No Say in the Vision: South East Africa, 1945 - 1968
Military Occupation:
Lieutenant-General Clifford Borain, 1945 | | |
Governors:
Major-General Evered Poole, 1945 - 1951
Air Chief Marshall Arthur Harris, 1951 -1965
| Deputy Governors:
AG "Sailor" Malan, 1945 - 1949
Sybrand Engelbrecht, 1949 – 1965
| Chairs of the Advisory Council:
Colin Steyn, 1946 – 1949
David Teixeira Ferreira, 1950 - 1951
Nicolaas Havenga, 1951 - 1952
Chairs of the Legislative Council:
Eben Dönges, 1952 - 1957
Oswald Pirow, 1957 - 1961
Hendrik van den Bergh, 1961 -1966 |
Governor:
Malcolm MacDonald, 1965 - 1968 | Deputy Governor:
Anthony Duff, 1965 - 1968 | Chair of the Transitional Council:
Moses Kotane, 1966-1968 |
Genesis
The British Mandate Territory of South East Africa was a creation of the Halfway House Protocol, an agreement between the victorious allied states for Britain to control the territories of the defeated South African Republic and the Laurentian provinces of Portuguese Mozambique that the Republic had occupied before World War Two.
The territory was the brainchild of Jan Smuts, the allied commander and Union Prime Minister. In the wake of the war, he saw the opportunity to bring the former Republic into “civilised” South Africa, and extend the Union to the Save River. Smuts was never that clear of how this would come about, speaking frequently, but vaguely, in the Union parliament of “our partners”, and “our brothers in Pretoria” – the same was as he spoke of “our brothers in Windhoek” – and “the long-term growth of the subcontinent.
Smuts’ untimely death in 1949 meant he never saw the territory’s changing face. Perhaps that was for the best. Historians still argue whether it was the indifference of the first governor, or the single-mindedness of the second that shattered Smut’s vision, or whether the aspirations of the majority were always going to consign his plans to the dustbin of history.
A Quiet Pool
The first Governor of South East Africa, Evered Poole, claimed in his memoires that Smut’s vision was of a partnership between the “loyal” Anglo and Afrikaner soldiers and the “practical” Afrikaner and Portuguese industrialists that would outweigh the “fanatic” nationalists, and gradually woo the conservative farmers away from them with better equipment, fertiliser and transportation. Poole bought into this, to some extent, although he mainly wanted a peaceful territory, and he reported to London, not Cape Town anyway. He focussed on post-war reconstruction, and took counsel from prominent white South East Africans like Colin Steyn from Bloemfontein, David Ferreira from LM, and the visionary industrialist Hendrik van der Bijl. Poole appointed the three men to the Advisory Council, which had been set up by the Halfway House Protocol, where they served alongside former resistance fighters Andrew Mlangeni, Eduardo Mondlane, and Moses Kotane.
Poole left the ‘De-Nazification” programme to his deputy, the fighter ace Commodore AG “Sailor” Malan. Malan had fought much of the war alongside black Caribbean and Rozvi pilots, and had indeed been based in the Rozvi Kingdom for the first half of the war. He hated apartheid and all its works, and gave no quarter to the men who he saw as complicit in the racism, censorship and abuses of state power by the van Rensburg regime. Malan was also a firm proponent of socio-economic and political rights for the majority black population – and of the democratisation project more broadly, both aspects Poole showed little interest in. Malan was a friend of the third key man in Pretoria, the Royal Rozvi Representative.
Brighton Hove had fought the war on the Rozvi Kingdom’s eastern front, relieving Buchwa, liberating Chicualacuala, and routing the Republic’s army in the battle of Chókwe. In the post-war settlement, the government in Danamombe named him as Representative, working alongside the Governor, in theory, but in practice, mostly with his friend and former comrade-in-arms, Malan.
The relationship between the three men, or more accurately between the Governor on the one side, and his deputy and the Representative on the other, went from polite to quiet, as Poole attempted to avoid any discussion of controversial matters, but matters came to a head in a meeting of the Advisory Council in May 1948, where Poole and Steyn wanted to appoint a lawyer named Charles Swart as President of the Supreme Court of the Transvaal, effectively the chief judge of the territory, despite Swart’s previous involvement with the van Rensburg regime as a prosecutor initially in Bloemfontein, but later in LM during the war. The Council meeting broke up without a decision on a recommendation to the Governor, and when Poole signed the proclamation of appointment the next day, Malan submitted his resignation.
Poole replaced Malan with his Quartermaster General, Brigadier-General Sybrand Engelbrecht, who served him without disagreement until the former’s early retirement on health grounds in 1951.
