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Chiefs or Modern Bureaucrats? Managing Black Police in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 March 2012

Keith Shear
Keith Shear*
Affiliation:
African Studies, School of History and Cultures, University of Birmingham
*
[email protected]
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Extract

Early twentieth-century South Africa was a composite society—“part settler state and part African colony … includ[ing] diverse recently conquered African polities as well as a divided white population.” Mining industrialization and British imperialism, particularly after the discovery of substantial gold deposits and the founding of Johannesburg in 1886, put pressure on southern African peoples and states to function as an integrated labor market, and on their leaders to submit to an overarching political authority. These developmental and administrative rationalizing forces were given greater scope in the years following the South African War of 1899 to 1902, especially in the defeated Boer republics of the interior. Renamed the Transvaal and Orange River Colonies, these territories were initially under the direct rule of British High Commissioner Alfred Milner. They took the lead in a process of state-building that continued well beyond their political amalgamation with the coastal colonies of the Cape and Natal to form the Union of South Africa in 1910. It has been argued that this institutional reconstruction left South Africa with “a modern civil service, with controls and an information-gathering capacity sophisticated enough to … make the competence, helpfulness, and honesty of individual state officials relatively less crucial.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 54 , Issue 2 , April 2012 , pp. 251 - 274
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2012

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23 TA, Facsimile Volume 1172, Lord Milner, South African Papers, Milner to W. H. Milton, Administrator, Salisbury, Rhodesia, 3 Dec. 1901.

24 Ashforth, Politics of Official Discourse, 22–68.

25 Weber, Selections in Translation, 351.

26 TA, Facsimile Volume 1172, Lord Milner, South African Papers, Milner to Milton, 3 Dec. 1901. See also Chanock, Britain, Rhodesia and South Africa, 28.

27 Gilmartin, D., “The Strange Career of the Rule of Law in Colonial Punjab,” Pakistan Vision 10, 2 (Dec. 2009): 1–21Google Scholar, here 2–3; Bayly, Empire and Information, 142–43, 212, 316–18, 365. I am grateful to Kim Wagner for his advice on these points.

28 TA, Archives of the Military Secretary to the High Commissioner (hereafter HMS), SAC 97/2, Military Secretary to Inspector General, South African Constabulary (hereafter SAC), 14 Aug. 1902; TA, Facsimile Volume 1169, Lord Milner, South African Papers, Milner to James Green, Dean of Pietermaritzburg, 12 Dec. 1901.

29 Historical Papers Division, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, A951, Lagden Papers: box 1, Aa2, Hercules Robinson to Lagden, 21 Apr. 1896; box 5, E, Lagden to Clarke, 18 Dec. 1898. Bechuanaland—like Basutoland a “native state” in the eyes of administrators—was the colonial-era name for Botswana.

30 Transvaal Colony, Transvaal Administration Reports for 1903 (Pretoria: Government Printing and Stationery Office, 1904)Google Scholar, Part II, “Native Affairs,” A.4.

31 Grundlingh, A., “‘Protectors and Friends of the People’? The South African Constabulary in the Transvaal and Orange River Colony, 1900–08,” in Anderson, D. M. and Killingray, D., eds., Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and Control, 1830–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 168–82.Google Scholar

32 Steele, S. B., Forty Years in Canada: Reminiscences of the Great North-West with some Account of His Service in South Africa (Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild, Stewart, 1915), 382.Google Scholar Steele was eager to involve the South African Constabulary as deeply as possible in every aspect of rural administration; his memoir bristles with comments on the obstructiveness and inefficiency of officials of other departments. Steele's imposing stature is mentioned in Trew, H. F., African Man Hunts (London and Glasgow: Blackie & Son, 1938), 17.Google Scholar See also Morrison, W. R., “Imposing the British Way: The Canadian Mounted Police and the Klondike Gold Rush,” in Anderson, D. M. and Killingray, D., eds., Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and Control, 1830–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 92–104Google Scholar; here 96–97, 103, note 21.

33 TA, HMS, SAC 97/2: Inspector General to Military Secretary [Lambton], 4 Aug. 1902; R. Baden Powell to Lambton, 5 Aug. 1902. In Natal, magistrates' control of “Native Police” ended acrimoniously in 1894 with the formation of the Natal Police: Colony of Natal, Departmental Reports, 1894–95 (Pietermaritzburg: Wm. Watson, 1896)Google Scholar, Part VI, “Defence,” “Annual Report of the Chief Commissioner of Police for the Year Ending June 30, 1895,” F-F5, here F-F2.

