The next step in the advance of the Nationalists was to be made in association with the Labour Party. In the light of the Nationalist Party's subsequent history, of course, the two parties may seem to have been strange bedfellows, but at the time there were many points of contact between their respective policies. On the one hand the Nationalists, associating British imperialism with entrenched money interests in South Africa, tended to be vaguely anti-capitalist in their propaganda if not always in their practice. On the other hand, the Labour Party tended to match the Nationalists in its determination to maintain the colour bar as the only way of maintaining the standards of the White worker. As early as 1907 the Transvaal Afrikaner party Het Volk had had a private election arrangement with Labour against their common enemy, the imperialists. Now, in the turbulent days of the post-war depression, the paths of the two parties were to draw closer together again.
The Nationalists were not untouched by the revolutionary propaganda in circulation throughout the world as a result of the war and the Bolshevik revolution. The old order was tottering.
Sympathy for the Bolsheviks (so long as they stayed in Russia) was widespread. Nationalists even found the idea of Bolshevism a handy weapon in their unceasing campaign against the British.
Addressing a Nationalist Party Congress at Pretoria in November 1919, General Hertzog 'warmly commended Bolshevism to the public'.
'I say that Bolshevism is the will of the people to be free,' he declared. 'Why do people want to oppress and kill Bolshevism? Because national freedom means death to capitalism and imperialism. Do not let us be afraid of Bolshevism. The idea in itself is excellent.'
His lieutenant, Dr Malan, was reported to have proclaimed at Vryburg on 23 January 1920: 'The aim of the Bolshevists was that Russians should manage their own affairs without interference from outside. That was the same policy that Nationalists would follow in South Africa. The Bolshevists stand for freedom, just like the Nationalist Party. An opportunity for the Nationalists to engage in some revolutionary activity of their own was to occur very soon, when the Rand was rocked by the 1922 strike of White miners in protest against a pay cut and an increase in the ratio of Black workers to White in the mines. The Chamber of Mines was determined to reduce production costs at the expense of the White mineworkers, about four fifths of whom were Afrikaners. In the event, the Nationalist politicians showed that they were neither willing nor able to defend the interests of the White workers, and that all their stirring demands for 'death to capitalism' and 'national freedom' were mere phrase-mongering.
The strike soon developed into an all-out struggle between the government and the mine-owners on the one hand and the workers on the other. At the end of January 1922 the Augmented Executive of the Mining Unions issued a communique: 'The attitude of the Prime Minister [Smuts] indicated that the government is backing the present attack by the employers on the White workers.' The statement called for the defeat of the government and invited negotiations with the Nationalist opposition.
In the early days of the strike, before martial law was declared and the shooting began, Nationalist politicians, headed by Transvaal Chairman Tielman Roos, frequently stood on the same platform as the strike leaders and mouthed the ambiguous strike slogan: ' Workers of the world unite and fight for a White South Africa.' The strikers were promised that they would be supported by the Nationalists and would be fed by the Afrikaner population of the countryside. Many of the strikers were organized in commandos on the Nationalist model.
A meeting of Nationalist and Labour Members of Parliament called in Pretoria early in February to discuss the situation was even nicknamed 'Roos's Parliament'. No concrete decisions were taken but there is no doubt that Nationalist agitation played a considerable part in getting the strike under way. The judicial commission which investigated the subsequent disturbances attributed them, amongst other things, to the help that the strikers expected from the platteland, political incitement by certain Nationalists, and the desire of Nationalist-minded strikers to establish a republic.
huge meeting of strikers was held in the Johannesburg Town Hall on Sunday 5 February, and at the height of the proceedings a carefully stage-managed entry was made by R. B. Waterston, a Labour M.P. and leader of the Brakpan commando. After a melodramatic speech, Waterston read a resolution demanding an end to domination by the Chamber of Mines and asking the Nationalists to proclaim a South African Republic and form a provisional government. It was carried in tumult, and Waterston hastened to Pretoria, accompanied by Shaw, Fisher, Kentridge, and others. But the Nationalist Party leaders received the deputation coldly and rejected its proposals altogether.
While the Nationalist leaders stood aside, however, the Nationalist rank and file continued to play a substantial part in the strike, organizing commandos on the Reef. As the struggle sharpened, these took on a more pronounced political character, and the commandants began to call themselves generals and to act in an independent manner. Strikers sang the 'Red Flag', the 'Marseillaise', and 'Die Volkslied', the old Transvaal republican anthem.
