Part two
THE STATES of South Africa, the United States, and Brazil were either formed or significantly reconfigured during the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. But amid state consolidation, national loyalty remained largely divided or nascent. Primary political allegiance had been long given to the British Empire or Afrikaner republics in what was to become South Africa, given to each state and to regions in the United States, and diluted by loyalty to Portugal within Brazil. As political institutions were reconfigured in each case, elites were eager to unify national loyalty to central states – to turn Afrikaners and British-descendant settlers into South Africans, Virginians and New Yorkers into Americans, royalists and republicans into Brazilians. Official definitions of membership in a single nation-state did not immediately produce popular allegiances accordingly.
Symbolism developed and encouraged emergent loyalty to the central polity. Flags were emblems of such unified nationalism encouraged by the state. But in each case, the national flag also represented pictorially the process by which previous allegiances were formally incorporated. The flag of South Africa included a miniature British Union Jack and banners of the two Afrikaner republics on a backdrop of the colors of Holland, thus symbolizing the hybrid nature of an emerging nation built upon previously divided loyalties. Similarly, the flag of the United States included a stripe for each of the original thirteen colonies and a star added for each state, symbolizing the federal unity of localized authority and allegiance. By contrast, the Brazilian flag bore no such references to divided powers or loyalties. Instead, Brazil’s banner projected the immutable unity of the post-colonial nation, symbolized by the central motif of the constellation of southern stars at the moment of the founding of the republic. The Brazilian nation was thus projected not as an emerging political compromise, but as a fixed part of the natural order. The motto inscribed on the flag, “Order and Progress,” reinforced an image of managed, coherent change. Flag imagery thus reflected a fundamental difference in nation-state building. Brazil emerged from a previously unified and preserved colony and empire. South Africa and the United States, for all their other differences, were constructed out of previously more independent units.
The issue of how to construct a racial order was central to the historical process of nation-state consolidation, as symbolized by the respective flags. In the United States, abolition of slavery came with the greater subordination of the states to federal power, forged in a bloody civil war and leaving the post-abolition racial order to be reconfigured. In South Africa, abolition came earlier. But the military establishment of central rule in South Africa implied a unified policy toward Africans to replace the varying approaches of the former colonies and republics. And the relatively peaceful process of abolition in Brazil ushered in the republic, which also faced the question of how to treat freed Afro-Brazilians.
All three countries reached climactic “moments” when political reconfiguration was tied to issues of race. The emergent nation-states would then each construct a legal racial order, building upon past experience, seeking to resolve prior or potential conflict. Unity had to be reinforced, for solidified subnational loyalties remained. Historical issues of race raised “problems” that had to be addressed to reduce or avoid embedded conflicts impinging upon efforts to reinforce the nation-state. These processes reached important turning points with abolition and/or state consolidation, when new or unified racial policies were debated and enacted. And these processes then played themselves out amid continued competition, uncertainty, and variations of policy. The outcomes of these processes differed. The conflicts and compromises inscribed in the history and even the flags of the United States and South Africa resulted in varying forms of legal racial domination. The stability inscribed in the Brazilian flag somehow gave rise to “racial democracy.”
Divergent racial orders solidified after abolition and/or after the formation of a unified state. That all three countries had previously enacted or practiced forms of racial discrimination did not result in a common outcome of official racial domination. The tablet was not wiped clean, but these legacies were interpreted differently, carried forward to justify racial domination, or denied to justify purported racial democracy. Something happened on the way to nation-state consolidation that set each country off on its own trajectory of race making and corresponding reinterpretations of its past. In South Africa and less pervasively in the United States, segregation was legally imposed. Why blacks were so singled out in terms of race, to be so dominated, remains to be explained. Why the same result did not emerge in Brazil also requires explanation. To explicate what happened requires analysis of the historical processes of nation-state building in each case, with reference to the resulting racial orders and to interpretations of the past and of evolving political and economic interests.
5
THE RACIAL STATE
The modern South African house of race began as two structures separately constructed. What was to become South Africa at the start of the twentieth century inherited from the previous century polities ruled by two fragments of European settlers, Dutch-descended Afrikaners and British-descended English-speakers (hereafter called “English); the two groups were themselves divided. Earlier-settled and isolated Afrikaners clung to images of racial distinction and order, amid the complicating fact of miscegenation. The British arrived later, bringing a post-Enlightenment “liberalism” that inspired the relatively early abolition of slavery. But such liberalism did not preclude the British from also imposing domination over “the natives,” or later the Afrikaners. Political and economic tensions between these groups vying for power were aggravated by disagreements over the treatment of slaves, Africans, and coloureds. The distinct solidarity of the English and Afrikaners was reinforced by resulting conflict and antagonism, dividing them despite their shared sense of white superiority. After the turn the century, the British forcibly combined the houses of Afrikaner republics and crown colonies. The misaligned floors would have to be roughly joined until the more complete renovation of apartheid constructed a more uniform edifice of racial domination. To build a united nation for whites, shared racism would become the basis for gradual reconciliation amid continued competition.
White Conflict, Forced Unity, and Black Exclusion
The arrival of the British in South Africa had a dramatic effect upon the Afrikaners. The Boers had been a loose collection of fiercely independent and religious families seeking to avoid enforced coordination. But the Afrikaners found a common interest in antagonism against the British. The new English-speaking settlers and authority gradually provoked mobilization and forced unity, “shaping a nation” among the Afrikaners, who grudgingly came together to protect their interests and values.1 Particular nationalist unity, as is often the case, was forged in adversity and resistance. By the mid-nineteenth century, the emerging Afrikaner nation sought expression in its own polities, but remained divided into separate republics. Formal disunity was thus simultaneous with a rising sentiment of Afrikaner nationalism that would only find unified expression in the crucible of war with the British Empire.
Violent conflict over who would rule South Africa came to a head at the turn of the century, exacerbated by British economic interests in gold and diamonds. The English mining magnates believed that a unified modern state was required to police labor, end internal tariffs, develop railroads to transport minerals, and reduce costly competition among the mining houses.2 Division among separate crown colonies and republics stood in the way of coherent development. When Cecil Rhodes’s own efforts to seize control of the Transvaal and force unification with the 1895–6 Jameson Raid failed, he and his fellow British capitalists used their control of the English-language media to push for direct imperial intervention. They decried the treatment of the English within the Afrikaner republics, “putting the heather a flame.” Never mind that the English voluntarily working in the Transvaal for the mining houses were “helots in golden chains,” that they mixed freely with Afrikaners, and that the English language was already becoming pervasive rather than needing to be “thrust . . . at the sword’s point.” There were enough isolated incidents of ill-treatment of English in the republics to inflame the imperialist-minded British public, despite the risks of waking “this demon of war in an entire nation” of Afrikaners.3
Mounting public pressure led an already eager, insatiable, and confident British Empire to use military force. The result was what the historian Hugh Seton-Watson calls the conflict “closest to the simple Marxist pattern of imperialist war.”4 But it was nationalist rhetoric and competing pressures for self-determination and imperial state consolidation that fed this conflict, rather than crass admissions of self-interest.
The emergence of two distinct nationalisms, Afrikaner and English-speaking South African, was an interactive process. The British-imposed reforms and their intervention “reinforced the aspirations of Afrikaner nationalism. In turn, Afrikaner nationalism stimulated British chauvinism, each movement drawing strength from its rival.”5 As the tension between these groups heightened with the mineral discoveries and competing claims for political control, each group was increasingly unified in antagonism with the other. As the more recent interlopers and an ascendant world power, the British took the lead in this dynamic. They were confident that their version of nationalism and a unified state could be imposed, even if such a conflictual process would further aggravate divided loyalties.
British military confidence was sorely shaken by what they called the Boer War and Afrikaners called the Second War of Freedom of 1899-1902. Imperial victory was far less easily achieved than had been expected. Britain retained a preponderance of force, putting an astonishing “448,000 men in the field, while the Boers could at no time call upon more than 70,000.”6 But the Afrikaners had the home advantage. They used their knowledge of the land to engage in a guerrilla campaign, waged effectively against a rigidly formal British military. Facing continued losses, Britain shifted its tactics. Victoria and her government were determined. The Queen’s army inflicted “scorched earth” retribution, and sought to deprive its adversaries of domestic support by throwing Afrikaner women and children into concentration camps. As many as 28,000, including also many Africans, perished of famine and disease in those camps. Among the military, more than seven thousand British troops died and twenty thousand were injured. The Afrikaners lost more than four thousand, a remarkably high proportion of their male population.7 A war expected by Britain to be won handily in a few months “proved to be the longest, the costliest, the bloodiest and the most humiliating war for Britain between 1815 and 1914.”8
In May 1902, the leaders of the remaining Afrikaner forces gathered to discuss their prospects in a town that came to be named Vereeniging, meaning “union.” The meeting transcript shows that while they tried to remain positive about the “splendid” Boer morale, the commanders acknowledged that their forces were severely depleted. At best, there remained 15,000 Afrikaner men facing an enemy of a quarter million troops.9 The possibility of negotiating a conditional peace was discussed. Convinced that “gold was the cause of the war,” some argued for an attempt to retain independence by giving to Britain what it wanted, Johannesburg and the mines. But it was too late for such appeasement. The British were judged unlikely to accept the mines, for doing so “would prove to the whole world that they only wanted the Gold Fields.”10 This would contradict the empire’s rhetoric of more noble aims. Instead, the immense British war effort had convinced the commanders that Transvaal Republic president Paul Kruger had been correct in his earlier statement to the British that “it is our country that you want.”11 But to continue fighting, while honorable, seemed also suicidal. General Jan Smuts concluded that “we may not sacrifice the Afrikander [sic] people for independence.”12 Seeing no alternative, the commanders resigned themselves to surrender in the hope of preserving the Afrikaner nation as such, if not political independence.
