Seven months into his stay Yergan reintroduced himself to readers of Association Men with is essay “The Negro in Africa—No Answer but God.” Four years after his first portrait there in World War One he assessed the situation of Black South African youth in an article comparing and contrasting them with their American Negro counterparts. In diasporic voice he stated,
The task confronting the young African student is infinitely larger and more difficult than that which faces us at home. Left to himself he might ultimately work it out along his own lines and with satisfaction to himself, but the fact he faces is an order of life not born of his own mind, and whether he will or no he must become a part of this order. He enters it with enthusiasm, but it is a hard row he has to hoe for there is a great mass to be lifted and carried—of ignorance, superstition, and poverty; a dead weight which will pull him back unless he has sterner stuff than many of us possess. It has been a great joy to me to find many of my black brothers possessing this sterner stuff and I believe they wish me to say to you that they are “climbing.”23
In his eighth month Max graced the pages of Manhood: Organ of the Cape Town YMCA with a historically grounded sermonette titled “On the YMCA in North America.” Introducing his South African readers to the history of the Y in the United States, he summarized its position as of 1922, described its key role in the recent world war, and devoted considerable space to comparing Black America and South Africa. Of the former he stressed the need for interracial cooperation and the salutary influence of gifts from financier Julius Rosenwald in constructing YMCA buildings in urban areas to promote “an era of interracial goodwill.”24
Countrywide Connection to the Nascent African Leadership Stratum
Yergan’s first year in South Africa had introduced him to most of the major leaders among the school people. Starting with his Teacher’s Christian Association colleague, Y predecessor, and all-around guide, D. D. T. Jabavu, Max met Native National Congress (NNC) foundation member John Langalibalele Dube, Xhosa specialist A. K. Soga, and scores of instructors in the Native training institutions in the Ciskei and Transkei regions of the Eastern Cape, and the historic Zulu lands of Natal, where the string of schools founded by the American Board held sway.
The Jabavu-Yergan relationship deserves more serious attention than it has received thus far. Catharine Higgs, Jabavu’s otherwise able biographer, essentially dismisses it. Yet there are clear indications that their friendship was of extreme importance to both men and, though there were apparently interpersonal tensions between them, their wives as well. The crux of the conflict and, when it worked, the comity, was their connection to America. Jabavu, like the generation of South Africa “been-to’s” who were educated abroad, had in a very real sense been shaped by his American and English academic and social experiences. But of the two influences, there seems to have been something unique about his American exposure. Jabavu found familiarity made manifest in the Yergans as they at times perceived in him a kindred spirit, if not temperamentally than perhaps situationally, for he had analyzed life in America and examined the historically Black colleges and their products as closely as they had. Both men perfected affectations of British bourgeois mannerisms while reveling in “cullud” culture. And they reciprocally referred to one another singly as “brother.” Moreover, they shared something even deeper, the practice of each naming a child as a tribute to the other.
On January 12, 1923, Susie gave birth to their second son, Max. In time, Yergan referred to him as Max Jabavu. Jabavu’s own son, born in 1928, was christened Tengo Max. There was nothing coincidental or accidental about this juxtaposition of male appellations. Names are too important to be arrived at arbitrarily, whether in Africa or Black America. Whatever happened or did not happen later between these two families, at one point they showed the most profound and intimate connection with one another, a spiritual bonding.
