‘To See Us As We See Ourselves’: John Tengo Jabavu and the Politics of the Black Periodical

Khwezi Mkhize

Journal of Southern African Studies, 2018, vol. 44, issue 3, 413-430

Abstract: John Tengo Jabavu’s Imvo Zabantsundu is recognised as the first black periodical in South Africa. As with many of his generation of mission-educated intellectuals, Jabavu’s endeavours in print culture were set against a milieu of intensified conquest and the struggle for colonial belonging. Imvo Zabantsundu has generally been regarded as a purveyor of the aspirations of colonial modernity among the black intelligentsia. In this article, I trace the making of Imvo Zabantsundu to the project of imperial liberalism. I argue that Jabavu and his peers were black Victorians who took their status as imperial subjects as a condition of possibility for their engagements with the colonial order. An encounter with Imvo Zabantsundu therefore means thinking through empire as both a political geography and a structure of feeling. In so doing, I suggest that we seriously consider imperial citizenship as a category through which to mark the making of the black intelligentsia and tune our senses to the long histories of liberalism that informed colonial belonging and its attendant contradictions.

Date: 2018
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DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2018.1462993

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