The mineral revolution and the making of South Africa’s racial order

From its inception in the mid-nineteenth century, the social landscape of mining was highly mobile and cosmopolitan and was shaped by the demands of its industry. The diamond fields of Kimberley and, later, the promise of gold on the Witwatersrand attracted hundreds of local and foreign fortune seekers. The capital-intensive nature of excavating the mineral deposits soon saw individual enterprisers displaced by larger companies. On the Rand, the first shaft was sunk in 1888, and by 1895 some 130 producing and working companies were in operation, controlled by some eight mining houses. These were dominated by European, mostly British and German, entrepreneurs and financiers who, from 1889, organised in Johannesburg as the Chamber of Mines. A ‘unifying and cost-conscious institution’,Footnote ⁸ the Chamber saw to the coordination of the various companies’ labour and wage strategies in order to maximise profits. It also represented the industry’s interests to the state. Under the watchful eye and shrewd direction of the mining magnates, South Africa was producing a quarter of the world’s gold supply by 1899.Footnote ⁹

The chemical processes and machinery required for deep-level gold mining demanded substantial capital investment and a vast amount of manpower possessing a certain skills base. Skilled tasks such as blasting and surveying were initially performed by professional miners, drawn primarily from the mining regions of Britain and Australia. These men were persuaded to brave the dangerous working conditions and high cost of living characterising early South African mining life in exchange for high wages.Footnote ¹⁰ But the bulk of mining operations, constituting the daily drudge of shovelling tons of broken ore into skips for transportation to the surface and hand-drilling holes for the placement of dynamite, was performed by an army of African migrants from across the Southern African region.Footnote ¹¹ Hailing from as close as the Basotho mountain kingdom to as far as present-day Tanzania, these men were typically recruited to the Rand on six- or nine-month contracts. By 1892, 25,000 were working the goldmines of the Witwatersrand, a figure that would soar to 200,000 by 1910.Footnote ¹²

Figure 1.2 White and black mineworkers of the Witwatersrand in the early 1900s.

Source: Patrick Pearson collection of photographs, Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

Gold mining on the Rand functioned within a set of structural economic conditions which would render labour a site of enduring struggle. High production costs, together with the price of gold being fixed internationally for extended periods of time, made minimising the cost of labour a central priority for mining companies.Footnote ¹³ The migrant labour system developed in direct response to the mines’ insatiable demand for large numbers of cheap workers. The system allowed mining companies to drive down labour costs by calculating workers’ wages around the level of subsistence required for a single individual, rather than a worker with a family of dependants. This allowed mining companies to effectively externalise the cost of social welfare and labour reproduction to communities in the reserves, facilitating the exploitation of not only the wage earners’ own labour, but also that of their rural kin.Footnote ¹⁴ In contrast to the mines of Katanga and the Copperbelt, moreover, most minework on the Rand did not require a skilled workforce. The unskilled nature of the work therefore rendered migrant labour more appealing than the expenses involved in sustaining settled labour communities.Footnote ¹⁵ Only in the 1970s would the makeup of mining’s black labour force shift away from foreign peasant labour towards local, proletarianised workers.Footnote ¹⁶

The economic imperative of a cheap and docile workforce, in combination with ideologies of racial superiority prevalent among local and foreign whites, served to justify not only this large-scale exploitation but also the authoritarian control of African workers. Black male migrants were housed in compounds for the duration of their contracts, their movements closely monitored by compound police. Scope for similar control of white workers was politically more limited and constrained by European miners’ experience of labour organisation against the interests of capital. By the first decade of the twentieth century, white miners with families earned 10 shillings per shift, while black migrants earned a maximum daily wage of 3 shillings.Footnote ¹⁷ Such divergent treatment served to reinforce existing social distance and racial prejudices. In time, mining’s racialised patterns of labour were copied throughout the evolving South African economy.Footnote ¹⁸

While the diamond fields were administered by the British-ruled Cape Colony, the rich goldfields of Witwatersrand lay within the jurisdiction of the overwhelmingly agricultural Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek or Transvaal, under Paul Kruger. The Transvaal’s defeat in the South African War (1899–1902) brought it under British rule, and legislative apparatuses were utilised to secure the mining industry’s interests, not least where the supply and control of African labour was concerned.Footnote ¹⁹ When the Transvaal was granted self-government in 1907 under an Afrikaner-led administration, mining concerns remained hugely influential. The new government under Boer Generals Botha and Smuts courted both mining magnates and white workers, presenting itself as representing the interests of both English-speaking and Afrikaner whites.Footnote ²⁰ Such conciliatory sentiments, in the context of shifting European realpolitik and waning British imperial power, underlay the merger of the Transvaal with the Cape, Natal and Orange River colonies to form the Union of South Africa in 1910. During constitutional negotiations, Smuts categorically rejected proposals for extending the Cape Colony’s qualified non-racial franchise throughout the new Union, since this would unsettle the racial order, with lower classes of whites losing the vote to a handful of educated and prosperous blacks. The establishment of the new dominion on the basis of exclusive white citizenship thus saw the racial stratification of the mining economy mirrored in political arrangements, as power was consolidated at the expense of non-Europeans, similar to arrangements in other assertive ‘white man’s countries’ such as Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.Footnote ²¹

Structural insecurity and white working-class subjectivities

Yet in the early twentieth century, a ‘white man’s state’ did not automatically translate into security for white workers. Studying white working-class demands and identities in early industrialising South Africa, Frederick Johnstone identified white workers’ condition of extreme ‘structural insecurity’. The exploitation and economic vulnerability suffered by African migrant workers, Johnstone argued, were partly ameliorated by the fact that they remained embedded in peasant economies and relationships. In the event of unemployment, they could return to the impoverished yet persevering rural communities of their places of origin, rather than face desolation in the cities.Footnote ²² In contrast, white workers were completely dependent on waged work. With no rural fallback, unemployment would relegate whites ‘to the margins of a capitalist society where charity was in short supply and social contempt abundant’.Footnote ²³ While Johnstone’s assessment underestimated the degree of exploitation suffered by Africans, he correctly identified the manner in which the presence of a large and exploitable black labour force aggravated white proletarian insecurity. With mining interests ‘dominat[ing] the state, the compound system, labour migrancy and pass laws ensured that black labour was both cheaper and more easily controlled than its white counterpart and that capital had every incentive to substitute it for white’.Footnote ²⁴

This perpetual threat of displacement would animate conflicts between white workers, capital, and the state in the first two decades of the century, as white workers pressed for a colour bar which would protect their jobs from black encroachment. In the Transvaal, underground blasting was reserved for white workers as early as 1893. In 1902, workers organised to form the Transvaal Miners’ Association (TMA) – later renamed the Mineworkers’ Union – to represent white miners’ demands for race-based protection to employers and the state. The union reflected the socialist labour politics of the British craft union tradition, and the first trade union leaders were overwhelmingly of British or Australian origin.Footnote ²⁵ In addition to organisational experience, these workers brought an ideology of ‘white labourism’ to the Rand, which meshed with local racist views. Jonathan Hyslop has argued that white labourism’s synthesis of hostility to capitalist exploitation, racist visions, and white workers’ ‘aspiration to incorporation into the dominant racial structure’ was an important source of working-class racism across the early twentieth-century British Empire and animated much of the radical labour militancy characterising this era.Footnote ²⁶

The Rand’s white workers instigated strikes in 1907, 1913, and 1914. Various factors brought on these industrial conflicts, including efforts by the Chamber of Mines to enforce tougher work regimes, mine managers’ refusal to recognise unions, and the terrifying death rate among underground workers caused by silicosis. Yet the threat of encroachment by cheaper African (or, briefly, Asian) labour shot through each upheaval.Footnote ²⁷ White workers articulated their demands in terms of racial identity, insisting that their interests as members of the ruling race be safeguarded. The 1907 strikers framed the upholding of their demands as a necessity for preserving ‘white civilisation’ in the Republic.Footnote ²⁸ The 1913 dispute saw white workers protest not only against the perceived despotism of mine management but also against state suppression, as the strike saw basic civil liberties curbed in an effort to quash the workers’ movement.Footnote ²⁹ Reflecting the bitter sense of rightlessness prevalent among organised labour, the South African Labour Party admonished the country to treat white workers ‘not with the intolerance by a “baas to a boy” but as a man and a citizen whose right to life, liberty and competence, is as important as his “master’s”’.Footnote ³⁰ During all three strikes, the government intervened in favour of employers, deploying the police and armed forces against the strikers.

