Professor Colin Bundy
Black, White and Gold: The Segregation Era, 1910-1948

Professor Colin Bundy - Black, White and Gold: The Segregation Era. 1910 - 1948

- So I think I am going to start to say Welcome to everybody, and a very, very warm welcome to Professor Colin Bundy, who is a historian who has retired off to career as an academic and university administrator. He served as vice chancellor of the University of Wits, principal of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and principal of Green Templeton College, Oxford. As a scholar, he was best known for his “Rise and Fall of a South African Peasantry.” He has co-authored with William Beinart of “Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa.” Since 2012, he has published four books in the Jacana Pocket series, “Govan Mbeki”, number one, “Short-changed, South Africa Since Apartheid”, “Nelson Mandela”, “Poverty in South Africa, Past and Present”. He has published over 50 articles and chapters on South African history and politics. We feel very, very honoured to have you on here with us. Welcome to Lockdown University, and we all look forward to hearing your lecture today, which will be on “Black, White, and Gold Segregation Era from 1910 to 1948.” This is a period that we all know very, very well as South Africans and we are so looking forward to hearing it from you. Thank you very much. Over to you.

• Wendy. Thank you very much. Wendy and I share an alma mater in the University of Wits, and it’s particular pleasure to be here this evening.

• Yes, we do. And Wits is so close to my heart. so thank you.

• That’s good to hear. I hope ladies and gentlemen, people listening this evening, this evening in Britain, I hope you’ll join me on a journey. This is the first of three lectures which outline the history of 20th century South Africa, from the formation of a new state in 1910 to the momentous transition to democracy in 1994 when Nelson Mandela was elected president. I think it’s an eventful, even dramatic journey. It begins with the construction of a new state, one that emerged from the ashes of war and rested upon the platform of large scale gold mining. And from the outset, power in this new country was in the hands of a white minority, which ensured the subordination of the black majority. In mid-century, in the 1950s, white rule developed into an extreme system of racial discrimination and an Orwellian network of control and repression. From the 1970s, it pitted an authoritarian, an increasingly militarised state against an exiled guerilla army and mounting domestic protests and resistance. And the journey culminates in a rare and unanticipated outcome, the decision by a minority, by a minority ruling group, to give up political power. Modern South Africa was parented by British imperial power and by mineral wealth. Britain asked the Dutch as the colonial power in the Cape in 1805 and for much of the 19th century, South Africa was an imperial backwater comprising two British colonies, The Cape and Natal, and two independent Boer republics, the Transvaal, and the Orange Free State, and a handful of independent African polities.

The Boer Republics were founded by Afrikaners who moved into the interior away from British rule. Boer is simply the Dutch word for farmer. The Afrikaners or Afrikaans speakers were descendants of Dutch settlers, and the Afrikaans language is derived from Dutch. But this region was transformed in the late 19th century by the discovery, first of diamonds and then the world’s most abundant goldfields. An imperial backwater became a maelstrom. British immigrants and capital flowed to the goldfields. British troops fought a series of wars against African societies. The Zulu war is the best known of these. London was determined to exercise control over the region. And so between 1899 and 1902, Britain waged its largest and costliest imperial war was known at the time as the Boer war, but today is more accurately referred to as the South African War. British victory was eventually achieved through a combination of scorched earth tactics and the internment of 118,000 Boer civilians in concentration camps. In these camps, diseases like measles, typhoid, and dysentery killed 28,000 Afrikaners, mainly women and children, and created a grievance that profoundly shaped Afrikaner nationalism in decades To come. The South African War is as important to the shaping of modern America as the Civil War was in American history. And it led to the formation in 1910 of a new state, the Union of South Africa. This was achieved by privileging white supremacy over black aspirations. When it entered the war, British politicians promised to ensure “equal laws and equal liberty” for all races after a Boer defeat, but simply reneged on that promise in order to persuade the defeated Afrikaners to join the white English speakers in a common political future. And the key clause in the peace treaty signed by Britain postponed any decision on the possible franchise by black South Africans until after the grant of self-government to the republics.

