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6 National Liberation

In document Workers and the Vote 98 (Page 114-137)

The teachers, ministers, editors, lawyers and doctors who founded the liberation movements were constitutionalists. They defended existing rights and resisted new discriminations in a constant struggle against aggressive white supremacists. African, Coloured and Indian leaders of the early period took their inspiration from liberal and humanitarian concepts. Their vision of the ideal society embraced equality before the law; the vote;

freedom of trade, labour, movement and residence; and equal opportunities of education and employment. Their natural allies in the white community before the rise of radical socialism were liberals of wealth and standing who counselled patience, acceptance of white supremacy, and respect for law and order;

and who left a deep imprint on the liberation movement, most of all in the Cape. There, the non-racial franchise gave Africans and Coloured the means of enlisting the support of progressive politicians. Jabavu was one of the first to recognize the value of an organized, disciplined African electorate. His entanglement in white party politics began with the publication of Imvo in 1884.

Twenty years later Abdurahman embarked on a similar course when he took his seat on Cape Town's municipal council.

Gandhi rose to world-wide eminence after he had left South Africa in 1914. Jabavu and Abdurahman might also have made their way into the top rank of rulers if they had lived in a less repressive society. Racial discrimination restricted them to a minor political role, but they were great men among their people. Though unwilling, and perhaps unable, to alienate them

selves from the poor and oppressed, they did not escape from the compromises that are forced on leaders without power who seek to reform but never to overthrow an evil social order. Both men witnessed the decline of Cape liberalism and the spread of racial In6

discrimination. Abdurahman saw the process more clearly and gained a deeper insight into the structure of white power. Yet, like Jabavu, he maintained his trust in white patronage long after the futility of such an attitude had been revealed. Neither took to heart Gandhi's message that a voteless and rejected people would not obtain relief from a parliament of their oppressors, but must depend on their own strength and develop their own methods of struggle.

Dr Abdul Abdurahman

(1872-1940),

acclaimed as South

Africa's foremost Coloured leader, was a Muslim, a member of the 'Malay' community, and a grandson of manumitted slaves, Chashullah and Betsy Jamal-ud-din (corrupted to Jamalee) who bought their freedom. They kept a fruit shop in Roeland Street, Cape Town, amassed a small fortune, and sent their son Abdul Rachman to study theology at Cairo and Mecca. He returned after an absence of ten years and married Khadija Dollie, 'the prettiest Malay girl in Cape Town'.1 Widely known as Hadjie Abdurahman, he pioneered modern education for the Muslims and refused to put up with a second-class education for his own sons. His eldest, the future Dr Abdurahman, was admitted to the S.A. College School, the oldest high school in the country,

'where, by his diligence and ability, he outdistanced his com rades in almost every branch of school work '.2 The college then raised a colour bar, whereupon the Hadjie went to England and stayed there, while his second son qualified as a chemist, and the youngest as a doctor. He lost his wife in England, and by her side was later buried her brother, H. M. Dollie, the father of Dr 0. Dollie, who also took his children to be educated in England.3

Having matriculated at the Cape, Abdul Abdurahman went to Glasgow, where he spent close on four years before graduating in medicine in 1893. Two years later he came home with his Scot

tish bride. 'He makes a great sacrifice,' wrote Peregrino, 'in returning to a country where colour, and not character, ability or standing, makes the man.'4 In 19o4, now a successful practi tioner, he was elected to the town council, the first coloured person to hold this office. 'I was reluctant to enter public life because failure at the polls would have drawn ridicule upon the

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Class and Colour in South Africa z85o-1950

coloureds,' he wrote after the election; but 'it is by individuals

stepping beyond the establishments of the time that a people progress.' 5 The European support he received at the polls 'does not betoken a white race degenerating, but a sign of rejuvenes

cence'. The British constitution was 'the admiration of the world, and one of the greatest blessings of mankind'. As leader of the A P o, Abdurahman spent much of the next five years in an unsuccessful attempt to vindicate his faith in British democracy.

