A History of South Africa

by Leonard Thompson

  Third, the constitution provided that at regular intervals judicial commissions were to divide the country into electoral divisions for the lower house of parliament and that each division was to contain the same number of voters, although the commissions could vary that number 15 percent either way from the average to take into account several factors, including “sparsity or density of population.” In practice, delimitation commissions would attach great weight to that factor, to the advantage of parties that represented rural voters. It would be crucial in 1948, when it enabled D. F. Malan’s National party to form a government and institute its policy of apartheid.

  Fourth, the constitution made both English and Dutch the official languages of the country. Discerning the crucial importance of language to the survival of Afrikaner culture and identity in the face of the forces of an-glicization., J. B. M. Hertzog had recently piloted a bill through the Orange Free State parliament to place the Dutch and English languages on the same footing in the white public schools of that colony. In the convention, Hertzog and ex-president M. T. Steyn made it clear that they would have no truck with unification unless the constitution included a strong safeguard for the Dutch language. The language clause, and the clause protecting the Cape nonracial franchise, were the two rigid elements in the constitution. Neither could be amended without the approval of two-thirds of both houses of Parliament sitting together.

  The constitution also included provisions under which the British government might at some unspecified date incorporate Southern Rhodesia, Basutoland, Bechuanaland Protectorate, and Swaziland into the new Union. Three Southern Rhodesians were present at the convention, without the right to vote. The British South Africa Company, which still controlled its territory under a royal charter, wished to see whether the new South African government supported its interests before deciding whether it should join the Union. Many white Rhodesians, moreover, being predominantly of British stock, were loath to be placed in a state with an Afrikaner political majority. Several convention delegates had hoped to incorporate the other three territories forthwith, but the British government, which administered them in cooperation with their African chiefs, informed the convention that this was not possible, since the chiefs did not wish to be placed under the control of white South Africans. As we shall see, these provisions never went into operation.

  Having completed their work in South Africa, the four colonial governments sent delegates to London, since only the imperial parliament had the legal authority to give effect to their decisions. Members of the Western-educated black elite in Southern Africa—clergy, journalists, teachers—and a handful of white sympathizers had also sent a deputation to London to agitate for the removal of the color bars from the constitution.63 They were supported by the Manchester Guardian and several prominent individuals. However, though most members of Parliament preferred that the constitution should not contain a color bar, nearly all realized that it was politically impracticable to attempt to alter the wishes of the four self-governing colonies. Indeed, the crucial decision had been made in 1902. The political color bars in the Transvaal and Orange River Colony constitutions, and the color bars in the draft South African constitution, were natural consequences of Milner’s decision to appease the fighting men of the republics at the expense of the black population.

  Both major British parties were extremely anxious for a solution to the South African problem. Among the 670 members of the House of Commons, a few Liberal backbenchers, Irish nationalists, and Labour members fought the color bars, but no amendment received more than fifty-seven votes. In the House of Lords no amendment was pressed to a vote. The South Africa Act (1909), as enacted by Parliament, was substantially the same as the document produced in South Africa. Prime Minister H. H. Asquith summed up the dominant mood—one of regret covered with a strong dose of wishful thinking: “Any control or interference from outside . . . is in the very worst interests of the natives themselves. . . . I anticipate that, as one of the incidental advantages which the Union of South Africa is going to bring about, it will prove to be a harbinger of a native policy . . . more enlightened than that which has been pursued by some communities in the past.”64

  On May 31,1910, eight years to the day since he had lain down his arms as a leader of the military forces of the Afrikaner republics, Louis Botha became prime minister of a British dominion with a population of 4 million Africans, 500,000 Coloureds, 150,000 Indians, and 1,275,000 Whites. That outcome was not what Milner had encouraged British South Africans to expect; nor was it what had been expected by the many black South Africans who had supported the British cause in the war.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Segregation Era, 1910-1948

  The material expectations of the founders of the Union of South Africa were fulfilled. Between 1910 and 1948, the economy weathered the Great Depression, and the national income of the country increased more than three times in real terms.1 The gold-mining industry made a major contribution to the national budget and provided enough foreign exchange for essential imports, especially heavy machinery and fuel oil. White farmers precariously held their own with massive state support, and manufacturing expanded prodigiously after 1933.2 The country produced plenty of coal but no oil, and to sustain its economic growth, it needed large inputs of foreign capital and technology. In other respects, the economy was nearly self-sufficient by 1948.

