BLACK AND WHITE, BUT NOT AT THE CINEMA!

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http://originalpeople.org/in-1810-a-freed-slave-named-tom-molineaux-fought-in-one-of-the-most-important-fights-in-the-history-of-boxing/

Currently, I am researching the life of my great-grandfather, Franz Ginsberg, who lived from 1862 until 1936. He migrated from Prussia to the Cape Colony in 1880, and by the early 1890s he was an important industrialist, making everyday essentials (such as matches, soap, and candles) in the Eastern Cape town of King Williams Town. In 1927, after many years in politics - both local and national, he was elected a member of the Senate of South Africa. To flesh out the biography that I am writing I have been reading the verbatim reports of the debates of the South African Senate. These are stored in the British Library. They contain what the Senators actually said, and therefore they are an ideal place to get some flavour of what my great-grandfather, who I never met, had to say.

One of the debates in which Franz Ginsberg was a participant was about the Entertainments (Censorship) Bill that was going through the South African Parliament in 1931. By this time, South Africa was ruled by a coalition Government that was dominated by the Nationalist Party under Prime Minister JBM Hertzog (1866-1942), which was elected into power in 1924. It would be somewhat of an understatement to say that even before South Africa became a Union in 1910, the non-European population of the country was very much the underdog. The Nationalist Party did very little to reverse the situation; it would be accurate to say that they made life for non-Europeans increasingly worse as time went on.

The Entertainments (Censorship) Bill, mentioned above was to establish a film censorship board whose role it was to examine:

“…films and film advertisements intended for public exhibition in any place in the Union.”

My great-grandfather was against this Bill because of the contents of some of the clauses defining what was unacceptable in films to be shown to the people of South Africa. Some of these reflect the prudishness of the Government of the times. For example: “the treatment of death”, “nude human figures”, “passionate love scenes”, & “scenes purporting to illustrate ‘night life’” -

Others were to protect the public from scenes relating to “controversial or international politics”, scenes relating to industrial relations, scenes “disparaging public characters,” and those liable to “create public alarm”: 

There are a few clauses that are particularly interesting, because they are harbingers of the apartheid regime that was to afflict South Africa between 1948 and the beginning of the 1990s. These relate depicting interactions between Europeans and non-Europeans. These clauses forbid the showing of films which:  contain “pugilistic encounters between Europeans and non-Europeans”; and “scenes of intermingling of Europeans and non-Europeans”:

My great-grandfather correctly pointed out that clause (o), which forbade showing “scenes of brutal fighting”, rendered clause (q), which forbade “pugilistic encounters between Europeans and non-Europeans”, redundant. If brutal fighting was to be banned, that would include ‘pugilistic encounters’ of any kind, be they between European and European or between European and non-European. So, logically, he was correct, but it was a different logic that was being employed by the Government in 1931 (and later on), the logic of racism.

[Illustrations from the published Debates of the South African Senate] 

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KEEP IT BRIEF!

When I was a child in the early 1960s, I loved chatting over the telephone. My father, whose childhood was spent in South Africa, did not share my enthusiasm for this; he kept his calls brief and to the point, and continues to do so today. I remember him telling me at least once that the telephone was designed to be used for giving short messages and for emergencies only, not for chatting. I often wondered why he had that idea.

Recently, as part of my research for a biography of my great-grandfather Senator Franz Ginsberg (1862-1936) I was leafing through some old issues of the Cape Mercury (published in King Williams Town in South Africa) dating back to 1924, when my father was a child. Almost every issue had a large advertisement giving the prices of three minute telephone calls from King Williams Town to other parts of South Africa. When I saw the prices, I began to understand my father’s feelings about telephone usage.

The same decaying newspapers that contained the telephone tariffs, also contained the daily market prices for foodstuffs and other commodities in the market at King Williams Town. These prices of everyday foodstuffs and so on put the prices of telephone calls into realistic perspective. For the same price as between 1 to 6 cabbages, sixpence, one could make a 3 minute call to nearby Peddie. The two shillings and sixpence that you might have spent on a three minute call to Port Elizabeth could have bought you any of the following: a dozen eggs; a live chicken (a good breed); a pound (454 grams) of butter; at least 33 pounds of forage for animals; or almost 100 pounds of tomatoes. In 1924, when my father was a child, telephone calls were really expensive. 

