Читать книгу Like Family - Ena Jansen - Страница 12

4

Legislation and Black Urban Women

The Native man is himself the arbiter of his women’s conduct and […] any incursion damaging to the domestic state of the Native people becomes an extremely hazardous proceeding.

Editorial — Umteteli wa Bantu, 31 January 1925

While South African cities may have different origins and histories, their demographics have all been determined by laws and regulations relating to race relations. After gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand in 1886, the mining settlement had a continuous stream of newcomers, and Johannesburg soon became the fastest-growing and largest city in South Africa. Katherine Eales identifies four distinct periods when black women migrated to Johannesburg: 1903–1912, 1913–1923, 1924–1931 and 1932–1939.¹ Apart from the many other restrictions they faced, the looming threat of the pass laws, which were eventually implemented in 1956, was a heavy burden to domestic workers. To this day, a defining characteristic of many such women is their status as migrant workers.²

1903–1912

‘She may take it into her head to walk away the next day’

The fact that 1903 is such an important date regarding the settlement of black people on the Witwatersrand is owing to the South African War (1899–1902).³ Quite apart from the imperialistic ambitions of Cecil John Rhodes, the war was provoked by the British to give them a greater say in the running of the gold mines in the Boer Republics. The lengthy war had left the region’s economy in tatters, and there was an urgent need for the mines to start producing again. There was a huge shortage of unskilled labour in the area around Johannesburg, and around 129 000 workers were urgently needed to go down the mines. In his influential study, Anglo American and the Rise of Modern South Africa (1984), Duncan Innes makes the following observation: ‘Given the centrality of the mines to the Transvaal’s economic recovery, the mines’ labour problems became the state’s Native Question in this period.’ Initially, the term ‘natives’ referred only to men, and so women were not considered part of the ‘Native Question’. The result was that, for many years, women occupied an ambivalent space in the urban environment.

Though at first state labour bureaus tried to lure black men to the cities, eventually force was exerted. So-called hut and head or poll taxes, introduced by the British elsewhere in Africa on a per hut or per household basis, were put in place, forcing rural men to join the cash economy, and thereby strengthening the workforce. An added incentive was to give rural wives a taste for western clothing, which would have accorded with mission school teaching. Violet Markham, a fiery supporter of Alfred Milner’s administration in the Transvaal, aptly remarked in 1904: ‘The Kaffir Bride […] may prove the most valuable ally the mine-owners could enlist in their struggle for labour.’⁴ The image of city life should, however, be unattractive and dangerous, so that brides would remain in the rural areas where they could take care of children, the sick and the elderly.

During the census of 1896, held a decade after the discovery of gold, the Gezondheids Comité (health committee) of Paul Kruger’s Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (ZAR) government established that out of a total of 14 195 black people in Johannesburg, 1 234 were women. Only 553 of these women did paid domestic work compared to 3 948 men. Most women were supported by men or earned their money by brewing and selling beer. By 1904 the black population had risen to 55 765, of whom 3 840 were women, while in 1911 there were 97 614 black people living in Johannesburg, of whom 4 357 were women.

A growing need for food in the expanding city led white farmers to farm larger areas of land. It suited them that the notorious Natives Land Act of 1913 prohibited the practice of serfdom or sharecropping, and that areas of the country allotted to black farmers totalled less than 10% of the entire land mass of the Union of South Africa. This was later expanded to 13%, comprising the ‘native reserve’ areas, which was under ‘communal’ tenure vested in African chiefs – land that could neither be bought, sold nor used as surety. The Act forbade black tenant farming on white-owned land, and since many black farmers were sharecroppers or labour tenants, the new law had a devastating effect, although its full implementation was not immediate. The Act strengthened the power of chiefs, who became part of the state administration, and it forced many black men into wage labour in ‘white’ areas. Leaders such as John Langlinalele Dube (1871–1946) and Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje (1876–1932) waged a long protest against the Land Act, but to no avail. Black families became increasingly dependent on their daughters to work the small patches of land they still had, which was one of the reasons they were so unwilling for them to go to the cities. According to European law, women were regarded as of full age at 21 years old, which clashed with traditional law, which considered women to be minors until they got married, though even then they were subject to fathers and husbands in many ways. As discussed in chapter 3, many young black women, especially those educated at mission schools, rebelled against traditional structures. Moreover, drought and infectious cattle diseases such as the rinderpest forced families to reconsider their mores. After sending their strongest young men to the cities they often had no choice but to allow their daughters to follow, though of course some women chose to run away from their villages.

