Class and Colour in South Africa, 1850-1950

PENGUIN AFRICAN LIBRARY Editor: Ronald Segal

Class and Colour in South Africa 1850-1950 H. J.

AND R.

SIMONS

Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England Penguin Books Inc., 711 o Ambassador Road, Baltimore, Maryland 21207, U.S.A.

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia First published x969 Copyright © H. J. and R. E. Simons, £969 Made and printed in Great Britain by Hazell Watson & Viney Ltd, Aylesbury, Bucks Set in Monotype Plantin This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

Contents

Foreword 1 The Liberal Cape 2

Diamond Diggers and the New Elite

7 Hi 34

3 Gold Miners and Imperialist War

4 White Labour Policies

5 Workers and the Vote

6 National Liberation

116

7 Thunder on the Left

139

8 Loyalists and Rebels

166

9 The New Radicals

187

Io Socialism and Nationalism

201

zx Class Struggles Resumed

220

12 The Communist Party Formed

244

13 The Rand Revolt

271

14 Unity on the Right

300

15 Fruits of Partnership

328

I6 The Industrial and Commercial Union

353

17 Black Republic

386

18 White Terror

416

19 Theory and Practice

438

Fascism and War

462

21 United Front 22

The Battle for the Unions

486 508

Contents War and the Workers 24 Resistance and Reaction 25 The Police State 26 Class Struggle and National Liberation 23

527 554 579 61o

List of Abbreviations

626

References

629

Parliamentary Papers

676

Bibliography

679

Index of Legislative Measures Index of Organizations and Newspapers

684

Index of Selected Names

696

687

Foreword

Some twenty years ago, South Africa was held in high esteem as a senior member of the British Commonwealth, a bastion of western capitalism, and the most advanced economic region in Africa. Her people, black and white, could claim with some justification that their material conditions were the best in Africa. The south had the highest national income per head of popula tion, the largest volume of trade, and the widest scope of oppor tunity for acquiring education or obtaining employment. Men from east and central Africa went south in search of higher wages or higher learning. Three centuries of white settlement - phased by colonial wars, expropriations of tribal lands, slavery, forced labour and industrialism - had produced a variety of human types, an inte grated multi-racial society and a way of life shared by some members of all racial groups. Colour prejudice was endemic and deeply ingrained among whites; but their policy of racial dis crimination, though vicious and degrading, differed in degree rather than in kind from the discrimination practised elsewhere under colonial rule. If racism was most bitter and intense in the south, it experi enced a measure of compensation in a countervailing radicalism that stretched across the colour line in pursuit of an open-ended, non-racial social order. Nowhere else in Africa did so many whites, Asians and Coloured participate with Africans in a com mon struggle against class or colour oppression. A peaceful transition to parliamentary democracy without colour bars seemed usible to some observers, as the tide of decolonization well at the end of the war. n years of unbroken rule by Afrikaner nationalism have I di troyed the hope of a peaceful revolution. South Africa Vll

Foreword

remains by far the largest producer of goods and capital in Africa. Her public services - the infrastructure of political and economic organization - are still the most advanced. Her stan dards of public morality, law enforcement and race relations have deteriorated to such a level, however, that she is now a byword among nations for bigotry, intolerance and despotic rule. She has been turned into a police state under the control of a white oligarchy which uses fascist techniques to enforce racial t larianism and to suppress movements for social equalit Aeqxjf has consequently opened between the south and the rest of Africa. Millions of men and women in countries north of the Zambezi are being exhorted and trained for the tremen dous task of modernizing their societies. Southern Africans, in contrast, are being forcibly regrouped - by a white bureaucracy - into tribal communities under hereditary chiefs. Thousands of Africans in the independent states occupy the highest positions in government, education, industry, commerce and finance positions of a kind that are reserved for whites only in the south. The balance of advantage is being tilted in favour of regions that are still considered backward by southern standards. The best that black and brown South Africans with professional qualifications can do for themselves is to escape to these coun tries, where their skin colour is a social asset and where they can apply their skills with dignity and in freedom. For, as long as they remain under white man's rule, they must expect to be outstripped in every field of social activity by their self-governing racial compatriots in the north. Southern Africans have taken up arms against white suprema cists to redress the balance. The freedom fighters are the van guard of a people preparing to rise for the recovery of lost liberties and for the right to move freely on terms of equality with all men at home and abroad. Their struggle is an old one. It began 300 years ago, when the brown men of the Cape - the

Nama who were called Hottentot and the Khoi who were called Bushmen - fought the white invaders with bows, arrows and spears. Bantu-speaking warriors - the Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho,

Foreword

Tswana and Venda - continued the struggle, until each nation in turn was defeated and absorbed in the white man's order. Wars of independence were succeeded by a struggle from within the industrialized society for parliamentary democracy, national liberation, or socialism. This book traces the interactions between the two main streams of resistance to white domina tion: the national movements of Africans, Indians and Coloured; and the class struggles of socialists and communists. Although it surveys the record of radical movements for the best part of a century, it is not a history. We prefer to think of it as an exercise in political sociology on a time scale; and we have not hesitated, therefore, to intersperse our narrative with comments and value judgements. We find no merit in apartheid and are wholly committed, as participants and observers, to the Resistance. We have not refrained from criticizing our heroes; and freely use the advan tages of hindsight in evaluating their programmes and procedures. A word of explanation is due to readers who think that this approach is unscientific, or who resent anything that seems dis paraging of the early radicals. We have no desire to muck-rake or belittle the achievements of men who, rising above the circ*mstances of their time and class, escaped from the stranglehold of white supremacy and suffered the penalties of opposition to an oppressive regime. We think that they must gain in stature from a frank account of the difficulties they experienced on their political pilgrimage. Our essays in political criticism of communists like Iron Jones, Bill Andrews and Douglas Wolton, of nationalists like Dr P. K. Seme and Dr Abdurahman, of radical labour leaders like Archie Crawford and Clements Kadalie, have a wider purpose than the purely biographical. Our view is simply this, that new generations of resisters are entitled to an honest appraisal of the past from the vantage point of the present. Many of the controversies here examined - the proper relationship between national liberation and class struggle, the choice between socialist and capitalist democracy, the con cept of African (or 'black') power, the strategies of a multi racial united front or 'non-collaboration with the Herrenvolk' -

Foreword are still with us and continue to produce furious debate. Our purpose is to tell a story and at the same time give resisters of today a guide to the background of these controversies. An attempt is made in the last chapter to abstract some con clusions and project them against an analysis of the power struc ture. Two propositions of theoretical interest emerge from the analysis. One is that an industrialized, capitalist society can per petuate pre-industrial social rigidities only by adopting the coercive techniques of fascist totalitarianism. The other proposi tion is that where class divisions tend to coincide with antagon istic national or colour groups, the class struggle merges with the movement for national liberation. We collected the bulk of the material in South Africa over a period of about ten years, in between our professional activities and political involvement. The actual writing was done in Man chester and London. We are indebted to the University of Manchester for the generous grant of a Senior Simon Research Fellowship, which enabled us to work in the tranquillity and comfort of Broomcroft Hall; to Professor Max Gluckman and colleagues in the University's department of social anthropology and sociology, for stimulating discussions; to Miss Nancy Dick, who patiently and reliably verified quotations and sources, un earthed material inaccessible to us, and compiled the index; to Michael Harmel and Kenneth Parker for reading and criticizing the draft; and to librarians of Cape Town, Johannesburg, Man chester, London and Moscow for their courteous attention and unfailing assistance. Finally, we acknowledge a debt and pay a tribute to our colleague Lionel Forman (1928-59), whose early

death deprived his country of a fine intellect and a brave fighter for freedom. Lusaka, Zambia ii September 1968

RAY AND JACK SIMONS

I The Liberal Cape

Britain took the Cape by force of arms in x8o6, after 150 years of Dutch rule, when the colony had a population of some 30,000 slaves, 26,ooo settlers, 20,000 free Coloured, Nama and Khoi* in white employ, and an unknown number living in remote regions. Apart from the officials, gentry and shopkeepers of Cape Town, most of the settlers were farmers, who either grew crops on the coastal plains or grazed livestock on the plateau behind the mountain ranges. Racial discrimination, a rigid division of labour, had hardened into a set pa T colonists did not disdain manual labour on their own accoi ugh they objected to working for a master. Slaves did the skilled and unskilled work in Cape Town and adjacent areas. They tailored, cobbled, built houses, cooked, traded, and mad ture, leather goods, wagons and music for their owner Th also worked on the farms, frequently with the free C]d Nama, the so-called Hottentots. Townsmen and farmers had much in common, in spite of substantial cultural differences. Both were stiffnecked Calvinists, who cited scripture to justify slavery and colour-class dis crimination. Both claimed for the white race an exclusive right to education, positions of public responsibility, the ownership of land and wealth. Both fornicated with slaves, Coloured and Nama, while keeping them in strict subordination. Farmers in the interior acquired, as well, the habits and outlook of pioneers and frontiersmen. They were independent and self-reliant; demanded aid from government yet resented its authority; and thought highly of physical courage, endurance, hunting skills and martial prowess. The colony resembled a feudal society in * Other suggested generic terms are Khoi-Khoi for the 'Hottentots' and San for the 'Bushmen'.

Class and Colour in South Africa r850-1950

classes, and many ways. It was divided into estates rather than strongly resisted radical reforms. in the East The slaves came from Holland's possessions and Indies, from West Africa, Madagascar and Mozambique; groups. No slave, belonged to a wide range of cultural and racial

into a legal whether Muslim, Christian or pagan, could enter

between settlers, marriage before 1823. Extra-marital intercourse as kleurlinge slaves and Nama gave rise to the Coloured, known The slaves never or bruinmense (brown people) in Afrikaans. to liberate fused into a single community or acted in concert cattle and themselves while under Dutch rule. The Nama, whose offered some sheep had grazed on land occupied by"tIe colonists, were resistance in the early days of settlement. Their numbers and then greatly reduced by epidemics of smallpox and measles, nick they soon succumbed to the white invaders. T They collectors. named the Bushmen, were hunters and food but fought back stubbornly and with great courage, to be all annihilated. The colonists were quick to resent the authoritarian rule and mercantilism of the Netherlands East India Cm any. They on complained often ab-itterly of excessive taxation, restraints trade, inefficiency and corruption in the administration. There was little effective protest. Malcontents and potential rebels could escape into the interior, where land was to be had for the taking. The first serious demand for political reform was made as late as 1779, when the current of liberalism from Europe and America combined with symptoms of the company's bank ruptcy to produce some agitation in the western Cape. The Cape Patriots, as they called themselves after a party of that name in Holland, petitioned the company directors in Amsterdam for a written constitution, seats for burghers on the administrative council and high court, freedom to trade, and the right to flog their slaves without official restraint. Not then, nor at any other time, did the settlers propose reforms that would benefit persons of colour, whether freemen or slaves. The frontiersmen spread rapidly over a wide area in defiance of the government's injunction to remain within a fixed boun dary. They rode rough-shod over the prior rights of the original

The Liberal Cape inhabitants to hunting, grazing and arable land. Survivors of the Nama were absorbed in the Coloured. The Khoi were hunted down and killed off like the great herds of wild animals that once roamed the plains. Bantu-speaking Africans might have shared this fate if they had not been more numerous and better equipped to meet the predatory raids of the commandos, the name given to the farmers' militia. It is significant of white attitudes that when the colonists first revolted against the government, they rose not in defence of their own liberties but to deprive Africans of land and stock. The revolt took place in 1795 on the eastern frontier, . district of Graaff Reinet. Honoratus Maynier, the local la 7 or magistrate, had prudently tried to curb the brutal treatment of Nama and Khoi by the settlers, and restrain them from pre maturely launching a large-scale attack on the Xhosa in their homeland between the Sundays and Fish rivers. The first major clash between the two groups of cattle-raising agriculturists had occurred in 1779, and the Xhosa had succeeded in stopping the vanguard of the trekboers. The settlers gave vent to their frustra tion by driving Maynier away and declaring a republic. Their fellow burghers to the south, in the adjacent district of Swellen dam, demanding freedom to enslave the Khoi and impose un Hllowed this example and paid forced labour on the t Africa's first republic was elected a 'national assembly and an external imperial born in a struggle between wlttlers right to suppress, plunder and exploit an authority fo

African peop

his time an ally of Britain in the war against Hollan ea republican France. The East India Company had announced its bankruptcy. The government at Cape Town could neither bring the rebels to heel nor help them to defeat the Xhosa. Left to themselves, the colonists might have been forced to negotiate on terms favourable to the Xhosa. The British, acting in the name of Prince William of Orange, occupied the Cape soon after the revolt in Swellendam. While most of the settlers gave their allegiance to the new regime, the malcontents of Graaff Reinet revolted twice more, first in 1799 and then in I8oi, against the administration's alleged partiality 13

Class and Colour in South Africa Y850-1950 to Coloured and Xhosa. British troops and Coloured riflemen were sent to quell the revolt in 1799. Farm workers, anxious to fight their white masters, joined the Coloured regiments; the rising fizzled out, and the farm workers were ordered to sur render their arms. They chose instead to join Ndhlambi's Xhosa in an attempt to drive the settlers out of the Zuurveld west of the Sundays river. This led to a mass revolt of Coloured on the frontier and a devastating war against the Xhosa. A firm and enduring alliance between Africans and Coloured might have enabled both to free themselves from white domination. For, notes Marais, 'if the rising spread to the western Hottentots and slaves, the white to its foundations'.1 man's hold on the Colony would be shaken The British intervened to detach the Coloured from their allies. Dundas, the acting governor, established a garrison at the site of the future Port Elizabeth, promised land to the Coloured, and assured them of better treatment on the farms. He instructed Maynier, now the resident commissioner, to register labour con tracts of three months and over between farmers and servants. Though farmers objected to the labour regulation, it was ampli fied and extended to all parts of the colony by the Batavian administration which succeeded the British in 1803. The extension of the Dundas regulation laid a basis for labour legislation and gave the free Coloured a modicum of legal pro tection. 'Under this growing rule of law,' according to Walker, ' most of the Hottentots took service, and not only ceased to be a peril to the Colony, but in due course became a reinforcement to it against the Kaffirs.'* 2 The comment neatly summarizes the divisive effects of a strategy that turned the Coloured away from their African allies and into an auxiliary of the whites. The Cape Mounted Riflemen, a predominantly Coloured regiment, played a greater part than the settlers did in subsequent wars against the Xhosa. When Ngqika, Gcaleka and Thembu struck back at Harry Smith's troops in 185o, and the Coloured in the eastern * 'Kaffir', 'Kafir' (Arabic for infidel, unbeliever) was a name widely applied to Africans of the south-eastern Cape and Natal. It is now a dirty word and appears in this book only in quotations. The spelling follows the original in each case.

The LiberalCape Cape rose in rebellion, some of the riflemen joined in the struggle for liberation. The regiment was reconstituted after the war into a mixed force of white and Coloured; and disbanded in 1870, on the eve of responsible government, when the whites could dis pense with the service of Coloured troops. 'From that time onward the military profession was closed to Coloured men in 3 South Africa.' Apart from some useful administrative reforms, the Batavian Republic's short interregnum of three years produced few notable changes. Slavery and serfdom were bound to disappear under the impact of Europe's expanding industrialism and bourgeois democracy. Holland would have been the emancipator if she had retained the Cape, and the battle for human rights might then have been fought out between a Dutch government and Dutch settlers. An indigenous liberalism, rooted in South African soil and embracing a section of the Afrikaner people, might have grown to maturity. Instead, it was the British who represented the age of enlightenment, and the new liberalism came to be identified in the minds of all South Africans with the policies of British imperialism. Their seizure of the Cape in 18o6 led ultimately to the emancipation of slaves, the subjuga tion of the Africans, and a cultural dualism among the whites that developed into rival nationalisms. Whitehall kept a tight rein on expenditure and expected the colony to pay its way. The Cape governor could, however, draw on far greater supplies of manpower, capital and armed force than the East India Company ever provided. ess of strength turned the scales in the settlers' favo I was the British army and not the Boer commandos eated the African and forced him to accept white author itish immi grants joined Afrikaner farmers on the easte ron ier. Governor Cradock sent a large force of troops and militia to the Zuurveld in i8 12. They drove 2o,ooo Africans back over the Fish river and built a double line of block-houses, garrisoned with troops and civilians, behind which quit-rent farms of 4,000 acres each were offered to the settlers on what had been African soil. Trained troops won a victory that had eluded the frontiersmen in more than thirty years of guerrilla warfare and cattle raids. 15

Class and Colour in South Africa z85o- 95o Slaves and the free Coloured fared scarcely better under high Tory rule. Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807 but allowed the settlers to retain and sell or buy their human property. Caledon's proclamation of i November 18o9 applied a strict pass law-to the Coloured, made the registration of labour con tracts compulsory if covering one month or more, and laid down the conditions under which an employer could withhold wages for goods supplied to his servant. Proclamations of 1812 and 1819 allowed a settler to apprentice and employ without remuneration a free Coloured child, from the age of eight to eighteen years, if it was an orphan, or destitute, or had grown up on the employer's property. The regulations might have saved the Coloured from'utter destruction', as some observers claimed, but only by reducing them to the level of serfs, at the mercy of farmers and officials who were also farmers. Circuit courts, having both administrative and judicial func tions, were introduced in 181I. They afforded some protection against gross cruelty and neglect. Missionaries like the Dutch man Johannes van der Kemp and the Scot John Philip had no difficulty in accumulating a mass of evidence to convince White hall that the Coloured were being degraded by economic and social servitude. The House of Commons instructed the Cape administration to abolish legal discrimination against free per sons. Bourke, the acting governor, anticipated the instruction by enacting Ordinance 5o of 1828. It repealed the offending pro clamations, and so freed the Coloured from the pass system and the risk of being flogged for offences against the labour laws. The registration of service contracts continued, but their duration was limited to one year. Children could be apprenticed only with their parents' consent. The ordinance applied only to Coloured workers, yet went a long way to establishing the principle of equality before the law. The white working class, then in its infancy, had a higher social status but a similar legal position. Workers in Britain were then, and for many years to come, liable to be imprisoned for breach of contract under the master and servant law. The colonial administration acted- rigorously against defaulters of any race. The demand for punitive measures came from employers who 16

The Liberal Cape wished to stop the desertion of workers in whom they had in vested money. Immigrant artisans and labourers who received a free passage to the Cape were usually obliged to serve a given master for a specified period, or buy their release by repaying the passage money. Land and work were plentiful in the colony. Many immigrants took the opportunity to set up on their own or to change their employment in breach of their indentures. To deter them, Lord Charles Somerset's proclamation of 26 June I818 prescribed a maximum sentence of two months' imprisonment and fine of twenty-five rixdalers for a defaulting servant, to which corporal punishment could be added for a second and subsequent offence. Laws devised for indentured white immigrants, free Coloured workers and emancipated slaves were the forerunners of South Africa's master and servant laws. Emancipation itself occurred on i December I834. There were then about 40,000 slaves and as many whites in the colony. Slave prices had doubled since 1807, when the importation of fresh supplies was banned. The owners were no more willing than the planters of the West Indies and America to surrender their property or to accept any limitation on their right of ownership. They objected strenu ously to regulations that curbed their brutality and enforced minimum standards of care in the treatment of slaves. Bourke's Ordinance i9 of 1826, which provided for the appointment of a regis and guardian of slaves, led to the resignation of the president and two members of Cape Town's burgher council, while owners generally agitated for a representative assembly. They wanted political rights for themselves so as to enslave others. Emancipation was forced on the colony by Britain. The social pressures that produced the Reform Act of 1832 resulted also in the Abolition of Slavery Act of x833. The end of tormal slavery accelerated the migration of farmers into the interior and precipitated the great trek of 1836. Somer set's 1820 settlers, planted in the Zuurveld to strengthen the white man's hold on the frontier, were forbidden to keep slaves. The great majority of owners were Afrikaners, and they resented the emancipation, Ordinance 5o, and the principle of equality before the law. The £i million allocated by the British parlia-

Class and Colour in South Africa z850-1950 ment as compensation to slave owners was, they said, less than the half the market value of the slaves. Settlers denounced colonial office for refusing to ratify D'Urban's annexation in rivers. 1835 of Xhosa territory between the Great Fish and Kei sell and They were outraged when the government decided to Land not make free grants of land seized from the Xhosa. hunger, dislike of British rule, and the rejection of racial equality by in any form were the root causes of the planned exodus whites with their Coloured servants from the colony. The firm stand made by the Xhosa barred the way to the escarp Transkei's rolling pastures between the sea and the great the ment. Turning westward, the tide of white migration crossed One Orange river to invade the grasslands of the high plateau. party of trekkers by-passed Moshoeshoe's kingdom of Lesotho

and entered Natal. Here a small community of English traders, hunters and missionaries had been settled since 1824. An armed struggle for supremacy took place in the years 1837 to 1842 between Afrikaners and Zulu and between British and Afrikan ers. It ended with the proclamation of Natal as a British colony in May 1843, when Napier, the Cape governor, decreed strict equality before the law of all persons in Natal, irrespective of colour, origin, language or creed. The Afrikaners then withdrew to join their fellow trekkers on the highveld. They founded republics of their own, free from British rule, on territory taken from Africans by force, and under a constitution that denied equality between white and black in either church or state. Few settlers in the Cape accepted the humanitarian's ideal of racial equality. Emancipation opened a new stage in the relations between white and Coloured; but it did not revolutionize the society or abolish discrimination. Ordinance i of 1835, which was supposed to prepare the slaves for freedom, changed little more than their name. Now called apprentice-labourers, they continued to work for their former owners, witmout wages and on the same terms of food, clothing, lodging and medical care. Penalties harsher in some respects than those prescribed by the slave laws could be imposed under the ordinance. It provided for police settlements, houses of correction and penal gangs. Ap prentices could be sentenced to hard labour, for periods ranging

The Liberal Cape from one week to six months, and a whipping of fifteen, thirty or thirty-nine stripes, for different classes of offences. These in cluded desertion, indolence, carelessness, negligence, damage to a master's property, drunkenness, brawling, insolence, unlawful conspiracy to disobey, persistent disobedience, and combined resistance against a master. This was harsher by far than Somerset's proclamation of 18x8 or Bourke's Ordinance 5o, and was consequently more to the liking of employers. They had no taste for the free labour market that developed after i December 1838, when the apprenticeship system came to an end. Many ex-slaves left their masters for the towns, or went to farm on their own in remote areas, or settled on government land. The migration, coupled with epidemics of smallpox and measles in x839-40, caused a shortage of labour on farms. The mean cash wage of agricultural workers in the west ern Cape rose from ten to fifteen shillings a month in the forties, and the customary wine ration was also increased. 4 Farmers complained of drunkenness, desertion and vagrancy among their Coloured servants, and agitated for restraints on movement and a disciplinary code. The Colonial Office had previously dis allowed a vagrancy law adopted in 1834 by the settler members of the legislative council. This yielded to the pressure by passing the Masters and Servants Ordinance of 1841, based partly on a British oraer-m-ouncil promulgated in 1838 for the West Indies. The ordinance repealed Ordinance 50 of 1828, re-enacted the disciplinary code prescribed for apprenticed ex-slaves, and re duced the scale of penalties to fourteen days' imprisonment for a first offence and/or a fine of not more than a month's wages. Employers were given a firmer hold over their servants by provisions that extended the statutory limitation on oral con tracts from one month to one year and on written contracts from one to three years. A contract could be terminated on a month's notice given by either party, and the notice became void if the servant failed to leave his service on the specified date. A servant was entitled to two months' wages and other contractual bene fits during sickness. It was made an offence to 'coerce' servants into joining a 'club or association', but the ordinance conceded a right to combine for collective bargaining.

Class and Colour in South Africa 185o-z95o Ordinance i of 1841 was the first labour law to include work ers of all races. The word 'servant' as defined included any to person 'employed for hire, wages, or other remuneration perform any handicraft or other bodily labour in agriculture or manufactures, or in domestic services'. Artisans, craftsmen, machine operators and labourers were equally affected. It was a unique case of class legislation without any trace of racial dis crimination. The legislative council made it generally applicable so as to meet anticipated objections in Whitehall. A law applying only to Coloured, explained Napier, would perpetuate their status 'as an inferior and distinct people'.

There was an addi

tional reason. Criminal sanctions were then commonly attached to labour contracts in Europe. The colonial administration saw no reason to exempt white workers. Belonging to the master race, they were less prone than their darker-skinned fellows to prosecution for breach of contract or disciplinary offences. The absence of a colour bar in the Cape's labour legislation had, however, a marked liberalizing effect on industrial relations in the colony. Cape liberalism stood for racial tolerance. It was not a general characteristic of the white population. British immigrants rapidly absorbed the racial prejudices of the older white inhabitants, or acquired their own, as in Natal, where English-speaking settlers were dominant after 185o. They disfranchised Africans in 1865 and developed under British rule a white supremacy state no more tolerant of African and Asian claims to equality than were the Afrikaner republics. Liberalism took root in the western Cape because of the region's peculiar history, relative tran quillity, racial composition and cultural cleavages. British radical and humanitarian movements reached their peak in the first half of the century during the colony's formative years. It was deeply influenced, through the Colonial Office, the British clergy and missionaries, by the agitation that produced the Reform Act and the Abolition of Slavery Act. The movement ebbed in the latter half of the century, by which time the Cape had laid the foundations of equality before the law. It was sustained both by pressure of a large, partially assimilated Coloured population and by antagonisms between English- and Afrikaans-speaking whites.

7 The Liberal Cape Both groups of colonists were represented in the agitation during the second quarter of the century for representative government. A legislative council of five officials and six nomi nated settlers was formed in 1834, only to whet the appetite for self-rule. The council fell into disrepute and nearly collapsed in 1849, when Lord Grey proposed to land convicts from the Nfune at the Cape. His decision caused great resentment, the more so since a draft constitution was then before the privy council. A country-wide Anti-Convict Association declared a boycott of government institutions and of private firms identified with Grey's action. Demonstrations and mass meetings disrupted business and caused a minor recession. Sir Harry Smith, the governor, refused to let the convicts land; and the Neptune eventually sailed with its cargo of prisoners to Australia. The propertied classes of Cape Town and the eastern Cape, alarmed at the upheaval, formed themselves into a party of moderates and rallied round the government. British liberals and Afrikaner settlers used the occasion to press the demand for a new consti 6 tution. The Colonial Office had countered early requests of this kind with two objections. No colony where people were enslaved was fit for self-rule, while the rise of Dutch and British parties would nullify one of the main benefits of representative government: the cultivation of common loyalties and national cohesion. Officials at the Cape and prominent liberals like John Philip and John Fairbairn, editor of the South African Commercial Adver tiser, reiterated the objections after emancipation. The Coloured lacked property and political experience. A settlers' parliament would pass oppressive laws depriving them forever of political power before they had learned to exercise their rights. On the other hand, British colonists, though the most wealthy, active and intelligent class, were a minority, and would not willingly submit to a Dutch majority inferior in all respects other than its numerical strength. The anti-convict agitation revealed a wide-, spread hostility to the British government, and when the Colonial Office decided that a representative parliament could not be avoided, its chief concern was to keep power out of the hands of the anti-British faction. 21

Class and Colour in South Africa 185o-195o

KAfricans

claims could be ignored. Though many thousands of Xhosa peasants, farm workers, prisoners of war and convicts, employed on roads and public works, inhabited the colony, the war on the eastern frontier was then at its height, and the great mass of Africans still belonged to independent states. This circ*mstance greatly facilitated the adoption of the colour-blind franchise insisted upon by the Colonial Office. The British government was in two minds, however, about the qualifications. The higher they were made, the smaller would be the Afrikaner and Coloured vote. British merchants, backed by Harry Smith and his colonial secretary, John Montagu, wanted a high qualifi cation which would confine the vote to occupiers of property worth £50 or more. This, it was argued, would safeguard im perial interests by offsetting the Afrikaners' numerical superi ority; and property interests, by excluding the working classes. Afrikaners, on the other hand, stood for a low qualification which would strengthen their position against the British merchants and officials in command of the legislature; and they were pre pared to pay the price of extending the vote to a possibly significant number of Coloured. A third group of liberals, led by Sir Andries Stockenstrom, William Porter the attorney-general, and Fairbairn, also advo cated a low qualification, but for different reasons. They wished to secure both the imperial connexion and Coloured rights, two aims which in their minds were wholly compatible. The Coloured preferred crown colony rule to a settlers' parliament. If a settlers' parliament had to come, they would use their vote to support the imperial connexion and therefore the British minority. Porter, in particular, wanted a popular franchise for genuinely liberal reasons as well. Both 'Klaas, the Hottentot' and 'his neighbour, Mynheer van Dunder, the boer', might know very little about parliamentary issues, he told the legislative council, but the best school for teaching them was the vote. They knew enough to distinguish their friends from their enemies. The Coloured, he added, had a right to protect their labour and sell it at their own price; the right to make 'the most of whatever powers of mind and body God has given them'. To those who feared that

the Coloured were politically dangerous, he replied in memorable

The Liberal Cape

words: 'Now, for myself, I do not hesitate to say that I would rather meet the Hottentot at the hustings, voting for his repre sentative, than meet the Hottentot in the wilds with his gun 7 upon his shoulder.'

The constitution of x853 gave the Cape a system of represen tative government, a parliament of two elected houses, and a franchise open to any man who for twelve months preceding registration had occupied property worth £25 or received an aggregate wage of either £50 or £25 with board and lodging.

This was Porter's 'low franchise', which the Colonial Office adopted in the hope that it would foster common loyalties and interests among all subjects without distinction of class or colour. Class coincided so closely with colour that the constitution was colour-blind only in form. The Coloured made up the great bulk of the poor - the landless, the low-paid, and the unemployed - who were kept off the rolls. A majority of the Coloured worked on the settlers' farms; and, it was ruled, farm labourers living in cottages owned by their masters did not 'occupy' property within the meaning of the constitution. The franchise dis criminated, therefore, against a colour-class. Even in later years, when Coloured voters were marginally important in a dozen or more constituencies, they never succeeded in returning any of their own people to parliament. It remained at all times a bourgeois institution of white landowners, merchants, company directors and professional men, in which the working class, white or coloured, had no representative of their own. A parliament of masters showed small sympathy with the working man. When only two years old, it passed the Masters and Servants Act of x856 - a law far more ruth ess Itan its preaecessors in the range of offences and the severity of the penalties prescribed for servants. Designed to enforce discipline on ex-slaves, peasants, pastoralists and a rural proletariat, it survived a century of industrialism and became the model for similar laws in white supremacy colonies throughout south, central and east Africa. The Act of 1856 remains with its off spring on the South African statute book: a grim reminder of the country's slave-owning past and a sharp instrument of racial discrimination. For though it is nominally colour-blind, the

X U~

Class and Colour in South Africa z85o-195o penalties are invoked only against the darker workers, some

breaches of the 30,000 of whom are sentenced annually for

labour code. The o ences can be rouped under three headsXbreach of 1 injury to property. The first group contract~indiscipline, includes ailure to commence work at an agreed date, unlawful disci absence from work, desertion and strikes. Among the and plinary offences are disobedience, drunkenness, brawling if he the use of abusive language. Finally, a servant can be jailed damages his master's property with malice or negligence, uses it unlawfully, loses livestock or fails to report the loss. Convicted servants were not given the option of a fine, however trivial the offence, by the original act. It authorized a sentence of one month's imprisonment for breach of contract or discipline by a first offender, and six weeks with solitary confinement and spare diet on a second conviction. A servant who damaged his master's property faced two months' imprisonment for a first offence, and three for a second, in each case with solitary confinement and spare diet. An employer who withheld wages could be sentenced to a fine of not more than £5. Liberals like Fairbairn and Saul Solomon put up some opposi tion to the act. Its victims were passive. Yet the urban prole tariat, if small, was well established and articulate. In 1856 the colony had some 9,o00 persons engaged in commerce, and 1,5oo

in manufacturing. Cape Town's list of manufactories in i859 included a total of fifty-six brickfields, limekilns, foundries, breweries, corn and snuff mills, soap, candle, fish-curing and printing establishments. The standard wage for white carpen ters, masons, bricklayers, joiners and mechanics in 1859-61 was 7s. 6d. a day, and for Coloured 6s. Employers complained that immigrants recruited in England to work in the colony for and 4s. a day often struck work soon after landing at Cape Town extracted as much as 15s. from employers." When regularly employed, building artisans, tailors, printers, bakers, wagon makers, and boat builders earned enough to qualify for the vote, fifteen years before Britain's second reform act of 1867. Yet there was no working-class movement in the Cape. Labour historians have diligently scanned the local press for

The LiberalCape

early evidence of such, and with meagre results. 9 Cape Town's printers formed a protection society in 1841, which soon faded away when some of the founders set up in business on their own. Workers took part in the anti-convict agitation, held mass meetings during the minor recession that followed, and de scended on the governor Smith to demand work or bread. The printers made another effort in 1857 at forming a mutual benefit society, to aid sick members, widows and orphans out of a fund to which every member subscribed 8d. a week.' 0 James Marriott, a radical printer, helped to promote the first labour newspaper, the Cape Mercury and Weekly Magazine, which ran from January to October 1859; and the first workers' cooperative,

formed in the same year 'for the cheapening of the price of provisions'. Prices were scandalously high, he wrote; and the Cape was not the land of milk and honey that immigrants were led to believe. A decent mechanic, earning Ci i6s. a week, had to find C2 2s. 3d. for the food, clothing and rent that cost only LI iis. 6d. in London." The Magazine recorded attempts by benevolent liberals to establish a Mechanics' Institute to instruct and entertain artisans. 12 It seems, however, that the first two trade unions were formed, both in Cape Town, only in 1881: a Typographical Society, and a local branch of the English Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners. The primary purpose of a trade union is to maintain and raise wage rates by limiting competition between workmen, prevent ing undercutting, and applying organized pressure on em ployers. For trade unions to arise, there must be a body of lifelong wage earners free to sell their labour, wholly dependent on wages, without prospect of becoming independent pro ducers, and aware of the benefits of collective bargaining. A century ago South African workers lacked one or more of these -qualities. White artisans could move easily out of their class to set up as masters on their own. Many of the less skilled workers were African peasants who retained a base in their traditional communities. Habits and attitudes inculcated during the period of slavery persisted among the ex-slaves, their descendants and for mer masters. Racial and cultural diversities in the working popu lation inhibited the growth of class consciousness and solidarity. C.S.A. -2

Class and Colour in South Africa z85o-195o South Africa has never provided a good living for the ordinary labourer. Wages and working conditions were adjusted to the conventionally low standards of ex-slaves, the free Coloured and tribal peasants. Immigrant working men competed with the Coloured for both skilled and unskilled work. House servants, farm hands, dairymaids, gardeners and grooms who migrated to the Cape in the nineteenth century usually lost little time in 13 looking for more remunerative and congenial employment. Opportunities kept pace with immigration, even in the sluggish economy of the period before the great diamond and gold discoveries. Thomas Pringle noted in 1824 that 'to mechanics and farm labourers of steady and enterprising character, the path to independence is still open and certain'. Many of the 200 Scottish servants and mechanics who came to the Cape a few years earlier had 'already cleared little fortunes of from £500 to £2,000'; all but a few were in prosperous and improving cir c*mstances. 1 4 Germans who came under contract to farmers in the sixties were also 'intent on procuring their freedom and independence'. After completing their contract period of two years' service and repaying their passage money, nearly all left the farms to become their own masters in the towns. 5 The economic expansion that accompanied the mining of diamonds at Kimberley accentuated the instability of the immi grant white worker. Germans, according to witnesses before the parliamentary committee of 1879 on labour resources, entered the colony in order to become masters. No sooner had they learned to be useful than they bought a horse and cart, or set up as a shopkeeper, or acquired land and competed for labour. 'The objection to Europeans,' said a witness, 'is that after a time they will set up a brandy shop or something of that kind. They become independent of labour too soon.' Only Coloured men were content to labour.1 6 They were paid about 15S. to 20S. a month, with food, quarters and a garden allotment, in the

western districts. Africans in the eastern Cape received from is. to 2S. a day with rations. White employees on the farms were

much better paid. They generally occupied the position of an overseer; and if steady, active and prudent, soon became masters 1 7 and employers.

