segregation_and_apartheid_in_twentieth_century

SEGREGATION AND APARTHEID

overwhelming need was seen to be cheap labour. If policy-makers were not actually in thrall to the mining magnates of Kimberley and Johannesburg, the state and employers nevertheless colluded in a system which allowed the exploitation of black workers. On the white-owned farms, segregation policy aimed at turning relatively independent black tenants and sharecroppers into labour tenants and labourers.

More than any other work, Harold Wolpe’s discussion of the cheap labour and reserve-subsidy thesis, reprinted here, became central to the radical analysis of segregation. Wolpe argued that cheap labour in the South African context was best procured through the system of migrant labour and that key elements of segregation policy reinforced this arrangement. The migrant labour system ensured that the mines predominantly used the labour of adult males whose families remained in rural areas. Capitalists were able to pay African workers meagre ‘bachelor’ wages because the costs of both the physical and social reproduction of the labour force was borne by their families who remained primarily responsible for maintaining subsistence agriculture in the reserves. If this system was to survive, reserves for African people had to be entrenched—a central feature of the 1913 Land Act. Wolpe did not argue that this was necessarily the main explicit intention of the Act, but that its ‘possibly unintended’ consequences were to underpin the migrant labour system.

The most important early challenge to this explanation, summarized in the extract by Beinart, came from historians working on the history of African societies and the origins of migrant labour. Both Marxist and liberal interpretations had focused on the state and the power structures of white society. In many of these analyses Africans were cast as passive objects of policy and victims of segregation; while it was taken for granted that they were opposed to their fate, they were hardly conceived of as historical actors and agents in their own right. Seen from the vantage point of late nineteenth-century chiefdoms, however, the origins of migrancy were revealed as rather more complex. In the early phases of labour migrancy (in some cases preceding formal colonial control) chiefs sometimes sent out workers and tried to benefit from their earnings by encouraging the acquisition of firearms to defend the independence of their kingdoms. Subsequently, the pressures on rural men to earn wages multiplied. But many African communities wanted to retain their

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INTRODUCTION

hold over the men who went out to work and tried to devise methods of ensuring their return.12 As long as land was available in communal tenure systems this also remained an attractive option for migrant men themselves. Migrancy could therefore be seen as having arisen as much out of the dynamics of African societies as the demands of the mines.

Belinda Bozzoli took the explanation which focused on African priorities a step further by examining the gendered nature of migrancy. In the article reprinted here, Bozzoli argues that migrancy on a large scale was only possible because the mines and African societies shared certain interests in the system. The legacy of patriarchal control in African societies, and the division of labour between men and women, enabled African men to keep women at home, thereby underpinning the survival of rural society. Bozzoli perhaps pays insufficient attention to the priorities of rural women themselves; though the demands upon them were undoubtedly great, their participation in rural protests against state intervention suggests they too wished to defend their ‘own’ world. Nevertheless, these reinterpretations of the origins and persistence of migrant labour led to an important reassessment of the balance of power between African societies, on the one hand, and the state and capitalism, on the other. They also raised further questions about the relationship of rural Africans to segregation.

A weakness common to liberal as well as early radical critiques of segregation was that both approaches assumed that Africans were available for incorporation into colonial society—whether as Christian modernizers seeking a relatively privileged position or as aspirant urban workers. Some certainly were. But in the early decades of the century, many were not. In the 1920s, for example, mass movements emerged in the South African countryside which challenged white rule by linking urban strands of protest with more traditionalist rural expressions of resistance.13 The new spirit of ‘Africanism’ drew on black American ideas and images, including the radical separatism of Marcus Garvey. As the aspirations of the mission-educated Christian élite to be incorporated within colonial society were thwarted, so some examined alternative strategies such as alliances with chiefs and specifically African forms of Christianity.

