UNIVERSITY OP THE WITWATERSRAND
 HISTORY WORKSHOP
 ijT- ? l 4,
 AUTHOR:
 TITLE:
 THE MAKING OF CLASS
 9-14 February, 1987
 J. T. Campbell
 T.D. Mweli Skota and the making and unmaking
 of a Black Elite
In 1977, a South African historian, Tim Couzens, visited the widow of T.D.
 Mweli Skota at her home in Pimville, on the eastern edge of Soweto.
 Couzens was one among a procession of historians who had visited Skota
 in the last years of his life, and he came now to collect any surviving
 papers. Zilpah Skota directed him to a few tattered and rain-soaked pa-
 pers in an open cabinet in her backyard. She had intended to throw the
 papers away, she said, because she needed the cabinet to store coal.1
 The papers are the flotsam of a life. They include correspondence from
 Skota's decade as General-Secretary of the African National Congress;
 pamphlets from the All-Africa Convention, of which Skota was an executive
 member; papers pertaining to the publication of his classic African Yearly
 Register; documents describing resistance to the destruction of Pimville;
 a few personal letters; and an endless collection of bills and accounts
 which he was often unable to pay.
 With decade long gaps, the papers do not in themselves provide enough
 material for a biography of Skota. Perhaps such a book will eventually
 be written. Both Couzens and Brian Willan have recently shown how much
 of an individual's life and thought can be reconstructed through a com-
 bination of academic doggedness and personal obsession. What follows
 reflects neither quality. Rather, it is an attempt to sift through what
 remains to illuminate some of the issues raised by one life which spanned
 almost ninety years of South African history. In particular, it seeks
 to use Skota's deteriorating fortunes as a window into the the de-classing
 of the black elite on the Rand in the twentieth century.1
 Among the historians who interviewed Skota late in his life were
 Couzens, Stanley Trapido, Gwendolen Carter, Thomas Karis, Brian
 Willan, and Paul Rich. My thanks to Professor Couzens for his as-
 sistance and encouragement in preparing this paper.
 See Couzens, The New African: A Study of the Life and Work of H.I.E.
 Dhlomo (Johannesburg: 1985); and Willan, Sol Plaatje: A Biography
 (London: 1984).
What makes the documents unusual is that they afford a glimpse of an
 elite in a simultaneous process of creation, and collapse. As much as any
 individual, Skota articulated the terms which South Africa's black elite
 used to describe itself and its world. His African Yearly Register, which
 sold 12 000 copies in the early 1930s, was more than just a social reg-
 ister of 'progressive' Africans. It was the centerpiece of a lifelong
 effort to lend the black elite historical depth and a consciousness of
 its own reality and role. But consciousness alone does not a class make.
 Skota's own life suggests the inability of that elite to give itself any
 secure material reality. Buffeted by hostile government legislation, .
 confined to impoverished, segregated locations, forever starved of capi-
 tal, the elite was constantly compressed back into the classes beneath
 it. Skota's life story exhibits these contrary processes. It is this
 which gives it its historical relevance, and its poignancy.'
 In historiographical terms, the exercise seeks, to make three related
 contributions. First, rehearsing details of Skota's myriad business
 ventures and misadventures may suggest broader changes in the nature of
 accumulation among the urban middle classes, particularly in response to
 segregation. Secondly, the evidence assembled here suggests that blanket
 statements about the black elite being 'bought off' or used as 'an agent
 of social control' need some refinement. If Skota is any indication, many
 of the elite were amenable to purchase, but neither the state nor capital
 seems to have evinced much interest in the needs (or possibilities) of a
 black middle class. Finally, the paper supplies some empirical grist to
 the debate on the consciousness of the black elite. It is a truism that
 the elite's economic proximity to the black lower classes created possi-
 bilities for 'downward identification' and 'radicalisation'. This paper
 offers no dissent to that contention. It does argue, however, that the
 Skota, T.D. Mweli, The African Yearly Register: Being an Illustrated
 National Biographical Dictionary (Who's Who) of the Black Folks in
 Africa (Johannesburg, 1930), hereafter designated Register
narrowing economic gap between the elite and the classes beneath it
 spawned a contrary process as well. De-classing created among the elite
 a need for mechanisms which maintained social distance, which emphasized
 status within the racial caste. To pick one homely example: Skota in-
 vested much of his income ? often more than his income ? on stationery.
 An elaborate new letterhead heralded each turning in his career, a let-
 terhead which advertised the respectability of the sender as much as the
 new enterprise itself.
 This final point has a further implication. Skota's life demonstrates
 that the black elite's sense of itself as a group distinct from the
 African 'masses' did not strictly depend on superior wealth or a partic-
 ular class position. One purpose of this paper is to identify more pre-
 cisely the lineaments of the black elite ? to illuminate the styles and
 symbols and language which allowed a very fluid group to cohere and
 maintain a sense of its own distinctiveness in the face of its economic
 evisceration.* :
 II
 Any study of Skota must begin with the African Yearly Register. First
 published in 1930, it was an amalgam of historical primer, political
 handbook, and social register. With over 370 sketches of African chiefs,
 professionals, businessmen, and political leaders, the Register has be-
 come a staple source for historians. Its contributors included many of
 Throughout this paper I have used the term 'elite' in place of the
 more problematic 'petty bourgeoisie'. While the latter term has be-
 come the vogue in South African studies, it tends to homogenise an
 elite which was remarkably disparate in class terms, ranging as it
 did from doctors and lawyers to more humble store clerks. Strictly
 speaking, few of the black elite were actually members of the petty
 bourgeosie. My thanks, in this context, to Peter Delius.
the foremost members of South Africa's black elite in the early 20th
 century: Solomon Plaatje, Charlotte Maxeke, George Champion, Josiah
 Gumede, H.I.E. Dhlomo. The book reflected a self-conscious attempt by
 Skota and his contributors to define the nature and role of the black
 elite; it strove to instil in an otherwise disparate group of educated,
 Christian Africans a sense of collective identity and mission. The first
 printing sold 6 000 copies, earning the attention of most of the country's
 major European newspapers. The Rand Dally Hall called it 'a fascinating,
 factful, instructive, pathetic and often amusing volume'; Kimberley's
 Diamond Fields Advertiser predicted the book would 'hearten the native1
 and 'impress on European opinion the "urge" for education' among the na-
 tives. A year later, a second, low cost edition of 6 000 was printed at
 the behest of Plaatje and Reverend Rubusana, who hoped that at 7/6 per
 copy the book would be accessible to the African masses. The contrast
 between the two editions encapsulates what was perhaps the central preo-
 ccupations of Skota's life: to carve out for 'progressive' Africans an
 intermediate position between European opinion and the black lower
 classes.9
 Skota's was an eclectic, sometimes facile mind, and his book drew on
 disparate intellectual sources. It was deeply Christian. It was steeped
 in Cape liberalism, evidenced particularly in the notion of the
 'civilised' African's stewardship for his benighted brethren. It bore
 the imprint of black American political thought: The book's subtitle
 {Being an Illustrated national Biographical Dictionary (Who's Who) of
 Black Folks In Africa) deliberately echoed DuBois; while its Pan-African
 scope and emphasis on race pride revealed the impact on Skota of
 ' For others involved in preparing the book, see Skota's Preface to the
 Register. The reviews quoted appeared in the Rand Daily Mail on 30
 October, 1931, and in the Diamond Fields Advertiser on 10 November,
 1931. The role of Plaatje and Rubusana in securing a reprinting of
 ' the book is described by Skota in a letter to Paul Mosaka, dated 1
 October, 1960 in box Ab of the Skota Papers (hereafter SKOTA). The
 papers are housed at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Garveyism. All of these influences, discussed below, fell within the
 rubric of what Skota termed 'progressive values.' Yet what was most im-
 mediately striking about the African Yearly Register was Skota's attempt
 to reconcile such values to African tradition -- to find sanctions within
 the African past for ostensibly contradictory ideas. He did so, on one
 hand, by establishing the chiefly lineages of many of his 'progressive'
 subjects; and on the other, by offering a revised interpretation of tra-
 dition. Thus Shaka was portrayed not as a 'cruel king', but as a 'King,
 judge and administrator ? a philosopher, a poet and a musician ... a
 Minister of Foreign Affairs ... [and] Political Agent ... [who] also
 engaged in research work.' In short, Tshaka was the prototype of the
 educated, de-tribalised elite. The paradoxical effect of this
 re-interpretation, as Tim Couzens has pointed out, was that the emergence
 of this elite appeared not to betray tradition but to fulfil it. Skota
 and his comrades were not changelings but (in H.I.E. Ohlomo's pregnant
 phrase) the 'New Africans."
 The phrase captured the central tension in Skota's thought. The Yearly
 Register left no doubt that Skota viewed Christianity and Western educa-
 tion as progressive and desirable. Nonetheless, he believed that tradi-
 tional ethnic identity provided the individual with a crucial historical
 grounding. He tended, in the fashion of many white liberals of the day,
 to ascribe the ills of the black community ? crime, alcoholism, juvenile
 delinquency -- to a loss of that identity, to the erosion of 'African
 Culture.' (The erosion of 'tribal restraints' in the liberals'
 vernacular. ) 'The moment the race as a whole discards its culture,' he
 wrote, 'it at once breaks its backbone and may be crippled for all tine.'
 He constantly spoke of the need to rekindle 'race consciousness', to re-
 discover 'the African soul', to escape from a racial 'inferiority com-
 plex. ' As a first step, he advocated discarding the colonial word
 ' See Couzens, The New African, especially chapter 1; Register, pp.
 101-103.
'native1, offering in its place 'African', for Skota a wonderfully elastic
 and allusive phrase. It conveyed an heroic past, an undifferentiated
 racial identity, an essentially unitary culture that was in all ways
 'best, highest and noblest."
 Ironically, Skota drew much of his 'Africanist' perspective from black
 American thought. A well-thumbed 1923 edition of The Philosophy and
 Opinions of Harcus Garvey can still be found among his papers. While he
 evinced little interest in black American emigration, the book clearly
 had a profound impact on him. He underlined passages on the importance
 of racial self-confidence, ambition, and organisation, and on the need
 to reclaim Africa's 'beautiful history.' Ultimately, he absorbed most
 of the central tenets of Garvey ism: a belief in the importance of race
 pride; conviction in the essential unity of African culture and experi-
 ence; and finally, a commitment to African 'redemption', with all its
 conceptual layers."
 The word redemption permeated Skota's writing. It was an ambiguous
 word, simultaneously conveying the need to awaken and to re-awaken. The
 ambiguity mirrored Skota's ambivalence about the past. At one moment he
 spoke of the need for Africans to return to a world that was organic and
 noble; at. the next, he celebrated the impact of Christianity and education
 in awakening Africa from its lethargy and bringing 'civilisation' to the
 'barbarous.' The paradox does not seem to have troubled him; he evidently
 felt no compulsion to choose between cultures. Indeed, the defining
 feature of the 'New Africans' in the Yearly Register was their facility
 7
  The quotations are drawn from articles in The African Leader, a
 short-lived newspaper edited by Skota. See 21 May, 28 May, 11 June,
 19 November, 10 December, 1932. The most complete set of the paper
 is found at the Johannesburg Public Library.
 ?' About two dozen of Skota's books are collected with the Skota papers.
 For an explicit statement of Skota's belief that all African peoples
 possessed essentially one culture, see The African Leader, 28 May,
 1932.
in two worlds. They were Africans, of putative royal blood, yet they had
 shed traditional garb for the high Victorian collar, the top hat and the
 walking stick. In short, they bridged the chasm of colonial society,
 preserving that which was redeemable in the African past while inculcating
 the values and styles of the modern world.
 The product of such a synthesis was sometimes incongruous. Skota, for
 example, was fascinated by traditional medicine.. While his book cele-
 brated the achievements of European-trained doctors like A.B. Xuma and
 Modiri Holema, he himself dabbled with traditional remedies, including
 dagga smoking. Afraid that such remedies would be forgotten, he sought
 to establish an Isambane African Medicine Research Institute, to enrol
 all herbalists and sangomas in' a society to study and preserve traditional
 medical knowledge. Characteristically, however, Skota clothed the idea
 in all the accoutrements of the modern age -- a Constitution, board of
 directors, and a liason office to 'keep the Government informed of the
 Activities of the Institute."
