The Economics of the Colour Bar

CHAPTER 6 AFRICANS IN THE MINES

TRIBAL BACKGROUND

TO understand the position of the Africans in the economy of South Africa and the rights and wrongs of the system, it is essential to know something of their tribal institutions and the attitudes formed in their homelands – ‘the reserves’. These tribal influences, although in process of adaptation, and indeed disintegration, are still powerful, even among many of those Africans who spend most of their time away from their tribe.1 However indefensible or unwise South African policy has been in its dealings with the Africans, it has usually had the virtue of taking account of their primitive background. Unfortunately, it is impossible to deal adequately, in a book of this kind, with the issues which arise when a primitive race, sociologically isolated by tradition, law and collusive action, has become an integral part of a modern, highly progressive economy. These are important aspects of the relations between the Whites and the Blacks which I shall be unable to discuss. Nevertheless, I hope to make clear the reasons for African feelings of injustice which have recently been so successfully exploited as to goad the Government to the most drastic repressive measures.

WAGE OPPORTUNITIES IN MINING

We must begin with a brief sketch of the way the Africans were increasingly attracted since the last century, mainly as unskilled labourers, into the white man’s economy, until today two-thirds of the black races can find subsistence only by working outside the reserves (the areas in which a modified tribal system still prevails).

Africans were attracted from the reserves last century through what seemed to them to be almost unbelievably favourable opportunities and prospects of improving their material condition. It was the rise of the great areas of mining activity which created these prospects. At the same time, the incentives for Africans to accept employment in the mines were strengthened by signs of increasing privation in the tribal areas due to soil erosion, population growth, and extending land occupation by Whites.

In the rough, early years of diamond activity, which constituted the pioneer development of mining in South Africa, the labour of the Africans, however unskilled, was at first in such demand that the wage-rates of black labourers sometimes rose nearly as high as those paid to white overseers. But even in an imperfect market, knowledge of mining employment opportunities spread in the tribal regions so that, despite the increasing demand for labour through the beginnings of gold-mining development, a growing inflow of unskilled Africans had by the middle 1880s brought down the market price for black labour to a small proportion of the rate needed to attract Whites. This disparity persisted through the gold-mining era and has lasted (for non-market reasons) until today. It had originally been thought essential, and was later felt to be appropriate, to employ Whites to supervise the operations of the raw African labourers. Since the alternative employments open to the Whites in farm and rural areas, although possibly declining as the 19th century advanced, were nevertheless very much more favourable than those open to Africans, supply and demand appears to have forced a wide discrepancy in the middle 1880s. Wage-rates for the white supervisors – untutored as they usually were – had yet to be very much higher than those required to attract African labour.

This was partly because, through organised recruitment and word of mouth, an understanding of the remuneration offered to Africans permeated the kraals (villages). The recruiting machinery which the mines soon found it profitable to set up actively informed the tribal communities of the opportunities which the mines were providing. It has been alleged that their agents painted at times an unduly rosy picture of the advantages, amounting sometimes to fraudulent persuasion, but African labourers who had once experienced mining work returned voluntarily again and again after their customary periodic sojourn with their family and tribe. Indeed, it soon became a mark of status or prestige within the tribe to have served in the mines.

In stressing the disparities which emerged between the earnings of Whites and Blacks, I am not alleging an unjust absolute level of remuneration. The earnings of Africans in South Africa have never been as low, in real terms, as they are commonly believed to have been. In this century, however, African wage-rates have been influenced through the only unquestionable instance of a labour-purchasing monopsony of which I know, that of a common recruiting organisation for all the mines. It has had the effect of ensuring a larger and more regular labour supply by overcoming the high ‘leisure preference’ of Africans,2 rather than the effect of ‘exploiting’ labour.

