Breaking With the Old Pattern of Control: African Deputations to Britain from Southern Africa in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, deputations of African chiefs, or their envoys, travelled to Britain from southern Africa. While he was in Britain in 1882, the Colonial Office placed stringent controls on Cetshwayo, the deposed Zulu king, because he was regarded as a prisoner of war visiting Britain under parole. These controls served as a template for the treatment of future deputations who were subjected to a recognisable pattern of constraints, the most disempowering of which was the imposition of the Colonial Office's choice of interpreter – through whom it could exercise control over the deputation. In 1907 a deputation of Basuto chiefs broke with the pattern of controls imposed on the earlier deputations. They did this with the help of two black activists. Josiah Gumede, a mission-educated, English-speaking African of Zulu descent, acted as both advocate and interpreter for the deputation, thus avoiding the imposition of an official, or officially endorsed person, appointed to act as their interpreter and, by extension, assuming the right to ‘take charge’ of them. Sylvester Williams, a Trinidadian-born pan-Africanist, sought support for the deputation from the white humanitarian community in Britain. Seeing the reluctance of the Aborigines' Protection Society to assist deputations of Africans in Britain, Williams sought to fill this vacuum in the humanitarian lobby. Though it involved a compromise with his pan-African principles, he formed a committee of radical white humanitarians to act as a respectable front for the Basuto deputation to approach the Colonial Office. In doing so, Williams attempted to reconfigure the humanitarian landscape of early twentieth-century Britain. He and Gumede, breaking with the old pattern of controls imposed on previous deputations, pointed the way towards a more effective strategy for traditional African chiefs and their followers to pursue their claims to the heart of empire.