Britain took the Cape by force of arms in 1806, after 150 years of Dutch rule, when the colony had a population of some 30,000 slaves, 26,000 settlers, 20,000 free Coloured, Nama and Khoi in white employ, and an unknown number living in remote .regions. Apart from the officials, gentry and shopkeepers of Cape Town, most of the settlers were farmers, who either grew crops on the coastal plains or grazed livestock on the plateau behind the mountain ranges. Racial discrimination, based on a rigid division of labour, had hardened into a set pattern. The colonists did not disdain manual labour on their own account, though they objected to working for a master. Slaves did the skilled and unskilled work in Cape Town and adjacent areas. They tailored, cobbled, built houses, cooked, traded, and made furniture, leather goods, wagons and music for their owners. They also worked on the farms, frequently with the free Coloured and Nama, the so-called Hottentots.
Townsmen and farmers had much in common, in spite of substantial cultural differences. Both were stiff-necked Calvinists, who cited scripture to justify slavery and colour-class discrimination. Both claimed for the white race an exclusive right to education, positions of public responsibility, the ownership of land and wealth. Both fornicated with slaves, Coloured and Nama, while keeping them in strict subordination. Farmers in the interior acquired, as well, the habits and outlook of pioneers and frontiersmen. They were independent and self-reliant; demanded aid from government yet resented its authority; and thought highly of physical courage, endurance, hunting skills and martial prowess. The colony resembled a feudal society in many ways. It was divided into estates rather than classes, and strongly resisted radical reforms.
The slaves came from Holland's possessions in the East Indies, from West Africa, Madagascar and Mozambique; and belonged to a wide range of cultural and racial groups. No slave, whether Muslim, Christian or pagan, could enter into a legal marriage before 1823. Extra-marital intercourse between settlers, slaves and Nama gave rise to the Coloured, known as kleurlinge or bruinmense (brown people) in Afrikaans. The slaves never fused into a single community or acted in concert to liberate themselves while under Dutch rule. The Nama, whose cattle and sheep had grazed on land occupied by the colonists, offered some resistance in the early days of settlement. Their numbers were then greatly reduced by epidemics of smallpox and measles, and they soon succumbed to the white invaders. The Khoi , nicknamed the Bushmen, were hunters and food collectors. They fought back stubbornly and with great courage, to be all but annihilated.
The colonists were quick to resent the authoritarian rule and mercantilism of the Netherlands East India Company. They complained often and bitterly of excessive taxation, restraints on trade, inefficiency and corruption in the administration. There was little effective protest. Malcontents and potential rebels could escape into the interior, where land was to be had for the taking. The first serious demand for political reform was made as late as 1779, when the current of liberalism from Europe and America combined with symptoms of the company's bankruptcy to produce some agitation in the western Cape. The Cape Patriots, as they called themselves after a party of that name in Holland, petitioned the company directors in Amsterdam for a written constitution, seats for burghers on the administrative council and high court, freedom to trade, and the right to flog their slaves without official restraint. Not then, nor at any other time, did the settlers propose reforms that would benefit persons of colour, whether freemen or slaves.
The frontiersmen spread rapidly over a wide area in defiance of the governments injunction to remain within a fixed boundary. They rode rough-shod over the prior rights of the original inhabitants to hunting, grazing and arable land. Survivors of the Nama were absorbed in the Coloured. The Khoi were hunted down and killed off like the great herds of wild animals that once roamed the plains. Bantu-speaking Africans might have shared this fate if they had not been more numerous and better equipped to meet the predatory raids of the commandos, the name given to the farmers' militia. It is significant of white attitudes that when the colonists first revolted against the government, they rose not in defence of their own liberties but to deprive Africans of land and stock.
The revolt took place in 1795 on the eastern frontier, in the district of Graaff Reinet. Honoratus Maynier, the local landdrost or magistrate, had prudently tried to curb the brutal treatment of Nama and Khoi by the settlers, and restrain them from prematurely launching a large-scale attack on the Xhosa in their homeland between the Sundays and Fish rivers. The first major clash between the two groups of cattle-raising agriculturists had occurred in 1779, and the Xhosa had succeeded in stopping the vanguard of the trekboers. The settlers gave vent to their frustration by driving Maynier away and declaring a republic. Their fellow burghers to the south, in the adjacent district of Swellendam, demanding freedom to enslave the Khoi and impose unpaid forced labour on the Nama, followed this example and elected a 'national assembly'. South Africa's first republic was born in a struggle between white settlers and an external imperial authority for the right to suppress, plunder and exploit an African people.