At first women found work in households in rural towns, then some moved away, travelling by train to the Witwatersrand. Many went in search of their husbands or accompanied them to the towns and cities. Before 1928 there were no hostels for single women, and the only mission haven in Johannesburg, St Agnes, had beds for only a handful of women who were taught domestic skills. Initially this field of work, for which women would ‘naturally’ be eligible, was still dominated by men. White housewives had been released from domestic work, and were now part of ‘proper’ urban society. Charles van Onselen gives a fascinating description of this era in his Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand, 1886–1914.⁵ The fact that employment contracts, health conditions and the wages of black men were regulated and documented in their passbooks made them appear reliable to employers, but because black women were not yet subject to pass laws, they were deemed to be unreliable, unregulated and therefore untraceable should they break their contracts. An official called AH Faure put it thus:

You hire her this morning, and she may sleep on your premises one night, but she may take it into her head to walk away the next day … If the Transvaal housewife is given some hold on the girl, it would be quite different. She would not mind the trouble of training the girl, but as it is today, I would not take the trouble, I would much rather take an untrained kaffirboy … I feel sure of him for at least the month.⁶

Black women demanded equal wages, but were considered less able than men. While very few of the 70 000 men who worked in kitchens had any formal training, the general opinion was that women would need to be trained. Furthermore, it was a widely-held view that all black people were carriers of venereal disease, and because the women were often considered to be either prostitutes or sellers of home-brewed liquor, white people were afraid of allowing black women into their homes. Interestingly, however, the Contagious Diseases Commission never considered testing women. Van Onselen found, furthermore, that white women feared that sexual relations might develop between their husbands and young black housekeepers.⁷ Servant women were, of course, considered to be immoral and licentious by nature – a theory that has a complex history, as Eales suggests:

In broad outline, it was the product of a number of strands of elite white Western thinking spanning several centuries which, though contradictory at times, merged to produce a damning conventional wisdom about black urban women.⁸

An example of this common wisdom of the day may be found in BF Nel’s 1942 study, Naturelle-opvoeding en onderwys (native education and tuition). According to Nel, the moral standards of all black people are extremely low and even lower in the case of the ‘degenerate native in our towns and cities’. The mere thought of such people being employed as nannies disgusts him, and he considers it an extremely dangerous situation that ‘our public parks and playgrounds teem with servants with one or two children under their care’.⁹

Theories concerning the carnal, primitive nature of dark-skinned people were not the preserve of South Africans. In Europe the ‘degenerate nature’ of black female sexuality was considered to be on par with that of white working class women. Cultural and literary historian Sander L Gilman contends that the notion of the moral and sexual corruption of ‘the servant girl’ was ‘common knowledge’. It was generally accepted that lower class women were ‘sexual predators’ and ‘naturally’ inclined to prostitution.¹⁰ The fact that many young women were forced – in European cities as well as in Johannesburg – to prostitute themselves to keep body and soul together only served to strengthen the stereotype. In the South African context, the myth of the noble savage underpinned the idea of the city being the locus of sexual degeneration of the native.¹¹ The contorted thinking of officialdom held that the allegedly ‘idyllic’ lives of rural black people needed to be protected. Many prejudices had still to be overcome, however, before black women would be elevated to an ‘honourable’ familial status in city households.

The country’s urgent need for manpower eventually created the breakthrough for black women in the domestic worker market. Both the Chamber of Mines and the Commission for Native Affairs found it outrageous that able-bodied men were washing dishes and making beds. They began to insist that ‘houseboys’ go and work in the mines – but something else needed to happen to get the men out of the kitchens. When, during 1911 and 1912, a few instances of sexual assault occurred on the Witwatersrand and the culprits were found to be mainly ‘houseboys’, the so-called Black Peril was the leverage for radical change in the domestic worker market.¹² The state as well as prominent women’s groups such as the Vrouwen Federatie and the Ladies Temperance Union did their utmost to allay the fears of white employers, with the result that more and more households opted for black women servants. According to the Report of the Commission Appointed to Enquire into Assaults on Women (1913), the option of importing white servants from England was far too expensive; they would in any case get married soon after arriving and become ‘madams’ themselves. Local white working class women, especially the daughters of Afrikaners still struggling to get back on their feet after their losses in the South African War, loathed the thought of doing ‘kaffir work’, while racially-mixed women from the Cape resented the racial restrictions placed on them by the Transvaal government. Black women were, therefore, the perfect option.¹³

In February 1912, the Transvaal Provincial Council began to draw up regulations that would assist black rural parents in controlling daughters who moved to cities, and allay fears of losing lobola or boghadi payments from men who impregnated their daughters. At the same time, employers needed to be given an assurance that they would have some form of control over the women. Family metaphors were lavishly employed: ‘fatherly control’ by the state, and regular medical inspections as well as the ‘motherly care’ of female employers would protect the women. Eales notes the following:

Between the self-interest of those whites wanting chaste, submissive women as servants and the gender and generational conflicts of many blacks lay the expedience of white administrators who tried to exploit prevailing sentiment to bring urban women under control. The autonomy of black women was the trade-off.¹⁴

