Men and women of all races streamed into factories as the depression lifted. The number employed in manufacturing rose by fifty-eight per cent from 192,420 in 1932-3 to 303,557 in 1935-6. The labour force in the latter period consisted of approximately 103,000 white males; 26,000 white females; 165,000 other males; and 10,000 other females. The respective percentage increases from the figures for 1932-3 were 47; 52; 68; and 35. 1
Most of the newcomers were Africans and Afrikaners with a rural background, alien and unacceptable to the English-speaking artisans who dominated the trade unions. Jimmy Briggs and A. A. Moore, founder and secretary of the mining unions' joint committee, returned with a dismal report from the national conference held at Kimberley in 1934 to discuss the 'poor white problem'. Attempts were being made, they told the TLC, to eliminate unemployment among rural whites by relaxing apprenticeship rules and other safeguards against labour dilution. Skilled urban workers were in danger of being ousted by 'the less skilled lower paid rural migrant'. 2
Blinkered by craft jealousy, male arrogance, cultural and colour prejudice, the labour aristocracy ignored the effects of industrialism on the composition of the working population. Ironmoulders struck in protest against the replacement of apprentices by semi-skilled whites in railway workshops. Engineers and boiler-makers refused to organize unskilled whites in foundries, steel mills and motor assembly plants. In 1935 the TLCs annual conference rejected a motion urging the unions to admit Africans in open or parallel branches. Objections were raised to the sharp rise in the number of women employed in factories and shops. Years of racial propaganda and collaboration with the employing class had blunted the artisan's feelings for social justice and class solidarity. He had neither political ambition nor compassion that might move him to assist any group of workers, white or black, whom he regarded as inferior because of their sex, race or lack of skill.
'The trend of trade union development,' observed the Industrial Legislation Commission of 1935, 'is definitely, and we consider rightly, along industrial lines.' Though craft unionism had certain advantages to offer the skilled worker, its influence would necessarily decline 'owing to the continuous changes which are taking place in industrial techniques'. 3 Communists and other radicals who did not share the artisan's prejudices recognized the trend and made it their business to form industrial unions for workers of all races and both sexes who performed much the same kind of work in the new secondary industries. Largely as a result of these efforts, the number of unions, including the unregistered, increased from 129 in 1934 to 166 in 1939, and their membership from 126,000 to 264,000.
In so far as the new unions supplemented rather than competed with the craft unions, conservative and radical leaders could work together without much friction, the more so because both were threatened by the divisive effects of an aggressive Afrikaner nationalism. Industrial unions laid a firmer basis than any yet provided for a non-racial class movement. The organizers, who came from all racial groups and both sections of the white population, introduced a new spirit of radicalism, which spread across the colour line.
The TLC became more representative and militant than at any time since 1925. Instead of confining its activities to the affairs of craft unions, it took up the grievances also of lower-paid workers, raised funds for strikers, assisted in negotiations with employers and the labour department, and agitated for improvements in the industrial laws. The battle for recognition had to be fought again in some industries, as hostile employers victimized trade unionists and refused to negotiate with the union. Backing from the TLC might make all the difference between success and failure in such cases. The minister accused the council and its secretary A. G. Forsyth in 1935 of 'aiding and abetting illegal strikes'. Its annual conference replied by unanimously demanding the 'deletion of the anti-strike provisions, in the Industrial Conciliation Act'. 4
The number of strikes increased from twelve in 1934 to thirty-four in 1937; and of the 5,900 strikers in the latter period, 4,800 were Africans, Coloured and Indians. Though small and short-lived, the strikes indicated that conditions were relatively favourable to the organization of the lower-paid workers. Africans remained outside the scope of industrial conciliation procedures; but organizers applied more often than in the experimental period, and with greater success, for wage determinations. These ceased to be regarded primarily as a means of creating employment for unskilled whites, and gave the urban worker some protection against unscrupulous employers and undercutting migrants. An employer could be prosecuted for paying less than the prescribed wage. Offenders were therefore open to pressure from trade unions, which succeeded in recovering through the labour department underpayments amounting to £9,370 in 1935 and £25,485 in 1938. 5
None of these gains could compensate, however, for the effects of the Africans' continued isolation. They combined with Indians or Coloured on occasion, as in the strike at Durban's Falkirk iron works in 1937; but white unions hardly ever tried to enlist their support. Strikes were usually partial and therefore unsuccessful, Coka pointed out in a review of recent disputes on the mines and in the furniture, clothing and laundry trades. White workers, being the more class conscious, should take the lead, he urged, in removing the causes of the movement's chronic weakness. 6
Would workers who themselves employed Africans in their homes assist them to obtain higher wages? Inequalities of status and bargaining power were both the cause and effect of racial antagonism. The African factory worker was a packer, cleaner or general labourer, and seldom a craftsman or machine operator. Though excluded from any industrial council, he could be fined or jailed if he went on strike. Thus handicapped, he had little to contribute, or so it seemed, to the success of a campaign for higher wages by the privileged white workers.
