The teachers, ministers, editors, lawyers and doctors who founded the liberation movements were constitutionalists. They defended existing rights and resisted new discriminations in a constant struggle against aggressive white supremacists. African, Coloured and Indian leaders of the early period took their inspiration from liberal and humanitarian concepts. Their vision of the ideal society embraced equality before the law; the vote; freedom of trade, labour, movement and residence; and equal opportunities of education and employment. Their natural allies in the white community before the rise of radical socialism were liberals of wealth and standing who counselled patience, acceptance of white supremacy, and respect for law and order; and who left a deep imprint on the liberation movement, most of all in the Cape. There, the non-racial franchise gave Africans and Coloured the means of enlisting the support of progressive politicians. Jabavu was one of the first to recognize the value of an organized, disciplined African electorate. His entanglement in white party politics began with the publication of Imvo in 1884. Twenty years later Abdurahman embarked on a similar course when he took his seat on Cape Town's municipal council.
Gandhi rose to world-wide eminence after he had left South Africa in 1914. Jabavu and Abdurahman might also have made their way into the top rank of rulers if they had lived in a less repressive society. Racial discrimination restricted them to a minor political role, but they were great men among their people. Though unwilling, and perhaps unable, to alienate themselves from the poor and oppressed, they did not escape from the compromises that are forced on leaders without power who seek to reform but never to overthrow an evil social order. Both men witnessed the decline of Cape liberalism and the spread of racial discrimination. Abdurahman saw the process more clearly and gained a deeper insight into the structure of white power. Yet, like Jabavu, he maintained his trust in white patronage long after the futility of such an attitude had been revealed. Neither took to heart Gandhi's message that a voteless and rejected people would not obtain relief from a parliament of their oppressors, but must depend on their own strength and develop their own methods of struggle.
Dr Abdul Abdurahman (1872-1940), acclaimed as South Africa's foremost Coloured leader, was a Muslim, a member of the 'Malay' community, and a grandson of manumitted slaves, Chashullah and Betsy Jamal-ud-din (corrupted to Jamalee) who bought their freedom. They kept a fruit shop in Roeland Street, Cape Town, amassed a small fortune, and sent their son Abdul Rachman to study theology at Cairo and Mecca. He returned after an absence of ten years and married Khadija Dollie, 'the prettiest Malay girl in Cape Town'.1 Widely known as Hadjie Abdurahman, he pioneered modern education for the Muslims and refused to put up with a second-class education for his own sons. His eldest, the future Dr Abdurahman, was admitted to the S.A. College School, the oldest high school in the country, 'where, by his diligence and ability, he outdistanced his comrades in almost every branch of school work'.2 The college then raised a colour bar, whereupon the Hadjie went to England and stayed there, while his second son qualified as a chemist, and the youngest as a doctor. He lost his wife in England, and by her side was later buried her brother, H. M. Dollie, the father of Dr O. Dollie, who also took his children to be educated in England.3
Having matriculated at the Cape, Abdul Abdurahman went to Glasgow, where he spent close on four years before graduating in medicine in 1893. Two years later he came home with his Scottish bride. 'He makes a great sacrifice,' wrote Peregrino, 'in returning to a country where colour, and not character, ability or standing, makes the man.'4 In 1904, now a successful practitioner, he was elected to the town council, the first coloured person to hold this office. 'I was reluctant to enter public life because failure at the polls would have drawn ridicule upon the coloureds,' he wrote after the election; but 'it is by individuals stepping beyond the establishments of the time that a people progress.'5 The European support he received at the polls ' does not betoken a white race degenerating, but a sign of rejuvenescence'. The British constitution was 'the admiration of the world, and one of the greatest blessings of mankind'. As leader of the APO, Abdurahman spent much of the next five years in an unsuccessful attempt to vindicate his faith in British democracy.
The elan and vigour of the African Political Organization in its early and middle years held great promise of a mass radical movement. Founded in 1902, it soon grew into what was perhaps the first national party, open to persons of all races and with branches in all the colonies. It failed to attract significant numbers of Africans and Indians, however, and remained predominantly Coloured, centred in the western Cape and concerned mainly with Coloured affairs. Abdurahman traced its origins to the political awakening brought about by Carnarvon's confederation scheme and the Anglo-Afrikaner war; but a more immediate impulse came from participation in parliamentary politics. One of the APO's first activities was to strengthen and mobilize the Coloured vote by urging qualified men to apply for registration on the electoral rolls. It made substantial gains by taking part in white party politics, but also encountered great hazards which often threatened to wreck the organization. The first of these crises occurred soon after its formation.