In effect, this excluded Africans from citizenship for over 90 years. However, the incorporation of Afrikaners certainly succeeded. The first three prime ministers of the Union of South Africa, Botha, Smuts, and Hertzog, had all been Boer generals during the South African War. And in 1908-09, a national convention was held at which local white politicians agreed on the form of the new state. It would conjoin the two ex republics and the two British colonies and create a single unitary strait with a strong central parliament. English and Afrikaans were granted equal status as official languages. In three of the four new provinces, the franchise was restricted to whites only. In the Cape Province, where 5% of the registered voters were African, they retained the vote until it too was removed in 1936. The union was created by an act of parliament, or an act passed in the British Parliament and came into being in May, 1910. The union was a self-governing dominion of the British empire, that is, it enjoyed the same status as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Generals Botha, and Smuts led a new party which was in power from 1910 to 1924. It included Afrikaans and English speaking politicians and promoted a common white South African identity over the language divide. Now, crucially, at the time of union, 20% of the population was white of whom a majority were Afrikaans speaking. Indigenous Africans comprised 67% of the total and there were two sizable minorities, people known in South Africa as coloured were of mixed descent and made up 9% of the population, while South Africans of Indian descent comprised about 4%.

The economic motor of the new state was gold. Gold mining underpinned remarkable economic growth that saw national income treble between 1910 and 1948. Gold attracted foreign investments and contributed to the national budget through taxation on its profits. It crucially earned enough foreign exchange to pay for essential imports such as machinery and oil. But the gold mining industry took a distinctive form, one that was intimately intertwined with class, race, labour market and the politics that took shape as segregation, which I’ll describe shortly. Now, gold in South Africa was abundant but was embedded in rock. There were no alluvial nuggets as in the Australian or Californian gold rush. The gold was embedded in reefs as they were called, as a rock that ran deep underground. I ask you to imagine a slice of rock going in at an angle like that down to a mile and more in depth from which the precious metal could only be extracted by following each reef down into the earth, sinking vertical shafts and then stopes running off them where underground miners perform backbreaking work, hewing the reef into pieces of rock which could be brought to the surface and crushed and processed to produce the gold. A massive amount of work involved, so that profitable gold mining had to be intensive and it had to be deep level. It required massive amounts of capital, technology and labour with the result that almost from the very beginning, the production of gold was in the hands of a few large companies. Their interests coordinated through a body called the Chamber of Mines. Now, the price of gold was fixed internationally and there was an unlimited market for the metal, but this depended upon keeping output as high as possible, and costs as low as possible. But which costs? Machinery, and chemicals, and oil were imported, and so the companies could do little to control their price. If the companies were going to lower their costs, it was the cost of labour that they must reduce. And their labour force had two distinct components. On the one hand, there were white skilled workers, mainly immigrants from the UK, the USA, and Australia with mining experience, and on the other hand, cheap unskilled African labour.

And so the chamber very rapidly established a system of labour recruitment, accommodation, and remuneration, which stamped itself deeply upon social, economic, and political relations in the new society. White skilled miners earned relatively high wages, black migrant workers were unskilled and low paid and they performed the bulk of the work underground. When the South African War began in 1899, there were nearly 100,000 black migrant workers each earning about one ninth of the wages of white miners. By 1910 that figure had risen to 180,000 black migrant workers. They travelled from their homes in rural areas to the mines where they signed 10 month contracts and then they would oscillate from the mines back to the reserves, from the reserves, their homes back to the mines. And they were unaccompanied by their families. They were housed in compounds, as they were called, these were vast purpose-built single-sex dormitories. These compounds cut overhead costs and they also facilitated close control over the lives of the workers. Mining companies based their labour policy on two simple imperatives, firstly, to reduce the ratio of white workers to black workers ‘cause whites were more expensive, and secondly, to ensure that migrant wages were kept as low as possible. Now, the drive by the mining companies to reduce the number of white miners culminated in a massive showdown between striking miners and the companies in 1922, an event known as the Rand Revolt. This strike which defeated commandos of armed white miners was finally crushed by artillery, machine guns, aeroplanes , and tanks. 200 miners and police lost their lives. There were 5,000 arrests and 18 death sentences handed down for the strikers’ leaders.

