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TheHeydayofApartheid1.pdf
5
The Heyday of Apartheid
The National Party retained control of government from 1948 until 1994, and the history of South Africa in the second half of the twentieth century was dominated by apartheid and the resistance it evoked. But apartheid was not static or monolithic. Each decade, broadly speaking, was marked by differences in both the content and the implementation of the policy, as well as in ways of resistance. In this chapter we shall examine these changes in the heyday of apartheid between the 1950s and the 1976 Soweto revolt.
The 1950s: constructing apartheid
During the first decade of National Party government, a barrage of legisla- tion codified and extended racial discrimination. As we have seen, much of this had precedents in segregationist laws and practices earlier in the century, but from the late 1940s the partial breakdown of segregation that had taken place during the years of the Second World War was reversed, and legislative discrimination was taken much further than before.
The cornerstone of apartheid was the division of all South Africans by race. Malan thus moved early to ensure the compartmentalization of the population. The prohibition of ‘mixed marriages’ (1949) and the Immorality Act (1950) extended the existing ban on sex between whites and Africans outside marriage to prohibit all sexual contact between whites and other South Africans, including Indians and coloreds. Racial division in the future was the goal. And the Population Registration Act of the same year
The Making of Modern South Africa: Conquest, Apartheid, Democracy, Fifth Edition. Nigel Worden. © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Worden, N. (2012). The making of modern south africa : Conquest, apartheid, democracy. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. Created from insu-ebooks on 2022-02-25 16:01:25.
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enforced the classification of people into four racial categories: white, colored, ‘Asiatic’ (Indian) and ‘Native’ (later ‘Bantu’ or African).
In subsequent years this rigid schema was extended to virtually every sphere of human activity. Residential segregation had existed in some parts of the country since the earlier part of the century, but the Group Areas Act (1950) extended the principle of separate racial residential areas on a comprehensive and compulsory basis (Mabin 1992). Its application was particularly felt in the cities, where forced removals were often justified by policies of slum clearance and coincided with modernist theories of town planning that involved massive urban restructuring (Parnell and Mabin 1995). With such justifications, Indian residents were moved out of the centre of Pretoria and Durban. Many colored inhabitants of Cape Town suburbs were relocated in segregated areas on the fringes of the city: plans for the demolition of the central District Six area had in fact been formu- lated before the Second World War (Bickford-Smith et al. 1999: 152–4). In 1954 the Natives Resettlement Act gave the state the power to override local municipalities and forcibly remove Africans to separate townships. Some of the first casualties were the African freehold areas of western Johannesburg such as Sophiatown, whose inhabitants were relocated to the new township at Soweto in 1955.
The Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (1953) enforced social seg- regation in all public amenities, such as transport, cinemas, restaurants and sports facilities. And educational apartheid was enforced in schools (1953), technical colleges (1955) and universities (1959). African schooling was still neither free nor compulsory, as it was for whites. Certainly, educational provision for Africans before this period had been unequal and most gov- ernment schools separated white and African pupils. However, the Bantu Education Act (1953) brought all African schools under the control of the Department of Native Affairs, thus phasing out the independent mission- ary institutions which had previously led the field in African education and were viewed as breeding grounds for African independent thinking and protest. The Act imposed a uniform curriculum which stressed separate ‘Bantu culture’ and deliberately prepared students for little more than manual labor. Verwoerd, then Minister of Native Affairs, commented that many previous educators of Africans ‘misled them by showing them the green pastures of European society in which they are not allowed to graze’ (Christie and Collins 1984: 173).
White political monopoly of power was further tightened in the early 1950s. The advisory Natives Representative Council, set up in 1936, was
Worden, N. (2012). The making of modern south africa : Conquest, apartheid, democracy. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. Created from insu-ebooks on 2022-02-25 16:01:25.
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abolished. The Bantu Authorities Act (1951) replaced it with government- approved chiefs in the reserves, but made no provision for the representa- tion of Africans in the towns and ‘white’ rural areas. The system of white parliamentary representation for Indians, established in 1946, was also ended. The only remaining ‘non-white’ representation in Parliament was that of coloreds in the Cape. The National Party’s electoral majority in 1948 was slender, and many marginal seats contained a number of colored voters who had largely supported the United Party and who bitterly opposed the discrimination of the Population Registration, Group Areas and Separate Amenities legislation. In 1951 the government attempted to have them removed from the voters’ roll. Such an action was only passed in Parliament with a bare majority and was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The government overcame this obstacle by rapidly appointing new senators to the upper house of Parliament who ensured the required two- thirds majority. Despite large-scale demonstrations of opposition by both coloreds and the white war veteran Torch Commando, in 1956 coloreds were registered on a separate roll and were restricted to electing four white representatives to Parliament (a system abolished in 1970). Total white monopoly of parliamentary power was thus obtained.
Colored disenfranchisement showed that the National Party was deter- mined to go to great lengths to ensure its electoral survival, although it increased its majority in the 1953 election, colored voters notwithstanding. other legislation increased government control over its non-parliamentary opponents. The Suppression of Communism Act (1950) gave the Minister of Justice the power to ban any person or organization he viewed as ‘com- munist’, a broad definition which included almost all opposition to apart- heid. Powers were developed to confine people to single magisterial districts and to silence their writings and speeches, a forerunner of the security legislation of later years. And the 1953 Criminal Law Amendment Act prescribed heavy penalties for civil disobedience, a response to the organ- ized campaigns of the previous year (see pp. 108–10).
All of these white supremacist actions met with the approval of every sector of the broad Afrikaner nationalist alliance. A more controversial plank of apartheid legislation in the 1950s related to control over black labor. African urbanization and assertive labor organization had been the main feature of the breakdown of segregation in the 1940s, and Malan’s call for restrictions on African workers and firmer influx control attracted much support in 1948. During the first few years of National Party power, a number of measures attempted to put such a policy into effect. Strikes
Worden, N. (2012). The making of modern south africa : Conquest, apartheid, democracy. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. Created from insu-ebooks on 2022-02-25 16:01:25.
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THE HEyDAy oF APARTHEID 107
by Africans were made illegal in 1953, and although black trade unions were not prohibited outright, employers were not obliged to negotiate with them and many of their leaders were banned under the Suppression of Communism Act. Labor bureaux were established in 1951 under the control of the Native Affairs Department to coordinate the needs of employ- ers in particular regions and the recruitment of Africans to work in the towns, ensuring that they did not leave ‘white’ rural areas until the needs of local farmers had been met. Illegal ‘squatting’ in urban areas was pro- hibited in 1951, and in 1952 the orwellian-named Abolition of Passes and Coordination of Documents Act insisted that all Africans (including previ- ously exempted women) carry a reference book to include an employer’s signature renewed each month, authorization to be in a particular area and tax certificates. Under Section 10 of the 1955 Natives (Urban Areas) Amendment Act, rights of Africans to live in a town were confined to those who had been born there or had worked there for fifteen years or for ten years with a single employer. All others needed a permit to stay for longer than three days.
