South Africa

ON THE WORLD TODAY

A LAND of burning color problems, the Union of South Africa lies on the strategic route to the East which was the lifeline of Commonwealth and Empire when Rommel was but thirty miles from Alexandria. Its Opposition Party stands for a republic and a break with the Crown.

When the royal family’s visit was announced a year ago, the joint leader of the Herenigde (Opposition, Nationalist) Party in the Transvaal, General J. C. G. Kemp, M.P., sent the following letter to the Star, one of Johannesburg’s leading newspapers: “General Smuts invited the British King to South Africa without consulting the Opposition. His object with such a visit just before a general election is clear — to whip up British sentiment in the country, possibly for party political purposes; and to strengthen the political and economic bonds with the British Empire. . . .

“The position of the Afrikaner and republican is clear. Those of us . . . still endeavoring to bring about a republic in South Africa, and other prorepublicans, cannot take part in a festivity which will strengthen the monarchy in the Union.”

There were many Nationalists who disagreed with General Kemp’s stand, but there were others who agreed. A few extremists among British South Africans, fearing violence, thought it an unwarranted risk to bring the royal family to the Union.

Land of contrasts

What is this Union of South Africa which the Crown chose to visit before all other Dominions? It includes the Cape Province, off whose rocky shores the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean meet, where mountains march from the coastal belt, with its fruit, wine, and all the good things of life, to the Karroo, a barren land of little rain, which lives on sheep and goat farming.

It includes the Orange Free State (the Iowa of the Union), where farm lands roll forever to the horizon and then merge into the desert-like but diamond-rich country around Kimberley. The Free State is the stronghold of the Nationalist Party, but today this Afrikander core of the nation is threatened with industrialization and another Johannesburg as a result of the gold strike at Odendaalsrust last year. It includes the Transvaal, the gold province and industrial heart of the Union, where Johannesburg, the Union’s New York, rises over a mile above the sea 900 miles away at Cape Town, and mines nearly 50 per cent of the world’s gold almost under the skyscrapers of which the city is so proud.

It is also a province of farms and ranches, of chrome, coal, iron, and platinum mines, of brisk, healthy high veld and of cactus-covered or lush, tropical low veld, ridden with malaria. It is a land of contrasts. Rich in minerals, it is unable to feed itself although dotted with rich farm lands. A land of eroded pink hills, it is so poor in lumber that it scouts the continent and imports from Scandinavia and the United States to fill its needs.

It is a land peopled with 2,335,460 Europeans, 7,725,809 natives, and 282,539 Asiatics, most of the last in Natal. What this mixed population will do about racial problems will matter enormously to the natives in French and Belgian Africa, to every place in Africa where there is a dark skin, and even to us in the United States. The population figures explain why South Africa is, and always has been, committed to a cheap-labor policy for non-Europeans.

A leading South African economist, S. H. Frankel, has estimated that half the population derives its income from the gold mines, directly or indirectly, and that the government depends on them for more than half its funds.

Burdened with the support of half the country, the mines could practice only one economy — cheap labor. Machinery from overseas, freight rates — almost every item involved in the extraction of lowgrade ore was high-priced, except native labor. And so it came about that the basic industry of the country reinforced the mental attitude of the South African toward the native as laborer and bolstered his conviction that economic superiority is and must continue to be the prerogative of the white man.

White supremacy

This cheap-labor policy came into conflict with the policy of white superiority. It would have been an economy to the mines to employ natives in semiskilled and skilled jobs, but there they met white resistance. The white miner said no, and fought the strikes of 1914 and 1922 to carry his point. The color bar, made legal by the Mines and Works Act of 1911, limited cheap labor in the mines by prohibiting the use of non-Europeans in many operations; and the white miners, backed by the rest of the population, were determined to see that it was carried into effect.

So hand in hand with the cheap-labor policy goes the policy of maintaining the economic superiority of the white race. The labor force in the mines, therefore, has resolved itself into a comparatively few Europeans (46,090 in 1936) overseeing a vast army of natives (394,320 in 1936).

In terms of dollars the European earned in that year an average of about $1425, the natives about $155 — and that small sum included $70 to cover food and housing, which left the native a cash wage of about $85 a year. The white is well established as the superior being in the mines when his earnings average roughly ten times those of the natives.

Last summer 300,000 natives in the gold mines of the Rand struck for improved working conditions and higher pay. The police were called out with their tear gas and tommy guns, and by the end of a week the natives were back at work, having gained nothing. The newspapers stated that only eight were killed, although some who went into the hospitals and morgues on the Reef reported that many times that number were killed.

The press raised the bogey of “ Communist agitator,” but influential and responsible men and women disagreed with that explanation, in spite of the fact that it was also the official explanation for the strike. There was no direct statement by General Smuts, but the Rand Daily Mail and other papers reported that in speaking before the Transvaal Head Committee of his United Party in Pretoria, the General blamed agitators for the strike and added that the Government was taking steps to see that this position was “put right.”

Further, he said that the wages and working conditions of native mine laborers had been fully investigated and that the Government had carried out practically in full the recommendations of the Lansdown Commission, which had been appointed to study and make recommendations concerning conditions affecting natives in the mines.

Margaret Ballinger, M.P., and white representative for natives in the General Assembly, and Jessie McPherson, mayor of Johannesburg, were among several who published the following answer to the Prime Minister: “We, the undersigned, wish to place on record our belief that the tragic incidents of the last few days could have been avoided had channels of negotiation between the African mineworkers and their employers been provided.