  During the same period, the white population consolidated its control over the state, strengthening its grip on the black population and eliminating the British government’s legal power to intervene in South African affairs. Politics under the constitution was dominated by the question of relations between the two segments of the white population—Afrikaners and English-speakers. Should they forget the past, reconcile their differences, and work together to form a single white South African “nation,” or should each ethnic community struggle to control the political system as a means of advancing its particular interests? Though this question was usually posed in ethnic terms, it also had a class basis. In the early twentieth century, people of British origin virtually monopolized the entrepreneurial, managerial, and skilled positions in every sector of the economy except agriculture, whereas many Afrikaners were impoverished. Known as Poor Whites, they were being driven off the land as agriculture became capitalized, and they were finding it difficult to adapt to the urban economy, except as unskilled workers, where they were liable to encounter competition from Blacks. In practice, no government could afford to ignore the needs of the Afrikaners, since they formed more than 55 percent of the electorate. By 1948, as a result of industrial growth, pervasive color bars, and state aid, white poverty was being phased out and individual Afrikaners were getting a foothold in top positions throughout the economy.3

  That was the period when colonialism and segregation, reinforced by racist assumptions, prevailed elsewhere in Africa and also in much of Asia and the Caribbean, and racist ideas and practices were widespread in the United States. In South Africa, though Whites were embroiled in internal quarrels, they dominated every sector of the capitalist economy and did so with the use of cheap black labor. The categories Race and Class coincided closely: with few exceptions, black people, however able, were subordinate to white people, however feeble. Blacks did the manual work in the white household and the mining stope, the arable field, and the factory floor. Many Africans in the agricultural areas outside the reserves were being transformed from renters and sharecroppers into tenant and wage laborers.4 Land shortage, population increase, and taxation were impoverishing the families in the African reserves, many of which could survive only by sending the men out to work for Whites for months at a time. Yet most Whites spoke no African language and never set foot in an African reserve. They assumed that all Africans had adequate homes in the reserves and that they came out to work merely to supplement viable domestic economies.

  In the cities, a few European socialists tried to mold black and white workers into a single, se
lf-conscious working class. They failed. The mining industries maintained the split between well-paid Whites (with access to political power) and poorly paid Blacks (without such access) that had emerged in Kimberley and Johannesburg in the late nineteenth century, and the manufacturing industries applied the same principle. White gold miners’ annual cash earnings were 11.7 times the cash wages of black gold miners in 1911, and 14.7 times in 1951. In manufacturing, where there was widespread employment of white women at low wages, the differential was 5.3 in 1916 and 4.4 in 1948.5 In 1946, white income per head in South Africa was more than ten times that of Africans, six times that of Asians, and five times that of Colöureds.6 The material gap between the two white ethnic communities was closing, but the gap between Whites and Blacks was as wide as ever and more rigid than ever.

  Black South Africans adopted a variety of strategies to cope with their problems. Most were preoccupied with day-to-day survival. In the reserves, for example, where families were split by the periodic absence of men, women were assuming the full burden of maintaining the domestic, economy as well as bringing up the children. Christian missionaries were having a. profound impact on the African and Coloured populations, however. Evangelization increased rapidly after the conquest, and by 1951, according to the census of that year, 59 percent of the Africans and 91 percent of the Coloureds were Christians.7 Most missionaries came to South Africa from Europe or North America and did not fully share the interests and prejudices of the white South African population. Because the government failed to provide education for them, those Africans who received a modern education did so in missionary schools, such as Lovedale in the Ciskei, Adams College in Natal, and Morija in Basutoland, and in the South African Native College, which was founded at Fort Hare in the Ciskei in 1916 and was largely controlled by missionaries. There, they encountered a relatively liberal Western tradition.

  Africans who had received a missionary education—clerks, teachers, clergy, and small businesspeople—periodically tried to harness the resentments of the black masses to counter white hegemony. In 1912, Africans founded a nationwide organization that became known as the African National Congress. It survived official obstruction and was destined to become a formidable instrument of resistance in the second half of the century.8 In the late 1920s, the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union of South Africa grew to be a massive rural movement of national liberation, with a membership of at least 150,000 before it fell apart in the face of official repression and internal conflict.9 By 1948, urban African workers had experimented with various forms of trade unions, even though the law excluded them from the formal collective bargaining process.10 Some African Christians adopted a different response. They broke away from white churches and formed religious communities where African leaders acted without white intervention and where Christianity was adapted to African culture.11

  The tensions in the system intensified during World War II, when South Africa participated on the side of Great Britain and its allies, to the dismay of numerous Afrikaners. Under wartime conditions, the economy expanded and diversified particularly rapidly, drawing more and more Africans into the urban labor market. Yielding to arguments that migrant labor, pass laws, and job color bars were inefficient as well as unjust, the government bent the job color bar, allowed black wages to rise at a faster rate than white wages, and temporarily relaxed the pass laws. It also recognized that Africans were a permanent part of the urban population and toyed with the idea of recognizing African trade unions. In those circumstances, a radical Afrikaner party managed to mobilize sufficient ethnic support to win a narrow victory in a general election in 1948.12

  White Politics, 1910-1939

  During the years 1910 to 1939, the successive South African administrations were all concerned to consolidate white power in the new state.13 In spite of a rural uprising by aggrieved Afrikaners during World War I, militant strikes by white workers, one of which escalated into a bloody confrontation on the Witwatersrand, and intermittent resistance by Blacks, the reach of the state increased steadily and scarcely anyone questioned its legitimacy. When Whites talked about “the racial question,” they were referring to the ethnic cleavage between Afrikaners and English-speaking white South Africans. They vented much of their political energy in internal squabbles over symbols—postage stamps, anthems, and flags. Insofar as they differed over “native policy,” it was in the search for the most effective means to advance their own material interests and ensure their security.

