In the 1920s and 1930s, when the missionaries’ hopes of influencing South African policy waxed and then waned, their principal black colleague was Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu. The son of John Tengo Jabavu, a respected black newspaper publisher and politician in the eastern Cape, Jabavu bore the names of both his father and of Scottish missionary John Davidson Don. In 1885, the year of Jabavu’s birth, Don had electrified black opinion by publicly denouncing the failure of government to prosecute a white man who had murdered a black man. The younger Jabavu’s life would reflect the duality of his name: a desire to honour and extend the political legacy of his father, of whom he wrote a reverential biography, and close ties with missionaries, in particular those dedicated to fighting injustice.
A graduate of the University of London, Jabavu served from 1915 to 1944 as a lecturer, later professor, at the South African Native College at Fort Hare. His activities embraced farmers’ associations, the Cape African Teachers’ Association and the temperance movement, and he wrote and spoke widely on religious and political affairs. He was tirelessly active in interracial organisations, a speaker at interracial conferences and a founder of the South African Institute of Race Relations in 1929. In black politics he was not a member of the ANC. Yet in 1935 he founded the All-African Convention, taking the lead in rallying black and liberal white opinion against the government’s plan to remove Cape blacks from the common roll.
In public Jabavu resembled many of his British missionary colleagues: unemotional, practical, rational, diplomatic. He had close ties with white missionaries at Fort Hare, in the church and in interracial organisations, and he addressed numerous missionary conferences in South Africa and abroad. A third-generation Methodist and a lay preacher, Jabavu regarded himself as ‘a missionary with remarkable opportunities to carry on mission work according to the needs of my environment’. He credited white missionaries with laying the foundations ‘for the modernisation of the African, not to mention the supreme gift of the gospel’, reducing African languages to writing and founding schools. ‘All our Native leaders today in every sphere of life are men who owe their education and training to some missionary school or college.’ But Jabavu also criticised missionaries for an undiscriminating condemnation of African culture and their reluctance to perpetuate the belief in racial equality expressed by early missionaries like John Philip.
From 1914, when he returned to South Africa from his British studies, until 1936, when his influence among blacks began to wane, Jabavu was the missionaries’ most powerful African ally, the chief link between the white and black sections of the interdenominational Christian movement for social reform.