Holland was at this time an ally of Britain in the war against republican France. The East India Company had announced its bankruptcy The government at Cape Town could neither bring the rebels to heel nor help them to defeat the Xhosa. Left to themselves, the colonists might have been forced to negotiate on terms favourable to the Xhosa. The British, acting in the name of Prince William of Orange, occupied the Cape soon after the revolt in Swellendam. While most of the settlers gave their allegiance to the new regime, the malcontents of Graaff Reinet revolted twice more, first in 1799 and then in 1801, against the administration's alleged partiality to Coloured and Xhosa. British troops and Coloured riflemen were sent to quell the revolt in 1799. Farm workers, anxious to fight their white masters, joined the Coloured regiments; the rising fizzled out, and the farm workers were ordered to surrender their arms. They chose instead to join Ndhlambi's Xhosa in an attempt to drive the settlers out of the Zuurveld west of the Sundays river.
This led to a mass revolt of Coloured on the frontier and a devastating war against the Xhosa. A firm and enduring alliance between Africans and Coloured might have enabled both to free themselves from white domination. For, notes Marais, 'if the rising spread to the western Hottentots and slaves, the white man's hold on the Colony would be shaken to its foundations'.1 The British intervened to detach the Coloured from their allies. Dundas, the acting governor, established a garrison at the site of the future Port Elizabeth, promised land to the Coloured, and assured them of better treatment on the farms. He instructed Maynier, now the resident commissioner, to register labour contracts of three months and over between farmers and servants. Though farmers objected to the labour regulation, it was amplified and extended to all parts of the colony by the Batavian administration which succeeded the British in 1803.
The extension of the Dundas regulation laid a basis for labour legislation and gave the free Coloured a modicum of legal protection. 'Under this growing rule of law,' according to Walker, 'most of the Hottentots took service, and not only ceased to be a peril to the Colony, but in due course became a reinforcement to it against the Kaffirs.'2 The comment neatly summarizes the divisive effects of a strategy that turned the Coloured away from their African allies and into an auxiliary of the whites. The Cape Mounted Riflemen, a predominantly Coloured regiment, played a greater part than the settlers did in subsequent wars against the Xhosa. When Ngqika, Gcaleka and Thembu struck back at Harry Smith's troops in 1850 and the Coloured in the eastern Cape rose in rebellion, some of the riflemen joined in the struggle for liberation. The regiment was reconstituted after the war into a mixed force of white and Coloured; and disbanded in 1870, on the eve of responsible government, when the whites could dispense with the service of Coloured troops. 'From that time onward the military profession was closed to Coloured men in South Africa.'3
Apart from some useful administrative reforms, the Batavian Republic's short interregnum of three years produced few notable changes. Slavery and serfdom were bound to disappear under the impact of Europe's expanding industrialism and bourgeois democracy. Holland would have been the emancipator if she had retained the Cape, and the battle for human rights might then have been fought out between a Dutch government and Dutch settlers. An indigenous liberalism, rooted in South African soil and embracing a section of the Afrikaner people, might have grown to maturity. Instead, it was the British who represented the age of enlightenment, and the new liberalism came to be identified in the minds of all South Africans with the policies of British imperialism. Their seizure of the Cape in 1806 led ultimately to the emancipation of slaves, the subjugation of the Africans, and a cultural dualism among the whites that developed into rival nationalisms.
Whitehall kept a tight rein on expenditure and expected the colony to pay its way. The Cape governor could, however, draw on far greater supplies of manpower, capital and armed force than the East India Company ever provided. The access of strength turned the scales in the settlers' favour. It was the British army and not the Boer commandos that defeated the African and forced him to accept white authority. British immigrants joined Afrikaner farmers on the eastern frontier. Governor Cradock sent a large force of troops and militia to the Zuurveld in 1812. They drove 20,000 Africans back over the Fish river and built a double line of block-houses, garrisoned with troops and civilians, behind which quit-rent farms of 4,000 acres each were offered to the settlers on what had been African soil. Trained troops won a victory that had eluded the frontiersmen in more than thirty years of guerrilla warfare and cattle raids.
Slaves and the free Coloured fared scarcely better under high Tory rule. Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807 but allowed the settlers to retain and sell or buy their human property. Caledon's proclamation of 1 November 1809 applied a strict pass law to the Coloured, made the registration of labour contracts compulsory if covering one month or more, and laid down the conditions under which an employer could withhold wages for goods supplied to his servant. Proclamations of 1812 and 1819 allowed a settler to apprentice and employ without remuneration a free Coloured child, from the age of eight to eighteen years, if it was an orphan, or destitute, or had grown up on the employer's property. The regulations might have saved the Coloured from 'utter destruction', as some observers claimed, but only by reducing them to the level of serfs, at the mercy of farmers and officials who were also farmers.
