The impetus given to secondary industries during the war persisted in the boom that followed. Of the 6,000 factories recorded under the 1918 Factories Act, 4,300, with a working force of 30,000 white and 74,000 other persons, were registered in 1919-20. The number employed in all manufacturing establishments topped the 180,000 mark at the end of 1920. Trade unionism made a corresponding advance. There were ninety unions with 132,000 recorded members in 1920, compared to 10,500 trade unionists in 1915. Goods were scarce and prices soared. The wholesale price index rose from 1,000 in 1914 to 2,318 in 1919 and 2,707 in 1920. The incidence of strikes rose from twelve in 1914 to forty-seven in 1919 and sixty-six in 1920, when 105,658 employees lost an aggregate of 839,415 working days through strikes. The majority took place on the Rand and in the port towns; affected a wide range of occupations, including the police and banks; and were settled quickly by voluntary arbitration. Organized labour was strong and the employing class conciliatory.
The socialists entered 1919 with great expectations. The working class of eastern and central Europe had hoisted the red flag. Symptoms of revolt appeared from Mexico to China. South Africans, too, showed signs of renewed militancy. The SAIFs conference at Durban in January passed a resolution, by thirtytwo votes to fourteen, condemning allied intervention in Russia and calling on capitalist powers to stop their intrigues against the working class. The conference also voted against the admission of Coloured delegates. The Cape Federation of Labour Unions retaliated by deciding to sever all relations with unions in the north. Such incidents were treated as minor divergences from the great forward movement.
Appeals for industrial solidarity made headway. Building workers on strike in Port Elizabeth refused to resume work unless employers included Coloured artisans in the terms of settlement. Tramwaymen in Pretoria stopped work in February 1919. Andrews urged them to form a workers' council and to run the trams in defiance of the municipality. They applauded and disregarded his advice. He was more successful in Johannesburg a few days later, at a mass meeting called by the SAIF to demand a shorter working week. The meeting passed a resolution, which he moved from the floor, protesting against the arrest and imprisonment of Africans who had demonstrated in Bloemfontein for higher wages. The ice had broken, the League declared. 'For the first time in industrial history white workers have thus publicly and corporately associated themselves with the grievances of native workers.' This was 'a historic landmark in the progress of the movement not only of this country but of the world'.1
Cape Town's socialists experienced a fresh rash of schisms. A. F. Batty resigned as organizer of the Labour party to found the Democratic Labour party on a non-racial platform. A Constitutional Socialist League appeared in opposition to the Intemational Socialist League. The Industrial Socialist League published a monthly 'satirical' journal, the Bolshevik, under the editorship of A. Z. Berman. He, Joe Pick and Manuel Lopes were arrested on the day of the paper's first appearance and charged with contravening a century-old newspaper ordinance.
The African National Congress mounted a great passive resistance campaign on the Rand at the end of March against the pass laws. Makgatho, the ANC president, gave two specific reasons for the campaign. It was meant to forestall an extension of Free State municipal regulations that obliged men and women to pay 1s. a month for residential permits. Secondly, whenever Africans struck work, they were beaten, fined or jailed because, it was said, they had broken their service contracts under the pass laws, and not because of their colour. Congress had therefore resolved to put an end to the pass system. Thousands of men threw their passes away or surrendered them to pickets so as to court arrest and force the government to attend to their grievances. More than 700 were arrested, while scores were badly injured by police and white civilians who assaulted Africans on the streets and broke up Congress meetings. 'They were driven like cattle, trampled by mounted policemen under their horses' hoofs, shot at by white volunteers,' reported Makgatho; 'and some men and women are in their graves as a result of their refusal to buy any more passes. 2
At this time 650 municipal engineers and tramwaymen in Johannesburg walked out in protest against a decision to retrench men in the power station. Andrews was called from the ISL office to speak at a great town hall meeting. He gave the same advice that he had given at Pretoria, now with more success. The men elected a 'board of control' headed by J. T. Bain and W. Glendon. It invaded the council chamber, turned the councillors out, and installed Bain in the mayoral chair. The local 'soviet', as it was called, administered the municipal services for several days until the council rescinded the retrenchment order and set up a joint board of councillors and employees to settle disputes. This fine demonstration of class spirit was, however, marred by a characteristic outburst of racial antagonism. While Africans defied the pass laws, a majority of the men on strike promised assistance if called upon to quell the 'native menace ' and to prevent ' outrages ' on white women and children.3
This betrayal of class solidarity infuriated Bunting, who had an additional and personal cause of complaint, since he had been assaulted by a mob of racists outside the court house where he was defending African resisters against the pass laws. As editor of the International he wrote bitterly about white workers who cheered Bolshevism and beat up Africans for daring to protest against passes: 'that outward and visible sign of semi-chattel slavery '. The whites, he pointed out, never condemned the daily outrages on their fellow workers, or protected them from the police, or helped them to obtain higher wages. The municipal 'soviet' was a commendable venture, perhaps the first of its kind in the empire, but it owed its success to the fatal defect of being a sectional enterprise. It was, after all, only an aristocrats' revolution. 'Where were the masses, the underdogs of Bantu race who far outnumber the whites in Municipal employ?' The 'soviet', which claimed to be in control, did not include any of the sanitary workers who had struck nearly a year ago and whose demand for a rise of 1s. a day was haughtily ignored.4