Bomber
To replace Poole, Churchill wanted a man he could rely on to hold the line against communism, and what he perceived as increasing communist influence in the territory. He selected Air Chief Marshall Arthur Harris, retired five years earlier, out of favour with the previous Atlee administration. Harris was not new to Africa: he had lived for some years in Kenya as a young man, and had fought under Smuts in the Tanganyika campaign during World War I, but he returned to Britain in 1917 and enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps, later the RAF, where he served the remainder of his military career.
Harris was sent to Pretoria with a very different vision from Poole: prevent the growth of communism in the territory and securing it as a loyal subject of the Empire. From this perspective, he was even less sympathetic than Poole to members of the Advisory Council complaining that a talented official or businessman had participated in the van Rensburg regime, its army or security services. When Ferreira retired in 1951, Harris replaced him with Nicolaas Havenga, a retired lawyer who had been mayor of Ladybrand during the war, who Poole had been using as an administrator in the eastern Orange Free State since then. Havenga’s appointment was seen as “an excellent compromise” by both the Governor’s supporters and men like Eben Dönges who advocated for “white self-government”. The former resistance fighters on the Advisory Council, however, were outraged, Mlangeni describing the appointment as “aimed at suppressing the political aspirations of the majority of the people who have no say” and Kotane refused to attend Council meetings chaired by Havenga. Protests by the communists in Krugersdorp, led by Fischer, and in Bloemfontein, led by Thabo Mofutsanyana were broken up by the police, although they allowed Sailor Malan’s speech in Johannesburg to go ahead.
But worse was to come. Early in the new year, Frederick Sturrock, a Johannesburg businessman who had served on the Advisory Council since 1949 announced his retirement, ostensibly on health grounds, although there were rumours that he was increasingly unhappy with the conflict in Council. Harris, deciding that an anti-communist, and someone with more security experience was needed, replaced Sturrock with “Lang” Hendrik van den Bergh, who had been chief of police in Bloemfontein during the war. The protests this time were massive. Mlangeni and Malan lead a protest of nearly 100,000 people through central Johannesburg, and Mondlane led a protest in LM.
The protests continued, more or less weekly until the morning in early February 1952 when the territory woke up to the news that Malan had been shot dead at his office in Yeoville the previous evening. Johannesburg police assigned blame to thieves, but the protestors had other views.
Then bombs were set off outside railway stations in Benoni and Rustenburg, which Harris immediately blamed on “the communists”.
Kotane, right up until his death always denied the Communist Party was involved, and that the decision to begin the armed struggle was not taken until some years later. To this day, historians and conspiracy theorists argue whether communists did in fact set off the bombs, either without Kotane’s knowledge, or he disowned them due to the backlash that resulted - or whether “Lang Hendrik” had the bombings done to justify the response he was itching to motivate for.
Either way, the response from the Governor was immediate: police crackdowns, an extended curfew in black townships, and the Communist Party was banned. The communist leadership went into hiding, and the African nationalists found their activities heavily circumscribed, for all that Mlangeni and Mondlane were technically still on the Advisory Council.
Things Fall Apart
Harris approached the Secretary of State for the Colonies with a plan for limited self-government, arguing that if be brought the whole white population on side, it would be easier to deal with the “black communists”. Oliver Lyttleton was quite happy with this approach - and the oversimplification that this would be a key step to “preventing communism in the British Commonwealth and Empire”.
So despite the security situation, elections were held for a Legislative Council, which would hold some limited powers over the territory’s domestic law. Men and women with residency and property qualifications could vote – the property qualifications effectively restricting the franchise almost entirely to white people. For the duration of the campaign, Harris kept security tight in the black townships and villages, and allowed (well-policed) white rallies to go ahead. He never said anything, but it was fairly obvious that Harris favoured Havenga, and the cluster of “moderate” Afrikaner and Portuguese businessmen the latter campaigned with. The results, when counted, shocked the governor.
All the seats in the 1952 election went to Eben Dönges and his allies, a group that largely conflated “white self-government” with Afrikaner nationalism. Van den Bergh was elected as part of this group. The Afrikaner nationalists were supported by the “practical” industrialists such as Francois du Toit, Havenga was bought off with an appointment to the Supreme Court (and a promise that he would be its President), and there was now only limited opposition from a few white “liberals”. Vanishingly few whites held to Smuts’ vision of loyalty to the Crown and some day joining the Union in Cape Town. Smuts’ vision had given way to a political culture that set itself in opposition to that, one of Afrikaner self-determination – and white privilege. The main groups contesting the Afrikaner nationalists were not “loyal” anglophiles, nor the white liberals, but the – unrepresented – African nationalists and communists.
