If there is one sphere in which the Nationalists have not yet been able to triumph as they would wish it is that of the South African economy, in which non-Nationalist elements play a leading role. Yet the economic position of the Afrikaner is by no means as weak as is generally imagined, and the traditional picture of the Boer as a sort of hill-billy character with a vacant expression and tattered clothing is completely out of date. The economic basis of Nationalist power is strong and is growing stronger all the time. Nationalist politicians and economists determine the direction which is taken by the whole economy. The Nationalist control of government is used to bolster Nationalist power and influence in the private sector of the economy.
Traditionally the Afrikaner has been a farmer - the very word Boer means 'farmer' - and the association with the land has dominated the thinking of the Afrikaner since the first settlements were established at the time of Jan van Riebeeck. In the days before mining and industry began in South Africa, farming was of course, the dominant economic activity. But the industrial revolution through which South Africa has passed in the present century has reduced the contribution of farming to the national income from twenty-two percent in 1925 to nine percent in 1964, though it still constitutes one of the most highly organized and protected industries in the country, and the influence of the farming community in the Nationalist Party is considerable.
The number of farms in South Africa, according to the 1961 agricultural census, was 105,000, covering an area of roughly 106 million morgen. The Director of the South African Agricultural Union, Mr Chris Cilliers, in a speech at an agricultural congress in George in June 1968, said that agriculture provided employment for sixteen percent of the Whites and sixty percent of non-Whites, and represented a total capital investment conservatively estimated at R6,300 million. Agricultural products provide more than a third of the country's annual foreign exchange earnings, including gold: they comprised thirty-eight percent (R366 million) in 1965, and thirty-five percent (R379 million) in 1966 (Annual Report of the Secretary of Agricultural Economics and Marketing for the year ending 30 June 1967).
In an address to an Afrikaner Chamber of Commerce in Belville, Cape, on 22 May 1964 Mr G.J.J.F. Steyn, Acting Secretary of Commerce and Industries, said that more than eighty percent of the farmers in South Africa were Afrikaans speaking (Cape Argus, 23 May 1964). Judging by election results, the majority of these undoubtedly support the Nationalist Party.
It can thus be seen that considerable financial resources were available to the Nationalists when they decided that the time had come to move into commerce, industry, mining, and finance, and challenge the citadels of power previously monopolized by non-Afrikaans elements - the Englishman and the Jew.
Because of his powerful position in the electoral sphere, the White farmer has been able to make successive South African governments dance to his tune. He is assisted in financing his operations by the Land Bank and a whole system of State subsidies and outright grants. He gets his produce delivered on the railways at rates lower than those applicable to mining or industry. He is protected by tariffs from the competition of lowcost food imports from abroad. The government helps him with research and technical assistance. And above all he has benefited from the development of cooperatives and control boards, which supervise the production, distribution and sale of agricultural products both in South Africa and abroad, so ensuring the best possible return for the farmer.
The first of these control mechanisms to be established was the Kooperatiewe Wynbouwers Vereniging (K.W.V.) set up in 1918 and eventually vested by Act of Parliament with complete control over the whole vine-growing industry. Production is by predetermined quota, to ensure against unwanted surpluses, while the producer gets a fixed price and distribution is wholly entrusted to the K.W.V. If the season has been good, the producer may even get an agterskot or final dividend, to convince him that he has been adequately compensated for the surrender of his independence.
Similar control boards were established for wheat and dairy products in 1930, for maize in 1931, for livestock in 1932, and for sugar in 1936. Today, there is hardly a branch of the industry which does not have its appropriate control board. The result is that South African farmers are placed in the position of a highly favoured monopoly. Production and prices are determined, not by the needs of the community, but by the greed of the producers. A helpless population is held to ransom by the farmers, backed by the powerful machinery of the State.
In agriculture, as in other sectors of the South African economy, there are extremes of wealth not only between owner and employee, but also between the farm owners themselves. There has been a growing tendency towards concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. Three quarters of the total number of farms are less than 1,000 morgen in extent, but they constitute only twenty-three percent of the total farming area. One quarter of the farms are over 1,000 morgen in extent, and account for seventy-seven percent of the total farming area (Union Statistics for Fifty Years).
Outside of a few areas, South Africa is not really suited to agriculture at all, and yields are poor in relation to the foremost agricultural countries of the world. A four-year study by the Department of Agricultural Economics and Marketing showed that returns on capital outlay varied from a loss of over 2 percent in one area to a profit of 13.6 percent in another, with the average profit about 5 per cent (Star, 28 May 1968) .
In his speech to the George agricultural congress referred to above, Mr Cilliers, Director of the S.A. Agricultural Union, warned that agriculture threatened to become the exclusive property of the rich, and many farmers might eventually find themselves tenants or sharecroppers for large landowners or financial institutions, as had happened elsewhere in the world. He quoted figures showing that only 2,7 per cent of farmers earned more than R10,000 a year: 75 percent had a taxable income of less than R3,000; and 50 per cent, less than R1,600. About 12,000 farmers out of 80,000 showed losses.
What enables the White farming community to survive is (a) the abysmally low wage structure; and (b) lavish assistance in the form of subsidies, tariffs, etc. from the State. Two estimates - by C.S. Richards for 1933, and by the Van Eck Commission for 1939-40 gave a figure of R15 million a year 'transferred (by the State) to farmers' income from the rest of the community'. (Houghton, The South African Economy, page 57).
Over and above this, farmers' borrowings from the Land Bank, other State departments, commercial banks, cooperatives and other sources have increased enormously over the years. Authorities in Pretoria were quoted in 1964 as estimating that the debt piled up by farmers then exceeded R800 million. At the end of 1963, farmers owed the Land Bank alone R134,554,736 in loans secured by property bonds. This compared with R55 million at the end of 1958 (Rand Daily Mail, 9 June 1964). And by 1968, farmers' debts had rocketed to R1,200 million (Star, 3 July 1968).
The producer monopoly on the control boards, set up under the Marketing Act, has also enabled South Africa to stabilize the prices of agricultural products internally at a level above the world price, while exporting 'surpluses' at a loss. One consequence of this is that millions of South Africans suffer from malnutrition because they cannot afford a balanced diet at the prices prevailing on the South African market.
