African Nationalist or British Loyalist? The Complicated Case of Tiyo Soga

If any spectacle is calculated to call forth the finest sensibilities of our being, as dutiful subjects, it is that of contemplating Her Majesty our Sovereign, in her present sorrowful position, as a desolate bereaved widow.

    Tiyo Soga, sermon, 1862¹

But if you wish to gain credit yourselves – if you do not wish to feel the taunt of men, which you may sometimes be made to feel – take your place in the world as coloured, not as white men; as Kafirs, not as Englishmen.

    Tiyo Soga, ‘The Inheritance of My Children’, 1870²

Mbeki did not mention Tiyo Soga’s sermon of 1862; nor that Soga apparently once walked from Glasgow to Dumbarton to catch a glimpse of Queen Victoria; nor Soga’s reaction to the visit of Prince Alfred to his mission station in 1860 (‘There was never such an excitement and enthusiasm witnessed anywhere … I had the honour of reading an address of welcome’); nor that the two preceding sentences in the ‘The Inheritance of My Children’ were: ‘You will ever cherish the memory of your mother as that of an upright, conscientious, thrifty, Christian Scotchwoman. You will ever be thankful for your connection by this tie to the white race’.⁵

Such apparent evidence of Soga’s British loyalism or professed admiration for elements of white culture might be dismissed by some within a postcolonial theoretical paradigm as ‘strategic’, ‘inauthentic’ or ‘mimicry’. After all the Black Britishness of Sol Plaatje, a writer and founder member of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC, later the ANC) in 1912, has been described as ‘colonial mimesis’; Plaatje himself of being at ‘one level … an ill-adjusted parodist’.⁶ Yet such dismissals can themselves be questioned. They are reminiscent of the denunciations by nineteenth-century British explorer Richard Burton of the ‘mimicry’ of the Creoles of Sierra Leone, denunciations common to many white observers of Black Britishness in the nineteenth century and, it seems, beyond.⁷

The fact is that the supposed ‘true’ identity and historical significance of Tiyo Soga has been represented in very different ways over time: as, for instance, exemplary Christian and loyal subject; or as first New African; or as proponent of certain traditional African ‘Ubuntu’ values and critic of Christian unfriendliness to strangers; or as father of Black Consciousness; or, as we have seen, as pioneer of the African Nationalist Struggle. These representations will be reviewed in more detail below. But the point of this article is not to suggest that Soga can be definitively understood as either a loyalist or a nationalist, or as someone whose consciousness moved in teleological fashion from one position to the other. Rather it proposes that study of the individual, whether a Soga or a Gandhi, is likely to point up the inadequacy of simplistically bifurcated notions of loyalism and nationalism that pay insufficient regard to specific historical contexts and possibly multiple contemporary understandings of concepts such as ‘nation’.

Like many collective identities, nationalism (in contrast to loyalism) has attracted a large theoretical literature as well as numerous more empirical studies. My use of the term draws on the distinction that has been made between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ nations and nationalisms.⁸ Membership of a civic nation, in this view, can be acquired, through naturalization perhaps, or through birth or residence in the territory of the nation state. Nationality, like citizenship, can be obtained, it is not necessarily a matter of actual or perceived heritability; yet members of civic nations can clearly evince civic nationalism as, for example, citizens of the United States have demonstrated. Adherents of ethnic or ‘kith-and-kin’ nationalism on the other hand will assume that members of a nation must have common ancestry, culture and history that has included (in the past if not in the present) and should include shared territory. Nationalists of this persuasion have wanted ‘the nation’ to coincide with the territory which it inhabits and over which it (or they) should exercise sovereign or state control.

Nationalism, whether civic or ethnic, may be at least partly imagined but will often involve a ‘real’ territorial component. Nationalism can coexist with other identities, including other forms of sub or supra-nationalisms, but may on occasion have special salience. Nationalism is created and experienced in particular historical circumstances, while its ideological content is subject to change over time, and is likely to be at least partly re-imagined or recreated.⁹

Loyalism is usually understood, in dictionary definition terms, simply to mean loyalty to an established government or state, particularly during times of war or revolt. It is commonly written about as a political act rather than examined as an actual or potential collective identity, nationalism of a special kind as it were, in its own right. The normal assumption appears to be that loyalism can be explained in terms of say material interest, or possibly religious persuasion, but may otherwise be little more than befuddled fealty to the Great White Queen across the sea, or the result of the dazzling power of imperial ornamentalism of one kind or another.¹⁰ The content of its imagination has on the whole been taken less seriously as an object of academic enquiry than nationalism.¹¹

Studying the lives of individuals in the British colonial world can also remind us that notions of what constitutes British, Scottish, Irish, ‘white’ or ‘creole’ identity can vary according to particular historical and geographical circumstances, and indeed by circulation of individuals and ideas around the British colonial world.¹² Yet such complexities are often grossly simplified or airbrushed out of grand narratives of nation, whether these narratives are associated with historians or politicians in erstwhile colonial powers or in their now independent ex-colonies. Tiyo Soga’s life provides the possibility of examining ‘black colonial’ identity during mid Victorian rule because – unusually for a black South African of this period – he left a considerable record of his thoughts in letters, journal entries, hymns, and newspaper articles. Such thoughts can be compared to those of the more renowned West Africans Edward Blyden and James Africanus Horton, though there is (as yet) no evidence that they knew of Soga’s journalism, nor that Soga knew of what Blyden and Horton had written while he was still alive.¹³ Importantly, we do have some record of what Soga did read and enjoyed reading, beyond the Bible and Bunyan, which affords hitherto neglected insights into what may have influenced the thoughts and apparent contradictions that he professed in writing on governments, nations and empire.

