The Economics of the Colour Bar

CHAPTER 15 THE DIRECTION OF AFRICAN LABOUR

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

THE ‘PASS LAWS’

A useful tool in this control has been a document of identification known as a ‘pass’ (officially called a ‘reference book’). Since the pass is proof of poll tax payment as well as of identification, the duty to carry it ought not to have become a source of bitterness.1 It happens, however, that African resentment has come to be more strongly felt against these Pass laws than against other laws which have been even more effective in withholding opportunities from them.

The reason appears to be that the penalties imposed on Africans who have been unable to produce their passes on demand have been extremely heavy, and their frequent inability to pay the fines has resulted in an enormous number of jail sentences for mere petty negligence. The general administration of these laws appears to have been harsh rather than precise. The rank and file of the police, who have the task of calling upon Africans to show their passes, have reflected the traditional Afrikaner outlook towards colour and have carried out their duties with crude severity, so that Africans have often been roughly addressed and even roughly handled by them. That is one reason why the Pass laws have engendered feelings of burning injustice and earned the enmity of Africans as a whole. Moreover, the prodigious number of charges brought under these laws seems to have encouraged many over-worked magistrates to deal out rugged rather than considered justice.2

A further cause of bitterness among the better educated Africans is that they are often peremptorily called upon to show their passes by poorly educated white police who all too often regard the cultured speech and bearing of well-educated Africans as arrogance. If they have inadvertently forgotten to carry their passes, they are likely to be subjected to the grossest humiliation.

But the chief cause for the hostility of Africans to these laws of recent years seems to be that they have become part of the apparatus through which the black races have been cut off from potential opportunities of employment. Business men and industrialists seeking profits through cheap labour have been straining to offer what have appeared to Africans as well-paid opportunities. But the latter have been increasingly forbidden to accept such offers by official decision and directed to other types of work.

PLANNING BY ‘INFLUX CONTROL’

The controls have been exercised until recently mainly under what is now called ‘influx control’. In 1923, previous municipal regulations applying to Africans were strengthened, extended and standardised by a measure of central control enacted through the Native (Urban Areas) Act. The chief aim of this Act was (or at any rate was represented to be) the improvement of the conditions of African urban residence. There was, of course, need for some such legislation, just as there is for municipal regulation everywhere; and there were fears that the truly appalling conditions which had been allowed to develop in some locations had contributed to the severity of a disastrous influenza epidemic of 1918. The failure of the 1923 legislation to prevent the continuance or emergence of slum or semi-slum conditions in the locations of many towns was chiefly due, I think, not to defects in the Act under discussion, but indirectly to other laws which prevented Africans from acquiring skills, particularly in building. Had the black people been freely allowed to serve their own community (even if not the Whites and Coloureds), entrepreneurs would have seen to it that the urban services needed to eliminate slum conditions (roads, sanitation, water, and houses instead of shanties) were provided at a wage-cost which the beneficiaries could have afforded.3

The Native (Urban Areas) Act was, however, undoubtedly used not only to regulate the influx to the towns, but (after the Second World War) to discourage or prevent Africans from making full use of the opportunities for material and social advancement which the free market was offering.4 In 1945, the machinery of prohibitions, permits and exemptions was developed in detail. Since then every employer of an African in industry or commerce has been required to register each wage contract individually. Every African is required to obtain a permit to be in any urban area and produce it on demand (in addition to having to produce his pass or ‘reference book’). An employed African is not allowed to change his employment without official sanction (easily obtainable before 1952). Moreover, the Government was accorded complete discretion to refuse permission to any African woman to take up employment or residence in any urban area. But since the Native Laws Amendment Act of 1952, the Africans have been increasingly subject to a totalitarian form of official control and regimentation. As might have been expected, the avowed purpose of this Act is ‘economic planning’ to eliminate the ‘waste’ of African labour through its ‘uneconomic employment’. The assumption is that officials know better than the market what the African labour ‘requirements’ of each area are and are able to ensure that the African labour supply is ‘properly’ allocated. All the typically totalitarian paraphernalia of central, regional, district and local African labour bureaux was created in 1952, and elaborated in a Bill introduced in 1963, to supersede the market by outright direction of African labour.

