In the Light of a Tswana Star: Koranta ea Becoana and the Pursuit of Multiethnic Liberalism in South Africa

Abstract This article explores changes and continuities in the lives and perspectives of Black South Africans at the beginning of the twentieth century, as portrayed in the Setswana-language newspaper Koranta ea Becoana . In studies of African responses to British colonization, scholars have tended to focus on evidence of nascent African nationalism in the English writings of Africans, but Koranta and other vernacular sources indicate that Africans during 1890–1910 were equally concerned with celebrating and preserving their various cultural and political traditions, advocating for a multiethnic liberalism that would not oblige them to choose between becoming either “Black Englishmen” or disenfranchised “Natives.”