Part Three: New Gropings for Effective Organisation and Representation, 1921 - 1934

Introduction

The postwar era opened inauspiciously for Africans in South Africa. The unrest which had been evident in the immediate postwar months continued into the early 1920s and culminated in a series of direct confrontations with white authorities. In October 1920, demonstrations by Africans in Port Elizabeth in support of an arrested African trade union leader sparked a reaction from white vigilantes and policemen in which twenty-three Africans and one white were killed. In May 1921, frustrated white authorities finally resorted to the use of force after the Israelites, a millenarian separatist sect, had repeatedly refused to move from ground outside of Bulhoek in Cape Province, where they had squatted for over a year. When a reinforced police unit was sent to eject them, the Israelites resisted with primitive weapons. In a one-sided struggle, 163 Africans were killed and 129 were wounded. In 1922, Bondelswarts tribesmen in South-West Africa challenged the imposition of new taxes by the South African administration of the former German colony; in a series of raids against the rebels, the government reestablished its authority at a cost of numerous African dead. These incidents underlined the determination of the white government to suppress ruthlessly what it regarded as serious challenges to its authority.

Yet it was not direct black-white confrontations that shaped the overall viewpoint of the government on the "Native question" during the 1920s and 1930s, but rather a series of developments within the white community itself. The key mining industry of the Witwatersrand had long attracted both white and nonwhite workers. Tradition, entrenched by legislation, allotted a monopoly of the skilled, highly paid positions at the top of the labor pyramid to the white minority, most of whom were English immigrants familiar with militant trade unionism; the nonwhite majority, overwhelmingly new African immigrants to the urban areas, was restricted to the unskilled, poorly paid positions. Faced with rising costs and declining profits, the mine owners began to hint that the color bar should be breached so that Africans and other nonwhites could advance into skilled positions--albeit at wages well below the rates for whites. White labor, already suspicious of the mine magnates on ideological grounds, reacted with determined opposition to the threat to their privileged position.

The issue was further complicated by the intrusion of another factor: the steady influx of poor white Afrikaners into the urban areas. Squeezed off their farms by persistent drought and the growing infertility of land, displaced Afrikaner bywoners flooded to the racially segmented labor markets of the cities. Bywoners were rural Afrikaners who squatted on the farms of the white landowners. Since the early twentieth century, tension had been growing between bywoners and landowners as a result of land becoming progressively less available, repeated droughts, and increasing concern for profits in agriculture. Although the Afrikaners, like the Africans, were initially untrained for skilled work, particularly in a new environment dominated by English, which to them was a "foreign" language, they demanded inclusion among the ranks of highly paid white labor on the basis of their skin color. Their presence sharpened the already tense relations between white capital and organized white labor.

During World War I, confrontation between capital and labor had been postponed. In a spirit of patriotism, the English-led trade unions and the Chamber of Mines had agreed to maintain the status quo for the duration of the war; both sides, in fact, benefited from the war-induced expansion, which drew substantial numbers of whites and Africans into the labor-hungry South African economy.

With the coming of peace and the spread of postwar economic difficulties, the issues of the color bar and of white wages came to the fore. Labor disputes multiplied throughout the Witwatersrand. A crisis was reached in 1922 when a dispute between a section of the white workers and the Chamber of Mines escalated into a general strike. The key issue for the white workers was the retention of their privileged position through the maintenance of the color bar. When a section of the strikers, including both English-speaking left-wing socialists and Afrikaner militants, used armed action to support their demands, the Smuts government invoked martial law, broke the strike by force, and restored public order. In the eyes of the defeated white strikers the Smuts government had aligned itself with the Chamber of Mines.

The crushing of the "Red Revolt" set the stage for a radical realignment in South African white politics. Previously, the rurally based Nationalist Party, dedicated to Afrikaner republicanism and racial segregation, had been wary of the socialism of the English-speaking white workers. From its side, the professedly socialist South African Labor Party, anchored among the English-speaking white workers and committed to the maintenance of their privileged position, was hostile to the republicanism of the Nationalists. In the wake of the 1922 strike, however, the determination of both groups to oust their common political adversary. General Smuts, provided a new and compelling incentive to compromise in the interests of a common political platform. After a series of delicate negotiations, the Nationalists and the South African Labor Party agreed early in 1923 to an electoral pact under General Hertzog in opposition to the South African Party of General Smuts. In return for Nationalist agreement to postpone republican demands, the
South African Labor Party agreed to postpone its socialist goal. Both parties were united in their conviction that additional segregation was imperative for the welfare of white South Africa.

The Africans had remained aloof during the 1922 disturbances, except when they reacted to unprovoked attacks by white strikers. A resolution passed by the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (see below) at a meeting in Cape Town indicated their feelings about the situation. The resolution condemned the attacks on non-Europeans and called on the government to protect the people; at the same time it blamed the color bar for the trouble on the Rand, and de­manded its abolition. In response, however, to a "Republican Resolution" passed by certain elements among the white strikers at a meeting in Johannesburg, and to their open urging of armed revolt, the ICU called on nonwhites to be loyal to government, King, and country. On its side, the government assured the country that the Africans had done nothing to cause trouble; yet it pushed forward with its restrictive program.

