H.J. & R.E. Simons
Class & Colour in SA, 1850-1950

Chapter 26
Class Struggle & National Liberation


Source: Harold Jack Simons, Ray Esther Simons, Class & Colour in SA, 1850-1950, 1969.
Transcribed: by Dominic Tweedie.


Ray and Jack in 1990

South Africa’s malaise stems from the impact of an advanced industrialism on an obsolete, degenerate colonial order. Stress and conflict are symptoms of an inner disharmony. Contradictions or antagonism, occur between the society’s structure and superstructure, between the dynamic potential of a multi-racial labour force and the strait-jacket of racially segregated institutions; between the dominant collective role of Africans in the economy and their exclusion from the centres of power. Material conditions are favourable to the emergence of an open society. If productive forces were allowed free play and harmonized with social relations, skin colour would be irrelevant to status and function. A rigid racial hierarchy obstructs the birth of a free society. Some four million whites combine the privileges of a colonial autocracy with the technology and amenities of the machine age and employ coercive measures to keep fifteen million Africans, Coloured and Indians in permanent subordination.

The imperial-colonial qualities of the society, which may not be evident at first light, become visible by comparison with the typical colony. In its normal form, the colony is a distinct territorial entity, spatially detached from its imperial metropolis, and allowed to retain as much cultural autonomy as is compatible with the interests of its absentee owners. These invest capital in the colony, promote trade and economic growth, introduce skills, create the rudiments of a modern administration, and generate social change. They also perpetuate archaic social forms among the colonial population, inhibit its spontaneous development, and impose autocratic methods of government. White settlers and officials monopolize the sources of power, all key positions and preferred occupations; appropriate far more than their fair share of educational, health and other social services; and maintain a wide cultural gap between themselves and the darker people.

The model fits in broad outline. White South Africans do behave as though they were imperial masters of a distant colony. Yet they delude themselves. The country has in fact advanced well beyond the limits of a primitive colonialism. Nowhere else in Africa has so large a part of the population been dispossessed of land or absorbed in the capitalist economy. Africans are allowed to acquire a permanent domicile and landed property in barely more than one-tenth of the surface area. They depend wholly or largely on what they earn in the remaining nine-tenths which have been declared ‘the white man’s country’. This is the developed sector, containing virtually all the mines, farms, factories, towns, ports, railways and strategic centres, and could be equated with an imperial state. But it is ‘white’ only in terms of proprietary rights and political authority. Black and brown people outnumber the whites in almost every town and rural district.

Africans, Whites, Coloured and Asians interact on many planes and cooperate in a wide range of activities. Interdependence is not confined to the market place or to the production of goods. Behaviour patterns, institutions and ideas cut across the colour line. Significant numbers of black, brown and white South Africans hold the same religious beliefs, belong to the same kind of family organization, play the same games and pursue common political objectives. The degree of cultural uniformity is high, and would be higher but for the elaborate system of colour discrimination and compulsory segregation. The discrimination is total, and the totalitarianism reveals the extent to which South Africans have merged into a single, indivisible society.

Previous governments actively promoted integration, and used catchwords like ‘guardianship’ and ‘trusteeship’ to account for white domination. The present government turns to the vocabulary of decolonization, rejects integration and insists that it can be reversed. The ideal way to resolve racial conflict, the government argues, is to impose maximum segregation, develop autonomous ethnic communities, and concede their right to self-determination, perhaps even secession. Rather than share power with Africans, apartheiders would partition the country into small, independent states. Or so they say.

The vision has no substance. It is out of line with the historical record, unbending realities, and the aspirations of most South Africans. Apartheid dogmas are to be regarded not as a blueprint for decolonization but as a formula for freezing the society in an archaic colonial mould. They provide a pretext for total discrimination and for denying the African’s claim to majority rule. Apartheid is also a party slogan, a battle cry to rally voters behind the platform of Afrikaner nationalism.

Antagonisms between Afrikaners and British dominated party politics for most of our period. The British had many initial advantages. Backed by the imperial state and representing a world-wide culture, they behaved with the arrogant assurance of conquerors. They dominated mining, industry and commerce, controlled banks and finance houses, and supplied most technical skills. Their urban culture engulfed the Afrikaner, left a permanent imprint on his style of life, fostered class divisions, introduced a liberal and a socialist radicalism, and undermined the values of his traditional agrarian society. Resisting absorption, Afrikaners acquired a national consciousness in their fight for political independence, language rights, religious cohesion and white supremacy.