Building on these insights, the extracts by William Beinart and Shula Marks suggest that segregation was not simply imposed

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SEGREGATION AND APARTHEID

from above.14 The shape it took was considerably influenced bythe intiatives and responses of people in the often forgotten rural areas where over 80 per cent of Africans continued to live until the 1930s. Attempts by the rurally based African population to defend their old ways of life were not segregationist in the sense that whites understood the term. But these could be compatible with elements of segregation in certain respects—as an expression of their own separate African identity, as a means to retain some control over their residual land, or as an expression of popular support for chiefs.

Shifting back to the urban perspective, it may be observed that most interpretations of segregation have emphasized the perceived threat to white society posed by rapid African urbanization. Whites saw a permanent black urban proletariat, living in poverty, as a crucible for trade unionism or as representing a dangerous threat to social order. In some early Marxist accounts capitalists were portrayed as collaborating to prevent the emergence of a class alliance between exploited African and white workers.15 This outcome was said to be achieved by deliberately restricting skilled and supervisory jobs for whites as well as by granting them special political concessions. Although the cost of certain categories of labour was increased as a result, this was outweighed by the benefits of keeping white labour as a buffer between African workers and white capitalists. Marxist scholars overemphasized the potential of interracial alliances of workers to challenge capitalism and racism at the same time.16 It should be borne in mind that their argument was also with those liberal writers who seemed to assign responsibility for the imposition of industrial and urban segregation to the racial attitudes of white workers and poor whites, rather than employers.

The broader ramifications of white fears about urbanization and proletarianization have been drawn out by Saul Dubow, whose particular concern is with the role of intellectual and social thought. He argues that segregation has been interpreted too narrowly as an economic strategy producing cheap labour. Instead, Dubow analyses it as a more generalized and defensive response to the forces unleashed by industrialization—a means to defuse potential class conflict and maintain overall white hegemony. In this account, segregation is viewed as an umbrella ideology which was capable of serving a range of white interest

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INTRODUCTION

groups, and even some black ones. The flexible nature of segregationist ideology addressed a variety of constituencies: white farmers were promised a ready supply of labour; the mines were assured that the system of migrant labour on which they had come to depend would remain intact; and white workers were given to believe that segregation would protect them from competition in the job market.

Drawing on earlier literature, in particular the unpublished work of Martin Legassick, Paul Rich and Saul Dubow began to explore in some detail the ideological elements that went into the making of segregation.17 In contrast to the view that segregationist philosophy was the legacy of the nineteenth-century Boer republics, they found that some of the most influential protagonists of segregation in the 1910s and 1920s consciously conceived of themselves as liberal-minded South Africans. These English-speaking liberal paternalists tried to plot a course between the apparently ‘assimilationist’ approach associated with mid-nineteenth-century missionaries—which they felt was tolerable neither to whites, nor to many blacks—and the ‘repressive’ policies of the Afrikaners.

Although segregation was a primarily a modernizing ideology, it also reflected widespread fears about the modern age. These centred on social Darwinist and eugenic anxieties about racial ‘deterioration’ or ‘degeneration’ in the amorphous context of industrial cities. Segregation encompassed a conservative and backward-looking horror of the levelling and atomizing consequences of capitalism. As a policy it therefore appealed to conservatives who were inclined to romanticize the countryside as a source of social order, tradition and deference. The developing anthropological notion of cultural relativism was readily adopted by segregationist ideologues who proclaimed the need to preserve the distinct identity of different cultures and the internal coherence of African societies. In the age of apartheid, Christian-Nationalist thinkers greatly embellished this idea of the primacy of separate cultural identity among both Afrikaners and Africans. They presented cultural differences in a highly idealized and distorted fashion and went further than segregationist thinkers in equating such differences with national, ethnic and racial identities.

