Further problems soon arose. As well as being divided, the leadership of the national organisation was increasingly out of touch with a growing urban constituency, particularly in the Transvaal. Here, on the Rand, rapidly rising prices, fuelled by wartime shortages, had generated a new militancy on the part of black workers. In response, the Transvaal branch of the Congress took up their cause, influenced by white socialist leaders who urged black workers to strike in order to force employers to increase their wages. All of this was anathema to the older, more conservative Congress leaders who still dominated the national executive.
Matters came to a head in June 1918 when the Johannesburg chief magistrate, T.G. Macfie, handed down a harsh sentence to 152 African workers, employed by the city’s sanitary department, whose crime had been to go on strike in pursuit of a decent living wage. In its response, the divisions within the SANNC were exposed. The radical leaders of the Transvaal branch of Congress, urged on by a small group of revolutionary socialists, turned the campaign to release the prisoners into a demand for an all-round increase of a shilling a day, and they threatened a general strike if their demands weren’t met. In this group, as it happened, was Horatio Bud-M’belle, one of Isaiah’s nephews, who was attracted by these ideas and sometimes spoke at meetings of the International Socialist League.
Opposed to this course of action were most of the national leadership of the Congress, who preferred to rely on more traditional methods of petition and appeal. Bud-M’belle, always the voice of restraint and moderation, addressed several meetings of the Transvaal branch of the SANNC, appealing to those present not to go on strike. ‘If we do not stop the strike,’ he told one meeting, ‘the whole of Johannesburg will be in flames … I therefore entreat you to stop the strike.’ His appeal had no effect. ‘Let it burn’ was the response, and Bud-M’belle – so it was reported – retired in disarray.8 Somebody of his background and experience was not well equipped to deal with this kind of crisis.
He had more luck with the telegram he sent to the minister of justice on 13 June, appealing for the release of the prisoners. In it, he explained that Macfie’s harsh sentence ‘has created an unfortunate situation for the leaders of the Congress’ and that he had needed to call upon other senior leaders (including his brother-in-law, Sol Plaatje) ‘to help calm the natives’ and defeat the extremists. He thought they now had ‘most of their machinations under control’, but more meetings were due to take place ‘under socialist auspices’ over the next few days. It would therefore ‘strengthen our hands considerably’, he said, were the government to extend ‘its clemency to the prisoners by altering Mr Macfie’s decision before the weekend’.9 Recognising the seriousness of the situation, the government ordered the release of the prisoners, the Supreme Court reversed the magistrate’s decision, and a commission of inquiry – the Moffat Commission – was appointed to look into the strikers’ grievances. The immediate crisis was thus defused.
The second major issue with which Isaiah Bud-M’belle was concerned as general secretary of the SANNC was its appeal to the British imperial government to intervene on its behalf. Inspired by wartime propaganda that made much of the rights of nations to determine their destinies, the Congress composed a lengthy petition for a second delegation to take to England, replete with fulsome expression of loyal sentiments. The deputation was led by Plaatje, but Bud-M’belle saw to the paperwork and conducted the correspondence with South African and imperial authorities. As before, the delegates were told, once they arrived in England, that since South Africa was now a self-governing dominion, the British government could not interfere, and they were advised to return home.
By the time they did, Bud-M’belle was no longer general secretary of the SANNC. According to one account, he was obliged to resign after a deputation, of which he was a member, had gone to see the minister of native affairs and had then disagreed among themselves during the interview. He was blamed for the debacle. He had also been obliged to give up his membership, according to another report, of the African Club in Johannesburg, a social and debating club frequented by the younger and more radical members of the Transvaal branch of Congress. They took exception to the evidence he had given to the Moffat Commission, which they thought undermined their cause. In these circumstances, the offer of a new job as clerk and interpreter in the Native Affairs Department in Pretoria probably came at just the right moment.