ECONOMIC CASE AGAINST ‘INFLUX CONTROL’

Yet throughout the implementation of the different influx control acts, industrialists have been trying to circumvent their provisions. The fight has taken the form partly of attempting to evade the obvious intentions, but partly of begging for permission to offer employment. Since the advent of the Nationalist Government (in 1948), however, resistance from industrialists has seldom taken the form of political opposition to the influx control laws; for open opposition in the political sphere from individuals might well mean the loss of the many favours which a government armed with authoritarian powers of control can hand out. The industrialists’ resistance was based on recognition that the community wanted and would always demand the products which African labour could provide, and took the form of dodging state-imposed restraints. Had the legal obstacles to making the best use of African labour been less formidable, managements might indeed have been induced (in the course of profit-seeking) to provide not merely employment opportunities for Africans but education and an environment conducive to industrial efficiency5 such as a normal family life. But here again the interests of investors have clashed with government policies.

With few exceptions the Republic official regards all Africans as merely standard ‘put and carry’ workers; and since 1952 very little freedom of choice seems to have been permitted to managements in recruiting this class of labour. Employers have been forced to choose the best they could from those permitted, by the bureaucracy, to join the pool of registered work-seekers in any district. The resulting waste of human powers and destruction of employee incentives must have been considerable; for even under the restricted opportunities for education and skill permitted by collectivist policies, African employees differ from one another in physical strength, eyesight, manual dexterity, literacy, savoir faire, reliability and experience. Hence the loss in productivity arising from official direction of labour is probably far larger than most industrialists realise.

The African himself is as dependent upon the whim of the politicians and officials as he would be in a totalitarian country. He has to receive permission not only to enter a particular urban area but to leave any area in which he lives. He may be given permission (in his reference book) to work only in a particular district, in a particular industry, in a particular type of work, or even for one particular employer. And in practice, if he has lost one town job, he is virtually compelled to accept any other employment offered to him. If he does not, he runs the risk of being ‘endorsed out’ of the urban area in which he has been working. Formerly an African had the right to continue to live and work in any area in which he had been born or in which he had been employed for ten years or more. Since 1952, he has no longer had that right. He may be removed by the Minister and permitted then to work (outside his ‘homeland’) only where the Department of Bantu Administration decides. Indeed, at the caprice of an official, or on a Minister’s decree, an African may be shifted from one area to another; diverted from one employment or occupation to another; and even removed, with little concern for human feelings or any resulting delinquency and illegitimacy, from his wife and family. He has no right of appeal to the Courts. It is not difficult to imagine the sense of helplessness and insecurity which the urban African must experience.

TOWARDS APARTHEID

The latest legislation, introduced in 1963, is intended to implement this policy by codifying 11 previous Acts and carrying further the enforcement of segregation wherever Whites and non-Whites have to co-operate in economic activity. It does so by reinforcing the power of official regimentation. Under the Bantu Laws Amendment Bill (which is expected to become law in 1964 and which has given rise to grave – although little publicly expressed – disquiet among industrialists), the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development will become the supreme director of initiative in the industrial and commercial spheres. He will be accorded dictatorial powers over the use of African labour. Thus, he will be able to determine the areas from which Africans may be recruited; the number of Africans who may be employed in any defined area; the location of industries in which they may be employed; and the specific employers for whom they may work. He will have the right to compel Africans who are displaced from jobs (so that their work shall be done by other races) to move to depots from which they will be allocated to labour camps, unless they happen to be migratory labourers who can be returned to the reserves. The Minister will also have the right – delegated to an official in one of the labour bureaux – to detain in depots adult Africans who are unemployed or who refuse any job offered to them6 or who are convicted (without Court trial but by administrative process) of breaches of the pass laws, influx control regulations and Native Labour regulations. Further powers include the right to detain unemployed Africans under 21 in youth camps; and even to remove from a particular area Africans born in it or who have lived in it for long periods,7 provided they are declared ‘surplus labour’ or ‘redundant’ or ‘idle’ or ‘undesirable’ or provided that, in the Minister’s opinion, it is ‘in the public interest’ that they shall be removed.8

If the Bill is passed no African will be allowed to work outside the reserves except as an employee of a white-owned company or person (otherwise than through special permission) and the self-employment of Africans will be virtually forbidden. Every contract of service with an African worker will henceforth have to be registered officially; heavier penalties will be imposed for employing an African without a permit; and no African will be allowed to live in a rural area outside a reserve or outside a ‘Bantustan’ unless he is employed by the owner of the land or is a labour tenant or squatter.

Not the least serious aspect of this Bill is the scope for corruption which it will create. ‘At every essential point’, commented the Cape Times during the debates on the measure, ‘the decision is in the right of an underpaid official, without possibility of proper supervision and without the machinery of publicity and court proceedings with which intelligent communities protect themselves from subversion by bribery.’