In the following year, the Smuts administration passed the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923, which provided for a standardized system within which white municipalities could limit and regulate the burgeoning African settlements within their boundaries. Municipalities were empowered to establish new "locations" for Africans outside or on the edge of white residential areas. These locations were under the control of white superintendents, but provision was made for setting up "Native Advisory Boards" to act as channels for the expression of opinion by their African residents. Municipalities could also define the categories of Africans who were permitted to live in urban areas. The legislation thus authorized influx control; yet there were no complementary measures to provide more land in rural areas for those Africans excluded from the cities.

With the victory of the Nationalist-South African Labor Party coalition in the general elections of 1924, a further impetus was given to segregationist policies. The Nationalists, increasingly concerned about the rapidly growing poor white population (almost 60 percent of the Afrikaner population at the height of their distress), and the Labourites, determined to preserve the protected position of the privileged white workers, moved quickly to satisfy the demands of their supporters. In its first two years in office, the Pact govern­ment unveiled a far-reaching program to entrench the position of white labor.

Under the guidance of Col. F.H.P. Creswell, the leader of the parliamentary wing of the Labour Party, who was appointed to the newly created post of minister of labour, a series of measures was passed that reinforced the privileged position of white workers and further differentiated their status from that of African labor. The Industrial Conciliation Act of 1924 had established machinery for the negotiation of labor disputes but specifically excluded "pass-carrying natives" (i.e., African males, the vast majority of the African labor force) from its provisions. Building upon this legacy of the Smuts administration, the Pact government passed the Wages Act of 1925 for the governmental determination of wage rates within specific industries. Agricultural and domestic workers (the largest categories of the lowest paid African workers) were specifically excluded from coverage under the legislation. The Mines and Works Amendment Act, 1926, overrode a court ruling of 1923 and once again made the color bar legal in the mining industry. The Pact government also pursued a much-publicized "civilized labor policy" under which poor white Afrikaners increasingly replaced Africans and other nonwhites at inflated wage rates in a wide range of relatively unskilled jobs in government-operated enterprises such as the railways.

The most comprehensive statement of the segregation policy of the Pact government was made by Nationalist Prime Minister Hertzog in a carefully reported speech made on November 13, 1925, in the small Orange Free State town of Smithfield. The program for his "solution" to the "Native" question was an elaboration of views that he had broadly outlined much earlier, prior to the introduc­tion of the Natives Land Act of 1913. It consisted of four points:
1) Removal of all African voters from the common roll where they voted for the same candidates as did whites in the Cape Province.
2) A final delimitation of land within the framework of the Natives Land Act of 1913.
3) The establishment of electoral machinery by which African voters could indirectly elect a small number of white members to the South African Parliament, and
4) The establishment of partly nomi­nated, partly elected local "Native councils" in the areas designated as African with further provision for an all-Union "Native council" to advise on African questions.

In a parallel proposal directed at the Coloureds, General Hertzog offered guaran­tees to fix their legal and political status at an intermediate point between those of the Africans and the whites. Early in 1926, he presented his proposals to the Parliament in what came to be known as the "Native Bills." Simultaneously, his proposals regarding the Coloureds were introduced as the Coloured Persons Rights Bill.

Up to 1935, Hertzog's Native Bills hung as an ever-present threat over the African popu­lation of South Africa. In keeping with his grand scheme, Hertzog insisted the bills be passed in toto and not separately. But in accordance with the "entrenched" clause of the Act of Union, the crucial provision to remove Africans from the common roll in Cape Province, where they had long voted for the same candidates as did whites, required a two-thirds vote of a joint sitting of both houses of Parliament. While most of the white opposition agreed with part of Hertzog's scheme, he was not able to win the necessary extraordinary majority during the period the Pact government or its successor Nationalist Party government was in power.

The failure of the Pact government to gain passage of the Native Bills did not mean that it desisted from efforts further to regulate African affairs. In 1927, supported by the opposition and opposed by only three dissident members of the Labour Party, the Pact government passed a Native Administration Bill. The measure enacted into law many of the provisions of the Native Administration Bill that had been proposed by the Botha government in 1917. The governor-general was given power to legislate by proclamation on African affairs, a power in effect exercised by the white-controlled government of the day. Most dramatically, the new bill included a "hostility clause" under which anyone inciting hostility between the races was liable to prosecution and punishment.

In 1929, General Hertzog went to the white electorate under the banner of the "Black Manifesto" in which the swart gevaar (black danger) was made the central issue, and the Nationalist Party heralded as the most effective protector of white supremacy. Elected to office upon a rising tide of votes sufficient to give the Nationalist Party an absolute majority in Parliament, General Hertzog was able to form a Nationalist Party government without the aid of the English-speaking South African Labour Party, although two of its leaders were included in the new cabinet. For the first time since Union, the South African government was controlled by an all-Afrikaner party.

The new government moved swiftly against a rising wave of African discontent that centered in Natal. Backed by the prime minister, the new Minister of Justice Oswald Pirow led a show of force in November, 1929, against Africans in Durban who had been boycotting municipal beer halls. In this same spirit, he piloted the Riotous Assemblies (Amendment) Bill through Parliament in 1930. This measure provided power to exile within South Africa persons deemed to create hostility between the races, thus giving new means to control radical political movements.

By other means, the government moved to assure its electoral base, and that of any future white government. White women were given the vote, as had been done in the United Kingdom in 1928, and at about the same time the property and educational requirements were removed for the white electorate, though not for the nonwhite voters of Cape Province. Temporarily thwarted in its objective of removing African voters from the common roll, Hertzog's Nationalist Party government compensated for this situation by substantially enlarging the white electorate.

