Robert Trent Vinson

Poking holes in the sky : Professor James Thaele, American Negroes, and modernity in 1920s segregationist South Africa

Abstract: In 1920s South Africa, white segregationists justified accelerated racially discriminatory legislation by casting blacks as “uncivilized primitive natives” undeserving of full citizenship rights. Africans often countered this discourse by pointing to African Americans as proof of black capacities to modernize and as role models worthy of emulating in antisegregationist activity. Black South African leaders often associated themselves with African Americans to further legitimize their respective political activities. This article explores this phenomenon with the example of James Thaele, the American-educated president of the African National Congress (Cape Western Province), perhaps the most actively militant organization in the late 1920s. Previous scholars have viewed Thaeles flamboyant dress and hyperbolic language as evidence of a curious eccentric. Instead, we show that Thaeles dress and language were important performative tools that subverted, mocked, and reversed white modernity narratives that locked Africans into static “uncivilized native” categories. Black America was an indispensable aspect of Thaeles antisegregationist attacks. At historically black Lincoln University (Pennsylvania), he earned two degrees, attaining an educational level then unavailable in South Africa, and he became enamored of Marcus Garveys Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (U.N.I.A.). Upon his return to South Africa, Thaele legitimized his political organizing, public speeches, and writings by emphasizing his celebrated American background and pointing to the U.N.I.A. as a model for antisegregationist organizing in South Africa.

Zulus Abroad: Cultural Representations and Educational Experiences of Zulus in America, 1880–1945*

This article broadens the study of cultural representations of the Zulu from within South Africa to the United States by exploring the experiences of Zulu performers and students in America between 1880 and 1945. In American exhibitions, carnivals, circuses and fairs, whites celebrated and re-enacted Anglo-Saxon military victories over darker-skinned peoples with stark contrasts of ‘civilised’ whites and subjugated ‘uncivilised’ Zulus. African Americans, struggling to secure basic political and socio-economic rights in America, had more varied and ambiguous views of Zulus. Some impersonated Zulus for monetary gain and to fashion new identities, others created cultural distance between themselves and Africans by advancing stereotypical images of Zulus as exotic African primitives, while some politically-minded blacks portrayed Zulu resistance to British aggression as ‘the greatest revolt against white supremacy’ in modern history and as a potential model for diasporic black political activity. Meanwhile, Zulu students in America countered negative stereotypes with their intelligence and industriousness, self-consciously framing their continued acquisition of education, Christianity and entrepreneurial capitalism as part of the larger goal of collective racial uplift of their ‘benighted’ brethren in Africa. Whereas most American portrayals of the Zulu depicted Africans as permanent primitives, Zulu students shared the view that any African primitivism was due not to inherent inferiority but to a lack of exposure to the civilising influences of Christianity and education. Ironically, they pointed to recently emancipated African Americans as proof of black capabilities. Thus this article provides an empirical case study that offers a more expansive framework for African history, redresses the relative neglect of Africa and Africans within African Diaspora studies and contributes to the rich postcolonial literature that illuminates the cross-cultural trans-Atlantic traffic of peoples, ideologies and images along the global colour line.

Citizenship Over Race

This essay provides a unique view of American-South African diplomacy primarily through the case study of African-American missionaries, Herbert and Bessie Mae Payne and James and Lucinda East, who sought to proselytize in South Africa between 1910 and 1923. In doing so, this article responds to recent calls to embrace an interactive “homeland and diaspora” model that bridges the emergent historiography of the African diaspora with that of continental Africa. Simultaneously this article redresses the shortage of analysis on Africa and Africans within African diaspora and black Atlantic studies by centering a diasporic population in Africa itself. The transnational orientation of this work brings a global dimension to African-American history while also moving South African history beyond its occasionally parochial nature.