South Africa

on the World Today

AFTER two years of austerity the Union of South Africa is breathing more easily, in spite of the high cost of living. This year the new gold fields in the Orange Free State actually will produce some gold and South Africa will have her first taste of the annual 50 million pounds (at the pre-devaluation figure) which Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, South African industrialist, predicts will come, eventually, from this field. This year, too, the price of gold in the “free” market is higher, so the Union will be able to buy more in return for her principal export. There were times in 1948 and 1949 when it was feared that South Africa’s industrial revolution might be slowed down for lack of capital with which to expand; but by lightening her belt through import control, by borrowing, and by devaluing her currency along with Great Britain, she weathered the abrupt drop in capital inflow. So once more the thin, dry air of the high veld has the tang of prosperity.

Dr. H. J. van Eck, Managing Director of the Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa, describes the expansion of the past twenty years as South Africa’s industrial revolution. From 1927 to 1946 the amount of new registered capital rose from 13 million pounds to 186 million; and by his reckoning, during the past ten years alone the Union’s real production increased by approximately 60 per cent.

The glamour of gold surrounds South Africa, and without her fabulously rich mines the country could not have paid for her industrial raw materials from abroad. But, as elsewhere, it is coal which makes the wheels go round and the Union has tremendous reserves, easily accessible in very wide seams. Coal production in 1950 was 50 per cent more than in 1940, reflecting the industrial development which has taken place. South African plants turn out shoes, textiles, clothing, glass, cement, iron, steel, electrical equipment, canned fruit, to name but a few items the Union makes for her own consumption and for export.

Wanted: skilled immigrants

In spite of the country’s progress and potential, South Africans have been leaving the Union more rapidly than immigrants arrive, and Cabinet ministers scour Western Europe for the skilled labor so desperately needed. It is estimated that 25,000 skilled immigrants must be found within the next three years, 4000 of them immediately.

Oddly enough, this situation exists only two years after the Government put an end to the scheme for assisting immigrants, initiated by the previous Government under the late General Smuts. During the two years the scheme operated, prospective settlers flowed into the Union at the rate of about 35,000 a year, which is in marked contrast to the 10,518 who came in the first ten months of 1950, when 12,404 left, most of them for the Rhodesias. Southern Rhodesia has taken 36,000 South Africans in the past five years.

When the first all-Afrikaner Nationalist Government came into office in 1948 it immediately put an end to state aid for immigrants, reasoning that there were signs of unemployment in some industries, that the housing shortage was acute, that undesirables had entered the country. Machinery for rigid screening of prospective immigrants on a financial, health, and security basis was set up because, as the Minister of Interior put it, “Only the best is good enough for South Africa.”

At the same time, the naturalization laws were tightened and the former two-year residence qualification in favor of those from the British Isles was upped to five years, the same as for all other nationalities. It may be significant that of the 2200 granted naturalization certificates in the latter half of 1949, 90 per cent were German — one of the predominant national strains in what is called, today, the Afrikaner nation.

United Party followers charged that the Nationalists’ attitude toward immigration illustrates their desire to dominate and, if possible, destroy the very identity of English-speaking South Africans. Similarly, when the Smuts Government threw open the doors of South Africa, the Nationalists accused it of trying to swamp the Afrikaner population, on the assumption that most of the immigrants were British and would strengthen the United Party.

Although both parties agree that the European population needs strengthening in relation to non-Europeans, who outnumber them about four to one, each section of the European population charges the other with trying to swamp it. “Whatever the immigration policy, it arouses resentment in one section or the other.” The upshot of the situation is that this new country of expanding industrial horizons attracts money and industry, yet is short of skilled labor.

Cheap, unskilled labor is the backbone of South African industry and there was a time when the supply seemed inexhaustible. Yet today the mines, the farmers, and industry complain of a labor shortage — a situation which many thoughtful South Africans attribute to the wasteful use of the available labor force. Cheap, unskilled labor in the long run is costly. This very serious handicap to the Union’s industrial progress may be paving the way for acceptance of some change in the country’s traditional labor policy.

Signs of the change were voiced by the leader of the Opposition, J. G. N. Strauss. He recently announced that his party favors a labor pattern designed to raise the productive capacity of non-Europeans in industry, and therefore their value as consumers, which in turn would lift European workers into higher income groups.