INTRODUCING TIYO SOGA AND HIS TIMES

Soga lived through a period of enormous violence and deprivation. This included three ‘Kaffir’ or Frontier Wars in which Xhosa forces lost to the British as well as the ‘suicide of the Xhosas’, the Cattle-Killing devastation of 1856–7. Tiyo Soga was in Scotland when the Cattle-Killing occurred, but witnessed its aftermath on his return. As this period coincided with the commencement of his recorded writing, that nigh apocalyptic event for the Xhosa needs some further description.

According to recent analyses, the Cattle-Killing began as a logical ‘veterinary’ response to the appearance of lung-disease before developing into a religiously syncretic millennarian movement (such as is not uncommonly associated with indigenous responses to colonial encounter) in which the killing of cattle was seen as a means to resurrect warrior ancestors and drive the British into the sea. An estimated 400,000 cattle were slain by followers of Ngqika (Gaika) Paramount Chief Sandile, and grain stocks were destroyed. The population of British Kaffraria was reduced from around 105,000 to about 37,000 by starvation and diseases associated with malnutrition. The British Cape colonial government under Sir George Grey was subsequently able to undermine Ngqika chiefly authority, independence and power and assert that of the British crown. These outcomes were achieved through a combination of punishment and then close regulation of chiefs by colonial administrators. Chiefs were reduced to being dependents of the British state.¹⁴

There are numerous uncontested ‘facts’ about Soga’s life, details common to often very different interpretations of its significance, which can serve to introduce him.¹⁵ He was born in the Eastern Cape in 1829, the year that Chief Makoma of the Ngqika Xhosa was expelled eastwards from the Kat River area of the Cape by the British. Soga was still a child during the sixth (of nine) ‘Kaffir’ or Frontier Wars, in 1834–5, during which he was apparently forced to hide in the Amatole Bush with his mother. Tiyo’s father, who became known as Old Soga, was himself the son of Jotello, a leading councillor of Chief Ngqika. Old Soga became a councillor to Sandile who we have seen was involved with the Cattle-Killing catastrophe of the 1850s. Yet Old Soga was also one of the first African commercial farmers in the Eastern Cape.¹⁶

Old Soga, unlike his wife, Nosuthu, did not convert to Christianity. Nosuthu consequently separated from her husband. It was she who refused to allow their son Tiyo to be circumcised and ensured that he was brought up as a Christian, attending the mission school at Chumie (or Thyumi) run by Scottish Presbyterian missionary William Chalmers (the father of Soga’s first biographer). Soga gained a scholarship to the mission college at Lovedale. His education was interrupted by the seventh Frontier War, the War of the Axe (1846–7), in which Chumie was razed to the ground and Lovedale damaged by Xhosa forces. Soga was then taken to Scotland by the Reverend William Govan to attend the Normal School in Glasgow, where he was baptized in 1848. Soga returned to what was now the British crown colony of British Kaffraria, immediately to the east of the Cape Colony, in 1849, in the aftermath of the War of the Axe. There he worked with another Presbyterian missionary, the Reverend Niven, as an interpreter, evangelist, catechist and writer of hymns in Xhosa. This was first at Chumie then at Keiskamma, where Soga experienced hostility from local youth because he was not circumcised according to Xhosa custom.

Presbyterian evangelical efforts at this stage did not meet with much success and were in disarray following the War of Mlanjeni (the eighth Frontier War, 1850–3). Niven took Soga to Scotland again where he was enrolled as a theology student at Glasgow University. After graduating he was ordained as a minister in the Presbyterian Church in December 1856. The Moderator at this service, the Reverend Dr William Anderson, used a prayer to praise the noble character of Sandile and deliver a ‘tirade’ against the colonial policy of England.¹⁷

The following year Tiyo Soga married Janet Burnside about whose background and subsequent life we know little. She appears to have been from a working-class family as her father was described on her birth certificate as a ‘warper’ (a kind of cloth-worker). Over the next thirteen years she gave birth to seven children, four sons and three daughters.¹⁸ Tiyo and Janet Soga travelled together to an Eastern Cape newly devastated by the Cattle-Killing, where Soga established a mission at Mgwali with the permission of Sandile. Here he kept a diary, corresponded with fellow Presbyterians (most often with Reverend Dr. Alexander Somerville, Secretary of the Mission Board of United Presbyterian Churches in Scotland) and wrote articles in Xhosa for a journal called Indaba on topics such as ‘Christians and Chiefs’, ‘Intoxicating Liquor’ and ‘Into the European Interior’, in which he pondered on the destruction of the local environment. At Mgwali, Soga translated Pilgrim’s Progress into Xhosa and worked on a Xhosa translation of the gospels. He met Prince Alfred, Queen Victoria’s second son, in 1860 and travelled to Cape Town with him, and Sandile, on a British warship. In 1868 he opened a mission at Tutuka in the territory of Chief Kreli of the Gcalekas, who had supported the Cattle-Killing. Soga died of consumption in 1871 at the age of forty-two, leaving extensive and revealing advice to his sons whom he and Janet had decided to send to Scotland to be educated.¹⁹

