Barnato, Beit, Joel, Rhodes, Robinson, Rudd and Wernher used the fortunes they had made out of diamonds to buy gold-bearing rock and to finance mining operations on the Witwatersrand. They duplicated the pattern of labour organization that had served them so well at Kimberley. Fifty-three companies employed 3,400 whites and ten times as many Africans in 1892 on outcrop claims along the Reef. 1 The whites supervised and did the skilled work. African peasant workers, who were housed and fed in compounds, usually worked for three or four months at a stretch before returning to their villages. The migratory labour system tended to be inefficient and wasteful. The large turnover of workers involved high recruiting and supervisory costs. Every new batch of peasants had to learn mining techniques and undergo the painful process of adapting themselves to a strange environment. Standards of housing and diet were subordinated to the aim of extracting the greatest output at the lowest cost. Bad living and working conditions made for high morbidity and mortality rates, and discouraged men from coming to the mines. But the owners found compensating advantages in labor-intensive methods of production; and turned down proposals to settle Africans with their families in villages along the Rand. 2
The white miner, a director of labour rather than a labourer, owed his supervisory role to the constant flow of greenhorns down the shaft. Since his job was a function of their inexperience, he was dispensable to the extent that they learned the skills of their trade. His dependence on the ignorance of the men under his supervision and his estrangement from them made him feel insecure. He feared competition, resented the African's ability to learn by doing, and with Kimberley's example in mind suspected the mine owners' intentions.
It was a fear of being swamped by fellow countrymen, however, that stimulated men from Cornwall, Lancashire and Scotland to found the Witwatersrand Mine Employees' and Mechanics' Union on 20 August 1892. Some 2,000 men and women, meeting in Johannesburg's Market Square, protested 'against the attempt of the Chamber of Mines to flood these fields with labour by means of cheap emigration '. 3 J. Seddon, the union's first secretary, warned that the Chamber meant to cut wages by bringing out miners with wives clinging round their necks. He listed other grievances: unsafe and insanitary working conditions, excessive hours, low wages. But he would not advocate a quarrel with capital. 'If any wages had to be reduced,' he appealed, 'let the wages of black labour be cut down.'
The miners rejected class solidarity with Africans but collaborated with capitalists in establishing, also on 20 August 1892, the Transvaal National Union to campaign for equal franchise rights for all white men in the Transvaal. The union became an instrument of subversion, a tool of Rhodes, Jameson and the mine owners who conspired to bring about the abortive putsch of 1896. Trade unionists had withdrawn long before then from the movement, but their initial participation revealed a conflict of loyalties and interests. Thomas, the mine union's president, wanted the men to cooperate with the owners whose interests, he said, they shared in such matters as the franchise and the customs tariff. 4 Seddon, on the other hand, urged the men to have nothing to do with the National Union as long as the owners persisted in their ' dastardly attempt to deluge the country with miners '. It was arrogance on the part of the Chamber of Mines, he urged, to ask workmen to join the National Union while trying to 'crush them down with a worse tyranny than ever the Transvaal Government proposed to put upon the country'. They should be labour unionists first and national unionists afterwards. 5
British workmen, most of whom were temporary residents, did not feel strongly about the franchise and suspected the aims of the employers. E. B. Rose, a member of the miners' executive and at one time president of the union, contended that 'the working man was politically the equal of the richest mineowner' as long as neither had the vote. Indeed, he claimed, workers were better off without a vote unless it was accompanied by the secret ballot. For, as they had learned at Kimberley before the Cape introduced the ballot in 1894, employers exploited the worker's vote under the open system. The National Union's leaders rejected a proposal to include a demand for secret voting in the franchise campaign, whereupon the labour delegates withdrew from the union. They decided to put their claims directly to the government and did so, added Rose, ' invariably with the happiest results'. 6
Mine owners on the Rand, though arrogant, commanded less power than in the Cape where Rhodes, as prime minister, was able to promote legislation in which he, as managing director of De Beers and uncrowned king of Rhodesia, had a personal pecuniary interest. Such a corrupting concentration of power could not occur in the Transvaal while Kruger and his burghers controlled the state. An alliance between white worker and Afrikaner farmer was conceivable in spite of language and cultural differences. Both groups were at loggerheads with the capitalists, who exploited the one and plotted against the other. Afrikaners recognized colour-castes and not classes. The constitution of 1856 guaranteed inequality between white and black in church or state; but Jack, if white, was as good as his master.