The elan and vigour of the African Political Organization in its early and middle years held great promise of a mass radical movement. Founded in I9o2, it soon grew into what was per haps the first national party, open to persons of all races and

with branches in all the colonies. It failed to attract significant numbers of Africans and Indians, however, and remained predominantly Coloured, centred in the western Cape and con cerned mainly with Coloured affairs. Abdurahman traced its origins to the political awakening brought about by Carnarvon's confederation scheme and the Anglo-Afrikaner war; but a more immediate impulse came from participation in parliamentary politics. One of the APO'S first activities was to strengthen and mobilize the Coloured vote by urging qualified men to apply for registration on the electoral rolls. It made substantial gains by taking part in white party politics, but also encountered great hazards which often threatened to wreck the organization. The first of these crises occurred soon after its formation.

John Tobin, a foundation member and an advocate of 'recon ciliation' between Coloured and white Afrikaners, canvassed for the SAP-Bond alliance in the general election of 1904. W. Col lins, the A P O'S first president, favoured the Progressives, who were supported also by Peregrino and other members of the Coloured Peoples' Vigilance Committee. To avoid a split, the organization expelled both men and invited Abdurahman to take the leadership. He joined the Cape Town branch in 1904 and was elected in 1905 to the presidency, an office which he held up to the time of his death in 194o. He was 'not a Progressive or a Bondsman,' he told the annual conference in Port Elizabeth;

and would never cease to agitate on behalf of their people as long as they were unjustly treated. The Coloured people were

Mal:

ip, - -.- - -

National Liberation

very fortunate, wrote

Imvo,

in having him as their leader. They could not have a more trustworthy guide. Whites were woefully mistaken in thinking that they could repress the Coloured and African people, 'as a policy of that kind is only calculated to unite and make the Coloured inhabitants more determined in claiming their own'.

6

The Chinese importations, colour bars on the mines, and the transfer of ultimate power to settlers in the Transvaal and Orange River Colony stirred Abdurahman to anger. His in augural address at the APO's annual conference in January 19o6 was one long indictment of the 'cosmopolitan exploiters' whose greed for gold had given rise to the system of indentured labour.

'Chamberlain, the great Imperial wanderer, visited South Africa, sympathized with the downtrodden Magnates, saw a Native war dance at Colenso, and gave the Rand lords forced labour at id. an hour.' The Flag had never been in such despic able hands since the old slave days. The ex-republics under British rule were 'simply Imperial prisons for coloured people, who are but goods and chattels in the hands of the country's

exploiters'.' The English press accused him of 'incendiary

talk' and of' stirring up the embers of race feud'. Johannesburg's municipal council refused to let him address a Coloured audience in the town hall, whereas the anti-Chinese opposition declared

that he 'expressed in most outspoken language the feeling of ninety-nine per cent of the voters'.'

The

APO'S

mission to England in

1906

failed to convince the British government that it was morally bound to extend the franchise to the Coloured in the north. Abdurahman then threw his weight behind the federal cause, represented in the Cape by the Progressive party. Jameson had said that federation would enable the Cape to 'hold to our Native policy until the neigh bouring colonies are sufficiently educated to agree to allow equal facilities for blacks and whites to rise in the scale of humanity'.

9

The

A P

o accordingly agreed at its annual conference in Indwe to support the Progressives in the 19o8 general election.

1 °

Tobin, Peregrino and Jabavu backed Merriman's South African party;

it won the election and argued the case for a unitary constitution.

Jameson and his fellow Progressive delegates to the National

lI9

Class and Colour in South Africa z85o-95o

Convention switched their allegiance, assented to a unitary con stitution, and accepted without protest the exclusion of persons of colour from both houses of parliament.1' The APo's second mission to England in i9o9 failed to secure the deletion of the colour bar clauses. Abdurahman had not failed, he wrote, to learn that 'the rights of unrepresented classes of citizens are always unsafe, and are never free from invasion'.'

The African and Coloured delegations returned smarting under the stigma of the colour bar and toured the Cape to report on their mission. At a public banquet attended by 300 notables in Queenstown in April i9io Abdurahman and Jabavu

appealed for a political union of all the coloured races. Abdurah man reminded an African audience at Indwana a few days later that he had warned against unification, the form of constitution advocated by the SAP, which had shown no sympathy with the African and Coloured peoples. Their first duty was to have a political union. 'If they achieved that their full re-enfranchise ment would be rendered easier.'"3 The need for unity was a constant theme in Abdurahman's speeches at this time. Coloured South Africans, he reiterated, were sons of the soil and had as great a claim to the country as any white settler. If 'Europeans persist in their policy of repression, there will one day arise a solid mass of Black and Coloured humanity whose demands will be

irresistible.

