The College of Humanities at the University of KwaZulu-Natal organised the Dr JL Dube Memorial Lecture series as he celebrates his 150th birthday. This is the lecture delivered by Prof. Cherif Kaita. Earlier, we posted the summary of this lecture on the CIHA Blog (found here) and this manuscript serves as an additional resource for anyone who wishes to read Prof. Keita’s lecture in full.
By Chérif Keita, The William H. Laird Professor of French and the Liberal Arts, Carleton College.
This coming January will mark the 22nd year of my involvement with the history of South Africa, both as a researcher and as a frequent visitor to a land with which I fell deeply in love since my first trip with college students in 1999. I was then co-leading an off-campus program to study for a month the topic of “Poetry, Performance and the Politics of Identity in South Africa”. At the core of my passion to understand and absorb the past of this brave nation lies a hidden challenge set before me by President Mandela in 2000. After hearing the name of John L. Dube during that trip, not only as a pioneering educationist but also as the founder of the African National Congress, I returned to the United States with a fervent desire to learn more about him, about his life and training in the US, in the hope of consolidating his legacy for the future generations. The more I thought about Dube’s life, the more I realized that film was the best medium to bring him more vividly in the collective memory. But since I was not a filmmaker, I submitted my idea to a friend of mine, Mweze Ngangura, an award-winning filmmaker from the DRC who was based in Brussels (Belgium). He was immediately hooked. Our plan was to build our story of my search for Dube around a conversation with President Mandela, who had paid a resounding tribute to him by voting at Ohlange on April 27, 1994. So, I wrote to Madiba’s office requesting an on-camera interview with him about Dube. He agreed in principle but asked that I send in my questions beforehand. After examining my questions, Madiba replied that he really knew very little about Dube and that he would have to do research in order to answer my questions. Receiving Madiba’s message about his inability to answer my interview questions, along with his wishes that I succeed in my research project, my great excitement and hopes for an on-camera chat were suddenly dashed. I was overcome by a terrible feeling of discouragement for I had suddenly missed my chance to meet in person such a giant of history. Luckily, I regained my poise a few days later, once I realized that through this canceled meeting, Madiba had offered me a unique gift by admitting his ignorance. I told myself that if Mandela, at his age, did not know much about Reverend Dube, the first president of a party and movement he embodied in the eyes of the world, there was one important challenge to me and to the younger generations, that is to roll up our sleeves and dig out the information for everyone’s edification. However, for me, this challenge was almost daunting: having failed to secure the most irresistible selling point for our film project, my initial partnership fell apart. Although I kept my interest in Dube’s life story, my knowledge of South Africa’s complex history amounted to very little. At that point, I was ready to give up but a strange event happened. One late night, I was reading in bed a book written by the son of Reverend William Wilcox, the missionary that had brought John Dube as a young boy to US. At one point in my reading, I came across this line: “My parents were married in my mother’s hometown of Northfield, Minnesota, in August 1881.” I could not believe my eyes: Northfield was my town and now what I read was saying that John Dube’s connection to America was through the very town where I live and from where I had traveled to SA a year earlier. My heart was pounding in my chest. I quickly put the book down, thinking that an evil spirit was playing a terrible trick on me. I decided to wait a few minutes before picking up the book again. Out of caution, I decided to start at the top of the page and read slowly until I got to the almost frightening line. I got there and it still said: “my parents were married in my mother’s hometown of Northfield, MN, ….” I jumped out of bed and could not sleep for the rest of that night. I was waiting for day to break so that I could begin my research of the Wilcox couple’s story in my own town, at the public library located just a few blocks from my house. The Dube story, that had started as a distant story had suddenly become a local story, even a personal story to me. I had found in the most unexpected way my own connection to a story some people thought I had no legitimacy to retell. In other words, instead of me finding the Dube story, the story had found me. I will come back to this question later. But for the moment, let me tell you what the following years brought.
In December 2004, I completed my first film, “Oberlin-Inanda: The Life and Times of John L. Dube” (54 min). In February, it was selected for the 2005 Pan African Film Festival, held in Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso). My wish had been that a representative of the Dube family be present for the unveiling of this little-known story to an international audience. I turned to President Thabo Mbeki with a request for financial support. President Mbeki responded positively and sent Mr. Zenzele Dube, the grandson of John Dube and my trusted helper and cheerleader, to the festival in Ouagadougou, where the film attracted a lot of attention, press coverage and even garnered a Special Mention for Best documentary in a Special Prize category. This was followed by President Mbeki’s letter of gratitude sent to me on behalf of the people of South Africa, written by Mr. Pallo Jordan, his Minister of Arts and Culture, along with a request that this first ever film about Dube be made available to SABC, the country’s public broadcaster.
