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8 Loyalists and Rebels

In document Workers and the Vote 98 (Page 164-185)

The Labour party claimed to have close on i6,ooo paid-up

members in

1912,

and the trade unions about

12,000

members

in 1914.1 Support for both came from the few scattered indus trial areas in the port towns and at Kimberley, Bloemfontein and Pretoria, but the movement's stronghold was on the Wit watersrand. The Rand retained for many decades the feverish

and unstable atmosphere of a mining camp; partly, some observ ers thought, through the unsettling effects of a high altitude in a sub-tropical region. The main contributory factors, however, were social. Recurring booms and slumps on the 'kaffir' share market injected a strong speculative element; while the big rewards and risks of deep-level mining encouraged a reckless and aggressive spirit in the mining community. Glaring contrasts between wealthy English-speaking suburbs and the squalid slums inhabited by Africans, Afrikaners, Indians and Coloured empha sized class, national and racial cleavages. Perhaps the most

important cause of underlying tension was the presence and ceaseless rotation of the 200,ooo African peasant workers. Iso lated in the compounds, never allowed to become full members of the community, and yet indispensable to its prosperity, they were a constant reminder of the society's intrinsic immorality and a challenge to the democratic or socialist pretensions of the white elite.

Labour leaders often forgot that the Rand was unique. They identified the small body of artisans whom they represented with the interests of all workers. Labour's principles, said Creswell in January 1913, came from the working man's 'hard necessities' and 'were calculated to promote the best human interests of all classes'. Journals sympathetic to Labour echoed these senti ments. The movement, declared the South African Review, took

166

as its platform 'those interests which are common to all'. Class consciousness meant only that workers recognized their special interests and the possibility of obtaining reforms through the political channel. The class war, on the other hand, 'was created, as it is sustained, by Toryism; it is the Labour movement which

the class war seeks to destroy'.2 The government, urged the South African Quarterly,

should distinguish between its political and economic functions, remaining neutral in the struggle for economic sovereignty. The feeling that the state was partial to the capitalists had prompted French syndicalists to urge its overthrow by means of the general strike. South Africa should meet this danger

by

enforcing the principle of collective bargain ing through recognized trade unions.

3

A general strike, even if confined to the Rand, threatened to disrupt the country's economic nerve centre. Smuts was deter mined to forestall a repetition of the July upheaval. In December

1913

the government published the texts of five bills dealing with industrial disputes.

4

Before parliament could consider them, a new round of strikes broke out. Prompted

by

the effects of an economic recession, retrenchment and alleged victimization, white coal miners in Natal struck work in December for i8s. a day and the reinstatement of men declared redundant. African coal miners followed with a demand for 4s. a day. The railway men were the next to threaten a strike against retrenchments.

The union executive called on railway and harbour workers throughout the country to stop work on 8 January if the adminis tration refused to stop retrenchment and re-employ men who had been discharged. H.

J.

Poutsma, the union's general secre tary, urged the Federation of Trades to call a general strike in support; and appealed to the railwaymen at Pretoria 'not to resort to violence, not to do anything that civilized people as they were should not do, but just cease work'.

5

The Federation stood solidly behind the railwaymen, said

J. T. Bain. The government, he added, had called out the troops

and 'were preparing to use the same damnable force against the

workers'. They, in turn, 'were prepared to use all the force they

had in their power

'.6

Smuts also was prepared, to the limit of

his powers under the Defence Act. He mobilized the active

167

Class and Colour in South Africa r85o-195o

citizen force, ordered armed guards to be stationed at railway premises, and instructed them to shoot after warning if any unauthorized entry was attempted.

7

Ten thousand troops were brought to the Rand

by io

January, and trade union leaders in different towns were arrested, among them Waterston, Glendon,

Colin Wade, Poutsma and other officials of the railway union.

8

South Africans make a practice of dramatizing their patterns of racial discrimination. While strike leaders were receiving 'courteous treatment' in the Pretoria jail, Sotho miners at Jagersfontein diamond mine suffered serious casualties in yet another of the so-called riots that resulted from the brutal suppression of African strikes. The men struck work on the

9

th because a white overseer had kicked one of their comrades to death. When the manager refused to have him arrested, the strikers attempted to break out and join forces with men in other compounds. White employees were called together, cornered the strikers, fired on them, killing eleven and wounding thirty-seven. Most of the Africans then went back to work, but

25o

or so who refused were marched to jail under armed escort.

