LETTERS Are the Pass Laws Defeated?

WHILE James Baker’s articles on South Africa in the past issues of The Newsletter have cogently posed the identity of interests between British and African labour, and have made some penetrating assessments of the situation, certain important aspects have been insufficiently explored, and in some cases even misrepresented.

A failure to understand the pass laws in the context of South African economic relationships, leads to the startling assertion that these laws ‘will never be reimposed unless the Nationalists are able to defeat the working class in a full-scale civil war’. This concept was echoed in the editorial of the same issue (April 2): ‘The pass system has gone’, and reiterated in the article of April 16. But, of course, the pass laws were suspended (not abolished) for only a few days, and pass raids have been resumed.

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From the outset of industrialization in South Africa, th ruling class was faced with a dual problem: that of harnessing the Africans to the economic machine, while at the same time preventing their development as an organized urban proletariat. Attempts to ride this problem run like a thread through the subsequent history of South Africa. It’ was Cecil John Rhodes who in his ‘Native Bill for Africa’ (the Glen Grey Act of 1894) formulated the pattern for the migrant labour system: already dispossessed of their land, the Africans were to be crowded into ‘reserves’, from which land and cattle hunger would drive the adult males to labour for the white man for contracted periods. The pass laws are an integral part of the migrant labour system, whereby hundreds of thousands of Africans are shunted from the reserves to the mines, farms and industry, and back again. For the laws are an attempt to control the free movement of labour and to force the Africans to work in those sectors of the economy where the labour shortage is endemic, the mines and farms. ¢ * Because Africans are naturally attracted by the relatively higher wages and less servile conditions in industry, there is a stream of ‘illegal immigrants’ (i.e., Africans without a pass to seek work) from the reserves to the urban areas. After pass raids they are obliged to return to the reserves, from where they will be redirected through the ‘legal’ channels to the mines and farms. It is not suggested that the pass system serves the economy in a smoothly mechanized way; it does not. Industry has asserted a claim to a labour force, and to a great extent this has been met. But like other sectors of the economy, it continues to be run largely on migrant labour, despite the fact that this hampers efficiency. _The abandonment of the pass system would mean the collapse of apartheid, and would reflect a tremendous political and economic revolution in South Africa. This has not yet been achieved.

Another aspect which requires much more enquiry and discussion is the leadership of the national movements. The essential feature of the present stage of struggle in South Africa is that the existing tendencies are in the melting pot;

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not one tendency has yet emerged as the leadership. The relationship of the masses to leadership in Africa can too easily be deduced from experiences and observations in the metropolitan countries, and thereby misconstrued. Many of the big struggles in the past years have been spontaneous. The strength of this is that they spread as quickly and fiercely as the African veldt fires, the weakness, that they are easily dissipated. The bus boycott of 1957, which had a sharp effect on the economy of Johannesburg, was born in Alexander Township spontaneously; the various political tendencies later intervened, and the African National Congress ‘attempted to claim it as their child—and incidentally helped to sell it out. Pass demonstrations, boycotts and stay-at-home protests have been called for many times before, with varying degrees of success. When the Pan-Africanists,- with a small following, called for protests against the pass laws in March, they found themselves with monster demonstrations and Sharpeville on’ their hands. But this does not mean that the Pan-Africanists have won the leadership of the people. There has been a qualitative leap in the objective situation, to which the increasingly repressive rule of the past 12 years, the Chinese revolution, Indian and Ghanian ‘independence’, the struggles in Nyasaland and the growing political maturity of a population increasingly drawn into the complexities of industrial and urban life, have contributed. Hence the present upsurge.

As in countries of Europe, a political tendency in thecolonies cannot be assessed on its paper programme alone. Noble words clothing naked class treachery are a commonplace. Thus while scrutiny of the programme of a group and their role in the present upsurge is imperative, a study of its history, its traditions, its social composition, and its past record of struggle is essential. Baker is correct to designate the leadeship of the African National Congress as a moderate and reformist tendency. The history: of their befrayals has been admirably told in a book ‘The Awakening There are other examples of too facile formulations in Baker’s articles. For example, on what basis does he assert that there is a growing unity of purpose between the African middle class (a questionable term in the context of South African class relationships, presumably intended to cover the petty traders, small slum landlords, teachers and clerks) and the working class? It is likely that he is correct, but the analysis culminating in the conclusion is wanting.

Altogether, much more analytic study is required on the South African situation and its perspectives. Many more questions have to be asked and answered before assessments are made. It would be most valuable if the comrades who have some knowledge on Africa could pool their information so that a debate might be opened and the salient controversies published, perhaps in Labour Review.

BENITA TEPER.

The Dennistoun. Ward (Glasgow) Labour Party passed a resolution to its Constituency Labour Party and to the National Executive Committee, calling for a boycott of goods from South Africa and of arms and military equipment to South Africa.