South Africa, history of

history of the area from prehistoric times to the present.

The prehistory and history of South Africa span nearly the entire known existence of humans and their ancestors—some three million years or more—and include the wandering of small bands of hominids through the savanna, the inception of herding and farming as ways of life, and the construction of large urban centres. Through this diversity of human experience, several trends can be identified: technological and economic change, shifting systems of belief, and, in the earlier phases of humanity, the interplay between physical evolution and learned behaviour, or culture. Over much of this human career, South Africa's past is also the past of a far wider area, and it is only in the past few centuries that this southernmost country of Africa has had a history of its own.

Prehistory

The earliest creatures that can be identified as direct ancestors of modern humans are classified as australopithecines (literally, “southern apes”), of which the first specimen to be described (in 1925) was the skull of a child from a quarry site at Taung (now in Northern Cape province). Subsequently, more australopithecine bones have been found preserved in limestone caves in the Transvaal region, where they had originally been deposited, up to three million years ago, by predators and scavengers. Australopithecines walked upright, fashioned simple tools from stone and bone, and lived by gathering plant foods and scavenging for meat.

In common with that of other parts of the world, South Africa's prehistory has been divided into a series of phases based on broad patterns of technology. The primary distinction is between a reliance on chipped and flaked stone implements (the Stone Age) and the ability to work iron (the Iron Age). The Stone Age, which in itself spans almost all human history, is further divided into early, middle, and late stages. The simple stone tools found with australopithecine fossil bones fall into the earliest part of the Early Stone Age.

The Early Stone Age

Early humans were evolving both in their physical form, gaining greater dexterity and mental ability, and in their cultural adaptations to the world. In recognition of the physical changes that were taking place, the fossil bones are divided into different genera and species. The genus Homo developed from and evolved alongside the genus Australopithecus before superseding the more archaic form. Early species of Homo also made stone tools that belong to the Early Stone Age; most Early Stone Age sites in South Africa were probably left by people classified as Homo erectus.

Simply modified stones, hand axes, scraping tools, and other bifacial artifacts were used for a wide variety of purposes, including butchering animal carcasses, scraping hides, and digging for plant foods. Most Early Stone Age archaeological sites in South Africa are the remains of open camps, often by the sides of rivers and lakes, although people also lived in rock shelters, such as Montagu Cave in the Cape.

The Early Stone Age was a period of very slow change: for more than a million years and over a wide geographic area, there were only the slightest differences in the forms of stone tools. However, the slow alterations in physical appearance that took place over the same time period are sufficient for physical anthropologists to recognize new species in the genus Homo. By about 500,000 years ago, some people were sufficiently modern in appearance to be considered an archaic form of Homo sapiens: important specimens belonging to this physical type have been found at Hopefield in Western Cape and at the Cave of Hearths in Mpumalanga.

The Middle Stone Age

Sometime after 200,000 years ago this long episode of slow cultural and physical evolution gave way to a period of more rapid change. Hand axes and big bifacial stone tools were no longer made, and people began to use stone flakes and blades to fashion scrapers, spear points, and parts for hafted, composite implements—a technological stage that has become known as the Middle Stone Age.

There are numerous Middle Stone Age sites in South Africa. People continued to live in open camps, while rock overhangs also were used for shelter. Day-to-day debris has survived to provide some evidence of early ways of life, although plant foods, which must have been important, are rarely preserved. Middle Stone Age bands hunted medium-size and large prey such as antelope and zebra, although they tended to avoid the largest and most dangerous animals such as the elephant and rhinoceros. Sometimes they collected tortoises and ostrich eggs in large quantities, as well as seabirds and marine mammals that could be found along the shore. The rich archaeological deposits of Klasies River Mouth Cave, on the Cape coast west of Port Elizabeth, preserve the earliest evidence in the world for the use of shellfish as a food source.

Klasies River Mouth Cave also is important for the evidence it provides for the emergence of anatomically modern humans. Some of the human skeletons from the lower levels of this site, possibly as old as 115,000 years, are modern in form. Equally early fossils have been excavated at Border Cave, in the mountainous region between KwaZulu/Natal and Swaziland. This archaeological evidence is consistent with the results of research by geneticists, some of whom believe that there was a single ancestral population of modern humans living in Africa about 200,000 years ago. Although it is still uncertain that there was indeed only a single centre for this last stage of human evolution, there is no doubt that the Border Cave and Klasies River Mouth people were some of the earliest representatives of modern humans.

The Late Stone Age

About 40,000 years ago people again began to change their basic techniques of toolmaking. Small, finely worked stone implements known as microliths began to become common, and the heavier scrapers and points of the Middle Stone Age less frequent. Archaeologists refer to this new technological stage as the Late Stone Age. The new ways of working stone again reflect an accelerating pace of change. In contrast to the almost static millennia of the Early Stone Age and the slow cultural changes of the Middle Stone Age, Late Stone Age people were far more responsive to changes in their environment. The numerous collections of stone tools from South African archaeological sites dating to the past 40,000 years show, in consequence, a great degree of variation through time and across the subcontinent.

Like their predecessors, Late Stone Age people relied heavily on plant foods, the remains of which have been well preserved at sites such as Melkhoutboom Cave, De Hangen, and Diepkloof in the Cape region. Animals were trapped and hunted with spears and arrows on which were mounted fine stone blades. In many areas people moved with the seasons, following game into higher lands in the spring and early summer months, when new flushes of plant foods could also be found. When available, rock overhangs were occupied; otherwise, windbreaks were used for shelter. Coastal resources were important, resulting in numerous shell middens scattered along the full length of the South African coastline. Shellfish, crayfish, seals, and seabirds were collected or caught along the shore, and fish were caught on lines, with spears, in traps, and possibly with nets.

Late Stone Age communities are the first to have left evidence for complex systems of belief, probably because sophisticated symbolic abilities are uniquely part of the anatomically modern condition—earlier forms of humans probably did not think in this way. There are numerous engravings on rock surfaces, mostly on the interior plateau, and paintings on the walls of rock shelters in the mountainous regions of South Africa, such as the Drakensberg and Cedarberg ranges. Dating is difficult, but it is clear that the art spans at least the past 25,000 years. South African rock art was originally seen either as the work of exotic foreigners such as Minoans or Phoenicians or as the product of primitive minds. Now it is widely accepted that the paintings were closely associated with the work of medicine people: shamans who were involved in the well-being of the band and often worked in a state of trance. Specific representations include trance dances, metaphors for trance such as death and flight, rainmaking, and control of the movement of antelope herds.

Pastoralism and early agriculture

About 2,000 years ago, new ways of living came to South Africa. From their earliest years, human communities had lived by gathering plant foods and by hunting, trapping, and scavenging for meat. However, people began to make use of domesticated animals and plants. In the east, where rainfall is adequate, crops could be grown and cattle, sheep, and goats herded near permanent villages and towns. In the west, where the climate is arid or where rain falls at the wrong times of the year for African cultivated plants, domestic livestock were kept by nomadic pastoralists, who moved over wide territories with their flocks and herds.

The origin of nomadic pastoralism in South Africa is still obscure. Linguistic evidence points to northern Botswana as a centre of origin, and this is supported by sheep bones, found in the same archaeological levels as pottery, that have been dated to about 150 BC from Bambata Cave in southwestern Zimbabwe. It is still unclear whether new communities moved into South Africa with their flocks and herds or whether established hunter-gatherer bands took up completely new ways of living. However, the results of archaeological excavations have shown that by the first few centuries AD sheep were being herded fairly extensively in Eastern and Western Cape provinces and probably in Northern Cape as well.

Surviving traces of sites where herders lived tend to be elusive. One of the best-preserved camps is at Kasteelberg, on the southwest coast near St. Helena Bay, where pastoralists kept sheep, hunted seals and other wild animals, and gathered shellfish, repeatedly returning to the same site for some 1,500 years. Such communities were directly ancestral to the Khoikhoi herders who encountered European settlers at the Cape of Good Hope in the mid-17th century.

The archaeological traces of farmers in the eastern regions of South Africa are more substantial. The earliest sites date to the 3rd century AD, although it is probable that farmers were already well established by this time. Scatters of potsherds with distinctive incised decoration mark early village locations in Mpumalanga and parts of KwaZulu/Natal.

The Iron Age

These first farmers had knowledge of ironworking, and their archaeological sites are grouped together as the Iron Age. The Early Iron Age represents the arrival in South Africa of new groups of people, having strong connections with East Africa and directly ancestral to the Bantu-speaking communities who form the majority of South Africa's population today.

Early Iron Age farmers grew crops, cutting back the vegetation with iron hoes and axes, and herded cattle and sheep. They also relied heavily on gathering wild plant foods, some hunting, and collecting shellfish if they lived near enough to the coast. Where conditions for agriculture were favourable (such as in the Tugela [Thukela] River valley in KwaZulu/Natal), villages grew to house several hundred people. There was probably some trade between different groups of farmers—evidence for specialization in salt making has been found in Mpumalanga—and with the hunter-gatherer bands that continued to occupy most parts of South Africa. Finely made, life-size ceramic heads from Lydenburg in Mpumalanga, dated to the 7th century AD, are a shadow of the complex systems of belief that have largely been lost to history.

Early Iron Age villages were built in low-lying areas, such as river valleys and the coastal plain, where forests and savannas allowed slash-and-burn agriculture. However, from the 11th century, farming communities began to settle the higher-lying grasslands beneath the Drakensberg and on the interior plateau. In many areas they started making different forms of pottery as well as villages built of stone. It is probable that these and other changes in patterns of behaviour reflect the increasing importance of cattle in both economic and social life. By convention, this later phase of precolonial farming is known as the Late Iron Age.

Other changes came in the north. Arab traders had begun to establish small settlements on the Tanzanian and Mozambican coasts in their search for ivory, animal skins, and other exotica. The trade beads they offered in return began to reach villages in the interior, the first indications that the more complex economic and social structures associated with long-distance trade were developing. The arid Limpopo River valley, eschewed by the earliest farmers, became a focal point of settlement as a natural trade route. Sites such as Pont Drift (about AD 800 to 1100) and Schroda (dated to the 9th century) show that their occupants were rich in both livestock and trade beads.

This was the setting in which Mapungubwe developed as South Africa's first urban centre. Starting as a large village like Schroda and Pont Drift, Mapungubwe rapidly developed into a town of perhaps 10,000 people. Differences in status were marked out clearly: the elite lived, and were buried, on the top of the stark sandstone hill that is at the centre of the town, while ordinary people lived in the valley below. The hilltop graves contained lavish burial goods, including a carefully crafted gold rhinoceros, and excavations have provided evidence for specialized crafts such as bone and ivory working, all suggestive of social and economic differentiation. Mapungubwe was abandoned sometime in the 12th century, after having been occupied for perhaps 200 years. It is likely that both the town's founding and its decline were closely related to trade—to the possibilities that the connection with the coast along the Limpopo valley offered for the accumulation of wealth and to the capture of this trade by Great Zimbabwe, farther to the north.

Europeans had long envied the riches of the Arab world, and in 1488 the first Portuguese ships rounded the Cape of Good Hope, pursuing a share of the lucrative Arab trade with the East. Over the following century, numerous vessels made their way off the South African coast, but the only direct contacts came with the bands of shipwreck survivors who either set up camp in the hope of rescue or tried to make their way northward to Portuguese settlements in Mozambique. From the early 17th century, the Portuguese control of the Cape sea route was challenged by both the British and the Dutch. In 1615 the British founded a short-lived settlement at Table Bay, and in 1652 the Dutch East India Company set up a small garrison under the slopes of Table Mountain, charged with the task of provisioning the Dutch fleets.

