ABSTRACT
On Sunday, 3 June 1934, African artists and intellectuals, American Board Missionaries, liberal whites associated with the Joint European/African Council movement and a “New African” (educated and, to a degree Europeanized) audience gathered at the Bantu Men’s Social Centre (BMSC) in central Johannesburg for a National Thanksgiving or Emancipation Centenary Celebration, commemorating the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834. The Celebration was framed by speeches by American missionaries and leading Africans, such as R.V.Selope Thema (editor of Bantu World) and Dr. A.B.Xuma (later president of the ANC) and incorporated chamber music by Mendelssohn and Schubert, extracts from Handel’s Messiah, Elgar’s “Land of Hope and Glory,” hymns composed by Europeans, Africans, and Americans, including “Negro spirituals,” and the Gettysburg Address, delivered by African variety impresario and Trinity College (London) graduate, Griffiths Motsieloa. It culminated in a “dramatic display,” the subject of which was not, as might have been expected, the emancipation of slaves in Africa or the Caribbean, but the lives of slaves in the United States.1