The effects of this system were made mercilessly evident in 1962, when South Africa was hit by an agricultural crisis, because the maize farmers had produced twenty-nine million bags of maize more than they could sell. The 'maize problem' had been created by what the Minister of Agricultural Economics and Marketing, Uys, called an 'explosion' in agricultural production - from forty million bags in 1959 to sixty-one million bags in 1962. It might be thought that such an explosion would have provided cause for joy and celebration, holding out the promise of abundant food for all. There was certainly need enough for the food in South Africa. In the Northern and Eastern Transvaal hundreds of thousands of African tribesmen were suffering from starvation after more than two years of serious drought. A survey conducted by the Gereformeerde Kerk in Vendaland, in the Northern Transvaal, revealed that through lack of food many people, mostly mothers and children, could eat only three times a week. From September 1962 to February 1963, 301 cases of kwashiorkor, mostly of children under five, and, 1,224 cases of pellagra were treated at five hospitals in the districts of Zoutspansberg and Sibasa alone. The pellagra was not the result of wrong eating habits, as had been alleged by Cabinet Ministers when the situation was first exposed in the Press, but was due to 'drastic famine in drought conditions', said the Kerk report.
Yet the government' s proposed solution to the 'maize problem' was (a) to export the maize surplus at a price lower than the Maize Board's domestic selling price - why couldn't the price be lowered for the benefit of the local population? - and (b) to restrict production, so that in future there would be no danger of surpluses. The Minister announced that the government was introducing a 'new and revolutionary' scheme for controlling agriculture in the Republic. The scheme would involve production control.
'We are looking for a lasting remedy which will not kill the patient,' he said. But the patient he was thinking of was not the Black child suffering from kwashiorkor or pellagra. It was the wealthy maize farmer concerned about his profits. South Africa has also witnessed the destruction of surplus fruit and milk at the behest of control boards in order to keep up prices.
Information supplied by the Minister of Agriculture, Mr Uys, in Parliament during the 1968 session revealed that in the four months from 10 October 1967 to 11 February 1968 the Milk Board had issued instructions for some 2,107,000 gallons of skimmed milk to be thrown away in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Klerksdorp, and Bloemfontein. The previous session, the Minister had stated that more than 500,000 gallons of skimmed milk had been thrown away in Johannesburg and Pretoria between 20 December 1966 and 28 February 1967, on the instructions of the Milk Board. The reason given was 'overproduction'.
Yet it has been estimated that one third of a pint of milk a day is sufficient to prevent a child from contracting kwashiorkor. The cost of treating kwashiorkor patients at one hospital alone - the King Edward VIII in Durban - was R700,000 over a ten-year period. 'The curative cost of treatment for one surviving child for a 30-day period is about R143, while the preventive cost for the same period is about 80 cents - the cost of a third of a pint of milk a day (Rand Daily Mail, 25 May 1968).
If the profits from farming are based partly on the exploitation of the consumer, they derive even more from the exploitation of the labourer. Approximately one third of the total African population of ten million live on farms in the White areas, while in the Western Province and Natal this labour force is supplemented by several hundred thousand Coloured and Asian workers. Although there are wide variations in the income of farm labourers, the figures show that the overwhelming majority have a standard of living considerably below that of the industrial workers in the towns.
Conditions for farm workers on most farms can be only described as feudal, and have played a predominant role in determining the master-race attitude of Whites to Blacks in South Africa. Most farm owners behave as though they counted their labourers among their personal possessions. Cases of assault by farmers on their workers are frequently brought before the courts, leaving one to guess how many similar cases are not even referred to the police. The brutal conditions prevailing on the potato farms of the Eastern Transvaal have already been mentioned. For all these reasons farmers find it increasingly difficult to secure and retain an adequate labour force. It has been one of the aims of the pass laws and the farm jail system to remedy this deficiency, but even these devices have proved inadequate, and the government has resorted to ever more stringent control and direction of labour in order to ensure that the needs of the farmers are met.
The processes of the industrial revolution through which South Africa has passed have resulted in the destruction of the old system of agriculture, the concentration of agricultural capital in ever fewer hands, and the drift of the Afrikaner to the cities. In 1911, more than eighty percent of the Afrikaners lived on the platteland; in 1936 the figure had dropped to forty-eight percent and by 1951 to thirty-one percent. If later statistics were available, they would undoubtedly show that the proportion had fallen still lower. The census figures show that between 1936 and 1960 the number of White males in agriculture declined from 180,000 to 114,000. The majority of these would be Afrikaners. Part of the accumulated capital of the farmers was invested in farm machinery; the number of tractors on the farms, for example, increased from 20,000 in 1946 to 120,000 in 1960. And part was invested in the new enterprises which the Afrikaner, under the direction of the Nationalist movement, had started to launch in the towns.
PRIVATE NATIONALIST CAPITAL
The attempt of the Afrikaner to establish himself in industry and commerce was a by-product of the whole Nationalist movement whose course has been traced in this book. Apart from small retail shops, the first enterprise of any significance founded by Afrikaners was Die Nasionale Pers, owners of the Nationalist newspaper Die Burger, which was started in 1915 with Dr Malan as the first editor. This was followed by the establishment of the two insurance companies of SANLAM and SANTAM in 1918, and the burial society AVBOB in 1921. Appeals were made to the volk to invest in 'their own' institutions, but progress was slow.
The next big spurt in Afrikaner economic development occurred in the 1930S as a direct result of the Broederbond's activities. According to statements by the former secretary of the Broederbond, I.M. Lombard, it was the Broederbond which gave rise to the founding of Volkskas, the Afrikaans banking house in 1934. The Broederbond raised £1,000 for the repatriation of the Argentine Boers, £3,000 for loan bursaries to the Afrikaner medical faculty in Pretoria, and £3,000 for an Afrikaans engineering faculty at Stellenbosch. The 1930s also saw the entry of the Afrikaner into the urban distributive trades with the setting up of Uniewinkels and Sonop in Bloemfontein.
In 1937 the new Nationalist daily paper Die Transvaler was started in Johannesburg. It was published by Voortrekkerpers, a company launched on the initiative of five Cape Nationalists headed by the leader of the Nationalist Party, Dr D.F. Malan, to promote the policies of the Nationalist Party in the Transvaal. The first editor of the paper was Dr H.F. Verwoerd, who from the start set the tone of uncompromising and strident chauvinism which was to dominate the Transvaal Party and ultimately to sweep down from the north and swamp the more 'liberal' nationalism of the Cape. It is one of the ironies of South African history that 'Cape liberalism', of whatever variety, pro- or anti_government, has been fated by its very softness to provoke the counter-forces of rigid orthodoxy and sectarianism which were ultimately to destroy it.
The greatest achievement of the Broederbond in this sphere, however, was the holding of the National Economic Conference in 1939 at which the Reddingsdaadbond was formed. We have already seen the steps taken by this conference in connexion with the capture of the trade unions (see Chapter 13). Of even greater importance was the conference decision to launch an economic movement which would harness the resources of the Afrikaner community for the development of an Afrikaner capitalist class.
The origin of the movement was the desire to raise the economic level of the Afrikaners as a community and in the process eliminate the class of poor Whites, who during the period of the thirties were estimated to number about 300,000, the majority of them Afrikaans-speaking.
