segregation_and_apartheid_in_twentieth_century

SAUL DUBOW

Much of the opposition mounted against the colour bar represented an alliance between proponents of laissez faire economic policies and those more inclined towards the expression of humanitarian sentiment. Yet, in spite of the opposition mounted against statutory job discrimination, it is notable that segregation itself was not under attack at this stage. Indeed some of the most outspoken opposition to the Bill emanated from such liberal paternalists as Brookes, Pim and Loram, who remained supporters of Hertzog. What distressed these individuals in particular was the principle of statutory discrimination, which it was feared would arouse unnecessary hostility among the African élite. The colour bar, it was pointed out, had long been a de facto feature of South African life and it could effectively be maintained through indirect means—for instance, through manipulation of the Wage Act.105

If the two segregationist traditions differed most strongly on the question of the colour bar, on other issues there was a substantial degree of convergence. The 1923 Urban Areas Act serves as a good example. This measure managed to synthesize the findings of the Stallard Commission (which argued that Africans’ presence in the urban areas should be restricted to their ‘ministering’ to the needs of whites) with those of the Godley Commission (which, accepting African urbanization as inevitable, went on to propose measures designed to improve the living conditions of permanently proletarianized Africans). In combining labour control with the ‘protection’ of Africans the 1923 Act attracted significant support from liberal segregationists, and the manner in which it was debated was portrayed as a vindication of the ‘consultative’ spirit underlying the 1920 Native Affairs Act.106

Common to both strands of segregationist ideology was an unashamed paternalism towards Africans and an unquestioning commitment to the maintenance of white supremacy. There were differences, however, as to what supremacy entailed, as well as the means by which it was to be upheld. By the early 1920s the major white political parties, together with significant elements of African opinion, had come to accept segregation in its broadest terms. This does not mean that there was unanimity about segregationist policies, much less that it was universally welcomed. But arguments about its content tended to revolve around matters of detail and differences in interpretation rather than on the generally accepted principle of consolidating a racially differentiated society.

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EDITORS’ NOTES

aSir Alfred Milner: British official who became the High Commissioner in South Africa from 1897 to 1905 during the key period of the South African War (1899–1902) and subsequent reconstruction policies for which he took considerable responsibility.

bSAP: South African Party. Established on a countrywide basis after Union in 1910, it was the ruling party in the all-white South African parliament until 1924 under Generals L.Botha and J.C.Smuts. It was a vehicle for moderate Afrikaner opinion, as well as many Englishspeakers, anxious to establish conciliation and white unity.

NOTES

1M.Lacey, Working for Boroko: The Origins of a Coercive Labour System in South Africa (Johannesburg, 1981), 14–17; R.Parry, ‘“In a Sense Citizens, But Not Altogether Citizens…” Rhodes, Race, and the Ideology of Segregation at the Cape in the Late Nineteenth Century’,

Canadian Journal of African Studies, XVII, 3 (1983), 377–91.

2See for example Paul B.Rich, Race and Empire in British Politics

(Cambridge, 1986), 21; E.H.Brookes, The History of Native Policy in South Africa from 1830 to the Present Day (Cape Town, 1924), 99–107. Note that the Chairman of the SANAC report was Sir Godfrey Lagden, a former Resident Commissioner of Basutoland. In arguing for segregation Howard Pim (see note 13) often cited the Basutoland precedent.

3D.Welsh, The Roots of Segregation: Native Policy in Colonial Natal, 1845– 1910 (London and Cape Town, 1971), 322.

4S.Marks, The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa: Class, Nationalism and the State in Twentieth Century Natal (Johannesburg, 1986), 5 and ch. 1. See also S.Marks, ‘White Supremacy: A Review Article’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, XXIX, 2 (1987), 385–97.

5C.W.de Kiewiet, A History of South Africa, Social and Economic (Oxford, 1941); E.A.Walker, The Frontier Tradition in South Africa (Oxford, 1930); C.M.Tatz, Shadow and Substance in South Africa: A Study in Land and Franchise Policies Affecting Africans, 1910–1960

(Pietermaritzburg, 1962).

