10. Africans in the Towns

CHAPTER 10 AFRICANS IN THE TOWNS

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.

THE URBANISATION OF THE AFRICAN

The sizeable influx of Africans to the towns (as distinct from the mining compounds) began shortly after the First World War, and was remarkably accelerated in the middle 1930s. It seemed to create the problem of the Poor Black. In reality it merely focused attention on it, since conditions that appear tolerable in tribal areas or on farms become intolerable in the relatively advanced sociological environment of modern industrial towns.1 Hence, when the number of urban Africans began growing rapidly, the need to redress the difficulties created by their primitive standards and customs became urgent.

When Africans first enter secondary industrial employments and other town occupations, they are usually quite unprepared for urban life. They find themselves in a bewildering environment where their tribal traditions, whilst still powerful, retain little meaning; they are submerged in a community whose language the majority do not at first understand; they are mostly housed in barracks – isolated from their wives and children; and they are engaged in serving a society which makes it clear to them that they are not regarded as eventual citizens but rather as permanent foreigners or (more recently) as temporary foreign visitors.

The most tenaciously rooted tribal traditions lose some of their hold with urban contacts, even with such restricted contacts as are permitted under the compound system. It is generally agreed that, after about a decade devoted to town employments, significant psycho-sociological changes occur. Some believe that Africans of the second generation in the towns are already essentially detribalised or urbanised, their links with the reserves having been irretrievably weakened. But although only a very small proportion of urban Africans have been born in the towns (probably not more than 2 per cent), growing numbers have now been town dwellers for two, three or four generations. These are increasingly referred to as ‘rootless’; their literacy is growing;2 they have ceased to be pagan in the usual sense of the word; their belief in witchcraft is losing its hold; they are learning to respect and place their trust in modern medicine (including patent medicines); they attach themselves readily to those Christian churches (including Christian sects they themselves have originated) which are willing to accept and respect them; but they have not thrown off all tribal superstitions and practices, especially the powerful tradition of lobola, a form of wife purchase (even when they have been married according to Christian as distinct from pagan rites).3 Growing numbers of urban Africans have been falling into this mainly, although not perfectly, detribalised class. That they feel perplexed, adrift, désorientés, is only to be expected.

URBAN ADAPTATION AND THE ‘PASS LAWS’

The disintegration of the stable sociological attitudes of the tribal social structure, accompanied by an imperfect adaptation of the African’s attitudes towards the urban environment, would have created major tensions under the most enlightened government. Instead, the strains have been enormously aggravated by ‘influx control’ and the manner in which the pass system has been administered.

Nevertheless, although Africans seem often to be miserably unhappy during the long periods of adjustment, their material advancement in urban employment is such that hardly any ever wish to return permanently to the reserves, or to the mines or the farms. Of course, unless their wives and families have been allowed to live with them as urban dwellers, they nearly all look forward to retiring to the reserves. Perhaps between one-fifth and one-quarter now regard the urban areas as their homes. A surprisingly high proportion of Africans employed in industry seems to have been attracted from employment in the mines, which first persuaded them to leave the reserves. Their real earnings as unskilled labourers in industry and commerce, although considerably lower than of Whites with equal muscular strength and intelligence, are high in relation to what they can command in other spheres.

Since they first came to the towns, Africans have been able to satisfy demand for their traditional food, clothing and shelter by the expenditure of a relatively small proportion of their current earnings. Some of their wages are (usually) sent to their families and dependents in the reserves.4 The balance they have gradually come to use in acquiring ‘luxuries’ in the form of what we regard as the ‘conventional necessities’ of the Whites. In earlier years, many Africans regarded money income earned outside the reserves chiefly as a source of acquiring additional cattle,5 but they have usually taken easily to the sort of status-conferring goods which the white man conspicuously possesses: smart suits, hats and footwear; blankets, mattresses and bedsteads; crockery and kitchen utensils; sewing machines; clocks and watches; radios; gramophones and musical instruments; bicycles and even cars;6 patent medicines; tea and processed foods; alcoholic liquor (until recently, illegally purchased); insurance and investment in savings accounts; expenditure on sports as participants and spectators; betting and other forms of gambling. Although some of these things have replaced similar commodities provided by primitive native crafts, the availability of new products and forms of expenditure has inexorably diverted the course of tribal change in the direction of Western civilisation.

The most important expression of their ‘luxury’ demand has been, however, for ‘leisure’ in a special sense. Africans in urban employments (as in mining) have always temporarily saved a large part of their earnings, not as provision for old age or contingencies, but to pay for periodic visits to their families and friends in the reserves.7 This has been largely, though not entirely, responsible for the high labour turnover of Africans in industrial and commercial employment.8 The tradition has survived partly because it has been difficult (and is becoming virtually impossible) for Africans to bring their women-folk to the towns.9 Moreover, some Africans return at the appropriate seasons to help with ploughing or harvesting.

It hardly needs stressing that the long recurrent periods of separation from their women-folk and families under this migrant labour system has created serious moral and sociological tensions among urban Africans, as well as among their children, who need the guidance of the head of the family.10 Recent legislation (discussed in Chapter 15) is aggravating – at least temporarily – this situation, which is believed by some students to be a chief cause of the violent (but probably ephemeral) Poqo movement.11 At the same time, the majority of the Africans themselves seem to have no general wish to settle permanently in urban areas. They are reluctant to break contact with their people, and even children who are born in the towns are often sent to the reserves for upbringing and education, partly because it is cheaper but partly because the parents believe the environment is better.