CLAIMING TIYO SOGA FOR AFRICAN NATIONALISM

Tiyo Soga was remembered and imagined in numerous ways after his death: in white missionary writing, black African literature, postcolonial literary analyses, and the speeches of politicians and academics in post-apartheid South Africa. The first and most substantial biography, one later culled, often very selectively, by many keen to establish Soga’s ‘true’ identity and significance, was published seven years after Soga’s death and written by his fellow missionary John Chalmers.²⁰ Chalmers portrayed Soga’s life as that of an exemplary Christian, a life that demonstrated more generally the intellectual capacity and possibility of conversion and ‘progress’ among Africans. This was a portrayal repeated in more single-minded fashion by H. T. Cousins in From Kaffir Kraal to Pulpit: the Story of Tiyo Soga (1899).²¹ Chalmers’s study was more nuanced. Beyond making him an ‘exemplary Christian’, it depicted Soga as a loyal British subject, devoted to the monarchy, but one who was also aware of what Chalmers dubbed his ‘Kafirhood’ and who had an appreciation of, and a desire to preserve, Xhosa history, folk-lore and at least some customs. Soga’s acknowledgement of his ‘Kafirhood’ was what the Comaroffs have described as a common and distinctive experience for the colonized: ‘the experience … of coming to feel, and to recognize one’s self as, a “native”’.²² Such experience was the likely outcome of colonial conquest, racial categorization and discrimination, even if the result was not always ‘native’ identity, as the cases of Creole and Coloured identities in Sierra Leone and South Africa respectively suggest.²³

The association between Soga and organized African nationalism arguably began in 1912 when Soga’s hymn ‘Fulfil Your Promise’ was sung at the start of the founding meeting of the SANNC, forerunner of the ANC.²⁴ But in what ways or to what extent the SANNC can be considered ‘nationalist’ is open to debate, as indeed is how far the ANC should be seen as nationalist in the 1920s and 1930s rather than as, say, an organization of ethnic mobilization. According to its draft constitution, the purpose – among others – of the SANNC was ‘safeguarding the interests of the native inhabitants throughout South Africa’ and promoting their ‘elevation’. This Sisyphean task ultimately required the SANNC and its successor to challenge discriminatory legislation, not least in terms of racial apportionment of land and disenfranchisement of black elites in provinces other than the Cape. In this respect its aims seem more like those of a civil-rights organization, akin to a provincial predecessor such as the pro-British South African Native Congress established in the Cape in 1898, than of a party seeking to control the state let alone one aiming to create a new nation.²⁵

Soga was not decisively claimed as a nationalist until the 1970s, by which stage the impossibility of the ANC’s success as a civil-rights organization had been abundantly and in the end decisively demonstrated (with the banning of the organization in 1960). In the 1930s ANC member, writer and journalist H. I. E. Dhlomo seems still to have accepted the Chalmers and Cousins version of Soga as exemplary Christian and bringer of enlightenment and modernity. Soga appeared as a non-speaking character near the end of Dhlomo’s play about the Cattle-Killing, The Girl Who Killed to Save, Nongquase the Liberator, in 1936. Soga ostensibly represented the ‘New African’, the harbinger of Christian enlightenment and progress. This was a persona that Dhlomo and many western educated ANC leaders adopted in the interwar years.²⁶ Dhlomo’s play seemingly argued that the Cattle-Killing paved the way for Christian conversion and liberation from ‘Superstition’ and ‘Ignorance’.²⁷ Yet the fact that Dhlomo credits Nongquase, the young prophetess who advocated the Cattle-Killing, with facilitating this liberation (as the very title of the play indicated) suggests his reluctance to denounce a famous representative of ‘pagan’, pre-colonial Africa. In this play and in two others, Cetshwayo and Shaka, the eponymous main characters are portrayed in tragic-heroic fashion. Consequently they were imbued with a humanity not accorded them in ‘white’ histories that labelled them mere ‘savages’ and thereby implicitly cast doubt on the possibility of African ‘progress’.²⁸

Dhlomo also appears to have been torn in the 1930s between retaining a belief that British conquest and subsequent ‘white’ supremacy was part of a historically progressive process and being increasingly attracted to strong and independent African leaders and societies before colonial conquest, whether pagan or not. His ambivalence in this respect seems to have reflected growing disillusionment with the pace and extent of African ‘progress’ in this decade, not least with legislation that removed Africans from the common voters roll in the Cape and confirmed the discriminatory segregation of land. African participation in the Second World War failed to alter this situation, and in the 1940s Dhlomo produced numerous poems bitterly denouncing white racism and African misery, though it seems that he still clung to an almost millennarian faith that British imperial intervention might one day bring relief. Such optimism was briefly expressed during the Royal Tour of South Africa in 1947, when Dhlomo penned these lines:

Your presence here we take as sign prophetic

Of greater things to come; of a new birth

Of freedom, righteousness and peace; when worth,

Not race, will be the standard and the law.²⁹

The coming of apartheid in 1948, consequent legislation and the declaration of a State of Emergency in 1960 (which banned the ANC and the smaller Pan African Congress or PAC) forced the ANC underground and into the ‘liberation struggle’. Apartheid legislation of the 1950s included the eradication of missionary education in favour of government-controlled Bantu Education, from the perspective of African elites another nail in the coffin of possible African ‘progress’. For A. C. Jordan, prominent Xhosa author of novels and short stories (in Xhosa) and Senior Lecturer in African languages at the University of Cape Town, disillusion followed that development and explained his revisionist stance on both missionaries and Tiyo Soga. This was expressed in a series of articles between 1957 and 1960 in the short-lived journal Africa South.³⁰ They were sharply critical of missionaries, who in African nationalist discourse were now seen in an enduringly influential (if not necessarily dominant) way as agents of conquest and colonialism rather than harbingers of progress and the New African.³¹ Jordan argued that to find contemporary African criticism of missionaries it was necessary to read what was written in African journals like Indaba, rather than publications produced by missionary presses.³² Although Jordan saw Soga as one of the founding fathers of Xhosa literature, this precluded his drawing (overtly at least) on Chalmers’s biography of Soga, published by the missionary Lovedale Press. Instead Jordan used one of Soga’s Indaba articles, entitled ‘Mission People and Red People’, to demonstrate that Soga himself criticized missionaries and Christian converts.