As Posel (1991) has argued, the 1955 Act demonstrated the triumph of a more pragmatic ‘practical’ approach to segregation over the ‘total’ segre- gation of men like Eiselen, who argued that all African economic activity and labor should be concentrated in the reserves (see p. 102). The needs of agricultural and urban employers for a steady supply of African labor determined government policy. Thus Africans should be permitted to move to towns if they were genuinely seeking work, and Section 10 recognized that ‘detribalized’ Africans had rights to urban residence whether or not they were employed there, thus providing a ‘labor pool’ for urban employ- ers. An example of this was Zwelitsha, near King William’s Town, which had been established in the 1940s. Inhabitants of the surrounding Ciskei reserve were initially encouraged to abandon farming and to form urban nuclear families with prescribed gender roles of male entrepreneurship and female home-making, following middle-class white norms. By the mid- 1950s such ideas were abandoned and Zwelitsha became simply a labor pool of proletarianized workers for local industry (Mager 1999: 47–67). Although pass laws were imposed, the labor bureaux were only partially successful in directing labor to where it was demanded. Employers circum- vented many of these controls when it suited them to do so.
The needs of business explain why the segregation of the 1950s remained ‘practical’, and influx control was not strictly applied. Similarly, while the government still had a rather uncertain electoral majority and no central
Worden, N. (2012). The making of modern south africa : Conquest, apartheid, democracy. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. Created from insu-ebooks on 2022-02-25 16:01:25.
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control over local municipalities, it was reluctant to attempt full-scale urban removals and the implementation of ‘total’ segregation. All this was to change in the subsequent decade.
In the 1958 election the National Party obtained almost twice as many seats as its opponents. Part of this increasing parliamentary strength resulted from ploys such as the removal of the colored franchise, the incor- poration of the white (predominantly Nationalist) electorate of South- West Africa and the redrawing of constituency boundaries to favour rural areas over United Party urban strongholds. But clearly apartheid genuinely appealed to an increasing majority of the white electorate. Why was this? Many Afrikaners approved the power exerted by a party in their name and the moves to break with Britain, as marked by the abolition of rights of appeal to the Privy Council (1950) and assumption of control over the British naval base at Simonstown (1955). But it was clear by 1958 that the Nationalists was also attracting English-speaking voters away from the United Party. The latter saw its sixty-five seats held in 1948 whittled down to fifty-three, most of them going to the National Party.
Most whites supported the apparent limits to African urbanization imposed by the government and the suppression of resistance. But most significantly apartheid policies had not interrupted economic growth, and white living standards increased steadily. Farmers benefited from increased produce prices and workers from racial job reservation. Although many English-speaking manufacturers and industrialists were alienated from Afrikaner nationalist politics, they were able to maintain and expand pro- duction and enjoyed tariff protection. Gold production expanded mark- edly, with the exploitation of new fields in the Free State. Foreign investment, encouraged by cheap labor, furthered white prosperity, and there was little external criticism of apartheid policies. only at the end of the decade did this change, with international condemnation and the flight of capital after the Sharpeville shootings. By then the National Party, now led by Hendrik Verwoerd, had acquired sufficient confidence and power to ride the storm.
The 1950s: Defiance and the Freedom Charter
The 1950s saw an unprecedented upsurge of popular protest. In some ways this was a logical development from the trends seen in the 1940s, notably the doubling of the African urban population, employment in secondary industry and trade union organization. But it was given a new impetus by the imposition of apartheid laws and the social engineering of the
Worden, N. (2012). The making of modern south africa : Conquest, apartheid, democracy. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. Created from insu-ebooks on 2022-02-25 16:01:25.
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Nationalist government. The intransigence of influx control (and especially the extension of passes to women), forced removals and the imposition of Bantu Education all led to resistance in the towns, drawing in both popular and middle classes. Despite the assault on union power, labor leaders organized protests around issues of low wages and price increases. Nor was resistance confined to the cities. Government intervention in reserve agri- culture and the unpopularity of measures carried out by chiefs appointed under the Bantu Authorities Act led to a number of rural protest move- ments. And the international context of decolonization elsewhere in Africa gave black political leaders hope that the construction of apartheid was a temporary aberration soon to be swept away in the wake of popular support for African nationalism.
Many of the tactics employed in this resistance, such as boycotts, staya- ways, strikes and civil disobedience, were those advocated in the African National Congress’s (ANC’s) Programme of Action of 1949 (see p. 95). In 1952 the ANC and the Communist Party jointly launched the Defiance Campaign to protest against the government’s new discriminatory legisla- tion, with the aim of mobilizing widespread defiance of unjust laws such as curfews, pass laws and segregation of amenities. over 8,000 people were arrested for defiance actions, mainly in the eastern Cape and on the Rand, and during the period of 1951–3 ANC membership grew dramatically from 7,000 to 100,000 (Lodge 1987: 310). Albert Lutuli, elected ANC President in late 1952, supported the principle of mass action in a clear break from the more conservative techniques of his predecessors. The Defiance Campaign was broken by the banning and imprisonment of many of its organizers, by legislation forbidding civil disobedience (the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1953), and by outbreaks of violence in Port Elizabeth and East London led by disaffected youth and women. But the impetus for mass campaigns was clearly established. The relocation of Sophiatown, which began in 1953, was resisted by local residents. Property owners refused to sign away their rights and, together with other tenants who would not move voluntarily, had to be forcibly relocated by the police. In 1954 the ANC called for a boycott of the new Bantu Education schools, an action that achieved considerable success initially on the Rand and in the eastern Cape. However, ANC promises of alternative informal education were only partially fulfilled, and when the government threatened to black- list teachers who supported the boycott and permanently to deny education to any children not enrolled by April of the academic year, opposition to Bantu Education collapsed.
Worden, N. (2012). The making of modern south africa : Conquest, apartheid, democracy. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. Created from insu-ebooks on 2022-02-25 16:01:25.
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More sustained campaigns were carried out from 1952 by women against the carrying of passes. The Federation of South African Women, founded in 1954, linked to the ANC but drawing on other liberal support- ers, coordinated campaigns of non-registration, pass burning and petition- ing, culminating in 1956 in a mass demonstration of 26,000 women from throughout the country at the Union Buildings in Pretoria. This opposition certainly slowed down state action in extending passes to African women, but it failed to prevent it. The government began issuing passes to women in remoter rural areas, and then to the most vulnerable urban workers, such as domestic workers and nurses, the latter being threatened with dismissal if they refused to comply.
