Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
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Anita van der Merwe, The Trekkers’ Land (Cape Town: New Holland, 2003)
… As the 1920s dawned, the South African Union was in its fourth year without a government. The Imperial governor-general had refused to dissolve the union parliament after Jan Smuts’ resignation as prime minister in May 1916 [1], and still refused to do so. Nor would he allow the existing parliament to form another cabinet. The union civil service and courts continued to operate, but the government effectively ceased to exist: the parliament became a debating society, the governor-general prosecuted the Matabeleland and Bastotholand wars on his own authority, and business was increasingly done through informal cooperation between the member governments.
By 1919, matters had reached truly ridiculous proportions. The withdrawal of Natal, Transkei, Bechuanaland and the Zulu and Swazi princely states on London’s orders [2], combined with the earlier defection of the Imperial delegates from the Orange Free State and the recall of those from the South African Republic, had left the party with only eight of the 48 remaining seats, but the governor-general, who remembered well how effective an opponent Smuts had been, refused to swear in a government of any other party. He declared instead that, in the absence of a cabinet, he would govern directly through the use of his reserve powers.
To say the least, this proclamation did not meet with the member states’ acceptance, and the governor-general could not enforce it. The majority of South Africa’s military forces were under the control of their respective states, and the governor-general needed the small Union army to prosecute his land clearances and colonial warfare in Matabeleland. In May, what was left of the South African parliament – including the delegates from Basotholand, which had defied its Imperial governor’s orders and declared its intention to remain in the union – voted to strip the governor-general of power and to take over the union administration.
With nobody to swear in a government, effective power fell into the hands of parliamentary committees made up of delegates from the majority parties, while Matabeleland became the private preserve of the governor-general and the scene of an increasingly brutal struggle between Ndebele and British settlers. The governor-general and the Imperial Government in London issued orders nullifying the union parliament’s acts, which the member states ignored, and until the Imperials’ fall in 1921, South Africa went on in this state of legal limbo. That the union survived at all in these circumstances is a testament to the members’ commitment, and even more a testament to Smuts, who traveled from state to state virtually without break to coordinate the efforts of the parliamentary committees and member governments.
The grand coalition that succeeded the Imperial Government was divided on how to deal with the mess, and after some debate and prodding from the other dominions, it invited the South Africans to a round table. In October 1921, the South African delegation arrived in London with three goals: to secure the appointment of a cooperative governor-general, to obtain ratification of their post-1916 acts and legislation, and to negotiate the return of the colonies that the Imperial Government had taken out of the union.
The first two were not particularly controversial. The South Africans had come to London with a name in hand - Orange Free State president Andries Bosch, who had historically been friendly to British interests before the Imperial Party forced his hand – and royal assent was quickly given to his appointment as governor-general. He, in turn, gave retroactive sanction to everything the union parliament had done since Smuts’ resignation, and agreed to dissolve that parliament and hold new elections. The matter of the colonies, however, was somewhat more complicated. Natal, which had welcomed King Albert and Queen Mary [3] upon their exile from Britain, refused to rejoin the union, and it was clear that nothing short of military force would make them do so. And while Britain was not averse to returning the other colonies to South Africa, there were questions as to whether they would return as British colonies or as wards of the union – to say nothing of Basotholand, whose successful defiance of the Imperial Government had amounted to a unilateral declaration of independence.
In the end, it was decided that all the colonies but Basotholand would remain British, with their recruits continuing to serve in the British army and their people having a right of appeal to the British courts, but that their governors would be appointed for a fixed term by the government of South Africa. For Basotholand, in exchange for an acknowledgment of nominal British sovereignty, London agreed to give up any actual power, recognizing the Sotho king as governor in perpetuity. Basotholand remained a colony in name, but in fact, it became a member kingdom of the union, on an equal footing with the Cape and the Boer republics.
The delegation returned to South Africa in December, and the formation of a new parliament followed quickly: the Cape, Basotholand and the Orange Free State held elections; the legislatures of Griqualand, Namaland and the South African Republic chose new representatives; and the governors, kings and chiefly councils of the colonies nominated their respective delegates. The Imperial Party failed to win even one seat, and Smuts’ Afrikaner Bond-centered coalition won a commanding majority with the support of the moderate Cape British parties and the independent Griqua and colonial members. This was the government that attended the 1922 Imperial Conference and helped to shape the new relationship between Britain and its dominions, and that would lead South Africa throughout the 1920s.
Smuts’ first priority on returning to office was to end the Matabeleland war, which had become a merciless struggle in which atrocities were commonplace and in which more than 100,000 people – an eighth of the population – had lost their lives. But eight years of sponsored settlement had put the matter beyond easy solution. The Ndebele were not inclined to trust Smuts’ good intentions, and the settlers – who by now numbered in the thousands and had established several towns – were heavily armed and had pledged to resist any attempt to evict them. It was doubtful whether the white troops in the South African military would fire on the settlers, and while the black troops’ willingness to do so was not in question, Smuts was well aware of how it would look to the Transvaal burghers or conservative Cape citizens if he sent black regiments to crush a white uprising. He had to satisfy himself with pulling the army into a defensive posture, ordering it to resist raids but not to attack the lands that the Ndebele still held.
It took a full year for Smuts to bring the parties to the negotiating table – it was that long before the Ndebele were convinced that the cessation of raids and punitive expeditions was more than a ploy, and that long before he lost sufficient patience with the settlers’ leaders to threaten to simply withdraw and leave them without protection. And once the talks commenced, it became clear that there was no way to satisfy everyone. It was only in August 1924, after eighteen months of off-and-on negotiations, that peace was finally made.
