Roberts A.D. The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 7: from 1905 to 1940

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1910-1914

Britain and the USA; among the latter was the Rev. John Dube,

founder of an industrial school in Natal, who was elected

president.

There was a growing awareness within Congress of specific

economic grievances, especially after the Land Act of 1913, but

its members were chiefly concerned to challenge white assump-

tions that the Union was a white man's country in which there

could be no room for black politicians. The Coloured community,

mostly resident in the Cape, had expressed its objection to the

terms of union through the African Political (later People's)

Organisation; this was strongest among urban workers and had

socialist sympathies. The APO was led by Abdul Abdurahman,

a Muslim of Malay descent with a Scottish medical degree. He

had worked closely with W. P. Schreiner and the African

representatives on the delegation to London in 1909 and maint-

ained his interest in 'non-European' co-operation. When the first

Native Congress deputation arrived in Cape Town in 1912, it met

the APO executive and both organisations called for annual

consultations. However, Congress resolutions, delegations to

parliament and Pretoria, and a further visit to London in 1914,

proved quite ineffectual.

While Congress petitioned at home and overseas, more forceful

action was taken by the least regarded sections of African society:

women and criminals. It was women who first mounted African

resistance to the pass-laws. Almost everywhere outside the

reserves, every African man had to carry one or more passes,

unless he was one of the few 'civilised' men obliged to carry

instead a certificate of exemption. Only in the

Cape,

and there only

outside the Transkei, were Africans free of this obligation.

Pass-laws enabled provincial governments and local authorities to

restrict the movement and residence of Africans in towns and

other areas of white settlement; they also helped employers to

enforce labour contracts. In 1913, the Orange Free State allowed

local pass-laws to be extended to women. The women soon

replied: in Bloemfontein, 600 dumped their passes at the mayor's

office, and their example was followed in many smaller towns.

Hundreds of women were gaoled; Congress took up their cause;

and soon afterwards Charlotte Maxeke founded a Bantu Women's

League. The campaign succeeded insofar

passes were no longer,

in practice, required of women.

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A very different response to oppression radiated from the gaol

in Pretoria, where by 1910 a Zulu prisoner, Jan Note, contrived

to hold sway over a criminal empire that encompassed the Rand.

At a time when the Bible was being radically reinterpreted by

black South African preachers, Note had found inspiration in

Nahum's vision of Nineveh, which rebelled against the Lord. He

directed an army of brigands whose own hierarchy of ' magist-

rates',

captains and sergeants mirrored white structures of

repression. It was nourished by prisons and mine compounds, for

'miserable wages and endless pass-law convictions ensured that

today's proletarian was tomorrow's prisoner'.

By 1913, these

Ninevites had gone far to neutralise the black police, and only in

1914 was the government sure it had the upper hand. The

Ninevites concentrated their violence on fellow-Africans, but they

were in open revolt against a common enemy.

The politics of the Indian community were dominated by

Mohandas Gandhi, a barrister who had founded the Natal Indian

Congress in 1894 and spent much time in South Africa before

finally returning to India in 1914. In 1909 Gandhi went to London

to voice the opposition of the Natal Indian Congress to the

colour-bar clauses in the draft South Africa Act. In this, of course,

Gandhi was at one with the African and Coloured delegates in

London, but his strategy was essentially different since he was able

to invoke the Government of India's concern with Indians in

Africa: in 1911 it was to ban the emigration of indentured labour

to Natal. In 1913 the Union government banned further

immigration from India, except for wives or children of Indians

already domiciled there, and for such men as could meet stringent

economic

conditions.

Gandhi did not quarrel with this in principle,

but he and other Indians feared that a judgement of the Cape

Supreme Court in 1910 invalidated Indian marriages. They also

attacked provincial barriers to Indian mobility within the Union,

and a £3 tax on Indians who remained in South Africa when their

term of indenture expired (for some 22,000 were still indentured).

Gandhi's preferred tactic was non-violent resistance

(satyagraha),

which he had first used in the Transvaal in 1907. In September

1913 Indian women in Natal incited Indian coalminers to strike,

Charles van Onselen, 'The regiment of the hills — Umkosi Wezintaba', in his Studies

in the social and

economic

history of

the

Witwatersrand 18S6-1914, l. New Nineveh (Harlow,

1982),

195.