The LiberalCape Not every white worker climbed. The failures often embar rassed employers and the white community. Members of parlia ment told the committee of 1879 that farmers were hard put to isolate English labourers from Coloured on the farms: 'they must be put on an equality, and then they take black women and go back.' The Coloured, being more skilful than the greenhorns, tended to look down on them, 'and in many cases they degener ate in consequence'. A white man was said to be a degenerate if he fraternized with the Coloured. He usually took on the pre judices of the colonists and gave a racial reason for escaping from a disagreeable occupation. White navvies employed on railway construction in the sixties refused to work alongside Coloured, and abandoned their jobs for this reason when set to work on the line at Tulbagh Kloof in the western Cape. They 'spoke about the Kloof in very strong navvy language' and said they were not going to mix with the Coloured, or teach them the way to work for the same rates of pay. Though the contractors offered higher wages to skilled men if they would stay and instruct the labour ers, they refused and left for New Zealand. 18 Any indignity associated with the work of an unskilled labourer was attached to his status as a hired man and not to the work itself. The colonists never turned work into the fetish that it became on the North American frontier. Nor did they, however, develop the repugnance to manual labour that characterized the Spanish in South America. Rough and laborious work might be thought fit only for 'Hottentots, Kafirs and Coolies' when per formed for hire. A white man was not degraded, however, if he felled trees, ploughed, made hay or used pick and shovel on his own account. Many settlers practised a definite craft and com bined farming with the trade of a blacksmith, mason or harness maker.' 9 Traditional attitudes placed a premium on skills which, like capital, were imported, and associated with a white skin, though not regarded in the Cape as the white man's prerogative. A white artisan would not lose caste by working side by side with the Coloured who provided the bulk of labour, both skilled and unskilled, in the building, furniture, garment and leather industries. He maintained his superior status if he earned more, occupied a leading position, and mixed with the Coloured only

Class I

Colour in South Africa 185o-i950

when at work. This social distance deterred him from combining with Coloured artisans in a trade union. A high degree of social mobility, the smallness and isolation of the white working class account, on the other hand, for the failure of white workers to form unions of thpo own. These factors did not apply to the ere restrained by an entirely different set of Coloured. condition T centuries of colonial rule, slavery, forced labour velopment had fostered in them an unquestioning and arreste ited the growth of submission to white authority, and either a class or national consciousnes d. The independent One important exception must spirit of the pastoral Nama persisted in the offspring of unions between themselves and the colonists. The 'Bastards', or Griwas as they were later called, spoke Afrikaans and shared dfi culture of their white forbears. This affinity did not save them from constant persecution. They were conscripted for service with the commandos, expelled from their pastures, denied the right to own land, and forced into the least accessible parts of the country. The survivors eventually took refuge towards the end of the eighteenth century in the semi-arid tract west of the Vaal and Orange rivers, in what came to be known as Gq land %st. Here they formed a semi-autonomous state un8lKdries er. Another distinct Griqua state 'took shape after 1825 Wa under Adam Kok at Philippolis, below the confluence of the Caledon and Orange rivers, while a third Coloured-Nama settle ment, culled from mission stations, was settled by the adminis tration in 183o along the Kat river in the eastern Cape. The three groups of pioneers were border guards, defending the frontiers of white settlement. All lost their land to the whites, and all rose in rebellion against white settler rule. The Kat River settlers fought with troops and commandos against the Xhosa in the wars of 1834 and 1846, suffered heavily, and received no compensation. Many of them, led by Andries Botha, took up arms and joined the Xhosa in the war of I85I. Botha was convicted of treason, the rebels' land was confiscated, and the colonists soon afterwards took over the entire settlement. In Griqualand West, Waterboer concluded mutual defence treaties with the government in 1834 and 1843. His burghers 28

The Liberal Cape marched with Harry Smith against a party of Voortrekkers in 1848. Six years later, however, Britain recognized the Orange Free State and abandoned the Griquas. Diamonds were dis covered in Griqualand West in the I86os, and this led to the annexation of the territory by Britain in 1871. Meanwhile, farmers of the Orange Free State had overrun the Griqua farms at Philippolis. Adam Kok then led his people in 186i to a sparsely inhabited region called Nomansland on the eastern plateau slopes of the Drakensberg. Here they founded their commonwealth of Griqualand East. It, too, was engulfed by the colonists. When Gcaleka, Ngqika and Thembu clans made another desperate attempt to liberate themselves in 1877-8, the Griquas of Griqualand East and West took up arms in a rebellion that spread across the Orange to the northern border of the colony. This was the last armed struggle of a Coloured com munity against white supremacy in South Africa. The Griqua were destroyed because the colonists coveted their land. In the older parts of the colony, where they were essentially the working classes, the Coloured survived because they possessed only their labour power. Cape liberalism gave them equality before the law, access to the courts, protection against lawlessness, a free labour market, and in all other respects permitted a high degree of discrimination. They were emanci pated from slavery, but not from poverty, ignorance and disease. As the legal gap narrowed, the social gap between them and the colonists widened. White supremacy was entrenched by a growing inequality in educational opportunities. Mission schools were founded for the Coloured after emancipation, and government schools for the whites. 'It is quite impossible to assess the damage suffered by the Coloured People,' notes their historian, Professor Marais, 'through their children being con fined to the inferior mission schools.' 20 If an assessment were made, it might be found that segregation introduced and main tained an educational gap of thirty years between whites and Coloured. A few obtained a good middle-class education. None was admitted to a post higher than that of messenger in public services or private corporations. That Coloured workers in the western districts were conscious 29

Class and Colour in South Africa z85o-195o of their disabilities appears from a petition presented to parlia ment in 1871 by Titus Lergele, Jacob Haas, Frederik Pitt and fifty-six other residents of Genadendal mission station. They protested against demands raised by colonists for discriminatory penalties under the masters and servants law for farm labourers, and a speedier procedure to deal with 'hard-necked servants' who caused 'great grievances and inconveniences'. 21 The peti tioners pointed out that memorialists before them had asked for relief from laws 'which injuriously affected the labouring classes'. Yet the obnoxious statutes remained in force, while others had been added which likewise bore hard on their class. The petition set out the case for reform, in particular for the option of a fine 'instead of imprisonment as a felon'. Since they were unrepre sented in parliament, and since 'strong prejudices still exist in the Colony against colour, race and class', the petitioners urged the governor, as Her Majesty's representative, to guard their interests. 2 2 Britain's master and servant law, equally one-sided, prescribed imprisonment for defaulting servants but not for employers. Trade unions mounted a campaign for reform and won a minor victory in 1867.23 The agitation touched at the Cape, where Saul Solomon 'lived himself into the heart of the Imperial Paorga ment by poring over political reports of 'the best English newspapers . He championed the workers' cause in the assem bly against J. C. Molteno, the main author of the 1856 Masters spokesman of the farmers. Responsible and Servants ct government came to the Cape in 1872, with Molteno as prime minister. He introduced a bill to give farmers the stiffer penalties they demanded for their servants, though Solomon was able to obtain important concessions after a long controversy. The amending act of 1873 did discriminate against servants employed on farms by exposing only them to sentences of imprisonment with hard labour, spare diet and solitary confinement. On the other hand, magistrates were given the power to impose fines, and not imprisonment alone, on all other servants; while em ployers were for the first time made liable to imprisonment for breaches of contract. Responsible government, imperial expansion and industrial-

The Liberal Cape

ism followed hard on the diamond discoveries of 1867-71.X British and colonial troops made war on the Hlubi in 1873, they 1 Gcaleka and Pedi in 1877, the Ngqika, Thembu, Pondo, Griqua and Rolong in 1878, the Zulu in 1879, the Sotho in 188o, the Ndebele in 1893, and the Afrikaner republics in 1899. The Cape absorbed the Transkei and its peoples in 1879-94. Britain an nexed Basutoland in i868, Griqualand West in 1871, the South African Republic in 1877, Zululand in 1887, Matabeleland in 1894, and the Afrikaner republics in 19oo. The Zulu rebellion of 19o6, in which nearly 4,00o Africans were killed, marked the last stage in 250 years of armed struggle by the traditional societies against white invaders. South Africa's industrial era was baptized in blood and the subjugation of small nations. As from the begin ning of the century, the liberation movement took the form of struggles between classes and national communities. The Cape's short-lived liberalism went into a decline after the granting of responsible government. Kimberley's mine owners produced diamonds under a regime of colour bars, pass laws and closed compounds for indentured, migratory peasant workers. Cecil Rhodes, mine magnate, politician and imperialist, domi nated the colony in the last quarter of the century. The formation of an Afrikaner Bond in 1879 polarized political differences among the colonists and strengthened the tendency towards overt racial discrimination. The Transkeian annexations multi plied threefold the potential African vote, then already a signi ficant electoral factor in eastern Cape constituencies. To keep out the 'blanket Kafir' - the term applied by racists to the Transkeian farmer - Rhodes, backed by the Bond, loaded the franchise against Africans in 1887 and 1892. Parliament ex cluded land held under customary tenure from the franchise qualifications, raised the landed property qualification from £25 to £75, eliminated the £25 wage qualification, and added a literacy test. The effect of the changes was to strike some 30,000 Africans off the rolls and to stimulate the growth of an African political movement. Wars, conquest and annexations provided one of the primary requisites of industrialism - an uprooted peasantry available at low cost for rough manual work. Peasant communities lost their

Class and Colour in South Africa z85o-r95o

self-sufficiency under the pressures resulting from the confisca tion of their land and cattle, the imposition of taxes, the substitu tion of traders' merchandise for domestic products, the spread of education and Christianity. Wage earning became unavoidable for increasing numbers of men and women. Members of small agrarian societies had to acquire the discipline and skills of the industrial worker, accustom themselves to urban society, learn the laws and language of the conqueror. They learned the hard way: on the job, without formal instruction, by working under employers, supervisors and technicians who neither understood nor respected their language and customs. The alchemy of diamonds and gold that transmuted agrarian societies into a considerable industrial state attracted thousands of artisans, clerks, farm workers, men without special skills, fortune seekers and aggressive capitalists. South Africa's white population rose from 260,O0 in z865 to 634,000 in z891; it grew threefold in the Transvaal, from 40,000 in 1875 to 119,000 in x89o. The newcomers included men with habits and attitudes appropriate to an industrialized society. Some were staunch trade unionists and ardent socialists. They grafted their beliefs and patterns of organization on the colonial stock. White working men, set in authority over African peasants, despised them and also feared them as potential competitors. Employers, concerned mainly to maximize profits, exploited the weak bargaining posi tion of the peasants and substituted them, when this was ex pedient, for the better paid whites. Immigrant journeymen joined forces with local artisans to erect their traditional defences against undercutting. Printers, carpenters, miners, engineers, engine drivers, iron moulders, masons, plasterers, plumbers, tailors, bakers and hair dressers formed trade unions at Cape Town, Kimberley, Durban and the Witwatersrand between 1881 and x899. The early growth of trade unionism was an easy, uneventful process in the port towns. Small employers hobnobbed with artisans in the friendly atmosphere of a colonial community, where dark men did the dirty work and all whites belonged to a racial elite. Passions ran higher in the crude mining camps of Kimberley and the Witwatersrand. Here white working men fought against great

The Liberal Cape capitalist combines for rights. The struggle rarely crossed the colour line to unite workers of all races in a common front against the employing class. White workers usually chose to fight on their own, often under the banner of white supremacy. Racial discrimination, sponsored by governments, employers and white workers, divided the working class into antagonistic racial groups. As industrialism spread, the country moved ever farther away from the ideal state contemplated by Cape liberal ism, in which all persons 'without distinction of class or colour should be united by one bond of loyalty and a common interest'.

2 Diamond Diggers and the New Elite

Diamonds were found in 1867-8 along the Vaal and Orange rivers in a region where some 3,ooo Griquas, i,ooo Korarmas and IOOO Afrikaners lived in uneasy proximity.' Britain had acknowledged the Griqua claims to the territory by treaty in x834 and 1846. Reversing her policy, she gave independence to the Transvaal voortrekkers in 1852 and to the Orange Free State in 1854, repudiated her alliances with coloured peoples north of the Orange, excepting Adam Kok, and in effect abandoned them to Afrikaner domination. Then came the discoveries. Diamonds, prophesied the Cape's colonial secretary, Richard Southey, were 'the rock on which the success of South Africa will be built'. Britain rediscovered a moral duty towards the Griquas. Wode house, the Cape governor, informed Kimberley, the British secretary of state, that 'as a matter of right the native tribes are fairly entitled to that tract of country in which, for the present, the diamonds appear to be chiefly found'. 2 Kimberley agreed and added that his government would be much displeased if the republics were to extend their slave-dealing activities, oppress the natives, and cause disturbances of the peace by encroaching on Griqua territory.3 Britain walked off with the prize, while Griquas, Korannas, Rolong and Afrikaner republics disputed the ownership of the diamond fields. Cornelius Waterboer, the Griqua leader, had trustingly appealed to Britain for protection. An arbitration court awarded the territory to his people, and Britain annexed it in x871 under the title of Griqualand West. A payment of £9,0ooo was made to the Orange Free State as compensation for the loss of her title. To the Griqua went the consolation of having their name perpetuated in one of the richest portions of the earth's surface, which once they had called their own. South

Diamond Diggers and the New Elite Africans of all races and a random selection of immigrants took their place. The influx raised the population of the territory by June 1871 to 37,000, of whom 21,000 were Africans and Coloured.' None of the administering authorities, whether Griqua, Afrikaner or British, was prepared for the rush. The diggers appointed committees to enforce order, and the Orange Free State asserted a nominal authority before the annexation, but there was a dearth of even rudimentary services. Housing, hospitals, water supplies, sanitation, power and transport had to be improvised, usually by private agencies at rising prices. Diggers, some with families, lived in wagons, tents, huts or galvanized iron sheds. Africans, who usually walked barefooted to the fields, often arrived in an emaciated state: 'weary, grimy, hungry, shy, trailing along sometimes with bleed ing feet, and hanging heads, and bodies staggering with faint ness.' 5 Many came from far in the interior with the sole purpose of earning £6 for a gun, the only weapon with which they could hope to protect their land and cattle against invading colonists. No one accepted responsibility for the newcomers. Their desti tution rendered them unfit for hard toil, but forced them to labour twelve hours a day and more. They slept on the bare earth without shelter or in a brushwood hut, and suffered greatly from the cold. They lived on mealie-meal, with an occasional chunk of refuse meat. Water, at 2s. 6d. a bucket, was beyond their means. Many acquired a taste for Cape brandy, retailed at 3d. a tot and ios. 6d. a gallon. There were no laws to regulate wages and working conditions, impose safety measures

against accident and disease, or enforce the payment of work men's compensation. Farmers trekked to the fields with oxwagon, family, and a retinue of servants who were paid £3 a year, or the price of a cow, to dig for diamonds, while the patriarch, smoking his pipe, sat at the sorting table. Recent immigrants, who accounted for one-quarter of the white population on the fields, soon adopted the South African way of life. They too hired Africans to pick, shovel, break, haul and sift ground, to cut and carry firewood, to cook and wash, and to accompany their masters to market with sack or wheelbarrow. Most whites felt disinclined for manual 35

X I

Class and Colour in South Africa r85o-.95o work during the summer, observed Sir Charles Payton, who spent six months on the diggings in 1871. 'It is quite sufficient for them to sit under an awning and sort, leaving the Kafirs to 6 perform all the other stages of work.' Middle-class English gentlemen, like Cecil Rhodes and his brother, 'delighted to find themselves in a veritable Tom Tiddler's ground, where they could not only pick up gold and silver, but have it done for them by "nigg*rs" ,.7 Conditions were ideal for making fat profits on a thin invest ment. Luck, foresight, tenacity, ruthlessness and a little capital were needed for success. Most diggers probably lacked these qualities and failed to pay their way.' But the successful ones could amass great wealth, by production or speculation, out of a valuable mineral extracted without expensive plant and by peasants who received no protection against gross exploitation. Diamonds to an estimated value of rIl million were taken out of the ground by I872.1 The labourer's share was a weekly wage of 7s. 6d. or ios. and rations worth 6s. 6d., consisting of twenty five pounds of mealie-meal (but whole mealies came much cheaper), an issue of coarse meat (called 'kafir' meat in the trade), a handful of coarse tobacco, and a Saturday night's tot of crude wine, spirits or brandy. Africans could not fail to note the contrast between their poverty and the value of their labour. If they missed the point, dealers in stolen gems drove it home. Illicit diamond mining grew into a major industry. Stolen stones passed from the labourer to a 'tout', who sold them for a small part of their value to a registered claimholder or licensed dealer. Louis Cohen, a native of Liverpool who emigrated to the diggings m"IM6, noted that many wealthy diggers laid the basis of their fortunes by buying stolen gems. They robbed the small man of his diamonds and claim, became big mine owners or dealers, and were then loudest in denouncing the profession that they had previously practised with such success."' African and Coloured labourers supplied the stolen diamonds. Few were convicted but all were suspected, not least by unsuccessful diggers. A mythology took shape. Coloured claimholders were said to be more successful than white ones, because they received stones stolen by relatives and friends.11 Africans, it was main 36

* -

-w

Diamond Diggers and the New Elite

tained, stole at least half the output.1 2 'The partially civilized Kaffir rapidly develops into a thief.' 1 3 The 'raw Kaffir'. fresh from the kraal, is best and most trustworthy. 'Above all things, mistrust a Kaffir who speaks English and wears trousers,' advised Payton, who had a prodigious capacity for consuming 14 and regurgitating colonial prejudices. Prospectors from Australia and California imported notions of a 'diggers' law'. A Diamond Diggers' Protection Society, formed in 1870, issued a set of regulations. 1ney stipulated that 'no licence to dig should be granted to a Native', prohibited persons of colour from holding claims or diamonds in their own right, and prohibited the buying of diamonds from any servant unless he had his employer's written authority to sell. The rules were given 'the force of law' by the executive council of the Orange Free State while it claimed to administer the diggings; but lost all semblance of legal validity after Britain had annexed Griqua land West.' - Coloured and Africans could then assert the same right as any white man to take out a licence and dig on their own account. The whites protested vigorously, especially when dia mond yields declined, or prices fell, or the cost of claims rose. There was always some distress among the diggers. They blamed it on the servants who stole and the dealers who bought the stones, but, above all, on African and Coloured licensed claimholders. Rioters swept through the streets of New Rush, the site of Kimberley, in z872; tried to lynch an Indian accused of buying diamonds; burnt the tents and canteens of suspected traffickers in stolen gems; chased and flogged African passers-by. Two of the three British commissioners appointed to administer the diggings submitted to the campaign of violence. They issued a proclamation on 23 July suspending all digging licences held by Africans and Coloured. No more licences were to be issued to persons of colour except by leave of a diggers' committee or of a board of seven bona fide white claimholders. 1 6 Barkly, the Cape governor and high commissioner of Griqualand West, ruled that such discrimination was contrary to reason and justice, and there fore ultra vires.1 I He disallowed the proclamation, but under took to see how far he could meet the rioters' demands. The diggers then submitted draft rules which would bar Africans and 37

Class and Colour in South Africa z85o-195o

Coloured from obtaining licences to search for, buy, sell, or otherwise trade in diamonds. The rules also provided for written labour contracts, the expulsion of unemployed Africans from the diggings, and the confiscation of diamonds held by servants.

Barkly conceded the substance of the demands in a proclamation of IO August 1872, described as a measure to prevent the stealing of diamonds. Barkly kept up the appearance of equality before the law by applying the proclamation to all 'servants'. But it discriminated, and was meant to discriminate, against Africans and Coloured. In the first place, no person could become a registered claim holder unless a magistrate or justice of the peace had certified him to be of good character, fit and proper to be registered. White officials under pressure from aggressive racists could be relied upon to use their wide powers against Africans as a class. Only a few licensed Coloured diggers, operating on the outskirts of the fields, remained to give credence to the Cape's doc trine of liberalism. Secondly, the proclamation laid the basis of the 'pass'I stem that spread in time to the Rand mines and from te-reto labour districts and towns throughout South Africa. It centred on the registration of labour contracts. Ser vants had to produce a certificate of registration on demand, and have it endorsed on taking their discharge. To leave the diggings lawfully, a servant had to produce the endorsed certificate and take out a pass. Any person found wandering in a mining camp without a pass and unable to give a satisfactory account of himself ran the risk of summary arrest, a 45 fine and three months' hard labour or twenty-five lashes. The object was to detect and apprehend deserting workers, who were liable under the Masters and Servants Act to fines or imprisonment. A related aim was the recovery of stolen dia monds. A policeman or employer might without warrant search a servant's room, property and person within twenty-four hours of his leaving his place of work. Diamonds in his possession belonged to his master unless the contrary was proved. Barkly's surrender to racism failed to appease the leaders of the malcontents. They were after bigger game than a handful of Coloured prospectors and debris-sorters. Aylward, Tucker, Ling 38

~mm~

Diamond Diggers and the New Elite

and others like them wanted power - an unreasonable and dangerous amount of power, reported Southey, now the lieu tenant-governor of Griqualand West. They would use it, he warned, to deprive Her Majesty's Coloured subjects of their rights and privileges.' 8 He and his secretary John Currey resisted demands for a stringent vagrancy law and an outright ban on the employment of registered servants by Coloured and Africans for mining and the sorting of debris. More tents were burned. Discontented diggers made common cause with plotters from the Orange Free State and speculators out to buy claims cheaply. They formed the Kimberley Defence League, organized armed vigilantes, an hoisted the black flrag. Marvon, the secretary of state, sided with the diggers and ordered the dismissal of Southey and Currey in 1875 for having failed to establish good relations with the whites of Kimberley." 9 The Griquas rose in rebellion in 1878, and the Cape incor porated Griqualand West in I88o. The colony's Va r Act of 1867, as amended by Act 23 of 1879, could then-e applied on the diggings. It supplemented the pass laws by prescribing a maximum of six months' imprisonment with hard labour, spare diet and solitary confinement for any 'idle and disorderly person' - the phrase used to describe anyone who wandered abroad with out lawful means of subsistence and failed to give a good and satisfactory account of himself. Southey had fallen foul of the Colonial Office by rejecting racial discrimination and protecting migrant workers against gross neglect. In his dispatches he complained of diggers who turned sick labourers into the street instead of caring for them as the law required. At his instance the legislative council passed Ordinance 2 of 1874 to provide hospital accommodation, medical attention and sanitary services 'for the benefit of the native labourers', though at their expense. Every master was to deduct one shilling a month from his servant's wage and pay it to the registrar of servants, for a hospital and the improvement of general sanitation. The diggers objected strenuously to the levy, which came out of the worker's pocket, although the annual African death rate in Kimberley reached the alarming figure of seventy-nine per thousanid in 1879 in contrast to a rate

Class and Colour in South Africa T85o-.950 of forty for whites. 2 0 The levy yielded £Io,ooo in 1882, and a hospital was built. Nearly twenty years later, however, sick Africans, usually suffering from scurvy, were often left 'to lie in the compounds day after day in their dirty blankets and their bodies in a filthy condition .21 Human beings were cheaper than diamonds, as white workers also discovered. Men died or suffered injury in accidents caused by inexperience, lack of training, inadequate safety measures and the failure to supervise machinery. Witnesses told the Diamond Mining Commission of 1881 that no proper inquest or inquiry was held after an accident.2 2 The commission suggested that safety regulations be introduced, but Cecil Rhodes and some other members of the commission seemed more anxious to prevent diamond thefts than to prevent accidents. Much atten tion was given to whether white employees as well as Africans should be searched for stolen stones. For the small claim holders, whose pressure had led to the elimination of Coloured diggers, were by then being eliminated in turn. A world-wide slump in diamond prices in 1875 forced many diggers out of the fields. More left as the yellow ground became exhausted. At lower levels, when digging deep into the blue ground, men found open-cast mining impossible on small claims of thirty feet square. Rockfalls, water seepage, boundary disputes, high costs and technical difficulties associated with deep-level mining hastened the process of converting independent diggers into servants of big companies. Successful diggers and dealers, foreign merchants and in vestors bought and accumulated claims, formed syndicates and merged into companies. The original 3,600 claims in the four big mines at Kimberley were reduced by 1885 to 98 properties, held by 42 companies and 56 private firms or individuals. The mergers continued until each mine was worked as a unit. Big capitalists bought or squeezed out small shareholders. Small companies formed large companies which eventually merged into one great corporation, the De Beers Consolidated Mine. It controlled all the Kimberley mnes and ninety per cent of the world's output of diamonds before the end of the century. 2 3 Laws enacted to protect small diggers now operated for the 40 or,

-wr,

~*,,I

Diamond Diggers and the New Elite company's benefit. Men who had clamoured for protection against illicit diamond buying found that the weapons they had helped to forge were being turned against themselves. A special court was set up in x88o to try cases of illicit diamond buying - 'the canker worm of the community', said the judge, Sir Jacobus de Wet. The Trade in Diamonds Consolidation Act of 1882 prescribed a maximum penatty or a tnousana-pount Mne or fifteen years' imprisonment or both for being in un lawful possession of uncut diamonds. Only a licensed dealer was allowed to buy the uncut stones. But heavy penalties did not stop the traffic. Attempts were therefore made to stop it at the source. Regulations of 1872 and I88o, that provided for the searching of persons when they entered or left mining ground, proved ineffective. A majority of the diggers and claimholders who replied to a questionnaire circulated by the commission of 1881 favoured the compulsory searching of African workers; some wanted whites also to be searched; and some suggested the lash, life imprisonment, banishment, or a stricter pass and vagrancy law to put down illicit diamond buying. Amended regulations of 1883 required all mine workers, other than managers, to wear uniforms and to strip naked in searching houses when they left work. White workers complained of being degraded to the 'Kafir's' level, went on strike, demonstrated and rioted in 1883. Twentyfive Africans who had joined in the turmoil were sent to jail for disorderly conduct, and the company rescinded the order to strip. A new instruction, issued in 1884, required white employ ees to be searched while clothed in shirt, trousers and socks, and those who refused were threatened with instant dismissal. The men called a general strike, stopped the pumps on all mines, and when the 'French' company resumed work, marched on the mine to put the hauling gear out of action. The company's guards, barricaded behind sandbags, called on them to halt, opened fire, killed four demonstrators outright and fatally wounded two more. The workers held a splendid funeral, gathered at mass meetings to protest, and went back to work after the owners had agreed to subject white employees to only 24 irregular surprise searches. 41

Class and Colour in South Africa 1850-I950

Africans were searched every day at the end of their shift. Stripped naked, they jumped over bars and paraded with arms extended before guards, who scrutinized hair, nose, mouth, ears and rectum with meticulous care. It was much the same kind of search that Africans endured in Kimberley's central prison where, remarked Judge, the civil commissioner, 'many a raw native ignorant of the laws of the province experienced the first acquaintance with civilization.'" 5 Rhodes and his fellow directors took the parallel a long way further when they hit on the idea of confining African miners in closed compounds for the four or six months of their contract period. This debasing form of working-class housing was firmly entrenched by i888, the year of the great merger of all controlling companies with De Beers. The compound was an enclosure surrounded by a high corrugated iron fence and covered by wire-netting. The men lived, twenty to a room, in huts or iron cabins built against the fence. They went to work along a tunnel, bought food and clothing from the company's stores, and received free medical treatment but no wages during sickness, all within the com pound. Men due for discharge were confined in detention rooms for several days, during which they wore only blankets and fingerless leather gloves padlocked to their wrists, swallowed purgatives, and were examined for stones concealed in cuts, wounds, swellings and orifices. 26 Kimberley's shopkeepers protested loudly that they were being deprived of trade by the company's policy of converting 'a labour contract into a period of imprisonment with hard labour and a truck system of wages'. 27 To appease them, De Beers undertook to stock its shops with goods bought only in the district; and Rhodes distributed the profits, amounting to a year, between a sanatorium, mining school and amenities for the whites of Kimberley."8 Africans, whose trade £1io,ooo

yielded the profit, were said to benefit in other ways from their enforced confinement. It shielded them, the company claimed, from the temptation to waste their money on strong drink and bad women or to risk unpaid imprisonment by stealing diamonds, deserting service, or breaking discipline. In truth, peasants who entered an alien world, dominated by persons of a different race,

Diamond Diggers and the New Elite language and culture, often fell prey to traders in shoddy goods, illicit liquor sellers, pimps and prostitutes. Many lives were wasted by alcoholism, venereal disease tuberculosis and crime. But free workers who inhabited the slums and shanties of industrial towns acquired the insights, maturity and hardness of will needed for survival in a harsh environment. Neither class nor national consciousness developed among the inmates of Kimberley's compound-jails. De Beers' monopolistic structure and political influence en abled it to rationalize mining techniques and enforce strict control of workers, output, markets and prices. Working costs dropped by half in the decade after amalgamation, to ios. a carat, while the average price of diamonds rose from 20S. to 30s. a carat. Dividends increased from 5 per cent in 1889 to 25 per cent in 1893 and 4o per cent in 1896.29 Rhodes, Beit, Barnato and Philipson-Stow, the four life governors, took 40 per cent of the profts I excess of £1,440,ooo a year - a right which the company for three million pounds' they eventuall T ough the harsh exploitation of Africans worth of shar urankel suggests, by 'miraculous industry' 30 and not, as Profe lions' worth of - the mine owners extracted more than £3 e accumulated diamonds at low capital costs in seventy ye o old on the Wit profits helped to finance the early watersrand. Rhodes seemed indifferent to the hom*osexual practices that the compounds of Kimberley and the Rand injected into African life. As prime minister of the Cape, he introduced the Glen Grey Act of 1894, which imposed a labour tax and introduced individual land holdings to make peasants migrate to the mines. He showed no desire to protect their families against disintegra tion and the moral rot caused by excessive labour migration. Unemployed white workers, displaced by his company mergers and rationalization, were given work on his Rand mines or recruited for the pioneer column that invaded Mashonaland in 189o. But there was a time when he required police protection

against the threats of unemployed diggers and bankrupt traders in Kimberley. De Beers dominated the town. Company detectives spied on 43 !1[

..............

Class and Colour in South Africa r850-950 men at work and in their private ives, reported on their political activities, and set traps for suspected dealers in stolen diamonds. When white workers banded together in 1891, they called them selves the Knights of Labour, taking the American secret as their model, and declared 'perpetual war society o and opposition to the encroachment of monopoly and organized capital'. 3" Some Knights had taken part in an abortive attempt to 'rush' the Premier mine, later called the Wesselton, which de Beers bought in 189i for nearly half a million pounds. They accused Rhodes of a 'breach of trust and corruption' for taking options on the property in his capacity as managing director while at the same time, as prime minister, opposing a petition to 2 have it proclaimed an open digging. The Knights of Labour blamed De Beers, 'that great mono poly', and the 'wealthy, overestimated, disappointing politician' Rhodes for the depressed state of the working classes during the collapse of the first gold boom. 'Unity, Charity, Fidelity' were inscribed on the society's banner. The members were pledged to champion the labouring classes everywhere against monopoly capital and 'the insidious attack of cheap labour competition'. The society aimed, on the one hand, to secure direct representa tion of labour in parliament, and, on the other, to exclude Indian, Chinese or 'other cheap labour competition of any Inferior Race attempting to invade our shores'. Here, in brief, was the ideological platform of the future white labour move ment. But the Knights themselves failed to establish a hold. The banksmen,* white employees of De Beers were engine drivers, onsetterst or supervisors. Set in authority over the African, they earned four or five times as much, and lived in company houses in an attractive suburb with clubhouse, parks and recreation grounds. The Knights could not wean them from loyalty to the company; or, according to trade unionists, break the strangle hold of the company over their lives. 'The white miners of Kenilworth, the suburb of Kimberley,' wrote J. A. Hobson in igoo, 'are absolutely under the control of De Beers Company: drawing their wages from De Beers, * Overseers at brink of pit or shaft. -lSupervisors of cage at bottom of shaft; also called 'hangers-on'. 44

7 Diamond Diggers and the New Elite living in houses owned by De Beers, trading with shops con trolled by De Beers, they are the political and economic serfs of the company; if they object to any terms imposed upon them by the company, they must quit not only their employment but their homes, and must leave Kimberley to find a means of living outside the clutches of the diamond monopoly.' 33 The experiences of militant workers in Kimberley were to verify Hobson's analysis in years to come. Conditions in the company town made a lasting impression on white workers of the Wit watersrand. Kimberley became a symbol of the fate that would overtake them if they allowed mine owners to substitute 'inden tured compound labour' for a free working class. The Knights of Labour faded away. But its vision of a war on two fronts, against Monopoly Capital and Cheap Coloured Labour, guided the thinking of organized white labour for many decades to come.

There was no doubt about the preference of the owners for

cheap and docile workers whose wages could be pegged for thirty years or more at an average rate of 3s. 5d. a day, while the average wage of white miners rose in a few years from x6s. 8d. to 22S. 6d. a shift. Africans paid 2s. a month in 'pass' and hospi tal fees, received free quarters and medical care, and spent about Is. 2d. a day on basic foodstuffs, mostly mealies, beans, bread and meat. 34 By stinting on food and other requirements, a diligent worker who escaped sickness and injury could save at most £20 in seven months, the time taken to complete six 'tickets' of thirty shifts each. But his diet was worse and his accommodation no better than that of the hard labour convicts who also worked on the mines. The death rate among under ground workers was reduced to forty per thousand by 1914 as a result of improved sanitation and medical treatment. But the Tuberculosis Commission of that year reproached the manage ment of De Beers' Premier mine near Pretoria for its 'extrava gant waste of life and health'. And the rebuke applied more or less to all mines." The diamond mines never lacked labour. They attracted men by paying piece rates and a small reward to finders of high priced stones. Ex-miners in the eastern Cape and Basutoland sent their sons to the compounds where they would be shielded 45 _.i

Class and Colour in South Africa 185o-950 from Kimberley's vices. The ten-feet high fences cut them off also from influences that might have made them politically conscious. The labour movement ignored the men in the com pounds. Both Coloured and African nationalists were committed to the mine owners' party and never criticized the compound system. It was 'as near perfection as it was possible to make it', declared Tengo Jabavu, editor of Imvo, when he visited Kim berley in 19o6 to collect money to found the South African Native College of Fort Hare. Officials of De Beers guided him 36 through the compounds and donated £2,500 to his college. But he complained that Alfred Beit left nothing in his will for the education of the African who had 'delved for diamonds to make Mr Beit a Magnate'. 3 7 The criticism applied equally to Rhodes, J. B. Robinson, Barney Barnato and other millionaires who made their fortunes out of the land and labour of Coloured and African. Financiers and mine managers were out to develop mines and not the miner. They adopted a laissez faire attitude, neglected his physical needs, made no attempt to teach him anything - the rudiments of mining, safety measures, the alphabet, or the elements of his new society - and used crude punishments to enforce required standards of discipline. Compound life con sequently tended to perpetuate tribal superstitions and antagon isms. Kimberley's Coloured and African residents formed mutual benefit and improvement societies in the eighties, but the men in the compounds never combined. Tribalism had a divisive effect also on other large groups of peasant workers. Fifty-six Zulu and Fengu were killed on Old Year's Day x883 in a 'faction fight' among railway construction workers at De Aar. The fighting, wrote Theal, doyen of South African historians, seemed to the men 'a not very objectionable mode of celebrating a holiday'. 3 8 His jocularity typified the colonial attitude to the new working class, as less of a threat than the Zulu impis (regiments) who cut down 8oo British soldiers and as many African levies at Isandhlwana in 1879. Indeed, another genera tion passed before African workers developed an outlook and organization to cope with the effects of industrialism. Radical whites and educated Africans blazed the trail.

Diamond Diggers and the New Elite The first African writers, journalists, ministers, teachers, clerks and politicians were sons or grandsons of tribalists and products of mission schools, among whom the Rev. Tiyo Soga (1829-71)

was an early and outstanding representativie,.is

father, a councillor of Gaika, had eight wives and thirty-nine children, and was killed in the war of 1877-8 against Gcaleka and Ngqika clans. Tiyo studied at the Lovedale Missionary Institution and the Free Church seminary in Glasgow, gradu ated at the age of twenty-seven in theology at Glasgow university, and was admitted to the ministry of the United Presbyterian Church - the first African from the south to take a degree and become an ordained minister. He married Janet Burnside, a Scot, and returned with her in 1857 to South Africa, where he preached, raised a distinguished family, trans lated The Pilgrim's Progress into Xhosa, composed hymns and assisted in a revision of the Xhosa Bible.3 9 Described in obituary notices as 'a perfect gentleman', a 'loyal subject of the Queen' and a 'noble missionary of the Cross', he died at the early age of forty-two on the eve of great changes that brought about many schisms in mission churches between white and African leaders. The missionary was a bearer of British culture as well as a teacher of the gospel. In both capacities he actively opposed traditional institutions such as chieftainship, the ancestor cult, the practice of magic, polygyny and bridewealth, that kept tribesmen away from the church.4 0 And he sided with the colon ists in their armed struggle to integrate independent states in the colonial society under British rule. The loyalties of missionary trained Africans, on the other hand, were divided between their people and the church, to which they owed their religion, education and livelihood. By the seventies, however, educated Africans, who found employment in government, commercial, legal and printing establishments, could free themselves of dependence on the missionary and become religious or political leaders in their own right. This development received a big impetus from the aggressive policy of expansion that Britain adopted after the gold and diamond discoveries. Reversing her policy of disengagement, Britain annexed

Class and Colour in South Africa r850-1950 Carnar Basutoland in 1868 and Griqualand West in 1871. Lord to link von, the secretary of state for colonies in 1874-8, decided opposition colonies and republics in a federation. He met with Repub and resorted to force. Britain annexed the South African war with lic in 1877 and then, to appease the burghers, made The war the aid of Swazi warriors on the Pedi under Sekukuni. Natal and against Cetshwayo's Zulu kingdom followed in 1879. stood in Transvaal colonists coveted the land, and Zulu power began in the way of federation. The annexation of the Transkei the the same year, after a long and bloody war. Basutoland was next victim. Acting under the Peace Preservation Act of 1878, to the Sprigg ministry at the Cape ordered Africans everywhere to assist hand in their rifles, legitimately bought and often used and the British against independent tribes. The Sotho refused of turned their rifles against the Cape police in 88o. The 'war disarmament' spread to Griqualand East, while the Transvaal republicans rose in rebellion, defeated the British at Majuba, and regained independence in 881. Attempts at confederation were abandoned, but only after arousing passions in Afrikaners and Africans that never died away. Educated or unlettered, Christian or pagan, all Africans were subject in some degree to the 'disarmament' act, the 'cattle removal' act of 1870, the 'vagrancy' act of 1879, pass laws, prohibition of liquor, and other measures that discriminated against their race. There was great resentment and call for protest. But the hundred years of desperate struggle on the frontier had ended in defeat. The chiefs, councillors and district heads who led the people in wars of independence were dead, exiled, deposed or absorbed as minor officials in the colonial bureauc racy. The struggle for liberation would from then on be fought within the common society by men able to wield the colonist's own weapons of education, propaganda, political organization and the vote. Leadership passed to the teachers, ministers and others like them in the eastern Cape who formed the Native Teachers' Association in 1875, the Native Education Association in 188o, the South African Aborigines' Association (Imbumba in Yama Afrika) in 1882, and the Native Electoral Association they 1884.41 Though largely confined to Xhosa-speaking people,

48 1/1---

- ---. -1-.--- -1 - I I- _-%

Diamond Diggers and the New Elite were non-tribal in composition and reflected the growth of an African consciousness. vu (1859-192 1), a prime mover in the forma John Ten o Electoral Association, became the acknow -Native tiono15te ledged leader of progressive Africans in the Cape for the next thirty years. A certificated teacher and lay preacher during his teens, he was appointed editor in 1881 of the Lovedale mission journal Isigidimi Sama Xosa (Xhosa Express) - the forerunner of the ChristianExpress and the present South African Outlook and matriculated in 1883, the second African to do so. His political career started in 1884, when he and the Association mobilized the ninety African voters in the constituency of Vic toria East behind James Rose Innes, a liberal of the old school and future chief justice. Innes won the election against six other candidates with the aid of the African voters, who plumped for him, though he was an utter stranger, because 'he favoured a fair and sympathetic policy towards the Bantu people '.*2 Jabavu left the Isigidimi after the election to found, with financial back ing from a brother of Rose lInes and other liberals, the first independent African newspaper, Imvo Zabantsundu (African Opinion). Imvo made its first notable impact with a campaign against the Sprigg government's Parliamentary Registration Act of 1887, which disfranchised thousands of Africans in the eastern Cape. Rhodes, then in opposition and angling for the Afrikaner Bond's support, wanted to go the whole way. Africans, he argued, were a subject race and should have no vote at all, as in Natal. There could be no union of South Africa unless the Cape met its neighbours on the issue of African rights. Writing in Imvo's editorial columns, Jabavu claimed that the bill, in addition to being 'the severest blow' yet aimed at his people, would 'establish the ascendancy of the Dutch in the colony for ever' by disfranchising the English party's 'devoted allies'. While the Afrikaner press deplored 'the impudence of the Kafir', Sprigg told the House that Imvo was 'libellous and seditious'. Yet Jabavu had leaned over backwards to show that he was no radical. 'We not only preach loyalty,' he wrote, 'but we preach subordination to superiors.' The 'Kafir', he maintained, was no C.S.A.- 3

Class and Colour in South Africa r850-1950

leveller or democrat; he believed in caste and the principle that 'some are born to rule and others to be ruled '.' A petition to the Queen, protest meetings, a conference and talk of a deputation to England followed the passing of the act. Many such appeals were to be made before Africans learned the futility of looking for salvation to Victoria or her successors. Rhodes drove the constitutional lesson home in 1892 by spon soring the Franchise and Ballot Act which raised the franchise qualifications to the cusauvaage of Africans, Coloured and poor whites. It was colour-class legislation and acceptable to all sides of the House including the liberals - Rose Innes, then attorney general in Rhodes' cabinet, John X. Merriman and J. W. Sauer - who had taken the place of Porter and Solomon as champions of coloured rights. But they opposed Rhodes in 1893 when he moved the abolition of plural voting in the Cape division, where alone each elector had four votes, to forestall the candidature of H. N. Effendi, representative of the Moslem Association. Col oured voters were expected to plump for him; and parliament insisted on remaining exclusively white. W. P. Schreiner, a famous liberal in later years, who had replaced Innes as attorney general, defended the measure. The return of a Coloured mem ber, he argued, might precipitate constitutional changes preju dicial to Africans. Their interests, he thought, would be best secured if they were represented in parliament by white men nominated by government.44 Ever willing to sacrifice African interests for an alliance with *Afrikaners, Rhodes was as ready to sacrifice the alliance to build an empire. He plotted against Kruger's republic and organized the coup that ended in the fiasco of Jameson's Raid in x896. It changed the course of politics, wrote Jabavu, by substituting 'the Dutch Question for the Native Question'." Liberals who con demned the raid broke with Rhodes to join forces with the Afrik aner Bond in opposition to the pro-imperialist Progressive party formed in 1897. Schreiner, the Bond's parliamentary leader, took over the premiership in 1898 and included Merriman and Sauer in his ministry. Jabavu, who had stood with Sauer on the same platform for twenty years, supported the government and came under heavy fire from the English press.

