White labour policies emerged from an all-white franchise. Having concentrated political power in the white minority, the British administration in the Transvaal connived at giving it control of industry, commerce and the skilled trades. Political power opened the door to economic privilege. Class, colour and national antagonisms offered a wide range of possibilities. Ambitious working men could appeal to class interests against employers or to racial sentiments against Africans and Asians; combine with Britishers against 'the Boer' or with Afrikaners against 'the capitalist'. Trade unionists and socialists on the Rand made a bid for political leadership soon after the war by forming the Witwatersrand Trades and Labour Council. Its foundation members were the societies of boiler makers, bricklayers, carpenters, engine drivers, engineers, iron moulders, musicians, printers, shop assistants and stonemasons.
The council's aims were modestly worded so as to disarm any suspicion of an intent to organize unions or interfere in their domestic affairs. It would link 'all branches of the working classes' together, promote the efficiency and progress of trade societies, and 'secure the return of representatives upon all governing bodies'. A parliamentary committee was elected to report on bills and motions affecting trade and labour. Delegates could be unseated for taking part in political activity 'not in conformity with the accepted policy of the Council'.1 This was the language of a political organization, and the council was commonly referred to as the Labour party.
Patriotic members of the council worked closely with the British administration. Both the council and the miners' union backed Milner's proposal that the Transvaal should donate ú30 million to the cost of the war. Chamberlain, when visiting the Rand in January 1903, congratulated the unions on their decision. Working men in England, he said, were also paying towards the cost. They 'would feel they were rather left in the lurch by their comrades here, if they alone of all classes were to object to any contribution'.2 Peter Whiteside, president of the trades council, and Alexander Riatt, branch president of the ASE, were rewarded with seats on Johannesburg's nominated town council, while Milner also appointed Riatt as a member of the legislative council to represent the working classes. Born in Glasgow in 1867, Riatt qualified as a mechanical engineer, emigrated to South Africa in 1890, took a prominent part in the British agitation against the republic, and fought with Bethune's mounted infantry in the war. A leading opponent of the Chinese labour policy, he was again rewarded with a seat on the legislative council after the introduction of responsible government in 1907. He resigned his seat, however, to become Inspector of White Labour three months before he died in November 1907.
The decision to import Chinese changed the political climate and opened a period of bitter class and national conflict on the Rand. More than any other factor, the ' Chinese question 'spurred British working men and Afrikaner nationalists into organized political activity. Their common cause against the 'Hoggenheimers'* laid the foundations of unity in time to come. After the enactment of the Chinese labour importation ordinance Whiteside told the trades council that he would despair of his party's future in the Transvaal were it not for the active and cordial cooperation of the Dutch. They gave the worker reason to hope that he would not have to face the foreign capitalist single-handed when the Transvaal obtained self-government.3 Whiteside's solution revealed the labour movement's racial bias. British workers looked to anti-British landowners for allies, and disdained their African and Coloured fellow workers.
The small body of white workers was unstable, poorly organized, divided and vulnerable. Some of the bigger unions, such as the societies of miners, railwaymen and plasterers, kept aloof from the trades council because of personal rivalries or its political activities. Not having a firm base in the working class, Whiteside, Riatt and certain other leaders collaborated with business and professional men in the White League and African Labour League against the Chinese. The inter-class alliance operated also in Johannesburg's first municipal elections of December 1903, when every voter cast thirty votes to fill thirty vacancies. The trades council threw in its lot with the United Conference group and nominated five candidates on their ticket. Miners, railwaymen and plasterers backed the opposition Reform ticket, and also put up five candidates. Only two Labour men, Riatt and Shanks, were elected. The results of the 1904 elections were as disappointing. Whiteside was the only successful candidate out of ten men who stood on a Labour platform. These setbacks and much disagreement over the participation by trade unions in elections strengthened the case for a distinct Labour party.