  The general election of 1910 was won by the South African party led by Louis Botha and Jan Smuts, the former republican guerrillas who had come into power in the Transvaal in 1907. Botha, a progressive farmer with vast landholdings, and Smuts, an able and ambitious Cambridge-educated intellectual, had reached the conclusion that it was sound policy to come to terms with the gold-mining industry as the most powerful economic enterprise in the country and to build a coalition from both ethnic sections of the white South African population. Since rabid imperialism was out of favor in Westminster, they also accepted South Africa’s membership in the British Empire and nudged Westminster in the direction of greater autonomy for South Africa and the other white dominions—Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

  The outcome was ironic. Although Parliament enacted laws in the interests of white workers and farmers, by 1919, when Botha died and Smuts succeeded him, the erstwhile fighters for liberation from British imperialism were losing Afrikaner votes and becoming dependent on the support of British South Africans. The Union of South Africa’s electoral arithmetic meant that a distinctly British party had no chance of winning an election. South Africans of British origin were fewer than Afrikaners and had widely divergent occupational, class, and regional interests. As the 1907 Transvaal election had shown, mining magnates like George Farrar and Percy FitzPatrick could not win the support of the British working-class colonists, who had founded aggressive trade unions and a Labour party in the Transvaal. A similar class division existed among the British in the Cape Province and in Natal, the one province with a British electoral majority. Moreover, as we have seen, the formula written into the constitution for the division of the country into unequal electoral divisions favored the rural, that is to say the Afrikaner voters. From the beginning, Jameson, Farrar, and FitzPatrick, the leaders of the Unionist party, found it expedient to establish cordial relations with Botha and Smuts, with a view to influencing their policy; and in 1921 the South African party absorbed the remnants of the Unionists.

  Botha and Smuts, meanwhile, were losing control over much of the Afrikaner electorate, which resented their policy of reconciliation. James Barry Munnik Hertzog, the Orange Free State leader who had already crossed swords with Smuts for his failure to give Dutch equality with English in the Transvaal schools, joined Botha’s cabinet in 1910 with misgivings. He soon quarreled with his colleagues, and in January 1914, he founded a new National party, committed to protecting the cultural and economic interests of Afrikaners and dissociating South Africa from the empire. Hertzog’s support came mainly from lower-class Afrikaners—marginal farmers who resented exploitation by rich landholders and people who had been dislodged from the land and were hard put to make ends meet in the towns. Afrikaner intellectuals, insecure in the face of angliciza-tion and urbanization, also supported Hertzog; so did some lawyers, businesspeople, and successful farmers in the western part of the Cape Province.

  World War I sharpened this division. When Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914, Botha and his colleagues accepted the fact that South Africa, like the other self-governing British dominions, was automatically involved, since it was not a sovereign state. But that was not all. Botha and Smuts also acted on a British request that South African forces should conquer the German protectorate of South West Africa, personally commanding South African troops in an operation that gave South Africa control of that territory. Their decision prompted a number of Afrikaners in the former republics, who had hoped to use Br
itain’s distractions as an opportunity to regain their independence, to raise an armed rebellion. The government quickly and firmly suppressed the uprising, and Smuts went on to a remarkable wartime career, commanding imperial forces in a prolonged campaign against the Germans in East Africa, serving as a member of the British Imperial War Cabinet in London, and contributing to the creation of the League of Nations at Versailles. Having entered on the world stage, Smuts became largely preoccupied with international rather than local affairs. As Afrikaner nationalists saw it, he had sold out to imperial interests.14

  The government also lost the support of working-class Whites by intervening in a series of industrial disputes on the Witwatersrand. By 1922, three-quarters of the white workers in the Witwatersrand gold-mining industry were South African-born, but British immigrants still controlled the Mineworkers’ Union. Conditions of work and the racial composition of the work force continued to be explosive issues. Mineowners, though they did not favor complete replacement of Whites by Blacks, were at moments of financial difficulty keen to expand the functions of lower-cost black workers. White workers in general favored the expansion of protected employment for themselves.

  Following a series of strikes by white miners about conditions of work and about black competition in 1907, 1913, and 1914, mineowners agreed to reserve some semiskilled work for Whites. After World War I, however, the industry faced an acute financial problem. It was a period of high inflation. Moreover, mining was taking place at ever-greater depths, the ore was of low grade, and the price of gold was low. One factor stood out in the industry’s balance sheets: the cost of white labor. The wages of white workers were fifteen times those of black workers, who could easily have performed the semiskilled operations. The Chamber of Mines thus decided to break its agreement and replace some of the highly paid white workers with Africans. The Whites went on strike in January, and the impasse continued until March. Miners formed armed commandos, one of which used the slogan, “Workers of the World Unite, and Fight for a White South Africa.” Smuts eventually came down heavily on the side of the owners, declaring martial law and deploying military aircraft, artillery, tanks, armored cars, and machine guns. When the dust settled, 687 people were injured and 153 were dead—4 of them executed. For the South African party, the political costs were high. Hertzog’s Nationalists formed an electoral pact with the Labour party and won the general election of 1924.15