First Episode : At the 2005 FESPACO, Cherif Keita came to present “Oberlin-Inanda : The Life and Times of John L. Dube”, a documentary which received a Special Mention from the Association Ecrans, and in which he recounted the life and the political journey of the man who founded the ANC and served as its first president.

Second episode : During the 21st edition of the African Biennial of the seventh art, which took place from February 28th to March 7, Cherif Keita was present again in the documentary category with his film entitled “Cemetery Stories : A Rebel Missionary in South Africa” focusing this time on the Wilcox family. The unconventional missionaries they were, the Wilcoxes sided with the Blacks against the white colonial system, an act for which they were kicked out of SA many times. But as they were leaving for good, they found another means to continue their fight, namely by “sticking a thorn into the sides of the colonial system through the education they were going to give John Dube”, a 16-year old orphan whose mother had entrusted to them. This strategy was effective because the Wilcoxes can rest today in peace. After his studies in the United States, John Dube returned to his country to start a school, the Ohlange Institute, a newspaper, Ilanga Lase Natal and a political party, the African National Congress, which was to play a leading role in the dismantling of Apartheid and in the advent of Democracy in SA. The Third episode is still to come : to bring to California, where the Wilcoxes are buried, a SA delegation composed of members of the Dube family and political leaders for an official tribute to the unsung pioneers.

In the meantime, FESPACO 2009 was an opportunity for Professor Keita to bring together some members of the Wilcox-Dube families : Jackson Wilcox, the grandson of the Wilcox missionaries, Deborah, their great-granddaughter, and Zenzele Dube, the grandson of John Dube, who had been sent in 2005 to Ouagadougou by former President Thabo Mbeki to attend the screening of the film about his grandfather’s life. Joining the family table were also Dominic Fucci, the American editor of the film and his daughter Fellina, 13 years old, both of whom were visiting for the first time the African continent.

Cherif said : “The presence of the Wilcoxes and Zenzele Dube at the 2009 FESPACO, the theme of which was “Heritage, Tourism and Cinema”, illustrates very well the way in which Cinema can enable people so distant from each other to discover their common family heritage”. When the human family gets together and tells their story, ............

How did you become interested in this topic ?

As a professor of Francophone literature at Carleton College, I wanted to study art and identity expressions in South Africa and for that reason I took a trip there with 17 students and traveled from Cape Town to Johannesburg by way of KwaZulu-Natal, to see how the various groups which had joined forces to defeat Apartheid were now expressing their own identity on the landscape of democratic South Africa. Not being a specialist of the country, I had chosen to anchor myself to the study of oral tradition, namely the genre called isibongo, the equivalent of the praise song, of the panegyric linked to the clan name and recited by the imbongi.

Since I specialized in this area of study for the Mande world, I co-directed this program with a colleague, who is a historian of South Africa ; going to South Africa was a real discovery for me. It is during this trip that I found out about a certain John Dube in a place called Inanda. We visited the home of Gandhi, who lived there and made his apprenticeship as a leader, and then two kilometers further we visited the house of John Dube, who was known as one of the first intellectuals of the area. He was in a sense the embodiment of the encounter between the West and traditional Zulu societies.

What was so special about him ?

He founded a school which we visited under the guidance of his grandson, who told us : “It is my grandfather who founded the ANC”. This was a surprise to me. I wondered why a man, who had been an important educator and politician, was not known. Miriam Makeba told me in 2001 that the first time she heard about John Dube was upon her return from exile and yet she symbolized for decades the fight against Apartheid. This proves the obscurity in which this man was kept. It is my own ignorance which caused me to wake up and try to speak about him around me, to ask questions about him, to which many people answered : “we do not know him.”

Having studied in the US like him, I felt a certain affinity with him and I told myself that I needed to push my investigation further. My research in archives, my trips to the places where he lived in the 19th century led me to some amazing and baffling discoveries. I asked myself how for example the US trained someone who founded the ANC, a movement which was being branded as “communist” by the propaganda of the white regime ? Out of curiosity, I went to the school where he studied, Oberlin College, in Ohio, and discovered that it was a place where self-affirmation was encouraged, where freedom and self-determination were cultivated. John Dube studied theology, and along the way, he met an important person, Booker T. Washington, one of the first African-American leaders of the modern era, who wanted Blacks recently emancipated from Slavery to assume their rightful place in society.