John Tobin, a foundation member and an advocate of 'reconciliation' between Coloured and white Afrikaners, canvassed for the SAP-Bond alliance in the general election of 1904. W. Collins, the APOs first president, favoured the Progressives, who were supported also by Peregrino and other members of the Coloured Peoples' Vigilance Committee. To avoid a split, the organization expelled both men and invited Abdurahman to take the leadership. He joined the Cape Town branch in 1904 and was elected in 1905 to the presidency, an office which he held up to the time of his death in 1940. He was 'not a Progressive or a Bondsman,' he told the annual conference in Port Elizabeth; and would never cease to agitate on behalf of their people as long as they were unjustly treated. The Coloured people were very fortunate, wrote Imvo, in having him as their leader. They could not have a more trustworthy guide. Whites were woefully mistaken in thinking that they could repress the Coloured and African people, 'as a policy of that kind is only calculated to unite and make the Coloured inhabitants more determined in claiming their own'.6
The Chinese importations, colour bars on the mines, and the transfer of ultimate power to settlers in the Transvaal and Orange River Colony stirred Abdurahman to anger. His inaugural address at the APOs annual conference in January 1906 was one long indictment of the 'cosmopolitan exploiters' whose greed for gold had given rise to the system of indentured labour.' Chamberlain, the great Imperial wanderer, visited South Africa, sympathized with the downtrodden Magnates, saw a Native war dance at Colenso, and gave the Rand lords forced labour at Id. an hour.' The Flag had never been in such despicable hands since the old slave days. The ex-republics under British rule were 'simply Imperial prisons for coloured people, who are but goods and chattels in the hands of the country's exploiters'.7 The English press accused him of 'incendiary talk ' and of ' stirring up the embers of race feud '. Johannesburg's municipal council refused to let him address a Coloured audience in the town hall, whereas the anti-Chinese opposition declared that he 'expressed in most outspoken language the feeling of ninety-nine per cent of the voters'.8
The APO's mission to England in 1906 failed to convince the British government that it was morally bound to extend the franchise to the Coloured in the north. Abdurahman then threw his weight behind the federal cause, represented in the Cape by the Progressive party. Jameson had said that federation would enable the Cape to 'hold to our Native policy until the neighbouring colonies are sufficiently educated to agree to allow equal facilities for blacks and whites to rise in the scale of humanity'.9 The APO accordingly agreed at its annual conference in Indwe to support the Progressives in the 1908 general election.10 Tobin, Peregrino and Jabavu backed Merriman's South African party; it won the election and argued the case for a unitary constitution. Jameson and his fellow Progressive delegates to the National Convention switched their allegiance, assented to a unitary constitution, and accepted without protest the exclusion of persons of colour from both houses of parliament.11 The APO's second mission to England in 1909 failed to secure the deletion of the colour bar clauses. Abdurahman had not failed, he wrote, to learn that 'the rights of unrepresented classes of citizens are always unsafe, and are never free from invasion'.12
The African and Coloured delegations returned smarting under the stigma of the colour bar and toured the Cape to report on their mission. At a public banquet attended by 300 notables in Queenstown in April 1910 Abdurahman and Jabavu appealed for a political union of all the coloured races. Abdurahman reminded an African audience at Indiana a few days later that he had warned against unification, the form of constitution advocated by the SAP, which had shown no sympathy with the African and Coloured peoples. Their first duty was to have a political union. ' If they achieved that their full re-enfranchisement would be rendered easier.'13 The need for unity was a constant theme in Abdurahman's speeches at this time. Coloured South Africans, he reiterated, were sons of the soil and had as great a claim to the country as any white settler. If 'Europeans persist in their policy of repression, there will one day arise a solid mass of Black and Coloured humanity whose demands will be irresistible.'14
The contemplated union never took shape. African and Coloured leaders joined in protest, but the political ties between their peoples were never more than tenuous. Geographical isolation, barriers of language, custom and race, economic differences and inequalities of status restrained them from merging into a single organization. Colour consciousness tended to smother class or national consciousness in the Coloured. They displayed an acute awareness of physical traits and a sensitiveness to gradations of colour that blocked the growth of unity within the group itself. 'And so through pride,' wrote a correspondent in the APO, 'the Coloured people, the true sons and daughters of South Africa, are today divided, and consequently their political and industrial positions are becoming more critical day by day.' Many slightly coloured persons passed for Europeans. some of them select who, and who not, to recognize in public, through being desirous of being regarded as Europeans.' They often feared that if they supported a dark complexioned person in political life, he would expect a greeting in the street. Until 'the slightly-coloured and the pitch black confer at one table, we will only dream of what we would be, and remain the shadows that we are.'15
Genealogical gossip was a favourite pastime of Afrikaners and even more popular among the Coloured. They took malicious pleasure in tracing the dark-skinned ancestry of their rulers. If the ' European descent ' clause meant that no ancestor was coloured, the APO remarked, it would bar two ministers of the crown in the Cape, one in the Transvaal, and several members of the Cape parliament, one of whom 'bears a titular distinction'.16 Such men might at least show sympathy with their kith and kin. 'But those who try to hide the little colour that is in them are always the bitterest anti-colour advocates.'17 When Botha formed his cabinet after the first Union elections, the paper dubbed it the regime of 'the half-white ministry'. Five of its ten members were not of pure European descent.18 Yet the 'piebald Botha Government' would employ only poor whites, and oust even Coloured relatives of ministers from the public service. The only government billet open to the Coloured would before long be 'a portfolio in the Union ministry'.19
