Industrialisation and race in South Africa, 1886–1994

Industrialisation and race in South Africa, 1886–1994 modern south africa deserves separate treatment, because the discovery of gold at the Witwatersrand in 1886 gave the south a traject

Industrialisation and race in South Africa, 1886–1994

modern south africa deserves separate treatment, because the discovery of gold at the Witwatersrand in 1886 gave the south a trajectory dif-ferent from the rest of the continent, moving towards an industrial economy, the entrenchment of local white power, and a unique system of racial repres-sion culminating in the apartheid programme of 1948, a centrally imposed programme of racial segregation under white domination Yet although South Africa was as distinct from the rest of the continent as Pharaonic Egypt, it shared many underlying historical processes The most fundamental was demographic growth, from perhaps three million or four million in 1886 to thirty-nine mil-lion in 1991 As elsewhere, this bred competition for rural resources, mass urbanisation, generational conflict, and the overextension of the state In the early 1990s, these conditions, together with industrial development and the international context, enabled black people to force their rulers to seek secu-rity in a long-term settlement Majosecu-rity rule in 1994 left South Africa facing the socio-economic problems troubling the whole continent, but its peak popula-tion growth rate was past and it possessed skills and resources making those problems potentially easier to surmount

mining and industrialisation The Witwatersrand goldfield in 1886 differed greatly from the early diamond diggings at Kimberley There were no black claim-owners, for the Witwaters-rand was not in the officially multiracial Cape Colony but in the South African Republic (Transvaal), whose Afrikaner government immediately confined min-ing claims to white men Nor did small white miners long survive, for in the unique geology of the Witwatersrand tiny flecks of gold were scattered in a narrow seam of hard rock – one ounce of gold in every four tons of rock – demanding deep mining, heavy machinery, and the most modern chemical extraction technology By the late 1890s, shafts were eleven hundred metres deep and the Rand was producing over a quarter of the world’s gold From the beginning, therefore, the Witwatersrand was dominated by giant mining houses, drawing some capital from Kimberley but most from Europe Industrial nations bought gold at fixed prices but in practically unlimited quantities The

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mining houses therefore had no incentive to restrict production or compete with one another As early as 1889, they formed a Chamber of Mines, chiefly

to reduce African wages, for with prices fixed and labour taking more than half of production costs, mining profitability depended on controlling wage levels White miners, initially needed for their skills, brought from Kimber-ley the practice of reserving skilled work for white men, which accorded with the existing racial system of the South African Republic Their militancy won them ten times the average black wage in 1898, twice the ratio at Kimberley

a decade earlier To accommodate this differential without destroying profits, the Chamber of Mines combined in 1896 to force African wages down to a level that remained substantially unchanged until 1971

This wage reduction was made possible by changes in the supply of African labourers Most were migrants, not because mineowners wished it – they thought migrant workers expensive and inefficient – but because Africans refused to exchange rural land rights for a lifetime amid the danger, disease, and brutal conditions of deep-level mining – ‘hell mechanized’, as a mission-ary described it Initially, therefore, mineowners had to pay wages sufficient

to attract Africans temporarily from their homes, but this changed as Africans lost their independence In 1895–7, especially, the Portuguese conquered the Gaza kingdom in southern Mozambique and imposed taxation and compul-sory labour, which were quickly followed by cattle plague and famine By 1896–8 the goldmines drew three-fifths of their fifty-four thousand African workers from southern Mozambique, which supplied the largest single contingent of mineworkers almost continuously until the 1970s Many others came from the Transkei and from Lesotho, 20 percent of whose able-bodied men were work-ing in South Africa at any moment in 1911 and 47 percent in 1936 Instead of working abroad once in early youth, men came to spend their lives oscillating between homes and workplaces Rural economies came to depend on their remittances Rural families adapted to survive absent fathers, often replacing the patriarchal and polygynous homestead by a three-generation household

in which a wife lived with her parents and children until her husband retired, perhaps bringing home tuberculosis, which by 1930 infected a large majority

of the Transkei’s adults

For African cultivators, gold mining initially expanded the profitable urban market already opened at Kimberley Maize production increased among Zulu, Sotho, and especially the peoples of the Orange Free State, the South African Republic, and Natal, where African peasant farmers with ox-ploughs expe-rienced a prosperity that their children remembered as a golden age, either farming the minority of land remaining to them or cultivating as sharecrop-pers on white farms From the 1890s, however, white entrepreneurs competing for urban markets and African labour sought to transform sharecroppers first into labour-tenants and then into landless labourers The Natives Land Act

