At the same time as he made his name in legal circles in Kimberley, Bud-M’belle emerged as a leading light in the social and communal life of the cosmopolitan African and coloured community of which he found himself a part. He was a talented musician and sportsman, and he lived life to the full, involving himself in just about everything that was going on. In 1895 he was one of the founders of the South African Improvement Association, which gave characteristic expression to the aspirations of this community. Its main aim was to ‘cultivate the use of the English language’, and its members met every two weeks to discuss, debate and entertain.4 Bud-M’belle was a founder, too, of the Philharmonic Society. He later became its musical director, and they put on performances in leading venues in Kimberley, with their repertoire reflecting the range of influences – African, European and African American – upon which they drew. He was also secretary of the Victoria Memorial Hall Committee, which successfully leveraged Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in June 1897 to raise funds for a much-needed new meeting hall. By this time, according to a praise poem composed in his honour, he was secretary of no fewer than eight organisations. On top of this, Bud-M’belle still found time to be a Wesleyan lay preacher and circuit steward. Quite how much he saw of his wife Maria, whom he married in 1897, and then his three daughters, is difficult to know.
Above all, he excelled as a sportsman and sports administrator. He played for one of the local African cricket teams, the Eccentrics C.C., making his name as a fine batsman, and for the Native Rovers rugby team, which played in the Griqualand West Coloured Rugby Football Union (along with four coloured teams). However, the Native Rovers had further ambitions. Bud-M’belle, who represented both the club and the union, was involved in plans to establish a countrywide South African Coloured Rugby Football Board, of which he became the first secretary. Recognising the need for a trophy for the competition they had organised, he approached the De Beers company. This resulted in the splendid-looking Rhodes Cup, a trophy worth fifty guineas, which Bud-M’belle collected from the De Beers offices in December 1897. It was awarded for the first time in August the following year when the inaugural competition was held in Kimberley. Today, it can be seen in the Springbok Experience Rugby Museum at the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town, a powerful reminder of black rugby’s deep historical roots – and of the largely forgotten contribution of Isaiah Bud-M’belle and his colleagues in putting the game on a proper footing.
As though to prove this was no fluke, Bud-M’belle repeated the trick for cricket. In his capacity as secretary of the Griqualand West Coloured Cricket Union, he approached Colonel David Harris, a director of De Beers and a member of Parliament for Kimberley, with a request to donate a trophy to cricket too. Again, De Beers agreed to the request. This time it cost them a hundred guineas and was to be known as the Barnato Memorial Trophy, after Barney Barnato, Cecil Rhodes’s great rival, who had disappeared overboard from an ocean liner off the coast of Madeira in June 1897. It was in the form of a Grecian urn, with a batsman and wicket standing on top, all in solid silver. In February 1898, both cricket and rugby trophies – two ‘beautiful specimens’, the local newspaper called them – were on public display at Messrs Morris & Bros store in Dutoitspan Road in the centre of Kimberley.5
Reflecting upon the two new trophies, John Tengo Jabavu – the editor of Imvo Zabantsundu, and a fellow Mfengu whom Bud-M’belle greatly admired – wrote that ‘it cannot be too strongly insisted upon that any money spent on the amelioration of the Natives is well spent, and as such will be repaid with interest to the community in time to come’.6 Jabavu had a chance to congratulate Bud-M’belle in person when he visited Kimberley in November 1897 and formally opened the new Queen Victoria Jubilee Hall. While Jabavu’s main concern was with ‘the Natives’ and the significance of De Beers’ donations to them, what was also striking about both sporting initiatives was the collaboration between black and coloured people. The fact that Bud-M’belle was accepted as secretary of both organisations, that it was he who was ‘chiefly instrumental’ in securing the trophies from De Beers, speaks volumes. He was in no doubt himself that sport, like music, could be a means of drawing communities together. Bud-M’belle was accepted as part of both African and coloured communities in Kimberley, and he played a full part in their sporting and musical lives.
He was just as concerned to promote good relations between blacks and whites. He was committed to the idea of ‘equal rights for all civilized men’ and a great believer in the Cape’s legal system, of which he now had a very intimate knowledge. And he was a loyalist. He saw the British Empire as a guarantor of the liberties of colonial citizens, black and white, and he understood the symbolic power of the figure of Queen Victoria, often taking advantage of this for his own purposes. For Africans like Bud-M’belle, the Empire was a source of protection against the racism of those among the white settler community who saw blacks not so much as fellow citizens but as cheap labour. Blacks and whites could and should work together, Bud-M’belle thought, and he had no truck with separatist sentiment. Indeed, he took the opportunity, when replying to Jabavu’s speech at the opening of the Jubilee Hall, to advise his audience to ‘beware of seditious talk, common in certain quarters, that Natives should have no dealings with whites’.7
All thoughts of cricket and rugby came to an end when war broke out between Britain and the Boer Republics in October 1899 and Kimberley was besieged by Boer forces. Bud-M’belle was away on Circuit Court duty when war was declared and so escaped being caught up in the siege, making his way instead to Cape Town. After working for a while in the magistrate’s office and for the Cape Supreme Court, he was appointed African languages interpreter in the Special Treason Court, set up to deal with Boer subjects of the Cape Colony who had taken up arms with their compatriots from the South African Republic and the Orange Free State. Soon, though, he was back in Kimberley and, after a brief period away in Grahamstown after being appointed interpreter in the Eastern Circuit Court, would remain there until 1916.
