3. Corrupting the State

Urban Labor Controls

Introduction

The formation of the labor bureau system was pivotal to the transformation of urban administration. Municipal officials in the 1940s had unanimously supported the Fagan Commission’s recommendation that the state should establish a centralized system of labor bureaus. But they also supported the commission’s insistence that the system should operate on a voluntary basis, functioning rather like a network of labor exchanges, so that urban administrators would not exert undue control over the labor market. The version that the department unveiled in 1952 departed radically from this basic premise. Within a few years, the department was fully immersed in administering a system that derogated the autonomy of local authorities, subjected Africans to authoritarian controls, and implicated its officials in practices that routinized brutality. Far from eliciting disapproval from government leaders, the department’s approach to the labor market received official sanction and protection. Liberal administrators therefore found themselves implicated in a system that violated the central premises of the paternalist approach to urban controls.

E. H. Brookes claimed that the department in the segregation era had frequently been motivated by benevolent ideals but persistently undermined by the generally poor quality of its administrative personnel.^[1] Liberals’ focus on matters of policy therefore had the effect of magnifying the benevolent tenor of Native administration in the segregation era. Conversely, the surge of administration to the forefront of the department’s concerns and its disavowal of paternalism in favor of overtly racist creeds propelled the department’s increasingly Afrikaner officials to the forefront of an authoritarian state. Within Native administration, a fateful fusion of state power and the Afrikanerization of the NC corps took place. This trend, however, is difficult, if not impossible, to document. A perusal of the Public Service List from 1947 to 1954, which provides complete listings of all civil servants in the various departments of the state, provides no help in tracing the Afrikanerization of the department. Although the list does break down the department’s personnel on the basis of grade and rank, Afrikaner names already heavily dominated listings for 1947 and 1948, making it difficult to see any marked changes. However, Rodseth’s claim that the department “pulled in many more Afrikaners at the rank of NC” is undoubtedly correct.^[2] Strongly supported by the new government, the powers of administrative officials expanded commensurately as urban labor controls developed into the spine of the apartheid state in the 1950s. By the end of the decade, the broad powers of Native Commissioners to prosecute and sentence Africans snared by the pass laws, frequently through illegal means, enjoyed the open support of the police, the Department of Justice, and the growing number of Afrikaner judges.

The labor bureau system did not corrupt the apartheid state by itself; the developments that molded the totalitarian tendencies of the apartheid state and the lust for grand designs within regime-supporting circles were too diverse to be reduced to the changes that Verwoerd brought to Native affairs. Nevertheless, so central was it to the logic of apartheid that the labor bureau system quickly moved beyond its original concerns—to limit Africans’ access to the urban areas and to “canalise” labor “efficiently” across the economy. Within a few years, it transformed a predominantly civil department into a powerful and oppressive apparatus. Africans were exposed to an authoritarian and unapologetic bureaucratic culture in which they were portrayed as little more than “labour units” to be moved about and incarcerated virtually at will.

This chapter examines the impact of the labor bureau system on the state. It does not provide a detailed account of the effects of the system on the labor market, because a rich literature has recently come into being on this topic.^[3] Instead, two discussions are presented to illustrate the corrosive impact of the labor bureau system on the state. The first examines how local authorities responded to a system that deliberately targeted their long-standing autonomy in regulating labor conditions within their areas of jurisdiction. It argues that even urban administrators who opposed or actively resisted the model were sucked into its systemic logic. The second deals with the police and the courts, the two vital branches of the state that imposed the sanctions on which apartheid labor controls were vitally dependent. The courts presented few problems: by virtue of the Native Commissioner Courts that the department controlled, “the state within a state” was virtually its own judicial system. In turn, the South African police had never been noted for an impartial approach to their duties or for a high level of professionalism, even in the segregation era.^[4] In the 1950s, South Africa’s law enforcement agencies were given a virtual carte blanche to transform labor controls into a generalized mechanism of terror. By the late 1950s, the civil concerns of urban Bantu administration were tightly integrated with the state’s repressive operations.

Outline of the Labor Bureau System

Provision for setting up a labor bureau system was established by the Native Laws Amendment Act of 1952. The labor bureau system was organized into three tiers: a Central Labour Bureau, a Regional Labour Bureau, and, at its broad base, numerous district and local labor bureaus. The Central Labour Bureau directed the operation of the whole system from its headquarters in Pretoria. Regional bureaus were entrusted with the tasks of coordinating labor flows between rural and urban localities and supervising the bureaus within the nine CNC administrative zones. A local labor bureau was located in each municipal area, while district labor bureaus were located in the rural districts of the Union, both in the white rural areas and in the reserves. A cybernetic chain linked the model together, with the top tier directing and controlling operations at the lower level.^[5]

District and local labor bureaus were expected to coordinate their activities in order to subject the circulation of labor into, within, and out of their areas to vigilant control. At the same time, Regional Employment Commissioners supervised the work of the bureaus and, after consulting with the CNCs in which their regions fell, were empowered to be the final arbiters for the interpretation of information concerning the labor market and for the implementation of the department’s policies. Municipal officials were particularly affected by this arrangement because it formally precluded them from influencing the decisions to remove or admit Africans to the urban areas. From the moment the labor bureau regulations were promulgated in 1952, local authorities strenuously objected to their subordinate position within the bureaucratic model. These regulations not only insisted on the subordination of local authorities to the Regional Employment Commissioner, but also gave Native Commissioners in district bureaus the final say in determining whether or not migrant workers could be accepted into the urban areas. Much of the subsequent conflict between local authorities and the department over the labor bureau system centered around these administrative provisions.

Together with the Director of Native Labour, CNCs met regularly throughout the year to coordinate their activities and to assemble a composite picture of the labor market as a whole.^[6] By the nature of the department’s hydra-headed policies in the urban areas, these meetings were generally not limited to discussions about the labor bureau system alone, except on those occasions when meetings were called to discuss the recommendations of specific subcommittees. Instead, meetings generally focused on the integration of labor bureaus with other aspects of the department’s ongoing interests: housing policy, the acquisition and reclassification of land in terms of the Group Areas Act, the reorganization of the reserves, and plans to combat political opposition. These topics were all interwoven in these meetings, and officials who specialized in these respective concerns were invariably present to point out loopholes and to make recommendations regarding labor conditions in their administrative areas.^[7] Documentary evidence of this “integrated approach” provides firm evidence of the sympathetic support that the department’s labor bureau plans received from other state agencies, strengthening the impression that the state’s urban African policy in the 1950s was all cut from the same cloth—in contrast to the episodic and checkered patterns of urban administration in the 1940s.

This vision of a “planned” labor market depended, of course, on reliable information about prevailing labor market conditions. However, gestures toward this end in the segregationist era provided neither precedent nor institutions on which apartheid administrators could elaborate. The task of linking the stabilization and circulation of African workers within and across the nine administrative zones to empirical data about the Union’s labor market therefore fell to the newly established Central Labour Bureau (CLB). A specialized institution for assembling this data was not established, however; instead, raw data about labor conditions were obtained from local bureaus in the form of aggregate figures on a fortnightly and monthly basis.^[8] This information was intended to yield a snapshot of the labor market at any particular moment. By reviewing the sequence of figures, one could obtain an indication of the flow of labor into and out of individual districts. In theory, from a sequence of these “snapshots” in a particular zone would emerge accurate updates concerning surpluses and shortages of labor, enabling officials in the CLB to compile a dynamic composite picture of labor circulation on a national basis.

The centralization of information was also reflected in the Reference Books, which superseded the various “pass” documents that Africans had to carry. Provision for the extension of Reference Books was made with the passage of the Native (Abolition of Passes and Co-ordination of Documents) Act of 1952. It consolidated fingerprints, information about the bearer’s residency rights in the urban areas, tribal affiliation, employment history, tax payments, and any infractions of urban labor control laws and regulations.

In contrast to the CLB, the Central Reference Bureau (CRB), established in 1953 in the office of the Under-Secretary for Staff and Administration, performed the more global task of rationalizing and centralizing information on all African individuals. As Ramsay, the first Director of the CRB, phrased it, “the Reference Bureau is, after all, a reference bureau as well as virtually the Bureau of Census and Statistics for Natives. It should at least control vital statistics and know the number as well as the whereabouts of all adult members of the Native population as required in terms of Section 10(2) of the Population Registration Act, 1950.” ^[9] In 1955, a Departmental Committee to Investigate the Mechanization of the Central Labour Bureau was instructed to investigate the cost-effectiveness of a number of mechanization schemes. It came out in favor of using punched cards, “the most up to date method,” on which data on African individuals were stored. For the cost of £5,870 12s.1d., Ramsay could boast that this would “become one of the largest mechanization schemes in the world” and that his bureau would soon possess the “world’s largest finger-print collection.” ^[10] Thus, the labor bureau system also provided invaluable detective functions for the police, centralizing evidence that could be used to prove that violators swept up in the pass dragnets were “idle or disorderly.” A memorandum on the “idle or disorderly” clause and the consequences that awaited Africans who “maliciously destroyed their fingerprint records” explained: “All compulsory endorsements made and refused, entries [into an urban area] and warnings issued are notified to the SA Criminal Bureau and are noted on the criminal records of the Native concerned. In practice,” it continued, “three or four of such endorsements on a Native’s record have been taken to indicate a perverted preference on the part of the Native to live without the law and therefore to be disorderly.” ^[11] When armed opposition emerged from the underground after the ANC and the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) abandoned the pattern of orchestrated “defiance campaigns” in the 1950s, information generated by the documentation of labor was to fuse with the intelligence gathered by the security establishment in the 1960s.