Settlement of the Cape Colony

The Dutch East India Company, always mindful of unnecessary expense, did not intend more than a minimal presence in the southernmost part of Africa. However, farming beyond the shores of Table Bay proved necessary, and in 1657 nine men were released from their contracts with the company and granted land along the Liesbeek River. In the same year, the first slaves were brought to the Cape, and, by the end of the century, the stamp of Dutch colonialism in South Africa was clear. Settlers, aided by increasing numbers of slaves, grew wheat, tended vineyards, and grazed their sheep and cattle from the Cape peninsula to the Hottentots Holland Mountains, some 30 miles away. A census of 1707 listed 1,779 settlers, owning 1,107 slaves.

In the initial years of Dutch settlement at the Cape, Khoikhoi pastoralists were keen to trade. However, the garrison's demand for cattle and sheep seemed insatiable, and the Khoikhoi became more wary. The Dutch began to push farther into the interior, seeking livestock in return for tobacco, alcohol, and trinkets. Numerous conflicts followed, and many Khoikhoi communities were decimated by smallpox, particularly in 1713. At the same time, colonial pastoralists, or trekboers, began to move inland beyond the Hottentots Holland Mountains with their own herds. By the end of the 18th century, the Khoikhoi chiefdoms had been largely decimated, their people either dead or reduced to conditions close to serfdom on colonial farms. The San (or Bushmen)—small bands of hunter-gatherers who had hung on to old ways of life in isolated areas—fared no better. Pushed back into marginal areas, they were forced to live by cattle raiding, justifying in colonial eyes their systematic eradication. Men were slaughtered and women and children taken into servitude.

Trekboers were in constant search of new pasturage, and they and their families spread northeast as well as north, moving toward the grasslands long occupied by Late Iron Age farmers. For many generations these communities had lived in settlements concentrated along the low ridges that break the monotony of the interior plateau. Population estimates are difficult, but some of these larger villages must certainly have housed several hundred people. Cattle were kraaled (penned) in elaborately built stone enclosures, the ruins of which survive today across a large part of Free State and in the higher areas of the Transvaal region. Extensive networks of exchange brought iron for hoes and spears from specialized manufacturing centres in the Mpumalanga Lowveld and the deep river gorges of KwaZulu/Natal.

Thus, by the closing decades of the 18th century, South Africa fell into two broad regions. The west—including the winter rainfall region around the Cape of Good Hope, the coastal hinterland northward toward the Namibian border, and the dry lands of the interior—was dominated by the advancing frontier of colonial settlement. Trekboers were taking increasingly more land from the Khoikhoi and from remnant hunter-gatherer communities, who were killed, were forced into marginal areas, or became labourers tied to the farms of their new overlords. In the east—where summer rainfall and good grazing made mixed farming economies possible—Late Iron Age farmers had long been established in both coastal and valley lowlands and on the Highveld of the interior.

Meanwhile, Cape Town had been developing as South Africa's second urban centre, although it was many years before it reached the size of Mapungubwe some five centuries earlier. The initial grid of streets had been expanded, linking the company's garden to the new castle that overlooked Table Bay. Houses—with flat roofs, ornate pediments, and symmetrical facades—sheltered officials, merchants, and visitors en route between Europe and the East. The administration of town and colony was in the hands of a governor and council, and the economy was in principle directed by the economic interests of the Dutch East India Company; in practice corruption and illegal trading were the order of the day. Both town and colony depended for their existence on the slaves, who by now outnumbered their owners.

Martin Hall

Growth of the colonial economy

During the century from about 1770 to about 1870, the region now known as South Africa was integrated more fully into the world capitalist economy. The decisive moment was the seizure of the Cape Colony by Britain in 1806 as a strategic base (securing the developing empire in India), market, source of raw materials, and outlet for surplus people. Britain possessed world hegemony between the 1810s and '60s, and its shadow loomed over southern Africa.

By the 1860s the Cape Colony had spawned the subcolonies of Natal, the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal. Whites settled to the edges of the Kalahari desert in the west, the Drakensberg and Natal coast in the east, and the tsetse-fly- and mosquito-ridden Lowveld along the Limpopo River valley in the northeast. Africans were dispossessed of much of their land, and many of them were forced to work for the settlers. The settler population increased from about 20,000 in the 1780s to about 300,000 in the late 1860s. It is impossible to estimate the African population accurately, but it is likely to have been between 2,000,000 and 4,000,000.

After the 1760s African societies were increasingly affected by ivory and slave traders operating from Delagoa Bay, Inhambane, and the lower Zambezi (in modern Mozambique) as well as by traders and raiders based in the Cape to the south. In response to these invasions, surviving African farming peoples evolved a number of sister states different in structure, scale, and military capacity from anything that had gone before. The most successful were the Pedi and Swazi in the eastern Highveld, the Zulu south of the Pongola River, the Sotho in the Caledon valley, the Gaza along the lower Limpopo, and the Ndebele in southwestern Zimbabwe. Possessing agriculture, these African societies proved resilient, unlike the hunting societies in the Cape, the Americas, and Australia. But unlike, for instance, states in China, they were unable to repel the invaders altogether, possibly because food surpluses had been insufficient to support a military class able to force unification early enough. Nor, even at their height in the 1860s, were the African states able to unite. They were able to protect their peoples from proletarianization and impoverishment for only a brief period. Accentuated competition among the European nations and the discovery of gold and diamonds in the 1860s led to a new imperialist offensive: between the 1870s and '90s the African states were destroyed by Europeans exploiting African divisions and using new breech-loading rifles and the first machine guns.

After the 1770s the Dutch settlers and African farming peoples collided. Dutch trekboers advanced across the semidesert Karoo of the central Cape and met agricultural peoples along a line running from the lower Vaal and middle Orange river valleys to the sea around the Gamtoos River (west of Port Elizabeth). West of this line the nonagricultural Khoi groups had already been badly disrupted by European invaders. The Boers were weakly controlled by the Dutch East India Company, a mercantilist organization that monopolized a sparse trade and was unenthusiastic about colonization. Rebellions against the company—as, for instance, by the burghers of Swellendam and of Graaff-Reinet in 1795—became frequent. In the 1780s armed clashes over land and cattle began between the Boers and Xhosa groups such as the Gqunukhwebe and Ndlambe in the Zuurveld between the Sundays and Fish rivers. The Boers developed a commando system in these continuous forays.

In contrast to this eastern frontier, the longer-settled areas of the western Cape had evolved a less fluid agricultural economy of grape and wheat farms run by imported slave labour. Slaves were treated harshly, and punishments for assaulting whites were brutal—for instance, death by impalement. Escaped slaves formed Maroons—small, self-sufficient communities—or fled into the interior. Because slave birth rates were low and settler numbers were increasing, the Dutch in the 1780s stepped up the enserfment of surviving Khoi (pejoratively called “Hottentots”) to help run the farms. Many Khoi in the east joined Xhosa groups in a major counteroffensive against colonialism in 1799–1801, and there were slave rebellions in 1808 and 1825.

The Dutch refusal to grant citizenship rights (e.g., access to land) to “Coloured” offspring of unions between whites and Khoi or slaves produced aggrieved groups of people, classified as “Basters,” who were Christian, spoke Dutch, and had an excellent knowledge of horses and firearms. Many fled north toward and over the Orange River in search of land and trading opportunities. After merging with independent Khoi groups, such as the Kora, they formed commando states under warlords, the more successful of whom came from the Bloem, Kok, Barends, and Afrikaner families. By the 1790s they were trading with and raiding local African communities such as the Rolong, Tlhaping, Hurutshe, and, farthest north, Ngwaketse. These groups coalesced into larger aggregations of people, who competed with each other to control trade routes going south to the Cape and east to Mozambique. By about 1810 Moleabangwe of the Tlhaping and Makaba of the Ngwaketse, for example, were already powerful rulers.

Along the southeast coast the Portuguese and some British and French were trading beads, brass, cloth, alcohol, and firearms in return for ivory, slaves, cattle, gold, and minor items such as wax and skins. During the late 18th century, high volumes of ivory were exported from Delagoa Bay annually, and slaves were taken from the Komati and Maputo river regions and sent to the Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean and to Brazil. There they worked sugarcane, coffee, and other plantations that met the needs of Europe's rising population. By 1800 trade routes linked Delagoa Bay northwest to the Soutpansberg (where copper was obtained from the Venda), west to the Tlhaping and Hurutshe, and south to the Zuurveld—thereby linking the Cape and coastal trade routes with the central interior.

This European trade was a primary cause of structural transformation within societies inland of Delagoa Bay. Warlords reorganized military institutions to hunt elephants and slaves. Profits from trade enhanced patronage capabilities, attracted followers, and raised military potential and, in turn, the capacity to dominate land, people, and cattle. Near the bay, Tembe and Maputo were already powerful states by the 1790s. To the west emerged the Maroteng of Thulare, the Dlamini of Ndvungunye, and the Hlubi of Bhungane. Between the Pongola and Tugela rivers evolved the Mthethwa of Dingiswayo south of Lake St. Lucia, the Ndwandwe of Zwide, the Qwabe of Phakatwayo, the Chunu of Macingwane, and, south of the Tugela, the Cele and Thuli. These groups competed to dominate trade and were the more militarized the closer they were to the Portuguese base.

Accentuated European impact, c. 1810–35

British occupation of the Cape

In 1795 the British responded to France's overrunning the Dutch Republic by occupying the Cape. After returning it at the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, they reannexed the colony in 1806 after the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars. Prior to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the Cape became a vital base for Britain—the Cape economy was meshed with Britain's. London Missionary Society and Methodist missionaries, as well as hunters and traders, ranged into Transorangia (the territory in the interior to the north and south of the Orange River) and the Transkei, mapping and exploring. Until 1825 Cape wines were given preferential access to the British market. Merino sheep were introduced, and serious sheep farming was begun to supply wool to British textile mills.

The infrastructure of a new type of colony was established. English replaced Dutch as the language of administration; in 1825 the Dutch rix-dollar was replaced by sterling; newspapers opened in Cape Town after 1824; British colonial governors were brought out; and in 1825 an advisory council for the governor was established, which was upgraded into a legislative council in 1834 with a few “unofficial” settler representatives. In 1813 most of the British East India Company's privileges were abolished (the company's last monopoly on the Chinese trade ended in 1833), after which the number of merchants increased and shipping trade expanded. After 1813 the Dutch loan farm system—whereby white colonists paid a small annual fee to the government but did not acquire ownership of the land—was gradually replaced with a virtual freehold system of landownership.

In 1820 a large group of British settlers arrived. Together with a high white birth rate and wasteful land usage, this produced an accentuated land hunger. To secure colonial hegemony and to alleviate the settler land shortage, the British applied massive military intervention against Africans on the eastern frontier. Until the 1840s the British did not envisage the colony expanding to include African (“Kaffir”) citizens: the latter were to be expelled across the Fish River, the unilaterally proclaimed eastern border of the colony.

The first step in this process was the onslaught of the British army against the Zuurveld Gqunukhwebe and Ndlambe in 1811–12. In the aftermath of this war, Graham's Town (now Grahamstown) was established as the military pivot of a line of forts. The removal of about 20,000 people eastward across the Fish aroused tensions that British governors exploited by divide-and-rule strategies. This exacerbated tensions between the Ngqika and the Ndlambe and Gcaleka, leading to the Battle of Amalinda in 1818. The Thembu and Mpondo farther east were established as British allies against all three of these peoples. An Ndlambe attack on Graham's Town in 1819 provided the pretext for the annexation of the next swath of African territory, to the Keiskamma River. The 1820 settlers took the African lands. Khoi soldiers were settled along the Kat River in 1829, and Rharhabe groups (e.g., Maqoma's) were repeatedly harried from their lands in the early 1830s. When the Rharhabe despairingly counterattacked in December 1834, Governor Benjamin D'Urban ordered the colossal invasion of 1835; thousands of Rharhabe were killed. In April 1835 the British crossed the Great Kei River and ravaged Gcaleka territory; on May 12 they murdered the Gcaleka chief, Hintsa. Only the intervention of the British colonial secretary, Lord Glenelg (to the fury of the settler expansionists), halted the seizure of all African land to the Great Kei. D'Urban's pioneering attempt to rule conquered Africans with white magistrates and soldiers was overturned by Glenelg; instead, for a time, Africans east of the Keiskamma retained their autonomy and dealt with the colony through diplomatic agents.