For their part, the British were eager to end an embarrassingly protracted war and to reap the fruits of military victory. To consolidate their control over all of South Africa, they needed to make peace with the Afrikaners with whom they would have to live. The British high commissioner, Lord Milner, insisted on Afrikaner “capitulation,” akin to that “of Lee at Appomattox.”13 London rejected the use of the word “surrender,” thereby hoping “to heal the breach between the Boers and the British.” The British government was eager to make of the Afrikaners “good British subjects, whom we desire to be loyal, against whom we do not wish to be obliged to keep an enormous garrison at an enormous expense.”14 Young Winston Churchill, a journalist covering the Boer War, agreed with London’s view, employing a more positive American analogy: “I look forward to the day when we can take the Boers by the hand and say as Grant did to the Confederates at Appomattox, ‘go back and plough your fields.’ “15 A unified state could be stabilized and economic development made viable only with such reconciliation of former combatants.
The terms of the final Treaty of Vereeniging demonstrate that the British had decided to forgo harsh retribution. Prosecutions of former adversaries were precluded, Afrikaner war debt was limited, Afrikaners were allowed to retain their arms, and use of “the Dutch language” was to be permitted in those schools “where parents and children desire it.”16 The British were confident that they could afford such magnanimity in victory to appease Afrikaners. In that spirit insisted upon by his superiors, Lord Milner concluded the signing of the treaty by “offering his hand, saying ‘We are good friends now.’ “17
Britain’s extension of friendship to the Afrikaners was a rude shock to the African majority, coloureds, and Asians. These subordinates had taken the British at their word, expecting that a victorious empire would impose its will and implement long-advocated reforms. Hoping to reinforce this prospect, black South Africans had contributed to the British war effort. Despite official commitments by both Britain and the Afrikaners to exclude Africans from a “white man’s war,” both sides did use Africans as scouts, laborers, and servants, with the total so involved numbering up to fifty thousand.18 The larger British force relied heavily on such African support, which was given in return for an expected share in the fruits of victory. Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain himself “promised the British parliament that victory . . . would bring ‘equal laws, equal liberty’ to all, whilst Milner . . . presented discrimination against coloureds as a justification for intervention . . . Not surprisingly, coloureds . . . gave the British cause their enthusiastic support.”19 Africans looked to Britain and her queen as potential saviors, akin to American slaves’ view of the Union and Lincoln. When British troops arrived in Pretoria in 1900, blacks publicly burned their passes, believing that a British victory meant the documents would no longer be required.20 The Afrikaners feared what the Africans hoped for, that “all the Kaffirs which the enemy have on their side”21 implied that a British victory would bring an end to black subordination and labor coercion.
Neither Afrikaner fears nor African expectations regarding “native” policies were substantiated in the final peace treaty ending the Boer War. Despite their own racism, the British ostensibly began the talks with a commitment to make good on the expectations of majority Africans. According to the negotiation transcript, the British draft treaty included the promising statement that “the franchise will not be given to natives until after the introduction of self-government.” But the draft British proposals were edited in the handwriting of Boer Generals Smuts and Hertzog, with this clause struck out by a firm line and replaced with: “The question of the franchise to natives will not be decided until after the introduction of self-government.”22 The British authorities accepted this revision, with no noted objection. British rhetoric that they had waged war on behalf of the coloureds and Africans was revealed as pretense. The crown did not press the matter when it finally had the chance.23 The imperial fist had taken its prize; its hand of liberal upliftment wavered and retreated to the regal posture, clasped behind.
Britain’s compromising away its commitment to the native franchise revealed the overriding nation-state building imperative of the post–Boer War era. “Concessions . . . to Afrikaner sentiment” were expressly intended to placate the defeated adversary, to “denationalize” and incorporate them within a unified white nation.24 The threat of British reforms, which had helped to mobilize and unify the Boers, was officially removed. This policy of conciliation reflected Britain’s assessment that the Afrikaners had proved themselves in war a viable threat to stable rule. Eager to consolidate their hard-won control over all of South Africa and its wealth as “a linchpin of the Empire,” the British sought as their primary goal to make peace with those who could most effectively challenge that control, the Afrikaners.25 Achieving stable imperial rule and development “depended on the help of colonial collaborators, and [the British] believed that ‘in South Africa collaboration had to be with the white communities,’ including the Afrikaners, who constituted the majority among the whites.”26 As Britain’s “Liberal Government was committed to unifying the white races so recently at war,” concessions intended to appease the Afrikaners and to invite their support were consistent with the victor’s objectives.27 To the British, such conciliation toward the Afrikaners appeared liberal.
The imperative for postwar reconciliation was reinforced by the heightened antagonism generated by that war. Heroic resistance against the leading global power had the effect of unifying the Afrikaner nation across regions in their effort to expel English “uitlanders,” or foreigners. The war had been interpreted both as divine intervention – “through this war He wishes to form us into a people” – and as comparable to the American War of Independence (rather than the Civil War analogies favored by the British).28 By the end of the war, the long history of conflict had aggravated a strongly anti-British sentiment. Boer militants encouraged such animosity and Afrikaner solidarity, leaving “the reverberations of menace” to linger on. “Memory of the war, carefully nurtured as it was, did more to unite Afrikanerdom than Kruger had ever succeeded in doing.”29 The violent process by which institutional unity had been won exacerbated white divisions threatening that official unity.
Despite the militant objections of nationalists, among Afrikaner leaders there was considerable postwar receptivity to accepting Britain’s “hand of friendship.” They had been defeated and in the aftermath of war they saw little alternative to finding some modus vivendi for living together with the English and for making the best of the situation. British-educated Jan Smuts took the lead in arguing for such English–Afrikaner collaboration. In his view, these two people’s “fates were bound up together and their welfare would depend on their capacity to co-operate . . . The imperatives [of both] were the same: bury the hatchet; promote the common interest; and build the future on trust and confidence.”30 General Botha joined Smuts in arguing that “white people in this land should be reconciled as “one nation . . . one solid, united and strong race.”31 Britain’s agreement not to insist on the native franchise removed a major irritant that would otherwise have stood in the way of white unity. Of course, popular bitterness remaining from the prior conflict could not be so easily wished away by the strategic logic of elites. But while full-fledged popular reconciliation was not possible, a veneer of reconciliation could be and was constructed, based on British concessions.
The real losers in the peace were the coloureds, the Asians, and the African majority, whose expectations of British-imposed reforms were swept aside by the very terms of the Afrikaners’ surrender. Though historical fact tends to obliterate counterfactual possibilities, this result was not foregone. Lord Balfour had argued for “segregation” of the Afrikaners after the Boer War, even if he did not go on to make the logical extension of arguing for an alliance with the “natives.” In any case, Balfour’s proposal was rejected by the British cabinet, for “the imperial project did not propose to usher in [such] a social revolution, the sentiments of the white community as a whole had to be taken into account.”32
Describing the notion of an English alliance with blacks against Afrikaners as “revolutionary” and as violating “white sentiments” suggests a strong racial undertone to the debate. Certainly the history of earlier discrimination suggests that British and Afrikaner views of white superiority provided a point of commonality on which peace might be built. Britain’s main objective was to take control of a unified South Africa, if need be by placating the Afrikaners. It was not primarily concerned with better treatment for the “natives,” an aim long contradicted by Britain’s own earlier practices. Indeed, the British were quite comfortable with the idea of white supremacy, and embraced such policies accordingly. Racism made an English–African alliance all but unthinkable, and a white alliance seem natural. Past discrimination was brought forward to justify the reinforcement of such a racial order and to diminish intrawhite conflict threatening state and economic consolidation.