As Jordan correctly argued, in this article Soga contrasted the ‘stingy’ attitude of such Christians towards strangers with traditional ‘Red Blanket’ or pagan Xhosa hospitality, what Jordan now referred to as Ubuntu.³³ Yet Jordan could have drawn on the other articles Soga wrote for Indaba between August 1862 and October 1864 to demonstrate that Soga praised and condemned elements of both Xhosa and ‘European’ culture. For instance, Soga consistently lauded European scientific knowledge, commodities such as blankets, ploughs, shoes, trousers and ‘most of all’ the Gospel, while condemning strong liquor, the ‘canteens’ where it was sold, and money-lending. Similarly, while praising traditional Xhosa hospitality and the art of conversation, and proposing that Indaba should be a place to record Xhosa fables, customs and history, Soga also wrote that Xhosas liked ‘to exaggerate’, were guilty of ‘irresponsible’ deforestation, and were ‘simpletons’, ‘ignorant’ and ‘stupid people’.³⁴

Nonetheless, in a new biography of Soga published in 1978, almost exactly a century after Chalmers, ‘white’ historian Donovan Williams wrote that Soga deserved the title of ‘The Father of Black Nationalism in South Africa’.³⁵ Significantly Williams was making this argument in the wake both of the Soweto uprising of 1976 and of the murder of the Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko by the South African security police in 1977. Williams himself had been Professor and Head of the Department of History at Fort Hare University (an institution whose undergraduates were predominantly black African, many of them aligned to the ANC and PAC) during difficult times in the 1950s. He was dismissed by the National Party’s Secretary of Bantu Education in 1959.³⁶

Williams’s personal experience and the times he lived through help to explain the Soga he delineated. Despite the fact that his account of Soga’s thoughts stayed close to that of Chalmers, both its preface and its conclusion were decidedly different. In the preface Williams argued that Soga was ‘an essential ingredient’ in ‘the nineteenth-century origins of Black Consciousness as the precursor of later, articulated nationalism’. His concluding page in less nuanced fashion endorsed Soga as ‘the Father of Black Nationalism’.³⁷

Williams drew not only on Cousins but also directly from Soga’s journal, letters and journalism to present Soga as a ‘man of two worlds’ who could not ‘detach himself entirely from either’.³⁸ Williams agreed with Cousins that Soga ‘loved his Queen’, and that he was happy to have ‘all natives’ as her subjects. Also that Soga admired Britain, especially for its avowed principle of law and order, ‘equity’ and ‘justice and humanity for native peoples’ and because of the consequent loyalty it inspired. Hence Soga saw British conquest as ‘legitimate’ and British advancement as a boon to ‘civilization’.³⁹

Yet Williams still concluded that Soga was the ‘Father of Black Nationalism in South Africa’, because Soga had cultivated ‘Black Consciousness’ and formulated ‘the concept of negritude’, and had done so before Blyden or Horton, and with no evidence at any stage that Soga was influenced by either of them.⁴⁰ Soga’s apparent British loyalism is not investigated in the same depth as his ‘negritude’, ‘Black Consciousness’ and ‘Nationalism’. But Williams suggested that it was the result of a form of indoctrination. Missionary education and particularly the ideology of the Presbyterian Church inculcated ‘subservience’. Williams makes this argument despite the fact that such Presbyterian ‘indoctrination’ included, as Chalmers noted in dramatic form and as we have already mentioned, a ‘tirade’ against British colonial policy by the Moderator (William Anderson) at Soga’s ordination. Yet the implication, though never stated explicitly by Williams, is that Soga eventually had to think past his Presbyterian inculcation into subservience to find his own authentic voice.⁴¹

Williams used three main sources in arguing that Soga was the Father of Black Nationalism. The first was the Indaba articles mentioned above, utilized rather selectively in making this argument towards the end of the biography. Williams highlights Soga’s view of Xhosas as ‘among the most noble of races’, whose characteristics included their art of conversation, sense of humour and hospitality, while omitting the Soga comments about ‘ignorant’ or ‘stupid’ people. Likewise Williams draws attention to Soga’s condemnation of the vices of European civilization rather than his praise of its virtues; he emphasizes those Xhosa customs Soga wished would continue, such as hospitality and deference to chiefs, rather than those, such as witchcraft, that he wished to be eradicated.⁴²

Williams’s second major source was two articles in a regional newspaper, the King Williams Town Gazette and Kaffrarian Banner. These were not mentioned by Chalmers, probably because he had written the first of them and Soga had responded with a passionate and probably (given their friendship from childhood and fellow missionary status) embarrassing rebuttal. Chalmers’s article was titled ‘What is the Destiny of the Kafir Race’, to which his answer was ‘likely extinction’. He blamed ‘indolence’ that was a ‘barrier to progress’, ‘hostility to education’ and the influence of the ‘excrescences of humanity exported from Britain’, who exposed Xhosas to their vices including love of strong drink. Soga responded that Chalmers was wrong about the likely extinction of the Xhosa. Despite slavery, wars, the ‘wreck of empires’ and ‘the revolution of ages’, he wrote, people he refers to as ‘Negros’ had kept their individuality and distinctiveness in other parts of the world as too would those in South Africa, even though ‘exposed to all the vices and the brandy of the white man’. Soga concluded:

The fact that the dark races of this vast continent, amid internecine wars and revolutions, and not withstanding external spoliation, have remained ‘unextinct’, have retained their individuality, has baffled historians, and challenges the author of the doom of the Kaffir race [Chalmers] in a satisfactory explanation. There has been observed among these races the operation of a singular law, by which events have readjusted themselves when they threatened their destruction. I believe firmly that among the Negro races of South Africa events will follow the same law, and therefore neither indolence of the Kaffirs, nor their aversion to change, nor the vices of civilization, all of which barriers the gospel must overthrow, shall suffice to exterminate us as a people.⁴³