The government's priorities were further revealed by its efforts to combat the impact upon South Africa of the worldwide depression. New welfare schemes for poor whites were devised, but not for Africans and other nonwhites, already at the bottom of the labor pyramid. Moreover, in 1932, the Native Service Contracts Act increased penalties for breach of contract and tightened restrictions on the movement by African labor outside the reserves. Although Africans were more involved than ever in the industrializing South African economy, the white-determined rules for their participation were being progres­sively strengthened to prevent any possible challenge to white superiority in any field.

Africans "Respectfully Submit"

It was against this unpromising backdrop that African protest continued to express itself from 1920 to 1935. Painfully aware of their growing disadvantages within the system, African leaders were still hopeful that the post-Union trend could be diverted into channels that were more promising for African advance.

At the conferences of African leaders which the governor-general called in accordance with the Native Affairs Act of 1920, Africans attempted to utilize the officially established advisory institutions. In terms of the act a group of Africans, selected each year by the government from among chiefs and other prominent persons, were invited to Pretoria for a three to six day meeting with the all-white Native Affairs Commission and a small number of white officials of the Native Affairs Department. Government thinking on key issues of importance to the African population was presented directly by responsible white ministers, including General Hertzog himself in 1925. In response, many of the invited Africans regularly challenged the paternalistic prescriptions of the white government, and constantly attempted to extend the platform from which they could discuss governmental policies.

The "civilized labor policy" of the Pact government soon came under fire. At the conference session in 1924 Africans also voiced concern that a differential standard of justice was being administered in the South African courts (see Document 39b). Yet it was the issue of African participation in the political process that most concerned the invited African delegates at these conferences.

They argued consistently that the government was failing to consult African opinion before it introduced measures affecting African affairs. Referring specifically to the institution of the conference itself, they proposed that its structure be altered to make it more representative, that Africans elect some of the delegates, and that it be given statutory powers guaranteeing consultation. In these arguments, always couched in respectful parliamentary language, African representatives showed themselves prepared to accept, at least temporarily, a restricted franchise coupled with a gradual extension of their political participation. Yet their speeches constantly reflected their commitment to an eventual full share in the South African political system (see Documents 39a, 39c, 39d).

In several instances there had been open differences between the African represent­atives of the three northern provinces and those of Cape Province. This was particularly the case in the discussions of the Registration and Protection Bill put forward by the Smuts administration in 1923 (see Document 39a). The bill proposed a standard system of African registration to replace the multitude of special local passes carried perforce by all African male residents of the northern provinces (and some in the Cape Province). Opposition to the pass system was universal and widespread, but the northerners, not surprisingly, were more willing than those from the Cape Province to accept a simplified and standardized system for all African males outside the reserves, including those in the Cape Province who had previously been exempt. The bill was not passed, but its discussion showed that some northerners might be willing to compromise the "privi­leges" of the Africans of the Cape Province in order to obtain some improvement of their own situation.

Despite their differences, Africans were unanimous in their reaction to General Hertzog's proposed Native Bills. Barely a month after his 1925 Smithfield speech, General Hertzog made his first (and only) appearance before the conference with a condensed version of his grand scheme for the "solution" of the "Native problem." He was received respectfully, even to the point where delegates expressed their appreciation for his willingness to tackle the complex "Native problem," but almost immediately voices were raised to attack the very concept of segregation upon which Hertzog's formula was based (see Document 39c). When the confer­ence met in 1926 (after the publication of the Native Bills) it was nearly unanimous in its opposition both to the basic idea of segregation and to the specific proposals contained in the Native Bills (see Document 39d). Although the protests of the delegates brought no change in the government's intent, they testified again to the African elite's steadfast commitment to the ideal of a non-racial South Africa, to the depth of its opposition to any strengthening of the ine­qualities within the South African system, and to its awareness of the crucial significance of the common voters' roll in Cape Province.

Africans further elaborated on their attitudes to the Native Bills before the Select Committee of Parliament that considered the legislation (see Documents 40a, 40b). African witnesses testified to the necessity of main­taining the Cape franchise and its inherent nonracial promise -- although, despite vigor­ous dissent from his fellow Africans, one witness (Meshach Pelem of the Bantu Union) indicated that he would be willing to accept separate representation. Professor Jabavu, deeply involved in Cape Province politics as president of the Cape Native Voters' Convention, specifically rejected arguments often made against the common voters' roll and defended its retention as an important sign of African progress within a common Western civilization. The representatives of the Transkeian Territories General Council argued from a strong mandate against the main provisions of the bills. Aware of the circumscribed limits within which their own representative institu­tion operated, they warned that Africans in the proposed Native councils would tend merely to be "government men" and not representative of African opinion. While the Africans were willing to accept separate Afri­can provincial councils as forums to deal with specific regional problems, they were not prepared to abandon the Cape system of national African representation.

Africans and Whites in Dialogue

The government-sponsored conferences and committee hearings were institutions linked to the government's policy of expanding the machinery of segregation. In contrast, a small but growing number of whites, largely associated with Christian organizations, attempted to extend informal African-white contacts in an atmosphere where there could be sympathetic discussion of other possibilities for meeting South Africa's racial prob­lems.

