A History of South Africa

by Leonard Thompson

  Between 1924 and 1933 the Hertzog administration passed more legislation in favor of the white population, especially of the Afrikaners, and acquired greater economic and political autonomy for South Africa. It made further capital available to white farmers through the Land Bank and through marketing controls and guaranteed prices for farm produce. It created a state corporation for the manufacture of steel. It protected white industrial workers from black competition and enfranchised white (but not black) women, thereby reducing the black proportion of the voters in the Cape Province from 20 to 10 percent. By promoting bilingualism, it opened up the civil service to Afrikaners.

  The government also fulfilled a major Afrikaner cultural goal. As we have seen, the South Africa Act made English and Dutch the official languages of the country, although Afrikaans, the spoken language of Afrikaners, had deviated considerably from its Dutch roots. By 1925, however, the Bible had been translated into Afrikaans, there was an Afrikaans dictionary, and there was a substantial literature in Afrikaans. In that year a constitutional amendment replaced Dutch with Afrikaans as an official language.16 The opposition did not dispute that change, but differences over the design of a national flag caused a prolonged and bitter ethnic conflict. Parliament eventually created a hybrid flag that incorporated the Union Jack and the flags of the Afrikaner republics.17

  In 1926, largely at Hertzog’s instigation, an imperial conference attended by the prime ministers of Great Britain and the self-governing British dominions devised a subtle formula that described the dominions as “autonomous communities within the British Empire . . . though united by a common allegiance to the Crown.”18 Five years later, the British Parliament passed the Statute of Westminster, which gave legal effect to that declaration. The South African government, meanwhile, like the governmerits of Canada and Australia, had begun to act independently in international affairs, placing diplomats in major foreign capitals and separating the office of governor-general (head of state) from that of the British representative in South Africa. Hertzog, like Smuts before him, also tried, but failed, to persuade Britain to allow South Africa to incorporate Basutoland, Bechuanaland Protectorate, and Swaziland.19

  The Great Depression led to a realignment of political parties. After the collapse of Wall Street in October 1929, South African exports plummeted. Australia, the major wool-producing country in the Commonwealth, followed Britain in devaluing its currency, leaving the South African pound worth twice as much as the Australian, and making it almost impossible to market South African wool. Nevertheless, the Hertzog administration adhered doggedly to the gold standard, causing distress among its main supporters, the farmers, until it finally devalued the South African pound in December 1932. By then, the South African economy had been greatly damaged. Negotiations then took place between the leaders of the two major parties. In March 1933, they formed a coalition government, with Hertzog as prime minister and Smuts as deputy prime minister. In an election later that year, the coalition parties won all but 14 of 15 8 seats in Parliament, and in December 1934, they merged to form the United party. By that time, the Labour party, rent by disputes over the government’s labor legislation, had splintered, some of Smuts’s former followers in Natal had founded a British ethnic party, the Dominion party, and a group of Afrikaners, led by D. F. Malan, a Dutch Reformed minister and newspaper editor, had left Hertzog’s camp and founded the Purified National party.20

  Until 1939, the United party maintained the drive to national autonomy and white hegemony initiated by its predecessors. The Status of the Union Act (1934) reinforced the Statute of Westminster, providing that acts of the British Parliament would no longer be valid in South Africa unless they were also enacted by the South African Parliament and that the governor-general should act exclusively on the advice of his South African ministers. The Natives Representation Act (1936) drastically weakened the political rights of Cape Province Africans, removing those who were qualified to vote from the ordinary voters’ rolls and giving them instead the right to elect three white people to represent them in the House of Assembly, the dominant house of Parliament. It also gave Africans in all four provinces the right to elect indirectly a total of four white senators, and created a Natives Representative Council with advisory powers.21 The white members of the House of Assembly and Senate whom the Africans then elected spoke up for their constituents in Parliament but did not significantly stem the trend toward segregation and discrimination.22

  The Dominion party was confined to Natal and of little account on the national stage. The Purified National party was a different matter. It addressed its appeal to an Afrikaner population that was experiencing a rapid rate of urbanization and benefiting from state provision of compulsory white education. During the late 1930s, it built up its strength with the support of a plethora of Afrikaner cultural and economic organizations. At the center of those organizations was the Afrikaner Broederbond (Brotherhood), a secret society of the Afrikaner elite—farmers, businesspeople, clergy, teachers, and academics. With the assistance of the Broederbond, the Purified National party achieved a propaganda coup in 1938, when it captured control of the organization of the centennial celebrations of the Great Trek. The celebrations culminated in a ceremony laying the foundation stone of a monument to the voortrekkers on a hill outside Pretoria. There, orators painted the voortrekkers in heroic hues, giving them the qualities necessary to promote the nationalist cause. They were profoundly religious. They were adamantly opposed to the mixing of the races. They stood for Afrikaner solidarity in the face of alien Western influences. “God,” said the Reverend T. F. Dreyer, “has willed that we must be a separate, independent people.”23

