There is a glossary for acronyms here.

The South African Native National Congress launches (January 1912)

In March 1910 on the eve of the formation of the Union, Black South African leaders met in Bloemfontein to organize a response. They decided to call a convention. In October 1911, Pixley Seme, a lawyer born to a prominent Zulu clan in Natal, wrote a call to action in Imvo Zabantsundu (Native Voice, for a copy see Johns, 1987, p. 72):

    “There is today among all races and men a general desire for progress and cooperation… The South African Native Congress is the voice bidding all the dark races of this sub-continent to come together once or twice a year in order to review the past and reject therein all those things which have retarded our progress…

    “If we wish to convince the Government that it is possible to have a uniform Native policy, then let us form this Congress. The demon of racialism, the aberrations of the Xosa-Fingo feud, the animosity that exists between the Zulus and the Tongaas must be buried and forgotten… These divisions are the cause of our woes…

    “Natives everywhere know that a South African Native Congress such as proposed in these columns, will give them the only effective means to make their grievances properly known… This is a general announcement to all the Native leaders... to arrange for the sending of delegates so that every section of the people shall be represented in that Conference of the races..." 

Seme suggested a two-part agenda. The first would involve establishing the Congress and electing office bearers. The second would consist of deliberations, starting with “a vote of confidence in General the Right Honourable Louis Botha, P.C.” We must assume that it would have been a vote of no confidence. There would then be general discussions on such topics as native unity, schools, churches, etc. It was to function as a parallel parliament.

The founding meeting took place on 8 January 1912 under the leadership of Seme, John Dube, and Sol Plaatje. Estimates suggest that between 100 and 200 delegates attended. They came from all of Southern Africa and encompassed all walks of life: workers, chiefs, intellectuals, church leaders, and professionals. They called the organization the South African Native National Congress. Seme summarized their purpose in an article in Ilanga Lase Natal (‘The Sun of Natal’): “The South African Native National Congress is a Native Parliament composed of two houses. The Executive Commoners and… the Nobles or Chiefs.” They elected John Dube as its first president.

It took a while for the Congress to agree a constitution, partly because of World War I. In September 1919, the first constitution was published. (for a copy, see Johns, 1987, pp. 76-82). In what follows, I’ve paraphrased the original but preserved its language. You will find the SANNC’s objectives in Ch. 3 of the constitution. They included:

1. To unite under the aegis of a deliberative assembly all organizations whose aims are the promotion of the interests of the aboriginal races. To be the medium (which expresses) representative opinion to educate the (White) Parliament and public regarding the requirements and aspirations of the Native people.

2. To educate Bantu people on their rights and to bring together all tribes and clans and by means of united political organization to defend their rights and to contend against racialism and tribal feuds.

3. To agitate against the Colour Bar and for equitable representation of Natives in Parliament. To seek the redress of grievances by constitutional means…

4. To expound the right system of education in all schools and colleges; and to encourage habits of industry and thrift and the gospel of the dignity of labour.

In the constitution’s fourth chapter the drafters specified the “methods or modus operandi” of the organization (again, paraphrased but using the drafters’ words):

    “The Association will achieve its aims by means of resolutions, protests, and deputations… and by united and passive action according to a constitutional and peaceful agenda. 
    "… when the time is ripe, it will form a group of members to secure their election to all legislative and administrative bodies…”

In 1923 the SANNC changed its name to the African National Congress. But in the meantime, apartheid had started with a vengeance.

Racial legislation in the first decades of the Union

Many British Lords had argued that South Africa would evolve into a non-racial democracy over time. It didn’t. Instead, successive Union parliaments took South Africa in a direction modelled on the 1905 report of the British Government’s South African Native Affairs Commission, chaired by Sir Godfrey Lagden.

The Commission had recommended that South Africa be divided into separate territories for Blacks and Whites. It added that Blacks living in urban areas should be forced to live in segregated “locations,” and it recommended separate political systems for the two races.