Circuit courts, having both administrative and judicial functions, were introduced in 1811. They afforded some protection against gross cruelty and neglect. Missionaries like the Dutchman Johannes van der Kemp and the Scot John Philip had no difficulty in accumulating a mass of evidence to convince Whitehall that the Coloured were being degraded by economic and social servitude. The House of Commons instructed the Cape administration to abolish legal discrimination against free persons. Bourke, the acting governor, anticipated the instruction by enacting Ordinance 50 of 1828. It repealed the offending proclamations, and so freed the Coloured from the pass system and the risk of being flogged for offences against the labour laws. The registration of service contracts continued, but their duration was limited to one year. Children could be apprenticed only with their parents' consent. The ordinance applied only to Coloured workers, yet went a long way to establishing the principle of equality before the law.
The white working class, then in its infancy, had a higher social status but a similar legal position. Workers in Britain were then, and for many years to come, liable to be imprisoned for breach of contract under the master and servant law. The colonial administration acted rigorously against defaulters of any race. The demand for punitive measures came from employers who wished to stop the desertion of workers in whom they had invested money. Immigrant artisans and labourers who received a free passage to the Cape were usually obliged to serve a given master for a specified period, or buy their release by repaying the passage money. Land and work were plentiful in the colony. Many immigrants took the opportunity to set up on their own or to change their employment in breach of their indentures. To deter them, Lord Charles Somerset's proclamation of 26 June 1818 prescribed a maximum sentence of two months' imprisonment and fine of twenty-five rixdalers for a defaulting servant, to which corporal punishment could be added for a second and subsequent offence.
Laws devised for indentured white immigrants, free Coloured workers and emancipated slaves were the forerunners of South Africa's master and servant laws. Emancipation itself occurred on 1 December 1834. There were then about 40,000 slaves and as many whites in the colony. Slave prices had doubled since 1807, when the importation of fresh supplies was banned. The owners were no more willing than the planters of the West Indies and America to surrender their property or to accept any limitation on their right of ownership. They objected strenuously to regulations that curbed their brutality and enforced minimum standards of care in the treatment of slaves. Bourke's Ordinance 19 of 1826, which provided for the appointment of a registrar and guardian of slaves, led to the resignation of the president and two members of Cape Town's burgher council, while owners generally agitated for a representative assembly. They wanted political rights for themselves so as to enslave others. Emancipation was forced on the colony by Britain. The social pressures that produced the Reform Act of 1832 resulted also in the Abolition of Slavery Act of 1833.
The end of formal slavery accelerated the migration of farmers into the interior and precipitated the great trek of 1836. Somerset's 1820 settlers, planted in the Zuurveld to strengthen the white man's hold on the frontier, were forbidden to keep slaves. The great majority of owners were Afrikaners, and they resented the emancipation, Ordinance 50, and the principle of equality before the law. The £1.25 million allocated by the British parliament as compensation to slave owners was, they said, less than half the market value of the slaves. Settlers denounced the colonial office for refusing to ratify D'Urban's annexation in 1835 of Xhosa territory between the Great Fish and Kei rivers. They were outraged when the government decided to sell and not make free grants of land seized from the Xhosa. Land hunger, dislike of British rule, and the rejection of racial equality in any form were the root causes of the planned exodus by whites with their Coloured servants from the colony.
The firm stand made by the Xhosa barred the way to the Transkei's rolling pastures between the sea and the great escarpment. Turning westward, the tide of white migration crossed the Orange river to invade the grasslands of the high plateau. One party of trekkers by-passed Moshoeshoe's kingdom of Lesotho and entered Natal. Here a small community of English traders, hunters and missionaries had been settled since 1824. An armed struggle for supremacy took place in the years 1837 to 1842 between Afrikaners and Zulu and between British and Afrikaners. It ended with the proclamation of Natal as a British colony in May 1843, when Napier, the Cape governor, decreed strict equality before the law of all persons in Natal, irrespective of colour, origin, language or creed. The Afrikaners then withdrew to join their fellow trekkers on the highveld. They founded republics of their own, free from British rule, on territory taken from Africans by force, and under a constitution that denied equality between white and black in either church or state.
Few settlers in the Cape accepted the humanitarian's ideal of racial equality. Emancipation opened a new stage in the relations between white and Coloured; but it did not revolutionize the society or abolish discrimination. Ordinance 1 of 1835, which was supposed to prepare the slaves for freedom, changed little more than their name. Now called apprentice-labourers, they continued to work for their former owners, without wages and on the same terms of food, clothing, lodging and medical care. Penalties harsher in some respects than those prescribed by the slave laws could be imposed under the ordinance. It provided for police settlements, houses of correction and penal gangs. Apprentices could be sentenced to hard labour, for periods ranging from one week to six months, and a whipping of fifteen, thirty or thirty-nine stripes, for different classes of offences. These included desertion, indolence, carelessness, negligence, damage to a master's property, drunkermess, brawling, insolence, unlawful conspiracy to disobey, persistent disobedience, and combined resistance against a master.