 The need to synthesize old and new was even more urgent in the case
 of religion. Skota was a devout Christian; he knew the Bible well. Tet
 traditional religion lay at the core of the culture he struggled to pre-
 serve. To reconcile the two, he resorted to portraying traditional re-
 ligion as a kind of incipient Christianity. Hence the following sketch
 of Moshoeshoe, primitive Christian, in the African Yearly Register:
 'Moshesh was not a heathen as has been the common belief of even histo-
 rians. He had a religion and prayed to some being twice a day ... for
 the Africans had a Qamata or Hodimo (God) long before the advent of the
 White man.' He read various books and papers on the theme, all exploring
 similarities between Christian and 'African' cosmologies ? the belief
 in a unitary God, in the survival of personality after death, the ele-
 The propectus for the Institute can be found in SKOTA, Box Fd.
vation of an Intermediate group of saints or ancestors. At the same tine,
 he emphasised the need 'to present Christ in the African way',. rather than,
 the Christ which 'the whiteman has painted', a Christ who 'condemned ev-
 erything social, moral and economic which is of African origin.' He ar-
 gued, for example, that the biblical admonition to feed and succour
 strangers in Matthew 25:35 could be used as an 'illustration of the
 sublimity and nobility of our [African] social system.' The problem,
 Skota believed, reflected prevailing religious imagery. Africans had
 been taught to 'visualise Christ as a whiteman and a white God whose
 sympathies are with those who act as the whites act, pray as the whites
 pray, and sacrifice as the whites sacrifice.' Throughout his life, Skota
 collected alternative icons ? a sketch of the apostles with a swarthy
 St. Paul; a newspaper photo of a statue of the Virgin Mary, the white
 paint peeling as if to reveal the dark skin beneath; posters of a black
 angel and a black Christ crucified.10
 In his quest for a traditional Christianity, Skota returned always to
 the idea of Ethiopia. He knew and cherished the prophecy in Genesis:
 'Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands to God.' Ethiopia, whether un-
 derstood literally or as a metaphor for Africa, was central to the iden-
 tity of the black Christian elite, for it represented an indigenous
 Christianity, a Christian pedigree independent of the colonial relation-
 ship. (This fact helps explain the rather surprising presence of the
 'Emperor of Abyssinia1 on the frontspiece of the Yearly Register.) When
 the Italians invaded Abyssinia a few years later, Skota and his colleagues
 followed the course of the fighting avidly in the black press. The war,
 three thousand miles to the North, menaced the Christian elite not only
 Register, pp. 66-67. On similarities between Christian and African
 religions, see for example Skota's copy of Edwin W. Smith's The Secret
 of the African (London: 1943). Quotations are drawn from The African
 Leader, 18 June and 23 July, 1932. The posters and pictures referred
 to are scattered throughout the Skota collection.
because of its colonial overtones but because it represented an attack
 on a history which they had appropriated for themselves.11
 As in the case of medicine, Skota's search for a religious synthesis
 found institutional form. In the 1940s he established St. Ntsikana's
 Order of True Africans.. Ntsikana, an 18th century Xhosa herdsman, was
 reputed to be the first black Christian in South Africa. According to
 legend, he was converted by divine revelation and had already begun
 proselytising when the first white missionaries arrived in the Eastern
 Cape.. Ntsikana thus represented yet another independent Christian
 lineage, a lineage which inverted colonialism. This animus was less ev-
 ident, however, in the Order itself, which was modelled on a European
 benevolent society. According to the draft Constitution, written by
 Skota, the Order would encourage 'Charity, Justice, Brotherhood and Fi-
 delity'; provide a contingent fund for members in distress; and foster
 the study of 'the origin and genealogy of the African race.' The Con-
 stitution contained the clearest expression of Skota's struggle to wed
 two worlds, the 'objects' of the Order included, in sequence: "... to
 encourage all good tribal or national customs of the Africans to kill
 tribal friction ... to abandon and discourage all such customs as are
 detrimental to the best interest of the race ... to borrow from other
 civilisations what virtues may be lacking in our own ... [and] to discard,
 suppress and renounce all vices of western civilisation.' In a hand-
 written solicitation for the Order, Skota put the problem more starkly,
 if no less paradoxically: 'We are fast heading for ... disintegration,
 unless we seek our lost knowledge and return to the beaten track of cen-
 11
  See the Register, p. vii and p. 269, where Skota traces Ethiopia's
 Christian lineage. On the preoccupation of the black middle class
 with the Italian invasion, see Skota's copy of Ethiopia the Valiant
 by William J.W. Roome (London: 1936), or any issue of Umteteli wa
 Bantu from the period.
turies, and from it mould our own tradition according to modern
 times.1"
 The function of the elite then, was to act as a kind of intellectual
 or cultural mediator -- to serve, quite literally, as an interpreter be-
 tween two worlds. The conception reflected, in part, the actual positions
 which educated Africans had come to occupy in colonial society. Many of
 the individuals featured in the African Yearly Register were in fact in-
 terpreters. Most of the rest occupied a narrow range of professions -?
 they were clerks, teachers, ministers and journalists ? precisely medi-
 ating between dominant and subordinate cultures. Even the chiefs and the
 handful of black lawyers in the book occupied a kind of social middle
 ground.
 What Skota's book revealed was the degree to which such interstitial
 positions wera assumed to entail political leadership. The Register
 constantly rehearsed its subjects qualifications as 'spokesmen' and
 'representatives' of the race. Such a characterisation suggests, in part,
 the persistence and internalisation of an older colonial tradition in
 which status ostensibly reflected 'civilisation' rather than race ? a
 tradition which accorded the 'civilised' African trusteeship over his
 'raw' cousin. As Africans organised independent political institutions
 in the early 20th century, members of this 'civilised' elite considered
 it only natural that leadership should devolve upon them; the same dual
 facility which enabled them to interpret for their colonisers equipped
 them to represent the colonised. There was more than an element of
 condescension here, in this notion of political leadership as obligation
 and entitlement of the elite. As Tim Couzens has observed, the most
 frequent praise term in the highly formulaic 'Who's Who' section of the
 Yearly Register was 'interested in the welfare of his people.1 (Both it
 12
  For the draft Constituion, see SKOTA Box Ea. The quotation is taken
 from an undated, handwritten address in SKOTA Box Be.
 10
and the synecdoche 'progressive' appeared In forty-four of the sketches.)
 Elite women were invariably described as 'social workers.' The mark of
 success for such people lay in having 'earned the respect of both black
 and white.' And most telling of all was Skota's easy and often dismissive
 usage of 'the masses.'11
 Implicit in such language was a certain political style. Inevitably,
 the leaders who subscribed to this code relied on the petition, the
 deputation, or other constitutional means of protest. It is now almost
 de rigeur among historians to deride such methods as 'middle class' and
 implicitly collaborationist. Although such a characterisation has some
 merit, it remains essentially vacuous in the absence of any analysis of
 why particular leaders elected to use such methods. Alleging that leaders
 'clung' to constitutional tactics out of chronic 'naivete' makes the
 question disappear but it does not answer it. The African Yearly Register
 may supply part of the answer. What the book illustrates is the degree
 to which the elite's claim to leadership, indeed its sense of itself as
 a political group, rested precisely on its facility with such colonial
 rituals as the petition and deputation. This may have been collab-
 oration, but it was of a peculiarly self-referential kind. Indeed, in
 Skota's case it almost appears as if mastery of the forms of constitu-
 tional protest ceased to be a political means and became an end in itself.
 The Register celebrated, for example, the 1913 and '19 Congress deleg-
 ations to Britain in terms which scarcely hinted at their barren accom-
 plishments. And well into the 1960s, Skota continued proudly to note that
 he had led 'a number of delegations' to government ministers, including
 General Hertzog ? delegations which had without exception proved
 fruitless."
 Couzens, The New African, p. 16.
 An example of historians dismissing black leaders as naive can be
 found in Jack and Ray Simons' Class and Colour in South Africa
 1850-1950 (Harmondsworth: 1969). On p. 429 they note that 'The con-
 servatives [among whom they include Skota] ... never quite understood
 11
Skota and the elite of his generation were obsessed with 'leadership'.
 They discussed it: in endless articles in the black press, and when Skota
 started his own newspaper in 1931 he dubbed it The African Leader. Almost
 invariably, they equated political leadership with elite mediation. Un-
 fortunately, both the state above them and the masses below them were
 often indifferent to their brokerage. Members of the elite constantly
 lamented 'the thankless conduct of some of our people', or the travails
 of 'trying to establish the senseJofJleadership among our people.' The
 masses' inability to discern their natural leaders, their susceptibility
 to the blandishments of charismatic rabble rousers, is a running refrain
 in the black press. Solomon Plaatje wrote in 1926 of the masses being
 'senselessly traduced by opportunists' and wondered aloud if Africans
 might 'deserve the repressive legislation already on the Senate book.'
 R.V. Selope Thema, in an article the same year on 'The Problem of Bantu
 Leadership' spoke for Skota and all his elite comrades when he denounced
 'diviner' style leadership ? leadership which had 'become expert in Na-
 tive psychology and in exploiting every grievance for the purpose of se-
 curing popularity.' Equally galling was the state's failure to recognise
 the function of the black elite. The government consistently refused to
 place in the hands of the black elite the material and political resources
 it needed to consolidate its position within the black community. D.D.T.
 Jabavu put the matter baldly: 'The more intelligent section of the Bantu
 stands in the position of intermediary interpreter between the Europeans
 and the backward Africans.' Its influence, he added, 'cannot wisely be
 ignored by the Government.' The statement, with its self-serving use of
 their society or its power structure. They persisted in believing
 that liberation would come through reasoned argument, appeals to
 Christian ethics, and moderate constitutional protest.' Brian Willan
 supplies a necessary corrective, using the above statement as a
 starting point, in 'Sol Plaatje, De Beers and an Old Tram Shed: Class
 Relations and Social Control in a South African Town', in the Journal
 of Southern African Studies, v. 4, No. 2, 1978, pp. 195-215. See
 Skota's biographical sketch of himself, ca. 1960, in SKOTA, Box Ad.
 12
the criterion of 'intelligence', captured the black elite at its zenith;
 the final, almost pleading admonition, foreshadowed its gloaming.15
 Ill
 Skota himself was a distillation of the qualities he described in the
 African Yearly Register. His family came from the Eastern Cape. His
 father, Boyce Skota, was, according to the Register, of Hlubi royal de-
 scent. In 1866, Boyce and his brother Ndzimende, both in their teens,
 were swept up in a wave of revivals conducted by an itinerant American
 evangelist and converted to Christianity. Ndzimende became a Wesleyan
 preacher and spent his life proselytising in Herschel District; Boyce
 enrolled at the Wesleyan school at Healdtown, where he qualified as a
 teacher. Over the next two decades Boyce Skota worked as teacher, court
 interpreter, and lay preacher ? a circuit which virtually defined the
 ambit of the educated, Christian African in the late 19th century Cape.
 While teaching in Alexandria, he married Lydia Gumede, daughter of John
 Tshangana Gumede and bearer of a similar elite, Christian pedigree.
 Somewhere around 1890, the couple joined the trek to the diamond fields.
 Trevor Dundas Mweli Skota was born a few months later."
 In Kimberley, the Skotas presumably settled, in Fingo Location, which
 was, as Brian Willan has shown, the virtual cradle of South: Africa's urban
 black middle class. Boyce Skota worked until his retirement at the
 15
  See D.D.T Jabavu to A.B. Xuma, 26 Hay, 1938, and Rev. J.A. Calata to
 Xuma, 18 August, 1938, both in the Xuma papers at the University of
 the Witwatersrand. Plaatje's comment is from Umteteli wa Bantu, 19
 June, 1926; Selope Thema's is from the same paper, 3 April, 1926.
 The final statement is fromJabavu's foreword to Rev. Allen Lea's The
 native Separatist Church Movement in South Africa (Cape Town: 1926).
