South African Politics During The Second World War Period
Part 3 of the Mandela Series: Nelson Mandela's politicization in the context of the Second World War
Photo credit: Darkshade Photos
In 1939, South Africa entered the Second World War on the side of the allies after a narrow vote in Parliament. The period of the 1940s in general are marked by a dramatic process of radicalization which was widespread throughout South Africa. Black politics and organizations were greatly radicalized and white politics, particularly on the right, were also radicalized. The 1940s were characterized by militant strikes, bus boycotts and squatter movements. All of these movements emerged in the context of the economic and social upheavals of the Second World War and were to influence Mandela’s radicalization in many ways.
The War injected South African industry with a significant boost. The accelerated increase in industrialization, stimulated by the Second World War, can be seen in the rapid expansion of the mining industry, but even more conspicuous is the massive expansion in war-time manufacturing. The manufacturing industry greatly expanded between the years 1940-1946, and rapidly overtook both agriculture and mining in its contributions to the gross national product, illustrating just how incredible its growth was as it had overtaken mining as the most powerful sector of the economy. This growth in industry can be explained by the increased demand for commodities which had hitherto been provided by Britain, but obviously could not be supplied due to the war. And the increase also arose from the demand for military products.
Rapid black urbanization also characterises this period. Indeed black urbanization experienced a dramatic growth; between the years 1936 and 1946 African urbanization radically expanded from 229,122 to 384,628. Mandela himself was part of this massive black migration to the towns. He moved to the township of Alexander, near Johannesburg, where “[e]very morning, the township felt larger than it had the day before. Men found jobs in factories and housing in the ‘non-European townships’…a prison-like compound of a few thousand matchbox houses.” Mandela was sympathetic to their plight. The major growth in the manufacturing sector had resulted in an increase in the number of Africans moving into the towns to live, undoubtedly “[r]ising real wages in manufacturing industry attracted more black people to towns. African factory workers were in greater demand since the beginning of the Second World War; indeed more than half of the 300,000 people who made up the South African forces were white. The outcome of this mobilization was that a great number of white positions were left empty and could easily be filled by the great reservoirs of cheaper and more exploitable black labour. Rapid urbanization also resulted in the establishment of permanent African communities in the towns; this was especially ensured by the increase settlement of African women and families in the towns. In 1946 the African women in Johannesburg constituted thirty-six percent of the African population of the town. One commentator has asserted that settled African communities on the Rand were “guaranteed by the increasing ratio of African women to men in urban areas,” which in 1921 rose from less than 1:5 to 1:3 in 1946. The phenomenon of rapid black urbanization may be accounted for by considering the decay of the reserves. The reserves were areas of land reserved exclusively for Africans and ensured that the white population of South Africa (which was about a million) would have the right to over ninety percent of the country’s land, leaving the four million Africans with access to only 7.3 percent. The reserves were reinforced by the Natives Land Act of 1913, which proves that the very sensitive issue of land to South Africans remained quite an apparent and an important concern well in the 1940s. However, even by the 1930s the reserves had been deteriorating at an extraordinary rate. There had been severe droughts in the country, such as the one in 1941 when a shortage of “mealies” (maize) caused a crisis in rural areas. Even before the war the price of mealie meal (the main subsistence food of Africans in the reserves) had increased by twenty percent. The reserves were becoming increasingly poverty-stricken, disease-ridden and ecologically degredated. Overcrowding was also a problem, Mbeki observed that “the density per square mile has always been as high as 120” in many of the reserves. The impoverished conditions of the reserves is a very likely explanation for what Tom Lodge describes as an African “exodus from the countryside”, for the black movement into the towns. This explanation is the one which was given by the Native Economic Commissioners in the early 1930s: “[t]he Commissioners felt that the environmental decay and population increase were the cause of rapid urbanization which threatened to swamp the white population.”