By 1959, the anti-pass campaign was over. Women’s protest turned instead to focus on police raids against shebeens (sites of illegal drinking but also township sociability), which threatened the dependence of many township women on informal beer-brewing (Mager 2010). In 1959 women in the shanty settlement of Cato Manor near Durban and in other parts of Natal picketed municipal beer halls, and in some cases attacked them and destroyed brewing equipment. Police broke up the protestors, but a boycott of beer halls followed, coordinated by the local branch of the ANC’s Women’s League. Protest by women was an important part of popular mobilization in the 1950s, but this was not so much a feminist attempt to overthrow the existing social order as opposition to state interference in the established rights and status of women. Indeed, Lodge has described some of the goals of the campaigns as ‘highly conservative . . . though no less justifiable for that’ (1983: 151). Edwards (1996) has argued that the Cato Manor attacks were in part motivated by women who were facing removal to the impoverished reserves, and who targeted local men in the beer halls who had obtained housing in the new KwaMashu township and were thus breaking local community cohesion.
other community-based actions emerged in the late 1950s. In 1957 buses were boycotted in the Rand township of Alexandra in campaigns against increased fares that invoked memories of the campaigns of 1944 (see p. 71). In the wake of this, union leaders in the newly formed South African Council of Trade Unions convinced the ANC of the need for a wider campaign around economic issues. The £1-a-day campaign of 1957– 8 called for a minimum wage and better working conditions, but its tactics of stayaway, combined in 1958 with protest against the white election of that year, met with only limited success. Police were readily able to identify those who remained at home, and dismissals for absenteeism from work
Worden, N. (2012). The making of modern south africa : Conquest, apartheid, democracy. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. Created from insu-ebooks on 2022-02-25 16:01:25.
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THE HEyDAy oF APARTHEID 111
took place. Moreover, as Feit has pointed out, the campaign was untimely. Wage levels were not noticeably lower than usual, and a number of urban workers were earning more than £1 a day (1967: 17). And the white election was of less immediate concern than day-to-day issues in the townships. Campaigns of this kind were difficult to sustain. Specific and limited targets were better supported.
Perhaps the most successful mass campaigns of the decade took place not in the towns but in the countryside. Impoverishment was increasing in the reserves, accentuated by the impact of migrant labor and overcrowd- ing. In the Transkei and Ciskei, young men were unable to obtain cattle and so establish homesteads, and instead asserted their masculinity through age cohort organizations and competitive fighting (Mager 1998). Rural conflicts around issues of impoverishment and state intervention were not new, but they rose to new heights in the late 1940s and the 1950s (Chaskalson 1988). Attempts by the government to improve reserve agriculture, by ‘bet- terment’ schemes of cattle culling and limitations on grazing were particu- larly threatening to men who controlled livestock and were fiercely resisted at a time when the sole means of survival for many homesteads was access to such land and stock (Mager 1999). Moreover, the Bantu Authorities Act made local chiefs responsible for these measures, as well as for tax collec- tion. By implementing state policies many of them forfeited local recogni- tion of their powers, and their appointment by the government further undermined their authority in such situations.
Attacks on local chiefs took place in the northern Transvaal (Soutpansberg and Sekhukhuneland) in the 1940s and again in 1958. In Witzieshoek, in the northern Free State, cattle were seized by reserve inhabitants before they could be culled, fences were torn down and clashes with the police took place. In Zeerust in the western Transvaal in 1957 chiefs appointed by the Bantu Affairs Department were deposed, and similar actions took place in both Natal and the Transkei. In Sekhukhuneland returning migrants joined local residents to form the Sebatakgomo organization, at least partially linked to the Communist Party and the ANC. They attacked chiefs who accepted the authority of the Bantu Affairs Department and their sympa- thizers (Delius 1996). In Pondoland in 1960 a major revolt took place against government chiefs and agents. Many of these uprisings used tradi- tional symbols and appeals. But they were by no means all ‘backward- looking’ peasant revolts. Links were made with urban protests especially in regions where migrants brought news of other campaigns, such as those against Bantu Education or passes for women. But in general, although they
Worden, N. (2012). The making of modern south africa : Conquest, apartheid, democracy. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. Created from insu-ebooks on 2022-02-25 16:01:25.
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did succeed in stalling state interventions, rural protest movements remained parochial in impact (Lodge 1983).
Indeed, all the popular struggles of the 1950s failed to realize their potential fully in challenging the state. one of the reasons for this, much debated by historians, was the nature of the relationship between mass mobilization and the leadership of the national organizations, in particular the ANC. Was the ANC now converted from the elitist and essentially conservative body of the 1930s to a new and mass-based movement with more radical goals and heightened impact? Some writers have argued that this was indeed the case, either in coordination with the labor movement as the political base for a new class consciousness heralded by the 1946 mine workers’ strike (o’Meara 1976), or in the broader sense that the ANC acted as the vanguard party planning and sustaining all popular move- ments of the decade (Pampallis 1991: 191–211).
But other historians have pointed out the limitations of these argu- ments. Links with trade union branches were made, but the middle- class leaders of the ANC were still uneasy in a proletarian alliance and local campaigns often went beyond the calls of ANC leadership, or else were not supported at all by the organization (Lambert 1981; Fine and Davis 1991). Broader populist causes rather than class-conscious action domi- nated ANC activities. Feit (1971) goes further, arguing that ANC leader- ship was detached from any popular base, that communication and coordination of actions were at best patchy, and that many campaigns failed as a result.
For instance, in Sophiatown the ANC appeared more concerned with the rights of property owners than with the plight of the larger number of tenants or the wider issue of forced removals, and it was divided over how far to resist legal eviction orders. Leaders were also split over how far to take the school boycott and were often unaware of the extent of local com- munity support. During the Alexandra bus boycott, Congress’s acceptance of the compromise by which employers could obtain transport rebates to pass on to their employees rather than lowering fares for all was rejected by many in the community as a sell-out. And only gradually did the urban leaders of the ANC come to recognize the importance of the rural areas. Although there was some linkage with the Sekhukhuneland revolt of 1958, it was not until the uprisings in Pondoland in 1960 that they accepted the full potential of rural mobilization (Bundy 1987a). In general, the 1950s seems to have been a decade of heightened defiance, but also of lost opportunities.
Worden, N. (2012). The making of modern south africa : Conquest, apartheid, democracy. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. Created from insu-ebooks on 2022-02-25 16:01:25.
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THE HEyDAy oF APARTHEID 113
Some of these debates show as much about the political sympathies and priorities of the writers in later years as they do about the nature of political mobilization in the 1950s. Clearly, the ANC failed to mobilize and coordi- nate widespread unified protest, as much because of its limited financial and administrative resources and heightened state repression as because of the conscious alienation of its leaders from popular or working-class inter- ests. Lodge, however, has pointed out that the situation was more complex (1987). ANC leaders were not merely ‘middle-class’ professionals alienated from popular issues. With the segregationist thrust of the 1950s, African experiences were widely felt across class lines, and issues such as Bantu Education or passes for women affected everyone.
