The mother of black freedom
In the second half of this essay by Panashe Chigumadzi, we see the full flowering of Charlotte Maxeke
In 1930, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in America commissioned Dr Alfred Bitini Xuma, an AME Church member and future president-general of the ANC, to write a “biographical sketch” of Charlotte Maxeke as a tribute to her achievements in religious and social activism: Charlotte
Manye (Mrs Maxeke): “What an Educated African Girl Can Do”.
In the book’s preface, leading pan-Africanist activist-intellectual WEB Du Bois praised his former student: “I regard Mrs Maxeke as a pioneer in one of the greatest of human causes, working in extraordinarily difficult circumstances to lead a people, in the face of prejudice, not only against her race but against her sex … I think that what Mrs Maxeke has accomplished should encourage all men, especially those of African descent.”
Indeed, as a pioneering activist-intellectual of the 20th century, Maxeke placed the “uplift” of black women both as mothers and girl children at the very centre of both the so-called “Native Question” and the Duboisian problem of the “global colour line”.
She did this in her early-1900s writings published in the AME Women’s Mite Missionary Society papers, her articles in the newspaper Umteteli wa Bantu in the 1920s and in speeches such as her 1930 “Social conditions among Bantu women and girls” address at the University of Fort Hare.
Disrupting gender paradigms
Standing before the Conference of European and Bantu Christian Student Associations at the university, Maxeke began: “In speaking of Bantu women in urban areas, the first thing to be considered is the home, around which and in which the whole activity of family life circulates … The woman, the wife, is the keystone of the household: she holds a position of supreme importance, for is she not directly and intimately concerned with the nurturing and upbringing of the children of the family, the future generation? She is their first counsellor, and teacher; on her rests the responsibility of implanting in the flexible minds of her young, the right principles and teachings of modern civilisation.”
At first glance, Maxeke’s firm location of black women in the domestic sphere appears to fit neatly within the gender schema of settler and patriarchal African nationalisms. But by locating the troubling conditions in the very heart of black life — the home and the woman — Maxeke hit at the nerve of the socalled Native Question, the problem of “reconciling natives” to settler rule.
The year before, prime minister Jan Smuts, whose response to the problem of meeting the labour demands of a settler economy was to preserve “native institutions” through the implementation of a destructive migrant labour system, declared in
“Native policy in Africa”, part of his 1929 Rhodes lectures at Oxford: “It is only when segregation breaks down, when the whole family migrates from the tribal home and the tribal jurisdiction to the white man’s farm or the white man’s town, that the tribal bond is snapped, and the traditional system falls into decay … It is not white employment of native males that works the mischief, but the abandonment of the native tribal home by the women and children.”
In direct contradiction to Smuts’s misogynist native policy, Maxeke’s reimagination of black womanhood dislodges black women as passive repositories of a “stable”, “traditional” African past, and establishes us as active participants in the complex future-making negotiations of “civilisations” under settler-colonial modernity.
Importantly, Maxeke does not advocate black women staying in reserves with little to no income. Instead, she is concerned that: “Many Bantu women live in the cities at a great price; the price of their children; for these women … are forced in most cases to go out and work … The children of these unfortunate people therefore run wild … learning crime of all sorts in their infancy almost.”
As a Christian woman Maxeke remains invested in “uplift” and the respectable femininity of urban black women. However, as her speech progresses, she does not call for greater policing of urban black women’s mobility — as settler authorities and some African patriarchs did.
Instead, Maxeke, who campaigned against pass laws, called for measures that would give them greater freedoms and independence, including improving urban women’s conditions by providing them with better access to accommodation — independent of attachment to men — and providing decently paying, lawful and what she deems genderappropriate employment.
Addressing the land question
Maxeke displays a keen historical awareness by locating black women’s social conditions firmly within the context of the “land question”.
She outlined the devastating 1913 Native Land Act, which effectively reserved 87% of land for white
South Africans and 13% for so-called “natives”, saying: “Bantu wealth is gradually decaying. As a result there are more and more workers making their way to the towns and cities such as Johannesburg to earn a living.” She makes it clear to her multiracial Christian audience that the betterment of the conditions facing black women is inseparable from the return of land to black people.
Drawing on her belief in the promise of nonracial Christian brother- and sisterhood, Maxeke goes on to make a bold critique of the “inequalities existing in our social scheme” by telling her multiracial Christian
audience: “Not only do the Bantu feel that the law for the white and the black is not similar, but we even find some of them convinced that there are two Gods, one for the white and one for the black.”
In the 19th and early 20th century, where the British Empire often promised “equal rights for civilised men” black people across the Atlantic often claimed equal political rights as people who had attained a level of “civilisation” that qualified them to perform the duties of democratic citizenship.
This was an appeal to “civilisationism” — a universalist theory of human social and cultural progress with roots in the European Enlightenment era and that came to dominate 18th and 19th centuries, when it was often used as a rationale for imperialism and colonialism’s “civilising mission”. For many, the most important element in this acquired competence was their belie
For many, the most important element in this acquired competence was their conversion to Christianity, which not only spoke to their moral enlightenment and sense of civic responsibility, but allowed them to claim membership in a supposed nonracial spiritual brother- and sisterhood.