ATTITUDE OF THE EMPLOYERS

When we deplore the results of large numbers of married men living in single quarters, we must remind ourselves that it was not market forces or profit-seeking incentives which entrenched the migratory system. In the early days, this system suited not only the needs of the mines but also the convenience of the Africans, who could easily spend short periods away from the reserves without disturbing their traditional mode of living. But whatever pragmatic factors were responsible for the inauguration of the migrant labour system, it was perpetuated by legislation.

Certainly managements (including those of the mines)12 may be blamed for conforming too complacently to governmental policy and white public opinion. They have, perhaps, made too little effort to foster the detribalisation process. Yet they would always have welcomed a settled African labour force, with the stability and reduced labour turnover among their employees that a normal family life could be expected to create. Even last century the wiser leaders in the mining industry could see the advantages which would accrue if the Africans had been permitted to become permanent urban dwellers, together with their families.13 For instance, the mines’ recruitment organisation became adapted with a view to mitigating the burden and inconvenience of the continuous labour turnover for which the constant movement of Africans backwards and forwards was responsible.14 Nevertheless the mine-owners – like the industrialists of today – felt constrained rather to adjust their policy to the system than to attempt to fight it.

An experiment in the gold-mining industry serves to highlight the manner in which market forces have tended, in themselves, to encourage the emergence of settled labour forces, and permit even Africans employed in mines to enjoy a normal family life, whilst the power of the state has been used in the opposite way, to prevent such a development. Little more than a decade ago, it had been decided to establish – more or less as a pilot scheme – married quarters for Africans in the newly developing Free State gold fields. The mine-owners hoped that, if the venture proved successful, they would be allowed gradually to extend it and bring a permanent African mining labour force into existence. This promising development was, however, suppressed by the government, and the mines were eventually allowed to provide married quarters for their essential personnel only up to a maximum of 3 per cent of the total labour employed. In the words of Mr Doxey, who has described this abortive experiment, ‘the mining companies were thus compelled to refrain from any attempt, however modest in scope, to build up a settled labour force’.15

THE INFLUX OF FOREIGN AFRICAN LABOUR

The problems of migratory labour are complicated by the large proportion of foreign Africans entering from Portuguese East Africa, the Protectorates, Nyasaland and other formerly British colonies as far north as Kenya and Tanganyika. This influx has been increasing steadily in recent years: they are now thought to form two-thirds of the total African labour force in the mines, compared with little over half in 1957.

These Africans have no wish to become immigrants – subjects of the Republic. They regard themselves as ‘temporary sojourners’.16 But had it not been for official restraints, the influx of African women from outside South Africa, as well as from the reserves, may well have tended to follow the influx of African men from both sources, in which case large numbers might have become immigrants. Although the result would have increased the magnitude of some problems confronting the town authorities, it would have solved others. Laissez faire, by permitting the growth of a normal family life in the areas offering employment, would have increased the attractiveness of mining and industrial work for both indigenous and foreign Africans. Left to themselves, black labourers from all parts of the continent would have trekked towards the opportunities and prospects offered in South Africa, just as the poorer people of Europe sailed across the Atlantic to the United States before the First World War.

Migratory African labour is not rendered cheaper (as is sometimes supposed) because Africans possess a prime source of subsistence in the reserves or in their homelands. Indeed, this factor has exactly the opposite influence by increasing the wage offer necessary to draw and hold the very conservative tribal dwellers away from the environment and social order in which they grew up and would mostly still prefer. For the employers the system is wasteful from almost every angle; and wastefulness spells dearness, not cheapness. Industrialists want a healthy, contented, loyal labour force.

Even in most ‘put and carry’ work some measure of experience, training and knowledge of routines are important for efficiency. Yet, although migrant Africans usually prefer to return to the same mine or (less frequently) to the same urban employer, their irregularity often obliges them to accept employment wherever there is a satisfactory vacancy, a circumstance which is aggravated by ‘influx control’.17 Productivity must suffer under any such system. Had the Africans been allowed – let alone encouraged – to develop as a normal town community, there can be little doubt that their contribution to the value of work performed would have been incomparably larger. The number of days worked would have increased and output per head have been improved.

LIMITED TRAINING OPPORTUNITIES

Hence, although the free market system has assisted the productive use of unskilled African labour, it has been allowed a very limited success in circumventing legislation, official action, or collusive action tolerated by the state, which has denied opportunities for the Africans to use skill and so effectively destroyed their incentive to acquire skill. This has been wholly to the detriment of industry. For instance, one important form of economy frustrated by regulations under the Mines and Works Act, by closed shop agreements under the Industrial Conciliation Act, and since 1956 by the ‘job reservation’ clauses of that Act, has been that attainable through ‘work studies’, under which ‘skilled jobs’ are analysed and broken down into ‘skilled’ or ‘semi-skilled’ operations on the one hand, and truly skilled operations on the other. In South Africa such analysis would normally have led to Africans being allowed to undertake (at first) the ‘semi-skilled’ parts of the work, thereby releasing Whites and Coloureds for employments demanding relatively more skill. This process, which has been fruitfully utilised in some measure on the Rhodesian copper belt,18 has been virtually suppressed in the Republic of South Africa. Experience in Northern Rhodesia provides some indication of South Africa’s loss in industrial and mining pursuits, and the near future may teach even more salutary lessons about the ability of Africans to contribute to output.19

The apartheid policy has been increasingly represented as implying separate development, including the provision of facilities for African advancement (economic and political) in ‘their own areas’. But when this policy was introduced Africans, who were denied the effective right to be apprenticed,20 could not – even in the townships and locations where they were living – legally perform any of a wide range of skilled tasks, in building and other industries, for which many had, often rather surreptitiously, acquired skills.