The mining industry having won this battle, was now able to focus its cost cutting on black miners. And in real terms, the wages of black miners fell over the next 50 years. White miners made up a smaller proportion of the total, but their wages rose steadily until they earned almost 20 times as much as black miners, by the end of the period I’m covering tonight. In these years, 1910 to 1948, segregation became a central feature of the new country’s political, social, and economic life. It was an organising principle, and an ideology. The term segregation actually entered South Africa from the sovereign states of America. There was a considerable traffic of ideas, methods, and justifications of the policy between these two regions. In the American south, of course, segregation had replaced both slavery and the liberal policies of reconstruction that immediately followed the Civil War. And from the 1870s onwards, African Americans were disenfranchised, separate facilities were introduced in transport, education, hospitals, and the courts. Known at the time as Jim Crow Legislation, segregation in the South became the law, the institutional practise, and everyday experience. South African proponents of segregation were absolutely clear about what they intended to achieve. Their policy, differentiating between white and black was meant to achieve economic growth and to maintain white supremacy. Segregationists sought a policy package that would enable the white community divided by history and by language to unify, to modernise, and to survive. Segregation provided a platform of ideas and practises upon which white minority rule was elaborated. And I’m just going to identify five key aspects of South African segregation.

Firstly, access to land was segregated. In 1913, the Natives Land Act defined 8% of South Africa, subsequently expanded to 13%, as “native reserves”. These were rural areas, of relatively dense African population. They were what remained after a century of colonial conquest and dispossession. The best known examples of African reserves are probably Zululand, and the Transkie, which form part of the Natal, and the Cape, respectively. The Land Act prohibited any purchase or leasing of land by Africans anywhere outside the specified reserves. The reserves were explicitly intended to serve as the recruitment basis for migrant labour. Secondly, politics were segregated. Africans were denied the vote, and any form of participation in the national political system. By that exception of the small number of Cape voters that I mentioned who lost the vote in 1936. And segregationists insisted that the proper mode of politics for Africans was their own traditional tribal existence, and they sought to prop up traditional structures and practises in the reserves. And what this meant is that the white government relied on a form of indirect rule. African chiefs in their own local areas ran courts, allocated land and cattle, settled disputes within families and so on. And their activities were overseen by white magistrates. The chiefs had become salaried agents of the white regime. Thirdly, the labour market and workplaces was segregated. One of the first pieces of legislation by the new government was the 1911 Mines and Works Act, which cemented a deep division along race and skills lines. It reserved certain jobs in mining, and the railways exclusively for white workers. And over the next 20 years, other laws extended and refined what was called job reservation, reservation jobs for whites, excluding Africans from skilled and semi-skilled jobs. A leading economic historian has commented that, “No other country has used the political and legal system to maintain such a comprehensive and formal colour bar.”

Africans were also excluded from the industrial relations system. Black workers could and did join trade unions, but these were not recognised by the state. Fourthly, towns and cities were segregated. The architecture segregation regarded towns as places in which white people lived by right, and where black people worked on sufferance. As a 1922 commission declared, and I’m quoting, “The native should only be allowed to enter urban areas, which are essentially the white man’s creation, when he is willing to enter and to minister to the needs of the white man, and he should depart therefrom when he ceases so to minister.” Legislation in 1923 also required all municipalities to create separate locations, they were called then, later we know them as townships, for Africans, and over time also for coloureds, and Indians. The Pass laws were central to what was called influx control, an attempt to control influx of black people to the cities. Every African man had to carry various passes at all times and was liable to arrest and prosecution, if he couldn’t provide them. They restricted where he might reside and for whom he might work. They drastically curtailed freedom of movement and they were over the years, a source of humiliation and subjection. 1930s also saw the white state embark upon the building of the distinctive townships, which you’ll know from television footage. They were at a distance from the city and its white suburbs, uniform matchbox housing, laid out on a grid, grimly, utilitarian dormitory areas for black workers with poor utilities, little public space and no work opportunities. Best known of these townships was Soweto, southwest of Johannesburg, and the name comes from southwestern townships, Soweto.

Fifthly, there was the everyday experiences of segregated amenities and facilities. It was simply taken for granted in South Africa that there were black churches and white churches, white hospitals and black hospitals, black schools and white schools, and so on. Now, it is important to notice that separation on racial lines did not prevail everywhere, in the years I’m describing today. All major cities had areas where poorer people of all races lived and worked and cohabited together. And in the countryside, there were significant pockets of land bought by Africans before the 1913 Land Act outside the reserves. It was only under Apartheid after 1948, that these anomalies became targets. I want to make two points, general points about segregation policies and practises, their origins and their most distinctive institutions. Well, all four of the entities which became the union, had practised various degrees of racial separation. A crucial impetus towards codifying and strengthening them came from British imperial projects in the years, immediately after the South African War. The governor of the defeated Transvaal and Free state in the years known as Reconstruction, was Lord Alfred Milner, an ardent and able proponent of the British Empire. And Milner’s priority was to bring the gold mines back to full production as quickly as possible, and this meant restoring their supply of migrant labour. He appointed a commission that was charged with arriving at a common understanding of the “native question”, as a prerequisite for the new South African state.

