The Economics of the Colour Bar

CHAPTER 17 THE BANTUSTANS

DURING the gradual change of emphasis from ‘baasskap’ to ‘separate development’ in the interpretation of apartheid, the most important gesture has been towards the ultimate establishment of ‘Bantustans’1 – areas within which Africans are to be accorded a measure of political autonomy. The possibility of the reserves being treated as the Africans’ national homes had for long been discussed, and the hope eventually emerged that, within these regions, it would be possible to claim that Africans had their own rights and privileges – political and economic – to compensate for what they lacked in the areas where most of them would continue to live and earn.

ORIGIN OF THE RESERVES

The origin of the reserves – the territories which, as the new Bantustans, have been promised more independence in local affairs – must be briefly sketched. Before 1913, Africans could legally retain or purchase land in the Cape and in Natal as freely as people of other races could, whereas in the two Afrikaner Republics there were legislative restraints on their land purchases. But in that year, the land laws of the four provinces were consolidated. The aim was partly to protect the interests of Africans by ending the continued encroachment of Whites on the already dwindling traditional African areas. Thus, in the so-called ‘scheduled areas’, Whites were henceforth denied the right to acquire land, but in all other regions – even in African urban locations – Africans were denied this right.2 In 1936, the restraints were strengthened. At the same time, however, provision was made (through the Native Land and Trust Act) for the gradual extension, by state land purchase from Whites, of the areas within which Africans could acquire land; but the actual expansion of such areas has been very small because of the high cost of land purchase from reluctant white farmers.

The first concrete step in the Bantustan direction was taken in 1959 through the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act. This Act established eight Bantu areas (the African ‘reserves’) within which there was to be co-operation between the Republic Government and the tribal authorities with a view to their eventual acquisition of local autonomy. Of the eight Bantustans originally envisaged, the only area to be offered this autonomy as yet has been the Transkei.

THE FIRST BANTUSTAN

The Transkeian Constitution Act, 1963, creates a Legislative Assembly of 109 members, namely, the four paramount chiefs, 60 other chiefs and 45 members elected by Transkeians living in the territory and by those registered as its citizens who happen to live outside.3 In general terms, it confers a type of subordinate ‘citizenship’ upon every Xhosa-speaking African, unless he belongs to one of the other Bantustans, which might perhaps be established later. The 45 representatives (other than the chiefs) will be elected by all such citizens on the basis of ‘one man, one vote’.4 The Legislative Assembly will have the right (subject to the approval of the Minister of Bantu Administration) to tax all its Xhosa ‘citizens’, wherever they may be in the Republic.5 Nevertheless, the Transkeian Africans (the Xhosa-speaking) will remain citizens of the Republic for external purposes and as such ‘enjoy protection’, although possessing no rights to vote in any constituency in which they may be resident or earning a living outside the Transkei. As a supposed quid pro quo, Whites are to be denied ‘citizenship’ rights within the Transkei.

All decisions of the Transkeian Legislative Assembly are to be subject to the approval of the Government of the Republic, and the Transkei will have no powers over defence, foreign affairs, immigration, railways, harbours and roads. Its courts will have jurisdiction over Africans only and not over Whites.

The emergence of this scheme was the result of a transformation of attitude which had come about very slowly. Nevertheless, it represented a remarkable change of front on the part of the party responsible, which had attained power through the promise of white domination – apartheid with baasskap. In 1950 Dr D. F. Malan, then Prime Minister and leader of the Nationalist Party, had reiterated categorically that they had always held ‘that total territorial separation was impracticable . . . Our whole economic structure is to a large extent based on non-white labour’. Total separation, he said, is ‘not the policy of our Party and it is nowhere to be found in our official documents’.6 Moreover, a few years earlier, the present Minister of Bantu Administration and Development had described the very policy for which he has recently obtained parliamentary sanction as ‘dangerous if not more dangerous than integration’. He maintained further that any such ideas were rejected by the Africans themselves. And only three years before the Transkei Act, Mr F. S. Steyn, MP, one of its chief defenders in 1963, described as ‘crazy’ anyone who thought that the Nationalist Party supported economic apartheid.

The ‘Fagan Commission’7 reported in 1948 that it would be quite impossible to bring about any measure of segregation such as is now intended. A few years later, the ‘Tomlinson Commission’, which the Nationalist Government appointed on coming to power in 1948 (to prepare a scheme which would permit the Africans to develop ‘in their own areas’, under tribal institutions and traditions) reported that the number of Africans who would have to find employment in white areas would inevitably increase rather than decrease in the years to come.

The Tomlinson Commission’s two most important recommendations for improving the productivity of the African areas were ultimately rejected by the Government. The first was that private capital, under white direction, should be admitted freely to the Transkei and other African areas. The second was that the primitive system of land tenure should be abandoned and large-scale, mechanised farming techniques adopted.8 These recommendations were, however, unacceptable to the Government on the ground that they conflicted with the basic objective of ‘a social structure in keeping with the culture of the Natives’.

