Industrialisation and race in South Africa, 1886–1994

P1: RNK 0521864381c12 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 16:38 12 Industrialisation and race in South Africa, 1886–1994 modern south africa deserves separate treatment, because the discovery of gold at the Witwatersrand in 1886 gave the south a trajectory dif- ferent from the rest of the continent, moving towards an industrial economy, the entrenchment of local white power, and a unique system of racial repres- sion culminating in the apartheid programme of 1948,acentrally imposed programme of racial segregation under white domination. Yet although South Africa was as distinct from the rest of thecontinentasPharaonic Egypt, it shared manyunderlying historical processes. The most fundamental was demographic growth, from perhaps three million or four million in 1886 to thirty-nine mil- lion in 1991.Aselsewhere, this bred competition for rural resources, mass urbanisation, generational conflict, and the overextension of the state. In the early 1990s, these conditions, together with industrial development and the international context, enabled black people to force their rulers to seek secu- rity in a long-term settlement. Majority rule in 1994 left South Africa facing the socio-economic problems troubling the whole continent, but its peak popula- tion growth rate was past and it possessed skills and resources making those problems potentially easier to surmount. mining and industrialisation The Witwatersrand goldfield in 1886 differed greatly from the early diamond diggings at Kimberley. There were no black claim-owners, for the Witwaters- rand was not in the officially multiracial Cape Colony but in the South African Republic (Transvaal), whoseAfrikanergovernment immediatelyconfinedmin- ing claims to white men. Nor did small white miners long survive, for in the unique geology of the Witwatersrand tiny flecks of gold were scattered in a narrow seam of hard rock – one ounce of gold in every four tons of rock – demanding deep mining, heavy machinery, and the most modern chemical extraction technology. By the late 1890s, shafts were eleven hundred metres deep and the Rand was producing over a quarter of the world’s gold. From the beginning, therefore, the Witwatersrand was dominated by giant mining houses, drawing some capital from Kimberley but most fromEurope. Industrial nations bought gold at fixed prices but in practically unlimited quantities. The 273 P1: RNK 0521864381c12 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 16:38 274 africans: the history of a continent mining houses therefore had no incentive to restrict production or compete with one another. As early as 1889, they formed a Chamber of Mines, chiefly to reduce African wages, for with prices fixed and labour taking more than half of production costs, mining profitability depended on controlling wage levels. White miners, initially needed for their skills, brought from Kimber- ley the practice of reserving skilled work for white men, which accorded with the existing racial system of the South African Republic. Their militancy won them ten times the average black wage in 1898,twicethe ratio at Kimberley adecade earlier. To accommodate this differential without destroying profits, the Chamber of Mines combined in 1896 to force African wages down to a level that remained substantially unchanged until 1971. This wage reduction was made possible by changes in the supply of African labourers. Most were migrants, not because mineowners wished it – they thought migrant workers expensive and inefficient – but because Africans refused to exchange rural land rights for a lifetime amid the danger, disease, and brutal conditions of deep-level mining – ‘hell mechanized’, as a mission- ary described it. Initially, therefore, mineowners had to pay wages sufficient to attract Africans temporarily from their homes, but this changed as Africans lost their independence. In 1895–7, especially, the Portuguese conquered the Gaza kingdom in southern Mozambique and imposed taxation and compul- sory labour, which were quickly followed by cattle plague and famine. By 1896–8 the goldmines drew three-fifths of their fifty-four thousand African workers from southern Mozambique, which supplied the largest single contingent of mineworkers almost continuously until the 1970s. Many others came from the Transkei and from Lesotho, 20 percent of whose able-bodied men were work- ing in South Africa at any moment in 1911 and 47 percent in 1936.Instead of working abroad once in early youth, men came to spend their lives oscillating between homes and workplaces. Rural economies came to depend on their remittances. Rural families adapted to survive absent fathers, often replacing the patriarchal and polygynous homestead by a three-generation household in which a wife lived with