THE SOUTH African state is unique. It does HOL 'diserminate' against the majority of its population, it excludes three quarters of them even from formal citizenship.
Nor is the apartheid state some backward relic. It is the most advanced industrial state in Africa. South Africa refutes any view that capitalism 'free enterprise' automatically produce democracy or even political advance. On the ... dontrary, it is because of capitalism -, that the South African historically became more reactionary at every turn. It is because it is so politically backward that South African capitalism has been so successful.
How did such uniquely reactionary and racist state come into being? In a nutshell, it was born of colonisation, slavery, and gold.
Wave The South African whites were colonists - and to this day call themselves Europeans. The first mass wave of settlers were Dutch farmers. Then in 1794. came the English to claim me strategically located Cape colony for their Empire.
But these whites were also slavers. And a slave by definition, is not human. They work but have no rights.
When in 1834 the British finally "freed' the Boers' slaves, the state and labour relations that. emerged were already branded with extreme oppression. The 1841 Master and Servants' Act made it illegal to break a labour contract; the Kaffir Employment Act forced black people to sign contracts and carry passes In the three Boer states black people had no vote and the Transvaal constitution bluntly stated the people want no equality of white and black inhabitants either in church or state'.
In North America those who colonised the interior of the continent, and who farmed the land with their own labour, had already won independence when they forged the final form of the United States constitution. These small farmers in alliance with the radical bourgeoisie, and workers, defeated the -StaLes and had to proclaim freedom for all on their banner in the US civil war.
Diamonds In South Africa the interior was instead colonised by slavers fleeing from the British. They drove the inhabitants off the land and set them to work - as wage labourers without political rights. When there was struggle for independence from Britain at the beginning of the 20th century it was waged by the most backward, cramped and reactionary sectionof South African society the Boers This struggle for independence had white supremacy openly inscribed on its banner.
Nevertheless it was just conceivable that the unstable Boer farm could have produced a development - an alliance of poor and proletarianised whites with dispossessed Africans against landlords and imperialists. This was a type of pattern which was seen in South America. But one discovery determined a completely different course: gold.
Diamonds had already been found in 1870. In 1886 the largest gold fields in the world were discovered. The profits were stupendous, standing even today at up to a hundred per cent higher the average industrial average. This development allowed an agreement of the British and the Boers.
A deputation of Boers visited Britain within a month of their defeat in Ine Boer war of 1899-1902. sought assurance the government that the recent dispute between the white races would change nothing in the status of the black' They need not have worried. The British imperialist Cecil Rhodes, who by 1900 controlled the mining industry, had already introduced the 'Glen Grey Act in 1894 — calling it his 'Native Bill for South Africa. Its purpose was to merely drive blacks off their land and into his mines.
*Every black man cannot have three acres and a cow'., Rhodes declared It must be brought home to them that in future nine-tenths of them will have to spend their lives in daily labour.
short the transplanted the Boer system of labour relations from the land to the mines welcoming the system the Boers had developed with open arms.
Struggle SLalC Africans were to be confined by force to a tiny portion of the land, denied the right to settle in the towns, and herded into the mines and factories by sjamboks and starvation.
Africans movements were rigorously controlled by Pass Laws and forced segregation. They were to become an institutionalised migrant labour force deprived of the most basic right of all: the right to form a community by living where they chose.
The profits of South Africa were imperialist. They derived from the combination of minéral monopoly and super-exploited labour were opened up by foreign capital.
But despite losing the war the Boers managed one unique feat. They maintained control of their own capital and siphoned off a portion of the superprofits of the British. They used this to create a white bloc uniting all from the richest mineowner landless Boer. With it they forged a new SLaLC. Instead of uniting with the black people to throw out the imperialists the Serialises to suppress the blacks. Time. secured the blacks, by virtue of a common goal with the British, to a white supremacist state — a unique fusion of settler and imperialist capital, a state which was not a nation state but a purely settler state of the white people.