Black Christians were therefore able to condemn white Christians for violating a colour-blind system of ethics to which whites themselves supposedly subscribed.
Indeed, it is within the Protestant churches of the US and the Southern African settler colonies, where black and white congregants were required to sit in different pews, with the best reserved for white worshippers, that many black Christians first experienced social segregation.
The separation and hierarchy of place often extended to ecclesiastical structures where black clergymen were often frustrated by the limited opportunities for advancement.
Out of such tensions and disillusionment with white ecclesiastical structures and theology came black theology and independent black churches such as the American AME Church and the Southern African Ethiopian movement.
Evolving out of its own critique of pervasive institutional racism, SA’s independency movement began in the 1880s with Nehemiah Tile’s Tembu National Church in 1884 and later Mangena Maake Mokone’s Ethiopian Church in 1892.
The refusal of Protestant missions to promote an indigenous clergy to positions of responsibility in church government and the search for avenues of personal advancement among a growing group of Western-educated black people stirred nationalist feelings at a time when their sovereign institutions were being undermined by colonial conquest. This spurred the desire to seek at least a partial independence in their own religious institutions.
Launch of the ANC
On the eve of the passing of the disastrous Native
Land Act, the Ethiopianist spirit of black independence led to the founding of the ANC (then named the South African Native National Congress in 1912). With the Rev Henry Reed Ngcayiya of the AME Church as chaplain, it was a gathering of Ethiopians — several AME leaders, including Charlotte and Marshall Maxeke, Nimrod B Tantsi, James Z Tantsi, Selby Msimang and James Ngojo, formed part of the illustrious roll call.
As he addressed the delegates, future ANC president Pixley ka Isaka Seme decried the manner in which white settlers were making black people into hewers of wood and drawers of water in their own land, just as the Israelites had done to the Gibeonites in the Promised Land.
In the face of this, the formation of the ANC was seen as a “watershed in African regeneration”, hastening the day when, as one delegate recalling the Ethiopian prophecy of Psalm 68:31 declared: “Ethiopia would stretch forth her hands unto God, and princes shall come out of Egypt.”
African regeneration
It is this entrenchment in the deeply intertwined black Christian and black political movements that gave Maxeke, president of both the ANC Women’s League and the AME Women’s Mite Missionary Society, the moral, political and intellectual confidence to criticise the hypocrisy of her white fellow South Africans as powerfully as she did.
This trenchant appraisal of Western Christian civilisation allowed Maxeke to conclude with this call
For Maxeke, black women are not understood to be the passive repositories of a stable, traditional past but rather of ‘the right principles’
What we want really, at this stage in our existence, is friendly and Christian cooperation between the Bantu and white women particularly
to action: “What we want really, at this stage in our existence, is friendly and Christian co-operation between the Bantu and white women particularly, and also of the whole communities of Bantu and white, to help us solve these problems, which can be solved if they are tackled in the spirit of Christianity and fair-mindedness.”
Manifesto for political unity
Ultimately, Maxeke left her multiracial Christian audience with something of a manifesto for political unity across gender and racial barriers and differences that anticipated the nonracial, nonsexist politics that both the ANC and broader women’s coalitions in SA would come to embrace.
It is true that we can view some of Maxeke’s investment in the somewhat conservative politics of Christian respectability and uplift, black-white “cooperation” and Christian “civilisationalism” with ambivalence.
Rightly, we can critique both the ideological and material consequences of some of the ideologies she anticipated, such as the ANC’s vision of nonracialism as espoused in the Freedom Charter that the Africanists such as AP Mda and Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe rejected in launching the Pan Africanist Congress with its Africanist liberatory conception of nonracialism.
With this in mind, a deeper reading of Maxeke’s strategic praxis in negotiating the challenges of her day productively collapses dichotomies such as political-religious, activist-intellectual, independence collaboration, modernity-tradition and public-private in ways that help us to fully appreciate the various ideological, political and religious traditions that shaped SA’s liberation struggle(s) long after her time.
The struggle over Charlotte Makgomo Mannya Maxeke as a religious mother-figure for the AME Church in SA on the one hand and a political motherfigure for the ANC on the other often preclude a full appreciation of the contributions of one of the most dynamic anticolonial activist-intellectuals of the 20th century.
Retrieving Maxeke from what her intellectual biographer Dr Thozama April has described as “the contradictory position of celebrated mother and neglected intellectual” requires a deep engagement with her complex reimagination of black womanhood at the very centre of transatlantic modernities at the turn of the 20th century that will ultimately enrich us in the struggles of our times.
✼ Read the first part of Chigumadzi’s reflections, marking 150 years since Charlotte Maxeke’s birth, on sundaytimes.co.za. This instalment is an edited excerpt from her doctoral thesis, “The Israelites and the Ethiopians: Dylann Roof, the AME Church and the transatlantic question of race across the American South, SA and Rhodesia”, which she is completing at Harvard