issue of the journal English in Africa dedicated to his early English short stories, most of which were culled from The Sjambok.2 While these stories are certainly noteworthy, they fall far short of capturing Dhlomo’s true literary and journalistic importance. R. R. R. Dhlomo is discussed several times in Tim Couzens’s magisterial biography of his brother, the playwright H. I. E. Dhlomo, and also in Ntongela Masilela’s work on the New Africans, but these authors devote little attention to R. R. R. Dhlomo in his own right.3 Dhlomo’s Zulu writings have gotten particularly short shrift, having been explored only in a pair of unpublished M.A. theses by Shelley Skikna (1984) and Fikile Khoza (2001), and also briefly in Sifiso Ndlovu’s 2017 monograph on the treatment of Dingane kaSenzagakhona in African 1 R. R. R. Dhlomo, Indlela Yababi (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: Shuter and Shooter, 1946); R. R. R. Dhlomo, UNomalanga kaNdengezi (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: Shuter and Shooter, 1947); R. R. R. Dhlomo, UShaka (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: Shuter and Shooter, 1937); R. R. R. Dhlomo, UCetshwayo kaMpande (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: Shuter and Shooter, 1952). 2 R. R. R. Dhlomo, “R. R. R. Dhlomo: 20 Short Stories,” ed. Tim Couzens, English in Africa 2.1 (1975). 3 See Tim Couzens, The New African; Ntongela Masilela, An Outline of the New African Movement in South Africa (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2013); Ntongela Masilela, The Cultural Modernity of H. I. E. Dhlomo (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2007); Ntongela Masilela, The Historical Figures of the New African Movement, vol. 1 (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2014). 258 literature.4 Dhlomo’s journalism in English drew similarly sparse interest in the first two decades following his death, but this has begun to change. Horst Zander’s Fact—Fiction —“Faction” (1999) discusses Dhlomo’s work at The Bantu World, but for years Stephen Smith’s 2004 University of KwaZulu-Natal thesis was for years the only study of Dhlomo’s satirical writing.5 The situation has improved with the publication of two excellent articles in 2018 and 2019 by Corinne Sandwith that focus on Dhlomo’s innovative approach to the city in his post- African Tragedy career.6 In addition, Dhlomo’s role as The Bantu World’s first women’s columnist in the 1930s is treated at some length in Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas’s 2009 collection Love in Africa.7 One hopes that this recent flurry of interest bodes well for the future. But who was this “son of the sun and son of the world,” as Shelley Skikna so memorably called him? R. R. R. Dhlomo was born sometime between 1900 or 1901 in Siyamu, near Pietermaritzburg, Natal, two years ahead of his brother Herbert.8 Rolfus (or Rolfes) Robert Reginald was the second of four children.9 His father Ezra had been born at Emakhabeleni in the Natal Colony, just south of the Thukela river, and was a close childhood friend of the future chief 4 Shelley Z. Skikna, “Son of the Sun and Son of the World: The Life and Works of R. R. R. Dhlomo” (M.A. thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1984); Fikile Patricia Khoza, “The Discussion of R. R. R. Dhlomo’s Historical Novels” (M. A. thesis, University of Durban-Westville, 2001); Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu, African Perspectives of King Dingane kaSenzagakhona: Second Monarch of the Zulu Kingdom (London, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017): 109-116. 5 Horst Zander, Fact—Fiction—“Faction”; Stephen Smith, “Restoring the Imprisoned Community: A Study of Selected Works of H.I.E. and R.R.R. Dhlomo and Their Role in Constructing a Sense of African Modernity” (M.A. thesis, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2004). 6 Corinne Sandwith, “Reading and Roaming the Racial City”; Corinne Sandwith., “Well-Seasoned Talks: The Newspaper Column and the Satirical Mode in South African Letters,” Social Dynamics 45.1 (2019), 103-120. 7 Lynn M. Thomas, “Love, Sex, and the Modern Girl in 1930s South Africa,” in Love in Africa, eds. Jennifer Cole and Lynn M. Thomas (Chicago, Ill.: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 31-57. 8 Dhlomo’s 1928 marriage certificate (MSCE—LEER—01—2889/1974, PAR, Pietermaritzburg) supports a birth date in 1901, whereas his death notice (a copy of which is enclosed in the same file) implies that he was born in 1900. Dhlomo’s birthday, however, is more certain: January 9, which he referred to in multiple columns over the years. See, for example, “R. Roamer, Esq.,” “R. Roamer, Esq. Talks About His Birthday,” The Bantu World (Johannesburg, South Africa), January 15, 1938; “Rolling Stone,” “Rolling Stone On His Birthday,” Ilanga Lase Natal (Durban, South Africa), January 20, 1945. 9 The order of Dhlomo’s given names, judging from government documents and his tombstone, appears to have been fairly interchangeable. In any case “R. R. R.” was his lifelong professional moniker. 259 Bhambatha kaMancinza, who later, in 1906, led the last armed anti-colonial rebellion in Natal.10 Ezra’s traditional upbringing did not prevent him from converting to Christianity and learning to read and write, and some time in the 1890s, at the urging of the Rev. James Scott, a Scottish Presbyterian missionary, Ezra settled in Siyamu, a community of amakholwa (African Christians), about six miles from the colonial capital of Pietermaritzburg.11 Siyamu was in close proximity to the Edendale mission, which played a decisive role in structuring the trajectory of R. R. R.’s life. His mother Sardinia (or Sardenia) Mbune, was a Caluza—the granddaughter of Reuben Inhlela “Tuyana” Caluza, one of the Presbyterian missionary James Allison’s original converts three generations prior.12 R. I. Caluza belonged to a Hlubi lineage displaced to modern-day Eswatini in the early nineteenth century and he followed Allison to Edendale in 1847. There they prospered, exemplifying the cardinal kholwa values of sober faith and entrepreneurial dedication. Sardinia’s cousins Joshua and Mjeli owned a bicycle shop in central Pietermaritzburg—highly unusual for Africans at the time. Her father John Masibekela Mlungunyama Caluza became the first choir conductor at the Edendale mission, and, according to Zelda de Beer, was “perhaps the first Zulu to sing and teach from staff notation.”13 10 On the Bhambatha Rebellion, see Shula Marks, Reluctant Rebellion: The 1906-8 Disturbances in Natal (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1970); Benedict Carton, Blood From Your Children: The Colonial Origins of Generational Conflict in South Africa (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 2000); and Jeff Guy, The Maphumulo Uprising: War, Law and Ritual in the Zulu Rebellion (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2005). 11 Following the practice of Hlonipha Mokoena and others, I use the Anglicized form “kholwa” in this chapter as an adjective. When referring to the people themselves, I use the standard Zulu amakholwa (literally, “believers”). Among the most important studies of kholwa communities in Natal are Norman Etherington, Preachers, Peasants, and Politics in Southeast Africa, 1835-1880: African Christian Communities in Natal, Pondoland, and Zululand (London, U.K.: Royal Historical Society, 1978); and Paul la Hausse de Lalouvière, Restless Identities: signatures of nationalism, Zulu ethnicity and history in the lives of Petros Lamula (c.1881-1948) and Lymon Maling (1889- c.1936) (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press, 2000). 12 See Veit Erlmann, African Stars,115. The life of R. T. Caluza, Dhlomo’s cousin, an alumnus of Hampton Institute and Columbia University, and the first prominent black recording artist in South African history, also testifies to Edendale’s reputation for cultivating excellence. 13 Veit Erlmann, African Stars, 113; Zelda de Beer, “Analysis of Choral Works by the Zulu Composer: Professor R. T. Caluza” (B.A. thesis, University of Pretoria, 1967): 1. 260 Not for nothing, it seems, was he called “Mlungunyama” (“black white person”). John M. M. Caluza purchased the formerly settler-owned farm Sardinia grew up on for the princely sum of £300.14 R. R. R. Dhlomo thus enjoyed both regal heritage and the fruits of multiple generations of African “progressivism.” Like Lovedale in the eastern Cape Colony, Edendale played a crucial role in the formation of a prosperous African petty bourgeoisie in nineteenth century Natal.15 Colin Bundy, for example, describes Edendale’s first five decades on the cutting edge of black South African enterprise in effusive terms: Some based themselves in trades or crafts in the township (builders, masons, carpenters, hedgers, thatchers and brickmakers); others accumulated wealth through farming the well-watered land and supplying the Pietermaritzburg market with vegetables, grain, and meal. By 1860. a thousand acres were under cultivation: the chief crops were maize, oats, beans, and melons; the most successful farmers re-invested their profits in further land, and there was a concentration of ownership. The community…enjoyed a ‘golden age’ between its inception and 1891.16 Burgeoning agricultural and commercial activity went hand-in-hand with the political aspirations one might expect from a dynamic yeomanry. “Being a kholwa was a political and social rather than just a religious identity,” writes South African anthropologist Hlonipha Mokoena.17 “By converting to Christianity and subscribing to progressive ideals of private property ownership, individual rights and the Protestant work ethic, the amakholwa within the limited political sphere 14 Veit Erlmann, African Stars, 113. 15 For recent monographs on aspects of the history of Edendale, see Sibongiseni M. Mkhize, Principles and Pragmatism in the Liberation Struggle: A Political Biography of Selby Msimang (Cape Town, South Africa: BestRed, 2019); and Marc Epprecht, Welcome to Greater Edendale: Histories of Environment, Health, and Gender in an African City (Montréal, Canada: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016). See also Sheila Meintjes, “Edendale 1850-1906: A Case Study of Rural Transformation and Class Formation in an African Mission in Natal” (Ph. D. diss., University of London, 1988). 16 Colin Bundy, The Rise and Fall of the South African Peasantry, 2nd ed. (Cape Town, South Africa: David Philip, 1988 [1979]): 179. 17 Hlonipha Mokoena, Magema Fuze: The Making of a Kholwa Intellectual (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2011): 20. 261 of colonial governance acquired, according to their own understanding, the rights of British subjects.”18 By the time R. R. R. Dhlomo was born, however, the kholwa oasis of Edendale was already past its peak. Legislative pressure from the competition-averse white agricultural sector, along with the stratification resulting from black capitalist agriculture’s own success contributed to social fragmentation. As early as the 1870s, according to Sheila Meintjes, a growing tenant population within the community made it impossible to enforce the community’s prohibition on alcohol and threatened other tenets of Victorian respectability.19 As late as 1881 the white visitor Francis Reginald Statham could still liken the place to “a piece of Yorkshire,” but by the time R. R. R. Dhlomo was a child, a variety of restrictive laws and tax levies passed by Natal’s all-white legislature had all but stifled black agricultural prosperity in the province.20 In 1912 Ezra Dhlomo moved his young family to the bustling city of Johannesburg and took a job with a lift company. His wife Sardinia became a washerwoman, and despite the family’s much straitened circumstances, she passed on traditional stories and cultural knowledge to her children, as H. I. E. would later remember in an Ilanga Lase Natal essay: I can see as it were on a cinema screen the scenes of the story-telling periods in the days of my youth. At home the genius and angel was mother—angel because we simply adored her and because I now know the blessings she gave me (hearest thou thy son, mother dear?); genius, well, simply because she was a genius in more ways than one, that great woman (sweet mother, hear me! ‘I fall upon the thorns of life. I bleed.’) We would gather around the fire and listen to her with rapt attention. Some stories made us laugh, 18 Hlonipha Mokoena, Magema Fuze, 20. 19 Sheila Meintjes, “Family and Gender in the Christian Community at Edendale, Natal, in Colonial Times,” in Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945, ed. Cherryl Walker (Cape Town, South Africa: David Philip, 1990): 131-132. 20 Francis Reginald Statham, Blacks, Boers, and British: A Three-Cornered Problem (London, U.K.: Macmillan, 1881): 182, quoted in Veit Erlmann, African Stars, 116. 262 others cry, yet others afraid and fidgety—how sweet those tears, how alluring those fears! I believe that fire fired not only the story-teller’s, but the listeners’ imaginations.21 According to Tim Couzens, it was she and not Ezra Dhlomo who exerted the lion’s share of intellectual influence over the Dhlomo children. Both R. R. R. and H. I. E. were taught by the famous educationalist Bertha Mkhize at the American Board Mission School in Doornfontein. When they grew older, in keeping with their elite pedigree, the pair were sent to Natal’s most prestigious missionary-run boarding schools— the Ohlange Institute in Inanda, the first formal South African boarding school outside white control, and then Adams College in Amanzimtoti, the leading American Board school in South Africa.22 The Rev. John Langalibalele Dube made an indelible imprint on the pair at Ohlange, which was designed as an African equivalent to Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute.23 A preeminent kholwa, Dube was a landowner, founder of the newspaper Ilanga Lase Natal, and served as the first president of the South African Native National Congress from 1912 to 1917; he soon became a personal hero to R. R. R. R. R. R. and H. I. E. Dhlomo made full use of the educational opportunities and personal connections afforded them in this extraordinary setting, and they both trained as teachers, though R. R. R. never practiced this profession.24 21 Shelly Z. Skikna, “Son of the Sun and Son of the Soil,” 22. Skikna’s information on Dhlomo’s early life comes from an interview conducted with Florence Kambule, née Dhlomo, by Tim Couzens in January 1975. The interview may survive as part of Prof. Couzens’s estate, but as of 2020 it is not available to researchers. H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Fire” TS., pgs. 2-3 (KCM 8290q), Campbell Collections, University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), Durban, South Africa. The quotation “I fall…” is from a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley. This essay was published under the pseudonym “X.” in Ilanga Lase Natal, August 30, 1947. 22 Shelly Z. Skikna, “Son of the Sun and Son of the Soil,” 22. For more on Adams College, see Albert J. Luthuli, Let My People Go: An Autobiography (Johannesburg, South Africa: Collins, 1962); David A. Rood, Jr., Blest Be The Ties That Bind: David Rood, the American Board Mission in Natal and Adams College (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: Cluster Publications, 2017); and Percy Ngonyama, “‘The Struggle for Survival’: Last Years of Adams College, 1953–1956,” Journal of Natal and Zulu History 28.1 (2010), 36–52. On Dube and Ohlange, see Heather Hughes, First President: A Life of John Dube, Founding President of the A.N.C. (Johannesburg, South Africa: Jacana Media, 2011). 23 See Heather Hughes, First President, 20-64. 24 Shelly Z. Skikna, “Son of the Sun and Son of the Soil,” 22. 263 Instead, in 1921 R. R. R. Dhlomo followed in the footsteps of many Ohlange and Adams College alumni, and left for Johannesburg. There he took a white-collar job as a clerk for the City and Suburban mine, a role that furnished abundant material for his later fiction.25 By this time he was already a frequent correspondent to Dube’s newspaper Ilanga Lase Natal, where he began honing his skills as a writer in both Zulu and English. In 1928 his novella An African Tragedy appeared under the imprint of Lovedale Press, and he married S. Victoria Nxaba of Groutville, a Natal mission community just as well-heeled as Dhlomo’s Edendale.26 We can see from this biographical sketch that Dhlomo grew up negotiating theoretically irreconcilable dualities—the bucolic countryside against the squalor of the city; pride in Zulu tradition versus Christianity and progressivism. Shelley Z. Skikna speculates that the struggle to bridge these gaps left R. R. R. with “an eternally compromising nature…unable to reject one view in favour of another, and always assimilat[ing] both sides of every argument into his writing, especially in his historical works.”27 One might go further and argue that this very ambivalence—usually interpreted as one of his greatest flaws—explains why R. R. R. Dhlomo found satire, with its built-in ironies and ambiguities, so attractive. Inhabiting a world that treated so much of what formed him as irreconcilable, but for the antigelastic bias of his kholwa 25 Tim Couzens, “Introduction,” in “R.R.R. Dhlomo: 20 Short Stories,” ed., Tim Couzens, English in Africa 2.1 (1975): 1-2; see also T. D. Mweli Skota, ed., The African Yearly Register, 143. For further details on Zulu clerks on the Rand, see Paul la Hausse de Lalouvière, Restless Identities, 168-174; and Peter Alegi, “The Sport of Zuluness: Masculinity, Class and Cultural Identity in Twentieth-century Black Soccer,” in Zulu Identities: Being Zulu, Past and Present, eds. Benedict Carton, John Laband, and Jabulani Sithole (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008), 273-280. 26 T. D. Mweli Skota, ed., The African Yearly Register, 143. For background on the Groutville community, see Robert Trent Vinson, Albert Luthuli (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2018): 15-23; Scott Couper, Albert Luthuli: Bound by Faith (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2010): 7-36. 27 Shelley Z. Skikna, “Son of the Sun and Son of the Soil,” 22-23. 264 upbringing it should not surprise us that Dhlomo found satire helpful in processing the complexities and absurdities of his life as well as those of his readers.28 As a clerk at City and Suburban, Dhlomo occupied an elite role for a black person. In 1911, the year before his family arrived in the city, there were 97,614 Africans living in Johannesburg, excluding migrant laborers, and less than seven percent of these were literate.29 Men outnumbered women in black Johannesburg by a ratio of more than twenty-two to one, though this was rapidly changing; by the 1936 census the ratio was nearly three to one.30 Dhlomo’s disgust with the apparent cheapness of life on the Rand is evident in his gritty Sjambok short stories like “The Death of Masaba,” where he decries the injustices of mining without clearly identifying with the miners themselves: These men—they were five, sitting round a glowing bucket fire—had left their kraals for the mines, forced to do so by hunger and want. They left their homes knowing of the terrible accidents that occur below the surface of the mines. Their only hope was that the always-wise white people would be true to them and treat them well: safeguard them from underground dangers, and work them as people with equal feelings though their skins were black.31 Though both Dhlomo and the mineworkers of which he wrote were swept up in the same socioeconomic trends that put rural prosperity out of reach for the vast majority of black South Africans, R. R. R. Dhlomo’s formative experiences were far removed from those of an 28 Sibongiseni Mkhize’s recent biography of H. Selby Msimang, a key leader in black politics throughout the twentieth century who was also from Edendale, also emphasizes pragmatism and flexibility as a key and rather under-appreciated element in his successes. The piecemeal and seemingly more open-ended nature of Union era- segregation, combined with the sense of dynamism and progress fostered in elite African spaces like Edendale and the Ohlange Institute, facilitated this pragmatism, whereas later on the rise of anti-colonial forces elsewhere combined with the more comprehensive and intractable framework of racial oppression exemplified by apartheid retroactively discredited this approach in the eyes of many. See Sibongiseni Mkhize, Principles and Pragmatism in the Liberation Struggle. 29 Jo Beall, Owen Crankshaw, and Susan Parnell, “A Matter of Timing: Migration and Housing Access in Metropolitan Johannesburg,” University of Cape Town Council for Social Science Research Working Paper 15 (2002): 4; Les Switzer, ed., South Africa’s Alternative Press, 1-2. 30 Jo Beall, Owen Crankshaw, and Susan Parnell, “A Matter of Timing,” 4. 31 “R. R. R. D.” [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “The Death of Masaba,” The Sjambok, September 6, 1929. 265 uneducated migrant from rural Zululand. “The Death of Masaba” is the story of a first-time migrant who dies of fatigue after being assigned work by his white supervisor (against regulations) that was too strenuous for him. Dhlomo’s representation of the miners stresses their poverty and imputes to them a naïve and childlike faith in the kindness of white people, soon supplanted by the grim reality that there are “many Kaffirs in the compound,” a phrase repeated throughout the story, and that their lives are very cheap.32 It conforms to a familiar critique of the migrant labor system: that the mines preyed upon downtrodden blacks and reaped massive profits from the parasitic relationship they cultivated with declining rural areas.33 Yet Dhlomo nowhere acknowledges the social capital that came from working in the mines. The work of David Coplan, as well as Patrick Harries and others, attest powerfully to the connections between migrant labor, worldliness, and potent masculinity.34 Dhlomo takes pains to mark himself as an outsider from this group, even though he is black: “it is difficult for a boy and his Baas to come to a quick understanding down there [in the mine],” he writes, because “in the mine their language is different from ours”—emphasis mine.35 Dhlomo here establishes his solidarity with the Sjambok reader—as a sophisticated, outside observer—rather than someone with an insiders’ insight into the story he tells. As an educated young man with an impeccably “progressive” pedigree, Dhlomo shared with his African intellectual contemporaries a distinct ambivalence towards the less fortunate blacks he encountered in the mining compounds and “native locations” of the Rand. 32 “R. R. R. D.” [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “The Death of Masaba,” The Sjambok, September 6, 1929. 33 See, for example, Martin Legassick, “South Africa: Forced Labor, Industrialization, and Racial Differentiation,” in The Political Economy of Africa, ed. Richard Harris (New York, N.Y.: John Wiley, 1975), 229-270; Harold Wolpe, “Capitalism and Cheap Labor-Power in South Africa: From Segregation to Apartheid,” Economy and Society 1 (1972), 425-456. 34 David Coplan, In Township Tonight! 24; also David Coplan, In the Time of Cannibals; and Patrick Harries, Work, Culture, and Identity. 35 “R. R. R. D.” [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “The Death of Masaba,” The Sjambok, September 6, 1929. 266 R. R. R. Dhlomo and the New African Movement The Dhlomo brothers were exemplars of a generation that has become known in scholarship as the “New Africans,” a term consciously adapted from black culture in the United States. They saw themselves as the South African counterpart to W. E. B. du Bois’s “Talented Tenth,” a comparison H. I. E. Dhlomo made explicit in an article for the newspaper Umteteli wa Bantu in 1932.36 By the end of World War I, the thinking went, the number of black South Africans who had obtained Western-style educations and fluency in English had reached a critical mass, and this extraordinary cohort was no longer content to take a passive role in debates surrounding South Africa’s future. Embracing a new and unapologetic identity as Africans—an identity that transcended old linguistic and political divisions, they were eager to assert themselves in the public square. As the Harlem Renaissance intellectual Alain Locke wrote in his foundational essay “Enter the New Negro”: The Old Negro, we must remember, was a creature of moral debate and historical controversy. His has been a stock figure perpetuated as an historical fiction partly in innocent sentimentalism, partly in deliberate reactionism. The Negro himself has contributed his share to this through a sort of protective social mimicry forced upon him by the adverse circumstances of dependence. So for generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being⎯a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be “kept down,” or “in his place,” or “helped up,” to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden.37 The legacy of colonial conquest loomed larger than slavery in the consciousness of the New Africans. Still, the parallels were striking. Young educated Africans also saw themselves reflected in Locke’s “migrant masses, shifting from countryside to city, hurdl[ing] several 36 Ntongela Masilela, An Outline of the New African Movement in South Africa, 176; also Ntongela Masilela, The Cultural Modernity of H.I.E. Dhlomo, 14-15; 162-163. 37 Alain Locke, “Enter the New Negro,” Survey Graphic (New York, N.Y.), March 1925. 267 generations of experience at a leap.”38 Locke centered the African American Great Migration as an essential element in racial renewal, despite his own privileged pedigree as a Harvard-educated member of Philadelphia’s black middle class. Indeed, as much as Locke strove to show the flourishing of black cultural life in Harlem to be an inevitable consequence of a people in motion gaining physical and spiritual distance from the conditions of the past, many “New Negro” luminaries were alarmed by the lowbrow habits and sensibilities of these new urban arrivals, as historians like Davarian Baldwin have detailed.39 In South Africa the situation was further complicated by the fact that migrant mineworkers were housed in compounds meant to physically and psychologically isolate Africans from the “white” cities and towns in which they labored. Furthermore, literate black men—Dhlomo the clerk was no exception—usually owed their livelihoods to the same white business interests that had masterminded this very system of exclusion, maintaining the increasingly untenable line that African workers did not require wages in the same way as whites. Attacking the foundation of the migrant labor system—let alone declaring racial solidarity with mineworkers—was a profoundly risky enterprise While black political activists like Dr. A. B. Xuma and A. W. G. Champion were harshly criticized by later generations for their moderation, their options were significantly constrained by these structural realities.40 38 Alain Locke, “Enter the New Negro,” Survey Graphic (New York, N.Y.), March 1925. 39 This phenomenon is addressed at length in Davarian Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 40 See A. W. G. Champion, The Views of Mahlathi: Writings of A. W. G. Champion, a Black South African, ed. M. W. Swanson (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press, 1983); Steven Gish, Alfred B. Xuma: African, American, South African (New York, N.Y.: New York University Press, 2000); Shula Marks, The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa: Class, Nationalism and the State in Twentieth-Century Natal (Johannesburg, South Africa: Ravan Press, 1986); Wonga F. Tabata, “A. W. G. Champion: Zulu Nationalism and ‘Separate Development’ in South Africa, 1965-1975 (M.A. thesis: University of South Africa, 2006); and A. B. Xuma, A. B. Xuma: Autobiography and Selected Works, ed. Peter Limb (Cape Town, South Africa: Van Riebeeck Society, 2017). 268 By the time the concept of the “New Negro” emerged in the 1920s, the United States already loomed large in black South African intellectual life. R. R. R. Dhlomo’s hero John Langalibalele Dube was educated at Oberlin College in Ohio, while his contemporary Pixley kaIsaka Seme had studied at Columbia University in New York. To those without the opportunity to travel abroad, America still beckoned. Starting in the late nineteenth century the U.S.-based African Methodist Episcopal Church expanded significantly in South Africa, appealing to black Christians frustrated with the controlling behavior of white missionaries.41 These were followed by evangelists for John Alexander Dowie’s Christian Catholic Apostolic Church of Zion, Illinois (also known as the Zionist Church); the successor groups they and their followers founded in South Africa are today some of the largest in the country, surpassing both Anglican and Dutch Reformed missionary efforts.42 Missionaries were not the only Americans to impact southern African life in at the turn of the twentieth century. In the cultural field, the arrival of the African American Orpheus McAdoo and his Virginia Jubilee Singers from the Hampton Institute in 1890 caused a sensation on both sides of the color line, inspiring a myriad of imitators.43 Meaningful grassroots contact with Africans from the diaspora was also taking place at the Cape, where hundreds of black American and West Indians worked as sailors and dockworkers. Some diasporic emigrants bought land, owned successful businesses, and accumulated wealth enabling them to divide their time between Africa and North America. Cape Town’s only black doctor in the nineteenth century, 41 See James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Richard Elphick, The Equality of Believers: Protestant Missionaries and the Racial Politics of South Africa (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 2012). 42 See Christoffer H. Grundmann, “Heaven Below Here and Now! The Zionist Churches in Southern Africa,” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 6.3 (2006), 256-269. 43 See Veit Erlmann, African Stars, 21-53; Chinua Thelwell, Exporting Jim Crow, 96-130. 269 Andrew Charles Jackson, was the son of one such striver, an emigrant from Virginia.44 After the First World War, as returning white South African soldiers organized to strengthen the color bar in mining and industry, the West Indian Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association grew enormously in South Africa, and was greeted favorably by activist newspapers like Abdullah Abdurrahman’s A.P.O., and the I.C.U.-supporting journal Black Man.45 A February 2, 1920 article in the S.A.N.N.C.-affiliated newspaper Abantu-Batho aptly illustrates the global consciousness of its writers, asking whites to “vacate our country to make room for our American Negro brothers and sisters, stolen away by you from us hundreds of years ago.”46 R. R. R. Dhlomo began his day job as an umabhalane (clerk) at City and Suburban Mine in an atmosphere of increasing unrest, as both white and black leaders making increasingly loud and irreconcilable demands on the mining establishment in a world still electrified by the events of the 1917 Russian Revolution. In early 1920 a strike by 71,000 African workers testified powerfully to the potential for mass action to destabilize the Rand mining industry, leading to the passage of laws like the 1924 Industrial Conciliation Act curtailing Africans’ ability to unionize.47 For white workers the bloody climax of this restive era was the “Rand Rebellion”—a 1922 strike which was suppressed through the imposition of martial law by Prime Minister 44 Misha J. Charles, “‘Soort Soek Soort’: The ‘American Negro Community in Cape Town, Until 1930” (M. A. thesis: University of Cape Town, 2004): 60-61. 45 See Robert Trent Vinson, “‘Sea-Kaffirs’: ‘American Negroes’ and the Gospel of Garveyism in Early Twentieth Century Cape Town,” Journal of African History 47.2 (2006), 281-303; Robert Trent Vinson., The Americans Are Coming! Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2012): 63-81. 46 “Native Killed for Farmer’s Daughter,”Abantu-Batho (Johannesburg, South Africa), February 2, 1920, cited in Paul Landau, “‘Johannesburg in Flames’: The 1918 Shilling Campaign, Abantu-Batho, and Early African Nationalism in South Africa,” in The People’s Paper: A Centenary History and Anthology of Abantu-Batho, ed. Peter Limb (Johannesburg, South Africa: Wits University Press): 276. 47 Philip Bonner, “South African Society and Culture, 1910-1948,” in The Cambridge History of South Africa, vol. 2, 255. 270 Smuts and the unprecedented aerial bombardment of white strikers in Fordsburg Square.48 Respectable omabhalane like Dhlomo and his older colleagues approached the situation with caution. The radical potential of the “migrating masses” could be a potent bargaining chip in interactions with management, but, as Alan G. Cobley has shown, this required striking a delicate balance between solidarity with lower-status workers and disavowal of their more strident rhetoric.49 In early 1920, in the midst of a violent African miners’ strike, the Transvaal Native Mine Clerks’ Association was formed. It is not known whether Dhlomo ever joined the group, but the Association succeeded winning management support for two institutions Dhlomo would support later in life: the Johannesburg Joint Council of Europeans and Africans, (convened in 1921) and the Bantu Men’s Social Centre (opened in 1924). These developments were concessions in the sense that they acknowledged the reality of an educated African presence in Johannesburg with legitimate civic and intellectual needs, but they also served the interests of the white establishment by directing the energies of young men like Dhlomo away from Marxist and Pan-Africanist groups by holding out the possibility of eventual accommodation within a liberal South African order dominated by mining interests: “equal rights for every civilized man south of the Zambesi,” as Cecil Rhodes had once advocated.50 48 See Keith Breckenridge, “Fighting for a White South Africa: White Working-Class Racism and the 1922 Rand Revolt,” South African Historical Journal 57.1 (2007), 228-243; Jeremy Krikler, The Rand Revolt: The 1922 Insurrection and Racial Killing in South Africa (Johannesburg, South Africa: Jonathan Ball, 2005); Jeremy Krikler, “Lost Causes of the Rand Revolt,” South African Historical Journal 63.2 (2011), 318-338; and H. J. Simons and R. E. Simons, Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850-1950 (London, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1969): 271-299. 49 See Alan G. Cobley, “‘Why Not All Go Up Higher?’: The Transvaal Native Mine Clerks’ Association, 1920-1925,” South African Historical Journal 62.1 (2010), 143-161. 50 Robert I. Rotberg, The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1988): 610-611. 271 Capturing Opinion: South Africa’s Black Press R. R. R. Dhlomo’s mother died in 1931—the same year in which The Sjambok ceased publication. Whether this influenced Dhlomo’s move back to Natal is unknown, but in this brief period between long stints in Johannesburg, he worked as a sub-editor for Ilanga Lase Natal. Alongside John Tengo Jabavu’s Imvo Zabantsundu (founded 1884), Ilanga represented the efflorescence of an independent African press in South Africa outside white missionary control. Yet there were differences between the two efforts. Jabavu’s paper was based in the Cape, where African voters made up a considerable proportion of the electorate: almost seventeen per cent of the total for 1886.51 This proportion declined to under eight percent by 1929 as a result of a sustained campaign to neuter the African franchise, which could still play an important political role in marginal constituencies.52 Still, Jabavu’s influence as an editor stemmed to a considerable degree from the constitutionally- sanctioned muscle of his audience; Les Switzer describes him as a “master publicist who maintained a wide-ranging correspondence with influential lobbyists in and out of parliament in Cape Town.”53 The situation in Natal was very different. By 1903 only two African men had met the restrictive colonial franchise requirements.54 It should come as no surprise that John Langalibalele Dube, who had studied in the United States, came to revere Booker T. Washington and his advocacy of “industrial education” in the Deep South, where blacks had also largely lost 51 Farai Nyika and Johan Fourie, “Black Disenfranchisement in the Cape Colony, c. 1887-1909: Challenging the Numbers,” Journal of Southern African Studies 46.2 (2020): 12; 13. 52 Noel Garson, “The Cape Franchise After Union: The Queenstown By-Election of December 1921,” African Studies 45.1 (1986): 63. 53 Les Switzer, “The Beginnings of African Protest Journalism at the Cape,” in South Africa’s Alternative Press, 61. 54 Stanley Trapido, “Natal’s Non-Racial Franchise, 1856,” African Studies 22.1 (1963): 22. 272 their political rights. Like Washington, Dube’s approach secured the goodwill and support of many prominent white leaders, but could not alter the outcomes of his greatest political battles— the fight for a Union-wide non-racial franchise and against the ruinous 1913 Land Act. In the interwar years, the most important development in the history of the South African press was the rise of white-owned, black edited newspapers that swamped a discursive space previously dominated by figures like Dube and Jabavu. In 1921, according to government statistics, just under 25,000 Africans in the Union were employed in what Les Switzer calls “middle-class occupation categories”: as police, teachers, clergy, nurses, clerks, secretaries, and salespeople. By 1936 this number had more than doubled to 53,745.55 For the first time the urban African population was large and literate enough to capture the interest of white business as a commercial opportunity. This was particularly true in the Transvaal, where Africans had never enjoyed political rights, real or illusory. As early as 1920 the Chamber of Mines-affiliated Native Recruitment Corporation (in concert with disgruntled elements of the S.A.N.N.C.) had launched Umteteli wa Bantu as a moderate counterweight to organs like Abantu-Batho and the I.C.U.-aligned Workers’ Herald. This effort to capture the minds and pocketbooks of literate Africans reached its apogee with The Bantu World, which was founded in April 1932 by Bertram F. G. Paver, a “failed farmer and advertising salesman.”56 While initially more than half of the investors in the Bantu Press (Pty.) Ltd. were black, after only a year the company was folded into the white-owned Argus media empire. By 1954, The Bantu World alone accounted for a quarter of total African newspaper 55 Les Switzer, “South Africa’s Alternative Press in Perspective,” in South Africa’s Alternative Press, 9. 56 Les Switzer, “Bantu World and the Origins of a Captive African Commercial Press,” in South Africa’s Alternative Press, 189. 273 circulation—not counting Bantu Press’s other properties, which by that time included both Imvo Labantsundu and Ilanga Lase Natal.57 Previous newspapers for Africans had never boasted a circulation of more than a few thousand copies—Dhlomo wrote that the combined circulation of Bantu World, Ilanga, Imvo and the Basutoland-based Mochochonono was just 10,000 in 1932.58 By 1940, less than ten years later, he boasted that Bantu Press newspapers had a combined circulation of over 200,000. Switzer cites a more conservative figure of 113,000 by 1946, but certainly the company’s audience was many times larger than its circulation due to the sharing of copies and communal reading practices.59 Historically, scholars have viewed this shift in largely negative terms, as a testament to the limitations of the African petty-bourgeoisie’s moderate, elitist politics and susceptibility to co-optation. Yet corporate capture was not a feature exclusive to the black press. In fact, virtually all English-language newspapers in South Africa were themselves entangled with big business, particularly mining capital. When viewed with this in mind, the co-optation of the black press was simply the process by which a previously anomalous dimension of the South African media landscape was brought into conformity with the rest of the sector. From the Schlesinger-owned Sjambok to Abe Bailey’s South African Associated Newspapers, there was nothing unusual at all about a twentieth century South African paper being beholden to moneyed interests. 57 Les Switzer, “Bantu World and the Origins of a Captive African Commercial Press,” in South Africa’s Alternative Press, 190. 58 “R. Roamer Esq.” [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “R. Roamer, Esq. on ‘Gesien’,” Ilanga Lase Natal, April 20, 1940. 59 “R. Roamer Esq.” [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “R. Roamer, Esq. on ‘Gesien’,” Ilanga Lase Natal, April 20, 1940; Les Switzer, “Bantu World and the Origins of a Captive African Commercial Press,” in South Africa’s Alternative Press, 190. 274 Furthermore, even the most apparently craven organs of white propaganda still afforded their black editors, reporters, and correspondents space to debate and hone their own ideas about life, politics, and modernity.60 Natasha Erlank quotes the Australian scholar Sylvia Lawson’s trenchant complaint that newspapers from the colonial past have been historically “over- dissected and under-read.”61 Scholars mine them for what they are looking for—usually politics and sometimes literary content—but newspapers must also be considered as holistic products in their own right. This phenomenon is particularly acute in studies of South Africa’s black press and, according to Erlank, ignores what Kevin G. Barnhurst and John Nerone refer to as “form.”62 While many commentators past and present have dismissed Umteteli wa Bantu as mere propaganda, Erlank pays close attention to the social universe of its writers and the multifaceted intimacy they established with their audience, which in turn informed the “promiscuous layout [Umteteli] employed, which included the casual and irregular intermingling of social and personal news with all the other paper content.”63 While this “telephone-book style journalism,” might seem arcane to the modern reader, Erlank argues that it acted as “a crucible of black sociability” central to the aim of projecting “a particular style of African modernity, one rooted in shared social experiences rather than in intellectual vision.”64 Brian Rutledge, in his study of mid-twentieth century black South African newspapers explores this idea even further, asserting that the commercialization of the African press resulted in “actions and intimacies in which South Africa’s print consumers became indistinguishable 60 See, for example, Natasha Erlank, “Umteteli wa Bantu and the Constitution of Social Publics in the 1920s and 1930s,” Social Dynamics 45.1 (2019), 75-102. 61 Sylvia Lawson, The Archibald Paradox: A Strange Case of Authorship (Ringwood, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 1983): xi. 62 See Kevin G. Barnhurst and John Nerone, The Form of News: A History (New York, N.Y.: Guilford Press, 2001): 1-28. 63 Natasha Erlank, “Umteteli wa Bantu and the Constitution of Social Publics in the 1920s and 1930s,” 77. 64 Natasha Erlank, “Umteteli wa Bantu and the Constitution of Social Publics in the 1920s and 1930s,” 94. 275 from print businesses,” a phenomenon strikingly similar to what one encounters on present-day social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok.65 These newspapers operated on shoestring budgets and relied heavily on the efforts of ordinary readers to fill space. Reader contributions could consist of letters to the editor, articles, stories, and jokes, but could also mean becoming an advertiser or a sales agent. What a paper like Umteteli wa Bantu or Bantu World could offer in return was chiefly social capital: the opportunity to build a public reputation. National fame in sport, literature, music, art, humor, courtship advice, and the domestic sciences (especially important for a growing number of literate women) was achievable through engagement with the white-owned African commercial press at a time when most other avenues to prominence in these fields were closed to black South African readers. The limitations on political discourse that prevailed at these “captive” papers, while real, did not necessarily hinder these efforts. What twenty-first century readers might be tempted to dismiss as obscure, escapist, or distracting was in fact crucial to the value these newspapers added to the texture of black South African urban life. Under the leadership of its first editor, Richard Victor Selope Thema, The Bantu World quickly established itself as the acme of black respectability and sophistication in 1930s South Africa. Born in the rural Transvaal in the same year as Johannesburg’s founding, Thema was a veteran of black politics who had served as editor of Abantu-Batho and aligned himself with pro- mineworker elements in the S.A.N.N.C. during the turbulent late 1910s. After the dust settled, he threw his lot in with the Joint Council and cultivated a reputation as a moderate acceptable to 65 Brian Rutledge, “South African Readers and Consumer Capitalism, 1932-1962” (Ph. D. diss., Cornell University, 2018): 8. 276 white liberals.66 In 1924 he was named the first superintendent of the Bantu Men’s Social Centre and, even after becoming editor of The Bantu World, he remained at the forefront of the Joint Council movement at the Witwatersrand. Thema, Dhlomo, and other Bantu World staff led a rich associational life within burgeoning black Johannesburg, and, as Erlank observes, “had a unique position in relation to people’s social worlds—[as printers] laying out wedding invitations for weddings that they would later attend— probably both as guest and reporter, their multi-layered experience affecting the choices they made about where, and on which page, to report items in a newspaper.”67 It was a social life that, while undeniably fragile and circumscribed relative to what whites enjoyed, imbued men and women of their generation with a powerful sense of change and potentiality. Cracking Up the Bantu World: R. Roamer’s Debut Was there room for humor in that turbulent mix? It is telling that, despite the praise he showered on Stephen Black for his portrayal of Jeremiah and Joshua in The Sjambok, R. R. R. Dhlomo waited almost a year after joining The Bantu World to reintroduce those characters to the world. Throughout 1932 Dhlomo had been contributing short fiction and articles on traditional Zulu customs on an informal basis to the paper, but it was not until November 5th that an announcement of his appointment appeared in the “Who’s Who” section of the paper.68 On January 21, 1933 he penned a letter in “The People’s Forum,” disguising his identity under the pseudonym “R. Roamer.” In light of subsequent R. Roamer’s subsequent antics, it seems very odd indeed: 66 See R. V. Selope-Thema, From Cattle-Herding to Editor’s Chair: The Unfinished Autobiography and Writings of R. V. Selope-Thema, ed. Alan G. Cobley (Cape Town, South Africa: Van Riebeeck Society, 2016). 67 Natasha Erlank, “Umteteli wa Bantu and the Constitution of Social Publics in the 1920s and 1930s,” 91. 68 “Who’s Who in the News This Week,” The Bantu World (Johannesburg, South Africa), November 5, 1932. 277 Sir,—Let me ask you this question: Why is it that serious minded people—thinkers, if you like, are not appreciated in Bantu society? Of course, Sir, you will at once understand that they are not. A sportsman, a clown, sorry for the word, but it is true, these are appreciated by our people. Are invited to social and dance parties. Are praised skyhigh as live and worthy fellows whose patronage should be sought at all costs. Go to these parties with nothing in your head but silly jokes about nothing and say yes, yes, to everything discussed: all the time, mind you, taking special care to relax your features so that they assume that clownish look which so captivates the hearts of the children. If you do this, you will be lionised everywhere. Girls will place their dainty hands over their fast beating hearts whenever your name is mentioned and sigh; “Oh!” Be serious: be a man of your own convictions. Smile when it is necessary and, even then, do not overdo it. State your views and opinions in a metallic voice. Prove you have brains and can use them; are using them, and can use them whenever it is necessary. It is goodbye to you in society, Sir. You will simply be relegated to the limbo of things of no importance; and left there to think what you like—which wouldn’t be worth recording here.69 R. Roamer’s letter is a heartfelt appeal for seriousness in public life. Though Dhlomo is not talking about the quality of contributions to the paper, the idea that “silly jokes about nothing” are all that one needs to get ahead in “Bantu society” corresponds to the idea that the newspaper, just like the township dance hall or political meeting, is useful as a place to be seen by others rather than a venue for the improvement of the community. In fact, Dhlomo argues that such frivolity actually degrades the “race.” “Brains do not dance, do not kick football, do not giggle all the time,” he adds later on, “if you show them you have the makings of greatness in you, they sniff and say they have no business with men who think too much of themselves.”70 In other words, the tall poppies get cut and the peculiar social dynamics of Johannesburg’s educated African circle enforce mediocrity. Indeed, it would not have been lost on many readers that newspapers like The Bantu World were essential to the decadent status-seeking that Dhlomo was attacking. As the assistant editor of the paper, Dhlomo was directly complicit. Perhaps this is 69 R. Roamer [R. R. R. Dhlomo], letter to “The People’s Forum”, The Bantu World, January 21, 1933. 70 R. Roamer [R. R. R. Dhlomo], letter to “The People’s Forum”, The Bantu World, January 21, 1933. 278 why he chose to adopt the posture of a concerned reader writing into the paper rather than publish his piece as a regular article. Still, it is unlikely that avid readers of The Bantu World would have been fooled. In fact, Dhlomo’s first humorous contribution to The Bantu World came two weeks prior, when an unattributed article entitled “Bantu Community Spend Holidays in Various Varied Occupations” had appeared on the page for “Social and Entertainment News.”71 On this page the assuming item shared space with such late-breaking scoops as “Enjoyable Party at Doornfontein” and “Popular Kimberley Couple Married in Wesleyan Church.” In fact, on closer inspection the article reveals itself to be a parody of the content elsewhere on the page. It begins innocently enough, commenting that the “Sporting and Social Clubs in the City” had organised an outing to the banks of the Vaal River for the New Year holiday.72 Some were unable to go, but passed the time at private parties or quietly at home. Still others—“enterprising, but sadly lacking in originality”—dressed as “coons” after the fashion of the Tweede Nuwejaar festivities in Cape Town, “repeating their non-too-lucrative [sic] efforts at penny-collecting.”73 Then, however, the column takes a turn: In a slum yard, Joseph remembered that Tom owed him 2/6. He made up his mind to get it back or die in the attempt. The fact that something stronger than ginger-beer in his stomach made him imagine this non-existent debt, did not worry him. He found Tom drinking himself to death with Ma-Hleza’s lizard and frog fermented beer. Joseph, without preliminaries, stabbed him in the stomach. After which callous act, he felt that he had been paid back his 2/6 with a profit to boot. For he left Tom gasping for breath on the floor and went out without saying a word about the 2/6.74 71 “Bantu Community Spend Holidays in Various Varied Occupations,” The Bantu World, January 7, 1933. 72 “Bantu Community Spend Holidays in Various Varied Occupations,” The Bantu World, January 7, 1933. 73 “Bantu Community Spend Holidays in Various Varied Occupations,” The Bantu World, January 7, 1933. 74 “Bantu Community Spend Holidays in Various Varied Occupations,” The Bantu World, January 7, 1933. 279 On closer inspection, this was no social item at all, but a stinging indictment of township life reminiscent of H. D. Tyamzashe’s “Christmas in Bantuland” (see Chapter 4). The story recounted in it is shorter and more straightforward. Cleverly, its impact is delivered as much through its placement as through its narrative: by masquerading as society news, it satirizes and indicts all other items on the page. How, it asks, can Africans preen over parties and weddings when such tragedies are playing out in the streets? The following week, on January 14, an article appeared about a visit to the Western Native Township (present-day Westbury, adjoining Sophiatown). This time it was attributed to “The Roamer,” who admits to being the author of the article about Joseph and Tom the previous week. In the column to its left there is a further piece about the neighbourhood of Doornfontein, this time by “Rollie”—another favorite pseudonym of Dhlomo’s—promising a trip to the Eastern Native Township (present-day Crown Mines) in the next issue. The pair of articles perhaps served a practical purpose: as planned items, Dhlomo was helping fill space on the page during a post-holiday slump in social announcements. Pragmatism notwithstanding, however, through their placement under “Social and Entertainment News,” the two articles once again deflate the other items on the page: an account of African progress in Kroonstad in the Orange Free State, an alumni reunion at Lemana Training College in the northern Transvaal, and a Johannesburg concert by a vaudeville troupe, the Darktown Strutters. Rollie admits that a large proportion of African Eisteddfod winners came from Doornfontein, but says he sees residents of the neighborhood “look on placidly while a man knocks another down and jumps on his stomach” and “hard-featured girls, who would pass for men anywhere, look on while their lips suck 280 hungrily at cigarettes.”75 Meanwhile in Western Township, The Roamer complains, that “the oldest residents try to brighten up things by staging parties, concerts, and meetings. But these are usually not well patronised for marabis and other violent excitements are staged and draw many to them.”76 Thus we see that the first appearances of the gadfly who would come to be known as “R. Roamer, Esq., K.A. (Know-All) Timbuctoo” were not overtly playful or humorous, but rather professed to be quite serious—even though the placement of the articles within in the newspaper produced in a distinctly dark irony. The Bantu World’s weekly R. Roamer column was formally inaugurated on March 4, 1933. Dhlomo now enjoyed a massive platform from which to publish more snide takes on black Johannesburg life. Yet the R. Roamer column stands out all the more in retrospect because it seems so tonally at odds with the rest of the paper. If anything, what is striking about newspapers like Umteteli wa Bantu and The Bantu World both before and during Dhlomo’s tenure as assistant editor is their striking lack of humor—their almost painful earnestness. Until his debut, it was very rare to encounter humorous or even lighthearted content in South Africa’s black press. Though some early black writers occasionally experimented with a satirical tone, only very rarely did such writing appear in print. Sol Plaatje’s Setswana translation of William 75 “Rollie” [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “Doornfontein Visited,” The Bantu World, January 14, 1933. 76 “The Roamer” [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “Western Township Residents Seem So Hard to Understand,” The Bantu World, January 14, 1933. Marabi was a danceable neo-traditional music similar to jazz popularly associated with illegal drinking establishments. See Christopher Ballantine, Marabi Nights: Early South African Jazz and Vaudeville (Johannesburg, South Africa: Ravan Press, 1994). The term marabi, as ethnomusicologist David Coplan has shown, also referred generally to proletarian (“low-class”) sociability; see David Coplan, In Township Tonight!, 115. Moreover, marabi became a term for a distinctive style of black soccer that emerged in the inter-war period, as shown in Peter Alegi, Laduma! Soccer, Politics and Society in South Africa (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2004): 57-59. 281 Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors was published in 1930 as Diphosho-phosho, but his acerbic recollections of the siege of Mafeking had to wait until the 1970s, decades after his death.77 The reason for this largely lay with missionary education, which combined the Church’s historically ambivalent view towards laughter with an even stronger anxiety about black laughter —the fear of being embarrassed before “pagan” peoples. Though there is compelling evidence that the book of Jonah was intended as satire, when God laughs in the Hebrew Bible it is almost always intended as an expression of hostile mockery.78 “Why do the heathen so furiously rage together?” asks the psalmist, since “He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh them to scorn: the Lord shall have them in derision…speak unto them in his wrath and vex them in his sore displeasure.”79 Likewise the epistle of James, in the New Testament, contains the command to “be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned to mourning…Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up.”80 Even more bluntly, Paul’s letter to the Ephesians encourages “neither filthiness, nor foolish talk, nor jesting,” because these actions indicate envy and sexual impropriety.81 Rather than veiling hostility and lording elegant words over others, Christians should speak frankly and without embellishment, “for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.”82 77 See Ndana Ndana, “Sol Plaatje’s Shakespeare: Translation and Transition to Modernity,” (Ph. D. diss., University of Cape Town, 2005): 142-207. 78 See John Morreall, Comedy, Tragedy, and Religion (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1999): 95-96; and Hennie A. J. Kruger, “Laughter in the Old Testament: A Hotchpotch of Humour, Mockery, and Rejoicing?,” In die Skriflig 48.2 (2014), 1-10. On the book of Jonah, see also J. William Whedbee, “Jonah as Joke: A Comedy of Contradiction, Caricature, and Compassion,” in The Bible and the Comic Vision, ed. J. William Whedbee (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 191-220; Mark Biddle, A Time to Laugh: Humor in the Bible (Macon, Ga.: Smyth and Helwys, 2013), 57-72; L. Julianna Claassens, “Rethinking Humour in the Book of Jonah: Tragic Laughter as Resistance in the Context of Trauma,” Old Testament Essays 28.3 (2015), 655-673. 79 Psalm 2:4-5, in The Book of Common Prayer (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2004 [1662]): 348. 80 James 4:9-10 (King James version). 81 Ephesians 5:4 (King James version). 82 Matthew 5:37 (King James version). 282 In the mission field, the fear and anxiety that laughter could provoke was particularly acute due to the general challenges of communication. Missionaries hoping to be taken seriously by Africans frequently wrote of the difficulties they faced in this effort: how could they save souls for God if Africans found them ridiculous? From the banks of the Ruvuma River separating modern-day Tanzania and Mozambique, the great Scottish evangelist David Livingstone recounted the bemusement his own presence could provoke, in an illustrative passage. “Successive crowds of people came to gaze,” he wrote in his journal in 1866, “my appearance and acts often cause a burst of laughter; sudden standing up produces a flight of women and children.”83 Such reactions remained common in all regions of the continent throughout the colonial era. Stephanie Newell provides excellent evidence for this in an exploration of “inappropriate” African responses to British propaganda films. While the spectacle of an audience erupting in laughter at films intended to promote domestic hygiene and discourage the use of traditional medicine was distressing to the secular missionaries of the mid-twentieth century, Newell notes that such debacles at least had the effect of separating the proverbial sheep from the goats: The media consumers who hooted at Machi Gaba, and who found the dead baby “hilarious” in Amenu’s Child, were very different entities from African colonial subjects. The latter were grafted into colonial power structures as citizens, office-holders, critics, clerks, literate and Christianized elites, modernized and (un)governable entities, and they are identifiable in the colonial archives as media consumers and media producers, English-language readers and writers.84 83 David Livingstone, The Last Journals of David Livingstone in Central Africa, ed. Horace Waller (New York, N.Y.: Harper and Brothers, 1875): 67. 84 Stephanie Newell, “The Last Laugh: African Audience Responses to Colonial Propaganda Films,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 4.3 (2017): 359. On African film audiences, see also Laura Fair, Reel Pleasures: Cinema Audiences and Entrepreneurs in Twentieth-Century Urban Tanzania (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2018); and Charles Ambler, “Popular Films and Colonial Audiences: The Movies in Northern Rhodesia,” The American Historical Review 106.1 (2001), 81-105. 283 To be sure, comedy could wield tremendous power. The American missionary Ray Phillips, later a great thorn in the side of R. R. R. Dhlomo’s brother (see Chapter 6), boasted in his book The Bantu Are Coming (1930), of preventing a group of black mineworkers from joining in violence related to the 1922 Rand Rebellion by showing them a Charlie Chaplin film. “At the end of two hours the compound was limp and weak from shouting,” Phillips reported, “the vengeful spirit had long since vanished, and the great crowd bade us good night in the usual joyous way—many still laughing.”85 Still, Phillips could not resist putting in a word against the mineworkers’ nickname for Chaplin—SiDakwa or “little drunken man,” which he called “untruthfu[l] and…libellou[s].”86 Similarly, at Marianhill just outside Durban, the Reverend Bernard Huss started introducing plays to his students at St. Francis’ College in the late 1910s, and found to his dismay that the Zulu-speaking children he taught were “far more attentive to actions and gestures than to words spoken by the actors.”87 Whether this was a language issue, a sign that the students still retained a stronger connection to the oral culture of their parents, or something else entirely is unknown, but it is striking to encounter the Reverend Huss’s comment that “several times, when we staged a comedy, I noticed that any funny action or gesture provoked peals of laughter, whereas little attention, if any, was paid to the text, although it was far more humorous, witty and funny than the accompanying action.”88 Even when whites tried to harness Africans’ demonstrated love of laughter, matters could still go awry: humor was an unstable compound. 85 Ray E. Phillips, The Bantu Are Coming: Phases of South Africa’s Race Problem (London, U.K.: Student Christian Movement Press, 1930): 150. 86 Ray E. Phillips, The Bantu Are Coming, 149. 87 Bernard Huss, “Education Through Drama,” Native Teachers’ Journal (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa), January 1921, quoted in Bhekizizwe Peterson, Monarchs, Missionaries, and African Intellectuals: African Theatre and the Unmaking of Colonial Marginality (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2000): 84. 88 Bernard Huss, “Education Through Drama,” Native Teachers’ Journal, January 1921, quoted in Bhekizizwe Peterson, Monarchs, Missionaries, and African Intellectuals, 84. 284 The difficulty of knowing precisely what Africans were laughing at was at the heart of the problem. Reducing performance to concrete and textual forms that European missionaries and settlers could “read” was, as Jean and John Comaroff have explored extensively, a crucial aspect of the colonial project.89 From the dubious codification of customary law to mission newspapers and associations that ran according to modified parliamentary procedure, missions worked to render Africans legible first to the missionaries, then to the colonial administration, and finally to the needs of colonial capitalism. The relative prosperity of Dhlomo and his cohort depended on their acquiescence to being moulded in this way. To laugh too much, or to express excessive wit, was to invite charges of arrogance, cruelty, or simple-mindedness. Simultaneously, missionaries built up a vast store of “expertise” on African ways, to the extent that by the twentieth century was seemingly no sphere of knowledge where credentialed white learning was not considered superior. As Bhekizizwe Peterson recounts, when B. W. Vilakazi became the first African on the faculty of the University of the Witwatersrand in 1935, Bantu Studies department chair R. F. Hoernlé reassured white students both that Vilakazi was a “good native who knows his place,” and that they would “not [be] compelled to go to Vilakazi for instruction”—avoiding both the indignity of submitting to an African teacher and acknowledgement that Vilakazi might possess insights a white scholar might lack.90 By the early twentieth century, however the missionary ethic of a sober, humorless Christianity was coming increasingly into conflict with new ideas about the nature and merits of humor. Outside the normative framework of missionary Christianity, the individual “sense of 89 See Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992). 90 Quoted in Bhekizizwe Peterson, Monarchs, Missionaries, and African Intellectuals, 89. 285 humor” was coming to be accepted as a useful, important, and even crucial tool for negotiating the tempestuous waters of modernity. In his 1998 book The Senses of Humor: Self and Laughter in Modern America, Daniel Wickberg argues that the way Americans and Europeans thought about laughter and its origins changed with industrialization and administrative bureaucratization beginning in the eighteenth century. In the pre-modern West, according to Wickberg, the present-day distinction between laughing at and laughing with simply did not exist: like the laughter of the Lord in the Second Psalm, “all laughter at the behavior of persons was conceived of as distancing the laugher from his object of amusement, or made possible by a pre-existing distance.”91 Under modernity, however, humor became identified less with an objective state of being, and more with a subjective way of seeing, [and] it was abstracted from character and moved to the discourse by which character was represented…Instead of being more personalized and character- specific, humor, in the eighteenth century, became more and more depersonalized as it was abstracted from the peculiar qualities of the concrete individual (the humorist); it finally came to rest in a set of texts, practices, and discourses, objectively accessible to all persons.92 Though Wickberg is speaking chiefly about literature in this passage, the shift he describes reverberated far outside the world of printed text. Humor’s transition from a quality of the other to a quality of the self, Wickberg argues, is a crucial dimension of the ethic of “bureaucratic individualism,”—the process by which submission to ever more vast structures of surveillance and authority correlates to a deepening interest in the singularities, dangers, and possibilities of a person’s interior life. Whereas being “humorous” previously meant being unbalanced, with the rise of the field of industrial psychology in the 1920s humor came to be seen as a highly advantageous trait. “To have a sense of humor,” as Wickberg puts it, “was to 91 Daniel Wickberg, The Senses of Humor, 34. 92 Daniel Wickberg, The Senses of Humor, 35. 286 have the capacity for self-adjustment, to expand and contract at will, to navigate the rigid demands of bureaucratic order by being inherently flexible.”93 Where laughter before had been thought of as a way of shoring up the foundations of a natural hierarchy, it was now regarded as a tool for navigating the vastness and perpetual flux of the modern world. It is not difficult to perceive the dilemma that the New African men like the Dhlomos faced. Though jocularity was undeniably an important aspect of precolonial southern African life (see Chapter 1), R. R. R. Dhlomo and his cohort were educated in an environment deeply suspicious of laughter. Yet after leaving school, New African men almost invariably found themselves subject to vast and impersonal bureaucracies, whether in the form of mining companies, government departments, or church hierarchies. The same could be said for the white working class “Thirties men” of Johannesburg, but they had their pick of newspapers, popular magazines, and sporting journals promoting a breezy, cheerful, and gently irreverent attitude towards life. It was not for nothing that Dhlomo chose the moniker R. (“our”) Roamer for his fictional Johannesburg flâneur—the Rand Daily Mail featured a “Topics of the Town” feature by “Saunterer,” The Star hosted “Stoep-Talk” by “The Pilgrim,” and “The Passing Show” appeared each week in The Sunday Times. Each of these columns featured light and amusing commentary that mixed discussion of everyday life with topics from the news. Their titles imply a pause from the hurly-burly of the rest of the newspaper as well as a certain level of detachment —a badge of comfortable and even complacent citizenship that black South Africans of did not enjoy, at least until the commencement of Dhlomo’s own efforts. 93 Daniel Wickberg, The Senses of Humor, 114. 287 The philosophy of the “sense of humor” was calibrated to promote the wellbeing of individuals who might otherwise feel dominated by faceless institutions. On its face, then, it is a philosophy that seems ideally suited to the lives of the African petty bourgeois in early Union-era South Africa. Certainly the New Africans had good reason to fear the consequences of being perceived by others both within and outside their community as jocular or unserious. At the same time, however, the world the “New Africans” inhabited was suffused with the incongruous and absurd—both within their communities and in relation to their white oppressors. Living in the city meant being able to read papers, access consumer goods, and participate in voluntary associations that would never have been possible in rural areas. At the same time, it meant submitting to a byzantine web of municipal pass laws and oppressive regulations meant to reinforce the idea that black people were only welcome in urban areas as sojourners or servants.94 With the rise of the commercial press, the idea of humor as a cultivatable aspect of the personality gained currency in black print discourse. For one thing, like the white press, newspapers began to print jokes. These were usually sourced from British or American compendia but were sometimes adapted to local contexts. The Bantu World called this feature “Just a Smile, Please!” while Ilanga Lase Natal—whose assistant editor Jordan Ngubane 94 The use of a pass system to curtail the freedom of movement and settlement of Africans in South Africa dates back to the earliest days of unfree labor at the Cape. The principle that blacks should only be allowed in cities as “demanded by the wants of the white population” was enunciated explicitly at the national level in the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923. After 1948 this law would prove foundational to “Grand Apartheid,” the idea that white supremacy in South Africa could be secured permanently by spinning off the “Native Reserves” as de jure independent or semi-independent states, meaning that the vast majority of Africans would have no legal claim on South African nationality. See T. R. H. Davenport, “The Beginnings of Urban Segregation in South Africa: The Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 and its Background,” Rhodes University Institute of Social and Economic Research Occasional Papers 15 (1971); Carl H. Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2012): 229-260; and P. B. Rich, “Ministering to the White Man’s Needs: The Development of Urban Segregation in South Africa, 1913-1923” African Studies 37.2 (1978), 177-192. 288 imitated Dhlomo’s style under the pseudonym “Jo the Cow”—went with the more explicit title “For Your Sense of Humour.”95 And in 1937 when the Transvaal African Boys’ Club organized an “African Voluntary Leaders’ Circle” of high school aged men, “humor” was one of six principles taught alongside leadership, efficiency, example, character, and duty: Humour, cheerfulness and laughter are the [soil] of life’s victor…Life is stern and unkind. The best way to make the facts thereof digestible to the young minds is to savour the facts with the [sense] of humour. A joke make[s] the lads open their minds, or mouths, if you like it, and the instructor may take the opportunity thus offered and hurl the unsavoury facts down their throats, there to serve their purpose.96 The Humor of R. R. R. Dhlomo Of course, urban black South African discourse was not limited to the textual—far from it. Other less highbrow forms of urban entertainment took a far more relaxed attitude towards jokes. Jeremiah and Joshua’s dialogues in the R. Roamer column were influenced a great deal by minstrelsy and vaudeville, both of which enjoyed waves of wide popularity in South Africa in the preceding decades. Consider the following parody of an A.N.C. meeting: Ourselves: So, ladies and gentlemen, you are satisfied with our past record of service for the race? Voices: We are! We are! Ourselves: So you vote unanimously for our re-election? Voices: And block! and block! Ourselves: You mean “en bloc”? Voices: Yes. And block. We want no new office bearers here.97 Troupes like De Pitch Black Follies, the Darktown Strutters, and Orlando Flying Birds are remembered today mainly for their contributions to popular music, but contemporaneous newspaper reports show that comedic sketches and speeches were an important part of their 95 See, for example, “For Your Sense of Humour,” Ilanga Lase Natal, April 2, 1938. 96 “Voluntary Leaders Circle,” The Bantu World, July 3, 1937. The above passage includes multiple compositors’ errata, necessitating the use of brackets. 97 “R. Roamer Talks About: Timbuctoo Congress,” The Bantu World, July 16, 1938 289 repertoire.98 Griffiths Motsieloa, for example, is commended in a 1933 Umteteli wa Bantu review for “clever impersonations,” and “several monologues in various languages,” suggesting that African taste was not limited to the realm of slapstick physical humor.99 The Bantu World of September 29, 1934, included a report on the case of John Mancoe, a prominent black leader in Bloemfontein, who was forced to refute certain allegations that the comedian Ndaba “Big Boy” Majola’s recent appearance in Bloemfontein “where he had amused his audiences and kept them rolling and roaring with laughter” had actually been a clandestine fundraiser for the A.N.C. “in their agitation on domestic affairs of the location with the local authorities.”100 Thus we see that comedy and politics have long been entangled.101 Unfortunately very little direct evidence about the specific content of early black comedic performance survives from pre-World War II South Africa. Dhlomo’s printed humor was a product of that ecosystem, however, and in the repartee between Jeremiah and Joshua we can recover a flavor of what the black urban audiences packing run-down township halls at that time were primed to appreciate. With R. R. R. Dhlomo’s invention of “R. Roamer, Esq.,” for The Bantu World, the black satirical tradition in South Africa decisively entered the world of print. Yet it is fitting and significant that “The Roamer” first appeared as a critique of frivolity, however much Dhlomo would later revel in the possibilities frivolity afforded. Judging from the number of supportive letters from readers that followed R. Roamer’s first Johannesburg jaunts, it would seem that 98 See, for example, Christopher John Ballantine, Marabi Nights, 16-85; David Coplan, In Township Tonight! 99 Umteteli wa Bantu, July 29, 1933, quoted in Bhekizizwe Peterson, Monarchs, Missionaries, and African Intellectuals, 143. 100 John Mancoe, “A Famous Bantu Comedian,” The Bantu World, September 29, 1934. 101 Indeed, black lives in South African cities were so precarious and contingent that almost every leisure activity and cultural expression was laden with political significance, from soccer to vaudeville to poetry. See, for example, Peter Alegi, Laduma!; Christopher Ballantine, Marabi Nights; David Coplan, In Township Tonight!; Veit Erlmann, African Stars; Tsitsi Ella Jaji, “Re-Collecting the Musical Politics of John and Nokutela Dube,” Safundi 13.3-4 (2012), 213-229; and Jeff Opland, “Abantu-Batho and the Xhosa Poets” in The People’s Paper: A Centenary History and Anthology of Abantu-Batho, 201-225, to cite only a small sample. 290 Dhlomo had struck a chord with the African public: they were eager for much more writing in this vein. In the words of one correspondent, Z. J. Raleigh Motaung, “I feel sure that almost every reader enjoys reading your articles, as enjoying the best dinner. What you write is true, because you say what you have seen, and ascertain what you know.”102 Whereas the missionary view of humor tied it to deception and misunderstanding, Dhlomo’s columns mixed candor with amusement—a bracing mix for the respectable black press. On September 9, 1933, Dhlomo revived Jeremiah and Joshua, without fanfare or an explanation of where the characters originally came from. Perhaps this was unimportant, or perhaps Bantu World readers already knew about their antics from The Sjambok. The pair resumed their weekly dialogues just as they had previously, albeit with fewer misspellings. Once again, Jeremiah asserted himself as the more dominant of the pair: Joshua: I say, Jerry, did you read the papers last week on Thursday morning? Jeremiah: Joshua! Jos: Yes, Jerry. Jer: Your insolence cripples description. Jos: (Alarmed) Hawu, what have I done now I who have nothing to do at all? Jer: You have insulted me. Jos: In what way, your august existence? Jer: In the way you interrogated me. Jos: (flabbergasted, but softly) Hawu, I have trod on the tail of an adder unawares. (aloud) Are you angry because I asked you about the paper, dear? Jer: (loftily) I seldom get angry with people of your low mentality. I only get depressed in spirits. Jos: In methylated spirits? Jer: Silence, fool! Tell me what you wanted to say when you lost your vocabulary. Always remember that to a man of my quality newspaper reading is as essential as drinking water.103 102 Z. J. Raleigh Motaung, “Carry On, Mr. Roamer,” The Bantu World, June 3, 1933. 103 “What R. Roamer Hears About Town,” The Bantu World, September 9, 1933. 291 This passage is dense with meaning. Jeremiah’s personality is basically unchanged, but in the context of a black paper his pompous, thin-skinned, newspaper-quoting “intellectual” identity could be explored more fully. Unlike Black, Dhlomo avoided the use of cacography in representing Jeremiah and Joshua’s accents, but retained Jeremiah’s love for florid and needlessly verbose language—making it obvious that the two are meant to be speaking English, the language of education. Joshua deftly deflates Jeremiah with his joke about methylated spirits, but then the conversation turns to language—specifically, a street sign pictured in a recent issue of the Rand Daily Mail. The sign is written in the two official languages of the Union, English and Afrikaans, but the municipality’s clumsy attempt at Zulu is what inspires bemusement: Jos:…I am puzzled about the other language. What is it? Jer: The word Ikona. It means “it is there.” Jos: What is there, baba? Jer: I don’t know. Perhaps they mean the street—Smith Street. They tell the Zulus it is there. Jos: But that is funny. Why do they tell the Zulus the street is there when they see it is there? Jer: We cannot fathom the depth of European wisdom, simpleton.104 Readers would have recognized that the writers of the sign had meant to write aikona —hhayi khona in modern Zulu orthography—meaning “certainly not” or “it is not there” (this nonstandard way of phrasing a negative command was common in the Fanagalo pidgin language used by whites with servants and labourers). Instead, thinking phonetically, the sign writers wrote ikhona or “it is there”—just the opposite of what they meant. Jeremiah’s remark at the end of the passage above is a wonderfully ironic dig at white “expertise,” and Dhlomo continues to lampoon white arrogance as the column goes on: 104 “What R. Roamer Hears About Town,” The Bantu World, September 9, 1933. 292 Jer:…These Europeans wanted to say Ca, but because they did not know Zulu they wrote Ikona, thinking this silly word means Ca.105 Jos: Why did they not ask the Zulus to tell them the right word, baba? Jer: (laughing): Ho! Ho! You think “experts” on Zulus would lower themselves by asking Zulus about their own language?106 Certainly R. R. R. Dhlomo’s invective here never matches the indignation of H. D. Tyamzashe’s I.C.U. harangues. Even so, this criticism must be understood within the ecosystem of The Bantu World as a whole. Unlike the editorials in a trade union paper, the R. Roamer columns functioned not as calls to mobilize, but rather as a means of release from the otherwise relentless pressures of building a progressive, New African ethic within the restrictions of a white supremacist society. Dhlomo’s characters are diffident and self-effacing—we can see this even in the brief passages above, in the fact that Jeremiah repeatedly declares the superiority of “Europeans” while simultaneously calling the word they chose for the sign, “Ikona,” “silly”—a weak descriptor that to some extent blunts the force of Dhlomo’s sarcasm. Yet if our focus is narrowed to the black press rather than the South African press as a whole, we risk neglecting important elements in the frame of reference shared by R. R. R. Dhlomo and his readers. Corinne Sandwith, in her excellent pair of articles on Dhlomo’s R. Roamer columns, rightly mentions self-censorship as a driver of Dhlomo’s apparent timidity. She writes that Dhlomo’s satires were “at odds” with the policy of The Bantu World, which “tended to restrain its critique within the bounds of an acceptable Capitalist Christianity.”107 More curiously, she claims that R. Roamer was a unique creation because “in South Africa, the iconoclastic send-up tended to find expression within the ambit of the oppositional newspaper and was usually 105 Cha or ca means “no” in Zulu 106 “What R. Roamer Hears About Town,” The Bantu World, September 9, 1933. 107 Corinne Sandwith, “Reading and Roaming the Racial City,” 21. 293 informed by the left-inspired teleology of social revolution precipitating structural change.”108 According to Sandwith, Dhlomo’s columns consistently subverted segregationist ideology by zeroing in on seemingly minor aspects of daily life—from trams to fences to roadsigns—and connecting them to broader issues by highlighting their absurdity. Dhlomo’s work is not a full- throated, comprehensive critique of black urban oppression, however, and R. Roamer columns are “incomplete, provisional, and often ambiguous.”109 Yet we should not take this to mean that Dhlomo’s opinions were ambiguous or provisional—rather, his was a conscious strategy aimed at avoiding friction with his superiors at Bantu Press, Ltd. For Sandwith, this explains why Dhlomo’s satire usually comes more in the form of suggestion than argument, leaving it to the reader to complete his punchlines.110 Jeremiah and Joshua were especially useful devices in this effort because they allowed Dhlomo to conceal his own views—whatever they may have been— behind the pair’s banter. As important as this is, we must also reckon with the debt that R. R. R. Dhlomo’s work owes to the thriving tradition of what we might call “establishment satire” in the Johannesburg daily press. On the same day that Jeremiah and Joshua made their debut, “Saunterer” in the Rand Daily Mail poked fun at the cultural pretensions of Johannesburg whites: My father was a great bookworm and had a book for years and years. He kept it in the sitting-room where everyone could see it, because, as he always said, it lent tone to the place. 108 Corinne Sandwith, “Well-Seasoned Talks,” 4. 109 Corinne Sandwith, “Reading and Roaming the Racial City,” 23. 110 Of course, as discussed in Chapter 1, izimbongi (Nguni praise poets) were no strangers to either outrageous language or complex circumlocutions. As Jeff Opland and Patrick McAllister put it in a discussion of Xhosa praise poetry, “izibongo were often cryptic, referring to circumstances or qualities in compressed, often metaphoric allusions: resolving the obscurities entailed the performance of a separate narrative (ibali), either by the poet or by some other informed person.” See Jeff Opland and Patrick McAllister, “The Xhosa Imbongi as Trickster,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 22.2 (2010): 157. 294 People who called on us used to be shown to the sitting-room and after they had sniffed around a bit and asked whether our mezzotint of Wemmer Pan on a foggy Pancake Day was a genuine Rembrandt, their eye would alight on the library and they would say, “Oh, I see you have a book.”111 The “Saunterer” column, “Topics of the Town,” appeared almost daily, directly adjacent to the editorial. Its aims were modest within the context of a paper aimed at the English-speaking white elite (it was not until after World War II that the Rand Daily Mail became known as the mouthpiece of South African liberalism). Its posture of gentle fun provided a counterpoint to the political matter nearby, and attracted eyes to the editorial page who would otherwise avoid it. Dhlomo’s column also appeared next to the weekly editorial, employing the same strategy. A quantitative content analysis of Dhlomo’s R. Roamer, Esq. columns reveals trends and patterns that might not otherwise be clear to the non-systematic reader. Dhlomo wrote over five hundred unique columns as R. Roamer, Esq., between March 1933 and March 1943, when he left The Bantu World (514 columns in total, though a small number were reprinted). The column appeared under multiple titles, starting as “What R. Roamer Sees [or “Hears”] About Town”, changing to “R. Roamer Talks to the People” for most of 1934, “R. Roamer Talks About…” between late 1934 and early 1940, and finally “R. Roamer, Esq. On…” from 1940 to 1943. Despite the name changes, the column was never absent for more than two weeks at a time over the course of its ten year run. Crucially, it survived the transition to World War II largely intact; even the bombing of The Bantu World headquarters by pro-Nazi terrorists in December 1940 and February 1942 did not interrupt the column.112 As The Bantu World shrunk in the early 1940s 111 “Saunterer,” “Topics of the Town,” Rand Daily Mail, September 9, 1933. Wemmer Pan is a popular Johannesburg park featuring a lake. 112 See The Bantu World, December 14, 1940; and “R. Roamer, Esq., K.A. on Dynamite,” The Bantu World, February 7, 1942. An authoritative work on the Ossewabrandwag, the pro-Nazi group behind the attacks on The Bantu World, is Patrick J. Furlong, Between Crown and Swastika: The Impact of the Radical Right on the Afrikaner Nationalist Movement in the Fascist Era (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1991). 295 due to paper rationing, it marked the end of an era for the women’s section of the newspaper, which at one point ran to four full pages and was also overseen by Dhlomo in his capacity as “The Editress” (see below). R. Roamer, Esq., however, was not reduced, and continued to command a full column in a prime location until Dhlomo’s departure from the paper. Out of 514 total columns, 115, or about one in five, were written as scripted dialogues between Jeremiah and Joshua. Once Dhlomo introduced these characters in September 1933, they appeared with regularity and could be relied upon to discuss any number of topics. Most of the other columns were written from the first-person perspective of R. Roamer, though Dhlomo was also fond of scripting Hansard-style reports of various gatherings, from meetings of the fictitious Bantu-African Knife Users’ Association to white “experts” from the Native Affairs Department.113 Jeremiah and Joshua were sometimes present at these meetings, and had other adventures narrated by Dhlomo, outside of the script format. Many of these narratives involved Dhlomo’s female characters, Nurse Jane Maplank of the Imaginary Hospital and the skokiaan queen Betty Bettina. Other recurring cast members include R. Roamer’s “Rib” (that is, his wife), and the Editor and the Editress of Bantu World. It should be noted, however, that while Dhlomo’s cast of characters was consistent, the columns largely lack continuity. Sometimes Jeremiah is represented as a pastor, at other times a gardener for a white family; often the pair are described as R. Roamer’s employees at The Bantu World. While Jeremiah is more pompous and learned than Joshua, Roamer boasts a “K.A.” (“Know-All”) degree from “Timbuctoo University” and outranks them both. It might be tempting to imagine Roamer’s origins in Timbuctoo as a sign of pan-Africanist sympathies—“a 113 “R. Roamer Talks About…Knife Users’ Conference,” The Bantu World, March 9, 1935; and “R. Roamer Talks About…Timbuctoo Experts,” The Bantu World, March 18, 1939. 296 positive affirmation of black culture,” as Stephen Smith puts it, but on closer inspection it becomes clear that Dhlomo’s Timbuctoo is a semi-fictionalized version of South Africa, with its own segregation policies and its own complement of white “experts,” rather than an alternative to it.114 It bears a closer resemblance to Tyamzashe’s “Bantuland” than any mythical Azania. The targets of Dhlomo’s satirical pen were diverse, and he had a particular talent for connecting seemingly unrelated issues in unexpected ways. One excellent example of this is his October 21, 1939 parody reframing the joint summertime assault of flies and mosquitoes as an analogue of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.115 Scholars like Smith and Sandwith have tended to focus on Dhlomo’s skewering of urban segregation: the tyranny of passes, the pick-up van, urban removals and Native Affairs Department queues. Certainly for the two months after the column’s inauguration segregation was almost Dhlomo’s exclusive target, as Roamer toured the various townships of Johannesburg. In the second half of 1933, however, Dhlomo turned to satirizing relations between the sexes, and from then on no single topic area dominated his work. The vast majority of R. Roamer columns were about one of three main subjects: segregation and social problems (140 columns or just over 27 percent), women and gender relations (128 columns or about 25 percent), and black politics and associational life (87 columns or about 17 per cent).116 In 1933, over 43 percent of R. Roamer pieces focused on South African segregation and social problems, but this share declined over time to 16 percent in 1942, Dhlomo’s last full year at The Bantu World. During the same period the share of columns fully or partially devoted to black politics and organizing increased from less than 10 percent to 34 114 Stephen Smith, “Restoring the Imprisoned Community,” 78. 115 “R. Roamer Talks About…Armed Forces,” The Bantu World, October 21, 1939. 116 This typology is inclusive, meaning that the same column can fall into multiple categories as long as it devotes significant space to a certain topic. 297 percent in 1942. One may speculate that the disruptions to South African life brought on by the war may have driven this shift, as white men left the labor force to fight abroad, and black politics became more restive. The proportion of columns focusing on gender remained fairly stable throughout the decade, except in 1938 where it grew to 39 percent and in 1939 when it shrunk to less than 10 percent of the columns printed that year. In 1935 a number of columns focusing on the Italian invasion of Abyssinia appeared, mainly at the expense of columns on segregation, which comprised just 19 percent of the year’s total—almost a fifty percent decline from their share in 1934. In 1939, another drop in columns about segregation was occasioned by the outbreak of World War II in Europe—a main theme in almost 16 percent of R. Roamer columns that year. In total, however, only a modest share of R. Roamer columns focused on current events at home or abroad—just under 12 percent in total, and just one column out of the fifty printed in 1941. Dhlomo’s humor impacted the rest of The Bantu World in important ways that built on his previous understanding of the newspaper as a kind of virtual performance space. A considerable number of R. Roamer columns (37 in total, or just over 7 percent) referenced persons, personae, or items elsewhere in The Bantu World. This was a critical function of the column. The Bantu World’s impact far exceeded its formal footprint—as late as 1954, Bantu Press, Ltd. had only fifteen employees on staff.117 Pseudonymous features like the R. Roamer column were thus an attractive means of artificially boosting the number of perspectives showcased by the paper. We have already encountered this in Stephen Black’s Sjambok (see Chapter 4): instead of writing just one editorial, staff journalists could write multiple columns under different pseudonymous 117 Brian Rutledge, “South African Readers and Consumer Capitalism, 1932-1962,” 57. 298 Women and Gender African Politics Social Problems and Segregation 50.00 37.50 25.00 12.50 0.00 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 Figure 6: Percentage of R. Roamer columns dealing with three major subject areas over time. Values denote the percentage of columns in a given year that deal meaningfully with the subject area (i.e., a quarter or more of a given column relates to the topic). Percentages are inclusive, meaning a single column may touch on two or all three subject areas, and the three categories presented here do not represent all subject areas in which columns were categorized. See Appendix A for full data. personae. Not only did such items vary and enrich the paper’s discussion, but more controversial views could be given vent without risking precious editorial space, which in turn would elicit further letters and debate. In such cases Dhlomo’s fictionalized persona acted as a compere or moderator who provided commentary and guidance on the newspaper itself. Ever since disrupting the “Social and Personal News” with his first appearances as Roamer, Dhlomo clearly understood the black South African newspaper’s heritage as a performance space, and he exploited that performativity to great effect—particularly in his satires of African leadership. Dhlomo could shame grandstanding and hypocrisy by calling it out—while at the same time providing a refuge from the excesses of his own paper. It was a model that stood the test of time, and changed the course of black South African writing forever. 299 Enter the Editress: Gender in R. R. R. Dhlomo’s Humor Dhlomo often wrote about women. The fact that the Editress was an occasional interlocutor of Roamer’s was an especially tongue-in-cheek maneuver because—as anyone who visited The Bantu World’s offices would have discovered—there was no such person. “Her” weekly columns in the women’s section of the paper were also written by Dhlomo, with recipes and homemaking hints sometimes supplied by Bertram F. G. Paver’s wife Marjorie. In his capacity as Roamer, Dhlomo would also sometimes comment on letters published in the women’s section and, occasionally, refer to the Editor and other correspondents. By doing this, Dhlomo not only drove traffic to other parts of the paper but also implicated Bantu World as the site of an ongoing drama of black life in Johannesburg, one that incorporated employees, contributors, and readers alike. R. Roamer columns frequently complain about the impotence of black leadership, and in column after column satirizing political meetings and would-be “big bugs,” the weaknesses of these leaders are seen to be stereotypically feminine ones, from vanity and loquacity to selfishness. What black people needed, according to Dhlomo, was organization, seriousness, and clarity of thought—hallmarks of a well-spent education. This is amply illustrated in a February 1934 column: Do you know a gramophone? I mean that instrument which sings [R. T.] Caluza’s songs? Yes, the gramophone. Now, do you know that once you set it going, it goes and goes and goes until the record can talk no more. Now there are Africans like that. Usually they belong to the half-baked, sorry, I mean half-educated sort. They looked into the classrooms of institutions but looked out again before they got anything worth mentioning into their brains. To cover this open space in their brains they must pretend it is not vacant by talking all the time. They see you enter a hall, house or room and this at once sets their well-oiled tongues yapping…This African sits there talking about other people’s morals. They 300 worry him, for they remind him of his own. He sees in all the little acts and talks of other people unmentionable evil. If he cannot talk about something he would burst and die. So he talks to save himself, and, at the same time, to make amends for his brainlessness.118 Dhlomo often poked fun at the mixing of the sexes in public gatherings, accusing “leaders” of becoming womanish in their presence. Women, R. Roamer insisted, were the original great talkers. “Unlike men,” R. Roamer explained, “when women are friends they hide nothing from one another. They discuss personal matters over garden fences and in their gatherings during the day. That is why when women friends quarrel they should such nasty things to one another.”119 In the following passage from an early column, the attendees at a meeting are lampooned for their lack of interest in the subject at hand, caring much more about burnishing their social reputation and impressing the ladies than the day’s topic: The meeting was presided over by a wise looking young man who, for reasons that he knows how to register many goals in a soccer match was chosen as chairman. Besides him [sic] sat the secretary[,] a young man who was considered for the post because he attends all the dances and parties held in the city. The chairman rose and told those present—ladies and gentlemen—why [he] had called that meeting; and asked the secretary to read the minutes of the last meeting. He does. They are correct. But because there are ladies in the meeting, the gentleman who dresses well, stands up and criticises the minutes. He wants to know, sir, why the minutes do not mention that Mr. and Mrs. So and So were there. The chairman looks pained at this glaring omission and says so. The secretary apologises effusively. You see, these are important things in the lives of these intellectuals, more important than what the lecturer will tell them about how to appreciate art.120 In contrast to the patriarchal kholwa order in which Dhlomo and many of his peers were raised, the segregated city was a space where norms were inverted, with perilous consequences. The moral libertinism of black Johannesburg, of which Dhlomo had already written in An 118 “R. Roamer Talks to the People,” The Bantu World, February 10, 1934. 119 “R. Roamer Talks About: Nurse Jane Maplank,” The Bantu World, May 14, 1938. 120 “What R. Roamer Sees About Town,”The Bantu World, May 27, 1933. 301 African Tragedy, induced men to become womanish and women—sometimes, and to humorous effect—to become mannish, as in this anecdote about a woman who lashes out violently at her lover for infidelity. Note Jim’s perverse remark on African polygamy, and the inversion of chivalry inherent in watching two women fight for his love: Jer: “No, I am not Maria,” hissed the woman in his face. “I am a mampara who was fooled by you. I am not Maria; Maria will meet you in a hot place.” Jos: What did she mean? Jer: She meant the place where fire burns forever more, for she stabbed him in the stomach. Jos: Did Jim go to the hot locality? Jer: Fortunately, his stomach is like rubber. The knife did not go in; but the wound made him a better man afterwards. He is now as harmless as a baby. Jos: He does not practice polygamy anymore? Jer: Oh, well, he says polygamy—like beer—are things handed over to us by our forefathers and we must not neglect them. Jos: How did he settle the affair? Jer: He says it will settle itself when the two ladies meet, and fight for him. He’ll take the winner.121 Whereas the kholwa order organized life around the Christian values of humility and hard work, the city was an unstable and disorderly space where stereotypically feminine faults like superficiality and affectation were rewarded. Restraining these tendencies therefore meant restraining the conduct of women, and Dhlomo’s efforts at The Bantu World illustrate the extent to which women’s laughter was a key focus of this work. If mission school education left African men with ambivalent feelings on the propriety of their own indulgence in humor— feelings that Dhlomo worked to relieve—women’s laughter still demanded rigorous control and oversight. Indeed, it is hard to overstate the difference in registers Dhlomo adopted between his R. Roamer columns and his weekly contributions as “The Editress.” If women close to Dhlomo knew the true identity of the Editress, their response to this ruse never made it into the paper. 121 “R. Roamer Talks About: Partnership,” The Bantu World, October 1, 1938. 302 While R. Roamer’s column was maintained as a humorous, irreverent space, The Bantu World’s women’s pages were the most censorious and didactic part of a censorious and didactic paper. Literate women could not be prevented from reading R. Roamer if they wished, of course. But the “women of the race” would never have their own equivalent of Jeremiah and Joshua. There was a regular dialogue feature—“Over the Tea Cups” featuring characters named Arabelle and Isabel—but their patronizing tone bears a closer resemblance to items in the syndicated Bantu Press children’s supplement. In keeping with the rest of the women’s page the subject of their discussion was limited exclusively to sincere moral admonishments, homemaking tips and English vocabulary. R. R. R. Dhlomo’s philosophy in editing the women’s section derived from the same self- improving ethos that animated The Bantu World as a whole. If The Bantu World was a tool for uplifting and improving the African majority, the mission of the Editress was to teach African women who embrace their roles as “progressive” (though subordinate) exemplars of the race. For men, the cultivation of a sophisticated sense of humor was a mark of progress, but since women in general were less educated, less literate, and assumed to be intellectually inferior, such an approach was deemed inappropriate for them. Instead, Dhlomo strove tirelessly to solicit contributions from women on love, marriage, and domesticity, frequently venting frustration that 303 his women readers were not holding up their end of the bargain.122 In one column as the Editress, Dhlomo writes of Edward Bok’s career at the American Ladies Home Journal as a model for his own work, insisting that success or failure depended on the seriousness and obedience of his readers rather than his own editorial choices.123 “They took the trouble to read the magazine carefully,” the Editress wrote of Bok’s white women readers, and “when they agreed with the articles they followed the advice which was given them and wrote letters of thanks to the Editor. When they did not agree they wrote and told the Editor why.”124 Dhlomo’s passive-aggression is often evident in his Editress and “Over the Tea Cups” columns, where he complained continually that women were not contributing more articles and organizing themselves for the betterment of society. Though women like Johanna Phahlane (“Lady Porcupine”) built up considerable public reputations as contributors to the The Bantu World women’s supplement, as Tsitsi Ella Jaji has explored, the fact that men often dominated the correspondence on matters of love and proper 122 It bears mentioning that in contrast to The Bantu World’s male-led efforts to propagate Christian domesticity among African women, African women’s political activism had a long history and a significant degree of both institutional and strategic autonomy from predominantly male organizations. While the focus in this chapter is on R. R. R. Dhlomo’s approach to gender and its implications for the politics of South African humor, we cannot take his accusations of women’s domestic apathy at face value; in fact, the absence of women’s voices from certain discussions may tell us just as much as their presence. See Nomboniso Gasa, “‘Let Them Build More Gaols,” in Women in South African History: Basus’iimbokodo, Bawel’imilambo (They Remove Boulders and Cross Rivers), ed. Nomboniso Gasa (Cape Town, South Africa: Human Sciences Research Council Press, 2007), 129-151, and whole volume. See also Belinda Bozzoli with Mmantho Nkotsoe, Women of Phokeng: Consciousness, Life Strategy, and Migrancy in South Africa, 1900-1983 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1991); Helen Bradford, “We Are Now the Men: Women’s Beer Protest in the Natal Countryside,” in Class, Community, and Conflict: Southern African Perspectives, ed. Belinda Bozzoli (Johannesburg, South Africa: Ravan Press, 1987), 292-323; Cherryl Walker, Women and Resistance in South Africa, 2nd ed. (Cape Town, South Africa: David Philip, 1991 [1982]); and Julia C. Wells, We Now Demand! The History of Women’s Resistance to Pass Laws in South Africa (Johannesburg, South Africa: Witwatersrand University Press, 1993). 123 For background on Bok, see Salme Harju Steinberg, Reformer in the Marketplace: Edward W. Bok and the Ladies’ Home Journal (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1979); and Jan Knight, “The Environmentalism of Edward Bok: The Ladies’ Home Journal, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, and the Environment, 1901-1909,” Journalism History 29.4 (2004), 154-165. 124 The Editress [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “The Ladies Home Journal,” The Bantu World, March 14, 1936. 304 wifely conduct periodically caused consternation.125 “Their arguments and contradictory articles have set those men of our race who are proud of their womenfolk gasping as to what our men are coming to,” wrote Titus Mabaso of Pretoria (ironically, a man) late in 1935, “Let these Pages be solely reserved for the views of our ladies.”126 This plea drew a sharp response two weeks later from Walter M. B. Nhlapo of Eastern Native Township, who correctly perceived himself as one of the chief offenders targeted by Mabaso.127 Listing G. K. Chesterton, the works of the seventeenth century English poet Robert Herrick, and a recent article in The Outspan as evidence for the necessity of criticizing women, Nhlapo provides us a revealing glimpse at his own literary frame of reference. Dhlomo himself felt moved to comment as the Editress, maintaining the illusion of his femininity. “While we are not afraid of criticism,” “she” wrote, “we believe that much good would be done to us if our menfolk would drive themselves almost insane digging up the good qualities there are in our women folk rather than split hairs over our weaknesses.”128 Men had a crucial role to play in supporting women’s progress, but within limits: the women’s section could only accommodate a few male complaints at once. Given that the same man was responsible for creating content in such radically different registers on a weekly basis, it stands to reason that unique juxtapositions sometimes arose. A particularly egregious case-in-point is the June 4, 1938 Bantu World, wherein R. Roamer discusses “1938 Figures.” Most of the column takes the form of a dialogue between R. Roamer and Nurse Jane Maplank. R. Roamer’s relationship with Nurse Maplank (often cast as Jeremiah’s wife) is full of banter and flirtation, and the column seems to poke fun at the both the 125 See Tsitsi Ella Jaji, Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, and Pan-African Solidarity (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2014): 125-126. 126 Titus Mabaso, “Leave Women’s Pages,” The Bantu World, November 9, 1935. 127 Walter M. B. Nhlapo, “Should Women Be Left Alone?,” The Bantu World, November 23, 1935. 128 Walter M. B. Nhlapo, “Should Women Be Left Alone?,” The Bantu World, November 23, 1935. 305 silliness of fashion and the vanity of both genders. In it, R. Roamer asks why women must “change their figures” with the latest fashion, and Nurse Maplank explains that women must keep up-to-date with fashion trends: “You will remember that when fashion said we should wear short dresses, we all seemed to have girlish figures?” “Quite true, Nurse. We remember last year when we mistook Mrs. Maplank, your dear mother, for yourself and—er. But what about those women whose figures are— dropping a bit?” “No self-respecting women allows her figure to drop…We women do not allow our waist lines to stick out as you men do.” “We do it purposely,” we argued, “because every man who loves dignity must have a Public Opinion.” “A what?” “A Public Opinion; that is, a waist line that pushes his waistcoat forward a little. We men believe that if you are well fed and er—important, you should look it.” “Isn’t that ridiculous!” exclaimed Nurse Jane Maplank. “Women go half hungry to retain their girlish figures. It is worth it.”129 Directly adjacent to “1938 Figures,” on the other side of the page, appeared the Editress’s weekly column, entitled “Is This You?”: Some of our women as soon as they marry, take not the slightest interest in their personal appearance. They think that marriage is the end of their efforts in this direction. They develop flat, unshapely figures, coarse, lined faces and take to wearing depressing dresses that make a young married woman look like her grandmother. And doing this, they are surprised when their husbands lose interest in them and seek outside interests where beauty and cheerfulness reign… She soon learns not to care for many things…Her life becomes just like that of a clock—a monotonous, ticking existence… Soon it will break your life and fling you into the background of things. People will avoid you as a useless person. Those who will be your companions and friends will be those who are as lifeless as yourself.130 129 “R. Roamer Talks About: 1938 Figures,” The Bantu World, June 4, 1938. 130 “Is This You?” The Bantu World, June 4, 1938. 306 For men, then, extra weight is almost the price of admission into public life, yet the same weight makes a woman “lifeless.” In his R. Roamer column, Dhlomo satirizes the whole notion of figures and fashion, juxtaposing the vanities of both men and women alongside each other in a breezy and amusing fashion. Then, in his column for the women’s page, Dhlomo as “the Editress” takes on the same issue and raises the stakes immensely. While figures can be discussed playfully in R. Roamer’s column, Dhlomo makes it clear that there is no room for such play on a page for “Women of the Race.” In his guise as a fellow woman, the message Dhlomo sent as the Editress was that women still needed clear and unambiguous instructions on how to dress, eat, work and behave—and that the male-dominated commercial press (as opposed to autonomous women’s spaces) should be at the vanguard of this effort.131 Irony, such as could be found in the humor column, was not, in his view, appropriate to women’s intellectual needs. For Dhlomo, few aspects of women’s behavior were beneath comment, from teaching children sarcasm to making fatalistic remarks to using the word “I” excessively in conversation —all three of these specific admonishments appear over the course of two issues from October 1936.132 In December 1935 he wrote as the Editress about smiling and how the refusal to smile often had “utterly robbed” a young woman she knew “of beauty.”133 Yet gratuitous displays of 131 For example, the self-help and mutual aid societies known as zenzeles and manyanos. See Debbie Gaitskell, “Devout Domesticity? A Century of African Women’s Christianity in South Africa,” in Women and Gender in South Africa to 1945, ed. Cherryl Walker (Cape Town, South Africa: David Philip, 1990); Deborah Gaitskell and Elaine Unterhalter, “Mothers of the Nation: A Comparative Analysis of Nation, Race, and Motherhood in Afrikaner Nationalism and the African National Congress,” in Woman—Nation—State, eds. Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias with Jo Campling (London, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), 58-78; Iris Berger, “An African American ‘Mother of the Nation’: Madie Hall Xuma in South Africa, 1940-1963, Journal of Southern African Studies 27.3 (2001), 547-566; Alan G. Cobley, The Rules of the Game: Struggles in Black Recreation and Social Welfare Policy in South Africa (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997); Ellen Kuzwayo, Call Me Woman (London, U.K.: The Women’s Press, 1985); Catherine Higgs, “Zenzele: African Women’s Self-Help Organizations in South Africa, 1927-1998,” African Studies Review 47.3 (2004), 119-141; Zubeida Jaffer, Beauty of the Heart: The Life and Times of Charlotte Mannya Maxeke (Bloemfontein, South Africa: Sun Press, 2016). 132 See “Avoid Sarcasm,” The Bantu World, October 3, 1936; “The Editress” [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “Our ‘I Don’t Cares,’” The Bantu World, October 14, 1936; and “The Editress” [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “‘I’—‘I’—‘I,’” The Bantu World, October 3, 1936. 133 “The Editress” [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “Watch Your Face!,” The Bantu World, December 14, 1935. 307 joy, in Dhlomo’s view, could also be dangerous. On July 30, 1938, he published a long letter written by a young nurse, Selina Rampa (a regular Bantu World correspondent), extolling the wisdom of the phrase “Laugh and the world will laugh with you.”134 In it, Rampa argued in breezy terms that “the world is whirled round by three engines known as laugh, love, and life,” and that laughter is a prerequisite of the other two. To a black South African public oppressed the by weight of white political and economic supremacy, Rampa castigates people that remark that it is a very hard world, for they do not know how to laugh at all e.g. how do you expect your cooking to be tasty and highly delightful if your fire is not bright? How can you expect cleanliness if you are not a lover of soap and water?…Even if you are a ‘High Bug’ laugh with the low ones and the world will laugh with you.135 To a present-day reader this may seem like inoffensive, even saccharine, copy. Rampa’s letter is no philosophical treatise; it offers little more than an invitation to smile at the little things; laughter of the most innocuous type imaginable. Still, within the space of the women’s page, Dhlomo could not resist weighing in. For “This Week’s Thought” Dhlomo chose Proverbs 4:13: “Take fast hold of instruction; let her not go; for she is thy life.” Surrounding it is another “By the Editress” column titled “Sunny Disposition,” which rails against “the wrong kind of laughter…Laughter that cheapens you.”136 Whereas Rampa’s letter—twee as it was—had to do with a general attitude towards life, for Dhlomo easy laughter was dangerous for black women because of the message it sent to men: Many women old and young suffer from this kind of laughter. They laugh when they should absolutely frown. They continue laughing when they should tell the cause of their merriment not to be rude or vulgar. They laugh when total strangers cast on their paths devoid of sense and decency. They laugh when they are spoken to by people who are not worth a penny… 134 Selina Rampa, “Laugh and the World Will…,” The Bantu World, July 30, 1938. 135 Selina Rampa, “Laugh and the World Will…,” The Bantu World, July 30, 1938. 136 The Editress [R.R.R. Dhlomo], “Sunny Disposition,” The Bantu World, July 30, 1938. 308 This laughter has brought down many nice innocent ladies to the level of cheap jacks. Anybody can point her out as “the girl who…,” then he describes what kind of girl this laughter machine was. You will also note that while men…are quite ready to pretend to love “an easy” woman one who can easily be made to laugh, they soon tire of her. And you will note too that while men like this kind of a woman to play with or pass time with, when they want a life companion, they pass her by; and look for a women “who is not so easy.”137 New African Flâneur: Roaming and Expertise in R. R. R. Dhlomo’s Humor R. R. R. Dhlomo’s satirical writing incorporated powerful critiques of white liberal segregationists whose post-World War I paternalism towards Africans had more to do with co- opting their political aspirations than improving their lot in society. Yet the very paternalism he attacked in white men he wielded with alacrity against black women. If black laughter was originally interpreted by missionaries as evidence of savagery, and now rehabilitated (for men) into a mark of urbane sophistication, Dhlomo still regarded black women’s laughter as basically dangerous. In his view, women had not yet progressed to the point where humor and irony had become useful for them as a means of self-improvement. Although The Bantu World’s women’s supplement (including the contributions of women like Johanna Phahlane and Selina Rampa) anticipated the women’s popular journalism of later magazines like Drum and Zonk!, it is telling that even as the scope of his writing transgressed the boundaries of the public and domestic sphere, for Dhlomo humor remained a resource and strategy for the more or less exclusive use of men. All this notwithstanding, R. R. R. Dhlomo’s satires really do mark a watershed in the history of black journalism and literature in South Africa, because they represented a decisive shift in the way the African newspaper had previously been imagined. This shift entailed a 137 The Editress [R.R.R. Dhlomo], “Sunny Disposition,” The Bantu World, July 30, 1938. 309 deeper engagement with the complicated realities of segregated urban life. We have already discussed how The Sjambok evoked the pre-apartheid theatre auditorium, acknowledging a black presence in the gallery seats that, while still unequal, was still revolutionary in the context of South Africa’s establishment press. Hailing from a milieu that valorized newspapers, debating societies, and formal meeting procedure, Dhlomo’s satire regarded such institutions with a healthy dose of skepticism, aware of how they contributed to the very qualities—selfishness, disunity, and sycophancy, among others—that the New Africans claimed to want to overcome. Dhlomo was influenced just as deeply by segregated public transport, most especially by township trains, in thinking about the newspaper as a community dialogue, and his experimentation with this radically different inspiration ranks among his most important contributions. To be black in Johannesburg in the 1930s and 1940s increasingly meant long commutes. In the mid-1930s, the government demolished the densely-packed slum of Prospect Township.138 Its former residents were sent to what The Bantu World unironically (and R. Roamer, Esq. ironically) referred to as the “Bantu Parktown”: Orlando, almost ten miles away from downtown.139 For the moment, residents of Western Native Township (modern Westbury) and Eastern Native Township (site of the present-day George Goch Men’s Hostel), were allowed to remain. The only places in greater Johannesburg where Africans could own property were 138 See Jeremy Foster, “The Wilds and the Township: Articulating Modernity, Capital, and Socio-Nature in the Cityscape of Pre-Apartheid Johannesburg,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 71.1 (2012), 42-59; Susan Parnell, “Race, Power, and Urban Control: Johannesburg’s Inner City Slum-Yards, 1910-1923,” Journal of Southern African Studies 29. 3 (2003), 615-637; Susan Parnell, “Slums, Segregation, and Poor Whites, 1920-1934,” in White But Poor: Essays on the History of Poor Whites in Southern Africa, 1880-1940, ed. Robert Morrell (Pretoria, South Africa: University of South Africa Press, 1992), 115-150. 139 Parktown is one of Johannesburg’s oldest and wealthiest neighborhoods, famous for its mansions built by the city’s original mining magnates. 310 Alexandra (about the same distance from town to the north as Orlando, and also a perennial candidate for removal) or Sophiatown, which was closer in. Serving the needs of the white population, both in the center of town and in increasingly far-flung, low density suburbs, meant spending time on crowded buses, trams and trains. Dhlomo frankly admits his interest in the social dynamics of public transportation in an August 8, 1942 column, writing that “most of the subjects we talk about here we get in these trains.”140 Another column describes the Pimville Express, which transported blacks from the burgeoning South Western Townships (Soweto) to central Johannesburg, as “our houses of parliament where we discuss all our problems.”141 As a product of missionary education, Dhlomo and his petty bourgeois peers moved through a world in which every sphere—even precolonial history and African cultural traditions—privileged white expertise and knowledge. Refusing to defer to whiteness meant jeopardizing one’s reputation and livelihood, and potentially falling from the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie. This was a lamentable fate not only for one’s own sake, but for the sake of all other African petty bourgeois, since such a fall could only serve to confirm white suspicions of racial unfitness. Yet in the trains, Africans were not bound by such strictures: The people who live in Pimville and Orlando are some of the best informed Africans in this country. They know everything under the sun, above the sun and inside the sun. In fact, it is a puzzle why, with such knowledge and such critical tongues, they live in locations. They should be living in palaces. Any train that leaves Johannesburg Station, for these two townships has a full load of passengers who are experts on every subject in the world…If you board these crowded trains in the evenings without your newspaper, you need not worry. You will soon hear all the latest news in the trains. And, what is more important, you will hear 140 “R. Roamer Esq. K.A. on Know-Alls,” The Bantu World, August 8, 1942. 141 “R. Roamer Esq. K.A. on Christmas Advice,” The Bantu World, December 26, 1942. 311 even the news that is not in any newspaper. “Confidential” news that even the Government does not seem to possess will be passed round in these trains.142 For Dhlomo, township trains were thrillingly uncontrolled sites of discussion and debate, outside the supervision of white “experts.” Indeed, not even the luminaries of the black petty bourgeoisie could control what was said in the trains. The ordinary rules of expertise were turned on their head; a passenger could hold forth on anything, however dubious their opinion. And the audience was different too: unlike the Bantu Men’s Social Centre and most other African associational contexts, the atmosphere inside a train carriage was neither exclusive nor hierarchical: men and women, young and old, illiterate and petty bourgeois all found themselves in the same space, hurtling past mine dumps towards their respective occupations in Johannesburg’s urban core. The train to Pimville and Orlando was a particularly potent symbol because unlike public transport in other parts of the city, it symbolized a new and radically segregationist vision, whereby Africans were assured they would be able to develop “along their own lines,” as the stock phrase went. Taken at face value, this augured well for African opportunities in the long term. In practice, however, segregated transport only drew attention to the hollowness of that promise. Consider an R. Roamer column from 1937 on “Important People”: Please, hand us our handkerchief there, dear Rib. Thank you. You ask why we laugh at these people? The landowners and residents of Sophiatown and Alexandra Township are the sole support of the buses that carry them to and from their work daily. But seeing these important people “moved on,” spoken to in rough language and packed like sardines into these buses would you believe this?… Landowners and residents fight like monkeys trying to board the tram-cars every evening at rush hours. Important residents stand in long, stupidly patient lines at the non- European station waiting for tickets for which they are not begging. They wait thus even 142 “R. Roamer Esq. K.A. on Know-Alls,” The Bantu World, August 8, 1942. 312 at rush hours at the week-ends because only one hole is opened and the others are there just for decorative purposes…143 In other words, public transport collapsed the hierarchy that Johannesburg’s black petty bourgeoisie fought to establish for themselves, demonstrating that the white government regarded all Africans as basically the same. In “Important People,” Dhlomo uses this deflation as grounds for issuing an uncharacteristically earnest lament—tempered, at the end, by an admission that he does not expect things to change much in the near future. Today our people in all walks of life are prepared to except [sic] half loaves on the plea that they are better than no loaf. What a stupid people! Do you think that a man who accepts half a loaf with a monkey’s grin on his face can impress the world of his suitability for a full loaf? Ikona! That is why wherever you go you see Africans receiving half loaves of bread instead of loaves… Oh, my! Oh, Mayebabo!144 This is enough to make us weep; but as tears are scarce and we might need them for more worthy purposes, we indulge in laughter instead.145 Public transport for Dhlomo revealed the basic absurdity of black urban life. In the pages of a newspaper dedicated to progress (The Bantu World’s women’s section, after all, was titled “Marching Forward”), Dhlomo’s descriptions of trams, trains and buses hinted at a dangerous idea. Perhaps the New Africans had not progressed nearly as far as they had thought. By adopting the persona of a train orator, alternately extravagant and self-effacing, Dhlomo found a way to step outside the suffocatingly formal conventions of respectable African print discourse in order to undercut it, anticipating an era beyond the Talented Tenth politics of his compatriots. His columns undermined the logic of segregation not only by connecting local events to global 143 “R. Roamer Talks About…Important People,” The Bantu World, July 3, 1937. 144 Maye babo is a Zulu interjection of shock and surprise. 145 “R. Roamer Talks About…Important People,” The Bantu World, July 3, 1937. 313 news, or interrogating its various expressions, but by rejecting the segregationist logic behind the Talented Tenth. Collectively, the R. Roamer columns stressed that segregation at its core was a positive feedback loop. The social problems it produced, and the parasitic white “experts” entrusted with addressing them, only served to justify further segregation. Hence R. Roamer’s suggestion that Alexandra’s segregated buses create riders who are fit only for segregation, having conformed themselves to its basic structural injustice. By discussing social problems like these in a humorous and morally neutral register, Dhlomo sharply critiqued African society while rejecting the rigid mission school logic of African uplift. This was a remarkable feat in the context of The Bantu World’s editorial position, and it was made possible through a deft use of ambivalent and self-effacing humor. Dhlomo was far from the only New African intellectual who would struggle with this received logic as the straitjacket of segregation tightened. Writing on B. W. Vilakazi’s poetry, Bhekizizwe Peterson stresses the striking “distances that members of the kholwa [Christian African] community were forced to travel in the direction of nationalist politics” in the interwar period.146 In The Bantu World R. R. R. Dhlomo made a strong connection between physical travel and the even deeper ideological journey that awaited his readers in the 1930s and 1940s. Dhlomo never denounced his elite pedigree or fully threw in his lot in with the skokiaan drinkers of the fictional Timbuctoo Township, but he understood that a climate where personal progress was possible only through currying favour with white “experts” would not produce durable progress for all. Some of Dhlomo’s bitterest satires were directed against these experts, 146 Bhekizizwe Peterson, Monarchs, Missionaries, and African Intellectuals, 112. 314 like “Dr. U. R. Bunkum, the celebrated anthropologist,” “Mr. Know Native Well, with many years of farming experience,” and the chairman of a meeting on African development, “a great expert on ‘African Scowls and Grins’” who “had made a big name for himself on these ‘Scowls and Grins in Bantu Society’ by conducting research.”147 Experts like these, according to R. Roamer, Esq., were confidence men who pretended to want to help Africans while actually focusing on their own aggrandizement. Carefully avoiding any mention of the fact that such white luminaries often contributed articles to The Bantu World, Dhlomo ridiculed the cheapness and hypocrisy of their supposed learning: Jos: I am in obfuscation. Oswini lwenkomo.148 Jer: These Europeans will help [compiling a new Zulu dictionary] because they are in touch with the Zulus. Jos: So a kitchen boy who is in touch with Europeans can help in compiling an English dictionary? Jer: You are lost. When a European is in touch with Africans he becomes an expert on their languages and cultures. Jos: And when an African is in touch with Europeans? Jer: He becomes a “spoiled half civilised mampara.”149 “Experts” claimed that by working with black people they were “ostracised” by their own communities—but Dhlomo notes here that this does not prevent them from accruing far more wealth and renown than Africans would in the same work. Protected by circles of sycophantic African “good boys” who eagerly devour crumbs from the master’s table, such so-called experts prevented people like R. R. R. Dhlomo from realizing their potential as scholars and analysts of their own people. 147 “R. Roamer Talks About…Timbuctoo Experts,” The Bantu World, March 18, 1939; “R. Roamer Talks About… Expertism,” The Bantu World, May 20, 1939. 148 The expression oswini lwenkomo is Zulu literally means “wandering in a bullock’s paunch,” i.e., confused. The definition of this idiom comes from J. W. Colenso, Zulu-English Dictionary, revised ed. (Pietermaritzburg, Natal: P. Davis and Sons, 1884): 524—a phrase that ironically is absent from C. M. Doke and B. W. Vilakazi’s Zulu-English Dictionary, the project to which Dhlomo is referring. 149 “R. Roamer Talks About…Zulu Dictionary,” The Bantu World, May 1, 1937. 315 THERE was a case of an expert who was given a sack at the University because he was inefficient. We forgot all about him until he returned to Timbuctoo as an expert on our customs. We heard that he would be given a job that had been done by a Timbuctian in the Dakwastad Township discovering our customs, discovering our religious zeal and discovering our moral weaknesses at a salary that enabled him to use his two feet as vehicles of locomotion.150 THE expert would take over this job. Right away he had a house built for him. He was given a car so as to get about his business quickly. Unfortunately there were “no funds” from which to draw in order to increase the Timbuctian’s salary. Yesterday we heard from Timbuctoo that the Timbuctian had got a better job as a chef in a Timbuctoo Boarding House.151 Just three months after this column appeared, R. R. R.’s brother, H. I. E. Dhlomo was sacked from his position as the organizer of the Carnegie Non-European Library at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre as a result of his failing marriage and disagreements with his supervisors (see Chapter 6). What status talented African men like the Dhlomo brothers could achieve within the paradigm of liberal paternalism was always precarious and subject to the arbitrary judgement of white patrons, who had a vested interest in defending their own privileged position as intermediaries. R. R. R. Dhlomo’s criticism was bold for the time, despite being constrained by the limits of his own position; in writing such columns he once again laid a foundation upon which future writers could build. Of course, not everyone was equally impressed with R. Roamer, Esq., K.A. (Timbuctoo) as the voice of the African Everyman. In March 1941, Walter M. B. Nhlapo—by then a Bantu World staff columnist—was moved to defend Roamer from accusations made by Alpheus Maliba in the Communist newspaper Inkululeko that he was a “sort of paid clown or humorist” spouting “Anti-African and pro-Government political propaganda” for a newspaper that ought to change 150 “Dakwastad” is a pun on the Zulu -dakiwe, “intoxicated”—the township is “Drunkville” 151 “R. Roamer, Esq. on Experts,” The Bantu World, October 5, 1940. 316 its name to “Umthengisi wa Bantu” (“seller” or “betrayer of the Bantu”).152 This was primarily because of Dhlomo’s dogged opposition to the Non-European Front, which he saw as an insincere effort by Indian South Africans to co-opt black political aspirations for their own ends.153 “To understand R. Roamer one must be…sensitive and sensible,” Nhlapo replied, adding that “it is easier to act tragedy than comedy.”154 It is clear that many readers agreed with Nhlapo, and were deeply impressed at the sophistication R. Roamer was able to achieve through jokes and irony. A. G. Seleso, writing in 1938, similarly commended the richness of R. R. R. Dhlomo’s writing: He appears to be a keen reader of human psychology: he chooses for his articles things that are generally inconspicuous to serious readers and writers, but if the most optimistic of them on all occasions sacrifice some time reading R. Roamer’s articles, digesting and masticating what they have read, they would not for a moment doubt the rich contents conveyed in his writings. Roamer’s various topics embrace almost every subject, i.e. character, social manners, politics, public health, love and marriage…In my opinion the prestige and reputation of the Bantu World largely depend on…two great writers—R. Roamer and the Editor.155 When Dhlomo left the Witwatersrand in March 1943 to take up the editorship of Ilanga Lase Natal, similar appreciations poured in. Writing in Zulu, B. T. B. Qina gushed that R. Roamer columns contained “things that are helpful to the whole black nation,” adding that “if you did not 152 Walter M. B. Nhlapo, “Spotlight on Social Events,” The Bantu World, March 22, 1941. 153 Significantly, the Non-European United Front effort originated in the Cape Province, where the Indian population was relatively small. Like other Africans from Natal, R. R. R. Dhlomo was keenly aware of the Indian population’s relative economic prosperity and distrusted their overtures to black people. Dhlomo also felt that the absence of a dynamic A.N.C. leadership would make it difficult for Africans to avoid exploitation by their prospective allies. It did not help matters that the Non-European United Front had deep ties to communist organizations. In his memoir, Nelson Mandela himself refers to R. V. Selope Thema’s vocal criticism of African-Indian cooperation. See Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (New York, N.Y.: Little, Brown, and Co., 1995): 135. See also Elizabeth Ceiriog Jones, “Inkululeko: Organ of the Communist Party of South Africa, 1939-1950,” in South Africa’s Alternative Press, 335; and Jon Soske, Internal Frontiers: African Nationalism and the Indian Diaspora in Twentieth-Century South Africa (Johannesburg, South Africa: Wits University Press, 2017). 154 Walter M. B. Nhlapo, “Spotlight on Social Events,” The Bantu World, March 22, 1941. 155 A. G. Seleso, “R. Roamer’s Success as a Journalist,” The Bantu World, March 26, 1938. 317 take notice, you lost the advice.”156 Eric L. M. Gumbi described the columns as “marvellous, race-improving, and literary…fire heating the big pot of civilisation in which the African race is boiling”—his own words a marvelously ironic reversal of the African cannibal trope, evoked Dhlomo’s own ambivalent embrace of the New African project.157 In embracing the gelastic domain, these and other contributors agreed, R. R. R. Dhlomo had contributed a great deal to the black South African community’s thought and sense of purpose. Laughter was not incompatible with the New African project, even as that project itself faced an uncertain future. The purpose of this chapter has been twofold. First, it has shed new light on the life and early career of an unfairly neglected South African luminary, R. R. R. Dhlomo. Second, it has sought to explore the world from which his pioneering satires emerged, from the powerful currents that sought to silence or control black laughter in a racist, segregated society, to the ways in which his humor writing became entangled with transformations occurring within the urban African population in Johannesburg and elsewhere. Though Dhlomo, with his elite pedigree, was neither a political nor a social iconoclast, his ingenious deployment of irony and ridicule as a weapon against injustice and impropriety had a profound impact on the literature and satire that followed, as we shall see. Against the gathering storm clouds of apartheid, Dhlomo’s very circumspection was what allowed him to anticipate, though not necessarily endorse, the transition to mass politics soon to be effected by the leaders of the A.N.C. Youth League. His R. Roamer, Esq. persona had eclectic origins—from Stephen Black’s Sjambok to black South African vaudeville performances to the comfortable white middle class satire of 156 B. T. B. Qina, “Ukupelekezela Umn. R. R. R. Dhlomo,” The Bantu World, March 20, 1943. Translated by the author. 157 Eric L. M. Gumbi, “Fare Thee Well Mr. R. R. R. Dhlomo,” The Bantu World, March 27, 1943. 318 “Saunterer” in the Rand Daily Mail, but ultimately it was the vibrance and perversity of the tightly-packed township trains that ultimately provided the column its soul. Driven (and policed) by working-class Afrikaners, shipping African men and women—poor and petty bourgeois, nurses and criminals alike—to their occupations in the white metropolis, the train was a pregnant metaphor for the forward trajectory of the nation. If black people could only progress “along their own lines” in the Union of South Africa, as the segregationist refrain went, the rail lines connecting Orlando to Park Station simply would not suffice. 319 Chapter 6— Bleeding, Wounded, Falling, Rising: The Gothic Satire of H. I. E. Dhlomo, 1932-1941 At the same time as R. R. R. Dhlomo was honing his craft as black Johannesburg’s most prolific newspaper humorist, his younger brother H. I. E. was striving tirelessly for the cause of high culture. As a poet, playwright, short story writer, journalist, and librarian-organizer, the younger Dhlomo is known for many things, but not primarily as a satirist. Yet his contribution to the nascent English language satirical tradition in South Africa must be recovered. H. I. E. Dhlomo’s embrace of nineteenth-century Romantic and Gothic tropes in his non-historical dramas is deceptive—especially in his last major work, Men and Women. While past critics have seen this tendency as evidence of the limitations of his craft, exploring these lesser-known works illuminates his approach to the worsening South African situation of his own day and reveals an additional dimension of Dhlomo’s relationship with African American writing. For H. I. E. Dhlomo, humor and satire served as signs of disturbance, signalling, like broken branches or discolored soil, madness, tragedy, and oblivion. His turn to horror and Gothic aesthetics marks an important early shift within South African literature, anticipating by decades broader shifts from social realism towards the absurd, the speculative, and the dystopian. Like so many of the figures in this study, H. I. E. Dhlomo died in middle age. He left behind a large and eclectic corpus of poetry, fiction, plays, and journalism that defies facile characterization. After his death in 1956. R. R. R. Dhlomo donated his brother’s personal papers to the the wealthy white liberal Margaret “Killie” Campbell’s burgeoning Africana collection in 320 Durban—today a unit of the University of KwaZulu-Natal.1 These papers remained untouched until two scholars—Nick W. Visser of Rhodes University and Tim Couzens of the University of the Witwatersrand—began collaborating in 1973 to edit and publish Dhlomo’s surviving work. According to Visser, it was only after two years of correspondence with the Killie Campbell Africana Library that the papers were even located, found “in folders stuck away on a shelf in a cupboard in the Library’s staff canteen.”2 From this initiative emerged H. I. E. Dhlomo: Collected Works (1985), which included all of the short stories, poems and scripts found in the Campbell Collection—excluding non-fiction and journalism, as well as all incomplete works, even if just one page was missing. Together with Couzen’s biography published in the same year, The New African: A Study of the Life and Work of H. I. E. Dhlomo, the collection appeared at a timely moment during the later years of the anti-apartheid struggle, when interest in the history of black South African political thought was high. The two books established Dhlomo’s reputation as a key black South African writer and thinker, and he has drawn the interest of scholars from Ntongela Masilela to Bhekizizwe Peterson to Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu.3 H. I. E. Dhlomo’s legacy as playwright, poet, politician, and intellectual is secure, yet none of these scholars have seriously considered the satirical dimension of H. I. E. Dhlomo’s work. Mainly by looking to his essays on African 1 Campbell is a name to conjure with in the history of Durban and KwaZulu-Natal generally. Killie’s father Sir Marshall Campbell was one of the original Natal sugar barons, and he donated the land on which the large township of KwaMashu (“the place of Marshall”) now stands. See Norman Herd, Killie’s Africa: The Achievements of Dr. Killie Campbell (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: Blue Crane Books, 1982). See also H. I. E. Dhlomo’s own praise of the Campbell library in X [H. I. E. Dhlomo], “The Campbells and African Culture,” Ilanga Lase Natal, February 5, 1944. 