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‘To See Us As We See Ourselves’: John Tengo Jabavu and the Politics of the Black Periodical

John Tengo Jabavu’s Imvo Zabantsundu is recognised as the first black periodical in South Africa. As with many of his generation of mission-educated intellectuals, Jabavu’s endeavours in print culture were set against a milieu of intensified conquest and the struggle for colonial belonging. Imvo Zabantsundu has generally been regarded as a purveyor of the aspirations of colonial modernity among the black intelligentsia. In this article, I trace the making of Imvo Zabantsundu to the project of imperial liberalism. I argue that Jabavu and his peers were black Victorians who took their status as imperial subjects as a condition of possibility for their engagements with the colonial order. An encounter with Imvo Zabantsundu therefore means thinking through empire as both a political geography and a structure of feeling. In so doing, I suggest that we seriously consider imperial citizenship as a category through which to mark the making of the black intelligentsia and tune our senses to the long histories of liberalism that informed colonial belonging and its attendant contradictions.