Noni Jabavu: Writing across worlds

"I shall always try and stay a Murray author", Noni Jabavu could be read reassuring her publishers, John Murray, following the publication of her second memoir. The assurance was characteristically warm, but it also revealed something of the seriousness with which Jabavu regarded the place she had secured within British literary and cultural life.

To be a Murray author was indeed to belong to a publishing house with a long and distinguished history. For Jabavu, it also meant carrying her reflections on African life to readers far beyond the worlds from which they were written. The correspondence preserved in the National Library of Scotland's John Murray Archive brings that relationship into sharp focus.

Across these papers, Jabavu appears as the assured narrator of 'Drawn in Colour': African Contrasts' (1960) and 'The Ochre People': Scenes from a South African Life' (1963). But she appears also as an author in the midst of composition, weighing book titles, revising painful memories, and responding thoughtfully to editorial advice. Her letters reveal that a book is never simply written. It acquires shape through exchange, negotiation, and careful revision.

Who was Noni Jabavu?

Helen Nontando (Noni) Jabavu was a Black South African author, broadcaster, and editor whose career unfolded across Britain and Africa. Although she belonged to one of South Africa's best-known intellectual families, much of her adult life was spent outside the country, writing about the people and places she knew so well.

That position, which was at once rooted and itinerant, gave her writing its distinctive edge. Jabavu could move between Britain, Southern Africa and East Africa, between domestic experience and political affairs, and between the familiarity of kinship and the estrangement of return. The John Murray Archive not only helps us to understand how she fashioned those movements into her two published books but also draws our attention to the stories that did not find their way into them, the relatives who helped bring them into being, and the other writing projects that remained unfinished.

The early beginnings of 'Drawn in Colour'

The origins of 'Drawn in Colour' can be traced back almost a decade earlier before its eventual publication in 1960. While sorting through the papers at the National Library of Scotland, I came across a letter between Jabavu and her John Murray editor, Osyth Leeston, in which Jabavu rediscovered a letter Lady Clarendon had written to her in 1951.

Jabavu was then in South Africa, grieving the recent death of her mother and describing the events unfolding around her family. Lady Clarendon believed there was a book in what she had written and urged her to consider pursuing it. The suggestion stayed with Jabavu and, when another family crisis drew her back to South Africa four years later – the death of her brother Tengo Max Jabavu – the experiences that would eventually provide the emotional spine of 'Drawn in Colour' began to crystalise.

This exchange offers one of the archive's most revealing insights into the making of 'Drawn in Colour'. The book is often remembered for the journeys and observations it recounts, especially Jabavu's portraits of experiences in Southern Africa and Uganda. But the archive suggests that its most important journeys were also inward, unfolding through memory as much as through travel. It was written from recollection, as grief, surprise, and estrangement gradually settled into language.

The archive also shows that lived experience did not always pass directly onto the page. One striking example concerns Jabavu's cousin, the anti-apartheid activist and Treason Trial defendant Tennyson Makiwane. She recalled that Makiwane had arrived unexpectedly at her home in Uganda while fleeing South Africa. Her husband, Michael Crosfield, then drove him across the border into Sudan before the British Protectorate authorities discovered that he was there.

Jabavu could not include the episode in 'Drawn in Colour'. Crosfield was a colonial civil servant and, by helping a member of her family to escape, had broken the law. As Jabavu remarked to her editor, "Blood being thicker than water." What appears in the memoir is shaped not only by memory, but also by discretion, risk, and the obligations of kinship.

A manuscript read within the family

'Drawn in Colour' was written by Noni Jabavu, but some of its earliest readers were members of her family. Her father, D. D. T. Jabavu, remained involved until the end of his life, answering questions and clarifying details, even from his hospital bed during his sudden illness. He died on 3 August 1959, shortly after Jabavu completed the manuscript.

"I'm only thankful I had just finished the book, I wouldn't have had the heart to go on writing about him and my home for a long time," Jabavu wrote. The news of his death was a profound blow. She later reflected that she regretted that her father died "before seeing even an early proof copy."