Case studies have shown that particular local circumstances need to be considered when assessing the effectiveness of campaigns and of national leadership. Thus in East London, active support was obtained for the Defiance Campaign by the dynamic local youth League, which also drew in migrants from the surrounding Ciskei reserve, but the lack of a large urban proletariat led to emphasis on communal rather than class issues in later years (Lodge 1987). By contrast, unionized textile workers in Benoni organized a number of strikes and stoppages; but organizers had difficulty in linking these up with the interests of the unemployed, who were more concerned with general survival than specific issues, and mobilized around gangs split on ethnic lines rather than labor or national organizations (Bonner and Lambert 1987). In Brakpan, stronger cross-class unity took place around issues of Bantu Education, curfews and pass laws, but these tended to be focused around locally elected councilors rather than national leaders, who failed to realize the extent of local feeling (Sapire 1989a).
The opposition movements not only faced difficulties of tactics and popular mobilization. They were also increasingly divided in terms of ide- ology. Some of these divisions were rooted in the differing organizations of the 1940s. For instance, the Non-European Unity Movement stressed the importance of tactics of boycott and non-collaboration, which had an impact on some of the defiance campaigns, particularly in the rejection of Bantu Education schools.
But its theoretical focus on the interests of the working class and its refusal to recognize race as a valid category of political organization alien- ated it from the ANC, which it believed advocated ‘pro-capitalist, anti- working class . . . bourgeois social democracy’. The Unity Movement’s strength lay in the western Cape, but although it was strong on theory,
Worden, N. (2012). The making of modern south africa : Conquest, apartheid, democracy. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. Created from insu-ebooks on 2022-02-25 16:01:25.
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advocating a Trotskyist line, it never mustered the degree of numerical active support obtained by the ANC (Nasson 1990).
But there were also divisions within the ANC. The crucial issue was whether Congress should link up with other organizations opposing apart- heid, such as the radical white Congress of Democrats, or whether it should follow a strictly Africanist course, rejecting association with all non-African associations, ranging in political terms from the moderate Liberal Party to the Communist Party. Under Lutuli the former policy triumphed. In the aftermath of the Defiance Campaign, and in the face of government banning of civil disobedience, plans were made to bring together oppo- nents of apartheid in the hope that sheer numbers and force of moral argument would lead to its overthrow.
It was also felt necessary to demonstrate multiracial unity to counter charges made by the state that racial segregation was natural and desired by all. The example it frequently gave of the dangers of inter-racial contact was the violent conflicts between Africans and Indians that took place in Durban in 1949, in which 142 people were killed, over a thousand injured, and many trading stores and houses looted. In this case ethnic tension had been heightened by specific local circumstances (Webster 1977). Africans were denied trading licenses and the right to own freehold property, both of which were obtainable by Indians. Indian monopoly over commerce, transport and property ownership (many African tenants had Indian land- lords) gave an ethnic focus to economic grievances at a time of increasing prices. Moreover, the verbal assault of the state on Indians, including the argument that they had no place in South Africa and should be returned to India, encouraged some Africans in the belief that the government would approve of attacks on their property.
The 1949 Durban riots, coming at the very start of the period of National Party government, were an important weapon in claims that South Africans of different ethnicity could never co-exist peacefully. It was thus crucial for those opposing apartheid legislation to demonstrate that this was not the case. In 1953 the ANC made links with the Congress of Democrats, the Indian Congress movement and the South African Coloured People’s organization (the successor to the APo) in order to launch a National Congress of the People. Local committees collected lists of grievances and demands, which were then drafted by a central committee into the ‘Freedom Charter’. This was accepted unanimously by the 2,844 delegates who gath- ered at Kliptown near Johannesburg in June 1955, and was later endorsed by all member organizations and by the South African Communist Party.
Worden, N. (2012). The making of modern south africa : Conquest, apartheid, democracy. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. Created from insu-ebooks on 2022-02-25 16:01:25.
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The government was unable to prevent such a gathering since the Congress of the People did not contravene existing laws. However, in the following year 156 of its leaders were arrested on charges of treason and ‘conspiracy to overthrow the state’, and the Congress was labeled a Communist movement. After lengthy proceedings, the state’s case was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1961, an action which played an important part in the government’s determination to rule without legal restraint (see p. 117). But the Treason Trial served to publicize the cause of the ‘Charterists’ more widely, both at home and abroad.
Charterism became the foundation of ANC ideology and the Freedom Charter remained a benchmark of opposition to apartheid into the 1990s. There has therefore been much debate about its meaning. Its clauses stressed that
South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and no govern- ment can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people . . . the rights of the people shall be the same regardless of race, color or sex
and it demanded that ‘all apartheid laws and practices shall be set aside’. It called for equal access to health, education and legal rights. Its vision of a future South Africa was thus strongly democratic and multiracial (Williams 1988). But its commitment to meaningful social and economic transforma- tion was less clear. Trade unionists were dissatisfied with its lack of refer- ence to worker control or the right to strike. It called for ‘public ownership of mines and banks’ and the re-division of land ‘amongst those who work it’, but it fell short of a clear commitment to socialism. It was adopted by the Communist Party, which by the late 1950s had come to accept that a national-democratic stage of revolution had to precede socialist transfor- mation (Hudson 1988). This was sufficient to ensure objection to the Charter by the Liberal Party, which steadfastly opposed any links with a radical strategy. But on the other hand, the Charter has been rejected by other left-wing organizations for its lack of radicalism.
But the main opposition to the Freedom Charter among the nationalist organizations in the 1950s came from the Africanists. Charterism rejected Lembede’s belief that only Africans owned South Africa (see p. 94). After his death in 1947, Africanist ideas were taken up by other younger members of the ANC, especially in the orlando branch under Potlako Leballo. Their publication, The Africanist, stressed the need for closer links with mass
Worden, N. (2012). The making of modern south africa : Conquest, apartheid, democracy. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. Created from insu-ebooks on 2022-02-25 16:01:25.
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protests, and it rejected Congress alliances with organizations such as the Indian Congress and the Communist Party. It viewed the Freedom Charter as a ‘political bluff ’. In 1958 tensions between Africanists and Charterists within the ANC reached a head, and after failing to capture control of the Transvaal executive a number of Africanists formed a new organization, the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), in 1959 under the presidency of Robert Sobukwe, with the slogan of ‘Africa for the Africans’.
Africanism was aided by a number of factors. It reflected the impatience of a younger generation with the liberal style of such men as Lutuli. It was part of a wider African assertiveness in this period, marked locally by increased support for the African independent churches, and more widely by the strength of African nationalism elsewhere, as shown by the 1958 Accra conference. Moreover, Africanists could point to the failure of the Charterists in achieving any success at halting the tide of discrimination, let alone driving it back (Gerhart 1978).
PAC membership numbers were lower than those of the ANC, but it captured the sense of township frustration in the late 1950s, especially on the Rand but also in the western Cape, where influx control was stringently applied and Section 10 rights strictly limited. The PAC was determined to capitalize on this advantage. In December 1959 the ANC announced a series of single-day anti-pass marches. By contrast the PAC called for a more sustained campaign, involving refusal to carry passes and mass presentation at police stations to demand arrest. This was the background to the peaceful march to the police station at Sharpeville in March 1960. Constables alarmed by the size of the crowd panicked and fired. Sixty-nine people died, many shot in the back, and 180 were wounded. A large crowd also marched from the Langa township into central Cape Town, although it disbanded without bloodshed when its leader Philip Kgosana was falsely promised an interview with the Minister of Justice.