6G.Leach, South Africa: No Easy Path to Peace, 2nd edn (London, 1987), 36, 40.

7A.N.Pelzer’s authorized history of the Afrikaner Broederbond, Die Afrikaner-Broederbond: Eerste 50 Jaar (Cape Town, 1979), 163–4.

8M.Legassick, ‘The Making of South African “Native Policy”, 1903– 1923: The Origins of “Segregation”’, seminar paper, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London (1973), 2.

9J.W.Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy (Cambridge, 1982), 211.

10South African Native Affairs Commission 1903–5, vol. I (Cape Town, 1905).

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11Rich, Race and Empire, 56.

12Cape Argus, 20 August 1902. Note that the Governor-General was not talking of territorial segregation; he was referring to the creation of special urban ‘locations’ for Africans in the wake of the bubonic plague. My thanks to Christopher Saunders for this reference.

13Pim Papers, University of the Witwatersrand Library A881 Hb8.16, ‘The Native Problem in South Africa’, by J.H.Pim, 1905. J.H.Pim (1862–1934) was born near Dublin and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He came to South Africa in 1890 as a chartered accountant with Rhodes’s British South Africa Company. In 1894 he established his own practice and became an auditor to De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd. He was a member of Milner’s nominated Johannesburg Town Council of 1903. Pim was a committed Quaker, who increasingly devoted himself to a variety of social welfare activities. Through his connection with the Joint Councils and the Institute of Race Relations, he became a prominent figure in liberal circles, and functioned as a theorist, organizer and patron. Various obituaries testify to Pim’s humanitarianism and refer to him as a champion of ‘native rights’.

14As note 13, p. 9.

15P.Rich, ‘The Agrarian Counter-Revolution in the Transvaal and the Origins of Segregation: 1902–1913’, African Studies seminar paper, University of the Witwatersrand (1975), 15; M.Legassick and D.Innes ‘Capital Restructuring and Apartheid: A Critique of Constructive Engagement’, in African Affairs, vol. 76, issue 305 (1977), 465–6.

16Pim, ‘The Native Problem’, 9.

17Pim, 7, 10.

18Pim Papers, A881 Fa 3/2, Abstract of paper for British Association, 2. For more on Pim’s interpretation of American History see his paper ‘The Question of Race’, delivered to the Fortnightly Club, 15 November 1906, in Pim Papers, A881 Hb 17.

19Pim Papers, Fa 1/3, ‘A Note on Native Policy’, 7.

20As note 19.

21As note 19, 7–8.

22Pim, ‘The Question of Race’, 2.

23South African Native Affairs Commission 1903–5, vol. I (Cape Town, 1905), 895.

24Pim Papers, A881 Fa 9/7, ‘Memorandum re “Segregation”’, (1914), 2.

25Stanley Trapido has pointed out to me that Pim’s ideas about the functions of the reserves appears in Appendix VIII, p. 111 of Cd 7707,

Dominions Royal Commission. Minutes of Evidence Taken in the Union of South Africa in 1914, Part II.

26M.S.Evans, Black and White in South East Africa: A Study in Sociology

(London, 1911). Maurice Smethurst Evans (1854–1920) went to Natal in 1875 and became a member of its Legislative Assembly in 1897. He served on the 1906–7 Natal Native Commission and published a pamphlet, The Native Problem in Natal (Durban, 1906). Evans travelled to the United States, after which he published a second volume, Black and White in the Southern States: A Study of the Race

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Problem in the United States from a South African Point of View (London, 1915).

27See for example Sarah Gertrude Millin in her The South Africans (London, 1926), 279, where she describes Evans as the ‘soundest and fairest observer of black and white inter-relationships in South Africa’.

28Evans, Black and White in South East Africa, 276.

29Evans, 277.

30Evans, 310.

31Evans, 153.

32Evans, 316.

33Evans, 177. See also 149–50.

