DURING the First World War, the white miners’ union1 had succeeded in enforcing wage-rate increases many times larger than those obtained by the unorganised Africans.

ALTHOUGH the ‘civilised labour’ legislation had erected the most formidable barriers to non-white advancement in the industrial sphere, the profit urge – coupled with entrepreneurial ingenuity – still disclosed ways round some of the barriers. The result was to bring about, from the middle 1930s, significant changes in the racial composition of the industrial labour force. Two important stimuli enhanced prospective yields and hence the free market incentives for the avoidance of colour bar obstacles.

WE HAVE seen that the solution of the Poor White problem (and incidentally the partial solution of the problem of the Poor Coloureds) required not only the more productive use of non-white labour generally but the settlement of Africans in or on the borders of towns, as a cheap source of ‘put and carry’ labour. This alone permitted the new products of economic integration to be profitable, i.e., capable of being priced within reach of the community’s income.

EVEN without the intervention of law, effective combination among African labourers would have been difficult because of high labour turnover due to the migratory system, marked language and tribal differences, the paternalistic governmental system of their reserve homelands, their general naivety and the absence of any tradition resembling labour-union action.

THE apartheid (in English ‘separateness’) policy under that name was introduced by the Nationalist Party after their victory in the 1948 elections. There was nothing essentially new about it at first, but in its subsequent enactment it has undergone some remarkable changes of emphasis. As an election slogan, it had succeeded because it placed chief stress on white ‘baasskap’ (i.e., ‘mastership’).

IN harmony with the spirit of the ‘group areas’ policy has been the incorporation of overt ‘job reservation’ into the Industrial Conciliation Act by amendments introduced in 1956 and 1959. This step has rendered more specific and deliberate the exclusions which had previously been stealthily achieved through the standard rate principle since the inception of the Act in 1924 and quite honestly through the Mines and Works Act of 1926 and the Native Building Workers’ Act of 1951.

THE Indian community, of whom about four-fifths live in Natal and most of the rest in the Transvaal, can be clearly differentiated from the Coloured population through their physical features and sociological traits. They constitute the group which, in the absence of restraints on the free market, could most easily be assimilated into the white-dominated occupations and into white society.

ONE OF the most curious aspects of the political situation in South Africa is the fact that a government which has passed an Act for the Suppression of Communism, aimed mainly at eradicating the activities of the Communist Party or Communist fellow-travellers among the Africans, has itself imposed a more or less authoritarian system on them. The effects of the policies described in this Chapter have been to create controls which bear a close resemblance to the system of labour allocation found behind the Iron Curtain.

IN pursuit of the objectives of apartheid or separate development, the proclaimed policy of the Nationalist Government has, since 1955, been (a) to establish ‘border industries’ near the reserves where it is assumed that Africans can be more suitably employed as labourers by white capitalists in integrated co-operation with white artisans and supervisors; and (b) to establish ‘Bantustans’, i.e., districts from which white capitalists (and ultimately white supervisors and artisans) will be excluded, but in which Africans will be allowed some considerable mea