In a little over a month at least 250 African men, women and children have been butchered by South Africa's armed police. In the first day alone, 25 — mainly children — were slaughtered in Soweto. At the end of a week it was 176 killed, 1,139 injured and 1,298 arrested.
The rioting and demonstrations have continued in many other African townships and even the Coloured and White universities. The immediate cause of the big Soweto demonstration of school-children and parents was the Government’s insistence on Afrikaans being used as the language of instruction. In the reserves, however, schools are free to choose English instead. There is little doubt that Africans regard Afrikaans as “the symbol of our oppression.’’ It is the language of the police, of the pass laws, of the job reservation rules, of all that they detest. It is the boss’s language, not theirs.
The Nationalists would prefer to have no blacks at all. But they recognize that industry, mining etc. would collapse without black labour. So they built townships outside the big cities, outsize council estates with minimal amenities. In Soweto “fewer than 20% of their tiny, boxlike houses have electricity, no more than 5% have hot running water.” (Time, 28th June 1976.)
Government policy decrees that all Africans belong to the tribal reserves and should settle there. In a 1947 pamphlet on Apartheid, the Nationalists declared: “the Bantu in the urban areas should be regarded as migratory citizens not entitled to political or social rights equal to those of the Whites” (quoted in Apartheid, ed. Alex La Guma, 1972) In 1969 a Nationalist MP justified the townships on the grounds that the urban Africans ”are only supplying a commodity, the commodity of labour . . . it is labour we are importing and not labourers as individuals . . . numbers make no difference”.
In Guilty Land, P. van Rensburg sums up the policy: “at the moment the Blacks are still necessary for the urban labour force . . . but they must not be allowed to gain the impression that they a permanent part of the town and city population. When they are moved to residentially segregated areas, they can have no freehold rights ... for otherwise the Government fears they would regard themselves as something more than temporary sojourners.”
The urban Africans have no security of tenure. If they lose their jobs or get in any kind of trouble they can be "endorsed out” or jailed. A Pretoria survey showed that only 15 per cent of the township’s residents were “born and bred” there. The African worker is merely a migrant. The government denies him either the vote or the right to strike or belong to a registered trade union. He is thus nearly helpless in the hands of the capitalists. One such migrant was John Mvalo: “John was conceived during one of his father’s visits home from the mines . . . Of his working life from the age of 16 to 47 (31 years) 36% of his time was spent at home and 64% in employment away. He had had 34 different jobs and the average length of a job had been 47 weeks.” (Geographical Review, Jan. 1968.)
Workers' Wages
The pay of Johannesburg Africans is only one-fifth of that earned by Whites in the same area, according to Time. A survey in 1957, after the bus boycott, indicated that for the bare essentials a family of five needed £27.10s. per month but the average income of such a family was only £18 per month. Ten years later a Johannesburg survey revealed that more than two-thirds of African families had incomes below R53 per month — the absolute minimum.
The next year the minimum figure rose to R59.70: “the effective minimum level of income is generally estimated at one and a half times the poverty datum line figure, which would mean that a family at Soweto should have at least R95.63 a month.” (Hilda Bernstein, in Apartheid.)
In 1969 a survey gave these figures for all urban African households:
Monthly incomes between R1 and R19 25%” ” ” R20 and R49 40%” ” ” R50 and R79 20%over R80 15%
In other words, 85 per cent of urban African families were living below “the effective minimum level of income” and about half were trying to survive on incomes below even the poverty datum line! A survey of African schoolchildren, by the South African Institute of Race Relations, found that 60-70 per cent. were “recognizably malnourished”, 50 per cent. “needed nursing and medical attention” and almost 10 per cent. “required hospitalization for diseases directly or indirectly attributable to malnutrition”.
But if the urban African is badly off, note how much worse off he could be. If he worked on a farm he could earn an average of £50 per annum or, possibly, nothing at all: “the African works for a fixed number of days in a year, between 90 and 180 days, in return for the right to live on the farm, to graze cattle, and to cultivate the land.” (M.B. Yengwa, in Apartheid.) In 1972 there were about 2 million African workers on White farms.