14

The contemplated union never took shape. African and Coloured leaders joined in protest, but the political ties between their peoples were never more than tenuous. Geographical isolation, barriers of language, custom and race, economic differ ences and inequalities of status restrained them from merging into a single organization. Colour consciousness tended to smother class or national consciousness in the Coloured. They displayed an acute awareness of physical traits and a sensitive ness to gradations of colour that blocked the growth of unity within the group itself. 'And so through pride,' wrote a cor

respondent in the A.P.O., 'the Coloured people, the true sons and daughters of South Africa, are today divided, and con sequently their political and industrial positions are becoming more critical day by day.' Many slightly coloured persons passed

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-W

for Europeans. 'Some of them select who, and who not, to recognize in public, through being desirous of being regarded as Europeans.' They often feared that if they supported a dark complexioned person in political life, he would expect a greeting in the street. Until 'the slightly-coloured and the pitch black confer at one table, we will only dream of what we would be, and remain the shadows that we are.

' 15

Genealogical gossip was a favourite pastime of Afrikaners and even more popular among the Coloured. They took malicious pleasure in tracing the dark-skinned ancestry of their rulers. If the 'European descent' clause meant that no ancestor was coloured, the A.P.O. remarked, it would bar two ministers of the crown in the Cape, one in the Transvaal, and several members of the Cape parliament, one of whom 'bears a titular distinction'.'

6

Such men might at least show sympathy with their kith and kin.

'But those who try to hide the little colour that is in them are always the bitterest anti-colour advocates.

' 17

When Botha formed his cabinet after the first Union elections, the paper dubbed it the regime of 'the half-white ministry'. Five of its ten members were not of pure European descent.'

8

Yet the 'piebald Botha Government' would employ only poor whites, and oust even Coloured relatives of ministers from the public service. The only government billet open to the Coloured would before long be 'a portfolio in the Union ministry'.'

9

White-baiting provided an emotional relief but left the im balance of power unchanged. The

A P 0

failed to develop suitable methods of mass struggle in spite of the example set by Gandhi's passive resistance campaign. At Abdurahman's request, Gandhi contributed an article on his struggle 'for national honour, for conscience, and for manhood' in which he claimed that his methods were 'as pure as the ideal itself. Suffering is the panacea for all evils. It purifies the sufferers.' Passive resistance, he contended, would lead to violence only if soul force were trans muted into body force; and was therefore best for 'illiterate natives'. It taught them to break their own heads and not other

people's in order to redress grievances.2 0 The closest that the

A PO

came to instituting a passive resistance campaign was to urge the Coloured in Pretoria to conduct one against the

C.S.A. -6 121

Class and Colour in South Africa 185o-z95o

municipality's decision to segregate them in townships. The Coloured residents preferred law suits to broken heads, however, and took the council to court.2 1

APO militants often spoke of using the 'economic weapon', but this too failed to materialize, although there were sufficient numbers of Coloured working men in the western Cape to make the political strike a feasible tactic. They were poorly organized, and reluctant to follow the A P o except during elections. Abdurah man tried hard to form trade unions, partly in order to detach Coloured workers from white labour leaders, and met with little success except among the teachers. Like Jabavu, he believed that his people would never hold their own against the colonists without a modern education, and so made this his primary concern. He fought a stubborn rearguard action against the spread of segregation in schools; used his position in the town council to force the S.A. College (later the University of Cape Town) to admit Harold Cressy and other Coloured students after him; and with J. W. Jagger, a prosperous merchant, induced the school board to establish the Trafalgar High School,

the first of its kind for Coloured, in

1910. 22

Many children owed

their education to his private generosity. The A.P.O. gave much attention to educational needs, agitated for better facilities, admonished parents to send their children to school, and venti lated the grievances of the teachers.

The formation of the S.A. Teachers' League in 1912-13

marked an important stage in the emergence of an intellectual leadership among the Coloured. Cressy, Francis Brutus, F.

