For the black population the period after 1948 was one of unremitting repression, falling real wages, and personal and employment insecurity. But for whites, South Africa was a different country. The legislative bedrock of apartheid was laid between 1949 and 1953, with the Group Areas Act, which enforced residential and business segregation; the Population Registration Act, which embedded race classification; the Separate Representation of Voters Act, which ultimately disenfranchised coloured voters; the Separate Amenities Act, which entrenched the principle of unequal amenities for different races and the Suppression of Communism Act, which gave the government an armoury of repressive powers. The 1948 election was followed by a reduction in capital inflows and a balance of payments crisis that peaked in 1949. But by 1950 the economy was showing real growth, which the opening of new gold and uranium mines promised to sustain.2With the strengthening economy came a ‘strong’ government promising to end black protest, political and industrial.
The rise of the NP was paralleled by the decay of the UP and its continued inability to offer nothing more than tonal differences from the NP. When NP backbenchers proposed concentration camps for participants in the 1952 Defiance Campaign – terrifying in itself – Julius Lewin, organiser of the liberal Hofmeyr Society (within the UP) reported: ‘It is already possible to visualise certain United Party members of Parliament solemnly declaring that the principle of concentration camps for Non-European resistance leaders is sound, but that the diet proposed is inadequate and there should be more latrines.’3
Internationally, anti-communist legislation was tabled in Canada, Australia and elsewhere in response to the Cold War. In South Africa the NP brought out Sir Percy Sillitoe, head of MI5, to advise them on the best means of combating communism. Through both innuendo and in-your-face smears the NP successfully generated suspicion of any message of racial equality as crypto-communist. Liberal academic Leo Kuper described this tactic as, ‘the progressive redefinition of communism as synonymous with non-discrimination on the basis of race or colour’.4NP vitriol was so powerful and white racism such a receptive organism that it was easy to extend the stain of communism to cover liberalism as well.
Listen, for example, to the words of George Heaton Nicholls, later leader of the Natal-based Union-Federal Party: ‘If Liberalism manifests itself in a humanitarian impulse to assist the downtrodden, if it is a matter of the heart, then I am a Liberal: but if it is a system of government, or aims at a system of government which considers a Hottentot equal in political stature to the astronomer Royal, then I am not a Liberal.’5
After Native Representative Hymie Basner took segregation to the United Nations in 1946 all the Representatives were accused by the NP of destroying white racial purity. When CPSA Central Committee member Sam Kahn was elected to Parliament as Western Cape Native Representative, a NP MP ‘… with his eyes glued on Mr Sam Kahn … said that if he had his way, all agitators would be put against a wall and shot’.6
The constitutional crisis and opposition
The early 1950s were dominated by the NP government’s battle to disenfranchise coloured (and some Indian) voters (a significant electoral factor in some seven Cape constituencies).7 The battle began in 1948 with a warning from the government of impending legislation and lasted through to the packing of the Senate in 1956 to force through the changes. It provided a clear indication of how far the NP would go to implement apartheid successfully.8
The extended constitutional crisis, which fuelled black and white political mobilisation, saw the Appellate Division set aside both the Separate Representation of Voters Act, passed with only a simple majority in 1951, and an attempt by the government to constitute the legislature as the High Court of Parliament.
The crisis gave rise to the most widespread anti-NP demonstrations by whites in the history of apartheid. Running parallel to white protest was the Defiance Campaign, which marked a new militancy among Congress members. On the occasions that the two movements intersected, white opposition fractured through wariness of black militancy, particularly when harnessed in extra-parliamentary protest, and in a context of widespread anti-communism.
In 1952 the War Veterans’ Torch Commando mobilised a paid-up membership of more than 250 000 (overwhelmingly white) ex-servicepeople, while the ANC and SAIC passive resistance campaign saw more than 8 000 volunteers arrested and paid-up membership of the ANC rise to more than 100 000.9 This ‘mass’ politics was new to South Africa; even more marked was the fact that all races participated in large numbers – albeit in separate organisations, exemplifying again the apparent contradiction of pursuing racial equality through racially separate organisations.
The Springbok Legion, which was a prime mover in using ex-servicepeople as a basis for opposition and in the formation of the Torch Commando, gave the Commando a militancy and, thanks in part to theatre director Cecil Williams, a Springbok Legion and CPSA member, a flair for dramatic protest action, until an internal purge of Legionnaires by its more conservative leadership. Thereafter, the Commando became a mass-based electoral adjunct to the UP, its creative energy spent and its political purpose lost, and it soon passed away.
The Defiance Campaign, marked by the discipline of the volunteers who deliberately broke apartheid laws and regulations in order to get arrested, grew throughout 1952 until repressed by draconian legislation – supported by the UP and the Torch Commando. It gave the congresses a renewed vigour and profile they would battle to match again during the 1950s as political space closed down, security police clamped down, and membership numbers declined steadily.
The Defiance Campaign breathed life into the ANC and SAIC, led to the formation of the Congress Alliance, and wedded Congress to militant, extra-parliamentary opposition. The Torch Commando, before it fizzled out, represented the first and last large-scale protest by whites against apartheid. Faced with a choice between defending principle and suppressing black militancy, the overwhelming preponderance of whites, even those who began by upholding the former, chose the latter.
Both more and less conservative forms of resistance to the NP contributed to and capitalised on the political ferment that accompanied attempts to force disenfranchisement legislation into the statute book. The political mobilisation of the period between 1951 and 1953, in particular the organisation of previously politically quiescent sectors of the population such as coloured voters and anti-NP whites, boosted hopes for the emergence of large white and coloured organisations to work alongside the African and Indian congresses.
In November 1952 the ANC and the SAIC called for the formation of a white congress, expecting an initial membership of 5 000 – one-fiftieth of the membership of the Torch Commando.10 Even that modest figure wildly over-estimated white opposition. And, instead of a single white political ally of the congresses there emerged a series of competing organisations beset by competition and sniping and pursuing different goals and strategies, some marked by deep antipathy to the goals and methods of the congresses.
White liberal responses to the constitutional crisis
Opposition to NP attempts to disenfranchise coloured voters was initially led by the Civil Rights League (CRL) and the Franchise Action Committee (FRAC). The CRL, which grew out of the Cape South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) and was launched at a ‘Citizens Rally’ attended by 10 000 people, aimed to rally white opinion against the unconstitutional manoeuvres of the government.11 It soon gained a popular following and attracted large audiences to its meetings. The left-wing Guardian newspaper welcomed it and its ability to rally white support, stating: ‘Now, resistance to these attacks is taking shape’.12
The League, overwhelmingly white, was led by senior SAIRR figures and recruited whites radicalised by