“New African” Men and Women in Segregationist South Africa

The term “New African” began appearing in the press at least as far back as 1928 to refer to an individual with a Christian mission education, cosmopolitan interests, and a sense of racial consciousness. This racial consciousness united people categorized as “native” or “Bantu” from across the Union of South Africa as Africans; these Africans claimed ties to other Africans across the continent and in the diaspora, at the same time as they made specific rights claims on the basis of their belonging in the Union of South Africa. The New African was clearly connected to the visions of a “New Negro” summoned by the African American intellectual Alain Locke (Reference Locke1925) and his colleagues in the mid-1920s, which heralded a “renaissance” of black cultural expression that would enable both collective political empowerment and individual psychological liberation from racism (see also Couzens Reference Couzens1985; Masilela Reference Masilela1996). The “talented tenth” of educated black leaders invoked by Locke’s colleague W.E.B. Du Bois did not have a serious equivalent in South Africa, as we will see. The New Negro thus entered South Africa as a figure from another “temporality” (Chrisman Reference Chrisman, Goebel and Schabio2006:31), and the tiny and tenuous class of mission-educated black South Africans looked to Locke’s New Negro as a vision of their future selves. Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association was also a vector for the translation of a more militant New Negro into South African public culture. In 1926 the organ of the Cape branch of the ANC, the African World, claimed that “the UNIA created the New Negro. . . . The New Negro is a problem to those who do not understand him. They do not know what to do with him. But he knows what to do with himself. He is going to blast his way to complete independence and nationhood” (quoted in Vinson 2012:100).

The New African, like the New Negro, emerged as a multivalent icon that linked cultural, psychological, and political struggles. R. V. Selope Thema, a journalist who had cut his teeth on the ANC’s Abantu Batho before becoming the editor of the Bantu World in 1932, first described the New African as a cosmopolitan thinker in the Johannesburg newspaper Umteteli wa Bantu. Writing as “A Wayfarer” (1928), he contended that “although the colour line is at present fenced with racial barbed wires[,] yet there is no racial bar which prevents the mind of the new African from appropriating the intellectual and spiritual heritage of civilised mankind.” To indicate what he meant by “civilised mankind,” he notably quoted Du Bois from The Souls of Black Folk (1903): “‘Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas.’” In his own “humble residence” in inner-city Johannesburg, Thema added, he had recently “enjoyed the company of Tagore the Indian Poet, Koo the Chinese social reformer, and Kagawa the Japanese Author. It is wonderful, this mental fellowship with men of other races and other lands—And who can prevent it?” But Thema emphasized that “the awakening of the African was seen not only in the field of learning,” but also

In his shift from the pleasures of cosmopolitan texts to the pleasures of antiracist struggle, Thema exemplified the ambiguities of the New African as an avatar of racial modernity: bookish but populist, forceful but smiling, appealing to Umteteli’s predominantly black readership without terrifying its white owners at the Chamber of Mines.

The concept of the New African developed over the next decade as a figure that combined ethnic pride with a commitment to panethnic unity in daily life and in formal politics. Although Zulu history and identity particularly appealed to many New Africans, especially in Natal (La Hausse 2000; Couzens Reference Couzens1985), these mission-educated people, as Shula Marks has emphasized, did not seek “an unconditional return to ‘tribal’ life” (1989:221). While ethnic consciousness, and sometimes even ethnic chauvinism, could facilitate cultural pride and stave off intraethnic class tensions while making the most of segregationist policies for black communities in the short term, New African leaders argued that “tribalism” was ultimately inimical to liberation from white domination. As the leaders of the All-African Convention put it in 1937, “The Africans are urged to close their ranks and pool their intellectual and material resources for the emancipation of their race from the thralldom of European oligarchy. . . . Your salvation depends on the unity of all the tribes” (Xuma & Msimang 1937). African racial consciousness emerged clearly not as an inevitable point of commonality in a context of ethnicized colonial administration, but as a strategic mode of affiliation. Anton Lembede, who became the first president of the ANC Youth League in 1944, stressed that “all Africans must be converted from tribalism to African Nationalism which is a higher step or degree of self-expression and self-realisation of the African spirit” (1945; quoted in Couzens Reference Couzens1985:260). Similarly, in 1945 the journalist and public intellectual Herbert Dhlomo compared the New African to two other figures: the “Tribal African,” who eschewed racial solidarity, and the “Neither-Nor African,” who did not respect his heritage or understand the possibilities of African national politics. The New African, by contrast,

Dhlomo’s invocation of the “New African masses” reveals the fundamentally transformative ambitions of the tenuous cultural class of educated Africans to which he belonged: he sought not just unity among elites, but rather a just society.