At the same time, the state did adopt race-based labour policies. In 1911, the Mines and Works Act was promulgated to regulate the working of mines across the new Union, and effectively extended the Transvaal’s race-based restrictions across the country. After the First World War, the number of job categories officially reserved for whites were further extended.Footnote ³¹ The adoption of these policies amid conflict between white labour and capital demonstrate that the colour bar cannot be attributed to white workers alone. State mining engineers, convinced that only whites could maintain safety underground; the white-ruled state, wary of the political consequences of alienating white workers; and the Chamber of Mines, eager to impede cross-racial working-class action – these all played their part in entrenching a racial division of labour.Footnote ³²

Figure 1.3 Hand hammer stoping in Crown Deep mine in the 1900s.

Source: Barloworld Rand Mines Archive at Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

As long as foreign miners retained their monopoly on skills, the threat of displacement was held at bay. But as early as 1901, the ever declining grade of ore saw mine owners introduce a number of technological innovations in order to expand production. These served to erode the skills of professional miners. In a pattern that would contribute to the industrial conflict of this period, the fragmentation of skilled trades into component parts that were subsequently redistributed to lesser-skilled, often black workers saw whites rapidly become predominantly supervisors in the production process – although their skills remained important in directing operations and training the ever changing black migrant labour force over which they presided. In addition to the eroding effects of technological advances, white workers were keenly aware that skills could be learned – not only by the black workers alongside whom they worked, but also by untrained whites entering the industry. Economic depression and war around the turn of the century saw an influx of impoverished, mainly Afrikaans-speaking whites into the urban economy.Footnote ³³ The racial attitudes of this newly urbanised proletariat reflected the racialised master–servant relations of their agrarian colonial roots. Many found employment in mining, especially after the defeat of the 1907 strike saw mine owners rush to replace militant immigrant miners. As the erosion of skilled work rendered the distinctions between skilled, semi-skilled, and unskilled work ever more ambiguous, it was possible for new white miners to obtain blasting certificates – qualifications of competency authorising them to handle dynamite – after only nine months’ training. This allowed them to work as blasters alongside professional miners from abroad. Meanwhile, unskilled whites were also appointed to perform supervisory work, overseeing unskilled aspects of the production process performed by Africans. By 1913, these developments had effectively rendered the craft unionism of the TMA obsolete. As the ranks of immigrant and local miners increasingly merged, the TMA transitioned from an artisan union to an industrial union.Footnote ³⁴

White working-class anger and anxieties regarding displacement came to a head in the wake of the First World War. The ensuing events of 1922 warrant detailed discussion – not only as a backdrop to the historical formation of the white working class, but also in relation to my interpretation of the politics of labour in the 1970s, addressed in Chapters 2 and 3. To South African historians, the 1920s and 1970s may seem like entirely different eras meriting very different treatment. However, chronologically, they are not far apart – the upheaval of 1922 was within living memory in the 1970s. Today, it is commonplace for scholars to argue – as I do – that events of the 1970s such as the oil shock, the election of Reagan and Thatcher, and the ascendance of neoliberal economic ideology are crucial for understanding developments in the 2010s. These are as distant from us today as the events of 1922 were in the 1970s, but this does not make them any less pertinent.Footnote ³⁵ Indeed, as Chapter 6 will show, 1922 continues to figure prominently for the MWU in its contemporary guise as the Solidarity Movement.

With many foreign miners enlisting in the armed forces, Afrikaners formed the majority of white miners in underground jobs by 1918. In December 1921, in the context of soaring post-war inflation, the Chamber of Mines announced its intention to replace some 2,000 white miners in semi-skilled work with cheaper black labour. The broader white mining labour force feared that it was simply a matter of time before they faced the same fate. Already battling rising living costs and now facing unemployment, they reacted with outrage. In January 1922, a major strike broke out in the gold and coal mines, soon backed by a general strike throughout the Transvaal. The strike turned into an armed rebellion, as 22,000 workers – the majority of them Afrikaners – challenged the power of mine owners and the legitimacy of the South African state that supported them. This revolutionary challenge took two main forms: on the one hand, many workers saw the strike as a revolt against British imperialism and, organising in commandos reminiscent of Boer tactics during the South African War, sought the formation of an independent republic. On the other hand, communist revolutionaries saw the strike as an opportunity to overthrow the capitalist order. These various expressions reflected the enmeshment of race and class militancy in the white labour movement, most dramatically demonstrated by the most infamous symbol of the 1922 rising: the strikers’ banner reading ‘Workers of the world unite and fight for a white South Africa’.

Figure 1.4 Members of the Newlands strikers’ commando ride past supporters holding a banner with the Rand Revolt’s famous slogan.

Source: Star, Through the Red Revolt on the Rand (Johannesburg, 1922)/African News Agency (ANA)

The strike reached its revolutionary climax in early March in a ‘small-scale civil war’, which saw Prime Minister Smuts supplement state forces with aerial bombardment, artillery, machineguns, and tanks.Footnote ³⁶ Battles took place throughout central Johannesburg’s white working-class suburbs of Vrededorp, Braamfontein, and Fordsburg, as well as in the east of the city in Germiston, Boksburg, and Benoni. For a short period at the height of the insurrection, the strikers turned to attacking blacks, murdering over 40 Africans. By mid-March 1922, government forces prevailed and the eight-week strike was crushed. In what has been called the ‘biggest and bloodiest upheaval in South African labour history’,Footnote ³⁷ more than 200 people were killed, some 600 wounded, thousands arrested, and four hanged for treason.Footnote ³⁸

Figure 1.5 Mounted police sweep through central Johannesburg on 9 March 1922.

Source: Star, Through the Red Revolt on the Rand (Johannesburg, 1922)/African News Agency (ANA)

The militancy and murderousness of the strikers expressed anxieties inherent in the formation of white working-class identity in the context of politicised racial imaginaries and intense class struggle. White workers, Jeremy Krikler has argued, had come to define themselves in relation to ‘that which they were not: rightless, wageless, racially-despised, unfree blacks’. The Chamber’s efforts to tamper with the colour bar were viewed as an assault on white workers’ racial identity and privilege, which, if successful, would ‘ground [them] down into poverty’ and see them become ‘white kaffir[s]’.Footnote ³⁹ According to Krikler, the ‘intense class consciousness’ and ‘militant anti-capitalism’ of white workers meant that the ‘White South Africa’ for which they were fighting was ‘a particular organisation of state, society and economy’ in which white workers would not be at the mercy of the industrial despotism of employers, but would be recognised as citizens of equal importance to other classes in the white community. For this reason, white working-class animosity and insurrectionary violence during the strike were overwhelmingly directed against white employers and the white state – those seen as infringing their rights, and towards whom workers directed their claims for full citizenship.Footnote ⁴⁰ At the same time, the conflict of 1922 occurred as the trade union organisation of African workers was gaining momentum and African political leadership was becoming increasingly vocal.Footnote ⁴¹ Just two years earlier, 70,000 African mineworkers had staged a strike that, like earlier white working-class action, was crushed by state forces. The racial pogrom of March 1922 formed part of broader incidents of violence during which white workers targeted African trade union organisation on the Witwatersrand.Footnote ⁴² Indeed, during neither the 1920 African mineworkers’ strike nor the 1922 Rand Revolt did white or black workers display labour solidarity across the colour line – they understood themselves to be fighting separate battles.