Appeals to class solidarity carried little weight without the backing of strong African unions. The radicals knew this and persisted in their attempts to organize the unskilled. All the old obstacles remained: the instability of the urban African population, a high turnover of migrant workers, legal discrimination, police repression, and opposition from employers and the administration. Max Gordon and D. R. Koza outlined some of the difficulties at the annual conference of the Trades and Labour Council in 1940. The labour department, they said, refused to recognize African unions or deal with their officials. Wage determinations, remarked A. A. Moore in his presidential address, were being judged almost entirely by their effects on white workers, who ignored the African's claims except when their own position was affected. 7
Not more than six African unions joined the Council in any one year. Discouraged from using their own language at its conferences, cold-shouldered by racists and pushed into the background, African organizers on the Rand preferred to be on their own. The African Federation of Trade Unions decided in 1936 to widen its base and attract former colleagues back into the fold. Two years later, on 7 August 1938, the Non-European Trades Union Coordinating Committee was formed in Johannesburg with Gana Makabeni as chairman. The delegates agreed unanimously to bar all whites from office though not from the executive. Gordon, then the secretary of four African unions, subsequently objected to the racial barrier and withdrew to set up a rival joint committee.
White men governed the country, supervised all establishments, owned the factories and commercial enterprises, said Makabeni in his presidential address at the second annual conference of the NETUC in November 1939. 8 'Must we have European leaders even in our own association?' he asked. Like all average whites, Gordon did not want to serve under the Africans whose friend he claimed to be. They valued his services, yet could not accept him as their leader. ' It is our lot and duty to shape the future of the non-European workers in this country.'
Gordon was a leather worker from Cape Town who moved to Johannesburg in 1934. He revived some unions that had dropped out of the African Federation and formed new ones, notably of distributive workers and general labourers. Though reputed to be a 'Trotskyist', he steered clear of politics and confined his criticism of communists to what he said was their 'reckless policy of calling workers out on strike with little hope of success'. His own practice of keeping a tight grip on the unions under his supervision antagonized some of the officials, who broke away from his leadership after he had been interned in 1940 under war emergency regulations. The joint committee subsequently merged with the coordinating committee into the Council of Non-European Trade Unions at a conference presided over by Kotane in November 1941. Makabeni was the president, Daniel Tloome the vice-president, David Gosani the secretary, and James Phillips a trustee of the new body. One of its priorities was to strengthen the African mine workers' union. 9
The communists had kept alive the nucleus formed by Bunting and Thibedi in 1931. Leaflets issued in 1933 and 1935 advised the men to set up a complaints' committee in every compound; and listed a number of specific demands drafted after a careful, first-hand study of conditions in the gold mines. African wages had been pegged for thirty years at the basic rate of 1s. 8d. for surface and 2s. for underground workers. Men were made to refund the cost of train fare to and from the mines out of their wages. They bought their own mining boots, received no protective clothing, and drew no pay during sickness or when disabled on duty. The union demanded a minimum of 4s. for an eight-hour day from bank to bank; three hot meals and meat twice a day; a free issue of a mattress, blankets and boots; free transport; full pay during sickness; a lump sum of £250 as compensation for death; the equivalent of three years' wages for total disablement; protection against assaults by overseers; the abolition of compounds; the right to form trade unions and the right to strike. 10
The owners ignored the demands, refused to negotiate with the union, and prosecuted organizers found in the compounds. Small, sporadic strikes broke out every year in different compounds, for higher wages, better food or sleeping quarters, and against brutal treatment by officials. On almost every occasion the police were brought in to arrest the leaders, intimidate the men and drive them back to work by force. Little more could be done in the circumstances than to keep up a propaganda campaign and maintain contact with a fraction of the 250,000 Africans employed on mines along the Reef.