In 1951, when the conditions under which many Africans were living outside the reserves and mine compounds had led to irritating external criticism, the Native Building Workers’ Act was passed to help rectify this disability by providing training facilities in building crafts for Africans. In an industry in which, as labourers, they make up four-fifths of the total labouring force, qualified Africans may now legally act as brick-layers, painters, etc., in ‘their own areas’ and on farms.21 They are, however, prohibited from doing this skilled building work in most other urban areas and the government retain complete discretion to determine the maximum number of Africans who may be allowed to acquire building skills.22

Even as unskilled labourers, Africans absorbed into the urban economy have obtained considerable benefits, not least in economic security. The tribal life is precarious in the extreme because crop failure (due to drought or pests) or cattle epidemics may cause famine. But because they have no effective labour unions, Africans can easily obtain employment (in urban as well as mine or farm occupations) when they face adversity in their homelands, so long as legislative obstacles do not prevent it. Hence the urban source of income tends to be highly elastic, and acts as a remarkably effective stabiliser in the economy of the reserves.23

With the typical Africans, however, it remains difficult to distinguish involuntary unemployment from the consumption of leisure. And sometimes what appears to be unemployment is, properly viewed, employment in the entrepreneurial effort of prospecting for the best paid opportunities. Thus the African may not always accept the first available employment. He may, for instance, prefer to scrape a meagre subsistence in the reserves; or he may prefer to invest in the search for better remunerated openings. If dismissed he seldom needed (until a few years ago) to spend more than a week or so in finding another job in any developed industrial area. Because he was usually confident of finding appropriate employment before long, he would sometimes spend much longer periods in seeking the best opening. In the past he was not forced to accept any job offered; and firms which required additional labour usually knew that they could attract it from other employers by offering generous wage-rates and good conditions of work.

In recent years, however, the position has changed fundamentally. Africans ‘endorsed out’ of an industrial area and anxious to avoid farming or mining may now find it impossible to discover another region where industrial employment is permitted for them. Unemployment in this sense may conceivably become increasingly serious. Moreover, it is no longer easy for the African to invest time in the search for favourable remuneration and fringe benefits. If he leaves a job he is liable to be ‘endorsed out’, and if he does get permission to enter an industrial area to look for work, he is allowed only 72 hours in which to do so. Such defects are obviously the product of labour direction, explicitly aimed to obstruct the relatively benevolent operation of the free market.

The Africans who have entered urban employment have had one big advantage compared with other races. Whilst they were excluded, originally by a custom and later by legislation, from preparation for the better-paid opportunities, they were not themselves permitted to organise in labour unions wielding the power of the strike threat.24 The result was that up to 1946 they came to enjoy, in the sort of industrial work left to them, a steadily increasing proportion of the growing aggregate value of the product of industry, and until 1946, real earnings per head which were increasing more rapidly than those of any other section of the population.

The higher wage-rates offered to Africans in secondary industry are possibly due to the absence of ‘monopoly’ elements among employers, such as the common recruiting organisation for mining employments. In spite of the absence of labour union organisation for Africans in most of the industries employing them, their labour has throughout been scarce, and managements have found it profitable to outbid one another for the limited supply.25 This scarcity is even more marked in the industrial regions of the Western Cape because of the distance from the African reserves, and wage-rates would have risen even more above those of other regions were it not that this area appears to have acquired a good reputation among Africans for treating them justly and humanely.

On the other hand, the absence of a common recruiting organisation or of an effective bonus system as a reward for long service seems to have meant that the turnover of African labour in industry and trade has throughout tended to be higher than in the mines. The African seldom feels any loyalty or sense of belonging to the firm which employs him. And although the colour bar has been less blatant and less rigid in industry, permitting exceptionally gifted or enterprising Africans to obtain some measure of responsibility or semi-skilled status, the overwhelming majority have been confined to completely unskilled work requiring mainly muscular strength. Here their labour has been very satisfactory, and apart from the tendency to leave for another job or return to the reserves, they are said to be conscientious, courteous and good-natured employees. Nor do they seem resentful of industrial discipline, although it is almost entirely enforced by Whites.26

AFRICAN ENTREPRENEURS

One field of African advancement that legislation did not originally discourage was business enterprise. Since the last war, a few thrifty and energetic Africans, perceiving opportunities for profit, have opened shops, dry cleaning establishments, filling stations, garages, cinemas, and simple businesses of that nature. The government has not failed to recognise this tendency to capitalistic development, and has (in 1963) begun to use its arbitrary powers to suppress it. Directives from the Secretary for Bantu Administration and Development have forbidden the opening of any new African owned or directed businesses even in African urban areas. Existing African businesses are to be allowed to continue temporarily, but it is the intention to ‘persuade’ or ‘encourage’ their owners to transfer them to the reserves (the Africans’ ‘homelands’), that is, far away from the areas where most African income is earned and spent. The explanation given is naturally the paternal concern of the government for the welfare of the Africans themselves! Their enterprises are, it is said, ‘frequently not successful’ and the black public does not, for instance, ‘obtain a proper cinema service’. But the real object has clearly been that of preventing the inauguration of African enterprise with its powerful educative influence and its stabilising tendency among the urban Africans.

