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A History of South Africa

Page 22

by Leonard Thompson


  Britain and the republics had claimed that the war was among Whites only and denied that they were using Blacks for military purposes. In fact, both sides made extensive use of black labor, and Africans as well as Afrikaners suffered from the scorched earth policy. Peter Warwick has shown that “at least 10,000 and possibly as many as 30,000 Blacks” had fought with the British army and that “almost 116,000 Africans had been removed to concentration camps, in which over 14,000 refugees lost their lives.”48

  On May 31, 1902, what became known as the Peace of Vereeniging was signed in Pretoria, after its terms had been accepted, fifty-four to six, by representatives of the commandos at Vereeniging in the southern Transvaal. As high commissioner, Milner had the major say in drafting the terms. He was determined to translate the military victory into durable British supremacy throughout Southern Africa. He planned to rule the former republics autocratically, without popular participation, until he had denationalized the Afrikaners and swamped them with British settlers. When that was done, and not before then, it would be safe and expedient to introduce representative institutions. Finally, he planned that the anglicized former republics should join the Cape Colony and Natal in a self-governing dominion that would be a source of economic as well as political strength to Great Britain.49

  Milner thus made sure that the treaty included no concessions to Afrikaner demands that might undermine his plans. In response to the demand for cultural autonomy, the treaty stopped short of making Dutch an official language in the new colonies, though it stated that Dutch would be taught in the schools where the parents desired it and would be allowed in the courts where necessary for the better administration of justice. In response to political demands, the treaty set no date for institutional changes, saying merely that military administration would be succeeded by civil government “at the earliest possible date” and that “as soon as circumstances permit, representative institutions, leading up to self-government, will be introduced.”50 The Peace of Vereeniging also included one major concession to Afrikaner and British colonial sentiment: “The question of granting the franchise to natives will not be decided until after the introduction of self-government.”51 That was a momentous commitment. The white inhabitants of the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony were themselves to decide whether to enfranchise their black fellow subjects. It was a forgone conclusion that they would exclude the Blacks, since the republics had never allowed Blacks to vote. That outcome was in harmony with Milner’s prescription for the role of Blacks in Southern Africa. “The ultimate end,” he had written in November 1899, “is a self-governing white Community, supported by well-treated and justly-governed black labour from Cape Town to Zambesi.”52

  Africans in the former republics had reason to expect that their lives would improve under British administration, since British propaganda had repeatedly criticized the republican governments for their treatment of Africans. Those hopes quickly subsided. In the rural areas, where Africans had carried out a “rebellion from below” during the war, the Milner regime reestablished Afrikaner landowners and made Africans’ lives harsher than before the war. In the towns, too, Africans’ conditions worsened, especially in the gold-mining industry, which Milner nourished as a magnet for white immigration, a source of profit for investors and taxation for government, and a catalyst for the region’s economy. He tightened the pass laws to restrict the mobility of African laborers, while the mining companies cut Africans’ wages and stopped competing for their labor by combining to form a Witwatersrand Native Labor Association (WNLA). When Africans walked off their jobs, the government responded with force; when Africans failed to come to the mines on the prescribed terms in the required numbers, the government arranged for laborers to be imported from China. By 1907, 63,000 Chinese had arrived, contracted for unskilled and semiskilled mine work at low wages. In combination, the government, the WNLA, and the Chinese laborers made the gold-mining industry profitable to investors and the state by undermining the bargaining power of Africans.53

  In white ethnic terms, Milner’s grand design did not succeed. He failed to create the conditions he had considered essential before it would be safe to establish self-government in the former republics. The British population of the coastal colonies and the Transvaal did increase considerably during Milner’s regime, and British merchants and companies bought up significant: quantities of land. Yet there was no mass British immigration to the towns, and fewer than three thousand British settlers—men, women, and children—were established on the land under his subsidized scheme. Milner failed swamping the Afrikaners with people of British descent. As before, Afrikaners formed well over 50 percent of the white population of Southern Africa. Only in Natal was there a clear British majority among the Whites.

  Nor were the Afrikaners denationalized. Far from destroying Afrikaner nationalism, Chamberlain and Milner, Roberts and Kitchener were the greatest recruiting agents it ever had. The Jameson Raid, coercive diplomacy, military conquest, concentration camps, and bureaucratic reconstruction gave Afrikaner nationalism a powerful stimulus. Most Afrikaners in the former republics retained an indelible conviction that their cause had been just; so did the ten thousand colonial Afrikaners who had joined or assisted the commandos. Up and down Southern Africa, Dutch Reformed clergy used their great influence to unite their people and keep them true to their Calvinist religion and their culture. In the Transvaal in 1905, two former commando leaders—Louis Botha, a progressive landowner, and Jan Smuts, the Cape-born and British-educated man who had served the Kruger government before the war—denounced the Milner regime in general and its decision to import Chinese labor in particular, and appealed to bittereinders, handsuppers, and National Scouts (those who resisted to the end, those who surrendered, and those who fought for the British) to unite in support of a new political movement, Het Volk (The People). In the Orange River Colony, Abraham Fischer and J. B. M. Hertzog founded a similar organization, the Orangia Unie (Orange Union).54 Cleavages would soon open among these leaders and their followers, but so long as Milner was high commissioner they pulled together in demanding self-government.

