Read Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties Online
Authors: Paul Johnson
Tags: #History, #World, #20th Century
We were together with Paul Ngei in gaol. If you go to Ngei’s home [you will find] he has planted a lot of coffee and other crops. What have you done for yourself? If you go to Kubai’s home, he has a big house and has a nice
shamba.
Kaggia, what have
you
done for yourself? We were together with Kungu Karumba in gaol. Now he is running his own buses. What have
you
done for yourself?
34
In fact a modest degree of corruption, provided it operated within well-understood African conventions, breach of which was answerable in the courts, was the least of the post-independence evils. Where the market system was allowed to operate, and the role of the state was restricted accordingly, corruption could be conventionalized (as, for instance, in eighteenth-century England) and so contained. It became an organic cancer only where the state took upon itself Utopian roles, as became increasingly the mode in Africa during the 1960s and still more in the 1970s. For this the assumptions of Leninism were partly responsible; still more the Bandung interpretation of Leninism, exalting the omni-competence of the political process to produce beneficial results, as preached by its eager acolytes such as Nkrumah.
But it was not collectivist philosophies alone which encouraged the fragile African state to expand and so corrupt itself. Some aspects of colonialism were also to blame. It is true that most colonies, in most
respects, were conducted on harmless
laissez-faire
principles. That was certainly the theory throughout the British colonial empire, for instance. Government protected the colony from external aggression, policed it and ran its currency. The market did the rest. Unfortunately there were innumerable exceptions to these principles, which in some cases amounted to an alternative system.
The great temptation of colonialism, the worm in its free-market apple, was the itch to indulge in social engineering. It was so fatally easy for the colonial administrator to persuade himself that he could improve on the laws of supply and demand by treating his territory as an ant-hill and its inhabitants as worker-ants who would benefit from benevolent organizing. The Belgian Congo, where white settlers were given no political powers at all for fear they would oppress the natives, was a monument to well-meaning bossiness. The law instructed firms to behave like ‘a good head of family’. As in Soviet Russia, there were restrictions on native movement, especially in the big cities, and in Elizabethville natives had to observe a curfew. The notion was that the African could be shoved around for his own good. Practice, of course, was much less benevolent than theory. Until 1945, the French used social engineering on a huge scale in the form of forced labour and native penal codes. It was infinitely less savage and extensive than the Gulag Archipelago but it rested on some of the same assumptions.
The most dedicated of the social engineers were the Portuguese, who ran the first and the last of the empires. In Angola and Mozambique they adopted slavery from the Africans, institutionalized it and integrated it with their administrative system. The slave-trade, especially to Brazil, was the economic mainstay of these two territories for three hundred years. The treaties the Portuguese signed with the African chiefs were for labour, not products (though in Mozambique the Arabs acted as middlemen). The Portuguese were the only primary producers of slaves among the European powers. They defended the trade desperately and resisted its suppression, abolishing it only when compelled by the British, and replacing it by a commercialized system of forced labour. This they maintained to the end in the 1970s, still with the co-operation of the African chiefs, who in the slave-days ran the labour-gangs or
shabalos.
Cecil Rhodes wanted to absorb Angola and Mozambique in the free British system, regarding Portuguese colonialism as an anachronism: in his innocence he did not realize it was a portent of twentieth-century totalitarianism. In the post-1945 period the Portuguese provided every year 300,000 contracted labourers from Mozambique and 100,000 from Angola, mainly for South Africa. Every African who had not been assimilated and granted citizenship (the
Portuguese had no colour-bar as such) had to possess a
caderneta
or pass-book with his work record. Bad workers were sent to the local
jefe de posto
for corporal punishment on the hand with a
palmatoria
or perforated ping-pong bat. The ultimate deterrent was hard labour on ‘the islands’ (Sao Tome or Principe). Like the Belgians, the Portuguese had a curfew, and Africans could not normally leave the house after nine.
35
The Portuguese authorities hotly defended their methods on moral grounds. They argued that in return for exporting labour, the two colonies were getting ports and railways and other investment unobtainable by any other means. They claimed they took their civilizing mission seriously: Africans were not children but adults who must be made to accept social responsibilities. This meant taking the men out of idleness into work, and the women out of the bondage of the fields into their proper role in the home.
36
But like most forms of moralizing interference it had unforeseen side-effects. In 1954 the Bishop of Beira complained that exporting labour was totally destructive of family life since 80 per cent of the men in his diocese were habitually away from home, either in Rhodesia and South Africa or on work-projects within the territory.
37
Even the British-influenced territories used large-scale social engineering in the form of land-apportionment to underpin racial divisions. In Kenya the expulsion of the Kikuyu from the ‘White Highlands’ between the wars (which we have noted in Chapter Four) raised some of the same moral objections as Stalin’s collectivization of the farms. It was the direct cause of the ferocious Mau Mau outbreak in the 1950s. Land apportionment legislation in Southern Rhodesia, a similar policy, was one of the underlying causes of the guerrilla war there which dominated Rhodesian history in the 1970s and was ended only with the change to black rule in 1979. But the outstanding example was South Africa, where social engineering was raised into the central principle (indeed philosophy) of government in the form of apartheid.
In South Africa pass-laws (and books) as forms of social control went back to the eighteenth century, being supposedly abolished in 1828 but creeping back in again, until in the 1970s arrests under movement-restriction laws averaged more than 600,000 a year.
38
Their origins lay in Elizabethan regulations to control ‘sturdy beggars’, themselves provoked by rapid population increase. But it is ironic that South Africa’s first positive measures of social engineering were the work of Jan Christian Smuts, who was one of the principal architects both of the League of Nations and of the
UN
, and who personally at San Francisco in 1945 drafted the
UN
Declaration on Human Rights.