The nuances and contradictions of interracial contact have long been a central preoccupation for writers of South African fiction,

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SEGREGATION AND APARTHEID

though less so for academic researchers whose concerns have tended to be more theoretical. Discussion of changing informal relationships, and their impact on formal ideologies and state policy is, however, beginning to extend our understanding of segregation. In this respect the work of social historians has been of particular importance. South African farms, in many ways bastions of baasskap (domination), have been revealed as the site of complex paternalistic relationships between white landowners and black tenants.18 The intricate nature of paternalism has also been explored in the context of domestic service where, typically, black women have raised the children of white employers while remaining separated from their own families in segregated ‘locations’ or the distant countryside.19 Suggestive work has also been conducted on outbreaks of mass social hysteria or ‘moral panics’ associated with instances of heightened racial tensions.20 Together, such approaches are helping to construct a fuller appreciation of the everyday language and practice of social relations under conditions of segregation.

THE RISE AND DEMISE OF APARTHEID

In analysing the transition from segregation to apartheid some writers stress elements of continuity. They point out that much of the core apartheid legislation amounted to a mere elaboration of earlier segregationist measures. For others, apartheid represented so great an intensification of segregationist ideology and practices that it could be considered as qualitatively different. Afrikaner nationalism and apartheid has even been likened to fascism.21 But, although some Afrikaners were profoundly influenced by fascist ideas and supported Germany during the Second World War, the analogy breaks down in crucial respects.22 Nevertheless, it is true to say that apartheid purported to be a rigorous and totalizing ideology in a way that segregation had never been.

The rhetoric of apartheid bore considerable similarities to white supremacist statements of the segregation era, but the central appeal to Afrikaner ethnic exclusivity was a distinctive aspect of apartheid. The context in which apartheid was introduced was also markedly different from the earlier segregationist period. In the era of European colonialism, segregation in South Africa did not appear exceptional. By contrast, in the democratizing postwar world and at the time of decolonization, apartheid began to stand

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INTRODUCTION

out internationally as an immoral system in a way that its predecessor had not. By the 1960s, with the banning of the African National Congress and the Pan-Africanist Congress and the systematic jailing of the African nationalist leadership—most notably Nelson Mandela—South Africa came to be regarded as a pariah state. Internationally, apartheid came to embody the evils of racist exploitation, while the South African liberation struggle served to symbolize, along with the civil rights movement in the United States, the aspirations of all those who strove for common human dignity and freedom.

The transition from segregation to apartheid is addressed by Wolpe, who sees the maintenance of the migrant labour system as the centrepiece of apartheid. According to this view, the government hoped to extend the economic and political advantages of a cheap and controlled migrant labour force to the growing manufacturing sector. In order to do so effectively it had to restore the crumbling economies of the African reserves. But this was insufficient in itself as the reserve economy could no longer provide a base for the bulk of African people. Tighter ‘influx’ controls and decentralized industries were therefore designed to inhibit the development of a black urban working class. Labour-hungry commercial farmers, who formed a vital part of the government’s political constituency, also stood to gain from apartheid labour allocation policies.

Economic explanations were developed by other radical social scientists in the early 1970s at the height of the apartheid era. In international terms, South Africa enjoyed relatively rapid growth rates through most of the 1960s (except in the immediate aftermath of the Sharpeville uprising at the beginning of the decade). To writers like Frederick Johnstone, this seemed to offer conclusive evidence that, far from the claims of liberal economists who argued that apartheid would automatically be eroded through economic growth and the rationality of the market, the apartheid system and capitalist development were in fact mutually sustaining.23 At the very least apartheid and economic growth did not appear contradictory.

Drawing on the work of Barrington Moore and other theorists of modernization, Stanley Trapido pointed out that democratic systems did not necessarily follow from industrialization and growth. Extensive state intervention (and even totalitarianism) often characterized successful late industrialization.24 The debate

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SEGREGATION AND APARTHEID

about the relationship between apartheid and economic growth was intensified by its relevance to opposition political strategies such as sanctions. Those supporting boycotts and disinvestment emphasized that economic growth was unlikely in itself to bring change. They questioned the motives of those who argued for continued trade, investment or ‘constructive engagement’ in the hope that growth would erode apartheid. For supporters of sanctions this seemed an excuse for ‘business as usual’.