All signs pointed towards such a possibility. A Social Democratic Federation had sprung up in Cape Town. Another SDF held a May Day demonstration on the Rand in 1904 as a counterblast to the conservative trade unions' Labour Day rally on Good Friday. The trades council invited the 'Boer Generals' to attend the rally, and received assurances of goodwill from Smuts. Whiteside visited Cape Town a few days later. He told the local trades council that only by taking part in politics could workers obtain the legislation needed to improve their condition. Foreign financiers would not be able to play ducks and drakes with a British colony, as they were doing in the Transvaal, if workers on the Rand had the Cape's advantages of a parliament and a pro-Labour newspaper like the South African News.4 He was talking to the converted. Cape Town's trade unionists had already formed the nucleus of a Labour party and entered the lists in a parliamentary election.
Five Labour candidates contested seats in the Cape's general elections of 1904. Four stood in Cape Town with the backing of the Political Labour League, an offshoot of the trades council. The fifth represented the British Workmen's Political and Defence Association of Port Elizabeth. The League's constitution and programme were suited to the colony's non-racial franchise. Membership was open to wage earners of any race or colour, and the programme required equal rights for all civilized men. This was a splendid avowal of democratic principle and a unique repudiation by white labour of racial policies. The effects were negligible. The leaders missed the opportunity of proving their sincerity by nominating a Coloured or African candidate. Their representatives were white, British and, with one exception, recent immigrants. They had little money, experience or organization behind them and were easily routed by Jameson's Progressive party, which had all three qualities, and could, in addition, rely on patriotic sentiments whipped up during the war among English-speaking and Coloured working men.
The Progressives obtained a majority of one in the legislative council and of five in the assembly. Dr L. S. Jameson, Rhodes' former lieutenant and the leader of the raid on the Transvaal, became prime minister. Britain's war had completed his mission, vindicated his political villainy, and enabled him to maintain the Rhodes tradition of combining the premiership with a directorship in the colony's richest corporation. The Labour candidates Corley, Craig and Purcell attacked his association with De Beers, accused him of supporting the Chinese policy, and demanded a tax on diamonds. They denounced his party as one pledged to the capitalists, that would not therefore introduce labour measures like workmen's compensation and compulsory arbitration in industrial disputes. Corley, a carpenter and the Labour League's president, warned his audiences that workmen would gain nothing from a representative of De Beers. A month later, defeated in the elections and blacklisted by employers, he broke up home and emigrated to New Zealand.5
The decision to take part in elections was reached after much debate on the rival merits of political and direct action, an issue that perplexed radical socialists for many years also in the Transvaal and Natal. The federation decided on independent political action in June 1906 and advised the trades council accordingly. It then formed a Labour Representation Committee and called a meeting of delegates from all working-class bodies to 'present a united front to the enemy at the elections'. The two wings of the movement could not agree, however, and the federation decided in March 1907 to nominate Needham, Levin son and Howard for the parliamentary elections. Ridout stood for the municipal council and obtained 1,498 votes for socialism from the workmen's single vote; but his opponent got 3,000 votes from the plural suffrage of property owners.6
Trade unionists took a hard knock at Kimberley, where De Beers ruled with an iron rod. The leading spirit here was James Trembath, a Cornish compositor, who settled in the town after the siege of 1900 and struggled for more than ten years to organize a labour movement. An attempt was made to put up labour candidates in 1904, and when this failed Trembath and his associates formed a trades council. Seven of its nine members worked for De Beers, which summarily dismissed them in 1905 after a dispute over workmen's compensation. One of the victimized men was Walter Madeley (1873-1947), a fitter from Woolwich, who twenty years later held office in Hertzog's cabinet. The company's behaviour gave rise to much agitation, but the company never relaxed its grip on the town. Madeley and the other victims were unable to find work locally, while the council lost what influence it had over the majority of workmen. 'There are many good trade unionists who are but indifferent politicians and many good politicians who are not trade unionists,' declared Trembath. It was unfair, he added, to force any man to pay for political propaganda to which he might be wholly opposed.7 For these reasons, a Political Labour League was formed to fight elections and conduct political campaigns.