White-baiting provided an emotional relief but left the imbalance of power unchanged. The APO failed to develop suitable methods of mass struggle in spite of the example set by Gandhi's passive resistance campaign At Abdurahman's request, Gandhi contributed an article on his struggle 'for national honour, for conscience, and for manhood' in which he claimed that his methods were' as pure as the ideal itself. Suffering is the panacea for all evils. It purifies the sufferers. 'Passive resistance, he contended, would lead to violence only if soul force were transmuted into body force; and was therefore best for 'illiterate natives'. It taught them to break their own heads and not other people's in order to redress grievances.20 The closest that the APO came to instituting a passive resistance campaign was to urge the Coloured in Pretoria to conduct one against the municipality's decision to segregate them in townships. The Coloured residents preferred law suits to broken heads, however, and took the council to court.21
APO militants often spoke of using the 'economic weapon', but this too failed to materialize, although there were sufficient numbers of Coloured working men in the western Cape to make the political strike a feasible tactic. They were poorly organized, and reluctant to follow the APO except during elections. Abdurahman tried hard to form trade unions, partly in order to detach Coloured workers from white labour leaders, and met with little success except among the teachers. Like Jabavu, he believed that his people would never hold their own against the colonists without a modern education, and so made this his primary concern. He fought a stubborn rearguard action against the spread of segregation in schools; used his position in the town council to force the S.A. College (later the University of Cape Town) to admit Harold Cressy and other Coloured students after him; and with J. W. Jagger, a prosperous merchant, induced the school board to establish the Trafalgar High School, the first of its kind for Coloured, in 1910.22 Many children owed their education to his private generosity. The APO gave much attention to educational needs, agitated for better facilities, admonished parents to send their children to school, and ventilated the grievances of the teachers.
The formation of the S.A. Teachers' League in 1912-13 marked an important stage in the emergence of an intellectual leadership among the Coloured. Cressy, Francis Brutus, F. Hendricks and Abe Desmore, among others, worked closely with the APO, contributed to its paper, and through their own quarterly, the Educational Journal, instilled in teachers a sense of national pride and of duty to their people. Employed in church schools, they were badly trained, grossly discriminated against, and underpaid at salaries ranging from £5 to £12. 10s. a month. 'The argument has been brought forward persistently,' wrote Brutus, 'that Coloured teachers cannot receive anything above a mere pittance in respect of salary because of the Native teachers, whose case has still to be dealt with.'23 They had a remedy, he suggested. Let them combine with the Africans, who were then affiliated to the white-dominated Teachers' Association. The Coloured teachers, who were timid, politically backward and race conscious, continued to segregate themselves in the League.
The APO's leadership of intellectuals and small businessmen sedulously avoided mass struggles. They adopted, instead, the techniques of a parliamentary party, and concentrated on election campaigns. Coloured and African voters held the balance in a dozen or so Cape constituencies. White candidates solicited their support during elections and ignored them at other times. Some of the money spent on elections trickled into the pockets of local agents, who were often leading members of APO branches, and from them to individual voters. The alleged corruption of the Coloured electorate, often given as a reason for taking the Coloured off the common roll, grew out of the colour bar constitution. A vote without power proved to be more demoralizing than total disfranchisement. Coloured politicians tended to become appendages of white parties, which denied them membership and rewarded them with scraps of political loot. The worst evil was not bribery, however, but the failure of the leaders to develop an alternative conception of the Coloured man's role in politics.
The Coloured were stemvee - voting cattle - in the Afrikaner's vocabulary of contempt. They put their cross on ballot papers but never took part in the selection of candidates or in the making of policies. Since all parliamentary parties stood for white supremacy, the Coloured voter could only choose between evils. He usually chose the English party, representing the industrialists, merchants and professions, who were protected by class barriers from Coloured competition and could therefore afford to deplore the grosser forms of racial discrimination, provided always that the darker man 'kept his place'. The leading liberal R. W. Rose Innes complained bitterly when the Rev. Rubusana, newly elected to the provincial council, exercised his right to travel in a first-class compartment with bedding, blankets and pillow supplied by the railway administration.24 While insisting on social segregation, the English middle class objected to the industrial colour bar which interfered with the employment of the lowest-priced worker. They were his natural ally on the labour market against the policy of sheltered white labour. If the APO ever had a political theory - and only glimpses of one appeared in the diatribes against racial discrimination- it was that an expanding, progressive capitalism would dissolve caste rigidities and give all men equal opportunities in a competitive society.
