The old man seemed wild with excitement. With a pathos and earnestness never surpassed, he offered supplications for the richest blessings to rest on his young Kafir brother. Then there was a sudden break … and something followed very like a tirade against the colonial policy of England; the petitions seemed to bristle with scathing satire against Her Majesty’s Government and the Premier, and the Colonial Secretary’s name rang throughout the church, while his blundering acts were confessed as if by his own lips. In marked contrast were the supplications for ‘the noble Kafir chieftain, Sandilli [sic].25
Between his two periods in Scotland, Soga returned to the eastern Cape between 1848 and 1851 to be an assistant to a Presbyterian missionary, Reverend Niven, at Chumie. Soga served as a co-evangelist, interpreter, schoolteacher, catechist and writer of hymns in Xhosa. He was soon made aware of how some among the Xhosa now saw him. After he moved to the Keiskamma outstation, parents of some of the boys he was teaching threatened to kill him. Having discovered that Soga was not circumcised, they taunted him for still being a boy, for lacking the courage to undergo ulwaluko and become a man, saying that his status meant harm would come to their children. When later in charge of mission stations himself, Soga expelled any young man he found practising ulwaluko.
Yet Soga was far more disturbed by what met him on his return to the same area in 1857 to establish Mgwali in the immediate aftermath of the cattle-killing calamity. This extraordinary event may well have begun as a logical ‘veterinary’ response to the appearance of bovine lung disease, but it developed into a religiously syncretic millenarian movement of the kind often associated with increasingly desperate indigenous reactions to colonial conquest. Already in the Eighth Frontier War (1850–53), a prophet named Mlanjeni had unhelpfully predicted that the Xhosa would be unaffected by enemy bullets. In April 1856, a young prophetess named Nongqawuse claimed that the killing of cattle and the destruction of crops would lead to the resurrection of warrior ancestors who would drive the British into the sea; the appearance of a host of healthy animals would then augur an era of boundless prosperity. An estimated 400 000 cattle were duly slain, and grain stocks were destroyed. The population of British Kaffraria was reduced from some 105 000 to around 37 000 by starvation and diseases associated with malnutrition. In a letter dated 2 September 1857, Soga wrote the following:
We are seeing sights that are making our hearts bleed and our eyes weep. It was only yesterday that … I dug the grave of a Caffre mother and two children, who had died of sheer starvation … about half a mile from the station … Children are coming here daily in scores in quest of food. The most of these are so weak and thin as to look positively like animated skeletons … At present, in consequence of depopulation, Emgwali has not a single inhabitant – the solitariness of it conveyed very melancholy feelings to the mind – but there is not the slightest doubt that when the Caffres have improved their means … they will return to this favourite spot.26
A month later, Soga pondered the future of his ‘own countrymen’, some of whom he described as resorting to eating the stalks of water lilies or, in one tragically desperate case, members of their own family:
Can it be that, as a people, we are doomed to remain forever in that degraded state in which we are so deeply and so generally sunk? God is no respecter of nations and peoples! Surely then the time of favour to poor, benighted, and despised Africa is yet to be.27
Soga emphasised in the same letter that his aim was ‘to elevate and enlighten, and to remove all the barriers that have interposed between man and man, by uniting all the bonds of a common brotherhood’. Most of his correspondence and journal entries describe his missionary activity, its spiritual and material progress, that he believed essential in achieving this aim. Developments were reported back to Scotland. Sometimes this took the form of Soga’s sense of the growing spirituality of individuals in his charge. At other times, progress was measured in decidedly material terms: people exchanging karosses for blankets, wooden spades for metal ones, or adopting anglicised domestic decorations. Advances were