Developing Interracial Work in Local Black School and Community Branches
Toward the end of 1923, Yergan took interracial work to unprecedented levels. In September he attended a gathering in Johannesburg where forty African men (“chiefs, ministers, teachers, farmers”) and association personnel met an equal number of Whites in whose ranks he counted “archbishops, presidents and moderators of the religious denominations, also business, educational and professional men.” There he was struck by what he saw as a “spirit of fairness and moderation,” and he said as much to his mentor, Howard’s Jesse Moorland, who in turn relayed it to the student body.25
The next month, following appearances at Tiger Kloof in the Northern Cape and Mochudi in Bechuanaland,26 he visited Natal University College in Pietermaritzburg, thereby breaking the color barrier. Speaking directly to his audience’s primal racial fears, he told students and faculty at this Whites-only institution that they had heard of the Black problem and that now he stood before them, representing the Black problem in human form.27 Then he traveled to Rustoord (now also Rusoord) in Somerset Strand for a November weekend conference. In a widely circulated SCA publication, an observer described Max’s appearance in this way:
It was a wonderful meeting. Mr Yergan is a man who simply radiates from him the spirit of Christ. It was not so much what he said, as the spirit in which he said it, that moved us very deeply indeed, and made us feel, perhaps more strongly than ever before, our real and great responsibility to the great black races in this country. Mr Yergan pointed out that the native is thinking—it is for us to direct his thought into the right channels and make it Christian thought. Fortunately the bitterness of many natives against the whites has been changed by the knowledge that many of the white people are in sympathy with them—this was especially so at a recent church conference at Johannesburg. We ought to seek to know the black people, said Mr Yergan, to visit their institutions and learn what their ideals are. They are, he said, very patient and very easily satisfied. The keynote of the whole meeting was the word, “good will,” and the prayers which followed showed a very sincere desire to fight down race prejudice, that we all may be one in God, who made us all.28
Having made his way through all four provinces and Bechuanaland, he then went to Basutoland.
A second year took the African-American missionary even further afield as Yergan saw Basutoland’s Morija Training Institution at least twice, in 1923 and 1925. The earliest recorded references to Max’s presence within the mountain kingdom dated from November 1923, when he was mentioned in the Thabeng Normal School29 vernacular Sesotho house organ, Leselinyana la Lesotho. Then Yergan guided visiting Swiss guests M. and Mme. Henry-Louis Henriod of the World Student Christian Federation across what some call the “Switzerland of Africa.”
Founded by the Paris Evangelical Mission, Morija afforded Yergan an opportunity to share his messages of uplift, Christianity, and cooperation with Basotho youth, students, and community members. Max and Henriod spoke or preached at Morija Bible School, the Progressive Association of Lesotho (Morija Branch), Thabeng School, and Morija Church. Yergan’s subjects included temperance, patience, hard work, and an active belief in Jesus. A Morija Bible School talk, after Henriod, treated slavery. Leselinyana recalled it this way:
As I am standing here I feel at home. I do not feel this way because of the resemblance of Lesotho to Switzerland, the country of origin of Mr. Henriod, in its topography. But what reminds me of home is seeing you and I find you are black as I am. It is now three hundred years that my grandfathers were taken to America as slaves. They left Africa by being sold. I mean they were sold just as one could sell his cow. When a husband was sold to a client going to Mechachane [to the north] the wife would be sold to a client at Quthing [in the south] and the child to a client at Qacha’s Nek [in the southeast mountains], one to one place and the other to a different one. There were whites who saw this trade in human beings from Africa to America as a great commercial advantage. For two hundred years these slaves were leading a heavy and painful life.30
Leselinyana went further as Ye
rgan cited God as a remedy to the slave’s dilemma.
To the Progressive Association, a farming cooperative, Yergan delineated a five-point prescription for progress: food, domestic hygiene, education, thrift, and what he termed “the fullness of personality.”31 The quartet of agrarian themes was borrowed directly from Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery. The reference to “personality” appears to be Yergan’s innovation, a device often employed exegetically.
