The Activist Collector: Lida Clanton Broner’s 1938 Journey from Newark to South Africa 9781978836174

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Note to the Reader
Prologue “Desire and Determination”
PART ONE
Chapter 1 A Transatlantic Friendship
Chapter 2 From Personal Pilgrimage to Political Purpose
PART TWO
Chapter 3 “Welcome to Africa!”
Chapter 4 Onward and Inward to the Transvaal and Natal
Chapter 5 Return to the Eastern Cape and Voyage Home
PART THREE
Chapter 6 Activist Exhibitions
Chapter 7 The Newark Museum and Beyond
Epilogue: Mother of the Oceans
About the Author

Citation preview

The Activist Collector

The Activist Collector Lida Clanton Broner’s 1938 Journey from Newark to South Africa

Christa Clarke

Newark Museum of Art  Newark, New jersey Rutgers University Press  New Brunswick, camden, and newark, new jersey

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Table of Contents Foreword..................................................................................................6 Acknowledgments..................................................................................8 Note to the Reader................................................................................13 Prologue   “Desire and Determination”...........................................14 PART ONE 1  A Transatlantic Friendship..............................................................24 2  From Personal Pilgrimage to Political Purpose...........................46 PART TWO 3  “Welcome to Africa!”.......................................................................70 4  Onward and Inward to the Transvaal and Natal.........................98 5  Return to the Eastern Cape and Voyage Home........................ 126 PART THREE 6  Activist Exhibitions....................................................................... 152 7  The Newark Museum and Beyond.............................................. 172 Epilogue   Mother of the Oceans..................................................... 198

About the Author............................................................................... 207

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Foreword The remarkable story of Lida Clanton Broner, a proto–civil rights activist and lifelong Newark resident, unfolds in this new publication. Made possible by the Broner family archive and extensive, in-depth research of author and former Arts of Global Africa Senior Curator Dr. Christa Clarke, this publication marks the concluding segment of innovative curatorial work supported by the A. W. Mellon Foundation, which, through a generous grant in 2011, enabled the renovation and reinterpretation of the Museum’s Arts of Global Africa gallery, as well as the comprehensive publication of the same name. From hairstylist and housekeeper to grassroots activist, Ms. Broner led an extraordinary life. The granddaughter of enslaved Africans, she was determined to visit her ancestral home. Her history with us began in 1943 with an exhibition of objects and artifacts she collected (and later donated to the Museum) during her 1938 trip to South Africa. That installation was among the very first museum exhibitions to focus on the art of South Africa and may well have been the first museum presentation of a collection by an African American woman. While global in scope, this is a story emphatically rooted in Newark and The Newark Museum of Art. Our foundational mission in 1909 as an inclusive, community-centric institution, along with our early and enlightened interest in African material culture, as well as the progressive and global mindset of then-director Beatrice Winser—the first in a long line of women whose leadership has profoundly shaped the Museum—were all factors that converged to make visible Ms. Broner’s collection and embrace her narrative. Nearly eighty years since we were first introduced to Lida Clanton Broner, I am very proud that with this publication, Dr. Clarke’s commitment to under-told stories of the African diaspora further illuminates Ms. Broner’s archive, her intrepid journey, and her important contributions to our understanding of pre-apartheid South Africa. —linda c. harrison Director & CEO The Newark Museum of Art

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Foreword

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Acknowledgments As I describe in the prologue to this book, this project began in 2014 with the gift to the museum of Lida Clanton Broner’s archive. I am grateful first and foremost to Albert LeRoy Clanton Jr., David Evans Clanton, Thomas Wesley Clanton, and their sister Ruth Hazel Clanton for preserving their grandmother’s archive and sharing her story so she may go on to inspire future generations and for their warm embrace and enthusiastic support of my research over the years. I dedicate this book to David and to the memories of Al and Tom, who did not live to see this publication, and to Ruth, who predeceased her brothers; to them I give my deepest thanks for trusting me to tell their grandmother’s story. Many current and former staff members at The Newark Museum of Art helped bring this publication to fruition in the years since Broner’s archive first came to the museum. The accessioning, digitizing, and photography of the collection was expertly overseen by staff in the registrar’s office: Janairy De Valle, Amber Germano, Andrea Ko, Heidi Warbasse, and Jason Wyatt. Librarian William Peniston processed the archive and was an essential resource for my research in general, especially on the museum’s history. In the curatorial department, research associates Henone Girma, who catalogued many of the objects in the collection and transcribed Broner’s journal, and Ava Hess, who researched the museum’s wartime programming, provided critical support in the early stages of research. Ulysses Dietz, first as chief curator and then as interim director, has been an unflagging cheerleader and an important sounding board throughout the years and a strong advocate for the importance of taking the time needed to do justice to Broner’s story. Thanks also to Kristin Curry in the museum’s institutional advancement department for helping to see this publication through as part of the larger initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation. Research began during the tenure of director Steven Kern, who recognized the significance of the story to the museum. Its publication is realized under the leadership of the museum’s current director and CEO, Linda C. Harrison, and through the advocacy of Catherine Evans, deputy director of collections and curatorial strategies. I am sincerely grateful to both for their commitment and especially for their empathetic support during the challenges faced over the last few years. Thanks also to Kitty Nguyen for project management and to Andrea Ko for registrarial assistance in the final stages. Richard Goodbody worked his usual wonders in photographing the objects so beautifully. 8

I am forever grateful to Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University for the support I received during the initial research phase of this publication as a 2017–2018 fellow. The Hutchins’s leadership team—Skip, Abby Wolf, and Krishna Lewis—have given me an intellectual home among a vibrant community of scholars as a resident affiliate and the additional gift of friendship. An amazing cohort of academics, activists, and artists during my fellowship year provided inspiration, insight, and crucial feedback in the incipient stages of my research along with many a late night of convivial camaraderie. My thanks to Zelalem Kibret Beza, David Bindman, Kurt Campbell, Myisha Cherry, Cassi Pittman Claytor, Jean-Christophe Cloutier, ­ Genevieve Dempsey, Martha Diaz, Zebulon Dingley, LaFleur Stephens-Dougan, Matheus Gato, Adam Habib, Tef Poe, Julie Kleinman, Nomusa Makhubu, Myles Osborne, Shenaz Patel, Belén Vega Pichaco, and Jenny Sharpe. In May of 2018, nearly eighty years to the day after Broner departed Newark, I traveled to South Africa to retrace her journey and mine the archives there in search of her traces. Adam Habib, then vice chancellor at the University of the Witwatersrand and a fellow in my Hutchins cohort, was instrumental in providing introductions and recommendations for my itinerary. In Johannesburg, I thank archivists Gabriele Mohale and Zofia Sulej for their assistance in the Historical Papers Research Archive (HPRA) at the University of the Witwatersrand and for the advice of Muchapara ­Musemwa, head of the School of Social Sciences at Wits. I am especially indebted to historian Vusumuzi Kumalo for providing greater historical context related to Broner’s itinerary, based on his own research on the interwar period. Vusi brought me to relevant sites in Johannesburg and nearby Evaton, where his multilingual skills and knowledge facilitated entry and gave broader understanding to their significance. Brenda Schmahmann, South African Research Chair at the University of Johannesburg, invited me to share my ongoing research in her seminar series with faculty, graduate students, museum professionals, and artists whose questions and dialogue helped refine my thinking. I am also grateful for the warm hospitality and insights of artists, especially Kim Berman, Joni Brenner, Ayana Jackson, Serge Alain Nitegeka, Mary Sibande, and Clive van den Berg. In the Durban area, I thank guides Sanele Mvuyane and Thami Mabina for organizing a tour of the places Broner visited in the area, now part of the Inanda Heritage Route. Research in the Killie Campbell Africana Library and Archives in Durban was facilitated by Emily-Ann Krige, and senior museologist Lulu Jakeni ­provided an introduction to the collections there along with other

Acknowledgments

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research assistance. In East London, I thank Derek Holder, interim director of the East London Museum, and the museum’s historian Zuko Blauw. Sakhela Buhlungu, the vice chancellor of Fort Hare University (East London campus) provided a historical background and assistance with my visit. At Fort Hare in Alice, I met with Sinazo Mtshemla, archivist at the National Heritage and Cultural Studies (NAHECS), and collections manager Faku Andile, who provided access to the archives and collections there. As an art historian venturing into new territory, I have benefited from conversations with many scholars on either side of the Atlantic over the years who have been generous in sharing their knowledge, patient with my many questions, and supported my research in other ways. In addition to those acknowledged above, my thanks go to Saleem Badat, Julia Charlton, Adrienne Childs, David Driskell, Shireen Hassim, Meghan Healy-Clancy, Catherine Higgs, Leslie King-Hammond, Nick Kline, Sandra K ­ lopper, ­Steven Nelson, Anitra Nettleton, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Clement Price, Mary Sue Sweeney Price, Ciraj Rasool, George Robb, L ­ owery Stokes Sims, J­ effrey Stewart, Lynn Thomas, Noelle Lorraine Williams, Deb Willis, Sarah van Beurden, Gary van Wyk, and Robert Trent Vinson. I have also benefited constructively from feedback following presentations of my research-inprocess at the Royal Ontario Museum, the College Art Association, the Black Portraitures conference, Wheaton College, the Newark Historical Society, and Boston University. I am ­grateful to Kim Miller and Cynthia Becker for their sustained support throughout the research and writing, and to Athambile Masola, from whom I have learned so much and who has cheerfully answered my many queries. As I reached the final stages, ­Dorothy Hodgson’s keen insights and thoughtful comments on the entire manuscript were invaluable. I have been fortunate to work with editor Mary Christian, who signed on at the beginning of this project. Mary provided excellent guidance at a critical stage in writing and helped me think through some of the structural challenges of this story; her deft edits have made it a stronger book. Lucia | Marquand was an early and enthusiastic partner in this publication, and I particularly thank Ed Marquand, Adrian Lucia, and Donna Wingate for their insights, guidance, and, above all, patience. It has been a pleasure to work with L | M publication team: Tom Eykemans, Kestrel Rundle, and Meghann Ney. Zach Hooker developed the beautiful and thoughtful design of this book. I am grateful to Rutgers University Press for partnering on this publication. I remain deeply grateful to the Mellon Foundation for the curatorial capacity grant awarded to The Newark Museum of Art’s Department of 10

Acknowledgments

the Arts of Global Africa in 2011. The realization of this publication is the capstone to this transformative grant. I thank the foundation for allowing the time necessary to properly research, reconstruct, and write the story of Lida Clanton Broner and her activist collection, a story that speaks powerfully to the social justice mission at the heart of the foundation’s work. Words cannot capture my gratitude to Andrew McClellan, my companion of heart and mind. This book has taken shape through many c­ onversations and shared experiences over the years, has been vastly improved by Andrew’s careful reading and superb editing skills, and most of all, has been nurtured by his unwavering love, support, and belief in me. —Christa Clarke

Acknowledgments

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Note to the Reader Making decisions about the terminology used to describe individuals or groups by race is a complicated and perhaps inevitably flawed undertaking given that racial categories themselves are historically contingent social constructions. In a book that spans the United States and South Africa— each with racially fraught histories and ongoing debates about race—these decisions are particularly vexed and never ideal. I use “African” or “black” to describe the indigenous majority population of Bantu-speaking peoples in South Africa. It should be noted, however, that “black” was an apartheid-era racial category, synonymous with “native,” that later came to encompass all nonwhite South Africans (inclusive of classifications as “Indian” and Coloured”) during the nation’s liberation struggles. In the context of the United States, I employ “African American” and “black” interchangeably to refer to individuals of African descent. Historical terms, like “Native” and “Bantu” in the South African context and “Negro” in the United States, are generally only used in quotes or as appropriate to reflect the language of the period. That said, given that most individuals discussed in the book are either black South Africans or African Americans, I tend not to describe individuals using racial terminology unless warranted by context. I do specify when individuals are white—the exception in this story—so as not to reinforce this as an unmarked and normative racial category. The names of many of the places that Lida Broner visited in South Africa have changed in recent years to better reflect the identity and heritage of the country’s black majority. For reasons of historical accuracy, however, I use the names specific to the time period under discussion throughout this book. Similarly, I refer to the Newark Museum—the museum’s name for over a century, from its founding in 1909. In 2019 the institution changed its name to The Newark Museum of Art. Lastly, and as Broner herself did, I use the terms “art” and “handiwork” interchangeably, along with others such as “object,” “artifact,” “work,” “craft,” or even “material culture” to refer to those products made by human skill. I do so in recognition that these distinctions are culturally specific and rooted in Western aesthetic ideologies developed in the late eighteenth century. —Christa Clarke

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Prologue

“Desire and Determination”

Shortly after arriving as the new curator of African art at the Newark Museum in 2002, I began the process of familiarizing myself with its extensive collections. Guided by a database-generated list, I worked my way through the department’s holdings, by country and date of acquisition. At some point, I came across a seemingly random collection of some sixty works from South Africa in the basement storage room. With gloved hands, I carefully examined a gourd container swaddled in a reticulated fishnet of small navy and pink glass beads; a burnished ceramic goblet brightly painted with designs in turquoise, red, and white; and a conical hat of finely woven grass immediately recognizable to me as the iconic headgear of a South Sotho man. A mud brick neatly wrapped in brown paper and twine and a lidded jar filled with red clay were among the most unexpected finds that seemingly spoke to the department’s origins as an ethnology collection (fig. 1). Some objects had small handwritten tags or labels, the neat penmanship marking them as gifts and recording names, dates, and places. This was unusual given typical Western collecting practices, where objects from Africa are presumed anonymous and provenance is murky at best. Curious to know more, I consulted the museum’s records: these perplexing works were donated in 1947 by Lida C. Broner of 514 Third Street in Newark. A slim folder of correspondence related to the acquisition described the donor as an African American woman who collected them while traveling in

FIG. 1  

Some of the works donated to the Newark Museum by Lida C. Broner in 1947. From left to right: Unrecorded South Sotho artist, Stemmed vessel (mpotjwana), 1930s, clay and pigment, 73/8 × 45/8 in., no. 47.65; Baked brick, 1938, 9 × 4 × 2 in., no. 47.88; Unrecorded Sotho artist, Hat (khaebana), 1930s, grass, 8 × 111/2, no. 47.115; Unrecorded Xhosa artist, Snuff container, 1930s, gourd, glass beads, 6 × 21/2 in., no. 47.81; Jar filled with pieces of ocher, 1930s, 71/2 × 37/8 in., no. 47.83.

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South Africa in 1938. It also revealed that the collection had been exhibited at the museum in 1943. I was intrigued. Who was Lida C. Broner? Why did she go to South Africa? Who gave Broner these objects and what did these gifts mean to them and to her? What were her experiences as a black woman traveling in segregated South Africa on the eve of the Second World War? And how did her collection end up on view, and then in storage, at the Newark Museum? The museum’s database yielded no answers to these questions. In an old filing cabinet in the registrar’s department, I dug up an obsolete set of yellowed typewritten accession cards that offered a few additional clues. The card for object 47.65, the ceramic goblet, provided a visual description and identified it as from “Africa (Basutoland).” The verso had a little watercolor sketch and a snippet of provenance: “Gift of Mother Masole / Brakpan Johannesburg / Oct. 1938 / to / Lida C. Broner.” Another card described the beaded gourd container as a “snuff box.” The back, with its sketch, read “Gift of Mrs. Bokwe / Middledrift, Dec. 1938 / to / L. C. Broner.” The cards classified the works by geography—from “British South Africa”—and by genre: basketry and snuff boxes, respectively. But the story behind Broner’s collection was frustratingly incomplete. With so little to go on, my investigation ground to a halt. While I remained curious about Broner, her collection stayed tucked in drawers and cabinets, the objects dispersed throughout the storage area and classified with like examples for purposes of comparison, the way curators do. They were linked only by the consecutive accession numbers that museum staff had inscribed on the objects in minuscule hand so long ago. When selecting representative examples of works from South Africa for display in the museum’s galleries, I routinely bypassed her collection, drawn instead to the more dazzling examples of beadwork or larger, more sensitively executed ceramic vessels. Broner’s objects looked relatively plain and humble; some seemed more like tourist trinkets than things a curator would choose for public exhibition. I did ponder including them in a research project centering on collections of African art formed by American women, but with so little to go on, that seemed like a reach. So, for much of the next decade, Broner’s collection lay dormant in storage. And then one day everything changed. Out of the blue in March 2014, I received a phone call from Thomas Clanton, who introduced himself as Lida Clanton Broner’s grandson and asked whether the museum still had his grandmother’s collection. Yes, we certainly did, I replied, and we made an appointment to view the works together. As it happened, Tom worked in Newark, less than a mile from the museum, and his brother, David, also 16

Prologue

FIG. 2  

Thomas (left) and David Clanton with their grandmother’s collection and archive at the Newark Museum, May 2014, ­photograph by Christa Clarke.

lived in New Jersey. The three of us met: objects were brought out from storage and Tom and David carefully handled each one, marveling at their grandmother’s life. They had been close to her, because from the early 1950s on she lived in their family house in Newark. “Grandma loved Africa,” Tom remarked to me that day, the first of many times he would recall the lasting bond that Broner formed with the continent during her brief but impactful odyssey. Two months later the Clanton brothers returned to the museum—much to my astonishment, with an unexpected gift: their grandmother’s archive of her 1938 journey to South Africa (fig. 2). There were an additional ninety objects, including strands upon strands of beadwork adornments and samples of needlework mounted on cardboard, each with Broner’s own handwritten tags attached. This bountiful trove also contained a travel journal detailing her everyday experiences; two photo albums filled with snapshots she took on her trip and photographs presented as keepsakes by South African friends; a scrapbook that Broner made with newspaper clippings and other mementos from her time in South Africa and about the display of her collection back in the United States; a large map with notations tracking her route by sea; a handful of books and pamphlets about South African life along with some souvenir postcards; and piles of letters that traced her greetings and conversations with South African friends from the mid1930s until her death in 1982. This archive was a most generous donation from Broner’s grandsons—Tom, David, and the eldest brother, Albert—that not only brought her sojourn to life but gave new meaning to the original group of objects their grandmother had given the museum nearly seventy years earlier.1 “Desire and Determination”

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FIG. 3  

Lida Clanton Broner in a portrait taken at Universal Studios, Jeppe (Johannesburg), South Africa, 1938. Collection of the Clanton family.

I opened the yellowed pages of Broner’s travel journal and read its epigraph, in the elegant script that I would come to know so well. “After ­twenty-eight years of desire and determination I have visited Africa, the land of my forefathers,” adding as her signature “Lida No’Lwandle Broner.” I was hooked. In the weeks and months that followed, I immersed myself in the remarkable story of Lida Clanton Broner (fig. 3) and her assemblage of objects from South Africa, through this rich personal archive. For decades, Lida Broner saved her earnings from working as a domestic and hairstylist to fulfill this lifelong ambition of returning to the continent of her grandparents. She was a churchgoer and clubwoman whose friendship with a visiting young South African woman forged transatlantic connections and sparked a political awakening. By 1938 what she had envisioned as a personal pilgrimage took on a larger purpose through her association with the nascent Council on African Affairs, an American solidarity organization supporting African struggles against colonialism. Influenced by a growing diasporic consciousness, and also hoping to contribute to it, Broner set off with the goal, as she put it, “to study the conditions of the Negro in South Africa” in order to draw attention to the segregationist policies of the era.2 It turned out that the collection she assembled during her nine-month journey was part of this plan. She returned home to Newark in February of 1939 with firsthand knowledge of life in segregated South Africa, an adopted Zulu name, and an assemblage of some 150 objects. They were made or given to her by “interested Africans”—most of whom were women—who wanted to forge transatlantic bonds by sharing their culture. Back in the United States, Broner mobilized this collection of “native handicraft” on behalf of her anticolonialist mission, rendered increasingly urgent with the coming of World War II. Through the mid-1940s, she presented the works in public displays about contemporary life in South Africa under the auspices of her newly restructured Women’s International Affairs Club, an auxiliary to the Council on African Affairs. The highest-profile showing of her collection was in 1943 at the Newark Museum, quite possibly the earliest museum exhibition of an African American woman’s collection in the United States. The museum’s interest led to the Broner’s donation of some sixty objects in 1947. Everything else from her momentous journey passed to her grandsons after her death in 1982. This book seeks to reconstruct the stories that once animated this group of objects, to understand how and why the collection came into being, the web of connections and interactions that brought them together, and to follow its path across the Atlantic, tracking its shifting uses and meanings 18

Prologue

through to its museological afterlife.3 To recover these rich histories, my analysis takes as its point of departure Broner’s archive, situating and interpreting the assemblage of objects in relation to their associated material culture of images and texts. “In archives,” South African historians Carolyn Hamilton and Nessa Leibhammer remind us, “things do not stand as representative of ‘a culture’ or as aesthetic achievements, but as inherited resources available for engagement in the present.”4 The paired concepts of backstory (here, what preceded the materials’ collection by Broner) and biography (beginning with its constitution as a collection and continuing through its separation and, later, reunion), as proposed by Hamilton, are the critical tools that facilitate this historical recuperation.5 By reconstructing the backstory and biography of Lida Broner’s collection, we are introduced to an “ordinary” woman from Newark whose life was, in fact, quite extraordinary—a woman I have come to call an “activist collector.” In this book, the objects that Broner collected are touchstones that bring into view a network of relationships that forged transatlantic ties with a shared vision of black liberation. Through her collection’s archival history we are connected to people, places, and ideas that illuminate the conditions of history in ways a textbook cannot. We come to know not only Broner but other forgotten women whose collective experience provides critical nuance and texture to a larger history of black women’s internationalism.6 The story of our “activist collector” unfolds in a layered and cumulative fashion. Individual chapters introduce Broner and follow her eventful journey and her expanding circle of acquaintance and sphere of activist engagement. Throughout, at the center of the story, is the intimate relationship between Broner and the things she collected, for which she created meaning and that in turn helped to shape her identity. Put simply, this book begins with a set of objects but looks through them at the people, places, and ideas that gave them significance across continents and through time.7 Over the past several years, I have read and reread Broner’s lengthy travel diary and piles of letters countless times, following the trail of the rich, if often fragmentary, repository of information it offers to reconstruct her ambitious journey and document the objects in her collection. In this book, I draw extensively on her own account to foreground her voice and perspective and to highlight her spirited and independent personality and outspoken opinions. The visual record she leaves for us is equally rich, comprising hundreds of her own photographs and those given to her by South African friends, some inscribed with personal notes and greetings on the backs. Her albums, with photographs carefully affixed and sometimes captioned, affirm the lived experience of modern black South Africans in “Desire and Determination”

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ways that counter the racialized and exoticizing practices of ethnographic photography.8 I have scrutinized these snapshots and studio portraits, tracing an intricate network of relationships and connecting individuals and ideas to the objects they made or gifted to Broner. I have also listened to what these quiet images and intimate exchanges have to say about identity and belonging, and the power of women’s networks.9 And I have attended closely to Broner’s scrapbooks and other saved documents and texts for the historical record they provide, a corrective whose perspective is shaped by her race and gender and is testament to her activist agenda.10 Her selection and sequencing of news clippings and other bits of information, often with handwritten notations and even corrections, assert race pride, highlight agency, and, especially, make visible the often hidden organizing work of black women. The reconstructed story of Broner’s journey and her collection, as revealed through her rich visual and documentary archive, is remarkable on a number of levels. Her travel narrative offers one of the few existing outsider accounts of pre-apartheid South Africa, private or published, by an African American.11 The closest parallels are the contemporaneous journeys of Eslanda Robeson, anthropologist, activist, and wife of entertainer Paul Robeson, in 1936, and of the political scientist Ralph Bunche in 1937, both of whom were, like Broner, associated with the Council on African Affairs.12 While the itinerary of Robeson’s three-week visit and Bunche’s more extensive three-month journey covered much of the same territory and they met many of the same people, what is different is the kind of information Broner gathered, including her resonant collection of objects and, perhaps more so, the way she gathered information. She did not travel as a celebrity or academic but as an ordinary working-class woman, albeit someone who was celebrated as a “Negro beauty specialist” and who benefited from access to the black South African intelligentsia. But she went deeper into South Africa, traveling beyond what seems to have been an established itinerary for African Americans. She sought to investigate the lives of p ­ eople—not only the influential educated, middle-class, Christian black South Africans that Bunche’s and Robeson’s shorter and more scripted journeys led them to, but also “native” people, as she described them in her travel journal, who welcomed Broner’s visits in more rural areas. These distant trips to communities in small villages required the assistance of friends who could translate into English, rickety transportation, and personal stamina, especially for long journeys on foot. But her determined curiosity brought ­manifold rewards: we can trace from her travel notes and the items she

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Prologue

c­ ollected how, town by town, she acquired a more three-dimensional perspective of South African life that extended from the aspirational professional classes to proud traditionalists, and her collection reflects the depth and texture of that cross-section. As a collector, Broner also provides a compelling counternarrative to the mainstream history of collecting African art in the United States. For much of the twentieth century, this history has unfolded against the backdrop of Europe’s colonization of most of the continent and has been largely shaped by white men and, to a lesser extent, white women.13 Broner is not only among the few African American collectors of African art in the early historical record; she is rare, if not unique, as a black woman.14 She is notable as well in that she developed her collection largely through gifts from people she knew or met, rather than under conditions of duress that too often characterize colonial-era collecting. And given that Broner’s network was largely centered around women, the gendered contours of her collection are evident in its emphasis on beadwork and pottery, art forms historically made by women—and distinguish her collection from the more celebrated masks and figural sculptures from western Africa valorized as art by modernist collectors. That her collection also includes Western-style examples of mission-school needlework and craft souvenirs, in addition to objects associated with traditional practices, challenges accepted notions of what constitutes authentic African art. And lastly, that Broner associated these works with contemporary life in South Africa, often as examples of continued cultural traditions, stands in contrast to the timeless vision of a “primitive” continent that was dominant in Western museums of the era. The story that follows takes only one point of entry into Lida Broner’s rich archive. What I see in this archive and how I have told her story is informed by my subjectivity as a curator who worked for many years at the museum that exhibited and later acquired Broner’s collection, as an Africanist art historian with a research interest in the history of collecting and the politics of representation, and as a white woman living in the United States. The story of Broner’s collection has taken me on my own journey into areas of scholarship entirely new to me, which, like the objects themselves, have opened up worlds and expanded my own understanding of ­history—even as that understanding surely has its limitations. By bringing this remarkable but unknown story to light, I hope other scholars with different perspectives and expertise will find new and additional readings that will enrich Broner’s inspiring legacy for future audiences.

“Desire and Determination”

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Notes 1  The Clanton brothers also had a sister, Ruth

Hazel (1947–1994). Albert LeRoy Clanton Jr. (1941– 2021) and Thomas Wesley Clanton (1950–2020) both passed while this publication was in process. I am grateful for their generosity, and that of their brother David, in sharing their grandmother’s life with me and for their warm friendship. I am also thankful that I was able to share some of this story with the Clantons and their extended family early in the research phase during a Sunday gathering at the Newark Museum. 2  “Back to Africa? Mrs. Broner Tells about Condi-

tions in Africa,” undated news clipping [with handwritten “April 1939”], Newark Herald News, box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, Lida C. Broner Papers, Library and Archives, Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ (hereinafter LCB). 3  Igor Kopytoff first offered the metaphor of a

biography as a means of understanding the social life of an object and its attendant shifts in meaning: Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64–91. In the decades since, the concept of object biography has been embraced and extended by numerous scholars across several disciplines including archaeology, anthropology, museology, and art history. Among those of particular relevance to this project are: Janet Hoskins, Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives (New York: Routledge, 1998); Hoskins, “Agency, Biography and Objects,” in Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Christopher Tilley et al. (London: SAGE, 2006), 74–84; Chris Gosden and Yvonne Marshall, “The Cultural Biography of Objects,” World Archaeology 31, no. 2 (1999): 169–78; Chris Gosden and Chantal Knowles, Collecting Colonialism (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2001); Samuel Alberti, “Objects and the Museum,” Isis 96, no. 4 (2005): 559–71; Jody Joy, “Reinvigorating Object Biography: Reproducing the Drama of Object Lives,” World Archaeology 41, no. 4 (2009): 540–56; and Donna Lee Brien, “Object Biography and Its Potential in Creative Writing,” New Writing 17, no. 4 (2020): 377–90. Scholars also have proposed the idea of networked biographies, or thinking of objects as having itineraries rather than biographies. See Robert J. Foster, “Notes for a

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Networked Biography: The P. G. T. Black Collection of Oceanic Things,” Museum Anthropology 35, no. 2 (2012): 149–69; Hans Peter Hahn and Hadas Weiss, Mobility, Meaning and the Transformations of Things (Oxford: Oxbow, 2013); Susan D. Gillespie and Rosemary A. Joyce, Things in Motion: Object Itineraries in Anthropological Practice (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2015); and Alexander A. Bauer, “Itinerant Objects,” Annual Review of Anthropology 48, no. 1 (2019): 335–52. 4  This is a methodological intervention modeled

by Carolyn Hamilton and Nessa Leibhammer in “Ethnologised Pasts and Their Archival Futures: Construing the Archive of Southern KwaZulu-Natal Pertinent to the Period before 1910,” in Tribing and Untribing the Archive: Identity and the Material Record in Southern KwaZulu-Natal in the Late Independent and Colonial Periods, ed. Carolyn Hamilton and Nessa Leibhammer (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2016), 2:416. 5  Carolyn Hamilton introduces these concepts and

methodological tools in “Backstory, Biography, and the Life of the James Stuart Archive,” History in Africa 38 (2011): 319–41. 6  The recently published anthology by Keisha N.

Blain and Tiffany M. Gill, To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019) represents an important contribution to this growing body of scholarship, as an extension and assessment of the field of black internationalism and attempt to analyze its gendered contours. 7  Alberti, “Objects and the Museum,” 561. 8  Leigh Raiford examines how Eslanda Robeson’s

photographic practices during her 1936 trip to South Africa challenged dominant representations of Africans in “The Here and Now of Eslanda Robeson’s African Journey,” in Migrating the Black Body, ed. Leigh Raiford and Heike Raphael-­ Hernandez (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017), 142–43. On photography, self-representation and strategies of affirmation in South Africa, see Santu Mofokeng, The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890–1950 (Steidl: Walther Collection, 2013); for the United States, see Brian Wallis and Deborah Willis, African American Vernacular Photography: Selections from the Daniel Cowin Collection (New York: International Center of Photography, 2005).

Prologue

9  See Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Durham,

NC: Duke University Press, 2017). See also Geoffrey Batchen, “Vernacular Photographies,” History of Photography 24, no. 3 (2000): 262–71; and Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images (New York: Routledge, 2004).

while stationed in the Congo beginning in the 1890s; philosopher Alain Locke, who acquired a collection of Congolese art from a Belgian collector, which he promoted throughout the 1920s as part of the New Negro movement; and the bibliophile Arturo Schomburg, who collected works in the 1930s.

10  See Natalie Pollard, “Alternative Histories in

African American Scrapbooks”; and Ellen Gruber Garvey, “Strategic Scrapbooks: Activist Women’s Clippings and Self-Creation,” in Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Ellen Gruber Garvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 131–71 and 172–206; and Amy Mecklenburg-Faenger, “Material Histories: The Scrapbooks of Progressive-Era Women’s Organizations, 1875–1930,” in Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes, Women and Things, 1750–1950: Gendered Material Strategies (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 141–56. 11  Robert R. Edgars describes the notes of Ralph

Bunche in similar terms in An African American in South Africa: The Travel Notes of Ralph J. Bunche, 28 September 1937–1 January 1938 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001), 2. 12  Eslanda Robeson published her impressions

of her 1936 journey several years later as African Journey (New York: John Day, 1945), an account that has been the subject of extensive scholarship. See Mary Mason, “Travel as Metaphor and Reality in Afro-American Women’s Autobiography, 1850–1972,” Black American Literature Forum 24, no. 2 (1990): 337–56; Maureen Mahon, “Eslanda Goode Robeson’s African Journey: The Politics of Identification and Representation in the African Diaspora,” Souls 8, no. 3 (2006): 101–18; Daniel Gover, “Eslanda Goode Robeson’s African Journey,” Journal of the African Literature Association 2, no. 2 (2008): 76–83; and Raiford, “The Here and Now of Eslanda Robeson’s African Journey.” Ralph Bunche’s travel notes have been published with extensive contextualization in Edgars, An African American in South Africa. 13  For an overview of this history and the rep-

resentation of African art in art museums, see Kathleen Bickford Berzock and Christa Clarke, eds. Representing Africa in American Art Museums: A Century of Collecting and Display (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011). 14  While the historical record is incomplete on

this topic, black collectors include the missionary William H. Sheppard, who assembled a collection

“Desire and Determination”

23

PART ONE

Chapter 1

A Transatlantic Friendship

Lida Broner dreamed of visiting Africa since the early days of her childhood. Born Lida May Tyler on May 24, 1895, in Raleigh, North Carolina, she was the granddaughter of enslaved Africans brought to the United States.1 As a little girl, she recalled being captivated by the stories her maternal grandparents shared about their lives before their forced migration across the Atlantic. While the specifics of their experiences and the places they lived went unrecorded, they left such a vivid imprint on young Lida that she resolved one day to travel to Africa herself. Broner would later say that her grandparents and their “many interesting tales of their homeland caused me from an early age to strive hard enough to someday be able to make a trip to their native land.”2 This intimate connection to Africa profoundly shaped Broner’s own identity throughout her life. Details of Broner’s early biography are sparse. In 1901, when she was only six years old, her father died, and she and her mother left racially segregated North Carolina. They settled in Kearny, New Jersey, then a small factory town just across the Passaic River from the flourishing industrial city of Newark. Broner graduated from Old Kearny High School in June 1912, and two years later married William Clanton. They moved to Newark, becoming part of the city’s rapidly growing African American population.3 Their union would end in divorce, but produced her only child, Albert Leroy Clanton, born June 1915. A second marriage, to Thomas Broner in 1928, was also short-lived but gave her another surname. Broner was active in the Baptist Church, joining Pilgrim Baptist in Newark in the 1920s. Through these years she worked as a housekeeper, supporting herself and her son while also diligently saving money to travel to the continent she had long dreamed of visiting. The fulfillment of this dream began—as so often is the case with life’s fateful twists—with a happenstance personal connection. In 1933 Lida Broner welcomed into her Newark home a young woman from South Africa, Rilda Marta (fig. 4). Broner was at the time probably living alone, as her only child, Leroy, was now an independent young man. Marta, just twenty years old, had arrived in New Jersey two years prior from East London, a port city in the eastern part of South Africa’s Cape Province. She had come to the United States seeking higher education, chaperoned by an African American Baptist missionary from New Jersey. With her sponsor returning to her post in South Africa, Marta was placed in Broner’s home through B ­ aptist Church

25

FIG. 4  

Photograph of Rilda Marta sent to Broner c. 1934 and inscribed on the back “to my dear sweet Aunt across the ocean . . . I shall not forget you.”

networks. Their friendship would ultimately lead to Broner’s extraordinary journey to South Africa some five years later.

Transatlantic Bonds The interwar journeys of both Marta, in 1931, and Broner, in 1938, and the bonds they formed across the Atlantic are part of a long history of linkages and exchanges between South Africans and African Americans.4 African Americans had been traveling to South Africa, and elsewhere throughout the continent, since the late eighteenth century in a reversal of the infamous “Middle Passage” that brought enslaved Africans to the Americas.5 The diasporic connection to South Africa is intriguing, since it was not a genealogical homeland for African Americans, whose roots are largely traced to west and central Africa. Instead, a host of other motivating factors—trade, economic opportunities, cultural exchange, and especially religious and educational philanthropy through missionary networks—led a significant number of African Americans to visit, establish connections with, and even settle in, South Africa. This was especially true as travel increased in the wake of the mineral revolution in the 1890s and accompanying rapid industrialization. The ongoing presence of African Americans from the late nineteenth century onward ultimately had a profound impact on black South Africans. They brought with them ideas about racial uplift formed in the context of increasing structural racism and disenfranchisement in the post-­ Reconstruction era. These “New Negroes” saw and presented themselves as models of middle-class respectability and exemplars of progress committed to “uplifting the race.”6 With a message of self-help and education as the key to social advancement and upward mobility and shared experience of racial oppression, African Americans found a receptive audience in South Africa, where they were viewed as role models and potential liberators.7 A particularly powerful example is the South African tour of the celebrated Jubilee Singers from the Hampton Institute in Virginia, which began in 1890. Over a five-year period, their performances not only influenced South African music but also shaped South African perceptions of African American history and life in significant ways. The chorus promoted an “up from slavery” narrative (a decade before the publication of Booker T. Washington’s influential autobiography) that countered earlier stereotypical and negative images crafted through minstrel shows and offered black South Africans an important model for racial advancement.8 As historian Robert Vinson notes, the Jubilee Singers also made visible the global color line— the larger system of white supremacy that undergirded Europe’s colonialization of Africa and Asia as well as Jim Crow in the United States.9 26

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Black-led churches and African American missionaries in South Africa were especially influential in solidifying the blossoming transnational relationship through the networks they established.10 Early missionaries on the continent were driven in part by the notion of “providential design” and “race redemption”—the belief that, having risen from slavery to freedom, they now had a duty to uplift their kin in Africa through Christianity.11 In South Africa, the newly established National Baptist Convention (NBC) established a presence by 1893, appealing to South Africans who had grown disillusioned with the Christianity promoted by white missionaries.12 They were followed by the AME Church just two years later. Black American Christians looked to fulfill their spiritual charge through education and religious philanthropy, establishing mission schools in South Africa and sending South Africans to the United States to study. Lacking opportunities for higher education at home, black South Africans had begun traveling to the United States as students from the end of the nineteenth century onward, mostly through the sponsorship of Christian missions.13 Among the first was Natal-born John Langalibalele Dube, the founding president of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC), the forerunner of today’s African National Congress (ANC). Dube attended Oberlin College in Ohio from 1888 to 1890 under the auspices of the white-led American Board of Missions. He returned to South Africa to establish the Zulu Industrial Christian School (later known as Ohlange) at Inanda in 1901 and launched an influential Zulu language newspaper Ilanga lase Natal. Dube was followed by several black South Africans who enrolled at the AME (African Methodist Episcopal)-affiliated Wilberforce College in Ohio beginning in 1894, after their celebrated tour of Britain and the United States as part of the African Jubilee Choir. Among them was Charlotte Manye (later, Maxeke) from the eastern Cape, a pioneering activist who became South Africa’s first black female college graduate in 1901. Returning home, Maxeke co-founded the AME’s Wilberforce Institute in the township of Evaton in 1905, modeled on her alma mater, which helped to establish the church’s presence in South Africa. And at a time when women were excluded from male-led organizations like Dube’s ANC, she led the nation’s first women’s organization, the Bantu Women’s League, formed in 1918, and its successor, the National Council of African Women (NCAW), founded in 1933.14 Lida Broner would stay with Dube and his wife, Angelina, while touring Ohlange, visit Maxeke’s Wilberforce, and meet many women involved in the fledgling NCAW. Over the next two decades, hundreds of South Africans were educated in the United States facilitated largely through black missionary ­channels.15 Chapter 1: A Transatlantic Friendship

27

They belonged to an emergent class of educated English-speaking Christians, so-called school people, which was centered in the eastern Cape, where the first mission stations had been established, and eventually extended elsewhere. They were products of prominent schools like Lovedale, established in 1841 in Alice by Scottish Presbyterians, and Healdtown Institute, a Methodist school near Fort Beaufort, founded in 1855. In the United States, most matriculated at black Christian colleges, including Wilberforce College in Ohio, Hampton University in Virginia, and the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. There, they absorbed American ideas about black education, particularly the Tuskegee model of industrial training promoted by Booker T. Washington, that they brought to South Africa. Back home, they formed a tight network of Christian elite, who saw themselves as models of racial uplift and a modernizing influence on the rest of the black population. Though representing a relatively small percentage of the nation’s population, these American-educated Africans would have an outsized impact in their country.16 Beginning in 1910, however, with creation of the Union of South Africa as a self-governing dominion of the British Empire, the mobility of Africans was increasingly circumscribed by the government. Segregation became more deeply entrenched through a series of laws that sought to maintain white political, economic, and cultural dominance, laying the foundation for the establishment of apartheid in 1948.17 In the wake of racially based and government-sanctioned discrimination, black-led religious institutions and their educational networks became important transnational conduits that contributed to emerging race consciousness and political organization.18 As a result, the relationship that had developed between South Africans and African Americans was now seen by the white South African government as a potentially destabilizing threat. The passage of South Africa’s Immigration Act in 1913 restricted the numbers of African Americans permitted entry, especially black missionaries.19 Additional policies enacted beginning in 1920 requiring the submission of a lengthy application with costly fees made it similarly difficult for South Africans to travel to the United States for their education or otherwise. The result was that even fewer of those from the “most respectable” segments of black society were able to make the journey in the interwar years.20

Rilda Marta’s Journey When she arrived in New Jersey in 1931, Rilda Marta was among the diminishing number of “respectable” South Africans who were granted permission to travel. Like other women who went abroad, whose transnational 28

Part One

experiences have only recently received attention, Marta belonged to an aspirational Christian middle class.21 In the context of segregationist South Africa of the 1930s, they were hardly “elite,” lacking meaningful access to land, wages, and voting rights. But they had social capital through their missionary education and family connections, which made their geographic and social mobility possible.22 This was certainly the case with Marta, whose family, schooling, and social network provided motivation and opportunity to travel abroad. Rilda was the daughter of Elizabeth and John Marta, who lived on Clarke’s Lane in East London’s East Bank, a so-called “native location” or section of town established under South Africa’s segregationist laws. The Martas were among the estimated twenty thousand Africans, nearly half the total population, living in the newly urbanized town. Many were temporary residents who came from rural reserves to earn wages, while others had settled permanently in recent years. A very small percentage were educated Christians who were influential in the community as teachers or ministers; the great majority were unskilled laborers working for white South Africans. They came from a mix of Xhosa and other isiXhosa-speaking communities, including the Pondo, Mfengu, and Thembu, but their identity transcended ethnicity. As described by white South African anthropologist Monica Hunter, in her 1936 account of the cultural dynamics of East London’s locations: “The values in town are European, not tribal. Status depends largely on wealth and education and these entail Europeanization.”23 Marta’s parents, as literate Christians who owned their own home, would have been relatively well-to-do East Londoners. Typical of their class, the Martas clearly regarded education as key to economic and social mobility. Indeed, Rilda was among the tiny percentage of black South ­Africans—some five thousand students of a total population of six million—who received secondary education at the time.24 She was sent to Methodist Higher Mission School in East London and then to boarding school at the prestigious Healdtown Institute, a Methodist high school some hundred miles inland, near Fort Beaufort. Offering a British-centric academic curriculum, Healdtown is notable for its roster of influential alumni who went on to shape the intellectual history and political life of South Africa.25 This includes Nelson Mandela, who attended the school just a few years after Marta graduated. Mandela later recalled that when he arrived at Healdtown in 1937, it was “the largest African school south of the equator, with more than a thousand learners, both male and female. Its gracefully ivory colonial buildings and tree-shaded courtyards gave it a feeling of a privileged academic oasis, which is exactly what it was.”26 There Marta received training as a teacher, Chapter 1: A Transatlantic Friendship

29

FIG. 5  

D. D. T. and Florence Jabavu featured in Imvo Zabantsundu, c. 1925, a clipping sent to and saved by Broner.

a relatively elite profession held by only eight women at the time in her hometown of East London.27 As a member of this privileged class of “school people,” Marta was part of a socially and politically influential network that extended well beyond East London. Notable among them were Davidson Don Tengo (D. D. T.) Jabavu and his wife Florence Thandiswa Jabavu (née Makiwane), both significant figures in South African history. The Jabavus, as we shall see, are also central to this unfolding story, their decades-long relationship to Broner documented in the many letters, photographs, and news clippings she saved in her archive (fig. 5). D. D. T. was a political leader and the first black professor at the University of Fort Hare in Alice, founded in 1916 as the nation’s first college for Africans, and Florence was known for her work on behalf of women’s and children’s welfare. They were from prominent families on the eastern Cape, early converts to Christianity who had established international links. D. D. T.’s father, Don Tengo Jabavu, was a journalist, politician, and editor of the pioneering i­siXhosa-English-language news­paper Imvo Zabantsundu (African Opinion). Florence’s father, Elijah Makiwane, was a Presbyterian minister, one of the first Africans to be ordained, and was active in the Native Education Association. D. D. T. was educated at mission schools in South Africa before earning a degree in English from University College London in 1912.28 He had also traveled extensively in the United States, spending two months at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, founded by African American educator Booker T. Washington. A devout Methodist who believed in progress through education, Jabavu was a product of the Cape liberal tradition—“equal rights for all civilized men”—and its nineteenth-century missionary roots.29 In the 1920s he was drawn into politics to defend the Cape franchise, which was 30

Part One

based on salary and land ownership, not race, making political equality seem achievable, at least for the small number of African men who qualified to vote.30 Nelson Mandela, who was his student at Fort Hare between 1939 and 1940, described Jabavu as “virtually synonymous” with the university, which became known for its many alumni who became activists and leaders in the struggle for self-determination in South Africa and elsewhere on the continent.31 Thandiswa Florence Jabavu was equally accomplished. She was educated at Lovedale, where she later taught, and studied music at Kingsmead College in Birmingham, England.32 “A woman whose brilliance was far above that of her husband,” according to her former student, the activist and writer Phyllis Ntantala, Jabavu was “a brave woman who was prepared to fight for those things she believed in,” especially with regard to the uplift of African women.33 Historian Catherine Higgs argues that Florence Jabavu was, in fact, more radical than her husband: “she despised white assumptions of superiority and strove to help African women help themselves. In this sense, she was a nationalist, albeit one without a vote or a recognized political voice.”34 She did, however, have an organizing platform. In 1927 she founded the African Women’s Self-Improvement Association, whose many branches came to be known by its motto, Zenzele (an isiXhosa word meaning “do it yourself”). Zenzele clubs and other women’s social welfare organizations, which we will return to in greater depth, were led by educated Christian women who saw their work as contributing to racial uplift by teaching domestic skills to rural women and generally promoting self-improvement and self-determination.35 While on one hand promoting a model of African womanhood grounded in missionary values, they also built solidarity and helped women forge networks that ultimately extended beyond the nation. Whether through family connections or involvement in Zenzele, Marta was known to the Jabavus before her journey to the United States. “When she left she was a shy, quiet girl,” Florence Jabavu would later recall to Broner, suggesting a close familiarity with Marta and her family.36 Jabavu may even have played a role in connecting Marta with Julia Tyesi, the African American missionary who sponsored her travels across the Atlantic. Tyesi was stationed at the Baptist mission in Middledrift, where the Jabavus had a home. Originally from Newark, Tyesi came to the eastern Cape in 1922 with her husband, a reverend and native South African. Like Jabavu and her Zenzele clubs, Tyesi was focused on racial uplift through her work with rural children.37 The connection to Tyesi opened an opportunity for Rilda Marta to travel to the United States in 1931. Returning to Chapter 1: A Transatlantic Friendship

31

Newark for an extended family visit, Tyesi took Marta with her, acting as her chaperone. Marta sailed from Cape Town on board the Kenilworth Castle to Southampton, England. She would later describe her journey and experiences in a three-part series published in Bantu World, an influential black South African newspaper.38 “It was the first time I had ever been in a big ship,” she reported, “I was thrilled and happy.” During her five-day stopover in England, after three weeks at sea, she noted how whites there “take a black person as a human being,” compared to South Africa. Marta continued on to New York aboard the Acquatania. Arriving at Ellis Island, she commented on the poor treatment of immigrants (“The statue of Liberty is not far away from that island,” she added pointedly). In the United States, Marta described initially feeling “like a stranger in a strange land.” She was awestruck by the wondrous spectacle of skyscrapers in New York City and hearing the water of the Hudson River rush around her while traveling by automobile underneath the “channels” to New Jersey. Marta stayed with Tyesi during her first year in New Jersey, where she repeated some secondary education at Newark’s Barringer High School in preparation for a college degree. At the beginning of 1933, however, Tyesi began preparing to return to South Africa. Seeking a new home for Marta through local church networks, Tyesi found Broner, a member of Pilgrim Baptist Church in Newark. Broner welcomed Marta into her home at 144 Highland Avenue in late January 1933. “She will fare just as my own child does,” Broner pledged to Tyesi. “All that I do is for the love of my people, and the advancement of my race,” words powerfully affirming both Broner’s sense of transatlantic kinship and her dedication to racial uplift.39

“The First African Beauty Specialist” When Marta came to live with Broner early in 1933, she had ambitious plans to further her education after graduating that year. As she later explained, “My aim in going overseas was to study medicine or law and having got there things did not work out as I thought they would.”40 Her expectation was perhaps aspirational, given that careers in nursing or teaching were the best possible options for women like Marta. At any rate, she soon discovered that her visitor’s visa could not be easily changed to the student visa she would need to pursue higher education. Instead, and at Broner’s recommendation and expense, Marta enrolled in a three-month course at Simplex College of Beauty Culture on Kinney Street in Newark in the spring of 1933. Broner would later say that she introduced Marta to “the beauty culture business in the hope that Miss Marta would be of service to Africa.”41 32