“We cannot accept the statements that the strike was the work of agitators. The existence of serious economic grievances was fully established by the Lansdown Commission, a considerable proportion of whose recommendations, designed to alleviate the position, were not implemented.”

Some people interpret these remarks as a polite way of telling the Prime Minister that he was not stating the facts. Smuts certainly has his difficulties. Should he want to, it would be a long task to implement in his own land the idealism for which he stands to most of the world. And that he wants to has been questioned. After the strike of 1914 in the mines his enemies coined the word platkat-politiek, meaning the policy of ruthlessly shooting down all opposition, to describe his outlook.

Natal segregates the Indians

But the problem of the native is not the only racial nightmare with which South Africa has to deal. There is a second — that of the Indians. South Africa’s Indian policy holds the spotlight because it is involved in imperial and world politics through Great Britain, India, and the United Nations.

The first Indian laborers were landed in Natal in 1860 in order to help establish Natal’s sugar industry. Until 1913, thousands of Indians were imported, and eventually the sons and grandsons of the immigrants began to compete with the Europeans. Last June, Parliament passed legislation aimed at segregating the Indians. The Indian was barred from owning property in certain areas of Natal, and of Durban in particular.

In protest against the “insult” implied in segregation, the Indian Government withdrew its High Commissioner in the Union, boycotted trade with the country, and demanded the withdrawal from India of all but certain named South Africans. Open economic warfare was India’s answer to South Africa. So bitterly do the South African Indians feel, that they sent a delegation to the United Nations Assembly to present their case, and in South Africa they have organized a Passive Resistance Movement.

The Nationalists as a body opposed a clause in the bill giving Indian men the vote, and one member of the Labor Party actually crossed the floor and joined the Nationalists. Behind every concession granted to the Indian, South Africans see a possible future demand by natives. So here was “more British than the British” Natal, the stronghold of sentiment in favor of the tie with the Crown, allied with the prorepublican Nationalists on a color question. Under the shadow of the native problem, the rest of the country backs Natal’s stand because of its fear of native encroachment on white preserves.

The Herrenvolk

White supremacy is the simplest, most direct political appeal to the prejudices and self-interest of South African voters; and the Herenigde Party, led by Dr. D. F. Malan, is the champion of white supremacy. In September, 1939, Smuts, then a member of the Hertzog cabinet, opposed the Prime Minister on the war issue and took the Union into the war by a mere thirteen votes. During the war the party strongly opposed its prosecution and agitated for its termination, and Dr. Malan even went so far as to negotiate with Hitler via Zeesen Radio for a republic, in case the Germans were victorious as he anticipated.

In spite of the fact that Nationalist wartime activities are now embarrassing to them, only last September Dr. Malan said: “We want to live out our own nationhood so that we do not need in any way to be under the English King, who is a total stranger in South Africa.” The Nationalist Party, he said, does not wish to destroy the English-speaking section, but “there must be undivided loyalty to volk and to country.”

It is not surprising that much in Nazi Germany appealed to many South Africans. They saw eye to eye with the Nazis on racial issues, not only in relation to the natives and Indians, but to the Jews as well. Anti-Semitism is strong — and growing — in the Union, probably because of the intense competition of the fairly large Jewish population in the big cities, notably in Johannesburg. Dr. Malan at one time went so far as to introduce into Parliament a bill which would have barred Jews of any nationality from living in the Union.

Nazi fellow travelers

There are other, even more reactionary organizations which may be counted on to support the Nationalists at election time. The Ossewa Brandwag (Sentinels of the Ox-Wagon) is a semi-military, secret organization, strongly sympathetic to Germany during the war, which is estimated to number about 50,000, under the leadership of Dr. J. J. J. van Rensburg. The OB is anti-parliamentary and stands for the suppression of non-Europeans and Jews, the dominance of the Afrikander, and a National Socialist Republic. It is reported to have captured the white trade-unions, largely on racial grounds.

The New Order, out and out totalitarian, is led by a brilliant lawyer, Oswald Pirow, grandson of a German missionary. The party is not large, but is moderately influential, and the New Orderites in Parliament vote with the Nationalists.

The Gray Shirts, now numbering about 12,000 or less, were originally a purely pro-Nazi organization, supported by German funds; and their leader, Louis Weichardt, was interned during the war. In May, 1946, “Welcome Back Weichardt from Internment” meetings were organized on the Rand. At the last minute they were banned by the Minister of Justice under the Riotous Assemblies Act. The Herenigde Party, however, has since forged a political link with the Gray Shirts, and Weichardt has pledged their support.

Boring from within

Behind all these reactionary organizations is another — Die Broederbond. It is more powerful, possibly more menacing, than the others, for it is practically “a state within a state.” As long ago as 1935 the late Prime Minister Dr. Hertzog warned the country against its machinations. The membership is small but select, made up largely of men in the professions and, it is said, even of government servants in high places. It is a secret organization pledged to the planned state, to white supremacy, and to the dominance of the Afrikander.

Through the cell system, its activities are directed by a top triumvirate; and through cross-membership in other organizations, such as the Nationalist Party, the Ossewa Brandwag, and various cultural and business groups, it can and does direct their policies and activities for its own ends.

There are fortunately such men as Deputy Prime Minister Jan Hofmeyr, who said: “The right course to take is, while facing facts, to refuse to abandon the firm ground of principle, to maintain the essential value of human personality as something independent of race or color, to provide facilities to native development and, since no one could say with certainty to what in the long run the policy of development would lead, to go forward in faith. That is the issue — faith against fear. A policy based on fear must lead to disaster.” Men who think in those terms and who also figure largely in politics may save the country from its own worst enemies within its borders — the small men ridden by fear.