Wilfrid Harrison claimed to be Cape Town's most noted 'mob orator'. His stock answer to hecklers who interrupted his denunciations of capitalism with interjections about the 'colour question' was, 'And what about your red nose - that is coloured, isn't it? 'He would go on to explain that he was there to deal, not with the pigment in a man's skin, which was a medical mystery, but with capitalism, the cause of colour prejudice and exploitation in general. 1 The evangelical socialists of Harrison's Social Democratic Federation insisted that race discrimination, like the conditions of the poor, was a 'side issue', a symptom of the tensions inherent in capitalist society. No true socialist would allow colour prejudice to divert him from his function of persuading the people to place the means of production under public ownership. Discrimination would disappear under socialism and should be ignored as being irrelevant to the labour movement.
The notion that class interest would prevail over racial antagonism seemed more credible in the western Cape than in the north. Members of the SDF certainly tried to put their theory to the test. H. MacManus quoting in his Belfast twang from William Morris and the Bible; Hunter mixing socialism with temperance; H. B. Levinson relying on economic determinism; Arthur Noon propagating Christian socialism, and Harrison, armed revolt, took their messages to racially mixed audiences in District Six, in Salt River, and at the foot of Van Riebeeck's statue in Adderley Street. Coloured leaders reciprocated their goodwill and cooperated with socialists in the early years. H. P. Gordon, a prospective Labour candidate for Woodstock in 1904, took the initiative in directing the movement into parliamentary politics, and proposed joint action with the APO in 1905. Abdurahman replied that 'Yours, or rather ours because we feel the same, is a hard life.' None of them ever expected ' that such brutalities, and injustices would be perpetrated under the protection of the British Rule or Mis-rule. There is only one thing for us to do, and that is sink our little differences and show a united front.' 2
The united front never took shape. For all their Hyde Park oratory, the socialists failed the sovereign test of political sincerity. They appealed for Coloured votes but were no more prepared than liberal or racist parties to nominate a Coloured candidate in municipal or parliamentary elections. Abdurahman himself built a first-rate electoral machine, which kept him in the Cape Town municipal council from 1903 until his death in 1940. He did not need the white worker's vote and, when obliged to choose between white candidates, preferred men of wealth or standing who backed him against Labour or Afrikaner Nationalist opponents. Neither white nor Coloured radicals attempted to recruit members from the Cape peninsula's 5,000 Africans, who were excluded from skilled work by convention almost as effectively as in the north. Without a large following in the Coloured population, and based on a small, conservative white working class, the socialists of the Cape remained in the cocoon stage of theoretical propaganda.
Many of the Cape's more energetic socialists - the Needham brothers, Erasmus, Davidson, McKillop, Blake, Fraser, Bateman - left South Africa or moved to the Rand during the first ten years of the century. Those who remained lost their missionary zeal, wrangled over whether or not to take part in elections, became armchair critics of the right-wing leaders, or joined the Labour party and were identified with its white supremacy policies. In spite of their failings, however, the pioneer socialists of the Cape made a significant contribution. Their insistence that class, and not race, was the basic cause of conflict left an imprint on later generations, and strengthened the hand of radicals with similar views in Natal and the Transvaal.
Socialists in the Cape belonged to the inner circle of a weak labour movement. Their counterparts on the Rand had the advantage of appealing to a large, relatively well organized and occasionally militant working class, but competed with a powerful right-wing trade union leadership. Ideological differences were therefore sharper, the conflicts within the movement more intense, than farther south. The right wing was heavily committed to racial discrimination. Socialists faced the dilemma of all radicals who contested elections based on an all-white franchise. They could denounce racism and suffer an abysmal defeat; or make a bid for success by trading radical principles for votes. Left-wing politicians were tempted to compromise. They concentrated their propaganda on the class war, evaded the colour issue, and when challenged rejected white labour policies as a betrayal of the white worker's interests. The white labour policy, according to Crawford's band of militant socialists, was a 'white kaffir policy' which would reduce all workers to the African's living standards.
Archie Crawford was labour's most notable maverick until Smuts had him deported in 1914. Born in Glasgow in 1883, and a fitter by trade, he came with the troops in 1902, worked on the railways at Pretoria, and was dismissed in 1906 for agitating against retrenchments in the workshop. In the following year he unsuccessfully contested the Boksburg West parliamentary seat, but was returned as a Labour member to the Johannesburg town council. His great achievement was to found, publish and edit the Voice of Labour, 'A Weekly Journal of Socialism, Trade Unionism and Politics '. It appeared regularly from October 1908 to December 1912, when it died for want of funds. Its correspondents included active socialists throughout the country: Harrison, Noon and Davidson of Cape Town, Norrie of Durban, Greene of Pietermaritzburg, Henry Glass of Port Elizabeth. It advertised and published extracts from the works of Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, De Leon, Eugene Debs, Blatchford and Keir Hardie; and made the first systematic attempt to spread the doctrines of revolutionary socialism. The paper, wrote its editor, 'is the barometer of working-class consciousness in South Africa'; and the failure to 'reach the moderate total of 10,000 indicates the almost criminal apathy of the working class'.
As Labour councillor, active trade unionist, member of the ILP and LRC, Crawford belonged to the top leadership until it broke with him over the issue of the Fordsburg nominations. He attended the series of conferences held at Durban and Johannesburg in 1908-9 to form the Labour party and draft its constitution. Representing his newborn Socialist Society at the conference of October 1909, together with Davidson and members of the ILP he moved that they call themselves the S.A. Socialist Party. This was defeated after a heated debate. Mathews, Mussared, Nettleton and other trade unionists told the conference that their members would not join a party bearing this name. Socialists would do more good by organizing their fellow workers than by preaching idealism. But the ILP delegates succeeded in obtaining a majority vote for their motion to insert in the constitution a clause calling for 'The socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange to be controlled by a democratic State in the interests of the whole community.' This was hailed as a great victory over the right wing, as was also the defeat of Sampson's policy of total segregation.