It was impossible to relate this perspective to Botha's party of landowners. They preferred stagnation to progress if progress would bring equality in its train. Tradition, sentiment and party interest induced them to buttress caste divisions with statutory sanctions. The Coloured had little to expect from Afrikaner Nationalists, who made a 'white South Africa' one of their planks in the 1910 general election, remarked the APO.25 It reported resolutions passed by congresses of farmers urging government to expel African tenants from white-owned land, indenture their families to farmers, raise the hut tax and put convicts to work on public undertakings.26 There was something radically wrong, the journal observed, when cabinet ministers invoked the black bogy to persuade whites to keep their children at school, accept compulsory military training, and employ whites only on skilled work.27 Hertzog's 'narrow racialism' was a menace to the Empire. He wished to extend the harsh, inhuman laws of the 'misnamed Free State' to all the provinces. 'In that prison-house of South Africa - worse even than the despotism of Russia - the Coloured people cannot work without a permit.28
Abdurahman told the APO's annual conference at Port Elizabeth in 1910 that in terms of the constitution each branch would decide for itself which candidate to support in the forthcoming election of the first Union parliament. The APO as an organization could not bind itself to any particular party. Subsequently, however, he advised the branches to support Jameson's Unionists against the ruling coalition under Botha. Raynard and some other members of the APO who objected that this directive violated the constitution were expelled or resigned.29 Jabavu, as always, backed the party of Sauer, who held a portfolio in the Botha ministry; and accused Abdurahman of 'prejudicing the case of the Coloured people in the eyes of the great Party in Power'. He was playing into the hands of the Transvaal by setting Coloured against Coloured.30
Botha's coalition of Afrikaner parties, which formally merged into the S.A. National party in 1911, won the election with sixty-seven seats. The Unionists, representing mine owners, industrialists, merchants and the majority of English-speaking voters, won thirty-nine seats; the Labour party, four seats, all in the Transvaal; and eleven seats went to independents. All parties fought on a platform of white supremacy, promised to protect the interests of white workers, and accused one another of ' racialism ', the current term for being anti-Afrikaner or anti-British. Botha and Smuts, in common with the Labour party, called Unionists the 'capitalist party'. Unionists on the Rand asked the electorate to 'Vote British'. The Labour party replied that the capitalists who used the slogan were foreign Jews. This was not the first time that Labour had disgraced itself with anti-semitism. Tom Mathews lost the Fordsburg municipal seat in 1908 because he called the capitalists 'Jews'.31
Arthur Noon polled 296 votes for Labour in Cape Town Central against the I,695 votes cast for Jagger, the Unionist candidate. The APO had supported Noon when he contested a municipal seat in August 1909. Then, he had been 'a true friend of all workers of every class and creed and colour', who would 'voice the views of all wage earners and tenants'.32 In 1910, however, the APO supported Jagger. They would 'like to see Mr. Noon returned some day, but it will take much time and labour to convert the people of Cape Town to Socialism'.33 This vacillation reflected the ambivalence in Abdurahman's attitude to the labour movement.
The British Labour party's opposition to the colour bar clauses in the South African Act left a deep impression. 'It is the one party,' declared the APO 'in whose hands the honour of Old England can safely be trusted.' Untainted by trade, not bemused by firearms, its democracy was pure. Labour would sweep the 'wretched hucksters' out of office at the next election. The Coloured hoped for a like display of class solidarity in South Africa. 'The same result will follow here as soon as all workers, white or black, learn that they are the country, and that on labour everything rests.'34 When the Cape railways advertised vacancies for white labourers only on construction works at Piketberg, the paper appealed to trade unionists to join in protest. 'Too long have black and white been played off against one another.... It is to the Socialists that we must look for help in our fight against a class tyranny that deprives us of political freedom.'35
It was a class as well as a racial tyranny. The word kleurlyn concealed the realities of capitalist exploitation behind the myth of racial inferiority. The 'colour line' was a subterfuge used to persuade the world that the darker races were inferior and incapable of undertaking so-called white man's work.36 All employers took part in the exploitation. The capitalists hired ' Kaffir drudges ' because these worked for a scanty wage. There was no more virtue in politicians like Sauer, Merriman and Burton, who employed convicts on their farms, than in the Rand magnates, who imported Chinese.37 Smuts might appeal for unity between white South Africans, few of whom did physical work except on the rugby field. The whole industrial and economic structure depended on the coloured races. Even Merriman, 'the greatest jabberer of the crowd', grew pumpkins by proxy with coloured workers, 'save when he can get white aristocratic convicts to slave for less pay'.38
Abdurahman retained his early faith in working-class unity for many years in spite of rebuffs by white trade unionists who agitated for colour bars. White workers erred, his paper argued, in looking on the Coloured as their enemy. They should declare war on indentured labour, whether for mines, farms or domestic service. Coloured workers, like the whites, sold their skills to the highest bidder. Neither could obtain their true reward without cooperation. The employer, their economic enemy, could win only by playing off one group against the other. Unless white artisans overcame their stupid prejudices, their prospects were no brighter than the Coloured's. 'Workers of all creeds and colours must stand together; must put an end to all divisions.' Unfortunately, the spirit of solidarity - the basis of all trade unionism - was 'deeper engraved in the heart of the Coloured artisan than it is in that of the white'.39