Black The chosen instrument for this process was the Boer National Party formed in 1902. It was this party which 'invented' Apartheid.
Party in turn was linked to a network of institutions of Afrikaner capital such as its rided 19nk), its first investment house, (founded 1934), trust, Federale (founded 1940) and the infamous secret society, the Broederbond.
The National Party finally won its electoral victory in 1948 and it has governed ever since. But this simply culminated a forty-year process during Afrikaner capital through political alliance with British imperialism what it had lost in the war against it.
The rise of the apartheid state was inexorable In 1913 WORKERS UNION OF AFRICA system different Act, known to Africans as the 'Law of Dispossession', confined black to 7 per cent of the land. The 1923 Urban Areas Act prevented blacks settling in the towns and introduced a uniform pass system. A succession of segregationist measures between drove black, coloured and Indian people off the voters' roll.
In Labour relations the principles of the original Masters' and Servants Act They were re-enforced again and again and British were coupled to the pass system. It was virtually illegal to strike - and black strikes were broken mass arrests, and often mass CIS SESSO shootings The risk of any alliance bet ween black workers and poor whites was prevented by white wage rates 8-10 times higher than those of blacks and by depriving black people of skilled British imperialists the poorest WAS with the of current events.
The National the black trade unions.
Volksbeleggings jobs and education.
invention achieved Land had gone before.
'reform'
blood industry the Wall Arcal state • Segregation with mass homes the Soweto rebellion of 1976 that focused world attention on the new rise of black revolt in long history South Africa. It is the starting point of most people's knowledge of South Africa and the direct background ALAN Soweto was the political backdrop to the rapid rise of It showed that the long year's of 1976.
Apologists for Britain's support for the South African regime often try to claim that apartheid was some peculiar LOWIIS abberation which will eventually disappear when "English good sense' prevails. But when communities the National Party government of 1948 began to implement apartheid formally it was only making systematic what had been developed with full British support in the entire hundred years that court.
Apartheid, however, was not mere. ly a 'logical' development of what went cibly resettled under It was the only possible way to defend it. This is why every hope of apartheid has so far been dashed and every mass movement for civil rights has finally been drowned in Why? Because once mining capital began to expand, as it had to, into intical effect dustry proper, then it was inevitable laborator that the urban black population would start to grow. Eight million black col - paratus which is among of the most oured and Indian people today work in making it ever more impossible to maintain the pure fiction that the "black' nation belonged in its rural homelands. It became more and more necessary to politically exclude blacks from any rights in the South comodate the The legislative keystone of apartheid was therefore the Group Areas act of 1950 — which created segregated esidential areas for whites, coloured Africans and Indians. By 1979 550,00 people had been evicted from their under this act and shipped off been its victims. either to makeshift townships, driven back into permanent migrant status (by being officially resident in the Bantu of apartheid's strengthening were coming to an end.
But South Africa had a of struggle before that great revolt of 1976 - a history without which the present struggle cannot be understood.
FREEMAN looks at the rise of the apartheid state - and at the history of black resistance which led to the explosion homelands but obliged to work in the towns) or by fording blacks into the twilight existence of the illegal shanty Women were particular victims of a : system designed to prevent stable urban emerging Under the Natal Code black women are perpetual legal minors with no right to own or inherit property, act as guardians of their children or represent themselves A staggering total of 6 million Africans have been uprooted and forthis policy inevitably, because of the ever-growing threat to white rule created by black resistance, this policy has gone hand in hand with growing repression, and growing political exclusion.
The "theory' of apartheid provides for 'independent' black administra tions in the bantu areas. But the prac is that the hated col bodies in the bantustans simply serve as part of a repressive apsophisticated and well-equipped in the white The real intention of the entire system is simple: it is to deprive blacks of any right to be present, or even to vote, in the real bodies of power in the country: in those of the white state.
Such a state as that of South Africa cannot be 'reformed'. . It cannot 'acblack people whose whole purpose it is to subjugate. It is not even a national state of South Africa. It is a purely white state.
