African Nationalist or British Loyalist? The Complicated Case of Tiyo Soga

The ‘true’ identity and supposed historical significance of Tiyo Soga (1829–71) has changed through time. Lauded by his first biographer (John Chalmers) as ‘A Model Kafir’, someone who lived an exemplary life in terms of the ‘civilizing mission’ through becoming the first Xhosa minister and tireless missionary to his ‘countrymen’, Soga has subsequently been hailed, one might say claimed (or reclaimed?), in succession as: the first ‘New African’; ‘the father of black nationalism’; the progenitor of Ethiopianism and the ANC; and the ‘founding father of black modernity’. This article revisits the question of Soga’s self-avowed, but now in contemporary South Africa downplayed or disavowed, British loyalism. The argument is that such loyalism was in keeping with Soga’s experience and theoretical understanding of mid nineteenth-century British nationalism and that he saw no contradiction between such Britishness and his own sense of ‘Gaika’, Xhosa or black African identity. To paraphrase the words of John Iliffe in Honour in Africa, such loyalism stemmed from, and allowed, Soga’s adoption of ‘respectability’ in order ‘to liberate’ himself ‘from ideas of honour no longer in tune with [his perception of] reality’.