The Sharpeville shootings marked a dramatic turning point in South Africa’s history. Strikes and stayaways followed throughout the country and the government declared a State of Emergency, detaining ANC and PAC leaders and then banning both organizations. Sharpeville revealed the failure of non-violent resistance and forced a new approach from oppo- nents of apartheid. And internationally the 1960 shootings had a major effect. Currency controls were introduced in an attempt to stem the flight of capital. Serious calls for economic sanctions against South Africa were made at the United Nations, although they were vetoed by Britain and the
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United States, who continued high levels of investment in South Africa throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
Just one month before the Sharpeville shootings, the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, had addressed the South African Parliament in Cape Town. Following a tour of Africa during which he had been impressed by the power of African nationalism, he warned that the ‘winds of change’ were sweeping through the continent, and that Verwoerd’s apart- heid policies would find no support from a Britain now committed to rapid decolonization. Verwoerd had already mooted the possibility of forming a republic independent of the Commonwealth. Later that year, following heightened criticism of his policies at the Commonwealth conference, Verwoerd withdrew South Africa from the organization. The path was set for increasing isolation from the political trends elsewhere in Africa and the world at large in the decades ahead.
State control and separate development: apartheid’s ‘second phase’
After the steady consolidation of National Party electoral power in the 1950s, the following years saw the entrenchment of state control and new methods of dealing with opposition. The 1960s have therefore been labelled the years of apartheid’s second phase (Posel 1991).
International condemnation after Sharpeville was firmly rejected by Verwoerd, who turned his back on the ‘winds of change’ sweeping Africa. The police force was increased in size and the new recruits were almost entirely Afrikaners. In the face of determined opposition campaigns, the General Law Amendment Act (1963) gave police powers of detention without charge and of solitary confinement. The banning of the ANC and PAC was accompanied by increasing numbers of such detentions and ban- nings of individuals. These tactics were to be the mainstay of internal repression into the 1990s. As Wolpe (1988: 88–9) has pointed out, after Sharpeville wide-ranging arbitrary powers provided a new means of state control, circumventing judicial intervention. Repetition of the state’s defeat in the Treason Trial was not to be permitted.
The early 1960s also saw a more determined application of African urban influx control. A change of policy from that of the 1950s now led to attempts to remove rights of urban residence from all Africans, including those previously accepted under Section 10 of the Natives (Urban Areas) Amendment Act of 1955 (Posel 1991). This was caused by several factors.
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The state was alarmed by the increase in urban protest, which had reached a climax at Sharpeville. Attempts to curb the urban radicalism of the 1940s had clearly failed. Moreover, local municipalities were either unwilling or unable to control urban influx, as shown by the Durban Council’s admission during the Cato Manor upheavals of 1959 that it ‘has been defeated . . . and cannot restore its authority without the fullest co- operation and most active assistance of the government’ (Posel 1991: 237).
New voices were heard within the Afrikaner nationalist alliance. The Broederbond had actively campaigned for Verwoerd’s succession to the Party leadership in 1958, and now held a much stronger position behind the scenes of decision making. Its members, already influential in many branches of the government, infiltrated the Native (renamed Bantu) Affairs Department (BAD) and also won over the South African Agricultural Union by advocating the limitation of urban African workers. In this context the stricter segregationist ideals of the Broederbond overrode the ‘practical’ segregation of the 1950s. In the months after Sharpeville, the BAD drafted a bill advocating the ending of Section 10 rights, the fixing of regional labor quotas by the Department with no reference to employers, and the preference to be given to industries willing to relocate to areas near the reserves.
The bill was fiercely opposed by commercial and industrial employers, including the Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut, and the government backed down. However, in the 1960s efforts were made by the state to enforce influx control more strictly, and although Section 10 remained on the statute books, the rights of urban Africans were increasingly restricted. For instance, in 1964 the Bantu Labour Act prohibited Africans from seeking work in towns or employers from taking them on unless they were chan- neled through the state labor bureaux. Urban housing construction for black families almost came to a halt, thus causing major shortages. And in 1968 Africans were forbidden from holding freehold property in townships but were obliged to become tenants in council-owned housing.
The opposition of urban employers to total urban influx control by the state raises the question of the relationship between apartheid policy and capitalist interests. Certainly in a broad sense apartheid did not limit eco- nomic – particularly manufacturing – growth in the 1960s. Despite loss of foreign investor confidence after Sharpeville, local capital filled the gap, and the comparative calm of the 1960s saw an economic boom with increased foreign trade and industrial growth, although black wages remained low and racial disparities of wealth increased still further. This has led many to
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argue that apartheid, like segregation before it, favored capitalist growth, particularly since it ensured a continued supply of cheap labor. But as Posel has argued, ‘apartheid neither automatically nor uniformly promoted capi- talist interests’ (1984: 2). Manufacturers needed a skilled and permanent labor force, and opposed stricter influx controls and total segregation. In the 1970s the disjuncture between capitalist needs and apartheid ideology grew wider (see p. 132).
The tightening of influx control and attempts to revoke Section 10 rights were part of a broader plan of political and social engineering that was implemented under Verwoerd and his successors. This was ‘Separate Development’, a policy by which the reserves served a political rather than a purely economic purpose, as Bantustans to which African political rights were confined.
The Bantustan strategy was only gradually developed. The 1951 Bantu Authorities Act had attempted to co-opt a local elite with limited admin- istrative powers. The Tomlinson Commission, set up to enquire into the economic viability of the reserves as self-contained units on the strict seg- regationist model, reported in 1955 that this could only be achieved with massive state funding, a commitment which Verwoerd refused to accept. But increasing political pressure from Africans gave strength to the idea of locating African political rights away from the urban centers to the periph- eries, thus counteracting the nationalist goals of organizations such as the ANC and PAC. The 1959 Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act set up eight (later extended to ten) distinct ‘Bantu Homelands’ out of the existing reserves, each with a degree of self-government. Not only did this greatly extend the powers of co-opted local chiefs, but it established the principle of ethnicity as the basis of the homelands. Africans were divided up into distinct ‘nations’ based on their ‘historic homelands’. Ethnic homeland loyalty was to replace national political aspirations in a move which the state hoped would defuse calls for the moral necessity of African self- government within South Africa itself.
In 1963 the Transkei Constitution Act set up the first homeland legisla- tive assembly, significantly in the area most recently convulsed by rebellion and one where Pretoria was anxious to rid itself of the responsibility of keeping control. In 1970 homeland citizenship was imposed on all Africans throughout South Africa, and self-government was given to the other homelands in 1971. Nominal independence was given the Transkei in 1976, followed by Bophuthatswana (1977), Venda (1979) and Ciskei (1981). By this process, citizens of the ‘independent’ homelands lost their South
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African nationality, although the homelands were not recognized as inde- pendent by any other country.
