African Americans and South Africa

This is a copyrighted document COPYRIGHT 2008. All rights reserved. This document, either in whole or in part, may NOT be copied, reproduced, republished, uploaded, posted, transmitted, or distributed in any way, except that you may download one copy of it on any single computer for your personal, non-commercial home use only, provided you keep intact this copyright notice. African Americans and South Africa Y. G-M. Lulat NOTE: This reading comprises Chapter 15 ( “U.S. African Americans and South Africa, 1800s –1948 ”) and Chapter 16 ( “U.S. African Americans and South Africa, 1949 –2008” ) from a book titled United States Relations with South Africa: A Critical Overview from the Colonial Period to the Present by Y.G-M. Lulat (New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing Group, 2008). For more on the book click here: http://bit.ly/sabook Chapter Contents Chapter 15 THE AME CHURCH IN SOUTH AFRICA/… 439 The AME and Education The Political Impact of the AME Pre War Influence: An Assessment GARVEY AND GARVEYISM/… 448 Garveyism in South Africa, 1920s –1930s Garveyism in Cape Town Garveyism in the Transkei Garveyism in Kimberly Chapter 16 RESURGENT INTEREST/… 471 The American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa (ANLCA) The Polaroid “Experiment” Sullivan Principles U.S. AFRICAN AMERICANS, U.S. JEWISH AMERICANS AND SOUTH AFRICA/… 479 THE ANTIAPARTHEID STRUGGLE IN THE 1980S/… 484 EPILOGUE: THE POLITICS OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA/… 486 15 U.S. African Americans and South Africa, 1800s1948 Free U.S. African Americans have had relations with at least two African countries that are of long- standinggoing as far back as the nineteenth century; of these two, paradoxically, one is South Af- rica (and the other is Liberia). 1 In fact, relations with South Africa, as we have already had occasion to mention, date back (albeit tangentially) to the seventeenth centurythanks to the U.S. whaling in- dustry. In surveying these relations, however, it is necessary to indicate at the very outset two important points that have to be kept in mind throughout the ensuing discussion: First, given the consistent exclusion of U.S. African Americans by U.S. Euro-Americans from effective participation in the foreign policy decision-making processalbeit not for want of trying to counter this exclusion throughout U.S. history (until recently), U.S. African American contributions in the area of U.S. relations with South Africa had been largely in the realm of nonofficial relations: that is, in the area of cultural relations. 2 It is only since the mid-1980s, that U.S. African Americans began to have a mean- ingful influence on U.S. foreign-policy-making processmainly via congressional activity. Second, U.S. African American attitudes toward and contacts with South Africa, at whatever level, cannot be completely separated from the more general matter of attitudes toward and contact with Africa as a whole. Throughout U.S. African American history, up to the present day, the theme that has remained consistent in this latter area has been a pronounced ambivalence derived from a base of ignorance fostered, in part, by U.S. Euro-American racism against blacks. Thus what was true in the years following the Civil War, ably described by Redkey (1969: 2) as follows, continues to hold true for the vast majority of U.S. African Americans to this day: As long as ignorance about contemporary Africa prevailed in the Afro-American community, hope romanti- cized the fatherland and fear fostered shame. Most blacks were ready to shift to either side, depending on their circumstances. Romantic Africa became in their minds a refuge from white persecution, the only place on earth where black men could truly be free. Humiliation at the Africans supposed backwardness led to confusion and guilt because Afro-Americans felt that they should be proud of their origins, but they knew little worthy of pride. 3 In relation specifically to South Africa, however, it is also true that knowledgeable U.S. African Americans had come to harbor a seething rage at the racially-determined suffering and indignities that blacks in that country had to put up with at the hands of whites, most especially after the insti- tutionalization of the apartheid system. 