Roberts A.D. The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 7: from 1905 to 1940
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
SPANISH EQUATORIAL GUINEA
The choice of the vicar apostolic to head the new body reflected
the position of the missionaries as the only group which made an
attempt to win the confidence of Africans and protect them from
the worst abuses of the planters. On the eve of the First World
War, the Claretians had seven stations on Fernando Po, one on
Annobon, and five along the coast of Rio Muni. The Protestants
were less numerous,
in
spite
of a
head start
in
the nineteenth
century, as the Spanish authorities showed considerable hostility
to missionaries who were not only heretics but also insisted on
speaking and teaching English rather than Spanish. There was
a
single American Board Presbyterian mission
on
the mainland,
famous
for its
hospital, and five English Primitive Methodist
stations
on
Fernando Po. The Methodists made attempts
to
penetrate Bubi society, but most
of
their work was with
the
Fernandinos, and they were peculiar in their refusal to open any
schools. Government primary schools were set up
in
the three
main urban centres after 1914, but
it
was not until the very end
of the 1930s that the state began
to
create
a
network
of
rural
schools.
At the end of this period, Equatorial Guinea was briefly caught
up
in the
bloody events
of
the Spanish civil war. Incidents
between the
'
lay' authorities and the
'
clerical' opposition devel-
oped in
1936,
as some churches were closed and the heady rhetoric
of the Popular Front began to be applied to the African majority
in the colony. When General Franco rose against the republic, the
head of the colonial guard in Santa Isabel pronounced in Franco's
favour and declared himself governor-general. The republicans
gave way without
a
fight on Fernando Po, but the governor of
Rio Muni refused
to
follow suit and defeated the levies raised
against him by the timber bosses. The right-wing rebels sent
a
ship from the Canaries, which sank the ship loyal to the republic
in Rio Muni. Moroccan troops then seized Bata, the capital of the
enclave. Some republicans were captured and shot, but most of
them seem
to
have escaped into neighbouring Cameroun and
Gabon. By October 1936, the colony was securely
in
Franco's
hands and contributing money, raw materials and food to the long
and bitter campaign against the republic. Franco's victory ushered
in
a
new period
for
Equatorial Guinea, marked
by
greater
metropolitan interest and investment in its distant colony, but also
by more oppressive and more directly racist colonial rule.
543
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
CHAPTER
ii
SOUTHERN AFRICA
By 1910, three governments held sway
in
southern Africa over
a region
as
large
as
India and five times the size
of
France.
The
Union
of
South Africa, created
in
that year, was
a
self-governing
Dominion
in the
British Empire;
it
brought together, under
a
unitary constitution, the territories of the Cape, Natal, the Orange
River Colony and the Transvaal.
1
The British government, which
had thereby granted virtual independence
to
the white people
of
South Africa, retained responsibility
for
three adjacent protect-
orates: Bechuanaland, Swaziland and Basutoland. However, these
were closely tied
to the
Union; Basutoland
was a
mountain
enclave within it; and
all
three were administered by
a
British high
commissioner who until 1931 was also governor-general of South
Africa. South West Africa was
a
German colony,
but the
best
harbour along
its
coastline, Walvis Bay, belonged
to
the Union,
for the Cape Colony had annexed
it
before the Germans took over
the surrounding territory.
Geographically, southern Africa encompasses huge contrasts.
Its watershed,
the
Drakensberg range, falls abruptly
to the
east
coast and causes monsoon rains
to
fall over Natal and the eastern
Cape. For centuries this coastal belt had been colonised by African
mixed farmers; more recently, they
had
been joined
by
British
planters
and
Indian workers. Elsewhere,
the
only important
regions
for
arable farming were parts
of
the northern plateaux,
where Afrikaners had settled, and the south-western Cape, which
enjoys
a
Mediterranean climate: this
was the
heartland
of the
Coloured people. Otherwise, the western two-thirds
of
southern
Africa comprise arid grassland, scrub
and
desert, where annual
rainfall varies from 15 inches
to
little
or
none.
