"Poking Holes in the Sky": Professor James Thaele, American Negroes, and Modernity in 1920s Segregationist South Africa

Abstract

In 1920s South Africa, white segregationists justified accelerated racially discriminatory legislation by casting blacks as “uncivilized primitive natives” undeserving of full citizenship rights. Africans often countered this discourse by pointing to African Americans as proof of black capacities to modernize and as role models worthy of emulating in antisegregationist activity. Black South African leaders often associated themselves with African Americans to further legitimize their respective political activities. This article explores this phenomenon with the example of James Thaele, the American-educated president of the African National Congress (Cape Western Province), perhaps the most actively militant organization in the late 1920s. Previous scholars have viewed Thaele's flamboyant dress and hyperbolic language as evidence of a curious eccentric. Instead, we show that Thaele's dress and language were important performative tools that subverted, mocked, and reversed white modernity narratives that locked Africans into static “uncivilized native” categories. Black America was an indispensable aspect of Thaele's antisegregationist attacks. At historically black Lincoln University (Pennsylvania), he earned two degrees, attaining an educational level then unavailable in South Africa, and he became enamored of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (U.N.I.A.). Upon his return to South Africa, Thaele legitimized his political organizing, public speeches, and writings by emphasizing his celebrated American background and pointing to the U.N.I.A. as a model for antisegregationist organizing in South Africa.