APARTHEID

The forgotten history of South Africa

The role of Churchill, Rhodes and Smuts in the formation of the Apartheid Policy of South Africa

Stes de Necker

Democracy has a long, if contorted, history in South Africa.

For nearly 100 years there was a non-racial franchise and the electoral role did not become exclusively white until 1956. The Coloured Vote Bill in that year was the final blow to a non-racial democracy which had been whittled away over the decades.

Like many apartheid laws passed by the National Party government in the Fifties, it was not a radical departure from the past. The legislation which created apartheid was based on existing laws and in many cases simply tightened or tidied them.

Most people think they know that apartheid was an invention of the Afrikaners and their belief that South Africa should be ruled exclusively by whites. This is a complete myth.

Conversely, it is usually thought that the English tradition in South Africa was non-racial and democratic. In fact, the British tradition, as purveyed by both English-speaking South Africans and the parliament at Westminster, has played a less than glorious role in establishing democracy.

The British Goevernment was the father and main architect of apartheid in South Africa !

It was two renowned Englishmen, Cecil Rhodes and Winston Churchill, who at crucial moments planted the seeds that were to ripen into policies which deprived black people of democratic rights in South Africa.

A third, Jan Smuts - an Afrikaner by birth who became a committed supporter of the British Empire - was also an architect of laws which were later to become the framework of apartheid.

Like Churchill, Smuts has a statue in Parliament Square, but in South Africa both will go down as men who destroyed rather than built democracy in the country.

Let's take Rhodes first, the Bishop's Stortford boy who wanted to build an African empire from Cairo to the Cape, who invented Rhodesia and left us with the De Beers diamond monopoly and 160 Rhodes scholarships at Oxford.

A millionaire from diamonds and gold before the age of 30, Rhodes became Prime Minister of the Cape in 1890. For more than 40 years the Cape had had a non-racial franchise which allowed anyone, irrespective of race, with property worth 25 pounds or wages of 50 pounds a year to vote for representatives in an Assembly which made laws for the colony.

Rhodes believed that the world should be ruled by the Anglo Saxon and Teutonic races: one of his dreams was to force the United States of America back into the British Empire.

Although Africans represented a minority of voters and did not vote as a block, Rhodes passed two laws simultaneously, which caused large numbers of them to be struck off the electoral role.

One, the Glen Grey Act, limited the amount of land Africans could hold; the other tripled the property qualification for the vote. Many Africans now had insufficient property to qualify and would find it almost impossible to get back on the list because of the legal limit on the amount of land they could hold.

The next blow to democracy came after the Anglo Boer war.

Elsewhere in the world the imperial government in London exercised a veto over its colonialists to protect the interests of the native people of the colony from the settlers.

In Kenya, for example, London blocked several attempts by colonists to make Kenya a 'white man's country'. Ultimately, in Rhodesia, Britain imposed sanctions to reverse Ian Smith's Declaration of Independence. In South Africa, however, the veto was abandoned when the Union of South Africa Act was passed in 1910 and the man who played a vital role in its abandonment was Churchill.

If one reads the debates that led up to the Act of Union, the most striking thing is that the words 'racial conflict' referred to the Anglo- Boer war. What we would call the racial issue was then 'the native problem'. The British had fought the war partly, so it was said, to protect the interests of the natives from the Boers, the Afrikaners.

During the war the British had encouraged Africans to work for British victory, which they did in large numbers. With victory, Britain might have been expected to extend the Cape non-racial franchise to the conquered territories of the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony so that blacks would be represented in the whole territory the way they had been in the British colony. But not only did they not do so, they also limited the 'native' vote to the Cape.

Africans were to have no say in the election of a national parliament, although they retained their voting rights to the Cape parliament.

The young Churchill, then Under-Secretary for the Colonies, had covered the South African war as a journalist and had been captured by - and escaped from - the Boers. He’s influence after peace was signed was crucial.

In a debate in July 1906 he called the peace treaty 'the first real step taken to withdraw South African affairs from the arena of British party politics'. He argued passionately that the Afrikaners should be allowed self-rule, a self-rule which he admitted would mean that black Africans would be excluded from the vote.

In parliament he told those who pointed out that the treaty had enshrined the rights of Africans that the Afrikaners interpreted the peace treaty differently. He said: 'We must be bound by the interpretation which the other party places on it and it is undoubted that the Boers would regard it as a breach of that treaty if the franchise were in the first instance extended to any persons who are not white.'