 " Register, pp. 256-8.
 13
Kiraberley Post Office, where he was soon joined by young Solomon Plaatje.
 He accumulated sufficient property to appear on the Cape voters' roll.
 Lydia settled in as a leader of the Wesleyan manyano and as a 'social
 worker and an important member of the community.' She was, the Register
 assured readers, 'respected by all who know her, both black and white.'
 Skota thus was born into Kimberley's elite, into a community bound by
 churches and cricket clubs, by debating societies and above all by music.
 (The visit of the McAdoo Singers from Hampton University in the year of
 Skota's birth introduced Kimberley to the American spiritual -- the first
 link in a chain of events that led to the introduction of the black
 American African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church into South Africa.)
 Forty years later, writing in the Yearly Register, Skota persisted in
 celebrating his subjects' piety, cricketing prowess or 'fine singing
 voice'. Read today, such details ring incongruously, but for Skota they
 were the ligatures of community.17
 No evidence remains of Skota's early education. He probably attended
 De Beers' Lyndhurst Road School; he did not proceed beyond secondary
 school. Only in 1910 does he surface in his own right. That year, at
 the age of twenty, Skota came to Johannesburg. He went to work as a clerk
 at Crown Mines. Mine clerking represented one of the spaces opened for
 the educated African by South Africa's ongoing industrial revolution.
 Typically, it was an interstitial space, lying smack between white capital
 and black labour. While this sojourn on the Rand lasted only two years,
 it was undoubtedly a formative time for young Skota. In Johannesburg,
 he witnessed the opening of a lifelong onslaught against what he regarded
 as the entitlements of his class. The Act of Union, specifically the
 failure to extend a colour blind franchise to the old Republics, cut the
 17
  Register, p. 257 and ff.; Willan, Sol Plaatje: A Biography, chapter
 2. On the visit of the McAdoo Singers, see Veit Erlmann, 'A Feeling
 of Prejudice: Orpheus M. McAdoo and the Virginia Singers in South
 Africa, 1690-1898', paper presented at the African Studies Institute.
 Seminar at the University of the Witwatersrand, 25 August, 1986.
 14
legs from beneath the emerging black middle class on the Rand. In the
 Cape, where propertied Africans wielded decisive power in a number of
 constituencies, the vote served to consolidate the position of the black
 elite. Voting lent substance to the claims of the propertied to act as
 trustees for all Africans;- it also provided a weapon with which they could
 defend themselves against discriminatory legislation. In contrast, the
 emergent middle class on the Rand would remain far more vulnerable to
 state enactments, and its status vis a vis the black proletariat would
 remain more problematic.1*
 Skota was still in Johannesburg when the state published draft legis-
 lation for the Natives' Land Act. The impact of the Land Act on black
 class formation ? and on Skota --can hardly be overstated. The Act
 restricted black land purchase to 7.3% of the area, of South Africa.
 Virtually none of the scheduled land fell in the Transvaal. Unlike his
 counterparts in the Cape or even Natal, where reserve land was more
 plentiful, Skota never succeeded in gaining access to land. During his
 lifetime he engaged in various land-buying ventures, but ultimately his
 fortunes were confined to the city. It was also in the wake of the draft
 legislation that Skota had his first experience in national politics.
 His role in the formation of the Native Congress is obscure, but he did
 later claim to have helped Pixley Seme in launching Abantu-Batho, the
 Congress' quasi-official organ. He apparently worked as sub-editor of
 the paper, before returning to Kimberley in 1913. He carried. Congress
 credentials back with him, and at some point in the next few years he was
 elected President of the Griqualand West and Bechuanaland Native National
 Congress.1*
 " Register, p. 257.
 " Ibid, p. 257.
 15
Skota spent the next decade In Kimberley. Little can be gleaned about
 his life there. From 1913-19 he worked as an interpreter in the
 Griqualand West division of the Supreme Court. He was apparently anxious
 to improve himself. A 1915 letter from the Chicago Correspondence School
 of Law reveals an abortive attempt to read law. A letter a year later
 from the 'Dickson School of Memory', also of Chicago, urged him to finish
 his course in 'Memory Training', which, the letterhead assured him, was
 'The Key to Success.' In 1918, he served on the executive of Plaatje's
 Kimberley 'Brotherhood', a movement transplanted from England which aimed
 in part at introducing principles of 'practical Christianity' and broth-
 erhood into the world of industrial conflict. It seems plausible that
 Skota was one of the 'moderate natives' who, in the absence of Plaatje
 in 1919, helped forestall a general strike against Be Beers.20
 Skota cemented his social position by marriage. In 1920 he married
 Francis Xiniwe. Francis was a third generation Lovedale graduate and a
 teacher at Lyndhurst Road. Her parents, Paul and Eleanor Xiniwe, were
 the epitome of an older, pre-segregation elite. After graduating from
 Lovedale, Paul Xiniwe worked as a teacher, accumulating sufficient capi-
 tal to buy property in a number of Eastern Cape cities. In King
 Williamstown, he owned and ran the Temperance Hotel (the name reflected
 his abstemiousness), which faced onto the city's Market Square and catered
 largely for whites. Both Paul and Eleanor Xiniwe had toured Europe with
 the South African Native Choir, singing before royalty, including Queen
 Victoria. The Xiniwe family was one of the most established in the Cape,
 and marrying into it did young Skota's prospects no harm.11
 Ibid, p. 257. The letters from Chicago are found in SKOTA, Box Bal.
 On the Brotherhood, see Solomon Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa
 (London, 1916), chapter 18 and Brian Willan, Sol Plaatje: A
 Biography, pp. 219-221. On the averted strike at De Beers, see
 Willan, 'Sol Plaatje, De Beers and an Old Tram Shed...1
 Register, pp. 108-109, 258, 280-281.
 16
He was Indeed a lad of prospects. He was a politician of national
 stature. He served as chairman and sang bass in the Abantu-Batho anisic
 troupe, the very pinnacle of black Kimberley society. He was a member
 of the Synod of the Church of the Province of South Africa, and, he later
 claimed, the bishop's ??'righthand layman'; half a century later: he still
 took pains to mention that he was 'the only non-European member of the
 Diocesan. Board of Education.' (Ironically, his marriage to Francis Xiniwe
 forced him to sever this cherished European connection. Francis was a
 divorcee, a fact which precipitated Skota's resignation from the C.P.S.A.
 He apparently Joined the A.H.E. Church at this tine, an all-black insti-
 tution which nonetheless possessed deep roots within Kimberley'a black
 middle class.) Unfortunately, Skota's economic fortunes did not keep pace
 with his social advance. After resigning as court interpreter he briefly
 served as Kimberley representative of a Cape Town-based black life in-
 surance company. In 1922, he stepped down another well-trod path: he
 founded and edited a newspaper. But, like Plaatje before him, he lacked
 the capital to sustain the venture, and The African Shield folded after
 a few issues. No copies survive. What these failures portend is a
 growing disjunction between Skota's social and economic status ? a dis-
 junction which was to become a defining feature of his life. His standing
 in the black elite was rock solid. He was destitute."
 12
  A program from a concert of the Abantu Batho Musical Association on
 12 December, 1919 can be found in SKOTA, Box 6. Skota sang In a
 quartet that evening with Francis Xiniwe. On his role in the
 C.P.S.A., see his letter to Father P.H. Coxan, 2 January, 1962, in
 Box Ba3, and his biographical sketch of himself from the same period
 in Box Ad. On insurance, see Register, p. 257. On the African
 Shield, see Les and Donna Switzer, The Black Press In South Africa
 and Lesotho: A Descriptive Bibliographical Guide to African, Coloured
 and Indian Newspapers, Newsletters and Magazines 1836-1976, (Boston:
 1979), p. 6.
 17
IV
 Skota returned to Johannesburg in about 1923. He settled in Pimville,
 his home for the last half century of his life. Pimville, initially known
 as Klipspruit, lay about a dozen miles southwest of Johannesburg, on the
 site of an old sewerage farm. Its creation, amidst a plague scare two-
 decades before, marked the first, removal of Africans from the central
 city. The land on which the location was built remained the property of
 the municipality; residents paid a monthly rent for stands and built their
 own dwellings according to their means. With only a handful of water taps
 and no sanitation, Pimville was already by 1923 blighted and decaying.
 Nonetheless, it remained a cohesive community, largely centred on the
 A.M.E. Church. As a church member and a national politician, Skota was
 quickly assumed into Pimville's elite."
 On the Rand, Skota went to work full-time for Abantu Batho, eventually
 becoming editor of the paper. His skills as journalist and printer were
 probably in high demand, for the creation of Umteteli ua Bantu (a rival
 newspaper established by the Chamber of Mines as a moderate alternative
 to Abantu Batho) had drained the struggling Congress paper of skilled
 personnel. From the vantage of Abantu, Skota went on to become Acting
 General Secretary of the South African Native National Congress. By 1925
 he had been elected in his own right to the post, which he held, for most
 of the ensuing decade.24
 1 1
  On Pimville, see the City of Johannesburg's Non-European and Native
 Affairs Department Survey of Reef Locations, May, 1939. The obser-
 vation about the role of the A.M.E. Church in the community is drawn
 from my own research and is pursued in a forthcoming paper.
 J
 * Register, p. 257. On the creation of Umteteli, see Tim Couzens,
 'History of the Black Press in South Africa, 1836-1960', unpublished
 paper, p. 23. Skota referred to the loss of personnel from Abantu
 in an interview with Paul Rich. See Rich, 'Ministering to the White
 Man's Needs: The Development of Urban Segregation in South Africa,
 1913-1923', paper delivered to the History Workshop, University of
 the Witwatersrand, February, 1978, fn. 25, p. 23.
 18
Little is known about Skota's activities as General Secretary of the
 Congress. He is credited with foreshortening the name of the organisation
 to its present 'African National Congress.' The proposal clearly re-
 fleeted Skota's attachment to Garveyism, as did his well-known suggestion
 in 1930 that the Congress assemble a 'monster conclave' of all theop-
 pressed 'negro' people from the Cape to Cairo. He also apparently cred-
 ited himself with the decision to to adopt Nkosi Slkelel' lAfrika as the
 Congress anthem in place of the more parochial Umteteli wa Land Act.
 Aside from such fragments, Skota's activities in the Congress remain
 largely obscure. Walshe lumps him with the 'radical' faction surrounding
 Gumede and Abantu Bat ho; Simons and Simons implicitly characterise him
 as one of the 'good boys' who helped engineer Pixley Seme's overthrow of
 Gumede and the communists.2 *
 Neither label is particularly helpful. Skota evidently moved among
 both 'radicals' and 'good boys.' Gumede was his uncle, and the two were
 always personally close. They were colleagues on Abantu Batho and later
 business partners. Yet when Gumede assumed the Presidency of the Con-
 gress, Skota was replaced as General Secretary by E.J. Khaile, an execu-
 tive member of the South African Communist Party and a former leader of
 the I.C.U. Skota recovered the office in 1928 or '29, still during
 Gumede's tenure. Skota was also close to Seme, having worked with him
 on Abantu Batho during his first visit to Johannesburg. He remained on
 as Secretary following Seme's accession and purge of the Executive. Two
 years later, however, he spearheaded the group which denounced Seme for
 his lack of leadership. It was Skota who called the emergency session
 which accused Seme of 'culpable inertia1; and he headed the committee
 26
  Gwendolyn Carter and Thomas Karis (eds.), From Protest to Challenge:
 A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa,
 1882-1964, 4 volumes (Stanford, 1972-77), v.I, 306-308, 312 and v.
 IV, p. 146; Peter Walshe, The Rise of African Nationalism in South
 Africa: The African National Congress 1912-1952 (Berkeley, 1971), pp.
 99, 175-176; Simons and Simons, Class and Colour pp. 392, 422, 429.
 On the adoption of 'Nkosi...', see the letter to Skota from Mary
 Benson, 10 August, 1962, in SKOTA, Box Ba4.
 19
chosen to oversee the reorganization and resuscitation of the Congress.