That a post–Boer War alliance between English-speakers and Africans remains only as a fabulous historical fantasy further testifies to the strategic assessment that precluded it. Compared to the proven threat of Afrikaner resistance, the British perceived no equally viable threat from the majority. The Zulus had been defeated. Prior experience had demonstrated that “whites were able to exploit the cleavages in African society more successfully than Africans could exploit the cleavages in white society. . . . Africans [had] never created a united front and whites [had been] able to use African allies in every conflict.”33 Coloureds in particular preferred to try “passing for white,” and blacks were forbidden to own arms, further undermining any united threat.34 Believing their own racist rhetoric, the British belittled the prospect of black opposition, and this view was again confirmed by the decisive defeat of the Bambatha revolt by Zulus in 1906. The possibility that such revolts would grow in the future only further encouraged the idea of white unity as the surest way “to safeguard . . . the interests of the Europeans.”35
After the peace treaty, racial prejudice came together with strategic advantage in encouraging an Afrikaner–English alliance and the further exclusion of “natives.” The two policies were connected. Britain could only hope to rule its newly won territory by making peace with those “fellow whites” who had previously resisted and who insisted on the abandonment of Britain’s promises of reform and the franchise. “The price of unity and conciliation was the institutionalization of white supremacy.”36 The former enemies had to be reconciled, and alliance between the whites was achieved at the expense of blacks and coloureds.37 For Britain, breaking promises to blacks seemed a small price to pay for the sake of ensuring Afrikaner loyalty to the empire.38 As Nelson Mandela would later describe these processes, “the white skinned peoples of South Africa patched up their differences and erected a system of racial domination against the dark-skinned peoples of their own land.”39 Often cynical and merely rhetorical prior commitments to liberal reforms were easily scuttled in favor of an alliance with Afrikaners deemed necessary for securing the prize.
This result had been anticipated. Upon his arrival in South Africa as high commissioner in 1897, Lord Milner wrote to Asquith regarding “the two great principles” that should guide his work: (1) the British rulers should seek to “restore the good relations between the Dutch [i.e., Afrikaners] and English,” and (2) they should “secure for the Natives . .. adequate and sufficient protection against oppression.” But Milner went on to note
that object No. 2 is the principal obstacle to the attainment of object No. 1 – is, and always has been . . . I personally could win over the Dutch in the Colony and indeed in all of South African dominions . . . You have only to sacrifice “the nigger” absolutely and the game is easy . . . You have, therefore, this singular situation, that you might indeed unite Dutch and English by protecting the black man, but you would unite them against yourself, and your policy of protection. There is the whole crux of the South African position. . . . [Self-government], fearlessly and unflinchingly applied, would make South Africa as loyal as Canada – but what would be the price? The abandonment of the black races, to whom you have promised protection.40
This dilemma, presciently described before the Boer War, would be unavoidable by 1902. Nor was Milner alone in foreseeing this outcome. Writing in 1900, J. A. Hobson noted that “hitherto the two white races, however they might bicker amongst themselves, readily united to present a single front against the Kaffirs.” Hobson foresaw that the “one inevitable effect of the present war will be to accentuate the race cleavage,” for whites would unite against blacks to make their peace.41
The linkage between the strategic imperative of unifying the former white adversaries and the imposition of racial domination was evident already in the interregnum period between the peace and the formation of the Union of South Africa. Botha and other Afrikaner elites sought to reinforce racial segregation as a means of encouraging white unity and loyalty, much as the peace treaty had abandoned commitments to the native franchise. There was no escaping the “native question.” How to shift “Bantu policy . . . [from] its provincial character and assume a more uniform trend” had become an important matter to be resolved.42 Already in the first two years after the Boer War, “colonies and ex-republics passed legislation compelling Africans to live in segregated compounds and locations.” The lack of a unified state apparatus meant that such facilities had to be funded locally, as with a tax on beer.43 Boer land seized during the war by Africans was forcibly returned to Afrikaner landlords.44 By 1903–5, the South African Native Affairs Commission was discussing “restrictions upon the purchase of land by Natives” and the need to avoid mixing, “or weakening in any way the unchallenged supremacy and authority of the ruling race” of whites. The commission called for replacing “the diverse character of legislation . . . to arrive at uniform principles.”45 Without a formally unified state, it was impossible to coordinate and impose segregation.
In 1906, one of Milner’s aides wrote what became known as the Shelborne memorandum. This text sets out British interests with astonishing clarity, advocating the formalization of a single state based on a union of English and Afrikaners. The division of South Africa among “separate governments” of colonies and defeated republics was decried, not least because these polities did not correspond with the “natural conditions . . . the division of race” unifying whites. Disunion was further decried for the resulting lack of coordination of railway development and fiscal policy, but it was “the native problem” that was most significant. Without a “federal union of some sort,” whites would never be able to defend themselves from the majority. This problem prompted the obvious solution: “a fusion of thought, aim and blood between the British and Boer stock” and “political institutions” that would give expression to such unified “South African nationality” based on “the mutual respect begotten in the course of that arduous struggle” of the war. The memorandum concludes that union “is the only means whereby peace and prosperity can be attained in this country.”46 In subsequent years, Milner’s “kindergarten” of young aides furthered the cause of union by publishing the fittingly titled monthly journal The State, envisioning a unity not yet achieved.
Pressure for union revealed a surprising consensus on this goal, albeit for different reasons. As Donald Denoon explains:
Imperialists . . . hoped that Union would bring prosperity, which would attract sufficient British migrants to swamp Afrikaner nationalism. Anti-imperialists hoped that Union would consolidate Afrikaner control. There was little disagreement over the immediate purposes of unification, and the catch-word “conciliation” served to stifle disputes over the long-term destiny of the region.47
Olive Schreiner and other Cape liberals well understood that such English–Afrikaner reconciliation implied greater racial animosity, domination and exploitation of the majority, drawing a “dark shadow” over the future. They sought to derail the movement to union.48 But the coincidence of imperialist and Afrikaner interests in union was too strong. The train had already left the station with both former warring parties on board. Though Schreiner appealed to British sentiment for defending “the natives,” this sentiment had already been forsaken in the peace treaty.
For Britain, as the victor in a war of imperial conquest, the imperative for consolidating control over its prize was worth much more than any moral commitments to blacks. With the record breaking 3,106-carat Cullinan diamond – given to King Edward VII by Botha in 1907 as proof of his loyalty – glimmering most brilliantly among the crown jewels, Britain yearned to reap the rewards from its richest new colonial possession. To do so, unity would have to be forged with the Afrikaners within a single state, at the price of turning a deaf ear to Schreiner’s prophetic warning. The blood spilt in the Boer War brought the birth of a new state, but not a unified nation. As signaled by the treaty negotiations ending the war, racial domination would be used to encourage such national unity by means of a white-ruled state.
Ethnic Political Competition and Segregation
The conflict between English and Afrikaner would not simply disappear with the end of military belligerence. Appeasing Afrikaner nationalism proved less “easy” than Milner expected. The war would continue by the other means of protracted political competition. And efforts to resolve this ethnic conflict would continue to pursue the logic of 1902. Advocates of unified white “South African nationalism” would consistently fall back on the strategy of prioritizing the racial difference from blacks in order to submerge white ethnic difference. Afrikaner nationalists countered their competitors with calls for stronger racial domination. This ongoing dynamic would consistently result in refinements of segregationist policies.
With the British Parliament’s passing of the Act of Union, in 1910 a single South African state came into existence. The form of that state was influenced both by the British model imported from London and by provision for an increasingly unified state reinforced by imperial power. The prior conflict had left little tolerance for a slow evolution of central state power, which might have encouraged even further conflict. The American model of federalism was also explicitly rejected as having “caused one of the greatest civil wars in history";49 South Africa had arguably just experienced a comparable watershed conflict and under British rule rather than federal union sought a political system that would avoid exacerbating tensions.50 Instead, the South African state emerged almost fall-blown on the imperial half-shell, as a “unitary state with parliamentary sovereignty. .. . The central government was legally supreme over all local institutions. Moreover, powers were not divided within the center.”51 As it would elsewhere in Africa, British colonialism forged a strong and unified state, assuming that such centralization of power would limit future conflict. This assumption would be proved fatally wrong, but in the meantime British interests were served.
The linkage between creating a strongly centralized state and forging Afrikaner–English unity on the basis of racial domination quickly became further evident with the formal extension of segregation. In accord with the findings of the South African Native Affairs Committee, land ownership was to be divided by “tribe” in order to reinforce divisions of blacks and thereby more easily suppress them.52 The 1913 Native Land Act, limiting African residence to 7.3 percent of the land “reserved” for that purpose, reassured Afrikaners of the state’s commitment to racial domination. This act thereby sought to unify whites, countering nascent support for Afrikaner nationalists under former General Hertzog.53
Franchise issues were addressed with somewhat greater cognizance of regional differences, with formal rules established by each province within a national framework.54 But Afrikaner leaders insisted that the more liberal Cape franchise not be extended to the now-unified country, for to do so would “enable [natives] to out-vote Europeans . .. an intolerable situation.”55 Instead, Cape liberalism would be brought more into line with the other provinces. Franchise restrictions in the Cape resulted in the 23 percent white population there having 85 percent of the vote by 1909.56
Racial domination not only encouraged white unity, thus allowing for state consolidation, but also reflected the pressures of dominant economic interests. Milner’s objectives of postwar reconstruction under a unified state “depended on getting the gold mines back into fall, profitable production.”57 Mining for abundant but low-grade ore, providing the engine of early development, required plentiful cheap labor, as would later industrial production.58 Farmers also required cheap black labor. But self-sufficient Africans were officially decried for having an “absence of incentive to labor.”59 Before the war the British had begun to force such labor at low wages, but during the war they had been reluctant to proceed, fearing that doing so would have discouraged black support for the British cause. After the war and union, this threat dissolved, validating Hobson’s prediction that “the first fruits of victory [in the Boer War] will be represented in a large, cheap, submissive supply of black and white labor.”60
British capital’s efforts to provoke the Boer War, forcing unification of the country, paid off handsomely. The newly founded South African state moved to reinforce earlier practices of racial domination and to encode uniform policies of labor control not previously possible. Poll or hut taxes, and the Native Lands Act of 1913 restricting the purchase of land by “natives,” forced Africans off land where they could be self-sufficient, ensuring a large supply of cheap labor and avoiding the need to grant higher wage incentives to black labor, an option officially described as “out of place.”61 State policies serving the interests of capital transformed Africans into a proletariat, with labor-coercive policies specified by race helping to fuel economic expansion and state growth. It was certainly in the state’s interest to bolster growth, suggesting a “pervasive convergence of interest between and within the state and capital.”62 White workers’ interests were also served, for instance with a comprehensive “color bar” established in 1911 to ensure that forced black entry into the labor market would not displace those whites who were already advantaged by their skills. Such segregation and official job discrimination further reduced the price of labor by limiting blacks’ options, and divided the working class into racial groups, diminishing its potential bargaining power. A trend of strong state intervention for economic gain was firmly established, with the imperial hand vigorously burnishing its new jewel.