White miners could do much to foster trade unionism among the men working under them. Thibedi, secretary of the African union, pointed this out to the S.A. Mine Workers' Union in 1936 and suggested joint action. He was told that constitutional difficulties stood in the way. 11 The whites had finally declared against inter-racial unity by re-inserting a colour bar in their membership clause. They looked on the African miner as a servant, and not a fellow worker; called him 'boy' or 'kaffir', and feared his potential rivalry. 'We regard as a miner a white underground worker,' the SAMWUs secretary said in 1931 before a parliamentary committee on the phthisis laws.
The unions of white workers employed on the mines formed a joint committee and negotiated a rise in the basic rate from 17s. 6d. to 19s. a shift in 1933. African claims were ignored. The persistence of old antagonisms came to light when East Rand miners struck work because a workmate was dismissed for refusing to supervise more than the customary number of Africans. Madeley told the strikers that the owners, given a free hand, would 'do away with the lot of you and bring about a position where you will have all natives in underground employment '. 12
By attempting to become a labour aristocrat, the higher-paid worker was pricing himself out of the labour market and thereby assisting the capitalist to level wages downwards. Or so George Hardy, the Communist party's adviser from Britain, maintained in an appeal for working class solidarity. White workers, he said, could best defend their position by organizing unskilled whites and Africans. 13 Working-class cooperation, declared the party, was ' an essential for the preservation of the European worker as much as any'. He had won a privileged position by industrial struggle and because employers could be forced to make concessions out of the surplus profit made on African labour. Circumstances had changed as a result of mechanization, new industrial techniques, competition, and a fall in the rate of profit. It was more profitable 'to skin the native at his relatively lower semi-skilled wage than to employ the privileged European worker'. To save himself, he must help the African to organize and must lead in the fight for equal pay for equal work. 14
The early socialists argued in the same way and with more convincing reasons. In their day white workers fought, at times with loss of life, for trade union and political recognition. That battle had been won. Surrounded by colour bars, the artisan no longer feared the African and therefore tolerated his presence. If trade union leaders sensed a danger, it came not from that quarter, but from the divisive effects of an aggressive Afrikaner nationalism. The communists mistook the symptoms of insecurity in the labour movement for a revival of militancy; and based their case on an identity of interests with the African which skilled workers refused to acknowledge.
Appeals for social justice met with a more generous response. In 1934 the Trades and Labour Council proposed a minimum wage of 10s. a day for all labourers. This was a 'fantastic suggestion', remarked the industrial legislation commission; it revealed an 'outstanding optimism' and was 'probably beyond the country's capacity for very many years to come. 15 A government bill introduced at this time specified a minimum of 1s. an hour in selected industries, trades and occupations, to the exclusion of agriculture, railways and public services. Its purpose, explained A. P. J. Fourie, the minister for labour, was to encourage the employment of unskilled whites at a ' civilized ' wage.
That meant displacing Africans, said the trades council; yet hundreds of thousands of Africans would 'benefit enormously', as there were not nearly enough whites to take their place. Employers killed the scheme by objecting that any large and general increase in unskilled wages would raise working costs, restrict output, reduce the volume of employment, and lead to the displacement of Africans. The Communist party, influenced by Hardy's reformist ideas and the argument that displacements might outweigh the benefits of equality, proposed 'as an immediate practical measure', a differential minimum rate of 10s. for whites and 5s. for Africans. 16
Kalk introduced a motion to this effect at the TLSs annual conference in 1937. Andrews and Wolfson agreed to the discrimination in principle, and suggested a minimum wage of 7s. 6d. for Africans. The only objection came from H. W. October, secretary of the Cape Town stevedoring and dockers' union. His members then earned 8s. or 9s a day, he pointed out, and were asking for 12s. 'It did not matter whether a worker was black or white, he should get that to which he was entitled.' The conference adopted Kalk's motion as the more expedient. 17
While approving of wage discrimination at the bottom of the ladder, white trade unionists insisted on the rate for the job at a higher level. The new Wage Act and Industrial Conciliation Act of 1937 applied the rule of equal pay for equal work at all levels. No wage-fixing agency was allowed to discriminate on grounds of race and colour. What seemed to be a rare instance of generosity actually amounted to gross discrimination. For it prevented Africans and Coloured from undercutting, and this was the only way by which they could offset prejudice and lack of skill.