2 Nick W. Visser, “H. I. E. Dhlomo (1903-1956): The Re-emergence of an African Writer,” English in Africa 1.2 (1974), 9-10. 3 See Ntongela Masilela, An Outline of the New African Movement in South Africa; Ntongela Masilela, The Cultural Modernity of H. I. E. Dhlomo; Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu, African Perspectives of King Dingane kaSenzagakhona, the Second Monarch of the Zulu Kingdom; and Bhekizizwe Peterson, Monarchs, Missionaries, and African Intellectuals. See also Mwelela Cele, “H. I. E. Dhlomo’s Brilliance as a Writer, Dramatist, Poet, and Politician Knew No Bounds: A Reappraisal,” Journal of Natal and Zulu History 28.1 (2010), 53-59. 321 theatre and his historical plays—his so-called “Black Bulls”—historians have sought insight into his politics. H. I. E. Dhlomo’s satire, however, is most evident in his plays with contemporary settings. Most of these do not survive in their entirety and thus were excluded from the Collected Works. The New African and the Captive Theatre: H. I. E. Dhlomo’s Early Career Born shortly after his brother R. R. R. in 1903, H. I. E. Dhlomo also experienced the privileges and challenges of life as a Dhlomo growing up in the 1900s and 1910s (see Chapter 5). Like his brother, he obtained a teaching certificate at the end of his prestigious education at Adams College. Unlike his brother, H. I. E. Dhlomo actually practiced his profession, first at the all-girl American Board mission at Umzumbe in southern Natal, and subsequently at the American Board school in Doornfontein, Johannesburg—the same school the Dhlomos had once attended. In his magisterial account of Dhlomo’s upbringing, Tim Couzens sketches H. I. E. Dhlomo’s upbringing and education in vivid detail. Erudition in English, based on reverence for canonical English writers, was highly valued, as one Adams College alumnus recounted in an interview: “I used to boast being able to quote to the other students,” says Dan Twala, “‘Et tu, Brute.’ All those little things we got from Shakespeare, we used to repeat them outside. ‘How now, Malvolio?’ Everybody thought he was great when he could quote a word or two from Shakespeare.”…One of the highlights of the week…was the Debating Society where one would invariably end one’s speech with a quotation. “You became the hero of the school then. You just broke through with a quotation.”4 In March 1931, Dhlomo married Ethel Kunene, a nurse at Bridgman Memorial Hospital in the Johannesburg suburb of Brixton, near Sophiatown. Nursing was a very high-status occupation for an African woman at the time, though encouraged by the authorities in large part 4 Tim Couzens, The New African, 51. 322 because of their fear of white women nurses in contact with black male bodies.5 By 1934, the couple had a son and a daughter. Ethel Kunene Dhlomo was still alive during Tim Couzens’s time, and in The New African Couzens records some of her observations about Dhlomo’s personality: According to his wife, Dhlomo “was a quiet man, very much reserved…He was very jealous, too! Jealous with the cat, you know. Couldn’t trust one with the cat (laughing). That’s what I always said to him.” He continued to be a bookworm: “Oh, he never used to drink that time, he never used to smoke or anything, but if he felt he had to get a book, it didn’t matter if we had to go without any meals…He’d sit in the tram or bus, before we’d get there he’d already written an article. He wrote to the Sunday Times, wrote to The Star and all that.”6 According to Ntongela Masilela, Dhlomo’s first venture as a public intellectual was an article written anonymously for Ilanga lase Natal at the end of 1923, entitled “Towards Our Own Literature.” In this article, Dhlomo discusses Walt Whitman as a model for aspiring “Native” artists, declaring that “the average ‘hundred per cent’ American looks at America through the spectacles that Whitman made for him”—an early expression of Dhlomo’s admiration for nineteenth-century Transcendentalist and Romantic poets.7 Earlier scholars have focused on these authors mainly as a source of Dhlomo’s literary foibles, but have not shown much curiosity about the inspiration Dhlomo drew from their ideas. For Dhlomo, Whitman’s bold articulation of the artist’s ability to commune with all and bring about communion among all offered a clear path out of the morass of “tribalism” and self-imposed inferiority in which he found his people. 5 See Shula Marks, Divided Sisterhood: Race, Class, Gender, and the South African Nursing Profession (London, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994); Charlotte Searle, The History of the Development of Nursing in South Africa, 1652-1960: A Socio-Historical Survey (Cape Town, South Africa: Struik, 1965). 6 Tim Couzens, The New African, 65. 7 “A Special Correspondent,” “Towards Our Own Literature,” Ilanga lase Natal, December 21, 1923. See discussion in Ntongela Masilela, The Cultural Modernity of H. I. E. Dhlomo, 20-21; 165-166. Couzens believes that the author of his article was actually R. R. R. Dhlomo, but Masilela is insistent, and I tend to agree. See Tim Couzens, The New African, 59. 323 In Dhlomo’s 1936 claim that “great artists and thinkers confine themselves neither to time, place or race, but create for all climes and all time,” he echoes Whitman’s audacious claims in Leaves of Grass: I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise… Of every hue and trade and rank, of every caste and religion Not merely of the New World but of Africa Europe or Asia…a wandering savage.8 Dhlomo soon became a regular contributor to both Ilanga as “Bert” and “Amicus Homini Gentis” and to Johannesburg’s Umteteli wa Bantu under his own name, commenting on a variety of political and intellectual topics. Though little of this writing specifically concerned drama, Dhlomo was intimately involved in the affairs of Johannesburg’s Bantu (later African) Dramatic Society when it was founded in June 1932. During his period of involvement with the Society, Dhlomo penned a series of articles for different publications outlining theatre’s potential to educate and uplift Africans, many of which were reprinted in a 1977 special issue of the journal English in Africa.9 In a representative 1933 article for The Bantu World, H. I. E. Dhlomo extolled the ways development of stage drama could edify the African public, as a means of celebrating their history and culture, as a platform for teaching moral lessons, and finally, “as a great agency for the propagation of ideas.”10 “In comedy or in drama, one may abuse, expose, defy, insult, and ridicule people, and say things that it would be foolish or even dangerous to publish in any other form,” he continued, adding that “even those who are not well educated can understand and 8 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Drama and the African,” English in Africa 4.2 (1977): 7. The essay was originally published in The South African Spectator 66.1 (1936), 232-235. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York, N. Y.: Penguin Books, 1976 [1855]): 40-41. First ellipsis in original. 9 “H. I. E. Dhlomo: Literary Theory and Criticism,” ed. Nick W. Visser, English in Africa 4.2 (1977). 10 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “The Africans Invade the Stage,” The Bantu World, April 15, 1933. 324 appreciate dramatic representation.”11 Dhlomo insisted, furthermore, that the sophisticated dramatic arts were not a European cultural export, but had deep indigenous roots. In a 1939 article published in the journal Bantu Studies, “Nature and Variety of Tribal Drama,” Dhlomo systematically explains his views, including the theory that izibongo, with their frequent and sudden changes of tone and perspective, contained clues that they were in fact drawn from an older and more fully realized dramatic tradition.12 Dhlomo’s mission as a dramatist was to reintroduce black South Africans to a heritage of greatness that had been obscured through the colonial legacy. His first plays, written in the early to mid-1930s, are historical in nature: The Girl Who Killed to Save (Nonqause the Liberator) and Ntsikana deal with Xhosa history, the now-lost Shaka, Dingane, and Cetshwayo are set in nineteenth-century Zululand, and Moshoeshoe concerns the great Sotho king (a play that was actually staged in 1939). Deploying elevated, poetic English alongside elements of traditional African performance, Dhlomo followed Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi and Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka in both dignifying the heroic African past and alluding the difficulties of the present.13 Their aim is not satire or deflation, but rather exaltation. Still, there is a marked difference between a pro- Missionary play like The Girl Who Killed to Save and a play like Cetshwayo, where missionaries along with other white characters are drawn as deceitful snakes—like the British trader John 11 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “The Africans Invade the Stage,” The Bantu World, April 15, 1933. 12 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Nature and Variety of Tribal Drama,” English in Africa 4.2 (1977), 23-36, originally published in Bantu Studies 13 (1939). Izibongo are discussed at greater length in Chapter 1. 13 Thomas Mofolo, Chaka (Morija, Lesotho: Sesuto Book Depot, 1925); Sol T. Plaatje, Mhudi. 325 Dunn, who attempts to rape the maid Bafikile in a striking reversal of the “black peril” trope.14 Dhlomo’s interest in the supernatural in these plays was as much Shakespearean as it is “traditional”, promoting a sort of African classicism where larger-than-life individuals are buffeted by both the consequences of their own choices and the hidden agency of fate. In these dramas, Dhlomo championed what he regarded as progressive voices from the African past, like the religious leaders Ntsikana and the Rev. Tiyo Soga, as well as the eponymous king and his cosmopolitan advisor Mohlomi in Moshoeshoe., who seek to transcend “tribal” divisions among black people and promote values in compatible with Christianity. As the years passed, Dhlomo wrote more and more about the present, and particularly about social ills. His play The Workers, for example, deals with a strike by employees at the “Nigger-Exploitation Slave Manufacturing Crookpany,” while The Bazaar, examines the experience of shopping while black.15 Certainly these plays illustrate Dhlomo’s mounting disillusionment with social conditions amid the gutting of the Cape’s non-racial franchise and the hardening regime of segregation in the 1930s. They also reflect his increasing wariness about historical plays. Lionizing the pre-colonial past always carried the risk of playing into the hands of segregationists; white spectators and benefactors simply could not be trusted to grasp Dhlomo’s New African ideology, which both celebrated the African past and demanded greater 14 See “Cetshwayo,” Scene III, in Dhlomo, H. I. E. Dhlomo: Collected Works, eds. Nick W. Visser and Tim Couzens (Johannesburg, South Africa: Ravan Press, 1985), 136. John Dunn is a momentous figure in the history of Natal and Zululand in the nineteenth century. Born to British parents in 1834, Dunn served for a number of years under the authority of Cetshwayo but was rewarded handsomely by the British for siding with the Crown in the Anglo-Zulu War. This act of betrayal, given Dhlomo’s sharpening critique of white philanthropic “friendship” with Africans, accounts considerably for Dunn’s very negative portrayal in Cetshwayo. See N. Hurwitz, “The Life of John Dunn, the White Zulu Chief,” Theoria 1 (1947), 58-64; Charles Ballard, John Dunn: The White Chief of Zululand (Johannesburg, South Africa: Adriaan Donker, 1985); T. J. Tallie, “Racialized Masculinity and the Limits of Settlement: John Dunn and Natal, 1879-1883,” Journal of Natal and Zulu History 30.1 (2012), 1-22. 15 See “The Workers,” in H. I. E. Dhlomo, H. I. E. Dhlomo: Collected Works, 211-227; and H. I. E. Dhlomo, “The Bazaar” TS., (KCM 8285), UKZN, Durban. 326 inclusion in the present. Feeling trapped within the narrow strictures of a creative landscape in the thrall of white philanthropists and liberal audiences, Dhlomo became interested in representing madness and its significance in black South African life. Weary of being misinterpreted, and battling terrific storms in his personal and professional life, H. I. E. Dhlomo’s main contribution to the history of South African satire is his exploration of the relationship between humor and horror. While for R. R. R. Dhlomo, humor showed mental sophistication and facilitated adjustment to the vicissitudes of an unjust world, in H. I. E. Dhlomo’s unpublished plays humor is almost always evidence of the sinister and a prelude to perversity. Long before “South African apocalyptic fiction” came into vogue during the latter half of the apartheid era, Dhlomo began writing imbuing his contemporary plays with supernatural and tragicomic elements, revealing the oblivion lurking just behind the comic veneer of South African life.16 H. I. E. Dhlomo has been criticized, even by his admirers, for imitating Shakespeare and the nineteenth century Romantic poets to which he was exposed in his youth, at the cost of developing his own unique voice. His writing, we are told, “shows very little artistic development” over time, which Nick W. Visser attributes to his lack of a literary community to provide him with feedback.17 Dhlomo’s choice to write in English instead of Zulu caused friction during his own lifetime with his friend and rival B. W. Vilakazi, and continues to crop up as something that demands explanation, given his otherwise unapologetic endorsement of all things African. Like his lack of “development”, Dhlomo’s “sub-romantic rhetoric,” “failure in 16 See Daniela D. Pitt, “Imagining Our End: South African Apocalyptic Fiction” (Ph. D. diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 2018). 17 Nick W. Visser, “H. I. E. Dhlomo (1903-1956),” 2. 327 diction,” and “a proclivity…to lapse into rather crude melodrama,” are usually excused with reference to the challenges of his context.18 Certainly Dhlomo’s dramatic work can seem dense with telling rather than showing; didactic and wordy, one gets the impression that his plays are more about promoting his own personal views than any particular plot or character study. Yet H. I. E. Dhlomo’s limitations as a playwright, real though they may have been, do not account entirely for the idiosyncrasy of his work. His attraction—in both his historical and contemporary plays—to scenes with large ensembles and complex simultaneous action, were guided as much by his views on the African dramatic tradition and its heritage of spectacle than his naïveté about the realities of play production. Both the genius and the tragedy of H. I. E. Dhlomo consisted in his ability to think bigger than most of his peers—as well as his critics. Close attention to the way Dhlomo conceived of his audience can also be instructive. Like black participation in the white press, black theatre in Johannesburg developed in the fraught context of white philanthropy. The Bantu Dramatic Society’s affiliation with the Bantu Men’s Social Centre and the monopolistic ownership of the black commercial press by white interests only sharpened the challenge of performing plays before audiences composed of petty bourgeois Africans and elite whites. British comedies predominated the early productions of the Bantu Dramatic Society. Its inaugural production was the eighteenth century play She Stoops to Conquer in April 1933, and this was followed by the more contemporary comedies The Cheerful Knave the following year, and Lady Windermere’s Fan in 1936.19 While reviews of these performances in the white press were positive, albeit considerably patronizing, the exercise of 18 Nick W. Visser, “H. I. E. Dhlomo (1903-1956),” 9. 19 Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer, ed. Dudley Miles (Boston, Mass.: Ginn and Co., 1917 [1773]); “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” in Oscar Wilde, The Works of Oscar Wilde (Boston, Mass.: The C. T. Brainard Publishing Co., 1909 [1892]); Keble Howard, The Cheerful Knave: A Comedy in Three Acts (London, U.K.: Samuel French, 1913 [1910]). 328 dramatizing white British characters seemed to distract white audience members in unwelcome ways, as the following Rand Daily Mail review of The Cheerful Knave reveals: To begin with, one must pay tribute to the earnestness, and to the altogether unexpected amount of skill, with which the Bantu players coped with a language and thought-idiom foreign to themselves. Secondly, it must be remarked that the highbrows of London or New York would have paid large amounts to relish the satire on modern manners which the play inevitably becomes in such hands. The Sitwells should have been in the front row. Aldous Huxley could probably write a novel on it, and Bernard Shaw a play.20 The Sunday Times reviewer agreed, declaring that “practically every line of the play was comedy, not so much because of its contents, but because of the actor or actress who said it,” adding that there was apparently a noteworthy difference in the humorous tastes of the two sections of the audience. The Europeans laughed at the wit or the incongruity, the Bantus at the action. When Lord Bacchus tells the burglar not to speak to a gentleman in that fashion, the front portion of the house laughed. When the burglar is knocked on the head and trussed up after a spurious fight with Lord Bacchus, the rear, or Bantu portion of the house, emitted peals of mirth. The Europeans watched Lord Bacchus kiss Miss P. Guduza in silence, but the strain at the back of the house must have been great, judging by a deep bass voice which muttered, in a tone audible everywhere, “Ah, that iss nice.”21 The Rand Daily Mail critic recorded, for the record, that “a fairly large audience of Europeans”—including the mayor and his wife—were present.22 Likewise, at the debut of Lady Windermere’s Fan, “at least half the people were Europeans.”23 Given all this, it is important to recognize that Dhlomo’s English language plays were not written with a purely African audience in mind. Second, while his brother R. R. R. Dhlomo was leading the push to develop black South Africans’ “sense of humor” as a mark of sophistication, in the context of a theatrical 20 G. de K. K., “Natives as Lords and Ladies,” Rand Daily Mail, December 13, 1934. 21 “Comedy by Bantu,” Sunday Times, December 16, 1934. 22 G. de K. K., “Natives as Lords and Ladies,” Rand Daily Mail, December 13, 1934. 23 D.E.R., “Fine Acting by Natives,” Rand Daily Mail, April 29, 1933. 329 audience black laughter was still likely to be interpreted by whites as further proof of African unsophistication. Dhlomo himself discussed this in an essay written as “Spectator” for Ilanga Lase Natal in 1941, describing a performance of George Bernard Shaw’s St. Joan by the students of his alma mater. “Here were European sympathisers and philanthropists,” he wrote, “come to see, not the play, but how ‘the simple Native’ would wrestle with the intricacies and subtle shades of ‘foreign’ art and the witticisms and philosophy of Shaw.”24 The story of Joan of Arc on the stage soon yields to the drama playing out all around him, of young sincere black artists and sneering white patrons—less a historical drama than a waking nightmare. The passage is worth quoting at length, since it not only illustrates Dhlomo’s views on mixed audiences, but also showcases his flair for the Gothic: Before me I saw the St. Joan of African Genius, Expression and Patriotism, eager and honest, determined to save her African France from oppression, ignorance, poverty and despair. Keen and sincere, she came to the so-called sympathisers and well-wishers, experts and liberals—the ‘friends’ of her sorely oppressed Race. She was willing to help, to co-operate and place herself under them and serve, all for the sake of her persecuted brethren and her beloved fatherland—the shrine of the nation’s Soul. But these highly- positioned, great, little, saintly, dirty men were cold and sarcastic about it all. Reluctantly, as a matter of policy and appearances, they decided to give her a chance, a trial (for the gifted are always under trial). For what could an innocent, simple and poor St. Joan do. These big men would nurse and control, protect and direct, her—she the St. Joan of African Talent […] The end came soon. The St. Joan of African Ability and Vision must be burnt and annihilated. Triumphantly if tragically she faced this supreme Fact and accepted the Truth. This great final defeat was also her greatest and final triumph. If she had refused this fact she would have lost all. She did not flinch, but chose the Cause and the agony. So did Socrates and Bruno, Galileo and Dante, Mahomet and Christ. And so much hundreds of the most precious and advanced spirits do today. They burnt her—the great men, the true leaders, the Christian ones, the learned minds, the friends of the people. They burnt the St. Joan of Africa. Still she burns. For immortal are the flames for the immortals. 24 The Spectator [H. I. E. Dhlomo], “Philosophy of St. Joan,” Ilanga Lase Natal, November 15, 1941. 330 Then…horror! It was not St. Joan they were burning. It was I. I burn. Flames leap about me. Crowds jeer. My enemies are writhed in smiles of victory. Din. Pain. Darkness. Do I see a steady Cross and a steadier Light beyond? Loud and continued applause brought me back to earth…to ‘St. Joan’, Bernard Shaw, Adams College students, the audience, and the hall. The dream was over. I found myself seated safely and comfortably with friends. The performance was over. The student actors and their learned teacher-producers, flushed and happy in their triumph, were mingling with the crowd and receiving well-earned congratulations and adulation. Then…a sudden flash of thought. O Pain, to think! Did I say the nasty dream was over? Seated safely? Glad? O mockery! Did I only dream and imagine? Perhaps. But when I awoke from my dream I found it truth. From the horrible flimsy dream I awoke into the more horrible tangible reality. It was no dream I had seen. It was palpable reality. I am an outcast, despised, rejected, crucified. They have nailed and chained me on the stake of disgrace, bitterness, frustration, poverty. I burn! My God, in flames of agony, failure, colour and frustrated talent, I burn! The fire eats into my soul. I bleed. I die. Why hast Thou forsaken me. I thirst! Africa thirsts! ‘How long, O Lord, how long?’25 Florid as it is, Dhlomo’s rhetoric here is about far more than ostentation. In this essay, Dhlomo demonstrates his ability to lose himself in art, erasing any racial, cultural and historical barriers that separate him from a St. Joan or a George Bernard Shaw. Such high-flown words echo the ecstatic passion of St. Joan herself, drawing a direct line between the heroic deeds of a doomed French warrior-saint, the accomplishments of a master Irish dramatist, and the artistic sensitivity of a black South African critic. The fact that St. Joan is a foreign work about an even more foreign woman is no impediment to the universal spirit of Art—despite the enormous challenges faced by the African in expressing and conveying this truth. Bridging the gulf between H. I. E. Dhlomo’s intentions and whites’ interpretations was a challenge worthy of martyrdom and legend. 25 The Spectator [H. I. E. Dhlomo], “Philosophy of St. Joan,” Ilanga Lase Natal, November 15, 1941. 331 Drama—like satire—granted its practitioners a wide license to educate and edify, but, paradoxically, this license relied in large part on ambiguity and conventions that underscored drama’s separation from “real life.” When white critics saw shows like The Cheerful Knave, the fact that Africans were portraying the characters in the play was at least as important as the play itself—and probably more so, for better or worse. What did “G. de K. K.,” the Rand Daily Mail reviewer, mean by “satire on modern manners”? Not that Keble Howard’s satirical vision was brought to life onstage by members of the Bantu Dramatic Society in the same way a white troupe would have done. Rather, the spectacle of Africans performing a white story revealed the folly of certain European manners by partially defamiliarizing such manners in the eyes of the audience. For many whites, the play likely provoked a prejudiced reflection on the misguidedness of African efforts to emulate European drama. The specific intentions and choices made by the actors in the play are irrelevant to the scenario. Africans could pretend to be white people for a couple of hours, yes—but it would not substantively affect the way they were seen outside the auditorium. Just as plays sourced from the imperial metropole invited white audiences to fixate on the apparent foreignness of the source material, celebrating the African royal past could also be dangerous, playing into the hands of white segregationists who felt Africans were only fit to serve despotic rural chiefs. Language was also a double-bind: H. I. E. Dhlomo could write in English and invite accusations of inauthenticity, or he could write in Zulu and tie his work to a much smaller and more parochial identity. Dhlomo cunningly satirizes this very point in his only surviving Zulu script, a short sketch called Umhlola Wasensimini (literally “A Marvel in the Field”), where black farmers trap a group of thieving monkeys who plead for their lives in human language. With his dialogue between cunning monkeys and bigoted humans, Dhlomo 332 snidely references the fascination and disgust held by many white people towards Africans who speak English: ZWANA: Kant[’] isi-Zulu lesi sekungulimi lwezimfene…Ukudelela nxa i[z]imfene sezikhuluma ulimi lwethu kanje. GWINYA: Qa, nkosi, ludumo lolo. Kush’ ukut’ isi-Zulu ngulimi olukhulu, olunamandla newozawoza ngoba laziwa ngu-wonke-wonke. Kudumisa nina loko. ZWANA: Indeed isiZulu is now the language of monkeys…It is disgusting when monkeys speak our language like this. GWINYA [a monkey]: No, O Chief; it is glory, that thing. It means that isiZulu is a great, powerful, and expressive language because it is known to all. That is to your praise.26 H. I. E. Dhlomo’s unpublished plays merit our attention because they show Dhlomo’s thought process in wrestling with these realities. In 1936, Prime Minister J. B. M. Hertzog finally succeeded in passing a bill stripping qualified Africans from the common voters’ roll in the Cape Province, eradicating the foundation on which African leaders had once confidently expected a more liberal and inclusive South Africa would be built; meanwhile in both cities and rural areas the power of the Native Affairs Department was vigorously expanding, entangling black South Africans in a vast and capricious bureaucracy with the power to rule by decree. Contemporary South Africa demanded H. I. E. Dhlomo’s attention, and in responding he would have to take a leaf out of his brother’s satirical playbook. Yet H. I. E. Dhlomo’s portrait of black South African life in the city had a much darker and more fantastical edge than one finds in the R. Roamer columns. Humor was enlisted not just in the cause of pathos but chaos, as Dhlomo began experimenting with magical and supernatural storytelling devices. Though Tim Couzens devotes space in his biography to discussing both Men and Women and The Living Dead, his interest in these plays is primarily psychological rather than literary—he identifies 26 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Umhlola Wasensimini” TS. (KCM 8289), pg. 5, UKZN, Durban. Translated by the author. 333 autobiographical elements in them and uses them to flesh out his narrative of Dhlomo’s life. Yet these plays’ contribution to the history of South African literature is far greater than his analysis suggests. In their grandeur and extravagance, Dhlomo’s unpublished plays assault and destroy the strictures placed on African theatre by white paternalism and condescension. Satire, the supernatural, and the gothic became Dhlomo’s chief weapons in this effort. The scripts for sprawling plays like Ruby and Frank and Men and Women—Dhlomo’s magnum opus—have a frantic quality to them, encompassing disjointed and discordant scenes and issues as if to showcase the widest possible field for African talent as possible. In dialogue that runs the gamut from florid verse to Shakespearean-inflected comedic wordplay to melodrama with long passages of philosophical exposition, Dhlomo sought to balance the emotional and satirical potential of drama with a desire to impress upon the white contingent of his audience that he—and by extension, Africans generally—were capable of creating intellectual dramatic art. This would be art that could not be explained with reference to Africans’ “obvious histrionic talent,” as the Rand Daily Mail review of Lady Windermere’s Fan put it.27 Dhlomo wanted his creative license, above all, to be understood as creative license, not as mimicry or as evidence of innate racial aptitude: a tall order in a racist society like South Africa. Ruby and Frank: Forbidden Loves Ruby and Frank stands alone among the unpublished plays of H. I. E. Dhlomo in that it was actually staged in October 1939.28 It was the last production organized by the Bantu Dramatic Society, which by the end had changed its name to the African Dramatic and Operatic Society. 27 D.E.R., “Fine Acting by Natives,” Rand Daily Mail, April 29, 1933. 28 Ruby and Frank was the title by which the play was marketed, though the typescript at the Campbell Collections is titled Ruby. 334 That it was staged at all is a remarkable accomplishment. The 108-page script is composed of a verse prologue and twelve scenes, with settings ranging from a boxing hall to a District Six shebeen to a middle class Coloured home. Altogether there are 49 characters with dialogue in the script, which would have necessitated a great deal of double-casting. There are also a handful of musical numbers and orchestral interludes which would have required the presence of a band. Judging by the fact that The Bantu World’s review of Ruby and Frank mentions a principal character—“Dorothy Mutle”—who does not appear in the Campbell Collection typescript, there were probably significant differences between the surviving text and the play as performed.29 Yet the review’s description of the play’s key themes is consistent with the typescript, and they are worth exploring. The name Ruby and Frank refers to the doomed romance of Ruby Meyer and Frank Mabaso, who meet for the first time as spectators at a boxing match. Ruby is Coloured, Frank is black, and both are “middle class,” according to the typescript, but the play is much larger than their storyline. Couzens mentions that Dhlomo himself had “one or two ‘coloured’ mistresses,” which may have had some bearing on the shape the play took, but its thematic depth has yet to be seriously explored.30 On the surface Ruby and Frank seems to have more to do with Coloured identity than black identity, for in it H. I. E. Dhlomo explores various aspects of Coloured life, with a special focus on their prejudicial attitudes towards black people. The “non-European” boxing match in Scene I, whose mixed audience includes white people, is a clear metaphor for the struggle between black, Coloured, and Indian South Africans for status. Both black and 29 Critic-at-Large, “‘Ruby and Frank,’” The Bantu World, October 28, 1939. 30 Tim Couzens, The New African, 177. Though he does not mention it with regard to Ruby and Frank, Ethel Kunene was apparently also classified Coloured by the government, owing to her great grandmother’s marriage to a white missionary in the nineteenth century. See Tim Couzens, The New African, 48. 335 Coloured characters debate the dynamics of their race’s relationship with the other section, as in this exchange between Ruby’s brother James Meyer, a political leader, and his associate Adams, which is then mirrored by a conversation among black spectators: ADAMS: Ja. It is all right when they [black boxers] fight the collies [coolies, sic]. One does not care which coon wins. MEYER: The better man should always win. And that is not the way to call them. This is sport, not politics. ADAMS: Politics is the background and pith of everything. Everything is coloured by politics. (Enter Mrs. Rampa, Mr. Sisu, Teacher Mini and Aunt Esther.) ESTHER: Hm! What mongrels these Coloureds are! I wish our boys would flog every one of them. MRS. RAMPA: Not so loud, Esther! People will hear. ESTHER: Who cares! MRS. RAMPA: I…and many others.31 Dhlomo’s main target in Ruby and Frank is racial prejudice but not segregation itself, though Frank does ascribe black-Coloured divisions to “the subtle methods of the white man.”32 The few white characters in the play are marginal to the plot. The play is not very humorous either, but for a few important moments. Irony, however, is a key motif. Only in Ruby’s love can Frank find wholeness, and yet loving her means subjecting them to a tyranny of divisions. “How,” he asks, “will half of us stay in an African and half in a Coloured area; half carry a pass and half not; half be admitted where the other half cannot[?]”33 Ruby replies that she is “nameless, raceless, colourless,” and that “I 31 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Ruby” TS., Scene I, pg. 3 (KCM 8267), Campbell Collections, University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), Durban, South Africa. Ellipsis in original. 32 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Ruby” TS., Scene II, pg. 20 (KCM 8267), UKZN, Durban. 33 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Ruby” TS., Scene II, pg. 17 (KCM 8267), UKZN, Durban. 336 and those on my side are pioneers in Man’s spiritual evolution which is just beginning.”34 Yet their love (and—as the product of interracial love—Colouredness itself) brings discord. Though the play takes a very negative stance towards Indians—one subplot involves a Non-European Front leader, Mr. Cassim, forcing his black mistress to abort their child—black and Coloured people are sketched as roughly equivalent groups facing the same set of social challenges.35 Tragic ironies abound in the way the social dynamics of South Africa, according to Dhlomo, obscure this truth. Ruby and Frank’s relationship ends early in the play, after a prolonged meditation on the cruelty and necessity of refraining from their interracial relationship. “Bleeding, wounded, falling, rising, pushing and pulling,” Frank declares, “alone [the] African must go on to battle.”36 Yet the play is still beginning—through Ruby’s family and friends the play explores multiple interracial relationships, alternating pity and horror. After breaking up with Frank, Ruby moves to Cape Town and becomes a social worker, helping a trainee nurse named Josephine Martin escape her drunken mother’s shebeen; at length she falls in love with the black man Don Khuzwayo, whose vision of interracial mixing is that of “a grand old stew.”37 Meanwhile Ruby’s light-skinned sister Molly, rebuffed by her white boyfriend Mr. Gordon after discovering she is 34 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Ruby” TS., Scene II, pg. 18 (KCM 8267), UKZN, Durban. Though the boundaries between black and Coloured would become legally much less porous as a result of the Population Registration Act of 1950, in the violent atmosphere of 1920s Johannesburg a series of laws were passed such as the Native Affairs Act of 1920 and the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 that introduced significant legal distinctions between blacks and Coloureds, particularly in cities. While Coloureds remained legally second-class citizens until the democratic transition, this phenomenon only intensified as the mid-twentieth century wore on. See T. R. H. Davenport, “The Beginnings of Urban Segregation in South Africa”; Carl H. Nightingale, Segregation; S. M. Parnell and G. H. Pirie, “Johannesburg,” in Homes Apart: South Africa’s Segregated Cities, ed. Anthony Lemon (Cape Town, South Africa: David Philip, 1991), 129-145; and P. B. Rich, “Ministering to the White Man’s Needs.” 35 For the dynamics of anti-Indian sentiment among Africans, especially in Natal, see Sibongiseni M. Mkize, Principle and Pragmatism in the Liberation Struggle, 112-129; Jon Soske, Internal Frontiers; and Goolam Vahed, “The Making of ‘Indianness’: Indian Politics in South Africa During the 1930s and 1940s,” Journal of Natal and Zulu History 17.1 (1997), 1-37. 36 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Ruby” TS., Scene II, pg. 13 (KCM 8267), UKZN, Durban. 37 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Ruby” TS., Scene I, pg. 5 (KCM 8267), UKZN, Durban. 337 Coloured in Scene VII, descends to the gutter. In Scene IX she nervously seeks a furtive encounter with white university students in a filthy Cape Town shebeen. That long shebeen scene, which covers more ground than just Molly’s downfall, ends in a melodramatic flourish as Adams, a poor and lecherous but racially fanatical Coloured activist, pursues the white students outside in order to retrieve Molly and her friend from their clutches. He is shot and killed by the whites, just as a Mrs. Jonkers announces that the shebeen proprietor’s infant daughter has died after being given too much wine as a sedative by her teenaged sister. Finally, in Scene X, Molly is knocked down after soliciting a white man in the street. A group of Coloured passersby seek to defend her honor, but they are discouraged by Mr. Kort, a Coloured leader, who asks what transpired: EUROPEAN: It[’]s a scandal! As I came up the street three Coloured women solicited my attention—the usual thing, you know. When I passed on unheeding, this woman accosted me, and actually dared to touch me. Annoyed and fearing what might happen if I were seen in such undesirable company, I shook and flung her away from me—with the results you see. KORT: She must be tipsy. MAN [same as EUROPEAN]: She is. KORT: We are sorry. You have been wronged. It is the tragedy of our economic and social system. Goodbye. MAN: I know. Thanks. Goodbye. (he goes out.)38 Molly’s final turn in the play thus exploits the trope of the humorous Coloured drunk à la Kaatje Kekkelbek, about as far from white respectability as Dhlomo could write her: WOMAN: (Rising) Vie es jy? Me es ek!39 JAMES: Molly! God! It cannot be! MOLLY [same as WOMAN]: What s-shoo say? Me es Molly. Ek gie nie om nie.40 JAMES: Ah! Punishment! Punishment! MOLLY: Ja, push me, push me, you hell! 38 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Ruby” TS., Scene X, pg. 94 (KCM 8267), UKZN, Durban. 39 In phonetic Afrikaans, “who are you? Me is I!” 40 In phonetic Afrikaans, “I don’t care.” 338 JAMES: [to Mr. Kort] My sister, Sir. My dear lost sister, of whom I spoke to you. MOLLY: Es et ek jy introduce?41 With whom? Hullo! (She tries to shake hands with Kort but clutches the air, plunges forward, and Kort comes to her rescue…)42 Dhlomo’s portrait of Molly is a microcosm of his multifaceted consideration of the question of Colouredness. Ruby and Frank’s dialogue is generally written in impeccably standard English, no matter who is speaking, so Molly’s use of dialect Afrikaans becomes an important mark of her forsakenness. There is, in addition, a heavy dose of irony in the fact that Molly’s eagerness to escape her origins results in her embodying the most trite of Coloured stereotypes. But Dhlomo’s self-aware approach to satire is best exemplified back in the shebeen scene, as the rabble-rouser Adams leads the assembled patrons in a song at the expense of social workers like Ruby Meyer: VOICES: Ja! Ja! Let’s sing ourselves to sin, and sin to song! (Guitars, banjos and voices combine in song) Song. I’m great and popular! I own a car! The social worker said… (As if we cared!) My hope is my position To which I cling! True values are a fiction In my snob Ring!…43 The interlude continues for six more verses. But lest the audience (black or white) fail to grasp the meaning of the song, Dhlomo follows it with an expository dialogue between two bar patrons. Social work, Swarts and Fredericks agree, is positive in and of itself, but once 41 In phonetic Afrikaans, “Is it me you’re introducing?” 42 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Ruby” TS., Scene X, pg. 95-96 (KCM 8267), UKZN, Durban. 43 First ellipsis in original. H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Ruby” TS., Scene IX, pg. 83 (KCM 8267), UKZN, Durban. 339 “organised” it falls prey to “institutionalism”—so much so that social workers have no interest in actually alleviating social ills, because they would be out of jobs.44 At that moment, Adams enters and riles them up. “What is all this talk, talk about social work!” he declares, “We want money! We are starving!”45 His demands are predicated on receiving a higher wage than that given to—as he terms them—“kaffir fools.”46 In the play, Adams embodies misdirected racial anger. In Scene II, he menaces Frank while he visits Ruby at her employer’s house, threatening to call the police on him for trespassing. And in Scene V, while beating his wife for accepting charity from their respectable black neighbors, his toddler son upsets a pot of boiling water and dies. Exclusivism, H. I. E. Dhlomo argues, no less than desperate assimilationism, is self- defeating. It is tempting to read the plot of Ruby and Frank as not only a metaphor for Coloured identity or black-Coloured relations, but as a reflection on the position of the New Africans themselves, caught between a white supremacist modernity and the beleaguered remains of pre- colonial culture.47 The end of the play is deeply ambiguous: Ruby dies of an unexplained illness, and calls Frank to her bedside where they enjoy her final moments together. The scene seems to conform that the two cannot be together in life—that the full synthesis of progressive black and Coloured, or of African heritage and cosmopolitan modernity cannot yet be realized amid a system that perverts noble causes and rewards ignoble ones. By setting the story mainly among 44 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Ruby” TS., Scene IX, pg. 84 (KCM 8267), UKZN, Durban. Again, considering the inevitable ties between most organs of social work and the mining sector, Dhlomo’s critic would seem to have some merit. 45 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Ruby” TS., Scene IX, pg. 85 (KCM 8267), UKZN, Durban. 46 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Ruby” TS., Scene IX, pg. 85 (KCM 8267), UKZN, Durban. 47 Key texts on black-Coloured relations in South Africa include Mohamed Adhikari, Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2005); Gavin Lewis, Between the Wire and the Wall: A History of South African Coloured Politics (New York, N.Y.: St. Martin’s Press, 1987); and Richard E. van der Ross, In Our Own Skins: A Political History of the Coloured People (Johannesburg, South Africa: Jonathan Ball, 2015). 340 Coloureds, H. I. E. Dhlomo’s play effectively becomes a drame à clef about Johannesburg’s African petty bourgeoisie—thus eluding the censure of the white-led institutions without whose support the Dramatic Society could not exist. The Expert: The Horror of White Paternalism After Ruby and Frank, however, H. I. E. Dhlomo became steadily more disillusioned with the paternalist status quo. Plays took a long time to rehearse owing to onerous African curfew rules, as the white producer of Lady Windermere’s Fan reported to the Rand Daily Mail. “We have to rehearse whole scenes almost phrase by phrase,” she lamented, “but what can one do in one-and- a-half hours?”48 In 1937, this became even more difficult for Dhlomo after he won a prestigious appointment as the Librarian-Organizer of the Carnegie Non-European Library Service, which operated out of the Germiston Public Library on the East Rand.49 He hoped the job would be less stressful than his teaching burden at the American Board School. However, as he enumerated in a 1937 article for The Star, Dhlomo was charged with an extraordinary number of tasks, from selecting books to maintaining accurate circulation records, to organizing lectures at various local distribution points all over greater Johannesburg, to writing and editing the Non- European Library Service’s journal, The Readers’ Companion.50 According to Bhekizizwe Peterson, this rota of duties hastened the demise of the African Dramatic Society to which Dhlomo had devoted so much. In an ideal world, both Dhlomos would have been able to make a living, however modest, as men of letters—R. R. R. immersing himself in the study of Zulu 48 Elsie Salomon, quoted in L. S. [Lewis Sowden], “Bantu Players Will Stage Oscar Wilde Comedy,” Rand Daily Mail, May 8, 1936. 49 See also Alan G. Cobley’s chapter “The Politics of Reading: Literacy, Consciousness and the Development of Library Services for Blacks in South Africa” in The Rules of the Game. 50 See R. Alain Everts, “The Pioneers: Herbert Isaac Ezra Dhlomo and the Development of Library Service to the African in South Africa,” World Libraries 3.2 (1993), 7-19. 341 history, and H. I. E. in poetry and drama.51 As H. I. E. Dhlomo’s alter ego George in Men and Women soliloquizes: [C]an I help it really when my God-given work is called my hobby, and my daily ephemeral drudgery, my profession! I am allowed no time—let alone given help and encouragement—to do what I can do better and to the fame and glory of my people, but told to do best what Time will not allow to stand, and from which my people and I gain nothing. Daily I am compelled to slave and waste at Nothing in order to create and build up Something! Wasting thought, years and a short span of frail life in order to snatch an hour to build thought, catch up with Time, hold the sunbeams and create an immortal universe. Nature in all her prodigality was never half as wasteful as our life and system.52 In November 1940 the strain of Dhlomo’s multifaceted work for the Carnegie Non- European Library were becoming apparent. Dhlomo was behind on his payments for the car that the Committee had procured for him in 1938, and the wear of constant use meant the car was worth much less than what he owed for it. On December 30, after being reprimanded by committee secretary E. A. Borland, Dhlomo left his post. Dhlomo claimed that he had been fired on the spot; the Committee’s line was that a furious Dhlomo had threatened Borland physically and resigned himself.53 Dhlomo received £15 from the Committee in lieu of notice, and fled to Natal, leaving his wife and children behind. Lacking money for accommodation, Dhlomo reportedly slept on the beach at night. Yet Dhlomo bounced back quickly. By April he was announcing war news for the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s new Zulu broadcast—with Charles Mpanza and the famous King Edward Masinga, among the first black South African non-musicians to be heard on the 51 The correspondence between R. R. R. Dhlomo and Killie Campbell preserved in the Campbell Collections attests to this desire on the part of R. R. R.—especially in Dhlomo’s unsuccessful campaigns for leaves of absence and research funding in the 1950s and 1960s. See, for example, R. R. R. Dhlomo’s letter of June 24, 1957 to Killie Campbell and her response of July 2, in “Correspondence—Letters 1957, January, February, March,” file 35 (KCM 6802), UKZN, Durban. 52 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Men and Women” TS., Scene V, pgs. 62-63 (KCM 8291), UKZN, Durban. 53 Cf. Tim Couzens, The New African, 206-207. 342 S.A.B.C. (see Chapter 8). It was the beginning of a new chapter in Dhlomo’s life. He became more and more active in African National Congress politics, and never again attempted to organize a theatrical society. Instead, when his brother became editor of Ilanga Lase Natal in 1943, H. I. E. Dhlomo accepted the post of assistant editor, where he became responsible for most of the paper’s English language content—excluding the humor column, which was was now known as “Rolling Stone’s Corner” and was still written by R. R. R. During this time H. I. E. Dhlomo continued writing plays, including The Expert, one of his most bitterly satirical efforts, of which sadly the prologue and first ten pages (about a fifth of the play’s length) are missing.54 The Expert, as its title implies, is aimed squarely at the white “experts” responsible for, among other things, removing Dhlomo from his post at the Carnegie Non-European Library. Though at a more manageable scale than Men and Women, the short play is so strident—almost carnivalesque in its ruthlessness—that Dhlomo could not have written it with any expectation of its being produced or published in the foreseeable future. Yet write it he did, and The Expert is a devastating cri de cœur on behalf of the frustrated New African intellectual. It was not Dhlomo’s first effort at tackling white paternalism. In his undated but certainly much earlier play Malaria—ostensibly about an epidemic—Dhlomo uses the prodigious but informally trained African physician Ruromba to represent the struggle of African artists and intellectuals for white recognition and support.55 In Malaria, Dhlomo harshly criticizes missionaries for their denominationalism and fear of Africans in the prologue, before Ruromba leaps to their defense near the end. Still, an exchange between Ruromba and an old man reveals 54 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “The Expert” TS. (KCM 8286), UKZN, Durban. 55 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Malaria” TS. (KCM 8287), UKZN, Durban. 343 Dhlomo’s view of the delicate relationship between Africans’ artistic gifts (“we are tender flesh”) and their ability to progress in the world: 3RD OLD MAN: Disease is deliberately caused by the white man to decimate the race, to undermine our well-being, to impoverish and compel us to serve as his labourers. Disease never comes of itself. It is caused. Today among our people, there are no charmers, real witchdoctors nor evil spirits. Yet disease is more rampant. What is the cause? It is the European and his way of life. What? Do you think we are children? These Europeans are dead with disease! RUROMBA: But it is we who suffer, not they. 3RD OLD MAN: Not they! You see biltong and call it meat! They died long ago. Not they! They have made a business of the sacred art of healing. Despite their life of luxury, wealth and comfort, they are always sick and keep an army, a whole tribe, of doctors. Disease has riddled them through and through, and parched their skins white. They are biltong that exists dead. They have no feeling. They grow not to decay. We decay and fall to bits because we are tender flesh, fresh, warm and human. RUROMBA: If they do not decay, then are they stronger than ourselves. It is time we too were burnt into incorruption by the heat of the Life of Light.56 By The Expert, such ambivalence had fallen away in Dhlomo’s mind. The plot is simple enough, despite the missing section of the typescript. Dr. Morland Turlips (a portmanteau of E. A. Borland, the actual secretary of the Carnegie Non-European Library Committee who fired Dhlomo, and the Rev. Ray Phillips, another member) is a respectable white liberal “advocate” for the African, consumed by his secret hatred for their kind.57 With the first ten pages of the play missing, the modern reader meets Turlips in media res, responding exasperatedly to “one of the most capable secretaries of the African Trade Union Movement” who has found out his secret.58 After his accuser “strides out” confidently, Turlips is shaken to his core: 56 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Malaria” TS., pgs. 30-31 (KCM 8287), UKZN, Durban. 57 At one point in the typescript Turlips says his name is “Stones,” which is possibly a reference to a third committee member, Senator J. D. Rheinallt-Jones. See H. I. E. Dhlomo, “The Expert” TS., pg. 27 (KCM 8286), UKZN, Durban. Ray Phillips is an extremely important figure in 1930s Johannesburg, and in 2019 he and his wife Dora were posthumously awarded the Order of the Baobab by the South African government. See Chérif Keita, “The Twin Legacies of Ray and Dora Phillips,” Africa is a Country, July 19, 2019, accessed March 18, 2021, . 58 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “The Expert” TS., pg. 11 (KCM 8286), UKZN, Durban. 344 TURLIPS: (waking from stupor) Where is the n-nigger! I w-will tell the Committee. I m-mean, I w-will have h-him fired. Dash it! I mean I will have him arrested for this. The world is going to pieces when there are talented, educated, militant Natives not under my thumb; Natives whom one cannot fire, intimidate, report or control.59 Turlips is subsequently relieved when a phone call allows him to reassert himself as a fixer for all things African: TURLIPS:…Speaking…Good day, Professor…yes…ya…Of course…send copies of your questionnaire[;] I will get you scores, hundreds of Natives to reply…No, no. Do not mention the question of money to them…They will do it if I tell them… good…ya…I wish you every success in your researches.60 Presently he is visited by a deferential African suppliant, Manzi the teacher, whom Turlips has fired. He appeals to Turlips’s professed Christian values to no avail. He is still £85 in debt for the cost of his furniture and his house, with no way to pay them down and a wife who “will be confined in a week or two.”61 He exits empty-handed, and later kills himself offstage. In this section the academic-industrial complex is vividly rendered.62 White scholars build their reputations off the consent of Africans whose efforts at advancement they either mock openly or stifle gradually through debt, meager pay and overwork. Dhlomo’s avatar in the play enters next—Ngqondo, named after the Zulu word for intelligence or understanding. Turlips says he is dismissing him because of difficulties within his 59 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “The Expert” TS., pg. 11 (KCM 8286), UKZN, Durban. 60 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “The Expert” TS., pg. 11 (KCM 8286), UKZN, Durban. 61 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “The Expert” TS., pg. 13 (KCM 8286), UKZN, Durban. 62 Indeed, considering the extent of ties between the Rand mining sector and scholarly enterprises dedicated to “race relations” in Johannesburg, the phrase “academic-industrial complex” should be taken quite literally. Both the Bantu Studies Department (1923) at the University of the Witwatersrand and the South African Institute of Race Relations (founded at a meeting in Ray Phillips’s home in 1929) were funded in large part by the Chamber of Mines and affiliates (as, for that matter, was the University of the Witwatersrand itself, which began life as the South African School of Mines). See W. D. Hammond-Tooke, Imperfect Interpreters: South Africa's Anthropologists 1920-1990 (Johannesburg, South Africa: Witwatersrand University Press, 1997): 34-35; and Ellen Hellmann, “Fifty Years of the South African Institute of Race Relations,” in Race Relations in South Africa, 1929-1979, eds. Ellen Hellmann and Henry Lever (London, U.K: Palgrave Macmillan, 1979): 1-27; and Anjuli Webster, “Silencing Africa? —Anthropological Knowledge at the University of the Witwatersrand (M.A. research report: University of the Witwatersrand, 2017): 15-27. 345 marriage and because, furthermore, “the Committee feel you are rather aloof, negligent of and ungrateful to them for having given you this great work.”63 This section of the play is clearly autobiographical, as Ngqondo is criticized for pursuing initiatives independent of white supervision, and dealing with what Dhlomo frames as the fallout from his wife’s infidelity. Here, agelastic haranguing precedes satire as Ngqondo impresses upon Turlips the hypocrisy of his actions (the passage is something of an autobiographical revenge fantasy; Dhlomo was only accused of threatening Dr. Borland, after all, not actually hurting him): TURLIPS: Don’t think you can frighten me. NGQONDO: I am desperate and determined. To prove it, I will go now and bring your wife here, embrace, kiss and commit… (Stung, Turlips forgets his fear for a moment and jumps up to strike at Ngqondo who floors him with a savage blow. For a moment Turlips is completely dazed and helpless. Ngqondo helps him to his chair, and listens to find out if someone is coming) NGQONDO: I thought you said Christians must bear their burdens, and all that! But merely to talk about kissing your wife, stings you to madness. Yet you would have me insult and disgrace myself, my children and my race, sell and crucify my feelings, mock and murder my genius by living with a bad woman who has besmeared the sacred name of mother and wife, and sold by her infidelity her children’s husband’s and her own name and soul. Plainly you ask me to caress and feed on a harlot…64 Thus far the tone of the play, while clearly satirical, has been very dour. After Ngqondo’s two page departing monologue, Dhlomo makes an abrupt transition, rendering a meeting of Turlips’s committee as an eight-page patter song in order to reinforce his anti-“expertism” message (though the script does not indicate music explicitly, it is strongly implied). An unholy trinity of white academic, missionary, and corporate interests implicate themselves in rhymed verses, followed each time by hearty agreement from the sycophantic black committee members. Out of all the verses, the longest is given to Mr. Falsy the anthropologist, in a incandescent 63 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “The Expert” TS., pg. 14 (KCM 8286), UKZN, Durban. 64 First ellipsis in original. H. I. E. Dhlomo, “The Expert” TS., pg. 17 (KCM 8286), UKZN, Durban. 346 rebuke to white academics who fear the modernism of Dhlomo and his New African contemporaries: FALSY: I hold the Blacks should dance in their own ways Just as they did in good old tribal days. Their skins and customs let them still retain Not for their own, but for the white man’s gain. For safety and our gain and jollity, Museum pieces let the Bantu be!… To keep them serfs let’s build a fine big kraal With an arena where they’ll dance for all European friends and visitors, for this Is business and sound politics, this is! To make it all sound sweet and fair and wise, And camouflage it just to searching eyes, We speak and write scientific offal deep About it so that while the people sleep, We do our job, The Blacks to rob Of their great might, Their rich birthright. Black men who see behind our screen and plan We persecute, blackmail, suppress, and ban.65 As for the three blacks at the meeting—Slima (isilima, idiot), Nkuku (inkukhu, chicken) and Khonza (-khonz-, to pay respect or show allegiance to)—their loyalty is bought through their salaries, paltry as they are. This musical flourish ends when Alfred, Turlips’s black servant, reads out a poem from Ngqondo that further enrages Turlips with its grace and magnanimity. The action continues with a visit from Jesus Christ and then Satan, adding to a lively tradition of divine visitations in Southern African fiction, from Olive Schreiner’s Trooper Peter Halket of 65 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “The Expert” TS., pgs. 22-23 (KCM 8286), UKZN, Durban. 347 Mashonaland (1897) to the satirical play Woza Albert! (1981).66 Finally, Satan arrives to collect Turlips’s soul, and, after a dramatic crescendo, he drops dead. The Expert is one of the harshest (if not the harshest) surviving examples of black South African literary satire in English before 1948. It attacks white liberals like Borland and Phillips as not only misguided, but as conscious foes of African advancement: Satan informs Turlips not only that his soul belongs to him, but that Turlips actually is a devil himself. But The Expert is more than just a vessel for H. I. E. Dhlomo’s rage. Inherent in ordering the story as a play is the proposition (almost a fantasy) of a world where such a production could actually be staged, independent of white oversight or support. Dhlomo would not live to see such a world, but such a vision directly prefigures the later development of South African protest theatre. The connection between a work like The Expert and later Black Consciousness theatre in South Africa is impossible to ignore.67 In satirizing the tyranny of white “experts”, H. I. E. Dhlomo destabilized the episteme of white supremacy under which he had been born. When Schreiner’s Trooper Peter Halket (written to protest Cecil Rhodes’s subjugation of present-day Zimbabwe) likens a black captive to the crucified Christ, the captive does not speak in his own words. The talkative Jesus who inspires Trooper Halket to free the captive is visibly foreign—“one of the Soudanese Rhodes brought down from the North, I suppose?” Halket asks—but he does not make his appeal in the 66 Olive Schreiner, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, and Company, 1900 [1897]); Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema, and Barney Simon, Woza Albert! (London, U.K.: Bloomsbury, 2018 [1983]). 67 See Robert Mshengu Kavanagh, Theatre and Cultural Struggle in South Africa, 145-195. See also Theatre and Change in South Africa, eds. Geoffrey V. Davis and Anne Fuchs (Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996); Loren Kruger, The Drama of South Africa: Plays, Pageants, and Publics Since 1910 (New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 1999): 129-190; and Performing Migrancy and Mobility in Africa: Cape of Flows, ed. Mark Fleishman (New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 348 guise of an African.68 In The Expert, Dhlomo makes the voice of Jesus and the voice of blackness one and the same, not beseeching but judging and condemning Turlips, for his part, is not only ridiculous because of his words but through his demeanor: he is described in stage directions as “a pathetic object of fear,” “dazed and helpless,” “blushing hatefully like a tiger, but grunting like a baboon.”—he, the “expert” whose phone never stops ringing after whom the play is named.69 Not only are “enlightened” black people like Ngqondo described in proportionately effusive ways, but both Christ and Satan are depicted as black. This de-centers and marginalizes Turlips, instead of merely reversing the familiar racial fault line of missionary Christianity. Turlips, hitherto so accustomed to being in command, finds himself lost in a cosmology not of his own making, beyond his comprehension. Like the Christianized Africans who gave up their birthright and patrimony through colonial conquest and the esoteric promises of missionaries, Turlips finds himself untethered from his identity, and the experience is so traumatic that it literally kills him. Men and Women: South African Gothic Dhlomo’s longest and most ambitious play, Men and Women, deserves to be acknowledged as one of the most important plays to come out of South Africa in the twentieth century. It goes further than any other H. I. E. Dhlomo play in rejecting the paternalistic framework under which black South African artists were compelled to work, and meditates on the condition of the would- be New African artist through a text that is as elaborate as it is raw. Despite this, it continues to languish in obscurity. Likely also written in 1941 shortly after Dhlomo’s dismissal from the Non-European Library Service, the one surviving typescript in the University of KwaZulu- 68 Olive Schreiner, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, 19. 69 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “The Expert” TS., pgs. 39, 14, 17 (KCM 8286), UKZN, Durban. 349 Natal’s Campbell Collections is in a sorry state. Scene VIII is missing in its entirety, while three more scenes are incomplete. Several of the pages are mouse-eaten. Despite its current condition, however,. It is intimidating, unapologetic, and far from flawless. Tim Couzens calls Men and Women “crude, often naïve…sometimes painful, sometimes evasive and confused, sometimes brave” and Dhlomo’s “most palpable failure.”70 He dwells on its clearly autobiographical elements—such as Florence Dhlomo confiding in the difficulties in their marriage to Ray Phillips—but seriously misreads the final scene as a “complete switch from the realistic mode of the rest of the play.”71 Couzens sees the macabre and melodramatic climax of the work as “high Elizabethan revenge tragedy” and thus a “retreat into the past,” but in fact this play—including its surviving ending—is visionary and certainly unlike any South African work that preceded it. Dhlomo himself was not unaware of his (and the play’s) limitations, and he acknowledges as much in a conversation between his protagonist-proxy George—and Hlubi, a university-educated intellectual (perhaps a stand-in in for B. W. Vilakazi): GEORGE: I should [pursue a university education]. I cannot. I have a task to accomplish, a task which I could have done much better if I had been better trained, but which I cannot accomplish now if I pursue the training so necessary to its perfection. In a battle, an ill-trained pilot must stick to his machine and fight on despite odds, and not bale out [sic] to go and seek the training that would have stood in good stead if he had it…72 Men and Women is so ambitious—grandiose, extravagant, and even neurotic yet tremendously stylized and fanciful—that comparing it to an air raid seems appropriate. It is a play that seems to revel in its own unproduceability; to read it is to be forced to imagine an entirely new artistic infrastructure in South Africa to support such an effort. It is H. I. E. 70 Tim Couzens, The New African, 204. 71 Tim Couzens, The New African, 205. 72 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Men and Women” TS, Scene V, pg. 82 (KCM 8291), UKZN, Durban. 350 Dhlomo’s ultimate act of rebellion as a playwright against the heavily (self-)censored world of his contemporaries and an uncompromising articulation of his mature politics. It is also the setting for some of Dhlomo’s most penetrating satire. Men and Women was not quite Dhlomo’s first dalliance with horror. In The Living Dead, a short play that Tim Couzens felt revealed ambivalence towards his family’s Christianized, Europeanized ways, the Mkize family is butchered by a wayward son who has escaped from a lunatic asylum—or so we think.73 In fact, H. I. E. Dhlomo’s younger brother Frank, a schizophrenic, was committed to an asylum at the end of 1939 and spent the rest of his life at various psychiatric facilities. It would seem, then, that the Mkizes are at least partially sketched to resemble the Dhlomos, though, unlike Couzens, my interest is less in these autobiographical snippets as in Dhlomo’s experimentation with genre. The trouble starts at the dinner table when Violet Mkize, Old Mkize’s daughter-in-law, brings up the fact that a neighboring family has gone to Natal to sacrifice to their ancestors. Her husband Selby scoffs at this, and immediately small things start to go wrong, from dishes breaking to mice scurrying across the room. As the family’s conversation continues, Dhlomo skillfully builds suspense from comedy to horror, until Earl finally breaks into the house to do his nasty deeds, killing every member of the family except two small children and Violet herself, who is only an Mkize by marriage. Then the play takes a surreal turn—the ghostly matriarch Ruth foretells deaths for each of the Mkize family members different than the stranglings, bludgeonings and stabbings that have just taken place. The violence is actually an omen: the same Mkize family members will die, the audience learns, 73 See H. I. E. Dhlomo, “The Living Dead,” in H. I. E. Dhlomo: Collected Works, eds. Nick W. Visser and Tim Couzens (Johannesburg, South Africa: Ravan Press, 1985), 179-188. 351 but over a much longer period of time—four months instead of four minutes—from causes ranging from childbirth to a police shooting. Many times the length of The Living Dead, Men and Women is a multidimensional exploration of infidelity presaged by Ruby and Frank’s treatment of interracial love. Its scale alone is massive. The 258 pages of Men and Women that survive represent about seven eighths of what was probably a complete script of about 300 pages. It is divided into eighteen scenes, plus a verse prologue and perhaps a verse epilogue after its missing conclusion. Many of the scenes also boast their own verse prologues. There are more than fifty characters, with the possibility of more in the missing pages. After a clearly Gothic prologue, where a crazed husband sitting at a pipe organ cackles maniacally about killing his wife, the action moves suddenly to much more familiar surroundings: a township dance hall. There a Dhlomo-esque artist-intellectual, George Khaba, enters the scene. Like H. I. E. Dhlomo, George works for a white-led Committee involved in social work among Africans. Also like Dhlomo, he is frustrated with family life and his wife Delilah’s secret liaisons with the scoundrel Nkomo. There is also the “fallen star” John Zwide, a musical prodigy languishing as a township band leader—his lover Dorothy Bantu also cheats with Nkomo, and John kills her in a fit of rage. Another young woman, Mary, is beaten habitually by her lover, Jack the gangster, while her cynical, streetwise friend Kate cruelly exploits her own doting husband, Sefali. George, despite his anger at Delilah’s perfidy, has a mistress of his own, Andrina. In another highly autobiographical turn, Nkomo and Delilah conspire to get George fired from his post by alerting his white bosses to his marital troubles. 