14 Industrialisation and race in South Africa.

of 1913 had this objective, for it prohibited land transfers between races, fixed the African share of South African land at 7 (later 14) percent, and restricted the number of sharecroppers and cash-tenants who could reside on a white farm outside the Cape Province But legislation alone could not change the countryside Between the wars there was violent agrarian conflict as farmers imposed more severe terms on resident Africans, who replied by burning crops, slaughtering stock, and hearkening to the millennial promises of religious and political prophets As late as 1954, some 20 percent of ‘white’ farms had no white resident, but by then the mechanisation of agriculture was finally driving sharecroppers and tenants from the land, as elsewhere in Africa Meanwhile the growing population on the limited and overexploited African reserves was impoverished Even in the 1920s, the reserves produced only half their food needs and the proportion fell steadily thereafter Only tiny privileged elites clung to the freehold property needed to finance education and professional careers

The commercialisation of agriculture in response to mining and urban growth also transformed the rural white population Their farms became

smaller and more numerous, but the bijwoners (squatters) who had grazed

their scrawny beasts on the fringes of nineteenth-century estates were driven from the land to join the more than 300,000 white people (about one-sixth

of the entire white population) thought in 1930 to be ‘living in great poverty’, often in the slums of industrial cities Given South Africa’s hard and ancient rocks, poor soils, and recurrent droughts, it cost the state£112 million in sub-sidies to European agriculture between 1911 and 1936 to keep white men on the land and to win their votes, chiefly through a state-supported marketing system, elaborate extension services, and transport geared to farmers’ interests Unlike white settlers elsewhere, most South African farmers did not become producers of specialised export crops like wine or coffee Despite low yields, maize was 39 percent of their output by value in 1919 and 32 percent in 1976 This white monopoly of the food market deprived Africans of bargaining power to push their wages above bare subsistence The number of African and Coloured farm labourers rose gradually to a peak of about 1,500,000 dur-ing the 1960s Most were poorer than either African townsmen or the reserve population, earning an average wage from all sources of£20 a year in the late 1930s

Although goldmining was vital to South African industrialisation, it did not automatically cause it, for eighty years of copper mining did not industri-alise the Congo, nor was South African industrialisation a sudden process In

1891 the Cape Colony’s manufacturing output was already more valuable than its diamond production In the South African Republic, however, goldmin-ing stimulated railway buildgoldmin-ing, urbanisation, coal mingoldmin-ing, and the coal-fired electricity that became the chief source of industrial power By 1914 the Witwa-tersrand possessed the world’s largest electrical power station, employing the latest German technology Manufacturing output expanded during the First World War and almost doubled during the 1920s One reason for industrial growth, in contrast to tropical Africa, was that political independence allowed white South Africans to be economic nationalists General Smuts, as Prime Minister from 1919 to 1924, made industrialisation a target of state policy The Afrikaner Nationalist government that replaced him in 1924 raised protective tariffs and invested mining revenue in industry, notably the state-owned Iron and Steel Corporation, which began production in 1934 and spearheaded the transition to heavy industry that countries further north later found so difficult From 1933, when South Africa abandoned the gold standard, greatly increased gold prices stimulated even faster growth and enabled the economy to escape the foreign-debt trap that was to check industrialisation in Algeria and else-where during the 1980s Between 1911 and 1945 the proportion of South Africa’s foreign debt to total public debt fell from 91 to 3 percent.1 Another crucial breakthrough took place during the Second World War, when manufacturing employment rose by 60 percent and the engineering industry shifted from craft

production to mass manufacture, initially of war materials and subsequently

of consumer durables The share of metal products and machinery in man-ufacturing output rose between 1936 and 1951 from 4 to 19 percent, making South Africa decisively a manufacturing country, with many characteristic fea-tures of a late-industrialising economy: large enterprises, a major state sector, heavy reliance on primary exports (of gold), and severe repression of labour Cheap labour, cheap energy, gold, government, and gradualism were distinctive features of South African industrialisation

Its most dramatic consequence was rapid urbanisation In 1891 Cape Town, with 51,000 inhabitants, was South Africa’s largest city, but by 1896 Johannes-burg, only ten years old, already contained 100,000 people, half white and half black, in an urban anarchy described as ‘a Monte Carlo superimposed upon a Sodom and Gomorrah’.2The country’s total urban population, some 1,225,000

in 1904, rose to 3,218,000 in 1936, including 68 percent of all white people and

19 percent of Africans Municipal authorities tried to control urbanisation by segregating Africans into locations, which became national policy under the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 To impose this model on a swollen mining town like Johannesburg, however, was beyond municipal capacity When the city centre’s notorious multiracial slums were demolished during the 1930s, for example, their African inhabitants moved not to the distant, expensive, and strictly controlled locations at Orlando (the nucleus of modern Soweto) but to freehold land at Sophiatown and Alexandra on the edges of the white city In Cape Town, similarly, some 37 percent of the residential area was still racially mixed in 1936, notably the largely Coloured working-class area called District Six, close to the city centre

