Ambivalent Intervention: The DNA and the Labor Market

The impression conveyed by writers such as Lacey (1981) and Fred Hendricks (1991) that the Department of Native Affairs in the late 1920s and 1930s was systematically fashioned into a coercive institution for facilitating the “superexploitation” of Africans is only partly true.^[5] The mood within the department was not entirely consonant with the state’s growing commitment to authoritarianism in the conduct of African affairs. For one thing, changes to the administrative structure of the department itself had not kept up with the flurry of legislation and administrative regulations. Apart from formally consolidating the minister’s authority—distinguishing its own judicial powers more clearly from those of the Department of Justice, which the department perceived to be its main rival within the state—and undertaking a number of minor administrative modifications, the DNA remained as understaffed, ineffective, and overshadowed by the Department of Justice as it had been prior to passage of the Native Administration Act.^[6] When viewed as a distinct “field,” urban administration remained essentially an ad hoc affair in the segregation era.

A crucial upshot of the department’s ideological objection to extensive interventions in the economy was the destabilization of urban administration. This destabilization was a gradual development. It assumed importance when African urbanization increased markedly immediately after World War I, and reached its high point in the course of World War II, when African urbanization increased rapidly in response to the twin forces of rural immiseration and the urban demand for cheap African labor. Urban administration ascended steadily, if uncertainly, to the forefront of the department’s agenda. By the end of World War II, it was clear that urban issues had eclipsed the department’s emphasis on administration in the reserves. But the formal importance of urban issues was not matched by a concerted administrative response. Accordingly, urban Native administration—or rather, its chaotic condition—become a nemesis of the segregation state.

By the mid-1930s, a battery of legislation formally enjoined the department to play a leading role in the organization and management of the labor market. Three major pieces of legislation were of particular importance: the Native Labour Regulation Act of 1911, the Native Service Contract Act of 1932, and the Native (Urban Areas) Act of 1923.^[7] In theory, these acts established a triadic structure that, had it worked, would have enabled the department to facilitate the supply of labor to each sector by ensuring that each had preferential access to a designated pool of African communities. In practice, as we see below, the department fell far short of this formal goal.

A simple snapshot of this formal model would yield the following picture: the Native Labour Regulation Act would have ensured that the mines drew their labor from the reserves; the Native Service Contract Act would have guaranteed white farmers access to the African communities within or close to the white rural areas; and the Urban Areas Act would have ensured that urban industrialists benefited from a carefully regulated flow of migrants from rural to urban areas as well as from a gradually increasing urban African population.

But this model was never fully established in the interwar years. Moreover, to the extent that attempts were made to cleave to this model, its fatal flaw was the intersection of two opposing developments: the state’s general preference for limited interventions in the economy and changes in the rural areas that drove rising numbers of Africans into the urban economy. The department responded to the latter development with characteristic ambivalence. Even as it explored more effective and more authoritarian measures for bringing the urbanization process under control, it refrained from imposing a coercive regime in the urban areas—principally because it did not wish to interfere with the traditional autonomy of local authorities, but also because it was in general support of African urbanization.

The DNA, Gold Mining, and White Agriculture

The Native Labour Regulation Act governed the employment and recruiting conditions in the mines and was therefore expressly designed to maintain the system of temporary male migration between the reserves and the mining areas. As its preamble stated, the central objective of the act was to “ensure ^[9]as far as possible a more equal division between conflicting industrial mining and agricultural interests in different parts of the Union.…” ^[8] The act therefore centralized controls relating to the migration of African mineworkers from the reserves, their accommodation in compound housing on the mining premises, and their return to the subsistence areas. It should be noted, however, that the actual process of recruiting workers and channeling them from the reserves to pass offices in the Transvaal (where a routine medical examination was undertaken and the service contract was registered) was left either to the industry’s private labor recruiting organizations or to private labor recruiters: these were not the department’s duties.^[9]