A major aim appears to be the deliberate destruction of such family life as the Africans have retained in the urban areas and the discouragement of Africans from sharing in Western culture (which means, incidentally, from sharing in Western values).9

The justification always put forward for these policies is that the Africans are, properly considered, merely temporary visitors to the areas in which they are employed. But as the Cape Times cogently explained recently, we are naming as ‘temporary sojourners’ or aliens ‘the very people on whose labour our wealth depends’, whilst ‘these terms are used of people who help us rear our children, serve us with food in hotels, teach in Western type schools and even lecture in our universities’.

The administrative cost of all these controls is growing annually mainly because of the increasing difficulty of maintaining law and order (whether owing to the resentments aroused or the mounting influence of African nationalism). But in part the cost arises out of the necessity to appease world opinion by providing ‘separate facilities’. Another, so far smaller, expense has been the purchase of support for apartheid from chiefs10 and other non-white leaders. Whereas in 1948 (just before the introduction of apartheid) the Department of Native Affairs had an annual budget of under £3.5 million and a staff of 185, in 1962 its successor, the Department of Bantu Administration and Development, already had a budget of nearly £13.5 million and a staff of 735.

If these multiplying expenditures could be shown to have been to the advantage of the Africans controlled they could be justified. But they appear to have been used mainly in the suppression of discontent and the wasteful duplication of ‘separate’ services.

ABANDONMENT OF THE RULE OF LAW

The methods employed to prevent subversion and disorder are also based on the totalitarian model. The rule of law has been abandoned, so that those who are suspected of trouble-making may be deprived of their liberty (by being subjected to house arrest, confined to particular areas or detained incommunicado for 90 days for ‘questioning’) without normal court processes. The principle that no person shall be punished unless judicial procedures have established the breach of some clear-cut law no longer applies. The fate of an alleged offender is determined not by a judge or a jury but by a politician or, under the ‘90 days’ rule, by a police officer.

It is not necessary to my argument to assume that these powers have been abused or that there is any intention to abuse them. The weakness in the judicial process of the free society is that its satisfactory functioning may sometimes be defeated by unscrupulous stratagems,11 which the Pan-Africans have learned. The Communists, however, and their saboteur trainees in South Africa, are not attempting to subvert a free society. They are trying to undermine a country which may be regarded as free for the Whites alone, and even for the Whites in certain senses only. In the old Transvaal and Free State Republics, and since 1910 in South Africa, the non-Whites have never experienced what the educated among them could be expected to regard as justice or, indeed, the conditions of freedom, in either the economic or political spheres. Injustice is the food on which the communist type of trouble-maker thrives. The paradox of South Africa is that the proponents of apartheid are, on the one hand, feeding the subversionists and on the other hand trying to suppress them.

It is this situation which creates the cruel dilemma of the true South African liberals. They must support action, even drastic action, to counteract a form of subversive activity which exploits violence and relies on the intimidation of non-conforming Africans by threats of murder and bodily harm. But when the defenders of intellectual and economic freedom approve of the only procedures which many believe can be effective to suppress subversion, they seem to be defending the very policies which have played into the hands of the would-be saboteurs.

It is, however, in the nature of extreme collectivist administrations that they welcome arbitrary powers; and it is perhaps for that reason that the methods adopted by the Government of the Republic have come to resemble so closely those of the countries behind the Iron Curtain. I hope it is not wishful thinking on my part when I record my belief that a truly democratic society, i.e., a liberal society, could resist the assaults of Communist-type intrigues without the crude injustices of administrative jurisdiction.12

It is difficult to imagine a better illustration than is provided by South Africa of the truth that the fight against colour injustice is actually against the consequences of planning on the collectivist model. Every repression of the Africans has, at the same time, been a repression of the free market. It is so-called ‘central planning’ which has caused African labour to become regarded as a mere source of useful, unskilled, muscular strength. And it is profit incentives which have tended powerfully to raise the material standards of Africans, to develop their latent powers, to raise their status and prestige in a multi-racial society, and ultimately to win for them equality of respect and consideration.

Not only has the centralisation of economic power through the Native Law Amendment Act and similarly orientated legislation prevented investment in Africans as human capital; it has substituted for the delicate and sensitive coordination effected by responsible decision-makers – subject to the disciplines of the loss-avoidance incentives – the decisions of officials controlled by no such impartial disciplines. Officials are irresponsible in respect of the social sanctions of the market, absolved from any profit or loss test of achievement, accountable merely to politicians, and subject to the temptation of corruption. Of course, politicians are responsible to electorates. But electors are much less rational and well-informed than consumers.

The Africans, of whom about two-thirds are forced to work outside any conceivable reserve ‘Bantustan’ of the future,13 have been left with no more civil rights than they would have as labourers in totalitarian countries. Their lives have become almost wholly regimented by officials whose decisions cannot be legally challenged. Because they, the Africans, have no voice whatsoever in the choice of the government, they are placed in the same position as any other political ‘minority’ under ‘omnipotent representative government’.