 Still, he did not break with Seme; the two apparently worked closely in
 preparing for the Bloemfontein Convention of April, 1933. Only after the
 fiasco at Bloemfontein did Skota speak out decisively, comparing Seme's
 tactics to those of a 'cornered monkey' and denouncing him for betraying
 'certain leaders in Johannesburg [who had done] all in their power to
 co-operate' with him. For all of that, his relationship with Seme ap-
 parently remained cordial into the 1940s."
 The foregoing suggests that the dichotomy between 'moderates' and
 'radicals' is grossly inadequate for disentangling the web of association
 within the inter-war Congress. Ideology was mediated by ties of family
 and friendship, by business connections, by personality. Even in the best
 of circumstances, ideology provided an uncertain marker, for within the
 Congress ideas were used promiscuously and with little consistency.
 Again, Skota illustrates the point. He borrowed freely from Garvoy,
 particularly in promoting the idea that colonialism was the primary menace
 to all African people. He supported the decision to affiliate the A.N.C.
 with the League Against Imperialism, and was selected, along with Gumede,
 Selope Thema and Levi Mvabaza, to represent Congress at the League's 1929
 Paris convention. (The abortive delegation planned to proceed from there
 to Jamaica for a convention of Garvey's U.N.I.A.) For all of that, he
 continued to style himself as a loyal subject of the Crown, and persisted
 in portraying British liberalism as a kind of social ideal. The African
 Yearly Register contained a dozen pages of photographs from the Prince
 of Wales' African tour, and Skota dispatched a copy of the newly published
 book to the Prince. Through most of the following year he prominently
 26
  Skota's relationship to Gumede is established in the sketch of his
 mother, Lydia Gumede Skota, in the Register, p. 258; the one surviving
 letter from Gumede to Skota is addressed to 'My dear nephew.' (11
 August, 1942, in SKOTA, Box Ba2.) His relationship with Seme can be
 gleaned from The African Leader ? the scathing quotation is taken
 from the 6 May, 1933 issue. However, letters to Skota from his second
 wife (see below) suggest that he and Seme remained friends into the
 1940s.
 20
displayed the polite reply he received from the Prince's Private Secre-
 Sfcota's attitude toward communism was equally idiosyncratic. He was
 never a party member. As a newspaper editor he printed various
 anti-communist screeds, and on one occasion he dismissed communism as just
 another 'foreign' ideology impeding the search for an authentic 'African
 Creed.' Nonetheless, he joined Gumede in defending affiliation with the
 League, which many in the Congress denounced as a surrender to Moscow.
 And even if he rejected the communists' program, he certainly imbibed
 their idiom. The result was sometimes bizarre, as for example when he
 dismissed allegations that the League was a communist, front as a phantasm
 of 'Imperialists and Capitalists.'2'
 Insofar as Skota had a preoccupation during his decade as A.N.C.
 General Secretary, it was less with advancing the interests of a partic-
 ular faction than with maintaining the unity and effectiveness of the
 Congress as an institution. Congress embodied for Skota the essence of
 political leadership ? it was responsible, scrupulously legal, adept in
 the ways of the colonisers, and dominated by people who, whatever their
 ideological differences, were all natural leaders and 'spokesmen' of the
 race. He was well-chosen to launch the reorganisation drive. He was
 tireless in his efforts to distribute membership cards, ensure that local
 branches were properly chartered and registered, and collar local
 factions which had flouted the leadership of the National Executive.
 2 7
  On the planned A.N.C. delegation, see the draft program for the 1929
 Convention of the Congress, written in Skota's hand, in SKOTA, Box
 Be. File NTS 1681 2/276 v. I, at the Pretoria Archives Depot, sug-
 gests that the deputation collapsed when members could not raise money
 for their passage. The letter from the Prince's Secretary is printed
 in most issues of The African Leader. On the Prince's tour, see
 Register, pp. 110-121.
 21
  Anti-communist articles can be found in many issues of The African
 Leader. The characterisation of communism comes from an undated,
 handwritten address in SKOTA, Box Be. For his unusual defense of the
 League Against Imperialism, see the 1929 draft Congress program.
 21
Unity was his watchcry. 'The African people are crying for something
 capable of drawing them together,' he wrote in the days before the 1933
 Convention. Congress, in failing to provide that unified leadership, had
 surrendered the field to groups like, the I.C.U., which 'contented itself
 with shouting "high wages" and "away with the Pass Laws" and in addition
 made promises it could never fulfil.' The admonition was revealing. To
 Skota, the I.C.U. represented headless politics, a movement of the masses
 untempered by the elite's superior insight. He suggested that Congress
 bring the masses back into the fold by introducing its own responsible
 trade union wing, 'guided by the National Executive.' 'Without this,'
 he warned, 'Congress will always find itself weakened whenever such
 movements as the I.C.U. which appeal to the natural instincts of the
 workers start ingratiating themselves with the masses.' Whether he was
 a 'radical' or a 'good boy', Skota remained convinced that political
 leadership was the province of a responsible elite.1*
 Skota's return to Johannesburg coincided with the passage of the 1923
 Natives (Urban Areas) Act. The Act, the foundation of all subsequent
 urban segregation bills in South Africa, had devastating implications for
 the black elite on the Rand. As Paul Rich and others have noted, the Act
 represented something of a turning point in the state's attitude toward
 the black middle classes. The idea of trying to co-opt the black elite
 had been widely mooted in the wake of World War I. The disaffected 'ed-
 ucated native' was a staple character in the writings of white liberals
 of the period, many of whom had witnessed firsthand the dangers of coop-
 29
  See The African Leader, especially 11 February, 1 April, and IS April,
 1933. Skota's portrait of the I.C.U. in the Register contains the
 only critical remark in the book, when he notes that 'speeches made
 by some of its members were unwise and unnecessary...' (p. 429).
 22
eration between black proletariat and elite daring the Witwatersrand
 'disturbances' of 1918-1920. European missionaries, educators and social
 workers responded with a concerted campaign to reinvigorate 'moderate'
 black leadership, a campaign made possible through the largesse of the
 Rand mining houses. Aggrey's visit, the launching of Omteteli, the cre-
 ation of Joint Councils, Bantu Hens' Social Centre, and later the South
 African Institute of Race Relations all represented efforts to create
 forums for the educated and thereby win back, their loyalty. Many whites
 went so far as to advocate granting urban freehold rights in order to
 stimulate the growth of a stable, propertied class in the municipal lo-
 cations. A 1919 Transvaal Commission, for example, suggested freehold
 as one solution to native grievances in Nancefield, a Johannesburg lo-
 cation which encompassed Skota's home in Pimville."
 Enthusiasm for such ideas ebbed. The deflation of 1921 highlighted
 the costs of any co-optation scheme; while the white miners' revolt of
 1922 served to remind the mining houses of the advantages of maintaining
 a society polarised along racial rather than class lines. With the report
 of the Stallard Commission in 1922, talk of cultivating a black middle
 class was displaced by the idea that all natives, regardless of their
 stature, lived in cities on white sufferance. While draft urban legis-
 On the Urban Areas Act see Paul Rich, 'Ministering to the White Man's
 Needs'; T.R.H. Davenport, 'African Townsmen? South African Natives
 (Urban Areas) Legislation through the Years', African Affairs, Vol.
 68, 1969, pp. 95-109; and Davenport, 'The Triumph of Colonel Stallard:
 The Transformation of the Natives (Urban Areas) Act between 1923 and
 1937', South African Bistorical Journal, No. 2, 1970, pp. 77-96.
 For related material on the black middle class on the Rand in the
 1920s, see Couzens, 'Moralizing Leisure Time: The Transatlantic Con-
 nection and Black Johannesburg , in Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone
 (eds.), Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa (London,
 1982), pp. 314-337; Philip Bonner, 'The Transvaal Native Congress,
 1917-1920: The Radicalisation of the Black Petty Bourgeoisie on the
 Rand', in Marks and Rathbone, pp. 270-313; and Bonner, ^The 1920 Black
 Mineworkers1 Strike: A Preliminary Account1, in Belinda Bozzoli (ed.)
 Labour, Townships and Protest: Studies in the Social History of the
 Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, 1979). A classic lament of the educated
 African's disaffection and potential for agitation is Rev. F.B.
 Bridgman's Annual Report for the Transvaal to the American Board
 Mission in June 1918, in the ABM papers, A/3/42, at the Natal Archives
 Depot.
 23
lation included provisions for accommodating the black middle classes,
 particularly through the granting of freehold rights, all such provisions
 had been excised by the time the Urban Areas Act became law. Property
 would be held on short lease, and only in specifically designated native
 locations. Provisions for a more liberal policy on pass law exemptions,
 embodied in the 1923 Natives Registration and Protection Bill, were sim-
 ilarly scuttled. Some residue of earlier thinking persisted in the form
 of Location Advisory Board, though municipalities were under no obli-
 gation to convene or consult them. In sum, the Act embodied the Stallard
 doctrine that blacks were in cities solely to 'minister to the white man's
 needs."1
 The Natives (Urban Areas) Act raised howls of protest from the black
 elite. Congress denounced it as 'a direct challenge to the loyalty of
 the Bantu and an insult of the most provocative character to the sense
 of fairness of the Bantu.' Beneath the rhetoric of loyalty and fairness
 lay the issue of accumulation. Restrictions on property ownership cut
 most deeply, especially among people like Skota who were new to an urban
 area. Blacks who already owned property might keep it or at least receive
 compensation, and property rights of legitimate heirs were protected.
 Such loopholes, however, ensured only the survival of a residual class
 of property holders in old freehold areas. Entry into the class was
 blocked. The Act similarly restricted access to pass exemptions, ensuring
 that the children of Skota and his cohort would face the spectre of passes
 and labour contracts which their parents had largely avoided. Even in
 the locations, the position of the black elite was jeopardised. In en-
 hancing municipal regulatory power, the Urban Areas Act freed munici-
 palities to enact a dizzying array of licensing, leasing, and trading
 regulations, most of which aimed to choke off black traders and
 shopowners. In the Free State, for example, municipalities used such
 11
  Rich, 'Ministering to the White Man's Needs'; Davenport, 'The Triumph
 of Colonel Stallard'.
 24
i 'v regulations to maintain the traditional ban against all black commerce
 t in the cities.'*
 * The Urban Areas Act o? 1923, subsequently tightened, in 1930 and '37,
 - i
 I ' did more to undermine the welfare of the urban black elite than any other
 i
 single piece of legislation. And it was only the opening salvo: The Fact
 Government, elected a year later, proceeded to attack what few elite
 niches the Urban Areas legislation had left unscathed. Job reservation,
 ? accelerating through the '20s and into the depression, foreclosed many
 of the clerical and semi-skilled positions traditionally occupied by ed-
 ucated blacks. In short, within a few years of Skota's arrival on the
 : Rand, the material foundation of the black urban elite had been gutted.
 Urban Africans' fortunes would be confined to segregated, impoverished
 locations, in which their rights to own property, to trade, and to utilise,
 their skills were tightly circumscribed.
 The elaboration of urban segregation foreclosed avenues of accumu-
 lation, but at the same time it created new possibilities. By ensuring
 that all black businessmen would face similar handicaps -- most notably,
 the limited size of the market for their goods and services, together with
 a chronic shortage of credit ? segregationist legislation paved the way
 for the organisation of racial cooperatives. Skota responded with
 alacrity. In 1926 he floated the 'African and Indian Trading Association,
 Ltd.' His partners in the venture were K.V. Patel and D.M. Nursoo, two
 Indian solicitors in Johannesburg, Reverend H.R. Ngcayiya, head of the
 Ethiopian Church and a founder of the A.N.C., and, after Ngcayiya's death,
 Gumede. The Association was a classic self-help organisation, and it bore
 the clear imprint of Garveyism. It sought to concentrate the resources
 ( of the black community through cooperative financing, purchasing and
 . wholesaling. By supplying black retailers directly, the Association
 11
  The statement by the Congress is quoted in Rich, 'Ministering ',.
 p. 19.