Compromising the State

The expanding powers of Native administration officials and the bureaucratic culture they established in the 1950s were foregrounded in a clutch of laws—principally the Group Areas Act of 1950, the Suppression of Communism Act of 1950, the Criminal Laws Amendment Act of 1953, the Native Labour (Settlement of Disputes) Act of 1953, the Public Safety Act of 1953, and the Riotous Assemblies and Suppression of Communism Amendment Act of 1954—that scaled back the tenuous liberties of blacks in the early 1950s and boosted the state’s powers to impose its racial designs onto society.^[12] The labor bureau system complemented the authoritarian political culture these laws established by providing the administrative framework for terrorizing African civil society.

As Greenberg, Hindson, and Posel have demonstrated, the system worked far from perfectly from the beginning. Measured against the formal intentions of the department, it proved to be self-subverting on a number of grounds and exacerbated many of the problems it was intended to eliminate.^[13] But, because the department resolutely stuck to it, the logic and irrationalities of the department’s grip on the labor market compelled a host of different actors—various categories of civil servants, employers, and Africans—to adjust their different responses in relation to the labor bureau system. Thus, even when they functioned poorly, labor bureaus remained an “absent presence” in the life of state and society. Whether their cooperation was unwilling and coerced, as in the case of some local authorities, or unbridled, as became the norm with most police, state cadres came under the coercive sway of the system’s logic. In any case, so pervasive and, as we see below, insidious was its functioning that the labor bureau system could not simply be ignored: to ignore it was to “subvert” it. Nor could one simply submit to its dictates: to comply with it was to become ensnared in the tentacles of the apartheid state.

An important development in the field of urban administration was the proliferation of administrative regulations, a process then well under way in most advanced democracies but increasingly prevalent in South Africa from the mid-1920s onward.^[14] In general, opponents of administrative law view the field as an insidious attack on the legislative branch, empowering unelected administrators to exercise potentially vast powers with little accountability either within or outside the state.^[15] In contrast, supporters of administrative law contend that legislatures are incapable of controlling the complex and highly specialized bureaucracies that comprise the modern state; in this view, the modern state would not be able to function without administrative regulations and the devolution of authority to minor officials.^[16] Unsurprisingly, the DNA embraced the latter perspective. As government critics in and outside parliament repeatedly pointed out, African legislation invariably bestowed enormous discretionary powers on the MNA, who in turn ensured that administrative regulations vested minor officials with unprecedented powers over Africans.^[17]

By its very nature, however, administrative law also enables civil servants to adapt and even reverse policies without running the gauntlet of divisive public scrutiny. Formal policy may therefore be substantially altered in this way. For this reason, the thicket of regulations and circular instructions that emerged in Native administration in the 1950s have recently come under the increasing scrutiny of scholars, for it is here—perhaps even more than in the broad sweep of legislation enacted in parliament—that important trends in urban administration may frequently be found.^[18] Even as they vilified “liberalism” and depicted urban employers as selfishly profiteering from chaotic labor surpluses in the urban labor market, urban officials, in the course of their attempts to reduce the urban population, quietly concocted a modus operandi at the level of administration that sometimes avoided debilitating changes in the urban economy at the expense of official government policy.^[19] The distinction between legislation and administrative law is therefore particularly important for assessing the labor bureau system.

As recent scholarship has illustrated, the labor bureau system remained incapable of subordinating the market economy to bureaucratic dictate. Rather than destabilize the various interests in the organization of the urban labor market, the department quietly scaled back significant aspects of its interventionist blueprints to the point that it frequently engaged in practices that the formal model sought to eliminate.^[20] By systematically conferring legality on violations of policy, labor bureau officials in the 1950s played the pivotal role of sanctioning practical agreements between private parties in the labor market. The result was that in many instances, administrative regulations effectively sabotaged the official rationale for having established the labor bureau system in the first place. As it became clear that the practical administration of the system would not shut off labor supplies to the urban areas, anxiety levels within the business community decreased noticeably as the fifties wore on. By forging a series of practical compromises around material interests, many of them ad hoc and contradictory, the department did much to consolidate “the material bases of consent” ^[21] within the broad white population. Perhaps more so than any other apparatus at the time, the DNA provided the state with the context in which discursive appeals to whites would register with growing success, as indicated by the National Party’s increasing electoral majorities from 1953 onward.

Local Authorities

Municipal officials immediately made it clear that they strongly opposed their marginalization within the new structure of labor controls. Verwoerd did not, however, go to any lengths to win the support of liberal urban administrators. Hence, meetings in the spirit of the conference that had taken place between department and municipal officials in 1937, with Smuts himself presiding, did not occur. At that meeting, called to deliberate the important implications of the 1937 Native Laws Amendment Act, Smuts had been careful to offset the powers that the act vested in the MNA (to compel authorities to exercise influx and other controls) with arguments that, characteristically, perpetuated the liberal preference for moral suasion and undermined the threat of compulsion from the central state. The air of open debate and heated defiance from municipal administrators that had marked that meeting did not resurface in the 1950s. Verwoerd’s response was to lay down the law to local authorities and to activate the powers that he enjoyed over them. The mechanism for integrating the work of urban officials was thus almost entirely bureaucratic and authoritarian, its logic predicated on the assumption that the discretionary prerogatives that administrators had formerly enjoyed posed a danger to the entire labor control apparatus, and therefore to the apartheid state itself.

The only evidence of a more conciliatory tone occurs in the department’s dealings with its own senior officials. In the early 1950s, a number of meetings of CNCs were devoted to the new labor control system; in these meetings, the logic of the system was laboriously dissected and examined for loopholes and inconsistencies. Judging from the recorded minutes, inquiries from the CNCs at the conferences held in 1952 and 1953 appear entirely technical; the information they sought reflected no qualms about the labor bureau concept generally or opposition to stepped-up influx control in particular. Records show, for example, no special interest in the tension between the preferential treatment reserved for “detribalised Bantu” and the “government’s policy that the Bantus in the European areas will be encouraged to remain in their own tribal areas.” ^[22] Nor were any serious questions asked about how Africans “endorsed out” of the urban areas would fare in the Bantustans’ depleted economies. Much as Smuts had looked to the Fagan Commission to deflect questions about immediate administration, Eiselen and Verwoerd halted speculation about the consequences of expulsion procedures on the grounds that the “socio-economic conditions” of the Bantustans were still under investigation.^[23] Despite repeated reminders that the labor bureau system was “part and parcel of a larger picture,” administrators were encouraged to accept the structure as an internally closed system divorced from broader issues of policy. Not even the CNCs, senior cadres whose duties included the administration of the Bantustans within their areas of jurisdiction, inquired deeply into the rural (or moral) implications of a system that promised to throw thousands of pass law violators from the urban areas into the poverty-stricken countryside. Such complacency and cooperation stand in contrast to the quarrelsome conference of 1937. Then, administrators had attacked Smuts’ confirmation that the state’s new policy was to expel all “redundant labour” to the reserves. It was Smuts’ explanation— “That is why the reserves have been enlarged”—that had solicited the anguished query from the municipal ranks: “[W]hat about the children? what about old people? Must they be cast out to die like a lot of dogs as has been suggested?” ^[24] This spirit of municipal querulousness was extirpated as the 1950s wore on.

Unsurprisingly, recollections by liberal officials such as Carr and Rodseth all converge around the central themes of the internal homogeneity and bureaucratic intolerance that stamped the department in the 1950s. The department did, of course, work hard to publicize the labor bureaus to a wide array of interested parties. While Verwoerd, Eiselen, and a number of other senior officers all presented addresses to representatives of local authorities, the United Municipal Executive (UME), and business associations, the only Africans who were “consulted,” it appears, were those sitting on the United Transkeian Territories General Council (UTTGC)—several years after the labor bureau system had been established—and the Location Advisory Boards Congress. Verwoerd’s position was that his department was not obliged to “consult with” Africans, since they were merely “guest workers” in South Africa.^[25]

One of the earliest analyses of the internal workings of the labor bureau system was produced by the UME in April 1954. At a meeting between the heads of the Urban Areas, Labour Bureau, General, and Reference Book sections of the department, it was decided to invite the UME to establish a Liaison Committee to “advise and consult” with the department over details of the labor bureau system.^[26] Taking the invitation in good faith, the UME appointed a committee that responded with an eight-page memorandum that broadly endorsed the need for a labor bureau system but also raised serious questions about the structure and functioning of the system. Within a year, the Secretary of the Liaison Committee complained that “the existence of this Committee has perhaps been overlooked in the past year,” after which it appears to have been dropped completely.^[27]

According to the document, the source of the problems in the operation of the labor bureau system could be reduced to just one aspect of administration: the virtual elimination of local labor bureaus from effective influence over the implementation of influx controls. The department, the memo remonstrated, failed to recognize that local and district bureaus had “distinct functions” and that a major occupation of municipal administrators was to perform “employment services.” As such, regulations that gave district bureaus “over-riding powers over Local Labour Bureaux” in assessing the urban labor market when only the latter “knows best what labour is required in its area” gave rise to four fundamental problems.