DiamondDiggers and the New Elite Alfred Palmer, editor and publisher of the South African Review, wrote in September 1899, on the eve of Britain's war against the republics, that Jabavu 'has much to answer for'. He had helped the Bond into a position where it could manufacture 'whips for dusky backs', by turning African voters against the Englishman, who gave them the best wages and fairest treat ment, compared with the 'dog's life' they led under 'Boer employment'. Rhodes, and not any Bond supervisor, was their proper leader. 4 6 In 1897 Rhodes promised 'equal rights for every white man south of the Zambesi'. Three years later, during the war fought, so the imperial government claimed, to enfranchise all British subjects and secure the full liberty of all in South Africa, Rhodes declared a policy of equal rights for every civilized man south of the Zambesi. 4 ' African and Coloured national movements were to take shape a few years later in the course of an unsuccessful struggle to hold Britain to her pledge.

3 Gold Miners and Imperialist War

Barnato, Beit, Joel, Rhodes, Robinson, Rudd and Wernher used the fortunes they had made out of diamonds to buy gold-bearing rock and to finance mining operations on the Witwatersrand. They duplicated the pattern of labour organization that had served them so well at Kimberley. Fifty-three companies em ployed 3,400 whites and ten times as many Africans in x892 on outcrop claims along the Reef.' The whites supervised and did the skilled work. African peasant workers, who were housed and fed in compounds, usually worked for three or four months at a stretch before returning to their villages. The migratory labour system tended to be inefficient and wasteful. The large turnover of workers involved high recruiting and supervisory costs. Every new batch of peasants had to learn mining techniques and under go the painful process of adapting themselves to a strange en vironment. Standards of housing and diet were subordinated to the aim of extracting the greatest output at the lowest cost. Bad living and working conditions made for high morbidity and mortality rates, and discouraged men from coming to the mines. But the owners found compensating advantages in labour intensive methods of production; and turned down proposals to 2 settle Africans with their families in villages along the Rand. The white miner, a director of labour rather than a labourer, owed his supervisory role to the constant flow of greenhorns down the shaft. Since his job was a function of their inexperience, he was dispensable to the extent that they learned the skills of their trade. His dependence on the ignorance of the men under his supervision and his estrangement from them made him feel insecure. He feared competition, resented the African's ability to learn by doing, and with Kimberley's example in mind suspected the mine owners' intentions. 52

Gold Miners and Imperialist War

It was a fear of being swamped by fellow countrymen, how ever, that stimulated men from Cornwall, Lancashire and Scot land to found the Witwatersrand Mine Emp19 ' and Mechanics' Union on 2o August I592. zome 2,000 men d women, meeung in Johannesburg's Market Square, prote~l 'against the attempt of the Chamber of Mines to flood these fields with labour by means of cheap emigration'.I J. Seddon, the

union's first secretary, warned that the Chamber meant to cut wages by bringing out miners with wives clinging round their necks. He listed other grievances: unsafe and insanitary working conditions, excessive hours, low wages. But he would not advo cate a quarrel with capital. 'If any wages had to be reduced,' he appealed, 'let the wages of black labour be cut down.' The miners rejected class solidarity with Africans but col laborated with capitalists in establishing, also on 20 August 1892, V the Transvaal National Union to campaign for equal franchise rights for all white men in the Transvaal. The union became an instrument of subversion, a tool of Rhodes, Jameson and the mine owners who conspired to bring about the abortive putsch of 1896. Trade unionists had withdrawn long before then from the movement, but their initial participation revealed a conflict of loyalties and interests. Thomas, the mine union's president, wanted the men to cooperate with the owners whose interests, he said, they shared in such matters as the franchise and the customs tariff.4 Seddon, on the other hand, urged the men to have nothing to do with the National Union as long as the owners persisted in their 'dastardly attempt to deluge the country with miners'. It was arrogance on the part of the Chamber of Mines, he urged, to ask workmen to join the National Union while trying to 'crush them down with a worse tyranny than ever the Transvaal Government proposed to put upon the country'. They should be labour unionists first and national unionists afterwards. 5 British workmen, most of whom were temporary residents, did not feel strongly about the franchise and suspected the aims of the employers. E. B. Rose, a member of the miners' executive and at one time president of the union, contended that 'the working man was politically the equal of the richest mine owner' as long as neither had the vote. Indeed, he claimed,

Class and Colour in South Africa r850-1950

workers were better off without a vote unless it was accompanied by the secret ballot. For, as they had learned at Kimberley before the the Cape introduced the ballot in 1894, employers exploited worker's vote under the open system. The National Union's leaders rejected a proposal to include a demand for secret voting in the franchise campaign, whereupon the labour delegates withdrew from the union. They decided to put their claims directly to the government and did so, added Rose, 'invariably with the happiest results

'.6

Mine owners on the Rand, though arrogant, commanded less power than in the Cape where Rhodes, as prime minister, was able to promote legislation in which he, as managing director of De Beers and uncrowned king of Rhodesia, had a personal pecuniary interest. Such a corrupting concentration of power could not occur in the Transvaal while Kruger and his burghers controlled the state. An alliance between white worker and Afrikaner farmer was conceivable in spite of language and cultural differences. Both groups were at loggerheads with the capitalists, who exploited the one and plotted against the other. Afrikaners recognized colour-castes and not classes. The con stitution of i856 guaranteed inequality between white and black in church or state; but Jack, if white, was as good as his master. Mine owners rejected equality of classes and races. The Star sneered at the 'embryonic John Burnses and Tom Manns' who, ambitious for themselves, valued notoriety and power more than the success of the workers' cause." Employers showed their teeth. Andrew Hope, the miners' new president, was told to quit the union or his job at the Simmer and Jack mine. He chose to be victimized. The union decided to offer 'passive resistance' to the company's 'tyrannical conduct' by employing Hope, at his 8 former salary, to organize the union along the Rand. The republic was destitute of industrial laws and hardly able to protect workmen against exploitation and victimization. The government disliked intervening more than was necessary in the internal affairs of mining companies, President Kruger explained to Rose and J. T. Bain, the union's president and secretary, when they asked him in 1893 to open state-owned mines for the relief of white unemployment. He would not risk the public's money

Gold Miners and Imperialist War in dubious enterprises or stir up more noise in Johannesburg, from where enough noise was coming already, by competing with the owners. 9 The union was more successful when it agitated against the owners' gold theft bill. Like the Cape's Illicit Diamond Buying Act, on which it was modelled, the bill would authorize espionage and the surveillance of employees by company agents. Miners lobbied the Volksraad and demon strated through Johannesburg streets in February 1893 behind a

brass band and banners, with the slogan I G B T HE THE IDB - REMEMBER KIMBERLEY AND IDB.

SHAD O W OF

The Volksraad threw the bill out; and the miners celebrated their victory with another procession, headed by Africans carrying a coffin in scribed 'In memory of G. T. Bill.'1 I The union claimed to have easy access to the government and a unique record of successes in obtaining legislative reforms, notably when the Volksraad adopted twenty of its twenty-three suggested amendments to the draft of the republic's first mining law of 1893."1 It introduced long-overdue safety measures and the first explicit industrial colour bar. This stipulated that no African, Asian or Coloured might prepare charges, load drill holes or set fire to fuses.1 2 The Volksraad adopted the clause by fifteen votes to eight. The minority pointed out that some 'Kaffirs' were well qualified to work with dynamite. It was unreasonable to pay a white man C5 a month for work that a black could do as well for £2. Anyone with a certificate of competency should be allowed to blast. But the state mining engineer contended that the only purpose of the clause was to prevent accidents. He, for one, had no confidence in a 'Kaffir'. Members who supported him said they would not give Africans 'so much right by law'; and read into the clause a general ban on their employment in the mines.1 3 The presence of competent Coloured and African blasters, some from the diamond fields, gave the lie to the contention that a dark skin denoted an inherent inability to acquire the skills and judgement of a skilled miner. Unqualified white men, on the other hand, were as great a danger in mining as unqualified Africans. The authorities soon found that a deficiency of pigment did not guarantee ability. The new mining code of x896 omitted

.....-17p

Class and Colour in South Africa r850-1950 the racial test and substituted a blasting certificate. It became the hallmark of a professional miner. In terms of the regulation a trained, reliable African or Coloured could assist the certifi cated blaster and under his direct supervision prepare charges, load drill holes and light fuses. 4 It was evidently assumed that only white men would hold a certificate. This was not a statutory rule. put the code did introduce two new colour bars. en the sole right to work as Or4 regulation gave whit er reserved the job of engine banksen and onsetters; an e miners, union had asked the driver to certificated whites. Is government to prohibit the employment of unqualified men on engines that hauled cages and skips along the shafts. Not only untrained whites, explained Rose, 'but Coolies and even Kaflirs also' were thus employed, 'with the inevitable result that acci dents to men employed in the mines through overwinding the cages or otherwise became more frequent.'1 6 But mine owners and managers objected to the colour bar. They argued for a test based on competence and not colour. Many 'Cape Boys', they said, were as competent as white men and should not be barred, especially in small mines and prospecting shafts.' 7 The govern ment made a concession to the owners in x897 by dropping the racial qualification for banksmen and onsetters, but retained it for engine drivers. 1 This was the only statutory colour bar left on the mines at the outbreak of war. White men did most of the skilled work, but there were areas in which Coloured and Africans could rise above the labourer's level. Colour prejudice, Anglo-Afrikaner rivalries and a shortage of skilled men formed the matrix of the labour movement. As at Kimberley, racial and national cleavages distorted class align ments. Immigrant miners, mechanics, fitters, joiners and prin ters formed trade unions along traditional class lines. The Witwatersrand Mine Employees' and Mechanics' Union agitated for an eight-hour day, safety measures, and compensation for injuries; celebrated May Day; and defended trade unionism against the accusation that it was prone to violence and anarchy.' 9 But the most class-conscious leaders, like the Scottish fitter J. T. Bain, also appealed to racial sentiment for protection rican miners and to republican sentiment for protec agams

Gold Miners and Imperialist War don against mine owners. The immigrants were torn between class interests and national loyalties. Bain, whom some his torians believe to have been South Africa's greatest trade union leader,2" became a citizen of the republic and fought against the British army. Few men of his class followed the same course. The great majority withdrew or joined the British troops. None identified himself with his African co-worker. Africans, observed the Star,2 1 had no value in the communitj' except as the equivalent of so much horsepower. They wer: * both indispensable and expendable. Accidents or disease killed, maimed or incapacitated thousands every year. Employers re cruited fresh supplies of sturdy young men from villages withi4 a radius of 5oo miles. They came by foot and rail, often ridin) for ten days in open cattle trucks, to be sent underground the day after their arrival and without training or time to recuperate. The resulting death rate was high. It averaged sixty-nine per thousand from diseases on Rand mines in 1902-3, when the first health statistics were compiled, and ranged from ix8 to 164 in groups of men from tropical regions. Pneumonia, scurvy, menin gitis, enteric, and dysentery caused the death of 3,762 Africans, or eighty-two per cent of all who died from disease on mines and works of the Witwatersrand in 19o3. The death rate fell to thirty-three per thousand in 19o6, after Milner's administration had enforced minimum standards of diet, housing, sanitation 2 and hospital care. The high incidence of deaths and injuries - for which no compensation was paid - bad food, poor accommodation and unpleasant work gave the mines a bad name. 'We do not like our men to go to Johannesburg, because they go there to die,' chiefs from Basutoland told Sir Godfrey Lagden, the Trans vaal's first secretary of native affairs under British rule.2 3 The African's only defence was to abscond or change his job for a better. Mine owners sang the praises of free enterprise, attacked Kruger's monopolistic concessions over dynamite, liquor and railways, but did not scruple to monopolize recruiting or to restrict the worker's freedom of movement and contract. Mana gers petitioned in i888 for a pass system, monthly labour con tracts, penalties for deserters, and the registration of all Africans

Class and Colour in South Africa r85o-195o in the republic. The Chamber of Mines, formed in 1889, complained in its first annual report that competition for labour ers was taking 'the regrettable form of overt attempts to bribe and seduce the employees of neighbouring companies to desert their employers'. A manager had 'standing alone, scarcely any other remedy than to raise his rates of pay'. Rhodes, Lionel Phillips, George Farrar and other members of the Chamber took drastic action. They conspired in 1895 to bring about the downfall of the republic; agitated for a labour tax, pass laws, and a ban on liquor for Africans; and undertook to reduce wages from 2s. 3d. a shift to is. 6d. for skilled and is. for 'ordinary' workers.2 4 Kruger's men disarmed Jameson's filibusters with hardly a struggle; and the Industrial Commission of 1896, keeping an eye on British allegations of 'Boer slavery', refused to recommend any measure 'equivalent to forced labour'. 25 But the Volksraad gave the owners their pass law, which they then said was ineffective to an extent that made it one of the grievances to be redressed by war. To monopolize recruiting and stop crimping, the owners formed the Native Labour Supply Association in 1896 and instructed compound managers to impose uniform conditions of service. Africans were to work not less than nine hours underground and ten on the surface, with a diet of not more than two and a half pounds of 26 mealie-meal a day and two pounds of meat a week. The attack on wages followed in 1897. The African miner's average wage had reached a peak of 63s. 6d. for thirty com pleted shifts in 1895. It was reduced to 48s. 7d. on a scale ranging from IS. 2d. to 2s. 6d. a shift. Anticipating disturbances and desertions, the Chamber asked the government to draft extra police to the mines and to instruct native commissioners 'to send forward as many natives as possible to these fields '.2 White mining employees at Randfontein were notified at about the same time that their wages would be cut by ten shillings to 2os. a week. They struck work, and were evicted by police at Kruger's command from their company-owned houses. But the men won and went back to work at the old rates. W. H. Andrews, then employed as a fitter on Porges Randfontein, took part in the strike and claimed that it made two notable gains. It pre 58

Gold Miners and Imperialist War vented a reduction of wages all along the Reef and 'exploded the fallacy that Oom Paul and his government were the friends of the workers'.2 Whether fallacious or well founded, the belief persisted among white workers for many years after the fall of the republic. Rhodes had engineered the armed invasion and abortive rising of December i895 in his dual capacity of prime minister and company promoter. His fellow conspirators included members of his chartered company, leading mine owners, the Bechuana land administration, and the British high commissioner at the Cape. Chamberlain, the responsible British minister, knew of Jameson's preparations but made no attempt to arrest the raid. 2 9 After it had failed, the imperial government took the initiative against the republic with the full backing and active support of a majority of mine owners. Britain drafted Io,ooo troops to South Africa in August 1899 and moved troops to the Cape and Natal borders. Kruger presented an ultimatum on 9 October, demand ing the withdrawal of the troops. Britain rejected the ultimatum, and the republican commandos invaded Natal and the Cape to begin a war that was to last for thirty-one months. Britain annexed the Orange Free State on 24 May 1900, occupied Johannesburg on the 31st, and annexed the South African Republic on i September. Republican forces continued to fight a guerrilla war with great courage and skill against an army nine times their size. The war ended in the defeat of the republics and a peace treaty signed at Vereeniging on 31 May 19o2. Britain spent £250 million on the war, put 448,ooo troops in the field, lost 5,774 men killed in action and I6,I68 who died of wounds and disease. Her armies burnt homes, deva stated farms, and confined civilians in concentration camps. Nearly 4,ooo republicans were killed in battle, 2o,ooo died in the camps, 31,000 were taken prisoner, and 2oooo surrendered at the end of the war."0 Africans and Coloured also died, unrecorded and unsung, in their masters' war. They served as scouts, spies, stretcher bearers, transport drivers, labourers and camp followers, but not as soldiers. Both British and Afrikaners respected the tradition that allowed men of colour to fight with colonists against tribal impis

Class and Colour in South Africa T85o-r95o but never against whites. Peasants lost crops, livestock and huts, as troops, burning and pillaging, swept over the farms. Com mandos, living on the land, seized the cattle of tribesmen with out compensation. The tribesmen retaliated when the com mandos withdrew by seizing the farmers' stock. There were inter-tribal clashes and occasional attacks on isolated bands of dispirited burghers. 3 ' Schreiner, the Cape premier, gloomily predicted an African rising if colonial forces fought outside the border. But Africans hoped that Britain would restore their land and made no concerted attempt to free themselves from white domination. It was a white man's war also in terms of its objectives. Britain expressed great concern for the sufferings of Africans, Coloured and Indians in the Transvaal; and professed to be fighting for their freedom and to extend the rights and liberties of the common people. The promise of their liberation seemed to many Englishmen the war's single redeeming feature. But Afri cans, Coloured and Indians obtained no relief either at the peace settlement or in the post-war reconstruction. Acting under martial law, the British military authorities reduced the African miner's average wage in i9oo from 45S. to 30s. per thirty com 2d. a shift.3 2 pleted shifts and the standard wage to is. or Is. Africans lost in bargaining capacity under British rule, which turned the republics into colonies, restored authority to the defeated enemy, cultivated their loyalty, and consolidated an alliance with them on the basis of white supremacy. The republicans fought to retain their independence. They were an oppressing as well as an oppressed nation, writes the Marxist historian Endre Sik; but as 'freedom fighters' their struggle, he claims, 'belongs to one of the most glorious chapters 3 A similar opinion was current of the history of liberation wars'. at the time in the international labour movement, not least in Britain, where the Independent Labour party's vigorous anti war campaign made it for several years 'the most unpopular Party and its adherents and leaders the most bitterly abused Africans, Indians and Coloured persons in the country '. probably agreed with Britain's Fabians that the war, if wholly unjust, was wholly necessary in the interests of civilization and

-~-.--.

----

7 Gold Miners and Imperialist War

the empire, whose control over such mighty forces as goldfields was to be preferred to control by small communities of frontiers 5 men. 3 Rosa Luxemburg, another Marxist, saw in imperialism the political manifestation of a ravenous capitalist system which existed by invading, destroying and absorbing small peasant societies. Like the Fabians, but without their faith in Britain's civilizing mission, she claimed that the war was 'historically necessary' and the evitable result of conflict between a'patriar omy' and 'modern large-scale capitalist ex chal peas ublican farmers and British capitalists, she ploitation4 n, le same aims. Both wished to subdue the argued, ha e expropriate his land, and force him into the labour mar o triumph of capitalism was a foregone conclusion in , o n absorption their to resist the republics for and it was futile in a modem state. 3 6 The Fabian-Luxemburg thesis rested on an assumption that the republicans could not or would not change their ways to meet the needs of an industrial economy. Sir Alfred Milner, the British high commissioner, Joseph Chamber lain, the secretary of state for colonies, the British press and the mine owners used a similar argument to justify their war. But it was a false and dishonest argument. Few agrarian societies were so richly endowed or well equipped as the Transvaal for an industrial revolution. The republic attracted educated and professional men from Holland or the Cape, and was beginning to produce its own specialists. Left to itself, it would have developed an efficient administration, a network of railways and roads, and adequate supplies of water and power. Far from being intractable, the burghers expanded production to provide foodstuffs for the Rand, built railways linking it to the ports, enacted an excellent mining code, kept order over unruly, rebellious fortune-hunters, repelled an armed imperialist invasion, and held the world's greatest military power at bay for more than two years. The mining companies under republican rule produced in 1897, after barely ten years of effective development, more than three million ounces of gold valued at £io j million and distributed £2,817,000 in dividends. Foreign capital flowed without let or hindrance into the republic; 61

Class and Colour in South Africa 185o-.95o operated in absolute security even during the war, when Kruger set his face against a scorched-earth policy; made great profits and paid in taxes only five per cent of declared profits. A war was neither inevitable nor necessary to modernize the republic.

The mine owners claimed that the dynamite monopoly, high railway rates, an abuse of liquor by labourers, and a scarcity of

African workmen cost the industry £2-J million a year, which would be saved if they could bend the government to their will. The wasted costs were exaggerated and the grievances trivial. They originated in government policy, not in a backward social structure, and were neither irremediable nor so grave as to warrant the use of force. British taxpayers should have queried the wisdom of a war that saddled them with a debt a hundred times as great as the alleged annual loss; a war fought to augment the profits of shareholders or, in J. A. Hobson's memorable phrase, 'to place a small international oligarchy of mine-owners and speculators in power at Pretoria'. His first-hand study of the Transvaal just before the war persuaded him that the mine owners had provoked it to obtain a government suited to their purpose. Their 'one all-important object' was 'to secure a full, cheap, regular, submissive supply of Kaffir and white labour'. 37 This, concisely stated, he argued, was Britain's war aim. The judgement now seems harsh and intemperate, but it gains credibility from the content of the agitation preceding the war and from the policies that followed afterwards. If motives are to be judged by consequences, the mine owners did plot to instal a government able to tap labour resources in Africa and Asia that the republic neither commanded nor wished to utilize. Britain did not, however, make war only to benefit shareholders. South African historians have shown that Cham berlain and Milner, who forced war on the republics, had in mind broad imperial interests which were being threatened by the shift in the balance of power.3 8 Gold mining was changing the Transvaal into Africa's most advanced economic region. It was likely to become the centre of a vigorous Afrikaner nationalism, radiating to the south, drawing to it the loyalties of Afrikaners throughout the sub-continent, and challenging Britain's presence in all South Africa. Chamberlain and Milner

Gold Miners and Imperialist War decided to prevent the growth of a rival imperialism. They demanded franchise reforms that would give British subjects the upper hand in the republic, asserted the rights of a suzerain, and when these stratagems failed, provoked the war. This is a political interpretation. It comes from scholars who reject economic determinism as being too simple and crude an explanation of political events. The interpretation serves as far as it goes, but it does not account for all the facts. The mine owners who plotted against the republic in 1895 cannot be exonerated from blame for the war of 1899. It is of the nature of capitalists to make profits and of governments to make war. Neither will readily admit to responsibility for the other. Yet economic and political motives have seldom blended so nakedly as in the capitalists and politicians who conspired in the last decade of the century to bring about the downfall of the Trans vaal. The South African war of 1899-i9o2 stands as a classic ex

ample of imperialist aggression prompted by capitalist greed. Britain might have atoned for her predatory aims if she had fulfilled her pledge to free Africans, Coloured and Asians from racial tyranny. Milner told a Coloured deputation in January igo that he could not accept their offer to take up arms against the republican forces; but promised to secure fair treatment for all persons of colour in the Transvaal. He 'thoroughly agreed that it was not race or colour, but civilization which was the test of a man's capacity for political rights .39 Two months later, in the first round of peace talks at Middelburg, Kitchener laid the basis for a betrayal of African rights. He told Louis Botha that if the burghers surrendered, they would be allowed to keep their rifles under licence - 'to protect them', in Botha's words, 'from natives'. Secondly, the 'Kaffir question' would be solved by not giving franchise rights to 'Kaffirs' until after the introduction of representative government. 40 The imperial government reacted with a firm declaration of principle. Chamberlain's cable of 6 March go stated: 'We cannot consent to purchase peace by leaving the coloured popu lation in the position in which they stood before the war.' He instructed Milner to modify Kitchener's peace proposals by stipulating that the franchise, if given after the grant of 63

Class and Colour in South Africa 1850-1950 representative government, 'will be so limited as to secure the just predominance of the white race, but the legal position of the Kaffirs will be similar to that which they hold in the Cape Colony'."1 Milner watered down the guarantee by substituting 'coloured persons' for 'Kaffirs' in the text of his letter to Kitchener; but it was clearly Britain's intention at that stage to insist on a non-racial franchise. The republicans rejected the peace terms for reasons other than the franchise. Fighting a stubborn guerrilla war, they wore the British down and sapped their will to continue a struggle that seemed pointless and wasteful after the seizure of the gold mines. On 31 May 1902 Britain agreed at Vereeniging to a peace settlement that would put Afrikaners back in power, give them £3 million to restore the ravaged farms, and keep Africans, Coloured and Indians in subjection. It was Smuts, on behalf of the vanquished, who drafted the decisive clause in the treaty. Article 8 stipulated: 'The question of granting the franchise to natives will not be decided until after the introduction of self-government.' 4 2 The treaty made no mention of Coloured rights and left the issue of the 'native' fran chise to be settled after the introduction of responsible govern ment, and not of representative government as Chamberlain had insisted. By agreeing to these terms, Britain was pledged to allow a white oligarchy to decide whether or not to give the vote to the great majority of the population in the conquered territories. She had tacitly surrendered her moral responsibilities and abandoned her self-assumed role as the protector of Africans and Coloured. Chamberlain told Generals Botha, de Wet and de la Rey in London on 5 September 1902 that there was 'no parallel in history for conditions so generous granted by a victorious belligerent to its opponents'.4 3 Others since then have praised the Vereeniging treaty as a magnanimous gesture, an act of contrition, a bold bid for Anglo-Afrikaner conciliation and a stroke of genius in the best English tradition." Afrikaners and Africans disputed this verdict, the former because an unjust war had deprived them of independence, the latter because an unjust peace had entrenched white supremacy. Referring to the peace treaty, Tengo Jabavu wrote in October

Gold Miners and Imperialist War

that, since 'the English, the Dutch and the Native elements' had a right to be in the country, 'each should be accorded by 1902

the others the common rights of citizenship ,.s Dr Abdurahman,

the outstanding Coloured spokesman in the first quarter of the century, warned that 'in the settlement after the war and in the endeavour to conciliate the two white races the material welfare of the blacks might suffer'. His people wanted to put such 'morbid' fears aside. 'Did not our Gracious King promise protection to the Natives ? Are we not loyal? Is not the British Flag synonymous with justice and freedom ?' So they reasoned. 'But, alasl our forebodings were only too true.' 4 6 Milner concentrated after the war on restoring the mines to full working capacity and on settling British immigrants in rural areas to offset the Afrikaner's ascendancy. Republican tech niques of white domination were improved and expanded for the purpose. Africans in the Transvaal, reported lieutenant governor Sir Arthur Lawley, had hoped that 'the old position of master and servant would be altered'. But his officials were mak ing every effort 'to maintain the relative position of the races as it existed in past days'. 4 7 The effort included a mass of colour

bar laws, many of them churned out before elected members sat in the legislative council. Peasants were forced to give up their arms and return cattle seized during the war, but they never recovered their own stock seized by British troops and republican commandos. Every adult African male was required to pay a labour tax of two pounds, with another two pounds for the second and each additional wife of a polygynist. The administration reshaped the laws on passes, labour contracts and liquor pro hibition; authorized municipalities to segregate Africans in locations; hired out African convicts to mining companies; and prohibited extra-marital intercourse between a white woman and any African, Asian or Coloured. 48 Not surprisingly, some

Africans wished 'to call back the days of the Republic', since X they had received better treatment and wages 'when the Boers dominated'.9

Britain had seven years of supreme authority in which to give the African and Coloured population of the ex-republics a new deal. Military rule was succeeded soon after the end of the 65

Class and Colour in South Africa z85o-r95o

governor war by crown colony government under a lieutenant minority of un assisted by two councils of civil servants. A May 1903 to the official white members were appointed in it acquired a Transvaal's legislative council. Two years later men could majority of elected members for whom only white was bound vote because, the Colonial Office declared, Britain by the treaty of i9o2 to deny representation to her coloured council subjects. 50 Civil servants dominated the executive throughout this period, however, while bills discriminating for against persons not of European descent had to be reserved also attention by the secretary of state. That safeguard appeared set in the Transvaal's constitution of 6 December I9O6, which up a parliament based on an exclusively white male adult suffrage. legal Until then the officials had power enough to do away with liberty' discrimination and extend to all races the 'equal laws, equal of South that Chamberlain had promised in igoo for the whole colonial Africa. s" But Milner's team of college graduates and their officials took over the racial ideologies as well as the offices of republican predecessors at Pretoria and Bloemfontein. The terms of the peace treaty, Milner's racism and the colour of bar constitutions alerted Africans and Coloured to the menace unbridled white power. They protested vigorously and on a scale that signified the presence of a large, well-informed opinion against discrimination. Africans in the Orange River Colony removal of petitioned Britain in 1902 for political rights and the goodwill. 52 of assurances windy only received and colour bars;

Africans was A 'monster' petition signed by 33,ooo Transvaal addressed to the king in I9O5. They asked that 'their interests

should be safeguarded in the granting of the constitution to the New Colonies . Coloured residents of the Transvaal made

similar appeals. 5 4 'As matters stand there is no help for it,' wrote

Jabavu, 'but for the Natives to combine with the Coloured people in the and make their representations to the ruling 5authorities 5 Street.' Transvaal, but better still at Downing

The African Political Organization sent Dr Abdurahman and

Pels

mI 9o6 to petition the government for to En gland

a non-racial franchise in the north. Jabavu regretted that Africans, 'not being properly organized', were not represented 66

Gold Miners and Imperialist War by 'a pure-blooded Native or two'; and took comfort in the thought that the deputies spoke for them as well as for the Coloured.5 6 Abdurahman urged Elgin to stipulate that Britain would extend the franchise to all races if the new colonies failed to do so within a year of obtaining self-government. The Colonial Office replied to this and all other such appeals that article 8 of the peace treaty bound Britain to limit the vote to 57 whites and to deny representation to her coloured subjects. This was a legal quibble, as Abdurahman was quick to point out. Article 8 referred only to 'natives'. It did not exclude Coloured and Asians from the projected franchise or prevent Britain from enfranchising Africans under the APO's formula. These possi bilities were never explored, however, nor was any attempt made to discuss a non-racial franchise on the grounds of merit. The British government, the colonial administration, white immi grants and settlers of all classes and shades of opinion assumed as a matter of course that only white men should exercise the vote in the north. The Transvaal Municipalities Election Ordinance of I9cliN, the prececient For an aU-wute franchise. Lionel Curtis, thefolnb clerk of Johannesburg and one of Milner's team of graduates from New College, Oxford, prepared the draft on which the ordinance was based. His franchise, he claimed, was so liberal 'as to include almost every white British subject, male or female'. 5 8 But his liberalism did not extend to persons of colour. Since article 8 of the Vereeniging treaty did not refer to local government, it could be argued that Britain was free to include them in the municipal vote. Indeed, Milner wanted to extend this vote to aliens and also to coloured British subjects who could pass an education test. Curtis objected, however, to the coloured franchise, and so did the Johannesburg municipal council, which consisted wholly of nominated white members. The official majority in the legislative council could have carried the government's proposal, but the administration preferred to yield without a struggle. Lawley saw no reason for imposing a franchise 'in opposition to the most deep-rooted sentiments of the white population'. He found it impossible to enforce 'a principle repudiated no less 67

Colour and Class in South Africa 1850-950 His govern by the British inhabitants than by the Dutch'. to coloured ment would not grant aliens a privilege denied strong body of British subjects, and so excluded both, though a 5 9 Though white opinion favoured the franchise for white aliens. formally pre patently discriminatory, the ordinance was never reservation sented to the Colonial Office for approval under the facts, but clause. The officials in Whitehall were aware0 of the 6 Britain had chose to ignore the constitutional safeguard. Yet were fought the war ostensibly to enfranchise her subjects who to her aliens in the republic. Her refusal to extend the vote coloured subjects or to aliens made a mockery of her preten sions to a high standard of political morality. She tried to justify the chicanery by pleading respect for the 'people's will', and then violated democracy by ignoring the legitimate claims of the majority. The Colonial Office turned a blind eye on measures taken to 'keep the Kaffir in his place'. It could not similarly ignore attacks on Indians. They had a doughty champion in Mohandas "Gandhi, influential friends in London, and the backing of the government in India. Britain had taken up cudgels on their behalf before the war in a dispute with the republic over the terms of Law 3 of 1885. It excluded Asians from citizenship, denied them the right to reside or own land outside segregated locations, and provided for their registration. Britain eventually agreed to the principle of residential segregation on alleged sanitary grounds, but objected to an order prohibiting Indians from trading outside the segregated areas or bazaars. The dis pute went to arbitration in 1895. Negotiations followed. The republic offered to compromise if the Coloured were included in the segregation law. MiMer replied that he 'could not, to help one class of British subjects, give away the rights of another class'. 6 1 He did just that after the war, however, in order to appease a handful of British shopkeepers. The Orange Free State had barred Asians from settling or trading in the republic. In terms of the Pretoria Convention of 1881, the Transvaal was bound to allow 'any person other than a native' to reside and trade within its borders. For this reason, and because they developed trade with farming communities,

Gold Miners and Imperialist War Kruger's government did not restrict the entry of Indians or segregate them rigorously. Milner's officials did both. They introduced a vexatious system of permits and gave notice, first in April 1902 and again a year later, of their intention to enforce the law of 1885, with exemptions for educated, wealthy Indians and for those who had traded outside the bazaars before the war. Chamberlain protested that he could not justify a continua tion of the republic's discrimination, but Milner endorsed his executive's action. He did this to satisfy the White League, an organization of shopkeepers and racists, and to win support for his policy of importing indentured Asian workers. Then, too, he and his officials believed in white supremacy dogmas. Lawley made this clear in his memorandum of 13 April 1904 on the need for new legislation to fetter Indian trade and immigration. 6 2 He argued, and Milner agreed, that the most momentous issue of the age was probably the struggle between East and West for the temperate zone. To honour past pledges of equality would be a greater crime than to break them, if they had the effect of handing South Africa over to an Asian people. The first duty of British statesmen was to find homes for the white race. Whites would always remain supreme in the public services, professions and farming. White artisans and mechanics could be relied upon to hold their own in the skilled trades by com bining. But Indian traders and small cultivators drove white men out of the retail trade and market gardening. Guided by an instinct of self-preservation, the Transvaal republic had pro hibited Indians from owning land. The same instinct was moving the commercial community to protest against Indian traders.6 3 Lord Selborne, successor to Milner, also saw no way of recon ciling Asian and European claims. South Africa would either remain a 'white man's country', based on a Negro proletariat, or be peopled by natives and Asians under European control. Britain had a duty when the Transvaal was a foreign state to protect her Indian subjects, even to the extent of making their grievances a cause of war. But the government would betray a trust, no less sacred, to the whites if it repealed the republic's anti-Asian law.6" Nearly i,1oo Indians had served in Gandhi's Ambulance Corps 69

Class and Colour in South Africa 185o-950 with British troops against the republics. Yet Britain preferred to betray her allies. The specific reasons given for anti-Asian legislation were as flimsy and contradictory as the Lawley Selborne ideology. Indians were said to have insanitary habits and live in squalor. So did many poor whites in the slums of Fordsburg and Vrededorp, but they were never segregated by law. Asian immigration was said to threaten white supremacy. Yet Lawley, Milner and the mine owners imported 43,000 Chinese for the mines against protests from South Africans of all races. On the other hand, Indians were accused of out-trading whites and using their 'immense wealth', as Lawley described it, to buy out the 'credulous' and 'ignorant Dutch farmer'. Summarizing white prejudices, Gandhi noted that 'the very qualities of Indians count for defects in South Africa'. They were disliked 'for their simplicity, patience, perseverance, frugality and other-worldliness '.65 With British supremacy firmly entrenched and closer union in the offing, a wave of reaction swept through the Cape from the north. In 1903 the East London municipality gave notice that 'Natives and Asiatics shall not be allowed or authorized to congregate, stand or walk upon any pavement' in any principal street or square. In 1904 parliament, reacting to an outbreak of bubonic plague, passed the Native Locations Act, providing for the segregation of urban ATricans. 7.he Immigration Act of 19o6 closed the Cape to Asian men over sixteen years of age from abroad and severely restricted their entry from other parts of South Africa. In the same year Natal brutally suppressed a small Zulu revolt against the ri poll tax, executed twelve Zulu convicted of killing two members of a tax-enforcing squad, and deployed o,ooo armed whites and some 6,0o0 African troops against Bambatha, the chief of a small Lala tribe in Greytown. This was the last upsurge of Zulu military power. The revolt originated in the poll tax, economic distress caused by cattle and crop diseases, and above all in the alienation of over two million acres of good farmland, representing five-twelfths of the Zulu country, to white sugar planters in 19o4. 6 Gandhi, thinking 'I must do my bit in the war' left the Transvaal to join the army 70

lo1--sw

Gold Miners and Imperialist War with a small Indian stretcher-bearer corps; and was there con verted to the ideal of life-long celibacy and poverty in the service of humanity.

He was 'doing his bit' when the Transvaal government intro duced the 'Black Ordinance' of 19o6, making fingerprint registration compulsory tor ati Asians of eight years or upwards. Gandhi saw 'nothing in it except hatred of Indians' and their 'absolute ruin'. A mass meeting held in Johannesburg on ir September took an oath to resist registration. Gandhi and H. 0. Ali, a Coloured Muslim, were deputed to put"e Indian case Mefore the government in Whitehall. They interviewed Lord E ., the secretary of state, and told him: 'Our lot is toay nitely worse than under the Boer regime.' 68 He responded by withholding assent to the 'Black Ordinance', not out of generosity to a persecuted minority, but to evade the issue until the grant of self-government to the Transvaal. This followed in a few days. The Transvaal's new constitution was promulgated on 6 December 19o6. An all-white electorate went to the polls on 2o February 1907. Botha's Het Volk party took office and promptly, on 21 March, introduced a replica of the rejected ordinance. It was passed by the unanimous vote of both houses at a single sitting. The Asiatic Law Amendment Act laid the basis of a pass system such as that applied to Atricans. Every Asian male had to register himself and produce on demand a thumb-printed certi ficate of identity. Unregistered persons and prohibited immi grants could be deported without a right of appeal. The bill went to Elgin under the clause reserving discriminatory laws. He recorded polite disapproval and allowed the bill to stand because, he said, his government felt 'they would not be justified in offering resistance to the general will of the Colony clearly expressed by its first elected representatives '.69 In other words, Britain had transferred power to a racial oligarchy and turned her back on the voteless majority. The Transvaal government, now responsible only to white settlers, bore down on Indians with new discriminations; used an immigration act to keep them out of the colony; and prohibited them from trading or occupy ing land in proclaimed goldfields. 7 0 Led by Gandhi the Indians 71

Class and Colour in South Africa 185o-z95o began the first sustained struggle of a persecuted racial com munity against unjust laws. They refused to register, picketed the permit offices, and went to jail in batches. Smuts, the responsible minister, offered to repeal the Asiatic Law Amendment Act if a majority of Indians undertook to register voluntarily. Gandhi agreed to the com promise and was released with other Satyagrahi prisoners. They did register, but the act was not repealed. Instead, Smuts took new measures to keep Indians out of the Transvaal. Certificates were burnt ceremoniously at a large gathering on 16 August 19o8. At about this time Satyagrahis from Natal started crossing the border illegally to court imprisonment and deportation. Indians overcrowded the jails. Smuts hit back by deporting resisters to India, but this the courts declared to be illegal. Some of Smuts's political principles, observed Gandhi, were ' not quite immoral'; though there was room in them'for cunning 71 and on occasion for perversion of truth'. Gandhi appealed once more to the imperial government when he led another deputation to England in i9o9 to protest against the colour bar in the Act of Union. His mission met with no more success than in 19o6. Gandhi came to South Africa in 1893 to advise on a lawsuit. He delayed his departure to lead a campaign against a bill to disfranchise Natal's Indians, founded the Natal Indian Congress in 1894, and remained for twenty years, duingwic heworked a aha: 'non-violent struggle born of out his technique of Truth and Love'. It ASaec =que suited to the conditions of a small voteless community, numerically weak and tempera mentally disinclined to use physical force. It would become a powerful political instrument in India, but it failed in South Africa because it never acquired a mass base. Provincial barriers, cultural differences, inequalities of wealth and status, and an uneven rate of political development inhibited the growth of a broad non-racial front against white domination. Gandhi and his fellow Indians saw in the African only an innocent tribal peasant who was being corrupted by civilization. They never thought of joining with Africans and Coloured in a common struggle. The Indians fought their battles in isolation and won only moral victories.