They were exhorted to support ons eie mense — our own people; to buy from Afrikaner shopkeepers, invest in Afrikaner firms, read Afrikaans, attend Afrikaner churches, join Afrikaner societies, and participate in Afrikaner cultural activities. They were spurred into making a great national effort to catch up with the British in the business of making money, by contributing to funds established to assist Afrikaner entrepreneurs. A few of the latter were spectacularly successful, but the gap remained. Like other underdeveloped communities, Afrikaners found that national sentiment and party loyalties were not enough for a successful assault on an entrenched capitalism. Collectively and individually, they made little headway against the accumulated weight of British capital, technology, managerial experience and imperial connexions. In the event, political power proved to be more effective than private enterprise.

The Afrikaner made his great leap forward on the political front. Here he had the advantage of numerical superiority over the British, a greater cultural cohesion, a score to settle and a demonic will to rule. The British created the conditions for his success by introducing parliamentary government, the two-party system, and an all-white franchise in the northern provinces. With the vote limited to whites, sixty per cent of whom were Afrikaans-speaking, the Nationalist party needed only to consolidate the Afrikaners, or a sufficient majority, in one voting camp. The intelligentsia — politicians, predikants, teachers’ lawyers, writers and civil servants — prepared the ground. They harped on past injustices under British rule; isolated Afrikaners in separate religious, social and economic institutions; agitated for equal language rights; pressed for total racial segregation; and carried on a remorseless vendetta against Africans, Coloured and Indians.

Afrikaners and British never allowed their antagonisms to disrupt the racial order. They manipulated Africans and Coloured for party gain, and made common cause against them in defence of white supremacy. At the crucial constitutional stages — in 1902-7 after the Anglo-Afrikaner war; in 1909-10, when the terms of unification were being decided; and again in 1936. the year in which Cape Africans were removed from the common roll — the British agreed to the principle of exclusive white power. An extension of the franchise across the colour line would certainly have improved their electoral prospects, and might have tilted the balance in their favour. Yet they chose to remain a political minority within the white elite. The powers of government passed to Afrikaner nationalism. The British had the satisfaction of continuing to possess the bulk of the country’s industrial and commercial wealth.

Economic conflicts between Afrikaans- and English-speaking whites are likewise settled where possible by introducing some kind of racial discrimination from which both stand to gain. Competing shopkeepers or estate agents will unite in pressing for measures to limit the business activities of Asians, prevent Africans from trading in the main shopping areas, or give whites an exclusive right to own land in selected suburbs. Competition for African workers, to take another example, has been a chronic cause of dissension between farmers and industrialists. The farmers have clamoured for and obtained stringent pass laws to direct the flow of peasants away from industrial areas to the farms. Industrialists and mine owners have found another solution, more satisfactory to themselves. They recruit foreign Africans from territories in southern and central Africa, thereby obviating labour scarcities from which the home-born African would benefit.

Farmers avoid that other thorny labour problem, the competition between white and black workers, by simply employing Africans and Coloured on all sorts of manual work, both skilled and unskilled. This was the colonial pattern, which left little room for white farm hands, and it persists in spite of considerable mechanization in agriculture. The practice of reserving preferred jobs for whites is an essentially urban phenomenon, which might not have developed into d rigid system if industrialists had been allowed a free hand. They have never ceased to complain (less vigorously now than in the early days of industrialism) that a division of labour by race insulates white workers against competition, deprives Africans of the opportunity to acquire and apply skills, and makes for inefficiency in both groups. Because of this, it is said, outputs are low, costs are high, and manufacturers cannot hold their own in competition with foreign producers.

White liberals concluded that the industrial colour bar was incompatible with economic expansion, that Africans and industrialists had a common interest against defenders of the colonial order, and that substantial industrialization would erode racial rigidities. The absorption of a large and growing number of peasants into the permanently urbanized population would, it was hoped, narrow the cultural gap between whites and Africans, and promote cooperation between them. Then, too, labour scarcities resulting from economic growth were expected to unlock doors through which Africans could enter the skilled trades, to the greater good of all concerned: employers, benefiting from lower unit costs; Africans from higher wages; the domestic market from increased purchasing capacity; and white workers from wider opportunities for technicians and supervisors. As in western Europe in the nineteenth century, manufacturers would press for the removal of impediments to a rationalized capitalism which, acting as a solvent of social rigidities, would prepare the way for a multi-racial parliamentary democracy.

