TSITSI ELLA JAJI

The Oxford English Dictionary’s primary definition of the Latin prefix trans– is “across, to, or on the farther side of, beyond, over”. Charlotte Makgoma Manye (later Mrs. Maxeke)^{[1]I use “Charlotte Manye Maxeke” throughout this essay, although Manye only married in 1903. Likewise, her sister Kate Manye Makanya was still Kate Manye at the time she enters into this story. My use of their combined names makes deference to the value assigned marriage and the position of wife within kinship structures of the period in South Africa while still recognizing their individual identities, and membership in the Manye family.} engaged in multiple exercises in such writing across and beyond the Atlantic between her South African home and her sojourns in England and the U.S. Her correspondences bolstered material and affective cross-Atlantic solidarity in a network of women who belonged to the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Here I analyze her musical performance, writing, and political work as an integral oeuvre, in which form, in the musical sense, gesture, and transposition are key.^{[2]As with Dube, despite her pioneering role in South Africa’s history, Manye has been the subject of only one biography – a pamphlet of barely twenty pages written by future ANC president, Dr. A. B. Xuma. The pamphlet is entitled Charlotte Manye (Maxeke) Or What An Educated African Girl Can Do (Johannesburg: Women’s Parent Mite Missionary Society of the AME Church, 1930). Other valuable, though brief, discussions are found in Veit Erlmann’s work on turn-of-the-century music, and J. Mutero Chirenje and James Campbell’s histories of the AME and independent churches, yet these are bounded by scholarly and historical categories, obscuring the full scope of her work.} This comprehensive account of how consistently Manye Maxeke interwove her public roles reveals an imprint of transnational black feminist solidarity on this period that often goes unrecognized. Manye Maxeke expressed her vision in multiple voices as a world-touring contralto, as a correspondent with African Americans who embraced her during her studies in the U.S., and as an activist for women in the South African prison system. Taken together, these expressive forms reveal the potential of transcription as a strategy Manye Maxeke adopted in writing on and through her body the very correspondence between South African and African American experiences of racial and gender oppression that made transnational black solidarity so necessary. Her methodology was rooted in adapting various aural structures from the stage to the page, and allowed her to attain a unique if ambivalent position of influence within state and religious structures. She first became a pivotal figure connecting blacks in the U.S. and South Africa through her experiences in education, and it is with these I begin.

By the turn of the century mission schools like the Wesleyan School in Kimberly where Maxeke herself taught had adopted and were reproducing the Victorian ideal of domestic femininity. While most schools admitted students regardless of gender, female students were less likely than their male counterparts to gain family permission to study.^{[3]As outlined in more detail below, Manye Maxeke made special mention of this issue in her letters to her supporters in the U.S. whcn launching her work as a college-educated teacher in the rural Transvaal.} A course of study that fitted women to be ideal Christian, literate helpmates for male clergy and skilled workers was crucial then, for women, access to formal education. Beyond the core subjects of reading and math, girls studied dressmaking, domestic science, and sometimes teaching methods. The lively debates over education in South Africa at that time mirrored those among African Americans in the U.S., where the classical schooling offered at Fisk, Hampton, and Wilberforce were counterposed to Tuskegee Institutes’ industrial course. However, women students rarely had such options open, and followed a program of study that was a compromise between domestic and academic pursuits. An article in the newspaper, Imvo Zabantsundu, which appeared after the release of the Lovedale School Girls’ Report of 1889 illustrates the concerns of the day:

The part Native young women are called upon to play in our economical system is, in importance, second to none. All the domestic arrangements, for weal or for woe, hinge upon them. And great would be the happiness of households if native young women were up to the domestic ropes.^{[4]Cited in J. Mutero Chirenje, Ethiopianism and Afro-Americans in Southern Africa, 1883-1916 (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State UP, 1987), 31. Lovedale was, of course, one of the flagship mission schools.}

As with discourses of ideal domesticity in other parts of the world, a woman’s sphere of influence was confmed to the home. Manye Maxeke’s own view on “a woman’s place”, within the conceptual and material Home was a complex one and it informed much of her activism She had tested conventional domestic boundaries (both household and geopolitical) throughout her life, beginning with her early career in music.

