A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa 1882-1964
Preface
The current situation in South Africa must be evaluated from the perspective that Africans in that country founded and operated nationalist organizations, engaged in political protest, and participated in national political activity earlier than Africans organized such activities in other parts of the African continent. It is, therefore, not only the paucity of current political opportunities for the majority of Africans in South Africa that is so disturbing, but also the fact that, while the political role and influence of most other Africans on the continent expanded, however unevenly, in their preindependence period, the progression in South Africa has been in the opposite direction. Despite patient and continuous efforts by all conceivable means to influence the dominant white electorate to expand their political role, Africans, who in the Cape Colony shared a nonracial franchise with whites, have had even their limited rights taken away. Since 1960, apart from electing a minority of the members of legislative councils in so-called Bantustans, which possess semiautonomous powers over the African rural sections of their areas, Africans have no political representation within South Africa.
The three volumes of documents on African protest and African challenge, of which this is the first, present the drama of more than eighty years of resolutions, requests, anxious arguments, agonizing frustrations, and calls to action by African leaders and organizations. The text provides the background and setting for the documents. The documents underpin the text and enable us to recreate through the words and actions of African leaders the events, tactics, emotions, and personalities of the past.
The collection of documents was the work of many years. Even so, the editors are painfully aware that their holdings do not include many of the records they would like to have. Like others who have studied African politics in South Africa at first hand, particularly in recent years, they were more often met with accounts of police raids, or of the burning of potentially banned material, than with documents to copy or to take. Nonetheless, although there were many stories of material destroyed in the nick of time, or because of fear of involvement, there were also dramatic instances of documents dug up in gardens, uncovered in chimneys, or brought under cover of darkness from hiding places threatened with disclosure. In these latter cases, the material was transferred to the editors with enthusiasm and the hope that it might some day be published.
Much more obvious ways of collecting material yielded a considerable harvest. Trial records, particularly of such long-drawn-out processes as the Treason Trial from 1956 to 1961, the Mandela Trial of 1962, and the Rivonia Trial of 1963-1964, are packed with information for those prepared to spend endless hours patiently putting together the details about persons and movements gleaned from the testimony of different witnesses. Numerous earlier government-sponsored investigations into African conditions and African testimony on pending legislation are often helpful. The records of the government-sponsored conferences of African leaders in the 1920s, of the Natives' Representative Council, 1937-1951, of the annual conferences of the African National Congress (ANC) and of other African organizations (also collected with difficulty and still incomplete) are even better sources of information, however verbose the speakers tended to be.
Newspapers, particularly African papers published in English and in various African languages like Imvo, Inkundla ya Bantu, and Abantu-Batho, the last-named the official organ of the ANC until the early 1930s, record African meetings and occasionally speeches. Imvo, which began publication in 1884, is available at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) on microfilm, but only one copy of Abantu-Batho has been found in the United States. Inkundla ya Bantu, published in the 1940s as a forum for African opinion, is unavailable in American libraries. After the mid-thirties, African politics can be followed through reflectors of the left: The Guardian and its successors, including New Age. The English and Afrikaans language newspapers, on the other hand, have usually tended to ignore African organizations unless their activities were regarded as threatening. Nonetheless, in the decades just before and after Union, it was common for the liberally inclined The Friend of Bloemfontein to report on the annual meetings held there by African organizations because of its central location, while detailed coverage oft Cape ANC meetings in the mid-thirties and of Transkeian developments can be found in the East London Dispatch.
In addition to collecting as much documentary material as possible, the editors interviewed at length and on tape as many participants as were available to record their personal accounts of events. The most systematic interviewing was done during 1963 and 1964, mainly in South Africa, but also in Basutoland (now Lesotho), Swaziland, Bechuanaland (now Botswana), Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and London. All three editors had previously interviewed many African leaders and secondary figures during the course of their earlier researches in South Africa, where Miss Carter worked in 1948-1949, 1952-1953, 1957, 1959 and 1961; Mr. Karis in 1955 and 1957-1959; and Mr. Johns in 1962-1963.
