7. From Native Administration to Bantu Administration

Introduction

Administrators in the segregation era had looked to Lord F. Lugard’s exegesis on “trusteeship” as the broad justifying authority for the extraordinary measures deemed necessary for the management of the reserves and their populations.^[1] Lord Lugard fell out of favor in 1948. The very large fly in Lugard’s ointment was the implicit promise of an eventual “assimilation” of black and white. Supporters of apartheid were fundamentally united in rejecting this specter. However, discord broke out over the specific role the reserves were to play in moving South Africa toward the apartheid nirvana of “harmonious multi-community development.”

Intellectuals and cultural entrepreneurs associated with SABRA—including W. W. M. Eiselen, at least until 1950—looked to the reserves as the moral fountainhead of apartheid practices: everything would fall into place once the reserves were rapidly pulled back from the brink of ecological disaster and converted into modern, viable economies capable of stanching the flow of workseekers into the white vaderland. But, for the constituency of apartheid pragmatists, this was another specter, one that impinged directly on the bottom line of key Afrikaner groups: urban businessmen, white workers, and farmers. The key event that would illuminate the lines of division over reserve policy was the publication of the report of the Tomlinson Commission in 1955—apartheid’s explicit and detailed refutation of Lord Lugard’s “trusteeship” thesis. At the time the commission was assembled in November 1949, it was simply assumed that the report would give substance to the two broad, interrelated points contained in the Sauer Commission report: that the reserves should be developed politically in keeping with the “tribal” character of their populations and economically in order to retain Africans. Instead, the Tomlinson Commission report—arguably the most remarked-on commission report in the apartheid era—marked an early turning point in the quest for Afrikaner unity, infusing the apartheid project with the seeds of a self-reflecting angst about the morality of practical apartheid.

The Department of Native Affairs, under whose auspices the Tomlinson Commission report had been commissioned, stood in the crosshairs of the debate between purists and pragmatists in the 1950s. Its response to the report sought to adjudicate the conflicting interests in and perceptions of the reserves and was, in consequence, a logically unstable amalgam of the two positions. The consequences of this fateful response are examined in the next chapter and again, more broadly, in the concluding chapter. This chapter accentuates the ideological transformation that shaped administration in the reserves in the 1950s and details the importance of the report published in 1955.

Ethnos Theory, Volkekunde, and Bantu Administration

John Sharp has described the racial ideology that rapidly suffused the state during and after the 1950s as an anthropological variant of “ethnos theory.” ^[2] Although it served as a binding ideological glue that informed “Bantu administration” generally, ethnos theory was not crucial to urban administration. It was limited to a number of specific innovations, such as the ethnic zoning of locations, the supersession of advisory boards by ethnically based Urban Bantu Councils, and the introduction of “mother-tongue” instruction into “Bantu” schools. In the reserves, however, ethnos theory was the very stuff of Bantu administration, and Volkekunde (anthropology) its academic champion.

Ethnos theory grew out of the impact of two intellectual sources on a handful of young Afrikaner students in Europe in the first of half of the twentieth century. From Abraham Kuyper, a professor of theology at the Free University of Amsterdam, these students extracted (and significantly distorted) his argument concerning “sovereignty in one’s own sphere.” ^[3] In his own writings, Kuyper’s conception of “sovereignty in one’s own sphere” broadly resembles the institutions that comprise civil society. Describing these institutions variously as “natural,” “original,” and “organic” spheres, Kuyper invests them with a high degree of autonomy from the state: “the State may never become an octopus, which stifles the whole of life…and thus it has to honor and maintain every form of life which grows independently in its own sacred autonomy.” ^[4] Thus, he argued:

In many different directions we see therefore that sovereignty in one’s own sphere asserts itself—:

1. In the social sphere, by personal superiority.
2. In the corporative sphere of universities, guilds, associations, etc.
3. In the domestic sphere of the family and of married life, and
4. In communal autonomy.

In all these four spheres the State-government cannot impose its laws, but must reverence the innate law of life. God rules in these spheres, just as supremely and sovereignly through his chosen virtuosi, as He exercises dominion in the spheres of the State itself, through his chosen magistrates.^[5]

No doubt intriguing to Kuyper’s Afrikaner neophytes in the 1920s and 1930s were his meditations on the “problem of differentiation amongst the species.” In a lecture that directly confronted Darwin’s theory of the relationship between natural selection and ecological diversity, Kuyper rejected the “survival of the fittest” theory in favor of Calvin’s theory of “predestination.” Whereas Darwin ascribed the abundance of species and the hierarchical arrangement among different life forms to “a blind selection stirring in unconscious cells,” Calvin attributed these to the master plan preordained by God. Species did not “select” their positions in the natural hierarchy through competitive struggles; they were “elected” to their stations by a divine Will. Justifying the providential hierarchy that placed some species above others, Kuyper wrote, “To put it concretely, if you were a plant, you would rather be rose than mushroom; if insect, butterfly rather than spider;…and, again, being man,…of the Aryan race rather than Hottentot or Kaffir.” ^[6] Nevertheless, all nations possessed an intrinsic integrity: “For God created the nations. They exist for Him. They are His own. And therefore all these nations, and in them all humanity must exist for His glory and consequently after His ordinances.” ^[7]

Kuyper’s arguments were modified by ethnos theorists such as Eiselen and Nico Diederichs in two crucial ways. First, Kuyper’s four “sovereign spheres” were reduced to a single historical imperative, die volke. In a world populated by numerous volke, each volk possessed a categorical right to autonomy.^[8] Because each volk was a “natural sphere” created by God, a divine mandate obliged the state to preserve the diversity and integrity of all volke in South Africa. Second, these “sovereign spheres,” already collapsed into the notion of die volk, were subordinated to the state. Writing in 1936, Nico Diederichs deduced, “Only in the nation as the most total, most inclusive human community can man realize himself fully. The nation is the fulfillment of the individual life.…To work for the realization of the national calling is to work for the realization of God’s plan. Service to the nation is therefore part of my service to God.” ^[9] Such a view owed more to Nazi Germany than it did to Kuyper’s framework. Indeed, in his foreword to Diederichs’ book, Piet Meyer acknowledged the primacy of Nazi influences when he converted the phrase “sovereignty in each sphere” into “totalitarianism in each sphere.” ^[10]

