A History of South Africa

by Leonard Thompson

  This great and historic racial cleavage was preserved and reinforced by drastic differences in living conditions. In Kimberley, white workers were free to live in the town with their families. During the 1870s, however, Africans became required to carry passes and to live in segregated parts of the town* or, if they were mineworkers, to live in all-male compounds attached to the mines. After 1885, moreover, the African mineworkers were not allowed outside the compounds throughout the duration of their contracts. The stated reason for this was to prevent them from stealing diamonds. Diamonds were entering the market illegally, and illicit diamond buying was a serious threat to the industry. But compounding also gave the companies inordinate control over their African workers, as well as economies of scale in lodging and feeding them.

  Africans in Kimberley were subject to summary justice and the indignity of being stripped for intimate body searches for diamonds. Their annual mortality rate reached 8 percent in the late 1870s. In most years, pneumonia was the principal killer, but in 1883, when smallpox broke out in Kimberley, the industry tried to hush it up until more than five hundred people had died of the disease. Conditions in the compounds were especially inhumane. There, African men, accustomed to living with their families in a rural environment, were cooped up in confined quarters under tight discipline without any women for the duration of their contracts—six months or a year. The migrant labor system also had serious social and economic effects on the home areas of the migrants. Family life was disrupted for long periods, and women became responsible for the economic and social management of households.

  The mining companies dominated Kimberley and overrode the merchants and traders on most issues when interests clashed. At one stage, the companies even planned to make white as well as black workers live in compounds and submit to intimate body searches for diamonds, but that was too great a departure from colonial norms, and the companies desisted in the face of opposition from the local tradespeople as well as the white workers. Since as white men they had the vote, white workers were able to realize a common interest with capitalism in entrenching a racial division in the first industrial city in South Africa. That was a momentous precedent for the structure of urban life and industry throughout the region. The arrangements in Kimberley foreshadowed later refinements of urban segregation, labor control, and all-male hostels for migrant black workers.

  In 1886, at a time when the diamond industry was approaching its mature form, gold was discovered thirty miles south of Pretoria, the capital of the South African Republic. The deposits were uniquely rich. Outcrops of reefs containing gold stretched forty miles east and west along the Witwatersrand, the watershed between the Limpopo and the Orange river systems. The reefs dipped below the surface to the south, and their gold content was regular and reliable, though low grade in comparison with the Australian and Canadian goldfields.13

  Kimberley was a natural precedent for the Witwatersrand. Men such as Rhodes, Beit, and Barnato who had made fortunes in Kimberley extended their scope to the Rand, as the Witwatersrand became known, and invested their profits there. White workers who were redundant in Kimberley as a result of the economies effected by consolidation brought their skills there. Within a decade, however, immigrants from Britain and Europe and people from the coastal colonies were flocking to the area and the Rand, with Johannesburg at its center, had far surpassed Kimberley, to become the site of the greatest industrial complex in Southern Africa and the largest gold-mining operations in the world. The MacArthur-Forrest process had solved the problem of extracting the gold from the complex conglomerate, and the industry was committed to mining at deep levels. By 1899, the industry, in which £60 million had been invested, was producing 27.55 percent of the world’s output of gold, Johannesburg had 75,000 white residents, and the gold-mining companies were employing 100,000 Africans.

  On the Witwatersrand, the individual digger was soon eliminated. Capital and large-scale organization were required to extract the gold from the ore and to mine below the surface. By 1888, joint-stock companies were buying out small claim-holders along the line of the outcrops and purchasing from the Afrikaner pastoral farmers the bare land above the dipping reefs to the south. In the following year, mining industrialists formed the Witwatersrand Chamber of Mines to advance their common interests. The amalgamation process continued, but it stopped short of unifying the gold-mining industry. In 1899, the 124 companies were divided among nine groups controlled by European finance houses.

  The gold-mining industry followed the Kimberley precedent of a racially split labor force. Since the international gold standard set a fixed ceiling price for gold, labor costs were the crucial variable in determining profitability. The industry had a strong incentive to keep the proportion of expensive white operators as low as possible, to exploit African labor as fully as possible, and to prevent the two sections of the labor force from combining. Two factors prevented the industry from being completely successful in the nineteenth century. One was internal: the mining companies and groups competed with one another, especially in the recruitment and treatment of labor. The other was external: the Afrikaner government of the republic, representing farmers who relied on African labor and to whom Johannesburg was a den of iniquity and also, as we shall see, a threat to the survival of their state, had material, cultural, and political interests that were poles apart from those of the industrialists.

  Racial segregation and discrimination were nevertheless the hallmarks of the industry. On the Rand, as in Kimberley, African men who had homes in the rural areas left their families for several months at a time to earn money on the mines. As in Kimberley, they lived in all-male compounds owned and controlled by the companies, under severe discipline imposed by African foremen responsible to white managers. They were clustered together, as many as fifty to a room, where they slept without beds in double-decker concrete bunks. Although, unlike their fellows in Kimberley, the African gold-miners were permitted to go outside their compounds when off-duty during the day, they had neither the money nor the leisure time to derive much benefit from that theoretical advantage. White workers earned about eight times as much as Africans and were free from supervision of their living arrangements. The mines even provided them with heavily subsidized housing.