Their 'native policy', said Sampson, was the rock on which the party might founder. He would grant all Coloured persons having one white parent full political, industrial and social rights. The white and black races were first separated by nature and should be kept apart. It was morally wrong for one race to suppress or exploit another. Though he approved of the white labour policy as a means to an end, it offered no permanent solution. It could be dangerous to the white race, by leading to the importation of low-wage Europeans under contract. Moreover, it disregarded the interests of Africans, who had been deprived of their land. The only natural solution was to segregate Africans in their own territory, where they could govern themselves and progress in ways they found most suitable. This could be done without taking an inch of land away from white men. Representatives of all European nations holding land in South Africa should meet to partition the country between whites and Africans. Meanwhile, Africans should be given their own elected councils, through which they could make direct representations to parliament. 3
Delegates from the Cape SDF, the ILP and Socialist Society spoke against Sampson's motion. The most effective speech came from James Trembath, Kimberley's labour councillor and a leader in the struggle of 1908 against De Beers over its decision to withdraw the customary half-holiday on Saturdays. 4 The colour prejudice in Johannesburg, he said, was most unreasonable. He was proud that the majority of white workers in the Cape were in favour of full equality. Labour could not afford to alienate the Coloured, who had a powerful organization in the APO. The party would be put back fifty years if they antagonized the 800 Coloured voters of Kimberley. When he successfully contested a municipal by-election, he had to overcome the handicap imposed by an anti-colour resolution moved by Bill Andrews at Johannesburg's Labour Day rally in 1909. His opponents posted copies of the resolution to every African and Coloured voter in Kimberley. 'The thing is we must either have coloured men on our side or against us.' This convinced conference, but it could not be persuaded into accepting Crawford's motion that the party should recognize only two classes in society and reject any policy based on differences of colour.
The militants were highly satisfied, in spite of this setback, which was more than compensated for by the adoption of a 'socialist objective' and the rejection of Sampson's apartheid policy. His one real regret, said Crawford, was that conference had agreed to allow trade unions to join the party on the payment of a political levy. Trembath, Sampson and Mathews had strenuously opposed his motion to admit individuals only. They wanted to get at the pockets of non-party trade unionists. Socialism was dearer than life to him, yet he would not force it on anyone. 5 His scruples - which Trembath and the Witwatersrand trades council had shared in 1905 - were related, however, to the disciplinary action taken against him in December 1909. Accusing him of disloyalty, the LRC had resolved to exclude him from its meetings. Crawford's own explanation was that the members of the committee had already nominated one another for the parliamentary elections, including the constituency of Fordsburg, to which he had a prior claim. 6
His candidature was endorsed at the inaugural conference on 26 December of the S.A. Socialist Federation which had as chairman the great industrial agitator J. T. Bain of Pretoria. Born in Scotland, a fitter by trade, he came to South Africa in the early 1880s, helped to form the miners' union, became a Transvaal burgher, fought on the side of the republics against the British, and was sent as a prisoner of war to Ceylon. Even his backing failed to give the Federation a flying start. Natal and Cape socialists, clinging to their customary parochialism, refused to affiliate. The Federation functioned only on the Rand and in Pretoria, largely as an opposition group to the Labour party which made its official debut at Durban on 10 January as the first national political party, with Sampson as president and Haggar as the general secretary. Labour was all set for the first round of elections under the South Africa Act.
Crawford's party disdained to join in the hue and cry against the darker man; but it did not add its voice to the protest against the colour bar in the constitution. It criticized Union in terms of the class theory, as a capitalist scheme, which had brought the workers nothing, and would take from them an increasing portion of the fruits of their labour. 'The Class War still wages' declared the Voice in its first issue after the inauguration of Union.7 When challenged on the colour bar, Crawford took refuge in a philosophical discourse on socialist ethics, which knew neither race, colour nor creed. He would admit qualified Coloured men to the franchise and to the socialist society.8 He did not follow this affirmation of principle with a campaign to recruit them to his party or to have the colour bar deleted. He argued instead that the white franchise was a capitalist device to stir up hostility between workers of different races. Colour consciousness, artificially stimulated, obscured class consciousness, which was a natural thing. 'Before they will let the white worker get hold of the reins of government, they will enfranchise the natives and exploit their ignorance.'9
Crawford contested Fordsburg against Bill Andrews, Krause and Patrick Duncan in the general election of 1910 and polled eight votes. His team mate Jim Davidson stood in Commissioner Street against Sampson and received twenty-five. The two socialists fought on an uncompromising class war platform, called for the abolition of capitalism, and studiously refrained from making any reference in their manifesto to racial discrimination or African claims. 10 The Labour leaders had agreed with Het Volk that the two parties would not contest the same seats. This, said the socialists, was a betrayal of socialist principles. 'No single candidate of the South African Labour Party,' they urged, 'should receive working class support.11 They did not rebuke Labour for betraying its principles by adopting white supremacy policies. After the election, however, the Voice claimed that Crawford and Davidson were the only two candidates in the Transvaal who had refused to draw the colour line, and were the first to stand for revolutionary principles. The votes they received were given 'for revolutionary Socialism and no race or colour bar'12
Two other Socialist candidates, L. H. Greene in Pietermaritzburg and Arthur Noon in Cape Town, also lost heavily. The Labour party nominated eleven candidates in the Transvaal, six in Natal and two in the Cape; and won four seats, all on the Rand, where Creswell, the party leader, Sampson, Madeley and Haggar were returned. Among those defeated were Andrews, Bain, Coward, Reid, Mathews, Mussared and Wybergh who, like Creswell, joined the party only two months before the election. Tom Maginess, the Labour candidate in Woodstock, lost by the small margin of 25 votes to John Hewat, the Unionist, and James Trembath polled 584 votes for Labour in Kimberley against the Unionist's 1,121 votes. Abdurahman canvassed for the Unionists and told Trembath that he could not expect support from Coloured voters as long as his party in the Transvaal was determined to crush the Coloured out from every sphere of employment.13 Trembath and Maginess, said Crawford, owed their defeat to the white labour policy of the trades hall in Johannesburg.14
Peter Whiteside found a seat in the senate by goodwill of Het Volk. 'A Ten Years fat job for Peter and the betrayal of the Workers,' noted the Voice. He was a Judas, the prototype of many present leaders who preached class war, such as Tom Mann, Andrews J.P. Tom Mathews and Mussared. He had not gone to the senate to represent the workers, for he had betrayed them as far back as 1907 by preventing his engine drivers and firemen from supporting the miners' strike. 15 The 'aristocrats of labour', wrote Crawford, were selling out for the sake of a few safe seats. 16 Eyebrows were raised in some other quarters at the alliance between a ' landed aristocracy ' and a working-class party. 17 Yet it was not very surprising, since the two saw eye to eye on the issue of racial discrimination. Botha had taken over the white labour policy for his election manifesto. Labour's own manifesto put forward a full-blown segregation scheme. Based on Sampson's rejected policy, it called for the subsidization of white workers in mines and factories, the expulsion of Asians, and a ban on the right of Africans to buy or occupy land outside the reserves.