AFRICANS’ HIGH ‘LEISURE PREFERENCE’

The unacquisitive nature of tribal Africans, possibly because the accumulation of private property (except in the form of cattle) offends the ‘communistic’ psychology of aboriginal societies, has, from the beginning, created one of the major difficulties of mining management. Moreover, the conventional material needs of the Africans are low relatively to their earnings, so contributing to what has been called their ‘wantlessness’ or what I prefer to call high ‘leisure preference’. Accordingly, those who found it profitable to employ them tried to find methods of increasing their preference for material goods as against ‘leisure’. The morally least defensible way of attempting this was by means of poll taxes intended to force the Africans to earn the necessary money,3 which they could only do by serving the white man outside the reserves, on the farms or mines or elsewhere. The monopsonistic method might be defended as ‘educative’.

In considering the use by the gold mines of monopsonistic power, we must remember that they have not been monopolistic in the sense that they have ever organised to prevent the entry of additional capital or restrict the level of output. The price of gold has been beyond their control, and there has been freedom to invest in this highly speculative field as well as in complementary industries.4 Moreover new development has competed freely for African labour, despite the common recruitment organisation. It is not surprising, therefore, that Professor S. Herbert Frankel found the average yield to investment in gold-mining to have been remarkably low,5 before the currency devaluations of the 1930s, particularly the dollar devaluation of 1934, had produced an enormous windfall yield.

In the early mining days many Africans had to trek huge distances – literally hundreds of miles – on foot, involving weeks and sometimes months of almost incredible hardship. In the case of the gold mines the hardships were aggravated by the dangers of exploitation by Transvaal farmers demanding free labour in return for the right to pass over their land; forced labour imposed by governmental authority en route; extortion by the police and conventional robbery. The mining corporations did their best to get the Transvaal Government to tackle these abuses, due chiefly to maladministration, but without avail before the Boer war.6 Yet, in spite of all these hardships and hazards, after short spells of work, originally for a few months and later for an average of a year or more, the Africans travelled back to their tribal kraals with the firm intention of returning to the mines for further periods of employment.

Competing with the mines for African labour were the farms, owned for the most part by Afrikaners. Farm labour was remunerated largely in kind and through permission to dwell (‘squat’) on the farmer’s land. Competition between the farms and the mines has been a continuous determinant of the remuneration which has had to be offered to attract the Africans to both fields of employment.

The cheapness of African labour did not, therefore, imply its ‘exploitation’. Indeed, as we have seen, it was the rise in the Africans’ money earnings above the value of those wants that could be satisfied by money expenditure, to which we can trace – in part – the origin of their high demand for leisure (the long periods devoted to living on previous earnings in the reserves).7 Nor was their primitiveness a reason for the cheapness of their labour. Their reluctance to break with the traditions of their tribe, their bewilderment at having to work under the discipline of foreigners with an incomprehensible moral code and talking a strange language, the need for a regularity of activity quite unparalleled in their primitive background, and the need for periodic return to their wives and families – all these factors inevitably handicapped the recruiters, both in persuading Africans to accept mining employment for the first time and in persuading them to shorten their habitual periods of residence in the reserves. To draw the Africans into the compounds, the benefits from mining work had to be correspondingly enhanced. To blame the mining corporations for the low wage-rates (low, that is, in comparison with the earnings of other races in other kinds of work) would, therefore, be to blame a mitigating factor and not a cause. Mining development has been (directly and indirectly) the greatest single uplifting factor for the poorer races and classes in South Africa, and especially for the Africans.

On the other hand, population growth in the reserves, due mainly to an alleviation of primitive African poverty for which mining employment must be given credit, has certainly been a labour-cheapening factor. But the cheapness of this labour soon became essential for the very survival of the population it had indirectly called into being. And this cheapness grew even more essential in order to maintain the relatively complex patterns of consumption which slowly emerged; for wholly new products had gradually become conventional necessaries – even within the reserves – as the Africans began to understand more of the new world to which they had been attracted.