  Even so, the United party seemed to be in firm command of the state apparatus. The economy was booming. The standard of living of nearly all white South Africans was improving. White poverty was decreasing. In the election of 1938 the United party won in seats in the House of Assembly, Malan’s Purified Nationalists won only 27, and the Dominion party won 8. But there was a cloud on the horizon. Though Smuts’s supporters had welcomed Hertzog’s insistence on making South Africa’s national sovereignty foolproof, they had different views as to how the government should exercise its sovereignty after Hitler’s Third Reich had absorbed Austria, conquered Czechoslovakia, and invaded Poland. When Britain declared war on Germany on September 3,1939, the United party split. A passionate debate ensued in the South African Parliament. Hertzog’s people were for strict neutrality, Smuts’s for joining Britain. When the vote was taken, Smuts’s motion for a South African declaration of war against Germany was carried by 80 votes to 67. That evening, the governor-general refused Hertzog’s request to dissolve Parliament and hold a general election. Hertzog resigned as prime minister, Smuts succeeded him at the head of a truncated United party, and South Africa went to war as an ally of Britain.24

  Segregation and Discrimination, 1910—1939

  By 1910, Whites had conquered the indigenous inhabitants of South Africa. The people whom Whites grouped together as the Coloured People, whose ancestors included the indigenous hunting and herding inhabitants of the western part of Southern Africa, owned scarcely any land; but many Bantu-speaking African farmers were still able to practice subsistence farming, modified but not destroyed by their conquerors, in reserves proclaimed by the colonial governments or on land they bought from Whites.25 During the ensuing years, however, the new state applied a comprehensive program of racial segregation and discrimination and gained control over the African peasantry. Laws limited land ownership by Africans to demarcated reserves, transformed Blacks who lived in rural areas outside the African reserves into wage or tenant laborers for white farmers, and ensured white dominance in the industrial cities and rural townships. Although the government was unable to enforce these laws to the letter, they played a crucial role in expanding the capitalist order under white control and reducing the black population to a proletarian status in that order.

  Three years after
the inauguration of the Union, without consulting any Africans, Louis Botha’s South African party administration, under strong pressure from its rural supporters, enacted a crucial law. The Natives Land Act (1913) prohibited Africans from purchasing or leasing land outside the reserves from people who were not Africans. It also prohibited sharecrop-ping in the Orange Free State. The act listed areas totaling about 22 million acres, or about 7 percent of the area of the Union of South Africa, as constituting the reserves and recommended that they should be substantially increased.26 Three years later, a commission appointed in terms of the act recommended that about 18 million more acres should be added to the area set aside under the Natives Land Act, but those recommendations met with a storm of protest from Whites and were not enacted.27 In 1936, fresh legislation created the South African Native Trust, managed by Whites, and empowered it to buy more land for Africans from funds provided by Parliament. By 1939, the trust’s purchases had brought the augmented African reserves to 11.7 percent of the area of South Africa.28

  Those African areas, which were destined to be treated as the Homelands of all the African inhabitants of South Africa in the apartheid era (chapter 6), were scattered throughout the eastern half of the country. The Transkei was the only substantial bloc of African territory in South Africa. Elsewhere, even in Zululand, Whites had acquired legal title to much of the best land during and after the conquest, whereas the republican governments of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal had set aside relatively little land for the exclusive use of Africans.

  The land thus proclaimed as African formed a small proportion of the territory that African mixed farmers had occupied before the Mfecane and the white conquest. By the 1920s, some of it was already carrying such a heavy concentration of people and livestock that the original vegetation was disappearing, streams and waterholes were drying up, and soil erosion was spreading. In the years that followed, the African reserves continued to deteriorate. The state network of railways and roads served the white farmers but neglected the reserves, and the government provided massive assistance to white farmers but scarcely any to Africans.

  After 1910, the people in the reserves became unable to produce enough food to feed themselves and to pay the taxes imposed by the municipal, provincial, and central governments, which; after 1925, included a poll tax of one pound paid by all African men aged eighteen years or more and a local tax of ten shillings per dwelling in a reserve.29 African farming gradually collapsed. Prosperous peasants, who had been producing a substantial surplus for the market, were wiped out.30 The quality of life declined for all Africans in the reserves. Over one-fifth of the children died within their first year of life. Undernutrition was common. The government left African education to the missionary societies, whose resources were very limited, and although it contributed more after 1925, in 1939 fewer than 30 percent of African children were receiving any schooling at all to equip them to adapt to the new order.31

  The reserves were being transformed into reservoirs of cheap, unskilled labor for white farmers and industrialists. In 1936, 447,000 Africans out of an officially estimated population of 3,410,000 were temporarily absent from the reserves. Only a tiny proportion of these absentees were female, and nearly all the males were between fifteen and fifty years old. By that time, almost every African man with a home in a reserve went out to work on a white farm or in a white town at some stage in his life. The wages he earned, though small, became an essential part of the economy of his rural household.32

  The South African economy thus developed unique characteristics. The regime professed to be applying a policy of racial segregation. It was a complex segregation that met white economic needs by making a high proportion of the subject people both labor for Whites and provide for their own maintenance.