Crawford put on a brave face. He was not disappointed, for to have won at the age of twenty-seven would spell popularity and put an end to his life's work! 'I stand for revolutionary Socialism,' he proclaimed, and 'refuse to draw lines of race, colour, creed, or sex. I only know the class division, its cause, and the struggle which arises therefrom; a struggle which will cease when there is only one class and that the nation.' 18 He took his defeat badly, in fact, and relinquished control of his paper and press a few weeks later to commence a thirteen months' tour of the 'industrial world'. Visiting Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Britain, he reported on wages, working conditions and the movement, hobnobbed with radicals, addressed meetings and poured scorn on 'reformism' and 'trade union fakirs'. He enlisted writers for the Voice and with less success potential revolutionary settlers for South Africa. This Odysseus, this wanderer, wrote his admirers, is probably ' the first of our class to circumnavigate the Industrial World on behalf of Socialism '. 19
His small band of followers, disheartened by their poor showing and at war with the Labour party, turned their backs on parliament. The working class, they argued, could not be emancipated through politics alone. Any labour movement would lapse into reformism and class collaboration if it was not founded on revolutionary industrial unionism as defined by the American syndicalist Eugene Debs: 'the unity of all the workers within one organization, subdivided in their respective departments, and organized, not to fraternize with the exploiting capitalists, but to make war on them and to everlastingly wipe out their system under which labour is robbed of what it produces and held in contempt because it submits to the robbery.' 20 South African syndicalists agreed that craft unionism catered only for the labour aristocracy and formed a bulwark of capitalism by perpetuating sectionalism. They instanced the miners' strike of 1907 - when engine drivers, under instructions from their secretary Peter Whiteside, transported scabs and ore mined by scabs - and the Natal railway strike of 1909, also lost because of craft divisions.
Industrial unions, syndicalism and the general strike were not recent discoveries. The Voice of Labour, which took its name from the official journal of the American Labour Union, the initiator of the IWW, was started to spread the idea of a general workers' union. It received a great if temporary impetus from Tom Mann when, at the invitation of the Witwatersrand trades council, he visited South Africa in March 1910 on his way home from Australia. The socialists, who first hailed him as their ally against reformism, soon lamented that he was a good man fallen among thieves. Andrews, Mathews, Sampson and other reformists were accused of isolating him from the left wing, whose views he shared. Placing his great abilities and marvellous eloquence at the disposal of trade union officialdom, Mann strengthened craft divisions by advocating a policy of working through existing unions rather than forming a new organization. Unlike Keir Hardie, who had appealed for equal pay and opportunities for all workers when he toured South Africa in 1907, Tom Mann made no reference to the position of the darker working man in his public speeches. He admitted at Jeppe that industrial unionism would not work as long as eighty per cent of wage earners were excluded from the unions. Yet he refrained from urging the unions to admit Africans and Coloured. He was strong where no colour problem existed, but weak in South Africa where he adapted his teachings to all-white audiences. 21
Mann, in a letter to Dr Abdurahman, pleaded in self-defence that he could not advance any cause if he antagonized the men whom he wished to convert. Perhaps because of his complaisance, his oratory left little permanent imprint. He persuaded the trades council to sponsor an industrial workers' union by guaranteeing two months' salary to the organizer. The council lost interest, while the union itself passed into the hands of the radical socialists. T. Glynn, the new secretary and a motorman on the Johannesburg tramways, declared that the union would have to fight ' men of the type of Geswell, Sampson, Andrews & Co.' if it was to meet the need of a 'class-conscious revolutionary organization, embracing all workers regardless of craft, race or colour', and dedicated to the entire overthrow of capitalism. 22 The union, renamed the Industrial Workers of the World (S.A.), put its theory to the test in a successful one-day strike of Johannesburg tramwaymen against a brow-beating inspector. Hailed as the first triumph of working-class solidarity among whites, the strike was contrasted with the strike of bricklayers at Pretoria, which ended after seven weeks in a defeat for the men.
The tramwaymen, dizzy with success, formed themselves into a branch of the IWW and refused to recognize a municipal committee appointed to inquire into their grievances. Their leaders Glynn and Glendon were summarily dismissed in May, and this sparked off a strike famous in S.A. labour history as the one and only militant action of the industrial unionists. 23 Yet they failed hopelessly. They had no plan of campaign, left the strikers without effective leadership and relied mainly on the support of outsiders. The council set out to break the union, called in the police, banned public meetings, and ran the trams with scabs under police protection. 'The Tram employees,' complained Dunbar, 'were not defeated by the Town Council, nor by the police with their pickshafts, but by the workers who scabbed on their fellowmen.' 24 Glynn, sentenced to three months' imprisonment for inciting a strike, won his appeal against the conviction. He and Dunbar of the IWW, Back of the SP, Cameron the veteran leader of the SLP, and Councillor Lane, the man who defeated Andrews in the municipal elections of 1905, were prosecuted and acquitted on a charge of holding an unlawful meeting. Two strikers, Whittaker and Morant, were framed by police and charged with placing dynamite on the tram lines. They were also acquitted and obtained damages against the government for illegal treatment while awaiting trial.