The effects of rapid black urbanization were to be intensely felt and to prove very problematic for many people. The accelerated industrialization, due to the wartime boom, resulted in a process of rapid urbanization which could not be easily accommodated in the towns where there was, as there always had been, a shortage of housing for Africans, especially in Johannesburg. As a consequence increased slum housing and slumyards became a conspicuous feature of black urban life. In the late 1920s the number of Africans living in slumyards in Johannesburg was around 40,000; by the late 1940s this figure had escalated to between 63,000 and 92,500 Africans. Mandela witnessed the extreme poverty experienced by many Africans in Alexander and this probably influenced his views towards white dominance. Stadler has concluded that this crisis arose from “the abysmal poverty of blacks in the city, their political disabilities, and the restrictions imposed on their access to accommodation in the city, particularly the inner city”. Many blacks were acutely aware of the reasons for the crisis thus an atmosphere of African discontent arose from amongst the urbanized African poor whose grievances appeared to be mounting: there was still high unemployment, and those who were employed frequently found their wages were too small to cover their basic living expenses. In response to their appalling conditions Africans demonstrated a new militancy through the squatter movements which occurred in Johannesburg in the 1940s, thereby aggressively asserting their rights to urban space. Such movements were led by men like James Mpanza who organized a movement in the township of Orlando in 1944.
Similarly in response to African urban poverty other militant movements were organized by African communities. One such movement was the 1940 bus boycott in Alexander, on the outskirts of Johannesburg. This bus boycott was an African response to the increase in the bus fare to Johannesburg from 4d to 5d. Again it was attempted to raise the fare by five pence but this time the Africans did not boycott the buses but simply refused to pay the increased fare. In August 1943, Mandela joined the tens of thousands of Africans (Lodge reckons 20,000) who boycotted the buses again, this time in a boycott lasting for nine days. During these nine days, thousands of people would walk the twelve miles or so from Alexander to Johannesburg. The boycott culminated in a massive march through Alexander on August 10 made up of 10,000 protestors, of which Mandela was a part. The effectiveness of the boycott was to impress Mandela, he reflects:
This campaign had a great effect on me…I found that to march with one’s people was exhilarating and inspiring. But I was also impressed by the boycotts effectiveness.
Mandela witnessed first-hand how powerful a weapon the boycott had been. Undoubtedly Mandela’s participation in the boycott would have an influence upon the methods of struggle that he would support in the future. This bus boycott, like the ones that were to follow during the rest of the decade, indicates the radicalization of blacks in this period. It would appear that the ANC played a very insignificant role in orchestrating the protestors, and the same can be concluded of the CPSA, this is similar to their involvement, or lack of, in the squatters movements. Perhaps the ANC’s apprehension towards mass politics might explain this, but really only tenuous links were established with the boycotters.
These radical black protest movements were symptomatic of the general increase in black militancy in this period. The bus boycotts and the squatter movements coincided with a series of strikes from 1941-1942 which occurred mostly in Johannesburg and Durban. Since the early ‘thirties black strikes had been few in number, indeed there were only 700 black workers (out of 1900 strikers) in the 1940 strike called by the CPSA. Also a wave of strikes took place between September 1942 and February 1943. Strikes by Africans were declared illegal however in 1942 by the War Measure 145, yet sixty strikes took place between 1943 and 1944. Like the squatters movements and the bus boycotts, these strikes were often not organized by the ANC, the CPSA or trade unions. In many cases they were worker reactions to dire circumstances. However, the African trade unions, of which the most significant belonged to the Council for Non-European Trade Unions (CNETU), did arrange more industrial activities after the initial strike waves. Indeed the strike waves of the early 1940s culminated in the great African mineworkers’ strike of 1946, where approximately 70,000 miners went on strike. The African Miners strike, it has been suggested by O’Meara, was a reflection of the increased proletarianization of the Africans. Indeed the black workers who were migrating to the towns were becoming increasingly proletarianized and this lead to the state’s fears that they were becoming “detribalized”. What is true is that the CNETU largely supported this strike. Although Moodie’s article on the strike emphasises the self-organization which was also involved. These strikes often occurred at a grass-roots level and were organized from below. These earlier black militant protests were failed by the ANC which did not exploit the popular protests, thus Congress came under severe criticism from a younger generation of radicals who witnessed its failure to harness the militancy of these popular struggles and to recognise the “motor force for change” that the popular struggles could have provided. It was out of this dissatisfaction with the ANC that the African National Congress Youth League emerged, of which Mandela was a member.