  Besides dividing the country into white-owned and African-owned land, the Natives Land Act contained clauses designed to reduce all Africans in the white-owned rural areas into tenant and wage laborers. It prohibited Africans from paying rent to absentee landlords or from having the use of part of a white farm and sharing the produce with the owner. The government could not fully enforce those clauses, however. In the Transvaal and Natal, powerful absentee landlords, including mining companies, continued to exact rent from African tenants, and in all four provinces, farmers continued to allow Africans to use part of their land and to make sharecropping arrangements with them. Moreover, a judicial decision made the act inoperative in the Cape Province, since the prohibition on Africans purchasing land outside the reserves would have prevented them from satisfying the property qualification for the franchise, which was protected in the constitution.33 The act caused the greatest hardship in the Orange Free State, where many farmers evicted Africans from their land immediately after the act was passed. Sol Plaatje, the secretary of the recently created African National Congress, described their experiences in Native Life in South Africa:

  Some readers may think perhaps that I have taken the Colonial Parliament rather severely to task. But, ... if you see your countrymen and countrywomen driven from home, their homes broken up, with no hopes of redress, on the mandate of a Government to which they had loyally paid taxation without representation—driven from their homes, because they do not want to become servants . . ., you would, I think, likewise find it very difficult to maintain a level head or wield a temperate pen.34

  White farmers paid their African workers lower wages than they could earn in the mining or manufacturing industries. Even so, many Africans preferred to stay on the farms, where, unlike urban workers, they had access to the land and lived as family units. If they tried to leave, however, some farmers tied them to the farm by using their control of local authorities to prevent Africans from getting “passes” to work in towns, by whipping workers who broke their contracts, and by placing Africans in debt.35 Most farm laborers were isolated from both the reserves and the towns and thereby were deprived of wider traditional as well as modern social networks and cultural opportunities. At best, their lives were ameliorated by paternalist farmers; at worst, they were victims of systematic exploitation.

  Before World War II, white farmers were just beginning to mechanize their operations. In 1937, they still owned more animal-drawn wagons than automobiles, trucks, and tractors combined.36 Even so, the volume and value of their produce doubled between the wars. Not only did the government make it possible for them to use coerced black labor; it also provided them with massive financial assistance. Between 1911 and 1936, the government spent £112 million on agriculture, in the form of direct assistance and subsidies, tariff protection, research, administration, and the dissemination of information. In addition, the state railways charged exceptionally low rates on farm produce. Nearly all of this assistance went to white farmers; scarcely any went to Africans in the reserves.37

  More and more South Africans, meanwhile, were moving to the cities, especially Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, Pretoria, and Port Elizabeth. Most were Whites who were squeezed out by the increasing commercialization of agriculture and Africans who could not survive in the reserves. By 1936, according to the official census of that year, the urban population numbered more than 3 million and comprised 31 percent of the total population. Of this, about 1.3 million were classified as White, 1.1 million as African, 400,000 as Coloured, and 200,000 as Asian. Sixty-five percent of the White population of South Africa, 44 percent of the Coloured, 66 percent of the Asian, and 17 percent of the African population were in the towns. Johannesburg, the largest city, had 519,000 inhabitants: 258,000 Whites, 229,000 Africans, 22,000 Coloureds, and 10,000 Asians.38

  The government tried to limit the flow of Africans into the cities with a complex accumulation of pass laws. The origin of those laws goes back to the eighteenth century, when slaves were obliged to carry documents signed by their masters when they were absent from their masters’ homes. Some pass laws were designed to ensure that white farmers should not lose their African laborers. It was unlawful, for
example, for Africans to leave the farms where they were employed without a pass (Document of Identification) provided by the farmer. Others were designed to prevent Africans from living in towns except as laborers for Whites. By 1930 in the Transvaal, for example, an African entering a proclaimed urban area was obliged to report to an official within twenty-four hours and obtain a permit to seek work. The official would issue a permit only if his other passes were in order. The permit was valid for six days. If the African failed to produce it on demand by an official, he would be jailed or expelled from the town. The attempt to enforce such laws created a vast class of lawbreakers. In 1930, 42,000 Africans were convicted for pass law offenses in the Transvaal.39 Nevertheless, despite the enactment of still tougher curbs in 1937, the African population of the towns continued to increase.

  The gold-mining industry continued to be the backbone of the South African economy. After 1933, the rise in the price of gold made it practicable to mine a large tonnage of low-grade ore. On the eve of World War II, the industry was producing one-fifth of the country’s net income, contributing more than two-fifths of the revenue, accounting for three-quarters of the exports, and providing the nucleus for a rapid growth of manufacturing industry.