The Economics of the Colour Bar

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’). But partly because of the wish to meet external criticism, from the United Nations and elsewhere, and partly owing to intractable internal developments, increasing emphasis has since been laid upon the notion of ‘separate development’. Moreover, there has been a significant change of tone in government utterances. Some leading advocates of apartheid have even been publicly preaching the desirability of courtesy in dealing with Africans, an attitude almost unimaginable 15 years ago. These changes represent retreats in a policy which, it was originally believed, could assist the maintenance of permanent White supremacy, partly by making the non-Whites themselves recognise their inherent inferiority.

LEGISLATING FOR APARTHEID

Among the measures which sought to entrench apartheid by such means is the Group Areas Act of 1950. The chief aim of this Act, which has created the most extreme bitterness, in spite of a whole series of amendments (some mitigating, some aggravating) is to establish and enforce segregation in respect of residence, property and business ownership.1 This is not a wholly preposterous objective. To some extent, racial segregation occurs purely as a result of natural human preference. It is very common in the world to find urban districts in which Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Syrians, Jews or other groups have congregated because of the preference of the poorer races for residence in the cheaper areas, the desire to avoid the unpleasantness of race prejudice or the wish to live near or as part of their own racially defined community. These tendencies had been traditionally enforced in South Africa by private covenants under which the sale of land or property to non-Whites was excluded by contract. The Group Areas Act has mainly affected the districts in which such contractually enforced segregation has not occurred. It not only restricts, on a racial basis, the areas of future development but sets out to enforce segregation in formerly mixed areas.

When the Coloured people and Indians have been forced to move from one district to another under the Act, they have normally been given adequate notice;2 and accommodation in new areas, often superior and not more expensive, has been available. But it has nearly always left them further from their place of employment;3 and the motive has made compulsory transfer an affront. Moreover, the Group Areas mentality ignores ‘the feeling of belonging, and the security of moving around in a well-known territory’, considerations which ‘are important to men, as they are to birds and animals’.4

The Minister of Coloured Affairs has recently claimed that the Government’s real aim is the ‘eventual removal of racial discrimination by allowing the various groups to develop and progress in their own areas’. But they certainly do not yet contemplate, for instance, the gradual admission of Coloureds to equality of opportunity in respect of the better-paid employments in ‘their own areas’. Indeed, because most Group Areas enactments have forced the Coloureds to live further than formerly from their work, they are likely to mean the withholding of opportunity.

One of the latest proclamations under the Act threatens the disruption of the lives of 5,000 Indians and the ruin of nearly 200 Indian businesses. They are to be expelled from an area in Johannesburg which has been one of their principal trading districts for more than half a century – indeed, since the days of Kruger. This area had been explicitly set aside for non-White occupation, with rights conferred in 1902 and 1941 to acquire freehold property. It contains two mosques, five Indian religious schools and various Indian amenities. Will it be surprising if this move leaves a smouldering indignation? The only group area for Indians in the Johannesburg district is to be at Lenasia, 22 miles outside the city.

BITTER LEGACY OF SEGREGATION

The resentments aroused by such imposed territorial segregation are due only partly to any economic injustice so caused. Well-to-do and well-educated Coloured people, Indians and Africans, are mostly convinced that the aim has been deliberately to humiliate them, to express contempt by a measure intended to emphasise, to them and to society, their inferiority and subordinacy. Thus, the various non-white races have almost invariably been moved or confined to the less pleasant districts. Explicit amendments of the original Act have laid it down that the facilities provided for non-Whites need not be ‘separate but equal’ – merely ‘separate’. In coastal towns, the beaches made available to the non-Whites have been the unattractive and least accessible ones; indeed, they have been banned from beaches and public parks they previously enjoyed whenever the Whites have coveted them. On publicly-owned transport they have been segregated into separate compartments, separate entrances, separate ticket offices, separate cloakrooms, etc. In the Cape Province where, before the enforcement of the Group Areas legislation, there had been no colour bar on the state-owned railways, on the local services, segregation was clearly intended to demonstrate that the non-Whites were regarded more or less as social lepers likely to contaminate the Whites if they travelled in the same buses, or on adjacent seats in buses, or in the same railway compartments. A further discriminatory rule implying disparagement concerns the right to use African domestic servants: the employment of Africans in this capacity is permitted in white areas only. And in the same spirit, the Factories Act was amended in 1960 to confer even more sweeping powers on the Minister of Labour to enforce the physical separation of the different race groups employed in any undertaking.

This emphasis on inferiority of status which is so resented by the non-Whites is illustrated by a general principle in all the Nationalist Government’s race legislation, namely, that no White shall ever be expected to hold any post where he will be subordinate to a non-White. Thus, in some ‘group areas’, firms owned by non-Whites may not employ Whites.5 And it is in keeping with this approach that the Minister of Bantu Administration recently issued a directive that ‘no official shall shake hands with a black man’. Similarly, the Defence Act provides that no non-Whites (i.e., the Coloureds, the Indians or Africans) shall ever be deemed to be the superior officer of any White, so that no non-White of any rank will ever be in a position to give orders to a White. And in the state-subsidised hospitals no non-white doctor may give instructions to white nurses.