Soon after the election, the Botha government began enacting laws along the lines envisaged in Lagden’s report:

Native Labour Regulation and Mines and Works Acts (1911): regulated Blacks’ employment in an attempt to control their migration into urban areas. Outlawed strikes by Black workers. Reserved skilled and semi-skilled jobs for Whites.

Immigration Regulation Act (1913): made it difficult for Indians to immigrate into South Africa and stopped Indians already in South Africa from moving from one province to another.

Native Land Act (1913): limited Black South Africans’ right to own land to “scheduled native areas” which were 7% of the country. Blacks were about 67% of the population. It was a massive act of land dispossession.

When war broke out in 1914, South Africa was required by colonial law to join the side of the British. This caused a former Boer general and member of Botha’s government, J.B.M. Hertzog, to breakaway and form the National Party. In the 1915 election, Afrikaner resentment after the Boer War was still so high that support for Hertzog’s nationalists immediately jumped to 30%. He won 27 seats. Botha’s SAP won 54 seats - not enough for a majority in the 130-seat parliament. He governed with support from the mostly English-speaking Unionists.

Jan Smuts became the leader of the SAP when Botha died in 1919. The SAP had continued to lose Afrikaner support in the post-war years. As a result, Hertzog’s National Party won 33% of the vote and 43 seats in the 1920 election. Smuts only won 41 seats. The White socialist Labour Party went from 3 seats (in 1910) to 21 seats with the support of militant English-speaking workers (it was the era of the Bolshevik revolution). Smuts was only able to govern by forming a formal coalition with the Unionists. Later that year, the Unionists merged into the SAP.

And discrimination marched on:

Native Urban Areas Act (1923): it became illegal for Blacks to live outside racially segregated “locations” in South African cities. Based on the 1922 Stallard report which had recommended that “Natives” should only be allowed into urban areas “as long as their presence is demanded by the white population.”

Worker militancy had become violent in 1921/22 when White mine workers turned out in force to protest the employment of lower-paid Black workers by the so-called “Rand Lords” (European capitalists). With the involvement of organized Marxists, it developed a kind of revolutionary momentum called the Rand Rebellion. Smuts put down the rebellion by force with the help of the army – and lost more White working-class support. Hertzog’s National Party and the socialist Labour Party took advantage to form an electoral pact for the 1924 election. It was an odd marriage of Afrikaner nationalists with English socialists. They won a huge majority with 81 of 135 seats. They formed what came to be known as the Pact government. The Pact held together and subsequently won the 1929 election. By that time, Hertzog had consolidated the Afrikaner nationalist vote; and the NP by itself won 41% of the vote. Smuts was out, Hertzog was in, and discrimination marched on:

Immorality Act (1927): prohibited White and Black South Africans from what it called “carnal intercourse.” Whites could still inter-marry with other ethnic minorities.

Native Service Contract Act (1932): Black farm workers were forced to stay on the farms on which they were working. They could not look for better paying jobs somewhere else. The Act legalised barbaric practices like whipping.

White women got the vote in 1930. But the onset of the Great Depression pitched South Africa into an economic crisis. As a result, Hertzog and Smuts decided to form a governing coalition in 1933. To ratify the coalition, they called an early election. By that time the legislature had increased to 150. The coalition won in a landslide: Hertzog’s NP = 75 seats; Smuts’s SAP = 61 seats. In 1934 they merged to form the United Party. This so angered an Afrikaner faction of Hertzog’s former National Party that it broke away under D.F. Malan to form the Gesuiwerde Nasionale Party (Purified National Party). The Gesuiwerdes had 19 seats.

Back in 1925 when still in the Pact, Hertzog had given a speech about his solution to the so-called “Native problem.” In essence, it simply reiterated a hard-line approach to territorial segregation, but added a structure for Black governance. His ideas came to fruition when the United Party passed the:

Representation of Natives Act (1936): creating an advisory body of 22 members called the Natives Representative Council. 12 were Blacks elected by male Black taxpayers; 6 were Whites and 4 were Blacks nominated by the Dept of Native Affairs. The Council could only advise. Removed Blacks in the Cape from the common voters’ roll.

