South Africa’s first non-white politician forged in Scotland
They were the Glasgow couple who paved the way for Nelson Mandela. Historians tell DAVID LEASK they want to find out more about Nellie and Abdullah Abdurahman
THEY were just 18. She was a machinist from a family steeped in early Scottish socialism. He was a middle-class student with no history of politics, staying on his own in Govan digs.
Nellie James was campaigning in Glasgow when she was introduced to Abdullah Abdurahman, the grandson of Malay slaves who became her husband and the first non-white ever elected to public office in South Africa.
The young Scot was making history when she took the future Dr Abdurahman into her family home to thrash out the issues of the day. Because this was 1891.
It would be nearly a hundred years before another black South African championed by Glasgow, Nelson Mandela, was to walk free from prison to create a new multi-racial democracy.
The young Abdurahmans, along with others, such as their friend Mahatma Gandhi, were among Mr Mandela’s pathfinders.
Dr Abdurahman – and his wife – spent decades fighting for equality in the Cape, not least to help young non-whites get an education. Their politics, however, might well have been made in Glasgow.
Historian and journalist Martin Plaut, who is researching a new book on the trailblazers, explained that Dr Abdurahman experienced a different life at Glasgow University than the one he endured in the pre-apartheid but still racially segregated Cape.
The politician and doctor, never, however, could quite understand why Britons treated him and Mr Gandhi, a solicitor, one way at home and another way altogether in Africa.
Mr Plaut, a former BBC Africa editor, said: “Glasgow absolutely shaped Abdurahman’s liberal and social values. He never lost his belief in Britain, although he felt it let him down. Abdurahman kept seeing Britain in the way he had known it when he lived in Scotland.”
Dr Abdurahman was elected as a city councillor in Cape Town and led the early equality group, the African Political Organisation.
He was a key mover in an unsuccessful movement – backed by Scottish political giant Keir Hardie – to get Britain to expand the vote to black people across South Africa. The delegation he led to the UK to fight for these rights in 1909 was made up of men who went on to form the African National Congress, now South Africa’s ruling party in 1912.
Yet very little is known about his life and studies in Scotland. Mr Plaut and his co-writer, Eve Wong, are desperate for anybody who can cast more light on how young Ms James and the future Dr Abdurahman spent their time together in Glasgow and then London.
Dr Abdurahman graduated from Glasgow University in 1893 and returned to Cape Town in 1902.
The couple are thought to have married around 1894, in England. A picture, thought to be taken at their wedding, shows Mrs Abdurahman clutching flowers by her side in a black dress, her groom in a morning suit, bow tie and thin black tie.
The ceremony was Muslim, though Mrs Abdurahman never took her husband’s faith. Her Christian and democratic passions were different.
Ms Wong has discovered that the James family were passionate about workers’ education and had been involved in the Labour movement. That was something Mrs Abdurahman took to Africa.
Speaking in 1948, the widow said she had been shocked when she arrived in the Cape. What impressed her, she told an interview, “was the fact that no secular public schools existed for coloured children, who, if they did not attend mission schools, few in number, were deprived of the opportunity of attending school at all.”
Schooling was to become a problem for her two mixed-race daughters. One, Waradea, was to become a pioneering woman doctor in South Africa having graduated in 1927 from Glasgow University. Dr Abdurahman’s brother also studied at Glasgow.
Labour historian and campaigner Blair Macdougall stressed Glasgow’s history of campaigning for Africa. He said: “Hardie was met with a furious reaction when he travelled to South Africa to make the case for racial equality, but on this, as with so much else, he was ahead of his time. Decades before Mandela Place the seeds of solidarity were being sown.”
Decades before Mandela Place the seeds of solidarity were being sown