Smuts allowed the situation to develop and then, when all possibility of negotiation was past, struck back hard, using artillery and aeroplane bombardment against the strikers who were, for the most part, unarmed and at best in possession of a few rifles and small arms. Hundreds of strikers were killed, and when the fighting was over, hundreds more were rounded up and imprisoned on a charge of treason. Three of the strike leaders were hanged, and went to their deaths singing the 'Red Flag'.
The strike exposed the revolutionary pretensions of the Nationalist Party and revealed its leadership as representative of a reactionary land-owning class which had no interest in the cause of the workers as workers. The Nationalist leadership toyed with the strike only for as long as it appeared to hold out some prospect of advancement towards the cherished ideal of a republic. When the chances of victory for the strikers disappeared, the Nationalist politicians abandoned the workers to their fate and returned to the parliamentary arena, there to pursue their struggle 'on constitutional lines'. The Nationalist Party never at any stage aimed to overthrow the existing social order, but sought to advance itself opportunistically by any means that lay to hand. It was prepared to support any anti Smuts movement. Its object was to obtain power, and the banner of 'freedom' which it raised was for Europeans only, preferably Afrikaners who supported its leadership.
The 1922 strike resulted in defeat for the White workers, but it was a Pyrrhic victory for Smuts and the mining magnates. Immediately after the strike a United Front was set up, supported by rank and file members of the Nationalist, Labour, and Communist Parties, with the aim of preventing further executions, procuring an amnesty for the imprisoned strikers, and defeating the Smuts government. For a time the United Front was active everywhere on the Reef, drawing its strength from the bitterness of feeling amongst the White workers and their desire to revenge themselves on the principal author of their misery, General Smuts. Hardship was widespread at the time. Already at the 1921 Congress of the Nationalist Party Malan had pointed out that the number of poor Whites had increased in the previous two years from 106,000 to 200,000. After the 1922 strike the lot of the White worker was even more precarious and, though his militancy had been sapped by the outcome of the fighting, he nevertheless remained determined to bring about a change.
The parties began to look toward the next elections, and Labour decided to withdraw from the United Front in order to clear the way for an alliance with the Nationalists. Behind the scenes the leaders began to negotiate.
Towards the end of 1922 the Federale Raad of the Nationalist Party declared that it was ready to lend its support to a joint struggle against the S.A.P. by voting either for Nationalist or for Labour candidates 'in order to eliminate or reduce the domination of the mine magnates and their money power'. In 1923 the Nationalist-Labour pact became a reality. An exchange of correspondence between the Labour leader Colonel Creswell and General Hertzog pledged the Nationalists not to upset the existing constitutional relations between South Africa and the British Commonwealth (a tricky point for the Labour Party, based as it was almost exclusively on the English-speaking section of the working class), while retaining the right to propagandize for independence outside Parliament.
At the Cape Congress of the Nationalist Party in 1923, Dr Malan said that the Nationalist and Labour Parties were both 'squarely opposed to capitalistic and monopolistic domination and exploitation of the people. In the existing circumstances ... co-operation between the Nationalist Party and the Labour Party is not only completely justified but is also a clear and urgent patriotic duty. After losing the Wakkerstroom and Oudtshoorn by-elections, Smuts decided to hold a general election in 1924. The voters performed their clear and urgent patriotic duty, and the S.A.P. suffered a resounding defeat, with Smuts losing his own constituency of Pretoria West to a Labour candidate. The Nationalist Party won sixty-three seats and the Labour Party eighteen, to fifty-three for the S.A.P. and one Independent. General Hertzog became Prime Minister and appointed two Labour members to his first Cabinet, Creswell and Boydell, increasing the number to three in 1925 when Creswell handed the Labour portfolio to Boydell and Madeley took over from the latter as Minister of Posts and Telegraphs.
In retrospect, the participation of the Labour Party in the coalition marked the beginning of the downfall of the Labour Party and the ascendancy of the Nationalists over the White (mainly Afrikaner) workers.