Challenge to the color bar

In a country where even the job of waiter on the railways is reserved for white men, it would be political suicide for any South African political leader to advocate removal of the color bar in industry. Yet, in effect, Mr. Strauss seems to approve lifting the natives to the ranks of semi-skilled or even skilled labor, while the white worker advances ahead of him into higher technical skills and management. Such a proposal is revolutionary. If it cannot be called a challenge to remove the color bar entirely, it is certainly aimed toward raising the level at which the bar is applied.

Even the Nationalist Government has been pressed by the serious housing shortage among urban natives to the point of allowing native carpenters, instead of European, to build native houses. If this can happen, it seems not impossible that a shortage of skilled labor which threatens the expansion on which South Africa’s future depends may arouse the country to the need of getting the most out of its labor force, whatever its color.

To date, the effect of the Nationalist policy of separateness seems to have resulted in increasing race tension. Actually, of course, the races have not been separated, except in such matters as fixing separate entrances to a railway station or separate coaches on suburban trains, and removing Colored voters from the common roll. The slow wheels of the Group Areas Act by which everyone is to be labeled by race and then assigned to the living and business areas of his race are just beginning to turn. It takes time to count and label people and then move them hither and yon.

Meantime, South Africa must produce more, attract more capital for more industries with which to raise her standard of living, find more skilled men to run even the existing industries; and finally, she has yet to create South Africans.

No melting pot

At present, the trend is toward Afrikanerizing the population. The Afrikaner nation began in 1657 with nine free Dutch burghers in Cape Town, who by 1688 had become six hundred. In that year and the next, two or three hundred Huguenots arrived and in time were absorbed by the Dutch. When the British first took the Cape in 1795, a century and a half after the Dutch East India Company set up its vegetable patch to revictual eastbound ships, the population density of the Cape was about one to ten square miles, or roughly 21,500 people. In 1820 five thousand British immigrants were brought out and settled on the eastern frontier as a buffer against marauding native tribes.

The Boer population increased by birth and by absorbing assimilable elements such as the Germans. Beginning in 1836 ten thousand Boers left the Cape on the Great Trek for the unknown north and there, eventually, they founded the Boer Republics. There, too, the frontier of loneliness, great spaces, and hostile natives put its imprint on the Dutchman and molded him into an Afrikaner. Today the Union’s population is roughly 60 percent Afrikaans and 40 per cent English-speaking.

Perhaps the outstanding characteristic of the Nationalist Afrikaner is that he believes himself without a home other than South Africa, while assuming that his English-speaking fellow citizen has a home to which he may return in Great Britain. Not that the English-speaking South African of the second, third, or fourth generation agrees. The Union is his only home. Unlike an American who recognizes the Americanism of his fellow citizens, whether their forebears arrived in 1663, 1820, or 1900, the Nationalist Afrikaner feels himself the only true South African. His is not a melting-pot philosophy in which people as different as Dutchmen and Britishers might be blended. He sees no safe future for South Africa unless the European population is Afrikanerized, made in his image.

Rift between British and Boer

Although his country is an independent, sovereign state, it is part of the British Commonwealth, and the Nationalist Afrikaner resents that tie to which English-speaking South Africans are loyal. He cannot accept it as Australians, Canadians, or New Zealanders do. He is “different.” His aim is a republic with the Afrikaner stamp, either with or without the dissolution of the Commonwealth tie, as may suit South Africa.

Directly and indirectly pressure is being exerted toward that end. The most startling step has been the passage of an act to put Cape Coloreds on a separate voters roll which, in effect, seems to have torn up the Union’s constitution. The “will of the people" is now the law of the land and many South Africans fear further changes may be as easily negotiated. For on its second reading this act embodying the constitutional change was passed by a Parliamentary majority of seven; by a minority government, at that. In recent speeches Prime Minister Malan has predicted the dissolution of the Commonwealth and of the United Nations.

The widening of the old British—Boer rift naturally weakens the structure of a society already taut with race tension. Whether or not Englishspeaking South Africans will resist the changes is the question. The Briton has a genius for compromise, allied to the guilt complex he carried out of the Anglo-Boer war. Yet there are signs that Englishspeaking South Africans are aroused against intransigent Afrikaners, who so far have made the demands and won their points without, in turn, making concessions.

The choice of the future lies between the economic liberalism of the industrialist, to which a vast expansion in South Africa could be geared, and a future whittled to the composition of the present population and rigidly regulated to the purposes of the Nationalist Afrikaner. Dynamic economic, national, and racial forces are pulling South Africa in both directions.