her parents and children until her husband retired, perhaps bringing home tuberculosis, which by 1930 infected a large majority of the Transkei’s adults. ForAfrican cultivators, gold mining initially expanded the profitable urban market already opened at Kimberley. Maize production increased among Zulu, Sotho, and especially the peoples of the Orange Free State, the South African Republic, and Natal, where African peasant farmers with ox-ploughs expe- rienced a prosperity that their children remembered as a golden age, either farming the minority of land remaining to them or cultivating as sharecrop- pers on white farms. From the 1890s, however, white entrepreneurs competing for urban markets and African labour sought to transform sharecroppers first into labour-tenants and then into landless labourers. The Natives Land Act P1: RNK 0521864381c12 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 16:38 Industrialisation and race in South Africa 275 14.Industrialisation and race in South Africa. of 1913 had this objective, for it prohibited land transfers between races, fixed the African share of South African land at 7 (later 14)percent, and restricted the number of sharecroppers and cash-tenants who could reside on a white farm outside the Cape Province. But legislation alone could not change the countryside. Between the wars there was violent agrarian conflict as farmers imposed more severe terms on resident Africans, who replied by burning crops, slaughtering stock, and hearkening to the millennial promises of religious and political prophets. As late as 1954,some20 percent of ‘white’ farms had no white resident, but by then the mechanisation of agriculture was finally driving sharecroppers and tenants from the land, as elsewhere in Africa. Meanwhile the growing population on the limited and overexploited African reserves was impoverished. Even in the 1920s, the reserves produced only half their food needs and the proportion fell steadily thereafter. Only tiny privileged elites clung to the freehold property needed to finance education and professional careers. The commercialisation of agriculture in response to mining and urban growth also transformed the rural white population. Their farms became P1: RNK 0521864381c12 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 16:38 276 africans: the history of a continent smaller and more numerous, but the bijwoners (squatters) who had grazed their scrawny beasts on the fringes of nineteenth-century estates were driven from the land to join the more than 300,000 white people (about one-sixth of the entire white population) thought in 1930 to be ‘living in great poverty’, often in the slums of industrial cities. Given South Africa’s hard and ancient rocks, poor soils, and recurrent droughts, it cost the state £ 112 million in sub- sidies to European agriculture between 1911 and 1936 to keep white men on the land and to win their votes, chiefly through a state-supported marketing system, elaborate extension services, and transport geared to farmers’ interests. Unlike white settlers elsewhere, most South African farmers did not become producers of specialised export crops like wine or coffee. Despite low yields, maize was 39 percent of their output by value in 1919 and 32 percent in 1976. This white monopoly of the food market deprived Africans of bargaining power to push their wages above bare subsistence. The number of African and Coloured farm labourers rose gradually to a peak of about 1,500,000 dur- ing the 1960s. Most were poorer than either African townsmen or the reserve population, earning an average wage from all sources of £ 20 ayear in the late 1930s. Although goldmining was vital to South African industrialisation, it did not automatically cause it, for eighty years of copper mining did not industri- alise the Congo, nor was South African industrialisation a sudden process. In 1891 the Cape Colony’s manufacturing output was already more valuable than its diamond production. In the South African Republic, however, goldmin- ing stimulated railway building, urbanisation, coal mining, and the coal-fired electricity that became the chief source of industrial power. By 1914 the Witwa- tersrand possessed the world’s largest electrical power station, employing the latest German technology. Manufacturing output expanded during the First World War and almost doubled during the 1920s. One reason for industrial growth, in contrast to tropical Africa, was that political independence allowed white South Africans to be economic nationalists. General Smuts, as Prime Minister from 1919 to 1924,made industrialisation a target of state policy. The Afrikaner Nationalist government that replaced him in 1924 raised protective tariffs and invested mining revenue in industry, notably the state-owned Iron and Steel Corporation, which began production in 1934 and spearheaded the transition to heavy industry that countries further north later found so difficult. From 1933,when South Africa abandoned the gold standard, greatly increased gold prices stimulated even faster growth and enabled the economy to escape the foreign-debt trap that was to check industrialisation in Algeria and else- where during the 1980s. Between 1911 and 1945 the proportion of South Africa’s foreign debt to total public debt fell from 91 to 3 percent. 