A chronic problem for the British was how to procure labour to develop the new settler farms and to build the towns. Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807 and pressured other nations to do the same. Some slaves continued to be imported into the Cape after 1807 (for example, “prize negroes”—slaves seized by the Royal Navy and reenslaved in the Cape), but they were not enough. An 1809 ban on Africans crossing the border aggravated the labour shortage, and the British, like the Dutch, were forced to enserf the Khoi (by the Caledon and Cradock codes of 1809 and 1812).

Anglo-Boer commandos illegally captured San women and children (exterminating many of the men), as well as Africans from across the eastern frontier. More serfs (called “apprentices”) were captured by the Griqua raiding states led by Andries Waterboer, Adam Kok, and Barend Barends along the Vaal, Molopo, and Caledon rivers from among the Taung, Hurutshe, Rolong, Kwena, and Fokeng peoples. The prisoners, known as Mantatees, were imported mainly into the eastern Cape in exchange for firearms, gunpowder, and horses; they were set to work on the farms. One Griqua raid on an unidentified people at Dithakong in 1823 was accompanied by the British government agent John Melvill and the Kuruman missionary Robert Moffat. White farmers also raided for labour north of the Orange River.

The need to align the Cape with the growing imperial antislavery ethos and to facilitate labour distribution produced an overhaul of labour policy in 1828. Ordinance 50 freed the Khoi to choose their employers but brought little tangible change to their positions; innumerable disincentives existed if they preferred not to work. Ordinance 49 permitted black labourers from east of the Keiskamma to come into the colony for work under control of contracts and passes issued by soldiers and missionaries. At first this permission was insufficient, and in August 1828 Anglo-Boer armies (supported by Khoi, Thembu, Gcaleka, and Mpondo auxiliaries) attacked the Ngwane east of the Great Kei at Mbolompo, returning with prisoners. More spectacularly, in its operations of 1835, the British army and its Khoi and African collaborators seized thousands of Rharhabe and Gcaleka women and children. Known as “Fingo,” they were dispatched as labourers throughout the Cape, so that by 1837 the Cape Colony's labour supply was assured, though only temporarily. Ironically, these illegal measures coincided with the formal abolition of slavery in 1834–38. Ex-slaves, Khoi and Fingo, were now controlled by the Masters and Servants Ordinance of 1841. This imposed criminal penalties for breach of contract and desertion of the workplace and increased the legal powers of settler employers.

The Delagoa Bay slave trade

Concurrent with these events in the Cape, the slave trade at Delagoa Bay had been expanding since about 1810 as the Brazilian plantations grew. During the late 1820s, slave exports from the Delagoa Bay area reached several thousand a year, in anticipation of what proved to be an ineffective attempt to abolish the Brazilian trade in 1830. After a dip in the early 1830s, the Bay slave trade reached a peak in the late 1840s.

The impact on hinterland societies was increasingly profound. Makhasane's Maputo and other groups became surrogate slavers and joined the Portuguese soldiers in inland raiding. Along the Limpopo and Vaal river networks Bay slavers competed with Griqua slavers supplying the Cape. The Gaza and Jele near St. Lucia moved north to slave; the Jele, or Ngoni, later resituated themselves west of Lake Nyasa, liaising with Arab slavers. Slavers burned crops, and famines were common. Many groups, including the Ngwane, Ndebele, and some Hlubi, fled westward into the Highveld mountains during the 1810s and '20s. The Ngwane were attacked in sequence by Bay, Griqua, and British slavers. The Patsa (Kololo) of Sebetwane, on the other hand, moved east out of Transorangia, ran into Bay slavers, migrated west into Botswana, where in 1826 they were attacked by an alliance of Ngwaketse and white mercenaries, and ended in Zambia in the 1850s exporting slaves to the Arabs and Portuguese. These migrations all produced further destabilizations.

Emergence of the eastern states

By the 1820s four main defensive state clusters had emerged between the Soutpansberg and the Drakensberg: Sekwati's Pedi in the Steelpoort valley, Sobhuza's Dlamini in the eastern Transvaal, the Mokoteli of Moshoeshoe (Mshweshwe) in the Caledon River region, and Shaka's Zulu south of the Black Mfolozi River. The Pedi received refugees from the Limpopo and coastal plains. Moshoeshoe's people absorbed refugees from throughout eastern Transorangia; they became formidable raiders and by the mid-1830s were able to defeat the Griqua and Korana raiders. Between about 1812 and 1825 Shaka welded the Chunu, Mthethwa, Qwabe, Mkhize, Cele, and other groups into a militarized state with fortified settlements called amakhanda. Zulu amabutho (regiments) defended against raiders, provided protection for refugees, and, the evidence suggests, began to trade in ivory and slaves themselves.

From 1824 the Zulu faced competition from Cape colonists who came to Port Natal (renamed Durban in 1835) and organized mercenary armies. Although on a smaller scale, these were comparable to the Portuguese prazero armies along the Zambezi and to the warlord state set up by the Portuguese trader João Albasini in the Soutpansberg in the 1840s. During the 1820s European raiders joined Zulu amabutho in raids north of the Black Mfolozi River and also operated south of the Mzimkhulu River—where slaves were being exported on French ships in 1825. In 1828 Francis Farewell's raiders, in alliance with Zulu groups, seized women and children in the same area. Trade conflicts helped split the Zulu elite into rival factions, a split that led to Shaka's assassination in 1828. The succession of Shaka's half brother, Dingane, was accompanied by civil wars and by increasing interference in the Bay trading alliances. In 1833 the Portuguese governor at Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), Ribeiro, was killed in one of these wars. White warlords in Natal such as Henry Flynn, Nathaniel Isaacs, and John Cane continued to slave and hunt elephants. By the mid-1830s consortia of Cape merchants were planning the formal colonization of Natal with its superb agricultural soils and temperate climate. The British left the less desirable Delagoa Bay region to the Portuguese, who traded slaves out of Lourenço Marques for another half-century.

The expansion of white colonialism, c. 1835–1870

The Great Trek

After about 1834 a previous trickle of Boer migrants north of the Orange River suddenly became an organized flood. This later became known as the “Great Trek.” The common view that this was a bid to escape the policies of the British—for instance, the freeing of the slaves—is difficult to sustain, as most of the ex-slave owners did not migrate (most trekkers came from the poorer east Cape), and in 1835 the labour shortage had been alleviated. The trek was the explosive culmination of a long sequence of colonial labour raids, grazing probes, land seizures, punishment commandos, and commercial expansions. Whites possessed weaponry that was always technologically one step ahead of that of the Africans. They also had the instructive examples of how small groups of raiders in Natal and Transorangia had wrought havoc over large areas and how the British army had induced terror in Africans. The trekkers were not backward feudalists escaping the modern world, as some historians have maintained; they were energized people extending their frontier. The trek was as inevitable a development as the North American colonists' push across the Alleghenies in the 1760s.

Several thousand Boers migrated with their families, livestock, retainers, wagons, and firearms into a region already destabilized and partially depopulated by Griqua and coastal raiders. Only when they came up against Mzilikazi's Ndebele (who in the early 1830s had moved from the southeastern to the western Transvaal) were they confronted, as at Vegkop in 1836. However, the Boers—in alliance with Rolong, Taung, and Griqua allies—crushed the Ndebele during 1837, taking their land and many cattle, women, and children. The Ndebele fled north, resettling around the Matopo and Malungwane hills in Zimbabwe.

By the early 1840s the trekkers had penetrated much of the Transvaal. A grouping of commando states emerged based on Potchefstroom, Pretoria, and, from 1845, Ohrigstad-Lydenburg in the eastern Transvaal. Andries Hendrik Potgieter, Andries Pretorius, Jan Mocke, and others competed for followers, attacked weaker African chiefdoms, hunted elephants and slaves, and forged trade links with the Portuguese. The development of farms was slow and inevitably depended on forced labour, as had been the case in the Cape prior to the 1830s. For a quarter of a century until the 1860s, moreover, the Pedi and Swazi in the east and even Kwena and Hurutshe groups in the west were strong enough to curb Boer expansionism.

Other Boers turned east into Natal and allied themselves with the resident British settlers. There was an inescapable confrontation between this coalition and Dingane's Zulu. The Zulu, though like the Ndebele scoring initial successes, were overpowered at Blood (Ncome) River in 1838 and the AmaQonqo Hills in 1840. The Boers, aided by Zulu civil war, annexed land to the Black Mfolozi River and set up Mpande as a puppet over the much-reduced Zulu kingdom. Colonial military strategies perfected along the Fish and Great Kei rivers in the eastern Cape were transplanted to the Tugela and Pongola. The whites began to carve out farms in Natal as they had done along the eastern frontier. Further slave and cattle raids on Ncaphayi's Bhaca south of the Mzimkhulu provided the pretext for British annexation of Natal in 1843. The Zulu were returned land between the Mfolozi and Tugela and for the time being left independent. Mpande (reigned 1840–72) was a formidable ruler and further built up Zulu military capacity, which his son, Cetshwayo, used effectively against the British invaders at Isandlwana in 1879.

The British in Natal

The coming of thousands of British settlers to Natal in the 1840s and '50s meant that for the first time black Africans and white settlers lived together (however uneasily) on the same land. In 1845 a diplomatic agent (later secretary of native affairs) was appointed: Theophilus Shepstone—a prototype of later chief native commissioners. Reserves for blacks were set aside (Harding Commission, 1852), and missionaries and pliant chiefs were introduced to persuade them to work. After 1849 Africans were subjected to a hut tax that was designed to raise revenue and force them into labour; isibhalo (forced) labour was used for road building; and Africans on state land and white farms were made to pay rents. To meet these burdens, the more resilient African cultivators—or squatters—grew surplus crops to sell to the growing towns of Pietermaritzburg and Durban.

The British were reluctant, though, to annex the Transorangian interior. No strategic interests were involved. Boer trade links with Delagoa Bay posed little threat, as Portugal was a virtual client state of Britain. The tasks of eroding African resistance and developing the land were left to the Boers. The policy was muddled and never clearly enunciated. Financial constraints operated. A halfhearted attempt was made to protect Britain's long-standing Griqua client states. Sir George Napier in 1843 and Henry Warden in 1849 attempted to arbitrate a border between Moshoeshoe's Sotho state and the Boers west of the Caledon River. After further war with the Rharhabe on the eastern frontier in 1846, the aggressive governor, Colonel Harry Smith, in 1847–48 finally annexed the regions between the Fish and the Great Kei rivers (establishing British Kaffraria) and between the Orange and Vaal (Orange River Sovereignty). These moves provoked further war with the Xhosa (joined once more by many Khoi) in 1851–53 and a free-for-all in the sovereignty, with unsupported British politicians ineffectively trying to influence events.

A striking feature of this period was the capacity of the Sotho people to fend off military conquest by the British and Boers. After defeating and absorbing the rival Tlokwa of Sekonyela in 1853–54, Moshoeshoe became the most powerful African leader south of the Vaal-Pongola. His soldiers utilized firearms and, in the cold Highveld, horses—the keys to political and military survival.

Attempts at Boer consolidation

Faced with these unprofitable conflicts, the British temporarily withdrew, and the Transvaal and Orange Free State Boers were given independence at the Sand River and Bloemfontein conventions of 1852 and 1854, respectively. The access of Africans to guns and gunpowder was prohibited. Both Boer groups wrote constitutions and established Volksraade (parliaments), although their attempts at unification failed. For more than a decade consolidation among the Boers was hampered by civil wars and the struggle with the material environment. Nevertheless, the Orange Free State's economy grew rapidly, and by the 1860s the Boers were exporting significant amounts of wool via Cape ports.