This was harsher by far than Somerset's proclamation of 1818 or Bourke's Ordinance 50, and was consequently more to the liking of employers. They had no taste for the free labour market that developed after 1 December 1838, when the apprenticeship system came to an end. Many ex-slaves left their masters for the towns, or went to farm on their own in remote areas, or settled on government land. The migration, coupled with epidemics of smallpox and measles in 1839-40, caused a shortage of labour on farms. The mean cash wage of agricultural workers in the western Cape rose from ten to fifteen shillings a month in the forties, and the customary wine ration was also increased.4 Farmers complained of drunkenness, desertion and vagrancy among their Coloured servants, and agitated for restraints on movement and a disciplinary code. The Colonial Office had previously disallowed a vagrancy law adopted in 1834 by the settler members of the legislative council. This yielded to the pressure by passing the Masters and Servants Ordinance of 1841, based partly on a British order-in-council promulgated in 1838 for the West Indies.
The ordinance repealed Ordinance 50 of 1828, re-enacted the disciplinary code prescribed for apprenticed ex-slaves, and reduced the scale of penalties to fourteen days' imprisonment for a first offence and/or a fine of not more than a month's wages. Employers were given a firmer hold over their servants by provisions that extended the statutory limitation on oral contracts from one month to one year and on written contracts from one to three years. A contract could be terminated on a month's notice given by either party, and the notice became void if the servant failed to leave his service on the specified date. A servant was entitled to two months' wages and other contractual benefits during sickness. It was made an offence to 'coerce' servants into joining a ' club or association', but the ordinance conceded a right to combine for collective bargaining.
Ordinance 1 of 1841 was the first labour law to include workers of all races. The word 'servant' as defined included any person ' employed for hire, wages, or other remuneration to perform any handicraft or other bodily labour in agriculture or manufactures, or in domestic services'. Artisans, craftsmen, machine operators and labourers were equally affected. It was a unique case of class legislation without any trace of racial discrimination. The legislative council made it generally applicable so as to meet anticipated objections in Whitehall. A law applying only to Coloured, explained Napier, would perpetuate their status 'as an inferior and distinct people'.5 There was an additional reason. Criminal sanctions were then commonly attached to labour contracts in Europe. The colonial administration saw no reason to exempt white workers. Belonging to the master race, they were less prone than their darker-skinned fellows to prosecution for breach of contract or disciplinary offences. The absence of a colour bar in the Cape's labour legislation had, however, a marked liberalizing effect on industrial relations in the colony.
Cape liberalism stood for racial tolerance. It was not a general characteristic of the white population. British immigrants rapidly absorbed the racial prejudices of the older white inhabitants, or acquired their own, as in Natal, where English-speaking settlers were dominant after 1850. They disfranchised Africans in 1865 and developed under British rule a white supremacy state no more tolerant of African and Asian claims to equality than were the Afrikaner republics. Liberalism took root in the western Cape because of the region's peculiar history, relative tranquillity, racial composition and cultural cleavages. British radical and humanitarian movements reached their peak in the first half of the century during the colony's formative years. It was deeply influenced, through the Colonial Office, the British clergy and missionaries, by the agitation that produced the Reform Act and the Abolition of Slavery Act. The movement ebbed in the latter half of the century, by which time the Cape had laid the foundations of equality before the law. It was sustained both by pressure of a large, partially assimilated Coloured population and by antagonisms between English- and Afrikaans-speaking whites.
Both groups of colonists were represented in the agitation during the second quarter of the century for representative government. A legislative council of five officials and six nominated settlers was formed in IB34, only to whet the appetite for self-rule. The council fell into disrepute and nearly collapsed in 1849, when Lord Grey proposed to land convicts from the Neptune at the Cape. His decision caused great resentment, the more so since a draft constitution was then before the privy council. A country-wide Anti-Convict Association declared a boycott of government institutions and of private firms identified with Grey's action. Demonstrations and mass meetings disrupted business and caused a minor recession. Sir Harry Smith, the governor, refused to let the convicts land; and the Neptune eventually sailed with its cargo of prisoners to Australia. The propertied classes of Cape Town and the eastern Cape, alarmed at the upheaval, formed themselves into a party of moderates and rallied round the government. British liberals and Afrikaner settlers used the occasion to press the demand for a new constitution.6
The Colonial Office had countered early requests of this kind with two objections. No colony where people were enslaved was fit for self-rule, while the rise of Dutch and British parties would nullify one of the main benefits of representative government: the cultivation of common loyalties and national cohesion. Officials at the Cape and prominent liberals like John Philip and John Fairbairn, editor of the South African Commercial Advertiser, reiterated the objections after emancipation. The Coloured lacked property and political experience. A settlers' parliament would pass oppressive laws depriving them forever of political power before they had learned to exercise their rights. On the other hand, British colonists, though the most wealthy, active and intelligent class, were a minority, and would not willingly submit to a Dutch majority inferior in all respects other than its numerical strength. The anti-convict agitation revealed a widespread hostility to the British government, and when the Colonial Office decided that a representative parliament could not be avoided, its chief concern was to keep power out of the hands of the anti-British faction.
