The Economics of the Colour Bar

WHY DO the non-white peoples of the world today enjoy a much lower average standard of material well-being than the white peoples? The answer is compounded of history, climate, custom, powerful inertias, insecurity for investment, and legislative barriers to employment. How far can their inferior economic status be said to be caused by natural handicaps and how far by injustice at the hands of white people? Usually there is a mixture of causes.

For instance, the failure to have stamped out disease, which still retards the development of many tropical regions, is due partly to inertia in the effective spread of medical knowledge, partly to tribal superstitions and customs, partly to climatic factors. Is there an element of injustice here?

Similarly, investment insecurity is partly a question of history and partly a matter of the slowness with which an understanding of the vital role of property – and its prerequisites – has spread to primitive communities. Some backward peoples and their advisers have ignored, or have failed to create, the conditions necessary for an inward flow of fructifying capital to provide productive equipment and foster the inborn powers of the people. Consequently, where capital flowed freely and rapidly from Western Europe to the under-developed regions of North America before 1914, it now tends to avoid areas like India and Africa, despite their enormous development potential. Is that situation due to injustice?

ECONOMIC ‘INJUSTICE’

As an economist, I shall attribute ‘injustice’ to any policy or action which is intended to perpetuate the inferiority of material standards or status of any racial group. The inheritance of inferior circumstances or status cannot usefully be regarded as ‘unjust’, except to the extent to which developed countries or colonising powers can be shown to be deliberately withholding opportunities from the underdeveloped areas or colonised peoples.

Nevertheless we must ourselves be just in evaluating the past. Although we may deplore the era of slavery, we must remember that the enslavement of primitive peoples was not condemned by the religious and ethical codes which existed in the era in which it flourished. John Wesley was not unjust to the children of his day when he laid it down that they should be allowed neither to talk nor smile at Sunday school! The gradual evolution of ideas about what is appropriate in the relations of one man to another, one caste or race to another has, significantly, been fostered by economic progress more than by any other cause.

Some injustices may be due more to class barriers than to colour barriers. For instance, there is much resentment felt against Portugal as an intransigent colonial power. But no legally enacted colour bars exist in any Portuguese territory; and a South African who crosses into Mozambique is at once struck by the wholly different attitude, at least superficially, towards colour. Yet the overwhelming majority of the Africans of Mozambique are extremely poor. Some critics conclude that Portugal maintains a de facto if not a legal colour bar. But there are approximately an equal number of Whites and non-Whites with ‘assimilado’ status (that is, who have achieved both literacy and the ability to live at defined civilised standards) who have long enjoyed absolute equality of rights before the law.1 Yet only 160,000 out of the population of 6.6 million enjoy this status and only 5 per cent of the non-white assimilados are Africans (the rest are Indians and half-castes). If the evident backwardness of the masses is caused by deliberate policy rather than by unrestrained population growth and a paucity of natural resources, there is certainly cause for complaints of class injustice, but not of colour injustice. But educated and responsible non-Whites are not subjected, in the Portuguese territories, to the indignities and humiliations they suffer in South Africa.2

THE MERITS AND DEFECTS OF COLONIALISM

The current, almost world-wide disapproval of colonialism is derived from the idea that the colonising nations have held or are holding the colonised peoples in some sort of subjection. Nearly all of us talk of the African races having recently obtained their ‘freedom’. Yet in most of the Western-held colonies, the rule of law has been long established; the highest standards of integrity in administration have been maintained; and where colonial administrations have sought to preserve tribal customs, institutions or forms of government, and so followed policies that tended to some extent to preserve the relative backwardness of the indigenous peoples, repression was certainly never the purpose. The spirit of that policy was essentially one of tolerance, even respect, for different ways of living; it was an attitude that facilitated the task of harmonious and just administration; and for this reason the colonising powers did not actively discourage primitive customs or supersede systems of authority incompatible with the emergence of modern communities.

It may be charged further that insufficient was done to educate the natives as administrators and for eventual self-government. Whatever the shortcomings, the motive was not reactionary. Colonial officials, it is true, sometimes came to regard themselves as a kind of ruling aristocracy, and no doubt regarded ‘educated natives’ as a disturbing element. And white settlers came quite naturally to believe in their innate superiority, moral and mental, over non-Whites who were assumed to be destined to play a subordinate role. The factor of ‘prejudice’ seems to have arisen in this manner. But prejudice is simply a manifestation of powerful custom. I shall suggest that it will dissolve under the pressures released by economic liberalism as rapidly as other customs that are inappropriate in a wealthier and more diversified economy.

In this book I am concerned with influences that are hindering the dissolution of prejudice and anachronistic custom, that is, with factors that may be held to be responsible for the ‘injustice’ presently endured by some – if not most – of the non-white peoples of the world.

I shall illustrate my thesis almost entirely by reference to experience in the Republic of South Africa where I have been living whilst my ideas were forming. But the lessons learned from a study of colour bars, apartheid and other manifestations of colour prejudice in South Africa, are of direct relevance wherever skin pigmentation or other racial characteristics serve as a principle for confining individuals to any sort of economic or social inferiority.3

Without attempting a comprehensive account of colour relations – economic, social or political – in South Africa,4 I shall try to identify (a) the forces that have tended to dissolve the economic and social inferiority of the non-white classes, and (b) the opposing forces – constituting the injustice – that have tended, deliberately or otherwise, to perpetuate this inferiority. In the final Chapter I shall sum up what I hope the reader himself will have gathered from the facts and interpretations presented about the nature of these forces.