It was one thing to gain political freedom but another to gain economic self-determination. Without the support and helping hand of the state authorities, how could this be achieved ?

Exactly, Booker T. Washington thought that Blacks had to learn the manual trades in order to have an income and gain the respect that came with the mastery of a skill. He saw the necessity to give training to people who were just coming out of slavery and give them the courage to start their own businesses, to open a workshop, a small business, ... in the spirit of independence. Booker T. Washington had founded a school called The Tuskegee Institute, in Alabama, to give that training to Blacks and this became a model for John Dube when he was starting his own school in Natal in 1900 under the name The Ohlange Institute, with funds he had raised in the United States from philanthropists. This was the first industrial education school founded by a black man for Blacks in South Africa.

Yet, the two schools did not have exactly the same programs.....

Jackson Wilcox, Zenzele Dube

True ! If in the context of the United States, Booker T. Washington had focused his efforts on industrial education and manual skills, John Dube decided in his school to give an intellectual training, but quietly, in order not to alarm the whites. He was successful because through this school went Africa’s first Nobel Prize winner, Albert Luthuli, who was the ANC president in 1960. He was truly John Dube’s protégé and there were many other pioneers in music, theater and art who came out of this school.

Dube was himself a novelist because he wrote the first Zulu novel in the thirties and he founded the first secular English-Zulu newspaper in 1903, Ilanga Lase Natal(the Natal Sun), which is published to this day. John Dube’s school still exists and it is where Nelson Mandela cast his vote in 1994 during the first open multiracial elections after visiting John Dube’s grave because as he said, “this is where everything started”. Facing Dube’s grave, he stated : “Mr. President, I have come to report to you that South Africa is today free.”

The other facet of his work, the political activity, consisted in launching with his cousin from Inanda, Pixley ka Seme, a lawyer trained under his care in the USA and in Oxford, England, a political movement, the ANC under the name of the South African National Native Congress in 1912 and for which he served as the first president from 1912 to 1917. Nelson Mandela speaks about him in his book, A Long Walk to Freedom, but without having really known him. When I was preparing my film, I sent him a questionnaire to solicit information about John Dube. He informed me that he would have to do some research himself to answer my queries, because Dube had died before he could know him and because of a great age difference between them. It should be noted also that Apartheid, which entrenched itself with the 1948 victory of the Afrikaner Nationalist Party, created a void of knowledge about the history of the British colonial period.

From this period until the sixties, the memories of John Dube were mostly erased and only the people who had studied in his school could really talk about him. This man had been forgotten and I decided that something had to be done.

You could have written a book, why did you prefer to make a film ?

I thought about it a lot and finally I decided that a book would collect dust on the shelves of a library whereas with a film, I could give a visual presence to this man, thus making up for all those years during which he had been buried in anonymity. “Oberlin-Inanda : The Life and Times of John L. Dube”, my first film covers his life until his death but also with a survey of his legacy, namely the school he founded and which is facing serious challenges today.

For this year’s FESPACO, your film entitled “Cemetery Stories : A Rebel Missionary in South Africa”, deals with a family of missionaries who played a role in the education of John Dube. How did you know that ?

In the course of my research I discovered that the people who had brought him to study in the United States in 1887, the Wilcox family, had roots in Northfield, the town where I had been living and teaching since 1985. An amazing coincidence, is it not ? To discover that I was living in the hometown of this white American couple that John Dube used to call “Dad” and “Mom”, the very people to whom his mother had entrusted him at age 16 so that he could have a good education in the US, this was an overwhelming symbol. For me, there was no longer any doubt : this story had chosen me and from that time, I tried to understand better these people who had had such a vision, a generous eye to detect the seed of leadership in this black African boy.

In what circumstances did John Dube and the Wilcoxes cross paths ?

The Wilcoxes, who were missionaries, served at the American Zulu Mission based in Natal and with a station in Inanda, between 1881 and 1919. The male children of the Christian community used to matriculate at another school created by American missionaries called Amanzimtoti. Wilcox had met John Dube in Inanda and had known the reputation of his father, who had died in 1878, when he was only 7 years old, and who had been one of the first three blacks to be ordained as pastors in the American Zulu Mission in the 1860s. Pastor James Dube was a man of vision and the Wilcoxes had heard about him when they arrived in 1881.