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1910—1914

and a party marched into the Transvaal before being arrested.

Smuts came under heavy pressure from both British and Indian

governments. The Indian Relief Act of 1914 abolished the £3 tax

and affirmed the validity of Indian marriages. Other fundamental

issues were avoided. Indians were to exercise voluntary restraint

in land purchases, their mobility remained curtailed and their

hopes for the franchise were ignored.

While Africans, Coloureds and Indians made plain their dis-

content with the first-fruits of union, the white community itself

was increasingly divided. In the view of Botha and Smuts, the

hoped-for nation was to be peculiarly South African, a composite

of white elements sharing a common educational system and

merging their histories, yet open to the well-springs of western

thought. The alternative they feared was a brooding Afrikaner

nationalism which would be culturally stultifying, a source of

acute political division, a threat to South Africa's military role in

the Empire and an obstacle to economic co-operation with

Britain. In the longer run, whites would also have to rise above

party politics if they were to articulate a coherent policy to deal

with the country's black labour force. This view was challenged

from within the Cabinet by Hertzog, who thought Botha, Smuts

and their followers were far too closely wedded to Britain and to

British financial interests in South Africa. This in turn, he argued,

led them to a premature drive for white unity which exposed

Afrikaners to the threat of anglicisation and the divisiveness of

class conflict.

The break came in 1912, when Hertzog challenged the ruling

South African National Party to insist on sovereign independence

and to put the Union's interests above those of the British Empire.

South Africa, he argued, should not be ruled by fortune-seekers,

the magnates whose loyalties lay elsewhere. Instead, it should be

governed by Afrikaners, a term he carefully defined to include all

those whites who were prepared to put South Africa first. Hertzog

was obliged to leave the government; support for him soon spread

from his political base in the Orange Free State to the Transvaal

and the Cape. In January 1914 he became leader of the new

Nationalist Party; henceforward the SANP was known as the

South African Party.

By this time, the power of mining capital had also been

challenged by white labour. Its leaders as yet were mostly

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English-speaking, though by 1914 perhaps four out often white

miners were Afrikaners. Collective bargaining had not been

formalised, but white trade unions were being consolidated and

syndicalist aspirations were widespread. The struggle focused on

the recognition of the mineworkers' union, and in July 1913 it

engulfed the Rand. Nineteen thousand white workers came out

on strike; imperial troops were called in to help the police; and

peace was restored only after Botha and Smuts personally

bargained with the Transvaal Federation of Trade Unions

(formed in 1911) and promised concessions.

In January 1914, white miners struck in the coalfields of Natal,

unrest spread to the railways and the Rand erupted again with

mounted commandos forming on behalf of white labour as the

call went out for a general strike. This time Botha was not well

and the full responsibility fell on Smuts. Seeing the Union as a

'small white colony in a dark Continent... [where whites] ... must

ever be watchful and careful',

Smuts was determined to assert

state authority. Backed by the Unionists, he declared martial law

and turned to the fledgling Union Defence Force, established in

1913;

this relieved Smuts of the embarrassment of having to rely

on imperial troops. Artillery drew up outside the Trades Hall, the

strike leaders surrendered and the general strike collapsed. The

tense situation was then aggravated when Smuts illegally deported

nine labour leaders and so appeared to confirm his collusion with

the mine-owners. As a result the confrontation strengthened the

ties which were forming between the Labour Party and Hertzog's

Nationalists as both parties attacked the Chamber of Mines,

foreign capital, Smuts and the South African Party.

