The CIHA Blog brings you the fourth lecture of the planned four-series of posts on the Dr JL Dube Memorial Lecture as he celebrates his 150th birthday. These series of lectures are organised by the College of Humanities at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. This specific lecture was delivered by Prof. Cherif Kaita, and you can find the full script of the speech here.
By Dr. Taruona Kudzai, University of KwaZulu-Natal
Cherif Keita, Professor of French and the Liberal Arts at Carleton College (Minnesota, US) has described his two decades of research on John Dube as being “in the bush of spirits” and as having been “ordered and planned by some unappeased souls.”
On 16 September 2021, Prof Keita was speaking as the curtain was coming down on the John Langalibalele Dube Memorial Lecture series, co-presented with Prof Simangaliso Kumalo, University of KwaZulu-Natal Professor of Theology & Ethics and Director of the Centre for Constructive Theology, and co-editor of the CIHA Blog.
Narrating how he came to know about Dube, Prof Keita said it was in 1999 while leading a group of American students to South Africa when he heard about the amazing story of the pioneer educationist and founding President of the African National Congress. He returned to the US with a fervent desire to learn more about this unique but little known man to consolidate his legacy for future generations.
The Malian native shared that he thought the best way to bring Dube more vivid and more rapidly into the collective memory would be through film, in the form of a conversation with President Nelson Mandela but was disappointed when Mandela told him that he knew very little about the life of Dube.
Ready to give up, he had a late night mind blowing revelation that made it impossible for him to walk away from the Dube story. While reading a book written by the son of Rev William Wilcox, the missionary who took the young Dube to the US, he came across a line that said his parents were married in his mother’s home town of Northfield, Minnesota in August 1881, the very town Prof Keita lives in.
“I could not believe my eyes. Northfield was my town and now what I read was saying that Dube’s connection to America was through the very town from which I had travelled to South Africa a year earlier! My heart was pounding in my chest. I quickly put the book down thinking that for sure some evil spirit was playing a trick on me in order to drive me out of my mind. I decided to wait a few minutes before picking up the book again. Out of caution, this time, I decided to start at the top of the page and read slowly until I got to the frightening line and it was still saying the same thing. I jumped out of bed and could not sleep for the rest of the night,” Prof Keita said.
The Dube story that had started as a distant story had suddenly become a local story, even better, a personal story to him. He had found in the most unexpected way his own connection to the story. Instead of him finding the Dube story, the Dube story had found him. This and the events that followed convinced him that his discoveries of the next decade were being “ordered and planned by the spirits.”
Prof Keita said, “As a person who was born into a Muslim family and whose teenage years were shaped by Catholic education, I could not see at first the whole spectrum of African spirituality. Ancestors and spirits rarely existed in my world view. But my next steps were going to radically change that situation. I was about to discover the real forces that were making me work so passionately, not only on Dube but also on a constellation of unheralded liberation pioneers, William Wilcox, Ida Belle Wilcox and Nokuthela, Dube’s forgotten first wife.”
Searching for the descendants of the Wilcoxes to tell them about the role their ancestors had played in South Africa’s liberation history, he found Rev Jackson Wilcox who was blown away by this discovery of his family heritage and offered to visit him in Minnesota. Prof Keita thought it was a good idea to find the family graves before he came so as to make the trip even more worthwhile.
“To my greatest surprise, I discovered that the maternal great grandparents of Jackson Wilcox had their graves in a cemetery right behind my house, no more than a hundred metres behind my bedroom.
“How could I explain it? Was this a mere coincidence? No. Was this proof of my uncanny skill as a researcher? No, emphatically no. However intelligent one may be as a researcher, nobody can create such a strange set of circumstances. I had to admit at that point that a transcendental phenomenon was at work here, something that rational discourse could no longer account for. It is then that I began to realise that my involvement in the Dube research in SA had been literally ordered and planned by some unappeased souls,” Prof Keita said.