The article, remarked Andrews in later years, disclosed Bunting's 'deep-seated hatred of the trade union movement which remained with him to the end and was I think a serious handicap to his usefulness and to the movement which he so faithfully and unselfishly espoused'.5 Jones, writing from the sanatorium in Maritzburg, defended the white workers. They were separated from the African by a functional gap, and not by a conflict of interests, since to supervise was not to exploit. As the only articulate section of the proletariat, they were the masters of the situation and could themselves win dictatorship for their class. The revolution would fail within twenty-four hours, however, unless both white and black workers experienced the joyousness of freedom. White workers would soon realize that the economic machine would collapse without the cooperation of the African. Facts would fall in line with theory as the working class became one, with no demarcation of colour. To ignore or sneer at either section of the workers was to be anti-proletarian in the lowest degree.6
The rebuke drew applause from the trade unionists, and ignored the basic issues raised by Bunting. Was the racial division of labour merely functional, or did it constitute a serious conflict of interests? Would white workers then or under socialism accept equality, perhaps at the price of reducing their standards in order to raise those of the Africans? Or would they insist on maintaining their superior status behind colour bars? Jones did not want discussions about the future to alienate the League from what he considered to be the revolutionary vanguard. The immediate task was to convert workers to socialism, combat racism, and lay the basis for solidarity. Displays of righteous indignation at their backwardness could only damage the cause. When the 'black hundreds', as the League called white hooligans, broke up its meetings on the Rand and at Cape Town, the socialists declared that this was a reaction to their growing strength. They marched triumphantly behind their own band, playing the 'Marseillaise', in the SAIF's May Day procession, and jubilated at the re-uniting of the workers' forces. While white workers marched in peace, the police broke up a meeting of 4,000 Africans who were holding their own demonstration.
The League's 1919 May Day brochure contained photographs of John Maclean, Lenin, Trotsky, Liebknecht and Luxemburg, together with the verses of the 'International' and the 'Red Flag'. The socialist rally passed resolutions acclaiming world revolution, condemning the League of Nations, and calling for unity without distinction of craft, sex or race. Andrews regretted the absence of Africans and Coloured. May Day 1920, he predicted, would see white and black demonstrating together. This seemed credible as the radical mood spread. White trade unionists joined in public protests at Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town against proposed legislation attacking African and radical organizations. The bill, which would amend the Public Welfare and Moratorium Act, proposed making it illegal for Africans to strike or for any one to spread ill-will among Africans towards other racial groups. Crawford's SAIF and NURAHS, the railwaymen's union, backed the protests, and the bill's most objectionable features were withdrawn.
There were other promising symptoms. The railway union kept an open door, and claimed to represent African, Coloured and white wage earners of all grades. Sam Barlin of the ISL organized a clothing workers' industrial union in Johannesburg of Coloured and white tailors - though not of the African labourers. The SAIFs trade union congress at Bloemfontein in May 1919 passed resolutions demanding the withdrawal of the Riotous Assemblies Act and other repressive legislation. Another resolution called for the nationalization of the mines, under the management of boards equally representative of the state and its employees. The congress also undertook to press for a minimum wage for white workers, and proposed an inquiry into the status of African miners. The radical phrases barely concealed a design to protect white workers securely against competition by placing the mines under the control of government, more susceptible than the mine owners to political pressure. It was the policy of trade unionists confident of their political strength, and whose socialism was geared to the structure of white supremacy.
This mood of militancy inspired the government to convene a national industrial conference of workers and employers in November and December 1919. Trade unionists from the north refused to sit with Coloured representatives of the Cape Federation, which thereupon withdrew. Radical in all other respects, the workers' delegates succeeded in carrying a resolution that urged the state to nationalize industries in the people's interests and as a prophylactic against strikes. The employers' side opposed the motion, and agreed that an overhaul of the country's primitive industrial legislation was long overdue. The conference unanimously voted for a new labour code which would provide for the recognition of trade unions, industrial councils, and benefits for white workers, including a minimum wage, paid holidays, equal pay for men and women, and bigger confinement allowances.7 It was a splendid banquet of peace and friendship between white labour and capital, which left nothing, not even crumbs, for Lazarus outside the gate.
Africans continued doggedly on their own to press for relief from discrimination and poverty. The ANC, meeting at Queenstown in May, learned that eighty-six passive resisters had been rearrested on refusing to take out passes after serving their sentences. Congress expressed sympathy with the victims, blamed their troubles on the unjust policy of denying civil rights to which Africans were entitled as British subjects, and decided to renew its request for an extension of the franchise to all sections of the population in the north.8 At this time H. Selby Msimang (1886-), a former court interpreter from Edendale, Pietermaritzburg, and secretary to Dr. Seme, was organizing workers in Bloemfontein for an increase in wages, pegged at 2s. a day throughout the war in spite of the steep rise in prices. After holding a series of meetings, he presented a demand for 4s. 6d. a day, was arrested, and then committed for trial on a charge of incitement under the Riotous Assemblies Act. He was eventually acquitted. The case led to his being brought into contact with Clements Kadalie, the founder of the Industrial and Commercial Union in Cape Town.9
According to Kadalie, the initiative for this venture came from A. F. Batty, founder of the Labour Democratic party and a persistently unsuccessful candidate in municipal and parliamentary elections. He asked Kadalie to join his electoral committee in the Harbours constituency; and, after losing a by-election, decided to 'consolidate the non-European vote' by setting up a permanent organization. A meeting of Coloured and African dockers agreed in January 1919 to form the ICU and, on Batty's motion, elected Kadalie to be the secretary.10 Msimang visited Cape Town in August at Kadalie's invitation, to speak at a public meeting called to launch the union. ' They were the real workers,' he told the audience, 'yet white workers were reaping the benefit of black labour.'11 Returning to Bloemfontein, Msimang formed a parallel separate Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union.