A final consideration concerns the distinction between the increasing real earnings of Africans and the number enjoying them. Even under the migrant labour system, with standard wage-rates and other colour bars, industrial employment could have raised the average standards of the Africans much more rapidly if their growing aggregate real income had not induced a massive increase in their total population. Is it necessary to insist that one ought not to blame the free market for this? A free labour market can disclose the most productive and best-remunerated opportunities for the additional hands, to feed, clothe, shelter and amuse the additional bodies. But, ceteris paribus, the remuneration will have to be lower the more rapidly the labour force increases.

The inescapable conclusion of this Chapter is that private enterprise in mining and industry (and the same is true even of the less rationally conducted sphere of farming activity) has tended to work wholly for the material advancement (and indirectly the social benefit) of the African people. The intervention of the centralised state, on the other hand, has worked almost entirely in the opposite direction, and the sole exceptions are found in certain mitigations of restraints on African labour and in the provision of urban amenities – policies introduced to ease consciences, to satisfy world opinion or to stave off internal trouble.27

This reality is strikingly illustrated by the case of migrant or foreign Africans who are prepared to travel huge distances in order to take advantage of the opportunities of earning which are offered in the Republic. The remarkable current influx of foreign African labour to the mines, in spite of the Republic’s appalling reputation, is significant. There are now over 800,000 black aliens in the Republic, all of whom are perfectly free to leave, or not to return after periodical sojourns at home, if their own independent countries can offer them better opportunities. But never before have they seemed to be as anxious as they are today to take advantage of the demand for their labour in the land which all African states unite in damning. Notwithstanding vociferous official hostility to the Republic’s policies, the countries from which the foreign Africans are attracted have been unable to prevent their nationals, impoverished through decolonisation, from flocking in ever-increasing numbers to mining and other employments. Even the recently enforced closing of the mines’ recruitment organisation in Tanganyika has so far failed to stem the influx of Tanganyikans into the Republic; and the prospect of the South African Government, for political reasons, forbidding the entry of Basutos has created alarm in Basutoland because any such action would threaten that Protectorate with starvation.28

Under the Aliens Control Act of 1963, the Government of the Republic has acquired increased powers of exclusion, on the grounds of doing justice to its own Africans.29 In a debate on the measure a Nationalist speaker referred to its being used to create employment at home by withdrawing opportunities for aliens. No wonder that a wise Basuto from Maseru is reported to have said:

‘They talk of independence! When freedom comes, my job may be placed in jeopardy and I could be out of work . . . By stopping this flow of labour South Africa could cripple the country in a month without touching other things like transport and communications.’30

31See Chapter 4, p. 32.

32It has been estimated that in the Cape Town area less than 30 per cent of employed Africans are illiterate, although about a quarter are literate in the Xhosa language only.

33This is probably the case with approximately half the Africans in urban areas other than mining areas.

34The growing population of the reserves, itself a response to enhanced urban earnings (in the mines and elsewhere), could not now subsist without contributions from African earnings outside.

35The possession of cattle confers prestige in the tribe. The traditional form of bride purchase is the transfer of cattle.

36It has been claimed recently that the per capita ownership of cars by Africans in the Republic is larger than that in Russia.

37Tribal Africans tend to be improvident in other senses; but as they become adjusted to urban life, they are capable of learning the meaning of thrift.

38African labour turnover is said to be much higher in these pursuits than in the mines. But Dr S. van der Horst has estimated that, in the Cape Town area, Africans over the age of 18 spend about 60 per cent of their working days in employment.

39The relative number of African women in urban areas seemed to have been increasing until the deliberate reversal of this trend during the last few years.

40Yet the original legislation which encouraged the perpetuation of this tradition aimed, at least ostensibly, at preventing social evils.

41Enquiries into recent riots brought out the fact that the rioters were wholly from single quarters. It has been reported that, at the Langa Location near Cape Town, 12,000 married Africans are living as bachelors in single quarters.

42The problems of migratory African labour in the gold mines are complicated by the fact that about two-thirds of the Africans employed are foreigners. (See below, pp. 92–3, 99–100, and Chapter 17, p. 155.)

43See, for example, Doxey, op. cit., p. 92.

44In recruiting Africans for mining work, their fares are frequently advanced. The usual contract is for periods of service of about nine months upwards, although the average is about 14 months. The Tomlinson Commission (1951) estimated that the migratory Africans are actually earning (i.e., actually doing paid work) during a period of only about 38 per cent of their working lives,

45 Doxey, op. cit., pp. 177–8.

46This fact gives considerable weight to the argument of the government that the migrant Africans of the Republic must equally be regarded as ‘temporary sojourners’ in the mining and urban areas.

47Official control on the entry of Africans into urban areas. See Chapter 15, PP. 130–1.

48I am not suggesting, of course, that Africans employed in the Rhodesian copper belt have been permitted – by the powerful white labour union – to acquire and exercise skills freely; although a trend in that direction now seems imminent.

49Provided, of course, that the necessary disciplinary structure and the market determination of wage-rates are not frustrated.

50There is no law to forbid the apprenticeship of Africans who have managed to acquire the necessary educational qualification. But any attempt to do so would almost certainly be quashed by the Registrar of Apprenticeship, responding to labour union pressure.

51It need hardly be stressed that the farming vote is more powerful than the industrial vote.

52By 1961, 3, 153 Africans had been authorised to do building work (under these restrictions) and there were 566 official learners.

