The Fortunes of Africa: A 5,000 Year History of Wealth, Greed and Endeavour

by Martin Meredith

  Yet Italy never gained full control of Abyssinia. Remnants of Haile Selassie’s army fought on in the provinces for months on end. After an attempt to assassinate him in Addis Ababa in February 1937, Italy’s Viceroy, General Rodolfo Graziani, ordered a campaign of brutal repression which further fuelled Abyssinian resistance to Italian rule. Within hours of the assassination attempt, sixty-two Abyssinians were hauled before a military tribunal, sentenced to death and executed. For three days, Blackshirt vigilantes were given licence ‘to destroy and kill and do what you want to the Ethiopians’. Several thousand died in the rampage. Italian officials also began rounding up all the young educated men they could lay their hands on, executing them. In a cable sent to the Italian governor of Harar, Graziani demanded: ‘Shoot all – I say all – rebels, notables, chiefs, followers either captured in action or giving themselves up or isolated fugitives or intriguing elements . . . and any suspected of bad faith or being guilty of helping the rebels or only intending to and any who hide arms.’ Some 350 chiefs were sent into exile in Italy.

  When an Italian investigation found evidence implicating monks at the monastery at Debre Libanos in the assassination attempt, Graziani cabled the local commander: ‘Therefore execute summarily all monks without distinction including the Vice-Prior.’ On 20 May, after attending a ceremony celebrating the feast of St Tekle Haimonot, the founder of their monastery, 449 monks, deacons, students and laymen were taken away and shot. Several hundred more were sent to concentration camps. On Graziani’s orders, the monastery was destroyed. ‘ . . . of the monastery at Debre Libanos,’ Graziani cabled to Rome, ‘there remains not a trace.’

  Far from intimidating the population, Graziani’s repression drove them to action. Across the highlands, resistance fighters known as ‘patriots’ launched guerrilla warfare, attacking convoys, supply dumps, warehouses and military outposts, and managed to retain control of several mountainous areas. Even though backed by an army of 150,000 men, Italian counter-insurgency campaigns made little progress.

  In Rome, Mussolini railed against the ineffectiveness of the Italian administration in Abyssinia. ‘The Duce’, Galeazzo Ciano, his son-inlaw, noted in his diary on 1 January 1939, ‘returned to Rome yesterday and we had a long discussion. He is very displeased about the situation in the AOI.’ Mussolini ordered more determined efforts before the next rainy season set in. But at the outbreak of the Second World War, the insurgency spread further. When Italy joined the war alongside Nazi Germany in June 1940, Britain recognised Haile Selassie as a full ally.

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  THE GOAL OF MASTERY

  In the bitter aftermath of the Anglo-Boer war, a group of Afrikaner leaders, fearing that the sheer weight of British power and influence would engulf the Afrikaner people and lead to their decline and oblivion, organised new forms of resistance. Many Afrikaners never accepted the idea of being part of the British Empire. Everywhere they were reminded of the presence of British authority. ‘God Save the King’ became the official anthem. The national flag was a British Red Ensign, with the Union Coat of Arms in a lower corner. The Privy Council in London, rather than the Supreme Court, was the final arbiter in the administration of justice. Moreover, on questions of war and peace, South Africa, under the 1910 constitution, was not a sovereign independent state, but bound by decisions of the British government. Most civil servants were English-speaking, even on the platteland. During the interregnum of British rule in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State in the postwar era, the whole education system was swept away. English teachers and English inspectors were appointed. English was designated as the sole medium of instruction, except for a few hours a week allowed for teaching in Dutch.