  When disputes arose, the Transvaal government as well as the industrialists favored the Whites. In 1889, for example, white workers struck with some success to protect their skilled positions and their rights to organize and to have some control over their working conditions, and in the 1890s the state created color bars for particular mining tasks, setting a limit to the upgrading of African workers. By cpntrast, in 1890, when African workers resorted to violence they were ruthlessly suppressed. Moreover, in 1895 the Transvaal legislature, the Volksraad, enacted a Pass Law, drafted by the leaders of the mining industry, that gave employers greater control over the movements of their African laborers. On entering the Witwatersrand, an African had to get a pass authorizing him to seek employment for three days, and when he found work his employer took possession of the pass and kept it until he was discharged. If he was found without a pass, he was liable to be arrested. In practice, the Transvaal government lacked the means to enforce such a law consistently, but it was an ominous harbinger for the future.

  In a set of stimulating essays, the historian Charles van Onselen has shown how, on the Witwatersrand, Africans were not the only people who were trying “to find a place of dignity and security within a capitalist world that encroached on them all too quickly.” In the early years of the gold-mining industry, landless Afrikaners as well as Africans settled on the Witwatersrand and organized small businesses. For example, Afrikaners became cabdrivers and brickmakers, while Zulus created a laundry service. By the mid-1890s, however, most Afrikaner and African entrepreneurs were being crushed out of business by industrial enterprises run by the mining companies, swelling the ranks of the poor Whites, as well as the poor Blacks. The arrival of railroads from the Cape colo
nial ports in 1892, Delagoa Bay in 1894, and Durban in 1895 terminated the role of the Afrikaner transport riders, who had originally provided a vital service to the mining industry and the Witwatersrand population.14

  The Conquest Completed

  Accelerated by the growth of the mining industries, two major political processes transformed Southern Africa in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. British regiments, colonial militia, and Afrikaner commandos completed the conquest of the African inhabitants, and, in a major war, the British army conquered the Afrikaner republics.

  The African societies of Southern Africa experienced intensified pressures after 1870. Although they differed in many other respects, white farmers and businesspeople, traders and missionaries, and government officials had a common interest in subjecting the Africans, appropriating their land, harnessing their labor, dominating their markets, and winning their hearts and minds. By the end of the century, they had completed the process of conquest that had begun in the time of van Riebeeck. All the indigenous peoples of Southern Africa were incorporated in states under white domination.15

  Virtually all the Whites in the region, in common with their contemporaries in Europe and the Americas, regarded themselves as belonging to a superior, Christian, civilized race and believed that, as such, they were justified in appropriating native land, controlling native labor, and subordinating native authorities. So dominant was this assumption that Whites did not permit their serious internal differences—Boer versus Briton, farmer versus townsfolk, employer versus worker—to retard the conquest. In critical situations Whites assisted one another against Africans, and Whites who had benefited from African patrons betrayed them. In 1879, Paul Kruger, who would soon lead Afrikaner commandos against the British occupation force in the Transvaal, gave the British military sound advice on how to cope with the Zulu, and John Dunn, the son of one of the early British traders in Natal, who had become wealthy and powerful as a client of the Zulu king Cetshwayo, went over to the side of the Whites as soon as the imperial army invaded his country.

  The Africans, by contrast, were unable to unite in self-defense. It would have been extremely difficult for Africans to create large-scale combinations against the invaders, because by 1870 they occupied distinct territorial clusters that were separated by wedges of white settlement. Moreover, the Africans, as well as the Whites, had serious internal cleavages. The political culture of the African farming societies in Southern Africa had involved frequent power struggles between segments led by members of their ruling families—father versus son, brother versus brother. Recent strife, including the Mfecane wars, had set chiefdom against chiefdom, lineage against lineage, and chief against commoner. When African chiefs and their councillors were confronted with white expansionists, they had to make critical choices along the spectrum from outright physical resistance to outright cooperation, and in some circumstances cooperation was a logical option.

  Whites, assisted by black allies, dealt with the African societies piecemeal. Whenever fighting occurred, white access to superior technology, in transportation as well as arms, more than offset the Africans’ numerical advantage. The longer a conflict lasted, the more likely the Whites’ victory, since white forces, sustained from commissariats borne by ox wagons from the nearest railhead, would destroy the food supplies of their enemies. To crown it all, in 1896—97, when the last indigenous community in South Africa (the Venda) was about to be conquered, a tragedy struck the entire region. An acute infectious disease known as rinderpest swept through from the north and destroyed up to 90 percent of the Africans’ cattle, which had been their principal form of wealth.16

  The course of events varied from case to case. Traders and speculators, drawing African polities into the international capitalist network, eroded some of them, notably the Swazi, to such an extent that they collapsed without offering physical resistance. Other Africans, such as the Zulu, fought desperately before they succumbed to superior force, but even in such cases economic penetration and internal cleavages contributed to the outcome.