Manye Maxeke made her debut as a solo contralto singer at a Kimberley community concert in September 1890, barely two months after Orpheus McAdoo’s ensemble, the Virginia Jubilee Singers, had first arrived in Cape Town.^{[5]For more on Maxeke’s musical career, see Erlmann, African Stars and Music, Modernity and the Global Imagination (Chicago: U Chicago P. 1991).} The American group was sensationally popular, inspiring a number of black elite local choirs whose preferences ran toward “modern” forms of leisure to adopt African American spirituals into their repertoire. One such group, the African Jubilee Singers (also known as the South African Choir) soon planned a tour to Britain organized by a set of enterprising impresarios, J. Balmer, Walter Letty, and Paul Xiniwe.^{[6]There is some variance in accounts of who was involved. While Erlmann mentions Balmer and Letty, Chirenje counts Xiniwe as a key figure. There also appear to have been additional managers and agents in the overseas venues.} Their stated aim was to raise 10,000 pounds for building technical schools in South Africa, a mission clearly inspired by the Fisk Jubilee Singers’ fundraising efforts. However, the shoddy management of the tour suggests that Balmer and his partners were far more interested in their own private profit than altruism.^{[7]See Chirenje, Ethiopianism, 39 and Erlmann, African Stars, 47. Erlmann details the adventures of the African Jubilee Singers in the second chapter of African Stars. He gives a full account of the parallel journeys of Orpheus McAdoo’s Jubilee Singers and its various splinter groups and the two African Jubilee Singers’ tours.} Charlotte Manye and her sister Kate were among the choir’s first recruits, and embarked on the first international concert tour in 1891. Many British listeners responded enthusiastically to the choir. Manye Maxeke’s biographer Xuma noted that “they had the unique experience of singing before the late Queen Victoria and other members of the Royal Family, who enjoyed their rendering of English songs and still more particularly of the native compositions set to more or less traditional tunes.^{[8]Xuma, Charlotte Manye (Maxeke), 11.} However, their performances also fueled debate on what authentic South African voices ought to sound like, and as Veit Erlmann points out, some listeners were disappointed by the choir’s failure to perform their difference sufficiently.

The audience’s disappointment was aural for the concert was not short on visual spectacle: the costuming provided lurid caricature stereotypes contrasting “raw” (as the language of the period put it) and “civilized natives”. The choir sang the first half of the program, devoted to “native songs”, in purportedly traditional dress, featuring animal skins from a hodgepodge of exotic locales (induding a tiger pelt that somehow strayed from orientalized Asia to savage Africa), and other signs of primitiveness. After a quick costume change during the intermission, they performed the second half’s program of standard Victorian amateur repertoire pieces in “modern”, which is to say English, fashions of the day. The object lesson was to demonstrate how civilization’s arts could transform guileless authentic natives into modern sophisticates. In order for this lesson to hold true, the knowledge that the signs of authenticity were a transcription of metropolitan fantasies onto black bodies had to be concealed by the mutual consent of audience and performers, the equivalent of a stage whisper. The audience was to suppress any doubts over how a “native” song came to fall into four-part harmony along the lines of European hymnody, or why Southern Africans were singing of (U.S. Southern) cotton, but rather were to marvel at how wondrously transformed they looked and sounded once the ostensibly improving conventions of Victorian concert performance were transcribed onto their bodies. That this was the same decade that blacks in Britain were organizing the international Pan-African Conference only shows how outrageous the reception of these performances was. Back home, South Africans who got wind of the staging arrangements were appalled that leading members of the black elite would appear in clothing that missionaries had convinced them symbolized the “barbarism” from which the amakholwa had been rescued. While their anxieties centered on the visual field, British audiences were troubled that the contrast was visible but not audible enough.^{[9]Erlmann fgs 4.1 and 4.2 (129-30) illustrate this vividly.}