Contrary to such expectations, however, industrialism has not visibly eroded colour bars. Racial discrimination is more pervasive, onerous and humiliating than it was twenty years ago. The urban African population is six times greater than in 1900, yet it has never been so hemmed in and insecure as now. Low unskilled wage rates and a growing disparity between average white and African incomes have not prevented the growth of a large internal market or a considerable export of primary and secondary products. Statutory colour bars have been extended from mining to manufacturing industries despite scarcities of skilled workers. Rather than admit Africans to the skilled trades, the government subsidizes the immigration of whites. Any preference that industrialists have for a free, competitive labour market is discounted by the benefits they derive from a regimented labour force.

Mine managements employ indentured, migrant peasants; pay them less than a living wage; house them in compounds; repatriate the diseased, crippled and enfeebled to their villages; and renew the supply of able-bodied men by drawing on rural communities throughout the sub-continent. Low African wage rates offset the cost of recruiting and training peasants under expensive white instructors and supervisors. By tapping human resources in the outer regions of South Africa’s economic empire, mine owners can freeze the African’s wage and keep him out of skilled work. The gap between the wages of white and African miners is wider than it was thirty years ago; the number of Africans working on the gold mines is greater (370,000 as compared with 297,000); and the proportion of home-born Africans to the total African labour force on the mines has dropped from fifty-two to thirty-four per cent.

Not all African miners are temporary migrant workers. Many renew their labour contracts for cumulative periods of up to twenty or thirty years; some have wives and children in adjacent municipal townships. But the structure of the mining industry, the compound system and state policy discourage any tendency for men to settle and live with their families near the place of work. It is government policy to impose a similar pattern of instability on Africans employed in factories, workshops, commerce and transport. Pass laws, officially called influx controls, limit the size of the urban African population to the number required for labour purposes. Only persons who were born in a town or have lived there continuously for at least ten years may rent a family house and have their families with them. Men not so qualified may remain in a town only if hired to work for a stated employer. They cannot bring their wives and dependants with them, and must depart if unemployed. Entry is denied to women from rural areas. Africans who are surplus to labour needs and those unable to work because of old age and illness must return to the reserves.

Prosecutions under the pass laws amount to close on half a million cases a year and form twenty-three per cent of all cases tried in the criminal courts. Africans pay a high price in fines, imprisonment and loss of wages for their individual defiance of the detested laws; but the social costs are higher. Migrant labour and influx controls disrupt family life, waste manpower, breed inefficiency and cause instabilities in both rural and urban communities. The system is rational only as a device to fortify the white minority’s defences against the emerging African proletariat. The perpetual rotation of Africans under intensive police surveillance has a crippling effect on African labour and political organizations. The fear of being ‘endorsed out’ of towns has been a major deterrent to mass action against apartheid.

Labour migration accordingly delays the process of consolidating Africans into a class-conscious proletariat. At the same time, racial discrimination obscures any interests they have in common with white workers. Africans and whites may not intermarry, live in the same neighbourhood, or travel, eat, drink and play together. They mingle only at the place of work and never as social equals. White workers are trained for a position of authority; they belong to the racial elite, and share its powers and privileges. Buttressed by laws and conventions against competition, they derive great advantage from an artificially induced scarcity of skills. The average wage of a white worker is more than five times that of the African in manufacturing industries (£119 a month as against £22), and more than fifteen times that of the African in the gold mines (£5 17s. a shift as against 7s. 5d.). The difference in status and living standards instils a sense of superiority in the white and dispels any notion of unity or cohesion with the black worker.

Radical socialists in the early part of the century took the Marxist view that capitalists and workers belonged to mutually antagonistic classes. A social class in Marxist theory comes into existence when persons who perform the same function In the production process become aware of their common interests and unite to promote them against the opposing class. Marxists recognized the competitive element in relations between workers, but believed that it was less important than their identity of interests as wage earners. Racial conflict and colour prejudice were considered by-products of capitalism, which provoked such antagonisms in order to divide the workers. On the other hand, capitalism created conditions that forced workers to recognize their common interests. The productive system had an inherent tendency to reduce the worker’s living standards to the lowest level at which he could produce and reproduce. That tendency was being manifested in the substitution of low paid Africans for more costly white labour. Since it was futile to expect protection from a capitalist government, white workers would be obliged in the long run to organize Africans and combine with them against the capitalist class.