  Rather than submit to the new school system, Afrikaner leaders founded their own private schools for what was called Christian National Education that used Dutch as well as English as a medium of instruction, adhered strictly to Calvinist traditions and promoted a sense of Afrikaner national consciousness among students. At the forefront of the schools campaign were the Dutch Reformed Churches, the most powerful Afrikaner institutions to survive the war, determined to preserve Afrikaner culture and religion as much for their own interests as for wider nationalist motives. In 1908, a predikant of the Dutch Reformed Church at Graaff-Reinet, Dr Daniel Malan, urged: ‘Raise the Afrikaans language to a written language, let it become the vehicle for our culture, our history, our national ideals, and you will also raise the people who speak it.’

  Hopes that Afrikaners and English-speaking South Africans might find a way of resolving their differences and merge into a single South African nation soon began to founder. An election in 1910 brought to power a new government led by Louis Botha and Jan Smuts, two Boer-war generals both committed to reconciliation. But other Afrikaner leaders questioned British hegemony. Among them was Barry Hertzog, another general from the war who joined the government but remained a staunch republican. Hertzog was determined that South Africa should develop a separate and independent identity within the Empire, embracing both English and Afrikaners on a basis of complete equality. ‘I am not one of those who always have their mouths full of conciliation and loyalty,’ he said in 1912, ‘for those are vain words which deceive no one.’ And in a clear reference to a recent meeting of the Imperial Conference in London that General Botha had attended, he added: ‘I would rather live with my own people on a dunghill than stay at the palaces of the British Empire.’ Dropped from the cabinet in 1913, Hertzog travelled from village to village in the Orange Free State promoting the Afrikaner cause and leaving in his wake a host of Afrikaner vigilance committees. The following year, with a handful of parliamentary colleagues, he formed a new National Party, demanding that ‘the interests of the Union come before those of any country’.

  When Botha and Smuts took South Africa into the First World War, at Britain’s behest, Hertzog stood against them. ‘This is a war between England and Germany,’ he said. ‘It is not a South African war.’ Several of his old colleagues from the Boer war thought the time was ripe for rebellion and issued a call to arms. In sporadic encounters lasting three months, Afrikaner rebels fought government troops. It was an episode that left yet more bitter memories. In the general election in 1915, the National Party won sixteen of the seventeen Free State seats, as well as seven seats in the Cape and four in the Transvaal.

  Adding to the anguish of Afrikaner nationalists was an immense social upheaval afflicting the Afrikaner community. Economic change in rural areas, caused in part by the war, in part by the growth of modern agriculture, pitched hundreds of thousands of Afrikaners into an abyss of poverty, precipitating a mass exodus to the towns – die trek na die stad. In 1900, there were fewer than 10,000 Afrikaners living in towns, less than 2 per cent of the total Afrikaner population of 630,000; by 1914, the number had grown to one-third. Yet, as the Afrikaners found them, the towns were an alien and often hostile world. The language of industry, commerce and the civil service was overwhelmingly English; their own language, derided as a ‘kitchen language’, was treated with contempt. Lacking skills, education and capital, many were forced to seek work in competition with cheap black labour and to live cheek by jowl on the ragged edges of towns. Urban poverty became as common as rural poverty. ‘I have observed instances in which the children of Afrikaner families were running around naked as kaffirs in Congoland,’ Dr Daniel Malan told a conference on urban poverty in 1916. ‘We have knowledge today of Afrikaner girls so poor they work for coolies and Chinese. We know of white men and women who live married and unmarried with Coloureds.’

  The degradation of poor Afrikaners in towns alarmed many Afrikaner leaders. The rough mining communities which had sprung up on the Witwatersrand were already notorious as places of drunkenness, immorality and crime. Johannesburg, in the words of a visiting Australian journalist in 1910, had become ‘a city of unbridled squander and unfathomable squalor’. Now it was feared that poor whites would sink to the level of African life, breaking barriers of blood a
nd race, debasing the entire Afrikaner stock.