Homi Bhabha’s analysis of colonial mimicry^{[10]Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York, Routledge, 1993), 85-92.} provides a useful lens for understanding why some found that the singers veered too close to European standards. The African choir’s Victorian segment presented the performers as the successful exemplars of the imperial civilizing project, or in Bhabha’s terms, as “subject[s) of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite”. However, the colonial desire for (and consumption of) such exemplary “natives” was also vulnerable to a menacing instability of (re)presentation, for maintaining white-ness depended on reproducing and marking signal differences. Bhabha analyzes colonial mimicry within the register of scopic desire, but what is striking in Manye Maxeke and her compatriots’ performance is that colonial mimicry operates in the aural register. Reactions in the British press were mixed. The weekly magazine South Africa judged that the “inevitable European harmonies … suggestive rather of an English tonic sol-fa class than savage strains” detracted from the value of the performance.^{[11] South Africa, 4 July 1891: 17, cited in Erlmann, 112.} The choir’s mastery of a range of idioms abandoned the function of standard colonial spectacle, to shore up confidence in metropolitan modernity by displaying colonial primitiveness. Instead, the evidence that the imperial “civilizing mission” could produce subjects so adept at maneuvering across languages, cultures, and mediums was deeply troubling for it revealed that a teleological arc from premodern “native” authenticity to a staid Victorian modernity might land in the wrong key, a key not easily distinguished from the familiar (literally, too close to diatonic Western harmonies). The imperial ear, alarmingly, did not, in fact, have a monopoly on perfect pitch.

In the context of these fraught performances, Mange Maxeke developed an ability to rivet an audience’s attention while disorganizing and frustrating their scopic and aural desires, and instead projecting before them issues they would rather ignore. If her musical performances simultaneously confused, delighted, and disappointed, her interviews with the British press similarly disarmed her audience. She reinforced their national ego ideal as exemplars of a uniquely British fairness, but used this as a challenge to marshal their support for human rights and educational opportunities for blacks in South Africa:

Let us be in Africa even as we are in England. Here we are treated as men and women. Yonder we are but as cattle. But in Africa, as in England, we are human…. Help us to found the schools for which we pray, where our people could learn to labour…, give our children free education … shut up the canteens, and take away the drink. These four things we ask from the English. Do not say us nay.^{[12]The Review of Reviews, ed. William T. Stead: September 1891 (cited in Erlmann, “Spectatorial Lust in Africans on Stage, 107).}

The whole passage lilts metrically and uses such lyrical devices as chiasmus deftly. In particular, the last sentence, with its bold imperative, direct address, alliterating stress on “not” and “nay” and rhyme (say/nay), reveals a sure inner ear for English rhetoric. She would remain committed to this agenda for reform throughout her career, challenging white liberals to ratify the colonial propaganda of a “civilizing mission” by recognizing the emerging modern black middle class and improving access to education. And she continued to use the rhetorical tactic of first lulling her audience into the comfort of familiar concord and then accenting the discord between such relationships and current situations to motivate action. The tensions between consonance and dissonance defined the putatively Western diachronic musical grammar the African choir so provocatively mastered, and also characterized Manye Maxeke’s discursive praxes: in this way she transcribed the most fundamental musical structures in her early career into her later textual output.

Poor management and internal strife brought the British tour to a dismal end, and Manye Maxeke was the only member of the original choir to agree to a second tour, this time destined for the U.S. and Canada with a much smaller ensemble of six. This tour was again derailed by the producers’ incompetence: when Balmer ran out of money he shamelessly abandoned the group, leaving them stranded and broke in Cleveland, Ohio. This was a turning point in Manye Maxeke’s life. Her biographer, Xuma, describes it in characteristically vivid terms. Upon meeting the choir, a “vision at once flamed into [AME Reverend Reverdy C. Ransom]’s mind. He asked them if they did not want an education. They were eager for it”^{[13]Xuma, Charlotte Manye (Maxeke), 11.} and he soon obtained permission, through rather involved means. Secretary of Missions, D. Derrick, unable to obtain official consent from the managers of the tour or her parents,

“kidnapped” Charlotte, a consenting party, and despatched [sic] her to Wilberforce (University, Xenia Ohio] where she was received temporarily as one of the family in Bishop Arnett’s, home. Later she was adopted by the Third Episcopal District as their African daughter,^{[14]Ibid., 12.}

Two things stand out in Xuma’s account First, his tone turns the relatively mundane matter of college registrafion into a melodrama complete with exaggerated emotion, sudden (presumably divine) inspiration, and international intrigue. Second, his language stresses kinship while casting Manye Maxeke as a perpetual minor, a daughter in need of multiple layers of parenting, and I will return to the quesfion of kinship below.