Attempts were made by the key speakers at the conference to assess the position of the Afrikaner in the economy at the time, and the following are some of the points which emerged:
That in 1939 48 percent of Afrikaners already lived in the cities and towns;
That the income per head of the Afrikaner in 1937 was £86, compared with £142 for non-Afrikaner Whites;
That of the £220 million invested in commercial banking, building societies, insurance companies and savings banks, only between £80 million and £100 million belonged to Afrikaners;
That although the Afrikaner owned about 75 percent of the assets in agriculture, his stake in mining and industry was so small that it was impossible even to frame an estimate.
That the purchasing power of the whole Afrikaner community was about £100 million a year.
The conference decided on a number of measures to improve the economic position of the Afrikaner. Among these were the provision of commercial and technical training for Afrikaner youngsters; the mobilization of Afrikaner capital and savings for investment; the establishment of agricultural and commercial cooperatives; the creation of an Afrikaner Chamber of Commerce and Industries; the formation of an Economic Institute of the Federation of Afrikaans Cultural Organizations (F.A.K.) which among other things, would have control of the Reddingsdaadfonds.
In his address to the congress, Dr M.S. Louw, Managing Director of the life assurance company SANLAM, indicated that the Afrikaner intended to take the capitalist road:
'If we want to achieve success,' he said, 'we must make use of the technique of capitalism, as it is employed in the most important industry of our country, the gold mining industry. We must establish a financial company which will function in commerce and industry like the so-called "finance houses" in Johannesburg' ('N Volk Staan Op, compiled by E.P. du Plessis for the Economic Institute of the F.A.K., published by Human and Rousseau, South Africa, 1964).
The first important consequence of the 1939 conference was the formation of Federale Volksbeleggings (F.V.B.) in 1939, the first Afrikaner investment company, that would grow into one of the giants of the economy. An extract from the minutes of a meeting held by the executive of the F.A.K. Economic Institute in Johannesburg on 27 September 1940 provides an interesting commentary on the principles which inspired those who were to be the leading figures of Afrikaner economic development: Federale Volksbeleggings Bpk. operates on the principle that it is a people's institution (volksinrigting), established on the mandate of the Ekonomiese Volkskongres of 1939, to serve as a means of furthering the Afrikaner's drive for economic independence. But the company is nevertheless a business undertaking which wishes to pay its shareholders in clinking silver (klinkende munt) and not just in sentiment ('N Volk Staan Op, p. 141).
The Afrikaner shareholder was to get his money, and the Afrikaner community its sentiment, in copious measure over the ensuing decades.
The Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut, counterpart of the English Chambers of Commerce and Industry, was formed in 1942 with a £5,000 interest-free loan from the Reddingsdaadbond. Its first congress was held on 24 August 1942 and its second in August 1943, by which time it was able to claim that the purchasing power of the Afrikaner, only £100 million a year in 1939, had risen to £120 million. In the ensuing years the Handelsinstituut was to become the core of the Afrikaner's drive for economic parity and ultimate hegemony.
Progress was steady, if still unspectacular. Before the Second World War the Afrikaners controlled 1,200 factories, including building and construction works - three percent of the total. According to the Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut the Afrikaners' share had doubled to six percent by 1949, and the number of institutions had grown to 3,385, employing 41,000 people. But eighty percent of the undertakings were one-man businesses and only two and a half per cent were registered as public companies. There was nothing to show in heavy industry.
In commerce there was a substantial improvement of the Afrikaner's position. Whereas before the Second World War almost all businesses in the country towns were in the hands of the English-speaking, the Jews, or the Indians, by 1949 the Afrikaner controlled twenty-five percent of all commercial undertakings. Three quarters of the 10,000 trading concerns then in his possession had been established or taken over in the ten years since the Economic Conference was held. During the same decade the Afrikaans financial houses had increased their stake from five to seven and a half percent of the total. Nevertheless, the advance was largely relative. In 1945 there was only one Afrikaner company with a capitalization of £1 million, whereas there were 116 companies on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange with at least that capitalization.
An opportunity to take stock more accurately was provided by the second Ekonomiese Volkskongres, held at Bloemfontein in October 1950 under the auspices of the F.A.K., the R D B, the Economic Institute and the Handelsinstituut. This summarized the achievement of the Afrikaner as follows:
Afrikaner Percentage of Ownership and Control
Commerce Industry Finance Mining Total PrivateEconomy 1938-9 8% 3% 5% 1% 5% 1948-9 25% 6% 6% 1% 11%
The net income of the Afrikaners was given as £350 million, out of a national income of £800 million a year.
The congress had to note one failure. Although the Reddingsdaadbond, which was to be the major promotion source of Afrikaner business enterprise, had by 1945 almost 400 branches and 700,000 members, and had been able to launch hundreds of new Afrikaner businesses and to strengthen hundreds of others, its central fund, the Reddingsdaadfonds, had proved a disappointment, collecting in donations from the public between 1940 and 1950 only £183,000 of the £2 million desired. The Fund was closed down in 1946.
It is interesting to note that twenty-one years later Dr P.J. Meyer, chairman of the Broadcasting Corporation, who had been secretary of the RDB at the time, gave the figure collected by the Reddingsdaadfonds as R568,142-90, of which the largest single portion had been invested in shares of Federale Volksbeleggings (Die Transvaler, 16 November 1967).
The Nationalists' great opportunity came with the capture of State power in 1948. There was one wing of the Nationalist Party, led by extremists like Dr Albert Hertzog, who felt that the best way to promote the Afrikaner cause was to use government to gain control of the country's whole economy at one fell swoop. 'I am satisfied', said Dr Hertzog in April 1949, 'that for all those who look to the future of South Africa there is only one solution, and that is that, irrespective of any other key industries, the gold mining industry should be nationalized by the State.' Nationalist political power, however, was still too precarious for such rash ventures, and Dr Hertzog was repudiated by the Prime Minister, Dr Malan, himself, who announced that 'the government contemplated no sweeping measures such as the nationalization of the gold mines'. Nevertheless, the idea of nationalization or some form of direct State control has remained in the background of Nationalist economic thinking, to be put on view from time to time as a threat whenever non-Afrikaans big business shows signs of proving recalcitrant.