Until the 1920s, the main threat to mineowners and the state came not from Africans but from European workers Initially most white miners were immi-grant bachelors seeking quick earnings before tuberculosis killed them They vigorously defended their jobs and racial wage differentials against employers anxious to replace them by equally competent but cheaper Africans The white miners’ tactics were militant unionism and racialism In 1893 the first all-white mineworkers’ union imposed a monopoly of blasting against the employers’ resistance Twenty years later a strike obliged the employers and the state to recognise the union From 1911 to 1925, the Labour Party largely controlled the Johannesburg City Council, whose employees briefly established a soviet

in the City Hall during 1918 A Communist Party came into being in 1921 A year later, when the mineowners tried to break the union and reduce the ratio

of white workers, ‘Strike Commandos’ converted a strike into the Rand Revolt, which briefly seized power in several mining towns until suppressed by the army at a cost of between 150 and 220 lives At this point, however, the state used its victory to domesticate both capital and labour The Mines and Works Amendment Act of 1926 fixed the ratio of white to black workers, enabling

mineowners to mechanise the industry and miners to become the best-paid of white workers

For black workers, by contrast, early militancy brought little reward Spo-radic African dock strikes in Port Elizabeth and Cape Town can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth century, but the first major African mine strike on the Witwatersrand in 1913 was broken by troops with fixed bayonets Rapid industrialisation, urban growth, and inflation during the First World War then radicalised white-collar workers as well as manual labourers, breeding sev-eral unsuccessful strikes in 1917–20 and the first major African trade union, the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU) This emerged in the Cape Town docks during 1918, was led by a migrant clerk from Nyasaland named Clements Kadalie, and expanded first into an urban general union and then into near-millennial rural protest expressing the grievances of threatened sharecroppers and labour-tenants on the highveld At its peak in 1927, the ICU claimed 100,000 members, but it then disintegrated in factionalism and disillu-sionment By 1933 there were only three African trade unions in South Africa, all unrecognised by the state During the next decade, Communist and Trotskyite organisers gradually constructed a more substantial labour movement from the shop-floor upwards Wartime militancy culminated in 1946 in a major African mine strike, but its violent suppression, with at least nine deaths and twelve hundred injuries, demonstrated the continuing dominance of employers and the state

politics 1886–1948 Mining and industrialisation transformed South African politics In 1899 the British launched the costly Anglo-Boer War to protect their regional supremacy against the South African Republic’s new wealth and power, but Afrikaner guer-rillas surrendered only when the Peace of Vereeniging of May 1902 promised that ‘the question of granting the Franchise to Natives will not be decided until after the introduction of self-government’.3 British control of South Africa depended on attracting enough English-speaking immigrants to the Transvaal

to outvote its Afrikaners That meant restoring and expanding gold produc-tion, which depended on recruiting sufficient nonwhite labour Because not enough Africans accepted work at the wages offered, some sixty thousand Chi-nese contract labourers were imported But this alienated English-speaking white workers, who dashed imperial plans in 1907 by allying politically with Afrikaner leaders

These events were crucial to Afrikaner nationalism Nineteenth-century Afrikaners had been strongly aware of their difference from Britons and Africans, but during the last thirty years of the century responsible government

at the Cape and the growth of more modern states in the northern republics had

encouraged sectional patriotisms President Kruger had dismissed Hofmeyr, the Cape Afrikaner leader, as ‘a traitor to the Africander cause’ The Anglo-Boer War partly healed these divisions, for many Cape Afrikaners sympathised with and sometimes aided the republics, but it also opened new conflicts between advocates of surrender and continued resistance It was the unification of South Africa and the creation of an electoral system that brought Afrikaners together into political nationalism, as would happen later in West Africa Unification was pressed both by the British and by local white politicians, especially the for-mer Afrikaner generals, Botha and Smuts, whose party, Het Volk, won the first election in the Transvaal in 1907 with labour aid and thereby ensured Afrikaner leadership of South Africa The negotiations that led to independence under the Act of Union in 1910 created a strong central government, entrenched the legal equality of the English and Dutch (from 1925, Afrikaans) languages, and left the franchise as it had been in each prewar province, so that Africans and Coloured people effectively had the vote (on a qualified franchise) only in the Cape

