The Logic of Apartheid

[p025] The Logic of Apartheid Seymour Papert I. SCIENTIFIC ANALYSIS AND LIBERAL CRITICISM Every reader of the Sunday Press has a vivid enough picture of the horrors of South African apartheid. Liberals like Father Huddleston (Naught for Your Comfort) have done an excellent job of exposure; but as long as the critique of apartheid remains on this level 86 of moral indignation it remains sterile as social criti- cism. In fact it is widely read and enjoyed in some quarters as a kind of political self-indulgence which provides the thrill of condemning wrongs at a distance while smoke-screening those nearer home. But South Africa is not in so different a world from Britain as the Liberals like to think. On the most

[p026] THE LOGIC OF APARTHEID elementary levels the countries are interconnected. Apartheid is financed by British capital; the British protectorates in South Africa are run as reservoirs of semi-slave labour for the Johannesburg mines; the Seretse Khama affair is just one example of how the British Government bolsters apartheid ideologically; British trade unions (particularly the Amalgamated Engineering Union) have segregated branches in South Africa, and so on. But if one digs a little deeper there are yet other, more general, connexions. The Union of South Africa is a capitalist country whose basic features are the same as those of Britain. A true insight into South Africa is an insight into capitalism itself, and its scientific critique a critique of world capitalism. ~The real mischief of liberal thinking is that it balks at penetrating the causes of historical phenomena. For example, we are told that the cause of oppression in South Africa is a kind of ‘racialist madness’ which has taken hold of the whites. Where does this madness come from? Here the voices differ: the ‘mentality’ of the Boers; the theology of the South African Church; ‘ignorance’, ‘stupidity’, ‘avarice’. None of these of course explains anything; nor does the pseudo-Marxist answer, ‘super-profits’. All capitalists would like to make super- profits; why i is it that in South Africa their quest leads in the direction it does? The liberals accuse South African capitalism of irra- tionalism. South Africa is a country with a rapidly growing industrial economy and a chronic shortage of labour. Steel production in 1948 was 600,000 tons, in 1956, 1,500,000 tons. Electricity production in 1948 was 770 million kilowatt hours, in 1956, 1,500 million kilo- watt hours. Yet more than half the industrial and min- ing labour force consists of unskilled migrant labourers who come for nine months of a time, then return to primitive conditions in the countryside. What could be more inefficient, irrational and anachronistic? But what the liberals fail to see is that the capitalist and his State machine adopt ‘irrational’ methods not out of stupidity, but because they are themselves entangled in contra- dictions from which they cannot escape. The irrational- ism of South Africa is only a particularly flagrant example of a universal feature of capitalism. Because the capitalist has interests above production, the way he organizes production is necessarily both irrational and coercive. The most paternalist factory management in the most liberal democracy is forced to adopt methods of pro- duction which enable it to check up on, control and dominate the workers. It is well-known that this means an enormous wastage and the use of techniques which are quite irrational when considered, for instance, in the light of how production will ‘be organized in a socialist society. But to invite the capitalist to be more rational in this respect is to invite him to resign his position in society. Il. THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF APARTHEID The Union of South Africa was created in 1910 by the amalgamation of four British colonies: the Cape of Good Hope, the Transvaal, the Orange River Colony (renamed Orange Free State) and Natal. The Cape colony differed from the others in having a more liberal political structure. Non-whites had the same qualified franchise as whites and were not segregated in public places. In the other three provinces, including Natal, which was predominantly English in population and tradition, they were subject to an almost total segrega- tion and had no political rights whatever. The ex- planation of these differences and of why the Cape tradition was essentially jettisoned in the new Union has very little to do with the special characters of Boer and Briton. It is, quite simply, that the Cape Province is two centuries older than the others and its institutions took form in a period when the problem of organizing the blacks into a labour force had not yet arisen. The main turning-point in the history of South Africa was the discovery of gold and diamonds in the middle of the nineteenth century. Up to then the problem pre- sented by the black man was that he owned land and cattle which the whites wanted. From the moment the mines opened, it was the black man himself the rulers were after. The Cape ‘liberals’ themselves began to work out a machinery to. mobilize. African labour—a machine which would eventually turn the black man. into a Helot, a slave, and dictate his exclusion from.the body politic. To this day there are relics of the old liberal- ism in the Cape where, for example, a black man may use the public library or listen to the municipal orches- tra, neither of which is possible in Johannesburg. They are, however, only relics. In all essential matters, the Cape has adapted itself. In 1894 John Cecil Rhodes introduced a Bill in the Cape Parliament which laid the foundation stone for the pattern of labour exploitation in the mines. - He proposed the creation of ‘Native reserves’ in which Africans would have plots of land and grazing rights not quite adequate to meet the needs of both subsistence: and the taxes they had to pay. The able-bodied men would therefore be forced to go out in search of money- wages; consequently the Native reserves would become reservoirs of labour. which need not be paid even a sub- sistence wage—the half-starved family on the reserve would subsidize the mining magnate in Johannesburg and London! Today the villages of- the reserves—and the British. ‘protectorates’ Basutoland and Bechuana- land—have a characteristically eerie appearance. One sees a predominance of children, of women and old men. At any particular moment more than half the total. male population will be away. Where are they? .