Protests and Police Statistics in South Africa: Some Commentary posted by Richard Seymour

	Peaceful	Unrest	Total
2004/05	7,382	622	8,004
2005/06	9,809	954	10,763
2006/07	8,703	743	9,446
2007/08	6,431	705	7,136
2008/09	6,125	718	6,843
2009/10	7,897	1,008	8,905
2010/11	11,681	973	12,654
2011/12[3]	9,942	1,091	11,033

	2011 population estimate[10]	Peaceful incidents	Peaceful incidents per thousand	Unrest incidents	Unrest incidents per thousand
Gauteng	11,328,203	9209	0.81	1097	0.10
Limpopo	5,554,657	4066	0.73	222	0.04
North West	3,253,390	6980	2.15	695	0.21
Mpumalanga	3,657,181	1944	0.53	358	0.10
KwaZulu-Natal	10,819,130	8555	0.79	546	0.05
Eastern Cape	6,829,958	3578	0.52	322	0.05
Free State	2,759,644	2606	0.94	413	0.15
Western Cape	5,287,863	3148	0.60	599	0.11
Northern Cape	1,096,731	1990	1.81	243	0.22

Labels: police, protest, revolt, south africa, working class

Of baboons and racists posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: london review of books, racism, reactionaries, reactionary subjectivity, south africa, white supremacy

The Making of a 'White Working Class' posted by Richard Seymour

It is far from obvious why class should be colour-coded. We can see how 'race' has been contiguous with strata within classes, so that the lowest wages and the least skilled occupations are dispensed to non-white members of the working class. We can also see how class is often construed as a kind of ethnicity, and how ethnic designations often overlap with economic positions. But the question of why there should ever be an identity such as a 'white working class' is clearly a social psychological one. One way of looking at this is to identify an extreme example to look for salient traits, and I think I have such in the 1922 Rand Rising. The Rand, or Witwatersrand, is of course the core of the gold and mineral mining industry of South Africa, and has been since the late nineteenth century. As such, it was the centre of capital accumulation at the time of the Rising, with the overwhelming (distorting) emphasis on mining capital.

Historically, the modern doctrine of ‘race’ emerged in two ways. The first was in the course of military confrontation, as in the combat between European farmers and American Indians. Originally considered the colour of the ‘juyce of Mulberries’ or ‘Olive coloured of a sad French green’, they were understood as having been ‘naturally white’, but darkened by the climate. Only when relations between them and Europeans were characterized increasingly by military combat were the racial codes introduced. Similarly, the battles of white Afrikan frontiersmen with 'natives' co-produce a colonial-racial ideology, which would be referenced during the 1922 rising. The second way in which 'race' emerged was precisely in the global ordering of the labour-system, and the replacement of white indentured labour with African slaves. Race had always ordered the colonial labour system in South Africa, whether when Africans worked as slaves until 1834, or during the period of 'colour bar' legislation in the Cape and elsewhere. The "colour bar" that emerged after the Mineral Revolution turned what had been a stratification according to skill into a stratification by race. But what was the cause of such policies. According to one well-known aqccount (HJ & RE Simons, Class and Colour in SA, 1850-1950), "White Labourism" was a "primary cause of policies that incite racial hostility", which implies that the political ideology of white workers intruded into the running of the labour system, redistributing the structure of wages and privileges to the benefit of the 'white working class'. It is certainly true, as I mentioned in a previous post, that white workers (mainly British workers trained in the Cornish mines, as part of what Jonathan Hyslop calls an 'imperial working class') pressed for the imposition of forms of colour bar legislation some time before employers were ubiquitously in favour of such means. However, as I also said, the demand became effective when employers and state administrators decided to back it. There is a rationale for this. As Harold Wolpe points out ('The White Working Class', Economy and Society, 1976), the particular demand for a skilled, supervisorial bloc of labour directing unskilled labour, resulted from the particular conditions of early mining capitalism, where the risks were high and the scope of the labour force too large for an individual capitalist manager-owner to handle (nowadays, of course, we have byzantine bureaucracies known as 'human resources' and 'personnel', as well as an apparatus of junior managers, to deal with this). British immigrant workers may have accepted colonial ideology. Used to being at or near the bottom of a vertiginous class pyramid in Britain, they were now part of a 'master race'. And arguably they had a shared grounding in the imperial experience that was quite different from their metropolitan cohorts. However, the drive for a colour bar was still at the stage of the 1890s an expression of an interested defined more by status and the desire to preserve it than anything else. Keeping the main labour competition out of skilled occupations preserved a skill monopoly. Further, just as a refinement to the point, the 'white working class' was not yet defined by whiteness - it didn't include, for example, proletarianised Afrikaners, who only became a majority of miners in the Rand by 1918, after a period of the state promoting Afrikaner employment in the mines. And 'white labour' had no serious political platform then of the kind that would gradually acquire and which was expressed in a way in the Labour-Nationalist Pact administration of 1924. (David Yudelman, in The Emergence of Modern South Africa convincingly disputes the idea that the Pact was a genuine political victory for white workers, but that is not quite my point: the point is that they were recognised as a special and particular constituency by that time). So, had employers not turned to segregationist measures in the mid-1890s, and had state personnel under the British not encouraged this in various ways, it is difficult to imagine a 'white working class' identity of the coherence that was later displayed emerging.