Meanwhile, the Nationalist political and business leaders entered into an alliance which has proved extremely beneficial to both over the years. No less an authority than Dr A.J. Visser, M.P. for Florida and first director of the Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut, has acknowledged: 'After the Nationalist Party came to power in 1948, there was an appreciable increase in the growth of the AHI and of the Afrikaner in the economic sphere' (Die Transvaler, 16 November 1967). Dr Visser stressed that the political and economic development of the Afrikaner must continue to go hand in hand. The spectacular progress of Afrikaner capital since 1948 has been due partly to the direct placing of government contracts with Nationalist firms, partly to the association of Nationalist capital with State capital. In Die Afrikaner in die Landsekonomie, Professor J. L. Sadie explains:
With a party in power consisting of an overwhelming majority of Afrikaners we find further a willingness in undertakings to seek cooperation with Afrikaner businesses, partly apparently because it is believed that the latter have easier access to authority. In the final instance the contribution of the government to the economic life by the establishment of undertakings such as Iscor, Sasol, Foskor, Escom, and the Industrial Development Corporation has created opportunities by which the Afrikaner could obtain experience in the function of management; opportunities which he would otherwise not have had.
State control over a certain sector of the economy is common to a number of capitalist countries, but in few has it progressed as far as in South Africa, where the State owns or controls land and forests, post, telegraphs and telephones, railways and airlines, broadcasting, and a host of other public services. In addition, the State has entered the field of private industry in electric power generation (Escom), printing, the manufacture of arms and ammunition, the production of iron and steel (Iscor), heavy engineering (Vecor), insecticides (Klipfontein Organic Products), oil, gas and chemicals from coal (Sasol), and fertilizers (Foskor). The State has also launched the Industrial Development Corporation, which has become, together with private capital, a permanent shareholder in a host of industries, mining and finance (Palabora and Central Accepting Bank); aircraft manufacture (Atlas); oil (Soekor); textiles; chemicals (SASOL and Sentrachem); shipping (Safmarine); with a total investment in 1968 of R300 million; the National Finance Corporation, to provide short-term loans for development; and the Fisheries Development Corporation, to build up a modern fishing industry.
Not all these projects were sponsored by the Nationalist government. Some of them, like Iscor, date back to the first Nationalist government of General Hertzog. ESCOM was started in 1922, and the IDC, born of the needs of war, in 1940, when imports were scarce and the country had to look to its own resources for survival. But undoubtedly the most significant development of State capital has taken place since 1948, when the Nationalist advent to power resulted in a dwindling flow of capital from abroad. After the Sharpeville shooting of 1960, indeed, the flow was reversed, and capital started to flee the country until controls were imposed to stop it.
In these circumstances, there has been a steadily increasing tendency for the State to take the initiative in economic development. While the hesitancy of private capital threatened to slow down the rate of increase of the national income the State has been forced to come forward with grandiose schemes to stimulate economic activity and prevent the collapse or indefinite stagnation of the economy. In recent years the threat of an international boycott, and the various United Nations resolutions calling for the application of sanctions against South Africa in protest at the policy of apartheid, have still further strengthened the government's desire to develop its resources and make itself independent of foreign supplies wherever it can.
In a series of articles for Fighting Talk during 1962 analysing the relationship between Nationalist capital and State capital, G. Fasulo estimated the total assets controlled by State capital in 1960 as somewhere in the neighbourhood of £1,500 million. And if the assets controlled by subsidiaries and firms in partnership with State capital were added, the total would be considerably higher. The total of foreign capital invested in South Africa is approximately the same as the total of State capital, but, because it is split up among many institutions, its political and economic impact is by no means as great as that of State capital, which is wholly under the control of the Nationalist government. It has been estimated that civil servants and employees of State capital number about one fifth of the White population, constituting with their families a majority of the electorate. Fasulo commented: 'All the Nats have to do is keep the dependants of the State happy and they can remain in power indefinitely so long as there is no major extension of the franchise.' Figures which have since become available furnish some confirmation of Fasulo's thesis. Calculations by Prof Houghton of gross capital formation in the period 1950-65 provide the following totals:
Public authorities 4,581 million rand Public corporations 1,014 million rand Private firms and individuals 8,831 million rand
Capital formation by public authorities increased from 149 million Rand in 1950 to 657 million Rand in 1965; by public corporations, from 42 million Rand to 162 million Rand; and by private enterprise, from 355 million Rand to 1,314 million Rand (The South African Economy, Table 6). Details of the assets of some of the public authorities and public corporations were given in the supplement to the Financial Mail of 28 March 1969:
Total assets latest year S.A. Railways and Harbours R2,304million Electricity Supply Commission (ESCOM) 1,303 million Iron and Steel Corporation (ISCOR) 450 million Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) 308 million SASOL 161 million FOSKOR 24 million
The significance of these figures is that the Nationalist Party has complete control both over State capital and, to a large extent, over the capital of the public corporations. In addition, it has the power to influence that proportion of private capital, estimated by the Handelsinstituut in 1967 at about one fifth, which belongs to the Afrikaner community. Thus, from the total of capital formed between 1950 and 1965, no less than R7,361 million would fall within the Nationalist fold, as compared with R7,065 remaining under the control of non-Nationalists.
According to the South African Foundation, 'The public sector of the economy has accounted for 38 percent of gross fixed investment since 1946. . . . The proportion is, however, rising, and so is the fixed investment undertaken by Stateowned corporations' (South Africa in the Sixties, second edition, 1965, p.28).
Another estimate was provided at a symposium of the South African Institute of Public Administration at Pretoria University in October 1968 by the deputy chairman of the Netherlands Bank, Dr B. H. Holsboer. For a private-enterprise country, South Africa had a surprisingly big government-owned sector in its economy, he said. 'Apart from the mining houses, the Government is the main representative of the capitalist system in South Africa.' Including the railways, ISCOR, SASOL, AMCOR and ESCOM the government's share of gross domestic investment is 23.2 percent. Moreover, the government share is growing. Investment by public corporations was 8.3 percent of that by private enterprise in 1960, and 18.3 percent in 1967.
Dr Holsboer said: 'There is hardly a branch of industry in which the Industrial Development Corporation has not taken an interest, and I am satisfied that many industries would hardly have developed if the I.D.C. had not given its support.' The same pattern applied throughout the economy where the government had taken the initiative. From the establishment first of the Reserve Bank and later of the National Finance Corporation had sprung a chain reaction - discount houses, merchant banks and unit trusts - placing 'South Africa's financial sector on an ultra-modern basis'.
Dr Holsboer pleaded for improved machinery for cooperation between the private and State sectors (Rand Daily Mail, 18 October 1968, and Star, 21 October 1968).
The question may be raised whether it is fair to regard the public and semi-public corporations as falling within the Afrikaner fold. Here we can presumably rely on the word of Dr Van Eck, chairman of the Industrial Development Corporation, who has stated that, in this sphere, the State has ignored 'the usual practice' of balancing the language groups, and that hardly any English-speaking people hold positions in State utility corporations.
Of the Industrial Development Corporation's nine directors, only one is English-speaking. Of SASOL's six directors, only one is English-speaking. FOSKOR has not had a single English-speaking board member in all the years of its existence. The language in which most board meetings of the corporations are conducted is Afrikaans.
