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

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1914-19*4

the wages of white mineworkers rose by 40 per cent between 1912

and 1919, they failed to keep pace with rising prices. For

non-whites, inflation on such a scale was disastrous. Their cash

wages scarcely rose at all, since they had no bargaining power.

Due to pre-war legislation, and in spite of military recruitment,

there were more Africans in search of work than ever before. By

1918,

some 260,000 were employed on the mines and

5,000

white farms; the latter, with their families, represented one-third

of the rural African population. The fall in real wages for Africans

threatened their very survival: when the influenza pandemic

swept South Africa in 1918 it attacked an already enfeebled

population and may have killed as many as 200,000 blacks.

The

emergence

of Afrikaner nationalism

The war and its aftermath hastened the growth of Afrikaner

nationalism. This was first revealed as a powerful political force

by the general election in October 1915. The South African Party

of Botha and Smuts was returned to power, but only because, on

the issue of the war, it had the support of the Unionist Party. Much

ground had been lost, especially in rural districts, to Hertzog's

National Party, which opposed the war. The Nationalists won 50

per cent of the poll, as against only 36 per cent for the SAP and

19 per cent for the Unionists. The Labour Party, which was split

on the question of the war, gained 9 per cent of the poll but failed

to add to its seats.

The rise of Hertzog's National Party gave voice to the cultural

and economic aspirations of Afrikaners. Their national identity

had been consolidated by their upheavals over the past century,

yet after the South African War many were deeply worried about

their capacity to sustain a separate culture in the face of the

growing power of English-speakers. Dutch had survived in South

Africa as a written language, used also in the pulpit and in polite

society, but it had long since become archaic; the language spoken

by ordinary people of Dutch descent was the taal, i.e. Afrikaans.

In 1906 an Afrikaans language association was formed, and in the

next few years several grammars and a dictionary were published,

while a translation of the Bible was undertaken. From 1914

This disaster is the subject of current research by Howard Phillips, University of Cape

Town.

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Afrikaans was introduced in schools, and by 1920 it had been

accepted by all the Dutch Reformed churches. There was a stream

of translations from European classics, poetry flourished, and an

anguished prose literature examined the predicament of the Volk.

Between 1914 and 1917 newspapers in Afrikaans were started in

the Transvaal, the Cape and the Orange Free State. The success

of the

Helpmekaar

fund which had been established to defend those

convicted of rebellion in 1914 stimulated further communal

fund-raising. Encouraged by the agricultural boom during the

First World War, two insurance companies were launched in 1919.

Several cooperatives followed, including a burial society and a

winegrowers' organisation. These early initiatives were streng-

thened by the formation in 1918 of the Afrikaner Broederbond

with its commitment to Christian nationalism, its alarm at the

cultural malaise in the cities and its political goal of a Calvinist

republic. The efforts of this secret society to coordinate the

regeneration of Afrikanerdom were in turn conditioned by the

Dutch Reformed churches as they added an ideology which

focused attention on the need for national coherence, encouraged

segregation and helped to insulate Afrikaners from the secularising

impact of urbanisation.

The initial position of the largest Afrikaner church, the

Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk, was essentially pragmatic. The

church, it was argued, had accepted segregated structures in the

nineteenth century for practical reasons; harmonious adminis-

tration of the different races within the one wider community now

seemed to require a comparable approach. But meanwhile the

distinctive character of Afrikaner society was gravely threatened:

the depression of 1904—9 had exposed the problems of 'poor

whites', mostly Afrikaner, scarcely able to make a living from the

land, while expanding towns brought poor whites and blacks ever

closer together. Against this background, a more ideological

analysis emerged, influenced by the nineteenth-century Dutch

theologian Abraham Kuyper. Calvinism had always accepted the

political realm as under the sovereignty of God. However,

Kuyper emphasised

sowereiniteit

in eie kring, God's sovereignty

within the separate spheres of creation. These independent

spheres of creation, not least the nations of history, had to be

respected and their component organisations protected from

liberal threats and revolutionary movements. Afrikaner theolo-

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gians,

working from this base, delineated a range of individual,

political, economic and cultural spheres, arguing not only for their

separate destinies, but also for Christian National Education as

the basis for their coordination and integration in the life of the

Volk. This doctrine remained contentious within the NGK and

at Stellenbosch (where a university was incorporated in 1918), but

it made a great impact on the two smaller churches, the

Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk and the Gereformeerde Kerk.