First, “the rigid implementation of labor bureau regulations” failed to achieve their stated goal of bringing migrant workers under the control of state officials. Workseekers in the rural areas had learned quickly that it was not always easy to obtain permission from NCs to enter and reside in the urban areas due to the new set of regulations that governed their geographical mobility. Rather than accept work on a white farm from the district bureau, workseekers preferred “to run the risk” of violating influx control measures by searching for unskilled work in the urban centers. Second, the memorandum argued, the strict implementation of influx controls had exacerbated income differentials between urbanized Africans and migrant workers. Wages had increased in the building industry from the “normal” wage of £2.10.0 to £2.17.6 because of the “difficulty that employers in the industry were experiencing in finding unskilled migrant workers.”

The third issue raised was that the policy of removing discretion from local labor bureaus to correlate the demand and supply for labor resulted in “serious defects” in the statistical returns compiled by the bureau. This was a mild description of what was really an extensive exercise in deception designed to paint the illusory picture of an apparatus sufficiently attuned to the vagaries of the labor market to assign workseekers accurately to particular positions in the class structure. The memorandum provided two examples of such statistical deceptions. First, it showed that workseekers registering in rural areas were “placed” simply by assigning them, not to a particular employer, but to an industry. Once authorized to enter the town and take up employment in a particular industry, workseekers invariably scouted around for better employment and were able to evade arrest because their documents were in order. In practice, therefore, large numbers of “placed workers” were actually workseekers. Consequently, the monthly return compiled by the CRB became “valueless” because “it is based on the principle that placements deducted from workseekers will reflect a surplus or shortage in the category of the labor concerned.” ^[28]

This type of deception was dwarfed by a greater inaccuracy deliberately recorded in statistical returns. The thrust of the 1952 Native Laws Amendment Act and of labor bureau regulations, we have seen, was to coordinate the working of influx and efflux controls—that is, workseekers would be permitted to exit from rural areas and enter urban areas only if district bureaus were first satisfied that employment was available in particular urban areas. Workseekers who complied with this requirement could then be legitimately chalked up as “placements” made by the bureau. In practice, the DNA’s boasts about its capacity to effect such finely tuned calibrations were highly suspect. The ruse employed was simple: bureaus registered workseekers after they entered the urban areas. Instead of expelling undocumented workseekers who presented themselves for registration, local labor bureaus were inclined to retain them by legalizing them post facto. Thus, workseeker permits and the service contracts of illegal entrants were registered simultaneously, instead of consecutively, as required by regulations.

Once recorded as “placements” in this manner, those service contracts registered by dint of official deception became indistinguishable from those registered procedurally. These practices, repeatedly referred to in departmental documents as “concessions against policy,” arose from “sheer necessity,” according to R. L. Wezel, the Witwatersrand Regional Employment Commissioner: “It is self-evident that had a decision not been taken to relax the strict compliance with sub-regulation 9(8) and General Circular No. 61 of 1953, the labor bureaux functioning in my regional area would not have been able to meet to a considerable extent the demands for Native labour…with the inevitable result that severe criticism would have been levelled against the Native Labour Bureau system.” ^[29] Such practices, however, became permanently ingrained in the functioning of the labor control bureaucracy.

The fourth criticism raised in the UME’s memo involved the long-standing dispute over the definition of a “labour surplus.” The department’s ability to control the labor market presupposed that three administrative categories basic to the revised labor control system could be clearly distinguished from one another: “Surplus Labour,” “Labour Demands,” and “Unfilled Vacancies.” But, the memorandum pointed out, administrative officers failed to categorize Africans in the urban areas accurately under these three headings. Labor bureau officials were therefore confronted with an apparent anomaly. According to monthly returns, the high figures recorded under “Demand” and “Vacancies” coexisted with high “Surpluses” of labor. Convinced that the urban labor market was already saturated, officials in the regional and district bureaus were inclined to resolve the conundrum by emphasizing “Surplus Labour” and therefore interpreted influx control regulations more narrowly. Equally important to local bureaus was their sensitivity to matching labor with appropriate employment. As the memorandum summarized it, “there may be a surplus but it does not necessarily follow that employer and employee want each other”; one official interviewed by Stanley Greenberg would later concede that employer and worker were matched in “a kind of blind date.” ^[30]

Recent analyses of the labor bureau system confirm the basic accuracy of these criticisms.^[31] These outcomes cannot be dismissed as the system’s teething problems. Not only did they become entrenched in the practical operations of the system; they were firmly rooted in the contradictory character of urban policy in the 1950s.^[32] The department was torn between its desire to impose a stringent influx control policy on Africans in the urban areas and its pragmatic realization that urban employers of all stripes, including the nascent Afrikaner enterprises that the government was bent on nurturing, were heavily dependent on the extensive utilization of cheap African labor. In trying to balance these two antagonistic principles, the department concocted an inconsistent administrative regimen. On the one hand, it routinely departed from the regulations that governed the labor bureau system, repeatedly describing its own “deviations” as “concessions against policy”; on the other hand, it imposed a firm bureaucratic grip on the labor market.

There were two major “concessions” that it extended to urban employers. First, instead of rigidly linking the rights of Africans to remain for longer than seventy-two hours in an urban area to their legal employment in that area, it formulated a Section 10 clause that significantly widened the conditions under which Africans could legally gain entry into and reside within the urban areas. Under the terms of Section 10 (1) of the Native Laws Amendment Act of 1952, Africans could only remain in an urban area for longer than seventy-two hours if one of the four following conditions was met:

a) he was born and permanently resides in such area; or

b) he has worked continuously in such area for one employer for a period of not less than ten years or has lawfully remained continuously in such area for a period of not less than fifteen years and has not during either period been convicted of any offense in respect of which he has been sentenced to imprisonment without the option of a fine for a period of more than seven days or with the option of a fine for a period of more than one month; or

c) such native is the wife, unmarried daughter or son under the age at which he could become liable for payment of general tax under the Native Taxation and Development Act, 1925 (Act No. 41 of 1928), of any native mentioned in paragraph (a) or (b) of this sub- section and ordinarily resides with that native; or

d) permission so to remain has been granted to him by a person designated for the purpose of that urban local authority.^[33]

In addition to these legal reasons for exempting Africans from the “seventy-two hour clause,” the department even went so far as to allow “a certain plussage” of unemployed workers to remain in the urban area to cater to the vicissitudes of the employment process and to offset the likelihood that labor shortages might drive up urban wage levels. Furthermore, Verwoerd made it clear that the department would not arbitrarily impede the entry of migrant workseekers into the urban areas if a “reasonable demand for this type of worker exists,” and he reassured urban employers that “the test is always the urban demand for labour.” ^[34] To urban employers anxious about the ideological rhetoric of the NP in the late 1940s, these pragmatic concessions were welcomed with relief. For example, speaking on behalf of the SAIRR, L. Rau observed in 1955 that “influx control has as yet had no detrimental effect on the African’s ability to secure employment in the cities. The demand for Native labour is being fully met.…” ^[35]

Apart from this series of official concessions, it is more than likely that corruption played an important role in undermining the official logic of the labor control bureaucracy. With urban employers eager to employ “tribal” labor and African workers desperate to secure official authorization to be in an urban area, the willingness of labor bureau officials—and the police with whom they routinely cooperated—to engage in practices outside of usual procedure undoubtedly encouraged some degree of corruption in the form of bribery. For a small sum, poorly paid officials were in a position to solve the problems of all parties, not least those of the bureaucracy itself—for every registered contract imparted the impression of administrative control. In July 1959, for example, a policeman was found guilty and sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment for “selling” a Reference Book for twenty-five pounds to one Mbulelo Botile in Cape Town.^[36] In December 1958, journalists learned that “If you have enough money and the right contacts you can usually obtain any ‘pass’ or permit that you need.” ^[37] Native Commissioners in Benoni were found to be extensively involved in these practices, routinely charging between one and three pounds for virtually any of the “rights” that entitled Africans to work and reside in the urban area; it was even possible to buy authorization to work in one area while residing in another, thereby circumventing a problem that plagued employers (not least the postal service) and taxed the administrative meetings devoted to this problem in the 1950s.^[38]

Despite their opposition to their subordinate position within the labor bureau system, local authorities did not find themselves in open conflict with it; instead, the flexible application of the system provided grounds for their cooperation. Moreover, because they had no interest in permitting the build-up of large pools of unemployed labor in their areas, local authorities looked to the structure to hold the numbers down.

