A History of South Africa

by Leonard Thompson

  In 1939, the gold mines employed 364,000 workers: 43,000 Whites and 321,400 Africans. After 1910, the industry continued to attract skilled operatives from overseas, but most of the white miners were South African-born. The industry drew African workers from a wide region within and beyond the borders of South Africa and avoided competition among the mining companies by joining in a monopsony. The Native Recruiting Corporation ran a network of recruiting stations in South Africa, Basutoland, southern Bechuanaland, and Swaziland. The Witwatersrand Native Labour Association operated in Mozambique and, after 1933, in Nyasaland, Tanganyika, Northern Rhodesia, northern Bechuanaland, South West Africa, and Angola. By 1936, 52 percent of the African mine workers came from within South Africa (39 percent from the Cape Province) and 48 from outside the country, especially from Mozambique (28 percent) and Basutoland (15 percent).40

  Soon after the foundation of the Union of South Africa, the state gave legal effect to color bars that had previously existed in the mining industry, in custom if not in law. In 1911, the government prohibited strikes by African mine workers and issued regulations under a Mines and Works Act to give white workers a monopoly of skilled operations. On that basis, mine labor continued to be split on a hierarchical, racial basis. The all-white Mine Workers’ Union, founded in 1902, was a formidable force. It won relative security of long-term employment for its members and the continuation of a vast gap between their wages and those of African workers. After 1920, the gap was never less than eleven to one in cash wages, or ten to one when allowance is made for the food that the companies supplied to the African workers. Furthermore, by 1939 white miners were receiving paid leave and pensions, which Africans did not receive, and far larger disability payments than those for Africans.41

  In 1922, as we have seen, the mining companies tried to offset the high cost of white labor by reducing the proportion of white workers from i White to 8.2 Africans to i to 11.4. But, although the Smuts government used military force to overcome white resistance, the votes of white workers brought Hertzog’s Afrikaner Nationalist party into power in alliance with white labor in 1924. The proportion of white workers employed in the gold mines increased thereafter, reaching 1 white to 7.5 Africans in 1939, even though the wage gap gave the companies a strong inducement to decrease the proportion of Whites. The mineowners had learned that in a country where Whites had votes and (except to a limited extent in the Cape Province) Blacks had none, it was not politically possible to replace some of its expensive white labor with Africans.42

  Labor in the South African gold mines is arduous, unhealthy, and dangerous. The heat is intense. The stopes are so narrow that men work at the rock-face in a crouching position. Between 1933 and 1966, 19,000 gold-miners, 93 percent of them Africans, died as a result of accidents.43 Many Africans miners contracted diseases on the mines. During 1931, the Miners’ Pthisis Medical Bureau classified 1,370 African miners as suffering from tuberculosis or lung diseases, or both, caused by mining.44 Living conditions were appalling. Down to World War II and beyond, only 1 percent of African mine workers were legally eligible for family housing. The rest were housed, as in the past, in single-sex compounds with between three and six thousand men to a compound. Those built before World War I housed between sixty and ninety men to a dormitory; those built during the 1930s, about twenty. Beds were not supplied. Men either slept on the short concrete bunks or made or bought wooden beds designed to fit them. The food, though nutritious, was unattractive and monotonous. Most mines had no dining rooms and men ate outside or in their dormitories.45

  The mines were run on military lines. The officers—the shift bosses and compound managers—were white; the noncommissioned officers—the underground “boss-boys” and compound “indunas”—as well as the mass of laborers, were black. No women were allowed in the compounds.46

  The state used its power to apply racial discrimination in manufacturing industries and public works. For this purpose, the Hertzog government invented a convenient euphemism. Instead of admitting that he was discriminating on grounds of race, Hertzog said he was discriminating in favor of “persons whose standard of living conforms to the standard generally recognised as tolerable from the usual European standpoint,” as contrasted with “persons whose aim is restricted to the bare requirements of the necessities of life as understood by barbarous and undeveloped peoples.” To stimulate growth, he provided manufacturing industries with tariff protection, provided that they maintained a satisfactory ratio between “civilised” and “uncivilised” workers in each industry. Furthermore, the wages of “civilised” workers, including those engaged in unskilled work, were set at higher rates than those of “uncivilised” workers.47