White workers’ incorporation into the racial state

The aftermath of the strike saw a significant shift in state policy towards white labour. Eager to avoid future industrial and political action of this scale and intensity, Smuts’ South African Party (SAP) government enacted legislation that secured a privileged bargaining position for white workers. The Industrial Conciliation Act of 1924 established, for the first time, a system for industrial relations across the economy through which employers’ organisations and trade unions could negotiate the peaceful resolution of industrial conflicts. By expressly excluding Africans from the legal definition of ‘employee’, and hence from joining legally registered and recognised unions, the Act barred Africans from these structures, thereby giving unionised workers – whites, but also other minority race groups – the power to negotiate via industrial councils for the racial allocation of the most favoured jobs and working conditions.Footnote ⁴³

But this was too little too late to redeem the Smuts government. In the 1924 general election, white workers used their political power to elect a National Party–Labour Party government perceived as sympathetic to their interests. The Nationalists represented the largely unskilled and recently urbanised Afrikaner population, as well as small property owners and small-scale Afrikaner farmers. Labour, in turn, represented much of the urban English-speaking proletariat, including white artisans and working-class immigrants. All were vulnerable to efforts to undermine the colour bar and looked to the state for protection.Footnote ⁴⁴ Together, the two parties formed an electoral pact and campaigned on the platform of ‘civilised labour’. This held that more systematic policies of racial discrimination were needed to ensure that ‘civilised’ persons, as distinguished from ‘barbarous and underdeveloped’ Africans, received employment and wages allowing them to maintain the appropriate ‘civilised’ lifestyle.Footnote ⁴⁵ The very ambiguity of these labels allowed the Pact parties to appeal to Cape-based coloured voters.Footnote ⁴⁶ Yet National Party leader General J. B. M. Hertzog’s declaration during the election campaign that the position of white workers represented ‘the most important issue for the survival and welfare of the country’ reflected the coalition’s true colours.Footnote ⁴⁷

Once in power, the Pact enacted legislation to privilege and protect whites in the workplace. While it was eager to partner with mining to grow the economy and stimulate job creation, it would no longer allow the Chamber of Mines to unilaterally decide to reduce the white labour force. Hence, it implemented the 1926 Mines and Works Amendment Act to safeguard white mineworkers from displacement. Moreover, it set out to uplift impoverished, unskilled, and newly urbanised whites by bringing them into employment and paying them ‘civilised’ wages. Often, jobs were created by replacing unskilled and semi-skilled African workers in state sectors.Footnote ⁴⁸ Grace Davie observed that this represented the reversal of ‘the tenet of the so-called civilising mission in Africa. Instead of anticipating gradual improvements in African society through education and religious conversion, the state declared its intention to elevate white living standards while announcing that Africans and Indians would indefinitely remain at a lower stratum.’Footnote ⁴⁹ The most significant drive to transform poor whites into ‘civilised labour’ occurred in the railways, where between 1924 and 1933 unskilled whites rose from 9.5 per cent to 39.3 per cent of the labour force, while unskilled black labour was reduced from 75 per cent to 49 per cent. By the early 1950s, the railways would become the largest employer of white labour, with some 100,000 unskilled and semi-skilled whites on its books. The Pact sought to create further employment opportunities for whites by expanding the industrial sector. It founded the parastatal steel company Iscor – which started production at its first site in Pretoria West in 1933 with an exclusively white complement – and introduced import tariffs to protect local industries. Meanwhile, in the private sector, companies were offered benefits and incentives, such as preference for state contracts, for favouring white over black labour.Footnote ⁵⁰

Figure 1.6 Jackhammer stoping in East Rand Proprietary Mines, 1938.

Source: Barloworld Rand Mines Archive at Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

Scholars disagree over who truly benefited from the reconfiguration of relations between the state, capital, and labour under the Pact government. Merle Lipton views the legislative measures implemented from 1924 as a victory for white workers in the wake of their 1922 defeat, drawing a more or less straight line from workers’ support for the Pact and its ‘civilised labour’ policy, through growing enthusiasm for Afrikaner nationalism in subsequent decades, to the NP’s election on its apartheid platform in 1948.Footnote ⁵¹ But not all white workers benefited from these policies. By prioritising the employment of unskilled and semi-skilled whites, skilled workers paid part of the price of financing full white employment: under the Pact, their wages fell in real terms.Footnote ⁵² Eddie Webster has demonstrated the uneven impact of the Pact’s policies in the steel and metal industry. He shows how ‘civilised labour’ policies posed a threat to the position of skilled workers, as it encouraged the dilution of craftsmen’s trades and the redistribution of labour to cheaper, lesser-skilled workers. Webster also argues that the Department of Labour, set up after 1924 to promote these policies, was in fact a ‘propagandist for scientific management’ that sought to wrestle control of the labour process from skilled workers by transferring the mental labour of planning and organisation to management.Footnote ⁵³ The 1924 Industrial Conciliation Act – introduced by Smuts but implemented under Hertzog – similarly represented a double-edged sword. It bolstered the position of white labour vis-à-vis other racial groups, but placed controls on organised labour. Strike action was limited, so that workers effectively sacrificed their most powerful weapon.Footnote ⁵⁴ Moreover, the Act’s conciliatory mechanisms facilitated the institutionalisation of working-class struggles and the bureaucratisation of trade unions, co-opting white labour into state-controlled structures of power. This, according to Phil Bonner and Eddie Webster, saw white unions ‘degenerate’ into ‘little more than benefit societies’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Viewing the state as an instrument of capital, Davies argues that these measures represented efforts to divide the working class along racial lines and thereby diffuse any challenge to the existing conditions of capital accumulation. The state’s accommodation of white workers during this period, says Davies, brought about ‘the almost complete political capitulation’ of the white labour movement.Footnote ⁵⁶ Yudelman quotes the dramatic decline in white strike action after 1922 as evidence of this co-optation.Footnote ⁵⁷ Coloured workers sat uneasily within the new labour dispensation. They did not enjoy the privilege bestowed on whites, but they were not excluded from the industrial relations machinery in the same manner as Africans, and therefore they enjoyed a measure of protection. In many instances, white, coloured, and Indian workers organised in the same trade unions.Footnote ⁵⁸ The very ambiguity of ‘civilised labour’ suggested their inclusion in the benefits of the policy, but in practice it functioned to favour whites.Footnote ⁵⁹ While employers were certainly frustrated by the new legislation forcing them to employ and negotiate with expensive white labour, African workers ultimately paid the price for white workers’ security – their wages were suppressed even further in an effort to reduce labour costs, and they were restricted to performing unskilled labour.Footnote ⁶⁰

The election and policies of the Pact government inaugurated two important shifts in South Africa’s political economy during this period. First, it demonstrated the political power of white workers and marked the overt politicisation of the colour bar.Footnote ⁶¹ By favouring poor whites for employment, paying them an inflated ‘civilised wage’, and institutionalising white labour's industrial power, the legislation of this period sought to separate and distinguish white workers from their African counterparts, to mark them out more clearly as citizens and as ‘civilised’ by conferring on them race-based privilege and status. This applied to white men as well as women. In the context of the Great Depression, particularly young, unmarried white women were increasingly drawn into the industrial workforce, with the garment industry in particular developing into a largely female sector.Footnote ⁶² It is no coincidence that white women were enfranchised in 1930. A year later, as the Depression swelled the ranks of the white poor, property and literacy voting qualifications for all white men over the age of 21 were also removed.Footnote ⁶³ From this time onwards, white workers ‘began to see their salvation not in independent organization as a class or in aggressively expressing their interests, but in developing a symbiotic relationship with the state’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Second, under the Pact government, the state started to play an active role in the functioning of the economy – a trend which continued under subsequent governments. In a recent historical analysis, Bill Freund identified the Pact’s policies as forming part of a trajectory of state-driven developmentalism in South Africa.Footnote ⁶⁵