34 TA, HMS, SAC 97/2, Lagden to Baden Powell, 2 Aug. 1902.

35 TA, HMS, SAC 97/2: Military Secretary to Inspector General, 14 Aug. 1902; Inspector General to Military Secretary, 17 Aug. 1902; Military Secretary to Inspector General, 26 Aug. 1902. In time the South African Constabulary came to employ roughly sixteen hundred Africans, half on police duty and the remainder as laborers: Public Record Office, London, Colonial Office 549/4, no. 12, Report of the South African Constabulary Commission, 1905, with Minutes of the Proceedings, Minutes of Evidence, and Annexures, evidence of R. S. Curtis, paragraphs 895–97.

36 Report of the SAC Commission, evidence of J. S. Nicholson, par. 192.

37 See correspondence in TA, Archives of the Secretary for Native Affairs (hereafter SNA), Native Affairs (hereafter NA) 2168/02 and NA 1490/07, especially the latter, SNA to Secretary for the Law Department, 12 Apr. 1907.

38 TA, SNA, NA 1490/07, Wheelwright to SNA, 25 Mar. 1907. For the greater tax burden that the post-war Transvaal regime imposed on Africans compared to its predecessor, and the resistance this generated, see Krikler, J., Revolution from Above, Rebellion from Below: The Agrarian Transvaal at the Turn of the Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 137–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 TA, SNA, NA 1490/07, SNA to Secretary for the Law Department, 12 Apr. 1907.

40 In addition to the South African Constabulary and the NAD police, a separate Transvaal Town Police had existed for the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg and satellite gold mining towns) and the Pretoria municipal areas.

41 TA, Archives of the Prime Minister (PM) 23/7/1908, H. Rose Innes et al. to PM, 26 June 1907; TA, PM 23/8/1908, H. Rose Innes to PM, 17 Oct. 1907; TA, Archives of the Law Department, AG 4523/07, Chairman, District Administration Enquiry Committee, confidential circular to Resident Magistrates, 22 Nov. 1907; TA, PM 23/9/1908, H. Rose Innes et al. to PM, 4 Jan. 1908; TA, Archives of the Government Native Labour Bureau, 272/14/4, Acting SNA to Director of Native Labour, Johannesburg, 13 Nov. 1923, enclosing copies of H. M. Taberer, Acting SNA, Circular no. 26 of 1908, 6 Aug. 1908, and H. M. Taberer, Acting SNA, General Minute no. 69/1908, 24 Sept. 1908, covering copy of R. Burns-Begg, Commissioner, Transvaal Police, undated Special Circular.

42 Dubow, S., “Holding ‘A Just Balance Between White and Black’: The Native Affairs Department in South Africa c. 1920–33,” Journal of Southern African Studies 12, 2 (1986): 217–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 222–23.

43 Central Archives, Pretoria (hereafter CA), NA 5231/1911/F607, Stanford to Under SNA, 9 Dec. 1910. Transkeian Magistrates both before and after Union were NAD rather than Department of Justice officials. For numerical breakdown of Transkeian Territories NAD “police” and “detectives” by race, see ibid., SNA to Under Secretary for Defence, 29 Aug. 1912. For a detailed description of the work of Transkeian NAD policemen, see ibid., Chief Magistrate, Umtata, to SNA, 21 July 1913.

44 Weber, Selections in Translation, 351.

45 CA, NA 5231/1911/F607, Dower to Minister of Native Affairs, 10 July 1912.

46 CA, Archives of the South African Police (hereafter SAP), UP 28/1, Commissioner, SAP, to Secretary for Justice, 1 Apr. 1913.

47 CA, NA 5231/1911/F607, H.R.M. Bourne, Under Secretary for Defence, to SNA, 7 Aug. 1912.

48 CA, NA 5231/1911/F607, Bourne to Dower, 4 Sept. 1912 (original emphasis).

49 CA, Archives of the Secretary for Justice (hereafter JUS) 2/1355/14, W. E. Stanford, Special Commissioner, to SNA, 8 Dec. 1914, copy enclosed in Private Secretary, Department of Native Affairs, to Private Secretary to the Honourable N. J. de Wet, 10 Dec. 1914. Although Stanford's report specifically discussed the changes in policing, his criticism included Department of Agriculture officials administering the Stock Diseases Act. For analysis of the November 1914 resistance, see Beinart, W. and Bundy, C., Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa: Politics and Popular Movements in the Transkei and Eastern Cape, 1890–1930 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987), 191–221.Google Scholar

50 TA, Archives of the Government Native Labour Bureau 1697/14/D76; CA, NA, 14/276.

51 CA, SAP, confidential file 6/8/10, pt. 2, T. E. Mavrogordato, Deputy Commissioner, Criminal Investigation Department (CID), Transvaal Police, to Secretary, Transvaal Police, Pretoria, 3 July 1911, enclosing draft CID regulations for the Union, par. 24, which lists categories of “special crime”; CA, Archives of the Police Inquiry Commission, 1936–1937 (K80), vol. 18, 10 Dec. 1936, evidence of Detective Head Constable Kietzman, p. 1,244.