When the Africans first entered the sphere of mining employment, they usually constructed their own primitive shelter from materials provided by the management. But it soon became essential to house them in barracks or compounds, a solution which was practicable because their women-folk did not accompany them. Here, isolated from urban influences in the wider sense, they largely preserved their tribal traditions whilst serving first a 19th and then a 20th century economy.

THE COMPOUND SYSTEM

The compound system was originally felt to be necessary in the diamond mines to prevent the theft of diamonds, for which there was at one time a ready market in the nearby Afrikaner republics. The system seems then to have been recognised as a method of employing African labour which was socially and politically acceptable. By the 1890s it had been generally adopted in large-scale mining for diamonds, gold or coal (and later for non-ferrous metals and asbestos). Within the compounds the necessaries of life were sold by shops, or provided as part of remuneration (which made it unnecessary for the compound dwellers to go outside). The material and social well-being of the employees so housed was, on balance, undoubtedly enhanced by these arrangements: the shelter was appropriate; surroundings were cleaner and healthier than they could have been without the mines’ initiative; access to alcoholic liquor (other than ‘kaffir beer’) was prevented (with the result that a common type of absenteeism was avoided); access to prostitutes was prevented; medical facilities were usually incomparably better than under any other practicable system; meals served as part of remuneration were carefully considered in the light of nutritional knowledge (at least during this century);8 facilities for recreation were provided; social life and organised sport could develop and were encouraged by most managements.9

Judgments may differ on how far such advantages can be regarded as adequate compensation for the isolation of African labourers from the modern world they were serving, and from their families. But the social milieu of the compounds served as some substitute, albeit unsatisfactory, for the lack of family life, and provided a framework within which a communal life adapted to a period of transition could develop. The prosperity of the mines has always depended upon their ability to attract their African employees back for further spells of employment, and compound amenities and conditions, along with conditions of work, have been a vital factor. As we shall see, the lack of similar facilities for those employed in secondary industry has given rise to serious problems of physical and moral hygiene.

I am not in the least concerned to defend the motives of the financiers and adventurers who developed the diamond and gold mines and complementary industries. Among them were no doubt ruthless and unscrupulous characters. Others were certainly ‘tough’, as pioneers must be when fighting for big prizes against great risks in the face of what must frequently have appeared as insuperable difficulties. Yet through their initiative all classes in South Africa benefited materially.

Neither the shareholders nor the administrators of the mines were responsible for colour bars or the withholding of opportunities of advancement from Africans. On the contrary, as far as organised labour and politics allowed, the mining interests always tried to prevent restrictions on the scope of African employment. Of course, they would have wanted to safeguard the established expectations of their existing white employees, at least as a means of maintaining staff harmony during the transition; and opportunities for Africans in skilled work and in positions of responsibility could, accordingly, have been opened up only gradually. But had the great mining magnates been free to insist on their interests as investors and those of a vast number of smaller shareholders, they would have opened the door, by slow degrees, to African advancement.

The mines never exploited African labour in the bad sense, as legislation (inspired by organised labour and not uninfluenced by broad restrictionist ideologies) certainly did. The mines liberated new opportunities for all races and especially for the most backward. The only elements of coercion which may be said to have driven Africans to the mines are (a) the poll taxes (and these taxes were introduced more in response to pressures from farming than from mining interests) and (b) the common recruitment organisation (described above) which sought to offset the Africans’ high ‘leisure preference’.