The Hertzog-Smuts government also enacted further discrimination against Indians:

Marketing and Land Occupation Act (1937): gave the government sweeping powers to expropriate Indian-owned land in rural areas.

World War II led to another political split: Smuts wanted to join the Allies while Hertzog wanted to stay neutral or join the Germans. Hertzog lost the caucus vote, left the United Party, and formed the Volksparty (People’s Party). In 1940, he merged with Malan’s Gesuiwerdes to form the Herenigde Nasionale Party (Reunited National Party). In the 1943 election, Malan’s reunited nationalists won 43 seats to the United Party’s 89.

The naivety of the British Lords is apparent when you read the debates that led to all these laws. The country’s racist drift was an inevitable consequence of its race-based franchise. Governments are accountable to their electorates and what the majority of White South Africans wanted was segregation and entrenched White control. And so, by the Second World War:

1. Black South Africans (about 70% of the population) could only own land in about 13% of the country.

2. Blacks had no self-government - not even in the 13% of the land they owned. They could only “advise” through the Natives Representative Council.

3. If they moved to cities to find work they had to live in racially separate dormitory towns, usually on the periphery of the cities.

4. Skilled and semi-skilled jobs were reserved for Whites. It was difficult for any race other than Whites to get apprenticeships.

5. Like Blacks, Indians also could not move around the country freely. Immigration into South Africa was restricted. Indians were being herded into racially separate suburbs by expropriation of the land they owned in rural areas.

Next week: Gandhi’s theory of resistance.

The first part of the book is a bare-bones history beginning with the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 and ending with the Botha reforms in 1980. Its purpose is to establish the flow of South African racial politics into the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.

The backdrop is the pass laws – that is, a package of laws that restricted the right of people who weren’t European to move around Southern Africa without permission. The earliest of these was passed by Earl George Macartney in 1797 to prevent Black South Africans from migrating to the Cape Colony. I mention them as a reminder that non-European South Africans faced many discriminatory practices before the Union.

In the first decade of the 1900s, Britain wanted to turn its four South African colonies (the Cape, Natal, Transvaal, and Orange River Colony) into one country. That’s where we begin.

The Convention on the Closer Union of South Africa

On 31 May 1910, four British colonies in Southern Africa combined to form the Union of South Africa. Two of them, the Transvaal and Orange River colonies, had been self-proclaimed Boer Republics until their defeat in the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902. A third, the Cape, became British in 1806 when it was seized from the Dutch; and Natal (the fourth) had been annexed by Britain in 1843. Delegates from the four met between 12 October 1908 and 11 May 1909 to draft a constitution for the new country. They called their meetings the Convention on the Closer Union of South Africa. All the delegates were White men.

Among the many contentious issues, two stood out. The first was the question of whether South Africa should be a federal or unitary state. Both Canada and Australia had adopted federal constitutions – Canada in 1867 and Australia in 1901. But Jan Smuts of the Transvaal argued forcefully that South Africa needed a union. He gave the United States as an example of a federal country that functioned poorly because of its lack of unity. He believed that delegating too much power to the provinces would cause divisions that the new country could not afford. The Cape and Natal delegations objected. But when the Natal delegation put the issue to a vote in Natal, the Union proposal passed, much to their surprise.

The second contentious issue was that of voting rights. This was an age when most democracies had not yet given women the vote. In addition, both the Transvaal and Orange River Colony restricted the vote to White men. Natal had introduced a non-racial qualified franchise based on property and rents in 1856. Over time, however, White settlers had introduced increasingly stringent criteria for qualification. By 1901 an increase in property prices and the addition of educational criteria had set the bar so high that almost no-one who was not a White man qualified.

The Cape had introduced one of the more liberal qualified franchises in the Empire in 1853. Nicknamed “the £25 vote”, it allowed any man owning property worth £25 or more to vote. The Cape’s franchise included traditional, tribal land. Men without title living on tribal land had the right to vote as a function of the value of the land. It was an unusually low non-racial bar for the era. Over time it had become more restrictive: first, by the removal of the tribal land criterion in 1887; and second, by an increase in the property criterion to £75 and the addition of a literacy test in 1892. These changes led to White men outnumbering others on the voters’ roll by about six to one. This was the system that the Cape delegation took to the Convention. They wanted South Africa to have something like the Cape’s qualified franchise.