The major academic centre for this Kuyperian ideology became

the University College of Potchefstroom in the Transvaal (incor-

porated in 1921), and it gradually infused the Broederbond.

The emerging contrasts in Afrikaner leadership were underlined

when Botha died in August 1919. Smuts now became prime

minister. Urbane and intellectual, he lacked Botha's common

touch; besides, for the past two and a half

years

he had been away

in London and Paris, first as a member of both the Imperial War

Cabinet and the British War Cabinet, and then as South Africa's

representative (with Botha) at the Peace Conference. Many

Afrikaners distrusted Smuts's close ties within the Empire and his

association with European liberalism and secularism. Hertzog, on

the other hand, voiced a deepening sense among Afrikaners that

they were a persecuted elect. Supported by the Dutch Reformed

churches, he proposed the creation of two separate school

systems, in Afrikaans and English. Hertzog also intended, through

constitutional means, to make South Africa a republic and take

it out of the Empire.

In March 1920 a general election dramatically confirmed the

appeal of such

views:

the National Party won the greatest number

of both seats and votes. In the towns, the Labour Party defeated

many Unionists. Once more, Smuts stayed in power, but only by

continuing the alliance with the Unionists. This enabled him to

push through a series of measures intended to encourage business

while improving the lot of white workers: the government

created the Reserve Bank, and sought to improve the transport

system, check profiteering in foodstuffs, provide more houses and

establish fair rents. The South African and the National Parties

held a conference to discuss the possibility of reunion, but it soon

broke down, and instead the South African Party absorbed the

Unionists. In February 1921 Smuts put this amalgamation to the

test of

new election. His record, and his timing, paid dividends:

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the Nationalists kept up their strength, but the Labour Party had

not yet recovered from the expense of their last campaign and lost

more than half their seats. Thus the South African Party returned

to power with a large overall majority. But this triumph was

shortlived: almost at once, the government was faced with

economic crises which exacerbated white sentiments of class and

culture and in due course swept Smuts from power.

Protest and repression

The first few years after the war were a time of violent conflict

in South African society. The privations of wartime had hurt

Africans most, and there was a series of collisions between black

and white. Since Africans were excluded from parliamentary

politics, strikes and boycotts were their only effective weapons.

In 1913 the success of the white mineworkers' strike had

prompted some 11,000 Africans to strike too; they were soon

forced back to work, but thereafter their material conditions were

somewhat improved. In 1915-16 there were several outbreaks of

black unrest on the Rand, though checked by the prompt arrest

leaders.

Early in 1918, African mineworkers boycotted trading

stores on the Rand, in protest against the continuing fall in real

wages. Then white municipal workers in Johannesburg success-

fully struck for-higher

pay;

when some of their African colleagues

tried to follow suit in May, over a hundred were gaoled. In June

the Transvaal branch of Congress convened a mass meeting and

demanded higher wages for African workers on the Rand. There

were several small strikes in July, but plans for a general strike

on the Rand were suspended when Botha agreed to meet a

deputation from Congress. The appointment of the Moffat

commission of enquiry raised hopes of reform, but they were soon

dashed. The Transvaal Congress leaders testified eloquently to the

commission: they denounced the mine companies' recruitment

and control of black labour as 'a relic of the slave trade which

civilised countries still practise under modified and conventional

forms'.

The MofFat Commission, however, accepted the view of

the Chamber of Mines that since African mineworkers received

free food and lodging there was no reason to increase their cash

wages, even though the Chamber ignored their need to buy boots

Quoted in F. A. Johnstone, Class, race and

gold:

a study of class relations and racial

discrimination in South Africa (London, 1976), 193-4.

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1914-1924

and clothing, let alone furnish their homes. Thus the Moffat

Report offered no encouragement to disfranchised Africans to

suppose that they would achieve anything by reasoned protest.