Over the next decade, Harris became increasingly isolated from London, especially after what he saw as the fiasco of Suez. MacMillan’s increasing dismissiveness of imperial power east of Suez angered him, and Colonies Secretary Macleod’s openness towards independence for African colonies disturbed him. At the same time he had no love for the nationalist attitudes Dönges expressed, and once he was replaced by Oswald Pirow in 1957, he left day to day business with the Legislative Council to his deputy.
The one area where he remained firm, and aligned with the Legislative Council was on fighting communism. Both the African nationalists and the communists led protests and strikes, often working together, and so Dönges, Pirow, and even Harris were quite happy to use apply the epithet “communist” to any opponents of the territory’s government.
Then in July 1960, police stations were bombed in Carletonville, Giyani, and Chókwe. Harris declared a state of emergency and attended a Legislative Council meeting for the first time in years. Van den Bergh dealt with security matters for the Legislative Council, and Harris found he a man he could talk to, since the man largely avoiding the nationalist jargon Pirow spoke with, instead talking of security and order.
As the sabotage campaign continued, van den Bergh increasingly gave direction to the police, with occasional consultations with Harris, until in March 1961, Oswald Pirow was assassinated when a car-bomb went off outside a church he was to have spoken at. Van den Bergh took over the Legislative Council, and instituted a major crackdown, capturing and detaining Fischer and Motsoaledi, and Mondlane was killed “resisting arrest”.
Harris conveyed MacMillan’s misgivings over the extent of the crackdown to van den Bergh, who is said to have retorted curtly that
any compromise now will be a big farce. They would rarely speak again.
For the next three years Harris watched from the sidelines as the increasingly militarised police clashed with increasingly well-armed saboteurs – and increasingly well-supplied black and white protestors in Johannesburg, Vanderbijlpark, and LM. From outside the territory, the wind was cold. Mlangeni had gone into exile in Gaborone, and was protected there by Chief Khama, for all that it was a British colony. Moses Kotane and Thabo Mofutsanyana appeared out of hiding in the Rozvi Kingdom, and was welcomed in Danamombe by Brighton Hove, now leading the newly-elected Workers’ Party government. Forces were gathering, and there was nothing Harris could do as the “white self-government” he had replaced Smut’s vision with was buffeted from all sides.
Winds of change
In 1964, two things changed the territory’s situation drastically. Firstly, the Labour Party under Hugh Gaitskell displaced the Conservative government in London. Gaitskell was not merely a left-wing politician, he was a firm anti-racist, and in opposition, had been deeply critical of the discrimination policies of the Union government in Cape Town, and of the Legislative Council in Pretoria even more. Gaitskell also supported of independence for African colonies as a way to keep alignment within the Commonwealth, and stave off links between African nationalism and Moscow. The new Colonies Secretary, Barbara Castle, instructed Harris to “begin endeavors towards a peaceful end to the conflict in the territory, as precursor for independence negotiations”.
The second event took place a few months later in the neighbouring territory of Basotholand, which was transitioning from limited self-governance to independence. Prince Bereng Seeiso was crowned King Moshoeshoe II, and in his speech at independence he committed the new Kingdom of Lesotho to “fully support” the movement for freedom in South East Africa. There were loud cheers in the audience, and a photographer snapped Castle clapping. When the new King sat down, the first to congratulate him were Gaitskell and the Rozvi king, who both spent quite some time talking with him.
As 1965 dawned, Harris knew his time was up, and sure enough, in mid January he was recalled to London. Castle met him, and briefly and baldly told him someone else was needed to usher in a new era for the territory. Engelbrecht was also being retired, and they would both be replaced by career diplomats.
Van den Bergh, who had been making increasingly concerned calculations of the security situation, agreed to negotiations and then promptly retired into obscurity. The last of his words to appear in print, shouted over his gate at a journalist who was asking questions were “
Do you want to talk about farming? If not, get away from here?”
So it was in April 1966, that Moses Kotane was sworn in by Governor MacDonald as Chair of the Transitional Council, with Castle and Rozvi Prime Minister Brighton Hove at his side - as was Sailor Malan, who it turned out had not been killed, but had been in hiding in Lesotho, running supplies to the protestors. Chief Luthuli, the new Prime Minister in Cape Town, also attended, but they are very different men, leading very different countries, and there is no talk of unification, except in the most idle of Johannesburg’s taverns.