The third source was Chalmers’s record of Soga’s advice to his sons that included the lines quoted at the beginning of this article. As clinching proof of Soga’s Black Consciousness and ‘founding father of Black Nationalism’ status, Williams also included these lines of advice Soga gave to his sons:

As men of colour, live for the elevation of your degraded, despised, down-trodden people. My advice to all coloured people would be: Assist one another; patronize talent in one another; prefer one another’s business, shops etc., just for the reason that it is better to prefer and elevate kindred and countrymen before all others.⁴⁵

What would not I do, to have all the natives brought, in God’s providence, under the influence of the English government, to smother all causes of irritation and heartburnings, and to approve themselves the faithful subjects of the best friend of all men, Queen Victoria.⁴⁷

After Williams’s biography, representations of Soga generally offered even less nuance concerning his supposed authentic identity. The Readers Digest Illustrated History of South Africa: the Real Story (1988) followed Williams’s lead, again selectively quoting from the advice to his sons ‘to take your place in the world as coloured, not as white men; as Kafirs, not as Englishmen’ to suggest that Soga sowed the seeds for ‘African nationalism’, in an implied teleological development.⁴⁸ In post-apartheid democratic South Africa, and with the ANC now in power, Soga’s annexation to the nationalist pantheon gathered momentum, perhaps predictably, towards Mbeki’s first ANC Today embrace, in 2001. As we have seen, Mbeki claimed Soga as a religious leader who had ‘immersed’ himself in the ‘struggle’, had ‘prophesied that the peoples of Africa were indestructible’ and had asserted ‘the inevitability of the liberation of Africa’ almost ‘two decades before the formal partitioning’ of the continent. The basis for this argument was that Soga had said ‘“Ethiopia shall soon stretch her hands to God”’, and believed that the African American was ‘“looking forward to the dawn of a better day for [himself] and all his sable brethren in Africa”’.⁴⁹

Gideon Khabela had set the tone for Mbeki's claims with his 1996 study of Tiyo Soga. For Khabela the oft-quoted lines of Soga’s advice to his sons – those cited by Williams and in the Illustrated History – as well as Soga’s response to Chalmers in the King Williams Town Gazette amounted to ‘militant nationalism’.⁵⁰ The pre-British conquest Xhosa were ‘once a respectable and virtuous people, living in an Edenic land’. Missionaries were the handmaidens of colonialism. Tiyo Soga had to be ‘understood against the background of the advent of organized African nationalism … He was among the first Black people [sic] to learn the art of survival – of avoiding the wrath of the white man by hiding their real feelings’. Tiyo Soga had been ‘made to believe that his people wallowed in a cloud of darkness and that their salvation lay in accepting the white man’s religion’, but eventually he saw the (nationalist) light.⁵¹

The appropriation of Soga as a ‘militant’ nationalist opponent of the British, whose true voice could be found if one looked hard enough, was given further support in a number of postcolonial studies in the late 1990s. For David Attwell, Tiyo Soga’s life raised the question ‘of whether nationalism can break the historical link between the civilizing mission and racism, between reason and instrumentality, between enlightenment and oppression’. Borrowing the title of Ashis Nandy’s book about ‘loss and recovery of self under colonialism’ in India, Attwell suggested that Soga lived in this bifurcated world in a condition of ‘intimate enmity’. He concluded that Soga ‘embraced the civilizing mission but sought to establish a new enunciative position within it’ that reflected this intimate enmity.⁵² In similar vein, Malinge Njeza gave the title ‘Subversive Subservience’ to his study of responses to Scottish missionary efforts, in which Soga featured prominently. Njeza argued that Soga demonstrated ‘elements of a colonized mind’ but also an ‘awareness’ of this colonization.⁵³ Leon de Kock, if deploying somewhat different prose, termed this an ‘agonistic response to textual incorporation by the narratives of a civilizing colonialism’. Soga’s ‘loyalty to pre-colonial Xhosa culture and missionary conformity are ambivalently inscribed, reflect a paradoxical shuttling in his own recourse to available forms of textual apprehension, whereas his more private textual residue suggests a tortured space of difference between textual entrapment and private otherness’.⁵⁴

It is not absolutely clear what de Kock means. But it is certainly possible to suggest that Soga wrote different things in different circumstances, depending both on who he was writing to (or for) and on what he was trying to say. Yet Soga’s views did not switch according to his audience. For instance statements that at least complicate the case for Soga’s ‘African nationalism’ can be found both in the private advice left in the notebook for his sons and in his journalism, whether for Indaba, whose readership was predominantly Xhosa, or for the King Williams Town Gazette, where it was predominantly white. Soga could change his emphases and opinions over time, and in varying historical circumstances. But these changes themselves do not represent an unproblematic teleological progression from British ‘loyalism’ to ‘African nationalism’, as chronological investigation of some of his statements in the 1860s can reveal. Equally it is still necessary to explain what we might mean in using these terms, and to be more sensitive to possible contemporary interpretations.

In 1858, shortly after Soga’s return to a British Kaffraria devastated by war and most recently the Cattle-Killing, in a letter to a Presbyterian minister back in Scotland, Soga expressed his feelings of near despair about the prospects of the Xhosa survivors. That this despair was not total may surely be attributed to Soga’s faith that his evangelical mission would succeed, and perhaps also to his faith in positive effects of British colonial rule, as much as to faith in his fellow ‘countrymen’. In writing to members of the Mission Board of the Presbyterian Church, Soga appears to have been expressing the urgency of the need for (his) missionary activity, as well as its difficulty. He wrote as follows:

My poor Countrymen! With what interest did I regard them, even when they, perhaps ignorantly, supposed me an indifferent stranger! … They looked upon poor me as an extraordinary personage, who had bridged over the apparently impossible gulf, fixed between his degraded condition and that of their pre-eminently distinguished white neighbours … Can it be that, as a people, we are doomed to remain forever in that degraded state in which we are so deeply and so generally sunk? God is no respecter of nations and peoples! Surely then the time of favour to poor, benighted and despised Africa is yet to be.⁵⁵