Equal pay without equal opportunity gave whites a near monopoly of skilled work. 18 This misuse of socialist doctrine, said Kotane, made unity between black and white impossible. 'Personally I feel that if the only way for us to acquire skill is to undercut the European workers' standards, let us do it, and then we would have power to demand and win something for ourselves.' 19 Hardy, however, argued that communists should defend the position of the skilled worker, though not at the expense of Africans and poor whites. 20 To reconcile these aims, radicals in the labour movement rejected undercutting and demanded equal bargaining rights for Africans under the industrial laws. 21
The trades council had made this its official policy at the inaugural conference in 1925, and reiterated the demand in January 1929 and October 1930. Hofmeyr, the then minister for labour, rejected it when introducing the Industrial Conciliation Bill in 1937. The time was 'not yet ripe', he said; Africans could not 'at this stage' be fired into the system of collective bargaining. 22 Instead, he inserted a clause allowing the minister to apply the terms of any wage agreement to Africans, even though they had had no part in the negotiations. In some cases the white trade unionists deliberately sacrificed the African's interests to gain benefits for themselves; in other cases employers arbitrarily fixed a wage rate for the occupations in which he was employed. 23
African trade unionism expanded in spite of the disabilities. Makabeni reported in November 1939 that eleven of the eighteen unions on the Rand, with memberships ranging from 100 to 1,400, were affiliated to the coordinating committee. Alarmed at the growth, the government decided to 'control' the unions through the native affairs department. Draft regulations were submitted to white trade unionists and members of parliament in August 1939; but the African unions rejected anything less than full recognition and the right to deal direct with the department of labour. The mine owners then intervened. Any form of recognition, they said, would encourage African miners to organize. Faced with this opposition, the government dropped its proposed scheme. 24
Government, employers and artisans rode on the African's back in splendid harmony, and believed that they had found the ideal basis for industrial peace. The only disturbing element was the unskilled white, a constant and irritating flaw in the dogma of racial superiority. Unwilling or unable to compete with the African, he lived on charity, subsidized jobs, and less reputable enterprises such as the illicit liquor trade. Afrikaner nationalists, who claimed to speak for their weaker brethren, toyed at one time with the notion of a minimum national wage, and hastily put it aside on realizing that it would benefit Africans and inconvenience farmers. The Nationalist party then fell back on its favourite stand-by, and called for white solidarity.
J. G. Strydom, the Transvaal Nationalist leader and a future prime minister, put his party's programme for industrial relations before the House in 1937. No wage legislation, he moved, would be acceptable unless it discriminated on the basis of colour. He proposed to guarantee whites a specified quota of jobs, a monopoly of certain trades, and separate spheres of work. J. H. Hayward, the member for Bloemfontein, added compulsory trade union segregation to the list. 25 Defeated on the motion by sixty-five votes to nineteen, the Nationalists took their policy to the country in a sustained bid for the working-class vote, were returned to office in 1948, and gave effect to their programme in the Industrial Conciliation Act of 1956. 26
Afrikaner nationalism rested on a triad of language, religion and race. The language identified the group as a separate entity, distinct from the English-speaking. Calvinism provided an ideology, a 'false consciousness' in the Marxist sense, which sanctioned the belief that Afrikaners were born to rule. The racial factor served to divide people into pigmented and dispigmented biological estates of unequal social status. To establish their hegemony, Afrikaner nationalists concentrated on two aims. One was to exclude all black and brown persons, forming eighty per cent of the population, from the centres of power; the other, to consolidate all Afrikaners, forming sixty per cent of the whites, into a single power bloc. As long as these conditions were fulfilled, Afrikaners would dominate the white minority and therefore the whole society.