352 Two thirds of the way through the script, however, the plot takes a hard turn away from social realism. Scene XII takes place at an herbalist’s, where several of the play’s disparate threads converge. George wants something to help him discern whether Delilah has been unfaithful, while Jack believes that the herbalist can help him discover buried treasure. Before he leaves, Jack offers to let George in on the scheme, and he accepts. After they exit, Nkomo enters with a “shivering old Bantu”—Dora’s father from Amanzimtoti—who wants John Zwide to die. The scene ends with Mary begging the herbalist for a root that will abort Jack’s child, even as an unnamed woman who regrets her abortion begs Mary not to go through with it, to no avail. Seeking to scam Jack, the herbalist hires people with theatrical sound effect equipment and ghostly costumes to scare Jack and his minions away from the site before they discover that the treasure does not exist. All goes according to plan in Scene XIII, except that after Jack and the tsotsis flee, a crazed-looking George comes out from the shadows and resumes digging, finding multiple cases of gold, money and jewels. George then pays a share of his fabulous wealth to the shocked herbalist in exchange for bewitching Nkomo—and John, who had acted as an accomplice. They are unsuccessful in salvaging John for George’s final flourish; he is already condemned to die as part of Dorothy’s father’s revenge. It is unclear exactly what will happen to Nkomo, though he takes it as a stroke of luck when Jack is hit by a bus and killed on his way to romance another maid in the suburbs. Scene XVIII, whose conclusion is sadly missing, is the culmination of George’s revenge fantasy. It is also one of the most extravagant and remarkable scenes in all of early black South African literature. The scene begins with George’s death—in his palatial mansion, attended by 353 his servant Tom, his mistress Andrina, his sister Pearl, and the drunk Ben Maseko (represented as the wisest of all the characters because he rejects the attentions of women). Years after abandoning his family to live as a recluse in his multiple mansions, George dies before them and, bewildered, the group begs Tom to explain what it all means. The scene then flashes back as Tom starts relating the tale of how, earlier, George lured his wife Delilah to the estate, overwhelming her with its opulence and pledging to take her back if she would put on her old wedding dress. As it happens, the hideous statue that graces George’s great hall is revealed as none other than the bewitched Nkomo, who serves simultaneously as mute statue, moaning slave, and victim of George’s sadistic outbursts. At the climax of George’s madness, he forces Delilah, now in her wedding dress, to “marry” the monstrous Nkomo. He then shoots them both and goes to the pipe organ—bringing the action full-circle to the events of Scene I. It is not known whether the scene reverts to Tom and the second group of visitors, as after page 278 the text is cut off. In The Living Dead, Dhlomo’s experimentation with multiple realities means we cannot entirely rule out the possibility that in the lost pages of Men and Women a different, less fantastical conclusion radically changes the tone of the work. Couzens compellingly argues that The Living Dead directly confronts the existential dread of the African petty bourgeoisie—the fear that in rejecting their patrimony, they have set unseen forces in motion against themselves. In Men and Women, George states the problem in slightly different terms—perhaps not coincidentally channeling the words of the demon-hunted Barton in Sheridan Le Fanu’s 354 influential 1847 ghost story “The Familiar.”74 “My affliction is that I know God is,” George laments to his sister Pearl, “I would be happy—so happy—if I thought he did not exist. My pain and burden are that I know God knows and is almighty. I know but fail to understand.”75 The New African, pulled in two directions by Christianity and tradition, treads with ambivalence— behind which, for Dhlomo, lurks horror. Men and Women is, at its core, a play about fidelity and infidelity. Not only the infidelity that sunk Dhlomo’s marriage and got him fired from the Non-European Library Service, but also fidelity in the sundry other relationships that Dhlomo felt were ensnaring him and his contemporaries. Faithfulness to art and the intellectual life, for example, is counterposed against the obligations of family life in the context of George and Delilah’s marriage. Their unfaithfulness to each other means George’s bosses no longer view him as faithful to the position with which the Committee has entrusted him. For John Zwide, the musical virtuoso reduced to playing two-bit township dances with a company of rustics straight out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, faithfulness to the path of high art has estranged him from his heritage, as shown in the very funny first half of Scene X: FIRST: (Posing as if in prayer) O Lord, give me the great musician who will oblige without fuss when asked to perform! JOHN: God’s answer is, ‘Don’t be a fool!’ 74 The Irish Gothic writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s “The Familiar” is the story of a veteran naval captain, James Barton, who is driven mad through the pursuit of a mysterious man known as “The Watcher,” thought to be the ghost of one of his former crewmen whose daughter he violated. “‘The fact is,’” exclaims an exasperated Barton to a theologian at the end of Chapter IV, “‘whatever may be my uncertainty as to the authenticity of what we are taught to call revelation, of one fact I am deeply and horribly convinced, that there does exist beyond this a spiritual world —a system whose workings are generally in mercy hidden from us—a system which may be, and which is sometimes, partially and terribly revealed. I am sure—I know,’ continued Barton, with increasing excitement, ‘that there is a God—a dreadful God—and that retribution follows guilt, in ways the most mysterious and stupendous— by agencies the most inexplicable and terrific;—there is a spiritual system—great God, how I have been convinced! —a system malignant, and implacable, and omnipotent, under whose persecutions I am, and have been, suffering the torments of the damned!—yes, sir—yes—the fires and frenzy of hell!’” See Joseph Sheridan le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly (London, U.K.: Eveleigh Nash and Grayson, 1923 [1872]): 84. 75 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Men and Women” TS. (KCM 8291), Scene V, pg. 69, UKZN, Durban. 355 TOM: Oh Johnie play! JOHN: Johnie be damned! I am Mr. Zwide. You fellows forget you are not of my rank and position. Unlike other arts, talent in music brings one down to mingle with the scum of the earth, with the masses instead of keeping one away from and beyond them. TOM: Art is of the common people and common, constant things. If you lose that contact, forget about creating great art. FIRST: Please, Sir Boss Zwide Esquire Limited, Our Lord and saviour, Doctor, Professor, King and Emperor—play!76 Moreover, in Men and Women, faithfulness to the spirit of the city means unfaithfulness to others. This is perhaps best exemplified by the character Kate, a sensual, gossipy woman who enjoys the doting affection of her husband even as she constantly abuses him to his face and cheats behind his back. At the beginning of Scene IV, which takes place in the domestic servants’ quarters of the house where Dorothy works, Dorothy is sewing and Mary is crocheting —two “productive” activities, while Kate is flipping through the pages of a pornographic magazine. Yet Mary’s lover Jack beats her, and when Jack dies she is overcome with ecstasy to finally be free of him. Dorothy, meanwhile, dies by the hand of her educated, intellectual boyfriend John Zwide—at the end of the jazz rehearsal scene that begins as pure comedy. “You are a wise and virtuous lady, Miss Bantu,” Nkomo sneers, “but, believe [me], so was Kate. She once used the same arguments as you use today.”77 The happiest male character, Ben Maseko, is the “wise fool” of the play. He swears faithfulness to alcohol (“my perfect untroublesome wife”) and rejects women entirely; as the dancehall’s master of ceremonies he instead exploits the lusts of others.78 Indeed, it would not be inaccurate to describe Men and Women as a three-hundred- page reflection on the nature of unfreedom. Surely it is not a coincidence that Maseko 76 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Men and Women” TS. (KCM 8291), Scene X, pgs. 175-176, UKZN, Durban. 77 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Men and Women” TS. (KCM 8291), Scene IV, pg. 52, UKZN, Durban. 78 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Men and Women” TS. (KCM 8291), Scene VI, pg. 121, UKZN, Durban. 356 introduces the jazz band in Scene II as “The Melody Slaves” nor that George calls the bewitched Nkomo his own slave—robbed of free will, stripped of all human feeling beyond lust. Even more remarkable than Dhlomo’s multifaceted exploration of faithfulness and slavery, is his experimentation with setting—perhaps the play’s most bewitching quality. In Men and Women H. I. E. Dhlomo synthesized the two kinds of play he had written theretofore— African historical dramas like Cetshwayo and Moshoeshoe and contemporary topical melodramas like Ruby and Frank. The result is a dizzying amalgam of the contemporary and the classical, a Sophiatown Othello with heavy Gothic elements. What is most striking, especially given the grandiose tone of the play at large, is the lightness of Dhlomo’s touch when it comes to social conditions. The characters are obviously black South Africans and the setting is certainly Johannesburg. In many respects his scene settings are quite novel; like Tyamzashe’s Bantuland and his brother’s Timbuctoo, H. I. E. Dhlomo shows here how the texture of black life is comprehensively overlaid onto that racialized city’s geography, as if to mock it. Love stories and murderous schemes play out just as easily in dingy township halls as on suburban street corners, at segregated bus stops. Race matters in the story, to be sure; George’s artistic and career woes are inextricable from his status as an African intellectual. But such issues are never foregrounded as they are in Ruby and Frank or The Expert. Men and Women is a play about just that—African men and women who face a set of social challenges, rather than the social conditions themselves. The only white people with dialogue in the surviving typescript are 357 Mary’s employers, who appear only in an extremely minor capacity, returning Mary to their flat after Jack’s funeral.79 In Men and Women, comedy is always cheek-by-jowl with horror. The jaunty patter of a jazz ensemble rehearsing in Scene X ends with John Zwide strangling a pregnant woman. Subsequently, as John lies on his deathbed—mad from syphilis and witchcraft—his horror reverts to comedy as he begins predicting the future and exposing the secrets of his gawking audience: JOHN: Mrs. Xamu there hid her key under the rubbish bin. Hlophe has £3 in his pockets. Mrs. Lithebe made £4 selling liquor yesterday. Nyoni is at the gate. He comes. His first words will be, ‘O friends! Is it still the same?’ (These statements are followed by amazement for all those mentioned confirm they are true. Nyoni enters and uses the words told.) SOME: Lord! He is cursed with prophecy! OTHERS: (Gloating) We shall hear more! NKOMO: (Aside) I hope the fool won’t talk too much! JOHN: Mlenze will be going to the dog race tonight. Yes, the dog Sammy Boy is the right one. You will win. (Cries of joy from Mlenze) JOHN: Munwe there is in love with Mrs. Zwane who is unfaithful to her husband. (Pandemonium! Black with rage, Zwane shouts, ‘So!’, punches his wife one shattering blow, and attacks Munwe. Cries of ‘Today we know!’, ‘Stop them! They will kill one another!’; ‘Is it true?’; ‘It must be as true as the other prophecies!’ The fighters are separated and taken out amid confusion and excitement.)80 Likewise, the clear comedic premise of a herbalist scamming a group of gangsters with theatrical props results in the discovery of real (if cursed) treasure. It also results in the improbable if not overtly humorous consequence of a black South African writer commanding unlimited wealth, 79 Again, the way Dhlomo’s work anticipates the Black Consciousness theatre of the 1970s is impossible to miss. In 1990, Bhekizizwe Peterson still complained that “black theatre has been unable to organise its internal structures differently from those characterizing the social formation. African males predominate as performers, whites as ‘skilled technicians’, who, mostly direct, and African women are reduced to the periphery in both numbers and status. Within independent black initiatives this scheme takes on a class rather than racially pronounced character.” From Bhekizizwe Peterson, Apartheid and the Political Imagination in Black South African Theatre,” Journal of Southern African Studies 16.2 (1990): 245. 80 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Men and Women” TS. (KCM 8291), Scene XV, pgs. 231-232, UKZN, Durban 358 living as a recluse in a lavish mansion. The final tableau in the surviving text is perhaps the most vivid example of all, as the plot completes its journey back to the moment of the prologue: (He [George] laughs madly and goes and plays the organ which brings Delilah to her feet. Nkomo takes her arm gently and tries to lead into the ‘chapel’. She attempts to wiggle free, but fails. He drags her on. She wails and raves and tears her clothes. Meanwhile the solemn Church music goes on interspersed with the laughter of the player. The music stops and George produces a revolver and approaches the couple. Delilah pleads for mercy. George shoots them dead—laughing all the while. We hear t[he] voices of the servants crying, ‘Open the door[!] Where is she? Murder! Murder! Open!’…81 What could be more illustrative of this dynamic than the contrast between George’s mad laughter and the Gothic grandeur of organ music? Perhaps Dhlomo was inspired by Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff in the film The Black Cat—a film that cemented the popular affinity between organ music and horror in its use of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.82 The film debuted locally at the lavish whites-only Plaza Theatre in central Johannesburg in the middle of 1935; it is unknown when Dhlomo might have seen it.83 The connection between comedy and Gothic horror is deep and long-standing, of course, so much so that “sometimes putative theories of comedy are equally serviceable as theories of horror.”84 As the philosopher Noël Carroll has argued, “the impurities of horror can serve as the incongruities of humor, just as, in certain circumstances, mere reference to the feces, mucus, or spittle we were taught to revile was enough to make us the class wit in the second grade.”85 Dhlomo’s humor never sunk to that level, and moves towards horror, not vice versa. Furthermore, it is not incidental to Dhlomo’s choices that African American fiction since the nineteenth century had engaged deeply with the aesthetics of Gothic horror, as scholars like 81 H. I. E. Dhlomo, “Men and Women” TS. (KCM 8291), Scene XVIII, pg. 278, UKZN, Durban 82 See Isabella van Elferen, “The Gothic Bach,” Understanding Bach 7 (2012): 10. 83 “Thriller at Plaza,” Rand Daily Mail, July 18, 1935. 84 Noël Carroll, “Humor and Horror,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57.2 (1999): 146. 85 Noël Carroll, “Humor and Horror,” 156-157. 359 Teresa A. Goddu, James Smethurst, and Maisha L. Wester have explored at length.86 While discussions of “horror” in Africa often centers the moral crises of white people (such as Mr. Kurtz’s famous exclamation in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness), Wester comments that “one of the reasons the gothic is pervasive and haunting is because it can contain and condense a seeming infinitude of threats and discourses.”87 Goddu, Smethurst and Wester each show that African American authors have a long history of inverting white Gothic tropes that cast black people as impure and monstrous. As Theodore L. Gross put it in his 1971 study, The Heroic Ideal in American Literature, “the nightmare world of Poe or Hawthorne has become the Monday morning of the Negro author.”88 Wester names several characteristic elements of this nightmare world in the introduction to her study, namely the “antihero or hero-villain,” the “suffering heroine,” voyeurism, abjection, and the uncanny.89 Each of these elements can be readily identified in Men and Women, though of them, the trope of voyeurism is especially notable: the voyeurism of the township hall, a familiar scenario from R. Roamer’s popular satire, is transformed by H. I. E. Dhlomo into a singular landscape of jealousy and betrayal that sets the whole tragic apparatus of the play in motion. As in African American literature, the Gothic elements in Men and Women are deeply historical in nature, and it is a monstrously racist society, rather than monstrous racial others, that haunt the play. Indeed, Wester’s description of Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923) could 86 See Teresa A. Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1997): 131-152; James Smethurst, “Invented By Horror: The Gothic and African American Literary Ideology in Native Son,” African American Review 35.1 (2001), 29-40; Maisha L. Wester, African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places (New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 87 See, for example, Cuthbeth Tagwirei, “The ‘Horror’ of African Spirituality,” Research in African Literatures 48.2 (2017), 22-36; Glen Retief, “Heartfelt Horrors: Africa, Racial Difference, and the Quest for Moral Enlightenment in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart,” Conradiana 36.3 (2004), 225-243. Maisha L. Wester, African American Gothic, 3. 88 Theodore L. Gross, The Heroic Ideal in American Literature (New York, N.Y.: Free Press, 1971): 184. 89 Maisha L. Wester, African American Gothic, 5-13. 360 easily be applied to Men and Women.90 “Recourse to gothic tropes,” she observes, “emphasizes both the seemingly permanent entrapment black bodies face in a racialized environment and the absolute horrors of intraracial betrayal, often made synonymous with interracial violence” (such as, in Men and Women, spousal infidelity leading to dismissal from one’s post).91 My intention here is not to argue that H. I. E. Dhlomo’s experience as a black South African was identical to those of his African American contemporaries. But we know that H. I. E. Dhlomo and his cohort took profound inspiration from North America and the West Indies, followed events there as closely as they could, and recognized the “entrapment” of racial oppression as a phenomenon that menaced both groups. Though the trans-Atlantic slave trade did not figure in Dhlomo’s family history to same extent as it did for his American counterparts, the idea that black people were constantly haunted by specters of violence and tragedy resonated deeply for a man whose first major dramatic effort was an attempt to make sense of the Xhosa Cattle Killing. In his earlier plays, Dhlomo’s protagonists continually articulate the lonely, doomed mission of the striving African artist; in Men and Women, finally, the artist goes mad and erupts in a frenzy of violence. As much as Dhlomo sought to valorize the struggle, in the end madness was a more likely outcome than redemption. Given the prevalence of alcoholism and early death among his generation’s leading lights, he was not so far off the mark. Dhlomo wrote many more plays that have not survived; their titles are written in the first edition of Dhlomo’s long poem Valley of a Thousand Hills, which was published in October 1941 by Knox Publishing House. Among these lost works are is his historical drama Shaka, as well as a play called Mendi which told the story of the eponymous ship in which over six 90 Peter Abrahams in his memoir Tell Freedom recounts discovering Jean Toomer’s poetry as a teenager in the library of the Bantu Men’s Social Centre. See Peter Abrahams, Tell Freedom: Memories of Africa (New York, N. Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954): 230; and Jean Toomer, Cane: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism (New York, N.Y.: W. W. Norton and Co., 2011 [1923]). 91 Maisha L. Wester, African American Gothic, 105. 361 hundred black troops of the South African Native Labour Corps died in 1917.92 Several other lost plays are handwritten underneath the printed list in Dhlomo’s copy of the poem, including several which were probably short non-character driven works designed to illustrate unjust social conditions along the lines of The Bazaar or The Pass: The Bus, The Rural Store, Lobola, and Mountains of Sand (Play on Mines). Couzens’s interprets the checkmarks added by Dhlomo to many of the plays on this list as evidence of their being in his possession—those plays that did not survive were likely lone typescripts not returned by (white) publishers and subsequently lost; an additional testament to the challenges of being a freelance African author.93 A Vision Thwarted: Remembering H. I. E. Dhlomo H. I. E. Dhlomo wrote his plays in an atmosphere where the prospect of a local African dramatic tradition along the lines he advocated was growing ever more remote; after 1941 his attentions turned decisively away from drama towards poetry and politics. The 1940s and 1950s in South Africa were characterized by enhanced white control of black dramatic efforts, which generally sought to steer energy away from protest politics towards light entertainment and spectacle. World War II further accelerated the creation a “captive African theatre” as South Africa’s white, pro-Empire elites reacted to the open disloyalty of a considerable section of the Afrikaans- speaking white population as well as the prospect of similar feelings among black, Coloured, and Indian South Africans. Hence the S.A.B.C.’s sudden interest in African language broadcasts, and the gradual erosion of The Bantu World down to a far less substantive newspaper concerned mainly with sports and a nascent celebrity culture that grew from the massification of the old social pages of which R. R. R. Dhlomo made so much fun in the 1930s. Dhlomo himself spent 92 See Albert Grundlingh, “Mutating Memories and the Making of a Myth: Remembering the SS Mendi Disaster, 1917-2007,” South African Historical Journal 63.1 (2011), 20-37. 93 Tim Couzens, The New African, 327. 362 only six months at his S.A.B.C. post, where he worked under the supervision of Hugh Tracey, a friend of Ray Phillips (see Chapter 8). Meanwhile, on the wartime stage, crowd-pleasing revues like the white soldiers of the Springbok Frolics and the black Zonk! ensemble satisfied the establishment’s appetite for material that would celebrate South Africa as a colorful, proud and loyal dominion of the British Empire (see also Chapter 8). Herbert Isaac Ezra Dhlomo died on October 23, 1956 at the King Edward VIII Hospital in Durban.94 His heart had been bothering him for some years before his passing. In the years between writing Men and Women and his death, he had mostly turned away from playwriting, though some of his most important poetry and journalism dates from this later period. As the assistant editor of Ilanga Lase Natal, Dhlomo produced richly lyrical essays under the pseudonym “X” on everyday subjects from “Fire” to “Soap.”95 In 1944 Dhlomo joined the Natal Youth League and served at one point as its acting president.96 In 1951 Dhlomo was instrumental in deposing the more moderate trade unionist A. W. G. Champion from leadership of the A.N.C. in Natal and replacing him with the future Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Luthuli. Dhlomo also became close with another momentous figure in twentieth century South African politics: Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, at the time an up-and-coming leader within the A.N.C. According to Buthelezi, his in-laws the Mzilas were often visited by Ezra Dhlomo at their home in Johannesburg while he was present, owing to a family connection.97 H. I. E. Dhlomo and Prince Buthelezi also both lived at the Somtseu Road Hostel in the early fifties, and Prince Buthelezi recounts a close shave in 1951 when he and Dhlomo were almost arrested by the security police for refuting the published text of a speech by the Zulu King, Cyprian 94 “Kasekho uMnu. H. I. E. Dhlomo,” Ilanga Lase Natal, October 27, 1956. 95 X [H. I. E. Dhlomo], “Fire!” Ilanga Lase Natal, August 30, 1947, and X [H. I. E. Dhlomo], “Soap Means Culture,” Ilanga Lase Natal, March 6, 1948. 96 Tim Couzens, The New African, 262-263. 97 Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, personal communication, July 25, 2019. 363 Bhekuzulu kaSolomon. All the while, H. I. E. Dhlomo was drinking more and more and his health began to deteriorate. In one of the later “X” essays, titled “Mr.,” one cannot help but feel the defeat in Dhlomo’s words. The cynicism of Men and Women and The Expert was borne out by events: Now that I am old and near the grave, Mr. has resurrected in the form of a ghost that haunts and plagues me wherever I go. I am quick to notice—and noticing it hurts me to the quick—people who insist on calling me Mr. when speaking to me. How old it makes me feel! How cold such conversation and such friendship! Did I say I was once eager to grow old! Yek’ iindlela zoɓusha!98 bamaxoxo nezemfene! (Ah! the ways of youth! the wisdom of toads and monkeys!) Those who address me as plain Zulu without tugging at my old and sensitive beard of Mr. put balm on my feelings (I would have said tail instead of beard, but tails are for the learned only; besides, Mr., like a beard, stands stubbornly in front of you, casting its depressing, senile shadow on and labelling you, whereas academic degrees, like tails, humbly follow behind you—a retinue of slaves carrying spices and fruits of wisdom proving your rank). But they are angels, magicians and physicians who call me by my first name. They make me feel young, human, loved, befriended, wanted. How warm, precious and personal is one’s first name! Be it the common Bafana or Ntombi, John or Mary, it is full of poetry, meaning and memories, and you feel it is yours and yours alone. Not like national, racial and family names that group and associate you with others, and such others may be more foreign to you than any foreigner,—and more useless and detestable. (And, likely, who think the same about you!) Curse racial and family ties! Give me the freedom to be I, and be blessed and cursed, acclaimed or censured as such,—and not because of my relatives, race or country.99 When Dhlomo finally passed away, a massive outpouring of tributes found their way into Ilanga. Among the most touching were a pair of poems written in Zulu by B. N. S. Mkhonza and Dhlomo’s colleague K. E. Masinga. Both poems lament the premature death of a man of such enormous talent: Maye! maye kufa Sela laphakade Wena ongenamahloni Wena ontshontshayo 98 Dhlomo is using the obsolete orthographic practice of writing “ɓ” (“6” on his typewriter) for what today would be rendered with “b.” 99 “X” [H. I. E. Dhlomo], “Mr.” TS., pgs. 3-4 (KCM 8290d), UKZN, Durban 364 Ngoba untshontsha amaqhawe Phoke uze untshontshe no H. I. E. Bekunani uke usiphe uHerbert Isaac Ernest Ngoba ubengakawenzi lomsebenzi ongaka? Siyabatholaphi abanye o-H. I. E.? Usijabheseleni kufa? Wenzeleni ukuba uthathe umfana onje? Uzidaleleni izinyembezi e-Afrika na? Alas! Alas, O Death, Eternal thief, You shameless one, You are a thief, Because you steal the heroes Is it not so? So you come and steal H. I. E. Why don’t you pick out and give us Herbert Isaac Ernest Because he hasn’t done enough of his work? Where do we find other H. I. E.’s? Why are you so ashamed of us, O Death? Why did you take a boy like that? Why did you cause tears to be shed in Africa?100 Masinga’s poem compares Dhlomo to a mighty warrior, like the Zulu kings he valorized in his plays. In Dhlomo’s hands, the pen replaced the sword and sowed unity among Africans: Hamba mfoka Dhlomo qhawe lezokubhala, Nalapho uyakhona akusiwena owokuqala ukuya khona. Akhona amanye amaqhawe ozofika ekuhlangabezile, Ayohuba izingoma zentokozo ngokulahlekelwa kwethu nguwe, Siyalila thina lapha kanti, Bona bayo ’thokoza ngesiZulu, Bayo’ “vuya” ngesiXoza Ba “thakase” ngesiSwazi. Go, you of the Dhlomo, literary warrior, Wherever you are you are not the first to go there. There are other warriors coming to meet you, They will sing songs of rejoicing over our loss, 100 B. N. S. Mkhonza, “H. I. E. Lala Ngoxolo,” Ilanga Lase Natal, November 3, 1956. Translated by the author. 365 We mourn here and, They will rejoice in Zulu, They will rejoice in Xhosa They are rejoicing in Swazi.101 Yet his death is still a tragedy, for with it the younger generations of African intellectuals—those Dhlomo worked hard to conscientize through the Congress Youth League—would be cut off from his wisdom and mentorship: Hawu, yeka ishwa lezingane ezikhulayo, Ezingabange zisaba nathuba lokuthwebula ikhono lakho, Ezingasabanga nathuba lokuthwebula usiba kwakho nesu lalo. Wowu! He! Yeka into yomuntu ngokuba umhluzi wempisi, ngoba Noma esefa ufa nayo… Obewusazokubhala Kwehl’sele kubabhali baqedele izinhloso zakho, Ukuze mhla wabahlangabeza waneliswe ukuthi bakufezela owawungakufezanga. Sekumthathile ukufa uH. I. E. sasala emhlabeni sixheke imilomo, Sayixheka qede ach’theka amakhomfi namathemba ebesiwamumethe. Hawu, what a misfortune for the growing children, Who never had a chance to capture your talent, Who no longer have the opportunity to capture your pen and its strategy. Wowu! He! What a strange treasure it is—another man’s trash, because If he dies it dies too…102 You were about to write, To aim for writers to accomplish your goals, So that when you meet them you will be satisfied that they did what you did not do. When H. I. E. died, we were left speechless on the earth, We laughed at all the comforts and hopes we had.103 While a new generation of young writers rose in the 1950s and 1960s to replace H. I. E. Dhlomo at the vanguard of South African literature, we can only speculate about where the trails he blazed may have led to if he had remained on the scene. To those of us standing in the 101 K. E. Masinga, “Lala Luqhotho Luka Dhlomo,” Ilanga Lase Natal, November 3, 1956. Translated by the author. 102 The proverb used here, “Into yomuntu umhluzi wempisi,” literally translates to “a person’s thing is a hyena’s broth.” Hyenas do not cook broths, so the expression is idiomatically similar to something like “One man’s treasure is another man’s trash.” 103 K. E. Masinga, “Lala Luqhotho Luka Dhlomo,” Ilanga Lase Natal, November 3, 1956. Translated by the author. 366 twenty-first century, he seems to look both forwards and backwards. Dhlomo’s Romantic and Gothic aesthetics are hindrances to many modern readers, but the perceptions that impede our modern-day appreciation of an epic like Men and Women are not altogether different from those that scuttled Dhlomo’s playwriting efforts to begin with. Critics wish that Dhlomo had stayed in his lane, had developed “his own authentic voice” (likely armed with their own idea of what his authentic voice would sound like), and had written plays with more of an eye to the practical limitations of his medium and circumstances. To entertain these wishes is to misunderstand H. I. E. Dhlomo’s project. The black South African theatre and literature we know largely comes down to us via the apartheid-era “captive press” and periodic rebellions against it, whereas Dhlomo’s vision of an uncompromising and autonomous African dramatic tradition embodied the New Africans’ ill-starred optimism like few other artifacts we have from the 1930s. Like Stephen Black before him, what H. I. E. Dhlomo wanted was at once simple and impossible: he dreamed of answering to no one. 367 Chapter 7— Springbok Follies: Herman Charles Bosman, Cecil Wightman, and the Gathering Storm, 1931-1965 “How shall we define the wayward and mysterious and outcast thing that we term humour—that is forever a pillar-to-post fugitive from the stern laws of reality, and yet forms so intimate a part of (and even embodies) all truth about which there is an eternal ring?…In the world’s cultural development humour came on the scene very late. And that is the feeling I have always had about humour, ultimately. That it is one of mankind’s most treasured possessions, one of the world’s richest cultural jewels. But that humour came amongst us when the flowers were already fading. And that it came too late.” —Herman Charles Bosman1 Starting in the 1930s, white South Africans felt increasing international pressure to account for their treatment of the Union’s black majority. This pressure came at a time when the prestige of the British empire was on the wane, and placed additional strain on an already fraying relationship. To some extent, this vindicated the efforts of earlier intellectuals (including people like Stephen Black) who longed for white South Africa to chart its own cultural path. Yet the increasing cohesion and acceptance of South Africanness in the white public sphere developed not in an atmosphere of optimism and creative openness, but rather against a backdrop of racial tensions that seemed increasingly to pose an existential threat to survival of the nation itself. Even the most fervent Anglophiles in South Africa were forced to reckon with the fact that the British Empire itself was becoming a thing of the past. How could an increasingly isolated white South Africa survive at the continent’s southernmost tip? How did humorists negotiate this fraught landscape? 1 Herman Charles Bosman, “Humor and Wit,” South African Opinion (Johannesburg, South Africa), June 1946; also reproduced in Herman Charles Bosman, A Cask of Jerepigo, ed. Lionel Abrahams (Cape Town, South Africa: Human and Rousseau, 1972 [1957]): 239; 243. 368 Humorous Native Studies? Confronting White Humor On November 2, 2019, I requested a book from the University of the Witwatersrand’s Cullen Library. I knew nothing about it, except that the title intrigued me: Humorous Native Studies by Monty Wilson.2 The volume does not actually give a year of publication, but the book was reviewed in the Rand Daily Mail on September 23, 1939, so we can say with confidence that the book dates from the eve of World War II.3 In the course of research I was seldom embarrassed by the sources I encountered in the archive. Still, I was not fully prepared for what awaited me. When Humorous Native Studies was delivered to my table, I wanted to apologize to the person who had paged the book for me and explain my research questions. Humorous Native Studies is a collection of a dozen illustrations of black South African men and women, most of them servants, engaged in various activities. Wilson’s pen oozes racist disdain. In the first image, captioned “When the Cat’s Away,” a black man clips his toenails on his employers’ bed, his head, feet, and lips elongated, his face scrunched up into a grotesque grimace. On the next page, an older white man enters the kitchen to find his employee using a dirty sock to filter the morning coffee. Panels involving women are no different, as when a woman is shown watering plants in the rain (caption: “It never rains but it pours!”). Underscoring the callous gaze through which these images were presented to a white public, the Rand Daily Mail’s reviewer refers to the dress-wearing, clearly female figure in this picture as “Jim.”4 If some African women were androgynized, however, other illustrations, are strikingly sexual —none moreso than “Summer’s largest Swallow!” in which a woman neglects her 2 Monty Wilson, Humorous Native Studies (Durban, South Africa: E. P. and Commercial Printing Co., [1939]). No year is given for publication and the book is unpaginated. 3 E. R., “Monty Wilson’s Humour,” Rand Daily Mail, September 23, 1939. 4 E. R., “Monty Wilson’s Humour,” Rand Daily Mail, September 23, 1939. 369 employer’s child in its pram to order to suck water from the garden hose of a salaciously- grinning man in the adjoining yard. To twenty-first century eyes, these images are simply vile. One is tempted to say that the only thing “humorous” about them is the cartoonishly plain fashion in which Monty Wilson represents his own prejudice and commitment to white supremacy. One might laugh (or cry) at the crass racism and misogyny of a previous age, but to refer to Humorous Native Studies as an example of humor in the normal colloquial sense feels wrong. Conditioned by humor’s positive twenty-first century connotations, we expect something humorous to be enjoyable; to call Monty Wilson’s book humorous feels like an endorsement. It is only after reflecting on the debates over humor and offence-taking that rage in our own society that we might realize how subjective and delicate the distinction between the laughter of play and the laughter of hatred. Like theories of laughter themselves, the two can mingle not only in crowds but even within individuals. Reading contemporary reviews of Wilson’s work by white South Africans reveals the magnitude of the interpretive gulf separating us from them. According to the poster artist Prebble Rayner, writing in the left wing magazine Trek about Wilson’s second collection of Humorous Native Studies, the drawings are specifically not “malicious” or “snobblishly condescending,” but rather show that the man he calls “Punch-Below-the-Equatorial-Belt” “is never spiteful, and behind his travesties is a remarkable degree of insight and a kindly spirit.”5 Even within the pages of this bohemian organ, which Corinne Sandwith has described as a hotbed of anti-government sentiment and early Marxist literary criticism, Wilson’s drawings 5 Prebble Rayner, “Bantu Banter,” Trek (Johannesburg, South Africa), June 6, 1941. 370 were framed as loving and insightful rather than as hateful and grotesque.6 In order to understand white South African humor in the early apartheid era, we need to unpack the rationale behind such a conclusion. Social boundaries—drawn by humor and confirmed by laughter—can be either hard as iron or soft and permeable. Monty Wilson’s illustrations impose a hard boundary between whites and the myriad Africans who served them and facilitated their daily life, while at the same time smoothing over divisions within the white population: unlike many political cartoons, the illustrations (all of which originally appeared in the Natal Daily News, where Wilson worked) have nothing to do with party politics. The ironic, disdainful laughter we might apply to Humorous Native Studies today—a laughter that will be familiar to anyone who has ever laughed at a stand-up comedian skewering racism or racists—is our own way of setting a hard boundary between Monty Wilson and ourselves. By moving Monty Wilson from jokester to laughingstock, this maneuver constructs a brand-new joke which excludes him, separating our pleasure from his. In order to fully comprehend the significance of Wilson’s work in its own context, however, we must persevere in investigating it on its own terms. In a society which mostly rewards laughter and humor, one is conditioned to approach humor as a positive social force, but this dissertation recognizes that the social boundaries humor erects are amoral: the stronger the sense of inclusion felt among those on the inside, the deeper the gulf between them and those left out. No study of South African humor in the twentieth century is complete without looking hard at the things which reinforced racism. 6 See Corinne Sandwith, “The Moment of Trek: Literary and Political Criticism in the South African English Periodical Press, 1941-1947,” Current Writing 10.1 (1998), 17-38. 371 Besides the short captions, the only text in Humorous Native Studies is a foreword by Wilson’s colleague from the Natal Daily News, Percy C. Bishop. He explains that while Wilson was something of a recluse, by the late 1930s when his work was introduced to the British press, his reputation in South Africa was already secure.7 And travel it did: earlier that year a two-page spread which included five sketches of what passed for rural Zulu life made it as far afield as the Sunday edition of the Nashville Tennesseean.8 Bishop argues that ultimately, Wilson’s sketches are popular because they are familiar and true-to-life, leaving no doubts about his own views on the role of Africans in society: We laugh over [Wilson’s studies], for they are laughter-making, but mingled with our mirth is a deeper and more abiding reaction; a feeling that, with humour for his cloak, Monty Wilson has revealed for us in these drawings the real mentality and nature of the Bantu race, compounded as it is of the high good humour of a simple and primitive people, combined with the wide-eyed curiosity and superstitious fancies of a child.9 The word humor does a lot of work in that sentence: Wilson has “humor” and Africans possess “high good humor.” But while Africans’ latter humor is childlike and simple-minded, Wilson’s humor is “a cloak,” that conceals from unworthy eyes his more sophisticated insights about society. Bishop does not detail what these are, but he does describe where Wilson gets his inspiration: The artist feels he owes much to the warm appreciation of his public. Throughout Southern Africa, from the Rhodesias to the Cape, from Natal as far northward as the Congo, hundreds of people knowing the natives and their ways have personally co- operated with Monty Wilson by sending him ideas for drawings culled from their own 7 It should be noted that Wilson published at least one other volume of cartoons in 1941, as well as two volumes of The Adventures of Intambo and Mafuta, or The Vicissitudes of the Botshongweni Family, the illustrated narrative of a pair of rural Zulus also originally serialized in the Natal Daily News. The Sunday Times reviewer of the second series of Humorous Native Studies remarked that the first volume “was sold out immediately on publication.” See “New Books,” Sunday Times, June 1, 1941. These books were also published by the E.P. and Commercial Press of Durban. Wilson continued to produce calendars and postcards featuring black rural scenes until at least 1950. 8 “‘Trailer’ Fashions in Zulu Land,” The Tennesseean (Nashville, Tenn.), April 23, 1939. 9 Percy C. Bishop, foreword to Monty Wilson, Humorous Native Studies. 372 experiences. These letters are treasured by the artist. To not a few of them he is indebted for ideas worked up into his native drawings.10 Behind the newspaper illustrations, Bishop describes a vast and even transcolonial network of white “people” (note how the word is juxtaposed with “natives” above), whose contributions inspired Wilson who in turn delighted audiences who had never been to Africa before. Just a few months before the Tennesseean’s Monty Wilson feature, the paper had run a long story on Zulu culture and music based on a recent visit by the white president of Nashville’s famous black university, Fisk.11 In it, President Thomas Elsa Jones emphasizes the similarities between African American and Zulu culture, comparing Zulu songs to spirituals and traditional dancing to jazz. Presiding over an all-black student body, Jones put a positive spin on the connections between Africa and the American South (the title of the article, “A War Whoop Like a Football Yell,” paraphrases his remark that the powerful voices of Zulu soldiers sounded like something that might be heard “at any Negro college in this country”). It seems reasonable to infer that to racist white readers of The Tennesseean, the deeper the ties between black Americans and Africans, the more local Jim Crow needed defending.12 This chapter explores the dynamics of white South African humor and satire in the mid- twentieth century. Conscious of the nation’s size and challenging position at the tip of a continent that was increasingly resistant to white rule, many artists opposed to segregation and apartheid rejected humor as escapist and oppressive, embracing an agelastic social realism based 10 Percy C. Bishop, foreword to Monty Wilson, Humorous Native Studies. 11 Emily Towe, “A War Whoop Like a Football Yell,” The Tennesseean, November 6, 1938. Fisk University is one of the oldest historically black higher education institutions in the United States. Though founded in 1866, it would not have an African-American president until 1946. See Marybeth Gasman, “Scylla and Charybdis: Navigating the Waters of Academic Freedom at Fisk University During Charles S. Johnson’s Administration (1946-1956), American Educational Research Journal 36.4 (1999), 739-758.; Thomas Elsa Jones, Progress at Fisk University: A Summary of Recent Years (Nashville, Tenn.: Fisk University, 1930); and Earl Wright II, “The Tradition of Sociology at Fisk University,” Journal of African American Studies 14.1 (2010), 44-60. 12 Emily Towe, “A War Whoop Like a Football Yell,” The Tennesseean, November 6, 1938. 373 on the idea that South Africa was a serious place that demanded serious solutions. Others, more amenable to the political status quo, continued to rely on older comic tropes in their humor while admitting the fact that the black majority in South Africa was not going anywhere. This concession to what the Rand Daily Mail called “that much-criticised, but nonetheless essential fellow-citizen of ours, who is generally referred to as ‘Jim Fish,’” in its review of Humorous Native Studies, may not seem like much.13 Increasingly conscious of both domestic and international critiques of South African policies and human rights abuses, humorists like Monty Wilson and the radio comedian Cecil Wightman sought to a propagate an image of South Africa that reinforced the nation’s allegiance to the rest of the non-Communist world while mobilizing an aesthetic of wacky exoticism against critics—a tactic I call “exotic expertise.” In short, South Africa was a joke that the nation’s opponents were not in on. That this was an important tool for fostering apartheid-era white cohesion is undeniable, and in fact this strategy has proved much more durable than the apartheid system itself. Indeed, the giants of post-apartheid humor in South Africa—from Leon Schuster to Trevor Noah—owe as much to this legacy than to the radical satire found in protest theatre or liberal apartheid-era literature. During this time of transition, one leading literary figure who refused to accept the increasing divide between escapist South Africanism and agelastic, socially-conscious literature was Herman Charles Bosman. A disciple and protege of Stephen Black in his youth, Bosman loomed large in Johannesburg’s elitist artistic scene throughout his life, yet in his attempts to bridge the divides within South African society, he returned again and again to the sun-baked heart of reactionary politics: the rural Transvaal and its white, Afrikaans-speaking farmers. For 13 E. R., “Monty Wilson’s Humour,” Rand Daily Mail, September 23, 1939. 374 Bosman it was a problem that those whites closest to the soil and the mystical soul of Africa were also those furthest away politically from advocating the kind of society South Africa needed to evolve into if it was to survive. While scholars have previously commented on his periodic swipes at white racial chauvinism, his leery attitude towards overt politics has prevented most of them from fully understanding his project. In fact Bosman’s humorous writings were a bold and original effort to reconcile the different sides of his own identity and that of his nation. When he died—in middle age, just like Stephen Black and H. I. E. Dhlomo—it marked the end of an era for South African satire, and it would be a long time before another South African writer would enlist satire to the cause of goals so lofty. The Bohemian and His Boer: Herman Charles Bosman’s Humor Since 1993 the remote town of Groot Marico in the province of North West has hosted South Africa’s only festival in honor of a satirist: the Herman Charles Bosman Weekend. Organized by the Herman Charles Bosman Literary Society, it is a boutique event open to a little more than a hundred guests, most of whom make the three-hour drive from greater Johannesburg and are lodged in local guesthouses. I attended in October 2019, during a spell of very hot, sunny and dry spring weather. I was interested in why Bosman’s memory remained so strong while the most of the other satirists I was researching for this project had been forgotten. Paying attendees were almost exclusively white—though I was surprised to hear as much Afrikaans as I did, since Bosman, while Afrikaans by birth, wrote mostly in English. A variety of activities were on offer, from a harpsichord recital at the Dutch Reformed Church hall to a workshop on clay ox-making on the grounds of the Society-run Bosman Living Museum. Food was sourced from local farms and prepared according to traditional “Boer” recipes—cuisine more familiar to Bosman’s 375 characters than to Bosman himself. This was grassroots cultural nationalism of a unique type. While not explicitly allied to a particular linguistic, cultural or racial group, it affirmed a white Africanness and a white folk culture (leavened with black music and dance performances) seemingly untainted by the apartheid legacy.14 Go!, a South Africa travel magazine, got it right when they titled their video montage of the 2015 event, “The Boere Bohemians of Groot Marico.”15 The centerpiece of the weekend, however, remained Bosman’s short stories: humorous sketches of life in the Marico Bushveld beloved by generations of mostly white South African readers. On Friday night a troupe of visiting artists from the Market Theatre Laboratory in Johannesburg collaborated with local musicians and schoolchildren to present “Our Dead Are Not Dead,” a work splicing ghost- and ancestor-related excerpts from Herman Charles Bosman’s Marico stories with passages from Niq Mhlongo’s 2018 short-story collection Soweto, Under the Apricot Tree. On Saturday, a keynote lecture explored Bosman’s ethnic identity (“Herman Charles Bosman…Khaki or Boer?”), and was followed in the evening by an impersonator of Bosman’s most famous character, Oom Schalk Lourens, narrating a selection of Bosman tales. The final item on the program Sunday morning was “Bosman Reborn in Bunraku Style Puppets,” which drew from Bosman’s Johannesburg stories. Collections of Bosman’s writing and books about Bosman were available in abundance at the festival. Homages to Bosman are not limited to the confines of Groot Marico: until recently a multi-storey mural of Herman Charles Bosman presided over a street in central Johannesburg near Beyers Naudé Square. The 14 See, for example, Albert Grundlingh, Potent Pastimes: Sport and Leisure Practices in Modern Afrikaner History (Pretoria, South Africa: Protea Boekhuis, 2013); and Mariana Kriel, “A New Generation of Gustav Prellers? The Fragmente/F.A.K./Vrye Afrikaan Movement, 1998-2008,” African Studies 71.3 (2012), 426-445. 15 Erns Grundling, “The Boere Bohemians of Groot Marico,” WegTV (YouTube video), January 5, 2015, accessed March 26, 2021, . 376 Media24 publishing conglomerate’s most prestigious award for South African English language fiction is called the Herman Charles Bosman Prize (Niq Mhlongo was the 2019 winner).16 To an outside observer it may seem strange that Bosman should be so honored. He was, after all, a convicted murderer who wrote for Stephen Black’s Sjambok under the nom de plume Herman Malan, because he feared people still remembered his trial. He faked his own death in 1937 to avoid creditors, and was arrested again in 1943 for botching an amateur abortion performed on his then-mistress Helena Stegmann. Why should he be celebrated, especially among the white bourgeoisie of twenty-first century Gauteng? Yet the question of his popularity pales in comparison to the other mysteries of his life. An Afrikaner who wrote mainly in English, a Johannesburger who is most remembered for his stories about the deep rural Transvaal (inspired by nothing more substantial than a one year stint as a schoolteacher), Bosman smoked dagga and ridiculed public morality during his time as the enfant terrible of Johannesburg’s tabloid press in the 1930s, yet just fifteen years later found himself settling into a respectable role as one of South Africa’s leading literary critics. Finally, there is the problem of Oom Schalk. Since his death in 1951, Bosman’s life has too often been overshadowed by the genial Boer patriarch he invented, Oom (“Uncle”) Schalk Lourens. The problem is not so much that the nostalgic folk aesthetic of the Bosman Weekend is an inappropriate way to remember his work. It is more that his work—and his life—remains such a puzzle almost a three quarters of a century 16 See Niq Mhlongo, “Niq Mhlongo Laments the Caprice—and Celebrates the Excitement—of Literary Awards, and Shares His Own Bittersweet Experience,” The Johannesburg Review of Books, July 1, 2019, accessed March 21, 2021, . Significantly, Media24 is owned by Naspers (that is, De Nasionale Pers Beperkt—by far the largest pro-Nationalist media house in apartheid South Africa) and is post-apartheid South Africa’s largest media company. See Sean Jacobs, Media in Postapartheid South Africa: Postcolonial Politics in the Age of Globalization (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2019), 93-94. 377 after his passing. In order to understand both the man and his characters, we must explore Bosman’s life in all its richness and contradictions. Bosman was no naïve sentimentalist: he spent long stretches of his life in Britain, and his novels Jacaranda in the Night (1947) and Willemsdorp (published posthumously in 1977) are savage critiques of the parochialism and moral bankruptcy of white small town life, more of an attack than a romanticization.17 Yet Bosman’s most popular work is often decontextualized, ignoring the author’s deeper goals. Herman Charles Bosman was born in Kuils River, just outside Cape Town, on February 3, 1905. His father, Jakobus Abraham or Jakoos, came from humble origins, and followed reports of steady work to the Rand, where the family had settled by 1910. His mother Elizabeth (Elisa for short) was a Malan by birth and boasted prestigious siblings, among them the respected judge A. C. Malan and the pro-South African Party journalist Charles Malan. The family was of modest means—Stephen Gray recounts how Herman’s father was beaten up in 1914 for scabbing in the mines, a tendency that Gray speculates may have contributed to his death in what was labeled a “mining accident” when Bosman was eighteen.18 It was not until the age of twelve that Bosman entered school himself, but when he did his parents took care to send him to the most prestigious institutions they could afford, first in the old Transvaal town of Potchefstroom and later on the east side of Johannesburg. The Potchefstroom and Jeppe High Schools for Boys were both “Milner schools,” designed by Lord Alfred Milner in the wake of the South African 17 Herman Charles Bosman, Jacaranda in the Night (Cape Town, South Africa: Human and Rousseau, 2000 [1947]); Herman Charles Bosman, Willemsdorp (Cape Town, South Africa: Human and Rousseau, 1998 [1977]). 18 Stephen Gray, Life Sentence, 54. Gray states that the date of Jakoos Bosman’s death is unrecorded but his death certificate does exist and gives a date of February 6, 1923. The cause of death is listed as “multiple injuries” causing “instantaneous death.” See his form of information of a death: no. 4864 of February 6, 1923, Civil Death Records of the Transvaal, National Archives of South Africa [NASA], Pretoria, South Africa. 378 War as engines for Anglicizing the conquered white population.19 Thus the young Bosman was raised in an atmosphere where Dutch-Huguenot heritage and Anglophilic social aspirations mingled. When Jakoos Bosman died, A. C. Malan interceded on his sister’s behalf to ensure that £500 was paid out under the Workmen’s Compensation Act, and that “the whole of such amount is spent upon the maintenance and education of the two minors”—Herman and his younger brother Pierre.20 At Jeppe High School, Bosman became keenly aware of his family’s modest means, and one of his earliest literary noms-de-plume, attached to work that appeared in the Sunday Times, was Ben Eath (that is, beneath), which he later altered to Ben Africa. He had to chop wood for his family sometimes before walking to school, and he did not fit in, according to his classmates.21 Young Herman was a voracious reader, particularly of American authors like Mark Twain, Robert Ingersoll, O. Henry, Ambrose Bierce, and Edgar Allen Poe, but he was not always a particularly compliant student, and he did not receive his matriculation certificate from Jeppe, but rather a smaller institution called Houghton College.22 In 1923 Bosman started work towards a three-year teaching certificate, which included coursework at the newly-renamed University of the Witwatersrand. In January 1926, Bosman married a woman named Vera Sawyer, lying about 19 See A. K. Bot, The Development of Education in the Transvaal, 1836-1951 (Pretoria, South Africa: Government Printer, 1951); Michael Cross, “The Foundations of a Segregated Schooling System in the Transvaal, 1900-1924,” History of Education 16.4 (1987), 259-274; J. W. Horton, The First Seventy Years, 1895-1965: Being an Account of the Growth of the Council of Education, Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa: Witwatersrand University Press, 1968). For general works on Milner, see John Edward Kendle, The Round Table Movement and Imperial Union (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1975); G. H. L. Le May, British Supremacy in South Africa, 1899-1907 (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1965); J. Lee Thompson, A Wider Patriotism: Alfred Milner and the British Empire (London, U.K.: Pickering and Chatto, 2007); and Leonard M. Thompson, The Unification of South Africa, 1902-1910. 20 See court report appended to Death Notice No. 51010 of April 26, 1923, Probate Records from the Master of the Supreme Court of the Transvaal, NASA, Pretoria, South Africa. 21 See Stephen Gray’s 2000 interview with Stanley Jackson in Remembering Bosman—Herman Charles Recollected: Tributes, Memoirs, Sketches, Interviews, ed. Stephen Gray (Johannesburg, South Africa: Penguin Books, 2008), 14-16. 22 Stephen Gray, Life Sentence, 64-65 379 both his age and his surname (he is listed as Herbert Charles Boswell on the certificate).23 Two days after their marriage he set out for the Groot Marico district near the border of the British protectorate of Bechuanaland, returning briefly for the Easter holidays, when he stayed with his mother and not his wife.24 Just six months into his marriage, and just under five months into his job as a rural schoolteacher, Bosman’s life changed forever. Just after midnight on July 19, an altercation occurred at 19 Isipingo Street in which Herman shot and killed his half-brother David Russell, the son of the man his mother had recently married. He was taken into custody for the shooting and charged with capital murder. The circumstances of the shooting to this day are not fully understood, but there appears to have been some discord between Herman’s mother and her new husband William Russell, because they were sleeping in separate bedrooms. There also appears to have been a physical fight between David Russell and Herman’s younger brother Pierre, which Herman sought to resolve by means of his rifle. Arguing that he had acted in defence of his brother might have won some sympathy from the judge, but unfortunately Herman did not attempt this, and his affect in the courtroom was aloof and stoic. Instead of framing his actions in terms of fraternal gallantry (both Pierre and David’s bodies showed signs of serious violence inflicted on one another, and Herman could not have ignored the noise of their scuffle), Herman argued that he walked towards his bedroom, loaded rifle in hand, and somehow caught the trigger on a jacket button while reaching for a light switch, causing the gun to fire and David to die. Further harming his prospects, the court was made aware of stories Herman had previously written dealing with the subject of murder. One 23 Civil Marriage Register No. 42/26 (1158) of January 21, 1926, NASA, Pretoria. 24 Stephen Gray, Life Sentence, 81. 380 such draft, which was quoted at length in the Rand Daily Mail, was titled “Tragedy—Told in the Russian Style,” and exemplifies precisely the kind of nihilistic, proto-existentialist worldview someone wishing to avoid the death penalty would not want the court to scrutinize: If you’ve ever been out on the veld on a cloudless night you’ll know what I mean. When you behold the mighty myriads of flashing stars and remember that each blazing world is kept to its course by gazing upon infinity in all its awful majesty; when you consider on how illogical a basis the whole firmament is constructed, and realize what a hopelessly inexplicable thing is life, what feeling can I then entertain for this tawdry logic of ours other than one of pity and contempt?25 Many years later, after Bosman’s death, his friend and Jeppe classmate Eddie Roux reflected that “almost all the queer things Bosman did, during the earlier part of his life at any rate, were done out of sheer cussedness, or from a desire to experience sensations.”26 Roux’s belief that Bosman shot David Russell “because he wanted to experience the sensation of a murderer in the dock” seems unlikely as a motive for the incident itself, but such a desire might have surfaced after the fact as a way to atone for his actions.27 Certainly the young Herman Charles Bosman seems to put more faith in sensations and emotions than in political principles and public morality, a hierarchy of principles that would be reflected in his later work. Bosman’s cousin Zita Grové, in a 1971 magazine article, recounted a couple of illustrative anecdotes from his years training as a teacher: Herman was a master of mob psychology. Once he stood on the pavement opposite the old Technical College in Eloff Street, pointing dramatically to some place overhead. People gathered about him, peering into the distance and asking each other what it was 25 “Bosman Committed for Trial,” Rand Daily Mail, July 31, 1926. 26 Eddie Roux (1903-1966) was an important Communist author, scientist and intellectual in his own right, of mixed Afrikaans- and English-speaking heritage, who edited the South African Communist Party newspaper Umsebenzi between 1936 and 1938. See Edward Roux, Rebel Pity: The Life of Eddie Roux (London, U.K.: Rex Collings, 1970); Eddie Roux, Time Longer Than Rope: A History of the Black Man’s Struggle for Freedom in South Africa, 2nd ed. (Madison, Wis.: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1964 [1948]); and also Mia Roth, “Eddie, Brian, Jack and Let's Phone Rusty: Is This the History of the Communist Party of South Africa (1921-1950)?”, South African Historical Journal, 42:1 (2000): 191-209. 27 Stephen Gray, Life Sentence, 60. 381 that they were supposed to be looking at. When a large crowd collected all over the pavement he edged away, chortling to himself about the idiocy of human nature He associated himself with the members of a political youth organisation and was actively engaged in such activities as street processions, mass meetings and pamphlet posting…In cafés he delighted in starting arguments between persons completely unknown to each other. On one occasion such an argument developed into a free fight, with everyone piling in regardless. Herman stood on the sidelines, encouraging all and sundry. At the height of the fracas he slipped out, called a policeman and watched gleefully the ensuing brawl from a safe vantage point.28 Whatever his reasons, Herman Charles Bosman’s unconvincing testimony did him no favours in the eyes of the court. On November 15, 1926, Justice Gey van Pittius sentenced Bosman to death, with the Rand Daily Mail reporting that he was “visibly moved.”29 Bosman made a speech from the dock where he referred to “this world of laughter and sighs” and the fact that he had “been upheld by the sublimity of a mother’s love” through the past five months.30 Thereafter Bosman was delivered to Pretoria Central Prison, where, it was assumed, he would die. Bosman’s stint as a condemned man did not last long. His classmates from high school and his teacher training days successfully petitioned Tielman Roos, the justice minister, to commute Bosman’s sentence from death to ten years in prison with hard labor. The success of this effort, to no small extent, rested on the argument that Bosman’s literary talents were so unique that his execution would do damage to the nation. They mainly cited his poetry as evidence of his potential greatness, though his humor was already a matter of public record. In the early days after his arrest, the Rand Daily Mail had reproduced excerpts from a piece 28 Zita Grové (née Malan), “My Cousin Herman,” Personality (Bloemfontein, South Africa), February 26, 1971; also published in Remembering Bosman—Herman Charles Recollected, 76. 29 “Sentenced to Death,” Rand Daily Mail, November 15, 1926. 30 “Sentenced to Death,” Rand Daily Mail, November 15, 1926. 382 published in The Umpa, the University of the Witwatersrand student magazine, titled “A Teacher in the Bushveld.” “A Teacher in the Bushveld” is the first record we have of Bosman discussing the Marico district that would become so inseparable from his literary legacy. What is most noteworthy about it in light of Bosman’s later work, is its sense of studied detachment. Bosman frames his trip as a conventional colonial narrative, wherein wry comment after wry comment is mingled with jokes at the expense of the locals. The man who meets him at the train station asks him, fatuously, “whether Johannesburg was much bigger than Koster,” and the people he was supposed to stay with were away at a communion service, meaning he would have to sleep in the school house.31 Bosman then praises the “erect carriage and…dauntless mien” of the black man whom he hires to carry his luggage, “one of the noble Matabele, whose forebears had died, assegai in hand, in defence of their country’s freedom.”32 When the man steals part of his luggage, all this fulsome commentary is revealed to be sarcasm. Ultimately, “A Teacher in the Bushveld” must be understood in light of Bosman’s youth and the audience he was writing for. Ever conscious of his less-than-sterling pedigree, Bosman’s racial privileges allowed him to avoid serious political engagement in a way that his contemporary H. I. E. Dhlomo could not do on the other side of the color line. But what Bosman and the younger Dhlomo shared was a passionate belief in art as a domain beyond and above politics and culture, to which the authentic artist could escape. Consider the way Bosman ends his sketch: 31 “Was a Brilliant Student,” Rand Daily Mail, July 20, 1926; originally published in The Umpa (Johannesburg, South Africa), June 1926. Koster is a small town in the Marico area. 32 Foreshadowing his punchline, Bosman uses the word “nigger” in reference to the man. 383 Life here is, on the whole, rather uncongenial and devoid of anything that is intellectually stimulating. In the full light of day this is an ugly and even repelling region. It is only after sunset that the place becomes invested with a certain modified lure, and enchantment. For, sometimes, at night, when the world is very still, a soft wind comes sweeping across the veld. Then, if you are outside, and listen very carefully, you can hear the story it has to tell. It is thoughtful, this little wind, and the tale it tells, as old as the world and as time-worn, has about it something that is yet new and sweet and strangely stirring. And this story is one that we all love to hear, for, steeped as it is in the fragrance of some romance of long ago, it awakens memories of far-off things—of trees that are dark in the moonlight, of crumbling garden walls, of star-dust and of roses.33 Bosman’s tone shifts radically over the course of these two paragraphs, from the jocular to the lyrical, and from the cultural specificity of the remote western Transvaal to the vague universalism of “star-dust and roses.” But what is most striking is how Bosman identifies storytelling as something important yet depersonalized. Here Bosman describes a story with no storyteller, in total contrast to his later work, where the minute dynamics of narration and performativity are subjects of sustained fascination. As with much of Dhlomo’s writing, the florid transcendentalism of these lines is immediately striking. Yet one also feels a sense of social alienation on Bosman’s part, and a yearning to understand the specificities of the place in which he found himself. That this was the case is amply shown by the fact that until his death Bosman never stopped thinking and writing about the Marico bushveld, despite never living there again (he only returned once more, for a brief visit, in October 1944). In “A Teacher in the Bushveld,” we see the young Bosman both fascinated by the land and alienated from its message by the facts of his upbringing. Whether literally true or not, there is pathos when Bosman writes about sleeping in an empty one-room school house in the middle of nowhere, waking up with a 33 “Was a Brilliant Student,” Rand Daily Mail, July 20, 1926. 384 chalk map of Asia tattooed on his jacket. Of course, if Bosman was looking for solitude, Pretoria Central Prison would also provide plenty. Bosman’s account of his time in prison, Cold Stone Jug, was not written until more than two decades after his arrest; he remained cagey about that chapter of his life long after his release.34 On June 24, 1928, the five-year old South African radio broadcasting industry was roiled by its first major scandal.35 Lago Clifford of the JB Broadcasting Station (known on-air as Uncle Joe), was arrested on a charge of crimen injuria.36 A group of nine girls aged eight to fourteen testified in juvenile court that Clifford—South Africa’s first radio announcer—had flirted and inappropriately touched them while working as “Jaybees,” described by the Rand Daily Mail as “radio nieces of ‘Uncle Joe’”37 In addition to being a well-known radio personality, Clifford was a veteran of the South African theatre scene and in 1909 had played Captain Hay-Whotte in Stephen Black’s revised Love and the Hyphen.38 In September he was found guilty and sentenced to twelve months of hard labor at Pretoria Central Prison.39 Bosman met Clifford in prison and he apparently made a lasting impression. Stephen Black’s tabloid The Sjambok published a lightly erotic story by Bosman (under the pseudonym “Ben Africa”) on May 31, 34 Herman Charles Bosman, Cold Stone Jug, a Chronicle: Being the Unimpassioned Record of a Somewhat Lengthy Sojourn in Prison (Cape Town, South Africa: Human and Rousseau, 1969 [1947]). 35 An overview of the literature on radio in South Africa and on the continent in general can be found in Ruth Teer- Tomaselli, “The Contradictions of Public Service and Commercialization in Mid-Century South African Broadcasting: A Case Study of the Schoch Commission and Springbok Radio,” Media History 25.2 (2019): 225-227. See also Graham Furniss and Richard Fardon, African Broadcast Cultures: Radio in Transition (London, U.K.: James Currey, 2000); Graham Hayman and Ruth Tomaselli, “Ideology and Technology in the Growth of South African Broadcasting, 1924-1971,” in Currents of Power: State Broadcasting in South Africa, eds. Ruth Tomaselli, Keyan Tomaselli, and Johan Muller (Cape Town, South Africa: Anthropos Publishers, 1989); Eric Rosenthal, You have been Listening…: The Early History of Radio in South Africa (Cape Town, South Africa: Purnell, 1974); Ruth Teer-Tomaselli, “Empire and Broadcasting in the Interwar Years: Towards a Consideration of Public Broadcasting in the British Dominions,” Critical Arts 29.1 (2015), 77-93; and David Wigston, “A History of the South African Media” in Media Studies: Media History, Media and Society, 2nd ed., ed. Pieter J. Fourie (Cape Town, South Africa: Juta, 2007), 3-58. 36 “Sensational Arrest,” Rand Daily Mail, June 25, 1928. 37 “Nine Little Girls Give Evidence,” Rand Daily Mail, July 3, 1928. 38 “Stage and Show,” Cape Argus, January 2, 1909. 39 “Lago Clifford Sentenced,” Rand Daily Mail, September 10, 1928. 