A few months after writing this, Soga went as far as to suggest to the Mission Board that the Cattle-Killing presented an evangelical opportunity. The Xhosa, ‘in whose temporal and spiritual welfare’ the Board had ‘taken so active an interest have, through the judgments of God now abroad in the land, been induced to learn righteousness’.⁵⁶ This sentiment is close to the one expressed in Dhlomo’s Nongquase, namely that the tragedy of the Cattle-Killing paved the way for Christian conversion and subsequent ‘progress’. For Soga, as for Dhlomo, this was not at odds with caring for ‘poor countrymen’; on the contrary, such conversion and progress were essential for their salvation. Soga’s comments on white colonists at this early stage of his return to Africa are brief but positive – influenced in part perhaps by the identity of his correspondent. This did not mean that his views were fixed. As we shall see, it is likely that Soga held less sanguine perceptions by the mid 1860s.

It was five years later, in 1863, that Soga wrote the Indaba article on ‘Intoxicating Liquor’ in which he mentioned both the good and the bad things brought to British Kaffraria by Europeans. The bad included ‘canteens’ (liquor shops), despite the decree issued against them by the territory’s High Commissioner, ‘Great Chief Sir George Grey’. During these five years, the administration of British Kaffraria, a combination of the High Commissioner (whoever was Governor of the neighbouring Cape Colony) and the British Colonial Office, had brought in 2,000 members of the ‘German Legion’ (only 300 of whom were married) as armed white farmers, and allotted farms to other white settlers from the Cape Colony proper as well. Part of the result, as a recent historian of this place and period has put it, was that ‘There was much drunkenness, rape of Xhosa women and even murder of one another, but especially of Xhosa’.⁵⁷ Under these circumstances it is hardly surprising that Soga both denounced white vices and wrote that ‘The people that everyone can see they are perishing are the Xhosa’.⁵⁸

Yet in May 1865 Soga penned the strong, according to some later commentators ‘nationalist’ or ‘Black Consciousness’, rebuttal of Chalmers’s prophecy of the ‘likely extinction’ of the Xhosa in the King Williams Town Gazette, albeit that this was a view seemingly held by Soga himself not long before.⁵⁹ The explanation would again seem to be a mixture of audience, historical circumstance and the particular stereotypes of the Xhosa used by Chalmers. Soga was here writing in a journal aimed predominantly at white settlers most of whom already had a decidedly racist view of the Xhosa.⁶⁰ This opinion had been presented as coherent theory more than a decade earlier in Albert Cole's The Cape and the Kafirs (1861), written during the War of Mlanjeni, which had also predicted the imminent extermination of the ‘Kafir’ race.⁶¹

The Cape and the Kafirs displayed the growing and empire-wide influence of the pseudo-scientific ideas of racial hierarchy and destiny expressed in Robert Knox’s The Races of Men in 1850.⁶² The popularity of such ideas among white settlers was in turn fuelled by Empire-wide events (including wars on the Eastern Cape frontier) that supposedly ‘proved’ the difficulty of ‘civilizing’ indigenous populations, notably the Indian ‘Mutiny’ of 1857 and the Waikato War of 1863 against the Maori.⁶³ In March 1865, the British Kaffrarian administration seemed set to bow to such opinion. It was contemplating moving all Xhosa eastwards beyond the Kei River, further from the centre of missionary activity and educational centres like Lovedale. Vacated land would be left free for white settlement.⁶⁴

This colonial policy if implemented threatened not only the Xhosa but also Soga’s own career. It was perhaps with both in mind that Soga set out to refute Chalmers’s prediction of the Xhosa’s probable ‘extinction’ through ‘idleness’ and ‘hostility to education’. Recent work has certainly argued persuasively that the particular ideas of other individuals within the British colonial world, including those of other missionaries, were often closely related to ‘careering’, whether in an occupational or geographical sense.⁶⁵ Soga may rightly have thought that his career was rather more occupationally and geographically bound up with Xhosa fate, or that of black Africa generally, than the careers of white missionaries like Chalmers. As it was, Soga still conceded that destruction of the Xhosa was possible if they lost their land. Yet he also argued, as we have seen, that not all ‘the negro races of South Africa’ or ‘dark races’ in the rest of the ‘vast’ continent, would be destroyed: ‘neither indolence of the Kaffirs, nor their aversion to change, nor the vices of civilization, all of which barriers the gospel must overthrow, shall suffice to exterminate us as a people’.⁶⁶

SOGA’s ‘NATIONALISM’ REASSESSED

What then should we make of this last statement of Soga’s? Terms such as ‘people’, ‘nation’, ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’ and even ‘class’ were often used interchangeably in the nineteenth-century Anglophone world. Soga’s use of such terms, or of particular labels such as ‘white’, ‘negro’, ‘Kafir’ or ‘English’, demonstrate that he adhered to contemporary British assumptions about the division of humanity into biologically distinct races with differing qualities.⁶⁷ In this particular instance, Soga was perhaps expressing what George Shepperson dubbed ‘pan-Africanism’ (in contrast to overtly political Pan-Africanism), one of many predominantly cultural and often ephemeral manifestations of trans-continental and sometimes trans-Atlantic ‘racial’ solidarity.⁶⁸ Bolstering this view is the fact that in the same year (1865) the Sogas had a third son whom they called Jotello Festiri, after two of Tiyo’s Xhosa relatives. This could be seen as foreshadowing a later concern for ‘African’ naming among educated elites in Lagos and Freetown: the Sogas had named their first two children after Presbyterian ministers.⁶⁹ But this moment of assertive African naming soon passed. Their next two children were called Frances Maria Anna and Jessie Margaret; and the new missionary station Soga established was called ‘Somerville’, after the secretary to the Presbyterian Mission Board who was Soga’s regular correspondent. In 1866 Soga was again marking the occasion of Queen Victoria’s birthday approvingly in his journal.⁷⁰