Onto this seminal framework was grafted a Fichtean structure that Afrikaner students picked up, and again distorted, at universities in Germany. The kernel of the lesson they learned from the theories of such ardent German nationalists as Johann Herder, Friederich Schleiermacher, and most importantly Johann Fichte was the contention that the destiny of every people was bound by nation, volk, and language, and that the life of the individual was wholly subordinate to that of the nation.^[11] Fichte’s language proved to be a fountainhead for apartheid ideology. Fichte wrote, for example, that “Only when each people, left to itself, develops and forms itself in accordance with its own peculiar quality, and only when in every people each individual develops himself in accordance with that quality—then, and only then, does the manifestation of divinity appear in its true mirror as it ought to be.…” ^[12] These were the basic lessons that Afrikaners such as Geoff Cronjé, Verwoerd, Piet Meyer, and Nico Diederichs brought home and reworked into the first comprehensive statement of apartheid’s political philosophy.^[13]

Between 1935 and 1944, Broederbonders such as Piet Meyer, Verwoerd, Geoff Cronjé, Henning Klopper, and other dominant members of the Dutch Reformed Church met almost nightly, fashioning a policy that synthesized Fichtean-Kuyperian philosophy with the historical circumstances in which the Afrikaner volk continued to struggle toward its destiny. The first results were captured in ’n Tuiste vir die Nageslag (A Home for Posterity, 1945), which Geoff Cronjé published in 1945. As a doctoral student in Germany in the 1930s, Cronjé had absorbed the virulent creed of Blut und Boden (blood and soil) championed by the Nazi state. These sentiments—particularly the belief that whites were both culturally and biologically superior to blacks—saturated his book and underscored the Fichtean rationales he advanced for demanding a “national home” for Afrikaners. Cronjé argued that the leaky customary and legal pattern of segregation developed over almost three centuries in South Africa was incapable of fulfilling the divine task of preserving the purity of different races, and of Afrikaners in particular. Nothing short of complete racial separation in all walks of life, he argued, could spare the various cultural groups from “miscegenation and racial conflict,” the “core of South Africa’s racial problems.” ^[14] Having themselves done battle with the “unscrupulous imperialist-capitalist system,” Afrikaners were particularly well qualified to “show the way in which the native must be led in his own interests and with a view to his own development.” ^[15] Suddenly, a halo was hung above the head of even the most minor official in “Bantu administration.” Transforming the business of oppression into God’s pastoral work, ethnos theory remade the image of the lowly Native Commissioner, elevating him into a selfless foot soldier in the crusade to “develop progressive Bantu communities.”

It has frequently been observed that these ideas were developed in response to the broad-based nationalism championed by the ANC as it sloughed off the old regimen of polite pleas and cooperation with liberal white bodies.^[16] Yet, well before Cronjé’s book consolidated the essentials of apartheid ideology, a slightly different strain, that took the Afrikaner’s civilizing mission somewhat less cynically, can be traced in the writing of W. W. M. Eiselen. Like many of his colleagues in the Broederbond, Eiselen had also studied in Germany, but perhaps because he had done so in the 1920s, before Nazism’s noxious creeds had congealed in the German academic establishment, the virulent racism that saturates the work of men such as Piet Meyer and Nico Diederichs is not evident in his own work. From the outset, Eiselen’s principal concern was to identify and preserve the cultural patrimony of African ethnic groups. From the 1920s until he retired from Bantu affairs in 1959, Eiselen held that the mission to distinguish and protect the “soul” of the Afrikaner volk could be morally justified only if Africans were accorded the same opportunity as whites.

Sharp suggests that it is more than likely that Eiselen was influenced by the German anthropologist W. E. Mühlmann, whose own views on ethnos theory had been influenced by the Russian anthropologist S. M. Shirokogoroff.^[17] According to Shirokogoroff, the term “ethnos” described the process that “ethnical units” experienced in the course of their history. The process could have many possible outcomes, and Shirokogoroff argued that one possibility was that ethnical units might stabilize and develop a strong group consciousness. According to Shirokogoroff, “…such a crystallization may occur in groups.…Yet such a crystallized state is not always observed and in some groups it rarely occurs, as for instance, in groups based upon religious or economic differentiation. This is a process which only may result in the formation of ethnical units, and the process I have called ethnos.” ^[18] Shirokogoroff’s own formulation thus permitted historical variation in the process of ethnos formation, but was undermined by the sharp juxtaposition of “ethnic” to “religious” and “economic” groups. Eiselen adapted Shirokogoroff’s theory in two critical ways. First, he posited language-based groups as the principal actors in history, subordinating all other qualities to ethnicity. Second, he did not interpret “ethnos” to be an historical process, as Shirokogoroff did, but ascribed it to the group itself, an entity whose essential characteristics were fixed in time and space and could therefore be taken for granted.^[19] This modification significantly narrowed the intellectual distance that separated Eiselen from the group of Afrikaners consciously crafting an ideology that would give Afrikaners control over the state. Still, Eiselen’s anthropological interest in preserving African cultures distinguishes him somewhat from this group, for whom apartheid was preeminently a divide-and-rule strategy. Indeed, Eiselen was perhaps the most liberal NP ideologue within the apartheid state in the 1950s.

Before his appointment as SNA, Eiselen had been a lecturer in Bantu languages at Stellenbosch University, Chief Inspector of Native Education in the Transvaal, and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pretoria. His association with E. G. Jansen was not a dynamic one. Jansen and Eiselen were not aggressive men,^[20] and it was only after Broederbonders in the Naturellesakegroep succeeded in getting Jansen kicked upstairs and replaced by Verwoerd that Eiselen’s contribution to policy would become clear. If it fell to Verwoerd to render African policy feasible in practice, it was almost certainly Eiselen who formulated the moral rationale that guided the project in its early years. His track record in this area was established and well known. For years, Eiselen had been insisting that segregation was morally suspect. As early as 1929, for example, he had argued that Hertzog’s solution lacked anything “positive” for the various ethnic groups that comprised the African population because it concentrated simply on drawing a racial line between white and black. Hertzog’s “Native policy” had therefore encouraged an oppositional black nationalism that would ultimately overwhelm whites. In contrast, Eiselen proposed that African “cultures” deserved to be treated with the respect that any ethnic group anywhere in the world deserved. The common denominator in this panhistorical view of ethnicity was what he called “the will of the people.” This will was congealed in language:

…there is one factor, and that the most important factor, which I have not yet mentioned. That is the will of a people to stand on guard [handhaaf], to remain immortal as a people. If such a will exists, then it can only operate through the medium of a unique ethnic language. From the history of the Boer people we learn how a people can retain its identity despite insuperable difficulties and economic disadvantages.…Because we refuse as government and People to recognize Bantu culture, because we measure the native with the measure of European culture and on that basis classify them as raw or civilized…[segregationist policies] were, albeit unconsciously, apostles of assimilation.^[21]

In contrast, Eiselen advocated a “positive” approach to the question of ethnic relations. He played a leading role in popularizing the use of the more anthropologically acceptable term “Bantu” in place of “Native” within the discourse of state officials.

