A History of South Africa

by Leonard Thompson

  While these things were happening, Whites were also conquering African communities that had previously preserved their independence in Southern Africa. Throughout the region, Whites were incorporating Africans into a capitalist, white-dominated economy. Many Africans were obliged to pay rent, or to surrender a share of their produce, or to provide labor services for the right to live on land that white people had appropriated. In areas where the land was still in African hands, the white governments were obliging chiefs and headmen to acquiesce in the presence of recruiters of labor for the mines as well as magistrates, whose duties included the collection of taxes. Some African families were enjoying increasing prosperity by producing food for the urban markets, but other families were experiencing periodic separation as the men traveled to mining towns or white farms to work for several months at a time, leaving the women with greatly extended responsibilities for the household economy. By 1900, moreover, a few Africans were living permanently in the towns and becoming the nucleus of an urban proletariat.1

  These events were accentuating differences among the inhabitants of Southern Africa. The primary division was still the racial cleavage that had been present in Southern Africa since the beginning of white settlement, slave importation, and Khoikhoi incorporation in the seventeenth century (chapter 2). This division was enhanced by the racist ideology that was now pervasive among Europeans and North Americans, as well as white South Africans, and it was becoming more rigid than ever. White men maintained an absolute monopoly of formal political power in the Transvaal and Orange Free State republics and a virtual monopoly in the colony of Natal. Even in the Cape Colony no black person ever became a member of the parliament or cabinet, and laws were passed to check the increase of the black members of the electorate, who never numbered more than 15 percent of the total.

  Perhaps the most fateful process of the period was the struggle that led to the racial structure of preindustrial, colonial South African society being applied in the mining industries. This was done by splitting the labor force between white workers, with skilled or supervisory roles, opportunities for advancement, high wages, and relatively good living conditions, and black workers, devoid of the means to exercise skilled or supervisory roles, poorly paid, and subjected to harsh living conditions in all-male compounds. A precedent was thus established for structuring industry on racial lines throughout the region.2

  There were also deepening secondary divisions inside each racial category. Most of the descendants of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century settlers identified themselves as Afrikaners, with their distinct language, religious affiliation, historical consciousness, and social networks, whereas nearly all of the nineteenth-century white immigrants (most of whom came from Britain) kept aloof from Afrikaners, despised their language and culture, and underestimated their achievements. Nearly all Afrikaners, moreover, continued to live and work in a rural environment, whereas most immigrants were townspeople.

  Neither the Afrikaners nor the immigrants were homogeneous communities. Among the Afrikaners there were well-to-do people—long-established wine farming families in the southwestern Cape Colony, wool farmers in the Cape interior, and grain and cattle farmers in the republics—but there were also increasingly numerous Afrikaners who owned no land, were unequipped to compete with white immigrants in the towns, and were becoming known as Poor Whites. Among the nineteenth-century immigrants, those who settled in Southern Africa before 1870 did not readily identify with the subsequent rush of people to Kimberley and Johannesburg. English-speaking lawyers, merchants, tradespeople, skilled workers, and semiliterate proletarians jostled and competed among themselves and with immigrants from the Continent in the older towns—Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Durban, and Pietermaritzburg—as well as in the mining cities. A few superrich mining magnates commuted between Southern Africa and England, where they made a splash in high society.

  Although people of British origin were a majority among the Whites in Natal and on the Witwatersrand, Afrikaners formed more than half the white population in the region as a whole. Moreover, whereas there was a balanced ratio of men, women, and children in the Afrikaner population, men predominated among the immigrants. Johannesburg, in particular, had a huge male adult majority in its white as well as its black population.3

  Black South Africans, too, had varied affiliations. The people whom Whites grouped together as “Coloured” differed greatly among themselves. Their ancestors included indigenous Khoisan people and slaves from Indonesia, Madagascar, and tropical Africa. They ranged frpm culturally deprived farm laborers to skilled urban craftspeople. Some were Christians, others Muslims. Moreover, although there were small Coloured communities in the Witwatersrand and in Natal, most Coloureds still lived in the western part of South Africa and had no contact with Africans.

