A History of South Africa

by Leonard Thompson

  Three political organizations strove to improve the lot of the subordinated peoples on the national scale: a Coloured organization, the African Political Organization (APO), founded in 1902; an Indian organization, the South African Indian Congress (SAIC), which was founded in 1923, and the South African Native National Congress (later known as the African National Congress, or (ANC), founded in 1912.63

  The leaders of those three organizations were Western-oriented middle-class people, the products of the best schools available. They aimed to realize the promise inherent in the Cape colonial tradition, first by gaining full equality with Whites for the middle classes they represented, and later by extending the benefits to the masses of their people. The precedent they had in mind was the step-by-step extension of the parliamentary franchise to all classes in England. They sought by rational argument and pressure within the framework of the constitution to persuade the white electorate to reverse the discriminatory tide.

  The founders of the ANC, Pixley ka Isaka Seme, Alfred Mangena, Richard Msimang, and George Montsioa, were mission-educated Christians who had qualified as lawyers in England. Seme, for example, had grown up on the American mission station in Natal, attended Mount Hermon School in Massachusetts, received a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University, studied law at Oxford University, and been called to the British bar in 1910. In his keynote address to the founding conference of the ANC in Bloemfontein, Seme said that “in the land of their birth, Africans are treated as hewers of wood and drawers of water.” He added: “The white people of this country have formed what is known as the Union of South Africa—a union in which we have no voice in the making of laws and no part in their administration. We have called you therefore to this Conference so that we can together devise ways and means of forming our national union for the purpose of creating national unity and defending our rights and privileges.”64 In the spirit of the black American educator Booker T. Washington, the ANC constitution proclaimed “loyalty to all lawfully constituted authorities” and stressed “the educational, social, economic and political elevation of the native people in South Africa.”65

  Down to 1939 and beyond, the ANC remained under the control of lawyers, clergy, and journalists, who tried to elicit white support to redress African grievances “by constitutional means.” Most of the time they adhered scrupulously to those cautious methods and modest objectives, lobbying sympathetic white missionaries, journalists, and politicians and protesting each installment of discriminatory legislation from the Natives Land Act of 1913 through the Representation of Natives Act of 1936. In 1914, they sent a fruitless delegation to England; in 1919, they sent another to Versailles to try to influence the peacemakers on their behalf.

  The Coloured and Indian organizations were under similar middle-class leadership and pursued corresponding goals for their people. Abdullah Abdurahman, president of the APO from 1905 until his death in 1940, was a doctor trained at Glasgow University; the leaders of the SAIC were such men as P. R. Pather, an estate and financial agent, and Abdulla Ismail Kajee, a businessman. The APO made some not very successful efforts to cooperate with African leaders, but the SAIC concerned itself exclusively with the interests of the Indian population.66

  In the 1920s and 1930s, members of all three organizations worked with such white liberals as Edgar Brookes, who represented Africans as a senator under the legislation of 1936. In and after 1921, liberals established a number of joint councils, where small groups of Whites, Africans, Coloureds, and Asians met to discuss racial problems, and in 1919, they founded the South African Institute of Race Relations, which collected and published information about the effects of segregation and discrimination. Few white South Africans, however, were susceptible to the influence of those bodies. Most Whites were determined to maintain their own privileges and power. The ANC, APO, and SAIC thus won no substantial victories; nor did they mobilize the black masses. By the 1930s, indeed, they were moribund.

  Sporadic attempts were made to create more radical movements. The most spectacular such organization was founded by Clements Kadalie, a mission-educated African from Nyasaland (modern Malawi).67 In 1919, Kadalie formed a small trade union among Coloured dockworkers in Cape Town; by 1928, it had swollen into a nationwide Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (icu), claiming a membership of more than 150,000 Africans, 15,000 Coloureds, and 250 Whites. By then, it was primarily a rural movement, tapping, especially, African sharecroppers’ and tenant laborers’ land hunger and exasperation as white landowners were squeezing them while they themselves were struggling for economic survival.

  The ICU organizers were frustrated Africans who had had a few years of missionary education but had not fulfilled the expectations of upward mobility engendered in their schools. They regarded the leaders of the ANC as “good boys” who were tied to the apron strings of white liberals. Drawing ideas from the independent churches, from Marxism, and from the back-to-Africa movement of Marcus Garvey, they galvanized rural audiences with strong rhetoric, including promises of land repossession and national liberation. In the Transkei there were echoes of the millennial beliefs that had led to the cattle-killing in 1857: “Ama Melika”—the Afro-Americans—were coming with ships and planes to liberate South Africa and destroy all Whites and black nonbelievers.68 Incidents occurred from the eastern Cape to the northern Transvaal. Africans refused to work, deserted, stole livestock, destroyed property.