The manuscript also became a family undertaking in Kampala. Michael Crosfield and Jabavu's daughter, Tembi, read, commented on, and corrected drafts. One letter captures the intimacy of this shared act of collective reading: "As I type this," Jabavu told Leeston, "Tembi is in another room reading the book; and I was terribly touched to see that her eyes were filled with tears. Nothing I could do, so I've simply left her & she is still reading." These quiet and intimate moments preserved in the correspondence remind us that 'Drawn in Colour' first returned family stories to those who had lived them before it reached its wider readership.

Once the manuscript reached John Murray, another circle of readers became involved in its making. Osyth Leeston and her colleagues helped Jabavu refine its structure, considered possible titles, and prepared it for publication. The eventual title, 'Drawn in Colour', neatly captured the spirit of the memoir. It evoked both the vividness of Jabavu's writing and the many contrasts she explored across Africa. The Irish artist and illustrator Pauline Bewick was commissioned to design the jacket and provide illustrations, beginning a visual collaboration that would continue with Jabavu's second book.

The publication of 'Drawn in Colour' in April 1960 brought Jabavu's writing to a much wider readership. Newspaper coverage in Britain, the United States, and in Africa, together with her appearance on ABC Television's 'The Book Man' with presenter and producer Guy Verney, introduced many readers to African life as narrated by a Black African woman in her own voice.

The book, however, was not received in the same way everywhere. In Uganda, the book became the subject of controversy, drawing criticism from Ugandan students and objections to its portrayal of religious figures. These contrasting reactions illuminated the different worlds in which Jabavu's memoir was read.

For many readers in Britain and the United States, it offered an introduction to places and experiences they scarcely knew. For many African readers, it spoke about people, institutions, and political aspirations that were intimately familiar, making its observations all the more immediate and, at times, deeply contested.

The American edition of 'Drawn in Colour', published by St Martin's Press in 1962, opened another chapter in the book's life. Jabavu travelled to the United States with Michael Crosfield and was honoured at a reception in Washington, D. C., hosted by the Liberian Ambassador and his wife. Delighted by the response, she wrote to Leeston:

"In addition, DIC ['Drawn in Colour'] was terribly well received, enthusiastic reviews. In Washington where our friend the Liberian Ambassador with whom we stayed held a reception for us, the local papers plugging it beforehand so that over 200 people came and an amazing no. of them had copies of the b[oo]k under their elbows for me to autograph! They were mainly people from State Departments, journalists, booksellers – my word, I never had such a launching!"

Moments such as these reveal that the book's life extended well beyond its printed pages. Lectures, reviews, interviews, and public receptions all shaped how writers like Jabavu came to be known, introducing both the author and her work to new audiences.

Beyond memoir writing

The success of 'Drawn in Colour' did not diminish Noni Jabavu's literary ambitions. The John Murray papers contain a series of new ideas, some pursued, others abandoned. One was a book on Southern Africa, interrupted by the deaths of her father and Tshekedi Khama – one of Bechuanaland's leading political figures.

She also considered an illustrated book about her family and worked on a novel called 'Unicorns Too'. Another project explored what she called "Moslem Africa," which she hoped to write from the perspective of "an African of Christian background looking at the social scene of those of Moslem background." She had initially imagined this idea as a novel but later concluded that "since novels don't sell so well, it might be as well to treat the whole matter non-fictionally." To pursue the project properly, she hoped to a find a publisher willing to finance research travel to Somaliland.

These unfinished projects demonstrate a far wider literary imagination than a bibliography of two published books might otherwise suggest. The archive introduces us to a writer who moved with ease between fiction, family history, travel writing, and social observation.

It also captures the many forces that shaped what Jabavu was able to write and publish: bereavement, editorial collaboration, and publishers' judgements about what readers were likely to buy. John Murray, for example, was particularly anxious that Jabavu should complete her second book project before committing herself on a new work of fiction. When Lady Howard de Walden expressed enthusiasm for Jabavu's fiction, Leeston urged her not to "let anyone persuade you to start on fiction when it is so important to work on this second book and get it as you want it."

Even her editorship of 'The New Strand' was weighed against the demands of the manuscript. As Leeston reflected, "I will talk to Jock about whether keeping on the magazine is really going to help the new book and I rather doubt this myself if that editorial note you have to write becomes a burden..."