It is arguable on the historical facts that inter-racial class solidarity in the Marxist sense exists as a potential in South Africa; that the specified conditions can be realized if workers of different colour groups are allowed freedom of association. White workers actually acquired a class consciousness, combined in trade unions, formed political parties with a socialist objective, came out on strike, and occasionally, as in 1913-14 and 1922, clashed violently with the forces of government. There was also evidence of inter-racial cooperation. Whites, Coloured and Indians belonged to the same unions in some occupations; whites and Africans joined together in some situations to press for higher wages or trade union rights. Members of the International Socialist League and later of the Communist party filled a leading role in these struggles; and found ample evidence to support their thesis of eventual solidarity among workers of all races against capitalism. On the model of social democracy in advanced industrial countries, the radicals envisaged the development of a non-racial labour movement in which white workers, by reason of their experience’ status and social awareness, would take the lead and strive towards a social revolution.

The radical vision failed to materialize. South Africa uniquely demonstrates that a dominant racial minority can perpetuate social rigidities and feudalistic traits on an advanced and expanding industrial base. To recapitulate: civic status is determined at birth and for life by colour rather than class, by genealogy rather than function; a person can move up or down the social scale within his primary colour group, but he cannot transfer to another such group; functional categories cut across the colour line, but members of one race cannot combine freely with co-functionaries of another race. There is, indeed, less working-class solidarity than existed thirty years ago; trade unionism has been fragmented by national and racial cleavages; and African trade unions are mere shadows of their former selves. Racial alienation in the working class is undoubtedly the consequence of contrived factors, and not of innate antipathies or any biological bias.

White Labourism has been a primary cause of policies that incite racial hostility, isolate colour groups, and dissolve class consciousness in colour consciousness. The British immigrants who founded the Transvaal labour movement early in the century aspired to mastery over the African. Starting with the elementary trade union plea for protection against labour dilution and unfair competition, they absorbed the colour prejudices of the colonial order and identified themselves with every attempt to keep Africans and Asians in subjection. By means of trade union combination, political pressure, strikes and physical violence, they secured for white miners and artisans sheltered employment which cut them off from their fellow African worker and filled them with overweening racial pride and arrogance. The Labour party pandered to this sentiment, agitated for an all-white franchise, and fought elections on a platform of white supremacy. It was the party’s proud boast that it had been the first to propose total racial segregation. And indeed, by entering into a coalition with Afrikaner nationalism in 1924, Labour enabled the Nationalist party to take office and lay the foundations of apartheid.

Labour’s left wing stood out against this trend, refusing to abandon socialist principles for a share of white power. This rejection of racial chauvinism was the more remarkable because it emanated from the heart of the movement, from founders and leaders of trade unions and of the Labour party itself. At first they too, like their conservative colleagues, appealed mainly to white workers, but with a difference. Whereas the conservatives made socialism serve as a pretext for discrimination, the radicals clung to the concept of class solidarity; and insisted that racial antagonisms were actually a variant or sub-species of class conflict. It was an ideology for a mature working class, but made its biggest impact on the new African and Coloured proletariat, and that only after the radicals had renounced white Labourism.

Three events in particular — the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Pact Government of 1924 — externalized the radical element and freed it from Labourism’s obsession with white parliamentary politics. The war precipitated a split in the Labour party and led to the formation of the International Socialist League. In opposing the war, the League moved from a general denunciation of imperialism to a specific examination of its effects on South Africa’s social structure. Radicals gained new insights into the relation between class and colour divisions; they began to claim that Africans were not finally competitors of the white worker, but his potential allies, without whom he could not achieve his own emancipation.

The October Revolution added the new dimension of Marxist-Leninist theory and inspired the formation of the Communist party. During its incubation, the socialists took the decisive step of crossing the colour line. They formed tenuous links with African nationalism, and laid the basis of African trade unionism. Later, when joined to the world revolutionary movement through the Communist International, the party acquired the ideological equipment it needed to cope with the complexities of a society divided into antagonistic classes, races and nationalities. An important determinant of party policy was the International’s formula for bringing about a synthesis between working-class and national liberation movements in the colonies. New vistas were opened. The communists completed their transition to a genuinely non-racial party — the first in Africa — and orientated themselves in theory and practice to the struggle for racial equality.