Afrikaners had to compete with African labour for access to employment during the early 1900s for a number of reasons. The social historian Timothy Keegan describes (in Konczacki et al, Studies in the Economic History of South Africa, Volume II) how an older Boer way of life had been squeezed by British capitalist penetration and land speculation. Previously they might have relied upon only guns and ammo for hunting, and wagons and oxen for travel and trade. But by the end of the Anglo-Boer War, they were political and militarily defeated, as well as economically transformed. The diminishing scope of 'free land' produced class stratification within the community, with some becoming reasonably profitable landowners and others becoming 'bywoners' (tenant farmers). They were, however, unable to compete with experienced African sharecroppers, whose advantages included their emphasis on communal life which helped them weather the vicissitudes of crop cycles. Keegan rather unflatteringly describes it in these words: "Mostly, they ended up in the industrial centres as unskilled proletariat, where the white supremacist state was eventually to save them from the consequences of their economic ineffectuality". This is not quite right. As Charles van Onselen shows (in Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand: Volume II, 1982), the initial tendency - quite successful for a while - was to join the local petit-bourgeoisie, involving themselves in two key economic areas: cab driving, and brick-making. Oh, laugh if you want: white bigots in the cabbie or brickie industry? I never in all my days! But of course the mining industry demanded a proper national transport system, which Kruger duly provided toward the end of the 1890s, just as the rinderpest was destroying the cattle that would pull the cabs, and the artisanal brick-makers lost out to mass production with Victorian technology. So, yes, Afrikaners were eventually forced into proletarianisation en masse. And, as more of them fled into the urban centres, dislocated by war and disease, they became more and more of a political problem.

It is sometimes claimed that Afrikaners remained unemployed through choice, by their refusal to accept conditions and jobs that their lack of 'economic effectuality' would have assigned them to - the jobs being done by the 'Kaffir', the 'native', African labour. Were they already so suicidally 'white' that they would rather starve than lower themselves to the status of the African working class? Robert Davies (in 'Mining Capital, The State and Unskilled White Workers in South Africa, 1901-1913', Journal of Southern African Studies, 1976) suggests otherwise. The truth is that it simply cost more to hire Afrikaner labour because it cost more to support the reproduction of their labour. As they were not subject to the migrant labour system and the various system of colour bars, they were not housed in vast cheap compounds, and fed with bulk bought meat. Their families, moreover, were not supported outside the capitalist sphere of production. Petit-bourgeois Afrikaner nationalist and labour politicians were sure that white workers would make up for it by superior productivity, unable to see a social logic to what they took to be a perversion of the capitalist class. And it is by the mid-1900s that you start to hear for the first time calls for a 'White Labour' policy. Previously, Afrikaner social struggles and complaints had been met with indifference, repression and occasional palliatives. By 1906, however, there was a recession in the Rand economy and huge numbers of displaced, unemployed Afrikaners - with not a few trained soldiers among them, who had recently come close to defeating the mighty British Empire. The protest had to be met in some way, particularly as it was noticed that British mine-workers during their 1907 strike against productivity speed-ups had gained the solidarity of Afrikaner labourers, whom they addressed as "fellow South Africans".