  Each year, the ‘poor white problem’, as it was called, continued to grow. Periodic droughts (in 1919 and 1924–7) and depressions (in 1920–3) drove more and more whites off the land. In the depression years of 1928–32 the scale of misery affecting poor whites was immense. A Carnegie Commission report estimated that in 1930 about 300,000 whites, representing 17.5 per cent of white families, were ‘very poor’, so poor that they depended on charity for support, or subsisted in ‘dire poverty’ on farms. A further 31 per cent of whites were classified simply as ‘poor’, so poor that they could not adequately feed and clothe their children. At least nine out of ten of these families were said to be Afrikaans-speaking.

  In rural areas, the Commission reported, many families were living in hovels woven from reeds or in mud huts with thatched roofs similar to those used by Africans. A third of these dwellings were said to be ‘unsuitable for civilized life’. Many white families lived a narrow and backward existence. More than half of the children did not complete primary education. ‘Education was largely looked upon, among the rural population, as something foreign, as a thing that had no bearing on their daily life and needs.’

  Facing social upheaval across the land and finding themselves in the towns at the mercy of British commerce and culture, Afrikaners responded by establishing their own organisations to try to hold the volk together and to preserve their own traditions. A host of welfare and cultural associations sprang up. In Cape Town, a group of wealthy Cape farmers and professional men established a publishing house and the first nationalist newspaper, De Burger. Forsaking the pulpit for politics, Dr Malan became its first editor and subsequently leader of the National Party in the Cape Province. Among the organisations founded during this period was the Afrikaner Broederbond. It began in 1918 as a small select society, interested principally in the promotion of Afrikaner culture, but it grew into one of the most formidable organisations in South African history.

  The black population, meanwhile, was subjected to a barrage of legislation designed to relegate it to a strictly subordinate role and to keep it segregated from whites. A major impetus towards segregation came as the result of an investigation by the South African Native Affairs Commission set up under British auspices in 1903 to work out a uniform ‘Native policy’ for the four South African territories, each of which maintained different laws and traditions affecting the African population. Most members of the commission were English-speakers and were regarded as representing ‘progressive’ opinion on native matters.

  The main recommendation of the commission’s report, published in 1905, was that whites and blacks should be kept separate in politics and in land occupation and ownership on a permanent basis. In order to avoid the ‘intolerable situation’ in future whereby white voters might be outnumbered by black voters, a system of separate representation should be established, though political power, of course, would remain in white hands. Land should also be demarcated into white and black areas, as the report said, ‘with a view to finality’. In urban areas, separate ‘locations’ should be created for African townsmen. These ideas on the need for segregation between white and black were widely shared at the time, by friends of the black population as well as by adversaries.

  The significance of the commission’s report was that it elevated practices of segregation commonly employed throughout South Africa during the nineteenth century to the level of a political doctrine. Segregation was used by every leading white politician as a respectable slogan and found its way in one law after another onto the statute book.

  In 1913, the Natives’ Land Act laid down the principle of territorial segregation and shaped land policies for generations to come. Africans were prohibited from purchasing or leasing land in white areas; henceforth the only areas where Africans could lawfully acquire land were in Native reserves which then amounted to about 7 per cent of the country. The Cape was excluded from the legislation since African land rights there affected voting rights.

  The effect of the Act was to uproot thousands of black tenants renting white-owned land – ‘squatters’, as they were commonly known. Some sought refuge in the reserves, though overcrowding there was already becoming a noticeable feature. Others were forced, after selling their livestock and implements, to work as labourers for white farmers. A whole class of prosperous peasant farmers was eventually destroyed. The impact was particularly severe in the Orange Free State where many white farmers lost no time in evicting squatters in compliance with the law. The plight of these destitute families driven off the land was described by the African writer Sol Plaatje, in his account of Native Life in South Africa. ‘Awakening on Friday morning, 20 June 1913,’ he wrote, ‘the South African Native found himself not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth.’ Plaatje recorded how, travelling through the Orange Free State in 1913, he found bands of African peasants trudging from one place to the next in search of a farmer who might give them shelter, their women and children shivering with cold in the winter nights, their livestock emaciated and starving. ‘It looks as if these people were so many fugitives escaping from a war.’

