the armistice, three explosive social struggles shook the country: a national anti-pass campaign coordinated by the Communist Party; the eighty-thousand-strong African mineworkers strike on the Rand gold mines; and the initiation of passive resistance by the Indian Congress for the first time since 1913. As the ANC began to reorient strategically and intellectually, two figures exemplified its search for a new direction: the prim, studious, and determined physician A. B. Xuma and the brilliant president of the ANC Youth League, Anton Lembede. Mandela’s autobiography suggests that the conflict between Xuma, representing the older generation’s gradualism, and the Youth League dominated the ANC during the 1940s. Militant African nationalism, according to this account, confronted and triumphed over the delegation-and-petition school of black leadership.26 However compelling, this narrative obscures the ways in which Xuma, who entered politics some fifteen years after the founding of the ANC, embraced the idea of national liberation and charted an ambitious new direction for the ANC in the context of a rapidly changing international order. Despite their intellectual, strategic, and temperamental differences, Xuma and the Youth League sought to conceptualize the project of African nationalism outside the framework of the Native Question. In different fashions, they drew on the experiences the Indian anticolonial struggle and the event of Indian independence in their efforts to articulate a basis for the claim to nationhood beyond empire and settler civil society.
Born in the Transkei to devout Methodist parents, Xuma’s childhood—like that of many African figures in this book—spanned two distinct worlds: the village life of rural African society and the discipline of the mission school. After training as a teacher, Xuma traveled to the United States where he studied at Booker T. Washington’s famed Tuskegee Institute in Atlanta and the University of Minnesota. Xuma’s American years were marked by periods of financial hardship and efforts to remedy the limits of his earlier education through night school. But he also benefited from the generosity of Christian networks, connections developed through the YMCA, and personal benefactors, including the chair of zoology at Minnesota. Working his way through medical school as a waiter on the Northern Pacific Railway, he passed his exams at Northwestern University in 1925 before proceeding to Hungary and Budapest to specialize gynecology and surgery. In 1927, he returned to South Africa and established his practice in Sophiatown. He named his surgery “Empilweni” (place of healing).27
Xuma entered politics in response to the Herzog government’s 1935 segregationist legislation. Elected to the vice presidency of an organization founded to coordinate black opposition, the All African Convention, Xuma achieved national prominence and became an advocate for independent African political organization. Although he worked closely with liberal whites at points in his long career, he fiercely resented paternalistic efforts at European “guidance.”28 Notably, he convinced the convention to reject an early proposal for unity with the liberal South African Institute of Race Relations. He also declined to stand for the Native Representative Council, an advisory board to the government created by the Hertzog legislation. If US black politics remained a touchstone for Xuma, he followed developments in India closely and concluded that the end of the war would create unprecedented opportunities for the colonized to participate in the crafting of peace.29 As early as 1935, he began weighing the consequences of employing “passive resistance” to gain African rights.30 His papers at the University of the Witwatersrand contain a complete press run of an Indian Opinion supplement on the Indian independence struggle from the mid-1940s.31
In 1937 Xuma returned to the United States to fundraise and consult with the National Association for the Advacement of Coloured People (NAACP), among others. He also met Maddie Beatrice Hall, who married Xuma in 1940. The following year, he studied public health in London, where he cultivated connections with Pan-Africanist circles. After he returned to South Africa, the Reverend James Calata asked Xuma to run for the presidency of the ANC, which he assumed in 1940. As the ANC’s seventh president, Xuma overhauled a collapsing, provincially fragmented, and clique-ridden apparatus. He passed a new constitution, fought to professionalize finances, and worked to create a functioning branch structure. Through these efforts, membership increased from around 1,000 in the 1930s to 5,517 in 1947.32 Xuma explicitly invoked the Indian Congress as a model for his effort to reconstruct the ANC.33 In a fateful move, he supported the unification of the Natal ANC under the presidency of Champion, who brought the province back into the national organization for the first time since 1919. Xuma defended the trailblazing efforts of his wife to revitalize the ANC Women’s League.34 He also embraced equal membership rights for women and sought to build stronger ties between the ANC and black trade unions.35
A younger generation of ANC leaders, such as Mandela, remembered Xuma as an elitist who, despite his important achievements, was caught in a gentleman’s politics ill-suited to a mass movement.36 It might be fairer to suggest that Xuma promoted an NAACP-style politics of racial uplift, respectability, and aggressive legal activism whose South African moment—if it ever existed—was shuttered by apartheid. In Xuma’s eyes, India’s independence under the leadership of a cultivated middle-class intellectual such as Nehru, and its self-appointed role as the diplomatic champion of the Third World, may well have represented the possibility that world politics was in the process of becoming more “American.”37 It was in this postwar opening that he saw the greatest opportunity to advance the African’s cause.
Whatever its continuities with earlier ANC traditions, Xuma’s approach departed from his predecessors by articulating the national aspirations of Africans within an internationalist framework of human rights and the nation-state. After the publication of the Allied war aims, the 1941 Atlantic Charter signed by Churchill and Roosevelt, Xuma began to strategize ways to interject the ANC’s voice into the coming negotiations over the contours of the postwar world.38 He also recognized that the foundation of the UN created the possibility for Africans to circumvent their disenfranchisement and utilize the body to indict South Africa’s racial policies. The consequences of this strategic reorientation were far reaching. Removing African politics from the geography of the British Empire, Xuma located the project of African nationalism within a problem space defined by the globalization of the nation-state and a new understanding of legitimate sovereignty. As independent India demonstrated, membership in the community of nations was no longer based on liberal conceptions of homogenous political community and democratic capacity derived from Western civilization. In this emerging world order, the nation-state derived its authority from the promotion of a globally binding framework of international law based on universal human rights.39
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