385 1929, smuggled out of prison via either Bosman’s mother or Bosman’s friend Fred Zwarenstein.40 Then, on July 5, of that year Clifford devoted a full page to Bosman as part of his series of sensational Sjambok prison exposés published under the guise of reformism.41 Calling Bosman “the most interesting and intellectual man I met at the Central Prison,” Clifford extolled his literary knowledge and published a wistful poem of Bosman’s, “Perhaps Some Day,” reflecting on his predicament: Some day, perhaps, I’ll see the world again May be some day. When all those things of grinding grief and pain Have passed away.42 Bosman was still devoted to crafting his image as an aesthete: Clifford reported that Bosman was initially an assistant librarian at the prison, “but after some months of this indoor work, asked for a change of labour, asked to be allowed to break stones! But the stones (as he said) were “under God’s clear sky.”43 In Cold Stone Jug, Bosman describes his transition from indoor to outdoor work (he was a type-setter in the prison print-shop, not a librarian) quite differently—as a terrible psychological blow.44 Despite Clifford’s advocacy, Bosman was not released from prison until September 14, 1930, a little more than four years after that fateful night on Isipingo Street. Banned from publishing under the terms of his probation, and with the memory of his trial still in the public’s 40 See Stephen Gray’s interview with Fred Zwarenstein in Remembering Bosman—Herman Charles Recollected, 94-95. 41 Ben Africa [Herman Charles Bosman], “In the Beginning,” The Sjambok, May 31, 1929. Neil Rusch discusses The Sjambok’s exposés on prison life as laying the groundwork for later apartheid struggles to reveal conditions within South Africa’s penal system, though he also contends, more dubiously, that Bosman was the true author of Lago Clifford’s series of articles. See Neil Rusch, “Cold Stone Jug: A History of the South African Prison Crusade,” Speak 1.6 (1979), 14-18. 42 Lago Clifford, “Poet Imprisoned for Passionate Murder,” The Sjambok, July 5, 1929. 43 Lago Clifford, ““Poet Imprisoned for Passionate Murder,” The Sjambok, July 5, 1929. 44 See Herman Charles Bosman, Cold Stone Jug, a Chronicle, 70-73. 386 consciousness, Bosman began using his mother’s maiden name as his surname. His wife, who had neither written nor visited him while he was incarcerated, was out of the picture, and the newly-minted “Herman Malan” went to live on his uncle Victor’s farm near Bronkhorstspruit.45 Bosman was not living in Johannesburg at the end of 1930 and must have had very little if any in-person contact with Stephen Black. Still, The Sjambok published several items written by Bosman under various pseudonyms, including the short stories “In Church” and “The Night- Dress.”46 On October 10, 1930, alongside an H. D. Tyamzashe piece on the lamentable state of Transvaal pass laws, The Sjambok carried a scoop by “Ben Onion” on the shocking state of Benoni’s black township. Here Bosman claims to have had a personal epiphany. “Hitherto, I have regarded the right to organise as the supreme privilege of the white man,” he writes, “but if the inhabitants…were to rise up in arms agains the conditions under which they exist you could count on me as one person who would not take up a rifle for the purpose of shooting them down.”47 In light of his subsequent choices, it is hard to take Bosman at face-value here.48 During the 1930s Bosman and his friend Aegidius Jean Blignaut, a notorious con-artist in his own right whom Bosman had met before his prison years, became the enfants terribles of Johannesburg’s literary scene. From Stephen Black they appropriated the Sjambok and L.S.D. names and attempted to profit off their erstwhile mentor’s legacy. Yet whereas Black, for all his bitterness and vituperation, cultivated a multiracial cast of both readers and contributors, Bosman and 45 Zita Grové, “My Cousin Herman,” 78. 46 Herman Malan [Herman Charles Bosman], “In Church,” The Sjambok, January 2, 1931; Herman Malan [Herman Charles Bosman], “The Night-Dress,” The Sjambok, February 13, 1931. 47 “Ben Onion,” “A Blot on Benoni’s Escutcheon,” The Sjambok, October 10, 1930. Emphasis in original. 48 Stephen Gray, for example, argues that this “unlikely declaration shows how profoundly Bosman was in fact reformed by his prison experience.” See Stephen Gray, Life Sentence, 136. 387 Blignaut’s editorial line was dishonest and cynical to the point of nihilism. When The Sjambok folded in March 1931, Bosman and Blignaut were ready with The New L.S.D., which resurrected some of The Sjambok’s features and seemed to hint at times that Black was the editor, but in reality this was a poorly executed ruse. The New L.S.D. was cheap and salacious in almost all respects, but it was particularly mean-spirited towards black Sjambok readers. Considering the newspaper’s short run of only a few months, it is notable how many familiar names one encounters. When H. D. Tyamzashe wrote a detailed rebuttal to an article attacking efforts to educate Africans, it was printed with an editor’s note telling him to “lay hold of your stertriem [loincloth] and make for the kraal of your fathers.”49 A letter from Christian Mogale was not published, but he was told publicly to “break your pen in half, stick a piece through each ear and get out of it.”50 N. Mletsjwa of Sophiatown was abused in the same fashion: “It is just like your kafir impudence to inscribe the letter ‘Dear Sir.’ We do not choose to be addressed by you as anything else but ‘Boss.’”51 Bosman and Blignaut expressed nothing but highly performative contempt for the Africans that had embraced The Sjambok as the first “white” newspaper to welcome their perspectives. Nowhere did they express this more clearly than in the article to which Tyamzashe responded, “The Negro Problem —Education a Rank Failure”: The educated kafir [sic] is a clumsy and monstrous incongruity: he is the result of efforts directed towards grafting modern cultural conceptions on to a paleolithic intellect. If these efforts had succeeded we would have had some grotesque mental hybrid; but fortunately they have failed; so all we have is an abortion. In the cosmos there can be no Frankensteins. 49 H. D. Tyamzashe, “The Negro Problem,” The New L.S.D. (Johannesburg, South Africa), April 24, 1931. 50 “Answers to Admirers (and Others),” The New L.S.D.., May 23, 1931. 51 “Answers to Correspondents,” The New L.S.D.., October 28, 1931. 388 The educated kafir is one of the saddest of mundane spectacles. He would be better dead. No one knows this fact better than the educated kafir himself. Let us leave it at that.52 While this stance was in line with the thinking of the average white Johannesburger (De Kock’s thirties man), it also suggests Bosman and Blignaut’s failure to comprehend what was so innovative about Black’s project in the first place. Largely unencumbered by ethical considerations, they likely saw a full-throated endorsement of segregation as the quickest path to white populist acclaim; this was certainly the calculus of Prime Minister Hertzog and his Pact government. Even though the pair openly exploited Stephen Black’s reputation, their relationship with him was brief; it is possible that he never discussed his motives and methods in editing The Sjambok at length—or perhaps he did, and they believed they could improve upon his tabloid model by jettisoning any association with black people. The simplest and perhaps the best answer as to why they turned on African readers comes down to cynicism. It is obvious from their various dishonest dealings as journalists and businessmen that they did not think much of their audience. Regardless of what they were capable of expressing through literature, they were looking for sensation and excitement with no regard for consequences. At The New L.S.D. and their later rags The New Sjambok, Mompara, and The New Ringhals, Bosman and the fraudster Blignaut acted as unscrupulous provocateurs and hired guns, pursuing a craven sensationalism unmatched even by twenty-first century tabloids like the Daily Sun. Perhaps their most shameful scheme kicked off in January 1932, when Bosman blackmailed E. S. “Solly” Sachs (the leader of the Transvaal Garment Worker’s Union and the brother of Bosman’s Jeppe classmate and future editor Bernard Sachs), allegedly at the behest of 52 “The Negro Problem,” The New L.S.D.., April 17, 1931. 389 some leaders in the Dutch Reformed Church.53 When Sachs refused to pay him £50, The New L.S.D.. accused him of “sway[ing] in the arms of skokiaan-reeking Zulu and Basuto women.”54 After at least one physical altercation between “Herman Malan” and Sachs supporters, Sachs brought a case of slander against Bosman and Blignaut and won. On other occasions anarchy was the pair’s calling card rather than any particular political agenda. They were hauled to court shortly after the Sachs case for printing “White Girls Getting Stuffed” on a promotional placard.55 These placards were to be spread around the city by black vendors, which, according to the Anglican bishop of Johannesburg who testified against the pair, greatly aggravated the crime. Bosman was also charged later in 1932 for a piece, published in The New L.S.D.., which “wrongfully unlawfully and blasphemously revile[d] and cast contempt upon the Supreme Being,” in the words of the court summons: “Hold out your hands,” God said, “Here are a few loose jewels I didn’t want to waste by making stars out of.” “But they are my jewels, God,” I said, “I don’t know where you got them from.” God sighed. “Ah well, I must be drunk again,” God said.56 53 Stephen Gray attributes this opinion to the anti-apartheid attorney, professor, and later Constitutional Court justice Albie Sachs, E. S. Sachs’s son. See Stephen Gray, Life Sentence, 178. See Albie Sachs, The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs (London, U.K.: Grafton, 1990 [1966]); Albie Sachs, The Free Diary of Albie Sachs (Johannesburg, South Africa: Random House, 2004); Albie Sachs, The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter (Oakland, Calif.: University of California Press, 2014); Emil Solomon Sachs, Garment Workers in Action: History of the Garment Workers of South Africa to 1952 (Johannesburg, South Africa: Eagle Press, 1957), as well as Jon Lewis, “Solly Sachs and the Garment Workers' Union,” in Essays in Southern African Labour History, ed. Eddie Webster (Johannesburg, South Africa: Ravan Press, 1978), 182-184; Iris Berger, Threads of Solidarity: Women in South African Industry, 1900-1980 (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1992): 170-189; H. J. Simons and R. E. Simons, Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850-1950; and Leslie Witz, “Servant of the Workers: Solly Sachs and the Garment Workers' Union, 1928-1952” (M.A. thesis: University of the Witwatersrand, 1984). 54 “E. S. Sachs and Kaffir Girl,” The New L.S.D.., January 29, 1932. See also Bernard Sachs, Herman Charles Bosman As I Knew Him (Johannesburg, South Africa: Dial Press, 1971): 16; 41; Leslie Witz, “Separation for Unity: The Garment Workers Union and the South African Clothing Workers Union, 1928 to 1936,” Social Dynamics 14.1 (1988): 40. 55 “Allegations of Indecency,” Rand Daily Mail, March 4, 1932. 56 The complete summons, dated April 18, 1932, is reproduced in Aegidius Jean Blignaut, My Friend Herman Charles Bosman (Johannesburg, South Africa: Perskor, 1981): 102-103. 390 In other words, God is a drunk and a con-artist—a reverent portrayal only in the eyes of a fellow con-artist. According to the judge in their case, Blignaut and Bosman were the first South Africans to be charged with blasphemy at least since the 1910 Act of Union.57 Unlike their defamation and indecency cases, this time the two were found not guilty. As might be expected from a man who had been sentenced to death at twenty-one, Bosman’s re-entry into society was rocky. In court testimony, he maintained the image of a brash, arrogant young romantic, knowing that he would be published in the daily press if he put on a show. But Bosman does not appear to have been animated by any greater motive than anarchism in these early days, a fact that makes the relative maturity of his Oom Schalk Lourens stories stand out in even sharper relief. Indeed, it is hard to reconcile the Bosman who wrote such a gripping exposé on African living conditions in Benoni for The Sjambok with the Bosman of The New L.S.D. Within the scope of the present study it will suffice to say that just as Bosman’s social milieu and immediate circumstances fluctuated widely at this early stage of his life, Bosman’s inner life appears have encompassed a number of seemingly irreconcilable contradictions. This, I argue, contributed significantly to his literary agenda, which is characterized by continual efforts to harmonize and unify disparate settings and cultures. Bosman introduced Oom Schalk Lourens to the world in a story called “Makapan’s Caves,” which appeared in the December 1930 issue of The Touleier, a short-lived Bosman- Blignaut effort at a literary magazine.58 In late 1854, the Ndebele leader Mgombane Gegana (Mokopane in Northern Sotho) and his followers were besieged by a Transvaal commando in a 57 “Not Guilty of Blasphemy,” Rand Daily Mail, May 11, 1932. 58 Herman Charles Bosman, “Makapan’s Caves,” The Touleier (Johannesburg, South Africa), December 1930. 391 series of caves, resulting in the death by starvation of many civilians.59 Bosman places a young Schalk at the scene alongside his brother Hendrik and their loyal black servant Nongaas. He sets the events later as well, just after the first Anglo-Boer War. When Hendrik does not return from an attack, he is presumed dead, and Nongaas, who has been infatuated with Hendrik since childhood, goes to look for him immediately. Schalk hesitates, but the next morning resolves to find his brother. After shooting a black man that he assumes to be one of Makapan’s warriors near the entrance of the cave, Schalk finds Hendrik alive but wounded. He rescues him, realizing too late that Nongaas had already found him, and that the selfless Nongaas was the man Schalk had shot and killed. At just a little over ten pages, the story is a rich and ambivalent reflection on South African history. And while the story is sad, it is full of humorous understatement. Consider the way Bosman describes the decision to go on commando: It was just after my twenty-first birthday that we got news that Hermanus Potgieter and his whole family had been killed by a kafir tribe [sic] under Makapan. They also said that after killing him, the kafirs stripped off old Potgieter’s skin and made wallets out of it in which to carry their dagga. It was very wicked of the kafirs to have done that, especially as dagga makes you mad and it is a sin to smoke it.60 A commando was called up from our district to go and attack the tribe and teach them to have respect for the white man’s skin. My mother and sisters baked a great deal of harde beskuit which we packed up, together with mealie-meal and biltong.61 59 See Jay Naidoo, “The Siege of Makapansgat: A Massacre? And a Trekker Victory?,” History in Africa 14 (1987), 173-187; and J. J. de Waal, “Die Verhouding Tussen die Blankes en die Hoofmanne Mokopane en Mankopane in die omgewing van Potgietersrus (1836-1869)” (M.A. thesis: University of South Africa, 1978). See also discussion in Isabel Hofmeyr, “Popularizing History: The Case of Gustav Preller,” The Journal of African History 29.3 (1988), 521-535, especially 531-534. In this article, Hofmeyr discusses a popular and oft-republished story about the events of 1854 by the Afrikaner nationalist historian and ideologue Gustav Preller, which she summarizes as “a shrill genocidal call” (533), justifying Boer rights to the land by stressing the grotesque savagery of the Ndebele, a dynamic which Bosman reverses. See Gustav Preller, Baanbrekers: ’n Hoofstuk uit die Voorgeskiedenis van Transvaal (Pretoria, South Africa: De Volksstem-Drukkerij, 1915). 60 Of Khoi origin, the term “dagga” refers both to cannabis and a local plant, Leonotus leonurus, which produces similar effects and has been smoked in Southern Africa for centuries. 61 Herman Charles Bosman, “Makapan’s Caves,” The Touleier, December 1930, also published in Herman Charles Bosman, Mafeking Road (Cape Town, South Africa: Human and Rousseau, 1969 [1947]): 63. Harde beskuit is a rusk—a hard, dry, usually buttermilk-based cake similar to biscotti, usually consumed with coffee or tea. 392 This kind of deadpan delivery had been pioneered by authors like Douglas Blackburn thirty years before, but Bosman perfected it.62 It is as if both groups are performing roles assigned to them: Makapan’s people kill and skin Potgieter because it is in their nature to do so, and the domestic details about Schalk’s mother and sisters give the impression of a cheery weekend outing rather than an infamous atrocity. The line about dagga (cannabis) is strongly ironic given Bosman’s post-prison writings about his personal enjoyment of the plant.63 The stench of death and suffering pervades the battlefield, and a modern reader can easily interpret the story as a poignant example of brutality meted out by white people in the name of civilization, with the harshest outcome reserved for Nongaas, who enthusiastically abandoned his people and way of life to follow the whites. It is thus a story not incompatible with Bosman and Blignaut’s later fulminations against literate black people in their paper: Nongaas is a kind of “abortion” in the context of the story, a cultural dead end whose reward for many years of service and sacrifice is to be shot by his own master who cannot even distinguish between him and any other African. Above all, “Makapan’s Caves” is a story that reflects Bosman’s cynical view of human nature and South African life. Bosman cuts the story off abruptly, just as Hendrik is beginning to express his admiration for Nongaas and his regret for his past treatment of him—the first time within the story that a white person shows open vulnerability: “You know,” he whispered, “Nongaas was crying when he found me. He thought I was dead. He had been very good to me—so very good. Do you remember the day when he followed behind our wagons? He looked so very trustful and so little, and yet I—I threw 62 Consider the following line delivered by Sarel Erasmus, the cowardly Boer narrator of A Boer Quixote: “We could no longer see men about the kraal, only a few women and very young children, for the men were perhaps all away with the British, who were ruining them by great pay, good food, and little work, which the Kafir in his heathenism loves.” See Douglas Blackburn, A Boer Quixote, 70. 63 See, for example, Herman Charles Bosman, “The Recognising Blues,” in Recognising Blues: Best of Herman Charles Bosman’s Humour, ed. Stephen Gray (Cape Town, South Africa: Human and Rousseau, 2001), 19-21. 393 stones at him. I wish I did not do that. I only hope that he comes back safe. He was crying and stroking my hair.” As I said, my brother Hendrik was feverish. “Of course he will come back,” I answered him. But this time I knew that I lied. For as I came through the mouth of the cave I kicked against the kafir I had shot there. The body sagged over to one side and I saw the face.64 Schalk undercuts Hendrik’s expressions of remorse by saying he was feverish when he made them, and the story ends immediately after the twist ending. The only indication of Schalk’s feelings towards the events he describes is a line at the very beginning, where he says “it isn’t right to kill that kind of kafir” who is “faithful and upright and a true Christian and doesn’t let the wild dogs catch the sheep.”65 Schalk’s studied repression of alternative feelings is palpable. Yet there is another dimension to the story; one that has escaped comment by other Bosman critics. The main action of “Makapan’s Caves” takes place when Schalk is twenty-one years old, exactly the same age Bosman was when he shot David Russell. It is a tale about a man wracked by guilt for not trying harder to find his brother, who shoots the wrong person in haste at the mouth of a cave, not unlike the dark room on Isipingo Street where Bosman had fumbled with the light switch. Finally, it turns out at the end that while Hendrik was injured, it was only an ankle sprain and not a gunshot; Nongaas had been bringing him food and water and Hendrik was not in imminent danger. “Makapan’s Caves” is the story of a fraternal relationship betrayed. More than an exciting incident from the distant past, in retelling the story of the siege of Mgombane Bosman draws a fascinating parallel between the trauma of colonial encounter and the central trauma of his own life, setting the stage for a career spent striving to reconcile his own experience with that of his country. 64 Herman Charles Bosman, “Makapan’s Caves,” The Touleier, December 1930. 65 Herman Charles Bosman, “Makapan’s Caves,” The Touleier, December 1930. 394 The fact that there is more than a passing resemblance between the circumstances of “Makapan’s Caves” and the real-life events that almost led to Bosman’s hanging, suggests that Oom Schalk Lourens was, for Bosman, a definite (if somewhat improbable) alter ego. At first glance, of course, the differences between the two are significant. Bosman was still in his twenties whereas Schalk narrates his tales as a wizened patriarch; Bosman was urban and Schalk is rural; Bosman, though an Afrikaner by birth, had been socialized in an Anglophone atmosphere whereas Schalk is Boer to the bone. Even so, I would argue that these very differences are what made Oom Schalk such an important and useful muse. Unlike the real Herman Charles Bosman, Oom Schalk is entirely a creature of his cultural context. His identity is fixed: he is an old Transvaal burgher—uneducated, Afrikaans-speaking, austerely religious, and one who takes hostility to racial and cultural others for granted. Bosman was none of these things. On the matter of race, if his early Benoni exposé exemplified his humanitarianism and his abusive comments in The New L.S.D.. testify to his reactionary side, we should also consider his poem “Africa,” from collection of poems he published under the name Herman Malan in the summer of 1931-1932, as evidence of more ambivalent feelings: Of Makana, my brother, I sing Of Makana, my brother, he, A trampled, captive Kafir—yet a king— Flung his imprisoned body into the sea. With lordly pride He scorned to reach Beyond the breakers on the white man’s sands Of Blouberg Beach, My eyes are darker since my brother died…66 66 Herman Charles Bosman, “Africa” TS., Herman Charles Bosman Papers (MS-0460), box 1, folder 14, Harry Ransom Center [HRC], University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas. Ellipsis in original. 395 Here Bosman refers to Makana (also known as Makhanda or Nxele) as his brother, comparing his own experience of prison life to that of the Xhosa religious and political leader who drowned in the course of escaping from confinement on Robben Island in 1820.67 Though today Makana is regarded as a hero of anti-colonial resistance in South Africa, where both a district municipality and a city (formerly Grahamstown) has been named for him, in Bosman’s time, establishment historians like George E. Cory and George McCall Theal treated Makana as a charlatan who fraudulently mixed Christianity and traditional belief.68 In the words of Cory, whose name still graces the Rhodes University library in Makhanda, “among a people equally remarkable for their ignorance and their credulity, imposture, such as that practiced by Makanna [sic], has more than ordinary scope.”69 Perhaps we need not wonder at the idea that these accounts, which portrayed Makana as a low-born con-artist, possessed a certain appeal for the similarly low-born, sometime-scammer Bosman. The end of the poem suggests the sexual and social dangers inherent in identifying with blackness as a white South African: Oh Africa, I feel your chaste Caress Of your hurt negro lips on me. I die: to wonder at your kiss is death.70 67 See Julia C. Wells, The Return of Makhanda: Exploring the Legend (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2012); and Janet Hodgson, “A Study of the Xhosa Prophet Nxele (Part I),” Religion in Southern Africa 6.2 (1985), 11-36; and Janet Hodgson, “A Study of the Xhosa Prophet Nxele (Part II)”, Religion in Southern Africa 7.1 (1986), 3-23. For a consideration of Makana’s legacy in literature, see Damian Shaw, “Makanna, Or, The Land of the Savage: Makhanda ka Nxele in English Literature,” English Studies in Africa 63.2 (2020), 112-122. 68 For a classic late twentieth century appraisal of Makana, see J. B. Peires, The Dead Will Arise, 32-33. See also Julia C. Wells, The Return of Makhanda. 69 George E. Cory, The Rise of South Africa: A History of the Origin of South African Colonisation and of its Development Towards the East from the Earliest Times to 1857, vol. 1 (New York, N.Y.: Longmans, Green and Company, 1910): 370. See also George McCall Theal, History of South Africa since September 1795, vol. 1 (London, U.K.: Swan Sonnenshein and Company, 1908): 269-271; 280-281. 70 Herman Charles Bosman, “Africa” TS., MS-0460, box 1, folder 14, HRC. 396 In short, Bosman was a keen observer of the social distinctions of his country from an early age, from the grand racial divides like those we see in “Makapan’s Caves” to far more subtle ones, like the extended meditation on micro-aggressions endured by Afrikaners navigating predominantly Anglophone social circles we encounter in his early story Johannesburg Christmas Eve.71 While aware of these fault lines, Bosman is generally very skeptical of their value. For Bosman, such distinctions between people tended to conceal more than they revealed, and thus his creative imagination could fashion the farmers of the Marico bushveld (a straightforward group identity if ever there was one) into tools for exploring the hollowness of white South Africa’s social hierarchy. As the white electorate became more deeply polarized in the run-up to World War II, a process which culminated in the 1948 electoral victory of the National Party, Bosman would return again and again to humor and storytelling as a means of grappling with the paradoxes of his time.72 Bosman, living as Herman Malan, only spent two more years in South Africa before fleeing to Europe with his new wife Ella in early 1934. The bookend for his departure was a blasphemy conviction for a story about a masturbating nun published in Blignaut’s The Ringhals in December 1933.73 After arriving in the United Kingdom, Bosman never again contributed to another Blignaut paper; Blignaut himself left for London in 1940, just as Bosman was returning to the Union, and did not visit South Africa again for forty years. Unlike Stephen Black, 71 Herman Charles Bosman, “Johannesburg Christmas Eve” TS., MS-0460, box 1, folder 12, HRC, also published in Herman Charles Bosman, Young Bosman, ed. Craig Mackenzie (Cape Town, South Africa: Human and Rousseau, 2003), 162-191 72 See Roberrt Citino, Germany and the Union of South Africa in the Nazi Period (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991); Patrick J. Furlong, Between Crown and Swastika; Christoph Marx, Oxwagon Sentinel: Radical Afrikaner Nationalism and the History of the Ossewabrandwag, trans. Sheila Gordon-Schröder (Pretoria, South Africa: University of South Africa Press, 2008). 73 Herman Charles Bosman, “A Nun’s Passion,” The Ringhals (Johannesburg, South Africa), December 1933, also published in Herman Charles Bosman, Young Bosman, 62. 397 however, the first phase of Bosman’s European sojourn was wonderfully productive; between 1934 and 1937 he contributed a large number of Marico stories to Edgar Bernstein’s new magazine The South African Opinion—this time published under his own name. More than two- thirds of the stories that would appear in Mafeking Road, the only collection of Bosman’s short fiction to be published in his lifetime, were published during his first years in the Northern Hemisphere. One of these stories, “The Music-Maker,” can provide some insight into Bosman’s time in London, reminiscent of Stephen Black’s experience two decades before.74 It tells the story of Manie Kruger, the best concertina player in the Marico, who becomes obsessed with becoming recognized as a musical genius after reading an article in the Dutch Reformed Church newspaper Kerkbode about “a musician who said he knew more about music than Napoleon did.”75 He begins to stage “recitals,” turning his front room into a theatre of sorts with bench seating and a green curtain operated by a black servant. After these recitals, Oom Schalk explains, instead of walking out from behind the curtain, Manie would go “backstage” to the kitchen and tell his well-wishers to see him around the back of his house. At his triumphant departure for the big city, Manie calls his adoring audience “soulless Philistines,” but they cheer after his admirer Lettie Steyn explains that “every great artist was expected to talk in that way about the place he came from.”76 Yet the story ends with a bitter twist when, on an errand to Pretoria, Schalk sees Manie Kruger playing the concertina on a street corner, in front of a bar’s green curtain—the same as the one he used to hang in his farmhouse. 74 Herman Malan [Herman Charles Bosman], “The Music-Maker,” South African Opinion, July 26, 1935; also published in Herman Charles Bosman, Mafeking Road, 35-40. 75 Herman Charles Bosman, Mafeking Road, 35. 76 Herman Charles Bosman, Mafeking Road, 39. 398 If the Marico stands in for South Africa and Pretoria represents London, in “The Music- Maker” Bosman’s cynicism about London and his developing critique of the white South African cultural inferiority complex are evident. The story is also an example of Bosman’s fascination with artificial identities, with Manie Kruger attempting to cultivate the affectations of high artistry despite the fact that, in Oom Schalk’s words “his veldskoens…were sticking out from underneath the curtain.”77 These two ideas—the importance of authenticity and the urge to lose oneself in a role—are always held in tension in Bosman’s work, because even as he championed what he saw as authentic white South African art, he was also profoundly shaped by his own affectations. Originally mechanisms for coping with his lower class Afrikaner pedigree, Bosman’s flirtations with Romanticism, cynicism, and the politics of both the far left and the far right, complicate any idea of what artistic honesty or authenticity might mean in his case. Later in life, Bosman offered the following justification for why he only wrote stories from white perspectives, using black characters almost exclusively as foils: This is material only for the Bantu artist. The white man must keep away from it. We have stolen enough from the kaffir [sic]. Don’t let us have the cheek to go and try to poach on the preserves of his life’s bitternesses as well, without having shared them. In any case, how can a white man get into a black man’s skin—and vice versa? That sort of thing is presumption, and can only produce falseness in art. No, they must write their literature. We must write ours.78 77 Herman Charles Bosman, Mafeking Road, 37. A veldskoen (“veld shoe”) is a homespun shoe made of hide. 78 Herman Charles Bosman, “Aspects of S.A. Literature,” Trek (Johannesburg, South Africa), September 1948. An exception. For articles that examine and critique Bosman’s treatment of black characters, see Lewis Nkosi’s 1969 essay “Herman Charles Bosman: In Search of the ‘True’ Afrikaners!,” in Writing Home: Lewis Nkosi on South African Writing, eds. Lindy Stiebel and Michael Chapman (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of KwaZulu- Natal Press, 2016), 211-222; and Glenn Lawson, “Race and Identity in Bosman’s Marico,” in Herman Charles Bosman, ed. Stephen Gray (Johannesburg, South Africa: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1986), 143-153. An opposing view is advanced in Susan Hayden, “Dancing the Tiekiedraai: A Socio-Historic Approach to Bosman’s Bushveld Narratives” (M.A. thesis: University of Cape Town, 1999). 399 Key to understanding this passage is the statement that comes just before it, that “the city must be handled romantically,” abandoning gestures towards social realism79 Bosman argued this first and foremost because this was how he approached his settings—centering ostensibly universal feelings and sensual experience rather than social and political phenomena. The passage’s professed support for black literary progress is thus tarnished by a film of condescension. On the one hand, like Stephen Black, Bosman wanted black authors to break free of the thrall of their white benefactors and advocates. On the other hand, it is clear Bosman does not appreciate the forces that kept African writers like the Dhlomo brothers from doing this. Fundamentally, Bosman did not comprehend the urgency and necessity of the African struggle for civil rights in South Africa. One is reminded of the case of H. I. E. Dhlomo, who years before had synthesized the deprivation and challenges of black urban life with the soaring heights of Romanticism in plays like Men and Women and The Expert—plays that were doomed to obscurity from the start for the very reason that they rejected white paternalism and charted a Gothic path (see Chapter 6). As insightful as Bosman could be, we see here how his avoidance of sustained political analysis created problems in other areas of his thought. The foregoing passage sets a strong social boundary, privileging race over class, language, and culture as a fault line in literature. As elsewhere, the exclusion of black people from Bosman’s literary imagination paradoxically made it easier to justify “poach[ing] on the preserves” of white people with whom Bosman shared little. If black South Africans could write stories about precolonial days from which they were now far removed, Bosman, notwithstanding his few months in the bushveld, could write about the farmers of the Marico. In another sense, 79 Herman Charles Bosman, “Aspects of S.A. Literature,” Trek, September 1948. 400 however, it is notable that Bosman maintained this barrier, because even in his early writing, he was committed to the idea that stories and storytelling threatened social boundaries in meaningful ways. Of all the tales in Mafeking Road, “Splendours from Ramoutsa” is the one which deals most directly with the art of storytelling itself.80 First published in The South African Opinion in February 1937 the narration begins with Oom Schalk asking why people listen to his stories, and his answer is that when the Marico is hot and dry, people like to listen to his stories because they can avoid doing their other work, like collecting water from a deep borehole. But why, Schalk asks, do they want to listen to his stories at other times? Oom Schalk falls into conversation with a young man named Krisjan Geel, who has just come back from the store in Ramoutsa (present- day Ramotswa, Botswana). The Indian owner has just told him the story of a young man and a princess who waits for him at a well in the hope that he will one day return. Feeling threatened, Schalk says that the best stories that the Indian tells are his lies about the products he sells. The result is a wonderful bit of cross-talk juxtaposing romance and reality: “…Another good one,” I insisted, “was when he said that there was no Kalahari sand in the sack of yellow sugar I bought from him.” “And she had seen him only once,” Krisjan Geel went on, “and she was a princess.” “…And I had to give most of the sugar to the pigs,” I said, “it didn’t melt or sweeten the coffee. It just stayed like mud at the bottom of the cup.” “She waited by the well because she was in love with him,” Krisjan Geel ended up, lamely. “…I just mixed it in with the pigs’ mealie meal,” I said, “they ate it very fast. It’s funny how fast a pig eats.”81 80 Herman Charles Bosman, “Splendours from Ramoutsa,” South African Opinion, February 20, 1937; also published in Mafeking Road, 160-166. 81 Herman Charles Bosman, Mafeking Road, 162. 401 Schalk suspects that the store-owner is getting back at him for complaining to the other farmers about the sugar. Soon enough, it seems, this attempt to usurp Schalk’s position in the community stops, though people start to pester him about adding elements from the Indian’s stories into his own. “And the next time you tell us about a girl going to Nagmaal in Zeerust, Oom Schalk,” suggests Frik Snyman, “you can say that two men held up a red umbrella for her and that she had jewels in her hair, and she was doing a snake-dance.”82 Schalk refuses, but Krisjan continues to fixate on the story of the princess at the well, until one day Schalk sees him telling the story to Lettie Viljoen at the borehole. The twist ending then becomes clear: Lettie is the princess in the story, and Krisjan is the oblivious young man at the well. “Splendours from Ramoutsa” is a story about stories. It is, above all, a story about the paradoxes bound up in stories. Krisjan Geel fixates on the story of the princess and the young man because it feels so remote to his life in the Marico, yet in fact it is so close to his experience that he unwittingly re-enacts it. Moreover, the exotic stories that the Indian store-owner tells are also hard to disaggregate, Bosman suggests, from the everyday acts of fraud that he supposedly commits, from adulterating his wares to holding his foot on the scale while measuring out dry goods. These dishonest stories underscore the difference between everyday life and the world of Eastern myth even as they reveal something universal about shared longing. Tellingly, the true significance of this episode is only obvious to Schalk as a storyteller, and not to his listeners or to those who listen to the Indian. Bosman’s proposition is that stories hide things even from their most eager listeners. In an unfinished novel called Louis Wassenaar written later in his life, Bosman expresses this 82 Herman Charles Bosman, Mafeking Road, 164. 402 paradox even more clearly.83 In it, the eponymous writer suffering from a creative block is lured into the lounge bar of the Carlton Hotel to have a drink with a man named Gris Aniescu, who wants to tell Louis about a woman with beautiful legs he saw boarding a tram. As they continue drinking, they are approached by an angry man who initially speaks in an incomprehensible foreign language, and accuses Gris of stealing his socks long ago. The matter is not resolved until Gris hands over the tattered socks from his own feet. This somehow inspires Louis to write a story called “The Ox-Riem” set in the Marico, which he eagerly reads to his editor, Mavis Smith, the next day. Mavis enjoys the story but says she is totally baffled by the connection to the anecdote about the socks, since the story is about a young girl from the bushveld who runs away to Johannesburg after being ill-treated by her guardian, who savagely whips her legs with an ox-riem (that is, an ox-hide cord). The text presents us with a riddle. What does “The Ox-Riem” mean in the context of Louis Wassenaar? As Salomé Snyman has written previously, it is one of the most wonderfully metafictional pieces of writing Bosman ever created.84 It casts the reader in the role of Krisjan Geel in “Splendors from Ramoutsa,” fascinated and yet baffled by what—if any—connection exists between the two stories. Is it a confidence trick, inviting us to look for hidden meaning where none exists, or is it an intimate reflection on the creative process? Can fiction really capture the hidden truth and beauty of the world, or does it serve only the interests of the writer? If we apply the lesson of “Splendours from Ramoutsa” to Louis Wassenaar, the answer must be both: the egoism and cravenness involved in storytelling can host deep and solemn things, just as 83 Herman Charles Bosman, “Louis Wassenaar,” in Old Transvaal Stories, ed. Craig Mackenzie (Cape Town, South Africa: Human and Rousseau, 2000), 88-114. 84 Salomé Snyman, “Herman Charles Bosman’s ‘Louis Wassenaar’: A Case of Writer’s Block or Exemplary Metafiction?”, English in Africa 30.1 (2003), 71-86. 403 deep and solemn things, on reflection, turn out to be much less than they seem. With this insight, the high and low things of the world can perhaps be reconciled, Bosman’s work suggests. That was the hope, at least, as Bosman struggled to reconcile the dueling impulses within himself. In addition to The South African Opinion, Bosman (as Malan) wrote for Empire and The Sunday Critic, two short-lived London publications started by Blignaut’s onetime roommate John Webb. Here Bosman, in stark contrast to his previous work for Blignaut, vigorously criticized the Pact government’s handling of race relations and Prime Minister Hertzog’s initiative to annex the High Commission Territories of Basutoland, Bechuanaland, and Swaziland. Comparing the initiative to Benito Mussolini’s war in Abyssinia, Bosman drew a sarcastic comparison between white South Africans and slave-owning Americans, “who got just as indignant when interfering outsiders expressed the view tactfully that there was a certain amount of over unkindness about the practice of lopping off the ears of runaway slaves.”85 Signs of the old Bosman remained, however. In 1937, short on cash, Bosman faked his own death in a cynical ploy to have money wired to his new wife, Ella Manson Bosman, to pay for the cost of a funeral. Some months later, Bosman’s mother Elisa visited England with William Russell, finding to her shock that her eldest son was still alive and well; an episode that effectively ended his relationship with his mother and several other members of the Malan family.86 Instead of chastening Herman and Ella Bosman, this seems to have spurred them on to new heights of fraud and anarchy. They started a crooked vanity press under the aliases of Arden and Eleanor Godbold, and refused to black out their flat’s windows during the last months of 85 “Baldwin Outvies Mussolini,” The Sunday Critic (London, U.K.), June 21, 1936. 86 It is not immediately clear where the colorful anecdote told by Stephen Gray in Life Sentence, 214-215 comes from, but this ignominious end to Bosman’s ruse is corroborated by Zita Grové in her memoir. See “My Cousin Herman,” Personality, February 26, 1971; or Remembering Bosman—Herman Charles Recollected, 85. 404 1938, in defiance of civil defense measures.87 Finally, on January 6, 1939, they boarded the Winchester Castle for South Africa. The excesses of their last several months in the United Kingdom may have finally chastened the Bosmans, because on their return to South Africa (with Herman now using his own surname), they successfully managed to turn over a new leaf and (mostly) avoid the attentions of the police. In early 1943 Bosman secured a position as the editor of the Zoutpansberg Review and Mining Journal in Pietersburg (now Polokwane) in the northern Transvaal, and traveling there with Ella marked his first major sojourn in rural South Africa since the immediate aftermath of his release from prison.88 Once again, however, their period of provincial respectability would come to a rapid and unexpected end. Early in Bosman’s tenure at the Zoutpansberg Review he made the acquaintance of a thirty-year old schoolteacher named Helena Stegmann, with whom he soon fell into extended discussion about the state of Afrikaans literature. The two began an affair in the plain sight and with the tacit approval of Ella, but during her school’s winter break (at the midpoint of the year), Helena discovered that she was pregnant. As an unmarried woman in a small and conservative dorp, Stegmann was terrified by the consequences of this development, and after she returned to Pietersburg, Bosman attempted to personally perform an abortion.89 When she collapsed bleeding in front of her students some days afterwards, she was rushed to the hospital and 87 The main source for this phase of Bosman’s life is a typescript written by George Howard, a friend and eyewitness, for a never-completed biography. It currently resides in the collection of the Amazwi South African Literature Museum, but is partially reproduced as George Howard, “A Portrait from Memory,” in Remembering Bosman—Herman Charles Revisited, 31-52 (with these specific events described on 50-52). Howard was also interviewed about this time in Bosman’s life by Valerie Rosenberg in Sunflower to the Sun (Cape Town, South Africa: Human and Rousseau, 1976): 128-133. 88 Bosman’s time in Pietersburg is recounted in Stephen Gray, Life Sentence, 221-255. 89 For background on abortion in twentieth-century South Africa, see Susanne M. Klausen, Abortion Under Apartheid: Nationalism, Sexuality, and Women’s Reproductive Rights in South Africa (New York. N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2015). 405 thereafter identified Herman Charles Bosman as the cause of her agony. She was persuaded to lay a charge against him, but after one appearance in court, they reconciled and by the summer of 1944, Herman had divorced Ella and married Helena.90 The last eight years of Bosman’s life were by far his most productive. Now back in Johannesburg, Bosman wrote further Oom Schalk stories—both in English and, for the first time, Afrikaans—for various periodicals, including Trek, The South African Opinion, On Parade, and the South African Jewish Times. He was also living into a new and unfamiliar role as a respected critical essayist and literary tastemaker. It was Bosman’s experiences with Helena at Pietersburg that caused him to write his first published novel, Jacaranda in the Night, later retooled as the more export-friendly Willemsdorp. In contrast to the quaint Marico life depicted (at least at surface level) in the Oom Schalk stories, these novels depict white South African small town life as a microcosm for the nation’s hypocrisy and cruelty. Mafeking Road, a collection of Bosman’s first Oom Schalk stories, was published in the same year. 1949 saw the publication of Bosman’s prison memoir, Cold Stone Jug, as well as an anthology of short-stories by white South African authors, Veld-Trails and Pavements, whose title hints at the rural-urban parallelism that fascinated Bosman his whole life.91 Finally, in 1950, with his health already failing, Bosman embarked upon a series of stories for The Forum collectively titled “In Die Voorkamer” (referring to the front room of a rural Afrikaner dwelling).92 These stories were set in the Marico like the Oom Schalk tales, but were updated to reflect on the ways platteland life had changed by the 1950s. Written on a weekly basis, Bosman experimented there with not one 90 Stephen Gray, Life Sentence, 257-258. 91 Veld-Trails and Pavements: An Anthology of South African Short Stories, eds. Herman Charles Bosman and C. Bredell (Johannesburg, South Africa: Afrikaanse Pers Boekhandel, 1952). 92 See Herman Charles Bosman, The Complete Voorkamer Stories, ed. Craig Mackenzie (Cape Town, South Africa: Human and Rousseau, 2011). 406 but but a whole multiplicity of narrators chewing over the news and jostling for status while waiting for the day’s post to come through. On October 14, 1951, in the midst of revising one of his “In Die Voorkamer” stories, Bosman suffered a fatal heart attack and was discovered by his wife Helena in the bathroom of their house in Lombardy East. Three years into the apartheid era, Herman Charles Bosman was dead. The last Oom Schalk story to appear in Bosman’s lifetime, “The Missionary,” appeared in Spotlight magazine in January 1951. Based not so much around the eponymous missionary, Reverend Keet, but the rude wood carving of him that one of his African converts presents to him, the story is among Bosman’s finest. The recurring motif of the story is superstition, from the Reverend Keet’s conviction that “the spirit of evil…h[angs] over the Marico like a heavy blanket,” to the evidence of voodoo practiced by the missionary’s wife at the story’s end.93 Conversing with Oom Schalk, the Reverend Keet laments that people in his flock were still visiting traditional healers and using indigenous medicines, though we learn as an aside that Oom Schalk’s grandmother also tied pieces of crocodile skin to things that needed exorcizing. At this point Elsiba, the Reverend Keet’s wife, objects to the carving the pair are talking about and takes off with it after serving them coffee. Oom Schalk relates that she and Willem Terreblanche, an assistant teacher, were having an affair at the time, and married discreetly shortly after the Reverend Keet died. When the new missionary is sent to live in the parsonage, the carving is found in the loft and Oom Schalk takes it home—removing the human hair and 93 Herman Charles Bosman, “The Missionary,” Spotlight (Johannesburg, South Africa), January 1951; also reproduced in Herman Charles Bosman, Unto Dust and Other Stories, ed. Craig Mackenzie (Cape Town, South Africa: Human and Rousseau, 2002 [1963]): 105. 407 nails that had been driven into it, the kind of twist ending that by then had become a Bosman trademark. Since stories like “The Missionary” are mediated by Oom Schalk’s deadpan delivery, national unity is never promoted directly. Nevertheless, it is implicit in many of the stories that comprise Bosman’s post-World War II Oom Schalk cycle. Bosman’s Marico is a microcosm of South Africa constructed by a man who yearned to process the multiple and contradictory strands of his identity through art. Indeed, though Bosman appreciated Johannesburg’s literary potential, as explained in a 1945 piece for The South African Opinion, it was rural areas that really fired his imagination. They are “unquestionably the best place in which to study life at close hand,” he argued, “because it is all in slow motion you don’t miss the significant details.”94 In “The Missionary,” as in other Oom Schalk stories, more unites people than separates them: missionaries, white farm folk and black villagers each respect and fear the supernatural in their own way, and a missionary’s wife is just as likely as anyone else in the community to be involved in occult activity. There is something distinctly paradoxical about it as well: Bosman searching for the roots of white South Africa in the countryside, while black writers of his time found themselves increasingly fascinated by the creative possibilities of the city. At any rate, Bosman’s humor has the remarkable quality of seeming to include and exclude at the same time: it is both urban and rural, it is both Afrikaans and English, it is both right- and left-wing—just as it is both hilarious and poignant, and just as Bosman himself cut a remarkable ambiguous moral figure. The only really consistent thread seems to be Bosman’s Romanticism, but even his Romantic subjects are delivered in the slow, digressive voice of Oom Schalk Lourens. 94 Herman Charles Bosman, “Dorps of South Africa,” South African Opinion, July 1945; also reproduced in A Cask of Jerepigo, ed. Stephen Gray (Cape Town, South Africa: Human and Rousseau, 2002 [1957]): 85. 408 This does not mean Bosman lacked the ability to express indignation or drive home a particular viewpoint effectively. Of his non-Oom Schalk works, nothing illustrates Bosman’s talent at using humor to ridicule white South Africa’s various demons than “Old Cape Slave Relics,” an piece that first appeared in The South African Opinion in 1946, and was later included by Bosman’s protégé Lionel Abrahams in the posthumous essay collection A Cask of Jerepigo.95 The outline of the piece is this: on a visit to an antique shop, Bosman encounters a piece of furniture described as an “Old Cape Slave Chair.” Stinkwood furniture from the V.O.C. era at the Cape which is still treasured by South African antiques dealers today, but the plain evocation of slavery in the cause of selling an old chair (“an age that enriched us with thick- walled gabled dwellings and gracious legends and hippopotamus-hide sjamboks”), affronts Bosman’s moral sensibilities, leading him sarcastically muse on other items that might be sold as “Old Cape Slave Relics.”96 The piece is an attack on the myth of genteel Cape slavery, and the flimsiness of the myths recounted by white people to bolster its mystique. In imagining “the Old Cape Slave Sedan Chair,” he invites his white readers to follow these labels to their logical conclusion, exposing the absurd historical distortions on which they are based: I can readily conceive of what an Old Cape Slave Sedan Chair would look like. The handles would be all right, encrusted with jewels and all that sort of thing; and they would be sumptuously padded, making it easy for the owner of the estate to carry the Old Cape Slave down to the plantation to work every day. But from the interior furnishings of the Old Cape Slave Sedan Chair you would be able to recognise the fact that those were indeed the days of slavery. There would be just a coarse horse-hair cushion to sit on, and in place of a curtain a strip of undyed hessian would flutter from the window- opening. All this would serve to make it clear to you as to how unenlightened the past age was really.97 95 Herman Charles Bosman, “Old Cape Slave Relics,” South African Opinion, December 1946; also reproduced in Herman Charles Bosman, A Cask of Jerepigo, ed. Lionel Abrahams, 183-185. 96 Herman Charles Bosman, “Old Cape Slave Relics,” South African Opinion, December 1946. 97 Herman Charles Bosman, “Old Cape Slave Relics,” South African Opinion, December 1946. 409 By inviting his readers to laugh at this burlesque of South African slavery, Bosman is holding out for ridicule some of the most comfortable and fully domesticated axioms of white South African identity—indeed, what could be more domestic than furniture? The myth of Jan van Riebeeck bringing civilization to the Cape, the myth of a benevolent slave system there, and nostalgia for those days of supposedly stable racial hierarchies and old-time pre-industrial graciousness frequently worked their way into the writings and aesthetics of the day, especially as South Africa approached the 1952 tercentenary of European colonization.98 By abruptly invoking the present at the end of the section (Bosman says that “they wouldn’t carry a mine- native today” in a sedan chair, “seated on a horse-hair cushion”), his implicit suggestion is actually that little has changed, that twentieth century mine labor and eighteenth century slavery are both sustained through comforting lies and whites’ desire not to peer too deeply into the abyss.99 The essay concludes with an even more extravagant fantasy. Reflecting on an “Old Cape Slave Suit-Case,” Bosman imagines a play that makes use of it as a key prop. The Old Cape Slave informs his master, Hendrik Terreblanche, that he is leaving, accidentally addressing him as Simon Legree (the villainous overseer from Uncle Tom’s Cabin).100 Hendrik begs him to stay, 98 This anniversary and the massive celebrations that accompanied it are the subject of Leslie Witz, Apartheid’s Festival: Contesting South Africa’s National Pasts (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2003). The broader context of white nostalgia surrounding slavery in the Western Cape is explored in a Ph. D. thesis by Samuel North, especially in his fifth chapter, which deals with representations and silences surrounding slavery on the tourist-oriented estates of the Cape Winelands. See Samuel North, “Contested Paths, Forgotten Voices: Remembering and Representing Slavery in South Africa” (Ph. D. thesis: University of Hull, 2017), especially 265-316. 99 Herman Charles Bosman, “Old Cape Slave Relics,” South African Opinion, December 1946. 100 A 1949 Oom Schalk story, “Sold Down the River,” refers extensively to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and is structured around a Marico performance of the play, which had to be adapted so that a “much less kind-hearted” Uncle Tom could “threaten to hit Topsy with a brandy bottle.” See Herman Charles Bosman, “Sold Down the River,” The South African Jewish Times (Johannesburg, South Africa), September 1949; also reproduced in Herman Charles Bosman, Unto Dust and Other Stories, 66-70. 410 saying he will “be betraying a whole epoch” if he leaves.101 Moved by his heartfelt appeal, the Slave puts down his luggage and rushes back to his master, who immediately rewards his loyalty with a frenzy of violence: “Noblesse oblige,” Hendrik Terreblance would answer simply, the tears starting to his eyes as he crushed the Old Cape Slave’s fingers in a vice-like grip. After that he would trip up the Old Cape Slave and kick him a number of times in the stomach and ribs. And for quite a long time after that he would be jumping up and down on the Old Cape Slave’s face.102 At every stage of the piece Bosman emphasizes that violence and cruelty are the core of what slavery was, and cannot be treated otherwise. The final paragraphs pivot back to how embedded the nostalgic myths of slavery are within different sections of white society. Bosman starts with vapid middlebrow English-speakers, on behalf of whom his suggested title (“Saving a Century, or The Honour of the Eighteenth”) could be connected to “Bradman’s 18th Century in first-class cricket or…one of Gordon Richard[s]’s more outstanding turf triumphs.”103 For rural Afrikaners, he says, the play could be dubbed ’n Eeu van Ondergang Gered (“A Century of Decline Redeemed”) and a “more virile ending” could be worked out.104 “Another light touch… that should go well with the audience,” according to Bosman, fiddling again with the tone of the play “would be to arrange, the instant the Old Cape Slave puts down the suit-case, for a couple of silver spoons, bearing Hendrik Terreblanche’s monogram, to drop out.”105 In “Old Cape Slave Relics,” Bosman devastatingly juxtaposes the naked cruelty of ongoing exploitation with the affectations and foibles of comfortable middle class life. He 101 Herman Charles Bosman, “Old Cape Slave Relics,” South African Opinion, December 1946. 102 Herman Charles Bosman, “Old Cape Slave Relics,” South African Opinion, December 1946. 103 Herman Charles Bosman, “Old Cape Slave Relics,” The South African Opinion, December 1946. 104 The reference here is to the famous pamphlet Een Eeuw van Onrecht (“A Century of Wrong”), often attributed to Jan Smuts, published to bolster the Boer cause during the South African War. See A Century of Wrong, issued by F. W. Reitz (London, U.K.: Review of Reviews Press, 1900). 105 Herman Charles Bosman, “Old Cape Slave Relics,” The South African Opinion, December 1946. 411 destabilizes this comfortable life further by drawing attention to the performativity of racial encounter. Where, he asks, is there any independence of thought or true reflection? Just like Hendrik and his slave, each segment of white society knows its role and performs it, without thinking of the cost. But if one day the modern-day equivalent of the Old Cape Slave should refuse to participate in the ongoing system of exploitation and violence, what are the chances that the result will resemble the fantasy Bosman spins for his audience? Disaster lurks behind this misleadingly breezy essay. Works like “Old Cape Slave Relics” showcase Bosman’s ability to press his digressive style of humor into the cause of devastating satire when he felt like it. Still, he was no ideologue. Bosman was always more interested in experience and atmosphere than ideas and politics, which, like other figures we have encountered in this study, he instinctively distrusted. Through his art Bosman represented, celebrated, lamented, attacked, and satirized his unjust society. Yet later in life, with the political situation growing ever more dire and with his literary star never brighter, Bosman stopped short of activism. The status quo directly benefitted him as a white man, and inspired him as a writer—at a safe distance from the realities of racial oppression. As a result, his was a humor that acknowledged injustice without suggesting a pathway towards change. It was a humor of romantic fatalism, a humor that acknowledges and affirms the reader’s feelings of detachment, even as it engaged in cerebral and sophisticated critiques of apartheid’s logic. It is no accident, surely, that during the apartheid era interest in Bosman went from strength to strength among white people of a certain artistic and political mindset. Both seduced and repulsed by Bosman’s visions of the platteland, beleaguered liberals were attracted to his wry social commentary and sympathized with his largely dismissive attitude towards 412 politics. Even today, as the New South Africa muddles along, Bosman’s world remains attractive to the descendants of this audience, perhaps because it contributes to the building of a usable past, an Old South Africa worth believing in. The Herman Charles Bosman Weekend and the continued commercial success of Bosman’s work suggests that such a world retains a considerable allure. Comfortable Humor: Cecil Wightman and Snoektown Calling For many older white South Africans, the name Cecil Wightman conjures vivid memories of sitting around the radio in the evenings, waiting for the sound of the Cape Town fish horns that heralded Snoektown Calling. Snoektown Calling was a comedic sketch program that ran from 1936 to 1964, launching the careers of a legion of white South African radio comedians who would prove influential throughout the intervening decades. Most of the broadcasts have been lost to time, but at the S.A.B.C. headquarters in Auckland Park, Johannesburg, a handful of recordings survive for researchers to explore. Cecil Wightman’s entrepreneurial spirit and focus on comedy draw obvious parallels with Stephen Black, who was almost exactly twenty years his senior. Born in Cape Town around 1901, Wightman’s youth was peripatetic, attending high school in Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Durban for brief stints—including a spell at Jeppe High a few years before Bosman. He left school entirely after Standard 8 (modern Grade 10), finishing his education as Herman Charles Bosman had, at a “cram school.” The metropole beckoned, and thereafter Wightman took to the sea as a humble pantryman with the Union-Castle Line running between South Africa and Great Britain. After a time he settled in England, dabbling in a number of different careers, including horse-breeding, before returning to South Africa after the death of his father. It was not until 413 well into middle age that he started Snoektown Calling, in January 1936, recorded out of his own studio in Gardens, Cape Town.106 The S.A.B.C. formally came into being later that year when the Union government bought I. W. Schlesinger’s African Broadcasting Company for £150,000.107 During these early years Wightman personally received a mere £2.10 per episode of Snoektown Calling, with still less going to his cast.108 Snoektown Calling was a fifteen-minute show that ran multiple nights a week. In it, Wightman and a cast of radio actors performed sketches poking gentle fun at South African life and current affairs. “Snoektown” was a nickname for Cape Town, and the fish-horn which blared at the beginning of the broadcast mimicked those of Cape Town’s mostly Coloured fishermen, who sold snoek out of carts up and down the streets of the city from the early morning onward.109 Accordingly, among the most popular and commonly-heard characters on Snoektown Calling were the stereotypical Coloureds Kaatjie and Lammie (voiced by white actors), whose dialogue could have been lifted straight out of one of the plays of Stephen Black: KAATJIE: Why must you be always so common, Lammie? 106 The foregoing information is from the Wightman Calling radio documentary, part 1 (46144), dir. Alan Swerdlow, aired July 4, 1993, South African Broadcasting Corporation Radio Archives [SABC], Johannesburg, South Africa 107 At the time there were about 150,000 licensed radios in the country, and if one assumes that the vast majority were owned by whites (21 per cent of the population in 1936), this works out to radio-listening share of the white population that, while considerable, was far lower than the equivalent figure for the entire U.S. population. See Malcolm Theunissen, Victor Nikitin, and Melanie Pillay, The Voice—The Vision: A Sixty-Year History of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (Johannesburg, South Africa: Advent Graphics, 1996): 18; 20. 108 Wightman Calling radio documentary, part 1 (46144), dir. Alan Swerdlow, aired July 4, 1993, SABC, Johannesburg. For context, a 1930 study submitted to the Carnegie Commission of Investigation on the Poor White Question in South Africa, classified white families as poor which took in less than £100 annually. Meanwhile, the minimum wage for unskilled black workers in Johannesburg outside the mines was set at 25/- a week in 1942 (£65 for 52 weeks), and was almost twice the average wage of a Witwatersrand mineworker. See R. W. Wilcocks, Die Armblanke-Vraagstuk in Suid-Afrika, vol. 2 (Stellenbosch, South Africa: Pro Ecclesia, 1932): 66, cited in Johan Fourie, “The South African Poor White Problem in the Early 20th Century: Lessons for Poverty Today,” Stellenbosch Working Economic Papers 14/06 (2017): 6-7; and Mark Stein, “Black Trade Unionism During the Second World War: The Witwatersrand Strikes of December 1942,” Institute of Commonwealth Studies Collected Seminar Papers 26 (1981), 94-102. 109 Snoek (Thyrsites atun) has a poor reputation in Britain due to its association with World War II-era rationing, but is an inexpensive and beloved fixture of South African cuisine, particularly in the working-class communities of the Western Cape. See Calvin Trillin, “Dissed Fish: The Strange Attraction of Snoek,” The New Yorker (New York, N.Y.), August 29, 2004. 414 LAMMIE: Okay now, what’s the reason you acting so upstage? KAATJIE: Upstage? Is that all you can say? LAMMIE: But you always dress up so expensive, you must spend all your money on dresses, and in the end it looks like you’s got on everything in case of a fire. KAATJIE: Hey, you’s insulting, man. Luister, Lammie, I likes to look nice.110 Kyk dis dress hierdie.111 Dis gee vir my a feeling of uplift.112 LAMMIE: Uplift? Ja, jy seek a mooi opgelift van daai dress.113 KAATJIE: Ag nee, but I means uplift for the mind. When you find beautiful things, this is what they calls good gracious living. LAMMIE: Good gracious living? KAATJIE: Ja. We must learn to get some culture, sien?114 LAMMIE: Oh, ja ja. KAATJIE: Start to read about what’s happening in the world…Only last night, Mr. Arendjie, he was advising me what books to reading.115 LAMMIE: Mr. Arendjie? Ha! Daai moeilike ou!116 Dis is where you is last night and I was waiting by the street corner till half past nine for you, nê? Daai wolf in a sheep’s overcoat. KAATJIE: Ag, jy is just jealous of Arendjie. You know why? Cause he believes in work outings. LAMMIE: Work? Darem het I seen Arendjie pretending to read the nuuspaper, ha. But he’s got the paper upside down.117 Though the above dialogue is from a 1964 episode of the program (nothing from the 1930s appears to have survived), its consistency with the humor of a half-century prior is itself significant. Between the many instances of malapropism and Afrikaans-English confusion above (such as in the word “nuus-paper”) and the burlesquing of respectability represented by the term “uplift” and the fact that Mr. Arendjie “reads” the newspaper upside-down, the aim of the sketch is ostensibly innocent fun, though the fun is decidedly at the expense of the Coloured working- class who inspired the name of the show. Unlike Kaatje Kekkelbek, whose uncompromising 110 Luister is Afrikaans for “listen.” The subsequent notes on this excerpt are all the author’s translations. 111 “Look at this dress here.” 112 “This gives me a feeling of uplift.” 113 “Yeah, you want a nice uplifting of that dress.” 114 Sien is Afrikaans for “see.” 115 Arendjie is arend (Afrikaans for “eagle”), with the diminutive suffix -jie; i.e., a little eagle. 116 “That dangerous guy!” 117 Snoektown Calling, aired July 18, 1964 (CDR/FE 361), SABC, Johannesburg. 415 insistence upon her human rights is what made her simultaneously so funny and so threatening to the settlers of the nineteenth-century Eastern Cape (see Chapter 2), Snoektown Calling’s Kaatjie does not threaten the system in any meaningful way. While Snoektown Calling affirmed that Coloureds were an integral part of South Africa’s cultural landscape, they are not represented as current, potential, or aspiring participants in the political life of the nation. Sketches like the above were always a mainstay of Snoektown Calling, but the program hit its full stride with the outbreak of World War II, when Wightman devoted most of his attention to consolidating support for the war effort. At a time when the white population of the Union was deeply divided over the decision to go to war, Wightman ridiculed the Axis leaders mercilessly, and won great popular as well as critical acclaim in the process. Among his biggest fans was Arthur R. Haggart, author of Trek magazine’s radio column, who in June 1941 called Snoektown “incomparably the best propaganda broadcast in the Empire and worth fifty talks by learned professors and doctors.”118 Two months later Haggart took up the same theme, this time complaining that while Wightman’s reputation is not nearly as prestigious as those of the more serious war propagandists, “it is he whose propaganda is worth-while.”119 Nevertheless, Haggart complained, Cecil Wightman is used far too sparingly, and his qualities are wasted on unsuitable subjects. In point of fact, he would be most useful now in London, advising the B.B.C. how to conduct its propaganda in this country. Whoever is doing that work now is not serving the Union any too well…Cecil Wightman understands the South African mental make-up.120 118 Arthur R. Haggart, “Radio,” Trek, June 6, 1941. 119 Arthur R. Haggart, “Radio,” Trek, August 1, 1941. 120 Arthur R. Haggart, “Radio,” Trek, August 1, 1941. 416 As Ruth Teer-Tomaselli has observed, the S.A.B.C. found itself in a very difficult position on the cusp of World War II.121 In the months leading up to September 1939, the organization took a wait-and-see approach to how the fraught politics of South Africa’s stance in the coming conflict—so much so that when war was actually declared by Parliament on September 5, the S.A.B.C. made no mention of the decision until the following day. Part of the issue was the 1936 Broadcasting Act’s strict prohibition on party-political messages over the air, drafted while J. B. M. Hertzog and Jan Smuts were still involved in a fragile coalition. The decision to go to war split this coalition, meaning that the war was now as unavoidable as it was partisan. More than once in the early years of the war the S.A.B.C. was accused of harboring Nazi sympathizers on its staff; at the same time, Nationalists were deeply unhappy with the S.A.B.C.’s reliance on rebroadcasted British Broadcasting Corporation (B.B.C.) content. Why should the state radio service rely so heavily on material that reminded listeners of the country’s colonial subordination? According to the Nationalist M.P. André van Nierop, this was a “flagrant violation of the basic principles on which the Corporation was established.”122 What Wightman was able to deliver during World War II was anti-Axis ridicule seamlessly interspersed with proudly local humor. It proved so popular with South African listeners that for several months in 1941, Wightman took the program on tour to cities around the Union. At Johannesburg’s Plaza Theatre, Gadabout of the Sunday Times (editor J. Langley Levy), was surprised to discover that almost all the voices for which the show had become so famous were undertaken by Wightman himself, with an assistant, Bernabé van Alphen, 121 Ruth Teer-Tomaselli, “In Service of Empire: The South African Broadcasting Corporation During World War II,” Critical Arts 28.6 (2014), 879-904. 