The South Africa Party, led by Botha and Smuts, formed the Union’s first government It was dedicated to reconciliation between Afrikaners and British, but this was undermined by the First World War, when South Africa’s participa-tion on Britain’s side precipitated unsuccessful rebellion by Afrikaner extrem-ists, and by disputes over the imperial relationship In 1924 General Hertzog’s National Party won power on the votes of most rural Afrikaners Externally he was satisfied with the dominion status recognised in 1926 Internally he pressed forward the relief of poor whites and the segregation of Africans already embod-ied in the Natives Land Act of 1913 and the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 Almost all white South Africans favoured segregation, even missionaries and liberals eager to protect Africans from deracination For Hertzog, a key element

in segregation was to remove Cape African voters – 10,628 of them in 1935– from the common roll and give them separate representation and institutions

To obtain the two-thirds majority necessary for this constitutional amend-ment and to tackle the economic problems of the international depression, Hertzog ‘fused’ his party with Smuts’s opposition in 1934 The new United Party removed Africans from the common roll in 1936, but fusion alienated Afrikaner extremists, who saw the new party as a capitalist coalition likely to divide the Afrikaner nation along class lines They broke away in 1934 under

D F Malan to form the Purified National Party It became the chief exponent of the ethnic separatism gaining support among Afrikaners during the later 1930s,

based on deliberate cultivation of the Afrikaans language, the v¨olkisch notions

of nationality fashionable in continental Europe, determination to win eco-nomic equality with English-speakers, and historical symbolism popularised

by the Voortrekker Centenary of 1938 When South Africa’s entry into the Second World War destroyed Hertzog’s government and left Smuts in power,

a bitter struggle for Afrikaner leadership ensued Malan won By 1945 he was

in a position to reunite the Volk

For Africans and Coloured people, too, the Anglo–Boer War and Union were key moments in political organisation The Coloured people numbered some 445,000 in 1904 and formed 9 percent of the population, mainly in the Cape Their first major association, confusingly named the African Political Organisation (APO), was formed at the end of the war in 1902 by their small professional elite led by Dr Abdullah Abdurahman It aimed to defend the community’s distinctive identity and extend its rights, especially the right to vote, into the newly conquered northern provinces This aim conflicted with the Peace of Vereeniging Instead the APO survived as the spokesman of the Cape Coloured elite, whose aspiration to be accepted into white institutions distanced them from the bulk of Coloured workers

From the 1880s, the mission-educated African elite of the Cape Colony and Natal – clergymen, teachers, clerks, commercial farmers – formed the first small modern African political associations The most articulate was the South African Native Congress, founded in the Eastern Cape in 1898 After British victory in 1902, these associations fostered similar bodies in the Transvaal and Orange Free State and urged the extension of the Cape franchise to these provinces When the Act of Union denied this and the new white parliament instead debated territorial segregation, elite leaders met at Bloemfontein in 1912

to form the South African Native National Congress (later the African National Congress, ANC) ‘for the purpose of creating national unity and defending our rights and privileges’ The ANC initially campaigned against the Land Act of

1913 by petitions and deputations When this achieved nothing, its moderate leaders were replaced in 1917 by more radical men from the Witwatersrand who associated the organisation with postwar strikes and antipass protests Alarmed, the moderates regained leadership in 1920, lost it again in 1927 to the communist Josiah Gumede, but ousted him once more in 1930 The following decade was the least active in the ANC’s history It did not effectively defend the Cape African franchise in 1936 Its total funds four years later were fifteen shillings.4 The vitality of interwar African politics lay in two other directions One was in the countryside, where protest either took near-millennial forms (as in Zionist churches or labour-tenants’ support for the ICU) or centred on resistance

to cattle dipping, soil conservation, and other official schemes to salvage the overcrowded reserves Political activity was also vigorous in the towns, where

a working-class lifestyle, often known as marabi culture, took shape around

the music, dance, sex, youth gangs, and illicit liquor of the shebeens in city-centre slums and freehold townships like Sophiatown Urban political action often went no further than repelling police liquor raids, but it could embrace anti-pass protests – especially against attempts to make women carry passes – and boycotts of municipal beerhalls, the most famous taking place in Durban

in 1929–30 and lasting eighteen months Protests on this scale were organised

by grassroots politicians – clerks or craftsmen threatened with unemployment, taxi-drivers, shack-landlords, herbalists, Zionist preachers – who drew ideas and slogans from modern organisations like the ICU, ANC, and Communist Party while also mobilising indigenous symbols and beliefs After Clements Kadalie had addressed a meeting in East London in 1930, for example, the next speaker was ‘a kitchen girl, at the Strand Hotel and a prophetess’ who

said she received a message from God that let all the natives listen to what Kadalie tells them God has revealed to her that Kadalie is the only leader who

is going to uplift Africa She again has received a message from the Almighty God that Kadalie should go to Gcalekaland in the Transkei and organise the AmaXhosas at the Great Place of the Paramount Chief.5