David Roediger points out that the 'labour republicanism' of American workers in the 19th Century involved its adherents measuring their status both against the dream of an egalitarian republic of small producers and the nightmare of chattel slavery. (David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, Verso, 2007) Similarly, white workers in early twentieth century South Africa could compare their lot with that of the indentured migrant 'Kaffir'. From 1910 onward, the mining industry was suffering a crisis of profitability which it sought to recover by boosting productivity, and increasing the number of machines that technicians supervised. The number of white employees per 1,000 tons hoisted declined continually between 1911 and 1915. Besides which, the employers were accelerating the fragmentation of skilled jobs into semi-skilled jobs that black workers could hold (still subordinate, of course). This was among the issues that drove the 1913 strike on the Rand which resulted in a humiliating defeat for the Smuts government. Lionel Phillips, the mine industrialist and Unionist politician concluded that it was nonetheless better to back down on this occasion than risk a general strike which might stimulate a revolt among the far larger mass of African labour. The state and mining capital adopted two strategies to meet the problem. The first was to devise a military strategy to defeat the strikers next time (and it seems there may have been deliberate efforts to provoke the next strike that took place in January 1914, and which was defeated by the recently constituted Union Defense Force). The second was to co-opt labour - but this meant white labour. For example, when African workers held a strike shortly after the white workers strike in 1913, they were simply brutally crushed - and don't appear to have gained any solidarity from white workers. There was no sense of accomodating their demands. So, among other measures, the government opened daily lines of communication with trade unions (which, I should point out, were segregated and had been since they were formed against stiff resistance from employers), and moved to impose state regulation on the industry. White labour, previously making demands from without the state, were now seen as fit subjects for incorporation into it - not, of course, as co-equals with capital or any such thing, but certainly as superior to their African co-workers.

Trade union leaders were given to expressing their demands in terms of preserving the 'colour bar' and holding back the 'black peril' - often as a disingenuous means of galvanising wider support for mundane economic strikes, but in fact the colour bar issue did come up repeatedly. In the post-WWI period, there was actually a steady erosion of the colour bar, because employers figured it would be cheaper just to alleviate the restrictions. The Low Grade Mines Commission went so far at one point as to recommend the legal abolition of segregation. A 1920 strike by African workers had - though it was pummelled relentlessly - scared the hell out of the employers, and even forced a few concessions out of them. And at the same time, the co-optation of white workers was having less and less success, and employers were anxious amid plummeting gold prices to reduce workers' wages. So, it was that the stage was set for the 1922 Rising on the Rand. Jeremy Krikler points out in White Rising (Manchester University Press, 2005) that at the time of the strike there were 200,000 workers in the Rand mines, but approximately only 10% were white workers. Yet, and this is the crucial thing, they made no appeal for solidarity from African workers. Not only that, but when African workers crossed the picket line, they were not considered scabs in the way that white workers were. The slogan of the strike was, infamously, 'Workers of the World Unite for a White South Africa'. It is worth pointing out that this didn't have the effect of galvanising mass cross-class support from white communities, as was presumably intended. So, what was going on?

Let's review: by 1922, Afrikaaners had fully entered the labour force in the mines, so the sector protected by colour bar legislation and custom was fully, inclusively 'white'; the fate of 'white labour' had become an explicit concern of the political class; the insitutions of segregated labour had been thoroughly entrenched, and the 1913 Native Land Act allotted three quarters of the land to white people or corporations, with rules restricting the sale of land to Africans; and neither the 1913 nor 1920 African miners strikes had resulted in much solidarity from white workers. So, I think that by this point it is safe to say that a 'white working class' identity had developed with some coherence. It competed with communist identities, of course, particularly after the electrifying revolution in Russia, which had also stimulated a wave of African revolt in the cities and would later infuse the countryside rebellion by the ICU (as in "I See You"). But my argument here is that to the extent that it is possible to conceive of a coherent 'white working class' identity, here it was. Now look at the sequel.