Abdurahman also moved into action on the industrial front in August by forming the AP0 Federation of Labour, the S .A. Workmen's Co-operative Union, and a Bootmakers' Union. His executive, he explained, felt that Coloured should have separate unions which would look to their own ranks for salvation against white labour aristocracy. The Cape Federation admittedly accepted Coloured workers, but they were barred from the white unions in the north and denied admission to the skilled trades. M. J. Green of the Motor Mechanics' Union in Johannesburg had recently announced that his society would 'not have anything to do with a motor car owned or driven by Asiatics or Coloured'. Abdurahman refused to distinguish between such racists and Cape Town's trade union leaders, Stuart, Evans, Thompson, or McWilliams, who organized open unions. 'The Coloured people have not yet forgotten that the White Unions of Cape Town hounded Coloured carpenters out of their workshops and kicked Coloured bricklayers off the scaffold.' White trade unionists in Cape Town were either revolutionary bolsheviks, like A. Z. Berman, or mere place seekers, like Batty, who hoped to climb into parliament on the backs of the Coloured. All of them were actuated by self-interest.12
The accusation might have been levelled also against Abdurahman. He denounced racial segregation yet resented class organizations that cut across the colour line. The labour movement in the western Cape was a greater threat than the bourgeois parties to his commanding role among the Coloured. Wilfrid Harrison of the SDF opposed him, and was defeated by more than 300 votes, at a municipal election in 1918. In 1919, Batty's Democratic Labour party, with the assistance of J. J. Fraitas, Dean and other Coloured tradesmen, put Hendry, one of their number, in the town council, which Abdurahman regarded as his special preserve. Harry Evans of the Cape Federation was backed by Coloured artisans when he stood against him in the provincial council elections of 1920. Abdurahman had a political motive for wanting to divide working men into racial camps.
Coloured artisans had equally strong economic reasons for combining in open unions with white printers, cabinet makers, builders, tailors or leather workers. Fraitas, Hendry, Gamiet, Gibbs, Abrahams and Petersen said as much when attending a conference called by Abdurahman. They refused to abandon the Cape Federation for his segregated organization. The non-racial body, they argued, gave them better protection and guaranteed the rate for the job. This might be so, he replied, though only in trades where the Coloured dominated and where the white man could not improve his wages without their cooperation. In other fields he persistently scabbed on them and smashed their strikes for higher wages. White labour enforced the colour bar on the mines, prevented engineering firms in Cape Town from apprenticing Coloured youth, and would remain their deadliest enemy until they 'learned to have no truck' with it at election times, and to 'organize themselves into separate unions for industrial purposes'.13
Port Elizabeth was the only other centre where open trade unions took root. Here, practically all masonry, bricklaying, plastering and painting were in Coloured hands, and the unions enforced full rates for them. No less racial prejudice existed there than on the Rand, reported C. B. Tyler, the BWIU organizer; but the unions had to take the Coloured in so as to protect themselves. 14 A union might, however, open its doors to Coloured artisans for the same reason, even though there were few of them. The Durban branch of the AEU admitted Coloured mechanics because, said Boydell, they were, when unorganized, at the mercy of employers and a danger to the white artisan15 Trade unions in the north, with few exceptions, avoided any need to combine with the Coloured simply by excluding them from skilled work. The BWIU, for instance, kept an open door in the Cape, and barred Coloured tradesmen in the Transvaal, even to the extent of blacklisting contractors and intimidating householders who employed them as bricklayers and painters.16
White prejudice imposed a segregated pattern on trade unionism in the north. Coloured and Indian workers had no alternative but to take Abdurahman's advice and form separate unions of their own. They were most successful in Durban because of the spade work done by Lee and Sigamoney. Indian dockers, shop assistants, hotel employees, tobacco workers and printers' assistants were organized by the end of 1919.17 Here and elsewhere, however, the unions, whether white, Coloured or Indian, excluded Africans. Relegated to work classed as unskilled, they did not compete directly with workers in the higher paid categories, and were therefore ignored. Trade unionists professed sympathy with the African's demand for higher pay to meet the rise in living costs, gave him no assistance and belittled his claims. ' The native, ' it was said, ' is in the happier position that he has a bit of land to go back to if his pay is unattractive - the white worker hasn't.'18
Yet it was the high cost of living that precipitated the ICUs first and perhaps most dramatic action towards the end of 1919. A general election was pending. All sections of the labour movement agitated against high prices and profiteering. The Cape Federation, backed by NURAHS, the railway union, urged dockworkers to refuse to handle foodstuffs for export. The ICU and a (Cape Town branch of the IWA responded by calling the men out on 17 December; and used the occasion to demand a pay rise from 4s. to 8s. 6d. a day.19 Two to three thousand men struck work. Police and troops were summoned. They ejected the Africans from their quarters in the docks, and prosecuted many for breach of contract under the master and servant law. The government yielded to the pressure and banned the export of food except by permit. NURAHS withdrew its moral support, white railwaymen scabbed, and the strike was called off after two weeks. The dockers received their reward in August 1920, however, when the stevedoring companies agreed to a minimum wage of 8s. for labourers, 12s. 6d. for foremen, and double pay for overtime.20