- About 600,000 of them are in compounds: attached to the mines and to some industrial plants. They live there under semi-prison conditions for periods of nine months at a time without seeing their families and often without being allowed off the premises. They sleep on concrete beds, eat a monotonous ration and _ receive when in service less than £1 a week. These are the men who mine the shiny gold which bolsters sterling and adorns delicate. hands. Ill. THE PASS LAWS The most dramatic expression of the contradiction in the South African economy is seen if we leave the compound of a Johannesburg mine and walk a few hundred yards to a place called a ‘location’. Here we find quite a different life—African workers living with their families. They work in secondary industries, com- merce, transport, domestic service, and very often have little or no connexion with the reserves. Their existence is the direct result of the creation of the mines, for the 87

[p027] LABOUR REVIEW mining camps immediately began to attract traders, bankers, policeman, prostitutes, professors—in short, the whole fabric of urban society. Industries grew up, at first to serve the needs of the mines—dynamite, rope and, later on, heavy engineering goods. Later there appeared industries to satisfy the needs of the growing urban population. The Witwatersrand changed in the span of one lifetime from a string of miners’ shacks to a conurbation of 1,500,000 people. Now from the beginning the growth of towns created problems, since the towns competed with the mines for the available supply of labour power. As early as 1895 the Chamber of Mines writes in its annual report: ‘Owing to the existing inadequate . . . regulations for the control of Native labour, it is impossible to secure such combination on the part of employers as would enable Native wages to be reduced to a_ reasonable level.’ And as time went on the situation became more acute. The growing industry could offer at least a sub- sistence wage and an urban life. The mine wages only eked out, to a subsistence level, the miserable produce of the plot on the reserve. The mines have to use this system because of their low yield. Although these mines are the greatest producers of gold in the world, their yield per ton of ore has always been low. As the best and most accessible ore was exhausted, shafts were sent down two miles under the earth to bring up ore which it would not be profitable to dig out, for instance, in Canada or Australia. - The continuation of gold mining is a good example of the domination of production by dead labour. Abstractly there are today many more profitable things to produce than gold. They are not produced because the capitalist is not interested in production but in his production. If he could reclaim all the investment he has put in the mines he would, at least in many cases, find it more profitable to use it otherwise. But there are those big holes going down two miles into the bowels of the earth representing the surplus value extracted from the labour of thousands of men, and he will keep them going as long as he can sell the gold no matter how ‘irrational’ and socially uneconomical this may be. The ‘solution’ of this problem was attempted along the lines suggested by the quotation from the Chamber ‘of Mines. The regulations for the control of Africans were therefore tightened and tightened again in an attempt to keep rigidly separated the two labour forces: the migratory labourers of the mines (and, incidentally, the farm workers) on the one side, and the urbanized industrial workers on the other. The kingpin of the labour control system is the ‘pass’ —an internal passport which every African must have with him twenty-four hours a day. Through these docu- ments he can be prevented from moving from one area to another, prevented from seeking certain categories of work and terrorized and humiliated, for every police- man has the right to stop him in the street and arrest him for the slightest irregularity in his papers. The system is so complicated that everyone is almost bound, sooner or later, to have an irregularity. The control of labour is not absolutely effective, and in fact a steady stream of illegal ‘immigrants’ find their way into the towns—but it makes movement difficult enough for the system to be kept working. On the other hand the ten- sion between the different groups competing for labour power becomes steadily more acute as the economy 88 May-June-July 1958 develops and, as it does so, the screw on the African is tightened. This is the basic reason why every South African government has, in its turn, produced a new spate of oppressive measures and has been regarded, quite correctly, as the worst to date. IV. INDUSTRY, MINES AND FARMS The economy can be divided into three parts: mining, factory production and agriculture. Although, as we have seen, the mines provided the impetus for the de- velopment of modern South Africa and continue to exert a dominating influence, the factory sector is expanding at least twice as fast. This has led many liberals to hold out hopes of the industrialists’ supporting a policy of reform that will do away with the system of labour control and the whole oppressive apparatus that goes with it. At least three reasons can be given why no such ten- dency is visible. The first is that the idea of a contradiction between