The impact of the war years
The years of the Second World War were a remarkable period in twentieth-century South African history, marked by the partial relaxation of discriminatory legislation, a 50% increase in real average earnings for black industrial workers, and rising hopes for a more liberal government policy.1 During the war, industrial manufacturing became the largest single sector of the economy, since uninterrupted industrial production was essential for the war effort, and the labour requirements of heavy and manufacturing industry began to compete with those of the formerly unchallenged mining and agricultural sectors. Representatives of organised industry opposed the migrant labour system and called for a permanent urban black labour force to meet their demand for semi-skilled and skilled labour. The privately owned commercial and manufacturing sectors joined the call for an urbanised labour force and saw a potential black consumer market ‘going to waste’.
Black workers, restricted by law to tribal reserves in rural areas, poured into the urban areas, driven by economic necessity and attracted by the growing demand for labour. Deneys Reitz, Minister of Native Affairs, relaxed influx control in the industrial centres of the Transvaal and Natal in 1942, increasing the number of urban Africans, while the 1943 Landsdown Mine Wages Commission reported that the reproductive capacity of the reserves, on which the migrant labour system was premised, was ‘a myth’.2 By 1948 the Native Laws (Fagan) Commission noted that women comprised a third of urban Africans and concluded that black urbanisation was permanent.3
Black urbanisation led to an acute housing shortage and informal settlements increased as thousands of homeless Africans built shacks on deserted land and provided their own services and infrastructure.4 Their direct action was matched in other urban struggles such as bus boycotts,5 while black unionisation and industrial action also increased. Although the fact was officially unrecognised, by 1945 more than 40% of commerce and privately owned industry was unionised. According to O’Meara, 145 522 African workers went on strike between 1940 and 1948, accounting for a loss of 409 299 workdays, and prompting organised manufacturing industry to call for the recognition of black trade unions. The Transvaal Chamber of Industries argued that ‘… if Natives are to enter industry in ever-increasing numbers, it is clear that their being organised and disciplined in proper unions is an indispensable prerequisite to their development as stable and productive workers.’6
During the war years liberal discourse moved beyond its former domain in educational or research bodies and was taken up by a series of government commissions whose reports supported the central demands of organised industry. For example, in 1942 the Smit Report called for the recognition of black trade unions and the Van Eck Commission proposed the abolition of pass laws, while the following year the Landsdown Commission called for the payment of a full living wage to urban African workers.7
Liberal values were popularised by the war itself, fought as it was against fascism and in defence of individualism, the rule of law and self-determination. These ideals were set out in Churchill and Roosevelt’s Atlantic Charter and it was necessary to promote them in South Africa in order to ensure support for the war effort. No wonder the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) – more a slow-burner than a hotbed of liberalism – in its 1948 Handbook on Race Relations in South Africa, offered its own brand of (entirely misplaced) optimism, concluding that ‘in South Africa more ill is wrought through lack of understanding than through ill will.’8
The United Party (UP) government of Jan Smuts faced a number of problems in the early 1940s – the Allied powers were suffering setbacks in the war, the threat of an invasion grew as the Japanese fleet entered the Indian Ocean and government had to fight a general election in 1943. In a tactical response, government sought to accommodate rather than alienate. In an attempt to win black working-class loyalty and avoid fighting challenges on too many fronts simultaneously, as the Axis powers were doing, the pass laws were partially relaxed and a pragmatic approach adopted to labour unrest. African unions were allowed to develop unofficially and, in 1942, Walter Madeley, then Minister of Labour, promised black union recognition in return for worker loyalty.9
Black strikes in areas of industry important to the war appear to have been settled in a manner favourable to workers. Smuts talked of replacing segregation with undefined (but nicer-sounding) ‘trusteeship’.10
Government also flirted with organisations sympathetic to the Allied cause and which had the potential to cause political or economic disruption. Following the entry of the USSR into the war in 1941, the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) threw itself into supporting the war effort – having previously opposed the war and supported the Hitler–Stalin pact – with a ‘Defend South Africa!’ campaign and soon gained a degree of political respectability. The Smuts government permitted the existence of the CPSA, the Friends of the Soviet Union (FSU), non-racial trade unions and other organisations. Not until 1994 would South Africa again see Cabinet ministers join communists on public platforms.
Smuts opened a 1943 ‘Soviet Friendship’ conference in Johannesburg, while his wife was a patron of the FSU. After 1941 the CPSA placed support for the war above purely domestic issues and discouraged strikes, a remarkable position for a party committed to working-class rights, and another in a lengthy and tortuous history of juggling domestic demands with the ‘party line’ coming out of Moscow. The Communist Party programme was vague about black political rights while supporting the principle that the government should provide food, shelter and medical services as required.11
The particular conditions of the war years allowed organisations such as the CPSA and the FSU to penetrate the white community in a way that was unknown before or after the war. In 1942 more than 6 000 people gathered to welcome the first Soviet consul to Johannesburg, and Medical Aid for Russia received more than £80 000 in the first two months of its existence.12 The Red Army offensive led the Minister of Justice, Colin Steyn, to conclude that a ‘… Russian victory will mean a victory for democracy’.13 The CPSA won seats in city council elections in Johannesburg, East London and Cape Town. The party also fielded nine candidates in the 1943 general election and, although all lost, they polled an average 11% of the vote.14
The war boosted industrialisation, which challenged the migrant labour system. Government commissions argued that African urbanisation and ‘economic integration’ – of blacks into the ‘white’ economy – were irreversible processes. A degree of consensus emerged about the direction of future government policy. The ANC and CPSA, as well as liberals in the UP, the SAIRR and among the Native Representatives (who were indirectly elected to Parliament by African voters) claimed that ‘nothing could be the same after the war’ – that government policy would have to acknowledge that segregation had failed to maintain racial separatism. In 1942 Julius Lewin, a liberal academic involved in the Army Education Service (AES) run by one of the most impressive South Africans of the twentieth century, Leo Marquard, stated:
We have a definite sense of taking a new direction. The van Eck Report … expresses this and the war itself means that no new disabilities will descend. On the contrary, old ones are being shaken – the hated pass laws have been relaxed and Native trade unions are to be recognised … We [can] get along faster now that the principle of this and that is conceded …15
High hopes for a change in direction by government were boosted by a speech made by Smuts in the ‘dark days’ of the war, even though the words seem more a lamentation than excitement about a possible new future:
The whole trend both in this country and throughout Africa has been in the opposite direction [to segregation]. The whole movement of development here on this continent has been for closer contacts to be established between the various races and the various sectors of this community … Isolation has gone and segregation has fallen on evil days too … A revolutionary change is taking place among the Native peoples of Africa through the movement from the country to the towns – the movement from old Reserves in the Native areas to the big European centres of population. Segregation tried to stop it. It has, however, not stopped it in the least. The process has been accelerated. You might as well try to sweep