1 Another crucial breakthrough took place during the Second World War, when manufacturing employment rose by 60 percent and the engineering industry shifted from craft P1: RNK 0521864381c12 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 16:38 Industrialisation and race in South Africa 277 production to mass manufacture, initially of war materials and subsequently of consumer durables. The share of metal products and machinery in man- ufacturing output rose between 1936 and 1951 from 4 to 19 percent, making South Africa decisively a manufacturing country, with many characteristic fea- tures of a late-industrialising economy: large enterprises, a major state sector, heavy reliance on primary exports (of gold), and severe repression of labour. Cheap labour, cheap energy, gold, government, and gradualism were distinctive features of South African industrialisation. Its most dramatic consequence was rapid urbanisation. In 1891 Cape Town, with 51,000 inhabitants, was South Africa’s largest city, but by 1896 Johannes- burg, only ten years old, already contained 100,000 people, half white and half black, in an urban anarchy described as ‘a Monte Carlo superimposed upon a Sodom and Gomorrah’. 2 The country’s total urban population, some 1,225,000 in 1904,rose to 3,218,000 in 1936, including 68 percent ofallwhite people and 19 percent of Africans. Municipal authorities tried to control urbanisation by segregating Africans into locations, which became national policy under the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923.Toimpose this model on a swollen mining town like Johannesburg, however, was beyond municipal capacity. When the city centre’s notorious multiracial slums were demolished during the 1930s, for example, their African inhabitants moved not to the distant, expensive, and strictly controlled locations at Orlando (the nucleus of modern Soweto) but to freehold land at Sophiatown and Alexandra on the edges of the white city. In Cape Town, similarly, some 37 percent of the residential area was still racially mixed in 1936, notably the largely Coloured working-class area called District Six, close to the city centre. Until the 1920s, the main threat to mineowners and the state came not from Africans but from European workers. Initially most white miners were immi- grant bachelors seeking quick earnings before tuberculosis killed them. They vigorously defended their jobs and racial wage differentials against employers anxious to replace them by equally competent but cheaper Africans. The white miners’ tactics were militant unionism and racialism. In 1893 the first all-white mineworkers’ union imposed a monopoly of blasting against the employers’ resistance. Twenty years later a strike obliged the employers and the state to recognise the union. From 1911 to 1925,the Labour Party largely controlled the Johannesburg City Council, whose employees briefly established a soviet in the City Hall during 1918.ACommunist Party came into being in 1921.A year later, when the mineowners tried to break the union and reduce the ratio of white workers, ‘Strike Commandos’ converted a strike into the Rand Revolt, which briefly seized power in several mining towns until suppressed by the army at a cost of between 150 and 220 lives. At this point, however, the state used its victory to domesticate both capital and labour. The Mines and Works Amendment Act of 1926 fixed the ratio of white to black workers, enabling P1: RNK 0521864381c12 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 16:38 278 africans: the history of a continent mineowners to mechanise the industry and miners to become the best-paid of white workers. Forblack workers, by contrast, early militancy brought little reward. Spo- radic African dock strikes in Port Elizabeth and Cape Town can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth century, but the first major African mine strike on the Witwatersrand in 1913 was broken by troops with fixed bayonets. Rapid industrialisation, urban growth, and inflation during the First World War then radicalised white-collar workers as well as manual labourers, breeding sev- eral unsuccessful strikes in 1917–20 and the first major African trade union, the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU). This emerged in the Cape Town docks during 1918, was led by a migrant clerk from