9. Conclusion

Native Administration and State Formation

The apartheid state is frequently offered as a textbook example of the violent repression that illegitimate regimes are compelled to engage in. In this perspective, the state’s illegitimacy ensured that the various legitimation schemes launched by the National Party government after 1948 would be widely rejected by all blacks, ensuring that the burden of bolstering the state would rest almost exclusively with the apparatuses of repression. Various chapters of this study have illustrated that apartheid was indeed a brutal affair. However, they have also emphasized a point sufficiently familiar to remain largely unexamined in the literature on the establishment of apartheid: that apartheid was installed not through military means, but largely through the everyday work of civil administration in the 1950s.^[1] A simple proposition therefore runs through this study: it matters a great deal that it was civil administrators and not military planners who directed the construction of the apartheid state. By adapting familiar techniques of civilian administration inherited from their liberal predecessors, Native administrators in the 1950s reversed the DNA’s earlier trajectory. Within a few years, Verwoerd and his colleagues made the state administration the spine of apartheid and discovered a winning formula for a government still very vulnerable at the polls. Thus, although the violence of the state is an important focus of this study, the preponderant concern has been with bureaucrats and their routine contributions to the state administration.

The “history from below” approach that has dominated recent analyses of the state in South Africa has shed much light on the complex configuration of the racial order and the particularities of administration and resistance at the local level. While this study has benefited from these social histories, it is also very much a “history from above.” Like a number of recent studies, it has emphasized the internal contradictions of administration and the tensions that existed between various state institutions. Unlike the majority of these studies, however, it has also asked questions about the recruitment of state functionaries, the organization of communication channels, the personal conviction of state cadres, and the dynamism (or lethargy) with which they undertook their tasks. Analytical concerns such as these were once dismissed as an “institutionalist” approach that treats bureaucracies independently of the political economy in which they are immersed. While it has avoided an institutionalist approach, this study has argued that these concerns are indispensable to a proper account of state apparatuses. The transformation of any state cannot be adequately grasped if explicit attention is not paid to such issues as the quality of the civil service, the clarity of their vision, the resources available to them, and the resourcefulness with which they identify and resolve administrative obstacles.

Institutionalist approaches generally undertheorize the systemic connections between administration and political economy. The shortcomings of the institutionalist approach are most readily apparent in the work of apartheid’s apologists. In the Volkekunde tradition, for example, municipal and Bantu authorities are simply disconnected from each other.^[2] By focusing on the emergence of three key apartheid institutions in the 1950s—the labor bureau system, the “planned Native location,” and the Bantu Authorities system—this study has shown that urban administrators and tribal chiefs were inseverably connected by the political economy of cheap labor. It was not fortuitous that the status of tribal chiefs and urban administrators ascended simultaneously in the 1950s: their stars rose as subsistence production plummeted toward extinction, setting the context for the coercive rationalization of administration in the 1950s.^[3] The reorganization of administration is thus incomprehensible outside the political economy framework. Accordingly, this study has integrated the concerns of the institutionalist and political economy approaches.

Like a number of recent studies, it has located the institutional conflicts between local authorities and the DNA in the broader context of South Africa’s political economy. It has argued that the DNA, torn between the competition between farmers, miners, and industrialists for cheap African labor—a development that demanded a greater state presence in the economy—and its role as a moderating influence on African policy, avoided systematic interventions into the labor market. Municipal cadres therefore took the lead in exploring ways to rationalize the African labor market. But local authorities also sought to protect their own institutional interests and were keenly aware of their constitutionally subordinate position within the state’s internal hierarchy. Municipal administrators therefore generally offset their demands for greater administrative efficiency and coherence with a firm insistence on municipal autonomy in Native administration. Despite the growth of a notably more technicist bureaucratic discourse in Native administration, the establishment of regional associations of municipal Native administrators with common interests in the rationalization of control measures, and attempts to accumulate “scientific” data about labor market conditions, Native administration remained faithful to the noninterventionist thrust of liberal discourse. This bottom-line administrative principle—that extensive state interventions into the economy conflicted with the rationality of the “free market” and invited problems of legitimation with Africans—accommodated a range of discordant voices within Native administration in the 1930s and 1940s.

The flexibility of official discourse was reflected in the ideology, recruitment, and socialization of officials in Native administration—which were rooted in the indecisive orientation and commitments of Native affairs in the first half of the twentieth century. Not even in its colonial era did South Africa sport a distinguished administrative service inspired by the high ideals of noblesse oblige that marked, for example, Britain’s colonization of India. The paternalist ideology in Native administration was therefore rooted in unpropitious soil and ill-prepared to resist the powerful, if competing, interests that whites had in subjecting Africans to racially oppressive controls in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the DNA did not succumb fully or willingly to the extensive involvement of the state in the proletarianization and distribution of cheap African labor, and it did not, therefore, play a leading role in state formation before the 1950s. Instead, it sought to ameliorate the harshest implications of racial supremacy. Together with its refusal to invade the customary autonomy of local authorities, the DNA’s ambivalent relationship to the racial structures it was authorized to regulate encouraged a degree of latitude in the ideology and performance of Native administrators that was arguably the prime reason for the demise of Smuts’ government in 1948.

The haphazard appointments that Smuts made to the NAC in the 1930s, the indifferent figures whom he appointed as MNA, and Smuts’ own extemporaneous pronouncements were emblematic of the laissez-faire underpinnings of Native affairs in the 1930s and 1940s. The spirit of ideological contestation that characterized the important conference of Native administrators in 1937 would have no place in the authoritarian Native bureaucracy of the 1950s. At this conference, even administrators from small “conservative” towns felt free to attack Smuts directly and to challenge what they perceived as the inhumane consequences that flowed from his surprisingly strong defense of an administratively “balanced” labor market to stabilize the supply of cheap labor to white farmers. Analogously, prominent administrators in “liberal” cities such as Johannesburg sought to protect the market advantages of the local African population by tightening influx and expulsion controls. And despite the incremental drift toward more authoritarian measures in the 1940s, Native administrators at both the municipal and central levels of the state maintained cordial professional—and frequently strong personal—relations with the liberal SAIRR.

Officially, the formal clarity of magisterial rule in the Transkei contrasted with the overlapping authorities and the ceaseless squabbling between local authorities and the DNA in the urban areas. The institutional ambiguities in urban administration were sharply illuminated by the growing importance that the segregationist state attached to the rational management of Africans in the 1940s. Because this concern was not extended to the reserves, where magistrates dominated the administrative machine, paternalist Transkeian administration received little attention. Magistrates therefore persisted in running the Transkei much as they had done decades earlier. They gave short shrift to evidence of alienation among chiefs and headmen and the increasingly violent opposition among commoners angered by the department’s plans to restructure subsistence production. Despite the importance of the reserves to segregation ideology, administration in the reserves remained in a state of arrested development and without any foreseeable prospect of significant modification. The unresolved tensions embodied within the paternalist administrative structure—pitting magistrates, chiefs, and headmen against one another—therefore simmered on in rural obscurity while the interconnected processes of landlessness, poverty, and ecological involution continued to expel swelling streams of migrant work seekers who taxed the resources and laissez-faire spirit of administrators in the urban areas. Thus, if administration in the urban areas was inchoate and dilatory even when it was innovative in the late 1940s, it was simply inert in the reserves. It was against this background that chiefs and headmen were persuaded in the 1950s to play what many of them thought would be leading roles in modernizing local government in the Transkei. Both bureaucratic confusion in the urban areas and paternalist inertia in the reserves reflected a larger and ultimately more consequential weakness of the segregation state: a failure of will and of vision. Undermined by unreliable bureaucratic structures in the crucial arena of Native administration and by moral qualms that frequently broke out into public debate and breast-beating, South Africa’s liberal era went out with (appropriately) a whimper in May 1948.