As the migration of Africans to the urban centers steadily increased, welfare societies among the whites undertook to investigate African living conditions and to extend charitable work into African townships. Following the 1921 visit of the Gold Coast educator, J. E. G. Aggrey, on a Carnegie endowment mission to study African education, concerned whites and members of the African middle class came together to form Joint Councils of Europeans and Bantu in the major South African cities. In 1929 the leaders of the Joint Council movement led in the crea­tion of the South African Institute of Race Relations, a nonpartisan body oriented to research and conciliation to ameliorate racial tensions. The welfare societies, churches, the Joint Councils, and the Institute helped to focus attention on the social and economic conditions of the nonwhites. Moreover, in the multiracial meetings organized by these groups Africans found new opportunities to express their views.

African opinion varied in its estimate of the value of the meetings. In 1922, R. V. Selope Thema, a journalist who had been closely associated with Congress since its foundation and had been a member of its 1919 deputation to Europe, endorsed biracial meetings as a useful device to provide information (see Document 41a). He urged that the inextricably integrated nature of South African society should be recognized by a commitment to equal rights for all. If such a commitment was not forthcoming, however, Selope Thema felt that serious consideration should be given to an equitable separation of the races.

The Rev. Abner Mtimkulu (a member of an African delegation that had testified in 1917 before a Select Committee of Parliament against the proposed Native Administration Bill) supported the concept of joint meetings between white and black, with particular reference to the Cape Native Welfare Society (see Document 41c). In Mtimkulu's view, such conferences were especially useful in helping Africans who were caught in a new and strange urban environment.

But James Thaele of Cape Town, a self-styled "professor," presented a dissenting view with specific reference to the first Conference on Native Affairs held under the sponsorship of the Dutch Reformed Church in 1923 (see Document 41b). Recently returned from the United States where he had become a supporter of Garveyism, Thaele articulated the skepticism of those who were dubious about any solution of the "Native problem" posed strictly within the framework of Christianity. Thaele argued, instead, that explicitly political and trade union actions were the only means by which the African could achieve his ends. Although later in his political career Thaele became antiradical, he represented in 1923 the tradition of African politics that placed primary reliance upon independent African action. In contrast, both Selope Thema and Mtimkulu, the latter perhaps more than the former, were anxious to work with sympathetic whites in order to improve the African's position.

Dr. A. B. Xuma, a future president of the ANC during 1940-1949, made a still more detailed survey of the possibilities for inter­racial cooperation in a speech to the Conference of European and Bantu Christian Stu­dent Associations in 1930 (see Document 41d). From the perspective of more than a decade of medical training in the United States and Europe, he criticized South African race relations in the post-Union period in comparison with those in the United States. Yet he saw hope in the activities of the Joint Councils, in the integrity of the South African courts, and in the neutral attitudes of certain white newspapers. Leaning to the position of Selope Thema and Mtimkulu, yet incorporating Thaele's concern for self-reliance within the African community, Xuma urged expansion of opportunities for Africans and that African views be seriously considered. Like Professor Jabavu a decade earlier, Xuma explicitly argued that the educated African was both the hope and the bridge linking black and white South Africa.

Both the potentialities and the limitations of unofficial joint conferences are reflected in the reports of conferences organized by the Dutch Reformed Churches and by the Joint Council movement. In conjunction with the official government-sponsored conference for African leaders in 1923, the Dutch Reformed Churches called a conference of their own in Johannesburg (the one of which Thaele had spoken); a second conference of this type was held in 1927 in Cape Town (see Documents 42a, 42b). The participants at both con­ferences -- whites concerned with "Native affairs," most of them connected with religious groups, and African leaders from a wide variety of groups, including political organizations and trade unions -- devoted considerable attention to discussing welfare measures. Yet African speakers also focused upon the main grievances agitating the African community, including unequal land distribution, the restrictions on Africans in urban areas, and lack of African political representation. Resolutions urged further joint conferences to discuss many issues. In 1927, however, the crucial issue of the Cape African franchise split the conference, many of whose white members were drawn from the ranks of the predominantly Afrikaner Dutch Reformed Churches.

Many of these same persons participated in the National European-Bantu Conferences, called yearly from 1929 on by a committee representing the Joint Councils of Europeans and Bantu. The National European-Bantu Conferences that were subsequently incorporated into the framework of the newly formed South African Institute of Race Relations, touched on most questions of concern to the African community (see Documents 43a, 43b). Although the discussions and resolutions of the conferences were never under­taken in a specifically political context, they tended to support those who were arguing for a sharp reversal of government policy away from the accelerating trend to segregation.

While the debates and statements of these conferences perhaps carried weight with those committed to the ideal of growing cooperation between African and white as partners or potential equals, they had relatively little effect on the overwhelming majority of white South Africans who saw Africans at best within a paternalistic framework. The conferences can be seen as a new form of common enterprise in the spirit of the "liberal" tradition implanted in the Cape Colony; yet the hopes they inspired were restricted to a small minority of white South Africans.

Non-Europeans Meet Together

Work with sympathetic whites for the advancement of the African cause was paral­leled by the first coordinated efforts to bring together all groups of South African non-whites in a united front to present their grievances to white South Africa. For the first time since the joint delegation of 1909, which had traveled to London in a vain effort to block passage of the Act of Union, Africans and other nonwhites attempted to devise a common strategy. On the initiative of Dr. Abdullah Abdurahman, president of the African People's Organization (and the leading Coloured representative in the 1909 delegation), a Non-European Conference was convened in 1927; three more were subsequently held in 1930, 1931, and 1934. The procedures of the Non-European Conferences with their emphasis upon discussion of nonwhite grievances and the passage of numerous resolutions recording opposition to government policy were much the same as those of the joint white-African conferences. Yet as gatherings restricted to nonwhites they repre­sented an important extension of the range of African political activity.