Hendricks and Abe Desmore, among others, worked closely with the APO, contributed to its paper, and through their own quarterly, the Educational Journal, instilled in teachers a sense of national pride and of duty to their people. Employed in church schools, they were badly trained, grossly discriminated against, and underpaid at salaries ranging from L5 to £12 los. a month.

'The argument has been brought forward persistently,' wrote Brutus, 'that Coloured teachers cannot receive anything above a mere pittance in respect of salary because of the Native teachers, whose case has still to be dealt with.' 2 3 They had a remedy, he suggested. Let them combine with the Africans,

122

who were then affiliated to the white-dominated Teachers' Association. The Coloured teachers, who were timid, politically backward and race conscious, continued to segregate themselves in the League.

The AP O's leadership of intellectuals and small businessmen

sedulously avoided mass struggles. They adopted, instead, the

I

techniques of a parliamentary party, and concentrated on elec tion campaigns. Coloured and African voters held the balance in a dozen or so Cape constituencies. White candidates solicited their support during elections and ignored them at other times.

Some of the money spent on elections trickled into the pockets of local agents, who were often leading members ofAP o branches, and from them to individual voters. The alleged corruption of the Coloured electorate, often given as a reason for taking the Coloured off the common roll, grew out of the colour bar con stitution. A vote without power proved to be more demoralizing than total disfranchisement. Coloured politicians tended to be come appendages of white parties, which denied them member ship and rewarded them with scraps of political loot. The worst evil was not bribery, however, but the failure of the leaders to develop an alternative conception of the Coloured man's role in politics.

The Coloured were stemvee - voting cattle - in the Afrikaner's vocabulary of contempt. They put their cross on ballot papers but never took part in the selection of candidates or in the making of policies. Since all parliamentary parties stood for white supremacy, the Coloured voter could only choose between evils.

He usually chose the English party, representing the industrial ists, merchants and professions, who were protected by class barriers from Coloured competition and could therefore afford to deplore the grosser forms of racial discrimination, provided always that the darker man 'kept his place'. The leading liberal R. W. Rose Innes complained bitterly when the Rev. Rubusana, newly elected to the provincial council, exercised his right to travel in a first-class compartment with bedding, blankets and pillow supplied by the railway administration.2 4 While insisting on social segregation, the English middle class objected to the industrial colour bar which interfered with the employment of

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Class and Colour in South Africa 1850-1950

the lowest-priced worker. They were his natural ally on the labour market against the policy of sheltered white labour. If the A P 0 ever had a political theory - and only glimpses of one appeared in the diatribes against racial discrimination-it was that an expanding, progressive capitalism would dissolve caste rigidi ties and give all men equal opportunities in a competitive society.

It was impossible to relate this perspective to Botha's party of landowners. They preferred stagnation to progress if progress would bring equality in its train. Tradition, sentiment and party interest induced them to buttress caste divisions with statutory sanctions. The Coloured had little to expect from Afrikaner Nationalists, who made a 'white South Africa' one of their planks in the i91o general election, remarked the A.P.O.2 5 It reported resolutions passed by congresses of farmers urging government to expel African tenants from white-owned land, indenture their families to farmers, raise the hut tax and put convicts to work on public undertakings.2 6 There was something radically wrong, the journal observed, when cabinet ministers invoked the black bogy to persuade whites to keep their children at school, accept compulsory military training, and employ whites only on skilled work.2 7 Hertzog's 'narrow racialism' was a menace to the Empire. He wished to extend the harsh, in human laws of the 'mis-named Free State' to all the provinces.

'In that prison-house of South Africa - worse even than the despotism of Russia - the Coloured people cannot work without a permit.' 28

Abdurahman told the A po's annual conference at Port Eliza beth in 19io that in terms of the constitution each branch would decide for itself which candidate to support in the forthcoming election of the first Union parliament. The APO as an organiza tion could not bind itself to any particular party. Subsequently, however, he advised the branches to support Jameson's Unionists

against the ruling coalition under Botha. Raynard and some other members of the A PO who objected that this directive violated the constitution were expelled or resigned.2 9 Jabavu, as always, backed the party of Sauer, who held a portfolio in the Botha ministry; and accused Abdurahman of 'prejudicing the case of the Coloured people in the eyes of the great Party in

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In document Workers and the Vote 98 (Page 114-137)