The advent of the Nationalist Party to power did a great deal to satisfy the Afrikaans ego. Hertzog's first act was symbolic, the release from prison of Manie Maritz and the remaining survivors of the 1914 rebellion. Afrikaans, the despised 'kitchen Dutch', was raised to official status beside English and Dutch, and the principle of bilingualism was pushed in the public service. The concept of Union citizenship was introduced, and the South African flag raised to equal status with the Union Jack. Above all, the constitution was amended to place on record the sovereignty and guidance of Providence over the Union - something which had been unaccountably overlooked by the fathers of the Union in 1910.
Hertzog also took the opportunity to demand at the Imperial Prime Ministers' Conference of 1926 greater independence for the Dominions within the framework of the Empire. The result was the famous Balfour Declaration that the dominions 'are autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate to one another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations'. This declaration was incorporated in the 1931 Statute of Westminster, and was made a law of the Union by means of the 1934 Status of the Union Act.
Hertzog considered this achievement tantamount to the reconquest of the power which had been lost by the republics at the close of the Boer War. On his return to the Union he urged the abandonment of Clause 4 in the Nationalist Party constitution which aimed at independence, and in 1927 this was duly amended to note acceptance of the declaration of the Imperial Conference of 1926.
Dr Malan was even more enthusiastic. He declared in 1927: 'We no longer regard England today as a conqueror but as the mother of our freedom. With our whole heart we recognize the magnanimity of England, and the result will be a friendship between us and England such as never existed before. There is no longer a British Empire, only an alliance of free nations in which we want to remain owing to friendship and self-interest. In the light of the words which were to be bandied about in the Union a bare ten years later by these self-same Nationalist politicians, such utterances bear a peculiar significance indeed.
The most concrete achievement of the Nationalist-Labour government, however, was in the sphere of legislation to entrench and extend the colour bar. In the words of C.W. de Kiewet in his History of South Africa, the Nationalist and Labour Parties were, in a manner of speaking, a White people's front against the natives. Only the passage of years revealed how thoroughly the change of government in 1924 had committed South Africa to policies conceived more resolutely than ever before in the interests of White society. It would be premature to speak henceforth of South Africa as a planned society. Yet there were manifest in government and legislation an increased unwillingness to leave the movement of society to chance, or to the unpredictable workings of economic or social laws. Better guarantees were sought for the development of a stable up-to-date White society. Means were more energetically sought to secure the political security of the White race as a whole and the economic security of its feeblest members.
The pact government, in other words, took the first tentative steps towards the creation of an authoritarian state based on that rigid race stratification which was to become such a feature of Nationalist rule after 1948. It was in 1924 that South Africa began to experience ever-increasing government intervention to ensure White supremacy and put an end to the laissez-faire policies of the S.A.P. and the mining magnates.
The mine-owners of 1922 had wanted to break down the colour bar within their labour force so as to increase the possibility of exploiting cheap Black labour and lessen their dependence on expensive articulate White workers. The Nationalist-Labour pact government responded by passing one law after another in the political, social, and economic spheres to halt African advancement and buttress the position of the Whites.
A Department of Labour was created whose main function was to cater for the labour needs of the Whites and protect them from any competition by the Blacks. A civilized labour policy was adopted whereby non-White unskilled workers on the railways and in other fields of State employment were replaced by poor Whites at 'civilized' rates of pay. The Mines and Works Act of 1926 restored the statutory colour bar on the mines, whereby certain categories of skilled and semi-skilled work were reserved for Whites alone. (The effect of previous legislation had been nullified by decisions of the Supreme Court.) In 1927 a law was passed prohibiting 'immorality' between Europeans and Africans.
In the sphere of the franchise an attack was launched against the non-Whites on two fronts. The relative strength of the non-White vote, limited already for all practical purposes to the Cape by the compromise agreement in the Act of Union, was further eroded by the enfranchisement of European women in 1930. Non-White women remained voteless, so that the strength of the European electorate was practically doubled. In 1931 the Whites of the Cape and Natal were granted adult suffrage, but for the non-Whites educational and property qualifications were retained. Thus the European electorate was expanded to its maximum, while the non-white electorate was pegged.
The second front of attack was represented by Hertzog's four Bills, introduced in 1926 but not finally passed until ten years later, and then in greatly modified form.