Nyasaland named Clements Kadalie, and expanded first into an urban general union and then into near-millennial rural protest expressing the grievances of threatened sharecroppers and labour-tenants on the highveld. At its peak in 1927, the ICU claimed 100,000 members, but it then disintegrated in factionalism and disillu- sionment. By 1933 there were only threeAfrican trade unions in South Africa, all unrecognised by the state. During the next decade, Communist and Trotskyite organisers gradually constructed a more substantial labour movement fromthe shop-floor upwards. Wartime militancy culminated in 1946 in a major African mine strike, but its violent suppression, with at least nine deaths and twelve hundred injuries, demonstrated the continuing dominance of employers and the state. politics 1886–1948 Mining and industrialisation transformed South African politics. In 1899 the British launched the costlyAnglo-Boer War to protecttheir regional supremacy against the South African Republic’s new wealth and power, but Afrikaner guer- rillas surrendered only when the Peace of Vereeniging of May 1902 promised that ‘the question of granting the Franchise to Natives will not be decided until after the introduction of self-government’. 3 British control of South Africa depended on attracting enough English-speaking immigrants to the Transvaal to outvote its Afrikaners. That meant restoring and expanding gold produc- tion, which depended on recruiting sufficient nonwhite labour. Because not enough Africans accepted work at the wages offered, some sixty thousand Chi- nese contract labourers were imported. But this alienated English-speaking white workers, who dashed imperial plans in 1907 by allying politically with Afrikaner leaders. These events were crucial to Afrikaner nationalism. Nineteenth-century Afrikaners had been strongly aware of their difference from Britons and Africans, but during the last thirty years of the century responsible government at the Cape and the growth of moremodern states in the northern republics had P1: RNK 0521864381c12 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 16:38 Industrialisation and race in South Africa 279 encouraged sectional patriotisms. President Kruger had dismissed Hofmeyr, the Cape Afrikaner leader, as ‘a traitor to the Africander cause’. The Anglo-Boer War partly healed these divisions, for many Cape Afrikaners sympathised with and sometimes aided the republics, but it also opened new conflicts between advocates of surrender and continued resistance. It was the unification of South Africa and the creation of an electoral system that brought Afrikaners together into political nationalism, as would happen later in West Africa. Unification was pressed both by the British and by local white politicians, especially the for- mer Afrikaner generals, Botha and Smuts, whose party, Het Volk, won the first election in the Transvaal in 1907 with labour aid and thereby ensured Afrikaner leadership of South Africa. The negotiations that led to independence under the Act of Union in 1910 created a strong central government, entrenched the legal equality of the English and Dutch (from 1925,Afrikaans) languages, and left the franchise as it had been in each prewar province, so that Africans and Coloured people effectively had the vote (on a qualified franchise) only in the Cape. The South Africa Party, led by Botha and Smuts, formed the Union’s first government. It was dedicated to reconciliation between Afrikaners and British, but this was undermined bythe First World War, when South Africa’s participa- tion on Britain’s side precipitated unsuccessful rebellion by Afrikaner extrem- ists, and by disputes over the imperial relationship. In 1924 General Hertzog’s National Party won power on the votes of most rural Afrikaners. Externally he was satisfied with the dominion status recognised in 1926.Internally he pressed forward the relief of poor whites and the segregation of Africansalreadyembod- ied in the Natives Land Act of 1913 and the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923. Almost all white South Africans favoured segregation, even missionaries and liberals eager to protect Africans from deracination. For Hertzog, a key element in segregation was to remove Cape African voters – 10,628 of them in 1935– from the common roll and give them separate representation and institutions. To obtain the two-thirds majority necessary for this constitutional amend- ment and to tackle the economic problems of the international depression, Hertzog‘fused’ his party with Smuts’s opposition in 1934.Thenew United Partyremoved Africans from the common roll in 1936, but fusion alienated Afrikaner extremists, who saw the new party as a capitalist coalition likely to divide the Afrikaner nation along class lines. They broke away in 1934 under D. F. Malan