relentlessly gauged by keeping track of numbers, such as those of ‘inquirers’ (candidates for conversion), converts, buildings, schoolchildren, textbooks, attendants at the Xhosa and English services, and the amount of money collected, especially for the churches erected in Mgwali and Somerville-Tutuka. Setbacks were not neglected. Soga described several inquirers and converts in Mgwali ‘backsliding’, succumbing to the likes of ‘Cape Brandy’ or extramarital sex – for example, a young married man from Mgwali having an affair when finding work in a nearby town, and a young woman ‘of very pleasing exterior’ giving birth to the child of an English carpenter, her interaction with Soga first ‘haughty’ then ‘heartbroken’. He lamented, ‘This sin, it is melancholy to state is the bane of the churches in this land.’28 A bright if unusual moment came when one erstwhile ‘drinker’ had what Soga termed a ‘smoke conversion’: having got profoundly dizzy and ‘felt himself to be dying’ after inhaling dagga through ‘a huge horn filled with water’, the young man sought Mgwali’s physical and spiritual solace. After a year, ‘Not a Sabbath, not a single class of inquirers has he missed, and he is happier when he is among us and away from his heathen friends.’29
Soga’s work predictably necessitated visiting so-called heathens. Missionaries were still much dependent on the cooperation of local chiefs for access to potential converts, as well as their own land and shelter, especially when first establishing a station. Soga gives many accounts of such expeditions, which frequently required the opening up of new wagon routes and fording rivers. He includes descriptions of the terrain encountered, detailed character sketches of several chiefs, and comparisons between the Xhosa and the British. Given his Christianity, Soga perceived many Xhosa religious beliefs to be ‘pagan superstitions’, condemned executions of those accused of malevolent witchcraft, and chiefly pointed out weaknesses related to ‘superstition’, like their participation in the cattle-killing movement.
Yet Soga also found much that was admirable about Xhosa chiefs, advisers and customs, reporting his thoughts here, too, to correspondents in Scotland. When describing Kreli (Sarhili ka Hintsa), chief of the Gcaleka Xhosa who fought the British in the last two Frontier Wars, Soga mentioned his ‘tall commanding presence’, his conveying of information ‘with exceeding good will’, and that he was a man of ‘fine intelligence’. Equally, Soga related that Kreli’s adviser or ‘prime minister’, Maki, had ‘the finest intellect’ and a ‘massive countenance [that] resembles not a little the busts of ancient Grecian sages I have seen in sculptures and in books’. Soga made it abundantly clear what he was attempting to convey to his (white) readers:
Europeans are, I think, apt to consider that the finest types of humanity, both for intellectual and physical development, are to be found among them alone. A great mistake. God has his nobility of humanity everywhere.30
Likewise, Soga thought that both the Xhosa and the British had many common human frailties, like vanity, even if some of their virtues and vices were different. In this regard, he deemed that the Xhosa were comparatively ‘ignorant’ and ‘superstitious’, yet they were also considerably more hospitable, had perfected the art of conversation, and demonstrated equal intellectual capacity. He saw the British in contrast as sometimes overtly racist and insulting, and he condemned their importation of strong liquor and sexual laxity to southern Africa. Nevertheless, he also thought that they offered (and could convey to others) forms of superior knowledge, including literacy and scientific methodology.31
Soga expressed these views publicly, whether in Xhosa in the Lovedale journal Indaba, in English at public lectures, or in two letters written to the King William’s Town Gazette and Kaffrarian Banner, a newspaper with a predominantly white readership. One of these letters was a passionate rebuttal of an earlier one in the same newspaper. This had been written by John Chalmers under the rhetorical title ‘What is the Destiny of the Kafir Race’, to which his answer was
‘likely extinction’. Chalmers put the blame on ‘indolence’ as a ‘barrier to progress’, and on ‘humanity exported from Britain’ who exposed Xhosas to their vices, including the love of strong drink.