34C.T.Loram, The Education of the South African Native (London, 1917). Charles Templeman Loram (1879–1940) was born in Pietermaritzburg and educated at the universities of Cape Town and Cambridge. He completed a doctorate at Columbia University in 1916. Between 1906 and 1920 he worked within the Natal Education Department. He left in 1920 to take up a position on the newly created Native Affairs Commission, in which capacity he served until 1929. In 1930 he rejoined the Natal Education Department as its Superintendent of Education. Loram was part of the Phelps-Stokes Educational Commission to Africa during 1921–4, and played a key role in allocating funds for research projects. He was closely involved in the Joint Council movement and became the first Chairman of the South African Institute of Race Relations in 1929. In 1931 Loram left SA to become Sterling Professor of Education at Yale University. He became Chairman and Director of Studies in the Department of Culture Contacts and Race Relations at Yale in 1933.

35Loram, chs IX and X.

36Loram, 17–25.

37Brookes, The History of Native Policy in South Africa from 1830 to the Present Day (Cape Town, 1924).

38Brookes, 501.

39Brookes, 343.

40Brookes, 504.

41This section is a condensed version of a paper entitled ‘“Race, Civilisation and Culture”: The Elaboration of Segregationist Discourse in the Inter-War Years’, in S.Marks and S.Trapido (eds),

The Politics of Race, Class and Nationalism in Twentieth-Century South Africa (London and New York, 1987).

42G.Jones, Social Darwinism and English Thought (Brighton, 1980), 147.

43Jones, Social Darwinism, 103.

44Rich, Race and Empire.

45Parry, ‘In a Sense Citizens’, 384–8.

46S.J.R.Martin, ‘Political and Social Theories of Transkeian Administrators in the Late Nineteenth Century’, MA thesis, UCT (1978), 82.

47R.Hyam, Elgin and Churchill at the Colonial Office 1905–8 (London, 1968), 539.

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48As note 47.

49P.B.Rich, White Power and the Liberal Conscience: Racial Segregation in South Africa and South African Liberalism 1921–60 (Manchester, 1984),

50On the prevalence (in the pre-Nazi era) of theories of racial superiority in South Africa derived from the biological sciences, see J.M. Coetzee’s brilliant essay, ‘Blood, Flaw, Taint, Degeneration: The Case of Sarah Gertrude Millin’, English Studies in Africa, XXIII,

1(1980).

51C.T.Loram, The Education, 9, 11. See also Brookes, History, ch. XVIII. On p. 403 Brookes states that ‘The native…is not naturally a towndweller or an industrialist’.

52See Rich, Race and Empire, ch. 6, which investigates the antimiscegenation movement in interwar Britain, centring on the presence of black seamen in ports like Cardiff and Liverpool.

53E.Stubbs, Tightening Coils: An Essay on Segregation (Pretoria, 1925); G.H.Nicholls, Bayete! (London, 1923).

54M.Evans, Black and White in South East Africa, 223.

55See for example Hertzog’s Smithfield and Malmesbury speeches in

The Segregation Problem: General Hertzog’s Solution (Cape Town, nd [1926]).

56C.M.Tatz, Shadow and Substance. On pp. 41–5 Tatz isolates and evaluates the validity of twelve arguments advanced by Hertzog for the removal of the Cape African franchise.

57De Kiewiet, A History of South Africa, 181.

58See for example J.E.Duerden, ‘Genetics and Eugenics in South Africa: Heredity and Environment’, South African Journal of Science (henceforth SAJS), XXII (1925).

59See for example M.L.Fick, ‘Intelligence Test Results of Poor White, Native (Zulu), Coloured and Indian School Children and the Educational and Social Implications’, in SAJS, XXVI (1929); Loram,

The Education, chs IX–XI.

60J.D.Rheinallt Jones, ‘The Need for a Scientific Basis for South African Native Policy’, SAJS, XXIII (1926); Loram, The Education; Evidence of Prof. and Mrs Hoernlé to Native Economic Commission (henceforth NEC), 13 June 1931, 9183–5.