  Laws governing apprenticeship and industrial bargaining further buttressed the racial structure of industry. The Apprenticeship Act (1922) gave unionized white workers a secure position by setting educational qualifications for apprenticeship in numerous trades. That made it impossible for most Africans to be apprenticed, since they lacked the means to meet the prescribed educational level.48 The Industrial Conciliation Act (1924) and its successors set up machinery for the prevention and settlement of disputes but excluded Africans from the definition of “employees.” That meant that white workers negotiated with employers the conditions of employment for themselves and for the African workers. Africans, debarred from participation, fell under state legislation.49

  Those decisions created pervasive racial discrimination in manufacturing and public works, as in the mining industry. Poverty among Whites was reduced at the expense of the black population, by giving Whites sheltered employment at uncompetitive wages in public works and in such state enterprises as the railroads. In manufacturing as in mining, moreover, the gap between skilled and unskilled wages was higher than in other industrializing countries, and Whites monopolized the skilled positions. In 1939, white workers earned 5.3 times as much as African workers in manufacturing and construction in South Africa.50 Government officials knew of these disparities. The secretary for labour wrote in his annual report for 1938 that “the unskilled, and for the most part inarticulate section of the employees did not secure that share of the increased prosperity of industry to which they were in equity entitled.”51

  In addition to attempting to check the urbanization of Africans, the government tried to segregate Africans within the urban areas. By 1910, there were laws in the Cape Colony, Natal, and the Transvaal authorizing the colonial governments to create and control urban “locations” for Africans, but many townships, especially the large cities, had areas where Whites and Blacks lived alongside one another. As the urban population increased, so did slums, crime, and disease. In 1918, there was a severe influenza epidemic. Five years later, the Smuts government enacted the Natives (Urban Areas) Act, which empowered an urban authority, subject to the approval of the government, to establish an African location. The government could then order all Africans in that town, except domestic servants, to reside in the location. The location was to be administered by a superintendent, assisted by an African advisory council, and employers were to be responsible for providing housing for their employees. When the act had been applied to a town, the urban authority was empowered to expel Africans if they did not carry registered service contracts or permits to seek work. An amendment of 1930 specifically empowered an urban authority to remove “surplus females.” This law was applied seriatim to most of the towns in the country, but the process was slow. By 1932, it had been applied to fifty-one towns in the country, including Cape Town and Pretoria, but was not yet fully in force in Johannesburg, Durban, or Port Elizabeth.52

  Over the years, South African towns acquired a characteristic dual form. The largest and most conspicuous part was a spacious modern town, consisting of a business sector where people of all races worked during the day and suburbs of detached houses, ranging from opulent to mediocre, owned by white families and served by black domestics. Separated from the modern town was a black location, where mu
d, clapboard, or corrugated iron buildings, with earth latrines, stood on tiny plots of land and were served by water from infrequent taps along the unpaved paths and roads. With various anomalies, the same principle applied in a hundred or more country villages. There were modifications in Durban and Pieter-maritzburg, which contained districts where Indian and white shops and households intermingled. In Cape Town, Whites and Coloureds lived alongside one another in several districts, and District Six, abutting on the business center, was long-established as the home of Coloured People.

