floor of his tiny cell.
Mbeki credits two people for deepening his political awareness, and for introducing him to Marxism. In the winter of 1933 there took place an encounter he regarded as a decisive political moment in his life. Eddie Roux, a member of the Communist Party of South Africa, and his new bride Win set off on ‘a sort of busman’s honeymoon’. They had recently begun to bring out a monthly magazine, Indlela Yenkululeko (The Road to Freedom), which they dispatched to schools and to Fort Hare. Now, with tents and a donkey, they tramped through the Ciskei – pitching camp by the Tyhume River – and held a series of outdoor meetings. The students (wrote the Rouxs) ‘told us of their life in college and of how they were disciplined and treated as schoolboys. We told them of the movement and of Indlela Yenkululeko.’ Among their audience was a rapt Mbeki, won by the clarity and radicalism of what he heard.
A less likely impetus to left-wing politics came from Max Yergan. Yergan, an African American, worked in South Africa between 1922 and 1936 as an employee of the YMCA. His biographer has argued that Yergan underwent a ‘shift from evangelical Protestantism to revolutionary socialism’ in the early 1930s, living ‘a double life’ (although in later life he became an ultra-conservative and apologist for apartheid). The political conversion may have been later and shallower than in this account. What is clear is that in 1934, on furlough, Yergan visited the Soviet Union and shifted suddenly – and briefly – leftwards. He preached a sermon at the Fort Hare Sunday service, on the text ‘I have come that ye may have life, and have it more abundantly’ (John 10:10), illustrating this with his impressions of Soviet material progress. Govan grew ‘very close’ to the black American – who lent Govan books from his holdings of the Little Lenin Library, starting with State and Revolution.
Mbeki’s interest in socialism – kindled by Roux, fanned by Yergan – became more systematic during his final years at Fort Hare. It took various forms, from student friendships to the distribution of Party literature. For weeks after the Rouxs’ al fresco addresses, a small group remained gripped with enthusiasm. Mbeki grew particularly close to a student a year ahead of him, Ernest Mancoba, a gifted artist and witty iconoclast. It was he who took Govan to hear the Rouxs; and afterwards Govan saluted him as ‘Comrade Number One’. The pair of them were at the centre of a handful of students who considered themselves socialists: ‘it was a small group … but we were very vociferous.’
Mbeki not only read whatever Marxist material he could lay hands on, but also began distributing it. He bought pamphlets during his summers in Johannesburg, and others were sent to him by Johnny Gomas, a Capetonian and Party member. Such material circulated mainly on campus, but Govan also drove with Yergan into the Ciskeian countryside to spread the word more widely. His visits to Johannesburg brought Govan into contact with Edwin Thabo Mofutsanyana, a leading member of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), whom he greatly admired (and later honoured by naming his oldest Thabo). But he did not join the Party. He explained this to me in terms of his theoretical heterodoxy at the time: his belief that organisational efforts should be primarily in rural areas. ‘That was my approach. Let’s go and organise in the Transkei, let’s go and organise in Zululand, so that when they come to Jo’burg they are already reached – we are able to guide them to take certain actions.’ Mofutsanyana (editor of the Party newspaper) was more orthodox, favouring work among urban workers. And (Govan added) ‘we used to debate and debate and debate’.
Deciding our future course: New Africanism in the mid-1930s
Govan’s interest in socialism and links with individual Party members placed him in a tiny minority at Fort Hare. But this was only one of the political roads he travelled while a student; and in his nationalist excursions he was accompanied by many of his peers. Among his contemporaries were others who left their mark upon South African public life: Nana Honono, A.C. Jordan, Victor Mbobo, Manasseh Moerane, Godfrey Mzamane, Paul Mosaka, Selby Ngcobo, Wycliffe Tsotsi and Benedict Vilakazi. All of them, including Mbeki, were affected by the political culture on campus in the mid-1930s, which reflected a broader phenomenon, a burgeoning sense of African identity, African grievances and African demands. This ‘New Africanism’ was articulated by members of a black intelligentsia more numerous but less submissive than their parents’ generation and structurally distinct from it.
The interwar years saw the growth of an African petty bourgeoisie in South Africa. Proportionately, their tally remained tiny; but in absolute terms they were numerous enough to generate awareness of shared identity and interests. African teachers, clergymen, clerks, nurses and journalists formed professional associations in the 1920s and 1930s. They experimented with new modes of cultural expression, social practice and political self-reliance – and they did so precisely at a moment, in the mid-1930s, when they felt threatened. Immersed in a world of literacy, learning and modernity, they saw the doors of opportunity previously opened by such immersion being slammed shut. They were alarmed by the loss of the Cape franchise, angered by the growth of segregation embodied in the Hertzog Bills, and frustrated by the impotence of gradualist liberal alternatives and missionary moralising. Their parents had sought through education to win full citizenship in the modern state; but the terms of membership were being rewritten.
The crucial ideological response by African intellectuals to these changes was a re-evaluation and reclamation of the resources and symbols of traditional African culture. The historian Alan Cobley proposes that ‘By the 1930s leading members of the black petty bourgeoisie, who, a generation earlier, would have been proud of their attributes and achievements as “black Englishmen”, were seeking to affirm their African identities.’ This was ‘essentially an effort to bring their social origins and their aspirations into harmony with their “African-ness”’. This was not a simple reversion to ‘custom’ or ‘tradition’, but attempts to rework African cultural forms and values in 20th-century ways. Thus Albert Luthuli founded a Zulu Language and Cultural Society at Adams College, not from a wish ‘to return to the primitive’ but ‘to preserve what is valuable in our heritage while discarding the inappropriate and outmoded’. Similarly, Z.K. Matthews and Paul Mosaka proposed an African Academy, which would promote ‘the serious study of Native problems’ as well as produce books on African music and legal systems.
For H.I.E. Dhlomo, ‘The new African knows where he belongs and what belongs to him; where he is going and how; what he wants and the methods to obtain it … [He is] Proud, patriotic, sensitive, alive, and sure of himself and his ideas and ideals …’ Cultural initiatives like these provided material from which a more assertive nationalism could be built in the 1930s and 1940s. The new form of nationalism – announced by the All African Convention (AAC) of December 1935 – was premised on action by Africans for Africans, and not in deferential alliance with white liberals. The new nationalist discourse appropriated the universal terms of liberalism but spoke them with an African accent. It was the language of intellectuals whose politics had been shaped not only in mission schools but also in reaction against them.
Unsurprisingly, similar tendencies were in play at Fort Hare during the 1930s. Govan Mbeki and his contemporaries were less patient and more critical than Jabavu or former ANC Presidents Mahabane and Seme. Their anger peaked during 1935 and 1936. The passage of the Hertzog Bills, the end of the right of African men in the Cape to qualify for the vote, Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia and excitement about the All African Convention were the issues that seized the young men and women at Fort Hare. In an obituary for one of his classmates, Benedict Futshane, Govan wrote that 1936 was ‘a year that decided the future course of most of us then at Fort Hare’. Like many of his classmates, Govan became a member of the ANC in that year. They were (he said) ‘absolutely moved’ as these events ‘whipped up so much feeling’. The intimate geography of Fort Hare meant that students could debate and argue over meals, in the dormitories, between classes, and in hastily convened meetings. ‘And those of us who were already drawn into political life’ (commented Govan), ‘well, during holidays we were taking part in meetings – especially in Jo’burg.’
The New Africanism found various expressions on campus. Students protested successfully against a segregated entrance