  White farmers and the government acted ruthlessly to suppress the icu, harassing organizers and evicting “trouble-makers.” The icu leaders, moreover, proclaimed grandiose goals but failed to design realistic programs of action, became corrupt and quarrelsome, and lost touch with the masses. Kadalie himself drew a salary of thirty pounds a month, at least sixty times that of many farm laborers; some Africans came to regard him as “a great cheat.”69 The movement disintegrated into numerous uncoordinated segments and petered out in the early 1930s. “It all ended up in speeches,” according to a former tenant laborer in the Transvaal.70

  In 1921, meanwhile, a small group of white intellectuals had founded the South African Communist party. It was the only political organization in South Africa that recruited members from all racial groups and had a multiracial executive. But, like other Communist parties outside the Soviet Union, it was subject to directives from Moscow, notably in 1928, when the Communist International ordered it to cease giving priority to the class struggle and to adopt the slogan and analysis of an “independent South African Native republic” or “black republic,” which threw the party into turmoil and led to schisms. The Communist party never gained a wide following. Its membership peaked at about three thousand in 1930 and then declined. Nevertheless, it exerted a considerable influence on the icu, and by 1939, it was beginning to attract several of the younger and more frustrated members of the ANC, APO, and SAIC.71

  World War II and the Triumph of Afrikaner Nationalism

  During World War II, South African forces fought in East and North Africa and in Italy. At war’s end, 218,260 South Africans were in uniform: 135,171 white men, 12,878 white women, 27,583 Coloured men, and 42,627 African men. All were volunteers. The Coloured and African men were distributed among the white detachments as laborers and transport drivers. A few were trained in South Africa as gunners, but the white reaction was intense. Nationalist party leader D. F. Malan railed in Parliament against the employment of “Kaffir soldiers,” and they were not used in combat. Even so, of the 5,500 South Africans who were killed in World War II, more than a quarter were black.72

  South Africa also made significant strategic and economic contributions to the Allied cause. After the Axis closed the Mediterranean to Allied shipping in 1941, the sea route via the Cape of Good Hope became vital for supplying the Allied forces in North Africa as well as Asia. Durban and Cape Town provisioned the vast number of ships on passage to and from Egypt, and South African factories suppled them with munitions, food, clothing, and cigarettes. South Africa was also a m
ajor source of strategic minerals for the Allies, notably gold, platinum, and uranium; the products of the Iron and Steel Industrial Corporation (ISCOR), a state corporation created by the government in 1928, rose to 866,107 metric tons in 1945.73

  Gold-mining remained the greatest South African industry. In 1946, it employed 370,959 people (42,624 Whites and 328,335 Blacks) and sold £102 million worth of gold. But whereas the gold-mining industry entered a period of slight decline after 1941, coal-mining and the manufacturing industries continued the rapid expansion that had begun in 1933. Between 1938—39 and 1945—46 the number of employees in the coal-mining industry increased by 50 percent to 51,643 and in manufacturing by 60 percent to 379,022. In particular, the garment industry nearly doubled in those years; by the end of the war it was employing 60,856 people and producing goods worth £42 million.74

  This expansion drew more and more people into the towns. By 1946,76 percent of the white population, 70 percent of the Indians, 62 percent of the Coloureds, and 24 percent of the Africans were in towns. The African figure was the most significant. There were more Africans than Whites in the towns by 1946. Moreover, whereas 5 5 percent of the Africans who were in towns at the time of the census of 1911 were male migrant laborers, serving short-term contracts in the gold, diamond, and coal mines, at the time of the census of 1946 only 21 percent of the urban Africans were employed by those industries. Large number of Africans, including African women, like Whites, Coloureds, and Asians, were settling permanently in the towns.75 The most pregnant social process in South Africa in the first half of the twentieth century was this massive relocation of Africans, pushed out from the impoverished reserves and the gradually mechanizing white farms and pulled into the towns by the prospect of jobs in the burgeoning manufacturing and service industries. Economic forces were counteracting government policies that had aimed to keep Africans out of the towns, except as migrant laborers with domicile in the reserves.76

  The government tried but failed to stop increased African settlement in the towns. And because neither the government, nor the urban authorities, nor industry provided housing for the influx, the Africans built shacks of sacks, wood, corrugated iron, and cardboard on the outskirts of the towns and improvised their own methods of social control. This squatting movement was especially effective outside Johannesburg. During the second half of the 1940s, between sixty thousand and ninety thousand Africans settled in squatter camps there, mainly in the area beyond the city’s southwestern borders that later became know as Soweto. As Oriel Monongoaha, one of the squatter leaders, put it: “The Government is beaten, because even the Government of England could not stop the people from squatting. The Government was like a man who has a cornfield which is invaded by birds. He chases the birds from one part of the field and they alight in another part of the field. ... We squatters are the birds. The Government sends its policemen to chase us away and we move off and occupy another spot.”77

  As more and more Africans became committed to urban life, they created a vigorous proletarian culture. The towns and squatter camps were violent places, seething with discontent. To survive in adverse circumstances, many people made a precarious living in the informal economy. Women ran shebeens, centers of liquor, fun, and sex; boys sold newspapers; gangs stole and fought. In Peter Abraham’s novel Mine Boy (1946), a woman gives advice to a newcomer from the country: “In the city it is like this: all the time you are fighting. Fighting. Fighting! When you are asleep and when you are awake. And you look only after yourself. If you do not you are finished. If you are soft everyone will spit in your face. They will rob you and cheat you and betray you. So to live here you must be hard, hard as a stone. And money is your best friend. With money you can bribe a policeman. With money you can buy somebody to go to jail for you. That is how it is, Xuma.”78