122 Hansard for February 11, 1941, vol. 41, col. 2776, in Union of South Africa, 1941: Debates of the House of Assembly. (Cape Town, South Africa: Unie-Volkspers Beperk, 1941), quoted in Ruth Teer-Tomaselli, “In Service of Empire,” 891. 417 generating sound effects. In an effusive review, Langley declared that the lazy, heavily-accented Afrikaans officers of Snoektown Police Station took him back to the days of Stephen Black’s Van Kalabas, and that Wightman was “the best mimic ever turned out of South Africa.”123 The Star’s theatrical critic agreed, writing that “Wightman, with a lock of hair falling over his eyes and an impish grin on his face, comes down to bedrock and talks of people and places everybody knows.”124 It is not so much that any of Wightman’s satire was particularly daring or unusual in the context of the wider Allied propaganda effort, but his work appeared authentic, and more than one listener wrote into the newspaper asking whether it would be possible to translate Snoektown into Afrikaans in order to fight pro-Nazi opinion within that segment of the population.125 Cecil Wightman may have been a gifted propagandist, but he had the heart of an entrepreneur rather than a loyal employee. In late 1943 he abruptly resigned from a radio play about the life of Prime Minister Smuts designed for broadcast in the United States.126 Within a matter of days after leaving the S.A.B.C., Wightman was engaged by the African Consolidated Theatres to tour a live version of Snoektown Calling around the Union. By 1947, however, Wightman had patched things up with the S.A.B.C. and was not only back on the radio, but also commanded his own weekly column in Spotlight magazine (the same periodical where Bosman’s 123 Gadabout [J. Langley Levy], “The Craziest Station—!,” Sunday Times, August 17, 1941. 124 “Showman,” “Genius of a South African Comedian,” The Star, August 9, 1941. The article also compared Wightman to Afrique, the stage name of Alec or Alexander Witkin. Afrique, who was also South African-born, became famous in London for his impressions of opera singers. See “Rand Attorney Headed for Vaudeville Fame,” Rand Daily Mail, May 22, 1936. 125 See, for example, “NOW,” “‘Snoektown’ is the Best Reply,” Rand Daily Mail, April 12, 1941. 126 Though the 1993 documentary Wightman Calling implies that Wightman somehow ran afoul of Smuts, this does not appear to have been the case. Wightman himself remarked in the press that one of the sentences in the piece was “woefully unjust to General Smuts’s great qualities of mind and, indeed, his real South African outlook.” According to an S.A.B.C. statement, Wightman objected to a suggestion for musical accompaniment made by the American radio producer assigned to work on the production. See “Statement by Mr. Cecil Wightman,” Rand Daily Mail, November 1, 1943; “Statement by Director of Information,” Rand Daily Mail, November 2, 1943. 418 “The Missionary” would later appear).127 In 1958 he took his show on tour once again, demonstrating, like Stephen Black, the importance of being able to master multiple platforms as a freelance creative artist. Wightman’s work is an excellent example of mainstream white South African humor in the mid-twentieth century, and in his characters we can perceive the outlines of a tradition that would make up in popularity and persistence what it lacked in originality and social imagination. As we have seen, the Coloured characters in Snoektown Calling are not much different from their counterparts in Stephen Black’s work, nor are Snoektown’s harried policemen much different from the boorish civil servants of the Tape and Wax Department. Nevertheless, there are meaningful differences. For one, Stephen Black was writing against something: against knee- jerk Anglophilia and disdain for all things colonial, primarily, in the cause of interpreting the momentous events of his time. Love and the Hyphen, Helena’s Hope, Limited, and The Dorp all hide serious discussions of social transformation underneath their farcical façades; even the “Telephone Conversations of Jeremiah” frequently meditated on serious subjects like black urbanization and the unequal criminal justice system. By contrast, Wightman’s Snoektown Calling became popular in a less parochial, less elitist white cultural landscape where the performance of South Africanness was not only understood as amusing but also beneficial to the body politic. Regardless of whether Afrikaans speakers became enamored of characters like Oom Danie (a genial but much staider counterpart to Herman Charles Bosman’s Oom Schalk), laughing at Wightman’s jokes placed one at the intersection of an identity that was at once comfortably English-speaking, anti-fascist, and one hundred per cent South African. 127 This column was promoted heavily in Johannesburg newspapers. See, for example, advertisement in Rand Daily Mail, February 12, 1947. 419 I use the word “comfort” advisedly. The fact that Snoektown Calling was intended as comfortable fare is all but explicitly stated in the show’s theme song, which begins by asking the listener to “pack all your worries and troubles aside.”128 In Snoektown Calling, South African society is depicted as a diverse array of local racial types, from blacks to Indians to Afrikaners and Natal Englishmen, but unlike in the work of Stephen Black, these types seldom, if ever, come into conflict. To the contrary, they hardly ever meet one another: Kaatjie and Lammie’s dialogues are confined to one segment, Oom Danie might appear in the next, followed by a pun- filled bulletin of by-election results. Nowhere is this logic, so redolent of segregation, more obvious than with regard to black people, whose impersonated presence on Snoektown Calling is limited to segments that are framed as broadcasts from an entirely separate station, Radio Ublungublu. In early 1960s, as African nations were winning their independence, this station was said to broadcast from an independent country—“the craziest radio station north of the line”—in contrast to Snoektown, “the craziest radio station south of the line.” The fictional Africans of “Mazintoland” were represented according to the generic tropes of white racism, as uncivilized cannibals: ANNOUNCER 1: Social notes: the doings of high society in Mazintoland. A wonderful party was held at the opening of Chief Dumbafuzi’s new kraal this afternoon. The cocktails were served of…lizards’ tails, and the snacks were admired; especially the sandwiches made of dehydrated Pygmies. ANNOUNCER 2: And I see that the bird’s nest soup made out of mambas’ nests had a real bite, and was much enjoyed by all the guests who survived. There were no complaints either from the guests who expired. ANNOUNCER 1: Now to something for the tiny tots. Stand by, children, for here is your Aunty Daffodil. AUNTY DAFFODIL: Hello children, how are you? 128 As preserved on “The Voices of Cecil Wightman from Snoektown Calling (1940-1956)” CD (CDR2011/1242), SABC, Johannesburg. 420 ANNOUNCER 1: Have you got some nice new nursery rhymes for the children, Aunty Daffodil? AUNTY DAFFODIL: Yes, certainly, listen to this: Humpty Dumpty sat in the pot For Humpty Dumpty the fire was so hot So poor old Humpty Dumpty, he won’t be around again For they cooked him with onions, for all the king’s men.129 When asked for a 1993 S.A.B.C. documentary whether their father was a racist, Wightman’s children argued forcefully to the contrary. “He was totally patriotic: black, white, Chinese, whatever,” explained Wightman’s son, “he was a South African and everybody was important to him.”130 To be sure, Wightman’s program occasionally made jokes that suggested moral concern for Africans, as in the following quip: REPORTER: Ah, but Col. Wetweather [an M.P.]— WETWEATHER: Yes? REPORTER: What about malnutrition among non-Europeans; the unequal distribution of mealies in the native territories, the lack of hospital accommodation for the poorer classes? WETWEATHER: Oh yes, I stand for that too. REPORTER: “You stand for that too”? WETWEATHER: Certainly, and we’ll all have to stand for it a good deal longer.131 But the segregationist format of the sketches ensured that such sentiments were contained, even when they were given voice. And in the years following World War II, as figures overseas began raising the alarm over South Africa’s racial policies, Snoektown Calling ridiculed these concerns and lodged its own concerns about the liberalism and hostility of the English-speaking press. In the following sketch, which aired following the horrific Sharpeville Massacre of 1960, Wightman’s program takes aim at South Africa’s former colonial master by sending the iconic Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson on a visit to a foppish Fleet Street editor. 129 Snoektown Calling, aired July 18, 1964 (CDR/FE 361), SABC, Johannesburg. 130 Wightman Calling documentary, part 2 (46494), dir. Alan Swerdlow, aired July 11, 1993, SABC, Johannesburg 131 Snoektown Calling, aired July 12, 1943 (CDR 2007/422), SABC, Johannesburg 421 When asked about South Africa, the editor, Mr. Jones, calls it “absolutely tops for such a small country” as far as news is concerned, while showing his ignorance about incidents of racial unrest in the United States and elsewhere in the world: JONES: …Oh, well that must have slipped my mind, old boy. But that Sharpeville affair, now that was something. HOLMES: But have any of you or your staff been to modern Sharpeville lately? JONES: No, why—why should we? That costs money. It’s so much easier just to remember Sharpeville. I never can remember the name of that place in Algeria where they shot all those people in hospital. Abu-ben-Walla-Walla or whatever it was called. Then there was that place in the Congo where they shot all those hostages and they chopped everybody up; it was—Bongo Chiwongo Pi-Congo or something or other. I mean who can remember that? It’s much easier to remember Sharpeville. It’s just like remembering Wimbledon, or Putney. HOLMES: Yes but don’t you think you ought to send someone? Someone out to South Africa, to see for themselves, sir? I think the whole thing calls for investigation, Mr. Editor. JONES: Oh no, no, no, not investigation. That’s the last thing we need, my dear chap. Besides, I couldn’t spare anybody. HOLMES: Why ever not? JONES: Well, after all, it’s summer holiday time now, you know. Lovely weather all of a sudden; it’s been very wet. It’s the third test match against the South Africans, and then there’s the grouse shooting. And, after all, we don’t need to send anyone; we can get it all from the South African newspapers themselves. Great stuff; it doesn’t even need editing. HOLMES: But do tell me, sir: how do you account for the fact that so many of the people who’ve gone to South Africa themselves to investigate conditions on the spot, have radically changed their minds not long after getting there? JONES: Oh, well, of course they’re just misguided stooges, antiquated squares, you know, who still think that seeing is believing.132 As we have seen from the days of De Temperantisten on, the self-pity of being misunderstood has a long history within white South African humor. In Snoektown Calling, however, it takes on a new urgency. The very title of the show, a riff on the “London Calling” 132 Snoektown Calling, undated, from “The Voices of Cecil Wightman from Snoektown Calling (1940-1956)” CD (CDR2011/1242), SABC, Johannesburg. Despite the title of the CD, the references to Sharpeville (1960), the Congo Crisis (1960-1961), and attacks by the Organisation Armée Secrète paramilitary group on hospitals in Algeria (1961-1962), mean that this segment was aired no earlier than 1961. 422 phrase used to introduce B.B.C. radio bulletins during World War II, implies South Africa’s independence and maturity, now called into question by lazy foreigners in cahoots with the local anti-Nationalist media. South Africa’s own whiteness and Britishness—the origin of names like “Sharpeville”—should be a point in its favor, the sketch implies, but instead this is held against it. When Cecil Wightman died unexpectedly on December 4, 1965, the South Africa he departed was a very different place from the one he was born into.133 While still not satisfying many of its frustrated artists, its cultural heights were less dominated by the parochialism of British colonial culture than they had been six decades before. However grudgingly, Afrikaners had become a part of the cultural mainstream: though still the butt of Van der Merwe jokes, their political power and increasing strength as a consumer bloc (one that, crucially, could not be satisfied solely with imported British and American cultural products) had borne results.134 Africans, on the other hand, were only beginning to come into their own as consumers, despite their numbers, and were forcibly excluded from most areas of civic and political life, alongside Indians and Coloureds. With the Civil Rights Movement well underway in the United States, and the independence of most British, French, and Belgian colonial possessions either already accomplished or soon to occur, white South Africans in the 1960s could feel the ground shifting beneath their feet. Calls for a cultural boycott of the country were growing overseas, and the question of what kind of South Africa could survive on an otherwise post-colonial continent loomed increasingly large. Wightman, ever the patriot, contended that the only path forward was 133 “Death of Cecil Wightman,” Sunday Times, December 5, 1965. 134 See Sandra Swart, “The Terrible Laughter of the Afrikaner,” 904. 423 for English-speaking South Africans to fully embrace their South Africanness, and lean in to the cachet of a white African identity. In so many words, this is what he told the Johannesburg Rotary Club in a talk he gave in 1941: that, “if a man from England came to make his home in South Africa, his background should date from the landing of Van Riebeeck.”135 In other words, by settling in South Africa, an Englishman’s Englishness became subordinate to his South Africanness, and in return can claim the whole history of white settlement on the continent as his own without hesitation. For Wightman and protégés like Philip “Pip” Freedman, the celebration of black and Coloured stereotypes as integral to South Africa’s national identity did not imply acceptance of actual demands for political change. It did, however, open up opportunities to perform and revel in what I call exotic expertise, an ideology which neutralizes the cognitive dissonance of settler colonialism by representing it as harmless and absurd. Through exotic expertise (perhaps exemplified best in the famous slogan that Radio Snoektown was “the craziest radio station south of the line”), white English-speaking South Africans could claim a unique facility with the strange and colorful absurdities that judgmental whites outside Africa could not claim. When seen through the lens of exotic expertise, the idea that South Africa was a uniquely serious place was among the greatest errors foreign media and commentators could make. If white South Africa was appeared out of step with the world, it was only because the rest of the world had gone mad. Making light of the dissonance between South Africa and the outside world was a useful way to reinforce the idea that the basic racial status quo was both desirable and sustainable. Amid mounting Cold War tensions on the continent, representing South Africa as a 135 “Mr. Wightman Addresses Rotary Club,” Rand Daily Mail, August 20, 1941. 424 land of happy warriors on behalf of the Free World seemed a compelling argument for ordinary treatment by the U.K., U.S. and others. Indeed, an argument might be made that under the circumstances South Africa could not afford to be seen as a joyless country. White South Africans needed to affirm that the social situation at home was well in hand —both among themselves and in their interactions with people from outside the country. The fact that Wightman was broadcasting domestically and not internationally was immaterial; his audience at home was already highly sensitive to negative overseas press. The local performance and appreciation of exotic expertise, perfected in Snoektown Calling’s myriad local impressions, idioms and references, was a prerequisite for the maintenance of South African prestige abroad. From the all-white musical revue Wait a Minim!, which opened in London in 1964 and enjoyed 456 performances on Broadway in 1966 and 1967, to the films of Leon Schuster two decades later, the legacy of Cecil Wightman can be readily apprehended in the way subsequent humorists spun the self-conscious marginality of white South Africa as a point of pride and relied on the idea that the white South African condition granted a unique and superior vantage point on the human condition relative to the safe, complacent metropole.136 Wightman’s affirmation of Anglophone South Africanness, however apartheid-friendly, ran into more and more difficulties in its latter years. A rising tide of letters to the editor complained about the political content of a program called Bright and Early he began headlining in the 1960s. In the Rand Daily Mail, letter-writer R. H. Dix objected to the quip “Don’t use the telephone, it’s agin’ the Government,” as an inappropriate and gratuitous interjection of politics 136 The best source on Wait a Minim! is Judy Harris’s extensive commentary at “Wait a Minim!,” accessed March 23, 2021, . See also Ralph Trewhela, “Wait a Minim and King Kong,” in The World of South African Music: A Reader, ed. Christine Lucia (Newcastle, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005), 93-96. For Leon Schuster, see Robin K. Crigler, “No Laughing Matter?”; Cara Moyer-Duncan, Projecting Nation: South African Cinemas After 1994 (East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 2020). 425 into the morning hours, and others agreed.137 “Cecil Wightman’s fatuous remarks, such as ‘South Africa is a police state—how would you like to live in a country without police?’ are difficult to take any time, but are quite intolerable on an empty stomach,” wrote one such letter, signed P. A. C. van Heyningen.138 At the same time, the Government itself was closing in. In the heady months following the Sharpeville Massacre, Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd’s government moved to pass a Publications and Entertainments Act that greatly increased the power of the state to ban works deemed “undesirable.”139 Having been taken off the air a few times since his earliest S.A.B.C. hiatus, Wightman was understood to be in the cross-hairs. Moreover, unlike live performers like Adam Leslie, his “denigration of political goings-on is heard by thousands of Nie-Blankes [non- whites],” in the words of Garry Allighan, radio critic for the Sunday Times.140 Section 5(2) of the law, which came into force in 1963, allowed for the censorship of material that (a) is indecent or obscene or is offensive or harmful to public morals; (b) is blasphemous or is offensive to the religious convictions or feelings of any section of the inhabitants of the Republic; (c) brings any section of the inhabitants of the Republic into ridicule or contempt; (d) is harmful to the relations between any sections of the inhabitants of the Republic; (e) is prejudicial to the safety of the State, the general welfare or the peace and good order.141 137 R. H. Dix, “Radio Remarks,” Rand Daily Mail, May 6, 1964. 138 P. A. C. van Heyningen, “Intolerable,” Rand Daily Mail, August 31, 1964. 139 See Peter D. McDonald, The Literature Police, 32-37. See also Christopher Merrett, A Culture of Censorship: Secrecy and Intellectual Repression in South Africa (Cape Town, South Africa: David Philip, 1995). 140 Garry Allighan, “You’d Better Watch Your Step, Mr. Wightman,” Sunday Times, May 28, 1961. For more on Leslie, see Mervyn McMurtry, “Adam Leslie and His Contribution to Satire in Intimate Revue in South African Theatre,” South African Theatre Journal 9.1 (1995), 3-27. 141 From Statutes of the Republic of South Africa 1963, no. 26 (Pretoria, South Africa: Government Printer, 1963), 276-300, quoted in Peter D. McDonald, The Literature Police, 34. 426 By overstepping the mark, Wightman could easily have found himself on the wrong side of Section 5(2)(c), though in fact the last two years of the program did not end up provoking any serious furor. Yet even though Wightman managed to escape censorship, others were not so lucky. In some ways the culture of self-censorship ushered in by the Publications and Entertainments Act was just as harmful as its actual enforcement, which banned the work of a wide range of novelists and musicians, both local and from overseas.142 Interviews with white comedic performers from the 1960s and 1970s confirm this view. Pieter-Dirk Uys’s run-ins with censors from the 1970s on, have provided grist and cachet to his satirical productions for decades. “One learnt how to do tango in front of a fucking firing squad,” he puts it, with inimitable pithiness.143 Mel Miller, a stand-up comedian and founding participant on South Africa’s first-ever television comedy program, Biltong and Potroast, remembers how hard the show worked to remain in the S.A.B.C.’s good graces despite the hoops it meant having to jump through. The program, which debuted in 1975 and was formatted as an improvised weekly showdown between teams of British and South African comedians, was anything but spontaneous: They gave us a subject and we told a joke, but that’s bullshit, because they knew the joke…They gave us a subject; we made it look like we’re thinking out of the box. A week or two before the show you had to go to the censor…and tell him the jokes, and if he said that was good enough you could use it…The censorship was unbelievable. 144 142 See Michael Drewett, “Music in the Struggle to End Apartheid,” in Policing Pop, eds. Martin Cloonan and Reebee Garofalo (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 2003), 153-165; and Peter D. McDonald, The Literature Police. 143 Pieter-Dirk Uys, interview by author, Cape Town, South Africa, June 7, 2019. See also Daniel Lieberfeld, “Pieter-Dirk Uys: Crossing Apartheid Lines,” TDR 41.1 (1997), 61-71; Pieter-Dirk Uys, Between the Devil and the Deep: A Memoir of Acting and Reacting (Cape Town, South Africa: Random House Struik, 2010); and Pieter-Dirk Uys, Echo of a Noise: A Memoir of Then and Now (Cape Town, South Africa: Tafelberg, 2018). 144 Mel Miller, interview by author, Johannesburg, South Africa, November 11, 2019. 427 The end of Snoektown Calling was far from the end of radio comedy in South Africa. In the 1970s, Pip Freedman, a Snoektown Calling alumnus, led his own enormously popular radio show on largely the same lines. Kaatje and Lammie were replaced by Platneus (Flatnose) Adonis and Gatiepie; Radio Ublungublu became Radio Darkest Africa.145 But surviving samples of this program show that it gave politics a much wider berth than Wightman had. It aired at a time when the S.A.B.C. was much more firmly under the supervision of the Afrikaner Broederbond, and lacked same artistic license as its predecessor.146 As a fixture of broadcast entertainment for almost three decades, Snoektown Calling was ideally positioned to help English-speaking white South Africans cope with the turbulent apartheid era. Instead of challenging the injustice of the system, it presented humor that felt political even as it detached the relatable minutiae of daily life in the Union-turned-Republic from a wider political context. It spun the challenge of darkening political and geopolitical horizons into a counter-intuitive point of pride and even patriotism. Ironically, as the boundaries of acceptable political speech contracted from the 1950s into the 1960s, the kind of humor that Cecil Wightman provided felt more daring (judging by readers’ and critics’ responses) at the end of the show’s run than at the beginning, even though in tone the program hardly changed. Of course this discussion of Wightman’s oeuvre does not account for alternative expressions of humor, most of which passed into oblivion: the graffiti, the obscene songs and jokes, and in- group humor of the apartheid era. In any case, it is not advisable to speak about “dark times for humor,” or a laughter famine separating Union-era humor from its post-apartheid renaissance. In 145 “The Pip Freedman Show” CD (CDR/FE 193), SABC, Johannesburg. 146 See William A. Hachten, “Broadcasting: Propaganda Arm of the National Party,” in The Press and Apartheid: Repression and Propaganda in South Africa, eds. William A. Hachten and C. Anthony Giffard (London, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984), 200-228. 428 the white press, on the radio, and later, on television, humor preserved the fantasy that South Africa was still an ordinary capitalist democracy that deserved to be accepted as-is by the rest of the free world. Out of conditions of political and social repression, we may say furthermore that the humor that surfaced as South Africa’s racial nightmare came to an end—earthy, coarse, stereotype-heavy, and highly masculine—is to a considerable extent, the humor of the 1950s released from amber.147 Since humorists’ capacity for transgression was so limited, such humor retained an edginess for decades that Wightman and others did little to earn. Conclusion: Dueling Traditions In exploring the work of Herman Charles Bosman and Cecil Wightman, this chapter has argued that the white humor of the early apartheid era can be broadly divided two philosophically distinct responses to the challenges of the late Union era. Both men chose the South African nation as their primary frame. Yet where Bosman used humor to expose the hidden dynamics of South African life, unsettling stereotypes about black and white people as well as rural and urban life, Wightman sought to affirm, if not the entirety of the social system, at least the claim of English-speaking whites to their place within it. Where Bosman’s stories consistently destabilize readers’ assumptions, Wightman’s radio comedy reinforced them. As an avowed South African patriot, Wightman was out to prove, contrary to foreign critics, that “youth could laugh at itself,” and that humor could play a role in social cohesion.148 While part of his formula consisted in taking care to lampoon both sections of the white population equally, just as important was the affirmation of exotic expertise as an antidote to white South Africa’s postcolonial inferiority 147 See Cara Moyer-Duncan, Projecting Nation; Zoe Parker, “Standing Up for the Nation”; Julia Katherine Seirlis, “Laughing All the Way to Freedom?” 148 “Mr. Wightman Addresses Rotary Club,” Rand Daily Mail, August 20, 1941. 429 complex. Perhaps it is better to think of Wightman’s humor as denialist rather than escapist, for the place Wightman would have his fans escape to was very much South African. Yet it was also very much a fantasy: a world where the political troubles and momentous troubles facing the nation could be expiated through anodyne quips and parodies. One is tempted to summarize the foregoing paragraph like this: Bosman’s humor is clever and interesting, while Wightman’s is regressive and trite. Here, however, we need to be especially careful. In an important sense Bosman’s undeniable gifts as a storyteller and analyst of the mid-twentieth century South African condition limited the impact of his humor. His stories and essays are often tremendously revealing, but Bosman was no activist or politician. His writing is concerned with neither fantasies nor solutions. In the next chapter we will encounter something similar in the work of Casey Motsisi, though his writing was also shaped by the much heavier limitations placed on his expression by virtue of being black under apartheid. Bosman and Motsisi’s humor provides a witness to absurdity rather than a way out of the morass. Wightman’s Snoektown Calling, however, offers a fantasy of South Africa—disingenuous with respect to the present, admittedly, but adaptable to a multiracial future. What if South Africa really was just a land of fun? What if its peoples’ quirks were celebrated as national assets, without any nagging questions about injustice to spoil the party? Bosman’s cerebral tales have won him no shortage of fans, while Cecil Wightman is almost forgotten except by those old enough to remember his time on the air. Still, if we want to understand the course that the mainstream of commercialized and mediatized popular culture took in South Africa for the rest of the twentieth century, it is to Wightman’s brand of patriotic humor that we should look. After 1994, released from the burden of international pariah status, 430 white South Africans who had not been vocal critics of apartheid were offered an opportunity to celebrate their citizenship in a country now considered free. The comedy of this era, heavily promoted by the corporate sector, celebrated South Africa’s eccentricities with a new vigor (see Epilogue). Crucially—and problematically—it did so without acknowledging that for many, the New South Africa’s promise of a better life for all has not materialized. It would not be until the early twenty-first century explosion of diverse stand-up comedy, which coincided with an economic downturn and increased pessimism about South Africa’s postapartheid trajectory, that the Bosman-Motsisi strain of destabilizing humor would again become prominent. 431 Chapter 8— On the Beat: Black Humor, 1943-1963 This study has argued that though laughter is audible throughout South African history, it becomes particularly revealing in the early- to mid-twentieth century, when the social boundaries of the nation were in acute flux. It has explored case studies of some underpaid and today underappreciated exponents of written and performed humor, and considered popular philosophies of laughter and humor as clues to understanding the contours of those most slippery of metrics—“impact” and “success.” It has argued that within a complex and deeply flawed society humor and laughter had a multifaceted importance, shoring up boundaries of identity that could be drawn many different ways, neither wholly progressive nor wholly reactionary in outlook. But what about the absence of laughter? Throughout my fieldwork I heard from people who were intrigued by my topic but puzzled by my periodization. These people expressed surprise that I would be able to “find” humor from the Union period, implying either that it had all been lost and was inaccessible (a fair point), or that there was little to be found. And indeed, when I embarked on this work I also fretted over how to quantify humor. What is the relationship between laughter and misery? As the level of misery in a society rises, does the gelastic domain shrink? Or is it censorship and repression, rather than misery, that are more determinative of laughter’s role in society? We might expect the three to correlate but they are not the same thing, after all. Could I show in my study that the end of the Union and the declaration of the Republic marked a distinct and palpable turning point in the history of South African humor? If humor is a historical phenomenon, is humorlessness also traceable in the archive? These are some of the questions that animated this final phase of my research. 432 In this chapter I turn to writings by three black South Africans that reveal much about humor and its limits during the tragic first fifteen years after World War II. We have already met R. R. R. Dhlomo in these pages, of course, but we have not dealt with his much longer tenure at the newspaper Ilanga Lase Natal, where he continued to produce both serious journalism and satire under the pseudonym “Rolling Stone” throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Ilanga Lase Natal was also well-known during this period because of another humorist, “Msimbithi, Umfana weKhishi.” Msimbithi’s columns are in Zulu, and his identity—intellectual and radio broadcasting pioneer King Edward Masinga—seems to have been a more closely-guarded secret. Written in an informal and linguistically innovative register, Msimbithi’s columns reveal much about the boundaries of acceptable public discourse and the texture of everyday life in twentieth century Natal. Finally, the “Bugs” and “On the Beat” columns of Karabo Casey Motsisi at Drum magazine illustrate in a sobering fashion the extent to which black South African literary horizons had changed since the publication of R. R. R. Dhlomo’s An African Tragedy three decades prior. Motsisi, perhaps more than any other writer of his cohort, reveled in the filth and degeneracy of the Johannesburg that so shocked Dhlomo in the 1920s, honing a searing critique of the apartheid state that feels a world away from Dhlomo’s focus on African vice and moral failure. The early apartheid era was a tragic time for black South Africans. Censorship, legal repression, and increasingly overt government violence placed steep constraints on what black South Africans could safely ridicule, in print or otherwise.1 People certainly broke the rules, but most of their words and laughter in this vein was, of necessity, unpublished and ephemeral. 1 This topic is covered in depth in Christopher Merrett, A Culture of Censorship. 433 Meanwhile, compassionate white liberals like Athol Fugard affirmed Africans’ love of laughter while remaining vague about its content and meaning. Yet such fuzziness did not prevent whites from expressing their own opinions on African laughter, as Fugard did when describing his “ideal play for the African” in the early 1960s: Humor too is very important. Africans have a great capacity to laugh at themselves and at others…yes, there must be lots of laughter: bitter laughter, cruel laughter, forgiving laughter, every kind of laughter…It could all add up to a special African contribution to the theatre. The satire and social comment that Brecht has in so much of his work could have a second home and a second lease of life here.2 This passage we might compare with those of the editor and founding Pan-Africanist Congress member Jordan Ngubane, a protégé of R. R. R. Dhlomo who wrote a somewhat turgid satirical column for Ilanga Lase Natal starting in the late 1930s under the name “Jo the Cow.”3 In An African Explains Apartheid (published in the United States in 1963, though written in 1961 before his exile), Ngubane credits the “Sutu-nguni” with an “inner peace, which was basically of the spirit, [which] he translated into his capacity to laugh even when in travail,” a latent quality in every human being that for Africans had been activated by “the very nadir of suffering.”4 If we take Fugard and Ngubane at face value, by the 1960s the positive laughter of participation 2 Quoted in Thandi Brewer, “Satire in South Africa,” 24. For more on the enduring influence of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) on African theatre—and white theatre about African topics—see Brian Crow, “African Brecht,” Research in African Literatures 40.2 (2009), 190-207; Charles Isherwood, “Brecht’s Casualties, in Africa,” The New York Times, January 20, 2016; and Celia McGee, “Approaching Brecht, By Way of Africa,” The New York Times, January 25, 2009. 3 The Pan-Africanist Congress or P.A.C. was founded in 1959 by disaffected members of the A.N.C., with the Wits University African Studies lecturer Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe serving as the group’s first president. P.A.C. members objected to the path the A.N.C. had taken since the adoption of the Freedom Charter in 1955, which they saw as subordinating the legitimate demands of black South Africans to an insufficiently race-conscious class analysis of the South African situation. The P.A.C. position was that a post-apartheid South Africa should be first and foremost a state for black people, and that the political vehicles needed to accomplish that goal should also be exclusively black African. See Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 227-230; Benjamin Pogrund, How Can Man Die Better? The Life of Robert Sobukwe (Johannesburg, South Africa: Jonathan Ball, 2015 [1990]); and Thami ka Plaatjie, Sobukwe: The Making of a Pan-Africanist Leader, vol. 1 (Johannesburg, South Africa: K.M.M. Review Publishing, 2019). For a discussion of Ngubane’s P.A.C. membership, see Tom Lodge, “A Liberal of Another Colour,” Transformation 16 (1991): 87. 4 Jordan K. Ngubane, An African Explains Apartheid (New York, N.Y.: Frederick A. Praeger, 1963): 78. 434 that we have heard in earlier chapters had been supplanted by a laughter of survival—laughter that was extraordinary because of the extraordinary pain at its origins. In hindsight it seems extraordinary that such rapid change and creative ferment in the cultural sphere could coincide with such a grim political situation. In the 1920s and 1930s, the literate black (and Coloured) population in South Africa was only just approaching a critical mass, with only a quarter of a century separating R. R. R. Dhlomo’s rudimentary African Tragedy from a monumental work of memoir like Peter Abrahams’s Tell Freedom.5 Yet if this kind of literature was becoming rapidly more sophisticated, its development was inexorably tied to the continued growth of the white-owned black commercial press. Though its dominance within the black South African intellectual ecosystem was not quite total (Jordan K. Ngubane’s Inkundla ya Bantu and an ever-changing handful of left-wing journals were willing to publish politically aware writing by Africans), its impact is undeniable.6 The growth of this press, defined in the postwar period not only by newspapers but by glossy magazines like Drum and Zonk!, encouraged the idea that black South Africans now formed a cohesive cultural group with its own “show business,” celebrity class, and destiny. Yet while a new identity based on shared Africanness might seem rife with activist possibilities, with a few exceptions the discourse facilitated by these new bearers of the zeitgeist became shallower, as white supervisors and black editors alike became warier of provoking the authorities. In the post-World War II era, both white and black South African popular culture was moving away from British models and towards American ones. Of course, black intellectuals for 5 Peter Abrahams, Tell Freedom. 6 See Les Switzer and Ime Ukpanah, “Under Siege: Inkundla ya Bantu and the African Nationalist Movement, 1938-1951,” in South Africa’s Alternative Press, 215-251; and Ime Ukpanah, The Long Road to Freedom: Inkundla ya Bantu (Bantu Forum) and the African Nationalist Movement in South Africa, 1938-1951 (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2005). 435 many years had looked towards the African American community for inspiration in their own struggles for justice, but now the cinema, recorded music, and popular literature rendered the aesthetics of American uniquely accessible to the public.7 At the same time, written humor in African languages was coming into its own. While on the surface these may seem like contradictory impulses, both were ways of evading white supervision. There is an emerging literature exploring how African languages, poorly understood by most whites, were ideal vehicles for communicating messages that otherwise would have faced strict censorship, especially on radio.8 At the same time, the adoption of heavily-stylized American aesthetics by writers such as Karabo Moses (Casey) Motsisi and Daniel Canodoise (Can) Themba were also a kind of cloaking mechanism. Satire wrapped in the jargon of pulp fiction helped these authors express ideas about South Africa that an unobservant reader might dismiss as derivative fantasy, but that in fact spoke powerfully to the moment. Certainly the first two decades after the Second World War were a period of momentous change in South Africa.9 In 1939, when Prime Minister Jan Smuts took the country into the war in aid of the United Kingdom, the most widely-discussed cultural fault line in both the local 7 See discussions in Christopher Ballantine, Marabi Nights; and David Coplan, In Township Tonight!; as well as Clive Glaser, Bo-Tsotsi: The Youth Gangs of Soweto, 1935-1976 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2000). See also Shane Graham, “Cultural Exchange in a Black Atlantic Web: South African Literature, Langston Hughes, and Negritude,” Twentieth Century Literature 60.4 (2014), 481-512. 8 See, for example, Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi, “‘You Are Listening to Radio Lebowa of the South African Broadcasting Corporation”: Vernacular Radio, Bantustan Identity, and Listenership, 1960-1994,” Journal of Southern African Studies 35.3 (2009), 575-594; Winston Mano, “Bantustan Identity, Censorship, and Subversion on Northern Sotho Radio Under Apartheid, 1960s-1980s,” in Radio in Africa: Publics, Cultures, Communities, eds. Liz Gunner, Dina Ligaga, and Dumisani Moyo (Johannesburg, South Africa: Wits University Press, 2012), 117-133. However, this contrasted sharply with the prevailing state of affairs in African language publishing, as Nomalanga Mkhize has explored. See Nomalanga Mkhize, “Away with Good Bantus: De-Linking African Language Literature from Culture, ‘Tribe,’ and Propriety,” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 15.1 (2016), 146-152. 9 As occurred during World War I, the demographic makeup of South Africa’s urban labor force was upended by the mass departure of white men to fight, combined with strong economic incentives attracting Africans to the cities. Anxiety over the prospect of an African urban majority in cities like Johannesburg contributed directly to the National Party’s adoption of apartheid as a signature policy. See T. R. H. Davenport, South Africa, 329-357; South Africa’s 1940s: Worlds of Possibilities, eds. Saul Dubow and Alan Jeeves (Cape Town, South Africa: Double Storey, 2005); and Hermann Giliomee, The Afrikaners, 439-446; 454-482. 436 establishment press and among commentators abroad was the conflict between Anglophones and Afrikaans-speakers. After the war, the shock election of 1948 confirmed that the old “Native question” had decisively eclipsed the “Race question” in importance. The future of the Union of South Africa was going to hinge on the willingness and ability of the white constitutional order to accommodate black demands for justice. It turned out that there was very little will to do this among whites. In the 1950s, the National Party was able to turn their technical 1948 victory (in which, it must be stressed, they lost the popular vote by more than 122,000 votes, or 11.5%) into a formidable electoral majority.10 On October 5, 1960, the white electorate voted by a margin of 52.3 to 47.7% to abolish the monarchy and rebrand the Union as the Republic of South Africa—a name deliberately echoing that of the old Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek that had been humiliated by the British army six decades prior. By 1961 the South African future was finally and firmly in right-wing Afrikaner hands. In his memoir Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela recounted how startling the National Party’s victory in 1948 was for him. At an A.N.C. meeting the day of the election, Mandela reports that the prospect of a Nationalist government was “barely discussed,” though afterward Oliver Tambo claimed to welcome the result, remarking that “now we will know exactly who our enemies are and where we stand.”11 Such comments reflected a long-standing frustration with double-dealing white liberals in African political circles—most acutely within the A.N.C. Youth League that H. I. E. Dhlomo supported, and in which Tambo and Mandela 10 This victory was enabled partly through mobilization of conservative support in rural areas (where votes were weighted up to one-third more than urban votes), but also among blue-collar Afrikaners in the Pretoria- Witwatersrand-Vereeniging urban industrial area. See Dan O’Meara, Forty Lost Years: The Apartheid State and the Politics of the National Party, 1948-1994 (Johannesburg, South Africa: Ravan Press, 1989); and Newell M. Stultz, The Nationalists in Opposition, 1934-1948 (Cape Town, South Africa: Human and Rousseau, 1975 [1974]). 11 Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 111; 112. 437 were leading figures. Even so, the first decade of National Party rule placed an unprecedented level of strain on the forces of African political liberation. D. F. Malan’s Nationalists used their parliamentary majority to sweeping effect, passing laws that would serve as the cornerstones of both petty apartheid (the 1949 Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, the 1950 Immorality Act, and the 1953 Reservation of Separate Amenities Act) and grand apartheid (the 1950 Group Areas Act, the 1950 Population Registration Act, and the 1951 Bantu Authorities Act), the latter of which sought to definitively sever African political aspirations from the Union’s whites-only constitutional framework.12 Entrenching this discriminatory morass was the absurdly broad Suppression of Communism Act (1950), which opened the way for almost any protest against apartheid’s legal framework to be deemed communist subversion, punishable by banning order and imprisonment.13 The A.N.C. at first attempted to resist these laws through peaceful mass action, launching the Defiance Campaign against a cluster of 1952 laws that tightened pass requirements.14 After the failure of this initiative to produce government concessions, in 1955 12 T. R. H. Davenport, South Africa, 361-381; Hermann Giliomee, The Afrikaners, 487-522. See also Deborah Posel, “The Apartheid Project, 1948-1970,” in The Cambridge History of South Africa, vol. 2, 319-368. For more on apartheid, see Apartheid’s Genesis, 1935-1962, eds. Phil Bonner, Peter Delius, and Deborah Posel (Johannesburg, South Africa: Ravan Press, 1993); Dan O’Meara, Forty Lost Years; Deborah Posel, The Making of Apartheid, 1948-1961 (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1997 [1991]). 13 T. R. H. Davenport, South Africa, 368-370; Robert Pincus, “Apartheid Legislation: The Suppression of Communism Act,” Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 5.2 (1966), 281-297. 14 See T. R. H. Davenport, South Africa, 366-371; Tom Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945 (New York, N.Y.: Longman, 1983): 33-66; Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 126-146; and Goolam Vahed, “‘Gagged and Trussed Rather Securely by the Law’: The 1952 Defiance Campaign in Natal,” Journal of Natal and Zulu History 31.2 (2013), 68-89. By 1952, black South Africans were no stranger to mass action. Mass protest against passes dates back to the 1913 Bloemfontein Anti-Pass Campaign, and in the 1946 an officially illegal mineworkers’ strike mobilized more than 60,000 workers under the aegis of the African Mine Workers’ Union (A.M.W.U.). Bus boycotts had also proven effective and remarkably successful in mobilizing Johannesburg’s African commuters. See Derek Charles Catsam, “Marching in the ‘Dark City’: Bus Boycotts in South Africa in the 1940s and the Limits and Promise of Comparative History,” Safundi 8.3 (2007), 315-325; T. Dunbar Moodie, “The Moral Economy of the Black Miners’ Strike of 1946,” Journal of Southern African Studies 13.1 (1986), 1-35; Dan O’Meara, “The 1946 African Mineworkers’ Strike and the Political Economy of South Africa,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 12.2 (1975), 146-173. 438 the A.N.C.—allied with the multiracial South African Congress of Trade Unions and Coloured, Indian, and white-led political organizations—held the Congress of the People in Kliptown, Soweto.15 This gathering, before it was dispersed by police, produced the Freedom Charter upon which the post-apartheid South African constitution is based, a document that advocated the political and economic transformation of the Union on the basis of a universal non-racial franchise.16 This effort was also met with a harsh official response, in the form of the 1956-1961 Treason Trial saga, which netted many of the leaders of the Congress of the People and convinced Africanists in the movement like Robert Sobukwe that multiracial cooperation was a strategic cul-de-sac.17 Indeed, it was a P.A.C.-led protest against passes on March 21, 1960, that provided the setting for what became known as the Sharpeville Massacre, an atrocity that resulted in 69 deaths and nearly 200 injuries, as well as the banning of both the P.A.C. and the A.N.C.18 Both organizations went underground and adopted courses of limited armed struggle in the wake of this unprecedented violence.19 In the span of less than twenty years, the African National Congress had undergone a stunning transformation from a small left-of-center advocacy 15 See Tom Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945, 67-90; Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 170-176. 16 For the text of the Freedom Charter, see The South Africa Reader: History, Culture, Politics, eds. Clifton Crais and Thomas V. McClendon (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014): 320-324. See also Legacy of Freedom: The A.N.C.’s Human Rights Tradition, ed. Kader Asmal with David Chidester and Cassius Lubisi (Johannesburg, South Africa: Jonathan Ball, 2005); and Rushil Ranchod, A Kind of Magic: The Political Marketing of the A.N.C. (Johannesburg, South Africa: Jacana Media, 2013): 44-68. 17 See Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 199-213; 242-261; and Kwandiwe Kondlo, In the Twilight of the Revolution: The Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania (South Africa), 1959-1994, 2nd ed. (Basel, Switzerland: Basler Africa Bibliographien, 2010 [2009]): 49-69. 18 See T. R. H. Davenport, South Africa, 394-398; Philip Frankel, An Ordinary Atrocity: Sharpeville and its Massacre (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001); Tom Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945, 201-230; Tom Lodge, Sharpeville: An Apartheid Massacre and its Consequences (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 236-239. 19 See Stephen R. Davis, The A.N.C.’s War Against Apartheid: Umkhonto weSizwe and the Liberation of South Africa (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2018): 27-57; Z. Pallo Jordan and Mac Maharaj, “South Africa and the Turn to Armed Resistance,” South African Historical Journal 70.1 (2018), 11-26; Brown Bavusile Maaba, “The P.A.C.’s War Against the State, 1960-1963", in The Road to Democracy in South Africa, vol. 1, ed. South African Democracy Education Trust (Cape Town, South Africa: Zebra Press, 2004), 257-297; and Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 269-276; 282-286 439 group to an underground liberation movement branded a “terrorist organization” by the white government.20 Triumph of the Big Bugs: R. R. R. Dhlomo as Rolling Stone In early 1943, with World War II still raging abroad, R. R. R. Dhlomo took up his new post as editor of Ilanga Lase Natal, moving to Durban from Johannesburg. Despite wartime pressures on the paper supply, Dhlomo’s humor column was resurrected in Natal: R. Roamer, Esq. became Rolling Stone, and Timbuctoo became Yap Yap Township. A new cast of characters soon followed: while Jeremiah and Joshua still made periodic appearances in the rebooted column, new characters appeared with humorous names. There was the pompous township politician Stockfell Mkhumbane, whose first name refers to a kind of rotating credit and savings association enduringly popular in South Africa’s townships, and whose surname is an alternative term for Durban’s racially-mixed Cato Manor community.21 Stockfell’s hangers-on had similarly colorful names, from Fusekani Madoda (which literally translates to “fuck off, men”) and Lalapandle E’Msizini (“Sleeps-outside at-home,” a reference to drunkenness) to the intellectual Verbose Sibankwa, A.B.C.D.F.G. (from isibankwa, a small lizard). 20 For more general background on the African National Congress, see Mary Benson, The African Patriots: The Story of the African National Congress of South Africa (London, U.K.: Faber and Faber, 1963); Heidi Holland, The Struggle: A History of the African National Congress (London, U.K.: Grafton, 1989); Peter Limb, The A.N.C.’s Early Years: Nation, Class and Place in South Africa Before 1940 (Pretoria, South Africa: University of South Africa Press, 2010); Rushil Ranchod, A Kind of Magic; and Treading the Waters of History: Perspectives on the A.N.C., eds. Kwandiwe Kondlo, Chris Saunders, and Siphamandla Zondi (Pretoria, South Africa: Africa Institute of South Africa, 2014). 21 For background on stokvels, see Belinda Bozzoli with Mmantho Nkotsoe, Women of Phokeng; Mark Nyandoro, “Defying the Odds, Not the Abuse: South African Women’s Agency and Rotating Savings Schemes, 1994-2017,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 19.5 (2018), 177-192; Grietjie Verhoef, “Informal Financial Service Institutions for Survival: African Women and Stokvels in Urban South Africa, 1930-1988,” Enterprise and Society 2.2 (2001), 259-256; and also discussion in Ellen Hellman, “The Importance of Beer Brewing in an Urban Native Slum Yard,” Bantu Studies 8 (1934). 39-60; and Hilda Kuper and Selma Kaplan, “Voluntary Associations in an Urban Township,” African Studies 3.4 (1944), 178-186. On Cato Manor, see Iain L. Edwards, “Mkhumbane Our Home: African Shantytown Society in Cato Manor Farm, 1946-1960” (Ph. D. diss.: University of Natal, 1989); Lindy Stiebel, “Made in Cato Manor: Ronnie Govender and the Fight to Preserve a Personal/Public Space,” Journal of Literary Studies 36.3 (2020), 114-129 440 If anything, the early Rolling Stone columns showcase Dhlomo at the height of his powers as a satirist. Some of Dhlomo’s most poignant comparisons of the treatment of humans and animals can be found in these years. In a column from September 1946, Dhlomo laments the case of Mphahleni Zikali, who saved almost four dozen white people from a sinking ship in 1942 and was being rewarded by the government with an ox. Dhlomo comments that “urban areas oxen are now the avowed enemies of Africans,” because every time something important happens they know they will be handed over to be slaughtered.22 Not only is an ox useless to Zikali except as meat for a fleeting feast, but the other oxen will have to lie to themselves about why their relations died. “Their children can say to their own children: ‘Our fathers were slaughtered on the occasion of the Victory celebrations. They died for a good cause,’” Dhlomo complains, “Then the young oxen would take pride in their origin and bless it.”23 There is a lot more going on under the surface of this column than first meets the eye. For oxen, victory in World War II and the upcoming royal visit are tragic occasions and not reasons to celebrate, because—ironically—they will result in slaughter. In the case of Zikali, white people are using an ox’s life to settle a debt, perpetuating the cycle of violence to another species. By anthropomorphizing the oxen, however humorously, Dhlomo draws a dark parallel between the oxen and black people, many of whom gave their lives for the war effort as members of the unarmed Native Military Corps.24 The column suggests that while white, black, and bovine all seem to be part of a single system of exchange and mutuality, the system really only satisfies white people. 22 Rolling Stone [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “Rolling Stone on an Ox,” Ilanga Lase Natal, September 26, 1946. 23 Rolling Stone [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “Rolling Stone on an Ox,” Ilanga Lase Natal, September 26, 1946. 24 See Kevin Frank Botha, “‘Warriors Without Weapons’: Black Servicemen in the Union Defence Force During the Second World War (M.A. thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1992). 441 Dhlomo had long been fascinated by the relationships between humans and animals, first experimenting with this theme at The Bantu World. Just as several of his columns in The Bantu World drew a bitter contrast between the way whites treated pets and the way whites treated Africans, at Ilanga Dhlomo tackled the same subject in columns on white efforts to protect monkeys (because, as one white person argued in the daily press, monkeys were in Durban before white people).25 Yet insects and cockroaches were the mainstay of his work in this area, inspired in no small part by the buggy reality of life in black communities and the lively discourse surrounding African sanitation playing out in the white press.26 The problem was not just that blacks lived in places with poor sanitation, but that official neglect often resulted in a circular official logic whereby the removal of Africans was justified on public health grounds and not municipal dereliction of duty. Thus the destinies of insects and Africans were inextricably linked, and sanitary campaigns spearheaded by municipalities and Native Affairs departments made use of much of the same rhetoric as segregationists did, producing irony on top of irony. In “Rolling Stone on Pests,” written in 1944, Dhlomo links the cockroach problem in Durban to the wartime blackout requirement, and speaks of a “ceaseless nightly battle [waged] against them with our hands and feet,” piling up a death toll “known only to the cockroach community.”27 This, in turn, leads to “the joy of the ants, who feed on the dead cockroaches.”28 25 Rolling Stone [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “Rolling Stone on an Ox,” Ilanga Lase Natal, September 26, 1946. 26 See Randall M. Packard, White Plague, Black Labour: Tuberculosis and the Political Economy of Health and Disease in South Africa (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1989); Maynard Swanson, “The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and Urban Native Policy in the Cape Colony, 1900-1909,” The Journal of African History 18.3 (1977), 387-410; Maynard Swanson, “‘The Asiatic Menace’: Creating Segregation in Durban, 1870-1900,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 16.3 (1983), 401-421; for a discussion of important caveats to this thesis with specific reference to Pietermaritzburg (the nearest city to Dhlomo’s birthplace), see Marc Epprecht, “The Native Village Debate in Pietermaritzburg, 1848-1925: Revisiting the ‘Sanitation Syndrome,’” The Journal of African History 58.2 (2017), 259-283. 27 Rolling Stone [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “Rolling Stone on Pests,” Ilanga Lase Natal, January 15, 1944. 28 Rolling Stone [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “Rolling Stone on Pests,” Ilanga Lase Natal, January 15, 1944. 442 In further columns Stockfell heads a commission to determine whether cockroaches, mosquitoes, or rats are “Public Enemy No. 1” in Durban townships, which eventually reports that the worst enemy of hygiene is human snuff-users spitting on the ground.29 Cockroaches then bring a libel suit against Rolling Stone for all that he has written against them.30 This and other insect columns can be read as allegories for the racial caste system, which treats the different racial groups as if they were different species. Another difference between R. R. R. Dhlomo’s Bantu World and Ilanga Lase Natal columns is his increasingly relaxed attitude towards alcohol.31 In The Bantu World when Dhlomo mentioned drink and drunkenness, he most often did so to stress its violent potential consequences. In his later columns as Rolling Stone, alcohol is treated far more casually. Stockfell Mkhumbane, Dhlomo’s new creation, combined the qualities of a pompous township “yapper” and a drunk, bolstered by his rotund “Public Opinion.” In the aforementioned column about public enemies Stockfell says at each adjournment he was obliged to “refreshen” himself with a cumulative total of “three bottles of ‘Make-Me-Forget’” and soda, rendering “the adjournments so costly,” in Stockfell’s words, “that by the time I heard the last, I was not quite up to the mark myself”32 The narrator Rolling Stone also takes much more of an interest in alcohol than R. Roamer ever did, reflecting changing standards of propriety that Dhlomo himself helped set in motion by discussing alcohol in a morally-neutral tone. 29 Rolling Stone [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “Rolling Stone on Public Enemies,” Ilanga Lase Natal, March 11, 1944; Rolling Stone [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “Rolling Stone on the Findings,” Ilanga Lase Natal, March 18, 1944. 30 Rolling Stone [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “Rolling Stone on Cockroach Protest,” Ilanga Lase Natal, August 5, 1944; Rolling Stone [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “Rolling Stone on the Case,” Ilanga Lase Natal, August 12, 1944. 31 There is an important literature on the significance of alcohol in South African history and in particular on the intersection of alcohol, race, and gender. See, for example, Paul La Hausse, Brewers, Beerhalls, and Boycotts: A History of Liquor in South Africa (Johannesburg, South Africa: Ravan Press, 1988); Liquor and Labour in Southern Africa, eds. Jonathan Crush and Charles Ambler (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1992); C. M. Rogerson, “‘In Their Right Place’; Beer Halls in Johannesburg, 1938-1962, African Studies 51.1 (1992), 95-122. 32 Rolling Stone [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “Rolling Stone on the Findings,” Ilanga Lase Natal, March 18, 1944. 443 In the run-up to the 1948 general election the Rolling Stone column turned away from allegory and flights of ironic fancy towards more straightforward attacks on segregation and the representation of Africans in the white press. Dhlomo opened the year with a non-humorous column commending the “Big Ones” for adding more Durban-Pietermaritzburg buses and spent the next several weeks decrying the pass system, white arrogance and indifference towards African conditions, alongside Africans’ tendency to let English-speaking whites off the hook for racism. 33 After April 24, roughly a month before the election, Dhlomo stopped writing the column and did not resume it until October, “rousing [him]self from self-imposed obscurity” to complain about a Natal Daily News advertisement touting a dog who “hates blacks”—Rolling Stone responds that he himself needs a watchdog, but would be deported if he advertised that his dog hated whites.34 The column did not return regularly to the pages of Ilanga before mid-1950, and on its return was much more closely focused on issues of racial injustice and apartheid. Why did the Rolling Stone column take such a hiatus between 1948 and 1950? We can only speculate; Dhlomo obviously remained the editor of the paper. In January 1949, Durban was rocked by anti-Indian violence perpetrated mostly by Africans, contributing to an already tense atmosphere; if these events played a role in interrupting the column they would have succeeded where World War II failed.35 Once he resumed in 1950, Dhlomo continued to publish Rolling Stone columns through the end of the decade, albeit with gaps that could last a year or more. From his columns we can infer with some confidence that R. R. R. Dhlomo—ever reluctant to take a position—felt particularly uncomfortable with the more radical turn in both 33 Rolling Stone [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “Rolling Stone on Pullman Buses,” Ilanga Lase Natal, January 3, 1948. 34 Rolling Stone [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “Rolling Stone on Super-‘Hatred,’” Ilanga Lase Natal, October 9, 1948. 35 See Ralph Callebert, “Working Class Action and Informal Trade on the Durban Docks, 1930s-1950s,” Journal of Southern African Studies 38.4 (2012), 847-861; Jon Soske, Internal Frontiers. 444 rhetoric and strategy black politics took from the 1940s onward. The barrage of train and tram talk that had so inspired Dhlomo in the 1930s had become a numbing torrent of chatter—it was not for nothing that his new column was set in Yap-Yap—as he complained in columns at the end of 1950. In “Rolling Stone on Stockfell Mkhumbane,” Stockfell is interviewed about his recent township advisory board victory, which he says came despite the odds: “I had to fight not only my opponents, Rolling Stone,” said the great man, filling his own glass with the contents of the bottle. We said, “Hawu, Baba, was the election fought with herbs and roots?” “No,” he said, emptying his glass. “I had to fight authors, journalists, printers, and publishers as well,” he said. For a moment we eyed him swiftly, thinking he had already emptied the glass “too many times.” We thought he was mentally unbalanced. But we only exclaimed: “Were your rivals in the literary circles?” “Well, I think so; because they attacked me with circulars written in burning words by authors and journalists. These circulars were printed and published and given away free, mahala and for nothing to all the residents of Yap-Yap Township.”36 Stockfell also says he had to fight the City Council, because “only a unanimous City Council in its hectic moments of unknown liberality and goodwill” would ever do what Stockfell’s opponents were demanding of it.37 And in a column published two weeks later, Rolling Stone criticized this group of over-educated and self-aggrandizing “Talkers” even more harshly—idle people, in Dhlomo’s opinion, who held forth on “Democracy, Nationalism, Boycotts, and God knows what other high-sounding terminologies,” while leaving the task of actually uplifting their own communities to whites.38 Now well into middle age, Dhlomo had seen explosive growth in black mass politics and media over the past three decades, even as organizations like the Bantu Men’s Social Centre remained firmly under white control, unleavened by even the illusion of 36 Rolling Stone [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “Rolling Stone on Stockfell Mkhumbane,” Ilanga Lase Natal, October 21, 1950. 37 Rolling Stone [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “Rolling Stone on Stockfell Mkhumbane,” Ilanga Lase Natal, October 21, 1950. 38 Rolling Stone [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “Rolling Stone on ‘Good Education,’” Ilanga Lase Natal, November 4, 1950. 445 black leadership. Dhlomo did not object to the goals of liberation politics, but he did feel that as long as this was true, whatever progress black South Africans might make would be built on a foundation of sand. The toll that the politics was taking on Dhlomo is subtle but unmistakeable in the Rolling Stone column. As R. Roamer, Esq. at The Bantu World, Dhlomo set himself up as a figure of authority, with his K.A. (Know-All) degree following closely behind him. Jeremiah and Joshua, by contrast, are represented as his intellectual subordinates and sometimes his employees. In Dhlomo’s Ilanga Lase Natal columns the dynamic is quite different: Stockfell Mkhumbane is the one with the “degree” (a P.O. or Public Opinion degree, confirmed by his girth). As a township politician he is also a fat-cat and a drunk, but Dhlomo no longer seemed to believe that a better alternative was possible. Indeed, in the election-themed columns just quoted Stockfell comes out as the least of all evils. And Rolling Stone, instead of looking down on Stockfell as R. Roamer had with Jeremiah and company, is written as Stockfell’s inferior. Rolling Stone usually approaches him with exaggerated deference, holding out for whatever crumbs might fall from the master’s table: The first part of him we saw enter our door was his Opinion which was soon followed by himself. From a close gaze at the Opinion we found that it has grown in size and dignity. The great man can no longer tie his shoe-laces without groaning and grunting like a pig fearing premature departure from this world… “What do you think of the Political Situation?” he asked us. We said it was bad. Anything can happen. He said, “Doesn’t it make you want to shake your hear more in sorrow than in anger to learn of the political mentalities of some Big Bugs in this country?” We said, in what way, Sir[?] We never forget to “Sir” him every time we answer him. He has money. He has a car. He has—well, you know. A man like that must be brushed the right way always.39 39 Rolling Stone [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “Rolling Stone on Mr. Stockfell,” Ilanga Lase Natal, February 1, 1947. 446 Stockfell and Rolling Stone’s mutual fondness for alcohol, to which the former has privileged access, reinforces the hierarchy of their relationship: “Good day, Sir,” we said to the Great man seated in his luxurious armchair. “We have come to congratulate you on your winning the Yap Yap Township Advisory Board elections.” “Thank you, Big Boy,” said Stockfell Mkhumbane, Yap Yap Township’s Mouthpiece and Earpiece. “We hear that it was a hard struggle, Sir,” we said, eyeing the bottle on the table, with the glass beside it. The Great man saw our look and invited us to sample the contents of the bottle. We did; and felt a glow of warmth and kindness swell inside us.40 Though R. R. R. Dhlomo still had more than two decades ahead of him, one can perceive in these apartheid-era columns a mounting weariness and dissatisfaction with life.41 A historian at heart, the elder Dhlomo believed as much as his brother H. I. E. that the revival of black South Africa could only come through a better appreciation of the precolonial heritage that many mission-educated Africans had rejected in their youth. For the Dhlomos, this Africa was important not only because it was as glorious as medieval Europe, but also because it was more egalitarian. It was a society that ostensibly balanced strong shared values with opportunities for individual achievement, and, for the elder Dhlomo, the mass political activism of the mid- twentieth century was doomed to fail if it was not animated by similar principles. While R. R. R. Dhlomo was not an ethnic chauvinist, he was also not immune to the pull of specifically Zulu organizations, and Shelley Z. Skikna discusses both his interest in Charles Mpanza’s Zulu Society and his abortive attempt, in the 1950s, to found the Abalondolozi Bamagugu EsiZulu 40 Rolling Stone [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “Rolling Stone on Stockfell Mkhumbane,” Ilanga Lase Natal, October 21, 1950. 41 One is reminded of Bloke Modisane describing patrons at his mother’s shebeen: “I felt that for them getting drunk was a purposeful destruction of the pain of their lives, a drowning of themselves in orgiastic expenditure.” See Bloke Modisane, Blame Me on History, 2nd ed. (Johannesburg, South Africa: Adriaan Donker, 1986): 39. 