Buffalo City is the home of South African constitutional democracy.
The long walk to freedom and constitutional democracy in SA began in Qonce (King William’s Town) and Buffalo City (East London) in the 1880s, 30 years before the formation of the ANC in 1912.
Between the creation of the city of East London in 1948 and the turn of the 20th century, African war refugees and groups came into the city looking for jobs and opportunity.
Some of these new arrivals were Mfengu people, others were from the Ndlambe clan to the east, yet others from the wider hinterland. Many were followers of Christianised Xhosa prophet Nsikana.
Ntsikana proclaimed that endless wars of resistance would ultimately be self-defeating for the Xhosa and Khoi indigenous people. He said that the blood of war one day turns to ants, and then into firewood, and finally into rocks.
Ntsikana sought an alternative road to war, by combining his Christian and traditional beliefs and using education as a weapon.
In this sense, he was like Chief Pato of the Gqunukhwebe, who invited the Wesleyan Christians to create a mission station near East London and used them as allies, but he never converted to Christianity himself.
At the end of the century, the new hybrid church congregations on the edge of town were consolidated by the settlers into West Bank and then East Bank (Tsolo) locations.
Many in East Bank and Tsolo were admirers of Ntsikana and his follower, Dr Walter Rubusana, scholar and Africanist Christian leader.
He built his Congregational church in the heart of East Bank, next to the Catholics and the Anglicans. He was a leading figure in translating the Bible into Xhosa and champion of his culture.
The other leading figure at this time was great Xhosa poet and praise signer SEK Mqhayi, who was a highly educated and prolific writer but never wrote in English.
They are both political icons of the city. SEK Mqhayi, who died in the city in 1945, was eulogised in 1951 by the former ANC president Alfred Xuma who used the words “Our Shakespeare! Our laureate!” at the unveiling of his tombstone in Buffalo City. Xuma also called him a “national treasure”.
A split among the constitutional democrats
By the 1880s, two new African political formations, which were anchored in the city, flourished as they competed to awaken (vukani) educated Africans to the need to achieve human rights and equality in the Cape Colony and, later, SA.
Both movements favoured constitutional democracy and liberal values, and both were championed through local African newspapers: Imvo Zabantsundu (Native Opinion) and Izwi Labantu (Voice of the People).
The older of the two movements, Imbumba yama Nyama (also known as the South African Aborigines Association) was formed in 1882 and brought together mission-educated Africans from the regional Native Educational Association and the emerging Native Vigilance Association, which campaigned for African rights and the registration of African voters.
The aim of Imbumba was to campaign for African rights, while mobilising African voters to support liberal candidates to represent their interests in the Cape parliament.
The most well-known figure associated with Imbumba was John Tengu Jabavu, the editor of Imvo, who was also a prominent Wesleyan church leader.
Jabavu lived in Peddie, but operated his newspaper and politics out of Qonce, where he enjoyed strong support from the powerful local Native Vigilance Association and the white liberal leaders Richard and James Rose Innes.
JT Jabavu and Imbumba were deeply involved in publicising and debating abuses of African rights through Imvo, the mouthpiece of the movement and were also actively embroiled in building alliances with influential white politicians in the region who were so-called “friends of the natives”.
Imbumba and Jabavu stood with the British settler liberals against the Boers and the Afrikaner Bond.
Jabavu was a political maverick but enjoyed his strongest support among the Mfengu elite whose ancestors had pledged loyalty to Britain in 1835.
The second grouping emerged after 1887 under the custodianship of the East London-based rising star of African politics, Walter Benson Rubusana, who came from Somerset East in the west, but had been educated on a mission at Peelton near Qonce and settled in the East Bank location.
This grouping came into being after Nathaniel Umhalla and Charles Pamla broke ranks with the Jabavu-Rose Innes alliance in Qonce, taking 60 voters away from their candidates. This angered the Imbumba leadership.
In December 1891, the split produced a new regional organisation, the South African Native Congress, which held its inaugural meeting in Qonce, attended by 34 leaders from 15 Eastern Cape towns.
At the conference, Nana Ganya from Qonce was appointed chair.
The new grouping seemed to have a wider ambition than just mobilising Cape voters and expressed the desire to build a network of supporters beyond the Cape.