Part One

Black beauty culture had become a thriving business in the United States by the early 1930s. Black-owned businesses like Annie Malone’s Poro and Madam C. J. Walker’s Manufacturing Company were pioneers of the industry in the early twentieth century, offering tools, methods, and training for women to cultivate a well-groomed appearance.42 The beauty industry also offered a path to economic independence at a time when there were few employment opportunities for black women other than domestic service.43 The fact that one could be certified in a relatively short period of time and at a low cost made beauty culture courses especially appealing. “Beauty culturalists,” as they called themselves, became skilled at a range of techniques related to hair and skin care. This included hair straightening, pressing, and other forms of styling, treatments to promote hair growth and a healthy scalp, and the business of selling cosmetics and hair-care products. The profession was an attractive option for Marta. Newark’s Simplex offered courses in “all branches of beauty culture,” encouraging women to “Be independent!” with the promise of a “prosperous future.”44 When she first arrived in the United States, Marta had noted the ways that African American women styled themselves differently, especially with regard to hair. “I was always proud to call myself as African,” she reported, but “what really made me feel strange [was] nearly every girl and woman has long hair and I among them looked like a boy dressed in girl’s clothes.” Self-­conscious about her own closely cropped hair, Marta continued, “I admired them . . . their hair long and beautiful, straight and some wavy, and I discovered that it was the work of a beautician.”45 For Marta, long, styled hair was not simply beautiful, but an aspect of self-presentation linked to self-respect. “The key to Happiness and Success,” Marta advised, quoting Madam C. J. Walker, “is a good appearance. You are judged by how you look.” The importance of self-presentation extended to the domestic environment she experienced in the United States. “I found the American Negroes neat and tidy not only in dress but in keeping their houses also. They keep their children very clean and they are pleasant to look at.”46 Marta’s commentary, with its emphasis on her improved appearance and straightened hair, echoes the ways in which the black beauty industry situated its work as contributing to the broader goal of racial uplift.47 Self-improvement through personal grooming, as well as the training and employment provided by the beauty industry, served to better the race by producing women who were successful, stylish, and independent. As such, black beauty culture participated in what has been termed a “politics of respectability,” a strategy for racial advancement that emphasized morals, manners, and appearance.48 Respectability politics were directed at both Chapter 1: A Transatlantic Friendship

33

FIG. 6  

Rilda Marta’s transformative turn to beauty culture demonstrated in before and after photographs, Bantu World, June 1935. Courtesy of the Library, University of the Witswatersrand, South Africa.

white and black Americans: they challenged and subverted white assumptions about the inferiority of blacks and associated negative stereotypes by presenting an alternate image of black womanhood while modeling ­middle-class values and manners that blacks were encouraged to emulate for the betterment of the race.49 While black beauty culture practices, especially hair straightening, were seen by some as reinforcing standards of beauty established by the dominant white culture, the industry also served the race by offering economic opportunities that allowed working-class black women an independent and respectable living. As Noliwe Rooks puts it, “while African American intellectuals were either downplaying the importance of outward physical beauty or raging at those who imitated white beauty, agents for hair-straightening systems were actually going door to door to sell these products” to earn income.50 Marta’s turn to beauty culture was transformative. Referring to the African American women she had so admired when she first arrived in the  United States, Marta proudly recalled that “it was not even a year before I looked just like [them] and some young men and young ladies told me I looked even better than some of the American ladies.”51 The dramatic change in her appearance is illustrated in a pair of photographs published in Bantu World the year after she returned to South Africa (fig. 6). In the “before” photograph, Marta is shown with her short hair and in a simple white blouse, gazing at the camera with a somewhat uncertain expression. 34

Part One

The “after” photograph presents the young woman posed more confidently and fashionably dressed in a jacket festooned with a brooch, with her smooth hair pulled back. Thanks to her education at Simplex College of Beauty Culture and Hairdressing in Newark, Marta went from a shy schoolgirl to a sophisticated lady.52 If Broner gave Marta “the beauty culture business,” she gained in return something equally transformative through her friendship with the young South African. The year that Marta spent with Broner provided a vital bridge to the land of Broner’s ancestors, one that led directly to her journey. Broner eagerly learned about South African culture from Marta, including some of the isiXhosa language, as well as songs. Broner eventually mastered “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika” (“God bless Africa”), also known as the African national anthem, and would sing along while playing it on her piano.53 The isiXhosa hymn had originally been composed in the nineteenth century and was adopted by the fledging African National Congress as its official anthem in 1925. The song, according to David Coplan, “has come to symbolize more than any other piece of expressive culture the struggle for African unity and liberation in South Africa.”54 Like its African American counterpart “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (the so-called Negro National Anthem), which was composed around the same time, the song is a redemptive plea for social justice.55 Behind its expressions of suffering, hope, and unity was a message of protest and resistance that black South Africans mobilized toward their political cause.56 Broner would later adopt the song to similar ends, playing it to accompany public presentations of her collection. Broner also struck up a lively correspondence with Marta’s parents in East London, keeping them informed about their daughter’s activities. Their letters back indicate how African Americans served as influential models of racial progress. “We are glad to see she is happy with you and her school,” Marta’s mother, Elizabeth, wrote, “our intention is that she must understand the negroes, their ways, their education and also their cleanliness.”57 A close transatlantic bond developed between Broner and the Martas over the course of Rilda’s stay. Beyond gratitude for the care of her daughter, Elizabeth Marta affirmed the diasporic connection by telling Broner, “you do everything for your race, your people and your country because Africa is also your country. We hope you may come and see it one day.”58 Rilda Marta departed Newark in the spring of 1934. Thanks to her beauty culture training—still very much a novelty in South Africa—she had become something of a sensation there even before her return. Anticipation of her arrival made front-page news more than once in Umteteli Wa Bantu, a national weekly newspaper with an educated and middle-class Chapter 1: A Transatlantic Friendship

35

black readership. With headlines heralding the “first African Beauty Specialist,” the articles provided an account of her activities abroad, including her stay with Broner and a grand farewell party given at her home in Newark. In one, Marta is described as having “the honor of being the first to carry to South Africa the African Hair Dressing Beauty Culture Business.” Another breathlessly declared Marta to be an “African woman pioneer in a new and praiseworthy direction,” adding that “her return to the southern post is awaited with great interest.”59

The “New Africans” On May 5, 1934, a Saturday, hundreds of black South Africans from throughout the eastern Cape came together to welcome Marta home. The arrival of the “first African beauty specialist” back in her native city warranted a grand reception. Held at Rabe Hall in East London’s East Bank location, this was no casual gathering. According to the extensive newspaper coverage, the reception was organized by a committee that “left no stone unturned to make it a success.” The hall was “tastefully decorated” and refreshments provided. There were numerous speeches of welcome, each of which Marta responded to with public remarks. Entertainment followed from eleven p.m. on, with more than 150 couples dancing to the music of the Gliders Jazz Band until the early hours of the morning.60 Those who gathered to welcome Marta were, like her own family, from the growing Christian middle class who saw education as essential to racial progress. By the late 1920s, this aspirational class had been dubbed the “New Africans” by R. V. Selope Thema, who, as editor of Bantu World, played an instrumental role in the construction of modern South African identity.61 The “New Africans” connected to and modeled themselves after the racially conscious “New Negro” shaped in the twentieth century by African American intellectual leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois, in his The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and Alain Locke in The New Negro (1925). Like the generation of “school people” that preceded them, they dressed in Western-style clothes and saw themselves as modern and “civilized.” They felt both disdain for and a duty to the less-fortunate “heathens,” who tended to be from rural backgrounds and practiced traditional belief systems.62 Respectability was central to their identity and ambitions, to such an extent that on eastern Cape, others sometimes referred to them a bit scornfully, by the hybrid isiXhosa-English name AmaRespectables or “respectable people.”63 The achievements and aspirations of these “New Africans” are vividly captured in the 1930 publication The African Yearly Register: Being an Illustrated National Biographical Dictionary (Who’s Who) of Black Folks in Africa.64 36

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Edited and compiled by T. D. Mweli Skota, the register offered a composite picture and celebration of the modern south African black, comprising progressive, respectable men and women with careers as clergy, teachers, politicians, clerks, entrepreneurs, journalists, lawyers, doctors, and nurses dedicated to the betterment of all Africans by improving the self and working for others.65 The “New Africans” that filled the pages, all educated and “civilized” Christians, looked to emulate their “New Negro” brethren, like Broner, across the Atlantic. At the same time, as they struggled to maintain their status in segregationist South Africa, the book’s emphasis on respectability and race pride was an appeal for acceptance and equal citizenship and a strategy to counter racism in a white-dominated society.66 This was the network Broner would later interact with before and during her journey; her own well-worn copy of the Register suggests that it was heavily consulted. The list of local dignitaries seated on the dais with Marta and her family came from the upper echelons of these “New Africans,” an indication of the high regard in which this pioneer in beauty culture was held. Moreover, many had traveled a good distance to attend the homecoming. Most were involved in politics; several figured in Skota’s African Yearly Register, among them was the Rev. Dr. Walter B. Rubusana, an elder statesmen who was prominent as the minister of one of East London’s largest churches and as a politician. An early agitator for black self-representation on the Cape, Rubusana was a founding member of what would become the African National Congress. On the other end of the political spectrum were members of the more moderate Jabavu family, who historically had advocated an assimilationist stance. They included Alexander Macaulay (“Mac”) Jabavu, who was then editor of Imvo Zabantsundu, the first black newspaper in South Africa established in King William’s Town by their father in 1890. Mac, along with older brother D. D. T., had been working together to preserve the Cape franchise and its few remaining voting rights for blacks. But it was Florence Jabavu who was singled out in the reception’s media coverage. Her presence was reported to have “added to the dignity of the occasion” and she is said to have delivered “the most striking” of all the  speeches. While her words of welcome were not recorded, we do know that Florence Jabavu later confided to Broner that she was “greatly impressed” by Rilda Marta’s transformation, remarking that “when she returned she had blossomed out into a lovely personality.”67 Marta’s education and fledgling career in beauty culture, along with her cosmopolitan look, made her the epitome of the “modern girl,” a social category that emerged in interwar South Africa.68 These sophisticated young women saw Chapter 1: A Transatlantic Friendship

37

their modern self-fashioning as contributing to racial betterment. Florence Jabavu, who regarded the uplift of African women as a national project, albeit one without a formally defined political platform, would certainly have considered the well-groomed and stylish Rilda Marta to be a shining example for others to emulate. And the appreciative Jabavu gave credit to her “dear sister” Lida Broner for this work “on behalf of African motherhood.”69

Visualizing Belonging

FIG. 7  

A page from Broner’s album with photographs sent by South African pen pals before her 1938 journey.

By the time Rilda Marta had returned in May of 1934, Broner had begun corresponding with other South Africans from the eastern Cape, and her connections now extended well beyond East London. Introductions were likely made through the Marta family and eventually included D. D. T. and Florence Jabavu. Broner sent letters to her new pen pals with photographs of herself and copies of black periodicals such as the Chicago Defender and The Crisis.70 In exchange, South Africans sent letters back along with photographs of themselves, often inscribed with personal notes, sometimes accompanied by news clippings and other print media. Broner preserved these mementos—in an embossed leather album that she assembled in the years leading up to her trip with “Photographs” in bold letters stamped in gold on its cover. The mix of studio portraits and everyday snapshots filling the album’s pages offers a window into middle-class black South African life in the 1930s. On one page, a woman sits comfortably in her home, hands clasped and legs crossed, surrounded by her material possessions; a young welldressed couple gazes inquisitively at the camera; another woman stands outside a building, a baby propped up next to her on a tall stool; a suited young man stands smiling for the camera, hat in hand, later adding “yours sincerely, Layton” (fig. 7). Many present themselves wearing their Sunday 38

Part One

FIG. 8  

The championship cricket team at Healdtown, a Methodist mission school near Fort Beaufort, South Africa, c. 1933, no. TR52.2014.2.7.

best—the men typically in suit and tie, sporting pocket squares and wearing hats; the women similarly fashionable, in dresses and low heels, sometimes ­carrying purses. Some of the photographs show glimpses of school life. There is, for instance, a series of images of uniformed children exercising in a schoolyard and a group photo of Healdtown’s championship cricket team, uniformed in matching V-neck sweater vests (fig. 8). Rilda Marta appears three times, smiling for the camera outside a modest home (see fig. 4), with an unidentified gentleman in a suit and tie, and in a candid photograph walking up Oxford Street in East London, smartly dressed. These photographs reveal how a particular class of black South Africans saw themselves—and wanted to be seen—at a moment of considerable social and political change. As Santu Mofokeng observes of a similar archive of African studio portraits from the same era, “When we look at these images, we believe them, for they tell us a little about how these people imagined themselves. We see these images in the terms determined by the subjects themselves.”71 The stakes of those terms, their significance, was political. James Campbell explains that “the image of Africans as traditional folk clinging to their tribal traditions retained a deep hold on the white South African imagination . . . providing the intellectual underpinnings of segregation and later of apartheid. A primary rationale of ‘separate development’ (one of South African officials’ serial euphemisms for apartheid) was that it shielded the distinctive cultures and traditions of the nation’s different ‘peoples’ from the corrosive effects of modern, urban life, even as it satisfied the white economy’s voracious demand for cheap labor.”72 The photographs of black South Africans (taken by whites) that dominate the era’s visual record perpetuated and reinforced tribal divisions Chapter 1: A Transatlantic Friendship

39

and ideas of racial difference. This is perhaps best exemplified by the eleven-volume Bantu Tribes of South Africa, published between 1928 and 1954 by Alfred ­Duggan-­Cronin, whose primitivizing photographs of rural peoples went hand in hand with the political imperatives of the state.73 By contrast, the snapshots and portrait photos sent to Broner recorded everyday experiences and achievements of educated Christians, offering a counternarrative of respectability.74 They were a “tool of uplift,” a way for New Africans to lay claim to a modern collective identity, and to affirm their individuality in the face of racial oppression.75 But these photographs speak to more than the self-imaging of their subjects. Tucked in letters sent across the Atlantic, forging intimate ties, the photographs also testify to social relationships through their gifting to Broner. None of those pictured, with the exception of Rilda Marta, had likely been to the United States, much less met Broner. But the messages inscribed on the back, or penned across the front, project an easy familiarity if not affection. There is, for example, Albert Nkomo of Healdtown, who sent at least six photographs of himself (along with one, it seems, of his girlfriend) in 1934, some of which are addressed to “Mother Broner, Newark, From her son, Albert Nkomo, South Africa.” A young man named Perry Samuels also posted several images, including two in which he is dressed as a cowboy, adding an apologetic inscription: “This came out rather dark, same as the other one. I am hoping to send better snaps of myself later.” An unidentified woman expresses insecurity over her appearance in the photograph, writing, “This is taken in my sitting room, oh dear me. I am really ugly there.” Rilda Marta offers the heartfelt inscription, “with kind wishes to my sweet Aunt Lida across the ocean, though far dear, I shall not forget you. Had it not been for your kindness I do not know what I would have done.”76 The circulation of “snaps,” along with the exchange of letters and newspapers, cemented these social relationships across the Atlantic.77 The photographs sent to Broner visualized and made tangible a form of belonging shaped by routes as much as by roots, to paraphrase Paul Gilroy.78 These everyday images moved between people and places, forging a collective black community and identity that transcended national boundaries.79 We can imagine Broner anticipating their delivery, then handling and studying the photographs for the details they revealed about the sitters’ lives. Personal inscriptions and warm dedications gave voice to distant yet familiar images, animating and reinforcing these bonds.80 Broner gathered and arranged the photos carefully in her album, a treasured repository of faraway friendships that she safeguarded, savored, and shared with friends. 40

Part One

Broner’s diasporic sensibility, rooted in her childhood memories of her African-born grandparents and deepened by the year spent with Rilda Marta, was now bolstered by transatlantic connections made visible and given material form. Africa was no longer an abstract concept known only through the tales of her grandparents, but now a destination within her reach and, in a sense, a home.

Notes 1  Biographical information here is from an

unpublished pamphlet marking the dedication of the Lida Clanton Broner Educational Center, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. School, Newark, NJ, June 3, 1982, box 7, folders 20–22, series VII: Catalogues and Pamphlets, Lida C. Broner Papers, Library and Archives, Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ (hereinafter LCB). 2  Lida Broner, as quoted in “Back to Africa?

Mrs. Broner Tells about Conditions in Africa,” Newark Herald News, undated newspaper clipping, box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB. 3  Significant numbers of southern blacks migrated

to New Jersey’s urban centers beginning in 1915. Newark had the most dramatic growth with a fourfold increase in the city’s black population. By 1930, there were more than ten thousand black residents in Newark, representing 8 percent of the city’s population. See Giles Wright, Afro-Americans in New Jersey: A Short History (Trenton: New Jersey Historical Commission, 1988), 54. 4  Exemplary studies of the transatlantic linkages

between African Americans and black South Africans include those by James T. Campbell, especially Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); and “The Americanization of South Africa,” in Race, Nation and Empire in American History, ed. James Campbell, Matthew Pratt Guteri, and Robert G. Lee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 130–56; Robert Trent Vinson’s The Americans Are Coming! Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012); and “Zulus Abroad: Cultural Representations and Educational ­Experiences of

Chapter 1: A Transatlantic Friendship

Zulus in America,” by Vinson and Robert Edgar, in Journal of Southern African Studies 33, no. 1 (2007): 43–62. The website developed by historians Robert Edgar and David Anthony as part of a larger project aiming to chronicle exchanges between African Americans and black South Africans between 1890 and 1965 provided additional background information for the historical summary here; see https://www.howard.edu/library/reference /bob_edgar_site/index.html. Edgar, Anthony, and Vinson are also collaborating to produce a documentary history, Crossing the Water: African Americans and South Africa, 1890–1965, forthcoming from Ohio University Press. I am grateful to Vinson for discussing this history and related ideologies at greater length with me in relation to my research. 5  James T. Campbell’s Middle Passages: African

American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005 (London: Penguin, 2016) surveys this fascinating history, lesser-known than that of enslaved Africans along the harrowing “middle passage.” 6  For a discussion of the development of the

“New Negro” as the dominant figure of racial uplift between Reconstruction and World War II, see the introduction by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Gene Andrew Jarrett to their edited anthology, The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892–1938 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 1–20. 7  Vinson’s The Americans Are Coming considers

how black South Africans looked to African Americans as role models and liberators, focusing on the period between 1890 and 1940.

41

8  Vinson, The Americans Are Coming, 13–24. See

also Amanda Denise Kemp, “‘Up from Slavery’ and Other Narratives: Black South African Performances of the American Negro (1920–1943),” PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1997; and Chinua Akimaro Thelwell, “Toward a “Modernizing” Hybridity: McAdoo’s Jubilee Singers, McAdoo’s Minstrels, and Racial Uplift Politics in South Africa, 1890–1898,” Safundi 15, no. 1 (2014): 3–28. 9  Vinson, The Americans Are Coming, 13. 10  See Campbell, Songs of Zion, particularly

chapter 8, “The Seed You Sow in Africa,” 249-93; and David Killingray, “The Black Atlantic Missionary Movement and Africa, 1780s–1920s,” Journal of Religion in Africa 33, no. 1 (2003): 3–31. 11  Vinson, The Americans Are Coming, 6. See also

Killingray, “The Black Atlantic Missionary Movement,” 6–8. 12  Vinson, The Americans Are Coming, 8, 17–18. 13  See Campbell, Songs of Zion, 249–93; and

Vinson, “Zulus Abroad,” 55–61. 14  On Maxeke, see Thozama April, “Theorising

Women: The Intellectual Contributions of Charlotte Maxeke to the Struggle for Liberation in South Africa,” PhD diss., University of the Western Cape, 2012; and “Charlotte Maxeke: A Celebrated and Neglected Figure in History,” in One Hundred Years of the ANC: Debating Liberation Histories Today, ed. Omar Badsha et al. (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2012). Campbell also discusses Maxeke in the larger context of American-educated black South Africans in Songs of Zion, 252, 282–93.

18  Iris Berger, South Africa in World History (Lon-

don: Oxford University Press, 2009), 104. 19  Killingray, “The Black Missionary Movement,” 21.

See also Vinson, The Americans Are Coming, 27. 20  Campbell, Songs of Zion, 257–58. 21  On the erasure of black women’s lives from the

South African archive in the interwar years, see Athambile Masola, “‘Bantu Women on the Move’: Black Women and the Politics of Mobility in Bantu World,” Historia 63, no. 1 (May 2018): 93–111. I am grateful to Masola for sharing her scholarship with me and for our ongoing and enriching intellectual exchange. 22  Athambile Masola, “Traversing and Writing

the World: Frieda Matthew’s Internationalism” (in review). 23  Monica Hunter, Reaction to Conquest (1936

London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 437. The description of and data on East London here is derived from Hunter’s account. See also Leslie Bank, “Home-Made Ethnography: Revisiting the ‘Xhosa in Town’ Trilogy,” Kronos 28 (2002): 146–71. On Monica Hunter Wilson’s work as an anthropologist, see Leslie Bank and Andrew Bank, Inside African Anthropology: Monica Wilson and Her Interpreters (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 24  According to Andrew Roberts, in 1938 there

were some 5,500 students receiving secondary education in South Africa. See Roberts, ed., Cambridge History of Africa, Vol. 7, 1905–1940 (London: Oxford University Press, 1986), 227–28.

15  Robert Edgar and David Anthony, on their proj-

25  For a list of these students, see: http://www

ect website, state that upward of several hundred South Africans came to study in the United States between 1890 and 1965. https://www.howard.edu /library/reference/bob_edgar_site/maintext.html. James T. Campell provides a conservative estimate of between 100 to 150 students, about 50 of whom were sponsored by the AME, up until the onset of World War I and less than forty in the 1920s. Campbell, Songs of Zion, 258.

.theheritageportal.co.za/article/upon-eagles-wings -healdtown-mission-institute-and-struggle-south -africas-freedom.

16  On the class dimensions and impact of US-­

educated South Africans, see Campbell, “The Seed You Sow in Africa.” 17  See Saul Dubow, Racial Segregation and the

Origins of Apartheid in South Africa, 1919–1936 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989).

26  Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The

Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (New York: Little, Brown, 1994), 36. 27  Hunter, Reaction to Conquest, 439. 28  Jabavu’s life as a teacher, church leader, and

politician is chronicled by Catherine Higgs in The Ghost of Equality: The Public Lives of D. D. T. Jabavu of South Africa, 1885–1959 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997). 29  Higgs, Ghost of Equality, 1, 51. 30  Catherine Higgs, “Revisiting D. D. T. Jabavu,

1885–1959,” in India and East Africa E-Indiya Nase

42

Part One

East Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2020), 33.

a letter sent to British consul, October 18, 1933, box 2, folder 7, series VI: Miscellanies, LCB.

31  Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 44.

40  “Miss Rilda Marta’s Trip to America” Bantu

32  V. M. Sisi Maqagi, “Florence Thandiswa Jabavu,”

World, July 13, 1935.

in Women Writing Africa: The Southern Region, ed. M. J. Daymond et al. (New York: Feminist Press of the City University of New York, 2003), 189–90.

41  Lida Broner, handwritten transcript of a letter

33  Phyllis Ntantala, A Life’s Mosaic: The Autobiog-

42  For more on African American women and the

raphy of Phyllis Ntantala (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 230.

beauty culture industry, see Noliwe Rooks, Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996); Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998); A’lelia Bundles, On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker (New York: Scribner Books, 2001); Susannah Walker, Style and Status: Selling Beauty Culture to African American Women, 1920–1975 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007); and Tiffany M. Gill, Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010).

34  Higgs, Ghost of Equality, 67. 35  Catherine Higgs, “Zenzele: African Women’s

Self-Help Organizations in South Africa, 1927–1998,” African Studies Review 47, no. 3 (2004): 121. 36  Florence Jabavu to Lida Broner, March 12, 1938,

box, 2, folder 7, series VI: Miscellanies, LCB. 37  For more on Julia Tyesi, see “An Appealing

to the British consul, October 18, 1933, box 2, folder 3, series VI: Miscellanies, LCB.

Article on Race Consciousness by Mrs. Julia Tyesi,” Bantu World 3, no. 28, March 16, 1935; and “Mrs. Julia Tyesi’s Letter to Friends in the United States,” Bantu World 4, no. 19, August 17, 1935. I am grateful to Athambile Masola for drawing my attention to these. Tyesi describes bringing Rilda Marta to the United States in a letter to Lida Broner dated February 23, 1933, box 2, folder 7, series VI: Miscellanies, LCB.

43  Rooks, Hair Raising, 52–59. See also Peiss, Hope

38  “Miss Rilda Marta’s Trip to the United States

45  Marta, Bantu World, June 29 and July 6, 1935, 12.

Filled with Excitement” was published in consecutive issues of Bantu World, June 29, July 6, and July 13, 1935. Lynn Thomas discusses Rilda Marta as an exemplar of the “modern girl” in her essay rethinking the gender history and historiography of interwar sub-Saharan Africa, “The Modern Girl and Racial Respectability in 1930s South Africa,” Journal of African History 47, no. 3 (2006): 461–90. 39  Lida Broner, handwritten transcript of a letter

to Julia Tyesi, February 22, 1933, box 2, folder 7, series VI: Miscellanies, LCB. Early in 1933, and for reasons unclear, the relationship between Marta and Tyesi soured. A series of increasingly acrimonious letters between Tyesi and Broner suggest that Marta accused Tyesi of mistreatment, to which Tyesi responded by threatening to take her back to South Africa. Broner, in a handwritten copy of an October 18, 1933, letter to the British consul, defended Marta’s decision to stay in the United States to continue her education and refers to Tyesi having “commited a very serious offence against this Gov.,” adding that she does not “wish to be implicated.” Lida Broner, handwritten transcript of

Chapter 1: A Transatlantic Friendship

in a Jar, 5. 44  Advertisement for Simplex College of Beauty

Culture in Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life, November 1936. 46  Marta, Bantu World, July 13, 1935, 12. 47  Kemp, “Up From Slavery,” 155–56. See also

Thomas, “The Modern Girl and Racial Respectability,” 467. 48  Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous

Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 186, 196. 49  Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 192–93. 50  Rooks, Hair Raising, 47–49. Rooks further argues

that women like Madame C. J. Walker offered an implicit critique of white standards of beauty and “drew upon culturally discrete symbols and practices within African American communities” in marketing beauty culture. Peiss, in Hope in a Jar, and Gill, in Beauty Shop Politics, also emphasize how the black beauty culture industry offered a degree of economic autonomy. 51  Marta, Bantu World, July 6, 1935, 12.

43

52  Thomas, “The Modern Girl and Racial Respect-

ability,” 487. 53  Marta, Bantu World, June 29, 1935. 54  David B. Coplan, In the Township Tonight!

of the Life and Work of H. I. E. Dhlomo (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1985), esp. 1–19. The book encompasses all of Africa but the majority featured by Skota are South African.

South Africa’s Black City Music and Theater (London: Longman, 1985), 46.

65  Couzens, The New African, 15–16, 28.

55  Bennetta Jules-Rosette and David B. Coplan,

67  Florence Jabavu to Lida Broner, March 12, 1938,

“‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’: From Independent Spirit to Political Mobilization,” Cahiers d’Études africaines 44, nos. 1–2 (2004): 173–74, 343–67, see especially 362–63.

box 2, folder 8, series VI: Miscellanies, LCB. 68  See Thomas, “The Modern Girl and Racial

56  Jules-Rosette and Coplan, “Nkosi Sikelel’

box 2, folder 8, series VI: Miscellanies, LCB.

iAfrika,” 362–63. 57  Elizabeth Marta to Lida Broner, undated (1933),

box 2, folder 7, series VI: Miscellanies, LCB. Marta’s letters to Broner are signed “Mrs. J. Marta” or “Mrs. Marta”; I have identified her first name as Elizabeth based on a gift to Broner from a “Mrs. Elizabeth Marta.” 58  Elizabeth Marta to Lida Broner, July 15, 1934,

66  Couzens, The New African, 18–19.

Respectability.” 69  Florence Jabavu to Lida Broner, March 12, 1938, 70  A letter from Rilda’s mother to Broner refer-

ences the “photos and papers” sent to a Mr. Mtoli (?) and also mentions that she gave Broner’s address to another gentleman, Mr. Clifford (?). Elizabeth Marta to Lida Broner, October 17, 1933, box 2, folder 7, series VI: Miscellanies, LCB. 71  Santu Mofokeng, The Black Photo Album/Look

box 2, folder 7, series VI: Miscellanies, LCB.

at Me: 1890–1950 (New York: Walther Collection, 2013), n.p.

59  See “First African Beauty Specialist: Miss Rilda

72  James T. Campbell, “African Subjects,” in Santu

Mata Takes a Course in the ‘States’” Umteteli Wa Bantu, February 3, 1934, and “Miss Rita Matta: First African Beauty Specialist,” Umteteli Wa Bantu, April 28, 1934 (Marta’s name is spelled incorrectly in both instances). Broner saved both news clippings, box 3, series III: Press Clippings, LCB. 60  A description of the reception is provided in

an article, “Reception to Miss Rilda Matta,” in an unidentified newspaper clipping in the Broner archive, Newark Museum, from which this information is drawn: box 3, series III: Press Clippings, LCB. 61  Ntongela Masilela, An Outline of the New Afri-

can Movement in South Africa (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2013), 23. On the “New Africans” and in relation to “New Negro” modernity, see Masilela, “New African Modernity and the New African Movement,” The Cambridge History of South African Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and “New Negroism and New Africanism: The Influence of the United States Modernity on the Construction of South African Modernity,” Black Renaissance 2, no. 2 (1999): 46.

Mofokeng, The Black Photo Album/Look at Me: 1890–1950 (New York: Walther Collection, 2013): n.p. 73  Michael Godby, “Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin’s

Photographs for the Bantu tribes of South Africa (1928–1954): The Construction of an Ambiguous Idyll.” Kronos 36, no. 1 (2010): 54–83. 74  On vernacular photography and image-­making

practices, see Geoffrey Batchen, “Vernacular Photographies,” History of Photography 24, no. 3 (2000): 262–71; on vernacular image-making practices in African-descended communities, see Brian Wallis and Deborah Willis, African American Vernacular Photography: Selections from the Daniel Cowin Collection (New York: International Center for Photography, 2005); and Tina Campt, Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 75  Leigh Raiford, “Notes toward a Photographic

62  Campbell, Songs of Zion, 253.

Practice of Diaspora,” English Language Notes 44, no. 2 (2006): 211. See also James T. Campbell, “African Subjects,” n.p.

63  Thomas, “The Modern Girl and Racial Respect-

76  All of the inscriptions quoted in this paragraph

ability,” 466.

are from Broner’s photograph album. LCB.

64  See Tim Couzens’s lengthy discussion of Mweli

Skota’s Yearly Register in The New African: A Study 44

Part One

77  Regarding the “performative qualities” of

the photo album, Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart argue that the implications of the gifting ­relationship are integral to the meaning of the photograph in affirming or constructing social relationships. See Edwards and Hart, Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images (London: Routledge, 2004), 11–13. 78  Paul Gilroy asks, “What forms of belonging have

been nurtured by visual cultures?” in Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 155. On roots and routes in the formation of the black diaspora, see his groundbreaking study, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 79  Leigh Raiford describes this as a “photographic

practice of diaspora,” considering how the medium has been used “to articulate—to join up and express—transnational collective black communities and identities” in “Notes toward a Photographic Practice of Diaspora,” 212. Joan M. Schwartz considers the role of photography in the making of “imagined communities” in “Photographic Archives and the Idea of Nation: Images, Imaginings, and Imagined Community,” Photo Archives and the Idea of Nation (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 17–40. Both Raiford and Schwartz draw upon the influential concept of an “imagined community” developed by Benedict Anderson to analyze this kind of transcendent nationalism in his book Imagined ­Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 80  Tina M. Campt examines the multiple ­registers

—visual, haptic, and sonic—of these “affect-laden objects” in Image Matters, 16–18. See also Campt’s Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

Chapter 1: A Transatlantic Friendship

45

PART ONE

Chapter 2

From Personal Pilgrimage to Political Purpose

Shortly after Rilda Marta’s return home to East London, Lida Broner decided to travel to South Africa. In May of 1934 she applied for a visa through the South African Legation in Washington, DC. Nearly three months later, she received a brusquely worded typewritten reply: “Owing to the aboriginal and coloured population of the Union, the Government is, as a general rule, unable under the provisions of the Immigration Regulations Act of 1913 to agree to the admission of persons not of pure white descent.”1 Broner was outraged. She added a handwritten “large” in the margins of the letter before the words “aboriginal and coloured population,” a sharp reminder that the country’s majority population was black. At the bottom, she wrote dismissively and with emphasis, “Please send this back.” Broner’s incensed commentary was a corrective and a statement of refusal. She did not send it back, however. In fact, not only did she retain the letter, but she had numerous copies made, some of which are found scattered throughout her archive while others presumably were distributed. That she saved so many copies of this letter throughout her long life speaks to a lasting sense of injustice sparked by this incident. And it suggests that this was the moment when her much-anticipated trip to South Africa became something more than a personal pilgrimage. Nurtured by her growing diasporic consciousness and transatlantic network and galvanized by her own experience of a global color line, Broner’s travel plans took on a greater purpose through her activities in the years leading up to her 1938 departure.

The Beauty Culture Business The year after Marta returned to South Africa, Broner took up the “beauty culture” business herself. She enrolled not at Simplex (Marta’s school) but at the Apex School of Scientific Beauty Culture in Newark, becoming part of its class of 1935 (fig. 9). While Simplex appears to have been a single enterprise in Newark, Apex not only had multiple branches but in fact was the largest and most significant black-owned business in New Jersey during the interwar period.2 Founder Sara Spencer Washington launched the company in 1920 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, by herself and “on a proverbial shoestring,” as she would later describe.3 Within a decade, Apex’s success rivaled that of Annie Malone’s Poro and Madam C. J. Walker’s company; in the 1930s, it actually thrived by advertising itself as a “depression-proof business.”4 By 1936—the year after Broner graduated—Apex’s standing 47

FIG. 9  

Lida Broner (standing, third from right) and members of the Apex class of 1935.

was such that Nannie Helen Burroughs, the prominent African American educator, religious leader, and social activist, delivered the commencement address. Once dismissive of the beauty industry, Burroughs now praised it for providing job opportunities for black women and fostering entrepreneurship. “The beauty industry is ours,” she proclaimed, “and we should keep it as ours.”5 As a mature woman, Broner’s turn to beauty culture was presumably less about personal transformation, as it had been with young Rilda Marta. Undoubtedly it was more appealing than the labor of domestic work. But it was a career decision that offered much more: in addition to the financial resources to get her to Africa, it gave her a portable skill—hairstyling—that could generate income while she was there and on the move. The financial autonomy enjoyed by “beauty culturalists” also fostered an activist culture that linked the social, political, and economic through shared ideals of racial uplift.6 Black beauty entrepreneurs and their clients came together within the safe space of the salon, combining the intimate work of hairstyling with talk of social and political change. Apex—which proclaimed itself “the largest Negro owned and operated company in the World engaged in the manufacture and sale of ­Cosmetics” —was especially politically attuned.7 Part of its success lay in its global 48

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­ erspective and integration of political and cultural issues into the disp course of the beauty industry. This was a deliberate strategy introduced by its founder, Sara Washington, who saw herself as “a political figure of importance as well as the outstanding Negro business woman in America.”8 By the 1940s, Apex had eleven schools in the United States; 4,000 annual graduates; and, with 45,000 agents around the world, an international presence. Thanks to Washington’s business savvy, the Apex enterprise ultimately extended well beyond its main focus on beauty culture to include a laboratory, a publishing arm, and a drug company.9 A member of the NAACP and the New Jersey State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, among many other civic organizations, Washington provided important social services, including a rooming house for travelers and one of the nation’s first golf courses for blacks in Atlantic City.10 Broner’s budding political consciousness was surely raised through her involvement with Apex. Certainly she would have been familiar with its periodical Apex News and Hair Magazine, which was published regularly throughout the 1930s. Apex News framed topical industry issues within a broader context of world politics. For example, a 1936 article, published just months after Broner graduated, likened the expansion of white companies into the black beauty industry to “Mussolini’s attempted rape of Ethiopia.”11 The invasion of Ethiopia—one of only two African nations that had never been colonized—by fascist Italy in October 1935 was an event of global significance that mobilized blacks around the world politically and fueled anticolonialist initiatives.12 Lida Broner, as we shall see, was among those that responded to this call to action. Apex also had ties to South Africa, where Apex hair care and cosmetics products were introduced around the same time that Rilda Marta came to live with Lida Broner. A 1933 feature on Sara Washington in the news­paper Bantu World heralded the future opening of the Apex Hair Company in c­ ities throughout South Africa. The company’s founder was presented as a role model for black South African women, an “astute and charming character whose persistent business sagacity has swept aside all possible adversities.” Training at the new Apex schools would afford “ambitious women financial independence at a vocation in which there is more money to be made than any other legitimate business.”13 Beginning in 1933, Apex also began to market its beauty products, and itself as the first “all Negro Company,” in Bantu World.14 During the 1930s, the newspaper was an influential cultural tastemaker reaching a broadbased black readership, with sections published in isiXhosa, isiZulu, Sesotho, and Setswana, in addition to Afrikaans and English.15 The newspaper Chapter 2: From Personal Pilgrimage to Political Purpose

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actively cultivated black South African women with regular articles about personal, educational, and professional successes published under headings such as “Page of Interest to Women of the Race” and “Bantu Women in the Home.”16 Apex shrewdly targeted the same readership with ads (likely the first of its sort tailored to this demographic) presenting beauty culture as a pathway to personal liberation through self-improvement.17 By 1936 the company had not only opened an international office in South Africa (which was located, surely not by chance, in the Bantu World building in Johannesburg), it also established a market there for beauty culture products, services, and training. Broner would be well received as a “Negro beauty specialist,” with her services much in demand while she was in South Africa.

“The Necessity of Organization” In 1935, around the same time that she graduated from Apex, Broner helped found the Lit-Muse, a black women’s club in Newark, which furthered her growing activism. Black beauty culture and the black women’s club movement were “inextricably interwoven,” according to historian Tiffany Gill, with a shared rhetoric of uplifting black womanhood.18 Broner was the corresponding secretary for the Lit-Muse and her close friend, Virginia M ­ itchell, was its president. Another friend, Una Janifer, the university-educated wife of a physician, served as advisor. Though small, with just fourteen members, Newark’s Lit-Muse belonged to a nationwide network of thousands of other black women’s clubs dedicated to social reform and racial advancement. At the state level, it was a member of the New Jersey State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, formed in 1915. In turn, the State Federation was a branch of the National Association of Colored Women’s clubs (NACW), founded in 1896 by suffragist Mary Church Terrell.19 The Lit-Muse Club in Newark was part of a long history of black w ­ omen’s organizing in the United States whose roots may be traced to social welfare clubs formed as early as the 1790s.20 From the late nineteenth century through the Progressive era, such clubs were increasingly dedicated to reform, including supporting suffrage for women, fighting racial discrimination, and progressing social uplift. They afforded black women, who were largely excluded from clubs formed by white women, the necessary organizational skills and networks to effect social and political change. They were shaped by and deployed a politics of respectability that gave black women standing within and beyond their communities. And they were united toward a common cause through state federations and especially through the NACW, which enabled women to connect their local community efforts as contributing to a larger collective movement.21 50

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The rise and growth of the black women’s club movement in the Progressive era is deeply entwined with women’s involvement in black churches, particularly their critical role in making the church an influential institution of racial self-help within the African American community.22 Broner and her fellow leader of the Lit-Muse Club, Una Janifer, for example, were both active in the Pilgrim Baptist Church congregation in Newark. Churches, long a center of African American communities, of course not only provided a space for spiritual and social communion, but also—like clubs—were powerful platforms for educational, economic, and political activities.23 While black men dominated the formal power structure and politics of churches, women’s church work cultivated needed organizational and networking skills, transforming “unknown and unconfident women into leaders and agents of social service and racial self-help in their communities.”24 “The Necessity of Organization” was the theme of the conference that brought together thirty different New Jersey women’s societies at St. Paul’s AME Zion Church in Trenton in 1915, leading to the formation of the New Jersey State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs.25 Reflecting the entwined efforts of clubwomen’s uplift and Christian activism, its founder and first president, Florence Randolph, was a suffragist and ordained elder associated with the AME Zion Church in Summit, New Jersey.26 Randolph was also actively involved in missionary work, serving as president of the New Jersey Women’s Missionary Society and traveling in the early 1920s throughout Liberia and Ghana to gain a better understanding of the needs of Africans in those regions.27 In fact, at its first convention in 1916, the New Jersey State Federation voted to sponsor a young girl from Ghana, Charity Zormelo, who attended Bordentown High School in the 1920s and went on to receive a BS from Hampton University in Virginia in 1934 before returning to her homeland.28 The New Jersey State Federation united and coordinated the efforts of individual clubs, each of which had a specific project within their community. Newark’s Lit-Muse Club was founded “to improve the status of native Africans,” a mission that reflected the international interests and experience of the State Federation’s president. Its focus would have appealed to Broner’s interests and capitalized on her growing ties across the Atlantic. How the club members proposed to serve this mission was not made explicit. However, the club’s name, with its allusion to the power of literature to spark inspiration, affirms that intellectual exchange was central to its activities. Like other black women’s study clubs of the era, print culture and public speaking played an important role in their educational agenda.29 Chapter 2: From Personal Pilgrimage to Political Purpose

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During the club’s early years, members distributed books, newspapers, and magazines within their local community and internationally to their contacts in Africa, and held programs featuring a range of speakers. But it is also clear that visual culture was central to the Lit-Muse Club’s mission from the very start.

An African Tea On June 21, 1935, Broner and her friend Una Janifer hosted the Lit-Muse’s inaugural event, an “African tea.” In the pages of Broner’s scrapbook, the program is mentioned only retrospectively, in two news clippings that cover the 1939 exhibition of Broner’s South African collection at a Newark YWCA, also sponsored by the Lit-Muse.30 The one-sentence description of the initial meeting, identical in both clippings, states that “the Lit Muse Club held its first African Tea, at which the guest speakers were Mr. Mekeke from South Africa and Mr. A. C. Peacock of West Africa, and at which there was an exhibit of African hand craft, including an Ethiopian flag and spear.” The mention, though brief, is important in establishing the African Tea in 1935 as a precedent to the first public presentation of Broner’s collection following her journey. While Peacock remains unidentified, it is quite likely that Mr. Mekeke is Clarke Edward Maxeke, the son of Charlotte Maxeke, who was then living in the United States following his studies at Morris Brown College in Atlanta.31 Maxeke had recently written a isiXhosa-­ language novel on life in Johannesburg, a topic he might well have spoken on to the women of the Lit-Muse Club.32 By sharing their knowledge and perspectives with its members, the two would have served the mission of the nascent Lit-Muse Club to raise awareness of contemporary life in ­colonial-era Africa. Their participation not only reflects the club’s international interests but is also evidence of the transnational networks that members like Broner were forming. Indeed, she may have been the one to extend an invitation to Maxeke to speak, given her recently established ties to South Africa. That the educational program was paired with an exhibition of African material culture is equally significant. The unspecified examples of “African hand craft” likely were provided by club president Virginia Mitchell, who owned a small collection she may have acquired as a missionary in Africa.33 The objects that are identified—the spear, and especially the flag—would have been read as powerful symbols of black independence on a number of levels. Most directly, the national flag of Ethiopia, with its iconic green, yellow, and red, represented the resilience and independence of the only African country that had successfully resisted colonization.34 The African 52

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nation was on the minds of many African Americans, if not the world, in June of 1935, following the buildup of Italian military forces along its borders, but more broadly, these objects evoked the concept of Ethiopia. Its biblical reference—“let Ethiopia hasten to stretch out its hands to God”— resonated among African Americans as a rallying cry of black liberation from the late eighteenth century on.35 In colonial-era Africa, Ethiopianism emerged as a similarly religiously based ideology in the nineteenth century, beginning with the creation of black independent churches in South Africa; in turn, its unifying vision of black nationalism ultimately shaped pan-­Africanist movements of the twentieth century.36 Presented together with the two guest lectures, the exhibition surely would have offered an implicit—if not explicit—critique of imperialism. It thus serves as a vivid example of the way black women’s organizations aligned art and activism throughout the Progressive era. From intimate presentations in domestic spaces, like the Lit-Muse’s African Tea, to more public, if still fleeting, exhibits at women’s conferences and conventions, club- and churchwomen incorporated material culture into their social and political work from the first decade of twentieth century on. Their displays deployed a range of works from needlecraft to paintings, all with the ultimate agenda of racial uplift.37 These civic-minded presentations participated in the broader phenomenon of exhibitions mounted by African American social organizations, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Colored Branches of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA).38 Presented in community centers, schools, libraries, and churches, the exhibitions also furthered the cause of racial uplift by showcasing black cultural achievement, even as they compensated for the historic marginalization of blacks, both as visitors and as exhibiting artists, from established art museums.39 While early on, exhibitions mounted by these civic organizations focused exclusively on work by African Americans, they began to include objects from Africa as early as 1918.40 They reflected a growing appreciation for African sculpture more broadly in the United States, driven both by its increasing availability on the market thanks to colonial-era circuits and its aesthetic “validation” through its influence on modernist art.41 Indeed, the same year as Broner’s African Tea, and just across the Hudson River from Newark, the Museum of Modern Art in New York hosted the landmark exhibition African Negro Art, organized by curator James Johnson Sweeney. With some 600 objects, the exhibition was expansive in scope and influential on a number of levels, even if it fundamentally recontextualized the works within a heavily aestheticized frame of reference. The spare Chapter 2: From Personal Pilgrimage to Political Purpose

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FIG. 10   Advertisement for The Negro in Art Week exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1927. Photograph courtesy Art Institute of Chicago.

installation eschewed any accompanying contextual information, foregrounding the visual qualities of the objects on display and establishing them as works of art. The selection of masks and figural sculpture from west and central Africa reflected the tastes of the majority white lenders to the exhibition, solidifying an emerging Euro-­ American canon of African art. By its close in May, the exhibition had been seen by some 50,000 individuals, including significant numbers of African Americans.42 In the decades preceding the MoMA exhibition, African art had also become an increasingly important point of reference for African American creatives and intellectuals.43 In 1925 the publication of The New Negro by the philosopher Alain Locke became an ideological rallying cry for the artistic and cultural renaissance known as the New Negro movement. The celebrated anthology included his influential essay “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts,” which encouraged African Americans to view African art as cultural heritage and a source of artistic inspiration as well as a catalyst for social reform.44 Locke’s “diasporic ancestralism” reframed African art as a “classical,” rather than “primitive,” tradition from which a modern African American art would be forged.45 Locke also conceived the first joint exhibition of African American and African art held in an art museum, The Negro in Art Week, presented at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1927 (fig. 10). The exhibition featured more than one hundred examples of African sculpture—again, masks and figural work—from a collection of Congolese art that Locke had acquired from Belgian diplomat Raoul Blondiau as the foundation of a planned, but never realized, Harlem Museum of African Art.46 Black women were also integrating African material culture into the activist programs of their club and church work as part of the New Negro movement.47 For the most part, showings like that staged at Lida Broner’s Lit-Muse, short-lived and poorly documented, remain outside of historical accounts of exhibition practices. There is, however, the compelling case study provided by historian Betty Livingston Adams of displays mounted 54

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by the interracial Church Women’s Committee (CWC) of the Federal Council of Churches in Christ in America (FCC) Commission on Race Relations from 1928 through the mid-1930s. The CWC presented exhibitions that paired African art with “New Negro” works at conventions as well as YMCAs, churches, and high school gyms.48 The intended audience was interracial; the CWC women believed that the power of visual culture in a public space “would lead to transformation on the personal level and empowerment on the national level,” resulting in a new era in race relations.49 One such example was a CWC conference in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1930, where more than one hundred delegates had the opportunity to view an exhibition of African art from the lending collection of the Newark Museum, accompanied by an anti-lynching lecture by Walter White, the leader of the NAACP.50 Viewed against this background, it is clear that the inaugural program mounted by the women of the Lit-Muse Club in 1935 was more than a social gathering. The pairing of material culture with a social agenda conformed to an established tradition of activism on the part of club- and churchwomen. And yet Broner’s display of “African Hand Craft” differs from that broader trend in crucial ways.51 While these other exhibitions utilized visual culture for social change and racial equity in the United States, there appears to have been little, if any, focus on the politics of global colonialism. Even Alain Locke, the leading voice of the “New Negro” movement, seems not to have taken advantage of the collection of Congolese art at the Chicago exhibition to critique Belgian imperialism and the atrocities of colonial rule.52 By contrast, the Lit-Muse Club’s African Tea offers an unusual instance of internationalist engagement with contemporary affairs on the African continent. It is more than likely that the African Tea’s fusion of personal testimony and material culture to raise consciousness about “the status of native Africans” inspired Broner to amass a collection of like objects during her visit to South Africa and to mobilize them with like intent but broader public impact upon her return.