At the same time, the department had no intention of relinquishing its control over African urbanization or individual Africans in the urban areas. Its decision to tolerate certain levels of urban unemployment and to allow employers to recruit new migrant labor should therefore be assessed in the light of three other aspects of its urban policy. These were designed to subordinate the urban labor market to strict bureaucratic control.^[39]

First, a central feature of urban policy in the 1950s was the department’s commitment to “freeze” African urbanization at levels current immediately after 1948. Africans who did not qualify to reside in an urban area under the terms of clauses (a), (b), or (c) of Section 10 (1) would henceforth only be permitted urban entry as migrant workers, entitled only to (d) rights. The second element of urban policy, extending influx controls to women, was closely related to the goal of freezing the size of the urban population. Hence, African women were denied independent rights to enter and reside in urban areas. Section 10 laid down that they could do so only if they were already legally employed or could prove that they were legally married to a male who qualified to be in the area. Furthermore, to subject women to greater control, the department began for the first time issuing passes to women. Third, the department appropriated an “urban labour preference” policy, which had been strongly endorsed by the AANEA immediately after World War II and which liberal administrators such L. Venables, W. J. P. Carr, and F. Rodseth continued to champion throughout the 1950s. This policy positioned the settled population ahead of migrant workers in the urban labor and housing markets. The practical implication of the urban labor preference policy was that the demand for labor would be met first by extending job opportunities to members of the settled urban population; permission to requisition fresh intakes of migrant labor would be granted only if, in the department’s estimate, urban unemployment had ceased to be a problem.

In sum, then, in the 1950s the department extended two significant concessions to urban employers, by agreeing to tolerate certain levels of urban unemployment and by permitting employers to recruit migrant labor. On the other hand, it also moved to impose bureaucratic controls on the market to freeze the urban population: controlling women and settling for an urban labor preference policy. But these goals clearly pulled in different directions, as Posel has demonstrated. Section 10 (1), for example, provided significant leeway for the urban population to increase on perfectly legal grounds. By agreeing to introduce clauses (b) and (c) alongside (a), Verwoerd allowed a large number of Africans to reside legally in the urban areas—whether or not they were unemployed. Even if unemployed, Africans who qualified in terms of these clauses were spared from having to register as workseekers at the local labor bureau. This meant that there was no way for the department to estimate urban unemployment levels accurately in order to enforce the urban labor preference policy. Legally unemployed Africans could therefore legally contribute to the very unemployment problems that the labor bureau system was intended to eliminate.^[40]

Accordingly, the practical contradictions of the labor bureau system frequently exacerbated many of the problems the department intended to eliminate through the “rational canalisation” and “stabilisation” of labor: urban unemployment persisted, migrant labor continued to gain entry to the urban areas, urban employers continued to complain about shortages of semi-skilled and skilled African labor, and the urban population continued to increase.

But, if the department did not construct a “rationally planned” labor market that subordinated the market economy to centralized planners, it did forge an administered one in which the preferences of employers and municipal officials were generally permitted to influence the labor control bureaucracy.^[41] Although the process was not always predictable, throughout the 1950s municipal officials in local bureaus invariably were in a position to convince their departmental counterparts in district bureaus to accede to urban employers’ requests for additional migrant labor.^[42] According to Carr, dealings with the district officials were frequently unpleasant and combative —but, in the end, also usually gratifying to Johannesburg’s NEAD. With the department charting a policy of “concessions” (of the sort indicated above by the Witwatersrand Regional Employment Commissioner) and given to ad hoc adjustments to cope with specific circumstances in different areas, district officials had ample incentive to follow suit.

Beginning with Greenberg’s depiction of apartheid as an internally inchoate state form, the collective impact of recent scholarship on the labor bureau system has steadily destroyed the structure’s reputation for omnipotence and doctrinaire imperiousness, showing that the very attempt to function flexibly yielded contradictory outcomes. Greenberg argues that these contradictions culminated in the immobilisme in which the state became mired in the 1980s.^[43] In the 1950s, however, these contradictions were central to the department’s ability to coordinate the respective interests of urban employers and municipal and departmental administrators. Senior liberal administrators such as Carr and Rodseth do not stress this achievement, preferring to lay emphasis on the antagonistic nature of their dealings with Verwoerd’s department.

It may be safely assumed that a self-selecting dynamic came into play in the wake of the internal ideological changes in the 1950s, dissuading government critics from seeking positions in urban Bantu administration. The department, after all, was responsible for formulating policies that remained relentlessly authoritarian even when urban policy promised to provide, in Verwoerd’s words, “guarantees, stability and security” to the urban African community,^[44] and the department appeared gratuitously coercive when it moved to ram its blueprints into place. Strongly supported by the liberal media, the Johannesburg and Cape Town city councils attacked the department for the sweeping powers it was amassing. D. L. Smit captured the unease among liberals when he described Verwoerd in 1953 as “a Napoleon in Native Affairs who was trying to set up a great Black empire under his supreme dictatorship.” ^[45]

But these developments should be also be placed in context. The sense that urban administration was dividing down the middle, with liberals poised against upstart apartheid ideologues in administration, was greatly exaggerated by the compulsory opposition that the Westminster constitutional model imposed on government and official opposition. From their vantage point as members of parliament in the 1950s, two liberals in Native affairs, Margaret Ballinger and D. L. Smit, arrived at precisely this conclusion and grew increasingly distressed that the distance between the two parties was actually narrowing over the “Native question.” ^[46] Verwoerd therefore took particular pleasure in pinioning former senior administrators such as D. L. Smit and Piet van der Byl. (Margaret Ballinger was too closely associated with “Natives” to deserve the Minister’s serious attention.) Zeroing in on the “middle ground” that the Fagan Commission had championed, he either ridiculed them for failing to repudiate the principle of racial domination or portrayed them as unabashed “assimilationists.” ^[47] These rhetorical clashes, however, distract attention from the degree of cooperation within the ranks of urban administrators.

For this reason, the recollections of David Grinker, an urban administrator in the 1950s and 1960s, are instructive. Grinker provides a glimpse of the attitude of those urban personnel who, on the one hand, were neither committed liberals cut in the mold of men such as D. L. Smit, W. J. G. Mears, Fred Rodseth, and W. J. P. Carr, or, on the other hand, staunch supporters of apartheid. Grinker’s assessments of the changes introduced in the 1950s and 1960s are arguably representative of a large number of urban officials—and possibly also of the rising numbers of white voters who handed the NP a string of increasingly large electoral victories in the same period. In his book (a highly personalized recollection of his years of service as an Assistant Bantu Affairs Officer, an assistant District Officer, and then an officer in the Witwatersrand Administration Board), Grinker describes “the different approach to administration of the [two] white language groups”:

The English regarded themselves as working for the community, within a framework of laws provided for this purpose. The Afrikaner worked for the state. The state and its interests came first, and, in most cases, the Afrikaans officials made no effort to bend the letter of the law.…The Afrikaner always seeks authority for everything from higher up the administrative ladder. The Englishman tends to manage by exception—only certain very specific decisions are referred upstairs.…^[48]

Grinker records his distance from apartheid policies and his admiration of municipal leaders such as W. J. P. Carr (who admonished Grinker for remaining in urban administration after the department displaced local authorities from all matters involving Africans in 1971). He also clearly conveys his objection to the insensitivity that the NP government’s approach to urban administration encouraged toward Johannesburg’s African population. At the same time, a strong theme that emerges from Grinker’s rambling account is the equanimity of his approach to administration. The antagonism and frequent skirmishes between the Johannesburg City Council, along with the personnel of its NEAD, and Verwoerd in the 1950s suggest a climate of irreconcilable differences between the two. This view was strongly promoted by the liberal media and Verwoerd’s critics in parliament. There is little doubt, however, that politics drove much of that criticism, as Verwoerd frequently complained. Grinker’s account therefore provides an alternative perspective to the rhetorical confrontations in parliament. For this minor administrator, low down on the chain of command, ideological battles were not the first consideration; getting the job done was the stuff of daily work.

Thus, the outstanding feature of Grinker’s narrative is his acceptance of “administration” as a “career,” the source of a decent occupation with the promise of promotion and upward mobility. He describes himself as belonging to a “not insignificant number of officials [in Diepmeadow] who are both dedicated and enlightened.” ^[49] At the time he first joined Johannesburg’s “Municipal Service” in 1965, Grinker confesses, he was ignorant of and indifferent toward Africans. But he warmed to his job as well as to a number of African officials he worked with. His best attempts to introduce a professionalism into black local government foundered, he laments, on the rocks of maladministration among his African colleagues and misguided interventions from ideologically driven Afrikaners above. Grinker’s depoliticized views of urban administration seem essential to his ability to reconcile himself to the heavily centralized, top-down, “racialist” ^[50] approach to administration favored by the “Afrikanerized” department in the 1960s. At the same time, the bureaucratic culture that overtook urban administration from the 1950s onward ensured that such criticism would be held firmly in check.

