Government and private industry actually made a few concessions to their reformist critics. They eased the job color bar, extended the industrial training facilities for Africans, raised black factory wages by a larger proportion than white wages, made Africans eligible for small old age and disability pensions, and increased the grant for African education and freed it from its dependence on African taxes. In 1942, they even relaxed the pass laws.88
But those reforms were mere palliatives. In 1946, the government was still paying more than twenty times as much per capita for white education as for black education. In 1942, moreover, Smuts removed from the cabinet Deneys Reitz, the minister who had been responsible for easing the application of the pass laws, and from the end of 1943 Reitz’s successor was enforcing them as rigorously as ever. Smuts never wavered in his belief that Africans were an inferior people; his was at best a paternalist attitude. Like most contemporary white people in Europe and North America, as well as South Africa, he could not imagine that Africans themselves were capable of improving their own status and living conditions. “Of course,” Smuts confided to a correspondent, “everybody [meaning, every white person] in this country is agreed that European and African should live apart and preserve their respective cultures.”89 Hofmeyr, too, never overcame his white South African fear of social mixing.90 Even the parliamentary representatives of Africans, committed though they were to reform, had virtually no close social contacts with Africans and stopped short of recommending universal suffrage or social equality.
By the end of the war, a new generation of black leaders, faced by the growing gulf between African realities and African expectations, was seeking more effective methods of resistance. In 1943, the annual conference of the ANC adopted a statement, Africans’ Claims in South Africa, which cited the Atlantic Charter and set out a bill of rights calling for the abolition of all discriminatory legislation, redistribution of the land, African participation in collective bargaining, and universal adult suffrage. That year a group of young professional Africans founded a youth league as a pressure group in the ANC, stressing the need for African self-reliance and unity. Graduates of the best missionary high schools in South Africa and of the Native College at Fort Hare, they included Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, and Walter Sisulu. In 1945 and 1947, ANC delegates attended pan-African meetings in Manchester, England, and Dakar, Senegal, where they met such African nationalists as Leopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, and Kwame Nkrumah of the Gold Coast (Ghana), who would soon become rulers of independent states. Nevertheless, in 1948 the ANC still had fewer than six thousand members, and it had no fully developed plan of action when white South Africans went to the polls in a general election.91
By that time, the Smuts government had finally lost the confidence of the older Africans who controlled the Natives Representative Council, created by the legislation of 1936. The councillors had become increasingly frustrated. They had taken their assignment seriously, but the government had continued to ignore their advice. In August 1946, when the council assembled in Pretoria for its regular session, the white chairman refused to make a statement about the massive strike of African miners that was taking place nearby on the Witwatersrand. The council then passed resolutions denouncing the shooting of strikers, calling the government’s maintenance of discriminatory laws and practices “the antithesis and negation of the letter and spirit of the Atlantic Charter and the United Nations Charter,” and demanding the abolition of all discriminatory legislation.92
In November 1946, Hofmeyr, acting prime minister in the absence of Smuts, who was attending a session of the United Nations, addressed a final meeting of the council. He defended the government’s racial policies and said that the removal of discriminatory laws “would not be in the interests of the Native peoples, since experience has shown that the average Native has not reached a stage in his development when he can retain the ownership of land under conditions of free competition.”93 The chairman of the council’s caucus was Professor Z. K. Matthews, head of the African Studies Department at the South African Native College. In dignified language, Matthews replied to Hofmeyr’s speech. It had, he said, “raised no hope for the future as far as the African people are concerned.”94 The council then adjourned, never to meet again. The ANC, at its annual conference in December, 1946, endorsed the council’s decision.
By 1939, Afrikaners still dominated the agricultural sector of the economy, but more than half of the Afrikaner people were living in towns, where they were struggling to establish themselves in an English-dominated milieu. They were concentrated in the lowest-level white occupations: unskilled laborers, miners and factory workers, teachers and junior civil servants. Only a few were beginning to enter the professions or compete with the English ascendancy in trade and business. In South Africa the average English-speaking White was twice as wealthy as the average Afrikaner.95
For many Afrikaners, ethnic identity was more important than occupational and class differences. The Broederbond, the Federasie van Af-rikaanse Kultuurverenigings (Federation of Afrikaner Cultural Associations), the Afrikaner churches, the Reddingsdaadbond (Rescue Association), and the National party combined to mobilize Afrikaner cultural, economic, and political power.
The outbreak of war caused deep splits among Afrikaners. The predominant feeling was one of profound dismay that the country should again be allied to Britain in a European war. But Afrikaners reacted in different ways. Thousands of young Afrikaners joined the army; indeed, more than half of the white men in South Africa’s armed forces were Afrikaners, predominantly men of rural origins who had settled in the towns but had failed to prosper in their new environment.
