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PAUL XINIWE |
In his fascinating geneological construction of New African
intellectual history from John Tengo Jabavu to Pixley ka Isaka Seme
in Imvo Zabantsundu (June 3 to November 21, 1961), Z. K. Matthews
noted the following observations concerning Paul Xiniwe: “One of the best
known buildings in King William’s Town is the Temperance Hotel. For generations
this hotel has been a home away from home for many thousands of Africans,
who, for one reason or another have had occasion to pay a visit to King
William’s Town. Some have spent a night or two there, others have had a
meal or two there, while others have gone in there just to rest their feet
after a round of busy shopping in the town. One wonders how many of those
who have had the benefit of this place ever spare a thought of gratitude
to Paul Xiniwe, who established this home for Africans many years ago.
Like so many of his contemporaries Paul Xiniwe was educated at Lovedale
where he qualified as a primary school teacher. After he left Lovedale
he entered the teaching profession and taught at various schools in the
Eastern Cape. Eventually he decided to give up teaching and to blaze a
new trail for Africans in business. This he did at a time when the belief
was still widely held that no African could run a business successfully.
. . . But the Temperance Hotel was not merely a business place. It was
a centre of culture. Both Paul Xiniwe and his wife were capable musicians.
In their younger days they had both been members of an African Choir which
toured Europe and they always encouraged music in their home and in the
district” (“Paul Xiniwe blazed new trail for Africans”, Imvo Zabantsundu,
October 7, 1961). The other members of the African choir were Eleanor Xiniwe
(wife of Paul), Johanna Jonkers, Josiah Semouse, Charlotte Manye (Maxeke).
These young New Africans seem to have been inspired by the visit of the
New Negro Orpheus McAdoo and the Virginia Jubilee Singers who visited South
Africa in 1890 singing all forms of Negro Spirituals. In appropriating
the Negro Spirituals, Charlotte Manye Maxeke and others were among the
earliest who established a Black Atlantic connection between New Negro
modernity and New African modernity. Having later studied at Wilberfoce
University under the guidance of W. E. B. Du Bois, Charlotte Manye Maxeke
was to become one the greatest South African modernizers. While in London
to record and perform with the others, Paul Xiniwe was given an opportunity
to pen an autobiographical self-portrait which appeared in the Illustrated
London News of July 1891, as part of publicizing themselves to the
English public: “I was born in November 1857, of Christian parents. I attended
school from my youth, and contributed in some measure to the cost of my
education by doing some domestic work for an English family before and
after hours. This materially assisted my mother in paying the school fees
and for my clothing. At fifteen years of age I left school and entered
the service of the Telegraph Department as lineman, having to look after
the poles and wires, and to repair breakages, by climbing the poles in
monkey-like fashion. Being transferred to the Graaff Reinet Office, 130
miles from home, I had to go there alone, without knowledge of the road,
or of any person there; but I go there in three days travelling on horseback.
The officer in charge at Graaff Reinet found my handwriting better than
that of the European clerks, and, in consequence, gave me his books to
keep, with additional pay, and any amount of liberty in about the office.
This was a privilege which I highly valued and turned to the best advantage
by studying the code-books, taking them home to pore over them at night,
and coming to the office about two hours before opening time, as I kept
the keys, to learn, privately, the art of telegraphy. I surprised the master
and the clerks one day by telling them that I could work the instrument,
and, to dispel their serious doubts went through the feat to their great
astonishment, but, happily, also, to the pleasure of my master. After three
years’ service I left the post of lineman, quitted Graaff Reinet, and was
employed on the railway construction as telegraph clerk, timekeeper, and
storekeeper: a highly respectable and responsible post for a native to
hold. When I left school and home I only had a little knowledge of the
‘three R’s’; but I was assiduous in improving my learning and seeking to
qualify myself for a higher position. I had now earned a good sum of money
on the railway, as well as a good name, as the testimonials I hold from
there could show. Still desirous of greater improvement, I went to Lovedale,
and held the office of telegraphist also in that institution, which helped
me to pay my college fees. I stayed there two years, and passed the Government
teachers’ examination, being one of only two who passed from the institution
out of twenty-two candidates presented. I then took charge of a school
at Port Elizabeth, which I kept for four years, and which I gave up to
carry on business at King William’s Town, until the period of joining the
‘African Choir’“. This treatise states or implies the three historical
vectors which were at the center of New African modernity: Christianity,
education, and Western civilization. Moreover, Paul Xiniwe exemplified
those qualities of determination, thriftiness, postponement of gratification,
hard work, which were necessary to succeed in capitalist modernity. These
were the qualities that enthralled Z. K. Matthews about Paul Xiniwe. In
his determination to get the best education that Lovedale could offer,
Xiniwe is comparable to R. V. Selope-Thema, the former junior colleague
by thirty years. The ‘African Choir’ stay in London turned out to be a
fiasco, with charges and counter-charges being thrown about between the
white South African administrators (organizers) and the African performers,
as we can gather from this letter from Paul Xiniwe to John Tengo Jabavu’s
Imvo Zabantsundu , denying libelous charges against him and
seeking to clarify the whole imbroglio: “The history of the choir dates
from Kimberley when about fifteen Natives voices---male and female were