This was one defeat that could not be attributed to craft divisions. It was therefore a splendid occasion for bewailing capitalist iniquities, working-class frailties, and the 'cowardly incompetence' of the 'Trades Hall clique'. No doubts were allowed to disturb the vision of one great industrial union. When Cape Town printers, white and Coloured, succumbed in June after a two months' strike and lockout on the issue of a closed shop, the radicals blamed not the scabs imported from Britain, but the abominations of craft trade unionism. Engineers refused to stop the machines, railwaymen hauled and workers bought scab 'matter', post office employees transmitted news, and printers in other towns set type from matrixes forwarded by rail to Cape Town master printers. 25 Andrews, back from his assignment to assist the strikers, told a Johannesburg labour meeting that the strike had done more than years of street oratory to convert people in Cape Town to socialism. The Voice sneered that his craftmanship had the 'usual success' attached to his efforts as a strike leader. 26
The radicals both detested and admired Andrews. His feud with Crawford dated from their clash in the Fordsburg election; and they resented his formidable role as organizer and political leader on the opposite side of the movement. He infuriated them with his cool, logical reasoning and exposure of sentimental humbug. Unable to find fault with his honesty and socialist sincerity, they descended to mere abuse. He was 'class war Andrews J.P.', a 'political opportunist' and 'labour fakir', who preached revolution and yet took office and title under capitalism. More than anyone else, they said, he perpetuated craft divisions and hindered class solidarity. When he contested the Georgetown by-election in January 1912, they accused him of being at the bottom of half the discord in the movement. He was a sleek, well paid official (on £25 a month!) who sacrificed nothing for the cause, and sneered at honest, impecunious, victimized socialist agitators. Andrews was returned to parliament with 1,046 votes, against the 726 polled by the Unionist candidate. The Rand's working class had evidently resolved on the Labour party, remarked the Voice, and consoled itself with the thought that this brought closer the day of disillusionment.27
'Political action is useless,' argued the bellicose blacksmith Andrew Dunbar, ' so long as the workers are split up in sectional unions.' Dunbar (1879-1964) came to South Africa from Scotland in 1906, joined the Natal railways, led 2,500 men out on strike in 1909 and subsequently settled on the Rand. An aggressive socialist, he vacillated in the next three years between the SALP, Socialist League, Socialist Party and IWW, of which he became the general secretary. The Voice defended him as unsurpassed in energy, enterprise and enthusiasm. When 'grimy and dirty, after having slaved nine hours at an anvil', he would address workers on the vices of social reformism and the merits of industrial unionism. They could not be emancipated through political action alone, he told them; for to be of use, a socialist party must be founded on the IWWs principle of direct action.28
He demonstrated the advantages of 'direct action' in Johannesburg's municipal election in October 1911, together with Mary Fitzgerald, the Irish beauty who partnered Crawford in his printing plant and later became his wife. A former typist in the office of the miners' union, she had recorded the death from phthisis of thirty-two executive members in a period of eight years; and was converted into a fiery socialist. She, Dunbar and Glynn came armed with pickhandles to election meetings of councillors whom they accused of banning free speech during the strike and turned them out of the hall. Labour increased its representation on the council from five to eleven members. The IWW, said Dunbar, could claim a fair amount of credit for the success. 29 Though only in its second year, it had done more fighting than all the craft unions and political parties since their inception. He would have nothing to do with either, not even with the Socialist party, and this obduracy led to his expulsion from the IWW in February 1912. 30
The reasons given for his expulsion were intolerance, unpredictable behaviour and intemperate attacks on his comrades; but he had sinned mainly by standing out against renewed attempts to consolidate socialist groups throughout the country in a single party. This led to a long and acrimonious debate. Dunbar and Glynn argued that the state reflected economic relations. No parliamentary action could alter its basic structure. Even if Marxists controlled parliament, military and police power would still be on the side of the capitalist class. The general strike was the most powerful weapon of the workers and they could bring about a revolutionary change only by destroying the economic structure of capitalist society. Davidson and Crawford retorted that the syndicalists had made a fetish of the IWW. It was merely a means to the end, and of relative importance to other methods of achieving socialism. Dunbar's opposition, they said, was based on the fallacy that a socialist party could grow only at the expense of the IWW; whereas they were complementary. The one could not be strong while the other was weak.
Davidson was another Scottish radical who had substituted Marxism for Calvinism. He came to Cape Town in 1898 at the age of twenty-one, worked in a bank and municipal offices, joined the SDF at its inception in 1902, and became its general secretary before moving to the Rand in 1910. Marxism, he maintained, held the view- that the capitalists possessed power 'as a reflex of the ideas of the masses as expressed in the State or ideological institutions'. A revolutionary should therefore concentrate on changing the mind of the masses by both political and economic activity. The masses had swung from political to direct or economic action. It was safe to predict that they would swing back to parliamentary action in the near future. Crawford agreed. The time might come when the IWW itself would enter the parliamentary field as a final, strategic move towards working-class emancipation.