A judicial inquiry was held; the white witnesses disagreed over the necessity for the shooting; and none of those responsible for the massacre was prosecuted.

9

Back on the Rand, an overwhelming majority of the Federa tion's affiliated unions voted in favour of a general strike, which was timed for the

13

th. Smuts put his emergency plans into operation, proclaimed martial law on the 14th, and called out

7o,ooo armed men,

'a

larger military force', he announced in

parliament, 'than was mobilized

by

the late Republics at the beginning of the late war'.

10

Generals Beyers and de la Rey who were to lead an armed rebellion against the state in October

-

rode with the commandos into the Rand. A cordon of troops, training a field gun, besieged the Johannesburg trades hall. The police arrested the Federation's entire executive, including Bain, Crawford, Andrew Watson,

J.

P. Anderson and Charles Mus sared. They went to jail singing the'Red Flag'. The police swooped

in all the big industrial centres and arrested hundreds of strikers, trade union and Labour party leaders, among them Creswell, Boydell and Andrews.

168

Deprived of their leaders, bewildered by press reports of capitulation, and intimidated by threats of dismissal, the workers lost heart. The Federation's acting executive, headed by George Kendall, tried hard to rally them by issuing a series of 'mani festos' which claimed widespread support and explained the purpose of the strike. 'This is a fight for civil liberty, a fight for better conditions.' Prepare 'to suffer and endure for the biggest fight in history.' This was a war 'not against the Community, but for it. You are battling for genuine free labour - for a land of the free, a land that men can love as their own.' The last manifesto, issued on 22 January, called on 'all workers to down tools' in the struggle for liberty, wages, and trade unionism.

On the same day, however, Kendall announced that the execu tive had 'declared the strike off - for the present'."

Andrews, as chairman of the Labour party, issued a manifesto urging 'every patriotic South African' to condemn and show his abhorrence of 'the violent and provocative methods adopted by the government'.' 2 His appeal met with little response. Apart from Durban's railwaymen, few workers outside the Rand and Pretoria followed the Federation's lead. Though a majority of the unions affiliated to the Cape Federation voted in favour, the executive decided against the general strike.13 Six hundred Col oured stevedores at Cape Town's docks struck work on the i4th for an increase in pay from 4s. 6d. to 6s. a day and for an eight hour day; but the administration broke the strike by introducing Africans from the eastern Cape to work on the ships. Some ioo African miners broke out of the Van Ryn Estate mine compound

on the I7th. They were rounded up by a large force of burghers, arrested and fined £I each. One was shot in the leg while attempt ing to get away. Otherwise, reported the press, 'the attitude of the natives has in all cases been most exemplary'. 4

Smuts sealed his victory with a high-handed show of power.

He decided to eliminate the 'dangerous men' and deter others of a like disposition while the country was in turmoil and before the labour movement could organize a public protest. Orders were given for the deportation of nine leaders: Bain, Crawford, Livingstone, Mason, McKerrill, Morgan, Poutsma, Waterston and Watson. They were rushed with great secrecy to Durban,

C.S.A. -8 169

Class and Colour in South Africa z85o-1950

placed on board the steamship

Umgeni, and sent off to England

on 30 January, the opening day of the new parliamentary session.

Smuts immediately introduced the Indemnity and Undesirables Special Deportation Bill to legalize the deportations and other unlawful acts committed under martial law. He based his defence on the urgencies of public safety, law and order; but could not deny Hertzog's accusation that since his victims had broken no law, and would not have been convicted in any court, he had ordered their abduction because he had no lawful reason to imprison them.

The six Labour members rose to great heights of parliamentary strategy in a filibuster against the bill. 'This was not a conspiracy on the part of the workers,' declared Creswell; 'it was a con spiracy between the Government and their friends, the capitalis tic school of Johannesburg, to run the country in their own interests.' They had conspired to grind down the working man for the benefit of the mining magnates. Andrews said that the strike was orderly passive resistance; and accused the govern ment of deploying the state's full resources to break trade unionism. The government had made a great blunder, he added;

and would yet discover that it had failed to crush the spirit of the people.1 5 In England George Lansbury called for a general strike to secure the return of the deportees. Stop work, he urged, 'until both the home and the South African governments are brought to their senses. The right of combination, the right to agitate, and the right to preach revolutionary ideas must be maintained.' 16 The deported men were advised to sue the ship owners for unlawful imprisonment on the high seas, but the action was discontinued after war had broken out.17 Smuts retreated under pressure and allowed the deportees to return to

South Africa at the government's expense.