The international socialists denounced the ' treachery ' of white workers who had scabbed so shamefully on the dockers, as on Coloured van drivers in Kimberley and Indian waiters at East London.21 Abdurahman fulminated against 'white irresponsible agitators' who deceived 'the poor native' with false promises of support. There were surely many competent Coloured and Africans, he argued, who would help the stevedores without their having to call in 'uneducated and discredited white men'. It was necessary to organize for industrial purposes, but the white man's example should not be followed in all things. Direct action, as practised in Johannesburg and Durban, was dangerous if resorted to by Coloured workers, since it 'would result in commandos using physical force against them. They must do nothing which would give Europeans any excuse for resorting to violent methods.'22
Direct action held no such terrors for Harry Haynes, one of the great radicals in the movement and a leader of the Durban municipal 'soviet' of January 1920. Born in Ireland in 1877, he came to South Africa with the troops in 1899, worked on the gold mines after the war, was elected to the union's executive, and chaired the Kleinfontein strike committee in 1913. That, he said, was an epoch in his life, the point at which he and many others first began to study the class war 'It was the year in which General Smuts planted the seeds of the working-class revolution in soil watered by blood spilt in the streets of Johannesburg.'23 He moved from the Labour party to the War-on-War League, joined the ISL, worked on the trams in Johannesburg and settled in Durban to recover from phthisis. Here he adopted a strategy, during a strike of municipal employees, which the ISL said was worthy of the old Kleinfontein revolutionaries.
Durban's municipal employees stopped work on 7 January in protest against the alleged victimization of the assistant town clerk, H. H. Kemp, a member of the municipal union and a parliamentary Labour candidate. The strikers brought all municipal services to a standstill for three days and then installed a board of control in the town hall. They won their point after a day of workers' management. The council agreed to set up a permanent conciliation board of councillors and employees.24 It was a minor 'seizure of power' with a distinct farcical element. There was more to it than comedy, however. The municipal 'soviets' of Johannesburg and Durban became a legend in the movement. Haynes, like J. T. Bain, had the makings of a genuine revolutionary, though they would hardly have been so bold, nor would the 'revolutionary instincts' of the rank and file have outstripped their 'socialist knowledge', to quote the International, if they had not obtained the sympathy of the white public.25 Their daring reflected the white worker's post-war mood of defiance. The boldness of the strategy and its success showed that he was becoming an important political force. He was on the way to winning his struggle for admission to the white elite.
Colour-conscious and self-confident whites had no ear for the appeals and warnings of the socialists. The ISLs fifth annual conference in January urged trade unions to organize Africans and demand equal pay for equal work. All would succumb to exploitation unless white and black joined hands to emancipate themselves.26 In practice trade unionists complained incessantly of being undercut, never scrupled to widen the wage gap and obstructed the African's efforts to raise his standards. Employees at the Johannesburg power station seemed to be breaking ground in February when they decided to submit wage demands for all racial groups. A representative meeting of white municipal workers rejected the proposal, however, and deleted the claims made on behalf of Africans and Coloured.27 A few days later eighty of the power station workers volunteered to scab, on condition that they were given armed protection, if their African co-workers came out on strike.28
The offer to scab was made during a strike on the mines. A large majority of the white employees balloted early in February 1920 in favour of a strike for higher wages and a shorter working week. They obtained an increase of 8s. a day with retrospective effect from 1 November 1919. African miners then organised a series of sectional strikes for a wage of between 5s. and 10s. a day, a fair deal in the concession stores, and an opportunity to do more responsible and better paid work. They complained of the steep rise in prices and pointed out that their families in the reserves, while needing more money because of a severe drought, were receiving less from their wages. The owners granted an increase of 3d. a shift as from 1 January, thereby raising the average wage to 2s.3d. for underground and 2s. for surface workers. The industry, said the Chamber, could not bear any additional wage increases; the removal of the colour bar was impracticable; and the strikes were due to the teaching of international socialists, particularly among the Zulu who put themselves on a par with whites. Africans continued to boycott stores on the East Rand, however; the strike spread, and 70,000 men had stopped work on twenty-two mines by 25 February.29
The strike put 8,600 white miners out of work. They drew full pay during the stoppage and on some mines took over the African's work, including tramming and shovelling, so as to demonstrate that they could keep the mines going without him. The executive of the SAMWU recommended its members 'to continue operations on the mines as usual' and agreed on 'the strongest possible measures to combat any attempt to imperil the colour bar'. While the Transvaal African Congress protested against assaults by the police and threatened a strike of domestic and commercial workers, the ISL circulated its famous 'Don't Scab' leaflet among the whites. 'The Native workers are beginning to wake up,' it said, and it appealed for sympathy on the grounds of fair play, trade union principle, labour solidarity, and self-interest. Therefore, DONT SCAB! DONT SHOOT! Don't take a rifle against your own hammer boys.'30
Joe Andrews, a member of the miners' general council and vice-chairman of his branch, was victimized for having distributed copies of the leaflet. His fellow workers at the Crown mine voted for his expulsion, and the management gave this as its reason for dismissing him. O'Leary downed tools in sympathy with Andrews and was also sacked. The socialists commented gloomily on the contrast between the behaviour of the white scabs and the 'splendid example of the power of industrial solidarity' set by Africans. They had shown a capacity to combine in 'an instinctive mass revolt against their whole status and pig level of existence'.31 The socialists regretted that ' the barriers of race, language, and, above all, police' prevented them from instructing the native labourers on the principles of working-class solidarity'. Yet the Africans managed well enough on their own without such instructions