REASONS FOR ‘VOLTE FACE’

The Transkei Constitution Act now inaugurates what Die Burger (the leading Afrikaans daily newspaper) has called ‘a new period in our South African statecraft’. The aim is represented as total political separation and, as far as can possibly be achieved, total economic separation, with a conditional black baasskap (mastership) inside the Bantustans and an unconditional white baasskap outside them.

What has been the cause of this volte face? Some suggest that the pressure of world opinion at the United Nations and elsewhere, the clearly expressed anathema of Western civilisation generally, and the ominous development of Pan-African imperialism, have made it essential that some concrete steps, at least, should be taken which could be represented as examples of the benevolence of ‘separate development’. Indeed, apartheid has had to be represented to the world, not as it had formerly been proclaimed to electorates, but as its complete opposite – an attempt to do justice to the Africans, as a means of responding to their legitimate aspirations.9 The Government seems to have felt that it could hardly explain the ethical content of apartheid whilst still denying all political rights to the Africans, and that some advantages for the black people had to be demonstrable in order to justify the growing stringency in the administration of the laws to maintain order, and the laws which deny (outside the reserves) opportunities of advancement for the majority. Considerations of this kind appear to have led it to plan for a measure of local self-government – at present very restricted – within the chief African reserves. The intention seems to be (although pronouncements have been contradictory and vague) to allow these areas ‘ultimately’ to become sovereign independent states on a par with the Protectorates. But whether ‘ultimately’ is envisaged to mean one, five, ten or 100 years no-one yet knows.

A quite different view of the reasons for the revolution in approach is held by others. They regard it as a courageous and imaginative attempt to solve at least one of the great colour problems of the Republic. Political exigencies, they suggest, prevent the true purpose from being frankly and unequivocally explained, but the aim is to create circumstances in which Africans who are at present South African nationals will be seen to have achieved the same political status as the 800,000 to 1,000,000 foreign Africans at present employed in and resident in the Republic. It will then be possible to give complete political ‘independence’ and ‘freedom’ to Africans in their Bantustan homelands; and whilst their men (but probably not their women) will be free to continue to work in the Republic as long as their labour is required they will, on the Bantustans attaining ‘independence’, have to renounce South African citizenship. Thereafter they will have no more right to find work or dwell in the Republic than Africans from the Protectorates, the Rhodesias, Portuguese East Africa, etc. They will then have no valid political grievances; for, it is argued, the areas intended for the projected Bantustans are at least as viable as the Basutoland and Bechuanaland Protectorates.

Whatever interpretation of the policy is accepted, it is obvious that it has been reluctant – forced on the Government because it rejects the thesis of the Progressive Party that the rights of minorities (such as those of the Whites in South Africa) can be effectively protected by constitutional entrenchments. It claims that nowhere in the world has a multi-racial parliament succeeded.10 Yet this first Bantustan move has been rather a conscience-saving step, taken hastily without sufficient thought. Like most precipitate, ill-considered action, it may be expected to have all sorts of unpredicted and unwanted consequences.

HURRIED LEGISLATION

One would have expected a far-reaching piece of legislation like the Transkeian Constitution Act, involving great constitutional changes, to have been the product of long and mature consideration, with ample time allowed for public and parliamentary discussion and even eventual recourse to a referendum. In fact, it was rushed through the House.

In 1961, the present Prime Minister, forecasting the Bantustan policy,11 admitted that it would be:

‘a form of fragmentation which we would rather not have had if it were within our control to avoid it. . . . There can, however, be no doubt that it will have to be done with the passage of time’.12

Two years later, in 1963, action to implement the promised dismemberment had somehow come to be regarded as a matter of the utmost urgency. The immediate reason for the urgency appears to have been the necessity to put up a case in defence of South African policy on the South-West African issue. Thus, if the Republican Government could promise prospective treatment of similar generosity or enlightenment to Ovamboland as appears to have been accorded to the Transkei, there might be some chance that the International Court of Justice and the United Nations would judge apartheid less harshly.