In
1911 there were
probably well under 200,000 people in South West Africa and less
than 150,000 in Bechuanaland.
In
sharp contrast, Basutoland may
1
The process of unification
is
considered, along with other developments before 1910,
in
The
Cambridge history
of
Africa,
vi
(1985).
544
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
1910-1914
have had as many as 430,000 while Swaziland had around 100,000.
In the Union, there were about four million Africans,
1,276,000
whites, 526,000 Coloured and 152,000 Indians.
It was not, however, climate but geology which was to exert
the primary influence on the peoples of southern Africa in the
twentieth century. Already, the course of economic and social
change had been deeply affected by the extraction of minerals:
diamonds at Kimberley since 1867, gold on the Witwatersrand
since
1886
and diamonds in South West Africa since 1908. By 1910
nearly half the world's gold came from South Africa, and nearly
all its diamonds. These facts, which gave the industrialised world
a major stake in southern Africa, were made possible both by
manipulating local markets in land and labour and by extending
the market for labour outwards, to the High Commission
Territories, Mozambique and British central Africa. On the
surface, the politics of South Africa might appear to be dominated
by ethnic conflict, but as its industry continued to expand class
interests became more sharply defined. The relations between
Afrikaners, Britons, Africans, Coloured people and Indians were
moulded by rivalry between mining and other capitalist enterprise,
and above all by the demands of capital for assured supplies of
cheap labour. The extent to which 'racial' and class divisions in
South Africa reinforced or cut across each other is perhaps the
most important theme in its modern history.
1 910-1914
South Africa
The white political ethos in which Union was established has
been called the 'Convention Spirit' — a willingness to form a
constitutional arena within which Boer and Briton would coexist
and perhaps merge to form a South African nation. The two seats
of government symbolised this spirit: the Union's administration
was established at Pretoria, in the Transvaal, while the two houses
of the Union parliament met in Cape Town. Whites were firmly
in control. Only whites could sit in the House of Assembly, and
its hundred-odd members were elected according to the existing
franchise laws of the constituent territories. These gave the vote
to nearly all white adult males. In the Cape, the vote was available
545
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
SOUTHERN AFRICA
0
20"S
\
SOU
V
4
Swakopmund*'^
N
G O L A
,
6°
Tsumeb
1
J/H^ WEST
1
•,r*«sflsk
f fl 0
'I'
WalvisS*^ *41^ndhoek
Ba
V
T
Rehobfi.
\
1
A
\
Luderitz\v^
\
P ItCA
>g§
T
»'
V
•\
\
)
(
\
Orange
""' .
J
..
te,
CapeTowr
ys^llenbp^
Simonstown
^?>
1
2o|°f
\V
B
EC
H
\
U A N
A-^
N
LAN
D
Y
F
/
"*
-^
h
:
.
/p
l/
P
NGWATO
J
I?
V
/ /
i boron
A
^
^
liA/lUrlt)/
^
'"Rrt
Elizabeth
// Salisbury
|
3
/\
-
,'f
Xo
U
TJH ER
N
>M1^
\
> * | ffl
\^
'
2Q°s
•y«-^Bulawayo
'S
4
ti
RH0DESIA
{
<
•
«\ s
•
0
'
\\
™"
S
\m Wrenci
If
/
"East London
1
1
Land over 150Ometres
9
,
t L
590km
6~
360
miles
19 South Africa, South West Africa
and the
Protectorates,
1920
to
all
adult males,
of
whatever colour,
who
could meet
a
property qualification and pass
a
literacy test: thus only four
out
of five Cape voters were white.
The
Cape franchise could only
be altered
by
a
two-thirds majority
of
both houses
of
parliament
in joint session. This provision also protected the equal status
of
English
and
Dutch
as
official languages.