Out of Town
The urban African worker’s insecurity is increased by the fear of being sent back to the Bantustans or tribal reserves. These comprise a mere 13 per cent. of South Africa’s land and only the Transkei has any coastline or is sizeable. Its only port, however, is zoned for Whites. “The land is impoverished and overcrowded with people and livestock; practically no economic development has taken place, and the primitive subsistence agriculture cannot at present support even the small proportion of resident Bantu; there are almost no mineral resources and no industry; and the population has acquired neither skills nor capital.” (Geographical Review, Jan. 1968.)
The Government refuses to allow White capital investment inside these areas. Instead the Government have insisted on the development of Border Industries just outside. The Border Industries, in spite of the cheap labour force, are unable to compete effectively against the heavy concentration of industry and capital in the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging area, which in 1969 housed 17 per cent. of the population and produced about 55 per cent. of S.A.’s industrial products. “The Reserves remain an economy without manpower. The men live in two worlds . . . More than 2 million people spend their lives circulating between industrial centres in White areas and in the subsistence life of the Reserves.” (Geographical Review.)
The same writer is anxious to point out how harmful this is: “only about half of the annual potential manpower resource of the Reserves is economically applied in White areas”. Moreover, according to a 1960 writer in the South African Journal of Economics, “a total annual potential of 1.140 000 man-years is available in the Bantu areas, of which 600,000 are not economically applied”. Now that’s what really hurts the bourgeois boffins: all that “cheap, docile” labour-power and it’s not being exploited. Just think of the loss of surplus-value involved!
In 1954 the Tomlinson Commission recommended that industry in the reserves should be financed by White capital investment. But the Government cut its own investment fund by two-thirds, refused to allow White capital investment and insisted on agriculture being based mainly on the tribal system.
Tomlinson proposed that 50 per cent. of the population of the reserves should be removed to enable the rest merely to get a living of 168 dollars per annum. Others suggested “a minimum subsistence figure three, for our even five times the Commission’s figure” (Geographical Review).
M. B. Yengwa describes life in the reserves in Apartheid: “Here grinding poverty and the resulting malnutrition, disease and squalor have become a way of life. This is the land of women, children and old and sick people. The healthy and active are the only exports “the Reserves have in the form of cheap ‘Bantu’ labour which they sell to the mining, agricultural and secondary industries in the White areas. In the Reserves — all Reserves — famine and starvation are the usual seasonal visitations.”
African Education
The government’s view of African education is clear. "The school must equip him (the Bantu pupil) to meet the demands which the economic life of South Africa will impose on him . . . There is no place for him in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour.” (Dr. Verwoerd, 1953.) Also: "Who will do the manual work if you give the Natives an academic education? . . . We should so conduct our schools that the Native who attends these schools knows that to a great extent he must be the labourer in the country” (Mr. le Roux, Nationalist MP).
To ensure that Africans don’t get too much education, the Government instituted a system of “academic ceilings.” The result is a phenomenal dropout rate. In 1968, of the 78 per cent. of African children in school, only 4 per cent. were getting secondary education. Other factors which prevent Africans from getting adequate schooling are lack of money, inadequate classrooms, gross overcrowding and double sessions in most schools (even triple sessions in some). Africans are forced to pay one-fifth or more of teachers’ salaries themselves, to raise half the cost of school building (from higher primary up) and to pay for school maintenance.
In 1969, the Johannesburg Star reported that the cost of education in Soweto schools had risen 50 per cent. The teacher-pupil ratio went from 1:42 in 1949 to 1:72 in 1969: “ill-fed families throughout South Africa cut down on the skim milk powder and mealie meal and contribute cents saved to pay thousands of extra teachers privately, thus improving the teacher-pupil ratio to the still appalling 1:58.5” (The Failure of Bantu Education, 1970).
