John Langalibalele Dube - Influenced By Washington

Influenced By Washington

Dube had experienced first-hand the influence of Booker T. Washington in his travels to the US to expand his education in early 1890. He founded the Inanda Seminary Institute for Girls at Ohlange in 1901, a school dedicated to teaching Bantu women modern ways in order to be liberated and find a place in modern society. In his Ukuziphatha Dube had identified the Bantu woman as the weakness in developing Bantu society because of the society's restrictions on education for women and what he identified as woman's propensity to ephemera. Dube was particularly influenced by reading Washington's Up From Slavery, a book on self-reliance, the gospel that was taught by the American sage Ralph Waldo Emerson. Washington's book proved immensely influential in Bantu thought and across the black world. It was subsequently translated into several Bantu languages in South Africa, but Dube never chose to translate it, instead putting its teachings into practice. This was a feat that was never duplicated, except by Garvey and his movement and, on a minor scale, by the political figure Steve Biko in his hometown of King William's Town in the province of the Eastern Cape. Dube had been inspired by Washington's Tuskegee Institute; years later Marcus Garvey attempted to see Washington because of a similar inspiration, though he arrived in the US in 1916, Washington had died the previous year. Dube's school is still functioning till today. Dube was a firm believer in self-reliance, both as an ethical and spiritual quest towards realisation of dignity and respect in the eyes of others. In Isita he preached self-reliance and the need for black people to initiate economic ventures in order to gain respect in the eyes of the world.

In 1901 John Dube established the Zulu Christian Industrial School at Ohlange, near Phoenix and EkuPhakameni.