4 White Labour Policies

Immigrant workmen of the early twentieth century were not pioneers, frontiersmen or revolutionaries. The colonial society was not so different from their own as to cause a sense of aliena tion. They fitted into the order of things as they found it and did what they could to better their conditions. They combined in ways familiar to them in their home countries, pressed their claims on governments and employers, and took political action to shape legislation affecting their terms of employment. The means they used varied according to the state of the labour market, the composition of the working classes, and the attitude of their masters. These factors, rather than differences in origin or outlook, accounted for the contrasting policies adopted by the labour movement in the Cape and in the northern colonies. The Cape's distinctive features were a non-racial franchise, an old tradition of legal identity between white and Coloured, a high proportion of Coloured artisans and factory workers, and the small size of the African population in the western districts. White and Coloured working people lived in the same neigh bourhood, worked on the same jobs, inter-married occasionally and cohabited more frequently, and had much the same standard of living. The elements of an integrated society existed. Labour leaders and trade unionists accepted the position, canvassed Coloured voters and organized Coloured wage earners. When George Woollends formed a socialist party in 19o4, he cited instances of hospitality extended to whites by Coloured families, and demanded justice for all working men, whether Dutch, Coloured, Malay or British-born. They should rid their minds of false ideas about colour distinctions, he urged, and unite on 1 equal terms for socialism. Not all trade unionists at the Cape were as tolerant. A small, C.S.A.

-4

Class and Colour in South Africa r85o-195o tight society of about i5o stonemasons refused to admit any Coloured and monopolized their trade on public buildings. Robert Stuart (1870-1950), the union's secretary, came to Cape Town from his native city of Aberdeen in 19o, took part in forming the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in I902, and

became a leading organizer of white and Coloured unions. But he never attempted to break down the colour bar in his own trade. Other early unions in the south were less successful in maintaining a colour bar. The plasterers barred 'Coloured labour' from membership in 190I and prohibited any member from working on the same scaffold 'with a coloured man, or a Malay, under pain of a fine'. F. Z. J. Peregrino (1853-1919, b. Accra), the West African editor and publisher of the South African Spectator, remarked scathingly that these 'inconsiderate and unreasonable white men' wished to perpetuate race pre judice, debase the Coloured artisan, and deny him the right to work at his trade. 'The Coloured Mechanic, Malay, black or Africander should make a common cause, and Organize, Organize, Organize.' 2 Bricklayers also adopted a colour bar in 19o4. The Coloured artisans then formed their own union and undercut the white man's wage of i2s. or 14s. a day. Employers hired the cheaper man, and the white workers negotiated with the Coloured for a single union of bricklayers and plasterers. Objections to an open, non-racial union came at times from the Coloured, as in Cape Town's bespoke tailoring trade. White journeymen, most of whom were Jewish, organized a society in 19o5. It tried hard but without success to enrol the large number of Muslims in the trade. Working seventy or eighty hours a week, the Muslims cut and stitched in their homes, usually in a room where the family ate and slept, and earned on an average £3 xos. a week for piece work.3 The union won its first victory in a test case, which decided that master tailors should pay for alterations to an ill-fitting suit. This, the union said, was tangible proof of its ability to fight also the battles of the Muslims, and should gain their confidence. The union then made an agreement with one big firm for a fifty-hour working week, a minimum wage of £4 4s. for a journeyman, and £ for a woman. Even this victory did not convince the Muslims. They adhered to their

White Labour Policies traditional work patterns and preferred to deal directly with shopkeepers and master tailors.' Manufacturers of leather goods, confectionery, cigarettes and furniture had a free hand in the absence of factory or wage legis lation. They employed juveniles and adults in badly ventilated shops, without proper toilet facilities or safeguards against injury. Employers giving evidence in 1906 before a select committee on a factory bill admitted to taking on boys and girls aged twelve years and upwards at a wage of is. 8d. to 2S. 6d. a week. Em ployees worked fifty-two hours a week and, where this was feasible, took work to be completed at home. African labourers were paid 3s. 6d. or 4s. a week; Coloured men might get is. more for the same kind of work. One tobacco firm paid girls of fourteen and sixteen years a weekly wage of 6s. 6d. to 8s. and women cutters 15S. to 35s. Another firm employing more than 300 white girls paid them an average wage of I Is. 3d. a week, and i6s. 7d. for packers. Skilled Coloured men in a food factory received an average of £3 a week, and white skilled immigrants £4 los. or £5 a week. Wages in the leather trade ranged from £2 to £3 a week. Most of the higher-paid men were whites, but they overlapped with Coloured in all skilled and semi-skilled grades. The two wings of the movement worked closely together in organizing May Day celebrations, soup kitchens for the unem ployed, legal defence for Needham and Lewinson, two SDF members arrested in August 19o6 for 'incendiary speeches', and elections. The societies of masons, printers, engineers and cigar makers hired the Federation's hall for meetings. When the cigar ette makers struck work in June for higher wages, they turned the hall into a factory and set up a 'Lock Out Cooperative'. The tailors complained that a member of the SDF was cutting prices, whereupon it decided to call on him to resign if he refused to join the union. But the tailors refused to donate money to the Federation's committee on unemployment, 'as it will lead to trouble in their union to mix up unionism with politics'. 5 Coloured and white working men had similar interests. They joined in the big unemployment demonstrations of 19o6 and in the campaigns of 19o6-7 for a workmen's compensation and 75

Class and Colour in South Africa 185o-z95o factories act. The Labour Advance party, formed in October

x9o5 by the Cape Town trades council and Social Democratic Federation, urged the adoption of a forty-eight hour working

week, universal, free and compulsory education, and adult 6 suffrage for all civilized persons. The party's speakers declared that there should be no distinction between white and Coloured 7 workers. All had the same aims and should work together.

Labour leaders drove the point home when addressing the cosmopolitan audiences at the Stone, the Coloured people's traditional open-air forum on the slopes of Devil's Peak in the workiqg-class area of District Six. The Coloured were sceptical. They drew attention to a 'no Coloured labour' clause in the contract for new university buildings, and blamed the unions. John Tobin, a founding member of the African Political Organ ization (Ap o), accused socialists of being rotten with colour prejudice. They denied the charge indignantly. Wilfrid Harrison, ex guardsman, carpenter and Cape Town's leading socialist, asser ted that the trades council had nothing to do with the obnoxious clause. All unions affiliated to the council welcomed any com petent Coloured tradesman. He proclaimed himself to be a red hot socialist revolutionary, at least in economic affairs, and like all genuine socialists repudiated a colour line. Harry MacManus, an Irish socialist, found a close resemblance between disputes over colour and the feud between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland. Le Roux, speaking in Afrikaans, ridiculed the idea that South Africa could ever be a white man's country. A. Needham, leader of the short-lived Socialist Democratic party, claimed that the 'colour question' had no relevance to socialism. They might 8 as well speak of a 'red question' for men with red hair. This was the language of orthodox socialism, couched in an idiom attuned to the liberal tolerance of the western Cape. The Cape Federation regarded itself as a branch of the London SDF, sold its paper the Clarion, and adopted propa ganda techniques that were suited to the conditions of a multi racial society. New members were welcomed with the singing of the Red Flag; a weekly journal, the Cape Socialist, appeared

when funds permitted; study classes were held for immigrant 76

White Labour Policies Dutchmen, Italians and Jews; and speakers harangued the crowd in Afrikaans, Xhosa and English. The Russian revolution of 19o5 was applauded at a public meeting, to which Olive Schreiner sent a message of solidarity and confidence: 'we are witnessing the beginning of the greatest event that has taken place in the history of humanity during the last centuries.' The Federation gave much attention to the 'Native Question' and the 'Coloured Question', set up a 'Kaffir Propaganda Com mittee', and learned from Harrison that the Coloured people were beginning to consider the question of socialism and how it affected them. He suggested holding meetings at the Stone, the APO's open-air forum, but the Coloured comrades thought that this would be 'discourteous and inadvisable'. They reported 'a good deal of interest among the Malays' and proposed a concert to assist the parliamentary election fund. 9 Staunch socialists on the Rand, in contrast, appealed to a white electorate for protection from Asian, African and Coloured competition. The divergence between the attitudes of the south ern and northern wings of the movement can be explained in terms of a response to contrasting situations. It is less easy to decide how far organized white labour in the north was respon sible for racial policies which it supported, developed and ex ploited for sectional gains. The republic's bitter racialism had infected the whole society, until discrimination seemed as natural and inevitable as differences in skin colour. In its agrarian setting, where farmers hired craftsmen and rarely competed with them, the discrimination determined status, land ownership and political power rather than the division of labour. The industrial colour bar of the mining era was a new development. It originated in the special skills of foreign-born technicians who turned their spheres of employment into a closed preserve. The barriers were not so high or rigid at the end of the war as to keep all dark men out of skilled work. Coloured artisans, lured to the Rand by its promise of 'a golden pound a day', worked at their trades also on the mines. Africans with industrial experi ence could rise above the level of a labourer. Landless Afrikaners and unskilled immigrants were available for manual work at the lower end of the scale. The position was fluid and might have

Class and Colour in South Africa

185o-r95o

been shaped into the pattern of the Cape's open labour market. It was Milner's officials, acting under the Mines, Works and Machinery Ordinance of 1903, who took the decisions that led to a rigid demarcation of work along colour lines. The ordinance itself did not discriminate or authorize a dis crimination that would have brought it within the ambit of matters reserved by the constitution for the secretary of state's approval. By repealing the republican laws ii of 1897 and 12 of x898, the ordinance removed the sole remaining colour bar in the Transvaal's mining legislation. But Wybergh, the com missioner of mines, introduced new colour bars in regulations issued under the ordinance. These defined the posts of manager, engine driver, banksman and onsetter in such a way as to reserve them for whites. 10 Amended regulations of 19o6 did the same thing for the work of a boiler attendant, lift operator, shift boss, 1 surface foreman, mine overseer and mechanical engineer. The discriminations were imposed by an all-powerful British adminis tration, without public pressure, stated reason, or comment by trade unions, mine managements and the legislative council. As in the case of at least two other discriminatory measures - the municipal franchise ordinance and the precious stones ordinance of 1903 - Milner failed to reserve the regulations for approval in

Whitehall. Was it to avoid publicity that Wybergh discriminated in an oblique, almost furtive manner by defining work categories? When president of the Transvaal branch of the South African League, that instrument of British imperialism, Wybergh had conducted a violent and dishonest campaign against the republic in 1898-9. His political activities lost him a lucrative post in Rhodes' Consolidated Goldfields. The firm had been deeply involved in the Jameson Raid and was not disposed to allow its staff to commit it in a similar conspiracy. Milner rewarded him after the war with the key post of commissioner of mines, but forced him to resign in 1903 for having opposed the introduction of Chinese indentured workers. Elected to the legislative assem bly in 1907, Wybergh told the Mining Commission that Africans should be barred by law from working on machinery, partly because they endangered lives but mainly to secure the jobs of white workmen. He suggested that the ban could be imposed 78 a.

White Labour Policies without such a bill 'as would have to be reserved for the consent of the Home Government'. Simply prescribe that white men shall be employed, he advised, 'and you avoid raising the ques tion of imposing disabilities on natives'. 12 Immigrant engine drivers, mechanics, miners and builders took advantage of the administration's racial bias. Many of their leaders, such as Whiteside, Walker, Waterston, Haynes, Craw ford and Andrews, had served with the British army against the republics. Belonging to a conquering nation and a racial elite, they adopted the ideology of a colonial society. The crop of trade unions that sprang up after the war combined class militancy with colour bars. Engineers, engine drivers, iron moulders and carpenters were represented on a joint mechanics committee that conducted a strike in April 19o2 against piece work on the Crown Reef mine. Five months later, 103 men struck work on the Village Main Reef mine where Frederic Creswell, the mine manager, and Wilfred Wybergh, commissioner of mines, were experimenting with a white labour force. Creswell substituted two white helpers at ios. a shift each for the five Africans who usually manned a machine drill at a wage of 2s. in cash and Is. in board and lodging. To offset the rise in labour costs, he told the machine minders to supervise three drills instead of two. They preferred less work to more white labour, however, and walked out, taking the white helpers with them.' 3 In spite of the setback, labour leaders insisted that it was sound for both economic and political reasons to employ large numbers of white labourers at rates intermediate between the African's 3s. and the artisan's 20S. The administration was at first sympathetic, since the proposal fitted in with the Milner-Chamberlain object of attracting as many British immigrants as would swamp the Afrikaner popula tion. Wybergh gave his official backing to the experimental use of unskilled whites on five mines. 14 The railways brought out navvies from Britain in 1903 to lay a permanent track for a wage of 5s. a day and all found. ' 5 But the white labourers were never given a proper trial. The mine owners had political and economic objections to their employment. Milner, ever complaisant to wards the Chamber, was converted to its policy of introducing 79

Class and Colour in South Africa r85o-.95o indentured Asians, and set his mind on preparing the white the public for a decision that would cause as great an uproar as proposed introduction of convicts to the Cape in 1849. Creswell and Wybergh were dismissed from their posts, the British railway navvies were repatriated, and an inter-colonial customs con ference, held at Bloemfontein in March 1903, was manoeuvred into supporting the Chamber's scheme. The conference found, on no evidence other than the reluc tance of Africans to work for the prevailing rate of wages, that there were not enough of them south of the Zambesi to satisfy demands for labour. Therefore, the conference recommended, Asians should be admitted under strict state control and on the 6 firm condition of eventual repatriation, Milner appointed a Labour Commission to substantiate these findings, and nego tiated for the introduction of io,ooo Indians to be employed on on a railway works. The Indian government rightly insisted 17 Milner relaxation of the Transvaal's anti-Asian legislation. refused to make any concessions, withdrew his request, and threw his weight behind the Chamber's policy of importing Chinese. The majority of the Labour Commission duly reported that 'white labour cannot profitably compete with black' in 'the lower fields of manual industry'. The gold mines, they said,

were short of 129,000 labourers; the shortage would rise to 325,000 by 19o8; and Africa could not meet requirements.",

Two commissioners, Peter Whiteside and J. W. Quinn, dis puted these findings. Whiteside, an Australian-born engine driver, president of the Witwatersrand Trades and Labour Council, and a nominated member of the Johannesburg town council, was a fervent racist. His associate Quinn later took a leading part in the agitation against the Chinese and for respon sible government. Both men insisted that though white labour ers, if given a fair trial, would supplement and even supersede Africans, mine owners wanted to perpetuate an 'inferior race' system of labour organization. They had a political bias against a big influx of white labourers, who would strengthen the work ing class and enable it to determine both wages and state policy. The minority report blamed the employers for the shortage of African workers, alleged that it was temporary, and urged the

White Labour Policies adoption of a fixed ratio between white and African workers. These were principles on which the labour movement would base its white labour policy in years to come. The economic motives for the introduction of Chinese arose out of Milner's 'struggle for British supremacy'. I The war had devastated the Transvaal and disrupted the recruiting system of the mines. The output of gold dropped from its peak of C1,71o,ooo in August 1899 - under a supposedly corrupt and inefficient regime - to £823,000 in December 1902. As many Africans worked for a wage in the Transvaal as before the war, but the number employed on gold mines declined from 107,482 in 1899 to 64,577 in June 1903.20 The decline revealed the African's good sense and the actual source of profit. For the owners had taken advantage of the war to cut his average wage from 47s. Id. in 1898 to 26s. 8d. in 1901-2. Men of the Cape, Basutoland and Bechuanaiand "refused altogether to engage themselves at the reduced rate of pay'. 2 1 Natal closed its borders to recruiters. Settlers in central Africa also opposed recruiting, which would force up wages, then 3s. or 5s. a month in Nyasaland. Mozam bique alone continued to forward its conscripted workers, though even here old mine hands refused to work for the lower rate. There was no time to spare, in the view of Milner and the owners; they wanted a ready-to-hand proletariat at the lowest possible cost who would restore the mines to full working capacity without delay, satisfy shareholders, attract new capital, save Milner's reputation and the Transvaal from bankruptcy. They would not wait for taxation and land seizures to turn African peasants into work seekers. 'Is this huge industry to be a school for teaching savages to become civilized workers?' thundered Sir George Farrar when he moved in the legislative assembly on 28 December 1903 that government be asked to legislate for the introduction of Chinese. One of the men sen tenced to death by the republic's high court for their role in Jameson's raid, Farrar admitted that it was a mistake to have reduced the African's wage; or to have thought, as his side did, that the war would last only six weeks. But, he added, they would make another mistake if they imported unskilled whites, for this 81

Class and Colour in South Africa 185o-z95o meant labour combinations, discontent, strikes and nothing else. He spoke for his class. Charles Rudd, one of Rhodes' partners, and other company directors agreed that a big body of enfran chised white workers 'would simply hold the Government of the country in the hollow of their hand' and 'more or less dic tate, not only on the question of wages, but also on political questions'.22 There was, too, the fear of inter-racial fraterniza tion. Top-ranking executives and engineers told Joseph Cham berlain in Johannesburg in January 1903 that the white man would forfeit his natural supremacy and cease to be the master if he worked side by side with Africans as fellow labourers. 2 3 Chamberlain's views were as misinformed and intemperate as the mine owners'. Africans alone among the world's great races, he said, believed that 'the only honourable employment for a man is fighting, that labour is the work of slaves'. Slavery had been abolished in theory, but the 'Kafir' bought his wives, who worked 'to keep him in idleness'. Abdurahman replied in a biting analysis of Chamberlain's speech, which, he pointed out, con tained the same arguments as those used by mine magnates in favour of forced labour. Chamberlain had not mentioned the thirty per cent reduction in the African's wage, his unhealthy working conditions, or the over-capitalized mines 'which cannot pay a dividend until the Kafir is compelled to work at a wage 4 fixed by the mining magnates'.2 Africans and Coloured stood to lose most from an influx of low-paid, indentured workers; and voiced their objections at meetings in the Cape, Transvaal and even isolated Bechuanaland. Jabavu circulated a petition to the king to 'avert this evil' of importing Asiatics 'with no idea of any rights, and with morals and habits unlike those of the European races, in which your petitioners have been hitherto trained '.2 The Chinese, he wrote after importing had begun, cost more and did less work than the African, who 'cordially detested' them. 26 White workers on the Rand were less united on the 'Chinese question'. The trades councils of Johannesburg and Pretoria claimed that all unions 'totally' or 'largely' opposed the im portation. 27 According to Milner, however, the miners were predominantly, and other artisans mostly, in favour. 28 The

White Labour Policies trades council accused mine managements of browbeating their employees into acquiescence. For this reason, or because they believed that the industry and their jobs were in danger, a significant number of miners passed resolutions and signed peti tions for the immediate introduction of indentured, non-British Asians to be employed only on unskilled work. Mine owners told the men that they had less to fear from the Chinese than from a horde of unskilled whites who, Farrar warned, would soon become skilled 'and compete with you'. He dangled the prospect of sheltered employment before a miners' audience at Boksburg in March 1903. The Chinese, he explained, would be repatriated, prohibited from trading or holding land, and excluded by law from many specified occupations. 2 9 The Labour Importation Ordinance of 19o4 duly prohibited the employment of Chinese in fifty-five scheduled occupations, in cluding such non-mining trades as bricklaying, carpentry, plumbing, painting, gardening and clerical work. Among other consequences, the agitation for and against the Chinese aroused and hardened colour prejudices, precipitated the emergence of the Afrikaner Het Volk party, prepared the ground for cooperation between Afrikaner nationalism and the white labour movement, and facilitated the introduction of a code prescribing minimum standards of housing, food, medical care and sanitation for African miners. 3 0 The Chinese were employed under conditions agreed by the owners, the Transvaal administration, the British and Chinese governments, after lengthy negotiations which centred mainly round the issues of wages and repatriation. Alfred Lyttleton, the secretary of state for colonies, complained that he 'really could not defend an arrangement by which the Chinese would be used to lower Kaffir wages'. 3 1 He was later bullied into agreeing to a guaranteed minimum wage of Is. to is. 6d. a shift, compared with the African's basic rate of Is. 6d. for surface and 2s. for underground work. Housed in compounds and working sixty hours a week, the Chinese were allowed a daily ration of I1 lb. of rice, J lb. of vegetables, and J lb. of meat or fish. The maxi mum compensation for death or total permanent disablement was fixed at £Io.

Class and Colour in South Africa

1850-1950

Medical officers attributed the occurrence of scurvy among African miners to the deficiencies of a mealie-meal diet and recommended the addition of rice, millet, legumes, meat and fresh vegetables. 32 The Chamber, however, 'viewed the native purely as a machine, requiring a certain amount of fuel', and took as its standard the 'minimum amount of food which will give the maximum amount of work' .3 3 Regulations issued in 19o6 prescribed a minimum of z lb. of mealie-meal and I oz. of salt a day, supplemented by 2 lb. of bone-free meat or fish, i lb. of soupmeat, i lb. of vegetables and i lb. of sugar or treacle a week. Though low in vitamins, calcium, animal protein and calories, the diet was a great improvement, saved many lives, and virtually eliminated scurvy as a cause of death. The men satisfied their craving for meat and milk by buying large quanti ties from the concession stores. No mine ever supplied milk, butter, cheese or eggs. Yet milk was a staple diet of men from stock-breeding communities and a primary source of the food constituents in which the mine ration was most deficient. The same kind of cheeseparing policy was applied to housing, working conditions and medical care. Huts of brick or stone, built for the Chinese and later also for Africans, were badly overcrowded, with rooms holding twenty or forty men each. The regulations prescribed a maximum air space of 200 cubic feet per inmate, though Dr Turner, the Medical Officer of Health, insisted that even 300 cubic feet were 'far too little'. 3 4 The Chamber replied that the adoption of his standard would cost the owners an additional £i million. No eating halls, tables or chairs were provided. The men drew their rations in tin bowls and mugs and ate squatting on the cement paving of the courtyard or sitting on the bunks in their sleeping quarters. They worked twelve hours a day on the surface or eleven hours underground without food, were often kept waiting in wet clothes for as much as three hours while the skips were being used to transport rock, and walked back to the compounds in a state of exhaustion, their bodies covered with stale sweat and grime. The regulations of 19o6 compelled owners to provide change houses for white and Coloured miners, but not for Africans, many of whom contracted pneumonia and chest com 84

White Labour Policies plaints through being exposed to sudden and great changes of temperature and altitude. 3 s Most mines had no hospitals before 19o6. when the health regulations obliged the owners to provide hospital accommoda tion for not more than two and a half per cent of the average number of Africans employed. In 1914, the Rand mines between them had only ten full-time doctors, each attending to between 82 and 265 hospital patients. There were thirty-nine part-time doctors, who had to reconcile their duty to helpless indentured Africans with the exacting demands of white miners backed by sick-benefit societies. The part-time men usually visited the hospital once a day to look at new patients and sign death certi ficates. Mine hospitals were managed by unqualified superin tendents and untrained African nurses who were paid 2s. or 2s. 6d. a day. Patients were underfed, mechanically treated with purgatives on admission, neglected, and forced to work during convalescence. Hospital costs were low and mortality rates high. Henry Burton, the minister of native affairs, asked in 1911: 'How is it that these things have not struck the mining people years ago? Here are these fellows, lying in their beds, and dying off like a lot of rats, [yet) nobody does a thing.' The hospital services became efficient only after the government had put a stop in 1913 to recruiting in tropical regions north of 220 south latitude and compelled the mines to pay compensation for miners' phthisis. 3 6 The high turnover of migrants exposed great numbers of men to the unfavourable conditions, spread the risk of pneu moconiosis and venereal diseases over a wide area, and delayed the peasant worker's adjustment to an industrialized environ ment. Mine owners acknowledged that 'the immense cost' of labour was 'not in the actual wages which we pay, but in the time wasted in teaching new batches'. 37 A certain way to reduce the high death rate from pneumonia was to settle the miners with their families in villages along the Reef, advised General Gorgas of Panama fame. 3 8 The owners preferred to offset the cost of wasted lives and skills with savings on housing, food and wages. Africans received less than a living wage, while their families kept themselves on the land. The owners contended that the

,Z. _'-

Class and Colour in South Africa z85o-z950 migratory system was 'a fundamental factor' in the mining economy and essential to their prosperity. If the African 'has not got the reserve subsistence to go back to', said Gemmill, the a wage to make it secretary of the Chamber, 'we cannot afford 9 s possible for him to live in an urban area', Segregation in compounds, labour migration and job reserva tion accentuated the racial and cultural differences between white miner and Africans. He was their 'boss', and not a fellow worker; and he tended to enforce his orders with kicks and blows. Africans 'were knocked about by irresponsible miners under ground', said George Trow at a Tembuland meeting; but they would not complain for fear of being sjambokked by African mine police.4 ° Jabavu, being anxious 'to secure a perennial stream of Natives to the Goldfields' and a reciprocal flow of wages to the reserves, had no time for the 'discontented trouble maker' on the mines; he attributed their unpopularity to com 41 pound managers drawn from Natal with Zulu police. The correspondence columns of his paper recorded other grievances in 1907-8, when the Chinese were being repatriated. Labour

agents misrepresented conditions to recruits who loafed, deser ted or struck work on finding that they had been deceived. Task work was another serious grievance. Drillers were obliged to drill at least forty-two inches during a shift, for which they were paid 2S., with Id. for every additional inch drilled. A driller might have to spend three or four hours clearing debris blasted out by the preceding shift before he reached the place marked for a hole. If he failed to complete the norm, however, his shift boss would refuse to mark his ticket. This meant that he was not paid for the day's work or credited with a shift towards the com pletion of his service contract.4 2 Pneumatic drills were then taking the place of hand drilling. Originally operated by white miners with African 'helpers', the heavy, cumbersome machine was at first considered a highly specialized tool, and the operator a skilled workman. During the war, and as Cornish miners returned home or died of phthisis, Africans were employed to 'run' the machine drill for an un skilled labourer's wage. The white miner became a supervisor, responsible for one or two drills operated by an African 'helper'

White Labour Policies and his team. Creswell, as we have seen, wanted the miner to take charge of three drills operated by white labourers and so provoked a strike in 1902 at the Village Main Reef mine. In 19o7 the manager of Knights Deep mine instructed each miner to supervise three drills manned by Africans. The miners' union, at that time a craft organization confined to holders of blasting certificates, accused the owners of diluting skilled labour in preparation for large-scale retrenchments of whites. The men at New Kleinfontein mine struck work on i May. The strike spread until more than 4,000 miners were involved. Smuts, as minister of mines, made his first appearance as protector of the propertied class and of mine owners in par ticular. He called out the imperial garrison, who broke up picket lines and protected scabs. Africans and Chinese worked the mines without close supervision. Employers declared a lock out, dismissed the strikers and took on Afrikaners in their place. The strikers trickled back to work, and the union acknowledged defeat at the end of July. The executive's members and other leading strikers were victimized, the number of white miners employed was reduced by ten per cent, and the cost of breaking rock fell by twenty-five per cent. 4 3 Jabavu, ever partial to Afrikanerdom, applauded the entry of young 'colonials' in the industry. Their presence would establish 'a better understand ing' between burghers and the mining populations, besides stopping the drain of money remitted by Cornish miners to their families. 4 4 H. L. Phooko, representing the Transvaal Native Congress, drew a more significant conclusion in evidence before the Mining Commission of 1907. By keeping the mines in produc tion during the strike, he remarked, Africans had shown a capacity to master all parts of the mining operation. They were not intellectually itfterior and often performed skilled work, though the law denied them freedom of contract and held them down as unskilled. 45 The commission, too, rejected the theory that the African was a 'mere muscular machine' and no more than 'an aid to enable the White man to earn wages sufficient to keep him in contentment'. Africans, warned the commission, were not 'barred by lack of brain and industrial training from 87

Class and Colour in South Africa r85o-195o

interfering with the White man's opportunities of employ ment'.46 The Transvaal Indigency Commission of x9o6-8 held

a similar view, and refused to recommend measures to protect white workers. Africans were being trained in regular work, showed a great yearning for education, and would in time insist on higher wages and access to superior kinds of work. Protective devices such as a fixed ratio between racial groups of employees or a minimum white wage would only discourage the employ ment of whites, insulate them against pressures for efficiency, and so hamper them in the coming struggle for supremacy.4 7 The miners themselves were in two minds about the white labour policy. A minority preferred African helpers. White labourers, according to this school of thought, were either casual, transient workers or Afrikaners who would learn the trade and saturate the market for skilled miners. 48 Men holding this view wished to maintain their bargaining power by limiting the diffusion of skills. Africans were socially inferior, easily handled and unlikely to compete. Jimmy Coward, a leading member of the miners' union and of the Independent Labour party, and at one time mayor of Germiston, claimed that he could take 'a raw green Kaffir from the Kraal' and within a week 'make him competent for me to leave my machine with him and go away whenever I have a mind'. White men were not willing to boss other white men in the same way as they would 'kaffirs'. He for 49 one would not do it.

Most labour leaders agreed with the Cornish miner Tom Mathews, secretary of the union from 19o8 to the time of his death from phthisis in 1915. He would treat Africans decently but 'not let them be free', and would rather have a white youth under him than 'a kaffir, or two kaffirs for that matter'. 5° The engineers' union, whose chief spokesman was its national organ izer W. H. Andrews, set out the reasons for this preference with prodigious subtlety in a memorandum submitted to the Mining Commission. 51 The coloured races, if unchecked would rise to the top and endanger the state itself by reason of their numbers, vitality and low standards. Unfair competition by unskilled whites was therefore more natural and infinitely more desirable than competition by Africans. Since white men were citizens 88

White Labour Policies and voters, they were 'far more likely to look at the matter from the point of view of the general welfare of the community.' On the other hand, 'the kaffir has no interest in the country except that he gets his living here. He has no voice in the Government'. Trade unionists who claimed privileges in the name of the capitalist state and for the general welfare of a class society had turned their backs on radical socialism. As members both of an inferior class and of a racial elite they were in an ambivalent position. It deflected them from their traditional attitudes. Ex perience of labour dilution convinced them that employers would substitute the cheaper coloured worker. A racial bar hardly needed justification in their eyes. It was a protective device, like restraints on the number of apprentices or on reclassification of jobs. Since the threat came from an alien and oppressed race, however, the trade unionists identified themselves with white supremacy so as to legitimate their class interests. Though Mathews, Andrews and other socialists of the time may not have been racists, they certainly excluded the African from their vision of the ideal commonwealth. Refusing to recognize him as a fellow worker and ally, they fused their craft outlook with the colour prejudices of feudalistic landowners in a struggle against both capitalists and Africans. The time had not yet come, however, for governments to catch votes with promises of sheltered employment. More ortho dox views about the value of competition prevailed, as in the report of the Indigency Commission. Trade unionists therefore found it expedient to demand protection from competition in the guise of protection against accidents. The plea that only trained and qualified persons should be employed in positions of trust seemed reasonable. Once the principle had been estab lished, it was easy to equate a white skin with technical skills and a sense of responsibility. The owners themselves were to blame for the myth of the African's incompetence. They objected to a regulation of 1896 that obliged managers to explain to illiterate workers, 'especially persons of colour', the rules 'apper taining to their particular occupation and duty'. Formal instruc tion was confined to whites, first by way of apprenticeship and classes in drilling techniques, and later at evening courses

Class and Colour in South Africa r850-1950 The govern conducted by the Transvaal University College. i, admitted only ment mining school. opened at Wolhuter in 19 their trade on white men. Africans and Coloured had to learn the job from the white miner. the Mining Miners and mechanics who appeared before claim with some Regulations Commission of 1907-10 could efficiently and plausibility that the mines would be run more certificated with fewer accidents if only white and preferably Dr F. E. T. men were employed on all engines and machinery. assistant attorney Krause, the chairman, was sympathetic. As one Forster, a general in the republic, he had clashed with on a charge lawyer who defended Baron von Veltheim in 1896 of bizarre inci of murdering the magnate Woolf Joel. A series in 1902 dents led to Krause being sentenced at the Old Bailey to incite the to two years' imprisonment for an alleged attempt 1904, Krause murder of Forster. Returning to Johannesburg in for Het Volk sat on the municipal council in 1907-8, stood elections of Party against Bill Andrews in the parliamentary and other radicals in 19io, subsequently defended communists pass laws. political trials, and spoke up strongly against the a When chairman of the commission, however, he advocated in white labour policy. South African whites and Afrikaners industry. particular. he urged should be trained for the mining Trade unionists admitted frankly that they wanted a colour for bar to raise the status of their trade and provide employment said whites. Tom Hannegan, on behalf of the engine drivers, out of that they would do all they could 'to take these boilers of the hands of coloured men'.52 The Amalgamated Society Engineers similarly coupled safety measures with employment other opportunities. The 'growing practice of placing kaffirs and coloured persons in charge of boilers, winches, engines and other machinery' increased the danger to life and limb; it also reduced 'the sphere of employment for European labour without which this colony cannot progress'. The union urged that 'no Kaffir or other coloured person' should be issued with a certificate of 53 competence or allowed to take charge of machines. But none of the witnesses produced evidence to show that accidents were more likely to occur when Africans operated boilers and winches.

White Labour Policies 'It is reasoning and you do not require proof,' said Bill Andrews. Government records showed that the number of mine acci dents caused by overwinding was small and unrelated to the employment of uncertificated drivers. Managers, engineers and inspectors agreed that engines not used for hauling persons could be safely entrusted to uncertificated operators. Many uneducated and even illiterate men made excellent drivers. Training, sobriety, 54 self-reliance and nerve were the qualities of a good driver. Meeting in committee to digest the evidence, the commission viewed the proposal to license drivers of all types of engines with great scepticism. Krause suspected that the real motive was 'to prevent all intelligent work on the mines from being done by natives'. The commissioners agreed among themselves that drivers of motor cars should be licensed, but not the drivers of traction and stationary engines, including those used for hauling 55 rock. The commission criticized mine managements for employing large numbers of unskilled whites 'often entirely ignorant of mining, and whose principal and often only recommendation is their physical fitness and their suitability for rough work'. Yet when the commission reported in x91o, it submitted draft regulations that were heavy with colour bars. Some appeared in the interpretation of terms, as when the words 'white person' were inserted in the definition of banksman, onsetter, ganger and mine manager. Some took the form of an injunction to employ only whites in specified occupations, such as blasting, running elevators driving engines, supervising boilers and other machinery; or as shift boss and mine overseer. Furthermore, only whites would be allowed to obtain the certificates of com petence required, for instance, by engine drivers and boiler attendants. The draft served as a model for the colour bar regulations issued by Smuts under the Mines and Works Act of 1911. The only reason given in the Krause report for this massive and far-reaching piece of racial discrimination was the bare and unsubstantiated assertion that 'wherever the safety of life and limb is concerned only competent White persons should be employed 5 The Chamber of Mines made a formal protest. It pointed out

Class and Colour in South Africa z85o-z95o that discriminatory regulations would be ultra vires if not authorized by the enabling statute; and suggested that 'com 7 petent' or 'reliable' be substituted for 'white person ', But the mine owners never contested the regulations until after the miners had suffered the great defeat of 1922. Owners and govern ment acquiesced for political reasons in a discrimination that was both unjust and unlawful. The African's capacity was never seriously questioned. Engineers and mine managers agreed that selected Africans, adequately trained, would be as competent 5as8 the white man for any job including that of a mine manager. No attempt was ever made, however, to give him systematic training for skilled work. None of the many commissions that inquired into the state of labour organization even considered the possibility of systematic training. Their only concern, when they discussed the African's role, was the degree of protection that should be given to white workers against competition. The claim that the colour bar has a prophylactic function is not borne out by the exceptionally high incidence of accidents on the mines. More than 30,000 men died in accidents on gold mines during the first half of the century. Untold others died from septicaemia and other effects of accidental injuries, or lost limbs and sight, or were otherwise disabled by accidents. The death rate from accidents on all mines in 19io was 4"05 per 1,000

African employees and 3-36 per I,ooo whites. The rate fell to 1.56 for both groups by 1956, but the accident rate was then 58-7 per 1,ooo miners, as compared with 30 in 1927, when the

existing definition of accidents was first introduced. The decline in the death rate must therefore be attributed to improvements in first aid and medical treatment rather than to more effective preventive measures. For an accident is not a fortuitous, un avoidable event. It is broadly, the result of defective adaptation or inadequate control of environment. Though unintended and unforeseen, it flows from a deliberate act, and can be averted by the adoption of sufficient care or by technical and material safeguards. The high and increasing incidence of accidents on mines points to deficiencies in management. Far from saving lives, the colour bar reduced standards of efficiency and safety. By keeping Africans ignorant of their trade,

White Labour Policies the owners sent up accident rates and strengthened the white worker's claim to a monopoly of preferred occupations. Com petence was identified with skin colour. Yet a large number of Africans by dint of intelligence and long service, were more skilled than their white overseer. The Chamber acknowledged in 1914 that such men were 'in many cases as good, or better, judges as to safety underground' than the partially trained white supervisors. 'The time has now arrived,' urged Abdurahrnan, 'when we should agitate for the repeal of those regulations which prohibit Coloured men from performing skilled work on the mines.' s9 The regulations remained to block the African's prospects of promoLion blunt his initiative and deprive him of incentives to become more proficient. Colour bars discouraged efficiency for different reasons also in the white miner He was trained but left the actual manual work to Africans. The division of functions tended to cultivate indifference in miners and managements alike to the African's safety. Fergusson Boksburg's outspoken mining inspector, drew attention to the consequences in his report for o910-1I.60 In England where mining was something of an hereditary occupa tion a miner's son would assist his father by doing work of the kind allocated to Africans on the Rand. The English miner took great care to secure and make safe the places where a lad was set to work, and to point out dangers to him. In the gold mines, however 'the death of a native is not looked upon by the miners here as a very serious affair' The directors were well aware that 'hundreds of men lose their lives annually through careless ness on the part of the miners and apathy on the part of the officials'; but made no effort to have matters improved. The probable explanation for their indifference lay in the old adage: 'Dead men tell no tales 'For 'a live Kaffir who has been assaulted is in a position to do a great deal of harm on his return home by persuading his friends not to allow themselves to be recruited'. Ten pounds were paid in compensation to the dependants of an adult killed in an accident and £5 to those of a young umfaan.* The African was cheap in death as in life and scarcely worth the cost of safety measures that might slow down production. Mine * Xhosa for young boy, lad.