The DNA was thus never directly involved in either the recruiting or the production process of gold mining. Instead, the Chamber of Mines developed its own recruiting apparatuses—the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA) and the Native Recruiting Corporation—going to extraordinary lengths to assert its lockhold over its far-flung sources of labor.^[10] The department’s role in the industry was confined to the placing of Welfare Officers on mining premises. These officers ensured that accommodation of workers conformed to guidelines and acted as links between black workers and the Director of Native Labour (DNL), the official who (under the terms of the Native Regulation Act of 1911) managed the Native Labour Department established within the DNA. Officials in the Native Labour Department also registered the service contracts of migrant workers.^[11] Beyond such functions, however, the DNA’s involvement in the gold mining industry was minimal; its principal role was limited to what it described as “welfare functions.” ^[12] Because they coincided with and reinforced the department’s paternalist responsibilities for Africans, these tasks were generally taken seriously by the sizable number of men allocated to the Director of Native Labour (three Native Commissioners [NCs], an Assistant NC, three Inspectors of Native Labour, and ten “relatively senior officers in charge of pass offices”). The department derived evident pleasure from the observation that “Native workers had come to trust the Labour Officers who tended to their interests in the Union’s labor centers.” ^[13]

In sharp contrast to its well-elaborated and cordial relations with the mining industry, the department’s dealings with white farmers remained perfunctory and testy throughout the segregation years. The reasons for this lay in the organization of labor relations in the white countryside, and more particularly, in the central importance that the large majority of farmers attached to labor tenancy, a long-standing practice which the Native Service Contract Act sought to rationalize and protect.^[14] The department was less than supportive of this arrangement in white agriculture for two reasons. First, it argued that labor tenancy was an “inefficient” economic practice. It therefore persistently pressured farmers to “stabilize” their labor force by converting to efficient mechanized production and wage labor as quickly as possible. Not surprisingly, the department’s praise was therefore reserved for the small number of more affluent farmers who, because they were better placed to take advantage of these costly innovations, enjoyed reputations as “progressive farmers” able to attract adequate labor by virtue of higher wages. Department officials were also uneasy with the physical abuse notoriously associated with labor tenancy, sometimes airing the view that labor tenancy was an inherently abusive institution (see below). Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that the Native Service Contract Act—which made labor tenancy the basis of capitalist agriculture and ensured that the cessation of the practice would be a conveniently gradual affair for the white farmer, drawn out over at least three decades after the act was passed in 1932—was shepherded through parliament by the Department of Justice and not by the DNA.

Ideologically impatient with the practice, the department took pains to distance itself from both the logic and the rigors of labor tenancy. It thus did little more than attempt to live up to the duties sketchily defined in the Native Service Contract Act. These were limited to the infrequent inspection of white farms and to the investigation of complaints by African farmworkers, whenever these arose.^[15] As we see below, even when it did cooperate with farmers desperately searching for ways to retain their farm labor tenants other than by improving wages and working conditions, its interventions tended to be more critical than supportive and were frequently couched in a pontificating and accusatory style which incensed labor-hungry farmers.

The department’s different responses to the Native Labour Regulation Act and the Native Service Contract Act index its ambivalence about intervening in the economy. Sensitive about its paternalist obligations toward Africans, it distanced itself with notable vigor from the Native Service Contract Act, in particular. This anti-interventionist stance in white agriculture did not contradict the department’s long-standing cooperation with the mining industry. The department took the position that its role in the mining industry was essentially to protect Africans, and therefore not very dissimilar to the “Betterment programs” it embarked on in the 1930s to stem the movement of Africans to the urban areas by shoring up the subsistence economies (see chapter 8). Having no similar powers on white farms, and being opposed to the harsh controls on which farmers relied to discipline Africans on their farms, the department consistently contended that the solution to the farm labor shortage lay in the market. Labor tenancy, it announced to various agricultural unions, “should be done away with,…farm wages [should be] increased and market forces should be permitted to determine the employment preferences of Natives.” ^[16]

The DNA, Urban Industry, and Local Authorities

The Service Contract Act of 1932 and the Native Labour Regulation Act of 1911 were rural-based controls. In contrast, the Native (Urban Areas) Act was a measure for controlling Africans who were already in the urban areas or desired to enter these areas. Of the three pieces of legislation, therefore, only the Urban Areas Act addressed specifically urban questions of Native administration. However, if this crucial measure marked the genesis of urban administration as a distinct component of the department’s activities, it also made clear that the department would not interfere with the strong pattern of municipal autonomy inherited from the colonial era.^[17] While it made the department formally responsible for formulating urban policy, the act entrusted all administrative functions to local authorities. As the act stood in 1923—prior, that is, to its repeated amendment over subsequent decades—urban policy hinged on three principles.