Africans claims could be ignored. Though many thousands of Xhosa peasants, farm workers, prisoners of war and convicts, employed on roads and public works, inhabited the colony, the war on the eastern frontier was then at its height, and the great mass of Africans still belonged to independent states. This circumstance greatly facilitated the adoption of the colour-blind franchise insisted upon by the Colonial Office. The British government was in two minds, however, about the qualifications. The higher they were made, the smaller would be the Afrikaner and Coloured vote. British merchants, backed by Harry Smith and his colonial secretary, John Montagu, wanted a high qualification which would confine the vote to occupiers of property worth £50 or more. This, it was argued, would safeguard imperial interests by offsetting the Afrikaners' numerical superiority; and property interests, by excluding the working classes. Afrikaners, on the other hand, stood for a low qualification which would strengthen their position against the British merchants and officials in command of the legislature; and they were prepared to pay the price of extending the vote to a possibly significant number of Coloured.
A third group of liberals, led by Sir Andries Stockenstrom, William Porter the attorney-general, and Fairbairn, also advocated a low qualification, but for different reasons. They wished to secure both the imperial connexion and Coloured rights, two aims which in their minds were wholly compatible. The Coloured preferred crown colony rule to a settlers' parliament. If a settlers' parliament had to come, they would use their vote to support the imperial connexion and therefore the British minority. Porter, in particular, wanted a popular franchise for genuinely liberal reasons as well. Both 'Klaas, the Hottentot' and 'his neighbour, Mynheer van Dunder, the boer', might know very little about parliamentary issues, he told the legislative council, but the best school for teaching them was the vote. They knew enough to distinguish their friends from their enemies. The Coloured, he added, had a right to protect their labour and sell it at their own price; the right to make 'the most of whatever powers of mind and body God has given them'. To those who feared that the Coloured were politically dangerous, he replied in memorable words: 'Now, for myself, I do not hesitate to say that I would rather meet the Hottentot at the hustings, voting for his representative, than meet the Hottentot in the wilds with his gun upon his shoulder.'7
The constitution of 1853 gave the Cape a system of representative government, a parliament of two elected houses, and a franchise open to any man who for twelve months preceding registration had occupied property worth £25 or received an aggregate wage of either £50 or £25 with board and lodging. This was Porter's 'low franchise', which the Colonial Office adopted in the hope that it would foster common loyalties and interests among all subjects without distinction of class or colour.
Class coincided so closely with colour that the constitution was colour-blind only in form. The Coloured made up the great bulk of the poor - the landless, the low-paid, and the unemployed - who were kept off the rolls. A majority of the Coloured worked on the settlers' farms; and, it was ruled, farm labourers living in cottages owned by their masters did not ' occupy ' property within the meaning of the constitution. The franchise discriminated, therefore, against a colour-class. Even in later years, when Coloured voters were marginally important in a dozen or more constituencies, they never succeeded in returning any of their own people to parliament. It remained at all times a bourgeois institution of white landowners, merchants, company directors and professional men, in which the working class, white or coloured, had no representative of their own.
A parliament of masters showed small sympathy with the working man. When only two years old, it passed the Masters and Servants Act of 1856 - a law far more ruthless than its predecessors in the range of offences and the severity of the penalties prescribed for servants. Designed to enforce discipline on ex-slaves, peasants, pastoralists and a rural proletariat, it survived a century of industrialism and became the model for similar laws in white supremacy colonies throughout south, central and east Africa. The Act of 1856 remains with its offspring on the South African statute book: a grim reminder of the country's slave-owning past and a sharp instrument of racial discrimination. For though it is nominally colour-blind, the penalties are invoked only against the darker workers, some 30,000 of whom are sentenced annually for breaches of the labour code.
The offences can be grouped under three heads: breach of contract, indiscipline, and injury to property. The first group includes failure to commence work at an agreed date, unlawful absence from work, desertion and strikes. Among the disciplinary offences are disobedience, drunkenness, brawling and the use of abusive language. Finally, a servant can be jailed if he damages his master's property with malice or negligence, uses it unlawfully, loses livestock or fails to report the loss. Convicted servants were not given the option of a fine, however trivial the offence, by the original act. It authorized a sentence of one month's imprisonment for breach of contract or discipline by a first offender, and six weeks with solitary confinement and spare diet on a second conviction. A servant who damaged his master's property faced two months' imprisonment for a first offence, and three for a second, in each case with solitary confinement and spare diet. An employer who withheld wages could be sentenced to a fine of not more than £5.
