A. B. Xuma: “Bridging the Gap between White and Black in South Africa”

About the Author

Alfred Xuma was born in the late nineteenth century (in 1893, it is thought) to a Xhosa family in the village of Manzana in the Transkei region of the Cape Colony. He left South Africa to achieve an advanced education in the United States, where he had to work to pay his tuition, fees, and life expenses as he studied to earn a bachelor's degree and a medical degree. He then studied in Europe to gain the proper British credentials in order to practice medicine in South Africa. Xuma returned to his country at the age of thirty-four, after a fourteen-year absence, and established his medical practice in Johannesburg, becoming the “first and only western-trained African physician” (Gish, p. 59) practicing in South Africa's most important city.

Within less than three years, Xuma had gained enough of a reputation beyond his medical competence to be invited to speak at the Bantu-European Student Christian Conference of 1930. His speech demonstrates that he had quickly learned about the extent of the discrimination against the majority African population, most of which had been imposed during his absence. But it took the government's final assault on suffrage in Cape Province in 1935–1936 to lead Xuma to become politically active. He strongly opposed the Representation of Natives in Parliament, which would deprive the Africans in Cape Province of the right to vote. Xuma was one of the organizers of the All African Convention of December 1935, which was attended by nearly four hundred Africans who discussed ways to oppose the constitutional amendment. The delegates sent a deputation to the prime minister, with whom they met twice in February 1936, but to no avail. Ever since 1910 African leaders had protested against legislation adversely affecting the interests and opportunities of the majority; they spoke out at meetings, railed against bills in the newspapers, and met with officials. They seem to have been listened to respectfully by government officials and others, but the result was always the same: The parliament passed the laws, and Africans suffered the consequences. Xuma's biographer, Steven Gish, emphasizes a facet of his character that emerged during the effort to preserve suffrage in Cape Province: “Xuma had shown that he was less willing to equivocate on African rights than some of his colleagues” (p. 87).

In December 1940 the ANC elected Xuma as its president, a post he would hold for nine years. During his presidency, Xuma traveled around the country tirelessly working to expand the membership of the organization and improve the finances of an almost bankrupt organization. He gave many speeches emphasizing the main goal of the ANC: to end segregation and eliminate discrimination from the country. Xuma stated in February 1941 that “South Africa is fighting for noble and high ideals—for Christianity and human decency” (Karis and Carter, vol. 2, p. 165). Later that year, he stated his belief that “South Africa stands for freedom, democracy, and Christianity” (Karis and Carter, vol. 2, p. 171).Under his leadership, a group of ANC leaders adapted a key World War II document, the Atlantic Charter (which had been signed by Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in 1941 and referred to Europe under Nazi German control), to the South African situation. Other themes that dominated Xuma's speeches included an end to legal disabilities, the restoration of the vote to all black South Africans, and a demand for social justice within South African society. Most important, he promoted ideas about individual and political self-reliance among Africans.

As president, Xuma transformed the ANC into a more dynamic organization. During the 1940s black South Africans recognized the need to challenge the discriminatory system more vigorously, staging strikes and boycotts to emphasize their demands for better lives. Xuma also helped prepare the ANC for a “bold new role” (Gish, p. 164) in protests against a much more extreme threat to Africans that the Afrikaner National Party imposed after 1948: apartheid.

After he left the ANC presidency, Xuma did not play a substantial role in the African challenges to the increasingly harsh system of apartheid. As Gish writes, however, Xuma continued to call for “change peacefully, reasonably and eloquently” (p. 203). Although Xuma was viewed as an elder statesman among the black elite by the time of his death on January 27, 1962, his efforts—as well as those of all opponents of apartheid—to speak out against South Africa's racist policies made no impact.