Mine owners rejected equality of classes and races. The Star sneered at the 'embryonic John Burnses and Tom Manns' who, ambitious for themselves, valued notoriety and power more than the success of the workers' cause.' 7 Employers showed their teeth. Andrew Hope, the miners' new president, was told to quit the union or his job at the Simmer and Jack mine. He chose to be victimized. The union decided to offer ' passive resistance ' to the company's 'tyrannical conduct' by employing Hope, at his former salary, to organize the union along the Rand. 8
The republic was destitute of industrial laws and hardly able to protect workmen against exploitation and victimization. The government disliked intervening more than was necessary in the internal affairs of mining companies, President Kruger explained to Rose and J. T. Bain, the union's president and secretary, when they asked him in 1893 to open state-owned mines for the relief of white unemployment. He would not risk the public's money in dubious enterprises or stir up more noise in Johannesburg, from where enough noise was coming already, by competing with the owners. 9 The union was more successful when it agitated against the owners' gold theft bill. Like the Cape's Illicit Diamond Buying Act, on which it was modelled, the bill would authorize espionage and the surveillance of employees by company agents. Miners lobbied the Volksraad and demonstrated through Johannesburg streets in February 1893 behind a brass band and banners, with the slogan IGB THE SHADOW OF THE IDB -- REMEMBER KIMBERLEY AND IDB. The Volksraad threw the bill out; and the miners celebrated their victory with another procession, headed by Africans carrying a coffin inscribed 'In memory of G. T. Bill.' 10
The union claimed to have easy access to the government and a unique record of successes in obtaining legislative reforms, notably when the Volksraad adopted twenty of its twenty-three suggested amendments to the draft of the republic's first mining law of 1893. 11 It introduced long-overdue safety measures and the first explicit industrial colour bar. This stipulated that no African, Asian or Coloured might prepare charges, load drill holes or set fire to fuses. 12 The Volksraad adopted the clause by fifteen votes to eight. The minority pointed out that some 'Kaffirs' were well qualified to work with dynamite. It was unreasonable to pay a white man £5 a month for work that a black could do as well for £2. Anyone with a certificate of competency should be allowed to blast. But the state mining engineer contended that the only purpose of the clause was to prevent accidents. He, for one, had no confidence in a 'Kaffir'. Members who supported him said they would not give Africans 'so much right by law'; and read into the clause a general ban on their employment in the mines. 13
The presence of competent Coloured and African blasters, some from the diamond fields, gave the lie to the contention that a dark skin denoted an inherent inability to acquire the skills and judgement of a skilled miner. Unqualified white men, on the other hand, were as great a danger in mining as unqualified Africans. The authorities soon found that a deficiency of pigment did not guarantee ability. The new mining code of 1896 omitted the racial test and substituted a blasting certificate. It became the hallmark of a professional miner. In terms of the regulation a trained, reliable African or Coloured could assist the certificated blaster and under his direct supervision prepare charges, load drill holes and light fuses. 14 It was evidently assumed that only white men would hold a certificate. This was not a statutory rule. But the code did introduce two new colour bars.
One regulation gave white men the sole right to work as banksmen and onsetters; another reserved the job of engine driver to certificated whites. 15 The miners' union had asked the government to prohibit the employment of unqualified men on engines that hauled cages and skips along the shafts. Not only untrained whites, explained Rose, 'but Coolies and even Kaffirs also' were thus employed, 'with the inevitable result that accidents to men employed in the mines through overwinding the cages or otherwise became more frequent.' 16 But mine owners and managers objected to the colour bar. They argued for a test based on competence and not colour. Many 'Cape Boys', they said, were as competent as white men and should not be barred, especially in small mines and prospecting shafts. 17 The government made a concession to the owners in 1897 by dropping the racial qualification for banksmen and onsetters, but retained it for engine drivers. 18 This was the only statutory colour bar left on the mines at the outbreak of war. White men did most of the skilled work, but there were areas in which Coloured and Africans could rise above the labourer's level.
Colour prejudice, Anglo-Afrikaner rivalries and a shortage of skilled men formed the matrix of the labour movement. As at Kimberley, racial and national cleavages distorted class alignments. Immigrant miners, mechanics, fitters, joiners and printers formed trade unions along traditional class lines. The Witwatersrand Mine Employees' and Mechanics' Union agitated for an eight-hour day, safety measures, and compensation for injuries; celebrated May Day; and defended trade unionism against the accusation that it was prone to violence and anarchy. 19 But the most class-conscious leaders, like the Scottish fitter J. T. Bain, also appealed to racial sentiment for protection against African miners and to republican sentiment for protection against mine owners. The immigrants were torn between class interests and national loyalties. Bain, whom some historians believe to have been South Africa's greatest trade union leader, 20 became a citizen of the republic and fought against the British army. Few men of his class followed the same course. The great majority withdrew or joined the British troops. None identified himself with his African co-worker.