The
electoral system
favoured rural voters, who were mostly Afrikaners:
an MP in
a
rural constituency
was
allowed
to
represent
26 per
cent fewer
voters than were required
for an
urban member. There were
few
constraints
on
the
power
of
the House
of
Assembly.
The
four
constituent territories
now
became provinces, with councils
which were essentially large-scale organs
of
local government:
they could legislate
on
education, roads
and
hospitals,
but
they
546
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
1910—1914
had few
fiscal
powers and depended heavily on central government
revenues. The Senate could at most delay legislation, and in any
case was largely a creature of the lower house: MPs and provincial
councils elected eight senators for each province, while the
government nominated eight more. The governor-general norm-
ally acted on the advice of the Cabinet; it was thus that he
appointed the judges of the Union's Supreme Court, who could
only be removed at the request of both houses of parliament. As
in the other Dominions, Britain retained final authority over
external affairs. For the time being, the defence of South Africa
continued to be entrusted to imperial (i.e. British) troops and the
Royal Navy, which used Simonstown as a strategic base.
The general election in 1910 brought into power a government
headed by General Botha of the Transvaal. His base was a loose
coalition of Afrikaner parties, supported by
a
minority of English-
speaking South Africans, though Botha included three in his
Cabinet. Once the new government had been formed, Louis Botha
and Jan Smuts's Het Volk, the Cape's South African Party
(including the Afrikaner Bond) and General Hertzog's Orangia
Unie merged in 1911 to form the South African National Party.
The opposition was divided along class lines. English-speaking
Unionists represented commerce, finance, mining and Natal
agricultural interests. A small Labour Party, dominated by
Englishmen and led by Colonel Creswell, represented the restive
white working class, within which Afrikaners were a growing
minority.
From the first, the new government sought to influence the
direction of economic growth, though the main dynamic was
private enterprise, aided by British and European capital and
Empire trade preferences. In the first few years of Union, mining
generated 27 per cent of national income, agriculture 17 per cent
and manufacturing 7 per cent. In 1913 domestic exports were
worth
£64111;
two-thirds of this came from gold and the remainder
from diamonds, wool and agriculture. These results were achieved
through systematic institutional pressures. Railway rates, which
hitherto had been chaotically competitive, were gradually co-
ordinated. Farm exports were rated below mineral exports; they
were also assisted by a 'tapering rate' which reduced the tariff per
ton as distance increased, thus favouring the remoter areas as
branch lines were extended. Such discrimination was the more
547
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
SOUTHERN AFRICA
Table
3.
South African
elections
and governments,
1910
1915
1920
1921
1924
1929
1933
1938
nist
0
a
39
40
rican
to
67
54
4i
79
53
61
61
1
0
1
26
44
45
63
78
75
United Party
1:
11
ed
Nat.
II
Pur
3
O
4
4
21
9
18
3
+
5
2
+
2
3
tendent
sr
Ind
11
6
3
1
1
1
6
4
nion
0
Q
8
U
O
4
1
rnment
0
0
SA(N)P
SAP
SAP
SAP
NP-Lab
Pact
NP
Coalition;
UP
UP
ier
e
Pre
Botha
Botha
Smuts
Smuts
Hertzog
Hertzog
Hertzog
Hertzog
important since
in
general
the
productivity
of
white farming was
still
low.
Most white farmers were poorly educated; their
techniques were often inefficient
and
liable
to
damage
the
environment.
The
Land Bank,
set up in
1912,
was one
result
of
legislation intended to assist them:
it
provided
a
source
of
capital
for fencing, dip-tanks
and
boreholes,
but was
used
to
increase
herds and landholdings rather than
to
improve farming methods.
The most important
way in
which
the
government subsidised
white enterprise was by helping
to
mobilise African labour while
keeping down
its
price. This
was a
principal
aim of
the Natives
Land
Act of
1913, which carried
out
recommendations made
in
1905
by the
Native Affairs Commission. Hitherto, blocks
of
land
had from time
to
time been
set
aside
as
reserves
for
exclusive
African occupation, especially
in
Natal
and the
Cape,
but
many
Africans
had
become tenants
or
sharecroppers
on
white land,
while in Natal, the western Transvaal and the Cape a few had been
allowed
to buy
freeholds.
