The Reverend Dr. John Langalibalele Dube (1871 – 1946) was a central figure in New African intellectual history thanks to his many contributions to the South African people and his lingering influence on other intellectuals of the time. He was a strong proponent of modernity in South Africa, founding the Ohlange Institution (1901) school and the Zulu newspaper Ilanga lase Natal (1903), as well as acting as the founding President of the African National Congress (ANC). Dube was also a devout Christian minister and wrote extensively on the efforts of Christian missionaries in Africa .

Born in Inanda on February 11, 1871 , Dube was the grandson of an esteemed Zulu chief, whose life Dube chronicles briefly in the beginning of A Talk Upon My Native Land (1892). Dube's grandfather had amassed a following of strong Zulu warriors so much so that the king of the time felt threatened by him; the king lured Dube's men away from him and proceeded to send assassins to kill Dube's grandfather. Luckily, Dube's grand mother escaped the attack – with Dube's father, James Dube, in tow. They escaped to Natal and soon became converted to Christianity, emerging their lives in the community established there by the missionary Daniel Lindley. James Dube pursued a life of theological study, culminating in his ordination as pastor of the church in Inanda, where he was the subject of deep respect and admiration.

John Dube himself attended the Amanzimtoti Seminary (also known at the Adams School ) until 1887, when he traveled to America to study at Oberlin College in Ohio . While schooling in the United States, Dube made several observations about his home country, remarking on the healthy climate of the Natal region in comparison to Ohio (“When I write to my friends, and tell them that in this country, the water freezes so hard that men and horses walk on it, they are astonished” [Dube, 24]) and on the spiritual condition of his people, likewise through comparison to American-born Africans and their Christian practices and ideologies in the United States. Dube was highly critical of the “raw Native” in South Africa . He considered education through Christian doctrine the only way to achieve successful modernization and blamed tribalism and indigenous cultural belief systems as the source of strongest opposition to modernity in South Africa . In an obituary published in 1946 in The Bantu World , Dube is quoted as once remarking that “the enemy of the African is the African himself.”

Yet Dube did not turn a blind eye to the flaws of the Church; in The Arrest Or Progress Of Christianity Among The Heathen Tribes of South Africa (1925), Dube wrote:

“Certain sections of the European community are too often another obstacle to the spread of the Gospel among the Native people. The example of many white people to the Natives has not been all that could be desired...The raw native cannot distinguish between Christian and non Christian white people...They all look alike to him...[it does not win respect for the missionaries and the Gospel that they] disregard the welfare and comfort of their servants after work hours, the way they show more interest in their horses, dogs, and cats.”

Dube believed that the missionary ought to involved himself in the practical concerns of South Africans as well as the spiritual concerns, that political action by the missionaries on the Natives' behalf would have been immensely more effective at winning converts.

The advancement of the South African people was a cause as close to Dube as his Christian beliefs. While living in the United States , Dube experienced firsthand the extreme racial segregation and the efforts of those individuals working to overcome it. In 1892, Dube returned to South Africa from Oberlin College . He had not received a degree from the school, yet he had gained a new perspective that was undeniably influential in his later endeavors.

After his time at Oberlin, Dube worked as a teacher for his alma matter, the Amanzimtoti Seminary in Natal . It was at this period that Dube became acquainted with and ultimately married a woman named Nokutela Mdima, who, along with Dube's friend and fellow Zulu missionary William Wilcox, would eventually convince Dube to start his own mission. The village of Incawadi , in the Umkomas Valley , was the site selected for Dube's mission. He and his wife traveled to Incawadi in 1894 and remained there for two years, establishing a small school and two churches with a congregation of twenty-seven converts. The Dube school was especially noteworthy; though teaching English and basic math skills like any other missionary school, Dube also allowed his students to read in their native language (which, in A Talk Upon My Native Land, Dube explains is more closely related to the Indo-European language group than other South African languages) and placed a strong emphasis on practical skills as well. The school and the mission itself at Incawadi were also unique because the missionaries (Dube and his wife) were indigenous Africans.

After working with the Natives at Incawadi, Dube traveled to the United States for a second time in 1897, to Brooklyn Heights in New York . In New York , he frequently attended lectures and demonstrations by Booker T. Washington, who became a source of great inspiration for Dube. He was an audience to Washington 's speeches on topics such as labor, methods for “self-support for Negroes,” and “the evils of coloured men in Africa who ‘study Cicero ' in school, yet who are ‘without trousers'” [ John L. Dube, A Biographical Sketch ]. Stirred by Washington 's ideas, Dube consequently visited the Tuskegee Institute and from 1897 to 1899 worked to raise funding for his own school, the Ohlange Institute. Dube attributes the motivation for establishing Ohlange to Washington in a letter written in March of 1897:

“I am very much interested in just the same work that you are for my people the Zulus of So. Africa . I am here preparing to return and start a school of an industrial character among them.”