Clearly, the political significance of Separate Development was more important than the economic motives of earlier segregationist policies. Economic self-sufficiency was never a viable or desired option. Verwoerd refused to permit industries to be developed within the reserves that would risk the emergence of a stable and politically dangerous proletariat. Instead, he encouraged them to set up on the borders of the home- lands, where they were removed from the urban centers of South Africa but had access to cheap migrant labor. The focus of Separate Develop- ment was ‘political independence with economic interdependence’ (Giliomee 1985).
The homelands policy had fundamental implications for modern South Africa. Firstly, it led to the forced relocation of Africans on an unprece- dented scale. The Group Areas Act produced urban removals and dispos-
Map 4 The Bantustans (Homelands) Source: J. omer-Cooper, 1987: History of Southern Africa. London: James Currey, 214. © 1987. Reprinted by permission of James Currey Publishers, an imprint of Boydell & Brewer.
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Map 5 Forced removals Source: A. J. Christopher, 1994: Atlas of apartheid. London: Routledge. Compiled from information in the regional reports of the Surplus People Project. © 1994. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Books UK.
East London Kamaskraal
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session. Separate Development extended this by removing into the homelands the sizeable number of African tenants, freeholders and squat- ters who were still in ‘white’ rural areas. Many of them were no longer required on farms which had mechanized. Kas Maine, who had survived as a tenant and sharecropper since the 1920s on over fifteen white-owned farms in the Transvaal, was finally forced to move to an impoverished reserve in 1967. Even there he was not left in peace: his grazing land was expropriated by the Bophuthatswana homeland government in 1979 to be set aside as a tourist game reserve near the Sun City casino complex (Van onselen 1996). Thus the process begun in 1913 was brought to its logical conclusion. Between 1960 and 1983, an estimated 3.5 million people were relocated under Group Areas and Separate Development legislation (Platzky
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and Walker 1985: 10) (see Map 5, p. 121). During the 1960s the population of the Bantustans rose by 70%, while those of African townships actually fell (Lodge 1983: 321). Forced removals on such a massive scale were the crudest sign of state power over black lives. In most cases those relocated to homelands were consigned to barren areas far removed from employ- ment or adequate resources. For instance, between 1979 and 1986 Botshabelo (‘place of refuge’) emerged on barren land 60 kilometres away from the nearest place of employment in Bloemfontein (Murray 1992: 204). A rural dumping ground of half a million people forced out of towns and farms in ‘white South Africa’, it was declared part of the newly created Bophuthatswana homeland. Critics of apartheid labeled such actions as tantamount to genocide.
Secondly, Separate Development stimulated and entrenched ethnic divi- sions by its attempts to ‘retribalize African consciousness’ (Molteno 1977: 23). To succeed, such a policy had to be built on existing perceptions and ethnic division could not be simply imposed from above. Certainly, differ- ing historical experiences and traditions existed. yet as recent work has shown, tribal identity was not a fixed constant (Vail 1989). The experience of conquest, proletarianization and social dislocation shattered pre-colonial polities and the identities that came with them. Tribalism was remolded and consciously shaped by new forces. The linguistic and cultural tribal divisions of modern South Africa were in large part defined by outsiders in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Missionaries established written norms for Bantu languages, usually based on particular dialects of regions in which their printing presses were located. Anthropologists and historians identified distinct tribal cultures and traditions in the model of European ethnology and national histories. In the circumstances of the 1920s and 1930s, these notions found fertile ground among ‘native’ admin- istrators concerned to bolster ‘traditional culture’ and to overcome class divisions (see pp. 85–6). They also appealed to local chiefs as a means of bolstering their position, and to some middle-class African teachers and intellectuals who adopted the role of interpreters of ‘tribal tradition’. This combination of administrative and local interests in the making of new tribal identities was most apparent in Natal, where Zulu ethnicity was strengthened by an alliance of state, landowners and the black middle class (see pp. 90–1). Tribal identity was given further emphasis by the experience of migrant workers, whose ethnic roots were reinforced by their dependence on the reserves and by competition in the workplace. Even those imbued with class or wider national political consciousness meshed
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these identities with a degree of ethnic particularism (Beinart 1987). However, as Mager (1999) has shown, identities forged by migrants were masculine and strongly patriarchal to the exclusion of women’s perceptions and experience.
Thus the concept of separate ethnic identity drew on a lengthy process of created tribalism. In some cases such as Zululand or the Transkei, the argument that the Bantustans were the rightful historic home of a particu- lar ethnic group coincided with common perceptions. Elsewhere this was not so. Bophuthatswana, for instance, was a cobbled-together collection of seven widely scattered areas of land, all of them undesirable for commercial agriculture. Its historical heritage was tenuous to say the least. And even the most ardent advocate of tribalism had difficulty in justifying the exist- ence of two distinct Xhosa homelands, the Ciskei and the Transkei (Mager 1999: 112–17).
Nonetheless, a sense of homeland identity did take root, even in Bophuthatswana. This was the result of the third lasting legacy of Separate Development in modern South Africa, the creation of new classes in the homelands. In a continuation of the policy of co-opting local chiefs, the Bantustan strategy gave Bantustan administrators’ considerable wealth, patronage and power. This served the dual purpose of creating local representatives of the state with vested interests to control popular opposi- tion of the kind that had emerged in the 1950s, and of hopefully defusing critics by devolving political power to African authorities. This is not to say that homeland leaders were all absolute puppets of Pretoria. Matanzima, ruler of the Transkei, was critical of Bantu Education and of the way in which forced removals dumped people into his territory, but his general support of Separate Development earned him financial and military backing from the South African government, and also attracted allegiance from the educated elite in the rapidly growing homeland bureaucracy (Southall 1982).
In addition to bureaucrats and politicians, a class of African traders and entrepreneurs also benefited from the Bantustan strategy. As Molteno (1977) has pointed out, whereas in the early part of the century the govern- ment aimed to undermine an African middle class, by the 1960s it was trying to create one, albeit dependent on South African capital and support as a means of linking it to apartheid structures and policies. Loans and grants set up local capitalists, and many also benefited from the departure of white traders from the homelands, giving the ‘new African trading class a stake in the political order’ (Stadler 1987: 139).
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Separate Development was thus a bold attempt to break down a broad African nationalism and to replace it with tribal identities, led by new classes of collaborators. It could only be achieved with systematic and ruth- less state intervention. How far it succeeded in achieving its goal remained to be seen.
After Sharpeville: decade of quietude?
In comparison with the resistance of the 1950s and with the upheavals of the 1970s and 1980s, the 1960s appears to have been a decade in which protest against apartheid was relatively muted. The banning of resistance organizations, increased police powers of detention, and heightened state control over publications, broadcasting and all forms of dissent were clear reasons for this. And the ruthless policy of forced removals weakened the potential for urban resistance, while the Bantustans provided one outlet for the previously frustrated careers of the African middle class.