The prominent New Africans discussed so far have all been male, and scholars have highlighted how New African nationalist organizing tended to exclude women. Most usefully, Natasha Erlank (Reference Erlank2003) has pointed out that while African politics had historically been rooted in patriarchal relations, the liberal tradition on which early African nationalist politics drew was predicated on a “fraternal contract” between men. While the first tradition subordinated women, the latter had historically excluded them. Erlank focuses on how men’s patriarchal and fraternal ideals legitimated women’s marginalization from male-led politics. But women such as Charlotte Maxeke and Lillian Tshabalala also proposed gendered versions of these transformative ambitions. Maxeke, the American-educated leader of the Bantu Women’s League and the National Council of African Women, brought models of African American women’s achievements onto South African shores; she also initiated the historic union between an independent South African church movement and the African Methodist Episcopal Church (see Campbell Reference Campbell1995; Hughes Reference Hughes2012). Tshabalala followed her path to the United States and an AME school in Ghana, returning to Natal in 1930 to launch the Daughters of Africa as a national women’s club movement based on African American models. The organizing work of such New African women encouraged women to think broadly about their place in South Africa and the world, and to transform that world. But according to their propositions, the public authority of the New African woman issued pointedly from her domestic authority. In a 1936 Bantu World piece, Tshabalala characteristically argued,

In meetings with domestic workers, teachers, and nurses around rural and urban Natal and Johannesburg in the 1930s and 1940s, the Daughters of Africa promoted “communications that are extensive of the home,” as members summoned their domestic authority to build crèches, develop savings schemes, and protest injustices, from pass laws to high transport fares (see Healy-Clancy Reference Healy-Clancy2012; Nauright Reference Nauright and Sheldon1996; Higgs Reference Higgs2004).

Precisely because New African men saw women’s roles as “managers of the house” as a key sign of racial modernity, they ceded significant space to New African women in engaging domestic issues in public culture, supporting women’s expanding authority over homes and the community institutions emanating from them. Thus Rahab Petje, in “Civilisation and Matrimony” (1942), was able to get away with this assessment of marriage: “Women are the integrity of home, while men are just big babies that still have to be nursed and petted; not only in the sentimental point of view, but also in the economical point of view.” I borrow the term “managers of the house” from the historian Afsaneh Najmabadi (Reference Najmabadi2005), who has explored a similar process of women’s association with domestic authority as a signal of modernist nationalism in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Iran.^{Footnote 1} Herbert Dhlomo (Reference Dhlomo1930) emphasized that “the civics of any country begin in the home,” urging women to engage with “self-improvement” societies to nurture proud, self-sufficient families. Comments such as “the question of happy marriage is of supreme importance to a civilised nation, because peace and prosperity of nations depends on happy homes” were not uncommon in the press (Lehana Reference Lehana1937). A Bantu World letter on girls’ education highlighted New African men’s encouragement of women’s domestic authority as an indicator and force of progress:

New African women, of course, often used their education precisely to escape their “great work” at home, but they authorized their public engagements in terms of racial service. For instance, in 1935 a recent college graduate named Pumla Ngozwana spoke before a panethnic group of high school girls, in an address that the Bantu World reproduced in full. “Before the emancipation of women who ever heard of a woman leaving her home and going about giving lectures?” she said of her own work. “That was an unknown thing. Her place was the home and nowhere else. Yet we have good examples of Bantu women who are devoting their lives to the service of their people.” Through service such as delivering uplifting lectures, she urged, “race consciousness is another of the qualities we have to develop. . . . We must work for a time when we shall all be just Africans or Bantu people without being too conscious of our various groups.” Women did not see their efforts to build “the race” as ancillary to the unifying work of male-led and male-dominated political groups like the ANC, but rather as central. In a Johannesburg meeting of the Daughters of Africa in 1942, for example, “Mrs. W. M. J. Nhlapo, B.A.” gave an address entitled “Women in the Centre of Things.” In this address, which also appeared in the Bantu World, she stressed that “the African woman” should focus on “emancipating herself from the age-long inferiority complex born of the age-long idea . . . [that] her place is that of remaining and toiling in the home.” But she should also take on the “task of seeing in the home, not an institution of a menial character, but the anvil on which men and women are to be shaped. Destroy the homes, you have destroyed the very life of a people.”