Crawford returned from his world tour after attending the unity conference at Manchester on 30 September 1911 between Hyndman's SDP, Grayson's SP, the ILP, the Clarion, and other left-wing groups. Finding his paper at a low ebb and the radicals in disarray, he decided to follow the British example. Mrs. Dora Montefiore, a former associate of Hyndman, combined wealth with revolutionary ardour and visited South Africa at Crawford's invitation. Speaking at socialist meetings, where the 'Internationale' was sung for the first time in South Africa, she argued the case for both political and industrial action. She, Mary Fitzgerald, Harrison, Norrie and Knowles from Durban were among the delegates at a unity conference held in Johannesburg in 1912. Agreement was reached and the United Socialist party announced its formation on May Day. The draft constitution repudiated reformism, affirmed ' the class war between the revolutionary working class and the reactionary exploiting class', and called for the overthrow of capitalism. Membership would be open to any socialist 'without discrimination as to race, sex colour or creed'.32
Socialists in Cape Town, Durban, Pietermaritzburg, Pretoria and Johannesburg agreed to merge and turn themselves into local branches of the USP. The merger never took place. The local groups argued over constitutions and the rival merits of industrial unionism, anarchism, and parliamentary politics. Norrie carried the USP flag at a parliamentary by-election in Greyville, Durban, a constituency with a large railway vote, and lost heavily to Tommy Boydell, the Labour party candidate. Unable to gain a foothold on the electoral ladder, the socialists ran into financial difficulties. The Voice was losing £20 a week and often could not pay the printers, Crawford and Mrs. Fitzgerald. If the paper served as a barometer of working-class consciousness, both reached their nadir at the end of 1912. There were times, mourned the editor, when socialists appeared not to want a paper to represent their interests: they certainly did not deserve one.33 Its obituary notice made a confession: 'We stirred things at times more well than wise, and have to pay the price in limbo.'34
Yet conditions were never again as favourable for the growth of a radical Labour movement on the Rand. A high proportion of the white workers were immigrant; many had a background of militant trade unionism. Industrial legislation was rudimentary and gave little or no protection against victimization, unemployment, occupational diseases or accidents. Workmen were unsettled, insecure and often came into angry conflict with employers and government. Trade unionism had taken root. Nearly all the unions then in existence were affiliated to the Transvaal Federation of Trades which replaced the Witwatersrand trades council in 1911. 35 The socialists were the kith and kin of the working man, spoke his language and worked at the same trades. The identity between white workers and radical leaders was closer in the first two decades of the century than at any later period. Trade unionists, however, generally ignored or were hostile to left-wing socialism. Marxist categories that had been delimited in advanced industrial societies seemed unconvincing in a colonial-type society where colour rather than class determined status and the distribution of power.
The radicals refused to believe that racial divisions predominated. 'The antagonism is class antagonism, and not racial,' they argued. ' The dividing line is not between white and coloured, but between property-owners and the proletariat.' 36 Africans had been specially selected for repressive legislation only because they were the largest body of wage slaves. The laws were meant to control all wage slaves, and would be applied also to whites who threatened the propertied classes. White workers conscripted under the Defence Act would be used first to chain up the African, and then to chain up the white worker. Africans would revolt one day against wage slavery. If they were crushed, whites would be reduced to the same condition. Both groups faced the same problem - how to dispossess an exploiting class. The solution for both lay in a universal organization of all workers and the general strike.37
Inspiration as well as theory came from abroad. 'It is just lovely to be alive in these days,' exulted the IWW. 'The whole world is seething with industrial unrest.'38 There was unrest also among white workers in South Africa, though the socialists misread its symptoms. It arose out of a struggle for recognition within the established order, and not against capitalism. The working man voted for the parties of white supremacy and their white labour policy, and not for the standard bearers of international socialism. These tried to wean him from the right-wing leadership by accusing it of pursuing a 'white kaffir policy' which would reduce him to the African's standards. Cheap labour drove out dear. A white man required at least 10s. a day, while an African might live on 2s. 6d. The capitalist would not cut his profits. If he substituted white workers for Africans he would pay them the lower wage. It was therefore in their interest to reject the white labour policy.39 Appeals of this kind were more likely to intensify the white man's fear of being ousted than to convince him that he could find security and win recognition by joining hands with members of a downtrodden race.
Tom Mann had pointed out that there could be no industrial unionism or general strike unless the African took part. The socialists dodged the issue, took refuge in revolutionary phrases, and never made it their business to help the darker man to organize. That, they argued, was better left to him. Their appeals for inter-racial cooperation were construed in terms of the white worker's interests. It meant, they said, no more than that the 'Chinaman or Kaffir' would not do the work of miners who came out on strike. The purpose of cooperation was to teach the coloured worker that to undercut was to scab, the punishment for which had no limit. White workers would befriend him only as long as he did not willingly contribute to their degradation. 40 Like the right-wing leaders, the radicals assumed that the African's role was to provide white men with the higher standards of living to which they laid claim.
The socialists, to their credit, condemned the cruder forms of discrimination in the movement. The Bloemfontein branch of the typographical union induced the municipal council in 1909 to insert a fair wage clause in printing contracts, together with the stipulation that 'no skilled labour must be carried out by coloured labour' . The Voice protested that the restriction barred the union's own Coloured members and suggested that their people in the Cape would be well advised to withhold their votes from a party intent on raising barriers against them. 41 African miners who struck work in January 1911 at the Dutoitspan, Voorspoed and Village Deep mines were driven back to work with bloodshed by the police and white miners, and then imprisoned under the master and servants laws without protest from the labour leaders. The Voice commented angrily on the ' white wage slaves ' who had ' prostituted themselves into guardians of Capitalist plunder'; and denounced the futility of sectional strikes.42 Yet socialists, too, were prone to colour prejudice.
Financial difficulties could not excuse the appearance in the paper of offensive advertisements such as one inserted by the tailors Ben Pickles & Co. which asked: ' Why should you wear a suit that has been made by sweated or coloured labour?' 43 The socialists disclosed their own racial bias when they insisted that cooperation between white and African workers did not involve 'kissing a black brother or inviting him to tea'. Peregrino, the editor from Accra, who claimed to have sat with the master minds of socialism in Europe and America, agreed that 'intelligent black men' neither urged nor desired social equality. All they wanted was the open door to political manhood. 44 This might have been a common opinion at that time, but socialists should have disowned the concession to colour prejudice. By refusing to adopt the principle of equality in every sphere, they isolated themselves behind an impregnable racial barrier from the bulk of the working class.
