"Native Unrest." Paper by Professor D.D.T. Jabavu read before the Natal Missionary
Conference, July 1920.

The Bantu people throughout the Union of South Africa are in a state of positive discontent. One need
not be regarded as an alarmist for making such a statement. These people are, as it were, beginning
to wake up out of their age-long slumber and to stretch themselves out and speak through their press
and platform-demagogues in municipal areas like Johannesburg, Cape Town and Bloemfontein, their
voice waxing louder and louder; while even in the rural districts of Natal, Pietersburg, the Transkeian
reserves and among Free State squatters there is a growing feeling of distrust in the white man's
lordship, loss of faith in his protestations of just intentions, and loss of confidence in the old-time
kindly protection of the British Constitution. These feelings are largely not expressed, for the Native is
not given to confiding the secrets of his inmost feelings to Europeans, as in many cases he dare not;
but nevertheless the feelings are there, and are seething like molten volcanic lava in the breasts of
these inarticulate people.

It is only the bolder spirits who have ventured to give the world this secret by means of their scathing
criticism in their press (the Abantu-Batho of Johannesburg being the most outspoken organ), and
through their deputations to Great Britain.

And unless something is done at once to mitigate the causes of present dissatisfaction it will not be
very long before the whole white community must deal with a situation overwhelmingly beyond their
control.

1. The most immediate cause of unrest, although there are two or three more equally serious, and
others less serious though individually and collectively serving to create an atmosphere of suspicion,
the most immediate cause of unrest is the present economic pinch.

The Natives have been far harder hit by the prevailing high prices of the strictest necessities of life,
than has been the white man. This needs no proving for the daily press reports unusual prosperity and
extravagant spending of money by those who have made fortunes out of the high prices of
merchandise. Government estimates display greatly increased salaries and wages, white employees
and clerks everywhere are being paid in accordance with the times, either as a consequence of strikes,
threatened strikes, or other persuasion. This is all due to the fact that the European, being well
educated, knows how to speak out his sufferings, plead his case intelligently in the press, organise to
the point of perfection, enlist public opinion in his cause, and finally force the hands of Government.

What about the black man? Behind him he has no European public opinion, the thing that counts in
this country; for his power to influence it is negligible because three fourths of his fellowmen in the
Union being without the franchise he has no political pull on Government. Hence he is expected to be
satisfied with pre-war wages plus a rise of only five per cent where the cost of living has advanced by
from fifty up to a hundred percent. The prices of rice and sugar are fixed; but maize, the staple food
of millions of black people, is left to the mercy of speculators. A native labourer in East London
recently asked in the Dispatch how he could be expected to be honest on a pound a week when his
food, rent and light alone cost him far more than that a week. The fact is that in most cases today the
wages earned by a black man cannot buy his food and the barest needs of life. It should be
remembered too that the labourers in the Rand and elsewhere are there to raise money not only for
their personal needs but also for the support of their people at home. Fireside discussions of these
things are more rife than they have ever been before. The cure for this is the sympathetic revision of
the scales of wages by employers everywhere, the alternative being that the blacks will be obliged to
learn the methods of white trade-unionists and be gradually drawn into socialistic organisations to
compel the employers to pay at their dictation, just as the American Negro has done who to-day
receives 15s. a day for the same type of unskilled labour for which the Bantu get two shillings.

2. Successive droughts with failures of crops have rendered agriculture, on the lines of the ante-diluvian African cultivation, unprofitable, neglected and unpopular. Wonderful opportunities in this
connection are being lost by the Union as a whole, for the Natives are capable of being made
important factors in the development of production. On this point the Native Farmers' Association of
Middledrift, C.P., last year prepared a memorandum for the Native Affairs Department where,
however, it received no attention, a memorandum recommending the purchase of a farm by
Government in which Natives would be taught how to make a living out of an "isikonkwane" (six-acre
plot) by means of a one-horse or one-ox American plough on the lines of Southern State Negroes, to
be taught by an American Negro familiar with the system. Incidentally, dipping has produced much ill-feeling, for Natives do not understand its aim, and they ignorantly imagine it to be a white man's
dodge to kill off their cattle, as witness the Matatiele disturbances in 1914; and Natives value cattle
above all their other worldly possessions. This is therefore a sore point with them. The cure here lies
firstly in the educational training of headmen and chiefs who will encourage the pursuits of
agriculture; secondly in the multiplication of native farm demonstrators on the American style to teach
dry-farming methods; and thirdly in the establishment of agricultural schools for Natives; for it does
not escape the knowledge of the more intelligent Native, that while Government spends £100,000
yearly on agricultural schools for whites, plus overseas scholarships and experimental stations, it
provides next to nothing for black people who pay much of the taxes and stand in sorest need for this
training.