The International Committee on African Affairs There is little documentation of Broner’s activities in the year following the African Tea in June of 1935. What we do know is that in the aftermath of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, she was among those whose efforts to broaden consciousness about the struggles of blacks in colonized Africa intensified and that she sought to connect the work of the Lit-Muse to a larger, more explicitly political platform. By the end of 1936, Broner had reached out to Max Yergan, an African American missionary and activist who had recently Chapter 2: From Personal Pilgrimage to Political Purpose

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returned from South Africa to lead the nascent International Committee on African Affairs (ICAA) as its executive director.53 Based in New York, the ICAA was officially founded in January 1937 (and restructured in 1942 as the Council on African Affairs) with a mandate “to study the conditions of life and work in Africa; and to promote the welfare of the African people.”54 The organization ultimately emerged in the 1940s as a leading pan-Africanist and anti-imperialist force in the struggle for African independence and, especially, South African liberation.55 Broner’s connection with Yergan was likely made through D. D. T. and Florence Jabavu, who were now part of her ever-widening correspondence network in South Africa. The Jabavus had known Yergan and his wife Susie since 1922, when Max came to work as a Baptist missionary for the YMCA in Alice. The two men formed a long and close friendship and political association over the course of the Yergans’ fourteen years in South Africa. While it is unclear whether their wives were close, they certainly shared an interest in social welfare and women’s issues. Susie Yergan helped establish the Unity Home Improvement Club in Alice in 1929 and founded the Bantu Women’s Home Improvement Association at the University of Fort Hare in 1935 “to promote the work through local associations wherever the work is needed.”56 With the Jabavus as their guide, the Yergans were introduced to the powerful network of “school people” that formed the nascent black leadership stratum of South African society.57 This was, in fact, the same network that Lida Broner herself would be introduced during her journey in 1938. The ICAA’s purpose was to educate the American public about Africa broadly, but its work was shaped in significant ways by Yergan’s own experiences and relationships in South Africa.58 By the early 1930s, disillusioned by the hardening of segregation and structural racism and with a new interest in Communism, Yergan began to advocate for radical social change.59 In 1935 he became involved with Jabavu’s All African Convention (AAC), founded in response to the segregationist legislation introduced by Prime Minister J. B. M. Hertzog. The so-called Hertzog Bills proposed eliminating the Cape franchise, the last vestiges of voting rights for blacks, and establishing a system of indirect representation. They also finalized a nationwide division of land, allocating a mere 13 percent to the majority black South Africans. In addition to stricter forms of segregation and disenfranchisement, blacks were barred from holding skilled jobs, their movements were restricted, and economic freedoms were curtailed.60 In effect, the Hertzog Bills established the ideological and political framework for the development of apartheid.61 56

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The AAC consolidated non-European (non-white) opposition to the legislation by bringing together more than four hundred delegates from across the ­political spectrum in December 1935. Passage of the bills shortly thereafter constituted a staggering defeat for the AAC. In response, Jabavu promoted moderate forms of protest—mass action in the form of resolutions and meetings—as opposed to boycotts and more radical forms of activism.62 At the same time, he also encouraged the AAC to develop a “world outlook” with regard to oppression and broaden awareness of its agenda well beyond South Africa. At a meeting in June 1936, Jabavu announced: “We appeal also to the rest of Africa and overseas to all peoples of African descent and other non-white races, as well as white races who are in sympathy with our universal cause.”63 In the same year, and with international outreach in view, Max Yergan was elected secretary for external affairs. Yergan issued a pan-Africanist resolution condemning the Italian invasion and, more broadly, Western imperialism and supporting the AAC’s commitment to “political education for the people and the achievement of political power for the people.”64 Relinquishing his YMCA post and returning to New York in the summer of 1936, Yergan further advanced the goal of connecting the emerging nationalist movements within Africa to its diaspora in what he saw as a global struggle against imperialism through his leadership of the ICAA, formally established at the beginning of the following year. Initial ­funding—a modest but symbolically meaningful 300 pounds—was provided by the anthropologist and activist Eslanda Robeson and her husband, the cele­ brated entertainer Paul Robeson.65 In addition to the Robesons, other notable African Americans among the ICAA’s founding members were political scientist Ralph Bunche; Channing Tobias, head of the YMCA’s Interracial Services Division; and Mordecai Johnson, the president of Howard University. Its membership included progressive white Americans as well, notably the social feminist Mary Van Kleek, who was active in labor movements; Raymond Buell, an Africanist political scientist at Harvard; and Frieda Neugebauer, who had served as Yergan’s stenographer in South Africa.66 Reciprocating Yergan’s affiliation with the All African Convention, D. D. T. Jabavu counted as a founding member, as did Dr. Alfred Bitini Xuma, a Johannesburg-based physician and vice president of the AAC who, like Jabavu, had spent time in the United States. (Xuma would become the president of the African National Congress in 1940.) The transatlantic journeys of two of the ICAA’s foundational members strengthened the emergent organization’s connections to South Africa. In June 1936, Eslanda Robeson, accompanied by her young son Paul Jr., arrived Chapter 2: From Personal Pilgrimage to Political Purpose

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in South Africa for a three-week tour, met by the soon-to-depart Max Yergan.67 In September of the following year, just after the ICAA was formally launched, Ralph Bunche embarked on a more extensive three-month journey with the advice of Yergan.68 Though Lida Broner’s 1938 journey would cover much of the same territory and she would meet many of the same people, the experiences of Robeson and Bunche were different from hers in crucial ways. Both were prominent intellectuals—Robeson was studying anthropology at the London School of Economics and Bunche was a professor of political science at Howard University—whose travel was eased by their connections to both the influential black middle-class and white liberals and first-class accommodations, but whose status provoked government scrutiny. Bunche was, in fact, advised not to give speeches or engage in political activities while in South Africa.69 Both, however, participated privately in high-level consciousness-raising (Robeson describes “big talk, challenging ideas, enthralling discussion” among South Africa’s black leadership) but spent little time with ordinary people, especially those living in rural areas.70 Bunche, whose own research in the United States analyzed class within the black community, observed the “wide gap between the educated African and the native masses” but also participated in indulgences afforded by his privileged position. “It’s good to live in Africa,” he commented, perhaps sardonically, about being served tea in bed and having his shoes shined every day, “the attention one does get from the black ­servants—and everyone has so many of him.”71 Men—and male-led organizations—dominated both their itineraries. Women make only sporadic appearances in Bunche’s account. But he did attend the foundational meeting of the National Council of African Women (NCAW) in December 1937, describing the fifty African women present as well dressed and intelligent but recording only the remarks of the white women who were advising them. (He observes that the chairwoman, Lily Nikiwe—whom Broner would meet the next year—was “very nattily” dressed, wearing a “sporty hat, short fur coat, pretty dress.”)72 And though Bunche is told by Oswin Bull, an English representative of the YMCA based in South Africa, that “Mrs. Yergan’s work would be more lasting than Max’s,” he did not seek to learn more about the women’s clubs Susie Yergan had been establishing throughout South Africa.73 Eslanda Robeson was more interested in women’s issues and even met briefly with social worker Mina Soga, a founder of the NCAW. But she too paid little attention to women’s organizing in South Africa—or, it seems, elsewhere. At the June 1936 AAC conference, where she met with the women’s section, Robeson reported, “They asked about the National Council of Women in America, about 58

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­ omen’s organizations in England, about Negro women everywhere. I told w them all I knew (privately regretting bitterly that I did not know more).”74 Lida Broner was one of those women whose female-led grassroots organizing may have been overlooked by Robeson (and others) but who, like Robeson, was closely involved in the ICAA from its very inception. Broner reached out to Yergan sometime in late 1936, before the organization was even formalized, seeking educational materials for her Lit-Muse Club. Notwithstanding her connection to Jabavu, Yergan took his time responding to multiple requests for materials about conditions for blacks in Africa. Finally, in January 1937, he wrote to her on brand-new ICAA letterhead that he was “very glad that you are a bit impatient with the delay which I have caused you. It shows that you and your associates are anxious to be doing things.”75 He promised to send a handbook he was working on that would offer a useful “system of study.” Broner was also actively corresponding with D.  D.  T. Jabavu and sending him American newspapers, probably copies of The Crisis and the Chicago Defender, which she would continue to do through the early 1950s. “My dear friend,” Jabavu responded, “you have no idea how appreciated has been your parcel of interesting newspapers with your kindly letter, by me and my family and many friends who call on me. Please send me once every three months or six months, if you can manage.”76 He also floated the possibility of a return visit to the US later that year. Broner’s involvement with the nascent anticolonial organization soon developed beyond correspondence when Jabavu and Xuma visited the United States later that year, a trip that purposefully coincided with the public launch of the ICAA. While the ICAA’s inaugural event is officially recorded as taking place in September 1937 at New York’s International House, it seems the very first public meeting of the organization may well have been in Lida Broner’s Newark home two weeks earlier, shortly after Jabavu arrived in New York (fig. 11).77 On August 26, in Broner’s living room at 109 Highland Avenue, both Jabavu and Yergan made Chapter 2: From Personal Pilgrimage to Political Purpose

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FIG. 11   Broner with D. D. T. Jabavu, probably outside her Newark home, August 1937, just before the public launch of the Council on African Affairs.

presentations about the work of the ICAA to the Lit-Muse Club and “several representative citizens,” including Harold Lett, director of the New Jersey Urban League. Yergan spoke on “the cause of native Africans and their hope for the future,” while Jabavu discussed social and economic conditions in Africa. Broner, Janifer, and other members of Newark’s Lit-Muse Club also attended the official launch of the ICAA in New York the following month, where Xuma, Jabavu, and Yergan all spoke about challenges facing Africans and the need to improve conditions.78 Jabavu left the US shortly thereafter on the Queen Mary, with Broner and a few other club members seeing him off. The close relationship that developed between Broner and Jabavu during his short stay was crucial to her journey to South Africa and subsequent activism, and ultimately blossomed into a long-lasting friendship. “I shall never forget my happy time at both Newark and New York,” Jabavu wrote Broner from London, just before traveling onward to South Africa.79 Broner, in turn, added her remembrances—three photographs of Jabavu, which he signed and dated August  25, 1937—onto the last page of the album devoted to her South African pen pals. Once home, Jabavu wrote again, thanking her for the letters, news­papers, and parcel for his wife, Florence, that she had sent ahead. Referring to Broner’s continued efforts to travel to South Africa, Jabavu assured her, “Do not worry, I have real hopes that 1938 will see you in Africa by hook or crook and I will not rest here till it is all through.”80

The Activist Agenda of the Ladies Auxiliary The day after Jabavu departed, Broner wrote Yergan announcing the LitMuse’s intent to form a “ladies’ auxiliary” to work on behalf of the ICAA. Yergan was “delighted” and offered to come to Newark to discuss the goals of the ICAA in greater depth with the club. Plans were quickly made for an October meeting at Broner’s home. Yergan encouraged the clubwomen to invite members of other organizations in hopes of expanding the network. His address on “the cause of native Africans and their hope for the future” was well attended, mostly by women representing the full spectrum of black activist efforts, including leaders from the New Jersey State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs and the Junior Federation, the Newark chapters of the NAACP and the National Negro Congress, the Domestic Workers Union, the Sojourner Truth branch of the YWCA, Bethany Baptist Church and a teacher from Apex Beauty School.81 Yergan credited the “great success” of the October meeting in Newark to Broner’s efforts and was eager to solidify the ICAA’s relationship with the Lit-Muse Club. “I want you to know that I am anxious to work in very 60

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close cooperation with you,” he wrote the next day. “It is a great cause that we are about and by working together we should be able to accomplish our ends.”82 Over the next months, they focused on distributing literature and, especially, grassroots fundraising. Yergan hoped that about $7,000 of the ICAA’s estimated $10,000 annual budget would be raised through direct appeals to the public through organizations like Broner’s. “I am sure you will agree that this is not a large amount when it is spread out over the thousands of friends we have throughout the country.”83 Pamphlets explaining the goals and efforts of the ICAA were distributed to auxiliary members and their network, soliciting an “immediate direct contribution to the work.”84 The entwined relationship of the ICAA and the All African Convention was evident: copies of the minutes of the 1936 AAC conference and of Jabavu’s presidential address were offered for sale at 50 and 25 cents, respectively. The Lit-Muse became an official affiliate of the ICAA in November 1937. It was the ICAA’s only women’s auxiliary. The financial campaign apparently absorbed much of Yergan’s attention that fall; Broner still awaited the long-promised study material she had first asked for at the beginning of the year. Nevertheless, she forged ahead with plans for the women’s auxiliary, meeting with Yergan in New York in November, accompanied by the club’s president Virginia Mitchell and Una Janifer. They proposed hosting a Sunday tea at Broner’s home, similar to her African Tea held two years prior. It would feature a lecture by an African on conditions back home—in this case, the planned speaker was Benjamin Kagwa, a young student from Uganda studying for his MD and recommended by Yergan. The tea also had an exhibition component, including a display of “African handicraft, books, magazines, music and pictures.”85 The occasion was clearly of great significance to Broner; she pasted a newspaper article relating the w ­ omen’s plans on the first page of a scrapbook that would eventually be filled with clippings and other mementos from her journey to South Africa and subsequent activism. In the photo accompanying the article, Broner stands proudly with her fellow club members, the shadow of a smile on her face. It is as if her own formal commitment to the cause was launched that day (fig. 12). Meanwhile, in South Africa, Jabavu led the third convening of the All African Convention in Bloemfontein in December 1937 that formally ratified its constitution. Its focus was on unity, proposing that “the African races of South Africa as a national entity and unit should henceforth speak with one voice, meet and act in unity in all matters of national concern.”86 Yergan, the AAC’s secretary for external affairs, though unable to attend in person, sent a report to the convention about the need “to build a people’s movement” in South Africa by uniting existing organizations as a Chapter 2: From Personal Pilgrimage to Political Purpose

61

FIG. 12   Broner (standing, second from right) with members of the Lit-Muse Club in a November 1937 news clipping saved in her scrapbook.

f­ ederation. Yergan described how the activities of the nascent ICAA would support these efforts by linking Africans to one another and to blacks in the diaspora, advancing a sense of shared struggle: “South Africa and other parts of Africa are not isolated from the rest of the world—indeed, I may report to you here that there are conditions in the West Indies and in parts of the Southern States equally as bad . . . hence the necessity for knowing one another’s conditions, of utilizing the facts relative to one another’s conditions and for struggling together even though separated by the seas.”87 Afterward, Jabavu described the convention to Broner as a “tremendous success,” writing that he had personally read Yergan’s reports to the 62

Part One

­ elegates in attendance and “added information about the Newark Auxiliary d Club which I had seen while there.” He was greatly pleased by the enlarged photograph Broner had sent him of the Lit-Muse—likely the one included in the news clipping on the first page of her scrapbook—exclaiming, if a bit patronizingly, “all of you seem to be at your sweetest best.” He told Broner that he was “specially sending this letter so that it may be read before your club,” adding that “all the dear Africans at Bloemfontein were in the heights of enthusiasm when they heard my account of my visit to the States and the real sympathy that I found existing there with the African home land.” He expressed “tremendous appreciation” for the funds the ICAA had raised on behalf of the AAC (fifty dollars) which assured “a successful position of affairs in our struggle for liberty.” Signing off, he urged Broner and her club to “please remain encouraged and remember always that Africa calls to you all with expectation of good news.”88 Jabavu was also focused on getting Broner a visa to travel to South Africa. In December 1937 he wrote a long letter to the secretary for the interior in Pretoria in support of her application for a six-month permit to visit. Vouching for Broner as someone he had known for “many years,” but deliberately avoiding mention of explicitly political motivation, Jabavu described her as “intensely interested in Child Welfare, Health matters and other concerns especially affecting the uplift of women and the home.” He added, “My wife has benefited from her expert knowledge.” Jabavu went on to emphasize that he and his wife had personally invited Broner “to visit the Union as our guest.” He concluded, “She is, in my opinion, a highly desirable type of immigrant, and I wish to add my own request to you to do all you can to expedite her permission to visit the Union on my own recognisances.”89 Jabavu’s political moderation and personal reassurances on Broner’s behalf no doubt assuaged the government’s security concerns. While Broner awaited the approval of her visa in Newark, she was made increasingly aware of conditions in South Africa through her expanding transnational network. Florence Jabavu expressed her frustrations in a long letter to “dear sister Broner” in March of 1938. “The odds are terrible here against the advancement of the Africans,” she wrote, observing that the British Empire “has managed to cloak its evil laws so well that the world at large has come to believe that the British government is an example in its good treatment of the African.” She went on to describe South Africa as a country whose great prosperity was “gained out of the sweated labor of the African.” Because so many have given in and accepted their conditions as inevitable, Jabavu added, “it is a good thing that some Africans do manage to get to America because when they come back they are filled with the Chapter 2: From Personal Pilgrimage to Political Purpose

63

desire to help uplift the masses.” Inquiring about Yergan and the work of the ICAA, she hoped that “the movement he has started will grow into a great power one day.” Finally, Jabavu commended Broner as a “friend” of these efforts through the ladies’ auxiliary she had formed.90 Broner received her visa permit in April and was at last able to fulfill her lifelong desire to visit the continent of her grandparents. With the logistical help of the National Council of the YMCA, probably through Yergan’s connections, she secured a third-class passage on the North German Lloyd Line to South Africa via England. Broner had saved for decades to pay the return fare of $496—the equivalent today of more than $8,000, an extraordinary amount by any measure and certainly a fortune for an African American woman working as a beautician. Departing New York on May 21, 1938, Broner was jubilant as she wrote the first entry of a diary chronicling her travels, “At last, the dream and ambition of my life was realized!!!”91

64

Part One

Notes 1  Secretary, South African Legation, Washington,

17  Thomas, “The Modern Girl and Racial Respect-

DC, to Lida Broner, August 8, 1934, box 2, folder 7, series VI, Miscellanies, Lida C. Broner Papers, Library and Archives, Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ (hereinafter LCB).

18  Gill, Beauty Shop Politics, 39, see also 41–42.

ability,” 482.

A Short History (New Jersey Historical Commission, Dept. of State, 1988), 60.

Gill emphasizes the extent to which beauty culturalists strategically adopted the rhetoric employed by clubwomen—especially respectability and self-­improvement—to bolster the dignity of the profession.

3  Sara Spencer Washington, Apex Beauty Products

19  With the motto “Lifting as We Climb,” the

and Their Use (Atlantic City, NJ: Apex News and Hair, 1949), 2.

NACW held biannual conventions attended by regional, state, and local club representatives. In the 1930s, the NACW expanded their work with the creation of the National Association of Colored Girls Clubs, which sought to prepare the next generation for leadership positions. On the history of the NACW, see LaVonne Leslie, ed., The History of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, Inc. (Middletown, DE: Xlibris, 2012).

2  Giles R. Wright, Afro-Americans in New Jersey :

4  Tiffany M. Gill, Beauty Shop Politics: African

American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 67. 5  As quoted in Gill, Beauty Shop Politics, 68. 6  Gill, Beauty Shop Politics, 1. 7  Washington, Apex Beauty Products and Their

Use, 8.

20  Anne Firror Scott, “Most Invisible of All: Black

8  Washington, Apex Beauty Products and Their

Women’s Voluntary Associations,” Journal of Southern History 56, no. 1 (1990): 6.

Use, 9. 9  Washington, Apex Beauty Products and Their

Use, 9. 10  Hettie V. Williams, “Sara Spencer Washington’s

Boardwalk Empire” (February 24, 2020), https:// hettie-williams.medium.com/sara-spencer -washingtons-boardwalk-empire–51000437ee62. 11  Gill, Beauty Shop Politics, 68. 12  Marc Matera and Susan Kingsley Kent, The

Global 1930s (New York: Routledge, 2017), 68.

21  Lisa Clayton Robinson, “Black Women’s Club

Movement,” African American Studies Center, see https://oxfordaasc-com. See also Leslie, The History of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, Inc. 22  Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous

Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 1. 23  Far from monolithic, the black church at the

Captive African Commercial Press in South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 355, 351. About 12 percent of the adult black South African population were literate at the start of the decade.

start of the twentieth century encompassed several different denominations, largely Protestant, whose congregations were primarily African American. Independent churches and denominational structures were formed, beginning as early as the late eighteenth century, and included the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, the AME Zion Church and the National Baptist Convention. In fact, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the National Baptist Convention was the largest organization of African Americans of any sort, either religious or secular. See Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 10.

16  Meghan Healy-Clancy, “Women and the Prob-

24  Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 17.

13  “Remarkable Business Acumen of Negro

Woman Shown in Her Work,” Bantu World, ­November 11, 1933. 14  Lynn Thomas, “The Modern Girl and Racial

Respectability in 1930s South Africa,” Journal of African History 47, no. 3 (2006): 483. 15  Les Switzer, “Bantu World and the Origins of a

lem of Family in Early African Nationalist History and Historiography,” South African History Journal 64, no. 3 (2012): 460.

25  Leslie, The History of the National Association

of Colored Women’s Clubs, Inc., 243–44.

Chapter 2: From Personal Pilgrimage to Political Purpose

65

26  Betty Livingston Adams details the extraordi-

34  Indeed, the combination of colors on the Ethi-

nary activism of Randolph in her study of black women’s Christian activism in New Jersey, considering the strategies and organizational models that non-elite black women used in the fight for social justice in the period between the world wars. See Adams, Black Women’s Christian Activism: Seeking Social Justice in a Northern Suburb (New York: NYU Press, 2016).

opian flag had such symbolic resonance that it was subsequently adopted by many pan-African entities and reflected in the flags of other independent African nations.

27  Gloria H. Dickinson and J. Maurice Hicks,

“Florence Spearing Randolph, 1866–1951,” in Past and Promise: Lives of New Jersey Women, ed. Joan N. Burstyn (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1987), 185–86. 28  Leslie, The History of the National Association

of Colored Women’s Clubs, Inc., 244. 29  See Elizabeth McHenry, “Reading and Race

Pride: The Literary Activism of Black Clubwomen,” in A History of the Book in America (Durham, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 491–510. 30  “Lit Muse Clubs’ African Exhibit at YMCA;

Mrs. Broner to Appear,” newspaper clipping, April 15, 1939, publication unknown, and “Lit-Muse Club,” undated newspaper clipping [handwritten “April 15, 1939”], publication unknown, box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB. 31  James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African

Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 281. Morris Brown was established in 1881 by African Americans affiliated with the AME Church.

35  James Quirin, “W. E. B. Du Bois, Ethiopianism

and Ethiopia, 1890–1955,” International Journal of Ethiopian Studies 5, no. 2 (2010): 2. 36  Getachew Metaferia, “The Ethiopian Connection

to the Pan-African Movement,” Journal of Third World Studies 12, no. 2 (1995): 302–3. 37  Higginbotham provides the early example

of the women’s auxiliary of the National Baptist Convention, who began exhibiting needlework by working-class members as fundraisers during their annual conventions in 1905 under the leadership of founder Nannie Burroughs. While showcasing artistry and skill, the displays addressed labor conditions and raised money to support their makers, described by Burroughs as the “daily toilers, who find but an hour or two each week to call their own.” Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 162–63. Scanning minutes of the annual conventions of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs over its first decades reveals a growing interest in the arts among clubwomen as part of their civic-oriented program. “Aesthetic appreciation” is listed on the agenda as early as 1912, linked to discussions of personal morals and women’s social roles. 38  Beryl J. Wright draws attention to this history

Yearly Register, Being an Illustrated National Biographical (Who’s Who) of Black Folks in Africa, ed. T. D. Mweli Skota (Johannesburg: R. L. Esson, 1930), 193.

in “The Harmon Foundation in Context,” in Beryl J. Wright and Gary A. Reynolds, eds., Against the Odds: African American Artists and the Harmon Foundation (Newark: Newark Museum, 1989), 13–25. See also Bridget R. Cooks, Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011), 9–11.

33  The conclusion that Mitchell served as a mis-

39  In fact, among the first exhibitions of African

32  “Mr. Clarke Edward Maxeke,” in The African

sionary in Africa is based on my reading of minutes from the April 3, 1940, meeting of the Women’s International Affairs Club (a later offshoot of the Lit-Muse), which note the unexpected passing of Virginia Mitchell and her mother’s donation of the African art objects that she owned to the club. The minutes further note that Mitchell had been distributing newspapers to five schools in Africa when she died, suggesting that she had ties on the continent. Box 2, folder 3, series II: Correspondence, LCB.

66

American art were those presented in the “colored branch” of the Brooklyn YMCA and at the annual meeting of the NAACP in New York in the years leading up to World War I. In the early 1920s, the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library (NYPL) in Harlem launched a series of exhibitions of “Negro art” initiated by Arthur Schomburg, the prominent black historian and bibliophile. The NYPL exhibitions served as a model for the best known of these sociologically oriented displays: the Harmon Foundation’s influential juried exhibitions

Part One

of African American art, which were presented annually in New York City between 1928 and 1933. For more on this history, see Wright, “The Harmon Foundation in Context,” 15–18; Mary Ann Calo, Distinction and Denial: Race, Nation, and the Critical Construction of the African American Artist, 1920–1940 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 67; and also Cooks, Exhibiting Blackness, 9–11. 40  African sculpture began to be exhibited

alongside African American art as early as 1918, in an exhibition at the Carleton Branch YMCA in Brooklyn mounted by Schomburg’s Negro Library Association. See Wright, “The Harmon Foundation in Context,” 16. 41  For an overview of the history of aesthetic

appreciation of African art in the United States, see Christa Clarke and Kathleen Bickford Berzock, “Representing Africa in American Art Museums: A Historical Introduction,” in Representing Africa in American Art Museums: A Century of Collecting and Display (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 3–19. 42  A photographic portfolio of objects in the exhi-

bition, produced by artist Walker Evans, circulated as an exhibition to the Harlem branch of the NYPL and historically black universities, extending its impact among African Americans. A recent discussion of this exhibition and its influence is “Blackness at MoMA: A Legacy of Deficit,” by Charlotte Barat and Darby English, in Barat and English, eds., Among Others: Blackness at MoMA (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2019), 18–21.

47  Locke’s Negro in Art Week at the Art Institute

of Chicago was organized in partnership with the Chicago Women’s Club, though this may have been a white woman’s club. See Lisa Meyerowitz, “The Negro in Art Week: Defining the ‘New Negro’ Through Art Exhibition,” African American Review 31, no. 1 (1997): 75–89. 48  The CWC circulated the well-known exhibitions

organized by the Harmon Foundation from 1928 through 1931 and also mounted their own exhibitions. See Betty Livingston Adams, “‘The Best Hotel on the Boardwalk’: Church Women, Negro Art, and the Construction of Interracial Space in the Interwar Years,” in Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practice, Sally M. Promey, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 575–96; and also Promey, Black Women’s Christian Activism: Seeking Social Justice in a Northern Suburb (New York: NYU Press, 2016). 49  Adams, “The Best Hotel on the Boardwalk,” 281. 50  Adams, Black Women’s Christian Activism, 97.

Another example that Adams provides featuring African art works from the Newark Museum’s Lending Collection is a convention held in Asbury Park in 1937 (288). 51  A notable antecedent is the collection formed

and Tobias Wofford, “The Influence of African Art on African American Art,” in The Routledge Companion to African American Art History, ed. Eddie Chambers (New York: Routledge, 2020), 72–80.

by African American missionary William Sheppard in the Belgian Congo in the 1890s, later purchased by the Hampton University, which he used as a visual aid in lectures critiquing colonialism. See Ira Dworkin, Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 163–200. Interesting though this is, it is unlikely that Broner was aware of Sheppard and his use of African art as colonial critique. It does, however, suggest a potential thread of African American missionary activism that could be pursued.

44  For more on Locke and the New Negro move-

52  Dworkin contends that in Locke’s research on

ment, see Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

colonial governance in Africa around the same time he was arranging for the purchase of the collection of Congo art “embeds” it “within the political culture of colonialism and anticolonialism.” Dworkin, Congo Love Song, 180. As far as I can ascertain, however, and rather surprisingly, there is no evidence that Locke explicitly used the ­collection to draw attention to conditions in the Congo, an assessment with which Locke’s biographer, Jeffrey Stewart, concurs. Personal email to author, November 2, 2018.

43  See, for example, Calo, Distinction and Denial

45  Wofford, “The Influence of African Art on

African American Art,” 74. 46  Most of the collection was acquired by the 135th

Street Branch of NYPL, the precursor to today’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. See Cooks, Exhibiting Blackness, 3–8, for an extensive discussion of the significance of this exhibition.

Chapter 2: From Personal Pilgrimage to Political Purpose

67

53  On Max Yergan and his role in the Council on

62  Catherine Higgs, The Ghost of Equality: The

African Affairs, see David H. Anthony, Max Yergan: Race Man, Internationalist, Cold Warrior (New York: NYU Press, 2006); and Charles Denton Johnson, “Re-thinking the Emergence of the Struggle for South African Liberation in the United States: Max Yergan and the Council on African Affairs, 1922–1946,” Journal of Southern African Studies 39, no. 1 (2013): 171–92.

Public Lives of D. D. T. Jabavu of South Africa, 1885–1959 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997), 126. 63  Higgs, The Ghost of Equality, 127. 64  Johnson, “Re-thinking the Emergence of the

Struggle,” 181. 65  Johnson, “Re-thinking the Emergence of the

Struggle,” 183.

54  Johnson, “Re-thinking the Emergence of the

66  Johnson, “Re-thinking the Emergence of the

Struggle,” 185.

Struggle,” 184–85.

55  For more on the Council on African Affairs and

67  Eslanda Robeson published her impressions of

its predecessor, the ICAA, within a broader context of African American anticolonialist movements, see Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anti-Colonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).

her travels several years later as African Journey (New York: John Day, 1945), an account that has been the subject of extensive scholarship. See Mary Mason, “Travel as Metaphor and Reality in Afro-American Women’s Autobiography, 1850–1972,” Black American Literature Forum 24, no. 2 (1990): 337–56; Maureen Mahon, “Eslanda Goode Robeson’s African Journey: The Politics of Identification and Representation in the African Diaspora,” Souls 8, no. 3 (2006): 101–18; Daniel Gover, “Eslanda Goode Robeson’s African Journey,” Journal of the African Literature Association 2, no. 2 (2008): 76–83; and Leigh Raiford, “The Here and Now of Eslanda Robeson’s African Journey,” in Migrating the Black Body, ed. Leigh Raiford and Heike Raphael-­ Hernandez (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017), 134–52.

56  Catherine Higgs, “Helping Ourselves: Black

Women and Grassroots Activism in Segregated South Africa, 1922–1952,” in Stepping Forward: Black Women in Africa and the Americas, ed. Catherine Higgs, Barbara A. Moss, and Earline Rae Ferguson (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002), 61–63. Higgs describes a rivalry between Jabavu’s Zenzele clubs and those of Yergan. 57  Anthony, Max Yergan, 59. Though Anthony

only mentions D. D. T. Jabavu and Max Yergan, we can safely assume that this network included their wives and other mission-educated women. 58  Anthony, Max Yergan. See also Anthony’s

“Max Yergan and South Africa,” in Imagining Home: Class, Culture and Nationalism in the African Diaspora (1994), 191, and “Max Yergan in South Africa: From Evangelical Pan-Africanist to Revolutionary Socialist,” African Studies Review 34, no. 2 (1991): 27–55.

68  Ralph Bunche’s travel notes have been pub-

lished with extensive contextualization by Robert R. Edgars, An African-American in South Africa: The Travel Notes of Ralph J. Bunche, 28 September 1937–1 January 1938 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992). 69  Edgars, An African-American in South Africa,

29. 70  Robeson, African Journey, 47. 71  Edgars, An African-American in South Africa,

59  Anthony, Max Yergan, 157.

136, 129.

60  Saul Dubow analyzes the ideological and

72  Edgars, An African-American in South Africa,

political framework of racial segregation in Dubow, Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in South Africa, 1919–1936 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989). See also Iris Berger’s South Africa in World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), esp. chapter 5.

277–78. It is telling that the index to Bunche’s account lacks entries for either “women” or “gender.”

61  Dubow, Racial Segregation and the Origins of

Apartheid, 1.

68

73  Edgars, An African-American in South Africa,

119. 74  Robeson, African Journey, 61. 75  Max Yergan to Lida Broner, January 4, 1937,

box 2, folder 4, series II: Correspondence, LCB.

Part One

76  D. D. T. Jabavu to Lida Broner, March 23, 1937,

83  Max Yergan to Lida Broner, October 12, 1937,

box 2, folder 10, series VI: Miscellanies, LCB.

box 2, folder 4, series II: Correspondence, LCB.

77  A newspaper clipping in Broner’s scrapbook,

84  Max Yergan to Lida Broner, December 9, 1937,

“Jerseyites Hear Discussion on African Problems,” with a handwritten date of September 25, 1937, describes the assembly: box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB. Penny Von Eschen describes the event as the ICAA’s first public gathering in Race against Empire, 18. 78  “Jerseyites Hear Discussion on African Prob-

box 2, folder 4, series II: Correspondence, LCB. 85  The planned program is described in “Confer

on African Program,” undated newspaper clipping (inscribed “Nov. 20 ’37”), publication unknown, box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB. 86  “Minutes of the All African Convention, Decem-

lems,” LCB.

ber 1937,” 18, see http://historicalpapers-atom.wits .ac.za/minutes-of-all-african-convention.

79  D. D. T. Jabavu to Lida Broner, September 24,

87  “Minutes of the All African Convention, Decem-

1937, box 2, folder 10, series VI: Miscellanies, LCB. 80  D. D. T. Jabavu to Lida Broner, October 27, 1937,

box 2, folder 10, series VI: Miscellanies, LCB. 81  For the undated correspondence, see Lida

Broner to Max Yergan and Max Yergan to Lida Broner [both September 1937], box 2, folder 4. Series II: Correspondence, LCB.” For his address, see “Max Yergan Relates Problems of So. Africa to Local Group,” undated newspaper clipping (inscribed “Oct. 16 1937”), publication unknown, box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB.

ber 1937,” 42. 88  D. D. T. Jabavu to Lida Broner, January 5, 1937,

box 2, folder 10, series VI: Miscellanies, LCB. 89  D. D. T. Jabavu to Secretary for the Interior,

Pretoria, South Africa, December 23, 1937, box 2, folder 10, series VI: Miscellanies, LCB. 90  Florence Jabavu to Lida Broner, March 12, 1938,

box 2, folder 8, series VI: Miscellanies, LCB. 91  Lida Broner, May 21, 1938, box 1, series I: Journal,

LCB.

82  Max Yergan to Lida Broner, October 12, 1937,

box 2, folder 4, series II: Correspondence, LCB.

Chapter 2: From Personal Pilgrimage to Political Purpose

69

PART two

Chapter 3

“Welcome to Africa!”

When Lida Broner boarded the SS Columbus, the fading former flagship of the North German Lloyd line, on Saturday, May 21, 1938, she was just three days shy of her forty-third birthday and traveling abroad for the first time in her life. She dressed smartly for the occasion, wearing a skirt and fitted jacket with a pocket square, her hat set at a jaunty angle. Her grown son, Leroy, came to see her off, along with Una Janifer and two other church friends; they each took turns with the camera, capturing the momentous occasion. Broner later assembled these photographs in an album dedicated to her trip, with a cheerful “Bon Voyage” caption offsetting the rather serious expression she wears in each (fig. 13). Broner’s two-part transatlantic crossing took nearly a month altogether. She first stopped in Britain: she arrived in Plymouth on May 28 and spent a week sightseeing in London. Continuing on board the SS Windsor ­Castle, she made stops in Cape Town and Port Elizabeth before arriving at her destination, East London. Although her journey was taxing and marked by encounters with racism throughout, she casually described it in her journal as “not eventful,” an indication of both her fortitude as well as the routine expectation of discrimination.1 On the first leg, the other passengers on the ship—mostly, if not entirely, white—at first ignored her; several days of silence were finally interrupted when a man inquired if she was the ship’s seamstress. Initial disregard turned to unwelcome curiosity. “Upon learning I was off on a year’s holiday to Africa, all became too friendly,” Broner FIG. 13  

Broner’s May 1938 d­ eparture for South Africa was captured in a series of “bon voyage” photographs in her album.

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complained. The second part of her journey was much the same. “Everyone on board looked at me as though I was the seventh wonder of the world,” she wrote; but she added “Did not mind,” a response that became commonplace in her diary in the face of physical discomforts and routine prejudice. When the ship docked in Cape Town, picking up white South Africans heading for destinations further east along the coast, Broner’s presence continued to cause a stir—“women could not follow their porters watching me.” Her status as an African American, however, did afford certain privileges that black South Africans were denied. She gleefully recorded that when a white woman tried to convince the head steward to prohibit her from eating in the ship’s dining room the passenger was politely informed that treatment was different “when Negroes came from over sea.” Jotting down notes on a small pad just before disembarking in East London, Broner outlined clear goals for her journey as a representative of the newly formed “ladies’ auxiliary” to the International Council on African Affairs. Knowledge-gathering, listed as “study of Negro history and African people,” was at the very top. Her second goal was to forge trans­national networks of exchange in the form of securing pen pals, distributing US black newspapers, and the creation of an International Book Lovers Club. Lastly, she added the development of a “musiaum of native handwork.”2 That Broner’s goals included creating a museum, and that she conceptualized it as such, reveal the purposeful nature of her collecting in South Africa and its connection to her sociopolitical ambitions. As we shall see, within the broader context of ethnographic collecting during the colonial era, Broner’s motivations and collecting practices are distinct, if not unique. This chapter and the next two situate the formation of Broner’s collection within the context of her journey. They trace her itinerary throughout South Africa as a means of understanding the social and historical circumstances surrounding how and what she acquired. They map Broner’s network of social relationships—the individuals she met and interacted with—and consider how these encounters and exchanges shaped the collection and the meanings attributed to the objects. And, drawing upon the textual and visual evidence in Broner’s archive, especially her travelogue, they consider her collecting practices and how she viewed her own activity as a collector. The objects Broner acquired tell a story about shifting gender roles and black women’s activism and related debates about “tradition” and the role of culture in emerging African nationalism, all unfolding against the larger backdrop of segregated South Africa in the 1930s.

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Introduction to the Eastern Cape Broner was still on the ship, docked in Cape Town a few days out from East London, when she received a letter from D. D. T. Jabavu. “Welcome to Africa!” he greeted her heartily, reassuring her that he would be waiting on shore when she disembarked early in the morning on June 21. Jabavu went on to detail the plans he had made for her initial weeks in South Africa. He warned her about the coming winter cold—“you need as many rugs or blankets as you can get”—and advised that she would “live a hard life with us in poverty. Prepare for the worst, in the way of accommodation, lack of water, lack of comfort, lack of fire, and lack of good food.”3 Jabavu, despite his prominence, was not immune to the era’s hardships. Broner’s point of entry was the eastern part of the Cape Province, the largest of South Africa’s four provinces. The eastern Cape was home to mostly isiXhosa-speaking communities who, for much of the nineteenth century, had fought and ultimately were defeated by British colonizers.4 The region’s identity was shaped by this long history of resistance and dispossession, as well as by the early presence of missionaries and resulting new class of educated black Christians.5 It was here that Broner spent her first two months, returning at the end for two more, and here that she was introduced to many of the people and ideas that would inform South ­Africa’s struggle for self-determination. The educated and English-speaking community that Broner had established through correspondence and exchange across the Atlantic anticipated her arrival. Friends awaited her in both Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, where the Windsor Castle stopped before continuing to its final destination of East London. The brief visits of this “beauty culture specialist” were newsworthy. Umteteli wa Bantu devoted a paragraph to the Port Elizabeth layover of their “notable visitor from America,” who was “spending her holiday as the guest of Professor and Mrs. D. D. T. Jabavu, of Fort Hare.”6 Broner preserved her memory of this visit in a photograph she placed in her album, which she captioned “Friends at Port Elizabeth” (fig. 14). She sits relaxed and smiling, a fur coat draped around her shoulders, surrounded by a group of mostly women. Broner’s hosts during her short stop in Port Eliza­beth included Lily Nikiwe (possibly the woman Broner holds hands with), who had recently chaired Chapter 3: “Welcome to Africa!”

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FIG. 14   Broner (seated) with “friends at Port Elizabeth,” shortly after arriving on the eastern Cape, June 1938.

the first national conference of the newly formed National Council of African Women (NCAW) and served as the organization’s vice president alongside its president, Charlotte Maxeke. Nikiwe was among the first of many women whom Broner would meet who were participating in the early struggle for liberation in South Africa through the organizations they were forming and networks they were building.7 Jabavu met her at the dock in East London and straightaway they traveled to the cosmopolitan college town of Alice. There, Broner spent time visiting friends while Jabavu wrapped up his semester teaching at University of Fort Hare. Together, they continued on to Jabavu’s old family farm in Rabula, where Broner met her pen pal Florence Jabavu for the first time. At the end of June, Broner returned to the city of East London and was hosted by the Marta family for most of the month of July. She was happily reunited with Rilda Marta, who had returned home from the Transvaal, where she was now working as a schoolteacher, practicing beauty culture on the side. During this first extended stay on the eastern Cape, Broner began fulfilling the purpose of her journey, that is, gaining firsthand knowledge of “the conditions of the Negro in South Africa.” Already aware of the increasing oppression blacks faced under segregation through her exchanges with South Africans and her association with the Council on African Affairs, Broner soon witnessed its impact for herself. En route to East London, while docked in Cape Town, she visited the township of Langa, established as part of the “pass laws.” Of the barracks-style housing for single male workers there, she noted “24 men in one room— paid $40 a month . . . Bunks side of walls for bed. One window.”8 Visiting a school in East London’s “location,” Broner described a crowded, makeshift school held in a church with three hundred children and where only the teachers had books. Writing in her diary over the course of the next six months, she detailed what she learned through experience and dialogue with those she met. She recorded paltry wages and excessive taxes and fees, restrictions on living and mobility and harsh punishments for transgressions, run-down schools and overcrowded hospitals, and hazardous work environments. Of life in Johannesburg’s mining compounds, Broner observed that it would “compare well to the prison camp at home” and was surprised to see men wearing numbered iron arm bands for identification in case of accident, “just like in war.”9 Conditions were much worse than even in Jim Crow America. Broner’s direct experience was enhanced through study. Early on, she attended a week-long course on race relations offered at the University of Fort Hare, which D. D. T. Jabavu had arranged, telling her it “will be a 74

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very important education for your experience of Africa.”10 There she heard lectures by white liberals, such as the social anthropologist Isaac Schapera and John David Rheinallt Jones, the founding director of South Africa’s Institute for Race Relations. “Very interesting indeed,” Broner observed. “Many facts were put forward of great importance. Pass and other laws against Natives, also the government’s policy of colour bar was discussed.” She learned more about segregation and its impact through educational pamphlets given to her to study and bring back to the United States. This included Jabavu’s 1934 publication Bantu Grievances (which bears the neatly penned dedication “presented by the author to Mrs. Broner when in South Africa” on its cover).11 The pamphlet catalogues a host of repressive laws and discriminatory practices, such as the 1913 Lands Act, which restricted the majority black population to a mere 12 percent of the land, resulting in “land hunger” and poverty; and the 1925 poll tax requiring all black men to pay the equivalent of a month’s wages (or more) while earning a fraction of what whites were paid for the same labor. It also documented excessive and punitive regulation of black mobility and employment, an inadequate system of education, and concerns over health care. On top of all this, Jabavu articulated the everyday race-based humiliations, or “pin-pricks” as he referred to them, “the little things that tell most in our social relationship with whites.”12 Broner was not immune herself to the sting of these “pin-pricks.” Throughout her trip she was routinely ignored by white store clerks and repeatedly asked to leave train compartments when whites entered, or to move off benches marked “European.” But, building on her experience on board the Windsor Castle, she quickly became savvy about the ways that her American citizenship allowed her to navigate the color bar. For example, traveling by train to King William’s Town, Broner relayed how she “blew up station hand for asking me not to sit on European bench. Went to station master and told him I was a visitor to the Union. Asked him if visitors were treated as Natives. He asked me what nationality I was. I told him. So he let me sit on the bench.” Broner’s determined resistance to frequent encounters with discrimination as she traveled through the country reveal much about her strong personality. Broner’s arrival coincided with a critical moment of emerging African nationalism in South Africa centered on the eastern Cape.13 By the late 1930s, there was a growing sense of African identity and an awakening political consciousness among mission-educated blacks. The promise of citizenship that came with Christian enlightenment had been dashed with the elimination of the last vestiges of black voting rights. The hardening of Chapter 3: “Welcome to Africa!”

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segregation throughout the 1920s and ’30s would lay the groundwork for the ­establishment of apartheid in the decade to come. Faced with diminishing prospects and shifting political terrain, educated South African blacks were advocating for self-determination. These “New Africans”—led by intellectuals and activists like D. D. T. and Florence Jabavu—looked to build unity by forging an African national consciousness across ethnic and rural-urban divides. The All African Convention, or AAC, led by Jabavu, proposed a moderate program of action and protest toward a unified struggle. On the one hand, the AAC elected members to the newly established Native Representatives Council, the essentially powerless governmental entity that replaced black voting rights, framing its participation as strategic as opposed to accommodationist. At the same time, the AAC was forceful and uncompromising in its public declaration that “imperialism, which has thus resulted in the ruthless destruction of African culture, is an evil force to be exposed, condemned and resisted.”14 In December 1937, just months before Broner’s arrival, the AAC adopted its first constitution, calling for “the African races of South Africa as a national entity and unit [to] henceforth speak with one voice, meet and act in unity in all matters of national concern.”15 The AAC viewed organizing—bringing together Africans and “international people of African descent”—as key to a unified resistance. Its new constitution emphasized the importance of the AAC’s role as an umbrella organization actively working to unite other groups and associations in the interest of collective action. Broner’s women’s auxiliary, through its affiliation with the AAC’s American arm, the ICAA, was one such organization. As declared by CAA leader Max Yergan, “our struggle, then, is the struggle for democracy; for freedom; for bread, for better wages; for better living conditions.”16 Broner’s knowledge-gathering and collecting mission became part of this struggle, focused on “educating public opinion [and] drawing attention to the facts of South African life” while simultaneously forging solidarity by building transnational alliances.17

Networking and Exchange From her arrival in East London in June 1938 until her departure six months later, Broner covered some two thousand miles and met countless South Africans. She traveled throughout all four provinces of the Union of South Africa as well as the British Protectorate of Basuto Land (now Lesotho). Her itinerary—and ultimately her collection—was shaped in important ways by the “New Africans” who served as her guides and hosts along the way. Broner emphasizes their hospitality in her diary as she navigated South 76

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Africa’s color line and race-based restrictions. They helped arrange travel, met her at trains, hosted her in their homes, toured her around in their cars and, especially in rural areas, translated for her. They invited her to dine in their homes, watch weekend tennis matches, participate in church services, and attend dance parties that sometimes went on until the early hours of the morning. Through this network, she experienced the spectrum of black life in urban townships and rural reserves; beyond participating in the mundane rituals of everyday existence, she visited mines, hospitals, and farms, and she attended church weddings, Zulu dances, and a Xhosa initiation ceremony. At the center of her extended sojourn were the Jabavus, who arranged her itinerary and afforded Broner social capital and entrée that extended well beyond the eastern Cape. The Jabavus, as portrayed by their daughter, the author Helen Nontando (Noni) Jabavu, were part of an all-embracing “net of people linked by professions, business, blood . . . [that] shared a social and political background inherited from earlier generations of Bokwes, Jabavus, Makiwanes and others—tens, scores, hundreds, now thousands.”18 Broner became part of this influential network, meeting a veritable who’s who of South Africans, many of whom had studied in the United States. At least thirty of those she met were profiled in Skota’s African Yearly Register, the go-to catalogue of leading blacks across the continent, a copy of which Broner owned. Broner’s network was politically engaged. Among them was the ­American-educated John Langalibalele Dube, the founding president of the African National Congress (ANC), and two of the organization’s future presidents, Alfred Bitini Xuma and James Moroka. It included other men considered among the era’s leading intellectuals, such as Z. K. Matthews and his brother-in-law, Dr. Roseberry Bokwe. Almost all of the men she met were involved in Jabavu’s All African Convention, either as leaders or delegates. At the heart of Broner’s network, however, were women, few of whom grace the pages of Skota’s Yearly Register. They were women whose activism was perhaps less publicly visible, or simply overlooked, but who— as we shall see—were no less politically and socially engaged.19 While some of their names have been the subject of study, especially Florence Jabavu and the pioneering social worker Sibusisiwe Makhanya, most of them have yet to be written into history.20 Over the course of her travels, Broner would become well acquainted with the social and political concerns of this black middle class and develop an intimate understanding of their lives. While her guides and hosts made sure Broner received a proper introduction to South African life, they were in turn eager to learn more about Chapter 3: “Welcome to Africa!”

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FIG. 15   Lida Broner (seated front row, fifth from left) at the first of many receptions in her honor, East London, July 1938.

black life in America. To these New Africans she offered an inspiring model of progress to emulate. As R. V. Selope-Thema, who regularly highlighted the achievements of successful black Americans as editor of Bantu World, explained, the African American experience was particularly instructive given the parallel history of racial oppression: “The Negro is essentially an African. In the culture which he has created in American society is embodied all the human qualities which he has inherited from Africa. It is often pointed out that there is no comparison between the race problem of America and that of South Africa. This is a misleading idea. South Africa, in her endeavour to solve the so-called Native problem, will do well to study American methods and put some of the American spirit in dealing with this burning question.”21 Broner’s itinerary, then, was as much about knowledge-sharing as it was about knowledge-gathering. Throughout her journey, Broner was the guest of honor at intimate gatherings hosted in urban homes and rural kraals, large assemblies held at social centers, and on tours of numerous educational institutions, from elementary schools to colleges. These kicked off on the eastern Cape with a welcome party in early July hosted by the Martas in their East London home, thanking Broner for her care of Rilda (“refreshments and everything was first class,” Broner enthused in her diary). A few weeks later, she was fêted at a larger reception “given in honor of your visit 78

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to us in the land of your fathers, brothers and sisters,” hosted by the Star of Hope Social Club. A photograph marking the occasion shows a smiling group of some forty-odd women and men, all dressed to the nines, posing outside the club’s East London hall (fig. 15). Broner sits proudly in the front row, wearing strappy heels and a light-colored dress, to the left of three suited men in the center. On the far side of these men is Rilda, beaming at the camera, her shoulders held by the woman behind her, likely her mother. Broner had the photograph enlarged and mounted with a typewritten caption, suggesting that she later used it in her exhibitions of “native handicraft.” She also saved typed remarks of greetings made by W. M. Tywabi, the social club president, which reveal the extent to which she was seen as a symbol of a larger, and linked, diaspora. “When we look at you, we picture the 12,000,000 brothers and sisters in America and we hope that providentially we shall all meet together in a generation to come and enjoy together the pleasure of our Country in peace.”22 In her comments at gatherings such as these, Broner shared an uplifting message of race pride and progress with her South African hosts. By her own account, she spoke on no less than fifty occasions over the course of her seven months in the country. Her speeches helped finance and sustain her ongoing travels, with the organizers asking attendees to make contributions toward a collection for her. Some of these events were significant enough to warrant newspaper coverage, in which the remarks made by this “Negro Beauty Specialist” were routinely described as “inspiring.” For example, at the school for the blind in the township of Sophiatown in Johannesburg, Umteteli Wa Bantu reported that she “gave a very interesting and instructive lecture about the progress of American Negroes, how they have advanced. From slavery, these Negroes have climbed up the hill. Many difficulties faced them, but by pulling together they have achieved success in many different walks of life.”23 Coverage of a social gathering organized by the Non-European Recreation Club of Crown Mines in Johannesburg described how “the house was deeply interested by her speech” about the life of the “American Negro,” taking heed of Broner’s conclusion that “it is co-operation and unity that will prosper a Nation.”24 While these receptions varied in terms of their setting and level of formality, they almost always included musical performances. Broner described these appreciatively in her journal, noting especially songs sung in “native languages.” At the same time, she complained about their “burlesquing over the spirituals.”25 Larger events hosted by organizations usually had a full program planned, almost always opening with a rendition of “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika,” a song whose veiled message of protest resonated Chapter 3: “Welcome to Africa!”

