Soga’s eventful short life brought to the Cape the principles of nonracialism

Couple’s public display declared as pair’s triumph over racial prejudice

During the night of July 2 1857, after a 73-day voyage from London that alternated calm monotony with stormy sea sickness, The Lady of the Lake dropped anchor in Algoa Bay.

The following morning, a relieved pair of passengers disembarked to explore Port Elizabeth, the emerging eastern rival to Cape Town as the Cape Colony’s economic hub.

News of this recently married couple’s arrival spread swiftly. Wandering through the town, they encountered “wonder and amazement” from all who saw them.

“In walking through the streets, black and white turned to stare at us, and this was the case as often as we went out.”

On at least one occasion, they also heard cries of “Shame on Scotland”.

These moments were recorded by the husband, newly ordained Presbyterian missionary Tiyo Soga, who was an energetic writer of letters and keeper of a journal.

Soga was returning to the land of his birth.

He had been born in 1829, about 200km north-east of Port Elizabeth near the Chumie (Tyumie) River, about 13km from the Lovedale mission station (now Alice).

His early childhood years were spent in what were then the fiercely disputed and mobile borderlands between the Cape Colony’s official frontier and still independent Xhosa polities.

In sharp contrast, his wife Janet Soga (née Burnside), hailed from the large city of Glasgow in Scotland.

Her family were struggling clothmakers in the rough Saltmarket area of town.

Soga did not record how they met; but he wrote of Janet’s personal sacrifice in leaving her native land for his: “She, poor thing, has made all the sacrifice. I trust a sense of this will render me a tenderly affectionate husband.”

The widely different origins of the husband and wife lay behind the amazed stares that greeted them that day, as on many others.

“It seemed to some to be a thing which they had not only never seen, but which they believed impossible to take place,” Soga noted.

Those shouts of “Shame on Scotland” were aimed at Janet and expressed the view of some white residents that such a marriage should never have happened.

Soga was perfectly aware of the effect he and Janet had on Cape sensibilities. He wrote immediately after their first walk through town that “the day has really been one of the triumphs of [nonracial] principle” over racial prejudice.

He already knew that his was a public and potentially exemplary life in this regard, as it also had to be in terms of Christian values.

He attempted to act accordingly, in both manner and deeds. Together with Janet, he proceeded to establish mission stations, first at Mgwali and then at Somerville-Tutuka, now Thuthura village near Kentani, where he died of tuberculosis in 1871.

Throughout the previous 14 years, “honourable, thrifty, frugal, devoted” Janet was Soga’s helpmate, mission schoolteacher and bearer of their seven children. Outliving her husband by three decades, she died back in in Glasgow.

She “marched heroically and faithfully by her husband’s side through all the chequered scenes of his short life”, according to Soga’s fellow missionary, friend and first biographer John Chalmers.

Chalmers recorded that Soga was buried at Thuthura – “within an orchard, neat and trim – of his own planting”.

Modest in death as in life, only a small mound in the earth marked his grave.

It was towards this small mound that former president Thabo Mbeki’s motorcade rumbled on September 9 2011. The event was organised by Gloria Serobe, a businesswoman from Kentani.

The September event was witnessed by several thousand people, including many ANC functionaries and involved the unveiling of a bust of Soga.

In his address, Mbeki did not miss the opportunity to give his views on what such a commemoration should mean: how South Africans should interpret Soga’s life.

He praised Soga as a protector of “our” African “identity as a people” against British imperialism and colonialism, an African identity that Mbeki believed should be “recovered” and “maintained”.

Against all odds, he refused to be corrupted and turned into an enemy of his people, and transformed into other than an African patriot.

In making this argument, Mbeki again cited those lines from Soga’s advice to his sons.

What he continued to omit, though, were the two important qualifying sentences that preceded them, immediately before “but”.

“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.”

Including these lines clearly complicates Mbeki’s interpretation of Soga. Potentially even more problematic for the former president were numerous additional episodes and utterings in Soga’s life.

It would seem, then, there was rather more to Soga than the sobriquet African patriot (against British imperialism), the “us” against “them” that Mbeki would have us believe.

Individual lives when examined in any detail frequently challenge such simple categorisation.

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He refused to be corrupted or turned an enemy of his people