3. In politics the black people are in the predicament of the American colonists of the eighteenth
century who were taxed without representation. Whatever else has held good heretofore the time has
gone past when the Bantu of this Union could be treated as children, however uneven be their
development in the mass. They have vivid recollections of how their political rights were bargained
away in the pacification of Vereeniging (1902). They reckon that the Union Act of 1910 unites only the
white races and that as against the blacks; for the colour bar clause struck the death-knell of Native
confidence in what used to be called British fair play. "That cow of Great Britain has now gone dry,"
they said, and they must look to themselves for salvation. All their deputations were referred back to
the adjudication of the very government they appealed against and which had now by some dexterous
manoeuvre made itself its own final Court of Appeal! Then immediately after the achievement of Union
the Dutch Reformed Church in her capacity as a Christian Church piloted through parliament in the
teeth of glaring heterodoxy an act calculated to stamp herself indelibly as an anti-Native Church.
Behold the contradiction in terms!

Out of this seed-bed of racial antipathy and out of a sense of self-preservation there sprang up several
native and colored political organisations, chief of which was the "South African Native National
Congress," which to-day represents the strongest single volume of Native feeling in the Union,
although its methods and spokesmen are open to criticism by certain sections of natives. The next
thing, which has probably done more than any other political event to rouse and antagonise Native
feeling against whites, is the passing of the 1913 Native Land Act. The irony of it is that the Act was
engineered by a man long acknowledged as a great friend of natives, a friend who had to perform an
odious task under the political whip hand of a refractory Negrophobist section of the then government
Had Mr. Sauer lived to administer the Act he would in all probability have mitigated its hardships. As it
was, he died immediately, and its rigour in the Orange Free State was and still is Procrustean,
whatever may be said for it in other provinces; for in this province its effect was to dispossess and
reduce the native to a veritable bondman. A lurid picture of its torments is to be found in "Native Life
in South Africa" by S. Plaatje. Mr. Selby Msimang, the editor of a Bloemfontein Native paper, has
collected a number of verifiable cases of its recent victims; while an eloquent sketch of the political
position of Natives that time may be seen in the "Dream of Alnaschar" speech by Dr. Abdurahman,
coloured political leader of Cape Town. Other political events that are factors in the present state of
native unrest are

(i) The 1914 Native deputation to the Imperial Parliament appeal against the Lands Act. True, it
returned fruitless, but its pertinacious labours have gone a long way in educating the British public on
the political disabilities of the aborigines in this country.

(ii) The 1918 Urban Areas Bill which sought to best unprecedented legislative powers upon to councils,
including the power to create municipal beer canteens, the effect of which would have been to
demoralise town natives

(iii) The Native Administration Bill of 1917 whose impracticability caused it to break the hands of its
own forgers,

(iv) The 1918 Rand strike of Native Sanitary labourers with the summary and notorious treatment
they received at the hands of the local magistrate This incident has served to unite Native miners
because they have ever since been confirmed in the idea that Government favours white strikers but
represses the black As the late Mr. J.B. Moffat pointed out in report this idea is a delusion so far as the
law goes, nevertheless it remains in the Native mind and it is for the powers that be to eradicate it.

(v) If ever one race in the world did ever seek the most signal way to repress and humiliate another,
human invention could not have done it more effectually than the system of Pass Laws now obtaining
in the Northern provinces. For decades, from the days of the Dutch Republics, has this system
enslaved the Native, and the Union, instead of palliating its incidence, has not only continued it,
accentuated it, but has actually threatened to make it universal or "uniform," to put it in the cunning
language of the law-maker. This thing, as one man expressed it on the Reef, is simply perpetuated
martial law in peacetime.