And this commission, which reported in 1905, formalised the idea of segregation in a new way. Above all, it envisaged the territorial separation of black and white as a permanent, mandatory principle of land ownership, a recommendation that was spelled out in that 1913 Land Act, formalising the division between white owned land and the native African Reserves. The commission also urged the systematic establishment of segregated cities, which is written into law in 1923. Now, Milner’s support for the gold mining companies and his desire to formulate native affairs policies ensured that the central institutions of the segregation era, migrant labour, rural reserves, mine workers compounds, and urban townships took shape around the needs of the gold mining industry. With that as a general background, let me return to a chronological account of political and social developments in the first three decades of the new state up till the outbreak of World War II. I’ll begin with white politics. The government was formed by the South African Party, SAP, led by Louis Botha until his death in 1919 when he was succeeded by Jan Smuts. In 1914, General Hertzog, the third of the trio, broke away from the SAP, and founded the National Party, committed to the cultural and economic interests of Afrikaners and anxious to distance South Africa from the British Empire. Later that year, 1914, when the first World War began, Botha and Smuts acted on a request by the British government that South African troops should conquer the German protectorate of Southwest Africa. This triggered an armed rebellion by diehard Afrikaner soldiers hostile to empire, but the rebellion was quickly repressed.

And in the years, immediately after the war saw a phase, a three or four year phase of social conflict and confrontation, strikes by black workers and white workers, and then in 1922, as I’ve mentioned, the drama of the Rand Revolt and its violent suppression. The mines proceeded to dismiss white miners, and the main losers were semi-skilled Afrikaner miners. And so unsurprisingly, many Afrikaners and most trade union members were bitterly hostile to Smuts. And in the 1924 general election, Hertzog’s National Party formed an electoral pact with the smaller Labour Party mainly representing the English-speaking working class. Smuts and his party were soundly defeated and the pact government took office. It placed what was known at the time as the poor white problem, at the centre of its activities. There were somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 impoverished whites, overwhelmingly Afrikaners, who had lost access to land during and after the South African War and had moved with their families into urban areas. They were typically poorly educated and unskilled. And the pact government and the fusion government, which followed, followed three main approaches. Firstly, it protected white workers from black competition at the workplace, strengthening the job colour bar, and promising that white workers would recede wages commensurate with civilised, i.e, white standards of living. Secondly, there was an ambitious policy of public works. Whites were employed in road and rail construction, in dams and irrigation works, and they largely replaced black workers on the railways. By 1939, the central government employed about 100,000 white workers, about half of them in the railways. And then thirdly, there was a sustained expansion of education, housing, and social welfare for whites.

With the result that by the 1950s, white poverty had been largely eliminated. 1933, with the country reeling from the International Great Depression Hertzog and Smuts entered a coalition government known as the Fusion government. And the following year, in 1934, the two politicians went further. Hertzog’s National Party and Smuts’ South African Party amalgamated to create a new party, The United Party. Hertzog remained as the United Party Prime Minister with Smuts as his deputy. And at that point, D.F. Malan, a cabinet minister, led 19 other members of parliament out of government and formed the Purified National Party as an opposition group. Malan’s party, the National Party insisted on the primacy of the Afrikaner folk or people. Thought purification and cleansing from old enemies such as mining capital, usually depicted as Jewish, the Empire, and Smuts. And South Africa recovered very rapidly from the Great Depression, largely because of the decision to leave the gold standard and free the price of gold. The value of the precious metal doubled over the next 10 years, and taxes on mining profits rose from about 6% to 30% of state revenue. And this made it possible for the government to create large parastatal entities to produce electricity and steel, thus fueling the growth of manufacturing. Labour force on the mines peaked in 1941 at 380,000 migrant workers, and about 41,000 white miners. 1939, when war broke out in Europe, the partnership between Hertzog and Smuts was shattered. Hertzog wanted South Africa to remain neutral. Smuts proposed a motion calling on South Africa to declare war on Germany. The motion was narrowly carried. Hertzog resigned, and Smuts became Prime Minister.