Africans, observed the Star, 21 had no value in the community except as the equivalent of so much horsepower. They were both indispensable and expendable. Accidents or disease killed, maimed or incapacitated thousands every year. Employers recruited fresh supplies of sturdy young men from villages within a radius of 500 miles. They came by foot and rail, often riding for ten days in open cattle trucks, to be sent underground the day after their arrival and without training or time to recuperate. The resulting death rate was high. It averaged sixty-nine per thousand from diseases on Rand mines in 1902-3, when the first health statistics were compiled, and ranged from 118 to 164 in groups of men from tropical regions. Pneumonia, scurvy, meningitis, enteric, and dysentery caused the death of 3,762 Africans, or eighty-two per cent of all who died from disease on mines and works of the Witwatersrand in 1903. The death rate fell to thirty-three per thousand in 1906, after Milner's administration had enforced minimum standards of diet, housing, sanitation and hospital care. 22
The high incidence of deaths and injuries - for which no compensation was paid - bad food, poor accommodation and unpleasant work gave the mines a bad name. 'We do not like our men to go to Johannesburg, because they go there to die,' chiefs from Basutoland told Sir Godfrey Lagden, the Transvaal's first secretary of native affairs under British rule. 23 The African's only defence was to abscond or change his job for a better. Mine owners sang the praises of free enterprise, attacked Kruger's monopolistic concessions over dynamite, liquor and railways, but did not scruple to monopolize recruiting or to restrict the worker's freedom of movement and contract. Managers petitioned in 1888 for a pass system, monthly labour contracts, penalties for deserters, and the registration of all Africans in the republic. The Chamber of Mines, formed in 1889, complained in its first annual report that competition for labourers was taking 'the regrettable form of overt attempts to bribe and seduce the employees of neighbouring companies to desert their employers'. A manager had 'standing alone, scarcely any other remedy than to raise his rates of pay'.
Rhodes, Lionel Phillips, George Farrar and other members of the Chamber took drastic action. They conspired in 1895 to bring about the downfall of the republic; agitated for a labour tax, pass laws, and a ban on liquor for Africans; and undertook to reduce wages from 2s. 3d. a shift to 1s. 6d. for skilled and 1s. for 'ordinary' workers. 24 Kruger's men disarmed Jameson's filibusters with hardly a struggle; and the Industrial Commission of 1896, keeping an eye on British allegations of 'Boer slavery', refused to recommend any measure ' equivalent to forced labour'. 25 But the Volksraad gave the owners their pass law, which they then said was ineffective to an extent that made it one of the grievances to be redressed by war. To monopolize recruiting and stop crimping, the owners formed the Native Labour Supply Association in 1896 and instructed compound managers to impose uniform conditions of service. Africans were to work not less than nine hours underground and ten on the surface, with a diet of not more than two and a half pounds of mealie-meal a day and two pounds of meat a week. 26
The attack on wages followed in 1897. The African miner's average wage had reached a peak of 63s. 6d. for thirty completed shifts in 1895. It was reduced to 48s. 7d. on a scale ranging from 1s. 2d. to 2s. 6d. a shift. Anticipating disturbances and desertions, the Chamber asked the government to draft extra police to the mines and to instruct native commissioners ' to send forward as many natives as possible to these fields'. 27 White mining employees at Randfontein were notified at about the same time that their wages would be cut by ten shillings to 20s. a week. They struck work, and were evicted by police at Kruger's command from their company-owned houses. But the men won and went back to work at the old rates. W. H. Andrews, then employed as a fitter on Porges Randfontein, took part in the strike and claimed that it made two notable gains. It prevented a reduction of wages all along the Reef and ' exploded the fallacy that Oom Paul and his government were the friends of the workers'. 28 Whether fallacious or well founded, the belief persisted among white workers for many years after the fall of the republic.
Rhodes had engineered the armed invasion and abortive rising of December 1895 in his dual capacity of prime minister and company promoter. His fellow conspirators included members of his chartered company, leading mine owners, the Bechuanaland administration, and the British high commissioner at the Cape. Chamberlain, the responsible British minister, knew of Jameson's preparations but made no attempt to arrest the raid. 29 After it had failed, the imperial government took the initiative against the republic with the full backing and active support of a majority of mine owners. Britain drafted 10,000 troops to South Africa in August 1899 and moved troops to the Cape and Natal borders. Kruger presented an ultimatum on 9 October, demanding the withdrawal of the troops. Britain rejected the ultimatum, and the republican commandos invaded Natal and the Cape to begin a war that was to last for thirty-one months.
Britain annexed the Orange Free State on 24 May 1900, occupied Johannesburg on the 31st, and annexed the South African Republic on 1 September. Republican forces continued to fight a guerrilla war with great courage and skill against an army nine times their size. The war ended in the defeat of the republics and a peace treaty signed at Vereeniging on 31 May 1902. Britain spent £250 million on the war, put 448,000 troops in the field, lost 5,774 men killed in action and 16,168 who died of wounds and disease. Her armies burnt homes, devastated farms, and confined civilians in concentration camps. Nearly 4,000 republicans were killed in battle, 20,000 died in the camps, 31,000 were taken prisoner, and 20,000 surrendered at the end of the war. 30
Africans and Coloured also died, unrecorded and unsung, in their masters' war. They served as scouts, spies, stretcher bearers, transport drivers, labourers and camp followers, but not as soldiers. Both British and Afrikaners respected the tradition that allowed men of colour to fight with colonists against tribal impis but never against whites. Peasants lost crops, livestock and huts, as troops, burning and pillaging, swept over the farms. Commandos, living on the land, seized the cattle of tribesmen without compensation. The tribesmen retaliated when the commandos withdrew by seizing the farmers' stock. There were inter-tribal clashes and occasional attacks on isolated bands of dispirited burghers. 31 Schreiner, the Cape premier, gloomily predicted an African rising if colonial forces fought outside the border. But Africans hoped that Britain would restore their land and made no concerted attempt to free themselves from white domination.