Eiselen had sought to influence the Union’s African educational policy well before he was appointed to the civil service in the apartheid era. In 1942, for example, he sat on the Committee on Bantu Languages in his capacity as Inspector of Native Education and because of his “specialised knowledge of the Bantu languages and of the educational requirements of the Bantu.” ^[22] The committee had been assembled to explore the possibility of making African languages available to African students at a higher grade. Eiselen’s expert knowledge of African languages is readily apparent throughout the committee’s report. The committee resoundingly rejected the argument “prevalent in certain quarters” that several African languages were so similar that the added expense of devising different syllabi could not be justified. The report tartly observed that if it was systematically observed, this argument would preclude “examinations given in Portuguese or Hebrew…and other languages foreign to the country.” Exclusion of indigenous languages was “not merely a deplorable illogicality, but a hardship so grievous as to amount to a positive injustice.” In a section redolent with Eiselen’s specialist training, the report contended that “The differences between the four South African Bantu language groups are profound—comparable at least to those pertaining to the Anglic, the Low German, the High German and the Scandinavian branches of the Gothonic group, and possible even to those between the Gothonic, the Romance, the Keltic and the Slavic groups in the Indo-European family.” ^[23] Later, Eiselen himself championed the idea, raised in the committee’s report in 1942, that all South Africans should be required to study an African language as a third official language to “improve race relations.” The major reason, however, for compelling Africans in particular to learn their own “mother tongue” was rooted in ethnos theory. The Committee on Bantu Languages had encountered opposition among whites to the idea of introducing African languages into academic curricula on two standard grounds: fears about “the multiplicity of Bantu languages” and “white opposition to a third official language.” Eiselen’s paternalist response to these objections was shaped by his sincere anthropological faith in cultural relativism and his belief that showing genuine respect for African languages also had implications for the humanity of the herrenvolk: “From our side, we can do much to encourage these Peoples in their struggle for cultural existence if we try to understand and respect their language and culture.” ^[24]

For Eiselen, the virtues of racial domination were of secondary importance to the Afrikaner’s more noble mission of preserving ethnic diversity among Africans. At the very end of his career in the public service in 1964, he was still arguing that the Afrikaner’s “task in South Africa is not the solution of a race problem but the creation of different ethnic groups [Volksgroepe]. ” ^[25] It was Eiselen, too, who sensitized state planners to the possibility that development plans in the reserves could be significantly accelerated, enabling the reserves to retain Africans and to absorb those whom influx controls would eject from the urban areas. This he did with a backhanded compliment that scotched “the commonplace assumption [among liberal segregationists] that Natives will require centuries of contact with western civilisation before attaining intellectual parity with Europeans.…” ^[26] The point, as Ashforth observes, was not that individual Africans were incapable of readily “progressing” along Western lines, but that the progress of individuals should not occur at the expense of “tribal cohesion.” ^[27]

The close cooperation between Verwoerd and Eiselen in the 1950s concealed this important ideological difference between them: for Verwoerd, the racial question was unquestionably supreme, and racial domination the prime object of state policy. The racial view that would soon become apartheid orthodoxy was widespread in European thought in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and not much weight was attached to the importance of tribal variation. As John Sharp observes, “…although it was recognised that Africans in South Africa belonged to several different ‘tribes,’ it was often argued that these were (relatively recent) offshoots from a single group with uniform racial and cultural characteristics,” so that “a great deal of scholarly effort…went into the speculative reconstruction of the common origins of the African population.” ^[28] Under Eiselen and Verwoerd, attention shifted decisively to the distinctions between ethnic groups, although for somewhat different reasons.

Although they differed significantly from segregation ideology, apartheid strategies for redesigning the reserves also elaborated on themes that had been basic to the paternalist model. Like the conservative ideology out of which benevolent paternalism was fashioned, apartheid philosophy in the 1940s and 1950s was resolutely opposed to the conception that society was composed of a collection of free-floating individuals. In keeping with conservative philosophy, apartheid ideology conceived of the individuals as members of groups intermediate between the individual and the state. Described, for example by Edmund Burke and other English conservatives, as “estates,” “interests,” and “classes,” these mediating communities were projected as bulwarks against the anarchy that rampant individualism, unhinged from its communal moorings by laissez-faire capitalism, threatened to unleash on society. For, “above all, conservatives feared rootlessness, the destruction of the restraining tradition, weakening of intermediate groups, the release of social control: they feared the mob.” ^[29]

Apartheid ideologues, apprehensive of individualism to a much greater degree than were their liberal predecessors in the state, consigned all individuals to the intimate, moderating influence of smaller ethnic groups. Whereas liberals embraced individualism among whites while expressing strong reservations about its influence among Africans, Afrikaner intellectuals displayed a general suspicion about individualism—certainly among Africans, but also as a matter of philosophical principle. The Fundamental Principles of Calvinist Political Science, issued by the Council of the Nederduits Gerformeerde Kerk in 1951, for example, expressly rejected the liberal claim that “the sovereign individual with its own interests is the highest good.” Thus, in the view of the council, the aggregate sentiment of individuals could not determine the policies of the state, described in its Fundamental Principles as “God’s authority-structure” on earth: in the liberal state, “franchise is pure vanity of sovereignty, rebellion against God.” ^[30]