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Distasteful matters in biography

I am in the process of writing a biography of one of my 19th century ancestors, who gradually assumed great importance in the political life of South Africa during the last decades of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th centuries.

I have been led to believe that my subject was sympathetic to the problems faced by his black African (‘Native’) and other non-European neighbours and fellow countrymen. This has been acknowledged by at least one black African organisation, the Steve Biko Foundation in King Williams Town. When I visited their headquarters in 2003, I saw a plaque commemorating him alongside a number of other similar memorials. He was the only white person considered to be worthy of honouring by the Foundation.

So far so good!

As I report on his activities in matters concerned with the treatment of black Africans  in King Williams Town, and then later elsewhere in South Africa, readers, many of whom are imbued with today's 'politically correct' notions, might well be surprised at what he, a so-called liberal, said and did.  The reader of an account of a far-off era must always remember that the actions and views of my ancestor, some of which may surprise the reader today, were quite liberal in comparison with those of many other South Africans of European origin. Therefore, we cannot, and should not, judge my subject's approaches to what used to be called ‘Native’ matters through 21st century eyes. Instead, we should try to understand and judge them through 19th century spectacles.  This won't make the unpalatable more palatable, but at least it makes it understandable and helps to judge more fairly a man, who meant to do his level best for those less fortunate than him.

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THEY WENT TO SOUTH AFRICA

EXODUS TO AFRICA

By Adam Yamey

This is to tell potential readers what my latest book Exodus to Africa is all about.

Prior to the British taking over the Cape Peninsula in about 1800, Jews were not permitted to live there by the Dutch East India Company that had been governing the region for several centuries. Some Jews, who converted to Christianity, did set foot in what is now ‘South Africa’, but unconverted Jews did not. The arrival of the first openly practising Jewish settlers followed close on the heels of the commencement of British rule.

At first, there was a small trickle of Jewish settlers, almost all of them from Great Britain and the German states. A few arrived from St Helena. With the arrival of the Mosenthal brothers from Kassel, the flow began to increase. The Mosenthals and their Jewish associates began setting up a chain of trading stores, which effectively began to make the remote interior of the Cape Colony begin to prosper. All of this activity began before diamonds (in about 1868) and gold (in about 1880) put South Africa (i.e. the territories that united after 1910) amongst the economically significant countries in the world. Before the discovery of these precious commodities and the opening of the Suez Canal, The Cape was little more than a place, like the tiny island of St Helena, where ships stopped to pick up water and supplies whilst they travelled between Europe and Asia. It was not a place that attracted many immigrants, Jewish or otherwise, from Europe. The USA was the most favoured destination for those seeking a better life. The diamond and gold ‘industries’ that began in the latter half of the 19^th century changed this. South Africa became attractive to immigrants including the Jews. The trickle of Jews from Europe to South Africa began to become an exodus (especially from Tsarist Lithuania). At the beginning of the 19^th century, there were a handful of Jews in southern Africa. By the 1930s, as many as one in twenty ‘white’ people was Jewish.

My book, Exodus to Africa, takes a fresh look at the reasons Jews chose to travel to South Africa; how they got there; what they did when they arrived; what they and their descendants did to affect the history of the country; how they helped to oppose racial inequality (apartheid and its antecedents).

The first of my relatives to arrive in South Africa was Heinrich Bergmann from Bavaria. He disembarked at Cape Town in 1849. The last of them, my father’s cousin Hendrik Jami, who arrived 100 years later. Between these two dates, many members of both of my parents’ families migrated from Europe to South Africa. Their diverse experiences cover many aspects of Jewish life in the country. Using many of their stories to illustrate these, I have attempted to produce a history of the Jews in the south of Africa.  The stories are told against the ever changing historical background of the troubled country where they chose to settle. My book is based on a multitude of sources, both previously unpublished primary material (documentary and from interviews) and also published secondary documentation.

Here are a few of the ‘protagonists’, whose tales are unfolded in my book:

Heinrich Bergmann (1830-1866), an early settler typical of the Jewish man who joined the Mosenthal Brothers.  His life took a surprising turn.