The bureaucratic reinvention of Native administration, a process distinguished by concerted attempts to convert the DNA into a “state within a state,” was the defining feature of state formation in the 1950s. All states, of course, are contradictory, and no state ever realizes the goals it sets out in theory. The reorganization of Native administration in the 1950s therefore generated important contradictions between different classes and within the state. The particular apartheid vision that the DNA outlined was not rooted in a “grand design,” as Posel has shown, but emerged through uneven processes of conflict, accommodation, and ad hoc experimentation; even the pace and tenacity of its administrative exertions were implicated in the unevenness of state formation. The notion of a state within a state, therefore, does not automatically invest the DNA with coherence and clairvoyance, as some have suggested.^[4] However, it does draw attention to the extraordinary consolidation of the DNA’s jurisdiction over the vast majority of South Africa’s population and the leading role it played in modernizing the distinctive institutions of “grand apartheid.” It should be noted that the 1950s and 1960s were also characterized by the modification or genesis of other state institutions, such as the bureaucracies established to administer “coloured” and “Indian affairs,” which were important to the institutional configuration of the apartheid state. However, none of these rivaled either the degree to which African affairs were compressed into a single bureaucracy or the defining role that the DNA played in shaping state and society in the apartheid era. Whatever their sui generis importance to the state or to the subsequent alignment of politics in the apartheid era, institutional innovations under the rubrics of coloured and Indian affairs were essentially derivatives of the fundamental transformation of the DNA into a “state within state.”

The specific manner in which this latter process was carried out led to the hypertrophy of the state administration and the highly visible role that authoritarian administrators played in regulating the labor, housing, and employment “markets” for the black majority. These initiatives entailed the centralization of the state and the gradual diminution of local authorities through processes that consolidated white support for the National Party government while exacerbating institutional antagonism between the DNA and local authorities. Furthermore, these initiatives redefined the DNA’s relationship to various classes within the white population. National Party cadres looked to the DNA to stamp out the “chaos” in the labor market and simultaneously, in very instrumentalist fashion, place the specific labor requirements of farmers at the top of its agenda. The DNA did meet farmers’ demands in ways that effectively institutionalized forced labor. However, to the surprise of many, it also displayed the limits of the state’s agrarian bias by energetically bolstering the reproduction and administration of industry’s urban labor force. The labor bureau system and the “planned Native location” therefore became the twin axes around which administration turned. At the same time, the collective impact of these two innovations extended well beyond the confines of Native administration.

Viewed from the perspective of state formation, however, the specific contributions of the labor bureau system and the planned location varied in important ways. The labor bureau system made its mark primarily (but, of course, by no means exclusively) on the state. Not only did the system entail the practical subordination of local authorities to the DNA, but its highly regimented and authoritarian bureaucratic logic rapidly evolved into the organizing principle of the judicial and law enforcement agencies, profoundly corrupting the state as a whole. The administrative consequences of the labor bureau system may well be described as perfidious, for the system orchestrated precisely the kind of attack on Africans that the DNA’s paternal sensibilities had sought to prevent in the segregation era.

In contrast, the principal impact of the mass-produced “planned Native location” was on society, and the consequences of these austere innovations consequences are best described as insidious. For if the labor bureau system openly violated the dignity and tenuous rights of Africans, the invention of the urban location was unveiled as the offspring of administrative inspiration and racial generosity. This posturing produced two insidious consequences. First, it diluted the unity of mass black opposition to apartheid. More importantly, it also anaesthetized whites to the pervasive coercion in which the DNA’s housing programs were rooted. Of course, the labor bureau system had the important effect of reshaping the conditions under which whites could gain access to cheap African labor; given the whites’ competing class interests in this labor, the system was surrounded by controversy from the outset. In contrast, the planned location locked onto the more visceral issue of residential propinquity to Africans. Because whites generally viewed Africans as labor units during the working day and threats at any other time, the majority of them received the mass replication and spatial separation of urban African locations with gratitude in the 1950s and with indifference later on. It would take the eruption of township youth in 1976 to propel the locations to the forefront of whites’ awareness. Whereas African locations are viewed in the literature principally as mechanisms for controlling Africans in the urban areas,^[5] this study contends that they should also be ranked with the Bantustan model as a notably successful attempt to legitimate apartheid in the eyes of the ruling population.

Racial Domination and the Primacy of the State Administration

Four analytical points flow from the survey above of the paramount importance of Native administration in the shaping of South Africa’s racial order. The first point deals with the role of paternalism and its gradual erosion; the second emphasizes the crucially important role that civilian administration played in routinizing oppression; the third examines the notion of “resistance”; and the last touches on a number of issues pertinent to the transition from apartheid to democracy in contemporary South Africa.

The Erosion of Paternalism in Native Administration

Paternalism is, of course, a negative quality. The concept condenses notions of patriarchal arrogance with presuppositions about the immaturity and defenselessness of subordinates. At the same time, paternalism also embodies a more “positive” claim. It is based on the notion, Charles van Onselen writes, that dominant and subordinate partner are “quasi-kin,” so that the bonds that tie the “father” to his “quasi-family” are also infused with a sense of moral obligation: the “father” has to provide a minimal degree of protection to members of his “extended family,” who, in turn, are obliged to combine deference with the performance of their duties. Of course, the asymmetrical reciprocity on which paternalist relations are based ensure that such relationships are unstable and contested, both “from below” and “from above.” ^[6] Nevertheless, an essential condition of a paternalist culture is that subordinate groups or their representatives grant an empirically variable degree of consent to their subordination.

Although the authoritarian state culture of the apartheid years contrasted significantly with the paternalist underpinnings of the segregation era, paternalism has not been systematically examined in the literature on South Africa. A small crop of studies, however, have demonstrated that racial domination was buttressed by paternalist norms that shaded off into Gramscian notions of “hegemony.” For example, in their respective works, Helen Bradford and Dunbar Moodie suggest that truncated forms of hegemonic practices struck root in particularly inhospitable and unpromising contexts in South Africa. In the absence of viable alternatives, Bradford and Moodie conclude, labor-tenants and hostel-dwellers became ensnared in a cultural dialectic that enabled them to extract some degree of humanity and material benefit from their everyday world in exchange for their cooperation with dominant white authorities. Bradford’s detailed analysis of the master-servant relationship in South Africa’s white rural areas in the 1920s and 1930s shows that, whether through enlightened self-interest or the intimacy engendered by the close proximity of farm life, many white farmers developed “a stunted approximation of the ethic of paternalism.” “And,” she continues, “there were certainly blacks who responded to this ideology of mutual obligations with loyal service.” ^[7]

Analogous tendencies characterized the highly asymmetrical relations between white authorities and African gold-mine workers; moreover, Moodie’s research on mineworkers during the 1970s demonstrates that these tendencies continued well into the apartheid years. Moodie demonstrates that relations in the gold-mine hostels were regulated by a “moral economy” that interwove the interests of and asymmetrical distribution of power between African workers and racist white authorities. In terms of this moral economy, white authorities and African workers recognized a common set of mutual, if always asymmetrical, expectations. Thus, Moodie concludes, “the moral economy and migrant cultures empowered black workers on the South African gold mines before the 1970s, but at the same time collective action according to the rules of the moral economy confirmed a wider overall system of management hegemony.…” ^[8] Africans’ active cooperation with the authority structure in the gold mines was contingent on their ability to extract some minimal rewards from the moral economy. Under these conditions, Moodie demonstrates, African mineworkers actively granted a degree of consent to coercive racial structures.

The analysis of paternalism’s demise in Native administration presented in this book confirms two basic principles. First, as Dubow also emphasizes, it illustrates that segregation entailed a definite degree of African consent to the paternalist institutions of segregation; indeed, African “compliance with consent” ^[9] was perhaps one of segregation’s principle strengths. Second, however, this study also demonstrates the contingent character of Africans’ consent to asymmetrical reciprocity in this period. At the same time, it should be noted that the withdrawal of this consent in the apartheid era does not mean that Africans’ response in the 1950s may be understood exclusively in the light of their disaffection with the state—this is the trap in which the “repression and resistance” approach is generally mired. Before taking up this point, the rest of this section discusses the conditions that sapped the paternalist principles of Native administration.

Paternalism in Native administration was gradually diminished in the first half of the twentieth century by three broad and interrelated developments: (a) the bureaucratic modernization and rationalization of the overall state; (b) the shift from an economy based almost exclusively around gold mining at the turn of the century to one characterized by diversified production, the dominance of manufacturing industry, and greater complexity in the African labor market; and (c) the emergence of sustained black opposition. The following discussion illustrates that these three developments undermined both the DNA’s paternalist traditions in the 1930s and 1940s and the qualified consent that Africans gave to the segregationist state.