At the same time, apartheid ideology placed a premium on humanitarian concern for those considered less fortunate. For Eiselen, at least, genuine respect and goodwill toward African tribes were essential components of the Afrikaner hegemony to which he and his colleagues in SABRA were committed. In an oblique criticism of Verwoerd’s response to the Tomlinson Commission’s ambitious development plan for the reserves, SABRA member Dr. C. H. Badenhorst exhorted the three Afrikaner churches to support the “maximum development” of both the political and “spiritual” missions of apartheid: “one does not ask: ‘How much will it cost?’” ^[31] Verwoerd’s conviction in this principle was undoubtedly of a lower caliber than Eiselen’s. From the outset of their collaboration in Native affairs in 1950s, Verwoerd’s steely approach to practical administration overshadowed Eiselen’s idealism. Eiselen appears to have grown jaded as the Bantu Authorities system became identified with violence and coercion—a consequence, he suggested in 1972, of the state’s decision to place autonomy for the reserves ahead of their economic development.^[32] The minister, however, remained unswervingly convinced that such events were little more than teething troubles or the handiwork of malevolent “agitators,” unwittingly aided and abetted by Afrikaner dissidents in SABRA—that is, that they did not detract from the essential correctness of the apartheid project itself. In Verwoerd’s hands, ethnos theory quickly drifted far from the moral moorings to which Eiselen hoped to anchor it. By the mid-1950s, it had become little more than an artifice to fracture black nationalism.

Ethnos Theory and Bantu Administration

Prior to the 1950s, ethnos theory simply posited an immutable distinction between “cultural groups” without detailing what the final destination of “Separate Development” was to be. At no point before 1959 did it suggest that the Bantu Authorities structure would culminate in African sovereignty in independent states. In an article published as late as 1959, Eiselen specifically repudiated such a prospect;^[33] once he had reconciled himself to the prospect of independence, Verwoerd would in turn repudiate Eiselen’s article. In parliament, Verwoerd dismissed the idea as the handiwork of the opposition’s “mischievous propaganda.” In any case, with white farmers steadfastly resisting the extension of the reserves (a policy that “purified” Nationalists had castigated as “giving the country to the Natives” in 1934),^[34] it would have been folly to advance the idea of sovereignty in enlarged reserves at a time when the government’s electoral support appeared slim and still tenuous. Verwoerd himself was crystal-clear on this point when, in an address to parliament in 1956, he specifically rejected the idea that the Bantu Authorities system presaged a movement toward independence for the reserves.^[35] Thus, despite the fanfare and ideological hyperbole in which it was couched, ethnos theory initially bore no constitutional implications for South Africa. For its part, the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951—the first legislative crystallization of ethnos theory in Native administration—amounted to little more than a change in the style of administration in the reserves.

Nevertheless, the Bantu Authorities Act swung the administration in a very different direction, and departmental officials were required to view themselves in a transformed light. For one thing, reserve policy was now based on centralized control—in itself, a significant departure from the rather idiosyncratic style that had predominated in the segregation era. Consolidated in the Bantu Authorities model, ethnos theory demanded that the state should play a central and interventionist role, educating Africans in the moral sentiments of their past to better equip them for their segregated future. Merely repelling the forces ranged against tribalism was not enough: Africans would “have to play their part [by] learning to love their culture and by becoming reacquainted with their traditions.” ^[36] In particular, magistrates were told in official circulars that it was up to them to educate Africans in patriotism, civic virtue, and collective loyalty. According to the new discourse, peasant society had crumbled ignominiously in the aftermath of contact with capitalist modernity, and the liberal state had been complicit in the consequent “demoralisation of essentially tribal peoples.” ^[37] Only the bureaucratic stratum of apartheid administrators could restore and protect a sense of community, not only in the reserves, but everywhere in the Union—wherever “detribalized Natives” had become separated from their “true” and “authentic” tribal roots. A circular surreptitiously shown to a researcher instructed magistrates “that since the success of the policy of the government is dependent on the goodwill of the chiefs, it is a Commissioner’s duty to exercise extreme patience and tolerance with the chiefs and headmen and failure to do this would be regarded as dereliction of duty on their part.” ^[38] In the segregation era, administrators in the reserves had never viewed themselves as playing central roles in the pass system. In contrast, magistrates were now kept abreast of the regulations that governed district labor bureaus, in particular, and as early as 1952 were instructed to grant Africans permission to leave their rural domiciles only if the applicants had a “bona fide reason to be in the urban areas.” ^[39]

Some officials from the old segregationist school suffered these administrative changes badly. As chapter 3 showed, senior officials such as D. L. Smit, E. H. Brookes, and Fred Rodseth were forced out of the DNA to make way for Broederbonders such as M. C. de Wet Nel, J. J. Serfontein, A. Malan, and H. F. Verwoerd. Segregationist administrators in the reserves had been content to preside over their districts like stewards, tut-tutting about the erosion of tribal societies, but indecisive about actively intervening in the political and economic structures that were tottering and falling about them. The aggressively interventionist brief now handed to administrators in the reserves thus ran against the grain of a revered administrative “tradition,” proud of roots that stretched back more than a century. Hammond-Tooke observes that in the 1950s some magistrates in the Transkei attempted to alleviate the weight of coercive measures as best they could. Another source notes that, in the Northern Transvaal, the “agonizing position into which the Government policy put these unfortunate men led to the resignation of at least six Native Commissioners” and that “one of them had a serious nervous breakdown which ultimately led him to suicide.” ^[40]

The second difference in the way departmental officials viewed themselves is somewhat less obvious but of greater importance: the administrative bureaucracies established for Africans were almost immediately targeted as strategic positions into which ethnos theorists and sympathizers were placed. The entire “Native group” in Malan’s Cabinet, for example, was placed in senior administrative positions within the department. The reorganization of the department, first to take over African education in 1954 and again in 1959 when a new, full-fledged Department of Bantu Education was established, provided further opportunities to place men hand-selected by the Broederbond to hold state policy together. The Afrikanerization of the African affairs bureaucracies continued rapidly in the 1950s, as the labor bureau system expanded and created openings in urban and rural areas. This pattern, in which the civil service was not so much Afrikanerized as Broederbonderized, was duplicated throughout the state, including in the coloured and Indian bureaucracies that emerged in the early 1960s, and was undertaken expressly to dampen internal conflicts and maximize the coherence of state actions. The intellectual warriors of ethnos theory quickly came to control the commanding heights of the state’s bureaucracies. Volkekundiges (anthropologists) also gave ethnos theory a foothold in the four Afrikaner universities and “provided undergraduates with a packaged formula which would fit many of them for service in the bureaucracy of apartheid, particularly in those government departments whose officials depend directly on the continuation of Verwoerdian apartheid for jobs and promotion.…” ^[41] Finally, the crop of segregated “tribal” universities that emerged after the Extension of University Education Act of 1959 provided important occupational opportunities that enabled Volkekundiges to set about “colonizing the consciousness” of thousands of young Africans, who, upon graduating, were themselves destined to take over the Bantustan civil service and tribal universities.^[42]

