South Africa - Independence and Segregation

The impact of the Anglo-Boer/South African War as a seminal influence on the development of Afrikaner nationalist politics became apparent in subsequent years. The Boer leaders – most notably Louis Botha, Jan Smuts and JBM Hertzog – played a dominant role in the country’s politics for the next half century. After initial plans for anglicisation of the defeated Afrikaners were abandoned as impractical, the British looked to the Afrikaners as collaborators in securing imperial political and economic interests.

During 1907 and 1908, the two former Boer republics were granted self-government but, crucially, with a whites-only franchise. Despite promises to the contrary, black interests were sacrificed in the interest of white nation-building across the white language divide. The National Convention drew up a constitution and the four colonies became an independent dominion called the Union of South Africa on 31 May 1910. The 19th century’s formally non-racial franchise was retained in the Cape but was not extended elsewhere, where rights of citizenship were confined to whites alone. It was clear from the start that segregation was the conventional wisdom of the new rulers. Black people were defined as outsiders, without rights or claims on the common society that their labor had helped to create.

Government policy in the Union of South Africa did not develop in isolation, but against the backdrop of black political initiatives. Segregation and apartheid assumed their shape, in part, as a white response to Africans’ increasing participation in the country’s economic life and their assertion of political rights. Despite the government’s efforts to shore up traditionalism and retribalise them, black people became more fully integrated into the urban and industrial society of 20th-century South Africa than elsewhere on the continent.

An educated élite of clerics, teachers, businesspeople, journalists and professionals grew to be a major force in black politics. Mission Christianity and its associated educational institutions exerted a profound influence on African political life, and separatist churches were early vehicles for African political assertion. The experiences of studying abroad, and in particular interaction with black people struggling for their rights elsewhere in Africa, the United States of America and the Caribbean, played an important part. A vigorous black press arose, associated in its early years with such pioneer editors as JT Jabavu, Pixley Seme, Dr Abdullah Abdurahman, Sol Plaatje and John Dube, serving the black reading public.

At the same time, African communal struggles to maintain access to the land in rural areas posed a powerful challenge to the white state. Traditional authorities often led popular struggles against intrusive and manipulative policies. Government attempts to control and co-opt the chiefs often failed. Steps towards the formation of a national political organisation of coloured people began around the turn of the century, with the formation of the African Political Organisation in 1902 by Dr Abdurahman, mainly in the Cape Province.

The African National Congress (ANC), founded in 1912, became the most important black organisation, drawing together traditional authorities and the educated African élite in common causes. In its early years, the ANC was concerned mainly with constitutional protest. Worker militancy emerged in the wake of the First World War and continued through the 1920s. It included strikes and an anti-pass campaign, given impetus by women, particularly in the Free State, resisting extension of the pass laws to them. The Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union, under the leadership of Clements Kadalie, was (despite its name) the first populist, nationwide organisation representing black people in rural as well as urban areas. But it was short-lived. The Communist Party, formed in 1921 and since then a force for both non-racialism and worker organisations, was to prove far longerlasting. In other sections of the black population too, the turn of the century saw organised opposition emerging. Gandhi’s leadership of protest against discriminatory laws gave impetus to the formation of provincial Indian congresses, including the Natal Indian Congress formed by Gandhi in 1894.

The principles of segregationist thinking were laid down in a 1905 report by the South African Native Affairs Commission and continued to evolve in response to these economic, social and political pressures. In keeping with its recommendations, the first union government enacted the seminal Natives Land Act in 1913. This defined the remnants of their ancestral lands after conquest for African occupation, and declared illegal all land purchases or rent tenancy outside these reserves. The reserves (“homelands” as they were subsequently called) eventually comprised about 13% of South Africa’s land surface. Administrative and legal dualism reinforced the division between white citizen and black non-citizen, a dispensation personified by the governor-general who, as “supreme chief” over the country’s African majority, was empowered to rule them by administrative fiat and decree.

The government also regularised the job color bar, reserving skilled work for white people and denying African workers the right to organise. Legislation, which was consolidated in the Natives (Urban Areas) Act, 1923, entrenched urban segregation and controlled African mobility by means of pass laws. The pass laws were designed to force Africans into labor and to keep them there under conditions and at wage levels that suited white employers, and to deny them any bargaining power. In these and other ways, the foundations of apartheid were laid by successive governments representing the compromises hammered out by the National Convention of 1908 to 1909 to effect the union of English- and Afrikaans-speaking white people. However, divisions within the white community remained significant. Afrikaner nationalism grew as a factor in the years after union.

It was given impetus in 1914, both by the formation of the National Party (NP), in a breakaway from the ruling South African Party, and by a rebellion of Afrikaners who could not reconcile themselves with the decision to join the First World War against Germany. In part, the NP spoke for Afrikaners impoverished by the Anglo-Boer/South African War and dislodged from the land by the development of capitalist farming. An Afrikaner underclass was emerging in the towns, which found itself uncompetitive in the labor market, as white workers demanded higher wages than those paid to black people.

Soon, labor issues came to the fore. In 1920, some 71 000 black mineworkers went on strike in protest against the spiralling cost of living, but the strike was quickly put down by isolating the compounds where the migrant workers were housed. Another threat to government came from white workers. Immigrant white workers with mining experience abroad performed much of the skilled and semi-skilled work on the mines. As mine owners tried to cut costs by using lower-wage black labor in semi-skilled jobs, white labor became increasingly militant. These tensions culminated in a bloody and dramatic rebellion on the goldfields in 1922, which the Smuts government put down with military force.

In 1924, a pact government under Hertzog, comprising Afrikaner nationalists and representatives of immigrant labor, ousted the Smuts regime. The pact was based on a common suspicion of the dominance of mining capital, and a determination to protect the interests of white labor by intensifying discrimination against black people. The commitment to white labor policies in government employment, such as the railways and postal service, was intensified, and the job color bar was reinforced, with a key objective being to address what was known as the “poor-white problem”.

In 1934, the main white parties fused to combat the local effects of a worldwide depression. This was followed by a new Afrikaner nationalist breakaway under Dr DF Malan. In 1936, white supremacy was further entrenched by the United Party with the removal of the Africans of the Cape Province who qualified from the common voters’ roll. Meanwhile, Malan’s breakaway NP was greatly augmented by an Afrikaner cultural revival spearheaded by the secret white male Afrikaner Broederbond [Brotherhood, or League of Brothers] and other cultural organisations during the year of the Voortrekker centenary celebrations (1938), as well as by anti-war sentiment from 1939.