Economic growth apparently reaffirmed English cultural chauvinism, asserted as “British race patriotism.”63 Despite formal commitments to the contrary, Lord Milner did not give up his interest in anglicizing South Africa, encouraging British immigration and countenancing the formation of Sons of England clubs. As early as 1903, school instruction in Afrikaans was limited to only three hours weekly.64 But these efforts backfired, for instance with Afrikaners forming their own separate schools. Afrikaner nationalism grew, with the intrawhite tension of the war continuing after formal hostilities ceased. Ironically, had the British not tried to impose their cultural superiority, Afrikaners might have been assimilated and shifted to using English as the language of economic opportunity. But local British officials were not so patient, with unforeseen consequences. “To attempt to denationalize a people, and to fail, is to produce the very opposite result intended.”65
Afrikaner nationalism found expression in the newly established political institution of the unified state. As a majority of whites, Afrikaners recognized their prospect of electoral control after the Boer War. The institutional resources of the centralized state could then be used to secure Afrikaner interests and defend Afrikaner culture. Confident in their own control over industry and finance, the English effectively ceded the political realm to the Afrikaners. In 1910, after a bitter election pitting Afrikaner against English, a former military leader of the defeated Afrikaner republics, Louis Botha, was elected prime minister, succeeded upon his death in 1919 by his ally, Jan Smuts.
The 1910 election outcome was ironic. Before the war, the Afrikaners had been disunited, protecting their interests by retreating into separate republics. The British had forced the Afrikaners together in a newly unified state, and then watched as that state became ruled by leaders of the defeated, who would use state power to further enforce segregation. Britain’s victory had delivered to the Afrikaners what they had alone been unable to accomplish; it was as if a Southerner had been elected president of the United States after the Civil War and imposed Jim Crow nationally.
Botha’s and Smuts’s election did not signal triumphant Afrikaner nationalism, but the rise of realistic politicians who had accepted defeat and quickly turned to advocating reconciliation and the end of animosity between English-speaker and Afrikaner. Botha and Smuts sought to finesse the tension between white unity and Afrikaner nationalism, arguing that white “national unity is entirely consistent with the preservation of our language, our traditions, our cultural interests.”66
Their rhetoric underplayed the extent to which Botha and Smuts sought to appease the British. In the eyes of many of their fellow Afrikaners, they “defected to the imperialist cause.”67 Smuts in particular was attacked by his fellow Boers for his support of English-language education in the schools and for his resistance to efforts at maintaining a separate Afrikaans culture. In the First World War Botha and Smuts sided with Britain against the Germans, who had supported the Afrikaners in the Boer War, provoking a small rebellion by more militant Afrikaners. Smuts was rewarded with the epithet of “handyman of the empire.”68 Nonetheless, he retained significant popularity as a hero of the Boer War, and thereby provided the British with the perfect vehicle for enacting their policies with impunity, appeasing the Afrikaners and unifying whites while pursuing imperial interest.
Sentimental attachment for former Boer commanders was not the only glue maintaining white unity in the early years of state building. The further enactment of racial domination served the same purpose, in accordance with the post–Boer War reasoning. Smuts generally preferred to leave the elaboration of race relations for the future, but when the issue could not be put off, he consistently upheld racial domination, on which Afrikaners and English could agree and unify. By 1917, Smuts was publicly committed to the exclusion of “non whites” from “common citizenship” and the armed forces, and to “keeping [blacks] apart as much as possible in our institutions.”69 Color bars were established on the mines and elsewhere. Influx control, limiting African urbanization, was proposed in 1922, followed the next year by the creation of separate Native Urban Areas.70 This racial exclusion consolidated white support during the formative years of union, and received the blessing of the British Empire.
Changing geopolitical and economic conditions nevertheless destabilized the compromise arrangement of the South African Party government under Botha and then Smuts. During the First World War, when many English workers went off to fight, the proportion of Afrikaners working in the mines increased. When gold profits later fell amid postwar inflation and a fall in the price of gold, the mining houses became eager to displace some of these whites with lower-paid blacks.71 But the color bar protected white workers and thereby effectively restricted the minimization of labor costs. The Chamber of Mines consortium proposed to reduce the number of reserved jobs and to substitute “about 2000 semi-skilled whites by lower paid blacks.”72 White workers went on strike, provoking Smuts to use force to quell what had escalated into the Rand revolt. In March 1922, Smuts called in 7,000 troops and his air force, resulting in four days of conflict leaving up to 220 dead.
Defeated by force, Afrikaner workers sought to protect their interests by turning to political mobilization, fanning ethnic animosity against Smuts’s policies. Having remained loyal to Smuts and his efforts at white unity, the Afrikaner majority now turned against him. Smuts had demonstrated that he favored the English mining capital’s interests over the interests of Afrikaner workers. Unity was one thing; shooting Afrikaners was another. Though recent scholarship has questioned the direct causality, the Rand revolt did strengthen a 1924 alliance led by Barry Hertzog’s Afrikaner Nationalists, which defeated Smuts in that year’s election.73 The reforms pursued by English capital had led to a reassertion of Afrikaner nationalism, which would push the state to act in favor of Afrikaner workers and against the interests of capital. As soon as the English and their Afrikaner allies had wavered from the post–Boer War “deal” of racial domination to unite whites, they found themselves pushed aside.
If the elections of Afrikaner Generals Botha and then Smuts were surprising in light of Britain’s Boer War victory, then the 1924 election of the more militant Hertzog was all the more so. But Britain’s ultimate commitment to democracy and unity among whites was steadfast, even to the point of empowering an Afrikaner nationalist. The British perhaps hoped that this outcome would itself again appease Afrikaners and promote white unity. Restoring that intrawhite peace was now seen to be more important than meeting the immediate demands of capital, for the Rand revolt had demonstrated that Afrikaner nationalism could still threaten stability and state unity, on which all profits depended. The newly forged, increasingly strong central state changed hands.
Trained in Holland rather than Britain, Hertzog had pragmatically agreed to union after the Boer War and argued that “all who gave their unconditional loyalty to South Africa were Afrikaners,” even English.74 But by 1912 his dismay at Botha’s accommodation had grown, and his defense of Afrikaner cultural distinctiveness forced his resignation from Botha’s cabinet. Thereafter, Hertzog argued for a “two stream” approach to white unity, with the Afrikaner and English peoples remaining distinct even as they flowed along parallel courses.75 In particular, Hertzog pursued his advocacy of Afrikaans instruction to electoral advantage, “using language to throw his net very wide.”76 He delivered on his promise in 1925 by making Afrikaans an official language of the state.
Hertzog was eager to protect the interests of those who had elected him in the wake of the 1922 revolt. By then more than 30 percent of Afrikaner families were known as “poor whites,” whose position was further eroded during the Depression.77 The state-owned Iron and Steel Corporation and other growing state functions employed a high proportion of whites. The Afrikaner-dominated agriculture sector was also subsidized by the state.78 With these practical policies of state support for poorer Afrikaners, together with his “two streams” rhetoric, Hertzog “played the nationalist banjo strongly.”79
While Smuts had used racial segregation to unify whites, Hertzog pursued such policies even further for the alternative purpose of appealing to distinct Afrikaner nationalism and tradition. Smuts’s racial policies were decried by Hertzog as overly liberal, and as not providing a “definite native policy” clarifying that South Africa was to be governed by the whites. Smuts himself was condemned by many Afrikaners as “a Kaffir lover.”80 The industrial color bar reserving certain jobs for whites, which Smuts had attempted to relax at his electoral peril, was reinforced in 1926. Unionization among blacks was banned, preventing blacks from gaining the bargaining power to raise their own wages and to compete more effectively.81 The Native Land Bill called for the further separation of African reserves, helping to solve a crisis in agriculture by reinforcing farmers’ control over black labor.82 By 1929, Hertzog was using rhetorical warnings of a swart gevaar (black peril) to consolidate his electoral block.