Class and Colour in South Africa z85o-195o owners objected vigorously to the first statutory obligation im posed by the Native Labour Regulation Act of 191I1 to compen sate Africans for injuries. The benefits ranged from CI to £2o for partial incapacity and from £30 to £50 for total permanent disablement. A man who lost a leg and became virtually un employable received a maximum of £20, the equivalent of four months' wages, board and lodging. The higher scale was ex tended in 1914 to include cases of fatal injuries. Though grossly inadequate, and notably less in relation to earning power than the benefits paid to injured white miners, the statutory scales gave mine officials a powerful incentive to reduce the number of accidents. Africans were expendable. They had a preferential claim to rough, hard and dangerous work, as in rock drilling, which exposed the operator to deadly clouds of silica dust. When the white miner became phthisis conscious, drilling ceased to be regarded as skilled and was entrusted wholly to Africans. Asked whether white apprentices could be substituted for young Africans in cyanide works and mills, Henry Hay, the manager of the Witwatersrand Deep, replied: 'You could not put white boys in the mill work, it is too dangerous; you could put them to be careful.' 6 1 in the cyanide works, but you would have Conventional divisions between skilled and unskilled labour often denoted the hazards of the operator's calling or his skin colour rather than the degree of skill involved. Thousands of Africans employed as drillers, trammers, packers, or in laying and firing charges, would be considered skilled in Europe and America. They were called 'boys' in South Africa and were paid one-ninth of the white miners' wage. Discrimination spread from the mines to other trades in which the safety factor was insignificant. English-speaking immigrants asserted a prior right to all occupations. White South Africans learned from them to agitate for a white labour policy in govern ment, municipal and railway services, in factories, bakeries and butcher shops. 6 2 The cry went up also in Natal, where labour leaders railed against the employment of Indians and Africans 63 White as crane drivers, riveters, mechanics and painters. supremacy claims were expanded early in the century into a

White Labour Policies demand for total segregation. J. E. Riley, president of the Johannesburg trades council and a militant member of the Operative Masons' Society, urged in r907 that all Africans should be confined to reserved areas in the colony. 6 4 The trade union ists who pressed for a colour bar seldom attempted to reconcile it with their class outlook. Appealing to race prejudice, they applied their traditional, protectionist policies to what they regarded as an extreme case of unfair competition. Africans were said to be the unwitting instrument of the capitalist class. Housed in compounds, paid less than a living wage, denied the right to strike or combine, they threatened the white man's job. Given a free hand, the capitalists would run the country with a multitude of bonded workmen for the benefit of foreign shareholders. Legal protection for the artisan was no more than a counterweight to the African's legal disabilities. 'I hold that the Kaffir should be allowed to get free,' said Tom Mathews, 'but in the interim, as he is here only as a semi-slave, I have a right to fight him and to oust him just as the Australians ousted the Chinamen and the Kanakas.' If he were to be allowed to compete with the artisan, the African should do so on an open market, as a free worker and without the mean advantage of a servile status.6 5 Labour leaders might have been acquitted of acting out of self-interest and racial arrogance if they had demanded equal rights for all workmen. Few, however, pressed for the removal of restraints imposed on the African's bargaining power by in dentured labour, compounds, pass laws and the master and servant acts. Labour men even failed to protest on humanitarian grounds against the conditions that caused the death from disease and accidents of some 5,ooo Africans a year on Transvaal mines between 1903 and 1920. These were the formative years of labour legislation. A firm stand made against discrimination could have done much to narrow the gap between artisans and Africans. The racists who led the labour movement missed the opportunity, as when the Transvaal parliament passed the Indus trial Disputes Prevention Act of 19o9. The first of its kind in South Africa, it introduced conciliation procedures in essential municipal services, mining, the building trades, engineering

Class and Colour in South Africa z85o-195o

employees and and metal works; and applied only to white employers of more than ten white persons. Africans R. Goldman, the member for Newtown, said that virtually should not have the right to strike, since they could their labour. De paralyse the mining industry by withholding mines, agreed. Villiers, the attorney-general and minister of not competent Moreover, he said, Africans were 'ignorant and was far distant to appoint an arbitrator'. He hoped that the day in a strike. It when they would be capable of combined action labour policies, was left to Wybergh, a leading advocate of white had dislocated the to defend, if sideways, the African. Who by their 'in mining industry if not the owners themselves, 'to an enormous defensible and arbitrary' act in cutting wages they excluded extent' before and during the war? The more be the incentive Africans from industrial laws, the greater would humble slaves, to employ them 'because they were being made to be dealt not able to speak for themselves, therefore easier white people'. with and more satisfactory to employers than Africans That was his great reason, he explained, for wanting Even this to be covered by the act in the same way as whites. and Samp appeal to self-interest failed to move Whiteside, Reid

to include son, the Labour party members. They were prepared be Coloured, among whom were first class mechanics. It would the shop a strange thing, said Sampson, if they were to remain in while white men came out on6 6 strike. 'Nobody,'

he added,

'intended to include the Kaffir.'

The advantages of inter-racial class solidarity seemed remote and im and problematical. White solidarity promised real

mediate gains. The small number of artisans in key positions of could wrest concessions with comparative ease at the expense by labourers. Labour leaders were able to strengthen their hand as claiming that the interests of white workers were the same those of the entire white community. Class struggles between whites, they argued, set a bad example to Africans. W. McLarty, the member for Durban gave this as a reason in 1903 for the introduction of industrial conciliation. A strike of white brick layers, he said, was followed by a successful strike of African tramwaymen. 'We have the Native population growing up around

White Labour Policies us, and being educated, and they are learning to strike.' He uttered the same warning in 19o9, when introducing a bill to settle disputes between employers and white working men. The Natal railwaymen's strike of that year was a grim reminder, he said, of the unsettling effects of a long strike on African, Indian and other workers. 6 Appeals to racial sentiment strengthened the case for factory legislation. What could be more persuasive than sensational dis closures of white girls working side by side with Africans and Indians in sweated food and clothing factories? This was the line taken by C. H. Haggar, the Labour member for Durban, in moving his factories bill in i909. He spoke of 'Kaffirs mould ing and kneading the dough in the trough, and the perspiration running down them into the trough'; of laundries where 'you find Coolies sleeping on the clothing sent there'.68 His bill contained a clause prohibiting employees of different sex and different races from working in the same rooms at the same time. This, rather than the protection of workmen against excessive exploitation, would have been the most significant effect if the bill had become law. In the event, many years were to pass before parliament implemented Haggar's proposal to segregate one racial group of factory workers from another.

C.S.A.

-5

5 Workers and the Vote

White labour policies emerged from an all-white franchise.

Having concentrated political power in the white minority, the it British administration in the Transvaal connived at giving control of industry, commerce and the skilled trades. Political power opened the door to economic privilege. Class, colour and national antagonisms offered a wide range of possibilities. Am bitious working men could appeal to class interests against em

ployers or to racial sentiments against Africans and Asians; combine with Britishers against 'the Boer' or with Afri kaners against 'the capitalist'. Trade unionists and socialists on the Rand made a bid for political leadership soon after the war by forming the Witwatersrand Trades and Labour Council. Its foundation members were the societies of boiler makers, bricklayers, carpenters, engine drivers, engineers, iron moulders, musicians, printers, shop assistants and stonemasons. The council's aims were modestly worded so as to disarm any suspicion of an intent to organize unions or interfere in their domestic affairs. It would link 'all branches of the working classes' together, promote the efficiency and progress of trade societies, and 'secure the return of representatives upon all governing bodies'. A parliamentary committee was elected to report on bills and motions affecting trade and labour. Delegates could be unseated for taking part in political activity 'not in conformity with the accepted policy of the Council'.' This was the language of a political organization, and the council was commonly referred to as the Labour party. Patriotic members of the council worked closely with the British administration. Both the council and the miners' union backed Milner's proposal that the Transvaal should donate £30 million to the cost of the war. Chamberlain, when visiting the 98

Workers and the Vote Rand in January 1903, congratulated the unions on their decision. Working men in England, he said, were also paying towards the cost. They 'would feel they were rather left in the lurch by their comrades here, if they alone of all classes were to object to any contribution '.2 Peter Whiteside, president of the trades council, and Alexander Riatt, branch president of the ASE, were rewarded with seats on Johannesburg's nominated town council, while Milner also appointed Riatt as a member of the legislative council to represent the working classes. Born in Glasgow in 1867, Riatt qualified as a mechanical engineer, emigrated to South Africa in 189o, took a prominent part in the British agitation against the republic, and fought with Bethune's mounted infantry in the war. A leading opponent of the Chinese labour policy, he was again rewarded with a seat on the legisla tive council after the introduction of responsible government in 1907. He resigned his seat, however, to become Inspector of White Labour three months before he died in November 1907. The decision to import Chinese changed the political climate and opened a period of bitter class and national conflict on the Rand. More than any other factor, the 'Chinese question' spurred British working men and Afrikaner nationalists into organized political activity. Their common cause against the 'Hoggenheimers'* laid the foundations of unity in time to come. After the enactment of the Chinese labour importation ordinance Whiteside told the trades council that he would despair of his party's future in the Transvaal were it not for the active and cordial cooperation of the Dutch. They gave the worker reason to hope that he would not have to face the foreign capitalist single-handed when the Transvaal obtained self-government.3 Whiteside's solution revealed the labour movement's racial bias. British workers looked to anti-British landowners for alies, and disdained their African and Coloured fellow workers. The small body of white workers was unstable, poorly organ ized, divided and vulnerable. Some of the bigger unions, such as the societies of miners, railwaymen and plasterers, kept aloof * A term of abuse with an anti-Semitic flavour that was used then, and would be used even more commonly in later years, to describe the mining magnates. 99

Class and Colour in South Africa r850-I950

from the trades council because of personal rivalries or its political activities. Not having a firm base in the working class, Whiteside, Riatt and certain other leaders collaborated with business and professional men in the White League and African Labour League against the Chinese. The inter-class alliance operated also in Johannesburg's first municipal elections of December 1903, when every voter cast thirty votes to fill thirty vacancies. The trades council threw in its lot with the United Conference group and nominated five candidates on their ticket. Miners, railwaymen and plasterers backed the opposition Reform ticket, and also put up five candidates. Only two Labour men, Riatt and Shanks, were elected. The results of the 1904 elections were as disappointing. Whitesidewas the only successful candidate out of ten men who stood on a Labour platform. These setbacks and much disagreement over the participation by trade unions in elections strengthened the case for a distinct Labour party. All signs pointed towards such a possibility. A Social Demo cratic Federation had sprung up in Cape Town. Another SDF held a May Day demonstration on the Rand in 1904 as a counter blast to the conservative trade unions' Labour Day rally on Good Friday. The trades council invited the 'Boer Generals' to attend the rally, and received assurances of goodwill from Smuts. Whiteside visited Cape Town a few days later. He told the local trades council that only by taking part in politics could workers obtain the legislation needed to improve their condition. Foreign financiers would not be able to play ducks and drakes with a British colony, as they were doing in the Transvaal, if workers on the Rand had the Cape's advantages of a parliament 4 and a pro-Labour newspaper like the South African News. He was talking to the converted. Cape Town's trade unionists had already formed the nucleus of a Labour party and entered the lists in a parliamentary election. Five Labour candidates contested seats in the Cape's general elections of 1904. Four stood in Cape Town with the backing of the Political Labour League, an offshoot of the trades council. The fifth represented the British Workmen's Political and Defence Association of Port Elizabeth. The League's constitu tion and programme were suited to the colony's non-racial 100

Workers and the Vote

franchise. Membership was open to wage earners of any race or colour, and the programme required equal rights for all civilized men. This was a splendid avowal of democratic principle and a unique repudiation by white labour of racial policies. The effects were negligible. The leaders missed the opportunity of proving their sincerity by nominating a Coloured or African candidate. Their representatives were white, British and, with one exception, recent immigrants. They had little money, experi ence or organization behind them and were easily routed by Jameson's Progressive party, which had all three qualities, and could, in addition, rely on patriotic sentiments whipped up dur ing the war among English-speaking and Coloured working men. The Progressives obtained a majority of one in the legislative council and of five in the assembly. Dr L. S. Jameson, Rhodes' former lieutenant and the leader of the raid on the Transvaal, became prime minister. Britain's war had completed his mission, vindicated his political villainy, and enabled him to maintain the Rhodes tradition of combining the premiership with a director ship in the colony's richest corporation. The Labour candidates Corley, Craig and Purcell attacked his association with De Beers, accused him of supporting the Chinese policy, and demanded a tax on diamonds. They denounced his party as one pledged to the capitalists, that would not therefore introduce labour measures like workmen's compensation and compulsory arbitration in industrial disputes. Corley, a carpenter and the Labour League's president, warned his audiences that workmen would gain nothing from a representative of De Beers. A month later, defeated in the elections and blacklisted by employers, he broke up home and emigrated to New Zealand. 5 The decision to take part in elections was reached after much debate on the rival merits of political and direct action, an issue that perplexed radical socialists for many years also in the Transvaal and Natal. The federation decided on independent political action in June 19o6 and advised the trades council accordingly. It then formed a Labour Representation Committee and called a meeting of delegates from all working-class bodies to 'present a united front to the enemy at the elections'. The two wings of the movement could not agree, however, and the iol

Class and Colour in South Africa r850-1950 Levin federation decided in March i9o7 to nominate Needham,

stood son and Howard for the parliamentary elections. Ridout for socialism for the municipal council and obtained 1,498 votes got 3,000 from the workmen's single vote; but his opponent 6 votes from the plural suffrage of property owners. De Trade unionists took a hard knock at Kimberley, where was James Beers ruled with an iron rod. The leading spirit here after Trembath, a Cornish compositor, who settled in the town organize the siege of 90oo and struggled for more than ten years to labour a labour movement. An attempt was made to put up

and his candidates in 1904, and when this failed Trembath

associates formed a trades council. Seven of its nine members worked for De Beers, which summarily dismissed them in 195o of the after a dispute over workmen's compensation. One victimized men was Walter Madeley (1873-1947), a fitter from Woolwich, who twenty years later held office in Hertzog's cabinet. The company's behaviour gave rise to much agitation, but the company never relaxed its grip on the town. Madeley and the other victims were unable to find work locally, while the council lost what influence it had over the majority of workmen. 'There are many good trade unionists who are but indifferent politicians and many good politicians who are not trade unionists,' declared Trembath. It was unfair, he added, to force any man to pay for political propaganda to which he might be wholly opposed. ' For these reasons, a Political Labour League was formed to fight elections and conduct political campaigns. Trembath urged working men in all centres to combine in order to put into parliament men who belonged to their class and looked after their interests. Without direct representation, he argued, they would always be mere pawns in the parliamentary game; they would receive only crumbs of labour legislation, never the loaf. Socialists in Durban held similar views and formed the Clarion Fellowship in 1903. Appealing to an all

white and almost wholly British electorate, Natal's labour move ment took on a distinctly British flavour. The Fellowship was modelled on the English society of the same name, distributed its publications, contributed to Hyndman's election expenses, and helped to send E. B. Rose as South Africa's representative to 102

Workers and the Vote the Second International congress at Amsterdam in 1905. The founders of the movement in Durban were two Scotsmen: A. L. Clark, 'the father of railway trade unionism', and Harry Norrie, a tailor from Forfarshire. Both spent their lives in preaching socialism, passed through many stages of radicalism, and never came to grips with the realities of Natal's multi-racial society. The Fellowship sponsored a Workers' Political Union in 1905 to fight a parliamentary by-election in Durban. Their candidate, C. H. Haggar, a bearded, colourful doctor of philosophy from East Anglia, was defeated. But he won a seat in 19o6 on the borough council as the nominee of the Natal Labour Representa tive Committee. This led to a quarrel between trade unionists and socialists over the choice of candidates that wrecked the trades council. Later in the year, however, Haggar, N. P. Palmer, D. Taylor and J. Connolly were elected on a Labour platform to the legislative assembly. Though this seemed a spectacular success, it reflected the amorphous nature of Natal's politics rather than the strength of its labour movement. The Witwatersrand trade council's decision to form a Political Labour League followed hard on Lyttleton's promise in July 1904 of representative government for the Transvaal. The in augural meeting took place only a year later on 31 August. Bill Andrews, the council's president, H. W. Sampson, its secretary, and Whiteside called for an end to Labour's local isolation, the formation of branches in every colony, and an all-South African campaign. The League's programme of twenty-two points made no concession, however, to the Cape's traditional policy of racial equality; and called for a union of the white races, equal rights for their languages, responsible government, white adult suffrage and single-member consti tuencies. Like their masters, the Labour leaders appealed for Anglo-Afrikaner unity at the expense of Africans, Coloured and Asians. Andrews, Sampson and J. H. Brideson represented the League in Johannesburg's municipal elections of October 1905. All were defeated in a campaign marred by internal squabbles and appeals to racial prejudice. The miners' union threw its weight against

Brideson, and the League sabotaged Andrews, its president. Its 103

Class and Colour in South Africa r85o-195o

executive, which included Sampson and Whiteside, publicly rebuked him for allegedly repudiating his pledge to abide by caucus decisions. The Rev. C. A. Lane, who defeated him by twenty-one votes, included in his manifesto a demand for a ban on extra-marital intercourse between black and white; it was unnatural, he claimed, for the races had been differentiated by Nature and should be kept separate by law. C. H. Short, the third candidate in the ward, accused Andrews of being supported by the mine magnates of Corner House, condemned 'the ten dency to mix the races', and denounced 'the preaching of the gospel of social equality of White and Black'. Andrews alone avoided such racist incitement, though he did not repudiate the League's undertaking to employ white labour where possible in municipal services. While laying the foundations of their movement by taking part in municipal elections, Labour leaders staked a claim to representation on a higher plane by joining in the campaign for responsible government. Mine owners and big business men, with the backing of Milner and the Colonial Office, tried to keep the reins in their hands. They formed the Transvaal Progressive Association in November 1904 and advocated strong ties with Britain, Chinese labour, equal voting rights for white men, and an interim period of representative government. Abe Bailey, a leading mine director and Progressive politician, declared that what he for one would not let the Boers 'win with the ballot-box 8 they had failed to accomplish with the Mauser'. Botha's Het Volk party, the Transvaal Responsible Govern ment Association led by E. P. Solomon, and Labour countered with a demand for immediate self-rule. At times they seemed to interchange their traditional roles. Germiston workers heard Whiteside (who had served as a quartermaster-sergeant against

the republic) denounce the Jameson raid and praise Kruger for having offered a franchise more generous than that proposed by the Lyttleton constitution. 9 A few days later, in February 19o5, A. D. Wolmarans, an uncompromising member of Het Volk's head committee, told farmers at Nylstroom that they had no quarrel with Britain. Their enemy was the capitalist, who had made war on the republic and was now fighting artisans and 104

Workers and the Vote farmers. They should stand together, stop the importation of Chinese, give employment to white men, and make the Trans vaal a white man's country. 10 When hotheaded republicans like Wolmarans and C. F. Beyers spoke of war between labour and capital, their rural audience took them to mean the old battle against foreigners, mine mag-S nates and British imperialism. Het Volk represented landowners and not socialists. 'Capital and Labour must work hand in hand - the one could not do without the other,' was Louis Botha's message to the Pretoria branch of the ASE at their annual dinner in June 1905. He assured the engineers that his people, in their impoverished state, had drawn closer to the working man, for whom Paul Kruger always kept an open ear.' I British workmen and Afrikaner landowners stood far apart in language, tradition and national loyalties. Many working men in the Transvaal preferred to remain under Britain's protective mantle and supported the plea of the mine owners for representa tive government.1 2 Labour leaders who backed the demand for immediate self-government joined forces not with Afrikaners but with English-speaking merchants and professional men. Whiteside, Wybergh, Shanks, Riatt and Creswell helped to draft the manifesto of the Responsible Government Association, signed it in the company of eighty others, and spoke on the association's platform. The Responsibles entered into an elec toral pact with Het Volk after the publication in 19o5 of the Lyttleton constitution, which provided for an elected majority in the legislature and an executive council dominated by British officials. Andrews and Sampson met representatives of the Responsibles in May to discuss an extension of the pact to include Labour, and reported back to the trades council, which agreed to support the pact on condition that Labour was free to press its own claims for the eight-hour working day, work men's compensation and other reforms.1 3 The constitutional issue was settled by a change of govern ment in Britain. Balfour's conservative ministry fell in December 1905. Campbell-Bannerman took office, went to the country in January 19o6, and won an election unique in British politics for the prominence given to a wholly colonial issue - the Chinese o105

Class and Colour in South Africa z850-1950

importations. The new Liberal cabinet scrapped Lyttleton's constitution and, acting on the recommendations of the Ridge way committee, decided to introduce quasi-responsible govern ment in the Transvaal. It was to have a nominated upper chamber and a legislative assembly of sixty-nine white members elected by white men only. Political parties in the colony pre pared for battle. Socialists and trade unionists formed the Independent Labour party in May 19o6. Het Volk's executive on the Rand turned down a motion to cooperate with Labour which, it said, had socialist tendencies. The Responsibles, in cluding Creswell and Wybergh, merged with the Reform Club, called themselves the Transvaal Nationalist Association, and renewed their electoral agreement with Het Volk. Labour held aloof and, in December 19o6, formed the Labour Representation Committee. It combined trade unionists, the I LP, and small left wing groups of Germans, Italians and Russian Jews. Socialists, trade unionists and political opportunists painfully edged their way to united action. Some trade unionists com plained that socialists dominated the LRC. A British Labour Union, making a brief appearance before the 1907 elections, denounced the 'fallacious doctrine of socialism as propounded by the Socialist Labour Parties'.14 At the other end of the spectrum, Jock Campbell's Socialist Labour party, formed in 1902, turned its back on all elections and distributed the works of Karl Kautsky, Daniel De Leon and his fellow syndicalists.1 5 Labour managed in spite of these differences to put up thirteen candidates in the Transvaal general election of February 1907. They polled 5,216 votes out of the 13,i8o cast in the thirteen constituencies and won three seats. Sampson and Whiteside were returned in Johannesburg, and J. Reid in Pretoria. Het Volk won thirty-seven seats, which gave it a clear majority of five, and Botha included E. P. Solomon and H. C. Hull, two leaders of the Transvaal Nationalist Association, in his cabinet. Het Volk did not oppose the Labour candidates. These lost to the Nationalists in three, and to the Progressives in seven, con stituencies. As in Natal and the Cape, the bulk of the working class vote went to parties representing capitalists and the middle class. They, and not Afrikaner nationalism, were Labour's chief xo6

Workers and the Vote political rivals. Sampson said as much when he reported back in October 1907 to his constituents. He was pleased that the Pro gressives were not in power. Labour's representatives were having an easy time under Botha's ministry. It had passed a workman's compensation act and could be relied upon to enforce laws against Asians. Labour looked forward, he added, to the elimination of Asians from the Transvaal, and would press for a law fixing ratios between whites and Africans in all industries. I6 Sampson was a compositor from Islington, London, who came to South Africa in 1892 at the age of twenty. He spent the next five years in Cape Town, where he helped to form a trades council; and then moved, after a printers' strike, to East London, where he founded a branch of the S.A. Typographical Union. Settling in Johannesburg in 1903, he became the union's presi dent and also secretary of the trades council. He lost three municipal elections before winning a seat in the legislative assembly; but then his parliamentary career continued without a break from 1907 to 1931. He was elected the first chairman of the S.A. Labour party at its formation in 191o. Ambitious, arrogant and racist, he was a principal architect of the white labour policy. His own union 'committed the dreadful sin' of admitting Natal Indian printers, but there was no truth what ever in the 'oft-repeated lie' that Sampson, as president, bore a special responsibility for the decision. 7 Radicals accused him of disrupting the party caucus in the Transvaal parliament by quarrelling with Whiteside and refusing to accept party disci pline.' Partly for this reason, the ILP'at its first annual confer ence in October 1907 repudiated the parliamentary actions of the three Labour members. 19 The heterogeneous elements in the Labour Representation Committee could never agree on a programme. The ILP, how ever, was explicitly socialist. It aimed, among other things, at 'The socialization of all the means of production, distribution and exchange, to be controlled by a democratic state in the interests of the whole community.' Whiteside explained that this was a beacon light, an ideal to be worked for, though nationalization of the mines was impracticable under existing conditions. 20 Some members wished to call themselves the 107

Class and Colour in South Africa 1850-195o Transvaal Socialistic Party, but the annual conference rejected the motion. Delegates were divided equally on another motion, which would allow members of the 'coloured races' to join the party. New alignments and cleavages developed, however, before the various factions agreed in I909 to form the South African Labour party. It made its official debut at Durban on 1o January i9io as the first national political party. Labour was all set for the first round of elections under the South Africa Act. The Act had been drafted by an all-white National Conven tion in 19o8-9. Described as a 'compromise' between Cape liberals and white supremacists of the north, it represented the fruits of partnership or, more accurately, of antagonistic co operation between British and Afrikaner imperialists, each in tending to dominate the other. The British wanted union for economic, political and military reasons. Afrikaners accepted cooperation as the price to be paid for the spread of nationalism and the maintenance of white supremacy. Africans, Coloured and Indians were the victims of closer union. The act excluded them from both houses of parliament and denied them the vote in the three northern provinces. The background to the colour bar clauses has been admirably described by the liberal historian L. M. Thompson.2 1 Here it is necessary only to comment on the attitudes of the labour and liberation movements. None of the delegates to the National Convention represented Labour, and this was a sore point with Labour leaders. They made the most of it in their opposition to union and the draft act. The strongest opposition came from Natal, where organized Labour appeared in the same camp as ultra-British jingos. Both groups preferred isolation to Afrikaner domination. Labour men had an additional grievance in action taken by the government to break a railwaymen's strike in April-May 1909. Three of the four Labour members of the legislative assembly moved that the union parliament should have only one chamber, to be elected once in three years. Haggar, to his credit, moved the deletion of the clause barring persons of colour from the house of assem bly. The amendments were defeated, and three-quarters of the 14,8oo Natal voters who took part in a referendum voted in favour of union. io8

% RRO' - "

,-.-

Workers and the Vote Whiteside, Sampson and Wybergh offered mild resistance to the draft in the Transvaal legislature. Trade unionists stated their objections in resolutions passed at a labour rally in Johan nesburg on Good Friday of i9o9. Madeley, C. B. Mussared, a leading member of the ILP, and Tom Kirby, president of the

Pretoria trade council, moved that since workers had not been represented at the National Convention, and since the draft act was undemocratic, it should be submitted to a popular referen dum. Bill Andrews and the Labour councillors John Ware and Jackson moved another resolution which called on the British government to withhold its assent until the draft had been amended and approved by a referendum of the electorate. The proposed amendments would eliminate the senate, introduce a separate 'Native and Coloured Assembly' having only advisory powers, block the extension of the Cape's 'coloured franchise', and confine the vote to adult whites, subject to retention of their rights by existing Coloured voters in the Cape. Tengo Jabavu, cautious as ever, took an intermediate position. He would give adult suffrage to white men and women, and the Cape franchise to Africans. It had worked well and needed no change. His scheme would prevent 'native predominance'." He steadfastly set his face against any agitation on behalf of the Africans while the National Convention was sitting. They should put their trust in the Cape's liberal delegates and not cry out before they were hurt. The Convention was 'a judicial tribunal set up to do justice to all sections without fear, favour or preju dice'. An agitation would be premature, give his people a bad name, and strengthen the argument that they had no place in the 'body politic'. 23 When the publication of the draft act ex posed the shallowness of his optimism, he pleaded that the colour bar clauses imposed an unnecessary humiliation. Africans, he insisted, had no desire to sit in parliament where they could exert no influence.2 He repeated this assurance on the Armadale Castle in July 1909, when on his way to London with an African delegation to protest against the colour bar. 'We have no wish to have a Native preponderance in the country,' he said; 'it is a thing which I should object to myself.' He 'would dread putting our people in a position of absolute equality with the 109

Class and Colour in South Africa r85o-.95o Europeans, especially in the Northern colonies'. But rights already held in the Cape should not be curtailed; 'and as to the 2 rest, some restricted form of representation might be given'. There was a streak of the Uncle Tom in Jabavu, but he was no white man's lackey. He had principles and a strategy based on an assessment of the African's relationship to competing white power groups. Long ago, he explained, when the English dominated parliament, parties divided on the 'Native Question'. One faction, led by Porter, Solomon, Molteno, Sauer and Merri man, took a liberal view and fought for the liberties of both colonists and Africans. Opposed to them were the majority of Englishmen, who followed reactionary leaders like the Uping tons, Sprigg and later Rhodes. They adopted a 'vigorous Native policy', signalized by disarmament, disfranchisem*nt, pass laws and other 'repressive legislation under which the Natives ... have ever groaned'. Africans naturally supported the liberals. The Afrikaner Bond as naturally allied itself with the anti African party. The Jameson raid severed the alliance. The Bond then transferred its support to the liberal, anti-imperialist group led by Sauer, Merriman and Schreiner, which Africans had always supported and which became the South African party in 1903.26 The English press and party insisted that Jabavu, 'an able and most influential Kaffir', had 'gone over' to the Bond or 'Strop en Dop' party,* if only by associating with Sauer and the SAP. 2 7 Jabavu was too astute a politician to suppose that he could refute the charge with an historical treatise. His people were hard-headed, cold logicians, he maintained, and had no desire to instal a 'Dutch' government at Table Mountain. He wished to satisfy them that he was no Bondsman and, like they,

wanted a government of 'the best Englishmen who will dispense justice evenly to English, Dutch and Native people, without

fear, favour or prejudice'. On the other hand, he had to show that Africans had nothing to expect from the English Progressive

party, and should vote against it at the polls. He gave two reasons. By making Jameson their leader, the Progressives had shown *The 'Lash and Liquor' party: a reference to Cape farmers who flogged their workers and supplied them with rations of cheap wine. IIO

Workers and the Vote

themselves willing to 'hand over the government of the people to the Mining Magnates', whose sole interest was 'Wealth and not the Commonwealth of South Africa'. Secondly, the Pro gressives hated African rights, as was evident from Jameson's letter of 20 September 1903 to the Muslim leader H. N. Effendi. It promised 'equal rights to all civilized men' and went on to insult Africans by stating that 'It is only the aboriginal natives we consider uncivilized'.28

Africans might have shared Jabavu's misgivings about Jame son's party, but they certainly had less confidence in political descendants of the Afrikaner Bond, whose leader, J. H. Hof meyr, had declared that he would sooner give franchise rights to convicts in the Breakwater prison than to the coloured races. 2 9 African and Coloured delegates, including Dr Abdurahman, met at Queenstown in December 1907 and decided to support the Unionist party, as the Progressives were now called. Jabavu's paper printed a vicious attack on Abdurahman - 'a man of mixed race' who was 'ashamed of his skin' - and denounced the conference. It was 'not representative'. The 'so-called vote to support the ex-Prog. candidates was passed by a few ignorant people of the rank and file'. 30 Jabavu prepared a counterblast and called a Native Electoral Convention in January. It urged constituents to vote for the SAP and passed resolutions in favour of African rights in the future Union. 3 1 The

SAP

won the elec

tion, Merriman headed the new ministry, and Jabavu jubilated. 'Of the 12 newspapers published within the Eastern circuit, Imvo is the only one in sympathy with the SAP.' 32 The publication of the draft constitution in February i909 aroused bitter resentment in Africans and Coloured. Jabavu blamed Natal for insisting on the 'European descent' clauses that barred men of colour from parliament and denied them the vote in the northern provinces.33 The Rev. W. B. Rubusana's Izwi Labantu accused the Cape delegates to the National Con vention of conspiring to eliminate the Cape African franchise. Rubusana, Jabavu and the Rev. J. L. Dube, editor of Ilanga Lase Natal, convened a South African Native Convention at Bloemfontein on 24 March. It elected an executive to defend African interests, protested against the colour bar, demanded III

Class and Colour in South Africa r850-1950 full and equal rights for all citizens without distinction of class, colour or creed, and called on Britain to fulfil her obligations under article 8 of the Vereeniging peace treaty by extending 34 the franchise to Africans, Coloured and Indians in all colonies. The convention agreed to send a delegation to England. The APO took a similar decision in April. Its campaign for a non-racial franchise had begun in x9o6, when Abdurahman, Fredericks and Daniels journeyed to England to protest against the terms of the Ridgeway constitution. The deputation's main purpose was to establish the claims of the Coloured to the franchise under article 8 of the Vereeniging treaty, but Abdurah man spoke for all the oppressed. If Britain refused to grant a non-racial franchise, he urged, there were other ways in which she could do justice to all her subjects. She could, for instance, before granting self-government to the ex-republics, repeal their discriminatory laws. They were still there, had been augmented, and were enforced with typical British rigour. Secondly, Britain should either extend the franchise to qualified persons of all races, or retain her sovereign authority over the unrepresented masses. In no circ*mstances should she commit them bound hand and foot to the colonists. 3 5 The deputation returned empty-handed but undaunted. The campaign continued and assumed a new dimension when the APO'S executive accepted an invitation to attend the joint con ference of Africans and Coloured at Queenstown. About 120 delegates came together, said Abdurahman, in 'the first genuine attempt to fuse the two sections of the population into one political whole'. 36 The men of the north, he told them, would always try to foist their repressive system on the coloured races; but would have less chance of success in a federation. For a union would be bound to follow the policies of the north more closely than Cape traditions. 3 7 When the National Convention met to draft the Act of Union, the APO petitioned it to respect existing rights and extend them to Coloured and Africans in the north. After the publication of the draft constitution petitions were submitted to the prime ministers, the high commissioner and the secretary of state, praying for the deletion of the colour bar clauses, the extension of the franchise to all qualified persons 112

Workers and the Vote in the Union, and the exclusion of 'native territories' from the 38 Union except on terms satisfactory to chiefs and councillors. Their rights were being whittled away for purely material advantages, said Abdurahman in his presidential address to the eighty-nine delegates who attended the APO's seventh annual conference in the Socialist Hall, Buitenkant St, Cape Town, on 13 April 19o9. The draft act was 'un-British in that it lays down

a colour-line'. The Cape's leaders had betrayed their trust; the light of freedom was vanishing before the old Transvaal repub lic's principle of no equality between black and white in church or state. 'No class in a State can progress,' he warned, 'if its political destinies are in the hands of a ruling caste'; or if it denied human rights that were inalienable and essential to national stability.3 9 The 'European descent' clauses, which barred persons of colour from parliament, were 'the foulest work that ever South African statesmen attached their names to', wrote Abdurahman in the second issue of the A.P.O. 'The original insult is there as fresh and bitter as when it was first deliberately hurled at us last February. It is an injustice, and cannot be tolerated by any self-respecting man.' 40 The decision to send a deputation, accompanied by W. P. Schreiner, to put their case before the British people and parliament, aroused great enthusiasm; and 'stimulated the feel ing of union among the coloured', reported the APO'S Aliwal North branch. More than twenty new branches were formed, fund-raising activities were organized as far afield as Rhodesia, and the first number of the A.P.O. appeared on Empire Day, 24 May 19o9. Every existing newspaper was there primarily to advocate the rights of property, wrote the editor; all assumed that South Africa belonged only to the few propertied whites. The press patronizingly condescended to the coloured races and regarded them as chattels: 'ever the subject race'. The A.P.O. would speak for the people. Time would show that a repressive policy was 'impossible, uneconomic and disastrous to all con cerned'. For nothing but moral decay and national degeneracy could come out of a racial aristocracy that dominated a degraded class. Abdurahman, Fredericks and D. J. Lenders of Kimberley 113

Class and Colour in South Africa r85o-i95o Jabavu, sailed for England in June. The African delegates were general Rubusana, D. Dwanya of Middeldrift, T. Mapikelaythe J. Gerrans secretary of the Orange River Native Congress, and of Bechuanaland. The two deputations and W. P. Schreiner, the their unpaid counsellor and tireless spokesman, represented at their great majority of South Africans; but they travelled poor. At own expense and by means of funds donated by the about the same time an official colonial delegation, accompanied expense to by the high commissioner, travelled at the state's imperial put the bill entrenching white supremacy through the reception parliament. The official delegation was given a roaring and in England; the unofficial representatives were snubbed ignored by the wielders of power. Philanthropists, missionaries, Labour Gandhi, the prime minister of New Zealand, the British against party and a group of Liberals in parliament protested indifferent. the colour bar. The people of Britain were bored and the white They had already surrendered sovereign power to Act oligarchy in Natal and the ex-republics. The South Africa at merely put the final seal of Britain's approval on the betrayal

Vereeniging in

19o2.

Asquith, Balfour, The Times, The Economist and other pillars They of the imperial establishment oozed an unctuous optimism. unifica agreed, on the one hand, that the settlers would abandon in tion rather than agree to an abatement of racial discrimination that the the act. The British public was assured, on the other, to racists, who would forgo the advantages of union if necessary to the maintain white supremacy, could be trusted to do justice Hardie subject races. Not everybody was as gullible. Dilke, Keir would and Ramsay MacDonald foresaw that the Act of Union establish a permanent white oligarchy. The Manchester Guardian we warned against deluding 'ourselves with the promise that 4 1 J. A. Hobson can undo the injustice when it is committed'. commented wryly on the irony of defeated Afrikaner generals rulers imposing on Britain a constitution which made them 'the upon of a virtually independent South Africa'. It would 'move group an unstable axis' and remain a source of 'weakness to the to of self-governing nationalities to which it falsely claims ap belong'. 4 2 The Labour Leader declared that Britain had 114

Workers and the Vote

proved of 'the union of a Boer Landed Aristocracy with an Exploiting Capitalist Plutocracy'; and damned South African trade unionists for being anti-African to a man.4 3 'Since our arrival here it has been a terribly up-hill fight,' wrote Abdurahman on 29 July. 'We are directing all our efforts and energies to the term "of European descent", but I fear all our efforts will be in vain.' The Cape's official delegates - the prime minister Merriman, Sauer, Hofmeyr, Jameson and chief justice Lord de Villiers - were 'our worst enemies'. Without the poison from them, the British public would never agree to the hateful colour bar. They were 'moving heaven and earth to retain the obnoxious words'; and 'naturally their opinions carry great weight, because the public who will suffer directly by the words "of European descent" are the Cape Colony people."' Critics of the colour bar in the Commons made their main stand on an amendment to clause 26, which would enable men of colour to represent the Cape and Natal in the senate; but the amendment was defeated by 157 votes to 57, the minority con sisting of 28 Labour members, 26 Liberals, and 3 Irish national ists."5 The bill was reported without amendment and passed the third reading without a division. The African and Coloured deputations returned with Schreiner to South Africa in September. They tried to glean comfort from their failure. The minds of English people had been enlightened as to the colour bar, Schreiner claimed; while Abdurahman assumed 'that at a very early date an attempt would be made ' 46 to erase the blot which now stained the Constitution'. Abdurahman's true assessment appeared in a leading article. Britain's national fibre had deteriorated. Everyone regretted the colour bar, but no one would reject it, apart from the Labour party and advanced radicals. 'No longer must we look to our flabby friends of Great Britain.' The political destiny of Coloured and Africans lay in their own hands. They would have to rely on economic struggle. 'We are the labour market'; and South Africa's stability depended on them. By refusing to bolster up the economy, they would bring selfish white politicians to their knees, and show white workers the value of combination their only weapon against the cursed wage system.4 7 1"5

6 National Liberation

The teachers, ministers, editors, lawyers and doctors who founded the liberation movements were constitutionalists. They defended existing rights and resisted new discriminations in a constant struggle against aggressive white supremacists. African, Coloured and Indian leaders of the early period took their inspiration from liberal and humanitarian concepts. Their vision of the ideal society embraced equality before the law; the vote; freedom of trade, labour, movement and residence; and equal opportunities of education and employment. Their natural allies in the white community before the rise of radical socialism were liberals of wealth and standing who counselled patience, acceptance of white supremacy, and respect for law and order; and who left a deep imprint on the liberation movement, most of all in the Cape. There, the non-racial franchise gave Africans and Coloured the means of enlisting the support of progressive politicians. Jabavu was one of the first to recognize the value of an organized, disciplined African electorate. His entanglement in white party politics began with the publication of Imvo in 1884. Twenty years later Abdurahman embarked on a similar course when he took his seat on Cape Town's municipal council. Gandhi rose to world-wide eminence after he had left South Africa in 1914. Jabavu and Abdurahman might also have made their way into the top rank of rulers if they had lived in a less repressive society. Racial discrimination restricted them to a minor political role, but they were great men among their people. Though unwilling, and perhaps unable, to alienate them selves from the poor and oppressed, they did not escape from the compromises that are forced on leaders without power who seek to reform but never to overthrow an evil social order. Both men witnessed the decline of Cape liberalism and the spread of racial In6

National Liberation discrimination. Abdurahman saw the process more clearly and gained a deeper insight into the structure of white power. Yet, like Jabavu, he maintained his trust in white patronage long after the futility of such an attitude had been revealed. Neither took to heart Gandhi's message that a voteless and rejected people would not obtain relief from a parliament of their oppressors, but must depend on their own strength and develop their own methods of struggle.

