Senator John David Rheinallt-Jones (July 5, 1882-January 30, 1953) was a prominent white advocate for interracial understanding and the rights of blacks in South Africa. An instigator of the Joint Council movement, and founder of the South African Institute of Race Relations (S.A.I.R.R), he helped introduce African Studies into South African universities and represented Africans in the South African Sernate from 1937 to 1942.
Rheinallt-Jones was born in Wales and followed his brother to South Africa in 1905. He worked in a bank until 1918, marrying his wife Edith in 1910. In 1921, he founded Bantu Studies (later African Studies), a journal of anthropology and sociology that he edited until Edith’s death in 1944.
He also edited The South African Quarterly for some time. He lobbied, along with Alfred and Winifred Hoernle, for the creation of the Department of Bantu Studies at the University of the Witswatersrand in the early 192Os.
Contact with a visiting representative of the Phelps-Stokes Foundation in 1921 led Rheinallt-Jones to establish the first Joint Council of Europeans and Africans, Known as the Joint Councils movement, the Council’s brought prominent blacks and whites together to discuss matters of common interest.
Over the next decades Rheinallt-Jones helped establish many of these Councils. In 1929, with the help of the Phelps-Stokes Foundation, Rheinallt-Jones founded the South African Institute of Race Relations (S.A.I.R.R) a research and policy institute supporting the efforts of liberal whites to win improved conditions for Africans and to extend interracial dialogue.
Rheinallt-Jones served as director of the Institute through the early 1940s. The Institute was probably best known at the time for its yearly compilation of statistics on the social, economic and educational conditions of the black majority.
Rheinallt-Jones served one term as Senator for Africans in the Transvaal and Orange Free State, but was defeated by the more militant Hyman Basner in 1942. After Edith’s death, he cut back his activities. In his later years, he took the post of Advisor on Native Affairs for the Anglo-American Corporation.
With the increasing power of Afrikaner nationalism, exemplified by the passage of the Hertzog Bills in the late 1930s, African nationalists turned to a strategy of mass organizing. They left many erstwhile liberal allies behind.
White liberals like Rheinallt-Jones seem in hindsight to have been too willing to work within the racially exclusive political system, and too reluctant to support external challenge by organized blacks. Yet his energy and devotion cannot be questioned. His vision did not come to pass, but it was not for lack of effort. CHRISTOPHER LOWE