 25
would cut out white middlemen and stop the flow of wealth out of the
 African community; profits could be used to provide credit to other
 capital-shy black entrepreneurs. From the beginning, however, the Asso-
 ciation was itself capital-shy, with registered capital of 10 000 II
 shares, of which Skota and his co-directors subscribed 203. While the
 company prospectus conceded the small capitalisation, it went on to out-
 line a grandiose series of proposals. Once the company had secured a
 foothold in wholesaling, warehousing and import-export, it would plough
 profits back into land, with the ultimate aim. of accumulating 30 000 acres
 'outside the Union of South Africa'. There the Company would settle and
 equip 300 shareholder tenants who would produce a variety of staples for
 marketing through the Association. Black-owned factories would comple-
 ment the scheme, producing necessities such as shoes and clothing. Ul-
 timately, the Association aimed at nothing less than the creation of an
 independent black economy in the sub-continent."
 Nothing envisaged in the Association's prospectus reached fruition.
 The company never obtained land. One fragment in Skota's papers suggests
 that the Association sought permission in 1931 to erect a private native
 hostel in Ferreirastown, Johannesburg ? itself evidence of Skota's sen-
 sitivity to the economic opportunities afforded by segregationist legis-
 lation. In the same year, the Company purchased the decaying printing
 plant of Abantu Batho. The press, donated by the Queen Regent of
 Swaziland in 1913, had been purchased on behalf of the Congress in 1929
 by Gumede, who in turn conveyed both it and the paper to the Company in
 1931. When the debt-ridden paper collapsed a few months later, the
 African and Indian Trading Association apparently went with it.3"
 " A copy of the Company prospectus can be found in SKOTA, Box Bal. An
 advertisemsnt for the Company, featuring plans for shoe and clothing
 factories, is in Skota's handwritten draft program for the 1929 A.N.C.
 Convention, in SKOTA, Box Be.
 ** SKOTA, Box Bal. Switzer and Switzer, The Black Press, pp. 25-27;
 Couzens, 'History of the Black Press in South Africa', pp. 22-23.
 26
While unique in the scope of its vision, the African and Indian Trading
 Association was in many ways representative of the cooperative movement
 of the 1920s and '30s. First, it revealed an intertwining of business
 and political affiliations. Two of Skota's partners were colleagues on
 the A.N.C. Executive; subscribers were solicited along Congress networks.
 (A copy was sent to John Dube's Ilanga Lose Natal, which endorsed it with
 the hope that.,'the lethargy that has so long characterised the Native will
 be trans formed, by the sharp wits of the Indians who are well-known experts
 in business principles.') Within a few years, similar ventures had been
 launched by Kadalie's I.C.U. faction and by a Congress coterie centred
 on Pixley Seme.. Examples could be multiplied. One possible implication
 is that political office, while rarely well-remunerated, could be crucial
 in opening up certain avenues of accumulation. Secondly, the Association
 well illustrates the disjunction between 'shadow and substance' so char-
 acteristic of the cooperative movement. Host cooperatives, including
 this one, were profit-making enterprises launched by middle class busi-
 nessmen. Inevitably, however, they were portrayed in far more radical
 terms, often as a form of resistance to exploitation by white capitalists.
 Finally the African and Indian Trading Association was representative in
 the rapidity of its demise. As with so many of black cooperatives, the
 shortage of capital which gave it birth also killed it."
 " Ilanga laseNatal, 11 February, 1927. My thanks to Paul la Hausse
 for sharing this reference with me. See also, Rich, White Power and
 the Liberal Conscience: Racial Segregation and South African
 Liberalism (Johannesburg, 1984), pp.34-49 and Walshe, The Rise of
 African Nationalism, pp. 145-147. Skota remined convinced of the
 merits of racial cooperation throughout his life. In 1948, he es-
 tablished a national purchasing cooperative for black shopkeepers,
 the African Federation of Trade, Commerce and Industry, aimed at
 'consolidating African Businesses on fa]sound business basis.' (See
 SKOTA Box Do.) In 1961, he attempted to launched the African Terri-
 torial Commerce & Industries, Ltd. (SKOTA Fe) Both ventures quickly
 withered for want of capital. Material on the cooperative movement,
 which still needs systematic treatment, can be found in the Ballinger
 Papers at the University of the Witwatersrand. For a comparative
 perspective on racial cooperatives as a response to segregation, the
 best place to begin is still August Meier's Negro Thought in America
 (Ann Arbor, 1963), pp. 119-157.
 27
Skota's career as a journalist did not end with the collapse of Abantu
 Batho. The paper's printing plant was rescued from the liquidators by
 another African, George Hashe, a former mine compound superintendent.
 Hashe promptly launched a new paper, The African Leader, with Skota as
 editor. Skota characterised the Leader as the lineal descendent of
 Abantu, and editorially it probably differed little from its predecessor.
 The paper, which survived only about a year, enabled Skota to air his
 views on 'African Culture' and the virtues of racial self-help, as well
 as to advertise the newly published African Yearly Register. The paper
 also provided him with a forum to resist the continuing assault on the
 prerogatives of the black elite. Throughout the pages of the African
 Leader, Skota decried policies seemingly calculated to undermine the
 'progressive class1 of Africans. He was especially caustic after reading
 the report of the 1932 Native Economic Commission. While broadly sympa-
 thetic with its recommendations for stimulating the Reserves, Skota de-
 nounced the Commission for its casual dismissal of the needs of what the
 Commissioners chose to characterise as 'a small, vocal, dissatisfied,
 semi-civilised group of urbanised Natives.' In overlooking the interests
 of the elite, Skota argued, the Commission betrayed its indifference to
 racial progress. History, he wrote, 'is brimful of evidence ... that the
 development of a race obtains its impetus from a few of its members who
 have made good.' A 'progressive class ... creates ambition'; its 'in-
 dustry and progressiveness ... radiate and permeate' the community around
 it; the 'masses' follow 'in the natural way.' The South African govern-
 ment, however, had chosen to arrest the race's leaders on the pretext that
 their 'illiterate kinsmen' must first be awakened. Such a policy, Skota
 concluded, represented nothing but a cynical attempt to preserve white
 supremacy.16
 36
  The African Leader 4 June, 1932. See also 31 December, 1932 and
 Switzer and Switzer, The Black Press, p. 27. Couzens suggests that
 the Leader was torpedoed by the proprietors of the white-owned Bantu
 World and Umteteli, who joined together to obtain Hashe's outstanding
 bond with a printing machinery company. 'History of the Black Press',
 pp. 27-28.
 28
The editorial was uncharacteristically vituperative. In part, its
 tone no doubt reflected the looming presence of the Hertzog Bills. First
 tabled in. 1926 and passed in ammended form ten years later, the Bills
 shadowed Skota's every turn as General Secretary of tha Congress. He
 served on the A.N.C. deputation sent to Cape Town in 1926 to monitor the'
 Bills' progress through Parliament, and throughout the ensuing decade he
 railed against the Bills at every opportunity. In 1935 and '36, he served
 on the Transvaal Executive of the All-Africa Convention, apparently with
 the conviction that the Convention would not displace the Congress as a
 permanent body. Politically, he no doubt found the Convention congenial.
 While the A.A.C. noted the grievances of farm labourers, tenants, and
 industrial workers, its delegates were generally drawn from the black
 elite and the debates reflected elite preoccupations. The provision to
 stop non-tribal cooperative purchase of land draw the fiercest fire. The
 restriction struck at the vitals of urban Africans, like Skota, who pos-
 sessed neither tribal affiliation nor the resources to purchase land in-
 dependently. D.D.T.- Jabavu, in his 1935 Presidential Address, denounced
 the proposal as an attempt 'to shunt the Natives from all civilised
 spheres back to tribal life', adding, 'No path is offered by which we ray
 travel to full blown citizenship through either education or wealth."7
 Equally galling was the elimination of the Cape African franchise.
 For Skota, Jabavu, and others: who had come of age in the Cape, the fran-
 chise represented real political power. It also was a potent symbol, for
 it embodied the last opportunity for Africans to participate in the wider
 society. Skota's own devotion to racial self-help had not dimmed his
 commitment to the goal of full participation,, and he commenced marshalling
 funds for a legal challenge to the Franchise Bill. A letter written to
 A.B. Xuma about the fundraising campaign in the Transvaal revealed the
 *
 T
  Carter and Karis, From Protest to Challenge, v. I, p. 302. 'The
 Findings of the All-Africa Convention, pamphlet among Skota's books,.
 no publication data, p. 26.
 29
co-existence of separatist methods and integrationist goals in Skota's
 thinking: 'We feel it is the bounden duty of the native to finance this
 case, although we have information that some of our European friends are
 willing to support.' Ultimately, however, the legal challenge proved
 unavailing. The Bill passed, taking with it the last vestige, of Cape
 liberalism. There was little for Skota to do except preserve the legacy
 of the struggle. In 1938 he began collecting materials for a pictoral
 history of the All-Africa Convention, a project he never completed. He
 kept among his papers until his death copies of the proceedings of the
 1935 and '36 Conventions, as well as a tattered copy of the 1923 Kimberley
 Voters Roll, which contained the names of both himself and his father."
 Little other evidence remains from this period of Skota's life.
 Francis Xiniwe Skota died in 1933. Skota was remarried, in about 1938,
 to Zilpah Shupinyaneng, daughter of an A.M.E. Church minister stationed
 at Pimville. The contrast between Francis Xiniwe and Zilpah Shupinyaneng
 paralleled Skota's own trajectory, away from a mission-educated,
 pre-segregation Cape elite into an elite defined by segregation. In
 contrast to Francis Xiniwe, Zilpah, who worked as a doctor's receptionist,
 was only modestly educated. Surviving letters suggest she was defensive
 about her lack of schooling and occasionally resentful of Skota's greater
 polish. In one letter during their courtship, she accused Skota of re-
 fusing to see her in order to preserve his reputation. For all of that,
 it was a successful marriage, despite Skota's flagging fortunes. 'Your
 poorness cant part me with you,' she assured him in one letter. 'I will
 stay with you even in bear foot.'"
 " Letter from Skota to Xuma, April 11, 1936, in the Xuma papers.
 19
  A handful of letters to Skota, all but a few from Zilpah, are housed
 with the Oral History Project at the African Studies Institute, Uni-
 versity of the Witwatersrand (hereafter ASI/OHP). See 10 October,
 1936, an undated letter from 1937, and 6 May, 1941.
 30
The depression, together with the wartime inflation hard on its heels,
 exacted a heavy price from Skota. All of Zilpah'a letters between 1939
 and 1942 were sent from Klerksdorp, where she lived with her family, ap-
 parently because Skota had been forced to take subtenants into their
 Pimville home. Her letters are affectionate and she visited when she
 could raise train fare, but she steadfastly refused to return until he
 had at least sub-divided the rooms in their house to afford her some
 privacy. She often asked Skota to forward odds and ends ? a few
 shillings for a pair of shoes (she had been forced to sell her only pair),
 a jar of. shampoo or skin lightener, a small glass basin to save her the
 humiliation of arriving at a friend's wedding empty-handed ? but for the
 most part she was supported by her father. In one letter she noted that
 she had taken to wearing her mother's old dresses, both because she could
 afford none and also, apparently, because she was pregnant. A son was
 born in about 1941, but mother and child were sickly and the boy died a
 few years later.*0
 Whatever money Skota earned during these years, he earned as a printer.
 According to stationery from the period, he continued as Managing Director
 of the African Leader Press, Ltd.. Working from-the old Leader attic*
 on Commissioner Street, he probably attracted some casual European trade,
 but the bulk of his business undoubtedly came from the African market.
 Again, his political connections certainly helped, enabling him to land
 contracts for handbills and posters. Equally important was his affil-
 iation with the A.M.E. Church, for which he printed a variety of posters,
 certificates, and a calendar. Dependence on black trade was hazardous,
 however, for the black printing market was small and, in light of, the
 number of failed, black newspapers, highly competitive. In 1941, a rival
 press appeared, floated by Godfrey Kuzwayo and two A.M.E.C. ministers,
 P.N. Selepe and N.B. Tantsi. Tantsi, once prominent in the South African
 " ASI/OHP, see especially April 17, April 20, April 23, May 2 and. May
 6, 1941.