52 TA, Archives of the Transvaal Police, confidential file 14/181, Mavrogordato to Commissioner of Police (Compol), 30 July 1908.

53 CA, SAP 15/48/17, Brink to Secretary, Transvaal Police, 24 June 1912.

54 CA, JUS 3/821/16, Compol to Secretary for Justice, 31 Oct. 1916. Hoffmann led the team assembled to investigate and break an African organization, Jan Note's Ninevites, which caused the state and the mining industry considerable difficulties in the early 1910s: van Onselen, C., Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, Vol. 2, New Nineveh (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1982), 189–92.Google Scholar

55 CA, Archives of the Commission to Enquire into Assaults on Women, 1912–1913 (K373), no. 168, 25 Oct. 1912, evidence of T. E. Mavrogordato, pp. 36–37. Hoffmann recruited and controlled Africans in the detective but not the uniformed service: ibid., no. 227, 19 Nov. 1912, evidence of A. J. Hoffmann, p. 41. Nonetheless, many uniformed African constables began their association with the police as “temporary native detectives” or Criminal Investigation Department informers: CA, SAP 31/68/25, pt. 1, W. H. Quirk, Divisional C. I. Officer, Eastern (Cape) Division, to Deputy Commissioner, CID, Pretoria, 24 Jan. 1922.

56 CA, JUS 1/240/30/1, Acting Compol to Secretary for Justice, 3 Nov. 1927.

57 The Nongqai 16, 3 (Mar. 1925): 143Google Scholar.

58 CA, K80, vol. 34, 1 Feb. 1937, evidence of I. P. de Villiers, p. 2,422.

59 CA, SAP 15/128/27: Commissioner for Inland Revenue to Compol, 21 Oct. 1921, enclosing copy of Resident Magistrate, Bizana, to Commissioner for Inland Revenue, Pretoria, 12 Oct. 1921; District Commandant, SAP, Bizana, to Deputy Commissioner, SAP, Umtata, 16 Nov. 1921, copy enclosed in Deputy Commissioner, Umtata, to Secretary, SAP, Pretoria, 21 Nov. 1921.

60 CA, JUS 1/240/30/1, H. S. Webb, Honorary Secretary, Komati Agricultural and Industrial Society, Hectorspruit, to Minister of Justice, Cape Town, 18 Mar. 1925.

61 CA, JUS 1/240/30/1, Acting Compol to Secretary for Justice, 3 Nov. 1927. As reported by the Acting Commissioner, the Natal Deputy Commissioner tried to downplay this statistic by claiming that at many of these stations white policemen were “using with progressive effect a good few words of Zulu.” By his own admission, however, the rank and file made “no serious and sustained attempt to master the Zulu language.”

62 CA, SAP 20/10/45, J.M.L. Fulford, Acting Deputy Commissioner, Natal Division, to Compol, 17 May 1929.

63 CA, K80, vol. 2, 20 Nov. 1936, evidence of E. W. Woon, pp. 217–19.

64 CA, SAP 15/25/29, W.H.C. Taylor, Acting Deputy Commissioner, Transkei Division, to Compol, 8 Oct. 1929.

65 CA, K80, vol. 3, 11 Dec. 1936, evidence of E. W. Wilkins, pp. 1,375–76, 1,380.

66 CA, K80, vol. 5: 4 Mar. 1937, evidence of W.H.C. Taylor, p. 4,039; 8 Mar. 1937, evidence of D. P. Fourie, p. 4,152.

67 Union of South Africa, Interim and Final Reports of the Commission of Inquiry to Inquire into Certain Matters Concerning the South African Police and the South African Railways and Harbours Police (Pretoria: Government Printer, 1937)Google Scholar [hereafter Police Inquiry Commission Report, 1937], par. 63(a). In 1911, Mavrogordato, charged with organizing a Union-wide Criminal Investigation Department, praised the Natal system of “allowing 1/- per diem for efficiency in languages,” and recommended adoption of this practice everywhere. However, the SAP discontinued it, a position endorsed in 1924 by Tielman Roos, the Nationalist Minister of Justice, although African language skills could earn white police additional points in promotion examinations or exempt new recruits from mandatory bilingualism in the two official languages (English and Afrikaans). Only in the mid-1930s did Pretoria approve an allowance of sixpence a day for those who could speak an African language, rising to a shilling if they could also read and write it. CA, SAP, confidential file 6/8/10, Mavrogordato to Secretary, Transvaal Police, 22 July 1911; CA, JUS 1/240/30/1, Compol to Secretary for Justice, 7 Aug. 1930; CA, K80, vol. 2, 7 Dec. 1936, written submission of J. Spence, read into evidence, p. 983.