For the next ten years, until his retirement in 1930, Bud-M’belle played an important role within the Native Affairs Department in Pretoria, his extensive knowledge and connections proving to be invaluable to his superiors. In fact, he was as much an adviser as a clerk or interpreter, and it is clear that the officials relied heavily upon him. He was a mine of information, for example, about the various African newspapers that came and went in the 1920s, and he was of the greatest assistance, so the solicitor-general acknowledged, in tracing and explaining biblical and historical allusions in correspondence that was submitted as evidence in the case of the Bulhoek massacre, involving the famous case of the ‘Israelites’ sect in 1921 – as well as interpreting in the trial itself. He was also able to help fellow Africans in their dealings with the Native Affairs Department, as when J.T. Gumede, president of the African National Congress (as the SANNC was renamed in 1923), needed a passport to travel to Europe. But it was by no means all plain sailing. ‘Mr M’belle’s official touch with the government,’ so it was reported, ‘has helped to secure Native acquiescence in measures which, from the Native viewpoint, were of doubtful advantage, and he has more than once been required by Native communities and bodies to vouch for his Department’s good intentions.’10 It cannot have been easy for him.
Among the highlights that friends recalled were Bud-M’belle’s interpreting for the Prince of Wales when he visited South Africa in 1925 (the prince presented him with a silver-topped walking stick) and at the ‘Native Conferences’ – four were held between 1923 and 1930 – set up to provide a channel of communication between government and moderate black leaders. He also interpreted at the Transvaal Supreme Court and the Native Appeal Court (Transvaal Division). Here, in the opinion of its president, Ernest Stubbs, the fluent and accurate interpretations by Bud-M’belle marked him out as superior to any other interpreter he had had any dealings with. Bud-M’belle also continued to add to his collection of qualifications, passing the Native Law and Administration examination, administered by the University of South Africa, in 1923. Earlier, while still in Kimberley, he had passed the Civil Service Law examination, which was the normal route to being promoted to the position of a magistrate – if you were white. Nevertheless, Bud-M’belle still enjoyed a high status, being considered an officer of the Administrative and Clerical Division, and he travelled first class when on official business. He remained, by some margin, the best-paid African civil servant in the Union of South Africa. Among his own people, he was held in high esteem and was often addressed by his praise name, Sozizwe, a Xhosa word meaning ‘Father of Nations’.
While he took no major role in the affairs of the ANC, Bud-M’belle was nevertheless heavily involved in initiatives that aimed, in the changed circumstances of the 1920s, to bring blacks and whites together. This was very much the age of the Joint Councils (American-inspired efforts to improve ‘race relations’), and Bud-M’belle supported their aims. He was a leading figure in the Pretoria Native Welfare Society, of which he became a life president; in the Pretoria Joint Council, after it was founded in 1922; in the Pretoria Location Advisory Board; and at the annual Advisory Boards Congress, which brought together representatives from different towns and regions. He was always one for detail, pushing for incremental improvements in transport, housing, taxation, conditions of employment and other areas that affected Africans’ daily lives. He was on hand as a source of advice to both the authorities and his people, and he was often asked to give evidence at commissions of inquiry. Once, as chair of a subcommittee organised by the Pretoria Native Welfare Society, he
succeeded in getting the municipality to exercise more effective control over rack-renting landlords. One of those who benefited from the reduction in rent – for his residence in Marastabad – was Bud-M’belle himself.
After his second retirement in 1930, Bud-M’belle was freer to speak out; but the ANC, which was in a dire condition throughout the 1930s, did not provide much of a forum. A more promising development was the formation of the All African Convention, which coordinated African opposition to General Hertzog’s proposed segregationist ‘Native Bills’. Bud-M’belle, an elder statesman by now, attended and spoke at its first meeting in Bloemfontein in December 1935, but it was others who took the organisation forward. None could prevent General Hertzog from abolishing the Cape African franchise. It was a bitter blow and a final nail in the coffin, as many saw it, for the idea of a liberal society in which there would be equal rights, subject only to a ‘civilisation test’, in politics and law.