53The present policy of gradually transferring Africans from the urban areas in which their earnings are highest (such as the Western Cape) to badly located ‘border areas’ (in which their earnings are planned to be much lower – see Chapter 16, pp. 142–3), or to the’ Bantustans’, or to farm and mining pursuits, is likely to weaken this source of economic security.

54They had, of course, no poorer, subservient classes to exploit.

55Of recent years I am not sure that this assertion has been quite true in the Western Province. The relative scarcity of African labour seems to have led managements to informal agreements not to ‘poach’ one another’s unskilled labour. Over the last decade, African wage-rates in secondary industry and commerce may therefore have been well below their equilibrium value, in the sense that it would have otherwise been profitable to employ far more than were available at the ruling wage-rates. Such a situation was possible because Africans have no effective labour organisation, whereas the wage-rates of white labourers and artisans are mostly covered by Wage Act or by the Industrial Conciliation Act which do not fix the price of African labour. At the same time, during the last few years, influx control (according to the most recent statistics) seems to be having the effect of increasing the per capita urban remuneration of Africans still more rapidly than that of other sections.

56The possibility that Africans usually prefer white foremen is suggested in an unpublished study of Dr van der Horst on the employment of Africans in the Cape Town area.

57For example, in the Native Building Workers’ Act, and in some aspects of Bantustan policy.

58About half the alien Africans in the Republic come from the Protectorates, and over 150,000 of them are Basutos. The latter are an important source of labour for the Johannesburg mines, where they have acquired considerable competence and experience as shaft-sinkers.

59A passport will be needed in future.

60Cape Argus, 7 May, 1963. The Government of the Republic could also withhold the 0.88 per cent of her customs revenues which, by an agreement concluded at Union, is at present paid to the Protectorates. This makes up one-third of Basutoland’s revenues, one-fifth of Bechuanaland’s and one-tenth of Swaziland’s.

