Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The opposition party, known as Unionist, was largely English and was led by Jameson supported by Duncan, Richard Feetham, Hugh Wyndham, and Long. Financed by Milner’s allies and the Rhodes Trust, its leaders considered that their chief task was “to support the prime minister against the extremists of his own party.” Long, as the best speaker, was ordered to attack Hertzog constantly. When Hertzog struck back with too violent language in 1912, he was dropped from the Cabinet and soon seceded from the South African Party, joining with the irreconcilable Boer republicans like Christiaan De Wet to form the Nationalist Party, The new party adopted an extremist anti-English and anti-native platform,

Jameson’s party, under his successor, Sir Thomas Smartt (a paid agent of the Rhodes organization), had dissident elements because of the growth of white labor unions which insisted on anti-native legislation. By 1914 these formed a separate Labour Party under F. H. P. Creswell, and were able to win from Smuts a law excluding natives from most semiskilled or skilled work or any high-paying positions (1911). The natives were compelled to work for wages, however low, by the need to obtain cash for taxes and by the inadequacy of the native reserves to support them from their own agricultural activities. By the Land Act of 1913 about 7 percent of the land area was reserved for future land purchases by natives and the other 93 percent for purchase by whites. At that time the native population exceeded the whites by at least fourfold.

As a result of such discriminations, the wages of natives were about one-tenth those of whites. This discrepancy in remuneration permitted white workers to earn salaries comparable to those earned in North America, although national income was low and productivity per capita was very low (about $125 per year).

The Botha-Smuts government of 1910-1924 did little to cope with the almost insoluble problems which faced South Africa. As it became weaker, and the Hertzog Nationalists grew stronger, it had to rely with increasing frequency on the support of the Unionist party. In 1920 a coalition was formed, and three members of the Unionist party, including Duncan, took seats in Smuts’s Cabinet. In the next election in 1924 Cresswell’s Labourites and Hertzog’s Nationalists formed an agreement which dropped the republican-imperial issue and emphasized the importance of economic and native questions. This alliance defeated Smuts’s party and formed a Cabinet which held office for nine years. It was replaced in March 1933 by a Smuts-Hertzog coalition formed to deal with the economic crisis arising from the world depression of 1929-1935.

The defeat of the Smuts group in 1924 resulted from four factors, besides his own imperious personality. These were (1) his violence toward labor unions and strikers; (2) his strong support for the imperial connection, especially during the war of 1914-1918; (3) his refusal to show any enthusiasm for an anti-native program, and (4) the economic hardships of the postwar depression and the droughts of 1919-1923. A miners’ strike in 1913 was followed by a general strike in 1914; in both, Smuts used martial law and machine-gun bullets against the strikers and in the latter case illegally deported nine union leaders to England. This problem had hardly subsided before the government entered the war against Germany and actively participated in the conquest of German Africa as well as in the fighting in France. Opposition from Boer extremists to this evidence of the English connection was so violent that it resulted in open revolt against the government and mutiny by various military contingents which sought to join the small German forces in Southwest Africa. The rebels were crushed, and thousands of their supporters lost their political rights for ten years.

Botha and, even more, Smuts played major roles in the Imperial War Cabinet in London and at the Peace Conference of 1919. The former died as soon as he returned home, leaving Smuts, as prime minister, to face the acute postwar problems. The economic collapse of 1920-192 3 was especially heavy in South Africa as the ostrich-feather and diamond markets were wiped out, the gold and export markets were badly injured, and years of drought were prevalent. Efforts to reduce costs in the mines by increased use of native labor led to strikes and eventually to a revolution on the Rand (1922). Over 200 rebels were killed. As a result, the popularity of Smuts in his own country reached a low ebb just at the time when he was being praised almost daily in England as one of the world’s greatest men.

These political shifts in South Africa’s domestic affairs did little to relieve any of the acute economic and social problems which faced that country. On the contrary these grew worse year by year. In 1921 the Union had only 1.5 million whites, 4.7 million natives, 545 thousand mulattoes (“coloured”), and 166 thousand Indians. By 1936 the whites had increased by only half a million, while the number of natives had gone up almost two million. These natives lived on inadequate and eroded reserves or in horrible urban slums, and were drastically restricted in movements, residence, or economic opportunities, and had almost no political or even civil rights. By 1950 most of the native workers of Johannesburg lived in a distant suburb where 90,000 Africans were crowded onto 600 acres of shacks with no sanitation, with almost no running water, and with such inadequate bus service that they had to stand in line for hours to get a bus into the city to work. In this way the natives were steadily “detribalized,” abandoning allegiance to their own customs and beliefs (including religion) without assuming the customs or beliefs of the whites. Indeed, they were generally excluded from this because of the obstacles placed in their path to education or property ownership. The result was that the natives were steadily ground downward to the point where they were denied all opportunity except for animal survival and reproduction.

Almost half of the whites and many of the blacks were farmers, but agricultural practices were so deplorable that water shortages and erosion grew with frightening rapidity, and rivers which had flowed steadily in 1880 largely disappeared by 1950. As lands became too dry to farm, they were turned to grazing, especially under the spur of high wool prices during the two great wars, but the soil continued to drift away as dust.

Because of low standards of living for the blacks, there was little domestic market either for farm products or for industrial goods. As a result, most products of both black and white labor were exported, the receipts being used to pay for goods which were locally unavailable or for luxuries for whites. But most of the export trade was precarious. The gold mines and diamond mines had to dig so deeply (below 7,000-foot levels) that costs arose sharply, while the demand for both products fluctuated widely, since neither was a necessity of life. Nonetheless, each year over half of the Union’s annual production of all goods was exported, with about one-third of the total represented by gold.

The basic problem was lack of labor, not so much the lack of hands but the low level of productivity of those hands. This in turn resulted from lack of capitalization and from the color bar which refused to allow native labor to become skilled. Moreover, the cheapness of unskilled labor, especially on the farms, meant that most work was left to blacks, and many whites fell into lazy habits. Unskilled whites, unwilling and unable to compete as labor with the blacks, became indolent “poor whites.” Milner’s Kindergarten had, at the end of the Boer War, the sum of £ 3 million provided by the peace treaty to be used to restore Boer families from concentration camps to their farms. They were shocked to discover that one-tenth of the Boers were “poor whites,” had no land and wanted none. The Kindergarten decided that this sad condition resulted from the competition of cheap black labor, a conclusion which was incorporated into the report of a commission established by Selborne to study the problem.