New African marriages, as partnerships between men and women with gendered ideas of sociopolitical transformation, were accordingly also in a state of transformation. Before the coming of colonial capitalism in southern Africa, marriage had been the foundation of an economy premised on homestead-based agricultural production and pastoralism: it was far from a private or individualistic institution. It was through marriage gifts of cattle—known variously as lobolo, lobola, bohali, or bogadi (bridewealth)—that men brought wives into their new homesteads, and it was through women’s labors as mothers and agricultural workers that these homesteads survived (Kuper Reference Kuper1982; Wilson Reference Wilson, Krige and Comaroff1981). As Jeff Guy (1990:40) has stressed, “This control and appropriation of the productive and reproductive capacity of women was central to the structure of southern Africa’s precapitalist societies. It was the social feature upon which society was based.” Marriage was a socially integral institution, predicated on the unions not only of families and homesteads, but also of polities. As Paul Landau (2010:2) has pointed out, “agrarian South Africa before the mid-nineteenth century was built not by tribes, but by active pioneers and state-makers”; and these “pioneers and state-makers” expanded their influence through ties of marriage.

Landau’s study reminds us that the “nation-building” work of New African marriages was not a new development, but rather a new chapter in a long history of “popular politics,” in which people shifted their political allegiances in pursuit of land, power, and well-being for themselves and their kin, deploying strategies that centrally included marriage (see also Osborn 2011). Nonetheless, the forms of marriage that New Africans pursued, and their social meanings, represented a significant historical shift. Nineteenth-century missionaries had urged converts to see marriage as a union of two individuals—uniting on their own volition, and creating a sanctuary from the world in which to raise Christian children (Comaroff & Comaroff Reference Comaroff, Comaroff, Comaroff and Comaroff1992; Schapera Reference Schapera1941; Thomas Reference Thomas, Thomas and Cole2009).^{Footnote 2} Yet missionaries, in their expressed ideals and in their own models of monogamy, could not present marriage as an exclusively private institution. For Christian social transformation to occur, missionary and convert couples had to serve, first and foremost, as radiant models: the family-as-sanctuary was valuable to the Christian mission not only because each family cultivated its own relationships with Christ, but also because these families would inspire other women and men to follow their lead (Healy-Clancy Reference Healy-Clancy2013). Ironically, then, missionaries’ fetishism of private domesticity was accompanied by an evangelical commitment to publicizing forms of monogamous, God-fearing family life that they termed “civilized.” All of this occurred in a context in which the claims to civilization of African Christians fueled their self-awareness as a class, and prompted some of the earliest organization under “national” banners.

The private, modern family was therefore quite public at its inception. As Christianity became deeply rooted over the first half of the twentieth century, Africans selectively contested, took up, and reinvented missionary ideals and practices of home. This was a defensive response to the constraints of racialized land policies and restrictions on urban residence, to be sure. But it was also a creative effort to maintain some of the core relations of precolonial homesteads, which combined productive and reproductive activities and included extended kin. Upon marriage, New African women thus ideally led what we might call “public–private homes.” New African families sought new forms of privacy, particularly against an overreaching state; but they also opened their homes to their communities and extended kin, as they embraced new ideals of public service. Some even ran clinics, schools, and other social institutions out of their houses (Cele Reference Cele, Healy-Clancy and Hickel2014). This was the context of change to which Petje’s call for interethnic marriage spoke.

