The painful paradoxes associated with being a black man in a white-dominated world are exemplified in the life of Tiyo Soga, the first black minister ordained into a church in Europe.
Tiyo Soga and his wife Janet
Tiyo Soga was born in 1829, the son of one of the Great Councillors of the Xhosa chief Ngqika. He came under the influence of the Scottish missionaries and was educated at Lovedale. The missionaries took him to Scotland during the War of the Axe, so he was never circumcised and therefore never qualified as a fully adult man according to Xhosa custom. In 1856, he married a Scotswoman, Janet Burnside, an extremely happy marriage that produced children who were also educated in Scotland. He was steeped in British culture and translated classics such as The Pilgrim’s Progress into Xhosa, as well as composing some notable Xhosa hymns that are still very popular today.
Despite this seemingly complete immersion in European culture, Tiyo Soga was often forcibly reminded of his inferior status as a black person. The very day he returned to South Africa after his long exile, he was walking the streets of Port Elizabeth with his new wife when a voice called out, ‘Shame on Scotland.’ Lower-class whites mocked him with impunity for his European attire. White intellectuals, influenced by Social Darwinism, engaged him in debate concerning the inevitable extinction of the black ‘race’ by their white superiors. Tiyo responded with an unequivocal assertion of the primacy of black rights in Africa, the black continent. ‘Africa was of God given to the race of Ham,’ he argued. And it was only a matter of time before Africa was Christianised, according to the Biblical prophecy: ‘Ethiopia shall soon stretch her hands to God.’ On a more personal note, dying young of tuberculosis, Tiyo Soga left this letter to his sons under the title of ‘The Inheritance of My Children’:
If you wish to gain credit for yourselves – if you do not wish to feel the taunt of men, which you may sometimes well feel – take your place in the world as coloured, not as white men; as [Xhosas], not as Englishmen . . . for your own sakes never appear ashamed that your father was a [Xhosa], and that you inherited some African blood. It is every bit as good as that which flows in the veins of my fairer brethren.
Black ministers of the next generation were even more forceful in their rejection of white hegemony. They found themselves, in the words of Bishop Dwane, members of ‘a church that practised discrimination in salaries, in its denial of equal opportunities, and its show of paternalism and overt racism’.
The first ‘Ethiopian’ to break away was Nehemiah Tile, a Methodist minister close to King Ngangelizwe of the Thembu. Tile undermined the authority of the white magistrates, saying that Ngangelizwe should come directly under the Queen, not under the white settlers of the Cape, and that the Thembu should have their own state church, similar to the Church of England. He further aroused the wrath of the Methodist missionaries by donating an ox at the circumcision of Ngangelizwe’s son, Dali ndyebo, thereby proclaiming that African ceremonies were compatible with Christian belief. Expelled from the church, Tile founded the Thembu Church of South Africa in about 1890. Although the church did not long survive his death, Tile’s example was followed by many prominent African churchmen, such as Mangena Mokone (linked up with the black American AME Church), P.J. Mzimba (founder of the Presbyterian Church in Africa) and J.M. Dwane (founder of the Order of Ethiopia within the Anglican Church).