The revulsion of Native feeling came to a head in a general Passive Resistance movement in
Bloemfontein, Kroonstad, the Witwatersrand, and elsewhere in 1918, when people mutually agreed to
throw away these passes and undergo voluntary imprisonment. Particularly painful and distressing
were these laws on women in the Free State and Natal.

(vi) Certain utterances by Europeans of eminence appearing from time to time in the press have
further alienated many Native minds. Such are the words of the Johannesburg magistrate to the
sanitary strikers. The famous Savoy speech by General Smuts in London in 1917 has remained an
enigma to Natives of this land.

Remarks like those made by a Mr. Van Hees lately in parliament on justice being only for whites and
not for blacks do a great deal of damage. Also, what does the expression "to make this a white man's
country" mean? Whoever is responsible for coining it must have meant the repression and destruction
of black races,

(vii) The 1920 Native Affairs Bill is moving Natives who have studied it for two reasons:

(a)  No attempt has been made to consult them generally before it was framed or discussed in
parliament, in view of the permanent character of the machinery it seeks to put up;

(b)  It has been feverishly rushed through parliament, just as was the Lands Act of 1913, which
itself is now proclaimed as the first installment of the Union Government policy. This feverish
hurry has of itself engendered suspicion.

Its powers are so elastic that everything is going to depend upon the personnel of the commissioners;
and it seems only fair that Natives should be consulted upon the choice of such plenipotentiaries. (See
also the "Grievances Memorial" pamphlet recently prepared by Messrs. Pelem and Soga, Queenstown,
C.P. -- perhaps the most comprehensive document, written by Natives of the Cape Province in
exposition of the Native Question from the political point of view; the present writer did not see it until
this paper had been completed.)

4. In the Department of Justice the Native has gradually lost faith.

i. In a country like South Africa, the jury system can never be a success inasmuch as it bolsters up the
distortion of justice nurtured by racial hatred, and cloaks it over with an appearance of legal rectitude.
Even a tyro can tell that a black man in a country such as this can hardly expect fair play from a white
jury, when he is pitted against a white man.

ii. The sentences of magistrates are a puzzle, and in their severity are distinctly anti-native. For the
crime of failing to dip, a magistrate in Kafraria recently fined a Native £20, a fine indubitably
disproportionate both to the offence, and the circumstances of the defendant, as compared with the
same magistrate's fine against a European who had committed a similar offence.

iii. Suspended sentences, as was remarked lately, in the House of Assembly by Mr. Langenhoven,
seem to have been invented for the sole benefit of the European and to bear little or no reference to
Natives,

iv. Natives do not fail to notice that Europeans get off lightly and quietly in crimes against Natives,
such as murder and rape, while Natives are unmistakably punished with the utmost rigour of the law
amidst press trumpeting and fanfare.

v. A high court Judge was not long ago reported in the Daily Dispatch as practising and upholding the
differentiation of punishment as between whites and blacks for similar offences. Under these
circumstances can one wonder that Natives should lose confidence in British Justice?

5. In social life the "School Native" cannot move anywhere without being made to know that his black
skin is his life-long damnation. He is practically not recognised as a citizen entitled to a place under
the sun, (particularly is this the case in Northern provinces). For instance in Pretoria I had three
simple Post Office transactions to negotiate. I entered the main post office to buy stamps, for I saw
several natives entering and being served. Peremptorily I was told in a discourteous and gruff manner,
that Natives could not buy stamps there but had to go some two hundred yards round the block of
buildings to the next street, where after much search, I eventually discovered a back-kitchen sort of
arrangement with Indian salesmen behind the counter, and got my stamps. To dispatch my parcel to
East London, I was told to go back to the General P.O. On getting there it was duly registered; and I
desired to purchase a postal order, but was then told to travel back to the Native P.O. for that! My
feelings are best left undescribed. Again when in Pretoria, I moved between friends at the East end of
the town and others near the Indian bazaar, a distance of about two or three miles across town,
covered directly by a 6d. Tram ride. Being a black man I was not allowed to use the trams, and was
compelled either to foot it daily all the way along the very tram route or pay half-a-crown each time
for a private cab.