As the strike wore on, and it became clear that the Smuts government was intransigent (Smuts was viciously hostile to labour all his political life), the strike was developing into an open, armed insurrection. The Smuts government was plotting the most vicious military force, including aerial bombardment, against the strikers. As this ominous prospect unfolded, a staggering series of racial massacres occurred, comparable with similar riots and pogroms in America and Russia in the same era. I noted that African miners were not considered 'scabs' and they weren't. They were rarely attacked, and unions insisted that they be kept out of the fight, which was between themselves and management. And when the massacres did start, it was not of African mine workers, or even of labourers as such. It was random killing of civilians - there are eyewitness reports of women and children fleeing squads of armed white workers, and being shot down in cold blood. 150 were wounded, and 44 killed, by one estimate. Jeremy Krikler (in 'The Inner Mechanics of a South African Racial Massacre', The Historical Journal, 1999) supplies the background. In the weeks prior to the massacres, an hysteria had built up in white communities about the 'black peril'. A palpable terror of an uprising took hold: 'the Kaffir will kill us all'. This fear had apparently been stimulated by one relatively isolated confrontation between African and white labourers at the New Primrose Mine, but the preparatory conditions were: a) the strikers knew that a terrible intensification of the class struggle was coming; and b) they had justified their strike by appealling to race pride, and race privilege, to keeping the African down, and perhaps their own guilt would have led them to expect an African uprising. But Krikler suggests another aspect of this: they took their appeal to be part of the white community seriously, and in their murders dramatised their desire to be in solidarity with the institutions of white supremacy that were about to massacre them: it was as if to re-direct the fire onto the 'real' menace, as opposed to the respectable white workers who only wanted their fair share.

The consequence was that they were cruelly defeated. They didn't take the insurrectionary class logic of their fight as seriously as they took the racial element. One consequence was that they lost approximately 17.7% of their wages - which, as Yudelman points out, was not really recovered by the Pact administration, whose policies of segregation, wage controls and state regulation were closer to the opposition than most like to admit. The workers were unable to see beyond a sectional interest because they racialised it. They were in part defeated by their commitment to the idea of a 'white working class', which in turn was produced in the furnace of colonialism, and the prevailing global system of white supremacy.

Labels: apartheid, racism, segregation, south africa, white working class

Migrant Labour and Xenophobia in South Africa posted by Richard Seymour

Xenophobia tears apart South Africa's working class:

Behind some of this tension is the recent expansion of the hated migrant labour system. We thought in 1994 that the ANC government would slowly but surely rid the economy of migrancy, and turn single-sex dormitory hostels into decent family homes. But hostels remain, and in Johannesburg, the ghastly buildings full of unemployed men were the source of many attacks.

Even if racially-defined geographical areas have disappeared from apartheid-era Swiss-cheese maps, the economic logic of drawing inexpensive labour from distant sites is even more extreme (China has also mastered the trick), now that it no longer is stigmatised by apartheid connotations.

Instead of hailing from KwaZulu or Venda or Bophuthatswana or Transkei, the most desperate migrant workers in SA's major cities are from Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia – countries partially deindustrialised by Johannesburg capital's expansion up-continent.

In a brutally frank admission of self-interest regarding these workers, First National Bank chief economist Cees Bruggemann intoned to Business Report last week: ``They keep the cost of labour down... Their income gets spent here because they do not send the money back to their countries.''

If many immigrants don't send back remittances (because their wages are wickedly low and the cost of living here has soared), that in turn reminds us of how apartheid drew cheap labour from Bantustans: for many years women were coerced into supplying unpaid services -- child-rearing, healthcare and eldercare for retirees -- so as to reproduce fit male workers for the mines, factories and plantations.

Apartheid-era superprofits for capital were the result. Now, with more porous borders and the deep economic crisis Zimbabweans face (in part because South African President Thabo Mbeki still nurtures the Mugabe dictatorship), South African corporate earnings are roaring. After falling due to overproduction and class struggle during the 1970s-80s, profit rates here rose from 1994-2001 to 9th highest in the world, according to a Bank of England study, while the wage share fell from 5% over the same period.

So notwithstanding South Africa's national unemployment rate of 40%, a xenophobia-generated bottleneck in the supply of migrant labour could become a problem for capital, such as occured at Primrose Gold Mine near Johannesburg. The mine's workforce consists nearly entirely of Mozambicans, who much of last week stayed away due to fear, thus shutting the shafts.

Labels: apartheid, colonialism, migrant workers, south africa

Sanctions Are Not an Alternative to War posted by Yoshie

A new BBC poll, released on 11 March 2008, shows the overall international support for sanctions or military strikes against Iran over its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment has declined from 2006 to 2008. That's good news. Bad news is that "a marked majority" of Americans and Israelis, two peoples whose public opinions matter the most to Washington, back "sanctions or military action against Iran."