Okay, while these developments in white politics were taking place, what were the political responses by black South Africans? When the South African War ended and Britain effectively dropped recognition of African rights in favour of incorporating the defeated Boer republics, a sense of betrayal ignited a surge of black political protests. The black educated elite was well aware that the four white rural provinces were going to merge. And they tried to counter this by enlarging the scale of their own associations. And when the National Convention took place in 1908-09, African leaders held a South African Native Convention, a long stride towards the formation of a permanent national organisation. That step was taken in January, 1912 in Bloemfontein. Several hundred of the most prominent black citizens in the country gathered. They were mainly drawn from the educated and better off minority. Teachers, clerks and interpreters, small businessmen, landowners, journalists, and a handful of lawyers and medical doctors who travelled overseas for training, mainly to the historical black colleges in the United States. There, the delegates voted to create a new national body, to protect African interests, convey its views to government, and to formulate policies on matters of the day. The organisation was called the South African National Native Convention, sorry, the South African National Native Congress, which shortly changed its name to the African National Congress, the ANC. The ANC committed itself to constitutional means and expended much political energy on petitions and delegations, both to the Union Parliament, and to the British Parliament. And apart from isolated moments of relative radicalism for its first three decades, the ANC couched its politics very much in the register of respectability and responsibility.

That is, it remained a body concerned essentially to defend and promote elite interests and not those of the rural masses or urban poor. And its membership fluctuated between a few hundred and about 2,000 people. In the 1930s, it fell into the doldrums and was challenged by other more short-lived national movements. However it survived, and as we shall see, it emerged in the 1950s as a much more radical movement with a vastly larger membership. And by the 1990s it reemerged on the national scale, this time as a government in waiting and it swept to victory in the country’s first democratic elections in 1994. The ANC is the oldest political party on the African continent, and in six months time, will have been in power in South Africa for 30 years. Parallel developments took place amongst politically active coloureds and Indians. An African People’s Organisation was formed in Cape Town lobbying for the political interests of coloureds, and in the Natal and the Transvaal, Indians resisted discriminatory legislation, and they were led by MK Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi spent nearly 20 years in South Africa as a young man, and it was here that he first implemented the methods of satyagraha, non-violence, non-compliance, or civil disobedience, which he later used to such effect in the Indian anti-colonial movement.

Finally, black resistance to white rule took other forms than overtly political, including religious, cultural, and intellectual movements that affirmed African identity and African agency. Within the African Christian community, they developed a powerful movement towards independent churches led by African clergy and with a commitment to self-organization. In the 1930s, African intellectuals called for a National African church, a national literature and a national identity. And it was initiatives like these that laid a platform on which a more assertive African nationalism would be built in the 1940s. And now the final section of my lecture deals with the 1940s. These were years of accelerated social and economic change. Manufacturing industry had begun to grow very rapidly in the 1930s, but once the war began, it expanded exponentially. Because imports were disrupted by the war at sea, South African factories now produced a much wider range of goods. The output of manufacturing industry doubled between 1938 and ‘48, and their growth was accompanied by a crucial change in employment patterns. Nearly 200,000 white men had enrolled in the armed forces, and many of the jobs that they left were filled by black workers moving increasingly into skilled and semi-skilled jobs. Black workers were available to because African urbanisation was increasing faster than ever. Between 1936 and '46, half a million Africans moved permanently to cities. They were escaping the deepening poverty of the reserves and the harshness of farm labour. And in 1946, the census reserved that 1.8 million Africans now lived in towns and cities equaling the number of urbanised whites.

These economic, social, and demographic shifts translated into political ferment and had momentous repercussions. Especially in Johannesburg, but also in other cities, there were waves of spontaneous protests. There were squatter movements where perhaps 90,000 homeless people moved on to unoccupied land and built shanty towns. There were bus boycotts, rent boycotts, local demonstrations and protests over living conditions. African townships became spaces of defiance, subversion, and resistance. Spurred by these demonstrations of popular discontent the ANC reacted. In 1941, you will remember, Roosevelt and Churchill issued the Atlantic Charter setting out American and British goals for a post-war world. They called for an end to conflict, for global cooperation, freedom from fear and want, and the principle of self-determination. The ANC responded with a document called African Claims, calling for the application of the Atlantic Charter to all parts of the British Empire. And it stated unambiguously, and I’m quoting, “We the African people in the Union of South Africa urgently demand the granting of full citizenship rights such as are enjoyed by all white people in South Africa.” It spelled out a bill of rights encompassing universal suffrage, freedom of movement, equal rights in property, free compulsory education, and so on. A far more sweeping and assertive political position than the ANC had previously made.