got together to go to England. They had two or three concerts at Kimberley
which were a financial success, and the promoters failing even then to
fulfil their engagements to the Native members, the majority withdrew,
and thus they left Kimberley with four Natives only, hoping to pick up
others as they travelled south, and depending upon me for the most part
to secure the full number. On arriving here [in Cape Town] they made us
believe that the four from Kimberley were the chosen, instead of only those
who would go with them. They arrived in this division perfect strangers
to me---I mean the four Europeans. I was the means of their introduction
to Lovedale, as well as obtaining the majority of the members of the choir,---as
their letters and telegrams to me could easily demonstrate. To show also
how much they depended upon me, they undertook to pay me in the Colonial
tour as much again as the other members of the choir, and half as much
in the English tour. The African Choir first consisted of one European,
and then three with another remarkable gentleman travelling independently
with the choir to see whether it was a good paying concern befor putting
his money---of which he had a plethora it was said unto us---into the venture,
and with him at our backs our craft would go ahead. At Kimberley (return
visit) a contract was entered between the members of the choir and the
managers. The goose that laid the golden egg being now at the helm. In
this contract they engaged inter-alia to pay me so much per week or per
month and pay all extras; and yet when it came to going unpaid for months,
and we demanded our salaries in England, they quibbled by saying---they
understood that we were to be paid out of the proceeds,---a fallacious
argument if not a gross misrepresentation of truth---because it is logically
true that it we were to share in the loss, we had also to share in the
profits, and thus become partners in the affair, which was not the case.
. . . The venture of the African Choir was a monetary speculation in spite
of all the platform declaration, and if as such it had gone before the
public, nobody would say aught against the trio, but the financial expectations
were not realised, and as soon as they went to Christian communities they
were at once in a [fatal?; word not totally legible] position. Such questions
as: Who are these men? What are they? had to be met by subterfuge. They
were never previously connected with Natives or mission work. One minister
said to me in consequence, the more they went among Christian people the
more suspicious the people will be of them. . . . In conclusion, I do not
desire to descend to the labyrinth of attacking personal and private characters,
because I believe it is forbidden by the laws of decency as well as those
of libel. . . . Last, but not least, we have been kindly received by the
British public, and to some we are exceedingly grateful for many and various
tokens of kindness. It has been a remarkable thing to me that one has to
go to England in order to realize the warm heartedness, the spontaneous
and unwearing generosity, and hospitality and the stirring kindness of
the British people” (“Affairs of the African Choir”, Imvo Zabantsundu,
March 17, 1892). Several features need to be noted concerning this remarkable
document. First, as a New African in developing South African modernity,
Paul Xiniwe believed that his education, intellect, talents, political
commitments, made him the equal of any educated white person. Secondly,
the making of artistic products or artistic productivity in modernity had
both a financial and aesthetic components which should not be confused
with each other for sentimental or political reasons. Thirdly, he came
to discover that the category European, in this instance meaning white,
was politically abstract, and needed to be situated within particular national
situations, in order to understand and comprehend its full complexity.
It was because of his first rate intellect that Z. K. Matthews and T. D.
Mweli Skota, among many other members of the African intelligentsia, held
Paul Xiniwe in such great esteem. It is not surprising therefore
that in Mweli Skota’s great book, The African Yearly Register, a
book that attempted to capture the collective historical experience of
New African consciousness in modernity, the photograph of Paul Xiniwe is
probably the most prominent. A biographical sketch of Paul Xiniwe on the
opposite page to the photograph, in all probability written by Mweli Skota
himself, since he too was engaged and fascinated by the business nature
or economic rationality of modernity, celebrates the idea that the New
African should deeply engage herself with the economic principles or the
economics of modernity: “After some years he tired of the teaching profession,
and having saved some money, resigned in order to become a business man.
He brought property at East London, Port Elizabeth and Kingwiliamstown,
and opened stores as merchant and hotel proprietor. At Kingwilliamstown
his property was conspicuous, being a double storey building and known
as the Temperance Hotel. In a very short time the Temperance Hotel was
known through the Cape Province. Paul Xiniwe took a very keen interest
in the welfare of his people. An upright man, honest gentleman, and a thorough
Christian and a staunch temperance apostle” (“Mr. Paul Xiniwe”, The
African Yearly Register, compiled and edited by T. D. Mweli Skota,
R. L. Lesson and Company Limited, 1930, p.109). Both portraits of Paul
Xiniwe in Mweli Skota’s collective portrait and in Matthews geneological
sketch, the New African economic person is emphasized. It is clear therefore
that Z. K. Matthews in 1961 must have written the panoramic sketch of New
African intelligentsia with T. D. Mweli Skota’s incomparable book
of 1930 open in front of him. What both emphasize, nevertheless, is that
we need to know more about the New African economic person, rather than
only the political or the artistic one. Perhaps with the momentous change
of 1994, this person will occupy a more central position in the foreground
of our rewritten national histories.
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