Attempts to modernize the overall state structure after 1910 established the broad rubric under which Native administration was bureaucratized in the 1920s and 1930s. Measures such as the Native Affairs Act of 1920, the Urban Areas Act of 1923, the Native Administration Act of 1927, and the Native Laws Amendment Act of 1937 shared a common concern to bolster the powers and “efficiency” of the DNA. Bemoaned by liberals inside and outside the DNA, the result of this process was a loss of “flexibility” and “a mania for conformity” that undermined paternalist ties between administrators and Africans institutionalized in South Africa’s precapitalist colonial history. The rationalization of Native administration, however, should be viewed as a component of the larger project to modernize the overall state structure. The racially oppressive “Native” measures spawned in the process, therefore, should not obscure other attempts to modernize and strengthen the interventionist powers of the state as a whole.

The statist core of “Native” legislation reflected a larger development in the 1920s: the emergence of a more authoritative and centralized state armed with significant powers to dominate the relationship between state, capital, and labor. Yudelman’s study of the relationship between capital, organized white labor, and the state in the wake of the violent strike by white mineworkers in 1922 demonstrates that the state responded to the threat of white working-class militancy by building into the Industrial Conciliation Act of 1924 measures that specifically subordinated both white workers and capital to the state. Yudelman concludes (perhaps somewhat extravagantly) that the state’s dominant status in the “symbiotic union” between state, capital, and labor made it a pioneering modernizer in controlling the industrial arena, and that its solution essentially predated similar projects subsequently undertaken in industrialized nations.^[10] Implemented under the aegis of fashioning a national African policy that was “just” and “uniform,” the “Native” legislation of the 1920s and 1930s was in keeping with this broad attempt to disentangle and elevate the specific interests and authorities of the state above the narrower interests of classes and class fractions in society. The result was the proliferation of more functionally specific “Native” institutional phenomena such as the Native Affairs Commission, municipal NADs, location Advisory Boards, the codification of “tribal law,” the strengthening of administrative communication between municipal and departmental officials, and gingerly reminders that the DNA could dictate the cooperation of local authorities. The collective impact of these state-boosting developments called into question (without, however, destroying) the importance that Native administrators had formerly attached to local discretion and “personal contact” in Native administration.

Smuts’ government viewed the modernization of Native affairs in the 1940s as part and parcel of the overall rationalization of the state structure. For this reason, the modernizing reforms outlined in liberal reports such as those of the Smit Committee (1942), the Britten Commission (1943), and the Fagan Commission (1948)^[11] should all be read in the light of the larger, tone-setting spirit of the Social and Economic Planning Council (SEPC). Smuts appointed the SEPC in 1942 to devise a blueprint for postwar “planning and reconstruction.” The SEPC commissioned a series of reports that defined how the state should assist in strengthening the various sectors of the economy, the efficiency of the labor market, and what the SEPC considered to be the “proper role of modern government.” ^[12] In the view of the SEPC, the “efficiency” of state institutions was greatest when government intruded least into society. Various reports under the imprimatur of the SEPC decried what one—the influential third report on “industrial and agricultural labor requirements”—described as the “highly compartmentalized” state bureaucracy and called for improved coordination, the elimination of overlapping authorities, and the pooling of information.^[13] With respect to the administration of Africans, the fifth report, on urban planning, proposed a more systematic approach to the planning of urban segregation so that the urbanization of both blacks and whites could be subjected to greater “regional and town planning.” The ninth report, on the reserves, aimed to bolster the DNA’s capacities to salvage the reserve economies and to modernize subsistence production.^[14]

The concern with rationalizing Native administration in the 1940s therefore coincided with the larger ambition to modernize the state as a whole. Despite its racial impress, the administrative concern with modernist obsessions such as “efficiency,” “planning,” and “sanitation” (or what Vijay Prashad, writing on similar developments in colonial India, summarizes as “the scientific management of the bodies of Natives”)^[15] stemmed from this broader modernizing thrust and so cannot be reduced simply to devious strategies formulated by state and capital to rationalize the “superexploitation” of blacks. The importance of such modernist themes in Native administration is examined further below.

The second development that eroded paternalism in Native administration was rooted in the diversification of the economy and the subsequent escalation of competition between the mining, agricultural, and manufacturing sectors for cheap African labor. Docility and cheapness were the common requirements of the various forms of African labor that emerged in this period. Other than these requirements, however, the logic of accumulation in the three sectors diverged. The resulting contradictory pressures had uneven effects on the spirit of paternalism in Native administration. Increasing conflict over labor supported the paternalist administration in some areas while eroding it in others.

For many Africans, the possibility of higher wages, the certainty of better working conditions, and the consolidation of thriving African communities in urban areas in the 1930s and 1940s contrasted starkly with the direct control of white farmers and the deteriorating condition of subsistence farming in the reserves; even employment in the mines appeared less attractive than a stint in the towns. The magnetic attraction of the urban economy therefore destabilized the rural basis of the labor controls established in the 1920s and 1930s. This steady demographic shift sharply exacerbated intersectoral rivalry for African labor and generated competing visions among miners, farmers, and industrialists.

Mine owners demanded reserves, passes, and migrant labor; at the same time, in a move that accorded well with the DNA’s refusal to become immersed in recruiting and regulating African workers, the industry permitted the DNA only a negligible role in the on-site regulation and supervision of African mineworkers. Until the 1950s, therefore, relations between mine owners and the DNA were in general mutually satisfying: mine owners benefited from administrative measures in the reserves that drew African males into the migrant labor system, while the DNA took the position that mine owners took adequate care of Africans on gold-mining premises. The development of gold mining, the spine of South Africa’s political economy, therefore buttressed the paternalist ethos of Native administration for two principal reasons: it provided a powerful rationale for retaining the reserves, the cradle of paternalism in Native administration, and it distanced administration from the reproduction of white supremacy within the gold-mining industry.

Demands from white farmers for a highly regulated labor market laid down a more complicated agenda for the state: farmers required the state to integrate administrative provisions designed to trap African laborers in white rural areas with draconian measures to extract and redistribute rural Africans rendered “superfluous” by the mechanization of agriculture. Capitalist development in agriculture could therefore impact the DNA’s paternalist approach with particular force. However, the department responded by declining to cooperate with the letter of the law. Although Smuts is on record as coming to the defense of the Native Service Contract Act at the conference of Native administrators in 1937, the DNA generally went out of its way to disparage the spirit in which that act was conceived and sometimes prosecuted white farmers for mistreating African employers, and it noted pointedly that responsibility for implementing the Native Service Contract Act rested with the Department of Justice. Nevertheless, it is clear that the DNA could have acted more concertedly in defense of Africans pinioned to sometimes callous farmers in the white countryside. Indeed, evidence that it relaxed its paternalist posture significantly in these areas is given by the department’s own participation in forced labor schemes in 1947—a stark contrast to its categorical repudiation of such practices just ten years earlier. In sum, the DNA preserved its paternalist orientation passively—that is, by refusing to sanction patently oppressive labor controls in white farming areas. The result was a culture of tolerance that eroded the liberal rhetoric of the 1930s and briefly ensnared rural native commissioners in the illegal practices of farmers who were unwilling to attract workers by raising wages—a bellwether development, perhaps, in a wider erosion of paternalist sentiments within the white voting public.

However, developments in the rural areas did not pose fundamental challenges to this administrative paternalism. Instead, it was in the urban areas that the DNA’s paternalism succumbed most definitively. Here, the department’s paternalist tradition were simply redundant where the context was dominated by the principles of modern urban management, where there was already a tradition of militancy in the mobilization of African labor, and where even the central importance of patriarchal control over extended families had, by the 1940s, given way to the spirit of individualism and market-driven competition. Such conditions militated against the persistence of paternalism in urban administration.