  Black Adaptation and Resistance, 1910-1939

  Before World War II, the subject peoples lacked the means to oppose the growth of the power of the South African state. Whites had a virtual monopoly of military weapons and training. The Defence Act of 1912 created an all-white Active Citizen Force. In World War I, black South Africans served in campaigns in South West Africa, East Africa, and Europe, and 5,635 Blacks lost their lives. Most, notably the 21,000 African members of the South African Native Labour Contingent in France, were employed as unarmed laborers. The exception was the Cape Corps, which consisted of white officers and Coloured other ranks and was organized as a combatant unit 18,000 strong in the East African campaign. White South Africans deeply resented the arming of the Coloured batallions, however, and at war’s end the government disbanded all the black units and failed to recognize their services.53

  Black South African resistance to the racial order was impeded not only by Blacks’ lack of access to firearms but also by their cultural and historical differences. Indian and Coloured South Africans had little in common with one another or with Africans, and were themselves disunited. Indians, amounting to 2 percent of the population of nearly ten million in 1936, were concentrated in Natal and the southern Transvaal and were first- and second-generation South Africans. Most were Hindus, the product of the process that had brought indentured laborers to Natal between 1860 and 1911. There was also a conspicuous minority of traders, mostly Muslims, who had come to South Africa independently; some of these had built up large businesses. Most Indians did not identify with the other subject peoples. Gandhi’s movement won minor concessions for the Indian population but fought no battles on behalf of the Africans.54

  The Coloured People—8 percent of the population—were concentrated in the Cape Province. They were exceptionally diverse by ethnic, cultural, and economic criteria. Members of the Cape Town Coloured elite, Muslims and Christians, were facing the fact that their status was deteriorating. Before Union, there had been no legal discrimination against Coloured People in the Cape Colony, and they had looked forward to a future of equal treatment and opportunity. After Union, legal discrimination against Coloured People as well as Africans increased in the northern provinces and extended to the Cape Province in the form of official regulations and administrative actions that made it difficult for Coloured People to compete with Whites in public service as well as private industry. The large Coloured underclasses, including illiterate, poorly paid farm laborers, had exceptionally high rates of illegitimacy, crime, and alcoholism, and many shared white fears and prejudices about Africans.55

  The Africans—69 percent of the population of the Union of South Africa, according to the census of 1936—had different histories, experiences, and interests. In the reserves and adjacent British and Portuguese territories, Africans continued to live in homesteads or villages and to acknowledge the political authority of chiefs and headmen. Nevertheless, white magistrates, traders, missionaries, and recruiting agents were transforming their culture and their social and economic relations. As we have seen, labor migrancy was becoming a central feature of the political economy of the region, since few Africans were able to produce enough to feed themselves and pay their taxes. African families were being disrupted. Women were assuming some of the responsibilities of household heads previously reserved to men. With their wages, young men were acting independently of their seniors, buying cattle for their own bridewealth, forming their own associations, and establishing their own homesteads, creating tensions between the generations.

  In the reserves, the ultimate authority in a district was the white magistrate, but he had little physical force at his disposal. He relied on the cooperation of the chiefs, who continued to settle disputes among Africans and to control the distribution of land but also tolerated the collection of taxes and received a small salary. A chief was therefore caught in the middle. He was legally responsible to the state but socially dependent on the support of the community. As Shula Marks has demonstrated in the case of Solomon ka Dinuzulu, the Zulu king who died in 1934, a chief held an ambiguous position; to be successful, he had to be a shrewd rein-terpreter of tradition and a skillful manipulator of people, white as well as black.56

  Missionaries presided over “an enormous benevolent empire” that reached into every African reserve community. In 1928, forty-eight missionary organizations were operating in the Union of South Africa. They employed over 1,700 white missionaries, teachers, doctors, and nurses and over 30,000 African clergy, lay preachers, and teachers.57 Receiving grants-in-aid from the provincial governments, the missions ran virtually the only institutions where Africans could acquire the literary skills necessary for effective participation in the industrializing economy. In 1935, theY registered 342,181 African pupils. Over half of them were in the elementary Standards, and most of the rest were in Standards 1 to 6. Only 1,581 Africans were in Standards 7 and 8, and a mere 193 were in Standards 9 and 10, which culminated in the matriculation, or school-leaving, examination and corresponded with the eleventh and twelfth grades in the United States.58