The
growth
of
towns
and
mines
had
prompted a number of African farmers to produce
for
the market,
and some were able
to
undercut white competitors. Well before
union, the emergence
of
such
a
peasantry
had
been challenged
by
piecemeal legislation;
the
Natives Land
Act
went
far to
destroy
548
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
1910-1914
it. In 1913, Africans owned 7.3 per cent of the country, either
communally, as in the reserves, or as freehold. The Act now
prohibited Africans from buying land outside such 'scheduled
areas',
except at the discretion of the governor-general. More
immediately important, the Act prohibited sharecropping; it
required Africans remaining on white property to provide 90
days'
labour each year for their landlord; and it severely curtailed
the mobility of farm labour. White farmers began to terminate
rental agreements, recognising that their erstwhile tenants were
now obliged either to work for them or to seek work elsewhere.
For the time being, however, it was impossible to apply the Land
Act to the Cape; the Supreme Court ruled in 1917 that it interfered
with African voting rights there which were based in part on
landownership, and since the Act had not been passed by the
two-thirds majority needed to curtail these rights, it was invalid.
The need for cheap labour was acutely felt by the mining
industry. The gold mines had for some time been unable to rely
on market forces alone to meet their labour requirements. They
sold their whole output to the Bank of England at a fixed price;
thus the income from sales could not properly reflect the costs
of production, which were high, and likely to
rise.
The gold mines
mostly exploited low-grade ores at ever-deeper levels: by 1913
more than 40 per cent of dividends were derived from mines at
4,000 feet or more below ground. Furthermore, the nature of the
rock called for elaborate structures to prevent collapse. This
meant that mining on the Rand was unusually labour-intensive.
Yet the mine companies' wage bills were artificially inflated by
the industrial colour-bar, whereby skilled jobs were reserved for
whites earning far more than Africans: in 1911 this was embodied
in regulations made under the Mines and Works Act. Thus the
mines were bent on paying as little as possible for the great mass
of unskilled labour which they needed.
To some extent they achieved this by avoiding competition
among themselves. Already the high cost of gold production had
brought about
a
concentration of ownership in the industry. Most
of the Rand mines, and many coalmines, were owned by six large
firms, and these in turn partly depended for finance on profits from
the diamond industry, which was almost entirely owned by De
Beers.
This concentration greatly facilitated collusion among
mine-owners to prevent competition for labour and thus minimise
549
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
SOUTHERN AFRICA
2SPt
BECHUANALAND
26 °S
I
I
Land over 1500 metres
9
,
390km
0 200miles
20 South Africa,
1937
wages. Yet industrial collusion alone was not enough; the power
of the state was also needed. Thus
in
191a the Native Recruiting
Corporation
was
given
the
sole right
to
recruit labour
for
the
goldmines within
the
Union
and the
High Commission Territ-
ories.
The long-established Witwatersrand Native Labour Assoc-
iation, which recruited in Mozambique and British Central Africa,
was forbidden
in
1913
to
recruit north
of
latitude 22°S: black
miners from the tropics were especially susceptible
to
pneumonia
in
the
Transvaal winters,
and
their death-rate (about
70 per
thousand
per
annum
in
1911) provoked
the
Union government
to impose
a
ban which the Labour Party welcomed, since
it
made
55O
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
1910-1914
it harder for the mines to replace whites by cheap black labour.