The arrests, imprisonment and deportations humiliated and angered the labour leaders. They were in no mood to respond sympathetically to the government's proposed measures for industrial peace. One of these, the Industrial Disputes Preven tion Bill, empowered employers and employees to form concilia tion boards or appoint arbitrators. Strikes and lockouts would be illegal unless preceded by an unsuccessful attempt to arrive

170

Loyalists and Rebels

at an agreement. The bill, which reached the statute book in an amended form only in

1924,

contained a major colour bar. It excluded from the definition of employees and therefore from the conciliation machinery all pass-bearing Africans, including those subject to the terms of the Native Labour Regulation Act of

1911,

and all indentured Indians. The parliamentary Labour party denounced, not the colour bar, but the partial ban on strikes. Andrews said that the bill was intended to cripple the trade unions. Creswell thought that it should be left alone until it could be considered

by

a new parliament 'in which the indus trial population would be more congenially represented'. Haggar maintained that the class war had been forced on the workers and would be waged until one class was wiped out.'

8

The government shelved the Industrial Disputes Prevention Bill and its companion, the Trade Union Bill; but Labour could not stay the passage of the far more repressive Riotous Assem blies and Criminal Law Amendment Bill. This penalized attempts to force workers to join or not to join trade unions; banned strikes in public utility services; gave magistrates, acting under ministerial authority, wide powers to prohibit meetings expected to endanger the public peace; and allowed the police in certain circumstances to arrest speakers and listeners or, in the last resort, to fire. This was the strongest attack yet made by a South African legislature on civil liberties and working-class rights;

and marked a new stage in the transition from a colonial economy to an industrialized society. Techniques of colonial repression, as exemplified

by

the Natal Code of Native Law, were from then on supplemented

by

more modern and pervasive restrictions on the labour and national liberation movements.

White voters demonstrated at the polls against Smuts's brutal attacks on trade unionism and the working class. Tom Maginess won a parliamentary by-election for Labour in Liesbeek, Cape Town; Morris Kentridge won another in Durban Central, giving Labour eight members in the assembly. Walter Snow, a victimized railwayman, was returned from Liesbeek to the pro vincial council. Labour won two provincial council seats in

Durban and one in Bloemfontein during 1914, and scored its

greatest victory in the Transvaal

by

contesting twenty-five and

17r

Class and Colour in South Africa z85o-z95o

winning twenty-three seats in the provincial council. The Labour councillors had a clear majority of one in the chamber, but could not obtain control of the executive, and so were unable to implement their policy. Their two notable achievements were a new municipal rating ordinance, which the central government disallowed, and a revision of the municipal franchise, which was extended to white women and modified so as to incorporate the principle of proportional representation. Under the leader ship of F.

A.

W. Lucas, a barrister and firm adherent of Henry

George's land tax theory, the Labour group tried hard to substi tute economic issues for Anglo-Afrikaner rivalries in provincial politics, and never wavered in their adherence to the party's white supremacy policy.

S.

P. Bunting, who won the Bezuidenhout seat, set out the case for the policy in an election manifesto

of 3,000

words.

Written in his involved style, and studded with capitalized phrases, it contained both an analysis of South African society and a passionate protest against class oppression. It has additional significance as marking a stage

in

the development of a great South African radical. Born of middle-class parents in London in

1873

and a graduate of Oxford, Bunting came as a lieutenant in the British army to South Africa in ioo, took a law degree after the war, and settled down to practise as an attorney in

Johannesburg.'9 Wybergh and Creswell were his intimate friends, and he came to share their belief in the white labour policy. He helped to found and took on the secretaryship of the White Expansion Society in 19o9, with Patrick Duncan as its

president and Lucas as one of the committee members. He then

joined the Labour party in i9io, became the secretary of the Witwatersrand district committee, and was elected to the

national executive in

1912.

His manifesto, therefore, repre

sented the views of a senior if exceptional member of the party.

