General seminar arrangements in 2025
- WISER's TRUST seminar is hosted on-line every Wednesday afternoon at 16:00 - 17:00 SA during the teaching semester | For information about WISER's PLANT LIVES seminar, please follow this link.
- Please register on Zoom in advance of the meeting on this link.
- Participants must should please read the paper below prior to the seminar, which is typically available by the Friday preceding the seminar.
African Associational Life and Journalism in Central Johannesburg of the 1910s
This paper was subsequently published in the Wits Press book The People's Paper http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/the-peoples-paper/
Many writers, from Eddie Roux to Tim Couzens to Les Switzer, have bewailed the absence of Abantu-Bantu from the shelves of libraries and from scholarship; this shocking neglect of black intellectual life has often been dismissed as a tragedy—few have bothered to do anything about it. The text below comprises chapter 11 of a book to be published by Wits University Press in September as The People’s Paper: A Centenary History & Anthology of Abantu-Batho. Its complexity, evident in the multi-lingual nature of the paper and its long obscurity, is glimpsed in the titles of chapters from Part One:
- “Only the Bolder Spirits”: Politics, Racism, Solidarity, and War in Abantu-Batho;
- “They Must Go to the Bantu Batho”: Economics and Education, Religion and Gender, Love and Leisure in the People’s Paper;
- Pixley Seme and Abantu-Batho;
- Queen Labotsibeni and Abantu-Batho;
- “We of Abantu-Batho”: Robert Grendon’s Brief and Controversial Editorship;
- The Swazi Royalty and the Founding of Abantu-Batho in a Regional Context;
- Abantu-Batho and the Xhosa Poets;
- African Royalty, Popular History, and Abantu-Batho;
- “Johannesburg in Flames”: The 1918 Shilling Campaign, Abantu-Batho, and Early African Nationalism in South Africa;
- Garveyism, Abantu Batho & the Radicalisation of the ANC during the 1920s;
- An African Newspaper in Central Johannesburg;
- Assessing the Decline and Legacy of Abantu-Bantu.
Part Two consists of a 200-page anthology drawn from each year of the paper’s life. The reason for bringing it back to life is the constant lament by scholars of its absence. I present below only a cog in our still very incomplete understanding of the life and times of the newspaper and its world, focusing on a little-known club. The empirical data on the life of this club is still very limited, which cramps our ability to draw firm theoretical conclusions, but it is a large advance on what we knew before.