The Politics of Writing about Marriage in the Bantu World

To understand more specifically the audience to which Petje spoke, we must consider the Bantu World and its women’s pages more closely. From its 1932 advent, the Bantu World had published pieces on ideals and practices of family; this content found a home in a “women’s supplement” called “Marching Forward” in November 1935. As Les Switzer (Reference Switzer and Switzer1997) has described, the Bantu World’s founding heralded white advertisers’ rising interest in African consumers. By 1945, the white-controlled Argus group operated ten African-oriented newspapers under its Bantu Press division, including pioneering publications such as Ilanga Lase Natal (The Natal Sun) and Imvo Zabantsundu (Native Opinion), founded by mission-educated African men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. By the time of the transition to apartheid in 1948, Inkundla ya Bantu (The Bantu Forum, 1938–52) was the only African-owned newspaper with a national audience (Ukpanah Reference Ukpanah2005). But the editorship of the other newspapers remained black, and their content remained multilingual. The Bantu World characteristically published most of its content in the mission-school lingua franca of English, but it also included translated and original content in Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Tswana, Venda, Tsonga, and Afrikaans. Despite what Switzer, in the title of his article, refers to as their “captive” position under white control, these newspapers remained sites of rich debates over race and nation—and these debates increasingly occurred in seemingly “nonpolitical” sections. In part, this was an ironic consequence of the commercial ownership structure: to attract readers and thus advertisements, these newspapers became more mass-oriented publications, including more images and reportage on social life from the 1930s (Ukpanah Reference Ukpanah2005). The Bantu World’s women’s pages reflected this push; letters from readers suggest that it provoked popular interest, attracting advertisers hawking a new range of goods to women (Thomas Reference Thomas and Weinbaum2008). While newspapers were not a mass phenomenon in this period, they did tap into a population that was aware of the power of texts. The African literacy rate increased from 12 to 20 percent between the mid-1930s and mid-1940s: by the mid-1940s some twenty-four thousand copies of the Bantu World sold each week; staff claimed that at least five people read each issue and, significantly, that they shared its contents with nonliterate neighbors and kin (Ukpanah Reference Ukpanah2005; Thomas Reference Thomas and Weinbaum2008).

Indeed, we should be careful not to caricature this audience as particularly elite. Readers lacked significant economic, political, or cultural power—as the very ownership structure of the press in this period reflects. In a context in which factory or domestic workers could command higher incomes than journalists or teachers, the class histories of families and individuals were often highly varied (Hughes Reference Hughes2012; Limb Reference Limb2010). Many black women in this period went from school to at least a spell in domestic service (Healy-Clancy Reference Healy-Clancy2013). Some of these educated domestic workers, like the future unionist and Federation of South African Women activist Lucy Twala, wrote for the Bantu World. Moreover, as Karin Barber has pointed out in her discussion of the politics of literacy across Anglophone Africa, few in this “educated elite” were as educated as they would have liked: “Literacy embodied aspiration, and aspiration was founded upon lack—a sense of personal inadequacy associated with an education perceived as incomplete” (2006:5). Education beyond the primary level remained rare for African men in this period, and rarer still for African women, in South Africa as throughout the continent. Bantu World writers and readers were defined less by occupation or income than by a shared culture, defined by their formative if incomplete experiences of mission education. They were rooted in what one 1940 editorial termed “The Book World”: a world in which texts and ideas mattered as indicators and engines of racial progress. “Before Africans can take their place in the league of progressive nations, our people must be taught to read,” the editorial contended. “Reading makes a people rediscover themselves and the world round them, impels them not only to progress, but to expression—to live more abundantly” (quoted in Peterson Reference Peterson and Barber2006:242). This text assumed an existing “our people,” who must “be taught to read” (by educated Africans and their allies). Literacy would enable them to “rediscover” an identity as “a people” and join “the league of progressive nations.” Above all, the Bantu World depicted its writers and readers as part of an uplifting class. This self-conception reflected as well as reinforced the politics of proximity accompanying segregationist policies in the urban areas from which most writers and readers came. Although the Bantu World writers routinely evinced a sense that they were culturally superior to uneducated neighbors, they are better understood as an evangelizing class than as an exclusive elite. The scope of their ambition and limits of their success—in the face of challenges from both a racialized state and those in their communities who rejected their visions of progress—emerge acutely in the pages of the newspaper.