In Bud-M’belle’s view, one positive thing that came out of the new legislation was the Natives Representative Council, a successor to the Native Conferences of the 1920s. In 1937, at the age of sixty-seven, Bud-M’belle put himself forward for election to the new council as an elected representative for the Transvaal and Orange Free State, pointing in his manifesto to his long record of service to his people. He knew their needs and aspirations, he said, and wished ‘to assure you all that if I am elected to represent you in the Natives Representative Council, my humble services will always be available to the African people’.11 In the event, he came second in the long list of hopeful candidates, pipped to the post by Richard Selope Thema, who had been his predecessor as general secretary of the SANNC. Thereafter, afflicted by ill health and failing eyesight, Bud-M’belle retired from public life and passed away in 1947.
At his funeral, many fitting tributes were paid. According to the Bantu World newspaper, in which he had once had a hand, it was ‘the largest, the most impressive and dignified funeral seen in Pretoria’, a ‘cosmopolitan crowd’ coming from far and wide, evidence of ‘how the deceased was highly esteemed by all sections of the community’. One speaker after the other spoke of their sense of loss. Mr C. Mboleka, chair of the Pretoria Advisory Board, said that Bud-M’belle had ‘guided them to success’, and they had ‘learnt much from him’. John Lekgetho, on behalf of the ANC, recalled ‘the help given them by the deceased who always gave them wise counsel in their affairs’. Dr James Moroka thought he was simply ‘one of Africa’s greatest men’.12 Little was said of his younger days: it was all a long time ago.
Posterity, though, has not been kind to Isaiah Bud-M’belle’s memory. A primary school is named after him in Atteridgeville, Pretoria, but there are no foundations, no statues. If a new interest in the history of South African rugby and cricket is at last uncovering a forgotten story, and Bud-M’belle’s part in it, he appears as little more than a bit player in the broader histories that have been written. To make matters worse, he has often been confused with his nephew, Horatio Bud-M’belle, whose ideas he certainly did not share. As a government servant, a believer in the promise of Cape liberalism, of equality before the law, of equal rights for all civilised men, his ideals, by the end of his life, seemed almost out of place, a hangover from a distant past. To later generations, it was easy to see him as too compromised, and too compromising, a figure to claim his place in the nationalist pantheon.
But Bud-M’belle deserves to be remembered for what he achieved, not for what he could not change. He was a brilliant linguist and interpreter, and he grasped the opportunities that came his way. He determined to do the best for himself and for his family, and to demonstrate what his people were capable of. In this way, he could counter – in deeds rather than with words – the prejudices and arguments of those who were guided by notions of racial superiority. He seems never to have let bitterness get a hold, despite all he went through both personally and politically. Even when seriously injured in a racially motivated assault on him in a Kimberley thoroughfare in 1906, he continued to believe that one day things would come right, that education, hard work and setting an example were the means to overcome both disabilities and prejudice. Proud of his Mfengu heritage, faithful all his life to the Wesleyan Church, he was a man of generosity and integrity, and he did much for his people quietly, behind the scenes, as well as in the public sphere. He never lost faith in the law, nor in the integrity of those who administered it. In another country, or another age, he might have made a good minister of justice.
Further reading
Although no published biography of Isaiah Bud-M’belle exists, for more about various aspects of his life, there is Brian Willan, Sol Plaatje: A Life of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, 1876–1932 (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2018); André Odendaal, Krish Reddy, Christopher Merrett and Jonty Winch, Cricket and Conquest: The History of South African Cricket Retold, Volume 1, 1795–1914 (Cape Town: Best Red, 2016); and Philip Bonner, ‘The Transvaal Native Congress 1917–1920: The radicalisation of the African petty bourgeoisie on the Rand’, in Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone (eds.), Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation, Culture and Consciousness, 1870–1930 (Harlow: Longman, 1982). Bud M’belle’s own Kafir Scholar’s Companion (Alice: Lovedale Press, 1903), recently reprinted, draws upon his experiences as a court interpreter to provide a wide-ranging introduction to isiXhosa.
