Documents - Part One: Leaders and Chiefs oppose government plans

Document 4. Introduction to pamphlet. Native Views on the Native Bills. By Professor D. D. T. Jabavu, August 1935

The Union Government has taken ten years (1925-1935) to evolve its "Native Bills" that are intended to be a permanent model for ruling its subject non-White peoples in the Union and the prospective Protectorates. The majority of the Africans vitally touched by this proposed piece of legislation have not yet seen it as it was published in English only a couple of months ago. They will understand its contents only when the latter are translated into Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho and Tswana and circulated town by town and village by village in the land. This implies that each headman, blockman and chief will have a copy of these bills in his mother-tongue, and the same done for groups like Advisory Boards and organisations of teachers, ministers, agriculturists, farmers, vigilance associations and the numerous economic and political units falling outside of tribal society. In all probability the Native Affairs Department will need four months to translate and publish these documents in the vernacular languages, and several more months during which to explain them analytically to the Bantu people concerned. The latter will thereafter require time to hold their own meetings for discussion so as to furnish their respective spokesmen with agreed views which will be tabled at a Government conference that will be summoned by the Minister for Native Affairs in 1936 or 1937 under Act 23 of 1920, the "Native Affairs Act" that provides for Government conferences to ascertain Native opinion on all important contemplated legislation affecting Natives. This was the sensible procedure adopted in 1922 in connection with the promulgation of the 1923 Urban Areas Act; and the present bills are of much greater significance.

Our Government, like all other civilised legislative bodies, is supported by influential daily journals that defend and justify its measures good or otherwise. The case for the inarticulate Bantu is either never heard or is severely handicapped by the lack of a strong press to educate public opinion, and the only public opinion that matters for parliamentary purposes in this country is European public opinion.

This publication is a humble attempt to readjust the balance in order that the weaknesses, the injustice and the defects of the bills under consideration may be better understood. The spearpoint of these bills is universally admitted to be the abolition of the Cape Native franchise. In the name of civilisation it will be a pity if these proposals reach enactment in the statute books in their present form without their framers fully realising the political obliquity that will be reflected there from upon South African history. We Bantu are as much exercised as any Europeans about the prestige of South Africa in the eyes of the world of Christendom. Many Whites mistakenly think that to be their exclusive concern. The Blacks may conceivably pity the Union Government when it unwittingly embarks on a policy censured by the rest of modern civilisation, because and only because of not knowing the evil repercussions of such a policy upon the future of South Africa and Africa as a whole. And the future of South Africa will not be a happy one if it is built to-day, even through the pretext of protecting the political supremacy of the White races, on legislation designed to be unfair to the weaker Black and Coloured races.

In this pamphlet, and other successive numbers of the series, we hope to get together some expressions of views that deserve the notice of our legislators, views excerpted from various publications. Our aim in doing this is to invite co-operation, willing co-operation between the African subjects of the King and the Union Government in the construction and evolution of a policy that will make for future peace, loyalty and contentment among the diverse peoples that constitute the Union of South Africa.

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