39
Smuts was one of the Boer moderates who, in the liberal peace settlement after the Boer War, were associated with the British in the re-creation of the country. These men laid the legislative foundations of a semi-totalitarian state based upon the principle of racial-ordering. In 1911 strikes by contract workers (i.e. blacks) were made illegal, while the Mines and Works Act reserved certain job-categories for whites. In 1913 the Natives Land Act introduced the principle of territorial segregation by skin-colour. This Act was the key to all that followed, not least because it determined the nature of the African response which was to create their own proliferating varieties of Zionist religious sects.
40
In 1920 the Native Affairs Act introduced segregated political institutions for Africans, setting up the Native Conference of African leaders, nominated by government, and guided by the all-white Native Affairs Commission of ‘experts’. In 1922 an Act restricted skilled apprenticeships to those with minimum educational qualifications (i.e. non-Africans). In 1923 the Native (Urban Areas) Act created segregated African residential areas in and near towns. In 1925 the Industrial Conciliation Act denied collective bargaining rights to Africans. The 1925 Wages Act and the 1926 Colour Bar Act were specifically designed to draw a gulf between poor whites and the African masses.
41
It was Smuts, again, who moved South Africa in a directly opposite direction to that followed by the government of India after Amritsar. In 1921 he massacred an African ‘Israelite’ sect which engaged in a mass-squat on forbidden land at Bulhoek, and the following year he put down a black labour rebellion in the Rand with 700 casualties. This ruthless policy was reinforced with further legislation. The 1927 Native Administration Act made the Governor-General (i.e. the government) Supreme Chief over all Africans, with authoritarian powers to appoint headmen, define tribal boundaries, move tribes and individuals, and control African courts and land-ownership. Its Section 29 punished ‘any person who utters any words or does any other act or thing whatever with intent to promote any feeling of hostility between Natives and Europeans’. Government police powers were further increased by the Mines and Works Act and Riotous Assemblies Act of 1930.
42
This granitic massing of totalitarian power took place at exactly the same time Stalin was erecting his tyranny on the Leninist plinth, gave government comparable powers and was designed to produce the same results.
During the Second World War, Smuts, who had earlier destroyed the hopes of the coloured and mixed races of securing political equality with white voters, extended social engineering to them. In 1943 he set up a Coloured Affairs Department to ‘administer’ the Cape
coloureds, and the same year he introduced the Pegging Act to stop Indians moving into white areas. Far from making common cause between the whites, Asians and coloureds, against the overwhelming majority of blacks, it was Smuts’s United Party which drove both into the arms of the black nationalists (who hated them more than whites), and the Indian element was vital in swinging Asian and
UN
opinion against South Africa.
43
Hence all the structural essentials of white supremacy and physical segregation existed before the United Party lost power to the Boer Nationalists in May 1948.
What the Nationalists did was to transform segregation into a quasi-religious philosophical doctrine, apartheid. In many ways they were a similar development to African nationalism itself. Their earliest slogan,
Afrika voor de Afrikaaners
, was identical with the black ‘Africa for the Africans’ of the 1960s and 1970s. Their religious sectarianism flourished at the same time as African Zionism and for the same purpose: to bring together in collective defence the oppressed, the unwanted and the discriminated against. It was remarkably similar to Jewish Zionism too, in both its origins and consequences. The Boers created their own Zion, which then served as the focus of hatred and unifying force for the Africans, as Israel did for the Arabs. The first Boer nationalist institutions, 1915–18, were created to provide help for poor whites through job agencies, credit banks and trade unions. They were fiercely anti-Semitic as well as anti-black and anti-British. The movement began with the defence of the underdog, then broadened to promote the political, economic and cultural interests of the Afrikaaners as a whole, then in 1948 suddenly made itself overdog, with a vengeance.
44
Apartheid first appeared as a political programme in 1948, treating the Reserves as the proper homeland for Africans where their rights and citizenship were rooted, but its origins went back to the foundation in 1935 of the
Suid-Afrikaanse Bond vir Rasse-studie.
It was therefore directly influenced by Hitler’s racial ideas and his plans for segregated settlement in Eastern Europe, though it added a Biblical underpinning lacking in Hitler’s atheist panorama. Beneath the surface, apartheid was a muddle, since it combined incompatible elements. As pseudo-scientific racism, it derived, like Hitlerism and Leninism, from social Darwinism; as a religious racism, it derived from fundamentalist beliefs which denied Darwinism in any form. On the surface, however, it had a certain clarity and simplicity; and the political system Smuts had created, reinforced by the Separate Representation of Voters Act (1951), which knocked the coloureds off the Common Roll, gave the
Nationalists a secure tenure of power which is now well into its fourth decade. They have thus had the means to embark on a course of social engineering which, for consistency and duration, is rivalled only by Soviet Russia’s own.
The object of apartheid was to reverse the tide of integration and create wholly separate communities. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949) extended the ban from white-African to all unions across the colour lines. The Immorality Act made extramarital sex illegal in any circumstances but more severely punished if it involved miscegenation. The Population Registration Act (1950) allocated everyone to a racial group, like the Nuremberg Laws. The Group Areas Act, the same year, empowered the government to designate residential and business areas for particular racial groups. It began the process of shoving human beings around like loads of earth and concrete, and flattening their homes and shops with bulldozers. The first phase of apartheid was consolidated by the security provisions of the Suppression of Communism Act (1950), which defined Communism not only as Marxism-Leninism but ‘any related form of that doctrine’ and any activity whatever which sought to bring about ‘any political, industrial, social or economic change within the Union by the promotion of disturbance or disorder’. This turned the authoritarian elements of the state, for the first time, against a significant portion of the white population.