One or two, like Greene of Pietermaritzburg, acknowledged that it was their duty to teach the 'great industrial, inarticulate mass of coloured labour' to welcome the advent of socialism and to unite under its banner. He too, however, gave priority to the interests of white workers. Socialism would keep them afloat by doing away with inter-racial competition. Capitalism, on the other hand, stirred up hostility and would drown them in a flood of coloured labour. Africans would have to secure their own emancipation; and the sooner the better.45
What form would their emancipation take? Unable to envisage equality, even in a socialist society, between white and black, the socialists tended to lapse into the cant of the right-wing leaders. 'Under socialism,' wrote the editor of the Voice, 'the native would not be driven out of his kraal in order to be exploited. He would remain there with his own kind and develop along his own lines.'46
It seemed evident to the socialists that white working men would form the vanguard of revolution. Capitalist tyranny would open their eyes to the futility of colour bars and provoke industrial upheavals which were bound to culminate in the general strike. The theory was plausible under the conditions of a raw industrialism. The ruling farmers, merchants and mine owners, though adept at forcing Africans to work, knew little about trade unions or class conflict and refused to take them seriously. Organized labour, on the other hand, had not yet achieved the status and recognition to which it aspired. Exploitation and class antagonism were most acute in the gold mining industry, whose impermanence and terrible toll of life were unparalleled, wrote the contemporary pamphleteers Campbell and Munro. 47 In March 1912 Crawford predicted that a miners' strike would follow the failure of the parliamentary Labour party to carry a bill for an eight-hour day 'from bank to bank', or from the time of going below to the time of return to the surface. 48 There were other grievances, notably an alleged tendency on the part of managers to 'blacklist' militants by making unfavourable comments on their 'tickets' or work records. The tension between managements and men reached breaking point in May 1913 on the New Kleinfontein mine.
The trouble began when the manager instructed five mechanics employed underground to work until 3.30 p.m. instead of 12.30 p.m. on Saturdays. This led to a strike for trade union recognition, the eight-hour day and the reinstatement of strikers. Tom Mathews, the union secretary, J. T. Bain, Andrew Watson, George Mason and other militant members of a strike committee went from mine to mine calling the men out. Crawford, Mary Fitzgerald, George Kendall of the ASE and other syndicalists joined the struggle and tried to turn it into a general strike against capitalism. 'The mob went from mine to mine,' said Smuts in parliament, ' and no number of police could have protected every property though we had collected numbers from all parts of the country.' 49 The owners, on the other hand, were determined to break the unions. Mines were kept in production by means of Africans and white scabs. Individual strikers called on Africans to come out as well, but the police forced them to work or remain in their compounds.
Some 18,000 whites on sixty-three mines were out on strike by the end of June. Smuts drafted police, mounted riflemen and troops of the British garrison to the Rand. The strike committee summoned workers to a meeting at Benoni on Sunday, 29 June, for a display of determination. 'Therefore the Strike Committee again asks you to come, and to come armed if you can, in order to resist any unlawful force which may be used against you.' 50
The government invoked a republican law introduced in 1894 to check the white immigrant agitation, banned all public gatherings in Benoni, and proclaimed martial law on Friday, 4 July. The Federation of Trades called a general strike on the same day. 'The response to this was a display of spontaneous loyalty and solidarity which probably is unequalled in the history of the world's industrialism.' 51 Bands of 'excited men and women waving red flags' and numbers of youths 'armed with sticks and other weapons' appeared on the streets. 52 War had been declared, wrote the editor of the Labour party's official paper the Worker, and had to be fought to victory. This meant bringing the public and parliament to their knees and extorting substantial legislation in the workers' interests. In principle, if not in tactics, an industrial war justified murder, arson, destruction of property and all other forms of armed struggle. 53
Police and troops broke up a banned meeting in Market Square, Johannesburg, on Friday afternoon. Crowds of demonstrators roamed the streets, stopped the trams, and pulled the running staff off the trains. That night hooligans burnt down a wooden ticket office at the main railway station, raided the bar, set fire to the Star newspaper offices, looted gunsmiths' and jewellers' shops, and exchanged shots with the police. The most serious clashes took place outside the Rand Club, the haunt of mine owners and the ruling elite, on Saturday afternoon. Demonstrators assembled outside the club, rushed the entrance, and were fired on by Dragoons. At least twenty people were killed in the fighting on Saturday, including Labuschagne, a young Afrikaner miner - Labour's first martyr. A leaflet issued soon afterwards commemorated his death in language that expressed the strikers' mood:
All civilisation cries Shame! Shame! Shame! on the work of the 1st Royal Dragoons who was backed up and urged by the devil, his government, his press and his pulpit. Labuschagne was Cowardly Murdered while defending the lives of women and little innocent children.
When the Chamber of Mines' dirty work was in full swing and honest working people were being shot down by Bums in soldiers' uniform in the employ of the Capitalist, a Man stepped off the sidewalk in Commissioner Street nearly opposite the White Kaffirs' nest - Rand Club - he stood and tapping his breast with his hand he said: 'Don't shoot any more women and children - shoot a Man. For these heroic words his Manly voice and heart was silenced by a volley of bullets....
Let the noble name of Labuschagne ring in every Working Man's home throughout the world. Cast fear and shame behind you. Labuschagne, the Hero Miner of the Rand goldfields died as a Man, defending the lives of women and little innocent children
Botha and Smuts rushed from Pretoria to Johannesburg on the Saturday and negotiated a settlement on behalf of the owners with the strike leaders, who agreed to call off the strike on condition that all men would be reinstated without victimization, while the government undertook to inquire into their grievances.54 Signing the document, said Smuts, was one of the hardest things he ever had to do. He and Botha were in no position to bargain. ' We made peace because the Imperial forces informed us that the mob was beyond their control.' The town might be sacked that night and the mines permanently ruined. The two ministers drove away through hostile crowds and made up their minds that such a state of affairs would never recur. 55
The strikers, too, were dissatisfied. They met in Johannesburg on the following Sunday in response to a leaflet issued by Bain, the secretary of the Federation. 'The Government has declared war against the Working Class of the Transvaal by its bloody, brutal and utterly unprovoked attack.' In spite of this rousing call to action in defence of civil liberties, Bill Andrews and the Federation leaders urged the men to accept the settlement. Opposition came from the radical socialists: Crawford, Mary Fitzgerald, Kendall and J. P. Anderson. The Federation had been bluffed, they said. The Chamber of Mines was not a party to the agreement, had not met the demand for collective bargaining, and was free to set up company unions - as indeed it did a few months later. 56 The socialists correctly evaluated the government's weakness and the strength of the men's case. They were never again in so favourable a condition to enforce a legitimate demand for trade union recognition by means of a strike. Though the meeting voted for Kennels resolution to persist until the authorities yielded, the right-wing leaders killed the strike. Nine years later, in the great revolt of 1922, it was Crawford who pressed for a peaceful settlement and Andrews who stood out for struggle to the bitter end.