Later, when the Wilcoxes had had serious differences with white colonists and other missionaries and decided to return to the United Sates, they were bearing a serious grudge against the system. It is at that time that John Dube’s mother, who had tried unsuccessfully many times to send her son to the United States, came to see the Wilcoxes with a sum of money and told them : “please take this money and take my son with you to the United States so that he can receive an education that only white boys get here in SA.” For these missionaries, to accept this request was a big responsibility because they had no money for having been ruined by the colonial system they were opposing. But they had a secret reason to say “yes”, which was to stick a thorn into the side of the colonial system trough the education they were going to give to John Dube.

They told themselves that by training this young boy, even if tomorrow they were not here, he would continue their fight against injustice. It should be noted that the Wilcoxes lived on and off for almost 40 years in South Africa because each time they were kicked out, they always managed to return. They were as much an influence on John Dube’s education as they were his allies in his fight against colonialism. They thought that it was preposterous to claim to be civilizing black Africans while robbing them of their land, their dignity. In 1914, John Dube formed a delegation to go to England and protest to the Crown, which had colluded with the agents of colonialism by creating the Union of South Africa in 1910 on the basis of an agreement between the English and the Afrikaners at the expense of the Natives. In spite of this injustice, blacks and their leaders were willing to fight within the framework of the law using constitutional means.

With a B.A in Theology in 1899, John Dube had received a very good education : he became a novelist, a journalist, a pastor, a churchman, a farmer, a musician and with his wife, they became pioneers in the development of modern Zulu choral music. His school became a hotbed for musical talents and one can count today several stars like Busi Mhlongo, Tu Nokwe and Kaya Mahlangu who came out of there. By the way, the former deputy-President of Thabo Mbeki, Mrs Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, went to high school there in the seventies.

In “Cemetery Stories : A Rebel Missionary in South Africa”, not only do you tell the story of these unorthodox missionaries, who took risks by siding with the Blacks but you also brought the Wilcox and Dube families together. How did that happen ?

The two families did not know each other at all, and while preparing the first film, I had contacted the descendents of Wilcox who did not know first of all that their ancestors were from the town where I lived. They did not know much about the story of their family in South Africa either. In a way, I reconnected them with their history.

The story of these two families is extraordinary for at that time very few free Africans went to study in the US. When Dube arrived there, he must have been one of the first free Africans to go there to study. I told myself that the people who facilitated this extraordinary event had to be unique people. And when I looked into their lives, I realized that they were radical people. The couple was driven out of South Africa and when leaving the country, William Wilcox was so ruined that he was not able to pay the boat fare for himself and his wife. Nobody had wanted to employ him anymore, not even other missionaries and he had no other means of subsistence beyond the meager fruits of the land they were tilling. His wife had to stay behind more than a year after he was gone. It is the black community of Inanda that organized a collection to help him get back to his native country. To pay tribute to him, they composed a praise poem, an isibongo, songs in which they told the Wilcoxes that they had been a shield for them, the downtrodden.

You were saying that your opinion of missionaries is more nuanced....

Absolutely ! When one compares this family to other missionaries, the ones who were the accomplices of colonial oppression, a question becomes clear : without the Wilcoxes, what would have happened to John Dube ? They are the ones that trained him, that instilled in him their ideas and what John Dube did later in South Africa, they would have liked to have done that. In Mali, we say that the person who raises you is the one who shapes your behavior and not the person who brought you into this world. This is exactly what happened in the case of John Dube and the Wilcoxes.

Does the general public in South Africa know the story of the Wilcoxes ?

Not at all ! this is where Oral Tradition shows all its importance. Thanks to the documents I had seen, I knew that the Wilcoxes had had problems with other whites because they had founded two small villages, Cornfields and Tembalihle, on the land they had bought with their Zulu partners. They had formed a cooperative company named the Zulu Industrial Improvement Company, in 1911, with the goal of buying plots of land and reselling them to blacks with a secure title deed in order to help them resist the land-grabbing pressures of the surrounding white colonists. The whites farmers got alarmed when they saw that this cooperative was doing so well and that more and more blacks were asking them for land. Right away they started to put roadblocks in the path of the Zulu Industrial Improvement Company because they could not tolerate the creation of such companies for black people. Later, the racist Apartheid system tried many times to expropriate the residents of Cornfields and Tembalihle when the Group Areas Act was enacted. They did not succeed. What saved them from “forced removals” was the title deeds they had obtained from Wilcox in 1911 and 1912. When I went to these two villages in KwaZulu-Natal in order to find out what they knew of this story, the elders told me that their community had been founded by a white missionary, a certain Wilcox, but that they had never seen his photo anywhere. I took out the photos and showed them.

