ENTRENCHING APARTHEID
Everyone knows apartheid started with the Nats’ narrow victory in 1948. But few remember the effort South Africans of all races made in a bid to ensure the party served only one term. This month marks the 70th anniversary of the 1953 election the moment apartheid really got going
On May 28 1948, South Africa woke up to the news that DF Malan, leader of the Herenigde Nasionale Party, had slunk into presidential office, with his party winning just 70 of the 153 seats in the House of Assembly. Despite having only a nanoscopic parliamentary majority together with the Afrikaner Party it had secured 79 seats the Nats went on to pass four repressive laws in 1950 alone. The Population Registration Act required every South African to be registered as white, coloured, Indian or black. The Group Areas Act designated suburbs according to race. The Immorality Act forbade “carnal intercourse” between races. And the Suppression of Communism Act gave the government wide-reaching powers to arrest just about anyone for doing just about anything. While these laws are rightly remembered as the building blocks of apartheid, they could all conceivably have been overturned if the Nats had lost the April 15 1953 election a plausible option, given its narrow parliamentary majority and the fact that it had lost the popular vote to the United Party (UP) in 1948. Malan’s first major roadblock came on March 8 1951, when he announced his plan to remove coloureds from the Cape voters roll. While he was formally introducing the Separate Representation of Voters Bill in parliament, Cissie Gool, the outspoken and charismatic councillor of District Six, led 20,000 people on a march through Cape Town. As they walked, they chanted: “We want the vote! Down with Malan.”
When the march reached the
Grand Parade, Gool read a resolution: “We who have brown skins know what it is to be humiliated and wear the badge of slavery and social outcasts. We condemn completely the [Separate Representation of Voters Bill] as an iniquitous and malignant measure which will rob the coloured people of longstanding
Of course, the apartheid government didn’t really care one bit about what coloured people thought of their bill. So they tried to remove coloured voters from the roll without the twothirds parliamentary majority required by the constitution.
A couple of months later, however, after the appellate division of the Supreme Court ruled Malan’s plans for coloured voters unconstitutional, he got the shock of his life when 3,000 white World War 2 veterans descended on Joburg’s cenotaph. They carried a coffin draped with the South African flag and bearing a large scroll which read: “Within this casket lies the constitution of South Africa, deposited for safe keeping with those comrades who fell in the name of freedom.”
The veterans’ movement was led by Sailor Malan, a farm boy from Wellington who had become famous as a flying ace during the Battle of Britain. It was known as the Torch Commando and grew exponentially. (The name came from the makeshift paraffin torches they carried at rallies.) Within three months, the Torch had almost 100,000 members enrolled in 206 branches. By the middle of 1952 its membership had swollen to a barely believable 250,000.
Neil Roos, the leading historian of early white opposition to apartheid, says the Torch “sought to cast itself as ‘apolitical’, waging a moral crusade against the National Party’s unconstitutional behaviour”. And Sailor Malan, who had no political affiliations and an abundance of moral credibility, was the perfect leader. If actions speak louder than words, his World War 2 track record was positively deafening.
Most Tortsies, as they became known, were probably more incensed at what they referred to as DF Malan’s “rape of the constitution” than they were at his treatment of coloured people. But this widespread and vocal outpouring of white opposition to apartheid remains an important and forgotten period in our history. In Sailor Malan’s words, the Torch Commando was “established to oppose the police state, abuse of state power, censorship, racism, the removal of the coloured vote and other oppressive manifestations of the creeping fascism of the National Party regime”.
Fired up: A meeting of the Torch Commando on April 26 1952. The group opposed the Nats’ attacks on the constitution
DF Malan and the apartheid establishment were petrified of the Torch Commando. Quashing nonwhite or radical opposition to their racist government was straightforward: they could use the new laws to throw offenders in jail. But dealing with tens of thousands of moderate whites led by an immensely popular, morally unimpeachable and undeniably handsome fighter pilot? Well, that was a far more delicate matter.