  While Afrikaners were moving closer together, South Africans of British origin remained deeply divided. Milner’s obsession with “race” had made him miscalculate their political behavior. He failed to realize that most of them subordinated their ethnic sentiments to their economic interests, which differed vastly. In his haste to revive and expand the gold-mining industry, Milner sided so blatantly with management that he alienated many British artisans, professionals, and businesspeople.

  By 1905, when Milner left South Africa, the political pendulum had turned in Britain. The jingoistic spirit that had added the word mafficking to the English vocabulary, when a mob celebrated the lifting of the siege of Mafeking on May 17,1900, had been dissipated by the knowledge that the war had claimed the lives of 22,000 imperial soldiers and cost the British taxpayers £200 million. The internal strains in the Unionist party were accentuated in 1903 when Chamberlain resigned from the cabinet to campaign for a high imperial tariff to knit the empire together as a closed economic bloc.

  During the war, the Liberal party had been divided. Liberal imperialists had supported the government, pro-Boers had opposed it, and a central group led by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had endorsed the war in principle but denounced the resort to what he called “methods of barbarism” in the treatment of civilians. The Liberals later converged on the center, criticizing Milner’s reconstruction program, especially the importation of Chinese labor, and in a general election in January 1906 they won a majority of eighty-four over all other parties in the House of Commons.

  Campbell-Bannerman’s government was no less anxious than its predecessor to preserve British interests in South Africa, but it differed profoundly about the means. The Unionists’ resort to force had been counterproductive; it had alienated the Afrikaners. As British historian Bernard Porter has said, the Liberals appeased the Whites at the ex
pense of the Africans because they realized that the imperial connection depended on the help of colonial collaborators, and they believed that “in South Africa collaboration had to be with the white communities,” including the Afrikaners, who constituted the majority among the Whites. They were following their predecessors in classing South Africa in the same category as the other great British colonies of European settlement—Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—rather than placing South Africa with Britain’s Asian and tropical African dependencies, where the European population was a much smaller proportion of the whole.55

  Accordingly, the government decided to grant Het Volk’s request for self-government in the Transvaal, but on terms that would honor the Vereeniging commitment to confine the franchise to white men and also, it hoped, ensure an initial electoral victory for the British element. First, it appointed a committee that, after visiting South Africa, submitted a secret report with specific recommendations to this effect, regarding “British supremacy as vital and essential.”56 The government then promulgated a constitution for the Transvaal that created an executive cabinet responsible to an elected parliament, in which each electoral division contained the same number of voters (which favored the British element, with its high proportion of single men), as distinct from the same number of white inhabitants (which would have favored the Afrikaners, with their large families).

  The British government miscalculated the outcome of the election, however. On February 20, 1907, many British working-class Transvaalers voted not for the Progressives, the true-blue party led by mining magnates, but for the Transvaal National Association, led by English-speaking professional men who had made an electoral pact with Het Volk, whereas the Afrikaners were solid for Het Volk, which won thirty-seven of the sixty-nine seats in the new parliament. Thus, five years after they had been forcefully incorporated in the British Empire, Transvaal Afrikaners regained control of the territory as a self-governing British colony. Nine months later, the Orangia Unie won a still more sweeping victory under a similar constitution in the Orange River Colony, where Afrikaners greatly outnumbered those of British descent. In February 1908, an election was held in the Cape Colony, where the South African party, led by John X. Merriman, an anti-imperialist son of an Anglican priest, came into power with the support of the Afrikaner Bond. That left Natal, with its British electoral majority, as the only South African government sympathetic to British imperialism.

  Once in office, Botha and Smuts found it expedient to work in harmony with the powerful gold-mining industry and to accept the overtures of the British Liberal government. They described their policy as one of “conciliation,” which involved reconciling the differences among Afrikaners and between Afrikaners and British Transvaalers. Although they repatriated the Chinese laborers, they allayed the fears of the industrialists by siding with them in labor disputes, and although Afrikaner conservatives suspected their motives, Botha and Smuts managed to maintain control of the Het Volk.57

  Botha and Smuts also discovered powerful incentives to join the Transvaal in a political union with the other self-governing South African colonies. The existing system of trade relations in the region, which were regulated by a customs union and railway agreements that had been negotiated by Milner, was on the verge of collapse. The customs union was threatened because the coastal colonies relied heavily on tariffs for revenue, whereas the inland colonies were more interested in reducing the cost of imported goods. There was also intense competition among the state railways for the trade from the ports to the interior, and Portugal was threatening to stop sending Mozambican laborers to the gold mines if the colonies imposed differential rates to offset Lourenço Marques’s advantage as the closest port to the Witwatersrand.58