It was a white man's war also in terms of its objectives. Britain expressed great concern for the sufferings of Africans, Coloured and Indians in the Transvaal; and professed to be fighting for their freedom and to extend the rights and liberties of the common people. The promise of their liberation seemed to many Englishmen the war's single redeeming feature. But Africans, Coloured and Indians obtained no relief either at the peace settlement or in the post-war reconstruction. Acting under martial law, the British military authorities reduced the African miner's average wage in 1900 from 45s. to 30s. per thirty completed shifts and the standard wage to 1s. or 1s. 2d. a shift. 32 Africans lost in bargaining capacity under British rule, which turned the republics into colonies, restored authority to the defeated enemy, cultivated their loyalty, and consolidated an alliance with them on the basis of white supremacy.
The republicans fought to retain their independence. They were an oppressing as well as an oppressed nation, writes the Marxist historian Endre Sik; but as 'freedom fighters' their struggle, he claims, 'belongs to one of the most glorious chapters of the history of liberation wars'. 33 A similar opinion was current at the time in the international labour movement, not least in Britain, where the Independent Labour party's vigorous antiwar campaign made it for several years 'the most unpopular Party and its adherents and leaders the most bitterly abused persons in the country'. 34 Africans, Indians and Coloured probably agreed with Britain's Fabians that the war, if wholly unjust, was wholly necessary in the interests of civilization and the empire, whose control over such mighty forces as goldfields was to be preferred to control by small communities of frontiersmen. 35
Rosa Luxemburg, another Marxist, saw in imperialism the political manifestation of a ravenous capitalist system which existed by invading, destroying and absorbing small peasant societies. Like the Fabians, but without their faith in Britain's civilizing mission, she claimed that the war was 'historically necessary ' and the inevitable result of conflict between a 'patriarchal peasant economy' and 'modern large-scale capitalist exploitation'. Republican farmers and British capitalists, she argued, had the same aims. Both wished to subdue the African, expropriate his land, and force him into the labour market. The triumph of capitalism was a foregone conclusion in her opinion, and it was futile for the republics to resist their own absorption in a modern state. 36 The Fabian-Luxemburg thesis rested on an assumption that the republicans could not or would not change their ways to meet the needs of an industrial economy. Sir Alfred Milner, the British high commissioner, Joseph Chamberlain, the secretary of state for colonies, the British press and the mine owners used a similar argument to justify their war. But it was a false and dishonest argument.
Few agrarian societies were so richly endowed or well equipped as the Transvaal for an industrial revolution. The republic attracted educated and professional men from Holland or the Cape, and was beginning to produce its own specialists. Left to itself, it would have developed an efficient administration, a network of railways and roads, and adequate supplies of water and power. Far from being intractable, the burghers expanded production to provide foodstuffs for the Rand, built railways linking it to the ports, enacted an excellent miring code, kept order over unruly, rebellious fortune-hunters, repelled an armed imperialist invasion, and held the world's greatest military power at bay for more than two years. The mining companies under republican rule produced in 1897, after barely ten years of effective development, more than three million ounces of gold valued at £10.5 million and distributed £2,817,000 in dividends. Foreign capital flowed without let or hindrance into the republic; operated in absolute security even during the war, when Kruger set his face against a scorched-earth policy; made great profits and paid in taxes only five per cent of declared profits. A war was neither inevitable nor necessary to modernize the republic.