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.
6In Natal there was some possibility of non-Whites qualifying for the franchise but only a handful did, in fact, qualify.
7Cape Times, 20 August, 1937. The exchange ceased on 31 August, 1937.
8In fairness I should add that, since the fall of the coalition and the outbreak of the war, the Cape Times has been the most influential outlet in South Africa for the consistent and persistent expression of enlightened opinion.
9They have since been represented in Parliament, not on a common roll, but by four white members. Indians now have no representation. But Coloured and Indians together exceed the Afrikaners in number.
10Cape Times, 13 May, 1963.
11See Chapter 17, pp. 158–160.
12Wilson and Mafeje, op. cit., p. 148.
13In more general and less misleading terms, this has meant seeking the achievement of each economic objective with a minimum sacrifice of alternative objectives. If every entrepreneur were able to pay the lowest wage-rates needed to acquire labour in the free market, not only would the dispersion of wage-rates between low and high levels be reduced to a minimum but the aggregate flow of wages would be maximised. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that, through such an economising of labour, the proportion of wages to other incomes in the division of the value of the product would be reduced.
14The Coloured labour unions have tended to be dominated by leaders from the extreme Left.
15See Chapter 11, pp. 105–6.
16I am not suggesting that it is not an appropriate function of the state to finance education, both general and technical.
17In part this idea was based on the fallacy that rapacious employers could exploit the non-Whites because their ‘needs’ were less than those of the Whites.
18This Table may, unless qualified, leave a wrong impression. Average earnings (salaries and wages) per head of Africans, as a proportion of the average earnings of Whites, rose steadily from 12% in 1933–4 to 24.7% in 1946–7. After that year, mainly because of “influx control”, a bigger proportion of Africans than the free market would have determined, found employment in less productive and less well paid areas. Hence, the percentage of African to white earnings per head fell steadily to 18% in 1958–9. Since then it has recovered to 18.5% in 1960–1.
19Provided, of course, that the necessary disciplinary structure and the market determination of wage-rates are not frustrated.
20There is no law to forbid the apprenticeship of Africans who have managed to acquire the necessary educational qualification. But any attempt to do so would almost certainly be quashed by the Registrar of Apprenticeship, responding to labour union pressure.
21It need hardly be stressed that the farming vote is more powerful than the industrial vote.
22By 1961, 3, 153 Africans had been authorised to do building work (under these restrictions) and there were 566 official learners.
23The present policy of gradually transferring Africans from the urban areas in which their earnings are highest (such as the Western Cape) to badly located ‘border areas’ (in which their earnings are planned to be much lower – see Chapter 16, pp. 142–3), or to the’ Bantustans’, or to farm and mining pursuits, is likely to weaken this source of economic security.
24They had, of course, no poorer, subservient classes to exploit.
25Of recent years I am not sure that this assertion has been quite true in the Western Province. The relative scarcity of African labour seems to have led managements to informal agreements not to ‘poach’ one another’s unskilled labour. Over the last decade, African wage-rates in secondary industry and commerce may therefore have been well below their equilibrium value, in the sense that it would have otherwise been profitable to employ far more than were available at the ruling wage-rates. Such a situation was possible because Africans have no effective labour organisation, whereas the wage-rates of white labourers and artisans are mostly covered by Wage Act or by the Industrial Conciliation Act which do not fix the price of African labour. At the same time, during the last few years, influx control (according to the most recent statistics) seems to be having the effect of increasing the per capita urban remuneration of Africans still more rapidly than that of other sections.
26The possibility that Africans usually prefer white foremen is suggested in an unpublished study of Dr van der Horst on the employment of Africans in the Cape Town area.
27For example, in the Native Building Workers’ Act, and in some aspects of Bantustan policy.
28About half the alien Africans in the Republic come from the Protectorates, and over 150,000 of them are Basutos. The latter are an important source of labour for the Johannesburg mines, where they have acquired considerable competence and experience as shaft-sinkers.
29A passport will be needed in future.
30Cape Argus, 7 May, 1963. The Government of the Republic could also withhold the 0.88 per cent of her customs revenues which, by an agreement concluded at Union, is at present paid to the Protectorates. This makes up one-third of Basutoland’s revenues, one-fifth of Bechuanaland’s and one-tenth of Swaziland’s.
31Some 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.
32Some 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.
33I 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.
34Without 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.
35Now 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.
36Of the four colonies merged, it was in the Cape alone that the non-Whites had any sort of effective political rights; and in order to get the consent of the Cape for unification it had been essential that there should appear to be no risk of these rights being removed. Moreover, the entrenched clauses (which were believed to eliminate the risk) were probably an equally necessary condition for the acceptance of the South Africa Act (which constituted the South African Act of Union) by the British Parliament. Indeed, in the debate on the Act British statesmen confidently expressed the view that the ‘liberalism’ of the Cape would gradually spread to the other provinces. But the march of time belied this faith and proved the entrenchments to be quite ineffective.
37But the South African government in the middle and late 1930s was an unholy and uneasy coalition, and if the liberal-minded members of the coalition had raised the issue it would have threatened cabinet unity. Indeed, when I myself tried to arouse public opinion in 1937 by referring to the manner in which the public had been misled, I was strongly attacked by the Cape Times (in a controversy which went into several issues) for irresponsibility. I had charged that we had carelessly ‘torn up our Constitution’. But no steps to rectify the position were taken, or even seriously considered.
38But the South African government in the middle and late 1930s was an unholy and uneasy coalition, and if the liberal-minded members of the coalition had raised the issue it would have threatened cabinet unity. Indeed, when I myself tried to arouse public opinion in 1937 by referring to the manner in which the public had been misled, I was strongly attacked by the Cape Times (in a controversy which went into several issues) for irresponsibility. I had charged that we had carelessly ‘torn up our Constitution’. But no steps to rectify the position were taken, or even seriously considered.
39When the Afrikaner Nationalists eventually obtained the upper hand, in 1948, they immediately took steps to prove that the Constitution had been torn up. By various manœuvres, which included an attack on the judiciary, an attempt to transform Parliament into a High Court, and finally packing the Senate with their own representatives, they secured the two-thirds majority needed for the abolition of the existing non-white voting rights. Far from the ‘liberalism’ of the Cape having spread to the rest of South Africa, as the British Parliament had been led to expect before Union, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State traditions of ‘no equality in church or state’ had been forced on the whole community, and the Coloureds had been deprived of a political status they had held for a century. Of course, political representation of a minority is no guarantee of economic justice for that minority. The Minister of Coloured Affairs argued recently in defence of the abolition of the political rights which the coloured people had enjoyed, that these rights had left 80 per cent of them ‘backward and poor, with leaders deserting them and trying to gain admission to the white masses’. But their removal from the common roll has been felt as a humiliating deprivation of status.