Afrikaner miners, of whom some had entered the industry as strike-breakers in 1907, loyally supported the strike. The rapidity with which they 'developed a class sentiment', noted Campbell and Munro, was one of its noteworthy features. Labour leaders widened their horizon to take in the prospect of a rapprochement with Afrikaner nationalism. The Worker discovered that the 'Dutch temperament' had a 'remarkable leaven of what really approaches very close to Socialistic ideas'. Hertzog had much the same outlook as Labour on such matters as ' financial imperialism', the immigration of low-paid workers, racial segregation and the white labour policy. His party and the Labour party 'represent the real forces of progress in South Africa'. 57
A glimmering of goodwill towards the African appeared at the other end of the spectrum. Correspondents to the Strike Herald, a Federation broadsheet, put the case for organizing African miners. They were ready for trade unionism, and many ' intelligent natives ' were willing to undertake the work. A mine could be kept going after a fashion when white workers only were on strike. If the Africans joined them, production would stop, and control of the mine would pass to the Federation. Abortive African strikes had broken out on half a dozen compounds in July, and there might have been a general stoppage along the Reef if the strikes had-taken place in the weekend of 'Black Saturday'. 58 Years later, communists claimed that the 1913 strike opened the eyes of militants to the potential of Africans in the labour movement. From that time, declared Ivon Jones, 'there has been a growing minority of white workers who realize that the emancipation of the white can be achieved only by solidarity with the native working masses'. 59
George Mason, a carpenter and staunch syndicalist from Durham, England, was one of those whom the strike converted into an advocate of solidarity with Africans. They stopped the Kleinfontein mine, he claimed, by responding almost without exception to his appeals. 60 R. B. Waterston (1881-1919), a fireman who came from Australia in 1899 to fight the republics, was also said to have urged Africans at Kleinfontein to down tools. Speaking in Fanagalo, the jargon used on the mines, he advised them to 'tchella lo baas wena meningi mali; picanniny sebenza', meaning 'demand more pay and less work'. Whether because of such appeals or on their own initiative, Africans did stop work on a number of mines. They demanded a rise of 2s. or more a day. Police and troops drove them down the shafts with bayonets and rifle butts and the white miners scabbed. 61
The A.P.O. protested against this 'brutal savagery' and insisted that Africans should have as much right as whites to withhold their labour. No whites were prosecuted for striking, while African strike leaders were sentenced to six months' hard labour. This was outrageous, said the African National Congress. A motion of sympathy for the white strikers failed to obtain a seconder at the special conference called in July to consider the Natives Land Act. Congress declared that the dispute affected only whites, dissociated itself from rumours of 'native unrest', and asked for protection of African miners in the event of a general strike. The ANC deputation to the minister of native affairs put these issues before him and complained that the convicted strike leaders were being punished for 'doing what their white overseers told them to do'. Malan, the minister, replied that the punishment was a deterrent to others; undertook to appoint H. O. Buckle, the chief magistrate of Johannesburg, to investigate the grievances of African miners; and gave assurances of protection for them in any general strike of white workers. 62
Threats of a general strike were being made throughout the second half of 1913. Even conservatives like Creswell declared that 'they would have to adopt other means' if constitutional protests failed. Speaking at Pretoria on 20 July, he said that workers on the Rand had done more in three days to bring the government to its knees than could be accomplished in ten years of agitation. A general strike, warned the Worker a week later, 'now means something like a civil war'. With 'great, general and united popular movement, it would very likely be successful, and therefore justified'. George Mason told trade unionists in Cape Town in September that they were fighting a class war in which the police and military served as 'the bribed assassins of the "Corner House" ' (the large mine company building in Johannesburg). The exhortations met with a favourable response. Both wings of the movement profited from Smuts's blunders and the arrogance of the mine owners. While new members streamed into the Labour party, the Federation made great headway with a trade union drive in the main industrial centres.
The next substantial defiance of authority came, however, not from Labour but from Natal's 140,000 Indians. They rose in November against the humiliation and injustice of restricted immigration, provincial barriers, discrimination under licensing and land holding laws, and the £3 tax imposed on persons who had not renewed their indentures. Gandhi accused Smuts of having broken his pledge to repeal the tax; and called on his people to strike. 63 They came out from coal mines, sugar fields, railways, factories, shops and offices. The police clashed with armed strikers on the plantations, killed nine and wounded twenty-five Indians. Gandhi led bands of satyagrahis three times across the Transvaal border before he and his lieutenants were imprisoned. India's government and press denounced the brutality, Botha appointed a commission to inquire into the causes of the disturbance, and Gandhi, released from jail, came to an agreement with Smuts. It closed, said Gandhi, ' the passive resistance struggle which commenced in the September of 1906', and led to the Indian Relief Act of 1914. 64 Parliament abolished the tax and recognized the validity of Indian customary marriages.
These were meagre gains, a South African sociologist has observed. 65 Though valuable as methods of political education, Gandhi's passive resistance campaigns were ineffective techniques of liberation. ' In 1913, at a time when it appeared obvious to all that the government had been brought to bay, he chose to demonstrate Indian magnanimity of heart, rather than exploit the situation for the immediate rectification of Indian rights.' The great Indian strike crippled industry in Natal and, coinciding with the white miners' strike on the Rand, 'placed the government in a particularly precarious position'. By calling off the Indian campaign, Gandhi left the government unhampered to suppress the miners' strike. His soul force had succumbed to Smuts's physical force.
