Women and the Maintenance of Ethnic Boundaries

There were areas in the activity of Cradock women in which ethnic and racial issues were explicitly raised. In a society like South Africa, the definition and maintenance of racial and ethnic boundaries is a central activity; in South Africa it is a major preoccupation of the state. Unlike much of the recent revival of ethnicity in the United States and in Europe, it has not had its origins in subordinate groups;^[107] South African boundary maintenance is undertaken by a racially and ethnically defined minority which since 1948 has attacked an earlier British ascendancy, gained control of the state, and further enshrined racial divisions in the law.

The use this dominant minority has made of its power has provoked sustained criticism and hostility, and, understandably, a tendency by outsiders to exaggerate the monolithic character of the dominant group.^[108] This tendency takes the form of either underestimating the amount of debate and conflict within that group, even only among its men, and of assuming that women and men think alike on all questions, or that, if women think differently from men, they are invariably overruled. These are, however, not positions that can be assumed. Women and men play different roles in any society, particularly in the raising of children and consequently in the choice of marriage partners: 'Any ethnic confrontation touches family . . .', as William Foltz has written.^[109] Even if the society is effectively dominated by men on most issues most of the time, women are likely to have their own views on many issues and to support agreed positions with greater, or with less, intensity than the men.^[110] And, of course, agreement cannot be taken necessarily to imply subordination.

There are several areas where these differences can appear in South Africa. There are ethnic distinctions from groups like the English, Jews and Lebanese ('Syrians'), all defined in South Africa as 'white', and therefore sub-groups of the white 'race'. Many Afrikaner men, having fought in the Anglo-Boer War, returned with a veteran's often grudging but real respect for his enemy and were, therefore, prepared to listen to Afrikaner proponents of conciliation like Generals Botha and Smuts.^[111] Many Afrikaner women came out of the war with a consuming bitterness and a suspicion that their men were possibly unreliable on ethnic issues. Thus we saw that Mrs Koopmans de Wet regarded men as not to be trusted to insist on using the language.^[112] She probably feared that the men, respecting power after a military defeat, might become English-speakers through self-interest and the daily activity of a market place dominated by English-speakers.

Married women in ethnically divided capitalist societies were far more confined within their ethnic segment than were their men, especially in South Africa, where domestic service was almost entirely an occupation for Africans and coloureds (but not Asians) and consequently had a stigma attached to it. White women were, therefore, largely confined to the home and to the company of servants and children, and outside the home often to church-related bodies which in South Africa were all ethnic ones. But virtually all married women had to shop, for themselves as well as for their families, and so commerce became the one multi-ethnic white area that they could not avoid. Similarly, Afrikaner women bought their clothes or materials in shops run by English-speakers and in commerce were likely to be employed by them, using English as the language of trade and still of government, though this was changing rapidly in the 1920s. In industry they were employed by English-speakers, and if unionized were likely to be led by English-speaking trade unionists, in one noted case a Jewish one.^[113] The

fact that Jews, prominent especially in small town commerce, were English-speaking in South Africa probably reinforced a growing anti-Semitism in the 1930s.

The resentment by Afrikaner women at the refusal of English-speaking shop assistants to talk to them in Afrikaans was part of a revolt against the English ascendancy, and their pressure for equal treatment of their language, enshrined in the South Africa Act of 1909 (South Africa's constitution) was more than a cry for bilingualism for its own sake. Understandably Afrikaner women saw the unilingual shop assistant and the unilingual civil servant as not merely arrogant and insulting but as barriers to their children in the future. It is possible that Afrikaner women were less willing than their men to acknowledge the current importance of English in commerce and the professions, and they may well have looked forward to a time when the dominance of Afrikaans was complete enough for bilingualism to become a synonym for the preference of Afrikaans over English, i.e. the replacement of one ascendancy by another.^[114] Nationally, the fight for bilingualism outside the schools could be seen in frequent resolutions at the National Party conferences which continue to be submitted, although with declining frequency, to this day.^[115] In Cradock from early on, the ACVV took stands on language issues in the schools and at the training college. As recently as 1978, a young Afrikaner woman, a member of the ACVV, complained vehemently of her treatment in a shop in Port Elizabeth, the regional 'capital'.^[116]

It has already been stressed that the ACVV was careful to keep itself out of party politics. In the 1920s that distinction was probably easier to sustain than after 1948. In Cradock one of the major patrons of the school feeding scheme was Alfred Metcalf, the local grandee, a lawyer and supporter of good causes—the Afrikaaner poor, public health for Africans, support of the Anglican church, and university scholarships for girls as well as boys. Thus the ACVV was prepared to fight for language rights, but was careful to acknowledge handsomely the help it received from English-speakers in relation to white poverty.^[117] But in one area, they showed that they believed that some whites were more equal than others, and in 1926 they adopted an explicitly anti-Jewish position, the more remarkable because it was in a religious, not an economic or political context, and because it seems to have caught Afrikaner men by surprise.