40When the Afrikaner Nationalists eventually obtained the upper hand, in 1948, they immediately took steps to prove that the Constitution had been torn up. By various manœuvres, which included an attack on the judiciary, an attempt to transform Parliament into a High Court, and finally packing the Senate with their own representatives, they secured the two-thirds majority needed for the abolition of the existing non-white voting rights. Far from the ‘liberalism’ of the Cape having spread to the rest of South Africa, as the British Parliament had been led to expect before Union, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State traditions of ‘no equality in church or state’ had been forced on the whole community, and the Coloureds had been deprived of a political status they had held for a century. Of course, political representation of a minority is no guarantee of economic justice for that minority. The Minister of Coloured Affairs argued recently in defence of the abolition of the political rights which the coloured people had enjoyed, that these rights had left 80 per cent of them ‘backward and poor, with leaders deserting them and trying to gain admission to the white masses’. But their removal from the common roll has been felt as a humiliating deprivation of status.
41If policy had been to encourage the investment of private capital in the reserves, however, the scant natural resources of these areas would have been more rapidly and intensively developed; and again the material benefits would have been largest among the Africans themselves. But the sociological consequences of the rising standards of living – the inevitable weakening of tribal customs and tradition – would not have been welcomed either by the South African Government or by the chiefs. And one of the principal objects of recent policy has been the prevention of any such developments. Thus, in recently granting some measure of local autonomy (so-called ‘self-government’) to the Transkei, the necessity to protect the Africans from the ‘wolves’, the white capitalists, has been emphasised by spokesmen for apartheid. There is a familiar, contemporary ring about the catch-phrases used to justify a policy which permits only such forms of material progress as the state finds expedient. Yet in curbing the profit incentive to investment (and in causing therefore a slowing down of the material advancement of the Africans), apartheid has warded off the emergence of a situation which is, on the whole, regarded as unjust. That is, it has (within the reserves) prevented a minority of Whites or foreign investors from becoming the owners of a large part of the physical resources which provide employment for Blacks.
42A serious difficulty confronted in any attempt to interpret experience of race relations arises out of a tendency for resentments aroused by unquestionable injustices, as I have defined them, to be directed against wholly innocent parties, through whose agency unjust discriminations happen to be applied. For instance, Africans are apt to blame the officials whose duty it is to enforce the pass laws or influx control for the decisions required by those controls or laws. Again, ‘when fares are raised or transport inadequate . . . the crews are liable to be treated as scapegoats’. Equally irrationally, the Africans tend to blame ‘employers’ for the relatively low wage-rates they can command rather than the legal enactments (such as the Wage and Industrial Conciliation Acts), social institutions (such as labour unions), or the customs which are responsible.
43Those who have said that capitalists want to maintain a supply of ‘cheap docile labour’ misconceive the interests of entrepreneurs. Certainly the co-ordination of complex activities demands ‘discipline’, and there may be no harm in describing willingness to accept entrepreneurial commands (themselves subject to the stern discipline of the market) as ‘docility’. But it does not mean passivity in face of injustice, which is what is usually implied. In a competitive society, entrepreneurs have every incentive to produce at least-cost, which means acquiring the services of people as well as of physical agents as cheaply as possible.
44The Industrial Conciliation Act appears, on the whole, to have favoured the Whites in a grossly unfair manner, especially in occupations dominated by the Whites when it was passed in the early 1920s. But it would be wrong to suppose that all industrial councils have represented white employees alone, or have been dominated by them. In the new industries such as clothing which emerged in the 1930s (through entrepreneurial avoidance of the spirit and aims of the ‘civilised labour policy’), the Coloured employees came to be strongly represented; and in industries where the labour unions are dominated by Coloureds, the incentive to bring Africans into semi-skilled occupations seems to have been weakened. On the other hand, the organisation of the Coloureds through industrial councils may have had the effect (before job reservation in 1956 and 1959) of protecting them not only against the potential competition of Africans but also against moves to oust them from their existing channels of employment for the benefit of Whites.
45The Industrial Conciliation Act appears, on the whole, to have favoured the Whites in a grossly unfair manner, especially in occupations dominated by the Whites when it was passed in the early 1920s. But it would be wrong to suppose that all industrial councils have represented white employees alone, or have been dominated by them. In the new industries such as clothing which emerged in the 1930s (through entrepreneurial avoidance of the spirit and aims of the ‘civilised labour policy’), the Coloured employees came to be strongly represented; and in industries where the labour unions are dominated by Coloureds, the incentive to bring Africans into semi-skilled occupations seems to have been weakened. On the other hand, the organisation of the Coloureds through industrial councils may have had the effect (before job reservation in 1956 and 1959) of protecting them not only against the potential competition of Africans but also against moves to oust them from their existing channels of employment for the benefit of Whites.
46By comparison, the initial disadvantages of the non-Whites due to home background and lack of resources for investment in their own education have in themselves been a minor hindrance to their progress. It will generally pay private enterprise to see that education, both general and technical, is made available where openings for the employment of the attributes and skills acquired are not likely to be suppressed. But powerful custom or prejudice, collusive action and legal enactment, by closing potential avenues of employment may destroy the motive for investment in human capital. Indeed, it will be wasteful for the state, for business concerns or for parents to devote resources to training and equally pointless for individuals to devote their energies and limited incomes to such purposes. But there would have been an irresistibly strong demand for developing the industrial usefulness of the Coloureds if it had not been for fears that any such move would have encountered other legislative steps to render unusable the skills so developed. The profit motive is powerful; but when it is likely to be overruled by legislation or regulation its power to serve the community is hamstrung.
47Of course, there were sincere supporters of the ‘civilised labour policy’ who believed it would truly raise the Coloureds and Africans to the white man’s standards, and equally sincere opponents who objected to it for precisely this reason. Thus, some of the most effective parliamentary criticism of the Wage Act (from the parliamentary Opposition – then the ‘South African Party’) arose from the belief that it would have its claimed effects and raise the earnings of the non-Whites, thus disturbing the existing non-white subservience. Other Opposition members believed (equally fallaciously) that employers could afford to pay high wage-rates to Whites because of the economies achieved in paying low wage-rates to non-Whites; and they opposed the Wage Act because they thought it might be used to raise Coloured and African wage-rates and hence ultimately reduce the earnings of Whites.
48PROPORTION OF AGGREGATE SALARIES AND WAGES PAID TO EACH RACE IN PRIVATE INDUSTRY IN THE REPUBLIC OF SOUTH AFRICA