That apartheid state can only be overthrown. And that task falls to the black population of South Africa who, for four hundred and thirty years, have The struggle against apartheid is one to smash the entire existing state structure in South Africa and everything that sustains it. THE BLACK people of South Africa have been writing history of resistance since the first Portuguese settlers were driven out in 1948. By 1879 the Zulu forces which headed resistance to the Boers, had 50,000 troops in arms and inflicted a stunning defeat on the British army.
The modern history of black resistance in South Africa however starts with same process which created apartheid in its modern form - with the rise of the black working class.
Apartheid finally is creating its own gravedigger. The racist South African state is founded on an army of black labour which grows in proportion to South African capitalism's development. Not surprisingly, therefore, the history of resistance to apartheid, and of resistance to South African capitalism, have been intertwined at every step.
Successive leaderships have ex plored 'peaceful' reform only to find this road barred by the South African state. Eighty years of bitter struggle have progressively shown black people that they cannot just defy the apartheid state. They must overthrow it. The successive waves of struggle have shifted the movement progressively leftwards In is orientation.
The very first modern movement of revolt Ghandi's 1906 campaign goainst nesses for ndians - Hustrated this dynamic clearly. Ghandi, the
and indeed the resistance.
bluntly prohibited one strike alone sixteen were shot dead.
were over 60 Non-European and commerce Two formed under strong fluence. The South African Trotskyists dissolved into it, and the Unity Moveit made a propaganda fetish of the boycott tactic for mass mobilisations and actions.
Simultaneously point on the issue of boycotting' these, white institutions became a fundamental line of divide in troduce In 1941, under the impact of wartime inflation, municipal, rail, dock, walked out in the Rand and Natal. This was under conditions where legislation 'all strikes by Africans under all circumstances.' In Sion But despite this repression there illegal strikes between 1942 and 1944. In 1942 the Council of Unions was ANC's formed. This at one point had 119 af- 7000 to 100,000 filiated unions and by 1945 represented 40 per cent of Africans in manufacture political developments companied this process. In 1943 the specific measures Non-European Unity movement was Bantu Authorities Trotskyist inment adopted a ten-point programme of democratic demands. Unfortunately being able to function. the ANC the future ANC When, in 1948, the National Party was elected to office and began to inapartheid ANC League shot to leadership of the struggle. On 1 May 1950 a one day stoppage of work was met by savage repression Eighteen people were murdered by the authorities and a general strike was called for 16 June in mourning and protest. This in turn was greeted by the Suppresof Communism Act and man ANC leaders were driven underground Defence Campaign was launched which turned the ANC into the broadest mass resistance body.
membership rose at a time when black union membership talling to 38,000.
The Defiance Campaign, organised jointly with Coloured and Indian mass organisations, was to protest against six including the Pass Laws, the Group Areas Act, and the system. It was however led on Ghandian lines with 5000 selected 'defiers', and could not defeat the all out repression launched against the moment. By 1953 ANC membership had fallen to 28,000 with its key leaders jailed or prevented from Socialist Action 13 September 1985 time: 21 March 1960 — Sharpville.
On that day police opened fire on unarmed demonstrators, killing 67 and injuring more than 180. Nearly all were shot in the back.
The pass laws were temporarily suspended but the mass mobilisation: went on. The-Justice Minister told parliament Their aim is to bring to its knees any white government in South Africa which stands for white supremacy ... they do not want peace and order; what they want is not £1 a day for all the Bantu; what they want is our country.' Repression, then as now, was the only answer for the regime. Neither the PAC nor the ANC were prepared for the scale on which it was launched. On 8 April a wave of government terror was launched. Both the ANC and PAC were outlawed, 18,000 were arrested -including 1,700 activists.
This was the decisive turning point in South Africa because it marked the end of all projects for gradual reform or legal action. Both ANC and PAC responded by setting up armed wings.
The problem however was that this armed resistance became for a whole period counterposed to systematic mass
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