 31
Communist Party, was a son of one of the A.M.E. Church's South African
 founders; Kuzwayo, a former Bantu World society columnist, was the
 church's financial secretary. With its privileged position, the group
 quickly cornered the market on church publications, including a lucrative
 contract for 10 000 hymnals.. Skota's business was crippled. By 1942 he
 was unable to pay his rent, his furniture had been sequestrated, and he
 seems to have lost his printing press. If letterheads can be believed,
 the African Leader Press lingered on into the 1950s, but Skota was never
 able to muster the capital to buy another press.*1
 The papers provide little evidence on how Skota survived over the next
 two decades. His two forays back into the world of racial cooperatives
 floundered; his printing business was moribund. He received some money
 from subtenants, along with a stipend for service on the Pimville Advisory
 Board. He remained an inveterate schemer. He briefly engaged with
 Wilfred Sentso in renting musical instruments. He priced chainsaws and
 obtained a permit to clear old trees from Pimville, in hopes of selling
 wood. Seeing the increasing number of cars in Soweto, he solicited loans
 to start a battery charging business; in a characteristic flight of en-
 thusiasm, he predicted the business would grow into an electrification
 scheme bringing lights into 'the homes of progressive natives.1 He also,
 on occasion, wrote to overseas companies enquiring about obtaining South
 African agency rights for various products ? a spraygun, a cheap oil
 heater manufactured in South Dakota. Nothing came of any of the schemes,
 but he somehow scraped together enough to save him submitting to wage
 ** SKOTA Boxes Bal, Ba2, Be and G. See also ASI/OHP April 23, 1941 and
 June 30, 1942, which refers to the rent and furniture. According to
 the Native Laws Ammendment Act of 1937, magistrates had power to issue
 warrants of execution against the movable property of Africans who
 fell into arrears on rent payments. See Davenport, 'The Triumph of
 Colonel Stallard', p. 89.
 32
labour. Throughout his life, no matter how dire his straits, he never
 worked for wages.*2
 Through it all, Skota clung to his sense of himself as a member of a
 racial elite. In the face of his de-classing, however, the role of the
 'New African1 became a,kind of charade ? a charade which could, at times,
 by savagely exposed. Abuse from a white; railway official (a perpetual
 grievance of the black elite); a policeman's blunt, 'Jy is net 'a
 kaffer,' \ a midnight raid during a location liquor sweep: All ripped away
 pretensions to influence and respectability so carefully nurtured by
 Skota and his compatriots. At. the same time, one's standing as 'man of
 the people' was vulnerable from below. Members of the black elite were
 not only insufficiently appreciated by the thankless 'masses', they were
 also a preferred target of township criminals. 'Notoreity is a veritable
 terror,' an oft-victimised Dr. Xuma wrote to Dr. Holema after the latter
 had been divested of money and car. 'Things that are happening seem to
 be pages from some fiction.' Xuma, who was less sentimental about his
 relationship to 'his people' than Skota, resorted to carrying a gun. For
 his part, Skota was nearly beaten to death in 1942 by a Sotho gang. His
 assault by these 'blanket wild men' ? the characterisation was Gumede's
 -- proved as destructive psychologically as physically, for it carried
 with it a reminder of just one of the realities of the community which
 Skota had presumed to lead.*'
 *
 2
  The material is scattered throughout the collection. See especially
 SKOTA Boxes Ba3, Ca2, Fe.
 *' Xuma to Molema, 4 Hay, 1937, and Xuma to the Johannesburg Adminis-
 trative Magistrate, 15 April, 1939. Xuma Papers. Xuma, who was al-
 lowed to own a gun to protect drugs kept in his surgery, was most
 indignant at the fact that Molema's assailants received only^5 fines,
 scarcely a fraction of the sentence they would have received had their
 victim been white. In regard to Skota, both Gumede and Skota's sis-
 ter, E.C. Gule, sent condolences after he had informed them of the
 assault. Gumede's comment about 'blanket wild men' (SKOTA Box Ba2,
 Gumede to Skota, 11 August, 1942), and Gule's disparaging reference
 to 'Basutos' (ASI/OHP, Gule to Skota, IS June, 1942) provide some
 insight into the way Skota must have characterised his attackers.
 By classing them in ethnic terms, as. uncivilised and savage, Skota
 33
On top of it all, lay the grinding fact of poverty, the reality of
 unpaid bills, of one's furniture being repossessed, of one's child going
 hungry. Such realities were doubly devestating for individuals who had
 imbibed an ideology which equated economic station with personal merit.
 The result, at least in Skota's case, was the development of a penchant
 for prevarication, a glib facility for disguising his destitution. This
 too was part of the world of the 'New African.'
 VI
 Little evidence remains about the last decades of Skota's life. He vir-
 tually disappeared from national politics. He apparently campaigned,
 unsuccessfully, for the Presidency of the Transvaal Congress in 1944, and
 according to Carter and Karis he was affiliated with Selope Thema's
 'conservative nationalist bloc' in the early 1950s. Neither claim can
 be substantiated from his papers. The papers do, however, provide a
 glimpse of Skota's final three struggles: to prevent the removal of
 Fimville; to produce a new edition of the Yearly Register; and to educate
 his one surviving son. Reviewing these struggles serves to illustrate
 the continuing decline of his fortunes, as well as abiding aspects of his
 character.**
 Skota led the fight against removing Pitnville from his office as
 Chairman of the Local Advisory. It is not clear when he assumed the of-
 fice, but he held it from at least 1943 until the Board's extinction more
 than two decades later. His presence on the Board is surprising, given
 The African Leader's florid denunciations of Advisory Boards a decade
 seems to have been attempting to define his attackers as somehow
 outside the community which he led.
 Carter and Karis, From Protest to Challenge, v. IV, pp. 146-147.
 34
earlier. The Leader had described the Boards as a 'shameful farce1, and
 accused the men on them of 'prostituting' themselves to earn enough money
 to pay their municipal rates; it demanded Board members resign, assuming
 they had 'any backbone or courage.in them.' One explanation for Skota's
 apparent change of heart is that he himself now needed the money to pay
 his rates. In fact, Skota led a 1946 deputation of Reef Advisory Boards
 to the Johannesburg City Council's Non-European Affairs Committee to de-
 mand an increase in Board member stipends. The Boards' work 'was not
 sufficiently appreciated,' he argued. He found it particularly unfair
 that board members had to pay for their own stationery."
 On the Board, his political concerns naturally grew more parochial.
 He campaigned for improved sanitation, roads, and lighting; for better
 treatment on the railroads for Africans commuting into the city; and above
 all against Pimville's removal. The office did enable Skota to recreate
 his intermediary position. He led local delegations to state and munic-
 ipal authorities, convened township meetings, and wrote endless letters
 to officialdom on behalf of illiterate constituents. But once again, his
 efforts to carve out a role as broker enjoyed little success. The Advi-
 sory Board possessed no independent power, and the obligation to consult
 it was honoured more in the breach than the observance.
 Plans for 'remodelling' Pimville were current as early as 1943. As
 Chairman of the Advisory Board and founder of the new Pimville
 Standholders Association, Skota devoted himself to safeguarding the
 rights of registered tenants through the process*. His central, concern
 was security of tenure. Few people, he pointed out, would invest in ia-
 *' The African Leader, 16 July, 31 December, 1932. On his role on the
 Advisory Board in the 1940s, see SKOTA Box Fe, especially a Resolution
 of Pimville Residents (24 March, 1943), copy of a report of the Man-
 ager of the Johannesburg Non-European Affairs Department (5 June,
 1944),. Minutes of a Pimville Deputation to the N.E.A.D. (16 April,
 1943), and Minutes of Johannesburg's Non-European Affairs Committee
 meeting with a delegation from Reef Advisory Boards (15 October,
 1946). . ?;
 35
proving their homes when they could face eviction on one month's notice.
 Thus any renovation should be accompanied by the introduction of freehold
 tenure or long lease in order to encourage people to build 'good and
 substantial homes.' In a meeting with the City Council, he cast freehold
 as a way to encourage stable families in the townships, and to protect
 the rights of the aged, who often faced eviction despite having paid for
 their stands many times over.4'
 Little was done in the way of remodelling Pimville in. the ensuing
 decade. In 1955, however, the Mentz Commission determined that Pimville
 stood outside of the area to be set aside for African occupation. With
 the passage of the Group Areas Act, Pimville was slated for destruction,
 ostensibly for reasons of sanitation. Residents were to be moved to a
 site and service area, a devestatiog turn for those.who lacked the means
 to build new homes. Skota, characteristically, hatched a variety of
 self-help schemes which would obviate the need for removal. In 1959, for
 example, he circulated a plan in which the impoverished community would
 subscribe 1760 000 to upgrade Pimville. He negotiated a half price ar-
 rangement with a local brickyard, and apparently began collecting money
 under the auspices of the Stallholders Association. A few pounds trickled
 in."
 After six years of uncertainty, the state elected to allow Pimville
 residents to remain. The community beneath, them, however, was to be
 bulldozed, re-surveyed, and re-built with standard two-room municipal
 housing. It was a pyrrhic victory, but Skota set about organising a
 community day of thanksgiving, complete with the slaughtering, of an ox.
 With removal imminent, he elected to cooperate with the state, perhaps
 *?' SKOTA Box Fe, especially the Minutes of the 16 April, 1943 Pimville
 Deputation.
 4 7
  Skota to W.J.P. Carr, 10 January, 1962, Minutes of a meeting of the
 Pimville Standholders Association, 20 October, 1959, and miscella-
 neous papers in SKOTA Box Cal.
 36
In the hopes of minimising the upheaval. Whatever his motives in coop-
 erating, he allowed himself to be shamelessly used. He chaired the local
 Valuation Committee, which determined how much residents would be com-
 pensated for their destroyed homes. He shared a podium with Minister of
 Bantu: Administration and Development De Wet Nel in a 1965 ceremony to mark
 the demolition and re-building of the 'new Pimville', which Skota hailed
 as 'the best, modern township in the Republic' (The. Advisory Board and
 Valuation Committee oversaw preparations for the ceremony, which Included
 speeches by Skota and the Minister and the unveiling of a plaque; township
 children were assembled and carried South African flags.) Later, Skota
 convened meetings at: government behest, to enable officials to explain
 new influx and housing regulations.**
 The state availed itself of Skota's mediation, but if Skota expected
 any consideration for his efforts, he was disappointed. His efforts to
 shepherd residents' interests through.the process of removal were stymied
 at every turn. His assertion of Pimville residents' traditional rights
 to keep cattle and grow mealies was noted and dismissed as impractical.
 He defended the interests of traders, only to learn that the state had
 set aside a fixed number of commercial sites ? a number far lower than
 the number of traders in old Pimville. Skota was most vociferous on the
 question of tenure. He apparently expected that sites in the new township
 would be held freehold; or at the very least that the state would follow
 the precedent set in the construction of Dube, where standholders were
 granted long leases and offered low interest government, loans to help them
 build. He set about organising purchasing and brick-making cooperatives
 to help trim building costs. In October, 1967, however, he was informed
 by the Bantu Affairs Commissioner in Johannesburg that the state had
 Skota to N.E.A.D., 12 June, 1961; Circular for celebration, ca.
 April, 1962; Minutes of Pimville Advisory Board, 13 April and 31 Au-
 gust, 1965; Minutes of Pimville Compensation (Valuation?) Committee,
 16 February, 1965; Application to hold a meeting from Skota to the
 N.E.A.O., 25 November, 1969: all in SKOTA Box Cal.
 37
'decided that there can be no ownership by Bantu of new houses in urban
 residential areas.' All houses would be built and owned by the City
 Council.*9
 There was a final betrayal. As construction began, Skota discovered
 that many of the residents of. old Pimville would not be allowed to settle
 in the new. The state, before accepting site applications, required
 residents to submit a letter from their employer as well as proof that
 they had lived continuously in Pimville. Those unable to demonstrate
 urban rights were to be removed to the appropriate rural homelands. Skota
 dutifully set about collecting affidavits from residents, many of whom
 had lived in Pimville since 1904, attesting to the bona fides of neigh-
 bors, schoolmates, and fellow church-goers. Affidavits litter his pa-
 pers, like the bare bones of a community.
 VII
 Skota envisioned the African Yearly Register as an annual publication.