The world has been told, partly through advertisements, that the African has been given ‘the land his forebears settled’, which is an area ‘the size of England and Wales’. But not only have these advertisements given a quite false impression of the political powers transferred so far, but they have failed to make it clear that the Bantustan areas, about the ‘size of England and Wales’, make up only about 13 per cent of the area of the Republic; that only 28 per cent of the people of the remaining, so-called ‘white’ areas, of South Africa are white; and that two-thirds of the people (that is, about ten million Africans) are expected to regard the Bantustan areas as their ‘homelands’! Even the Minister of Bantu Administration admitted that the provision of sufficient employment in the reserves to reverse the flow of Africans to the white cities cannot be expected to be achieved until 1978–80. But no realist expects, at the outside, that more than about one-third of the Africans will ever be actually resident in their ‘homelands’. People do not choose to live in the territory for which they will have a vote but where they can earn their subsistence. And neither the Transkei nor the other projected ‘homelands’ can offer anything like the standards of subsistence to which the Africans have become accustomed. As the Cape Times has pertinently insisted:

‘There is not a town or village in this country which is not more Black than White . . . the platteland is two-thirds Black . . . White South Africa on its own cannot mine an ounce of gold, produce a bale of wool or run a mile of railroad. . . . A real partition between White and Black of this country would leave the Whites in an enclave roughly equivalent to the Western Province of the Cape; and the gold mines, diamond mines and wool farms would not be in the White area’.

Much play has been made of the euphemism, the Africans’ ‘homelands’. But for the majority of Africans, the over-populated and much eroded farming areas which make up the largest part of the Bantustans will never be more than their homelands of ancestry and affection, or to visit, never for residence. The homeland of Zionist-minded Jews everywhere may be in one sense Israel. But they expect political rights wherever they live because they are prepared to give their political allegiance to their country of adoption. Is it surprising that Africans should have similar feelings?

POVERTY OF THE BANTUSTANS

Moreover, not only are the Transkei and other projected Bantustans so poor in natural resources that they have, for some time, been declining in population; very little practical can be done, by means of any form of defensible state investment, to enhance their productivity. About half the area of the Africans’ so-called ‘homelands’ is barren, semi-desert. Some portions are fertile and have a favourable rainfall, but the income per head was estimated by the Tomlinson Commission (in 1951) to be less than £13 per annum.13 This income is approximately doubled by the export of labour, that is, through the income sent in or brought in from outside by the migrant Africans.14 The same Commission estimated that the average income per family from remittances from Africans employed outside was nearly £19.

The poverty of the projected Bantustan areas has been aggravated because private, white-owned capital and direction has largely been excluded. Yet the Transkei Act still forbids all private investment from outside. This policy alone will ensure that any industrial progress in the Bantustans will be reduced to a minimum. There is no doubt that the Nationalist Government has been shrewdly correct in recognising that, to permit free reign to the system of competitive capitalism, even in the poorly-endowed African areas, will be to allow a considerable rise in the material standards of the people and, in due course, far-reaching modifications of the tribal system.15 Private profit-seeking would (i) prompt an immediate search for investment opportunities; (ii) stimulate as rapid an industrial and agricultural development of these areas as their meagre natural resources and their long distance from industrial materials and from markets would allow; (iii) result (on a small scale at first) in Africans undertaking not only skilled work but responsible and executive tasks; (iv) teach Africans how to promote business and industrial enterprises owned by themselves; and (v) lead to the demand for similar opportunities in the areas, outside the Bantustans, in which the larger part of the industrial employment of Africans will always occur. But it was this that the Tomlinson Commission’s terms of reference had really instructed them to prevent by means of ‘socio-economic planning’. As things are, any investment in these African ‘homelands’ from outside has to take place via the Bantu Investment Corporation, i.e., via the state; but the Corporation is responsible to the Minister for Bantu Administration who will be able to veto any developments which are politically unacceptable because they may seem likely to compete effectively with industries employing Whites.

The ostensible reason for excluding white-owned capital is the familiar one of protecting the workers against capitalist exploitation. ‘We will not let the wolves in – those people who simply seek where they can make money in order to fill their own pocket’, said the Minister of Bantu Administration.16 Apparently supporting the common denunciations of colonialism, and condemning the system under which the Blacks provide labour and foreign powers collect the profits, the Minister contended that it would be wrong to allow the Transkeian people to be exploited like, say, the people of the Swaziland Protectorate. The Swazis, he alleged, were exploited by the British, who used that area as a milch cow and took away all the wealth.

Much publicity was given to the first Transkeian textile factory financed by the Bantu Investment Corporation. Few got the impression that it was a tiny concern with a capital of about £18,000 which is planned to begin with 20 African women employees and eventually to employ 60! If government policy were to divert huge sums of private capital, via taxation and the Bantu Investment Corporation, to industrial establishments in the Transkei instead of to the border areas, and if Africans there were to be trained for skilled work in large-scale, fully mechanised, assembly-line industries and remunerated at wage-rates sufficiently low to permit the sale of the full output, it might be possible to maintain intact the capital so transferred. But this is precisely what the Government and its spokesmen have been careful never to suggest.