Grinker’s reflections on his years as urban administrator are remarkable for another reason: the complete silence he maintains about the labor control apparatus, the pivot of policy and administration in the 1960s. But Grinker’s silence on this issue is not unusual; W. J. P. Carr himself maintains a similar silence on the subject in Soweto: Its Creation, Life and Decline, his own account of his years as head of Johannesburg’s NEAD. His narrative spans the crucial years from 1952, when the labor bureau system was introduced, until 1969, just two years before the department finally made good on its threat to relieve local authorities of all responsibilities for African administration. As the head Native administrator of South Africa’s premier city, Carr’s liberal politics were well known, and he became embroiled in a number of the Johannesburg City Council’s disputes with Verwoerd over the latter’s brusque policies toward the settled urban African population. His stolid and widely publicized criticism of Eiselen’s instructions to introduce “ethnic zoning” in locations also earned him the wrath of the department in 1957. He was, he writes, convinced that “one of the basic flaws in the pass laws was the fact that all Africans were regarded as being in the same circumstances, with no differential treatment for the individual regardless of whether he was an educated professional man or a labourer.” In response to the Sharpeville episode, he authored a memorandum suggesting how the pass laws could be relaxed. The document was submitted to the Chambers of Commerce and Industry, which then offered Carr’s recommendations to the government under its own auspices; so bad were relations between the JCC and the government that the document would otherwise have been “rejected out of hand.” ^[51] But despite such evidence of active disagreement with the apartheid regime, Carr remained preeminently an administrator, a liberal who took great pride in the dual role he played in maintaining law and order in the African areas while promoting the process of “civilisation” among Africans.

More forcefully than Grinker, Carr associates himself with Africans’ intense opposition to influx control policies, concluding that it was “little wonder that every African leader, advisory board member and writer complained ceaselessly about the hardships inseparable from the pass laws.” ^[52] Yet, writing four decades later, Carr remains unable to denounce unequivocally the need for a labor control apparatus. The reasons restate the awkward position in which liberal administrators found themselves once the system—the backbone of apartheid—was established. The system, Carr writes, was necessary:

From the [local] authorities’ point of view, there had to be some control over entry, employment and housing, lest all facilities be swamped by the thousands who would do anything to circumvent the pass laws. There were not enough jobs or houses, too many children to be accommodated in schools, and not enough money to provide all the amenities that were required. It was a situation in which there could not be any winners, only losers.^[53]

Verwoerd would hardly have disagreed. Thus, Carr accounts for Johannesburg’s brushes with Verwoerd’s department by emphasizing the clashes over certain specific aspects of the latter’s housing solutions—but not its will, which he admired—and the controversial policy of ethnic zoning—an exaggerated “ideological” initiative that not even the department appears to have taken seriously in subsequent years.^[54]

The focus of administration, after all, is the practical. Thus, Carr’s 1960 recommendations also rested on the point that “some restriction on the movement of Africans was necessary”: “…the total abolition of the pass laws, influx control, and all restrictive legislation, as demanded by the PAC and ANC, could not be supported because of the threat this would pose to the white community.” ^[55] This basic “threat” to the white population formed the irreducible point of convergence around which every single municipal administrator rallied, regardless of ideological proclivities.

Liberals were particularly aware that the centrifugal logic of the labor bureau system corroded their political principles. But these were also the men who knew from firsthand experience the consequences of administrative disorder. Thus, according to another liberal administrator, E. A. E. Haveman (Manager, Durban NAD), the transcendent principle was not race but “order.” In 1952, Haveman informed the South African Institute of Town Clerks that “local authorities are concerned (in practice at any rate) not about the pros and cons of a black proletariat taking the place of the migrant peasant, but about the possibility that the black proletariat will grow too rapidly—or, to put it more concretely, about the fact that it has grown so rapidly that the local authority cannot cope with its housing and other needs.” ^[56] Haveman reconciled himself to the labor bureau system by airily dismissing the official goals of the structure: “Influx control, though ostensibly a mechanism for regulating labour supplies, is more usually resorted to as a means of reducing or slowing down the demand for housing.” ^[57] To prove that race was not the driving concern of liberal urban administration, Haveman described the municipality as a “vast closed shop,” “an enormous trade union,” and a “city state”—institutions that are justified in devoting their resources to accredited members only. As proof, Haveman cited the “poor white” phenomenon: “…[W]hen the civilised labour policy and the depression jointly produced an influx of poor Europeans into urban areas, some municipalities protested vigorously and would certainly have controlled the influx had they found it possible to do so.” Civil order, not racial segregation, was the urban Native administrator’s primary concern.

The department’s “flexible application” of influx controls in the early 1950s therefore established the context in which liberal administrators felt justified in subordinating labor controls to an administrative discourse about the need to maintain local stability and “sound housing policy.” Like S. Bourquin (Durban NAD), many liberal administrators may have believed that “the Bantu are being over-administered.” ^[58] But, like Bourquin, all gave precedence to the immediate administrative tasks at hand—and so maneuvered themselves into repeatedly prefacing administrative observations with language such as “I am not concerned with the ethics of the situation but am merely stating a fact” (which is how Bourquin qualified his remark that “the same salary that secures a junior European clerk will attract the cream of Bantu officials”).^[59] Liberal administrators therefore reconciled themselves to the strict influx controls promulgated in 1952 (but not, as we have seen, to the official logic of the labor bureau system as a whole).

From the other end, conservative administrators imbued the labor bureau system with the most benign potential. Amongst these cadres, a standard claim was that the “rational canalisation” and “stabilisation” of labor worked to the benefit of all parties, especially African workers.^[60] F. W. C. Buitendag (Manager, NEAD, Germiston) may well have provided the first “scientific evidence” for this claim.^[61] Four years before the labor bureau system was implemented in 1953, Germiston’s NEAD had independently gone ahead to evaluate the likely benefits of the system. The results obtained were central to the faith that Eiselen was to place in the labor bureau’s ability to “place the utilisation of Native labour on a scientific basis,” culminating in his declaration of the Western Cape as a “Coloured labour preference area.” ^[62]

Buitendag’s evaluation began with “an exhaustive survey” of Germiston’s African population, which numbered 35,000 in 1948. Results showed that 60 percent of the labor force originated from the reserves and white rural areas. Because “no machinery existed for the guidance of prospective African workers,” rural workers spent an average of 20 days searching for each job they found, compared with 10 for urbanized workers. High labor turnovers meant that, on average, African workers were employed for “a bare 150 paid working days per year,” and several industrial firms reported annual labor turnovers of 200 and 400 percent. This meant that the “total labour force was only 60% effective,” leading Buitendag to conclude, “In theory, therefore, if a 100% efficiency of the application of the labour force could be achieved, a vast reserve of nearly 10,000 workers could be freed for other employment.” ^[63] Buitendag’s experimental solution to the problem centered around obtaining daily updates about unemployment conditions from a municipal Labour Liaison Officer appointed by the NEAD, streamlining the registration of workseekers’ permits (in part by dispatching “mobile offices” to African peri-urban areas), and constructing a “modern out-patients clinic as an adjunct to the labour Bureau, and the appointment of a full-time medical officer assisted by qualified male and female nurses.” Within four months, “workers arriving in the area at eight o’clock in the morning, after having complied with every possible requirement of the law in regard to entry, medical examination and registration, were actually placed in full-time employment by 10 o’clock in the morning of the same day.” By 1952, labor turnover had decreased an average of 85 percent, and since 60 percent of the labor force were migrants, “the figure must be regarded as very reasonable.”

Tests to match workseekers with employers also yielded similarly pleasing results. Buitendag discovered that labor bureau officers, once apprised that migrants held strong “group preferences” to work and reside with Africans from similar rural backgrounds, could rapidly correlate batches of workseekers with certain occupations. Aptitude tests were then conducted to ensure that “the worker’s inherent ability, his technical, mental and physical attributes were…being related to the work to which he was being assigned.” Armed with such “scientific evidence,” conservative administrators such as Buitendag portrayed labor bureaus as benevolent institutions because they were “efficient.”

Anxious about losing complete control over urban administration, liberal administrators continued to support stepped-up influx controls, while their more conservative counterparts divined benevolence in the bureaucratic structure established in 1953. In matters of urban administration, all roads returned to Rome: unable to leave African urbanization unchecked, all administrators without exception continued to rely on some form of control structure to do the indispensable business of monitoring and expelling Africans. The persistence of a labor control apparatus was therefore an uncontested assumption within municipal circles. Liberal administrators such as Carr viewed it as highly significant that their particular vision was distinguished by a core set of stipulations: the system should be uncoupled from the extensive use of force; workers should not be compelled to accept only those positions offered by labor bureaus; the rights of urban employers to have adequate access to different kinds of labor should not be impinged on; and finally, municipal officials should play a prominent role in determining how the system worked.^[64]

However, local authorities were also positively attracted to certain key aspects of the department’s urban policy in the 1950s. The areas of mutual concern to the two rungs of the state centered around the emergence of the two principles adopted by the department in the 1950s: the department’s commitment to policies that gave preferential treatment to the urban African population and its pursuit of the “stabilisation” of labor. Administrators had called for similar steps in the 1940s. The AANEA had repeatedly accepted a motion in 1945, in 1946, and again in 1947 to the effect that the national system of labor bureaus it championed should protect urban Africans from the competitive pressure of migrant workers. According to the AANEA, the state should

accept as a cardinal principle of policy that:

—the urbanized Native be protected by local authorities refusing the entry of rural Natives into towns where there isunemployment among urbanized Natives, and by giving preference in employment to urbanized Natives resident in any Reef town.^[65]

This view was accepted by the department in the 1950s. In Verwoerd’s version, it was “self-evident to any normal, sober, Christian person” that

the man who was in the city for the shortest period, the man who has the least experience, the man who is the least useful as a worker—that is to say, the newest recruit in the field of labour—must be the first to be put out if there is unemployment. Such people must not lie about and cause such an overflow that there is constant circulating unemployment. That is not in the best interests of the permanent members of the community.^[66]

As both of these quotes suggest, the importance attached to the “stabilisation” of African labor was sufficiently established within state discourse in the 1950s to barely warrant the detailed sort of exegesis devoted to it in the 1930s and 1940s.^[67] These two “liberal” arguments concerning the “stabilisation of labour” and an urban labor preference policy were broadly accepted by the department in the 1950s.^[68] But the extent of agreement between municipal administrators and the department was not limited to a few commonly held ideas about narrow aspects of policy. They also occurred at the level of administration.