The humiliation of non-Whites through the Group Areas legislation has been further emphasised in (a) the Immorality Act, which makes sexual intercourse or intimacy between Whites and non-Whites (even if the couple have married since the Act was passed) a criminal offence,6 although relations between, say, Coloureds and Africans, or between Indians and Africans, constitute no crime; (b) the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, which forbids inter-marriage between Whites and non-Whites yet permits inter marriage between the other non-white races; (c) the exclusion of non-white students from those universities which had formerly accepted them,7 separate university colleges under stringent state control being provided for the non-white races; (d) governmental pressure to enforce apartheid even in scientific and learned societies;8 (e) the enforced segregation of non-Whites and Whites in the Cape Town city libraries which, until 1963, were open to all races;9 (f) the Population Register Act, in terms of which the registration cards which all are supposed to carry specify one’s race.

It must be admitted, however, that apartheid of the group areas kind has to some extent created (hardly intentionally) opportunities for non-Whites to serve their own people in government employment, in grades which were formerly virtually denied to them, although at lower remuneration than is paid to Whites. They have been allowed, for instance, in clerical and minor executive posts on the railways, where they have to deal only with their own racial group. Again, in the separate university colleges for non-Whites, the more able Coloureds, Indians and Africans may well find opportunities (at lower salaries) which the ‘open universities’, selecting staff according to academic achievement and promise alone, would never have been able to offer them;10 and because these universities are cheaper, higher education (inferior and – some of us fear – indoctrinated)11 may be brought more effectively within the reach of the poorer races. And it is certainly not out of the question that apartheid in other forms will indirectly have similar consequences and provide, so to speak, politically acceptable ways of reducing colour injustice, especially in the ‘border industries’ and ‘Bantustan’ developments (see Chapters 16 and 17). But the spheres in which this will be possible appear to be few and limited by political expediency in a régime in which the votes of Coloureds are unimportant and those of Indians and Africans non-existent.12

THE TYRANNY OF PARLIAMENTARY MAJORITIES

It may be thought that residential segregation and separate facilities in respect of universities, libraries, learned societies, beaches, public gardens, the Post Office, theatres, sport, transport, etc., are hardly examples of injustices of economic origin; for in these cases any discriminatory treatment appears to originate in political or socio-psychological factors rather than economic causes. But it is an important part of my case that all forms of what are felt to be injustices – economic or otherwise – can be seen to have their ultimate source in an abuse of parliamentary majorities. For majorities, even if based on ‘one man, one vote’, may withdraw from minorities or from classes not represented the opportunity to win equal dignity and respect as well as the right to economic opportunities.

This is, I feel, the most vital point of my whole thesis. Unless parliaments are restrained by iron-clad constitutional entrenchments, political majorities, as defined and distorted by electoral laws and voting procedures, will almost always be tempted to exploit their power tyranically, that is, without true regard for the rights or feelings of political minorities or for those who lack effective political representation. The majorities in the white constituencies, to which the authors of the Group Areas programme have successfully appealed, have wanted to humiliate the non-Whites. Let us be under no illusion on that point. This is partly because one of the parties found it profitable deliberately to foster racial pride, racial prejudices, racial fears and racial hatreds. But do not the almost sadistic aspects of the laws I have been discussing expose the undemocratic weakness of certain forms of representative governmental machinery? I return to this problem in Chapter 18.

13The group which has been most adversely affected economically by the Group Areas legislation has been the Indians, for they have very largely built up their businesses and goodwill in white areas. I devote Chapter 14 to their special case.

14Removal notices are not usually served until at least one year after Group Area proclamations, and the notices must then give a minimum of three months’ grace in respect of residences and twelve months in respect of businesses.

15This movement of non-Whites to areas further and further from their place of employment has been most serious in the case of Africans. It seems to have had some effect upon industrial location, some new factories having been sited so as to be near to where the African employees live.

16Wilson and Mafaje, op. cit., p. 173.

17In view of the fact that, as yet, there is a relative handful of experienced non-white executives in South Africa, this rule must make it extraordinarily difficult to establish businesses under non-white ownership or management.

18Indeed, an even more serious offence than homosexual relations in most countries.

19The universities concerned bitterly opposed this legislation. They remain ‘open universities’ and have pledged themselves to continue to press for the restoration of their right to admit or reject students on the basis of academic merit, not colour or race.

20The Minister of Education, Arts and Science has recently informed these societies that, unless they discharge from membership any non-Whites among them, they will lose all state subsidies. Most learned societies will, it is believed, forgo their subsidies rather than take this step, which some have suggested will not only bring South Africa into ridicule abroad, but cause valuable scientific and cultural links with the world to be lost. Non-white membership has not, however, yet been made illegal.

21The threat to withdraw the Provincial subsidy was the method of enforcement.

22The staffs of the university colleges for non-Whites are, at present, almost entirely White.

23The university colleges for non-Whites are as much under direct governmental control as they are in Communist countries. Professors and lecturers have the status of public servants. It is difficult to know what measure of freedom of thought is possible under these conditions.

24It remains true, I think, that as long as it is within the power of the Government to protect Whites from the competition of non-Whites, the right of the latter to contribute to the common pool of output is almost certain to be restrained at least as much as it has been in the past.

• 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.
• 13Some 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.
• 14Some 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.
• 15I 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.
• 16Without 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.
• 17Now 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.
• 18Of 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.
• 19But 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.
• 20But 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.
• 21When 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.
• 22When 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.
• 23If 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.
• 24A 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.