They set out:
(1) To abolish the common roll vote in the Cape which the Africans had enjoyed since representative government had been introduced there in 1853, and to substitute seven M.P.s and four Senators (Whites) elected on a communal roll. (2) To establish an African Representative Council. (3) To peg African land ownership. (4) To confirm the Coloured vote in the Cape and extend the same rights to Coloured men in the other provinces.
Bill No. 4 may cause some surprise, but it should be borne in mind that at this stage the Nationalists had to cater for a sizeable Coloured vote in the Cape, and in any event still hoped to use the Coloured people as allies in the fight against the Africans.
Whilst Hertzog preached segregation for the Africans, he showed himself differently disposed towards the Coloured, who 'had his origin and existence in our midst. He knows no other civilization than that of the White man. However often he may fall short of it, his outlook is essentially that of the Whites and not that of the natives, and his mother tongue is that of the White man. In his case there can be no talk of segregation' (quoted in van den Heever).
Dr Malan was quite as forthright. Addressing the Malay Congress in 1925, as Minister of the Interior, he said: 'The Nationalist Party is seeing to it that there shall be no colour bar for Coloured people and for the Malays. The government will always try to give the Malays a higher status than they possess, and that is - equal rights with the White man.'
When the Women's Enfranchisement Bill was before the Assembly, he pleaded for the inclusion of Coloured women in the voters' rolls, and in the joint session of Parliament he pressed for the extension of the franchise to the Coloured people in the northern provinces.
Yet Bill No. 4 was eventually dropped altogether. When the other Bills were finally passed in 1936, the number of M.P.s to be elected on a communal roll had been reduced to three (from the seven originally proposed) and the amount of land for African occupation pegged permanently at thirteen percent of the total (for seventy percent of the population; and even that thirteen percent has not yet been fully bought by the Native Trust).
Hertzog's colour bar Bills caused widespread and vigorous agitation when they were first introduced, not least among the African people themselves. The meteoric rise of the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union, which at one stage claimed 100,000 members, and the agitation of the Communist Party and other organizations led the government to take further steps on that road of repression to which the world has grown so accustomed in Nationalist legislation since 1948. The Native Administration Act of 1927, re-enacting provisions of the old type colonial legislation which stemmed from Natal (for example the Code of Native Law), and the 1930 amendment to the Riotous Assemblies Act of 1914, directing against 'agitators' for African rights the provisions of a law which had first been aimed at the White workers, both conferred enormous administrative powers on the government to interfere with the freedom of the individual and severely limit freedom of speech and assembly. Right from the outset the exercise of Nationalist power was marked by that combination of legislative and administrative restriction which so disfigures South African government policies today.
It is to the lasting disgrace of the Labour Party that, while preaching the brotherhood of man, it restricted that brotherhood to men with white skins only. Yet, as it turned out, it was on the reefs of colour that the Nationalist-Labour alliance eventually foundered. Cabinet Minister Madeley was expelled from the Cabinet for having received a deputation from the I.C.U. against the express instructions of General Hertzog himself. Creswell stood with Hertzog on this issue, but the majority of the Labour Party National Council backed Madeley, who also had the support of six M.P.s. The dispute cost the party dear. In the 1929 elections Labour lost ten seats, with the Creswellites gaining five and the Madeleyites three, to seventy-eight for the Nationalist Party, sixty-one for the S.A.P., and one Independent. For the first time the Nationalist Party could have ruled alone, since it enjoyed a majority over all the other parties combined. But Hertzog chose to maintain his alliance with the Labour right wing, and Creswell and Sampson were given seats in the Cabinet.
The Nationalist Party's ' Black menace ' propaganda was proving popular with the electorate. But the mining magnates were shortly to make a come-back. In September 193 I Britain went off the gold standard. South Africa, whose economy was tied to that of Britain, would normally have followed suit, but General Hertzog chose to regard such action as derogating from the newly-won independence of the South African State, and the country stayed on gold. Farmers could not find an outlet for their products, and the numbers of the unemployed swelled spectacularly. Widespread political agitation arose to compel the government to abandon the gold standard. Tielman Roos, former Chairman of the Transvaal Nationalist Party, who had been desiccating quietly on the Appeal Court bench, announced on 22 December 1932 his return to politics and at the head of a new group joined the agitation against the gold standard. He called for a national government, and the combination of economic and political pressures assumed alarming proportions. ú3 million left the country within three days. Panic reigned. Five days later on 27 December it was announced that the country had abandoned the gold standard.