Other Afrikaners tried to exploit the opportunities created by the German victories. German radio broadcasts in Afrikaans were beamed to South Africa. Afrikaner intellectuals who had studied in German universities, such as Nicholaas Diederichs (later president of the Republic of South Africa) and Piet Meyer (subsequently chairman of the South African Broadcasting Corporation), wrote articles, pamphlets, and books and spoke to enthusiastic audiences, using ideas from German national socialism. A certain J. Albert Coetzee started a pamphlet with the statement, “The history of South Africa is really the history of the origin of a new nation—of how, from different European nations, groups, and individuals it was separated, cut off, differentiated and specialized to form a new volksgroep, with its own calling and destiny, with its own traditions, with its own soul and with its own body.”96 The lexicon included explicit racism. In Rasse en Rasvermenging (Races and Race Mixing), G. Eloflf described distinct white, black, and yellow races, each with its spiritual as well as biological characteristics: “The preservation of the pure race tradition of the Boerevolk must be protected at all costs in all possible ways as a holy pledge entrusted to us by our ancestors as part of God’s plan with our People. Any movement, school, or individual who sins against this must be dealt with as a racial criminal by the effective authorities.”97
A militant organization known as the Ossewa Brandwag (Oxwagon Sentinel) welcomed the spate of German successes and resorted to sabotage but did not threaten the state. Malan meanwhile retained control of the National party, which absorbed some of the men who had followed Hertzog out of the United party and ejected others, including Hertzog himself. The National party adhered to constitutional methods and, as the prospects of a German victory dwindled, won the whole-hearted allegiance of the Broederbond and the other Afrikaner cultural and economic organizations. Although the ruling coalition composed of the United party, the Labour party, and the anglophile Dominion party won 105 seats in the general election of 1943, the National party, with 43 seats, emerged as the parliamentary opposition.98
As the election of 1948 approached, the National party, assisted by the plethora of local branches of Afrikaner organizations, formed an effective alliance of the principal rural and urban classes of Afrikaners, appealing to their ethnic and racial attitudes, as well as
their material interests. It attacked the British link, which had led to the involvement in two world wars and the alliance with communist Russia. It denounced Smuts as a British toady, pointing out that, in spite of his obsession with global politics, he had not deterred the United Nations from refusing to allow South Africa to incorporate South West Africa, nor had he stopped the United Nations from rebuking South Africa for limiting the rights of Indian traders in Natal and the Transvaal. It criticized the government for its liberal reforms and for its failure to stop both the flow of Africans into the towns and the outburst of African industrial strikes.”99
Afrikaners were deeply worried about the state of race relations. Nearly all believed that the state should do more to maintain white supremacy and the “purity” of the white “race.” They differed as to how that should be done. Farmers and businesspeople wanted unimpeded access to African labor, combined with stringent government controls over its allocation and discipline. By contrast, Afrikaner workers wanted greater protection from African competition—an attitude that harmonized with the ideas of intellectuals who were developing a blueprint for complete economic as well as political segregation of South African society.100 Professor of Sociology at the University of Pretoria G. S. Cronje systematized those ideas in *n Tuiste vir die Nageslag (A Home for Posterity), in which he argued that the only way to ensure the long-term survival of the Afrikaner people was to separate the races into completely distina territories in South Africa and make the Whites do without black labor.101 Cronje’s book was the subject of earnest debate in Afrikaner cultural circles, including the South African Bureau of Racial Affairs, which Afrikaners founded in opposition to the liberal South African Institute of Race Relations. The Afrikaans press and the Afrikaner churches also publicized the ideal of absolute racial separation.
In 1946, the National party appointed a committee, chaired by Paul Sauer, a senior party politician, to prepare a policy statement on the racial problem. The Sauer report treated Indians as an alien, unassimilable element in South Africa. It recommended the rigorous segregation of the Coloured People, the consolidation of the African reserves, the removal of missionary control of African education, and the abolition of the Natives Representative Council and the representation of Africans in Parliament. On several crucial matters, however, the report was an inconsistent, contradictory hybrid of two competing ideas. It set out complete economic segregation of Africans in their reserves as an ultimate goal but qualified it by stressing the need to satisfy white farming and manufacturing interests. Everything possible should be done to deter the exodus of Africans from the farm. Labor bureaus should be created to harness African labor to meet the demands of both rural and urban employers. And the migrant system should be extended, not reduced. Urban African workers should not be accompanied by their families.102 The label given to this policy was Apartheid, a coined word that Afrikaner intellectuals had begun to use in the 1930s.103 It means, simply, Apartness.
In comparison with its opponents’ preparation for the election, the United party campaign was feeble. Smuts, at seventy-eight, was tired and out of touch. Apart from Hofmeyr, the other members of the cabinet were inefficient and complacent. Unlike the Sauer report, the Fagan report was unclear and alarming to many Whites. In accepting Africans, including African women, as a permanent element in the urban population and in rejecting influx control, it aroused racial fears. The National party’s election propaganda repeatedly pilloried Hofmeyr, Smuts’s deputy, characterizing him as an extreme liberal under whom the South African population would be bastardized if he became prime minister.104
When the votes were counted, the National party had won seventy seats, mainly rural, and the United party had won sixty-five seats, mainly urban. Ironically, the United party would have won the election if the rural electoral divisions had not contained fewer voters than the urban divisions, as laid down in the constitution for which Smuts had been primarily responsible. Malan then formed a government in alliance with the Afrikaner party, a Hertzogite rump, which he soon absorbed. Afrikaners, skillfully mobilized, had peacefully won political control of a country in which they formed no more than 12 percent of the population.