Through the oral tradition they knew the stories about Wilcox and it is this memory that they kept for almost a century. When they saw the photos, they expressed the wish to meet the descendents of the Wilcoxes. At that time, I had had only phone contacts with the latter but with time, I was able to meet the grandson, Reverend Jackson Wilcox, and the great-grandaughter, Deborah. They came to meet me in May 2007. It was then that I showed them their family graves and that we took the decision to go together to South Africa. The trip took place in November 2007 and this was the first Wilcox-Dube contact since 1926, when John Dube attending the Panafricanist Congress in New York took advantage of that trip to visit the old missionaries in California ; the families had not been aware of each other and now they were being reunited. It was a moving moment, an unforgettable moment for me.

Was the circle thus completed ? Have you fully accomplished your mission ?

No, not yet. There is one more piece to add. My goal is to do everything possible so that a South African delegation, composed of members of the Dube family, of representatives of the two villages, and officials of the government and any person who wants to join the group, come to California, where the Wilcoxes are buried and pay tribute to them. I have already obtained the agreement in principle of the authorities of the province of KwaZulu-Natal, who have asked me to tell them what they need to do to fulfill this wish.

People know Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, Albert Luthuli, Nelson Mandela, etc. What has been done to honor the memory of John Dube, the founder of the ANC ?

Here I should say that I have woken up a lot of people. The African national Congress and the government had not yet given any awards to John Dube but after the screening of my film at FESPACO 2005, in the presence of his grandson, sent to Ouagadougou at my request by President Thabo Mbeki, and after I wrote a long letter to report to the President what I had done in Ouagadougou with the press and also to thank him for his generosity, things changed. The President called the Dube family to tell them that on April 27, 2005, during the national celebration of the advent of democracy, the Albert Luthuli Medal, which is the highest honor of the land, was going to be bestowed on John Dube. That was done. The authorities of the province of KwaZulu-Natal commissioned a statue of John Dube and I helped that sculptor with my visual documentation about John Dube. My film was shown on national television SABC1 and a member of Parliament has proposed that the film be screened at the Parliament. I receive thanks and words of encouragement from many people, letters from the Ministers of Culture and National Education ; all that convinces me that people appreciate this story which they did not know. One can only value what one knows.

Jackson Wilcox : the grandson of the Wilcoxes.

Did you know the eventful history of your grandparents ?

In truth, I did not know this story but I knew that they were very poor and ruined when they left South Africa. And this poverty influenced the way my mother reacted when I told her that I wanted to become a pastor. She had seen how my grandfather had been poor as a pastor and she tried to discourage me from taking the same road. I often visited my grandparents in the little house they had built themselves when they returned from South Africa. When my grandfather died, I inherited something from him : a small bookcase he had made and which was not very pretty because he was not a good carpenter. I kept it all the same in my collection because my grandfather had other talents and a spiritual strength. I was small when my grandfather died and I do not remember much about him. I knew that he spoke Zulu well. I learned more about him by reading a book written about him. However, I knew my grandmother better ; she was living in a retirement home in Monrovia, California and she always had a worn-out Bible near her bedside. This shows her spiritual side.

You became a pastor against your mother’s wishes. Why ? Was it your way to defend the same values and causes as your grandfather ?

Yes, it was. These are the same values I always try to advocate. Toward the end of his life, my grandfather was sponsored by a church called the Pasadena Baptist Church in California, because he was trying to collect funds to get back to South Africa and help black people buy land. In fact, my parents met in that church. My grandfather was an example for me because he preached the Gospel by referring to what Jesus did. This is what explains his decision to fight against racial segregation and British colonialism. I believe that there are still many missionaries today who carry the same convictions.

What does being in Ouagadougou and watching the film about your forebears mean to you ?