Racial domination used earlier as the basis for encouraging white unity was pursued even further by an Afrikaner nationalist government. Hertzog used segregation to consolidate the Afrikaner voting majority and to distance it from English liberalism. Afrikaner nationalism sought to trump the competing tendency for white unity by even further developing the racial domination seen as advantageous by both camps.
These developments reveal the extent to which countertendencies within white politics ironically reinforced racial domination for opposing reasons. As useful as racial domination proved to be as a strategy for encouraging white unity and state building, English and Afrikaner tensions still did not disappear. Afrikaner nationalists remained suspicious of English liberalism and pushed for further segregation to protect Afrikaner interests and to prevent any return to English reforms. To counter this tendency, the English and their Afrikaner allies would advocate greater segregation to reassure and win over Afrikaner rank and file. In this way, Afrikaner nationalism reinforced the impetus for white unity via racial domination. The dynamic of intrawhite tension appeased by segregation continued to operate. Ongoing party competition among whites suggests that reconciliation was not achieved, but remained a goal requiring continued effort. No single, seamlessly functional agreement was reached. Instead, the pact of white unity and black domination was continually reforged, with party competition reflecting divided allegiance within a unified state.
While party competition provides an intervening explanation of deepening racial domination, it also kept intact the polity over which parties vied. For much of South Africa’s first half century, official race policies continued to be driven by the competing tendencies either for white unity reinforced by racial exclusion or for distinct Afrikaner nationalism incorporating its own impetus for such exclusion. Both camps saw their interests as potentially being met within the polity. Whichever tendency proved predominant during a specific historical period, black South Africans suffered under tightening white rule.
By the 1930s, the two competing tendencies of white politics briefly converged. State intervention had effectively bolstered the relative economic standing and culture of Afrikaners. Hertzog concluded that “the two streams” could now flow together in a “spirit of complete equality between white men” and primary loyalty for South Africa.83 Accordingly, in 1934 Smuts’s South African Party and Hertzog’s Nationalists fused into the United Party. As both had pursued policies of racial domination, this commonality helped to cement their merger. Hertzog and Smuts agreed that “to build up a white nation in South Africa it was essential that the principle of differentiation shall be the principle of native policy.”84 This principle justified the further exclusion of coloureds and Africans, including the separation of African voters in 1936, residential segregation applied to coloureds for the first time, and enactment of the Coloured Advisory Council’s recommendations for the extension of a South African version of Jim Crow. Again, white unity was reinforced by racial domination. And that unity was perceived as then strong enough on its own to no longer require a special dispensation and alliance with coloureds.
As it had during the First World War, geopolitics again intruded on South Africa during the Second World War. Resulting tensions tore apart the alliance of the United Party. Smuts forced through a declaration of war to support Britain, overriding Hertzog’s objections. In protest, Hertzog resigned from the government. While some Afrikaners supported the war effort, many did not, refusing to support British imperialism and preferring their former German allies from the Boer War.
The war exacerbated domestic ethnic tensions. The use of black service troops, though unarmed, was decried by racists. The anti-Nazi, antiracism rhetoric of the Allies’ Atlantic Charter raised both blacks’ expectations of reform and Afrikaner resentment at such intrusive moralism.85 Many Afrikaners saw support of Britain as inconsistent with racial domination, against which the war was ostensibly being waged against Germany. On the home front, white workers gone to fight were replaced by blacks, with the prospects of such employment helping to create a 47 percent increase in the urban black population. Influx control effectively collapsed.86 Afrikaner resentment grew and Afrikaner nationalism surged.
The resurgence of Afrikaner nationalism during the 1940s was not only the result of resentment at being dragged into “Britain’s war.” Suspicion of the English had lurked despite political alliances. There was a sense that “the Afrikaner was being exploited and his culture undermined. . . . Exclusive English clubs were closed to Afrikaners, mirroring the exclusiveness of high society in Britain.”87 Hardship during the Depression years exacerbated such resentment, which found combustible material among an increasingly urbanized poor Afrikaner population. This antipathy was reinforced by “fear of the English using non-white votes to strengthen their position.” United Party reforms of the color bar and increased African education fed concern among Afrikaners that the English intended to abandon the post–Boer War deal of white unity via segregation.88 Such fears were heightened further by the unprecedented 1946 strike by 70,000 African miners, who expected Britain’s war victory to result in better wages and treatment.89 The perceived threat of being swamped by blacks fused with resentment at English cultural domination, inflaming Afrikaner nationalism.
Afrikaner nationalism had for decades been purposefully reconstructed and reinforced by militants. The leading vehicle for this project was the Broederbond, an originally secret society of Afrikaners founded in 1918 under the leadership of a then obscure D. F. Malan, among others. Dedicated to “the ideal of the eternal existence of a separate Afrikaner nation with its own language and culture,” the Bond encouraged its large membership of teachers to advocate this ideal in the classroom and elsewhere.90 But the Bond initially sought some moderation, seeking to incorporate or “Afrikanerize” the English within a single white nation and to avoid partisan political disputes that undermined “unity among the Afrikaners.”91
After his alliance with Smuts, Hertzog rejected the Bond in 1935 as “a serious threat to the peace and order of the Union.” The Bond subsequently took a more strident position. They turned to “obtaining and retaining political and economic power, especially political power, out of which would come economic.”92 Efforts to encourage volkskapitalisme continued, complemented by explicit acts of volk political mobilization. In 1938, the Broederbond celebrated the centennial of the Great Trek by sending replica ox wagons throughout the country, evoking an outpouring of Afrikaner nationalism among the rank and file. Anglo traditions were denied, for instance when the Afrikaans press purposefully ignored the royal visit of 1947.93 And as early as 1935, the Bond advocated apartheid as a reinforcement of segregation, thereby seeking to trump again the United Party’s policies and to identify racial domination with Afrikaner nationalism rather than with white unity.94
Within party politics, the Broederbond’s Afrikaner nationalism was represented by the National Party. The party leader, D. F. Malan, provided an interlock with the Broederbond. Malan had earlier advocated a liberal form of nationalism according to which Afrikaners remained distinct but cooperative with the English. But Malan had moved to the right. In 1935 his National Party became the official opposition. Thereafter, the National Party firmly advocated ethnic solidarity, projecting themselves as “pro-Afrikaner, hostile even to the English.”95 The project of racial domination was not abandoned, but again redirected in its strategic purpose to reinforcing distinct Afrikaner solidarity. Historical resentment over English liberalism was reignited. Mindful of political advantage, the National Party combined Afrikaners’ fears of the black majority with fears that the English would reverse their policies of segregation and embrace the majority. Some British-descendant South Africans shared this fear, and joined in supporting the National Party as a bulwark against “the torrent of blackness . .. and liberalism which a ’sickly West’ had unloosed upon the world.”96 They agreed with many Afrikaners that the English–Afrikaner white unity via racial domination established after the Boer War could no longer be counted on. Preserving “European racial survival” could only be entrusted to the Afrikaner majority among whites, with their greater historical commitment to segregation.97
From 1910 to 1948, Afrikaner nationalists and an Afrikaner–English alliance advocating white unity had vied for power. This divide built upon earlier ethnic conflict, exacerbated by disputes over the treatment of Africans despite common assumptions of white supremacy. Political parties competed with each other for state power, with ethnic nationalists defending Afrikaner workers and a cross-ethnic alliance using race to unify whites. Their joint agreement on the use of central state power for such racial domination left them trying to outdo each other in segregation. This commonality kept the polity intact and the competition contained. Indeed, this party competition replicated and replayed the original deal of building the nation-state with racial domination. Only at mid-century did Afrikaner nationalists emerge victorious.
Apartheid and Greater White Unity
The post–Second World War realignment of white South African politics was consolidated with the unexpected victory in 1948 of the National Party. Malan became prime minister. Two generations of party competition culminated with the 1948 electoral victory of the Afrikaner nationalists. The symbolism of this victory was reinforced with the dramatic construction of the Voortrekkers’ Monument in Pretoria, wherein was inscribed (in Afrikaans) “We for Thee, South Africa.” One Afrikaner in six attended the official dedication in 1949.98 However, the party’s victory had been narrow and Malan sought further consolidation and English support. Long-standing demands for a republic free of links to the United Kingdom were soft-pedaled. More extremist Afrikaner nationalists were initially excluded from the government. 99 Nor was the new government willing to risk interupting tremendous economic growth. Between 1912 and 1952, with manufacturing’s contribution to national income growing from 6.9 percent to 23.6 percent and mining down from 27.6 percent to 13.2 percent, real national income grew threefold.100 With concomitantly increased revenues, the state grew apace, further empowering the Afrikaners who came to control it, but also raising concerns about any state efforts that might interrupt growth. But the constrained form of Afrikaner nationalism designed to appease English capital would not last; Malan and his brief-termed successor Johannes Strydom became transitional figures in a shift to strident Afrikaner ethnic domination.