Conflicts over Reserve Policy

Much as Smuts’ government had waited for the Fagan Commission to deliver its report, a sense of anticipation hung about the commission appointed in 1949 to undertake a detailed and comprehensive investigation of the reserves.^[43] It was clear to anybody inside or outside government that the “development of the Native areas” would be a central theme in apartheid’s future. However, uncertainty existed within Afrikanerdom about the nature and scale of “development” and consequently about the role that the future reserves would play in the political and economic life of white South Africa. Since these issues were central to the Tomlinson Commission, there was an expectation that they would be laid to rest when the commission completed its work. Instead, the report that F. R. Tomlinson submitted to the department in 1954 became a lightning rod for criticism across the political spectrum, exposing ideological tensions between Afrikaner constituencies wedded to different notions of apartheid and alerting the state to the scale of resources necessary to develop the reserves.

The central issue at stake in the debate over the role of the reserves was the extent of the state’s commitment to “total apartheid.” Two interrelated questions loomed large. The first stemmed from the scale of development envisaged in the reserves: would adequate economic opportunities be created in the reserves to justify the exclusion of Africans from the urban areas? The second dealt with the extent of suzerainty that Dr. Malan’s government was prepared to concede to the reserves: did the reference in the Sauer Report of 1947 to establishing ethnic “national homes” in the reserves envisage enhanced powers of local government, or, more drastically, did it raise the prospect of genuine independence?

Consistent with their demands for the speedy elimination of the migrant labor system, purists assumed that the economic development of the reserves should be sufficiently substantial to obviate any need for Africans to enter the “European areas” in search of adequate employment. For purist intellectuals in SABRA, the point was both logically clear and morally correct: terminating the migrant labor system and reversing African urbanization meant supporting genuine development in the reserves.^[44] The second question was placed on the agenda in 1956, when Professor J. L. Sadie, a SABRA member, was urged by M. C. de Wet Nel, then still Deputy Minister for Native Affairs, not to raise the matter as planned at a conference called to discuss the report of the Tomlinson Commission.^[45]

Purists found support in an unexpected quarter. For entirely different reasons, the Chamber of Mines (CM) was in broad agreement with proposals to stimulate development in the reserves. This support was not exactly ardent and was diluted by a number of qualifications that undermined the salience the CM attached to its prescriptions for stimulating the reserve economies. Nevertheless, this support marks an important rebuttal of the cheap labor thesis, which has simply assumed that the gold-mining industry remained implacably opposed to the development of the reserves throughout the twentieth century.^[46] Given the consistency with which this argument has been held and its importance to Marxist accounts of South African history, some emphasis on an alternative reading of the Chamber of Mine’s reserve policy in the 1950s seems warranted.

About the time that the Tomlinson Commission took up its four-year project, the gold-mining industry was confronted with a significant constriction of its labor supplies: in 1951, the industry claimed a shortfall of approximately 60,000 African workers, and it expected the figure to escalate to 130,000 by 1956.^[47] At the same time, the discovery of new gold-bearing reefs in the OFS breathed renewed vigor into an industry dedicated to the pursuit of what was widely believed to be a “wasting asset” that would soon be depleted. Instead, increased labor supplies became necessary precisely as labor sources came to seem unreliable. It was against this background that the Gold Producer’s Committee authorized a delegation led by A. W. Gemmill to articulate the industry’s interests in reserve policy before the Tomlinson Commission. Members of the commission were clearly expecting that Gemmill’s remarks would center around the need to extend the migrant labor system. But, reversing a principle that had seemed inviolate since the early 1900s, the Chamber of Mines spokesmen surprised the members of the Tomlinson Commission by actually advocating a policy of economic development in the reserves. At the same time, their evidence before the commission makes it clear that the CM’s position was not entirely consonant with the recommendations of the apartheid purists. Whereas purists favored both agricultural and industrial development, the Chamber of Mines favored a policy that gave primacy to agricultural development, viewing a modicum of industrial development as a gradual derivative of modernized agriculture. Moreover, the CM made it clear that it would support industrialization in the reserves only if all projects were undertaken from beginning to end by private capital; it therefore struck preemptive blows against “artificial interference” in the form of state subsidies, the creation of public works programs by state corporations “along the lines of the Tennessee Valley Authority,” or “the direction of labour” to promote the “decentralisation” of industry as a way of keeping Africans out of the established “white” urban areas. With an equanimity that clearly surprised members on the Tomlinson Commission, the Chamber of Mines therefore reasoned that “if, as a first phase, a policy of agricultural development is accepted and pursued actively, there will naturally follow in the course of time the establishment and development of villages and industries to cater for the needs and to provide the services required by stabilised agricultural communities.” ^[48] Like his colleagues on the Commission, F. R. Tomlinson expressed surprise at the Chamber of Mines’ support for development in the reserves. It is worth quoting the exchange between Tomlinson and Gemmill. Gemmill makes it clear that, while not opposed in principle to the industrialization of the reserves, the chamber remained perennially vigilant about processes that would disrupt its access to migrant labor. The pivot of Gemmill’s position was the primacy of agricultural development:

The Chairman:

In other words, you visualise the development of small scale industries narrowly attached to soil products?

Mr. Gemmill:

Yes.

The Chairman:

[Would you accept plans to] Improve and then develop, say, a second ISCOR [Iron and Steel Corporation]?

Mr. Gemmill:

…If, of course, you had a large mining deposit which had to be worked, that is a different thing, but other wise it is a process of growth, and not building a skyscraper.…You start for instance with dairy cows and then have milk. Then you have a creamery and processes, and in the same way industries have grown up in European areas: the creamery and the cheese factory and so on. Some others could be tanneries; for example, boot manufacturing.

