Ports as Portals: D.D.T. Jabavu's Voyage to the World Pacifist Meeting in India (original) (raw)

English Studies in Africa 62 (1), 2019

Abstract

Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu’s travelogue of his four-month-long trip to India to attend the 1949 World Pacifist Meeting contributes to the rich archive of thinking about the intellectual and political flows of influence between Africa and India. Existing scholarship on African-Asian encounters has focused prominently on the trajectory from Asia towards Africa and hence exhibits a tendency to minimize African agency. This article offers a brief reading of the English translation of D. D. T. Jabavu’s travelogue E-Indiya nase East Africa (published in 1951 in isiXhosa) in order to reflect on his particular brand of transnationalism, which deeply informed his contribution to South African politics in the first half of the 20th century. A keen observer of the landscapes and waterscapes around him, Jabavu’s sense of embeddedness in local and translocal networks – rather than the space of the nation – contributes to an understanding of transnational historiography of southern African studies. The article focuses on selected passages to suggest that with historical hindsight, the travelogue offers much beyond Jabavu’s gradualism which has relegated him marginal in the dominant narrative of anti-apartheid nationalism. Jabavu engaged in the quixotic and often painstaking labour of developing alternative intellectual and political networks in the pursuit of equality. In these networks, ports function as significant literal and figurative sites of exit and entry. Keywords: World Pacifist Meeting of 1949, D. D. T. Jabavu, travelogue, networks of solidarity, conferencing, India, Fort Hare, Gandhian politics of non-violent resistance

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