When Noon and Tom Maginess spoke to APO branches on Labour's racial policies, Abdurahman declared himself to be a socialist, like any public man who tried to improve the position of the lower classes. By cooperation they could bring the capitalists to their knees within forty-eight hours. He objected to strikes, as they caused more misery than they alleviated, but the strike appeared to be the only weapon available. Maginess and many of his comrades in the Cape admittedly wanted the Coloured worker to get the same pay as the white for the same work, but the Transvaal Labour party's sole aim was to prevent the Coloured from living at all. The talk about 'dragging the white man down' was childish. The Coloured wanted to uplift themselves and all men. But the white workers on the Rand were about the most selfish lot he had heard of in any part of the world, as selfish as a pack of hungry wolves.40
The APO's faith in working-class solidarity turned into bitter resentment as the labour movement in the north pressed its demands for racial discrimination. Addressing the annual conference at Johannesburg in 1912, Abdurahman referred to the cumulative evidence that the general body of whites regarded his people as pariahs - banned from the Dutch Reformed Church, from schools and the army; and doomed to a condition worse than slavery. The self-styled Labour party aimed at giving white men a monopoly of skilled work for all time. Yet some skilled trades in the Cape employed a vast majority of Coloured, and the process must extend to the Rand. It was simply not practicable to assign separate classes of work to men grouped according to their colour. The interests of white artisans, too, demanded the removal of colour bars and the establishment of inter-racial working-class solidarity. Labour leaders who turned white workers against the darker races were playing into the hands of the capitalist. The division of the nation into hostile camps would give rise to a solid front of Africans and Coloured. White racists were creating the conditions for a war of extermination. Conference should meet the danger by laying the foundations of a Coloured Races Union. ' To ensure peace, one must prepare for war.'41
The alternatives were class war or race war, and the choice lay with the white worker. Though radicals might believe that class antagonisms would dissolve his colour prejudice, those in the APO were more realistic. They acknowledged that the Cape's socialists were sympathetic to the Coloured worker. Was it not a fact, however, that they had joined the Labour party, whose white labour doctrines had been adopted by Botha and inserted into Het Volk's manifesto? Tom Maginess admitted to the affiliation. Labour leaders had decided on it, he said, after much hesitation, and were convinced that their party would not injure the Coloured worker. It was largely because of Abdurahman's influence, he complained, that Labour in the Cape had no seat in parliament. White and Coloured workers would not fail if they stood together, as they had done on the issue of workmen's compensation.42 These assurances carried little weight, however, when set against such displays of hostility as the circulars issued by the Transvaal federation of trade unions, calling for a boycott of builders, owners and merchants who ' sacrificed the heritage of the white people ' by employing Coloured workers.43
There was little in Labour's parliamentary record to evoke enthusiasm in Coloured and African voters. Creswell, Sampson, Madeley, Haggar and Andrews knew that their political bread was buttered on the side of white privilege. They represented artisans, clerks and small traders on the Rand; and rarely spoke on behalf of the entire working class. Creswell made this clear early in 1911 when moving the adoption of his party's white labour policy. It was of the utmost importance, he argued, that whites should engage in every kind of social undertaking and productive enterprise. 44 As parliament unrolled its endless chain of discriminatory laws, Labour members spoke only against those elements that might injure the white working man.
The Unionists, but not Labour, opposed 'that blasphemous piece of legislation', the Dutch Reformed Church Act.45 Introduced on the opening day of the Union parliament's first session, it excluded coloured persons from membership of the church in any province other than the Cape. Creswell criticized the Native Labour Regulation Act of 1911 for perpetuating the ' semi-slavery system' of indentured labour which narrowed the white man's sphere of employment. But he made no protest against the medieval penal code that the act inflicted on Africans.46 He objected to the Immigrants' Restriction Act of 1911 because it left a loophole through which Asians might enter the country; and would not condemn the restraints on freedom of movement that imprisoned South African Indians in their province of domicile.47 Even Andrews, the only genuine socialist in parliament, could be heard asking ministers to substitute white youths for Africans on the maintenance of telegraph lines in his constituency of Germiston; or complaining that Africans were being employed to knock down rivets on railway bridges. This was a white man's job, and riveters argued that they were ' making a rod for their own backs ' by teaching Africans a part of their trade.48
It was not only for economic reasons that socialist principles gave way to electoral expediency. Labour leaders also pandered to the white man's sexual prejudices. Madeley drew attention in the House to 'brutal outrages on white women by Kaffirs', and would have the minister advise judges to inflict 'the utmost legal penalty of the death sentence on persons convicted of rape'.49 This display of ferocity occurred during a 'Black Peril' campaign that had been sparked off by the reprieve of an African sentenced to death at Umtali in Rhodesia for the rape of a white woman. The APO commented sensibly that the employment of African men in white households inevitably exposed them to temptation. Labour's official paper the Worker replied with an outrageous attack on the 'APO the mouthpiece of the black, brown, snuff and butter '; and concluded that ' after a nigger has absorbed the poison into his head he will reckon that the white woman is his game'. The APO's editor, 'who, we believe, has a white wife, should get 25 of the best enthusiastically administered by someone from Umtali way'.50
Abdurahman retorted that it was 'foul and loathsome conduct' so to drag in the family of another editor; and asserted that the Coloured were determined to make their opinions heard. The Worker returned to the attack with an abusive article on the APO's alleged encouragement of the 'cholera' of Coloured business enterprise. The white worker would be ousted unless he woke up. His remedy was to boycott 'everything produced by the cholera' and to demand a minimum wage for all workers. South Africa, replied the APO was the home of the Coloured. They would assert their right to live and work where they liked, and would not concede privilege to any white man because of his colour. The aim of the demand for a minimum wage was to oust the Coloured man from his trade. He did not fear the whites in open contest but loathed their hypocrisy.51