The Bantu World is a challenging source, befitting its complicated class of writers and readers. This difficulty is enhanced by writers’ common use of pseudonyms, a technique that seemed to appeal less to their desires for anonymity than to stylistic play (see Newell Reference Newell2013). The brothers Herbert Dhlomo and Rolfes Dhlomo, the most prolific journalists of this era, mastered the art of multiple monikers. One of Rolfes Dhlomo’s key noms de plume was female: when he came to the Bantu World in his early thirties, he took on the role of “Editress” of the women’s pages. This publication was therefore predicated on notions of racial and gender autonomy that were essentially fictional: black run but white owned, speaking for women but firmly under male control (Healy-Clancy Reference Healy-Clancy2012). These fictions make it difficult to unearth women’s voices from layers of representation, suggesting why scholars have generally not looked to press sources to understand gender relations.^{Footnote 3}

In this compromised context, we can nonetheless see that Petje and other young women articulated ideas that placed pressure on men as well as women. In her “Civilisation and Matrimony” (1942), for instance, Petje made an “appeal to African women who are single like me,” urging her readers to see that “marriage is a job. It requires brains and stamina from both parties. It does not mean a soft place for the woman, and a fool’s paradise for the man. It needs strength, generosity and honesty, and human understanding.” Yet women often couched these demands in language of patriarchy, reflecting the constraints of the discourse. For instance, in calling men out for disrespectful conduct, Petje appealed to chivalry: “Woman is and has to be the centre of admiration and respect. . . . We see today women disgraced, degraded, shunned and neglected, and even robbed of their lives by so[-]called gallants of today,” she contends in “Do Women Deserve Inconsideration?” (1942). Similarly, Maria C. T. Piliso, in an article titled “Husbands Should Encourage Their Wives to Take Interest in Life” (1933), railed against men who subordinate their wives’ career interests to their domestic responsibilities.

Behind modern marriages predicated on choice, she suggests, lurks patriarchy and the husbands’ desire to control their wives’ labor in the mode of a traditional homestead head. She acknowledges that “a good many of husbands in their hearts would agree with me that, in this modern world and judged by modern standards, [such a position] is utterly fallacious.” But men persist in trying to control their wives because they fear that if they do not, “they themselves may very well wake up one day to find that they have been dislodged from their position—a courtesy position, assigned to them by custom, seldom won in fair fight—as head of the household.”

This writing nevertheless suggests that a new domestic order, in which authority is premised on merit rather than gender, might emerge through the agency of men, in their current roles as heads of household. Piliso contends, “My husband must insist on me continuing my career. Because if I do, I will be so much more sympathetic about his work. . . . Moreover, my being a worker myself, my own mind will be so attuned, my brain so organised to understand and cope with modern problems, that in moments of crisis he shall be able to ask my advice” (1933). Her closing remarks, while redolent of liberal individualism, are imbricated with an assumption that men still mediate between women and the world of wage labor and that women must convince their husbands of their right to work.

The type of women’s labor ideal for New African families was implied in the accompanying photograph of “Mrs. R. W. Msimang, Orlando district nurse”: the paradigmatic profession of racial service, as Shula Marks (Reference Marks1994) has discussed. Whether these narrative strategies reflected Piliso’s own views alone or also revealed those of the “Editress,” their effect was to underscore the contestations in which New African marriage was enmeshed—debates that would deepen over the next decade, as women’s urban settlement and public presence increased (Thomas Reference Thomas and Weinbaum2008, Reference Thomas, Thomas and Cole2009; Hellman Reference Hellman1948; du Toit 2005).

At least some men were also embracing ideals of companionate marriage over the course of the 1930s, even if this acceptance, in some cases, was accorded grudgingly. For instance, a 1937 “New Marriage Pledge” by one reader began, “I Promise: That I will adjust myself to the new status of woman and treat my wife as a partner and not as a chattel!” The vows conclude with a confirmation of marriage as a profession: “That I will look on marriage not as a lottery or a necessary evil or convenience of living but as a splendid art which it is every man’s privilege to practice. That I will work for success of my marriage as I would for a career and not expect result in a minute or triumph in a DAY” (Haiyan Reference Haiyan1937). In a 1937 letter to the editor, Eccles B. Mathabane warned that youth were entering into marriage too lightly and affirmed that modern marriage should be “a business run by two partners—wife and husband.” But he emphasized women’s contributions to this partnership most heavily: “Less time than before marriage should be spent in amusements and more time devoted to the improvement of her home. She should attend to or supervise household affairs, stitch her hubby’s torn shirts and trousers, mend his socks and then and only then will she find that she has little or no time for gossip and amusements.” As Mathabane’s pedantic tone suggests, New African men could still regard themselves as the ultimate authorities atop a domestic hierarchy, despite women’s invocations of their management of the house to justify their public engagements.