Liberals like Fairbairn and Saul Solomon put up some opposition to the act. Its victims were passive. Yet the urban proletariat, if small, was well established and articulate. In 1856 the colony had some 9,000 persons engaged in commerce, and 1,500 in manufacturing. Cape Town's list of manufactories in 1859 included a total of fifty-six brickfields, limekilns, foundries, breweries, corn and snuff mills, soap, candle, fish-curing and printing establishments. The standard wage for white carpenters, masons, bricklayers, joiners and mechanics in 1859-61 was 7s. 6d. a day, and for Coloured 6s. Employers complained that immigrants recruited in England to work in the colony for 4s. a day often struck work soon after landing at Cape Town and extracted as much as 15s. from employers.8 When regularly employed, building artisans, tailors, printers, bakers, wagon makers, and boat builders earned enough to qualify for the vote, fifteen years before Britain's second reform act of 1867. Yet there was no working-class movement in the Cape.
Labour historians have diligently scanned the local press for early evidence of such, and with meagre results.9 Cape Town's printers formed a protection society in 1841, which soon faded away when some of the founders set up in business on their own. Workers took part in the anti-convict agitation, held mass meetings during the minor recession that followed, and descended on the governor Smith to demand work or bread. The printers made another effort in 1857 at forming a mutual benefit society, to aid sick members, widows and orphans out of a fund to which every member subscribed 8d. a week.10 James Marriott, a radical printer, helped to promote the first labour newspaper, the Cape Mercury and Weekly Magazine, which ran from January to October 1859; and the first workers' cooperative, formed in the same year 'for the cheapening of the price of provisions'. Prices were scandalously high, he wrote; and the Cape was not the land of milk and honey that immigrants were led to believe. A decent mechanic, earning £1.16s. a week, had to find £2.2s.3d. for the food, clothing and rent that cost only £1.11s.6d. in London.11 The Magazine recorded attempts by benevolent liberals to establish a Mechanics' Institute to instruct and entertain artisans.12 It seems, however, that the first two trade unions were formed, both in Cape Town, only in 1881: a Typographical Society, and a local branch of the English Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners.
The primary purpose of a trade union is to maintain and raise wage rates by limiting competition between workmen, preventing undercutting, and applying organized pressure on employers. For trade unions to arise, there must be a body of lifelong wage earners free to sell their labour, wholly dependent on wages, without prospect of becoming independent producers, and aware of the benefits of collective bargaining. A century ago South African workers lacked one or more of these qualities. White artisans could move easily out of their class to set up as masters on their own. Many of the less skilled workers were African peasants who retained a base in their traditional communities. Habits and attitudes inculcated during the period of slavery persisted among the ex-slaves, their descendants and former masters. Racial and cultural diversities in the working population inhibited the growth of class consciousness and solidarity.
South Africa has never provided a good living for the ordinary labourer. Wages and working conditions were adjusted to the conventionally low standards of ex-slaves, the free Coloured and tribal peasants. Immigrant working men competed with the Coloured for both skilled and unskilled work. House servants, farm hands, dairymaids, gardeners and grooms who migrated to the Cape in the nineteenth century usually lost little time in looking for more remunerative and congenial employment.13 Opportunities kept pace with immigration, even in the sluggish economy of the period before the great diamond and gold discoveries. Thomas Pringle noted in 1824 that ' to mechanics and farm labourers of steady and enterprising character, the path to independence is still open and certain '. Many of the 200 Scottish servants and mechanics who came to the Cape a few years earlier had ' already cleared little fortunes of from £500 to £2,000'; all but a few were in prosperous and improving circumstances.14 Germans who came under contract to farmers in the sixties were also 'intent on procuring their freedom and independence'. After completing their contract period of two years' service and repaying their passage money, nearly all left the farms to become their own masters in the towns.15
The economic expansion that accompanied the mining of diamonds at Kimberley accentuated the instability of the immigrant white worker. Germans, according to witnesses before the parliamentary committee of 1879 on labour resources, entered the colony in order to become masters. No sooner had they learned to be useful than they bought a horse and cart, or set up as a shopkeeper, or acquired land and competed for labour. ' The objection to Europeans,' said a witness, ' is that after a time they will set up a brandy shop or something of that kind. They become independent of labour too soon.' Only Coloured men were content to labour.16 They were paid about 15s. to 20s. a month, with food, quarters and a garden allotment, in the western districts. Africans in the eastern Cape received from 1s. to 2s. a day with rations. White employees on the farms were much better paid. They generally occupied the position of an overseer; and if steady, active and prudent, soon became masters and employers.17