Magistrates in the reserves personally controlled a broad swath of local government, and looked upon the district council system as essentially an appendage of their powers. In contrast, urban administration was organized along technocratic lines, and although the urban machine was poorly organized at best, bureaucratic principles—such as the principal of legitimate domination and the impersonal nature of bureaucratic rationality—either prevailed or served as benchmarks against which state cadres measured their administrative performance. Therefore, relations between white urban authorities and Africans were regulated by relatively rigid bureaucratic channels that reinforced the impersonal character of bureaucracy and undercut the maintenance of paternalist bonds between blacks and whites. According to Max Weber, the emergence of rational administration is rooted in the instrumental logic of capitalist relations.^[16] Thus, in the urban areas, where capitalist relations were most well developed, the regularization of the wage relation gutted paternalist sentiments by enabling Africans to subsist independently of the personal support of white authorities and to dispense with the need to cultivate close ties with urban authorities. Finally, the sheer intensification of racial domination also ensured that solicitous sentiments between white authorities and Africans would be kept in check. The elimination of the poor white problem is instructive in this regard. Poor urban whites, whom the report of the Stallard Commission lumped together with unemployed Africans as threats to law and order, benefited materially from paternalist policies designed to accelerate the “civilizing process” by virtue of their status as destitute “citizens.” In contrast, urban African administration converted issues of citizenship into technical squabbles about which level of the state bore the moral and fiscal responsibilities for accommodating and administering Africans in the urban areas. The instrumental logic of this administrative approach to meeting the material requirement of Africans therefore contrasted sharply with the notion fostered by the state (at least from the late 1920s on) that all whites were “quasi-kin” and therefore organically connected to the economic and cultural capital of the state.^[17]

In sum, the uneven development of capitalism in the segregation era irreparably strained the paternalist principle in Native administration. While the DNA continued to defend the paternalist pillars of its stewardship over the reserves, its interventions in capitalist agriculture fell far short of the custodial responsibilities it set for itself. Developments in urban administration inflicted the greatest damage on its paternalist claims, however: here the sheer logic of bureaucratic rationality and the materialist culture of modernity made these claims increasingly irrelevant both to Africans and to the organization of administration itself.

The overall modernization of the state, the regularization of wage relations, and the better developed instrumental logic of urban administration eroded the paternalist posture of the segregationist state, but did not account for the demise of paternalism by themselves. African opposition to institutionalized racial domination, mainly but not exclusively in the urban areas, was paternalism’s third gravedigger. Segregation policy was fashioned in large measure in response to whites’ generalized anxieties about the political and social threats that rapid African urbanization posed to the racial state. The 1920s and 1930s were indeed characterized by the growth of the militant ICU, opposition from labor tenants, and unorganized urban working-class movements focused around issues of affordable housing and transport. These political developments, however, fed into an amorphous sense of dread among whites and did not directly challenge the stability of the state. Moreover, prominent African leaders (drawn from a spectrum spanning religious denominations, the ANC, the AAC, and the CPSA) called the state’s bluff and used segregated institutions such as the Advisory Boards, the NRC, and the Bunga to press for the abolition of racial discrimination and the restoration of the African vote in the Cape Province. These three bodies did not give their cooperation spontaneously or unreservedly, and the possibility of rebellion was frequently discernible in some of the combative antigovernment speeches they generated. It took, however, the unforeseen combination of several events during the war for this undercurrent of opposition to burst forth and coalesce explicitly against the state: Smuts’ tantalizing but stillborn “evil days” speech, the spurt in industrial development and the concomitant growth in African urbanization, the outbreak of grassroots working-class mobilization around urban housing and rents, the ANC’s abandonment of rural issues and adoption of a more confrontational program centered in the urban areas, and the virtual collapse of African administration in the country’s major cities and towns all contributed to the sense that segregation policy was in disarray. Africans were also acutely aware of the transformed global context after World War II. Making explicit references to the Atlantic Charter in the course of World War II and to what some members of the Bunga maintained were “more enlightened” administrative practices in British colonial Africa, prominent Africans rejected the arguments and institutions of paternalism, even if they did so with varying degrees of tenacity and resolve.

In response to the state’s inertia and Africans’ impatience, prominent Africans in the three “Native” institutions withdrew or qualified their consent to paternalist rule. The NRC not only rejected segregation, but also pointedly heaped ridicule on the very notion that whites bore any paternal responsibility for Africans and that Africans were the “quasi-family” of the state. A number of Advisory Boards across the country either supported the NRC by also adjourning indefinitely or adopted a more critical and combative relationship with the local authority in charge; even the Bunga, a long-standing institution not noted for temerity, openly called for the termination of the prefectural model and requested self-government in the Transkei.

These developments revealed the scale of Africans’ disillusionment with segregation. Still, African leaders would not have challenged the racial state in the absence of mounting opposition and militancy at the grassroots level. The immediate event that triggered the shutdown of the NRC was the state’s brutal response to the African mineworkers’ strike in 1946, a quintessential urban eruption. At the same time, the NRC’s collaboration with the ANC also made it clear that the body identified itself with the ANC’s generalized repudiation of segregation and the latter’s new commitment to more militant grassroots mobilization in the urban areas.

Although the evidence is less compelling in the reserves, it is likely that growing popular anger among peasants opposed to the DNA’s various development schemes prompted headmen and chiefs in the Bunga to speak out more candidly against their white overseers, indicating the extent to which the paternalist culture beloved to magistrates had worn thin in the Transkei. Never as elaborate in South Africa as it was elsewhere in Britain’s colonies, the paternalist tradition in the reserves was badly eroded as early as 1887, the year the council system was installed in the Transkeian Territories. The paternalist ethos of administration in the Transkei was therefore significantly offset by an administrative structure that channeled magistrates’ relations with chiefs and headmen through bureaucratic controls, diminishing the sense that magistrates were tribal “fathers” organically connected to their African wards.

Subsequently, in the twentieth century, a host of interrelated processes systematically whittled away at the paternalist claims of magistrates and undermined patterns of deference toward chiefs and headmen: the growing participation of Africans in the wage economy; the decreasing dependence of migrant workers on chiefs and headmen; the relative decline of reciprocal gift exchange, both among commoners and between chiefs and commoners; and a greater familiarity with the institutions of modernity—all of which were exacerbated by the ineluctable deterioration of the Transkeian ecology in the twentieth century. Paternalism, however, involves not one but two partners, so that its decay, van Onselen notes, generates responses both “from above” and “from below.” ^[18] Already shriveled by the culture of white supremacy and by authoritarian “tribalist” measures such as the Native Administration Act of 1927, the paternalist sensibilities of magistrates weakened further in the late 1940s when the DNA began implementing its soil- and stock-improvement schemes. Because magistrates were convinced that “inefficient farming methods” contributed to the downward trend in subsistence production, they were exasperated by the suspicion and sabotage with which peasants greeted the DNA’s development plans. In the late 1940s, they requested that the authority impose rehabilitation measures without peasants’ consent.

As segregation drew to a close, the paternalist links that held the Transkei’s prefectural administrative system together were not yet destroyed, but were in tatters: the Bunga requested to be freed from the control of magistrates, magistrates sought the authority to impose development schemes without Africans’ consent, and African peasants actively opposed not only the DNA’s development plans but chiefs and headmen to boot. The latter therefore bemoaned the bureaucratic limbo in which they were suspended by paternalist policy. Primed for the DNA’s rhetoric of “liberation” in the 1950s, chiefs and headmen requested the liquidation of the paternalist prefectural model and took the highly consequential step of accepting the Bantustan juggernaut —and so fell prey to what Berman describes as the “illusion of the devolution of power.” ^[19]

Dubow argues that the strength of segregation lay in its “flexibility” and “elasticity.” But these qualities were also segregation’s Achilles’ heel. The essential weakness of segregation was that it portrayed paternalist measures as temporary devices that mediated the cultural gulf between blacks and whites. With the support of national organizations such as the ANC and the CPSA, Africans in the various “Native” institutions gave their qualified consent to segregation but also kept a beady eye on its speedy termination. The late 1940s thus marked a generalized appreciation within African political society that segregation had no built-in denouement. Buoyed by popular urban struggles over bread-and-butter issues, an anti-statist mood consolidated among African leaders in the later 1940s, matching the statist predilections in strategically important white constituencies. Thus, the paternalist pillars of segregation policy were effectively rejected both “from above” and “from below.”

Collectively, the three interconnected trends identified in this section—the ongoing modernization of the South African state, the transformation of the capitalist economy, and African mobilization, principally in the urban areas—intersected and ensured the untenability of paternalism in Native administration.