Another factor that may explain the relative quiescence of the 1960s was economic. Despite the crisis of investor confidence immediately after Sharpeville, the decade was one of unprecedented economic growth for South Africa. The gross national product grew at over 5% per annum, and average real wages increased at a steady level (Feinstein 2005: 184–8). Certainly, the benefits of this were limited primarily to the white popula- tion, and the racial disparities of wealth were enormous. yet in contrast to the periods of labor resistance and protest in the post-war years, or those that were to come in the 1970s and 1980s, levels of black unemployment in the 1960s were relatively low. overall, it appears that less than 10% of the economically active population as a whole were unemployed during the 1960s. The figure was to rise to 20 % and above in the subsequent decades (Wilson and Ramphele 1989: 84–5). Relative economic stability, as well as state oppression, explains the comparative lack of oppositional protest during the 1960s.
However, the lack of overt resistance on the scale of previous years should not be seen as a sign of acquiescence. Less visible developments were taking place which provided a crucial background to the renewal of overt protest in subsequent years.
The banning of the ANC and the PAC after Sharpeville did not lead to their eclipse, but to a necessary change of strategy. Attempts to organize stayaways and strikes were weakened by the difficulties of underground organization. At the end of 1961 armed struggle was therefore proposed as
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an alternative tactic. Some ANC leaders, including Mandela, Sisulu and other ex-youth League organizers, were determined that direct action should begin. Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) was founded as an underground guerrilla army, and a number of sabotage attacks on power stations and government installations were made over the next three years. At the same time, a small group of predominantly white radicals known as the National Committee of Liberation (later renamed the African Resistance Movement) planned a sabotage campaign and planted bombs in Cape Town and Johannesburg. And in the western Cape, where PAC support was strong, an underground movement known as Poqo (‘Pure’ or ‘Alone’ in Xhosa) emerged, with rather indiscriminate plans to provoke a general uprising by killing police, suspected informers and government agents as well as whites. Some attacks of this kind occurred in Langa township near Cape Town, and a short-lived uprising took place in the rural town of Paarl in November 1962. Poqo also worked amongst peasants in the Transkei, where it acquired a quasimillenarian character, and some attacks on col- laborating chiefs took place.
Davis and Fine (1985) have stressed that the move to armed struggle was a decision of leaders of the nationalist movements but had in fact already been affected by popular actions. Armed resistance had taken place prior to 1961–2, as in Pondoland in 1960. Hopes of mobilizing a general uprising were not fulfilled. And all of the early underground movements were broken by police arrests. Aided by the British colonial police in Basutoland who seized membership lists from the PAC office in Maseru, many PAC activists in South Africa were detained in early 1963. In July of that year the headquarters of Umkhonto at Rivonia were raided, and its leaders captured and sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island. The African Resistance Movement was infiltrated and broken up. Although the Non-European Unity Movement was not itself banned, it was unable to fill the vacuum created by the repression of the other liberation organi- zations and was split by ideological division, with some of its members leaving South Africa and others being arrested on charges of sabotage (Davies et al. 1988: 313). By 1964 leaders of the resistance movements were either in prison or had escaped to exile abroad.
Both the ANC and the PAC faced major difficulties as exiled organiza- tions in the 1960s. Although they found bases in friendly countries, the ANC in Zambia and the PAC first in Lesotho and then in Tanzania, they were isolated from developments within South Africa. It was difficult to mount infiltration campaigns into the country, given its terrain, the strength
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of the defense forces and the ring of surrounding countries allied to Pretoria. Attempts at coordinated campaigns were made between ANC cadres and Zimbabwean guerrillas and by the PAC in Swaziland, but they failed to penetrate South Africa. only with the collapse of white rule in Angola (1974), Mozambique (1975) and Zimbabwe (1979) did greater opportunities for guerrilla action emerge. Many of the rank and file members of the organizations were frustrated by inactivity in isolated and poorly equipped training camps.
Ideological and personal rifts also weakened both bodies, especially the PAC, whose goal of Africanist struggle was difficult to maintain out of its South African context. The ANC was in general more successful in obtain- ing international support, although it was still treated warily by the Western powers. Both the PAC and the ANC survived in early exile, ready to take a more active role in the later 1970s and 1980s, but during the 1960s and early 1970s their influence within South Africa was much reduced. The expectations of mass confrontation raised in the early 1960s did not materialize.
What did emerge in the later 1960s was the powerful new ideology of Black Consciousness. Although at this stage Black Consciousness was more of a philosophical movement than an active political program, it did fill some of the vacuum created by the banning of the nationalist organizations.
Black Consciousness ideas originated amongst university students. The creation of new segregated universities led to a marked increase in the number of African students after 1958. Some were particularly influenced by American developments in black theology, and formed the University Christian Movement. There was growing awareness of the ideas of black separatism which took institutional form. Many African students were frustrated by white domination of the National Union of South African Students, and in 1969 they split away to establish the all-black South African Students’ organization (SASo), under the presidency of a student from the segregated medical school at the University of Natal, Steve Biko.
Although SASo was a student organization its members encouraged blacks in other contexts to break away from white-dominated liberal organ- izations. The Black Communities Project was formed to encourage and support black self-help schemes. In 1971 representatives of these bodies set up the Black People’s Convention (BPC) to provide a political body organ- ized along Black Consciousness principles. But this failed to gain a large membership. It was limited by inadequate funding and state repression,
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and also by the reluctance of many to be involved with an overtly political movement, thus ‘vindicating the view held by Steve Biko and others that black people had first to be “liberated from fear” ’ (Buthelezi 1991: 126).
It was on such psychological grounds that Black Consciousness explained the failure of ANC and PAC tactics. Black inferiority, induced by years of oppression and of white liberal paternalism, prevented effective organiza- tion and resistance. Blacks therefore needed to acquire a social identity of their own. As Biko stated, ‘what Black Consciousness seeks to do is to produce . . . real black people who do not regard themselves as appendages to white society’ (1978: 51). Black Consciousness was thus an attitude of mind, a conscientization necessary for political activism to succeed. Although Black Consciousness advocators included supporters of both the ANC and the PAC, their political and economic program was vague. They advanced black communalism, said to be rooted in indigenous culture and based on the principle of sharing of wealth, although they also accepted the need for private property. only after the banning of Black Consciousness organizations in 1977 did its leaders advocate a more radical socialist program (Leatt et al. 1986: 105–19).
