Seán Morrow, The Bams of Grasslands Farm: A Family History (Johannesburg: Staging Post, 2024)
WHAT might the course of South African history have been had the Christian African middle class of the nineteenth century been shown greater regard by the colonial authorities? If it had not then been further disadvantaged by racial prejudice and segregation, would apartheid have been so easily enforced?
Bam is not a Xhosa name, but acquired by people of the Nxasana/Mkhiwa clan. An ancestor, the Mpondomise commoner Solomon (Mtshobi), had the foresight in 1880 to serve the British in conflict related to the Basotho Gun War. His reward was a 500-morgen farm called Grasslands at Gqowana near Tsolo. The family became part of the Transkei gentry, exercising a benevolent paternalism over Grasslands with kinship sharecropping, and placing great emphasis on literacy and the use of English. Females were not excluded.
Under the stewardship of Solomon’s son Chalmers, the farm survived persistent debt and threats from the South African Native Trust. The lives of the next generation, Lockington and Temperance (Mazwi), were disrupted by World War II after which Grasslands went into decline, but was nonetheless a haven and refuge from apartheid. Goqwana was a sizeable village, the farmland under individual ownership with moderate overgrazing. Temperance rescued the farm and with her Moravian background held the family together until her death in 1988. Her son Fikile put Grasslands through a period of co-operative experimentation that foundered when project funding dried up after 1994.
Most of this narrative concerns the six children, four daughters and two sons, of Lockington and Temperance; in particular Brigalia and Fikile (Fiks). Both came under significant liberal influence: Fikile living in Sophiatown with his father and knowing Trevor Huddleston; Brigalia through her mother’s employment at the Pholela rural health centre founded by the Karks. Apartheid severely limited professional aspirations and the other sisters became nurses: one in London, another at the Rietvlei mission hospital, and a third trained at McCords before marrying a Durban businessman. The other brother also worked in Durban, and later founded his own business having become the first registered African plumber in Natal, living a life on the edge as a Xhosa in Inkatha territory. (His property was indeed a secret ANC safe house.)
Brigalia was educated at Shawbury at the time of the 1948 strike before graduating from Lovedale as a teacher. In Johannesburg she turned to social work and became involved with the YWCA moving to Durban where she was responsible for community health in rural areas. Her views led to a ban from Radio Zulu; and her links to Defence and Aid prevented her acquiring a passport to study in Canada. Her travel problems were later overcome by United Nations documentation and then a Liberian passport. Nevertheless, as a South African she encountered continued difficulties, most notably in Kenya and Trinidad.
In 1967 she arrived in Geneva at the World Council of Churches (WCC) and would stay in Switzerland for 21 years, eventually acquiring citizenship. Her initial brief was the family and she later took on responsibility for women’s advancement. But the WCC was terrain contested between mainstream thinking and liberation politics; nowhere more stark than within the Programme to Combat Racism where harsh ideological lines were adopted. Brigalia was an ANC sympathiser and known to Oliver Tambo, but her work on behalf of women was thwarted by the Women’s League in the name of vanguardism and the notion that there was a single struggle. Opposition to feminism, patriarchy and the position of churches behind the Iron Curtain were some of the issues Brigalia had to navigate. Caught up in internal politics, her contract was not renewed in 1979.
Her subsequent career was with the YWCA headquarters and then an international trade union federation. She returned to South Africa in 1988 and filled a position at the South African Council of Churches (SACC) as deputy to Frank Chikane at a momentous time described as ‘ecumenical struggle’. Shortly after Brigalia’s appointment, Khotso House, location of the SACC’s head office, was bombed by the regime and effectively demolished, but the organisation remained functional. Chikane was subsequently poisoned twice, placing Brigalia at the centre of the SACC’s programme of resistance, balancing conciliation and principle; and epitomised by the Standing for the Truth campaign. It was a period of multiple challenges, for instance widespread violence and the return of exiles. From 1994 she was secretary-general of the SACC faced by political pressures such as Nelson Mandela’s request for premature readmission of the Dutch Reformed Church.
But further efforts to advance the cause of women came to nought and Seán Morrow suggests that Brigalia allowed her energies to be dissipated. From 1997 until 2011 she was on the Independent Electoral Commission, from 1999 as chair. Here she more successfully championed women and acted as conciliator and networker. Although the president of long meetings, she was good at identifying talent and the IEC was notable for recruitment of religious and legal minds.
Fikile was studying law at University of Cape Town just before the 1959 Act imposing apartheid on higher education, a contemporary of Archie Mafeje and Pallo Jordan; and knew the Wilson and Simons families. He favoured the Unity Movement and with Neville Alexander founded the National Liberation Front. After trying to escape to Botswana, he was arrested and charged with ‘constructive sabotage’, an offence typical of the twisted world of apartheid, for which he received a ten-year sentence on Robben Island that ended in 1974. He famously described the Island as his university, a place where he operated as a non-doctrinaire diplomat.
On release he was restricted to Transkei and practised law in Idutwya. He was skilled at circumventing restrictions, acting as advisor to Steve Biko and undertaking pupillage at the Johannesburg bar. Nevertheless, he was constantly harassed and detained on a number of occasions although protected to some extent as an advocate. Morrow makes the intriguing comment that there was a ‘curious intimacy about the Transkei’ especially among the small educated elite linked by family, religion and traditional practices. By 1984 Fikile was working in Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth) at the Legal Resources Centre.
After liberation Fikile played a number of roles including chancellor of Wits University and member of the board of the South African Broadcasting Corporation. But he is best remembered as the founding judge president of the Land Claims Court where he played a creative role. His affinity with rural issues led to an interventionist approach that considered social justice as thoroughly as the law. He even went so far as to hold workshops for plaintiffs to make sure their documentation was acceptable.
A great deal of valuable archival material was lost at Goqwana in what is described as a hurricane – more likely a tornado – in 1986. It is today ‘substantially … a place of pilgrimage and remembrance’ (p. 217) but the Bam family still has a presence in the area. Above all, there is an extensive family network nationally that includes many successful professionals, a legacy of a commitment to education and religion, fostered by the relative autonomy of Transkei and the internationalism of the church. Morrow points out that this is a reflection of confidence in talents and social standing that apartheid failed to dim.
This family history highlights many important facets of South African history from the colonial era to democracy via apartheid. The involvement of so many personalities makes it seem a little disjointed at times. A photograph or two might have been sacrificed profitably to a family tree. And it is always frustrating to find South African place name errors in a local imprint. Edenvale is not a suburb of Pietermaritzburg (p. 92; it’s Edendale, which appears correctly elsewhere in the book) and Richards Bay has no apostrophe (p. 100). What is more, both errors have made it into the index.