I contrast ‘omnipotent government’ with what some Americans are beginning to call the ‘libertarian’ tradition (because the socialists have taken to describing themselves as ‘liberal’) but which I still prefer to call ‘liberal’. Under the liberal tradition, the powers of governments are restrained by rigid constitutional entrenchments which (i) protect minorities from spoliation by majorities, (ii) guarantee the independence of the judiciary,14 and (iii) prohibit delegated legislation (unless subject to immediate and effective parliamentary review) and administrative jurisdiction.

PRESSURES ON EMPLOYERS

It may be asked why, if the private enterprise system is opposed to apartheid, investors and managements have not used their financial and political power to prevent it? The answer is that, as in the United States, Britain and other countries in the Western world, investors and managers are a political minority. Apart from the pressures on them to maintain ‘good industrial relations’ by appeasing white employees, they are all too often inhibited from openly or effectively criticising a policy which is against their long-term interest because they fear the state. For instance, in the sphere we have been discussing, private undertakings are at the mercy of officials (nominally, the Minister of Bantu Administration) concerning the amount of African labour they are allowed to employ. Is it surprising that directors and managers have tended to become servile to the Government? An open opponent of apartheid may well fear, inter alia, that his competitor will be quietly allowed plenty of African labour whilst he is allowed little. He will have no appeal to the Courts. And the Government have not hesitated to remind business men of the big stick which the centralisation of economic power enables them to wield. For instance, the Minister of Bantu Administration recently warned those white traders of the Transkei who had been criticising the Bantustan proposals (see Chapter 17), which appeared to threaten them with ruin, that ‘if it had to depend on him, they would have no reason to expect anything from him when the time came’.15 It is significant that the Transkei Territories Civic Association, pointing out that ‘the threat by the Minister savours of intimidation’, pleaded that they did not have the wrong opinions; that they were not guilty of taking part in politics; that they were ‘not agitators’; and therefore that the Minister’s threat was unjustified. They seemed almost to take for granted his right to damage those who take the wrong line in politics.

Some business men have told me that their reluctance publicly to criticise the present government is due less to fear of arbitrary ministerial or official action than the threat of organised boycotts through quiet ministerial suggestions to provincial and local administrations and to powerful Afrikaner business organisations subject to party discipline. Indeed, they feel that, in the interests of their investors and employees, they are compelled occasionally to make public gestures of approval of the ruling party, although a longer view of their interests might prompt frank opposition. The extent to which would-be critics of the Government do, in fact, fear reprisals is illustrated by the recent appeal of the huge Bristol-Myers Co. to the Cabinet, asking that they should be declared innocent of the charge of intentionally sponsoring a biased TV film about South Africa called ‘Sabotage’.

There is no way, I suggest, of ever preventing such abuse of state power except ‘liberal’ constitutional entrenchments which limit the sphere of parliaments to the enactment of non-discriminatory laws, and limit the powers of cabinets to the initiation and non-discriminatory execution of those laws. Such constitutional restraints would prohibit the political direction of labour and economic activity generally. It implies, therefore, the acceptance of the only alternative form of co-ordination, namely the social discipline of the free market in a legal framework designed to avoid the concentration or abuse of power by exposing all owners of resources or suppliers of goods or services to open competition in meeting the wishes of the sovereign consumer. And that discipline is exerted through permitting politically unrestrained investment in human capital and the attraction of labour to where its contribution to the common pool of output, and hence its value, is largest.

 

16The ‘Pass Laws’, originally applying to slaves and hottentots, date from the days of the East India Company. In the case of the large number of foreign migrant Africans who find employment in South Africa, the ‘pass’ has really served as a passport. Foreign Africans are now to be required to carry proper passports.

17For instance, Dr Helen Suzman, MP, referred recently to the enormous number of pass law cases in which sentences ranged from £7 10s. or 15 days’ imprisonment to £45 or go days, and African youths were sentenced to up to 8 cuts. She said: ‘I am not against corporal punishment per se. I can see that it has a use against thugs who go around assaulting people . . . But I cannot by any stretch of the imagination see why cuts have to be imposed on youths for statutory offences’. She went on to say, from personal observation at certain Bantu Commissioners Courts, that the sittings reminded her of a sausage machine. ‘Hundreds of Africans came up in Court . . . it takes 2 minutes to have the whole matter interpreted and dealt with and the verdict is R10 or ten days, or R20 or twenty days. [R2 equals £1.] So it goes on over and over again’. The Minister replied that there was a group of young Africans who banded together in a campaign not to carry their passes and that their parents had asked that they should be caned.