Administration and the Routinization of Oppression

Philip Corrigan has argued that the bureaucracies of the state constitute a “theater of educative tendencies” that encourage some moral features to the detriment of others: “what the state regulates are moral features of the social environment.…” ^[20] A number of writers on state formation have applied the notion of “moral regulation” not to civil society but to the civil service. For example, drawing on the writing on state formation by authors such as Michael Mann and Derek Sayer, T. Osborne notes that “one of the main functions of ideology is not so much to subdue the masses as to boost the confidence—the ‘internal morale’, as Mann puts it—of elites themselves.” In this perspective, the question is not “what does the ruling class do when it rules?” as Goran Therborn has asked, but “what do those who rule have to do to themselves in order to rule?” What happens, Osborne argues, is that state cadres develop ethical standards that justify state practices in the eyes of state administrators themselves.^[21]

This argument is of considerable importance to the process of state formation examined in this book. Given the dominance of liberal administrators and politicians within South Africa’s leading metropolitan areas, the ideological division within the ranks of Native administrators in the early apartheid years raises important analytical issues about the extent and nature of cohesion within Native administration. This section advances two claims. First, it argues that a significant rapprochement existed between liberal and pro-apartheid administrators at the level of civil administration, but not at the level of policy. Second, the practical cooperation of liberal and pro-apartheid personnel was crucial to state formation in the development of routinized racial oppression and in rendering apartheid palatable to a growing number of whites. In this regard, the logic that diminished the distance between liberal administrators and the DNA may be simply stated: liberal officials objected to the moral bases of apartheid, but were impressed by the DNA’s “modern” administrative competencies.

Hannah Arendt’s memorable analysis of “the banality of evil” within the administrative structure of the Nazi state cannot simply be applied to the South African context.^[22] The collective importance that bureaucrats in South Africa attached to “modern methods of administration” was rooted in whites’ dependence on black labor. Accordingly, modern techniques of population management in South Africa were crafted to exploit and control cheap labor rationally, not liquidate it as the Nazi state and a number of early settler societies attempted to do.^[23] Nevertheless, Arendt’s phrase sharply reminds us that racial oppression in South Africa was transformed into a largely bureaucratic enterprise controlled not by repressive apparatuses but by everyday citizens in the form of civil administrators. Because Verwoerd and Eiselen could generally count on the voluntary support of pro-apartheid cadres, the comments below address only the extent to which the DNA’s “internal morale” also influenced and encompassed liberal administrators.

It is not customary to attribute concepts such as “moral regulation” to the DNA of the apartheid years; rather, comments generally emphasize the authoritarian discourse that settled in from the 1950s on.^[24] Still, the transition from paternalist to autocratic administration was not so great as to eliminate altogether a certain sense of morality among Bantu administrators. At the same time, the sense that apartheid was a moral project was anchored chiefly in the person of the SNA, W. W. M. Eiselen; moreover, the moral zeal within Bantu administration was on the wane even before Eiselen left the department in the late 1950s, eclipsed by Verwoerd’s more forthright commitment to baaskap. A system of moral regulation within the DNA in this decade was therefore merely embryonic in the first half of the 1950s and already vestigial by the time of the Sharpeville massacre in 1960; the department’s claims to a moral compass thereafter were simply hollow. But a strict focus on the internal moral regulation of the corps of Native administrators would also obscure an important aspect of state formation in the 1950s: the rapprochement between liberal and pro-apartheid administrators at the level of practical administration.

Osborne argues that the internal regulation of state cadres does not principally involve either the “conscience” of bureaucrats or the “moral systems” that shape these cadres.^[25] Rather, the conviction and performance of state administrators rests principally on a sense of “ethical competency”— a sense not only that they are authorized to speak on behalf of others, as Ashforth has demonstrated, but also that they are competent to steer the ship of state. Weber argued that notions of ethical competency confer a special status on the credentialing and professionalization of civil servants and their rational allocation to appropriate rungs in a legal-rational state. His formal theory views these developments as essential to the ethical formation of state bureaucrats and the elevation of administrative work into a bureaucratic “vocation,” as opposed to its simple identification with “discipline.” ^[26] Weber’s famous pessimism about the “the iron cage of bureaucracy” is frequently understood to mean that state bureaucrats are captives of the disciplinary implications of bureaucratic rationality. However, another (and perhaps more correct) reading suggests that Weber’s theory of bureaucracy meant that “the very condition of experiencing authority as deriving from abstract rules and roles—not persons—presupposes an ethical formation on the part of the bureaucrat.” ^[27] If it were simply coterminous with discipline and repression, civil administration would not require a special “type” of bureaucratic personality, and its inertia would be largely a matter of theoretical fiat.

Notions about the moral regulation of Native administrators in the apartheid era may be laid to rest—but only to understand better the success that the DNA enjoyed in locating its authority partly in a sense of ethical competency that spanned the ideological divide between liberal and pro-apartheid administrators. Viewed from this perspective, the DNA was surprisingly successful in consolidating the ranks of administrators by championing “modern” principles of administration. With Verwoerd as MNA, the DNA actively promoted the professionalization of “Bantu administration” and encouraged its officials to obtain degrees in Bantu administration at Afrikaner universities. If it amassed extraordinary powers and duties, it also rationalized administration by generating a series of functionally specific subdepartments, commissions, and committees. It sought to implement its programs on the basis of empirical evidence derived through “scientific” research. It conformed to parliamentary protocol, and even when it ejected senior liberal officials, it did so with the approval of the Public Service Commission. And, contrary to the theoretical proposition that bureaucracy and inertia are synonymous, thanks to the authoritarian and distinctly top-down approach it developed to address the problems of administration, the DNA significantly expanded state control of African civil society. Therefore, if it is measured against the standard of ethical competency rather than against the more exacting standards posed by the notion of moral competency, the DNA’s contribution to state formation in the 1950s emerges in a more constructive (if always odious) light. These developments sanitized the unsavory work of apartheid in practice. As long as administration was viewed as essentially sound from a professional point of view and institutionally intact—in the sense that the principle of legitimate domination was respected and the correct papers were filled out and stamped—white administrators of all stripes shared a sense of belonging to a “modern” state. “Order” certainly prevailed over “law” in the apartheid version of the modern state, but administrators knew from their personal experience of administrative disarray in the 1940s that law without order harbored problems of its own. Thus, liberals’ objections to the new regime precluded a value consensus with pro-apartheid colleagues over apartheid policy, while the DNA itself soon diminished the moral regulation of its administrative corps. But these developments did not preclude a rapprochement over the ethical competence of Native administrators. Modern administrative techniques were the halo with which Bantu administrators crowned themselves; this creed constituted their “ethical competence to rule.”

Liberal administrators did not view the DNA of the 1950s as a “theater of educative tendencies.” There is no reason to doubt W. J. P. Carr’s claim that he derived a distinctly moral pleasure in circumventing a bureaucratic culture that he patently disliked. Still, the procedural means by which the DNA embarked on its programs confronted liberal administrators with a dilemma: while they viewed apartheid interventions in the economy as “irrational” and racially oppressive intrusions into society, they were also hamstrung by the procedural means by which the DNA formally set its programs in place: in most instances laws were enacted, instructions were issued, and papers were signed. Embedded in the bureaucratic means by which apartheid was consolidated were two dilemmas that ensnared the paternalist objections of liberal administrators.

First, liberal administrators such as W. J. P. Carr and Fred Rodseth were keenly aware of the distinction between technical conformity with rules and the values embodied in rules—the important distinction that Weber made between “legality” and “legitimacy.” ^[28] Although very much aware that legality was not an adequate substitute for legitimacy, there was little they could do to obstruct the flood of legislation, administrative regulations, and far-reaching instructions that the DNA circulated through internal departmental memoranda. Moreover, all administrators appreciated the greater professionalization of administration and the DNA’s strong support for the IANEA’s idea that Bantu administration should be included in university syllabi.

Second, liberal administrators were also attracted to the administration of measures they deemed excessive or simply odious. The thrust of paternalist administration, as we have seen, had been that it was both rational and more democratic to entrust the administration of local African affairs to municipal officials. In contrast, Verwoerd championed a regimented and highly centralized structure that was governed, he declared in a 1956 address to the IANEA, by “clear cut and concise principles according to a consistent program.” ^[29] Verwoerd’s vision echoed Weber’s summary of the essential features of a system of rational administration: a system of “precision, stability, stringency of discipline and reliability,” in which administrators are guided by “an orientation to the files.” ^[30] Municipal administrators soon learned, however, that the bureaucratic model operated flexibly in practice to meet the contradictory pressures in the labor market. Hence, liberal officials learned that the “efficiency” of bureaucratic interventions could not be defined solely by the “inputs of administrators,” given the complexity of the modern capitalist economy. For, as Claus Offe notes in a critique of Weber’s formal theory of bureaucracy, bureaucratic rationality cannot be measured by the “continuous and inexorable application of legal norms”; thus, they knew that the formal “irrationality” of the urban machine frequently boiled down to a “rational” and expedient search for congruence between bureaucratic logic and environmental logic.^[31]

Local authorities were certainly coerced into cooperating with apartheid, but there were also sufficient inducements for them to collaborate with the department and even to admire it. Several chapters have detailed the means by which the department ascended so rapidly and unexpectedly to its dominant position within the state. Chapters 3 and 4 argued that it was partly because the DNA was perceived by both conservative and liberal administrators as dynamic, resourceful, and pragmatic that it was able to outflank internal opposition within the state. Like administrators generally, all Native administrators were generally drawn to the order and efficiency that the department promised to bring in the 1950s. The administrative corps valued predictability, stability, and efficiency as goals in themselves and were genuinely impressed by the technical means that the department deployed to resolve “the Native question” immediately after 1948.