On May 28 1951, Sailor Malan led a “huge procession” to the gates of parliament. True to form, DF Malan refused to receive them, precipitating a brawl in which at least 160 were injured.
No-one could agree on who started the fight. One UP senator said policemen had attacked the crowds with “pretty hefty” weapons. Afrikaans newspaper
Die Burger, meanwhile, blamed the unruly behaviour on coloured people, and its coverage highlighted the gory wounds sustained by policemen.
While the Torch Commando accused the Nats of gutting the constitution, DF Malan and his cronies used the violence of May 28 to claim that it was the Torch abandoning “constitutional methods”. Much was made of the group’s “Communistic colour policy a clear message that DF Malan was considering using his Suppression of Communism Act to silence them.
The ANC also attempted to rain on DF Malan’s parade. The Campaign for the Defiance of Unjust Laws officially kicked off before dawn on June 26, when Raymond Mhlaba and 32 other singing protesters entered a Port Elizabeth railway station through a “whites-only” entrance and were arrested.
By the end of the day about 250 people were in tjoek; over the next few months this number swelled to more than 8,000. Doctors, factory workers, lawyers, teachers, students and ministers defied the law by swimming at white beaches, sitting on white benches and travelling on white buses. While being rounded up they chanted, “Hey, Malan! Open the jail doors. We want to enter.”
In November 1952, Nelson Mandela and 18 other campaign leaders were arrested and charged under the apartheid regime’s favourite toy, the Suppression of Communism Act. Though he had no choice but to find them guilty, the presiding judge did point out that the charges had “nothing to do with communism as it is commonly known”.
The leaders didn’t end up in jail, however, as their nine-month prison sentences were suspended. But they were all slapped with banning orders that made it illegal to speak to more than one person at a time, restricted them to a single municipality and forced them to report to the police every week.
With the ANC silenced and the protests of coloured people ignored, the Torch Commando set its sights on helping the UP (and the much smaller Labour Party) defeat the Nats in the 1953 election.
The great thorn in the side of all opposition parties, however, was how to gain traction in the countryside. In an attempt to drum up support on the platteland, Sailor Malan launched Operation Backveld. Only, this proved far harder than the Torch had imagined and they eventually resorted to busing in urban Tortsies to Nat strongholds. In Piet Retief, Torch members sabotaged a Nat meeting by turning off the lights. They then went on to win the mass brawl that ensued.
But how would they fare in the electoral war? The Torch attempted to pull out all the stops in the lead-up to the 1953 election, supplying 15 full-time organisers, 5,000 cars and 60,000 canvassers. But despite their best efforts, the UP received a bloody nose at the polls; the Nats extended their majority in parliament by 19 seats.
Though it took a while for the Torch Commando to officially shut up shop, its flame had been reduced to a flicker.
In 1952, in a poignant reminder of the importance of the separation of powers, the appellate court had found DF Malan’s Separate Representation of Voters Act was “invalid, null and void and of no legal force and effect”.
But the “good” doctor took the 1953 election win as his cue to pack the court with right-wing judges who supported apartheid. While he was at it, he changed the makeup of the Senate in such a way that the NP miraculously increased its control from 25% to 87%. (This despite the fact that the NP had won just 49% of the popular vote to the UP’s 48%.)
When the issue of removing the coloured vote was taken back to the court in 1957, the freshly packed court wasted no time in approving the plans.
After 1953, mass white opposition to apartheid fizzled so much so that in the lead-up to the 1966 election, the Sunday Tribune declared that “Mr Verwoerd could not lose this election if he tries”.
More radical opposition, meanwhile, was to feel the full might of the law. Apart from the Defiance Campaign, the ANC arranged no major initiatives in the
1950s. And by the early 1960s all its leaders were either in prison or in exile.
There’s no denying that 1948 started the rot. But with the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that 1953 sealed the deal.
Dall is, with Matthew Blackman, author of Spoilt
Ballots: The Elections that Shaped South Africa