Click on the chart for a larger view

What should leftists do?

Notice that (1) advocates of military strikes are minuscule in almost all nations, being sizable only in Israel (where they constitute the second largest bloc); and (2) even in the USA and Israel they are outnumbered by supporters of sanctions, by a large margin in the former.

Those who are still capable of rooting for bigger and badder military adventurism, having recognized (at least some of) its consequences in Iraq (if not those of imperialist interventions elsewhere), are true believers, unlikely to change their minds whatever leftists might say.

Those whose minds can be, and must be, changed are those who advocate "only diplomatic efforts" and those who want to "impose economic sanctions."

What's our message? The main point we need to get across is this: sanctions are not an alternative to war, but a prelude to it, so "diplomatic efforts" must be made against sanctions (without which clarification Washington can easily merge the pro-diplomacy and pro-sanctions blocs into a diplomacy for sanctions bloc).

We have seen how the use of economic warfare segues into the use of military force, in Iraq, most obviously, but also in Haiti, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, and elsewhere. Economic sanctions degrade their target nation's capacity for self defense, materially by diminishing the nation's ability to maintain, let alone upgrade, economic foundations and military apparatuses for it, and psychologically by aggravating existing contradictions and antagonisms and sowing new ones within the target nation. That creates an opportunity for the empire. And, when sanctions fail to change behavior of the target government to the satisfaction of the empire, that creates a pretext . . . which is easy to do, for the empire merely needs to keep changing its demand (as it already has on Iran, from answering "outstanding questions" that the International Atomic Energy Agency has to stopping uranium enrichment regardless of the fact that the IAEA says Iran has answered all of them and to providing "additional clarifications" about information allegedly contained in the dubious laptop procured by MEK, a notorious anti-Iranian terrorist cult) so the target government can never meet it.

The time to act is now. If Washington succeeds in putting together a coalition of governments -- in which "center-left" political parties play the key role -- that will enforce the sanctions that really "work," the game is over for the Iranian people.

No matter how much the White House tries to stoke pro-war sentiment (so far having influence only over Israelis), it doesn't have troops for a ground invasion for now, with its troops tied up in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere; and no matter how badly it wants to sanction Iran, it cannot do so directly, for, after decades of unilateral US sanctions, Iran's main trade partners are now Asians and Europeans. Therefore, Washington seeks to wield its (declining but still existing) dollar hegemony to economically and politically isolate Iran, especially from Asia and Europe, but also from the rest of the world. Tehran seeks to do the opposite.

This is an international struggle that best illustrates the complex reality of imperialism today, whose modus operandi is not inter-imperialist rivalry but incorporation of the power elites and ruling classes (overlapping categories) of more and more nations (which is what the media actually mean when they speak of the "international community"), so that there will eventually be "nothing outside the empire" (the empire's preferred future that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri mistook for its present). What the Iranians are up against, in other words, is not US imperialism plain and simple but a multinational empire under US hegemony, in which nations such as India, Brazil, and South Africa play increasing roles.

As it happens, however, Washington's demand regarding Iran is against the vital short-term interests of many nations in the world, since few will benefit from moves that cannot but aggravate the energy supply bottlenecks that are (combined with the declining dollar and surging energy demand among energy exporters as well as emerging industrial powers such as China and India) directly pushing up fuel prices, indirectly raising food prices, and helping create a specter of stagflation or even depression (since higher energy prices, in addition to its own current account deficit, constrain the US government's ability to resolve the crisis of credit), and against the long-term interests of just about all of them, especially in the global South. The struggle is not so much between Iran and the USA as in each nation, between its own objective interests (national development and international equality) and Washington's subjective preference (US hegemony).

