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Books on Africa
and Africans
The World and Africa
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Things Fall Apart /
Mandela’s Way /
Leadership without a Moral Purpose
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Who Fears Death
Hottentot Venus: A Novel
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Incognegro: A Memoir of
Exile and Apartheid
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Dreams of Africa in Alabama /
Diary
of a Lost Girl
Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall's African Journey
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Darfur: a short history of a long war /
The Land Question in South
Africa
The Autobiography of an Unknown
South African /
Chinua Achebe: The Man and His Works /
Becoming Ebony
The Osu Caste
Discrimination in Igboland /
Lumumba Speaks: Speeches and Writings, 1958-1961 /
Before the Palm Could Bloom
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
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Amy Ashwood Garvey: Pan Africanist
Feminist /
The Prophet of Zongo Street
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Christian
Missionaries in Phokeng
Excerpts from
The Autobiography of an Unknown
South African
By Naboth Mokgatle
The First Christian Message --
Lutherans
One day, I was told, a man arrived in our
village and introduced himself as a missionary for the Dutch
Reformed Church. and said that he wanted to start a mission
station in the village. My grandfather, Paramount Chief Mokgatle,
then asked the gentleman to call back in a few days time to meet
him with his people and the tribe's councillors. As agreed, several
days later the missionary arrived to find a large gathering of
people, among them tribal elders and councillors. The missionary
then, without wasting more time, began to explain in detail the
message of Christianity he had brought to our people.
He told the gathering that what he was
preaching was the word of God and that God could only be reached
through his Son Jesus Christ, whom he went on to explain came
into the earth to testify that there was a living God, the
father of all peoples and nations on earth. He went on to say
that Jesus gave his own life for the sake of all peoples because
the people at the time of his birth were no longer obeying the
commands of God who was angry and about to punish his
people.
He ended his talk, I was told, by saying that
the only way people could speak to God, who made the earth,
people and everything on earth, was by believing in God by first
believing in Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the representative
of God the father to the people on earth.
Having explained the teachings of
Christianity, which he keenly urged our people to embrace, he
told them that in addition he was bringing a new system of
learning and communication. But the first thing to do, he told
them, was to give themselves to Jesus, by consenting to be
baptised, and thereafter building a church in which they could
meet to praise God through Christ, worship him and honour
him.
At the end of his lengthy talk, when he had
explained everything he knew needed explaining at first,
grandfather asked the learned gentleman to give them time to
consider alone what he had told them, but to return again in a
few days' time to hear their detailed considered reply. the
missionary readily agreed to their request and, after he had
been entertained, he left. That was the first Christian message
to my people.
When he returned to our tribe to hear what my
people had decided, he received an answer which must undoubtedly
have disappointed him. My grandfather, I was told, with the
advice of his councillors and the elders of the tribe, said this
to him:
"We thank you very much for the trouble
you have taken to come here to introduce to us your religion and
the church. We are sorry . . . we cannot accept your religion
and the God your urge us to accept and believe in. We have our
own way of worshipping God and the way we think we can reach
him. We think that our dead ancestors are the way we can speak
to God. Through them we firmly believe he can speak to us, by
accepting our humble requests to him or rejecting them. We,
therefore, think that it would serve no useful purpose for you
or ourselves, to join together and worship the God you have
spoken to us about. The best thing we think is that you pass on
to try elsewhere."
The gentleman waited after grandfather had
spoken to see whether there were someone or other in the
gathering who would rise to support what grandfather had said,
or to say something contrary to it. No one rose and the
missionary felt satisfied that grandfather's reply was a
unanimous one. . . .
No doubt, though his invitation to my tribe
to join the Dutch Reformed Church was fruitless, the words he
left with them had built themselves houses in the heart of some
members of my tribe. Some of them had already become Christians
in their hearts but were not courageous enough to say so at the
time.
They thought that if they did they would be
regarded as men of weak faith, who were easily blown away from
their faith in the power of their ancestors by something new and
foreign to them. Christianity was indeed a new thing to them,
they needed more time to think about it and everything that went
with it.