The terms, like the negotiations themselves, made nobody very happy. The settlers would stay, but all land that they didn’t actually occupy, including territories that had been cleared and designated for settlement, would revert to the Ndebele. Compensation would be paid for the lands that remained in European hands. And, following the example of Fiji, Matabeleland would have two parallel governments: the traditional Ndebele kingdom and the settlers’ legislature, each having sovereignty over its constituents throughout the province and each choosing two of its delegates to the union parliament. The small Boer enclave of Vryheidsland, which had largely stayed out of the fighting, would retain its territorial autonomy and choose a fifth representative.
It was a fragile peace, and it would be tested, but it would hold through the 1920s as the union itself recovered. By this time the improving economic situation and the increasing trade with the German colonies had led to steady growth and investment, and even the beginnings of industrialization in the Cape. South Africa had historically lagged behind the other dominions in industrial investment, relying instead on its rich gold and diamond resources, but by 1930 it was diversifying, and the member states’ economies were becoming more integrated. This in turn fueled the growth of transportation and public health infrastructure even in traditionally backward areas, and rising living standards began to take the edge off the conflicts of the 1910s.
Peace in Matabeleland also helped to bring the adjacent kingdom of Mutapa into the union. The Shona kingdom had cultural ties to South Africa – the Springbok Clan of trekboers had been integrated into its kinship system for forty years, and they frequently married back and forth with their cousins in the Boer republics – and the rise of the militant Novo Reino regime made it wary of its alignment with Portugal. Few in Mutapa wanted an open break with Lisbon, but like the Nama, they believed that membership in the South African union would be a useful counterweight. With their accession in 1926, and that of the Free Republic of Rehoboth in 1928, all but a few of the far-flung Afrikaner communities were gathered under the South African banner, and the union brought together parts of three empires. The South Africa of 1930 was still British at its core, but German investment and Portuguese labor immigration were increasingly important, economically and even culturally.
The 1920s also saw the African population mobilize as it had not done before. The Cape Malays and the mixed-race peoples had been brought into South Africa’s political life as members of the Afrikaner nation, but the Africans were a less comfortable fit. Before the Imperial interregnum, the Africans who qualified for the Cape franchise tended to vote for the Afrikaner Bond or for one of the liberal British parties, and while they received patronage from those parties, they were largely regarded as appendages. But the challenges of the 1910s – the Imperial Government’s repressive racial policies, the spread of the Congo fever, the Sotho and Ndebele conflicts – convinced them of the need to speak for themselves. The admission of Basotholand as a full member of the union also led Africans in the other states to demand what the Sotho had.
The first meeting of the All-South Africa Reform Congress – a party modeled very consciously on its Indian namesake – took place in Cape Town’s District Six in March 1925. Its membership included Africans from nearly all major ethnic groups and – again as in India – a number of sympathetic whites. Its debates were informed by the secular politics of the West, by the traditions of centuries, and by religions old and new: charismatic Christianity, Mormonism, and the Abacarist Islam that had filtered from Malê merchants via the Cape Malays.
The manifesto issued at the close of the Cape Town meeting called for unity among Africans, ironically taking the Afrikaners as a model of how cultural and political ties could transcend ethnic boundaries. It demanded universal suffrage in the Cape, the vote in the Boer republics and Griqualand (where Africans then had none), equality in education and jobs, full recognition of customary land tenure, and equal status for the colonies. It was, in other words, a call to unite for majority rule.
In the Cape elections held that year, the Congress failed to win any seats: it was as yet more an intellectual movement than a mass movement, and the African voters followed their established political loyalties. But in succeeding years, it won significant legal victories, including a court ruling requiring qualified candidates for union civil service posts to be considered without regard to race, and after lawyer Gwede Mbalula won a by-election to the Cape parliament in 1927, it became a recognized force in South African politics. The strength of that force would become apparent in the 1929 general election, when the Congress won eleven seats in the Cape legislature and two seats in the union parliament. Africans were now more than 20 percent of the Cape electorate, and were no longer silent either there or elsewhere…
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Samuel Dlamini, “Natal After the Fall,” African History Quarterly 33: 279-86 (Summer 1979)
… King Albert’s first choice of exile was a European country, but he found his options limited. France and Russia were out, as was Germany, whose center-left government had vocally opposed the Imperial Party. The Habsburg lands and Belgium were too Catholic, Iberia too unstable, Greece too poor, Switzerland too republican and Scandinavia too cold. That left the Netherlands, and while he received a cordial welcome in Amsterdam, he found life as a private citizen demeaning and the new British government expressed its discomfort with him being that close to home. Thus it was that, six weeks after leaving England, he departed a second time, for Durban.
Natal and Albert suited each other. The Imperial Party had taken power in Natal even before it had done so in Britain, and in successive elections, it had secured almost complete control of the Natalian parliament. With the Imperials in control of the police and treasury, Natal had become a virtual one-party state: although other parties were allowed to exist, they were slapped down if they did much more.
Albert, for his part, was an answered prayer to the mandarins of Durban. The fall of the Imperial Government left them with a choice of declaring independence or being ousted from power, but they could hardly secede from the British Empire while representing a party whose raison d’etre was maintaining that empire’s greatness. With Albert as a figurehead, Natal could become effectively independent while still claiming to be British, and on New Year’s Day 1922, the legislature declared that Albert’s abdication had been coerced and that it would not recognize George V as the legitimate king.
Albert, aware that renouncing his abdication could lead to unwanted attention in London, did not personally endorse the resolution: he refused to make public appearances as king and insisted on being addressed as “Your Grace” rather than “Your Majesty.” But he also did nothing to oppose it, and did not gainsay the Natalian government when it professed to act in his name. In exchange, the government provided him and the former Queen Mary with a handsome subsidy and a palatial villa where they entertained the cream of Durban society and visiting sympathizers from abroad. An American businessman, visiting in 1925, would describe their establishment as a cross between an English country estate and an antebellum plantation.
