African intellectuals and activists before 1912

The first argument that this chapter makes is that the history of the modern African national movement and the freedom struggle in South Africa needs to be viewed within new time periods.

The South African Native National Congress (SANNC) that Sol Plaatje represented when he wrote Native Life emerged from long-established organisational structures and forms of expressions and a decades-long tradition of African involvement in ‘modern’ forms of constitutional politics, which had cross-territorial aims and ideas. While its formation in 1912 was a defining step forward, the broad process of mobilisation that set in motion the national movement started much earlier.

Indeed, many of the ideas and approaches underpinning the early African National Congress (ANC) can be traced back to pre-colonial times and to the first ideas germinating from an indigenous Christianity that emerged in the early 1800s in encounters between the indigenous people and the bearers of colonialism and Christianity. The long mobilisation that led to the ANC, and the depth of it, has been little understood. It passed through four broad phases over at least five decades.

In the first aspirational phase from the 1860s to the 1880s, Africans organised and expressed themselves within prototypical structures controlled by or close to the white missionaries, and the first generation of literate Africans started writing in the press in English, isiXhosa, isiZulu, Sesotho and Setswana. Tiyo Soga was prominent among those beginning to articulate African and pan-African opinions within colonial discourses. The second phase commenced in the late 1870s to early 1880s, when activists began to establish independent political organisations and newspapers separate from, and sometimes critical of, the mmissionaries in which they expressed African opinion within colonial debates and evolving colonial political structures. Growing in numbers and chastened by government behaviour in the last war of dispossession in the eastern Cape in 1877–1878, mission-educated intellectuals began writing to the newspapers, petitioning Parliament and organising to fight for the rights of the colonised. The weapons of the new politics were deputations, mass meetings, petitions, protests and other forms of constitutional struggle that became familiar later. They declared that the way forward now was to ‘shoot with the pen’, using constitutional methods to fight for a greater role for themselves within the new colonial society with its common economy and boundaries.