For example, it was universally accepted within the state and in industrial circles that the “stabilisation of stabilisation” would yield an increase in the productivity of labor. The department could therefore argue that compelling industrialists to work with a limited pool of workers dovetailed with the best interests of the state and economy: as Buitendag’s findings had shown, the administrative and fiscal problems of control would be decreased while labor productivity would increase. The department’s demand that employers should “make maximum and optimal use of the labour already available in the urban areas” was therefore pegged onto the long-standing complaint that, in relation to countries such as the U.S., Britain, Canada, and Australia, productivity rates in South Africa were artificially depressed as a consequence of South Africa’s vast supplies of cheap African labor.^[69] Citing “certain aptitude tests undertaken on an experimental basis by some labour bureaux,” Eiselen drew on Buitendag’s “scientific findings” to justify the “Coloured labour preference policy” he formulated for the Western Cape:

Superficially it would appear that one hundred thousand Native workers in the Western Province cannot be spared. What at first sight appears correct may, however, be wrong in actuality. It is no secret that labour, both Native and Coloured, is used in a wasteful manner. In certain towns where aptitude tests are carried out in the labour bureaux, the turnover of workers has become so much smaller and their efficiency has increased so much, that is has become possible to maintain the same production with a much smaller labour force.^[70]

By “developing to its fullest potential a smaller but more productive labour force,” economic modernization would simultaneously reduce the high rate of labor turnover in South African industry and depress the growth rate of the urban African population.^[71] Liberals strongly supported both of these outcomes. Because they shared this modernizing impulse, all that local authorities could do was to object to the manner in which the department sought to stabilize labor, a tack that blurred their differences with apartheid urban policies.

Controlling women afforded another area of broad agreement between municipal and departmental officials. The department had never attempted to issue passes to women in the interwar years, and thereafter it had limited itself to requiring women to seek the permission of NCs in the rural areas before departing from the urban areas.^[72] Municipal administrators in the segregation era had displayed an increasingly keen appreciation that controlling urbanization meant controlling the movement of women. Speaking at a 1941 conference attended by members of the Johannesburg and Reef municipalities, the Medical Officer of Health for Roodepoort-Maraisburg complained that “women came in and resided in Johannesburg for as long as they liked as visitors and nobody knew where they were or who employed them.” ^[73] Noting that “there was a strong feeling [among Africans] against making women carry passes,” the mayor of Roodepoort-Maraisburg recommended that this political problem could be circumvented “by making them carry badges.” ^[74] Attempting to tighten its control over the movement of women, in the 1940s the Johannesburg NEAD responded to applications for housing with a form letter advising applicants to “bring with you your marriage certificate, Service Contract and Tax Receipt.” ^[75] The concern with bringing women under administrative control escalated in the 1950s, culminating in the extension of Reference Books to women in the late 1950s. But this concern was also expressed in less malignant forms. Thus, part of Verwoerd’s strategy for gaining control over African urbanization involved shoring up the urban African family by “having the patriarchal family introduced again.” ^[76] And to “gain a better idea about the marital status of Native women,” an NC suggested in 1952 that all Africans should be required to “register their union” at the local NC’s office.^[77] Liberals who had researched the breakdown of the African family in the urban areas in the segregation years would have applauded these recommendations.^[78]

If local authorities approached the labor bureau system with varying degrees of enthusiasm, none rejected the system on principle. The effect was to undercut severely the paternalist claims of liberal administrators such as W. J. P. Carr, Fred Rodseth, and E. A. E. Haveman. These men reassured themselves that, had they had their druthers, the system they would have installed would have been markedly less coercive and much more supportive of the settled African population. In practice, however, all they could do was cooperate with their statutory superiors. At the same time, the labor bureau system enabled local authorities to deflect criticism onto the Department of Native Affairs even as municipal officials continued to thwart Africans from entering their areas. In December 1958 and January 1959, for example, municipal officials in Johannesburg alone refused entry to a total of 2,352 Africans.^[79] On the strength of these numbers, approximately fifteen thousand Africans must have been debarred in 1959 from entering Johannesburg —a figure that does not include expulsions out of the city.

Moreover, the operations of local labor bureaus cannot be divorced from parallel developments in the white rural areas. As the following discussion illustrates, the linkage between urban and rural controls provides a graphic glimpse of the corrupting effect that the labor bureau system had on the state as a whole.

Labour Bureaus, the Police, and the Courts

Throughout the segregation years, the department’s refusal to become directly involved in recruiting for any sector (with the partial exception of the mines—see chapter 2) remained anchored in the sort of paternalist arguments that Sir Godfrey Lagden had advanced in 1901. According to Lagden, it was “both in the interests of justice and business, undesirable for magistrates or other officers of the Government to be employed to recruit labour. The labourers should feel certain that, in case of dispute or grievance, they always have an impartial forum to appeal to. If a magistrate becomes a recruiting agent, his individuality is prejudiced.…” ^[80] At the time they were penned, these sentiments were intended to distance the department from the labor requirements of the gold-mining industry, but they also accurately capture the department’s subsequent response to all employers. In the 1950s, the department repudiated this policy by bending urban influx controls to meet the specific labor demands of farmers.

Archival documents bear ample testimony to the increasing desperation and anger of farmers throughout the 1940s. In this period, individual farmers, regional agricultural unions, and various farmers’ cooperative societies bombarded the department with a blizzard of recommendations designed to increase and retain their African labor force—all without improving wages and working conditions. Between 1944 and 1947, for example, the department received numerous requests for the following sorts of interventions: more “reception depots” to intercept and detain foreign Africans entering the northern Transvaal; “labour gangs supervised by European foremen”; the establishment of rural schools to dissuade African youth and families from heading for the urban areas; schemes to limit Africans’ right to board trains headed for the urban areas (including the conversion of railway conductors into “Special Constables”); and requests to criminalize the act of accepting cash advances without turning up to work for the farmer concerned.^[81] Within agricultural circles, the South African Agricultural Union (SAAU) was the strongest voice calling for the rationalization of wage labor, the cessation of practices such as labor tenancy and migration, and the rapid transition to mechanized production; at the same time, even this coalition of “progressive farmers” proposed that these developments should be shielded behind departmental efforts to “stabilise” labor coercively by establishing an administrative wall between urban and rural areas.^[82] By 1948, the department’s standard riposte to all these requests was that farmers should look to the market and “make farm labour more competitive by bringing wages up to mark.” ^[83]

By 1948, no substantial administrative stratagems had emerged to address the relentless complaints about farm labor shortages. Instead, the disorder in urban administration after the war made it easier for farmworkers to slip in and “disappear” into the urban economy. The labor bureau system and the escalation of influx controls signaled that the department’s relations with the agrarian community changed in 1948.

The basic division within commercial agriculture—between “progressive farmers,” who had made the transition to mechanized production undertaken with a smaller labor force of semi-skilled workers, and farmers who continued to rely on droves of unskilled workers, labor tenants, and their families—had not disappeared by the 1950s. Although this was by no means a rigid distinction, in general labor tenancy remained more firmly entrenched in arable than pastoral farming. The latter sported significantly higher levels of mechanization and productivity and, consequently, a greater reliance on semi-skilled African workers. In contrast, farmers who specialized in crops and who had not progressed far in acquiring machinery such as tractors and combine harvesters distanced themselves from calls to rationalize agricultural production at short notice; instead, they remained heavily dependent on labor tenants and large supplies of unskilled seasonal labor. The modified urban controls of the 1950s fed into these two broad tendencies in different ways.

First, new efflux and documentary controls made it much more difficult for farmworkers to depart a white farm: not only did the farmer’s permission to do so have to be recorded on the Reference Book, but the stamped approval of the rural Native Affairs Commissioner also had to be secured. For the first time, efflux controls of this nature became effective in trapping Africans in the rural areas, and they mainly account for the “stabilisation” of farm labor in the 1950s.^[84] This development redounded to the particular benefit of “progressive” farmers. Considerable evidence suggests, however, that these controls were not entirely effective in meeting the demand for stable semi-skilled African farmworkers. African farm wages rose significantly in the early 1950s, and Africans opposed the Reference Book by migrating out of rural areas. Nevertheless, research at the time confirmed that large numbers of Africans submitted to farm labor only because they were indeed immobilized by the new controls.^[85]

The other function of the labor bureau system was to meet farmers’ high demands for casual, unskilled seasonal labor by “directing” unemployed workers in the towns and cities to rural white farmers. The numbers involved in this scheme were sizable, but paled in comparison with other administrative schemes (discussed below) devised by the Department of Prisons to meet the supply for unskilled farm labor. Nevertheless, the category of Africans “directed” by the labor bureau system cannot be entirely separated from the schemes administered by the Department of Prisons, precisely because a large bulk of the convicts daily delivered to the country’s prisons were victims of the multiplying laws and regulations that constituted the “pass system.”