 Yet aside from a reprinting in 1932, no new edition appeared. There is
 some evidence that he began preparing a new book in the late ' 30s, the
 materials for which may have been destroyed in a fire at the printing
 works. Skota was often disingenuous in accounting for the delay between
 editions, referring in one letter, for example, to a 'scarcity of printing
 equipments' during the depression and war. In 1956, he again began col-
 lecting materials for a new edition of the Register. His plans, charac-
 teristically, were grandiose. He envisaged an expanded 'Who's Who1,
 *' Minutes of Pimville Advisory Board, 19 January, 1966; Skota to
 N.E.A.D., 28 July, 1966; Bantu Affairs Commissioner, Johannesburg,
 to Skota, 24 October, 1967, in SKOTA Box Cal.
 38
followed by a series of directories featuring black businessmen in each
 of the Provinces and Protectorates. Skota hoped to profit from the books,
 and he may also have hoped to recover some of the prestige that had been
 his following publication of the first edition. In broader terms, the
 project's impetus was unchanged from 1930: It was yet another attempt
 to awaken Africans to their legacy of struggle and achievement; to ap-
 propriate that legacy for a contemporary elite; and to facilitate the
 development of consciousness and cohesiveness among black businessmen.
 For Skota, the need for such a project was even more glaring than it had
 been three decades earlier.B?
 Host of the questionnaires Skota sent out, often to thirty year old
 addresses, returned undelivered. A few of Skota's contemporaries did
 resurface. A.W.G. Champion replied with astonishment: 'I had no idea
 that you[w]ere still alive as many of our big guns have left the globe.'
 Champion attributed their shared oblivion to a hostile press and to e
 younger generation which had grown indifferent to 'we of the old school
 of thought.' Time had muted old disputes, and Champion agreed to prepare
 a sketch of his old comrade and rival, Clements Kadalis. Any hope that
 the book would resurrect the 'old school', however, was vein. For Skota,
 the project succeeded only in resurrecting many of the obstacles that had
 dogged his life. Mounting debts, together with a new battery of state
 legislation, produced endless delays. In the end, only one book appeared,
 a combination 'Who's Who' and Transvaal business directory, published in
 1966 through the largesse of a white philanthropist.61
 Initially Skota planned to publish the books independently. He would
 prepare each himself, pay for printing from advertising revenue, and
 pocket the proceeds from sales. He contacted potential advertisers, white
 5 0
  Skota to Paul Mosaka, 1 October, 1960, SKOTA Box Ab.
 81
  Champion to Skota, 28 October, 1961, SKOTA Box Ac.
 39
and black, casting the series as 'the advertising medium for the potential
 black market1. Few advertisers came forward. African traders, catering
 to small, local markets in the black townships, had little incentive to
 invest R100,00 per page to advertise in a book aimed at a national audi-
 ence. White advertisers were even less forthcoming. White capital had
 its own channels into the 'potential black market' and was not dependent
 on the intercession of Skota. Furthermore, and in spite of the thirty
 year old press notices which Skota enclosed with the circular, few white
 businessmen were prepared to entrust even R100.00 to an African of whom
 they had never heard. One advertising executive consulted by Skota ex-
 plained, delicately, that white businesses would be more likely to ad-
 vertise in the book if it was put in the hands of a 'reputable publisher.'
 Skota resisted the suggestion, pointing out to various friends that roy-
 alties from a publisher would scarcely cover his costs. By July, 1961,
 he had sold eleven partial pages.52
 Desperate for money, Skota tried to mobilize political connections.
 He wrote a lengthy letter to Paul Mosaka, a colleague from the Pimville
 Advisory Board and an officer of the Institute of Race Relation's Bantu
 Welfare Trust. In 1961, the Trust proferred a loan of R1200.00. The loan
 did not begin to cover printing costs, but it enabled Skota to extinguish
 debts, pay for postage and stationery, and continue his feckless pursuit
 of advertisers. One of the first things Skota did with the money was to
 re-open an office in central Johannesburg. In a grateful letter to the
 Trust, he confessed some difficulty in finding 'suitable accommodation'
 due to the 'Group Arrears Act' (the malapropism was prophetic), but he
 eventually settled back on Commissioner Street."
 5 2
  Undated circular, ca. 1960; L.H. Walton, South African Associated
 Newspapers, Ltd. to Skota, n.d., SKOTA Box Ab.
 8 1
  Skota to P. Mosaka, 1 October, 1960, SKOTA Box Ab; Bantu Welfare Trust
 to Skota 1 March, 1961, and Skota's reply 9 March, 1961, SKOTA Ba3.
 40
Inevitably, Skota's predictions on the date of the first book's ap-
 pearance were optimistic. The money dwindled. He was soon unable to meet
 his rent, though he insisted on paying at least one rand per month, ap-
 parently as a testament of good faith. By the end of 1962, he was six
 months in arrears and struggling to stave off eviction. The Bantu Welfare
 Trust, uneasy about publication delays, withdrew the final installment
 on Skota's loan and instituted legal proceedings to recover the RIOOO.OO
 already lent. For his part, Skota continued to solicit quotations from
 printers; he negotiated with publishers (in 1962, he predicted publica-
 tion 'next week'); and he began to explore the possibility of buying a
 press and printing the book himself."
 Skota had an ulterior motive for purchasing his own press. At some
 point in the early 1960s he had been struck by the vast market for school
 exercise books created by the Bantu Education Act. His papers.are full
 of calculations on the number of exercise books consumed annually in the
 Union's 2176 Bantu schools. He approached the Government'with a plan to
 go into the printing business, eventually securing an Interview with the
 Secretary for Bantu Education. It appears that he couched his proposal
 shrewdly: He argued that he could undersell the present supplier; that
 part of his profits would be used to fund scholarships for black youth;
 and, in a final flourish, that it was in keeping with 'Government policy'
 that 'Africans should serve themselves.' The Secretary, who spoke his
 own dialect of self-help, concurred and invited Skota to tender a bid on
 exercise books. Not surprisingly, Skota failed to raise the capital to
 take advantage of the opportunity, but he remained obsessed with the idea,
 ** Skota's correspondence with his landlord (and their attorneys) can
 be found in SKOTA Box Bd. A letter from his attorney to Skota on 10
 June, informed him of an impending suit by the Bantu Welfare Trust;
 eventually the Trust settled for a signed undertaking: See SKOTA
 Boxes Ab and Ba4.
soliciting money for a press from any and all European acquaintances,
 including some visiting historians.86
 This ability to recognize the spaces created by government legislation
 was equally evident in Skota's encounter with the Group Areas Act. In
 November, 1962, he was ordered to vacate his Commissioner Street office
 in terms of the Act. (It appears that the city's Non-European Affairs
 Department became alert to Skota's presence after he had written re-
 questing information for his book.) Skota still possessed enough contacts
 within the Department to secure an interview with the Secretary of the
 Natives Resettlement Board, and he succeeded in winning a series of ex-
 tensions through the end of 1963. In the interim, he hatched a plan to
 construct an office block in Soweto to accommocate black professionals
 driven from the center city by the Act. He proposed building on a site
 opposite Baragwanath Hospital, convenient to Johannesburg, appropriating
 the time-honoured language of sanitation to justify displacing the
 fruitsellers and vendors who occupied the site. The state, judging from
 surviving correspondence, ignored the proposal, although it did reserve
 Skota space in a government-built block. Nonetheless, the incident, like
 the abortive school exercise book venture, is suggestive: It again
 reveals that government legislation opened certain avenues of accumu-
 lation even as it foreclosed others; it presages a process in which middle
 class accumulation would become increasingly entwined with apartheid
 policy; and finally, the state's response to Skota's overture suggests
 that it still remained largely indifferent to the opportunity to cultivate
 urban collaborators which this process afforded."
 " Notes in SKOTA Ba3; Skota to E.R. Silberbauir, 3 January, 1969, SKOTA
 Box Cal; Secretary for Bantu Education to the Secretary of the Advi-
 sory Board for Bantu Education, carbon copy to Skota, 27 September,
 1965, in SKOTA Box Fe (the same box contains a price list for printing
 machines); Skota to the Secretary for Information, 17 April, 1967,
 SKOTA Box Ab.
 86
  Letter to Skota from his landlords, 14 November, 1962; Skota to Mrs.
 Binswanger, 19 June, 1963; N.E.A.D. to Skota, 4 February, 1963; Na-
 tives Resettlement Board to Skota, 10 December, 1962; Skota to
 42
More devestating to Skota's immediate task of finishing his book was
 a government restriction, gazetted in February, 1963, which barred any
 current or former member of an 'unlawful organisation1 from writing,
 printing or publishing any material without ministerial consent. The
 regulation, circulated to supplement the Suppression of Communism Act,
 effectively gagged Skota, a former member of the banned A.N.C. Even; the
 trickle of advertising revenue evaporated. For Skota, the remainder of
 the year was consumed by visits to the Johannesburg Chief Magistrate, to
 the Office of the Chief Commissioner for the Vitwatersrand, the Informa-
 tion Office, the Ministry of the Interior, and eventually the Ministry
 of Justice. He eventually was given leave to continue with the book,
 though none of the officials he met was willing to entrust him with a note
 to the effect with which to placate advertisers. Skota proceeded to ex-
 cise all references to the A.N.C. from the book. As an additional pre-
 caution, he decided to include only South Africans in the book,
 effectively vitiating the book's Pan-African pretensions. He later in-
 formed the Secretary of Information that he saw 'no wisdom' in preparing
 a book which encompassed countries that 'condemned South Africa'.97
 Throttled by debt and unable to meet even day to day expenses, Skota
 turned finally to philanthropy. He solicited from liberal European ac-
 quaintances letters of introduction to Mary Oppenheimer, granddaughter
 of Ernest Oppenheimer, the founder of Anglo-American. Miss Oppenheimer
 was apparently quite taken with him, and became a kind of personal patron.
 Details of publication fell smoothly into place. The Ernest Oppenheimer
 Trust guaranteed the nearly R8 000,00 needed to print copies of the book.
 Johannesburg Bantu Commissioner, 22 November, 1962 in SKOTA Box Ba3.
 Natives Resettlement Board to Skota, July 2, 1963, SKOTA Box Ba4.
 Skota to E.R. Silberbauir, 3 January, 1969 and Natives Resettlement
 Board memo 30 March, 1967 in SKOTA Cal.
 8 7
  Skota to Mrs. Binswanger, 19 June, 1963, SKOTA Box Ba3. Skota to
 Chief Magistrate, Johannesburg, 7 August, 1963; Magistrate's reply,
 14 August, 1963; clipping from Johannesburg Star, 23 February, 1963
 in SKOTA Box Ba4. Skota to Secretary of Information, 17 April, 1967,
 SKOTA Box Ab.
 43
Distribution, at the insistence of the Trust, was entrusted to a European
 publisher, the Central News Agency, which demanded a whopping 50% of sales
 revenue for its trouble. For his part, Skota assumed the role of
 supplicant. He wrote heart-wrenching letters confessing his inability
 to raise rent or even the five rand tariff on his postbox; the debts were
 quickly extinguished by the Trust. As a testament of his gratitude, he
 assembled a delegation of the old elite to present Miss Oppenheimer with
 a portrait on the occasion of her betrothal. (He browbeat Hodiri Molema
 into coming from Mafikeng for the ceremony, reminding him of the "?3 000
 000 that Ernest Oppenheimer had donated for the construction of Soweto,
 'where our erstwhile homeless people now live happily.1) As a final
 gesture of his gratitude, he decided to dedicate the book to Oppenheimer,
 'in recognition of the noble and priceless deeds he performed for the
 benefit of the Africans in the sub-continent.' The irony of dedicating
 a book devoted to recapturing Africans' legacy of struggle to a Randlord
 apparently escaped him.9*
 The book finally appeared in 1966, but any hopes Skota had of profit-
 ting from it were soon dashed. The C.N.A., never committed to the
 project, failed to advertise the book and, in Skota1s opinion, overpriced
 it. By the time the Agency removed the book from the shelves in December,
 1967, just seventy copies had been sold. Proceeds were divided between
 Skota's creditors; the remaining 9930 copies were re-boxed and returned
 to the Oppenheimer Trust. The Oppenheimer Trust, in reply to Skota1s
 complaints, suggested he distribute the book himself, offering him as many
 copies as he could buy at one rand per book. Skota announced his inten-
 " Introductions came from Silberbauir, Director of the Bantu Wage and
 Productivity Association, and Guy Tatham, of the African Market Re-
 search Service, Ltd. See Skota to Mr. Drummond Campbell, 4 January,
 1965, SKOTA Box Ab; correspondence between Skota and Mary
 Oppenheimer, January - July, 1964, SKOTA Box Ba3; and Skota to Modiri
 Molema, 30 July, 1965, SKOTA Box Ba4. T.D.M. Skota (ed.) The African
 Who's Who: An Illustrated Register and national Biographical Dic-
 tionary of the Africans in the Transvaal (3rd edition - Revised and
 Enlarged) (Johannesburg: 1966). Hereafter Who's Who.