GOVERNMENT PROPAGANDA versus REALITY

The South African Information Office has recently published statistics of the amount being spent for the benefit of Africans. It should have explained that the greater part refers to expenditures which have become essential outside the intended Bantustan areas. These expenditures have been thought expedient because most of the Africans are employed, and have to reside, outside ‘their own areas’, whilst the conditions under which they have been living in urban townships could easily shock the visitor from abroad.17

Again, in the advertisements in the overseas press the aim of the Bantustan policy has been stated to be that of permitting ‘self-realisation to the utmost possible extent for each group. The Bantu of South Africa will work out their own destinies just like all other States in other parts of the world and Asia.’ The world would naturally assume from this that complete sovereignty for the Bantustans is contemplated in the near future in an economically viable area. But most of the supporters of the Government have been left with the impression that real ‘independence’ cannot be expected for at least a century. In the course of the Second Reading debate on the Transkei measure, the Minister of Bantu Administration was quite explicit. He said: ‘There will be no autonomy in the Transkei. . . . Where do you see it in the Bill?’ The attainment of true autonomy, he suggested, would be ‘a hundred year job’. And one of the Government’s spokesmen reassured the House that ‘the Transkei will have a long wait for independence, if it is ever attained at all’. If these assertions represent policy unfairly, the Government’s own equivocation is responsible.

The Transkei scheme has to be seen in the setting of Nationalist ideologies. The constituencies which returned the Government to power have been continuously indoctrinated with the ‘ideal’ of white ‘baasskap’; and their leaders have now had to explain that what has been termed ‘self-government’ or ‘independence’ in elucidations of the Transkei Act does not mean that there is or ever has really been any question of making the Transkei a separate state. ‘It is’, said the Deputy Minister of Bantu Administration, ‘a means of maintaining white “baasskap” in white areas by allowing Africans “baasskap” in theirs’. But ‘baasskap’ implies the right to employ or exercise jurisdiction; and in fact no black person is to be allowed to employ a white person in the Bantustans, whilst Whites are not to be tried in African courts, but in courts falling under the jurisdiction of the Republic.18 Moreover, in the areas of white ‘baasskap’, the Whites are never likely to exceed 30 per cent of the total population.

The Deputy Minister of Bantu Administration described the aim as that of bringing about the ‘Bantu’s self-realisation, materially and spiritually, within his own homelands’. The Xhosa-speaking Africans were being accorded ‘full rights’ in their own territories because they were to be permitted only ‘secondary rights’ in the other areas (in which the majority of them have to reside in order to subsist). The phrase ‘full rights’ means, in the present Act, nothing more than certain rights of local government, in spite of many references to ‘ultimate independence’ in the debates and public utterances.

The Opposition tried in vain to obtain from the Minister of Bantu Administration a definition of ‘self-government’.19 He did assert unequivocally, however, that the Government of the Republic was sacrificing no part of its sovereignty. It seems therefore that there is no intention to create immediately, say, a Ghana, but rather something like a dependent colony (which is being done, incidentally, in an age in which the word ‘colony’ has become more or less a term of opprobrium).

One member of the Government Party contended that the Transkei would not be a state but would rather resemble a province in its status. Yet the State Information Office in London referred to it as the ‘first Bantu State’. and the Commissioner-General for the Transkei described it as a ‘new self-governing State in its infancy’ with the Republic as its ‘Mother Government’. In effect, then, the world is told that the Africans are being led towards full autonomy, to be left absolutely free to govern themselves; whilst to its own supporters the Government adds ‘subject to our agreement’.

POLITICAL CONFUSIONS

The inconsistencies in the pronouncements of Ministers at the Second Reading, as well as explanations by other members, were bewildering. But there seems to have been some directive from the caucus, between this stage and the Committee stage of the Bill, that Government speakers should be careful not to reject the idea of ultimate complete independence. Whatever assurances had to be given to the electorate, it may have been thought expedient that the record in the Parliamentary Debates should not be such as could be quoted against South Africa before the International Court of Justice or at the United Nations.

The Government’s difficulty in explaining the Bill apparently arose, then, out of its evident aim of satisfying both overseas opinion and the expectations of its own supporters. As an Opposition Senator complained, the electorate is being told: ‘This is a minor measure and, under Government care, some small matters will be handed to the Transkei Government; important matters will remain under the control of the Republic’; whereas the world overseas is being told: ‘This is a step under which the Bantu of the Transkei will enjoy independence’. On the other hand, the attempt by the Opposition to make political capital out of the Government’s quandary led a member of the Nationalist Party to complain – not without justification – that:

‘United Party criticism of the Transkei Bill depended on whom they wanted to impress. To the local white population they wanted to say that the Government was giving the Transkei complete independence and sovereignty. To South Africa’s enemies overseas they wanted to say that the whole thing was a bluff and was only a smoke-screen for continued suppression.’

And some members of the United Party certainly did find it expedient to harp on the Black Peril, at least one complaining that the Government was ‘doing everything for the Kaffir and nothing for the Whites’. At the same time the real aims of the measure may have been obscured by the Government spokesmen’s attempt to avoid any impression of having been forced to give in to ‘the Kaffir’.

