SOUTH AFRICA: Black Mark

For three decades, Jan Christian Smuts has been one of the West’s great champions of world order. For much of that period he has also been Prime Minister of South Africa. Increasingly, Smuts, the head of a reactionary state, is becoming an embarrassment to Smuts, the progressive international statesman. Last week, when he arrived at the United Nations Assembly, Smuts’s critics were laying for him with fresh ammunition, recently provided by South Africa’s worst racial conflict.

He hoped to persuade the United Nations to let him incorporate mandated South-West Africa into his country. Africa’s blacks, who regard the South African Government as the harshest of many oppressors, opposed the merger. (One of their spokesmen, Chief Tshekedi Khama of Bechuanaland, was prevented by the British from coming to New York.) Smuts’s plan was also opposed by India, whose old case against South African discrimination was boiling again. Russia would use South Africa’s record as propaganda among dependent peoples everywhere. Humanitarians who agree with Smuts when he talks of one world were prepared to disagree with a champion of “white supremacy” whose policies seemed to contravene the “Declaration of Human Rights” of the U.N. Charter.

Birth of a Policy. “What a source of labor!” cried Cecil Rhodes on seeing a huge gathering of South Africa’s blacks.

How to squeeze the natives out of “Native Reserves” into the gold and diamond mines became the first order of business for all South Africa’s “bosses,” from Rhodes to Smuts. First a hut tax was imposed which forced the impecunious natives to earn white man’s money. Later came a head tax of 20 shillings a year. Squads of police cruised nightly through urban “locations” (segregated residential quarters), routing all Negroes without poll-tax receipts. The penalty: jail, cuts with a thin bamboo cane—or a job in the mines. By 1938 the rural Europeans, who form 10% of the population, held 88% of the land. All adult male natives must carry passes—some of them as many as ten passes at a time.

Two months ago the Native Mineworkers’ Union, which for six years had vainly petitioned for an audience with mineowners, struck. Negro gold miners were earning 46¢ a day—virtually the same wage they had received since Cecil Rhodes’s day, 46 years before. They asked for $2 a day. Fifty thousand gold miners, a sixth of all those in South Africa, refused to carry on the country’s basic industry.

On the strike’s second day Prime Minister Smuts summoned his Cabinet, later declared: “I’m not unduly concerned . . . the strike was not caused by legitimate grievances but by agitators.” Immediately after the meeting drastic measures were taken to break the strike. Armed police descended a thousand feet into the dim stopes of one mine, drove up, level by level, some 1,000 sit-down strikers. Backed by a law forbidding gatherings of more than 20 natives on mine property, police quickly smashed mass meetings. Other cops swept through the Communists’ and Springbok Legion’s (a progressive veterans’ organization) offices throughout the land. Most of the Central Committee of the puny Communist Party, together with known trade-union leaders, were arrested. Investigation showed that the calling of the strike was opposed by Communist and union leaders, who were overruled by rank-&-file pressure. The strike was crushed, but South Africa’s dry air last week still crackled with tension between 7,700,000 Negroes and 2,300,000 whites who rule them. The Government appointed another commission (all white) to study the problem.

Death of a Promise. Jan Smuts’s appearance at U.N. recalled that in 1919, as head of a mandates committee, he had implored the Paris Peace Conference to “demonstrate that world . . . opinion is in favor of the ultimate self-government of all peoples, without distinction as to race, religion or color. . . .”

Smuts’s country had failed dismally to advance toward that brave ideal. Egged on by his opposition, the even more reactionary Nationalist Party, Smuts was going deeper & deeper into the racist morass of “white supremacy.” Just before leaving for the current round of international conferences, he announced a great campaign to bring to South Africa “thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions of immigrants.” That they would be white went without saying.

The immigration policy was spurred by South Africa’s desperate shortage of labor. Despite the shortage, the blacks in South Africa’s mines would continue to make 46¢ a day.