68 Author's interview with R. de Villiers, Cape Town, 18 Nov. 1994. Pofadder is a sparsely populated town in the arid Northern Cape near the Namibian border, often spoken of metaphorically as “the middle of nowhere.”

69 CA, NA 82/332, SNA to Compol, 27 Oct. 1936.

70 Dubow, “Holding.”

71 CA, SAP 39/1/25, T. C. Whelehan, for Compol, to District Commandants, Native Police Assigned to Native Affairs Department, 31 Oct. 1929; CA, SAP 9/30/33, G. Mears, for SNA, to Compol, 24 June 1936.

72 CA, SAP 39/1/25, Deputy Commissioner, Transvaal Division, to Secretary, SAP, 29 Dec. 1923; ibid., Whelehan to District Commandants, Native Police Assigned to Native Affairs Department, 31 Oct. 1929; CA, SAP 15/33/29, Deputy Commissioner, Transvaal Division, to Compol, 11 Feb. 1931 (the quotation from here). See also the extensive documentation in CA, SAP 9/30/33. The ICU for a time surpassed the African National Congress (ANC) in membership and militancy.

73 CA, SAP 9/30/33, Chief Magistrate, Umtata, to District Commandant, SAP, Umtata, 25 Nov. 1929, enclosed in Acting Deputy Commissioner, Umtata, to Compol, 2 Dec. 1929.

74 TA, Archives of the Government Native Labour Bureau 272/14/4, SNA, Union Circular No. 18/1924, 14 Mar. 1924, enclosing “Rules for Control of Native Police Specially Assigned to the Department of Native Affairs in South African Police Areas.”

75 Compare the suggestive discussion, “Bureaucracy in a Particularistic Setting,” in Fallers, L. A., Bantu Bureaucracy: A Century of Political Evolution among the Basoga of Uganda (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 238–47.Google Scholar

76 Beinart and Bundy, Hidden Struggles, 209, 217.

77 Criminal Procedure and Evidence Act, No. 31 of 1917, sec. 390.

78 “Regulations Prescribing the Duties, Powers and Privileges of Chiefs and Headmen,” Government Notice No. 2,252 of 1928, Government Gazette Extraordinary, 21 Dec. 1928.

79 On the 1927 Act and the NAD's status, see Dubow, “Holding,” 230–37.

80 CA, NA 14/284, E. W. Lowe, Chief Native Commissioner, Northern Areas, to SNA, 19 Jan. 1937.

81 United Transkeian Territories General Council, Proceedings and Reports of Select Committees at the Session of 1936 (King William's Town: King Printing Company, 1936), 211Google Scholar.

82 CA, K80, vol. 103, 19 May 1937, evidence of I. P. de Villiers, p. 8,891.

83 Ibid., vol. 54, 4 Mar. 1937, evidence of H. W. Kelly, pp. 4,047–48.

84 Author's interview with R.S.N. Gxumisa, Mount Frere, 3 Aug. 1994. Non-European Unity Movement leader I. B. Tabata later excoriated the “powerful combination of the policeman-chief and headman and the policeman-intellectual” in a polemic against the South African form of indirect rule that, not unlike the perspectives of Mamdani and Young, wholly identified these intermediaries' interests and actions with those of the government. See his The Boycott as a Weapon of Struggle (Durban: African Peoples' Democratic Union of Southern Africa/NEUM, 1952), 17.Google Scholar I thank an anonymous reviewer for this reference.

85 CA, K80: vol. 5, 23 Nov. 1936, evidence of A. C. Lowe, pp. 245–48; vol. 17, 9 Dec. 1936, evidence of Head Constable P. A. Brittan, pp. 1,196, 1,203–4.

86 CA, NA 87/332, pt. I(d), Deputy Commissioner, Transvaal Division, to E. G. Halse, 6 Oct. 1937. The legislation is usefully summarized in Police Inquiry Commission Report, 1937, par. 288, “Powers of Police in Relation to Natives.”