As I said, when we went to South Africa, to visit the places where my grandparents lived, the welcome was breathtaking ; here, just like there, I have the feeling that I have come home. It was very important for me both to go to South Africa and to be at FESPACO in Ouagadougou in order to learn something about my grandfather thanks to this film. The end of Apartheid and the advent of democracy are in a way the fruits of his struggle also. Absolutely, I am proud of it. My daughter here took a lot of interest in this history and I am very happy that she did.

Deborah Wilcox

Deborah Wilcox : the daughter of Jackson Wilcox :

This story interested me because it is like a rediscovery of my family’s history, a reconnection with my family heritage. In South Africa, I felt at home in the company of the Dube family. It was as if I had met my own family because of those strong bonds that existed between our forebears and this explains the warm welcome we received in South Africa.

Zenzele(Ze) Dube : the grandson of John Dube.

Did you know about the ties your grandfather had with the Wilcox family ?

To be honest, I did not know at all and it was difficult for me to know this history. In my youth, it was not the kind of story that was openly available in the political context of Apartheid. The only opportunity I had to learn a little bit about my grandfather’s past was when I studied at Ohlange, the school he founded and which was headed by a man named S.D. Ngcobo. At that time, all school curricula were under the control of the Apartheid government as part of what was called Bantu Education. Before he became the principal of Ohlange, S.D. Ngcobo had been informed of his promotion to a higher position. Because of the shortcomings of the administration of the school, Ohlange was falling apart. Mr. Ngcobo refused the promotion he was given and said that he wanted to be appointed principal of my grandfather’s school instead of being named Inspector somewhere else. This type of dedication is rare nowadays and it took him a lot of courage to display such an attitude. Seeing how determined he was to go to Ohlange, they finally agreed to his request but warned him that the school was headed the wrong way. He answered that he knew and that he still wanted to go there and improve it. That was in 1963. The first thing he did when he arrived was to divide the student body into four groups and each group was named after someone who had played a significant role in the life of the school by collaborating with my grandfather, people like Charles Dube, his brother, John Ndima, his brother-in-law, Sihlela and Albert Luthuli. He then organized contests in literature, in sport, in poetry between the four groups. This was a disguised way of recounting History through the names of our African heroes, especially since the moment the school started to enjoy such a good reputation, students were coming to it from many parts of South Africa, Southern Africa and as far as Uganda.

Why, do you think, your grandfather remains so little known among South Africans ?

Everyone has his or her own answer to this question. As far as I am concerned, in any country, politicians try to give themselves the best role and since my grandfather is dead, the others will forget him. I may be wrong, but even at the university, people are not eager to talk about him. You must remember also that we lived for a long time under Apartheid and one could not speak about this kind of topic. Now things have changed and while we used to turn away from the past, now we are coming back to it. But there are few people capable of going back so far into the history of the ANC in order to speak about pioneer leaders like my grandfather. However, as the saying goes, he who laughs last laughs best. When History comes knocking on our door like it is happening now with someone like Cherif Keita, who is not even a South African, those who want to know the truth will find out.

Your grandfather received the Luthuli Award. Are you expecting more from the government ?

For sure, and this award is only the beginning of a greater celebration to come. We, South Africans, have done nothing to celebrate the legacy of this man and it took a Malian to come and show us our own history and the way to teach our past.

But there are other facets of South African history that are not known...

Yes, it is true and all this proves that the political history of South Africa is very complex and that research can have perverse results.

My grandfather managed to do extraordinary things in difficult circumstances ; he left us many landmarks and I am not happy about the present-day conditions of the school he founded. The buildings are deteriorating for lack of funds, the quality of the education is constantly falling and it is crucial that politicians understand the importance of this school and start to do something. We are gong to fight so that this school does not go down, for this would be a second death for the founder. That is why we have to disseminate far and wide information about my grandfather in order to stop his legacy from deteriorating further.

At the request of Cherif Keita, I had come to Ouagadougou for FESPACO 2005 and I made a special trip this year again at his request to attend the screening of the film about the Wilcox family. It is for me an opportunity to thank Cherif Keita for his monumental work because I did not that without the Wilcoxes, my grandfather would not have become what he became. Thank you, Mr. Keita ! Thanks to you, the education of our people will now begin.

Interview by Joachim Vokouma, Ouagadougou, March 6, 2009

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