The proceedings of these conferences indicated, however, the difficulties of achieving any common nonwhite front. Representatives of Indian organizations (in attendance for the first time at a meeting with South African Coloured and African organizations) sought to preserve their distinctive status in relation to the British Indian representative appointed to negotiate with the South African government on behalf of the Indian community; accordingly, in 1927, they requested and obtained conference agreement that they could maintain a certain aloofness from any active political involvement (see Document 44). Divergent political approaches among the delegates were particularly evident in 1930 when a small group of delegates, who favored a more radical strategy of direct confrontation through passive resistance and demonstration (supported at the time by the Communist Party of South Africa), unsuccessfully challenged the majority, who favored continuation of the more traditional methods of respectful resolutions and deputations (see Document 45). Even efforts to establish a more permanent organization for coordination of nonwhite political activity foundered on the fears and unwillingness of many existing organizations to yield their separate independence (see Document 46).

Despite disagreements and the inability to advance beyond discussion and resolutions, the conferences did highlight the extent to which different nonwhite groups held common positions of opposition to government policies, in particular to the Native Bills and to the legislation of the first years of the second Hertzog government. As was often emphasized, the delegates felt that their meetings were not a substitute for, but a supplement to, joint cooperation with sympathetic South African whites. It was in an extension of this spirit that the Non-European Conference of 1931 decided (over opposition in its own ranks) to send a delegation to Great Britain to counter General Hertzog's efforts to obtain a voice for South Africa in the determination of policy throughout the British Empire in Africa. Although the delegation was subsequently reduced to one man, Professor Jabavu, it gave an opportunity for the conference through him to provide the overseas public with an exhaustive list of grievances that was an expanded and strengthened reformulation of the points he had presented in 1920 (see Document 47). In addition to this action, the Non-European Conferences established patterns of consultation between Africans and other nonwhite groups although consultation did not go beyond sporadic meetings. Nor was there any attempt to establish a mass-based political organization.

Africans Acting Alone

The focus of African political activity remained within African organizations. The Bantu Union, founded by Meshach Pelem in 1919, stayed a small organization in the eastern Cape Province, rivaling and sometimes cooperating with the Cape Native Voters' Convention. Yet it was the latter organization which became the focal point for African involvement in the electoral process. Continuing his father's practice of organizing registered African voters. Professor Jabavu led the convention in efforts to exert some influence upon government policies through participation in electoral politics. The convention's 1928 petition to Prime Minister Hertzog graphically revealed the deep anxieties of the group most immediately threatened by the Native Bills (see Document 50a). Discussion at the December, 1928, meeting of the conven­tion showed that the membership proposed to throw its support to white politicians solely upon the basis of their stand on the Cape African franchise (see Document 50b).

Yet participation in electoral politics in Cape Province was at the periphery of African concern. The South African Native National Congress, renamed the African National Congress (ANC) in 1923, kept its position at the center of African politics throughout most of this period, although it was for a while eclipsed by the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union which at the height of its power became political rather than strictly industrial in character. Nonetheless, the ANC, drawing adherents from the African middle class throughout South Africa, continued to bring together Africans from each of the four provinces in periodic meetings to discuss grievances and to try to organize means to present the African viewpoint to white authorities. Still hampered by poor organization and limited finances, the ANC focused its activities around its annual conferences in Bloemfontein, although it also made sporadic representations to the government, particularly in response to specific measures proposed by the Hertzog administration.

In the Rev. Z. R. Mahabane's 1921 presidential address to the Cape branch of the South African Native National Congress, and in the significantly named Bill of Rights formulated in 1923, the ANC leadership had reiterated its identification with the standards of British practice and justice at the same time that it attempted further to legitimize its demands by placing them in the context of inalienable democratic and human rights due the Africans of South Africa (see Documents 48a, 48b). It was from these premises that the ANC launched its protests against specific government legislation throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s.

Resolutions of the ANC regularly repeated Mahabane's arguments against the segrega­tionist intent of government legislation. The Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 was opposed because it did not give Africans full freehold rights in urban areas (see Document 48b). Later, the ANC newspaper Abantu-Batho, strongly criticized proposed amend­ments to the Natives (Urban Areas) Act on the grounds that it would perpetuate and strengthen segregation (see Document 48g).

Moreover, the government-sponsored conferences of African leaders, authorized under the Native Affairs Act of 1920, were attacked on the ground that their members were not elected and therefore not representative of African opinion (see Document 48c). Respectful demands were also made that the Union government undertake to provide compulsory education for African children (Document 48c).

With the publication of Hertzog's Native Bills in the wake of his Smithfield speech, ANC protests centered on the threat to the limited political rights still held by Africans, in particular to the nonracial franchise in Cape Province. The reports of the 1926 meeting of the ANC indicate differences of attitude toward Hertzog's proposals to "solve the Native problem," but its resolutions, and those of the House of Chiefs assembled by the ANC in 1927 in accord with its constitutional procedures, displayed the depth of African feeling against the Native Bills (see Documents 48d, 48e).