The key to success was Afrikaner solidarity in the towns. Urban conditions developed close relations between humans of different types, assimilated them into social classes, promoted the growth of sub-cultures, and broke down barriers between ethnic groups. To prevent assimilation, Afrikaner leaders made racial segregation compulsory and formed a wide range of separate voluntary associations. Afrikaner schools, universities, churches, press, political parties, occupational and cultural societies - chambers of industry and commerce, clubs, boy scouts, and the like - insulated Afrikaners from British or radical influences and cultivated a colour consciousness that inhibited the growth of class consciousness.
Colour, not class, had marked the great divide in Afrikaner agrarian societies before the days of industrialism. The Afrikaner's traditional ethos rejected both marked inequalities among whites and liberal or socialist concepts of equality between races. All politicians, predikants, teachers, writers, journalists and shopkeepers who made a living out of the Afrikaner community wished to preserve its cohesion. Inter-racial or international class organizations that attracted Afrikaner workers exposed them to a liberating stream of new ideas and experiences which tended to detach them from the Afrikaner bourgeoisie. The Afrikaner bourgeoisie reacted with a vigorous onslaught on free trade unionism and radical socialism.
Predikants and politicians who made it their business to rescue Afrikaners from militant trade unionism had never been obliged to fight for a living wage. Without experience of industrial relations or the determination needed to break new ground, they employed agents to form rank-and-file movements, and tried to capture or split existing unions. The first and most successful of- these efforts was the Spoorbond, a union of railworkers organized in 1934 with the backing of the Afrikaner Broederbond.
Both bodies originated with H. J. Klopper, a railway official who joined the service in 1911 and the Nationalist party in 1912. His political activity paralleled his rise from clerk to system manager until he resigned in 1942 to enter parliament. A foundation member of the influential Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurverenigings, he formed its first railway branch in 1930 and led the great oxwagon trek during the centenary celebrations of 1938 from which emerged the nazified Ossewabrandwag. In 1939 he took part in promoting the Reddingsdaadbond*, ostensibly created to collect money for budding Afrikaner capitalists, rescue poor whites, and prevent Afrikaner workers from developing into a separate class outside the mainstream of their national culture. 27
Klopper and his associates made the railways their chief recruiting ground in the Broederbond's formative years. Hungry for promotion and resentful of the English-speaking officials who dominated the service, clerks in the lower grades welcomed a secret society linking them to 'nationally minded' Afrikaners in key positions. Covert pressures could be applied to the administration and government for a redress of Afrikaner grievances. The Spoorbond gave the leaders a mass following and enabled them to compete successfully with the older railway unions.
One of these, the National Union of Railway and Harbour Servants, was formed in 1910 with the aim of absorbing the dozen railway unions in existence at that time. Led by English-speaking officials and open to members of all colour groups, NURAHS failed to attract the bulk of Afrikaner labourers in the service. Only twenty-five per cent of white employees were organized in 1933, and this minority was divided into eight unions. The Spoorbond, in contrast, enforced a colour bar, agitated for the replacement of Africans or Coloured by whites, conducted its affairs in Afrikaans, and insisted on equal language rights in the administration. It was a spectacularly successful policy. Within three years the Spoorbond claimed to have 16,000 members and forced NURAHS to dissolve. Announcing this decision, the president F. Phillips urged the English section 'to realize that Afrikaners had thrown off their former feeling of inferiority and were now the dominant force in the service'. 28
The Spoorbond's leaders struck a note new in trade unionism. They repudiated class war and strikes, relied on peaceful negotiations, and called on their followers to render ' loyal service ' in keeping with the union's motto: Verozuer deur Diens.(Conquer through Service) 29 'The Bond was more than a trade union; it was a people's movement - a volksbeweging - born out of a spontaneous process of nation building.' Guided by the principles of Christian nationalism, it would promote the welfare of its members, raise the service to the status of a calling, integrate it with Afrikaner national life, and cultivate the use of Afrikaans in order to achieve equal language rights.