Not every white worker climbed. The failures often embarrassed employers and the white community. Members of parliament told the committee of 1879 that farmers were hard put to isolate English labourers from Coloured on the farms: 'they must be put on an equality, and then they take black. women and go back.' The Coloured, being more skilful than the greenhorns, tended to look down on them, ' and in many cases they degenerate in consequence'. A white man was said to be a degenerate if he fraternized with the Coloured. He usually took on the prejudices of the colonists and gave a racial reason for escaping from a disagreeable occupation. White navvies employed on railway construction in the sixties refused to work alongside Coloured, and abandoned their jobs for this reason when set to work on the line at Tulbagh Kloof in 2he western Cape. They 'spoke about the Kloof in very strong navvy language ' and said they were not going to mix with the Coloured, or teach them the way to work for the same rates of pay. Though the contractors offered higher wages to skilled men if they would stay and instruct the labourers, they refused and left for New Zealand.18
Any indignity associated with the work of an unskilled labourer was attached to his status as a hired man and not to the work itself. The colonists never turned work into the fetish that: it became on the North American frontier. Nor did they, however, develop the repugnance to manual labour that characterized the Spanish in South America. Rough and laborious work might be thought fit only for 'Hottentots, Kafirs and Coolies' when performed for hire. A white man was not degraded, however, if he felled trees, ploughed, made hay or used pick and shovel on his own account. Many settlers practised a definite craft and combined farming with the trade of a blacksmith, mason or harnessmaker.19 Traditional attitudes placed a premium on skills which, like capital, were imported, and associated with a white skin, though not regarded in the Cape as the white man's prerogative.
A white artisan would not lose caste by working side by side with the Coloured who provided the bulk of labour, both skilled and unskilled, in the building, furniture, garment and leather industries. He maintained his superior status if he earned more, occupied a leading position, and mixed with the Coloured only when at work. This social distance deterred him from combining with Coloured artisans in a trade union. A high degree of social mobility, the smallness and isolation of the white working class account, on the other hand, for the failure of white workers to form unions of their own. These factors did not apply to the Coloured. They were restrained by an entirely different set of conditions. Two centuries of colonial rule, slavery, forced labour and arrested development had fostered in them an unquestioning submission to white authority, and inhibited the growth of either a class or national consciousness.
One important exception must be noted. The independent spirit of the pastoral Nama persisted in the offspring of unions between themselves and the colonists. The 'Bastards', or Griquas as they were later called, spoke Afrikaans and shared the culture of their white forbears. This affinity did not save them from constant persecution. They were conscripted for service with the commandos, expelled from their pastures, denied the right to own land, and forced into the least accessible parts of the country. The survivors eventually took refuge towards the end of the eighteenth century in the semi-arid tract west of the Vaal and Orange rivers, in what came to be known as Griqualand West. Here they formed a semi-autonomous state under Andries Waterboer. Another distinct Griqua state took shape after 1825 under Adam Kok at Philippolis, below the confluence of the Caledon and Orange rivers, while a third Coloured-Nama settlement, culled from mission stations, was settled by the administration in 1830 along the Kat river in the eastern Cape. The three groups of pioneers were border guards, defending the frontiers of white settlement. All lost their land to the whites, and all rose in rebellion against white settler rule.
The Kat River settlers fought with troops and commandos against the Xhosa in the wars of 1834 and 1846, suffered heavily, and received no compensation. Many of them, led by Andries Botha, took up arms and joined the Xhosa in the war of 1851. Botha was convicted of treason, the rebels' land was confiscated, and the colonists soon afterwards took over the entire settlement. In Griqualand West, Waterboer concluded mutual defence treaties with the government in 1834 and 1843. His burghers marched with Harry Smith against a party of Voortrekkers in 1848. Six years later, however, Britain recognized the Orange Free State and abandoned the Griquas. Diamonds were discovered in Griqualand West in the 1860s, and this led to the annexation of the territory by Britain in 1871. Meanwhile, farmers of the Orange Free State had overrun the Griqua farms at Philippolis. Adam Kok then led his people in 1861 to a sparsely inhabited region called Nomansland on the eastern plateau slopes of the Drakensberg. Here they founded their commonwealth of Griqualand East. It, too, was engulfed by the colonists. When Gcaleka, Ngqika and Thembu clans made another desperate attempt to liberate themselves in 1877-8, the Griquas of Griqualand East and West took up arms in a rebellion that spread across the Orange to the northern border of the colony. This was the last armed struggle of a Coloured community against white supremacy in South Africa.