In its efforts to register its protests and achieve its integrationist ends, the ANC until the mid-1920s kept well within the constitu­tional means Mahabane had supported in his 1921 address. The ANC made no attempts to organize any protest campaigns like the passive resistance movement of 1919. Resolutions taken at the annual conferences were regularly presented by ANC deputations to white authorities. In 1924, it urged cooperation with other nonwhite groups, and accordingly its leaders subsequently participated in the Non-European Conferences (see Document 48c). For the most part, the ANC seemed content to act as a national African forum and informal political pressure group, concentrating its efforts at the time of its annual conference.

By the late 1920s, disagreements over strategy and principle produced new controversies within the ANC. After the publication of the Native Bills in 1926, an ANC conference agreed to embark upon a nationwide campaign of demonstrations in alliance with the ICU (see below); but the leaders subsequently backed away from this endorsement, and the campaign remained stillborn. Younger members of the organization chafed under the ineffective methods of the past and became receptive to radical slogans and cooperation with the Communist Party of South Africa. A representative of this more activist group, James Gumede, of Natal, a founding member of the ANC and a member of the 1919 ANC delegation to Great Britain, was elected ANC president in 1927. In his inaugural message, he made a specific appeal to the left and right wings to join in a united front on behalf of the African people (see Document 48f).

Shortly thereafter, Gumede, who had attended a Communist-sponsored Congress of Oppressed Nationalities in Brussels and then traveled to the Soviet Union, indicated his readiness to cooperate with the Communists in joint efforts to influence the government, including mass demonstrations. Since associa­tion with liberal white sympathizers and respectful protests had done nothing to halt the expansion of government restrictions on Africans, Gumede was ready to make a tactical alliance with Communists to further the goals of the ANC. But his policy provoked dissension within the ANC's already fragile structure, particularly after 1928, when the Communist Party in response to directives from Moscow endorsed the goal of an "Independent Native Republic as a stage toward a workers' and peasants' republic." A vivid indication of the degree of the ANC's disorganization was embodied in the report of the secretary-general in 1930 (see Document 48h). The controversy that Gumede's approach aroused came to a head at the annual conference that year, where he was challenged by Dr. Pixley Seme, the ANC's founding father. Running on a sharply anti-Communist platform, Seme captured the presidency of the organization, but it was a Pyrrhic victory for the cohesion of the ANC was shattered (see Document 48i).

For the first five years of the 1930s, the ANC was unsuccessful in reconstituting its unity even to the extent of meeting regularly to pass resolutions and to organize the deputations that had been the focus of its activities in the 1920s. Thus no serious consideration was given the imaginative proposal made in 1930 by Mweli Skota, a journalist and ANC secretary-general, for the convocation of a continent-wide Pan-African Congress to coordinate opposition to General Hertzog's efforts to influence British African policy (see Document 48h). In 1931, a call at an ANC meeting in the Transvaal for a passive resistance campaign against the pass laws in the tradition of the 1919 demonstrations was similarly unheeded (see Document 48j).

President Seme had his own definite ideas for reconstructing the ANC. These first centered around a new constitution which would have given greater powers to the generally more conservative chiefs. Later, in 1934, they involved African Congress Clubs, economic self-help groups that would seek to give the ANC a sound economic base (see Documents 48l, 48m). His opponents shared his concern for achieving African unity, particularly when economic dislocations and new measures of the Hertzog government spot­lighted the disabilities of the African people (see Document 48k). Yet Seme and his opponents were unable to resolve their differences. The ANC disintegrated further into competing cliques. Nevertheless, the unaccepted proposals of both Seme and his opponents, including the abortive plans advanced by the latter in 1931 for a passive resistance campaign, all highlighted African grievances and gave rise to new suggestions for means to express them forcefully. Inability to organize did not mean the abandonment of the goals that had animated the ANC since its foundation.

The other focal points for the articulation of African grievances were nonwhite trade unions. In the postwar labor unrest that erupted in most major South African cities, small trade unions mushroomed as Africans and Coloureds attempted to organize themselves for the effective expression of their grievances as workers. In 1920, a conference of local nonwhite trade unions organized by Selby Msimang, a founding member of the ANC, and Clements Kadalie, the Nyasa founder of the Cape Town ICU, agreed upon the formation of a federation of nonwhite trade unions called the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union of South Africa. Under the presidency of Msimang, the new organization placed its greatest emphasis upon the need for African workers to organize carefully so that advances could be obtained through peaceful negotiation with white employers. Msimang's speech, delivered before the second conference of the federation in Cape Town in 1921, listed the major grievances of African workers. They ranged from strong dissatisfaction with restrictive governmental machinery to antagonism to the industrial color bar that prevented the employment of nonwhites in skilled positions (see Document 49a-l).

A more limited organization, the Transvaal Native Mine Clerks' Association, was founded by A. W. G. Champion in 1920 to bring together the generally literate Africans who occupied the small number of low-level clerical and supervisory positions open to Africans on the mines. Although the program of the organization was oriented to the interests of the "educated Native," whose role in the supervision of the mass of illiterate mine workers was explicitly noted, it also attempted to speak for all African workers in demanding that they be given a voice in the industrial system of which they had become a part. Its 1922 memorandum to the Mining Industry Board was couched in respectful, almost obsequious terms, yet through the accommodating language protruded an unmistakable questioning of the basic principles of a system that held the African worker at the unskilled, low-paid bottom rungs of the economic ladder (see Document 49a-2). In a similar vein, the organization welcomed the Prince of Wales to South Africa in 1925, while explicitly warning him not to be deceived as to the true conditions of African workers on the basis of his carefully guided tour of the mining compounds (see Document 49a-3).