The Cape economy

Capitalist infrastructure came earlier in the Cape because of its older colonialism and its seacoast links to the empire. Banks and insurance and limited-liability companies were founded in the 1840s and '50s. The ending of ceilings on interest rates in 1860 attracted capital, which was loaned against rising property values. A class of prosperous colonial shopkeepers, financiers, traders, and farmers emerged. Cape Town grew to more than 30,000 people in the 1850s. Port Elizabeth, established in 1820, became an important trading centre and harbour. Representative government came in March 1853: the Legislative Assembly had elected members, but an executive was appointed from London; only in 1872 was the executive made responsible to the assembly. Franchise qualifications were relatively low. Some Africans could even vote, but the numbers were too small to have political impact. These nominal rights were reduced later in the century and abolished outright in 1936.

The colonial attacks of 1811, 1819, 1835, 1846, 1851, and 1858 deprived Africans of most of their land between the Sundays and Great Kei rivers and produced impoverishment and despair. From 1855 British magistrates were imposed in British Kaffraria, and the power of the Xhosa chiefs was destroyed. Following a severe lung sickness epidemic in 1854–56, the Xhosa killed many of the remaining cattle and in 1857–58 were unable to grow many crops (for reasons that are still not entirely clear). The subsequent starvation drove yet more thousands of Africans into the Cape Colony to work. In British Kaffraria, as in Natal, the hut tax was introduced in 1849. African citizens of the Cape Colony (Fingo) were controlled under the Masters and Servants Act of 1856 (an updating of Ordinance 50 of 1828 and the 1841 ordinance), and non-Cape Africans were regulated by the Kaffir Employment Act of 1857 (an updated version of Ordinance 49). In 1865 British Kaffraria was fused with the Cape Colony, and thousands of newly defined Fingo resettled east of the Great Kei, thereby creating Fingoland. The Transkei—the hilly country between the Cape and Natal—became a large African reserve, the still independent parts of which were annexed in the 1880s and '90s. Mpondoland fell in 1894.

White missionaries and their black catechists worked sedulously from the 1820s to undermine African cosmologies and seduced Africans into desiring European manufactures they had previously done well without. The techniques for destroying African cultures and for forcing Africans to work pioneered in the Cape and Natal were exported to the rest of Africa after the 1880s. For a time, nevertheless, there was room for a small class of African peasant farmers (producing for the market and liable for rents and taxes), who used plows and sold surplus grain to the towns in competition with colonial farmers. Difficulty in obtaining capital, as well as legal and political discrimination, drove most of them out of business in the decades following the South African War of 1899–1902.

The Cape economy, narrowly based on wine and wool, was not particularly prosperous. Wool exports, though soaring to 12,000,000 pounds (5,440 metric tons) in 1855, lagged far behind those of Australia and were susceptible to drought and market slumps, as in the early 1860s. Roads were built with African labour, but only a few miles of railway were constructed before 1870. Attempts to broaden the economic base were not at first successful. Guano (droppings of gannets and cormorants used as fertilizer) was exploited on off-coast islands; copper began to be mined in Namaqualand; hunters operating as far as the Zambezi sent out much ivory; and traders, hunters, missionaries, and full-time prospectors surveyed and sampled the rocks. The efforts of the last were rewarded with the discovery of diamonds in the Vaal valley and of gold in the Tati valley in 1866–67 and in the northern and eastern Transvaal in 1871.

Disputes in the north and east

To the north, colonial communities and the African states cooperated and competed with each other, the advantage slowly moving to the colonists. Mswati's Dlamini Swazi and Manukosi's (Soshangane's) Gaza supplied slaves both to the Transvaal Boers and to the Portuguese. Mswati's people overran much of the Lowveld, incorporating many groups (the emakhandzambile) and exchanging captured children for firearms and horses with the Transvaal settlers. The death of Manukosi in 1858 led to a Gaza civil war in which the Swazi, the Boers, and the Portuguese all intervened. In 1864, when Mswati controlled the land almost to Lourenço Marques, the Gaza (under the victor, Mzila) migrated northward into the Búzi River area of eastern Zimbabwe.

Farther south the Zulu competed with the Swazi and the Boers to dominate the Pongola and Ingwavuma valleys and with the Boers to control the Buffalo (Mziniathi) River area. A Zulu civil war in 1856 (the Battle of Ndondakasuka on the lower Tugela River) elevated Cetshwayo over Mbuyazwe, and he effectively ruled Zululand from the early 1860s. Shepstone interfered not only in Zulu politics but also in an Ndebele succession dispute, attempting to oust Lobengula in favour of a pretender in 1869–72. Marthinus Pretorius, the Transvaal leader, annexed huge areas, at least on paper. To the irritation of settler farmers and plantation owners, few Zulu went south to work in Natal. Instead, a supply of Mozambican indentured labourers (some of them effectively forced) was organized. This evolved in the following decades into a steady flow of migrant labour. However, initially there was not enough labour to satisfy the new sugar plantations, and, from about 1860, indentured labourers from India were brought over to do the work.

Moshoeshoe's Sotho continued their tenacious hold on their lands along the Caledon River and were for a time able to supply the Boers of the Orange Free State with grain and cattle. The Boers, however, coveted the fertile Caledon valley. Moshoeshoe mobilized 10,000 men to defeat them in the war of 1858; but, with the consolidation of the Orange Free State under Johannes Henricus Brand in the early 1860s, the Sotho were defeated in 1865–66 (Treaty of Thaba Bosiu, 1866), and only British annexation of Moshoeshoe's territory in 1868 prevented complete Sotho collapse.

The decline of the African states

As the 1860s came to an end, the great African states began to weaken. This was symbolized by the death of a generation of powerful leaders: Manukosi in 1858, Sekwati of the Pedi in 1861, Mswati and Mzilikazi in 1868, Moshoeshoe in 1870, and Mpande in 1872. Just as in Germany, Italy, Canada, and Australia, so in southern Africa capitalism required the unification of communications, currencies, financial institutions, and governments. Besides, the Zulu, Swazi, and Pedi were needed as labourers, and their land—the last large fertile areas controlled by Africans—was coveted.

Governor George Grey had already proposed a federated South Africa in 1858, and in the late 1860s the discovery of gold and diamonds brought matters forward. The annexation of Basutoland in 1868 was followed by the British seizure of the diamond fields from the competing Griqua, Tlhaping, and Boers in 1871 (the Keate Award); Colonial Secretary Lord Carnarvon's more determined federation plan of 1875; Shepstone's invasion of the Transvaal in 1877; and the British invasions of Zululand and Pediland in 1879. A bid to seize Delagoa Bay was overturned by the arbitrating French president, Patrice, Count de Mac-Mahon, in 1875; and Swaziland was left to collapse internally. With the collapse of Zulu resistance in the 1880s, the invasions of the Gaza and Ndebele kingdoms in 1893–96, and the crushing of Venda resistance in 1898, there were by 1900 no autonomous African societies left in the subcontinent.

Julian R.D. Cobbing

Diamonds, gold, and imperialist intervention (1870–1902)

Between 1870, when the diamond rush to Kimberley began, and 1902, when the South African War ended, South Africa was transformed. Midway between these dates, the world's largest goldfields were discovered in 1886 on the Witwatersrand. An economic backwater became a major supplier of precious minerals to the world economy. A scatter of disparate statelets—British colonies, Boer republics, and African kingdoms—came under British control. Predominantly agrarian societies began to urbanize and industrialize. Political responses included a nascent Afrikaner nationalism and the first modern political organization in black societies. These dramatic changes were propelled by two linked forces: the development of a capitalist mining industry and a sequence of imperialist interventions by Britain.

Diamonds and confederation

A chance find in 1867 drew several thousand fortune seekers to alluvial diamond diggings along the Orange, Vaal, and Harts rivers. In 1870 richer finds were made in “dry diggings,” and a large-scale rush followed. By the end of 1871, nearly 50,000 people were living in a sprawling, polyglot mining town that in 1873 was named Kimberley.

Initially, individual diggers, black and white, worked small claims by hand. Production was rapidly centralized and mechanized, and ownership and labour patterns more starkly divided along racial lines. Joint-stock companies bought out diggers; a new class of mining capitalists oversaw a transition from diamond digging to mining industry. By 1889 concentration became monopoly when De Beers Consolidated Mines (controlled by Cecil Rhodes) became the sole producer. While some white diggers were kept on as overseers or skilled workers, the workforce consisted mainly of African migrant workers, housed in closed compounds by the companies from the mid-1880s.

Diamonds were discovered in a zone whose sovereignty was already disputed. The Orange Free State, the South African Republic, the western Griqua under Nicolaas Waterboer, and southern Tswana chiefs all pressed competing claims. At a special hearing in October 1871, Robert W. Keate (lieutenant governor of Natal) found in favour of Waterboer. Waterboer was persuaded to request British protection against his Boer rivals, and the area was annexed as Griqualand West.

The annexation of the diamond fields signaled a more forward policy under a Liberal ministry but fell short of the ambitious confederation policy pursued by Lord Carnarvon, colonial secretary in Benjamin Disraeli's 1874 Tory government. He sought to unite republics and colonies as a self-governing federation in the British Empire. Carnarvon was influenced by Theophilus Shepstone, secretary for native affairs in Natal, who urged a coherent regional policy with regard to African labour and administration.

Carnarvon concentrated at first on persuading the Cape and the Free State to accept federation. A conference in London in August 1876 revealed how chilly these parties were to the proposal. His southern gambit frustrated, Carnarvon embarked on a northern strategy. The South African Republic (Transvaal) was virtually bankrupt, and support for President Thomas F. Burgers was dwindling. During the London conference, news arrived of a military humiliation of Burgers' forces at the hands of Sekhukhune's Pedi. Carnarvon commissioned Shepstone to annex the Transvaal. Shepstone entered the republic in January 1877 and against only token resistance proclaimed it a British colony in April.

Deft as the annexation was, administration of the new possession was maladroit. Empty coffers and insensitivity to Afrikaner resentments led to a clash over tax payments, and, under a triumvirate of Paul Kruger, Piet Joubert, and Marthinus Wessel Pretorius, the Transvaal Boers opted to fight for independence. British defeats, especially at Majuba, hastened a decision to which William Gladstone's cabinet was already inclined. Republican self-government was restored, subject to an imprecise British “suzerainty” over external relations. Confederation received its quietus with these events.

Wars of conquest

Seizure and retrocession of the Transvaal overlapped with a sequence of wars that completed the conquest of African societies. Imperial troops tipped the balance decisively against societies that had previously withstood subordination to settler control. A century of military conflict on the Cape frontier ended with the Cape-Xhosa war of 1877–78, and between 1878 and 1881 the Cape Colony defeated rebellions in Griqualand West, the Transkei, and Basutoland. Sir Bartle Frere, governor of the Cape and high commissioner for southern Africa from March 1877, rapidly decided that independent African kingdoms must be tamed if political and economic integration of the region were to become reality.

Frere identified Cetshwayo's Zulu kingdom as a major obstacle to confederation. An impasse was engineered, and British and colonial troops invaded Zululand in January 1879. The annihilation of a large British force at Isandhlwana slowed the invasion, but imperial firepower ultimately prevailed. For the Zulu, political dismemberment followed upon military defeat. Divide-and-rule policies precipitated civil war in 1883, and in 1887 Zululand was annexed. British troops also took part in 1879 in a campaign that crushed Pedi military power in the northern Transvaal.

Afrikaner and African politics in the Cape

By the mid-1870s, 240,000 whites in the Cape constituted about one-third of the colony's population. Cape revenues accounted for three-quarters of the total income in the region's four settler states in 1870, and the diamond discoveries stimulated railways, public works, banking, and commerce. Although by 1870 some two-thirds of the settler population spoke Dutch or Afrikaans, political power was exercised largely by an English-speaking elite of merchants, lawyers, and landholders. In the last quarter of the century, heightened political and cultural awareness among Cape Afrikaners took organized form, and the period also saw new forms of political expression and mobilization among black voters.