First, the act provided a legislative mooring to the argument that the presence of Africans in the urban areas should be limited strictly to their utility in the urban economy. As the infamous report of the Stallard Commission of 1921 expressed it, “the Native should only be allowed to enter urban areas, which are essentially the white man’s creation, when he is willing to enter and to minister to the needs of the white man, and should depart therefrom when he ceases so to minister.” ^[18] This approach gradually eclipsed the alternative “urban Native policy” championed by liberals drawn from the Cape, whose solutions favored converting Africans into a property-owning and politically moderate petty bourgeoisie in the urban areas.^[19] In opposition to this strategy for managing a potentially volatile urban African population, the Stallard doctrine denied Africans any unconditional rights in the urban areas; regardless of their material security, good police record, or length of residence, all Africans would be no more than “temporary sojourners” in the urban areas. As a number of observers have noted, the steady ascendance of Stallardism over the classic liberalism of the Cape reflected the prevalence of certain class interests in urban African policy at the time the Urban Areas Act was passed. White workers supported any plans which obstructed Africans’ access to the urban labor market, fearful that the relative cheapness of African labor would undermine the “civilized labor policy” that enjoined employers to give preferential treatment to white workers. White commercial and real estate interests similarly viewed an expanding class of African property-owners as a threat and so supported Stallardism because it promised to preclude this outcome. Farmers also stood to benefit from the policy: by making it difficult for Africans to enter the urban areas, Stallardism reinforced the controls that farmers were demanding on the mobility of black workers in the rural areas.^[20]

A second focus of the Urban Areas Act was the policy of residential segregation it instituted for all urban areas. Capturing white unease about “racial integration” in the urban areas, the Stallard Commission expressed its concern about blacks and white “living cheek by jowl” in squalid shantytowns, striking a particularly alarmist tone about the pervasiveness of the practice in the Johannesburg area, South Africa’s major industrial zone. Spurred by the outbreak of infectious epidemics in African residential quarters just after World War I, public authorities feared that the buildup of large, poor African communities in or close to urban centers would facilitate the spread of contagious diseases into the white communities. Residential segregation along racial lines was thus presented as a scientifically grounded defense against the spread of diseases, and a medical discourse about the transmission of disease from black to white bodies served as the idiom through which whites expressed their strong anxieties about racial propinquity in the Union’s urban areas.^[21]

The report of the Stallard Commission proffered residential segregation as the antidote to “inevitable miscegenation,” but also as necessary to the strict administrative controls it recommended for monitoring the presence of Africans in the urban areas. The commission recommended that the housing market for Africans in the urban areas should be confined to the construction of townships owned and administered by local authorities, with “no Natives to be allowed to reside elsewhere.” This body blow to the liberal strategy of promoting an affluent class of moderate, property-owning Africans bolstered by the municipal franchise was incorporated into the Urban Areas Act.^[22]

Third, giving substance to a recommendation of the Stallard Commission, the Urban Areas Act provided for the creation of a segregated municipal infrastructure for regulating urban African policy. The act provided for segregation in three specific areas. First, it made it obligatory for local authorities to record all funds used for administering townships under a separate Native Revenue Account into which all fines, rents, and profits from the sale of African beer had to be deposited. Surpluses generated under this account—derived almost exclusively through the sale of African beer, recorded under a subaccount known as the “Kaffir Beer Account”—could not be transferred to the city’s general account; however, the act did not prevent local authorities from supplementing the Native Revenue Account with funds drawn from the general revenue account. Second, to offset the municipal disenfranchisement of Africans, the act encouraged local authorities to establish a Native Location Advisory Board, which local authorities were to “consult” over specific areas of urban African policy. This political structure was intended to provide a limited forum to the small African petite bourgeoisie in the Union’s urban areas, a mark of recognition that might inoculate them against the alarming spread of militant rhetoric in the Union’s townships in the 1920s.^[23]

