In 1933, Noni Jabavu boarded a ship from East London to Cape Town to meet the couple who would become her caregivers in England. Despite attending Lovedale Girls’ School, a prestigious missionary-run institution in South Africa, it was decided that she would pursue the rest of her education in the imperial core, following the footsteps of her father, Professor Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu (or DDT Jabavu), who had been educated at the University of London. At a rustic farmhouse in Claremont belonging to none other than General Jan Smuts, former Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, a 13-year-old Jabavu was assured she would be safe in the hands of Arthur Bevington Gillett and Margaret Clark Gillett, the heirs to successful banking and shoe family businesses respectively.
“I learned then that the plan was for me to be trained as a doctor to serve my people,” Jabavu writes in “Smuts and I,” the title of one of the newspaper columns featured in Noni Jabavu: A Stranger at Home. “Oom Jannie”, as Jabavu refers to Smuts, was part of the Cape Colony liberals of 19th-century British colonial South Africa, a group made up of members of the black intelligentsia like the Jabavus, Quakers, businessmen, and enterprising politicians wary of the growing economic power of the rival colonies. While they may have come from different walks of life, they were united by their belief in the “Cape liberal tradition,” which prized the so-called civilizing mission behind European colonialism. In “Smuts and I,” Jabavu reflects sentimentally on the arrangement that would alter the course of her life, writing that she “was not too well primed about the negotiations that must have gone on between [her] parents and [her] prospective loco parentis,” but that it was “a practical demonstration of the generations of friendship between the families.”
It’s these kinds of revelations in A Stranger at Home which give readers insight into the political, economic, religious, and intellectual coalitions that produced people like Noni Jabavu. It also offers a snapshot of class in black South Africa before apartheid, disproving the misconception that the black middle class only arose after the country’s democratic elections in 1994. Born in 1919, she descended from educated and prominent people on both sides of her family. Her grandfather, John Tengo Jabavu, established the Xhosa and English-language newspaper Imvo Zabantsundu, the first black-run and owned periodical in the country. Her father, Professor DDT Jabavu, was a distinguished academic at the University of Fort Hare in the Eastern Cape province, as well as a founding member of the All African Convention, an organization that challenged the erosion of black men’s voting rights in South Africa. Her mother, Florence Jabavu (née Makiwane), had been an organizer in self-help women’s group, while her aunt Cecilia Makiwane was the first black nurse on the continent, and her other aunt, Daisy Makiwane, a journalist and editor at Imvo Zabantsundu.
A Stranger at Home is a culmination of years long scholarship, research and advocacy work between Makhosazana Xaba and Athambile Masola. As writers and academics, both assembled the writings Jabavu produced in 1977, when the Daily Dispatch, an English-language newspaper based in the Eastern Cape, hired her to write a weekly column titled “Noni on Wednesdays.” Having spent more than majority of her life living abroad, holding temporary and permanent residences in countries such as England, Italy, Spain, Canada, Mexico, Jamaica, the US, Uganda and Kenya, to name a few, Jabavu’s return to South Africa was buoyed by her mission to collect materials necessary to write a biography on her father—a task that she never got around to completing. The last time she had visited the country was in 1955, when she attended the funeral of her younger brother, who was murdered by a gang while studying medicine at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
This experience of personal loss, coupled with the loss of a country as she had once known it, inspired Jabavu to pen her first memoir, Drawn in Color: African Contrasts in 1960. Not only was it a critical success with reviews published in The Guardian, The Sunday Times, and The Scotsman, but it was also a commercial success, receiving five reprintings during its initial publication. It also made Jabavu the first black South African woman to publish a memoir. She followed Drawn in Color with The Ochre People: Scenes from a South African Life, published in 1963, another memoir that infused her personal history with travel writing.
