Nor was international traffic only one way. John Montagu imported with him the experience of Australian colonial politics and administration, and Jane Turner carried in her the habit of knuckling down, drawn perhaps from a working-class English childhood in the East End of London. Travel could also be undertaken, and other worlds and their ideas encountered, through reading and other journeys of the imagination, journeys that could inform and entertain, and which, by stretching the capacity of minds, could possibly aid the art of coping with everyday life. Put another way, the past lives of the South Africans represented here, whether mobile or stationary, embodied a mixed migration of the mind, one that could often be emancipating yet which was equally not easily reconciled with the historical conditions of their existence.
The complicated and absorbing personal experiences in these chapters also defy neat packaging into the usually clear-cut South African categories of privileged top dog or downtrodden underdog. In the present age of dwelling neurotically on the checkerboard of identity politics, we present individuals who would, in a way, not necessarily be easy to pick out as the usual suspects on an identity parade. The journeying they undertook, whether literally or figuratively, could repeatedly complicate their own sense of identity. It certainly led Tiyo Soga, Isaiah Bud-M’belle and Pat Pattle, in turn, to believe that it was possible to be simultaneously Xhosa, Mfengu or white South African as well as British; for J.K. Mohl to consider himself an artist acceptable to the British royal family; and for Lilian Ngoyi, momentarily, to be free to feel that she was simply a human being.
For all their obvious differences in place and in circumstances of birth, in racial identity, social origin, temperament, and ideological and other beliefs about the world that they inhabited, these men and women had important emotional qualities and personal experiences in common. They were strong-minded, resilient, resourceful, determined, independent, intelligent, principled, brave, not easily deterred, and very interested in learning. Some endured tragedy, trauma and painful loss, others the foundering of hopes, the closing of doors and the shrinking of expectations. We believe that their striking stories are worth knowing.
Tiyo Soga: The object of wonder
Vivian Bickford-Smith
* * *
During the night of 2 July 1857, after a seventy-three-day voyage from London that alternated calm monotony with stormy seasickness, The Lady of the Lake dropped anchor in Algoa Bay. The following morning, a relieved pair of passengers disembarked to explore Port Elizabeth, the emerging eastern rival to Cape Town as the Cape Colony’s economic hub.
News of this recently married couple’s arrival spread swiftly. Wandering through the town, they encountered ‘wonder and amazement’ from all who saw them. ‘In walking through the streets, black and white turned to stare at us, and this was the case as often as we went out.’1 On at least one occasion, they also heard cries of ‘Shame on Scotland.’2 These moments were recorded by the husband, newly ordained Presbyterian missionary Tiyo Soga, who was an energetic writer of letters and keeper of a journal. One of the first duties he had performed as a minister was on-board The Lady when he read the service for an infant buried at sea: ‘Coffin – two holes – to let in water – Revulsion of feelings – The deep plunge.’3 Soga was returning to the land of his birth.
He had been born in 1829, some 200 kilometres north-east of Port Elizabeth near the Chumie (Tyumie) River, about thirteen kilometres from the Lovedale mission station (now Alice). His early childhood years were spent in what were then the fiercely disputed and mobile borderlands between the Cape Colony’s official frontier and still independent Xhosa polities. In sharp contrast, his wife, Janet Soga (née Burnside), hailed from the large city of Glasgow in Scotland. Janet’s family were struggling cloth-makers in the rough Saltmarket area of town. Tiyo did not record how they met; but he wrote of Janet’s personal sacrifice in leaving her native land for his: ‘She, poor thing! has made all the sacrifice. I trust that a sense of this will render me a tenderly affectionate husband.’4
The widely different origins of the husband and wife lay behind the amazed stares that greeted them that day, as on many others. ‘It seemed to some to be a thing which they had not only never seen, but which they believed impossible to take place,’ Soga noted. Those shouts of ‘Shame on Scotland’ were aimed at Janet and expressed the view of some white residents that such a marriage should never have happened. Yet, more often, simple incredulity explained an onlooker’s reaction.
