Anita van der Merwe, The Trekkers’ Land (Cape Town: New Holland, 2003)
… The Cape Universal Suffrage Act 1933 was the ultimate fruit of the Bobotie
Indaba forty years before. [1] If the Boers had continued to stand alone, they would have been a small minority to whom a universal franchise represented a mortal threat. But with the Coloureds and the Cape Malays in the Afrikaner fold, they were part of a majority instead – and, what’s more, a majority to which incoming minorities assimilated. Immigrants from Europe and Asia, Xhosa newly come from the eastern Cape or the Transkei to find factory jobs, and labor migrants from other parts of the South African Union all learned Afrikaans and English for work, and in their dealings with small merchants, they were likely to use the former. Some European immigrants were already marrying into Boer families, some Indians into the Cape Malay population and some Africans with the Cape Coloureds, all of which drew them into Afrikaner culture. So universal suffrage seemed less a threat than a natural step, and the final legislative vote on January 30, 1933 passed with less than twenty dissenters.
The Orange Free State, to the surprise of many, would be the next domino to fall. It was a more provincial society than the Cape, but most of the Africans living there were Sotho, and the wartime Boer-Sotho alliance had only deepened since the Imperial Party fell. The Boers felt comfortable sharing power with the Sotho elites, who by now were military comrades and business partners, and weren’t very worried about the Tswana minority, which mainly kept to itself. The entry of the All-South Africa Reform Congress into an Afrikaner-led coalition after the 1933 Cape election also reassured them that power-sharing would not lead to them being submerged.
A series of conferences on the Free State’s future began in 1934, involving several of the South African states: the king of Basotholand and the governor and chiefly council of the Bechuanaland Protectorate took part in the negotiations for their respective peoples, and the Cape government acted as facilitators. The result was the Bloemfontein Pact of 1935: the Free State would enact universal suffrage and legal equality of all citizens, in exchange for which the Africans agreed to work through the established political parties rather than forming separate ones. Party lists would be divided evenly between Europeans and Africans, with Sotho and Tswana represented in proportion to their numbers. If the president were European, the speaker of the Volksraad would be African and vice versa, and each people would have its own civil courts and communal institutions. This was not an arrangement of separate governments, such as Matabeleland had, but it did reassure all parties that they would not be judged by the others’ standards, and tied them more closely to their counterparts in other member states.
Griqualand and the Transvaal would be the hardest nuts to crack. In the former, the Griquas had begun to merge into the larger Afrikaner people, but that increased rather than calmed their cultural anxiety. Unlike the Boers, they didn’t think of themselves as cultural leaders, and they already felt compromised by having to enfranchise European miners. They felt that any expansion beyond that would lead either to being overwhelmed by Africans or absorbed into an undifferentiated Cape Coloured community. Some Africans – and a few Europeans – had been brought into the Griqua community over the past two generations through intermarriage or adoption, but the door was closed to those who were unable to find a sponsor or unwilling to assimilate.
And in the South African Republic, the Boers were quickly becoming a minority even among whites, with more and more Portuguese settlers spilling over the Mozambique frontier and sometimes marrying into the Pedi and Swazi populations. They were a much smaller proportion of the population than their counterparts in the Orange Free State, they had not reached an accommodation with their African neighbors, and they were traditionally more conservative. This meant that, although Africans won more legal protections during the 1930s, the ruling establishment considered a universal franchise out of the question, and it was only the fact that the Congress was still a mostly-Xhosa and Sotho movement that prevented serious unrest from arising.
To an extent, the fate of Griqualand and the Transvaal melded into the debate over the future of the union as a whole. On one occasion, the opposition leader in the South African Republic Volksraad suggested that universal suffrage be implemented for federal purposes only, and that a directly elected lower house be added to the existing parliament in which each state determined how to choose its delegates. This proposal encountered resistance not only from the Congress and from politicians who feared that direct federal elections would lead to centralization, but from the protectorates and princely states. Of the non-settler member states, only Basotholand had democratized in any meaningful way, and although the British governors in the others had begun to experiment with advisory councils, neither they nor the African elites were eager to disrupt the status quo. It is one of the 1930s’ greater ironies that the Swazi, Zulu and Tswana democratic movements had stronger support in Cape Town and Pretoria than in their own capitals.
The debate over what type of union South Africa should be, how it should be governed and how the member states should relate to the whole was in full cry by 1940. Nearly everyone realized that the existing structure was a collection of interim measures and compromises, but no one agreed on how it needed to be changed, and the fact that three member states owed nominal allegiance to Germany or Portugal didn’t make matters any simpler. The failure to find agreement on a constitution would impede the efforts to reach a resolution in Griqualand and the South African Republic, and it would also hinder the formation of a unified policy toward Natal…
… The South Africa of the 1930s was in a state of cultural flux to match its political flux. It was British in its institutions, even where those institutions had Dutch or African names, and British culture still carried an air of sophistication and informed many customs of daily life in the cities. But in the countryside, and in the mixed neighborhoods of Cape Town, the generation-old political union between the Boers and the mixed-race Afrikaners was becoming more and more of a cultural union, and it was reaching out to dominate the nation’s literary and artistic life.
The emergence of Coloureds and Cape Malays into South African letters had begun in the nineteenth century, but it picked up steam in the 1920s as their emerging movement gained influence among the Afrikaans magazines and publishing houses. In many cases, shared history led them to write about the same things the Boers did, but with a subtly different perspective: the theme of Adam Willemse’s
The Trek (1932) was dear to the Boers’ hearts, but the viewpoint alternated between white and Coloured members of the same extended family. Other themes, especially among the Malay authors, were entirely new, as with Ebrahim Shahid’s
Orang Cayen (1937), a magical-realist story of seventeenth-century Muslim settlers steeped in both Javanese and Khoikhoi legend. Even some Xhosa migrants to Cape Town had begun to write in Afrikaans, telling stories of contemporary life and their own great trek from the countryside to the industrial cities. And at the same time, white Afrikaners began exploring many of the same subjects, a development seen not only in novels but in poetry and song.
