The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa by S. Mark Stanley Trapido S. Marks

Author:S. Mark, Stanley Trapido, S. Marks [S. Mark, Stanley Trapido, S. Marks]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317868965
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2014-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

The Garveyism of James S. Thaele and the ANC

On December 4, 1922, G. Boyes, a Cape Town magistrate, wrote to E. Barrett, Secretary of Native Affairs: ‘The evolution, amalgamation of native black races and the various changes and movements are, in my opinion, rapidly arriving at a crisis.’53 Thus, by early 1922, the Lovedale establishment was articulating the concern it felt in light of the impression that Garvey’s ideas had been making on members of the African educated élite: ‘Marcus Garvey carries away some of our Native friends’, an editorial in the South African Outlook lamented. The Garvey movement, the editorial went on, ‘seduced not a few earnest workers for the wellbeing of Bantu South Africa away from paths of practical service, into dubious and sterile relationships’, causing ‘their attitude towards the Europeans with whom before they were co-operating [to become] embittered.’54 At about the same time as this editorial was published, the Native Affairs Department reported an almost identical concern but on a much broader scale: ‘The race consciousness of the South African Native is steadily growing’, it declared, warning that ‘The danger lies in the probable tendencies of the development of race consciousness to become anti-European and to seek expression in action subversive of law and order.’55

In face of this mounting pressure from an aroused African racial consciousness consequent upon the ‘Africa for the Africans’ movement, ‘Professor’ James S. Thaele, BA, BSc., former Lovedale student, arrived back in South Africa after being away in the United States for ten years, during which time he graduated from Lincoln University and the University of Pennsylvania. But Thaele was also, in an important sense, a graduate of the Ethiopian movement, since he had been among the twenty-two South African students who attended Lincoln University, one of the major Afro-Americn centres of higher education in the United States, between 1896 and 1924. Moreover, Thaele’s subsequent plan for an ‘African land settlement’ scheme (Thaele was general secretary and S. M. Bennet Ncwana was president), whose aim was ‘inducing Natives living in towns to settle on the land’, would appear to have connected him to that phase of the earlier Ethiopian phenomenon which involved land purchases. Thaele’s plan, in fact, bore a certain resemblance to the AME’s land syndicate scheme organised by the AME’s Rev. Allen Henry Attaway, principal of Bethel Institute, which consisted of a 10,000-acre farm at Croen River, the later site of the AME’s Chatsworth Industrial High School.

Described by commentators as flamboyant and eccentric in terms of both rhetoric and dress – ‘spasms of twisted eloquence and weird posturings’ was Umteteli wa Bantu’s contemporary description – Thaele, in fact, personified the ‘American Negro’ style of post-war Cape Town radicals. Thaele, upon his return from the United States, quickly moved the Western Cape Congress of the ANC into a radical Garveyite direction, in the process becoming simultaneously the driving force of Cape Town Garveyism. The same overlapping quality was to be repeated when the ICU moved its headquarters from Cape Town to

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