The missionary left our tribe like a man who
planted a seed in a dry soil, knowing well that one day rain
would come to water the dry soil and the seed would grow and
bear results. . . .
In Durban, among the Lutheran missionaries
[Lutherans of Hermannsburg], men from my tribe, like teen-age
boys amongst teen-age girls looking for sweethearts to marry,
made their choice. they picked one for themselves and asked him
to consent to become their teacher of the Christian doctrine and
priest. His name was Penzhorn. Having been chosen, Mr. Penzhorn
and his family agreed to accompany my people on the long journey
back to Phokeng. On arrival, they were given everything a
strange family needed and a site on which to build their home.
Since they were brought to the tribe, the building of a home for
them became the tribe's duty.
While their home was under construction they
lived at the Paramount Chief's home, and Mr. Penzhorn began his
baptismal work to make sure that he had people in the tribe to
join his church. At that time the whole tribe . . . was
polygamous. Men were free to marry as many wives as they could
support. the legend is that the first man to be baptised -- in
the presence of a large crowd -- was grandfather's son of his
third wife, who was named for grandfather's father, Sekete. He
was a polygamist himself. Mr. Penzhorn gave him the Christian
name John, and from that day he was known amongst the first
Christians as Johannes.
He was followed by his brother, who was given
the name of peter and thereafter came to be known as Petrus.
Peter had not become a polygamous at that time and the church he
joined barred him from becoming one.
African Methodist Episcopal [AME] Church in Phokeng
While the Lutheran Church under Ernest
Penzhorn flourished in my tribe teaching people the Bible solely
in their own language, Sesotho, so enabling them to understand
better and better the religion they had chosen, issuing
pamphlets to make it easy for them to read catechisms, but not
teaching them the art of writing; while all this was going on
another man appeared on the scene. he was an American Negro, Mr.
Morrison. he introduced himself as a representative of a
Christian Church but of a different denomination; the church he
was asking my tribe to allow him to establish was the African
Methodist Episcopal Church (AME).
* * *
Indeed Mr. Morrison, like a young man seeking
a young woman to marry amongst married and unmarried, succeeded
in getting recruits for his church. The church became popularly
known as the church of Morrison.
In Phokeng itself, it seems, Mr. Morrison did
not enjoy a large following, but he did establish his church.
The English language was heard for the first time through Mr.
Morrison, who found himself confronted with the problem of
talking to people who did not understand what he was saying. . .
. Those who chose to join Morrison's church began to make bricks
with him, and asked the chief to give them a site where they
could build their church.
* * *
In Phokeng Mr. Morrison started a day school for
the children and taught them their first lessons in English. The
English alphabet was studied and heard for the first time.
Morrison's English day school attracted a good deal of attention
among the people of my tribe. At that time . . . the people were
aware that the white man's rule was spreading all over the country
and therefore it was essential to get prepared and to learn his
language.
Those men of my tribe who had been to Kimberley to
work for money in the claims had had contact with the English
people there and were impressed by them and found them very
clever; they found no comparison between them and the Dutch people
they knew. Although the Anglo-Boer war had not broken out, they
could sense that eventually the Englishmen with his cleverness,
was bound to make an impact on the whole country.
Pentecostalism in Phokeng
The man and woman who reached our tribe in
nineteen-thirteen were Kenneth Spooner and his wife. . . . Kenneth
Spooner, like Mr. Morrison before him, came from the United States
of America. He was not bringing a new religion, it was the same as
the one brought by Mr. Penzhorn of the Lutheran and Mr. Morrison
of the AME Church, but his method of applying that religion was
different. Mr. Spooner and his wife were received and allowed to
tell the people who they were and the differences between his
church and the other two already in Phokeng.
When Mr. Spooner unfolded his story there were,
as always happens, some members of my tribe who were attracted
right away by what he told them. It seems to me that two things
appealed to them most: first, in his new church baptisms are held
in the open in the rivers, lakes and ponds; parents do not make
decisions for their children to be baptised, the children must
grow up first and when they are over the age of sixteen they must
ask for baptism themselves. He went on to explain that thatw as
how Christ, whose servant and worker Mr. Spooner was, was baptised
by John the Baptist in the river Jordan. That, I think, sunk
deeply into the minds of those who later made up their minds to
join Mr. Spooner's church.