The two began a significant correspondence; in May of 1897, Washington requested Dube deliver a commencement speech at Tuskegee . Not surprisingly, Dube obliged and gave a very well-received oration. Even after his return to South Africa , Washington would continue to be a guiding role model for Dube, who, in 1907, sent Washington

another letter along with many newspaper documents (including Dube's own Ilanga publication) to detail the progress of Dube's work at Ohlange and elsewhere.

The Ohlange Institute itself was finally established by Dube in 1901. Originally known as the Zulu Christian Industrial School , Ohlange was modeled after Dube's impressions of Tuskegee and Oberlin. The Institute stressed education in practical knowledge, preparing its students in areas of skilled labor, although the school branched out into the humanities and sciences as enrollment grew in subsequent years. Ohlange was the first of its kind, a university founded by indigenous Africans for indigenous Africans, and bordered on controversy and government conflict, as the apartheid was quite wary of educated blacks. The effects of the Ohlange Institute would have a lasting impact on South African intellectual history; for figures such as H.I.E. Dhlomo and Jordan Ngubane, Ohlange would be influential just as Tuskegee had influenced Dube.

In 1912, Dube was elected the first President of the African National Congress. While serving his term, Dube was a staunch opponent of the 1913 Native Land Act (which barred Africans from owning, buying, and using land) and led a delegation to the United Kingdom to protest its enactment. In 1914, Dube wrote of the Native Land Act:

“It is only a man with a heart of stone who could hear and see what I hear and see and remain callous and unmoved. It would break your hearts did you but know, as I know, the cruel and undeserved afflictions wrought by the hateful enactment on numberless aged, poor and tender children of my race in this their native land. From the ashes of their burnt out kraals, kicked away like dogs by Christian people from their humble hearths, from the dear old scenes where their fathers were born and grew up in simple peace, bearing malice to none, and envying neither European nor Indian the wealth and plenty they amass themselves from this their land, these unfortunate outcasts pass homeless, unwanted, silently suffering, along the highways and byways of the land, seeking in vain the most unprofitable waste whereon to build their hovel and rest and live, victims of an unknown civilisation that has all too suddenly overwhelmed and overtaken them...”

In 1917, Dube was forced to retire from his position as President of the ANC, though he would remain an active member of the Natal Congress until his death in 1946.

In many ways, Dube was a man of conflicting character, from his disrespect of Native culture and simultaneous embrace of the Zulu language and African equality, to his firm anti-communist stance and his extension of an invitation to Communist Party member Edward Roux to instruct at Ohlange. Critics also cite his Christian ideals as being contradictory to his progressive politics. Yet Dube's legacy is too great to be tarnished by such minor flaws, as his revolutionary work in politics and especially education continue to effect South Africans long after his death. Forging his accomplishments out of a mix of Zulu tradition, Western modernity, and American political sensibility, the Reverend Dr. John Langalibalele Dube was a true New African intellectual, well worthy of the posthumous praise sung by H.I.E. Dhlomo:

Great son of streams and valleys African!
Mafukuzela!  thou of warrior frame;
Whose rare achievements proved the Black Man can!
You thought and taught and wrought us into fame.
Not scars of war alone adorn your brow;
For Beauty, Song and Fire of vale and hill,
Of our rich idiom - how the gods endow! -
The pages of your story wondrous, fill.
Blest leader, thou, to fight and midst the glist
Of battles fierce - great scholar, author, sage -
Find time the Muses fair to serve.  Our mist
Of ignorance you raised, Light of our age!
In pangs of birth we stood when he began;
Twas dark!  God spoke!  and there arose this man!

References

1. John L. Dube, A Talk Upon My Native Land , R.M. Swinburne & Co. Printers, Rochester (New York), 1892.

2. Rev. John L. Dube, “The Arrest or Progress of Christianity Among The Heathen Tribes of South Africa ,” The Evangelization of South Africa : Mission Conference , Die Nasionale, Cape Town , 1925, pp. 62 – 69.

3. Ntongela Masilela, “John Langalibalele Dube Intellectual Sketch,”The New African Movement Website , http://www.pitzer.edu/academics/faculty/masilela/nam/newafrre/writers/dube/dubeS.htm

4. Anonymous, “The Late John. L. Dube,” Bantu World , March 2, 1946

5. Anonymous, “John L. Dube, A Biographical Sketch” http://www.oberlin.edu/external/EOG/Dube/Dube.htm

6. Anonymous,“John Dube” http://literature.kzn.org.za/lit/9.xml

7. Anonymous, “John Langalibalele Dube, First ANC President-General”
http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/people/dube.html