Trembath urged working men in all centres to combine in order to put into parliament men who belonged to their class and looked after their interests. Without direct representation, he argued, they would always be mere pawns in the parliamentary game; they would receive only crumbs of labour legislation, never the loaf. Socialists in Durban held similar views and formed the Clarion Fellowship in 1903. Appealing to an all white and almost wholly British electorate, Natal's labour movement took on a distinctly British flavour. The Fellowship was modelled on the English society of the same name, distributed its publications, contributed to Hyndman's election expenses, and helped to send E. B. Rose as South Africa's representative to the Second International congress at Amsterdam in 1905. The founders of the movement in Durban were two Scotsmen: A. L. Clark, 'the father of railway trade unionism', and Harry Norrie, a tailor from Forfarshire. Both spent their lives in preaching socialism, passed through many stages of radicalism, and never came to grips with the realities of Natal's multi-racial society.
The Fellowship sponsored a Workers' Political Union in 1905 to fight a parliamentary by-election in Durban. Their candidate, C. H. Haggar, a bearded, colourful doctor of philosophy from East Anglia, was defeated. But he won a seat in 1906 on the borough council as the nominee of the Natal Labour Representative Committee. This led to a quarrel between trade unionists and socialists over the choice of candidates that wrecked the trades council. Later in the year, however, Haggar, N. P. Palmer, D. Taylor and J. Connolly were elected on a Labour platform to the legislative assembly. Though this seemed a spectacular success, it reflected the amorphous nature of Natal's politics rather than the strength of its labour movement.
The Witwatersrand trade council's decision to form a Political Labour League followed hard on Lyttleton's promise in July 1904 of representative government for the Transvaal. The inaugural meeting took place only a year later on 31 August. Bill Andrews, the council's president, H. W. Sampson, its secretary, and Whiteside called for an end to Labour's local isolation, the formation of branches in every colony, and an all-South African campaign. The League's programme of twenty-two points made no concession, however, to the Cape's traditional policy of racial equality; and called for a union of the white races, equal rights for their languages, responsible government, white adult suffrage and single-member constituencies. Like their masters, the Labour leaders appealed for Anglo-Afrikaner unity at the expense of Africans, Coloured and Asians.
Andrews, Sampson and J. H. Brideson represented the League in Johannesburg's municipal elections of October 1905. All were defeated in a campaign marred by internal squabbles and appeals to racial prejudice. The miners' union threw its weight against Brideson, and the League sabotaged Andrews, its president.
Its executive, which included Sampson and Whiteside, publicly rebuked him for allegedly repudiating his pledge to abide by caucus decisions. The Rev. C. A. Lane, who defeated him by twenty-one votes, included in his manifesto a demand for a ban on extra-marital intercourse between black: and white; it was unnatural, he claimed, for the races had been differentiated by Nature and should be kept separate by law. C. H. Short, the third candidate in the ward, accused Andrews of being supported by the mine magnates of Corner House, condemned 'the tendency to mix the races', and denounced 'the preaching of the gospel of social equality of White and Black'. Andrews alone avoided such racist incitement, though he did not repudiate the League's undertaking to employ white labour where possible in municipal services.
While laying the foundations of their movement by taking part in municipal elections, Labour leaders staked a claim to representation on a higher plane by joining in the campaign for responsible government. Mine owners and big business men, with the backing of Milner and the Colonial Office, tried to keep the reins in their hands. They formed the Transvaal Progressive Association in November 1904 and advocated strong ties with Britain, Chinese labour, equal voting rights for white men, and an interim period of representative government. Abe Bailey, a leading mine director and Progressive politician, declared that he for one would not let the Boers ' win with the ballot-box what they had failed to accomplish with the Mauser'.8
Botha's Het Volk party, the Transvaal Responsible Government Association led by E. P. Solomon, and Labour countered with a demand for immediate self-rule. At times they seemed to interchange their traditional roles. Germiston workers heard Whiteside (who had served as a quartermaster-sergeant against the republic) denounce the Jameson raid and praise Kruger for having offered a franchise more generous than that proposed by the Lyttleton constitution.9 A few days later, in February 1905, A. D. Wolmarans, an uncompromising member of Het Volk's head committee, told farmers at Nylstroom that they had no quarrel with Britain. Their enemy was the capitalist, who had made war on the republic and was now fighting artisans and farmers. They should stand together, stop the importation of Chinese, give employment to white men, and make the Transvaal a white man's country.10
When hotheaded republicans like Wolmarans and C. F. Beyers spoke of war between labour and capital, their rural audience took them to mean the old battle against foreigners, mine magnates and British imperialism. Het Volk represented landowners and not socialists. 'Capital and Labour must work hand in hand - the one could not do without the other,' was Louis Botha's message to the Pretoria branch of the ASE at their annual dinner in June 1905. He assured the engineers that his people, in their impoverished state, had drawn closer to the working man, for whom Paul Kruger always kept an open ear.11 British workmen and Afrikaner landowners stood far apart in language, tradition and national loyalties. Many working men in the Transvaal preferred to remain under Britain's protective mantle and supported the plea of the mine owners for representative government.12 Labour leaders who backed the demand for immediate self-government joined forces not with Afrikaners but with English-speaking merchants and professional men.