But the most telling criticisms of the Bantustan plan, as it was disclosed in the Transkei Act, have given credit for what Dr Helen Suzman called its ‘one encouraging aspect’. In spite of her having described the project as ‘founded on fear and built on fraud’, she said that it at least reflected:

‘an awareness on the part of the Government that the political aspirations of the Africans could not be denied forever. This was indeed something, because it reflected a change of political thinking of the Government’.

The misgivings of the disinterested critics arise mainly because they have been left in no doubt about the reluctance with which the Bantustan era has been inaugurated, and partly for this reason, and partly owing to contradictory explanations, they genuinely cannot tell how far the benevolence of governmental utterances is matched by equally benevolent intentions.

The phrases used about self-government, whether intended sincerely or primarily for overseas audiences, may well prove embarrassing at some time in the future; for they seem likely to lead the chiefs to claim these words to record a solemn contract and to demand early ‘sovereign independence’ as it is understood elsewhere. Some defenders of the Transkei project have described it (rather ominously, I feel) as a means of achieving ‘peaceful co-existence’ with African nationalism which, they seem to imply, must inevitably develop there.

Professor P. V. Pistorius (an eminent political theorist who is a member of the executive of the Progressive Party), is one of those who regards the whole plan simply as ‘window dressing’. He believes that it was never the intention to create an independent state in the Transkei but merely to limit its development to the agricultural sphere and to provide a birth place and a breeding ground for future labour in the white areas. But as I have said, other critics believe that the Government’s aim is to grant complete independence to the Bantustans as soon as possible, thus placing all Africans in the same position as the enormous number of foreign Africans who find employment as migratory workers in the Republic.20 When the removal of all African women from the Republic is complete – and present policy is tending in that direction – citizens of the Bantustans will have become alien visitors, permitted to enter the Republic only on such terms as the Government may enact.

OTHER ATTEMPTS TO ISOLATE AFRICANS

I should be the last to suggest that the Africans of the Transkei are ripe for representative government as ordinarily understood. Many are still very primitive in habits and outlook, and devoted to traditional tribal customs. But others, who may well be in the majority today, are at any rate striving for modernity and in process of fairly rapid assimilation. An enquiry by the National Institute of Personnel Research discovered, in the study of one urban group, that 70 per cent regarded themselves as fully detribalised. And it is this partially assimilated group who are likely to create trouble, as the Government of the Republic realistically perceive. Indeed, the dominance of the chiefs in the new Transkeian Legislative Assembly seems to have as its constitutional purpose the concentration of influence into the hands of the relatively primitive. But if that has been the aim, it is likely to fail; for the appointment of chiefs is to be subject to the approval of the Department of Bantu Administration, and it is only too likely therefore that the chiefs will lose the respect in which they were traditionally held. They will come to be thought of merely as African representatives of the Whites.

Another apparent stratagem with the same purpose may perhaps prove more effective. An attempt was made in the first draft of the Transkei Constitution Bill to make Xhosa the sole official language. This could be an effective means of isolating the Africans from the modern world; but it met with so much opposition that after the introduction of the Bill it was amended to permit the use of Sethotho, Afrikaans or English. But there are at least five other Bantu languages used by the Africans, and when (if ever) the other Bantustans are created it may be necessary to give similar recognition to yet other languages. The prospective ‘Tower of Babel chaos’ (as the Leader of the Opposition put it) can well be imagined.

Yet the majority of educated Africans actually object to the use of the vernacular as a medium of education. They believe that the insistence upon Xhosa (or other African tongues) has been intended, first, to deny them fruitful contact with Western culture by preventing them from becoming articulate in the English language (for English is tending to become the lingua franca of that culture);21 second, to preserve those tribal traditions which tend to perpetuate their backward condition; and third, to keep alive the ancient rivalries between the different tribes by preserving their separate languages on the principle of divide and rule.22 If the Act is successful in ensuring that the Bantu languages remain the everyday means of communication of the Africans it will be just like excluding them, as Professor Pistorius has put it, ‘from the benefits of science, of health and hygiene, and of the social and moral values on which we base our lives’. The wiser African leaders wish to rescue their people from their barbaric customs, ancient practices and superstitions, like faith in diviners and witch doctors, which are incompatible with the modern world. They see these traditions as impediments which the reading of English books and periodicals could be calculated rapidly to dissolve. Many of the attitudes which they deplore are responsible for the high death rates and particularly the high infant mortality rates in the African territories.23 But the Government of the Republic still seem to be hoping that, through control of the Africans’ minds, through careful determination of the content of their education, through the preservation of their languages, and through their exclusion from areas or spheres of employment where they compete with Whites, renewed vigour may be given to tribalism.