It was in this context of general radicalization that Mandela’s own political radicalization took place. After moving to Johannesburg in 1940, Mandela came into contact with key figures and personalities who were to be of fundamental importance in influencing his politicization. Personalities such as Walter Sisulu and Gaur Radebe were to have great effects on Mandela’s ideas, Mandela concludes that: “[t]hrough my friendship with Gaur and Walter, I was beginning to see that my duty was to my people as a whole, not just a particular section or branch”. Mandela met Gaur Radebe while working at the Witkin, Sidelsky and Eidelman law firm. Radebe was a prominent member of both the ANC and the Communist party. It was Radebe who introduced Mandela to the ANC’s philosophy and its history, of Radebe, Mandela says:
What made the deepest impression on me was Gaur’s total commitment to the freedom struggle. He lived and breathed the quest for liberation…He seemed to think of nothing but revolution.
Mandela was introduced to Sisulu in 1941. Through Sisulu Mandela met many other black radicals who were part of the liberation struggle for Africans. Certainly Mandela’s meetings with men such as Anton Lembede who advocated strong and militant African nationalism were to have a profound effect on his ideology. Anton Muziwakha Lembede was a young Zulu school master. Lembede, like Mandela, had received his degree in law and then he went to work at a law firm with Pixley Seme, a leading founder of the SANNC in 1912. Lembede’s impact on Mandela’s ideas and other like-minded men was massive; “Anton Lembede was the principal architect of South Africa’s first full-fledged ideology of African Nationalism.” It was this ideology which was to characterize the African National Congress Youth League while in infancy. The organization was founded on Easter Sunday in April 1944, by Mandela, Lembede, Mda, Sisulu, Tambo and Nkomo who first proposed Dr Xuma (then the president of the ANC) with the draft constitution and manifesto for a Youth League but did feel threatened by the proposal. The Youth League members shared similar views and were intent on resuscitating the flagging status of the ANC (which had previously been thought of as “an organization of elderly people”) by infusing it with militancy. These younger, more militant Africans can be compared to the founders of the SANNC in 1912, who were middle-class professionals and the “products of missionary education.” Similarly, the founders of the Youth League were predominantly professional men of middle-class status, “mainly teachers or students of medicine or law.” The Youth League intended to provide “the brains-trust and power-station of the spirit of African nationalism.” The Youth League’s African nationalism was not the militant and exclusive “Africanism” of Lembede, with which Mandela also strongly sympathised:
Lembede’s Africanism was not universally supported because his ideas were characterised by a racial exclusivity that disturbed some of the other Youth Leaguers. Some of the members felt that a nationalism that would include sympathetic whites was a more desirable course.
Mandela’s views here are obviously charged with Lembedist sentiments which attempted to assert a positive image of being black; Lembede wanted to dispel the “black inferiority complex.”
Mandela and the other Youth Leaguers were well aware of international events: the Second World War (a war for democracy) profoundly stimulated their political consciousness; the general condemnation of fascism and the Nazis by most people gave hope to many Africans. Undoubtedly, these hopes were further fostered by the Atlantic Charter of August 14 1941, signed by Roosevelt and Churchill (to which the ANC responded with “Africans’ Claims” in 1943). Many Africans were hopeful that its democratic principles would be extended to them, and it “aroused hopes and fired the imagination of all peoples in regard to the new world ordered adumbrated in its terms.” Other international events such as the invasion of Ethiopia in the mid-thirties by Italy heightened African consciousness as did more recent national movements in Ghana and Nigeria.
Wartime hopes for a new deal, the growth and militancy of new trade unions, and communist and other left-wing demonstrations and activity undoubtedly stimulated the political consciousness of the younger intellectuals.
Indeed it was under these circumstances that Mandela’s political radicalization was forged.