contributed by Brian Willan

Richard Msimang (1884-1933) was one of South Africa’s earliest black lawyers, and
the first to qualify as a solicitor in England and Wales. Returning home to South
Africa in 1912 he went on to play an important part in the early years of the South
African Native National Congress (later to become the African National Congress)
and was responsible for drafting its first constitution. Such achievements were made possible by the eight years he spent in England between 1904 and 1912.

His father Joel Msimang was a Wesleyan Methodist missionary in South Africa, and he wanted an English education for his eldest son. Queen’s College in Taunton, Somerset, a Methodist school, which had a
long tradition of taking students from other parts of Africa, was a natural choice, and
they were happy to take him in. Richard Msimang flourished at the school. He frequently took part in debates at the school’s debating society, joined its organising committee and one year was
elected its secretary. He excelled at both football and rugby. He had played both
games at his previous schools in South Africa and must also have benefited from the
fact that, at 20 years of age when he arrived at Queen’s, he was several years older
than most his fellow students. The school magazine is full of reports of his prowess.
‘Msimang’s play was quite a revelation’, it said of his first appearance in the school
football team, ‘persisting and untiring, with a happy knack of stopping dead in full
career.’

But it was in rugby that he really made his mark, especially from 1907 when
he was a regular member not of the school team but of Taunton RUFC, one of the
leading rugby clubs in the southwest of England. He was a regular for them between
1907 and 1912, usually at scrum half but occasionally at fly half, and was extremely
popular. The author of the history of Queen’s College, a contemporary of his, wrote
that he was ‘the most popular player Taunton had ever had’, adding: ‘The crowd
loved to see him emerge with a smile from the bottom of a heap of forwards. He was
a brilliant scrum half, tough and with a swerve that made it difficult to being him
down. So popular was he that sometimes he had to leave the ground by a back exit
to avoid the crowd’. Another time a reporter wrote that he ‘had never known a man stand a gruelling like he does’ and thought him ‘one of the most gentlemanly players that ever donned a jersey’. In 1912 he was the team’s vice captain, narrowly losing that year in the final of the Somerset Cup.

courtesy Richard Walford.

From 1907 to 1912, while continuing at Queen’s College, Msimang was
articled to a local law firm, Messrs Kite, Broomhead and Kite, studying at the same
time for the legal qualifications that would enable him to become a solicitor. He was
successful in passing both Part 1 and Part 2 of the Law Society’s examinations. This
was also a period in which he became increasingly interested in political
developments in South Africa, which he discussed with his fellow black South African
law students who were in England at the same time – Pixley ka Izaka Seme, Alfred
Mangena and Richard Montsioa. When W.P. Schreiner, a well-known South African
lawyer and politician, came to England in 1909, leading a deputation protesting
about the provisions of the draft South African constitution, Richard Msimang wrote
to him as follows. ‘As a native of Natal and one greatly interested in your mission. I
beg to wish you every success in your endeavour to secure for us the right of
representation which we are being unjustly denied’.

Msimang returned to South Africa at the end of 1912, playing his last rugby
match for Taunton v Newton Abbott on 12 October. The month before, at a
testimonial, he was presented with ‘a gold watch, chain and pendant, inscribed in
commemoration of his association with the club’. He died in 1933, insolvent,
defeated by the obstacles placed in his way by a hostile South African government.

Further reading
Brian Willan, ‘”One of the most gentlemanly players that ever donned a jersey”: the
English rugby career of Richard Msimang (1907-1912)’, Quarterly Bulletin of the
National Library of South Africa, vol 66, no 3, July-September 2012.
Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, The Land is Ours: South Africa’s first black lawyers and the
birth of constitutionalism (Century City: Penguin, 2018), esp. pp 115-154.