The change took place gradually and with much internal strain. Communists who had spent their working lives in the labour movement could not easily detach themselves from the white worker. Their theory and some experience, notably in the Rand revolt of 1922, convinced them that he was potentially the most revolutionary force in the country. Africans, in contrast, seemed to be unorganized, politically backward, and more responsive to nationalism than to socialism. It appeared obvious to some communists that white workers were the natural instrument for welding Africans into a class-conscious proletariat; and that it was the party’s role to make both aware of their historical mission. The Nationalist-Labour government of 1924-8 shattered that belief. Labourism underwent a permanent change, became wholly absorbed in the white power structure, and ceased to operate as an independent political force. The communists continued to proclaim their faith in the eventual triumph of working-class unity. But in 1928 they adopted the dramatic perspective of a Black Republic, which placed them squarely on the side of national liberation.

For the next two decades communists cooperated or competed with the liberation movement in varying phases of protest and struggle. Their primary task was to dissolve racial, tribal and national antagonisms in a common class consciousness, and develop a strategy of mass action against white domination. This was a formidable undertaking which called for much personal devotion and the patient, laborious organization of people in the first stages of industrialization. To be an African and a communist was to run the risk of being victimized on both counts; and only those with a firm ideological conviction would meet the challenge. There was another and more serious hindrance to the reception of Marxist concepts. White labour’s persistent pressure for industrial colour bars, its segregation programme and rabid racialism had alienated African and Coloured leaders. Unable to reconcile class theories with the white worker’s behaviour, these doubted the authenticity of the socialist vision or thought it too remote to be a sound guide to action. They preferred radical liberalism to radical socialism.

Some commentators traced the preference to the influence of an African bourgeoisie. If that was a factor, its effects were hardly more than negligible. The ‘middle class’ consisted of small traders, building contractors, owners of bus companies or other minor enterprises in segregated townships. Pinned down in the poorest quarters, starved of capital, unable to buy land or to compete against whites in the open market, African entrepreneurs were virtually obliged to evade the restraints of discriminatory laws by resorting to subterfuge and illegality. Their conditions made them highly vulnerable to official pressures and averse from active participation in politics. In fact, few businessmen played a leading role in the African National Congress.

The leaders of Congress were intellectuals and trade unionists, but trade unionism was too weak to set the pace. The clergymen, lawyers, writers, doctors, teachers, clerks and chiefs who founded Congress or who decided its policies were constitutionalists. Predisposed by education, social position and expediency to a concept of gradual change, they aspired to political equality within the framework of parliamentary government. African nationalism originated in a defence of the Cape’s non-racial franchise or in demands for its extension to the northern provinces. The antecedents left a mark. Elsewhere in Africa, national liberation meant the transfer of political authority from an external imperial government; in South Africa it was construed as a sharing of power with the white minority. ‘ We, the African people,’ declared Congress in its Bill of Rights of December 1945, ‘urgently demand the granting of full citizenship rights such as are enjoyed by all Europeans in South Africa.’ It was a demand based on doctrines of popular sovereignty: universal adult suffrage, direct representation in parliament, and equality before the law. Congress was a radical liberal movement which never envisaged anything so far-reaching as the socialization of the land, mines, factories and banks.

Radical liberalism emanated from British institutions and values, and received a measure of support from sections of the English-speaking middle class; but it was no more acceptable than was radical socialism to white supremacists. The African elite included men and women who would have risen to eminence in any open society; yet all were relegated by reason of race to a civic status lower than that of the meanest white. Whether wageworker or peasant, businessman or professional, intellectual or chief, no African was admitted to parliament, municipal councils, the army, civil service, mining and financial houses, or managerial and technical posts. All Africans endured the humiliation and restrictive effects of pass laws, racial classification, residential segregation, and discrimination in public life. None could escape the state’s coercive sanctions. The African National Congress spoke for the entire African population when it presented a claim to full citizenship.

The achievements of Congress were considerable. It exposed the myths of white superiority and prevented them from hardening into sacred taboos. It kept the spirit of resistance alive and prevented Africans from sinking into a condition of submissiveness, of apathetic acquiescence in white power. It awakened a national consciousness that transcended language, tribal, provincial and class barriers. It gave the people dignity, pride in their cultural heritage, and a determination to regain their land and liberty. By refusing to compromise, or to accept less than total integration into the entire range of political and economic institutions, Congress stripped white South Africa of its humanitarian pretensions and revealed the true face of apartheid for all the world to see.

