When the Blue Bulls won the Super 14 Cup at Orlando Stadium, whilst many may have missed the significance of the occasion, the Blue Bulls coach offered us an important respite when he remarked, amidst the euphoria that: “One day we will look back and really appreciate what it was about”.
For, indeed, this was not an insignificant and minor occasion just as the founding of the Union of South Africa was such an important event a hundred years ago.
Those of us lucky to be alive today are accorded that precious moment to look back and really appreciate what it was about. We carry with us the responsibility to find what was positive in that act, if any, and yet to negate through our present-day deeds its destructive legacy of exclusion, racism, class oppression and gender discrimination.
Before we proceed further, we need to remind ourselves that the colonisation of South Africa, as that of the other colonies, had been spawned by the emergence and spread of capitalism as a global system.
In 1776, Adam Smith wrote that the discovery of America and that of the passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope were two greatest events recorded in human history, the full extent of whose consequences at the time, although having been very great, were still impossible to can have been fully comprehended.
However, he said:
“To the natives both of the East and the West Indies, all the commercial benefits which can have resulted from those events have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have occasioned”. (The Wealth of Nations)
Almost a century later, Marx said these events “signalled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production” and were “the chief momenta of primitive accumulation”
They not only shaped the modern South African State; they also laid the basis for the subsequent dreadful misfortunes that black people experienced.
More than anything else, it was the discovery of diamond and subsequently gold that was to play a decisive role in the course of political and economic development in South Africa.
It created new social conditions which were, in many ways, different from the general situation of the classical colonial system pertaining throughout the African continent.
As a result of these discoveries, the settler communities decided to settle here permanently, which accordingly, created a peculiar situation in which both the colonial ruling class with its white support base and the oppressed majority shared a single country.
In this arrangement, all white classes benefited, albeit unequally and in different ways, from the internal colonial structure and, conversely, all black classes suffered national oppression and economic exploitation, albeit in varying degrees and in different ways. This is what came to be known as “colonialism of a special type”.
The discovery of mineral wealth propelled the conditions for an advanced capitalist economy in South Africa, but within the broader system of colonial domination in the imperialist epoch.
This created new levels of economic greed and political ambitions among the British imperialists, and set them along the path of war. The so-called Anglo-Boer War was an imperialist war fought to decide the ownership of the richest gold mines in the world.
Despite it being regarded as a “family quarrel” to forge “white unity”, many Africans participated in the war and suffered in one way or the other, and yet their contribution was neither acknowledged nor rewarded.
This was deliberate as neither the Brits nor the Boers wanted to be seen to owe the Africans anything out of the war. No rewards would be had by them owing to their participation in that war.
The defeat of the Boers and end of the South African War resulted in the consolidation of the British Empire over all of South Africa. In the post-war arrangement, the Afrikaners emerged as junior partners, even though they were never to accept this position.
They began systematically to capture the levers of the state and the economy in order better to position themselves in the new settlement, forging specific economic interests and addressing them as a volk.
Critical among what they did, was the use of korrektiewe aksie (corrective action), in order to enhance their political and economic aspirations as a group, the same korrektiewe aksie they today think the victims of the legacy of this marriage of convenience achieved in 1910 do not deserve.
The union partially settled the native problem by uniting the two central political blocs of the white establishment and excluding the black majority in the settlement. This was of course unsurprising. The priority now was the unity of the two main white groups to resolve the native question, the proverbial white man’s burden. In this arrangement, these two groups would have no concern over what black people thought or aspired for. Unsurprisingly, in the Union, race was to play a primary role.
South Africa was dubbed a white man’s country and democracy itself was defined as a white man’s democracy.
Accordingly, we see that the Union of South Africa was, throughout its existence, an anti-African Union wherein black people had neither a political role nor economic stake. It was predicated on this notion that Africans were cheap and expendable labour, and were not South Africans.
By failing to grant black people political rights, their economic exploitation was turned into law and it created a situation in which race, class and gender oppression were so enmeshed to a point where national liberation would be meaningless without at the same time pursuing gender equality and class emancipation.
This meant that they could neither pursue their political aspirations nor realise their rightful economic stake in the Union, which would condemn them to be perpetual producers of wealth, which they produced not for their own benefit but for its appropriation by the white minority, treated not as human beings, but as beasts of burden cheap labour without rights.