87 CA, K373, No. 162, 22 Oct. 1912, evidence of T. G. Truter, pp. 1–2, 18–19; Union of South Africa, Report of the Commission of Enquiry to Enquire into the Organisation of the South African Police Force Established under Act No. 14 of 1912 (Cape Town: Government Printer, 1926), par. 242Google Scholar.

88 CA, K80, vol. 17, 9 Dec. 1936, evidence of G. Ballenden, p. 1156.

89 Union of South Africa, Report of the Commission Appointed to Enquire into Assaults on Women (Cape Town: Government Printer, 1913), par. 51Google Scholar; Jeeves, A. H., Migrant Labour in South Africa's Mining Economy: The Struggle for the Gold Mines' Labour Supply, 1890–1920 (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1985), 181Google Scholar; Moodie, T. D. (with Ndatshe, V.), Going for Gold: Men, Mines, and Migration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 79–80, 169–70.Google Scholar

90 TA, SNA, NA 2935/03, Lagden to Windham, 20 Nov. 1903.

91 Barlow Rand Archives, Sandton, Crown Mines Repository, box 368, Robinson G. M. Co. Ltd, File no. 3400, Compound, 1905–1924: S. M. Pritchard, Pass Commissioner, Department of Native Affairs, Johannesburg, Circular P.C.33/06 to Mine Inspectors, 24 Mar. 1906; McKenzie to W. W. Mein, 29 May 1906. See also CA, K373, no. 254, 27 Nov. 1912, evidence of H. Britten, p. W53.

92 CA, K373: no. 162, 23 Oct. 1912, evidence of T. G. Truter, pp. 1–2; no. 168, 25 Oct. 1912, evidence of T. E. Mavrogordato, p. 27. Blackburn's, Douglas novel, Leaven: A Black and White Story (London: Alston Rivers, 1908)Google Scholar, spryly satirizes these relationships. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this reference.

93 CA, K373, no. 162, 22 Oct. 1912, evidence of T. G. Truter, p. 11.

94 Breckenridge, K., “‘We Must Speak for Ourselves’: The Rise and Fall of a Public Sphere on the South African Gold Mines, 1920 to 1931,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40, 1 (1998): 71–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 104–6.

95 Chamber of Mines Archives, Johannesburg (CMA), file “Uniforms of Mine Police Boys, 1914,” C. L. Davison, for Director of Native Labour, to Secretary, Transvaal Chamber of Mines, 17 Oct. 1914.

96 CA, K373, no. 251, 26 Nov. 1912, evidence of H. P. Slater, pp. 34–35. On Bush's reputation when in the Criminal Investigation Department, see van Onselen, C., “Who Killed Meyer Hasenfus? Organized Crime, Policing and Informing on the Witwatersrand, 1902–8,” History Workshop Journal 67 (Spring 2009): 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 13.

97 CA, K373, no. 264, 2 Dec. 1912, evidence of E.L.R. Kelsey, pp. 49, 55.

98 CMA, Police Matters, 1940, A. E. Trigger, Manager, Mines Police Department, New Consolidated Gold Fields, Limited, to Joint Secretary, Transvaal Chamber of Mines, 7 Nov. 1940.

99 TA, Archives of the Supreme Court, Witwatersrand Local Division (WLD) 22/1945, Alfred Ernest Trigger v. Hyman Meyer Basner, Record on Appeal [hereafter Trigger v. Basner], Exhibit “G,” Witwatersrand Mine Native Wages Commission, Evidence of the Gold Producers' Committee of the Transvaal Chamber of Mines, Statement No. 15, “The Objects and Functions of the Mine Police Organisations,” 4 Aug. 1943.

100 CA, SAP 2/21/45, J.N.O. Spence, Manager, Mines Police Department, Northern African Mining, to Compol, 5 Feb. 1945. I thank an anonymous reviewer who pointed out that these developments are part of a much longer history in South Africa of private policing and military forces drawing on the expertise of former state employees; this is not merely a post-apartheid phenomenon.

101 Trigger v. Basner, Exhibit “J,” Letter of Demand, H. Rissik, for Van Hulsteyn, Feltham & Ford, to Senator H. M. Basner, 8 Oct. 1943.

102 Ibid., Exhibit “I,” Mines' Police Department, “Consolidated Circular Instructions.”

103 Ibid., Exhibit “O,” undated “Memorandum by Colonel A. E. Trigger: Native Compound Administration”; CMA, Police Matters, 1940, Trigger to Joint Secretary, Transvaal Chamber of Mines, 7 Nov. 1940.