Codifying & implementing Apartheid, 1948-59

Codifying & implementing Apartheid, 1948-59

1. POLITICAL SUPPRESSION & TREASON TRIAL 1956-61

   • 1956, 156 members leading activists - of the congress alliance were arrested
     • Gov alleged a conspiracy that the congress movement planned to overthrow the gov by force, with violence & that they espoused communist ideas
   • BENEFITS FOR OPPOSITION
     • Provided occasion for congress alliance to meet/ confer & cement relationships
     • prosecution failed to prove ANC advocated violence/ was communist
     • used courtroom to publicise their anti-apartheid message in SA & abroad
     • International attention. Scandinavian countries
     • membership grew from 5,000 - 1948 to 100,000 -1950s
     • "The free world cannot be unconcerned when there is a land where 80% of the people are unfree" dean of Harvard
   • UNDERMINED OPPOSITION
     • ANC split forming PAC
     • End of trial, ANC & PAC outlawed=banned
     • Long lasting trial - 5 years - stopped the ability of leaders to campaign & protest
   • 1950s gov increasingly concerned with growing influence of congress movement

2. TOMLINSON REPORT & THE BANTUSTANS

   • BANTUSTANS
     • Africans- multiple identities - could see themselves as a member of a clan, zulu SA & Johannesburg worker
     • Africans subdivided into their historical chieftaincies & lang groups, but whites would remain whites, no separate bit for white Afrikaners/english Portuguese speaking
     • New areas of white-owned land bought to extend homelands- still made up very little % of SA's land area. NP not prepared to divide SA equally as whites wouldn't accept the sacrifice
   • BETTERMENT
     • WHY; enviro degradation/soil erosion in the reserves thought by gov to be undermining peasant agriculture, intensifying poverty & driving more A to cities
     • rural families moved into compact villages; deeply resented
     • divide the pastures with barbed wire into smaller paddocks, animals moved from paddock to paddock throughout year to stop overgrazing
     • Strategy that would stop enviro degradation & enable Africans to intensify their farming without destroying the soil & vegetation
   • PURPOSE OF THE TOMLINSON COMMISSION
     • Make apartheid work/ successful
     • Believed that economic development of former reserves had to be heart of Apartheid, 'sustained development of Bantu areas on a large scale' was 'germinal point'
     • REJECTION OF VERWOERD
       • Private land ownership would undermine the power of chiefs on whom he relied on for political support
       • Felt bantus should develop at their own pace & wouldn't allow outside investment
       • Landholdings enlarged - millions of a lose land & migrate to cities for work - undermine a central tenet of Apartheid
       • Didn't want to create subsidised industries that might compete with urban white business
       • Didn't believe white SA would support expenditure
     • RECOMMENDATIONS OF TOMLINSON
       • Advocated major funding for rural industries
       • Private enterprise, SA & foreign should be encouraged to invest in these areas
       • Bantustans can be transformed by state investment of £100 million +
       • Create a class of full-time farmers by increasing size of pot & turning communal into private tenure, implied pushing families off land, in order to create bigger economic units for farming