During these years, two of the passions in his life came to the fore. The first was his desire to promote education for his people, both locally in Kimberley and beyond. For Bud-M’belle, education, however acquired, was the key to advancement, and it was natural that he should do all he could to help extend opportunities to his people. It was no great surprise, therefore, that he took the lead in building up the Lyndhurst Road Native School, helping it to acquire a reputation as one of the colony’s leading schools for Africans. It actually emerged out of a struggling primary school that was run by the Wesleyan Church, which had got to the point where it could no longer carry on. A new African-run school committee stepped in, secured recognition and financial support from the Kimberley School Board and the Education Department in Cape Town, and went from strength to strength. Their vision was of an interdenominational school for Africans, run by Africans but within the broader educational structures of the Cape Colony – a further expression, as Bud-M’belle saw it, of the advantages of working together with whites rather than apart from them. Bud-M’belle, secretary of the school committee from 1902 to 1916, was its driving force, and he enjoyed the confidence of parents, teachers and Education Department officials. By 1916, it offered Standards One to Six, and that year two of its students – Z.K. Matthews and St Leger Plaatje (the eldest son of Sol T. Plaatje, the first general secretary of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC)) – won scholarships to Lovedale, one of the few missionary institutions providing secondary education. It was the culmination of fifteen years’ hard work.
But Bud-M’belle had broader ambitions, too. In 1901, he launched a ‘Queen Victoria Memorial scheme’ to promote African education in the colony as a whole. As with the Jubilee Hall, his idea was to raise money by appealing to loyalist sentiment on the part of both blacks and whites and to commemorate the recently deceased queen. Initially, he envisaged a scholarship fund for African students, but as support for the scheme grew, so did its ambitions, a
nd its cause was taken up by the South African Native Congress (SANC), a precursor of the SANNC, the leading black political organisation of the day. Soon the aim changed to raising funds in order to build a college of higher education, or even a university, for African students.
Progress in raising funds was slow, however, and it wasn’t helped by disagreements among those involved. The situation changed significantly as a consequence of the work of the South African Native Affairs Commission in 1903–1905. Set up to find a basis for a common ‘native policy’ for the coming South African union, the commission devoted considerable attention to the question of education. The commissioners, and white opinion more generally, were concerned about the number of black South African students travelling to the United States for their education at African American colleges (as Bud-M’belle had once hoped to do himself), fearful they would come back with subversive ideas. They recommended, therefore, that an African college for higher education should be established, but under missionary rather than African control. This led to the launch of a new fund-raising scheme for an ‘Inter-State Native College’, supported by some government officials and missionaries.
Isaiah Bud-M’Belle (right) around 1901. Sol Plaatje, his famous brother-in-law, is standing beside him
Crucially, Jabavu lent his support to the new initiative, seeing it as a chance to regain his political reputation, which was being increasingly challenged by more radical voices within the SANC. Others joined him, believing that this new campaign had a greater chance of achieving its objective. Bud M’belle, always close to Jabavu, was among them. He had become concerned that the SANC’s Queen Victoria Memorial scheme was becoming anti-white in its tone and association with black-separatist ‘Ethiopian’ tendencies, which he very much opposed. So, despite having come up with the idea in the first place, he transferred his allegiances to the new Inter-State Native College scheme, joining its executive committee and playing an important part in its development.
Its plans came to fruition in 1916 with the laying of the foundation stone of the new college in Alice in the eastern Cape, a short distance from the Lovedale Missionary Institution. For Bud-M’belle, it must have been a bittersweet moment. On the one hand, it was a successful culmination of his efforts to bring much-needed higher-education facilities within the reach of black South African students, to provide the opportunities he had once sought for himself. The fact that he brought with him, as he travelled to Alice from Kimberley, the two young men who had won scholarships to Lovedale, was further cause for pride – a reward for all the hard work he and others had put into the Lyndhurst Road Native School. Now, if the young men fulfilled their promise at Lovedale, there was every prospect of their going on to attend the nearby Fort Hare University College, as it would come to be known, once it was fully operational.
On the other hand, at such a seemingly auspicious moment, he himself had just suffered a bitter personal blow. On Christmas Eve 1915, he was informed that his position as interpreter for the Griqualand West High Court was to be abolished with immediate effect and that the Public Service Commission could find no alternative job for him. The fact that the Griqualand West High Court had far fewer cases to deal with than before and could no longer justify having a full-time interpreter was only part of the story. Since the Union of South Africa was established in 1910, the government had conducted a systematic campaign to remove blacks from government employment, and its action was part of this process too. Since Bud-M’belle was also the highest-paid black employee in the country, earning over £400 a year, the financial saving was no doubt an important incentive, too.
