Empire, Race and the Politics of Anti-caste by Bressey Caroline

Author:Bressey, Caroline
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2015-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 6.4 Firing at Long Range, one of John Mitchell Jr’s editorial cartoons for the Richmond Planet, 2 February 1895

Mitchell’s cartoon provides further evidence that by 1895 Catherine’s work could be referenced in black American newspapers with little explanation, her efforts pervasive within some public cultures. In June Imvo Zabantsandu reprinted a letter previously published in the Cape Times on the ‘Coloured Question’ in southern Africa. Under the header ‘The Brotherhood of Man’, the author explained that he or she had only recently arrived in the colony and so presumed it would not be surprising that the ‘coloured question’ should be especially interesting to them. Believing ‘somewhat in the brotherhood of man, irrespective of the colour Nature may have thought fit to dye his skin’, the author strongly protested against views of ‘Kaffirs’ that had been so offensively enunciated in the Parliament recently. The writer admitted that their recent arrival meant they did know of the history of the honourable member whose language had moved them to protest, ‘nor if he was a Jew, Turk, infidel, or heathen’, nor ‘whether his hair be black or white’.98 They assumed from his name he could not be English and thanked God for that at least, though they quickly went on to remind the editor of the unenviable notoriety Lord Salisbury earned by his lapsus lingua in referring disparagingly to Dadabhai Naoroji as a ‘black man’. There was no reason, the author argued, that the accidental birth right of colour, of whatever shade, should impede a man’s progress or check his legitimate ambition. The reader signed off their letter Novocastrian, a reference to their origins in Newcastle upon Tyne or Newcastle, New South Wales.99 The content of their letter is suggestive of a connection to the SRBM in some form and its continuing influence on one reader’s life. If they had been a regular reader of Anti-Caste or Fraternity, they would have been alert to a highly critical analysis of politics in southern Africa particularly the military brutality and capitalist greed of Cecil Rhodes.

Notes

1 Impey to Chesson, March 1888, MSS. Brit. Emp. s.18 C138/173.

2 New York Age, 7 April 1888, 2.

3 New York Age, 7 April 1888, 2.

4 Penn, Afro-American Press.

5 Cleveland Gazette, 6 October 1888, 2.

6 Cleveland Gazette, 6 October 1888, 2.

7 Cleveland Gazette, 6 October 1888, 2.

8 Cleveland Gazette, 6 October 1888, 2, original emphasis.

9 Cleveland Gazette, 6 October 1888, 2.

10 New York Age, 1 December 1888, 2.

11 Christian Recorder, 13 June 1899.

12 ‘Anti-Caste’, in Christian Recorder, 13 June 1899 reprinted in ‘Supplement to Anti-Caste’, January 1890, npn.

13 AJH, ‘Liverpool Daily Post’, in Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism.

14 AJH (who argues that the increase was probably largely due to the Echo founded in 1879), ‘Liverpool Daily Post’, in Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism.

15 Catherine mentions that Russell had been helping her in a letter to F Chesson, 16 October 1882, MSS. Brit. Emp. s.18 C138/164.

16 ‘News of the day’, Liverpool Daily Post, 2 March 1889.

17 Supplement to Anti-Caste, January 1890, 1.

18 ‘The editor’s New Year’s address’, Supplement to Anti-Caste, January 1890, npn.

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