And in 1944, the ANC was nudged further towards the left when a youth league of the organisation was constituted. And over the next few years, the youth league did its best to transform the parent body from a rather passive body into one that actively challenged white rule. And among young men in Johannesburg who joined the ANC Youth League in 1944, Nelson Mandela and Oliver Tambo. Now this turbulence in African political life, both those grassroots protests and the radicalization of the ANC required the white political parties to respond. Smuts and his UP government, the wartime government were challenged by this conjunction of war overseas and political turmoil at home. And this stimulated new thinking on policy. Crucially, the Smuts government took a series of tentative steps towards recognising that African urbanisation was irreversible, that a settled black working class was a permanent phenomenon, and that there was a crisis in the living conditions of these newly urbanised workers and their families. A series of commissions and reports provided evidence of the levels of urban poverty, crime, juvenile delinquency, and the pressures on black family life. These reports recommended that the government provide better housing, provide subsidised and compulsory mass education for Africans, and provide more generous welfare provision. In short, that it should extend social and economic citizenship to urban African. Perhaps the most significant policy shift that took place during the war was the suspension for four years of arrests under past laws. Another change implemented in 1944 saw Africans receive disability and old age pensions for the first time, albeit at less than a third of the amount paid to whites. However, many of the proposals for further incorporating the black urban population remained just that, proposals which were not implemented. Smuts was notably more cautious and less reform-minded than some of his cabinet colleagues and senior civil servants.

In 1948, the reformist voice in government was most clearly expressed by a commission headed by Judge Henry Fagan. The Fagan Report insisted, “The idea of total segregation is utterly impracticable,” that Africans were moving from the countryside to towns out of economic necessity. And that there was now in the cities, and I’m quoting, “A settled permanent native population,” and policy should flow from these facts. In stark contrast, the Afrikaner National Party led by Dr. Malan was horrified by the pace of African urbanisation and by African assertiveness. Malan’s so-called Reunited National Party was constituted in 1940, that’s when he absorbed with Hertzog. And at that point, its main focus was in strengthening white Afrikaner culture and institutions, and distancing South Africa from Britain. But despite its claims to have reunited Afrikaners, in the early years of the war Afrikaner politics was riven with fratricidal conflict. From the outset, Malan’s party was challenged by other Afrikaans political groupings, especially on the radical right. Here, an anti-democratic nationalism flowered, sceptical of parliamentary government, and there was a cluster of organisations which combined virulent antisemitism with an openly pro-German position. A grouping known as the Grey Shirts was formed as early as 1933, inspired by the antisemitism thuggery of Hitler’s Brown Shirts. In 1940, an ex-cabinet minister called Pirow, created the New Order advocating an Afrikaner national socialism. But the most important pro-Nazi group was the Ossewabrandwag, literally Ox-wagon Sentinel, I’m going to call it the OB, led by a strong admirer of Nazi Germany. The OB explicitly rejected parliamentary politics, pinned its hopes on an Axis victory and hoped that Germany would help establish an Afrikaner Republic.

The OB riding on a wave of Afrikaner hostility to “British Jewish democracy,” acquired a mass membership of perhaps a hundred thousand people. Between 1939 and 1941, it was the largest movement within Afrikaner nationalism and its division of storm troopers sought to disrupt the war effort through acts of sabotage and some assassinations. The Smuts government arrested several thousand of the OB paramilitary wing and held them in internment camps for the duration of the war. 20 years later, National Party Prime Minister. Although Malan wanted South Africa to remain neutral in the war, he continued to work through parliamentary politics and he resisted violence against the war effort. And in 1942, he dissociated the National Party from the OB. And as the tide of war changed, so pro-German sentiments amongst Afrikaners waned. Malan and his party could now focus more directly on those same developments which had challenged the Smuts government, African urbanisation, poverty, and spontaneous political protests. And from 1944 onwards, Malan and his closest political ally, Paul Sauer, framed their response to these issues as apartheid, an Afrikaans word, meaning literally apartness or separation. And in 1947, Malan appointed Sauer to head a commission to come up with recommendations for turning apartheid into a comprehensive policy.

