The Making of the Apartheid Plan, 1929-1948* - CC

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Making of the Apartheid Plan, 1929–1948 389 Downloaded by [Shanghai Jiaotong University] at 18:42 19 September 2012 facilitated the transition of a subject people to a higher state of improvement. In 1921, Lord Lugard, the most famous of British African governors, expressed the trusteeship idea in his Dual Mandate as follows: Europe was in Africa for ‘the mutual benefit of her own classes, and of the native races in their progress to a higher plane’. He believed the benefits could be made reciprocal. This was the ‘dual mandate’, the title of Lugard’s book. 72 In his 1944 speech, Malan pointed at the failure of ostensibly liberal systems to deal fairly with subordinate people. Eighty years after the victory of the North in the American civil war, blacks in the South could still not vote and were subject to the ‘lynch law’. In Australia, the government took aboriginal children away from their parents and brought them up as Europeans in special hostels. When the aborigines retrogressed, the Australian government reverted to a policy of allowing them to elevate themselves ‘on the basis of what is their own’. Malan’s solution was couched in classic terms of paternalism and trusteeship. Subordinate people had to be helped to develop that which was their own, and to climb the ladder of civilisation according to their own aptitude and capacity. At present they were unhappy because they had nothing that was their own. They could only be made happy if opportunities were created that enabled them to rehabilitate themselves. That meant establishing segregated townships with their own doctors, nurses, clerks and policemen. White, coloured and African communities could live alongside each other in ‘friendship and co-operation with each other.’ 73 In the same debate, Paul Sauer poured scorn on the idea that the western Cape had become more integrated. Forty years earlier, he said, it was still possible for coloureds to complete their education in a white school. ‘Today such a thing is inconceivable. I cannot imagine that there is a single high school that would permit this today.’ He called for a ‘realistic policy’ that would prevent Africans or coloured people from encroaching on areas where whites lived, worked or cast their vote. Only once racial competition had been ruled out would whites be willing to assume a sympathetic position towards coloured aspirations. 74 In 1945, a party commission appointed by Malan recommended a policy of social, industrial and political apartheid with respect to coloured people, but argued at the same time that this would have to bring about an improvement in their conditions. 75 In the same year, the NP accepted apartheid as its official racial policy. From 1946, Die Burger acted as the ‘mass ventilator’ of apartheid. 76 In 1947, Malan appointed Sauer to head a party commission to turn apartheid into a comprehensive racial policy. Also on the commission were three NP parliamentarians (one from each northern province) and the ubiquitous G. B. A. Gerdener as the only non-politician. His presence symbolised apartheid’s fusion of racial and mission policy. The way in which the Sauer Commission went about its task illuminates the NP’s grass-roots character. It did not invite representations from corporate bodies, such as the agricultural unions or Afrikaner business. It thought that the need to secure Afrikaner survival outweighed accommodating Afrikaner interest groups. Secondly, the Afrikaners of the 1940s and 1950s attached great importance to culture and learning. 77 They did not look to businessmen or wealthy farmers to justify apartheid but to ministers, academics, professional men and senior journalists. The academics had to incorporate insights from 72 The quotes are from K. Robinson, The Dilemmas of Trusteeship (London, Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 22, 65. 73 HAD, 1944, cols. 6697–6699. 74 HAD, 1944, col. 6713. 75 E. J. G. Janson, ‘Die Burger en die Kleurlingstem, 1943–1948’ (MA dissertation, Unisa, 1987), pp. 77–78. 76 N. Rhoodie, Apartheid and Racial Partnership in Southern Africa (Pretoria, Academica, 1968), p. 53. 77 Patterson, The Last Trek, p.253.
390 Journal of Southern African Studies Downloaded by [Shanghai Jiaotong University] at 18:42 19 September 2012 their respective fields, and representatives of the party had to report back what the people wanted. Accordingly, the commission sent out a circular, inviting opinions, to all elected representatives of the party, all chairmen and secretaries of the party’s district councils, all ‘well-disposed’ Afrikaner lecturers at universities and other ‘knowledgeable experts and interested persons’. The latter were mostly farmers, church ministers and missionaries. Some 5,000 circulars were sent out, and about 500 replies were received. Some of the academics who responded were appointed to subcommittees. The commission’s report, published late in 1947, was incorporated into the NP platform for the 1948 election. 78 The report combined the dual nature of NP thinking: both racist and ‘ethnicist’, both religious and secular. It formulated an antinomy that formed the bedrock of apartheid thinking: ‘There are two policy directions towards non-whites: on the one hand there is the apartheid policy; on the other hand there is the policy of gelykstelling [social levelling], propagated by Communists and others who favour race-mixing.’ To justify the rejection of ‘equal rights and opportunities’, the report used terminology very similar to that first employed in the DRC during the 1930s: ‘It was decreed by God that diverse races and volke should survive and grow naturally as part of a Divine plan.’ The report even incorporated a section on mission policy, which clearly was drafted by Gerdener: ‘The Gospel has to be taught to all volke and population groups as part of the calling of the Christian church’. The aim of mission work was ‘self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating churches’. The Sauer report has been extensively discussed and need not detain us here. The whole thrust of the report is the elimination of ‘surplus’ black labour, not black labour, and the channelling of sufficient labour to the mines, farms and industry. 79 The report clearly hoped that temporary or migrant labour would provide the bulk of the new labour demand. However, this clashed with the demand of organised Afrikaner business and agriculture for workers who had settled with their families. The report did not try to resolve this clash. In this sense, then, the report did not constitute a blueprint for apartheid to which all Afrikaner nationalists subscribed, but rather reflected the contradictory tendencies in the Nationalist movement. 80 The idea of ten black ethnic groups each with its own homeland was a later elaboration. In 1950 Albert Geyer, ex-editor of Die Burger and now High Commissioner in London, mooted the idea of the black authorities forming a Central Council to discuss matters common to all reserves and the introduction of machinery for ‘close contact and consultation’ between such a council and the government. Hendrik Verwoerd, Minister for Native Affairs, rejected the idea because he felt that competition would develop between such a council and Parliament. 81 English-speaking South Africans shared the NP’s determination to maintain white domination. On the eve of the election, Arthur Keppel-Jones, whose 1947 book, When Smuts Goes, painted a dark picture of South Africa should the NP ever come to power, argued that the main concern of whites in general was ‘not to be submerged in the oncoming tide of black race. If they were to remain a separate people then they must retain their dominant position.’ 82 The kind of segregation that most English-speakers supported 78 J. P. Brits, ‘ “The Voice of the People”: Memoranda presented in 1947 to the Sauer Commission’, Kronos, 22 (2000), pp. 61–83; J. P. Brits, Op die Vooraand van Apartheid (Pretoria, Unisa, 1994), pp. 80–108. 79 Sauer Report (1947). 80 Posel, The Making of Apartheid, p. 60. 81 J. P. Heiberg, ‘Dr. A. L. Geyer as Suid-Afrika se Hoë Kommissaris in die Verenigde Koninkryk’ (PhD dissertation, University of Stellenbosch, 2001), pp. 211–213. 82 A. M. Keppel-Jones, ‘The Political Situation in South Africa’ (paper presented to the Royal Institute for International Affairs, 27 March 1947).
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