The Ghost of Equality — 1997 ·

The Public Lives of D. D. T. Jabavu of South Africa, 1885–1959

By Catherine Higgs

“A vivid portrayal of D. D. T. Jabavu, a black leader who helped shape many South African worlds—black and white, rural and urban, secular and sacred—as the shadows of segregation lengthened over his land. With meticulous documentation and lucid prose, Higgs expounds the ideas and aspirations of this many-sided man, his liberalism, multiracialism, and Christianity in particular. Inaugurating a reassessment of Jabavu’s generation of African leaders, she illuminates the early history of some of the South African traditions that, to the world’s surprise, triumphed with the collapse of apartheid.”

Richard Elphick, Professor of History, Wesleyan University

“Catherine Higgs’s fine-grained narrative raises important questions about the adequacy of existing analyses of black South Africans’ reception of British liberalism and the Christian gospel. Higgs demonstrates that the situation in the early to mid-twentieth century was much more complex and conflict-ridden than conventional wisdom allows. What is perhaps most surprising about the D. D. T. Jabavu we meet in these pages is the extent to which his racial consciousness gave form and substance to his liberalism and to his faith. No radical, he was nevertheless what black Americans of his generation would have called, respectfully, a ‘race man.’”

John Edwin Mason, Assistant Professor of History, University of Virginia

Catherine Higgs is an associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of The Ghost of Equality: The Public Lives of D.D.T. Jabavu of South Africa, 1885–1959, and coeditor of Stepping Forward: Black Women in Africa and the Americas, both published by Ohio University Press.