Nevertheless, ever the loyal government servant, Bud-M’belle interpreted the speeches that accompanied the laying of the foundation stone for the new college, translating into both English and Xhosa the words of General Louis Botha, the South African prime minister, who was speaking in Afrikaans. It was a poignant moment.
Bud-M’belle’s belief in the power of education was matched only by a deep pride in his Mfengu identity. His ancestral name was Ntshangase, of the amaBhele clan, and he traced his family’s origins – like many others who would come to be known as Mfengu – to the present-day province of KwaZulu-Natal. Pride in these origins had always been there, but in the first decade of the twentieth century it became a matter of public affirmation and expression – not just for him, but for many other Mfengu who lived in different parts of southern Africa. Partly this can be attributed to a new awareness of the need to remind the British, now that they were in charge and engaged in planning the future of southern Africa, of their past history and loyalty to the British authorities and of their contribution as colonial military allies, especially in the wars against the Xhosa in the eastern Cape. At the same time, as the British looked towards segregation as a guiding principle for the future administration of ‘native affairs’ and stressed the role of chiefs in the governance of the African people, it threatened to put the Mfengu at a disadvantage. They had few recognised chiefs and previously had been happy enough to do without them. Now, however, times were changing, and it was a good opportunity to rediscover them – or, if need be, to invent them.
This, then, was the context in which M’belle took the lead in efforts to record and to document Mfengu history. Related to this were parallel plans to bolster Mfengu identity by declaring a ‘Fingo National Day’ (14 May) so that, once a year, they should remember and celebrate their origins. They even managed to persuade the colonial authorities to officially recognise this and to give government employees of Mfengu origin the day off work.
Once again assuming the familiar role of committee secretary, Bud-M’belle set up a ‘Fingo History Fund’ in order to collect and publish material, and he commissioned Reverend Joseph Whiteside, a Wesleyan missionary, to compile a book. Several of the chapters in History of the Abambo (Fingos), as it would be titled, were drawn from a much earlier unpublished history of the Mfengu by Reverend John Ayliffe, the missionary most closely associated with their early history, establishing a direct connection with what had come to be seen as their myth of origin. Whiteside and Ayliffe were presented as joint authors on the front cover of the book, but several other people were thanked for contributing information, including Richard Kawa, whose own Ibali lama Mfengu would be published some years later, and Bud-M’belle himself. Bud-M’belle led the fund-raising campaign, and the book was published in 1912. It wasn’t quite the lavish illustrated volume that he had originally envisaged: it was more of a concise history of just under a hundred pages, published by the Lovedale Press.
Quite what Bud-M’belle thought of the contents of the book is unknown. The most controversial issue was that of the relations between the Mfengu – once they had fled southwards from Shaka’s Zulu wars – and the Xhosa, among whom they found refuge. Were they treated as slaves, who were then liberated by the British with the help of missionaries (which was the view held by Ayliffe and Whiteside), or were they treated well as fellow Africans, allowed to live among them? Richard Kawa, a leading authority, adhered to the latter view, which could be why he was not more involved in the project. So far as Bud-M’belle was concerned, the main points to convey were that the Mfengu had a distinct identity; that they had proper chiefly lineages (he may well have supplied some of this detail); that they had been loyal to the British; and that they had been more receptive to Christian missionaries, and were therefore more advanced, than any other African peoples. History of the Abambo (Fingos) did the job that was required. Had funds allowed it, Bud-M’belle was going to include in the book a photograph of Sir Walter Hely-Hutchinson, who had been governor of the Cape Colony from 1901 to 1909 and had approved the declaration of Fingo National Day.
A new phase in Isaiah Bud-M’belle’s life began when he left Kimberley for Johannesburg early in 1917. After losing his job, his intention had been to remain in Kimberley if he could, but since there were few other employment possibilities locally (certainly at the level of salary he was accustomed to)
and he had received an offer from an insurance company in Johannesburg, he decided to make a move. Freed from the restrictions of government employment, he also became general secretary of the SANNC. Up until then, in keeping with his need to be seen as impartial, his political activities had been low-key and behind the scenes, but there was no doubt at all that he associated himself fully with the aims of the Congress. He had been a vital source of support for his brother-in-law Sol T. Plaatje, its first general secretary, who had spent much of the First World War in England, campaigning against the Natives Land Act of 1913. He helped to keep Plaatje’s newspaper going during his absence, stepping in to pay the office rent when the need arose, and had supported Sol’s sister (Elizabeth Plaatje) financially. Later, when Plaatje was away on a second mission to England, he would also pay for his children’s school fees.
But it was a difficult time to be taking on such a role. The leadership of the Congress was divided, unsure of how to respond to a government that simply ignored their representations, especially on the Natives Land Act and legislation that was intended to build upon it. Internal divisions, exacerbated by arguments over the funds raised to pay for the delegation to England in 1914, added to the difficulties. Tensions were very evident at the Congress’s fifth annual general meeting in Bloemfontein in May 1917. John Dube, its president, was forced to resign, as was Richard Selope Thema, its secretary. Some months later, Bud-M’belle was elected in Thema’s place.
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