 44
tion to purchase one hundred copies of the book to distribute to black
 schools,.but he never mustered the cash.**
 The book itself was an anachronism. It reproduced much of the vocab-
 ulary of the first edition: Progressive, interested in the welfare of
 his people, respected by Europeans. The Bantu Mena' Social Centre -- one
 of the middle class institutions of the 1920s and by 1966 a grotesque
 irrelevancy ? featured prominently; the banned A.N.C. did not appear.
 Host of the individuals in the book had appeared in the first edition,
 and often the original biography was inserted verbatim.. Where it was not,
 as in Skota's case, the additional information amounted to a litany of
 defunct organizations and failed enterprises. .
 The book did include some members of the next generation, people unborn
 or still children when the first edition had appeared. Host occupied
 longstanding niches of the black elite ? teaching and preaching, clerical
 work and trading. The book does reveal, however, the emergence of new
 employment categories. Daniel Chocho, manager of the African Marketing
 Division of a Cape Town agency, and David Nkosi, a personnel manager for
 Coca-Cola, were white collar workers within white capital. Both positions
 suggest a kind of inversion, of the elite's intermediary role.. The career
 of C. Named! Phatudi, teacher, inspector of Bantu Schools, and President
 of the South African Federation of Sub-Inspectors and Supervisors, il-
 lustrated again some of the possibilities opened by the Bantu Education
 Act. But what is most striking about the new entries in the 1966 Register
 is the absence of generational continuity. Frequently in the first edi-
 tion, two or even three generations of a single family were represented.
 Skota himself possessed such a provenance. Certainly one should not
 overgeneralise; given the narrowness of employment categories, elite
 " Skota to the Secretary of Information, 17 April, 1967; Ernest
 Oppenheimer Trust to Skota, 6 March and 16 Hay, 1968, SKOTA Box Ab.
 Undated draft letter by Skota, SKOTA Box Ba4.
 45
status was precarious at the best of times. Nevertheless, the 1930 edi-
 tion of the Register does suggest that many of the older mission-educated
 elite had succeeded in conveying elite status to their children. In
 contrast, Skota and his generation seem to have been relatively less
 successful in reproducing their status. Their children are conspicuous
 in the 1966 Who's Who only by their absence.60
 VIII
 Ultimately, the history of any class must be measured over generations,
 and it is in the measuring that one begins to grasp the full dimensions
 of Skota1s failure. For Skota, it was in the order of things that chil-
 dren superceded their parents, just as he had exceeded the achievements
 and status of his father. In the case of the black elite, this eminently
 middle class notion had an additional racial overlay: 'Civilisation' was
 progressive, and it was the task of each new generation of educated
 Africans to light their race's path to full manhood. This twin notion
 of generational progress infused the original African Yearly Register,
 lending an evangelical note to many of the life histories in the book.61
 Skota understood the generational component of racial 'progress.' He
 noted in his preface to the 1930 Register that the book was written for
 children, to disabuse them of the belief that their ancestors were 'mur-
 60
  Who's Who, pp. 12, 40, 98.
 61
  Louise White, in an article on the Kenyan petty bourgeoisie, has put
 the generational issue well: 'Would that petty bourgeoisie ... be
 allowed to accumulate capital and pass property to heirs, thereby
 developing a partly autonomous economic base, around which a sense
 of continuity, a sense of place in the city, and a sense of collective
 identity might, over generations, emerge? The short answer in Kenya,
 as in South Africa, was no. See White's 'A Colonial State and an
 African Petty Bourgeoisie: Prostitution, Property, and Class Struggle
 in Nairobi, 1936-40', in Frederick Cooper (ed.) Struggle for the City:
 Migrant Labour, Capital, and the State in Urban Africa (London: 1983).
 46
derers, traitors, etc.', and to provide an historical foundation for their
 continued advance. He was well aware of pitfalls along the way. Like
 so many of the urban black elite, he was obsessed with the problem of
 'juvenile delinquency.' He generally attributed its prevalence to the
 displacement of African 'culture'. The end of the lobola system had
 undermined a crucial mechanism of generational control; uncritical ac-
 ceptance of 'Western' notions of sexual equality ? what Skota termed
 'petticoat rule' -- had undermined patriarchal authority.- Thus loosed
 from the 'discipline of Bantudom,' children ran wild. 'So it goes on,'
 he concluded, 'until we breed a generation of analalta, Aaarabi and cut
 throats.'"
 The African Yearly Register stood at the center of a lifelong effort
 to restore the restraints of culture. At the same time, Skota attacked
 the problem of juvenile delinquency in a number of more tangible ways.
 In the 1930s, he campaigned against Lodger Permits, a form of municipal
 taxation which tended to drive adolescents into the labour market. In
 the 1940s and '50s, he fought for a relaxation of municipal housing re-
 strictions to enable children to settle near to their parents. In the
 1960s, he attempted to organise, through the new Urban Bantu Council, a
 public campaign in Soweto against youth crime. (He suggested arranging
 local meetings at which community leaders would exhort 'the lawless ele-
 ment to divert their energies along better and ... benefical lines.')
 And in the 1970s, he oversaw a program to feed children of working parents
 in Pimville who often had nowhere to go and nothing to eat at lunchtime.
 Everyday during the school term his house was swamped by hordes of young
 children, to whom he gave broken biscuits purchased at a discount from a
 local baker."
 " Register, p. xiii. The African Leader, 11 June, 1932.
 " The African Leader, 4 February, 1933; Minutes of a Pimville Deputation
 to the N.E.A.D., 16 April, 1943, SKOTA Box Fe. References to the
 feeding scheme are scattered through the collection.
 47
When Skota fulminated about amalaita and 'Sons and Daughters who do
 as they please, often bringing Shame and Disgrace to the home,1 he may
 have been speaking from personal experience. He had two sons, both by
 his second wife, Zilpah. The first was born into poverty in Klerksdorp
 and died in 1946. Three years later, the couple had a second son,
 Mjokwani Vulindlela. Little evidence remains about Jockie Skota, but he
 seems, in his father's terms, to have been wayward. In 1958, Skota con-
 sidered enrolling the boy in school in Basutoland, both to escape the
 impact of Bantu education and in the hopes that in a 'countrylike' setting
 the boy might outgrow his proclivity for 'dodging' school. Nothing came
 of the plan, but three years later he succeeded in getting Jockie out of
 Soweto. He enrolled the boy at St. Christopher's, an Anglican School in
 Swaziland. Church membership was one prerequisite for admission; thus
 Jockie re-entered the church which his father had left forty years before.
 For the required reference from the boy's 'priest1, Skota submitted a
 letter from an A.M.E. minister, to whom he confided, 'I am terribly wor-
 ried about the schooling of my boy.1 In February, 1962, with the appli-
 cation still incomplete, he dispatched Jockie to Swaziland, wiring
 fifteen rands directly to the school to help pay for books.6*
 Thus begun a year-long struggle to raise school fees. Skota wired a
 few rands to the school intermittently, always with the promise that the
 balance would soon follow. In one letter in early 1962, he assured the
 principal that 'when my book is published about April or May, I will show
 my gratitude in a practical way.' Six months later, and further in ar-
 rears, he was more contrite: 'You cannot imagine how ashamed and disap-
 pointed I feel when I fail to meet my obligations on time. But
 circumstances have been such that I have to be fighting all the time ?
 until my book is published.' It seems the administration at St.
 6
 * See Skota's address on the 'Order of Africa1, n.d., SKOTA Box Be.
 Vera Gule to Skota, 5 March, 1958, SKOTA Box Ba2. Skota to Fr. P.H.
 Coxan, 21 November, 1961 and 2 January, 1962; Skota to Rev. Mgomezulu,
 30 December, 1961 and 16 January, 1962, in SKOTA Box Ba3.
 48
Christopher's was less interested in Skota's contrition than in his money,
 and in September, they sent Jockie home to fetch outstanding fees of
 R19.68. For all of Skota's correspondence to the school, only one letter
 to his son survives, a copy of a brief note which accompanied a pair of
 shoes: 'My dear boy, 1 hope you are studying very hard, and above all
 pray as often as possible.'89
 In spite of his father's admonition, Jockie failed in his first term
 at the new school. A terse note in January, 1963 informed Skota that the
 boy should not return to St. Christopher's. Skota frantically cast about
 for another school, eventually settling for a Catholic School in Natal
 which had not yet fallen beneath the hammer of Bantu Education. He pre-
 vailed on the principal at St. Christopher's to write a reference for the
 boy. 'You are the only person to whom I can appeal,' he wrote. 'By
 granting the said testimonial you may be saving the boy from becoming a
 vagabond, that roamTa] the streets of Johannesburg until he gets into se-
 rious mischief."* ?
 The papers give no indication how the boy fared at the. new school.
 What is clear is that in 1971, Jockie Skota was killed in Soweto, a victim
 of a hit and run driver in Orlando East. An inquest failed to turn up
 the identity of the driver. A year later, Skota tried to engage the
 Witwatersrand Traffic Investigator to find the driver. The papers give
 no indication of whether he succeeded, but he did subsequently engage a
 European attorney to file a claim for compensation. It is not too un-
 charitable to think that he was less concerned in securing a prosecution
 " Skota to Fr. Coxan, 5 February, 3 April, and 28 September, 1962; Skota
 to Jockie, 14 March 1962. SKOTA Box ??
 88
  Coxan to Skota, 15 January, 1963; Skota to. Coxan, 1 March and 8 March,
 1963, In SKOTA Box Ba3.
 49
than in obtaining some settlement to supplement his meagrely pension.
 The claim was rejected.67
 Skota lived out his life on a pension of sixteen rands per month. In
 1974, he wrote a polite letter to the Director of Pensions enquiring
 whether the amount was correct. He was informed that the amount was
 'quite correct', although it appears that the pension was subsequently
 reduced. He and his wife relied on charity: An undated circular letter
 addressed to 'Dear Friends' expressed their gratitude for food parcels.
 The circle had closed; the man who had cast himself as benefactor to his
 people was now a beneficiary of charity. Nonetheless, he continued to
 offer himself as an intermediary, a role for which he was still equipped
 only by virtue of his literacy. He wrote many letters in the last years
 of his life: letters for people ensnared in the pass laws; a plea from
 a man whose son had apparently been misplaced by the South African Prison
 Services; claims for people who had been bilked out of money; and endless
 letters to establish the rights of individuals to remain in the recon-
 structed Pimville. He continued to provide broken biscuits to
 schoolchildren, though the task was made more difficult by the refusal
 of suppliers to continue delivering to Soweto. And, to anyone who would
 listen, he expounded on the profits he would make selling school exercise
 books, but for a printing press. He shared his failing memory with vis-
 iting historians, and at some point undertook to write a history of the
 African National Congress, petering out after a few pages. In June, 1976,
 he died at his home in Pimville. He left only a single cabinet of tattered
 books and papers, a physical metaphor for the evisceration of a class.
 " Skota to M.G. Salomon, 8 January, 1974, SKOTA Box Ac. Skota to Man-
 ager Witwatersrand Investigation and Training, 3 January, 1973; M.G.
 Salomon to Skota, 8 January, 1974, SKOTA Box Ba3.
 50