In July 2005, I arrived in Durban with the film, as part of the Official selection of the Durban International Film Festival. The then Consul General of India in Durban, H.E. Ajay Swarup, sent some of his staff members to attend the first screening at Howard College. He later contacted me with a request for a private showing for an important member of the Durban Indian community. He explained to me that this person was very much interested in my film but had limited mobility due to a stroke. This person turned out to be Professor Fatima Meer, whom I knew as a close friend of Nelson and Winnie Mandela and for her book, Higher Than Hope. I felt truly honored by this unexpected opportunity. I was even more honored when, after watching the film with Consul General Ajay Swarup, Ze Dube and myself in her living room, she asked if I had a copy for Madiba, because she wanted to have one hand-delivered to him by her nephew, who, she said, was Mr. Mandela’s lawyer and was scheduled to see him a few days later. What an amazing opportunity this turned out to be! I felt that through this channel, Madiba was getting the result of the challenge he had placed before me, six years earlier: to find out who J. L. Dube was. This was all the more important as Madiba’s generation of revolutionaries had been conditioned to see the ones who preceded them almost as too soft, as too prone to accept compromise. Thus, I applauded the opportunity I was having to shift Madiba’s perspective of J. L. Dube by showing the double yoke of colonialism that he and his generation operated under.
What followed this first film takes my narrative into a stranger direction: my dependence on the spirits for the success of my journey of two decades. As a person who was born into a Muslim family in an urban context and whose teenage years were shaped by Catholic education, I could not see at first the whole spectrum of African Spirituality. Ancestors and spirits barely existed in my world-view but my next steps were going to radically change that situation.
You recall the circumstances under which I discovered that Mrs. Ida Belle Wilcox, whose maiden name was Clary, was a native of Northfield, Minnesota. You will remember that it is this late-night mind-blowing revelation that made it impossible for me to walk away from the Dube story. I was about to discover the real forces that were making me work so passionately and tirelessly on John L. Dube and the constellation of unheralded liberation pioneers in his orbit: William Wilcox, the man he used to call “father”, Ida Belle, whom he called “mother” and last-but-not-least, Nokutela Mdima Dube, his forgotten first wife. This is how it happened.
After I finished Oberlin-Inanda, I decided to look for the descendants of William and Ida Belle Wilcox, to let them know about the key role their ancestors had played in South Africa’s liberation history, a history I suspected they would not know too well. The oldest descendant I found was Reverend Jackson Wilcox, 86 years old, a resident of Fresno, California, two thousand miles from me. Blown away by this new discovery within their family heritage, Reverend Jackson Wilcox offered to come visit me in Northfield, along with his daughter Deborah, a resident of Alaska and his son John Wilcox, a resident of North Dakota. This was in April 2007. I thought that it would be good to find the family graves before they came, something that would make their trip even more worthwhile. To my greatest surprise, I discovered that Jackson Wilcox’s maternal grandparents, Nathan Gove Clary and Ann Webb Clary, had their graves in a cemetery behind my house, no more than a hundred meters behind my bedroom. How could one explain this? Was this a mere coincidence? No? Was this a proof of my skill as a researcher? No, emphatically, no! However intelligent one may be as a researcher, no one can create such a set of strange circumstances. I had to admit that a transcendental phenomenon was at work here, something that rational discourse could no longer account for. It is then that I began to realize that my involvement in the Dube research had been literally ordered and planned by these two unappeased souls that were my neighbors. It started with my 1999 trip with students; it continued with my first encounter with John Dube during a lecture Professor Heather Hughes gave to our group, and then through a visit to Ohlange, where I stood with my little old camcorder in front Dube’s overgrown and not-well tended grave, filming it. I asked myself then and still continue to wonder: “was that the moment when Dube’s spirit latched on to me, the accidental visitor to his grave, realizing that I was the connection needed to patch together his life and the lives of so many unheralded heroes? The truth is that from that day of January 1999 to today, my life has been changed profoundly. Never a day has passed without my thinking about Dube, Wilcox, Nokutela Dube, Inanda, Cornfields, Thembalihle, and the whole web of unsuspected connections that would have gone unnoticed without my modest involvement in retrieving South Africa’s complex liberation history.