Whiteside, Wybergh, Shanks, Riatt and Creswell helped to draft the manifesto of the Responsible Government Association, signed it in the company of eighty others, and spoke on the association's platform. The Responsibles entered into an electoral pact with Het Volk after the publication in 1905 of the Lyttleton constitution, which provided for an elected majority in the legislature and an executive council dominated by British officials. Andrews and Sampson met representatives of the Responsibles in May to discuss an extension of the pact to include Labour, and reported back to the trades council, which agreed to support the pact on condition that Labour was free to press its own claims for the eight-hour working day, workmen's compensation and other reforms.13
The constitutional issue was settled by a change of government in Britain. Balfour's conservative ministry fell in December 1905. Campbell-Bannerman took office, went to the country in January 1906, and won an election unique in British politics for the prominence given to a wholly colonial issue - the Chinese importations. The new Liberal cabinet scrapped Lyttleton's constitution and, acting on the recommendations of the Ridgeway committee, decided to introduce quasi-responsible government in the Transvaal. It was to have a nominated upper chamber and a legislative assembly of sixty-nine white members elected by white men only. Political parties in the colony prepared for battle. Socialists and trade unionists formed the Independent Labour party in May 1906. Het Volk's executive on the Rand turned down a motion to cooperate with Labour which, it said, had socialist tendencies. The Responsibles, including Creswell and Wybergh, merged with the Reform Club, called themselves the Transvaal Nationalist Association, and renewed their electoral agreement with Het Volk. Labour held aloof and, in December 1906, formed the Labour Representation Committee. It combined trade unionists, the ILP, and small left-wing groups of Germans, Italians and Russian Jews.
Socialists, trade unionists and political opportunists painfully edged their way to united action. Some trade unionists complained that socialists dominated the L R C. A British Labour Union, making a brief appearance before the 1907 elections, denounced the 'fallacious doctrine of socialism as propounded by the Socialist Labour Parties'.14 At the other end of the spectrum, Jock Campbell's Socialist Labour party, formed in 1902, turned its back on all elections and distributed the works of Karl Kautsky, Daniel De Leon and his fellow syndicalists.'15 Labour managed in spite of these differences to put up thirteen candidates in the Transvaal general election of February 1907. They polled 5216 votes out of the 13180 cast in the thirteen constituencies and won three seats. Sampson and Whiteside were returned in Johannesburg, and J. Reid in Pretoria. Het Volk won thirty-seven seats, which gave it a clear majority of five, and Botha included E. P. Solomon and H. C. Hull, two leaders of the Transvaal Nationalist Association, in his cabinet.