That description might have done as well for the country as a whole. Natal in the 1920s was both a museum piece and a cautionary example. It was a shard of Imperial-era Britain preserved in amber, unabashedly white-supremacist in an era where the Great War and the Indian revolution were fast making such racial verities obsolete. It was also a showcase of what the Imperials would have done to the empire as a whole had they had free rein: a country in which a small white minority lived at middle-class standards or better on the labor of a subjugated majority.
In the early days of Imperial rule in Natal, many Africans and Indian sugar workers had protested the new regime or else voted with their feet by emigrating to Transkei, Zululand or (in the Indians’ case) Mauritius. By the time of Albert and Mary’s arrival, such things had been taken in hand by much the same means as were used in the Jim Crow South: strict censorship and limits on education, bans on assembly and organization, surveillance of religious institutions and controls on movement and residence. Natal was in fact able to clamp down much more firmly on movement than the American South: African-Americans were at least citizens, while nonwhite Natalians were not, and there was no limit on the degree to which the government could restrict their rights. Throughout the 1920s, a new Jim Crow edifice was built in Natal at the same time that its model in the United States was starting to be dismantled.
Natal would become a cause celebre for the Congress Party – for both of them, in fact, because Indian workers were subject to the same restrictions as Africans. Neither could operate openly in territories under Natalian control, but they worked together to create a network much like the South Carolina-based “new underground railroad” that functioned in the American South. This network was supported not only by the growing African political organizations in South Africa but by the government of India and the Indians of Mauritius, and would be only the beginning of fruitful cooperation between the two…
_______
[1] See post 3734.
[2] See post 3921.
[3] A different Mary.
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Sulemain
Banned
Okay, that was an officially awesome update. Good to see Jan Smuts and the ASARC try to turn South Africa into the country it both deserves and has the potential to be 
.
The situation in Natal is what I expected; brutal and unpleasant. If I were to describe TTL's "Unholy Alliance", Alt-Coperatist/Fascist Belgium, Portugal and Jim Crow Natal would do it.
.The situation in Natal is what I expected; brutal and unpleasant. If I were to describe TTL's "Unholy Alliance", Alt-Coperatist/Fascist Belgium, Portugal and Jim Crow Natal would do it.
Okay, that was an officially awesome update. Good to see Jan Smuts and the ASARC try to turn South Africa into the country it both deserves and has the potential to be
The situation in Natal is what I expected; brutal and unpleasant. If I were to describe TTL's "Unholy Alliance", Alt-Coperatist/Fascist Belgium, Portugal and Jim Crow Natal would do it.
There are also some quite unpleasant Latin American regimes around, both Belgian-inspired and secularist (Salvador IIRC).
Sulemain
Banned
True, true. There is unpleasantness in this world for sure, but nowhere near the same extent as OTL. More to the point, more people are aware of the unpleasantness.
The Matabeleland Boers are the ones in the Vryheidsland enclave, which borders on the Transvaal. They aren't a full member of the union but have a measure of autonomy. Those in Katanga are a true diaspora, albeit a small one, and by now there should indeed be a few in the German Copperbelt.
And the idea of a broad Afrikaner nation is certainly an important one, not least because it means that the white Afrikaners will feel much less besieged. Those in the Cape, especially, will see themselves not as an anxious minority but as part of a cultural majority.
Okay, that was an officially awesome update. Good to see Jan Smuts and the ASARC try to turn South Africa into the country it both deserves and has the potential to be
There are still plenty of conflicts and flashpoints, though. TTL's smaller Cape Colony might be able to make the transition to majority rule fairly easily - without the Transkei and Griqualand, the Afrikaans-speaking Coloureds are either a plurality or close to it, and with them as part of the Afrikaner nation, the whites don't have to worry too much - but in the Boer republics and Griqualand, it will be a long, hard struggle. Not to mention that there's still a lot of bad blood in Matabeleland, and the member entities' different levels of sovereignty will continue to be tricky. And then there will be the disputes over closer political integration...
TTL's South Africa is headed in the right direction for the most part, but no one said it would be easy.
There's absolutist Persia too, and China's crash industrialization/modernization program has some deeply unpleasant aspects although others are progressive.
For that matter, I haven't really considered what Siam's internal politics are - its king is a pretty rational actor on the international stage, but that doesn't mean he's a nice guy at home. Then again, Siam might be very progressive - I suppose I ought to figure it out.
I'd describe South Africa by this point as a cup 5/6th full of delicious lemonade with a huge, horsefly-sized Tstse fly stuck in it!
It is not so clear to me why the nonwhite subject peoples of Natal cannot all vote with their feet, leaving the sahibs there high and dry. In even the ATL Jim Crow South, there wasn't really any place for African-Americans to go, whereas they could find hope, more often than OTL (not that they could compare) for incremental local improvements, while the fact that there were some opportunities for some of them to migrate elsewhere--to South Carolina to a limited extent (very limited, counting the preemption of the land by the Circles that would only admit a few) and to places like Sequoyah and the various growing cities--tended to cool the conflicts and give the stay-at-homes a bit of leverage. This combination, with a stronger emphasis on despair, was true OTL as well. OTL white supremacist South Africa was a far-flung domain with borders far from the traditional ranges of the native African peoples, north of it before WWII were other white-supremacist colonial regimes, and as decolonization proceeded these were replaced by governments beholden to local cliques and populated to saturation with completely alien other African peoples, all deeply impoverished compared to even the trickle-down of wealth the Apartheid regime did command--also these other African nations were vulnerable to punishing military attacks, that the Nationalist government was soon canny enough to veil by raising rival factions to fight insurgent wars, giving cover to "mere assistance" by the South African Defensive Forces, notably bombing by the air arm.