The Afrikaner Bond, founded in 1880, initially represented poorer farmers and espoused an anti-British Pan-Afrikanerism in the Cape and beyond. By 1883, however, under Jan Hendrik Hofmeyr, the organization was realigned. Supported mainly by wealthier farmers and urban professionals, the Bond championed the Cape's commercial interests within a framework of regional British imperial dominance. In 1890 Hofmeyr threw his support behind Cecil Rhodes, enabling the latter to become prime minister of the Cape. The Rhodes-Hofmeyr alliance was based on their mutual desire for economic expansion northward.

A major cleavage opened between Bond politicians and English speakers loosely defined as Cape liberals. The latter grouping had material as well as ideological interests in the prosperity of an African peasantry, and in several eastern Cape electoral districts black voters were crucial in electing liberal “friends of the native.” The Bond was hostile toward a commercializing black peasantry and pursued more restrictive franchise qualifications.

The piecemeal annexation of the Transkeian territories to the Cape between 1872 and 1894 greatly increased the number of Africans in the colony. Peasant production for local markets and the emergence of literate clerks and teachers enabled individuals to qualify for the vote. The rise of the Afrikaner Bond and new laws affecting franchise qualifications and taxes stimulated more vigorous African participation in electoral politics after 1884. In the eastern Cape, new political and educational bodies were created, as were the first African newspapers and African-controlled churches. The period also witnessed the first political organizations among Coloureds in the Cape and Indians in Natal and the Transvaal.

Gold mining

In 1886 prospectors established that a 40-mile belt of gold-bearing reefs existed, centring on modern Johannesburg. The rapid growth of a gold-mining industry intensified processes started by the diamond boom: immigration, urbanization, capital investment, infrastructural development, proletarianization, and labour migrancy. By 1899 the gold industry employed 109,000 people (of whom 97,000 were African migrant workers); it produced 27 percent of the world's gold and had attracted investment worth £75 million.

The world's richest goldfield was also the most difficult to work. Although abundant, the layers of gold-bearing rock ran extremely deep, and the gold content of the ore was low. To be profitable, gold mining had to be intensive and deep-level with large inputs of capital and technology. These factors ensured that production was in corporate hands almost from the outset, and amalgamation of companies proceeded rapidly. By 1898, 124 companies were arranged in nine holding companies, or “groups.”

The group system facilitated collusion between companies to reduce competition over labour, the costs of which were crucial to their profitability. The gold mines rapidly established a pattern of labour recruitment, remuneration, and accommodation that left its stamp on subsequent social and economic relations in the country. White immigrant miners, because of their skills, scarcity, and political power, were able to win relatively high wages. African migrants from throughout southern Africa, especially from Mozambique, were unskilled and low-paid (earning at century's end about one-ninth the wage of white miners). The mine magnates sought assiduously to limit the ratio of white to black workers and to peg migrant wages as low as possible. Migrant miners were housed in compounds, which facilitated their control and reduced overhead costs.

The road to war

Even before gold was discovered, the South African interior was an arena of tension and competition. Germany annexed South West Africa in 1884. The Transvaal claimed territory to its west, which Britain countered by creating the Bechuanaland protectorate and annexing the crown colony of British Bechuanaland. Rhodes secured concessionary rights to land across the Limpopo River, founded the British South Africa Company, and in 1890 dispatched a pioneer column to occupy what became known as Rhodesia.

While these forces jostled for position in the region at large, the domestic politics of the South African Republic became unsettled. Few 19th-century states could have adjusted with ease to the changes engendered by the gold discoveries, and certainly not a preindustrial society ruled by agrarian notables, whose president believed the world was flat. Although Paul Kruger's government made strenuous efforts to accommodate the mining industry, it was soon at loggerheads with Britain, the mine magnates, and the Uitlander (“Outlander”) immigrants.

British policymakers were anxious about the Transvaal's potential as an independent actor; deep-level-mine owners chafed at corruption and inefficiency; and Uitlanders were largely excluded from the vote. In the event, Uitlander grievances provided both cause and cover for a conspiracy between British officials and mining capitalists. An Uitlander uprising in Johannesburg would be supported by an armed invasion from Bechuanaland, headed by Leander Starr Jameson, Rhodes's lieutenant, and the high commissioner would intervene to “restore order.”

The plot was botched. The Uitlander rising was called off; Jameson went ahead with his incursion in December 1895, but within days he and his force were rounded up. Rhodes had to resign as prime minister of the Cape; British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain managed to conceal his complicity. The raid polarized Anglo-Boer sentiment in South Africa, simultaneously exacerbating republican suspicions, Uitlander agitation, and imperial anxieties. The last of these had the greatest purchase, especially with the arrival in April 1897 of Sir Alfred Milner as high commissioner and governor of the Cape.

In February 1898 Kruger was elected to a fourth term as president. He entered a series of negotiations with Milner over the issue of the Uitlander franchise. Milner declared in private early in 1898 that “war has got to come” and adopted intransigent positions. The Cape government, headed by William P. Schreiner, attempted unavailingly to mediate. Marthinus Steyn, Free State president, also tried to avert war, even while he attached his cause to Kruger's. In September 1899 the two Boer republics served a last-ditch ultimatum on Britain. On its expiration on October 11, Boer forces invaded Natal.

Britain went to war to secure its hegemony in southern Africa, the Boer republics to preserve their independence. These motives were sharpened by the “new imperialism” of the late 19th century and by competing local interests. Ultimately they led to war because the discovery of gold on the Transvaal Highveld had dramatically shifted the economic centre of gravity in the region, raising the stakes and firming the resolve of the main players.

The South African War, 1899–1902

An expensive and brutal colonial war lasted two and a half years. It pitted almost 500,000 imperial troops against 87,000 republican burghers, Cape “rebels,” and foreign volunteers. The numerical weakness of the Boers was offset by their familiarity with the terrain and support from the Afrikaner populace, plus the poor generalship and dated tactics of the British command. Although it was often styled a “white man's war,” both sides used blacks extensively as labour, and at least 10,000 Africans fought for the British.

In the first phase of the war, Boer armies took the offensive and in December 1899 (“Black Week”) punished British forces at Colenso, Stormberg, and Magersfontein. During 1900 Britain rushed reinforcements to the front; relieved sieges at Ladysmith, Kimberley, and Mafeking; and took Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, and Pretoria. In a third phase, Boer commandos eschewed conventional engagements and waged guerrilla warfare. The British commander, Lord Kitchener, devised a scorched-earth policy against the commandos and the rural population supporting them. Farms were destroyed, the countryside blockaded, and the civilian population rounded up into concentration camps. Some 25,000 Afrikaner women and children died of disease and malnutrition in these camps; 14,000 Africans died in separate camps: in Britain the Liberal leader charged the government with winning the war by “methods of barbarism.”

In May 1902, Republican forces—reduced to about 20,000 exhausted and demoralized troops—sued for peace. The Treaty of Vereeniging reflected the conclusive military victory of imperial power but made a crucial concession. It promised that the “question of granting the franchise to natives [Africans]” would be addressed only after self-government had been restored to the erstwhile Boer republics. The treaty thus consigned the political fate of the black majority to the decision of white minorities.

Reconstruction, union, and segregation (1902–29)

The Union of South Africa was born on May 31, 1910, parented by constitutional convention and an act of the British Parliament. The infant state owed its conception to centralizing and modernizing forces generated by mineral discoveries. Its character was shaped by eight years of “reconstruction.” Between 1902 and 1910, efficient administrative structures were established, the economic dominance of gold was consolidated, and a modus vivendi was struck between Afrikaner politicians and mining capitalists. Reconstruction also ensured that settler minorities would prevail over the black majority. Prewar property relations were restored; African societies were policed and taxed more effectively, and the new constitution excluded Africans from political power. Policies proposed during reconstruction pointed toward racial segregation, which became the governing orthodoxy after 1910.

These years witnessed high levels of social and political conflict. Syndicalist white workers and Afrikaner republican diehards fought against employers and government, their clashes culminating in the Rand Revolt of 1922. New political vehicles for Afrikaner and African nationalism were constructed. Black protests against the new order ran from genteel lobbying and passive resistance to armed rural revolt, strikes, and mass mobilization.

Milner and reconstruction

In 1902 Milner transferred his headquarters from Cape Town to Pretoria. The move symbolized the centrality of the Transvaal to his mission of constructing a new order in South Africa. When Milner departed in 1905, his vision of a country politically dominated by English-speaking whites had foundered. Schemes to flood the rural Transvaal with British settlers yielded only a trickle. Compulsory Anglicization in education fanned Afrikaner nationalism instead of snuffing it out. Opposition to “Milnerism” defined the emergent political groups led by ex-Boer generals Louis Botha, Jan Smuts, and J.B.M. (Barry) Hertzog. Milner had hoped to withhold self-rule from whites in South Africa until “there are three men of British race to two of Dutch.” But, when Henry Campbell-Bannerman's Liberal ministry granted responsible government to the ex-republics, Afrikaner parties—Het Volk (The People) and Oranje Unie (Orange Union) in Transvaal and the Orange Free State, respectively—won elections in 1907.

Yet, if Milner's political design failed to take shape, his blueprints for economic and social engineering were largely realized. Served by a “kindergarten” of handpicked young administrators, he made economic recovery a priority. It was imperative to restore the mines to profitability. Rail rates and tariffs on imports were lowered, and the expensive concessions granted by the Kruger regime were abolished. Milner also made strenuous efforts to ensure cheap labour to the mines. He authorized the importation of some 60,000 Chinese indentured labourers when African migrants resisted wage cuts. Although this experiment provoked political outcries in the Transvaal and in Britain, it succeeded in undercutting the bargaining power of African workers. The value of gold production swelled from £16 million in 1904 to £27 million by 1907. Chinese miners were restricted to certain tasks, setting the precedent for a statutory colour bar in the gold mines.

The administration strove to remodel the Transvaal as a stable base for agricultural, industrial, and finance capital. Some £16 million was spent on returning Afrikaners to their farms and equipping them. Scientific farming methods were promoted, a land bank was established, and more efficient tax collection increased pressures on black peasants to work for white farmers. Central and local government bureaucracies were overhauled. Especially on the Witwatersrand, the “kindergarten” tackled town planning, public transport, housing, and sanitation. In each of these spheres, a new urban geography proceeded from the principle of separating white and black workers.

The South African Native Affairs Commission (SANAC) was appointed to provide comprehensive answers to what was called “the native question.” Its 1905 report proposed territorial separation of black and white landownership, systematic urban segregation by the creation of African “locations,” the removal of black “squatters” from white farms and their replacement by wage labourers, and the segregation of blacks from whites in the political sphere. These (and other SANAC recommendations) provided the basis for laws passed between 1910 and 1936.

Convention and union

The new Liberal government was no more careless of British interests in South Africa than its Conservative predecessor, but it sought to secure those interests through collaboration and consent. Granting responsible government to the ex-republics was the first step in this direction. Concern in London over the electoral victory by Het Volk was short-lived. It was soon clear that Botha and Smuts accepted as axiomatic the economic preeminence of mining capital. The political corollary to this was accommodation between local and imperial political interests, expressed as a policy of “reconciliation” between Afrikaans- and English-speaking whites. The way was clear for the second stride: political unification of the region.

A constitution was drafted by a national convention, which met in Durban in 1908–09. Afrikaner leaders, and Cape Premier John X. Merriman, opted for a unitary state with parliamentary sovereignty. Four provinces enjoyed limited powers. Executive authority was vested in a governor-general, advised by a cabinet from the governing party. A technical issue, pregnant with consequences, was the delimitation of electoral constituencies so as to favour overrepresentation of rural voters. Afrikaner nationalism was the major beneficiary in subsequent years.