As late as 1954, E. A. E. Haveman described municipal authorities as discrete “city states,” implying that the specific concerns of urban administration —influx control, social welfare, housing construction, and so on—were not only spatially separated but also qualitatively distinct from the concerns of rural administration. He was, in a word, wrong. If urban administrators seemed detached from developments in the rural areas, dealing only with the urban consequences of decisions taken in the remote hinterland, this was an illusion sustained by administrative myopia. In the 1950s labor bureau regulations knitted urban and rural administration together, ensnaring all officials in a system bent on alleviating the “farm labour shortage.” Nothing reveals the systemic interconnections within the broad field of Bantu administration quite as clearly as the fusion between urban administration and the various forms of forced schemes hatched in the 1950s to bolster farmers’ demand for cheap labor.

The practice of making convict labor available to white farmers may be traced as far back as 1889 (and probably much earlier) in the Cape colony.^[86] In 1934, an administrative arrangement reached between the Department of Prisons and agricultural unions extended the policy on a countrywide basis; the 6d. that the farmer paid per worker went not to the convicts but to the Department of Prisons. The Department of Native Affairs was not involved in this program. Nevertheless, the system automatically compromised the department for three reasons: it was applied only to nonwhites, it involved transgressors of “petty crimes,” and it was limited to short-term offenders, sentenced to serve less than three months in jail.^[87] By virtue of its formal control over the various pass laws and regulations, this was an area in which the department’s profile was automatically high. In the 1930s, for example, urban areas regulations authorized magistrates to sentence Africans caught in violation of the “idle and disorderly” clause to up to two years. In practice, J. M. Brink (NC, Johannesburg) observed, the majority of sentences were considerably shorter; many of them ranged “between two and three months.” ^[88]

The first and only instance in which the department appears to have officially relaxed its paternalist posture in relation to convict labor in the segregation years occurred in 1947. In collaboration with the Department of Prisons, it established “an inter-departmental scheme for the employment of petty offenders” to divert convict labor to farmers in the Bethal area (in the eastern Transvaal). Pass offenders from the urban areas were delivered by policemen to white farmers with or without the consent of the prisoner for a period equal to the length of the sentence, usually set at three months, and so were automatically deprived of the right to have three-quarters of their sentence remitted. The scheme was brought to light by the investigative journalism of Ruth First; soon thereafter, the Lansdowne Commission on prison conditions excoriated the system and demanded its immediate termination.^[89] Apprised of the scheme, General Smuts (muttering “What will the world think of us?”) summoned a high-level meeting at his house consisting of Fred Rodseth, J. M. Brink, the Minister of Justice, the Commissioner of Police, and the local magistrate in Bethal, and, commanding the last to set aside his illness, secured the end of the system in short order.^[90] However, the scheme was revived almost immediately after the general election of 1948, setting the stage for the legalized atrocities for which the Bethal area would subsequently became infamous.

Farmers in the Bethal district were long known to have subjected laborers procured under the terms of this system to inhumane treatment, thereby gaining the fearsome reputation that fueled the “labour shortage” in the Bethal area:

Farmers clothed prison workers in discarded [maize] sacks. Disused, or specially built, sheds were used for housing where they were crammed together with little ventilation, no water and no toilets. They were locked in at night and from the end of the working day on Saturday until sun-up on Monday. They slept on sacking, hay or the bare floor. They were given no eating utensils and food was thrown on sacking or on the floor, or poured into their cupped hand. At work, they were at the double all the time and if they did not move fast enough they were thrashed or set upon by dogs. Physical beating was frequent and often brutal enough to result in permanent injury or death, although few of these cases reached the courts.^[91]

Improvements to the system in the 1950s were limited to increasing the payment to 9d., making the money payable to the prisoner, and formally requiring the consent of the prisoner—whose very condition and subordination to officials in charge of the prison labor scheme ensured, of course, that consent was always “voluntarily” given. Unsurprisingly, reports suggested that conditions worsened considerably in the 1950s: to the above litany were added fresh revelations about outright starvation, compelling prisoners to dig for potatoes with their bare hands, and mutilation of the feet to prevent prisoners from escaping.^[92] As the liberal journal South African Outlook observed, “So long as the bad system prevails there will be an automatic and constant pressure toward the mischievous practice of keeping the gaols full…of short-term or first offenders.” ^[93]

An impression of the state’s commitment to extending prison labor to white farmers is given by the rising numbers of African “participants” in the “9d.-a-day-scheme”: from 40,500 in 1952, to 100,000 in 1964, to just under 200,000 in 1957–58.^[94] To accommodate these escalating numbers, convict labor was rationalized in 1959. Farmers were encouraged by the Department of Prisons to establish Farmers’ Prison Co-operative Societies, which would pool contributions to construct private jails on white farms. Again, the prisoners carted off by farmers were short-term “petty offenders”—the euphemism for the rising number of men trapped by the pass system.^[95] In 1959, Victor Verster, the Director of Prisons (who gave his name to an infamous prison with which political prisoners in the 1970s and 1980s would become well-acquainted) boasted that “the Department of Prisons has become the focal point for the farmer, from the Limpopo to the Cape. They all want labour from us, but we cannot supply it, but we are doing every thing in our power to meet the emergency.” ^[96]

Africans forced into the 9d.-a-day-scheme were drawn from the general pool of convicts under the charge of the Department of Prisons. To this category, the DNA’s labor bureau system added a specifically urban source of ultra-cheap labor: under the department’s policy of “labour canalisation,” Africans detained for violations of the Urban Areas Act were channeled to the white farming areas. Although the numbers were not as great as those generated by the 9d.-a-day-scheme, they were nevertheless considerable, growing from under 30,000 in 1952 to approximately 88,000 in 1957.^[97]

Africans dispatched to white farmers by the operations of the labor bureaus were described by the department as having being “placed,” a designation that strengthened the illusion that labor bureaus allocated labor efficiently. However, so onerous were working conditions on most white farms—especially the poorly capitalized ones, where the demand for cheap, unskilled labor was greatest—that many Africans routinely declined the option of being “placed,” preferring to be “endorsed out” of the urban areas instead. In 1958, of the 710 Africans to whom the Johannesburg Municipal Labour Bureaus refused to issue workseekers’ permits, only 232 accepted work in the farming areas.^[98] Moreover, since the number of “placed” workers continually exceeded the numbers who remained in the rural areas, it is more than likely that conditions in white agriculture encouraged high desertion rates for those brave souls who preferred to run the gauntlet of being detected without a properly filled-out Reference Book than to suffer further dehumanization on the white farm.^[99]

As the figures cited above indicate, the labor bureau system in the 1950s sucked municipal administrators into its orbit: in implementing influx controls to stave off what Carr described as the “threat to the white population,” liberal administrators became complicit in creating exactly the human fodder that farmers rapidly came to view as “their” labor. But the perniciousness of Bantu administration did not lie in its secondary effects. Its true register is to be located at the source—that is, within the department itself. The physical degradation and danger to which it now routinely exposed African pass offenders afford sufficient evidence of the gulf that separated it from the sentiments articulated by Sir Godfrey Lagden at the time of Union and reiterated by department officials thereafter. Yet, even more revealing than such blatant collusion with brutal farmers was the manner in which “pass offenders” were obtained.

Liberal activist Patrick Duncan traces the department’s direct complicity in the brutal exploitation of farm labor to a circular dispatched by Eiselen in 1954. In this circular, Eiselen authorized municipal officials and Native Commissioner Courts to “induce unemployed Natives roaming about the streets in various urban areas to accept employment outside such areas”; according to the Secretary for Native Affairs, the scheme would save money on daily arrests and prosecutions of Africans for “contraventions of a purely technical nature.” Within months, Duncan writes,

Squads of police, not in uniform, but armed, would round up Africans in the streets, and ask for their passes…and would tap their pistols as credentials. Anyone without a pass would be arrested, put in a pick-up van and taken to cells.…Under the threat of prosecution, the police and magistrates would offer them work.…The men were told that if they signed these contracts, for three and six months, they would not be prosecuted. Many thousands signed, or merely joined queues of men who understood nothing except that they were being driven on to [trucks] to avoid prison.

