1929: ECONOMIC CRASH

segregation. The Cape Times ran a series of front page articles severely criticising Smuts. He was incensed. “I cannot understand why the Cape Times makes these attacks on me in my absence and what is behind it,” he wrote in a letter to his wife, Issie Krige.

In his book, Cape Times – An Informal History, former assistant editor of the Cape Times, Gerald Shaw, wrote about how Smuts had been lampooned in a cartoon published in the newspaper. heimer scared the miners into legal slavery by warning that many diamond mines were close to collapse.

Many smaller businessmen were bankrupt, but the billionaires progressively gained control of South Africa’s immense economy.

Even though the 1929 Wall Street Stock Exchange Crash sparked the Great Depression of the early 1930s and was the greatest financial crisis of the 20th century, it hardly affected the heavyweights in the stock market, even more so those who owned the gold retrieved from South African soil.

Hertzog and his financial advisers became aware that the tide of prosperity that had bolstered the government since the 1924 elections would be stemmed by the economic crash. The government had been advised that the coming financial year would be bad. The price of wool was down; maize was practically unsaleable; export fruit was fetching low prices; and there was no local market for wheat. The gold mines were struggling and the revenue from them dropped sharply.

A worldwide drought that followed in the 1930s, combined with the Wall Street crash, ruined the finance and agriculture industries of almost the entire world. The consequences of these disasters prompted mass unemployment and impacted heavily on individuals, families, communities, countries and world politics for decades.

Unemployment and homelessness soared. Businesses were forced to close and while the wealthy held on to their opulence, famine squeezed the life out of everyone else.

In 1931, Britain tried to remedy the Wall Street crash by coming off the gold standard. This move would severely affect SA’s already waning economy, and in defiance of Britain and in desperation, Hertzog tried to retain the gold standard.

However, Smuts fiercely opposed Hertzog and tried to pressure Parliament to comply. Hertzog’s cronies, some of whom later sided with Smuts, convinced him to submit.

Many South African newspapers, including the Cape Times, prophesied that Smuts’s plan would return the economy to normal, but the crash continued to have lasting effects, proving them wrong.