  Consider the Zulu case.17 The Zulu kingdom had survived the assassination of its founder, Shaka, in 1828 and defeat by Afrikaner voor-trekkers a decade later, but it was subject to endemic factionalism. In customary Nguni fashion, rival members of the royal family built up segments that competed for power and wealth—a process that led to civil war in 1856. The authority of the monarchy was also challenged by interests associated with representatives of pre-Shakan chiefdoms. By that time, furthermore, Afrikaner farmers were infiltrating Zulu territory from the Transvaal republic in the north; so were British traders from the colony of Natal in the south. John Dunn attached himself to Cetshwayo, the victor in the civil war, and became the most powerful and wealthy man along the Natal border in the southern part of the kingdom, where he accumulated forty-six Zulu wives, ten thousand followers, and vast herds of cattle.

  After the death of Dingane’s successor, Mpande, in 1872, Cetshwayo strengthened the central government of the kingdom and based his foreign policy on an alliance with Natal, represented by the powerful secretary of native affairs, Theophilus Shepstone, as a safeguard against Afrikaner expansion from the Transvaal. Dunn supplied Cetshwayo with firearms, helped him to funnel African labor from the Tsonga chiefdoms in Mozambique to Natal, and served as his de facto foreign minister and private secretary.

  In 1877, the foundations of Zulu security began to crumble. Acting as an agent of the British government, Shepstone annexed the Transvaal as a British colony and became its administrator. Then, seeking to win the support of the Afrikaner population by assuaging their hunger for land and to satisfy the ambitions of Natal traders and British missionaries and imperialists, Shepstone threw his erstwhile Zulu allies to the wind. He espoused Transvaal territorial claims against the Zulu and persuaded the British high commissioner that the kingdom, with its powerful military organization, was the major obstacle to peace and order in Southern Africa.

  In December 1878, disregarding the report of a boundary commission appointed by the Natal government rejecting the Transvaal claim to Zulu territory, the high commissioner peremptorily demanded that Cetshwayo should disband his army within thirty days. Cetshwayo’s response was to mobilize about thirty thousand men. On January 11,1879, a British force of seven thousand British regulars, about as many Natal African levies, and a thousand colonial volunteers invaded Zululand. Ignoring the advice of no less a person than Paul Kruger, the British commander failed to order entrenchments around his camps and reconnaissance in depth ahead of the line of march. Sixteen hundred British soldiers spent the night of January 21 unprotected, beside the hill Isandhlwana. Early the next morning, a Zulu army took them unawares and slaughtered nearly every one of them, in the greatest disaster to British arms since the Crimean War. However, a British outpost warded off a Zulu attack at Rorke’s Drift on the Natal frontier, and, after reinforcements had arrived, the war gradually drew to its inexorable conclusion, culminating in July with the destruction of the Zulu capital at Ulundi. John Dunn, followed by several leading Zulu chiefs, had defected to the British at the start, but it was technological factors that were decisive. The Zulu never made effective use of their guns, while lumbering ox-wagon trains replenished the invaders’ supplies of food and ammunition.18

  The military campaign was not the end of the Zulu kingdom. Having defeated the army, the British set Zulu against Zulu, preventing a revival of Zulu power without cost to Britain. They abolished the monarchy, banished Cetshwayo to Cape Town, and divided Zululand into thirteen separate territories under thirteen appointed chiefs—members of the royal family, descendants of pre-Shakan chiefs, and the inimitable John Dunn. Chaos resulted. John William Colenso, an Anglican bishop, espoused the cause of Cetshwayo, with the result that Cetshwayo was permitted to plead his case in Britain and then to return to Zululand with limited powers. But it was a truncated Zululand: a substantial area in the north was placed under a distant relative of Cetshwayo name
d Zibhebhu and another in the south was administered from Natal.

  Civil war followed between the conservative, royalist party led by Cetshwayo and the reform-minded party of Zibhebhu. Zibhebhu initially gained the upper hand: his men burned Ulundi for the second time, and Cetshwayo fled and died under British protection. The councillors of Cetshwayo’s fifteen-year-old son, Dinuzulu, then made a deal with Afrikaners who had been infiltrating the country. During 1884, the Afrikaners carved a ministate, the New Republic, out of the northern third of the former Zulu kingdom, and with their help the royalist faction defeated Zibhebhu’s forces. In 1887, the Transvaal incorporated the New Republic and Britain annexed the rest of Zululand, divided it into districts, appointed magistrates, and began to collect a hut tax. Dinuzulu and his councillors tried to prevent the magistrates from usurping the powers of the chiefs, but it was too late. Dinuzulu was arrested, convicted of treason, and exiled to Saint Helena, and when he was allowed to return it was only as a local headman. By that time, Zululand had been incorporated in Natal, where white farmers and speculators were agitating for Zulu territory. The government appointed a land commission that marked out a number of reserves for the Zulu and threw the rest of the country open to white settlement, leaving only about one-third of the former kingdom in Zulu hands (1902—4). Before the war of 1879, Shepstone had expressed the hope that Cetshwayo’s warriors would be “changed to labourers working for wages.” His wish was granted.19