Pat Pattle: The Icarus of the Transkei
Bill Nasson
* * *
For readers who know of Roald Dahl only as the author of acclaimed children’s stories such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach, here – to borrow a phrase much favoured by the late J.V. Stalin – is a little-known fact. This famous British writer was also a Royal Air Force (RAF) fighter pilot in the Second World War. In south-eastern Europe during the raging air war between the Allies and their Axis enemy over Greece, Dahl flew with a young Empire–Commonwealth pilot, described gushingly in his autobiography Going Solo as a ‘legend in the RAF’ and as ‘the Second World War’s greatest flying ace’.1 An enigmatic and slightly febrile individual, this hero of Dahl’s Mediterranean conflict was a twenty-six-year-old South African airman, Pat Pattle, described by his flying contemporaries as very small and very soft-spoken. There was an irony to Pattle being recognised as the airborne gladiator of the moment. Despite the reputation he would later earn, he had not been considered suitable for flight training by his own country’s air force in the mid-1930s.
However, not all of Pattle’s qualities were admired by Roald Dahl. In Dahl’s critical depiction of an episode during April 1941, Flight Lieutenant Pattle, ‘the ace of aces’, staged a risky fly-past over Athens, leading a dozen aircraft in a flamboyant display to demonstrate to the anxious Greeks below that the British remained aloft and undefeated. It was, he thought, an unnecessarily foolhardy act of brinkmanship in which, ‘assuming that we could all fly as brilliantly as he could’, Pat Pattle spearheaded his squadron on ‘one hell of a dance around the skies above the city’.2
But it ended in disaster. Jumped by a far larger swarm of Luftwaffe Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighters, the RAF flight was torn apart. Dahl’s luck held. But Pattle’s did not. Entombed in his stricken Hawker Hurricane fighter, he disappeared into the sea off Athens. His short and concentrated life perhaps bears some resemblance to that of Icarus in ancient Greek mythology, who brushed aside warnings not to fly too close to the sun, as its heat would destroy his wings. When the feathers melted away, he plummeted into the sea and drowned. Metaphorically, Pattle might be viewed as an impetuous Icarus of the industrial age who flew, if not too close to the sun, perhaps too brazenly over the Acropolis. His was an especially brief life, cut short by a war in which fighter pilots lived by the skin of their teeth.
Pat Pattle was an imperial child of the age of white British Dominions, born in the first decade of the Union of South Africa. Since early adolescence, he had tried to become known as ‘Tom’, before settling on ‘Pat’ as hi
s favoured label. It was no surprise that he needed a chummy badge to be flashed as an antidote to the Victorian English starchiness of the name given to him on his birth in July 1914: Marmaduke Thomas St John Pattle. As the gruff South African foreign correspondent Carel Birkby remarked in his aviation essays, Dancing the Skies, ‘Marmaduke was a hell of a name to give a South African boy.’3
Marmaduke was born into a migrant British family in Butterworth, one of the colonial Transkei’s oldest white settlements. The masculine mark of the Pattles’ place in the world was their lengthy South Asian, Far Eastern and African expeditionary army pedigree. Marmaduke’s South African–born English father, Jack, was the son of the military head of the Butterworth magistracy who, before becoming a local attorney, had fought Boer republicanism in the South African War of 1899–1902 and had then taken part in the subjugation of the rebellious monarchical Zulu in the 1906 Bambatha Rebellion in Natal. Armed service was the family’s contribution to the extension of the Empire and to the maintenance of colonial order.
Less iron-fisted by upbringing, Marmaduke’s mother, Edith Brailsford, was a locally trained English hospital nurse who had been settled in South Africa as a very young child. Secure in their comfortable Butterworth house, and in their good name, the Anglo-Protestant South African Pattles were infused, in their Eastern Cape frontier way, with the drill and Dettol of their professional kind and respectable small-town status.
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