AFRICAN OPPOSITION TO TRANSKEI

The idea that the type of self-government offered to the Transkei is a response to the ‘legitimate aspirations’ of the Xhosa-speaking people would be difficult to substantiate. The Africans in that area did not openly press for any such move. At the only meetings in the Transkei at which the project was publicly discussed, clear opposition was expressed; and it was probably only the use of the Government’s emergency powers to prohibit meetings (under Proclamation 400) which prevented more widespread and vocal protests.24 Certainly Chief Kaiser Matanzima, and the Transkei Territorial Authority, of which he has been chairman, were consulted; they expressed the fullest approval of the measure; and the Government claims that they represent 95 per cent of their people. But they were appointed to office and not elected; and their unequivocal support for apartheid and their opposition to racial integration (which, they maintain, has been responsible for the racial disturbances in Kenya, Rhodesia and the United States) must make it obvious to all but the most naïve that they could never claim to be representative of the Xhosa people. They might claim to know better what is for the benefit of the people of the Transkei than the people themselves. Indeed, the measure of autonomy now accorded might turn out to be, directly and in its repercussions, the most important step yet achieved towards the attainment of economic justice for ‘Transkeian citizens’ in all parts of the Republic. Yet those who know the Transkei well believe that a referendum among the Xhosa-speaking Africans would have resulted in an overwhelming rejection of the plan (possibly foolishly, because it may have left them with more powers).

Bitter opposition has naturally been aroused among the small white population (about 16,000) who have been deprived of political rights in the Transkei. ‘We shall be foreigners in the land of our birth’, they have protested. They will, however, remain under the jurisdiction of the Parliament of the Republic and they have been assured, although in the vaguest terms, together with the Transkeian Coloureds (who number about 15,000), that their interests will be safeguarded.

OPPOSITION’S CRITICISMS

The weight of parliamentary criticisms of the Transkei scheme was, as I have already suggested, weakened by the obvious intention of the parliamentary Opposition to make the maximum political capital out of any generous representation of the proposal. But the Opposition’s warning that the move may lead to dangerous conflict cannot be lightly dismissed. For one thing, it will mean that an enormous proportion of the labour force in the white areas will be citizens of the Transkei (or of other Bantustans which may some day be created). One fear is that the new African authorities will demand the right to bargain with the Government of the Republic on the conditions of employment of Africans; for if free elections are permitted, the elected members of the Assembly are almost certain to promise spectacular improvements to their constituents. The Opposition are afraid – not unreasonably – that this will eventually create opportunities for Communists and Pan-Africanists to foster discontent and race hatreds.25

But if the new system of government does, in fact, confer on the Transkei authorities some real power to demand effectively the gradual dissolution of colour bars in the white areas – especially those imposed by labour union standard rates, minimum wage legislation and job reservation – the wise use of that power could of course benefit the Africans enormously. In other words, effective competition of the Africans with the Whites could be gradually brought about by successive mitigations of the barriers to equality of opportunity. But the present Government of the Republic would never respond to any such demands and they will, after all, retain ultimate political and military power.

It seems more likely that if the Transkeian authorities do exert pressure in this field, they will demand not better paid opportunities but higher wage-rates and costlier conditions of work for Africans in their existing employments. If they do so, they will be bolstering traditional apartheid and assisting the continued subordination and poverty of their people.26 In industrial and commercial occupations such a policy could reverse more effectively than current apartheid measures an obvious tendency, in the absence of state intervention and controls, for Africans to command a growing proportion of the produce of industry and a more rapid increase in the real per capita wage-rate than that achieved by any other section of the population.27

Other critics of Bantustan proposals are apprehensive that the legislative machinery created will inspire the formation of an African fifth column. African nationalist demagogues are, it is feared, likely to be encouraged to exploit anti-white feeling. The danger is that black nationalist leaders will imitate the white Nationalist Party leaders of the Republic who have so successfully exploited colour prejudice and anti-British sentiment for political advantage. The inevitable ultimate necessity, under such circumstances, to use the Republic’s police and armed services to maintain law and order within the area (and this is clearly a contemplated possibility under the Act) will, it is thought, be all too easily represented to the world as on a par with the Russian subjection of her colonial satellites in Europe.

These fears are not wholly without grounds. The Nationalist Government of the Republic are relying on the support of the chiefs and the survival of tribalism. But may they not be disappointed? In 1960, the British had expected (or at least hoped) that the newly established Basutoland National Council would reflect tribal conservatism. In fact, it seems to have become a medium of expression for the Pan-African imperialism with which African nationalism is allied. What some South African critics of the Transkeian project are dreading is that similar reactions may be expected in the Transkei. In spite of the fact that Chief Matanzima and other Transkeian leaders publicly praise apartheid and attack both the white ‘Liberals’28 and the British, some shrewd South Africans fear that this is the purest casuistry. Matanzima has already claimed (without explicit contradiction) that the Republic’s approval of Transkeian legislation will simply be ‘a formality’; that he and his cabinet colleagues in the Transkeian Assembly will be free to select their own advisers in other countries; that he and his friends will be free to go abroad as they wish; and that they will be allowed to establish their own broadcasting station. The danger to South Africa is that, whether or not the Paramount Chief is sincere or casuistic in his expressed admiration for apartheid, it seems only too likely that powerful pressures – internal and external – will force him gradually to give way to the Pan-Africanists.

