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‘Messing with Coloured People’1: The 1918 Police Strike in Cape Town, South Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Bill Nasson
Bill Nasson
Affiliation:
University of Cape Town
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Extract

This article seeks to provide an interpretation of a strike by white policemen in Cape Town in 1918. It argues that this defensive dispute over wages and living conditions can best be understood not simply through an examination of service dissatisfaction in the urban police community, but by incorporating this episode into the larger picture of South African police development in the early decades of the present century. In this broader context, several factors seem general and influential: local social resentments over the terms of national police organization after Union; police practices and attitudes, especially in relation to the increasing recruitment of Afrikaners; the position of white working-class policemen in the ‘civilized labour’ stratification of Cape Town society; and, most visibly, the inflationary effect of the First World War on the living standards of poorly paid, disaffected and unorganized constables. It is argued that these converging pressures generated a severe crisis of work discipline in 1917 and 1918 which tipped the Cape Town police into a classical natural justice strike. While ordinary policemen were split between petitioners and younger, less hesitant radicals, there was considerable popular support for strikers’ claims, both within the Cape police body and the local white labour movement. The government used a strategy of provisional concessions to settle the dispute. In conclusion, it is suggested that the strike experience helped to strengthen associational bonds between lower-ranking policemen and that a commitment by the state to improved service conditions provided an anxious constabulary with a more secure ‘civilized labour’ identity in the post-World War I period.

Type
Police in South Africa
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , July 1992 , pp. 301 - 319
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

2 De Burger, 3 Jan. 1918. Gray attempted to get the bail pledge withdrawn.

3 For punitive proceedings, see Cape Archives, CA I/CT 6/431, Magistrate's Records: Cape Criminal Cases, 1918; Cape Times, 10 Jan. 1918.

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59 Report of Select Committee on Police Strike, 40.

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65 House of Assembly Debates, Nov. 1915–June 1916, 375. After a short investigation by Truter, the Chief Commissioner advised the Minister to raise Lodging Allowances.

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76 As recalled by a relative: interview, Mr L. Wyngaard, Cape Town, June 1990.

77 Report of Select Committee on Police Strike, 94.

78 Ibid. 21.

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83 Ibid. 26.

84 First Report of Public Service Commission of Inquiry, 102. In 1918, out of a total Western Province police complement of 1,160, there were only 68 Coloured constables.

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100 Report of Select Committee on Police Strike, 50.

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102 I am grateful to David Anderson for this sharp observation; for some contrasting appreciation of the trickiness of decolonization and the police institution, see Clayton, Anthony and Killingray, David, Khaki and Blue: Military and Police in British Colonial Africa (Ohio University Monographs in International Studies, no. 51, 1989), 261–6.Google Scholar

103 Third Report of Public Service Commission of Inquiry, 125.