Let me recall a moment, exactly 10 years ago, in August 2011, when I was invited to give the J. L. Dube lecture at the kind request of Professors Lebo Moletsane and Simanga Kumalo. I chose for that lecture to focus on the two subjects of my second film in the trilogy: Rev. Wilcox and his wife and their work as the founders of the Zulu Industrial Improvement Company in 1910 and their founding of two communities in the Natal Midlands with their Inanda partner, Rev. C. K. Goba: those informal settlements are known as Cornfields and Thembalihle. The late Professor, Rev. Bonganjalo Goba (May he rest in peace!) was the respondent to both my film, “Cemetery Stories: A Rebel Missionary in SA”, and my accompanying lecture. At the end of his remarks, Rev. Professor Goba proclaimed: “Professor Keita, the ancestors are not through with you yet!” In fact, everything that happened during that trip proved him right. I had come to Durban that time to not only give this momentous lecture but also to find Nokutela Dube’s family in order to begin to piece her life back together, after she had fallen into total oblivion for some generations. How did I make this resolution? Once again, I must return to the spirits behind my house in Northfield. They provided me with the one irrefutable piece of evidence that a young Zulu girl named Nokutela had been their daughter Ida Belle’s student at Inanda Seminary in the early 1880s. Ida Belle Wilcox, the Inanda Seminary teacher, had been an avid letter writer since her youth in Northfield. In keeping with this habit, she often wrote back to her mother, Ann Clary, in Northfield, from various places in Natal: Inanda, Ifafa, Umtwalumi, Amanzimtoti, etc. In one correspondence, she included the school essay of a very young girl named Nokutela, to show her mother how Zulu girls were so intelligent and quick to learn English. This essay and the letter were published, as was usually the case, in my town’s newspaper, The Rice County Journal, in 1882. At the end of her short essay, Nokutela wrote: “people who do not have children are troubled a lot.” Think about it! Such a deep understanding of life coming from such a young girl. Was that not Nokutela speaking to me from the grave about her life as a woman who did not have a child of her own and about her fate she met since she died in January 1917. Was that not Nokutela calling out to me to rescue her from the Purgatory of history, 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. I could not but take my camera, once again, to work on a third film, “ukukhumbula uNokutela/Remembering Nokutela”, completed in 2014, resulting in Nokutela being awarded the Gandhi Prize in 2013, along with her contemporary Charlotte Mannya-Maxeke, and to her receiving the Order of the Baobab Award in Gold in 2017, exactly a 100 years after her death.
To start concluding the story of my two decades plus in the bush of Spirits, let me revert back to Madiba. You remember that he was the one person who challenged me in 2000, when he admitted that he did not know much about Dube. Now, I have another story about him from 2018, after he had passed on to the world of the spirits. Clearly, he also was not yet through with me. In 2018, a senior researcher of the Nelson Mandela Center of Memory wrote to me to explain the following trail of connections, from Madiba’s recollections of his 1962 trip to Mali. When Madiba arrived in Bamako, as he was seeking the support of progressive African countries for the liberation struggle, he had first met a man named Lamine Keita, a high-ranking official in the government. That Lamine Keita listened to his story, and then, introduced him to Mr. Madeira Keita, the Minister of Justice, who, in turn introduced him to President Modibo Keita. The rest is history: Mali contributed generously for the upkeep of the ANC fighters in Tanzania and elsewhere, an action which garnered President Keita the posthumous Award of the Companions of O. R. Tambo in 2006. The researcher wanted to find out if I knew that Lamine Keita and if he was a relative of mine. Little did I know, after digging around, I discovered that he was indeed an “adoptive” cousin of my father, from the village of Djoliba, on the banks of the Niger River. I should note in passing that this is the native village of singer Salif Keita. In African terms, Lamine Keita was a relative of mine. I had known about him when I was a very small boy but did not know much about his occupation beyond the fact that he was very prominent. He passed away a long time ago after I had left Mali for my studies in Europe. Thus, through this long shot question from the Nelson Mandela Foundation, I discovered suddenly another side of my earliest personal link to South Africa’s history and the unlikely connection between my childhood village of Djoliba and the journey across the African continent of a man from Qunu, who had embarked, when I was a very small boy in Mali, on his stretch of a long march to Freedom of the people of South Africa. This Journey had been started before even he was born, by John and Nokutela Dube, by William Cullen Wilcox and Northfield native Ida Belle Wilcox, and which required the sacrifices of so many anonymous people scattered around the globe.
Let me now conclude, not as a filmmaker or historian, but as the professor of literature that I remained throughout, with a beautiful poem that sums up my journey in the bush of spirits, a journey my friend and brother Zweli Mkhize has often called “a true case of ancestral possession”. It is titled “Remember” and it is by the talented South African poet, Umaruddin Don Mattera, who was born a Christian, converting to Islam later in his life, but who remained committed to the full spectrum of African spirituality: “Remember”.
Remember to call at my grave
When freedom finally
Walks the land
So that I may rise
To tread familiar paths
To see broken chains
Fallen prejudice
Forgotten injury
Pardoned pains.
And when my eyes have filled their sight
Do not run away from fright
If I crumble to dust again.
It will only be the bliss
Of a long-awaited dream
That bids me rest
When freedom finally walks the land…
I thank you all for the opportunity to address you on the 150th anniversary of the birth of Dr. John Langalibalele Dube, known as “Mafukuzela onjege Zulu”, the humble leader who worked tirelessly for a day when the children of Africa will walk with their heads held high, enjoying total control of their own destiny on the land of their ancestors. May his example of community service continue to inspire us to invest our better selves in the building of just and equitable nations across Africa.