The South African snake pit
Repression and bloodshed are no strangers to Africa.. Even so, what is happening now in South Africa will make a black page in the history of that unhappy continent.
South Africa lives now under a cloud of fear, in resigned acceptance of the fact that widespread violence is inevitable in the near future. Both the Government and the Africans are ready. Both have done their share of violence. The record of the government is well enough known; now an African terrorist movement has emerged, and has already carried out its first “execution.”
Behind the political dispute there is the mass of everyday crime, the gang warfare, the murders (2,610 of them in 1961—twenty times many as in Britain, which has a population three times that of South Africa) and the intimidation. This is South Africa. It is a scene savage enough to belong to a distant, primitive society.
Yet in many ways the Republic is a modern country, with strongly developing industries and considerable natural wealth. It has mines which have turned out over £16 million worth of gold in one month. It has uranium—a by-product of the gold mines. It has silver, manganese, asbestos and diamonds.
Over the ten years 1952 to 1962, South Africa more than doubled the value of her exports, from £376.2 million to £778 million—in impressive increase, even after we have allowed for currency inflation. Vital production, such as steel, has bounded upwards.
With her economic power, and with a ruling class which is possibly the most sophisticated in Africa, South Africa could become the workshop of its continent. But the policy of its government is firmly denying the Republic its chance of becoming an advanced, developed capitalist nation.
This policy is apartheid—euphemistically translated as “separate development’’—which the South African government has followed single-mindedly since the Nationalists came to power in 1948. Because apartheid is essentially a repressive policy, it needs widespread coercive laws to enforce it.
The Pass Laws, for example, forbid an African to stay outside his allotted area for more than a certain time. The Laws are designed to keep the Africans out of the towns, and confine them to the rural areas. There are frequent round ups of Africans in the towns, to ensure that the Pass Laws are not flouted. One thousand Africans a day are being arrested in this way.
South Africa has established Bantustans, or areas reserved exclusively for coloured people. Nobody goes voluntarily to a Bantustan—100,000 native families have already been forcibly moved into them and the government plan to move a total of five million families in the same way. This has meant that one-third of the Africans now have no legal right to live anywhere.
It means that eventually South Africa will be split into two nations, with the white one having 87 per cent. of the land.
The Pass Laws are not the only repressive legislation at work in South Africa. The Africans—the vast majority of the population—have no legal right to strike, nor even to negotiate through trade unions. And in case opposition to the government threatens to become too vocal, there are Acts like the recently passed Security Bill, which allows the indefinite detention of an opponent of the government and which can, of course, be used against a European as easily as against an African.
As the screw has been tightened upon the African, his desire to hit back has been intensified. The Luthuli tactic of passive resistance seems likely to be forgotten, as the violence from one side inevitably provokes further violence from the other. The immediate outlook for South Africa is not happy.
Why does the South African government stand out against what seems the inevitable progress of its country into the ranks of the world’s capitalist powers? In South Africa there are eleven million Africans as against three million Europeans. If the country’s industry is to develop it needs a stable, contented working class to draw upon for its labour requirements. The bulk of this working class must come from the Africans.
But a stable working class is one which has the sort of political and legal rights which workers in this and other capitalist countries have. If the Africans had these rights, there would almost certainly be no compromise with the Europeans. The country would become, like Ghana, Nigeria, and so on, politically African.
To the industrialists of South Africa, this is not so fearsome a prospect. They are confident that they could do a deal with an African government and in any case they know that their future expansion depends upon the freeing of the native labour force.
It is a different matter for the landowners. Their future hangs upon them preventing the Africans asserting their numerical superiority. So they have done their best to prevent the Africans developing into a perceptible working class. They have tried to keep them out of the towns. And now, as they split the country in two, they are in fact trying to stop South Africa entering the twentieth century.
South Africa’s industrialists—her capitalists—aspire to become the continent’s dominant economic power. The policy of apartheid stands in their way, while the smaller, newer states do their best to catch up and take the lead. Unless the industrialists can match their economic power with political power, their ambitions will become an empty dream.
They have a hard struggle ahead. At the moment, as the country slips ever deeper into the pit of violence, of crime and xenophobia, it seems that the landowners may win.
And there is a massive irony in this situation, which should be remembered by everyone who, for one reason or another, takes up the stand against apartheid. The very people who are administering the policy—the dour, ruthless men who are obstinately turning South Africa into a mad dictatorship—are the heirs of the men who were once the darlings of the “progressives.”
When, at the turn of the century, British capitalism was reaching out for the new-found mineral wealth of South Africa, the Boer farmers were the world’s favourite underdogs. Many people thought that they were gallant defenders of liberty against a powerful bully. What was called the “morality” of what was called “ England’s last imperialist war ” was a hot political issue.
Well, the Boers made their point. Out of the early struggle of their nationalism has grown the dictatorship which oppresses South Africa today. There is nothing surprising in this. Most struggling nationalist movements pose as the champions of freedom; when they come to power, freedom is often one of the first things to be thrown out of the window.
True as this is of the Boers, it is equally so of the Africans who are now suffering under apartheid. There is no reason to assume that if they ever get power in South Africa they will be any better than some of the other African governments, who have allowed only as much political freedom as their particular brand of capitalism needs. There is no reason to assume, in fact, that the African nationalists would be any better than Verwoerd himself.
This is the irony and the bitterness of nationalism and indeed of property society. South Africa is but one corner of a world which, by its very fundamentals, can only live by denying human priorities.
IVAN