In parliament Labour members took up the cudgels on the African's behalf only when to do so would strengthen the white worker's position. They had him in mind when they urged the House to extend the principle of statutory compensation for industrial injuries and miners' phthisis to Africans and Coloured. They, too, were human, said Madeley, and had a right to be compensated.52 Sampson gave the real reason when he told his party's annual conference in January 1912 that black labour was being preferred to white because workmen's compensation and other industrial laws made the white man more expensive.53 As the APO54 never tired of explaining, the Labour leaders wanted to price the Coloured man out of the labour market. Alerted by these warnings, he looked askance at appeals to join hands with white workers. When Clark, president of the carpenters' society, urged Coloured artisans in Natal to organize and affiliate to his federation, they told him that white carpenters and bricklayers refused to work next to Coloured journeymen. They were consequently obliged to take a lower wage in order to keep their jobs; and would be forced out of their trade if they followed his advice.55
Creswell outlined his party's policy of total segregation during the debate on the Natives Land Act of 1913. They were the first, he claimed, to advocate the partitioning of South Africa between the races. The reserves should be consolidated into a continuous tract ' so that the natives might have their own institutions and develop along their own lines'. Andrews criticized the draft act in so far as it aimed at the supply of 'an abundance of cheap Kafir labour'. He would not, however, exempt the Cape or any other region from the restrictive clauses. Nor did he wish to see large areas being set aside for Africans until they had learned to work the land to its fullest value.56 None of the Labour members protested against the injustice or examined the consequences of restricting the occupancy rights of four million Africans to less than 8 per cent of the country's area, while the 1.25 million settlers had unlimited access to the remaining 92 per cent.
The act scheduled some 10.5 million morgen*, with a promise of more to come, for occupation by Africans, who would be prohibited, except in the Cape, from buying or leasing from non-Africans outside the scheduled areas, without the governor general's express permission. This protected white landowners from competition by Africans, who were slowly buying back some of the land filched from them or their fathers. By outlawing tenancy agreements between landowners and Africans, the act would prevent some farmers from maintaining reserves of African labour while other farmers complained of labour scarcity. Finally, the restriction on land holding by Africans would force peasants to leave the overcrowded, impoverished reserves to work for mine owners and farmers. The Cape was excluded because a ban on the right to acquire land would diminish the African franchise, which had been entrenched by the South Africa Act. Territorial segregation was imposed on the Cape only after Africans had been removed from the common roll in 1936, and it was only then that parliament redeemed its promise to set more land aside for their occupation.57
J. W. Sauer, the minister of native affairs, piloted the Natives Land Bill through parliament. A great champion of equality in pre-Union days, he traded his principles for cabinet rank and succumbed to the racists of the north. The APO called on him to resign rather than betray the confidence that Africans had placed in him. His bill was 'more barbarous than anything Kruger ever introduced'; 'the most audacious act of piracy on rights of man that has been committed in South Africa'; and 'the quintessence of tyranny and falsehood'. Nothing so base had issued from a parliament that ' since the day of its foul birth, has loaded this land with loathsome rottenness in every conceivable form of colour legislation'. It was the African's duty to send a deputation to England in the faint hope that the imperial parliament might withhold its consent.58
African reactions were no less immediate and vehement. 'Awakening on Friday morning, June 20th, 1913, the South African Native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth,' wrote Sol Plaatje, the first secretary-general of the S.A. Native National Congress.59 He toured the areas affected by what he called the 'Plague Act' and wrote a harrowing account of the plight of tenant families evicted with their livestock from farms within two months of the act's implementation. Meetings of protest, petitions and deputations failed to obtain relief. Conferences convened by the Congress in July 1913 and February 1914 decided to send a deputation to England. Botha, the prime minister, curtly rejected a petition submitted by Dube, the Congress president, on behalf of his voteless people.' "I'll have your land, so go to England," is practically what Botha's reply means,' commented the APO 'and to England we trust the Natives will go to tell Englishmen how the sons of the soil are being robbed.'60
Only Jabavu among the leaders adhered loyally to Sauer, defended the act and opposed the sending of a deputation. Misrepresenting the terms of the act, he told his followers that it would secure their land against alienation to whites and provide homes for landless squatters. His people rejected his special pleading. He had offended them in 1910 by backing the Botha Smuts government and by opposing Rubusana's candidature for the provincial council seat of Tembuland. If Africans seized the first opportunity to send one of their own people to the council, Jabavu argued, they would stir up an agitation against them and endanger their franchise in the Cape.61 Rubusana persisted, won the election with a majority of twenty-five votes, and became the first and last African provincial councillor. In 1911 Jabavu, his son Davidson, Rubusana, Chief Dalindyebo and Palmer Mgwetyana represented Africans at the Universal Races Congress in England.62 On his return, Jabavu formed the S.A. Races Congress in opposition to the S.A. Native National Congress, later known as the African National Congress.63 By this time, however, he had lost his people's confidence. They looked for leadership to the ANC.
