Seme: a fallible leader in a difficult era

MORE than anyone else, Pixley ka Isaka Seme (1881-1951) was the founder of the ANC. It was he who, on his return from long years of study in the US and Britain, issued the call to Africans to meet in Bloemfontein in January 1912 to form a new national organisation.

At the meeting itself, he was the keynote speaker and the main driving force behind the creation of the SA Native National Congress (which changed its name to the ANC in 1923) and then of the newspaper that he hoped would be the vehicle of the congress, Abantu-batho.

And yet, Seme is now a largely forgotten figure, although the ANC plans to devote one of its 12 months of celebration of its centenary to him. Why this relative neglect? There are several reasons. Seme did not become the first president-general of the congress. Instead, he put forward his mentor, John Dube, who was not at the meeting in Bloemfontein, to be the organisation’s first president.

Although Dube’s papers were lost on his death, Heather Hughes has recently written a splendid biography of Dube (Jacana, 2011).

If Seme left any papers, they, too, have been lost, and no substantial biography has been written.

The fullest study of his life remains an article I published 20 years ago in the SA Historical Journal, based largely on a cache of his letters that were found at Howard University in the US, letters that he had written to an African-american academic, Alain Locke, whom Seme had befriended when studying at Oxford.

There are other reasons that Seme has not been held in higher esteem in the ANC.

An arrogant personality, he alienated others, and after 1912 his career went into a steady decline.

He returned to SA soon after the creation of the union in 1910.

His reputation was high, especially because of the famous speech he had made at Columbia University on the regeneration of Africa, which had circulated widely in SA and showed Seme to be someone who could work wonders with words.

He returned to SA not only with a degree from Columbia, but one from Oxford as well, and he had been called to the Bar at the Middle Temple in London.

It seemed that the world lay open before him.

But he found it difficult to adjust to life in SA after his long absence, and although he soon began practising as an attorney, and became the congress’s first treasurergeneral, he was always in financial difficulties.

Various ventures on which he embarked failed, including buying farms in what was then the Transvaal, and he soon lost interest in Abantu-batho, which struggled on without him.

He did represent the Swazi king in a high-profile legal case in London in the 1920s, but that turned out to be another failure when the Privy Council rejected the Swazi claim.

Seme began drinking to excess, and before the decade was over he was involved in a car accident while drunk.

He claimed an honorary doctorate from Columbia, although there is no evidence that it was given to him, and he was later struck off the roll of attorneys.

He was, nevertheless, chosen in 1930 to be president-general of the ANC.

His tenure of that position was, however, another disaster. It is generally recognised that the ANC sank to its lowest fortunes in the six years during which he headed the organisation, which became virtually moribund.

The early 1930s were the years of the Great Depression, and Seme cannot be entirely blamed for what happened to the ANC, but he proved a very poor leader who did nothing to reverse the decline in the ANC’S fortunes. Instead, he aided that decline through his inaction and difficult personality, as well as his ultraconservative politics.

His law practice in Joburg – for he recovered his licence to practise – is now remembered chiefly for the fact that in the early 1940s he employed Anton Lembede, founding president of the ANC Youth League, as a clerk, but the new generation that Lembede represented had little time for Seme’s conservatism.

By the time he died in Joburg in 1951, the ANC’S revival was well advanced.

Albert Luthuli, who spoke at his funeral, was on the way to becoming one of the ANC’S finest and most respected leaders. (In Oslo, Norway, in December 1961 he delivered in a speech as inspirational as that which Seme had given in New York in 1906.)

While that speech was remembered, the ANC had good reason not to look back to Seme’s presidency, and even his role as

Saunders, a retired UCT historian, is a research associate of the Centre for Conflict Resolution.