Gemmill then proceeded to explain why the chamber so sharply distinguished agricultural development from “advanced industry.” Industrialization, whether in the white urban areas or within the reserves, tended to dissuade Africans permanently from entering into mine labor. In contrast, agricultural development within a context of land shortage would boost living standards within the reserves without constricting the supply of labor. Gemmill’s clarification went to the heart of the matter:

…it means that within the peasantry there would still be the young man, say from eighteen to twenty-five, the sons of the farmers. We consider they would still be able to migrate to work and would in turn bring back in the way of deferred pay and money—bring back that assistance, and would assist in purchasing farming implements and so forth. We would have the balance of the community; the young man, the man we want could still migrate and then return.^[49]

Thus, the Chamber of Mines endorsed development plans that would carve the African population in the reserves into two basic pools: a small number of “efficient farmers” and a vast rural proletariat, which the CM estimated would amount to 25 and 75 percent, respectively, of the reserve population. Members of the commission clearly anticipated that the chamber would lay claim to this latter rural proletariat. But, again to the commission’s puzzlement, Gemmill’s testimony made it clear that the mines were content to draw their migrant workers almost exclusively from the class of “efficient farmers,” on the assumption that “after completing several contracts on the mines, [the migrant worker] would, in due course, settle down at home as a married man, as a useful member in a farming community,” thereby perpetuating the migrant labor system in the future. The other 75 percent, Gemmill concluded, would be employed as migrant workers in manufacturing industry and, somewhat miraculously, in the sea of creameries, tanneries, and small bootmaking enterprises that would flourish despite the absence of active state support.^[50] These qualifications would clearly have dampened the industrialization of the reserves. Yet it is clear that the CM was prepared to support qualified plans to stimulate the revitalization of the reserves.

Ranged against proposals to develop the reserves were the vested interests of pragmatists in retaining access to migrant labor. The AHI feared that extensive development of the reserves would cut off the source of cheap labor; for its part, the South African Agricultural Union had no interest in plans to convert Africans peasants into a flourishing class of market competitors. For different reasons, therefore, these two bodies distanced themselves from the zeal with which zealous Afrikaner intellectuals pressed for the reconstitution of the reserves. The AHI, for example, very cautiously tolerated the idea of developing the reserves, but only after first obtaining Verwoerd’s word that the reserves “would not be developed to the point that they became competitors with industry in the European areas”;^[51] its support, therefore, was conditional on only limited development of the reserves.

With regard to the SAAU, Posel notes that agrarian capital did not share the AHI’s interests in migrant labor. Instead, it favored the “stabilisation” of labor as a means of simultaneously consolidating its labor supplies and facilitating the transition to more productive farming methods.^[52] Despite its 1944 recommendation that Smuts’ government should “stabilise” the labor market, in part by promoting agriculture in the reserves, the SAAU’s interests in suppressing market competition from African farmers prevented the body from supporting calls for the extensive development of agriculture in the reserves. The same pragmatic logic that had subverted urban policy thus exercised a similar influence on reserve policy, compelling the state to cut back on plans to disconnect the reserves thoroughly from white South Africa.

White labor also developed a hostility to the government’s early attempts to entice industry into relocating to industrial zones along the border of the reserves, chiefly by relaxing minimum wage regulations. The goals of this program were twofold: to reverse the concentration of South African industry in a small number of industrial centers and to freeze the size of the urban population by employing African workers who commuted back and forth across the border on a daily basis.^[53] In 1958, however, the leader of the Garment Workers’ Union requested that the government prohibit clothing factories in Natal and the OFS from participating in the “border development” program: two thousand white workers in the Transvaal had been badly impacted by the program, raising fears about white workers again “walking the street, hungry and out of work”; the complaint was repeated that same year by a junket of MPs.^[54] Although border industries were located on the “white” side of the border, the implications of development within the reserves would have been the same for white labor.

Meanwhile, around the time that the Tomlinson Commission’s report was published, intellectuals within SABRA pressed the government to step up development plans in the reserves, raised the prospect of granting sovereignty to the ethnic “national units,” and continued to argue for the expulsion of Africans from “white” South Africa.^[55] Caught in the crossfire, the department became the crucial state institution for mediating the beginnings of the ensuing broedertwis (strife between brothers). The National Party had served notice of the importance it attached to the reserves in its election manifesto on “Colour Policy,” which promised that “a body of experts will be established for the judicious use of the land in the Native areas.” ^[56] Based on an interview with the chair of the eventual commission, F. R. Tomlinson, Ashforth suggests that the actual impetus behind the formation of the commission appears to have come from Strijdom, who floated the idea to E. G. Jansen and Prime Minister Malan one year after the 1948 election.^[57] However, according to B. M. Schoeman, E. G. Jansen, the MNA, failed to appreciate the linchpin role that the reserves were intended to play in the 1950s, so that were it not for the newly appointed SNA, W. W. M. Eiselen, reserve policy would have languished in the three years immediately after the National Party assumed office.^[58] In any case, Jansen’s appointment of the commission to undertake a comprehensive investigation of the reserves initially pleased the Naturellesakegroep in the Cabinet. But confidence in the minister proved short-lived as holdover personnel from Smuts’ government successfully slowed down policy changes (chapter 2). Once Jansen was kicked upstairs to the status of Governor-General, H. F. Verwoerd took the reins in Native Affairs. Thus, when the mammoth Report of the Commission for the Socio-Economic Development of the Bantu Areas within the Union of South Africa—that is, the Tomlinson Commission report—was delivered to the Minister of Native Affairs after five years of genuinely hard and impressive scholarly research, the seventeen hefty volumes were placed on Verwoerd’s desk. The report was actually submitted late in 1954, but was only made public the following year, in summarized form.

The Tomlinson Commission and Bantu Authorities

The terms of reference that defined the parameters of the commission’s investigation were simultaneously broad and prescriptive, providing an early indication of the breadth of purpose and zeal animating the social engineers of the new regime. The commission was authorized to “conduct an exhaustive inquiry into and report on a comprehensive scheme for the rehabilitation of the Native areas with a view to developing within them a social structure in keeping with the culture of the Natives and based on effective socio-economic planning.” The full-time, heavily Afrikaner membership of the commission was suggestive of the new government. F. R. Tomlinson himself had recently taken up a senior position as Professor of Agricultural Economics at the University of Stellenbosch, where he and Verwoerd had come to know—and, according to Tomlinson, intensely dislike—each other when both were junior lecturers.^[59] Three other academics, all Afrikaners, were also appointed to the commission. M. C. de Wet Nel, leader of the Naturellesakegroep, Chris Prinsloo of the Urban Affairs Section, and C. B. Young, Under-Secretary for the Native Areas, represented the department. Two Afrikaners represented white farming interests. The commission also drew on the expertise of research specialists in economics, demography, labor matters, and agricultural-environmental practices. Determined to uncover the full complexity of administration and civic life in the reserves, the commission amassed a wealth of information about Africans, their eroding “tribal past,” and their adaptation to the market economy in the white areas, and it considered ways to combat “undesirable changes” by resuscitating the various “tribal economies.”

