The CIHA Blog brings you the third 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. Heather Hughes and Dr. Deborah Mindry.
By Dr. Taruona Kudzai, University of KwaZulu-Natal
The good that Nokuthela and Angelina Dube did stubbornly resisted to decay with their mortal remains. Researchers have started to piece together the bits and pieces of their lives to reveal phenomenal women behind the great first President of the African National Congress (ANC), John Langalibalele Dube.
This emerged during the third of the four-part John Langalibalele Dube Memorial Lecture series, co-presented by Dube biographer and University of Lincoln (UK) Professor Heather Hughes and Dr Deborah Mindry, Research Anthropologist at University of California, Los Angeles (US), on 15 September.
Piecing together the fragments unearthed on the life and legacy of Nokuthela, Dube’s first wife, Prof Hughes said something unusual about Nokuthela is that she wrote a school essay at eleven years of age (in 1883) survived, thanks to Idabel Wilcox the missionary based at Inanda, who sent it to a missionary journal in Minnesota, US.
Prof Hughes said, “From the essay, we can hear her voice directly speaking to us as a school girl. The interesting thing about Wilcox is that she named the author Nokuthela Mdima. So infrequently did missionaries name their converts in reports and correspondence. So it was a human gesture on the part of the Wilcoxes to name their sources.”
In the essay entitled My Home, Nokuthela wrote: “We live in Africa. There are many people here. Some are good and some are wicked. They know how to read. There are a great many who have wagons, oxen, goats, sheep and other things. Some are rich and some are poor. If a person had no children, he troubled very much…”
Another of Nokuthela’s writings that has found its way into the historical record, Prof Hughes said, is a speech which she made on behalf of the old girls of Inanda Seminary at the 75th anniversary of the American Board in South Africa. Speaking of Mary Edwards, a teacher at the school, Nokuthela said: “Now, we your daughters, are scattered all over the country but we can never forget your teaching. We shall always remember the comfort and advise you have never failed to give us in our time of need.”
In 1894, Nokuthela married Dube at Inanda. The young couple moved to Incwadi, outside Pietermaritzburg, where they started a new congregation and established a school. With a desire for more education and the need to raise funds to progress their vision of educating their people, she said, they travelled to the US where they did a lot of fundraising. Notably, they met civil rights campaigner, Booker T Washington, at his Tuskegee Institute.
According to Prof Hughes, “It was quite rare for a black man from southern Africa to do that and even rarer for a black woman. But Nokuthela spoke with incredible conviction and helped them to raise a lot of money.” The Dubes returned to Natal with funds to begin their industrial school at Inanda.
From the start of the school, Prof Hughes said, Nokuthela played a leading role. “She headed both the domestic and music departments. Nokuthela also saw to the cooking of school meals. One pupil remembered that ‘the diet was second to none because Mrs Dube prepared all the soups and stews in her own kitchen.’”
Speaking of Nokuthela’s musical talent and influence, she said, “Under her leadership, Ohlange became very famous. She also became famous for the musicians that she produced, such as Reuben Caluza, and also for her choir called the Inanda Native Singers. Nokuthela was the first published African woman composer. In 1911, the Dubes’ songbook Amagama Abantu was published. She had to arrange the music, and John the lyrics. They also published the first secular songbook in a southern African language.
“Nokuthela’s voice became as important as she sang for some very important people including Prof Sir George Darwin, son of the famous evolutionary scientist Charles Darwin, when he visited South Africa in 1905 and he was totally impressed with her singing.”
Nokuthela also played a prominent role in the founding of Ilanga lase Natal, the newspaper most closely associated with Dube’s name.
On an overseas fundraising trip in 1909, Nokuthela and her husband interacted with some very influential radical and political figures in Britain, such as Olive Schreiner, Betty Molteno and Alice Green. Prof Hughes noted: “Nokuthela became part of a network of radicals campaigning for African and Indian rights across the British Empire. Evidence suggests that Nokuthela very likely participated in the elaboration of ideas that we have now come to associate with Schreiner, first wave feminism. I think we need to recognise Nokuthela as an amazing civil rights campaigner.”