The mine owners claimed that the dynamite monopoly, high railway rates, an abuse of liquor by labourers, and a scarcity of African workmen cost the industry £2.5 million a year, which would be saved if they could bend the government to their will. The wasted costs were exaggerated and the grievances trivial. They originated in government policy, not in a backward social structure, and were neither irremediable nor so grave as to warrant the use of force. British taxpayers should have queried the wisdom of a war that saddled them with a debt a hundred times as great as the alleged annual loss; a war fought to augment the profits of shareholders or, in J. A. Hobson's memorable phrase, 'to place a small international oligarchy of mine-owners and speculators in power at Pretoria'. His first-hand study of the Transvaal just before the war persuaded him that the mine owners had provoked it to obtain a government suited to their purpose. Their 'one all-important object' was 'to secure a full, cheap, regular, submissive supply of Kaffir and white labour'. This, concisely stated, he argued, was Britain's war aim. 37
The judgement now seems harsh and intemperate, but it gains credibility from the content of the agitation preceding the war and from the policies that followed afterwards. If motives are to be judged by consequences, the mine owners did plot to instal a government able to tap labour resources in Africa and Asia that the republic neither commanded nor wished to utilize. Britain did not, however, make war only to benefit shareholders. South African historians have shown that Chamberlain and Milner, who forced war on the republics, had in mind broad imperial interests which were being threatened by the shift in the balance of power. 38 Gold mining was changing the Transvaal into Africa's most advanced economic region. It was likely to become the centre of a vigorous Afrikaner nationalism, radiating to the south, drawing to it the loyalties of Afrikaners throughout the sub-continent, and challenging Britain's presence in all South Africa. Chamberlain and Milner decided to prevent the growth of a rival imperialism. They demanded franchise reforms that would give British subjects the upper hand in the republic, asserted the rights of a suzerain, and when these stratagems failed, provoked the war.
This is a political interpretation. It comes from scholars who reject economic determinism as being too simple and crude an explanation of political events. The interpretation serves as far as it goes, but it does not account for all the facts. The mine owners who plotted against the republic in 1895 cannot be exonerated from blame for the war of 1899. It is of the nature of capitalists to make profits and of governments to make war. Neither will readily admit to responsibility for the other. Yet economic and political motives have seldom blended so nakedly as in the capitalists and politicians who conspired in the last decade of the century to bring about the downfall of the Transvaal. The South African war of 1899-1902 stands as a classic example of imperialist aggression prompted by capitalist greed.
Britain might have atoned for her predatory aims if she had fulfilled her pledge to free Africans, Coloured and Asians from racial tyranny. Milner told a Coloured deputation in January 1901 that he could not accept their offer to take up arms against the republican forces; but promised to secure fair treatment for all persons of colour in the Transvaal. He 'thoroughly agreed that it was not race or colour, but civilization which was the test of a man's capacity for political rights'. 39 Two months later, in the first round of peace talks at Middelburg, Kitchener laid the basis for a betrayal of African rights. He told Louis Botha that if the burghers surrendered, they would be allowed to keep their rifles under licence - 'to protect them', in Botha's words, 'from natives'. Secondly, the 'Kaffir question' would be solved by not giving franchise rights to 'Kaffirs' until after the introduction of representative government. 40
The imperial government reacted with a firm declaration of principle. Chamberlain's cable of 6 March 1901 stated: 'We cannot consent to purchase peace by leaving the coloured population in the position in which they stood before the war.' He instructed Milner to modify Kitchener's peace proposals by stipulating that the franchise, if given after the grant of representative government, 'will be so limited as to secure the just predominance of the white race, but the legal position of the Kafflrs will be similar to that which they hold in the Cape Colony'. 41 Milner watered down the guarantee by substituting 'coloured persons' for 'Kaffirs' in the text of his letter to Kitchener; but it was clearly Britain's intention at that stage to insist on a non-racial franchise.
The republicans rejected the peace terms for reasons other than the franchise. Fighting a stubborn guerrilla war, they wore the British down and sapped their will to continue a struggle that seemed pointless and wasteful after the seizure of the gold mines. On 31 May 1902 Britain agreed at Vereeniging to a peace settlement that would put Afrikaners back in power, give them £3 million to restore the ravaged farms, and keep Africans, Coloured and Indians in subjection.
It was Smuts, on behalf of the vanquished, who drafted the decisive clause in the treaty. Article 8 stipulated: 'The question of granting the franchise to natives will not be decided until after the introduction of self-government.' 42 The treaty made no mention of Coloured rights and left the issue of the ' native ' franchise to be settled after the introduction of responsible government, and not of representative government as Chamberlain had insisted. By agreeing to these terms, Britain was pledged to allow a white oligarchy to decide whether or not to give the vote to the great majority of the population in the conquered territories. She had tacitly surrendered her moral responsibilities and abandoned her self-assumed role as the protector of Africans and Coloured.
Chamberlain told Generals Botha, de Wet and de la Rey in London on 5 September 1902 that there was 'no parallel in history for conditions so generous granted by a victorious belligerent to its opponents'. 43 Others since then have praised the Vereeniging treaty as a magnanimous gesture, an act of contrition, a bold bid for Anglo-Afrikaner conciliation and a stroke of genius in the best English tradition. 44 Afrikaners and Africans disputed this verdict, the former because an unjust war had deprived them of independence, the latter because an unjust peace had entrenched white supremacy.