The far-ranging deliberations of the Tomlinson Commission report may be reduced to three primary policies that the commission regarded as interdependent: (1) the separation of farmers from nonfarmers, (2) a land rehabilitation policy, and (3) the industrialization of the reserves. These were standard concerns in plans for the reserves in the segregation era. But three further points distinguished the Tomlinson Commission report from previous proposals: the vital importance that the report attached to the quantitative measurement of classes, detailed proposals that made increased agricultural productivity dependent on the large-scale removal of “inefficient” peasants from the land, and lastly, the conviction that all plans affecting the reserves should promote tribalism in general and the Bantu Authorities model in particular.

First, the commission approached the task of separating farmers from nonfarmers by calculating the minimum income from agriculture that would be capable of sustaining a farming household. The commission self-consciously sought to assemble a mass of statistical information to bolster its cause. As the report noted, the absence of reliable data on the reserves was a source of long-standing official complaint; in 1943 the report of the Social and Economic Planning Council on the reserves had gone so far as to plead for the establishment of a research institute to obtain “fundamental scientific knowledge on which to base wise land use so as to ensure that the productivity of the land will be increased and maintained” because “we will not know how to do it until we find out; we cannot find out until we investigate.…” ^[60] Tomlinson’s commission flung itself into the statistical breach, emerging with impressively precise data.

Based on a survey of 111 peasants who made a living from farming alone, the commission concluded that “£56 p.a. is large enough to attract a Bantu to full-time farming in mixed farming and pastoral areas, and to bind him permanently to the land.” It therefore adopted £60 per annum as the minimum gross income for the farming population and based its entire project on this figure, tersely commenting that “the Bantu will have to raise his income of £60 to higher levels—by his own efforts.” Recourse to the 1951 census revealed that a staggering 49 percent of the population in the reserves—approximately 1.8 million people—would have to be moved off the land in order to accommodate the selected farming population, designated as “economic farming units” (EFUs) in the report. For the Transkei, between 34 percent and 77 percent of the population would have to be relocated.^[61]

Relocation was tied to an acceleration in the implementation of Betterment schemes. Verwoerd had already anticipated this recommendation in a policy speech before the Senate in 1954 when he announced a new three-step policy of “Stabilisation, Reclamation and Rehabilitation.” ^[62] Peasant resistance was continuing to leave its mark on the department’s work. In the new policy, culling and fencing were to be temporarily shelved in favor of first “stabilising” the deterioration of the soil in as large an area as possible, followed by the surveying of land into residential, arable, and grazing lands. Culling and fencing would be introduced at this stage, by which time, it was hoped, education on the value of rehabilitation would elicit the cooperation of location members. Reclamation schemes would be similar in purpose to the previous rehabilitation policy: to restore land to its maximum potential. Once ecological deterioration had been “stabilised” and land once destroyed had been “reclaimed” for agricultural use, then the “rehabilitation” of land could finally take place, yielding the rural nirvana envisaged in the report of the Tomlinson Commission: thousands of “economic” farmers resident on 52-morgen lots, possessing a maximum of 8 cattle, 9 sheep, and 11 goats, each producing an anticipated 18.7 bags of grain, which, the commission computed with deadly accuracy, would “leave a surplus of 3 bags” to be used as the farmer saw fit. In order to “bring the profit motive…into play more strongly than before,” the commission strongly insisted, and was indeed adamant, that individual tenure should be introduced to replace all other forms of tenure. Moreover, families were entitled to purchase more than one EFU (although warnings were issued against the possible emergence of “land barons”), but could retain their title deeds only if the land was worked to the magistrate’s satisfaction. It was recommended that all reserve land should be brought under Proclamation 116 of 1949, which increased the magistrates’ powers to override chiefs and headmen unilaterally in order to implement the department’s schemes. The report recommended that £37 million should be set aside for soil reclamation, afforestation, and general agricultural development; £31 million for the establishment of industries; £8 million for roads and railways; £5 million for electrification schemes; £12 million for urban development; and £11 million for education.

The separation of “true farmers” from proletarianized workers resident in villages was to be a gradual process. Planning Committees in the Transkei (known as Ad Hoc Committees in the other reserves) would determine how many EFUs could be laid out in a particular location and would allocate land on a pro rata basis to “bona fide farmers” who had held land before. In practice, it appears that land was frequently allocated as a fraction of an EFU (say, one-sixth, one-third, or one-half of an EFU), thus strengthening the gradations separating the poorest producers from the wealthiest—who could, moreover, purchase more land—and rendering the former prone to eventual relocation.^[63] “By a process of gradual elimination,” the SNA informed the Chief Magistrate in the Transkei, some of “the landholders would lose their rights which would then be acquired by the others who would then have full economic units.” ^[64]

The third aspect of the commission’s plans, the industrialization of the reserves, was intended to “absorb” those who were already landless and those soon to be dispossessed of their land. The report did not specify what the total costs of the industrialization scheme would be, but stressed the need for gradual change in order to avoid “a sudden, rapid and almost revolutionary shift to industry.” It called for a sum of £30 million for the first ten years to initiate a program of secondary and tertiary development capable of generating fifty thousand jobs per annum. A revised educational policy geared to the “techniques of a progressive economy” would be necessary to generate the skills required in an industrializing society. Since a “Bantu educational system” had already been proposed by the Native Education Commission chaired by Eiselen, it was left to the Tomlinson Commission to heartily endorse the policy of tribal education.^[65] But, in a rare descent to reality, the commission also recognized that the complete absence of start-up capital meant that the provision of jobs and education would be meaningless unless industries were actually established. Hence, it argued that “European capital” should be welcomed in the reserves, and that a proposed Bantu Development Corporation should be established under the aegis of the DNA to nurture a class of African businessmen. The department was eminently qualified to undertake the work of reorganizing the reserves: “it appears that the only logical course is to concentrate within one department as many functions pertaining to the reserves as are practical, in other words, to proceed with the conception of a ‘state within a state.’…” ^[66]