The High Commission Territories

The economic conditions of Africans in Basutoland, Bechuanaland

and Swaziland were not markedly different from those in the

Union's reserves. Britain was a reluctant administrator, deter-

mined to establish balanced budgets and minimise expenses. The

territories were widely regarded as merely sources of unskilled

labour for the mines, and their political future was uncertain. The

schedule appended to the Act of Union for South Africa made

provision for their eventual incorporation, but the Union's policy

W. K. Hancock, Smuts, I. Tbt sanguine years, iSyo-tfiy (Cambridge, 1962), J69.

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1910-1914

of segregation and persistent African opposition to incorporation

resulted in continued British administration. This left the chiefs

very much to their own devices. In Basutoland, they collected tax

and retained

per cent of the proceeds as well as fines from their

courts. These

native administrations' were supervised by poorly

staffed civil services mainly financed from the South African

customs union, to which the territories had belonged since 1903:

Basutoland received 0.9 per cent, Bechuanaland under

per cent

and Swaziland just over

per cent of total customs receipts. The

territories' rudimentary transport systems were not much

improved. The South African railway network approached the

borders of Swaziland and Basutoland. In the case of Bechuanaland

it traversed the eastern region en

route

to Southern Rhodesia.

Within the territories there were a few sand roads and tracks

augmented by bridle paths; the latter were particularly important

in the highlands of Basutoland.

Four-fifths of Basutoland consists of rugged mountain terrain

and much of the population was concentrated in the lowlands.

There was virtually no land alienation; the white population of

under 2,000 was occupied in retail stores and the civil service.

Basuto exports of grain and wool, first prompted by South

African mining in the 1870s, continued to be an important source

of cash income. They were however often checked by drought,

locusts or lice, and since the 1880s many of the younger men had

been going to work in South Africa: by 1911 one in three

able-bodied men was out of the country. Bechuanaland's sparse

population was largely confined to the east, as the Kalahari,

stretching away to the west, was inhabited by small groups of

remnant 'Bushmen' and Nama. Tribal reserves and Crown land

comprised almost 40 per cent and 60 per cent respectively; 3 per

cent of the land had been alienated to 2,000 whites, mostly

Afrikaners. Cattle exports, to South Africa and Southern Rhod-

esia, were checked not only by disease but by an almost unbroken

drought from 1911 to 1921. Labour migration was at first less

pronounced than in Basutoland, perhaps running at half the rate,

but it steadily increased. Swaziland, the smallest of the territories,

enjoyed a high rainfall and the variety of three distinct climatic

zones — the high, middle and low veld. Under Transvaal control

from 1894, and under British protection from 1903, the country

had experienced massive land alienation as a result of corrupt land

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concessions. When, by the First World War, this process was

stabilised, less than one-tenth of the country was Crown land, the

Swazi had regained a third, and the remainder had been

consolidated in the hands of approximately 500 white farmers,

many of whom were absentee landlords. The emigration of labour

was less common than in Basutoland and Bechuanaland, but

likewise tended to increase.

South West Africa

Up to 1908 South West Africa had cost the Germans a great deal

of money, and a good deal of blood, for very little return; they

had even managed to kill off about a quarter of their African

subjects. The coastal hinterland was desert, and the Germans

(with the aid of British investors) had had to build railways far

inland to reach the main areas of German settlement and

production. From Swakopmund one line ran east to Windhoek,

the capital; another ran far to the north-east, to the copper mines

at Otavi and the well-watered Grootfontein district. In the south,

a line linked Liideritz to Nama country. The relatively populous

country of the Ovambo, on the Angolan border, was not yet under

German rule. Exports had only twice risen above £100,000; their

growth had been drastically set back by the great African revolt

in 1904—8 in the central and southern parts of the territory. This

cost the Germans £23111 and the lives of about 2,000 Germans,

mostly soldiers. Von Trotha, the military commander, tried to

exterminate his main enemy, the pastoral Herero. Their numbers

fell from about 75,000 to 15,000 and some took refuge in

Bechuanaland. Among the Nama and the Rehoboth Basters,

several communities were reduced by war and starvation to less

than half their size.

It is a curious irony that within weeks of the final action in this

genocidal campaign the Germans found a major new source of

wealth which required much African labour. In 1908 and 1909

diamonds were discovered in gravel beds east and south of

Liideritz. The imperial government soon entrusted all diamond

sales to a board controlled by the main German banks. By 1913

diamond exports were worth nearly £201; they comprised 75 per

cent of

all

exports and over

per cent of world diamond output.

This was achieved by conscripting the Ovambo who, after the

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1910—1914

war, were by far the largest ethnic group in the territory,

numbering around 100,000. German officials, aided by German

and Finnish missionaries, now made treaties with Ovambo chiefs.