  Although the amount of land for Africans was increased in 1936 to 14 per cent of the total area of the country, overcrowding caused ruinous conditions. Official reports warned of land degradation, soil erosion, poor farming practices, disease and malnutrition on a massive scale. Unable to support their families in the reserves, needing money to pay for taxes, more and more men headed for towns in search of work.

  The same process of segregation was applied to towns. The Native Urban Areas Act of 1925 established the principle that the towns were white areas in which Africans were permitted to reside in segregated ‘locations’ only as long as they served white needs. The Act provided for ‘influx controls’ regulating the entry of Africans into urban areas through greater use of the pass system. Pass laws, commonly employed since the nineteenth century for a variety of purposes, became an integral part of Native policy. African men were required to carry passes recording permission to work and live in a particular white area. They needed passes for travel, for taxes, for curfews, always liable for inspection by police. Africans deemed to be ‘surplus’ to labour requirements were liable to be deported to the reserves.

  African workers also faced discrimination in the labour market. In 1911, the government introduced an industrial colour bar giving white mineworkers a monopoly of skilled occupations. In 1924, it attempted to tackle the problem of white unemployment by devising what was called a ‘civilized labour’ policy, giving preference to white workers and restricting black employment opportunities. An official circular defined ‘civilized’ labour as ‘the labour rendered by persons whose standard of living conforms to the standard of living generally recognized as tolerable from the European standpoint’. It went on: ‘Uncivilized labour is to be regarded as the labour rendered by persons whose aim is restricted to the bare requirements of the necessities of life as understood among barbarous and undeveloped people.’ In practice, the policy meant that wherever feasible whites replaced blacks in the public service. The greatest effect occurred on state-owned railways: between 1924 and 1933, the number of white employees increased by 13,000; some 15,000 Africans and Coloureds lost their jobs. Other government agencies and departments were similarly affected. By the 1920s, South Africa had developed an economic system allocating skills and high wages to whites and heavy labour and menial tasks to blacks on meagre pay.

  In 1936, African voters were struck from the common roll in the Cape Province, losing a right they had held for more than eighty years. The practical effect of the legislation – the Representation of Natives Act – was limited. African voters at the time numbered only some 10,000, amounting to no more than 2.5 per cent of the provincial electorate and 1 per cent of the Union’s electorate. But the political significance was crucial. As the historian Cornelius de Kiewiet noted: ‘To destroy the Cape native franchise was to de
stroy the most important bridge between the world of two races.’

  Facing the juggernaut of white power, the small black elite – teachers, church ministers, clerks, interpreters, journalists – made strenuous efforts to mobilise political action to protect their interests. In January 1912, at a gathering in Bloemfontein, several hundred prominent Africans formed the South African Native National Congress – later renamed the African National Congress – to oppose discriminatory legislation. The early African nationalists were mostly conservative men, the product of missionary schools, influenced by Christian tradition and concerned largely with their own position in society. For more than thirty years, they organised deputations, petitions and protest meetings. But their attempts to withstand the onslaught of segregation had little effect.

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  By the 1930s, the Broederbond had developed into a tightly disciplined, highly secretive group with an elite membership bound together by oath. It had helped launch a range of Afrikaner cultural institutions and was keen to move into new spheres, into politics and business. Its guiding force had become a bevy of Afrikaner academics in the Transvaal, able to provide a new coherence to the aims of Afrikaner nationalism. Those aims were no longer confined merely to defending Afrikaner traditions. Their essential theme was to establish Afrikaner domination. In a private circular issued in 1934, Professor J. C. van Rooy, the chairman of the Broederbond, wrote: ‘Let us keep constantly in view the fact that our chief concern is whether Afrikanerdom will reach its eventual goal of mastery [baasskap] in South Africa. Brothers, our solution for South Africa’s troubles is . . . that the Afrikaner Broederbond shall rule South Africa.’