Here though, in 1920s South Africa, Natal is a relatively small part of a much larger (larger than OTL!) federation that is increasingly run by and for Africans, who anyway have enough power to prevent any part of the Federation from supporting Natalese white supremacy. It is obviously too early for the Federation to countenance talk of invading and actually kicking the Natalese whites from their plantation pinnaces--the whites of South Africa won't hold with going that far.
But if individual subjects of the Natalese regime slip past the border, they can expect to find much sympathy and some room for them to make a new home not too different from their former lives and (despite the fact that it isn't where they grew up) immediately better in some ways, and if the whites of Natal complain about it they will get no sympathy whatsoever, not in Cape Town or Pretoria (or wherever the actual center of the Federation is) and not in London, nor elsewhere in the civilized world. Maybe a bit from some factions in Lisbon. (But not from the Pope either!)
So, while I suppose I shouldn't underestimate peoples' attachments to their homes, be they ever so oppressed in them, the immediate problem the Natal regime faces is ongoing black flight. It was mentioned that this happened soon after the Imperial takeover there, but then stabilized, presumably because with the Imperial Party advancing throughout the Empire there was then little sense that elsewhere would be better among the majority. But with the downfall of the Imperial Party and the repudiation of King Albert, I'd think there would then be a second, and potentially much bigger, perhaps complete, evacuation of the nonwhites to other parts of South Africa.
Unless of course the government clamped down. Indeed we've got a dirty laundry list of Jim Crow/Apartheid like repressive regulations they did impose. But the essential one, which is a very tight clampdown on mobility of any kind, particularly closing the borders as tight as the Soviets ever locked up the infamous "Iron Curtain," seems to be missing from the list!
And indeed, while that is precisely what the Natal oligarchs need, it would also be a very grave step for them to take. The dark spectacle of barbed wire and machine-gun bristling sentry towers stretching across the borders, and families being routinely gunned down trying to cross them to freedom, and the sheer expense of these fortifications against their own people and the heavy hand of patrols to keep natives and immigrant non-Europeans on their reservations and shuttling them under guard to their jobs servicing the whites--it would make them and anyone who fancied them infamous pariahs on a scale I'm not sure this timeline has seen since the slaveowners of various American nations were finally disabused of the notion they could own human beings.
To be sure it is closely rivaled still by the ugly realities of Jim Crow in the USA, but as the post says those "quaint customs" and "peculiar institutions" are on their way out in America.
So if the Natalian situation really does require this sort of flamboyant totalitarian spectacle to hang on on white supremacist terms, it won't be quiet! Either the world, and specifically the British lands, tired of bloodshed, sits back and accepts the status of accomplice in these outrageous crimes against humanity, or the South African federation, Commonwealth at large, and indeed the whole world is paralyzed because sufficient voices in open defense of white supremacy are numerous and loud enough to defend the Natalian extremists.
Perhaps I overestimate the mobility of the Natalian subject peoples, and underestimate how well other Jim Crowish tools in the racist toolkit that were mentioned, such as the ability of the Natalian establishment to propagandize those who have not yet fled with scary stories about how hard life would be for them if they left.
But I think without an ugly degree of harsh and overt control on mobility, the Natalian subject peoples would indeed slip away, if not in a matter of weeks, than surely as a slow leak over a decade or two.
Perhaps if the timescale of that leak is long enough, that is indeed the situation Jonathan will be showing us--that within a half decade or so the regime is in crisis due to declining workforce, and on the cusp of deciding whether even harsher measures that will get them in trouble with world and South African opinion are needed, versus capitulating to the prevailing world opinion that they are a bunch of ogres and need to reform.
It is not so clear to me why the nonwhite subject peoples of Natal cannot all vote with their feet, leaving the sahibs there high and dry. In even the ATL Jim Crow South, there wasn't really any place for African-Americans to go, whereas they could find hope, more often than OTL (not that they could compare) for incremental local improvements, while the fact that there were some opportunities for some of them to migrate elsewhere--to South Carolina to a limited extent (very limited, counting the preemption of the land by the Circles that would only admit a few) and to places like Sequoyah and the various growing cities--tended to cool the conflicts and give the stay-at-homes a bit of leverage. This combination, with a stronger emphasis on despair, was true OTL as well. OTL white supremacist South Africa was a far-flung domain with borders far from the traditional ranges of the native African peoples, north of it before WWII were other white-supremacist colonial regimes, and as decolonization proceeded these were replaced by governments beholden to local cliques and populated to saturation with completely alien other African peoples, all deeply impoverished compared to even the trickle-down of wealth the Apartheid regime did command--also these other African nations were vulnerable to punishing military attacks, that the Nationalist government was soon canny enough to veil by raising rival factions to fight insurgent wars, giving cover to "mere assistance" by the South African Defensive Forces, notably bombing by the air arm.
Here though, in 1920s South Africa, Natal is a relatively small part of a much larger (larger than OTL!) federation that is increasingly run by and for Africans, who anyway have enough power to prevent any part of the Federation from supporting Natalese white supremacy. It is obviously too early for the Federation to countenance talk of invading and actually kicking the Natalese whites from their plantation pinnaces--the whites of South Africa won't hold with going that far.
