A. B. Xuma: “Bridging the Gap between White and Black in South Africa”

Context

The demography of South Africa reflects a history of migration and interaction over the course of many centuries. The majority African population—farmers and cattle herders speaking Bantu languages—slowly migrated into the eastern 40 percent of South Africa during a period of more than a thousand years. The indigenous Khoisan speakers, mainly hunters and gatherers (though some owned cattle as well), lived in the western and central zones of South Africa. When the European employees of the Netherlands East India Company arrived in 1652 to set up a refreshment station at Cape Town, they encountered the Khoisan speakers but had little or no contact with the Bantu speakers on the frontier until the 1770s. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European immigrants, mainly from the Netherlands, France, and parts of Germany, lived a frontier existence through which the three European groups intermarried, slowly migrated eastward, and began to identify themselves as a separate European group, Afrikaners, with an evolving language, Afrikaans. Sexual relations between European males (mainly company employees and sailors) and free Khoisan women and slave women (of Malay or tropical African origins) yielded a racially mixed population who still refer to themselves as “coloreds.”

After the 1770s, the history of African-European contact became one of periodic conflict well into the nineteenth century, when important Bantu-speaking kingdoms with strong central governments emerged. South Africa came under British colonial rule early in the century. After 1836 a portion of the Afrikaner population migrated into the South African interior to live among Bantu speakers rather than on a frontier with them. With the discovery and concomitant exploitation of diamonds in 1867 and large quantities of gold in the mid-1880s, South Africa became a modern industrial country.

British colonial rule ended in South Africa on May 31, 1910. At that time, there were approximately four million Bantu-speaking South Africans, 1.2 million whites, and considerably smaller numbers of coloreds and Indians (who had arrived in the later nineteenth century). The whites were divided between the Afrikaans speakers (about 60 percent of whites) and the English speakers. Political power, economic control, and ownership of more than 90 percent of the land rested with the white minority. South Africa was divided into four provinces: Cape, Natal, Orange Free State, and Transvaal. Only in Cape Province were a small number of Africans and coloreds who met an economic qualification allowed to vote (a privilege dating back to 1853). After 1910 many whites, including politicians, were asking what was to be done about the “native question.” Very few whites believed in equality between the races; consequently, there was no satisfactory answer to the question. One possible solution, according to some whites, was to separate the races as much as possible, and the white parliament passed laws trying to implement a segregation policy. Segregation laws fell into several categories: workplace, urban, and rural. Certain historians refer to the time between 1910 and 1948, the year that apartheid began, as the “segregation era.”

Black Africans faced endless humiliations in their daily interaction with whites. Workplace segregation included prohibitions against Africans entering apprenticeship programs to learn skilled trades, working in supervisory positions, or earning equal pay for equal work. Africans suffered from racial discrimination in trains, housing, and schools and before juries. They were also subjected to physical abuse, especially in rural areas, at the hands of white farmers. In theory, sharecropping on white farms was illegal in certain provinces; meanwhile, rural African land buyers could not borrow money from the semi-independent government Land Bank. Black Africans were prohibited from walking on the sidewalk in Pretoria, the administrative capital, during part of the 1920s; were denied drivers' licenses; and were given discriminatory criminal sentences compared with those for whites for similar infractions. Parliament declared sex between whites and blacks illegal in 1927.

Despite the oppression, an educated black population expanded during this period, mainly because segregated primary and secondary missionary schools did exist. Yet there were never enough such schools in South Africa, so completing primary and secondary school was a signal achievement for black Africans. Xuma attended Clarkebury, one of a number of excellent secondary schools. In 1916 the South African government opened the South African Native College at Fort Hare, in eastern Cape Province, for advanced training. Education abroad was possible only for a select few. The highly educated African elite, trained as physicians, lawyers, teachers, social workers, journalists, and editors, gained opportunities to voice their distress, disappointment, and opposition to discrimination in South African society, such as in meetings with government officials and multiracial public and private conferences. Thus, the Bantu-European Student Christian Conference, while unusual, was not unprecedented. Black African leaders also voiced their opinions at the annual meetings of political organizations like the African National Congress (ANC), founded in 1912, and in black-edited newspapers as well as white-owned newspapers.