Xaba first took an interest in Jabavu when she was working on her MA in Creative Writing at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2004. For close to 20 years, she has led the charge to resuscitate Jabavu’s work, traveling across the continent and the world to gather information that would shed more light on her life and writing. Masola’s desire to study Jabavu began when she started writing for the Daily Dispatch, prompting her to search for other black women writers who had contributed to the newspaper. She completed her PhD in English Literature, where she explored the concept of home, exile, and transnationalism in both Noni Jabavu and Sisonke Msimang’s memoirs. In the introduction and afterword for A Stranger at Home, Xaba and Masola describe the book as a “project against the erasure and flattening of black women’s identities,” and an “intentional calling of [Jabavu’s] name in order to resist the intellectual erasure of her work.”
Despite serving as the first black person and first woman to edit the British literary magazine The New Strand and cultivating an impressive literary career in the 1960s, Jabavu’s name does not feature in the pantheon of notable 20th-century South African writers. In fact, until very recently, little was known about her at all. One can speculate the reasons for this. Typically, the category of “great South African writer” has been reserved for white South Africans like Nadine Gordimer, JM Coetzee and Athol Fugard, no doubt because of their insights and talents, but also because of the Western world’s tendency to look to white liberal South Africans to interpret the race problem in the country. Furthermore, Drawn in Color and The Ochre People were not published in South Africa at the time of their release. It was only in 1982 when the latter was published locally by Ravan Press, with another reprinting in 1995.
There’s also the matter of how to define a black woman writer with a background and perspective like Noni Jabavu. Unlike some of her younger peers, she did not grow up witnessing the cruelty of the apartheid regime, nor did she throw herself into a life of political activism, theory, or writing designed to advance the cause of black liberation. While she wrote disapprovingly of racialism in her Daily Dispatch columns, she also held elitist views typical of the class position her family held in South Africa, and that she would later occupy in Britain and other parts of the world. In one of her columns, Jabavu speaks proudly of being part of the lineage of “Cape liberals such as Cronwright, Hofmeyer, Jabavu, Rose Innes, Molteno, Schreiner, Merriman, Sauer,” gloats about her proximity to“English tycoons, upper class, bankers, industrialists [and] conservative liberals,” discusses her marriage to ex-husband Michael Cadbury Crosfield, related to the founder of the chocolate company Cadbury, and reveals a life of maids, butlers, footmen, servants, chaperones, and chauffeurs in her service. In an introduction to “Noni on Wednesdays,” written by Peter Kenny, she describes personal and family history as such: “accidents of birth have produced people like me, middle class, indeed upper class for five black generations here in South Africa. Landowners, politicians, educationists, lawyers, doctors and writers. Am I not lucky to be one of them?”
This is what makes Jabavu a confounding figure in the world of South African letters. Both Xaba and Masola have acknowledged how her class position complicated the relation she held to South Africa and her other identities. In her dissertation, “Jabavu’s journey,” Xaba writes that “Noni was aware of the role her class position played in her life and how it cuts across being a woman, being black, and a foreigner in many of the countries she lived in as a writer,” explaining that her “class status distinguishe[d] her from the other women who in comparison rose from nowhere and struggled their way through to becoming writers.” In a 2017 article for the Mail & Guardian, Masola writes that Jabavu “drifts in and out of the identity politics that seeks to homogenize what it means to be black in South Africa.”
It raises the question of whether the exceptionalism of Jabavu’s achievements and the uniqueness of her life can be contextualized through a black feminist politic given that she did not appear to write, or see herself through this ideological framework. A Stranger at Home is structured around the 49 columns Jabavu wrote over her tenure at the Daily Dispatch, with Xaba and Masola prefacing each chapter with a brief summary of the themes and concerns that she explored. This approach organizes the contents of the book for a reader who might feel lost without that kind of anchoring, allowing Xaba and Masola to reinforce their argument that Jabavu was a pioneering black woman writer whose existence posed an affront to patriarchal norms.
Yet ascribing a feminist subversion to someone who was “elite by birth, by family of adoption, later by marriage and inevitably by association,” as Xaba writes in her dissertation, doesn’t seem appropriate or convincing. Too often, radicalism is projected onto black people who are recognized as “the firsts” in their field, regardless of their…