  Most Africans still identified with specific chiefdoms, which had a history of conflict with neighbors, especially during the Mfecane wars. Nevertheless, “tribalism,” as the Whites called it, was less rigid than Whites believed. African social and political communities had always been flexible. In the late nineteenth century and afterwards, Africans continued to move from one chiefdom to another and chiefs willingly incorporated newcomers. Conquest and industrialization intensified social divisions among Africans. Mission-educated clergy and teachers, and successful peasants, formed a new hierarchy in competition with the old hierarchy of chiefs.

  To compound the diversity of the Southern African population still further, the Natal government continued to import laborers from India to such an extent that by the end of the century there were more Indians than Whites in Natal. It was on behalf of the Indian traders that a young London-trained barrister, Mohandas Gandhi, went to South Africa in 1893. In the next twenty-one years, Gandhi led several campaigns against unjust laws in South Africa. Although he did not achieve decisive results there, the technique of passive resistance that he developed in Natal and the Transvaal would have profound effects on the British Raj in India, after he returned home in 1914.4

  Great Britain was deeply involved in all these transformations. During the mid-nineteenth century, Britain had been by far the most urbanized and industrialized country in the world, and British merchants had been able to penetrate overseas markets without serious competition from foreigners and without the need to invoke the state to support them with protective tariffs or territorial annexations. After 1870, however, other countries were becoming industrialized, notably Germany and the United States, and they were eroding the economic preeminence on which British global strength had rested. In an international environment that was strikingly different from the free-trading Western world of the midcentury, European states were playing an increasingly active role at home and abroad. Competition intensified among them and developed into an arms race that eventually tore Europe apart.5

  The British government was put on the defensive by the decline of its relative power and the rise of economic and military competition, especially from Germany. In the last three decades of the century, successive British administrations tried to find a policy that would prevent rivals from encroaching on territories hitherto dominated by British trade and capital, such as those in the Southern African interior. As the mineral wealth of the region became revealed, some British politicians and businesspeople came to regard its control as a matter of national importance. The increase in the British political commitment in Southern Africa was modified by tactical differences between the political parties. Under Disraeli and his successors, the Conservative or Unionist party took a strong imperialist line, whereas Gladstone’s Liberal party split from top to bottom over the question of territorial expansion.

  In the 1870s local circumstances rather than international competition prompted Britain to annex first the diamond fields (1871) and then the Transvaal republic (1877) and to conquer the Zulu kingdom, the most powerful African state in Southern Africa (1879). When the Transvaal Afrikaners rebelled and defeated the British forces in the
region, in 1881, however, a Liberal administration granted them a qualified independence rather than incur the cost of reconquest. International competition influenced British policy more profoundly after the mid-1880s, when Germany annexed South West Africa (Namibia), as well as Togoland, Cameroon, and Tanganyika, and dominated an international conference in Berlin that set the ground rules for a general “scramble” for African territories. By 1890, moreover, the Witwatersrand gold fields had transformed the Transvaal from a backwater into the economic hub of Southern Africa.

  Even so, until 1895 British administrations generally relied on settler communities to sustain their interests in the region. Although the government authorized the annexation of the Transvaal in 1877, it did so in the hope that annexation would pave the way for the amalgamation of all the territories in Southern Africa into a federal state within the British Empire. In 1889, it empowered a commercial company dominated by Cecil Rhodes—prime minister of the Cape Colony and the most powerful man in the diamond- and gold-mining industries—to annex and administer territories north of the Limpopo. It was not until the strategy of delegation of imperial responsibilities backfired with the ignominious failure of Rhodes’s attempt to supplant the government of the Transvaal republic in an attempted coup known as the Jameson Raid—a classic piece of naive adventurism—that the British government assumed direct responsibility for preventing the Transvaal from slipping out of the imperial network. British pressures culminated in the South African War, 1899–1902, Britain’s greatest war since the Napoleonic Wars.