The strike was a well planned, disciplined campaign and not an 'instinctive revolt'. It showed that many thousands of men from a wide variety of regions and peasant communities could combine effectively. It was a 'new phenomenon', remarked Sir Evelyn Wallers, president of the Chamber of Mines, this first 'native strike in the true sense of the word'. The 'absolutely peaceful cessation from work' indicated that the African 'was advancing more rapidly than we had anticipated', and would not remain satisfied for very long with his position in industry.32 There was a high degree of organization. The strikers picketed the mines and otherwise kept quietly to the compounds. Their readiness to ' put into practice White organized labour's methods of direct action is an ominous sign of the times'.33 This display of cohesion and discipline alarmed the government. 'General surprise and consternation were felt at the way in which the strike was engineered' reported the departrnent of mines; the more so, because a 'concerted attempt at violence in one form or another was not seriously attempted'.34
Policemen and soldiers surrounded one compound after another, told each group of strikers in turn that the rest had returned to work, and drove them down the mine with rifle butts if they refused to credit the story or to resume work for any other reason. They were said to have 'rioted' if they resisted. The strikers at the Village Deep compound barricaded themselves behind logs. The troops broke through with fixed bayonets and fired, killing three and wounding forty. Police and civilians attacked a meeting of Africans in the slums of Vrededorp, killed eight and wounded eighty. 35 The quality of the alleged rioting can be gauged from the report of a trial on a charge of public violence of three strikers from the Langlaagte compound, who were accused of having threatened the compound manager.
'You try to ape the white man by going on strike,' lectured the magistrate, 'but you do not understand a strike unless it is connected with rioting.' Yet they had not actually attacked the manager or assaulted anyone. For this reason, and because they had spent five months in jail awaiting trial, they were sentenced to only one month's imprisonment.36
An African, according to the ethos of racists, 'apes the white man' when he develops a taste for good clothing, food or liquor; aspires to higher education, the vote and skilled work; or acquires any trait regarded as the hallmark of a superior status. He is a 'good boy' if he practises the Christian virtues of docility and resignation, is poorly educated and 'keeps his place'. There is no way, however, of supplying education and Christianity in such doses as to immunize him against the virus of ambition. The second generation of Africans educated in mission schools, mines, factories and stores were coming to the fore in the 1920s They saw through the white man's claim to superior moral worth and intellectual capacity. Some of them had begun to challenge his monopoly of technical skills and the jobs to which such skills gave entrance.
In retrospect, the failure of the labour movement to assist the strikers, if only by protecting them against intimidation, marked an irreversible trend to cleavage along racial lines. The African working class had matured and was ripe for organization. Given assistance, the strikers might have taken a significant step towards the 'equal pay for equal work' that the white labour leaders insisted was an essential condition for the removal of the colour bar. The refusal of the leaders to support the strike displayed their insincerity. As the ISL admitted later in the year, white workers hated the African less out of fear of competition than because they aspired to membership in the ruling caste.37 The socialists attributed much of the hostility to the influence of Afrikaner workers. This was a delusion. The bulk of British workers were as determined to 'keep the kaffir in his place'. They did not want to narrow the wage gap or to promote solidarity between themselves and the African.
The demand for a relaxation of colour bars was the strike's most significant feature. It was not a new proposal. H. L. Phooko and S. M. Makgatho, the president and secretary of the Transvaal Native Congress, told the mining commission of 1907 that many Africans were being paid at unskilled rates for doing skilled work. With proper training they could undertake all branches of mining operations.38 H. O. Buckle, the native grievances commissioner of 1913-14, reported to the same effect and found that the men were justified in asking for the removal of the statutory barrier.39 E. J. Way, in his presidential address to the S.A. Institute of Engineers in July 1914, argued that 'colour' was the only difference between the races. He agreed with H. M. Taberer, director of the Native Recruiting Corporation, that the colour bar on the mines existed largely for sentimental and political reasons, discouraged efficiency among whites, and gave the African no scope or incentive whatever. A great many white supervisors on the mines were inefficient and could be readily replaced by more experienced and efficient Africans. 'The only remedy,' Way argued, 'is that white and black shall have equality of opportunity, and the better man must win in the long run.' 40
J. B. Moffat, who inquired into the causes of African strikes on the Rand in 1918, pointed out that the Mines and Works Act of 1911 did not authorize discrimination. The colour bar regulations under the act must therefore be regarded as ultra vires. It was the white workers, and not the regulations, who barred the employment of Africans on skilled or semi-skilled work. 'This means that one of the principal industrial avenues along which the natives might legitimately hope for advancement is to be closed to them, and that a policy of repression is to be followed.' The government, Moffat recommended, should free itself from the odium of being a party to such discrimination, by repealing the colour bar provisions.41 They gave white men a monopoly of as many as thirty-two occupations in which 7,057 were employed in 1920. A conventional colour bar, not prescribed by regulation, gave another 4,020 whites an exclusive claim to nineteen other occupations.42 It was the conventional and not the statutory barrier that the mine owners wished to abolish.