Radical scholars’ understanding of the economic success of apartheid has since been modified and academic positions have softened. One of the central issues has been the position of manufacturing industry which, by the 1940s, had outstripped mining, though not agriculture, as an employer. Liberals had long pointed to the shortage of a stable supply of skilled labour as an indication that state intervention in the labour market led to great inefficiencies and that apartheid actually retarded economic growth.25 Cheap migrant labour might have been beneficial to the mining industry which sold its products internationally and had to depress labour costs in order to maintain profits, but the system inhibited the growth of a local market for manufactured commodities. Although capitalism might have lived easily with apartheid in the 1960s, these weaknesses were more acutely revealed when manufacturing growth slowed between 1975 and 1980 and subsequently stagnated. Terence Moll has recently argued that, while growth during the apartheid era was strong, it was not as spectacular in international terms as had earlier been suggested because comparisons tended to be made with Europe rather than other developing countries.26

More recent radical writing has also diverged from the argument that apartheid primarily involved an extension of migrant labour. Doug Hindson and Deborah Posel have detected a more pragmatic policy to divide urban African ‘insiders’ from rural migrant ‘outsiders’ by means of complex legislative and bureaucratic processes. They view apartheid as an attempt at ‘labour differentiation’: the control of African urbanization and redistribution of labour between different sectors of the economy, rather than a wholesale extension of migrant labour.27 Posel in particular distinguishes between the intentions and the practical consequences of government policy. Apartheid, she argues, was never fully able to control black population movements. Building on earlier interpretations of segregation, Posel suggests further

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INTRODUCTION

that modifications in policy were often a response to African resistance as much as to ideological canons or capitalist interests.

Arguments about the nature of apartheid have also switched back to the question of ideology. Deborah Posel’s article in this volume argues that apartheid was not a unitary ideology embodying a preconceived ‘grand plan’. Nor was the apartheid state a monolithic entity. In the pre-1948 period, the Afrikaner nationalist movement represented an alliance of conflicting interests. Likewise, in the decade after the Nationalists came to power, its hold was rather more fragile than was apparent in the interlude between the Sharpeville uprising of 1960 and the Soweto revolt of 1976. Like analysts of segregation, Posel maintains that apartheid policy spoke with different voices to the differing constituencies out of which its support was carved. Thus, the conception of apartheid as articulated by Afrikaner businessmen differed in significant respects from that of idealistic theoreticians and intellectuals who were inclined to do without African labour in order to achieve the goal of ‘total segregation’.28

Hermann Giliomee’s contribution also directs attention away from debates about the specificities of economic rationality and labour control. Giliomee takes his cue from the powerful strand in Afrikaner writing which reveals a preoccupation with their own nationhood and identity rather than their policy towards blacks. He acknowledges that apartheid has involved the use of ethnic power for economic gain and, indeed, one of the most interesting elements of Giliomee’s work is his understanding of the changing social composition of Afrikanerdom.29 Particular attention is drawn, for example, to the ways in which Afrikaner nationalist ambitions in the 1930s and 1940s mobilized around the need to resolve the problem of ‘poor whiteism’. But Giliomee does not consider that class interests are as salient as ethnic imperatives. He insists that ‘cultural and psychosocial fears’ are critical in understanding the development of ethnic mobilization. Rather than conceiving of apartheid either as a sacrosanct ideology, or as a deliberate ploy to secure material advantages, Giliomee sees apartheid first and foremost as a vehicle for nurturing the unity of the volk. Anticipating the events of the late 1980s, he suggested that if apartheid were to become inimical to the ethnic interests of Afrikanerdom, it could be substantially modified or even jettisoned.