White poverty and workers as the vanguard of whiteness

Reverberating through the industrial conflicts and labour politics of this period were broader social anxieties regarding the maintenance of South Africa’s racial order. These became concentrated on the issue of white poverty. This was not a new phenomenon – a substantial population of impoverished proletarianised whites had long been present in colonial South Africa. But historians have convincingly argued that it was only from the late nineteenth century, in the context of depressed economic conditions and white middle-class anxieties about the future of the colony, that white poverty gained prominence and political traction as a major social problem.Footnote ⁶⁶ South Africa’s industrial heartland became the focal point of these anxieties, as impoverished rural Afrikaners spilled into the urban economy. The white population of Johannesburg swelled from 40,000 in 1899 to 250,000 in 1914, accompanied by the proliferation of unsanitary and crowded slums in suburbs such as Fordsburg and Vrededorp – the very neighbourhoods where mineworkers would clash with state forces in 1922.Footnote ⁶⁷ Growing perceptions of the threat which these conditions posed to health, and of the preponderance of criminality, miscegenation, and racial mixing in poor communities, mixed with prevailing social Darwinist understandings to cast poor whites as a danger to continued white supremacy. One Social Welfare Department worried that ‘the weak members of a superior race too readily adopt the lower mental and moral standard of a contiguous and inferior race’,Footnote ⁶⁸ while a prominent economist labelled poor whites ‘a menace to the self-preservation and prestige of the white people’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Such views mirrored concerns about racial degradation and the future of white rule in other European colonies.Footnote ⁷⁰

State efforts to address the ‘poor white problem’ and secure the racial order through racial segregation and labour protection are crucial to this chapter’s discussion of the formation of the white working class. From 1910, the SAP government enacted urban reforms, clearing racially mixed slums and arranging segregated rehousing. The Pact introduced much more forceful interventions for safeguarding the racial hierarchy. The urban workplace was regarded as a key battlefront: poor unskilled whites forced to compete with cheaper African workers ran the risk of sinking below the level of blacks.Footnote ⁷¹ Hence, in addition to its ‘civilised labour’ policy, the Pact launched an ambitious programme of public works, employing poor whites in the construction of irrigation schemes, roads, dams, and railway lines. It also expanded government services in housing, education, and health, and instituted non-contributory old-age pensions. Whites – and, to a lesser extent, coloureds – were the beneficiaries of this state support; Indians and Africans were excluded.Footnote ⁷²

Despite these measures, the Great Depression exacerbated the material and symbolic dimensions of white poverty. Large numbers of rural poor – often Afrikaner bywoners (tenant farmers) who had not benefited from the Pact’s urban-focused policies – washed up in the cities as the economic downturn was compounded by a prolonged drought.Footnote ⁷³ Following a familiar pattern, these unskilled whites accumulated in multiracial neighbourhoods, struggling to find work amid a large body of cheap black labour. In 1929, a commission of inquiry, funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, embarked on the first research-based investigation into white poverty in South Africa.Footnote ⁷⁴ In its highly influential 1932 report, the Commission put the number of poor whites at 300,000 (17 per cent of the white population), of which 250,000 were estimated to be Afrikaners. Members of the Commission reported evidence of a ‘spirit of dependency’ fast approaching ‘national pathology’ among the country’s white poor. They recommended the improvement of education among poor whites and the provision of employment opportunities to address the problem.Footnote ⁷⁵

Grace Davie has demonstrated how the researchers involved in the Carnegie Commission were influenced by Western progressivist views, scientific racism, and everyday popular understandings of poverty and social health. These understandings of the possibility of white degeneracy now came to function alongside environmental and structural understandings of poverty.Footnote ⁷⁶ The white poor were no longer simply dangerous but deserving and in need of protection: they formed a fragile barrier between racial suicide and racial purity that had to be bolstered. Afrikaner nationalists, who were mobilising aggressively in the 1930s, hijacked the Carnegie report, steering its impact and public uptake.Footnote ⁷⁷ They used it to lobby for forceful state-led redistribution under an Afrikaner government to uplift poor whites. In the process, ‘environmental explanations partially displaced notions of innate racial difference’.Footnote ⁷⁸

The political triumph of Afrikaner nationalism is discussed later in this chapter. Here, I wish to highlight two crucial points emerging from this period. First, poor whites and white workers did not form clearly distinct communities. Interventions raising poor whites into work, racially segregated rehousing efforts, and shared state dependence meant that a fluidity existed between poor whites and white workers in terms of both social relations and lived experience that did not always make them easily distinguishable. As we have seen, the white strikers of 1922 were very aware of this – they earnestly feared slipping (back) into the ranks of the white poor and becoming ‘white kaffirs’.Footnote ⁷⁹ ‘Workers called white and classes called poor’ were never, as Jon Hyslop remarks, simple sociological categories.Footnote ⁸⁰ Second, this fluidity meant that, as most impoverished whites moved into work and the poor white problem was ‘solved’, the white working class came to represent the bulwark upholding the racial order, the vanguard of whiteness. As racially mixed slums were cleared and society increasingly segregated, the workplace, where white and black continued to labour shoulder to shoulder, became the key battlefront for maintaining the racial order. Chapter 2 shows how the idea that white workers formed the vanguard of white society against the swart gevaar (black peril) remained current on the eve of the political and economic crisis of the 1970s. At the same time, residues of popular understandings of white degeneracy, racial shame, and inferiority associated with poor whiteism never faded completely and continued to cling to the working class. This, too, would be revealed in contestations emerging around late-apartheid reforms.

The rise of Afrikaner nationalism and the triumph of apartheid

A party split in 1934 had left the NP significantly weakened when the majority of its members merged with Smuts’ SAP to form the United Party (UP) and take power. In their new capacity as the official opposition, the Nationalists sought to mobilise support by rallying around white poverty as encapsulating Afrikaner economic and cultural subordination. To be sure, by the 1930s, the economy was dominated by people of British or Jewish descent, and English was the dominant language of commerce and the state. Afrikaners’ educational levels were low and they were overwhelmingly concentrated in low-paid working-class jobs. This, Nationalists felt, saw Afrikaners exploited and excluded, their language and traditions treated with disdain, relegating them to cap-in-hand second-class citizenship. In response, Afrikaner intellectuals and politicians offered a Christian Nationalist reworking of Afrikaner history which framed Afrikaners as a cohesive and divinely ordained people, destined to unite against the dual threats of British foreign hegemony and the uncivilised natives, and to assume their ‘rightful place’ in their land of birth.Footnote ⁸¹ In his landmark study Volkskapitalisme, Dan O’Meara explained the rise of Afrikaner nationalism during the 1930s and 1940s by pointing to the material, rather than political or ideological, basis of this movement. Specific petty bourgeois class forces, he argued, sought to secure a base for capital accumulation by mobilising all Afrikaans-speakers – including workers – around an ideological redefinition of Afrikaner nationalism which would act as the vehicle for establishing an Afrikaner class alliance in order to capture economic, and later political, power.Footnote ⁸²

The 1938 centenary of the Great Trek presented a felicitous opportunity for propagating the Nationalist message. Nationwide celebrations, culminating in the laying of the cornerstone of Pretoria’s colossal Voortrekker monument, attracted mass popular enthusiasm as Afrikaners came together to celebrate what was increasingly imagined as the volk’s heroic history in its battle for survival and freedom. A speech by NP leader D. F. Malan presented the workplace as a battlefront between the races when he likened the Voortrekker pioneers of old holding their own against black hordes in the interior to present-day Afrikaners facing black job competition in the urban economy. The difference, Malan claimed, was that:

Such ideas encapsulated and transmitted understandings of the white lower classes – whether in work or seeking employment – as the front line of whiteness, not marching confidently but a desperate, socially precarious group in need of support.Footnote ⁸⁴ ‘n Volk red homself (A people rescues itself) became the popular call to Afrikaners to use their financial resources in service of their people, supporting new Afrikaner businesses which would in turn employ (especially poor) Afrikaners, and promoting national pride in their language and culture. This form of mobilisation – what scholars have called the Afrikaner cultural and economic movement – acted as a vehicle for the popularisation of Afrikaner nationalism from the 1930s onwards. To a great extent, the movement was engineered and driven by the Afrikaner Broederbond (Brotherhood), a secretive Christian Nationalist organisation founded in 1918 by a handful of Afrikaans-speaking teachers, clergymen, and politicians – those petty bourgeois forces identified by O’Meara – to promote the ‘welfare of the Afrikaner nation’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Over the next decades, the Broederbond covertly developed and directed a gamut of interlocking political, cultural, educational, religious, and other organisations and initiatives – often with overlapping leadership – with a shared vision of capturing control of the state as a vehicle for Afrikaner advancement. This saw cultural mobilisation become entangled with economic and political ambitions. Through its subsidiary, the Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurvereniginge (Federation of Afrikaans Cultural Associations or FAK), for instance, the Broederbond engineered the large-scale coordinated promotion of the Afrikaans language and culture as white, nationalist, and politically coherent. Simultaneously, it was involved in setting up an Afrikaans savings bank, finance house, and chamber of commerce with the purpose of mobilising Afrikaner capital, in turn to finance the expansion of Afrikaner businesses and employment and see Afrikaners gain a foothold in trade and industry vis-à-vis established English business.Footnote ⁸⁶

For many white workers, developments during the Second World War caused great concern. Wartime industrial growth, particularly in semi-skilled positions, stimulated large-scale African urbanisation as workers flocked from the rural areas to job opportunities in the cities. Eager to attract black workers, anglophone manufacturing and commerce called for the loosening of segregationist labour and influx control. As Africans were absorbed into industry, the colour bar was regularly breached. The 1940s saw average African industrial wages rise more rapidly than those of white workers (although the former still lagged far behind), the emergence of an increasingly assertive black labour movement, and more vocal demands for black political rights. The UP government struggled to respond to black urbanisation, its influx control system ‘overwhelmed’ to the ‘point of rupture’. In the run-up to the 1948 general election, it could only put forward modestly reformist and ambiguous proposals for affecting labour stabilisation and addressing African demands, and it was widely viewed as accepting mass African urbanisation as irreversible.Footnote ⁸⁷

The NP, by contrast, seemed to offer the white electorate a clear solution for safeguarding its interests: apartheid. As both an immediate political intervention and a long-term policy, apartheid promised more rigorous controls on Africans’ movements and position in the labour market, and expressed commitment to the restoration of a racial order threatened by white poverty and black social mobility.Footnote ⁸⁸ In contrast to the UP, which was closely identified with the interests of capital, the NP cast itself as the party of the ‘working man’ and the economically disadvantaged Afrikaner people, running on ‘an explicitly anti-capitalist and (Afrikaner) populist platform’.Footnote ⁸⁹ It promised state intervention in and regulation of the economy and labour market, including the nationalisation of mines, banks, and land companies. At the same time, in the post-war context of growing Cold War tensions and increasing African and multiracial labour organisation, it accused the UP of failing to defend whites against the threat of (non-racial) communism. Not content with appealing to workers in this way, the Broederbond launched covert attempts to gain control of unions with substantial Afrikaner membership through the infiltration of leadership structures and the exploitation of racist sentiments among white workers.Footnote ⁹⁰ This met with varying degrees of success.Footnote ⁹¹ Despite measures implemented by the Pact government to co-opt white workers, organised labour still harboured a range of political and ideological sympathies in the 1940s. The flourishing of the manufacturing sector in this period saw the emergence of a new generation of industrial unions that were non-racial and socialist in orientation. Indeed, historians have interpreted the 1940s as a historical moment when real opportunities for multiracialism existed in the organised labour movement as the new industrial unions sought to mobilise alongside African workers.Footnote ⁹²

Nevertheless, the Nationalists’ ‘ideology of racism and mythology of black, Anglo and communist threats’ directed white, particularly Afrikaner, workers towards ‘adopting an ideology that neatly justified their exploitation and replaced class consciousness with race anxieties’.Footnote ⁹³ By the late 1940s, notes O’Meara, ‘most white workers had been persuaded that potential competition from cheaper African labour posed a greater threat to their interests than did the bosses’.Footnote ⁹⁴ These developments contributed to the delegitimisation of working-class identification in the post-war years, making class identification harder to sustain.Footnote ⁹⁵ Furthermore, it is perhaps unsurprising that the Nationalists’ explicit ideological inclusion of poor and working-class whites in the body politic of the volk appealed to these constituencies, given the manner in which the Smuts administration was perceived to be in league with the very Anglo and capitalist interests which were seen to threaten white working-class citizenship.

In 1948, the NP’s apartheid platform won it significant support in the urban mining and industrial constituencies of the Witwatersrand, as well as among steelworkers and lower middle-class constituencies in Pretoria. Beyond the cities, farming communities – especially the maize farmers of the Transvaal – had become alienated from the UP government by its wartime suppression of agricultural prices. Deeply worried about the threat African urbanisation posed to the stability of the rural labour force, farmers also threw their weight behind the NP. Thus, when it came to power in 1948, the NP stood at the head of a broad social alliance of petty bourgeois Afrikaner political and cultural entrepreneurs, workers, and farmers.Footnote ⁹⁶

The apartheid state and the organised labour movement

In the decades following 1948, the NP intensified and expanded existing provisions for ensuring white domination on the basis of racial separation. The large-scale state intervention this required was not unusual in the post-war context. War-weary populations, governments, and businesses desired stability, growth, and broad-based social welfare, and centralised state planning presented a vehicle for achieving full employment and the reduction of economic inequality alongside industrialisation, modernisation, and rising production and foreign trade.Footnote ⁹⁷ This international enthusiasm for large, regulatory states was given ‘its own particular twist’ by the NP. Posel explains that the NP ‘harnessed the broadly Keynesian notions of statecraft … to its own particular – and distinctive – project of “modernising” racial domination. Imagining a bigger, more interventionist and regulatory state as the agent of large-scale social transformation made it possible to envision a society in which constructs of race would become the all-embracing, ubiquitous basis of the social order.’Footnote ⁹⁸

These ambitions were clearly reflected in labour legislation designed to extend discriminatory provisions. The 1953 Native Labour Act cemented the exclusion of Africans from existing industrial conciliatory mechanisms by setting up a separate system centred on factory-level ‘works committees’ to represent African workers. These were largely powerless, leaving Africans no effective or legal avenues through which to express their grievances.Footnote ⁹⁹ The 1953 Act, claimed then Minister of Labour Ben Schoeman, would see African trade unions ‘die a natural death’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Coloured and Indian workers continued to be included in the formal labour relations machinery alongside whites, but here, too, efforts were made to regulate the labour market for the benefit of white, enfranchised workers. The 1956 Industrial Conciliation Act broadened the discriminatory measures laid down in 1924. Its notorious Section 77 made statutory provision for the racial allocation of jobs across the economy through direct government intervention. The Act officially delineated this form of job reservation as ‘a protective measure of the Whites, Coloureds and other Non-White groups against racial competition’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Yet, when introducing the Act in Parliament, the Minister of Labour explained that Section 77 would serve to ‘safeguard the standards of living of the White workers of South Africa and ensure … that they will not be exploited by the lower standards of any other race’.Footnote ¹⁰² While white poverty is broadly considered to have been ‘solved’ by this point, such statements reflected the persisting conviction that white workers required protection if they were to continue upholding the vanguard of whiteness.