It was further to ensure that they do not become a political threat to the establishment, which feared that by offering them a franchise they would use their numbers to unseat them, take over the state and transform themselves from the status of right-less producers to that of masters of their own destiny. The natives were an ever-present menace in the union.
Accordingly, the exploitation of their labour, going hand-in-hand with their political oppression, became a vital instrument for the pursuit of economic plunder. The exploitation of the country’s resources depended upon black labour.
For this reason, the colonial regimes would put in place a battery of laws to control and exploit black labour such as Bantu Education and others intended to ensure that no skills would be had by black people, generation after generation.
This explains why the European settlers and successive white regimes relied on unskilled African labour and consequently why South Africa is today faced with such enormous lack of skilled labour and high unemployment particularly among Africans.
Among whites, the unemployment rate has always hovered at approximately four percent from 1970 to 2008, and only went up to 6,1% during the recession, which disproves the lie that the white youth have been negatively affected by policies such as affirmative action and black economic empowerment.
The current structure of the South African economy was created over a century ago, and was pursued with unyielding zeal and unnerving totality during this period that started in 1910. Clearly, the union economic structure was so perverse that it negated its own possibility for further development and modernisation, and eventually became a fetter to capitalism itself.
From the white minority state established in 1910, we see that Africans got the rawest deal, which is why in 1976, Walter Sisulu characterised the central feature of the revolution in South Africa as an African revolution, saying that: “In the first place, the oppression and exploitation of the African people is the pivot around which the whole system of white supremacy revolves”.
By this he meant that that the liberation of the African people was a necessary condition for removing the oppression of all other national groups in South Africa.
1994 achieved what the founders of the Union of South Africa in 1910 had been too shorted to envision, the creation of a non-racial Union of South Africa. Standing as we do at this historic juncture, only our extravagant imagination can allow us to go back a century earlier and imagine what would have been achieved had the Brits and the Boers sat together in Vereeniging with the leaders of black people such as Dr. Abdul Abduraman, Professor Jabavu, Mahatma Ghandi, Dr. John Dube, Dr Pixley kaIsaka Seme and Charlotte Maxeke together to found a non-racial Union on the basis of universal franchise!
Indeed, the past hundred years would have turned out vastly and qualitatively different and the previous century of racial strife would have been avoided - South Africa would long have been a non-racial nation.
For, this is precisely what the Union of South Africa failed to achieve - whilst it united South Africa; it deliberately and dismally failed to forge a united, non-racial and democratic nation.
By precipitating as it did the unification of South Africa, it also helped to precipitate the forging of a liberatory African nationalism that eventually culminated in the formation of the South African Native National Congress, bringing together the various native congresses that already existed in the colonies, and compelling compelled them to forge a Congress of the African Nation along the whole territory of South Africa.
The formation of this Congress of the African Nation was an answer to the Union of South Africa, and set us along a path of a truly democratic and non-racial nation, an antithesis of the colonial state of 1910, which antithesis must find expression in the fulfilment of the social aspirations of all South Africans, black and white, so that they all can identify themselves with the new state.
The new South Africa we are constructing today is duty-bound consciously to be inclusive and biased towards the poor and the vulnerable of all racial groups. To say this does not mean that the liberation of the Africans and black people in general is no longer relevant.
However, it acknowledges the new political and social dynamics spawned by the progress of the national democratic revolution, such as that there are poor and vulnerable white South Africans who equally need the support of the new developmental state.
The new South Africa established in 1994 has been premised on the most noble values of the Freedom Charter that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people,” that “our country will never be prosperous and free until all our people live in brotherhood, enjoying equal rights and opportunities” and that “only a democratic state, based on the will of all the people, can secure to all their birthright without distinction of colour, race, sex or belief.”
This remains a revolution of the whole people, whose liberation of the most oppressed would simultaneously result in the liberation of white people in general from the burden of apartheid which they have carried for centuries around their necks like a heavy chain.
In particular, it would free the white working class and the white poor from the pact they made with white capital to defend the status quo. It would bind them into a new principled pact with their black counterparts and free them wholeheartedly to pursue their genuine interests together with their black counterparts without having to pay allegiance to a system that negated their genuine interests as a class and made them partners to its depravity.
This is what a real Union of South Africa should have been about in the first instance!
I thank you.
Issued by: Department of Home Affairs
1 June 2010
Source: Department of Home Affairs (http://www.dha.gov.za)