The way was now prepared for a political realignment. Roos, a master of intrigue, had made considerable inroads into the ranks of the Nationalist Party, so that Hertzog was later frankly to admit that the party had become 'rotten'. In the eyes of the electorate the time had come for a change, and Hertzog was convinced that he would lose the next election. To stave off the threat from Roos, he entered into negotiations with Smuts. On 23 February 1933, the two leaders announced that they had reached agreement on a coalition, and by the month's end a new coalition Cabinet had been set up with Hertzog as Premier and Smuts as Deputy. In the face of Smuts's adamant refusal to countenance it, the alliance with Labour was quietly dropped.
The 1933 elections gave seventy-five seats to the Nationalist Party, sixty-one to the S.A.P., four to Labour, two to the Roos Party, two to the Home Rule group, and six seats to Independents. An uneasy peace supervened.
For a time the parties retained their separate identities in the coalition. But the internal logic of coalition, which was to create a strong united front among the Whites to deal with the economic problems of the depression and to settle once and for all the question of the 'Native Bills' (pending since 1926 because the government did not have the two-thirds majority required by the constitution), eventually drove them towards fusion. On 5 December 1934, the followers of Smuts and Hertzog met in Bloemfontein and formed the United South African National Party, better known simply as the United Party. For the Nationalist die-hards and their counterparts among the English speaking section, this was to be the parting of the ways.
Coalition was one thing, fusion another. Coalition was a tactical necessity forced upon the Nationalist Party by the crisis through which the country was passing. But fusion was the destruction of the Nationalist Party itself, the end of the dream which the Afrikaner people had cherished ever since the Boer War - the restoration of independence and the supremacy of the volk. Fusion was in fact a complete negation of the 'two-stream' policy with which Hertzog had started his political career after Union, the very issue on which he had broken with Botha. Yet now Hertzog himself, the man who stood for the aspirations of Afrikanerdom in the eyes of his people, was entering into political union with Smuts and the English-speaking section in a bid to create one White nation.
In a speech at Paarl in 1934 condemning fusion, Dr Malan declared: 'Instead of bringing together those who belong together, we see everywhere that Afrikanerdom is dissolving and dissolution means death.' The hard core of the Nationalist Party, headed by Malan, refused to follow Hertzog into fusion and nineteen Members of Parliament remained on the opposition benches, after almost half the Cape Nationalists and three quarters of the Free State Nationalists had followed Hertzog into the United Party. In the Transvaal J. G. Strijdom was the only Nationalist M.P. left in opposition. In the Free State there were four, led by C. R. Swart (later the State President). These were the leanest days of 'purified' Nationalism since the Party itself had been formed in 1914.
On the other side of the political spectrum, the jingo element within the English-speaking section found fusion equally unacceptable and in 1934 formed the Dominion Party, which stood for the maintenance of the closest bonds of Empire and the Thin Red Line.
Fusion, however, won the overwhelming endorsement of the electorate at the next election in 1938, and the United Party won 111 seats, to twenty-seven for the Nationalist Party, eight for the Dominion Party, three for Labour, and one Socialist.
The enormous majority of the United Party, however, was to prove illusory. Fusion brought no unity, either ideological or racial. When war eventually came, the party split into its component parts.
Hertzog's decision to join forces with Smuts was undoubtedly a betrayal of Nationalist policy and the surrender of principle to expediency by an opportunist. The ostensible reasons he gave for his action were fallacious: what weighed most with him was the desire to retain power. There was a similar element of opportunism in Malan's decision to break with Hertzog. In the 1933 election the Malanites had been content to stand as coalition candidates. Did Malan break away because Hertzog dropped him from his Cabinet? Or did he refuse office? Hertzog taunted Malan with the prospect of an endless wandering in the wilderness, a permanently ineffectual opposition. But Malan turned back to the Afrikaner people for support. He felt that he was building on a surer foundation than Hertzog. Blood was thicker than water, and in time the appeal of naked racialism would show results. The Afrikaner people constituted the majority of the electorate, and if their national sentiment could be aroused, they would prove to be politically indestructible. Time was to prove him right, despite many disappointments. The tenacity with which the 'purified' Nationalists fought for their point of view from this moment of their lowest ebb until they were swept to power in 1948 constitutes one of the most remarkable features of recent South African political history.