From how Soga used ‘nation’ in his writing, as well as how he referred to his ‘countrymen’, it would certainly seem that Soga thought of himself (at least some of the time) in ‘ethnic national’ terms, as ‘Kafir’ or Xhosa, while seeing others like the English in the same way. As we have established, in the Indaba articles and elsewhere Soga attached positive and negative qualities to both Xhosa and English behaviour and ‘custom’ alike; neither ‘nationality’ was definitively better. What seems to have happened was that by the mid 1860s he had become more aware of English ‘vices’, including settler racism. In an increasingly sceptical imperial ‘white’ world generally after the ‘Mutiny’ and Waikato War, he was more inclined than previously to assert that the Xhosa had ‘virtues’. But unlike Blyden, Soga never appeared to suggest that an ‘African personality’ was superior to its European counterpart. His rebuttal of Chalmers in a newspaper with a predominantly white settler readership in 1865 was brave, correct and evinced Soga’s sense of being ethnic nationally Xhosa as well as a pan-African member of the ‘Negro races’ of the Black Atlantic world. But it was not ‘nationalist’ because Soga never advocated African self-rule or independence from British sovereignty, unlike James Africanus Horton in West Africa.⁷¹

This still begs the question of what precisely Soga thought would or should be the destiny of his own Xhosa ‘nation’, assuming it avoided destruction. Near the end of his life Soga wrote what was a highly revealing letter to Somerville in which he drew parallels between the Scots and the Xhosas:

I have not seen, but I have heard and read, of the Scottish Highlanders’ love and attachment to their hereditary native chiefs. I trust the present Scottish races do not ‘Plough the Sentiment to Scorn’ because they are now under one benign rule with the English people … [This sentiment had kept] … the Highland world together, and kept their patriotism alike alive, and for that reason alone was to be admired. The Caffers are bound to their chiefs by the same devoted attachments.⁷²[my emphasis]

Like most of his Scottish mentors and presumably his wife Janet Burnside, it would appear that Soga could combine a sense of belonging to a particular non-English ‘nation’ associated with its own territorial locality, customs and history, with loyalty to the ‘English’ government and Queen Victoria.⁷³ Soga had an ethnic, ‘kith-and-kin’, sense of belonging to a Xhosa nation of this kind, but this was not logically at odds with believing he could be a member of a British civic nation as well. Soga’s own writing expressed Xhosa patriotism, indeed his journalism may have helped others to imagine this. But he was not a Xhosa nationalist in the sense of someone who expressed a desire to control or indeed create a state that coincided with an ethnic notion of nationality. And he was certainly not someone who ever expressed antipathy to those of ‘other’ nations or ethnicities. Rightly or wrongly, Soga believed that it was the British state that would deliver what he considered desirable ‘progress’ in southern Africa in terms of Christianity, European education and science and irrespective of ‘race’ or nationality.⁷⁴

This view was still plausible in nineteenth-century Southern Africa. In the Cape Colony, that abutted British Kaffraria and into which this territory was eventually absorbed (in 1866, the year after Soga’s pan-African journalism), it was possible for members of other nations, including at least some Xhosas, to become active, enfranchised citizens. According to the constitutions that granted Representative Government (1853) and Responsible Government (1872), all males could qualify for the vote if they met relatively low wage or property qualifications. This was at the heart of what has been called the Cape liberal tradition.⁷⁵ In other words ‘difference’ of race or ethnicity was not necessarily a barrier to being thought of as fellow Britons by at least some white colonists, or indeed feeling yourself to be British in a civic national sense. Britishness could still be conceived of as a matter of appropriate dress, behaviour, belief and language, all attainable through education and hard work, through ‘progress’ and ‘enlightenment’, achieved pre-eminently in his day of course by Soga himself.⁷⁶ Yet Soga was aware of the particular cruelty meted out by British troops during the Frontier Wars, that produced Xhosa children ‘who dreaded white men’.⁷⁷

Soga’s favourite reading, which included Bunyan and the Bible, provides possible insight into how he could reconcile Xhosa ethnic national identity with supra-British civic nationality. According to Chalmers, Soga’s notebooks and journal show that the authors he favoured included Irving, Prescott, Macaulay, Vinet, Boswell, Longfellow, Conybeare, Gibbon and Neander.⁷⁸ Precisely what Soga gleaned from them must be a matter of speculation. Yet what he wrote generally accorded with their arguments. William Prescott had written about the conquest of Mexico and Peru; Walter Irving and Longfellow reflected in satirical and poetical fashion respectively on the conquest of North America. Their combined message could be summarized as follows: there was much to respect in actually or supposedly vanishing pre-colonial societies; indigenous people had an entitlement to land; the morality of the conquerors was often dubious; yet conquest was the inevitable result of superior technology and led to Christian conversion and new, ‘superior’ knowledge so was to be welcomed.⁷⁹

Longfellow’s recently published Hiawatha may have had particular resonances for Soga on his return to British Kaffraria in 1857.⁸⁰ Macaulay’s History of England was a narrative of improvement and told how after ‘years of enmity’ Scotland and England were united ‘by indissoluble ties of interest and affection’.⁸¹ Neander and Gibbon showed that Christianity and civilization came to different societies at different times, and that England itself had not always been prosperous or technologically advanced.⁸² Both Boswell’s Life of Johnson (Soga’s favourite book, according to Chalmers) and The Wrongs of the Caffre Nation by ‘Justus’ (also read by Soga) showed that it was possible to be critical of what Johnson on occasion referred to as the imbecility of government policy, while remaining loyal to the state itself. The ‘tirade’ against British colonial policy by Presbyterian minister William Anderson at Soga’s ordination in Scotland was a further exemplar in this respect.⁸³