The Cape lost and the Convention proposed a compromise: each colony could keep its franchise in its territory. In practice this meant that only White men over 21 would have the right to vote in the Transvaal and Orange River Colony. Natal retained its highly restrictive qualified franchise: only 200 of the roughly 22,000 eligible voters were not White. The Cape was allowed to keep its qualified franchise. But it lost the right to elect men who were not White to parliament.

The draft passed easily in all four colonies. And so, a delegation went off to London with the draft. It became law when the British passed the South Africa Act on 20 September 1909.

At the time, the makeup of South Africa’s population was as follows: Black = about 4 million (67%); White = about 1.3 million (21.9%); Coloured = about 0.5 million (8.4%); Asian = about 0.14 million (2.4%). Nearly 80% of the men in the geographical territory of the new Union of South Africa were denied the vote.

Petitions that argued for Black parliamentary representation

Black political activists had not been silent during the Convention. On 22 October 1908, activists from the Transvaal submitted an eloquent argument for the extension of political rights to all South Africans. It was submitted on behalf of the “aboriginal natives of South Africa resident in the Transvaal” (Public domain. See Johns, 1987, pp. 52-3):

        “We, the undersigned, being aboriginal natives of South Africa resident in the Transvaal, beg to bring before your honourable convention our just claim to be granted representation in the Parliament of a United South Africa.

        “We desire to remind you that the natives in this colony have hitherto been totally unrepresented… notwithstanding the fact that they contribute largely in direct taxation to the treasury, in addition to bearing a full share of the indirect taxation through pass fees, railways, and the Customs tariff.

        “We attribute the advancement in prosperity and loyalty, which is such a marked characteristic of the natives of the Cape Colony, to the generous policy which has permitted them to qualify themselves as citizens… And we submit that the same happy result may be expected to follow the extension of the Cape franchise to our people throughout South Africa.

        “We therefore submit to the favourable consideration of your honourable convention our claim to be permitted to qualify for full political privileges such as may be granted to the European population…”

All they were asking for was the Cape’s qualified franchise. But their petition and others like it were ignored. By the end of the convention, it had become clear that the draft constitution would not extend the qualified franchise beyond the Cape. As a result, activists decided to take the battle to Britain. In July 1909 a multiracial delegation led by William Schreiner, Abdullah Abdurahman, and John Tengo Jabavu petitioned the British Houses of Parliament to argue for amendments that would extend the qualified franchise to all South Africans. Schreiner had been a prime minister of the Cape and Jabavu was a Black activist and founding editor of the African-owned Xhosa newspaper, Imvo Zabantsundu (Native Opinion).

Their petition read (in part) as follows (Public domain. See Johns, 1987, pp. 55-6):

        “Your humble Petitioners are by resolution of five coloured and native congresses, and by resolutions passed at public meetings held at very many different centres in South Africa, empowered to approach the Imperial Parliament by Petition… Those whom your Petitioners represent are loyal and dutiful subjects of His Majesty.

        “In the colony of the Cape of Good Hope political rights have been granted to all without discrimination of race or colour… Nowhere has it been suggested that those rights have ever been abused…

        “Your humble Petitioners respectfully submit that the only practical means whereby fair legislation can be attained is by granting equal political rights to qualified men irrespective of race, colour, or creed… The Bill now before the Parliament… would create a political discrimination against non-European subjects of his majesty…

        “Your petitioners fear that the franchise rights of the coloured people and natives of the Cape Colony are not adequately protected… but are threatened by the provisions of Clause 35.

        “Your Petitioners apprehend that by the racial discrimination proposed in the aforesaid Bill… the prejudice already existing in the Transvaal, Orange River Colony, and Natal, will be accentuated; that the status of coloured people and natives will be lowered, and that an injustice will be done to the majority of the people in British South Africa who have in the past shown their unswerving loyalty to the Crown…

        “Wherefore your Petitioners humbly beseech your Honourable House so to amend aforesaid Bill as to protect the existing rights of His Majesty’s coloured and native subjects…”

A clause of the draft constitution had limited members of what would be the new parliament to White men. Clause 35 entrenched the rights of the Cape to its qualified franchise – but, in the view of the petitioners, without adequate protections.