The Sauer Report presented total apartheid as the eventual ideal and goal, but said it would take many years. It proposed to consolidate and develop the African reserves as a justification for the denial of any black rights in the cities. It called for an extension, not a reduction of migrant labour. African workers, it declared, in cities should not be accompanied by their families. Indians were declared to be an alien, an assimilable element and Sauer called for the rigorous segregation of coloureds. To conclude, in 1948, the Fagan report and the Sauer Report proposed different answers to the native question. One recommended that segregation be relaxed and reformed, the other, that segregation be entrenched and extended. The battle lines for the 1948 general election had been drawn. And if that election pitched Smuts’ United Party against Malan’s National Party, whoever took power would be confronted by political forces outside parliament, by the dispossessed and the voteless, by their grievances, their discontent, and by the political bodies that sought to give them voice. Thank you very much.

• Colin, thank you for that excellent, excellent presentation. It was a true masterclass. Absolutely brilliant. Are you willing to take questions and to answer questions?

Q&A and Comments:

• I am indeed.

• Thanks. There are a couple there. I’m going to leave, hand it over to you.

• Okay, I’ve got them here.

• [Wendy] Okay.

• The first one says that they’d “never heard about black people having the vote and then losing it in the 1930s. Growing up in South Africa, our history lessons did not mention this.” This is from Serena Kapinsky and she’s absolutely right. White South Africans were taught very, very poor history at school. And the next question comes from somebody who shared secondary education with me at Graeme College, Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape. And he hopes I’ll find time in one of my lectures to mention a great Afrikaner, Bram Fischer, who fought for change in South Africa, and seems to have been written out of the struggle for that change. Thanks very much for that. I will indeed mention Bram in a later lecture.

Q: Then I’m asked whether the development of modern medicine did these serve to increase the black population such that the old reserves were no longer capable of maintaining the increased black population.

A: That’s an absolutely correct assumption. Modern medicine did indeed change, particularly infant mortality to being able to cope with things like measles and other things that could, so that African population grew very rapidly during the 20th century, and indeed placed absolutely intolerable pressure, economic pressure, and population density in the reserve areas.

Q: Somebody, Romaine Stanger asks simply, “Did economics dictate apartheid?”

A: Well, yes and no. Apartheid quite clearly served economic interests and performed economic functions, but there were other issues as well. There were ideological issues, there was straight racism, and there was the political attempts to set up structures that entrenched and defended white supremacy and made trade-offs in one sort or another.

Q: Bev P asks me, and I’m reading the question, “Since the mining industry was pivotal to sustaining apartheid, I’d like to mention the denial of the Mapungubwe, gold indigenous mining community, who preceded white colonisation by approximately 500 years, 900 to 1300 CE. These gold and the famous gold artefacts, including the rhinoceros were found by the Victoria University archaeologists in 1933 and kept out of the public domain for 60 years until the change of government.”

A: Thanks for that. That’s an interesting reminder that Centralis gold is in its modern form that gold was mined by indigenous Africans much earlier than that.

Q: I’m asked how the church viewed segregation.

A: White churches, but particularly the Dutch Reformed Church, the official church of Afrikaners evolved quite detailed justifications for segregation. They accepted segregation and they sought to defend it. They sought to defend it in terms of fairness, and separate development. And it is important to notice that later during apartheid significant sectors of the churches, Christian churches did break with the ruling apartheid view. But in this period, in the segregation era, there was very, very little dissent from the Dutch Reformed Church.

Now I’ve got three people who say that they’ve learnt tonight, somebody who’s lived in South Africa all his life and not known that history.

Q: “Were Africans forced to learn English and to give up their native languages?” Shelly Shapiro asks.

A: No, there was no requirement of Africans to learn English. The first schools provided for Africans were mission schools, where Africans learnt to speak English or Afrikaans and Afrikaans mission stations, but predominantly English. And I think very rapidly what I called earlier, the educated elite amongst Africans who were products of these mission schools realised that proficiency in English was going to be essential for them to take a place, to take a place in a multiracial society. And so the ability to speak English and indeed in other parts of South Africa to speak Afrikaans became survival skills and political skills of Africans. But they continued, I mean, mother tongue education continued to be more numerous than mission schools. And the early educated elite, for example, founded newspapers that wrote in both English and the vernacular languages.