Yet neither Champion nor Msimang provided sufficiently dynamic leadership to establish their organizations upon a national basis. It was Clements Kadalie, the leader of the local ICU in Cape Town, who made nonwhite trade unionism a significant force in African politics in the 1920s. Denied the position of secretary-general in Msimang's organization, Kadalie had retired to his home base in Cape Town. In 1922 he convened a conference of Msimang's trade union federation (of which he technically remained a member) and apparently succeeded in taking over the machinery of the organization from Msimang, who retired gracefully to avoid disruption of the union. From his new position Kadalie embarked upon a campaign to convert the slightly renamed organization, the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union of Africa (ICU), into a nationwide mass-based organization which could claim to speak for all the nonwhite workers of Africa.

The obstacles to success were great. The African proletariat of South Africa, an ethnically diverse group of largely unskilled workers, many of whom were still migrants closely linked to African reserves, did not readily lend itself to regular and cohesive organization. Furthermore, white management, which especially in the key mining industry isolated African workers through the compound system, hampered and harassed ICU efforts. In addition, the government frequently invoked weapons from its arsenal of restrictive legislation to limit any African trade union activity.

Despite the difficulties before it, the revitalized body, known simply as the ICU, caught hold in the mid-1920s. Although poorly organized and unevenly led, it expanded into the major urban centers and even into the countryside, particularly in Natal and the Orange Free State. Its trade union concerns had clear political overtones; indeed, by the mid-1920s Kadalie's ICU was implicitly chal­lenging the preeminence of the ANC in African politics.

The thrust of Kadalie's appeal was visible in an editorial in the ICU newspaper The Workers' Herald in December 1923, on the eve of the annual conference that launched the first national organizing campaign (see Document 49b-1). In its revised constitution of 1925, the ICU's goals were set forth, both with regard to trade union concerns and to welfare interests (see Document 49b-2). The preamble of the constitution, retained from the constitution of the original Cape Town ICU, explicitly dedicated the trade union to a socialist goal. The specific grievances of the ICU and its animosity to segregationist white trade unions reflected the particular disabilities of nonwhite workers in South Africa. Yet at the same time, the ICU identified itself with all workers, regardless of race. It held out the ultimate goal of a color-blind socialist society. Like the ANC in its more explicitly political sphere, the ICU as the spokesman for labor argued for the full inclusion of the African within a nonracial integrated system.

Although the ICU constitution specifically eschewed political involvement, the nature of its concerns and the situation in which it operated extended it beyond this commitment. In 1924, Clements Kadalie was active on behalf of the anti-Smuts coalition of the Nationalists and the South African Labour Party, probably being persuaded that the ouster of a government closely associated with the Chamber of Mines might be to the benefit of African labor. As the segregationist intent of the Pact government became clearer, the ICU became progressively disenchanted with the government whose election it had encouraged. With the Smithfield speech and the publication of the Native Bills the break was complete. The resolutions of the ICU against the Native Bills show great similarity to the arguments and demands made by the ANC in the same period (see Document 49b-3). Like the ANC, the ICU called for an end to the pass laws, the abolition of the color bar, limited legislative power for Africans through a shift in the format of the government-sponsored conferences for African leaders, and retention of the direct vote for Africans in the Cape Province. But although at one time the ICU considered joining the ANC in a nationwide campaign of demonstrations against the Native Bills, it failed to act upon the proposal.

Like the ANC, the ICU in the mid-1920s became partly preoccupied with internal struggles complicated by debate on the nature of the relationship it established after 1924 with the sympathetic Communist Party. When the Communists moved to challenge the leadership of Kadalie and Champion (who had joined the ICU from the Transvaal Native Mine Clerks' Association in 1925), Kadalie was able to rally support within the executive to oust Communist officers, and subsequently in March, 1927, to forbid any member of the ICU to hold membership simultaneously in the Communist Party. Subsequently, the ICU claimed to continue its expansion throughout South Africa, making exaggerated estimates of a membership of 100,000 in early 1928.

Cut away from the option of a left-wing alliance with the then white-run Communist Party, Kadalie placed new reliance upon the traditional approach of deputations to gov­ernment authorities, which he buttressed by efforts to obtain significant overseas support from British and European socialists and trade unionists. The "soft" side of this tack could be seen in Champion's respectful letter written (while Kadalie was on tour in 1927 in Britain and Europe) to Prime Minister Hertzog, requesting a meeting to discuss the grievances of the ICU in an atmosphere free from polemics (see Document 49b-4). Its "hard" dimension was visible in the appeal by Kadalie to the white workers of Britain for support against the segregationist practices of white South Africa (see Document 49b-5). Kadalie was particularly anxious to mobilize British public opinion against passage of the Native Administration Act of 1927 under which those convicted of inciting "hostility" between the races in South Africa were to be liable to imprisonment or fines.