Figure 1.7 The crew that attained the world deep-level mining record in 1958 at East Rand Proprietary Mines.

Source: Barloworld Rand Mines Archive at Historical Papers Research Archive, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

The 1956 Act also sought to bolster white working-class dominance in industrial relations. While the 1924 Act had allowed white, coloured, and Indian workers to organise in multiracial unions, the new legislation forbade the registration of new multiracial trade unions and ordered existing multiracial unions to split into separate branches or unions according to race. It further determined that only whites could serve on union executives, thus securing the leadership of the organised labour movement for whites and weakening the bargaining position of other workers. Doxey suggests that these provisions sought to obstruct the development of a united and potentially left-leaning multiracial labour movement – and, in the process, served to reduce the collective bargaining power of organised labour as a whole.Footnote ¹⁰³ The NP had already dealt organised labour a heavy blow with its 1950 Suppression of Communism Act. This intentionally broad and ambiguous law subsumed all manner of political dissent. Several hundred trade unionists were removed from their positions under the Act, stifling leftist sympathies within organised labour. According to Fine, this defeat of socialist ideas and independent trade unionism among white workers made them a ‘prop for the apartheid state’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

It is important to understand the profound impact of this legislation on organised labour, as it would significantly shape the nature of workers’ responses to reform efforts from the 1970s. To be sure, factionalism had long characterised the South African labour movement – but this new legislation saw racial and ideological divisions become more pronounced. Despite the NP’s success in purging socialist tendencies, different views about cross-racial solidarity remained within the labour movement. In October 1954, 61 unions – mostly open industrial and craft unions – formed the Trade Union Council of South Africa (TUCSA) as a coordinating body intended to bolster labour unity in anticipation of the divisive new Industrial Conciliation Act. Membership was restricted to registered unions, but TUCSA liaised closely with unregistered African unions outside the formal system. For some, this did not go far enough towards the goal of labour unity. In March 1955, unions opposing TUCSA’s unwillingness to accept African affiliates formed the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), which afforded white, multiracial, and African unions equal rights. For others, TUCSA’s fraternising with African workers and its new industrial unions’ acceptance of ‘non-white’ members went too far. Thus, a number of predominantly Afrikaner craft unions in construction and state employment joined with racially exclusive industrial unions to form the Co-ordinating Council of South African Trade Unions. Together with white railway unions, they subsequently formed the South African Confederation of Labour (SACLA). Following the promulgation of the 1956 Act, TUCSA advised its multiracial affiliates to split into separate branches, not separate unions, in order to retain some unity. By contrast, SACTU encouraged coloured and Indian workers to break away from mixed unions and form their own organisations, lest they continue to be governed by white workers. At the same time, there was a strong movement of white workers into exclusive unions, and by the mid-1960s, white membership of mixed unions had virtually halved.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The organised labour landscape remained tumultuous. SACTU’s association with the liberation movement soon incurred the wrath of the government. By 1967 it had been immobilised, its organisational capacity depleted by the detention or banning of its leaders. TUCSA, meanwhile, wavered in its stance on the exclusion of African unions. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, it variously moved to allow or disallow African membership. These oscillating efforts saw virtually all craft unions leave TUCSA. By the 1970s, TUCSA represented around 223,000 workers, of whom the majority were coloured, some were Indian, and about 58,000 were white. As per the determinations of the 1956 Act, TUCSA was white-led, even though the complexion of its leaders was representative of only 27 per cent of its members. SACLA also faced difficulties – racial homogeneity clearly did not guarantee unity. In the course of the 1960s, there were growing doubts among the artisanal affiliates about state policies, and in 1966 the Railroads and Harbours Staff Associations stated that the utilisation of labour resources needed to be reassessed in order to maintain economic growth. This brought it in direct conflict with the Co-ordinating Council’s commitment to the status quo.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Various craft unions – including the Railroads associations – subsequently disaffiliated. By the mid-1970s, SACLA represented some 200,000 white workers, or 31 per cent of the organised labour force.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

The NP’s labour legislation, which sought to promote the position of white workers and to distinguish them as a clear category of privileged citizens from other sections of labour, therefore did not go uncontested within organised labour. The main disagreement between – and, indeed, as Chapter 3 will show, within – these labour federations revolved around the inclusion of African workers in the labour movement. White workers were represented across the spectrum of these divided opinions, including forming a minority of SACTU members.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Moreover, it is important to note how apartheid labour legislation sought to secure protected privilege for white workers. This was primarily done by keeping other races down – excluding coloured and Indian workers from leadership positions, barring Africans from participating in the mechanisms of industrial governance, and blocking ‘non-white’ access to certain jobs and skills – rather than by legitimately strengthening white workers’ skills and bargaining positions. Iscor, for instance, adhered to state requirements for the employment of ‘civilised labour’ while excluding black workers – yet the measures taken in this regard were designed to preserve and reproduce the white labour force, rather than promote its upward mobility. Indeed, Iscor devised a range of measures – offering credit facilities to encourage homeownership, providing sport, recreational, and medical facilities to workers, recruiting successive generations from the same families – to ensure that it retained its workers.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Similarly, the NP’s legislation fostered a certain kind of white labour movement – acquiescent, nationalist, and not anti-capital. The Suppression of Communism Act facilitated the removal of the best black and white trade union leaders, while the 1956 Industrial Conciliation Act deepened fragmentation throughout organised labour. Thus, Alexander argues, white workers, like blacks, were the victims of apartheid – their organisations crushed and their exploitation secured under the NP, leaving them reliant on the state.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Figure 1.8 Workers operating the four-stand tandem cold reduction mill at Iscor’s Vanderbijlpark works, 1965.

Source: Iscor News, January 1965

The race-based dualism of the labour regime – conferring rights and protection on the white minority and excluding the African majority – also extended to the NP’s other legislative endeavours to enshrine a social hierarchy in which racial identity formed the basis of inclusion and exclusion in every aspect of political, economic, and social life. The 1950 Population Registration Act divided the South African population by race. Africans were additionally subdivided into ‘distinct’ ethnic groups. In the course of the 1950s, the creation of separate homelands for each of these ‘nations’ became NP policy. Enacting the Promotion of Bantu Self-government Act in 1959, Prime Minister H. F. Verwoerd explained in Parliament that the new law would see whites retain sovereignty in South Africa, while the ‘black nations’ would be led to ‘full development’ and ‘full authority’ in their ‘own areas’.Footnote ¹¹¹ In the context of worldwide decolonisation, this provided a convenient instrument for depriving Africans of their citizenship, thus cementing the convergence of race and rights in South Africa. This policy of separate development, explains Dubow, saw apartheid evolve ‘from the pronouncement of white domination – baasskap – to an elaborate and obfuscatory ideology of “multi-national” development’.Footnote ¹¹² The Transkei, identified as a Xhosa homeland, was the first territory to be granted self-government in 1963. The scheme made no provision for Africans residing in South Africa’s ‘white’ cities, or for the country’s coloured and Indian communities.Footnote ¹¹³