They took up the cry with great urgency. The cost of mining gold reached a peak figure of 25s.8d. a ton of ore milled in 1920, when the mills crushed twenty-four million tons of rock. Gold prices, which soared to a record figure of 130s. a fine ounce in February, declined sharply thereafter while working costs remained constant. The owners asserted that it would soon be unprofitable to keep the low grade ore mines in production unless labour costs were drastically reduced. White miners' wages had risen by fifty per cent since 1913, and African wages by only nine per cent. A major reason for this situation was a conspiracy by the owners to freeze African wages. Operating a 'maximum average' agreement arrived at in 1912 when the Native Recruiting Corporation was formed to organize labour supplies in South Africa, Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland, the owners pegged the rate at 2s.3d. a shift for the largest category of miners. Fines were imposed on mines where the maximum average was exceeded. The arrangement discouraged managements from introducing monetary incentives to increase output and obliged them to reduce piecework rates whenever the bulk of workers became more efficient. Because of this inequality, it would be hazardous to attempt savings by cutting African wages.
The owners proposed a reshuffle of work patterns to diminish the white man's role. A government commission was appointed in 1919 to consider possible economies. It included three officials of the Chamber of Mines and three labour representatives: Archie Crawford, Forrester Brown and Bower Pohl, a member of the miners' union. The testimony of witnesses before the low grade mines commission received much publicity on the Rand and influenced the attitude of workers on both sides of the colour line.
The Labour World conducted a vigorous campaign against the commission and the mine owners. J. H. Gow, the editor, a town councillor and former secretary of the Labour party, had won a provincial council by-election in 1918 in the mining constituency of Siemert under the banner 'Vote for Gow and a White South Africa'. His Unionist opponent received some backing from the SAIF and white trade unionists who, according to the paper, had been taken in by Crawford's conciliation policy.43 This experience added venom to Gow's pen. He predicted that the commission's findings were a foregone conclusion: they would defend the financial gang and recommend the abolition of the colour bar. The decision, he alleged, had been taken in London, which really controlled the industry. Sir Lionel Phillips was out to break the colour bar, probably with the approval of Crawford, Brown and Pohl. The white worker 'must now get ready to fight for his very existence'. Nemesis would overtake the owners. The African miner could not be expected to remain satisfied with his wage after hearing the praises showered by magnates and experts on his potential abilities. The police would chase and Smuts might deport Andrews, Bunting and others of the ISL if they were to tell Africans what the experts had said before the commission.44
Andrews, Bunting and Jones communicated with the white worker, however, and not with the African. Their reflections on the evidence given before the Low Grade Mines Commission led them to a significant stage in their long odyssey through the breakers of on the side of right and progress. The white labour movement finds itself on the side of reaction. 'The mine owners, he acknowledged, clothed their capitalist depredation in negrophile philanthropy. The plea of giving the African a chance in life was a cloak for the real object of increasing dividends. Even so, the quest for cheap labour coincided with the needs of social progress, as in the movement to do away with slavery in the U.S.A. The Chamber could link all demands for the African's advance to the demand for the abolition of the colour bar. The Labour movement, in contrast, appeared as the great enemy of four million proletarians. White workers had no moral right to a monopoly of any trade. ' Let the fact be conceded that under the Capitalist system the standard of life of the white workers and the rights of the native workers are incompatible.'45
The socialists refused to accept the corollary that the African miner had a common interest with the mine owner against the white labour aristocracy. To assert this would cut them off from their base in what they regarded as the vanguard of revolution. They fell back instead on speculations about the future soviet society. If Africans could not rise except by ousting the white man, then so much the worse for capitalism. Equal pay for equal work would reconcile legitimate demands for keeping up living standards with the principles of justice and humanity. This was a Utopian solution under the existing order. In fighting for it, however, the workers would achieve socialism. A 'natural goodwill' born of the interdependence between white mechanic and black helper, miner and hammer boy, railwayman and cleaner, would then be 'reflected in amity on the political plane'.46 Africans would form their own soviets and sit in the supreme soviet where colour prejudice was weakest The common society would take the form of an 'exchange of labour services en masse - between the white and native communities, the products and functions of each being indispensable to the other'.47 The argument stopped at this point, leaving an impression that socialism, as conceived, would perpetuate segregation or at least the traditional division of labour between skilled whites and unskilled Africans.
Africans wanted immediate relief from racial discrimination and excessive exploitation. They had all to gain, as Colonel Pritchard, the director of native labour, told the commission, by acting in concert against a system that actually prohibited their advancement.48 If allowed to do skilled work, many would settle down as permanent and professional miners with a better status and wage than the migrant worker could hope to obtain. African miners as a class would benefit from the abolition of the colour bar by obtaining improved medical services, working and living conditions, and compensation for injuries and pneumoconiosis. There could be no doubt as to the nature of the African's interests. As for the country as a whole, Pritchard warned that it was sitting on a volcano, which was-bound to erupt unless men acted in a statesmanlike way by removing the colour bar, the root cause of the inefficiency alleged to be throttling the mines, and the African's most powerful lever against government and the white community. Both government and the white community discounted the danger and ignored the warning when the African miners came out on strike.