Dressed in the manner of a Presbyterian minister, Tiyo Soga alone presented an astonishing sight in the eastern Cape frontier region. This was a place of often violent and calamitous colonial encounters, understood by many contemporaries as a racial contest between black and white. Soga’s lifetime witnessed three ‘Kaffir’ or ‘Frontier’ wars in which, amid much brutality, Xhosa forces eventually lost out to the British, as well as the millenarian ‘cattle-killing’ movement of 1856–57, sometimes referred to as the ‘national suicide’ of the Xhosa. African Christian converts were a tiny minority, and Soga was then the only African Christian minister. Yet the clothes he wore and his appearance with Janet at his side suggested to all who saw them a vision of the future: for some, doubtless hopeful; for others, fearful. As Soga recorded three months later:
Accustomed to view the position in which they saw me placed as the exclusive monopoly and prerogative of the white man, I was to them the object of wonder … They looked upon poor me as an extraordinary personage, who had bridged over the apparently impassable gulph [sic].5
Soga was perfectly aware of the effect he and Janet had on Cape sensibilities. He wrote immediately after their first walk through town that ‘the day has really been one of the triumphs of [non-racial] principle’ over racial prejudice.6 He already knew that his was a public and potentially exemplary life in this regard, as it also had to be in terms of Christian values. Soga attempted to act accordingly, in both manner and deeds.
The recently ordained Tiyo Soga, c. 1857
Together with Janet, Soga proceeded to establish mission stations, first at Mgwali and then at Somerville-Tutuka, now Thuthura village near Kentani, where he died of tuberculosis in 1871. Throughout the previous fourteen years, ‘honourable, thrifty, frugal, devoted’ Janet was Tiyo’s helpmate, mission schoolteacher and bearer of their seven children. Outliving her husband by three decades, she died back in her hometown, Glasgow. She ‘marched heroically and faithfully by her husband’s side through all the chequered scenes of his short life’, according to Soga’s fellow missionary, friend and first biographer, John Chalmers.7
Chalmers’ biography, published in 1877, portrayed Soga’s life first and foremost as one of an exemplary Christian of impressive intellectual ability, a life that demonstrated more generally the possibility of African conversion and a capacity for ‘progress’ that defied white racial prejudice. He lauded Soga’s considerable written legacy of hymn writing, the translation of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress into Xhosa, and his work on the first Xhosa translation of the gospels. Chalmers recorded that Soga was buried at Thukura, ‘within an orchard, neat and trim, of his own planting’.8 Modest in death as in life, only a small mound in the earth marked his grave.
It was towards this small mound that former South African president Thabo Mbeki’s motorcade rumbled on 9 September 2011. The event was organised by businesswoman Gloria Serobe, who was also from Kentani. She had struggled to locate Soga’s burial place that January and had been forced to ‘phone a local headman for assistance who revealed she had been standing right next to it’.9 The September event was witnessed by several thousand people, including many ANC functionaries. It involved the unveiling of a bust of Soga, ensuring that his grave would be easier to find in future and that his life was commemorated here where he died. In his address at the graveside, Mbeki did not miss the opportunity to give his views on what such a commemoration should mean: how South Africans of the twenty-first century should interpret Soga’s brief life.
