African Nationalist or British Loyalist?: The Complicated Case of Tiyo Soga

Fig. 1.

The Missionary Tiyo Soga (1829-71), photographic portrait taken some time between 1856 and 1869, from John A. Chalmers, Tiyo Soga: a Page of South African Missionary Work, Edinburgh, London, Glasgow and Grahamstown, 1878.

If any spectacle is calculated to call forth the finest sensibilities of our being, as dutiful subjects, it is that of contemplating Her Majesty our Sovereign, in her present sorrowful position, as a desolate bereaved widow.

Tiyo Soga, sermon, 1862¹

But if you wish to gain credit yourselves — if you do not wish to feel the taunt of men, which you may sometimes be made to feel — take your place in the world as coloured, not as white men; as Kafirs, not as Englishmen.

Tiyo Soga, 'The Inheritance of My Children', 1870²

It was the second of these statements by the Presbyterian missionary Tiyo Soga, not surprisingly, that was quoted in ANC Today, the online journal of South Africa's ruling African National Congress party (ANC), in 2001. The article in which it featured was by President Thabo Mbeki and was entitled 'Religious Leaders who Immersed Themselves in the Struggle'.³ In a 2005 issue of the journal, Mbeki hailed Soga as one of the pioneers of the 'struggle'; Soga 'occupied an honoured place as one of those who laid the foundations for the emergence of the African National Congress, the leader of our people in the continuing struggle for genuine liberation'.⁴

Mbeki did not mention Tiyo Soga's sermon of 1862; nor that Soga apparently once walked from Glasgow to Dumbarton to catch a glimpse of Queen Victoria; nor Soga's reaction to the visit of Prince Alfred to his mission station in 1860 ('There was never such an excitement and enthusiasm witnessed anywhere . . . I had the honour of reading an address of welcome'); nor that the two preceding sentences in the 'The Inheritance of My Children' were: 'You will ever cherish the memory of your mother as that of an upright, conscientious, thrifty, Christian Scotchwoman. You will ever be thankful for your connection by this tie to the white race'.⁵

Such apparent evidence of Soga's British loyalism or professed admiration for elements of white culture might be dismissed by some within a postcolonial theoretical paradigm as 'strategic', 'inauthentic' or 'mimicry'. After all the Black Britishness of Sol Plaatje, a writer and founder member of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC, later the ANC) in 1912, has been described as 'colonial mimesis'; Plaatje himself of being at 'one level . . . an ill-adjusted parodist'.⁶ Yet such dismissals can themselves be questioned. They are reminiscent of the denunciations by nineteenth-century British explorer Richard Burton of the 'mimicry' of the Creoles of Sierra Leone, denunciations common to many white observers of Black Britishness in the nineteenth century and, it seems, beyond.⁷

The fact is that the supposed 'true' identity and historical significance of Tiyo Soga has been represented in very different ways over time: as, for instance, exemplary Christian and loyal subject; or as first New African; or as proponent of certain traditional African 'Ubuntu' values and critic of Christian unfriendliness to strangers; or as father of Black Consciousness; or, as we have seen, as pioneer of the African Nationalist Struggle. These representations will be reviewed in more detail below. But the point of this article is not to suggest that Soga can be definitively understood as either a loyalist or a nationalist, or as someone whose consciousness moved in teleological fashion from one position to the other. Rather it proposes that study of the individual, whether a Soga or a Gandhi, is likely to point up the inadequacy of simplistically bifurcated notions of loyalism and nationalism that pay insufficient regard to specific historical contexts and possibly multiple contemporary understandings of concepts such as 'nation'.

Like many collective identities, nationalism (in contrast to loyalism) has attracted a large theoretical literature as well as numerous more empirical studies. My use of the term draws on the distinction that has been...