The House of Lords debated the South Africa Act on 27 July 1909 (Hansard, Vol. 2). Three quotes convey the flavour of that debate. First up, Lord Northcote (Hansard, Vol. 2, col. 769):

        “… what has to be considered is the whole idea underlying... the British Empire… I would ask this House to consider what that idea really is. I say unhesitatingly that, alike in the case of Canada, Australia, and South Africa, it is the determination to have white rule and white responsibility for the conduct of public affairs.”

The second quote comes from Lord Courtney of Penwith who argued against the draft constitution’s race-based franchise. He warned of the dangers of a Whites-only government (Hansard, Vol. 2, col. 788):

        “If you have only a small proportion of European descent governing a vast mass of coloured population you will have a position of unrest, of instability, and of future danger such as would not make South Africa a sound element in your Imperial Union.”

The final quote comes from the Marquess of Lansdowne who captured the sentiments of the majority (Hansard, Vol. 2, col. 792):

        “… we have to ask ourselves with regard to this Bill the simple questions—Is it a good Bill for the Colonies? Is it a good Bill for the Empire? I think we may safely answer both those questions in the affirmative…”

The debate can be summarized in a few sentences. For the majority, it was a trade-off between preserving a fragile peace between Afrikaans- and English-speaking White South Africans, and the rights of the rest of the people. The Lords believed that not giving the former Boer Republics what they wanted would cause the whole process to blow up (they used those words).

For the minority who favoured non-racial political rights of some sort, limiting the vote to White men in most of the country was morally wrong and a strategic mistake. They warned that the country would eventually blow up.

And so, the draft passed into law. Writing in Imvo Zabantsundu in August 1909, Jabavu noted that “The Native and Coloured people must now realize that an entirely new chapter in South African history is opening… they will have to depend on themselves and their… European friends for the securing of their civil and political rights.” (Public domain. See Johns, 1987, p. 57)

And as Schreiner and his colleagues warned in London, not even the so-called “entrenched” franchise in the Cape would be safe. Starting in 1936, Union governments steadily whittled away the Cape’s non-racial franchise. When changes were challenged in court, the courts ultimately sided with the ruling government’s interpretation of the Constitution.

The first general election in the Union of South Africa took place on 15 September 1910. It resulted in a win for a coalition led by the South African Party of Louis Botha and Jan Smuts. It won 66 seats, most of them unopposed. The English-speaking Unionist Party ended up with 36 seats. A small socialist, mainly English-speaking Labour Party came third with 3 seats. Louis Botha became the first prime minister. Modern South Africa had become a political reality.

Next week: Apartheid gets started; Black South Africans get 7% of the land.

Introduction

South Africans are good at democracy. Elections are on time, every time. People line up on the appointed day, wait patiently, vote – and get on with their lives. The results have never been challenged. As Pierre Cronje (one of the founders of the National Democratic Movement) says, “it is such an elegant solution to the problem of choosing leaders – you put your mark on a piece of paper and go home.” If White men had extended the franchise to everyone in 1910, we would have found out that we are good at democracy a lot sooner than we did. That doesn’t mean that we choose well. But then, that’s the point of a democracy: every five years (or so) you can “throw the bums out.”

The title of this book is accurate but could be misleading. So it’s important to say what the book is not about: it is not a history of the process that took South Africa from a country governed by European settlers and their descendants to a non-racial democracy. Instead, it’s a short history of a movement: the National Democratic Movement (English) or Nasionale Demokratiese Beweging (Afrikaans); and the role that it played in South Africa’s transformation. A lot has been written about this period by others. This book fills in the NDM part of the story.