Its foundations had been laid in the preceding decade by the formation of a provincial Native Congress in Natal, the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony. The Act of Union stimulated the leaders to meet the challenge of a single, central white government. The S.A. Native Convention, held at Bloemfontein in March 1909, had elected an executive 'to promote organization and to defend the interests of the Natives' against the colour bar in the draft Act of Union. Rubusana, Dube, Silas Molema of Mafeking and other members of the executive claimed to have branches in all the provinces Basutoland and Bechuanaland.64 In 1911 Seme announced the proposed formation of a S.A. Native Congress. There was, he observed, a general desire for progress and for a national forum. ' We are one people. Let us forget the differences between Xhosa-Fingo, Zulus and Tongas, Basutos and other Natives.' Nearly all the leaders and greater chiefs supported the movement for a congress that would give them an effective means of making their grievances known to government and South Africa at large.65
Pixley ka I. Seme, born in Zululand, was related by marriage to the Zulu royal house. He graduated at Columbia University, was admitted to the Bar from the Middle Temple, and practised law in Johannesburg. He did the spade work for the conference with the aid of other young lawyers. One of them, Alfred Mangena (1879-1924), was a member of Lincoln's Inn, and became the first African from South Africa to qualify and practise as an advocate. Another, R. W. Msimang, who also qualified in Britain, drafted the ANC constitution. The notice convening the conference went out in December over Seme's signature. Conference would formally establish the ANC as 'a national Society or Union for the natives of South Africa'; adopt a constitution; elect officers; take a vote of confidence in Botha, Sauer, and the 'Native Senators'; and discuss a variety of topics, including marriage and divorce, schools and churches, pass laws, ' the black peril and the white peril', and native beer, land, courts and labour. 'If there is no other reason to attend the Congress,' remarked Plaatje, 'it is at least worth a railway fare to go and hear what the "Four Native Senators" have done to deserve a vote of confidence.'66
Close on a hundred delegates from all parts of South Africa and the Protectorates attended the ANCs inaugural conference at Bloemfontein on 8 January 1912. Among them were nine influential chiefs, including Maama Seiso, representing the Basutoland monarch Letsie 11, and Joshua Molema, representing the Rolong paramount Montsioa. J. Mocher, president of the Free State Native Congress, took the chair. Seme and Molema moved the institution of Congress. This thereupon adopted a constitution and elected an executive with Dube as president, seven vice-presidents including Rubusana, the corresponding secretary Plaatje, a recording secretary Attorney G. D. Montsioa of Pietersburg, and two treasurers, Seme and Mapikela. Letsie 11 accepted the position of honorary president, but he was only one of some eight reigning monarchs who were elected to that position; others were the kings of the Lozi, Zulu, Pondo, Tembu, Rolong, Kgatla and Ngwato.67
The deference shown to traditional rulers and the provision made in the constitution for an upper house of chiefs have led some writers to overestimate the influence of tribal leaders on Congress. The late I. I. Potekhin, a Soviet historian of Africa, argued that they were feudal compradores** who controlled the ANC for many years in opposition to the progressive intellectuals of the rising national bourgeoisie. It was because of the chiefs' influence, he maintained, that Congress rejected illegal mass struggle against oppressive racial laws and crawled before the authorities. In his opinion, an insoluble contradiction existed between the aim of building a nation and the aim of strengthening tribal institutions. 'An organization of feudal compradores, such as was the ANC at first, cannot be the standard-bearers of a nation.' Seme, like other right-wing leaders, Potekhin wrote, actually lowered the level of national consciousness by teaching Africans to think of themselves as junior partners of the white man who had brought peace and goodwill to Africa. 'Congress never even put the question of national independence for the Bantu or of freedom for their country from British imperialism.'68
Potekhin did not adequately examine the process of amalgamating scores of formerly independent and often antagonistic ethnic societies into a single nation. No Marxist who is familiar with the concept 'national in form, socialist in content' should be surprised to learn that tribalism will wither away only if given free play in a non-tribal environment. The teachers, lawyers, ministers, journalists, clerks and other ' intellectuals ' who set the pace would have isolated themselves from the great majority of Africans if they had rejected the traditional leaders. Sol Plaatje was no tribalist, but he welcomed the participation of chiefs. Similar attempts at unity had been made before, he noted, but 'it became evident that the Natives can never effect anything unless supported by Chiefs'. For one thing, a majority of wage earners came from beyond the borders of South Africa, and would not join a movement if it was not sponsored by their chiefs.69 This was true also of many peasant workers in South Africa, who made their living in the towns while their families, land and livestock remained a part of the traditional community.
The chiefs were neither 'feudal' nor 'compradores'. Cast in conflicting roles, they defended their people against the colonists and also served as minor functionaries of the white bureaucracy. The dualism produced many strains and some overt resistance to authority. Most chiefs were illiterate and backward custodians of tribal values; but some were progressive, while not a few members of the new educated elite were reactionary. Both groups confronted white power in two dimensions. One was British imperialism, the dominant force until after the Anglo-Afrikaner war. The other was an authentic budding South African imperialism. For historical and tactical reasons Africans, Coloured and Indians appealed to the external power for assistance against their immediate oppressors until experience taught them that salvation would not come from Whitehall.