Other writers eventually revealed that children under the age of sixteen (the age at which the Reference Book had to be carried and produced on demand) and even Africans whose books were perfectly in order were swept up in police pass raids. By the end of the decade, the department no longer sought to comply with the protocols of civilian administration, as the labor bureau system was altered to meet the insatiable demand for forced labor. The illegality in which the enterprise was steeped, Duncan notes, “degraded the police from being law enforcement officers into kidnappers and blackbirders.” ^[100]

To redouble the point that the department would not be deflected from Eiselen’s goal, Native Commissioners Courts rose to their full oppressive potential. Initiated by the Native Administration Act of 1927, Bantu Commissioner Courts became the Satanic mills of apartheid, swallowing up hundreds of thousands of Africans in any given year and disgorging them either into jails or onto white farms. The essential contribution of these segregated “instruments of domination” to the reproduction of the state in the 1950s was that they enabled prosecutions for pass law violations rapidly to treble and quadruple without straining the “normal courts of the land.” ^[101] Where magistrates and Native Commissioners had once balked at consigning pass law offenders to the mercy of farmers and “labour colonies,” Bantu Commissioners broached the task with quotidian equanimity, permitting only the lunch hour and tea break to punctuate the dreary business of criminalizing one out of every four Africans for what even the state described as “technical offences.” ^[102] Numerous observers, including Eiselen himself, remarked that convictions under these laws were so commonplace that they effectively lost their stigma and hence their deterrent value.^[103] An editorial article in Contact (“South Africa’s non-racial fortnightly”) concisely captured Africans’ attitude toward the pass system by citing a declaration by Henry David Thoreau, the liberal Northerner who had opposed slavery in the United States: “Under a government which unjustly imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is in prison.” ^[104]

Thus, the crystallization of forced labor schemes in the second half of the twentieth century linked together the respective concerns of urban municipal administrators, department officials in the rural areas, the penal system, and the administrative legal institution known as the Bantu Commissioner Courts. Also, because the systemic logic of the new control structure depended on the actual discovery of pass offenders, the contributions of law enforcement officers must be added to the above state cadres. As Patrick Duncan observed, the emergence of the labor bureau system exerted a formative influence on the nature of apartheid policing in the early 1950s. Duncan’s observation that the department’s “canalisation” schemes “degraded” the police referred only to the South African Police. But the impact of the labor bureau system on law enforcement went considerably beyond this corrupting trend. By the mid-1950s, the enforcement of labor control laws and regulations involved a much wider range of law enforcement agents. In 1956, the description of the “authorised officers” who could demand the Reference Book was extended to cover virtually all grades of “European” municipal officials, “receivers of Native tax and inspectors of Native labour”; in 1955, NAD municipal police were given broad powers to demand the Book and unfettered powers to search and arrest “illegals” within municipal locations.^[105]

The most profound impact of the labor bureau system on policing, however, was that it served as a powerful stimulus in directing police work away from civil policing and detective functions and vastly escalated what the literature of policing describes as “colonial policing,” an approach distinguished less by impartial service to the law than by the will to enforce prevailing government policies—in short, “political policing.” ^[106] The colonial approach to policing was, of course, a constituent element of policing from the outset of the Union. But the trend escalated significantly after 1948; thereafter, the “greatest change…occurred in the policing of race relations.” This change was reflected in three areas of policing: the surveillance and suppression of political mobilization in the 1950s, the policing of crime in black areas, and “the enforcement of administrative regulations which controlled the boundaries between the races.” ^[107] A sharp escalation in the crime and prosecution rate was recorded in the 1950s: the figure rose from 74.2 per thousand head of population for the period 1927–45 until it stood at 99 per thousand in 1959.^[108] Brewer attributes the increase to the explosion of administrative regulations and the unwillingness of the police to be lenient in enforcing these. “Native” regulations accounted for a sizable proportion of these administrative regulations: in 1952, Verwoerd informed parliament that 950 clerks were needed just to issue the labor control forms, while many more were required to process them.^[109]

The “seventy-two-hour” clause (i.e., the Section 10 clause) formed the spine of the logic that impelled a host of law enforcement agencies to patrol the black residential areas and specifically the mobility of African individuals. Amendments to the Urban Areas Act in the 1950s left intact the right of any African (who had departed the rural areas with official permission) to remain in an urban area for seventy-two hours without having to register as a workseeker at the local labor bureau. This meant that the only way to detect Africans without the seventy-two-hour exemption was to demand the document from every African—a cumbersome and hopeless process. Moreover, Africans who lost their Reference Books or had them stolen were entitled to report the matter to the local bureau or Native Commissioner, initiating a lengthy period before a duplicate would be issued (for the cost of one pound). So many Books were “lost” from 1953 to 1954 alone that in 1954 the department made it a criminal act to destroy either the Book or the thumbprint it contained.^[110] Furthermore, the welter of detail recorded in the Reference Book (tax payments? employer’s monthly signature up-to-date? permission from the farmer granted? authorization from the Native Affairs Commissioner secured? official or forged Book?) clearly prevented the police from examining each category carefully.

Under these conditions, police simply positioned themselves at points where Africans congregated and conducted mass arrests. The doors of police (kwela) vans would be opened and batches of Africans would be whisked off to prison. After a night, a weekend, or even several weeks in jail,^[111] the African would be brought before the Bantu Commissioner. Here he would produce the Book—sometimes in perfect legal order.^[112] If a “technical offense” had been committed, including the possibility that the accused had simply been “cheeky” toward the police, he would be jailed or given the option of farm labor.

To police the department’s seventy-two-hour clause, two strategies were available to the state. The first, increasing the number of police, was attempted but foundered on the rocks of the policemen’s low starting salary.^[113] The second, pursued from 1950 onward, was to inundate the white areas with police. Thus, whites were given extensive protection by the police, while the black residential areas were massively underpoliced, leaving the locations and squatter camps vulnerable to the predatory gangs and criminality that flourished amid high levels of urban poverty. The most serious categories of crime in the black areas—murder, gangland slayings, rape, extortion—lost out to the chilling bark of the police “Waar is jou pass?” (Where is your pass?). The trend after the 1950s was for policemen to saturate the “white areas” and stalk the locations at the dead of night, smashing down doors in search of illegal alcohol and gaps in the clutch of authorizations recorded in the Book, and so generating the continuous streams of offenders required to meet farmers’ demand for labor.

In sharp contrast to Smuts’ personal intervention in 1947 to terminate the “farm labour scheme,” the integration of civil administration in the urban areas with the overt repression and degradation of African labor enjoyed the full support of key colleagues in government. One of these was C. R. “Blackie” Swart, the Minister of Justice, who in 1952 described farm jails as “my own particular baby.” ^[114] Under Swart, the one department that could have curtailed the operations of the labor control bureaucracy, as well as the daily pronouncements of Bantu Commissioner Courts,^[115] instead rushed into complicity with developments in urban Bantu administration. When liberal legal activist Joel Carlson brought actions of habeas corpus to the courts to extract “petty offenders” from the grip of the various farm labor schemes in the late 1950s, Swart committed the state to defend and pay the legal costs of indicted farmers.^[116] Swart actively promoted corporal punishment in jails and expressly authorized its extension to farm jails. He raised no objections when Verwoerd introduced and secured the Native (Prohibition of Interdicts) Act of 1956, which excluded “any court of law” from interfering with the removal orders issued to Africans anywhere in the country. This act was used extensively in 1957 and 1958 to tie the hands of judges who ruled against the department’s right to serve summary eviction notices and expulsion orders to Africans in the urban areas.^[117]

Urban Bantu Administration and the Apartheid State

Despite the developments discussed above, it is important not to overstate the extent of the state’s internal unity in the 1950s. The labor bureau system remained internally contradictory: local authorities competed against one another and resisted the diminution of their powers by the Minister of Native Affairs, and the courts frequently ruled against the government in a wide swath of areas dealing with “race relations” and administrative despotism. The government’s reflexive response in closing loopholes in apartheid legislation with a blur of revised regulations, amendments, and new legislation failed to synchronize the constituent elements of the state throughout the 1950s and beyond. However, as long as a minimum degree of submission and compliance can be extracted from society, authoritarian regimes do not have to fetishize perfection and linear consistency as holy grails within the state, since the very existence of institutional discord affords evidence of a regime’s “democratic” character.^[118]

Developments in urban labor control should be assessed in the light of the claim that the subduction of paternalist sentiment in the 1950s was an inconsistent affair. The labor bureau system did not deliver Africans into the hands of an all-powerful state. Its crucial function, instead, was to forge the practical regimens around which three further achievements became organized. First, the sheer inconsistencies and “concessions against policy” on which the system came to rest were central to the department’s ability to offset its blatant partiality toward farmers with a relatively generous response to the urban demand for labor. The labor bureau system, in other words, acted as a hegemon that staked out the terms in which liberal employers cooperated because they, too, benefited from the overall functioning of the system. Their opposition was compromised both because all local authorities were committed to the principle of influx control and because of the “flexibility” with which potentially draconian measures were administered.

Second, the labor bureau system established a logic that key state institutions were drawn into defending. In particular, the police and the courts rallied around the system. The unstinting support of these two institutions enabled the “state within a state” to pluck Africans from street and bed, expose them to peremptory inquisitions in Bantu Commissioner Courts, and secure their distribution as virtual slave labor to thuggish white farmers. The entire process was all but obscured from public view.

Third, the least tangible but perhaps most significant legacy of the labor bureau system was that the authoritarian bureaucratic culture it established paved the way—both within the state and among the voting public—for the repressive apparatuses that dominated the late 1960s. One year after the Sharpeville incident, the government proclaimed, “The minister of justice…and the minister of defence…have announced that the South African Police and the Defence Force will be reorganized on similar lines so that they can provide a single fast striking force to crush any uprising regarded as a threat to the security of the state.” ^[119] The labor bureau system presaged this development by acclimatizing state cadres and white South Africans to a bureaucratic culture that viewed Africans as an internal threat.

Notes