Capitalism and white society under apartheid

Western policy priorities at this time reflected the alliance between states, capital, and labour born of the post-war context. In this triangular arrangement, governments effectively oversaw institutionalised negotiations between capital and labour to reach deals acceptable to all sides – typically, high wages and good benefits in exchange for high profits and labour predictability; as well as a steadily expanding welfare state and state participation in the economy in return for political stability, the suspension of communist sympathies, and a predictable macro-economic environment. By the 1970s, notes Eric Hobsbawm, all advanced capitalist states had become welfare states in the sense that the majority of state employment and expenditure was concentrated in social security. This social consensus and the arrangements it produced were fundamentally dependent on the sustained economic growth characterising the post-war Golden Age.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In South Africa, the NP’s efforts to shore up a distinctive racial and nationalist order were ‘inseparable from efforts to sustain and regulate practices of capital accumulation and economic growth, along with the class interests and conflicts associated with those’.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Thus, the statism evident in post-1948 labour legislation extended to all spheres of South Africa society, reflecting the broad-based social alliance represented by the ruling party. The implementation of stricter influx control attempted not only to stifle African urbanisation but created the rural reserves of cheap black labour that white farming required. Generous subsidies and inflated prices for agricultural products further benefited the sector, with white farmers’ real incomes growing by 7.3 per cent per year between 1960 and 1975. This growing prosperity concealed white agriculture’s deepening state dependence, with an estimated 20 per cent of farmers’ incomes deriving from various forms of state support by 1972.Footnote ¹¹⁶

For white workers, the discriminatory sanctions of apartheid labour legislation protected ‘their narrow niche of privilege’ by insulating them from black labour competition and guaranteeing employment in reserved jobs, often with inflated wages. The first five years of NP rule witnessed a 10 per cent rise in real white wages in construction and manufacturing, while African wages shrunk by 5 per cent. Yet, as O’Meara notes:

What the NP did offer working-class whites, in addition to statutorily protected employment in industry, was privileged educational opportunities as well as expanded employment options as avenues for upward social mobility.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The creation of a range of new state and semi-state institutions saw Afrikaner employment in public administration expand by 98.5 per cent between 1946 and 1960, and the state become the country’s largest employer. The civil service in particular shed its segregation-era English character to become an assertively Afrikaner domain.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Under the NP, the size and number of state bureaucracies grew rapidly – from 26 government departments in 1948 to 41 by 1970.Footnote ¹²⁰

For workers, however, state employment fostered dependence. Often public service employees were those who had failed in more competitive and lucrative private sector labour markets – to the extent that internal government observations noted that the civil service employed ‘factory rejects’. And if the government bestowed jobs, it could just as easily revoke them – a realisation that often produced labour acquiescence. The civil servants’ Public Service Association was a toothless organisation throughout the apartheid period, unwilling to bite the hand that fed it. As Posel argues, this dependency was magnified by the politics of job reservation: ‘The prospect of having to compete for their jobs against a huge black labour pool must have been a rude reminder to white civil servants [and other protected workers] that their meal tickets remained with the National Party.’Footnote ¹²¹

Crucially, the expansion of state capacity also offered important opportunities to those petty bourgeoise Afrikaner elements which, in O’Meara’s analysis, first initiated the reformulation of Afrikaner nationalism with the goal of capturing economic and political power. Many found favourable career prospects in the public service, where bureaucrats enjoyed ‘security of tenure, cradle-to-the-grave social welfare, and handsome study opportunities’.Footnote ¹²² Most NP Members of Parliament hailed from Afrikaner petty bourgeois ranks and were members of the Broederbond. For Afrikaner businessmen, meanwhile, the expansion of state capitalism offered employment opportunities in the top management and advisory positions of state and semi-state enterprises such as the South African Railways and Harbours, Iscor, the national electricity provider Eskom, and the oil-from-coal energy and chemical company Sasol. State benevolence towards Afrikaner business also saw government accounts and contracts transferred to Afrikaner financial institutions and enterprises. From just 6 per cent in 1948, Afrikaner control of private industry rose to 21 per cent by 1975.Footnote ¹²³

The NP’s statism was supported by strong post-war economic growth. South Africa’s GDP showed an annual average increase of 5 per cent between 1948 and 1957, 3 per cent between 1957 and 1961, and a flourishing 6 to 8 per cent between 1962 and 1974, earning the latter period the label ‘the golden age of apartheid’.Footnote ¹²⁴ Supported by such consistent growth, NP policies facilitated dramatic upward social mobility among white South Africans. According to Davies, ‘between 1946 and 1960 the number of whites described in censuses as labourers … decreased by 61 percent while the numbers in the new petty bourgeoisie increased by some 74 percent’.Footnote ¹²⁵ Within the Afrikaner population, the absolute and proportional number of males in the lowest-income categories shrunk, while their presence in the higher-income sectors of the economy swelled rapidly, leading to the establishment of an urban Afrikaner middle class of white-collar workers and managers.Footnote ¹²⁶ Broad occupational data, meanwhile, shows the percentage of Afrikaners in blue-collar employment remaining remarkably stable in the first decades of NP rule (Table 1.1). By contrast, the same period saw a significant decline in the percentage of Afrikaners in agriculture, offset by the spike in those in white-collar employment.

These local trends mirrored international developments. The dramatic decline of the peasantry alongside the rise in higher education opportunities during the Golden Age saw similar shifts in the population segments involved in agriculture and white-collar employment in industrialised countries. But the size of the industrial working class remained relatively constant at about one-third of the population in these countries, while it grew in Eastern Europe and the ‘Third World’, where industrialisation was expanding. Hence Hobsbawm stresses that ‘the idea that the old industrial working class died out during this time of economic boom is statistically mistaken on a global scale’ – this would not be the case until the 1980s.Footnote ¹²⁸

In the 1930, advocates of the Afrikaner economic movement had rallied around the slogan ‘n Volk red homself. When they reconvened in the 1950s, it was in a ‘mood of self-congratulation’.Footnote ¹²⁹ The poor white problem was considered solved, and Afrikaner businesses were establishing a firm foothold in the economy. With the rescue action accomplished, this section of NP supporters could now focus on making money. By the 1960s, writes Beinart, it was ‘the best of times, materially, for white South Africans’; they had ‘never had it so good’.Footnote ¹³⁰ In this way, too, South Africa echoed global realities. Globally, the prosperity of the post-war era was not just visible in retrospect but consciously experienced by the populations of increasingly prosperous ‘developed’ countries. British Conservatives fought the 1959 general election on the slogan ‘You’ve never had it so good’, winning Harold Macmillan the premiership for a second time. Industrial expansion throughout the capitalist, socialist, and ‘Third’ world made this a Golden Age of impressive economic growth – and increasing labour shortage. Full employment and the burgeoning consumer society placed at least some affluence within most working-class people’s reach, with workers in the industrialised West enjoying a universal and generous welfare state, paid annual leave – even the luxury of owning a car.Footnote ¹³¹

Yet while apartheid was, in O’Meara’s words, ‘good for every white’s business’, the actual material advantage of the NP’s pro-white policies was spread very unevenly. The new class of urban Afrikaner financial, industrial, and commercial capitalists emerged as the major beneficiaries; they ‘blossomed from an embattled infancy to potent adulthood under the benevolent care of the NP government’.Footnote ¹³² Apartheid-era legislation drove down the cost of African labour and shielded local industries, creating favourable conditions for capital accumulation for Afrikaner business. The period 1946 to 1960 witnessed growing stratification within the white Afrikaans-speaking population, as Afrikaners became overwhelmingly concentrated in three distinct occupational categories: ‘professional, managerial and executive (i.e. the upper middle class); clerical, sales and administrative (the middle to lower levels of the middle class); and skilled and supervisory workers’. O’Meara argues that:

Considering the position of economically active Afrikaans-speaking white males in 1960, O’Meara identifies those in ‘administrative, managerial and executive’ positions, representing only 4.2 per cent of this working population, as the highest-income category, earning an average monthly income of R3,308. Artisans and production workers, by contrast, are recorded as the largest occupational category of Afrikaans-speaking white males at approximately 27 per cent of the population. Yet with a median monthly income of R1,473, they were one of the lowest earning in relative terms, ahead only of ‘manual labourers’ with a median monthly income of R931 and the ‘unemployed’.Footnote ¹³⁴ Embourgeoisement was uneven and often shallow. By 1964, some 60 per cent of the unionised whites in the employ of the Chamber of Mines were so-called day’s pay men. By far the largest number of them were production workers represented by the all-white Mineworkers’ Union.Footnote ¹³⁵