In March and April 1919 the Transvaal Congress organised

more militant resistance, in which women took a prominent part;

in Johannesburg and Pretoria, though not in the mine compounds,

it led massive non-violent demonstrations against the pass-laws.

There was still hope that reform might come from outside South

Africa: as they dumped their

passes,

crowd sang' Rule Britannia'

and cheered the king and President Wilson of the USA. Indeed,

Wilson's talk of national self-determination had encouraged the

National Congress to send a delegation to the Peace Conference

'to let them know that there are two nations here, white and

black'.

But neither tactic had any success. In South Africa, the

government set up a one-man commission and then ignored its

proposals for modest changes in the pass-laws. At Versailles,

Congress failed to get a hearing. Its delegation went on to London

and sought to remind the king of black loyalty during the war,

but its 'Memorial' was merely referred back to the governor-

general. It may have stiffened Britain's resolve to retain the High

Commission Territories, but otherwise the only result of the

journey to Europe was to drain Congress of hard-won funds.

Congress was clearly in crisis. Peaceful petition had failed yet

again, but few wished to revive more militant tactics. Congress

had been founded by men committed to constitutional methods,

and concerned above all to see the Cape property franchise

extended. Many had qualms about illegal action such as striking

or even pass-dumping. By and large, the literate black middle

class,

conditioned by liberal expectations of individual advance-

ment, feared mass protests and the damage they might do to race

relations. The Congress newspaper Abantu Batho had fiercely

criticised the government, and in 1916 Solomon Plaatje, first

secretary of Congress, published his Native life in

South

Africa, a

searing attack on the Natives Land Act. Yet in 1918 Plaatje

congratulated himself and De Beers on negotiating welfare

measures for workers at Kimberley which would immunise them

from the 'black Bolsheviks' of the Transvaal Congress.

In 1919

Ibid.,

176.

Brian Willan, 'Sol Plaatje, De Beers and an old tram shed: class relations and social

control in a South African town, 1918-1919', Journal of Southern African Studies, 1978,

ii, 206.

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the National Congress finally published

its

constitution.

important respects, this was

distinctly conservative document:

chiefs were

to sit ex

officio

in an

'upper house'; women were

allowed only auxiliary membership, without the vote; while the

list of methods to be used by Congress did not include industrial

action.

The reluctance of Congress to assume leadership of the masses

meant that it was soon eclipsed as a political force by the Industrial

and Commercial Union (ICU). This was formed in January 1919

by Clements Kadalie, an itinerant worker from Nyasaland, in Cape

Town, where

December he brought out 400 dockworkers

strike. The Transvaal Congress was still very active:

January

1920 it instigated a conference with employers on the Rand which

yielded slightly higher wages for

all

but mineworkers. This in turn

provoked 72,000 black miners to engage in what the Chamber of

Mines admitted was an 'absolutely peaceful cessation of work'.

The strike was ruthlessly suppressed. Men were driven down the

shafts both by false rumours of

return to work and by soldiers'

bayonets; three strikers were killed

and

forty wounded.

significant concessions were made

and no

overall leadership

emerged, while there had been little scope

for

Congress activity

in the mine compounds. But associations of African workers had

been formed recently in Port Elizabeth and East London, while

Indian

and

Coloured workers formed trade unions, mainly

Durban. In July

1920

several groups of African workers, including

the ICU, were convened

Bloemfontein

Selby Msimang,

founder-member

Congress. This failed

achieve immediate

unity, but Kadalie's ICU soon proved the most effective nucleus

for a national workers' movement: in August he won a wage rise

for some of his Cape Town dockers by merely threatening

strike.

In October 20 Africans were killed by police in

demonstration

at Port Elizabeth; this led to modest wage increases for municipal

employees, but it also provided the occasion for Kadalie to reunite

the workers' movement in an enlarged ICU, in which he displaced

Msimang.

The government's response

African discontent

was not

wholly confined

the use

brute force.

May 1920 Smuts

admitted that Africans needed constitutional channels

protest

and introduced a Native Affairs Act; this provided for the creation

" Johnstone,

Class,

ran and

gold,

180.