At the Bantu Commissioners Court at Port Elizabeth 316 men and 47 women were sentenced, over a period of 9 weeks, to a total of £5,500 in fines or 13,000 days imprisonment, and 74 youths and 24 young men received a total of 640 cuts.

18Concern with world opinion about the condition under which urban Africans (outside the mining compounds) were living appears to have been mainly responsible (a) for the relaxation in 1951 of the prohibition on the training and employment of Africans as building artisans (see Chapter 10, p. 95), and (b) for the introduction in 195a of the ‘Native Services Levy’, a sort of local poll tax paid by employers for each African employed (other than as domestic servants or on farms). The proceeds of the levy have been used to provide, in the urban locations, the sort of services which are paid for by local rates in most municipal areas: street lighting, sewage, roads, refuse collection, etc. A later Act imposed a Transport Levy (also on employers) to subsidise the cost of Africans travelling to and from employment. This was necessary because they had been, in many cases, forced to reside at long distances from their places of employment.

The provision of these services by such means is believed by many to have militated against the interests of Africans; first, by causing recourse to labour-economising methods of a kind which have not been allowed to have their normal effect of engendering alternative employments for those displaced; and second, by encouraging employers to substitute other forms of non-white labour for African labour.

19Additional aims of the 1923 Act, and subsequent influx control legislation (in principle defensible in the light of liberal ideals), were to facilitate the working of the Masters’ and Servants’ Acts (see Chapter 10, pp. 92–3) and to control liquor (including Kaffir beer).

20I must repeat that I am not claiming that altruistic motives would have actuated such developments. For instance, continuous improvements in respect of miners’ diets, sporting and general recreation facilities, standards of compound accommodation and medical and hospital services on the mines were accelerated by the competition of industrial occupations, which were attracting Africans from the mines. The steps taken to meet this competition were not disinterested. None the less they were laudable and enlightened.

21This provision might seem to make unemployment a crime.

22Those in this category will, however, have the privilege of being the last to be expelled.

23Outspoken criticism of the first draft of the Bill resulted in the concession (if it can be really so termed) that, in the implementation of such transfer, the authorities ‘must take into consideration the Bantu’s family ties and other commitments’, and that there must be ‘suitable other work’ (in the opinion of politicians or officials) for him to go to. Incidentally the Minister of Bantu Administration will acquire virtually absolute power to determine the future siting of industry; for there is hardly a single industry which does not employ more African labour than White or Coloured labour.

24The fact that state-provided education for African children, controlled by the Department of Bantu Education, is now restricted to Standard II (except within the Africans’ ‘homelands’, where higher education of a type, also government controlled, is available), is relevant to this thesis.

25In 1962, the sum of £146,000 was allocated under the heading ‘Allowances, Presents and Rations to Chiefs and Headmen’.

26To take a parallel case, the surviving power of gangsterdom in the United States could undoubtedly be broken most easily if the administration there had the power to apprehend ‘known’ (i.e., suspected) gangsters and incarcerate them without trial. But in spite of the magnitude of the gangster evil, any temptation to use such methods has been wisely restrained; for it would be, in effect, conferring arbitrary power on politicians and destroying confidence in the administration of justice. Most Americans realise that the influence of the gangsters will ultimately be terminated through the normal process of law in the Courts.

27One factor which encourages the shrewd Nationalist politicians of the Republic and discourages their liberal critics is that the former know only too well that the ruthless suppression of discontent is hardly likely to bring greater opprobrium than the almost opposite policy. Thus, in the British South African Protectorates, African nationalism has almost completely free rein, including the right to complain to the world of ‘oppression’, the right to organise to throw off ‘the British yoke’, and even the right to receive funds from Ghana for this purpose! As a special correspondent in The Times has recently expressed it, ‘the bitterest lesson for the British’ is that, in the eyes of the non-white world, they are ‘indistinguishable from the South Africans as oppressors of the black man’. The Times, 3 January, 1963.

28See Chapter 17.

29The traditions of judicial independence, within the diminished sphere left to the Courts, appear so far to have survived in South Africa, in spite of the suspicion that some appointments to the bench have been politically motivated.

30Argrrs, 6 March, 1963.

• 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.
• 16Some 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.
• 17Some 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.
• 18I 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.
• 19Without 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.
• 20Now 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.
• 21Of 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.
• 22But 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.
• 23But 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.
• 24When 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.
• 25When 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.
• 26If 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.
• 27A 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.
• 28Those 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.
• 29The 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.
• 30The 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.