This popular politics, often openly racialistic and tribalistic, was a world apart from the staid multiracial resolutions of ANC conferences

The Second World War did something to fuse the two political levels On the elite plane, in 1944 young men from the black University College at Fort Hare, exasperated by the ‘gentlemen with clean hands’ who ran the ANC, formed within it a Youth League as a ‘brains-trust and power-station’ to press the state for full political equality They were willing to associate Congress with the popular protest mounting during the war as industrial growth bred mass urbanisation that swamped housing and other facilities In one series

of protests, residents of Alexandra boycotted buses and walked nine miles each way to work rather than pay a fare increase of one penny In another, nearly 100,000 homeless people created illegal squatter camps on vacant plots

in and around Johannesburg Urbanisation swamped segregation ‘You might

as well try to sweep the ocean back with a broom’, Smuts complained in 1942 Indian urbanisation, too, seemed to Durban’s white residents to ‘penetrate’ their suburbs, provoking shrill demands for restriction or repatriation As the war ended, all political tendencies agreed that South Africa needed a new racial order and that only the central government could establish it

the ascendancy of apartheid

In 1948 the largely white electorate faced a clear choice of racial policies Malan’s National Party offered apartheid, a newly coined word to describe a more rigid, centrally enforced segregation, confining each race to specified areas, allocat-ing African labourers to farms or towns, but promisallocat-ing also to enable each race to practise its own culture and manage its own affairs Smuts’s United Party, by contrast, claimed to defend South Africa’s traditional racial order, where the state assisted communities to segregate themselves voluntarily but saw African urbanisation as irreversible and gradual assimilation to Western

culture as desirable Unexpectedly, the Nationalists won, with only 40 percent

of votes Their first measures sought to attract further white support, ban-ning mixed marriages, creating procedures for universal racial classification, and setting up machinery for compulsory segregation under the Group Areas Act of 1950 Subsequently, as support and confidence grew, their programme expanded into ‘positive Apartheid’, including a separate Bantu education system and ‘self-governing’ but dependent rural Homelands for the various African

‘tribes’ Whereas interwar governments had enacted segregatory legislation, the Nationalist regime implemented it Power, not policy, was the chief novelty

of apartheid The power came from the growing wealth and administrative capacity of the industrial state, the faith in state intervention and social engi-neering common throughout the postwar world, and the racialism that enabled Nationalists to justify their ruthlessness towards black people

Until the mid-1970s, apartheid was remarkably successful Its main achieve-ment was the segregation of cities by moving their black inhabitants to suburban townships isolated by ‘machine-gun belts’, a strategy made possible by elec-tric trains and motor transport In Johannesburg, Sophiatown was destroyed between 1955 and 1963 and Africans were relocated into the 113,000 concrete houses of Soweto, divided into tribal sections The estimated 120,000 Africans in Durban’s main freehold settlement, Cato Manor, were rehoused in two town-ships in the neighbouring KwaZulu homeland District Six in Cape Town was razed during the 1970s; its Coloured inhabitants were resettled in an outlying concrete wilderness where an incomplete survey in 1982 counted 280 juvenile street gangs Legislation decreed that only Africans born in a town or work-ing there continuously for fifteen years (or ten years for one employer) had permanent residential rights The African urbanisation rate slowed from the early 1950s, although the statistics probably underestimated it Action under the Group Areas Act also relocated 305,739 Coloured people, 153,230 Asians, and 5,898 whites by March 1976

African resistance to this assault brought ANC elite politics and urban pop-ular action closer together In 1949 Youth League members gained leadership

of Congress Three years later, in alliance with radical Indian politicians, they launched the Defiance Campaign of nonviolent resistance to unjust laws The most widespread protest the country had seen, it expanded ANC membership

to a claimed 100,000, or 1 percent of the African population, with the main support in the industrial towns of the Witwatersrand and the Eastern Cape But the state broke the campaign by legislation punishing deliberate breach of the law by whipping As the 1950s proceeded, it became clear that mass non-violent nationalism, so successful in India and tropical Africa, might heighten political consciousness – nobly expressed in the Freedom Charter of 1955 – but scarcely threatened a regime prepared to shoot demonstrators As poli-tics grew more dangerous and African frustration increased, younger radicals