The Griqua were destroyed because the colonists coveted their land. In the older parts of the colony, where they were essentially the working classes, the Coloured survived because they possessed only their labour power. Cape liberalism gave them equality before the law, access to the courts, protection against lawlessness, a free labour market, and in all other respects permitted a high degree of discrimination. They were emancipated from slavery, but not from poverty, ignorance and disease. As the legal gap narrowed, the social gap between them and the colonists widened. White supremacy was entrenched by a growing inequality in educational opportunities. Mission schools were founded for the Coloured after emancipation, and government schools for the whites. 'It is quite impossible to assess the damage suffered by the Coloured People,' notes their historian, Professor Marais, 'through their children being confined to the inferior mission schools.'20 If an assessment were made, it might be found that segregation introduced and maintained an educational gap of thirty years between whites and Coloured. A few obtained a good middle-class education. None was admitted to a post higher than that of messenger in public services or private corporations.
That Coloured workers in the western districts were conscious of their disabilities appears from a petition presented to parliament in r871 by Titus Lergele, Jacob Haas, Frederik Pitt and fifty-six other residents of Genadendal mission station. They protested against demands raised by colonists for discriminatory penalties under the masters and servants law for farm labourers, and a speedier procedure to deal with 'hard-necked servants' who caused 'great grievances and inconveniences'.21 The petitioners pointed out that memorialists before them had asked for relief from laws ' which injuriously affected the labouring classes '. Yet the obnoxious statutes remained in force, while others had been added which likewise bore hard on their class. The petition set out the case for reform, in particular for the option of a fine 'instead of imprisonment as a felon'. Since they were unrepresented in parliament, and since 'strong prejudices still exist in the Colony against colour, race and class, the petitioners urged the governor, as Her Majestys representative, to guard their interests.22
Britain's master and servant law, equally one-sided, prescribed imprisonment for defaulting servants but not for employers. Trade unions mounted a campaign for reform and won a minor victory in 1867.23 The agitation touched at the Cape, where Saul Solomon 'lived himself into the heart of the Imperial Parliament' by poring over political reports of 'the best English newspapers'.24 He championed the workers' cause in the assembly against J. C. Molteno, the main author of the 1856 Masters and Servants Act and spokesman of the farmers. Responsible government came to the Cape in 1872, with Molteno as prime minister. He introduced a bill to give farmers the stiffer penalties they demanded for their servants, though Solomon was able to obtain important concessions after a long controversy. The amending act of 1873 did discriminate against servants employed on farms by exposing only them to sentences of imprisonment with hard labour, spare diet and solitary confinement. On the other hand, magistrates were given the power to impose fines, and not imprisonment alone, on all other servants; while employers were for the first time made liable to imprisonment for breaches of contract.
Responsible government, imperial expansion and industrialism followed hard on the diamond discoveries of 1867-71. British and colonial troops made war on the Hlubi in 1873, the Gcaleka and Pedi in 1877, the Ngqika, Thembu, Pondo, Griqua and Rolong in 1878, the Zulu in 1879, the Sotho in 1880, the Ndebele in 1893, and the Afrikaner republics in 1899. The Cape absorbed the Transkei and its peoples in 1879-94. Britain annexed Basutoland in 1868, Griqualand West in 1871, the South African Republic in 1877, Zululand in 1887, Matabeleland in 1894, and the Afrikaner republics in 1900. The Zulu rebellion of 1906, in which nearly 4,000 Africans were killed, marked the last stage in 250 years of armed struggle by the traditional societies against white invaders. South Africa's industrial era was baptized in blood and the subjugation of small nations. As from the beginning of the century, the liberation movement took the form of struggles between classes and national communities.
The Cape's short-lived liberalism went into a decline after the granting of responsible government. Kimberley's mine owners produced diamonds under a regime of colour bars, pass laws and closed compounds for indentured, migratory peasant workers. Cecil Rhodes, mine magnate, politician and imperialist, dominated the colony in the last quarter of the century. The formation of an Afrikaner Bond in 1879 polarized political differences among the colonists and strengthened the tendency towards overt racial discrimination. The Transkeian annexations multiplied threefold the potential African vote, then already a significant electoral factor in eastern Cape constituencies. To keep out the 'blanket Kafir' - the term applied by racists to the Transkeian farmer - Rhodes, backed by the Bond, loaded the franchise against Africans in 1887 and 1892. Parliament excluded land held under customary tenure from the franchise qualifications, raised the landed property qualification from £25 to £75, eliminated the £25 wage qualification, and added a literacy test. The effect of the changes was to strike some 30,000 Africans off the rolls and to stimulate the growth of an African political movement.
Wars, conquest and annexations provided one of the primary requisites of industrialism - an uprooted peasantry available at low cost for rough manual work. Peasant communities lost their capitalist combines for rights. The struggle rarely crossed the colour line to unite workers of all races in a common front against the employing class. White workers usually chose to fight on their own, often under the banner of white supremacy. Racial discrimination, sponsored by governments, employers and white workers, divided the working class into antagonistic racial groups. As industrialism spread, the country moved ever farther away from the ideal state contemplated by Cape liberalism, in which all persons 'without distinction of class or colour should be united by one bond of loyalty and a common interest'.