Interviewing Africans in South Africa, particularly those who have been associated with African nationalist organizations and activities, has always been a ticklish business. It has become progressively more difficult, partly because of police surveillance, and partly because extensive bannings, imprisonment and death sharply limit the number of persons available. Nevertheless, a significant number of older leaders and some younger ones were still able to speak privately during 1963 and 1964. The editors would like to pay special tribute to their courage and the patience with which they gave their time unstintingly to help reconstruct the picture of the past. Many African leaders are now outside South Africa and to them, too, goes our appreciation for the long hours they spent answering our detailed questions.
By comparing different stories of events with each other, we were able to answer many questions that arose in our minds as we pored over the documents. Unfortunately, many questions remain unanswered, sometimes because neither participants nor witnesses were available and sometimes because memory was blurred.
Enough material was gathered, however, to fill several large files at the Program of African Studies of Northwestern University. Having collected it, the next and not least difficult task was to bring order to the highly varied documents from many sources and, still more difficult, to select and excerpt those that seemed most suitable for publication. The focus of attention has been on African political activity. Thus, while we have included those African activities that involved cooperative activities with non-Africans, we have left out documents illustrating the independent efforts of Indians and Coloured and of both liberal and left-wing whites. In selecting documents within these limits, we have looked first for those of historic importance and secondly for those particularly illustrative either of major themes or of forms of expression. Only a few personal letters have been included. Despite their bulk, the volumes are only an introduction to the rich materials that should be used in preparing a definitive political history of modern South Africa. They include, however, far more documentary material than has been previously available and thus open up new lines of inquiry and opportunities for gaining a more balanced perspective of South African history.
The field research most directly related to these volumes was done during two intensive periods in South Africa (June-August, 1963, and January-April, 1964) collecting material both lot South Africa's Transkei and for this documentary collection. The original purpose of the research was to gain perspective toward and to analyze developments in the Transkei as the South African government's first large-scale experiment in territorial separate development. It became quickly apparent, however, that these research periods also afforded major opportunities to secure material on the earlier history of African nationalist organizations and activities and that these opportunities were unlikely to occur again. Without being diverted from our responsibilities for the study of the Transkei (in which we were ably joined by Dr. Newell M. Stultz of Brown University), Mr. Karis, Miss Carter, and Mr. Johns (who was part of our research team from January to April 1964) took advantage of every opportunity to collect documents and to hold interviews relevant to this second, and in many ways more important, purpose.
Without the devoted assistance of our small research staff--Molly Wise, Linda. Christianson, and Peter Basquin during our first research trip, and Catherine Eglin, Molly Wise, and Margaret Anderson during the second--it would have been impossible to secure as complete a collection as we did. It was they who spent long hours photostating material we had located, who packed innumerable bundles to ship to the United States, and in countless other ways magnified the effect of what we were able to do. The collection itself and the volumes have benefited from the experience, and efforts of J. Congress Mbata, formerly of the Institute of Race Relations, Johannesburg, then of Northwestern University, and now of Cornell University.
We would also like to express our warm appreciation to the director and staff of the South African Institute of Race Relations, to the librarians of university and public libraries throughout South Africa and of the Parliamentary Library, Cape Town, and to the many others in that country who gave us unstinting aid in our search for material. We have benefited from the rich collection of documents held at the British Museum and Public Records Office, at the African Microfilm Center, directed by the Center for Research Libraries, Chicago, and at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, California. We acknowledge with special satisfaction the initial stimulus to make this collection of documents, and the interest, advice and support extended by Dr. Peter Duignan, director of the African Program of the Hoover Institution, and by Dr. Lewis Gann, also of the Hoover Institution.
Above all, we think with deep appreciation of those Africans who worked so hard, so long and with so little return, to make South Africa the great nonracial country it could have become. Telling evidence of their long, patient and courageous efforts is provided through their own words in this documentary collection.
Thomas Karis
Gwendolen M. Carter
August 1970