Dr Abdul Abdurahman

(1872-1940),

acclaimed as South

Africa's foremost Coloured leader, was a Muslim, a member of the 'Malay' community, and a grandson of manumitted slaves, Chashullah and Betsy Jamal-ud-din (corrupted to Jamalee) who bought their freedom. They kept a fruit shop in Roeland Street, Cape Town, amassed a small fortune, and sent their son Abdul Rachman to study theology at Cairo and Mecca. He returned after an absence of ten years and married Khadija Dollie, 'the prettiest Malay girl in Cape Town'.1 Widely known as Hadjie Abdurahman, he pioneered modern education for the Muslims and refused to put up with a second-class education for his own sons. His eldest, the future Dr Abdurahman, was admitted to the S.A. College School, the oldest high school in the country, 'where, by his diligence and ability, he outdistanced his com rades in almost every branch of school work '.2 The college then raised a colour bar, whereupon the Hadjie went to England and stayed there, while his second son qualified as a chemist, and the youngest as a doctor. He lost his wife in England, and by her side was later buried her brother, H. M. Dollie, the father of Dr 0. Dollie, who also took his children to be educated in England. 3 Having matriculated at the Cape, Abdul Abdurahman went to Glasgow, where he spent close on four years before graduating in medicine in 1893. Two years later he came home with his Scot tish bride. 'He makes a great sacrifice,' wrote Peregrino, 'in returning to a country where colour, and not character, ability or standing, makes the man.' 4 In 19o4, now a successful practi tioner, he was elected to the town council, the first coloured person to hold this office. 'I was reluctant to enter public life because failure at the polls would have drawn ridicule upon the 117

ip,- -.- - -

Class and Colour in South Africa z85o-1950

coloureds,' he wrote after the election; but 'it is by individuals stepping beyond the establishments of the time that a people progress.' 5 The European support he received at the polls 'does not betoken a white race degenerating, but a sign of rejuvenes cence'. The British constitution was 'the admiration of the world, and one of the greatest blessings of mankind'. As leader of the AP o, Abdurahman spent much of the next five years in an unsuccessful attempt to vindicate his faith in British democracy. The elan and vigour of the African Political Organization in its early and middle years held great promise of a mass radical movement. Founded in I9o2, it soon grew into what was per haps the first national party, open to persons of all races and with branches in all the colonies. It failed to attract significant numbers of Africans and Indians, however, and remained predominantly Coloured, centred in the western Cape and con cerned mainly with Coloured affairs. Abdurahman traced its origins to the political awakening brought about by Carnarvon's confederation scheme and the Anglo-Afrikaner war; but a more immediate impulse came from participation in parliamentary politics. One of the APO'S first activities was to strengthen and mobilize the Coloured vote by urging qualified men to apply for registration on the electoral rolls. It made substantial gains by taking part in white party politics, but also encountered great hazards which often threatened to wreck the organization. The first of these crises occurred soon after its formation. John Tobin, a foundation member and an advocate of 'recon ciliation' between Coloured and white Afrikaners, canvassed for the SAP-Bond alliance in the general election of 1904. W. Col lins, the APO'S first president, favoured the Progressives, who were supported also by Peregrino and other members of the Coloured Peoples' Vigilance Committee. To avoid a split, the organization expelled both men and invited Abdurahman to take the leadership. He joined the Cape Town branch in 1904 and was elected in 1905 to the presidency, an office which he held up to the time of his death in 194o. He was 'not a Progressive or a Bondsman,' he told the annual conference in Port Elizabeth; and would never cease to agitate on behalf of their people as long as they were unjustly treated. The Coloured people were

Mal:

National Liberation very fortunate, wrote Imvo, in having him as their leader. They could not have a more trustworthy guide. Whites were woefully mistaken in thinking that they could repress the Coloured and African people, 'as a policy of that kind is only calculated to unite and make the Coloured inhabitants more determined in claiming their own'. 6 The Chinese importations, colour bars on the mines, and the transfer of ultimate power to settlers in the Transvaal and Orange River Colony stirred Abdurahman to anger. His in augural address at the APO's annual conference in January 19o6 was one long indictment of the 'cosmopolitan exploiters' whose greed for gold had given rise to the system of indentured labour. 'Chamberlain, the great Imperial wanderer, visited South Africa, sympathized with the downtrodden Magnates, saw a Native war dance at Colenso, and gave the Rand lords forced labour at id. an hour.' The Flag had never been in such despic able hands since the old slave days. The ex-republics under British rule were 'simply Imperial prisons for coloured people, who are but goods and chattels in the hands of the country's exploiters'.'

The English press accused him of 'incendiary

talk' and of' stirring up the embers of race feud'. Johannesburg's municipal council refused to let him address a Coloured audience in the town hall, whereas the anti-Chinese opposition declared that he 'expressed in most outspoken language the feeling of ninety-nine per cent of the voters'.' The APO'S mission to England in 1906 failed to convince the British government that it was morally bound to extend the franchise to the Coloured in the north. Abdurahman then threw his weight behind the federal cause, represented in the Cape by the Progressive party. Jameson had said that federation would enable the Cape to 'hold to our Native policy until the neigh bouring colonies are sufficiently educated to agree to allow equal facilities for blacks and whites to rise in the scale of humanity'. 9 The AP o accordingly agreed at its annual conference in Indwe to support the Progressives in the 19o8 general election.1 ° Tobin, Peregrino and Jabavu backed Merriman's South African party; it won the election and argued the case for a unitary constitution. Jameson and his fellow Progressive delegates to the National lI9

Class and Colour in South Africa z85o-95o Convention switched their allegiance, assented to a unitary con stitution, and accepted without protest the exclusion of persons 1 of colour from both houses of parliament. ' The APo's second mission to England in i9o9 failed to secure the deletion of the colour bar clauses. Abdurahman had not failed, he wrote, to learn that 'the rights of unrepresented classes of citizens are always unsafe, and are never free from invasion'.' The African and Coloured delegations returned smarting under the stigma of the colour bar and toured the Cape to report on their mission. At a public banquet attended by 300 notables in Queenstown in April i9io Abdurahman and Jabavu appealed for a political union of all the coloured races. Abdurah man reminded an African audience at Indwana a few days later that he had warned against unification, the form of constitution advocated by the SAP, which had shown no sympathy with the African and Coloured peoples. Their first duty was to have a political union. 'If they achieved that their full re-enfranchise ment would be rendered easier. '" 3 The need for unity was a constant theme in Abdurahman's speeches at this time. Coloured South Africans, he reiterated, were sons of the soil and had as great a claim to the country as any white settler. If 'Europeans persist in their policy of repression, there will one day arise a solid mass of Black and Coloured humanity whose demands will 14 be irresistible. The contemplated union never took shape. African and Coloured leaders joined in protest, but the political ties between their peoples were never more than tenuous. Geographical isolation, barriers of language, custom and race, economic differ ences and inequalities of status restrained them from merging into a single organization. Colour consciousness tended to smother class or national consciousness in the Coloured. They displayed an acute awareness of physical traits and a sensitive ness to gradations of colour that blocked the growth of unity within the group itself. 'And so through pride,' wrote a cor respondent in the A.P.O., 'the Coloured people, the true sons and daughters of South Africa, are today divided, and con sequently their political and industrial positions are becoming more critical day by day.' Many slightly coloured persons passed 120

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for Europeans. 'Some of them select who, and who not, to recognize in public, through being desirous of being regarded as Europeans.' They often feared that if they supported a dark complexioned person in political life, he would expect a greeting in the street. Until 'the slightly-coloured and the pitch black confer at one table, we will only dream of what we would be, and remain the shadows that we are. ' 15 Genealogical gossip was a favourite pastime of Afrikaners and even more popular among the Coloured. They took malicious pleasure in tracing the dark-skinned ancestry of their rulers. If the 'European descent' clause meant that no ancestor was coloured, the A.P.O. remarked, it would bar two ministers of the crown in the Cape, one in the Transvaal, and several members of the Cape parliament, one of whom 'bears a titular distinction'.' 6 Such men might at least show sympathy with their kith and kin. 'But those who try to hide the little colour that is in them are always the bitterest anti-colour advocates. ' 17 When Botha formed his cabinet after the first Union elections, the paper dubbed it the regime of 'the half-white ministry'. Five of its ten members were not of pure European descent.' 8 Yet the 'piebald Botha Government' would employ only poor whites, and oust even Coloured relatives of ministers from the public service. The only government billet open to the Coloured would before long be 'a portfolio in the Union ministry'.' 9 White-baiting provided an emotional relief but left the im balance of power unchanged. The AP 0 failed to develop suitable methods of mass struggle in spite of the example set by Gandhi's passive resistance campaign. At Abdurahman's request, Gandhi contributed an article on his struggle 'for national honour, for conscience, and for manhood' in which he claimed that his methods were 'as pure as the ideal itself. Suffering is the panacea for all evils. It purifies the sufferers.' Passive resistance, he contended, would lead to violence only if soul force were trans muted into body force; and was therefore best for 'illiterate natives'. It taught them to break their own heads and not other people's in order to redress grievances. 2 0 The closest that the

came to instituting a passive resistance campaign was to urge the Coloured in Pretoria to conduct one against the APO

C.S.A.

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Class and Colour in South Africa 185o-z95o municipality's decision to segregate them in townships. The Coloured residents preferred law suits to broken heads, however, and took the council to court.2 1 APO militants often spoke of using the 'economic weapon', but this too failed to materialize, although there were sufficient numbers of Coloured working men in the western Cape to make the political strike a feasible tactic. They were poorly organized, and reluctant to follow the A P o except during elections. Abdurah man tried hard to form trade unions, partly in order to detach Coloured workers from white labour leaders, and met with little success except among the teachers. Like Jabavu, he believed that his people would never hold their own against the colonists without a modern education, and so made this his primary concern. He fought a stubborn rearguard action against the spread of segregation in schools; used his position in the town council to force the S.A. College (later the University of Cape Town) to admit Harold Cressy and other Coloured students after him; and with J. W. Jagger, a prosperous merchant, induced the school board to establish the Trafalgar High School,

the first of its kind for Coloured, in 1910. 22 Many children owed their education to his private generosity. The A.P.O. gave much attention to educational needs, agitated for better facilities, admonished parents to send their children to school, and venti lated the grievances of the teachers. The formation of the S.A. Teachers' League in 1912-13 marked an important stage in the emergence of an intellectual leadership among the Coloured. Cressy, Francis Brutus, F. Hendricks and Abe Desmore, among others, worked closely with the APO, contributed to its paper, and through their own quarterly, the EducationalJournal,instilled in teachers a sense of national pride and of duty to their people. Employed in church schools, they were badly trained, grossly discriminated against, and underpaid at salaries ranging from L5 to £12 los. a month. 'The argument has been brought forward persistently,' wrote Brutus, 'that Coloured teachers cannot receive anything above a mere pittance in respect of salary because of the Native teachers, whose case has still to be dealt with.' 2 3 They had a remedy, he suggested. Let them combine with the Africans, 122

National Liberation who were then affiliated to the white-dominated Teachers' Association. The Coloured teachers, who were timid, politically backward and race conscious, continued to segregate themselves in the League. The AP O's leadership of intellectuals and small businessmen sedulously avoided mass struggles. They adopted, instead, the techniques of a parliamentary party, and concentrated on elec tion campaigns. Coloured and African voters held the balance in a dozen or so Cape constituencies. White candidates solicited their support during elections and ignored them at other times. Some of the money spent on elections trickled into the pockets of local agents, who were often leading members ofAP o branches, and from them to individual voters. The alleged corruption of the Coloured electorate, often given as a reason for taking the Coloured off the common roll, grew out of the colour bar con stitution. A vote without power proved to be more demoralizing than total disfranchisem*nt. Coloured politicians tended to be come appendages of white parties, which denied them member ship and rewarded them with scraps of political loot. The worst evil was not bribery, however, but the failure of the leaders to develop an alternative conception of the Coloured man's role in politics. The Coloured were stemvee - voting cattle - in the Afrikaner's vocabulary of contempt. They put their cross on ballot papers but never took part in the selection of candidates or in the making of policies. Since all parliamentary parties stood for white supremacy, the Coloured voter could only choose between evils. He usually chose the English party, representing the industrial ists, merchants and professions, who were protected by class barriers from Coloured competition and could therefore afford to deplore the grosser forms of racial discrimination, provided always that the darker man 'kept his place'. The leading liberal R. W. Rose Innes complained bitterly when the Rev. Rubusana, newly elected to the provincial council, exercised his right to travel in a first-class compartment with bedding, blankets and pillow supplied by the railway administration. 2 4 While insisting on social segregation, the English middle class objected to the industrial colour bar which interfered with the employment of 123

Class and Colour in South Africa 1850-1950 the lowest-priced worker. They were his natural ally on the labour market against the policy of sheltered white labour. If the AP 0 ever had a political theory - and only glimpses of one appeared in the diatribes against racial discrimination-it was that an expanding, progressive capitalism would dissolve caste rigidi ties and give all men equal opportunities in a competitive society. It was impossible to relate this perspective to Botha's party of landowners. They preferred stagnation to progress if progress would bring equality in its train. Tradition, sentiment and party interest induced them to buttress caste divisions with statutory sanctions. The Coloured had little to expect from Afrikaner Nationalists, who made a 'white South Africa' one of their planks in the i91o general election, remarked the A.P.O.2 5 It reported resolutions passed by congresses of farmers urging government to expel African tenants from white-owned land, indenture their families to farmers, raise the hut tax and put convicts to work on public undertakings. 2 6 There was something radically wrong, the journal observed, when cabinet ministers invoked the black bogy to persuade whites to keep their children at school, accept compulsory military training, and employ whites only on skilled work.2 7 Hertzog's 'narrow racialism' was a menace to the Empire. He wished to extend the harsh, in human laws of the 'mis-named Free State' to all the provinces. 'In that prison-house of South Africa - worse even than the despotism of Russia - the Coloured people cannot work without 28 a permit.' Abdurahman told the Apo's annual conference at Port Eliza beth in 19io that in terms of the constitution each branch would decide for itself which candidate to support in the forthcoming election of the first Union parliament. The APO as an organiza tion could not bind itself to any particular party. Subsequently, however, he advised the branches to support Jameson's Unionists against the ruling coalition under Botha. Raynard and some other members of the APO who objected that this directive violated the constitution were expelled or resigned. 2 9 Jabavu, as always, backed the party of Sauer, who held a portfolio in the Botha ministry; and accused Abdurahman of 'prejudicing the case of the Coloured people in the eyes of the great Party in 124

National Liberation Power'. He was playing into the hands of the Transvaal by setting Coloured against Coloured. 30 Botha's coalition of Afrikaner parties, which formally merged into the S.A. National party in 1911, won the election with sixty-seven seats. The Unionists, representing mine owners, industrialists, merchants and the majority of English-speaking voters, won thirty-nine seats; the Labour party, four seats, all in the Transvaal; and eleven seats went to independents. All parties fought on a platform of white supremacy, promised to protect the interests of white workers, and accused one another of 'racialism', the current term for being anti-Afrikaner or anti British. Botha and Smuts, in common with the Labour party, called Unionists the 'capitalist party'. Unionists on the Rand asked the electorate to 'Vote British'. The Labour party replied that the capitalists who used the slogan were foreign Jews. This was not the first time that Labour had disgraced itself with anti Semitism. Tom Mathews lost the Fordsburg municipal seat in 19o8 because he called the capitalists 'Jews '. Arthur Noon polled 296 votes for Labour in Cape Town Central against the 1,695 votes cast for Jagger, the Unionist candidate. The APO had supported Noon when he contested a municipal seat in August 19o9. Then, he had been 'a true friend of all workers of every class and creed and colour', who would 'voice the views of all wage earners and tenants '.32 In r9Io , however, the APO supported Jagger. They would 'like to see Mr Noon returned some day, but it will take much time and 33 labour to convert the people of Cape Town to Socialism'. This vacillation reflected the ambivalence in Abdurahman's attitude to the labour movement. The British Labour party's opposition to the colour bar clauses in the South African Act left a deep impression. 'It is the one party,' declared the A.P.O., 'in whose hands the honour of Old England can safely be trusted.' Untainted by trade, not bemused by firearms, its democracy was pure. Labour would sweep the 'wretched hucksters' out of office at the next election. The Coloured hoped for a like display of class solidarity in South Africa. 'The same result will follow here as soon as all workers, white or black, learn that they are the country, and that on 125

Class and Colour in South Africa z85o-195o labour everything rests.' 3 4 When the Cape railways advertised vacancies for white labourers only on construction works at Piquetberg, the paper appealed to trade unionists to join in protest. 'Too long have black and white been played off against one another. . .. It is to the Socialists that we must look for help in our fight against a class tyranny that deprives us of 35 political freedom.' It was a class as well as a racial tyranny. The word kleurlyn concealed the realities of capitalist exploitation behind the myth of racial inferiority. The 'colour line' was a subterfuge used to persuade the world that the darker races were inferior and in capable of undertaking so-called white man's work. 36 All em ployers took part in the exploitation. The capitalists hired 'Kaffir drudges' because these worked for a scanty wage. There was no more virtue in politicians like Sauer, Merriman and Burton, who employed convicts on their farms, than in the Rand magnates, who imported Chinese. 37 Smuts might appeal for unity between white South Africans, few of whom did physical work except on the rugby field. The whole industrial and economic structure depended on the coloured races. Even Mer riman, 'the greatest jabberer of the crowd', grew pumpkins by proxy with coloured workers, 'save when he can get white aristocratic convicts to slave for less pay'. 3 8 Abdurahman retained his early faith in working-class unity for many years in spite of rebuffs by white trade unionists who agitated for colour bars. White workers erred, his paper argued, in looking on the Coloured as their enemy. They should declare war on indentured labour, whether for mines, farms or domestic service. Coloured workers, like the whites, sold their skills to the highest bidder. Neither could obtain their true reward without cooperation. The employer, their economic enemy, could win only by playing off one group against the other. Un less white artisans overcame their stupid prejudices, their pros pects were no brighter than the Coloured's. 'Workers of all creeds and colours must stand together; must put an end to all divisions.' Unfortunately, the spirit of solidarity - the basis of all trade unionism - was 'deeper engraved in the heart of the Coloured artisan than it is in that of the white',39 126

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When Noon and Tom Maginess spoke to APO branches on Labour's racial policies, Abdurahman declared himself to be a socialist, like any public man who tried to improve the position of the lower classes. By cooperation they could bring the capitalists to their knees within forty-eight hours. He objected to strikes, as they caused more misery than they alleviated, but the strike appeared to be the only weapon available. Maginess and many of his comrades in the Cape admittedly wanted the Coloured worker to get the same pay as the white for the same work, but the Transvaal Labour party's sole aim was to prevent the Coloured from living at all. The talk about 'dragging the white man down' was childish. The Coloured wanted to uplift themselves and all men. But the white workers on the Rand were about the most selfish lot he had heard of in any part of the world, as selfish as a pack of hungry wolves. 40 The A PO's faith in working-class solidarity turned into bitter resentment as the labour movement in the north pressed its demands for racial discrimination. Addressing the annual con

ference at Johannesburg in I912, Abdurahman referred to the

cumulative evidence that the general body of whites regarded his people as pariahs - banned from the Dutch Reformed Church, from schools and the army; and doomed to a condition worse than slavery. The self-styled Labour party aimed at giving white men a monopoly of skilled work for all time. Yet some skilled trades in the Cape employed a vast majority of Coloured, and the process must extend to the Rand. It was simply not practicable to assign separate classes of work to men grouped according to their colour. The interests of white artisans, too, demanded the removal of colour bars and the establishment of inter-racial working-class solidarity. Labour leaders who turned white work ers against the darker races were playing into the hands of the capitalist. The division of the nation into hostile camps would give rise to a solid front of Africans and Coloured. White racists were creating the conditions for a war of extermination. Con ference should meet the danger by laying the foundations of a Coloured Races Union. 'To ensure peace, one must prepare for war.' 4

The alternatives were class war or race war, and the choice 127

Class and Colour in South Africa T85o-i95o lay with the white worker. Though radicals might believe that class antagonisms would dissolve his colour prejudice, those in the A P 0 were more realistic. They acknowledged that the Cape's socialists were sympathetic to the Coloured worker. Was it not a fact, however, that they had joined the Labour party, whose white labour doctrines had been adopted by Botha and inserted into Het Volk's manifesto? Tom Maginess admitted to the affiliation. Labour leaders had decided on it, he said, after much hesitation, and were convinced that their party would not injure the Coloured worker. It was largely because of Abdurah man's influence, he complained, that Labour in the Cape had no seat in parliament. White and Coloured workers would not fail if they stood together, as they had done on the issue of work men s compensation. 4 I These assurances carried little weight, however, when set against such displays of hostility as the circu lars issued by the Transvaal federation of trade unions, calling for a boycott of builders, owners and merchants who 'sacrificed the heritage of the white people' by employing Coloured 43 workers. There was little in Labour's parliamentary record to evoke enthusiasm in Coloured and African voters. Creswell, Sampson, Madeley, Haggar and Andrews knew that their political bread was buttered on the side of white privilege. They represented artisans, clerks and small traders on the Rand; and rarely spoke on behalf of the entire working class. Creswell made this clear early in 191i when moving the adoption of his party's white labour policy. It was of the utmost importance, he argued, that whites should engage in every kind of social undertaking and productive enterprise.4 4 As parliament unrolled its endless chain of discriminatory laws, Labour members spoke only against those elements that might injure the white working man. The Unionists, but not Labour, opposed 'that blasphemous piece of legislation', the Dutch Reformed Church Act.45 Intro duced on the opening day of the Union parliament's first session, it excluded coloured persons from membership of the church in any province other than the Cape. Creswell criticized the Native Labour Regulation Act of 19xi for perpetuating the 'semi slavery system' of indentured labour which narrowed the white 128

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man's sphere of employment. But he made no protest against the medieval penal code that the act inflicted on Africans. 46 He objected to the Immigrants' Restriction Act of 1911 because it left a loophole through which Asians might enter the country; and would not condemn the restraints on freedom of movement that imprisoned South African Indians in their province of domicile. 4 7 Even Andrews, the only genuine socialist in parlia ment, could be heard asking ministers to substitute white youths for Africans on the maintenance of telegraph lines in his con stituency of Germiston; or complaining that Africans were being employed to knock down rivets on railway bridges. This was a white man's job, and riveters argued that they were'making a rod for their own backs' by teaching Africans a part of their trade.48 It was not only for economic reasons that socialist principles gave way to electoral expediency. Labour leaders also pandered to the white man's sexual prejudices. Madeley drew attention in the House to 'brutal outrages on white women by Kaffirs', and would have the minister advise judges to inflict 'the utmost legal penalty of the death sentence on persons convicted of rape'.49 This display of ferocity occurred during a 'Black Peril'

campaign that had been sparked off by the reprieve of an African sentenced to death at Umtali in Rhodesia for the rape of a white woman. The A.P.O. commented sensibly that the employment of African men in white households inevitably exposed them to temptation. Labour's official paper the Worker replied with an outrageous attack on the 'A.P.O., the mouthpiece of the black, brown, snuff and butter'; and concluded that 'after a nigg*r has absorbed the poison into his head he will reckon that the white woman is his game'. The A.P.O.'s editor, 'who, we believe, has a white wife, should get 25 of the best enthusiastically adminis tered by someone from Umtali way'. 5 Abdurahman retorted that it was 'foul and loathsome con duct' so to drag in the family of another editor; and asserted that the Coloured were determined to make their opinions heard. The Worker returned to the attack with an abusive article on the A.P.O.'s alleged encouragement of the 'cholera' of Coloured business enterprise. The white worker would be ousted unless he woke up. His remedy was to boycott 'everything produced by 129

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the cholera' and to demand a minimum wage for all workers. South Africa, replied the A.P.O., was the home of the Coloured. They would assert their right to live and work where they liked, and would not concede privilege to any white man because of his colour. The aim of the demand for a minimum wage was to oust the Coloured man from his trade. He did not fear the whites in open contest but loathed their hypocrisy.5 1 In parliament Labour members took up the cudgels on the African's behalf only when to do so would strengthen the white worker's position. They had him in mind when they urged the House to extend the principle of statutory compensation for industrial injuries and miners' phthisis to Africans and Coloured. They, too, were human, said Madeley, and had a right to be compensated.5 2 Sampson gave the real reason when he told his party's annual conference in January 1912 that black labour was being preferred to white because workmen's compensation and other industrial laws made the white man more expensive. 5 3 As the A.P.O.54 never tired of explaining, the Labour leaders wanted to price the Coloured man out of the labour market. Alerted by these warnings, he looked askance at appeals to join hands with white workers. When Clark, president of the car penters' society, urged Coloured artisans in Natal to organize and affiliate to his federation, they told him that white carpen ters and bricklayers refused to work next to Coloured journey men. They were consequently obliged to take a lower wage in order to keep their jobs; and would be forced out of their trade if they followed his advice.55 Creswell outlined his party's policy of total segregation during the debate on the Natives Land Act of 1913. They were the first, he claimed, to advocate the partitioning of South Africa between the races. The reserves should be consolidated into a continuous tract 'so that the natives might have their own institutions and develop along their own lines'. Andrews criticized the draft act in so far as it aimed at the supply of 'an abundance of cheap Kafir labour'. He would not, however, exempt the Cape or any other region from the restrictive clauses. Nor did he wish to see large areas being set aside for Africans until they had learned to work the land to its fullest value. 56 None of the Labour mem130

NationalLiberation bers protested against the injustice or examined the consequences of restricting the occupancy rights of four million Africans to less than 8 per cent of the country's area, while the If million settlers

had unimited access to the remaining 92 per cent.|

The act scheduled some io4 million morgen,* with a promise

of more to come, for occupation by Africans, who would be

prohibited, except in the Cape, from buying or leasing from non-Africans outside the scheduled areas, without the governor general's express permission. This protected white landowners from competition by Africans, who were slowly buying back some of the land filched from them or their fathers. By outlawing tenancy agreements between landowners and Africans, the act would prevent some farmers from maintaining reserves of African labour while other farmers complained of labour scarcity. Finally, the restriction on landholding by Africans would force peasants to leave the overcrowded, impoverished reserves to work for mine owners and farmers. The Cape was excluded because a ban on the right to acquire land would diminish the African franchise, which had been entrenched by the South Africa Act. Territorial segregation was imposed on the Cape only after Africans had been removed from the common roll in 1936, and it was only then that parliament redeemed its promise to set more land aside for their occupation.5 7 J. W. Sauer, the minister of native affairs, piloted the Natives Land Bill through parliament. A great champion of equality in pre-Union days, he traded his principles for cabinet rank and succumbed to the racists of the north. The A.P.O. called on him to resign rather than betray the confidence that Africans had placed in him. His bill was 'more barbarous than anything Kruger ever introduced'; 'the most audacious act of piracy on rights of man that has been committed in South Africa'; and 'the quintessence of tyranny and falsehood'. Nothing so base had issued from a parliament that 'since the day of its foul birth, has loaded this land with loathsome rottenness in every con ceivable form of colour legislation'. It was the African's duty to send a deputation to England in the faint hope that the imperial parliament might withhold its consent.5 8 *A morgen is approximately equal to two acres. 131

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African reactions were no less immediate and vehement.

'Awakening on Friday morning, June 2oth, 1913, the South

African Native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth,' wrote Sol Plaatje, the first secretary 59 general of the S.A. Native National Congress. He toured the a areas affected by what he called the 'Plague Act' and wrote harrowing account of the plight of tenant families evicted with their livestock from farms within two months of the act's implementation. Meetings of protest, petitions and deputations failed to obtain relief. Conferences convened by the Congress in July 1913 and February 1914 decided to send a deputation

to England. Botha, the prime minister, curtly rejected a petition submitted by Dube, the Congress president, on behalf of his voteless people. '"I'll have your land, so go to England," is practically what Botha's reply means,' commented the A .P.O., '-and to England we trust the Natives will go to tell Englishmen 60 how the sons of the soil are being robbed.' Only Jabavu among the leaders adhered loyally to Sauer, defended the act and opposed the sending of a deputation. Misrepresenting the terms of the act, he told his followers that it would secure their land against alienation to whites and provide homes for landless squatters. His people rejected his special pleading. He had offended them in i9io by backing the Botha Smuts government and by opposing Rubusana's candidature for the provincial council seat of Tembuland. If Africans seized the first opportunity to send one of their own people to the council, Jabavu argued, they would stir up an agitation against them and endanger their franchise in the Cape. 61 Rubusana persisted, won the election with a majority of twenty-five votes, and became the first and last African provincial councillor. In 1911 Jabavu, his son Davidson, Rubusana, Chief Dalindyebo and Palmer Mgwet yana represented Africans at the Universal Races Congress in England. 62 On his return, Jabavu formed the S.A. Races Con gress in opposition to the S.A. Native National Congress, later 63 known as the African National Congress. By this time, how ever, he had lost his people's confidence. They looked for leadership to the AN C. Its foundations had been laid in the preceding decade by the 132

National Liberation formation of a provincial Native Congress in Natal, the Trans vaal and the Orange River Colony. The Act of Union stimulated the leaders to meet the challenge of a single, central white govern ment. The S.A. Native Convention, held at Bloemfontein in March i909, had elected an executive 'to promote organization and to defend the interests of the Natives' against the colour bar in the draft Act of Union. Rubusana, Dube, Silas Molema of Mafeking and other members of the executive claimed to have branches in all the provinces, Basutoland and Bechuana land.6 4 In 1911 Seme announced the proposed formation of a S.A. Native Congress. There was, he observed, a general desire for progress and for a national forum. 'We are one people. Let us forget the differences between Xhosa-Fingo, Zulus and Tongas, Basutos and other Natives.' Nearly all the leaders and greater chiefs supported the movement for a congress that would give them an effective means of making their grievances known to government and South Africa at large.6" Pixley ka I. Seme, born in Zululand, was related by marriage to the Zulu royal house. He graduated at Columbia University, was admitted to the Bar from the Middle Temple, and practised law in Johannesburg. He did the spade work for the conference with the aid of other young lawyers. One of them, Alfred Mangena (1879-1924), was a member of Lincoln's Inn, and became the first African from South Africa to qualify and practise as an advocate. Another, R. W. Msimang, who also qualified in Britain, drafted the ANC constitution. The notice convening the conference went out in December over Seme's signature. Con ference would formally establish the AN C as 'a national Society or Union for the natives of South Africa'; adopt a constitution; elect officers; take a vote of confidence in Botha, Sauer, and the 'Native Senators'; and discuss a variety of topics, including marriage and divorce, schools and churches, pass laws, 'the black peril and the white peril', and native beer, land, courts and labour. 'If there is no other reason to attend the Congress,' remarked Plaatje, 'it is at least worth a railway fare to go and hear what the "Four Native Senators" have done to deserve a 66 vote of confidence. ' Close on a hundred delegates from all parts of South Africa I33

Class and Colour in South Africa 1850-1950 and the Protectorates attended the ANC'S inaugural conference at Bloemfontein on 8 January 1912. Among them were nine influential chiefs, including Maama Seiso, representing the Basutoland monarch Letsie II, and Joshua Molema, represent ing the Rolong paramount Montsioa. J. Mocher, president of the Free State Native Congress, took the chair. Seine and Molema

moved the institution of Congress. This thereupon adopted a

constitution and elected an executive with Dube as president, seven vice-presidents including Rubusana, the corresponding secretary Plaatje, a recording secretary Attorney G. D. Montsioa of Pietersburg, and two treasurers, Seme and Mapikela. Letsie II accepted the position of honorary president, but he was only one of some eight reigning monarchs who were elected to that position; others were the kings of 6 7the Lozi, Zulu, Pondo, Tembu, Rolong, Kgatla and Ngwato. The deference shown to traditional rulers and the provision made in the constitution for an upper house of chiefs have led some writers to overestimate the influence of tribal leaders on Congress. The late I. I. Potekhin, a Soviet historian of Africa, argued that they were feudal compradores* who controlled the ANC for many years in opposition to the progressive intellectuals of the rising national bourgeoisie. It was because of the chiefs' influence, he maintained, that Congress rejected illegal mass struggle against oppressive racial laws and crawled before the authorities. In his opinion, an insoluble contradiction existed between the aim of building a nation and the aim of strengthen ing tribal institutions. 'An organization of feudal compradores, such as was the AN C at first, cannot be the standard-bearers of a nation.' Seme, like other right-wing leaders, Potekhin wrote, actually lowered the level of national consciousness by teaching Africans to think of themselves as junior partners of the white man who had brought peace and goodwill to Africa. 'Congress never even put the question of national independence for the imperialism.'68 Bantu or of freedom for their country from British Potekhin did not adequately examine the process of amalga mating scores of formerly independent and often antagonistic *Native agents of foreign firms. The word is used here to describe tribal chiefs. 134 *

***~,

NationalLiberation ethnic societies into a single nation. No Marxist who is familiar with the concept 'national in form, socialist in content' should be surprised to learn that tribalism will wither away only if given free play in a non-tribal environment. The teachers, lawyers, ministers, journalists, clerks and other 'intellectuals' who set the pace would have isolated themselves from the great majority of Africans if they had rejected the traditional leaders. Sol Plaatje was no tribalist, but he welcomed the participation of chiefs. Similar attempts at unity had been made before, he noted, but 'it became evident that the Natives can never effect anything unless supported by Chiefs'. For one thing, a majority of wage earners came from beyond the borders of South Africa, and would not join a movement if it was not sponsored by their chiefs. 6 9 This was true also of many peasant workers in South Africa, who made their living in the towns while their families, land and livestock remained a part of the traditional com munity. The chiefs were neither 'feudal' nor 'compradores'. Cast in conflicting roles, they defended their people against the colonists and also served as minor functionaries of the white bureaucracy. The dualism produced many strains and some overt resistance to authority. Most chiefs were illiterate and backward custodians of tribal values; but some were progressive, while not a few members of the new educated elite were reactionary. Both groups confronted white power in two dimensions. One was British imperialism, the dominant force until after the Anglo-Afrikaner war. The other was an authentic budding South African imperial ism. For historical and tactical reasons Africans, Coloured and Indians appealed to the external power for assistance against their immediate oppressors until experience taught them that salvation would not come from Whitehall. The educated leaders were restrained, religious, and skilled in handling whites with tact and tolerance. Always on the defensive, Congress was constrained to appease an aggressive, bigoted South African colonialism. Rubusana, on being nominated for the Tembuland seat, declared that his people acknowledged the superiority of the white race. All they asked for was equal opportunity and the open door. 7 0 Congress struck 135 ./

I-

Class and Colour in South Africa 185-i95o the same conciliatory note in its first statement of aims.7 1 It would promote 'unity and mutual cooperation between the Abantu races'; maintain a central channel of communication between them and the government; strive for the educational, social, economic and political elevation of the African people; promote mutual understanding between the chiefs; encourage a spirit of loyalty to the British crown and all lawful authority; bring about better understanding between the white and black inhabitants; safeguard the interests of Africans, and obtain redress for their just grievances. Congress failed in the early period to arrive at a consistent political theory or strategy of struggle. The movement's great achievement was to develop a national consciousness through joint action and the medium of its paper Abantu Batho (The People). Meeting in Johannesburg on 8 May 19x2, the executive claimed that Congress held sway over all regions except the eastern Cape, where it had encountered Jabavu's resistance. The Congress leadership tended to be centred in the north partly for this reason and because it was there that Africans had no vote and were most fully absorbed in an expanding industrialism. The approved methods of struggle were to ventilate grievances at public meetings and through the press, and make representa tions for redress by means of resolutions and deputations. The complaints were endless: a new dog tax in areas where dogs were needed to keep down vermin; inadequate compensation for miners injured or killed at work; poor accommodation for third-class passengers on the railways; the substitution of white for African interpreters in the courts; the denial of franchise rights; the pass laws; the harassment of women in the Free State under municipal regulations. The women made history in 1913 by organizing a passive resistance movement and went to jail in large numbers rather than take out residential permits. Congress took up their case and scored one of its few victories in the struggle against discrimination. Congress established its claim to speak for the people when it conducted a country-wide campaign against the Natives Land Act. Recalling Abdurahman's famous speech of January 1912, it declared that his prediction of a war of extermination was 136

National Liberation

being fulfilled. Some fifty delegates at a special session in Johannesburg in July 1913 heard Sotho, Zulu and Xhosa inter preters read the act line by line. In August Saul Msane (Natal), J. M. Nyoking (oFs), S. M. Makgotho (Transvaal), Enoch Mamba (Transkei), Sol Plaatje (secretary), Chief Kekane (Hamanskraal) and the Rev. Twala interviewed F. S. Malan, who had taken Sauer's place after his death in July as minister of native affairs. They gave instances of hardships caused by the act and told him of their decision to appeal to Britain. Whatever steps they took, he was assured, would be within 'the four corners of the law'. Malan replied that the act had to be obeyed and doubted the success of a mission to Britain. The leaders toured the country to explain Congress policy and collect funds 2 for a deputation.7 Imvo sang Sauer's praises in obituary notices and failed to point out that his Land Act embraced the hated northern prin ciples which he had once opposed. The Congress took its cam paign into the heart of Jabavu's political domain and challenged him to debate the issue in public. He refused and struck back by standing for election to the provincial council in Tembuland against Rubusana, the sitting member. This split the African vote. A. Payne, the white candidate, won the seat with 1,oo4 votes, against Rubusana's 852 and Jabavu's 294. 'One of the ablest, most cultured and respected Natives, the first of his race to be elected to the Provincial Council, has been unseated through the despicable action of one who has long been dis credited by a vast majority of the Bantu race.' 73 The A.P.O.'s comment expressed the sentiments of Africans generally, in cluding many of Jabavu's followers. The betrayal, coming on top of his support of the Land Act, put an end to his political career; and no African was ever again elected to the provincial council. Rubusana left soon after his defeat, together with Dube, Plaatje, Mapikela and Msane, to put the African case before the British government and public. They left against the express wishes of Lord Gladstone, the governor-general, and Louis Botha; and. they received no sympathy from Lewis Harcourt, the secretary of state for the colonies. He rejected the deputation's petition, which pointed out that '37

Class and Colour in South Africa r85o-1950 Africans were the original inhabitants of South Africa, and he told the Commons that a just, considered segregation would probably lead to greater happiness for all. Britain trusted the South African government and must respect its sovereign authority. Britain had never surrendered her position as pro tector of the natives, but would not intervene unless gross palpable injustice was proved. The deputation had come to England against the advice of Botha and Gladstone; knew that the act would not be disallowed; and should have made their case in their own parliament. It was not, however, their parliament. Britain had excluded them to appease white power. The South African government responded only to voters and ignored the interests of a political nullity. Congress met on i August 1914 to hear a report on the mission and to plan the next stage in its own campaign. Dube returned a few days later. Botha, he said, had deceived the British with assurances that all Africans evicted from farms would be given land in the reserves. Abdurahman's comment was more incisive. 'The Coloured races of the Empire may be robbed, plundered and forcibly driven into slavery by whites'; but the imperial parliament would approve as long as these things were done through legislative enactment. 'The present foundation of the Empire is rotten, and cannot last.' If 'it cannot be mended, then the sooner it is ended the better'. 'The coloured races could not possibly be worse governed when left to their own resources than they were governed under British rule.'" Britain went to war on 4 August. Two weeks later Abdurahman have to ask ourselves is how declared: 'The only question we 75 we can best serve the Empire.'