Upon his return from Britain in late 1927, Kadalie attempted to reorganize the ICU along the lines of a properly established British trade union. Yet it was clear that he had no intention of abandoning agitation by the ICU against those government policies it considered inimical to the interests of African workers. The Economic and Political Program for 1928, for which Kadalie obtained the approval of the ICU at its conference in April 1928, represented one of the most compre­hensive and forthright statements of ICU concerns (see Document 49b-6). The program focused upon economic demands, but it explicitly argued that the ICU must also be concerned with politics. In this spirit it not only favored a petition opposing the with­drawal of the Cape African franchise, but also efforts by the ICU to find its own candidates for the Cape Provincial Council (still legally open to nonwhites). On the key question of passes, the program urged that the government be petitioned to make a test withdrawal of pass law enforcement for a six-month period. In the event that the government proved unreceptive to this request, the pro­gram argued for a campaign of pass-burning and civil disobedience. With these proposals Kadalie tried to place the ICU within the political tradition for which the ANC stood.

But the program was only a stillborn testament to the political aspirations of Kadalie and the ICU. At the very moment it was being passed by the annual conference, the ICU was in the process of irreversible disintegration. Organizationally overstrained by a too-rapid expansion, criticized by an impatient rank and file, and challenged on all sides by white South Africa, ICU leaders began to squabble over alleged corruption, local autonomy and political tactics. When Champion was suspended pending an investi­gation of the financial affairs of the Durban and Natal sections of the ICU which he headed, the ICU lost its strongest branches. Shortly thereafter, Champion became pres­ident of a separatist ICU yase Natal based on a platform of provincial autonomy.

In mid-1928, William Ballinger arrived from Britain as adviser to the ICU. His efforts to reorder the organization sparked new dissension. Amidst recriminations about financial irregularities and irresponsibility, Kadalie finally withdrew in early 1929 and made an effort to form an independent ICU out of the dissidents, who by that time were united in their opposition to Ballinger. But neither he nor Ballinger was successful in recreating a strong viable African trade union organization. Neither could attract national support, and their local efforts were hindered by organizational weaknesses, continued factionalism, and (in the case of Kadalie) government harassment in the wake of an attempted general strike by African workers in East London early in 1930.

In Natal, and more particularly in Durban, however, Champion showed signs of mustering support for an action-oriented group ready to challenge government policy. The constitu­tion of the ICU yase Natal spelled out the wide scope of activities which the provincial trade union organization reserved for itself (see Document 49c-l). In 1929, Champion attempted to channel discontent among African workers against a provincial regulation that gave a monopoly on the brewing and sale of utshwala (African beer) to white municipal authorities. In disturbances between Africans and whites in June 1929, partially centered around the Durban headquarters of Cham­pion's organization, six Africans and two whites were killed. In Champion's discussions of the disturbances and their aftermath, resentment against the regulation of African affairs by white "experts" was sharply expressed in the context of a demand for African participation in deliberations about African policy and combined with an appeal to the Nationalist government to intervene against locally based English-speaking administrators of Native policy (see Document 49c-2).

Champion's latter appeal was acted upon by the Nationalist government -- but with disastrous results for the ICU yase Natal. In response to the June demonstrations (and in order to counter expected Communist-sponsored demonstrations scheduled for late 1929), Oswald Pirow, the new minister of justice in the Nationalist government, directed reinforced police units in mass raids upon Africans in Durban in November 1929. Then in 1930, Pirow piloted the Riotous Assemblies (Amendment) Act through the South African Parliament. Under this legislation, Champion became the first African to be banished from his place of regular political activity, being exiled from Durban for a three-year period from 1930 to 1933. In his absence, the ICU yase Natal dwindled into a small sect of the sort that Kadalie and Ballinger led in East London and Johannesburg, respectively. The ICU as a national nonwhite trade union primarily for Africans was dead.

The significance of the ICU for African politics, however, had been considerable. In its meteoric rise and fall can be seen the gropings of the new South African proletariat for an effective means to articulate their demands as workers and increasingly to link themselves with broader African efforts to participate politically in South Africa on an equal and nonracial basis. Africans had taken up the promises of advancement implied both in the capitalist ideology of the mine owners and industrialists and in the socialist ideology imported by white workers to South Africa. That white society rejected this interpretation of its ideologies is not surprising, yet its rejection did not prevent the reformulation of this variant of the African claim for equality in subsequent years, particularly in relation to the workers of the key mining industry. The activities of the ICU opened a new dimension of African political activity, dramatically forcing attention to the problems of a significant group of Africans who had become irrevocably enmeshed in the "integrated" economy of South Africa.

In a less spectacular fashion, the concerns of Africans as urban residents were also increasingly articulated, in part in response to the provisions made for limited African representation under the 1923 Natives (Urban Areas) Act. Although African leaders, and the ANC in particular, had not overlooked urban problems, they had not focused their attention upon them. In 1930, the voice of a long-time activist, Mrs. Charlotte Maxeke, who had achieved political prominence in 1919 as a leader of women demonstrators against proposals to extend the pass system to women, was heard in a plea for joint confer­ences of Africans and whites to analyze the situation of urban African women (see Document 51c).

African concern for the problems of urban areas found organizational expression in the Location Advisory Boards' Congress of South Africa, founded in 1929 by representatives from the advisory boards selected in African urban locations under the terms of the 1923 Natives (Urban Areas) Act. R.H. Godlo's presidential address in 1929 and the memorandum the Congress submitted to the minister of Native affairs in 1930 reflected pre-occupation with the