Robert Trent Vinson – författare

For more than half a century before World War II, black South Africans and "American Negroes"—a group that included African Americans and black West Indians—established close institutional and personal relationships that laid the necessary groundwork for the successful South African and American antiapartheid movements. Though African Americans suffered under Jim Crow racial discrimination, oppressed Africans saw African Americans as free people who had risen from slavery to success and were role models and potential liberators.Many African Americans, regarded initially by the South African government as "honorary whites" exempt from segregation, also saw their activities in South Africa as a divinely ordained mission to establish "Africa for Africans," liberated from European empires. The Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, the largest black-led movement with two million members and supporters in forty-three countries at its height in the early 1920s, was the most anticipated source of liberation. Though these liberation prophecies went unfulfilled, black South Africans continued to view African Americans as inspirational models and as critical partners in the global antiapartheid struggle.The Americans Are Coming! is a rare case study that places African history and American history in a global context and centers Africa in African Diaspora studies.

In an excellent addition to the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series, Robert Trent Vinson recovers the important but largely forgotten story of Albert Luthuli, Africa's first Nobel Peace Prize winner and president of the African National Congress from 1952 to 1967. One of the most respected African leaders, Luthuli linked South African antiapartheid politics with other movements, becoming South Africa's leading advocate of Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolent civil disobedience techniques. He also framed apartheid as a crime against humanity and thus linked South African antiapartheid struggles with international human rights campaigns. Unlike previous studies, this book places Luthuli and the South African antiapartheid struggle in new global contexts, and aspects of Luthuli's leadership that were not previously publicly known: Vinson is the first to use new archival evidence, numerous oral interviews, and personal memoirs to reveal that Luthuli privately supported sabotage as an additional strategy to end apartheid. This multifaceted portrait will be indispensable to students of African history and politics and nonviolence movements worldwide.

This much-awaited volume uncovers the long-lost pages of the major African multilingual newspaper, Abantu-Batho. Founded in 1912 by African National Congress (ANC) convenor Pixley Seme, with assistance from the Swazi Queen, it was published up until 1931, attracting the cream of African politicians, journalists and poets Mqhayi, Nontsisi Mgqweth, and Grendon. In its pages burning issues of the day were articulated alongside cultural by-ways. The People’s Paper – comprising both essays and an anthology – explores the complex movements and individuals that emerged in the almost twenty years of its publication. The essays contribute rich, new material to provide clearer insights into South African politics and intellectual life. The anthology unveils a judicious selection of never-before published columns from the paper spanning every year of its life and drawn from repositories on three continents. Abantu-Batho had a regional and international focus, and by examining all these dynamics across boundaries and disciplines, The People’s Paper transcends established historiographical frontiers to fill a lacuna that scholars have long lamented.