But if individual subjects of the Natalese regime slip past the border, they can expect to find much sympathy and some room for them to make a new home not too different from their former lives and (despite the fact that it isn't where they grew up) immediately better in some ways, and if the whites of Natal complain about it they will get no sympathy whatsoever, not in Cape Town or Pretoria (or wherever the actual center of the Federation is
) and not in London, nor elsewhere in the civilized world. Maybe a bit from some factions in Lisbon. (But not from the Pope either!)So, while I suppose I shouldn't underestimate peoples' attachments to their homes, be they ever so oppressed in them, the immediate problem the Natal regime faces is ongoing black flight. It was mentioned that this happened soon after the Imperial takeover there, but then stabilized, presumably because with the Imperial Party advancing throughout the Empire there was then little sense that elsewhere would be better among the majority. But with the downfall of the Imperial Party and the repudiation of King Albert, I'd think there would then be a second, and potentially much bigger, perhaps complete, evacuation of the nonwhites to other parts of South Africa.
Unless of course the government clamped down. Indeed we've got a dirty laundry list of Jim Crow/Apartheid like repressive regulations they did impose. But the essential one, which is a very tight clampdown on mobility of any kind, particularly closing the borders as tight as the Soviets ever locked up the infamous "Iron Curtain," seems to be missing from the list!
And indeed, while that is precisely what the Natal oligarchs need, it would also be a very grave step for them to take. The dark spectacle of barbed wire and machine-gun bristling sentry towers stretching across the borders, and families being routinely gunned down trying to cross them to freedom, and the sheer expense of these fortifications against their own people and the heavy hand of patrols to keep natives and immigrant non-Europeans on their reservations and shuttling them under guard to their jobs servicing the whites--it would make them and anyone who fancied them infamous pariahs on a scale I'm not sure this timeline has seen since the slaveowners of various American nations were finally disabused of the notion they could own human beings.
To be sure it is closely rivaled still by the ugly realities of Jim Crow in the USA, but as the post says those "quaint customs" and "peculiar institutions" are on their way out in America.
So if the Natalian situation really does require this sort of flamboyant totalitarian spectacle to hang on on white supremacist terms, it won't be quiet! Either the world, and specifically the British lands, tired of bloodshed, sits back and accepts the status of accomplice in these outrageous crimes against humanity, or the South African federation, Commonwealth at large, and indeed the whole world is paralyzed because sufficient voices in open defense of white supremacy
are numerous and loud enough to defend the Natalian extremists.Perhaps I overestimate the mobility of the Natalian subject peoples, and underestimate how well other Jim Crowish tools in the racist toolkit that were mentioned, such as the ability of the Natalian establishment to propagandize those who have not yet fled with scary stories about how hard life would be for them if they left.
But I think without an ugly degree of harsh and overt control on mobility, the Natalian subject peoples would indeed slip away, if not in a matter of weeks, than surely as a slow leak over a decade or two.
Perhaps if the timescale of that leak is long enough, that is indeed the situation Jonathan will be showing us--that within a half decade or so the regime is in crisis due to declining workforce, and on the cusp of deciding whether even harsher measures that will get them in trouble with world and South African opinion are needed, versus capitulating to the prevailing world opinion that they are a bunch of ogres and need to reform.
Yep. Racial prejudice is still very much there, for instance, it ihas begun eroding much earlier and much quickly worldwide, arguably even requiring less shock.
Decolonization seems no less bloody than IOTL overall (the Indian war's nastiness more than compensates the likely lesser number of "colonial" conflicts) but promises to be conducive to a lot richer and stabler "devoloping" world in the aftermath.
We, as "rich Westerners" did not often stop to consider how abismally sucky, even when not very violent, the post-colonial decades have been IOTL on average. The range includes long-lasting hellholes such as former Belgian Congo, whole regions caught in seemingly inescapable loops of impoverishment and recuring conflict (often sectarian) like many parts of the Middle East, massively devastating and long wars like in Indochina, half-locally made nastiness by national regimes forced to keep together casually arranged lumps of territory that happened to have shared a colonial administration and wrap over intractable social and geopolitical issues through brutality of varying level, including genocidal level, and I could go on.
This TL is not going to avoid conflict, but the worldwide distribution of wealth is, geopolitcally speaking, more even, and the intellectual bases for some of the least pleasant OTL's regimes appear to have been discredited early. The Fascism analogue(s) is fairly repulsive, but, being originally far more embedded in a universalistic religious discourse, has retained a lot more of a humanitarian streak (and a similar case, though more ambiguous, could be made for TTL's iterations of Socialism).
By the way, with this I would not to argue that religion is necessarily a beneficial influence on political ideology. But IOTL, Fascism emerged at is very core as celebration of organized violence for its on sake, although it was not always readily apparent. Here, the *Belgianism (or whatever it is called) is more clearly focused on order. I would argue that, IOTL, the call for order (a particular kind of, though not very well defined) was a very important part of the appeal Fascism had, a component that was able to lure the likes of Ezra Pound, Luigi Pirandello or Martin Heidegger (I'm am considering Nazism as a form of Fascism for the purpose of this comment, though I am aware that it is historically incorrect in a broader sense) people that probably would have not been entirely comfortable with underlying moral assumption of the ideology they had embraced.
Very good couple of updates. The Copperbelt region had a lot of immigration, has devastated social structures and the Congo fever over it, it would be quite possible that the society will look nothing like how it was before. What is the language situation? The local languages like Bemba and must be under pressure because German will be an high prestige language : will there be any kind of Creole developing?
Will we see other congresses over the world? An Algerian one is the only one I could possibly see but you always manage to find ways to make things interesting. The developments on Mauritius made me think about La Réunion, I think there are less Indian there than OTL with the war but maybe more Vietnamese, and as France was shown as sympathetic to self determination in English colonies, there could be some links.
I like the pale shade of grey you use for this world, and the fact you don't idealize Human nature : there is always going to be people taking bad decision, ugly political movements, men that are after fame, power and glory to fuck it all up. I think Natal is quite likely to last a few decades at least : you can't expect South African whites to accept invading a colony to put up majority rule.