The mouthpiece for the Congress movement became the new independent African newspaper, Izwe Labantu, which was published in Buffalo City.
The power of Imvo and Izwe in the promotion of constitutional democracy and equal rights in SA should not be underestimated, particularly given the contemporaneous closure of two other key newspapers carrying African opinion, the missionary-funded, Eastern Cape publication Isigidimi samaXhosa (The Xhosa Messenger), which was shuttered in 1888, and Inkanyiso lase Natal, which closed in 1896.
Buffalo City Africanist: Dr Walter Rubusana and SEK Mqhayi
Meanwhile, the great significance of the Congress movement in African politics also should not be underestimated.
The movement came to represent the interests of educated elites from African chieftaincies and ethically mixed political formations, including the Gqunukhwebe, the Ndlambe and the Rharabe, who had ended up on mission stations after their political defeat and humiliation at the hands of British imperialists.
These elites were less admiring of British values and yearned to retain their culture and languages.
They also tended to gravitate towards independent or separatist churches which were not connected to the mainstream British protestant missionary denominations, such as the Anglicans, Wesleyans and Presbyterians.
Within this grouping, the Reverend Walter Rubusana was the leading figure.
Rubusana had excelled as a student at the Peelton mission school and then became an accomplished scholar and theologian, as well as a politician promoting African rights and democracy.
Rubusana created his own separatist Christian church in the East Bank location in East London.
Before Union, he joined several delegations to petition the British government for African rights and was the first African to be elected to the Union parliament in 1910.
At the same time, Rubusana remained a strong advocate of the virtues of African culture and languages and was adamant that Christianisation and the adoption of British values should not diminish Africans’ respect for, and identification with, their cultural roots.
Rubusana was himself acutely aware of the devastating consequences of the degradation of indigenous cultures and values in the pursuit of British-style education, democracy and modernity.
Accordingly, Rubusana lobbied for the inclusion of African chiefs as an “upper house” at the inaugural conference of the South Africa Native National Congress in Bloemfontein in 1912, two years after the establishment of the Union of South Africa.
At the conference, Rubusana was widely tipped to become the first president of the ANC but apparently stepped aside at the critical moment to allow John Dube to take the post.
In East London, Rubusana was also close to the great Xhosa poet and praise singer SEK Mqhayi, whose father was a Ndlambe war refugee.
He was sent home to Kentani to live with relatives before attending the Wesleyan Methodist mission school of Healdtown in Alice.
Mqhayi was a star pupil but refused to turn his back on his culture when the renowned Xhosa journalist and cleric Rev John Knox Bokwe implored Mqhayi’s family not to send him to initiation school.
Bokwe said that Mqhayi might be expelled if he went to “the bush”, but Mqhayi disobeyed and became a Xhosa man. He was accepted back into school when he returned.
One of Mqhayi’s strongest supporters among the mission educated elite was Walter Rubusana, who, after Mqhayi’s graduation as a teacher, invited him to work as a teacher in a new school in the West Bank location.
Crucible of democracy
Those who renamed East London chose the hard rock of war nationalism, Gompo, as their conceptual guide.
They recalled the power of hope and magic where the swirling currents and the murmurs of the ancestors in the sea inspired a thirst for freedom.
But the contribution of the city to democracy has been in its capacity for hybridity.
It was the influence of the anti-war prophet Ntsikana and his supporters who drove the city to start its own African newspapers and pressure groups to campaign for political and human rights, promoting equal rights and constitutional democracy.
In the competition between Buffalo City and Qonce in these endeavours Jabavu and the Qonce liberals, like Rose-Innes, offered a more conventional route, while the influence of Dr Walter Rubusana and SEK Mqhayi in Buffalo City insisted that rights could not be meaningfully won without the retention of indigenous culture and dignity.
The split ultimately cost Rubusana the chance to be the first president of the ANC, which fell to John Langalibalele Dube of Natal.
Buffalo City and East London were forerunners, political giants in the struggle for constitutional democracy in SA.
They led where others followed — and even the split between the liberal and Africanist factions of African nationalism and the liberation movements tracks through the city’s fascinating political history.
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