Malan and Strydom did use the state to reinforce racial domination, de-linked from Anglo-Boer unity. The National Party’s policy of apartheid envisioned eventually dividing the country into two states of blacks and whites. But Malan concluded that “for the foreseeable future, however, this is simply not practical.”101 Accordingly, plans for the establishment of viable separate black “homelands” proposed by the Tomlinson Commission were postponed because of the associated expense.102 But the goal of total separation did inform policy measures that made significant strides toward that ideal. The 1950 Population Registration Act set the foundation for apartheid by establishing distinct racial categorization of the population according to subjective interpretations of reputation and “appearance.”103 Complementary acts forbade cross-racial marriage or sex, ignoring past Afrikaner indulgence. The Group Areas Act of the same year reinforced residential segregation, the pass system was “rationalized” in 1952, and in 1953 the Bantu Education and the Reservation of Separate Amenities Acts divided schools and most public facilities accordingly. Even the potential alliance with coloureds, formerly embraced by Afrikaner nationalists, was abandoned as inconsistent with racial domination. As most coloureds had supported the United Party, the Nationalists paid little cost in 1956 in depriving the coloureds of direct representation. They were placed on a separate voters’ roll.
The linkage between racial domination and Afrikaner nationalism reached its apogee with the government of H. F. Verwoerd in 1958–65. Born in the Netherlands, Verwoerd embraced Afrikanerdom with the enthusiasm of the converted. In his view, the National Party represented “not an ordinary party. It is a nation on the move,” in which the English could be absorbed only if they gave primacy to South Africa over the empire. Even the nation’s key symbols had to conform to Afrikaner nationalism, with the remaining official status of the Union Jack and “God Save the Queen” already abandoned in 1957.104 And once British influence had been curtailed by electoral victory and symbolic adjustment, Verwoerd focused on “the black threat.” He saw swaart gevaar as more pressing than any remaining threat posed by the outvoted English, and more useful for mobilizing Afrikaner support. To address this issue systematically, Verwoerd dedicated all of his skills with the zeal of an ideological purist, expanding on the plans he had developed as minister of native affairs in the Malan government. According to Afrikaner nationalist stalwart Jaap Marais, “previously segregation was very loosely applied, fragmented, but Verwoerd forged this into a completely unified philosophy.”105 Total segregation, earlier advanced as an ideal but impractical form of social engineering, was pursued to its extreme.
The keystone to the policy of “separate development” was the idea of creating self-governing black “homelands,” or bantustans, and formally excluding Africans from South African citizenship. Earlier concerns about the carrying capacity of overpopulated land and related costs were brushed aside.106 From these homelands black labor could be selectively drawn without threatening white rule and interests. Business objected to the loss of black markets and argued that such protostates placed black labor out of reach. These objections were rebuffed, with the homelands purportedly intended to protect blacks from English capital’s “exploitative propensities.. . . Verwoerd was perfectly willing to act against the interests of capitalists when he thought it in the larger interests of the nation.”107 In the process, Verwoerd expected to make allies of those black leaders who would benefit from state support for the bantustans. To implement this policy, the Transkei became the first “self-governing” homeland in 1963, with others following. Even the coloured community was subjected to the same logic of geographic separation. The Western Cape was reserved for whites and coloureds; over 20,000 Africans were forcibly removed from the region by 1961.108
Africans and coloureds did not appreciate Verwoerd’s “largesse.” When their protest erupted into violence in 1960, Verwoerd moved quickly to impose harsh repression, banning the major anti-apartheid organizations and forcing them into exile. Even they would be forced into formally “separate development” outside of South Africa.
The same logic of “separate development” was applied to whites. Even Verwoerd initially hesitated to fulfill the long-standing Afrikaner nationalist goal of declaring South Africa a republic outside the Commonwealth, thereby risking further antagonization of English speakers. But Britain itself provided a useful provocation. In February 1960, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan came to Cape Town, and citing “the wind of change [that] is blowing through the continent,” acknowledged emerging African nationalism.109 Verwoerd shrewdly grabbed Macmillan’s logic, arguing that South African whites’ own nationalism justified their formal independence from an empire that no longer desired an association. Verwoerd also used the image of a Communist threat to unify whites against the Soviet backed African National Congress.
South Africa’s departure from the Commonwealth marked another turning point in white politics. Verwoerd argued that Britain’s liberalism left English speakers fearing black rule with little alternative but to abandon imperial loyalties and to rally round. Sensing such “new possibilities . . . the National Party became less focused on Afrikanerdom.” Verwoerd shifted his rhetoric from Afrikaner nationalism to “white republicanism.” To encourage white unity and a return to a fusion of Europeans “culturally and racially alien” to Bantus, he even hailed his former nemesis, Jan Smuts.110 Earlier references to the Afrikaner volk shifted so as to include all South African whites in a common volk. “The wheel had come full circle,” with Verwoerd sensing that Afrikaner nationalism had been sufficiently consolidated to allow for an extension of nationalism to include all whites.111
Much as Hertzog had prematurely concluded that the “two streams” of white South Africa could flow together, Verwoerd believed that the time was ripe for the same confluence. The gambit paid off, with English-speaker joining Afrikaner in supporting the 1961 formation of the Republic of South Africa. Verwoerd sought to strengthen English and Afrikaner support for the republic even further after 1961 by turning again to the well-rehearsed technique of heightening racial domination in order to unify a white nation. As the Tomlinson Commission had argued, “the creation of the European population” rested on “racial grounds,” reinforced by discrimination and segregation.112 This strategy appealed to Verwoerd’s racist vision and to the popular white ideology of superiority. Ironically, achievement of the long-held Afrikaner goal of a separate republic now allowed for a relaxation of Afrikaner separatism.
By this circuitous route, South Africa emerged in the mid-1960s as a strong state and more unified white nation enriched by a booming economy. The state promoted both Afrikaner interests and white unity via a highly elaborated form of racial domination. All that Milner had foreseen had been achieved, except for British domination. All that the Afrikaner nationalists had sought had been won, despite earlier defeat. They had gained control of the state and built Afrikaner capital. State intervention to uphold racial domination also bolstered Afrikaner workers, ensuring their support. By 1969, white gold mine workers made on average twenty times the earnings of blacks, and in 1972 the average wage for all whites was close to seven times higher than for blacks.113 A strong state imposing labor controls was able to override the rhetorical objections of “liberal” business. Leading industrialist Harry Oppenheimer decried Verwoerd as “a man prepared to slow down his nation’s welfare on account of political theories. [We] are dealing with an impractical fanatic.”114 But such fanaticism further enriched Oppenheimer and his associates.
Not only did white workers benefit from the effects of apartheid’s restraints on black advancement and wage differentials in the private sector. They also directly benefited from employment in the growing state apparatus enforcing these rules. According to Stephen Lewis, “the objective of South African governments since the 1920s, especially since the National Party came to power, has been to [advance] the class of poor whites.”115 State employment was the most direct way to address this problem. By 1972, “fully 43 percent of the white labor force was employed by the state sector,” exploding in size to administer apartheid.116 Loyalty was encouraged, if not directly bought, by such intervention. A more complete coincidence of white worker interests and state policies of racial domination is difficult to imagine. And state growth also served to unify whites by providing protection from the potential “black threat.” The number of whites employed by the police and military grew rapidly. Thus, state growth served the multiple functions of developing the economy, promoting the cause of Afrikanerdom, encouraging white unity, and providing security from the excluded majority. The elaborately “impractical” construction of apartheid proved highly effective for nation-state building among whites.
Still, the impracticality of Verwoerd’s apartheid could not be wished away by ideological vehemence. Even before the shock of disruptive protest and sanctions, the economic viability, if not the morality, of racial domination was subject to question. According to later Broederbond chairman P. J. de Lange, who by 1994 was inclined to be retrospectively realistic,
the Broederbond warned against economic problems by the late fifties. We could not create a sufficiently large economy with the talent and resources of only four million out of twenty-five million. . . . [For instance,] work reservation was a mad policy. How do you build enough houses with white hands on the trowel and blacks only mixing the concrete? Influx control almost created a Broederbond revolt, in that it destroyed black family life. The Broederbond, being strongly Protestant, put a strong value on family life. In the early sixties, there was an argument within the Broederbond that the moral basis of apartheid was highly questionable.117
Even if this assessment overstates Afrikaner concern about apartheid, as is likely, it does suggest some early criticism and disquiet. Afrikaners had always been conscious of themselves as a minority within South Africa, as indicated by their various efforts to find allies among English-speakers, or coloureds. Even at the height of their dominance in the 1960s, Afrikaners were concerned about their own potential isolation, reaching out for allies among English capital even as they were vilifying “Hoggenheimer” capitalists for electoral advantage.118 The National Party continually faced the challenge of how to maintain apartheid and Afrikaner dominance while seeking to make alliances seemingly inconsistent with these policies.
