Newspaper publication tended to favour expression in the form of poetry, and the essay, but the occasional short story was also published. An example of one of these early short stories is A.S. Vil-Nkomo’s “Mhlutshwa Comes To Johannesburg”, published in Bantu World on 29 April 1933.6 It centres on the decision by the elder of a pair of brothers to leave the farm on which they work and go to Johannesburg in search of employment and personal betterment. The story is notable for its brevity (it is just over 700 words long) and for its rudimentary nature: there is a conspicuous lack of descriptive detail and little development of character, and the dialogue between the two brothers is expressed in the entirely inappropriate register of formal English (“I whom am younger than you fail to see the force of your argument”). It does at least sketch in simple terms the predicament of the rural black farm worker – the elder brother seeks to escape the “tyranny of Has-Broek farm” by going to the city – and serves as an early instance of the “Jim Comes to Joburg” story.
R.R.R. Dhlomo was perhaps the most significant precursor of the Drum writers. His early novel, An African Tragedy (1928), shows the influence of missionary discourse. It is essentially a morality tale: the central character, Robert Zulu – “a young Christian teacher in the mission” (2) – is a kind of Everyman who gives way to temptation and goes to the bad in the city.His first “disastrous step” is his “bad choice of companions” (3), and his second is the reckless pursuit of pleasure – “that sort of pleasure for which Johannesburg is so notorious” (3). His moral decline is rapid: within a few months he is “a reckless, dissolute young man” (3). The
narrator’s horror and dismay are communicated to the reader through explicit
commentary. At one point there is a lengthy homily on the evils of Prospect Township – “a revolting, immoral place; where the black sons and daughters of Africa are kicked about by their unbridled passions as a football is on the playfields” (5). The horror is heightened by the observation that “Ministers – in names and collar only – live in filthy closeness with loose women” (5). After a vehement denunciation of the failure of professed Christians to intervene, the narrator apologises to the reader: “Pardon my digression, my poor effort being to write the story of Robert Zulu as he handed it to me for publication – not to presume to teach or preach” (7). The author’s didactic intent could not in fact be clearer, or the Christian frame of reference more
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explicit: his cautionary tale concludes with Robert infecting his innocent rural bride with syphilis, so that their child is born blind. There is an equivocal deathbed scene, and the novel concludes with a reading of psalm 139. In spite of its brevity (it is only 40 pages long), its one-dimensional characterisation and its insistent moralising, the novel belongs to the same genre as Paton’s Cry, The Beloved Country (1948), which uses the same Christian frame of reference and rests on the same over-simple
opposition between rural innocence and urban depravity. All three texts – the short story by Vil-Nkomo, and the novels by Dhlomo and Paton – mark stages in the development of the “Jim Comes to Joburg” genre.7
In her recent study of the influence and dissemination of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s
Progress, Hofmeyr describes the extent to which Protestant religious education relied
on allegory, and the way in which “literature” was “heavily moralised”: “. . . on the one hand, it could ‘improve’ its readers and ‘save’ them from corrupting pastimes; on the other, it could show them an instance of an elevated national product to which ‘their’ people could aspire” (Hofmeyr 126). Although Dhlomo was educated at the Ohlange Institute and Adams College, his novel was published by Lovedale
(described by Hofmeyr as ‘one of the subcontinent’s Bunyan epicentres’ (2004: 120)), and these assumptions about literature and its function would have been widespread among the missionary-educated elite at the time. The pressures or constraints of missionary influence and publication are clearly evident in Dhlomo’s text: the Publisher’s Note to An African Tragedy commends the book “as a contribution towards staying the decline of Native life in large cities and towns.” Subsequent critics (writing from a very different era, with their own critical agendas) have often dismissed Dhlomo’s text – in some cases, perhaps, without giving sufficient
consideration to its informing context. Gray (Southern African Literature 173) describes the novel as “a rudimentary attempt at transforming pamphleteering into fiction” (South African Literature 173), while Mzamane describes this phase of black writing as “a literature of converts and uncritical acceptance” (“Early Trends” 152). Shava criticizes the novel’s failure to examine the material conditions and socio- economic pressures that contribute to the breakdown of both traditional and Christian norms and values. If one places the novel in the context of its time, however, one
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Stephen Gray has surveyed the field in his 1985 article, “Third World Meets First World: The Theme of ‘Jim Comes to Joburg’ in South African English Fiction”.
recognises the extent to which it reflects the prevalent concerns of members of Dhlomo’s class.
In 1924 the newspaper Umteteli wa Bantu ran a competition on the dangers of town life: Couzens quotes an extract from Douglas C. Zulu’s prize-winning essay, in which he urges a cousin to stay at the Hostel of the Helping Hand club, where he will be introduced to “healthy outdoor games . . . educative lectures . . . and social and religious gatherings” (“Social Ethos of Black Writing” 67). He is expressly advised to “pick his companions carefully”. Robert Zulu’s “first disastrous step” was also “his bad choice of companions” (African Tragedy 3). The moral concerns of An African
Tragedy are consistent with the views expressed by Dhlomo and others in newspaper
articles during this period and represent an understandable response to what was seen as the erosion of traditional and Christian norms and values.