And Josie Adler doesn’t want any more history books until every teacher spends a year studying this kind of history. Yep.

Q: “What about Afrikaners’ religious beliefs, black men as hewers of wood and drawers of water, et cetera?”

A: Yes. That was part of the justification. Africans are seen as sons of Ham, et cetera. And that ties up with my earlier answer to the Dutch Reformed Church.

From Simon, “I don’t understand why the nationalist government didn’t include the Boer war as a central element of school syllabi.” That’s interesting. And you would’ve thought that they would have. In 1938, the National Party, then still in opposition in South Africa, mounted an extraordinary public pageant of nationalism. In 1938, they celebrated the centenary of the Great Trek, that is the movement of Boers out of the Cape and Natal into the interior. And they celebrated the centenary in 1938. They reenacted the Great Trek. Waggons were pulled by oxen along the original lines of the Great Trek and culminated in Pretoria at what was the monument to the Trek. The great national monument celebrating Afrikanerism. And I suppose in many ways it was the trek rather than the Boer war which became the central of the school syllabus. It’d be interesting to explore that in more detail as to why. But it’s not that the Afrikaans past was ignored, it’s rather that the Trek Boer part, the Great Trek was emphasised and centralised.

Q: Can I speak to the differences in white and black education systems?

A: Well, under the Union of South Africa, education for whites was free and compulsory. There was also an independent fee paying sector of white education. Black education in this period remained either vernacular schooling, that was primary schooling only. And the only schools in this period that took Africans through to the end of secondary education were mission schools. And they were replaced in the early 1950s, That’s the subject of my next talk, by something called Bantu Education.

Q: And then a question says, “In the United States, black history is being revised to mask black heritage. Is this happening in South Africa?”

A: And there’s a response to that saying that’s only happening in some states, that Maryland has expanded black heritage classes. I think in South Africa, black history is in the process of being rediscovered and being very forcefully asserted rather than revised. I think there is a tendency for black history to be shoehorned into a nationalist narrative at the expense of other aspects of black history. But it’s certainly not being abandoned.

Q: “Was there significant antisemitism during these times?”

A: In the 1920s and 1930s and especially in the early 1940s, the answer is very much yes. I’m not going to expand on that because you’re going to have an absolutely expert set of lectures from my friend Milton Shane, the preeminent South African historian of South African jury and of anti-Semitism. But he will provide you that history.

Q: “What about the uprising,” I’m asked, “of black children when the government tried to make it the law to teach in Afrikaans in school?”

A: That’s in 1976, and it’s a central feature of my next lecture. I won’t expand on that now. Somebody who worked at the Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto had no idea where the name came from. Well now you know. Another question about the Soweto riots, that’s 1976, but again, that’s for Thursday.

Q: “Is the National party still in control in Cape Town where the ANC cannot get part?”

A: Not the National Party, but a party now called the Democratic Alliance. National Party is actually no longer in existence. Christopher, I’ll pass that on to my sister.

Q: “Does tribal influence amongst the blacks not still play a marked role in current South African government?”

A: I wouldn’t call it tribal influence, no. I think there is, it’s a reality that there are ethnic identities within the African population as a whole and that these do reflect in some amount of tensions. Nelson Mandela and his successor, Thabo Mbeki, for example, as presidents took great care in balancing their cabinets across those ethnic or linguistic divisions. I don’t think it’s a major factor. It doesn’t look anything like, for example, the kind of ethnic tensions that tore Nigeria apart and that have also been very, very divisive in other post independent African countries. Wendy, I hope I haven’t spent too long answering those questions, but it was a delight

• No.

• to get them.

• No, no, no. Just as I said before, million thanks, Colin. It was, I learned a lot too. Very enlightening, very informative and beautifully presented. It’s very concise and we’re looking forward to Thursday.

• Thank you very much.

• Yeah. And I’m just so thrilled, delighted and happy to have you on with us. A huge thank you.

• Thank you very much indeed. And thanks everybody for the questions.

• Yeah, thank you everybody for participating. Very excited to know, I’ll be talking about South Africa and also to have my Wits colleague, my university professor. I mean I’m sure we’re a similar age, So you know, I always feel so proud of all the South Africans who are just so accomplished. Thank you to everyone and thank you Colin. Thank you Emily.