He went on to note, in words that exemplified the strengths and weaknesses of South African liberalism at the time, ‘Our cause is logically so strong that we are tempted to put our whole faith in logic.’69
Espousing, as they did, a gradualist reformist vision and opposed to extra-parliamentary strategies that jeopardised the slow evolution of a race-blind meritocracy, the natural course for liberals in their support of incremental change and black socio-economic advancement was to put pressure on the United Party to adopt a more liberal ‘native policy’. They opposed demands for significant political reform as premature until ‘the basic social and material conditions for an advance towards them have been achieved’.70 With economic developments appearing to nudge government towards a policy change, liberals called for restraint on the part of the Congresses.
Encouraged by the apparent congruity between the process of industrialisation and political goals, the Native Representatives saw the main task of liberals as being ‘to assist, at every point, the forces making for the evolution of the Bantu people into a modern community’.71
As Martin Legassick put it, ‘… their argument that progress could only come by the evolutionary acceptance of “civilised” Africans into the community, became transformed into the belief that because progress had come (as measured in terms of economic indices), acceptance of “civilised” Africans would follow’.72
In 1943 the UP was supported by industrial, mining and agricultural capital but by 1946, unity in support of the war had given way before the competition for black labour. As a result, according to O’Meara, ‘the UP government fell between at least three stools’ in attempting to appease the competing demands of these three main sectors of the economy.73 Politically, the UP faced an attack on its ‘liberal’ policies from the right by the Nationalist Party (NP) and for its illiberal policies from the left by the organised black opposition, which expressed itself by means such as industrial action and passive resistance.
The UP’s response was mixed as it tried to hold together its own internal factions while appeasing those outside it. Smuts made some cynical moves in the direction of the gradual black inclusion in state structures called for by liberals, among them his offer of white parliamentary representation to Indians. In response to the adjournment of the NRC Smuts offered to enlarge the council to fifty elected members.
Hofmeyr shared the liberal desire to separate perceived black moderates from radicalising influences and warned Smuts of ‘the disturbing fact that the moderate intellectuals of the Professor Matthews type have committed themselves to a policy of non-cooperation’.74 This was confirmed when both Smuts’s proposals were rejected by the African and Indian congresses. Liberals outside the UP appealed for black restraint, arguing that South Africa was less like colonial India (where mass-based passive resistance campaigns were effective) and more like nineteenth-century Britain, where gradual extension of the qualified franchise had brought parliamentary democracy into being.
Edgar Brookes argued: ‘Most of us believe that given time and opportunity we can do in South Africa in the twentieth century what was done with signal success in England in the nineteenth century; namely, step by step obtain majorities in the privileged groups for the extension of rights to the unprivileged’.75
Facing opposition from both white and black the UP lurched to the right in an attempt to appease current (white) rather than possible (and distant) future (black) voters. In 1946 the miners’ strike was crushed, the NRC adjourned, and the offices of the CPSA, The Guardian, the Springbok Legion, various trade unions, and the homes of prominent left-wing individuals were raided by the police.
Gone were the days of shared platforms; communists (real and imagined) were again the enemy. Finally, in attempting to rationalise its ‘native policy’ and provide labour, as demanded by the different sectors of the economy, the UP convened the Fagan Commission to investigate influx control with regard to the growth of urban industry and its effects on migrant labour.
The Fagan Commission had an obvious ideological function, namely to repair the growing crisis of legitimacy faced by the Smuts government as segregation was undermined by industrialisation, urbanisation, and the liberal discourse that attended them. Of course the commission could not fulfil this task. Its 1948 report was internally contradictory, favouring both a permanent black urban presence and continued migrant labour.76 Rather than provide a legitimating discourse the report operated within a framework of economic necessity and expediency. As Ashforth argued, the racist assumptions of the report were in common with the ‘grand tradition’ of South African ‘Native commissions’, but the Fagan Report was unique in that it:
… does not provide a scheme for the legitimate division of rights and obligations within the state on racial grounds. Fagan accepts the racial division of the state as it stands and rationalises it in purely ‘racist’ terms ... For Fagan the divided State can be accepted as legitimate merely on the basis of administrative expedience; there is no need for any of the rhetorical paraphernalia of ‘civilising mission’ or ‘development’.77
By 1946 liberals were caught between a radicalising Congress movement and a United Party government that resorted to repression rather than concession. Leo Marquard warned Hofmeyr that ‘the United Party is frightening off its possible friends by vainly trying to attract its known enemies’, noting that liberals were ‘profoundly disturbed and bewildered by what we feel to be a drift away from liberalism and an appeasing of reaction’.78
Liberals sought to keep in place a moderate ANC leadership with whom dialogue was possible, which forced them (assuming force were required) to oppose an election boycott called for by the ANCYL. They also proposed political reforms that they regarded as pragmatic, implementable responses to the Fagan Report. Both tactics would fail, leaving liberals isolated, ostracised and facing the twin extremes of white racism and black militancy.
Liberals in a corner
Liberals aimed to establish in South Africa what Margaret Ballinger later described as ‘a Western state, maintaining Western standards and based on Western values’.79 The evolutionary attainment of such a society was premised on parliamentary gradualism; this, in turn, required governmental concessions to ‘reasonable’ black demands. The alternative, as they saw it, was anarchy:
[Black] resistance, whether by armed rebellion or by general strike or by non-cooperation movement on a national scale would arouse fierce passions and produce results which none could foresee. The whole structure of parliamentary government through ordered democratic channels would be destroyed, and that before the non-European himself is ready to accept the responsibilities which would be thrust upon him.80
No liberal organisation operating in the political arena was established and no liberal programme of action was developed; rather, the Native Representatives and leading SAIRR members attempted to influence the policies and programmes of the UP and the ANC and play a mediating role between the two. The events of 1946 confronted liberals with their inability to influence either side.
The NRC adjournment, argued Margaret Ballinger, amounted to a ‘repudiation of the whole representation embodied in the 1936 Act under which we hold our seats’.81 While the UP seemed intent on kicking away one leg of the stool on which Ballinger and fellow liberals perched awkwardly, another was being kicked out from under them by the ANCYL call for a boycott of all native representation elections.
Apparently lacking an alternative strategy, Margaret Ballinger and her husband, William, jointly advised Z K Matthews in September 1946 that ‘the African people are not yet ready for a complete repudiation of the Council’ and that ‘… probably the best next move would be for the Councillors simply to accept the next summons to meet, to turn up at Pretoria as if nothing had happened, and then to begin to argue about the future of the Council when you reassemble’.82
But