On November 11, Yergan stood in the pulpit of Morija Church. Max’s text was Luke 19 on Zaccheus, commander of the tax collectors. Aiming to show the universal redemptive power of Christ, Leselinyana had Yergan speaking these words:
There are people who seek to procure certain things for the sake of having them and not with an intention of saving them but to destroy them. Herod once did the same. He looked for children not to save but to destroy them. There were some whites, who have looked for and are still looking for new countries, not looking for these countries to save their citizens but only to make a living for themselves and to oppress the citizens of other countries. It had been so in my nation three hundred years ago. Whites came to Africa and caught some black people, took and sold them as slaves in America, the slaves of whom I am a descendant. In those three hundred years these slaves toiled without any remuneration or salary.32
Yergan’s panacea for this oppression was God’s grace, which he felt helped slaves learn manual trades, attain educations, and do the hard work that allowed them to improve their situations, individually and collectively. In a style generously mixing parables, proverbs, anecdotes, and scripture, he drew upon recent and past history and contemporary social movements like temperance, counseling patience, piety, resilience, humility, and mindfulness in service to God and humanity as paths to glory.
Founding a Basutoland Native SCA chapter, Max would return to see it in 1925.
Leselinyana saw Yergan’s tour as successful. One may wonder what this meant. Lacking the language skills that would enable him to speak directly to his audiences, Max had to rely upon intermediaries. Only a handful of his hearers could have comprehended his speech. Yet Negro American missionaries were not wholly unknown in Basutoland;33 subaltern references would have resonated with them.34 Between the symbolism of his American background and his own attempts to build support for himself as a “returned African,” Yergan represented with some skill his overseas people, their diasporic lived experience, and their historical connections to Africa.
Combined with the imprimatur of Christianity and the permanence of print, Max’s personality left tracks in the soil of the mountains of the “Rooftop of Africa” that remain visible. Overcoming barriers of language and the mediation of interpreters, not to mention the watchful eyes of White missionaries and government officials who were terrified by the specters of Marcus Garvey and Ethiopianist nationalism, he made a mark that reveals the power of the presence of an evangelical pan-African personality. In an insular environment among a particularistic people, Yergan told stories that could not have appeared more remote but that left space for him to return. Against all odds, he saved a place for himself and his saga in oral tradition, the heroic poetry, or lithoko, of the Basotho.35
Yergan’s Basutoland adventure paid clear dividends. It permitted him to forge bonds with Henriod, which increased his influence, now reaching toward the higher circles of the World Student Christian Federation, and it also enabled him to connect with the land and people of another place whose lives and customs were both intertwined with and yet distinct from those of the mass of Africans living and working in the Union. Reciprocating some of the hospitality they had experienced, during the Christmas vacation Susie and Max hosted Reverend and Mrs. Casalis of the Paris Evangelical Mission, the order that ran Morija.36 By late February Cape Town YMCA Secretary Bull wrote E. C. Jenkins, “Yergan is doing excellent work and making splendid impressions—and the passing of time only serves to make more clear how sound—(I almost said ‘white’) he is all through.”37 It may have been early to note a Freudian slip, but Bull made one. No wonder it proved so prudent for Bull to encourage Mott to pay Yergan’s way from Cape Town to Europe to attend a series of international meetings the following year.
In January 1923 Max had participated in the third national conference of the ICU (Industrial and Commercial Workers Union of South Africa), in April he published “The Native Students of South Africa and Their Problems” in The Student World,38 a vehicle of the World Student Christian Federation, in August and September he met and chaperoned WSCF luminary Henry-Louis Henriod across South Africa and far into historic Basutoland, and throughout the year he had been written up regularly in Imvo Zabantsundu (“African Opinion”) the King William’s Town newspaper founded by John Tengo Jabavu. Imvo provided a running commentary of Yergan’s feats.