The educated leaders were restrained, religious, and skilled in handling whites with tact and tolerance. Always on the defensive, Congress was constrained to appease an aggressive, bigoted South African colonialism. Rubusana, on being nominated for the Tembuland seat, declared that his people acknowledged the superiority of the white race. All they asked for was equal opportunity and the open door.70 Congress struck the same conciliatory note in its first statement of aims.71 It would promote 'unity and mutual cooperation between the Abantu races'; maintain a central channel of communication between them and the government; strive for the educational, social, economic and political elevation of the African people; promote mutual understanding between the chiefs; encourage a spirit of loyalty to the British crown and all lawful authority; bring about better understanding between the white and black inhabitants; safeguard the interests of Africans, and obtain redress for their just grievances. Congress failed in the early period to arrive at a consistent political theory or strategy of struggle. The movement's great achievement was to develop a national consciousness through joint action and the medium of its paper Abantu Batho (The People).
Meeting in Johannesburg on 8 May 1912, the executive claimed that Congress held sway over all regions except the eastern Cape, where it had encountered Jabavu's resistance. The Congress leadership tended to be centred in the north partly for this reason and because it was there that Africans had no vote and were most fully absorbed in an expanding industrialism. The approved methods of struggle were to ventilate grievances at public meetings and through the press, and make representations for redress by means of resolutions and deputations. The complaints were endless: a new dog tax in areas where dogs were needed to keep down vermin; inadequate compensation for miners injured or killed at work; poor accommodation for third-class passengers on the railways; the substitution of white for African interpreters in the courts; the denial of franchise rights; the pass laws; the harassment of women in the Free State under municipal regulations. The women made history in 1913 by organizing a passive resistance movement and went to jail in large numbers rather than take out residential permits. Congress took up their case and scored one of its few victories in the struggle against discrimination.
Congress established its claim to speak for the people when it conducted a country-wide campaign against the Natives Land Act. Recalling Abdurahrnan's famous speech of January 1912, it declared that his prediction of a war of extermination was being fulfilled. Some fifty delegates at a special session in Johannesburg in July 1913 heard Sotho, Zulu and Xhosa interpreters read the act line by line. In August Saul Msane (Natal), J. M. Nyoking (OFS), S. M. Makgotho (Transvaal), Enoch Mamba (Transkei), Sol Plaatje (secretary), Chief Kekane (Hamanskraal) and the Rev. Twala interviewed F. S. Malan, who had taken Sauer's place after his death in July as minister of native affairs. They gave instances of hardships caused by the act and told him of their decision to appeal to Britain. Whatever steps they took, he was assured, would be within ' the four corners of the law'. Malan replied that the act had to be obeyed and doubted the success of a mission to Britain. The leaders toured the country to explain Congress policy and collect funds for a deputation.72
Imvo sang Sauer's praises in obituary notices and failed to point out that his Land Act embraced the hated northern principles which he had once opposed. The Congress took its campaign into the heart of Jabavu's political domain and challenged him to debate the issue in public. He refused and struck back by standing for election to the provincial council in Tembuland against Rubusana, the sitting member. This split the African vote. A. Payne, the white candidate, won the seat with 1,004 votes, against Rubusana's 852 and Jabavu's 294. 'One of the ablest, most cultured and respected Natives, the first of his race to be elected to the Provincial Council, has been unseated through the despicable action of one who has long been discredited by a vast majority of the Bantu race.'73 The APO's comment expressed the sentiments of Africans generally, including many of Jabavu's followers. The betrayal, coming on top of his support of the Land Act, put an end to his political career; and no African was ever again elected to the provincial council. Rubusana left soon after his defeat, together with Dube, Plaatje, Mapikela and Msane, to put the African case before the British government and public. They left against the express wishes of Lord Gladstone, the governor-general, and Louis Botha; and they received no sympathy from Lewis Harcourt the secretary of state for the colonies.
He rejected the deputation's petition, which pointed out that Africans were the original inhabitants of South Africa, and he told the Commons that a just, considered segregation would probably lead to greater happiness for all. Britain trusted the South African government and must respect its sovereign authority. Britain had never surrendered her position as protector of the natives, but would not intervene unless gross palpable injustice was proved. The deputation had come to England against the advice of Botha and Gladstone; knew that the act would not be disallowed; and should have made their case in their own parliament.
It was not, however, their parliament. Britain had excluded them to appease white power. The South African government responded only to voters and ignored the interests of a political nullity. Congress met on 1 August 1914 to hear a report on the mission and to plan the next stage in its own campaign. Dube returned a few days later. Botha, he said, had deceived the British with assurances that all Africans evicted from farms would be given land in the reserves. Abdurahman's comment was more incisive. 'The Coloured races of the Empire may be robbed, plundered and forcibly driven into slavery by whites'; but the imperial parliament would approve as long as these things were done through legislative enactment. 'The present foundation of the Empire is rotten, and cannot last.' If ' it cannot be mended, then the sooner it is ended the better'. 'The coloured races could not possibly be worse governed when left to their own resources than they were governed under British rule.'74 Britain went to war on 4 August. Two weeks later Abdurahman declared: 'The only question we have to ask ourselves is how we can best serve the Empire.75
*A morgen is approximately equal to two acres
**Native agents of foreign firms. The word is used here to describe tribal chiefs.