The other point which I imagine also played a
large part in recruiting members for Mr. Spooner was that in his
church the priest did not have to pray for all the congregation;
when the time for prayer came, everyone must make his or her own
appeal to God.
Mr. Spooner gave the name of his church as the
Pentecostal Holiness Church. It was Baptist in character and
method and, like the Lutherans and the AME before it, it was
against polygamy. There were two other elements which I imagine
did not appeal strongly to those who listened to Mr. Spooner, even
those who join him in the Pentecostal Holiness Church. He said
that medicines were not allowed in his church; prayer was more
powerful than medicine.
* * *
Mr. Spooner did not speak, read or write
Sesotho. He was a stranger in a strange land among strange people.
Mr. Penzhorn disliked him intensely. he nicknamed him Rabodiba
(Man of Ponds) because he took people to ponds for baptism.
* * *
Boys and girls at Mr. Spooner's school who were
fast learners became Mr. Spooner's assistants in teaching the
beginners. To get them to speak English quicker, Mr. Spooner made
a rule that at school the children should speak in English, and in
their mother tongue after school. Those who were caught speaking
their own language were punished.
* * *
Reverend Kenneth Spooner died in Rustenberg
General Hospital, after undergoing an operation, in
nineteen-thirty-six or 'thirty seven. News of his death reached me
in Johannesburg while I was there visiting my sick mother who was
staying with my sister Majone . . .
One thing we all did not understand was how it
was that Kenneth Spooner died in hospital when his church's
doctrine was that no medicine helped, only prayers were essential
when anyone fell sick. Our queries did not help us much, Reverend
Kenneth Spooner was no longer sharing life with us. Source:
The Autobiography of an Unknown
South African by Naboth Mokgatle. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1975.Winner of the 1971 Anisfield-Wolf
Award in Race Relations
* *
* * *
| Family
My name is Monyadioe Moreleba Naboth
Mokgatle, I was born in a tribal village called Phokeng in
the district of Rustenburg, Transvaal Province, South Africa, on
the first of April nineteen-hundred and eleven. I was one of the
three sons of Sethare Hebron and Salome Mokgatle, and the
last-born in the family. My parents had eight children, three
boys and five girls. I do not know when they married, but my
mother told me that in eighteen-ninety-six, at the time when the
Bafokeng tribe lost most of their cattle through cattle sickness
which swept the tribe and the surrounding tribal lands, their first child, a daughter called
Nkatlholeng, was a baby of about nine or twelve months.
My mother was a Christian and my father was
not. Because of that, their marriage was performed in both
Christian and non-Christian traditions. The ceremony, according
to my mother, was held in a Lutheran church at Hermannsburg
Mission and at my father's home in the traditional way. |
 |
My
father's parents, like all African parents, paid bogadi
(dowry) for their son's bride. Without the payment of bogadi,
African law and tradition would not have recognised their union
as a legal one. Source:
The Autobiography of an Unknown
South African by Naboth Mokgatle. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1975.Winner of the 1971 Anisfield-Wolf
Award in Race Relations
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Runoko Rashidi Speaks in Nigeria
Interviewed by Lola Balola
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Nigeria
50-Year
Anniversary—BBC
My Country
Documentary—Lagos
Stories
Lagos Story
1 of 3 /
Lagos Story
2 of 3 /
Lagos Story
3 of 3
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Escape from Slavery: The True Story
of My Ten Years in Captivity and My
Journey to Freedom in America
By
Francis Bok
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Word, Image, and the New Negro
By
Anne Carroll
The
author's analysis of how the illustrations
amplify and create tension with the writing
and how they empower and sometimes
disempower their subjects is the first
critical work in this important area.