Wilberforce was the flagship American Methodist Episcopal institution, the first private black university in the U.S., and one that offered a classical education. Its faculty included internationally prominent black intellectuals, induding Charlotte’s professor W. E. B. Du Bois, and philologist William Scarborough, both of whom would soon participate in the Pan-African Conference of 1900. Xenia was also home to an unusually large community of college-educated prosperous blacks so that Charlotte not only had much to write home about, but she also transformed Southern African religious history through her letters home.

Writing to her sister, Kate Manye Makanya, Charlotte described the African Methodist Episcopal church in the U.S. and when Kate shared a letter with their uncle Rev. J. M. Mokone, he caught Charlotte’s enthusiasm and sought to merge his separatist Ethiopianist church with the U.S. denomination. The letter in question does not survive in manuscript, but rather “has been preserved as a kind of oral tradition within the South African AME Church”^{[15]James Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and in South Africa, (Chapel Hill: U North Carolina P, 1998), 134. Much of what is known of the letter is from an unpublished interview with her sister The interview by Margaret McCord (1954) was made available to Erlmann, who cites it in Music, Modernity and the Global Imagination, 107.} and the textual transcriptions of this oral tradition are revealing as we consider Charlotte Manye Maxeke’s agency as an educated black woman in her time. Campbell’s history of the AME Church is typical of multiple versions of the events that adopt a speculative and wondrous tone oddly out of tune in an otherwise sober account:

Sometime in 1894, Charlotte Manye wrote to her sister Kate in Johannesburg, apparently on paper emblazoned with the letterhead of AME Bishop Henry Thrner,… Kate chanced to show the letter to Mangena Mokone…. After reading Charlotte’s rapturous descriptions of Wilberforce, Mokone penned a brief letter to Bishop Turner, dated May 1895. A brief courtship ensued.^{[16]Ibid., 134 (my italics).}

The two denominations soon forged formal ties. The version L. L. Berry gives in A Century of Missions of the African Methodist Episcopal Church 1840-1940 is even more striking in tone:

The counterpart to the prophecy of Isaiah as he referred to the introduction and peaceful reign of the Church of Jesus Christ when he said, “And a little child shall lead them”, may be applied to this introduction of the Ethiopian Church of South Africa to the African Methodist Episcopal Church, for it was a native young woman of South Africa, Catherine [sic] Manye, who first called the attention of the Rev. M. M. Mokone to Bishop H. M. Thrner, of Atlanta, Ga., as the representative of the greatest Negro Church in the world, known as the African Methodist Episcopal Church.^{[17]Llewelyn I. Berry, Century of Missions of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1840-1940. (New York: Gutenberg, 1942), 74.}