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of tribal councils in the reserves, advisory councils for Africans

in urban areas,

Native Affairs Commission (consisting of whites)

and territorial conferences of chiefs and council members. This

measure implemented an ideology of segregation which Smuts

had expounded in Britain; black and white, he argued, could not

be governed in the same way and the Union would pioneer a

formula for civilising all Africa. The Act found favour with many

liberals, in London as well as South Africa, but it did no more

than provide a facade of paternalist consultation. Besides, segreg-

ation remained economically as implausible as ever. In 1916 the

Beaumont Commission had recommended that the land available

for African ownership be increased from 7.} to 13 per cent of the

country.

Parliament objected; provincial committees proposed

a slightly smaller increase, but Smuts did not put this before

parliament.

The Native Affairs Act was promptly denounced by the Rev.

R. Mahabane, leader of Congress in the Cape, as an evasion

of its main demand: the right to sit in parliament. But he also

acknowledged that Britain ' had finally washed her hands of the

innocent blood of the Bantu races'.

He was thus obliged, along

with other Congress leaders, to consider whether equal rights

might after all be compatible in certain ways with the inescap-

able fact of segregation. There was serious talk of seeking parlia-

mentary representation through a separate electoral roll, and of

accepting residential segregation if only the area in which blacks

could live as of right was much enlarged and included towns.

Once the Native Affairs Act was law, Congress agreed to

cooperate with it. If Britain would not help, and if mass action

was eschewed, Congress could do no more than talk to such

whites as would listen. By now there were several who would,

aware that the more conservative Congress members shared their

fears of radical leadership among black workers. The scope for

such talk was enlarged in 1921: with the encouragement of Dr

J. E. K. Aggrey, a black West African member of the visiting

Phelps-Stokes Commission,

a group of liberal whites in the

professions set up in Johannesburg the first of several local and

Sec above, p. 549.

Quoted by Peter

Walshe,

TberiscofAfrican

nationalism

South

Africa (London, 1971),

85.

See chapters 3 and 5.

569

SOUTHERN AFRICA

interracial Joint Councils, through which they hoped to bring

African wants and aspirations to the attention of white legislators

and employers. Several Congress leaders took part in Joint

Councils, and also in the biennial European-Bantu Conferences,

initiated in 1923 by the Dutch Reformed churches. During the

1920s, the English-speaking universities of Cape Town and the

Witwatersrand (incorporated in 1918 and 1921) introduced the

study of African languages and social organisation. Even these

universities, however, rarely accepted black students before the

Second World War. In 1923 Fort Hare, the college for blacks in

the eastern Cape, became a university college, but Africans who

wished to study medicine normally had to go abroad. Black

doctors were kept away from white patients, and black lawyers

were virtually excluded from the South African Bar.

Even if a few blacks did make new white friends, they also

moved further from their own people. Congress lost ground both

in the towns and in rural areas: chiefs were essentially government

employees and risked dismissal by supporting it. This was

underlined by the massacre in May 1921 at Bulhoek, in the eastern

Cape. The

Israelite' followers of Enoch Mgijima were typical of

many millennial groups which had sprung up under charismatic

leaders among illiterate people who rejected white authority and

the chiefs who had to enforce it. In 1920 the Israelites refused to

move from land which a number of Africans held in common.

This angered not only these Africans but also white farmers who

wanted the Israelites' labour. The newly appointed Native Affairs

Commission concluded that the Israelites would have to be

removed by force. Five hundred charged with sticks and assegais

against armed police; 163 were killed.

By this time the white community was also under great stress.

Those on the land suffered first. In 1919-21 there were severe

droughts: such a calamity was by no means without precedent,

but it aggravated the cumulative damage done by years of

overgrazing and careless veld-burning. The post-war boom lifted

the value of agricultural and pastoral exports to a record level in

1919,

but prices fell sharply in

1920—1.

More and more Afrikaners

were driven in desperation to seek ever-scarcer jobs in towns

which they still feared as centres of an alien economy and English

culture, where distinctions between white and black were all too

easily blurred. Between 1911 and 1921 the white population in

57O

1914-1924

urban areas increased faster than that of

blacks.

This was a phase

in what D. F. Malan, Nationalist leader in the Cape, likened in

1916 to another great trek: but this time, he said, it was 'a journey

from Canaan to Egypt'.