Labels: brazil, imperialism, india, iran, Israel, south africa

Segregation, apartheid and the interpenetration of race and class. posted by Richard Seymour

It is a fairly commonplace myth in liberal historiography about South Africa that apartheid was a result of the triumph of illiberal Afrikaaners over the more liberal southern Cape which had the most British influence. It is actually a mytheme in British culture too, expressed in the joke: "Why is Holland so laid back? Because they sent all their mad bastards to South Africa." Another myth is that part of the reason for the ability of the racist-nationalist power bloc to impose entrenched segregation and then apartheid is the lack of pragmatism on the part of resistance groups such as the ICU, the Communist Party and the AAC, but this is to conflate pragmatism with liberalism and social compromise, itself a fairly commonplace gesture in bourgeois ideology. The marxist revisionists of the 1970s and their slightly pomo challengers in the 1980s provided the tools to take these myths apart, but they also furnished new insights into the ways in which 'race' operated as a regulatory principle and how it interacted with class. I am always intrigued by the way the fiction of race blends in with other social forms - class, ethnicity and gender, most obviously. One can easily think of examples: when I grew up a 'Protestant-looking' household was one that could pass for middle class; class itself is itself often understood as a kind of 'ethnicity'; the ideology of 'race' is usually coextensive with a conception of proper gender relations; and, as we will see later, the stratification within classes based on skills and trade has been susceptible to racial ordering. The racially ordered labour system in South Africa is as good a basis as any for investigating these interconnections

The roots of formal apartheid in South Africa, introduced in a series of measures by the Afrikaaner Nationalist government elected in 1948, were established in a sequence of legal, political, economic and ideological mutations that began with the transformation of the Southern African economy by the rise of mining capital. The principle of white supremacy had been established in various ways before – for example, in the Shepstonian policies of colonial Natal which “provided a ready-made rationalisation” for segregation (John Cell points out that the Natalian expert on the ‘Native Question’, Maurice Evans, also held that Natal and Basuto-land provided some of the fabric for possible segregation). And the constitutions of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic insisted on "no equality between coloured people and the white inhabitants". However, an increasingly stark, and rigid, racial order emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Through the imposition of racially organised restrictions in the labour system in the late 19th Century and the elaboration of legal doctrines pursuant to the subordination of the ‘Native’ after the Boer War, the ascendant capitalist elite sought to integrate African peasants into the labour supply on an affordable basis. The colour-coding of labour legitimised this subordination and helped to frustrate the development of class consciousness among the growing working class. Crucially, it met some of the demands of white workers on terms that could be accommodated by the ruling class.

However, this is not reducible to a ‘cheap labour’ thesis, which strikes me as a reductionist approach. ‘Race’ was not merely a pragmatic auxiliary to the capitalist management of the labour system, a cheap ‘divide and rule’ mechanism. The doctrine produced and imparted its own rationality, affecting the balance of risks for any would-be employer as well as for statesmen pursuing particular policies. The hyperstition of ‘race’ inflected debates about disease, population management and geography. And the relatively short-term goal of profitable mining was situated within broader debates about what constituted self-government (was it a political or cultural state?) and who was fit for it. It also interacted with religion (capitalist labour could be seen as an admirable system of reward and punishment for fallen man) and rationalism (in which segregated labour was eventually seen as the most efficient use of human resources for the improvement of all).

The historical context for this development is obviously one in which white supremacy was an organising principle throughout the colonial world, and in ex-colonies (for example, the post-bellum American Deep South provided much of the experiential input into the doctrine of segregation in the Republic of South Africa). This racial order infused and, to some extent, enabled the global emergence of nation-states and capitalist development. Initially, mining interests did not favour a rigid racial division of labour. Until 1885, the main mineral traded in Southern Africa was diamonds, and for much of the early trade, Griqua, Kora and Tlhaping producers were dominant. But white diggers had sought to impose their own monopoly on claim ownership with some success. For instance, while the British authorities in the Cape were reluctant to endorse overtly discriminatory legislation, diggers were required to have “a certificate of good character” from a justice of the peace or resident magistrate. The historian Paul Maylam notes that this did not prevent de facto white ownership and control of the diamond mining industry, and it may be that the policy was “racially laden” , particularly if one’s ‘race’ impeded a judgment of “good character”.

Even so, it is clear that whatever significant forms of segregation took place were still usually ad interim rather than premeditated and systematic. Indeed, the initiative often came from white workers who, beholden to a doctrine of "free white labour", sought to maintain and entrench their own relatively privileged status. What the mine-owners did want was to depress labour costs, and they did this by recruiting large numbers of African labourers for “unskilled jobs at minimal rates of pay”. This recruitment drive, especially as demand for labour outstripped supply in the 1890s, stimulated one of the many fears entertained by white workers – being ‘flooded’ or ‘swamped’ by cheap African labour.