Het Volk did not oppose the Labour candidates. These lost to the Nationalists in three, and to the Progressives in seven, constituencies. As in Natal and the Cape, the bulk of the working-class vote went to parties representing capitalists and the middle class. They, and not Afrikaner nationalism, were Labour's chief political rivals. Sampson said as much when he reported back in October 1907 to his constituents. He was pleased that the Progressives were not in power. Labour's representatives were having an easy time under Botha's ministry. It had passed a workman's compensation act and could be relied upon to enforce laws against Asians. Labour looked forward, he added, to the elimination of Asians from the Transvaal, and would press for a law fixing ratios between whites and Africans in all industries.16
Sampson was a compositor from Islington, London, who came to South Africa in 1892 at the age of twenty. He spent the next five years in Cape Town, where he helped to form a trades council; and then moved, after a printers' strike, to East London, where he founded a branch of the S.A. Typographical Union. Settling in Johannesburg in 1903, he became the union's president and also secretary of the trades council. He lost three municipal elections before winning a seat in the legislative assembly; but then his parliamentary career continued without a break from 1907 to 1931. He was elected the first chairman of the S.A. Labour party at its formation in 1910. Ambitious, arrogant and racist, he was a principal architect of the white labour policy. His own union 'committed the dreadful sin' of admitting Natal Indian printers, but there was no truth whatever in the 'oft-repeated lie' that Sampson, as president, bore a special responsibility for the decision.17 Radicals accused him of disrupting the party caucus in the Transvaal parliament by quarrelling with Whiteside and refusing to accept party discipline.18 Partly for this reason, the ILP at its first annual conference in October 1907 repudiated the parliamentary actions of the three Labour members.19
The heterogeneous elements in the Labour Representation Committee could never agree on a programme. The ILP, however, was explicitly socialist. It aimed, among other things, at 'The socialization of all the means of production, distribution and exchange, to be controlled by a democratic state in the interests of the whole community.' Whiteside explained that this was a beacon light, an ideal to be worked for, though nationalization of the mines was impracticable under existing conditions.20 Some members wished to call themselves the Transvaal Socialistic Party, but the annual conference rejected the motion. Delegates were divided equally on another motion, which would allow members of the 'coloured races' to join the party. New alignments and cleavages developed, however, before the various factions agreed in 1909 to form the South African Labour party. It made its official debut at Durban on 10 January 1910 as the first national political party. Labour was all set for the first round of elections under the South Africa Act.
The Act had been drafted by an all-white National Convention in 1908-9. Described as a 'compromise' between Cape liberals and white supremacists of the north, it represented the fruits of partnership or, more accurately, of antagonistic cooperation between British and Afrikaner imperialists, each intending to dominate the other. The British wanted union for economic, political and military reasons. Afrikaners accepted cooperation as the price to be paid for the spread of nationalism and the maintenance of white supremacy. Africans, Coloured and Indians were the victims of closer union. The act excluded them from both houses of parliament and denied them the vote in the three northern provinces. The background to the colour bar clauses has been admirably described by the liberal historian L. M. Thompson.21 Here it is necessary only to comment on the attitudes of the labour and liberation movements.
None of the delegates to the National Convention represented Labour, and this was a sore point with Labour leaders. They made the most of it in their opposition to union and the draft act. The strongest opposition came from Natal, where organized Labour appeared in the same camp as ultra-British jingoes. Both groups preferred isolation to Afrikaner domination. Labour men had an additional grievance in action taken by the government to break a railwaymen's strike in April-May 1909. Three of the four Labour members of the legislative assembly moved that the union parliament should have only one chamber, to be elected once in three years. Haggar, to his credit, moved the deletion of the clause barring persons of colour from the house of assembly. The amendments were defeated, and three-quarters of the 14,800 Natal voters who took part in a referendum voted in favour of union.
Whiteside, Sampson and Wybergh offered mild resistance to the draft in the Transvaal legislature. Trade unionists stated their objections in resolutions passed at a labour rally in Johannesburg on Good Friday of 1909. Madeley, C. B. Mussared, a leading member of the ILP, and Tom Kirby, president of the Pretoria trade council, moved that since workers had not been represented at the National Convention, and since the draft act was undemocratic, it should be submitted to a popular referendum. Bill Andrews and the Labour councillors John Ware and Jackson moved another resolution which called on the British government to withhold its assent until the draft had been amended and approved by a referendum of the electorate. The proposed amendments would eliminate the senate, introduce a separate 'Native and Coloured Assembly' having only advisory powers, block the extension of the Cape's 'coloured franchise', and confine the vote to adult whites, subject to retention of their rights by existing Coloured voters in the Cape.