Referring to the peace treaty, Tengo Jabavu wrote in October 1902 that, since 'the English, the Dutch and the Native elements' had a right to be in the country, 'each should be accorded by the others the common rights of citizenship '. 45 Dr Abdurahman, the outstanding Coloured spokesman in the first quarter of the century, warned that 'in the settlement after the war and in the endeavour to conciliate the two white races the material welfare of the blacks might suffer '. His people wanted to put such ' morbid ' fears aside. ' Did not our Gracious King promise protection to the Natives? Are we not loyal? Is not the British Flag synonymous with justice and freedom? ' So they reasoned. 'But, alas! our forebodings were only too true.' 46
Milner concentrated after the war on restoring the mines to full working capacity and on settling British immigrants in rural areas to offset the Afrikaner's ascendancy. Republican techniques of white domination were improved and expanded for the purpose. Africans in the Transvaal, reported lieutenant governor Sir Arthur Lawley, had hoped that ' the old position of master and servant would be altered '. But his officials were making every effort 'to maintain the relative position of the races as it existed in past days'. 47 The effort included a mass of colour bar laws, many of them churned out before elected members sat in the legislative council. Peasants were forced to give up their arms and return cattle seized during the war, but they never recovered their own stock seized by British troops and republican commandos. Every adult African male was required to pay a labour tax of two pounds, with another two pounds for the second and each additional wife of a polygynist. The administration reshaped the laws on passes, labour contracts and liquor prohibition; authorized municipalities to segregate Africans in locations hired out African convicts to mining companies; and prohibited extra-marital intercourse between a white woman and any African, Asian or Coloured. 48 Not surprisingly, some Africans wished 'to call back the days of the Republic', since they had received better treatment and wages ' when the Boers dominated'. 49
Britain had seven years of supreme authority in which to give the African and Coloured population of the ex-republics a new deal. Military rule was succeeded soon after the end of the war by crown colony government under a lieutenant governor assisted by two councils of civil servants. A minority of unofficial white members were appointed in May 1903 to the Transvaal's legislative council. Two years later it acquired a majority of elected members for whom only white men could vote because, the Colonial Office declared, Britain was bound by the treaty of 1902 to deny representation to her coloured subjects. 50 Civil servants dominated the executive council throughout this period, however, while bills discriminating against persons not of European descent had to be reserved for attention by the secretary of state. That safeguard appeared also in the Transvaal's constitution of 6 December 1906, which set up a parliament based on an exclusively white male adult suffrage. Until then the officials had power enough to do away with legal discrimination and extend to all races the 'equal laws, equal liberty' that Chamberlain had promised in 1900 for the whole of South Africa. 51 But Milner's team of college graduates and colonial officials took over the racial ideologies as well as the offices of their republican predecessors at Pretoria and Bloemfontein.
The terms of the peace treaty, Milner's racism and the colour bar constitutions alerted Africans and Coloured to the menace of unbridled white power. They protested vigorously and on a scale that signified the presence of a large, well-informed opinion against discrimination. Africans in the Orange River Colony petitioned Britain in 1902 for political rights and the removal of colour bars; and received only windy assurances of goodwill. 52 A 'monster' petition signed by 33,000 Transvaal Africans was addressed to the king in 1905. They asked that 'their interests should be safeguarded in the granting of the constitution to the New Colonies'. 53 Coloured residents of the Transvaal made similar appeals. 54 'As matters stand there is no help for it,' wrote Jabavu, ' but for the Natives to combine with the Coloured people and make their representations to the ruling authorities in the Transvaal, but better still at Downing Street.' 55
The African Political Organization sent Dr Abdurahman and P. J. Daniels to England in 1906 to petition the government for a non-racial franchise in the north. Jabavu regretted that Africans, 'not being properly organized', were not represented by 'a pure-blooded Native or two'; and took comfort in the thought that the deputies spoke for them as well as for the Coloured. 56 Abdurahman urged Elgin to stipulate that Britain would extend the franchise to all races if the new colonies failed to do so within a year of obtaining self-government. The Colonial Office replied to this and all other such appeals that article 8 of the peace treaty bound Britain to limit the vote to whites and to deny representation to her coloured subjects. 57 This was a legal quibble, as Abdurahman was quick to point out. Article 8 referred only to 'natives'. It did not exclude Coloured and Asians from the projected franchise or prevent Britain from enfranchising Africans under the APOs formula. These possibilities were never explored, however, nor was any attempt made to discuss a non-racial franchise on the grounds of merit. The British government, the colonial administration, white immigrants and settlers of all classes and shades of opinion assumed as a matter of course that only white men should exercise the vote in the north.
The Transvaal Municipalities Election Ordinance of 1903 set the precedent for an all-white franchise. Lionel Curtis, the town clerk of Johannesburg and one of Milner's team of graduates from New College, Oxford, prepared the draft on which the ordinance was based. His franchise, he claimed, was so liberal 'as to include almost every white British subject, male or female'. 58 But his liberalism did not extend to persons of colour. Since article 8 of the Vereeniging treaty did not refer to local government, it could be argued that Britain was free to include them in the municipal vote. Indeed, Milner wanted to extend this vote to aliens and also to coloured British subjects who could pass an education test. Curtis objected, however, to the coloured franchise, and so did the Johannesburg municipal council, which consisted wholly of nominated white members. The official majority in the legislative council could have carried that government's proposal, but the administration preferred to yield without a struggle.