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For those in the know, there were existing clues to Mbeki’s likely argument here. Writing an article on ‘Religious Leaders Who Immersed Themselves in the Struggle’ ten years earlier in ANC Today, the party’s online journal, Mbeki had cited from extensive written advice that Soga had given to his sons shortly before his death:
But if you wish to gain credit yourselves – if you do not wish to feel the taunt of men, which you may sometimes be made to feel – take your place in the world as coloured, not as white men; as Kafirs, not as Englishmen.10
In 2005, in the same journal, Mbeki again hailed Soga as one of the pioneers of the struggle: he ‘occupied an honoured place as one of those who laid the foundations for the emergence of the African National Congress, the leader of our people in the continuing struggle for genuine liberation.’11 At Soga’s graveside in 2011, Mbeki soon warmed to this version of Soga’s life. While quoting Yeats and Shakespeare, he praised Soga as a protector of ‘our’ African ‘identity as a people’ against British imperialism and colonialism, an African identity that Mbeki believed should be ‘recovered’ and ‘maintained’:
Tiyo Soga, one of the very first among the modern African intelligentsia, should have become a slavish agent of the oppressor and expropriator. Against all odds, he refused … to be corrupted, bought and intimidated, turned into an enemy of his people, and transformed into other than an African patriot.12
In making this argument, Mbeki again cited those lines from Soga’s advice to his sons. What he continued to omit, though, were the two important qualifying sentences that preceded them, immediately before ‘But’:
You will ever cherish the memory of your mother as that of an upright, conscientious, thrifty, Christian Scotchwoman. You will ever be thankful for your connection by this tie to the white race.13
Including these lines clearly complicates Mbeki’s interpretation of Soga. Potentially even more problematic for the former president were numerous additional episodes and utterings in Soga’s life. For example, he apparently once walked from Glasgow to Dumbarton to catch a glimpse of Queen Victoria; and he wrote about Prince Alfred’s visit to Mgwali in 1860 as follows: ‘There was never such an excitement and enthusiasm witnessed anywhere … I had the honour of reading an address of welcome.’14 There was also Soga’s sermon in 1862 on the death of Albert, who was Alfred’s father and Victoria’s consort:
If any spectacle is calculated to call forth the finest sensibilities of our being, as dutiful subjects, it is that of contemplating Her Majesty our Sovereign, in her present sorrowful position, as a desolate bereaved widow.15
It would seem, then, that there was rather more to Soga than the sobriquet African Patriot (against British imperialism), the ‘us’ against ‘them’ that Mbeki would have us believe. Individual lives when examined in any detail frequently challenge such simple and often intentionally Manichean categorisation. Instead, they reveal a cliché, but one seemingly in need of constant repetition even in the twenty-first century: that individual lives are full of contradiction and complexity, including Thabo Mbeki’s.
Yet complexity has always been inconvenient for politicians and academics when peddling the idea of discreet, perhaps essentialist, identities associated with the likes of race, nation and ethnicity, whether they do so for overtly assertive or discriminatory purposes. As it is, the line between the two is ever permeable, with understandable pride so easily becoming ugly prejudice. Soga knew this. He scorned such prejudice from whatever quarter it came.
In doing so, Soga drew on extraordinary personal experiences. The remarkable trajectory of his life could hardly have been predicted in 1829. He had been born in a ‘traditional’ Xhosa village, and his infancy there was like most others’. In the fortnight after his birth, for instance, he was rubbed twice a day with a wet concoction of medicinal roots and leaves and swung over a fire that encased him with incense of similar materials while drying him. He was then daubed with the likes of clay, or the bark of a plant, or mashed snail. As a boy, he learnt Xhosa folklore and listened to stories of martial deeds. During the War of Hintsa, the Sixth Frontier War of 1834–35, he hid from the conflict with his mother and sister in the Amatole bush, suffering from hunger, cold and rain.
Tiyo’s father, referred to as Old Soga in the historical record, was a Xhosa traditionalist who fought against the British. He became a councillor to Sandile, paramount chief of the Ngqika or Gaika amaRarabe section of the Xhosa, who died fighting the same foe in the Ninth (and final) Frontier War of 1878. Yet, and again challenging simplicity, Old Soga was also an agricultural innovator, claiming to have been the first Xhosa to use a plough and to introduce irrigation as part of Xhosa agricultural production. He nonetheless resisted conversion to Christianity.