Manye Maxeke’s activities were repeatedly described as signs, wonders, and fulfillments of biblical prophecies. These accounts honor Manye Maxeke’s remarkable impact on South African history; however they also obscure her agency by emphasizing her youth and ascribing the affective and intellectual labour of her writing to divine intervention in ways that male figures in this story were not described. Such narratives imply a degree of dependency in her interactions with friends and colleagues at Wilberforce that is not consistent with her public speaking record or with the energy and independence she brought to her work establishing schools once she returned to South Africa. Many accounts of the early days of the AME Church in South Africa imply that after her initial letter, Charlotte receded into relative obscurity.^{[18]Early twentieth-century versions of the establishing of the AME’s South African diocese mention material texts exchanged across the Atlantic. Chirenje, for example, provides information on letters Mokone, his assistant Reverend Xaba, and John Tule wrote to Turner, but does not mention Manye Maxeke.} Quite the contrary, the trans-Atlantic correspondence in 1895 did not suddenly exclude Manye Maxeke after the initial letter. According to the entry on Rev. Mokone in African Who’s Who, “[o]n the 31st May, 1895 Rev. Mokone wrote to Bishop Turner and Miss Charlotte Makhomo [sic] Manye. After this letter a regular correspondence was carried on between Bishop Turner, Rev. Mokone and Miss C. M. Manye”.^{[19]Mweli Skota, ed. African Who’s Who: An Illustrated Classified Register and National Biographical Dictionary of the Africans in the Transvaal, 15.} Mweli Skota, editor of the Who’s Who, not only knew Manye Maxeke, but also relied on her as one of the main contributors to the volume. She would have at the least proofread this entry on her uncle if not penned it, and it it should be taken seriously as a reliable source despite the absence of the letter referenced. A second detail seldom mentioned is that the print matter Bishop Turner mailed to Mokone to familiarize him with the AME Church induded music as well as text. When Mokone wrote requesting information on the denomination Turner sent “a Discipline, a hymnal, and other books”.^{[20]Charles Spenser Smith, A History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church: Bring a Volume Supplemental to A History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Philadelphia: A.M.E. Book Concern, 1922), 182. Supplement to Daniel Alexander Payne’s earlier edition.} Writing in 1922, church historian, Charles S. Smith viewed a hymnal as just one among many books, a form of print culture as legitimate and quotidian as any other textual object. Music was central to the culture of the church, and hymnals were deemed useful, indeed necessary elements for establishing an understanding between the American denomination and its would-be South African affiliates. Uniting South African believers with the AME church in the U.S. was achieved through an exchange of textual and musical print matter.

Manye Maxeke’s most important experiences in Xenia came through her ties to the Women’s Mite Missionary Society. No mere ladies auxiliary; the Society was an international organization that placed AME women at the fore-front of the exchanges between African American and South African (not to mention West African and West Indian) religious seekers. During her studies, Charlotte received financial support as a “daughter” of the local Xenia chapter. However, she was far more than a charity case: she became an active member and regularly addressed meetings.^{[21]Chirenje, Ethiopianism, 51.} As she honed her speaking skills, she drew on a rich heritage of female African American religious orators, induding Zilpha Elaw, Julia Foote, and Jarena Lee, for whom social justice and personal spiritual fulfillment were inseparable.^{[22]William Andrews’ volume Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986) remains an invaluable source for information on these women.} Charlotte urged her American sisters to support other South Africans wishing to study at Wilberforce, so that they could return to teach at home. Indeed, she was instrumental in facilitating scholarships for a number of young students, including her future husband, Marshall Maxeke.^{[23]According to Skota’s African Who’s Who, Marshall Maxeke was originally inspired to seek education in the U.S. by Orpheus McAdoo’s ensemble. His future wife helped him gain admission, and he went on to be ordained in the AME church. He compiled the first AME Church Hymn Book in the Xhosa language, indicating that Charlotte was not the only one transcribing black sounds across the Atlantic.}

When Manye Maxeke returned to South Africa, she joined Fannie Jackson Coppin in establishing an AME women’s organizational network in South Africa. Jackson Coppin, a pioneering administrator in the Philadelphia schools and former music teacher, had overseen the restructuring of The Women’s Mite Missionary Society to make its fundraising activities and internal communication more effective during her tenure at its helm. When her husband, Bishop Levi Coppin, was assigned to oversee the South African district in 1900, she accompanied him. Even after the missionary couple returned to the U.S. in 1904, Manye Maxeke would continue to work through the Society, maintaining ties with American-based branches through her letters, keeping them all apprised of her work as a teacher in the Transvaal. Initially, AME institutions in South Africa relied on financial support from American-based missionary funds, although they would soon show their own initiative in raising funds.^{[24]Bishop Levi J. Coppin records in his Unwritten History how South African chapters took extraordinary initiative in mobilizing. “It is a fact that one has pleasure in noting with especial emphasis, that our African women… are really enthusiastic Christian workers. They so soon learn that Christianity is not simply something to believe or recite, but, something to be, and to do.” (362).} So at first Manye Maxeke had to rely on her writing skills as a correspondent to request help from members of the Xenia chapter, as in her letter to the 1903 Convention of the Society.