While it has emphasized the oppressive austerity and aesthetic unpleasantness of the planned location, this study has been principally concerned with the “labor process” of state managers and their search for administrative solutions. A striking feature about these solutions is the “modern” perspective in which the DNA attempted to place them. The modern management of urban populations, Jim Holston notes, rests on the fusion of three elements: state power, rational planning, and the capacity for mass production.^[32] One of the ironies of Bantu urban administration was that these elements were used extensively in the design and construction of the “planned Native urban location” (chapter 5). Indeed, apartheid was a species of what Jeffrey Herf terms “reactionary modernity.” ^[33] For while the DNA glorified (and so perverted) the “tribal” past, the techniques it used to impose state control over the present were quite modern. The outcome of this rapprochement between “science” and oppression, as of its authoritarian motivations, was a notably deformed version of the planner’s dream: to build “healthy communities which benefit from the considerations which specialists from the National Building Research Institute and other fields have put into the planned urban location, considered from the viewpoint of health and convenience.” ^[34] In formulating its solutions, the department departed from previous practice by evincing an unquestioned faith in the virtues of numbers derived through “scientific principles”: it counted, recorded, classified, and distinguished Africans into a variety of categories, secure in the ability of the modern state to predict and control trends in civil society as a first and necessary condition for bringing order to society as a whole.

The self-righteous air that surrounded the search for bureaucratic solutions enabled authoritarian bureaucrats to pose as good Samaritans. Liberal administrators who were otherwise appalled at the insensitivities of urban apartheid were drawn into the flurry of blueprints, conferences, experiments, and testing that characterized the period from 1951 to 1954. They objected to this or that principle of the enterprise, but were patently relieved that the nightmare of inadequate housing was at last enjoying the undivided attention of the central state. They certainly bridled at the spirit of le droit administratif in Native administration, but were as proud of “modern” conurbations like Soweto as the DNA itself was. Long in the business of expelling Africans out of the urban environs prior to 1948, liberal administrators became resigned to their grim business thereafter: Fred Rodseth left the department in the early 1950s only because he was forced out, and W. J. P. Carr—who prized administrative order as much he opposed “Verwoerd and his gang” ^[35]—retained his senior position in the Johannesburg NEAD for two full decades before he finally tendered his resignation in 1969.

The expansion of the state’s bureaucratic juggernaut of the 1950s signaled a development not recognized in the literature on Bantu administration: the transformation of Bantu administration into a “career,” in much the same sense in which Edward Said uses the term in his classic work Orientalism: an honorable and prestigious occupation in which the very act of public service is implicated in the reproduction of “difference,” and all the (cultural, social, economic, and political) connotations embodied in that term.^[36] Normalized by the civilian character of administration, bureaucratic coercion also rewarded Bantu administrators with a respected career and the prospect of upward mobility in an expanding bureaucratic structure. This development stands in contrast to the lowly orbit of Native administrators in the interwar years, when entry into Native administration could only be remedied by departing for another department (Native administrators invariably selected the Department of Justice) where promotion prospects were almost certain to be higher. In the apartheid era, the expansion of African administration, the professionalization of administration, and the new status attached to the field turned Bantu administration into an important arena for recruiting trusted Afrikaners upward into the state.

It was not only Afrikaner civil servants who were directly affected by the normalization of bureaucratic coercion. The brevity of Rodseth’s career and the longevity of Carr’s illuminate the corrosive impact of the department’s programs on South African liberalism. Simultaneously displaced and seduced, white liberals remained impotent as apartheid administrators and bureaucrats remade the racial order that they had begun, linking white affluence generally to expanding state bureaucracies. From the 1960s on, the steady Afrikanerization of the department (and of the civil service generally) coincided with the shift from the dominance of state administration to the primacy of the repressive apparatuses. This new phase in state formation was directed exclusively by Afrikaners and so eclipsed the authoritarian bureaucratic culture of the 1950s in which liberal administrators had participated. These two phases of state formation were not separated by a rupture, however. Instead, the consolidation of bureaucratic authoritarianism in Native administration foreshadowed the emergence of the more callous and sinister state of the 1960s.

Compliance without Consent: Resistance, Space, and Administration

It was noted above that African leaders granted a significant degree of voluntary consent to the paternalist segregation state. In contrast, Africans’ response to the repressive apartheid state was characterized by “compliance without consent.” ^[37] This section argues that the concepts of “consent” and “compliance” should be treated cautiously, for two reasons. First, voluntary consent and involuntary compliance are not mutually exclusive responses. Various chapters on the segregation era in this book provide empirical support for Adam Przeworski’s claim, derived from a modification of Gramscian theory, that consent to domination always entails either the presence or the threat of force.^[38]

The claim that Africans’ response to segregation was conditioned by coercion is uncontroversial. In contrast, the complementary claim that flows from Przeworski’s argument would seem to be that Africans’ compliance with the apartheid state also entailed a degree of voluntary cooperation. Such a contention would be controversial—and it would also be wrong. It is only valid in a perspective that makes the cooperation of a subordinate group a function of either a normative consensus or the pervasive application of force. Submission to relations of asymmetrical reciprocity, however, may be explained outside of this stylized polarity. Heribert Adam and K. Moodley, for example, distinguish relations of patronage, clientelism, and apathy from naked force in their account of blacks’ compliance with apartheid.^[39] Their argument acknowledges the range of options available to the authoritarian state and oppressed groups, and it refuses to collapse these options to binary couplets such as “repression and resistance.” This theoretical refusal is crucial to understanding state formation in South Africa.

The second reason for treating the concepts of consent and resistance cautiously centers around the strategically pivotal role that authoritarian state administration played in the elaboration of apartheid. This study has shown that the DNA positioned itself so centrally in relation both to the state and to civil society that its activities exerted a defining influence on the genesis and evolution of the state as a whole. Moreover, the bureaucratization of Native administration—especially urban administration, although the argument is also apposite to the modernization of administration in the reserves—should be viewed in the light of a claim central to the theoretical tradition stimulated by the work of Michel Foucault. For theorists such as Foucault and Anthony Giddens, the ubiquity of bureaucracy in modern societies entails an unparalleled involvement of administrators and bureaucrats in the “surveillance” of society.^[40] The development of bureaucracy in modernity as “a highly rationalized mode of information gathering and administrative control” enables coercion to be laundered as “administration” in the modern rational state. If bureaucratic surveillance is consequently ubiquitous, it is also potentially subtle because of the sweep of its (sometimes invisible) reach.^[41] Not despite but because of their looming presence in society, modern bureaucracies daily ensnare individuals in civil society, routinizing the compliance of civil society to the bureaucratization of the social order.

The linking of bureaucracy to surveillance in this manner illuminates the complexities of the DNA’s impact on blacks. At various points this study has qualified the image of an institution unflinchingly committed to terror and brutality. In this respect, it differs significantly from analyses by Lacey and Muthien.^[42] Because they refer to the segregation era, when the department was disorganized in practice and lacking in vision, Lacey’s conclusions—that the department searched for ways to maximize the “superexploitation” of Africans with mathematical precision, foresight, and efficiency—are particularly shallow.

Muthien’s assessment of the department in the apartheid era are more plausible. Her study takes issue with arguments by Hindson and Posel that the department’s contradictory policies yielded an “urban labour preference policy” that significantly shielded urban Africans from the ferocity of urban pass controls. In practice, Muthien argues, all Africans were equally vulnerable to influx controls. Moreover, the apartheid state remained steadfastly committed to terror from the outset: “As the guarantor of white supremacy, with marginal legitimation buttressed by a minority, the South African state had to resort to continual violence to ensure its dominance in civil society.” ^[43] Hegemonic practices, she concludes, were alien to apartheid.