49Hence, although the free market system has assisted the productive use of unskilled African labour, it has been allowed a very limited success in circumventing legislation, official action, or collusive action tolerated by the state, which has denied opportunities for the Africans to use skill and so effectively destroyed their incentive to acquire skill. This has been wholly to the detriment of industry. For instance, one important form of economy frustrated by regulations under the Mines and Works Act, by closed shop agreements under the Industrial Conciliation Act, and since 1956 by the ‘job reservation’ clauses of that Act, has been that attainable through ‘work studies’, under which ‘skilled jobs’ are analysed and broken down into ‘skilled’ or ‘semi-skilled’ operations on the one hand, and truly skilled operations on the other. In South Africa such analysis would normally have led to Africans being allowed to undertake (at first) the ‘semi-skilled’ parts of the work, thereby releasing Whites and Coloureds for employments demanding relatively more skill. This process, which has been fruitfully utilised in some measure on the Rhodesian copper belt, has been virtually suppressed in the Republic of South Africa. Experience in Northern Rhodesia provides some indication of South Africa’s loss in industrial and mining pursuits, and the near future may teach even more salutary lessons about the ability of Africans to contribute to output.
50The apartheid policy has been increasingly represented as implying separate development, including the provision of facilities for African advancement (economic and political) in ‘their own areas’. But when this policy was introduced Africans, who were denied the effective right to be apprenticed, could not – even in the townships and locations where they were living – legally perform any of a wide range of skilled tasks, in building and other industries, for which many had, often rather surreptitiously, acquired skills.
51In 1951, when the conditions under which many Africans were living outside the reserves and mine compounds had led to irritating external criticism, the Native Building Workers’ Act was passed to help rectify this disability by providing training facilities in building crafts for Africans. In an industry in which, as labourers, they make up four-fifths of the total labouring force, qualified Africans may now legally act as brick-layers, painters, etc., in ‘their own areas’ and on farms. They are, however, prohibited from doing this skilled building work in most other urban areas and the government retain complete discretion to determine the maximum number of Africans who may be allowed to acquire building skills.
52In 1951, when the conditions under which many Africans were living outside the reserves and mine compounds had led to irritating external criticism, the Native Building Workers’ Act was passed to help rectify this disability by providing training facilities in building crafts for Africans. In an industry in which, as labourers, they make up four-fifths of the total labouring force, qualified Africans may now legally act as brick-layers, painters, etc., in ‘their own areas’ and on farms. They are, however, prohibited from doing this skilled building work in most other urban areas and the government retain complete discretion to determine the maximum number of Africans who may be allowed to acquire building skills.
53Even as unskilled labourers, Africans absorbed into the urban economy have obtained considerable benefits, not least in economic security. The tribal life is precarious in the extreme because crop failure (due to drought or pests) or cattle epidemics may cause famine. But because they have no effective labour unions, Africans can easily obtain employment (in urban as well as mine or farm occupations) when they face adversity in their homelands, so long as legislative obstacles do not prevent it. Hence the urban source of income tends to be highly elastic, and acts as a remarkably effective stabiliser in the economy of the reserves.
54The Africans who have entered urban employment have had one big advantage compared with other races. Whilst they were excluded, originally by a custom and later by legislation, from preparation for the better-paid opportunities, they were not themselves permitted to organise in labour unions wielding the power of the strike threat. The result was that up to 1946 they came to enjoy, in the sort of industrial work left to them, a steadily increasing proportion of the growing aggregate value of the product of industry, and until 1946, real earnings per head which were increasing more rapidly than those of any other section of the population.
55The higher wage-rates offered to Africans in secondary industry are possibly due to the absence of ‘monopoly’ elements among employers, such as the common recruiting organisation for mining employments. In spite of the absence of labour union organisation for Africans in most of the industries employing them, their labour has throughout been scarce, and managements have found it profitable to outbid one another for the limited supply. This scarcity is even more marked in the industrial regions of the Western Cape because of the distance from the African reserves, and wage-rates would have risen even more above those of other regions were it not that this area appears to have acquired a good reputation among Africans for treating them justly and humanely.
56On the other hand, the absence of a common recruiting organisation or of an effective bonus system as a reward for long service seems to have meant that the turnover of African labour in industry and trade has throughout tended to be higher than in the mines. The African seldom feels any loyalty or sense of belonging to the firm which employs him. And although the colour bar has been less blatant and less rigid in industry, permitting exceptionally gifted or enterprising Africans to obtain some measure of responsibility or semi-skilled status, the overwhelming majority have been confined to completely unskilled work requiring mainly muscular strength. Here their labour has been very satisfactory, and apart from the tendency to leave for another job or return to the reserves, they are said to be conscientious, courteous and good-natured employees. Nor do they seem resentful of industrial discipline, although it is almost entirely enforced by Whites.
57The inescapable conclusion of this Chapter is that private enterprise in mining and industry (and the same is true even of the less rationally conducted sphere of farming activity) has tended to work wholly for the material advancement (and indirectly the social benefit) of the African people. The intervention of the centralised state, on the other hand, has worked almost entirely in the opposite direction, and the sole exceptions are found in certain mitigations of restraints on African labour and in the provision of urban amenities – policies introduced to ease consciences, to satisfy world opinion or to stave off internal trouble.
58This reality is strikingly illustrated by the case of migrant or foreign Africans who are prepared to travel huge distances in order to take advantage of the opportunities of earning which are offered in the Republic. The remarkable current influx of foreign African labour to the mines, in spite of the Republic’s appalling reputation, is significant. There are now over 800,000 black aliens in the Republic, all of whom are perfectly free to leave, or not to return after periodical sojourns at home, if their own independent countries can offer them better opportunities. But never before have they seemed to be as anxious as they are today to take advantage of the demand for their labour in the land which all African states unite in damning. Notwithstanding vociferous official hostility to the Republic’s policies, the countries from which the foreign Africans are attracted have been unable to prevent their nationals, impoverished through decolonisation, from flocking in ever-increasing numbers to mining and other employments. Even the recently enforced closing of the mines’ recruitment organisation in Tanganyika has so far failed to stem the influx of Tanganyikans into the Republic; and the prospect of the South African Government, for political reasons, forbidding the entry of Basutos has created alarm in Basutoland because any such action would threaten that Protectorate with starvation.
59Under the Aliens Control Act of 1963, the Government of the Republic has acquired increased powers of exclusion, on the grounds of doing justice to its own Africans. In a debate on the measure a Nationalist speaker referred to its being used to create employment at home by withdrawing opportunities for aliens. No wonder that a wise Basuto from Maseru is reported to have said:
60‘They talk of independence! When freedom comes, my job may be placed in jeopardy and I could be out of work . . . By stopping this flow of labour South Africa could cripple the country in a month without touching other things like transport and communications.’

The Economics of the Colour Bar