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with the hopes and frustrations of the black bourgeoisie.26 During visits to schools Broner was typically serenaded by children. And Broner herself often sang and performed on piano. She was well received, especially when she sang the black American national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” whose message of uplift and unity, along with resistance—came to be more and more at the heart of the special bond that she shared with each of her South African audiences.

Women Helping Women Women’s groups were even more essential forums for sharing ideas about racial uplift and advancement. Many of the women at the heart of Broner’s social network were mission-educated, respectable women committed to helping other women—for example, Florence Javabu and Lily Nikiwe, or Hilda Godlo, whom Broner met through the Jabavus in early June, during her stay in East London. Godlo (fig. 16) was a social worker in East London with a successful side career as distribution agent for the newspaper Bantu World.27 She was married to R. H. Godlo, who served as the recording secretary for D.  D.  T. Jabavu’s All African Convention and who had recently been elected to the Natives’ Representative Council in East London. A glowing profile of Hilda Godlo published in Bantu World describes her as “versatile and active” with a future that “still lies promisingly before her.”28 Along with her hobbies (she played lawn tennis “remarkably well”), the profile highlights her involvement in women’s social welfare groups. She was chairwoman of the East London branch of the African Women’s Self-Improvement Association, one of more than thirty branches of the now well-established club led by Florence Jabavu, known informally as Zenzele.29 Godlo was a member of the recently established National Council of African Women (NCAW), which Broner first became acquainted with through Nikiwe in Port Elizabeth. And she also belonged to the local Methodist manyano, or prayer union, a church association that offered a support network for black mothers in the early twentieth century.30 Women’s social welfare organizations were formed in response to the profound changes in African home life brought about by colonial expansion and conquest, especially with regard to the role and status of women. Precolonial homesteads were agrarian and polygamous in structure. Women’s labor in the home and on the fields, as well as their role as mothers, while controlled by men, were the social and economic foundation of domestic life. The forcible introduction of the migrant labor system and shift to a cash economy, along with land dispossession, significantly affected African family life from the late nineteenth century on. Increasing numbers of men 80

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FIG. 16   Hilda Godlo, featured in The Bantu World, April 1935.

left rural homesteads to work in South Africa’s industrializing urban areas, leaving women behind with added domestic responsibilities and declining social status and economic independence. At the same time, white Christian missionaries focused their conversion efforts on women and their role in the home, aiming to remake African families according to Western models of monogamous marriage and divisions of labor often incompatible with established traditional systems. As Deborah Gaitskell observes, when put into practice Victorian ideals of “devout domesticity” offered African women a contradictory package: “a way to escape from some of the constraints of pre-Christian society and yet a firm incorporation into the domesticity and patriarchy of Christian family life.”31 The new social pressures and concerns about gender and family life brought by these changes led African women to organize during the interwar period. Organizations, like Zenzele clubs, manyanos as well as the umbrella group, the NCAW, were founded by prominent African women who absorbed, adapted, and “re-domesticated” white missionary ideals of home and family with their own aspirational, often alternative, agendas.32 Florence Jabavu, for example, critiqued aspects of missionary interventions in traditional African family life while reaffirming the value of women’s role within the home. In her 1928 essay “Bantu Home Life” she skillfully renegotiated Western ideas about domesticity to foster the advancement of African women, positioning them as socially essential. “The woman as manager of the home has not been afforded a proportionate advance in the attitude with which she is viewed and should be respected. . . . This is gradually sapping the moral fibre of the race in its endeavors toward culture inasmuch as no race can advance without race pride. Such pride in the analysis depends upon the motherhood of the nation, and upon the self-confidence Chapter 3: “Welcome to Africa!”

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that can be engendered only by the mother in the home.”33 Many women’s organizations catered to women in rural areas whose lives were particularly affected by labor migration and landlessness, looking to build solidarity across class lines and to help women gain status through education.34 Self-­ improvement was at the core of such efforts, expressed quite literally in the name of Florence Jabavu’s organization, which was known by its motto “Zenzele,” meaning “do it yourself” in isiXhosa. An account of a Zenzele meeting hosted by Hilda Godlo the month before Broner’s arrival provides a good example of how mission-educated women saw themselves as contributing to uplifting the nation by helping African women help themselves in the domestic sphere.35 As recorded in East London’s Daily Dispatch, delegates from thirty active branches throughout the eastern Cape came together in April 1938 for a short training course of lectures and demonstrations, which included needlework and soap making. On this occasion, they were addressed by Miss Eleanor Hawarden, a white South African then living abroad and a vocal advocate for women’s education in Africa: “In London, she said, were students from all parts of Africa, from Nigeria, Kenya, Tanganyika, as well as from South Africa, who were studying with a view to improving themselves and their conditions of living of the African people. The most important people in this work of improving a nation were the women (applause) and she was glad to find that the African women in East London and surrounding districts realized the impor­ tant part they played in this work.” In response, Mrs. Jane Ntutu, a Zenzele member, affirmed Hawarden’s sentiment, reminding fellow members that “no nation will ever rise above the level of its womenfolk.”36 Within the confines of a male-dominated society, African women were leveraging their domestic authority to participate in the work of nation-building.37 That this news clipping about the Zenzele meeting is preserved in Broner’s archive, presumably sent by South African friends, is a material reminder of the ways that black clubwomen with shared values and goals were connecting with one another across the Atlantic. Indeed, the intertwined goals of racial respectability and social transformation at the core of South African women’s organizations formed during the interwar period reflect the influence of African American women’s clubs.38 Their founders all had transnational connections or experience in the United States that linked them to women’s organizations, including the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) and the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). American-educated Charlotte Maxeke, who was mentored by the NACW’s Frances Coppin, founded the first women’s organization in South Africa, the Bantu Women’s League (BWL), in Orange 82

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Free State in 1918. The BWL eventually became the National Council of African Women (NCAW) in 1933. The Zenzele clubs were established in the eastern Cape by the 1920s by Florence Jabavu with the help of African American social worker Susie Yergan, the wife of Max Yergan. Susie Yergan also established the Unity Home-Makers Club in 1929, which led to the formation of an umbrella organization, the Bantu Women’s Home Improvement Association in 1935.39 Sibusisiwe Violet Makhanya, who studied in the United States a generation after Maxeke, formed the Bantu Youth League (BYL) in Umbumbulu “to build up decent home life among our African people.”40 In Natal, Cecilia Lillian Tshabalala drew from her many years of experience in the United States to launch the Daughters of Africa (DOA) in Durban in 1932. She remarked, “Nearly all women of note or power in the STATES belong to some kind of CLUB or CLUBS,” praising their efforts “to build and consolidate their race as a whole educationally, economically, socially and otherwise.”41 Given their domestic orientation, South African women’s social welfare groups have been seen as apolitical and dismissed as marginal to African nationalist movements.42 And yet, the very first black-led women’s organization, Maxeke’s Bantu Women’s League, emerged from the anti-pass campaign in Orange Free State, in which women successfully protested against, and ultimately overturned, a 1913 law requiring that women in urban townships buy entry permits. More recent assessments propose that these gendered networks in fact served as “activist spheres,” fostering forms of public engagement, resilience, and resistance in the interwar period.43 Nomboniso Gasa traces women’s growing political consciousness to the connections they formed with other women both within and outside their communities, situating personal struggles against marginalization within the public domain.44 Meghan Healy-Clancy describes how women strategically used “discourses of home and family to envision, and to enact new forms of national and racial allegiance.” She argues that, in fact, the perception of social welfare groups as politically marginal organizations gave women “space to think, talk, and write about nation, race and unity” largely free from oversight or interference in a male-dominated society.45 Broner would become well acquainted with many such women’s organizations during her time in South Africa. She was the guest of honor at grand receptions hosted by their “New African” leaders and more informal gatherings held in their homes. She also met with uneducated or “native” women, as she called them, in towns and in rural areas; they were not only the targets of self-improvement efforts but, in some cases, were forming their own groups. Mindful of the All African Convention’s emphasis on the Chapter 3: “Welcome to Africa!”

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power of coalitions, Broner forged formal affiliations with several South African women’s clubs. Through alliances with the Daughters of Africa, Zenzele, and Unity clubs, her Newark-based Women’s Auxiliary became part of a powerful, if historically neglected, transatlantic network of women who were not only sharing ideas and concerns but seeking to actively participate in public life. For Broner, the meetings of these South African women’s clubs, as well as the more general events to promote black men and women’s progress, were all occasions that afforded her opportunities to begin and develop her collection. Whether visiting schools or hospitals, attending gatherings in private homes or being feted at public receptions, she became increasingly in demand for her speeches, and she was regularly given works in exchange for them. Her description of visiting the school for the blind at Sophiatown, a township of Johannesburg, provides a glimpse of how these exchanges sometimes unfolded: “Instructor asked me to speak to the men. Told him I would if he gave me a piece of their hand work and sang for me. He gave me a stool. They sang me two beautiful African songs which I had not heard before. Miss Kraai gave me a clay pot. Mr. Bassi gave me a clay pot too.”46

Objects of Belonging Broner first began to acquire works during this initial period on the eastern Cape. Although she didn’t have preconceived collecting parameters for her “musiaum of native handwork,” she early on visited the East London Museum with Rilda Marta because she was “interested in the Native art.” Throughout much of the twentieth century, works made by black South Africans were only to be found in natural and cultural history museums, like the one in East London. Such collections typically included pottery, beadwork, basketry, and weapons, often assembled by cultural outsiders like missionaries or traders.47 In these museums, they were categorized and displayed as ethnographic specimens rather than as art.48 The distinction between the two was based on Western systems of value, which defined the former as functional objects of cultural use and the latter as works made for aesthetic contemplation.49 That Broner herself would use terms like art and handwork (or handicraft) interchangeably in describing her objects indicates her appreciation of their visual aspects and skill they exhibited beyond their cultural dimensions. Broner’s visit to the East London Museum proved a disappointment, however. She grumbled that there was “very little” on display, adding that the museum itself, which had only just opened in 1931, was “very small.” If Broner had visited a different ethnographic museum, like the South African 84

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Museum in Cape Town, she would have had a more fulsome introduction to “native art” and to recently introduced strategies of museum classification and display. At the beginning of the twentieth century, ethnographic museums offered little to no context for their collections of African material culture, freely mixing examples of “handicraft” with displays of taxidermy and natural specimens.50 By the 1930s, however, South African museums had begun to assign ethnic designations, labeling works as Zulu or as Xhosa, for example. In typical ethnographic fashion, displays presented groupings of objects as “timeless representations of tribal identity,” originating from an unchanging or idealized past.51 In so doing, museum installations reflected and reinforced the era’s emerging taxonomies of ethnic difference, as constructed in the work of government ethnographer Nicolas van Warmelo. Beginning in the 1930s, van Warmelo set out to identify and map distinct “tribes” based on language.52 The resulting classifications reinforced contemporary policies of racial segregation that divided and governed black communities according to ethnic or group identity—policies that would be formalized as apartheid in 1948. In contrast to the rigid and racialized structure of mainstream ethnographic collections, Broner relied on personal connections and contingent encounters as she traveled to form a community-generated sampling of “native handcraft.” Ultimately subverting top-down colonial narratives and stereotypes, the purpose of her collection was to raise consciousness in the United States about the true “conditions of the Negro in South Africa” and thus strengthen transatlantic black solidarity. All told, Broner amassed more than 150 works in seven months of travel. They are everyday objects, ranging in scope from beaded pendant necklaces and painted clay vessels to embroidered doilies and wooden utensils. The vast majority of the objects were given to Broner “to show in America.” Well over one hundred works in the collection, the greater part by far, were from women. About twenty gifts are from the schools that she toured, from staff or pupils. Many were offered in exchange for her speeches or for her hair services. Some works were given during social visits, whether dinner in a township home or during a visit to a rural kraal, as expressions of friendship. More than gifts, they were objects of belonging that affirmed diasporic ties, the act of gifting itself expressing solidarity. Broner also actively solicited works for her collection, sometimes through commission. More often, Broner asked for works of interest without offering compensation, leveraging instead the fact that she intended to show them in America. Some of these exchanges reveal cultural misunderstandings or socioeconomic tensions between the collector and the owner Chapter 3: “Welcome to Africa!”

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of the object. While in Alice, Broner reported that she “asked one man to give me his curious Native pipe to take to America. I was surprised and embarrassed when he explained that if he did not have his pipe it would be thought he had been caught with another man’s wife!”53 In Vereeni­ ging, Broner described her efforts to pry away a “native broom” from an old woman sweeping her yard. When the woman said she could not give it freely but would sell it, Broner protested that she couldn’t afford it. “She looked at me from head to foot and then at my hands,” Broner reported, and replied, through an interpreter, “you are wearing a very fine coat and your hands are a lady who knows no hard work. Therefore you can well afford to buy the broom.”54 During this first leg of her trip on the eastern Cape, Broner acquired just a handful of works. The pace of collecting quickened as she traveled onward and inward beginning in late July, with extended stays in Johannesburg and Vereeniging in Transvaal province. During her two and a half months in the Transvaal, Broner assembled a wide-ranging group of some forty objects, including ceramic vessels and clay bead necklaces from clubwomen and examples of knitted and embroidered handiwork from women being trained as domestic servants. A brief two-week visit to the Durban area in Natal province resulted in another forty-odd works in a flurry of gift-giving. Many were pieces of beadwork from women in Zulu kraals and household items such as woven grass mats and wooden spoons from the schools she visited. Collecting intensified after she returned to the eastern Cape in late October, where she journeyed to rural areas between longer stays in Alice and East London. During these final two months in South Africa, Broner acquired more than seventy works. Most are beadwork adornments made by i­siXhosa-speaking women, but there are also examples of mission-school needlework, items of domestic use, and even glass jars filled with “native staples.” The number of objects acquired and the wide range of genres represented distinguish Broner’s collection from the smaller assemblages of Eslanda Robeson and Ralph Bunche, both of whom brought African objects back from their respective journeys in South Africa in 1936 and 1937. Finding that his elite hosts had little interest in traditional culture, Bunche purchased a few examples of beadwork at a trading store in Middledrift on the eastern Cape (“the educated Africans here have very few African art objects on display in their homes,” he bemoaned).55 Robeson, however, was the recipient of gifts from both white and black South Africans throughout her three-week tour. Visiting the museum at the University of Cape Town, she describes the (white) curator giving her son Pauli “some bushman beads 86

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made of ostrich eggshells” and the social anthropologist Isaac Schapera (whom Broner heard speak at Fort Hare) giving her a set of four “African divining bones.”56 Robeson also recounts gifts from her prominent host, Frieda Bokwe Matthews, an influential teacher whose students included Nelson Mandela. “Before I came to realize that Africans, with their exquisite politeness, will give you things you admire, I had been vocal about my admiration for the lovely beadwork I had seen. So Frieda made a collection of it for me; a beautiful Swazi headdress and train; an interesting Bechuana navy-and-white belt; a fascinating black-and-white Xosa collar; some Zulu pieces from Natal; and several aprons.” According to Robeson, Matthews “made the collection as representative as possible, each piece was typical and beautiful”; she added, “to me it was priceless—a museum collection.”57 Broner, too, saw her collection as a “musiaum of native handwork.” But it was also, like the photo album she assembled prior to her journey, a material archive of transnational relationships. For each work, Broner typically recorded the date and place she acquired it and—importantly—often the name of the maker and/or donor as well. This information was handwritten on small tags she attached to the objects and was also included in her travel diary, sometimes along with additional data about its creation or cultural use. Broner took photographs of some of those who gave her gifts, allowing us to attach faces to the people she names. Those named, both women and men, were mostly from the mission-educated class that formed her larger social network. Other works are identified simply as from a “native woman,” an “old man,” or, occasionally, from “a friend,” suggesting more casual encounters of exchange and, perhaps more so, Broner’s sense of social class distance. More than fifty women’s names are associated with half of the works in Broner’s collection, a sharp contrast to the eight men identified by name for just thirteen works. Her collection is thus nothing like the ahistorical examples of fixed tribal identities typically seen in museums of the era. And it was unlike the “representative” collection formed by Frieda Matthews for Robeson. Instead, the objects document moments in time and specific social encounters and instant alliances that she so carefully recorded on the tags attached to them.58 Thanks to that detailed information, not only can we reconstruct her physical journey, we meet more directly the cultural, social, and political worlds that Africans, especially women, were navigating in segregated South Africa.59

The First Gifts to Lida Broner’s Collection A close look at two of the works Broner acquired at the beginning of her journey and their multivalent associations reveals much about how black Chapter 3: “Welcome to Africa!”

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South Africans, especially women, navigated the tensions between ­tradition and modernity and the ambiguous role of culture within. Inevitably, owing to her close ties with like-minded women, Broner was compelled to reckon with her own understanding of the dialectical forces at play, with her views becoming more complex over time. After all, she represented modernity with her Western beautification skills and message of uplift, yet she witnessed the role of culture as a bulwark against the repressive power  of colonialism, which she came to resent with increasing conviction born of experience. The first object, associated with tradition, is a charm necklace made of small glass beads and bits of dried plant root given to her by Gertrude Marta, Rilda’s sister, sometime during Broner’s first week at their home in East London. It was the first of nearly fifty examples of beadwork that Broner would acquire over the course of her journey, and beadwork was by far the greatest emphasis within the overall collection. The other, Western in style and therefore “modern,” is an embroidered place setting that she received from Elizabeth Marta, Rilda’s mother, in late July 1938 toward the end of Broner’s first stay with the Martas. Examples of mission-inspired needlework constitute the next largest category of objects in her collection, numbering around twenty in total. The necklace is a delicate item, made of small blue, white, and black glass beads interspersed with pieces of dried agapanthus root (better known as African lily), strung together with cotton thread, and clasped with a pearl button (fig. 17). Broner recorded that this necklace was a type “worn by mother after birth of first child,” describing it with reference to traditional use.60 A breastfeeding mother would chew off a bit of the dried root, which was believed to have medicinal properties, for protection before nursing her child.61 The charm necklace, ikhubalo in isiXhosa, is among the many different types of beadwork traditionally produced by women in isiXhosa communities in South Africa from at least the nineteenth century on. Historically, beadwork was worn by men and women as markers of social roles and status and to signal belonging to a people or a place, even if ethnic and regional identities were not necessarily fixed.62 Wearing beadwork also facilitated connections to the ancestral realm: glass beads had “divine shine,” believed to embody spiritual power.63 White beads, which held particular symbolic significance because of the ­color’s association with supernatural clarity and purity, feature in beadwork made to be worn during times of transition, as in this necklace for a new mother.64 The exchange of beadwork as gifts also expressed and cemented social bonds, typically between women makers and their husbands or b ­ oyfriends, Chapter 3: “Welcome to Africa!”

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FIG. 17   Unrecorded Xhosa artist, Necklace (ikhubalo) early twentieth century, glass beads, motherof-pearl button, agapanthus roots, cotton, length 12½ in., no. 47.94. This was “worn by mother after birth of her first child,” and given to Broner by Gertrude Marta, East London, June 1938.

FIG. 18   “Hand work of Mrs. Mamashela, Native African Woman,” probably cotton, 20 × 197/8 in., no. 2014.46.79, given to Broner by Elizabeth Marta, East London, July 1938.

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as well as between mothers and daughters. Gertrude Marta’s gift of this work to Broner would have had significance in affirming their social relationship. As an artistic practice, beadwork was established in and enabled by the colonial era. The small glass seed beads used in its creation were imported from Europe, along with metal needles and cotton thread. From the mid-nineteenth century, glass beads were especially plentiful through trade, leading to the growth and development of various forms of beadwork and bead-working techniques. While sewing was previously associated with men, who were historically responsible for making garments from leather, women learned the skill through missionaries and adapted the needle arts to creating increasingly complex and innovative beaded objects.65 The production and exchange of beadwork increased significantly with the introduction of the migrant labor system from the late nineteenth century. On a practical level, cash generated by migrant labor paid for raw materials— beads, needles, and thread; on the symbolic plane, as men went to work in mines and other urban industries, the women were expected not only to tend rural homesteads but also uphold cultural practices and maintain ancestral links, and beadwork became an important vehicle for both.66 By the early twentieth century, those within black communities and cultural outsiders alike saw beadwork as a visual expression of indigenous values in the face of social change.67 The necklace Gertrude Marta gave to Broner would therefore have been regarded as an emblem of tradition—and an important gesture of thanks and acceptance by another member of the Marta family. Because of its traditional significance, beadwork directly conflicted with the “civilizing” aims of white Christian missionaries. Associated with spirituality and used to communicate with ancestors, beadwork was condemned as a heathen practice. Traditionalists, especially those in more rural communities, continued to wear beadwork as a symbol of resistance to missionary attempts to redefine African identity and culture.68 Missioneducated Africans, on the other hand, typically surrendered their personal pieces of beadwork to signal their conversion to Christianity. White missionaries often donated beaded items to museums as documents of “primitive” tradition and evidence of the necessity of their “civilizing” mission.69 In some instances, collections of beadwork were ritually burned and converts received mission-produced needlework and Western-style clothing to mark their new identity as a modern Christian.70 Just as the beaded charm necklace symbolized tradition, the embroidered place setting Broner acquired from Elizabeth Marta in East London exemChapter 3: “Welcome to Africa!”

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plified the civilizing aims of mission schools from the nineteenth ­century on—and by extension, modernity (see fig. 18). It is a simple yet refined example of open whitework embroidery, a technique involving selectively removing threads from the foundation fabric and stitching groups of the warp and weft together using fine white thread to create openwork patterns with an elegant white-on-white effect, in the modern European taste.71 As part of their conversion to Christianity, women were taught various forms of needle­work and encouraged to wear Western-style clothing as evidence that they were civilized and modern.72 The production of needle crafts reflected the imposition of European attitudes about women and women’s work.73 Needlework was a manifestation of devout domesticity; the precision and perseverance it required was thought to promote good Christian character, infusing its creation with moral purpose.74 A far less elevated goal, which we discuss in the next chapter, was fostering practical skills for work within the developing colonial economy, in particular domestic service in white households.75 Elizabeth Marta gave Broner the embroidered place setting, but she was not the maker. Broner’s handwritten tag notes instead that it is “Hand Work of Mrs. Mamashela Native African Woman.” Broner records meeting Mamashela while touring East London’s West Bank, an area housing Mpondo migrants from more rural communities. Given her interests in social welfare, Elizabeth Marta likely brought Broner to the West Bank location to meet women who were the target of uplift efforts. In her diary, Broner praises Mamashela’s “very beautiful handwork,” material evidence of her mastery of Western domestic arts and, more so, her newfound status as a civilized Christian. We imagine that Marta purchased the embroidered place setting from Mamashela as a way to support her, both morally and economically. Gifted then from Marta to Broner, the needlework illustrates both the self-improvement that lay at the heart of women’s uplift efforts but also the ties between women as they looked to help one another through their organizational work. Interpreting Gertrude Marta’s gift of the ikhubalo, or charm necklace, on the other hand, is less straightforward. The Martas formed part of East London’s recently established Christian middle class. Given the negative associations with beadwork inculcated by missionaries during the colonial era, it is perhaps surprising that Gertrude Marta would associate herself with such “heathen” practices. It is doubtful, if not implausible, that this young mission-educated woman was the maker of a ritual object designed to protect a Xhosa mother. She may, like her mother, have purchased the work for Broner, probably from a rural member of a woman’s organization, some of 92

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whom earned income by making beadwork and traditional clothing to sell to fellow members living in towns.76 It is also possible that the necklace was a family heirloom that was still valued, if surreptitiously; passing it on to an outsider would ensure it lived on.77 The necklace surely carried dual connotations of past and present, an instance of Lize van Robbroeck’s observation that “for the bourgeois black Christian, tradition existed simultaneously as the bearer of lost sovereignty and cultural pride; and as a debased and shameful relic of a primitive past.”78 That Gertrude Marta shared the necklace’s ritual significance with Broner, but not the name of its maker suggests this ambivalence with regard to the place of traditional culture. As Broner traveled across the country gathering and dispensing information, the layered meanings of the objects she collected revealed a country and a people in the process of deep social and political change. The gifts that she received speak to the ambiguous, sometimes contradictory place of culture in a rapidly modernizing society and the ways urban Christians were reevaluating “tradition” in an era of emerging African nationalism.79 Nowhere are these overlapping forces of tradition and modernity more clearly relayed than in these two first gifts to Broner—the delicate Xhosa necklace, an expression of pride in heritage, and the finely embroidered ­place mat, a signifier of the domestic skills of the educated modern Christian woman. Broner would become increasingly conscious of and invested in these tensions as her adventure and collecting enterprise continued on to South Africa’s other provinces.

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Notes 1  This chapter focuses primarily on the first two

8  Price and Data Book, box 6, folder 16, series VI:

months of Broner’s travels, encompassing her twopart transatlantic journey (May 21–June 19, 1938) and her arrival in South Africa and initial stay in the eastern Cape (June 19–July 30, 1938). Unless otherwise indicated, quotations by Broner are from her travel journal during this period, series I: Journal, Lida C. Broner Papers, Library and Archives, Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ (hereinafter LCB).

Miscellanies, LCB.

2  “Price and Data Book,” box 6, folder 16, series VI:

Miscellanies, LCB. 3  D. D. T. Jabavu to Lida Broner, June 13, 1938, box 2,

9  Lida Broner, September 2 and 7, 1938 (Johannes-

burg), series I: Journal, LCB. 10  D. D. T. Jabavu to Lida Broner, July 9, 1938, box 2,

folder 8, series VI: Miscellanies, LCB. 11  D. D. T. Jabavu, Bantu Grievances (London:

George Routledge and Sons, 1934) (pamphlet; reprinted from Isaac Schapera’s Western Civilization and the Natives of South Africa [London: George Routledge and Sons, 1934]).

folder 8, series VI: Miscellanies, LCB.

12  Jabavu, Bantu Grievances, 298.

4  Both D. D. T. and Florence Jabavu were Mfengu,

13  On emerging African nationalism in response

ers: The Origins of the ANC and the Struggle for Democracy in South Africa (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013); William Beinart and Colin Bundy, Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa: Politics & Popular Movements in the Transkei and Eastern Cape, 1890–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); and Les Switzer, Power and Resistance in an African Society: The Ciskei Xhosa and the Making of South Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993).

to increasing segregation and the role of the AAC, as discussed in these paragraphs, see Les Switzer, Power and Resistance in an African Society: The Ciskei Xhosa and the Making of South Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); Iris Berger, South Africa in World History (London: Oxford University Press, 2009), especially chapter 5: “Worlds Apart: A New Racial Divide,” 85–108; Natasha Erlank, “Christianity and African Nationalism in South Africa in the First Half of the Twentieth Century,” in Omar Badsha et al., One Hundred Years of the ANC, 77–96; Saul Dubow, Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in South Africa, 1919–1936 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989); and Tim Couzens, The New African: a Study of the Life and Work of H. I. E. Dhlomo (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985).

6  “Town and Country News,” Umteteli wa Bantu,

14  “Timeline: All-African Convention (AAC),” South

a group that settled among isiXhosa-speaking communities beginning in the early nineteenth century and, despite siding with the British in their “frontier wars” with the Xhosa in the nineteenth century, eventually assimilated into Xhosa society. 5  See, for example, André Odendaal, The Found-

June 25, 1938, University of Johannesburg Institutional Repository, https://ujcontent.uj.ac.za/vital /access/services/Download/uj:27852/SOURCE1?view =true. 7  Thozama April mentions Nikiwe and her role

in the formation of the NCAW in her larger study of Charlotte Maxeke’s intellectual contributions to South Africa’s liberation struggles, “Theorizing Women: The Intellectual Contributions of Charlotte Maxeke to the Struggle for Liberation in South Africa,” PhD diss., University of the Western Cape, 2012, 182–91. See also Thozama April, “Charlotte Maxeke: A Celebrated and Neglected Figure in History,” in One Hundred Years of the ANC, ed. Omar Badsha et al. (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2012), 97–110.

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African History Online, https://www.sahistory.org.za /article/timeline-all-africa-convention-aac. 15  “Minutes of the All African Convention, Decem-

ber 1937,” 18, see http://historicalpapers-atom.wits .ac.za/minutes-of-all-african-convention. 16  “Minutes of the All African Convention, Decem-

ber 1937,” 38. 17  “Minutes of the All African Convention, Decem-

ber 1937,” 41. 18  Noni Jabavu, The Ochre People: Scenes from a

South African Life (London: Murray, 1963), 20–21. 19  See Meghan Healy-Clancy, “Women and the

Problem of Family in Early African Nationalist History and Historiography,” South African Historical Journal: The ANC at 100 64, no. 3 (2012): 450–71.

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20  Penelope Hetherington addresses the neglect

of women in South Africa’s historical record in “Women in South Africa: The Historiography in English,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 26, no. 2 (1993): 241–69. Nomboniso Gasa argues for the need to approach historical documents in new ways to make visible black women’s lives in “Let Them Build More Goals,” in Women in South African History, ed. Nomboniso Gasa (Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council, 2007). Athambile Masola addresses the politics of the archive and exemplifies the potential of this approach through her recuperation of the lives of black women in the interwar years in “‘Bantu Women on the Move’: Black Women and the Politics of Mobility in The Bantu World,” Historia 63, no. 1 (2018): 93–111. 21  “Once Slaves, Now Rich and Free: Amazing

Feat of Negroes to Inspire Bantu,” Bantu World, August 20, 1932, as quoted in Ntongela Masilela, “New Negro Modernity and New African Modernity,” paper presented to “The Black Atlantic: Literatures, Histories, Cultures” forum, Zurich, January 2003, 23, http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/nam/general /modernity.pdf. 22  W. M. Tywabi, president, Star of Hope Social

Club, East London, typewritten greetings to “Our Guest, Mrs. Broner, of America,” July 29, 1938, box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB. 23  “Sophiatown, Johannesburg/School for Blind,”

undated newspaper clipping (inscribed “Umteteli 22-10-38”), box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB. 24  “Crown Mines / Visit of Mrs. L. Broner,” by

Thomas Tsamesi, undated (October 1938?) news­ paper clipping, box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB. 25  Lida Broner, August 22, 1938 (Vereeniging),

series I: Journal, LCB. 26  Bennetta Jules-Rosette and David B. Coplan,

“‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika’: From Independent Spirit to Political Mobilization,” Cahiers d’études africaines 44, nos. 173/174 (2004): 350. 27  Biographical notes about Hilda and Richard

Godlo are provided by Alan Gregor Cobley in “‘On the Shoulders of Giants’: The Black Petty Bourgeoisie in Politics and Society in South Africa, 1924 to 1950,” PhD diss.. School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1986, 332. See also a profile of Hilda Godlo in “Bantu Women on the Move,” Bantu World, April 6, 1935. I am grateful to Athambile Masola for directing me to this profile

Chapter 3: “Welcome to Africa!”

and for her work on Godlo, and other historically marginalized women, in “Bantu Women on the Move,” Historia, 93–111. 28  “Bantu Women on the Move,” Bantu World,

April 6, 1935.” 29  Catherine Higgs states that the African

­ omen’s Self-Improvement Association (AWSIA) W was founded by Max Yergan’s wife, Susie, in Peddie, on the eastern Cape in 1922 and notes that it had fifteen branches by 1938. See “Helping Ourselves: Black Women and Grassroots Activism in Segregated South Africa, 1922–1952,” in Stepping Forward: Black Women in Africa and the Americas, ed. Catherine Higgs, Barbara A. Moss, and Earline Rae Ferguson (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002), 60. However, a newspaper account of a meeting in East London published in the Daily Dispatch, April 9, 1938, states that the movement was started in 1916 and that there were by then at least thirty active branches. See “‘Zenzele’!,” undated news clipping [handwritten “Daily Dispatch April 9 1938”], box 3, series III: Press Clippings, LCB. 30  See Beverly Haddad, “The Manyano Movement

in South Africa: Site of Struggle, Survival, and Resistance,” Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity 18, no. 61 (2004): 4–13. 31  Deborah Gaitskell, “Devout Domesticity? A

Century of African Women’s Christianity in South Africa,” Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945, ed. Cherryl Walker (London: James Currey, 1990), 254–55. 32  See Deborah Gaitskell, “From Domestic Ser-

vants to Girl Wayfarers at St Agnes,’ Rosettenville: Phases in the Life of a South African Mission School, 1909–1935,” Southern African Review of Education 19, no. 2 (2013): 92–110, and Gaitskell, “Housewives, Maids or Mothers: Some Contradictions of Domesticity for Christian Women in Johannesburg, 1903–39,” Journal of African History 24, no. 2 (1983): 241–56. 33  Florence Thandiswa Jabavu, “Bantu Home

Life,” 1928, in M. J. Daymond et al., Women Writing Africa: The Southern Region (New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2003), 1:194–95. The introduction to this compendium offers an analysis of how African women, including Jabavu, renegotiated Western-derived definitions of domesticity; see especially 1:25–28. 34  Higgs, “Helping Ourselves,” 70.

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35  Catherine Higgs, “Zenzele: African Women’s

Self-Help Organizations in South Africa, 1927–1998,” African Studies Review 47, no. 3 (2004): 121; see also Higgs, “Helping Ourselves.” 36  “’Zenzele’!,” undated news clipping (inscribed

“Daily Dispatch April 9 1938”), box 3, series III: Press Clippings, LCB. 37  Meghan Healy-Clancy, “Women and the Prob-

lem of Family in Early African Nationalist History and Historiography,” South African Historical Journal 64, no. 3 (2012): 452. 38  On the transatlantic connections between black

women’s clubs discussed here, see Higgs, “Helping Ourselves” and “Zenzele”; Brandy S. Thomas, “‘Give the Women Their Due’: Black Female Missionaries and the South African-American Nexus, 1920s to 1930s” (MA thesis, Ohio State University, 2011); Meghan Healy-Clancy, “The Daughters of Africa and Transatlantic Racial Kinship: Cecilia Lillian Tshabalala and the Women’s Club Movement, 1912–1943,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 59, no. 4 (2014): 481–99; and Dawne Y. Curry, “‘What Is It that We Call the Nation’: Cecilia Lillian Tshabalala’s definition, diagnosis, and prognosis of the nation in a segregated South Africa,” Safundi 19, no. 1 (2018): 55–76. Curry argues that Tshabalala also drew from the models offered by African American and South African male movements. Iris Berger also discusses these linkages during a slightly later period in “An African American ‘Mother of the Nation’: Madie Hall Xuma in South Africa, 1940–1963,” Journal of Southern African Studies 27, no. 3 (2001): 547–66. 39  Catherine Higgs, “Helping Ourselves,” 62. Higgs

notes the popularity of Yergan’s BWHIA was such that it had sixty-three branches with 1,911 members by 1938. 40  Deborah Gaitskell, “Housewives, Maids or

­ others,” 242. For more on Makhanya, see Shula M Marks, Not Either an Experimental Doll: The Separate Worlds of Three South African Women (London: Women’s Press, 1987). 41  Healy-Clancy, “The Daughters of Africa and

Transatlantic Racial Kinship,” 481. 42  For a critical review of the historiography see

45  Healy-Clancy, “Women and the Problem of

Family,” 452. 46  Lida Broner, October 16, 1938 (Johannesburg),

series I: Journal, LCB. 47  Nessa Leibhammer, “Dominant and Contrasting

Patterns: The Representation of Black South Africans by White South Africans,” in Visual Century: South African Art in Context, Volume 1, 1907–1948. ed. Jillian Carman (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2011), 53. 48  Jillian Carman, “Art Museums and National

Identity,” in Carman, Visual Century, 21. See also Anitra Nettleton, “The Art Museum in Africa—a Utopia Desired?,” Social Dynamics 39, no. 3 (2013): 421. 49  James Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988) remains a classic among studies on the art/artifact distinction. Anitra Nettleton discusses these distinctions with regard to South African collections in “The Art Museum in Africa.” 50  Leibhammer, “Dominant and Contrasting

Patterns,” 47. 51  Leibhammer, “Dominant and Contrasting

Patterns,” 49. See also Emma Bedford, “Exploring Meanings and Identities: Beadwork from the Eastern Cape in the South African National Gallery,” Ezakwantu: Beadwork from the Eastern Cape (Cape Town: South African National Gallery, 1994), 10. 52  Leibhammer, “Dominant and Contrasting

Patterns,” 47. 53  Lida Broner, November 24, 1938 (Alice), series I:

Journal, LCB. 54  Lida Broner, August 4, 1938 (Vereeniging),

series I: Journal, LCB. 55  Ralph Bunche, as quoted in Robert R. Edgars, An

African American in South Africa: The Travel Notes of Ralph J. Bunche 28 September 1937–1 January 1938 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001), 136. 56  Eslanda Robeson, African Journey (New York:

John Day, 1945), 33–34.

Healy-Clancy, “Women and the Problem of Family.”

57  Robeson, African Journey, 48.

43  Deborah Gaitskell describes women’s social

58  Chris Gosden and Yvonne Marshall, “The

welfare organizations as “activist spheres” in her introduction, Journal of African Studies 10, no. 1 (1983): 6.

59  Foster’s concept of “networked biography”

44  Gasa, “Let Them Build More Goals.”

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Cultural Biography of Objects,” World Archaeology 31, no. 2 (1999): 169–78. is useful here, see Robert J. Foster, “Notes for a

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Networked Biography: The P. G. T. Black Collection of Oceanic Things,” Museum Anthropology 35, no. 2 (2012); see also Samuel Alberti, “Objects and the Museum,” Isis 96, no. 4 (2005): 561.

Schmahmann (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2000), 32.

60  Although Broner does not mention the necklace

74  See Gaitskell, “Devout Domesticity? A Century

in her diary, the Newark Museum’s 1947 accession card includes information, presumably provided by Broner, about the date of the gift and its donor along with this description. 61  This attribution is provided by Gary van Wyk,

personal communication, March 9, 2022. Dawn Costello discusses the function of such necklaces, which she identifies as izinyango, in Not Only For Its Beauty: Beadwork and Its Cultural Significance among the Xhosa-Speaking Peoples (Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1990), 64.

73  Nettleton “To Sit on a Cushion and Sew a Fine

Seam,” 32. of African Women’s Christianity in South Africa,” and also Anitra Nettleton, “In Pursuit of Virtuosity: Gendering ‘Master’ Pieces of 19th Century South African Indigenous Arts,” Visual Studies 27, no. 3 (2012): 230. 75  Nettleton, “To Sit on a Cushion and Sew a Fine

Seam,” 33. 76  Higgs, “Zenzele,” 132. 77  Art historian Sandra Klopper proposes this

explanation in an email to the author, April 13, 2021.

62  Gary Van Wyk, “Illuminated Signs: Style and

78  Lize Van Robbroeck, “Beyond the Tradition/

Meaning in the Beadwork of the Xhosa- and Zulu-Speaking Peoples,” African Arts 36, no. 3 (2003): 14.

Modernity Dialectic,” Cultural Studies 22, no. 2 (2008): 212.

63  Van Wyk, “Illuminated Signs,” 19. 64  Costello, Not Only For Its Beauty, 18–19. 65  Anitra Nettleton, “The Art of Those Left Behind:

Women, Beadwork and Bodies,” in A Long Way Home: Migrant Worker Worlds 1800–2014, ed. Peter Delius, Laura Phillips and Fiona Rankin-Smith (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2014), 90.

79  Lize van Robbroeck, “‘That Magnificent Gen-

eration’: Tradition and Modernity in the Lives, Art and Politics of the First Modern Black Painters,” in Carman, Visual Century: South African Art in Context, 127.

66  Nettleton “The Art of Those Left Behind,” 343. 67  André Proctor and Sandra Klopper, “Through

the Barrel of a Bead: The Personal and the Political in the Beadwork of the Eastern Cape,” Ezakwantu: Beadwork from the Eastern Cape. (Cape Town: South African National Gallery, 1994), 58. 68  Proctor and Klopper, “Through the Barrel of a

Bead,” 58. 69  Anitra Nettleton, “Jubilee Dandies: Collecting

Beadwork in Tsolo, Eastern Cape, 1897–1932,” African Arts 46, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 38, 41. 70  Proctor and Klopper, “Through the Barrel of a

Bead,” 59. 71  https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/embroidery

-styles-an-illustrated-guide. 72  Anitra Nettleton, “To Sit on a Cushion and Sew

a Fine Seam: Gendering Embroidery and Appliqué in Africa,” in Material Matters: Appliqués by the Weya Women of Zimbabwe and Needlework by South African Women’s Collectives, ed. Brenda

Chapter 3: “Welcome to Africa!”

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Chapter 4

Onward and Inward to the Transvaal and Natal

At the end of July, Broner left the eastern Cape on a three-month tour of South Africa’s other provinces. “Do your best to overlook the faults and drawbacks of our country,” D. D. T. Jabavu entreated her as she embarked on her travels, “for it is nevertheless our homeland.”1 Her first stop was Vereeniging in the Transvaal, some six hundred miles inland and north, where Rilda Marta worked as a schoolteacher. Much of her time was spent in that province, with long stays in Vereeniging and neighboring Evaton and in the industrial city of Johannesburg. From the Transvaal, Broner journeyed southeast to Natal, where she spent two weeks touring the city of Durban and the reserves on its periphery, Umbumbulu to the south and Inanda to the north. En route back to East London, she stopped for several days in Orange Free State, first in Bloemfontein and then Thaba Nchu, with a day trip to the British protectorate of Basutoland (now Lesotho). The objects that she acquired through her travels reveal a nation in transition, reflecting the impact of industrialization and ongoing debates about the role of education, the status of women, and the value of cultural heritage. In all, she would travel well over two thousand miles, primarily by train and mostly by herself. It was an ambitious journey by any standard but certainly more so for an African American woman in 1930s South Africa. In her journal, Broner gives a sense of the challenging nature of long-­distance travel at the time, which was compounded by rising racism. Describing the first leg of her journey to Vereeniging, when she was accompanied by Marta, she writes, “We had twelve packages. Eight suitcases, two hat boxes, one food basket, one bundle of bed clothes! Travel is hard in Africa. Left East London at three P. M. Travelled until dark, then next morning until eight o’clock. Passed perhaps eight or nine hundred miles of vacant land.”2 During their brief daylong layover in Bloemfontein, they fit in sightseeing with political activists Milner Langa Kabane and his wife, Helena, and participating in a women’s meeting held by Marian Moikangoa, who was involved in the National Council of African Women.3 They were hosted for dinner at the home of a Mr. and Mrs. Peters, who sent them off with provisions for the journey ahead. It was midnight when they boarded the train to continue on to Vereeniging. “At the station we were turned back at the gate because we were black,” Broner reported. “We had to walk around the station at the back and over the bridge to the platform.” Their friends were charged three cents each just to accompany them on the platform to see them off. 99

Vereeniging: “Native” Life and Adapted Education For most of August, Broner stayed with Marta in Vereeniging’s Top Location, a black township with a largely Sotho population. Her arrival was hailed at a welcome party organized by Marta, where Broner “gave good wishes from our American Negro brothers and sisters” to those gathered in between a lively program of games, songs, and dances.4 “Everyone came,” she wrote in her journal. “More men than women. Really enjoyed this more than any party so far.” Broner’s cheery account glosses over deteriorating conditions and simmering social unrest at the location, where residents were scheduled to be forcibly removed by government decree. She adapted quickly to the challenges of Marta’s home, fetching water from the standpipe down the road and learning to use an imbawula, a makeshift coal stove made from an old tin with holes, for heat. She spent her days socializing and exploring, meeting with teachers and nurses, window-shopping in town, visiting the brick and tile plants, watching the hometown soccer team play Port Eliza­beth, and regularly attending church services on Sundays. She was also pleased to receive a marriage proposal—her second of the trip, no less, and both declined—from a barber friend. “He is a very handsome black man!” she enthused. “Very!!” Broner attracted the attention of others as well while in Vereeniging. Children referred to her as “Mistress Black white aunty,” a moniker indicating the ambiguities of her identity and status as a visiting African American. Her straight hair was much admired, which she capitalized on by selling hair products and doing hair, for both women and men. People were curious about life in America, peppering her with questions about everything from educational opportunities for blacks to the success of Joe Louis, the new heavyweight boxing champion and no doubt the most famous black man in the world. This interest sometimes extended to liberal whites concerned about “native welfare,” who summoned her throughout the trip to ask about healthcare and education for blacks in the United States. Broner often declined or kept them waiting, gestures of resistance evidencing a healthy skepticism of their intentions. She describes reluctantly meeting with a Mrs. Robertson only after repeated requests that grew ever more insistent, first delivered by the location’s head nurse and then, more menacingly, by a black policeman. “Found her nice and interesting,” Broner reported. “But don’t think any of these white people are really interested in the African Negro.” Broner was eager to experience “native” life, a term she employed mostly when referring to uneducated Africans or those with traditionalist beliefs or practices. She paid a shilling to a Sotho man to make her an openwork 100

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sun hat, watching him deftly manipulate wet grass to create the work. She admired the hairstyle of a “native” girl “done up in what seemed to be a thousand or more little twists.” A highlight of her stay was attending a feast and dance in Vereeniging’s central square in honor of the visit of a Sotho chief’s grandson. “Heard war cry for the first time!! It is blood curdling!! It goes to the very bones of one,” she confided to her journal. “Yet there is something within that answers.” Broner’s dawning appreciation of “native” life led her to question the ways her network of “school people” set themselves apart from those they described as heathens. Encountering a group of “naked Natives in a car” on their way to give a concert, she later declared, “They are just as civilized as any other people!” Her growing awareness of South Africa’s ethnic diversity also underscored the challenge of how to promote unity. After attending a church service conducted in three languages that neither she nor the isiXhosaspeaking Marta could understand (one being Sesotho, and the others most likely isiZulu and Setswana), Broner commented, “Five nations, all of one race, unable to understand each other.” It is worth noting here the pan-­African inflection in her reference to “one race.” Broner’s main focus was on education, which was not compulsory for blacks and historically had been left to mission schools to provide. She spent time at the Methodist School in Vereeniging, where Marta was now working as a teacher. A photograph mounted by Broner and identified with a typewritten caption shows Marta seated alongside her fellow teachers—­notably an all-black staff—each appearing the very model of mission-­educated respectability (fig. 19). In Marta’s school, Broner spoke to the students, who in return sang three African songs. At the end of her visit, the principal of the school thanked her with gifts of a woven basket and a mat made by a twelve-year-old girl. Broner also traveled to the nearby township of Evaton to visit the Wilberforce Institute, important as the first African independent school in the Transvaal. Associated with the AME Church, it was founded in 1908 by pioneering activist Charlotte Maxeke and her husband, and named and Chapter 4: Onward and Inward to the Transvaal and Natal

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FIG. 19   Rilda Marta (bottom left, seated) with teachers at the Methodist School in Vereeniging, late 1930s.