The third component of administrative segregation at the municipal level was the act’s stipulation that each local authority should establish a “municipal Native Affairs Department” (NAD).^[24] Run by a “Manager,” a municipal officer devoted exclusively to African affairs, who was assisted by a location superintendent who managed the day-to-day affairs of administration, the municipal NAD was intended to “promote expertise in urban Native administration, establish contact between urban Natives and the Town Council and serve as a link between local authorities and the Department of Native Affairs.” ^[25] This development signaled the importance attributed to the new field of urban administration in the early 1920s and the perception that the field required a degree of specialization and professionalization entirely foreign to administration in the colonial era. In practice, the establishment of NADs also isolated and marginalized African affairs from the “normal” concerns of white city councils—as is borne out by the indifferent attention and fiscal resources that local authorities reserved for African administration well into the 1940s. Known as Non-European Affairs Departments (NEADs) in areas where African, “coloured,” and Indian “affairs” were lumped together, these municipal departments were entrusted with an expanding volume of increasingly complex work in the 1930s and 1940s, while local authorities settled for a policy of benign neglect in African administration. Unsurprisingly, NAD personnel soon came to perceive themselves as “Cinderellas,” or “poor cousins of the state.” ^[26] Suspended between increasingly aggrieved African townships and, to quote Brian Porter (Johannesburg’s Town Clerk), the “mean and niggardly policies” of local authorities,^[27] NADs were all but left to their own local devices while the DNA struggled to sharpen its competencies in urban administration. By the outbreak of World War II, however, NADs had developed into important mechanisms for managing African urbanization and for dealing with the labor requirements of urban employers.

Urban employers sounded two themes as the segregation years wore on. On the one hand, they relied on the more vulnerable and cheaper supplies of migrant labor to meet their needs for unskilled manual labor and to perform work that the more discriminating and educated urban population routinely rejected.^[28] Their official discourse, however, harped on the virtues of the “free market” and the superior “efficiency” of “detribalised” urban labor. But, as liberal organizations frequently pointed out in the 1930s and 1940s, these were not discrete segments of the labor market: the sheer presence of large numbers of migrant labor inevitably exerted a downward pressure on the living standards and work ethic of the settled population. “Loyalty and discipline,” E. Burrows observed in a memorandum submitted as evidence to the Fagan Commission in 1948, “are qualities to be found only in a stable labor force.” After emphasizing the problems and constant costs of retraining, the loss of working time, and the complications that migrant labor raised “for the establishment of good relations based on mutual understanding,” Burrows concluded that “the low level of skill and the rapid job to job movement result in low output and low income. Low per capita output from African workers means an unnecessarily low national income. Moreover, low earnings are often reflected in poor housing and inadequate diet, and ultimately in reduced working efficiency.…[T]he situation tends to reproduce itself.” ^[29] Burrows’ discussion on aggregate effects suppresses the qualitative differences between settled and temporary labor as well as the effects of the latter on the living standards of the urban community. A memorandum submitted by the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) to the commission dealt at length with precisely this point:

[Urbanized Africans] are in competition with migrant laborers in the labor market, and since they are out-numbered by the latter, the customary rate of wages is determined by what the migrant laborer will make.…Since the Reserves reduce the necessity of making the income received by the migrant in the town adequate to support his family all the year round, a depressing effect on wages results. This depressing effect is felt most strongly among urbanized natives and incidentally, by landless migrants, who have none of the resources of their rural brothers, who draw wages on the same scale and have to support their families in the urban areas at high costs of living.…Thus, the urbanized natives have been forced below subsistence levels and even when working continuously, find that their earnings are not adequate to meet their expenses.^[30]

A growing concern thus emerged in the 1930s and 1940s about ways to limit the impact of semi-proletarianized workers on the urban African community without restricting employers’ access to adequate volumes of migrant labor. The Urban Areas Act was directed toward this end. By the late 1930s, the act embodied four administrative mechanisms for controlling African access to the urban areas and for regulating Africans within the urban areas: the registration of labor (or “service”) contracts between employer and worker; the issuance of “workseekers’ permits,” which authorized Africans in the rural areas to enter an urban area; influx controls and powers to evict Africans from urban areas; and exemptions from the pass system, granted at the department’s discretion.^[31]

Primary responsibility for administering the regulations issuing from the Urban Areas Act was vested in municipal officials—specifically, in officials in the municipal pass office, managers of the municipal NAD, and the Superintendent of Locations. A basic tension was therefore built into the structure of urban administration. The 1923 Urban Areas Act vested local authorities with powers to carry out policies with national implications. This arrangement raised the possibility not only that the responses of local authorities might differ, but also that the narrower concerns of local authorities might conflict with the department’s wider responsibilities for the functioning of the African labor market.