These unidimensional assessments have two weaknesses: they flatten out the contradictions of the department’s “labour process” in the 1950s, and, ironically, Muthien’s exclusive concern with “repression and resistance” actually abbreviates the range of practices on which the department’s “continual violence” rested. This latter point requires further comment.

Like Muthien’s work, this study has demonstrated that the department’s policies frequently degenerated into capricious and indiscriminate attacks on all Africans. But it has also attempted to convey that the department’s oppressive labors, particularly in the first half of the 1950s, were more nuanced both in execution and in consequence, and that blacks did not always “resist” the DNA’s innovations. These “uncomfortable facts,” to use a phrase that Alfred Stepan coins to make a similar point about the inconsistencies of military rule in South America,^[44] were as constitutive of apartheid as were the multiple injustices that the apartheid regime inflicted on the African majority. Thus, much as Bradford, Moodie, and van Onselen have illustrated how hegemonic norms could emerge in such punishing contexts as labor-tenancy and gold-mine hostels, this study has demonstrated that the DNA could sometimes rely on more than overt oppression.

Even more importantly, the rigid focus on repression and resistance should be rejected because it obscures the most enduring legacy of Native administrators to state formation in the apartheid era: the implications that flow from the racialization of space in the urban areas. From the perspective of la longue durée, apartheid space was perhaps more effective than visible repression in achieving the balkanization of civil society and the compliance of blacks. Western civilization sports a lengthy theoretical history that privileges time at the expense of space. In Western cultures, David Harvey notes, history is conceived almost entirely in temporal terms: in ideologies as diverse as Marxism and liberalism, concepts such as “development,” “progress,” and “modernization,” all converge in the belief that history is movement (whether societal or individual) from one “stage” to another. In contrast to the dynamism attached to time, space and the built environment in Western cultures are portrayed as inanimate, the “dead” consequences of human labor. Space has decisive consequences for human societies, however. It is not only an “objective” determinant of our habitus, but fundamental to the constitution of economics, politics, and culture.^[45]

Chapters 3 and 4 illustrated that apartheid administrators appreciated the central importance of space. Urban administrators lavished extraordinary attention to its “rational planning,” attempting to link space systematically to the logic of pass controls, to policing strategies, and to attempts to whip up what Eiselen called “ethnic pride amongst urban Bantu évolueés. ” The township’s external links to the rest of the urban area were carefully sited, and the internal infrastructure and layout of the location were planned with explicit, detailed attention to the disciplinary potentials of space. The tyranny of the planners’ blueprints yielded a degree of spatial compartmentalization whose sheer banality had profound implications for every aspect of urban life. As a rule, when planners reshape the built environment, individuals are compelled to adjust accordingly, reinforcing to some extent the spatial parameters of their oppression. Spatial planning in Native administration channeled workers toward planned transport facilities and away from white residential areas, toward centralized disembarkation points and away from social contact with whites, back toward the transport facilities and away from white suburbia, and finally back into the segregated townships. By design, spatial arrangements could expose Africans to centralized scrutiny (as marchers hoping to penetrate the white city knew) or sweep them out of sight (to the gratitude of most whites). John Brewer’s observation that the location was dramatically underpoliced should be understood in the context of the unpredictable “pass raids” that became a feature of police work in the urban areas.^[46] Pass raids were brutal physical affairs. But they were also designed to remind all Africans of the power of surveillance. For Africans, apartheid was terrifying because the threat of bureaucratic invasion was at least as intimidating as actual invasion. Because techniques of surveillance require a clearly defined spatial context, as Foucault has argued,^[47] the racialization of space was fundamental to the genesis of the apartheid state. Standing as testimony to its own enduring impact, the “planned urban location” today outlives both the planners who hacked the urban areas into their present grotesqueries and the racial state itself.

But the sheer attention that a martinet such as Verwoerd lavished on urban space suggests that urban administrators also adhered to the notion of space as inanimate and radically distinct from time. To apartheid planners, space would be used as a one-sided weapon against time, a mechanism for arresting the development of African political communities and for disrupting the forging of common traditions: by freezing Africans’ “tribal consciousness,” the “tyranny of time” ^[48] would be vanquished and subordinated to the machinations of the state. Behavior and consciousness, however, are not dictated simply by the built environment, as planners too readily assume. In simultaneously subverting and acquiescing to built forms, individuals and communities impart changing meanings to spatial structures. In turn, space becomes implicated in the transformation of the self-perceptions and capacities of social groups: space both restrains and enables.^[49]

Just as spatial planning through rigid bureaucratic interventions reforged urban communities in unintended ways, so spatial configurations became interwoven into the composition of communities that were neither simple victims of the state nor pure protagonists of resistance. If developments such as the planned location and centralized transport facilities “squeezed” classes together and strengthened the creation of militant working-class consciousness, as E. B. Nzimande and G. Seidman argue,^[50] the production of racial space in the 1950s also provided fertile soil for the disruptive tendencies of criminals and the police alike. Thus, resistance does not emerge in a spatial context that is presumed to be fixed and inert. Because it is decisively shaped by the spatial matrix, resistance is as much about the forging of bonds within space as it is about propelling struggles from one “stage” to another. Furthermore, the political mobilization of women in the Gopane district (see chapter 8) is a reminder that space is not conditioned solely by race and class. Because it is the site in which all social processes are worked as well as a crucial medium through which power is filtered, space is also suffused with tensions over cleavages such as age, gender, ethnicity, status, and religion. In the Gopane district (see chapter 8), concerted resistance also embodied unpredictable gender issues that distressed African men almost as much as they flummoxed Native administrators.

The regionalization of anti-state and intra-black struggles in the 1980s underscores the importance that this study attaches to the racialization of space. Indeed, popular mobilization in that decade was very much a problem of combating the administrative and spatial dimensions of the apartheid state and the ability of a shadowy “third force” within the state to plunge certain localities into turmoil. The specificity of popular struggles in this period cannot be grasped if the spatial underpinnings of apartheid projects are not adequately examined. For example, mobilizing strategies in the late apartheid years had to be carefully crafted and synchronized to overcome the spatial dispersal of coloureds, Indians, and Africans across metropolitan areas, their regional concentration in different parts of the country, and the ethnically specific character of the administrative apparatuses that dealt with each group’s “affairs.” Activists discovered that these cleavages were not always easy to surmount, particularly in the early stages of mass opposition. But ethnic administrative structures also served as lightning rods for popular mobilization. After 1976, the spatial compression enabled the proliferation of dense political networks within and between black residential areas. Thus, the history of resistance is, in part, also the story of converting the bureaucratic and spatial impediments to popular mobilization into weapons of struggle. Just as the reorganization of the state’s apparatuses created the conditions for their own subversion, the distinctive institutions generated in the process also shaped the nature of specific struggles against racial domination.

Indiscriminate violence (particularly in the Western Cape area on which Muthien’s conclusions are based) thus became the most visible sign of the department’s assault on Africans, and waves of anti-apartheid campaigns became the leitmotif of the black response in the 1950s. Yet these developments concealed similar subtexts: the violence of state cadres was not limited to overt repression, and the response of blacks was more complex and multitextured than the notion “resistance” permits. Greenberg has applied this argument to the 1980s, when the state was clearly in disarray.^[51] This study presents it as a formative dimension of the apartheid state in the turbulent 1950s. Spatializing strategies were deeply implicated in “continual violence” against blacks—certainly less visibly than the gendarmerie, whose sheer sight was sufficient to induce terror in any African passerby, but perhaps just as effectively.

Beyond the insidious potentials of space, the department’s attempts to address African opposition in more active ways also qualify the claim that it relied on “continual violence” alone. Two instances of these attempts were the department’s involvement in the provision of urban housing (chapter 4) and the cooptation of the rural African elite in the reserves (chapter 8). Neither was intended as a hegemonic mechanism for winning the popular consent of Africans, and both were deliberately divisive in intent. But, although they served as magnets around which popular anger clustered, they also disrupted the unity of African opposition at strategic moments in the 1950s. The prospect of improved accommodation in far-off planned locations was sufficiently tempting for a number of Africans to hobble the ANC’s “WE SHALL NOT MOVE!” campaign; similarly, administrators used the very process of clearing Johannesburg’s “slums” to stoke ethnic hostility between Africans and coloureds. In the reserves, the establishment of the Bantu Authorities model later made thousands of Africans dependent on material resources that the central state channeled through pliant chiefs and headmen. Whether the motive was material enticement, as in the case of housing, or clientelism, as with the Bantu Authorities system, these examples illustrate that the department was able to relax its repressive stance to some degree.