When she died in January 1917, a couple of years after the breakdown of their marriage, Prof Hughes said, her influence was evident in the number and social status of people who came to her funeral. “The funeral in Johannesburg was really huge, attended by most of the ANC executive, many of the key individuals in Johannesburg and nationally important people. Her musical talent and contribution to the founding of Ohlange were specially remembered at the service,” she said.
After the burial at Brixton cemetery, she seemed silenced and forgotten. Close to a century later, the process of reclaiming her memory began.
Prof Hughes said, “In 2013, The Mdimas and Dubes gathered at the Brixton cemetery to unveil a proper tombstone to reclaim her role in South African history and to reinsert her memory into South African public life. She was also posthumously awarded the Mahatma Gandhi Satyagraha Award. In 2014, her tomb was declared a national heritage site and she was a recipient of a post-humous national award for her exceptional contribution to the upliftment of African people. In this way, Nokuthela’s journey to occupy her proper place in the South African history and national memory begun.”
Speaking on what she has been able to recover on Angelina, Dube’s second wife whom he married on 2 August 1920, Dr Mindry said Angelina did not see herself as a politician but rather saw the formal political realm as her husband’s domain, something in keeping with gender norms of the time.
Shortly after their marriage, Dr Mindry said, Angelina accompanied her husband to the Pan-African meetings in Europe where they interacted with, among others, W.E.B. Du Bois. Angelina brought ideas from these meetings to the women of South Africa.
While admitting that women were generally out of political affairs because their domain was the household, she said, while John spoke to the men, Angelina was his mouthpiece to the women.
She said, “Angelina’s contribution in supporting her husband’s political career was no less important. She was not just the woman to bear children. She was committed to sustaining and upholding the African family in the face of colonial injustices. She was determined to empower African women and take forward the agenda of social justice.
“She stood alongside her husband, supporting his mission and advancing the cause of her people in the face of injustice. She continued the legacy Nokuthela and Dube had begun. She was his companion in cementing African independence and working to ensure the rights of her people.”
Angelina joined and later became President of the Daughters of Africa (DOA) which had been established ‘to promote sisterhood, to develop a community of mutual service and to better our society.’ According to Dr Mindry, “The members visited many mission settlements in Natal, organising branches of DOA and promoting interest in and fundraising for Ohlange Institute. The members taught one another to cook, saw, knit and grow gardens. The goal was not only how to maintain a respectable African household but also to uplift women in the community.”
In addition to the DOA, Angelina was also involved in the founding of the Association of Bantu Parents as well as the Durban Bantu Women Society which focused on economic upliftment of African women as well as support African women and children in the city.
Their focus on the African family, Dr Mindry said, was deeply political at a time when colonisers restricted women from joining their husbands and obstructed their efforts to raise their children in the cities.
She said, “White industrialists and politicians were eager to ensure steady supply of young males to work in the cities but they were not prepared to make provision for permanent residence of African families in the cities. DOA members wrote protest letters to Ilanga lase Natal and organised public protests against the Durban Council’s efforts to limit African women’s presence in the city. They defended the rights of children and even pursued legal action to prevent the removal of African street children to rural areas.”
Dr Mindry said Angelina’s name comes up as one of the African women leaders involved in these efforts to advocate for African women and their families, though she did not seem to like the limelight.
Dr Mindry said, “We know she played a vital role in linking the political endeavours of African women and African male leadership. Fatima Meer noted that Angelina was ‘very impressive, dignified and full of authority.’ Meer asserted that Angelina was ‘more like Winnie Mandela.’
“Makhumalo, a humble modest woman, walking arm-in-arm with the Daughters of Africa, leading the fight to protect their families, demanding their rights, advocating for children, mothers and widows, challenging white authorities and white rules, champion of African women and families, may we remember you and raise you up for generations.”