When South Africa was discussed four years later, Churchill's successor tried to reassure parliament that the Afrikaners would come round to the view that it was wiser to include Africans in the franchise. A delegation of Africans from the South African Native Congress, the forerunner of the ANC, came to lobby parliament at Westminster, but to no avail.

Because of Churchill and his policy the British parliament had already washed its hands of responsibility for the rights of its black citizens in South Africa. When the new parliament in South Africa passed the Land Act, making it illegal for Africans to purchase land from Europeans anywhere outside the reserves, a delegation of Africans who came to London to protest were told that it was a matter for the South African parliament.

The notorious 1913 Land Act, passed three years after South Africa gained its independence, marked the beginning of territorial segregation by forcing the majority of Black South Africans to live in reserves and making it illegal for them to work as sharecroppers.

The Land Act prohibited Africans, except those in the Cape Colony, from buying or renting any land except in the restricted areas that were reserved for Africans in the form of reserves.

The then government wanted African farm labourers as to work for cash wages as quickly as possible, rather than squatting or share cropping. There were small groups of Blacks who temporarily escaped this fate, living in small spots of land (black spots) in the White areas which they had bought before the Land Act was passed. 

The deputy leader of the party which passed the Land Act was Jan Smuts.

After the war he played a crucial role in striking the deal between Britain and the Afrikaners and is usually regarded as the man who represented liberal democratic values in South Africa. In fact, Smuts believed that South Africa should be a 'white man's country' and he believed in 'segregation' - which is simply English for apartheid.

He passed the first piece of legislation which separated white and black areas and in 1920 the Native (Urban Areas) Act which laid down the principle of residential segregation in urban areas, keeping blacks away from white residential areas.

He also initiated the principle of reserving jobs for whites in the Mines and Work Act.

In the 1929 'Black Peril' election, when fear of being dominated by Africans became the major issue, Smuts demanded that the rate of black integration into white society must be curtailed. He also called for South African influence to be extended north and east in the creation of a British Confederation of African States.

Smuts lost that election to J B Hertzog's National Party, but five years later they formed a coalition and democracy took another blow.

In 1939, the other law aimed at removing these black spots was passed and all Black occupants were relocated to the reserves.

Further separation was ensured by different forms of urban control.

In the early 1920s, the government of Jan Smuts set out a basic framework for administering the lives of urban Africans. The government was encouraged by the recommendation of the Stallard Commission of 1922, which had called for a system of influx control for Africans.

It was based on the principle that Africans were allowed in the urban industrial areas only if they were to work – and they had to leave when the job was done. 

The Native Urban Areas Act of 1923 was passed to separate the so-called location from White towns through the establishment of a separate, self balancing, native revenue account.

Furthermore, the government excluded Africans from White-funded amenities in White areas to which Africans did not contribute taxes.

The Native Representation Act of 1936 took away the franchise from Africans in the Cape.

Instead, Africans in the whole country were to be able to elect four white men to represent them on a council, with eight other appointed members. Although 'coloureds' remained on the Cape electoral role until 1956, the 1936 act was the final stage in a long retreat from democracy in South Africa.

Political segregation

From 1924 to 1939, James Barry Munnik Hertzog became the prime minister and he achieved the objective of political segregation throughout the country.

The Representative of Natives Act of 1936 removed Black voters in the Cape Province from the common electoral roll, and put them on a separate roll to elect three representatives to the House of Assembly. 

Four senators were elected by electoral colleges to represent Africans throughout the country.

When the National Party won the 1948 election on the platform of apartheid, it did not have radically to rewrite South Africa's laws. The foundations of apartheid were already in place!

The Afrikaner National Party won the 1948 general election under the slogan apartheid, meaning separateness.

The National party started to pass a wide range of apartheid laws which aimed to ensure racial separation on all aspects of political, social and economic life. The laws also controlled the movements and economic activities of Black people. 

The goal of the Afrikaner National Party was not only to separate South Africa’s white minority from its non-white majority, but also to separate non-whites from each other, and to divide Black South Africans along tribal lines in order to reduce their political power.

The African (Bantu) groups were separated into homelands, or Bantustans, consigned there to become separate ‘nations’.  About 13% of the South Africa’s land was set aside for these homelands. 

The remaining land, including the major mineral areas and the cities, were set aside for the Whites.

The basic principle of separate development policies was to grant Blacks rights and freedoms only within the confines of the Africans’ designated homeland, while outside the reserves blacks were to be classed as foreigners.