Tengo Jabavu, cautious as ever, took an intermediate position. He would give adult suffrage to white men and women, and the Cape franchise to Africans. It had worked well and needed no change. His scheme would prevent 'native predominance'.22 He steadfastly set his face against any agitation on behalf of the Africans while the National Convention was sitting. They should put their trust in the Cape's liberal delegates and not cry out before they were hurt. The Convention was 'a judicial tribunal set up to do justice to all sections without fear, favour or prejudice'. An agitation would be premature, give his people a bad name, and strengthen the argument that they had no place in the 'body politic'.23 When the publication of the draft act exposed the shallowness of his optimism, he pleaded that the colour bar clauses imposed an unnecessary humiliation. Africans, he insisted, had no desire to sit in parliament where they could exert no influence.24 He repeated this assurance on the Armadale Castle in July 1909, when on his way to London with an African delegation to protest against the colour bar. 'We have no wish to have a Native preponderance in the country,' he said; 'it is a thing which I should object to myself.' He ' would dread putting our people in a position of absolute equality with the Europeans, especially in the Northern colonies '. But rights already held in the Cape should not be curtailed; 'and as to the rest, some restricted form of representation might be given'.25
There was a streak of the Uncle Tom in Jabavu, but he was no white man's lackey. He had principles and a strategy based on an assessment of the African's relationship to competing white power groups. Long ago, he explained, when the English dominated parliament, parties divided on the ' Native Question'. One faction, led by Porter, Solomon, Molteno, Sauer and Merriman, took a liberal view and fought for the liberties of both colonists and Africans. Opposed to them were the majority of Englishmen, who followed reactionary leaders like the Upingtons, Sprigg and later Rhodes. They adopted a ' vigorous Native policy', signalized by disarmament, disfranchisement, pass laws and other 'repressive legislation under which the Natives ... have ever groaned'. Africans naturally supported the liberals. The Afrikaner Bond as naturally allied itself with the anti-African party. The Jameson raid severed the alliance. The Bond then transferred its support to the liberal, anti-imperialist group led by Sauer, Memman and Schreiner, which Africans had always supported and which became the South African party in 1903.26
The English press and party insisted that Jabavu, 'an able and most influential Kaffir', had 'gone over' to the Bond or 'Strop en Dop ' party,** if only by associating with Sauer and the SAP.27 Jabavu was too astute a politician to suppose that he could refute the charge with an historical treatise. His people were hard-headed, cold logicians, he maintained, and had no desire to instal a 'Dutch' government at Table Mountain. He wished to satisfy them that he was no Bondsman and, like they, wanted a government of 'the best Englishmen who will dispense justice evenly to English, Dutch and Native people, without fear, favour or prejudice'. On the other hand, he had to show that Africans had nothing to expect from the English Progressive party, and should vote against it at the polls. He gave two reasons. By making Jameson their leader, the Progressives had shown themselves willing to 'hand over the government of the people to the Mining Magnates', whose sole interest was 'Wealth and not the Commonwealth of South Africa'. Secondly, the Progressives hated African rights, as was evident from Jameson's letter of 20 September 1903 to the Muslim leader H. N. Effendi. It promised 'equal rights to all civilized men' and went on to insult Africans by stating that ' It is only the aboriginal natives we consider uncivilized'.28
Africans might have shared Jabavu's misgivings about Jameson's party, but they certainly had less confidence in political descendants of the Afrikaner Bond, whose leader, J. H. Hofmeyr, had declared that he would sooner give franchise rights to convicts in the Breakwater prison than to the coloured races.29 African and Coloured delegates, including Dr Abdurahman, met at Queenstown in December 1907 and decided to support the Unionist party, as the Progressives were now called. Jabavu's paper printed a vicious attack on Abdurahman - 'a man of mixed race' who was 'ashamed of his skin' - and denounced the conference. It was 'not representative'. The 'so-called vote to support the ex-Prog. candidates was passed by a few ignorant people of the rank and file'.30 Jabavu prepared a counterblast and called a Native Electoral Convention in January. It urged constituents to vote for the SAP and passed resolutions in favour of African rights in the future Union.31 The SAP won the election, Merriman headed the new ministry, and Jabavu jubilated. 'Of the 12 newspapers published within the Eastern circuit, Imvo is the only one in sympathy with the SAP.'32
The publication of the draft constitution in February 1909 aroused bitter resentment in Africans and Coloured. Jabavu blamed Natal for insisting on the 'European descent' clauses that barred men of colour from parliament and denied them the vote in the northern provinces.33 The Rev. W. B. Rubusana's Izwi Labantu accused the Cape delegates to the National Convention of conspiring to eliminate the Cape African franchise. Rubusana, Jabavu and the Rev. J. L. Dube, editor of lLanga Lase Natal, convened a South African Native Convention at Bloemfontein on 24 March. It elected an executive to defend African interests, protested against the colour bar, demanded full and equal rights for all citizens without distinction of class, colour or creed, and called on Britain to fulfil her obligations under article 8 of the Vereeniging peace treaty by extending the franchise to Africans, Coloured and Indians in all colonies.34 The convention agreed to send a delegation to England.