Lawley saw no reason for imposing a franchise 'in opposition to the most deep-rooted sentiments of the white population'. He found it impossible to enforce' a principle repudiated no less by the British inhabitants than by the Dutch'. His government would not grant aliens a privilege denied to coloured British subjects, and so excluded both, though a strong body of white opinion favoured the franchise for white aliens. 59 Though patently discriminatory, the ordinance was never formally presented to the Colonial Office for approval under the reservation clause. The officials in Whitehall were aware of the facts, but chose to ignore the constitutional safeguard. 60 Yet Britain had fought the war ostensibly to enfranchise her subjects who were aliens in the republic. Her refusal to extend the vote to her coloured subjects or to aliens made a mockery of her pretensions to a high standard of political morality. She tried to justify the chicanery by pleading respect for the 'people's will', and then violated democracy by ignoring the legitimate claims of the majority.
The Colonial Office turned a blind eye on measures taken to 'keep the Kaffir in his place. But could not similarly ignore attacks on Indians. They had a doughty champion in Mohandas Gandhi, influential friends in London, and the backing of the government in India. Britain had taken up cudgels on their behalf before the war in a dispute with the republic over the terms of Law 3 of 1885. It excluded Asians from citizenship, denied them the right to reside or own land outside segregated locations, and provided for their registration. Britain eventually agreed to the principle of residential segregation on alleged sanitary grounds, but objected to an order prohibiting Indians from trading outside the segregated areas or bazaars. The dispute went to arbitration in 1895. Negotiations followed. The republic offered to compromise if the Coloured were included in the segregation law. Milner replied that he 'could not, to help one class of British subjects, give away the rights of another class'. 61 He did just that after the war, however, in order to appease a handful of British shopkeepers.
The Orange Free State had barred Asians from settling or trading in the republic. In terms of the Pretoria Convention of 1881, the Transvaal was bound to allow 'any person other than a native' to reside and trade within its borders. For this reason, and because they developed trade with farming communities, Kruger's government did not restrict the entry of Indians or segregate them rigorously. Milner's officials did both. They introduced a vexatious system of permits and gave notice, first in April 1902 and again a year later, of their intention to enforce the law of 1885, with exemptions for educated, wealthy Indians and for those who had traded outside the bazaars before the war. Chamberlain protested that he could not justify a continuation of the republic's discrimination, but Milner endorsed his executive's action. He did this to satisfy the White League, an organization of shopkeepers and racists, and to win support for his policy of importing indentured Asian workers. Then, too, he and his officials believed in white supremacy dogmas. Lawley made this clear in his memorandum of 13 April 1904 on the need for new legislation to fetter Indian trade and immigration. 62
He argued, and Milner agreed, that the most momentous issue of the age was probably the struggle between East and West for the temperate zone. To honour past pledges of equality would be a greater crime than to break them, if they had the effect of handing South Africa over to an Asian people. The first duty of British statesmen was to find homes for the white race. Whites would always remain supreme in the public services, professions and farming. White artisans and mechanics could be relied upon to hold their own in the skilled trades by combining. But Indian traders and small cultivators drove white men out of the retail trade and market gardening. Guided by an instinct of self-preservation, the Transvaal republic had prohibited Indians from owning land. The same instinct was moving the commercial community to protest against Indian traders. 63
Lord Selborne, successor to Milner, also saw no way of reconciling Asian and European claims. South Africa would either remain a 'white man's country', based on a Negro proletariat, or be peopled by natives and Asians under European control. Britain had a duty when the Transvaal was a foreign state to protect her Indian subjects, even to the extent of making their grievances a cause of war. But the government would betray a trust, no less sacred, to the whites if it repealed the republic's anti-Asian law. 64
Nearly 1,100 Indians had served in Gandhi's Ambulance Corps with British troops against the republics. Yet Britain preferred to betray her allies. The specific reasons given for anti-Asian legislation were as flimsy and contradictory as the Lawley-Selborne ideology. Indians were said to have insanitary habits and live in squalor. So did many poor whites in the slums of Fordsburg and Vrededorp, but they were never segregated by law. Asian immigration was said to threaten white supremacy. Yet Lawley, Milner and the mine owners imported 43,000 Chinese for the mines against protests from South Africans of all races. On the other hand, Indians were accused of out-trading whites and using their 'immense wealth', as Lawley described it, to buy out the 'credulous' and 'ignorant Dutch farmer'. Summarizing white prejudices, Gandhi noted that ' the very qualities of Indians count for defects in South Africa'. They were disliked 'for their simplicity, patience, perseverance, frugality and other-worldliness'. 65
With British supremacy firmly entrenched and closer union in the offing, a wave of reaction swept through the Cape from the north. In 1903 the East London municipality gave notice that 'Natives and Asiatics shall not be allowed or authorized to congregate, stand or walk upon any pavement' in any principal street or square. In 1904 parliament, reacting to an outbreak of bubonic plague, passed the Native Locations Act, providing for the segregation of urban Africans. The Immigration Act of 1906 closed the Cape to Asian men over sixteen years of age from abroad and severely restricted their entry from other parts of South Africa.