  Britain eventually conquered the republics and annexed them as British colonies but did not use its victory to modify the racial structure of Southern African society. On the contrary, the war ended in a treaty that guaranteed that black people would not participate in parliamentary elections in the new colonies when they were given representative institutions. In 1907, the British honored that agreement, and three years later the Cape Colony, Natal, the Transvaal, and the Orange Free State joined to form the Union of South Africa, which, from the day of its birth, was dominated by its white inhabitants.6

  Diamonds, Gold, and the Mining Cities

  Africans had worked outcrops of copper, iron, and gold in various parts of Southern Africa for over a millennium. By the 1860s, Whites, too, had been extracting small outcrops of copper in the northwestern Cape Colony and of gold in the eastern Transvaal. There was flurry of excitement in 1867 when alluvial diamonds were found near the confluence of the Vaal and the Harts rivers in arid country west of Bloemfontein. By late 1870, five thousand people were there, Whites and Blacks, using picks and shovels to extract promising soil and hand sieves to sift it, and forming a rugged gambling, boozing, and whoring society like that of the mining camps in North America. A few lucky ones were finding diamonds, which they sold to local representatives of European merchants. A year later, the supply was petering out, and the episode would have been yet another brief incident had not more diamonds been discovered on sparsely populated land several miles from the river valleys. By 1872, twenty thousand Whites and thirty thousand Blacks had converged on the area. Within a few years, geologists realized that the “dry diggings” were the outcrops of diamondiferous pipes that extended far below the surface and contained the largest concentration of gem diamonds yet discovered. Kimberley, the diamond city, was born 550 miles from Cape Town and 350 miles from the nearest coastline at East London.

  Profound technical problems had to be overcome before those bountiful resources could be fully exploited. Initially, as in the alluvial fields, individua) diggers acquired small claims and worked the surface with pick and shovel, helped, perhaps, by three or four assistants. Most of the diggers were white; nearly all their assistants, black. By the end of 1872, four mines were taking shape and many of the claims were subdivided into tiny plots. On the Kimberley mine, the most productive of the four, there were no fewer than 1,700 properties, one of which, for example, measured seven feet by thirty and was sold for fifteen hundred pounds. As their excavations deepened, the miners erected an elaborate haulage system with pulleys and wires and wooden staging to remove the excavated ground. Chaos resulted. Collapsed roadways, mounds of earth, and floodwaters made more than half the mine unworkable.

  Concentration and mechanization gradually overcame these problems. Steam traction replaced man and animal power, and underground shafts and tunnels eventually replaced open mining. As advanced technology took over, small properties and individual diggers were superseded by larger holdings and highly capitalized organizations. The mid-1880s were years of mutually destructive cutthroat competition among those companies.7

  As the competition developed, a few individuals, most of them youthful immigrants from Europe, struggled to the top and amassed great wealth. There was Barney Barnato, born in 1852, the son of a London publican and grandson of a rabbi, who arrived in Kimberley in 1873 with “a little cash and forty boxes of cheap cigars,”8 set himself up as a dealer in diamonds, and step by step, by fair means and foul, acquired more shares in the Kimberley mine than anyone else. There was Alfred Beit, born in 1853, son of a Hamburg merchant, a shy and socially unobtrusive man who was sent to Southern Africa in 1875 to buy diamonds for a German firm and became the brains behind the amalgamation of plots and the development of deep-level mining. And there was Cecil Rhodes, younger son of an English country parson, who went to Natal for his health in 1869 at age sixteen and then alternated between Kimberley and Oxford University, where he imbibed grandiose visions of imperial expansion and graduated in 1881, already a multimillionaire.9

  By May 1887, Rhodes had acquired practical control of De Beers, the second most productive of the four mines, but Barnato and Beit, as well as Rhodes, still had large holdings in the Kimberley mine. Within the next year, however, Rhodes’s De Beers Consolidated Mines acquired control of the Kimberley mine by entering into partnership with Beit, getting financial backing from the Rothschilds of London, and cajoling Barnato to cooperate. De Beers thus acquired a monopoly of the diamond production of the area.