Gandhi went to India in July 1914, never to return. 'His name,' said the A.P.O. 'will be handed down to posterity as one of the greatest and truest sons of India that ever came to the shores of South Africa.'66 The entire Indian community would have followed him if Labour had had its way. The party's fifth annual conference agreed on 1 January 1914 that the presence of Indians would 'always lead to grave difficulties', and urged the government to repatriate them with adequate compensation.67 As to Africans, the third annual conference, meeting at Bloemfontein in January 1912, adopted a full-blown segregation policy. It would isolate them in separate areas under advisory councils; rule out any extension of their franchise; prohibit them from owning or leasing land in so-called white areas; replace them by white workers in the towns; and absorb persons so displaced in sugar and cotton plantations in the reserves. Development costs would be met out of revenue from African taxation.68 Armed with these resolutions, Creswell told parliament in the debate on the Natives Land Bill of 1913 that his party was the first to advocate the separation of the races. Left to themselves, they would naturally tend to live apart. Indentured labour and other institutions that increased the points of contact were evil and served only the propertied classes. ' It should be the aim of the country to give the natives their own parallel institutions.'69
The Coloured could not be disposed of so easily, even on paper, by deportation or segregation. Labour party branches in the Cape wanted their votes; trade unions wanted to organize the Coloured artisans. George Mason, returning from his organizing tour in the south, advised the Federation in September 1913 to admit those who were prepared to demand 'civilized white standards of wages'. The Worker agreed. 'Altruism in this respect is also the first step towards self-protection.' Trade unionism, the paper discovered, depended 'not upon boycotting, but upon organizing the coloured workers and raising them economically'.70 The party's third, fourth and fifth annual conferences debated these issues with great solemnity and some acerbity. A report on 'Coloured Labour Policy' came before the conference at Cape Town on 1 January 1913. Delegates affirmed the policy of maintaining white standards, accused the Coloured of undermining them, and piously proclaimed the aim of uplifting those who aspired to achieve them. The white man could not afford to surrender his monopoly of the vote ' until such time as our native policy is given effect to'.71 This, the A.P.O. caustically remarked, might be 'as long in coming as the Greek Kalends'.72
The party constitution drew no colour line; membership was 'Open to all adults of either sex who endorse the objects of the party and are accepted by the branch they desire to join.' Commenting on this clause, the committee appointed to consider the question of membership conceded that it was unjust, indefensible and even suicidal to exclude civilized Coloured. On the other hand, nothing should be done to attract them at the expense of the party's white ideal. This schizophrenic dialectic produced a monster: 'it is undesirable to admit coloured persons to membership of the party who have not given practical guarantees that they agree to the party's policy of upholding and advancing white standards.' The fourth conference, held at Pretoria on 29 December 1913, adopted the negative condition by seventy-two votes to forty-nine. Both sides wished to maintain white supremacy, and disagreed over whether this would best be served by admitting or excluding Coloured members. Would they be more, or less, dangerous as competitors on the labour market if brought into the movement? Would the party lose more white votes than the number of Coloured votes it might gain by opening its doors? Personal prejudice or sectional interest dictated the answer.
H. D. Bernberg, the party secretary and a member of the Transvaal provincial council, confessed that he was a racist who wanted to keep the party white. George Mason, who had pulled African miners out in the New Kleinfontein strike, thought that it was ridiculous to raise the 'mongrel race' to the European's level. The Coloured man, 'all right as a friend or chum', always worked at a lower rate. The miners' delegates were personally in favour of admitting the Coloured, but their union had instructed them to vote against. John Ware, the Australian-born stonemason and another provincial councillor, said that his society would not allow a Coloured apprentice; and warned conference that the open door would frighten the rising generation of Afrikaners away from the party. The Cape Town delegates, Tom Maginess and Bill Freestone, were in favour of admitting the Coloured. Arthur Barlow agreed, and argued that the same blood flowed through white and Coloured veins. S. P. Bunting saw no objection against allowing the Coloured to help them fight for white standards. Bill Andrews declared that since the Coloured undersold the white man when work was scarce, it was in his interests to raise them to his level. Harry Haynes thought that the white man would remain supreme if he admitted Coloured members and got them to fight for the higher wage.73
The conference of 1913-14 elected Andrews as the party's chairman for the coming year. He predicted in his inaugural address at Pretoria that other parties would make capital out of Labour's decision to admit Coloured members. Derision would turn to fear, however, when the Coloured joined the great proletarian alliance. They never did join. The negative and humiliating resolution on membership was swept aside by the dramatic episodes of 1914: the general railwaymen's strike in January, the deportation of labour leaders, the party7s subsequent successes at the polls, the outbreak of world war and the split in the party. The war was the dominant issue when the party next discussed the question of membership in August 1915 at Johannesburg. John Ware, now a senator, reminded conference that he had opposed the Pretoria resolution because it was not worth the paper it was written on. Every branch had put its own interpretation on the resolution, with the result that not a single Coloured had joined outside the Cape. He moved an amendment that would make it possible for Coloured to become members of the party.74
Creswell deeply regretted the motion. There were, he said, more important questions before conference. Andrews, having moved to the left on the war issue, remarked that 'the working class of this country are the Native people'. If the party was genuinely Labour, and not the middle-class party it appeared to be rapidly becoming, they would admit Africans as well. Gerald Kretzchmar, an executive member of the Federation of Trades, spoke passionately against the motion. A permanent gulf would separate English and Afrikaner workers, he warned, if the party were to concede equality to the Coloured. And the party would never gain power without the Afrikaners' support. Conference rejected Ware's motion by sixty-one votes to twenty-six, and went on to discuss the main business - the party's war policy. Andrews was voted out of the chair after a furious debate; conference carried the war policy by eighty-two votes to thirty75 and the anti-war faction walked out, taking along three leading officers and seven members of the executive. Denuded of its militants and radical socialists, the Labour party would never again attempt to build a bridge between white and coloured working men.