The clerks, teachers and predikants who dominated the Broederbond and through it the Spoorbond appealed for Afrikaner solidarity, not class solidarity; relied on political pressure, not industrial action; and clamoured for a rise in status and not of wages. The scale of priorities reflected their petty bourgeois aspirations and their desire to combat influences that alienated the working man from a national consciousness. Artisans and clerks who mixed with English-speaking colleagues; labourers, gangers and porters who had nothing except a sense of racial superiority to separate them from African and Coloured railwaymen: such would be lost to Afrikanerdom unless they were isolated and welded together behind barriers of language, religion and race. With this composition and programme, the Spoorbond was a potential danger both to craft unions and to men of colour.
The craft unions consolidated their forces in 1936 behind a federal council and challenged the Spoorbond's claim to represent white workers of all grades. After much wrangling, the administration decided on a system of group representation which, the Spoorbond complained, would confine it to the lowest paid. 30 The Nationalist opposition took the dispute into parliament and were told by Pirow, the minister, that he would not allow them to drag the union into the political mire in which they had already plunged many Afrikaner societies. The union accused him of sacrificing the largest Afrikaner union to political ends and ' the antiquated, essentially British-Jewish view that group representation of workers was necessary'. 31
Both craft and industrial unions, whether led by British or Afrikaner officials, shut their doors on African, Coloured and Indian railwaymen and forced them to organize on their own. The initiative came from Cape Town, where the local dockers' union, formed by the ICU in 1919, provided a stable base for the undertaking. 'Thanks to the initiative and indefatigable activities of H. October, Secretary of the Stevedore Workers' Union, and W. Driver of the railway workers, supported by many earnest and loyal workers, among whom Comrade Ray Alexander deserves special mention,' reported the Negro Worker in October 1936, 'it was possible to organize this first successful National Conference of Railway and Harbour Workers.' 32
The conference, representing some 1,300 members, formed itself into the S.A. Railway and Harbour Workers' Union and adopted a programme of demands- a minimum wage of 1s. an hour; one week's annual leave on full pay; equal opportunities to become skilled; an increase in the number of African and Coloured railworkers; and an end to the policy of displacing them with whites. White employees had by April 1933 recovered the wage cuts made during the depression. In the next five years they received increases and benefits to the combined value of £11 million. The wages of African employees, in contrast, had not been restored by 1938 to the pre-depression period. They ranged from 2s. 6d. to 4s. 6d. a day, and fell far short of the minimum standards fixed for general labourers by wage determinations and agreements. 33 Without political influence, denied representation on negotiating boards and welfare committees, ignored and persecuted by the administration, the union's officials and members were committed to a bitter struggle for social justice and a living wage. 34
The Spoorbond's main achievement was to isolate white railworkers from Africans and Coloured. It never managed to break down the fences erected by artisans and the salaried staff, who defeated all attempts to merge their craft unions in one large industrial union. Enough progress was made, however, to satisfy the men behind the Broederbond that they could detach Afrikaners from the mainstream of the labour movement. The Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurverenigings announced in 1936 that it proposed to sponsor a purely Afrikaans trade union organization. Its aim, said Albert Hertzog, was to 'weld the Afrikaner workers and the Afrikaner nation into a mighty unity'. 35 The son of the prime minister, member of the bar, and a graduate of Stellenbosch, Amsterdam, Leyden and Oxford, he led a crusade to rescue ' poor young Afrikaners' from ' wrong and bad movements'. 36
His confederates included the Rev. du Toit; Professor N. Diederichs; F. J. Zeeman, the United party MP for Brakpan; and H. Bosman, a director of Volkskas.**
Their resources came from the Nasionale Raad van Trustees, created in 1936 with an endowment of £10,000 from Mrs Jannie Marais, the widow of a former MP for Stellenbosch who made a fortune out of Kimberley diamonds. This coterie of intellectuals related their vision of Afrikanerdom to the conflict between German Nazism, British imperialism and world communism; declared that Afrikaner workers were being lost to 'internationalism' in all its forms; and steadily kept before them the aim of capturing the workers' vote for the Nationalist party.