He managed the Worker, his party's paper, in 1912, and sat on its editorial board; yet his manifesto, printed in heavy type with many capitalized phrases, came far closer in spirit to the radicalism of the rival journal Voice of Labour. Like Crawford, he believed that South Africa's industrial upheavals formed part of

a world-wide struggle between international finance and the

172

Loyalists and Rebels working classes. They were striking, not for higher wages, but

FOR BETTER STATUS, the RIGHT TO LIVE, a PLACE IN THE SUN. They refused to be mere servants, and this was natural in South Africa 'where every white man has tasted more or less the sweets of masterhood himself'. But the ruling class in this,

THE MOST CAPITALIST-RIDDEN COUNTRY IN THE WORLD,

was determined to suppress trade unions, dispense with white workers, and run the economy with white overseers, and '"cheap", unenfranchised, unorganized Kaffirs'. This 'means

eventually a Kaffir's land.

THE ABOMINATION OF DESOLA TION'. White South Africa was in danger, and only the Labour party resisted the REAL ANARCHIC CONSPIRACY AGAINST SOCIETY.

Labour would do away with the differences between master and servant, secure equal opportunities for all, and reconstruct society on a cooperative basis - 'the only possible means to

TRUE AND UNIVERSAL LIBERTY AND WELLBEING'. It would be a white man's heaven. Africans were enemies within the gate:

the 'allies, or rather tools, of Capitalism against the white workers'. There followed an odd qualification: 'But this is merely a temporary obstacle, for the native workers are bound to organize soon.' An obstacle to what? And would they organize with or against the white workers? If Bunting had misgivings about the African's role, he suppressed them in deference to the party's official policy. Ignoring the effects of industrialization and the pressures that forced peasants to enter the labour mar ket, he maintained that they were landowners, who did not need to work if left to themselves. They were better off than the whites, and earned wages as a luxury. The party's policy was to separate them territorially, repatriate Asiatics, and gradually eliminate the Coloured by preventing miscegenation.

Racial tolerance could not be expected of Labour councillors when a man of Bunting's calibre identified himself thus whole heartedly with white supremacy. Reviewing their 'one-sided ness', the A.P.O. listed some of their colour bar proposals. They refused to grant supplies unless the executive undertook to build roads departmentally and with white labourers only at adequate wages; voted money for public buildings at Warmbad

'73

Class and Colour in South Africa T85o-z95o

with a proviso that Africans employed there be dismissed; and denied the municipal franchise to the darker peoples while conferring it on 'every pimp, prostitute and illicit liquor seller in gaol'.

10

The Labour majority introduced free secondary educa tion to white children in the province, and opposed schools for

Coloured and Africans.

21

Ware, sitting on the Witwatersrand School Board, moved the adoption of a resolution that 'the teaching of trades, or the use of tools, to Coloured people and Natives will be sternly discountenanced'. Labour members of the Johannesburg town council were notoriously rigid in denying Coloured, Indians and Africans the use of the municipal trams.

A

solid phalanx of parliamentary parties

-

South African, Unionist, Nationalist and Labour

-

confronted black and brown South Africans on almost every issue involving racial discrimina tion. Individual Unionists occasionally protested.

A

few Cape liberals, notably Morris Alexander, Merriman and the Schrein ers, consistently skirmished for Coloured rights. Labour stood always on the side of the extreme racialists, as in the debates on the colour bar regulations issued

by

Smuts under the Mines and Works Act

of 191 .2 2

These reserved thirty-two categories of work for whites and prohibited the issue of certificates of com

petence in the Transvaal and Orange Free State to any person of colour.

A

certificate obtained

by

one of them in Natal or the Cape had no validity outside that province. Merriman took up the cudgels at the request of the

AP

o and moved the deletion of

the colour bar in 1914. A petition before the House, signed by 1,624

Coloured residents of the Transvaal, complained that they were prevented from earning their living

by

following their trades as engine drivers, carpenters, blasters, gangers, banksmen and onsetters; and prayed that the word 'white' should be replaced

by

the word 'competent' in the regulations.

23

Smuts admitted in the Senate that the discrimination against the Coloured man was indefensible and would have to go, though not in the immediate present. The strongest opposition to Mer riman's proposal came from the Reef's representatives, both

Unionist and Labour. Creswell repeated his familiar argument

in moving an amendment to the motion. It was really directed

against trade unionism, he said, and aimed at setting the col

174

In document Workers and the Vote 98 (Page 164-185)