The APO took a similar decision in April. Its campaign for a non-racial franchise had begun in 1906, when Abdurahman, Fredericks and Daniels journeyed to England to protest against the terms of the Ridgeway constitution. The deputation's main purpose was to establish the claims of the Coloured to the franchise under article 8 of the Vereeniging treaty, but Abdurahman spoke for all the oppressed. If Britain refused to grant a non-racial franchise, he urged, there were other ways in which she could do justice to all her subjects. She could, for instance, before granting self-government to the ex-republics, repeal their discriminatory laws. They were still there, had been augmented, and were enforced with typical British rigour. Secondly, Britain should either extend the franchise to qualified persons of all races, or retain her sovereign authority over the unrepresented masses. In no circumstances should she commit them bound hand and foot to the colonists.35
The deputation returned empty-handed but undaunted. The campaign continued and assumed a new dimension when the APO's executive accepted an invitation to attend the joint conference of Africans and Coloured at Queenstown. About 120 delegates came together, said Abdurahman, in 'the first genuine attempt to fuse the two sections of the population into one political whole'.36 The men of the north, he told them, would always try to foist their repressive system on the coloured races; but would have less chance of success in a federation. For a union would be bound to follow the policies of the north more closely than Cape traditions.37 When the National Convention met to draft the Act of Union, the APO petitioned it to respect existing rights and extend them to Coloured and Africans in the north. After the publication of the draft constitution petitions were submitted to the prime ministers, the high commissioner and the secretary of state, praying for the deletion of the colour bar clauses, the extension of the franchise to all qualified persons in the Union, and the exclusion of 'native territories' from the Union except on terms satisfactory to chiefs and councillors. 38
Their rights were being whittled away for purely material advantages, said Abdurahman in his presidential address to the eighty-nine delegates who attended the APOs seventh annual conference in the Socialist Hall, Buitenkant St, Cape Town, on 13 April 1909. The draft act was 'un-British in that it lays down a colour-line'. The Cape's leaders had betrayed their trust; the light of freedom was vanishing before the old Transvaal republic's principle of no equality between black and white in church or state. 'No class in a State can progress,' he warned, 'if its political destinies are in the hands of a ruling caste'; or if it denied human rights that were inalienable and essential to national stability.39 The 'European descent' clauses, which barred persons of colour from parliament, were ' the foulest work that ever South African statesmen attached their names to', wrote Abdurahman in the second issue of the A.P.O. 'The original insult is there as fresh and bitter as when it was first deliberately hurled at us last February. It is an injustice, and cannot be tolerated by any self-respecting man.'40
The decision to send a deputation, accompanied by W. P. Schreiner, to put their case before the British people and parliament, aroused great enthusiasm; and 'stimulated the feeling of union among the coloured', reported the APOs Aliwal North branch. More than twenty new branches were formed, fund-raising activities were organized as far afield as Rhodesia, and the first number of the A.P.O. appeared on Empire Day, 24 May 1909. Every existing newspaper was there primarily to advocate the rights of property, wrote the editor; all assumed that South Africa belonged only to the few propertied whites. The press patronizingly condescended to the coloured races and regarded them as chattels: 'ever the subject race'. The A.P.O. would speak for the people. Time would show that a repressive policy was 'impossible, uneconomic and disastrous to all concerned'. For nothing but moral decay and national degeneracy could come out of a racial aristocracy that dominated a degraded class.