to form the Purified National Party. It became the chief exponent of the ethnic separatism gaining support among Afrikaners during the later 1930s, based on deliberate cultivation of the Afrikaans language, the v¨olkisch notions of nationality fashionable in continental Europe, determination to win eco- nomic equality with English-speakers, and historical symbolism popularised by the Voortrekker Centenary of 1938.When South Africa’s entry into the Second World War destroyed Hertzog’s government and left Smuts in power, P1: RNK 0521864381c12 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 16:38 280 africans: the history of a continent abitter struggle for Afrikaner leadership ensued. Malan won. By 1945 he was in a position to reunite the Volk. ForAfricans and Coloured people, too, the Anglo–Boer War and Union were keymoments in political organisation. The Coloured people numbered some 445,000 in 1904 and formed 9 percent of the population, mainly in the Cape. Their first major association, confusingly named the African Political Organisation (APO), was formed at the end of the war in 1902 by their small professional elite led by Dr. Abdullah Abdurahman. It aimed to defend the community’s distinctive identity and extend its rights, especially the right to vote, into the newly conquered northern provinces. This aim conflicted with the Peace of Vereeniging. Instead the APO survived as the spokesman of the Cape Coloured elite, whose aspiration to be accepted into white institutions distanced them from the bulk of Coloured workers. From the 1880s, the mission-educated African elite of the Cape Colony and Natal – clergymen, teachers, clerks, commercial farmers – formed the first small modern African political associations. The most articulate was the South African Native Congress, founded in the Eastern Cape in 1898.AfterBritish victory in 1902, these associations fostered similar bodies in the Transvaal and Orange Free State and urged the extension of the Cape franchise to these provinces. When the Act of Union denied this and the new white parliament instead debated territorial segregation, elite leaders met at Bloemfontein in 1912 to form the South African Native National Congress (later the African National Congress, ANC) ‘for the purpose of creating national unity and defending our rights and privileges’. The ANC initially campaigned against the Land Act of 1913 by petitions and deputations. When this achieved nothing, its moderate leaders were replaced in 1917 by more radical men from the Witwatersrand who associatedthe organisation with postwarstrikes and antipass protests. Alarmed, the moderates regained leadership in 1920, lost it again in 1927 to the communist Josiah Gumede, but ousted him once more in 1930.Thefollowing decade was the least active in the ANC’s history. It did not effectively defend the Cape African franchise in 1936.Its total funds four years later were fifteen shillings. 4 The vitality of interwar African politicslayin two other directions. One was in the countryside, where protest either took near-millennial forms (as in Zionist churches or labour-tenants’ support for the ICU) or centred on resistance to cattle dipping, soil conservation, and other official schemes to salvage the overcrowded reserves. Political activity was also vigorous in the towns, where aworking-class lifestyle, often known as marabi culture, took shape around the music, dance, sex, youth gangs, and illicit liquor of the shebeens in city- centre slums and freehold townships like Sophiatown. Urban political action often went no further than repelling police liquor raids, but it could embrace anti-pass protests – especially against attempts to make women carry passes – and boycotts of municipal beerhalls, the most famous taking place in Durban P1: RNK 0521864381c12 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 16:38 Industrialisation and race in South Africa 281 in 1929–30 and lasting eighteen months. Protests on this scale were organised by grassroots politicians – clerks or craftsmen threatened with unemployment, taxi-drivers, shack-landlords, herbalists, Zionist preachers – who drew ideas and slogans from modern organisations like the ICU, ANC, and Communist Partywhile also mobilising indigenous symbols and beliefs. After Clements Kadalie had addressed a meeting in East London in 1930, for example, the next speaker was ‘a kitchen girl,attheStrandHotel .andaprophetess’ who said she received a message from God that let all the natives listen to what Kadalie tells them. God has revealed to her that Kadalie is the only leader who is going to uplift Africa. She again has received a message from the Almighty God that Kadalie should go to Gcalekaland in the Transkei and organise the AmaXhosas at the Great Place of the Paramount Chief. 