If mothers saw their nurse girls’ surroundings and knew of their diseases, they would abandon their pleasures and nurse their own children rather than allowing them to run the risks they do. Your washing is done by people often rotten with venereal disease and your milk and meat may at any time be infected.23
The Minister of Justice, Oswald Pirow, had initially proposed that the Urban Areas Act of 1923 incorporate health tests for black women, but his proposal met with strong opposition. A ‘Communist Party activist’ rejected his plan with the retort: ‘The government can go to hell. Let Pirow’s wife be the first to be examined.’24 A compromise of sorts was reached when it was agreed that women living in municipal hostels would be tested and given a certificate to prove that they were healthy before going to work as servants. On the whole, however, black women were not interfered with.
Still, another infamous rule was extended to include black women. This was the so-called Night Pass Ordinance of 1902, according to which black men could be arrested if found walking around in white neighbourhoods at night. The law was initially meant to curb crime and to ensure that men got enough sleep for a good day’s work. At the instigation of Minister of Justice Tielman Roos, this humiliating ordinance applied to black women also from 1 February 1925. Extending the curfew law to include women was aimed at preventing ‘immorality’, with the fear of miscegenation surely playing a role. Indeed, Sarah Gertrude Millin (1889–1968) had just published her novel God’s Step-Children (1924), which contained a clear warning about the wretchedness of miscegenation. According to an editorial in the weekly Umteteli wa Bantu, the suggested extension of the curfew to include black women ‘sorely wounded native pride’. On 31 January 1925, the following appeared in this mouthpiece of Johannesburg’s black elite: ‘The Native man is himself the arbiter of his women’s conduct and is resentful of any interference in his matters marital […] Her husband is still her lord, and it is because of this old fashioned and very desirable relationship that any incursion damaging to the domestic state of the Native people becomes an extremely hazardous proceeding.’ Night passes would also subject women to pass controls. Although ‘no selfrespecting native would bewail the repatriation of the many women and girls of his colour whose conduct defiles the town, whose profanity is disgusting and whose prostitution is a national disgrace’, Umteteli regarded the notion that the extension of night passes to women might serve to ‘humiliate thousands of their respectable sisters’ as preposterous.25 Two years later, the Immorality Act No 5 of 1927 was passed prohibiting ‘extra-marital carnal intercourse’ between whites and Africans. The Immorality Ordinance 46 of 1903 had already been passed in the Transvaal criminalising sex between black men and white women.
Because of the upsurge in industrial development and commercial expansion between 1924 and 1929 there were ample work opportunities for black men. According to the 1931 census, 70% of Johannesburg households still employed men as domestic servants, while there was an urgent need for labour in mines, industry and agriculture. The obvious solution was to replace them with black women, but this remained a complex issue. It was feared that an influx of rural women to towns and cities would lead to ‘detribalisation’ and an increase in black families settling in and around cities, where housing was scarce. Section 12(a) of the Urban Areas Act of 1923, as amended in 1930, determined that a black woman entering an urban area had to prove that she had accommodation; however, it was virtually impossible to enforce this law which many municipalities described as absurd and unfeasible. Eales explains that the poor implementation was due to the ambivalence of officials: ‘They might have been “natives”, possibly undesirable and immoral, but they were also women, and the wards of African men.’ In practice, the legal position of black women remained inviolable. There was a three-pronged effort to curtail their freedom: medical check-ups to curb the spread of venereal disease, the imposition of a curfew, and influx control by means of selective accommodation. However, without pass laws it was impossible to regulate the women’s movements and implement these measures.
To a large extent, the Native Administration Act No 38 of 1927 acknowledged common law, and therefore the special jurisdictional powers of traditional leaders and chiefs in the Native Appeal Courts, especially in cases concerning lobola and boghadi. The official position was that whatever was beneficial in traditional ‘Bantu culture’ should be combined with that which was beneficial in European culture. The prevailing idea was that black people belonged to ‘childlike races’ who should be taken care of. It was hoped that an efficient administration would contribute to the retention of tribal alliances, and that migrant workers would eventually return to the rural areas and help care for the elderly. Children who were born in cities could also be sent ‘home’ to be raised in ‘homelands’ which would function as kindergartens and retirement homes – in essence, the incubator and the graveyard of white South Africa’s workforce. Eales, however, warns against too much cynicism in this regard:
However patronising, arrogant or paternalistic their presumptions may have been, the earnestness with which many state officials and ideologues shouldered the white man’s burden requires formal acknowledgement.26
Still, obtuseness coupled with commitment proved an even heavier burden for black women.
1932–1939
Finding a foothold
The Great Depression of 1929–1933 and the ensuing period of industrial growth had a massive impact on perceptions held by the next generation of white policymakers regarding urban black women. During the Depression many women lost their jobs, and efforts were made to prosecute and deport ‘unwanted’ women. At a conference held in Johannesburg in October 1938, liberal activist JD Rheinhalt Jones aptly summed up the situation, though his words fell on deaf ears: ‘We may today pass a hundred Urban Areas Acts, but not even steel fences and police guards will keep the Bantu from our cities.’27
The black population had grown from about 150 000 in 1932 to 219 893 according to the 1936 census. This was largely the result of the systematic undermining of black people’s ability to sustain themselves in the rural areas. Farmers were suffering the effects of widespread drought and other natural disasters, but unlike their white counterparts, black farmers had no access to credit facilities or markets. Undeterred, and desperate to survive, they went in search of work in cities, and in the hope of building a new future, many brought their families with them. The authorities had no option but to pay attention to the growing urbanisation of black people. The socio-political crisis of the early 1930s – initially caused by high unemployment figures, an increase in urban settlement and insufficient housing – meant that values attached to order, stability and family cohesion were stressed. Terminology used by officials during this period was largely family-based and the reluctance of the state to force black women to carry passes was, in a sense, related to the growing symbolic force of the family unit.
During the 1930s, major changes took place in the history of white South Africans too. On the one hand there was the Depression, accelerated urbanisation and industrialisation, but the decade was also dominated by the findings in 1932 of the Carnegie Commission: the armblanke or poor white problem among Afrikaners was the acute manifestation of conditions in the country as a whole. Those in positions of authority were constantly harping on the rehabilitatory role of a healthy family life, in particular the edifying power of women in relation to their households and the volk or nation. Women had, however, to be taught to look after themselves so that they would not be a burden to the state. Although these findings were formulated with mainly poor whites in mind, there can be little doubt that social workers in other communities were influenced by these views.
A result of the panic about moral decline was that black women living outside of conventional family units, especially those who worked as prostitutes or in the illegal liquor trade, once again became the target