138

7 Thunder on the Left

Wilfrid Harrison claimed to be Cape Town's most noted 'mob orator'. His stock answer to hecklers who interrupted his de nunciations of capitalism with interjections about the 'colour question' was, 'And what about your red nose - that is coloured, isn't it?' He would go on to explain that he was there to deal, not with the pigment in a man's skin, which was a medical mystery, but with capitalism, the cause of colour prejudice and exploita tion in general.' The evangelical socialists of Harrison's Social Democratic Federation insisted that race discrimination, like the conditions of the poor, was a 'side issue', a symptom of the tensions inherent in capitalist society. No true socialist would allow colour prejudice to divert him from his function of per suading the people to place the means of production under public ownership. Discrimination would disappear under social ism and should be ignored as being irrelevant to the labour movement. The notion that class interest would prevail over racial an tagonism seemed more credible in the western Cape than in the north. Members of the SD F certainly tried to put their theory to the test. H. MacManus quoting in his Belfast twang from William Morris and the Bible; Hunter mixing socialism with temperance; H. B. Levinson relying on economic determinism; Arthur Noon propagating Christian socialism, and Harrison, armed revolt, took their messages to racially mixed audiences in District Six, in Salt River, and at the foot of Van Riebeeck's statue in Adderley Street. Coloured leaders reciprocated their goodwill and cooperated with socialists in the early years. H. P. Gordon, a prospective Labour candidate for Woodstock in 1904, took the initiative in directing the movement into

parliamentary politics, and proposed joint action with the

APO

139

Class and Colour in South Africa r85o-195o in 19o5. Abdurahman replied that 'Yours, or rather ours because we feel the same, is a hard life.' None of them ever expected 'that such brutalities, and injustices would be perpetrated under the protection of the British Rule or Mis-rule. There is only and that is sink our little differences and one thing for us to do, 2 show a united front.' The united front never took shape. For all their Hyde Park oratory, the socialists failed the sovereign test of political sin cerity. They appealed for Coloured votes but were no more prepared than liberal or racist parties to nominate a Coloured candidate in municipal or parliamentary elections. Abdurahman himself built a first-rate electoral machine, which kept him in the Cape Town municipal council from 1903 until his death in 1940. He did not need the white worker's vote and, when obliged to choose between white candidates, preferred men of wealth or standing who backed him against Labour or Afrikaner National ist opponents. Neither white nor Coloured radicals attempted to recruit members from the Cape peninsula's 5,ooo Africans, who were excluded from skilled work by convention almost as effec tively as in the north. Without a large following in the Coloured population, and based on a small, conservative white working class, the socialists of the Cape remained in the cocoon stage of theoretical propaganda. Many of the Cape's more energetic socialists - the Needham brothers, Erasmus, Davidson, McKillop, Blake, Fraser, Bate man - left South Africa or moved to the Rand during the first ten years of the century. Those who remained lost their mission ary zeal, wrangled over whether or not to take part in elections, became armchair critics of the right-wing leaders, or joined the Labour party and were identified with its white supremacy policies. In spite of their failings, however, the pioneer socialists of the Cape made a significant contribution. Their insistence that class, and not race, was the basic cause of conflict left an imprint on later generations, and strengthened the hand of radicals with similar views in Natal and the Transvaal. Socialists in the Cape belonged to the inner circle of a weak labour movement. Their counterparts on the Rand had the advantage of appealing to a large, relatively well organized and 140

Thunder on the Left occasionally militant working class, but competed with a power ful right-wing trade union leadership. Ideological differences were therefore sharper, the conflicts within the movement more intense, than farther south. The right wing was heavily com mitted to racial discrimination. Socialists faced the dilemma of all radicals who contested elections based on an all-white franchise. They could denounce racism and suffer an abysmal defeat; or make a bid for success by trading radical principles for votes. Left-wing politicians were tempted to compromise. They concentrated their propaganda on the class war, evaded the colour issue, and when challenged rejected white labour policies as a betrayal of the white worker's interests. The white labour policy, according to Crawford's band of militant socialists, was a 'white kaffir policy' which would reduce all workers to the African's living standards. Archie Crawford was labour's most notable maverick until Smuts had him deported in 1914. Born in Glasgow in 1883, and a fitter by trade, he came with the troops in 1902, worked on the railways at Pretoria, and was dismissed in 19o6 for agitating against retrenchments in the workshop. In the following year he unsuccessfully contested the Boksburg West parliamentary seat, but was returned as a Labour member to the Johannesburg town council. His great achievement was to found, publish and edit the Voice of Labour, 'A Weekly Journal of Socialism, Trade Unionism and Politics'. It appeared regularly from October 1908 to December I912, when it died for want of funds. Its corre spondents included active socialists throughout the country: Harrison, Noon and Davidson of Cape Town, Norrie of Durban, Greene of Pietermaritzburg, Henry Glass of Port Elizabeth. It advertised and published extracts from the works of Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, De Leon, Eugene Debs, Blatchford and Keir Hardie; and made the first systematic attempt to spread the doctrines of revolutionary socialism. The paper, wrote its editor, 'is the barometer of working-class consciousness in South Africa'; and the failure to 'reach the moderate total of io,ooo indicates the almost criminal apathy of the working class'. As Labour councillor, active trade unionist, member of the IL P and LRC, Crawford belonged to the top leadership until it 141

Class and Colour in South Africa z850-1950 broke with him over the issue of the Fordsburg nominations He attended the series of conferences held at Durban and Johannesburg in 19o8-9 to form the Labour party and draft its constitution. Representing his newborn Socialist Society at the conference of October 19o9, together with Davidson and mem bers of the ILP he moved that they call themselves the S.A. Socialist Party. This was defeated after a heated debate. Mathews, Mussared, Nettleton and other trade unionists told the conference that their members would not join a party bearing this name. Socialists would do more good by organizing their fellow workers than by preaching idealism. But the I LP delegates succeeded in obtaining a majority vote for their motion to insert in the con stitution a clause calling for 'The socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange to be controlled by a democratic State in the interests of the whole community.' This was hailed as a great victory over the right wing, as was also the defeat of Sampson's policy of total segregation. Their 'native policy', said Sampson, was the rock on which the party might founder. He would grant all Coloured persons having one white parent full political, industrial and social rights. The white and black races were first separated by nature and should be kept apart. It was morally wrong for one race to suppress or exploit another. Though he approved of the white labour policy as a means to an end, it offered no permanent solu tion. It could be dangerous to the white race, by leading to the importation of low-wage Europeans under contract. Moreover, it disregarded the interests of Africans, who had been deprived of their land. The only natural solution was to segregate Africans in their own territory, where they could govern themselves and progress in ways they found most suitable. This could be done without taking an inch of land away from white men. Repre sentatives of all European nations holding land in South Africa should meet to partition the country between whites and Afri cans. Meanwhile, Africans should be given their own elected councils, through which they could make direct representations to parliament. 3 Delegates from the Cape SDF, the ILP and Socialist Society spoke against Sampson's motion. The most effective speech 142

Thunder on the Left came from James Trembath, Kimberley's labour councillor and a leader in the struggle of 19o8 against De Beers over its decision to withdraw the customary half-holiday on Saturdays. 4 The colour prejudice in Johannesburg, he said, was most un reasonable. He was proud that the majority of white workers in the Cape were in favour of full equality. Labour could not afford to alienate the Coloured, who had a powerful organization in the APo. The party would be put back fifty years if they antagonized the 8oo Coloured voters of Kimberley. When he successfully contested a municipal by-election, he had to over come the handicap imposed by an anti-colour resolution moved by Bill Andrews at Johannesburg's Labour Day rally in I9o9. His opponents posted copies of the resolution to every African and Coloured voter in Kimberley. 'The thing is we must either have coloured men on our side or against us.' This convinced conference, but it could not be persuaded into accepting Craw ford's motion that the party should recognize only two classes in society and reject any policy based on differences of colour. The militants were highly satisfied, in spite of this setback, which was more than compensated for by the adoption of a 'socialist objective' and the rejection of Sampson's apartheid policy. His one real regret, said Crawford, was that conference had agreed to allow trade unions to join the party on the payment of a political levy. Trembath, Sampson and Mathews had strenuously opposed his motion to admit individuals only. They wanted to get at the pockets of non-party trade unionists. Socialism was dearer than life to him, yet he would not force it on anyone. 5 His scruples - which Trembath and the Witwaters rand trades council had shared in 19o5 - were related, however, to the disciplinary action taken against him in December I9o9. Accusing him of disloyalty, the L R c had resolved to exclude him from its meetings. Crawford's own explanation was that the members of the committee had already nominated one another for the parliamentary elections, including the constituency of Fordsburg, to which he had a prior claim. 6 His candidature was endorsed at the inaugural conference on 26 December of the S.A. Socialist Federation which had as chairman the great industrial agitator J. T. Bain of Pretoria.

'43

Class and Colour in South Africa r85o-195o Born in Scotland, a fitter by trade, he came to South Africa in the early 88os, helped to form the miners' union, became a Transvaal burgher, fought on the side of the republics against his the British, and was sent as a prisoner of war to Ceylon. Even backing failed to give the Federation a flying start. Natal and Cape socialists, clinging to their customary parochialism, refused in to affiliate. The Federation functioned only on the Rand and Pretoria, largely as an opposition group to the Labour party which made its official debut at Durban on io January as the first national political party, with Sampson as president and first Haggar as the general secretary. Labour was all set for the round of elections under the South Africa Act. Crawford's party disdained to join in the hue and cry against the darker man; but it did not add its voice to the protest against the colour bar in the constitution. It criticized Union in terms of the class theory, as a capitalist scheme, which had brought the workers nothing, and would take from them an increasing portion of the fruits of their labour. 'The Class War still wages' declared the Voice in its first issue after the inaugura tion of Union. 7 When challenged on the colour bar, Crawford took refuge in a philosophical discourse on socialist ethics, which knew neither race, colour nor creed. He would admit qualified 8 Coloured men to the franchise and to the socialist society. He did not follow this affirmation of principle with a campaign to recruit them to his party or to have the colour bar deleted. He argued instead that the white franchise was a capitalist device to stir up hostility between workers of different races. Colour consciousness, artificially stimulated, obscured class con sciousness, which was a natural thing. 'Before they will let the white worker get hold of the reins of government, they will 9 enfranchise the natives and exploit their ignorance.' Crawford contested Fordsburg against Bill Andrews, Krause and Patrick Duncan in the general election of 191o and polled eight votes. His team mate Jim Davidson stood in Commissioner Street against Sampson and received twenty-five. The two social ists fought on an uncompromising class war platform, called for the abolition of capitalism, and studiously refrained from making any reference in their manifesto to racial discrimination or 144

Thunder on the Left African claims. 10 The Labour leaders had agreed with Het Volk

that the two parties would not contest the same seats. This, said the socialists, was a betrayal of socialist principles. 'No single candidate of the South African Labour Party,' they urged, 'should receive working class support.'1 1 They did not rebuke Labour for betraying its principles by adopting white supremacy policies. After the election, however, the Voice claimed that Crawford and Davidson were the only two candidates in the Transvaal who had refused to draw the colour line, and were the first to stand for revolutionary principles. The votes they received were given 'for revolutionary Socialism and no race or colour bar'.' 2

Two other Socialist candidates, L. H. Greene in Pieter maritzburg and Arthur Noon in Cape Town, also lost heavily. The Labour party nominated eleven candidates in the Transvaal, six in Natal and two in the Cape; and won four seats, all on the Rand, where Creswell, the party leader, Sampson, Madeley and Haggar were returned. Among those defeated were Andrews, Bain, Coward, Reid, Mathews, Mussared and Wybergh who, like Creswell, joined the party only two months before the election. Tom Maginess, the Labour candidate in Woodstock, lost by the small margin of 25 votes to John Hewat, the Unionist, and James Trembath polled 584 votes for Labour in Kimberley against the Unionist's 1,121 votes. Abdurahman canvassed for the Unionists and told Trembath that he could not expect sup port from Coloured voters as long as his party in the Transvaal was determined to crush the Coloured out from every sphere of employment.' 3 Trembath and Maginess, said Crawford, owed their defeat to the white labour policy of the trades hall in 14 Johannesburg. Peter Whiteside found a seat in the senate by goodwill of Het Volk. 'A Ten Years fat job for Peter and the betrayal of the Workers,' noted the Voice. He was a Judas, the prototype of many present leaders who preached class war, such as Tom Mann, Andrews J.P., Tom Mathews and Mussared. He had not gone to the senate to represent the workers, for he had betrayed them as far back as 1907 by preventing his engine drivers and

firemen from supporting the miners' strike.1 5 The 'aristocrats of C.S.A. -7

145

Class and Colour in South Africa z85o-r95o labour', wrote Crawford, were selling out for the sake of a few safe seats. 16 Eyebrows were raised in some other quarters at the alliance between a 'landed aristocracy' and a working-class party."7 Yet it was not very surprising, since the two saw eye to eye on the issue of racial discrimination. Botha had taken over the white labour policy for his election manifesto. Labour's own manifesto put forward a full-blown segregation scheme. Based on Sampson's rejected policy, it called for the subsidiza tion of white workers in mines and factories, the expulsion of Asians, and a ban on the right of Africans to buy or occupy land outside the reserves. Crawford put on a brave face. He was not disappointed, for to have won at the age of twenty-seven would spell popularity and put an end to his life's work! 'I stand for revolutionary Socialism,' he proclaimed, and 'refuse to draw lines of race, colour, creed, or sex. I only know the class division, its cause, and the struggle which arises therefrom; a struggle which will cease when there is only one class and that the nation. '18 He took his defeat badly, in fact, and relinquished control of his paper and press a few weeks later to commence a thirteen months' tour of the 'industrial world'. Visiting Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Britain, he reported on wages, working conditions and the movement, hobnobbed with radi cals, addressed meetings and poured scorn on 'reformism' and 'trade union fakirs'. He enlisted writers for the Voice and with less success potential revolutionary settlers for South Africa. This Odysseus, this wanderer, wrote his admirers, is probably 'the first of our class to circumnavigate the Industrial World on behalf of Socialism.19 His small band of followers, disheartened by their poor show ing and at war with the Labour party, turned their backs on parliament. The working class, they argued, could not be eman cipated through politics alone. Any labour movement would lapse into reformism and class collaboration if it was not founded on revolutionary industrial unionism as defined by the American syndicalist Eugene Debs: 'the unity of all the workers within one organization, subdivided in their respective departments, and organized, not to fraternize with the exploiting capitalists, 146

Thunder on the Left

but to make war on them and to everlastingly wipe out their system under which labour is robbed of what it produces and held in contempt because it submits to the robbery.' 20 South African syndicalists agreed that craft unionism catered only for the labour aristocracy and formed a bulwark of capitalism by perpetuating sectionalism. They instanced the miners' strike of 1907 - when engine drivers, under instructions from their

secretary Peter Whiteside, transported scabs and ore mined by scabs - and the Natal railway strike of i9o9, also lost because of

craft divisions. Industrial unions, syndicalism and the general strike were not recent discoveries. The Voice of Labour, which took its name from the official journal of the American Labour Union, the initiator of the i w w, was started to spread the idea of a general workers' union. It received a great if temporary impetus from Tom Mann when, at the invitation of the Witwatersrand trades council, he visited South Africa in March i91o on his way home from Australia. The socialists, who first hailed him as their ally against reformism, soon lamented that he was a good man fallen among thieves. Andrews, Mathews, Sampson and other reformists were accused of isolating him from the left wing, whose views he shared. Placing his great abilities and marvellous eloquence at the disposal of trade union officialdom, Mann strengthened craft divisions by advocating a policy of working through existing unions rather than forming a new organization. Unlike Keir Hardie, who had appealed for equal pay and oppor tunities for all workers when he toured South Africa in 1907, Tom Mann made no reference to the position of the darker working man in his public speeches. He admitted at Jeppe that industrial unionism would not work as long as eighty per cent of wage earners were excluded from the unions. Yet he refrained from urging the unions to admit Africans and Coloured. He was strong where no colour problem existed, but weak in South Africa where he adapted his teachings to all-white audiences. 1 Mann, in a letter to Dr Abdurahman, pleaded in self-defence that he could not advance any cause if he antagonized the men whom he wished to convert. Perhaps because of his com plaisance, his oratory left little permanent imprint. He persuaded 147

Class and Colour in South Africa r85o-z95o the trades council to sponsor an industrial workers' union bY guaranteeing two months' salary to the organizer. The council lost interest, while the union itself passed into the hands of the radical socialists. T. Glynn, the new secretary and a motorman on the Johannesburg tramways, declared that the union would have to fight 'men of the type of Creswell, Sampson, Andrews & Co.' if it was to meet the need of a 'class-conscious revolutionary organization, embracing all workers regardless of craft, race or 22 colour', and dedicated to the entire overthrow of capitalism. The union, renamed the Industrial Workers of the World (S.A.), put its theory to the test in a successful one-day strike of Johannesburg tramwaymen against a brow-beating inspector. Hailed as the first triumph of working-class solidarity among whites, the strike was contrasted with the strike of bricklayers at Pretoria, which ended after seven weeks in a defeat for the men. The tramwaymen, dizzy with success, formed themselves into a branch of the i Ww and refused to recognize a municipal com mittee appointed to inquire into their grievances. Their leaders Glynn and Glendon were summarily dismissed in May, and this sparked off a strike famous in S.A. labour history as the one and only militant action of the industrial unionists. 2 3 Yet they failed hopelessly. They had no plan of campaign, left the strikers without effective leadership and relied mainly on the support of outsiders. The council set out to break the union, called in the police, banned public meetings, and ran the trams with scabs under police protection. 'The Tram employees,' complained Dunbar, 'were not defeated by the Town Council, nor by the police with their pickshafts, but by the workers who scabbed on their fellowmen.' 24 Glynn, sentenced to three months' imprison ment for inciting a strike, won his appeal against the conviction. He and Dunbar of the Iww, Back of the sP, Cameron the veteran leader of the sL P, and Councillor Lane, the man who defeated Andrews in the municipal elections of 1905, were prosecuted and acquitted on a charge of holding an unlawful meeting. Two strikers, Whittaker and Morant, were framed by police and charged with placing dynamite on the tram lines. They were also acquitted and obtained damages against the govern ment for illegal treatment while awaiting trial. 148 P-

.. .

. . .

Thunder on the Left This was one defeat that could not be attributed to craft divisions. It was therefore a splendid occasion for bewailing capitalist iniquities, working-class frailties, and the 'cowardly incompetence' of the 'Trades Hall clique'. No doubts were allowed to disturb the vision of one great industrial union. When Cape Town printers, white and Coloured, succumbed in June after a two months' strike and lockout on the issue of a closed shop, the radicals blamed not the scabs imported from Britain, but the abominations of craft trade unionism. Engineers refused to stop the machines, railwaymen hauled and workers bought scab 'matter', post office employees transmitted news, and printers in other towns set type from matrixes forwarded by rail to Cape Town master printers.2" Andrews, back from his assignment to assist the strikers, told a Johannesburg labour meeting that the strike had done more than years of street oratory to convert people in Cape Town to socialism. The Voice sneered that his craftmanship had the 'usual success' attached to his efforts as a strike leader.2 6 The radicals both detested and admired Andrews. His feud with Crawford dated from their clash in the Fordsburg election; and they resented his formidable role as organizer and political leader on the opposite side of the movement. He infuriated them with his cool, logical reasoning and exposure of sentimental humbug. Unable to find fault with his honesty and socialist sincerity, they descended to mere abuse. He was 'class war Andrews J.P.', a 'political opportunist' and 'labour fakir', who preached revolution and yet took office and title under capitalism. More than anyone else, they said, he perpetuated craft divisions and hindered class solidarity. When he contested the George town by-election in January 1912, they accused him of being at the bottom of half the discord in the movement. He was a sleek, well paid official (on £25 a month!) who sacrificed nothing for the cause, and sneered at honest, impecunious, victimized social ist agitators. Andrews was returned to parliament with 1,046 votes, against the 726 polled by the Unionist candidate. The Rand's working class had evidently resolved on the Labour party, remarked the Voice, and consoled itself with the thought that this brought closer the day of disillusionment.2 7 X49

Class and Colour in South Africa

185o-195o

'Political action is useless,' argued the bellicose blacksmith Andrew Dunbar, 'so long as the workers are split up in sectional unions.' Dunbar (1879-1964) came to South Africa from Scot land in 19o6, joined the Natal railways, led 2,500 men out on strike in i909 and subsequently settled on the Rand. An aggres sive socialist, he vacillated in the next three years between the SAL P, Socialist League, Socialist Party and I w w, of which he became the general secretary. The Voice defended him as unsurpassed in energy, enterprise and enthusiasm. When 'grimy and dirty, after having slaved nine hours at an anvil', he would address workers on the vices of social reformism and the merits of industrial unionism. They could not be emanci pated through political action alone, he told them; for to be of use, a socialist party must be founded on the 1 w w's principle of direct action.28 He demonstrated the advantages of 'direct action' in Johan nesburg's municipal election in October 1911, together with Mary Fitzgerald, the Irish beauty who partnered Crawford in his printing plant and later became his wife. A former typist in the office of the miners' union, she had recorded the death from phthisis of thirty-two executive members in a period of eight years; and was converted into a fiery socialist. She, Dunbar and Glynn came armed with pickhandles to election meetings of councillors whom they accused of banning free speech during the strike and turned them out of the hall. Labour increased its representation on the council from five to eleven members. The I wVw, said Dunbar, could claim a fair amount of credit for the success. 29 Though only in its second year, it had done more fighting than all the craft unions and political parties since their inception. He would have nothing to do with either, not even with the Socialist party, and this obduracy led to his expulsion from the IWW in February I92.3° The reasons given for his expulsion were intolerance, un predictable behaviour and intemperate attacks on his comrades; but he had sinned mainly by standing out against renewed attempts to consolidate socialist groups throughout the country in a single party. This led to a long and acrimonious debate. Dunbar and Glynn argued that the state reflected economic 150 ...

_",

Thunder on the Left relations. No parliamentary action could alter its basic structure. Even if Marxists controlled parliament, military and police power would still be on the side of the capitalist class. The general strike was the most powerful weapon of the workers and they could bring about a revolutionary change only by destroy ing the economic structure of capitalist society. Davidson and Crawford retorted that the syndicalists had made a fetish of the I WW. It was merely a means to the end, and of relative impor tance to other methods of achieving socialism. Dunbar's opposi tion, they said, was based on the fallacy that a socialist party could grow only at the expense of the iww; whereas they were complementary. The one could not be strong while the other was weak. Davidson was another Scottish radical who had substituted Marxism for Calvinism. He came to Cape Town in 1898 at the age of twenty-one, worked in a bank and municipal offices, joined the

at its inception in 1902, and became its general secretary before moving to the Rand in I9IO. Marxism, he main tained, held the view that the capitalists possessed power 'as a reflex of the ideas of the masses as expressed in the State or ideological institutions'. A revolutionary should therefore con centrate on changing the mind of the masses by both political and economic activity. The masses had swung from political to direct or economic action. It was safe to predict that they would swing back to parliamentary action in the near future. Crawford agreed. The time might come when the iww itself would enter the parliamentary field as a final, strategic move towards working class emancipation. Crawford returned from his world tour after attending the unity conference at Manchester on 30 September x911 between Hyndman's SDP, Grayson's sp, the ILP, the Clarion, and other left-wing groups. Finding his paper at a low ebb and the radicals in disarray, he decided to follow the British example. Mrs Dora Montefiore, a former associate of Hyndman, combined wealth with revolutionary ardour and visited South Africa at Crawford's invitation. Speaking at socialist meetings, where the 'Inter nationale' was sung for the first time in South Africa, she argued SDF

the case for both political and industrial action. She, Mary

'5'

Class and Colour in South Africa 185o-195o

Fitzgerald, Harrison, Norrie and Knowles from Durban were among the delegates at a unity conference held in Johannesburg in I912. Agreement was reached and the United Socialist party announced its formation on May Day. The draft constitution repudiated reformism, affirmed 'the class war between the revo lutionary working class and the reactionary exploiting class', and called for the overthrow of capitalism. Membership would be open to any socialist 'without discrimination as to race, sex colour or creed'. 32

Socialists in Cape Town, Durban, Pietermaritzburg, Pretoria and Johannesburg agreed to merge and turn themselves into local branches of the usP. The merger never took place. The local groups argued over constitutions and the rival merits of industrial unionism, anarchism, and parliamentary politics. Norrie carried the usP flag at a parliamentary by-election in Greyville, Durban, a constituency with a large railway vote, and lost heavily to Tommy Boydell, the Labour party candidate. Unable to gain a foothold on the electoral ladder, the socialists ran into financial difficulties. The Voice was losing £20 a week and often could not pay the printers, Crawford and Mrs Fitz gerald. If the paper served as a barometer of working-class consciousness, both reached their nadir at the end of 1912. There were times, mourned the editor, when socialists appeared not to want a paper to represent their interests: they certainly did not

deserve one. 33 Its obituary notice made a confession: 'We stirred things at times 4more well than wise, and have to pay the ' price in limbo. 3

Yet conditions were never again as favourable for the growth of a radical Labour movement on the Rand. A high proportion of the white workers were immigrant; many had a background of militant trade unionism. Industrial legislation was rudimentary and gave little or no protection against victimization, unemploy ment, occupational diseases or accidents. Workmen were un

settled, insecure and often came into angry conflict with employ ers and government. Trade unionism had taken root. Nearly all the unions then in existence were affiliated to the Transvaal Federation of Trades which replaced the Witwatersrand trades council in 191I. 3 5 The socialists were the kith and kin of the 152

Thunder on the Left working man, spoke his language and worked at the same trades. The identity between white workers and radical leaders was closer in the first two decades of the century than at any later period. Trade unionists, however, generally ignored or were hostile to left-wing socialism. Marxist categories that had been delimited in advanced industrial societies seemed unconvincing in a colonial-type society where colour rather than class deter mined status and the distribution of power. The radicals refused to believe that racial divisions pre dominated. 'The antagonism is class antagonism, and not racial,' they argued. 'The dividing line is not between white and coloured, but between property-owners and the proletariat.' 36 Africans had been specially selected for repressive legislation only because they were the largest body of wage slaves. The laws were meant to control all wage slaves, and would be applied also to whites who threatened the propertied classes. White workers conscripted under the Defence Act would be used first to chain up the African, and then to chain up the white worker. Africans would revolt one day against wage slavery. If they were crushed, whites would be reduced to the same condition. Both groups faced the same problem - how to dispossess an exploiting class. The solution for both lay in a universal organization of all workers and the general strike. 7 Inspiration as well as theory came from abroad. 'It is just lovely to be alive in these days,' exulted the IWW. 'The whole world is seething with industrial unrest.' 38 There was unrest also among white workers in South Africa, though the socialists misread its symptoms. It arose out of a struggle for recognition within the established order, and not against capitalism. The working man voted for the parties of white supremacy and their white labour policy, and not for the standard bearers of inter national socialism. These tried to wean him from the right-wing leadership by accusing it of pursuing a 'white kaffir policy' which would reduce him to the African's standards. Cheap labour drove out dear. A white man required at least ios. a day, while an African might live on 2s. 6d. The capitalist would not cut his profits. If he substituted white workers for Africans. he would pay them the lower wage. It was therefore in their interest '53

Class and Colour in South Africa z85o-195o to reject the white labour policy. 39 Appeals of this kind were more likely to intensify the white man's fear of being ousted than to convince him that he could find security and win recog nition by joining hands with members of a downtrodden race. Tom Mann had pointed out that there could be no industrial unionism or general strike unless the African took part. The socialists dodged the issue, took refuge in revolutionary phrases, and never made it their business to help the darker man to organize. That, they argued, was better left to him. Their appeals for inter-racial cooperation were construed in terms of the white worker's interests. It meant, they said, no more than that the 'Chinaman or Kaffir' would not do the work of miners who came out on strike. The purpose of cooperation was to teach the coloured worker that to undercut was to scab, the punish ment for which had no limit. White workers would befriend him only as long as he did not willingly contribute to their degrada tion.4 0 Like the right-wing leaders, the radicals assumed that the African's role was to provide white men with the higher standards of living to which they laid claim. The socialists, to their credit, condemned the cruder forms of discrimination in the movement. The Bloemfontein branch of the typographical union induced the municipal council in 1909 to insert a fair wage clause in printing contracts, together with the stipulation that 'no skilled labour must be carried out by coloured labour'. The Voice protested that the restriction barred the union's own Coloured members and suggested that their people in the Cape would be well advised to withhold their votes from 41 a party intent on raising barriers against them. African miners who struck work in January 19 11 at the Dutoitspan, Voorspoed and Village Deep mines were driven back to work with blood

shed by the police and white miners, and then imprisoned under the master and servants laws without protest from the labour

leaders. The Voice commented angrily on the 'white wage slaves' who had 'prostituted themselves into guardians of Capi

42 talist plunder'; and denounced the futility of sectional strikes. Yet socialists, too, were prone to colour prejudice.

the Financial difficulties could not excuse the appearance in

paper of offensive advertisem*nts such as one inserted by the

154

Thunder on the Left tailors Ben Pickles & Co., which asked: 'Why should you wear a Suit that has been made by sweated or coloured labour?' 4 3 The socialists disclosed their own racial bias when they insisted that cooperation between white and African workers did not involve 'kissing a black brother or inviting him to tea'. Pere grino, the editor from Accra, who claimed to have sat with the master minds of socialism in Europe and America, agreed that 'intelligent black men' neither urged nor desired social equality. All they wanted was the open door to political manhood.4 4 This might have been a common opinion at that time, but socialists should have disowned the concession to colour prejudice. By refusing to adopt the principle of equality in every sphere, they isolated themselves behind an impregnable racial barrier from the bulk of the working class. One or two, like Greene of Pietermaritzburg, acknowledged that it was their duty to teach the 'great industrial, inarticulate mass of coloured labour' to welcome the advent of socialism and to unite under its banner. He too, however, gave priority to the interests of white workers. Socialism would keep them afloat by doing away with inter-racial competition. Capitalism, on the other hand, stirred up hostility and would drown them in a flood of coloured labour. Africans would have to secure their own emancipation; and the sooner the better.45 What form would their emancipation take? Unable to en visage equality, even in a socialist society, between white and black, the socialists tended to lapse into the cant of the right wing leaders. 'Under socialism,' wrote the editor of the Voice, 'the native would not be driven out of his kraal in order to be exploited. He would remain there with his own kind and develop along his own lines. 4 6 It seemed evident to the socialists that white working men would form the vanguard of revolution. Capitalist tyranny would open their eyes to the futility of colour bars and provoke indus trial upheavals which were bound to culminate in the general strike. The theory was plausible under the conditions of a raw industrialism. The ruling farmers, merchants and mine owners, though adept at forcing Africans to work, knew little about trade unions or class conflict and refused to take them seriously. '55

Class and Colour in South Africa r850-1950 Organized labour, on the other hand, had not yet achieved the status and recognition to which it aspired. Exploitation and class antagonism were most acute in the gold mining industry, whose impermanence and terrible toll of life were unparalleled, wrote 7 In the contemporary pamphleteers Campbell and Munro.' March 1912 Crawford predicted that a miners' strike would a follow the failure of the parliamentary Labour party to carry bill for an eight-hour day 'from bank to bank', or from the time " There of going below to the time of return to the surface. were other grievances, notably an alleged tendency on the part of managers to 'blacklist' militants by making unfavourable com ments on their 'tickets' or work records. The tension between managements and men reached breaking point in May 1913 on the New Kleinfontein mine. The trouble began when the manager instructed five mechan ics employed underground to work until 3.30 p.m. instead of 12.30 p.m. on Saturdays. This led to a strike for trade union recognition, the eight-hour day and the reinstatement of strikers. Tom Mathews, the union secretary, J. T. Bain, Andrew Watson, George Mason and other militant members of a strike com mittee went from mine to mine calling the men out. Crawford, Mary Fitzgerald, George Kendall of the AS E and other syndical ists joined the struggle and tried to turn it into a general strike against capitalism. 'The mob went from mine to mine,' said Smuts in parliament, 'and no number of police could have protected every property though we had collected numbers from all parts of the country.' 4 9 The owners, on the other hand, were determined to break the unions. Mines were kept in production by means of Africans and white scabs. Individual strikers called on Africans to come out as well, but the police forced them to work or remain in their compounds. Some I8,ooo whites on sixty-three mines were out on strike by the end of June. Smuts drafted police, mounted riflemen and troops of the British garrison to the Rand. The strike committee summoned workers to a meeting at Benoni on Sunday, 29 June, for a display of determination. 'Therefore the Strike Committee again asks you to come, and to come armed if you can, in order 5 to resist any unlawful force which may be used against you.' " x56 I .