The relation of Afrikaners to Jews has always been complex, especially in small towns where Jews played a central part in marketing the farmer's product. Although Jews were no longer the traditional smouse, or itinerant traders, they were frequently speculators in stock, travelling around the district, making offers for small lots of stock, useful to a farmer temporarily out of cash.^[118] In small towns they ran butcher shops, hotels, general dealerships and the shops catering to the poor, black and white alike. There were enough Jews in Cradock—148 according to the 1926 census—to support a synagogue whose foundation stone is dated 1928.^[119] In 1927, apparently before it was ready, the Jews applied to the Kerkraad for use of the Dutch Reformed church zaal (hall), and the Kerkraad agreed. In what must have been a considerable surprise and embarrassment to the Kerkraad, the ACVV executive wrote to deplore the fact that the Raad had allowed the hall to be used by 'die Jode1 —the Jews.^[120] This developing anti-Semitism among Afrikaner women was also taking place among men: the Carnegie Report on rural impoverishment by an Afrikaner, J.F.W. Grosskopf, has references to the 'cunning means' by which poor whites were exploited by shopkeepers in towns, especially by Jews whose 'influence . . . was often pernicious'.^[121]

With relation to blacks and coloureds, there are few allusions in ACVV minutes to race attitudes: the preoccupation with poor whites excluded the black and

coloured poor, and no cases, such as a 'doubtful' application for entry to the Wilson School, appear. There is, however, abundant evidence that nationalist Afrikaner women in the 1920s were taking a militant line on segregation. Both major political parties had separate parties for their women, and the Vroue Nasionale Party met annually and debated resolutions on a wide range of subjects. In 1928 the Party called for the training of 'native' nurses and doctors to be segregated at any hospital; at their 1929 congress they took a hard line against the employment of white nurses to nurse African and coloured patients, especially males.^[122] This sexual and racial issue involved a piece of irrationality on the part of an organization that was prepared to use the state to protect access to particular jobs in favour of its own ethnic group.

The Cradock ACVV did, however, express itself on the necessity of segregation. In the 1920s, it had been given some land by the municipal council as a site for a school for domestic science for girls, but the site was returned to the council, partly because the school project was abandoned in favour of an old people's home and a commercial school, but partly also because the site was too close to the African location.^[123] In 1928 also, when the council was considering a subsidized housing scheme for poor whites, the ACVV showed that they regarded rehousing as a means to ensure racially homogeneous neighbourhoods.^[124] In doing so, they were simply reflecting what was happening in one town after another—with the coming of the Afrikaner poor to town, demands began to be made for segregation in housing. This was a new demand to be added to those from white temperance advocates who wanted the segregation of coloureds from blacks: under South African law, coloureds had freer access to liquor than did blacks, and as Cradock's 'location' housed both groups, coloureds did a brisk trade as couriers.^[125]

In schools these pressures were strong, particularly in the western Cape, where, in the 1920s and 1930s, the changing school populations in the Cape peninsula brought a series of controversial cases on the admission of coloured children to schools, and the attempted elaboration of distinction between 'fully coloured' and 'slightly coloured'.^[126] There were two kinds of dispute: one where a coloured child was seeking admission to a school, as had happened in the Wilson School in 1898;^[127] the other where parents objected to the presence of children already in school, as happened in the cases in the Cape peninsula cited above. In Cradock there is no record of the former type after 1906 and no record at all of cases of the latter. It might be, therefore, that the mechanisms of exclusion worked effectively enough in Cradock to avoid such cases by operating in such a way as to prevent the claim to entry formally being made, and, therefore, leaving no documentary record behind. This is basically an argument from silence and subject to all the weaknesses of such arguments.

We are dealing here with a society in which women were playing the role of culture brokers, incidentally creating an ethnic self-consciousness and policing a social boundary. One consequence of the intimate knowledge that these middle class members of the ACVV executive had of the Afrikaner poor was an ability to define the boundary between white and brown Afrikaners. Membership of the white church, regular attendance, and acceptance as behoeftig (needy) by the ACVV would have been sufficient to put any doubts as to racial status to rest. There is no way of knowing whether any judgments by the executive as to lack of need were really ones of racial categorization, but it is highly unlikely that the ACVV would have helped a multiracial household. It would be interesting, moreover, to find out if there was any correlation between aid from the ACVV and church attendance. What is clear is that there was no appeal against the

judgments of the ACVV bestuur, and there is no record in these minutes, or in the local press, of protests from the poor.

There is another area of social welfare in which the acknowledgement of racial boundaries became increasingly clear. As a result of the anxieties raised by the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918–1921, which was particularly severe on coloureds, anxieties exacerbated by a serious plague scare in 1926, white women began to organize in a Women's Civic Association (WCA), hoping to organize across ethnic boundaries. The major issue taken up by the WCA was public health, particularly for the location, the result partly of a fear that the black and coloured poor were a major source of diseases which recognized no racial boundaries. The initial meetings were bi-ethnic and the WCA proceeded to persuade the Town Council to subsidize a nurse, and Alfred Metcalf anonymously put up £300 to pay for the building of a dispensary in the location.^[128]

Without a major public split, the WCA gradually became a body representing English-speaking middle class women. At first, the ACVV was sympathetic to the health project, but cooperation was never really achieved because the ACVV kept its attention on the Afrikaner poor.^[129] The location nurse, who was originally to have served white, black, and coloured poor, became by 1927 one to serve blacks and coloureds only. At a meeting of the ACVV on 6 September 1930, a delegation from the WCA asked for help with the nurse's salary, but in December, the wife of the Nationalist mayor, Mrs Hattingh, reported that she had persuaded the WCA to withdraw the request.^[130] The ACVV remained an ethnic organization preoccupied with the white poor, which in Cradock meant Afrikaner poor, moving the Town Council to establish a clinic for whites and later, in 1949, appointing a social worker of its own, an operation which continues to this day. According to a black informant, in about 1950 a deputation from the location appealed to the ACVV to take up some of the activities of the long defunct WCA and its successor, the Joint Council. The reply, he said, was: Africans should organize themselves and mobilize their resources as Afrikaners had done.^[131]