The mine owners had no intention of paying them more unless the old rates of pay and, after a few months, to a longer working day. For the owners, acting on a recommendation of the Low Grade Mines Commission, revised work schedules so as to make Africans put in an hour more per shift without an increase in wages. Crawford, Brown and Pohl, who represented Labour on the commission, also agreed to 'speed up the nigger', as the Labour World49 vulgarly called the decision. They shied at the real issue, and dissented from the majority's recommendation to relax the colour bar. That would have to come, said Crawford, or the men would have to accept a wage cut, if economic calamity was to be avoided. Yet he feared the trouble that would arise before they adapted themselves to either course.50 Other sections of the movement shared his fears. The 13,000 white men working underground would not take it lying down, warned the Labour World. Capitalists could afford to take a liberal view. Company directors and trade union officials 'do not have to work alongside the smelly black'. The issue was one of life or death to the poor worker. ' Breaking the colour bar will be the signal for the biggest example of "direct action" that has yet been shown on these fields.'51
The APO interviewed government, Unionist and Labour party members in April 1920, two months after the African miners' strike. Creswell told the deputation that his party would not cut its own throat. White miners to a man opposed the removal of the colour bar. The APO had never supported the party at elections and would continue to oppose it even if the colour bar were deleted from the constitution.52 Merriman carne to the rescue with a motion in the House similar to the one he had introduced in 1914, calling for the repeal of the colour restrictions in the mining regulations. He said that the white miner was an overseer who drew £1.10s. a day for sitting on a bucket while the African did the work for 2s. a day. Creswell, as in 1914, moved that the House decline to discuss the motion until the mine owners ceased to employ indentured workers and undertook to pay a civilized wage on an equal scale for all employees irrespective of colour. The white miners threatened an industrial revolution if the colour bars were removed. The government side adjourned the debate before the House could vote on Merriman's motion.
The forecast was shrewd, as the Rand revolt of 1922 would show; and it pointed to the beginning of Crawford's downfall. An uncompromising internationalist, he had antagonized the Labour party by setting his face against its flag waving and patriotic gestures. He widened the breach after the war by keeping the trade unions out of the party's electoral fold, initially for syndicalist reasons and later so as to bargain with its political opponents.53 He was equally hostile to the ISL, whose leaders had spurned him in his radical youth, although he shared its views about war and industrial unionism. His grit, determination and refusal to overlook old scores were allied to a great egotism and desire for power. The Federation of Trades grew under his management into the largest, richest and most influential section of the labour movement; and he would not share its control. He defeated Andrews in 1920 in an election for the post of secretary, and converted Forrester Brown, the miners' union secretary and former ISL leader, into a loyal disciple of what the League called Crawfordism: the use of revolutionary phrases for the purposes of reaction.54
Described as the Gompers of South Africa, Crawford kept a tight rein on the affiliated unions and set himself up as their chief representative. His policy met with success during the boom, since employers readily made concessions to keep the industrial peace. The full weight of the federation could then be brought to bear against men who took the bit between their teeth, or against unions, like those of the ironmoulders, engineers, municipal employees and builders, that insisted on negotiating directly with employers. This craft sectionalism destroyed Crawford's scheme of welding the workers into one great industrial union. Trade union officials resented his invasion of their authority, and accused him of bungling when he failed to produce the required results. Inflation caused a rash of wildcat strikes. The Federation congress at Bloemfontein in 1919 decided to withhold support from strikes not previously sanctioned by the central executive, and so indicated that its controls were breaking down. Crawford's report to the general council in April 1920 called for solidarity and denounced sectional strikes. What Crawford really had in mind, said Andrews, was to negotiate with employers at the expense of the workers, and not to call for a more general strike or a bigger mass movement.
Both reformers and radicals suspected Crawford's sincerity towards the working class. It was a strange metamorphosis, they said, that had turned the one-time mob orator of the town hall steps into an intimate of mine magnates and company directors. He expounded the principles of the wage fund theory instead of singing the 'Red Flag', and advised workers to accept wage cuts so as to keep the mines in production. He appeared on public platforms with Wallers and accompanied Gemmill at the state's expense to the first international labour conference at Washington in 1919. The government appointed him to the industrial advisory board and to commissions of inquiry into the cost of living, the mining industry, and unemployment. The higher he climbed, the farther he moved from his radical past. He and his Federation demanded the dismissal of Coloured drill sharpeners in 1918, supported the mine owners' plea in 1919 for the removal of the embargo on the recruiting of Africans in tropical regions, and took part in the anti-Asian conference called by the S.A. League in 1920.