In order to reach these goals a pass system was considered, though the women, having witnessed the humiliation of their men, fought for their autonomy. They realised that such a system would be detrimental not only to female domestic workers, but also to women who made a living by selling liquor and prostitution. During 1912, many protest meetings were held in Johannesburg and other Witwatersrand towns, supported by black political groups and churches that believed the pass laws would subject women to maltreatment and bullying by the infamous black police force. Resistance was so great that the proposed pass law of 1912 was never endorsed. The decision was ‘that the question of including native females under the Pass Law was neither expedient nor necessary, as the enforcing of a native female Pass Law would be deeply resented by the natives all over South Africa, and would have a most prejudicial effect on our labour supplies’.¹⁵

At this stage, the freedom of movement of unemployed black men was already severely restricted. There was a strong government move to relocate all ‘surplus’ black people to the rural areas; only men who could prove that they had employment would be allowed in the cities. Exactly what the migrant patterns of women were is difficult to judge. Although they now had much easier access to the previously male-dominated field of domestic work, the women’s daily activities and problems passed by with hardly any documentation, except when this had some impact on the supply and productivity of black male workers.

1913–1923

‘No tampering with our women’

The aftermath of the South African War continued to disrupt the country for many years. Natural disasters such as drought contributed to the drastic impoverishment of rural areas and the implementation of the Natives Land Act of 1913 pushed even more black families off the farms. One of the results of this law was the widespread practice of wives of tenant families working in the homes of white farmers. Many women, however, chose instead to earn money by working in towns and later on in cities. The migrant labour system meant that many women went in search of their husbands, especially during the 1920s. The 1921 census found that, during the preceding ten-year period, the number of ‘non-European’ women in Johannesburg had increased by 180%. It became evident that women, too, were becoming urbanised at a rapid pace, whether because of their own initiative or desiring to reunite with their families. The languages spoken by these new arrivals were mainly seSotho and isiXhosa.¹⁶

At this stage, the ‘Black Peril’ began to take on a different form: whites feared that crime, disease and upheavals in the slum areas of Johannesburg would threaten their own neighbourhoods and the white community order. The Transvaal Commission for Local Government, known as the Stallard Commission, issued strict regulations regarding ‘redundant natives’ in an effort to chase them from the cities: those men who were ‘lazy’ or unemployed, and women whose ‘unattachment’ could be negatively interpreted because they had neither father nor husband to whom they were answerable.¹⁷ Domestic work was the only means by which a woman could live relatively safely, securely and independently in the city.

Despite strong opposition, a vociferous and influential black elite that included women developed, and various groups were formed in Johannesburg. In November 1917, Charlotte Maxeke, president of the Bantu Women’s League, met with Prime Minister Louis Botha, who was at the time also Minister of Native Affairs, to discuss the proposed new pass laws for women. Ten days later, she spoke out strongly against the proposals at an anti-pass protest meeting at Klipspruit.¹⁸ Many white officials and church leaders were clearly sensitive to the possible effects of opposition by black men to ‘tampering with their women’, and in 1919 the bishop of Pretoria warned of serious trouble if their pleas were not heeded: ‘The inference was that women were the inviolate property of men, and that the alienation of further rights of property from African men by officials of the white state was not a step to be taken lightly.’¹⁹

The idea that men were the ‘owners’ and guardians of women would persist for a long time. This is evident, for example, in Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948): Pastor Stephen Kumalo does not for a moment doubt that it is his right to rescue his son’s pregnant wife and his sister Cynthia from the wicked influences of a Gomorrah-like Johannesburg. Though at the time critics read Cynthia’s refusal to return to rural Natal as a sign of moral degeneration, I prefer to interpret this as evidence of a woman’s desire for independence.

1924–1931

‘Her husband is still her lord.’

The Natives (Urban Areas) Act No 21 of 1923 came into effect in January 1924, but made practically no difference to the freedom of movement of black women. They still did not carry passes and there was no way of establishing whether they had announced their arrival in a town or city at a ‘reception depot’. The population that was supposed to be governed by this law was undergoing rapid change. By the mid-1920s, not only single women but also many married women who had children and were determined to create a permanent life for themselves arrived in Johannesburg. The authorities were powerless to fit these women into their schemes. In the meantime, Charlotte Maxeke had established a small labour bureau near the Department of Native Affairs in Market Street where she assisted with the ‘placing of good girls in employment’.²⁰ Acknowledging that the women’s stay in the city would not be temporary led to the realisation that official policy concerning housing would need to be adjusted.