5 This popular politics, often openly racialistic and tribalistic, was a world apart from the staid multiracial resolutions of ANC conferences. The Second World War did something to fuse the two political levels. On the elite plane, in 1944 young men from the black University College at Fort Hare,exasperated by the ‘gentlemen with clean hands’ who ran the ANC, formed within it a Youth League as a ‘brains-trust and power-station’ to press the state for full political equality. They were willing to associate Congress with the popular protest mounting during the war as industrial growth bred mass urbanisation that swamped housing and other facilities. In one series of protests, residents of Alexandra boycotted buses and walked nine miles each way to work rather than pay a fare increase of one penny. In another, nearly 100,000 homeless people created illegal squatter camps on vacant plots in and around Johannesburg. Urbanisation swamped segregation. ‘You might as well try to sweep the ocean back with a broom’, Smuts complained in 1942. Indian urbanisation, too, seemed to Durban’s white residents to ‘penetrate’ their suburbs, provoking shrill demands for restriction or repatriation. As the war ended, all political tendencies agreed that South Africa needed a new racial order and that only the central government could establish it. the ascendancy of apartheid In 1948 the largely white electorate faced a clear choice of racial policies. Malan’s National Party offered apartheid, a newly coined word to describe a more rigid, centrally enforced segregation, confining each race to specified areas, allocat- ing African labourers to farms or towns, but promising also to enable each race to practise its own culture and manage its own affairs. Smuts’s United Party, by contrast, claimed to defend South Africa’s traditional racial order, where the state assisted communities to segregate themselves voluntarily but saw African urbanisation as irreversible and gradual assimilation to Western P1: RNK 0521864381c12 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 16:38 282 africans: the history of a continent culture as desirable. Unexpectedly, the Nationalists won, with only 40 percent of votes. Their first measures sought to attract further white support, ban- ning mixed marriages, creating procedures for universal racial classification, and setting up machinery for compulsory segregation under the Group Areas Act of 1950.Subsequently, as support and confidence grew, their programme expandedinto ‘positiveApartheid’, includinga separate Bantu educationsystem and ‘self-governing’ but dependent rural Homelands for the various African ‘tribes’. Whereas interwar governments had enacted segregatory legislation, the Nationalist regime implemented it. Power, not policy, was the chief novelty of apartheid. The power came from the growing wealth and administrative capacity of the industrial state, the faith in state intervention and social engi- neering commonthroughout the postwar world, and the racialism that enabled Nationalists to justify their ruthlessness towards black people. Until the mid-1970s, apartheid was remarkably successful. Its main achieve- ment was the segregation of cities by moving theirblack inhabitants tosuburban townships isolated by ‘machine-gun belts’, a strategy made possible by elec- tric trains and motor transport. In Johannesburg, Sophiatown was destroyed between 1955 and 1963 and Africans were relocated into the 113,000 concrete houses of Soweto, divided into tribal sections.The estimated 120,000 Africans in Durban’s main freehold settlement, Cato Manor, were rehoused in two town- ships in the neighbouring KwaZulu homeland. District Six in Cape Town was razed during the 1970s; its Coloured inhabitants were resettled in an outlying concrete wilderness where an incomplete survey in 1982 counted 280 juvenile street gangs. Legislation decreed that only Africans born in a town or work- ing there continuously for fifteen years (or ten years for one employer) had permanent residential rights. The African urbanisation rate slowed from the early 1950s, although the statistics probably underestimated it. Action under the Group Areas Act also relocated 305,739 Coloured people, 153,230Asians, and 5,898 whites by March 1976. African resistance to this assault brought ANC elite politics and urban pop- ular action closer together. In 1949 Yo uth League members gained leadership of Congress. Three years later, in alliance with radical Indian politicians, they launched the Defiance Campaign of nonviolent resistance to unjust laws. The most widespread protest the country had seen, it expanded ANC membership toaclaimed 100,000,or1 percent of the African population, with the main support in the industrial towns of the Witwatersrand and the Eastern Cape. But the state broke the campaign by legislation punishing deliberate breach of the law by whipping. As the 1950sproceeded, it became clear that mass non- violent nationalism, so successful in India and tropical Africa, might heighten political consciousness – nobly expressed in the Freedom Charter of 1955 – but scarcely threatened a regime prepared to shoot demonstrators. As poli- tics grew more dangerous and African frustration increased, younger radicals [...]