A third European culture, that of Portugal, was also growing in influence. In 1920, there might have been five thousand Portuguese in the entire union, but there were 35,000 in 1930 and 90,000 in 1940. Most lived in the Transvaal along the Mozambican border, but more and more came as factory workers to the Cape cities’ “Lisbon Towns” or to Basotholand and the princely states as small merchants, and Mutapa’s accession to the union meant that a portion of the Portuguese empire was now on South African soil. Their impact was felt strongly in South African cuisine, with many Mozambican and mainland Portuguese recipes becoming favorites among the Afrikaners and the northeastern African peoples. The Luso-African musical styles that had begun in Angola and Mozambique spread rapidly to South Africa beginning in the late 1920s, with the Portuguese, like the Coloureds, taking their place as a bridge between Europe and Africa.
And the growth of an African urban population was accompanied by a corresponding artistic movement. The design of public and interior spaces, especially in mixed neighborhoods, adopted more of an African aesthetic, and the number of books published by African authors increased more than ten times between 1930 and 1940. The African authors were divided over whether to promote their own languages as literary media or to write in Afrikaans and English to reach a wider audience, with many doing both at various times. Their output ranged from folklore collections and codifications of national epics (the epics being particularly important to the Zulus and Sotho) to contemporary novels and poetry, and the latter, influenced by the Congress’ pan-African ideology, began to build an African consciousness distinct from ethnic identity. This would, in time, both rival Afrikaner identity and become part of it…
Samuel Dlamini, “Natal After the Fall,” African History Quarterly 33: 279-86 (Summer 1979)
… In August 1929, a group of ninety Americans landed in Durban, hoping to find in Natal the Old South that had given way to the civil rights struggle. They were very surprised to learn that Natal didn’t want them. They were too American and too poor: the Natalian ruling class didn’t want to dilute its British character, and it certainly didn’t want white immigrants who would become industrial workers or small shopkeepers. The would-be immigrants went on to their ship’s next destination, Perth, and from there disappeared into history.
The story of the “Jim Crow refugees” was hardly unique. Natal took only a limited number of European immigrants each year, and held them to strict financial and language criteria. The Natalian ideal was a British gentry ruling over an African servant population, and it saw any Europeans who fell below the upper middle-class level as damaging to white supremacy. [3] Americans with money to invest were barely tolerable, in small numbers; working-class Americans – or worse yet, working-class Poles or Spaniards – were not even that. The democratic Cape, which
did welcome working-class whites along with Indians and Chinese, typically drew four to six times the number of European immigrants that Natal did; it was not until the last few years, when putting men in uniform was a more urgent need than maintaining a Little England character, that the Natalian government would relax the qualifications.
Of course, the fact that Natal didn’t want exiles from the Jim Crow South didn’t prevent it from imitating that regime. In some ways, it went even beyond the excesses of the southern United States: the Jim Crow states had to work within limits imposed by federal law, while Natal effectively had none. By the 1930s, when the Natalian system reached its nadir, Africans endured movement restrictions, exploitative labor, censorship and sheer terror that was, if not slavery, rivaled only by conditions in the old rubber colonies.
During and immediately after the Imperial period, many Africans had voted with their feet and fled to Basotholand, Zululand or Transkei. To stem the tide, Natal instituted a registration and pass system under which Africans were restricted to their home districts and checkpoints were posted at district boundaries. A labor tax forced Africans above the age of sixteen to work on public projects two months a year, and additional cash taxes forced them to work for the European farmers and businesses that were their only source of currency. Any crime – and nearly anything could qualify as one, according to the administrative courts that handled offenses by Africans – could result in deportation to a labor camp or leasing to a private employer for a term of years. Indians were treated only marginally better: they were not subject to annual forced labor and had access to elementary education, but they were also restricted to certain districts and jobs, and those who were seen as troublemakers faced drastic consequences.
The Africans did not submit to this regime willingly, and in the early years, there were strikes and uprisings. But there were few weapons in Natal, where (unlike the Transkei or Zululand) Africans had never been allowed to enlist in the army, and the narrowness of the coastal strip enabled the Natalian forces to quarantine rebellions districts and prevent uprisings from spreading. By the 1930s, those who had not been killed in battle or fallen victim to the brutal reprisals had fled into the bush, finding what refuge they could in the Drakensberg and getting sporadic help from their South African compatriots, while the remainder resigned themselves to their lot for the time being.
The Natalian regime did have the perverse benefit of slowing the spread of Congo fever: with movement restricted so severely, there were fewer opportunities to transmit the disease to new regions. But that was more than offset by the complete absence of educational and public health measures. In the rest of southern Africa, even Matabeleland, public health campaigns were starting to have an effect, and the number of known cases was holding steady or beginning to decline. In Natal, the fever was “treated” only by folk cures and magic, and it inspired the same apocalyptic visions that had swept Matabeleland the decade before.
It was these, ironically, that would bring matters to a head. Even the totalitarian regime imposed on Natal’s Africans could not entirely prevent communication, and an apocalyptic cult spread across the country that equated the state with the Congo fever itself. There would be an event, it was told, that would usher in a cure for both of the people’s afflictions. And with the death of King Albert in early 1941, the prophets in several districts believed that the event had come…
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[1] See post 1206.
[2] See post 4122.
[3] I am indebted to Viriato’s discussion of Rhodesian immigration policy
here.
