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Many blacks saw the British victory as the hoped-for opportunity to put all
four colonies on an equal and just footing, but the treaty left their franchise
rights to be decided by the white authorities. The ex-Boer republics retained
the whites-only franchise. In 1909 a delegation appointed by the South African
Native Convention, including representatives of the coloured and Indian populations,
went to London to plead the case of the country's disenfranchised black population.
But when the Union of South Africa came into being on 31 May 1910 the only province
with a non-racial franchise was the Cape, and blacks were barred from parliament.
Of the estimated 6 million inhabitants of the Union in that year, 67% were black
African, 9% coloured and 2,5% Asian.
The South African Party, a merging of the previous Afrikaner parties, held
power under the premiership of General Louis Botha. Repressive measures to entrench
white power were not long in coming - the Masters and Servants Act, the reservation
of skilled work for whites, pass laws, the Native Poll Tax and the 1913 Land
Act which reserved 90% of the country for white ownership.
By the time this act was passed, the African National Congress (ANC) had come
into being on January 8 1912, in Bloemfontein, in an act of unity joining an
educated elite, the rural classes and tribal structures. The committee included
Sol Plaatje as secretary; the first president of the ANC was the Rev John L
Dube. Both formed part of a second unsuccessful delegation to London, this time
to protest the land grab.
Resistance started to assume a more outspoken and militant form, especially
when several hundred black women marched in Bloemfontein to protest against
being forced to buy passes every month. Similar protests were held in other
places, and participants arrested. The women were harshly treated in jail.
The Indian community were also suffering under viciously racist treatment -
in 1891 they had been expelled from the Orange Free State altogether. Mohandas
Gandhi, then a young lawyer who had arrived in South Africa in 1892, had become
a leading figure in Indian resistance. The struggle against the £3 Indian
poll tax in Natal involved a mass strike in which a number of Indians were killed,
but achieved success when the tax was removed in 1914 - the year Gandhi, by
then known as Mahatma, left the country.
In the white camp, Botha and Smuts were in favour of reconciliation with English
South Africans, but they did not represent the whole of the embittered Afrikaner
nation. JBM Hertzog headed up the more conservative Nationalist Party. Afrikaner
polarisation assumed dramatic form when South Africa entered the First World
War in support of Britain and anti-British Afrikaners unsuccessfully rebelled.
The ANC supported involvement in the war and unknown numbers of black soldiers
died. (South Africa gained control over the previously German-held South West
Africa - now Namibia - as a result of the war; the territory became a Union
mandate.)
With the inspiration of the October Revolution in Russia, the post-war period
was marked by strike action. In 1918 a million black mine workers went on strike
for higher wages, and 71 000 did the same in 1920 - the latter strike successfully
extracting a wage increase. Between those strikes, 1919 saw the formation of
the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union of South Africa and the convening
of the SA Indian Congress. In the same year Botha died and Smuts became Prime
Minister.
If official (white) South Africa was taking its place in the wider world as
a result of the First World War, the ANC was beginning to see itself as part
of the wider African efforts against colonialism in Africa. In its 1918 constitution
it referred to itself as a "Pan African Association" and the organisation
attended the second congress of the international Pan African Movement in 1921.
Another strike was looming on the mines - by a different group of miners. Rising
costs and a falling gold price led the Chamber of Mines to allow the lower-paid
African miners to do semi-skilled work. White miners reacted violently in a
1922 strike, militarily suppressed by Smuts. Hertzog's Nationalists found increased
support in the white Labour Party, and an election pact saw Smuts ousted and
Hertzog instituted as Prime Minister in 1924.
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