That was the burden of the trade unions' complaint against the FAKs subversive tactics. Their sole purpose, said the trades council in 1936, was to divide the unions for party gain and turn them into Nazi organizations. It was a plot of capitalists and employers, said Johanna Cornelius, president of the garment workers' union, to keep workers backward by fomenting race hatred. Charles Harris, secretary of the miners' union, pointed out that it and the garment workers' union were being singled out for attack. Though more than ninety per cent of his members were Afrikaners, they would have nothing to do with Hertzog's agents. 'The time had arrived to fight. It was a political move to take control of the trade union movement.' 37
The Federasie fired the first shot by instituting the Afrikaanse Bond van Mynwerkers in 1936, with the stated aim of improving the mining industry 'from the Afrikaner's point of view'. An innocent observer might suppose that this referred to the miner's working conditions; but the Bond's management committee, on which not a single miner sat, had no intention of engaging in battle against the mine owners. The target was trade unionism and not the capitalist. Under the pretence of soliciting support for the Afrikaner's language, tradition and commercial enterprises, the FAR launched a propaganda assault on the miners' union and urged men to resign from membership. A separate organization was necessary, declared Dr N. J. van der Merwe, a prominent Broederbonder, because Afrikaners had little experience of trade unionism and were unable to reform the unions from within. 38
The SAMWU hit back by reviving the demand for a closed shop and instructed its members to come out on strike against the employment of non-members at the Randfontein mine in October 1936 and the Simmer and Jack in March 1937. The mine owners were no less anxious to check the spread of Nationalist party influence among the men. Reversing the policy adopted in 1922, the Chamber undertook to recognize only one registered union for each class of employees as from 1 June 1937. All whites other than officials and apprentices were required as a condition of employment to join one of the registered unions. In return for this concession, the unions agreed to keep out of politics and to withdraw from activities or organizations not solely concerned with trade unionism. 39
'We have to do here with trade unions which are out to create a class-consciousness in the Afrikaner ranks,' complained Dr van der Merwe, and he took exception to the closed shop for that reason. 40 The united front of mine owners and unions balked the attempts of the Nationalists to form a rival union. They changed their tactics, dissolved the Bond in 1938, and organized a 'reform' movement within the SAMWU. The Raad van Trustees appointed, financed and controlled the Reformers' general council under an elaborate set of rules. Among other things, the council undertook to capture existing unions; guide them along the lines of Christian-nationalism; cleanse them of 'foreign and wrong' influences; free them from 'the international and communistic' trades council; and 'strive for the maintenance of the colour bar' in all industries. 41
The programme of the Reformers matched the findings of an Afrikaner church commission appointed in 1937 to examine the effects of communism on the trade unions. Its report appeared in a scurrilous brochure which enabled Solly Sachs to recover damages for libel from the author Dr Wolmarans and the Voortrekkerpers. Communism, the arch enemy of Christianity, said the commission, threatened civilization by preaching class struggle and equality between black and white. Communists such as Sachs and Wolfson misused their position and exploited the unions for propaganda purposes. The Trades and Labour Council, added Wolmarans, was controlled by Jewish and English-speaking communists and their allies. Exploited Afrikaner workers, whom the church had neglected, fell into the hands of unscrupulous communists like Sachs. He had done much no doubt to improve their wages and conditions, but at the cost of their spiritual well-being. 42
The communists' long record of organizing factory workers of all races was a convincing rebuttal of the malicious gossip and deliberate distortions out of which the case against them was compounded. The outsiders were their accusers, the theologians and academics, who practised precisely what they attributed to the militants: dogmatism, intolerance, subversion, and an unscrupulous disregard of Christian ethics and democratic procedures. An election year lay ahead, however, and the Nationalists were preparing for battle along a wide front of incitement to race hatred.