Congress was less successful in dealing with the problem of ways and means. A clear strategic perspective never emerged from the recurring discussion of grievances and goals. Fiery speeches, strong resolutions, deputations and petitions had an educative value, yet brought no relief. Nearly half a century of protest and appeals produced only more repression, greater discrimination. Communists and its own left wing urged Congress to adopt a grass-roots organization based on local branches and cells; and to mobilize the people for civil disobedience, political strikes, passive resistance and defiance of unjust laws. The main core of the Congress leadership remained addicted, however, to politics of a kind that, appropriate to a party competing for votes, acted as a mischievous anodyne on a people who, being voteless, were always the victims and never the makers of policy.

Parliamentary government in a racially stratified society made white interests paramount. If universal suffrage produces a welfare state under capitalism, white suffrage gives rise under colonialism to a colour-bar state. A political party that appeals to white voters alone invariably makes their claims the touchstone of policy, plays on their collective fears of black power, excites and reinforces their racial antagonisms, and consolidates them into a hegemonic bloc in opposition to the voteless majority. As long as Africans and Coloured retained a toehold in the Cape’s parliamentary system, they might hope to secure the backing of one or other candidate in search of votes. The removal of Africans from the common roll in 1936, however, virtually eliminated the possibility that any big party would attempt to create a consensus of white and black. The resulting polarization called for a new approach by Congress: an emphasis on strategy rather than on goals. In keeping with this demand for a reappraisal, questions of strategy dominated discussions and became the main cause of dissension in all sections of the liberation movement during the next decade.

For a while, at the time of the attack on the Cape franchise, it seemed as though Africans would move out of the parliamentary orbit and adopt a strategy of mass resistance to white domination. The prospect receded as leaders involved themselves in the election of white ‘native representatives’ to parliament and of Africans to the Native Representative Council. A few years later, when the Coloured community faced the first threats of political segregation, a group of intellectuals reacted by launching a campaign for the boycott of segregated institutions. Though tactically unsuccessful, the campaign stimulated young radicals to look for bolder and more imaginative methods of struggle than speeches and deputations. The issue came sharply to the fore again in 1946, when Natal and Transvaal Indians, reviving Gandhi’s satyagraha, launched a passive resistance campaign against compulsory residential segregation. At the same time, the great strike of African miners on the Witwatersrand, followed by prosecution of Communist party leaders and the refusal of Native Representative Council members to cooperate with the government, gave another big impetus to the demand for mass action. A process of cross-fertilization set in that held the promise of unity among Africans, Coloured and Indians.

The parliamentary victory of Afrikaner nationalism in 1948 signified a reversal of the post-war trend towards decolonization in Asia and Africa. The new government merged the old colonial autocracy with industrial capitalism in a programme of racial totalitarianism. A series of discriminatory laws completed the segregation of Africans, Coloured and Indians; reduced them to the same level of subordination; and consolidated the whites into one power bloc. Starting with the Suppression of Communism Act of 1950, which outlawed all expression of fundamental dissent as well as the Communist party, the government has used the coercive techniques of colonial rule to silence and suppress its radical opponents. Excluded from the safeguards of judicial process, they have been listed as communists; banned from trade unions and political organizations; exiled to remote, desolate regions; placed under house arrest; or imprisoned for long periods without trial.

Total oppression evoked total resistance. Flushed with success, confident of its ability to muster the great majority of whites behind its policy of apartheid, and contemptuous of the African’s will or capacity to fight back, the government mounted a ruthless attack on the champions of an open, non-racial society. They took up the challenge by resorting to mass struggle. Radical nationalists and radical socialists on both sides of the colour line joined forces in an alliance of the African Congress, the Indian Congress, the Coloured Congress and the Communist party. Defiance campaigns and national strikes led to the Sharpeville massacre of 1960. It marked another turning point. Parliament outlawed the African National Congress and the Pan African Congress, drove the liberation movement underground, and committed it to a strategy of insurrection, guerrilla warfare and armed invasion.

 

The full text of Class and Colour in SA, 1850-1950 is now available at The A.N.C. Books On-Line.