Now my interpretations of the facts will amount to a criticism of the thinking – not the sincerity – of many of the more vociferous of those who campaign, with tenacity and courage, against colour injustices. I shall, on the whole, be questioning the insight and wisdom of people with no axe to grind – the vastly more numerous disinterested opponents of racial discrimination.5 It is ideas and stereotypes, not aims and purposes, which I shall be challenging.

Among my tasks will be that of dealing with the opinions of those who stoutly and honestly defend colour bars, the supremacy of Whites, ‘baasskap’, apartheid, ‘separate development’, and so forth. In this part of my task I do not feel I am likely to be seriously misunderstood. But when I expose the frequently inadequate knowledge and defective reasoning of burningly sincere do-gooders, anxious to exterminate all vestiges of colour privilege or subordinacy, I run the risk of being suspected of hostility to ideals which I share. May I assure hasty critics that I deplore colour discrimination no less than they do; the difference is that I believe it can be eradicated without bloodshed or the worse injustices that would accompany their methods.

6The system has recently been changed. Any African may now choose whether he wishes to be subject to tribal or Portuguese law. If he chooses the latter, he has the right to vote (whatever that means in a dictatorship) but he then becomes liable to taxation.

7Inter-marriage is a crime in South Africa. It is officially encouraged in Mozambique.

8The present government of the Republic of South Africa deny that this is the purpose of apartheid (separate development). I propose, however, to show why that must be the consequence of their policy.

9See Bibliography, p. 183.

10There are of course politicians who seek to exacerbate colour resentments solely because they think it will help them in their manœuvring for power. I am not writing for them. They and their henchmen will misrepresent and reject my thesis because it may hamper the achievement of their ambitions.

• 1The system has recently been changed. Any African may now choose whether he wishes to be subject to tribal or Portuguese law. If he chooses the latter, he has the right to vote (whatever that means in a dictatorship) but he then becomes liable to taxation.
• 2Inter-marriage is a crime in South Africa. It is officially encouraged in Mozambique.
• 3The present government of the Republic of South Africa deny that this is the purpose of apartheid (separate development). I propose, however, to show why that must be the consequence of their policy.
• 4See Bibliography, p. 183.
• 5There are of course politicians who seek to exacerbate colour resentments solely because they think it will help them in their manœuvring for power. I am not writing for them. They and their henchmen will misrepresent and reject my thesis because it may hamper the achievement of their ambitions.
• 6Some injustices may be due more to class barriers than to colour barriers. For instance, there is much resentment felt against Portugal as an intransigent colonial power. But no legally enacted colour bars exist in any Portuguese territory; and a South African who crosses into Mozambique is at once struck by the wholly different attitude, at least superficially, towards colour. Yet the overwhelming majority of the Africans of Mozambique are extremely poor. Some critics conclude that Portugal maintains a de facto if not a legal colour bar. But there are approximately an equal number of Whites and non-Whites with ‘assimilado’ status (that is, who have achieved both literacy and the ability to live at defined civilised standards) who have long enjoyed absolute equality of rights before the law. Yet only 160,000 out of the population of 6.6 million enjoy this status and only 5 per cent of the non-white assimilados are Africans (the rest are Indians and half-castes). If the evident backwardness of the masses is caused by deliberate policy rather than by unrestrained population growth and a paucity of natural resources, there is certainly cause for complaints of class injustice, but not of colour injustice. But educated and responsible non-Whites are not subjected, in the Portuguese territories, to the indignities and humiliations they suffer in South Africa.
• 7Some injustices may be due more to class barriers than to colour barriers. For instance, there is much resentment felt against Portugal as an intransigent colonial power. But no legally enacted colour bars exist in any Portuguese territory; and a South African who crosses into Mozambique is at once struck by the wholly different attitude, at least superficially, towards colour. Yet the overwhelming majority of the Africans of Mozambique are extremely poor. Some critics conclude that Portugal maintains a de facto if not a legal colour bar. But there are approximately an equal number of Whites and non-Whites with ‘assimilado’ status (that is, who have achieved both literacy and the ability to live at defined civilised standards) who have long enjoyed absolute equality of rights before the law. Yet only 160,000 out of the population of 6.6 million enjoy this status and only 5 per cent of the non-white assimilados are Africans (the rest are Indians and half-castes). If the evident backwardness of the masses is caused by deliberate policy rather than by unrestrained population growth and a paucity of natural resources, there is certainly cause for complaints of class injustice, but not of colour injustice. But educated and responsible non-Whites are not subjected, in the Portuguese territories, to the indignities and humiliations they suffer in South Africa.
• 8I shall illustrate my thesis almost entirely by reference to experience in the Republic of South Africa where I have been living whilst my ideas were forming. But the lessons learned from a study of colour bars, apartheid and other manifestations of colour prejudice in South Africa, are of direct relevance wherever skin pigmentation or other racial characteristics serve as a principle for confining individuals to any sort of economic or social inferiority.
• 9Without attempting a comprehensive account of colour relations – economic, social or political – in South Africa, I shall try to identify (a) the forces that have tended to dissolve the economic and social inferiority of the non-white classes, and (b) the opposing forces – constituting the injustice – that have tended, deliberately or otherwise, to perpetuate this inferiority. In the final Chapter I shall sum up what I hope the reader himself will have gathered from the facts and interpretations presented about the nature of these forces.
• 10Now my interpretations of the facts will amount to a criticism of the thinking – not the sincerity – of many of the more vociferous of those who campaign, with tenacity and courage, against colour injustices. I shall, on the whole, be questioning the insight and wisdom of people with no axe to grind – the vastly more numerous disinterested opponents of racial discrimination. It is ideas and stereotypes, not aims and purposes, which I shall be challenging.