As the Cape Argus wisely warned:

‘Outside the country the Government has described the new constitutions for the Transkei as “a major step towards sovereign independence”. . . . The Government cannot state one thing to the South African electorate and another to the rest of the world; nor can it dictate or control the pace of the steps towards sovereign independence, once the first step, however faltering, is made. Chief Matanzima has made demands which can end only in a claim for sovereignty. When one leader makes such demands, it pays others to go further. There can be no reason to suppose that the Transkei will not follow the pattern.’

Moreover, the encouragement of the Xhosa people to direct their loyalty towards themselves alone, through giving them their own flag, national anthem and oath of allegiance is likely, many believe, to prove much less innocuous than the Government have imagined. But the Minister of Bantu Administration29 dismissed a strong Opposition plea for the retention of a common citizenship with loyalty to one Fatherland.

APARTHEID NO LASTING SOLUTION

If the Government really are envisaging ultimate, true sovereign independence for the Bantustans, the move will, as we have seen, leave the Africans who had formerly been citizens of the Republic more or less in the same constitutional position as the many foreign migrant Africans from the protectorates, Portuguese East Africa and other African territories, who regularly find employment in the Republic.30 But, said the Leader of the Opposition, in view of the Pan-African menace, a wise government would have welcomed every point of contact rather than have fostered the isolation of the Africans. Within a few years we may well see a disgruntled Transkeian Government appealing to the United Nations to intervene in the interests of Xhosa labourers who, by reason of the economic development of the African Continent, must find their subsistence in areas in which they are denied human rights.

White South Africa may be forced to pay a huge price for what many regard as the stubborn failure of its Government to face the problems of a multi-racial society. The concessions made to the Transkei have achieved nothing towards the solution of the problem of how political rights may be extended to the black majority (at present the ‘have nots’) outside the Bantustans whilst adequately safeguarding the rights of the white minority (at present the ‘haves’). Nothing has been done to remove the increasingly resented stigma of blackness – the assumption that Africans are inferior not only by primitiveness of culture, poor education and lack of economically valuable skills, but by race and skin pigmentation. And nothing has been done to solve the problems of rights and opportunities for the Coloureds and the Indians, or the problems constituted by the indigenous races of South West Africa (in whose ‘homeland’ there were, indeed, no Whites at all a century ago).

The Minister of Bantu Administration had one very effective point in defending the Transkei plan. Neither the Whites nor the Coloureds nor the Indians wanted integration, he said. Even the Africans did not want it. Hence the separation of the races was obviously the solution preferred by all. But if that were true, there would be no need for drastic legislation to prevent integration.

The Whites, the Coloureds and the Indians would, in the mass, like to be protected against the competition of Africans. And most of them would not wish to marry Africans. But I believe that all Africans would welcome the opportunity of competing more effectively with the privileged Whites or with the relatively privileged Coloureds or Indians, and that none of the non-white races would object to social integration with the Whites. I believe further (as I have already explained) that there is no genuine distaste, at least amongst the detribalised Africans, for intermarriage with races which enjoy higher social and economic status.

What is really valid in the Minister’s claim is simply that all privileged groups and races would like the power of the state to be used on their behalf. They would all like to prevent profit-seeking incentives from dissolving the privileges and creating opportunities for the unprivileged classes and races. The virtue of the free market system is that it disciplines the inherent selfishness of man, makes possible an economic order which offers equality of opportunity, and creates thereby the conditions from which equality of consideration and respect are likely to emerge.

 

31The term ‘Bantustan’ was, I think, originally used ironically. But through the official preference for the word ‘Bantu’ instead of ‘African’, it has come into general use.

32Unimportant exceptions to this assertion, introduced in 1937, under which urban land purchases by Africans could be authorised by explicit government permission, were abolished in 1963 under the Better Administration of Designated Areas Act.

33There is a precedent for this in that Basuto Africans living outside Basutoland were permitted, in 1962, whilst resident (technically as foreigners) in the Republic to vote for their councils in the Protectorate. It should be explained that there had long been some measure of local self-government in the Transkei. The Transkeian Territories General Council (the Bunga) had functioned for many years, until, about five years ago, it was superseded by the ‘Bantu authorities’ system, which gave greater powers of control to the Department of Bantu Administration.

