Anthony Egan
THE GHOST OF EQUALITY: The Public Lives of DDT Jabavu 1885-1959 by Catherine Higgs (Ohio University Press/David Philip/Mayibuye Books, R79,95)
Davidson Don Tengu Jabavu was a leading educationist and liberal political figure of early 20th-century South Africa. The son of a leading black journalist and newspaper editor, John Tengo Jabavu, he grew up in an Eastern Cape missionary-influenced family and followed his father’s direction into the arenas of education and politics.
DDT Jabavu graduated from the University of London and qualified as a teacher at Birmingham University, where his lecturers held him in high esteem. He visited the United States and was strongly influenced by the Tuskegee Institute, a centre for African-American learning that emphasised black self-advancement through education and professional training while downplaying questions of political equality. This controversial position Jabavu brought back to his work in South Africa.
The idea of a South African Native College – the roots of Fort Hare University – had been mooted in a liberal missionary circles for some time. Jabavu’s father supported the idea. The South African Native National Congress (later to become the African National Congress) did not: they wanted a college less overtly white-dominated and missionary-controlled.
But the Jabavu group won the day and in 1916 the college was opened by Prime Minister Louis Botha. Its two staff members, Alexander Kerr and DDT Jabavu, divided the subjects between them, Kerr taking English and the sciences, Jabavu African languages,history and Latin.
Jabavu was also active in Methodist Church circles and later in politics. He had grown up in a strongly Christian environment, worked with missionaries at Fort Hare, and was often a guest speaker at Methodist and ecumenical gatherings locally and abroad. Yet he was often critical of how missionaries had affected African traditional custom.
Politically Jabavu was – like his father – something of a maverick. Even by the standards of his time his politics could be labelled as essentially gradualist: he advocated the “equal rights for all civilised men” that was at the heart of 19th-century Cape liberalism. He defended the “Cape franchise” against the attempts by JBMHertzog in the 1920s and 1930s to disenfranchise “qualified” voters.
By the late 1930s Jabavu’s views were decreasingly discounted in black political circles. Despite joining the Non-European Unity Movement and making slightly more radical speeches, his political career declined.
Shortly before he died in 1959, Jabavu expressed his disillusionment, commenting that white South Africa had not lived up to the values and promises of the Western civilisation he’d championed as educationist, writer and politician.
Catherine Higgs has written an excellent biography that packs considerable detail into a relatively short text (159 pages). Her research is impressive – endnote junkies will be delighted to find 80 pages to pore over. We are presented with a real human being – dedicated and vain, spirited and disillusioned – and not just some figure described as part of a slice of history that has been researched before.
Higgs also manages to provide valuable insights into a number of the intellectual and political currents of Jabavu’s times: African nationalism, liberalism and Christianity, particularly Methodism.