In 1958, Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd became the prime minister, and he transformed apartheid policy into a system he referred to as separate development. 

Sex outside marriage between races was already banned, but it was carried to its logical conclusion in the 1949 Mixed Marriages Act and the Immorality Act of the following year which banned any sex between races.

The Native Laws Amendment Act, built on Smuts' Native (Urban Areas) Act, redefined which Africans were allowed into urban areas. The laws affecting the various pass laws that were already in existence were amalgamated into the Abolition of Passes and Consolidation of Documents Act and forced all Africans to carry a single pass. It was made a criminal offence not to produce the pass book when required by the police.

Various laws relating to urban affairs which prescribed segregation were gathered into the Group Areas Act which made separation absolute and gave the government powers to define an area as White, Black, Indian or Coloured.

The Industrial Conciliation Act built on the foundations of Smuts' Mines and Work Act to restrict further black rights at work.

On the crucial issue of land, the Prevention of Illegal Squatting Act gave the government power to move African tenants from privately or publicly owned land and tidy up the land into segregated areas.

The Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act of 1959 created 10 Bantu homelands/Bantustans.
Separating black South Africans from each other enabled the government to claim that there was no black majority in the country, and reduced the possibility that blacks would unify into a single nationalist organisation.

Every black South African was designated as a citizen of one of the Bantustans, a system that supposedly gave them full political rights, but effectively removed them from the nation’s political body.

Movement of Blacks to and between other parts of South Africa was strictly regulated; the locations of residence or employment were also restricted and entry was only allowed if people were permitted to work there.

Black people were not allowed to vote and own land.  Blacks who were dwelling in urban areas as urban workers, including those who were third- or fourth-generation city dwellers, were seen as transients. Their real homes were in rural reservations from which they or their ancestors migrated. Only those holding the necessary labour permits, granted according to the labour market, were allowed to reside within urban areas. Such permits often did not include permission for the spouse or family of the permit holder.

Most African urban dwellers had living outside the Bantustans were subject to strict blackout regulations and passbook requirements, especially in the cities. Blacks who were found without passbooks were subject to arrest. The apartheid police officials were granted extensive powers of preventive detention in 1962, initially for 30 days, later for indefinite periods.

Education

Education was separated in such a manner that non-whites were not allowed to attend White schools. Primary, secondary and higher education was separated.

During Apartheid, 11 universities in South Africa served mainly white students. They included, as divided according to the language of instruction: five Afrikaans universities (Stellenbosch, Pretoria, Potchefstroom, Orange Free State, and Rand Afrikaans Universities); four English language universities (Cape Town, Witwatersrand, Natal, and Rhodes); and two bilingual universities (Port Elizabeth and the University of South Africa).

The University of Durban-Westville, which was based in Natal Province, now known as Kwa Zulu Natal Province, was basically an apartheid institution reserved for the use of Indian and some Coloureds students. The institution started as a University College on Salisbury Island in Durban Bay in the early 1960s. Student numbers grew rapidly and in 1971 full university status was granted, and the following year the new university moved into its modern Westville campus. As the 1970s and ‘80s unfolded, the campus became a major site for anti-apartheid protests, and in 1984 the university defiantly opened its doors to students of all races.

The University College of the Western Cape was established in 1959 for Coloured students and the first group of 166 students was officially enrolled in 1960. The Institution was based in the Cape Province, now known as the Western Cape Province. In 1970, the institution gained university status and could award degrees and diplomas.

Several segregated colleges for advanced technical training were also created, mainly in the major urban areas, preparing students directly for work and offering different programmes in the agricultural sciences, commerce and industry, public service, military, and health sectors.

In the mid-1970s and 1980s, new ethnic universities were built for homelands such as Transkei, Ciskei, Venda, and Bophuthatswana.  Those included the University of Transkei, originally a satellite campus of Fort Hare later taken over by Ciskei; the University of Venda; the University of the North; and the University of Bopthutswana.


Vista University was established with campuses in South Africa for the segregated African townships around Johannesburg, Pretoria, Benoni, Port Elizabeth, and Bloemfontein.

Job reservation

The Job Reservation laws passed in the mid-1950s protected most of the skilled jobs for Whites and ensured that Whites graduates got jobs. 

This was the completion of legislation which began with Cecil Rhodes' Glen Grey Act, nearly 50 years before.

The arrival, or rather re-arrival, of non-racial democracy in South Africa in 1994 was clearly cause for celebration, but to believe that it was a victory of Black Nationalism over White 'Afrikaner' domination is a comlete myth.