Socially speaking, the black man in all public places is either "jim-crowed" or altogether ostracized. In
stores he has to wait until all whites are served; in public offices, he is bullied by officials, in markets
his stock and produce are by tacit agreement earmarked for low prices; his sugar cane is not accepted
at the Zululand mills; evening curfew bells restrict his freedom of movement among his friends and he
is cut and snarled at throughout his life.

6. In railways he is at the very start of his journey buffeted by booking clerks; in the goods sheds he
is unnecessarily anathematised in language that cannot bear repeating. His waiting rooms are made to
accommodate the rawest blanketed heathen; and the more decent Native has either to use them and
annex vermin or to do without shelter in biting wintry weather. His accommodation in trains is
frequently not equal to the money he pays in fares.

To travel 3rd class is often a test of physical endurance especially on some lines where there are more
people than the half coach or single coach can contain. Travelling first class from Alice to Durban
recently my first class compartment was in many cases only an old second redubbed "First" and, as it
was, I was recklessly dumped with second-class passengers -- the very privacy for which I had paid
being denied. Reserved bookings by Natives are frequently ignored. Several times have I had to claim
refunds from railway divisional superintendents when after fulfilling all legal requirements for
reserving a seat, I had to go third or not go at all. A number of Native teachers last winter wrote to
Umtata a fortnight ahead of time to have second-class seats reserved for them. When they came to
join the train not only was there no accommodation made for them but also no second-class tickets
would be issued to them and they had either to abandon travelling or go third class. When I joined the
same train at Butterworth I was offered pretty much the same treatment, but I stood my ground,
threatening to take legal proceedings against the delinquents when after half an hour's palaver an
extra coach was attached, to the relief and joy of many black passengers who included a native doctor
qualified in Edinburgh University. Such incidents often render railway travelling a perfect misery, as
the decent Native has constantly to engage in ugly altercations with supercilious officials in claiming
his privileges. Much heartburning has come from the system of replacing blacks by poor whites in
railway sheds and workshops. Refreshment stalls like those at Amabele, Komgha and Sihota are doing
incalculable harm, converting otherwise peaceful natives into bitter malcontents by their disgusting
contempt for native passengers in peculiarly native districts. In fact Transkeian Europeans by their
policy of pinpricks against natives are gradually accentuating racialism. For example rank prejudice is
shown in the very Council Hall at Umtata where Natives may use only a certain door to enter or leave
the hall in the Bunga sessions, this peculiar piece of snobbery even necessitating crossing the hall in
front of the magisterial benches -- all this in a Native reserve.

The cure here lies in the appointment of officials with tested sympathy towards Natives, in all
departments of Government.

The above six points constitute, in my view, the most important factors in the general ferment of
unrest, which need urgent solution. Now I wish to take eight other points which contribute not a little
to the charged atmosphere that has been electrified by racial distrust.

7. Native Housing: This question deserves the attention of all interested in the welfare of Natives. In
most municipalities these people live in squalid surroundings, shockingly overcrowded, these quarters
being favourable breeding beds for disease and epidemics. From their nature they are cesspools of
drunkenness and demoralisation. Conveniences are distant. Sometimes nonexistent; water is hard to
get; light is little; sanitation bad; while there are no common laundry buildings, no gardens, no
amusement halls or clubs. Some are located near sanitary dumps, e.g. Klipspruit and Springs in the
Rand. The favourite solution of the problem is to threaten to remove them further away from the
towns without promising improvement of conditions.

The cure for this is to be found in the suggestions made in the newly published Government
Commission Report on Housing. Many constructive proposals may be gained also from the speech of
Mr. P. D. Cluver, Mayor of Stellenbosch, given at Grahamstown in the 1920 Municipal Congress and'
from the "Municipal Control of Location," a paper by Dr. F. A. Saunders, F.R.C.S., of Grahamstown
(now published in pamphlet form) delivered before the same Congress.