Lacking the skills of artisans, Afrikaners

fresh from the countryside had good reason to fear being undercut

in the labour market by black migrant workers whose wages were

low just because, unlike unskilled white workers, they retained

communal rights to the use of land in reserves and thus, in theory,

had an alternative livelihood.

The proletarianisation of Afrikaners combined with the long-

term crisis in the goldmining industry to cause an explosion on

the Rand. From 1916, gold output steadily declined. In 1919,

Britain abandoned the gold standard, and from July the Rand

mines were able to sell in the best available market. At first, this

yielded a 'premium' well above the normal price, but late in 1921

the premium fell sharply, and in any case it simply reflected a

depreciation of currency which inflated the cost of mining

materials. It now seemed likely that two-thirds of the producing

mines would soon have to close. This predicament was at least

partly due to the fact that the mine companies' wage bill for 21,000

whites was almost twice that for 180,000

blacks.

Thus in December

1921 the Chamber of Mines abandoned the status quo agreement

of 1918 and proposed to replace about 2,000 semi-skilled white

mineworkers with blacks.

This plan was political dynamite, for implicitly it threatened

most white workers. During the war, about a quarter of the white

workforce had gone on active service. The ensuing vacancies in

semi-skilled jobs were mostly filled by Afrikaners: by 1922 they

numbered three out of four white workers on the goldmines. But

here and there, up to 1918, semi-skilled jobs had also been given

to experienced Africans, who had shown they could do them quite

as well as whites. It was precisely because they knew this that

white mineworkers saw the Chamber's proposal as a new threat

to the livelihood, not just of

minority, but of white workers in

general. This was underlined when, early in January 1922, whites

went on strike in the coalmines to prevent wage cuts: Africans

and white officials kept up production much as before, thus

showing that most whites were dispensable.

Quoted by D. Welsh, 'The growth of towns', in M. Wilson and L. M. Thompson

(eds.),

The Oxford

history

South

Africa, II (Oxford, 1971), 204.

571

SOUTHERN AFRICA

On io January 1922 all white workers went on strike in the

goldmines, power-stations and engineering-shops. They were led

by a combination of unions involved in the dispute, but Afrikaners

also created semi-military commandos. Negotiations proved

fruitless. Smuts, concerned above all to maintain the country's key

industry, declared on

February that the government would use

its powers to protect strikebreakers. Thus fortified, the Chamber

of Mines rejected a new approach early in March from the unions,

who now ceded leadership of the strike to the Council of Action,

a group of radicals who had been expelled from the mineworkers'

union in the previous year. Their secretary was W. H. Andrews,

who had founded the Communist Party of South Africa in 1921.

However, Marxist commitment to working-class solidarity,

regardless of colour, found no response among white workers

who had been willing to scab during the African strike in 1920.

Besides, the council's authority

was

challenged by the commandos,

whose fighting mood was further excited when three of their men

were killed by police at Boksburg. While the strike itself slowly

began to lose support, Afrikaner commandos planned an armed

rising both on the Rand and in the surrounding countryside: they

resolved to declare a republic. There were white assaults on

African miners and Indians, some of whom were killed, and also

on the police. On 10 March Smuts proclaimed martial law and

surrounded the Rand with troops, planes, tanks and artillery.'

These forces were at once attacked by the commandos, but within

five days the government had secured control of the Rand.

Between 150 and 220 people were killed, including

soldiers and

29 policemen. Five thousand men were arrested; four were

hanged for murder.

Hertzog, the Nationalist leader, was quick to make political

capital from this disaster. He pointed to Smuts's repeated use of

force: against labour in 1913 and 1914; against Afrikaner rebels;

against Africans at Port Elizabeth and Bulhoek; and now on the

Rand. 'The Prime Minister's footsteps dripped with blood.'

Meanwhile, the mine companies rubbed salt in white wounds.

They proceeded to reduce working costs by reducing white wages

The Union government was now in charge of all land-based forces in South Africa;

the Imperial Military Command there had been abolished in December 1921.

" Quoted from the Cape Argus by W. K. Hancock, Smuts, II. The fields of force,

1919-19JO (Cambridge, 1968), 88.

57*