With the gift of hindsight, Prof Keita wondered if the spirit of Dube had not leapt onto him when he had earlier visited his grave for his first film. He said, “I had stood in front of Dube’s over-grown and not well-tended grave. Filming it, I asked myself then and still continue to wonder: Was that the moment when Dube’s spirit leapt unto me, realising that I was the connection needed to patch together his life and the lives of so many people who were so intimately tied to his life?”
Prof Keita shared that in 2006, Dr Zweli Mkhize, then Economic Development Minister in the KwaZulu-Natal provincial government, had quipped: “Prof Keita, are you sure you are not a sangoma (spiritualist)?” a very perceptive question which, he said, took him a long time to fully understand. He also shared a remark that was made by Rev Prof Bonganjalo Goba after a lecture on the Wilcxoes in 2011. Prof Goba had said to him, “Prof Keita, the ancestors are not yet through with you.”
What happened during that week as he started to piece Nokuthela’s life back together, proved that Prof Goba was right. The “spirits behind his house” led him to the most irrefutable piece of evidence that a young Zulu girl named Nokuthela had been their daughter Ida Belle’s student at Inanda Seminary in the early 1880s. Ida Belle had included Nokuthela’s school essay in one of her letters that was published in the Rice County Journal, her home town’s newspaper, in 1882. At the end of the short essay, Nokuthela wrote: “People who do not have children are troubled a lot.”
“Such a deep understanding of life coming from such a young girl. Was that not Nokuthela speaking to me from the grave about her life as a woman who did not have a child of her own and about the purgatory of history to which she had been condemned since her death in January 1917? Was that not Nokuthela calling up to me to rescue her from erasure, the erasure to which biology had condemned her through no fault of her own? Clearly once again, I was following the unmistakable guidance of some spirits, of several spirits active on both sides of the Atlantic,” Prof Keita said.
The strange set of events convinced Prof Keita that he had a commission from the spirits. At the unveiling of Nokuthela’s grave, Dr Mkhize remarked to Prof Keita: ‘My brother, your research goes beyond academic. It is ancestral possession.”
Prof Keita concluded, “The truth is that from that day in January 1999, to today, my life has been profoundly changed. Never a day has passed without me thinking about Dube, Wilcox, Nokuthela, Inanda and a whole web of unsuspected connections that could have gone unnoticed without my modest involvement in retrieving the piece, yes but an important piece in SA’s complex history.”
Talking about what influenced Dube to be the great leader, educationist and Africanist that he became, Prof Kumalo identified his Zulu culture, mission education and socialisation, as well as the three women in his life, namely his mother Elizabeth, and his two wives Nokuthela and Angelina.
He said, “The socialisation that he had from his upbringing among his people was quite influential in shaping the man he later became. Growing up in a mission station of the American Board, people who belonged to the tradition of non-conformism, people who believed deeply in the freedom of human beings, shaped his thinking and his outlook on life. But over and above that, he was shaped by the mission station education.
“But more than that, Dube was shaped very much by the women around him. He was very much influenced by his mother who raised him after his father died three years after his birth. When Nokuthela, his first wife, came into his life, she was already qualified as a teacher, while Dube had no tangible qualification. Marrying this powerful woman gave gravitas to his work and call to Ministry and she journeyed with him till their separation. His second wife Angelina, was also a leader in her own right, and she also played a role that influenced and shaped Dube.”
On Dube’s contribution to South Africa, Prof Kumalo said he had a very clear understanding that ‘politics is religion and religion is politics,’ refusing to buy into the idea of separating religion from politics. He said Dube also insisted on a holistic education, that is, education must be built on three principles, namely, education for the head, education for the heart, and education for the hand. Dube was also one of the pioneers of African consciousness in the South African context, Prof Kumalo said, and was proud of being ‘a full-blooded African.’ Another issue that Dube raised is the issue of land. He organised people to contribute cattle to buy land so that they could own land and use it to develop themselves. Dube was also a great leader who spoke about leadership as serving his people. Finally, Prof Kumalo said, Dube was committed to non-violence, insisting that people needed to walk to their freedom without using violence because in Dube’s own words, “in the context of violence there are no winners. There are bad winners and bad losers.”