Territories north of latitude 220 south had been closed to recruiting because of the high death rate among miners from the tropics. Home-born Africans were finding more congenial and better paid work outside the mining industry. The owners wished to tap new sources of labour, and Crawford agreed. The ban should be lifted, he argued, both to give Africans freedom of movement and to stimulate the economy. That would relieve unemployment among whites. Andrews and Bunting, giving evidence before the unemployment commission, put in a copy of the Communist Manifesto and said that capitalism caused unemployment. The competition of cheap labour was 'clearly a special contributing cause'. It also resulted in acute anti-native prejudice, particularly in whites most likely to want 'kaffir jobs'. Segregation was possible only under socialism, which did away with indentured labour; and then there would be so much less reason for it, since unemployment would disappear. The proper remedy was to nationalize the means of production, introduce a system of labour exchanges, and provide for insurance against unemployment. 55
An emphatic protest against all forms of indentured labour came from African and Coloured trade unionists meeting at Bloemfontein on 13 July in response to a resolution moved by Msimang at the annual conference of the ANC in May. White workers had only the capitalist as their foe, he told the delegates, ' but native and coloured workers have both capitalists and trade unions to fight against'. The conference decided to form one union, called the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union, of Africans, Coloured and Indians of both sexes south of the Zambezi. The fifty delegates undertook to conduct a campaign against the pass laws and the system of recruiting men under contract. This was 'detrimental to the progress of all native races' and should be abolished at an early date.56 Msimang was appointed president, and M. Mocher the secretary of the union. Kadalie took this badly and on his return to Cape Town persuaded his organization to dissociate itself from the proceedings at Bloemfontein. Samuel Masabalala, another delegate, returned home to Port Elizabeth and started an agitation for higher wages. He drew large crowds and in October threatened to call workers out on strike for a wage of 10s. a day. In an attempt to pacify them, the municipal council invited Dr. Rubusana to visit the town and appeal for restraint. He was assaulted at the first meeting which he addressed, and this led to Masabalala's arrest. A group of workers gathered outside the police station on 23 October to demand his release and attacked with sticks and stones. A shot was fired into the air, the demonstrators fled in all directions, and while fleeing were shot at by the police and armed civilians. Twenty demonstrators and three white bystanders were killed and 126 others wounded in what Abdurahman called South Africas 'Amritsar'. R. Sidzumo, the secretary of the local ICWU, appealed for assistance to Msimang, who came from Bloemfontein, organized a funeral procession attended by 30,000 people, met the mayor and a group of employers, and persuaded Rubusana to withdraw his complaint. Masahalala was acquitted on a charge of public violence, and Smuts, yielding to pressure, appointed a commission of three to inquire into the causes of the disturbances.
One of them was Abdurahman, the first person of colour to be appointed to such an office. The commission found that 'all the firing which took place after the mob broke away was directed against fugitives that it was unnecessary, indiscriminate and brutal in its callousness, resulting in a terrible toll of killed and wounded without any sufficient reason or justification'.57 In spite of this uncompromising verdict, the government denied liability and offered only ex grate payments as compensation to the victims.58 An amount of £2,857.1s.0d. was eventually paid to the claimants. £2,327.11s. of this went to the dependants of the three whites who had been killed, and to twelve whites injured in the disturbances; £377. 7s. 6d. was paid to the dependants of one Coloured killed and two Coloured injured. The dependants of two Africans killed received £75, and one African injured, £15. The cost of burying ' unclaimed' Africans amounted to £62.2s.6d.59
The international socialists deplored this brutal operation of Smuts's notorious 'don't hesitate to shoot' policy. White workers who flew to arms to 'keep order' for their masters shared responsibility for the terrible racial upheaval that would come if the African was not given the right and assistance to form trade unions. His strongest weapon was to strike quietly and without demonstrations which gave the police an opportunity to shoot and stampeded the whites into the camp of the bosses.60 The Labour party predictably approved of the police action. The public would welcome a return to methods employed in Kruger's republic, where the police periodically raided Africans for assegais and knobkerries. Aggression such as the whites had experienced at Port Elizabeth could not be tolerated. ' We must make it quite clear to the natives that we will exact measure for measure in any unprovoked violence against our people.'61
Port Elizabeth's workers disregarded both threats and advice and continued to press their claims with the assistance of Msimang, who remained to look after the union's affairs. In January 1921, after white municipal workers had been given a cost of living allowance, Africans and Coloured rejected an offer to increase their wages from 4s. to 4s.6d. and took another decision to strike. Abdurahman, who was in the eastern Cape on an electioneering tour for the South African party, intervened and negotiated a settlement with the municipal council. It agreed to pay its African and Coloured employees a similar allowance, on a scale ranging upwards from 1s. a day. Masabalala took his revenge on the government by canvassing voters on behalf of the opposition Nationalist party, much to Abdurahman's disgust. After the elections, and when the Nationalists had suffered defeat, Masabalala resumed his radical role and denounced 'the unprecedented bloodthirstiness of the capitalist class .62
The police blamed the bolsheviks, complained of inadequacies in the criminal law, and urged drastic action against the ' machinations of extremists'.63 Kadalie, the first victim of the witch hunt, was served with a deportation order in November 1920, ostensibly because he was a full time secretary of the ICU and might therefore become an economic burden to the state. The socialists protested and challenged the SAIP and other white workers' organizations 'to stand by a persecuted trade union official irrespective of his colour'.64 Relief carne, however, from another quarter. Lawyers, Scottish Presbyterians, Abdurahman and his Unionist party friends applied pressure and prevailed on the government to cancel the order. 'I became as free a citizen as anyone could wish,' exulted Kadalie; and he used his liberty to consolidate the ICU and canvass voters for Hertzog's Nationalist party.65