  Politics had affected this outcome. Four authorities initially claimed sovereignty over the diamond fields: the two Afrikaner republics (the Transvaal and the Orange Free State), the southernmost Tswana chiefdom, and the Griqua chiefdom of Nicholas, son of Andries Waterboer. The strongest white claim to the dry diggings was that of the Orange Free State, since the area included farms that had been recognized not only by the Orange Free State government but also, in some cases, by the British officials who had ruled the area between 1848 and 1854. Nevertheless, in 1871 the British high commissioner proclaimed the annexation of the territory which became known as Griqualand West, after a British arbitrator had ruled in favor of Waterboer and Waterboer had been persuaded to request British protection. The British government failed to provide for an efficient local administration, however, and thus its officials depended on the cooperation of the local white population: first the diggers’ committees and later the major industrialists. The industrialists’ grip tightened after 1880, when Griqualand West was incorporated in the Cape Colony. They established control over the parliamentary representation of the area, and in 1890, Cecil Rhodes, by then the dominant figure in the diamond industry, became prime minister of the Cape Colony.10

  Throughout those years, the financial basis of the diamond industry was insecure. Marketing was one major problem. The value of gem diamonds is set by fashion rather than utility. In the late nineteenth century, it swung abruptly with the state of the capitalist world economy. It was actually in danger of collapsing as South African stones flooded the market and as production costs rose during the installation of expensive capital equipment. The viability of the industry thus came to depend largely on control of the marketing of the diamonds. Market control followed quickly on the consolidation of the production process, however. In 1895, a syndicate of London merchants contracted to buy De Beers’s output for the next eighteen months for £5.4 million which was the start of a continuing
pattern of long-term contracts. The industry was stabilized by cooperation and eventual merger between a monopoly producer and a monopoly marketer.

  Labor management was another major determinant of the viability of the industry. During the formative years, struggles between the companies and the workers, and among different classes of workers, were intense. The outcome was significant for the future of South Africa. It came in two stages. First, white populism created a color bar in Kimberley. Initially, a few African and Coloured men as well as white men controlled claims and competed for unskilled labor. In 1872 an all-white diggers’ committee drew up a set of rules designed to adapt the established racial order of South Africa to the urban and industrial context, by eliminating black diggers and making Blacks liable to be searched without a warrant and to receive as many as fifty lashes if found to be in possession of diamonds they could not account for.11

  The British officials declined to endorse such overtly racial rules, but the high commissioner issued proclamations that had much the same effect without being overtly racial. Any black person was de facto excluded from owning diamond claims or trading in diamonds and was liable to imprisonment or corporal punishment if found “in precincts of the camp without a pass signed by his master or by a magistrate.”12 These proclamations were intended to appease the antislavery lobby in Britain. Color-blind in form, in practice they applied exclusively to blacks and divided ownership and production of diamonds by color.

  As the individual digger phase passed, mining personnel became structured into a complex hierarchy. The machines were worked by skilled immigrants from overseas, including men from Cornwall, England, where the tin-mining industry was in decline. At the other extreme, a mass of people was recruited to do the manual labor, especially the heavy and dangerous work underground, from the African societies of Southern Africa. In between, there were overseers of the African labor—white South Africans drawn largely from the erstwhile digger population. The skilled operatives, being scarce, commanded high wages, and the overseers, being white men in a colonial society already structured on racial lines, were able to carve out an intermediate and sheltered niche for themselves; but the manual laborers, drawn from societies with no previous experience of industrial labor and having no say in the colonial political system, got short shrift. Step by step, the working class was split into two strata, white and black: the white, privileged, well paid, and free; the black, unprivileged, poorly paid, and unfree.