This challenge remained after Verwoerd was assassinated in 1966 by a crazed white messenger. B. J. Vorster, an Afrikaner nationalist who had been imprisoned for opposing South Africa’s alliance with Britain during the Second World War, became prime minister. Nonetheless, Vorster now set out to win English support. By 1977, official publications noted that “Afrikaner nationalism has gradually broadened into a more comprehensive white South African nationalism. . .. Between those of British stock and their Afrikaner compatriots there has been a growing comradeship, a new identity of purpose.”119 While such white unity continued to be tied to racial domination, this linkage did not prevent Vorster from attempting also to find “nonwhite” allies, even as he reinforced apartheid. Embracing coloureds as part of the nation if not of the volk, Vorster’s Theron Commission “made it clear that the present political solution cannot continue.” Theron proposed the reinstatement of coloured voting, and in 1977 Vorster proposed a newly inclusive constitution.120 But the contradiction with apartheid was too great, and these recommendations were not enacted, bitterly disappointing expectant coloureds. Vorster’s failure to consolidate broader support was well demonstrated by the violent protests of the Soweto uprising during 1976 and 1977. A year later he fell from power amid a scandal over secret government funding of the media.
Vorster’s fall did not disrupt National Party dominance, but brought to power P. W. Botha, an early advocate of apartheid and former minister of defense. In the wake of the 1976 revolt Botha committed his government to a combination of reluctant liberalization, an increasing centralization of power, and reinforced security.121 Black protest had to be appeased or contained, given the economy’s dependence on black labor. In 1978 Botha dramatically declared that South Africa must “adapt or die,” and in 1979 one of his ministers, Piet Koornhof, declared that “apartheid is dead.”122 But eager not to lose his electoral base, Botha hedged on reforms. He simultaneously enacted a “total strategy” of heightened security. Citing the threat from black protest backed by international Communism, Botha exploited fear of a “total onslaught” to justify “the biggest use of state funding for the military.”123
Botha’s rhetoric of threat and bluster tended to overshadow his reforms. These were nevertheless dramatic, even if they left the underlying structure of apartheid intact. Education expenditures and other policies encouraged the growth of a small African middle class needed for skilled labor and intended as a form of “labor aristocracy” with an interest in stability. Botha’s Wiehahn Commission proposed legalizing black unionization, assuming that registering “black trade unions as bargaining partners” would encourage orderly unionism.124 In addition, Botha granted township residents ninety-nine-year leases in 1978, introduced a pilot program of compulsory education for African children in 1981, abolished most job color bars by 1983, and ended restrictions on Africans living in the Western Cape and university segregation in 1984. In 1985 he promised freehold rights and pledged to end both “forced removals” and bars on mixed marriages or miscegenation; in 1986 he repealed pass laws and allowed for the opening of central business districts.
Further reforms were discussed in cabinet. Gerrit Viljoen, then a minister, claims that by 1985 he had embraced the earlier findings of the Riekert Commission and “persuaded P.W. Botha to stop influx control and to cancel coloured labor priority in the Western Cape. [These policies] did not work and could not. They required martial law, injustice and enforced poverty and were inconsistent with economic development.”125 Botha himself claimed to have rejected “the antiquated, simplistic and racist approach.. . . This country is a multicultural society – a country of minorities. .. . The present system [of influx control] is outdated and too costly.... A solution will have to be found for [urbanized blacks’] legitimate rights.”126 He retained the homelands and official ethnic distinctions among blacks as a means of diluting the threat of African majority rule. His expectation was that a minority coalition government might emerge in which white power would be maintained.
The single most dramatic reform taken by Botha was his 1983 proposal for a new “tricameral” parliament, providing a separate chamber not only for whites, but also one for coloureds and one for Asians. Botha’s proposal can be seen as an attempt “to phase out the polarity [of nonwhites opposed to whites]. He needed coloureds and Asians as part of the total strategy, and even Africans, if he could figure out which to trust.”127 Having been courted in a series of meetings with government beginning in 1979, English-dominated big business largely supported Botha’s reforms. Two-thirds of whites, Afrikaner and English, voted in favor of the new constitution.128
Despite white support, the tricameral parliament did not produce the desired result among blacks. With Africans still excluded, the new constitution served to unify opposition within the newly formed United Democratic Front. Leaders of the Front voiced their skepticism that “you cannot expect Botha, who came to power on the apartheid ticket, to be the very person who dismantles apartheid.”129 Botha’s reforms were described as “trying to find the secret of sharing power without losing control.”130 Bishop Desmond Tutu wrote to Botha, lamenting that eight years had been “wasted trying to beautify apartheid.”131 Such opposition and the protest it engendered demonstrated that Botha’s efforts at appeasement had the reverse effect.
Rising popular protest was seen by Botha as rude ingratitude for his reforms, provoking him to swing toward the opposite pole of his ambivalent agenda. A 1985 speech demonstrated this reversal, for after claiming to have embraced reform, Botha concluded that “I am not prepared to lead white South Africans and other minority groups on a road of abdication and suicide.”132 Evoking Julius Caesar’s return to Rome to crush insurrection, Botha claimed to have “crossed the Rubicon.” That same year, Botha declared a state of emergency, which was interpreted by the black opposition as “an admission of defeat” for his purported reforms.133 Oliver Tambo of the African National Congress (ANC) declared from exile that Botha had been “revealed as a military dictator, not a reformer.”134 But while the opposition decried his repression, whites rallied around Botha as their protector. His dramatic electoral victory by a two-thirds margin in 1987 led Botha to abandon fully the idea of sharing power with blacks. But still his ambivalence remained, for Botha continued to seek credit both for his use of repression to protect whites and for his reforms. As late as 1988, he still claimed that his “government has gone far to serve people, broaden democracy, remove hurtful and discriminatory legislation and social practices, provide for needs of all.”135 The regime appeared stuck between its two opposing aims.
By the late 1980s, mass protests had revived and reconfigured old splits among whites divided over how to restore stability. Afrikaners themselves divided between hard-liners advocating repression and soft-liners allied with English-speaking liberals pushing for further reforms. The “civil religion” of Afrikaner nationalism no longer united the volk, and by 1988, half claimed to have abandoned their support for “grand apartheid,” favoring even more fundamental reforms of minority rule.136 The Broederbond sided with these reformers, with its chairman beginning to “speak more publicly [that] Afrikaner interests could not be promoted alone, for instance the vote needs to be extended to all,” ostensibly raising the possibility of a black president.137 But at the same time, one-third of the white electorate voted for representatives opposed to reform.138 Seeking electoral advantage among these hard-liners, Andries Treurnicht argued against any “blurring of the Afrikaner consciousness into a kind of white unity.” The right countered the Broederbond’s reformism, provoking massive resignations by right-wing Broeders already during the 1970s.139 In 1982, Treurnicht had formed the Conservative Party, gaining support from poorer Afrikaners and those who saw Botha as being the tool of the liberals.140 Twenty-one members of Parliament abandoned the National Party to join the Conservative opposition.141
The white political block appeared to splinter: where once it had united, the maintenance of racial domination now divided. Afrikaners were again split along lines similar to those that had divided the United or South African Party. The National Party had repositioned itself on the reformist side of the divide despite its use of repression. It sought an alliance with English-speakers and claimed to represent all whites, maintaining the basic structures of racial domination even as it pursued reforms. The ambivalence of this agenda created divisions within the Afrikaner community. The ANC and other opponents of the regime did not agree with the conservatives in seeing Botha as a liberal, but they did find encouragement in the division within the ruling elite.142
But what appeared as a splintering of whites over the future of apartheid was actually also a fundamental realignment of white unity even more advantageous to the ANC and its allies. As the National Party shifted toward reform, it lost some Afrikaners but gained many English. In 1981, 85 percent of Afrikaners supported the National Party as compared to 20 percent of English. Eight years later, Afrikaner support for the Nationalists had fallen to 46 percent, demonstrating the new split. But English support had risen to 60 percent, creating a new coalition of white support for the Nationalists as they moved toward reform.143 English capital was increasingly “going with the state while wringing their hands” over support of their former adversaries.144 Whereas whites had earlier attempted unity on the basis of racial domination, they now moved toward unity for reform of the same policies. In 1986, 55 percent of Afrikaners and 82 percent of English supported the pace of reforms or an even faster pace, with the National Party enjoying a “voter base now almost equally English and Afrikaner.”145 By 1992, “a surprising 68.7 percent of South Africa’s whites,” Afrikaner and English, voted to support “negotiated abolition of their minority rule.”146
English electoral support for reform had been reinforced by the economic transition of British-dominated big capital to a greater focus on manufacturing and less on mining, the latter having relied on forced, cheap, and unskilled black labor. The later-developing manufacturing sector was dependent on skilled and relatively permanent labor, which could then also add to the domestic market for goods produced.147 Indeed, manufacturing helped attract Africans to the cities, with the proportion living in urban areas rising from 10.4 percent in 1904 to 27.1 percent by 1951.148 Often within the same conglomerates, manufacturing firms pressed against the interests of mining capital to reduce the economic constraints of apartheid and to draw more skilled black labor into urban production. State policy shifted accordingly. By 1979, the Riekert Commission had agreed that influx control produced “lower productivity and restrictions on the mobility of labor. . . . [R]ecruitment and employment should not be restricted.”149 Thus, self-interested pressure for reform from English manufacturing capital later coincided with growing English-speaking electoral support for such reform.