Ascent within the YMCA, SCA, WSCF, SVM, and Allied Institutions
In 1924 Yergan entered the ecumenical speaking circuit, attending major overseas conferences in Swanwick and High Leigh,39 England, Saarow, Germany, and Holland. Along with his growing family he had also moved from Cape Town to the Alice, Ciskei, campus of Fort Hare Native College in the Eastern Cape. In early February O. B. Bull asked E. C. Jenkins if the Y’s National Council would fund Yergan’s attendance at the August WSCF meeting in High Leigh, England.40
The next two months found Yergan the focus of laudatory articles in Imvo Zabantsundu.41 By mid-April he was elected to the WSCF Executive Committee. Later that month Bull thanked Mott for letting Max attend the High Leigh conference, adding that “Yergan is doing really well.” Bull felt that Max possessed “the gift supremely needed in South Africa, a far-seeing patience,” a phrase in the letter that Mott underlined. Bull went on, asserting that “even the most stand-offish soon find him out for the charming fellow he is. He is creating some new precedents in addressing audiences of students in the European colleges.”42 June found Thomas Jesse Jones and J. E. K. Aggrey returning to South Africa for their second Phelps Stokes tour.
During September Yergan brought Fort Hare principal Alexander Kerr up to date on his participation in recent Holland, Swanwick, and High Leigh conferences:
On the day of our arrival we went to Holland to attend the student conference and from Holland went to Swanwick. After Swanwick he went to the General Committee Meeting at High Leigh. The student conferences were of immense interest and help to me, but the General Committee meeting was of far more significance. It is significant in the first place in that it had two Negroes as members, the other being a woman representative of the Negro section of the student movement in America. In the second place a precedent was established in electing me as a member of the executive committee of the [WSC] Federation, thereby giving Negro students in America and Africa as well (for I think it was on the strength of my African connection that I was elected to the executive committee) a larger share in the full life of the whole student movement.43
The High Leigh conference precipitated another at Le Zoute, Belgium, that sparked the inauguration of the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures.44 Yergan’s contributions to this conference were noted by an Aggrey biographer.45
Midway through 1925, Yergan claimed not to have lost any of the inspiration that led him to the Southern African subcontinent. In fact, he seemed to overflow with new projects and dreams, proudly telling Moorland that he still retained “a head full of plans and ideas.” Chief among these stood the vision of a structure on the Fort Hare campus that would take advantage of the ethnic and religious diversity of the college, which he felt was “the one seat of learning for Africans South of the Equator which has already some of the marks of university rank and which will without doubt be the recognized African University for the entire sub-continent.” Adopting the practical logic of his prior sociological training, he proposed grooming future African leaders using a scheme with “three or four” major components:
a. We want to weld together these members of the great Bantu section o
f African peoples (roughly speaking, all the peoples South of a line running irregularly across Africa North and South of the Equator belong to this family) by helping to give to their leaders common ideals of service
b. Under conditions of increasing secularization of education we want to contribute towards the very much needed spiritual foundation of the people.
c. We want to have a share in making possible a Social Vision for each student, and
d. We wish to demonstrate among the heathen masses for the benefit of the students, what may be done along lines of social improvement.46
After having surveyed the length and breadth of the Union Max determined that what he and association work needed most was a structure that could house a new research institute for African social service workers on Fort Hare’s campus:
This building will make each one of the above desires directly possible, for it will serve as the common rallying point for the entire college, thus breaking over tribal, denominational and all other walls of separation. It will also be a community building—a sort of human laboratory, if you please, for experimenting and discovering, for the observation and instruction of students as well as the Christianization and social improvement of the masses of needy people in the neighbourhood of the college. The building would also serve as national headquarters for our movement and give us facilities for a much needed literature depot where we can become the distributing center for the much needed printed page among our people. The building will cost at most $20,000 with I suppose another $1000 for a movie machine and extra equipment. We may have to wait until my return from furlough before we see this building erected, but we need it, we want it, and I believe God is going to give it to us.47
In 1925 Max traveled extensively in Natal48 and the Transkei, detailing his reflections to his Colored Work Department mentor, Howard University dean of men Jesse E. Moorland. The Yergan-Moorland correspondence captures Max’s mind eloquently and candidly at that historical juncture. In July he taught in the All Saints Mission Winter School for Natives and attended the SCA’s Pretoria General Conference, in August speaking to the Cape Teachers Association on “The Art of Living.”
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