61Union Government, Pretoria, UG (henceforth UG), 14–’26, Report of the Economic and Wage Commission (1925), 326.

62S.M.Molema, The Bantu—Past and Present (Edinburgh, 1920), 328.

63W.Eiselen, Die Naturelle Vraagstuk (Cape Town, 1929), 3–4.

64On Eiselen’s retirement the Bantu Affairs Department’s official journal Bantu, VII, 8 (1960) devoted an entire issue to him. A lengthy eulogy to Eiselen quoted extensively from the 1929 address cited above. It was represented as a direct antecedent to his views on apartheid.

65On the material basis of Cape liberalism, see Stanley Trapido’s pioneering essay ‘“The Friends of the Natives”: Merchants, Peasants and the Political and Ideological Structure of Liberalism in the Cape,

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1854–1910’, in S.Marks and A.Atmore (eds), Economy and Society in Pre-Industrial South Africa (London, 1980).

66On the institutionalization of anthropological studies in South Africa and its relationship to segregation see my ‘“Understanding the Native Mind”: Anthropology, Cultural Adaptation and the Elaboration of a Segregationist Discourse in South Africa, c. 1920–36’, seminar paper, University of Cape Town (1984). For a discussion of the impact of anthropology on liberal thought in the 1920s and 1930s, see Rich, White Power, ch. 3.

67Loram, The Education, vii–viii; J.D.Rheinallt Jones, ‘Editorial’ in Bantu Studies, I, 1 (1921), 1; J.E.Duerden, ‘Social Anthropology in South Africa: Problems of Nationality’, SAJS, XVIII (1921), 4–5. According to Adam Kuper, Anthropologists and Anthropology (London, 1973), 62, Smuts, in consultation with Haddon of Cambridge, was personally responsible for inviting Radcliffe-Brown to UCT.

68A.R.Radcliffe-Brown, ‘Some Problems of Bantu Sociology’, Bantu Studies, I, 3 (1922), 5.

69See my ‘“Understanding the Native Mind”’.

70See Rich, White Power, ch. 3, especially 54–63; also Rich, Race and Empire, ch. 5.

71G.W.Stocking, Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York, 1968). For an assessment of the impact of Boasian thought, see also M.Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory (London, 1968), chs IX and X.

72Stocking, Race, Culture and Evolution, 199–200. See also the entry on ‘culture’ in R.Williams’s Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society

(London, 1976), 78–9.

73J.C.Smuts, Africa and Some World Problems (Oxford, 1930).

74Smuts, 77.

75Smuts, 77.

76Smuts, 84.

77Evidence of G.P.Lestrade to NEC, Pretoria, 9 June 1931, 8787.

78Lestrade Papers, University of Cape Town, Jagger Library BC 255 K1. 11, ‘Statements in Answer to General Questionnaire Issued by the NEC’.

79UG 22–’32, Report of the Native Economic Commission 1930–32, 31, para.

200.Note that Dr Roberts of the Native Affairs Commission and NEC dissented from this view, adding, ‘the way of progress for the Native lies along the path of the Native assimilating as rapidly as possible the European civilization and culture’, 31, para. 201.

80J.E.Holloway, ‘The American Negro and the South African Bantu—A Study in Assimilation’, South African Journal of Economics, I, 4 (1933),

81Schapera, Western Civilisation and the Natives of South Africa: Studies in Culture Contact (London, 1934). See also his ‘Changing Life in the Native Reserves’, Race Relations, I, 1 (1933). See Max Gluckman’s paper ‘Anthropology and Apartheid: The Work of South African Anthropologists’, in M.Fortes and S.Patterson (eds), Studies in African Social Anthropology (London and New York, 1975), 36.

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Gluckman credits Schapera as the dominant figure in reorientating British anthropology towards the idea that Africans and whites were ‘integral parts of a single social system, so that all had to be studied in the same way’.

