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White Power in South Africa: Cohesion without Consensus?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Dennis Austin
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THAT SOUTH AFRICA HAS WITHIN ITS STATE AND SOCIETY THE POTENTIAL for revolution is rarely doubted. It is a very strange and wicked country — anachronistic and atavistic, as if left over from the past to trouble the present. Africans are not worse treated today in South Africa than black men and women were in the United States 150 years ago. They are not bought and sold as property. Their survival, too, is assured unlike, say, the American Indians or the Aborigines of Australia at the turn of the century. They are more free, or less 'unfree', than the serfs in Russia before emancipation. But the extraordinary feature of South Africa is that it is still bound to a rigidly divided society which, if it is not slavery, is certainly close to serfdom. To behave in the twentieth century in a modern industrial state as if it were still the nineteenth or eighteenth century is very unusual, so unusual in fact that many people simply refuse to believe that it can be done: the whites deny that the parallel is just, the non-white populations refuse to believe it can last. It is this conflict of belief as well as the opposition of interests which seem to presage tragedy, for, if revolution comes, it will certainly be tragic not only for those who fear its consequences but for many who now want to hasten its arrival. Very often in such terrible situations, it seems to me that there is also an element of fatalism. It comes to be believed that what must be, will be, although whether that point has yet been reached in South Africa I do not know. It is something we have to consider.

Type
Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , 01 January 1978 , pp. 21 - 38
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1978

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References

1 Population 1974 (est.) (Millions)

2 The most thorough account of the fortunes of the political parties at elections since 1943 is Kenneth Heard, General Elections in South Africa 1943–1970, London, 1974. The most interesting interpretation of Afrikaner political history is Newell Stultz, Afrikaner Politics in South Africa, 1934–1948, California, 1974.

3 On the importance of the Afrikaner belief in Christian National Education, see Lavin, Deborah, ‘The Dilemma of Christian National Education in South Africa’, The World Today, Vol. 21, No. 10, 10 1965.Google Scholar

4 Strauss, H., ‘Underground African Politics’, Societies of Southern Africa in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Vol. 3, London, 1972, p. 132.Google Scholar

5 See Wolpe, Harold, ‘Class, Race and Occupational Structure’, in The Societies of Southern Africa in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Vol. 2, October 1970 – June 1971, No. 12, London, 1972.Google Scholar

6 Stanley Trapido, ‘South Africa in a Comparative Study of Industrialization’, ibid, p. 54.

7 Report of the Commission for the Socio-Economic Development of the Bantu Areas within the Union of South Africa, Pretoria, 1955. The Commission included the then British High Commission Territories of Basutoland, Swaziland and Bechuanaland as part of the ‘Bantu Areas’.

8 See below, p. 29

9 Max Gluckman, in Leo and Hilda Kuper, Pluralism in Africa, London, 1971, p. 376.

10 Leo Kuper, An African Bourgeoisie: Race, Class and Politics in South Africa, New Haven, 1965, p. 6.

11 Gluckman, p. 387.

12 Mr Wolpe has described how, in the garment industry, the proportions of the labour force were laid down in 1960 as 19% white, 37% Coloured, 44% African, additional labour being permitted only in the ratio of 25% white, 37.5% Coloured, 37.5% African: but ‘the 1969 statistics showed… that the actual composition of the labour force was 9% white, 32% Coloured and 60% African’. ‘Class, Race and the Occupational Structure’, The Societies of Southern Africa in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Vol. 2, October 1970 - June 1971, No. 12, London, 1972, p. 116.

13 ‘South Africa in a Comparative Study of Industrialization’, ibid, p. 50. The evidence does not, in my view, fully support the argument except where racial divisions are concerned. The expansion of the South African economy plus Afrikaner nationalism did see a transfer of political-economic power from the English-speaking community to the Afrikaner.

14 The United Party was formally dissolved in June 1977 splitting ‘Left’ and ‘Right’. Parliamentary seats were National Party 123, United Party 30, Progressive Reform Party 12, South Africa Party (formed as a right-wing break away from the UP) 6. The UP seemed likely to reform under a different name, but a pale shadow of its past. In the November 1977 elections the National Party won 80% of the seats, and the former United Party ceased to exist.

15 Leo Kuper and M. G. Smith, op. cit., p. 278. In 1976, for example, the budget increased pensions and disability grants. Whites were awarded an extra R. 8 a month, Coloureds and Asians an extra R. 4. 50, and Africans an extra R. 3. 50. The totals were (monthly) R. 72, R. 34 - R. 38. 50, and R. 15 - R. 18. 50; the ratios - Whites 100, Coloureds and Asians 53.5, African 25.5, Financial Mail, Johannesburg, 9 July 1976.

16 17 Ibid, p. 180.

17 Ibid, p. 272. ‘In 1961 the Nationalist government finally decided that it could not expect South African-born Indians to expatriate themselves to India… and granted them a status that could be described as “pariah citizenship”.’, p. 270.

18 Whites - 4.2 million Non-Whites - 20.7 million Africans - 17.7 million Non-Africans - 7.2 million

19 de Kiewiet, C. W., The Anatomy of South African Misery, London, 1956.Google Scholar

20 The present intention is to establish nine homelands. Bophutha Tswana is scheduled to become independent on 6 December 1977, as a divided state of six units islanded among a sea of white-dominated areas. Of its 2,000,000 prospective citizens, nearly two-thirds live and work outside its territory. Of the 800,000 who actually live in the new ‘state’ about a quarter are ethnically distinct from the Tswana majority.

21 Stultz, op. cit.

22 The rate of increase between 1960 and 1970 increased the numerical preponderance of the African population. See Brotz, Howard, Politics of South Africa, London, 1977, p. 93 93.Google Scholar

23 Some 43% of all African men in the Republic are estimated to be migrant workers, that is, some 1.5 million. If we add c. 260,000 African women to the total, the economy contains about 1.75 million African migrants. African Bureau Document Paper, March/April, 1977. Roughly half a million Africans are prosecuted annually for infringing the pass laws which still oblige every African aged 16 and over to carry a ‘reference book’.

24 Professor Stultz has traced the idea back to 1939 and forward to 1976. ‘The first explicit and extended consideration of the idea was probably provided by Dr R. F. Alfred Hoernle in lectures given at the University of Cape Town in 1939 and later reproduced in his book South African Native Policy and the Liberal Spirit’ (Newell Stultz). By 1974, Chief Gatsha Buthelezi was giving the Hoernle Memorial Lecture, proposing a federation of three constituent states - one Africandominant, one white-controlled, one multi-national.

25 There is of course a veiled racial antiracism in Washington and London vis-à-vis Pretoria. They cannot believe that white South Africa is as wicked as, say, black Uganda, either because South Africa is governed by Europeans, or because it is an ‘advanced industrial state’, or because (most uncomfortably) white South Africa brutally expresses beliefs still not fully under control in Britain and America: it holds up a dreadful mirror to the liberals’ own fears.

26 Population in millions (The Economist, 1 January 1977).

27 There is, to be sure, the difference which Vorster insists on vis à vis the United States: ‘The US black man is an American in every sense of the word, The only difference is the colour of his skin. He has lost his language, his culture and identity. The black man in South Africa, however, was never a slave. He was a proud man of his nation.’ A telling argument, but as The Guardian, 21 May 1977, (which printed part of Vorster’s speech) commented: ‘Mr Vorster’s attempt to preserve and dignify… every group in South Africa might meet with more sympathy if it did not invariably redound to the benefit of the whites” - and, one might add, the degradation of the blacks.