It is clear that lurking in these often overheated discussions of love, sex, and marriage were certain racial questions—not only political and cultural questions of what Lynn Thomas (Reference Thomas and Weinbaum2008) has called “racial respectability,” but also questions animated by eugenic anxieties. Concerns about failed motherhood were often rendered in biological terms, as “Editress” Rolfes Dhlomo’s writings typify. Under the alias “X.Y.Z.” in 1939, for instance, Dhlomo argued, “A woman must be chaste, for by her chastity she insures well for the future of her progeny, and hence for the social and moral uplift and advance of her nation. If a woman fails to do this, then she spells ruination for her people, and hence she’s a murderer and a traitor.” He was warning not only that women’s reproductive health would shape the biological fitness of her children (and “her nation”), but also that women’s conduct would shape the moral fiber of her children (and “her nation”). He claimed that “a woman who indulges in foul talk” is “slaying her race, and has no business to be alive”; she “is sure to produce an offspring of swearing reprobates and brigands.” Women’s smoking and acting “too modern” should also be “stamped out ruthlessly,” for such a mother would “ruin her race.” He emphasized that women’s “natural responsibility over their offspring and race” gave them an “unalterable influence” in shaping model youth, or in “sowing the seeds of savagery in the poor innocent offspring.”

In Petje’s warnings about the deleterious effects of stunted interethnic courtships with which we began, we see how the politics of marriage was naturalized as a politics of racial salvation. The 1942 article that posed the question “How can we build Africa when we regard each other as aliens?” bore a revealing title: “Segregation and Unsociable Mothers and Fathers.” Conversations about unmarried women in the Bantu World often accused these “modern girls” of being “too independent” to pursue marriage seriously (as discussed in Thomas Reference Thomas and Weinbaum2008; see also Hodgson Reference Hodgson2001). But Petje suggested that the “many old maids found about town”—“most” of whom were “fallen girls,” heading for “degeneration”—really did not “want to be degenerates.” The problem, she claimed, was instead that “uneducated” parents did not trust their daughters to pursue uplifting New African marriages. She walked readers through a nightmare courtship scenario between a “very prominent and outstanding Zulu B.A.” who was humiliated by the parents of his Sotho girlfriend “for the simple reason that he is a Zulu.” Petje complained,

She particularly urged mothers not to see themselves as part of a “more advanced nation” than their daughters’ suitors, emphasizing that the “pride and salvation of a mother depends on a daughter’s sound marriage.” To create New African families, Petje suggested, youth who had been educated at panethnic mission schools and socialized in diverse urban spaces needed to educate their parents to see “the nation” in more expansive terms. Petje argued that women—both daughters and mothers—were central to this process of building an African consciousness because they were central to biological and social reproduction: it was young women who “would one day be mothers of Africa,” and it was their mothers who must ensure that their daughters raised children with “prominent and outstanding” New African men. Although the print culture in which she worked was multiply constrained, writing about interethnic marriage enabled Petje to make space for a gendered vision of New African politics—in which domestic hierarchies should be more flexible and empowering to young women as a matter of racial progress. But how did women navigate domestic hierarchies to build New African families? Memoirs of a New African marriage address this complex question.

The Politics of Marital Memoirs: Frieda and Z. K. Matthews

In 1935 at Adams College outside of Durban, Zachariah Keodirelang (Z. K.) Matthews presented a speech titled “The Tribal Spirit among Educated South Africans.” He stressed that reports of African “detribalization” had been exaggerated, as elements of “the old political organization of the tribe” endured in mission-educated Africans’ homes—in relationships of respect and hierarchy in families, and especially in courtship and marriage practices. Matthews emphasized that national consciousness would be attained not by the erasure of ethnic consciousness, but by the incorporation of ethnic pride into a broader racial movement:

To understand where Matthews’s national vision came from, we might look to his professional biography. He was born in 1901 near the diamond-mining center of Kimberley. His parents were Tswana Christians from modest economic backgrounds—his father worked in the mines as a shop clerk, and his mother was a domestic servant. But the family had strong connections to nationalist politics—Sol Plaatje, a founding member of the ANC, was Matthews’s cousin. Matthews attended high school at Lovedale mission, the bastion of New African schooling in the Cape (Williams Reference Williams1970). He was the first African to earn a bachelors degree in South Africa, graduating from the South African Native College at Fort Hare in 1923. He then became the first African head of the high school at Adams College in 1925. In 1930 he became the first African to complete the bachelor of laws degree from the University of South Africa, which he followed with a masters degree from the “Race Relations and Culture Contact” program at Yale and then a year’s study with Bronislaw Malinowski at the London School of Economics. In 1936 he was appointed a lecturer in law and anthropology at Fort Hare. He was also active in nationalist politics, as a force behind the All-African Convention in the mid-1930s and then as ANC provincial president for the Cape in the late 1940s and early 1950s; in 1956, along with his son Joe and 154 other leading anti-apartheid activists from diverse backgrounds, he would stand in the famous Treason Trial. After his acquittal, he resigned from Fort Hare to protest its classification as an apartheid institution for Xhosa-speaking students.

Matthews’s personal life also shaped his vision of education as a force for panethnic unity. His paternal line hailed from the Bamangwato chiefdom in present-day Botswana, from which his grandfather and namesake, Zachariah Keodirelang Matthews, had departed following a succession dispute to settle with the related Barolong chiefdom in Thaba Nchu, near the politically vibrant city of Bloemfontein. His maternal line was Barolong royalty. When he was a boy, his mother “would tell us story after story about people in our family and Barolong history” (1981:11). At Lovedale he remained connected to that heritage, forging a lifelong friendship with his classmate (and future Bamangwato regent) Tshekedi Khama. But also, he explained,

Students made these connections despite the school’s policy of structuring the residence halls and sports teams according to language group—a reflection of missionaries’ tribalizing tendencies. One of the most important relationships of Matthews’s life was forged across these boundaries. “If anybody had told me when I entered Lovedale that I would marry a Xhosa-speaking girl, I would have said he was talking nonsense. But that is precisely what I did,” he recollected (1981:36).

Matthews met the young Frieda Bokwe, also a Lovedale and then Fort Hare student, through her older brother, Rosebery. The Bokwe family had been deeply rooted at Lovedale since its founding. Frieda and Rosebery’s father was the remarkable composer and minister John Knox Bokwe, whose forebears had been among the first Christian converts in the region (Olwage Reference Olwage2006). Their mother was a teacher of Mfengu origins. Matthews and Rosebery Bokwe became close friends at Lovedale. “Rosebery and I shared classes and studies and we even shared the one pair of long pants which he acquired and which—great day—I too would wear, taking turn for turn with him,” Matthews recalled (1981:40). He fell in love with Frieda Bokwe at a picnic on her seventeenth birthday, in 1922, but their families urged them not to rush into marriage: “The customary age for marriage among Africans of our kind was much beyond that. Moreover the completion of our schooling had to come first” (1981:70). They married in December 1928, after a three-year engagement. She was then twenty-three and held a teacher’s diploma, and she was teaching at the Inanda Seminary for girls outside of Durban.

Significantly, Matthews’s reflections on courtship and marriage were edited by his wife and by the anthropologist Monica Hunter Wilson, a white woman raised at Lovedale who was their friend. Between 1952 and 1953 Matthews recounted his memoirs of his youth; after his death in 1968 Frieda Bokwe Matthews and Wilson supplemented these early recollections with their accounts of his later career. The result appeared in 1981 as an unusually collective memoir: Freedom for My People: The Autobiography of Z. K. Matthews: Southern Africa 1901 to 1968. The book was billed as a “memoir by Monica Wilson,” but the material came from Matthews himself or from his widow, who provided most of the material in the section about their engagement and marriage. In brackets before this section Wilson notes that “no account of his marriage was given by Z. K. in his autobiography and the following passage is taken from his wife’s journal” (1981:89), and so Z. K.’s autobiography moves into Frieda’s voice for the next several pages. Later Frieda Bokwe Matthews composed her own memoirs for her grandchildren, which she published in 1995 as Remembrances. Here she goes into more detail about her betrothal and marriage, positioning herself as central in mediating ethnic affiliations to create a New African family.

When she was growing up, Frieda Bokwe’s strongest identification was with the cosmopolitan African Christian community around Lovedale and Fort Hare. In Remembrances she recalls her childhood as being passed in “happy afternoons at my mother’s house when young people from all parts of southern Africa would spend an hour or two to enjoy something of the homeliness which mother gave, and we girls fussed around, making tea and passing scones we all agreed were the best ever made” (1995:7). Among their many guests was the future Bamangwato regent, Tshekedi Khama. She also recalls her grandmother’s stories of their Mfengu heritage, although her sense of a specifically ethnic identity seems to have been subordinated to a strong African Christian identity.