Generously illustrated. Highly recommended.—
Choice
In
tracing the formation of the idea of the New
Negro through the vital interplay of
literature, art, and social criticism,
Word, Image, and the New Negro
makes a superb contribution to scholarship
on the Harlem Renaissance, the history of
African American publishing, and modern
American culture.—Eric
J. Sundquist, author of
To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of
American Literature |
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The first detailed comparative analysis of the mix
of text and illustration in the major African
American magazines and anthologies of the 1910s and
1920s. It is a major advance in our understanding of
what amounted to innovative collage forms
articulated to race and politics. Carefully
theorized and rich with persuasive readings, the
book should appeal not only to literary scholars but
also to anyone interested in modernity and the
little magazine.—Cary
Nelson, author of
Revolutionary Memory
A very welcome contribution to the contemporary
rethinking of the period. By calling our attention
to the images that consistently and significantly
appeared alongside some of the well-remembered texts
of the Harlem Renaissance, Carroll foregrounds the
very modernity that the New Negro Movement sought
self-consciously to embrace.... Carroll's eye for
the particular will have both a helpful and
inspiring effect on readers who want to continue
building on the work she has done here.—Net
Reviews
This book focuses on the collaborative illustrated
volumes published during the Harlem Renaissance, in
which African Americans used written and visual
texts to shape ideas about themselves and to
redefine African American identity. Anne Elizabeth
Carroll argues that these volumes show how
participants in the movement engaged in the
processes of representation and identity formation
in sophisticated and largely successful ways. Though
they have received little scholarly attention, these
volumes constitute an important aspect of the
cultural production of the Harlem Renaissance.
Word, Image, and the New Negro marks the
beginning of a long-overdue recovery of this legacy
and points the way to a greater understanding of the
potential of texts to influence social change.—amazon.com
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Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the
Making of the New Negro
By
Barbara Foley
A carefully argued,
nuanced presentation of the genesis of the
Harlem Renaissance. Foley's breadth of
knowledge in American radical history is
impressive.—American
Literature
Foley's book is a lucid
and useful one... A heavyweight
intervention, it prompts significant
rethinking of the ideological and
representational strategies structuring the
era.—Journal
of American Studies
Foley
does a masterful job of analyzing the racial
and political theories of a wide range of
black and white figures, from the radical
Left to the racist Right... Students of
African American political and cultural
history in the early twentieth century
cannot ignore this book. Essential.—Choice
In our
current time of crisis, when ruling classes
busily promote nationalism and racism to
conceal the class nature of their
inter-imperialist rivalries, one can only
hope that readers will not be daunted by
Foley's dedication to analyzing the
ideological milieu of the 1920s that
contributed to the eclipse of New Negro
radicalism by New Negro nationalism.—Science
& Society |
With the New
Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance, the 1920s
was a landmark decade in African American political
and cultural history, characterized by an upsurge in
racial awareness and artistic creativity. In
Spectres of 1919 Barbara Foley traces the
origins of this revolutionary era to the turbulent
year 1919, identifying the events and trends in
American society that spurred the black community to
action and examining the forms that action took as
it evolved.
Unlike prior
studies of the Harlem Renaissance, which see 1919 as
significant mostly because of the geographic migrations
of blacks to the North, Spectres of 1919 looks at
that year as the political crucible from which the
radicalism of the 1920s emerged. Foley draws from a
wealth of primary sources, taking a bold new approach to
the origins of African American radicalism and adding
nuance and complexity to the understanding of a
fascinating and vibrant era.—amazon.com
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Super Rich: A Guide to Having it All
By Russell Simmons
Russell Simmons knows firsthand that
wealth is rooted in much more than the
stock
market. True wealth has more to do with
what's in your heart than what's in your
wallet. Using this knowledge, Simmons
became one of America's shrewdest
entrepreneurs, achieving a level of
success that most investors only dream
about. No matter how much material gain
he accumulated, he never stopped lending
a hand to those less fortunate. In
Super Rich, Simmons uses his rare
blend of spiritual savvy and
street-smart wisdom to offer a new
definition of wealth-and share timeless
principles for developing an unshakable
sense of self that can weather any
financial storm. As Simmons says, "Happy
can make you money, but money can't make
you happy." |
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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