That many English were prepared to support reforms is not surprising; what is more remarkable is the shift of Afrikaner support in that direction. In large part, many Afrikaners saw no alternative given the crisis of rising protest, economic dislocation, and informal and formal sanctions, as described by Robert Price.150 The “black threat” had become ever more real in response to apartheid, threatening civil war. But Afrikaners were also increasingly ready to compromise because they had in effect accomplished what they had set out to gain through the exercise of state power and apartheid. They had used the state to support Afrikaner culture and to provide jobs. By 1977, the state and its parastatal corporations accounted for 20 percent of total economic activity, with the public sector representing more than 30 percent of GDP.151 Large numbers of Afrikaners had been hired as civil servants to administer the burgeoning apartheid bureaucracy. Afrikaners benefiting from these policies achieved close to economic and social parity with the English, as the status of all whites was consolidated. In 1964, 75 percent of Afrikaners were “working class,” but by the mid-1970s, after a decade of state-led embourgeoisement, 70 percent were “middle-class.”152 As a result, “Afrikaners had acquired more self confidence, with English and Afrikaners growing together.”153 Insecurity and separatism had diminished, as was further evident in high rates of intermarriage between English and Afrikaners.154 Racial domination had served as a means of subordinating blacks, of achieving reconciliation of Afrikaners and English, and alternatively for advancing Afrikaner interests to greater parity with their former English adversaries. With these goals largely achieved, Afrikaner support for apartheid diminished, raising the possibility of and support for substantial reform.
That Afrikaners’ interests were served by apartheid, gradually reducing the imperative for such policies, reveals a more general economic component of racial domination. In South Africa, economic interests were not unitary but long divided between and within white capital and labor. Such conflict posed “a threat to the survival of the white race”155 and the state, for it exacerbated the historical conflict between Afrikaner and English that had torn the country at its birth. Class conflict aggravated ethnic tension, for most white workers were Afrikaner and capital was dominated by the English. Afrikaner economic advance also required that such competition not explode beyond control.
Racial domination emerged as a common vehicle for appeasing both British-dominated capital and the largely Afrikaner white working class. It served to unify whites across their contrary and divided class interests. Racial domination was thus reinforced not so much to serve one set of economic interests as to serve the interests of all whites. Capital growth spurted with early segregation, and continued to profit under apartheid. Fear of another Rand revolt kept employers from breaching the color bar despite the savings such action promised.156 White workers benefited from black subordination, even as such subordination was later reformed. In the process, the overlapping class and ethnic conflict was contained, avoiding further disruption to the economic growth from which both capital and white labor profited. Loyalty to the minority regime was maintained by pandering to the white labor voting bloc, and economic viability was maintained by ensuring revenues for capital, with the two goals balanced against each other. “The principal function of segregationist ideology was to soften class and ethnic antagonisms among whites, subordinating internal conflicts to the unifying conception of race.”157 Racial domination diminished both class and ethnic conflict in an uneasy symbiosis.
The South African state’s policies of racial domination appear in a certain sense autonomous – designed to preserve the social order, polity, and economy. Capital, itself divided, had to adjust, though at little financial sacrifice.158 White workers also benefited, but did not achieve all their goals. Nevertheless, as much as this arrangement suggests state autonomy, it also reflects the degree to which the state was continually responding to varied interests. The state was pressed by sector-specific business demands, labor strikes, unrest, and electoral pressures, with competing parties representing vying interests. Varying forms of racial domination emerged from this mix of changing pressures upon the central state, reinforced by prevailing cultural traditions of racism. Rising competition did reinforce racial domination as means of containing potential conflict, but this dynamic emerged more from ongoing intrawhite than from black-white competition. The state compromised between competing white interests.
The powerful imperative for compromising between shifting and conflicting white economic interests is demonstrated by the tremendous costs of resulting policies. Policing and maintaining the pass laws alone cost more than R136 million per year by 1976; the total costs of inefficiencies imposed by apartheid were much higher.159 But the larger cost of renewed intrawhite ethnic and class violence was avoided. Open conflict, as in the Boer War and Rand revolt, was not repeated.
The South African state’s commitment to racial domination was thus reinforced by the need to head off challenges to the nation-state emerging from overlapping political and economic intrawhite tensions. In historical perspective, emerging white unity demonstrated that racial domination had served this strategic purpose, albeit fitfully. The Boer War had solidified antagonistic solidarities in a bloody mold, with English rallying to the empire and Afrikaners united by their resistance to foreign domination. The tensions exacerbated by war had to be resolved in peace. For the newly formed state to function, and not be torn by continued ethnic conflict, the groups solidified by the war would have to find a mode of cooperation. Treatment of Africans, one of the causes of earlier tensions and the war, was turned into a basis for encouraging unity. British liberal rhetoric aside, which is where it was placed, the common ground of white racist ideology and interests provided the foundation on which peace could be built. Exclusion of the Africans helped to unify the nation of whites, defined then as such in an effort to use race to heal the previous rift. South Africa thus emerged in its very formation as a “state of race,” with newly enforced and unified segregation essential to state viability and growth.
White unity encouraged through racial domination became a recurring, if still unresolved, theme throughout the first half of the twentieth century. With every reemergence of the English–Afrikaner rift, the salve of racial domination was applied to keep the peace. What had worked in 1902 worked again and again; reconciliation was repeatedly encouraged at the expense of “nonwhites.” Official segregation and discrimination categorized whites, Africans, coloureds, and Asians as such, as part of a race making process intended to heal the ethnic and class conflict between the English and Afrikaners. Racial groups were increasingly defined by the sharp knife of a state committed to carving up the population to achieve a stability in which growth could proceed. That process varied over time, but each variation served the strategic logic of forging an alliance for white nation-state consolidation.
A white coalition across ethnic lines proved long elusive. At times, Afrikaner nationalism was appeased by racial domination linked to white unity, as after the Boer War. But during other periods, unity governments threatened to abandon racial domination and the interests of poorer Afrikaners, as was the case under Smuts in the early 1920s and under the fusion government during the Second World War. Afrikaner nationalists used these opportunities to mobilize support by reaffirming their commitment to racial domination, thereby trumping advocates of white unity who wavered in this regard. This strategy helped to bring Hertzog to power in 1924 and Malan in 1948, with state intervention used after both these transitions to advance Afrikaners.
Racial domination became a political football used for advantage by both white and Afrikaner nationalists, serving the interests of both. Whichever tendency was predominant in any one period, the racial order was reinforced. Continued party and economic competition repeatedly reinvigorated the original “deal” of encouraging white unity and enforcing domination. This odd commonality explains the preservation of the union. The pressing issue of “the native question” served to unify whites within both camps, in that sense helping to hold the polity together. Union created a single prize, which Afrikaner and white South African nationalists sought to win by use of racial domination, despite some liberal objections and failed attempts at reform. In this sense, political and economic competition unintentionally served to stabilize the system, which retained its commitment to segregation and then apartheid. Growth proceeded, from which all whites benefited. Black South Africans suffered throughout.
The dynamic of intrawhite political competition was largely resolved after the National Party victory in 1948. The Afrikaner-controlled state dedicated itself to bolstering the social and economic status of its chief constituency. Apartheid profited the Boers while consolidating white privilege more generally. Afrikaners gradually moved toward parity with English-speaking whites, diminishing antagonism, resentment, and distrust. And as Afrikaner confidence in power grew, they became more magnanimous toward their former English adversaries. Verwoerd himself followed Hertzog’s own earlier shift from a “two stream” approach toward white unity. Afrikaner nationalism was again diluted into white nationalism. The result was a greater degree of white unity, which eventually shifted toward reform of apartheid. Rising black protest played a major role in this shift, as will be discussed later.
South African racial domination was then closely tied to the gradual consolidation of a class compromise, a unified nation-state and political competition for control of that state. The racial order was not the result of natural or biological distinctions of physical differences alone, for such differences were interpreted in different ways at various times, as with the shifting treatment of coloureds. The British victors of the Boer War saw a pressing strategic advantage in aligning with the Afrikaners and imposing racial domination, not least because the Afrikaners represented a more viable, proven threat to the state than did the Africans. This strategic assessment importantly coincided with prior racial prejudice common to the English and the Afrikaners, despite policy differences. But prejudice in itself does not explain the outcome. There had been a significant English tendency for reform that was purposefully marginalized in order to make union possible.
As argued by Steve Biko, racial domination was “not a mistake on the part of whites but a deliberate act.”160 It served particular economic, political, and strategic interests of South African and Afrikaner nationalists alike. Indeed, racial domination was not the result of a unitary nation-state, but a product of vying efforts to forge such unity and the competition for state control. White supremacy was the glue that held South Africa together, inscribed in the very foundation of a polity born of historical conflict and exclusion. Only after that polity had matured for most of this century and its initial ethnic conflict had subsided would this glue begin to comeunstuck.