34The elections will take place under the shadow of ‘Proclamation 400’ which imposes a sort of martial law and forbids meetings of more than five persons without special permission. Moreover, the Minister of Justice has power to impose house arrest on, or detain incommunicado for 90 days, with no right of appeal to the Courts, any person suspected of endeavouring to further the ends of Communism or to encourage violence. It will be all too easy to victimise effective critics; they will have no legal remedy as the law stands, and outspoken criticism of official policy may therefore be seriously discouraged.

35Unless the collection of these taxes is undertaken by the Government of the Republic, it seems likely to lead to widespread evasion. Moreover, the collection of the taxes may well engender all the friction and resentments aroused by poll taxes.

36House of Assembly Debates, April 1950.

37The Native Laws Commission, 1948, U.G. 28/40.

38It is significant that the chairman of the Commission, Professor F. R. Tomlinson, was an agricultural economist.

39In appealing to the Afrikaner electorate, however, it seems to have remained expedient to emphasise that the object is ‘baasskap’.

40The contention is surely rash. Whatever defects may be alleged against the Mexican or Brazilian form of government, those defects do not seem to be a consequence of their multi-racial virtues.

41The Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959 (see p. 152) was, in a sense, a forecast of policy; but the intentions have taken some sort of shape only in the Transkei Act.

4210 April, 1961.

43That is, rather more than half the present average for India as a whole, and about equal to the income per head in such primitive states as the Central African Republic, Niger, the Somali Republic, Chad and Upper Volta.

44These comparisons must not be considered as referring to the average income of Africans as a whole in the Republic of South Africa. The average African income is probably much higher in the Republic than the average income of Africans in any other country of the Continent. Moreover, comparisons of income of this type exaggerate differences; for the more or less self-sufficient poorer communities perform services for themselves which do not enter into national income figures, and for other reasons such comparisons may be highly misleading. See F. C. Benham, Economic Aid to Under-developed Countries, O.U.P., 1961, pp. 3–4.

45See Chapter 9.

468 May, 1963.

47The unsatisfactory conditions under which large numbers of urban-dwelling Africans have been housed (outside the mining compounds) until the recent change of policy arose mainly because they were prevented from entering the skilled occupations, even to serve their own communities, in the provision of conventionally necessary urban services. The restrictions to blame have been somewhat eased since 1951 in respect of the building industry. See Chapter 10, pp. 94–5.

48The Minister gave the assurance also that, as far as possible, no white witnesses would have to appear in Transkei courts.

49One Opposition member was moved to ask, ironically: ‘What is it going to be, a non-self-governing self-governing State, or a self-governing non-self-governing State?’

50See Chapter 10, 99–100, and pp. 155–6.

51Some believe that the substitution of Afrikaans for English as the language of contact has been quietly brought about for the same reason since the Bantu Education Act of 1953, which transferred control of African education to the Department of Bantu Administration. There is unquestionable evidence of a rapid deterioration in the standard of English since 1953.

52One member of the Parliamentary Opposition charged the Government bluntly with aiming at keeping the various groups at one another’s throats.

53It is true that the condition of Africans in these respects is better in the Republic of South Africa than elsewhere in the Continent of Africa; but their circumstances remain intolerable in a community which has advanced to the point at which a determined effort could eliminate the worst evils without unduly offending tribal sentiment. There is no area in the world in which it is more obvious that material advancement demands the abandonment of old faiths and revered traditions. But the better educated and more enlightened Africans do not revere the traditions of their people. On the contrary, they perceive that tribal influences, although sociological realities, are holding their people back.

54This proclamation prohibits meetings of more than five people without special permission. The Government claims that the last three years of martial law in the Transkei have been made necessary by white agitators, who have indeed been ingeniously active. It has been announced also that, at the request of the Africans themselves, the emergency powers will continue to be enforced by the Republic after the ‘independence’ of the Transkei has been achieved.

55The Opposition have also drawn attention to the likelihood that pressures through the new African Legislative Assembly will result in the boundaries of the Transkei being extended at the expense of English-speaking farmers.

56Any such action would be likely to produce a relatively small well-paid African force at the expense of the great mass who, seeking work outside the Transkei, will be forced to accept lower wage-rates on the farms and mines. Any policy which raised the cost of farm or mine labour would almost certainly be vetoed by the Republic.

57The statistics illustrate very clearly this tendency towards the relative improvement of the material standards of the Africans during the period which begins with the entrepreneurial evasions of the ‘civilised labour policy’ (under the stimulus of the increased dollar price of gold) in 1934 and ends with resort to ‘economic planning’ in the form of influx controls after the Second World War.

58The South African Liberal Party is a slightly Leftist organisation which explicitly rejects Communism, advocates non-violence, but canvasses African support and presses for one-man one-vote in the Republic. It may have been used, however, as a refuge for Communist fellow travellers working for the cause of Pan-African imperialism.

59Cape Times, 2 April, 1963.

60See Chapter 10, pp. 99–100, and p. 164.

• 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.’