8. Insecurity of land tenure: Like the owning of cattle the possession of land, to Natives, is a natural
ambition. But the possibility to buy land or hire it has been seriously circumscribed everywhere by the
Land Act of 1913. The worst case is that of the Orange Free State, which has rendered confusion for
the black man worse, confounded. Before 1913 the Native could hire land or plough on the half-share
system for a white master and could not purchase land under any conditions. Today he is not allowed
under this law to hire land or to contract to plough on half-shares. He is a literal serf, landless, unable
to hire land, and must only be a paid servant of the Dutchman.

Also in many urban locations there are no facilities for Natives to buy property, hence there is no
inducement for them to beautify, and improve with gardens even if they did feel so inclined, the
property that is rented from a town council and liable at any time to be moved away by a resolution of
the town council.

9. Missions. Missionaries will forever be remembered with gratitude by Natives as the people who
befriended them in times of trouble and danger at the risk of their own lives. They faced opprobrium
for the sake of black people, founded countless mission stations and bequeathed unto them the
present foundations of the entire educational structure that is today theirs. Today however there is a
danger that the type of earnest missionaries associated with the founders of prominent mission
stations and Native Training Institutions is being steadily replaced by ministers and other staff
members of a more and more secular spirit, who not only fail to understand the Native, much less to
love him, but adopt a socially distant attitude of master to servant. Success in Christian work without
Christian love is impossibility. Now many a missionary of today has no handshake for a black brother
and he feels distinctly embarrassed when he is among other whites and meets him in town.

His position is lordly, his discipline military. This doubtless form a small fraction of the whole but as in
all things in the world, the many are apt to be judged by the few erratic cases. On one occasion I was
invited by a Principal of a Native Training Institution to lecture to his students. He, as my host, took
no steps to let me even see the inside of his house -- perhaps with all my ten years of English
University life I was not good enough for him -- but boarded me among the boys in their dining hall
where he only came to say prayers and to depart. There was high feeling among the boys and Native
Teachers over this treatment of me but I asked them earnestly to say nothing about it for the day of
Nemesis was bound to come, since this attitude was characteristic of certain missionaries.

One mentions this incident as a warning to a Conference of this kind for this is where racial
sectarianism takes its source, for even in synods, presbyteries and conferences the spirit of racial
discrimination is so powerful that the black delegates have again and again to be sorted out from the
rest like goats from the sheep. Therefore do not rest on your laurels for Natives are watching you at
every step. Their docility does not spell stupidity.

10. Education. The present condition of Native education in the Union is one of chaos, for while at the
Cape and Natal there are signs of organisation to improve things, there is nothing of the sort being
done in Transvaal and the Free State. Natives here have a just grievance. They see Government
spending lavishly in putting up majestic educational edifices for European primary, secondary and
University education staffed by highly paid teachers, while they have to be satisfied with having their
children taught in mission rooms with walls dilapidated and furniture rough and scanty, teachers
receiving miserable pittances, so miserable that a raw and illiterate Zulu policeman in Durban to-day
gets better pay than the best paid Zulu school teacher. Provincial grants to Native education are very
tiny by comparison with those for white schools and infinitesimal as compared with the enormous
revenue derived from Native taxation. There is no pension for a Native teacher in Natal.

The inspectoral system there however is a model one and a contrast to that of the Cape, where its
terrorism over teacher and pupil is such that at a certain school near King William's Town the
inspector not long ago actually failed an entire school of seventy, passing only four. Such a system
needs overhauling. Cape Native teachers would be considerably benefited in their work by an
instructive and sympathetic, even humorous paper like the Natal Native Teachers' Journal published
by the Education Department instead of the lifeless dry-bones of the Cape Education Gazette.

The report of the Native Education Commission 1919 is a capital document worth studying as it
contains valuable proposals, which would change a great deal of what is antiquated, if acted upon.

Useful for Cape Teachers would be Winter School courses such as those yearly organised in Natal by
Dr. C. T. Loram, M.A., and author of The Education of the South African Native.