... Industrialisation and race in South Africa 285 only 1.6 percent during the 1980s, below population growth The first symptom was a decline in gold output, which peaked in 1970 This coincided with a major structural change in the economy Until the early 1970s South Africa had operated a low-wage economy for black people Real African mining wages were slightly less in 1969 than in 1911 In 1973, however,... united, and less easy to marginalise by encouraging rival African organisations than National Party leaders had expected Instead of dominating the ANC, they became increasingly dependent upon it to achieve a settlement sufficiently acceptable to Africans Yet Mandela and his colleagues were equally insecure Bereft of military force and opposed by entrenched Homeland parties headed by Inkatha in KwaZulu,... 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 16:38 Industrialisation and race in South Africa 283 broke away from the ANC in 1958 and formed the Pan-African Congress (PAC), rejecting alliance with non-African organisations In March 1960, its anti-pass campaign provoked the police to fire on a meeting at Sharpeville, killing sixtynine unarmed people The government then banned both the ANC and the PAC Both turned to sabotage,... ostensibly leaderless strikes began in the Durban docks and spread to manufacturing industry and the goldmines They challenged the low-wage structure at a moment when world gold prices were soaring and mineowners feared that political independence in Central Africa might rob them of long-distance migrants Between 1972 and 1980, therefore, average real African mine wages trebled and the effect spread throughout... its base of financing, counselling and moral support had crumbled P1: RNK 0521864381 c12 CUNY780B-African 978 0 521 68297 8 May 15, 2007 16:38 Industrialisation and race in South Africa 287 It was as if God had taken a hand – a new turn in world history We had to seize the opportunity.14 He legalised the ANC and released its imprisoned leader, Nelson Mandela, to provide a negotiating partner De Klerk... multiplied over six times Engineering and the metal industries became the largest manufacturing sector, supported by new technological industries like chemicals and plastics Rich new goldfields in the Orange Free State revitalised goldmining, while the freeing of gold prices in the early 1970s raised them tenfold during the next decade Mechanisation transformed white farming, which no longer needed the... the other South Africa, as ‘a nation of minorities’, could then become a loose consociation in which whites and their allies would control the industrial heartland and dominate a penumbra of black units Africans rejected and destroyed this strategy in the township revolt of 1984 The brutality of the revolt and its suppression also alerted international opinion and prompted economic sanctions, especially... was crushed in 1964 Organised African politics gave way for a decade to factional conflicts in the Homelands Apartheid had again succeeded The economy also prospered Between 1946 and 1973, real GDP increased steadily at between 4 and 6 percent a year, not a rapid growth rate for a middle-income developing country but substantial and sustained Between 1950 and 1980, the volume of manufacturing output... earlier fall in its deathrate had probably begun as early as the 1890s By the mid-1980s, whites were barely reproducing themselves by natural increase Asian fertility began to decline during the 1940s and Coloured fertility during the 1960s Less is known of African fertility; it was certainly declining by the 1980s and probably during the 1960s, but it was still higher than that of other races.7 Africans... demographically, while they still held real power, and at a time when African nationalists appeared weak and isolated As the new president, F W de Klerk, a conservative National Party stalwart, explained in 1990, The decline and collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and Russia put a new complexion on things The ANC was formerly an instrument of Russian expansionism in Southern Africa; when that threat fell away, . 16:38 Industrialisation and race in South Africa 275 14 .Industrialisation and race in South Africa. of 1913 had this objective, for it prohibited land transfers. demonstrated the continuing dominance of employers and the state. politics 1886–1948 Mining and industrialisation transformed South African politics. In 1899 the