­ odeled after Maxeke’s US alma mater. In Evaton, Broner stayed with two m black South African teachers, Charlotte Opperman and her husband, and had dinner in the home of African American missionaries Dr. Amos White, who served as Wilberforce’s principal, and his wife, Luella. The Whites, who had arrived the previous year, believed the school offered a unique opportunity to contribute to progress. “Africa is witnessing the dawn of an educational awakening,” Amos White declared, and Wilberforce would play a key role through training “that is worked out, organized, supervised and controlled by black men and women.”5 Broner took note of the significance of the all-black staff and the Whites’ educational leadership, observing that “this is the only school in South Africa under American Negroes.” By now Broner would have become well aware of the inadequacies of black education in South Africa and how schools like Wilberforce, and other mission schools, sought to redress them. But while she took note of low wages, crowded conditions, and insufficient resources, she may not have been attuned to the contemporary discourse surrounding “native education.” In recent decades there had been significant debate in South Africa about whether the European-based education system introduced during the colonial era was appropriate for the needs of blacks in a changing society. The interwar period witnessed an ideological shift to “adapted education,” a pedagogical approach based on American models of industrial training, especially Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute.6 Adapted education emphasized vocational trades and everyday skills in addition to—or, more often, in lieu of—an academic curriculum. Wilberforce, for example, had a theological school and offered teacher training as well as a new Domestic Science program, established by Luella White, which included needlework, housewifery, and even a course in beauty culture.7 Adapted education was promoted by white government officials and others as a means of responding to the poverty and social fragmentation among blacks resulting from urbanization and industrialization.8 Many Africans, however, viewed it as undermining intellectual progress and racial advancement, preparing them for a life of service in segregated South Africa and ensuring the continuation of cheap black labor necessary for its economy. The model of adapted education included teaching Africans carpentry and woodworking, basketry, sewing, and native crafts along with other practical skills for everyday life. Variously described as art, handwork, craftwork, or arts and crafts, these skills were mandatory in the industrial training programs of the vast majority of government and mission schools by the mid-1920s.9 If, initially, the rationale for teaching handicrafts was that students would benefit economically from the sale of their work, in the 1930s 102

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the justification for training programs shifted to emphasize preservation of Africanness based on the simplistic conviction that “crafts, like music, were what Africans did.”10 As even Wilberforce’s Luella White observed in her account of living in South Africa in the late 1930s, “All Africans are known for their handiwork.”11 Cultivating native crafts would, it was argued, promote cultural cohesiveness at a time of increasing fragmentation within African societies.12 This seemingly benevolent ideology, however, situated within the broader state agenda to “retribalize” Africans through culture, amounted to a strategy of divide and conquer that would ultimately lead to apartheid. Broner’s journal offers no indication that she was aware of debates about “adapted education” and the role of craft in promoting cultural stability; nevertheless, gifts of handwork made by schoolchildren constitute a significant portion of her collection. Among the twenty-odd examples of crafts acquired by Broner over the course of her trip, a few demonstrate wood-carving skills, including several spoons with burnished geometric designs decorating the handle, but the majority are baskets and plaited and coiled trivets woven from strands of grass (fig. 20). Although these are humble domestic products made by unnamed pupils in training, they constitute an affecting material record of educational policy for blacks in 1930s South Africa. Chapter 4: Onward and Inward to the Transvaal and Natal

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FIG. 20   Some of the craftwork given to Broner by students and educators at the South African schools she visited. Trivets, 1930s, grass, diam. 73/4 in., no. 2014.46.69 (left) and 51/2 × 91/4 in., no. 2014.46.70 (right), given to Broner at the Ohlange Institute; Stirrers in Zulu style, 1930s, wood, 16 in., nos. 2014.46.54 (top) and 2014.46.55 (bottom), given to Broner by schoolchildren in Umbumbulu.

Johannesburg: Labor and Leisure From Vereeniging, Broner traveled by train at the end of August to Johannesburg for an initial two-week stay. She would return at the end of September for an additional month. Johannesburg was a rapidly industrializing city established and shaped by the discovery of gold on farmland in the late nineteenth century. It was a relatively short journey of about forty miles from Vereeniging, but it was a world apart. “Joe’burg is like New York,” Broner marveled. “All kinds of people and business going on.” In the 1930s, the bustling metropolis was being transformed by the large-scale migration of Africans from the countryside, representing a diverse mix of ethnicities. Nearly four hundred thousand African men were working in the gold mines, living in on-site compounds for periods of six to nine months, then returning home to their families.13 Women, too, were coming to Johannesburg in increasing numbers, many finding jobs as domestic workers in white homes. There was also a small but growing educated black middle class in skilled professions who were making Johannesburg their home.14 Broner’s experience of the city would be mediated by this urban elite. During her two visits to Johannesburg, Broner stayed at the Helping Hand Club, a hostel and domestic training school for African women established in 1919.15 “Nice size room,” Broner commented upon arrival. “Two beds. No heat. Cement floor. Double clothes closet, about four feet high with two compartments for hats. White people run it as a training school and home for Native servant girls.” The newly built hostel offered a safe and comfortable shelter for up to forty girls and women working in or visiting the city and whose sexual purity was seen as in need of protection. Broner took note of the sharp points of broken glass embedded in the cement of the fence surrounding the hostel: “This is to keep men from coming in at night to see the girls.” The Helping Hand offered a six-month intensive course in domestic skills such as cooking, laundry, housewifery, and needlework. In theory, its graduates could go on to manage their own Westernized homes as “proper” Christian wives or, perhaps, run small dressmaking businesses. In reality, most young women of the Helping Hand were destined for a life in domestic servitude in white homes.16 The Bantu Men’s Social Center (BMSC) was the hub of Broner’s social activity throughout her time in Johannesburg. Established in 1924, the center was the nucleus of the city’s black cultural life: it had a well-stocked library; hosted meetings, weddings, and other social events; sponsored plays, films, and musical performances; and presented debates and athletic competitions.17 Broner found it a welcoming space, despite its exclusively male membership representing the upper echelons of black society. She 104

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headed there within hours of arriving in the city and was met by its assistant secretary, Emmanuel Lithebe, and treated to a fancy lunch (“steak in tomato juice!!”) and a planned itinerary to introduce her to the city. Echoing the two-part welcome she had received in East London, where an informal greeting was followed by a formal function, later that week she was the guest of honor at a grand fête where she was welcomed “on behalf of the African community” by R. V. Selope-Thema. Her host was a prominent man of parts: former superintendent of the BMSC, he was now editor of the Bantu World as well as a founder of the AAC, an ANC activist, and a principal architect of the “New African” modernity.18 To mark the occasion, she received one of her most treasured gifts—six record albums, “all in the Native language,” from Griffiths Motsieola, who led the vaudeville group known as the Darktown Strutters (Eslanda Robeson describes receiving a similar gift of records during her reception at the BMSC in 1936).19 To be so honored on the first two stops of her tour must have been a heady experience for the African American hairstylist from Newark. Through the Helping Hand and the BMSC, Broner had a broad introduction to the bustling city and firsthand experience of African urbanization; in turn, she had opportunities to talk about black life in America and impart her skills. The minutes of the Helping Hand for September 1938, for example, note: “We gave hospitality to Mrs. Broner, an educated American Negro woman who spoke to our girls about conditions of living in the U.S.A.”20 She spent time with Mrs. Borel, the hostel’s white superintendent, who took her to speak to the girls in another hostel and invited her to dinner in her home. Broner especially came to know the young women of the Helping Hand, teaching them how to care for and style their hair and sharing details about her club work in the United States. Their ease, even eagerness, as they posed for Broner’s camera, conveys the warmth and familiarity of their relationship (fig. 21). Days were typically spent at the Bantu Men’s Social Center, where Broner went to have lunch, watch tennis and cricket matches, or just to socialize. In the company of club members, Broner toured mines and hospitals and visited the offices of the Star Chapter 4: Onward and Inward to the Transvaal and Natal

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FIG. 21   Young women at the Helping Hand Hostel, Johannesburg, October 1938, photograph by Lida C. Broner.

FIG. 22   Some the “snaps” Broner took of life in Johannesburg, including a tennis match at the Bantu Men’s Social Center, October 1938, photographs by Lida C. Broner.

­Newspaper, as well as beer halls and barbershops—mostly male spaces to which she would have had limited, or no, access as a woman (fig. 22). Some nights she returned to the center for meetings or to attend a party, often staying well past midnight. Returning at two in the morning on one such occasion, she wrote in her diary, “Had the time of my life! Men danced me almost to death.” As much as Broner clearly enjoyed being part of Johannesburg’s “cultural elite,” she was drawn to the emergent urban working-class culture and interested in the ways that “tradition” was being navigated in the city. Her visit to the “Mai Mai” market, known as “the Place of Healers” (­Ezinyangeni) for its lively trade in traditional medicines, left her awestruck. “Never saw so many roots, snakes, lizards, bats, rats, horns, hoofs, feet, legs, bones, teeth, skin, fur and even old iron, in my life!!!” she remarked. Broner particularly admired the “tribal” dancing performed by men at mining compounds, which she may not have realized was more about tourism than 106

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t­ radition. “The time and rhythm were perfect,” she enthused. “Surprised to see how hard the men stomped their feet on the cemented ground. Clapping of hands and flat sticker make perfect background for drum. First use of drum I have seen in Africa. Men wear no clothes except a loin cloth, feathers, sheep wool on legs and ankle bracelets, which looked like they were made of dried pine tree cones.” She returned several times to watch and was persistent, though ultimately unsuccessful, in her efforts to acquire for her collection examples of the leg bells she so admired as well as the large circular wooden earrings worn by men. Both the Helping Hand and the BMSC, as well as recreational activities at mining compounds, were philanthropic initiatives of a small group of liberal whites concerned with “native welfare.” Several were long-serving representatives of the American Board of Missions, based in Johannesburg. Broner became acquainted with many of them, including Clara Bridgman, an American missionary who founded the Helping Hand with her husband. Bridgman spent a day taking Broner around some of the other institutions she had helped to establish, including the Talitha Home for delinquent girls and Bridgman Memorial Hospital, which trained black midwives and provided maternity care. Broner also spent time with Rev. Ray E. Phillips and his wife, Dora, and Rev. J. Dexter Taylor and his wife, all American Board missionaries. “Don’t know whether to trust them or not,” she confided. Broner’s instinctual suspicion was not entirely without merit. The influential Ray Phillips, for example, was, on one hand, an ardent opponent of segregation who looked to address the needs of the city’s growing black population and to foster racial cooperation during his forty years in South Africa.21 He focused on creating leisure opportunities for Africans, including recreational facilities for mine laborers and social clubs like the Helping Hand Club and the BMSC. But as much as these efforts were directed at social welfare, they were also about social control. The Christian model of leisure aimed at civilizing Africans in their adaptation to urban life, thus diffusing social unrest and preventing political radicalization. Women especially were the target of social policies that promoted Western ideals of marriage and home.22 Though Broner herself represented the Christian West, and was no doubt hosted by these missionaries for that reason, her immersion in South African life gave rise to an increasing respect for traditional customs and awareness of the repressive effects of white benevolence. Broner spoke on no fewer than sixteen occasions while in Johannesburg, mostly arranged by her “New African” hosts. These talks ranged from her formal reception at the BMSC and other community centers to classroom visits and casual get-togethers at homes and hostels. T ­ hroughout, Chapter 4: Onward and Inward to the Transvaal and Natal

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FIG. 23   Mrs. R. E. Masole, the proprietor of a grocery store in Brakpan, in an undated photograph from Broner’s album. Broner maintained correspondence with the Masoles through the 1970s.

she ­continued to offer an inspiring message to men and women about “the progress of the American Negro, in spite of many handicaps,” often reminding those gathered that it was “co-operation and unity that will prosper a Nation.” Speeches by this “Negro Beauty Specialist” at the University of Witwatersrand, at the Sophiatown School for the Blind, and at Crown Mines, among others, were notable enough to merit newspaper coverage. Her hosts at private gatherings represented the city’s educated African elite, many of whom graced the pages of Mweli Skota’s African Yearly Register and owned homes in the “respectable” township of Sophia­town. They included Ben Mabuza, a restaurant owner who prepared a twelve-course dinner for Broner, and Daniel Denelane, the chief headman at Robinson Deep Gold Mine compound, who hosted a grand party with dancing to a live orchestra. It was at the Denelane’s that Broner was given the name No’Lwandle, meaning “Mother of the Ocean” in isiZulu, “as I am the first Negro woman to make the trip across the ocean alone,” she noted with great satisfaction (if inaccurately). Adopted by Broner as her middle name, it was surely one of the greatest gifts she received on her journey. These occasions offered opportunities for the exchange of knowledge and to build solidarity around common concerns. Broner describes returning to the BMSC one evening expressly “to speak to the men about Tribal unity.” Her conversations with women revealed that they too were politically aware, despite being formally excluded from the public sphere. Broner recounted that the girls she spoke to at the Doorfontien hostel “asked some interesting questions. One girl wanted to know what were Negroes doing to stop lynching.” She attended a women’s meeting in Brakpan, a mining town east of Johannesburg, with the respectable Mrs. R. E. Masole, who ran a successful grocery store (fig. 23). There, she found that “women seem interested to advance. Also form clubs.” In Brakpan, Broner also became aware that such organizing efforts were perceived as subversive and that the newspapers she distributed carried significant risks for their intended audience. “One woman said secret service men came to her house at midnight looking for papers and books from America.” Similarly, at the BMSC, she was visited by a Mrs. Maraki who told Broner that “if a Negro here was caught reading the 108

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‘negro World,’ a Garvey paper, he was put in jail.” Despite these prohibitions, Broner maintained a correspondence with Masole and her husband, and other South African friends, throughout much of her life.

Collecting in Johannesburg Through such social encounters during her month and a half in Johannesburg, Broner acquired nearly thirty works—all of them gifts. They include her only painting, a present from the artist John Koenakeefe Mohl, whom she met at a dinner in Sophiatown. Mohl was known for his views of township life and landscapes and his pioneering efforts to run an art school for Africans from his home.23 Broner noted that he wanted to place his art “in the American market,” and perhaps hoped the example he gave her (sadly, now lost) would pave the way. Foremost among the gifts she received in Johannesburg were several examples of burnished earthenware vessels made by South Sotho women (fig. 24). In southern Africa, ceramic vessels are “inherently social” objects, forming, affirming, and maintaining relationships between individuals and groups through their use and exchange.24 Miss Kraai and Mr. Bassi, teachers at the School for the Blind in the township of Sophiatown, gave her two small wide-bellied pots (lefitsoana), after she spoke to their students. From Miss Kraii is a lipped jar covered in red slip and decorated with rows of tan arcs around the body and from Mr. Bassi, a rounded vessel banded with alternating sections of textured and painted decoration. Mrs. R. E. Masole, Chapter 4: Onward and Inward to the Transvaal and Natal

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FIG. 24   Examples of earthenware vessels made by South Sotho women, acquired in Johannesburg, October 1938. Left to right: two wide-bellied pots (lefiso), 1930s, clay and pigment, 43/4 × 63/4 in. and 67/8 × 8 in., nos. 47.68 and .69, given to Broner by Miss Kraai and Mr. Bassi; Two stemmed vessels (mpotjwana), 1930s, clay and pigment, 73/8 × 45/8 in. and 57/8 × 4 in., nos. 47.65 and 2014.46.74, given to Broner by Mrs. R. E. Masole and “Mother Masole”; Animal-shaped vessel (koko), 1930s, clay, 71/4 × 5 in., no. 47.67, given to Broner by Clara Bridgman.

who took Broner to the women’s meeting in Brakpan, and “Mother Masole” each gave her a stemmed goblet (mpotjwana), one banded with a dotted lozenge design, the other brightly painted with blue and red geometric motifs and the hooked shape of a hollowed-out calabash used as a serving implement. Clara Bridgman, the American Board missionary, gave Broner two sculptural animal-shaped vessels (koko), one in the form of a ram’s head. Historically, earthenware vessels were hand-built by South Sotho women and exemplified their central role in maintaining positive relationships with ancestral spirits. Similar to the ways that glass beads and beadwork have been associated with the spiritual realm among Xhosa communities, earth is a sacred substance in South Sotho culture that embodies the spirits of familial ancestors, or balimo. As David Riep explains, “Not only does the material function to create meaningful objects aimed at the maintenance of spiritual relationships; the link between the past, present and future is grounded within this substance of the temporal world.”25 Women were responsible for maintaining these relationships, honoring ancestral spirits through the brewing and serving of beer in pottery vessels they made for this purpose. The vessels were vehicles of spiritual communion, stored within domestic spaces on a low platform.26 Collectively, the Sotho pottery given to Broner illustrate contemporary changes in artistic production and shifting patronage.27 Traditional forms, like the two wide-bellied pots used for serving beer, were historically undecorated but women began to add incised and painted bands—as seen in these examples—in the twentieth century. The stemmed goblets (mpotjoana) used for drinking are uniquely South Sotho forms, introduced in the late nineteenth century, which may reflect missionary influence, their shape being similar to the European chalices used in liturgical practices.28 The more sculptural vessel (koko) in the shape of a ram’s head, is a type commonly sold at “native craft” fairs organized by mission stations and other church-related organizations in the 1920s and 1930s as outreach to local communities.29 These animal-shaped vessels, made for outside patrons, may have been introduced in local schools as part of the handicraft curriculum of adapted education.30 It is unlikely that any of these vessels were made by the gift givers themselves, but rather presented to Broner as examples of “native craft,” distanced from their original context. In fact, she added “Basuto pottery” or “Basuto Land” to the names she recorded on the labels but did not record their spiritual function. “Girls in the hostel were very sorry to see me go,” Broner wrote on her last day in Johannesburg. “Many gave me things to show in America.” These Chapter 4: Onward and Inward to the Transvaal and Natal

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FIG. 25   Gifts of needlework “to show in America” from the young women of the Helping Hand, October 1938. Clockwise from top: work and gift of Miss Florence S. G. Mhambi, Doily, 1938, cotton, diam. 111/2 in., no. 2014.46.87; work and gift of Dorcas Makgato, Hat, 1938, ­cotton, 61/2 × 91/4 in., no. 2014.46.68; work and gift of Miss Sarah Sethsedie, Doily, 1938, cotton, diam. 73/4 in., no. 2014.46.86; and work and gift of Miss Onnah Duiker, Sweater, 1938, cotton, 83/8 × 53/4 in., no. 2014.46.85.

modest offerings of needlework are perhaps the most poignant of all the things she acquired (fig. 25). They are simple examples of newfound skills, made under the instruction of Mabel Plaatje, the needlework mistress of the Helping Hand training school (Plaatje also gave Broner a delicate linen table square with hemstitching and applied knitted lace edging). Among them is a knitted cap, a small sweater for a toddler, a crocheted table mat, and an embroidered doily in the shape of a flower. Broner recorded the names of their makers on tags she attached, allowing her to connect each work to a familiar face in the photographs she took of the confident young women who posed for her with such ease. Though the individual identities of the women in Broner’s photographs are unrecorded, tracing these names in the archives of the Helping Hand opens a window onto their lives.31 Florence Mhambi, for example, who gave Broner a crocheted table mat, arrived at the hostel in early September at age twenty, having completed the equivalent of eighth grade. Described by the superintendent as “a very intelligent Shangaan girl,” she had to support her own training since her father was a “bad payer” and ended up working locally for a Mrs. Green. There is no further record of her after 1939. Dorcas Makgato, the maker of a knitted cap presents a sadder situation. Makgato was a mission-educated Pedi girl from Pietersburg who arrived at the Helping Hand in May at age nineteen. “Very good in school and intelligent,” she went to work for a Mrs. Regan, who at first reports that she is “excellent,” then later “not so good.” Records explain how Makgato “gets in trouble with home boy” and “changes job,” and then returns to the Helping Hand having contracted venereal disease. After declining treatment, Makgato is brought home by her father; “died 1st August 1941” is her final entry. The contrast between the aspirations embodied in these simple objects, presented to Broner as examples of domestic respectability for show across the Atlantic, and what we may intuit about the fortunes of their makers bound for service in white households, points to the ambiguities in many of the things she brought home.

Natal: Better Homes for Better Africans Broner’s time in Johannesburg was punctuated by a two-week visit to Natal, the smallest of South Africa’s four provinces. Located in the southeastern part of the country, this former British colony was home of the powerful kingdom forged by Zulu clans beginning in the early nineteenth century. Broner made the journey of over 350 miles by overnight train, by herself, with just two bags and a box of homemade cakes from a “lady friend” as her only provisions. After twenty-one hours of travel, she arrived in 112

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­ mbumbulu, a township southwest of Durban in the Umlazi district. It was U the homeland of the Makhanya clan, who settled there in the early nineteenth century, and where the American Board established its first Christian mission in 1836.32 Broner was met at the train by the pioneering social worker Sibusisiwe (Violet) Makhanya, a connection made through D. D. T. Jabavu. M ­ akhanya was a graduate of the leading mission schools in Natal and had studied rural education and social work in the United States in the late 1920s, where she first encountered the “seeds of race consciousness.”33 Spurning the ­Tuskegee-style industrial education model offered by her American sponsors, she enrolled at the Teachers College of Columbia University in New York, financing her studies by giving speeches on Zulu life and customs and by cleaning bathrooms—an earlier parallel to the speeches and hairstyling that funded Broner’s knowledge-gathering mission in South Africa. Returning to Natal in 1930, she opened a community health center and directed the Bantu Youth League, which looked to cultivate upright Christians who also valued Zulu cultural traditions. By all accounts, Makhanya was confident and independent, a defiantly unmarried woman who owned her own home and was deeply respected as a community worker by both blacks and whites. Broner clearly felt she had found a kindred spirit and a peer in ­Makhanya (they were a year apart in age). Decades later Broner would recall that “the very happiest part of my visit to Africa, the land of my forefathers, was spent in her home.”34 Makhanya hosted Broner for much of her visit and arranged an ambitious schedule of activities, recorded in a surviving typewritten program saved by Broner. Combining tours of schools and hospitals with visits to see “native life” in kraals, it reflects the way that Makhanya bridged two worlds as an American-educated, modern Christian with a deep respect for Zulu traditional life and customs.35 Makhanya was not alone in her strong sense of Zulu identity. In the late 1930s, Zulu ethnic nationalism was on the rise in Natal in response to rapid social change. Led by the African Christian intelligentsia—known in Natal as the amakholwa (“the converted” or “believers”)—Zulu ethnic consciousness centered around the traditionalism represented by symbols of the Zulu monarchy and its powerful history. But reconciling “Zulu tradition” with “Christian progress” was not without complexity and contradiction. The ambiguities of cultural nationalism are revealed in the words of Albert Luthuli, a teacher and later president of the African National Congress and Nobel Prize winner, who founded the Zulu Cultural Society in 1937 (for which Makhanya served as an advisor): “We did have an intense wish to preserve what is valuable in our heritage while Chapter 4: Onward and Inward to the Transvaal and Natal

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discarding the inappropriate and outmoded . . . our task seemed to consist of relating the past coherently to the present and the future.”36 First in the Transvaal and now in Natal, Broner came to realize how black South Africans were navigating between tradition and modernity. Through Makhanya, Broner was introduced to both contemporary social institutions as well as “traditional” life in Natal. She visited and spoke at the leading mission schools, beginning in Umbumbulu with Adams College, one of the oldest black colleges in South Africa, established by the American Board of Missions in 1853 (“was very much impressed with work there,” she reported). Traveling north to Inanda, she went to the Ohlange Institute, significant as the first educational institution in South Africa founded by a black person and where Nelson Mandela would later choose to cast his vote in 1994 in the country’s first all-race elections. It was founded in 1901 as the Zulu Christian Industrial School by Rev. John Langalibalele Dube and based on Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee model. “This is the first school that I saw tailoring, farming and shoe making as well as building,” Broner wrote admiringly. “All well developed.” She also visited nearby Inanda Seminary, established by the American Board in 1869 as the country’s first all-­female boarding school. By the 1930s, Inanda was the premier school for elite African girls, offering an academic curriculum and professional training, especially as nurses, at a time when such educational opportunities were unattainable elsewhere.37 In contrast to the young women of the Helping Hand, its graduates were not groomed for a lifetime of subservience and included many influential women, among them Sibusisiwe Makhanya, who both attended and taught at Inanda.38 Women, who were increasingly building community by organizing around social welfare issues in the interwar period, were at the center of Broner’s Natal itinerary.39 Early on, she was introduced to Makhanya’s work with local women involved in the Bantu Youth League, speaking at a large gathering for which Makhanya served as translator. “Better homes for better Africans,” is how Makhanya described her community work, aligning its domestic goals with the political project of nation-building much like Florence Jabavu’s Zenzele clubs.40 In addition to Makhanya, whose home she stayed in for over a week, other prominent women hosted Broner throughout her two-week stay in Natal. She befriended Marie Dube, an African American music teacher at Adams College, and had afternoon tea with the white wife of its principal, Edgar Brookes, a liberal senator devoted to African education. She went to see the work of Constance Makhanya, Sibusisiwe’s sister and a midwife in Umbumbulu, where she took a photo of the two outside her large six-room home (fig. 26). “P. S. In front of her 114

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FIG. 26   Sibusisiwe Makhanya (standing) with her sister, Constance, and two unidentified children, Umbumbulu, September 1938. Broner inscribed “P. S. in front of her own home” on the back, photograph by Lida C. Broner.

own home,” Broner wrote on the back, underscoring its significance in a nation where the vast majority of blacks, and few women, had neither land nor homes. In Inanda, Broner was hosted for three days at Ohlange by its founder, the Rev. John Dube (a relative of Sibusisiwe) and his wife, Angelina, president of the Daughters of Africa (DOA). During her stay, Broner forged bonds with Angelina that were intimate and political in equal measure, doing her hair and cementing a transnational link between their respective organizations. Complementing evidence of progressive infrastructure on the rise, Makhanya ensured that Broner also experienced aspects of traditional life in Zululand. Together, they visited Zulu kraals near Umbumbulu, walking for miles over hills and valleys to get to the rural villages. “Everyone here is named ‘Makanya,’” Broner commented, perhaps not realizing it was the name of the clan that had migrated to the area in the 1840s. She described having her first taste of “native beer” and admired a “Zulu maid” who “had her hair done up in grass” in the elaborate conical hairstyle of a married woman known as isicholo. She took note of how items of dress indicated status. “Saw leather skirt for first time,” she said of an isidwaba. “Bead work on it signified this girl is engaged.” She was a close observer of social systems in households, noting their polygamous structure, rights of succession and Chapter 4: Onward and Inward to the Transvaal and Natal

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the customs of hlonipha, or rituals of respect, that women observed with their in-laws. Climbing a hill where the “scenery from the top is beyond description,” Broner was overcome by her feelings of deep connection to the land and its proud history. “To the east was Zulu Land, the home of kings and rulers!! Oh! Africa! Africa! The land of my forefathers.” It is significant that her feelings for the land of her forefathers were elicited in the rural heartland, surrounded by traditional life, rather than the streets of Durban and Johannesburg. Yet, of course, the call of the modern city was not to be denied. It was back in Durban with Sibusisiwe Makhanya that Broner spent her last few days in Natal. Inhabiting her identity as the “Negro Beauty Specialist of Newark,” she addressed the Durban Bantu Parliamentary Debating Society “on the progress of the American Negro.”41 She also spoke at the Taylor Street School, which she described as “the first and one of 3 native schools the government helped build.” Among the teachers there at the time of her visit were Govan Mbeki and Epainette Mbeki, the parents of future South African president Thabo Mbeki. Visits to “various social service centres” were also on Broner’s agenda, but her diary reveals numerous unscripted activities as well. This included a meeting with John Dube’s considerably more radical rival Allison Wessels George (A. W. G.) Champion, a populist African political activist and trade unionist described by Broner as “a staunch leader of the Native people.” On the lighter side, Broner also recounted the exhilaration of taking a ride—twice—with Makhanya in one of Durban’s celebrated rickshaws, pulled by Africans dressed in flamboyant costumes with elaborate cow-horn headdresses inspired by Zulu culture. “Sister Sibusisiwe told man to shake us up and down. Thought I would tip over!” While in Durban, Broner had opportunities to see how indigenous medicinal practices co-existed with or even challenged Western medicine. Her official schedule brought her to McCord Zulu hospital, founded by American medical missionary James McCord and where the activist Katie Mak­hanya, Charlotte Maxeke’s sister, worked for decades as a nurse.42 “Native nurses,” Broner observed pointedly of the hospital staff, “but no Native doctors.” However, she and Sibusisiwe Makhanya stayed at the home of “Mafavuke, a Native herb doctor” during their stay in the city. Though she provides no further identification, this was surely Mafavuke Ngcobo, a licensed iziNyanga, or traditional Zulu herbalist. A wealthy man who owned five muthi shops and operated a successful mail-order medicine business, Ngcobo drew the ire of white medical authorities by assuming the Western title of “doctor.”43 Broner would have had a window onto the ways 116

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that ­traditional herbalists like Dr. Mafavuke were banding together in the late 1930s to form professional organizations like the Natal Native Medical Association in support of native medicinal rights and practices.44

Collecting in Natal During Broner’s short two weeks in Natal, she acquired over thirty works, mostly as gifts. Some of these are domestic items made from grass and reeds used in traditional Zulu homes, including a broom, baskets, and various types of mats used for sleeping, sitting, or eating. Among them is the finely woven small mat, or isithebe, used to grind maize or serve food given to Broner by her host, Sibusisiwe Makhanya—a material reminder of the hospitality she so enjoyed (fig. 27). Other works representative of Zulu heritage include beadwork adornments signaling the increasing social status that women traditionally gained through marriage and motherhood (fig. 28). Broner acquired a pair of beaded headbands (iminqwazi) historically worn by women when they marry, symbolizing the lowered gaze maintained in the presence of their in-laws as part of rituals of respect (hlonipha).45 The combination of plastic and glass beads distinguish the headbands as FIG. 27   Unrecorded Zulu artist, grinding mat (isithebe), early twentieth century, Natal, 1938, reeds, grass, 14 × 15 in., no. 47.121, given to Broner by Sibusisiwe Mahkanya, Umbumbulu.

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FIG. 28   Gifts to Broner while in Natal province reflected Zulu pride. Clockwise from top: Unrecorded Zulu artist, Woman’s waistband (ixhama), early twentieth century, grass and glass beads, 42 × 15/8 in., no. 47.96, given to Broner by Angelina Dube; Unrecorded Zulu artist, Miniature war shield, spear, and club, 1930s, wood, wire, and hide, 111/2 × 10 in., no. 2014.46.52, given to Broner by Constance Makhanya; Unrecorded Zulu artist, Pair of headbands (iminqwazi), 1930s, glass beads, plastic beads, 10 × 1/2 in., nos. 2014.46.34a, b.

c­ ontemporary work, possibly made expressly for Broner. From Angelina Dube, Broner received a woman’s belt (ixhama) worn after the birth of a first child.46 Densely beaded on a plaited grass backing, the belt is decorated with designs of repeating triangles in navy, red, and dark green beads on a white background. The nurse and midwife Constance ­Makhanya gifted Broner what might be considered the ultimate symbol of male Zulu pride and identity—miniature versions of a Zulu war shield (isihlangu), spear (assegai), and wooden club, or knobkerrie, undoubtedly a reflection of the region’s rising cultural nationalism in the 1930s. But of all the gifts she received in Natal, Broner seemed to value most the beadwork given to her by young women from the kraals. They gave her several neck ornaments (ucu) during her prearranged visits and even came to Sibusisiwe Makhanya’s home to bring her more. These gifts ranged

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from simple strands of beads to necklaces with beaded panels featuring ­geometric patterns (fig. 29). They are the type of beadwork adornments made by young women to give to the men they intend to court, signaling their interest.47 Broner in fact took photographs of the girls dancing an “engagement dance” for her, their lead looking back smiling into her camera, as if demonstrating the intended goal of the necklaces they gave to her. On the back of another photograph, she wrote, “Zulu maidens—my friends who gave me most of my beadwork. I visited them on their kraals on Sept. 17, 1938. Had a lovely time” (fig. 30). The young women stand proudly wearing multiple strands of beads, including a choker with a pendant tab similar to those given to Broner. Though she described them as friends, no names are recorded on the handwritten tags attached to these works; they are simply described as “Gift of the Makanya Tribe.”

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FIG. 29   Some of the neck ornaments (ucu) given, and probably made, by the “Zulu maidens” Broner befriended in Umbumbulu (see fig. 30), 1930s, glass beads, cotton, left to right: lengths 61/4 in., 103/8 in., and 71/4 in., nos. 2014.46.43, 2014.46.19, and 2014.46.29.

FIG. 30   Broner photographed women she visited in Umbumbulu, describing them as “my friends who gave me most of my beadwork,” September 1938.

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Bloemfontein and Thaba Nchu: Black Pride Toward the end of October 1938, after nearly three months of traveling in the Transvaal and Natal, Broner headed back to the eastern Cape from Johannesburg. En route, she spent several days in Orange Free State, the last of the four provinces visited. It was a former Boer (Afrikaans) republic with a large Sotho population. Stopping first in Bloemfontein, she stayed in the home of Cornelius Rakhosi Moikangoa, a member of Jabavu’s AAC, and his wife Marian, who was involved in the fledgling National Council of African Women. Marian Moikangoa was also the leader of the local Home Improvement Club and had hosted the women’s meeting Broner attended on her brief stop earlier in her journey. Again, Broner’s agenda focused on schools. Cornelius Moikangoa was deeply involved in African education: a former principal at Lovedale, he was the headmaster of the province’s native schools, and secretary of the Cape Teachers’ Association. Broner spoke to teachers at three schools to a mixed reception. “At the high school the white staff did not want to speak to me,” she reported. “Look like it hurt them.” Perhaps her message of black advancement in the United States troubled them. She was, however, much in demand for her beauty culture work, doing seven “heads,” as she put it, in two days (“Could have done more”). From Bloemfontein, Broner was picked up by Dr. James Moroka, a prominent medical doctor and politician, and his wife, Susan, in their car and brought to Thaba Nchu, some forty miles away and considered the “birthplace” of the Sotho nation. Moroka was, in fact, the great-grandson of a Sotho (Twana) chief. He received his medical degree from the University of Edinburgh and returned to South Africa to set up a practice in this rural area, where he treated both white and black patients. He became active politically in the 1930s, when he served as treasurer of the AAC and later joined the African National Congress, eventually serving as its president. The Morokas took Broner right away to speak to the students at the high school (“they sang me three Native songs”) and tour the medical dispensary. The following day, Susan Moroka drove Broner to Morija, in Basutoland (now Lesotho), well over two hours away. Broner was impressed with what she saw. “The people in Basuto Land seem to be far better off than the people in the Union.” She attributed this to self-determination, noting its status as a protectorate rather than “British territory.” In her journal, she emphasized aspects of their independence: “The Natives of Basuto Land do everything for themselves. Native Police, their own stamps, post office, etc. They do all kind of work with no white man to boss the job.” In her photo album, she pasted three of these stamps—miniature markers of black Chapter 4: Onward and Inward to the Transvaal and Natal

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FIG. 31   Dr. James Moroka and his wife, Susan, with one of their children, Thaba Nchu, October 1938, photograph by Lida C. Broner. Broner pasted stamps from Basutoland above their photograph in her album.

autonomy—above a photograph of the Morokas standing next to their car, itself a symbol of freedom and achievement (fig. 31). During her short stay in Bloemfontein and Thaba Nchu in October, Broner added about ten works to her growing collection. Almost all were examples of women’s art forms and given by women to represent their culture (fig. 32). For example, Broner records that in Thaba Nchu Susan Moroka’s aunt gave her a burnished vessel and a wooden needle used for thatching grass “when she learned I was from America.” While other works in her collection are not identified as Zulu or Xhosa, she labeled many of these “Basuto” or “Basutoland” along with the gift-giver’s name, an emphasis that perhaps suggests her appreciation of its self-determination. Susan Moroka gave her a strand of clay beads (sefaha tsa letsopa), a type historically worn by South Sotho women. Simple in style, the necklace had deep symbolic significance, the clay beads embodying the spiritual powers associated with earth in Sotho culture.48 From Marian Moikangoa, she received a ceramic cup and saucer, similar to the examples of mpotjoana acquired in Johannesburg. Nurse H. G. Mthembu in Bloemfontein presented her with a thethana, a type of fringed and beaded skirt worn by young Sotho girls (Broner described it as a “girl’s ‘G-string’ belt”).49 Worn from age four or five until marriage, such waist skirts were historically produced by women in an extremely time-­ consuming process that typically took a year or more to complete. Though Broner’s stay in Bloemfontein was brief, she was nevertheless thrown a “very grand” reception, as she had been elsewhere on her trip. Organized by Marian Moikangoa and the clubwomen, it was held at the Bantu Social Institute and, she recounted, “the hall was packed full.” An article in Umteteli wa Bantu, “Mrs. Broner Entertained,” details the by-nowfamiliar pattern of these gatherings: the rallying song of “Nkosi Sikelel’ 122

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i­Afrika” was followed by a varied program of welcome speeches and musical selections. What is distinctive, however, is the palpable shift in Broner’s message. As recorded in the newspaper’s coverage of the event: “When she rose, she received a rousing ovation, which came spontaneously from the people. Her address was mainly on race consciousness and race pride. Speaking of the achievements of the American Negro, she said that one thing that had contributed to his success was unity. In America, she said, they are proud of being black, and still prouder of their African background, and they were anxious to learn and know more of Africa. She said they need no apologies for being black, for they are inferior to no other people mentally, physically and morally.”50 Gone was an emphasis on “progress.” In its place was a resounding focus on transatlantic connection and communication and, especially, on black pride. We can see with this that her travels have led to an appreciation for South African culture and heritage that is more profound than ever before. Chapter 4: Onward and Inward to the Transvaal and Natal

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FIG. 32   The gifts Broner received in Orange Free State included items traditionally worn by South Sotho women. Waistband (the­thana), early twentieth century, fiber and glass beads, 183/4 × 3 in., no. 47.97, given to Broner by Nurse Mthembu (left); and Necklace (sefaha tsa letsopa), early twentieth century, clay beads and glass beads, length 14 in., no. 2014.46.48.

Notes 1  D. D. T. Jabavu to Lida Broner, August 16, 1938,

box 2, folder 10, series VI: Miscellanies, Lida C. Broner Papers, Library and Archives, Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ (hereinafter LCB). 2  This chapter covers the three months from

July 30 to October 30, 1938, a period during which Broner traveled beyond the eastern Cape with stays in Vereeniging (August 1–27 and October 20–24), Johannesburg (August 27–September 10 and September 25–October 20), Imbumbulu and Durban (September 11–24), and Bloemfontein (October 25– 29). Unless otherwise indicated, quotations by Broner are from her travel journal during this period, series I: Journal, LCB.

12  Magaziner, The Art of Life in South Africa, 45. 13  Figures from Ray E. Phillips, The Bantu in the

City (Lovedale, South Africa: Lovedale Press, 1938), xix–xxi. 14  Phillip Bonner, “African Urbanisation on the

Rand between the 1930s and 1960s: Its Social Character and Political Consequences,” Journal of Southern African Studies 21, no. 1 (1995): 115–29. 15  On the Helping Hand and domestic training,

see Deborah Gaitskell, “Housewives, Maids or Mothers: Some Contradictions of Domesticity for Christian Women in Johannesburg, 1903–39,” Journal of African History, 24, no. 2 (1983): 241–56.

3  Thozama April mentions Moikangoa’s participa-

16  Gaitskell, “Housewives, Maids or Mothers,” 246.

tion in the foundation conference in Bloemfontein in “Theorizing Women: The Intellectual Contributions of Charlotte Maxeke to the Struggle for Liberation in South Africa,” Ph.D. diss., University of the Western Cape, 2012, 186, note 309.

17  On the BMSC, see Alan Gregor Cobley, Class

4  “Vereeniging News,” undated newspaper clip-

ping, publication unknown, box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB.

and the New African Movement,” in The Cambridge History of South African Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 325–38.

5  Dr. A. J. White, “Wilberforce Institute and Native

19  Eslanda Robeson, African Journey (New York:

Education in the Transvaal,” Negro Journal of Religion 5, no. 3 (April 1939): 5. Archive of the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR), Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.

John Day, 1945), 76. Of her gift of records, Robeson writes, “They could not have given me anything more welcome or of more practical value.”

6  Daniel Magaziner, The Art of Life in South Africa

(Athens: Ohio University Press, 2016), xxiii. 7  Yvitte Tahii, “Some Recent Accomplishments,”

Negro Journal of Religion 5, no. 3 (April 1939): 5. Archive of the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR), Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. 8  Peter Kallaway, “Welfare and Education in British

Colonial Africa and South Africa during the 1930s and 1940s,” Paedagogica Historica 41, no. 3 (June 2005): 342–45. 9  Magaziner, The Art of Life in South Africa, xxv, 3. 10  Magaziner, The Art of Life in South Africa, 22,

43. 11  Amos Jerome White and Luella Graham White,

Dawn in Bantuland, an African Experiment (Boston: Christopher, 1953), 256.

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and Consciousness: The Black Petty Bourgeoisie in South Africa, 1924 to 1950 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1991). 18  See Ntongela Masilela, “New African Modernity

20  Records of the Helping Hand Hostel (A2052),

Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. 21  In The Bantu in the City (based on his Yale

doctoral thesis), Phillips provides a snapshot of the emergent permanent urban population of blacks and their adaptation to modern industrial life. See Ray E. Phillips, The Bantu in the City: A Study of Cultural Adjustment on the Witswatersrand (­Lovedale, South Africa: Lovedale Press, 1938). 22  Iris Berger describes Phillips’s influential social

welfare agenda in “From Ethnography to Social Welfare,” Le Fait Missionnaire 19, no. 1 (2006): 91–116. See also Cecile Badenhorst and Charles Mather, “Tribal Recreation and Recreating Tribalism: Culture, Leisure and Social Control on South ­Africa’s Gold Mines, 1940–1950,” Journal of Southern African Studies 23, no. 3 (1997): 473–89.

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23  “John Koenakeefe Mohl,” https://www.sahistory

.org.za/people/john-koenakeefe-mohl. 24  See David Riep, “A Social Life of Pots in South-

ern Africa,” De Arte 55, no. 2 (2020): 93–126. 25  Riep, “A Social Life of Pots in Southern Africa.” 26  David Riep, “House of the Crocodile: South

Sotho Art and History in Southern Africa,” PhD diss., University of Iowa, 2011, 364. 27  Riep, “House of the Crocodile,” 179–87, 499–500. 28  David Riep proposes this link between the

mpotjoana form and early missionary presence and also notes that while such vessels may have originally been made for Western patrons, they were also adopted for local use and continue to be used today to commune with the spirit realm. See “A Social Life of Pots in Southern Africa,” 116–17. 29  Riep, “House of the Crocodile,” 186–87. 30  Riep, “A Social Life of Pots in Southern Africa,”

118. 31  Records of the Helping Hand Hostel (A2052/L),

Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. 32  D. H. Reader discusses social change among

ed. Cherryl Walker (London: James Currey, 1990), 219. See also Meghan Healy-Clancy, A World of Their Own: A History of South African Women’s Education (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014). 38  Hughes, “A Lighthouse for African Woman-

hood,” 216. 39  Marijke du Toit, “‘Anginayo Ngisho Indibilishi!’

(I Don’t Have a Penny!): The Gender Politics of ‘Native Welfare’ in Durban, 1930–1939,” South African Historical Journal 66, no. 2 (2014): 307, 319. 40  Marks, Not Either an Experimental Doll, 38. 41  Noted in the “Social & Personal” section of an

undated news clipping (inscribed “Sept. 19”), publication unknown, box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB. 42  See the fascinating biography by Margaret

McCord, The Calling of Katie Makhanya: A Memoir of South Africa (Hoboken, NJ: J. Wiley, 1995). 43  Karen Flint, Healing Traditions: African Medi-

cine, Cultural Exchange and Competition in South Africa, 1820–1948 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 120. 44  See Flint, Healing Traditions.

Zulu-speaking communities and the formation of the Makhanya clan in his Zulu Tribe in Transition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1966).

45  Carol Boram-Hays, “Borders of Beads: Ques-

33  Much of the biographical information on

46  Boram-Hays, “Borders of Beads,” 46.

Sibusisiwe Makhanya here is from Shula Marks, Not Either an Experimental Doll: The Separate Worlds of Three South African Women (London: The ­Women’s Press, 1987), see esp. 30–39; see also Robert Trent Vinson, The Americans Are Coming!: Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), 132–36.

47  Boram-Hays, “Borders of Beads,” 44.

34  Lida Broner to Margerite Malherbe, Sept. 10,

1972, file 4, KCM 14661, Sibusisiwe Makhanya Papers, Campbell Collections, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa.

tions of Identity in the Beadwork of the Zulu-­ Speaking People,” African Arts 38, no. 2 (2005): 45.

48  See Riep, “House of the Crocodile”: 189, 365–66;

and David Riep, “Hot Women!: South Sotho Female Arts in Context,” African Arts 47, no. 3 (2014): 31–32. 49  See Riep, “House of the Crocodile,” 256–60; and

Riep, “Hot Women!,” 37. 50  “Mrs. Broner Entertained,” undated newspaper

clipping (inscribed “Nov. 12”), identified as from Umteteli wa Bantu, box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB.

35  Marks, Not Either an Experimental Doll, 30–39. 36  As quoted in Shula Marks, “Patriotism, Patriar-

chy and Purity: Natal and the Politics of Zulu Ethnic Consciousness” in The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa, ed. Leroy Vail (London: James Currey, 1989), 224. 37  Heather Hughes, “‘A Lighthouse for African

Womanhood’: Inanda Seminary, 1869–1945,” in Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945,

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Chapter 5

Return to the Eastern Cape and Voyage Home

After nearly twenty hours of train travel from Bloemfontein, Broner arrived back in East London in the early evening of Sunday, October 30, squeezing into the waiting taxi with her six packages. Returning to the ­Martas’ home, she surveyed the collection she had assembled—now numbering some eighty works—and showed it off to a visiting friend. “He was very glad to see all the things I had to take home.”1 With just two months to go until her departure, set for December 30, Broner was well aware that her time in South Africa would be coming to a close before too long. Her travels had given her a broader perspective on the challenges and complexities of black life in a country undergoing dramatic social and political transformation. She had come to see the importance of a shared identity in a land of many languages and diverse histories, where there were generationally shaped divisions between “school people” and “raw natives,” but where all Africans were affected by the same forces of oppression. Broner returned to the eastern Cape with a new commitment to the value of culture in forging national consciousness and to shaping her collecting with a greater focus on tradition.

Embracing African Culture Just a few days after arriving in East London, Broner returned to Alice, where she was treated to yet another elaborately orchestrated reception, detailed in the yellowed program preserved in her scrapbook. Held at Lovedale’s Ntselamanzi Public Hall, the event’s organizing committee came from the tightly connected mission-educated network of eastern Cape elite she was introduced to earlier that year. It was led by Zachariah Keodirelang (Z. K.) Matthews, a politician and influential professor at Fort Hare who was considered one of the era’s leading intellectuals. The musical program, performed by the Lovedale Quartet, was arranged by Matthews’s wife, Frieda, an educator and daughter of the distinguished composer John Knox Bokwe (it was she who assembled the “representative” collection of beadwork for Eslanda Robeson two years prior). Her brother, Barbour Bokwe, was the event’s chair and D. D. T. Jabavu was the treasurer in charge. Representatives from several area women’s clubs were in attendance, including the Ntselamanzi and Lovedale branches of the Unity Home-Makers Club (founded by Susie Yergan) and the Alice-based Zenzele club (founded by Florence Jabavu). The program began with the usual singing of “Nkosi ­Sikelel’ iAfrika,” followed by introductory speeches interspersed with songs. 127

Mr.  Gibson Maneli offered a welcoming address in which he described those present as “the cream of the community” who were there “to get ideas which would help toward progress” for the “masses of people who had lagged behind in the march of civilization.” His remarks were followed by those of Mr. V. Mbobo of Healdtown, who emphasized that the kinship felt with “American Negroes” was “strengthened by having one among us in the flesh and blood.”2 Broner rose and delivered a moving lecture. With D. D. T. Jabavu interpreting in isiXhosa, she first gave “greetings of love and encouragement from 12 million sons of Africa in America who loved this land but could not come freely because of barring laws.” She began her talk by stating that the progress of African Americans was based on, and accelerated by, social unity—“a spirit of ‘one-fleshed-ness’”—that developed in the wake of emancipation. She acknowledged the advantages African Americans had— compulsory education and voting rights—compared to blacks in South Africa. But, she added, “though they had the vote, yet they could not use it freely in the United States. Though they had free education, there was still slavery of 1930s style. The real secret of their achievement was unity.” Broner then shifted her focus to acknowledge the plight of those gathered. “Africans no doubt had their difficulties and they would overcome many of these by Unity.” Her message of unity was now informed and sharpened by her firsthand experiences. With confidence and clarity, she told her audience that culture was the key to nation-building. “I wish that African Negroes would be proud of the fact that they are black, and show their culture in things that are AFRICAN, eg. Your songs, your dances, your Art, eg. Beadwork . . . if you discard your African culture, you will lose your nationality. Dance your dances for the same reason that a Scotsman dances his ‘Highland Fling’ and for the same reason that an Irishman dances his ‘Irish Jig,’ etc. Those are the things that keep up a nation.” She did not equate culture with ethnicity, viewing it as politically divisive. “Zulu, Xhosa, Suthu etc. are all AFRICAN,” she emphasized, “Be consolidated in spirit.” She enjoined Africans to “use their beadwork” purposefully as a strategy of resistance against oppression, warning that “when people want to subdue others they took away their culture.” And she ended by challenging those “New Africans” who dismissed the value of tradition in their quest for equality. “Why should an African discard these things under cover of civilization? Show your culture in improving them, or else you will ultimately find you are not recognized as a race—you are nothing.” Broner’s powerful speech with its rallying call to “show your culture” was well received. Her hosts acknowledged the “unfortunate outlook that 128

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tended to make Africans despise everything African” and thanked her for “the inspiration and encouragement.” Her message came at a key moment of cultural reckoning, as New Africans were forging a nationalist movement that would encompass, rather than erase, ethnic consciousness. Prominent among these advocates was Z. K. Matthews, the lead organizer of Broner’s reception, who had described “the growing movement among educated South African natives for the promotion of a larger unity which will give full place to the peculiar traditions of each tribe and yet make possible cooperation between different tribes for their mutual benefit.”3 In his remarks following Broner’s speech, Matthews underscored her central message of liberation. “Perhaps she had attended better receptions,” he graciously allowed, but “here they had the honor of being the historical corner of the Union where battles were fought for freedom against invasion. Today, however, there were large schools from which sons and daughters of Africa could go forth to win freedom for Africa in another way.”4 Now on her return leg of her epic journey, Broner was inspired and her words and her collection demonstrated a fortified sense of purpose.