The regnant ideology in the English-controlled Cape was assimilationist – the British would use what today is known as ‘soft power’ to win Africans “to civilization and Christianity”, as Sir George Grey put it. This assimilationist posture is often referred to in terms of a "Cape liberal tradition", but I question the utility of this phrase – it seems to re-describe rather than explain. After all, from 1875 there was a great deal of de facto segregation in the "liberal" Cape: for example on the railways, where one’s class of carriage was arranged both by class and race. Further, to de facto segregation was added de jure segregation with the National Reserve Location Act of 1902 which forced Bantu-speaking Africans into restricted locations. Parry makes the important point that the overall context of imperial rule had changed dramatically for Britain. If the British Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century had been expansionist, it had also attenuated its aggression with co-option and persuasion. The Indian Revolt of 1857 and the Jamaican Rebellion of 1865 both stimulated high-handed ‘revenge’ and an increasingly shrill assertion that the "lower races" could not be integrated and so would have to "disappear". Racial ideas meshed with Social Darwinist doctrines in official British propaganda. A new attitude to relations with the Africans was entailed, and it is one in which Victorian liberals were deeply implicated.

However, that background alone would not explain the scale, timing and nature of the transformation, much less the duration of employers’ resistance to entrenched segregation. It was the interaction of this transformation of imperial ideology with economic necessity that made was decisive. For example, the first of a series of cumulative transformations leading to entrenched segregation was arguably the 1894 Glen Grey Act, promulgated by Cecil Rhodes, which abolished communal land ownership, taxed those who could not prove they had worked in the last three months, and imposed male primogeniture laws for the inheritance of land, with the intended effect of driving more and more Africans who had hitherto subsisted on collectively owned land into the workforce. The legislation is named after the turbulent colonial territory that Rhodes was made Prime Minister of in 1890. The British had repeatedly considered similar measures to break up the old African social fabric and win the loyalty of some. It was initially conceived of as an adaptation to indigenous resistance, and this preceded the ‘mineral revolution’, never mind the arrival of Cecil Rhodes. However, the Glen Grey Commission that was put to work in 1892 was aware of the region’s hitherto protection from the pressures of the labour market, and hostile to it. And Rhodes was certainly anxious to satisfy his labour shortages. Whether or not the legislation was primarily intended to supply cheap labour, it did so, and provided a model for others who wanted to do so. At first blush, too, the legislation would not seem to advance segregation so much as integration, even if on a highly unequal basis, since its thrust was to drive African workers into capitalist relations alongside white workers. However, while it stimulated the production of a large African proletariat to work in the mines, it also established separate laws with respect to land and taxation. Segregation was not complete separation – it was separation for the purposes of domination and exploitation. The success of this policy inspired much of the legislation later recommended by the South African Native Affairs Commission (SANAC) and legislation enacted post-Union.

The significance of this legislation is not only the precedent it set. Part of its importance is what it says about the racial order that it was acting on. In South Africa, the arguably mundane business of specialisation of skills and class differentiation had been enchanted by its interaction with ‘race’. Just as certain forms of menial labour was seen as being beneath whites, skill was increasingly a cultural achievement rather than a vocational one, a gift of whiteness rather than of training and labour market fluctuations. Such conceits guided future legislation. In 1898, it was deemed that no ‘coloured’ person could hold an engine-drivers’ certificate of competency. And in 1903, the Volksraad in Transvaal adopted a regulation explicitly barring all but competent whites from underground blasting. When Chinese labourers were imported as a temporary stopgap to the labour supply problem in 1904, they were specifically excluded from over fifty separate skilled trades.

