Africans’ Claims
The main response of the ANC – still a small, elitist body yet to undergo its own radicalising transformation brought about by wartime conditions – was the 1943 publication of Africans’ Claims in South Africa, drawn up by a committee dominated by doctors, lawyers, teachers and ministers of religion, and intended to attract ‘distinguished University graduates’ to the ANC.17
The organisation sought to capitalise on the liberal ethos of the period by placing squarely before government the vision of non-racial citizenship. Africans’ Claims articulated Western liberal-democratic demands in a non-racial South African context and attempted to formulate an ideological path that government, apparently backing away from segregation, should follow. But segregation and trusteeship, tragically, were aeons away from equality.
Africans’ Claims was divided into two main parts following a preface written by Dr Alfred Bitini Xuma, President-General of the ANC. The first placed the Atlantic Charter in a South African context and analysed the nature of oppression in the country; the second comprised a Bill of Rights. It tried to achieve two goals simultaneously: to generate black support for the ANC while appealing for wider acceptance of the principle of non-racial equality. Addressing the white audience, Xuma appealed for the anti-fascist values of the war and the Atlantic Charter to ‘apply to the whole of the British Empire, the United States of America and to all the nations of the world and their subject peoples’; talking to the domestic black audience he noted that ‘we are not so foolish as to believe that because we have made these declarations our government will grant us our claims for the mere asking’ and warned that ‘this is only the beginning of a long struggle …’.18
The Bill of Rights called for equal political participation and universal suffrage, breaking with previous ANC demands for a qualified franchise. One decade’s radicalism was the next decade’s old hat: when the overwhelmingly white Liberal Party was launched in 1953 its call for a qualified franchise would be scorned by the ANC as garishly out-of-date, rejected by UP members, and savaged by Afrikaner nationalists as a fundamental threat to ‘preserving South Africa as a White man’s country and a bastion of Western Christian civilisation’.19
The Bill of Rights also demanded ‘a fair redistribution of the land as a prerequisite for a just settlement of the land problem’, ‘freedom of movement, residence and equality before the law, as well as equal pay for equal work, employment insurance and unemployment benefits’.20 The economic sections of the Bill demanded equality with whites and the removal of laws that hampered African economic mobility.
Africans’ Claims was ‘radical’ to the extent that it signalled a shift to the left by the ANC. It was ‘radical’ in demanding non-racial equality; its other demands were little more than the contemporary liberal canon. It was a moderate restatement of democratic goals and aspirations in a South African context and in tune with international opinion as set out in the Atlantic Charter, flowing from and trying to nudge ahead the apparent liberalisation of government thinking.
In 1943 the ANC also adopted a new constitution which abolished the ‘House of Chiefs’ set out in its original 1912 constitution, centralised authority with a working committee of members living within a fifty-mile radius of the President-General and attempted to create an effective branch structure. The ANC in 1943 was a small organisation dominated by professionals but, under the influence of the pragmatic Dr Xuma, it began to show signs of ‘a more vigorous reaction to the new pressures and challenges created by a rapidly industrialising society’.21 The initiation of a branch structure was an important (if tentative) first step along a long road towards the mass mobilisation that would be an ANC hallmark by the end of the twentieth century. But it was a long journey. In Xuma’s prophetic words, Africans’ Claims and restructuring the ANC were ‘… only the beginning of a long struggle entailing great sacrifices of time, means and even life itself ’.22
But the door was slammed shut. The UP won a landslide victory in the 1943 general election at home while the balance of forces in the war changed overseas, and with the changed circumstances came a changed Smuts government.
Through his secretary, Smuts rejected Africans’ Claims as ‘propagandist’ and stated that he was ‘not prepared to discuss proposals which are wildly impracticable’.23 Influx control measures had been relaxed in 1942 but were restored in 1943. Madeley reneged on his promise to recognise African trade unions, and went further and enacted War Measure 145, which made strikes illegal.
In 1946, Acting Prime Minister J H Hofmeyr, a prodigy accepted by Oxford when barely into his teens, able to manage four or five wartime ministries simultaneously, still the doyen of many older (white) South African liberals (and never without his mother),24 presided over the violent suppression of a strike by some 70 000 African miners, following which the CPSA executive committee was tried for sedition. For the United Party government liberalism was a matter of global justice but had little to do with the ‘native question’ at home, where it was a tactic not a principle.
Despite this, the Atlantic Charter, to which the South African government was a signatory, continued to inspire black political activity. The 1945 United Nations Charter, of which Smuts was an author, increased black demands for the domestic application of liberal principles. Smuts himself noted:
The fully publicised discussions at UNO are having a great effect in all directions. We even hear about them from our domestic farm Natives who really have nothing to complain of, but are deeply stirred by all this talk of equality and non-discrimination.25
Africans’ Claims did not fill the growing ideological vacuum created by an increasingly strident nationalist movement on the one hand and a government unable to please the competing sectors of a rapidly industrialising economy on the other. Nor did it generate a legitimating ideology to replace segregation (which it had assisted in undermining). But it did commit the ANC to a more radical programme than it had previously endorsed, and pressure continued to grow within the organisation for the use of more militant extra-parliamentary methods of protest.
Black unity
During the war, ideological changes, economic necessity and governmental pragmatism combined to generate widespread black militancy. African urbanisation and unionisation increased dramatically. In 1945 the Council of Non-European Trade Unions claimed an affiliation of 119 unions, representing more than 40% of Africans in industry.26
In August 1946, 70 000 African miners went on strike; within three days, eighteen had been killed and the strike bloodily broken. As migrant miners fled police brutality in the compounds, they crossed paths – on Germiston Station – with their indirectly elected representative councillors, who were on their way to a meeting in Pretoria.
The Native Representative Council (NRC), an indirectly elected African body set up in 1936 to assess legislation affecting ‘native affairs’, and presided over by Hofmeyr while Smuts attended the United Nations, adjourned indefinitely after requests to discuss the miners’ strike were turned down and in protest over government’s handling of the strike. NRC member James Moroka, a wealthy doctor and later ANC President-General, accused the government of a ‘… post-war continuation of a policy of Fascism which is the antithesis and negation of the letter and the spirit of the Atlantic Charter and the United Nations Charter’.27
Meanwhile, Smuts was joined at the UN by a delegation from the ANC and SAIC, as well as by former CPSA member and native representative Hymie Basner. The vexed ‘native question’ ensured that world attention focused on racial oppression in South Africa, robbing Smuts (some believe) of his moment of international acclaim at the UN, but signalling the shape of the future.
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