Will we see other congresses over the world? An Algerian one is the only one I could possibly see but you always manage to find ways to make things interesting. The developments on Mauritius made me think about La Réunion, I think there are less Indian there than OTL with the war but maybe more Vietnamese, and as France was shown as sympathetic to self determination in English colonies, there could be some links.
I like the pale shade of grey you use for this world, and the fact you don't idealize Human nature : there is always going to be people taking bad decision, ugly political movements, men that are after fame, power and glory to fuck it all up. I think Natal is quite likely to last a few decades at least : you can't expect South African whites to accept invading a colony to put up majority rule.
Well, one does hope that the situation in Natal will change eventually. I don't see the situation in Natal lasting forever, but I guess there has to be some misery in the world, so maybe change won't be that radical when it comes.
At least the rest of South Africa seems to be shaping up pretty well. With at least some blacks having significant political rights quite early on, I'm guessing that Apartheid might not even be hinted at, and that South Africa may develop to be a much more equal society than OTL's. A man can dream...
At least the rest of South Africa seems to be shaping up pretty well. With at least some blacks having significant political rights quite early on, I'm guessing that Apartheid might not even be hinted at, and that South Africa may develop to be a much more equal society than OTL's. A man can dream...
Guess there's an element of stereotype involved in Albert's choice (southern Scandinavia really isn't that cold -at least, not if the comparison is with Britain). But then, if Scandinavia has roughly followed their original political development course (as they might well have, even with the postponed crisis and what that lead to), they would probably all be a bit too lefty for Albert's tastes.
I guess it might at that; mobility control does not have to be as lurid as I first imagined, with a giant version of the Berlin Wall all around the province!
The important thing day to day is after all making the subject people show up for work; this can be partially accomplished through squeezing them onto the worst lands a la OTL "Bantustans" in "Grand Apartheid," but then it is necessary to route the people squeezed out of the subsistence economy to where they are wanted and back onto the reservations when they are not. Natal will have to have a big investment in internal policing anyway, so the main thing keeping people from running over the border will be preventing them from getting anywhere near it by means of pervasive passbooks. Anyone who doesn't look "white" will have to justify their presence anywhere with such devices.I'd guess that kind of thing cost a lot in OTL Apartheid SA--but they bore the cost, and for that matter the Soviet Union was run along similar lines, even in the early days of Stalin's rule and the Five Year Plans, so if the poor Soviet Union could afford the expense I suppose the Natal oligarchs can squeeze it out of the very people it is used to regulate.
Such a regime would still look heavy-handed to anyone who gets inside to take a look at it, but most outsiders who would choose to do that would break down into the categories of people more or less sympathetic (white supremacists and economic investors who aren't put off by it) or troublemakers (muckraking journalists and revolutionaries) sneaking in to document it. If tourists, such as passengers on passing liners which dock at the major ports (Durban OTL is not just presently the major port of South Africa but arguably of the whole continent--but that might not have been the case for either 100 years ago--I'd have thought Cape Town would always have led the way in SA, to this day) see too much unpleasantness and are bothered by it, it would always be possible to reorganize things around the ports--to tighten control behind the scenes and make jobs in the port districts desirable enough that the selected nonwhites granted passes there value them too much to make trouble, then administer pass control unobtrusively in the tourist zones, and double down on the perimeters out of sight of transients. Actual frontier zones could evolve in either direction. Some borders would be areas of visible tight control, up to and including perhaps the nightmare frontier fences, wherever the opinion of the people over the border is not deemed to matter, or possibly is sympathetic to the white supremacist regime. Wherever such things would be embarrassing with consequences, the border zone might be layered like port districts, with the actual border being a Potemkin village and the ugly stuff hidden just out of line of sight of nosy foreigners.
Then anyone who cares to deplore the situation would have to go out of their way to educate themselves, or listen to people who are already outraged by it.
Going by the map of 1892 Africa, Natal's situation is remarkably different than OTL in that several of its neighbors are African-native lands--Basotholand, Transkei, and Zululand. These are presumably much more genuinely native-controlled than the OTL "Bantustans" of the latter two names. The people who live there might not welcome escaping native peoples of Natal (and still less Indians) but might be happy to pass them on to other places; the rest of Natal's borders are with the Orange Free State and TTL's South African Republic (OTL Transvaal). How strict Natal emigration controls might look to them depends on exactly who lives on the borders I guess. While it seems established that white South Africans, of either Boer or Anglo extraction, include progressive people who more or less champion native rights, there are presumably some disgruntled white supremacists who have learned to tolerate universal human rights but don't like it; if any of these dominate along big stretches of the borders, perhaps the Natalese won't need elaborate fences there, if the locals help in catching and repatriating refugees!
But that might be politically risky for them to do and ineffective as I think even in relatively dense Boer or Anglo settlement areas there are a lot of non-whites, whose sympathies would go the other way and would at least try and help some emigrants pass the net, as well as raising a ruckus about it in the capitals. So anyway the tight and ugly fences might go up there if the predominant white view in selected localities of OFS and SAR along the border is indifferent or supportive. Other border zones of the Afrikaaner republics that are primarily native-African occupied as the tribal colonies might also have the ugly frontiers since the Natalian elites would not worry about offending them--this might cost them later as the prestige of Native Africans rises in the Federation though!Once I realized that ITTL Natal does not border on Cape Province at all, I became unsure there would be any boundaries where they would feel the need to hide the repressive functions.
But while this attitude might work in the 1920s and into the '30s, I think in the Federation both the status of Africans and sympathy for them by whites will rise, and what was acceptable in 1922 will seem more outrageous by 1940. By then, the fact that the grim regime was tolerated so long will probably lend some inertia to the situation.