THE MIRAGE OF SLAVERY

The attitude of the world towards the South African mining industry has been influenced, I think, by stereotypes formed during the ‘Chinese slavery’ agitation, to which I have already referred. It is important, therefore, that this incident should be seen in perspective. The shortage of African labour which caused the mines to seek indentured Chinese in the early years of the century seems to have been partly due to the way the Boer war led to the breaking down of customary limitations on the employment of Africans in other spheres. The evasion of obstacles to equality of opportunity (as between sexes, age groups and races) has been a typical consequence of periods of war and reconstruction. In the Transvaal, the additional and competing demand for African labour was augmented by the quite different colour attitude of the British authorities, who were in control for some time after the war. They did not share the Boers’ race prejudices and did not hesitate to use African labour where it would be useful. The post-war shortage of mine labour so caused was aggravated also by memories of former maltreatment by the Transvaal authorities. Moreover, the relatively high wage-rates that attracted the tribal Africans into war-time occupations not only financed longer periods (in the reserves), away from wage-paid work but led to the feeling that similar wage-rates ought to be offered in the mines. These factors, together with abundant harvests in the reserves immediately after the war,10 disappointed the expectations which had stimulated mining development.

The repatriation of the Chinese in 1907 would have affected the development of mining even more adversely but for a sharp recession at that time which led to the dismissal of large numbers of Africans from other forms of employment. Because there were no labour unions or government restraints on wage-rates11 the mines provided an automatic solution of the unemployment problem, by offering an immediate alternative source of income.12

Those 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.13

MARKET INCENTIVE TO ADVANCEMENT

But the advantage of the services of people compared with the services of physical productive agents is that people are intelligent and capable of wielding complex tools, under co-ordinated direction, and with discretion. It was possible to abolish slavery in various parts of the world without counter-revolution to restore it, because the cost of the abolition was negative, in spite of the frantic but unenlightened opposition of so many slave owners. And in the modern world in which there is a vast market to be served, there is a most powerful motive to invest in human capital and train primitive people for operations which require intelligence, judgment and responsibility.

The tendency of the free market to create opportunities for skill-acquisition by Africans was emphasised by technological progress, constantly being brought about by the enterprise of mining managements. As more mining skills were transferred to machines, a growing proportion of semi-skilled labour was required, for which Africans could easily be trained.

But the ambitions aroused by the readiness of some Africans to rise above ‘put and carry work’ provoked demands from the Whites for the restraint of the profit motive. Their fear was that the search for low cost output was tending to bring about a rapid rise in the standards of the more able or enterprising members of a primitive people, and so threatened their relative status.

Whenever the point of view of the mine-owners was publicly expressed, it was clear that they were wholly in favour of opening the door to African advancement, through permitting the training of Africans for more productive and more valuable work – a policy which, they occasionally perceived, would tend ultimately to reduce race friction. Their motive of ‘profit-seeking’ or ‘loss-avoidance’ conflicted with the barriers to African skill-acquisition; for these barriers rendered the low-grade, marginal mines, and the low-grade seams in all mines, unprofitable. But they were invariably realistic in not suggesting revolutionary changes. They never envisaged more than a gradual relaxation of the colour bars which we are about to discuss. Yet they knew only too well that there was much semi-skilled work which was performed by Whites (at the traditional high wage-rates) which could have been efficiently performed by Africans after a period of training at wage-rates very much higher than were then available to Africans, but very much lower than were currently commanded by the Whites. The mines would have benefited handsomely if such a step could have been taken, and it would have prevented the emergence of one of the most conspicuous colour injustices in South Africa.

 

14Opinions differ about the proportion which could be properly described as fully detribalised. See Chapter 10, pp. 87–9.

15See S. T. van der Horst, Native Labour in South Africa, O.U.P., 1942, pp. 120–138, 192–214.

16Under the Transvaal Labour Tax system, work performed for the State or for fanners was a method of settling the tax liability without money. The poll tax may be defended in principle, however, if it can be shown to be a relatively cheaply administered means of raising revenue to pay for collective objectives, if the rapid achievement of higher material standards by all is accepted as one of these collective objectives, or if the intention is educative – the active discouragement of primitive indolence when employment opportunities are available.

17Especially after the Boer war, when maladministration in the Transvaal, including the practice of granting private monopolies and concessions for the production or import of necessities, was brought to an end. Transport remains today the sole big exception. The mines have been seriously exploited through the railway tariff and, because the State-owned railways are protected against road motor traffic, they have no remedy.