In farming areas the policy is to have only primaries and these can only be established if the farmer wishes. The schools can be useful to the farmer. In 1969 the Minister of Bantu Education told the Senate: “we have made it compulsory that where the farmer wants these facilities, part of the school instruction . . . must be training in the normal activities on the farm . . . any farmer who has a farm school on his farm and who wishes to make use of the school children under the supervision of the teacher to assist with certain farm activities, this can be arranged . . .” The success of the Government’s policy has resulted in there being “no registered non-White veterinarians, architects, civil, electrical or mechanical engineers” (UNESCO). Dr. Birley visited the 4 secondary schools of the African township of Johannesburg: "I have recently surveyed their laboratories and equipment carefully. The schools have . . . between them 13 Bunsen burners, six balances and three microscopes.” Literacy among Africans dropped from 80 per cent. in ’59 to only 40-50 per cent. in ’63 (Government figures). In addition, the Government bans “unregistered” teaching, including night schools, and reduced its grant for night schools from R46.000 (’58-9) to zero (’65). The wonder is that any Africans learn to read at all!
Effects on the Economy
Some of these facts go to explain just why the world capitalist class condemns Apartheid. Here are some typical criticisms:
“The very idea of separateness is a renunciation of market forces . . . it denies the non-Whites the right to advance industrially in existing fields where their skills can be fully used productively to the benefit of the community as a whole; it inhibits the development of consumer purchasing power and therefore it discourages new investment” (Fridjohn, quoted in The Geographical Review.)
In this context “productively” means of course “profitably”, the “benefit of the community as a whole” really means “the benefit of the employing class and the greater exploitation of the wage-slave class”.
The low wages which are preserved by job reservation, the pass system, denial of the right to strike or to organize in trade unions, lack of any political power, and concentration in the starvation areas of the reserves, these low wages which are so helpful to the farming and mining sections of the capitalist class in S.A. spell “wastage” to the manufacturers. (In S.A., industry has only got ofF the ground recently: in 1972 it still accounted for only 28 per cent. of the Gross National Product.) By the year 2000, it is estimated there will be more than 20 million Africans in S.A. Are they never to be allowed colour TV, washing machines, hi-fi, DIY gadgets, cars, holidays abroad and so on? After all, it’s a poor sort of a home market which specialises in mealie meal and skim-milk. Not much profit in them.
The “liberal” Patrick van Rensburg deplores apartheid because it means extra costs for “the taxpayer” (those poor capitalists!): all those dual bus services, separate park benches, loos, exits and entrances, the enormous bureaucracy needed to administer the Population Register, and the pass laws, not to mention boss’s army of police, spies and paid informers. Also he points out that “if the burden and worry of undernourishment were removed at once, Africans would immediately produce more”. Which shows us whose interests he really has at heart! Greater productivity means greater profit-making for bosses, greater exploitation for workers. Another point he makes is that job reservation, preventing the Africans from competing for skilled jobs, cushions inefficient Whites.
Quo Vadis
As Socialists we do not concern ourselves with the plight of the capitalists, and their dispute with South Africa’s White farmers. The pass laws exist to protect the farmers from the effect of higher wages in the urban areas. In South Africa political power is held by the representatives of the farming and business community, and working-class Whites support them. The Government’s policy has been successful in dividing the workers of S.A. on grounds not only of race but also of language — English or Afrikaans speaking.
It is a fallacy to suppose that the ending of Apartheid would mean the ending of slums, hunger, unemployment, and insecurity. Nowhere can you find a country which has eliminated these miserable features of the profit-producing system. The Africans of South Africa will remain second-class citizens as long as they are part of the international wage-slave class. Their poverty is a result of their class position in society, only made worse by the fact that they as a group have been selected for the low-paid jobs in the economy and that they are denied the right to organize for better living and working conditions, either politically or through trade-union action.
The Socialist attitude has nothing in common with the Pan Africanist Congress which operates on racially divisive lines, or the African National Congress, one of whose goals is “equal pay for equal work”. Both are reformist organizations. Neither is based on class-consciousness, and an awareness that the African worker is a part of the international working class, just as the South African boss class is a part of the international brotherhood of bosses. The workers of S.A. have a long way to go in discovering that their real enemy is our class-divided social system, and that unity on the basis of the common interests of all workers everywhere, “without distinction of race or sex”, is the real key to their liberation from misery and exploitation.
Charmian Skelton
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