Two “entrenched” clauses, on language and franchise, could be amended only by a two-thirds majority vote in Parliament. Dutch and English were made official languages, reflecting the parity at the convention of Afrikaner and English-speaking delegates. The franchise issue underlined that all delegates were white males. Female suffrage was never countenanced, and imperial collaboration with settler communities was achieved at the expense of blacks. While Cape delegates favoured a colour-blind franchise, those from the Transvaal and Orange Free State demanded an exclusively white electorate. A compromise simply confirmed existing electoral arrangements. The ex-republics retained white male adult suffrage: in Natal the franchise was effectively all-white; in the Cape the vote was open to men who met property and literacy qualifications. In 1910, 85 percent of Cape voters were white, 10 percent Coloured, and only 5 percent African. Representation was further limited on racial lines: even in the Cape, only whites might stand for Parliament.

Black political responses

The South African War was fought when many black communities were hard-pressed. During the 1890s, drought and cattle disease impoverished pastoralists, and competition increased for African land and labour. During the war most black South Africans identified with the British cause, encouraged by the assertions of imperial politicians that “equal laws, equal liberty” for all races would prevail after a Boer defeat.

The Treaty of Vereeniging brusquely reneged on such promises. A sense of betrayal stimulated political protest, especially among mission-educated Africans. A multitude of organizations sprang up; their leaders sought to meet the impending union of white-ruled provinces by uniting Africans over regional and ethnic divides. While the constitutional convention deliberated, the South African Native Convention met in Bloemfontein. The first instance of coordinated action among the fledgling political associations, it was an important step toward the formation of a permanent national organization. This took place on Jan. 8, 1912, with the founding of the South African Native National Congress (later African National Congress).

Parallel developments took place among politically conscious Coloureds. The first nationally based organization was the African Political (later People's) Organization, founded in Cape Town in 1902. Under the presidency of Dr. Abdullah Abdurahman, this body lobbied for Coloured rights and linked at times with African political groups. Indians in the Transvaal, led by Mohandas K. Gandhi, also resisted discriminatory legislation. Gandhi spent the years 1893 to 1914 in South Africa as a legal agent for Indian merchants in Natal and the Transvaal. Between 1906 and 1908, in protest against a Transvaal registration law requiring Indians to carry passes, Gandhi first implemented the methods of satyagraha (nonviolent noncompliance), which he later used with such effect in India. Not all black protest was conducted through the new middle-class organizations. In 1906 peasants in Natal refused to pay a poll tax, and their resistance developed into an armed rising, led by a chief named Bambatha. At the end of this “reluctant rebellion,” between 3,000 and 4,000 Africans had been killed and 7,000 imprisoned.

Union and disunity

Louis Botha formed the first Union government on May 31, 1910, supported by the majority party in each province and by the British government. These auspices were of limited benefit as his administration entered a period of flux and violent conflict. Tensions stemmed from issues left unresolved by the constitution, from rapid but uneven economic growth and its attendant social antagonisms, and from the legacy of conquest and dispossession of indigenes by colonists.

A major axis of conflict ran between employers and organized white workers. On the Witwatersrand the Chamber of Mines and miners' trade unions were locked in combat for a decade and a half. Violent confrontations took place in 1907, 1913, and 1914. On each occasion the government deployed troops to end the strikes. White workers suspended strike action during World War I, but militancy flared again in 1919, fueled by inflation. The Chamber of Mines, squeezed by rising costs and a falling gold price, announced in December 1921 that it intended replacing semiskilled white workers with lower-paid Africans. The miners' protest stoppage in January 1922 became a general strike, and in March it developed into an armed rising, with strikers organized as commandos. Smuts, prime minister since Botha's death in 1919, used artillery and aircraft to crush the Rand Revolt, at a cost of some 230 lives. The phase of intense conflict between white unions and employers ended with the passage of the Industrial Conciliation Act in 1924, which set up new state structures for regulating industrial conflicts.

Black workers also engaged in sporadic strikes before, during, and after World War I, and the first African trade unions emerged. In February 1920, 71,000 African gold miners struck for higher wages and lower prices, halting production for a week. Soldiers and police broke the strike, at a cost of 11 lives and more than 100 miners injured. This strike was part of a wave of protest in several cities, as inflation eroded the real wages of black workers.

In Port Elizabeth police fired on a crowd of demonstrators, killing 23 and wounding 126: Abdurahman called it “South Africa's Amritsar.” Higher casualties occurred in May 1921, when troops killed 183 members of a religious sect, the “Israelites,” who had occupied land at Bulhoek in the Cape and refused to leave it. In 1922 in South West Africa (administered by South Africa as a League of Nations mandate territory from 1920), the Smuts government launched a military expedition against the Bondelzwarts people, who resisted a dog tax. More than 100 of the Bondelzwarts died. Hertzog listed these incidents in Parliament when he said of Smuts that his “footsteps dripped with blood.”

Afrikaner rebellion and nationalism

Hertzog also cited the death toll of the Afrikaner Rebellion of 1914. When Britain declared war on Germany, South Africa's dominion status meant that it was automatically at war, and its troops were mobilized to invade German South West Africa. This sparked a rebellion led by former Boer generals, who were high-ranking officers in the Union Defence Force. More than 11,000 men, mainly poverty-stricken rural Afrikaners, joined the rising. The government used 32,000 troops to suppress it, and more than 300 men lost their lives in the fighting.

The rebellion, though, was a convulsive and atypical episode in the rise of Afrikaner nationalism as a political force. More telling and durable responses came from Afrikaner strata profoundly affected by economic change, war, and reconstruction. After 1902 thousands of landless families streaming into the cities indicated how the prewar rural social order had crumbled. One response to the threat of further disintegration was a “second language movement,” spearheaded by teachers, clergymen, journalists, and lawyers deeply threatened by the cultural dominance of English speakers. It succeeded in its immediate aim when Afrikaans replaced Dutch as an official language in 1925; it also played a vital role in shaping Afrikaner self-awareness.

These forces—“poor whites” and militant intellectuals—provided much of the backing for the National Party founded by Hertzog in 1914. In the general election of 1915, the National Party won 30 percent of the poll, as Afrikaners deserted the South African Party led by Botha and Smuts. In 1920, on a platform of republicanism and separate school systems for Afrikaans- and English-speaking whites, Hertzog won a majority of both seats and votes. Smuts formed a government by allying with the strongly pro-empire Unionist Party. In 1923 the National Party entered into an electoral pact with the Labour Party. The combined voting strength of aggrieved white workers and anti-British nationalists swept Smuts from office. Hertzog headed a coalition government, known after the electoral agreement as the Pact government.

Segregation

In the first two decades of the Union, segregation became a distinctive feature of South African political, social, and economic life. It was promoted as actively under the South African Party (1910–24) as it was in the years when Hertzog was premier (1924–39). New statutes provided for racial separation in industrial, territorial, administrative, and residential spheres. It is less than helpful to explain this barrage of legislation as the product of reactionary attitudes inherited from the past. Rather, segregation represented efforts to regulate class and race relations during a period of rapid industrialization, a set of mechanisms for achieving both economic development and the maintenance of white supremacy. Indeed, the central institutions of 20th-century segregation—migrant labour, reserves, compounds, and urban locations—took shape around the gold-mining industry.

The 1911 Mines and Works Act and its 1926 successor reserved certain jobs in mining and the railways for white workers. The Natives Land Act of 1913 defined 8 percent of South Africa as African “reserves” and prohibited any purchase or lease of land by Africans outside the reserves. The law also restricted the terms of tenure under which Africans might live on white-owned farms. The Native (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 provided for segregating urban residential space and created “influx controls” to reduce access to cities by Africans. In 1926 Hertzog published bills proposing simultaneously to increase reserve areas and remove African voters in the Cape from the common roll. These aims were realized in legislation 10 years later.

The Pact years, 1924–29

The Pact government strengthened South African autonomy from Britain, aided local capital, and protected white workers against black competition. Despite the rhetoric of its election campaign, the government did little to harm the interests of the mining industry.

Hertzog played a leading role in the imperial conference that issued the Balfour Report (1926), establishing autonomy in foreign affairs for the dominions. Much parliamentary energy was consumed in wrangles over the symbols of nationalism—flag and anthem. Economic nationalism included protective tariffs for local industry, subsidies to facilitate agricultural exports, and a state-run iron and steel industry. White trade unions grew more bureaucratic and less militant, although their members enjoyed at best modest material gains. More direct benefits were enjoyed by unskilled and nonunionized whites who were aided through sheltered employment in the public sector and through prescribed minimum wages in the private sector. Although the overall level of white poverty remained high, these policies saw the manufacturing sector absorb white labour nearly twice as fast as black. In this, as in other respects, the real losers during the 1920s were Africans.

For Africans, segregation meant restricted mobility, diminished opportunities, more stringent controls, and a general sense of exclusion. Economic conditions in the reserves were deteriorating, on white farms the terms of tenancy became more onerous, and the urban slums provided a harsh alternative for those who left the land. The middle-class leadership of the African National Congress (ANC) had pressed for the extension of the Cape franchise to other provinces. By 1926 it was evident that even this slender link to central political institutions was under threat of severance.

These conditions prepared the ground in which the first mass-based African political organization flourished. The Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU) was until 1926 a Cape-based union with African and Coloured members drawn mainly from urban areas. It became a mass-based vehicle of rural protest, drawing scores of thousands of supporters from African tenants on white farms. The ICU linked innumerable local rural grievances with a generalized call for land and liberation. By 1929 the ICU was a spent force; unable to meet the expectations it raised in the countryside, it fell apart into several feuding factions.

The mushroom growth of the ICU stimulated radicalism in other organizations. Some ANC leaders, especially Josiah Gumede (president, 1927–30), moved leftward in the late 1920s. The Communist Party of South Africa, founded in 1921, was at first active almost solely within white trade unions, but from 1925 it recruited African members more energetically, and in 1928–29 it called for black majority rule and closer cooperation with the ANC.

These political challenges to white supremacy were reflected in the 1929 general election. For the first time since union, questions of “native policy” dominated white electoral politics. Afrikaner nationalists made “black peril” and “communist menace” their rallying cry. It was not to be the last such occasion.

Colin J. Bundy

The 1930s

The central theme in the history of South Africa since 1930 is the creation and eventual supersession of the most stringent system of racial segregation and discrimination that the world has known. The local whites, who never formed more than about one-fifth of the total population and were fewer than one-seventh by the 1990s, dominated the South African economy as well as the parliamentary institutions that they had inherited from Great Britain, at the expense of the Africans, Coloureds, and Indians. By 1976 white South Africans had constructed a rigid racial system known as apartheid (“apartness”), which caused untold misery and poverty and had become notorious throughout the world. The apartheid regime then began to fall apart as a result of internal resistance and fundamental changes in the distribution and exercise of power in the neighbouring states and the world beyond. By 1989 there was a stalemate. Some white political leaders realized that the regime was losing control of the country, while their opponents were aware that they lacked the means to overthrow it. There ensued a complex series of negotiations, culminating in the creation of a new, nonracial constitution, the election of a new parliament by universal adult suffrage, and the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa.

In the early 1930s the South African cabinet was composed of members of the National Party, which held a majority of the seats in the House of Assembly and drew its main support from Afrikaner farmers and intellectuals. The major parliamentary opposition was the South African Party—the party of most of the English-speaking whites, who formed about 45 percent of the white population and included the major industrialists. In 1931 the Hertzog government achieved a major goal when the British Parliament passed the Statute of Westminster, which removed the last vestiges of British legal authority over South Africa. In 1934 the South African Parliament made that decision watertight in South African law by enacting the Status of the Union Act. Meanwhile, the Hertzog government had been losing support through its mismanagement of the problems created by the Great Depression, and in 1933 the prime minister decided to form a coalition with his rival Smuts, the leader of the South African Party. A year later the two organizations merged to form the United Party, with Hertzog as prime minister and Smuts his deputy.

