Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu

Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu (20 October 1885 – 3 August 1959) was a South African educationist and politician, and a founder of the All African Convention (AAC), which sought to unite all non-European opposition to the segregationist measure of the South African government. He was the eldest son of political activist and pioneering newspaper editor John Tengo Jabavu, and the father of Noni Jabavu, one of the first African female writers and journalists.

Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu was born in King Williams Town, in the Eastern Cape, and was educated at Morija Institution, a mission centre in Basutoland (present-day Lesotho). He later studied at Lovedale in the Cape Province before going to the United Kingdom, where he completed his matriculation at Colwyn Bay in Wales. In 1906 he entered the University of London, earning a BA degree in English six years later. As a student he attended the 1911 Universal Races Congress held in London, where he met leading African Americans and Africans, including his father, who was a member of the South African delegation.

Before returning home in 1915, D. D. T. Jabavu visited the United States on a tour of Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute and other black centres of learning. Back in South Africa, he was a founding member of the staff of the University of Fort Hare in 1916, and the first and only African academic at the institution, where he remained as professor of African languages until 1944.

In addition, he established the South African Native Farmers' Association to encourage the development of better farming standards, stressing the value of manual labour. He also founded the Cape African Teachers' Association and the South African Native Teachers' Federation, which he led for many years. He was also president of the Cape Native Votes' Convention, which campaigned in the 1920 and 1930 for the retention of Africans' voting rights.

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