Dr van Eck was not complaining. In fact, he was replying to a complaint from an M.P. that English was used too much in the work of these corporations (quoted in the Sunday Times, 25 February 1968).
Both Britain's Economist and the South African Financial Mail have referred to 'murmurings' that the I.D.C. has provided 'more help for Afrikaner than English-speaking business'. The deputy editor of the Economist, Norman Macrae, after a visit to South Africa commented that he ' did not find that the criticisms were very loud'; but he conceded that there was something in them by adding that the 'great Randlord companies would rather not have the I.D.C. as a partner in their own ventures because they prefer to run their shows free from interference. But they are happy to see the I.D.C. build other people up, sometimes ... in collaboration with foreign investors such as Cyril Lord, more often with Afrikaners' (Economist, 29 June 1968).
Of the ten major industrial undertakings in which the I.D.C. has substantial interests, semi-State corporations like SASOL and FOSKOR together with Afrikaner private companies form the largest group. As for the corporations themselves, they too are engaged in a host of projects, the cumulative effect of which is to strengthen the Afrikaner control of the economy.
The allegation that these semi-public corporations have, over the years, become a law unto themselves and have placed themselves in a position where, although launched by public funds, they refuse to account to the public in any way was voiced by Mr Ben Roux, senior lecturer in public administration at the University of South Africa, in an article in the February 1968 issue of the independent monthly review New Nation.
Mr Roux calculated that there were at that time about twenty public corporations of first-line rank in South Africa. Their activities gave cause for alarm. Some, like ISCOR and the National Development Corporation, had been allowed to create and acquire almost in total defiance of the principle of parliamentary supremacy - and their creations had been allowed to create and acquire in their turn, 'organizationally obfuscating proliferations' of semi-autonomous enterprises of all kinds.
ISCOR, basically a primary producer of iron and steel, has its tentacles in and around various commodity-producing concerns, engineering enterprises, farms, hunting resorts, country clubs, hotels and sales companies, etc. The organizational totality of all these is hard to comprehend and falls more or less into the same category as the vast, sprawling, privately owned De Beers organization.
These corporations, handling public funds and launched to further government policies, are bafflingly secretive about their policies and activities, wrote Mr Roux. He himself was refused information about salary scales on the grounds that 'no information about their staffs could be supplied to outsiders'. This attitude was to be deplored, said Mr Roux, 'but it is perhaps caused by the fact that some grades of personnel in at least three public corporations that I know of receive pay packets of up to 45 percent more than those of similar levels in the public service.' Mr Roux also questioned whether swimming pools, massage salons, air-conditioned underground wine-cellars and sun rooms were necessary amenities for executives employed by public corporations.
Perhaps the most serious charge that he raised was in connexion with the fate of Klipfontein Organic Products (KOP), a major basic chemical concern manufacturing insecticides, caustic soda, hydrogen, hydrochloric acid and other chlorine by-products. The corporation was originally started in 1942, under the control of the Defence Department, to make mustard gas and other products required by the armed forces. Later it started to produce DDT. After the war, it was taken over by the Department of Commerce and Industries, and in 1950 converted into a State corporation, since when the company's turnover rose at a steady rate of between 8 and 12 percent a year. In the year ending 30 June 1964, turnover rose by a record 16.2 percent, to reach R6.1 million.
The following year KOP was sold lock, stock and barrel, to private enterprise in the shape of Federale Volksbeleggings, at a price somewhere between the R5.6 million that the government said would be the minimum it would expect, and the R7 million which was the maximum that FVB was prepared to pay. Mr Roux asked what had happened to the 'very sound reasons' which had originally been advanced for making KOP a public corporation.
The economic potential represented by the State and the semi-public corporations was reflected in an estimate by the South African Bureau of Statistics that between 1968 and 1970 nearly R4,000 million would be spent on public capital projects. These figures include spending by the government, post office, S.A. Railways and Harbours, provincial administrations, divisional councils, municipalities, universities and technical colleges, control boards, and public corporations such as ESCOM and the Industrial Development Corporation. The Bureau said that the public sector's capital expenditure exceeded R1,000 million for the first time in 1967. It is expected to reach R1,288 million in 1968; R1,357 million in 1969; and R1,335 million in 1970 (Sunday Times, 14 April 1968).
The Bureau does not disclose details of the development plans, which in any event do not appear to include the semipublic corporations. But programmes announced in the press include the following: ISCOR, an expansion programme costing R560 million, to be completed in the early seventies; SASOL, with a total capital investment of R250 million up to 1968, is planning to build, in cooperation with Compagnie Francaise des Petroles and the National Iranian Oil Co., a government-controlled oil refinery at Sasolburg in the Free State, costing R50 million; the Industrial Development Corporation, busy in 1968 with projects for a R35 million aluminium smelter at Richards Bay, and a R50 million submarine cable linking South Africa via Lisbon with Europe and America, is continuing plans for border industries; ESCOM, already producing fifty percent of the electricity generated in all Africa, was in 1968 contemplating further expansion totalling R100 million; the government had launched the gigantic Orange River scheme, expected to cost R450 million.
Such are only some of the projects launched in South Africa on State or semi-State initiative. By comparison, the development plans announced by private industry are modest in the extreme.
But quite as important as the economic power of the State and its corporations is their political power. According to the Minister of Planning, answering a question in the Assembly on 13 February 1968, more than 857,000 people of all races are employed by South Africa's central, provincial and local government authorities, including the post office, the railways, and the various statutory control boards. The number of Whites comprises just under 400,000 of this total.
Dr E.G. Malherbe, former Principal of the University of Natal, in his presidential address to the South African Institute of Race Relations in January 1968, also gave the figure of just under 400,000 Whites in State employment. If the Whites employed by semi-government enterprises like SASOL and the other corporations of its kind were added, then the number of Whites who could be regarded as direct or indirect servants of the State totalled at least 500,000.
Almost all of these were either voters or eligible to vote. It could also be assumed that each employee had at least one voter dependent on him or her. This meant that electors who were in one way or another dependent on the government totalled 1,000,000, out of a total electorate of 1,900,000 on the voters' roll for the last general election in 1966.
'These figures are approximate but they are near enough to reflect an alarming state of affairs from the point of view of political independence,' he said. 'Just as the upper castes of Prussia determined the whole character and fate of the German people, so it lies within the powers of this 1,000,000 to determine the fate of nearly 20 million inhabitants of this country.' By the very nature of their jobs, these people were virtually emasculated as critics of the government's policy, he said (Star, 31 January 1968).