mining and industrial capital is an abstraction. These are admittedly opposites in that they compete for labour power and have conflicting interests. But concretely they are very often identical in that individual capital- ists have holdings in both sectors. The second reason involves the interests of the white farmers, who benefit from the system of labour control in various ways, of which the most important is that the pass laws tie some three million Africans to the farms under semi-feudal bondage. Thus the largely (but decreasingly) ‘English’ mines and the largely ‘Afrikaner- Boer’ farmers are united by a common interest which transcends all the noisy disputes between the two linguistic sections of the white population. The third reason is ideological. Once given a set of social relations the ruling class will always try to evolve a philosophy which justifies these relations. In South Africa nationalist intellectuals have created a systematic and elaborate doctrine of apartheid which seeks to bring every aspect of life into line. One result of this is the enactment of a whole series of apartheid laws which are, in isolation, absurd from every point of view and which derive their sense only from this universal human urge to integrate, unify and rationalize. Another result is that the system is made more and more rigid and un- changeable as eternally valid principles are invented to prop up temporarily convenient economic arrangements. V. THE WHITE WORKERS A factor which differentiates South Africa from a typical colonial country is the number and social struc- ture of the white population. They make up about a fifth of the total and include a working class which plays a critical role in the country. The great majority of skilled workers is, in fact, white. Important cate- gories of employment (skilled engineering, engine drivers and firemen, electricians) are legally reserved for whites only and many other occupations (e.g., heavy transport, printing) are virtually monopolized by them. They have a number of guarantees against unemployment. For example, in the mines a European must be employed for every so many Africans even if, as actually is the case, many of the white workers are absolutely redund- ant. The history of these privileges throws some light on

[p028] THE LOGIC OF APARTHEID the way a ruling class ‘organizes’ society. Objectively, they are a bribe given to a section of the working class which consequently becomes a bulwark against the majority of the workers—the blacks. Yet the capitalists did not plan this in a conscious way. It is not in the nature of capitalists to have done so: they are far too dominated by the making of immediate profits. On the contrary it was only after bitter struggles on the part of the white workers that the capitalists gave up trying to break down the white workers’ privileges. As early as 1907 there was a large-scale strike against the attempt to decrease the ratio of white mineworkers. In 1911 martial law had to be declared to deal with a strike of white railwaymen. In 1922 a general strike lasting 22 days was directed mainly against the attempt to intro- duce black workers into skilled jobs. In the course of this strike the white workers actually took control of suburbs of Johannesburg and were dislodged only after fierce fighting and with the help of aircraft and artillery. As a direct results of the strike, the Smuts government fell and Herzog came to power to carry out a policy of ‘civilized labour’ which established the main lines of the present industrial colour bar. Thus the white workers fought their way into the Herrenvolk and capitalism was strengthened by being forced to accept an ally which it had done its best to break. It is common for even the most politically conscious Africans to refer to the white workers as a kind of parasite, paid high wages for doing nothing, while the black man does the real work. This is not always true, and this type of error can lead to serious misunder- standings of the entire political situation in the country. The rift between white and black workers is not import- ant simply because there are so many scabs who can break strikes or act as special policemen. The funda- mentally important aspect is that just because the whites actually do monopolize the skilled work they split the factory and deprive the African worker of that self- confidence which comes from a sense of mastery at the point of production. In this way the white worker im- pedes the development of a proletarian class conscious- ness among the blacks. This point is illustrated by the course of the recent bus strike in Alexandra township. ‘Alex’ is an African township twelve miles from the centre of Johannesburg. Toward the end of 1955 the bus fare into the city was raised by a penny. There followed a protracted boycott of the buses during which the majority of the people, mainly workers, walked to and from the city every day. This was kept up with great militancy despite police provocation and appeals from those formally in the leadership, who urged the people to accept various com- promises; but throughout the whole affair there was no significant tendency to take the struggle into the factories. The reason for this lies in the nature of the relations of production inside the factory. The African worker still feels less secure and self-confident in the workshop, where he is among white workers, than in the township among ‘his own’ people. His solidarity, in other words, is still a national solidarity rather than a class solidarity. VI. THE POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE AFRICAN The white invasion found the Africans living in tribal units in a state of military conflict with each other. In fact the conquest was largely achieved by playing one tribe against the other through the willing services of missionaries who had gained influence over the chiefs. This technique of “divide and rule’ was carried