82W.M.Macmillan, My South African Years: An Autobiography (Cape Town, 1975), 194, 214–19. Macmillan criticized Rheinallt Jones, the Hoernlés and especially Loram for their involvement in anthropological research. For details of his failed attempt to subvert Jones’s course on the native law and administration, see Wits. Arts Faculty Minutes, vol. VIII, 38–40b, University of the Witwatersrand Archives, William Cullen Library.

83W.M.Macmillan, Complex South Africa: An Economic Footnote to History (London, 1930), preface, 8.

84Heaton Nicholls Papers, University of Natal, Killie Campbell Library, KCM 3323, File 3. Handwritten memo on Native Policy, nd, 1.

85Records of the South African Institute of Race Relations Archives, University of the Witwatersrand Library (henceforth ‘SAIRR’) AD 843 72. 1. Unmarked newspaper clipping, 10 May 1929 (CPA). For the full Afrikaans version, see Eiselen, Die Naturelle Vraagstuk.

86Smuts, Africa, 96.

87SAIRR Papers, AD 843 B53. 1, Natal Advertiser, 15 May 1935.

88As note 87.

89Rich, Race and Empire, ch. 2.

90M.Perham, ‘A Restatement of Indirect Rule’, Africa, VII, 3 (1934), 326. See also B.Porter, The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism 1850–1983 (London and New York, 1975), 293.

91L.Mair, Native Policies in Africa (London, 1936), 261–9.

92Hancock, Smuts, vol. II, 116.

93UG 7–19, Report of the Native Affairs Department (NAD) for the Years 1913–1918, 16. This periodization differs from John Cell’s, who argues that the essential institutions of segregation were in place by 1924 and that its principal architect was Smuts, not Hertzog. See his

White Supremacy, 58, 216.

94See e.g. The Round Table, no. 44 (1921), 945; GG (State Archives, Pretoria, Archives of the Governor-General) 1435 50/865, GovernorGeneral Buxton to Viscount Milner, 21 July 1920, ‘Native Affairs Bill (Confidential)’; J.H.Hofmeyr, South Africa (London, 1931), 170–1.

95UG 34–’22, Report of the NAD for the Years 1919–1921, 4.

96As note 95, 1–4. See also Rand Daily Mail, 21 February 1923.

97P.Walshe, The Rise of African Nationalism in South Africa: The African National Congress 1912–1952 (London, 1970), 70–1, 89 and passim. See also H.J. and R.Simons, Class and Colour in South Africa 1850– 1950 (Harmondsworth, 1969), ch. 11; E.Roux, Time Longer than Rope: The Black Man’s Struggle for Freedom in South Africa (London, 1948), 143.

98P.Bonner, ‘The Transvaal Native Congress 1917–1920: The Radicalisation of the Black Petty Bourgeoisie on the Rand’, in Marks and Rathbone (eds), Industrialisation and Social Change:

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African Class Formation, Culture and Consciousness, 1870–1930

(London, 1982).

99GG 1435 50/854, Buxton to Viscount Milner, 3 June 1920, ‘Report on the Native Affairs Bill’, 1. See also Herbst Papers, University of Cape Town, Jagger Library, BC 79 D24, Memo by E.R.Garthorne on Native Segregation, 7 October 1924. Garthorne said that while segregation was ‘freely advocated in general terms, there has as yet been no very precise or authoritative exposition of its implications…’,1.

100The Round Table, no. 57 (December, 1924), 192.

101Cape Times (editorial), 3 May 1924. See also 11 and 12 June 1924, 17 September 1924 and 18 October 1924.

102Hancock, Smuts, vol. II, 163.

103For an account of this lineage, see Cape Times (editorial), 22 October 1924; 7 April 1936 (editorial); 1 May 1935 (editorial); 22 August 1936 (editorial). Also Smuts, Native Policy, 78–85; Hancock, Smuts, vol. II, 227; Hofmeyr, South Africa, 313–15.

104Cape Times (editorial) 23 January 1925; 11 May 1926 (editorial); 17 February 1925 (editorial).