4 As Magubane (1987) points out, the collective historical ex- perience of blacks in both parts of the world had been foundationally central to the particular type of economic, social and political development that Europeans would engineer in these two areas; thereby creating a basis for U.S. African American interest in South Africa that was rivaled only by interest in one other African country, Liberia (putting aside ancient Egypt). At the same time, U.S. African Americans increasingly became aware that as long as the apartheid system continued to vio- 438 | U.S. RELATIONS WITH SOUTH AFRICA: A CRITICAL OVERVIEW late the African continent, no person of African descent anywhere in the world could stand tall and proud. In fact, politically conscious U.S. African Americans have long understood that respect and dignity for the African diaspora was indissolubly linked with the status of Africa in the world. Only a free and strong Africa could provide them with the psychological platform from which to build their own economic and political strength. Consequently, to U.S. African Americans, on the eve of the twenty-first century, South Africa remained of special moral, psychological and political significance, just as it did over a hundred years b efore, on the eve of the twentieth century, as the following discussion will show. 5 The earliest large-scale presence of U.S. African Americans in South Africa, it appears, was a re- sult of happenstance. 6 In 1894, four years after a successful concert tour of South Africa by the U.S. African American choir, the McAdoo Singers (also known as the McAdoo Minstrels or Virginia Ju- bilee Singers) led by Orpheus Myron McAdoo, had sparked much excitement among Africans, a choir group of African students from South Africa (led by two white South Africans, and called the African Native Choir), while on a visit to the United States, ran into severe financial difficulties that left them stranded in Cleveland, Ohio. 7 While little is known of what became of others, eight of them were able to obtain assistance from U.S. African American clergy in Cleveland; among them was a 21-year-old student by the name of Charlotte Manye Maxeke (who fate would single out for an inadvertent but important role). 8 She had come in contact, accidentally it appears, with a young minister, Reverdy Ransom, of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Churcha U.S. African American denomination and he in turn introduced her to one of the church leaders, Bishop Benja- min Arnett, who was known to be a strong supporter of mission activity, in Africa, by U.S. African Americans. Arnett helped Charlotte to enroll in a college run by the denomination, the Wilberforce University, in Ohio. At the same time, he opened his home to her, making her part of his family (Williams 1982). 9 Now, it so happened that Charlottes uncle in South Africa was none other than Mangena Mok- one, the leader of a newly formed Ethiopianist Methodist church. Mokone, a minister in the English Wesleyan Methodist Church of South Africa, had resigned from it in October of 1892 to found the new church in Pretoria in November of the following year that they named the Ethiopian Church . The immediate specific incident that provoked Mokone, and a number of his colleagues, to embark on this drastic and, it would appear, unprecedented action was an all-white meeting of Wesleyan ministers from which they had been excluded (Odendaal 1984: 25). 10 This incident, serving as the prover- bial straw that broke the camels back, was part of a range of discriminatory practices that had begun to be institutionalized by the Church following its decision (a few years earlier in 1886) to segregate its religious and other services, and which Mokone would now enumerate in a Declaration of In- dependence he issued upon his resignation (Chirenje 1976: 257). Mokone learned of Charlottes scholarship at Wilberforce University and the existence of the AME Church following a visit on May 31, 1895, to his niece, Mrs. Kate Makanya, in Johannesburg; she had received a letter from Charlotte, who was her sister, written on AME Church stationery. Mokone immediately set about writing one of the leaders of the AME Church, a Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, informing him about his own Ethiopianist church: I am the minister of the above [Ethiopian] mission and also the originator of the same. I have two ordained ministers or priests and seven deacons. It is entirely managed by us blacks of South Africa (Chirenje 1976: 258) Mokone then went on to ask for assistance with the sponsorship of Africans to study at U.S. institutions. In contacting Turner, little did Mokone know that he was dealing with a remarkable man; one who, among other things, not only happened to have had the distinction in 1863 of being the first U.S. African American chaplain to be appointed to the U.S. Army by Abraham Lincoln (Williams 1982), but who was also consumed by thoughts such as the following: If all the riff-raff white-men wor- shippers, aimless, objectless, selfish, little-Souled and would-be-white negroes of this country [United States] were to go to Africa, I fear it would take a chiliad of years to get them to understand that a black man or woman could be somebody without the dictation of a white man.

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