In sum, the program called for state intervention to create, within three decades, an economy and a class structure in the reserves that were typical of industrialized states. A contemporary critique described the report as “a form of whistling in the dark”: “It is no matter that not even the whole of the Union has yet attained such occupational diversity and industrial specialisation, nor that this is a picture of a Union consisting eventually of two Canadas—when so far there is not even one.” ^[67] The White Paper, which set out the government’s response, deflated Professor Tomlinson’s grandiose vision with just two blows: it rejected extensive industrialization and vetoed private ownership of land. In May 1956, Verwoerd informed parliament that the commission’s estimate of £104,486,000 would be reduced to “at most £36.6 million.” ^[68] The motivations for and consequences of this decision were made crystal clear in the reasons advanced for vetoing, in its entirety, the £30 million required for industrial development, the second largest item in the commission’s estimates:

For secondary and tertiary development £30,000,000 has been calculated. That is the amount which is really intended for the development of white industries in the Native areas with State assistance. That can help kill the White industries now existing in the White areas.…I think it would be catastrophic for the present development of South Africa to establish subsidised White industries in Native areas in competition with the existing White industries. Therefore that £30,000,000 falls away.^[69]

The government also would not permit individual tenure, which the commission had viewed as indispensable to the successful reconstitution of the reserve economies, to erode the practice of communal land ownership: “individual tenure would undermine the whole tribal structure. The entire order and cohesion of the tribe…is bound up with the fact that the community is a communal unit.…” ^[70] Hopes for significant agricultural development were therefore effectively doomed.

No state policy emerged to match even remotely the scale of class restructuring called for by the commission. When the department began its policy of relocation in the 1960s, those most affected were not the inhabitants of the reserves, but Africans in the prescribed white areas: labor tenants set adrift by the mechanization of white agriculture, segments of the unemployed population in the urban areas, and Africans in so-called “black spots,” derisive shorthand for the remnants of an African peasantry “squatting” on unoccupied white farms or on African-owned land still surviving in the midst of the prescribed white rural areas. C. Simkins concludes that these removals largely account for the explosive growth of the reserves’ population between 1955 and 1969. In this period, population density increased from 60 to 100 persons per square mile, yielding a growth rate of 5.38 percent accountable for neither by immigration nor by natural increase.^[71]

Thus, in rebutting the central tenets of the Tomlinson Commission’s report, Verwoerd made it clear that SABRA’s morally shaped views would not be permitted to influence state policy. At a congress called in June 1956 by SABRA, the Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurverenigings (FAK), and the Afrikaner churches to discuss “the future of the Bantu in South Africa,” none of the purists directly attacked Verwoerd’s White Paper for eviscerating genuine development in the reserves (perhaps in deference to a letter that Verwoerd sent to SABRA appealing for “the leaders of Sabra and of the churches” not to serve as the “catspaw [of] the official Opposition”).^[72] In his address to the Kongres, Professor J. L. Sadie responded to Verwoerd’s refusal to involve private capital in the development of the reserves with the observation that foreign capitalists had invested “hundreds of millions of pounds in the Union and [have] established their own enterprises, even allowing their own people to emigrate for this reason, but it does not mean that the Union no longer belongs to South Africans.” ^[73] SABRA’s in-house publication made the “altruistic” case for genuine development in the reserves; this approach was sharply distinguished from what the chair of SABRA described as the “egotistical” motivations of those whites who “want separation…all right, but not at the cost of their own comfort and advantage or the abandonment of so-called cheap labour in the factory or the farm.” ^[74] Articles in the journal pointed out that, in combination, Verwoerd’s decisions to disallow the participation of private capital in the development of the reserves and to reduce the sum of £104,486,000 million to just £30 million would ensure the failure of industrialization projects.^[75]

That Verwoerd would dismiss these criticisms could be guessed from the behavior of the two departmental officers who had served on the commission. C. B. Young and I. Prinsloo had neither objected to nor offered any comment on the report’s recommendation that “European capital” should play a central role in development plans. Only after F. R. Tomlinson submitted the report to Verwoerd would they break the commission’s consensus, coming out in support of Verwoerd’s alternative plan to use funds to establish an Industrial Development Corporation to oversee the £3 million that he was prepared to set aside as start-up capital. Later, M. C. de Wet Nel, then chair of the Native Affairs Commission (and Verwoerd’s successor as MNA in 1957), also reversed his earlier support for private funds in the development of the reserves to march in tune with the minister’s position. As Verwoerd had once informed parliament, “My department advocates what I advocate.” ^[76] A Bantu Investment Corporation was duly established in 1959. Explaining why only £500,000 was allocated to this body to begin the process of industrializing the reserves, Verwoerd adduced Gemmill’s argument before the Tomlinson Commission: “the Bantu must start on a small scale.…He must start on the basis of self-help.” ^[77]

The department pressed on with its plans to “stabilise” and “rehabilitate” the reserves. This meant that the Bantu Authorities system, and the chiefs who controlled the juggernaut, became fused with an economic development program destined to fail. Chiefs were again denied any prospect of putting their traditional authority to “progressive” ends by associating themselves with an expanding regional economy. Again, therefore, their relationship to the DNA would be overwhelmingly political.

The reorganization of administration to grant Africans greater administrative authority thus coincided with a change in the historic function of the reserves. Ensconced in embattled tribal authorities, the African rural elite struggled to impose a stable mode of domination over Africans who had no viable economic prospects in the reserves but were now also hindered by administrative action from entering the urban labor market. After the 1950s, the subsistence capacities of the reserves would plummet ineluctably to the point of nonexistence. Henceforth, their chief function would be to contain and discipline the reserve army of African labor: those Africans prevented by law from departing for the urban areas, the “idle or disorderly” evicted from the urban areas, and the “excess labour” skimmed off the white farming areas. Virtually by itself, therefore, Verwoerd’s evisceration of the Tomlinson Commission’s central recommendations hinging around industrial development and land tenure reforms also gutted the Bantu Authorities project.

Notes