JOBS FOR PALS
The Nationalists have used their State power to benefit Nationalist private industry. They have openly given State contracts to private Nationalist firms. For example Verwoerd's publishing houses (Dagbreekpers and Hayne & Gibson) received government contracts worth £1,5 million between 1960 and 1962. Advertisements were placed in Nationalist newspapers to an extent out of all proportion to their relative circulation. A diamond-prospecting company formed in the early sixties with a share capital of £1,250,000 obtained, through the Nationalist investment company of Bonuskor, an important concession on the coast of South-West Africa from the Nationalist-controlled Administration of South-West Africa. The company obtained the concession in the face of strong competition from De Beers and allied American interests. Two of Escom's biggest power stations are built next to coal mines owned by Federale Mynbou, a Nationalist mining concern which is accordingly guaranteed a long-term market for its coal. Federale Volksbeleggings, a Nationalist investment house, has financed a synthetic rubber plant using raw materials from the State firm SASOL, and the rubber firm has full government backing to guarantee it a market.
Not all the cases referred to, nor the others raised over the years, necessarily involved corruption, though some cases were brought before the courts and convictions obtained. But of Nationalist favouritism for Nationalist concerns, there is abundant evidence.
In his article for Fighting Talk on Nationalist capital in October 1962, G. Fasulo wrote:
This Broederly assistance from public funds is made easier by a system of interlocking directorates which has been built up between Nat capital and State capital. For example, Dr H.J. van Eck of the State firm I.D.C. [the Industrial Development Corporation] is a director of SANLAM (The largest Afrikaner insurance company.) Dr M. S. Louw of SANLAM has been appointed head of the government's new Coloured Development Corporation.... Mr C.H.J. van Aswegen, general manager of SANTAM, has been appointed a director of the State-owned National Finance Corporation.... Mr J.G. van der Merwe is a director of Voortrekkerpers and of Massey Ferguson, the big agricultural machinery firm, in which Federale Volksbeleggings has a large investment, and the State firms Iscor and Klipfontein Organic Products (KOP). In addition the State capitalist firms and State departments are used as a training ground for Nat business managers.
An indication of how greatly this mutual aid has succeeded in developing private Nationalist capital may be obtained from the following details:
The Afrikaner bank Volkskas, founded in 1935, had assets in 1950 of about R40 million. By 1958 these had risen to R140 million; and by 1968, to R538 million (Financial Mail, 13 December 1968).
The building society Saambou, launched in 1942, had in 1943 a total capital of about R25,000 and registered a loss for the year of R1,200. By 31 March 1968, the assets of the company had risen to R110,518,988, and the company had made a profit, after tax, for the previous financial year, of R4,138,607. By March 31, 1969, Saambou's assets had increased again to total R125 million. (Star, 29 May 1968 and 14 April 1969).
The life insurance company SANLAM, formed in 1918, had assets in 1949 of R34 million. By 1968 these had increased tenfold, to R334,043,000 (Star, 9 April, 1968).
The insurance company SANTAM, formed in 1918, had assets of R25 million in 1962; by 1968, these had risen to R91 million (Rand Daily Mail, 23 November 1968).
The Afrikaner banking concern Trustbank, formed as recently as 1955, has today assets of over R300 million, and occupies the fourth place in the banking world, exceeded only by Barclays, the Standard Bank and Volkskas (Transvaler, 16 November 1967).
The investment company Bonuskor, formed in 1946, increased its assets from R16 million to R25 million between 1962 and 1964. It is now involved with the government in the development of the Atlas aircraft corporation.
The investment company Federale Volksbeleggings, formed in 1940 after the first Ekonomiese Volkskongres, has today assets under its direct control worth R84,385,000, compared with a mere R15 million in 1962 (Die Transvaler, 16 November 1967).
The building society Nasionale Bouvereniging, formed in 1959, had assets in 1963 totalling R21,496,280; by 1964 these had risen to R31 million ('N Volk Staan Op, p. 209).
Agricultural cooperatives, the majority of which are under Afrikaner control, increased their turnover from R58 million in 1940 to R666 million in 1964. In the twenty years between 1936 and 1956, their assets increased from R14 million to R246 million ('N Volk Staan Op, Chapter 12).
Perhaps the biggest breakthrough of Afrikaner capital has been in the sphere of mining. Federale Mynbou, the only Afrikaner-controlled mining company of any consequence, was formed in 1953 by Federale Volksbeleggings, with the cooperation of Bonuskor. A large block of shares in the company was later bought by SANTAM. For ten years the company made steady, if unspectacular progress, until in August 1963 it joined with the giant Anglo-American Corporation in the formation of 8 R22 million new company, Main Street Investments. This was followed by the appointment one month later of Mr T.F. Muller (Managing Director of Federale Mynbou and a brother of Foreign Minister Dr Hilgard Muller) as managing director of Anglo-American's General Mining and Finance Corporation, and of Mr W.B. Coetzer (chairman of Federale Mynbou) as a director of General Mining. A year later, Federale Mynbou took over General Mining completely, and at one stroke Federale Mynbou, formed with an issued capital of R200,000, and with assets in 1963 of R60 million, took possession of an empire with assets estimated at between R200 and R250 million, increasing by 1967 to R350 million (Die Transvaler, 16 November 1967). The stake of the Afrikaner in gold mining jumped from one to nine percent. In addition, Federale Mynbou now controls thirty-seven percent of South Africa's uranium production, twenty percent of its coal, and thirty-two percent of its asbestos. It also has extensive interests in sugar, diamonds, platinum, salt and chrome, and is spreading itself into the worlds of banking, engineering and chemicals (Star, 19 September 1966; and Die Transvaler, 16 November 1967).
The take-over was described by the Sunday Times on 30 August 1964 'not only as a personal triumph for Mr Harry Oppenheimer chairman of Anglo-American, but also as an important step forward in his proposals for closer business cooperation across the South African language barrier'. Mr T.F. Muller said that the take-over 'would probably not have come about but for the integrity and assistance of Mr Oppenheimer'.
Mr Oppenheimer himself, in an interview published in the Sunday Times of the same date, disclosed that, as early as 1957, Mr Muller and Mr Coetzer, of Federale Mynbou, had approached his father, Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, to arrange 'an Afrikaans break-through into the mining field'.
Mr Oppenheimer said: 'We thought then that if we could help, it would be the right thing to do, but there were no opportunities at that time. Then, last year, came the chance to do something constructive . . . '
He added that it was 'very important' that the two language groups should work together, and now the ideal opportunity had arisen.
True-blue Nationalists greeted this new development with some dismay. Die Vaderland commented: 'The original idea of Afrikaner participation in the mining industry is dead and buried in Hollard Street in a coffin of 24-carat gold. Mr Oppenheimer's break-through only existed in that he saw the rising pressure of the Afrikaner mining enterprise; but instead of opposing it, he was more realistic and made a breach in the wall, so that the small but swelling stream could dissolve into his dam' (8 September 1964).