Nevertheless, she also remembers the “puzzled, rather antagonistic attitude” of her kin to the arrival of Matthews and his father, who accompanied his son to request Frieda’s hand in marriage. Since Frieda’s father had died when she was an adolescent, her uncles were in charge of these negotiations: “My mother had had to call them together to report that a visitor was coming from the land of the Tswana to take one of their daughters. One old man wanted to know where the sons of well-known Xhosa men were that a daughter of Knox/Bokwe should be married to a foreigner.” He fretted, in Frieda’s presence, that she would be “thrown away to people whose ways and customs were not known” (1995:10). Her uncles’ hostility was such that Frieda decided to stay during the negotiations to mitigate tensions. Z. K. Matthews translated between Setswana and isiXhosa. The uncles nonetheless attacked the Matthews men over their English surname, which they explained derived from the missionaries who had converted Z. K. Matthews’s grandfather. The uncles then asked for the Matthews’s isiduko, or clan name, which alarmed Frieda:

Much to her relief, her future father-in-law replied easily, “I am Phuti of the Ngwato tribe of Bechuanaland.” She recalled that her uncles relaxed immediately, since “although this man came from a town, and although he carried a white man’s name, he was an ordinary country man, knowing his past and his tribe.” The negotiations subsequently culminated in a plan for a small sum of bogadi/lobola and a “Western engagement ring” for Frieda (1995:12).

Despite her comment about her and her future husband’s “detribalised” life, Frieda Bokwe Matthews found that Z. K.’s sense of ethnic identity was much more pronounced than her own. She reported being miffed when, after her Christian wedding ceremony on the Lovedale campus, she encountered a group of unfamiliar paternal relatives:

This historical engagement with Christianity, which introduced cleavages between traditionalists and a minority of mission-educated Xhosa speakers, was quite different from that of the Bamangwato, whose Chief Khama III had become an enthusiastic Christian two generations before (Landau Reference Landau1995). But Frieda Bokwe Matthews emphasized that she came to accommodate their differences, seeing positive elements in her Tswana, Xhosa, and African Christian affiliations. She came to regard her “real home-in-law” as the Bamangwato heartland, Serowe, and she settled in Botswana after her husband’s death. She gave all of her five children Tswana as well as English names, in deference to her husband’s concern that “their true nationality should not be obliterated. Already the surname ‘Matthews’ was a handicap.” But she also nourished her children’s Xhosa and Christian identities. At home, she wrote that the “children became more Xhosa than Tswana in speech,” while she and her husband spoke English to each other (1995:9,21,27). As her friend Phyllis Ntantala remembered her, “Of the African women I know, there are none as African and aware of their great African heritage as she is. And yet, on the surface, she is so English” (1992:ix).

In addition to providing insight into the ethnic negotiations of a prominent New African couple, Frieda Bokwe Matthews’s memoir depicts the politics of marriage beyond her family. She expresses great interest in the marriage of Chief Tshekedi Khama’s nephew, Chief Seretse Khama, to a British woman, for which he would be forced out of his chieftainship. In 1966, Seretse Khama would become independent Botswana’s first president, with his wife Ruth Williams Khama by his side; Z. K. Matthews would serve as Botwana’s ambassador to the United States. “The irony of it for me,” Frieda Matthews recalled, was that shortly before the announcement of the marriage,

But Chief Tshekedi affirmed his nephew’s right to choose his wife, noting that “I daresay he had not reckoned with the possibility that Seretse would want a white girl.” She also mentions, in passing, her role in the contracting of one of the more prominent transnational New African marriages. After Christopher Kisosonkole of Uganda came “especially to us to help him find a wife, an educated one, who would be a companion and not merely a wife,” she set him up with her close friend Pumla Ngozwana (1995: 26,31). Their 1939 pairing anticipated ANC President Alfred Xuma’s 1940 marriage to the African American teacher and clubwoman Madie Hall, whom Xuma had similarly pursued in hopes of forging a companionate marriage through which he could lead “the race” (Berger Reference Berger2001). Frieda Bokwe Matthews’s marital narrative thus bolsters a broader narrative of marriage as integral to the expansion of political communities.