The making of 'The Ochre People'

Noni Jabavu wrote 'The Ochre People' while leading a remarkably busy public life. As editor of 'The New Strand', she found herself confronted with towering piles of unsolicited manuscripts from aspiring contributors.

"Life on the magazine front is getting much more relaxing for me, thank Lord," she told Leeston. "I have, from this week, stopped reading all those huge piles of mss. I will only read a small handful…things which won't exhaust me at all! What a relief…"

We learn from the John Murray Archive that, aside from producing her monthly editorial column, Jabavu entertained occasional contributors over lunch and visited the magazine's offices once or twice a week to deal with correspondence. "Funny kind of editor, aren't I!" she joked to Leeston. Behind her humour lay a familiar challenge. Editing demanded the same energy, time, and attention that her own writing required.

Her international profile was also growing. In 1962, whilst still writing 'The Ochre People', she embarked on an American lecture tour organised by the prominent speakers' agent Colston Leigh. These public engagements introduced her work to new audiences and established her as an important public commentator on African affairs. They also repeatedly placed her in the position of interpreting African experience to readers and audiences far from the continent.

Like 'Drawn in Colour', the title of 'The Ochre People' was the subject of discussion between author and publisher. Leeston worried that another recent book on Africa had already used the word "ochre" and suggested that Jabavu might have to find an alternative. In the end, the title remained.

Jabavu also cared deeply about the book's visual appearance. Her preferred cover image was the striking Kniphofia uvaria, reproduced in Mary Maytham Kidd's 'Wild Flowers of the Cape Peninsula'.

Although the final jacket, once again designed by Pauline Bewick, took a slightly different direction, the correspondence reveals how closely Jabavu thought about the relationship between her writing and its visual presentation.

Initial commercial signs were encouraging, with advance subscription sales reaching roughly 3,000 copies. But the book's prospects in South Africa were already being overshadowed by the threat of censorship.

F. L. Cannon of Oxford University Press (OUP) in Cape Town warned John Murray that the authorities would take an unfavourable view of the book, singling out a paragraph concerning C. R. Swart, then State President of the Republic of South Africa. In Cannon's judgement, copies arriving in their existing form were likely to be banned.

Under South Africa's new publications legislation – which would later be consolidated in the Publications and Entertainments Act of 1963 – he felt unable even to include the book in OUP's catalogues and suggested that page proofs of similar works should, in future, be submitted for local scrutiny before publication. Cannon's letter reveals how censorship could shape a book's fortunes long before any official ban was imposed.

For Jabavu, the stakes were especially high. South Africa was not simply another market for her book. It was the country she was writing about, the setting of her family story, and the place whose changing political landscape gave 'The Ochre People' much of its urgency.

Reading the books through the archive

Published books can make their own arrival seem inevitable, concealing the uncertainty of their own creation. The John Murray Archive shows that 'Drawn in Colour' and 'The Ochre People' took shape through conversation: between a daughter and her father, a mother and her child, a wife and her husband, and an author and her publishers. It also shows those intimate exchanges intersecting with the larger world of publishing, such as sales forecasts, publicity, book design, and the ever-present shadow of censorship.

What I have found most compelling in the Noni Jabavu papers is the opportunity to encounter her not only as the accomplished author of two celebrated memoirs, but also as a writer thinking her way through ideas and memories. Her letters are by turns funny, vulnerable, shrewd, and forthright. They show an author deeply confident in her gifts, yet still questioning titles, weighing editorial advice, reworking memories, and wondering how her book would be received. That, perhaps, is the John Murray Archive's greatest gift. It does not simply preserve the publishing history of the books Noni Jabavu wrote. It preserves the conversations, decisions, and moments of uncertainty that made them possible.

Noni Jabavu's declaration that she would try to remain "a Murray author" was perhaps more than a simple expression of gratitude or loyalty to her publisher. It spoke to a relationship through which she hoped to build a writing life across continents. That life extended beyond the two John Murray books she published, just as those books reached beyond any single national literary tradition. To read the correspondence alongside them allows us to encounter Jabavu not simply as the author of two remarkable memoirs, but as a writer whose work was shaped by relationships, journeys, and the many conversations from which books are made.