The latter were allowed to retain substantial autonomy, but they

were given a new role, as labour recruiters. Conveniently for the

Germans, the Ovambo were already impoverished by drought,

flood and locusts, and by 1910 several thousand Ovambo were

going south each year to work for a spell in the mines or on the

railways; temporary' shortages' were made up by recruiting from

the Cape. As for the surviving Herero and Nama, they had lost

all their cattle and were forbidden to replace them; they had also

lost their land to white farmers, who now employed them at

starvation wages and freely used both whip and gun. By 1911,

90 per cent of the adult male population outside Ovamboland

were working for white men.

The new mining economy whetted the German settlers' appetite

for power. Their numbers rose sharply after the war, reaching

14,000 by 1910, though only 1,000 were farmers and many were

transients. In 1909 they received a measure of self-government:

elective municipal and district councils were created, and the latter

(consisting mostly of farmers) elected members for the new

territorial council

{Landesraf).

This had limited powers of legis-

lation, but only over settler areas; the governor thus retained

control over the main labour reservoir, Ovamboland. Besides, the

votes of official council members equalled those of settler

members, some of whom were the governor's nominees. In 1912

the government achieved a surplus, and imperial subsidies were

confined to military expenditure; from 1907 to 1915 they totalled

£14111.

In 1913 the government launched a programme of public

investment in white farming; it had already (for military ends)

extended the railway through the farming areas south of Wind-

hoek. But economic self-sufficiency encouraged settler hopes of

full self-government. Farmers were jealous of the mine companies'

access to labour; they were also disturbed by the government's

occasional lip-service to humane standards of behaviour. Yet the

farmers were now outnumbered by white miners and artisans,

groups that were given two council seats in 1914. Further

constitutional change was cut short by war.

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I914-I924

The First World War

In August 1914 the First World War broke out. South Africa, with

a German colony on its borders, was at once involved, and the

war aggravated the tensions within the Afrikaner community.

Botha and Smuts promptly affirmed their support for Britain. The

Union Defence Force relieved imperial land forces of their part

in the defence of the Union, and at the request of Britain the

government organised an invasion of South West Africa, by both

land and sea. Parliament gave massive support for such a

campaign, and South African troops, conveyed in ships of the

Royal Navy, seized the German port of Luderitz. But the

Germans captured Walvis Bay, and further advances by the South

Africans were delayed by trouble at home where many Afrikaners,

including Hertzog, were firmly opposed to the war. Early in

October, Colonel Maritz of the Union army defected to the

Germans; soon afterwards, General de Wet raised a rebel force

in the Orange Free State and proposed to establish a free South

African Republic with German help. By December, Botha had

suppressed this rebellion; prudently, he used only Afrikaner

troops, and the rebels were for the most part treated leniently.

Botha now resumed the invasion of South West Africa, where he

had already taken personal command. By the middle of January

1915,

South Africans had caused the Germans to abandon the

northern ports. Botha now led some 50,000 white troops against

only 2,000 German regulars and 7,000 reservists. In arid terrain,

without initial control of the railway, the South Africans found

rapid movement difficult, but the Germans failed to make the most

this.

Botha launched

three-pronged attack from Bechuanaland,

across the Orange River and inland from Luderitz, and soon

outmanoeuvred his opponents. He captured Windhoek in May,

and the German remnant which had fled north surrendered in

July-

Between August and October 1915

contingent of white South

Africans left for the Western Front. The infantry brigade was

diverted to Egypt, where it repelled the Turks and the Sanusi from

the western border. The brigade reached France in time for the

Somme offensive in July 1916: it was almost wiped out at Delville

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I914-1924

Wood. Meanwhile, South African troops had also been sent to

East Africa, where Smuts commanded the British imperial forces

during most of 1916. Nearly 25,000 white South Africans served

in France, and over 30,000 in East Africa; altogether nearly one

in five white men in South Africa were enrolled — a higher

proportion than for any other British Dominion

58,551

were killed

on active service. Coloured men also carried arms. Late in 1915

they were recruited for the Cape Corps; one battalion first served

in East Africa and was sent to Palestine in July 1918. In addition,

some 6,000 Cape Coloured served in France as drivers and

labourers. In all, 709 Coloured men were killed on active service.