The shareholders of Federale Mynbou, however, did not object, nor did those of General Mining. Since then, Federale Mynbou has increased its links with English financial interests and now has a large stake in Stewart and Lloyds, Union Carriage and Wagon, and Hall and Longmore, as well as a ten-per-cent interest in the R100 million Highveld steel and vanadium development which is one of Anglo-American's biggest current undertakings. The accolade of Hollard Street was bestowed on the managing director of Federale Mynbou, Mr T.F. Muller, when he was elected President of the South African Chamber of Mines in 1968.
The greatest individual success-story in the sphere of Afrikaner industry is that of Mr Anton Rupert, head of the Rembrandt Tobacco Corporation. Rupert is alleged to have started his business career with a capital of £10 in 1941, when he launched the Voorbrand Tobacco Company, the first of the Rembrandt group, in partnership with Dr A.J. Stals, subsequently appointed Minister of Health when the Nationalist government came to power in 1948. The first cigarette manufactured by Rembrandt was produced in 1948.
By the time of the 1950 meeting of shareholders, Dr N. Diederichs, then chairman of the Corporation and later Minister of Finance, boasted that Rembrandt had already succeeded in quadrupling its sales, and had 'often sold more [cigarettes] in non-Afrikaans areas than in Afrikaans areas'. The company, by a combination of technical progress (it was the first to put the so-called 'king-size' filter cigarette on the market) and skilful advertising, was able to challenge and beat the entrenched overseas-controlled United Tobacco Company, which had hitherto enjoyed a monopoly in South Africa. No doubt the backing of the Afrikaner finance houses also helped.
Rupert then turned his attention overseas and, backed once more by the Afrikaner finance houses, bought Rothmans and Carreras in Britain; extended the Rothmans interests in other countries; and launched a new cigarette on the market, Peter Stuyvesant, which soon became a best-seller.
Today the Rembrandt group ranks among the first five in the world cigarette industry, with a turnover of 800 million rand. The annual report of the Corporation in October 1968 stated that the total assets of the Rembrandt group had increased by R16,832,000 to R443,549,000 in the year ended 30 June 1968. The combined profits of the group amounted to R54,729,000 before tax (Financial Mail, 8 November 1968).
By 1964, it has been calculated, the shareholders of Rembrandt Tobacco Corporation (S.A.) alone had received in dividends a total of R5,656,168 rand - R1,941,168 rand more than they had contributed in capital. Since the establishment of the company, a total of almost 226 percent (or 113 cents per 50-cent share) has been paid out in dividends on issued capital from time to time ('N Volk Staan Op, pp. 166-7).
The group is already manufacturing in more than thirty factories in eighteen countries. Direct subsidiaries of Rembrandt, in addition to Rothmans and Carreras, are the American Cigarette Co. (Overseas) Ltd; Murray Sons and Co. Ltd; and John Sinclair Ltd. Associated companies include P.J. Carrell and Co. Ltd; Alfred Dunhill Ltd; Schimmelpenning Cigaren Fabriken; Martin Brinkman of Bremen; and Canadian Breweries. Rembrandt has a controlling interest in the R20 million Oudemeester liquor company, now linked with the Dutch firm Heinekens and for a short time also with the British firm of Whitbread. The group also has investments in the wool and printing industry in South Africa.
At the annual meeting of the Rembrandt Corporation in Stellenbosch in October 1966, Dr Rupert said: 'We believe that the Rembrandt organization is the world's first truly multinational group. We believe we have found a new formula of international understanding and co-operation.' He was referring to the Rembrandt Corporation's policy of penetrating underdeveloped countries by means of offering fifty percent of the shares in the local subsidiary for distribution in the country concerned, and allowing a certain number of local figures to have seats on the board of directors, and even to head them. Final control, of course, remains in the hands of Rembrandt, but the company wins the cooperation of those who might otherwise be its competitors by distributing amongst them a share of the profits. In this way Rembrandt has succeeded in establishing itself in countries like Fiji, Malaysia, Malta, Jamaica, Eire and Cyprus, and recently has been turning its attention more and more to Africa, where it has subsidiaries in Rhodesia and Zambia. A Kenya subsidiary, headed by former Vice-President Joseph Murumbi, met with 'consumer resistance' and was eventually taken over by the British American Tobacco Company. Plans are in hand, however, to launch a subsidiary in Tanzania.
In his 1968 report Rupert also mentioned that Rembrandt had expanded its operations in Mocambique, where it obtained an interest in an investment company which owns Sociedade Agricola de Tabacos Limitada of Lourenco Marques and its subsidiary Tabaqueira de Mocambique Limitada of Mocambique Island. The latter two companies have been engaged in the cigarette and tobacco industry for more than thirty years.
In this new venture, Rupert added, 'our Group has also been joined by A. Tabaqueira S.A.R.L., the largest cigarette manufacturing company in Portugal. The company A. Tabaqueira is a member of the internationally known Companhia Uniao Fabril, the largest industrial group in Portugal' (Financial Mail, 8 November 1968).
In September 1968 the journal of the South African Foundation, Perspective, announced that the Rembrandt subsidiary Carreras had 'captured half of the newly opened up Saudi Arabian cigarette market, estimated to be worth a total of about £10 million a year'.
Dr Rupert high-mindedly declares that the welfare of the White and Black peoples of Africa are indivisible. In an interview published in an Afrikaans newspaper in October 1966, he said that if the Afrikaners were to learn from their own experience, and would help the Africans to have a share in the productive means of their country, 'we will speedily have more and more people who will not be able to afford to be revolutionaries.... The Bantu is our Black shadow - we are his White spirit. If they do not eat, we do not sleep.' The Black peoples should be placed in a position of wanting to preserve what the Whites want to preserve, otherwise they would want to experiment with Communism (Dagbreek en Sondagnuus, 30 October 1966). Regarded by right-wing Nationalists as a 'liberal', Rupert nevertheless declares his adherence to apartheid. There are no non-Whites on the boards of his South African companies.
As Afrikaner capital has developed, it has begun to penetrate the sphere of non-Afrikaner capital and form alliances with foreign business concerns. General Mining and three Portuguese banks joined in 1965 to start the Bank of Lisbon and South Africa. In 1968 Volkskas bought a twenty-per-cent interest in the Diners Club of South Africa, controlled by the Standard Bank. Also in 1968, a new brand of petrol came on the South African market; called Trek, it is backed by General Mining, Federale Volksbeleggings, Shell, British Petroleum and the I.D.C. subsidiary, Industrial Selections. Afrikaner capital has also started to extend beyond the borders of the country. Handelsinstituut delegations have visited Angola, Mocambique and Rhodesia seeking new outlets to the north. In July 1968, the magazine Perspective reported that General Mining was about to sign an agreement with the government of Peru for the financing and execution of an irrigation project 625 miles south of Lima. General Mining would offer machinery and invest 25 million dollars in the building of a 9,5-mile tunnel and access channels in the area of Majes-Siguas.