Fashioning Identity The following day, Broner was visited at the Jabavu home by several women who had attended the stirring reception. “One woman is going to make me a Native dress. Izikaka,” she noted, using the term for a leather skirt historically worn by women. A few days later, a “native woman” hired to make Broner’s dress, Nongendu Mhanbi, came to take her measurements. “Although she could not speak English we understood each other by signs very well,” Broner recounted, “I think my dress is going to look very nice.” Mhanbi would return several more times over the next three weeks for additional money to buy materials. Photographs in Broner’s album show a woman in traditional dress with a beadwork collar necklace standing proudly next to a young schoolgirl with books in hand (fig. 33). The woman wears an elaborate melton cloth turban and long front apron and cloak, denoting her status as an older married woman with children (the girl at her side is presumably her daughter). We may safely assume that this is Mhanbi, for she holds in her o ­ utstretched arms what looks to be the completed dress. The dress Mhanbi was commissioned to make is among the most notable of all the works Broner acquired on her journey (see fig. 42). The long wraparound skirt, umbhaco, is decorated with rows of black braid along Chapter 5: Return to the Eastern Cape and Voyage Home

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FIG. 33   Nongendu Mhanbi (right), with an unidentified girl, holding dress made for Broner, Alice, November 1938, photograph by Lida C. Broner.

the bottom (the term izikhaka refers to those skirts originally made with leather). A shoulder wrap, or ibhayi, has geometric designs made from black rickrack trim and mother-of-pearl buttons with a fringe of beads. The apron (incebetha), designed to cover the chest and tie at the back, also has rows of black braid and beadwork. Mhanbi made Broner a matching bag (­ingxowa) of the sort women would use to carry tobacco and pipes.5 In effect, Broner’s dress is a modern version of a Xhosa married woman’s attire, and inherently cross-cultural in style and material. The voluminous skirt, along with the elaborate turban as worn by Mhanbi, reflect the impact of Victorian fashion introduced in the nineteenth century, while certain key materials were obtained through European trade, including the white cotton sheeting from which the dress was made (then dyed with red ocher), the braid and rickrack trim, the glass beads, and even the buttons.6 In her 1963 memoir The Ochre People, the writer Noni Jabavu, daughter of Florence and D. D. T., describes the flowing dress of the Xhosa traditionalists she grew up among: “Then there was the ankle-length ochered skirt, copiously flared, cut so that the straight edges, picked out with bead-work, were in front and the fullness swathed to the back where the folds swung from heel to heel as a woman walked. And in the eyes of those brought up to appreciate the niceties of the costume, the swing of those provocative folds depended on how she carried herself.” Despite her upbringing as a “school Christian” taught by her nanny to avoid “things pagan,” Noni Jabavu later said that “the red-robed people had come to me to seem magnificent . . . the women were like the figures on frescoes of ancient vessels—all the movement was there, the flow and grace, on backgrounds of terracotta and black.”7 In the late 1930s, the dress was a signifier of Xhosa identity and traditionalist beliefs when worn by women like Mhanbi, who was likely unschooled (as we might guess given that she did not speak English) and from the rural outskirts of Alice. As Noni Jabavu’s account—along with Broner’s many photographs of her “New African” social milieu—make clear, it was not the dress of a respectable middle-class Christian woman. And yet, at the time that the dress was made for Broner because of her appreciation of African culture, Florence Jabavu too had begun to encourage the women of Zenzele to wear Xhosa traditional dress on special occasions. Members wore a standardized version of the dress, much like Broner’s, that was intended to minimize ethnic distinctions between various isiXhosa-speaking groups (Florence was herself Mfengu, a refugee group assimilated by the Xhosa) and to downplay class differences between middle-class members and the rural women they were helping. In spite of that intention, the very class 130

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division that the dress sought to minimize was reinforced by the economic reality that rural members earned much-needed income by sewing the attire for their middle-class “sisters” in town—just as Mhanbi had done for Broner.8 Despite these inherent ironies, Florence Jabavu undeniably intended her advocacy of Xhosa dress to foster nationalistic solidarity. As historian Catherine Higgs has observed, “Like her counterparts among the Christian Zulu black intelligentsia in the neighboring Natal Province . . . Jabavu borrowed what she considered positive from Xhosa ‘tradition’—sisterhood, cooperation, “traditional” clothing—and discarded the aspects that would conflict with her status as an educated woman, the daughter of a Christian minister, and the wife of a college lecturer.”9 It is an example of the gendered strategies that women adopted as a means of contributing to African nationalist discourse. Broner, whose native dress was made for her right after delivering such a powerful message about cultural nationalism, would no doubt have been attuned to its political implications. The Xhosa dress, significant in this context, took on an additional layer of meaning later on, as we shall see, when Broner wore it to exhibitions of her collection back at home.

Collecting Culture Broner stayed at the Jabavu home in Alice for most of November, with D. D. T. traveling back and forth to the family farm in Rabula. Her days and evenings were full. She spoke to women of the local branch of Unity Home-Makers Club. She attended the Ciskei Missionary Council in nearby Kings William’s Town, a meeting of mostly white representatives from area churches, where she took note of the obstacles Africans faced in taking control of their own education. “Could clearly see that missionaries mean to keep a grip on the schools through the Church, until the last gun is fired!” She met with students at Healdtown, Rilda Marta’s alma mater, where twenty-year-old Nelson Mandela was then in his final term. Teachers and especially students from nearby Fort Hare and Lovedale came to visit Broner at the Jabavus’, often asking for American addresses in the hopes of striking up exchanges. Her circle of “New African” friends invited her over regularly for dinners and to parties and birthday celebrations. She did hair and gave advice about hair care. She went to church services. She had her “snaps” developed, wrote and posted letters, and sent money orders for “Negro newspapers” to be sent to some of the schools she had visited. Her lecture at Ntselamanzi Public Hall had apparently caused quite a stir. Its coverage in the school newspaper of nearby Healdtown reported how Broner advocated for economic solidarity, describing how ­African Chapter 5: Return to the Eastern Cape and Voyage Home

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­mericans boycotted white businesses: “We [the Negro community] A deprived those traders of dollars. . . . Consequently most Negroes were employed in shops with reasonable salaries and they in turn went out to build their own shops.” The remarks were seen as subversive and copies of the paper were burned. Broner managed to save one, which she pasted in her scrapbook, with her handwritten disavowal in the margin that the “writer had really misquoted” her. Broner also wrote a letter to Healdtown’s superintendent, stating firmly that “At no time and under no circumstances have I made any remarks against the laws or government of this country. Nor have I at any time advised the native people on any course to follow. Great care is taken at all times, by me, to confine my remarks to the life of the American Negro.”10 It’s difficult to know whether to read this incident in a straightforward manner or whether Broner was really covering her tracks; the emphasis on economic empowerment unmistakably evokes the black nationalism of Jamaican-born activist Marcus Garvey and his United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which Broner never explicitly associated herself with. Regardless, it is tempting to think that the activist student who authored the piece might have been in the circle of friends that included Nelson Mandela, whose own consciousness, as we shall see, was awakened at Healdtown that fall. As Broner’s perspective on the importance of African culture evolved still further, and after she returned to the eastern Cape, she became even more focused on collecting traditional objects. She acquired nearly half the works in her entire collection during the final two months of her journey, suggesting both an urgency and her increased sense of direction. She made an effort to see native art at Fort Hare, mostly beadwork apparently, which she deemed a “small but very good collection.” Most of the dozen works she procured in Alice were examples of beadwork, some of which she bought directly from “native women” who stopped by to sell their work and whose names go unrecorded. One notable exception was a “native necklace” Broner purchased from Mrs. Vivian Hala of Lovedale after styling her hair. Apart from her Xhosa dress, arguably the most distinctive item Broner acquired in Alice (but now missing) was an assegai, the iconic wooden throwing spear historically used as a weapon among southern African communities. Patrick Kraai of Fort Hare gave the assegai to her in exchange for doing his hair. The spear, like the dress, had a long local tradition of use but it also symbolized resistance. She tells us in her diary that the assegai was “something I have wanted ever since I got here”; indeed, it was the only object she described targeting for acquisition during her entire journey. Why she singled it out becomes clear in the context of a story Nelson 132

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Mandela relates in his autobiography, an event he describes as having an impact “like a comet streaking across the sky.” As a student at Healdtown in the fall of 1938, Mandela attended a performance by the celebrated Xhosa imbongi (praise singer) Samuel Krune Mqhayi. He appeared before the students as an “electrifying” sight, dressed in full Xhosa leopard-skin attire with assegai in hand. Mandela recounts how at one point, roving the stage and raising his hand for emphasis, Mqhayi accidentally hit the assegai against a curtain wire: He stopped walking, faced us, and, newly energized, exclaimed that this incident—the assegai striking the wire—symbolized the clash between the culture of Africa and that of Europe. His voice rose and he said, “The assegai stands for what is glorious and true in African history; it is a symbol of the African as warrior and the African as artist. This metal wire,” he said, pointing above, “is an example of Western manufacturing, which is skillful but cold, clever but soulless. What I am talking about,” he continued, “is not a piece of bone touching a piece of metal, or even the overlapping of one culture and another; what I am talking to you about is the brutal clash between what is indigenous and good, and what is foreign and bad. We cannot allow these foreigners who do not care for our culture to take over our nation. I predict that one day, the forces of African society will achieve a momentous victory over the interloper. For too long, we have succumbed to the false gods of the white man. But we will emerge and cast off these foreign notions.”11 In much the same way that Broner exhorted her Lovedale audience to “use your beadwork,” Mqhayi held up the assegai as a cultural touchstone for his powerful vision of black liberation, a vision that fired the imagination of the young Mandela in history-changing ways. It is surely more than coincidence that Broner acquired her assegai just two days after visiting Healdtown herself that same fall of 1938. Intent on acquiring works that represented African culture, the pace of Broner’s collecting quickly accelerated following her departure from Alice toward the end of November. Jabavu had petitioned the Immigration office to extend Broner’s visa so she could travel extensively throughout the eastern Cape, making special arrangements for her to experience more rural life among various isiXhosa-speaking communities.12 Thanks to Jabavu’s interventions, she visited Middledrift, Rabula, and King William’s Town in the Ciskei, crossed the Kei River into the Transkei, continuing on to the more remote towns of Qoboqobo, Kentani, and Idutywa. “This part of the Chapter 5: Return to the Eastern Cape and Voyage Home

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country does not seem to have many white people,” she observed during her travels, “Many, many craals!” She felt the thrall of time and tradition represented by life in the countryside. “Thousands of Natives live here in their huts just as they did five thousand years ago. Many have beautiful and prosperous farms.” Her explicit appreciation of traditional architecture, the wattle-and-daub homes with conical thatched roofs, and fertile farmland is notable at a time when Western-style square homes and enclosed gardens were synonymous with “civilization.”13 All told, Broner covered over three hundred miles, a great distance made more challenging by rural transportation. She traveled on trains in the crowded compartments reserved for Africans and occasionally in run-down cars serving as taxis. On a day trip to Kentani in the Transkei, she memorably rode a bus there and back, which she described “as just an old trap on wheels. No seats inside. Just a board which runs around the four sides! The men were ‘Raw’ therefore very rough. When I asked one for a seat he laughed and jumped in before me.” For destinations that lacked paved roads, she sometimes took a horse and carriage. More often, she traveled by foot to reach far-flung villages “as far as Newark is from New York,” on more than one occasion walking twenty miles “over ditches, grass, hills and water.” As throughout her entire journey, Broner’s experiences in the countryside were shaped by Jabavu’s interconnected circle of educated Christians who hosted her and facilitated her travels. In Middledrift, she stayed with Frieda Matthews’s brother, Dr. Roseberry Bokwe, and his wife, Irene, for two nights, tagging along with Roseberry as he traveled across the vast district treating patients. Broner returned to the Jabavus’ Rabula farm for two weeks, where she observed harvesting and was especially fascinated by the brickmaking process on their farm. Deeming the deep-red mud bricks “second to none,” she made repeated visits to the kiln and was given one to bring home when she left (see fig. 1). In King William’s Town, she stayed two nights at the Temperance Hotel, founded in 1895 as the first black-owned hotel in South Africa by Paul Xiniwe, a Lovedale graduate and a member of the famous African Choir that toured England in the 1890s. While there, she visited the offices of Imvo Zabantsundu, the “largest and oldest Native newspaper in SA,” and met with its editor, Alexander “Mac” Jabavu, son of its founder and brother of D. D. T. Heading north, Broner was met in Butterworth by “Queen Lumkwana,” who was her companion for a final week in the rural Transkei, a region linked to the city of East London through migrant labor.14 Lumkwana, a teacher at the Athlone School for the Blind in faraway Cape Town, was on leave visiting her family near Qoboqobo, where her brother taught in the mission school. 134

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FIG. 34   Broner’s friend, Queen Lumkwana (center, in hat), outside her rondavel near Qoboqobo, November 1938, photograph by Lida C. Broner.

Broner had some of her more memorable experiences of traditionalist life in the Transkei with Lumkwana as host and guide, while staying at her rondavel (“a nice round hut, with modern furniture”) (fig. 34). Her presence in the area drew the attention of locals. Women came to visit Broner dressed “in all their finery,” including a woman wearing “a real IZIZ-KAKA. A fur skirt. It was a beauty!”; many of them danced for her. Among her visitors was a diviner (igqirha), or “woman doctor” as Broner described, and her son, who may have been a trainee. Broner’s photo captures the diviner wearing the ceremonial regalia of her profession, which included a baboon hide hat, a wildcat skin bag, and the long multistrand beadwork necklace (isidanga) that facilitated communication with the spiritual world (fig. 35). Diviners were typically women and consulted to determine the cause of misfortune, such as illness or economic loss. In the first half of the twentieth century, the practice of divination gave women claim to spiritual ­authority—and thus autonomy—at a time of immense social and political change. They became adept cultural mediators, adapting their practice in response to widespread Christian conversion and expanding their role to meet the new needs of rural African families brought on by the violence and disruption of white rule.15 Traveling by foot for many miles with Lumkwana, Broner was granted a two-hour audience with a “Chief Gwebibango,” whom she described as “a very handsome, gray, bearded, bright eyed, tall dark devil!” and his royal councilors. Hearing how he “managed” his three wives, allowing “each one Chapter 5: Return to the Eastern Cape and Voyage Home

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FIG. 35   A Xhosa diviner (center) wearing the ceremonial regalia of her profession, with her son, possibly in training, at Qoboqobo, December 1938, photograph by Lida C. Broner.

a week in turn” but not more, Broner countered with her own perspective on gender relations, “When I had a husband, when I wanted him that was the time. [The chief] said we were spoilt by Western civilization.” Though she was evidently free to express her views, her cultural assumptions and ignorance of traditional customs were checked at the end of the conversation when she stood up to leave. “One of the old men who had been talking in Xosa all the time, as though he did not know a word of English gave me great shock by saying in PERFECT ENGLISH, ‘Sit down! You are in the presence of Royalty! When you wish to leave you say, ask to be shown the road.” Chastened, Broner did as she was told and was soon dismissed. Broner also traveled north to remote Idutywa where “the whole town seemed to be expecting Queen Lumkwana and I!” Arriving after midnight to a boardinghouse room with a dirt floor and a tin roof, she was awakened at six in the morning to find people already waiting to see her. She delivered a speech to a packed Jubilee Hall, where attendees took up a collection so she “could get out in the craals and see Native life there.” Thanks to their efforts, Broner witnessed young Mfengu girls dancing to mark the end of their seclusion during the rite of passage known as intonjane, which had largely disappeared by the 1930s due to missionary pressure (fig. 36). In her brief stay there, she found the rural outpost to be an unexpected hotbed of political activity. “Was surprised to find myself talking to Prince Sebu of Ethiopia,” she recounted, quite possibly referring to Crown Prince Asfaw Wossen, son of Emperor Haile Selassie I, who was in exile after the Italian invasion of 1936. “He is here under an assumed name. Says that Ethiopian 136

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FIG. 36   Young Mfengu girls participating in intonjane, a coming-of-age ceremony, near Idutjwa, December 1938, photograph by Lida C. Broner.

war has caused whites more fear of blacks.” Broner also described narrowly missing Wellington Buthelezi—“the slippery one, who is posing as an American Negro”—the charismatic leader of a popular liberation movement based on Garveyism that flourished in segregationist South Africa. Though Wellington, actually a black South African from Natal, was himself largely discredited by the late 1930s, Garveyism continued to resonate in the rural Transkei, especially among women who were organizing with the goal of self-determination.16 Meeting with women-led organizations was foremost on Broner’s agenda during her time in the countryside. Though many of their members could not speak English and lacked formal education, they were eager to connect with Broner and learn from an American counterpart. With Irene Bokwe she attended a club meeting in Middledrift. “Told them about our Club,” she reported. “They joined up with us.” The women cemented the formal alliance with the Lit-Muse Club by performing a celebratory dance for Broner. While in Rabula, Florence Jabavu brought Broner to meet with her Zenzele club. In King William’s Town, Broner went with Mrs. Ngesi, owner of the Temperance Hotel, to the kraals where she had formed a branch of the Unity Home-Makers Club. “There were eight ‘red’ women among them. Although they cannot read, one is the club secretary. She gives notice of meetings etc. by word of mouth! They were very interested in the work.” With Lumkwana, she met with women of Qoboqobo’s Home Improvement Club, speaking through an interpreter, and with women in tiny Idutywa, where they gave Broner the honor of naming their new and Chapter 5: Return to the Eastern Cape and Voyage Home

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FIG. 37   Gifts of beadwork marked formal and informal alliances forged with women during Broner’s final months in South Africa. Clockwise from top: Unrecorded Xhosa artist, Pouch, early twentieth century, glass beads and cotton, 6 × 33/8 in., no. 2014.46.28, given to Broner by Irene Bokwe (Middledrift); Unrecorded Mfengu artist, Bracelet, early twentieth century, glass beads, wool, and cotton, length 4 in., no. 2014.46.36, given to Broner by Mrs. Nowan Badlani (Middledrift); work and gift of “a friend in the street” (Butterworth), Necklace, early twentieth century, glass beads and cotton, length 71/2 in., no. 2014.46.51; work and gift of “Chief Gamor’s daughter” (Rabula), “Love letter” necklace (iphoco), early twentieth century, glass beads and cotton, 93/8 × 37/8 in., no. 2014.46.37; work and gift of “Miss Nomo Kazi Siko, Pondo Tribe of Transki” (Qoboqobo), “Love letter” necklace (iphoco), early twentieth century,  glass beads and cotton, 33/4 × 13/4 in., no. 2014.46.40.

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FIG. 38   “Three women visitors” at Qoboqobo, December 1938, photograph by Lida C. Broner.

apparently ­unaffiliated club. She called it “Hands Across the Sea,” a name which speaks powerfully of her vision of pan-African unity. Women gave Broner many gifts of beadwork throughout her travels in these more remote parts of the eastern Cape (fig. 37). Some of these emblems of tradition were from clubwomen, formally presented at meetings to mark these new transnational alliances. From Irene Bokwe, who brought Broner to the meeting of the Middledrift Unity Home-Makers Club, she received a small beaded pouch and the gourd snuff container covered with a net of beads, both in the familiar palette of navy, pink, turquoise, and white glass beads preferred by isiXhosa-speaking beadworkers (see fig. 1). Mrs. Nowan Badlani, another member of the Middledrift club, gave Broner a navy, white, and blue beaded anklet accented with cerise-colored tufts of wool popular with Mfengu teenagers. More so than at any other point in her journey, however, Broner acquired beadwork from “native” women through unstructured exchanges. She waded across a river in Rabula to spend an afternoon watching the harvesting and chatting, through an interpreter, with a group of women under the trees. While there, a woman identified as Chief Gamor’s daughter showed Broner the beadwork she was working on and later returned, as promised, to give her the finished piece—a type of beaded necklace with a square tab known as iphoco, often referred to as a “love letter” or “keeper of the heart” necklace.17 Chance encounters, whether shopping in trading stores or walking through farmland, often resulted in spontaneous gift-giving. Broner labeled one such example, a small two-stranded necklace of black and pink beads, simply as “gift of friend on the street/Butterworth/Transki/ Dec. 15, 1938.” “Native” women also sought Broner out and brought her beadwork, as gifts or to sell. In Qoboqobo, she recounted how she “had three women visitors at 6:30 A. M. They had been sitting outside of the hut since day light! Visited me while I remained in bed.” In Broner’s photograph, the turbaned women gaze warmly at her, one broadly smiling, the clasping arms and tiny toes of the babies they carry on their backs barely visible (fig. 38). Broner recorded the name of one of these women who gave her a small “love letter,” “Miss Nomo Kazi Siko, Pondo 140

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FIG. 39  

Unrecorded artist, P­ illowcase, 1930s, labeled by Broner “ZENZELLI CLUB uneducated women instructed by Mrs. DDT Jabavu,” cotton and wool, 15 × 201/2 in., no. 2016.59.9.

Tribe of Transki” with the date. But another of Broner’s gifts, a cloth pillowcase embellished with needlework flowers and labeled “ZENZELLI CLUB un-educated woman instructed by Mrs. D. D. T. Jabavu,” reminds us of class stratifications and the ambivalent status that such “red” women had with their ­mission-educated sisters (fig. 39). Broner did not romanticize what she saw of rural life in South Africa, observing the impact of poverty and racial segregation with difficult access to medical care, and run-down schools and churches. Nor did she hesitate to challenge those traditionalist practices she disagreed with, particularly as they related to gender relations. One can only imagine, for example, the surprised reaction of the man she encountered “riding on his horse while his wife walked the 12½ miles to town besides the horse! When I spoke to him about this he said it was their ‘custom.’ He did promise to do better by his wife in the future.” But by and large, Broner’s travels in rural parts of the eastern Cape reinforced her appreciation not only for traditional culture and customs but for the people themselves, so often spurned as backward by the mission-educated class. Her affirmation of the “red people” is attested to by one of the most mundane works in her collection—bits of red ocher (ibola) given to her by the women she chatted with under a tree in Rabula that she then stored in a glass jar with the label “RED CLAY/Used for Chapter 5: Return to the Eastern Cape and Voyage Home

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Facials & Dyes/Transki—Dec. 1938” (fig. 40). “Before I left Queen Lumkwana’s home the old women had a prayer over me, which is an African custom,” Broner recounted toward the end of her stay, concluding that “these ‘raw’ Native people are just as good Christians as anyone.”

Leaving Africa

FIG. 40   Jar of red ocher (ibola), 71/2 × 37/8 in., no. 47.83.

Broner arrived back in East London on December 20, amid the hustle and bustle of the holiday season. “It is hot as fire and just a few days before Christmas,” she reported. “The Santa Claus looked very queer in his white whiskers and red suit, with the boiling hot sun on him.” Christmas at the Martas’ was a festive affair. The house was festooned with crepe paper decorations, a fancy dinner was served—“pudding and all!”—and neighbors stopped by throughout the day with holiday greetings. The celebrations continued through the next day—Boxing Day in South Africa—after which Broner focused on her voyage home less than a week away. She ran errands in town while wearing her woven Sotho rain hat, her attire attracting the attention of white passersby. She packed her clothes and other possessions, filling not only her steamer trunk but several boxes, which she sent ahead to the dock via a wagon. Friends came over to have tea and say farewell, bringing her photographs of themselves and other mementos, including a Christmas fruitcake “to take to America.” A final flurry of gift-giving from clubwomen in these last days yielded an additional dozen works for Broner’s now extensive collection. Two of these are especially resonant as parting gifts (fig. 41). One is a “keeper of the heart” necklace, part of a larger present of beadwork and needlework from “Sister” Gerty Samuels of East London. On the square pendant panel are two women, standing hand in hand, their stylized figures picked out in black beads against a background of white forming the shape of a heart at the center. The uplifted position of their arms indicates they are good dancers, in the traditional language of beadwork.18 The imagery evokes the collaborative spirit of women’s clubs and the bonds of sisterhood formed across the Atlantic. The other—a small hand purse woven of grass with a stitched scene of a cluster of circular rondavel homes—offers a more 142

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complicated narrative. It was made for Broner by Lucy Njikelana, a teacher at Lovedale and the newly elected president of the Unity Home-Makers Club. In form, technique, and intended use, the purse reflects the “civilizing” mission of women’s clubs. Yet its imagery is paradoxical, for these are not the square homes synonymous with Western ideals of domesticity, and its nostalgic scene of rural life is at odds with the social upheaval that Broner had witnessed firsthand. Much like the Xhosa-style dress that Florence Jabavu encouraged Zenzele club members to wear, the hand purse exemplifies the ways mission-educated women drew upon aspects of tradition, at times in seemingly contradictory or ambiguous ways, to participate in the larger construction of cultural nationalism. Chapter 5: Return to the Eastern Cape and Voyage Home

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FIG. 41   Two parting gifts to Broner: work and gift of Lucy Njikelana, Alice, Hand purse, 1930s, burlap, thread, and metal, 61/2 × 41/4 in., no. 2014.46.78 (left); Unrecorded Xhosa artist, “Love letter” necklace (iphoco), early twentieth century, glass beads, button, and thread; 61/2 × 27/8 in., no. 2014.46.32, given to Broner by Gertrude Samuels (East London).

Lucy Njikelana was among the small group of friends, which included D.  D.  T. Jabavu, and Queen Lumkwana, who accompanied Broner to the East London docks on December 30, 1938. The ship set sail at 4:45. “Was just a little seasick,” Broner wrote later that evening, adding wistfully, “Think it was more due to leaving Africa the land of my forefathers than anything else.” The ship stopped first for three nights in Cape Town, where she spent days in the relatively new “location” of Langa with Charleton Nabe and his family. Touring around with the Nabes in their car, Broner watched tennis and cricket matches, took tea with friends, and even traveled to the top of Table Mountain in a cable car. “Brother Nabe” also made sure Broner saw the barracks-style living quarters of single men in the location where she observed beds “boxed in bunks, just like so many shoe boxes stacked against the wall,” giving her a sense of how the tiny and fragile black elite lived side by side with the working poor.19 After a farewell reception, where she spoke for an hour to a packed house at Langa’s school, Broner departed the following day with gifts of flowers, cake, and “bon voyage” streamers from her Cape Town friends. “Africa! Africa! Africa! The land of my forefathers!” she lamented in her journal on January 6, “I leave Africa with much deeper regret than I left America, my native land. But I will return some day!” On board the ship to England, as on the train to East London, Broner was thrust back into an environment of discrimination and scrutiny as a black woman traveling alone. Disheartening though not unanticipated, she proved adept at navigating its challenges. Right away, she checked on seating arrangements in the dining room, informing the chief steward that she wanted to eat at the same time as other passengers. “He said, ‘Well now we want to be diplomatic about it. We have no small table.’” Broner stood her ground. “I told him he could call it just what he liked. I did not mind. The fact that he had no small table was his problem. All I was concerned about was my meals on time in the dining room! Well I have a nice little table all to myself.” Though reluctant to be seated in the same room with her, even at separate tables, her white fellow passengers proved talkative, curious indeed to know her opinions, especially on the subject of Africans. Asked by a young white South African what she thought about the way they treated blacks, “Well I told him,” Broner recounted, leaving us to imagine her candid, if not biting, reply. “He admitted the whites keep Natives down because they do not know what will happen if Natives are educated.” Similarly, conversing with a group, Broner expressed her “shock” about the Dutch Reformed Church’s endorsement of segregation in South Africa. Addressing the minister among them, she continued on to say that 144

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she “had become confused by meeting so many different Gods, in Africa,” suggesting that her faith had been tested by the “Christian” practices she had witnessed there. “Whose God is the right God,” she asked, poignantly, “and where is he to be found?” Broner soon enough looked to avoid such exchanges, sensing that her fellow travelers had “the same opinion as all whites about Negroes.” For the remaining two and a half weeks of her journey, she focused her energies on rewriting her diary and processing her experiences in South Africa.

Return via “Black London” Disembarking in Southampton, England, on January 23, Broner expected to “still be a stranger in a strange land.” Instead, she soon found herself immersed in “Black London.”20 This time, instead of the government-run Aggrey House, where she had stayed on her way over, Broner made her way to the “Africa House” in north London. “Like this place very much,” she commented on arrival, admiring its autonomy. “It is the property of West Africa. Bought with money raised by the Chiefs and people of West Africa, for all African people from all parts of the world. Owned and operated by the West African Student Union.” The Africa House was run by political activist Felix Oladipo (Ladipo) Solanke and his wife Opeolu (Olu), both of whom were from Yoruba-­ speaking communities in Nigeria.21 Solanke came to London in 1922 to study law at University College. His activism began in 1924, when—remarkably given the era—his public protests about the misrepresentation of Africans as “cannibals” at the wildly popular Empire Exhibition led to the closure of its African Village. His ongoing experience of racism, coupled with pride in African traditional culture, led him to found, with Herbert Bankole-Bright of Sierra Leone, the West African Student Union (WASU) in 1925. Solanke soon looked to extend the cultural and political scope of WASU to include accommodation for black students and visitors to London in the face of constant discrimination. After a three-year fundraising tour of West Africa from 1929 to 1932, he opened Africa House as a hostel and cultural center in the mid-1930s. Broner’s nearly two-week stay at the hostel was fortuitous, if not a matter of fate. By 1939, it was not only a haven for blacks from all parts of the world but had become a vital hub of anticolonial thought and action in the very heart of the British Empire. As described by historian Marc Matera, it was a “site for the exchange of ideas among black intellectuals from around the Atlantic,” a point of entry for new arrivals from Africa and its diaspora and a welcoming space for black residents of London. The Africa House fostered Chapter 5: Return to the Eastern Cape and Voyage Home

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black internationalist solidarity, hosting many future political leaders in Africa and functioning as a clearinghouse for news.22 In South Africa, Broner had acquired firsthand knowledge of the impact of institutionalized racism and awareness of a global color line, and she forged transnational bonds in the interests of pan-African consciousness. Over the course of her brief stay in London, she would gain a wider perspective on colonial oppression in which to situate her South African experiences. Women, mostly from West Africa, were especially influential in making the Africa House a center of black cultural life in London through their leadership of its social committee.23 Broner was warmly received at the Africa House by both Olu and Ladipo Solanke, who were solicitous hosts throughout her stay. They organized a welcome reception with a lively and cosmopolitan mix of attendees that included two South Africans (the Jabavus’ daughter, Noni, who was studying in London, and Mark Hlubi, an ANC representative), “three West African princes of the present ruling line,” as well as three unidentified white women. The reception offered Broner an opportunity to discuss her experiences in South Africa and share her insights with an interested audience. After playing “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika” on the Victrola, she spoke for twenty minutes, accompanied by the display of works from her collection. “All seemed very interested and pleased to hear about S. Africa,” she reported, adding that the white women “wanted my African beads.” Broner’s emphasis on African culture surely resonated with her hosts, passionate advocates of tradition and the importance of cultural expression. After her talk, in a gesture of gift-giving that spoke to pan-­ African unity, Ladipo Solanke presented Broner with an additional work for her collection—a woven basket from his homeland of Nigeria. Significantly, Broner’s stay coincided with the weeklong run of the anti-imperial Workers Exhibition at the Friends House, a Quaker-run center not far from Africa House in north London. Organized by representatives of the Independent Labour Party, the Workers Exhibition was first presented in Scotland, where it served as a pointed rejoinder to Glasgow’s celebratory Empire Exhibition of 1938. While the Empire Exhibition aimed to “illustrate the progress of the British Empire at home and overseas,” the Workers Exhibition promised to present “the Empire as it really is.”24 With one hundred pavilions showcasing achievements in art, science, and industry, the Empire Exhibition was imperial spectacle designed to glorify the British Commonwealth and foster national pride; it was attended by twelve million people over its six-month run in Glasgow. In contrast, the smaller Workers Exhibition, which was on view for two weeks in Glasgow before coming to London, used a combination of photographs, diagrams, and charts to expose the 146

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exploitation and oppression of workers around the globe that underpinned the colonial enterprise.25 In the words of one of its organizers, Arthur Ballard, “While we cannot put on an elaborate show, we believe that we can, by means of our Exhibition, at least show to the workers the intolerable conditions within the Empire and the necessity of their support for the anti-Imperialist struggle.”26 It was likely Ladipo Solanke who encouraged Broner to visit the exhibition, given his anticolonial stance and his understanding of the power of representation. Broner reported that it was “very good” and purchased two copies of an accompanying pamphlet, Come and See the Empire by the All Red Route. Deemed the “best anti-Imperialist propaganda ever produced in this country” by the British socialist newspaper New Leader, the pamphlet highlighted the condition of colonial workers throughout imperial territories.27 Broner’s experience of the Workers Exhibition would surely have had an impact on her own activism, which would strengthen on her return home. The global scope of its critique broadened her understanding of the reach of imperialism and racism, while its exhibition structure offered an effective model for how she might instrumentalize her own collection as part of an anticolonial agenda. But Broner also saved, in her archive, a clipping about the Empire Exhibition, the target of imperialist critique. It covers the visit of Queen Mary to the South African Pavilion, where the regent praised the beadwork on display (notably lacking from the Workers Exhibition). “I think the Natives of South Africa must be very clever indeed,” the Queen is quoted as saying, “and have an amazing sense of color, to string beads together with such taste.”28 For Broner it was that and a good deal more. The beadwork was beautiful and culturally resonant, and also a visual touchstone to draw attention to contemporary conditions of colonialism. When she returned to Newark, she hoped to bring together those valences in a way neither exhibition did.

“Hurrah for Africa” The clouds of war were gathering when Broner departed London on February 3, 1939, traveling by train to board the MS St. Louis in Southampton. Part of the German-owned Hamburg America Line, the St. Louis was not allowed to “put to” in England, obliging onward and arriving passengers to take an hour-long ferry ride from ship to shore. As another ominous sign of things to come, Broner observed, “Many Jews were getting off in England. They had been exiled in Germany.” Indeed only four months later, nine hundred Jewish refugees aboard the very same ship would be turned away in Cuba and refused entry by the United States. Sent back to Europe, more than two Chapter 5: Return to the Eastern Cape and Voyage Home

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FIG. 42   Broner in her Xhosastyle “native dress,” which she wore to a “fancy dress” ball on the ship going home, undated photograph.

hundred and fifty of them would eventually perish in the Holocaust. On board, Broner disregarded what were now predictable encounters with racism. “People snickered when I went in the dining room. I did not mind in the least as I am thoroughly convinced that white people do not have a full brain.” She enjoyed time on her own, reading, rewriting her diary, and outlining speeches she would give when she returned home. Given her personality, it comes as no surprise that she spent a day absorbed in the popular self-help book Live Alone and Like It (1936), which she read cover to cover. Much like the independent and well-traveled single women the book sought to reach, Broner didn’t let gender or race—or even the consistently rough seas—stand in the way of fully participating in the ship’s activities. Most evenings, she attended social events, going to a “beer party” with “balloons, fancy hats, and frankfurters, all of which I enjoyed,” watching movie screenings (in both German and English), and attending concerts. Two days before arrival, now in calmer seas, the ship hosted a “fancy dress” ball. Passengers were invited to don a costume, the more exotic, the better. Broner decided to wear the Xhosa dress made for her by Nongendu Mhanbi. “Think I will put on my IZI-KAKA and just see how these people take it.” One can only imagine the stir she must have caused among ball attendees. A photograph, possibly taken on board the ship, shows Broner resplendent in her “native” dress, the long skirt with its braided decoration cascading to the floor and a voluminous shawl with beaded edging wrapped around her. She looks back at the camera, her head adorned with beaded bands (fig. 42). “Everyone was taken up with my Native dress,” Broner proudly reported at the end of the evening. And so they were. Prizes were announced the following day. “Well, my IZI-KAKA really did win the first prize,” she recorded with evident astonishment. “An amber bracelet and a cigarette case. Real amber. Hurrah for Africa.” Hurrah indeed. 148

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Broner arrived in New York on February 13, 1939. “The longest day I most ever lived. Seems like we will never get to shore. Everybody anxious to get off the boat.” One of the few American citizens on board, she was among the first to disembark, exiting down the first-class gangway despite her third-class ticket—a fleeting and ironic instance of privilege coming at the end of her long transcontinental encounter with its opposite. Passing through customs, an inspection officer asked if she was a returning missionary when he saw all the things she had collected. “I said ‘yes,’ and sailed through again without any trouble.” On the dock, her son, Leroy, was waiting to meet her along with Una Janifer and a few other club friends. After nearly nine months of travel, Broner was home. “God Bless Africa, May She be redeemed!!!” she wrote in the final entry of her travel diary. With its inflections of Garveyism, Broner evokes the black nationalist vision of a divinely ordained liberation of African peoples that would be the driving force of her activism back in the United States in the years ahead.29

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Notes 1  This chapter focuses on Broner’s final two

10  Lida Broner, copy of a letter from Broner to

months on the eastern Cape (October 29–­ December 30, 1938) and return voyage via London (December 30, 1938–February 13, 1939). Unless otherwise indicated, quotations by Broner are from her travel journal during this period, series I: Journal, Lida C. Broner Papers, Library and Archives, Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ (hereinafter LCB).

unnamed superintendent of Healdtown, November 25, 1938, box 6, series VI: Miscellanies, LCB.

2  This and other unattributed quotations in this

section related to Broner’s Ntselamanzi reception are from “Welcome to Mrs. Broner,” undated news clipping (inscribed “November 12, 1938”), publication unknown, and from an account of her speech as recorded in “An American Negro Visits South Africa,” typewritten school newspaper (Healdtown) dated November 19, 1938, box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB. 3  Z. K. Matthews, “The Tribal Spirit among Edu-

cated South Africans” (1935) as quoted in Meghan Healy-Clancy, “The Politics of New African Marriage in Segregationist South Africa,” African Studies Review 57, no. 2 (2014): 19. 4  “Welcome to Mrs. Broner,” box 4, series V:

Scrapbooks, LCB. 5  Dawn Costello, Not Only for Its Beauty: Bead-

work and Its Cultural Signifiicance among the Xhosa-Speaking Peoples (Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1990), 6–12. 6  Emma Bedford, “Exploring Meanings and Identi-

ties: Beadwork from the Eastern Cape in the South African National Gallery,” in Ezakwantu: Beadwork from the Eastern Cape (Cape Town: South African National Gallery, 1993), 14–15. 7  Noni Jabavu, The Ochre People: Scenes from

11  Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The

Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (New York: Little Brown and Company, 1994), 40–41. 12  E. Goodwin, Commissioner for Immigration

and Asiatic Affairs, typewritten copy of a letter to D. D. T. Jabavu, October 13, 1938, box 6, series VI: Miscellanies, LCB. 13  See Jean and John Comaroff, “Home-Made

Hegemony: Modernity, Domesticity, and Colonialism in South Africa” in African Encounters with Domesticity, ed. Karen Tranberg Hansen (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 37–74. 14  William Beinart and Colin Bundy, Hidden

Struggles in Rural South Africa: Politics & Popular Movements in the Transkei & Eastern Cape, 1890–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 24–25. 15  See Sean Redding, “Women as Diviners and

as Christian Converts in Rural South Africa, c. 1880–1963,” Journal of African History 57, no. 3 (2016): 367–89. 16  See Robert Trent Vinson, “‘Hidden’ in Plain

Sight,” in Global Garveyism, ed. Ronald J. Stephens and Adam Ewing (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019), 182–204. 17  Costello uses the term “keeper of the heart” in

Not Only for Its Beauty, 20. Gary Van Wyk refers to the tabs as “love letters” in “Illuminated Signs: Style and Meaning in the Beadwork of the Xhosaand Zulu-Speaking Peoples,” African Arts 36, no. 3 (2003): 22–23.

a South African Life (London: John Murray, 1963), 62–63.

18  Costello, Not Only for Its Beauty, 20.

8  Much of the information in this paragraph is

19  Wayne Dooling, “Poverty and Respectability in

drawn from Catherine Higgs’s “Zenzele: African Women’s Self-Help Organizations in South Africa, 1927–1998,” African Studies Review 47, no. 3 (2004): 119–41. I am grateful to Higgs for clarifying aspects of Jabavu’s deployment of Xhosa dress in relation to this project. Catherine Higgs, personal communication, March 21, 2021. 9  Higgs, “Zenzele,” 128.

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Early Twentieth Century Cape Town,” Journal of African History 59, no. 3 (2018): 431–32. 20  See Marc Matera, Black London: The Imperial

Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015). 21  On Solanke, the WASU, and the Africa House,

see Matera, Black London, 25–36, 52–59. See also Daniel Whittall, “Creating Black Places in Imperial

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London: The League of Coloured Peoples and Aggrey House, 1931–1943,” London Journal 36, no. 3 (2011): 225–46.

27  Britton, “Come and See the Empire by the All

22  Matera, Black London, 53–55.

news clipping, publication unknown [1938], box 3, series III: Press Clippings, LCB. The beadwork on view was from the collection of white South African Estelle Hamilton-Welsh. For more on this collection, see Sean Morrow, “‘The Things They Have Made Will Live Forever’: The Estelle Hamilton-Welsh Collection in the F. S. Malan Museum, University of Fort Hare,” Journal of Southern African Studies 22, no. 2 (1996): 271–85.

23  Matera, Black London, 54–55. 24  Quote from lead organizer Arthur Ballard, in

Sarah Britton, “‘Come and See the Empire by the All Red Route!’: Anti-Imperialism and Exhibitions in Interwar Britain,” History Workshop Journal 69, no. 1 (2010): 79. 25  Britton, “Come and See the Empire by the All

Red Route!,” 78–79. 26  Alasdair Pettinger, “The Other Empire Exhi-

bition, 1938,” blog post, June 23, 2020. bulldozia: research projects in transatlantic history & literature, https://www.bulldozia.com/2020/06/23/the -other-empire-exhibition-1938/.

Red Route!,” 81. 28  “Queen Mary Praises Africans,” undated

29  See Keisha Blain, “‘The Language of Free-

dom’: Garveyite Women, Diasporic Politics, and Pan-­African Discources of the 1940s,” in Global ­Garveyism, 168–81.

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Chapter 6

Activist Exhibitions

Shortly after Broner’s return from South Africa, she sat down with a reporter for Newark’s Herald News, New Jersey’s most widely circulated black weekly. The interview, published in late April 1939, presented “for the first time the frank and interesting reflections of an American Negro after a visit to Africa.” Titled “Back to Africa? Mrs. Broner Tells about Conditions in Africa,” the headline’s allusion to the movement popularized by Marcus Garvey in the 1920s reflects the ongoing resonance of black nationalist ideology among its African American readership.1 The article begins with Broner’s summary of her thoughts about present-day conditions in South Africa. “There is no difference between the African Negro and the American Negro save that the Negro of South Africa lacks the financial and educational advantages that we are enjoying here in the United States.” She went on at length to describe how South Africans were handicapped by low wages, long work hours, heavy taxes, and poor living conditions. She detailed how limited education was, noting that the prohibitive costs of schooling, lack of access, and meager opportunity meant that very few South Africans were formally educated. And yet, Broner observed, in the face of these imposed difficulties, South Africans “have made definite steps affecting a spirit of race consciousness.” She described the widespread impact of Garveyism “which was very popular several years back” and their continuing belief “that the followers of this movement will ultimately come to deliver them from their oppression.” For that reason, she continued, “every attempt is made to keep the American Negro from coming into Africa and ‘stirring’ up complications. The American Negro is feared greatly by governing countries who attempt to maintain a status quo in the dark continent.” Notwithstanding such impediments, blacks were organizing “to champion the cause of the natives.” Foremost among these efforts, according to Broner, was the work of the All African Convention and its affiliate, the International Committee on African Affairs. “Dr. Max Yergan, who is director of the International Committee of African Affairs, is idolized by the natives,” she added. “He is a national hero.” Broner’s closing words were a determined call to action. “All in all, as a result of my trip, I have concluded that the Negro problem in South Africa is a very grave one. However, the solution of the problems lies in the education of the American Negro on the conditions under which the natives of South Africa live.” As an activist who viewed the struggles of black Americans as fundamentally connected to those of colonized people around the 153

world, Broner immediately channeled her energies toward this goal. She became increasingly involved in the International Committee on African Affairs (ICAA), which emerged as the leading voice of anticolonialism in the United States until the mid-1950s. Crucially, for our purposes, the collection of “handwork” she had acquired from friends in South Africa would take on a central role in her activist agenda, as it was exhibited regularly throughout much of the 1940s.

Exhibiting Africa

FIG. 43   Newspaper clippings in Broner’s scrapbook about her 1939 exhibition of “African Hand Craft” at the Sojourner Truth branch of the YWCA, Newark.