On June 1, 1948, Malan arrived in Pretoria by train to receive a tumultuous welcome. “In the past,” he said, “we felt like strangers in our own country, but today South Africa belongs to us once more. For the first time since Union, South Africa is our own. May God grant that it always remains our own.”105
CHAPTER 6
The Apartheid Era 1948-1978
After its initial victory in 1948, the National party consolidated its power. In that year it created new parliamentary seats for representatives of white voters in South West Africa (six in the House of Assembly and four in the Senate) who were elected to support the government. Then, step by step, it eliminated every vestige of black participation in the central political system. In 1956, after a long political and legal struggle, it dealt the Coloured votes in the Cape Province, most of whom had supported the United party, the same blow as the Hertzog government had dealt the African voters in 1936: it placed them on a separate roll and gave them the right to elect Whites to represent them in Parliament. Fourteen years later, it abolished the parliamentary seats of the white representatives of both African and Coloured voters.1
For three decades, the National party had the support of the overwhelming majority of the Afrikaner people. In the election of 1966, it also began to win substantial support from English-speaking Whites, who were attracted by the government’s determination to maintain control in the face of increasing black unrest and foreign criticism. It won successive elections by increasing majorities. The United party never recovered from its defeat in 1948. Once in 1959 its leaders actually tried to outbid the Nationalists in racism by rejecting the purchase of more land for Africans, whereupon its relatively liberal members broke ranks and founded the Progressive party. In 1977, a shadow of its former self, the United party dissolved. In the general election that year, the Nationalists won 134 seats in the House of Assembly, whereas the major opposition, the Progressive Federal party, won a mere 17 seats.
The National party used its control of the government to fulfill Afrikaner ethnic goals as well as white racial goals. It achieved a major ethnic objective in 1961 when, after obtaining a narrow majority in a referendum of the white electorate, the government transformed South Africa into a republic, thereby completing the process of disengagement from Great Britain. The government had intended to follow the precedent whereby India remained a member of the British Commonwealth when it became a republic. At a conference of Commonwealth countries, however, the African members, supported by Canada as well as India, sharply criticized apartheid, and South Africa then withdrew from that loose association.
The government meanwhile Afrikanerized every state institution, appointing Afrikaners to senior as well as junior positions in the civil service, army, police, and state corporations. Medical and legal professional associations, too, came increasingly under Afrikaner control. The government also assisted Afrikaners to close the economic gap between themselves and English-speaking white South Africans. It directed official business to Afrikaner banks and allotted valuable state contracts to Afrikaners. Afrikaner businesspeople channeled Afrikaner capital into ethnic banks, investment houses, insurance companies, and publishing houses. By 1976, Afrikaner entrepreneurs had obtained a firm foothold in mining, manufacturing, commerce, and finance—all previously exclusive preserves of English-speakers. Whereas in 1946 the average Afrikaner’s income had been 47 percent that of an English-speaking white South African, in 1976 it had risen to 71 percent and continued to rise thereafter.2
The political successes of the National party were due in part to the rising standard of living of white South Africans of all classes. Except for recessions in the early 1960s and the late 1970s, the South African economy was buoyant. The value of South African output at 1970 prices grew from R 4,434 million in 1950 to R
15,474 million in 1979.3 The Whites were the principal beneficiaries. White farmers, most of whom were Afrikaners, received massive state support. They mechanized their farms and trebled their output, while the government assisted them to obtain and keep black wage laborers and to eliminate the vestiges of black occupation of white land as sharecroppers or renters.
The Nationalist government also gave fierce expression to its determination to maintain white supremacy in postwar South Africa. Much of its early legislation coordinated and extended the racial laws of the segregation era and tightened up the administration of those laws. The term apartheid, however, soon developed from a political slogan into a drastic, systematic program of social engineering. The man largely responsible for that development was Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd.
Verwoerd was born in the Netherlands in 1901 and migrated to South Africa in 1903 with his pro-Boer Dutch parents. Brought up in Cape Town, Southern Rhodesia, and the Orange Free State, he identified passionately with the Afrikaners. In private life he was charming; in public affairs, dogmatic, intolerant, domineering, and xenophobic. After acquiring a doctorate in psychology at Stellenbosch, the premier Afrikaner university, and spending 1927 visiting German universities, he became professor of applied psychology at Stellenbosch. In the mid-1930s, he promoted the cause of the Poor Whites and opposed Jewish immigration from Nazi Germany. In 1937, he became founding editor of Die Transvaler, created with nationalist funds for the express purpose of rallying Transvaal Afrikaners to the party. By 1948, he was widely known as a fiery republican. Malan then made him an appointed senator and in 1950 minister of native affairs. He was prime minister of South Africa from 1958 until September 6, 1966, when, as he was about to make a major speech in Parliament, a deranged attendant stabbed him to death.4
A History of South Africa Page 27