The production of the new racial order was a response to various actual and perceived problems for the rulers of South Africa. In the first place, the British were committed to the principle of white supremacy. The British high commissioner to South Africa, Viscount Milner, had explained to Prime Minister Asquith before the Boer War began that the principle of defending the ‘Native’ from oppression at the hands of both Dutch and English in South Africa was at odds with the principle of winning a loyal ally in the Dutch. Secondly, mining magnates had complained Paul Krueger’s administration and its failure to produce a steady supply of the needed labour especially for the Witwatersrand. The solution could not involve coercion of a too obvious kind, since the ‘Native Laws’ of the Boers that resembled slavery had been an issue utilised by the British government in its war propaganda. Yet, if the transformation that took place during and after the Boer War was animated in large part by the desire of central mining interests for cheap labour, the enabling discourses were legal, political, scientific, bureaucratic and cultural as well as economic. It required a vast effort at social engineering, the adoption of a bureaucratic rationality and a form of knowledge about the ‘Native’ that was neither as variegated nor ambiguous as that possessed by missionaries. As Adam Ashforth points out, the ‘Native’ had to be carefully constructed to be the subject of laws. SANAC, appointed by Viscount Milner following the Inter-Colonial Customs Conference of 1903 at which delegates from Britain’s regional colonies were in attendance, was to produce this kind of knowledge. The proper subject of ‘Native’ law was thus defined variously as ‘Kafir’, ‘Bantu’, ‘Native’ or ‘savage’, and this definition itself overlaid with assumptions of cultural inferiority and disability. In particular, he was understood to be bound by feudal political forms and antiquated modes of production that were unproductive. It was therefore necessary to impose restrictions on ‘Native’ land ownership, and undermine their existing social forms with the imposition of primogeniture. If only it were possible to “do away with free land,” one could “strike at the root of much that is most unsatisfactory in Native life”. Further, intermixture between the races should be avoided, and the ruling race’s supremacy should be carefully conserved. Capitalist social-property relations and white supremacy were cosubstantial with civilization.

Other discourses co-produced the new segregated order. The bubonic plague had arrived in South Africa in 1900, with the Boer War in procession. A surfeit of metaphors through which the ‘Native’ was understood as ‘disease-ridden’ came into widespread useage. The description was often used as if it were cognate with ‘lazy’, ‘uncivilized’ and ‘poor’. These metaphors contained a hidden cargo of economic resentment, but they also induced a set of policies designed to reduce the intermixture of African and white populations. In the case of Cape Town, the policy of moving Africans to Uitvlugt was considered a great success. It produced a temporary labour shortage, but this could be managed if the location was used as a source for labour to be funnelled to employers based on ‘pass laws’. Not only was the ‘Native’ considered diseased. He was also the source of viral discontent, especially where there was too great an effort to civilize him and where he had developed expectations beyond his means. He stirred up discontent and was unwilling to perform the manual labour that was required of him.

The SANAC recommendations provided the basis for future segregationist legislation. But as Legassick points out, a large part of the responsibility for disseminating these ideas is borne by those liberals who pressed for self-government for South Africa along the lines of Australia and Canada. Lionel Curtis, an advocate of integrating South Africa into a single Commonwealth state on the basis of self-government, was also one of the earliest explicit advocates of segregation. Other liberals, such as James Bryce, considered the ‘disaster’ of Reconstruction states in the American South an exemplary lesson in the danger of extending self-government to the ‘natives’. While the South Africa Act of 1909 granted self-government for whites, ‘Natives’ were the subject of authoritarian colonial relations. The Natives’ Land Act of 1913 restricted African land rights dramatically. Subsequently, some of the most violent labour disputes in the immediate aftermath of WWI - the South African government actually bombed the workers involved - involved the white working class wanting to avoid the status of 'Kafir'.

I leave the chronology there, although the resistance through the 1920s and 1930s, and what it says about combined an uneven development, is a compelling topic in itself. But let me put together some conclusions. It is obviously not possible to read off the transformation in South Africa’s racial order from economic developments. However, it is possible to say that among other things, the racial order was a particular ordering of labour, a colour-coding of labour’s status. It was increasingly seen as a natural means of managing both labour relations and the labour supply. The reshaping of the racial order did meet economic interests that were clearly expressed through policymaking institutions, and these emerged specifically from the transformation of the South African economy by the discovery of diamonds and gold in particular. It acted to consolidate Britain’s imperial tutelage of and economic position in the mineral-rich territory, by uniting its interests with those of whites in South Africa. Although South Africa’s capitalist class was not always the only or main agent pressing for entrenched segregation, only when that agency shifted from general resistance to aggressive support for such policies did the demand for them become effective. The spread of capitalist social-property relations and the imposition of white supremacy were co-extensive in a way that was possible chiefly because of the way in which capitalist relations were borne by the agency of empire. This is both because of the racist doctrines through which the British Empire came to understand its subjects, but also because it involved a capitalist society in an encounter with pre-capitalist societies which seemed self-evidently ‘backward’.

Labels: apartheid, capitalism, class and race, segregation, south africa