on after the conquest. Right up to the present enormous efforts are made to maintain antagonisms between tribes and between the Africans proper, the ‘Coloureds’ (people of mixed descent numbering over a million) and the small but important Indian section. But in this the Govern- ment fights a losing battle that demands ever more drastic and desperate measures, and so swells the ever lengthening list of apartheid legislation. To maintain apartheid between white and black it is necessary io create a fanatically complex structure of minor apart- heids within the non-white section. The conditions of industrial life necessarily erode tribal thinking and there has consequently been a steady growth of African nationalist consciousness. The rapid maturing of this consciousness is shown by the change im the language of the political organizations. Right up to the thirties they talked of themselves as ‘mouthpieces of the people appealing to the Government to listen to their legitimate grievances’. Today even the African National Congress, dominated as it is by the small but influential non-white bourgeoisie,’ has formally adopted a programme demanding full equality. But despite enormous strides in the political maturing of the people the emergence of a proletarian tendency in the national movement has been less clear. The All- African Convention, which was the vanguard of the post-war political awakening, was able to obtain the support of militant ‘peasants’ in the reserves* and radical teachers, but only to a very limited extent that of industrial workers. There have been several mush- room African trade union movements (illegal of course), but they have not taken root. That there are theoretical reasons why this should be so has already been in- dicated. On the other hand changes are taking place rapidly which must lead to the development of a more coherent proletariat. Until recently most Africans had connexions with the countryside; today a generation is growing up which knows no other life but that of the city worker. Until recently most Africans were confined to unskilled manual work under close supervision; to- day they are doing more skilled and responsible work, not only because technological development imposes qualitative changes on the factory which raise the level 1 The non-white shopkeeper or landlord is affected by apart- heid in contradictory ways. On the one side he feels its humiliation, is cramped economically by it and has a constant sense of insecurity. On the other side he often benefits from a system which gives him a virtual monopoly of trade in ‘black areas’. This combines with the normal timidity of any bourgeoisie to make its political role vacil- lating and treacherous. It is interesting to note that the Communist Party (which has never been very strong) sup- ports the zig-zags of the black bourgeoisie in the most un- principled manner. South African readers would profit from a study of the role of the Communist Party in Algeria: the very close analogy with the behaviour of their own Com- munist Party would show them that the tactics of the latter are by no means determined by special features in South Africa. 2 The reserve dwellers have at one and the same time certain attributes of a peasantry (in that they work plots of land on their own account) and others of a working class (in that they sell labour power to the mineowners). 89

[p029] LABOUR REVIEW of industrial culture of all the workers. To these and other internal factors must be added ‘the new influences from outside: the growth of a militant proletariat on the copperbelt, the new upsurge of the socialist move- Pat Dooley: A Tribute Dear Friends, I was extremely moved by ‘Pat Dooley’s Letters’ published in your March-April number. I knew Pat well. In the years just before the last war he worked in Holborn, where I then lived. We often held meetings together at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, during the lunch hour. His humour and wonderful sense of the dramatic made him a superb outdoor speaker, so that even political enemies enjoyed listening to him. The day after war broke out the platform for the meeting did not arrive, by a mishap, but Pat did, and he used the steps of the drinking-fountain as a platform. He was arrested, dragged off to the police station, fined a fiver. But within days we had the meetings going again, and collected the fiver to pay the fine. I think perhaps Pat was one of the great kerb- stone political educationalists. I recall his advice to would-be speakers: ‘Prepare well what you are going to say, do not depend on the Holy Ghost descending to help you out—he’!l always let you down.’ Often before the war I supported his nomination to higher committees of the Communist Party, and I questioned leading comrades as to why Pat was, for example, not included on the London district committee of the party. The reasons given were usually vague, deprecatory, suggestive in the ‘don’t ask too many questions’ disgusting Stalinist manner. Even then, it seems, they sensed the genuine revolutionist in Pat, the under- standing that this man would not fit into the ‘party. machine’. I regret not having contacted Pat during the years following his withdrawal from the party—merely to express my feelings of solidarity with him as another human being. But, after my two years in Poland, I shall endeavour to take the lead from my old fellow-propagandist. In his letter he wrote: ‘I. . . could write a book—which I ought to have done, because only when the British workers know these things can they understand Poland and Hungary (and the long-suffering Russian people) and also prevent our bureaucratic little Stalins here from exercising similar excesses.’ To the best of my ability I hope in book form, and in other ways, to do what Pat (rightly, in my opinion) re- proached himself for not having done. Long live the memory of a fine socialist, and a lovable human being. London, N.3.