, - - -

Thunder on the Left The government invoked a republican law introduced in 1894 to check the white immigrant agitation, banned all public gatherings in Benoni, and proclaimed martial law on Friday, 4 July. The Federation of Trades called a general strike on the same day. 'The response to this was a display of spontaneous loyalty and solidarity which probably is unequalled in the history of the world's industrialism.'" Bands of 'excited men and women waving red flags' and numbers of youths 'armed with sticks and other weapons' appeared on the streets. 5 2 War had been declared, wrote the editor of the Labour party's official paper the Worker, and had to be fought to victory. This meant bringing the public and parliament to their knees and extorting substantial legislation in the workers' interests. In principle, if not in tactics, an industrial war justified murder, arson, destruc tion of property and all other forms of armed struggle. 5 3 Police and troops broke up a banned meeting in Market Square, Johannesburg, on Friday afternoon. Crowds of demon strators roamed the streets, stopped the trams, and pulled the running staff off the trains. That night hooligans burnt down a wooden ticket office at the main railway station, raided the bar, set fire to the Star newspaper offices, looted gunsmiths' and jewellers' shops, and exchanged shots with the police. The most serious clashes took place outside the Rand Club, the haunt of mine owners and the ruling elite, on Saturday afternoon. Demon strators assembled outside the club, rushed the entrance, and were fired on by Dragoons. At least twenty people were killed in the fighting on Saturday, including Labuschagne, a young Afrikaner miner - Labour's first martyr. A leaflet issued soon afterwards commemorated his death in language that expressed the strikers' mood: All civilisation cries Shame! Shame! Shame! on the work of the ist Royal Dragoons who was backed up and urged by the devil, his government, his press and his pulpit. Labuschagne was Cowardly Murdered while defending the lives of women and little innocent children. When the Chamber of Mines' dirty work was in full swing and honest working people were being shot down by Bums in soldiers' uniform in the employ of the Capitalist, a Man stepped off the sidewalk 157

Class and Colour in South Africa z850-1950 in Commissioner Street nearly opposite the White Kaffirs' nest he said: Rand Club-he stood and tapping his breast with his hand For Man!' a 'Don't shoot any more women and children-shoot silenced by a these heroic words his Manly voice and heart was volley of bullets.... Working Man's Let the noble name of Labuschagne ring in every you. Labu home throughout the world. Cast fear and shame behind as a Man, schagne, the Hero Miner of the Rand goldfields died defending the lives of women and little innocent children. on Botha and Smuts rushed from Pretoria to Johannesburg the owners the Saturday and negotiated a settlement on behalf of on with the strike leaders, who agreed to call off the strike condition that all men would be reinstated without victimiza their tion, while the government undertook to inquire into one of the grievances. 5 4 Signing the document, said Smuts, was in no hardest things he ever had to do. He and Botha were position to bargain. 'We made peace because the Imperial forces town informed us that the mob was beyond their control.' The ruined. might be sacked that night and the mines permanently The two ministers drove away through hostile crowds and made ss up their minds that such a state of affairs would never recur. The strikers, too, were dissatisfied. They met in Johannesburg on the following Sunday in response to a leaflet issued by Bain, the secretary of the Federation. 'The Government has declared war against the Working Class of the Transvaal by its bloody, brutal and utterly unprovoked attack.' In spite of this rousing call to action in defence of civil liberties, Bill Andrews and the Federation leaders urged the men to accept the settlement. Opposition came from the radical socialists: Crawford, Mary Fitzgerald, Kendall and J. P. Anderson. The Federation had been bluffed, they said. The Chamber of Mines was not a party to the agreement, had not met the demand for collective bar gaining, and was free to set up company unions - as indeed it did a few months later. 5 6 The socialists correctly evaluated the government's weakness and the strength of the men's case. They were never again in so favourable a condition to enforce a legiti mate demand for trade union recognition by means of a strike. Though the meeting voted for Kendall's resolution to persist 158

Thunder on the Left until the authorities yielded, the right-wing leaders killed the strike. Nine years later, in the great revolt of 1922, it was Craw ford who pressed for a peaceful settlement and Andrews who stood out for struggle to the bitter end. Afrikaner miners, of whom some had entered the industry as strike-breakers in 1907, loyally supported the strike. The rapidity with which they 'developed a class sentiment', noted Campbell and Munro, was one of its noteworthy features. Labour leaders widened their horizon to take in the prospect of a rapprochement with Afrikaner nationalism. The Worker discovered that the 'Dutch temperament' had a 'remarkable leaven of what really approaches very close to Socialistic ideas'. Hertzog had much the same outlook as Labour on such matters as 'financial imperialism', the immigration of low-paid workers, racial segre gation and the white labour policy. His party and the Labour party 'represent the real forces of progress in South Africa'. 7 A glimmering of goodwill towards the African appeared at the other end of the spectrum. Correspondents to the Strike Herald, a Federation broadsheet, put the case for organizing African miners. They were ready for trade unionism, and many 'intelli gent natives' were willing to undertake the work. A mine could be kept going after a fashion when white workers only were on strike. If the Africans joined them, production would stop, and control of the mine would pass to the Federation. Abortive African strikes had broken out on half a dozen compounds in July, and there might have been a general stoppage along the Reef if the strikes had taken place in the weekend of 'Black Saturday'." s Years later, communists claimed that the 1913 strike opened the eyes of militants to the potential of Africans in the labour movement. From that time, declared Ivon Jones, 'there has been a growing minority of white workers who realize that the emancipation of the white can be achieved only by solidarity with the native working masses'." George Mason, a carpenter and staunch syndicalist from Durham, England, was one of those whom the strike converted into an advocate of solidarity with Africans. They stopped the Kleinfontein mine, he claimed, by responding almost without exception to his appeals. 60 R. B. Waterston (1881-igig), a fireman

159

Class and Colour in South Africa z85o-95o who came from Australia in 1899 to fight the republics, was also said to have urged Africans at Kleinfontein to down tools. Speaking in Fanagalo, the jargon used on the mines, he advised them to 'tchella lo baas wena meningi mali; picanniny sebenza', meaning 'demand more pay and less work'. Whether because of such appeals or on their own initiative, Africans did stop work on a number of mines. They demanded a rise of 2s. or more a day. Police and troops drove them down the shafts with 61 bayonets and rifle butts and the white miners scabbed. The A.P.O. protested against this 'brutal savagery' and in sisted that Africans should have as much right as whites to withhold their labour. No whites were prosecuted for striking, while African strike leaders were sentenced to six months' hard labour. This was outrageous, said the African National Congress. A motion of sympathy for the white strikers failed to obtain a seconder at the special conference called in July to consider the Natives Land Act. Congress declared that the dispute affected only whites, dissociated itself from rumours of 'native unrest', and asked for protection of African miners in the event of a general strike. The ANc deputation to the minister of native affairs put these issues before him and complained that the convicted strike leaders were being punished for 'doing what their white overseers told them to do'. Malan, the minister, replied that the punishment was a deterrent to others; undertook to appoint H. 0. Buckle, the chief magistrate of Johannesburg, to investigate the grievances of African miners; and gave assur ances of protection for them in any general strike of white workers.6 2 Threats of a general strike were being made throughout the second half of 1913. Even conservatives like Creswell declared that 'they would have to adopt other means' ff constitutional protests failed. Speaking at Pretoria on 2o July, he said that work ers on the Rand had done more in three days to bring the government to its knees than could be accomplished in ten years of agitation. A general strike, warned the Worker a week later, 'now means something like a civil war'. With ' great, general and united popular movement, it would very likely be successful, and therefore justified'. George Mason told trade unionists in 16o

Thunder on the Left Cape Town in September that they were fighting a class war in which the police and military served as 'the bribed assassins of the "Corner House"' (the large mine company building in Johannesburg). The exhortations met with a favourable re sponse. Both wings of the movement profited from Smuts's blunders and the arrogance of the mine owners. While new members streamed into the Labour party, the Federation made great headway with a trade union drive in the main industrial centres. The next substantial defiance of authority came, however, not from Labour but from Natal's 140,000 Indians. They rose in November against the humiliation and injustice of restricted immigration, provincial barriers, discrimination under licensing and landholding laws, and the £3 tax imposed on persons who had not renewed their indentures. Gandhi accused Smuts of having broken his pledge to repeal the tax; and called on his people to strike.6 3 They came out from coal mines, sugar fields, railways, factories, shops and offices. The police clashed with armed strikers on the plantations, killed nine and wounded twenty-five Indians. Gandhi led bands of satyagrahis three times across the Transvaal border before he and his lieutenants were imprisoned. India's government and press denounced the bru tality, Botha appointed a commission to inquire into the causes of the disturbance, and Gandhi, released from jail, came to an agreement with Smuts. It closed, said Gandhi, 'the passive resistance struggle which commenced in the September of 9o6', and led to the Indian Relief Act of 1914.64 Parliament abolished the tax and recognized the validity of Indian customary mar riages. These were meagre gains, a South African sociologist has observed. 6 5 Though valuable as methods of political education, Gandhi's passive resistance campaigns were ineffective tech niques of liberation. 'In 1913, at a time when it appeared obvious to all that the government had been brought to bay, he chose to demonstrate Indian magnanimity of heart, rather than exploit the situation for the immediate rectification of Indian rights.' The great Indian strike crippled industry in Natal and, co inciding with the white miners' strike on the Rand, 'placed the 161

Class and Colour in South Africa 1850-r950 government in a particularly precarious position'. By calling off the Indian campaign, Gandhi left the government unhampered to suppress the miners' strike. His soul force had succumbed to Smuts's physical force. Gandhi went to India in July 1914, never to return. 'His name,' said the A.P.O., 'will be handed down to posterity as one of the greatest and truest sons of India that ever came to the shores of South Africa.' 6 6 The entire Indian community would have followed him if Labour had had its way. The party's fifth annual conference agreed on i January 1914 that the presence of Indians would 'always lead to grave difficulties', and urged the 67 government to repatriate them with adequate compensation. As to Africans, the third annual conference, meeting at Bloem fontein in January I912, adopted a full-blown segregation policy. It would isolate them in separate areas under advisory councils; rule out any extension of their franchise; prohibit them from owning or leasing land in so-called white areas; replace them by white workers in the towns; and absorb persons so displaced in sugar and cotton plantations in the reserves. Development costs would be met out of revenue from African taxation. 68 Armed with these resolutions, Creswell told parliament in the debate on the Natives Land Bill of 1913 that his party was the first to advocate the separation of the races. Left to themselves, they would naturally tend to live apart. Indentured labour and other institutions that increased the points of contact were evil and served only the propertied classes. 'It should be the aim of the 69 country to give the natives their own parallel institutions.' The Coloured could not be disposed of so easily,, even on paper, by deportation or segregation. Labour party branches in the Cape wanted their votes; trade unions wanted to organize the Coloured artisans. George Mason, returning from his organ izing tour in the south, advised the Federation in September 1913 to admit those who were prepared to demand 'civilized white standards of wages'. The Worker agreed. 'Altruism in this respect is also the first step towards self-protection.' Trade unionism, the paper discovered, depended 'not upon boycotting, but upon organizing the coloured workers and raising them economically'. 70 The party's third, fourth and fifth annual con 162

Thunder on the Left ferences debated these issues with great solemnity and some acerbity. A report on 'Coloured Labour Policy' came before the conference at Cape Town on i January 1913. Delegates affirmed the policy of maintaining white standards, accused the Coloured of undermining them, and piously proclaimed the aim of uplifting those who aspired to achieve them. The white man could not afford to surrender his monopoly of the vote 'until such time as our native policy is given effect to'. I This, the A.P.O. caustically remarked, might be 'as long in coming as the Greek Kalends'. 7 2 The party constitution drew no colour line; membership was 'Open to all adults of either sex who endorse the objects of the party and are accepted by the branch they desire to join.' Com menting on this clause, the committee appointed to consider the question of membership conceded that it was unjust, indefen sible and even suicidal to exclude civilized Coloured. On the other hand, nothing should be done to attract them at the expense of the party's white ideal. This schizophrenic dialectic produced a monster: 'it is undesirable to admit coloured per sons to membership of the party who have not given practical guarantees that they agree to the party's policy of upholding and advancing white standards.' The fourth conference, held at Pretoria on 29 December 1913, adopted the negative condition by seventy-two votes to forty-nine. Both sides wished to maintain white supremacy, and disagreed over whether this would best be served by admitting or excluding Coloured members. Would they be more, or less, dangerous as competitors on the labour market if brought into the movement? Would the party lose more white votes than the number of Coloured votes it might gain by opening its doors? Personal prejudice or sectional interest dictated the answer. H. D. Bernberg, the party secretary and a member of the Transvaal provincial council, confessed that he was a racist who wanted to keep the party white. George Mason, who had pulled African miners out in the New Kleinfontein strike, thought that it was ridiculous to raise the 'mongrel race' to the European's level. The Coloured man, 'all right as a friend or chum', always worked at a lower rate. The miners' delegates were personally in

163

Class and Colour in South Africa z85o-195o

favour of admitting the Coloured, but their union had instructed them to vote against. John Ware, the Australian-born stonemason and another provincial councillor, said that his society would not allow a Coloured apprentice; and warned conference that the open door would frighten the rising generation of Afrikaners away from the party. The Cape Town delegates, Tom Maginess and Bill Freestone, were in favour of admitting the Coloured. Arthur Barlow agreed, and argued that the same blood flowed through white and Coloured veins. S. P. Bunting saw no objection against allowing the Coloured to help them fight for white standards. Bill Andrews declared that since the Coloured undersold the white man when work was scarce, it was in his interests to raise them to his level. Harry Haynes thought that Coloured the white man would remain supreme if he admitted 7 3 wage. higher the for members and got them to fight The conference of 1913-14 elected Andrews as the party's chairman for the coming year. He predicted in his inaugural address at Pretoria that other parties would make capital out of Labour's decision to admit Coloured members. Derision would turn to fear, however, when the Coloured joined the great proletarian alliance. They never did join. The negative and humiliating resolution on membership was swept aside by the dramatic episodes of 1914: the general railwaymen's strike in January, the deportation of labour leaders, the party's subse quent successes at the polls, the outbreak of world war and the split in the party. The war was the dominant issue when the party next discussed the question of membership in August 1915 at Johannesburg. John Ware, now a senator, reminded confer ence that he had opposed the Pretoria resolution because it was not worth the paper it was written on. Every branch had put its own interpretation on the resolution, with the result that not a single Coloured had joined outside the Cape. He moved an amendment that would74make it possible for Coloured to become members of the party. Creswell deeply regretted the motion. There were, he said, more important questions before conference. Andrews, having moved to the left on the war issue, remarked that 'the working class of this country are the Native people'. If the party was 164

Thunder on the Left genuinely Labour, and not the middle-class party it appeared to be rapidly becoming, they would admit Africans as well. Gerald Kretzchrar, an executive member of the Federation of Trades, spoke passionately against the motion. A permanent gulf would separate English and Afrikaner workers, he warned, if the party were to concede equality to the Coloured. And the party would never gain power without the Afrikaners' support. Conference rejected Ware's motion by sixty-one votes to twenty-six, and went on to discuss the main business - the party's war policy. Andrews was voted out of the chair after a furious debate; conference carried the war policy by eighty-two votes to thirty; 75 and the anti-war faction walked out, taking along three leading officers and seven members of the executive. Denuded of its militants and radical socialists, the Labour party would never again attempt to build a bridge between white and coloured working men.

165

8 Loyalists and Rebels

The Labour party claimed to have close on i6,ooo paid-up

members in

1912,

and the trade unions about

12,000

members

in 1914.1 Support for both came from the few scattered indus trial areas in the port towns and at Kimberley, Bloemfontein and Pretoria, but the movement's stronghold was on the Wit watersrand. The Rand retained for many decades the feverish and unstable atmosphere of a mining camp; partly, some observ ers thought, through the unsettling effects of a high altitude in a sub-tropical region. The main contributory factors, however, were social. Recurring booms and slumps on the 'kaffir' share market injected a strong speculative element; while the big rewards and risks of deep-level mining encouraged a reckless and aggressive spirit in the mining community. Glaring contrasts between wealthy English-speaking suburbs and the squalid slums inhabited by Africans, Afrikaners, Indians and Coloured empha sized class, national and racial cleavages. Perhaps the most important cause of underlying tension was the presence and ceaseless rotation of the 200,ooo African peasant workers. Iso lated in the compounds, never allowed to become full members of the community, and yet indispensable to its prosperity, they were a constant reminder of the society's intrinsic immorality and a challenge to the democratic or socialist pretensions of the white elite. Labour leaders often forgot that the Rand was unique. They identified the small body of artisans whom they represented with the interests of all workers. Labour's principles, said Creswell in January 1913, came from the working man's 'hard necessities' and 'were calculated to promote the best human interests of all classes'. Journals sympathetic to Labour echoed these senti ments. The movement, declared the South African Review, took

166

Loyalists and Rebels

as its platform 'those interests which are common to all'. Class consciousness meant only that workers recognized their special interests and the possibility of obtaining reforms through the political channel. The class war, on the other hand, 'was created, as it is sustained, by Toryism; it is the Labour movement which the class war seeks to destroy'.2 The government, urged the

South African Quarterly,should distinguish between its political and economic functions, remaining neutral in the struggle for economic sovereignty. The feeling that the state was partial to the capitalists had prompted French syndicalists to urge its overthrow by means of the general strike. South Africa should meet this danger by enforcing the principle of collective bargain ing through recognized trade unions. 3 A general strike, even if confined to the Rand, threatened to disrupt the country's economic nerve centre. Smuts was deter mined to forestall a repetition of the July upheaval. In December 1913 the government published the texts of five bills dealing with industrial disputes. 4 Before parliament could consider them, a new round of strikes broke out. Prompted by the effects of an economic recession, retrenchment and alleged victimization, white coal miners in Natal struck work in December for i8s. a day and the reinstatement of men declared redundant. African coal miners followed with a demand for 4s. a day. The railway men were the next to threaten a strike against retrenchments. The union executive called on railway and harbour workers throughout the country to stop work on 8 January if the adminis tration refused to stop retrenchment and re-employ men who had been discharged. H. J. Poutsma, the union's general secre tary, urged the Federation of Trades to call a general strike in support; and appealed to the railwaymen at Pretoria 'not to resort to violence, not to do anything that civilized people as they were should not do, but just cease work'. 5 The Federation stood solidly behind the railwaymen, said J. T. Bain. The government, he added, had called out the troops and 'were preparing to use the same damnable force against the workers'. They, in turn, 'were prepared to use all the force they had in their power '.6 Smuts also was prepared, to the limit of his powers under the Defence Act. He mobilized the active 167

Class and Colour in South Africa r85o-195o

citizen force, ordered armed guards to be stationed at railway premises, and instructed them to shoot after warning if any 7 unauthorized entry was attempted. Ten thousand troops were brought to the Rand by io January, and trade union leaders in different towns were arrested, among them Waterston, Glendon, 8 Colin Wade, Poutsma and other officials of the railway union. South Africans make a practice of dramatizing their patterns of racial discrimination. While strike leaders were receiving 'courteous treatment' in the Pretoria jail, Sotho miners at Jagersfontein diamond mine suffered serious casualties in yet another of the so-called riots that resulted from the brutal suppression of African strikes. The men struck work on the their comrades 9 th because a white overseer had kicked one of to death. When the manager refused to have him arrested, the strikers attempted to break out and join forces with men in other compounds. White employees were called together, cornered the strikers, fired on them, killing eleven and wounding thirty-seven. Most of the Africans then went back to work, but 25o or so who refused were marched to jail under armed escort. A judicial inquiry was held; the white witnesses disagreed over the necessity for the shooting; and none of those responsible for the massacre was prosecuted. 9 Back on the Rand, an overwhelming majority of the Federa tion's affiliated unions voted in favour of a general strike, which was timed for the 13 th. Smuts put his emergency plans into operation, proclaimed martial law on the 14th, and called out 7o,ooo armed men, 'a larger military force', he announced in parliament, 'than was mobilized by the late Republics at the beginning of the late war'. 10 Generals Beyers and de la Rey who were to lead an armed rebellion against the state in October - rode with the commandos into the Rand. A cordon of troops, training a field gun, besieged the Johannesburg trades hall. The police arrested the Federation's entire executive, including Bain, Crawford, Andrew Watson, J. P. Anderson and Charles Mus sared. They went to jail singing the'Red Flag'. The police swooped in all the big industrial centres and arrested hundreds of strikers, trade union and Labour party leaders, among them Creswell, Boydell and Andrews. 168

Loyalists and Rebels Deprived of their leaders, bewildered by press reports of capitulation, and intimidated by threats of dismissal, the workers lost heart. The Federation's acting executive, headed by George Kendall, tried hard to rally them by issuing a series of 'mani festos' which claimed widespread support and explained the purpose of the strike. 'This is a fight for civil liberty, a fight for better conditions.' Prepare 'to suffer and endure for the biggest fight in history.' This was a war 'not against the Community, but for it. You are battling for genuine free labour - for a land of the free, a land that men can love as their own.' The last manifesto, issued on 22 January, called on 'all workers to down tools' in the struggle for liberty, wages, and trade unionism. On the same day, however, Kendall announced that the execu tive had 'declared the strike off - for the present'." Andrews, as chairman of the Labour party, issued a manifesto urging 'every patriotic South African' to condemn and show his abhorrence of 'the violent and provocative methods adopted by the government'.' 2 His appeal met with little response. Apart from Durban's railwaymen, few workers outside the Rand and Pretoria followed the Federation's lead. Though a majority of the unions affiliated to the Cape Federation voted in favour, the executive decided against the general strike. 13 Six hundred Col oured stevedores at Cape Town's docks struck work on the i4th for an increase in pay from 4s. 6d. to 6s. a day and for an eight hour day; but the administration broke the strike by introducing Africans from the eastern Cape to work on the ships. Some ioo African miners broke out of the Van Ryn Estate mine compound on the I 7 th. They were rounded up by a large force of burghers, arrested and fined £I each. One was shot in the leg while attempt ing to get away. Otherwise, reported the press, 'the attitude of the natives has in all cases been most exemplary'. 4 Smuts sealed his victory with a high-handed show of power. He decided to eliminate the 'dangerous men' and deter others of a like disposition while the country was in turmoil and before the labour movement could organize a public protest. Orders were given for the deportation of nine leaders: Bain, Crawford, Livingstone, Mason, McKerrill, Morgan, Poutsma, Waterston and Watson. They were rushed with great secrecy to Durban, C.S.A. -8

169

Class and Colour in South Africa z85o-1950

placed on board the steamship Umgeni, and sent off to England on 30 January, the opening day of the new parliamentary session. Smuts immediately introduced the Indemnity and Undesirables Special Deportation Bill to legalize the deportations and other unlawful acts committed under martial law. He based his defence on the urgencies of public safety, law and order; but could not deny Hertzog's accusation that since his victims had broken no law, and would not have been convicted in any court, he had ordered their abduction because he had no lawful reason to imprison them. The six Labour members rose to great heights of parliamentary strategy in a filibuster against the bill. 'This was not a conspiracy on the part of the workers,' declared Creswell; 'it was a con spiracy between the Government and their friends, the capitalis tic school of Johannesburg, to run the country in their own interests.' They had conspired to grind down the working man for the benefit of the mining magnates. Andrews said that the strike was orderly passive resistance; and accused the govern ment of deploying the state's full resources to break trade unionism. The government had made a great blunder, he added; and would yet discover that it had failed to crush the spirit of the people.1 5 In England George Lansbury called for a general strike to secure the return of the deportees. Stop work, he urged, 'until both the home and the South African governments are brought to their senses. The right of combination, the right to agitate, and the right to preach revolutionary ideas must be maintained.' 16 The deported men were advised to sue the ship owners for unlawful imprisonment on the high seas, but the action was discontinued after war had broken out. 1 7 Smuts

retreated under pressure and allowed the deportees to return to South Africa at the government's expense. The arrests, imprisonment and deportations humiliated and angered the labour leaders. They were in no mood to respond sympathetically to the government's proposed measures for industrial peace. One of these, the Industrial Disputes Preven tion Bill, empowered employers and employees to form concilia tion boards or appoint arbitrators. Strikes and lockouts would be illegal unless preceded by an unsuccessful attempt to arrive 170

Loyalists and Rebels

at an agreement. The bill, which reached the statute book in an amended form only in 1924, contained a major colour bar. It excluded from the definition of employees and therefore from the conciliation machinery all pass-bearing Africans, including those subject to the terms of the Native Labour Regulation Act of 1911, and all indentured Indians. The parliamentary Labour party denounced, not the colour bar, but the partial ban on strikes. Andrews said that the bill was intended to cripple the trade unions. Creswell thought that it should be left alone until it could be considered by a new parliament 'in which the indus trial population would be more congenially represented'. Haggar maintained that the class war had been forced on the workers and would be waged until one class was wiped out.' 8 The government shelved the Industrial Disputes Prevention Bill and its companion, the Trade Union Bill; but Labour could not stay the passage of the far more repressive Riotous Assem blies and Criminal Law Amendment Bill. This penalized attempts to force workers to join or not to join trade unions; banned strikes in public utility services; gave magistrates, acting under ministerial authority, wide powers to prohibit meetings expected to endanger the public peace; and allowed the police in certain circ*mstances to arrest speakers and listeners or, in the last resort, to fire. This was the strongest attack yet made by a South African legislature on civil liberties and working-class rights; and marked a new stage in the transition from a colonial economy to an industrialized society. Techniques of colonial repression, as exemplified by the Natal Code of Native Law, were from then on supplemented by more modern and pervasive restrictions on the labour and national liberation movements. White voters demonstrated at the polls against Smuts's brutal attacks on trade unionism and the working class. Tom Maginess won a parliamentary by-election for Labour in Liesbeek, Cape Town; Morris Kentridge won another in Durban Central, giving Labour eight members in the assembly. Walter Snow, a victimized railwayman, was returned from Liesbeek to the pro vincial council. Labour won two provincial council seats in Durban and one in Bloemfontein during 1914, and scored its

greatest victory in the Transvaal by contesting twenty-five and 17r

Class and Colour in South Africa z85o-z95o

winning twenty-three seats in the provincial council. The Labour councillors had a clear majority of one in the chamber, but could not obtain control of the executive, and so were unable to implement their policy. Their two notable achievements were a new municipal rating ordinance, which the central government disallowed, and a revision of the municipal franchise, which was extended to white women and modified so as to incorporate the principle of proportional representation. Under the leader ship of F. A. W. Lucas, a barrister and firm adherent of Henry George's land tax theory, the Labour group tried hard to substi tute economic issues for Anglo-Afrikaner rivalries in provincial politics, and never wavered in their adherence to the party's white supremacy policy. S. P. Bunting, who won the Bezuidenhout seat, set out the case for the policy in an election manifesto of 3,000 words. Written in his involved style, and studded with capitalized phrases, it contained both an analysis of South African society and a passionate protest against class oppression. It has additional significance as marking a stage in the development of a great South African radical. Born of middle-class parents in London in 1873 and a graduate of Oxford, Bunting came as a lieutenant in the British army to South Africa in ioo, took a law degree after the war, and settled down to practise as an attorney in Johannesburg.' 9 Wybergh and Creswell were his intimate friends, and he came to share their belief in the white labour policy. He helped to found and took on the secretaryship of the White Expansion Society in 19o9, with Patrick Duncan as its

president and Lucas as one of the committee members. He then joined the Labour party in i9io, became the secretary of the Witwatersrand district committee, and was elected to the

national executive in

1912.

His manifesto, therefore, repre

sented the views of a senior if exceptional member of the party. He managed the Worker, his party's paper, in 1912, and sat on its editorial board; yet his manifesto, printed in heavy type with many capitalized phrases, came far closer in spirit to the radicalism of the rival journal Voice of Labour. Like Crawford, he believed that South Africa's industrial upheavals formed part of

a world-wide struggle between international finance and the 172

Loyalists and Rebels working classes. They were striking, not for higher wages, but FOR BETTER STATUS, the RIGHT TO LIVE, a PLACE IN THE SUN. They refused to be mere servants, and this was natural in South Africa 'where every white man has tasted more or less the sweets of masterhood himself'. But the ruling class in this, THE MOST CAPITALIST-RIDDEN COUNTRY IN THE WORLD,

was determined to suppress trade unions, dispense with white workers, and run the economy with white overseers, and '"cheap", unenfranchised, unorganized Kaffirs'. This 'means

eventually a Kaffir's land.

THE ABOMINATION OF DESOLA

White South Africa was in danger, and only the Labour party resisted the REAL ANARCHIC CONSPIRACY AGAINST TION'.

SOCIETY.

Labour would do away with the differences between master and servant, secure equal opportunities for all, and reconstruct society on a cooperative basis - 'the only possible means to TRUE AND UNIVERSAL LIBERTY AND WELLBEING'. It would be a white man's heaven. Africans were enemies within the gate: the 'allies, or rather tools, of Capitalism against the white workers'. There followed an odd qualification: 'But this is merely a temporary obstacle, for the native workers are bound to organize soon.' An obstacle to what? And would they organize with or against the white workers? If Bunting had misgivings about the African's role, he suppressed them in deference to the party's official policy. Ignoring the effects of industrialization and the pressures that forced peasants to enter the labour mar ket, he maintained that they were landowners, who did not need to work if left to themselves. They were better off than the whites, and earned wages as a luxury. The party's policy was to separate them territorially, repatriate Asiatics, and gradually eliminate the Coloured by preventing miscegenation. Racial tolerance could not be expected of Labour councillors when a man of Bunting's calibre identified himself thus whole heartedly with white supremacy. Reviewing their 'one-sided ness', the A.P.O. listed some of their colour bar proposals. They refused to grant supplies unless the executive undertook to build roads departmentally and with white labourers only at adequate wages; voted money for public buildings at Warmbad '73

Class and Colour in South Africa T85o-z95o

with a proviso that Africans employed there be dismissed; and denied the municipal franchise to the darker peoples while conferring it on 'every pimp, prostitute and illicit liquor seller in gaol'. 10 The Labour majority introduced free secondary educa tion to white children in the province, and opposed schools for Coloured and Africans. 21 Ware, sitting on the Witwatersrand School Board, moved the adoption of a resolution that 'the teaching of trades, or the use of tools, to Coloured people and Natives will be sternly discountenanced'. Labour members of the Johannesburg town council were notoriously rigid in denying Coloured, Indians and Africans the use of the municipal trams. A solid phalanx of parliamentary parties - South African, Unionist, Nationalist and Labour - confronted black and brown South Africans on almost every issue involving racial discrimina tion. Individual Unionists occasionally protested. A few Cape liberals, notably Morris Alexander, Merriman and the Schrein ers, consistently skirmished for Coloured rights. Labour stood always on the side of the extreme racialists, as in the debates on the colour bar regulations issued by Smuts under the Mines and Works Act of 191 . 2 2 These reserved thirty-two categories of work for whites and prohibited the issue of certificates of com petence in the Transvaal and Orange Free State to any person of colour. A certificate obtained by one of them in Natal or the Cape had no validity outside that province. Merriman took up the cudgels at the request of the AP o and moved the deletion of

the colour bar in 1914. A petition before the House, signed by 1,624 Coloured residents of the Transvaal, complained that they

were prevented from earning their living by following their trades as engine drivers, carpenters, blasters, gangers, banksmen be and onsetters; and prayed that the word 'white' should 23 replaced by the word 'competent' in the regulations. Smuts admitted in the Senate that the discrimination against the Coloured man was indefensible and would have to go, though not in the immediate present. The strongest opposition to Mer riman's proposal came from the Reef's representatives, both Unionist and Labour. Creswell repeated his familiar argument in moving an amendment to the motion. It was really directed against trade unionism, he said, and aimed at setting the col 174

Loyalists and Rebels oured peoples against white workmen. His party advocated equal pay for equal work, whereas the mine owners wanted to hire labour at the lowest possible rate. They would not pay Africans a shilling more, but would, if allowed, give individuals something more to take over the white miner's occupation. It was for this reason that a number of Coloured were being given work in the mines. He was against the colour bar, as it instilled a false sense of security in white men. His amendment declared that the abolition of the colour bar would increase profits at the expense of the white, African and Coloured population as long as the mining industry employed uncivilized, servile and largely imported workers, and as long as there was no legislation to guarantee miners a civilized standard of wages. Steps should be taken to change the system before the House could take note of the petition. It was an impossible condition in the existing social order. Indeed one must doubt if the white workers really wanted a change along the lines indicated by Creswell. They aspired, in Bunting's percipient phrase, to 'a better status' and 'a place in the sun': but not, as he suggested, to an egalitarian society. Their aim was to achieve recognition as members of the master race. They would rather supervise African servants than fraternize with persons whom they, like other whites, considered to be members of an inferior race. Creswell's party and the trade unions made no attempt to organize Africans and Coloured behind a demand for equal wages and opportunities. In spite of disclaimers, white workers had the same interests as mine owners in perpetuating the migrant labour system. The A.P.O. drew the inescapable conclusion. There was a time, it said, when the Coloured were free to sell their labour on an open market. Their main concern then was to defend the franchise. As doors of employment were being closed to them everywhere, the question of where to find work overshadowed all other problems. In that frame of mind, they responded favourably to Labour leaders, and hailed their vigorous cam paign in the Cape. The Labour party's attitude on the colour bar and Indian Relief Bill soon convinced many of its insincerity. The party would keep the Coloured out of the mines, and the 175

k.=- - -_ -

Class and Colour in South Africa 185o-195o Indian in a semi-servile condition on the sugar plantations so as to prevent him from finding employment in other occupations. This intolerable narrowness and selfishness would disenchant exploita the Coloured. 'The continuance of the White policy of welding tion and repression of the Coloured races is gradually the latter into one solid mass.' None of the existing generations one would be alive when black humanity learned to speak with 24 irresistible voice; but that time would come. The outbreak of world war delayed the event, opened old and wounds, revived the conflict between British and Afrikaner, checked the growth of an alliance between white Labour and Afrikaner nationalism. At a special session early in September ninety-two to twelve 1914 parliament adopted a resolution by votes affirming the 'whole-hearted determination' of the House to 'take all measures necessary for defending the interests of the Union and for cooperating with his Majesty's Imperial Govern ment to maintain the security and integrity of the Empire'. No section of the population adhered more loyally to this pledge than the African, Coloured and Indian. They must endure their domestic burdens in solemn silence, declared the A.P.O., and 25 empire's other sons. the than worthy less no themselves prove Abdurahman told a crowded Coloured meeting in Cape Town to forget their many grievances while the empire's very existence was at stake. Other leaders - Carelse, Veldsman, the Rev. Dr Gow, S. Reagon, Dr A. H. Gool - echoed his appeal and under took to raise a Coloured war relief fund. 'With all its faults,' wrote Abdurahman, 'the Empire contains some attractive force which during periods like the present converts the silken thread into bonds of steel'. 26 The APO offered to raise a corps of 5,0o0 men for active service. Fully 13,000 volunteered within a month. Africans also asked to be allowed 'to cast a few stones at the Germans'. Dube and other ANC leaders left a special conference on the Native Land Act to offer their services to the government at Pretoria. Coloured and Africans who professed loyalty so spontaneously and without official exhortation were probably motivated by the usual sentiments and reasons of a people at war: a sense of duty, a spirit of adventure and desire to escape from the daily round, 176

Loyalists and Rebels the prospect of a job and of gaining social esteem. Then, too, a Coloured man might hope to escape in uniform from the nagging humiliation of being 'different' and inferior. By taking part in the war effort and 'doing his bit', he would merge with the 'nation' and lay up credit for the day of victory. He could claim freedom and justice, and an easing of the black man's burden, to the extent that he made sacrifices in the common cause. This is what his leaders told him. He suffered a rude rebuff. The government would recruit Coloured men to groom army mules and drive transport wagons; but fighting Germans was a white man's privilege, reserved for the active citizens' force organized under the Defence Act of 1912. Then came the rebellion of October. Six thousand burghers of the Transvaal and Orange Free State took up arms against Botha. Beyers, having resigned his post of commandant general, Maritz and Kemp, two high-ranking officers, and the veteran

general de Wet led the revolt. It was a romantic, somewhat mystical resumption of the republics' struggle for independence, a protest against the invasion of German South West, and a crusade to avenge Slachtersnek, the concentration camp martyrs and the humiliation of Vereeniging. Botha proclaimed martial law, appealed for volunteers to fight in South West, and sum

moned the commandos against the rebels. Maritz led his men over the border to join the Germans. The Coloured in the north west Cape asked for arms to defend themselves. The AP0 repeated its offer to raise a corps, and was again refused. This was a white man's war, the government replied. It was anxious to avoid employing Coloured citizens, or others not of European descent, in a combatant capacity against whites.2 7 Yet black and brown men were fighting on both sides in Europe and Africa. Even the Union had a quota of dark-skinned

soldiers. The government assured Afrikaner nationalists that 'no armed Natives or Coloured persons were employed to assist in the suppression of the rebellion'. The statement rested on the false assumption that all South African soldiers were of pure European descent. In reality, many were coloured passing as white. 'Their dark complexion, the kink in the hair, the broad flat nose - these all betray their ancestry.' 28 Some Coloured men '77

Class and Colour in South Africa 185o-i95o

made their way at their own expense to England, to enlist there for active service. Bewailing the refusal to lift the colour bar in South Africa, the A.P.O. declared that whites would rather see 29 the empire fall than place Coloured men in the firing line. Their faith in the Allied cause remained undimmed. 'Thrice we offered our services, and thrice they were refused. We cannot do more.' They could only pray that peace would bring 'true British liberty and justice'; not the liberty that enabled a dis loyal crowd to pass a Natives Land Act, rob men of their fran chise rights, and ban them as outcasts; but a liberty ensuring to 30 all in the empire an equal opportunity to live in freedom. Botha announced the conquest of German South West on io July 1915. Abdurahman wrote that the Coloured had small reason to rejoice. He hoped that Botha would go forward in the path of duty to the king, and with a more tender conscience to the large Coloured and African population of the conquered territory. It would be a great mistake if he gave way to pressure and appointed only Afrikaners to administer them. Very few had been trained to deal tactfully and fairly with persons of colour; most of them suffered from centuries' old colour prejudice. At least the northern half of South West, which was inhabited mainly by tribal Africans, should remain a protectorate on the 3 model of Basutoland, to be administered directly by the crown. ' The advice was sound, as time would show; but Botha had other considerations on his mind. Fixing his eyes on the ap proaching elections, he wished to reconcile Afrikaners to his successful imperial venture by promising them farms and administrative posts in the conquered territory. Thousands of Coloured and Africans served with Botha's troops as transport drivers, medical orderlies and labourers. Now that the fighting had finished in South West Africa, troops could be sent to more distant fields, where the employment of Coloured combatants would be less obvious and perhaps less offensive to racial susceptibilities. A volunteer force had already been raised for Europe. The Coloured agitated once again for the right to kill or be killed. The war, they said, was not for white people only. The great majority of South Africans were not white. No army recruited in South Africa could be truly repre 178

Loyalists and Rebels sentative unless it included a Coloured contingent. At last, in September, they were told that the government had offered and Britain had accepted the formation of a Coloured infantry corps under white commissioned officers. Abdurahman was appointed to a recruiting committee and asked his people to take their proper place in the fighting line. 'Today the Empire needs us. What nobler duty is there than to respond to the call of your King and Country?' 3 2 The Labour front was less united. The party's conference of January 1913 had committed it to a watered down version of the Socialist International's Stuttgart and Basle resolutions. If war threatened, the conference agreed, workers of all countries con cerned should try to prevent it by a simultaneous stoppage of work. It was an innocuous motion, said Creswell, since it would not place any country in the position of being crippled by a general strike while its adversary carried on with the backing of the workers.3 3 In keeping with this resolution, the administrative council, with Andrews in the chair, appealed on 2 August 1914 to workers everywhere to organize against the war. It had been fomented by capitalist governments, was unjust, and could benefit only armament manufacturers and other enemies of the working class. The S.A. Industrial Federation, the Cape Town SDF and Durban SDP passed similar resolutions. This was a brave stand, which put South African radicals well in the van guard of international socialism. They found little support among the party rank-and-file. The Worker, then edited by Wybergh, whipped up enthusiasm for the war after Britain's entry. A leading article in the issue of 6 August argued that the German workers had failed to make an effective protest. 'And if your best friend goes mad and attacks you with deadly weapons, you have no choice but to defend yourself.' Creswell agreed. 'If you are attacked,' he said, 'you have got to fight.'3 The government undertook on io August to invade German South West. Parliament met a month later to give its approval. Botha told the House that South Africa was legally and morally committed by her allegiance to the crown. Only Hertzog's Nationalists stood out for neutrality. The South African party, Unionists and Labour, including Andrews,

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Class and Colour in South Africa 1850-1950 carried a motion of loyalty to the king and support for the war by ninety-two votes to twelve on 14 September. Madeley abstained, but joined the pro-war group before long. The first troops sailed for South West Africa on the same day. A patriotic wave swept through the party as one branch after The another voted for war in defiance of the executive's policy. Cres industrial federation also rescinded its anti-war resolution. well and Maginess left to serve in South West. The Worker conducted a pro-war campaign. There was resistance to the war fever only at the highest level of the party's leadership. D. Iron Jones, Bunting, Colin Wade and P. R. Roux claimed that the party was bound by its resolution of 1913 and the Basle declara tion. The administrative council under their direction passed a series of resolutions urging the international labour movement to convene peace conferences. Wade and his colleagues formed the War on War League in September, and published the War on War Gazette. Though censored out of existence at the end of November, it left an imprint. Branches of the League appeared along the Reef, in Durban and Cape Town, linking pacifists and radical socialists in a united front. Who was the defender of the true faith: Creswell, fighting in a major's uniform to extend South Africa's frontiers; or Jones, the consumptive teacher from Wales, fighting for lost causes and the underlying masses? The League maintained that the Creswel lites had surrendered the party's principles for the sake of parliamentary seats. Reinforced by Andrews, and in control of the party machine, the anti-war group mustered a majority of the delegates to the annual conference at East London in January 1915. Creswell was on active service and Andrews in the chair. Conference had before it John Ware's pro-war motion. James Clark, another Transvaal provincial councillor, moved that all wars under capitalism injured the working class. Conference evaded the issue in the interests of unity by adopting a 'neu trality' resolution from which only Wybergh dissented. It reason and allowed every member to decide, according to his 35 war. the conscience, whether to support or oppose The conference put the War on War group in the saddle by re-electing Andrews, Jones and Weinstock to the posts of presi18o

Loyalists and Rebels dent, secretary, and treasurer, and giving them a majority on the executive. 36 Party members, however, responded more eagerly to the call of war than to the call of peace. The executive intensi fied efforts to recruit Afrikaners, who were less susceptible than the British to war fever. Bunting had earlier predicted that a pro-war stand would ruin the prospect of attracting Afrikaner workers. The party, he said, could not hold its own with Unionists and Nationalists in the 'patriotic game'. 37 To ap preciate the significance of his comment, one should bear in mind the steady movement of unskilled Afrikaners into the industrial centres, and earlier attempts by the labour movement to gain their allegiance. As far back as 19o8 Frank Nettleton, the secretary of the Pretoria trades council, had cooperated with officials of Het Volk in forming Arbeid Adelt, a non-political society of unskilled Afrikaners on a white labour policy platform. The party's executive decided in January 1912 to print its constitution in Afrikaans and English. The whole-hearted par ticipation of Afrikaners in the miners' strike of 1913 alerted the movement to their potential role. The Labour party and Hertzog's Nationalists had much in common, argued the Worker at great length in August. Both rebelled against the oppression and exploitation that stemmed from capitalism; both advocated racial segregation and a ban on the importation of cheap contract labour; both represented the forces of progress. Hertzogism was bound to shed its 'racial' bias against the British and develop its socialistic side, the paper predicted. 38 Nettleton, then endeavouring to organize railway and other transport workers in one union, made a special drive to recruit Afrikaner gangers, drivers and labourers. Afrikaner leaders were not prepared, however, to stand aside while their people fell into the clutches of foreign socialists and atheists. The Rev. Brandt launched a Christian Union in Johannesburg. Madeley asserted that it was Botha's brain child. The prime minister had proposed the union's formation, took a hand in drafting its rules, and promised to obtain recognition for it on the mines. 3 9 Afrikaner names appeared with growing frequency from August onwards in the Worker's reports of branch activities

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