It seems sadly possible that before Natal's hierarchal regime breaks down completely, they might try a Disney makeover first, cleaning up the ugliness of their act as plainly visible to increasingly disapproving foreigners in the Potemkin fashion I suggested above, probably giving a cosmetic makeover to the whole place so that at a glance things seem improved--while tightening up on the police state aspect.
This presumes that they can remain economically competitive with this Orwellian setup of course! OTL there are enough sad examples of successful authoritarian regimes that we can't just assume they can't do it. But also enough dysfunctions and breakdowns that we don't know they will either! If they keep slipping behind, or if efforts at controlled uplift of the workforce backfire by producing more revolutionaries than sycophants, then the thing will become increasingly explosive.
In this timeline, we can't discount the possibility that all this drama will be preempted by someone or other taking a high road instead and melting the hearts of stone of the elites, so that the whole mess we see now is just a brief afterglow of a preempted racial dystopia and Natal belatedly gets on board the Clue Train.
As I understand it, the legal fiction is that they continue as before, a part of the British Empire recognizing the British monarch as head of state - it's just that they regard Albert as the legitimate monarch, whereas the rest (unless any other Imperial-ruled colonies repeats the same trick, I guess) of the Empire, including Britain itself, regards George V as the current monarch.
Tonight I feel cynical:
I wouldn't really think that the rest of the world, except the bordering African states (of which, though, only Basotholand is self-govering by now) would make much of a fuss about a white minority elite living off the work a segregated and politically muted black population for some decades, and especially not about said black population being prevented to emigrate. In IOTL, more recent and, on would hope, relatively enlightened times, Israel, the US and the EU have been building quite the ugly fence without much of the world batting an eyelid (though these are very different iterations of the "ugly fence" notion). OK, these fences are more meant to keep people OUT, rather than people IN (although it could be debatable in the Israeli case, since the effect of Israeli policies together is largely to keep a large number of Palestinians in the areas where they are supposed to be, as opposed to move freely withing Israeli-controled territory; but I digress).
TTL is on average more enlightened than IOTL (surely more than OTLs twenties) but I would guess that the average opinion of the "civilized world" would be that if the government of Natal chooses to envelope the whole damn country in barbed wire and checkpoints, well, it is regrettable, but ultimately not anybody else's business.
I also think that the average African outside Natal might be very sympathetic to plight of his or hers brethren in Natal in principle, but only as long as Natalian escapees are not numerous enough to be perceived as competition for jobs or a public order problem. When things go at that point, there will be a lot of people willing to pretend in public that Natal does not exist, or that everything beyond that border fence is fine, they are only escaping because they want to steal our jobs and rape our daughters, the whites up there are a nasty bunch but they are right in keeping them in line (OK, that would work much better where the ethnicity of the Natalian refugees is different from the local - so probably not very much in Zululand, and in Transkei might be problematic; but among the Africans of the Cape and Transvaal it might work).
Just to keep you company on the Cynic Train, the small neighboring African bailiwicks that would have the most kinship sympathy also have the least room or resources for these guests, which is why I assumed they'd send them along to the bigger Afrikaaner republics or Cape Province. Where as you point out, there probably isn't so much wide open space or job opportunities for unrelated Africans and others to feel comfortable with many of them.
The answer lies in the physical map of southern Africa. The mountains in Natal run very close to the coast, so anyone who wants to leave would either have to cross the Drakensberg to Basotholand or the Transvaal, or make their way along the coast to Zululand or the Transkei. The coastal route involves crossing rivers where checkpoints can easily be set up, and there are other checkpoints along the coastal road at district boundaries. And there aren't that many passes across the Drakensberg - the way out through *Ladysmith wouldn't be that hard to close.
Some do manage to leave, of course - the Africans in Natal are mostly Zulu or Xhosa, so anyone who can get across wild country to Zululand or the Transkei (respectively) would be in a place where the people speak his language and are likely to shelter him. But getting there isn't easy, and getting caught on the way means trouble. Under the circumstances, most will stay where they are, keep their heads down and get on with their lives.
Since most of the checkpoints are internal, there's no need for barbed wire and machine-gun nests at the border. And the same checkpoints allow the government to control news from the interior: as you say, anyone who wants to find out what's going on will have to work to educate himself. Durban is harder to control, but the port workers are vetted pretty thoroughly (and many of them are white).
The problem is that it isn't part of the federation any more - the Imperials took it out in 1919, and it now refuses to return. The only leverage South Africa has is military force, and they've got enough of their own problems to worry about that they aren't ready to invade. Of course, if there's a rebellion, they might step in to restore order, or (as Sulemain says) a majority-rule government might eventually force the issue. Natal can't last forever; the timescale will be left to future updates.
That, and the borders are forming somewhat more organically. I'm not one of those who blames post-colonial conflicts primarily on borders (especially that near-nonexistent thing called "ethnic borders" - try drawing one between Hema and Lendu, for instance) but the artificiality of borders in OTL does contribute to a lack of identification between citizens and the states in which they live. Here, the emerging states of Africa and Asia are entities that their people fought for and participated in creating, so there will be more of a sense of belonging and engagement going forward. The tradeoff for this is a decolonization process that, if anything, is even bloodier than OTL (the Indian war of independence alone involved 1.4 million British, Indian, and imperial deaths in battle, as well as excess civilian deaths resulting from famine and siege), but greater solidarity plus a better economic base will make things somewhat smoother after decolonization is done.
Good point. I guess the closest thing in TTL to glorifying violence for its own sake is the Imperial Party, and even they leaned heavily toward maintaining order and tradition. At least some of the sheer nihilism of OTL's twentieth-century political movements is missing in TTL.
It will look somewhat like the Pacific societies that rebuilt themselves after collapse in the nineteenth century - in other words, it will embrace many of the colonial ways but still have a large traditional component.