Nosothu, one of Old Soga’s eight wives and Tiyo’s mother, did not. On converting, she separated from Old Soga and refused to allow Tiyo to undergo ulwaluko, the customary Xhosa circumcision rituals intended to prepare boys for manhood. She insisted that her son go to the mission school at Chumie, which was run by the Scottish Presbyterian missionary William Chalmers (John’s father). Tiyo was sent the thirteen kilometres from there to Lovedale, ‘an academy where the various races, white, black and copper-coloured, so far as receiving instructions was concerned, met on common ground’.16 Initially the lowest placed in class, Tiyo ‘crept up slowly but firmly’ and ‘at last he was dux in all his classes save one, and only second in arithmetic’.17 His studies were interrupted, however, by the War of the Axe (the Seventh Frontier War) in 1846, in which the Chumie mission station was razed to the ground, Lovedale was damaged, and students and staff fled westward to the Kat River. Lovedale’s uprooted principal, William Govan, suggested that Soga could accompany him to Scotland for further education, to which Nosothu agreed: ‘If my son is willing to go I make no objection, for no harm can befall him even across the sea; he is as much in God’s keeping there as near to me.’18
During his first, two-year, visit to Scotland, Soga was homesick and often surprised – perhaps, understandably, even disorientated on occasion – by what he saw and experienced. Some of the young man’s apparent reactions were recorded by fellow Presbyterians: Soga staring at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, asking, ‘Did man make this?’; his exclaiming when the train north entered a tunnel, ‘Into what country are we being taken now?’; and his shock when his Normal Seminary satchel and school books were stolen from ‘the door-step of a house facing one of the public streets of that city whose motto is, “Let Glasgow flourish by the preaching of the Word”.’ Nonetheless, while at school, he ‘mingled freely in the sports of his classmates … and though a daily spectator of iniquity on the streets of Glasgow … was protected from vice by the everlasting Father.’19 Having declared his adherence to Christianity, Soga was baptised at the John Street Church in 1848.
He spent his second, much longer, Scottish sojourn from 1851 to 1857 completing an arduous theology degree in Glasgow and Edinburgh that preceded his ordination. Some of his notebooks survive and reveal, between illegible comments in pencil, that Soga spent much of his ‘free’ time as a teacher at a Sunday school in a ‘destitute district of the city’ and in mission work there.20 This might well be how he met Janet. He was also a member of the Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Society, reading widely, far beyond what was required by the theology syllabus. It would seem, from their testimonies at least, that Soga attracted admiration and devotion from many of his fellow students. Robert Johnston recalled:
From the time that we entered upon our theological studies … we saw more and more of each other. We sat at the feet of the same reverend teachers … we had the same knotty points on which to try our intellectual strength; his special student friends were mine.21
According to Johnston, it was Soga’s influence that made him accompany Tiyo to the Cape as a fellow missionary in 1857. Henry Miller, who became a Presbyterian minister in Hammersmith, related that
Tiyo and I, as John Street lads, were more intimate tha
n any other students. We made many excursions together … discussed abysmal things, read the Greek Testament, and prayed together … God’s grace had made my African brother a Christian, a scholar, and a gentleman, whom the best men in the community were proud to honour.22
At his ordination, Soga received a letter signed by 186 students. It read, in part:
Now that … you are about to return to your native country as a commissioned ambassador of Christ, we cannot allow you to depart without giving you this written testimony … to the esteem and affection with which we regard you, the deep interest we feel in your temporal and spiritual prosperity … Independently of all considerations as to your origin and early training, we have reason to respect you for what you are … When we consider the comparative disadvantage of your early years, and the difficulties to be encountered in mastering a language so utterly dissimilar … to your native tongue … we cannot but highly appreciate the extent of your acquirements.23
Here are a few lines of Soga’s reply:
I go home then to Kaffraria much cheered by your best wishes, your affectionate remembrances, and your prayers … Scotland … I can never forget … I shall ever look back to her as my second home.24
During the ordination ceremony, the Reverend William Anderson, who was moderator for the occasion, gave a dramatic ‘tirade’ against British colonial policy. ‘Daft Willie’, as he was sometimes referred to, was a theologian and the pastor of the John Street congregation that had met and ‘adopted’ Soga when he had first visited Glasgow in the 1840s. Chalmers records that at Soga’s ordination,
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