447 (“Preservers of the Treasures of the Zulus”) as a successor organization.42 Dhlomo also enjoyed a very positive relationship with the Zulu royal family after evidence from his school setwork Izikhali Zanamuhla (1935) was used to resolve the succession dispute that followed the death of King Solomon kaDinuzulu.43 One confronts Dhlomo’s dissatisfaction vividly in letters from the 1950s that survive at Durban’s Killie Campbell Africana Library. These letters mostly consist of unsuccessful appeals for funding to pursue research projects. In a letter to Killie Campbell dated June 24, 1957, Dhlomo wrote that “my soul longs to devote the rest of my life” to research “in Zulu that would be of help to our growing children.”44 Campbell was sympathetic, and on multiple occasions in the 1950s and early 1960s she reached out to friends like Senator Edgar Brookes and Professor Hansi Pollak of the University of Natal on Dhlomo’s behalf, but was unsuccessful in securing either a leave of absence for Dhlomo from his boss D. S. Harrison (managing director of the Bantu Press, Ltd.) or pointing Dhlomo in the direction of meaningful funding. Instead, it appears the best she could do was allow Dhlomo to use her library after its ordinary closing time of five o’clock—and before the African curfew in the tony Essenwood neighborhood where Campbell’s mansion was located. “I strongly urge you not to give up your present Important position as Editor of a newspaper, dealing with Africans and their affairs,” Campbell once wrote him, for three reasons: Firstly, you are doing good work for your people as you are now employed. Secondly, there is little or no money to be made by authors, and a more than hard struggle to keep a 42 See Shelley Z. Skikna, “Son of the Sun and Son of the Soil,” 65-116. 43 Shelley Z. Skikna, “Son of the Sun and Son of the Soil,” 84-88. See also Paul La Hausse, “‘Death is Not the End’: Zulu Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of the Zulu Cultural Revival,” in Zulu Identities: Being Zulu, Past and Present, eds. Benedict Carton, John Laband, and Jabulani Sithole (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2008), 256-271. 44 R. R. R. Dhlomo to Killie Campbell, June 24, 1957 (KCM6802), UKZN, Durban. 448 home going to those who pursue this life, and thirdly, I could not name anyone to whom you could apply to sponsor you in this.45 Though Campbell was twenty years Dhlomo’s senior, this reply was patronizing. Dhlomo was no fool—as one of the Union’s most prolific authors of Zulu setworks, he well knew that there was no money in publishing for Africans. When he was contributing stories to The Sjambok—a white paper!—and helping to edit by far the best-funded and most widely-read newspaper for Africans that had ever existed in South Africa, Dhlomo must have felt like he was at the vanguard of a golden age for African writers. Yet even as the African audience for books and periodicals expanded by leaps and bounds, his opportunities for free expression and creative autonomy either stagnated or slowly eroded. As editor of Ilanga, Dhlomo should have been revered as at least the second most powerful black journalist in the Union (after the editor of The Bantu World) and as such one of the most important journalists of any race—especially in such turbulent political times. Instead, he was compelled to approach his managing director as a suppliant. The story was the same with the white management of Shuter and Shooter, the Pietermaritzburg textbook publisher upon whom Dhlomo relied to distribute his books. Shuter and Shooter still exists, and still sells R. R. R. Dhlomo’s books—UShaka, UDingane, and UCetshwayo are all available for online purchase, though the most recent cover of UCetshwayo regrettably lists the author as “R. R. H. Dhlomo.”46 Unfortunately, however, perhaps in the course of moving offices from central Pietermaritzburg to its current headquarters, a great deal of correspondence relating to Dhlomo’s work with the Shuter and Shooter has vanished. Shelley Z. 45 Killie Campbell to R. R. R. Dhlomo, July 2, 1957 (KCM6802), UKZN, Durban. 46 “UCetshwayo (Revised Edition),” Shuter and Shooter Publishers, accessed December 2, 2020, . 449 Skikna’s 1984 thesis on Dhlomo is the only link we have to these lost documents, which vividly attest to the truth of what Campbell wrote about African authors. Dhlomo’s letter to Shuter and Shooter were full of entreaties for small sums of money—R60 here, R150 there—to be put towards small research trips as well as urgent medical expenses as his health began to fail in the mid-1960s.47 Moreover, the scope of Dhlomo’s studies was structurally limited by the understanding that his work would only be financially viable if it qualified as a school setwork. In a 1966 letter regarding Dhlomo’s UDinuzulu, written by a Natal schools inspector to Shuter and Shooter, we can see the difficulty inherent in balancing serious scholarship with the needs of white-run education departments: 1. The book deals with a part of history [the 1906 Bhambatha rebellion] which is far too recent to be the subject of school study. It will undoubtedly lead to heated discussions which cannot tend to better race relations…Inevitably [teachers] will find themselves placed in most invidious positions… 2. There is not enough story in the book for a J.C. [Junior Certificate] prescribed literature text. In fact the book is more a history source book than a novel…Dlomo [sic] assumes knowledge of the history of the times which I am sure the majority of the people do not have.48 It is absurd to argue that sixty years was not enough time to allow Zulu students to come to terms with the Bhambatha Rebellion, and telling that the letter-writer expects a “novel”—not a work of serious scholarship—from Dhlomo. As it happened, UDinuzulu was published in 1968, over the objections of the letter-writer, and the following year Dhlomo was even approached by the S.A.B.C., which wanted permission to broadcast thirty ten-minute excerpts from the book on 47 The rand (R) replaced the pound in February 1961 in anticipation of South Africa becoming a republic. One rand was worth roughly $1.40-1.50 U.S. throughout the 1960s. See Shelley Z. Skikna, “Son of the Sun and Son of the World,” 27-31. 48 Letter to C. L. S. Nyembezi included in R. R. R. Dhlomo’s lost Shuter and Shooter correspondence, January 19, 1966, quoted in Shelley Z. Skikna, “Son of the Sun and Son of the World,” 228; 230. 450 their black South African service, Radio Bantu.49 Dhlomo, however, only received R50 out of the transaction. R. R. R. Dhlomo wrote the Rolling Stone column fairly regularly between 1956 and 1962 —his last major satirical effort. Unlike his earlier columns from the 1950s, Dhlomo largely avoided politics, returning to the humorous anecdotes about domestic life and romance which older readers would have found familiar from his Bantu World days. He wrote less and less about the township magnate Stockfell Mkhumbane, and more about Lalaphandle, now styled “the No-Good Son of So and So” and the shebeen queen Sis Kate.50 While at this point his subject matter was usually derivative of material he had already published, there were still some flashes of originality, such as in his column “Learn Three Languages at the Same Time”: Mina ayazi ini yena lo cats talk at night, maar ek know hulle praat, because they talk, see? Now, meneer, loboy kawena vra for more geld as times are hard. All over die dorp people talk about money, mina futhi funa more mali mina sebenza like mbongolo as I tell you before. Ekskuus, meneer, if I talk too much kakhulu in this brief, letter, or ncwadi. You see, sir, I write to you in zonke lo speak for this country which is what the learned people call multi-racial, that zonke zizwe live together… Now, sir, you should be proud kakhulu impela wena got lo clever kitchen boy wat kan skryf in drie languages like die professors of Yap Yap Bantu University what knows all languages even the one they call the dead one. Mina kabanga when you get such a baie mooi brief you will nika mina more pay, for mina wake with the hoenders and sleep when die cats come out by the night. This is maningi sebenza, nkosi kamina, my meneer, sir. Now I say, sala kahle, tot siens, goodbye from your good boy what works like mbongolo kaMasipalati. I don’t know what these cats talk about at night, but I know they talk, because they talk, see? Now, sir, this boy of yours is asking for more money as times are hard. All over the town people talk about money, I also want more money, I work like a donkey as I tell you before. Excuse me, sir, if I talk too much in this letter. You see, sir, I write to you in all 49 Shelley Z. Skikna, “Son of the Sun and Son of the World,” 30. For background on Radio Bantu, see Sekibakiba Peter Lekgoathi, “You Are Now Listening to Radio Lebowa of the South African Broadcasting Corporation," 575-580; and Malcolm Theunissen, Victor Nikitin, and Melanie Pillay, The Voice—The Vision, 75-85. 50 The name is spelled both Lalaphandle and Lalapandle at different times, reflecting newer and older Zulu spellings, respectively. 451 of the languages of this country which is what the learned people call multiracial, that every race lives together… Now, sir, you should be very, very proud that you have this clever kitchen boy that can write in three languages like the professors of Yap Yap Bantu University, that knows all languages even the one they call the dead one. I think when you get such a very beautiful letter you will give me more pay, for I wake with the chickens and sleep when the cats come out at night. This is a lot of work, my chief. Now I say “stay well,” “until next time,” “goodbye” from your good boy that works like a municipal donkey.51 Here we see Dhlomo experimenting with language and turning the concept of “broken English” on its head. Apartheid policies seeking to separate races and cultures are held out for ridicule in this anti-apartheid riff on the century-old Kaatje Kekkelbek routine, as this “kitchen boy” is able to understand and use English, Zulu, and Afrikaans vocabulary simultaneously, more adeptly than his boss would likely be able to. Of course, by the late 1950s, the promiscuous township argot known as tsotsitaal was already well-known, and had been featured in D. Can Themba’s photographic short-story “Baby Come Duze” in Drum magazine.52 Dhlomo was no longer at the forefront of representing urban African life; Themba belonged to a new generation of African writers who had grown up with the black commercial press and came of age amid the raucous politics of the 1940s. More evidence of Dhlomo’s artistic slump during this time is the increasingly formulaic content of his columns. One can only enjoy hearing how Lalaphandle’s wife accused him of infidelity because he was talking in his sleep so many times.53 Dhlomo’s 51 Rolling Stone [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “Rolling Stone’s Corner: Learn Three Languages at the Same Time,” Ilanga Lase Natal, August 29, 1959. I have marked Zulu (or, more properly, Fanakalo) words in italics and Afrikaans words in bold. 52 D. Can Themba, “Baby Come Duze,” Drum (Johannesburg, South Africa), April 1956. Both Fanakalo and tsotsitaal have been mooted at various times as simpler alternatives to the many African languages spoken in South Africa. See, for example, D. T. Cole, “Fanagalo and the Bantu Languages in South Africa,” African Studies 12.1 (1953), 1-9; Leketi Makalela, “Trans-languaging in Kasi-taal: Rethinking Old Language Boundaries for New Language Planning,” Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics 42 (2013), 111-125. 53 See for example, “Rolling Stone’s Corner: All Because He Talked in His Sleep,” Ilanga Lase Natal, February 8, 1958; “Rolling Stone’s Corner: Danger of Talking in One’s Sleep,” Ilanga Lase Natal, April 4, 1959; and “Rolling Stone’s Corner: Danger When Lalaphandle Talks in His Sleep,” Ilanga Lase Natal, June 25, 1960, for a small sampling. 452 views on what was funny about love and marriage were no more progressive in the Drum Decade (see below) as they were three decades earlier, and they were certainly no more interesting. And so it was that the first great satirist of the black South African press, in the vein of his mentor Stephen Black and his younger brother H. I. E., exited the scene a broken man, without fulfilling what he felt was his potential. If his columns were repetitive, Dhlomo need not take all the blame. Indeed, one of the things that is most striking when one examines Dhlomo’s full archive of humor is how little changed in terms of the various “pinpricks” and injustices that Dhlomo was compelled to tackle. In his Bantu World columns there is a palpable freshness in his critique, an optimistic playfulness implying that such outrages were not long for this world. These aspirations were thwarted in the succeeding decades by a white regime which had no interest in granting the rights of citizenship to Africans, no matter how educated or witty. The terms in the columns may have changed: “development along their own lines” gets replaced by “apartheid,” and buses replaced trams as topics of discussion, but the substance of racial oppression remained the same. Stagnation can be just as telling as change as we consider the humor of the early apartheid era. If anything, the scope of Dhlomo’s critique of white supremacy grew more attenuated as time went on. In The Bantu World Dhlomo wrote bitterly sarcastic columns like his 1934 “Manufactured Languages,” a piece that indicts not only the specific practice of European meddling in the orthography of African languages, but attacks missionaries for ensnaring Africans in the framework of white supremacy.54 Published at such an early date, it survives as a 54 “R. Roamer Talks to the People: Manufactured Languages,” The Bantu World, October 6, 1944. 453 passionate cri de cœur against the issues we have already discussed with publishers and white gatekeepers—issues Dhlomo would spent the rest of his life unsuccessfully attempting to transcend. Three decades of bitter experience later, Dhlomo fell back on other topics to avoid talking about apartheid, and when he did, he cast demeaning measures as irrational and silly rather than unjust, as in this item—one of his last Jeremiah-Joshua dialogues: Jer: I call you stupid because I saw you stretch out your hand trying to shake that White man’s hand. Jos: How does that make me a stupid [sic]? Jer: You must not shake hands with White people. Jos: But how can I greet them when they come to my place? Jer: Greet them the “Bantu way.” Jos: Jerry, man, be serious. What is the “Bantu” way of greeting? Jer: I do not know; but there is one because from now on you as a teacher must not shake hands with a White inspector the White way. Shake his hand the “Bantu” way. Jos: Jerry, you know what? Jer: Yes? Jos: If it was not so early in the morning I would think you had already gone to Sis Katie’s for a quick one. I cannot understand you at all.55 In the last dozen years or so of his life, with younger brother dead and his own health on the decline, R. R. R. Dhlomo lost interest in satire, and, it seems, increasingly lost interest in Ilanga Lase Natal. This is perhaps a significant reason why his impact has been largely neglected in the decades since his death. Even Obed Kunene remained at arm’s length—the man who took over “Rolling Stone’s Corner” in 1962, signing off as “Uncle Joe” and the following year succeeded Dhlomo as editor of Ilanga. Unlike John Langalibalele Dube, who mentored Dhlomo in the 1920s, R. R. R. did not cultivate a protegé. In an interview conducted by oral historians at the University of Natal in 1979, Kunene put it poignantly: 55 Rolling Stone [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “Rolling Stone’s Corner: Must Watch Your Step in Shaking Hands!,” Ilanga Lase Natal, April 2, 1960. 454 He was definitely a frustrated man…with the kind of distance that existed between himself and the rest of us yokels, we were not always in a position to know the details of this, but he definitely was not the happiest man around, or the happiest editor that…I met. He was not doing his work full-time; he seemed to spend part of his time in the office and part of his time at Pietermaritzburg, which was his home, and although he wrote—mostly columns—in both English and Zulu, he seemed to be vastly preoccupied with his own novel writing—Zulu novel writing. So…I could never really claim to have gained much from Mr. Dhlomo’s editorship, because I never had the opportunity. Nor, for that matter, did any one of the young reporters who were at Ilanga then, have the opportunity to be close enough to the man to come away with much benefit from his wisdom and from his experience as an editor. There was this inexplicable gulf between himself and ourselves, and the only times we got to meet him really would be when he felt like addressing us on some issue—usually not, you know, the most serious of issues. Some petty little thing… and that was the only time we would get to meet him. So I would really feel somewhat incompetent, you know, to comment broadly on his time as editor of this paper. Something I regret because before then I had great respect for him, which never disappeared. As I was saying…we did some of his books at school…56 Dhlomo’s only son Reggie, who had been abandoned by his father along with his first wife when he went to live with Gertrude Dhlamini, worked as a photographer at Ilanga while his father was still editor, but was pointedly not present at the unveiling of his father’s tombstone.57 Always “a man of very few words,” according to the nephew who drove him to the hospital for the last time, by the time of his passing R. R. R. Dhlomo had become an especially elusive figure.58 After leaving his post as editor, Dhlomo continued to write a political column for Ilanga, and was even featured in a newspaper advertisement for Ellis Brown Coffee and Chicory Mixture in 1970. “R. R. R. Dhlomo, former Editor of Ilanga, and well-known author and historian says he could write a book about Ellis Brown’s delicious flavour,” reads the caption.59 When he died on May 16, 1971, the only assets factored into his estate were R697.66 in royalties 56 Obed Kunene, interview by Andrew Manson and Deanne Collins, September 19, 1979, on audiocassette (KCAV 123), UKZN, Durban. 57 Percy Khumalo, “High Praise for Local Zulu Writer,” Echo (supplement to the Natal Witness [Pietermaritzburg, South Africa]), November 1, 1984. 58 Edgar Dhlomo, interview by author, July 2, 2019, Mbumbulu, South Africa. 59 Advertisement in Ilanga Lase Natal, April 7, 1970. 455 from Shuter and Shooter for the period 1972-1974 and a house in his ancestral village of Edendale: a 517 square foot dwelling on a half-acre lot that was appraised for R2,250 but actually sold for three times that amount.60 R. R. R. Dhlomo’s will named Gertrude Dhlamini as his sole heir, but she died soon after Dhlomo. After nine years of legal wrangling Victoria Nxaba Dhlomo was able to secure half of her husband’s estate. Comparing the press coverage of R. R. R. Dhlomo’s death in 1971 to his younger brother’s in 1956, one is struck by the paucity of the former. H. I. E. Dhlomo was mourned by correspondents in essays and poems published for some weeks after his death, whereas R. R. R. Dhlomo was the subject of just a few brief articles in The World and Ilanga. One reason for this comes down to the format of the two papers—by 1971 they were a far cry from the elite petty- bourgeois organs they had once been. Crammed full of pictures, their tone had become light and their politics evasive. Though Dhlomo’s funeral was attended by many prominent people, including A. W. G. Champion, H. Selby Msimang, and Prof. C. L. S. Nyembezi, his grave in the Sinathing Cemetery, Edendale, went unmarked for the first decade after his death.61 He did not receive the send-off he deserved.62 The Unbreakable Stick: K. E. Masinga as Msimbithi Yet R. R. R. Dhlomo’s humor column was not the only, nor even the most important humorous offering in Ilanga Lase Natal in the decades following the Second World War. Arguably Ilanga’s most popular feature during these decades was the column (usually more of a page) attributed to 60 “Estate of the Late Dhlomo Robert Reginald Rolfu [sic],” MSCE-LEER-01-2889/1974, PAR, Pietermaritzburg. 61 Percy Khumalo, “High Praise for Local Zulu Writer,” Echo, November 1, 1984. 62 On A. W. G. Champion see A. W. G. Champion, The Views of Mahlathi; and Wonga F. Tabata, “A. W. G. Champion.” On H. Selby Msimang, see Sibongiseni M. Mkhize, Principles and Pragmatism in the Liberation Struggle. On C. L. S. Nyembezi, see Noemio N. Canonici, “C. L. S. Nyembezi’s Use of Traditional Folktales in his Igoda Series of School Readers” (M.A. thesis: University of Natal, 1985), especialy 5-7 and 219-224. 456 “Msimbithi, Umfana weKhishi,” whose mysterious identity is suggested by an otherwise inconspicuous line in that paper’s report on Dhlomo’s funeral: Inkundla yamahlaya okuhalelisa imisebenzi kaMnuz. Dhlomo beyisisontweni lasePresbyterian kwaCaluza, izilomo zezikhulumi ebezivikisana ngesikhwili somsimbithi nguMnuz. K. E. Masinga, obephethe izintambo zohlelo. There was a forum for jokes congratulating the works of Mr. Dhlomo at the KwaCaluza Presbyterian Church, and the mouths of the speakers were managed by the unbreakable fighting-stick of Mr. K. E. Masinga, who was handling the schedule.63 As the above passage explains, King Edward Masinga was the master of ceremonies at R. R. R. Dhlomo’s funeral. He is described as wielding an isikhwili or “short, thick, knobless fighting stick” made of umsimbithi (Milettia caffra in Latin) which possesses a dense, hard wood ideal for fighting sticks.64 The phrase was a sly reference to Masinga’s famous noms-de-plume —“Msimbithi Umfana weKhishi” (Msimbithi the Kitchen Boy) and “Induku Engaphukiyo” (the Unbroken Stick). Though Masinga is a much more famous figure today than R. R. R. Dhlomo, no scholar so far has explored the dimension of Masinga’s contributions to South African culture that lies behind those monikers. Despite Masinga’s acknowledged importance as the father of African language radio in South Africa, scholarly references to Msimbithi are few and far between. At the time of research, the first and for a long time only reference I was able to locate was a passage from a 63 “Ufihlwe Ngamahlaya UMnuz. Dhlomo,” Ilanga Lase Natal, May 22, 1971. The italics are added. 64 As the scientific name suggests, the historical English name for this tree is Kaffir Ironwood, and for obvious reasons is not much used today. See C. M. Doke and B. W. Vilakazi, Zulu-English Dictionary, 427; 756. Stick- fighting remains a popular pastime in rural Zululand. See Benedict Carton and Robert Morrell, “Zulu Masculinities, Warrior Culture and Stick Fighting: Reassessing Male Violence and Virtue in South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 38.1 (2012), 31-53. 457 1958 paper by the anthropologist Absolom Vilakazi on class stratification in rural Zululand.65 Describing the habits of Christians in the Nyuswa reserve, Vilakazi writes that Tea is always offered to a stranger as hospitality, and people feel very uncomfortable and apologize profusely if they cannot show this hospitality. One Christian woman said to the writer: “Please do not report me to Msimbithi, for I have no tea leaves and Msimbithi has just written an article in the Ilanga Lase Natal about how stingy we Christians are” (Msimbithi, we may explain, was a newspaper columnist whose articles…were a humorous but much-dreaded commentary on the social habits of Christians and educated Africans in general. This leads us to another social characteristic of the Christians: their newspaper- mindedness and sensitivity to newspaper criticism of their social customs. It is difficult to meet any Christian in the whole of the Reserve, or any literate person, for that matter, who has not heard of Msimbithi and who does not use Msimbithi’s phraseology to characterize modern behavior patterns.66 Vilakazi’s words are easily corroborated by examining post-World War II issues of Ilanga. Space came at a price in that paper, and the striking thing about Msimbithi’s column is its incredible length, often taking up an entire page on its own. This is before one reckons with the letters that streamed in to the paper from correspondents, thanking Msimbithi for his columns and usually agreeing with his perspective. When Obed Kunene began writing Ilanga’s humor column in 1962, his nom-de-plume “Uncle Joe” was taken from a longtime character in Msimbithi’s column. Msimbithi was every bit at central to Ilanga Lase Natal’s brand in the post World War II-era as R. Roamer, Esq. or the Editress had been at Bantu World before the war. If Masinga was Msimbithi (and this further confirmed by a surviving associate, Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi), his already massive impact on the history of Zulu literature as a writer and 65 It should be noted that Absolom Vilakazi was a leading Zulu scholar as well as the first black president of the African Studies Association, elected in 1973 while in exile in the United States. See C. Gerald Fraser, “Scholars’ Group Elects a Black,” The New York Times, November 4, 1973. 66 Absolom L. Vilakazi, “A Reserve From Within,” Practical Anthropology 5.3 (1958): 129. Vilakazi italicizes the word Msimbithi each time it appears. 458 broadcasting pioneer must be reassessed to include his journalistic accomplishments, which have gone totally unremarked upon.67 The name Msimbithi had another meaning as well, which would have been known to keener students of Zulu history. It was the name of Shaka kaSenzagakhona’s translator, whom whites like Henry Francis Fynne and Francis Farewell in the 1820s knew only as Jacob—a Xhosa-speaker whose previous encounters with white people in the Cape Colony had left a very bad taste in his mouth. In the Cape Colony, Jacob had been arrested for stock theft and imprisoned on Robben Island; later, working as a translator on a British surveying expedition around Delagoa Bay, he swam to shore and found his way to Shaka’s court. There he established a prosperous homestead and warned Shaka many times of the dark motives of the English.68 A “perfidious and designing villain” in the eyes of the whites, Jacob was the first example in Natal’s history of the dangers posed by Africans with linguistic knowledge and experience of European settler society.69 This as well would have been familiar to Masinga, who like R. R. R. Dhlomo had received his education at John Langalibalele Dube’s prestigious Ohlange Institute. In a 1986 interview, K. E. Masinga described his hiring at the S.A.B.C. in theatrical terms. As paraphrased by Liz Gunner, Desperate for the war news to be broadcast to Zulu listeners in their own language, [Masinga] walked into the Durban SABC studios and asked to be employed for this purpose as the first Zulu announcer. He met with a refusal, but instead of walking out sadly—or angrily—he performed his exit within a particular genre. Drawing on a set of 67 Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi, personal communication, September 9, 2019. 68 The main (and imperfect) source for this information are the diaries of Henry Francis Fynne and Nathaniel Isaacs, early Natal settlers, who despised Jacob. See Henry Francis Fynne, The Diary of Henry Francis Fynne, eds. James Stuart and D. Mck. Malcolm (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: Shuter and Shooter, 1986 [1950]) and Nathaniel Isaacs, Travels and Adventures in Eastern Africa, Descriptive of the Zoolus, Their Manners, Customs, Etc., Etc., with a Sketch of Natal, vol. 2 (London, U.K.: Edward Churton, 1836): 251-258; also summarized in Rajend Mesthrie, “Words Across Worlds: Aspects of Language Contact and Language Learning in the Eastern Cape, 1800-1850,” African Studies 57.1 (1998), 21-22. 69 Nathaniel Isaacs, Travels and Adventures in Eastern Africa, vol. 2, 257. 459 gestures and an array of semiotics recognised as part of the powerful native exotic, he walked out backwards from the presence of the man who had said ‘No!’ (as one would when leaving the presence of Zulu royalty). As he did so, he exclaimed, as one would for Zulu royalty, ‘Bayede Wena weNdlovu! [Hail, You of the Royal house!; literally, ‘of the Elephant’] Bayede!’ At which point—so the narrative goes—the official figure of authority (undoubtedly the journalist and ethnomusicologist Hugh Tracey), changed his mind, and a deal was struck.70 Even if this anecdote was embellished, it is still a powerful example of the way communication between white and black men in South Africa was complicated by contradictory understandings of respect and politeness. The first part of the story shows Masinga conducting himself in a manner befitting a white man—confidently and even audaciously securing an audience with Hugh Tracey (then the head of the S.A.B.C.’s Durban studios), and stating his request without hesitation. When this is rebuffed, Masinga adopts an entirely different affect, addressing a midlevel civil servant as the Zulu king. By walking backwards, addressing him in Zulu and averting his eyes (another traditional sign of respect), Masinga gave up on approaching Tracey as one man to another and chose instead to do so as noble savage to white chief. Degrading as it may have been, K. E. Masinga got what he wanted out of the exchange. Initially Masinga’s broadcasts were very rudimentary—only three minutes long—but by September 1942 they had been expanded to half an hour. Transistor radios did not yet exist, and very few Africans could access electricity, let alone afford the bulky radio sets of the day, so the government placed loudspeakers at strategic points within townships and mining compounds where people were likely to gather. As Thokozani N. Mhlambi notes, this meant that radio had 70 See “Izihlabani Zomsakazo uMnu. K. E. Masinga,” Acc. 65982, Cat. T (Z/94) 161, South African Broadcasting Corporation Sound Archives, Durban, South Africa, paraphrased in Liz Gunner, Radio Soundings: South Africa and the Black Modern (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2019): 35. Bracketed text in original. Thokozani N. Mhlambi provides a transcription of another, earlier interview with Masinga (c. 1953-1962) in English. See Thokozani N. Mhlambi, “Early Radio Broadcasting in Africa: Culture, Modernity, and Technology” (Ph. D. diss.: University of Cape Town, 2015): 148-153. 460 to compete with the already crowded sonic landscape of these areas; a far cry from the stereotype of a white nuclear household gathered around the family radio.71 There is some confusion about whether the first Zulu voice on the air was Masinga, his Zulu Society colleague Charles Mpanza, or H. I. E. Dhlomo, who also was involved in the initiative for a time (see Chapter 6). In any case, the vast majority of recordings that once existed of these broadcasts have been lost. Of the trio, it was Masinga who remained longest on the airwaves, and it was he who entered public consciousness as the black voice of the S.A.B.C. Masinga’s career at the S.A.B.C. spanned three decades, and continued long after his formal retirement in 1971. Liz Gunner evokes the African trickster trope to describe his career at this stiflingly conservative state broadcaster, marveling at the extent to which Masinga was able to cultivate personal notoriety and popularity at his post.72 His bosses took no chances; everything Masinga said on-air had to be translated into English and pre-approved by higher-ups, and, when granted a passport in 1957 to embark on an educational tour of the United States, he had to put down a large deposit to be reclaimed only on returning and surrendering said passport.73 Yet with his resonant voice and skillful invocation of Zulu culture and identity, Masinga was able to mold the modern technology of radio into something recognizably Zulu. Both Hugh Tracey, Charles Mpanza, and Masinga were keen to preserve what they understood as Zulu tradition, albeit to somewhat different ends. In the course of their radio work, Masinga and Mpanza aided Tracey enormously in the latter’s efforts to record and transcribe African songs from Natal and beyond, the nucleus of what remains today as the 71 Thokozani N. Mhlambi, “Sound in Urban Public Space: Loudspeaker Broadcasts in Johannesburg and Durban in South Africa, 1940s,” Cultural Studies 34.6 (2020), 959-978. 72 Liz Gunner, Radio Soundings, 35-37. 73 Liz Gunner, Radio Soundings, 46-47; Thokozani N. Mhlambi, “Sound in Urban Public Space,” 971. 461 International Library of African Music at Rhodes University in the Eastern Cape.74 Tracey’s personal taste and resulting prescriptive tendencies are well-known in scholarly literature; like many other white “experts” on Africans, he strove to find music that was “uncorrupted” by European or African-American influences, supposedly reflective of a pristine precolonial Africa and threatened by the onslaught of modernity.75 For his part, Masinga would address his viewers in terms that recalled heroic Zulu history, not altogether dissimilar from his show of obeisance to Hugh Tracey at his hiring. “Zuuuluuu!,” he would shout, elongating each syllable, “Siyanibingelela mabandla kaMjokwana kaNdaba” (“We greet you all, assemblies of Mjokwana of Ndaba,” Shaka’s royal lineage).76 According to Mhlambi, Masinga balanced stentorian deliveries and explicit appeals to Zuluness with a consummate ability to ncokola nabantu, which Doke and Vilakazi define as joking or teasing people, but which Mhlambi defines more precisely as “vernacularity…an ability to speak to people in a light-hearted, approachable, informal, and welcoming way.”77 Given what Masinga was up against—the crowded informal and semi-formal marketplaces of Natal’s black urban communities—the ability to connect personally with an audience was no mean feat. But it is not only in the aural domain that Masinga accomplished this. In his weekly 74 According to Mhlambi, Mpanza was responsible for finding musicians to play on the Zulu language broadcasts. See Thokozani N. Mhlambi, “Sound in Urban Public Space,” 971-972. More on Mpanza’s cooperation with white authorities in the cause of preserving Zulu culture can be found in Shula S. Marks, “Patriotism, Patriarchy, and Purity: Natal and the Politics of Zulu Ethnic Consciousness,” in The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa, ed. Leroy Vail (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1989): 217-218; 223. For background on Tracey, see Paulette Coetzee, “Dancing with Difference: Hugh Tracey on and in (African) Music,” Safundi 16.4 (2015), 396-418; and For Future Generations: Hugh Tracey and the International Library of African Music, ed. Diane Thram (Makhanda, South Africa: International Library of African Music, 2010). 75 See Garrett Felber, “Tracing Tribe: Hugh Tracey and the Cultural Politics of Retribalization,” South African Music Studies 30-31 (2011), 31-43. 76 Thokozani N. Mhlambi, “African Pioneer: K. E. Masinga and the Zulu ‘Radio Voice’ in the 1940s,” Journal of Radio and Audio Media 26.2 (2019): 212. 77 Thokozani N. Mhlambi, “African Pioneer,” 225-226; C. M. Doke and B. W. Vilakazi, Zulu-English Dictionary, 533. 462 Ilanga Lase Natal column, Masinga demonstrated great agility and wit, applying the modern ideology of the sense of humor to the domain of written Zulu.78 By this means, Masinga became a household name, the satirical scourge of the Nyuswa Reserve of which Absolom Vilakazi would later write. Masinga’s involvement with Ilanga Lase Natal started before R. R. R. Dhlomo’s editorship of the paper. Perhaps because of his affiliation with the S.A.B.C., his professed politics were to the right of Dhlomo’s. Here, in a 1942 column, he complains about the political ferment in the country under the nom-de-plume “Mkhabawukethi” (“Belly-is-a-Voter”): Niyabona, bantu bakwethu, umlungu yonke lento anayo namuhla uyaye athi wayisebenzela iminyaka eyikulungwane ngawakho akazimisele ukuba ayinike omunye umuntu masinya. Uma ufuna akunike umbuso wakhe, name juluka ubemanzi ufuna inhlalo engcono. Uhlale ukhala njalo. Ubusanikweni, ukhale. Ngasemqondweni ukhaliphele ukuzifunda izinto zonke. Uma umuntu omnyama esethanda ukuba zonke izinto azifunde, us’esendleleni yenkululeko. Nikuyeke loku, maZulu amahle, ukuba nithi “Ngezikhathi zaoShaka kwang’ukuthi nokuthi, kunje kunje.” Selafa lelo! Lafa ngoCetshwayo, lafa laphela. Kufuneka ukuba s’akhe elisha manje ngokufuna inhlakanipho yomlungu. Uma sifuna inhlakanipho, sifune yona kuphela, singazihluphi ngokufuna ukuba ngabelungu abamnyama. You see, my people, the white man has all that he has today and he says he worked for it over a thousand of your years and he is not willing to give it to anyone else immediately. If you want to be given his kingdom, sweat it out and seek a better lifestyle. You are always crying. Don’t cry and cry. Mentally you are smart enough to read all things. If a black person wants to learn everything, he or she is on the path to freedom. Beautiful Zulus, stop saying, “In Shaka’s time it was like this and that, like this or like this.” That’s dead! It died in the time of Cetshwayo, it truly died out. We must build anew now by seeking the wisdom of the white man. If we seek wisdom, that’s all we want; let’s not worry about wanting to be black white people.79 Like Dhlomo, then, Masinga saw it as part of his task to call people back from the debasement of European customs and appeal to them as Zulus, to renew their ethnic pride and— 78 See Daniel Wickberg, The Senses of Humor, and Chapter 2 of the present study. 79 “Eziphakwa Mkhabawukhethi,” Ilanga lase Natal, May 30, 1942. Translated by the author. 463 with it—their dignity. But most of Masinga’s columns had nothing to do with African politics as such. Masinga was a master storyteller, and whereas few of his early radio broadcasts survive, by reading his Ilanga columns one readily perceives his giftedness at ukuncokola nabantu (ukuncokola naBantu, if you like—entertaining the Africans): Ubani lo owathi amaTea-Room ethu esithi thina aphambili izindawo zokuba kuzodla abelungwana abashonile ngoba bebalekela imali eningi ekhokhwa kwawakubo. Bashona qede bakhumbule ukuthi abizoshonela emaTea-Room ethu? Bawenza indawo yokushonela kanti thina sithi indawo yethu yokunkinsa? Ayi! Khuzani banini maTea Room xoshani okhwala emaTea Room ethu isithunazo lesi ukuba indawo yokunkinsa bayenze indawo yabo yokuzoshonela khona. Kwawabo abangeni ngoba besaba ukushona nokuxathuka. Pho ke bazoxathukela kwawethu? Khuzani banini maTea Room. Futhi aninalo iLayisense lokufunza abelungu. Who is it that speaking about our Tea-Rooms said that they are the best places for young white men to eat who have been ruined because they are running away from a lot of money being owed at home. They are broke and remember that they will not be broke in our Tea-Rooms? They make it a place of ruination while we call it our place of living large? Wow! Order the tea-room owners to throw out those who cry in our Tea-Room; it is an inappropriate thing to be in a place of living large making it a place of their ruin there. Those do not come in because they are afraid to be ruined and filthy-dirty. So we can be filthy too? Command the tea-room owners. Also you don’t have a license to feed whites.80 Here is a dramatic reversal of segregation’s logics: white people who are “ruined” (the root -shon- is also used to mean “fallen” or “died”) clutter the tables of Natal’s African tea-rooms, weeping in filthy rags. As always, Masinga’s appeal is to African dignity, with which this kind of thing does not comport. Interspersed with the text are brief rhetorical questions and interjections, further contributing to the reader’s sense of being addressed in real life, outside the newspaper page. 80 “Ezika Msimbithi,” Ilanga Lase Natal, October 21, 1944. Translated by the author. 464 Indeed, less sarcastic and more direct that R. Roamer. Esq., or Rolling Stone, the Msimbithi, Umfana weKhishi column incorporates a wonderful orality. Its language that can be sophisticated at times, yet always flows smoothly and logically according to the rhythm of ordinary speech. Perhaps this is an unconscious example of Masinga’s well-honed broadcasting skills coming to the fore, or, perhaps, knowing that it was popular for newspaper content to be read allowed for the benefit of people who were not literate, Masinga actively calibrated his column to reward oral performance. Whatever the underlying reason, Msimibithi’s column showcased the texture of daily life in the language of the people, one which purported to reflect the unfiltered views, not of an aloof flâneur like R. Roamer, Esq., but of a regular man-on-the- bus. Indeed, Msimbithi’s status as a “kitchen-boy,” though not dwelt on extensively within the columns themselves, further reflects Masinga’s sophisticated framing of the character. A kitchen-boy serves whites and hears all. Jacob Msimbithi, literally an interpreter, also heard all, but was treated by whites as a dangerously liminal figure of indeterminate beliefs and desires. Masinga’s nom-de-plume contrasts strongly with those of the pre-World War II Bantu World writers, whose names would not be out of place in the white daily press—Wayfarer, Scrutator, or Busy-Bee, for instance. Masinga’s Msimbithi no longer pretended to participate in a deracinated public sphere as a detached observer of the rabble. To the contrary, his advice—and Msimbithi supplied a great deal of advice—came from the rabble, and celebrated the fact. Masinga, who translated multiple Shakespeare plays into Zulu for radio broadcast in the course of his work with the S.A.B.C., was a deep lover of language and an innovative experimenter with it. While R. R. R. Dhlomo used Fanakalo periodically in his columns, 465 Masinga enjoyed Zuluizing the English language, using it as a tactic in critiquing the aspirations of educated, Christian Zulus. SITSHUZI MI PILIZI:—Habe Matishelakazi ngathi angikhohlwe ukunikhumbuza nina boMama nibahle kangaka ukuthi, “Pilisi nesti tayimi ya kamu ini Tilomu Dont iti withi yawa ovakoti Oni Pilizi Ladizi.” Habe singahlukani futhi boMama Sitshuzi mi…he…he…he…nikhulume nezigqoko nizijikise laphaya ogibeni odongeni. Ngaphandle kwaloko veliveli Bhedimenazi veli. Nigithi nizwile ngoba nginitshele ngesi B.A. Isingisi ngenzela khona abangafundile bangeke bezwe. EXCUSE ME PLEASE:—Goodness gracious, Madam teachers, let me not forget to remind you Madams who are so beautiful that, “Please next time you come into the Tea- Room, don’t eat with your overcoat on please, ladies. Gracious, let us not differ, Madams, excuse me…he…he…he…talk to your hats and turn them around over there on the rack on the wall. To not doe that is very very bad manners. You all say you heard me because I told you in B.A. English for the illiterate.81 I have bolded the passages in English in order to show how Masinga rendered the language according to the rules of Zulu spelling and pronunciation. In the course of this short item, which takes young teachers to task for their etiquette in tea-rooms, Msimbithi assumes the role of the scold. By vividly rendering his advice in heavily-accented and Zuluized English, Masinga acknowledges the irony at the heart of trying to police Africans’ behavior towards white standards of etiquette: one’s manners, like one’s language, remain foreign, even if one embraces the new system. Whereas the content of Masinga’s conservative advice does not differ significantly from that of Dhlomo, the message that Masinga sends is therefore more ambiguous, and better calibrated to South Africa’s grim racial regime. Msimbithi columns, because of their length, usually covered multiple topics, with Masinga interspersing humor, wordplay, admonishment and biblical advice. As with Dhlomo’s 81 “Ezika Msimbithi,” Ilanga Lase Natal, April 12, 1947. Translated by the author. 466 column, certain characters reappeared in stories, such as Soslinah, Joe, and Sheyameni. Masinga took interest in soccer as well as education, and at one point devoted a full column to extolling R. R. R. Dhlomo’s school reader Izikhali Zanamuhla.82 A favorite concern for Masinga, however, was romance and relationships. This was an interest that he would retain for the rest of his long career: in 1984, his marriage advice program Mkhulule (“Get Rid of Him/Her”) was scrapped by the S.A.B.C.’s Radio Zulu as a result of his “degrading attitude” towards women, which had provoked a number of listener complaints.83 The best way to illustrate this attitude in action is with an extended excerpt from an Msimbithi column that shows off Masinga’ flair for oral storytelling (see Appendix B). From this excerpt one can get a sense of the snappy, almost stream-of-consciousness flow of Masinga’s writing (reminiscent of the Zulu imbongi or praise- singer; see Chapter 1) as he moves from one topic to another, riffing on the theme of romantic perfidy. His prose is rich with inventive vocabulary—not only in the form of Zuluized English and tsotsitaal (as in “Khamduze”, “Big Shod”, and “DB Fulu,” respectively) but also by deploying inventive Zulu words rich in imagery. Like other African languages in South Africa, Zulu is rich in its use of ideophones—onomatopoeic interjections that do not inflect and can convey everything from a loud noise to the richness of specific colors.84 In the excerpt above, for example, we see the rich alliterative phrase “bhayibhayibhayi-abantu bebethi,” where the ideophone “bhayi” (meaning “acting confusingly” or “struggling frantically”) is reduplicated 82 “Ezika Msimbithi,” Ilanga Lase Natal, July 30, 1955. 83 Sipho Jacobs and Bancroft Hlatshwayo, “S.A.B.C. Gags K. E. Masinga,” City Press (Johannesburg, South Africa), March 18, 1984. 84 For a general discussion of ideophones, see Mark Dingemanse, “Advances in the Cross-Linguistic Study of Ideophones,” Language and Linguistics Compass 6.10 (2012), 654-672. For discussion of ideophones in Africa and in Zulu specifically, see G. Tucker Childs, “African Ideophones,” in Sound Symbolism, eds. Leanne Hinton, Johanna Nichols, and John J. Ohala (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press,1994), 178-204; and Mthikazi Rose Masubelele, “Are Ideophones Translatable? The Case of Translating isiZulu Ideophones in D. B. Z. Ntuli's Short Story Uthingo Lwenkosazana (The Rainbow),” Literator 39.1 (2018). 467 three times for effect and juxtaposed to two other b-heavy words, giving an wonderful impression of overall commotion and chatter.85 Readers were frequently held in stitches by Msimbithi’s commentaries, judging from the number of appreciative letters published in Ilanga Lase Natal addressed to or about Msimbithi— many more than engaged with H. I. E. Dhlomo’s intellectual essays or Rolling Stone’s column. Oftentimes writers would praise the influence of Msimbithi’s criticism, such as “Isibukeli” (“Spectator”), who wrote in to commend the decrease in the appearance of women’s makeup and Indian-style head coverings among Zulus that he noticed after a recent Msimbithi column.86 “Msimbithi is one of the leaders of the nation leading us to the right thing,” gushed L. C. Z. Nyinde of Somtseu Road Hostel, adding (in English), “We certainly must have Msimbithi with his humorous writing.”87 When the column went on hiatus, as it sometimes did, fans would write in demanding its return. One reader, writing in English, compared Msimbithi to Ovid, “who [was] called upon to apply [his] literary genius as an instrument of improving Roman society,” adding that “those in the game of pelting Rome became his enemies, but the sincerely faithful Roman citizens admired Ovid.”88 The key difference, of course, being that Ovid was a Roman citizen of his country, while Msimbithi as a black person, was denied citizenship rights in his country. Because they are so numerous and so long, a full analysis of K. E. Masinga’s Msimbithi columns awaits future study. The question of authorship is still not entirely settled; even if Masinga wrote most of the columns appearing under the heading of Msimbithi it does not mean 85 C. M. Doke and B. W. Vilakazi, Zulu-English Dictionary, 27. 86 “Isibukeli,” “Obongela Msimbithi,” Ilanga Lase Natal, June 1, 1946. 87 L. C. Z. Nyinde, “Kazi Ubheda Uthini uMsimbithi,” Ilanga Lase Natal, January 6, 1951. Translated by the author. 88 Auby V. Campbell Mlots, “Msimbithi’s Column,” Ilanga Lase Natal, December 1, 1945. 468 that he wrote them all. The modest purpose of this introductory investigation has been to show how the vernacular humor of Msimbithi, Umfana weKhishi established itself as a literary fixture of Zulu-speaking communities in South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s. The fact that it did so tells us something about the changes occurring in urban black society in the post-World War II era. The value of a comparison with R. R. R. Dhlomo’s Bantu World column is readily evident. Whereas the humor of Dhlomo’s R. Roamer, Esq. represented the first sustained effort by a black South African writer in English to write humorously about real social conditions, R. Roamer’s positionality as an ironist and a flâneur separated him (and his readers) from the social conditions that surrounded them. If we accept that a primary concern of humor is the reinforcement of social identity, the specific identity that Dhlomo strove to reinforce was classically New African—rooted in the black experience but looking expectantly to a liberal future where public discourse would be conducted without much reference to race. The absurdity of “pinpricks” and “little heavens” were discussed continually, despite the fact that such slights were commonplace, because change was seen as possible and even imminent. Msimbithi’s perspective was different in important ways. Rising to prominence at a time when segregation was more deeply entrenched, he devotes much less attention to the broader racial regime, focusing almost exclusively on the social life and individual conduct of Africans. In short, he focused on what he believed people were able to control—and indeed, he was praised by those who felt his column did so effectively. The perspective of his column is darker in the sense that despite its Christian overtones, it does not offer the same escapist possibilities as R. Roamer’s flights of fancy about Timbuctoo. At the same time, readers’ responses to the column suggest that it met people where they were. Msimbithi, Umfana weKhishi did not 469 perpetuate the chimera of deracinated citizenship in a reformed Union, but instead reinforced the liminal, contradictory realities of life. Masinga’s literate Zulu-speaking readers, like the character of Msimbithi, were both kitchen boys and unbreakable sticks—like the historical Jacob Msimbithi, they were seen by some whites as irreclaimable scoundrels even as they bridged the widening, worsening gap, between white settler society in South Africa, and the pride of King Shaka kaSenzagakhona. Though scholarly literature has ignored the legacy of Masinga’s comic raconteur, he lives on in the theatre. It is not for nothing that in UMabatha (1970), Welcome Msomi’s Zulu homage to William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the drunken porter character is called Msimbithi.89 The play opened in London in 1972, in New York in 1979, and has been revived both domestically and internationally several times, making it one of the most internationally successful South African plays of all time.90 At Home in the Bloodmine: Casey Motsisi at Drum This final section of the chapter assesses humor and satire in Casey Motsisi’s work at Drum magazine and the broader challenges posed by apartheid at the twilight of Union and the menacing dawn of the Republic. Of course, no discussion of South African popular culture in the early years of apartheid would be complete without reference to Zonk! and Drum, the first general-interest magazines marketed to black South Africans on a mass scale. In these magazines, a new generation of young black and Coloured writers—writers like Zubeida “Juby” Mayet, D. Can Themba, Ezekiel (later Es’kia) Mphahlele, Nat Nakasa, Bessie Head, Richard Rive and many others—tested the waters, with many finding that political and artistic conditions 89 Welcome Msomi, UMabatha (Johannesburg, South Africa: Heinemann Publishers, 1998 [1970]). 90 See Scott L. Newstok, “‘Why Macbeth? Looking Back on Umabatha After Forty Years: An Interview with Welcome Msomi, Shakespeare in Southern Africa 21 (2009), 73-80. 470 made it impossible for them to stay in South Africa. While many of these writers attended missionary institutions, they often did so well after the heyday of mission education in South Africa; their entire lives had been lived under conditions of tightening political oppression. At the same time, they had come of age at the time when black commercial media and consumer culture was hitting its stride, and as a result their knowledge of the world beyond South Africa was certainly richer than what the vast majority in previous generations had known. A larger black public able to read in English, combined with the increasing influence of the United States on white popular culture, meant that knowledge of the United States and the global African diaspora expanded well beyond those with access to rare opportunities for overseas study or the library of the Bantu Men’s Social Centre.91 Many of the writers of the Drum and Zonk! generations (often conflated with the Sophiatown Renaissance, though the latter term is geographically limited to Johannesburg) experimented with humor. Of them, however, the work of Casey Motsisi stands out as the one who made humor and satire most central to his artistic mission. Because he never went into exile or published a book in his lifetime, he has been given short shrift by scholars following his death in 1977 (Motsisi joins the long list of writers in this study who died prematurely—he was only 45 years old). Indeed, his commitment to humor has divided critics: in 1974, three years before his death, Don Dodson’s African Studies Review article “The Four Modes of Drum: Popular Fiction and Social Control in South Africa,” dismissed Motsisi as a symbol of black South African literature’s immaturity. For Dodson, Motsisi’s famous “On the Beat” column is not 91 Although, as Langston Hughes’s involvement with Drum magazine contests attests, many black Johannesburg luminaries did have contacts in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. See Langston Hughes and the South African Drum Generation: The Correspondence, eds. Shane Graham and John Walters (New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); and Shane Graham, “Cultural Exchange in a Black Atlantic Web.” 471 much more than an alcoholic’s attempt to cope with the tragedy of his own life—when published, its malign influence was multiplied through becoming palliative to others. For Dodson, laughing at Motsisi’s picaresque yarns and absurd potboiler turns of phrase becomes a substitute for demanding social change, keeping black South Africans down. As Dodson puts it, Humor passes the censors of the elite because it poses no manifest threat to the distribution of power in society. It is appealing to the artist because it helps him accommodate to oppression without going mad. And it is enjoyed by readers not only for its intrinsic rewards, but also for its support in enduring the unendurable. Thus, humor serves to stabilize the social system: to protect the interests of the elite and to ease the burdens of the oppressed.92 On the other hand, the literary scholar Ursula Barnett has seen fit to comment on the relative rarity of humor in Drum.93 Besides Motsisi’s monthly column, there was a jokes page (“Laugh Your Head Off”) where people were encouraged to contribute for a shot at prize money. The jokes, however, were almost never original, much like the jokes R. R. R. Dhlomo used to publish in The Bantu World women’s supplement, and in any case very few are set in South Africa. Aside from the occasional humorous story, such as Es’kia Mphahlele’s “Lesane,” the content of Drum was not aimed at provoking laughter.94 Indeed, its laser focus on pleasure, desire, and joy calls to mind nothing so much as Anca Parluvescu’s distinction between the smile and the laugh (see Chapter 1).95 Ultimately, the consumerist fantasy at the heart of Drum was what circumscribed its potential as a vehicle for humor: humorous deflation would have been fatal to the magazine’s mystique. A smile seduces, but a snorting chuckle often does just the opposite. 92 Don Dodson, “The Four Modes of Drum: Popular Fiction and Social Control in South Africa,” African Studies Review 17.2 (1974): 318-319. 93 See Ursula A. Barnett, A Vision of Order: A Study of Black South African Literature in English (1914-1980) (London, U.K.: Sinclair Brown, 1983): 183. 94 Ezekiel [Es’kia] Mphahlele, “Lesane,” Drum, December 1956. 95 Anca Parvulescu, Laughter, 7. 472 It must be remembered that Drum was as much a vehicle for advertising as it was a literary organ. Humor could be accommodated within designated areas only as long as Drum’s audience felt that the magazine took their identities as stylish and informed readers seriously. If Drum were to call that identity into question—as racist critics of black consumerism in the mainstream press frequently did, the spell might be broken and the magic lost. As for Dodson, his distinction between humor and irony is founded on a circular logic: he defines humor by its oppressive role within the social system, so that anything which might challenge this understanding of humor is necessarily not humor at all. If it is not oppressive, according to Dodson, it is irony. This attempt to impose a moral framework upon humor a priori is misguided and strips both “humor” and “irony” of their ambivalence. As we have seen throughout this study, it is more productive to approach forms of humor and satire in terms of their consequences for identity, as tactics that are simultaneously creative and destructive. In order to assess the work of Motsisi, we once again have to return to the World War II era and trace the rise of the first commercial magazines for black South Africans. Among the several groups organized to perform for white servicemen during World War II was a black revue called Zonk! (from the Zulu zonke for “everything” or, more colloquially, “All that!”) Organized by Ike Brookes Baruch and composed of members of the Native Military Corps, Zonk! opened at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre in June 1944, with Lewis Sowden of the Rand Daily Mail calling it “easily the best Bantu show that has been staged here.”96 Many members of prominent black jazz bands and concert party troupes participated in the production, which toured the Union and was rebooted at one point as Nu-Zonk. In 1950, a film version of Zonk! was released, and 96 L.S. [Lewis Sowden], “Bantu Revue, ‘Zonk,’ Full of Zest,” Rand Daily Mail, June 14, 1944. 473 became a staple of black cinemas throughout the next ten years. Touted as the “First All-African Musical Film” and arriving on the heels of another music-heavy film Jim Comes to Joburg (1949) as well as the first Afrikaans movie-musical, Kom Saam Vanaand (1949), the film is a testament to the growth and increasing segmentation of consumer culture in South Africa. Less and less, it seemed, was show business the exclusive preserve of English-speaking whites. In all its various iterations, Zonk! was greeted positively in both the white and black presses, albeit with predictable commentary.97 When the Sunday Times critic advised the troupe to “concentrate on…numbers with a local flavour, for which they seem to have a natural talent, rather than what always must be imitations of American shows,” R. R. R. Dhlomo (as Rolling Stone), fired back that “experts” believed that “all that the African artist can do or should do is smash his feet on the hard ground in the form of dancing.”98 As Irwin S. Manoim has noted, the refusal of African jazz performers and impresarios to comply with “expert” denunciations both facilitated and inhibited the movement for cultural recognition. In the 1930s, as swing music entered the zeitgeist of white entertainment, black impresarios began to court white audiences and white businessmen like Ike Brooks began to involve themselves in the industry, diluting black creative control and nudging them away from political activism.99 Pictorial magazines catered to what was thought of as a large and politically impressionable population of urban Africans who were literate but less well-educated than the 97 See Jacqueline Maingard, “Bokkies/Moffies: Cinematic Images of Black Sexual Identity in ‘Zonk!’ (1950),” Journal of African Cultural Studies 16.1 (2003), 25-43. 98 S.H., “Stage and Cinema: Spirit of Enterprise Accelerates Theatre Development in S.A.,” Sunday Times, March 31, 1946; “Rolling Stone on ‘Experts,’” Ilanga Lase Natal, May 25, 1946. 99 Irwin S. Manoim, “The Black Press, 1945-1964: The Growth of the Black Mass Media and their Role as Cultural Disseminators” (M.A. thesis: University of the Witwatersrand, 1983): 107. 474 coterie of petty-bourgeois intellectuals that preceded them. As such, they promised fertile ground for both white advertisers and black cultural aspirations. Preceding the release of the film by about a year, in 1949 a magazine called Zonk! debuted. It was hailed in a Rand Daily Mail puff piece as “the first of its kind.”100 Unlike black newspapers, it was picture-heavy, and in its appeals to advertisers, the magazine promised a “completely NON-POLITICAL publication,” albeit one that “fosters in him [the African] a pride of race through pride in his own national magazine.”101 Humor, in the form of a generic jokes page, was present at the very beginning, but was treated carefully. In October 1950, Zonk! published a story called “Die Topie,” where a gambling addict is rewarded when he wins money at fah-fee to pay his family’s rent.102 A disclaimer was appended to the article reminding readers that they should not be fooled by Topie’s victory: We can laugh at gambling, at betting, drinking, vice and crime. But let us never laugh at gamblers, drunkards, crooks and criminals, for they are human beings like ourselves, but that their lives have taken dark turnings and lead to nowhere. Let us laugh. But let us keep our own lives an example of all that we would like to be admired for, since good citizenship is the first quality of man’s life among men.103 While Zonk! published several writers who would go on to fame in the pages of Drum magazine and beyond, editorial control remained firmly in the hands of whites like Brooks. The emphasis on images over text, which rippled from Zonk! through the black press over the course of the 1950s, led to “an increasing concentration of editing power in the hands of skilled technicians (usually white), rather than civic leaders or political strategists (usually black).”104 In 100 “Picture-Story Magazine for Non-Europeans, ‘Zonk’, Rand Daily Mail, August 4, 1949. 101 Advertising rate card reproduced in Irwin S. Manoim, “The Black Press, 1945-1964,” 181. 102 N. B. Boloang, “Die Topie,” Zonk! (Johannesburg, South Africa), October 1950. Fah-fee is an illegal game of chance that remains popular in South Africa today. See Stephen Louw, “Chinese Immigrants and Underground Lotteries in South Africa: Negotiating Spaces at the Cusp of a Racial-Capitalist Order,” Journal of Southern African Studies 45.1 (2019), 49-68. 103 N. B. Boloang, “Die Topie,” Zonk! (Johannesburg, South Africa), October 1950. 104 Irwin S. Manoim, “The Black Press, 1945-1964,” 111. 475 other words, the stylistic appeal of Zonk! and the periodicals that imitated it comprised part of a Faustian bargain whereby the trappings of media representation came at the expense of what autonomous influence black journalists and celebrities were able to exert over the cultural landscape. A similar progression can be seen with Drum magazine, one of the most famous periodicals in South African history. It and its sister publication Golden City Post, were projects of Jim Bailey, and represented the first significant attempt to break the monopoly enjoyed by the Bantu Press, Ltd. over the black South African market (Zonk!, while an independent publication, was not initially seen as threatening by the Bantu Press, which was still courting a more staid, educated readership). Bailey was the scion to an enormous fortune built by his father Sir Abe Bailey off of the mines of the Witwatersrand, and his fabulous wealth facilitated bold and influential, if often unprofitable, experiments in the world of African publishing. Relaunching a failing Zonk! imitator called The African Drum, Bailey envisioned a magazine that would appeal not just to black (and Coloured and Indian) working class South Africans, but to readers all over Britain’s African colonies from Kenya to the Gold Coast. This decision created a number of problems from a business standpoint, but since profit was apparently not one of Bailey’s requirements for success, the revamped magazine rocketed to a circulation of more than 73,000 in 1955, making it the hottest-selling magazine, black or white, on the African continent.105 Bailey’s other initiative, the weekly newspaper Golden City Post, was a racy and sensationalistic tabloid, like a black version of Stephen Black’s Sjambok with the highbrow material removed. Unlike Drum, it competed directly with The Bantu World. Its wings were clipped prematurely, 105 See Irwin S. Manoim, “The Black Press, 1945-1964,” 79-88. 476 according to Irwin S. Manoim, when the Bantu Press-affiliated Bantu News Agency raised its distribution fees, forcing a price increase and a circulation drop. Rounding out the rush to capture the African magazine market was the press behind the pro-Nationalist newspaper Dagbreek, which launched Bona magazine in 1956. In a maneuver that prefigured future controversies, because Bona was published in African languages it was eligible to be assigned reading in African schools, placing responsibility for Bona surpassing Drum to become South Africa’s highest-circulating magazine firmly at the feet of the National Party government.106 As we have already seen, the black press in South Africa before Zonk! and Drum was a shoestring operation, with very few full-time reporters. Both magazines, therefore, focused on training their own cohort of black writers who would provide stories for the magazine. Remarkably, for Ike Brooks at Zonk!, this meant relying on the same musicians and performers who had staged his revue.107 At Drum, Jim Bailey brought on a team of highly respected white journalists and photographers, and the Africans who worked on staff became legends both individually and en bloc, referred to after the fact as “the Drum boys” or “the Drum generation” of the long 1950s, which in this context became known as “the Drum decade.”108 The mingled glamour and horror of this period in South African history still looms very large in the national consciousness, in part because for so many black South Africans who would 106 The “Muldergate” and “Guptagate” scandals of the 1970s and 2010s, respectively, also involved corrupt arrangements between the South African government and favored newspapers. Furthermore, both scandals contributed to the ouster of a South African leader. See Joel Mervis, The Fourth Estate, 434-452; Pieter-Louis Myburgh, The Republic of Gupta: A Story of State Capture (Cape Town, South Africa: Penguin Books, 2017); Irwin S. Manoim, “The Black Press, 1945-1964”, 73-74. 107 Irwin S. Manoim, “The Black Press, 1945-1964,” 67. Chief among these problems was the difficulty of finding advertisers for a continental magazine when most businesses operated in only one area; this problem could be solved by marketing separate editions for different regions, but doing so created other costly logistical challenges. See Irwin S. Manoim, “The Black Press, 1945-1964,” 86-88. 108 See, for example, The Drum Decade: Stories from the 1950s, 2nd ed., ed. Michael Chapman (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press, 2001 [1989]). 477 soon become exiles, the doomed fleshpot of Sophiatown was their last memory of a South Africa in which liberal-driven change still felt possible.109 As one of the rare places in greater Johannesburg where Africans could own property, explosive population growth had produced an oligarchy of landlords and a much larger population of backroom-dwellers whose unquestionably squalid conditions provided the government’s chief public justification for expelling the whole community to Soweto. Aside from their often unchecked alcoholism, the Drum writers have been critiqued for their blind faith in white liberalism (entering a new, less inhibited but much more ineffectual phase with the 1959 founding of the Progressive Federal Party). Their reluctance to involve themselves in liberation politics, and their imitation of American aesthetics has left a bad taste in the mouths of many activists both at the time and since. Even so, it is striking how few biographical (as opposed to autobiographical) accounts of the Drum writers have ever been attempted, and writers who have discussed Motsisi’s writing have not so far taken much of an interest in his life story. Karabo Moses “Casey” Motsisi was much younger than either the Dhlomo brothers or K. E. Masinga. He was born in 1934, in the Western Native Township of Johannesburg. The Bantu World was already up and running, and Motsisi does not seem to have enjoyed anything in the way of rural enrichment, again, unlike Masinga or the Dhlomos. In his thesis on Drum magazine writers, David Rabkin even makes the extraordinary claim that Motsisi “spoke no African language.”110 According to his childhood friend Stanley Motjuwadi, Motsisi’s family, like his 109 The realities of the historical Sophiatown are discussed concisely in Tom Lodge, “The Destruction of Sophiatown,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 19.1 (1981), 107-132. It is discussed as a site of fantasy and nostalgia in Paul Knevel, “Sophiatown as Lieu de Memoire,” African Studies 74.1 (2015), 15-75. 110 David Rabkin, “Drum Magazine (1951-1961) and the Works of Black South African Writers Associated With It (Ph.D. diss.: The University of Leeds, 1975): 109. Rabkin also makes this claim for D. Can Themba, and is vague about his source in each case; see David Rabkin, “Drum Magazine (1951-1961),” 113. 478 own, was “stupidly large and poor.”111 From an early age, Motsisi possessed a quick and deadpan wit: [Motsisi’s] favorite joke was his definition of a burglar. “To get along in life, Kid Brother, you must have ENTERPRISE like a burglar. You must prise and enter,” he would laugh. How very early in life we became criminals. To make up school-fees and pocket-money we sold sweets in the trains between Randfontein and Springs. As unlicensed traders on the railways we ended up scrubbing the floors and shining bicycles at Langlaagte Railway Police Station. This is how early in life The Kid learned to ride a punch.112 Rabkin claims that Motsisi left the Pretoria Normal School after the introduction of Bantu Education in 1953 due to his lack of African language proficiency.113 Such a statement should be taken seriously rather than literally; certainly many teachers and trainee teachers left in disgust after the Bantu Education Act was passed.114 It may well be that having grown up in the heady multiracial, multilingual and multiethnic atmosphere of Sophiatown and Western Native Township, Motsisi was not able to speak any one African language to the pure rural standards of the government curriculum; if so it is merely an index of how far removed he was from the pedigree of someone like R. R. R. Dhlomo. For good measure, two additional explanations of why Motsisi left the Pretoria Normal School exist: one no less spectacular claim, recounted by Stanley Motjuwadi, is that Motsisi was expelled for refusing to divulge the writer of a “naughty” article in the school magazine that he edited, and a more prosaic one holds that Themba offered 111 “Black Stan” Motjuwadi, “Kid Brother,” in Casey Motsisi, Casey and Co.: Selected Writings of Casey “Kid” Motsisi, ed. Mothobi Mutloase (Johannesburg, South Africa: Ravan Press, 1978): i. 112 “Black Stan” Motjuwadi, “Kid Brother.” 