The era of ‘high apartheid’, roughly from 1960 to 1976, was a

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SEGREGATION AND APARTHEID

period in which the government engaged in a massive process of social engineering. Relatively rapid economic growth for much of this period provided the apartheid state with the opportunity to put its ideas into practice. The most striking policy development in this respect was the attempt to turn the existing reserves into selfgoverning ethnic statelets or ‘homelands’. Debates about the homelands have been central to critiques of apartheid. The very word ‘homeland’ has been rejected because it seemed to lend legitimacy to the state’s policy of balkanization and exclusion. Opposition forces preferred instead to retain the word ‘Bantustan’, which suggests the artificiality of configuring geographical regions so as to correspond to supposed ‘tribal’ divisions.

The Afrikaner leader most closely identified with the development of the homelands was Hendrik Verwoerd, Prime Minister from 1958 to 1966 and before that Minister of Native Affairs. Verwoerd envisaged the creation of the Bantustans as a form of political decentralization or internal decolonization. He calculated that this would defuse the rising tide of African nationalism and parallel the decolonization policies pursued by Britain and France in Africa from the late 1950s. In theory, the new separate nations would be able to house the bulk of black people and provide the basis for national self-determination. Emphasis was placed on the virtues of ‘separate development’ rather than the racially exclusivist aspects of apartheid. This initiative involved a new system of local and regional government in which chiefs were elevated to positions of unprecedented authority. The Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 and the 1959 Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act paved the way for nominal Bantustan independence, granted first to the Transkei in 1976.

In order to secure the fantasy of independent homelands, a vast administrative apparatus was established to regulate the rights of Africans to live and work in ‘white’ cities and towns. For many years, academic critics tended to focus on the ‘success’ of this policy, reflected, for example, in the massive number of pass law arrests. From 1960 to 1980, the proportion of the total African population in what were classified as the main ‘white’ urban areas actually declined from 29.6 to 26.7 per cent (though this still represented an absolute increase of over two million people). The population of the homelands grew from 4.2 million in 1960 (39 per cent of all Africans) to over eleven million in 1980 (52.7 per cent).

Pioneering social reporting by the Catholic priest Cosmos

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INTRODUCTION

Desmond followed by careful demographic work and a nationwide survey by the Surplus People Project revealed a little more clearly what was entailed in this process.30 The policy of forced population removals (which continued until the mid1980s) was carried out on a vast scale. One of the consequences of this programme was that urban-type settlements were diverted away from the major metropolitan areas. Many were established within or near homelands where they became apartheid’s human ‘dumping grounds’. Colin Murray’s article describes and analyses this process in areas of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. Previously rural zones, they rapidly became the sites of huge African settlements which were urban in respect of their population density and lack of agricultural opportunity, but rural in their isolation and lack of services and employment.

In the process of creating and justifying homelands, the restoration of chieftaincy and the invocation of ‘tribalism’ played a vital role. The government wished Africans to be Zulu or Xhosa, Pedi or Tswana, and so on. Apartheid therefore involved creating clear legal distinctions not just between black, coloured, Asian and white, but also within African society. For many years both liberal and radical scholars eschewed discussion of ‘ethnic’ or ‘tribal’ differences among blacks, fearing that this would lend legitimacy to the state’s plans for the balkanization of South Africa. As a result—and compared to that of many other African countries—the South African historiography of ethnicity has until recently been rather weak.

Although ‘tribalism’ in the apartheid era was undoubtedly imposed from above, several studies suggest that it could nevertheless resonate with strands in African politics. Beinart points to significant legacies in popular rural consciousness about the value of ‘traditional society’ and chieftaincy which initially afforded Bantustan politicians some degree of political purchase.31 Material interests were also of significance because large sums of money were channelled through the homeland governments: the politics of patronage and the opportunities offered to individuals in the newly created institutions of government or in business proved highly alluring.

By no means all attempts to develop ethnic identity were successful and there remains within the literature a strong strain that sees the ‘creation of tribalism’ as a mechanistic and corrupt affair. Jeff Peires’s article (originally published anonymously

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