Afrikaner capital is showing plenty of initiative and drive in the course of its expansion, though much of the risk in its projects is mitigated by the knowledge that behind it stands the economic and political weight of the Afrikaner community and the South African state. At the same time, the hard core of Afrikaner capitalism remains itself exclusive and untouched by foreign enterprise, nationalist and basically as isolationist as ever in its attitude to the world. With time and the lure of money, all this may change as the entrepreneurs emerge from the laager. But the example of Rupert - internationalist abroad, Nationalist at home - shows that even the biggest of the Afrikaner business-men will come to heel when the whip of Afrikanerdom cracks.
The bulk of farming capital, an expanding sector of private industrial and commercial capital, and a complete monopoly of State capital - these constitute the economic basis of Nationalist political power. It is a powerful weapon, directed purposefully and ruthlessly by men whose ideology includes State direction of the country's economy in the interests of Afrikanerdom and the maintenance of White supremacy. The Afrikaner has come a long way economically since 1948, yet he still feels that he has a long way to go.
In 1952 the Afrikaanse Nasionale Studentebond paper Werda estimated that in Johannesburg only 1.5 percent of the 70,679 Afrikaners had an income of £1,000 and over (the figure for the English was given as ten percent), while fifty percent were earning less than £600 (English, forty percent). Of the 3,282 persons with an income of £3,000 and over, only eighty-one were Afrikaners.
Later figures were given in the pamphlet by Professor Sadie already quoted. In 1957 he claimed that the Afrikaner was responsible for £334 million or twenty-six percent of the £1,284 million in the private sector of the national income. This had to be compared with the fact that Afrikaners constituted fifty-seven percent of the total White population (assuming that the non-White contribution to the national income was negligible). Professor Sadie pointed out that, while Afrikaners were responsible for three quarters of the income from farming, outside of this sphere their share of the national income was only fourteen percent. In mining they controlled only one percent of production. The total personal income of Afrikaners was £425 million, or forty-four percent of the personal income of all Whites in South Africa. The average Afrikaner earned £260 a year in comparison with £435 earned by the non-Afrikaner.
The economic progress of the Afrikaner was celebrated in November 1967, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the foundation of the Afrikaner Handelsinstituut. By this time the Afrikaner had ceased to be a creature of the platteland, and more than seventy-five percent of the Afrikaans-speaking community lived in the cities and towns.
In an address at a celebration in Johannesburg, the Minister of Finance, Dr Diederichs, said that the Afrikaner had a controlling share in about a fifth of the private sector, excluding agriculture, where he was still overwhelmingly predominant. But although still behind the English-speaking section, there was no reason for concern, said Dr Diederichs. Seen in the perspective of the Afrikaner's economic history, the position was encouraging.
According to figures given by Dr Diederichs, about 55 percent of Afrikaners in urban areas earned R2,000 a year, compared with 77 percent of the English-speaking. But only 3.9 percent of the Afrikaners earned R8,000 or more, compared with 13.4 percent of the English-speaking section (Die Transvaler, 17 November 1967). The previous day, Die Transvaler had published a special twelve page supplement on the Handelsinstituut, in which the President, Mr Jan Marais, said that there were now 252 Sakekamers (local Chambers of Commerce, branches of the AHI) and 6,700 members.
Mr A. S. Engelbrecht, economic adviser of Volkskas, gave the following estimates of the Afrikaner share in business life:
1938/9 1948/9 1961/2 Commerce 8% 25% 28% Finance 5 % 6 % 14% Manufacture 3 % 6% 9% Mining 1 % 5% 1O%
Mr Engelbrecht said that taking into account the economic development of the country, the Afrikaner's economic say was still too small, and over the previous four years he had not kept pace with the general rate of development (Die Transvaler, 16 November 1967).
In this, however, his opinion clashed with that of Dr T.F. Muller, managing director of Federale Mynbou and General Mining, who in an address at Randburg earlier in the year had claimed that the eleven largest Afrikaner enterprises grew fifteen fold during the period 1950-65, compared with a threefold increase in the economy as a whole (Die Vaderland, 4 and 5 April 1967).
In a special supplement on South Africa published in the London Times on 21 October 1968, Dr T.F. Muller, as managing director of the General Mining and Finance Corporation, wrote:
Considering, first of all, the earnings of the Afrikaner in relation to the English-speaking South African, it is clear that the gap is steadily being closed. Taking the Afrikaner's earnings at the Random figure of 100 a year, the corresponding figures for the English speaker's earnings were: 1946, 180; 1955, 138; 1960, 125.
These opinions, however, relate only to the private sector of the economy. If one includes the sphere of State and semi-state capital in the perspective, then the share of the country's wealth controlled by the Afrikaner, and subject to the direction of the Nationalist Party government, is of vastly greater significance.
It used to be regarded as one of the peculiar paradoxes of South Africa that the ruling class, or those owning the means of production, identified so closely with the English-speaking section of the community, should since 1948 have been so consistently prevented from wielding political power. A thorough study of South Africa's capital structure today, however, may well show that the paradox is more apparent than real, and that in fact the Afrikaners, held together as a force in every field by the tightly-knit communal structures analysed in this book, constitute now the predominant influence in the economy as well. Afrikaner State, semi-state and private capital move and work together, and have largely succeeded in preventing the infiltration by non-Afrikaner elements. The manipulation of this force by the Nationalist government brings closer the ideal of the corporate state outlined in the draft constitution (see Chapter 7), with the interests of capital and labour coordinated by allegedly impartial organs of State staffed by the Broederbond elite. South Africa is nearer to this fate than most of her citizens, or the outside world, yet realize.
True, a serious clash of interests will remain so long as the private sector of the economy remains largely in the hands of non-Afrikaners. Apartheid, with its emphasis on racial separation and the retention of migratory labour, runs directly counter to the needs of secondary industry, which requires a trained and stable labour force for its proper development. Even in mining a considerable body of opinion, headed by the Oppenheimer group, wants an end to the old compound system of labour and the creation of a permanent urban African proletariat. These sectors of the economy are precisely the ones in which the Nationalists are most weakly represented. For ideological as well as economic reasons, the Nationalists will spare no effort to subdue them and compel them to conform at last to the demands of the State.
Since the National Economic Conference of 1939, the Nationalists have been able to advance from a position of great weakness to one of great and increasing strength. Time and the fruits of office have not mellowed them. Today they stand poised for their final assault on the remaining bastions of economic power, the conquest of which promises to bring with it the fulfilment of the Afrikaner dream.