By 1916, nonetheless, the Chamber of Mines employed 219,000
Africans, nearly all in the goldmines. About half came from within
the Union (mainly the eastern Cape and Transvaal), 12 per cent
from the High Commission Territories (mainly Basutoland) and
38 per cent from Mozambique. Of those from the Union and the
HCTs, about 60 per cent were recruited on contracts lasting from
three months to a year; recruits from elsewhere were bound by
contract for up to eighteen months. Within the Union, both
recruited and 'voluntary' workers were drawn on to the labour
market by the Natives Land Act. In 1911 the Native Labour
Regulation Act, consolidating earlier laws, had confirmed that
breach of contract by Africans was still a criminal offence, and had
outlawed African strikes, even if it also sought to control the
treatment of labour by employers and recruiters. The combined
effect of all these measures was to hold down African wages to
the barest minimum. In 1912 the ratio between the wages of white
and black mineworkers (including the latter's rations) was 9:1,
and over the next decade it steadily increased. African workers,
in the mines and elsewhere, were paid, fed and housed only as
single men, while their families were left to support themselves
as best they could in the reserves.
By 1915 no more than half the African population were living
in the reserves: they were tending to become now mere labour
reservoirs. The old patterns of shifting cultivation had once been
capable of yielding considerable grain surpluses, but under the
new constraints a syndrome of impoverishment began to take
hold. The pressure of human and animal population increased;
soil erosion spread rapidly; and labour migration became the very
basis of survival rather than just a means of paying poll-taxes and
supplementing income. Government policies were deliberately
framed to promote acute land shortages, the lack of cash-crops
and extensive migrant labour. Unlike white farmers, Africans had
no lobby in parliament to secure credit through a Land Bank.
Indebtedness rose sharply; a co-operative movement struggled
without official encouragement; there were no railway branch-
lines into the reserves; and the retention of the principle' one man,
one plot' meant a decline in family acreage.
The first Union census, in 1911, showed that one in eight
Africans, and half the European, Coloured and Indian commun-
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
SOUTHERN AFRICA
ities,
were living in towns. The urban Africans exceeded half a
million and already comprised
a
third of the total urban popul-
ation; there were over 100,000 in Johannesburg alone. For most
of them, conditions were very bad. Urban wage structures had
been determined when families were maintained by subsistence
agriculture. The reality was now likely
to be
very different.
Malnutrition was widespread in the reserves, on white farms and
in the expanding slums. In the municipal locations set aside for
Africans, sanitation was usually non-existent; the water supply
was often an irrigation furrow; and many Africans had to house
themselves in shanties built from packing-cases, flattened tins and
sacking.
The
crowded mining barracks
at
least provided
a
controlled diet and some recreational and hospital facilities, but
from 1903 to
1920
some
5,000
African miners died every year from
accidents and disease as tuberculosis spread rapidly. Among the
Coloured people of the Cape, conditions were, if anything, rather
worse, for they had no land for subsistence agriculture. Malnut-
rition was endemic and the incidence of tuberculosis
at
least as
high — that is four to six times the rate among Europeans.
In
addition, alcoholism was rampant, having its roots
in
the 'tot'
system of the vineyards where Coloured labourers received two
quarts of wine per day as part-payment. The only exceptions
to
this depressing picture were the small elite of teachers and clerks,
and the skilled workmen who came
to
enjoy some protection
within white-run trade unions.
If Africans as well
as
Coloureds and Indians had been indignant
after the Anglo-Boer War at Britain's failure to extend the Cape's
' native' policy to the northern colonies, they were appalled when
early in 1909 the National Convention produced the colour-bar
clauses
of
the draft South Africa Act.
A
South African Native
Convention promptly met
to
condemn the clauses and exhort
Britain to maintain and extend the Cape common roll. When their
protests, memorials and
a
delegation
to
London failed,
the
Convention ceased to exist. However, it was soon replaced by the
South African Native National Congress, which was formed
at
Bloemfontein in 1912. This was essentially
a
middle-class body,
with close ties
to
chiefs.
Its
members came from all over the
country and were dedicated
to
promoting national rather than
ethnic unity; most were lawyers, teachers, clergymen and journa-
lists,
though
a
few were traders and farmers. Some had been
to
55*
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008