In the same year Natal brutally suppressed a small Zulu revolt against the £1 poll tax, executed twelve Zulu convicted of killing two members of a tax-enforcing squad, and deployed 10,000 armed whites and some 6,000 African troops against Bambatha, the chief of a small Lala tribe in Greytown. This was the last upsurge of Zulu military power. The revolt originated in the poll tax, economic distress caused by cattle and crop diseases, and above all in the alienation of over two million acres of good farmland, representing five-twelfths of the Zulu country, to white sugar planters in Igo4. 66 Gandhi, thinking 'I must do my bit in the war' left the Transvaal to join the army with a small Indian stretcher-bearer corps; and was there converted to the ideal of life-long celibacy and poverty in the service of humanity. 67
He was 'doing his bit' when the Transvaal government introduced the 'Black Ordinance' of 1906, making fingerprint registration compulsory for all Asians of eight years or upwards. Gandhi saw 'nothing in it except hatred of Indians' and their 'absolute ruin'. A mass meeting held in Johannesburg on 11 September took an oath to resist registration. Gandhi and H. O. Ali, a Coloured Muslim, were deputed to put the Indian case before the government in Whitehall. They interviewed Lord Elgin, the secretary of state, and told him: 'Our lot is today infinitely worse than under the Boer regime.' 68 He responded by withholding assent to the ' Black Ordinance', not out of generosity to a persecuted minority, but to evade the issue until the grant of self-government to the Transvaal. This followed in a few days. The Transvaal's new constitution was promulgated on 6 December 1906. An all-white electorate went to the poll on 20 February 1907. Botha's Het Volk party took office and promptly, on 21 March, introduced a replica of the rejected ordinance. It was passed by the unanimous vote of both houses at a single sitting.
The Asiatic Law Amendment Act laid the basis of a pass system such as that applied to Africans. Every Asian male had to register himself and produce on demand a thumb-printed certificate of identity. Unregistered persons and prohibited immigrants could be deported without a right of appeal. The bill went to Elgin under the clause reserving discriminatory laws. He recorded polite disapproval and allowed the bill to stand because, he said, his government felt 'they would not be justified in offering resistance to the general will of the Colony clearly expressed by its first elected representatives'. 69 In other words, Britain had transferred power to a racial oligarchy and turned her back on the voteless majority. The Transvaal government, now responsible only to white settlers, bore down on Indians with new discriminations; used an immigration act to keep them out of the colony; and prohibited them from trading or occupying land in proclaimed goldfields. 70 Led by Gandhi the Indians began the first sustained struggle of a persecuted racial community against unjust laws.
They refused to register, picketed the permit offices, and went to jail in batches. Smuts, the responsible minister, offered to repeal the Asiatic Law Amendment Act if a majority of Indians undertook to register voluntarily. Gandhi agreed to the compromise and was released with other Satyagrahi prisoners. They did register, but the act was not repealed. Instead, Smuts took new measures to keep Indians out of the Transvaal. Certificates were burnt ceremoniously at a large gathering on 16 August 1908. At about this time Satyagrahis from Natal started crossing the border illegally to court imprisonment and deportation. Indians overcrowded the jails. Smuts hit back by deporting resisters to India, but this the courts declared to be illegal. Some of Smuts's political principles, observed Gandhi, were 'not quite immoral'; though there was room in them ' for cunning and on occasion for perversion of truth'. 71 Gandhi appealed once more to the imperial government when he led another deputation to England in 1909 to protest against the colour bar in the Act of Union. His mission met with no more success than in 1906.
Gandhi came to South Africa in 1893 to advise on a lawsuit. He delayed his departure to lead a campaign against a bill to disfranchise Natal's Indians, founded the Natal Indian Congress in 1894, and remained for twenty years, during which he worked out his technique of Satyagraha: 'non-violent struggle born of Truth and Love'. It was a technique suited to the conditions of a small voteless community, numerically weak and temperamentally disinclined to use physical force. It would become a powerful political instrument in India, but it failed in South Africa because it never acquired a mass base. Provincial barriers, cultural differences, inequalities of wealth and status, and an uneven rate of political development inhibited the growth of a broad non-racial front against white domination. Gandhi and his fellow Indians saw in the African only an innocent tribal peasant who was being corrupted by civilization. They never thought of joining with Africans and Coloured in a common struggle. The Indians fought their battles in isolation and won only moral victories.