Soga’s response is worth summarising at some length because of the way it was subsequently used to argue that he was a nationalist (whether Xhosa, African, pan-African or black) rather than a British loyalist. Soga wrote that Chalmers was wrong about the likely extinction of the Xhosa. Despite slavery, wars, the ‘wreck of empires’ and ‘the revolution of ages’, people he referred to as ‘Negros’ had kept their individuality and distinctiveness in other parts of the world as they would in South Africa, even though ‘exposed to all the vices and the brandy of the white man’. Soga concluded:
The fact that the dark races of this vast continent, amid internecine wars and revolutions, and not withstanding external spoliation, have remained ‘unextinct’, have retained their individuality, has baffled historians, and challenges the author [Chalmers] of the doom of the Kaffir race in a satisfactory explanation. There has been observed among these races the operation of a singular law, by which events have readjusted themselves when they threatened their destruction. I believe firmly that among the Negro races of South Africa events will follow the same law, and therefore neither indolence of the Kaffirs, nor their aversion to change, nor the vices of civilization, all of which barriers the gospel must overthrow, shall suffice to exterminate us as a people.32
What, then, should we make of this letter by Soga? A second biography of his life, published almost exactly a century after Chalmers’ book, left the reader in little doubt. The passage above was central to its author’s conclusion that Soga was ‘The Father of Black Nationalism in South Africa’ and that Soga had formulated the concept of ‘negritude’ before similar ideas appeared in the works of nineteenth-century West African intellectuals like Edward Blyden and James Africanus Horton. This biographer, Donovan Williams, also cited a further extract from Soga’s advice to his sons in order to argue that Soga had articulated an early form of Black Consciousness:
As men of colour, live for the elevation of your degraded, despised, downtrodden people. My advice to all coloured people would be: Assist one another; patronize talent in one another; prefer one another’s business, shops etc., just for the reason that it is better to prefer and elevate kindred and countrymen before all others.33
For Williams, and several other subsequent writers, Soga’s apparent British loyalism was merely the result of indoctrination: that missionary education, and particularly the ideology of the Presbyterian Church, had inculcated ‘subservience’.34 This, despite the fact that it was William Anderson who had launched an attack on British colonial policy at Soga’s ordination. As Chalmers related, Anderson was also responsible for the English version of words inscribed in Xhosa on a memorial tablet placed ‘to the left of the vestry door’ at Soga’s church in Mgwali. They proclaimed Soga to be ‘The First Ordained Preacher of the Kafir Race’ and ‘an Ardent Patriot’.35
It would certainly seem that Soga thought of himself (at least some of the time) in ethnic, racial or national identity terms, as ‘Kafir’/Xhosa, ‘Native’/African or ‘Negro’/black, while seeing others, including Europeans or whites, through this prism. Yet, as we have established, Soga attached positive and negative qualities to both Xhosa and white British behaviour and ‘custom’ alike: neither group was definitively better. His rebuttal of Chalmers in a newspaper with a predominantly white-settler readership in 1865 was brave and correct and evinced Soga’s sense of an ethnic national identity as Xhosa, as well as a pan-African membership of the ‘Negro races’ of the Black Atlantic world. It was ‘national’ not ‘nationalist’, though, because Soga never advocated African self-rule or independence from British sovereignty, unlike Horton and Blyden; nor did he suggest that an African personality was superior to its European counterpart.
When he spoke to the predominantly white Young Men’s Christian Association in Cape Town in 1866, he criticised aspects of British civilisation that were ‘repulsive and unconvincing’. In terms emulated later by Blyden, Soga expressed pity for the factory hands in London, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Yet, and only a year after his rebuttal of Chalmers’ prediction of Xhosa doom, he also spoke about his ‘poor countrymen’ and the ‘dark races of this vast continent’ more generally being ‘left so far behind in civilization and Christian enlightenment’, and he hoped that the ‘next wave of development’36 would help them. There was no echo here of Blyden’s hope for distinct African development.