  Events in Natal, where Africans outnumbered Whites by ten to one, were another factor that led many white South Africans to favor a political union. In 1906, the Natal militia suppressed an African rebellion led by Bambatha, a former chief whom the government had deposed, with a loss of thirty white men and some three thousand Zulu; and in the following year the Natal government remobilized the militia and arrested Dinuzulu, the head of the Zulu royal house, on the grounds that he had been behind the rebellion and was plotting further resistance. By 1908, a government commission had revealed that the Natal Africans had substantial grievances, including insensitive administration and economic hardship. Later, when Dinuzulu’s trial for treason was completed, the presiding judge concluded that there was no evidence that he had formen ted rebellion before or after 1906. The result was that Whites in Natal were unsure of their capacity to control a distinct state, whereas Whites in the other colonies feared the consequences if Natal was left to its own devices.59

  The idea of South African federation or unification was not new. It was central to the imperialist philosophy. As we have seen, Lord Carnarvon and his officials bungled an attempt to give effect to it in the 1870s. Subsequently, Rhodes and Milner regarded it as their mission to create a vast British state extending northward from the Cape to the Zambezi or even further. After Milner left Southern Africa, a group of bright young men whom he had brought out from England to assist in administering the new colonies and who became known as the Milner Kindergarten hoped to salvage his work. They wrote a memorandum for public consumption, stressing the attractions of unification to white South Africans.60

  South African unity was also a goal of many thoughtful Afrikaners, but with the opposite intent—that it should weaken not strengthen imperial influence. Before the war it had been beyond the bounds of practical politics, but after Het Volk and the Orangia Unie assumed office in the Transvaal and Orange River Colony and the South African party did so in the Cape Colony, anti-imperialists throughout Southern Africa could look to unification as a means of solving their trade squabbles, consolidating the white South African communities, and eliminating imperial interference. Accordingly, in May 1908 an intercolonial conference patched up the railway and customs agreements and recommended that the four parliaments appoint delegates to a national convention to prepare a constitution for a united South Africa (map 7).

  7. Southern Africa in 1908

  The convention assembled in Durban in October 1908. There were thirty delegates with voting rights: twelve from the Cape Colony, eight from the Transvaal, and five each from the Orange River Colony and Natal. All. needless to say, were male and white. Fourteen were Afrikaners, sixteen were of British origin. Jan Smuts arrived with a well-thought-out constitutional scheme that he had cleared with the Progressive and Het Volk members of the Transvaal delegation, as well as with the leaders of the ruling parties in the Orange River Colony and the Cape Colony. Consequently, in spite of some heated debates, the convention moved fairly rapidly toward consensus. In February 1909 the delegates signed a draft constitution, and in May they amended it in the light of modifications recommended by the colonial parliaments. The document was then approved unanimously by the parliaments of the former republics, with two dissentients in the Cape parliament, and by a three-to-one majority in a referendum of the voters in Natal.61

  The constitution contained four major principles that have profoundly affected the course of South African history. First and foremost, it followed the British model, creating a unitary state with parliamentary sovereignty. It included no substantial concessions to Natal’s demands for federalism. The four colonies became the provinces of the Union of South Africa, but the central government was legally supreme over all local institutions. Moreover, powers were not divided within the center. As in Great Britain, the executive was responsible to a majority in the lower house of parliament, named the House of Assembly; the Senate, the upper house, was indirectly elected and weaker in several respects; and there was no bill of rights. In addition, with two exceptions to be noted, laws amending the constitution could be enacted in the same way as other laws—by simple majorities in both houses of parliament. The judiciary thus had scarcely any scope for testing the validity of acts of parliament.
That institutional system of winner take all, devoid of checks on the legal competence of a majority party, was to have momentous consequences.

  Second, the convention had to cope with the fact that the franchise laws of the four colonies differed substantially. In the Transvaal and Orange Free State, as we have seen, all white men, and none but white men, were entitled to vote in parliamentary elections or to become members of parliament. In Natal, where the colonial government had whittled away the political rights of blacks, white men could vote provided they satisfied quite low economic criteria, but law and practice excluded all but a few Africans, Indians, and Coloureds. In the Cape Colony, although Rhodes’s administration had diminished the black proportion of the total vote in the 1890s, the franchise laws were still nonracial in form. There, any man could vote or become a member of parliament, regardless of race, provided that he was at least barely literate and that he either earned fifty pounds a year or occupied a house and land worth seventy-five pounds, outside the communal land in the African reserves. In fact, however, no black man ever sat in the Cape colonial parliament, and in 1909, 85 percent of the registered voters were Whites, 10 percent Coloured, and 5 percent Africans.62 That problem caused passionate debates in the convention. Some Cape delegates, who had black as well as white constituents, proposed a uniform franchise on the Cape colonial model, but the other three delegations remained adamantly opposed to that proposal. The outcome was a compromise: membership in parliament was confined to white men, and the franchise laws of each colony remained in force in each province, but, to protect the rights of Blacks in the Cape province, any bill altering those laws would require the support of two-thirds of both houses of parliament in a joint sitting.

 

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