The gist of her letter was an update of her teaching activities and progress in opening educational opportunities to girls whose parents were skeptical of formal education. Her prose finessed the language of kinship, calling on her American colleagues as mothers while also recognizing that the Society was an organization, made up of members, not simply spiritual sisters, daughters, and mothers. This distinction between kinship and member-to-member relations served to highlight the fact that affective connections did not substitute for the constitutional obligation of the organization’s members to collaborate. At the same time, addressing “her mothers” in the plural reflected the overlap between Southern African conceptions of extended family, diasporic retentions of similar widespread African cultural values, and the language of Christian fellowship. She wrote:

Most of the boys and girls sit on the floor and the floor is of mud and clay. As I said when I was there, I need the aid of my mothers. Let each member of the society, if possible, adopt a boy or girl to aid him or her with things to put on…. A few pounds will buy the wood and I can get some one to make the benches, so please tell my mothers about this.^{[25]Minutes, “Women’s Mite Isliwionary Society, Minutes of the Seventh Annual Convention, Cincinnati” (1903), 47, my italics.}

In order to mobilize her readers’ emotions, she emphasized nostalgia particularly effectively by recalling songs they had sung together, songs familiar to them all.

This was an astute choice given that music was a central part of the program for the conference where her letter was to be read. Indeed five hymns and two choir selections were induded in the program for the July 2 evening session where her appeal was to be heard. Such gatherings were unimaginable without music, especially congregational singing, which engaged the entire body in vocalizing the unity they had gathered to forge. Charlotte wrote to her fellow believers, explaining:

I am way out forty miles from the nearest town. I used to sing over there, “Perhaps to-day there’s a lonely spot in earth’s harvest field so wide”, and I think this is the spot. Write to us soon. I have written many letters that were never answered. Pray for us. “God be with you till we meet again”.^{[26]Ibid., 47.}

The first lyrics that she cited were from a mission song “I will go where you want me to go”, by Mary Brown (with additional lyrics by Charles Prior), and music by Carrie E. Rounsefell.^{[27]http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/i/g/igowhere.html. Words: Mary Brown, in Our Best Endeavor (Silver Burdett & Company: 1892) (verse 1), and Charles E. Prior (verses 2-3). The original title was “Go Stand and Speak”, with music by Prior. A new tune for the hymn, by Carrie E. Rounsefell, was composed in 1894 for use in a revival meeting at the Baptist church in Lynn, Massachusetts, and this became the standard tune.} With music composed in 1894, it would have been the latest thing, a most modern gospel song, and Manye Maxeke’s choice indexed women’s increasing participation in liturgy through new music. Furthermore, it highlighted how music functioned to orient her in a familiar affective and spiritual landscape (one she shared with her American sisters) even as she experienced her location as remote. Lastly, recalling the words of a song she had learned in the United States reinvoked memories of how she had been taken in as a “foreigner”, by the Society.

Her signifying on remoteness and loneliness was complicated by the fact that her status as a distinctly modern subject had been ratified by her experiences as a foreigner in Britain, Canada, and the U.S.

So for Manye Maxeke becoming “modern” was predicated on the ability to feel alienated from a landscape that lacked the signs of Western modernity.

Her citation garbled the lines of the hymn slightly: “Perhaps today there are loving words” came from the second verse, and “In earth’s harvest fields so wide” from the third. The sample lines suggest that she quotes from memory, which shows how ingrained congregational singing was in religious practice; however, they also reveal that even the aural mnemonic device of citation was subject to the erosions of time and space. Manye Maxeke’s remoteness was wearing away the common musical repertoire she shared with those meeting in Ohio.

That said, there are multiple indications of her letter’s effectiveness in tapping a common nerve in the conference minutes. Immediately following its reading, the assembly sang “God be with you till we meet again”. This was, of course, a traditional choice for an adjourning song, but in joining to sing the lyric that Manye Maxeke herself had referenced, the trans-Atlantic solidarity between these women literally resounded. It was also noted that hers was “A very touching letter” with the full text induded in the minutes. Finally, the audit report indicates that $400 was set aside for the work in South Africa ($100 of which was specifically designated for Manye Maxeke). She had struck the right chord.