Black Consciousness drew on a number of distinct traditions. In a broad sense its emphasis on black pride and self-assertion was modelled on similar developments in the United States and the experience of the African diaspora, as well as on the ideas of such writers as Fanon and Senghor. The American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s gave a particularly strong impetus to increasing black assertiveness. In the South African context Black Consciousness followed some of the arguments of the Africanist and PAC traditions by stressing that South Africa belonged to its black people alone and by its rejection of liberalism and white-dominated organizations. However, Biko’s definition of black was more one of attitude than of eth- nicity. It included all of those oppressed by apartheid, thus extending the term to bring in ‘colored’ and Indian South Africans, but excluded those whose collaboration with apartheid structures such as the police or Bantustan administrations still defined them as ‘non-whites’. White oppo- nents of apartheid had no place in Black Consciousness organizations, but should rather conscientize their ‘racist brethren’ (Halisi 1991).
Black Consciousness also developed in the context of the international student revolt of the late 1960s, and was a distinctly generational and intel- lectual movement which did not penetrate far into working-class or peasant communities. The ANC viewed it as a useful means of arousing self- awareness but limited in its abilities to effect political action. others rejected
Worden, N. (2012). The making of modern south africa : Conquest, apartheid, democracy. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. Created from insu-ebooks on 2022-02-25 16:01:25.
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its philosophy. The Unity Movement disapproved of the primacy that it gave to race over class and the ineffectiveness of ‘self-help’ organizations to change the fundamental structure of society (Alexander 1991).
The state initially believed that Black Consciousness could further its plans of Separate Development, but soon learnt otherwise. Biko rejected Bantustan collaborators and refused to countenance such organizations as Inkatha, founded by Buthelezi in 1975 and based on KwaZulu ethnicity, despite the apparent similarity of emphasis on the distinctiveness of black culture and the need for self-pride (Southall 1981). State harassment of Black Consciousness leaders grew in the 1970s, culminating in the torture and murder of Biko while under police detention in 1977 and the subse- quent banning of all Black Consciousness organizations.
yet despite these limitations, Black Consciousness ideas did find fertile ground in the circumstances of the 1970s. Like other developments in this decade of quietude, it was an important part of the renewed conflicts of subsequent years.
Towards Soweto: protest renewed
The relative calm of the period between 1963 and 1973 was underpinned by some economic improvement in the position of Africans, albeit on a limited scale. Between 1970 and 1972, for the first time, the gap between black and white wages began to narrow, partly because the mines offered slightly higher wages to attract local rather than foreign miners, but mainly because the growth of manufacturing led to a need for skilled employment which was met by black workers.
However, between 1973 and 1976 this process was brought to a halt. A drop in the gold price and heightened inflation mainly caused by an increase in the oil price introduced a period of recession. It was against this background that black protest was renewed by labor conflict. Numerous strikes took place, involving over 200,000 black workers, particularly in Durban and the rest of Natal, but also in East London and parts of the Rand. Some national trade union organization took place, but most of the strikes broke out at local factory level in response to specific grievances. This was particularly true in Natal, where the high incidence of strike action was explained by low wages, bad working conditions, and ease of com- munication between workers in different factories who commuted from the nearby KwaZulu homeland and were supported by Buthelezi (Hirson 1979: 142; Friedman 1986: 47–8). Some worker goals were achieved: higher
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THE HEyDAy oF APARTHEID 129
wages and improved working conditions were granted, and the action of these years gave impetus to later recognition of the bargaining powers of black trade unions (see p. 133).
Some writers have argued that this increase in worker militancy explains the township revolts that began in Soweto in June 1976 (Hirson 1979). However, there were other more immediate causes of these upheavals. The early 1970s had seen a major growth in the number of Africans attending schools, although commensurate funding and equipment were lacking, and the difficulty of finding employment after school education increased during the recession of 1973–6. Tensions among school pupils was there- fore already high when a new ruling decreed that half of the curriculum in black schools was henceforth to be taught in Afrikaans. In protest 15,000 schoolchildren marched through Soweto. Police confronted the crowd, fired and killed several students. As a result attacks were made on police, administration buildings and beer halls. Class boycotts, school burnings and counter-attacks and raids by police followed. Within several days the conflict had spread to other townships on the Rand, and in the following weeks also to Cape Town and the eastern Cape. In late August and September school boycotters made successful appeals to workers to stay away from work. Further conflict was caused when police encouraged migrant hostel workers in Soweto to attack pupils who had demanded the closure of the state beer halls. By the end of the year an official (and doubtless underes- timated) figure was given of 575 dead and 2,389 wounded in the conflicts (Lodge 1983: 330).
The Cillie Commission appointed by the government had a clear expla- nation. The revolt was the work of outside ‘agitators’ and bore little relation to real township or youth grievances. But although ANC pamphlets were distributed in Soweto and elsewhere, and the exiled organization later claimed that it had played a major part in organizing the revolt, there is every sign that it was taken by surprise by the events of 1976–7. The deten- tions and bannings that followed led many township youth to flee from South Africa and join ANC and PAC camps outside the country, but it was only then that active involvement in the nationalist organizations could take place.
The student leaders of Soweto were much more influenced by the Black Consciousness movement, which was particularly influential amongst teachers and student groups in the early 1970s, and this was certainly pow- erfully expressed in the protests of ‘colored’ students in the western Cape in 1976 (Lodge 1983: 333). As Biko said, evidence that Black Consciousness
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was a force to be reckoned with was ‘In one word – Soweto!’ (Leatt et al. 1986: 112).
A particular psychological impetus, especially among black intellectuals, was the success of the anti-colonial movements in neighboring Mozambique and Angola in the previous year, and the defeat of South African troops who had intervened in Angola in 1975. But the Soweto uprising was not a revolutionary movement. It lacked clear organization and leadership. Despite some contact with workers, the students had no formal links with worker organizations. As some writers have stressed in this regard, the events of 1976 were a missed opportunity (Mafeje 1978).
yet, as in the case of Sharpeville, the Soweto uprising shocked both South African whites and international opinion. Many foreigners had their first clear image of South Africa formed through vivid television pictures of the Soweto shootings. The anger of a new township generation was palpable and highly threatening to the established order. This and the labor disputes of 1973–6 were reminiscent of the conflicts of the 1940s which apartheid was supposed to have resolved. Although state repression was strong and continued into the next decade, the following years also saw attempts to change the Verwoerdian model. Apartheid was beginning to falter, although this was not fully apparent until the 1980s, and it was still to take an unconscionable time to die.
Suggestions for further reading
Lodge, T. 1983: Black politics in South Africa since 1945. London: Longman; Johannesburg: Ravan.
o’Meara, D. 1996: Forty lost years: the apartheid state and the politics of the National Party, 1948–1994. Johannesburg: Ravan; Athens: ohio University Press.
Posel, D. 1991: The making of apartheid 1948–1961: conflict and compromise. oxford: Clarendon Press.
Stadler, A. 1987: The political economy of modern South Africa. London: Croom Helm; Cape Town: David Philip.
Worden, N. (2012). The making of modern south africa : Conquest, apartheid, democracy. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. Created from insu-ebooks on 2022-02-25 16:01:25.
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2 0 1 2 . Jo
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& S
o n s,
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te d . A
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