105J.H.Pim, ‘General Hertzog’s Smithfield Proposals’, The SA Quarterly, VII, 3–4 (1926), 6. ‘I have no quarrel with the native colour bar formed by public opinion’ but the proposed legislation ‘will have grave reactions upon the relations between Europeans and Natives throughout the Union. It protects the inefficient white against the efficient native’. See also Brookes, The Colour Problems of South Africa (Lovedale, 1934), 9.

106See, e.g. Cape Times, 3 April 1922, 29 June 1927 (editorial); UG 36–’23,

Report of the Native Affairs Commission for the Year 1922, 4–5; The Round Table, no. 53 (1923), 174.

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7

CHIEFTAINCY AND

THE CONCEPT OF

ARTICULATION:

South Africa circa 1900–50

William Beinart

This article by William Beinart, a South African-born historian now based at the University of Bristol, was intended to reorient explanations of segregation and apartheid away from metropolitan policy-making and towards the rural African reserves. Taking issue with Wolpe’s thesis about the role of the reserves in providing industry with a cheap labour force and the view that segregation/apartheid was tailor-made to the demands of capitalist mine-owners and industrialists, Beinart shows that the migrant labour system was significantly shaped by the dynamics of African societies themselves. Beinart is also concerned to counter the assumption in much liberal and Marxist scholarship that rural Africans were simply available to be reshaped by colonists—either as modernizing Christian peasants or as urban workers. He draws attention to the complex nature of local African politics and the varying forces to which chiefs attempted to respond. As the central state attempted to intervene more and more directly in rural life, some chiefs played critical roles in the defence of communal resources and values and even became the focus of political opposition. Others collaborated with the apartheid government in an attempt to secure their own positions or to preserve some local autonomy for their regions. But the line between resistance and collaboration was seldom impermeable. Segregation was therefore not simply imposed upon rural Africans from ‘above’ by a state enjoying absolute power; it was constantly negotiated and challenged even as the rise of apartheid led to a steady erosion of the bargaining position of rural Africans.

* * *

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This note is not primarily concerned with the theoretical standing of, or language surrounding, the concept of articulation. Rather, it explores the metaphor suggested by that term: the idea that two ‘modes of production’ can coexist, however briefly, during a period of ‘transition’. The issue is also approached at something of a tangent by focusing on the survival of chieftaincy in South Africa’s African reserves.

Many of those who now hold power in the homelands or Bantustans are descended from, or claim descent from, old chiefly lineages. Yet these areas have undergone far-reaching changes in the last century; their people became deeply dependent on wages even where they retained access to rural plots and stock. Chieftaincy, a political form which recalls pre-colonial society, hardly seems an appropriate institution to represent and govern a migrant labour force, much less those hundreds of thousands, now millions, of people who have been resettled in rural towns.

Confronted with this anomaly, critics of Pretoria’s Bantustan policy have often argued that chieftaincy was an imposition. The government resurrected a spent institution as part of its attempt to extend self-government to the reserves. Explanations of the provenance of the policy differ. Scholars are increasingly tracing it back to the 1920s and the heyday of segregationism, rather than just to the early apartheid era of the 1950s.1 Nevertheless, it is widely recognized that the current form of chieftaincy was entrenched in the latter period when government officials, accompanied by tame anthropologists and black information officers, scoured the rural districts for the remnants of chiefly lineages. ‘Tribes’ were defined, Tribal and Regional Authorities created and some of the chiefs were installed with much pseudotraditional ceremony. Chiefs were also given salaries and scope for personal gain. In this way, the state hoped to secure a conservative, or reactionary, rural hierarchy which would help to defuse broader national struggles. Modern chieftaincy, in short, has been seen as a creation of, and creature of, the state.

If this outline caricatures some of the more complex contributions to the debate on the nature of the South African state, it does not entirely misrepresent them. Nor is such a position completely rejected in the equally schematic alternative presented here. What is significant about this line of analysis, for the purposes of the article, is that some of its elements can be related to ideas about the articulation of modes—or at least to the way in

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