There was no question of allowing black South Africans to

fight: the government feared that if black and white became

brothers-in-arms they might also find common cause as workers.

At the outbreak of war, the Congress sought to prove its loyalty

by refraining from political agitation and it offered to raise combat

troops for the South West African campaign. The offer was

declined; Congress was told that this was a white man's war. This

brusque treatment rankled, especially after Maritz's rebellion had

revealed the extent of white disloyalty. But in warfare, as in work,

the white man needed blacks to fetch and carry for him. Africans

were recruited as non-combatant labourers; Congress swallowed

its pride and lent its support. Thus over 30,000 black South

Africans served in South West Africa and 17,000 in East Africa

while, in 1917-18, 19,000 served in France with the South African

Native Labour Contingent; this also included 2,000 men from the

High Commission Territories. Over 3,000 black South Africans

died on military service, mostly from tuberculosis; 615 were

drowned when the

Mendi

sank off the Isle of Wight in 1917. For

many black men, service in France was of seminal importance:

a Sotho recruit later observed,

It was our first experience of living in a society without a colour bar...We were

aware, when we returned, that we were different from the other people at home.

Our behaviour, as we showed the South Africans, was something more than

they expected from a Native, more like what was expected among them of a

white man.

For South Africa's economy, the war had very mixed results.

The goldmining industry faced mounting difficulties. Gold out-

put, which had risen very fast up to 1912, fluctuated and from 1916

S. J. Jingoes, ed. J. and C. Perry, A chief is a chief

by the people

(London, 1975), 92-3.

561

SOUTHERN AFRICA

declined. Working costs continued

rise, yet the large inflow

capital

1909-10

was not

matched

for

another twenty years.

From 1916 new mines were developed on the Far East Rand which

later

did

very well,

but by

1918 half the goldmining companies

were unable

make

profit. Diamond sales fell sharply after

1913;

they enjoyed

brief recovery

1919-20 but did not again

reach these levels until

the

late 1920s. Besides,

the

benefits

mining

to the

Union's economy were diminished

by the pro-

portion

dividends which left the country and were reinvested

elsewhere.

Exports of ostrich feathers from the Cape, worth

£$m

in 1913, collapsed

they went out

fashion, but wool exports

greatly increased. Moreover, wartime shortages due

shipping

problems softened the opposition

farmers and businessmen

the growth of local manufacturing industries. Hitherto, these had

been mainly confined

construction

and

basic mining require-

ments, notably dynamite

and

some engineering products.

Now

consumer goods such as footwear, blankets and processed foods

were also produced. Between 1911 and 1921 the number of people

employed in manufacturing rose from

5,000

to 180,000; by 1922

manufacturing contributed 12

per

cent

national income.

The

mining industry, owned mainly abroad

and

selling abroad,

was

little interested in this expansion, but in 1917a federated Chamber

of Industries was formed and soon gained support for protection.

This expansion

production, dramatic when expressed

money terms, must

offset against wartime inflation: whereas

the cash value

exports increased

150 per cent between 1914

and 1920, their real value increased by much less than

per cent.

Inflation undoubtedly meant hardship

for

most wage-earners.

White mineworkers, at least, were able

bargain

the basis

their skills, kept artificially scarce

by the

colour

bar and

made

scarcer still as men went off

war.

1915 the Chamber of Mines

finally recognised the South African Mineworkers' Union, and

1918 it conceded a status quo agreement whereby the existing lines

between black and white jobs were

be maintained. Yet though

Between

1887 and 1952

about £148111

was

invested

goldmining from outside

the industry; some £120111 came from overseas, mostly Britain.

The

industry itself

reinvested

further £63111 before paying out dividends, which amounted

£248111.

Of this sum, three-quarters

£184111) went abroad.

S. H.

Frankel, Capital

investment

in Africa (London, 19)8), 89. For government revenue from the goldmines, see below,

586.

Percentage price increases, 1914-1920: imports,

180;

South African goods,

104;

wholesale, i}o; consumer, 78; British consumer,

160.

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