Abdurahman, Fredericks and D. J. Lenders of Kimberley sailed for England in June. The African delegates were Jabavu, Rubusana, D. Dwanya of Middeldrift, T. Mapikela, the general secretary of the Orange River Native Congress, and J. Gerrans of Bechuanaland. The two deputations and W. P. Schreiner, their unpaid counsellor and tireless spokesman, represented the great majority of South Africans; but they travelled at their own expense and by means of funds donated by the poor. At about the same time an official colonial delegation, accompanied by the high commissioner, travelled at the state's expense to put the bill entrenching white supremacy through the imperial parliament. The official delegation was given a roaring reception in England; the unofficial representatives were snubbed and ignored by the wielders of power. Philanthropists, missionaries, Gandhi, the prime minister of New Zealand, the British Labour party and a group of Liberals in parliament protested against the colour bar. The people of Britain were bored and indifferent. They had already surrendered sovereign power to the white oligarchy in Natal and the ex-republics. The South Africa Act merely put the final seal of Britain's approval on the betrayal at Vereeniging in 1902.
Asquith, Balfour, The Times, The Economist and other pillars of the imperial establishment oozed an unctuous optimism. They agreed, on the one hand, that the settlers would abandon unification rather than agree to an abatement of racial discrimination in the act. The British public was assured, on the other, that the racists, who would forgo the advantages of union if necessary to maintain white supremacy, could be trusted to do justice to the subject races. Not everybody was as gullible. Dilke, Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald foresaw that the Act of Union would establish a permanent white oligarchy. The Manchester Guardian warned against deluding 'ourselves with the promise that we can undo the injustice when it is committed'.41 J. A. Hobson commented wryly on the irony of defeated Afrikaner generals imposing on Britain a constitution which made them ' the rulers of a virtually independent South Africa'. It would 'move upon an unstable axis ' and remain a source of ' weakness to the group of self-governing nationalities to which it falsely claims to belong'.42 The Labour Leader declared that Britain had approved of 'the union of a Boer Landed Aristocracy with an Exploiting Capitalist Plutocracy'; and damned South African trade unionists for being anti-African to a man.43
'Since our arrival here it has been a terribly up-hill fight,' wrote Abdurahman on 29 July. 'We are directing all our efforts and energies to the term "of European descent", but I fear all our efforts will be in vain.' The Cape's official delegates - the prime minister Merriman, Sauer, Hofmeyr, Jameson and chief justice Lord de Villiers - were ' our worst enemies '. Without the poison from them, the British public would never agree to the hateful colour bar. They were 'moving heaven and earth to retain the obnoxious words '; and ' naturally their opinions carry great weight, because the public who will suffer directly by the words "of European descent" are the Cape Colony people.'44 Critics of the colour bar in the Commons made their main stand on an amendment to clause 26, which would enable men of colour to represent the Cape and Natal in the senate; but the amendment was defeated by 157 votes to 57, the minority consisting of 28 Labour members, 26 Liberals, and 3 Irish nationalists.45 The bill was reported without amendment and passed the third reading without a division.
The African and Coloured deputations returned with Schreiner to South Africa in September. They tried to glean comfort from their failure. The minds of English people had been enlightened as to the colour bar, Schreiner claimed; while Abdurahman assumed 'that at a very early date an attempt would be made to erase the blot which now stained the Constitution'.46 Abdurahman's true assessment appeared in a leading article. Britain's national fibre had deteriorated. Everyone regretted the colour bar, but no one would reject it, apart from the Labour party and advanced radicals. 'No longer must we look to our flabby friends of Great Britain.' The political destiny of Coloured and Africans lay in their own hands. They would have to rely on economic struggle. 'We are the labour market'; and South Africa's stability depended on them. By refusing to bolster up the economy, they would bring selfish white politicians to their knees, and show white workers the value of combination their only weapon against the cursed wage system.47
* A term of abuse with an anti-Semitic flavour that was used then, and would be used even more commonly in later years, to describe the mining magnates
** The 'Lash and Liquor' party: a reference to Cape farmers who flogged their workers and supplied them with rations of cheap wine.