11. The Civil Service is greatly injuring Native sentiment with its policy of weeding out competent
Natives where they can serve their people better than can other people. Even in a Native reserve like
the Transkei Territories; Native youths with good qualifications are put on a special Native scale of
salaries lower than that of whites with inferior credentials. Why not give the Native a fair chance in his
own reserve? Why must he after due training have to work under an inferior "black scale" of
remuneration in a Native district? Where is our civil service? Why not give us a chance to rise
according to our ability and professional qualifications? People who wield no small influence among the
less enlightened are asking such questions.

12. Bolshevism and its nihilistic doctrines are enlisting many Natives up-country. Socialism of the
worst calibre is claiming our people. The main alarming features are (a) That Christianity must be
opposed and rooted out, for it is a white man's religion, which the white man himself does not act
upon. "Let us fabricate a religion of our own, an original, independent African religion suited to our
needs," say they. (b) "Let us unite to compass our freedom, opposing the white man tooth and nail as
he has taken our country and made us economic slaves." The cure here is that we should have in this
country counteracting forces. There should be more social workers such as Dr. D. Bridgman and Rev.
Ray Philips in Johannesburg who are organizing for Natives a sort of Y.M.C.A. scheme to provide
recreation, a large club with reading, writing and restaurant rooms plus playing fields, debating and
musical societies. This is needed in every location, rural and urban, to heighten the tone of Native life.

13. Agitators. There has sprung into life a large number of Natives from the better-educated classes
who have seized the opportunity of the general state of dissatisfaction to stir up the populace to
desperate acts. A sensational report of something of this kind appeared in the vernacular in a recent
issue of Imvo by a Rand correspondent. Personally I do not blame these men for the conditions that
have called them into being are positively heartrending and exasperating in all conscience. They
poignantly feel the sting of the everlasting stigma of having to carry passes in time of peace in the
land of their birth. They are landless, voteless, helots; pariahs, social outcasts in their fatherland with
no future in any path of life. Of all the blessings of this world they see that the white man has
everything, they nothing.

Like Catiline and his conspirators of Roman history, they believe that any general commotion,
subversion of government and revolution are likely, out of the consequent ruins and ashes, to produce
personal gain and general benefit to Natives and sure release out of the present state of bondage.
They harp upon the cryptic and dangerous phrase "to make this a white man's country," which as we
all know has become Parliamentary platitude. Armed with rallying catch phrases and a copious
Socialistic vocabulary they play as easily as on a piano upon the hearts of the illiterate mine labourers.
It must be remembered too that the Socialism they acquire is not the harmless commonsense system
advocated by Phillip Snowden and Ramsay Macdonald in their books; but the atheistic and
revolutionist doctrines of Count Henri Saint Simon of the early 19th century introduced into England
by Robert Blatchford, Charles Bradlaugh and J. M. Robertson in latter days, and now somehow
imported into South Africa.

The cure here lies in our being able to produce well educated Native leaders trained in a favourable
atmosphere, who will be endowed with commonsense, cool heads, with a sense of responsibility,
endurance and correct perspective in all things. The Native College at Fort Hare has this as one of its
aims and if sufficiently supported it ought to be a real help to the country and the government.

14. Finally the Native Labour Contingent that did work in France during the Great War has imported
into this country a new sense of racial unity and amity quite unknown heretofore among our Bantu
races. Common hardships in a common camp have brought them into close relation. They had a
glimpse at Europe and even from the closed compounds they got to discover that the white man
overseas still loves the black man as his own child, while on the contrary some of their white officers,
including two chaplains, forsooth, made themselves notorious by their harsh treatment and slanderous
repression of them when French people befriended them. All this was carefully noted and published
among their fellowmen in this country when they returned. The result is that there is among the
diversified Bantu tribes of this land a tendency towards complete mutual respect and love founded
upon the unhealthy basis of an anti-white sentiment. They thus provide plastic material for all sorts of
leaders and agitators who may use it for good or ill.

It is the duty then of every loyal citizen of the Union to be familiar with these causes of unrest and
discontent, with a view to each one taking his share in providing a solution that will save the country
from what will, if not arrested in time, surely come up sooner or later as an anarchist disruption of this
land.

Source:

Karis, T & Carter G. M. (1972). From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa, 1882-1964, Volume 1: Protest and Hope, 1882-1934. Stanford University: Hanover Press.

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