The two parties and the two leaders had a common interest in favouring the enfranchised population, nearly all of whom were white, at the expense of the unenfranchised, all of whom were black. They agreed in providing massive support for white farmers; in assisting whites to rise above poverty, by providing them with jobs protected from black competition; in endorsing the mining industries' continued use of migrant African workers; in excluding Africans from participation in the conciliation machinery for settling industrial disputes; and in trying to curb the movement of Africans from the reserves into the towns. Furthermore, in 1936, with an overwhelming majority, Parliament removed from the ordinary voters' rolls those relatively few Africans who were qualified to vote; in return, it entitled Africans in the Cape Province to elect three white representatives to the House of Assembly and Africans throughout the Union to elect indirectly four white senators. It also created a Natives Representative Council with advisory powers.

After 1933, with the improvement in the international economy as the Western powers recovered from the depression, the white farmers prospered, new secondary industries were established, and South Africans of all races began to flock to the towns. South Africa was transformed from an overwhelmingly rural country, producing primary commodities for export and importing manufactured consumption goods, into a country with a diverse and nearly self-sufficient economy. However, although the standard of living of most whites improved greatly from this expansion, there was scarcely any improvement in the lives of Africans, Coloureds, and Indians. The government did add some land to the reserves, but these never exceeded 13 percent of the area of the country, and their condition was deteriorating through overpopulation and soil erosion, making it necessary for a high proportion of the men to work for wages outside the reserves, on the white farms or in the towns. There they were in an unfriendly world. African and Coloured farm labourers, scattered in small groups throughout the agricultural areas, were the most deprived of all South Africans. In the towns, life was insecure for Africans, and wages were low. In the gold-mining industry, the real wages of Africans declined by 15 percent between 1911 and 1941, when white miners were paid 12 times as much as Africans.

The education of Africans was left to Christian missions, whose resources, augmented by small government grants, enabled them to find places for only a small proportion of the African population. Missionaries did, however, run numerous schools, including some excellent high schools that took a few pupils through to the university matriculation level. Missionaries also were the dominant influence in the South African Native College at Fort Hare, which they had founded in 1916 and which included degree courses. These institutions educated a small but increasing number of Africans, who secured jobs as teachers, in the lower reaches of the civil service, or as clergy (especially in the independent churches, which had broken away from mainstream white churches). Frustrated by the fact that whites did not treat them as equals, some of them took part in opposition politics in the ANC. However, the ANC and two parallel movements—the African Political Organization (a Coloured group) and the South African Indian Congress—had little popular support and exerted scarcely any influence over the main course of events. Their leaders were mission-educated men who had liberal goals and used strictly constitutional methods, such as petitions to the authorities. The radical African ICU had collapsed by 1930, and the Communist Party of South Africa, founded in 1921, made little headway among Africans at that time.

World War II

When Britain declared war on Germany on Sept. 3, 1939, the United Party split. Hertzog proposed that South Africa should be neutral, but Smuts opted for joining Britain. Smuts's faction narrowly won the crucial parliamentary debate, the Hertzogites left the United Party, Smuts became prime minister, and South Africa declared war on Germany.

South Africa made significant contributions to the Allied war effort. Some 135,000 white South Africans fought in the East and North African and Italian campaigns, and 70,000 Africans and Coloureds served as labourers and transport drivers. South African platinum, uranium, and steel were valuable resources and, during the many months while the Mediterranean Sea was closed to the Allies, Durban and Cape Town provisioned a vast number of ships en route from Britain to Suez.

The war was an economic bonanza for South Africa. Stimulated by the reduction of imports, the manufacturing and service industries expanded rapidly, and the flow of Africans and others to the towns, already under way since 1933, became a flood. By the war's end, there were more Africans than whites in the towns. These Africans set up vast squatter camps on the outskirts of the white cities, improvising shelters from whatever materials they could find. They also began to flex their political muscles. They boycotted a Witwatersrand bus company that tried to raise fares; they formed trade unions; and, in 1946, 74,000 African gold miners went on strike for higher wages and improved living conditions.

The government suppressed that strike brutally but had no clear program for the future. White intellectuals proposed a series of reforms within the segregation framework, and the government and private industry made a few concessions, easing the industrial colour bar, increasing African wages, and relaxing the pass laws. However, the government failed to discuss these problems with black representatives. It lost credibility in the eyes of educated Africans in 1946 when it snubbed the Natives Representative Council for criticizing its handling of the miners' strike and calling for the removal of discriminatory legislation.

Meanwhile, Afrikaners had created a series of ethnic organizations to promote their interests, including an economic association, a federation of Afrikaans cultural associations, and the Broederbond, a secret society of Afrikaner cultural leaders. In 1934 Daniel F. Malan, a former Dutch Reformed minister, had refused to follow Hertzog's Nationalists when they fused with the South African Party to form the United Party. Instead, he formed a new Purified National Party, which became the official parliamentary opposition. During the war many Afrikaners welcomed the early German victories—some of them committed acts of sabotage—but Malan's party adhered to constitutional methods and gradually gained support from Afrikaner clergy and intellectuals as well as from Afrikaans cultural and economic associations.

The United Party, which had won a general election in 1943 by a large majority, approached the 1948 election complacently. However, its policy statements were equivocal on race relations, while the National Party claimed that the government's weakness was threatening white supremacy and produced a statement that used the word apartheid to describe a program of tightened segregation and discrimination. With the support of a tiny fringe group, Malan's National Party won the election by a narrow margin.

Apartheid

After winning the 1948 election, the National Party rapidly consolidated its control over the state, and in subsequent years it won a series of elections with increased majorities. In 1956 Parliament removed the Coloured voters from the common voters' rolls. To do that, the government packed the Senate with its nominated supporters to gain the two-thirds majority in a joint session of both houses required by the constitution. The 1956 law also entitled Coloured people to elect four whites to represent them in Parliament, but that arrangement did not last long. In 1969 the government abolished those seats that had represented Coloured voters, thus making the electorate exclusively white. Indians had never had parliamentary representation, and the seats of white representatives of Africans were abolished in 1959.

In 1961, with the approval of a majority of the white voters in a referendum the previous October (but without consultation with any Africans, Coloureds, or Indians), South Africa became a republic. The government had hoped that the country would follow a 1947 precedent, when India became a republic but continued to be a member of the Commonwealth, but, meeting criticism from other Commonwealth members, it withdrew South Africa from that loose association.

At home, the government vigorously furthered its ethnic goals. It made it compulsory for white children to attend schools that were conducted in their home language, either Afrikaans or English (except for the few who went to private schools). It advanced Afrikaners to top positions in the civil service, the army, the police, and the state corporations, such as the South African Broadcasting Corporation, which had a monopoly of radio services. It also awarded official contracts to Afrikaner banks and insurance companies. These methods raised the living standards of Afrikaners closer to those of English-speaking white South Africans.

Except for a recession during the early 1960s, the economy grew rapidly until the late 1970s. By that time, with a mixture of public and private enterprise, South Africa possessed a modern infrastructure, which was by far the most advanced in Africa: efficient financial institutions, a national network of roads as well as railways, modernized port facilities in Cape Town and Durban, and, besides the long-established diamond-, gold-, and coal-mining industries, a wide range of factories. The private sector was dominated by two great interlocking giants: the Anglo American Corporation of South Africa, founded by Ernest Oppenheimer in 1917, and De Beers Consolidated Mines. They formed the core of one of the world's most powerful networks of mining, industrial, and financial companies, employing 800,000 workers on six continents. State corporations controlled industries that were vital to national security, notably Armscor (Armaments Corporation of South Africa), which produced high-quality military equipment, and SASOL (South African Coal, Oil, and Gas Corporation), which alleviated South Africa's lack of petroleum resources by converting coal to gasoline and diesel fuel.

This burgeoning economy was buoyant enough to sustain the cost of a drastic program of social engineering. The man who played the major part in transforming apartheid from an election slogan into practice was Hendrik F. Verwoerd. Born in The Netherlands, Verwoerd immigrated with his parents to South Africa when he was a child. He became a nominated senator in 1948, minister of native affairs in 1950, and prime minister from 1958 to 1966, when a deranged man assassinated him in Parliament. According to Verwoerd, the South African population comprised four distinct racial groups (white, African, Coloured, and Asian), each with an inherent culture; whites were the “civilized” group and, as such, entitled to control the state.

Parliament passed a plethora of laws to give effect to these ideas and to institutionalize the apartheid system. The Population Registration Act (1950) classified every South African by race. There were laws to prohibit interracial marriage or sex. Other laws and regulations segregated South Africans in every sphere of life: in buses, taxis, and hearses; in cinemas, restaurants, and hotels; in trains and railway waiting rooms. When a court declared that separate amenities should be equal, Parliament passed a special law to override it. Under the Group Areas Act (1950), the cities and towns of South Africa were divided into segregated residential and business areas, and the government removed thousands of Coloureds and Indians from areas classified for white occupation.

A vast bureaucracy, staffed largely by party loyalists, administered apartheid, aided by a mass of coercive laws. The Suppression of Communism Act of 1950 defined communism and its aims sweepingly and empowered the government to detain anyone it deemed likely to further any communist aims. Later laws gave the police the right to arrest and detain people without trial and without access to families or lawyers and left the courts with scarcely any means to intervene.

Africans were treated as “tribal” people, domiciled in the reserves under hereditary chiefs and bound to live there except when they were working for whites. In 1951 the government abolished the Natives Representative Council. Then it began to consolidate the scattered reserves into 8 (eventually 10) distinct territories, designating each of them as the “homeland” of a specific African ethnic community. It also manipulated homeland politics so that compliant chiefs controlled the administrations of most of those territories. Claiming to match the decolonization process that was taking place in tropical Africa, the government devolved powers onto those administrations and eventually encouraged them to become “independent.” Between 1976 and 1981 four accepted independence: Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda, and Ciskei. However, like the other homelands, they were economic backwaters, dependent on subsidies from Pretoria, and not a single foreign government recognized them.

Conditions in the homelands rapidly deteriorated, partly because they had to accommodate vast numbers of additional Africans. Attempting to reverse the flood of Africans into the towns, the government strengthened the pass laws, making it illegal for an African to be in a town for more than 72 hours without a job in a white home or business. By 1983, in a particularly brutal series of forced removals, it had ejected more than 3.5 million Africans from the towns and from white rural areas (including lands they had occupied for generations) and dumped them in the reserves.

The government also established direct control over the education of Africans. In the Bantu Education Act of 1953, it took African schools away from the missions. Then, to meet the expanding economy's increasing demand for semiskilled black labour, it created more African schools, especially in the lower grades, but subjected the students to stringent discipline and prescribed syllabi and textbooks that endorsed official policies.

A 1959 law prohibited the established universities from accepting black students, except with special permission on an individual basis. Instead, the government created five new ethnic university colleges—one for Coloureds, one for Indians, one for Zulus, and one for Sotho, Tswana, and Venda students, plus a medical school for Africans—and transformed the South African Native College at Fort Hare, which missionaries had founded primarily but not exclusively for Africans, into a state college solely for Xhosa students. It staffed these ethnic colleges with white supporters of the National Party and subjected the students to stringent controls.

Resistance to apartheid

Apartheid imposed appallingly heavy burdens on most South Africans. The economic gap between the wealthy few, nearly all of whom were white, and the poor masses, virtually all of whom were African, Coloured, or Indian, was larger than in any other country. The whites were well fed, well housed, and well cared for; Indians, Coloureds, and especially Africans suffered from widespread poverty, malnutrition, and disease. Consequently, despite the growth of the national economy, for most South Africans life was a struggle for day-to-day survival.