This still begs the question of what precisely Soga thought would or should be the eventual destiny of his own Xhosa ‘nation’, assuming it avoided destruction. Near the end of his life, he wrote what might be a highly revealing letter in this respect to one of his regular correspondents in Scotland, Dr Alexander Somerville. In it, Soga drew parallels between the Scots and the Xhosas:
I have not seen, but I have heard and read, of the Scottish Highlanders’ love and attachment to their hereditary native chiefs. I trust the present Scottish races do not ‘Plough the Sentiment to Scorn’ because they are now under one benign rule with the English people … [This sentiment had kept] the Highland world together, and kept their patriotism alike alive, and for that reason alone was to be admired. The Caffers are bound to their chiefs by the same devoted attachments [sic].37
Like most of his Scottish mentors and presumably his wife Janet, Soga could combine a sense of belonging to a non-English ‘nation’ associated with its own territorial locality, customs and history, with loyalty to the ‘English’ state and Queen Victoria. Soga had an ethnic, kith-and-kin sense of belonging to a Xhosa nation of this kind that was not logically at odds for him with believing he could be a member of the British civic nation as well, like the Scots. His own writing expressed Xhosa patriotism; indeed, his journalism may have helped others to imagine this. But he was not a Xhosa nationalist in the sense of someone who expressed a desire to control or create a state that coincided with an ethnic notion of nationality. And he was certainly not someone who ever expressed antipathy to those of ‘other’ nations or ethnicities. Rightly or wrongly, Soga believed that it was the British state that would deliver what he considered desirable progress in southern Africa in terms of Christianity, European education and science, irrespective of race or nationality. As he put it himself in 1864:
Whilst deeply attached to my [Xhosa] people, I am the loyal subject of the best Government for the aborigines that ever existed under heaven. What would I not do, to have all the natives brought, in God’s providence, under the influence of the English Government, to smother all causes of irritation and heartburnings, and to approve themselves the faithful subjects of the best friend of all men, Queen Victoria!38
With hindsight, Soga’s faith in the British may seem delusional; but to many other black British beyond Soga, including many founder-members of the African National Congress, it still seemed a plausible position in nineteenth-century southern Africa. In the Cape Colony into which (after six years of de-annexation) the Kaffrarian territory was re-absorbed in 1866, the year after Soga’s pan-Africanist letter, it was possible for members of other nations, including at least some Xhosas, to become enfranchised citizens. According to the constitutions that granted Representative Government (1853) and Responsible Government (1872), all males could qualify for the vote if they met relatively low wage or property qualifications. This was at the heart of what has been called the Cape liberal tradition. In other words, difference of race or ethnicity was not necessarily a barrier to being thought of as a fellow Briton by at least some white colonists, or indeed to feeling oneself to be British in a civic national sense. Britishness could still be conceived of as a matter of appropriate dress, behaviour, belief and language, all attainable through education and hard work, through ‘progress’ and ‘enlightenment’, achieved pre-eminently in his day, of course, by Soga himself.
He was perfectly aware of the cruelty
meted out by British troops during the Frontier Wars, a series of conflicts that produced Xhosa children ‘who dreaded white men’ and fuelled pervasive white racism.39 He could and did fervently disagree on occasion with vacillating British colonial government policy. This happened most notably in 1865 (the year of that passionate response to Chalmers in the King William’s Town Gazette) when the British Kaffrarian authorities were contemplating moving all Xhosa eastward beyond the Kei River, leaving the land entirely to white settlement. The fact that the Sogas named their third child Jotello Festiri, after two of Tiyo’s relatives, may have intentionally expressed their anger about this possibility, foreshadowing similar assertive ‘African’ naming among elites in Lagos and Freetown. Yet their next two children, as with their first two, had Christian names, and the Somerville-Tutuka mission station honoured the name of Soga’s Presbyterian correspondent back in Scotland. By 1866, and with British Kaffraria reincorporated within the Cape Colony, Soga was again approvingly marking Queen Victoria’s birthday in his journal.
His favourite reading material, which included Bunyan and the Bible, provides further possible insight into the complexity of his thoughts on colonial conquest and how he could reconcile Xhosa ethnic national identity with supra-British civic nationality. His notebooks and journal show that the authors he favoured included Prescott, Irving, Longfellow, Macaulay, Neander, Gibbon, Boswell and Justus. Precisely what Soga gleaned from them must be a matter of speculation. Yet what he wrote generally accorded with their arguments. William Prescott had written about the conquest of Mexico and Peru; Walter Irving and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow reflected in satirical and poetical fashion respectively on the conquest of North America. Their combined message could be summarised as follows: there was much to respect in vanishing precolonial societies; indigenous people had an entitlement to land; the morality of the conquerors was often dubious; yet conquest was the inevitable result of superior technology and led to Christian conversion and ‘superior’ knowledge, so it was to be welcomed.
Illuminating Lives Page 3