113 David Rabkin, “Drum Magazine (1951-1961),” 109. 114 See discussion in Anne Kelk Mager and Maanda Mulaudzi, “Popular Responses to Apartheid: 1948-c. 1975,” in The Cambridge History of South Africa, vol. 2, 383-384. See also R. Bentley Anderson, “‘To Save a Soul’: Catholic Mission Schools, Apartheid, and the 1953 Bantu Education Act,” Journal of Religious History 44.2 (2020), 149-167; Linda Chisholm, Between Worlds: German Missionaries and the Transition from Mission to Bantu Education in South Africa (Johannesburg, South Africa: Wits University Press, 2017 [2015]); Clive Glaser, “Soweto’s Islands of Learning: Morris Isaacson and Orlando High Schools Under Bantu Education, 1958-1975, Journal of Southern African Studies 41.1 (2015), 159-171; Ellen Vea Rosnes, “A Time of Destiny for Norwegian Mission Schools in Zululand and Natal Under the Policy of Bantu Education (1948-1955),” History of Education 49.1 (2020), 104-125. 479 him a job on the spot after reading a short story Motsisi submitted to Africa, the short-lived magazine Themba edited before joining Drum.115 At any rate, at Madibane High School in the Western Native Township, Motsisi’s English teacher was none other than D. Can Themba. When the latter won a short-story competition and was hired as assistant editor of the magazine, Motsisi was encouraged to contribute. His first short story for Drum, “Love in the Rain”—about a respectable girl who falls in love with a Sophiatown musician— appeared in the December 1955 issue.116 The next month Motsisi was listed on the masthead as staff. After more than a year of working as a reporter penning “show business” stories with headlines like “Drum Pin-Up Gets Pinned!” In July 1957, Motsisi married one Grace Nkosi, originally of Driefontein, Natal, in Durban where she had been living.117 Motsisi published his first “Bugs” column in August 1957.118 It is a short but powerful vignette. Motsisi’s narrator is trying to sleep on a cold night when a bug bites him and, when he tells it to leave him alone, it “peep[s] out of the tear in my blanket and smile[s] as if to say ‘Try and make me stop.’”119 This only encourages more bugs to bite him, which they say they are doing because he is black: “I’ll catch you and squeeze you to death,” I threatened. “Try!” challenged another, a hardened delinquent, I could tell. I tried. I fumbled in the dark with murderous fingers. No bugs. “Ho, ha, hi, hi, ho, ha, ha, hi,” the bugs laughed until the tears flowed from their bloodthirsty eyes. “You can’t see us, hey? It’s dark in here. Why, you can’t even see yourself because you’re as black as the night. How can you expect to see us? We’re bugwise. We’re going to bite your skin off, black boy.”120 115 “Black Stan” Motjuwadi, “Kid Brother,” in Casey Motsisi, Casey and Co., i-ii; Mike Nicol, A Good-Looking Corpse (London: U.K.: Secker and Warburg, 1991): 220. 116 Moses Casey Motsisi [sic], “Love in the Rain,” Drum, December 1955. 117 Duplicate Original Register No. 66 of July 13, 1957, PAR, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. 118 By “pinned” Motsisi meant “married.” Moses Casey Motsisi, “Drum Pin-Up Gets Pinned!”, Drum, April 1956. 119 Moses Casey Motsisi, “Bugs,” Drum, August 1957; also reproduced in Casey Motsisi, Casey and Co., 4-5. Mutloase erroneously states that the piece “If Bugs Were Men” (Moses Casey Motsisi, “If Bugs Were Men,” Drum, February 1958) was Motsisi’s first Drum contribution. 120 Moses Casey Motsisi, “Bugs,” Drum, August 1957. 480 Finally, in desperation, the narrator begs the insects to go after his brother instead. Their reply is that that is what just what they have been doing; the kicker of the story is that the narrator has gotten out after a week’s jail time for pass violations. This inspires the bugs to take pity on him and leave. Even Don Dodson, who is otherwise harshly critical of Motsisi, praises the “Bugs” columns for their satirical imagination, calling them “an especially effective medium for irony” sadly foreclosed by editor Tom Hopkinson’s recommendation for Motsisi to switch to stories about human beings.121 What no writer has so far commented on is the resemblance Motsisi’s bug columns share with R. R. R. Dhlomo’s Rolling Stone material about insects. In both, bugs are protean symbols. They are gregarious and humanized even as they literally suck the blood of the comic narrator. They depend on human society but in a way perverted by the South African social system; for the bugs in this particular story, pass offenses are bad not because they are unjust but because they deprive the bugs of a food source. In the work of both Dhlomo and Motsisi, bugs represent characteristics of both black people and white people and serve as tools to expose the absurd cruelty at the heart of segregation and apartheid, especially the perverse incentives these systems establish. In September 1957’s “Johburg Jailbugs,” two bugs in the Fort prison discuss what the humans call the “Good Old Days”—and how they were not good old days because back then there were only a few prisoners. Now, the bugs agree, are the “Good Young Days,” since the prison is overflowing with black prisoners brought in for apartheid violations.122 In “High 121 Don Dodson, “The Four Modes of Drum,” 321. 122 Casey Motsisi, “Johburg Jailbugs,” Drum, September 1957. 481 Bugs,” the next month’s installment, a rambling bug writes a letter to its wife about Sophiatown, darkly comparing the abundance of blood in the neighborhood to the Witwatersrand gold deposits: When grandfather said that South Africa is a bloodmine, he little realized he was making an understatement. Why the place is just overflowing with blood… Here you don’t have to crawl out in the middle of the night and dig through human flesh for blood. Blood is lying around everywhere just for the picking. Alluvial blood, they call it down here. Only last night one of the youngest boys came in with blood oozing from a gash in his forehead. The room was just red with his blood. Bloodheart, I hope to be joining you soon. Travelling for us Sophiatown bugs is not easy. The people here can’t get passports although many of them are keen to. It would burst your bloodsack to listen to them talk about England and “Home,” by which they mean America.123 This passage is particularly revealing because it explicitly connects the bugs’ bloodsucking to South Africa’s history as a mining center and site of exploitation. Motsisi shifts the frame deftly from white colonial cruelty to the legacy of violence such cruelty has bequeathed to the black population. The fact that the individual victim is described as “one of the youngest boys,” accentuates the pathos of the scene. Motsisi’s snide commentary on the people of Sophiatown at the end of the passage is also significant because it illuminates one of the important ways in which Motsisi’s generational perspective differs from that of Dhlomo and Masinga: his celebration of individual agency. Motsisi writes that many people in Sophiatown want to leave South Africa altogether but are prevented from doing so by the government’s refusal to grant passports. This specifically affects the bug-narrator’s ability to get back to his wife, but at the very end of the column he says he has made a plan to stow away in the vest of someone who is being deported to Rhodesia. It is a far 123 Casey Motsisi, “High Bugs,” Drum, October 1957. 482 cry from Dhlomo’s emphasis on the collective: even if he mostly eschewed overt politicking, like other New Africans R. R. R. Dhlomo saw unity as a necessary condition for addressing black problems. Even where Dhlomo incorporated vermin into his political parodies, the “solutions” he presents (such as they are), are collective, such as in his 1947 column “Taxes,” where the solution for the overabundance of flies is to tax them and force them to carry passes, or in the “Public Enemies” column cited above, where a commission led by Stockfell Mkhumbane seeks to identify the city’s biggest pest.124 For Motsisi, individual escape (and escapism, as into alcohol) is presented as the only feasible solution to conflict. David Rabkin describes Motsisi stories as being “propelled by an inexorable logic,” and at the level of plot this logic usually boils down to the pursuit of alcohol.125 In December 1957’s “Christmas Bugs,” we see this in particularly sharp relief as Motsisi’s human narrator declares that “I love Christmas because it always gives me an excuse of getting myself really catblown and making up for all those dry months without the Ghost Squad muscling in on my fun or the Editor looking at me with those ‘Next time he’s drunk on duty I’m going to fire him’ eyes.”126 He is not enjoying anyone’s companionship at this moment, just walking down the street drinking brandy straight out of the bottle. Like H. D. Tyamzashe’s “Christmas in Bantuland” or Herman Charles Bosman’s “Johannesburg Christmas Eve,” Christmas is an occasion where alcohol underscores social alienation and—later on in the column, as Motsisi’s narrator converses with “Bugsnick” (a pun on Sputnik)—filth. In a country where people’s alienation 124 Rolling Stone [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “Rolling Stone on Taxes,” Ilanga Lase Natal, March 15, 1947; Rolling Stone [R. R. R. Dhlomo], “Rolling Stone on Public Enemies,” Ilanga Lase Natal, March 11, 1944. 125 David Rabkin, “Drum Magazine (1951-1961),” 111. 126 Casey Motsisi, “Christmas Bugs,” Drum, December 1957 483 from one another is so acute, flies and rotgut are the only companions on which one can really rely. Even Motsisi’s “On the Beat” column, which started in May 1958, embodies this sense of social alienation. Besides the notorious shebeen queen Aunt Peggy, the “On the Beat” vignettes are populated by an ever-changing carousel of lowlife “Kids,” all of whom seem as aimless as the narrator.127 Personal identity is always contingent; it is never intrinsic. Real names, which are so pregnant with meaning in African culture, are almost always avoided (the one exception again being Aunt Peggy). From Kid Maintenance (so-called because he owes maintenance money to so many former lovers) to the homeless Kid Malalapipe (from the Zulu umalalapayipini, one who sleeps in a drain), names are nothing more than fleeting references to the present or recent past. While on the one hand this means the individual is free of any pre- existing social baggage (except for race, which can still get one arrested, beaten, and thrown in jail), within the context of a nightmarish status quo the only identities that one can really live into are hedonistic and self-destructive. In “On the Beat,” Motsisi amplifies this feeling of futility by avoiding the past and future tenses at all costs, emulating the American short-story writer Damon Runyon. The result is a racy chronicle of township misadventures that is intermittently hilarious and deeply sad, one that occurs in an eternal grammatical present where both reflection and planning are almost impossible. The world of Casey Motsisi’s “Beat,” in marked contrast to the breezy optimism in 127 Shebeens (informal, illegal taverns) were a key “public” social space in apartheid South Africa, and they remain important today. See Iain Edwards, “Shebeen Queens: Illicit Liquor and the Social Structure of Drinking Dens in Cato Manor,” Agenda 3 (1988). 75-97; Paul la Hausse, Brewers, Beerhalls, and Boycotts; Anne Kelk Mager, Beer, Sociability, and Masculinity in South Africa (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2010): 12-27; Shebeens, Take a Bow! A Celebration of South Africa’s Shebeen Lifestyle, eds. Jim Bailey and Adam Seftel (Johannesburg, South Africa: Bailey’s African History Archives, 1994). 484 so much of Drum magazine, is unrelentingly cruel and lonely. Take, for example, Mostsisi’s submission for August 1959: Aunt Peggy throws this free ‘Customers Only’ party on account she made some money on the Durban ‘July.’ As usual, the horse yours truly put his last cigarette butt on is still running. I get to this party late in the evening. My landlord delays me for hours because he walks into my shanty without knocking and finds my pal, Inch-by-Inch, and his sister, who were paying me a visit, relaxing on my bed. The suspicious old coot sees the two on the bed and accuses me of running a brothel. He tells me that I’ll have to clear off his premises… I promise myself that I’ll get even with the guy one day as I give the code knock on Aunt Peggy’s door. She opens the door and welcomes me with a brandy-flavoured wet kiss on the forehead. The room is full of merry-makers including the two familiar faces of two white cops and a black cop belching through a bottle of beer in their special corner… It’s while I’m still scratching my head trying to think, when my boozing pal, Kid Vinegar, a sour-faced character who wouldn’t mind cheating while playing patience with himself, walks up to me and whispers an idea into my ear. He wants to know if Aunt Peggy can’t ask her cop friends to make a false raid on some shebeen and take all the hooch, but to leave the shebeen queen alone. We go into an emergency huddle with Aunt Peggy and the cops, and we all agree that Kid Vinegar is a sensible guy. And they all agree that my landlord should be honoured with a visit. Me and the cops get into a car and make for my landlord’s place. I show them the house, and in a few minutes the cops come out carrying a case of hooch and a manacled landlord. I rush to his ‘rescue’ just as they are pushing him into the car. I tell them it’s my hooch and they should take me instead of the landlord. The black cop, putting on the big act like we arranged it, says I’m lying, but nevertheless they take me. They tell the landlord that since he’s a first offender, the fine I’ll have to pay will be a quid. The landlord gives me the quid and the ‘I’ll see about cutting down your rent money’ smile. We make off for Aunt Peggy’s, where we immediately get ready to jet up the smouldering party. We take a swig of my landlord’s hooch, and all begin coughing something bad, whereupon everybody refuses to have anything more to do with the stuff. I should have known that the old crook sells only doped-up hooch…128 In the above excerpt, almost everyone is implicated in illegal activity, from the narrator, who patronizes Aunt Peggy, to the landlord selling “doped-up hooch,” to the cops, whose friendly 128 Casey Motsisi, “On the Beat,” Drum, August 1959. 485 relationship with Aunt Peggy is a recurring theme. The system is totally corrupt, and justice is wholly in the eye of the beholder. What appears to be a selfless act—the narrator’s intervention on behalf of his landlord—turns out to be the very definition of self-interest in this veritable smorgasbord of vice. According to Svend Riemer, writing in 1947, Damon Runyon embodied the spirit of pre- World War II American urban life in the same way American regionalist authors captured their respective corners of the country. For Riemer, Runyon’s literary universe is one in which success is dependent upon luck and good fortune rather than systematic effort. There is no relation between reward and endeavor, and the individual drifts along, bewildered by the overwhelming robot of a social machinery that is too complex to be mastered or even understood by stray individuals. Good fortune or bad, it is “here today and gone tomorrow.” There is no conceivable connection in time and thus this dimension disappears as a framework for purposeful action.129 The topic of American mass-market fiction and its penetration of the South African market awaits thoroughgoing analysis.130 Yet it is easy to see how such an understanding of the world might appeal to young black readers and writers like Motsisi. We must assess the latter’s choices not solely in hindsight, after all, but we must also consider what results political organizing had delivered to Africans over the course of his lifetime. It would not be illogical to conclude that the answer was very little: Motsisi was born just before the disastrous Hertzog bills nixed the Cape African franchise; he was fourteen when the National Party came to power and nineteen when Bantu Education threatened to close the only major path to relative success—educational 129 Svend Riemer, “Damon Runyon: Philosopher of City Life,” Social Forces 25.4 (1947): 403. 130 Two articles which provide suggestive entrées to the topic are Tyler Scott Ball, “Sof’town Sleuths: The Hard- Boiled Genre Goes to Jo’Burg,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 5.1 (2018), 20-35 and Colette Guldimann, “Against the Law: Arthur Maimane’s Pioneering Hard-Boiled Black Detective Fiction in Drum Magazine, Safundi 20.3 (2019), 259-276. 486 achievement—available to his urban cohort. The post-World War II bonanza of investment in black popular media, indicative of white business’s changing attitudes towards black consumers, was one of the paths to change that remained unblocked. Casey Motsisi was also unique among the luminaries of Drum for the fact that he never left South Africa. Aside from star reporter Henry Nxumalo (also known as “Mr. Drum” and “George Magwaza”), who was stabbed to death while investigating an illicit abortion ring on New Year’s Day in 1957 (a crime for which no one was ever arrested), and veteran female reporter Zubeidah “Juby” Mayet, virtually all of the magazine’s other star writers were out of the country by the early 1960s. Only a few, like Es’kia Mphahlehle, Lewis Nkosi, and Arthur Maimane, were able to return to a democratic South Africa. Nat Nakasa took up a journalism fellowship at Harvard University, but committed suicide after it expired.131 D. Can Themba died in Swaziland at forty-three in 1968, after years of heavy drinking. Todd Matshikiza, who left South Africa for London with the cast of the musical King Kong, died in Zambia at forty-seven; William “Bloke” Modisane held on longer, until his early sixties, writing and acting in the United Kingdom and then West Germany.132 Motsisi himself wrote an article on this subject in March 1963, lamenting that “life gets pretty dull around the old burg sometimes now.”133 According to Essop Patel, two days before his suicide Nat Nakasa told a friend in New York (perhaps the jazz master Hugh Masekela) that “I can’t laugh anymore—and when I can’t laugh I can’t write.”134 131 Matthew P. Keaney, “‘I Can Feel My Grin Turn to a Grimace,”: From the Sophiatown Shebeens to the Streets of Soweto on the Pages of Drum, The Classic, New Classic, and Staffrider (M.A. thesis: George Mason University, 2010): 125-135. 132 See Liz Gunner, “Exile and the Diasporic Voice: Bloke Modisane’s B.B.C. Radio Plays, 1969-1987,” Current Writing 15.2 (2003), 49-62. 133 “We Remember You All…!,” Drum, March 1963. 134 Essop Patel, preface to Nat Nakasa, The World of Nat Nakasa, ed. Essop Patel (Johannesburg, South Africa: Ravan Press, 1985): xii; Hugh Masekela’s role as a confidant during Nakasa’s final days is attested in Matthew P. Keaney, “‘I Can Feel My Grin Turn to a Grimace,” 128. 487 Motsisi, though falling deeper and deeper into alcoholism, still could write, even in a country that worked hard to stifle the creative spirit of its black population. Motsisi’s work has confused critics like Don Dodson because, without any of the old gestures at mission school morality, he took the depressing realities of early apartheid life and spun them into laughter. If R. R. R. Dhlomo’s humor aimed at affirming New Africans’ particular identity, and Masinga’s Zulu humor made additional provision for the liminality and precarity of this identity in the post-World War II era, Motsisi’s innovation was to use humor to consider the consequences of a lack of identity. Largely stripped of their political structures with the banning of the A.N.C. and P.A.C., subsisting on the bittersweet fruits of a consumerist renaissance which paradoxically accelerated the loss of black South African commercial and artistic autonomy, and driven increasingly into early graves, imprisonment, and exile for their convictions, the African reading public who became Motsisi’s fans were arguably in an even more dire position at the end of the 1950s than they had been at any point since the South African War. Reflecting this pain, Motsisi’s “On the Beat” stories conceal a dangerous loss of agency beneath their innocuous façade. Undoubtedly stylized, nevertheless the stories speak—in contrast to much of the rest of Drum—directly to the plight of the “permit-flogged and landlord- ridden” people of Johannesburg for whom victory meant managing to tread water.135 One might well argue that Motsisi was the least fanciful of the Drum writers. In his 1960 poem “The Answered Prayer,” Motsisi himself teases the idea that we might read his work in this way, against the grain. Titled “The Efficacy of Prayer” in the anthology Casey and Co., the poem centers on the ignominious burial of a man the community calls Dan 135 Casey Motsisi, “On the Beat,” Drum, October 1958. 488 the Drunk (which, in classic fashion, Motsisi suggests might not be his real name) and his ignominious burial. There is, Motsisi tells us, a generational divide in the way Dan’s death is seen: Somehow the old people are glad that Dan the Drunk is dead. Ghastly! They say he was a bad influence on the children. But the kids are sad that Dan the Drunk is no more. No more will the kids frolic to the music that used to flow out of his battered concertina. Or listen to the tales he used to tell… “I’m going to be just like Dan the Drunk,” a little girl said to her parents of a cold night while they crowded around a sleepy brazier. The parents looked at each other and their eyes prayed. “God Almighty, save our little Sally.” God heard their prayer. He saved their Sally. Prayer. It can work miracles. Sally grew up to become a nanny…136 Sally is captivated by the stories that Dan the Drunk tells, even though he is a social outcast. When she says that she wants to be like him, contrary to her parents’ fears, she is not referring to his dissolute habits but his heart for children. The fact that she becomes a nanny strikes a palpably discordant note. While Sally avoids becoming a drunk, it leaves a bitter taste in the mouth to think that raising white children is the highest height to which she could aspire with the gifts in her heart. Nevertheless, the core of the poem’s message is that the seemingly meaningless antics of a drunk can in fact be full of significance when viewed in the right light. In the same way, both the “Bugs” columns and “On the Beat” mean much more than they let on at first glance. 136 Second ellipsis in original. Casey Motsisi, “The Answered Prayer,” Drum, November 1960. 489 Particularly poignant evidence of change in the dynamics of black laughter through the early apartheid era can be made by comparing the fiction of two exiled writers who, while both classified as Coloured, identified strongly with the liberation struggle of the African majority. In Peter Abrahams’s memoir Tell Freedom, memories of laughter in the 1930s are almost invariably positive. The people of Tell Freedom are not shy about laughing; variations on the word laugh occur 115 times in the text, spread across many different contexts. Abrahams tells us that his childhood home in Vrededorp, Johannesburg, was one of “love and laughter.”137 And not just at home, but in the streets as well: “Morning breaks gaily in Vrededorp,” Abrahams writes, “there is laughter among the people in the morning. It is as though they find themselves so surprised to be alive that they cannot help laughing.”138 For the young Abrahams, the only thing puzzling about reading W. E. B. DuBois’s Souls of Black Folk was that “there was no laughter in [it].”139 Later, Abrahams describes “two trade unionists…black and…white” who “laughed with the joyous gaiety of boys who had won a great prize,” suggesting that laughter is not just a consolation for the defeated or a momentary escape.140 In contrast, Alex La Guma’s understanding of laughter in his early collection A Walk in the Night and Other Stories (1962) is relentlessly dark, even 137 Peter Abrahams, Tell Freedom, 6. For more on Abrahams, see Robert Ensor, The Novels of Peter Abrahams and the Rise of Nationalism in Africa (Essen, Germany: Die Blaue Eule, 1992); Kolawole Ogungbesan, The Writings of Peter Abrahams (New York, N.Y.: Africana Publishing Company, 1979); “Peter Abrahams Centenary,” ed. Hopeton S. Dunn, Critical Arts 34.3 (2020); and Hein Willemse, “Peter Abrahams (1919-2017),” Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 54.1 (2017), 253-256. For background on Vrededorp, which, like Sophiatown, was hard-hit by forced removals starting in the 1970s, see Nazir Carrim, Fietas: A Social History of Pageview, 1948-1988 (Johannesburg, South Africa: Save Pageview Association, 1990); and Manfred Hermer, The Passing of Pageview (Johannesburg, South Africa: Ravan Press, 1978). 138 Peter Abrahams, Tell Freedom, 92. 139 Peter Abrahams, Tell Freedom, 226. 140 Peter Abrahams, Tell Freedom, 308. 490 though La Guma too is writing about a very similar urban community.141 “Laugh” and its derivations occur 42 times in this shorter text, but almost always in situations of despair and hostility. “A baby wailed with the tortured sound of gripe and malnutrition and a man’s voice rose in hysterical laughter,” runs one typical passage.142 Echoing its function in H. I. E. Dhlomo’s plays, at best the laughter in A Walk in the Night acts as a thin barrier obscuring the true thoughts and feelings of characters trapped by the South African caste system. As the white Constable Raalt and his driver patrol the Cape Town slum of District Six by night, laughter is a foreboding, menacing thing—even in the mouths of polite and deferential Coloureds it cannot be trusted. “These bastards don't like us; they never did like us and we are only tolerated here,” thinks Constable Raalt, “I bet there are some here who would like to stick a knife into me right now.”143 Meanwhile, the unnamed white driver’s interior thoughts hinge on comparing the laughing, good-humored farmworkers he used to drive around on his father’s orchard to the sullen, handcuffed enigmas he now conveys for the police. As he wonders whether the people in the back of his police van are the same as those he joked with on the farm, the protagonist Willieboy’s obscenity-laden taunt of “You…boer” before being shot ends the driver’s reverie.144 The monstrous power wielded by the boer-farmer and the boer-policeman are one in the same, 141 For more on La Guma, who was also one of the 1956 Treason Trial accused, see Cecil A. Abrahams, Alex La Guma (Boston, Mass.: Twayne, 1985); Nahem Yousaf, Alex La Guma: Politics and Resistance (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2001); Roger Field, Alex la Guma: A Literary and Political Biography (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell and Brewer, 2010). For discussion of A Walk in the Night specifically, see J. M. Coetzee, “Man’s Fate in the Novels of Alex La Guma,” in Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Atwell (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 344-360; and Gareth Cornwell, “‘Style is the Great Betrayer: Socialist Realism in La Guma’s A Walk in the Night,” English Studies in Africa 54.1 (2011), 11-20. 142 Alex La Guma, A Walk in the Night and Other Stories (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1967 [1962]): 22. 143 Alex La Guma, A Walk in the Night and Other Stories, 58. 144 Alex La Guma, A Walk in the Night and Other Stories, 82. Besides denoting an (Afrikaner) farmer, “Boer” is derogatory apartheid-era slang for a policeman, reflecting the overwhelmingly Afrikaans-speaking character of the police force. 491 and the mask of laughter in both city and countryside signifies something much more sinister than appearances suggest at first. In 1910, at the dawn of Union, South Africa seemed poised for artistic ferment. A half- century later, many of South Africa’s finest artists had left the country, and those left behind— including humorists—faced political constraints on their creativity that would scarcely have been imaginable at the beginning of the twentieth century. In hindsight, with the declaration of a republic, we can perceive that the development of South African satire had reached a crucial inflection point, with one important chapter closing and the next one held in an indefinite limbo. From Abdullah Abdurrahman to Casey Motsisi, an eclectic group of writers had used the tools of laughter to ask bracing questions about kind of country the Union of South Africa would be. As of May 31, 1961, that Union no longer existed: the Republic of South Africa that replaced it had no such identity issues. Founded on the supremacy of white Afrikaans-speakers, it promised to be an anti-Union that would expel the various husks of rural black settlement known as Bantustans from the rest of the South African body politic, and disaggregate the Coloured and Indian populations from whatever tenuous claim they might once have had on meaningful citizenship. The humor of R. R. R. Dhlomo, K. E. Masinga, and Casey Motsisi can thus be read together as a kind of mariners’ chart, sounding sometimes roundabout and often foreshortened courses towards uncharted waters. Whether their work passes the present-day laugh test is not nearly as significant as what it shows us about the ways black identity was changing in the decades after World War II, buffeted by political defeat and borne forward by consumerism. 492 Epilogue— From “Fanagalo” to Leon Schuster: Notes on Post-Apartheid Laughter Talking Back to White Laughter: The Case of “Fanagalo” In the middle of 1956 a jaunty, accordion-heavy tune called “Fanagalo” caused an uproar in the South African press. The precise origins of the song are obscure: it is often attributed to Tommy (Thornstein) Roering, who also worked on the 1949 Afrikaans movie-musical Kom Saam Vanaand!1 Yet the song also appears on a 1952 album called African Jazz and Variety, where the song is performed by jazz legend Victor Ndlazilwane’s band The Woody Woodpeckers in a guitar arrangement whose tune and rhythm is virtually identical to the later versions by white bands.2 The lyrics are orders barked out to a black domestic servant (a “Zulu boy”), commanding him to do various things around the house. A chorus of “Fanagalo, Fanagalo…” is placed between each of the spoken verses referring to the servant as Jim (Fish), a name that was infamously used by whites to refer to any black male. The version recorded in 1958 by the Three Peterson Brothers expanded on The Woody Woodpeckers recording as well as earlier versions performed by Dan Hill and His Nightbirds (a white band also known as The Zulu Rhythm Boys). It uses the following lyrics: [Chorus:] Fanagalo, Fanagalo, The Zulu boy will understand; Fanagalo, Fanagalo, The magic word from Zululand! Jim, catch-a lo rooster, 1 Roering is listed as the copyright holder of both the words and music of “Fanagalo” in the “Published Music, July- December 1956,” Catalog of Copyright Entries, 3rd series, vol. 10, part 5a, no. 2 (Washington, D.C.: The Library of Congress, 1957): 686-687. 2 For more on this dubious venture by promotor Alf Herbert, see Gwen Ansell, Soweto Blues: Jazz, Popular Music, and Politics in South Africa (New York, N.Y.: Continuum, 2004): 96. 493 Jim, catch-a lo rooster, Pluck-a lo feathers, Put in lo oven, Serve-a lo dinner, Fanagalo.3 Jim, dig-a lo garden (Uh! Uh!) Jim, dig-a lo garden (Uh! Uh!) Pas op maflower, Pas op maflower, Cultivate!4 Fanagalo. Jim, shine-a lo furniture, Jim, shine-a lo furniture, Buff up lo, dust it; Buff up lo, dust it; Renovate! Fanagalo. Jim, khanda lo moto Jim, khanda lo moto Stop it, lo puncture Stop it, lo puncture Overhaul!5 Fanagalo. Jim, shove-a lo plam (Uh!), Jim, shove-a lo plam (Uh!), Missis hamba, Shaya golef, Me babysit!6 Fanagalo.7 Fanagalo (more properly spelt “Fanakalo”) is a Zulu-based pidgin closely associated with the mines of the Witwatersrand. Tellingly, its name derives from the Zulu for “(do it) just like this,” a keen reminder of the power dynamics which gave rise to the language. According to 3 The use of the unconjugated Zulu demonstrative pronoun “lo” for “this” is a hallmark of Fanakalo. Singular commands in Zulu (and all verbs in Fanakalo) end in “-a” 4 “Pas op” is from the Afrikaans for “watch out”; “maflower” is a Zuluized plural for “flowers” 5 “Khanda lo moto” means to beat, hammer, or fix the car. 6 “Pram” is pronounced “plam” as a result of the Zulu language lacking a letter r; the last part of the verse indicates that the lady of the house has gone to play golf. 7 Three Peterson Brothers with Nico Carstens and his Orchestra, “Fanagalo,” ‘On Safari’ with the Three Peterson Brothers, Columbia (33JS 11011), 1958. See also Dan Hill and His Nightbirds, “Fanagalo,” Decca (FM 6347), 1956; The Woody Woodpeckers, “Fanagalo,” African Jazz and Variety, South African Institute of Race Relations, 1952. 494 “Music Lover,” an (apparently black) writer to the Rand Daily Mail in August 1956, the song “amuses many” but also “hurts many if not all Africans who understand the wording.”8 “Music Lover” went on to note how Dorothy Masuka’s song “UDr. Malan Unomthetho Onzima” (“Dr. Malan has a harsh law”) had been banned by the government, and that once, on asking a friend whether he would like a copy of “Fanagalo,” he was told that “if you have the money to spare, please buy five parcels of fish and chips and keep the rest.”9 This letter by “Music Lover” was also discussed in the pages of Ilanga Lase Natal. Obed Kunene, who succeeded R. R. R. Dhlomo in the early 1960s as Ilanga’s editor, disagreed with the complaints. Pointing out that whites could speak Zulu no better (and usually much worse) than their employees could speak English, Kunene argued that Fanagalo was “no one’s language,” so no one had cause to be insulted.10 M. B. Dlamini of Richmond was even more philosophical. “When peoples of different nationalities come to live together,” he argued, “certain unstandardised forms of speech automatically ensue…The use of broken language is one of the features of music.”11 On August 21, 1956, the Rand Daily Mail reported that a delegation of Zulu chiefs sent a deputation to the S.A.B.C. offices in Durban to request that the song be banned from broadcasts aimed at blacks, due to its “derogatory” content—in spite of the “hundreds of requests…received weekly” by the so-called “Bantu programme” to play it.12 This inspired a tongue-in-cheek editorial in the next day’s edition, which accused the rural chiefs of lacking a “sense of humour.”13 “Do the protests come from the suburbs, from the Zulu boy or his 8 “Music Lover,” “They Dislike ‘Fanagalo,” Rand Daily Mail, July 31, 1956. 9 “Music Lover,” “They Dislike ‘Fanagalo,” Rand Daily Mail, July 31, 1956. 10 Obed Kunene, “No Indignity in ‘Fanagalo,’” Ilanga Lase Natal, August 4, 1956. 11 M. B. Dlamini, “‘Fanagalo’ is Non-Political,” Ilanga Lase Natal, September 8, 1956. 12 “‘R.D.M.’ Correspondent,” “Zulu Chiefs Don’t Like ‘Fanagalo,’” Rand Daily Mail, August 21, 1956. 13 “‘Fanagalo’ is Out,” Rand Daily Mail, August 22, 1956. 495 Missis?” it asked. “Not a whit,” the editorial concluded: “Zulu boy is probably flattered, and his Missis sees the fun. If she doesn’t, it’s probably the woman next door that the woman is getting at anyhow. Ask Zulu Boy [sic]. He’s sure to say yes, and laugh like anything all the time.”14 This is a classic example of exotic expertise at work, dismissing the complaints raised by opponents of the system. The chiefs’ objection alienates them from the harmonious South African order; everyone is in on the joke except the dour killjoys who want to politicize domestic life. As has already been discussed, “Fanagalo” was not the exclusive preserve of white musicians. The 1952 version by The Woody Woodpeckers, contains a different opening verse: Jim, thatha lo meat, Jim, thatha lo steak, Cut in-a pieces, cut in-a pieces, Feed-a lo dog!15 Fanagalo.16 In The Woody Woodpeckers’ version, the fact that such fine meat is being given to an animal is emphasized, with “feed-a lo dog!” almost shouted by the singer. Listening to the band live in 1959, Joan Bernitz of the Sunday Times appreciated this change. The “light irony” introduced by the band—which would soon be folded into the cast of the international hit musical King Kong, “pu[t] this abominably patronising ‘hit tune’ into its proper absurd place,” she wrote.17 Her opinion echoes the words of “Sipho” in the pages of Ilanga: “I think their main object was to ridicule the alleged insult to the African nation….in fact they sing it better than the European 14 “‘Fanagalo’ is Out,” Rand Daily Mail, August 22, 1956. 15 “Thatha” means “take.” 16 The Woody Woodpeckers, “Fanagalo,” African Jazz and Variety, South African Institute of Race Relations, 1952. 17 Joan Bernitz, “More Than Clever Kids,” Sunday Times, November 25, 1959; see also Robert Mshengu Kavanagh, Theatre and Cultural Struggle in South Africa, 95. For more on the South African boxing musical King Kong, see Tyler Fleming, Opposing Apartheid On Stage: King Kong the Musical (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2020). 496 composer…I believe we can now laugh it right out. There is the solution to ‘Fanagalo’ controversy.”18 In the controversy over the song “Fanagalo,” we can see how thorny debates over humor could become in a divided and repressed society. We see whites suggest that enjoying the song—and accepting the system it portrays—will bring about inclusion for the so- called “Zulu boy.” We also see Africans reimagining “Fanagalo” as an indictment of white ignorance and ineptitude. Yet as H. I. E. Dhlomo learned in the course of his career as a dramatist (see Chapter 6), the impact of these alternative interpretations by Africans was always going to be limited in a world where whites were committed to interpreting any occasion of African laughter as either malice or stupidity. What was the real price of being included in the joke? The late 1950s tussle over the song “Fanagalo” occurred prior to the government’s passage of the 1963 Publications and Entertainments Act. Yet it was an important precursor to subsequent debates over what constituted humor and what constituted insult in a troubled and repressed society. As the South African bandleader Anton de Waal pointed out in a 1959 Sunday Times article, South African artists produced a number of international hits in the 1950s, and “Fanagalo” was not the only song that could be interpreted as an insult to Africans. Another was Thomas de Villiers “Duffy” Ravenscroft’s “Rickshaw Boy,” a humorous rhapsody on the extravagantly-costumed Zulu men who still tow tourists around the Durban beachfront: He bobs up and down like a ball on a string, The bells on his toes ring-a-ding, ring-a-ding; He runs like a hare and he trots like a mare And he’s here and he’s there and he’s everywhere; He’s up in the air like a wild kangaroo; He’s down, running ‘round, crowing cock-a-doodle-do 18 “Sipho,” “‘Fanagalo a Joke,” Ilanga Lase Natal, September 22, 1959. 497 He sways like a bear full of devil-may-care and he sings As he runs on air.19 In “Rickshaw Boy” the Durban rickshaw driver is treated less like a human being as a force of nature—tamed just enough to be tourist-friendly.20 Both songs in both eras, as sung by white artists, are prime expressions of exotic expertise, illustrating the singer’s familiarity with the strange and wonderful world of Africa and Africans. They represent Africans in roles determined for them by colonialism, as ahistorical fixtures of a strange but ultimately seductive and enticing landscape. They allow the listener to identify with Africanness, and the special insights that the continent imparts on its white residents, while still maintaining a barrier of (outwardly) innocuous ridicule between them and Africans themselves. Retroactive Talking Back: The Case of Leon Schuster South African social media lit up on June 20, 2020, when it was reported that nine of the Leon Schuster’s comedy films had been removed from Showmax, a popular South African streaming platform.21 Five of the nine films were permanently banned from the platform.22 The removal took place in the context of American protests over the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck for fifteen minutes, and a related movement in the United States to remove monuments celebrating the Confederate “Lost Cause” 19 Duffy Ravenscroft, “Rickshaw Boy,” Kwela with Duffy, Gallo (Africa) GALP1012, 1958. 20 For more on rickshaw-pulling as a Durban institution, see Rowan C. Gatfield, “The Isimodeni Tradition: Traditional Beadwork, Zulu Trinket, or South African Sartorial Tradition on Durban’s Golden Mile?,” Anthropology Southern Africa 42.2 (2019), 127-148; Hlonipha Mokoena, “The Rickshaw Puller and the Zulu Policeman: Zulu Men, Work, and Clothing in Colonial Natal,” Critical Arts 31.3 (2017), 123-141. 21 James Richardson, “Nine Leon Schuster Films Removed from Showmax,” The South African (Cape Town, South Africa), June 20, 2020, accessed March 28, 2021, . Showmax’s parent company is Multichoice, whose parent company is Naspers, one of South Africa’s largest present-day corporations and one with a deep history of supporting Afrikaner Nationalist politics. 22 Emmanuel Tjiya, “Leon Schuster Scores Big With Mama Jack,” The Sowetan (Johannesburg, South Africa), July 9, 2020, accessed March 28, 2021, . 498 in the American Civil War.23 The films were taken down on the grounds that they (in the words of a spokesperson) could “possibly be racially insensitive.”24 The next day the actor Rob van Vuuren (who, like Schuster, is white) issued an apology for his appearance in blackface alongside Schuster in Schuks! Your Country Needs You (2013). Van Vuuren wrote that he was “deeply ashamed…for contributing to negative stereotypes from a position of power and privilege,” despite the fact that Schuks! Your Country Needs You was not one of the films that had been flagged for review.25 Conrad Koch, a popular white stand-up comedian and ventriloquist whose puppet interlocutor “Chester Missing” was black until a few years ago, added that Schuster’s humor was flawed because it allowed white people to feel “very safe” about their “racial and cultural supremacy.”26 The common thread linking all nine films is Leon Schuster’s well-known history of using racial disguises (including the use of dark makeup, wigs, and prosthetics) for comedic effect, often for the hidden camera pranks. In the scripted films Mr. Bones (2001) and Mr. Bones 2 (2008), Schuster, who is white and Afrikaans, does not wear makeup but rather affects a stereotypical black South African accent as a time-traveling isangoma (traditional healer) from the fictional kingdom of Kuvukiland.27 In Mama Jack (2005), Schuster’s character disguises 23 To provide just one example, the removal of the films took place in the same month as it was announced that the U.S. state of Virginia would remove the monument to Confederate leaders lining Richmond’s famous Monument Avenue (Richmond had served as the capital of the pro-slavery Confederate States of America). See Michael Levenson, “Protestors Topple Statue of Jefferson Davis on Richmond’s Monument Avenue,” The New York Times, June 11, 2020, accessed March 28, 2021, . 24 James Richardson, “Nine Leon Schuster Films Removed from Showmax,” The South African, June 20, 2020, 25 Rob van Vuuren, “There is no easy way to say this…,” Facebook post, June 21, 2020, accessed March 28, 2021, . 26 Conrad Koch (@chestermissing), “The question is actually…,” Twitter update, June 20, 2020, accessed March 28, 2021, . The racial transformation of Koch’s Chester Missing character is discussed in “Is Chester Missing Blackface?,” Africa Is A Country, January 14, 2013, accessed May 24, 2021, . 27 Mr. Bones, dir. Gray Hofmeyr (Umhlanga, South Africa: Videovision Entertainment, 2001); Mr. Bones 2: Back from the Past, dir Gray Hofmeyr (Umhlanga, South Africa: Videovision Entertainment, 2008). 499 himself as a black housekeeper by means of a fat-suit and blackface makeup.28 Most of the films that were removed from Showmax, however, like You Must Be Joking! (1986), Oh Schuks, It’s Schuster! (1989), and Schuks! Pay Back the Money (2015), are candid camera gag films, where Schuster uses elaborate racial disguises to play tricks on ostensibly unsuspecting South Africans.29 As Cara Moyer-Duncan explains in her recent study, Projecting Nation, Schuster is arguably the most successful filmmaker in South Africa’s history.30 Born to a working class family in the conservative city of Bloemfontein, Schuster’s comedic songs about rugby cemented his credentials as an exemplar of Afrikaner masculinity, while his unapologetic embrace of slapstick, pranks, and stereotype won him a large and extraordinarily diverse fan base by the 1990s.31 In the 1990s and 2000s the films which he co-wrote and starred in reaped record profits in a country where Hollywood imports have traditionally dominated. Until recently Mr. Bones 2 held the record for the highest grossing film ever in South Africa—foreign or domestic.32 Ultimately, then, the debate surrounding Showmax’s decision was less about the specific films that were removed as about the merits of Schuster’s humor agenda. South Africa’s 28 Mama Jack, dir. Gray Hofmeyr (Umhlanga, South Africa: Videovision Entertainment, 2005). 29 You Must Be Joking!, dir. Elmo de Witt (Kavalier Films, 1986); Oh Schuks, It’s Schuster!, dir. Leon Schuster (Koukus Produksies, 1989); Schuks! Pay Back the Money!, dir. Gray Hofmeyr (Umhlanga, South Africa: Videovision Entertainment, 2015). 30 Cara Moyer-Duncan, Projecting Nation. 31 See My Story: Leon Schuster, dir. Annalet Steenkamp (Johannesburg: Lucky Bean Media, 2015). For an example of Schuster’s rugby material, see Leon Schuster, “Hie’ Kommie Bokke,” YouTube video, October 20, 2015 [1995], accessed March 28, 2021, . 32 “‘Potter’: Tops ‘Mr. Bones 2’ Box Office Record,” The Witness (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa), July 19, 2011. 500 influential Black Twitter subculture was divided.33 “Hit a like If you agree he made your Childhood days,” goes one Black Twitter-identifying tweet, alongside a picture of Schuster made up as a black woman for Mama Jack. It was liked over 11,000 times in four days.34 About a week before the controversy erupted, Mama Jack was rebroadcast on the network e.tv, attracting 2.91 million viewers—a strong showing in a country of less than 59 million people.35 As for Schuster himself, he had already announced in a 2018 interview that he would no longer act in blackface, and apologized further on June 24 for the pain his films may have caused.36 “I don’t want us to laugh at each other,” he said, “I want us to laugh with each other.”37 For black South Africans who grew up with Schuster movies, the fact that he went after all sides signified inclusion, while for whites his ability to win applause from the majority for his racial disguises and accents represented the ultimate triumph of exotic expertise—Schuster’s acceptance meant 33 According to Alexia Smit and Tanja Bosch, “Black Twitter does not necessarily refer to a homogeneous group of Twitter users, but in the South African context could be seen as an umbrella term uniting diverse users through shared culture, language or interest in specific issues; and often code- switching or texting in languages other than English. Indeed, ‘Black Twitter’ might also be usefully understood as a site where ideas about Blackness and group identity are openly contested and negotiated in diverse ways” (1516). See Alexia Smit and Tanja Bosch, “Television and Black Twitter in South Africa: Our Perfect Wedding,” Media, Culture, and Society 42.7-8 (2020), 1512-1527. See also Kenichi Serino, “#RainbowNation: The Rise of South Africa’s ‘Black Twitter,’” The Christian Science Monitor (Boston, Mass.), March 7, 2013. For discussion of Black Twitter in the American context, see Sarah Florini, “Tweets, Tweeps, and Signifiyin,” Television and New Media 15.3 (2014), 223-237; Marc Lamont Hill, “‘Thank You, Black Twitter’: State Violence, Digital Counterpublics, and Pedagogies of Resistance,” Urban Education 53.2 (2018), 286-302; and Raven S. Maragh, “Authenticity on ‘Black Twitter’: Reading Racial Performance and Social Networking,” Television and New Media 19.7 (2018), 591-609. 34 @MntakaSkhumba, “Hit a like if you agree…,” Twitter update, June 19, 2020, . At the time of writing, Leon Schuster was trending yet again because of a blackface performance of Master KG and Nomcebo’s hit song “Jerusalema” that aired on Bulgarian television. See Storm Simpson, “Leon Schuster Is That You? Twitter Reacts to Jerusalema Blackface Video,” The South African, March 19, 2021, accessed March 28, 2021, . 35 Emmanuel Tjiya, “Leon Schuster Scores Big With Mama Jack,” The Sowetan, July 9, 2020, 36 See Leonie Wagner, “I Won’t Go Blackface Now. It’s Just Racist: Leon Schuster,” Sunday Times, August 5, 2018; and Herman Eloff, “Leon Schuster: ‘I Don’t Want Us To Laugh At Each Other, I Want Us To Laugh With Each Other,’” Channel24 (Cape Town, South Africa), June 24, 2020, accessed March 28, 2021, . 37 Herman Eloff, “Leon Schuster: I Don’t Want Us To Laugh At Each Other, I Want Us To Laugh With Each Other,’” Channel24, June 24, 2020, accessed March 28, 2021, . 501 that it was not only desirable to embrace the New South Africa as a white person, but also that doing so need not be disruptive to one’s pre-existing sense of self. Instead of “some of my best friends are black,” Schuster’s broad popularity allowed white people to say that “some of my friend’s best friends are black.” Both the appeal of this maneuver and the problems inherent to it are readily evident. Because Leon Schuster’s films are tied so strongly to the colorblind euphoria of the democratic transition, ongoing debates about his work are necessarily debates about the post- apartheid order. Obviously his films do not aim for gritty realism, but through Snoektown-esque fun they suggested that all South Africans could unite around their love of laughter. This idea has been born out over the past two decades by the rise of a vibrant and diverse comedy scene where racialized accents and stereotypes have long been a staple—from Trevor Noah’s mimicry to Conrad Koch’s ventriloquism to the 2007-2008 sitcom The Coconuts, where a white suburban family learns how to adjust after a lightning strike turns them black (the white characters are played by African actors, while their live-in domestic worker is played by a white woman who speaks with a Zulu accent).38 Imitation, Recognition, Suspicion, and New Paths The controversy over “Fanagalo” in the 1950s and Leon Schuster’s films in the 2020s is a powerful illustration of the continuities revealed by the history of South African humor. Schuster is, in many ways, a late twentieth-century Cecil Wightman. Instead of designing gags to shore up the foundations of a white-dominated society, Schuster dedicated himself to boosting the 38 See Anders Kelto, “A White Comedian and His Black Puppet Help South Africans Talk About Race,” The World (Boston, Mass.), April 24, 2014, accessed March 28, 2021, ; Christelle de Jager, “S. African Net Races to Comedy,” Variety (Los Angeles, Calif.), January 25, 2008, accessed March 28, 2021, . 502 newly democratic South Africa at a time when many whites were ambivalent. It should not surprise us that Schuster’s career was able to negotiate the transition from National Party rule to the postapartheid era so successfully. By going after “all sides” of South Africa’s racial divide with his comedy pranks, Schuster repeated Wightman’s formula of going after both Afrikaans- and English-speaking whites, on the theory that a nation that could laugh at itself was still at its heart a healthy nation. To be sure, after years of international isolation and political struggle, it is clear from Schuster’s popularity that a wide swathe of South Africans were ready to laugh at each other. Racial masquerade à la “Fanagalo” was read as transgressive in an atmosphere where so much repression had previously been justified on the basis of defending the dignity of various racial categories. Remarkably, both “Fanagalo” and “Rickshaw Boy” survived to be covered by white artists in the post-apartheid era, in a particularly startling example of this trend. The chorus of the original “Fanagalo” was incorporated into a 2001 Thys die Bosveldklong song of the same title, a medley of rough Fanagalo “translations” of classic Afrikaans songs, including the classic “Sarie Marais.” Carike Keuzenkamp, another well known Afrikaans singer, released an Afrikaans version of “Rickshaw Boy” for children in 2005.39 Below are the three relevant versions of “Sarie Marais”: the canonical Afrikaans chorus, a literal English translation of the chorus, and Thys die Bosveldklong’s “Fanagalo Keurspel”: O bring my t’rug na die ou Transvaal, Daar waar my Sarie woon, Daar onder in die mielies by die groot doringboom Daar woon my Sarie Marais.40 39 Carike Keuzenkamp, “Riksja Booi,” Carike in Kinderland, vol. 2, Vat 5 Musiek, 2005. 40 Lyrics from Chris. A. Blignaut with the Jansen Quartet, “Sarie Marais,” Sarie Marais, Columbia (LE13), 1931. 503 Oh bring me back to the old Transvaal, There where my Sarie lives, Down in the mealie fields at the big thorn tree, There lives my Sarie Marais. Mina funa hamba lapha lo die ou Transvaal, Manje lo Sarie yena khon’, Lapha suide kalo mielies emakhulu doringboom, Manje lo Sarie yena khon’.41 In the initial postapartheid era, South Africans of all races were excited by the possibilities of free expression, and the urge to recast historical tragedy as endearing eccentricity was as strong as ever. Hence Schuster’s simulated black South African accent in Mama Jack, which he justified in an interview by saying that “a domestic worker is a domestic worker. That’s reality. I couldn’t do Mama Jack speaking [impersonates an upper-crust accent] ‘Oh my darling”. They just don’t speak like that. The ladies that I was working with, who play the part of the domestics, that’s how they speak.”42 The white Jewish stand-up comedian Nik Rabinowitz, who speaks fluent Xhosa, wrote a long bit tackling similar territory—the impossibility of pronouncing English phrases in a white South African accent while speaking Xhosa.43 Trevor Noah himself, South Africa’s most famous stand-up comedian, built his reputation in large measure on his ability to imitate accents while also appealing to the corporate clients which continue to form the financial bedrock of South Africa’s stand-up comedy scene.44 Yet it all depends on who feels 41 Thys die Bosveldklong [Thys Streicher], “Fanagalo Keurspel,” Ek Hou Nie Van Werk Nie, Fantasia Records, 2001. 42 Matthew Krouse, “Oh Mama!” The Mail and Guardian (Johannesburg, South Africa), July 14, 2006, accessed March 28, 2021, . 43 See Quentin Emmanuel Williams and Christopher Stroud, “Multilingualism in Transformative Spaces: Contact and Conviviality,” Language Policy 12.4 (2013), 289-311. 44 For further discussion of the economics of South African stand-up comedy, see Robin K. Crigler “There’s No Such Thing As ‘Too Soon’ Here: Taking Stock of South Africa’s Comedy Boom,” in Stand-Up Comedy in Africa: Humor in Popular Languages and Media, ed. Izuu Nwankwọ (Stuttgart, Germany: Ibidem Press, 2021), 235-251. On Trevor Noah’s accents and the controversies they have provoked outside South Africa, see Tomi Obaro, “Trevor Noah Still Doesn’t Get It,” BuzzFeed News, December 6, 2016, accessed March 28, 2021, ; and “Comedian Trevor Noah Slammed for Mocking India-Pakistan Crisis,” Al Jazeera English, March 4, 2019, accessed March 28, 2021, see . 504 included in the joke. The optimistic Mandela years have lost much of their shine amid collapsing service delivery, broken government promises regarding land reform, the persistence of gender- based violence and economic stagnation over the past decade and a half. Given all this we should not wonder that some people now look at Leon Schuster films and other artifacts of the 1990s less as signals of a new inclusion and more as Humorous Native Studies warmed over, regardless of conscious intent. In this study, I have argued that humor was an essential tool in representing the South African nation in the Union period. It continues to be deployed for this purpose today. Humorists on both sides of the color line used humor to map the social boundaries of their world. Taking South Africa’s social problems and historical inequalities as a point of departure, many of these humorists used their work to criticize a status quo that was inhibiting the South Africa they wished for from being born, while others attempted to defuse these issues with jokes and parody. Ultimately, the need to affirm individual subjectivities and group identities in the context of a highly diverse and unequal society reveals itself as the common denominator in each case. As Rob van Vuuren puts it, humor helps us in “dealing with the terror of realizing that we are just these insignificant little clown particles floating around in an endless cosmos of rakes to step on and banana peels to slip on.”45 Much more work needs to be done in order to bring out the full significance of humor in South African history. Much more work needs to be done on the dynamics of humor in African languages—in the press, in oral literature, and on social media as well as within South Africa’s burgeoning “vernac” stand-up comedy scene. More efforts should be made to identify and 45 Quoted in Emma Dollery, “What is the Importance of Art When a Country is Burning? Escaping Reality with Comedy, Satire, and Drama,” Daily Maverick (Johannesburg, South Africa), March 2, 2021. 505 grapple with unrecorded, unprinted forms of humor, as well as the significance of gender and sexuality in this history. This study has, I hope, scratched the surface of this massive topic and provided some insight—both by its merits and its shortcomings—into how such studies might be handled in the future. Yet the story of humor in South Africa remains largely untold. Humor is one of the most pleasurable and also one of the most subjective forms of discourse. Not only can it take us to places we want to go, it can take us to strange and impossible places we would never otherwise expect. Humor can disable our inhibitions and break through to our most closely-guarded selves. Yet humor is extraordinarily idiosyncratic in its impact; what doubles one person over in spasms of joy may leave another person perfectly unmoved. It is even more perilous when two people laugh at the same thing for different reasons —one feels the shock of finding isolation where one had expected camaraderie, and the anger of feeling fooled. In a place where so much remains unequal, even twenty-seven years after the arrival of democracy, both the desire to laugh and the inclination to suspect each other’s laughter are likely to remain powerful forces in South Africa for a long time. 506 APPENDICES 507 APPENDIX A: A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF R. ROAMER COLUMNS IN THE BANTU WORLD, 1933-1943 Total S. P. G. Misc. J.J. Afr. B.W. Int’l Local W.P. Flies Non- Ts. Cols. Pol. Tie- C.E. C.E. Hum. per In Col. 1933 44 19 12 11 10 3 2 1 2 1 1.2 (43.2) (27.3) (25.0) (22.7) (6.8) (4.6) (2.3) (4.6) (2.3) 1934 52 19 9 16 7 5 5 7 4 4 2 1.4 (36.5) (17.3) (30.8) (13.5) (9.6) (9.6) (13.5) (7.7) (7.7) (3.9) 1935 52 10 12 14 10 8 3 5 3 6 4 1 1.3 (19.2) (23.0) (26.9) (19.2) (15.4) (5.8) (9.6) (5.8) (11.5) (7.7) (1.9) 1936 49 12 13 16 15 4 4 2 4 2 1 1.2 (24.5) (26.5) (32.7) (30.6) (8.2) (8.2) (4.1) (8.2) (4.1) (2.0) 1937 53 14 18 13 12 7 6 1 1 5 2 1.2 (26.4) (34.0) (24.5) (22.6) (13.2) (11.3) (1.9) (1.9) (9.4) (3.8) 1938 54 14 21 12 10 5 4 5 1 1 1 1.2 (25.9) (38.9) (22.2) (18.5) (9.3) (7.4) (9.3) (1.9) (1.9) (1.9) 1939 51 15 5 11 17 11 1 8 1 4 3 1.2 (29.4) (9.8) (21.6) (33.3) (21.6) (2.0) (15.7) (2.0) (7.8) (5.9) 1940 48 15 9 7 9 11 3 7 4 1 1 1.2 (31.3) (18.8) (14.6) (18.8) (22.9) (6.3) (14.6) (8.3) (2.1) (2.1) 1941 50 13 16 10 14 14 4 1 1 1 1 1.2 (26.0) (32) (20.0) (28.0) (28.0) (8.0) (2.0) (2.0) (2.0) (2.0) 1942 50 8 11 9 9 17 4 2 6 1 1 1 1.3 (16.0) (22) (18.0) (18.0) (34.0) (8.0) (4.0) (12.0) (2.0) (2.0) (2.0) 1943 11 1 2 4 2 2 1 2 1.1 (9.1) (18.2) (36.4) (18.2) (18.2) (9.1) (18.2) Avg. 514 140 128 123 115 87 37 31 30 25 18 8 1.3 (27.2) (24.9) (23.9) (22.4) (16.9) (7.2) (6.0) (5.8) (4.9) (3.5) (1.6) Table 1: A Content Analysis of R. Roamer Columns in The Bantu World, 1933-1943. The first number listed in every cell refers to the number of columns coded for a particular topic in a given year, while the number in parentheses shows the percentage of columns for the year coded for that particular topic. Columns were analyzed on an inclusive basis; if a column fell into one of the following categories for a quarter of its length or more, it was counted for that category. The same column could therefore count for multiple categories. “S.P.” (Social Problems) above refers to columns that directly discuss segregation, poverty or crime. Columns coded “G.” (Gender) feature women characters prominently or discuss gender relations. “Misc.” (Miscellaneous) columns devote significant space to topics outside the purview of the other categories listed here. The “J.J.” (Jeremiah and Joshua) code is applied only to those 508 columns that are structured as scripted dialogues between the two characters, and not columns were they are only mentioned. “Afr. Pol.” (African Politics) columns deal with organized black South African politics. “B.W. Tie-In” refers to columns that discuss features or items found elsewhere in The Bantu World, or figures such as the Editor or the “Editress.” “Int’l C.E.” and “Local C.E.” refer to international and domestic current events, respectively. “W.P.” (White Press) refers to columns that discuss letters or articles explicitly identified as appearing in white South African newspapers such as The Star and the Rand Daily Mail. Columns coded “Flies” riff on the topic of flies and vermin. “Non-Hum.” refers to columns that are entirely agelastic in tone (clearly not meant to be laughed at.). The final column, “Ts. Per Col.,” shows the average number of coded topics covered by a single column over the course of a particular year. 509 APPENDIX B: AN EXCERPT FROM AN MSIMBITHI, UMFANA WEKHISHI COLUMN “Ezika Msimbithi,” Ilanga Lase Natal, February 26, 1955 (bold is in original): UMFAZI OQOMAYO Ungadudeki wena Mfazi oqomayo, oqomile, onamashende: Amahuzu lawo owaqomile akakuthandu, ayakufisa, nawo Fesikrimu labo akuthengela bona ayakuyenga-nje, nawo Fishpesti labo akuthengela bona, ayakusondeza-nje kuwona khona uzosondela eduze—uwezwe ethi Khamduze Bebhiy. Kuse kuhle namhlanje kodwa mhla yakulahla indida yakho, nawo kumhla ekulahlayo njengenyongo yenyathi. Ngoba phela ungakhohlwa ukuthi amahuzu lawo akuthanda ngoba usondhleke kahle; mhla kwakushela yiwona ayobaleka kuqala ngoba akuthanda njengoba usacwebezela wondhliwa yindoda yakho, wona akafuni kondhla mfazi, afuna oMesis Sheyameni Phanayo ukuphela babawisele imendo yabo badhlulele phambili babashiye beyizimpabanga ezizula emgwaqweni bese kulokuthiwa “Uyambona lowaya muntu wesifazane osenjeyaya? KwakunguNkosikazi wesiqumama esingu Mr. Suthayo, umuzi wakhe wawiswa ngamaHuzu amadala ayekade eyegila imikhuba edhla izindhlubu namakhansi, manje noma behlangana endhleleni akasafuni nokumbheka”. Laphoke seyibuye yonke ingqondo kulowo mfazi, usethi nxa elele unyembezi luphume esweni luze luyongena endhlebeni ludhlule lapho luyohlangana nomlomo luphenduke uhlakahla nxa eqala ukukhumbula umubuso awushiya emzini wakhe edhlala amahumusha namahumushakazi. Sekuthi nxa ethi uya emizini yalawo mahuzukazi ayegila nawo imikhuba amubize ngesicefe, uyangena emzini yabo bathi “Hawu wafika lapho ngithi ngiyaphuma ngijahile ngithunywe uyise kaBadhliswa ekuthinithini” lutho akayindawo akasakufuninje, yena uqobo lwakhe lowo owayeyi Big Shod lapho usekubiza ngesinikinikana sesigilamikhuba. Ihuzu phela owawuliqomile lapho alisaphathwa alisaziwa ukuthi latshobela kuziphi izintaba na? Noma lizohlangana nawe lithi Qwi-Ngaleziyantaba zaseNtalashini, lithathe ezinye izitaladi-lidhlulela phambili liwisa abanye wena alisakufuni sewawanje lisazokwenzani ngawe? Selawadhla amaqanda emzini wakho lakima laqeda lathi nya. Lalikuthanda ngoba wondhliwe kahle uma sewu Yisichayi sika Nomgwaqo alisakufuni ihuzu. Uyathayima noma cha? Asikhathali noma ungayeka kodwa asikuniki lutho sikunika Amahuzu izimambana ezadhla inyoni indiza, yona yagcina indiza kanti seyiwile dikli. Kulungile mfazi oqomayo noqomile ayithi iphuma indoda ekuseni iiya [sic] esebenzini wena bekufika amaBhikishodikazi nikrime niye emahuzwini niqaphele isikhathi sika Fayifi ukuba sinishayele ekhaya sithi “Hamba juba bayokuhlutha phambili, bayokuhlutha kwaBhanki eMkhumbane”. Uma kwenza ngoba lomhlaba uwuthatha ngokuwugijima ngejubane lika MSHAYIZULE uzoficeka sewulele amankenyane eduze komgwaqo sewushile-lapho kugcina khona izimoto ezinejubane nabafazi abanejubane. Cha bafundi bezika Msimbithi ngisekhona nina bakwethu bo. Ngisho ngoba ngihlangene nenye insizwa kuleliyasonto mhla lina kakhulu yathi “Haku yisiPoki yini lesi loku ngizwe ngomuntu okade eyongcwaba Msimbithi ukuthi ufile wangcwatsha na?” 510 Ngiyananzisake ukuthi angikafi ngisekhona ngisahamba leyongoma yami endala engagcina ngiyihaye mhla ngigcina esontweni ethi:— “We, nhliziyo yami, Mawuhlakaniphe, Zikuhaqe izitha zakho, Zivukele wena… Linda uthandaze, Ungayeki ukulwa, Ekufeni uyoqeda— Umsebenzi wakho…” Kantike mina ngiyasithanda noma angithi ngisixolele isitha esisobala kunomuntu onesimilo sika JUDA SIKARIYOTHI owabulala inkosi yakhe elokhu ezishaya umngayana wayo weluka izikimu zokuthi uyoze ayibambe okhalweni. Uyamubona lowomuntu oke umushiye emzini wakho ngoba uthi umethembile? Mubi lowomuntu. Uyothi uthi wena HAA, kade esehambe naye umkakho wothi uthi bhaybhayibhayi-abantu bebethi—suka kanti uhlakaniphile kangaka nje awukuboni okukwe ematheni yu D—B Ful. Nempela nawe uzibone ukuthi ungu DB-Fulu (DBFOOL).” Translation by the author: THE WOMAN WHO CHOOSES Don't be confused, you who choose, who is chosen, who has lovers: The city boys you have chosen don’t love you, they desire you, and the face cream they buy for you will seduce you, and the fish paste they buy for you will bring you closer—just so you will be closer—you heard him say kom duze [come closer], baby. It’s fine today but the day you dump your puzzle of a guy is also the day they cast you out like a hot potato [like the gall bladder of a buffalo]. After all, don't forget that these city boys do not love you because you are good to eat; on the day of the wedding, they are the ones who will run away first because they love you while you are still glittering and being fed by your man. They don’t want to feed the woman, they only want Mrs. Sheyameni Phanayo [Mrs. Sheyameni Generous] to break up their marriage and move on leaving them wandering the streets and saying “Do you see that woman over there? She was the flower of the noble Mr. Suthayo [Mr. Stuffed], his house was brought down by the dirty old one who had the habit of eating groundnuts gluttonously out of cooking pots; now when they meet in the street he doesn't even want to look at her.” When the woman regained consciousness, tears welled up in her eyes as she lay on her ear and passed out until the tears entered her ear and passed through it to meet her mouth where they became dried spittle when she began to remember the kingdom she left behind at her home, where she palled around with the gossiping men and women. When she said she was going to the houses of those dirty tarts and they called her a nuisance, she went into their house and they said “Oh, he came when I said I was going out in a hurry and I was sent by the father of Badhliswa [“Caused-to-be-Shared”] to say such and such” nothing is out of place but the one who was what the Big Shot there calls a dirty deceiver. The dirty trash you had chosen there; it is not addressed or known which hills he disappeared 511 into. Or he will meet you and say, “Go to the mountains of Talashin, and take some of the streets —and pass others, and it shall fall on you, and you shall not want it.” You ate the eggs in your house and he stopped eating and finished. She loved it because she was well-fed and when the ISICHAYI of the Street did not want a side-piece. Are you confused or not? We don't care if you give up but we don't give you anything. We give you the Hummingbirds that ate the bird in the plane, it kept the plane and it fell down. It is okay for a choosing and chosen woman to say that a man goes out in the morning to go to work when the Mmes. Bigshots arrive and go to the tart’s and drive her home at 5 o’clock saying “Go, dove, and they'll snatch you up front, they’ll snatch you from the bank of the Mkhumbane [a stream in Cato Manor].” If you do it because you are taking on the world by running at MSHAYIZULE's speed you will find yourself lying by the side of the burnt-out road—where there are fast cars and fast women. No, students of Msimbithi; I am still here, comrades. Even though I met a young man this week on a rainy day, he said, “Isn’t this a ghost? I heard about someone who was going to bury Msimbithi and that he was dead and buried?” I would like to remind you that I am not dead while I am still walking with my old song that I last sang on the last day of church:— “You, my heart, May you be wise, Your enemies surround you, They are against you… Wait and pray, Do not stop fighting, In death you will finish— Your work… ” Either I love him or do not I forgive the obvious enemy with the character of JUDAS ISCARIOT who killed his lord by pretending to be a friend and plotting schemes to catch him in the loins. Do you see the person that left you behind at your place because you said you trusted him? That person is evil. He will say to you “HAA,” your wife has gone with him and says confused people are saying “go away” and “you’re so smart you just don't see what is soaked in saliva you damned bloody fool.” You have seen yourself that you are a DB-Fulu (DBFOOL). 512 BIBLIOGRAPHY 513 BIBLIOGRAPHY Archives and Libraries Consulted Amazwi South African Museum of Literature (ASALM), Makhanda, South Africa. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn. Campbell Collections, University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), Durban, South Africa. Cecil Renaud Library, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Centre for African Literary Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Cape Town Archives Repository (CAR), Cape Town, South Africa. Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa Archive, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Wellington, South Africa. Harry Ransom Center (HRC), University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas. 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