[Source - Chloe Rushovich for FHYA, 2023, using Cambridge University Library materials and materials provided by Sally Kent: Volume II of the South African Native Affairs Commission - Evidence taken in Cape Colony. The commission, chaired by Sir Godfrey Lagden (1851-1934), later a vice-president of the Royal Colonial Institute (an earlier iteration of the RCS), was appointed by the British High Commissioner for South Africa, Alfred Milner, to examine and provide recommendations for 'the Native question'. The volumes of evidence give some access to the African voice which is so often silent or simply absent in official documents. The report, published in February 1905, advocated, amongst other things, for territorial and political separation along racial grounds, the industrial and manual education (as opposed to literary education) of African peoples, and the importance of Christianity.
Notable interlocutors in the SANAC volumes include:
-John Tengo Jabavu - political activist, editor of the first isiXhosa newspaper, fought for equal rights for the Xhosa population of the Cape Colony, advocated for public education and women's rights;
-Reverend Elijah Mdolomba - clergyman and political activist, president of the Cape African National Congress (ANC), ANC secretary-general during the presidency of Pixley Seme;
-Reverend Pambani Jeremiah Mzimba - founder of the Presbyterian Church of Africa;
-Reverend Edward Tsewu - minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, significant leader of the struggle for land rights in South Africa in the early twentieth century;
-Harriette Colenso - British Christian missionary in southern Africa, advisor to Dinuzulu, fought against the attempts by British colonial officials to destabilise the Zulu royal family;
-Theophilus Shepstone - British South African statesman, responsible for the annexation of the Transvaal to Britain in 1877;
-Arthur Jesse Shepstone - assistant-commissioner in Zululand, in the South African War, 1899-1902, secretary for Native Affairs (Natal), secretary of the Natal Native Trust;
-James Stuart - colonial official and prolific recorder of oral history materials in Natal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.]
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