Abstract

The first president of the African National Congress, John Langalibalele Dube, is well known as the leading spokesman of his day of Natal's African Christian elite. This article shows that his membership of another elite, that of the Qadi chiefdom, is central to an understanding of the role he played in the 1920s and 1930s in brokering segregationist alliances between white and black interests. The Qadi chief provided critical support to Dube throughout his long career; Dube, in turn, brought much prestige to the chiefdom. Moreover, Dube's connections caused deep rifts and raised many political questions over the idea of Christians associating with traditionalists, not only on his own mission station at Inanda but throughout colonial Natal. Yet his membership of two elites was also of a doubly subjugated kind: Africans suffered inferior status in the eyes of both the state and the church. He fiercely resented and rejected this. Yet his simultaneous desire for respectability and acceptance prevented him from breaking free altogether of the order that entrapped him, and produced in him so many of the ambiguities that Shula Marks has extensively explored.