Nevertheless, during the 1950s the previously moribund ANC came to life under a vigorous president, Albert Lutuli, and three younger men—Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela, who ran a joint law practice in Johannesburg, and Walter Sisulu. In cooperation with the South African Indian Congress, which also had been revitalized, they organized a passive resistance campaign in 1952, when thousands of volunteers defied discriminatory laws. Three years later, in conjunction with Indians, Coloureds, and sympathetic whites, they convened a mass meeting (Congress of the People) that adopted the Freedom Charter, asserting that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black or white, and no Government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people.” The government broke up the meeting and subsequently arrested 156 people and charged them with high treason. None was found guilty, but the trial dragged on until 1961, when the last of the accused were released.

In 1959 a group of Africans led by Robert Sobukwe, a language teacher at the University of the Witwatersrand, believing that the alliances with white, Coloured, and Indian organizations had impeded the struggle for African liberation, broke away from the ANC and founded the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC). On March 21, 1960, the PAC launched a fresh campaign. Thousands of unarmed Africans invited arrest by presenting themselves at police stations without passes; at Sharpeville, near Johannesburg, the police opened fire on such a crowd, killing at least 67 and wounding more than 180 Africans, most of whom were shot in the back as they were running away. Thousands of workers then went on strike, and in Cape Town 30,000 Africans marched in a peaceful protest to the centre of the city. The government reestablished control by force: it mobilized the army, outlawed the ANC and the PAC, and arrested more than 11,000 people under emergency regulations.

These events led to a change in the strategy of the congresses. Previously, they had confined themselves to nonviolent methods. After Sharpeville, however, the ANC and PAC leaders and some of their white sympathizers came to the conclusion that black people would never overcome apartheid by peaceful means alone. Violence, they concluded, was a necessary and legitimate means of resistance to the violence of an illegitimate regime. However, although their military units detonated several bombs in government buildings during the next few years, the ANC and the PAC did not pose a serious threat to the state, which had a virtual monopoly of modern weapons. By 1964 the government had captured many of the leaders, including Mandela and Sobukwe, and sentenced them to long terms of imprisonment on Robben Island in Table Bay, four miles from Cape Town. Hundreds of others fled the country. Oliver Tambo presided over an exiled ANC executive in Zambia.

A new phase of resistance began in 1973, when black trade unions organized a series of strikes for higher wages and improved working conditions. Moreover, Steve Biko and other African students founded a Black Consciousness movement that appealed to Africans to take pride in their own culture. That ideology was immensely attractive to young Africans. On June 16, 1976, thousands of children in Soweto, the African township outside Johannesburg, demonstrated against the government's insistence that they should be taught in Afrikaans rather than in English. Police opened fire, touching off a nationwide cycle of protest and subsequent repression. Once again the government reestablished control by force. Within a year, it had banned many more organizations and the police had killed more than 500 people, including Biko. Those events received worldwide execration. In 1973 the UN General Assembly had declared apartheid to be “a crime against humanity,” and in 1977 the UN Security Council unanimously voted a mandatory embargo on the export of arms to South Africa.

The unraveling of apartheid

By 1978 the illusion that apartheid would bring peace to South Africa was shattered. Most of the homelands were economic and political disasters. Their only significant export was labour, and most of their leaders were corrupt and unpopular. The national economy was in recession. Skilled whites were emigrating, and inflation was running high. Moreover, the global environment was changing. The Portuguese had handed over the government of Angola and Mozambique to Africans in 1974–75, and the writing was on the wall for Ian Smith's white regime in Rhodesia (which would come under African control as Zimbabwe in 1980). Increasingly isolated as the last bastion of white racial domination, South Africa had become the focus of global denunciation.

By that time, the National Party was passing under the control of a new class of urban Afrikaners—businessmen and intellectuals who, like their English-speaking white counterparts, believed that reforms should be introduced to appease foreign and domestic critics. The first attempt to give effect to their ideas occurred after Pieter W. Botha, who had been a National Party politician throughout his adult life, succeeded John Vorster as prime minister in 1978. Botha's administration applied a mixture of carrots and sticks. It repealed the bans on interracial sex and marriage; desegregated many hotels, restaurants, trains, and buses; removed the reservation of skilled jobs for whites; and repealed the pass laws. Provided that black trade unions registered, they were entitled to access to a new industrial court and permitted to strike. Also, a new constitution created separate parliamentary bodies for Indians and for Coloureds and vested great powers in an executive president, namely P.W. Botha.

However, the Botha reforms stopped short of making any real change in the distribution of power. The white parliamentary chamber could override the Coloured and Indian chambers on matters of national significance, and all Africans remained disenfranchised. The Group Areas Act and the Land Acts maintained residential segregation. Schools and health and welfare services for Africans, Indians, and Coloureds remained segregated and inferior, and most nonwhites, especially Africans, were still desperately poor. Moreover, Botha used the State Security Council—which was dominated by military officers—rather than the cabinet as his major policy-making body, and he embarked on a massive military buildup.

In 1979, in an effort to limit South Africa's economic domination of the region, South Africa's black neighbours formed the Southern African Development Coordinating Conference (SADCC), but it made little progress. Most of the export trade of the region continued to pass through South Africa to South African ports, and South Africa provided employment for 280,000 migrant workers from neighbouring countries. Botha also used South Africa's military strength to restrain those countries from pursuing antiapartheid policies. He kept South West Africa/Namibia under South African domination, sent military raids into every other southern African state, and assisted the Renamo rebels in Mozambique and the UNITA faction in its civil war in Angola.

During the 1980s the conservative British and American administrations of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, respectively, faced increasingly vociferous pressures for sanctions against South Africa. In 1986 a high-level Commonwealth mission went to South Africa in an unsuccessful effort to persuade the government to suspend its military actions in the townships, release political prisoners, and stop destabilizing neighbouring countries. Later that year, American public resentment of South Africa's racial policies was strong enough for the U.S. Congress to pass a Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act over a presidential veto, banning new investments and loans, ending air links, and prohibiting the importation of many commodities. Other governments took similar actions.

Meanwhile, in 1983, 1,000 black and white representatives of 575 community groups, trade unions, sporting bodies, and women's and youth organizations launched the United Democratic Front. There followed a vast escalation of strikes, boycotts, and attacks on black police and urban councillors. Under strong pressure from white hawks, the Botha government resisted those pressures. In 1985 it declared a state of emergency in many parts of the country; a year later it promulgated a nationwide state of emergency and embarked on a savage campaign to eliminate all opposition. For three years police and soldiers patrolled the African townships in armed vehicles, destroying black squatter camps and detaining, abusing, and killing thousands of Africans, while the army also continued its forays into neighbouring countries. Rigid censorship laws tried to conceal those actions by banning television, radio, and newspaper coverage.

The resort to brute force did not create stability. Long-standing critics such as Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, defied the government; influential Afrikaner clerics and intellectuals withdrew their support. Resistance by black workers continued, including a massive strike by the National Union of Mineworkers; saboteurs caused an increasing number of deaths and injuries. The economy was severely strained by the costs of sanctions, of administering apartheid, and of military adventurism, especially in Namibia and Angola. The gross domestic product was decreasing, inflation rose above 14 percent per annum, and there was a dearth of investment capital. Moreover, in 1988 the army suffered a military setback in Angola, after which the government signed an accord paving the way for the removal of Cuban troops from Angola and the UN-supervised independence of Namibia in 1990. In these circumstances, many whites came to realize that there was no stopping the incorporation of Africans into the South African political system.

As these events unfolded, government officials held several discussions with Nelson Mandela, the imprisoned ANC leader, but Botha balked at the idea of allowing Africans to participate in the political system. In 1989 Botha stepped down as party leader and president. To succeed him, the National Party parliamentary caucus elected F.W. de Klerk, the party's Transvaal provincial leader. De Klerk was 21 years younger than Botha and more sensitive to the dynamics of a world where racism was anathema and democracy was on the rise in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In a dramatic address to Parliament on Feb. 2, 1990, de Klerk announced a program of radical change. Mandela was soon released from prison. During 1991 Parliament repealed the basic apartheid laws, including the Group Areas Act, the Population Registration Act, and the Land Acts; the state of emergency was lifted, and many political prisoners were freed and exiles allowed to return.

Mandela was elected president of the ANC in 1991, succeeding Oliver Tambo, who was in poor health and died in 1993. Mandela agreed with de Klerk that it was essential to negotiate a way out of the existing stalemate. The two leaders sponsored meetings of representatives of most of the political organizations in the country, with a mandate to draw up a new constitution. These negotiations, however, took place amid pervasive and escalating violence. The African townships and rural areas were riddled with crime, as poverty, family disruption, and high unemployment created social instability. Criminal violence shaded into political violence as people sided with rival factions, especially in Natal and in the industrial heart of the country in the southern Transvaal. In Natal, the conflicts were mainly between Zulu supporters of the ANC and members of the Inkatha Freedom Party, a Zulu ethnic movement led by Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, chief minister of the KwaZulu homeland. In the Transvaal, most of the conflicts occurred between Zulu migrant workers, who were housed in large hostels, and the residents of the adjacent townships.

As the bargaining continued, both the ANC and the National Party made concessions, as a result of which de Klerk and Mandela ran the risk of losing the support of their own constituencies. Whites were loath to forfeit their power and privileges; blacks had hoped to win complete control of the state. Although a majority of white voters endorsed the negotiating process in a referendum in 1992, both white and black extremists tried to sabotage the process through various acts of terror.

Nevertheless, by the end of 1993 Mandela, de Klerk, and leaders of 18 other parties endorsed a new, interim constitution, to take effect immediately after South Africa's first election by universal suffrage scheduled for April 1994. Under this constitution, all citizens over 18 were enfranchised, the homelands were abolished, and the country was divided into nine new provinces. The provincial governments were given substantial powers. Any party winning at least 5 percent of the national vote was entitled to cabinet representation. The new constitution contained a long list of political and social rights and a mechanism through which Africans could regain ownership of land that was taken away under apartheid. The new parliament was to devise a permanent constitution for South Africa.

In the April 1994 election, the ANC won 63 percent of the vote, the National Party 20 percent, and Inkatha 10 percent, giving the ANC 20 seats in the cabinet, the National Party 7, and Inkatha 3. The ANC also became the majority party in seven of the provinces, but Inkatha won a majority in KwaZulu/Natal, and the National Party—supported by mixed-race as well as white voters—won a majority in Western Cape.

On May 10 Mandela was sworn in as president of the new South Africa before a vast, euphoric crowd that included the secretary-general of the UN, 45 heads of state, and delegations from many other countries. Mandela and de Klerk had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, and the skilled, charismatic Mandela had become one of the most renowned and admired personalities in the world.

The new “government of national unity” aimed to provide Africans with improved education, housing, electricity, running water, and sanitation. Recognizing that economic growth was essential for such purposes, the ANC adopted a moderate economic policy, dropping the socialist elements that had characterized its earlier programs, and Mandela and his colleagues campaigned vigorously for foreign aid and investment. But there was no flood of foreign investment; many other countries were vying for capital, and foreign investors waited to see whether the new South Africa would become stable.

Leonard Monteath Thompson

The government also had to grapple with a host of daunting institutional problems associated with the transition to a postapartheid society. This transition necessitated adding Africans to the civil service, incorporating antiapartheid guerrillas into the police and the army, and creating new municipal governments that embraced both the old white cities and their black township satellites. Labour disputes, criminal violence, and conflict between Zulu factions, especially in KwaZulu/Natal, continued. The IFP (which was behind a new provincial constitution that granted a sweeping autonomy to KwaZulu/Natal but that was struck down by the Constitutional Court) refused to participate in the process that resulted in the creation of the new national constitution that was passed by the Parliament in May 1996. That document was revised by Parliament in October after review by the Constitution Court and signed into law by Mandela in December of the same year. Also in 1996, the NP left the government of national unity to form a “dynamic but responsible” opposition.

Apartheid's legacy will bedevil South Africa for years to come. In the short run, much depends on the capacity of the regime to generate economic growth while satisfying the expectations of the black masses. In the long run, if South Africans can achieve political stability, they have the resources to create a brighter future.

Leonard Monteath Thompson/Ed.

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