Although little of her writing or speech texts are extant for the next two decades, reports appeared in newspapers, induding Izwi LaBantu, the Christian Express, Imvo Zabantsundu, and even the Mozambican paper, O Brado Africano, covering her activities as an educator, her testimony and organizing in protest of the women’s pass laws in 1912, her founding of the Bantu Women’s League in 1918, and activism throughout the 1920s advocating for better living and working conditions for black women migrating to urban areas and rights for female prisoners. As with her address to British audiences in 1891, and her letter to her AME comrades in 1903, these reports show that her speeches balanced tact and direct interpellation in careful counter-point, but it was the latter that defined her style.

Having seen how central music was for Manye Maxeke’s thought, a new reading of her most anthologized writing emerges. Her address to the 1928 Bantu-European Students Christian Conference in Fort Hare, entitled “Social Conditions Among Bantu Women and Girls”, and published in their proceedings in 1930 did not explicitly mention music. However, the anxieties about an urban underground economy driven by beer illegally brewed by women and animated by marabi, a popular local jazz form, furiously fueled social welfare debates. At issue was the institution and maintenance of bounds between public and private, street and home. Put differently, the topologies of black South African aspiration depended upon maintaining the borders of interior domestic space, and orienting the center of this space around women. In her discussion of how current conditions of urban migration and labour markets in Johannesburg impact family life, Manye Maxeke begins with an analysis of space. It is the Home, she argued, “around which and in which the whole activity of family life circulates”, that fundamentally structures a society because of the importance of home training in raising future generations. For Manye Maxeke, this put women on the frontlines of South Africa’s unfolding experiment in urban modernity, facing the injurious proto-apartheid laws. As a mother, a woman was her children’s “first counselor and teacher; on her rest[ed]  the responsibility of implanting in the flexible minds of her young, the right principles and teachings of modern civilization”.^{[28]Charlotte Maxeke. “Social Women Among Bantu Women and Girls (1930) in Women Writing Southern Africa, ed. Mary Daymond (New York: Feminist Press. 2003),196.}

Her most trenchant critique of rent regulations that disallowed black women the right to secure lodgings unless accompanied by a man was that they turned domestic space inside out. When women migrated to the cities in search of their missing husbands (mine labourers who fell out of touch with their rural families), they often had difficulty locating these men. The rental laws were such that women were forced by circumstances to consort with men in order to provide shelter for their families. Thus we see that the authorities in enforcing the restrictions in regard to accommodation are often doing Bantu society a grievous harm, for thcy are forcing its womanhood, its wedded womanhood, to the first step on the downward path of sin and crime.^{[29]Ibid., 197}

The pass laws meant that this was not mere hand-wringing over decorous morality. When newly arrived women in a society dependent upon strong domestic ties forged in the interior home space were literally turned out of doors by the state, not only their personal lives but an entire economic system and generational structure was being destabilized. And wage labor was so unfairly remunerated that even women who managed to locate their husbands were forced to take jobs with no accommodations for their children, who wound up on the streets to “run wild” (197). Running wild, in 1920s South African cities, implied not only possible prostitution, but brewing skokiaan in informal speakeasies, or shebeens, often with live marabi or brass band music playing to attract customers. Ironically, her desire to maintain petit bourgeois decorum and uplift the race echoed many of jazz’s detractors among the African American elite.

If many of her ideals about a harmonious household were consonant with the cult of domesticity that had accompanied the missionaries’ “civilizing project”, she was also savvy about her audience, and how to interpellate them most directly by naming the possibility that they might turn a deaf ear. As in earlier declarations she wrote:

These facts do not sound very pleasant I know, but this Conference is, according to my belief, intended to give us all the opportunity of expressing our views, our problems, and of discussing them in an attitude of friendliness and fairmindedness, so that we may perhaps be enabled to see some way out of them.

She understood that coalition building depended as much on congregational listening as on congregational singing, and on being able to listen multiply, anticipating the surround sound of solidarity. By collocating audiences through oratory, press, and public correspondence, Manye Maxeke quite literally, wrote across geographic, denominational, cultural, and linguistic gaps that made this feminist chapter in solidarity possible.

First published in Africa In Stereo. Publication in herri with kind permission of the author.