18S. H. Frankel, Capital Investment in South Africa, pp. 79–80.

19Most of the abuses were brought to an end after the Boer war; and the common recruitment organisation has since provided private protection against the possibility of similar forms of maltreatment developing.

20Their separation from their wives and families has now become the chief cause of what I have termed their ‘high demand for leisure’. The migratory labour problem is discussed below, pp. 52–3, and in Chapter 10, pp. 90–3.

21In diamond mining, however, it was always the policy to pay an all-inclusive money wage, leaving each employee free to purchase (within the compound) such food and other consumers’ goods as he fancied and could afford. (See Doxey, op. cit., p. 35.)

22The listing of these virtues must not leave an impression of idyllic conditions. The standards of the mass of Africans employed in mining, although continuously improving, remain primitive.

23See Doxey, op. cit., p. 57.

24See Chapter 11.

25I certainly do not suggest that the motive was generosity. But this does not affect the question of the efficiency of the unhampered market as a means to the maintenance of full employment.

26In 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.

• 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.
• 14Some injustices may be due more to class barriers than to colour barriers. For instance, there is much resentment felt against Portugal as an intransigent colonial power. But no legally enacted colour bars exist in any Portuguese territory; and a South African who crosses into Mozambique is at once struck by the wholly different attitude, at least superficially, towards colour. Yet the overwhelming majority of the Africans of Mozambique are extremely poor. Some critics conclude that Portugal maintains a de facto if not a legal colour bar. But there are approximately an equal number of Whites and non-Whites with ‘assimilado’ status (that is, who have achieved both literacy and the ability to live at defined civilised standards) who have long enjoyed absolute equality of rights before the law. Yet only 160,000 out of the population of 6.6 million enjoy this status and only 5 per cent of the non-white assimilados are Africans (the rest are Indians and half-castes). If the evident backwardness of the masses is caused by deliberate policy rather than by unrestrained population growth and a paucity of natural resources, there is certainly cause for complaints of class injustice, but not of colour injustice. But educated and responsible non-Whites are not subjected, in the Portuguese territories, to the indignities and humiliations they suffer in South Africa.
• 15Some 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.
• 16I 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.
• 17Without 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.
• 18Now 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.
• 19Of 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.
• 20But the South African government in the middle and late 1930s was an unholy and uneasy coalition, and if the liberal-minded members of the coalition had raised the issue it would have threatened cabinet unity. Indeed, when I myself tried to arouse public opinion in 1937 by referring to the manner in which the public had been misled, I was strongly attacked by the Cape Times (in a controversy which went into several issues) for irresponsibility. I had charged that we had carelessly ‘torn up our Constitution’. But no steps to rectify the position were taken, or even seriously considered.
• 21But 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.
• 22When the Afrikaner Nationalists eventually obtained the upper hand, in 1948, they immediately took steps to prove that the Constitution had been torn up. By various manœuvres, which included an attack on the judiciary, an attempt to transform Parliament into a High Court, and finally packing the Senate with their own representatives, they secured the two-thirds majority needed for the abolition of the existing non-white voting rights. Far from the ‘liberalism’ of the Cape having spread to the rest of South Africa, as the British Parliament had been led to expect before Union, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State traditions of ‘no equality in church or state’ had been forced on the whole community, and the Coloureds had been deprived of a political status they had held for a century. Of course, political representation of a minority is no guarantee of economic justice for that minority. The Minister of Coloured Affairs argued recently in defence of the abolition of the political rights which the coloured people had enjoyed, that these rights had left 80 per cent of them ‘backward and poor, with leaders deserting them and trying to gain admission to the white masses’. But their removal from the common roll has been felt as a humiliating deprivation of status.
• 23When 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.
• 24If 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.
• 25A 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.
• 26Those 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.