Eric Louw, resigning his ambassadorial post in France to take part in the 1938 elections, told country audiences that Jews, communists, capitalists and trade unions menaced the great middle class. F. C. Erasmus accused the government of buying farms and tractors for Africans, and of spending £88,000 a year on their education as compared with the £46,000 spent by the Nationalists when in power. 43 The Nationalist election manifesto demanded strict segregation, the reservation of jobs for whites, a ban on mixed marriages, the removal of African representatives from parliament and of Coloured voters from the common roll. The word 'aparte', meaning separate and unequal, appeared three times in this preview of totalitarian apartheid. 44
Polling 247,765 votes, the Nationalists won twenty-seven seats in a House of 153. This was an 'all-time low', explained the minister of labour, Senator Jan de Klerk, in 1956. 'The struggle could not be waged on this front. In the political sphere the Nationalist party was practically paralysed, and we had this wild flow of Communism engulfing the workers on the Rand. Then the Afrikaner people, in its broad mass, got up in arms and stepped in with all the organizational power at its disposal.' The three Afrikaans churches, the Reddingsdaadbond, the Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurverenigings, and the Blankewerkersbeskermingsbond(Society for the protection of white workers. Cp. Chapter 24, pp. 562 ff. combined their forces to rescue Afrikaner workers from communism, liberalism and nonracial trade unions. 45
Apart from its rhetoric, de Klerk's statement gave an accurate account of the reason why his party publicly adopted Albert Hertzog's policy at an inter-provincial congress in November 1938. Regarded as a landmark in the Nationalist party's history, the congress undertook to save white civilization for all time and to submit its apartheid programme in a petition to parliament. D. F. Malan, the party leader, fulminated against communism, liberalism and organized Jewry, the evil genius, he maintained, behind the doctrine of equality. The towns had become the new battle ground against the rising forces of colour. Protected by wage determinations and trade unions, Africans and Coloured were competing with Afrikaner workers. South Africa was becoming blacker and the white race poorer. 46
Church and party took the message to audiences throughout the country. Albert Hertzog told farmers that their future would be decided at the Blood Rivers and AMajubas of the towns. To win, the Nationalists must conquer the trade unions, more than a hundred of which were controlled by foreign enemies of the Boers or by communists who used them to spread their doctrine of hate against the Volk, the white man, the family and Christianity. 47 Communism, declared the Cape synod of the Dutch Reformed Church, had spread its tentacles over Africans and the unions in a bid for revolution, atheism, equality and the abolition of private property. The church must fight the menace by means of sermons and pamphlets; and would call on government to suppress all communist organizations. 48
Jacob Hugo, a young working miner, reacted by killing Charles Harris outside Johannesburg Trades Hall on 15 June 1939. Harris, the secretary of the miners' union, was a miner by trade and a Jew by religion. The evidence at Hugo's trial revealed that he hated Jews, belonged to a 'reform' group, and relied on its leader Albert Hertzog 'to get him out of trouble'. Sentenced to life imprisonment' Hugo was given his freedom in 1948, soon after the Nationalist party had taken office. Dr T. E. Donges, who defended him at the trial, was appointed minister of interior in the new cabinet and was president elect of South Africa at the time of his death in 1967.
Who was to blame for the murder of Harris: Hugo who fired the shot, the Reformers who egged him on, or the predikants and politicians whose propaganda moved him to an act of homicidal violence ? ' The Reformers and the powers behind them, of which they are the puppets,' reported a government commission, 'constitute a subversive movement, which is detrimental to the interests of the mineworkers.' 49 Subversion and assassination were employed after attempts to capture the union by democratic procedures had failed. Only four of the eighteen seats on the general council went to the reform group on a ballot held in April. 50 Undaunted by the setback, the Reformers kept up their agitation and forced the union to secede from the Trades and Labour Council in November. It was evident, warned the Guardian, that the Nationalist party wanted to split the movement by forming a rival trade union centre. 51
Other fissures and alliances were to develop, however, as a result of South Africa's participation in the Second World War. 'For us it will always be a struggle against capitalism,' declared J. H. van den Bergh, president of the miners' union. 'We in South Africa do not want Fascism, Nazism, or Communism. We know only Afrikanerism.' 52 Yet 3,000 whites employed on the mines enlisted in 1940 for active service in a patriotic wave that pushed the Reformers into the background. In August the union's executive offered to rejoin the trades council if it would change its constitution so as to admit only white delegates and white unions. 53 The council refused under pressure from the radicals, and the union reaffiliated unconditionally. Plunged into internal turbulence by the effects of war, the Nationalists abated their disruptive work in the unions until 1944, when prospects of victory for the Axis powers began to fade.
* Society for active rehabilitation.
**A bank which has since become one of the most important in the
country.