Of course, these strategies fall far short of hegemony. Nevertheless, they illustrate that a range of options exists between such stark polarities as “repression and resistance” or “coercion and consent.” This range is particularly important in durable authoritarian states such as the apartheid regime. Here, the sheer pervasiveness of bureaucratic regulation poses a dilemma in itself: as long as an odious administrative structure cannot be removed completely, oppressed groups are compelled to generate survival strategies within the folds of the state. Accordingly, the automatic “consent” that spatial arrangements generate has to be actively combated by mobilizing communities struggling to make ends meet under challenging circumstances. In the language of resistance in the Western Cape region, large numbers of blacks therefore found themselves “cooperating under protest.”

Native Administration and Democracy in South Africa

Bureaucracy and race were deeply entwined in the apartheid era. However, the mechanisms that bound the two together varied in accordance with political and economic changes in the country, so that the nature of this embrace changed in crucial ways. It is instructive to sketch broadly the sequence of institutional dominance within the apartheid state before concluding with comments that link Native administration to democratization in contemporary South Africa.

As this book has detailed, the principal mechanism that bound bureaucracy and race together in the 1950s was the state administration, a process dominated by the DNA. From approximately 1960 to the mid-1970s, this task was taken over by the repressive apparatuses; these high-water years of National Party rule were characterized by the intensification of the DBAD’s labor control boards and the steady growth of “internal security” apparatuses. The eruption of the Soweto rebellion in 1976 triggered the “repression with reform” period that coincided with P. W. Botha’s term as state president from 1978 to 1989. To repulse what Botha’s government described as a “total onslaught” by antiregime forces based inside and outside South Africa, a virtual shadow government of security apparatuses controlled by “securocrats” (as they became known) assumed centralized control for coordinating internal repression. Simultaneously, the government pursued a reform policy that aimed at four integrated objectives:

(1) To free the economy from the bottlenecks imposed by apartheid; (2) To create a black socio-economic strata [sic] with material and status interests that would be threatened by radical transformation; (3) To coopt a significant segment of the black population into the existing framework of power by making available opportunities for black and social and economic advancement and by ameliorating living conditions in the urban black townships; and (4) to “normalize” South Africa’s status internationally by bringing its domestic sociopolitical arrangements into line with international standards.^[52]

However, “repression with reforms” generally fanned opposition into mass insurrection. By the late 1980s, securocrats were under challenge from reformist cliques within the government. Clustered in the “constitutional development” quarters, reformists hoped to prolong white privilege through increasingly Byzantine constitutional models that simultaneously extended and effectively checked political rights for all black South Africans. By 1986, the state was disorganized, directionless, and mired in what Greenberg describes as immobilisme. It was clear by the late 1980s that this condition was due to the weight and incompetence of its administrative bureaucracy in the context of apartheid’s economic deficiencies.

This phase was terminated by the appointment of F. W. de Klerk as state president in 1989 and the negotiated settlement that concluded with the democratic elections of 1994. Although it was not clear at the time, de Klerk’s appointment resolved the struggle between securocrats and reformers in the latter’s favor. Not even reformers anticipated, however, that in 1990 de Klerk would undertake the dramatic political reforms that paved the way for the unbanning of all political groups, including the ANC, the PAC, and the South African Communist Party.

Different bureaucracies and cadres have therefore been dominant at different stages of state formation in the apartheid era. However, the sequence in which successive state institutions gained dominance within the state are but variations on a common theme: race and bureaucracy were tightly connected in South Africa for at least forty-two years after 1948. In this period, a swelling army of state bureaucrats and civil servants amassed formidable powers to control black civil society and came close to extinguishing completely a public sphere for Africans in particular. At the same time, the sequence of institutional dominance sketched out above illustrates both the logic and the limits of bureaucratic rationality in the apartheid state. The bureaucratic techniques on which racial domination rested were but techniques, or instruments, toward the larger goal of racial prosperity; that is, to adapt a distinction made by Robert Price, bureaucratic rationality in South Africa possessed “instrumental significance,” not “consummatory significance.” ^[53] The instrumental logic of bureaucratic rationality in the apartheid state may therefore be usefully contrasted to that of the Nazi state. For the Nazi state, bureaucracy was not an instrumental technique, but a principle unto itself. The resultant disconnection of bureaucratic rationality from the rationality of the capitalist economy ensured that the Nazi state was governed by self-referential principles and by what T. Mason labels the “primacy of the political”; in this context, irrationality and self-destruction overtook the Nazi state.^[54] In contrast, the bureaucracies of the apartheid state were firmly rooted in, and hence generally sensitive to, the rhythms of and bottlenecks in the capitalist economy.

There were therefore definite limits to the autonomy of the state bureaucracy in South Africa. These limits were established by the utility of racial domination as an instrument for materially enriching whites in general and Afrikaners in particular. When the conditions that facilitated the exploitation of African labor through extraeconomic coercion changed from the late 1960s and early 1970s on, administrative techniques arising out of the broad but defining framework fashioned in the 1950s were gradually modified, relaxed, and ultimately abandoned in subsequent decades. These developments generate two important propositions on which this study concludes.

The first proposition is that the sheer plenitude of oppressive “Native/ Bantu/black” measures served a double duty in bolstering the apartheid state. They boosted state capacities when they functioned adequately; and when they did not, they enabled the state to judiciously relax or remove troublesome impediments under the banner of “concessions” and “reforms.” As Greenberg has shown, the latter development provided sustenance to the morale of Bantu administrators in the 1970s and early 1980s: for these cadres, the removal of obsolescent administrative measures did indeed “legitimate the illegitimate” and fasten administrators’ claims to ethical competency to a discourse about controlled reforms and deracialization.^[55] In the interim, white prosperity was maintained, and the class distinctions between Afrikaners and English-speaking whites were almost extinguished.

Second, the recasting of the state’s bureaucracies was crucial to the institutional stability of a patently illegitimate regime. Thus, in 1994, the ANC initiated a new era but inherited a state edifice and civil service that were still very much intact; indeed, the democratic settlement spearheaded by the ANC and the National Party was made conditional on the protection of the positions and pensions of apartheid’s bloated civil service. The bureaucratic survival of the apartheid state and the persistence of apartheid cadres into the fledgling democracy are phenomena worthy of close scholarly attention. These institutions and cadres were spawned in an authoritarian bureaucratic culture by a state that was artificially bloated, genuinely corrupt, and increasingly inefficient, and whose law enforcement agencies, moreover, were given a virtual carte blanche in the 1980s to engage in activities that included the wide-scale pilfering and misuse of state funds to organized massacres conducted by elements of the sinister “third force.” South Africa’s contemporary state administration will necessarily play a central role in systematically scaling back the legacies of Native administrators against this dark background. Moreover, South Africa’s democracy has been launched in an international climate hostile to “big government” programs and in a global economy that prompts states to remain competitive partly by reducing expenditures on social welfare programs and lowering wages. In this context, issues that have animated this study—such as the zeal, resourcefulness, and cohesion of the state’s administrative ranks—will be crucial to expunging the gross racial, ethnic, gender and spatial deformities of apartheid, just as they were to the consolidation of the state when “Verwoerd and his gang” lorded it over society in the 1950s.

The apartheid state was compelled to fetishize bureaucratic stability. Democracy in contemporary South Africa provides the one missing ingredient that eluded the National Party and that only blacks could provide: legitimacy. The immediate task facing the democratic state, and a task upon which the fate of democracy in South Africa may yet turn, is to fuse the legitimacy of the democratic regime to a bureaucratic framework that is badly in need of rejuvenation. In June 1994, President Nelson Mandela promised to build a million houses; by September 1996, fewer than twenty thousand had materialized.^[56] In this context, today’s state cadres might do well to search beyond the racist authoritarianism of the National Party government of the 1950s and learn from the dynamism of “Verwoerd and his gang.”

Notes