  Most teachers in the mission schools were Africans, who, being under-qualified and poorly paid, could provide no more than a rudimentary elementary education. Some were responsible for as many as eighty pupils. Several high schools, however, were staffed by relatively competent people—notably, Adams College in Natal (American Board of Foreign Missions), St. Peter’s in the Transvaal (Anglican), and Healdtown (Methodist) and, above all, Lovedale (United Free church of Scotland) in the eastern Cape Province. At the top of the system was the South African Native College at Fort Hare in the Ciskei, which was founded by the Methodist, Anglican, and Scottish missions with government support in 1916. By 1940, Fort Hare had 195 students, primarily Africans but some Coloureds and Indians. Even so, because they were preparing students for public examinations controlled by white South African educators, students in this system were obliged to conform to officially prescribed syllabuses. The history syllabuses and textbooks, in particular, expressing the dominant assumptions of the period, treated the history of South Africa as the record of white settlement and had no empathy with African culture, the African side of conflicts, or the condition of Africans since the conquest. In his memoirs, Z. K. Matthews, an African who became a lawyer and received a master’s degree from Yale University, recalled his time as a student at Lovedale and Fort Hare:

  Our history, as we had absorbed it from the tales and talk of our elders, bore no resemblance to South African history as it has been written by European scholars, or as it is taught in South African schools, and as it was taught to us at Fort Hare. . . . The syllabus for matriculation emphasized South African history, so ... we struggled through the white man’s version of the so-called Kaffir Wars, the Great Trek, the struggles for control of South Africa . . . and ... we had to give back in our examination papers the answers the white man expected.59

  Africans who lived on white farms had exceptionally bitter experiences. “Unskilled and easily replaceable,” as well as “isolated and illiterate,” they were “grouped in tiny clusters, and separated by vast distances and wretched poverty from others, even within the same district.”60 Their main concern was to retain the use of the land they regarded as rightfully theirs. But white landowners, operating in adverse market conditions and coping with droughts and pests, were themselves hard pressed to make a living and were trying to do so by squeezing the utmost from thei
r “volk,” expelling those who were surplus to their needs, converting the rest into laborers, and paying them as little as possible.

  Following the white conquest, new cleavages meshed with old in the African societies. One can distinguish four main tendencies.61 The African masses were largely concerned with their immediate situation, whether they resided in the reserves, on white farms, or in towns or were migrant laborers moving between the reserves and the white areas. Their grievances were specific, and with few exceptions, they held fast to traditional African values. Whatever their situation, they relied heavily on their extensive kinship networks. Poor or incapacitated people received food and shelter from relatives. African women were especially resilient in the responsibilities that were thrust on them.

  Second, the chiefs and headmen more or less reluctantly, and more or less skillfully, adapted to the loss of their autonomy and to their ambiguous roles in the white state. Third, a small, relatively prosperous educated elite monopolized the salaried jobs—high school teachers, ministers in the mission churches, official interpreters. They tended to accept the premise of liberal ideology, with its distinction between barbarism and civilization, and to see themselves as the modernizers of African society. Finally, many people had a little education but failed to get or to hold salaried jobs. They were particularly frustrated, alienated from traditional society but excluded from the benefits of modernization. Many joined independent churches and espoused an Africanist ideology, with modern as well as traditional elements.

  In the reserves, Africans used a variety of stratagems to improve their lot. William Beinart and Colin Bundy have demonstrated in eight case studies from the Transkei that “peasants/migrants were trying to defend their rights to land, their ownership of cattle and other resources, and their ability to affect local political processes.”62 Before 1939, these were the main forms of political expression for most Africans. Though their successes were few and their links with national movements sporadic, they exemplified the vitality of local political life and their deep-seated desire to control their lives.