When Soga returned to southern Africa, although there was substantial white settler racism which Soga himself experienced, there were still powerful voices in favour of Cape liberalism and the civilizing mission. These included two newspapers, the Port Elizabeth Telegraph and Cape Argus.⁸⁴ Saul Solomon, owner of both, whom Soga met, was an influential member of the Cape parliament.⁸⁵ And despite extensive racism, especially in the Eastern Cape, Soga was still able to preach to predominantly white congregations in places like Grahamstown, Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage.⁸⁶

Soga had further reason to believe that British civic nationality could prevail over its racist ‘kith-and-kin’ ethnic counterpart. He was married to a white woman, had white friends and colleagues with whom he stayed in Scotland and Cape Town, and had been cordially received by the likes of Sir George Grey and the young Prince Alfred during his royal tour of 1860.⁸⁷ Soga also spoke to the predominantly white Young Men’s Christian Association in Cape Town in 1866. There he criticized aspects of British civilization that were ‘repulsive and unconvincing’ and, foreshadowing late nineteenth-century Blyden, expressed pity for the factory hands in London, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Yet just over a year after he rebutted Chalmers’ prediction of Xhosa doom, he spoke about his ‘poor countrymen’ and the ‘dark races of this vast continent’ more generally being ‘left so far behind in civilization and Christian enlightenment’, and hoped that the ‘next wave of development’ would help them. There was no echo here of Blyden’s hope for distinct African development.⁸⁸

EPITAPH

British Kaffraria’s incorporation that same year of 1866 into the Cape Colony may have given Soga renewed hope that progress was achievable. He reported enthusiastically on his acquaintanceship with the Superintendant of Cape Education, Langham Dale, who, in 1866 at least, still believed that colour prejudice in education and society more generally was wrong.⁸⁹ Chalmers used Dale’s satirical poem against such prejudice to preface a chapter intended to demonstrate that Soga was above all a gentleman and a Christian. The lines quoted went:

‘Ne crede colori,’ the Poet erst sang –

Appearances ever delude;

But white is the hue that to us is genteel,

The black one, of course, is tabooed.⁹⁰

So Soga’s death in 1871 preceded the era when British betrayal and abandonment of creolized black African elites both in South Africa and the empire at large were to be more visible. Even then many members of black elites still clung in the face of white settler racism and power to the hope of British government or royal intervention.⁹¹ Dhlomo’s poem on the Royal Tour of 1947 was one manifestation of such hope.

The Xhosa inscription on Soga’s memorial tablet, placed on a wall in his mission church in British Kaffraria, was a translation from the English version written by Dr William Anderson, the Presbyterian minister at Soga’s ordination in 1856. Anderson was the man who had launched that tirade against British colonial policies, someone with whom Soga occasionally corresponded, and after whom Soga had named his oldest child. Anderson’s inscription proclaimed Soga to be ‘The First Ordained Preacher of the Kafir Race’ and ‘an Ardent Patriot’.

Yet Soga was not a patriot in the sense of a nationalist who promoted or pursued the idea of (Xhosa) independence or state-control even if he had a sense of belonging to an ethnic Xhosa nation. This sense of national identity included a perception of territorial locality, shared customs, kinships and history. It was akin to similar patriotisms of many non-English within the British Empire, including many Scots. For Soga it was perfectly compatible with seeing himself also as a loyal British subject and belonging to a British civic nation.⁹²

Perceiving oneself in this way became much harder for black Britons towards the end of the nineteenth century, in the era of high imperialism. Pseudo-scientific racism greatly strengthened ethnic rather than civic notions of British nationhood. This was reflected in the constitution of the Union of South Africa in 1910 which reserved membership of parliament for ‘whites’ and guaranteed white electoral supremacy.⁹³

In 1871, when Soga died, this political exclusion lay in the future. Yet given his own experience of settler racism, Soga was constantly reminded that he was a Xhosa. In defence of his personal honour he needed to recognize and also to defend himself as Xhosa, as well as to record and affirm selected pre-colonial elements of Xhosa culture that did not contradict what he saw as ‘progress’. As Chalmers remarked, ‘few men possessed his [Soga’s] degree of self-respect’. Soga hoped that his sons would have a similar sense of purpose and personal honour.⁹⁴ To this end, part of the advice he left them went as follows:

I have got to a point of respectability in society, to which many considered impossible for a black man, yet it never was impossible [Soga’s emphasis] … God has made from creation no race of men mentally and morally superior to other races. They are all equal in these respects; but education, civilization, and the blessings of Christianity have made the differences among men.⁹⁵

Soga thought that these values and beliefs were best protected and advanced by British sovereignty, hence his bolstered-by-Bunyan loyalism. Propagating these values was central to his personal and career choices, and in keeping with what he judged, from historical reading, to be the most likely outcome of this fateful period of colonial encounter. He saw no contradiction between his Xhosa-ness and adherence to British civic nationality. Yet he was no jingo and reportedly disliked the ‘vain glory’ of Rule Britannia: ‘he, as one of the conquered race, felt that it exulted over a crushed foe’.⁹⁶ One can conclude that for Soga values trumped nationalism. Again as he advised his sons: ‘No man should dislike others, because they are not like himself, or are not his countrymen’.⁹⁷

My thanks for the very helpful suggestions made on earlier drafts of this article by anonymous readers as well as the History Workshop Journal editors for this issue; clearly I am responsible for any shortcomings that remain.

NOTES AND REFERENCES