The Mineworkers’ Union

The establishment of the MWU in 1902 came amid the intense conflict between workers and employers characterising the early twentieth-century industrialised and industrialising world. For most of the century, the MWU’s membership covered non-artisanal underground employees – those whites at the lowest end of the mining skills and supervisory hierarchy, working in the production process directly alongside African workers. MWU members played a central role in the 1922 Rand Revolt. White miners who were organised in the MWU – totalling some 15,000 by 1922 and by then including immigrants as well as unskilled Afrikaans-speaking whites who had entered the mines during the war – shared both the republican and the revolutionary sentiments that animated the revolt. The MWU is said to have warned that the Chamber’s reorganisation of labour would see ‘the Kafir [sic] … take up the place of the white man and then we are doomed to national annihilation’.Footnote ¹³⁶ The strikers’ banner reading ‘Workers of the world unite and fight for a white South Africa’ was carried by the Newlands commando, led by I. J. Viljoen, an MWU member.Footnote ¹³⁷ According to the union’s biographer Wessel Visser, the 1922 strike became ‘embedded in the historical psyche and collective consciousness of MWU members’.Footnote ¹³⁸ As subsequent chapters will show, the salience of this strike turned insurrection would reverberate through the union throughout the twentieth century and remains an evocative reference point in the present.

MWU members were major beneficiaries of the civilised labour policies instituted by the Pact government – in particular the 1926 Mines and Works Amendment Act, which entrenched white job reservation in mining by reserving certificates of competency in certain skills, such as blasting, for white and coloured workers.Footnote ¹³⁹ By the 1930s, as the Carnegie Commission was undertaking its investigation into white poverty, newly proletarianised and often unskilled Afrikaners constituted the overwhelming majority of MWU members. The union’s leadership, by contrast, remained largely English-speaking.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Afrikaner nationalists saw this situation as reflecting the overall disempowerment of Afrikaners under Smuts’ pro-British UP and set their sights on gaining control of the MWU. They set about branding established labour leaders as communist agents and exploiting antisemitic and racist sentiments among white workers. In the context of falling workers’ wages and corruption among union leaders, the nationalists successfully turned MWU members against their Labour Party-oriented executive. By 1948, Afrikaner mining constituencies – previously Labour strongholds – displayed strong support for the Nationalists and were instrumental in voting the NP into government. A few months later, the MWU elected a new NP-oriented executive. The union subsequently developed an assertively Afrikaans and Christian identity. Visibly more nationalist in character, its mouthpiece condemned communism and working-class consciousness as threatening the unity of the volk.Footnote ¹⁴¹

The first decades of apartheid witnessed the race-based social alliance in action: South African businesses and the NP government benefited from the industrial discipline and political loyalty of white workers, while workers in turn enjoyed the protection and benevolence of the state and employers.Footnote ¹⁴² In addition to material benefits, white workers’ new-found social security as full members of the white body politic and key partners in Afrikaner political power must have gone some way towards ameliorating the real and subjective class and race insecurities long associated with white proletarianisation and poverty. The MWU in particular wielded great influence within government – its representatives enjoyed direct access to ministerial offices and even the Prime Minister, with some serving on the executive of the Transvaal NP.Footnote ¹⁴³ And on the labour front, MWU representatives drove hard bargains in the interests of their members. Particularly from the 1960s, as shortages of white labour and technological advances in mining techniques saw the Chamber of Mines press for the reorganisation of the racial division of labour, MWU general secretary Arrie Paulus jealously guarded his members’ privilege and power. Paulus, known for his brashness and brinkmanship, negotiated improved wages and benefits in exchange for uncertified African workers being given greater responsibility in the blasting process.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Government and mining capital alike regarded Paulus with wary reverence, with mining giant Anglo American recognising the firebrand unionist as ‘the most powerful labour leader in the country’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

Figure 1.9 Arrie Paulus (right) and Cor de Jager (centre-left) emerge smiling from a meeting with then Minister of Mines Carel de Wet (centre-right) in 1970.

Source: The Star, 24 October 1970/African News Agency (ANA)

Labour aristocracy or privileged precariat?

Understandings of white workers as historically unproblematically privileged and secure within the context of the racial state still prevail. In his opening to The Rand Revolt, Krikler admits that he started the study considering white workers ‘something of a labour aristocracy – deserving infinitely less sympathy than the black workforce below them’. He records his bewilderment when his sources revealed these aristocrats of labour ‘announc[ing] themselves rightless, [in a world] in which one sensed acute pain and fear, a jolting internal dislocation’. Krikler was writing, of course, about 1922 – and we must recognise that, after the economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s, the position of apartheid-era white workers was certainly different to that of their ancestors on the Rand one or more generations earlier. In the early decades of the twentieth century, ‘the privileged position of this “labour aristocracy” of white workers … was real relative to the black working class, but non-existent when set against the status of the wealthy whites who despised them’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The powerful social and economic engineering of the state, the suppression of black resistance, and steady economic growth under apartheid seemed to cement white prosperity and the myth of the classless volk – even if the well-heeled sections of the volk drove the latest model ivory-coloured Mercedes while others rolled through life in Ford Zephyrs and Cortinas.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

Yet, as Krikler realised with regard to 1922, and as this chapter has shown for subsequent decades, things were distinctly more complex than this veneer of white workers’ wealth suggested. While on the surface it might have been all bonuses and braaivleis, this ostensible privilege and security were a smokescreen held up by the state. It was the very nature of this artificial protection that rendered many white workers vulnerable and dependent on the racial state.

The workers of the MWU represent a case in point. By the 1970s, these white miners’ role in the underground production process had progressively diminished. Blasting – formally reserved for whites – had become semi-skilled work, effectively rendering the holding of a blasting certificate superfluous. While there continued to be real skill involved in this job, concessions negotiated by the union saw black workers take on much of the actual work while the white blaster simply supervised – as the opening vignette about Willie demonstrates.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ This made white miners completely dependent on racially discriminatory legislation to safeguard their superior position and privileges in relation to African workers. Without the protection of the racial state, these workers were simply under-skilled, overpriced, and expendable. Moreover, their mining-specific skills bound them to these precarious positions: MWU members – in contrast to craftsmen and maintenance workers in the mining industry – did not have a trade, making employment outside mining unlikely.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ This exacerbated the economic vulnerability of these white miners. In Posel’s formulation, referring to workers in the apartheid-era civil service, the power and privilege conferred on workers dependent on the racial state were not unproblematically about the benefits of the ‘wages of whiteness’, but rather like a ‘golden handcuff’ – ‘a mix of costs and benefits, pleasures and pains’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

Thus, rather than seeking to categorise white workers during the apartheid era as either genuine proletarians or the lackeys of bourgeois capital, I propose that a more complex picture emerges from the history of white working-class formation over the course of South Africa’s industrial and political history. This results in an understanding of white workers that places less emphasis on their relations to production and more on their relation to and position in the racial state. In this sense, they were certainly privileged, particularly from 1924 – and we may point to the same evidence offered by Marxists such as Davies and Simson on employment, status, and income. At the same time, however, white workers’ position was precarious; often, what stood between them and material and subjective cataclysm was state legislation protecting them from black labour competition and exclusion from the white body politic. Would this ever come about? Would the likelihood that bourgeois interests could sacrifice the white working class remain as minimal as Davies supposed? How would white workers respond, and what would the impact be on their forms of organisation, their politics and subjectivities? The following chapters seek to answer these questions.