The interview with Broner was, in fact, published to coincide with the first public presentation of her South African collection on April 23, 1939. Organized under the auspices of the Lit-Muse Club, the exhibit of “African Hand Craft” was held on a Sunday afternoon at the Sojourner Truth Branch of the YWCA in Newark, where Broner’s friend and fellow club leader Una Janifer chaired its management committee. The institutional context—a “colored branch” of the YWCA as opposed to a museum—is not surprising. For African Americans, exhibitions in nontraditional spaces were born of necessity in the Jim Crow era. From the first decade of the twentieth century, the “colored branches” of the YMCA and YWCA, along with other civic institutions, played a prominent role in the cultural life of black communities. They offered a space for African Americans to stage exhibitions as well as educational programs, lectures, and concerts.2 YMCAs, along with other community centers, public libraries, and churches, were especially important sites of gathering and exchange as racial segregation intensified throughout the 1930s, and they would be, almost exclusively, the venues for the public presentations of Broner’s collection in the years to come— with the noteworthy exception of the Newark Museum in 1943. While there is no visual documentation of the display of Broner’s collection, the exhibition was significant enough to warrant advance publicity in local newspapers. She saved three different clippings, which together provide our only record of the event (fig. 43). One of the clippings, from an unidentified newspaper, describes the exhibition as composed of “gifts from interested Africans, many of whom were educated in America.”3 Among the works on view were “articles made by the blind as well as rack work by educated people,” but the “most interesting part,” as noted in that newspaper, was “the beautiful bead work, basket weaving, clay pottery and skin blankets made by primitive people commonly called heathens.” The presentation of the works would be further enlivened by “recordings of African music and folk tales,” which Broner had also collected along the way. Of particular note—highlighted in the headline of the news 154

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article—was the appearance and participation of Broner herself, who “will relate several of her experiences as a feature of the exhibit.” The article is accompanied by a photograph of the intrepid collector in her African dress. Broner’s exhibition is noteworthy in its content, method of presentation, and activist message. Its focus on examples of needlework, beadwork, basketry, and pottery from South Africa was distinct from the figurative sculpture more typically displayed as “African art.” Moreover, these objects were not from a timeless African past but rather “gifts from interested Africans” representing the cultural present and social relationships formed with individuals over the course of her travels. Broner’s lived experience and transatlantic bonds were central not only to the content but to the creation of the exhibition, which was personal and experiential in its execution. The objects were not silent witnesses to an unknowable past, but activated through music, words, and, especially, Broner’s physical presence within the intimate space of the exhibition, which offered a live connection to the works on display. Broner’s decision to wear African attire was a powerful affirmation of the significance of culture and its ongoing relevance to collective identity. Show your culture “in things that are African,” she had urged the audience during her last major public speech in South Africa, at Ntselamanzi Hall in Alice, “these are the things that keep up a nation.” If, on the boat to New York, her appearance in “native costume” may have appealed to passengers on the level of superficial exoticism, back in Newark, in this context and to this audience, it conveyed a message of black pride and pan-­African unity. Broner’s deployment of African dress as a practice of cultural nationalism had precedent—we recall her friend Sibusisiwe Makhanya similarly had worn Zulu attire on her lecture tour in the United States a decade earlier.4 And later, in 1962, Nelson Mandela would memorably dress in a traditional ­leopard-skin Xhosa kaross, or cloak, and beaded necklace for the court hearing that led to his sentencing and imprisonment. “I had chosen traditional dress to emphasize the symbolism that I was a black African walking into a white man’s court. I was literally carrying on my back the history, culture, and heritage of my people. That day, I felt myself to be the embodiment of African nationalism, the inheritor of Africa’s difficult but noble past and her uncertain future.”5 His wife, Winnie, also appeared in court wearing an ankle-length Xhosa skirt and beaded headdress. As an African American, Broner’s self-presentation was also a public enactment of her newly solidified diasporic identity. At some point soon after her return, she went to Columbus Studio on Bloomfield Avenue in Newark, just around the corner from her home, to have her photograph 156

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FIG. 44   Lida Clanton Broner, probably 1939, photographed in Xhosa dress with Zulu beadwork at Columbus Studio, Newark, NJ, collection of the Clanton Family.

taken in African attire. In the resulting full-length portrait, Broner stands in profile against a studio backdrop, barefoot and gazing contemplatively downward at a beaded pipe she holds in her hands (fig. 44). She is dressed in the long skirt (umbhaco) and shoulder wrap (ibhayi) made for her in Alice by Nongendu Mhanbi, and she wears the pair of beaded headbands (iminqwazi) acquired in Natal. Since her return, Broner had also taken on the Zulu name she had been given—No’Lwandle, or “Mother of the Oceans”—as her Chapter 6: Activist Exhibitions

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middle name. And sometime after the spring thaw, she had planted maize seeds gathered in South Africa in the soil of her Newark backyard. Her grandsons later recalled how proud she was of the corn she grew, the tall stalks a living, thriving testament to the roots she had grown in “the land of her fore­fathers.” Now, in the space of the exhibition, wearing her flowing ocher-dyed dress and adorned with layers of beadwork, Broner’s embodiment of an “African” identity similarly collapsed cultural distance, challenging notions of a faraway, “primitive” Africa. Her physical presence and playing of South African music established a performative context that would be fundamental to subsequent displays of her collection. While the material culture at the heart of the exhibition may not have been explicitly political, Broner’s agenda was. She shaped the interpretation of the exhibition by sharing firsthand knowledge about the “conditions under which the natives of South Africa” lived, consistent in purpose with the “frank and interesting reflections” offered up in the Newark Herald News interview. That the event was conceived by the Lit-Muse Club as a fundraiser for the International Committee on African Affairs (ICAA) corroborates its activist agenda.6 Media coverage of the show highlighted the club’s affiliation with the ICAA and its alignment with the work of South Africa’s All African Convention (AAC), and specifically the club’s relationship with D. D. T. Jabavu.7 Jabavu was, in fact, eagerly awaiting Broner’s news about public reaction to the display. “The people here still speak fondly of you and your inspiring lectures and your kind personality with the so-called humble and ‘savage’ people,” he wrote, making reference to the interest she had taken in aspects of traditional culture. “We shall be excitedly interested to know the impression made by your genuine African attire and curiosities.”8

A Global Vision Eager to capitalize on her South African connections and broadened understanding of the world, Broner moved swiftly to expand the program and purview of Newark’s Lit-Muse Club. She reached out to the ICAA’s executive director Max Yergan soon after her return. Nearly two years had passed since Broner hosted what may indeed have been the organization’s first (if unofficial) public meeting in her modest Newark home in August of 1937. She had kept in touch with Yergan while in South Africa, exchanging letters. In that time, the ICAA had established itself and sharpened its focus on educating the American public about Africa and facilitating the education of Africans in the United States. Though financial resources were limited in its early years, the ICAA enjoyed a high public profile thanks to the prominence of its founding board members, an interracial group of left-wing 158

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­ rogressives that included Paul and Eslanda Robeson and Ralph Bunche, p along with other educators, lawyers, and philanthropists. As director, Yergan was especially successful in leveraging his contacts to build a transnational support network of anticolonial activists. This included South African AAC leaders closely associated with the formation of the ICAA, such as D. D. T. Jabavu, A. B. Xuma, and Z. K. Matthews, but also London-based pan-­Africanists, including Kenyan-born Jomo Kenyatta (his nation’s first president) and the Trinidadian activist George Padmore.9 Broner’s Newark-based Lit-Muse Club, as auxiliary to the ICAA, together with her own largely women-led, transatlantic alliances, were part of this far-reaching network. Yergan was eager to hear about Broner’s journey and “very much interested in the collection of exhibits” that she had brought back, suggesting they get together “at the earliest possible convenience.”10 Over the course of 1939 they met several times, working together toward a shared “purpose of making Africa better known.”11 Yergan proposed the possibility of the ICAA publishing her travel diary, which, although it never came to pass, speaks to his high regard for the perspective she brought to bear on South Africa. He clearly saw the significance of her knowledge of African women’s issues, recommending that she accept an invitation to speak on the topic at the Colored Women’s Clubs conference in Bordentown, New Jersey, that July.12 “I think your presence there with your exhibit will be of great value to the members of that conference,” he wrote encouragingly.13 Upon her return, Broner led the Lit-Muse’s fundraising efforts on behalf of the ICAA, which included the YWCA exhibition on “African Handcraft.” She also hosted an African student, Prince Abner G. Nkosi of Swaziland, who had just completed his first year of studying economics at Yale.14 As she had been while abroad, she was especially involved in the circulation of black print media, which played a critical role in the shaping of the politics of the African diaspora from the late 1930s on.15 For example, Broner distributed copies of Yergan’s pamphlet Gold and Poverty in South Africa (1938), which dissected how white wealth was built on exploitative black labor, and she managed to send more than fifty American black newspapers to South Africa in 1939 alone.16 The advent of World War II at the beginning of September amplified the importance of these organizational efforts. “The present war situation has brought Africa very much to the front as part of the whole colonial question,” Yergan wrote in a letter that December to Broner’s friend and fellow Lit-Muse leader, Una Janifer, “I shall be glad to meet at length with your Executive Committee and some of the other ladies in order to help clarify any points on which there may be difficulty in understanding the Chapter 6: Activist Exhibitions

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real issue in the present war as it affects Africa.”17 That real issue, in the eyes not only of Yergan but of people of African descent across the diaspora and their allies, was colonialism. As historian Penny Von Eschen explains, over the course of the interwar period, “nationalists and pan-Africanists had trenchantly critiqued and debunked myths of white supremacy and the civilizing mission and had challenged the political and economic order on which they rested.”18 If the 1935 invasion of Ethiopia heightened the sense of kinship African Americans had with Africans on the continent and in its diaspora in their global struggle against imperialism, the Second World War galvanized anticolonial activism.19 The urgency is evident in Yergan’s determination to meet with the Lit-Muse. “I know you and some of the members are following the present war situation,” Yergan wrote to Broner. “It is full of meaning for Africa and as soon as possible I would like to come over and discuss it with you and your executive committee.”20 Broner was not only following the war situation, she was determined to participate in the ICAA’s larger global efforts related to Africa. Since her return, she had become increasingly frustrated with the “blank absence of interest or sympathy in the program of the ICAA” on the part of fellow members of the Lit-Muse. She described their apathy to Yergan, complaining that during her absence “they only came to meetings to hear the interesting letters I wrote the club.” Facing the fact that she “had been acting as a hypodermic to a group of social parasites,” Broner announced her intention to resign from the Lit-Muse in June 1939. Una Janifer and a few other members of the club’s executive committee agreed to join her, but asked Broner to stay on through the end of the year to help fulfill the club’s financial pledge to the ICAA as an affiliate.21 In the meantime, Broner petitioned Yergan to restructure the women’s auxiliary as an independent entity under a new name, the “Max Yergan Auxiliary.” Yergan enthusiastically supported the idea of a fresh start “in view of your national and international interest,” but advised “you want a name for your Club that will go infinitely beyond any person and include all people of Africa and the great cause of Africa.” He recommended a few possibilities, such as the Women’s Africa Aid Club and the Women’s Africa America Club.22 Broner and her fellow executive committee members selected the name that most clearly conveyed the global dimensions of the redefined platform of their work: the Women’s International Affairs Club.

Black Women’s Internationalism In December 1939, the Newark-based Women’s International Affairs Club (WIAC) was formalized as the sole women’s auxiliary to the ICAA, and 160

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Broner was appointed its president. An account of the club’s foundational years makes clear the extent to which Broner’s knowledge-gathering journey was the catalyst that converted the organization’s local activism to concerns for global struggles. “Mrs. Broner spent nine months in South Africa visiting friends and studying conditions. Thereupon the club’s interests became international.”23 Its constitution outlined a black internationalist agenda in unambiguous terms.24 The WIAC’s purpose was “to help educate the American people to a true understanding of the conditions under which others live; to promote interracial understanding and good will among people; to act as mothers to African students while in this country; to study the history of other countries and people; to hear speakers from all parts of the world.”25 Transatlantic networks of exchange—institutions, individuals, and ideas— were central to its work. In addition to being the auxiliary of the ICAA, the WIAC listed formal alliances with several South African organizations, including the male-led, explicitly political All African Convention. Equal weight was given to alliances with women’s organizations such as the Daughters of Africa, the Unity Club, and Zenzele club (fig. 45). Broner’s transnational coalition was part of impor­tant history of black women’s i­nternationalism—a “long lineage of black women thinkers, doers and creators” dedicated to global liberation from white supremacy.26 Although the WIAC had only four members in its inaugural year—indeed, fewer in number than its organizational alliances—the women’s club was clearly relevant to the ICAA.27 Soon after its formation, Yergan wrote to the new vice-president, Una Janifer, to connect the work of the ICAA with the new organization. “I am looking forward to 1940 as a most important year of our Committee’s existence, and I am anxious for the fullest possible conference and collaboration with your important Club.”28 An exhibition of Lida Broner’s collection, planned for February 1940 at New York’s International House, was foremost on the WIAC’s agenda. The exhibit, to be organized by Broner and Janifer in consultation with Yergan, was in fact announced in tandem with the launch of the newly formed organization. Broner’s appearance was highlighted in its advance publicity: “The president of the Women’s International, Mrs. Lida Broner, who spent nine months touring South Africa, will supervise the exhibit and will appear in native costume.”29 Scheduled as the featured speakers at the high-profile Chapter 6: Activist Exhibitions

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FIG. 45   Front cover of the constitution and by-laws of the Women’s International Affairs Club, c. 1940s.

opening on February 12 were Paul Robeson and his wife, Eslanda; seven African students were to be guests of honor.30 Although the much-anticipated exhibition never materialized because of Yergan’s prolonged illness that spring, Broner’s collection was shown at three events sponsored by the WIAC during the year.31 One of these was a roundtable discussion in June held at Calvary Baptist Church in East Orange, New Jersey, where Broner exhibited her materials and sold copies of Yergan’s Gold and Poverty in South Africa to attendees from other women’s clubs.32 Broner’s report to Yergan on the club’s inaugural year highlights their use of visual culture; she included media coverage by the black press to underscore its centrality as a strategy to advance the WIAC’s internationalist agenda. The exhibitions not only built public awareness about Africa but were fundraisers for the ICAA. To maximize both of these ends, Broner looked to place her program, with its combination of lecture and exhibition, under professional management. By December she reported to club members that she had secured the services of Frances Wills, who at the time was managing a reading tour for Langston Hughes.33 That Wills took on the WIAC as a client alongside the illustrious poet speaks to the interest in their program. Club minutes provide a vivid snapshot of the ambition and depth of the WIAC’s interests and activities in their inaugural year, all the more remarkable given their small number.34 Monthly meetings rotated among member’s homes, which were within walking distance from each other in neighborhoods flanking Newark’s Branch Brook Park. Education and exchange were central features. Club members shared books on Africa and looked for opportunities to link up with other clubs and organizations. On one occasion, for example, Broner reported on an “interesting visit” to the recently formed Ethiopian World Federation in New York, a solidarity and support group that had “some of the same African interest we have.”35 Finances were an ongoing concern, especially given the postponement of the big New York event that they had hoped would generate income. Fundraising strategies were modest. In addition to the roundtable discussion held at Calvary Baptist Church, there was an afternoon tea (which netted $3.10) and a garden party at Una Janifer’s, which likely included displays of Broner’s collection. The fact that a local Boy Scout troop offered to raise money to send newspapers to Africa, “provided Mrs. Broner gave them some talks on Africa,” points to the very grassroots nature of their work.36 Though the WIAC was small in size and scale, Broner and her colleagues successfully used their platform to draw media attention to Africa. The clippings that fill pages in Broner’s scrapbook track the club’s activities 162

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through the war years, revealing how they engaged with black internationalism through exhibitions, meetings, lectures, and exchange of print media that drew local attention to global issues. “The war in Europe has affected Negroes in many ways,” one article from March 1940 begins. It continues on to emphasize the WIAC’s role in linking the local to the global. “This fact was brought very close to home at the meeting of the Women’s International Affairs Club here last week, when the mail bag was opened and the contents read.” The article goes on to describe a letter from “Mrs. R. J. Moroka, head of the Basuto Land Unity Club of South Africa” who was unable to come to the United States as a guest of the WIAC “because of cancelled plans for a peace conference.” A letter from Johannesburg told of a rush for workers in the gold mines: “The mines are working overtime to produce gold faster. Mines are operating twenty-four hours a day with three shifts of eight hours each, paying the workers the sum of 35 cents a day.”37 The “overseas program” of the WIAC was especially robust, thanks to networks Broner had established in South Africa and in London during her journey. In 1940 the club was sending periodicals to many of the black schools that Broner had visited in South Africa as well as the Bantu Men’s Social Center in Johannesburg and the West African Students Union in London. The schools included John Dube’s Ohlange in Natal, Healdtown, and the University of Fort Hare in the eastern Cape, and St. Peter’s School outside Johannesburg. The impact of such efforts, though not easily quantified, should not be underestimated. Writing from Fort Hare, D. D. T. Jabavu thanked the club for “the coloured newspapers and magazines [which] . . . are looked forward to with great interest” by the students, remarking they were particularly pleased by boxer Joe ­Louis’s victories.38 One imagines a young Nelson Mandela, who had recently taken up boxing and was among the 150 students studying at Fort Hare that year, being especially inspired by Louis’s achievement. Also of note was the club’s dispatch of a complete run of The Crisis for the year 1939, along with issues of Opportunity to the Bantu Men’s Social Center. In his autobiography Tell Freedom, the distinguished South African writer Peter Abrahams described his profoundly consequential encounter with works by black American writers while working at the Bantu Men’s Social Center in the late 1930s: “I became a nationalist, a color nationalist, through the writings of men and women who lived a world away from me. To them I owe a great debt for crystallizing my vague yearnings to write and for showing me the long dream was attainable.”39 How many others were inspired by the magazines and newspapers so patiently assembled by Broner and her friends and posted with the aid of a local Boy Scout troop? Chapter 6: Activist Exhibitions

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In turn, the women of the WIAC had a window on the world through letters and “native newspapers” mailed by Broner’s friends in South Africa as well as black newspapers from her contacts in London. Sibusisiwe Mak­ hanya was among those correspondents, sending updates on her work among women and other news along with items requested by the WIAC. That these included booklets on interracial relations in South Africa as well as additional examples of beadwork speaks to the club’s fusion of the political and the cultural. One particularly memorable letter described ­Makhanya’s launch of a “winter school” for women and girls, after a threemonth renovation of an old wattle-and-daub cottage, and her “delight” at learning about the “African Jungle” Broner had grown from her seeds in her backyard (“you should ‘charge’ when people come to see it”). The letter gives a sense of the impact of their continuing relationship and exchanges. “The papers you send are always perused with the keenest interest,” adding, of the American-born sister-in-law of John Dube, “You ought to have seen Marie Dube one day when she was here devouring the Afro-American as fast as she could going from each copy to another.” Makhanya had also become a passionate consumer of Broner’s beauty products, thanking her for the “precious gift” of face powder and asking her to send some much-needed “hair grease,” explaining “my hair is simply falling.”40 Dispatches from overseas also shed light on the deepening crisis of war, especially in London. A “distressing appeal” in July from the Africa House for financial assistance—“the European war was making things hard”— was followed by a letter two months later from a Mr. Pahlana that ended abruptly “as the air raid sirens were sounding and he had to make for the nearest shelter.”41 From South Africa, Jabavu wrote for the club’s help in sheltering his daughter Noni as a war refugee (she was unable to come) and urged members to continue efforts “to interest sympathizers in the cause of Native Africans.”42

An Anticolonial Agenda At the beginning of 1941, the ICAA was transformed into the Council on African Affairs (CAA) and Broner began to be invited to their quarterly meetings, a mark of her growing stature and commitment. Now chaired by Paul Robeson, with Yergan as executive director, the CAA retained an emphasis on education, but its agenda became more explicitly political, addressing the linked struggle to fight colonialism abroad and racism at home.43 Broner continued to support the anticolonial work of the CAA through her leadership of its women’s auxiliary. While there are no extant club minutes beyond 1940, the WIAC’s published account of its foundational 164

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years details “club highlights” through 1944. In 1941 these included hosting Ntombi Tantsi, an alumnus of Inanda who lived in Pretoria, who somehow managed a transatlantic journey to Newark during wartime. Tantsi would have been a strong ally of the WIAC as an advocate for women’s organizing to achieve economic and political emancipation. (In a speech at Inanda two years earlier, she had declared: “The race is looking to you, women. If you fail then the whole black race will perish.”)44 The women of the WIAC achieved another small but significant victory by helping to establish a bookshelf dedicated to “good books on Africa” at the main branch (not the “colored branch”) of Newark Public Library on Washington Street. The stress placed on good books on Africa suggests a desire to ensure a more accurate representation of the continent and present-day conditions. Broner also participated in programs outside the auspices of the WIAC that were less strictly informational with regard to present-day conditions in segregated South Africa. A compelling example was the historical pageant, “Still Looking at the Stars,” presented at Montclair High School in New Jersey in February 1942 featuring Broner as “an African woman” in an all-black performance. Historical pageants were an important and still understudied aspect of African American culture in the Progressive era. Through performances in public schools and other civic spaces, African Americans reclaimed and reshaped black history to promote a positive cultural identity by acknowledging their many contributions to the nation’s progress.45 “Still Looking at the Stars” was presented during Negro History Week by a coalition of six local religious organizations with the larger goal of promoting interracial understanding.46 Its title was from a poem, Oriflamme, by the Harlem Renaissance writer Jessie Redmon Fauset, who had recently moved to Montclair. Taking as its point of departure an image of the abolitionist activist Sojourner Truth remembering her mother, the elegiac poem mourns the destruction of family caused by the institution of slavery. “I think I see her sitting bowed and black,” it begins. “Stricken and seared with slavery’s mortal scars / Reft of her children, lonely, anguished, yet / Still looking at the stars.”47 “Still Looking at the Stars” exemplified the affirmative educational spirit of pageantry by depicting “the achievements and contributions of the Negro to America through music, dance and drama” in four acts. The Chapter 6: Activist Exhibitions

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FIG. 46   Lida Broner and an unidentified young girl (Hester Baskerville?) dressed in African attire, possibly as part of the 1942 pageant at Montclair High School.

pageant’s opening scene was set in “the grasslands of South Africa,” then crossed the Atlantic to a plantation in the American South, moving forward to “America in modern times” before ending in George Washington ­Carver’s living room at Tuskegee College. Broner appeared in act one wearing what a local newspaper described as a “native African dress made . . . by interested African friends” and was accompanied by a young girl, Hester Baskerville, who played the role of the “African child” dressed in a beaded skirt from Broner’s collection (fig. 46). The program informed the audience that Broner’s “scene represents authentic tribal customs and properties, which she brought back with her” from her recent journey to South Africa. Special attention was paid to Broner’s dress, described as “seamless, as has been their custom since the time of Christ, though formerly cattle skins were used before the Europeans brought cloth. It is dyed in native dyes.” Noting that the dress “was made for her by the natives as a message to the American negro,” the program went on to present an interpretation that offered a “New Negro” twist on the Xhosa dress. “The embroidery carries significance. The black rikrak braid signifies that the way of the African Negro is dark and troubled, but the buttons represent the eyes of the American Negro, who because he can see the way brings hope to the race.”48 With its up-from-slavery narrative arc and message of redemption, “Africa” functioned here more as a metaphor than as a contemporary place experiencing colonialism.

Wartime Activism At the beginning of 1942, Lida Broner was invited to serve on the executive committee of the Council on African Affairs, where she took her place among an interracial group of twenty-five prominent civic leaders and intellectuals. It was a strong endorsement of her work with the women’s auxiliary and recognition of the remarkable achievements of a working-class black woman who had graduated from Apex Beauty School only six years before. She saved the listing of CAA members from her first meeting, on January 22, 1942, where her name appears as “Mrs. Lida N. Broner”—the “N” for No’Lwandle—directly across from the prominent white anthropologist Franz Boas. War was foremost on the agenda at that meeting. The Atlantic Charter issued by Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt just five months prior, with its postwar vision of self-determination for all people, had propelled anticolonial efforts. As Yergan stated in his executive report, “an allied victory would strengthen the forces of freedom and bring to bear upon Africa the powerful democratic principles for which the allied forces 166

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are fighting.” He outlined the CAA’s program for the coming year, including the publication of a series of pamphlets on Africa’s participation in the war, contemporary living conditions on the continent, and an analysis of European colonial governance. Yergan also recommended “enlarged types of educational work through the organization of forums, discussion groups, lecture tours.”49 Broner took an immediate interest in the CAA’s proposal to organize discussion groups, seeing them as a useful way for local communities to become more deeply involved in the work of the CAA. She was soon tasked with developing a “concrete program” with input from individuals from throughout the greater New York City region. Her partner in these efforts was Yergan’s stenographer and close associate Frieda Neugebauer, a white South African who, as head of the CAA’s education committee, explained that she looked to Broner for “the benefit of your advice, experience, and ideas.”50 Community meetings were formalized as part of the CAA’s agenda in May; they were to include “a lecture on Africa and its importance in the whole war effort.” And no doubt at Broner’s recommendation, the lectures would be “accompanied by an exhibit of African work and culture.”51 By the summer of 1942, the community meetings were launched in Newark with a program sponsored by the WIAC on behalf of the CAA. A Sunday afternoon public rally on June 28 was held at Pilgrim Baptist Church, followed by a reception at Broner’s house on Highland Avenue, home also to her South African collection. Yergan and Channing Tobias, CAA board member and head of the “colored division” of the YMCA, spoke to those gathered about “the contribution of Negro and African peoples to victory of the United Nations over fascism,” urging “the removal of all barriers which prevent their full participation in the war effort.”52 Broner worked with Neugebauer to publicize the program in advance, spreading the word through Newark’s newspapers, the Ys, and churches.53 By all accounts, the meeting was a success, providing the kind of grassroots structure necessary to garner broad support. Though the event raised only $12.00 for the CAA (about $200 today), Yergan thought the “meeting on Sunday was an excellent indication of the interest you have stimulated in Newark,” and more generally that “it also revealed the fact that there are real possibilities for the sort of development in the future which we have in mind.”54 The day after the Newark program, the CAA’s Education Committee met in New York. High on the agenda was a proposal for Broner to organize a larger “African Exhibit,” evidently bolstered by the success of her program in Newark. Community meetings featuring African art that she had developed with Neugebauer also began that fall.55 A clipping in Broner’s Chapter 6: Activist Exhibitions

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FIG. 47   Broner displaying her prized assegai (spear) and other works from her collection at the Children’s Youth Center, Brooklyn Urban League, undated news­ paper clipping in her scrapbook.

scrapbook highlights the educational intent and intimate nature of one such display for the Children’s Youth Center at the Brooklyn Urban League (fig. 47). Broner is dressed fashionably in Western attire, strands of pearls around her neck, surrounded by a group of children. On the table in front of her are works from her South African collection, including beadwork adornments, a pipe, a ceramic vessel, and, it appears, the jar with red clay. In her hands, she holds her prize assegai, explaining the importance of the “African chief’s badge” to a seemingly awestruck young boy. The larger exhibition of African art that Broner envisaged was apparently more ambitious, proposed to “include not only objects of African culture but posters, charts, and other information about the present-day life of African peoples,” an interpretative model not dissimilar from that of the Workers Exhibition she had seen in London.56 During the planning of 168

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the African show, Broner was in touch with Beatrice Winser, a white woman who served a dual role as ­director of both the Newark Public Library and the Newark Museum. The two had corresponded earlier about African books for the library; now Winser wanted to know more about Broner’s art collection, which she had learned about two years earlier, from the museum’s ethnology curator, Hunter Ross, and she even offered assistance with the exhibition.57 In February of 1943 the museum committed to hosting a lecture by Yergan sponsored by the WIAC. Perhaps, Winser suggested to Broner, “you would like to have some of your material in the lecture room at the time Dr. ­Yergan speaks.” She added, “Your material sounds interesting and the Museum should know about [it].”58 This simple but enthusiastic expression of interest set in motion a historic presentation of Lida Broner’s South African collection at the Newark Museum in May of 1943.

Notes 1  “Back to Africa? Mrs. Broner Tells about Con-

ditions in Africa,” Newark Herald News, undated newspaper clipping [probably late April/early May 1939], box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, Lida C. Broner Papers, Library and Archives, Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ (hereinafter LCB). The quotations by Broner in this and the two following paragraphs are from this article. As referenced within, the article was published the week after the introduction of the Greater Liberia Bill in Congress on April 24, 1939. The bill, which was ultimately unsuccessful, was proposed by Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo, a white supremacist and a member of the Ku Klux Klan whose advocacy for racial separatism found common ground with the Back-to-Africa movement popularized by Marcus Garvey in the 1920s. 2  Beryl J. Wright, “The Harmon Foundation in

Context,” in Against the Odds: African-American Artists and the Harmon Foundation, ed. Gary A. Reynolds et al. (Newark: Newark Museum, 1989), 15; Bridget R. Cooks, Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011), 10. 3  “Lit Muse Clubs’ African Exhibit at YMCA;

Mrs. Broner to Appear,” newspaper clipping,

Chapter 6: Activist Exhibitions

April 15, 1939, publication unknown, box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB. All quotes in this paragraph are from the article. 4  In addition to Makhanya, there is also the

example of the British-Sierra Leonean Adelaide Casely Hayford, who wore African dress during her speaking tour in the United States to raise money for girls’ education. See Rina Okonkwo, “Adelaide Casely Hayford, Cultural Nationalist and Feminist,” Phylon 42, no. 1 (1981): 41–51. 5  Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The

Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (New York: Little, Brown, 1994), 173. 6  Lida Broner, “Annual Report” to Max Yergan,

November 28, 1940, box 2, series II: Correspondence, LCB. The report makes clear that Broner’s exhibitions served to raise funds for the ICAA, as part of a financial obligation related to their organizational affiliation. 7  “Lit Muse Clubs’ African Exhibit at YMCA;

Mrs. Broner to Appear,” newspaper clipping, April 15, 1939, place of publication unknown, box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB. Reflecting the gender bias of the day, there was no mention of the alliances Broner had formed with various women’s organizations in South Africa.

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8  D. D. T. Jabavu to Lida Broner, February 9, 1939,

24  According to Keisha Blain and Tiffany Gill, black

box 2, series II: Correspondence, LCB.

internationalism has historically been understood as “a global political, intellectual, and artistic movement of African-descended people engaged in a collective struggle to overthrow global white supremacy in its many forms.” See Keisha N. Blain and Tiffany M. Gill, “Introduction: Black Women and the Complexities of Internationalism,” To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 2. Among the scholars whose work has been influential to my understanding of black internationalism and its complexities in addition to Blain and Gill, are Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘But a Local Phase of a World Problem’: Black History’s Global Vision, 1883–1950,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (1999): 1045–77; James Meriweather, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935–1961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); and Von Eschen, Race against Empire.

9  Information on these formative years of the ICAA

is drawn from David Henry Anthony, Max Yergan: Race Man, Internationalist, Cold Warrior (New York: NYU Press, 2006), 183, 193–95; see also Charles Denton Johnson, “Re-Thinking the Emergence of the Struggle for South African Liberation in the United States: Max Yergan and the Council on African Affairs, 1922–1946,” Journal of Southern African Studies 39, no. 1 (2013): 184–85; and Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anti-Colonialism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 18–19. 10  Max Yergan to Lida Broner, March 1 and March 7,

1939, box 2, series II: Correspondence, LCB. 11  Max Yergan to Lida Broner, July 6, 1939, box 2,

series II: Correspondence, LCB. 12  Max Yergan to Lida Broner, June 6, 1939, box 2,

series II: Correspondence, LCB.

25  “Women’s International Affairs Club.”

13  Yergan to Broner, July 6, 1939. The planned

26  Blain and Gill, To Turn the Whole World Over,

speech and exhibit did not materialize.

2–3. Blain and Gill’s anthology of essays is the first to examine the ways in which black women have engaged in and articulated black internationalism over the past two centuries. Other significant scholarship includes Michelle Rief, “Thinking Locally, Acting Globally: The International Agenda of African American Clubwomen, 1880–1940,” Journal of African American History 89, no. 3 (2004): 203–22, Barbara Ransby, Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022).

14  “South African Prince Is Guest of the Lit Muse

Club,” undated newspaper clipping, publication unknown (inscribed Sept. 30,’39), box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB. Broner had met Nkosi and his father Sobhuza II, the paramount chief of Swaziland, while in South Africa. 15  Von Eschen, Race against Empire, 14–16. 16  “War Delays Mail from So. Africa,” undated

news clipping (inscribed “Feb. 10,’40”), publication unknown, box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB.

27  In addition to Broner (president) and Janifer

19  Von Eschen, Race against Empire, 22.

(vice-president), Mrs. Bertha Evans served as recording secretary and Mrs. M. Travis as treasurer. The WIAC’s bylaws state that the club could have up to thirty members, though its membership does not appear to have ever been that high.

20  Max Yergan to Lida Broner, November 30, 1939,

28  Max Yergan to Una Janifer, December 1, 1939,

17  Max Yergan to Una M. Janifer, December 1, 1939,

box 2, series II: Correspondence, LCB. 18  Von Eschen, Race against Empire, 22.

box 2, series II: Correspondence, LCB. 21  The preceding quotes and history in this para-

graph are drawn from Lida Broner, “Annual Report” to Max Yergan, November 28, 1940, box 2, series II: Correspondence, LCB. 22  Max Yergan to Lida Broner, November 30, 1939,

box 2, series II: Correspondence, LCB. 29  “Club Plans African Exhibit,” undated news

clipping (inscribed “Dec. 23, 1939”), publication unknown, box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB. 30  “African Show Plans Set for Next Month,” un-

box 2, series II: Correspondence, LCB.

dated news clipping (inscribed “Jan. 13, 1940”), publication unknown, box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB.

23  “Women’s International Affairs Club: Constitu-

31  Lida Broner to Max Yergan, “Annual Report,”

tion, By-Laws, Club Highlights,” undated pamphlet [after 1944], box 2, series II: Correspondence, LCB.

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November 28, 1940, box 2, series II: Correspondence, LCB.

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32  “Affairs Club to Hold New Round Table,”

undated news clipping (inscribed “April 6, 1940”), publication unknown, box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB. 33  Broner reported to club members that she

had been “able to successfully place the exhibit under the management of Miss Francis Wills of N. Y.” Minutes of the WIAC, October 8, 1940, box 2, series IV: Photo Albums, LCB. My identification of Wills is based on an advertisement in The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP, for Miss Frances Mills, lecture management, which offers spring dates for a ­lecture-reading of “Poems of Negro Life” by Langston Hughes. The Crisis, April 1940: 102. 34  Information here is drawn from the Minutes of

the WIAC for 1940, box 2, series IV: Photo Albums, LCB. 35  Minutes of the WIAC, November 5, 1940, box 2,

series IV: Photo Albums, LCB. 36  Minutes of the WIAC, March 6, 1940, box 2,

(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), 88. 45  Darren Barry, “Pageantry,” in African American

Culture: An Encyclopedia of People, Traditions, and Customs, ed. Omari Dyson, Judson L. Jeffries, Kevin L. Brooks (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2020), 3:697–98. 46  Undated news clipping (inscribed “Feb. 14,

1942”), publication unknown, box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB. 47  “Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882–1961),” in Shad-

owed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Nellie McKay and Maureen Honey, 96–99 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006). 48  Information in this paragraph from “Program

Notes” for “Still Looking at the Stars,” box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB. 49  Information in this paragraph from the Minutes

series IV: Photo Albums, LCB.

of the Council on African Affairs, January 29, 1942, box 2, series II: Correspondence, LCB.

37  “War in Europe Affecting Us,” undated news

50  Frieda Neugebauer to Lida Broner, May 4, 1942,

clipping (inscribed “March 16, ’40”), publication unknown, box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB. 38  “War Delays Mail from So. Africa,” undated

news clipping (inscribed “Feb. 10, ’40”), publication unknown, box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB. 39  Peter Abrahams, Tell Freedom: Memories

of Africa (New York: Knopf, 1954), 229. Ntongela Masilela considers the relevance of New Negro writings within his larger discussion of the relationship between New Negro modernity in the United States and New African modernity in South Africa during the first half of the twentieth century in “New Negro Modernity and New African Modernity,” An Outline of the New African Movement in South Africa (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2013), 109–70. 40  Sibusisiwe Makhanya to Lida Broner, August 31,

1940, box 2, series II: Correspondence, LCB. 41  Minutes of the WIAC, July 2 and November 5,

1940, box 2, series IV: Photo Albums, LCB. 42  Minutes of the WIAC, November 5, 1940, box 2,

series IV: Photo Albums, LCB. 43  Johnson, “Re-Thinking the Emergence of the

Struggle for South African Liberation in the United States,” 186. 44  Meghan Healy-Clancy, A World of Their Own:

A History of South African Women’s Education

Chapter 6: Activist Exhibitions

box 2, series II: Correspondence, LCB. 51  Minutes of the Education Committee of the

Council on African Affairs, May 12, 1942, box 2, series II: Correspondence, LCB. 52  “Tobias, Yergan to Speak in Newark Sunday,” un-

dated news clipping (inscribed “June 27, ’42”), publication unknown, box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB. 53  Frieda Neugebauer to Lida Broner, May 27, 1942,

box 2, series II: Correspondence, LCB. 54  Max Yergan to Lida Broner, July 1, 1942, box 2,

series II: Correspondence, LCB. 55  Minutes of the Education Committee of the

Council on African Affairs, June 29, 1942, box 2, series II: Correspondence, LCB. 56  Minutes of the Council on African Affairs, Octo-

ber 14, 1942, box 2, series II: Correspondence, LCB. 57  Beatrice Winser’s earliest extant letter to Lida

Broner was sent on February 13, 1940, shortly after a visit by the museum’s ethnology curator, Hunter Ross. In 1942, Winser wrote again to Broner first about books for the library on August 10, and on October 7, expressing interest in her exhibition. Library & Archives, Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ (hereinafter NMOA). 58  Beatrice Winser to Lida Broner, February 1, 1943.

Library & Archives. NMOA.

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Chapter 7

The Newark Museum and Beyond

The Women’s International Affairs Club program at the Newark Museum with Max Yergan as guest speaker went forward as planned on May 20, 1943. On the same day, a selection of Lida Broner’s objects went on public display at the museum. This exhibition would ultimately shape the destiny of Broner’s South African collection. Museum director Beatrice Winser initially had suggested a small showing of objects as a visual accompaniment to the lecture. She had wanted to do more but, as she wrote apologetically to Broner, “our exhibition schedule for the year has already been planned and no galleries will be available.”1 It was indeed a busy year at the museum, with no fewer than seventy-eight exhibits on the books, twenty-five of which were described as “major.”2 Signaling her sincere interest, Winser dispatched the museum’s registrar, Eleanor Olsen, to Broner’s home to inspect the collection and see what might be possible. In the end, and no doubt to Broner’s delight, space was made available in the Junior Museum, a large room on the first floor of the main museum primarily designed to present educational exhibitions targeted to youth. The Newark Museum’s monthlong presentation of South African Arts and Crafts was remarkable on several fronts. Foremost, it presented a collection formed by an African American—a woman no less—at a time when African Americans were typically marginalized in museums as visitors, as artists, and as collectors. Second, the collection itself—consisting of gifts of beadwork, basketry, needlework, and ceramics—was noteworthy for the ways it deviated from the era’s developing canon of west African masks and figural sculptures, and from the force or coercion that typically characterized the unequal power dynamics of early collecting. Third, the museum’s contextualization of the collection, emphasizing present-day life in South Africa and more broadly situated within global politics (explicitly) and colonialism (implicitly) was perhaps unprecedented. This exhibition’s exceptionalism makes us wonder how and why it came to be presented at the Newark Museum—and how the collection was eventually donated to the museum in 1947. The short answer lies in the convergence of three key circumstances: the museum’s distinctive foundational mission and history, its early and unusual interest in Africa, and the direction of its wartime programming. Examining these, and looking also at the events and figures that became so influential for Broner, helps us to understand the context of her exhibition, its aftermath, and the eventual formal acquisition of her collection by the Newark Museum. 173

A New Museum for Newark The Newark Museum was founded in 1909 with a progressive, not to say radical, agenda. Its visionary first director, John Cotton Dana, was a white man who set out to create a “new museum” in deliberate contrast to the fine arts museum model that catered to the elite, represented by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Instead of a temple in a park devoted to masterpieces, Dana established the Newark Museum as a practical civic institution located in the heart of the city.3 At the time, Newark was a bustling center of commerce and industry with a majority population of European immigrants and a small but rapidly growing number of African Americans (Broner, who moved to Newark with her first husband in 1914, was part of that demographic). Dana aimed to bring good design and cultural literacy to the members of the diverse metropolis. “The goodness of a museum,” he proclaimed, “is not in direct ratio to the cost of its building and the upkeep thereof, or to the rarity, auction value, or money cost of its collections. A museum is good only insofar as it is of use.”4 Dana’s progressive vision defined “art” broadly, with a collecting scope that eschewed “old master” paintings and ancient marbles in favor of contemporary and everyday art of a type that often wasn’t considered museum-worthy elsewhere, including modern photography, domestic handicrafts, and mass-produced goods. “Study your teacups,” he declared in 1914, explaining that a simple cup, which couldn’t be further from the conventional canon, had been subject to “time, care, labor and high skill for many thousands of years.”5 But beyond merely showcasing beauty and good design, the museum’s championing of everyday objects extended across cultures. Art could be “an agent of change” toward social and economic uplift.6 In its first two decades, the Newark Museum mounted a series of “process exhibitions” that celebrated the region’s manufacture of industrial products—clay, textiles, leather, and jewelry—intended for the benefit of factory workers and their families and they acquired everyday objects from “foreign lands,” underscoring a core institutional belief that “good design” was universal while also advancing public understanding of world cultures. Education and community outreach were central to the realization of this vision of the Newark Museum as a museum of service. Dana, who began his career as a librarian and served as director of Newark Public Library since 1902, wanted his museum to do for visual literacy what libraries did for book learning. The museum’s history and early programming were deeply entwined with that of the library, which housed the fledgling museum on its top floor until the opening of a dedicated new building in 1926. Until his death in 1929, Dana served as director of both museum 174

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and library; that dual directorship continued until 1942, under the tenure of his successor, Beatrice Winser (fig.  48). Under Dana’s leadership, the museum prioritized accessibility, engaging a broad spectrum of society of all nationalities and races well beyond the typical museum-going elite, including factory workers, artisans, office workers, and schoolchildren. Exhibitions were experiential, typically enlivened by demonstrations and lectures designed to educate and entertain. The Junior Museum was an especially important part of the museum’s educational program, aimed at nurturing life-long museumgoers. Early on the museum established a lending collection for visual education, which paralleled the scope of the permanent collection but could be loaned to schools, libraries, churches, and other civic organizations. And taking his lead from branch libraries, Dana proposed a pioneering program of branch exhibitions at local libraries to further serve populations beyond the museum’s walls.7 Newark’s communities, in turn, shaped the museum, including its collecting and exhibiting practices. The museum offered space for community members to represent themselves and their interests, routinely hosting meetings and lectures organized by local social and business associations. Some of the museum’s exhibitions were organized through public subscription rather than curatorial selection, and featured such things as the handi­ work and collections of local club members, the products of textile and ceramic manufacturers, even the prized possessions of children.8 White clubwomen, for example, who provided social and economic capital to the fledgling museum, exhibited their antiques and other domestic objects, giving civic significance to arts of the home.9 Through Newark’s public schools the museum sourced everyday objects from “children of foreign parentage” for its Homelands exhibition in 1916. Ezra Shales has drawn attention to the contradictions inherent in the exhibition and in the museum’s cultural pluralism more generally, including its imperialist underpinnings and simultaneous celebration of diversity and promotion of civic solidarity through assimilation.10 Nonetheless, the participatory nature of these exhibitions Chapter 7: The Newark Museum and Beyond

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FIG. 48   John Cotton Dana, founding director of the Newark Museum, and Beatrice Winser, who succeeded him as director in 1929, c. 1924. Newark Museum of Art Archives.

and the validation of everyday objects in personal collections, especially those formed by women, were innovative for its time and would pave the way for presenting Broner’s collection in 1943.

The African Collections The Newark Museum’s African collections began in 1917, the year after the Homelands exhibition. Its first accession was a gift of South African beadwork, a rectangular panel with brass button clasps made by a Zulu-speaking woman in southern Natal sometime in the late nineteenth century, a generation before Lida Broner visited this region. The beadwork was donated by Berthold Audsley, a white British-born Newarker who built scale models for the museum.11 The acquisition would have served two purposes in the museum’s collecting priorities: it fulfilled the museum’s pledge to extend “knowledge of and sympathy with peoples of other lands and other times” through the study of everyday objects, and it exemplified good design through its strong geometry and colorful rows of boldly outlined diamond-shaped patterns.12 In hindsight, while Dana’s visionary museology deserves recognition, it was not without its ambivalences and contradictions. The culturally pluralistic vision of good design is at odds with the classificatory practices that established the African collection in the museum’s early decades, leaving objects like the South African necklace—and later Broner’s collection —in an ambiguous taxonomic space. When the beadwork panel was accessioned by the museum, it was assigned to the nascent department of ethnology (the scientific study of races and peoples, especially through material culture and lifestyle).13 Although in principle, a work from any culture in the world could be defined as ethnological, Newark’s department only encompassed works by the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the Pacific, and Africa. This was typical of biases of the era, in which the term ethnology effectively became code for a group of unrelated cultures misguidedly perceived as primitive. The racialized evolutionary framework is made clear in the museum’s first substantial discussion of its ethnological collections, which highlighted their presumed ability to “give us an interesting story of primitive man, and of his slow evolution from savagery to civilization.”14 In its first decade, the African collection was developed only sporadically, with occasional gifts from residents whose missionary work or business had sent them to Africa. As the museum readied for the opening of a new building in 1926, the African collections became a greater institutional priority, signaled by a quickening pace of acquisitions and the commitment of 176

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funds when opportunities presented themselves. Major purchases in 1924 came from the holdings of Walter C. Hill and Walter Dormitzer, two white collectors who were acquiring African artifacts at the turn of the century. “This is probably worth taking because we already have a start on an African collection,” museum staff member Alice Kendall advised, after seeing the carved figures and decorated calabashes from western Africa decorating Dormitzer’s billiard room, “Not very much attention has been paid to primitive Africa by Museums. Recently there has been more—notably by the Brooklyn Museum.”15 Kendall was referring to Primitive Negro Art, Chiefly from the Belgian Congo, presented by Brooklyn the previous year; it was the first museum exhibition in the United States to present African objects as art as opposed to ethnography. In establishing Africa as a focus of its collecting efforts, the Newark Museum intended to expand its fledgling collection into an area that was only starting to be appreciated by American museums. Indeed, objects from Africa had only begun to enter American museum collections in the late nineteenth century, mostly as ethnological specimens or curiosities in natural history museums. By the early twentieth century, a few art museums had also begun to develop collections of African material culture that were wide-ranging and eclectic; at first their importance was justified more for their civic or educational value than for their artistic merits.16 Newark was not a natural history museum, but neither was it an art museum with the priorities of so many of the fine art museums that had been rising, during the same decades, in major American industrial cities. Instead, this modern and civic-minded “new museum,” with its progressive acquisitions and programming, took a quite different approach to its African collections during the interwar period. African objects were shown as design inspiration in exhibitions devoted to Newark’s industries, but were also used as a foil for the “progress” of the local factory-made wares. Similar contradictions are evident as well in the museum’s earliest exhibitions to focus exclusively on its African collections, in 1926 and 1928. The first adopted a strongly ethnographic approach, with “savage weapons, crude utensils, barbaric ornaments, strange charms and fetishes” on view in the museum’s newly opened science department.17 The second, despite the pejorative title Primitive African Art, explicitly emphasized “the ability of the Africans as artists” in the museum’s main first-floor galleries. But rather than concentrating exclusively on the figurative sculpture and masks that were then gaining acceptance as “art” among the cultural vanguard in the United States, the exhibition presented a wide range of objects, including many genres typically dismissed as ethnographic. The selection was Chapter 7: The Newark Museum and Beyond

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FIG. 49   Display case in the exhibition Primitive African Art, 1928, Newark Museum, Exhibition Photographs, Newark Museum of Art Archives.

intended to demonstrate the artists’ “strong sense of design not only in sculpture but also in the making of everyday utensils and weapons.”18 Display cases included examples of woven textiles and baskets, wooden stools and utensils, carved calabashes and beaded gourds, and appliqued leatherwork in addition to sculptural figures (fig. 49). If at times objects from Africa were positioned as “primitive” within an evolutionary framework, the museum also collected and presented such works as examples of continuous, living traditions of artistic production, in dramatic contrast to the ahistorical approach adopted by most museums. John Cotton Dana, in fact, made trips to the continent in 1928 and 1929, traveling to Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, and later to Egypt “to round out the North African unit,” and focused on contemporary objects of daily use in rural and urban life. He purchased more than four hundred 178

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works, ­including “rugs from Algiers, costumes of native men and women, the everyday costume as well as the ceremonial dress, silver work of Kabyle tribes . . . and doors and windows which illustrate the interesting lattice work found in Algiers.”19 A highlight of his Egyptian acquisitions was a full-size tent commissioned from the family of his Bedouin guide. Dana explained that these were “not ‘Museum Pieces’ in that they are not ancient, rare or costly. . . . But they are brilliant in color, attractive in design, serviceable, and, on the whole, tell much of the peoples from whom they have come.”20 His focus on North African artistic traditions also established a broader geographic range for the African collections than other museums, which tend to center on works from sub-Saharan Africa. The 1929 exhibitions that featured Dana’s purchases were equally noteworthy: 500 New Objects from Abroad exhibited works from Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria as examples of living traditions of artistic production and how they were used in everyday life. The installation re-created two souks, with objects displayed as if for sale, and also presented the corner of an Algerian room with wall hangings and a window grill. Modern Cairo and a Few Egyptian Antiquities also featured mise-en-scène domestic displays, including a re-creation of a Bedouin home, the tent he had commissioned, and live demonstrations of textile weaving presented alongside rugs. Seeking to connect the works on display to an audience that might find them culturally meaningful, the museum also publicized the exhibition in New York’s five Arabic-language newspapers (having a total circulation of over 20,000), in a community marketing strategy that was well ahead of its time.

Beatrice Winser and “Native Peoples in Theaters of War” Dana’s vision for and early leadership of the Newark Museum often eclipses the women who shaped the institution in these formative decades. His workforce was largely composed of women, all of whom were white, some of whom forged new career paths as librarians and museum professionals despite limited opportunities. Some were graduates of the museum’s own apprentice program, which provided practical training in museum work for mostly female cohorts from 1925 until 1941.21 They were civically active suffragists who viewed their cultural work at the museum and library as entwined with social reform and uplift. Beatrice Winser, who succeeded Dana as director following his death in 1929, was one of these “crusading reformers” whose significance has been historically neglected.22 The first in a long line of women directors of the Newark Museum (a rarity even today), Winser stewarded the institution through the tumultuous years of the Great Depression and Second World War and extended its reach Chapter 7: The Newark Museum and Beyond

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despite the financial hardships that shadowed much of her tenure. She was a feminist whose international outlook and advocacy for equal rights for all people would have made her particularly receptive to Broner and her activist agenda for her South African collection. By 1943, when the exhibition of Broner’s South African collection opened, the museum was known as a progressive institution of service to its diverse constituencies. It had built strong relationships with individuals and civic organizations within the community and established itself as a museum interested in global culture, including recognition for its pathbreaking African collection. Under Winser’s leadership, the museum invested more deeply in education, expanding the scope of its youthoriented Junior Museum and launching the pioneering program of branch exhibitions in the city’s public libraries.23 It’s clear too, though heretofore unacknowledged, that during Winser’s tenure the museum actively sought greater representation of and engagement with African Americans, a rapidly growing demographic in Newark. The museum acquired its first work by an African American artist, Henry Ossawa Tanner’s painting The Good Shepherd (1920), in 1929, the year Winser assumed directorship. Two years later, Newark hosted one of the Harmon Foundation exhibitions, its first devoted to the art of African Americans, followed by American Negro Art: Contemporary Painting and Sculpture in 1944. And by at least 1930, as discussed in chapter 2, we know that black churchwomen in New Jersey were borrowing African objects from the museum’s lending collection for their own exhibitions aiming to foster better race relations.24 But it was the Newark Museum’s wartime agenda that ultimately provided the opening for Broner and her South African collection. Beginning in 1942, shortly after the United States entered the global conflict, many of the museum’s exhibitions and programs centered on war, the institution clearly seeing itself as an important educational resource about current events at home and abroad.25 Exhibitions large and small spanned a gamut of topics and genres from the predictable, such as the documentary photography in Our Navy in Action or the museum’s displays of American and Soviet war posters, to more surprising shows like Arts and Crafts by Torpedoed Seamen, which presented handcraft made by injured merchant sailors convalescing at a New Jersey rest home. Newark’s programming was equally wide-­ ranging: educational films about how to deal with air raids, newsreels of battle footage, and training sessions devoted to operating various kinds of machinery, mostly geared toward helping women get wartime jobs. As American involvement in the war deepened, Newark’s desire to represent different ways of living in far-off countries also shifted emphasis. In 180

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December 1942 the museum debuted Native Peoples in Theaters of War, a series of exhibitions designed to give audiences a sense of life in the non-­ European Allied nations of the world through displays of their material culture, amplified by public programming and suggested reading. As Winser explained in her report to the trustees, “At this crucial time for all the world our special contribution is to create an understanding of our Allies with whom we are fighting for the peace to come.”26 Showcasing objects from the permanent collection, a series of “cumulative” exhibitions took place over the course of a year, beginning with North Africa, followed by Alaska, Australia and the Pacific Islands, and then China and India. Their purpose was “to present peacetime ways of native peoples in the battle areas, in so far as could be illustrated by objects selected from the Newark Museum.” The exhibitions attempted to provide some historical context for the works on display, noting in the label copy whether certain objects, like weapons, were still used in the present day. Current events were located on a map at the entrance to the exhibition, “Where It Happened,” which was updated daily by museum staff.27 The Newark Museum’s global, war-related programming in the 1940s could be seen across American art museums. In New York City alone, the Museum of Modern Art mounted Bali, Background for War in 1943, featuring “native sculpture, paintings and idols” collected by anthropologists George Bateson and Margaret Mead, as a way of preparing American soldiers going to Bali to better understand the people and customs.28 And the Brooklyn Museum presented exhibitions on European nations and their colonies, including Netherlands and the Netherlands Indies at Peace and at War in 1943, as well as others such as the 1945 exhibition, War Weapons of the Pacific (Primitive Weapons and Modern Warfare), which compared Army and Navy weaponry to those used by Pacific Islanders.29 What distinguishes the Newark Museum is the geographic breadth that included Africa, and especially the explicit connections drawn between the works on display and contemporary global politics. Topical and quickly prepared, there were no catalogues, yet other surviving materials outline their priorities. Documentation related to the North African Native Peoples in Theaters of War exhibition, for example, described Africa as “the colonial continent, a vast territory which outside Powers looked upon as spoils to be divided among themselves” and observed further that “African aspirations toward self-government will be stimulated” by the war,30 Winser made her views on the relation between global politics and human rights explicit in an opinion piece published in New Jersey’s Star Ledger during the exhibition’s run.31 With the headline “Unity for Democracy,” she urged Chapter 7: The Newark Museum and Beyond

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readers to “become internationally minded.” She declared that understanding “how the world outside this hemisphere lives economically, politically, and culturally” was imperative to achieving global peace—“a peace which will assure the equality of rights to all the nations of the world.” Drawing inspiration from the words of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, she concluded: “Thus only will democracy triumph and ‘under God, this nation, and all others, shall have a new birth of freedom.’” Her deliberate insertion of “and all others” visioned a democratic world with freedom for all peoples.

