The Ghost of Equality
The Public Lives of D.D.T. Jabavu of South Africa, 1885-1959
(Ohio University Press, 1997)
ART 114
Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu was born in the Cape Colony in British southern Africa on October 20, 1885, when a few African men could vote and the prospects for black equality with the ruling whites seemed promising. He died on August 3, 1959, in the Cape Province of the Union of South Africa, eleven years after the apartheid state had begun stripping blacks of their rights and exorcising the ‘ghost of equality’ with a completeness unparalleled in the country’s history. The ‘ghost of equality was the last vestige of the Cape liberal tradition — itself best summed up by the dictum ‘equal rights for all civilized men’ — finally erased in 1959 with the passage of legislation that would, the following year, remove from parliament the last elected white representatives of Africans.
If D.D.T. Jabavu’s life reveals anything about South Africa’s political history, it is that this history was not monolithic. It was not simply a lengthy confrontation between a black elite represented by the African National Congress and the white segregationist state. Rather, there was a range of black political opinion and activity, of which Jabavu, an active participant in virtually every government-sponsored and every major extra-parliamentary conference between 1920 and the late 1940s, represented one prominent historical strain.
This book, however, is about more than D.D.T. Javavu’s politics; it is about his public life, or perhaps more accurately, his public lives. The book is arranged thematically, divided according to the parts Jabavu played: student, teacher, Methodist, and politician.
(Description Source: Ohio University Press)
Author
Catherine Higgs is a professor of History in the Department of History and Sociology at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus. She earned her PhD in modern African history at Yale University. Her scholarship has focused on the intersections of religion, politics, labour, and activism; her approach is interdisciplinary and transnational. She is the author of The Ghost of Equality: The Public Lives of D. D. T. Jabavu of South Africa, 1885-1959 (Ohio University Press, 1997), and Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery and Colonial Africa (Ohio University Press, 2012). She is co-editor of Stepping Forward: Black Women in Africa and the Americas (Ohio University Press, 2002), and In India and East Africa/E-Indiya Nase East Africa: A Travelogue in IsiXhosa and English (University of the Witwatersrand Press, 2020). She is completing a book about the anti-apartheid activism of Catholic sisters in South Africa, which considers whether and how small actions can shift national policy.
Her research has been funded by the National Humanities Center, the American Philosophical Society, the Luso-American Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Before joining the University of British Columbia, she taught at the University of Tennessee, the University of Nebraska at Kearney, and at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. She teaches about Africa, Southern Africa, and the Atlantic World; newer courses focus on commodities, markets, labour and public policy, including China’s investment in Africa.
UBC Library Holdings
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From the Publisher – Ohio University Press
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Paper ISBN: 9780821411711
Hardcover ISBN: 9780821411698
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