LITMIR.BIZ

      Afrikaners v. Africans

      1946–1949

      THE HOPES OF MANDELA and his friends for a more benign post-war world were soon dashed: not by an apartheid regime, but by the United Party government of Jan Smuts, who had been Churchill’s loyal ally in the war, and who was supported by South Africa’s English-speaking businessmen. In 1946, only months after the final Allied victory over Japan, Smuts made two ruthless moves which pushed both Africans and Indians into greater militancy, and into working together.

      The first was against a strike by the newly-formed African Mineworkers’ Union, whose prime mover and first President was Mandela’s friend Gaur Radebe. Radebe had been succeeded in 1942 by J.B. Marks, a robust African communist who had studied in Moscow and who led the strike of 70,000 black miners in August 1946, demanding more pay and better food and conditions. The mining companies, supported by the government, forced the workers back down the mines with bayonets, killing nine and wounding hundreds. Ten days later, fifty of the leaders were charged with fomenting a strike. Several were found guilty, and were fined or imprisoned.¹

      Most whites saw the crackdown as a necessary response to the communist menace, which was now re-emerging after the wartime truce. Smuts flew off to London, ‘not unduly concerned’, while the Rand Daily Mail attacked the ‘wild speeches and absurd demands’ of the union leaders, including ‘J.B. Marx’.² The conservatives within the ANC, including Dr Xuma, blamed the communists for provoking a premature test of strength, but the Youth Leaguers criticised Xuma for not calling a general strike in sympathy.³ The brutal suppression seemed to vindicate Lembede’s warning that blacks could expect no mercy from the whites. Mandela was moved by the bravery and solidarity of the strikers – some of whom he knew – and he visited them with J.B. Marks. He discussed communism with Marks, and was struck by his humour and humility. Marks saw Mandela as a rabid nationalist, but thought he would outgrow that phase.⁴

      The crushing of the mine strike made fools of the patient delegations of the ANC ‘Old Guard’, who had put their faith in Smuts. While the black miners were being bayoneted, the Natives’ Representative Council was quietly debating black grievances with the government in Pretoria. Its members adjourned in protest, but did not actually boycott the Council. Smuts, however, realised that he had alienated ‘moderate intellectuals of the Prof. Matthews type’, and the next year he tried to placate a delegation of Council members headed by Matthews.⁵ Smuts spoke in his usual paternal mode: ‘This young child, South Africa, is growing up, and the old clothes do not fit the growing boy.’ He deplored their ‘sulking’ attitude, and offered them ‘a bone to chew’ in the form of a bigger Council, all black and all elected, and legalised black unions, though not in the mines. Matthews was sceptical, and explained that the black people had lost confidence in the Council. Afterwards he told the press that the mountain had given birth to a mouse, and that the hungry masses needed more than a bone to chew.⁶ But the Natives’ Representative Council remained passive and ineffective (it would be abolished by the first Nationalist government).

      Nelson Mandela was more lastingly influenced by Smuts’s second harsh move, against the Indians in South Africa. The 300,000 Indians who had arrived in Natal since the 1860s, first as contract labourers, then as traders, had their own history of discrimination and protest. They had first learnt about peaceful protest in 1911 from Mohandas Gandhi, who devised his kind of passive resistance while he was working as a lawyer in South Africa, and had led thousands of Indians illegally from Natal into the Transvaal. Africans and Coloureds tried similar protests in 1919 and 1939, but without success. The Indians, some of whom had become prosperous merchants, kept themselves aloof from blacks, and hoped for better treatment after the war. But in 1946 the Smuts government introduced the Asiatic Land Tenure Bill, the ‘Indian Ghetto Act’, which banned the sale of any more land to Indians, while offering them the sop of white representatives in Parliament and an advisory board. It shook the Indians out of their complacency. For two years they sustained a passive-resistance campaign echoing Gandhi’s of thirty-five years before, occupying land reserved for whites: two thousand protesters went to jail, including the campaign’s two leaders, Dr ‘Monty’ Naicker and Dr Yusuf Dadoo.⁷

      Mandela was coming closer to the Indians. He was impressed by their progress from speech-making and resolutions to mass action, in contrast to the inertia of the ANC. He was struck by the solidarity and sacrifice of the protesters, who included both militant and conservative Indians, and he admired both Naicker and Dadoo.⁸ In Johannesburg he was now meeting many Indians, and found himself personally at ease with them. A flat in downtown Johannesburg, 13 Kholvad House, in Market Street, had become a crucial meeting-place between the races. There Mandela would meet Ismail Meer, Ruth First, Yusuf Cachalia and many other Indian and white communists in a relaxed atmosphere. He also spent much time at the home of Amina Pahad (whose two sons Aziz and Essop were later to join the Mandela government), where they would all eat curry and rice with their fingers. It reminded him of his childhood at Jongintaba’s Great Place.⁹ And after some early arguments he worked closely with Ahmed Kathrada, a young Indian communist who was to spend twenty-five years with him in prison.

      Through his Indian friends Mandela became more interested in India itself, which was then on the verge of independence, and in the achievements of Gandhi and his disciple Jawaharlal Nehru. ‘When we were starting the struggle we really had very little to go by from the leadership in our country,’ he recalled, ‘because their

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