An Exhibit of South African Arts and Crafts at the Newark Museum The Exhibit of South African Arts and Crafts from Broner’s collection opened at the Newark Museum on May 20, 1943, the same day as Max Yergan’s lecture, and was on view through June 17. Even though South Africa was not a theater of war and the exhibition was not officially part of the Native Peoples in Theaters of War series, the exhibition can be seen within the broader context of the museum’s international program and in relation to Yergan’s lecture, “Africa in New World Relations.” His topic advanced the CAA’s central agenda—a postwar vision of an independent “New Africa” as set forth under the terms of the 1941 Atlantic Charter, which assured all nations the right to self-determination. This agenda was made clear in an editorial in the CAA’s new monthly bulletin, New Africa, launched that summer: “America’s new relations to Africa are one of the important results already achieved by the war. The Council on African Affairs wants to see these new relations effective in creating an Africa free from the heavy handicap of undemocratic rule. Such an Africa is an absolutely necessary part of a United Nations world.”32 The exhibition of Broner’s collection was held in Newark’s Junior Museum gallery, a special priority for Winser with her emphasis on education and habituating lifelong museumgoers. Especially during wartime, she believed it was essential “that the youth of our country is taught not only about his community and his own country” but the lives of those in foreign lands.33 Unfortunately, there are no photographs of the monthlong display, but other documentation indicates that the exhibit featured some forty-odd works from her larger collection.34 It included examples of beadwork given by friends in Natal and the eastern Cape, a sampling of Sotho pottery she collected in Johannesburg and Thaba Nchu, and a selection of woven grass mats, household utensils, and carved curios acquired at the various schools she visited. Also on view was the gourd covered in a net of glass beads given by Irene Bokwe in Middledrift to mark the transatlantic alliance of their clubs, the baked mud brick that Broner watched being made in Rabula, and the “grass pocketbook” with its stitched scene of rural homes given to her 182

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by Lucy Njikelana, president of the women’s Unity Club, as a farewell token. Notably absent were the examples of Western-style needlework—the crocheted hats and sweaters, embroidered doilies, and whitework place settings given to her by the women of the Helping Hand or those “uneducated natives” being instructed by mission-educated elite. The exhibition offered the public examples of “native arts and crafts” representative of contemporary black South African life. An introductory text identified the owner as Lida Broner, “who has been instrumental in obtaining, for the Newark Library, many books and magazines published in South Africa.” It included a simple overview of her recent journey: “Mrs. Broner, whose ancestors came to America from South Africa, spent a year among the native people living with them on the velds, eating native foods, learning their arts and customs.”35 Unlike the first display of the collection at the Sojourner Truth YWCA, no mention was made of the objects as gifts from “interested Africans,” but consistent with other previous showings, Broner appeared in her Xhosa dress and beaded headbands at the opening and played her recordings of South African music. The performative and experiential element was very much in keeping with the Newark Museum’s practices and institutional identity as a “live” museum. The exhibition immediately caught the attention of Margaret Vance, a reporter at New Jersey’s leading newspaper, the Newark Evening News, who eagerly sought out an interview with Broner. “You had better bring your costume in case Miss Vance would like you to have it,” Winser advised.36 Anticipating questions about the exhibition’s relevance to the CAA, Broner reached out to Max Yergen, who assured her she would quite ably represent the organization’s agenda regarding Africa.37 Vance’s extensive article, with an above-the-fold headline “Newark Museum Showing South Africa Arts, Crafts Brought Back by Woman Who Saved 28 Years to Make Trip,” appeared on June 1, 1943, several days after the show opened (fig. 50).38 In the accompanying photograph, Broner, following Winser’s tip, appears in full South African attire wearing her long skirt, front apron, shawl, and beadwork headbands, gazing at the pipe she holds in her extended left hand. Elaborating on the title, the article began: “It took 28 years of saving for Mrs. Lida C. Broner of 109 Highland Avenue to accumulate enough money to enable her to go to South Africa. But as a result Newark Museum is now exhibiting some of the native arts and crafts she brought back to this country. They will remain on view a few weeks.” The article goes on to describe some of the objects on view, highlighting their making and use. It noted that the baked mud brick—“the kind described in the Bible”—was made without straw, a beadwork neckpiece was “a symbol of everlasting Chapter 7: The Newark Museum and Beyond

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FIG. 50   Broner was photographed in her African attire for the Newark News article on her 1943 exhibition at Newark Museum.

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f­ riendship because it contains no dark beads” and the calabash is intended to be “filled with fruit and placed on the roadside with water for strangers.” Special attention was given to Broner’s attire. Under a subsection titled “Iza-Kaka,” Vance detailed the individual elements of Broner’s dress, “made without cutting the material,” and commented that her beaded headband “indicates the wearer is either unmarried or a widow.” Significantly, the article focused as much on Broner and her journey—in her own words, “the happiest experience of my life”—as it did on the works on display in the exhibition. Vance included a short biographical profile of Broner describing her decades of work as a domestic servant and beautician and her motivation for travel, which “sprang from her maternal grand­ parents, both of whom were full-blooded Africans brought to this country as slaves at an early age.” With surprising candor, the article illuminated labor conditions and economic exploitation, reporting that “a full-grown woman works a whole month as a domestic servant for $5” and noting the excessive burden of government taxation. Given room to dispel stereotypes of “primitive” Africans, Broner described how “professional heathens” are paid by sightseeing bus drivers to paint their bodies and perform for white visitors; “Natives do not normally go around naked,” she remarked dryly. Lack of free and compulsory education was an especially significant limitation to the advancement of black South Africans. “They have the same desires and ambitions as others and there are strong and able leaders among them,” Broner concluded. While the article is not explicit about segregationist laws in South Africa, its focus on social and economic conditions for blacks is a sure measure of Broner’s success in promoting the work of the Council on African Affairs. Comparison with media coverage of other “non-Western” cultures in the Native Peoples in Theaters of War series underscores the extent to which Broner was able to shape the message of the exhibition through this interview. A lengthy article on the North Africa exhibit by the same reporter bore the headline “Striking Ornaments Serve as Modern Piece Models” and emphasized in generic fashion the design possibilities of the jewelry rather than French colonial policies.39 Press coverage of the Pacific exhibition was particularly egregious in replicating racialized and exotifying tropes of the era. “Strange Customs Are Exhibited at Museum’s South Pacific Show” read the headline of an article in the Newark Evening News, its emphasis on “primitive living conditions” and “weirdly painted skulls” on display undercutting any institutional intent to induce a sympathetic reading of the people in that part of the world.40 As collector, curator, and then press interpreter for the exhibition, Broner rejected such demeaning stereotypes Chapter 7: The Newark Museum and Beyond

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in favor of portraying a resilient people bolstered by living traditions in the face of colonial struggle and socioeconomic hardships. At the close of the exhibition, Winser returned Broner’s collection with a warm note of appreciation: “People have been interested in the exhibit and I want to thank you very much for letting us have it.”41

Wartime Activism and African Solidarity Broner continued her work with the Council on African Affairs, which would reach the height of its influence and public visibility over the coming years. The appointment of Howard University professor Alphaeus Hunton as the CAA’s educational director in summer of 1943 (who assumed the duties of Frieda Neugebauer, Yergan’s stenographer) is considered a turning point for the organization.42 The CAA strengthened contacts throughout Africa and expanded its knowledge of colonial affairs through communication and subscriptions to African and European periodicals. At the same time, it broadened its base of supporters in the United States and grew its membership, joined by prominent African Americans like women’s rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune, who had founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935. As editor of New Africa, Hunton publicized the organizing work of African trade unions and women’s groups and analyzed the economic implications of colonialism. The CAA’s continued focus on political and social conditions in South Africa was especially significant, giving rise to a pre-apartheid solidarity movement in the mid-1940s.43 Lida Broner participated in the CAA’s anticolonial program as a grassroots activist with transatlantic alliances in South Africa during the war and its immediate aftermath. She corresponded with friends across the ocean, exchanging letters and newspapers despite ongoing censorship by the South African government and the slow mail. Her correspondents included D. D. T. Jabavu, whose main contact with the CAA by 1943 seems to have been Broner, not Yergan.44 “The Fort Hare students, especially the King of Bechuanaland, ask me every week for American Negro newspapers,” Jabavu wrote, “Please send me a few once a month, now and then the ‘Crisis.’ They read them cover to cover.”45 Broner also hosted and maintained close ties with visiting South Africans, among them Pearl Bennett (whose mother she visited with in Johannesburg) and Chief Mobedi of Basutoland, who were guests of honor at a tea sponsored by the WIAC at the Institute for International Democracy in New York.46 Broner’s friendship with Ntombi Tantsi, an educator, missionary, and women’s rights activist who came to the United States in 1940 and died after a brief illness in 1944, offers a particularly poignant instance of these transatlantic bonds. Broner attended 186

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Tantsi’s funeral with Una Janifer and used soil she had brought back from her journey “in the carrying out of the African custom of each mourner throwing a handful of dirt in the grave.”47 Broner worked locally to bring visibility to global issues during wartime, particularly struggles in South Africa, as head of the WIAC. In 1943, the women’s organization held a series of lectures on world affairs in Newark with a roster of speakers that reflected the CAA’s international anticolonial networks. Twice, the WIAC hosted Kumar Goshal, a US-based Indian journalist whose critiques of imperialism were regularly published in the black press, who spoke on “India in the Global War.”48 Broner broadened the reach of the WIAC by joining the Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs in 1944, hosting a “get acquainted” tea for district representatives at a community center in Newark.49 And in 1945 she led efforts to donate “some 500 of the best books on Africa” to Newark’s Public Library; many were recommended and/or supplied by Jabavu.50 Though Broner’s work often went unrecorded in the CAA’s monthly bulletin, this event was commemorated in the September 1945 issue of New Africa with a photograph showing Broner with South African friend Pearl Bennett presenting the books to the library (fig. 51). FIG. 51   Lida Broner presenting books from South Africa on behalf of the Council on African Affairs to the Newark Public Library, New Africa, September 1945, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS312), Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, UMass Amherst Libraries.

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Broner was actively involved in what the CAA described as “one of the greatest meetings ever held in Harlem”: a famine relief rally for South Africa. The program was held at Abyssinian Baptist Church in January 1946, just a few months after the war ended, and headlined by Paul Robeson and Marian Robinson.51 According to press coverage in The Voice: The New Paper for the New Negro, Broner informed a capacity crowd of 4,500 about a letter she received from South Africa “which urged immediate assistance and told of the sub-subsistence rationing of the meager supplies.”52 The rally raised nearly $2,000 (equivalent to $29,000 today) and two million pounds of canned food were sent to South Africa for distribution by Broner’s friend Roseberry Bokwe, who was now involved in the African National Congress. The CAA also sent Bokwe a message of solidarity: “We want our brothers and sisters in South Africa to know that they have friends here in America who realize that the fight against discrimination in the US can be won only as part of the war against human exploitation and oppression in SA and everywhere else. We are your allies and together we shall achieve the final peoples victory.”53 During these years, Broner continued to exhibit her South African collection, but only sporadically and not as part of the “enlarged education” she originally envisioned for the CAA working with Neugebauer. Her collection was presented twice, in October 1943 and October 1944, at Newark’s Central YMCA, alongside “exhibits from all parts of the world.”54 In the first exhibit, Broner appeared in African dress with Hester Baskerville and played her recordings of South African music (fig. 52). She also managed to place work by John Mohl “in the American market,” as he requested when they met in in Sophiatown, lending the painting he gave her to an Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture by Negro Artists held in 1945 at Newark’s Artists of Today Gallery.55 The last presentation of Broner’s collection in relation to the work of the CAA was just after the end of the war at the 115th Street branch of the New York Public Library. The exhibition featured photographs and pamphlets about “modern Africa” and printed materials about the CAA loaned by its educational director. Hunton recommended that the library also reach out to Broner about the possibility of loaning her collection but did not connect the political goals of the organization to her cultural activism. The display of Broner’s “very interesting African art and handicraft objects” was well received, “one of the most popular we have ever had,” according to the assistant librarian Flora Morrison. “Both children and grown ups seem fascinated by it.”56 But on this occasion the exhibition was not shaped by Broner’s personal perspective on social conditions in South Africa, nor did she appear in her African attire and ­supply 188

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FIG. 52   Lida Broner and an unidentified young girl, possibly Hester Baskerville, dressed in African attire, probably October 1943 or October 1944, with her South African collection on display at the Central YWCA in Newark.

musical recordings. Instead, and foreshadowing the future of the collection, Broner’s journey and lived experience was largely disconnected from her “lovely things.” “I want to ask you about your middle name, No’Lwandle,” Morrison wrote toward the end of the exhibition’s run. “It’s African, isn’t it?”57

Accessioned In the early spring of 1947, Broner wrote to Beatrice Winser, offering to donate works from her collection to the Newark Museum. She described her ambitions to take a trip around the world, something she’d been working toward for the past few years, saving what she earned through her labor as a domestic servant and additional income from her beauty culture work. Winser was “much interested” in the objects and supportive of Broner’s plans. “We need emissaries like you to preach the gospel of one world,” she responded, encouragingly. “We shall be delighted to have your collection of South African material. I suggest that you send the material to the museum and allow us to make a selection here.”58 The museum’s director, about to retire, was evidently quite keen to secure the donation. Winser wrote again Chapter 7: The Newark Museum and Beyond

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the following week to brief Broner on the process of accessioning. “When we receive your gift, we will go over it and report to you if there is any material which duplicates ours, etc etc.”59 Broner chose some eighty objects from her larger collection, just over half, for the museum. The selection was representative of the wide-­ranging and eclectic mix of everyday objects she had acquired, many of which were included in Newark’s exhibition four years earlier. Included were multi­ ple examples of ceramic vessels and grass mats, a few gourds, spoons and baskets, and a smattering of beadwork adornments. There were also the labeled jars of “native staples”—porcupine needles used in women’s hair-styling; samples of materials used in the fabrication of mats, cloth, and roofing; the baked red brick; and stalks of corn and heads of wheat. Broner retained her commissioned dress, much of her beadwork, and all the gifts of ­Western-style needlework she was given in South Africa. She also kept the photo albums, scrapbooks, music recordings, books and pamphlets, and diary that documented her journey and the friendships she had forged across the Atlantic, and her organizing work back in Newark. By June, objects from Broner’s collection had been transferred to the museum for review. Alice Kendall, the newly appointed director, confirmed their receipt: “Your gift will make a very real contribution to the Newark Museum collections. We have so little from South Africa.”60 Once the objects arrived at the museum, they were unpacked, itemized, and carefully vetted by staff, who identified sixty works to accept into the collection. They were objects that the museum saw as representative of the daily life of people—things of use and things used in making. “We should like to label your gift of South African arts: The Lida C. Broner Collection,” Kendall proposed; provenance provided the remaining connective thread.61 Broner received a copy of the formal record of gift, which listed each item. Most of these were brief visual descriptions, like a “man’s belt: beads worked on grass” (the one given by Angelina Dube, wife of the founder of the African National Congress), a “gourd covered with bead-work lacing: snuff box” (given by Irene Bokwe, whose husband was also a CAA member and had recently led famine relief in South Africa), or a “medium size woven grass mat: meat tray” (given by her travel companion in the Transkei, Queen Lumkwana). A few had additional remarks that provided a bit of context. The description of a “necklace, oaka root & beads”—the one given to Broner by Rilda Marta’s sister during her first week in South Africa—makes reference to its traditional use, noting it is “worn by mother after birth of first child.” The listing of a “Grass Mat (spirals of rag rug)” also records the greetings of solidarity “from Imbumbulu Primary to our 190

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Brothers The Negroes of America” on its tattered label. The eleven stalks of corn on the accessioned list include a reference to its post-collection history, “this corn was grown in Newark by the donor from seed brought over from South Africa,” but not the symbolism of Broner’s African roots that its planting represented. At the Newark Museum, a registrar accessioned each object and assigned them numbers 47.65 through 47.124, adding the works to a collection still classified as ethnology. The registrar typed descriptions of each on index cards, including hand-drawn illustrations, and filed them in the card catalogue, sorting by geography and genre (figs. 53a–d). The stemmed vessel made of red clay with painted designs was labeled “goblet” from “Africa (Basutoland)” and filed as “British South Africa—Pottery.” The back of the card describes it as a gift of “Mother Masole” in Brakpan, Johannesburg, in October 1938. Neither Broner’s connection to her daughter, the fashionable Mrs. R. E. Masole, a successful proprietor of a grocery store, nor the larger context for this gift—a meeting with women eager to advance and form clubs despite government censorship of the newspapers and books they received from American friends—was recorded. The gourd with its net of blue and pink beads was similarly tagged as a “snuff box” with “Africa” listed as its country of origin. On the back, it was noted as a gift of Mrs. Bokwe in Middledrift in December 1938, but there was no mention of the Unity Club meeting Broner attended with Irene Bokwe where the women cemented the formal alliance forged that day with their Newark sisters by performing a dance. Twenty objects were returned to Broner. As Kendall explained, they were works that were “in a sense, duplicates of other items in the collection, and a few pieces which do not seem strictly of museum quality. A list of these pieces is enclosed.”62 This list included the red clay cup and saucer with silver trim given to her by Marian Moikangoa, leader of Bloemfontein’s Home Improvement Club who hosted the “grand reception” for Broner at the end of her travels in the Transvaal. The modest vessel was likely seen as redundant by museum staff, who chose instead the examples of ceramic vessels offered that were more decorated and finely executed. Also returned were the “miniature war implements,” the small shield, spear, and staff given to Broner in Umbumbulu by Sibusisiwe Makhanya’s sister, Constance, a symbol of Zulu pride reflecting emergent African cultural nationalism, but one that may have been dismissed as touristic. The list of returns included another “souvenir”—the “woven grass handbag” with embroidered images of a cluster of rondavel homes, given to Broner by Lucy Njikelana as a

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FIGS. 53a–d   Newark Museum catalogue cards made in 1947 for the stemmed vessel given to Broner by Mother Masole (no. 47.65) and the snuffbox container from Irene Bokwe (no. 47.81), Object Records, Registrar’s Office, Newark Museum of Art.

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good-bye gift, which exemplified the tensions between tradition and modernity that marked her South African journey. The process of accessioning reveals frictions between the collection’s richly layered experiences and subjective values, and the museum’s normative categories and standards of quality. As in the case of all private collections that are given to museums, the personal threads that connected one object to another and the collection to the owner are overridden, if not severed, by institutional priorities and procedures. Museum practices of classification transformed works from Broner’s collection into object types and representative examples of ethnic styles. The meanings attached to the objects and to the collection as a whole—what they represented to the people who made or gave them to Broner and how she thought about and used her collection—were left behind. Lack of contextual information about the intellectual environment informing the collection rendered them museal, or museum-like, as German philosopher Theodor Adorno describes such objects that no longer carry meaning and, as such, are in the process of dying. “Museum objects,” he writes, “stripped of the personal narratives that their previous owners ascribed them, occupy a twilight world, ordered by the rules of institutionalized knowledge.” In 1947, the path of Broner’s collection diverged and a portion of these works entered this twilight world, where they would remain well into the twenty-first century.

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Notes 1  Beatrice Winser to Lida Broner, February 1, 1943.

Object Records, Office of the Registrar, Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ (hereinafter NMOA). 2  “Annual Report for 1943,” Exhibits Department,

Exhibit Files, box 57, Library & Archives, NMOA. 3  For a brief overview, see “A Museum and Its

City,” in Newark Museum: Selected Works (Newark: Newark Museum, 2009), 6–11. Dana and the early years of the Newark Museum are the subject of in-depth scholarship by Carol G. Duncan, A Matter of Class: John Cotton Dana, Progressive Reform, and the Newark Museum (Pittsburgh: Periscope, 2009), and by Ezra Shales, Made in Newark: Cultivating Industrial Arts and Civic Identity in the Progressive Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rivergate, 2010). 4  John Cotton Dana, “A Plan for a New Museum:

The Kind of Museum It Will Profit a City to Maintain,” in The New Museum: Selected Writings by John Cotton Dana, ed. William A. Peniston (Newark: Newark Museum and American Association of Museums, 1999), 65. 5  John Cotton Dana, “American Art: How It Can Be

Made to Flourish,” in Peniston, The New Museum, 218.

early institutional context in Christa Clarke, “From Ethnology to the Arts of Global Africa: A Century of Collecting at the Newark Museum,” in Arts of Global Africa: The Newark Museum Collection, ed. Christa Clarke (Newark: Newark Museum, 2018), 13–31. 14  E. D. C., “Hidden Treasures,” The Museum:

Science, Art and Industry 4 (July–August 1925): 59. On evolutionary theory and museums, see Tony Bennett, Pasts beyond Memory: Evolution, Memory, Colonialism (New York: Routledge, 2004). 15  Alice W. Kendall to Beatrice Winser, June 24,

1924, Object Records, Office of the Registrar, NMOA. 16  For more on this history, see Kathleen Bickford

Berzock and Christa Clarke, Representing Africa in American Art Museums (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011). 17  1926 Annual Report, Newark Museum Asso-

ciation, Newark, 30, Annual Reports, Library & Archives, NMOA. 18  See “Museum Opens African Exhibit,” news

clipping (inscribed “Sunday Call 22 Apr ’28”), Press scrapbook, 1928, Library & Archives, NMOA. 19  “Museum Director Back from Africa,” news clip-

6  Shales, Made in Newark, 18, 29.

ping (inscribed “Newark Star-Eagle, May 15, 1928”), Press scrapbook, 1928, Library & Archives, NMOA.

7  Beatrice Winser provides an overview of New-

20  “Museum Director Back from Africa.”

ark’s educational program in “The Newark Museum’s Service to Schools,” Bulletin of the American Library Association 31, no. 10 (1937): 655–58. 8  Shales, Made in Newark, 261–63. 9  Shales, Made in Newark, 115–18, 173–74. 10  Shales, Made in Newark, 194–200. Tellingly, the

term Homelands was applied equally to European immigrants and African Americans, all of whom were deemed foreigners. 11  The maker’s name is unrecorded. Audsley

may have acquired it in South Africa; his gift was accompanied by a photograph, presumably his, of an unidentified woman wearing a similar beadwork panel that he also gave to the museum in 1917; it is no longer in the collection. 12  John Cotton Dana, A Plan for a New Museum

21  For more on this program, whose impact

remains understudied, see Sally Anne Duncan and Andrew McClellan, The Art of Curating: Paul J. Sachs and the Museum Course at Harvard (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2018). Duncan and McClellan also address the many barriers women faced in advancing their careers as museum professionals. 22  Shales, Made in Newark, 87. Shales attends to

the overlooked role of women in the founding of the Newark Museum, including Winser, throughout this publication. See also Timothy J. Crist, “Beatrice Winser: Librarian, Museum Director, and Advocate for Women’s Equality,” New Jersey Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6, no. 1 (2020): 21–34. 23  See Winser, “The Newark Museum’s Service to

(Woodstock, VT: Elm Tree, 1920), 57.

Schools.”

13  I provide more extensive discussion of the

24  “Through the kindness of the Newark Museum

history of Newark’s African art collection and its

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able to see an exhibit of native African art, which showed creative genius and great skill,” “Report of the New Jersey Interracial Conference of Church Women, Stacy-Trent Hotel, Trenton, Trenton, N. J., May 8, 9 and 10, 1930,” Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America Records, 1894–1952, NCC RG 18, box 56, folder 13, Presbyterian Historical Society. Adams mentions this exhibition and another one in 1937 of African art from the Newark Museum’s lending collection being exhibited at interracial conferences organized by the New Jersey Church Women’s Committee of the FCC. See Betty Livingston Adams, Black Women’s Christian Activism (New York: NYU Press, 2016), 97; and “The Best Hotel on the Boardwalk”: Church Women, Negro Art, and the Construction of Interracial Space in the Interwar Years,” in Sensational Religion, ed. Sally M. Promey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 288. 25  My discussion of the Newark Museum’s wartime

programming draws upon a summary of research conducted on this topic for me by Ava Hess, former research associate at the museum, personal communication, December 30, 2017. 26  Beatrice Winser, “Director’s Report for 1943

Made to the Trustees on January 18, 1944,” Annual Reports, Library & Archives, NMOA. 27  Information here from Theaters of War 1942—

Docentry and General Materials, Exhibit Files, box 57, Library & Archives, NMOA. The exhibition, it seems, was referred to as both Native Peoples in Theaters of War and Theaters of War—Countries and Native Peoples. 28  Museum of Modern Art Opens Exhibition

Bali, Background for War, press release [August 1943], Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 55.9. Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_press -release_325409.pdf.

Museum News: “We can be certain that the rapid opening up of Africa during this war will be a development, not merely of railways, airports, and their supply routes, but also one which is social and psychological. African aspirations toward self-­ government will be stimulated. Intelligent anticipation of political differences is necessary if future unrest is to be avoided.” 31  Beatrice Winser, “Unity for Democracy,” news

clipping (inscribed “Star Ledger, 4/8/43”). Press scrapbook, 1943, Library & Archives, NMOA. 32  “Editorial,” Council on African Affairs, New

Africa 2, no. 1 (August 1943), W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312), Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, UMass Amherst Libraries. The masthead of its newly launched monthly bulletin, New Africa, proclaimed the organization “dedicated to new relations with Africa—for victory over fascism, and in the interest of the African people.” 33  Winser, “Unity for Democracy.” 34  My reconstruction of the exhibit is based

on surviving label copy, some correspondence between Broner and the museum staff, and brief descriptions in news clippings saved by Broner and the museum. 35  Undated typewritten labels, Object Records,

Office of the Registrar, NMOA. 36  Beatrice Winser to Lida Broner, May 21, 1943,

Object Records, Office of the Registrar, NMOA. 37  “I think if you stress the proposals the Council

has made in the interest of African welfare you will be on the right track.” Max Yergan to Lida Broner, May 24, 1943, box 2, series II: Correspondence, Lida C. Broner Papers, Library and Archives, Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ (hereinafter LCB). 38  “Newark Museum Showing South Africa Arts,

/opencollection/exhibitions/1763 and https://www .brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/exhibitions /1805.

Crafts Brought Back by Woman Who Saved 28 Years to Make Trip,” Newark News clipping (stamped June 1, 1943), Press scrapbooks, 1943, Library & Archives, NMOA. Quotations in this and the following paragraph are from this article.

30  “Theaters of War—Countries and Native

39  Vance observed, “With increasing activity in

P­ eoples,” typewritten document prepared by Margaret Jarden (museum registrar), April 15, 1943, Exhibit Files, box 57, Theaters of War 1942— ­Docentry and General Material, Library & Archives, NMOA. The statement about war stimulating African independence was an observation reprinted from the December 1942 issue of Chicago’s Field

that theater of war, designers will probably get inspirations for patterns from that area.” “Native North African Jewelry Is Brought to Notice by the War,” news clipping (inscribed “Newark Evening News, January 13, 1943,” Press scrapbook, 1943, Library & Archives, NMOA.

29  See https://www.brooklynmuseum.org

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40  “Strange Customs Are Exhibited at Museum’s

52  “Robeson, Anderson Pack ‘Aid to Africa’

South Pacific Show,” news clipping (inscribed “Newark Evening News, February 27, 1943”]. Press scrapbook, 1943, Library & Archives, NMOA.

Meeting,” news clipping, The Voice: The New Paper for the New Negro, January 12, 1946, box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB.

41  Beatrice Winser to Lida Broner, June 17, 1943,

53  Council on African Affairs, New Africa 5, no. 1

Object Records, Office of the Registrar, NMOA.

(January 1946). W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, UMass Amherst Libraries.

42  Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black

Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 20. 43  Penny Von Eschen attributes this in part to

Hunton’s involvement. The summary of CAA activities here is based on Von Eschen, Race against Empire, 60–61. 44  In a letter to Lida Broner, Jabavu states that

Yergan “long ago dropped writing me.” D. D. T. Jabavu to Lida Broner, May 17, 1943, box 2, series II: Correspondence, LCB. 45  D. D. T. Jabavu to Lida Broner, March 13, 1944,

box 2, series II: Correspondence, LCB. Jabavu’s reference (“the King of Bechuanaland”) was to Seretse Khama, then a Fort Hare student and later the first president of Botswana. 46  “Newark Women’s Club to Hold Semi-Formal

54  Women’s International Affairs Club: Constitu-

tion, By-Laws, Club Highlights, undated pamphlet [after 1944], box 2, series II: Correspondence, LCB. 55  See “Negro Art Exhibit Officially Opened” and

“All-Colored Exhibit Opens at Artist of Today Studio,” undated news clippings, publications unknown [October 1945], box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB. The exhibition also included works by Richmond Barthe, Romare Bearden, William Johnson, Horace Pippin, Charles White. 56  Flora Morrison to Lida Broner, November 28

and December 13, 1945, box 2, series II: Correspondence, LCB. 57  Flora Morrison to Lida Broner, January 10, 1946,

box 2, series II: Correspondence, LCB.

Tea in New York” and “Women’s Club Sponsors Tea,” undated news clippings, publications unknown (each inscribed “July 1, 1944”), box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB.

58  Beatrice Winser to Lida Broner, April 16, 1947,

47  This is described in the “Club Highlights” of

60  Alice Kendall to Lida Broner, June 10, 1947,

the WIAC’s Constitution, Bylaws, box 2, series II: Correspondence, LCB. Tantsi’s February 19, 1944, obituary, published in the Pittsburgh Courier, was saved by Broner in her scrapbook, box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB. 48  “Kumar Goshal to Be Here Oct. 24,” undated

Object Records, Office of the Registrar, NMOA. 59  Beatrice Winser to Lida Broner, April 23, 1947,

Object Records, Office of the Registrar, NMOA. Object Records, Office of the Registrar, NMOA. 61  Alice Kendall to Lida Broner, August 14, 1947,

box 2, series II: Correspondence, LCB. 62  Alice Kendall to Lida Broner, June 23, 1947,

box 2, series II: Correspondence, LCB.

news clipping (probably October 1943), publication unknown, box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB. For more on Kumar Goshal, see Vijay Prashad, “An Indian Journalist in the African American Press,” Asian American Writer’s Workshop, 2022, https://aaww.org/vijay-prashad-global-jim-crow/. 49  “International Affairs Club Hostess to District

Units,” news clipping (inscribed “Oct. 28–1944 ­ ewark News”), box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, LCB. N 50  John Kaiser to Lida Broner, June 7, 1945, box 2,

series II: Correspondence, LCB. 51  Council on African Affairs, New Africa 5, no. 1

(January 1946), W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312), Robert S. Cox Special Collections and ­University Archives Research Center, UMass Amherst Libraries.

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Epilogue

Mother of the Oceans

In early March of 1948, a dismayed Lida Broner fired off a typewritten letter to W. E. B. Du Bois, who had recently become chair of the Policy Committee for the Council on African Affairs. Writing in her capacity as president of the CAA’s auxiliary, the Women’s International Affairs Club, Broner conveyed their deep concerns that the “government has listed the Council as a subversive organization planning the overthrow of our government.” Broner criticized the way Du Bois was handling these accusations. “I must say that I never read so many words in my life that meant absolutely nothing with regard to such a matter as the Council now has to go through,” she wrote, referring to the draft policy statement he had circulated among CAA members for review. She noted that already “several members of the Council have been arrested as communist,” and added that the majority “are upright loyal American citizens.” Broner concluded by asserting her position regarding the organization: “In this country we still have political freedom and freedom of speech. Therefore a man’s political point of view is his personal and private affair. If there are some communists in the Council it is our job to prove that the Council is not a communist organization.”1 Broner’s concerns reflect the major geopolitical shift that had occurred with the introduction of the Truman Doctrine in March 1947, which aimed to consolidate opposition to communism. The American president’s redefinition of its foreign policy established the ideological basis for the Cold War, and, as Penny Von Eschen has argued, ultimately led to the breakdown of broad anticolonial alliances that had solidified during the war.2 This included the CAA, whose leadership was divided on US foreign policy. The organization’s chair, Paul Robeson, and his allies, which included Du Bois, were opposed to the Truman Doctrine, believing that it undermined the organization’s efforts toward African self-determination. On the other side, the executive director, Max Yergan, along with Broner and others, maintained that the organization should be nonpartisan. The split eventually led to Yergan’s dismissal in September 1948, which prompted the resignation of several prominent CAA members. Others, like the women’s rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune, distanced themselves from the organization because of its “Communist faction.”3 The rift in the CAA illustrates the rapid turn of anticolonial politics prompted by the Cold War, as focus shifted from international alliances to fighting discrimination at home. Von Eschen observes that “the affirmation by many black American leaders that ‘Negroes are Americans’ left no room for the claim of commonality with 199

FIG. 54   Broner documented media coverage of her organizing work for the Foreign Missionary Board of Pilgrim Baptist Church during the 1950s in another scrapbook.

Africans and other oppressed peoples,” a position that would profoundly impact civil rights politics in the United States in the coming decades.4 Broner, too, parted ways with the CAA in 1948 and, it seems, dissolved her women’s auxiliary around the same time. But she remained internationally minded throughout her life, embodying her Zulu name, No’­Lwandle —which means “Mother of the Oceans” —even if she no longer used it in her signature.5 In the 1950s she devoted herself to missionary work as president of the Foreign Missionary Board (FMB) of Pilgrim Baptist Church while continuing to support herself as a domestic and hair stylist. Broner led church efforts to support African students studying in the United States and to ship books to schools in South Africa, Uganda, and Liberia; she documented this organizing work in the pages of a new scrapbook. A 1951 news clipping shows Broner seated with other FMB women amid piles of books (fig. 54), part of a three-hundred-pound shipment being sent to Baptist Secondary School in Uganda and to Albert High School in Monrovia, Liberia. Broner took a special interest in Liberia, the west African nation settled by free and formerly enslaved African Americans in the nineteenth century, and even had hopes to travel there herself. In 1963 she fulfilled a longtime ambition to travel around the world—on the Norwegian line Oslofjord, with stops in nineteen ports including Yokohama, Manila, Bombay, Beirut, and Tangiers—a plan she had shared with Beatrice Winser so many years before.6 Broner continued to loan the South African objects that remained in her possession to sporadic local exhibitions until the early 1960s. Among these were a Festival of Nations exhibition organized by Newark’s YWCA in 1948 and an “African exhibit” at South Side High School, where her 200

Epilogue

g­ randchildren attended school, in 1961. The Newark Museum included a small selection of the works she donated in three exhibitions: Circus in 1951, and It’s a Small World and Art in Life in Africa, both in 1954.7 Broner kept letters related to the loan exhibitions and the notices she received when her gifts were on display at the museum, but she did not save any news clippings about these more generic exhibitions in her scrapbook, nor were they connected to her organizing work and activism. Yet on those few occasions when works from her collection were exhibited at the museum, she brought her young grandchildren to see them, sharing stories about the people who gave them to her.8 For Broner, these objects were touchstones, connecting her with individuals and lived experiences. One imagines that the presence of her African beer cup, exhibited in It’s a Small World, prompted a vivid memory of her visit with Mr. and Mrs. Masole and her meeting with the women eager to form a club despite the threat of government censorship in the mining town of Brakpan. The Masoles were among the South African friends Broner corresponded with over the decades, well into the apartheid years and the height of resistance movements there in the 1960s and 1970s. Their letters and Christmas cards offer cheery bits of news, affectionate greetings, and, at times, cautiously worded windows into the increasing challenges faced by South Africans under its state-sponsored system of racial segregation and oppression. Isaac (I. B. S.) Masole wrote regular letters to the Ocean Queen, as he warmly called her, until old age, sending Broner newspapers and pamphlets and also black magazines like Zonk! and Drum for her grandchildren. “We must maintain the expansion of international education as much as we possibly can,” Masole wrote in September 1948.9 Their free exchange of news and pleasantries is tempered by the shadow of surveillance and repression in their later letters. Writing in October 1964, Masole boasted about being spry enough in his seventies to play tennis with James Moroka, former ANC president (whom Broner had met), but added, “In this country it is not safe to discuss or write to a friend about the events that are taking place.”10 In return, Broner sent “negro dolls” from “Granny Lida,” symbols of race pride treasured by the Masoles’s granddaughters who saved them for their own daughters “so you can be remembered by our family.”11 Broner kept in touch with Florence and D. D. T. Jabavu until their deaths in 1951 and 1959, respectively, sharing updates about family and mutual friends along with news of Joe Louis’s latest triumphs (“I enjoy the boxing pictures you always send me when Negroes get into the limelight,” D. D. T. wrote).12 And in 1972, after decades of silence, Rilda Marta (now Rilda Jiya) resumed her transatlantic correspondence with her “beloved mother,” describing Mother of the Oceans

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the path of her difficult life and straitened circumstances.13 Divorced, living in a township home, and forced to rent out rooms to strangers to make ends meet, Marta’s aspirations for success as a teacher and beauty specialist were cut short by the harsh realities of an imposed system of white supremacy. Broner’s last letter from South Africa, which she received shortly before her death on January 6, 1982, was from her “loving daughter” Marta, congratulating her on the occasion of her eighty-sixth birthday.14 Throughout these decades, the sixty objects that Broner donated to the Newark Museum in 1947 mostly remained in storage, with the exception of those few early exhibitions. In the mid-1950s, under director Katherine Coffey (the museum’s fourth director and the third woman to lead it), Newark shifted course regarding its African collections to focus more on aesthetics.15 The museum was responding to growing interest in African sculpture in particular, as New York became the center of the African art market following World War II. Art museums were increasingly exhibiting and collecting masks and figural sculpture from west Africa, works whose formal elements were viewed as instrumental to the development of Western modernist aesthetics. The Newark Museum hired Columbia University professor Paul Wingert as a consultant in 1954; he proposed bolstering what he described as the museum’s “predominantly ethnological” holdings by acquiring sculpture that was “excellent from the standpoint of art.”16 Mirroring a broader postwar formalist trend in the art world, Newark carried forward the aesthetic reorientation of its African holdings in a series of exhibitions over the next decade that included Significant Forms in 1956, Masks and Headdresses in 1961, and Primitive Design: Sources and Meaning in 1963. The museum’s fifth director, Samuel C. Miller, joined the museum in 1967, first as assistant to Coffey before taking on leadership of the institution in 1968. Miller’s arrival coincided with the major civil disturbances that erupted in Newark that summer. As director, he affirmed the museum’s role in rebuilding the city. He focused institutional resources on community relations, especially with Newark’s majority African American population, and he emphasized the representation of African and African American art. In his first year the museum organized the major exhibition Art of Africa, which opened on January 25, 1969. Conceived as a survey of key sculptural traditions, it presented more than one hundred works from the collection in a striking installation that foregrounded aesthetics but offered little cultural context (fig. 55). It attracted some 12,000 visitors, breaking all attendance records, and was especially well received by the city’s African American communities. It is possible that Lida Broner attended. We do know that none of the humble everyday objects she donated to the museum 202

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FIG. 55   Arts of Africa exhibition at Newark Museum, 1969. Exhibition Photographs. Newark Museum of Art Archives.

were included in this exhibition. They were overlooked in favor of the more dramatic and better-known masks and figural sculptures, a legacy of modernist taste. It is ironic that at the height of the city’s Black Power movement, the objects gifted to Lida Broner—imbricated with the struggles and aspirations of South Africans in the pre-apartheid era and used on behalf of anticolonial activism—remained in storage, as they would for the rest of the twentieth century. And as I confessed in the prologue to this story, I, too, overlooked Broner’s South African collection for much of my tenure at the Newark Museum. When I first picked up that ceramic cup given to Broner by “Mother Masole” and other works from her collection in the museum’s storage room, I examined them as any museum specialist of my place and time would. My curatorial training and advanced degree in African art history gave me an understanding of “representative” style and how to determine authenticity and assess aesthetic quality. By these standards, the goblet was a mere curio in the Sotho style, probably made for sale. Even as a curator seeking to expand the canon and challenge accepted criteria of aesthetic judgment, and as a scholar interested in the role of collectors in shaping Western perceptions about African art, it was hard for me to see how I might use these objects. The gift of Broner’s archive in 2014 changed all that. It not only provided additional context for her objects, it opened an entry into understanding Mother of the Oceans

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her initial gift. Approaching Broner’s collection as archive—considering these objects together with the photographs she assembled in albums, her journal and letters, the news clippings and ephemera that she preserved in scrapbooks, as well as the labels, accession cards, and other materials associated with their museum lives—has enriched its potential to illuminate the past.17 It moves us beyond thinking about the objects in Broner’s collection through the well-worn binaries of art or ethnography, traditional or modern, the authentic or touristic. Reconstructing the archival history of Broner’s collection—its backstory and biography—replaces curatorial standards of evaluation with the meaningful strata of her lived experience that can embrace ambiguity and nuance. These resonant objects, to paraphrase Stephen Greenblatt, are now animated by a chorus of intertwined voices, many of them internationally minded black women, like Broner, whose stories have been neglected and overlooked.18 We gain an intimate view of the ideas and events that shaped their lives and to which they contributed through desire and determination. In this book, I use the term “activist collector” to describe Lida Clanton Broner because she assembled this group of objects to do something, to be mobilized on behalf of a larger cause. They ended up at a museum whose founding director, John Cotton Dana, believed that “the worth of a museum object is in its use.”19 And yet for decades Broner’s collection remained sequestered away and the story of her activism was unknown even to her grandchildren, who knew that she “loved Africa.” In the same way that Broner’s grassroots organizing connected her to other people, places, and ideas, this modest group of gifts “to show in America” connects us to a much richer story than any collection of representative regions and object types ever could. They are useful objects, but in a greater sense than either Broner or her gift givers intended, for they allow us not only to reach into the past but to contemplate their relevance in the present day. The conditions of their making, the forces and networks that brought them together, and the motivations for mobilizing them as a collection reverberate in current debates about cultural representation, the role of heritage and whose voices are recorded, particularly in relation to identity, and are echoed in ongoing struggles for racial and gender equity. This, then, is the archival potential of Lida Clanton Broner’s collection and, ultimately, why her story matters.20

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Notes 1  Lida Broner to W. E. B. Du Bois, March 5, 1948,

15  For a more expansive history of African art at

W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312), Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, UMass Amherst Libraries.

the Newark Museum, see Christa Clarke, “From Ethnology to the Arts of Global Africa,” in Arts of Global Africa: The Newark Museum Collection, ed. Christa Clarke (Newark: Newark Museum, 2018), 13–31.

2  Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire:

Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 6. 3  Von Eschen, Race against Empire, 115–16. 4  Von Eschen, Race against Empire, 97. 5  Broner’s internationalism is much like that of

16  Unsigned and undated internal memo, “Recom-

mendations,” 1954, Object Records, Office of the Registrar, Newark Museum of Art. 17  As discussed in the prologue, my methodolog-

Mary McLeod Bethune, president of the National Council of Negro Women and fellow CAA member, as described by Grace V. Leslie in her “‘United, We Build a Free World’: The Internationalism of Mary McLeod Bethune and the National Council of Negro Women,” in To Turn the World Over: Black Women and Internationalism, ed. Keisha N. Blain and Tiffany M. Gill (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 192–218. Leslie proposes that Bethune represents a “more widespread and complicated internationalism” that is a counterpoint to the more radical black internationalism of women like Eslanda Robeson.

ical approach follows that modeled by Carolyn Hamilton and Nessa Leibhammer in “Ethnologised Pasts and Their Archival Futures: Construing the Archive of Southern KwaZulu-Natal Pertinent to the Period before 1910,” in Tribing and Untribing the Archive: Identity and the Material Record in Southern KwaZulu-Natal in the Late Independent and Colonial Periods, ed. Carolyn Hamilton and Nessa Leibhammer (Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2016), 413–49. The concepts of backstory and biography used here are proposed by Hamilton in “Backstory, Biography, and the Life of the James Stuart Archive,” History in Africa 38 (2011): 319–41.

6  See box 4, series V: Scrapbooks, and box 2,

18  See Stephen Greenblatt, “Resonance and

series II: Correspondence, Lida C. Broner Papers, Library and Archives, Newark Museum of Art, Newark, New Jersey (hereinafter LCB). 7  Box 2, series II: Correspondence, LCB.

Wonder,” in Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 42–55.

8  David Clanton shared this memory with me,

19  John Cotton Dana, The New Museum (Wood-

personal communication, December 30, 2021.

stock, VT: Elm Tree, 1917), 37.

9  I. B. S. Masole to Lida Broner, September 4, 1948,

20  Sara Byala makes a compelling and poignant

box 2, series VI: Miscellanies, LCB.

parallel argument regarding the present-day relevance of MuseumAfrica through her detailed reconstruction of its archival history in A Place That Matters Yet: John Gubbins’s MuseumAfrica in the Postcolonial World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

10  I. B. S. Masole to Lida Broner, October 7, 1964,

box 2, series VI: Miscellanies. LCB. 11  Constance Masole to Lida Broner, n.d., 1977

(postmark), box 2, series VI: Miscellanies, LCB. I. B. S. Masole refers to Broner as “Granny Lida” in a letter, November 29, 1968. 12  D. D. T. Jabavu to Lida Broner, August 21, 1954,

box 2, series VI: Miscellanies, LCB. 13  Rilda Jiya (Marta) to Lida Broner, May 16, 1972,

box 2, series VI: Miscellanies, LCB. 14  Rilda Jiya (Marta) to Lida Broner, July 10, 1981,

box 2, series VI: Miscellanies, LCB.

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About the Author Christa Clarke is an independent curator and research affiliate at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. As the former senior curator of Arts of Global Africa at The Newark Museum of Art, her acquisitions and exhibitions sought to reposition African visual culture at the center of global discourses; her work there was supported with major grants from the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment of Humanities. She was curator of African art at the Neuberger Museum of Art from 1999 to 2002 and has served as consulting curator at Smith College Museum of Art, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Williams College Museum of Art, and the Memphis Brooks Museum. Clarke has also been a research fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harvard University, and the Clark Art Institute, and held teaching appointments at NYU Abu Dhabi, Boston University, University of Pennsylvania, George Washington University, Drew University, and Rutgers University. Her publications include Representing Africa in American Art Museums (2011, co-edited with Kathleen Berzock), the award-winning African Art at the Barnes Foundation (2015), and Arts of Global Africa: The Newark Museum Collection (2018). From 2017 to 2019, she served as president of the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC), of which she is now a lifetime trustee. She received her BA from University of Virginia and her MA and PhD from the University of Maryland.

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Copyright © 2022 Newark Museum of Art All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Control Number: 2022942427 ISBN 978-1-9788-3615-0 Published by The Newark Museum of Art 49 Washington Street Newark, New Jersey 07102 newarkmuseumart.org Published by arrangement with Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey rutgersuniversitypress.org Produced by Lucia | Marquand, Seattle luciamarquand.com Edited by Mary Christian Designed by Zach Hooker Typeset in Freight Text Pro by Maggie Lee Proofread by Carrie Wicks Color management by I/O Color, Seattle Printed and bound in China by C&C Offset Printing

Unless otherwise indicated, all objects and archival material illustrated in this book are from the Lida C. Broner collection at The Newark Museum of Art. Those with accession numbers beginning with 47 were given to the Museum by Broner in 1947, the remainder by her grandsons in 2014 and 2016. Their credit line is Gift of Lida C. Broner, 1947 and The Lida Clanton Broner Collection, Gift of her grandsons Albert, David, and Thomas Clanton, 2014 or 2016, respectively. Photography of The Newark Museum of Art’s objects is by Richard Goodbody. Front cover: Lida Clanton Broner, probably 1939, photographed in Xhosa dress with Zulu beadwork at Columbus Studio, Newark, NJ, collection of the Clanton Family. p. 2: Lida Broner’s passport for her 1938 journey to South Africa. p. 4: Unrecorded Xhosa artist, “Love letter” necklace (iphoco), see fig. 41. p. 7: Lida Broner and an unidentified young girl, possibly Hester Baskerville, dressed in African attire, see fig. 46. p. 12: Hand purse, see fig. 41.

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The Newark Museum of Art, a not-for-profit museum of art and science, receives operating support from the City of Newark, the State of New Jersey, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State (a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts), the New Jersey Cultural Trust, the Prudential Foundation, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the Victoria Foundation, the PSEG Foundation, the Phyllis Bolton Administrative Trust, the Wallace Foundation, and other corporations, foundations, and individuals. Funds for acquisitions and activities other than operations are provided by members and other contributors.