Standard German is becoming common, because it's necessary for those who want to go to secondary school or get a job with the mining companies. But there's also a Lingala-like creole developing in the towns and countryside, which combines German with an amalgam of the regional languages.
Quite likely, but I'll hold my peace for now.
Fair point - some of the Indian workers who left Natal in the 1910s might have gone there as well, and with post-Imperial Britain once again friendly with France, there could easily be links between the two diaspora communities.
The full-on petty apartheid is unlikely to happen - outside Natal, there won't be separate beaches or water fountains. On the other hand, some parts of the grand apartheid playbook might still be on the table: for instance, one possible response to demands for majority rule in the settler states might be to cede border areas to African-run member colonies or to form additional states in part of their territory.
On second thought, though, majority rule in the Orange Free State might not be that hard. Whites were a higher percentage of the population in the early 20th century than now, and most of the Africans there are Sotho, who are now the Boers' buddies due to the under-the-table aid that was given during the Imperial period. A transition to universal suffrage under a Boer-Coloured-Sotho alliance isn't out of the question. Transvaal, Griqualand and Matabeleland will be the tough ones.
Fair enough. Maybe the cold was the excuse Albert gave for spurning the Scandinavian states, when his real problem was in fact their wishy-washy liberalism.
It's the Dominion of Natal. Lord Insane is correct: they're operating under the fiction that they're still a dominion of the British Empire. (Can't unilaterally declare yourself a dominion? Well, those bastards in Madras got away with it, and so will we, until someone with more available firepower shows up.)
Albert is His Grace, the Duke of Clarence, which title wasn't stripped from him when he abdicated (although he did renounce any right to sit in the House of Lords). When a Natalian politician refers to him as "the true king," he just looks the other way.
Falecius pretty much has it, especially since (as noted above) the Natalian movement controls aren't all that visible from outside. There will be quite a bit of condemnation of Natal, but for the time being, not so much of a will to actually do anything about it.
The refugees won't do that badly in the Transkei or Zululand as long as there aren't very many of them - kinship ties in both ethnic groups stretch across the region, so any given refugee will likely to find someone with a family connection to take them in. They'll be at the low end of the totem pole when it comes to land and jobs, though, and since it's very doubtful that they'd get away with any cattle or means to buy them, they'd have low social status in a place where cattle ownership is a mark of wealth. And if the trickle of refugees becomes a flood, then as Shevek23 says, the local authorities will start sending people on to Cape Town or Johannesburg, and it's a long way from the Congress' African-unity rhetoric to the streets.
Eastern and central Africa will be next - the Zanzibari empire, Ethiopia, the Great Lakes and possibly an overall discussion of the impact of Congo fever.
Yep.
For example, in Western Europe, that for all its problems has been possibly the most prosperous place of known human history in the last decades, few thousands of refugees have caused a bloody lot more of a fuss than any human-rights related issue, including (or especially) the ones causing such refugees to come.
It has been a serious factor in the upswing of votes for quite volk-und-blut types, and even before the Crisis; a lot of other factors are at play here, but still, we had calls to sink boats full of asylum seekers in the Italian Parliament and it seemed quite fine to a lot of people.
So, my guess is that, unless other circumstances intervene, a lot of people will be vaguely sympathetic to the poor oppressed Zulus (?) in Natal, some people would be irritated at Natalian immigrants in other parts of South Africa, and the vast majority of everyone else outside Zululand and a few other place would put some effort on not giving a fuck. There will be a few activists, and quite more of them in the South Africans states, but I don't expect that, in the British Empire at large, they would be significantly more relevant than, say, pro-Saharawi activists in Spain.
A possible exception, however, and it would be a major one, could be the Indian Republic, where it could be a nationalistic rallying cause over the treatment of fellow Indians by evil white Imperial(ist)s. Not sure how much concern the treatment of Africans would be, but India is going to be quite a power in this world (not having that crippling confrontation with Pakistan would be huge) so that could influence matters.
Which brings me to another point. IOTL Indians where often seen as higher on the perceived racial ladder of the late 1800s-early1900s insofar they were considered "Aryans", whatever the hell it was supposed to mean exactly. This sort of views had a lot to do with a significant trend to conflate linguistic and racial grouping (mostly very disputable ones anyway) and relate the result to "cultural" or "spiritual" timeless features. It also tied nicely with racial anti-Semitism (to be understood etymologically here). However, ITTL the racialization of (West) Africans has taken a very different path, putting at least some of them in a position quite akin to the Indians' one, and, anyway, a lot of racist assumption have undergone a very early and thorough shattering at least in some places and circles.
Is this sort of bullshit still an plausible approximation of scientific or popular consensus by the twenties ITTL, or has the "Aryan Myth" and all its tail of lunacy got an earlier rest ?
Entirely agreeing with the above, especially your take on the borders point; by the way, some of the "ethnic" divides in Africa are quite a product of colonialism themselves (the racial mindset driven entrenchment of the Hutu/Tutsi divide, with its unspeakable consequences, comes to mind).
About "nihilism", any news about TTLs legacy of its OTL "forefathers"? I suppose that the careers of people like Nietzsche and Bergson may be similar to OTL, but the way their thought is received might be very different (I can see Bergson being influential among French Futurists for example). Georges Sorel's life, on the other hand, would be changed deeply by the Great War and its aftermath. If he is similar person to his OTL's self, and he survives the war, he might turn into a much more regular sort of Socialist in Red France.
The Imperials do ultimately glorify (organized) violence for its own sake indeed (or better yet, the results thereof, in the form of the Empire to loot), but in a much more subdued and implicit manner I suppose if compared to your average Fascist from OTL. The emphasis on individual heroism won't be as strong, too.