The NDM was founded by Wynand Malan and some dissident White politicians in 1987. Malan had been a member of parliament for the governing National Party. In 1987, he and a group of high-profile NP supporters broke away to contest the White elections as independents on an anti-apartheid platform. They achieved stunning results in an environment which had become very difficult for White anti-apartheid parties. Later that year they were joined by Progressive Federal Party dissidents Peter Gastrow, Pierre Cronje, and Pieter Schoeman. The two sets of defections – from the governing NP and the liberal PFP – tell you something about the political logjam that South Africa was in at the time.

This is their story. To set the scene, I’ve started in 1910. I’ve ended in 1990 with de Klerk’s speech. Some might say – why 1910? Read on. Others might say “but a lot happened after 1990.” Read on.

Now – some notes about the approach I’ve adopted for the book.

First, this is not an academic book in the manner of footnotes and references for every statement. I wanted to keep the book short and readable. But it is well researched. There are sources for everything. Click on the link and you’ll find them. When I researched the book, I discovered that there are many minor variations in authoritative sources around specific dates (for events, for instance); or numbers of people killed. You might therefore find dates and numbers that differ from mine. But you’ll find that the variations are small.

Second, I tried to keep it short by focusing on the content that I thought the reader should know. This means that the book does not dive into the details of every aspect of South Africa’s history. Important events are untold, for instance, the 1914 Afrikaner rebellion. Also missing is the story of simmering Afrikaner resentment against the British. At its core, the National Party was anti-British. You can see this from how it emerged as a result of breakaways during the World Wars and the Great Depression.

Third, names and terminology: I’ve adopted a convention of calling people and groups what they called themselves at the time. This is why the descriptor “non-European” appears in the early chapters. In fact, in one of the African National Congress’s early meetings, a member proposed that the organization should switch from the terms “European” and “non-European” to “African” and “non-African.” The ANC didn’t consider it seriously at the time.

Fourth, the term “Black territories”. At the heart of South Africa’s apartheid policies was the attempt to restrict Black land ownership to a small part of South Africa. The National Party called these “homelands”. It was a euphemism designed to make the policy sound acceptable. The ANC called them “Bantustans”. It was a pejorative name aimed at denigrating them. I’ve decided to use the words “Black territories.”

Fifth, acronyms! There’s the African National Congress (ANC), the National Party (NP), the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU), the Gesuiwerde Nasionale Party (GNP), the Herstigte Nasionale Party (HNP), the Progressive Reform Party (PRP) – and on and on. There are a great many names because organizations kept appearing and disappearing and renaming themselves. The use of acronyms to shorten the text made the text very difficult to follow. But writing out the names in full made the text slow and clumsy. So I’ve adopted the editorially inconsistent practice of sometimes writing a name in full; and sometimes using the acronym.

Sixth, I’ve made substantial use of quotes from source documents. This is a) because it ensures accuracy when representing a person or organization; b) because I need them for commentary; and c) because nothing captures what people were thinking better than the words they actually used. For the sake of brevity, I’ve sometimes shortened the quotes by cutting out words that weren’t needed. I haven’t used the convention of “…” to flag this every time because it breaks the flow. But the meaning of the originals is faithfully rendered.

When it comes to sources, I would like to thank the University of Cape Town Library Special Collections for permission to use extracts from Bloom’s “Notes of a meeting held at Mfuwe Game Lodge.” And a big thank you to the African National Congress and the Nelson Mandela Foundation for permission to quote from documents in their archives - in particular, Michael Young’s notes on the secret meetings between Thabo Mbeki and Willie Esterhuyse; the ANC’s archival documents in Karis (1972) and Gerhart and Glaser (2010); and the O’Malley interviews.

Finally, some stylistic notes: I’ve adopted a mix of British and Canadian spelling based on whichever felt right to my eye. It’s eccentric, but that’s the way it is. With respect to quotation marks, I’ve adopted United States conventions - it’s where I publish most these days. The bold text is mine, including the bold in quoted sources.

Some may feel that the book ends abruptly. That’s because de Klerk’s speech brought fundamental changes to what each of us in the NDM was doing. We stayed socially and politically involved in different ways. I have allowed myself some final comments in an “Epilogue.”

Next week: 1910: South Africa sets off in the wrong direction