  Rises in the cost of living exceeded any increases in the wages of those who had jobs. By 1945, food was particularly expensive as a result of a prolonged drought. The state itself continued to apply its Civilised Labour policy, providing sheltered employment for Whites and paying its unskilled white laborers more than twice as much as its unskilled African laborers.79

  To cope with their predicament, Africans formed trade unions and organized numerous boycotts and strikes, although the Industrial Conciliation Act excluded Africans from participation in the collective bargaining process and the government made strikes illegal. By 1945, the Council of Non-European Trade Unions claimed a strength of 15 8,000 members in 119 unions, amounting to 40 percent of African employees in commerce and manufacturing.80 The inhabitants of Alexandra, a township in the northeastern part of Johannesburg, repeatedly and successfully boycotted the buses that took them to work when the companies tried to raise the fares. For ten days in 1943, for example, 20,000 boy cotters got up at three in the morning and walked to work, returning home at nine in the evening.81

  The crucial terrain for labor relations was, as ever, the mining industries. Between 1939 and 1948, police or departmental inspectors reported over a hundred gold and coal mine disturbances to the Native Affairs Department. The largest was a four-day strike called by the African Mineworkers Union on the Witwatersrand in August 1946, when 74,000 workers brought eight gold mines to a standstill, after the Chamber of Mines had refused to accept the reformist recommendations of a government commission. The union demanded a minimum wage of ten shillings a day, family housing, paid leave, and better food. The government reacted brutally. It arrested strike leaders, drove men underground at bayonet point, killed 12 men, and injured more than 1,200. The Chamber of Mines then announced that the “Gold Mining Industry considers that trade-unionism as practised by Europeans is still beyond the understanding of the tribal Native. ... A trade union organisation . . . would not only be useless, but detrimental to the ordinary mine Native in his present stage of development.” The chamber’s victory broke the African Mineworkers Union and seriously weakened the Council of Non-European Trade Unions.82

  Between 1939 and 1948, the racial division among South African workers became sharper than before. This was largely because the wartime expansion involved changes in the structure of manufacturing industries. Before the war, for example, the Transvaal garment industry provided employment for many Afrikaner women who had moved from the farms to the towns. During the war, however, the expansion of the garment industry led to the employment of increasing numbers of Coloured and African women. Solly Sachs, an energetic socialist leader of the Garment Workers’ Union, and several remarkable Afrikaner women, tried to maintain workers’ solidarity across the color line, but by 1948 the Garment Workers Union had split into two racially defined branches, and segregation notices had gone up in entrances, elevators, and offices.83

  The Smuts administration maintained the segregation system set out in the Representation of Natives Act (1936), the Native Trust and Land Act (1936), and the Native Laws Amendment Act (1937). Nevertheless, there was much uncertainty about the future. A small but articulate white intelligentsia concentrated at the University of the Witwatersrand and the Institute of Race Relations pressed for increased wages for black workers, the recognition of African trade unions, and the abolition of the pass laws. Commercial and industrial businesspeople saw a need for a stabilized work force rather than the migrant laborers used in the gold mines. A few senior officials who were aware of the miserable conditions of Africans’ lives believed that the laborers posed dangers for the white population. In Parliament, the Africans’ white representatives who were elected under the legislation of 1936 continuously pressed for reforms. Prime Minister Smuts’s ablest cabinet colleague, J. H. Hofmeyr, who became deputy prime minister and heir apparent, gave them intermittent encouragement. He once declared in Parliament, “I take my stand on the ultimate removal of the colour bar from our constitution.”84 Smuts himself raised liberal hopes in 1942, when he admitted that he could not stop Africans from flocking to the towns and announced that “segregation has fallen on evil days.”85

&
nbsp; International events added to domestic pressures for reform. The propaganda of the Allies during the war against Nazism, including the Atlantic Charter, was antiracist. During 1942, the Japanese victories raised the possibility of a Japanese invasion of South Africa and with it the need to conciliate the black masses. And after the war ended, Smuts himself took part in drafting the Charter of the United Nations, the Dutch and the French failed to regain control of their eastern empires, and in 1947 the British government withdrew from India.

  In response to those domestic pressures and external developments, the government appointed numerous committees and commissions, staffed by reform-minded white people, to investigate the racial problems of the country and to plan for the future. In their reports they criticized specific hardships experienced by black South Africans but cast their recommendations within the established segregation framework. One report exposed the appalling conditions in the reserves and denounced the system of migrant labor as “morally, socially, and economically wrong” and looked forward to “its ultimate disappearance.”86 Others, influenced by contemporary thought in Britain, proposed that welfare services should be created for all South Africans, on a segregated basis. Particularly significant was the report, issued in February 1948, of a commission chaired by Justice H. A. Fagan. It concluded that the trend toward urbanization was irreversible and recommended that the pass laws be eased and that the migrant stream be directed into the most useful channels by a national system of labor bureaus.87