Jakob Seligmann (1846-1906), from Bavaria, was a ‘founding father’ of a small town in the Orange Free State. He fell afoul of the law and fled from Africa.

Sigmund Seligmann (1856-1939), also from Bavaria, started as an employee in the Cape Colony, and then began his own successful trading business before retiring to Germany in the late 1890s.

Franz Joseph Ginsberg (1862-1936), from a part of Prussia that is now Poland, began life in South Africa as a photographer. Soon, he became an industrialist, and then first an influential local politician, and later a national one. In 1927, he was elected a Senator in the Parliament of united South Africa.

Gustav Ginsberg (1872-1922), Franz’s brother, a dentist, who suffered from the effects of the vagaries of first the 2^nd Boer War and then later the First World War. His sons became well-known in the arts, both in South Africa and the USA.

Iwan Bloch (1886-1931), from Baden-Württemberg, who began working as a shop assistant in Zurich, and ended up the Mayor of a town in South Africa.

Joseph Halperin (1870- c. 1949) sailed to South Africa with his wife and three children. Ran a bakery and then a dairy in Cape Town before retiring to enjoy the successes of his children who had advanced up the ‘social ladder’.

Solomon Yamey (1883-1931) left his shtetl in Tsarist Lithuania and became a wandering pedlar (‘smous’) in the Cape before owning his own successful store in an Afrikaans speaking town near Cape Town. 

 By the time that John Katzin (1866-1931), who was born in Tsarist Lithuania, arrived in South Africa he had already lived in Amsterdam and London. In South Africa, he made a fortune in the laundry business. Some of his children became noted in wider world of public work and literature.

Henry Polak (1882-1959), [seated left in the picture above] a lawyer with London, became one of MK (later the ‘Mahatma’) Gandhi’s close associates in South Africa.

David Kitson (1919-2010) was one of the brave people with Jewish roots who actively supported the struggle against apartheid. His cousins the Budlenders, of Lithuanian and Polish Jewish extraction, risked arrest and worse because of their brave stand against the iniquities of racial oppression in South Africa.

There is no doubt that though a small proportion of the European population of South Africa, the 

Jewish people played a disproportionately large role in the development and history of its country 

from 1800 onwards. Freed from the repression and hostility that they faced in the countries where 

they were born, they flourished in a country that was no stranger to oppression. Exodus to Africa  explores all of this and much more. 

Exodus to Africa is NOW available on KINDLE:

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A NEW ADVENTURE STORY

It is 1877. 

Jakob Klein, a liberal-minded Jewish pioneer from Bavaria, has been living in the small town of Rouxville in the Orange Free State in southern Africa for well over a decade.

He will try anything to support his wife and young family. His questionable business ethics often cause him to sail close to the wind. This time, he has sailed far too close, and his life has capsized. His dubious dealings have lost him his home and livelihood. His young family have had to leave him to seek refuge with relatives in the Cape Colony.

Now, he is in jail, awaiting transfer to Bloemfontein where the serious case against him is to be heard by the highest court in the land. With only his guards for company, he has plenty of time to wonder what sort of future fate holds for him and whether he will ever see his family again.

Read Jakob's story in ROGUE OF ROUXVILLE. It is an exciting tale of debt and deception based loosely on the life of a real person, and set mostly in the wilds of what was later to become the Union of South Africa.

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ALIWAL: my first novel

Henry Bergmann lives on the frontier of the Cape Colony in Aliwal North, the town he helped to establish in 1849.

He is the richest man in the town, and probably one of the wealthiest in the Colony. 

His integrity and concern for others has gained him positions of responsibility including managing the town's bank.

He meets a respected gold prospector, who invites him to join a venture that promises to yield rewards beyond his wildest expectations . 

Although he has enough already, he would like to use the promised riches to improve the prosperity of the town, to develop it into the pride of the Colony.

He accepts, travels north into the Transvaal, and becomes entwined in something that will lead him gradually, but inexorably, towards a tragic fate.

Fact and fiction are interwoven excitingly in ALIWAL, my first biographical novel.

ISBN: 978-1-4461-8322-9

Available as a book or an ebook on www.lulu.com and also on Amazon (where a Kindle version is on offer as well) and Barnes& Noble, .