According to the 1921 census, only 23% of all white, Asian and coloured women older than 15 years were economically active compared to 92.4% of the men. Coloured women led with 37.4% being employed, while 19.4% of white women and 12.6% of Asian women worked. Only 10% of black women did paid work. As in all capitalist societies, women’s work was the least skilled and they were paid the lowest wages. Of the black working women, 65% were employed as domestic workers; at 85%, the figure was higher among working coloured women. More than anything else, their domestic work helped to create an image of black women as subservient and motherly – which also influenced the way the women perceived themselves and their relationships with their employers. In the intimate spaces of white homes, close ties developed between black women and white people which were completely different to other interracial connections. White and black women were in daily, close proximity, which enabled the development of personal relationships across the rigid colour line. However superficial and limited, these relationships were nevertheless impossible elsewhere. Because practically all white women had a black servant, they were free to go out to work, to become involved in various organisations or simply enjoy a vast amount of free time. Most white children grew up with a black nanny who was often like a mother to them but also always remained a servant. Furthermore, many of the reported (and probably unreported) cases of ‘immoral’ interracial sexual relations took place between male employers and servant women (see chapter 8).

In the meantime, young white women from farms and small country towns were also streaming to the cities in an effort to escape rural poverty. Although many of them found work in clothing factories, this was often at the expense of black and coloured women who could otherwise also have held these better-paid jobs.²¹ An example is Dina, daughter of Oom Gert in Trekkerswee (Sorrows of the Trek; 1915) by the poet known as Totius (1877–1953).

As long as pass laws proved ineffective in preventing black women from migrating to urban areas, the only way to control black families was by clearing slum areas and offering alternative housing, and then prohibiting further newcomers on the grounds that no housing was available. It was on this basis that Orlando township came into being south-west of Johannesburg in the early 1930s. For the next 50 years, until the 1980s, limited housing would prove an effective measure for controlling the influx of black people.

There was still a widely-held belief that most black women were either prostitutes or working in the illegal liquor trade. It was also believed that they were responsible for the spread of venereal disease, which, until the 1930s, was called the ‘sickness from women’, especially black women, caused by ‘bad blood’ that infected men during intercourse. This belief was even held by the respected writer RRR Dhlomo (1901–1971).²² In An African Tragedy (1928), the first novel in English by a Zulu writer, Dhlomo presents a fable of sin and forgiveness which illustrates the corrosive effects of the city on a pair of lovers who come from a rural area. The alarming thought that infected women might be working in city kitchens was persistent. An ‘eminent physician’, FA Saunders, was quoted in The Star of 13 May 1920 as saying:

If mothers saw their nurse girls’ surroundings and knew of their diseases, they would abandon their pleasures and nurse their own children rather than allowing them to run the risks they do. Your washing is done by people often rotten with venereal disease and your milk and meat may at any time be infected.²³

The Minister of Justice, Oswald Pirow, had initially proposed that the Urban Areas Act of 1923 incorporate health tests for black women, but his proposal met with strong opposition. A ‘Communist Party activist’ rejected his plan with the retort: ‘The government can go to hell. Let Pirow’s wife be the first to be examined.’²⁴ A compromise of sorts was reached when it was agreed that women living in municipal hostels would be tested and given a certificate to prove that they were healthy before going to work as servants. On the whole, however, black women were not interfered with.

Still, another infamous rule was extended to include black women. This was the so-called Night Pass Ordinance of 1902, according to which black men could be arrested if found walking around in white neighbourhoods at night. The law was initially meant to curb crime and to ensure that men got enough sleep for a good day’s work. At the instigation of Minister of Justice Tielman Roos, this humiliating ordinance applied to black women also from 1 February 1925. Extending the curfew law to include women was aimed at preventing ‘immorality’, with the fear of miscegenation surely playing a role. Indeed, Sarah Gertrude Millin (1889–1968) had just published her novel God’s Step-Children (1924), which contained a clear warning about the wretchedness of miscegenation. According to an editorial in the weekly Umteteli wa Bantu, the suggested extension of the curfew to include black women ‘sorely wounded native pride’. On 31 January 1925, the following appeared in this mouthpiece of Johannesburg’s black elite: ‘The Native man is himself the arbiter of his women’s conduct and is resentful of any interference in his matters marital […] Her husband is still her lord, and it is because of this old fashioned and very desirable relationship that any incursion damaging to the domestic state of the Native people becomes an extremely hazardous proceeding.’ Night passes would also subject women to pass controls. Although ‘no selfrespecting native would bewail the repatriation of the many women and girls of his colour whose conduct defiles the town, whose profanity is disgusting and whose prostitution is a national disgrace’, Umteteli regarded the notion that the extension of night passes to women might serve to ‘humiliate thousands of their respectable sisters’ as preposterous.²⁵ Two years later, the Immorality Act No 5 of 1927 was passed prohibiting ‘extra-marital carnal intercourse’ between whites and Africans. The Immorality Ordinance 46 of 1903 had already been passed in the Transvaal criminalising sex between black men and white women.

Because of the upsurge in industrial development and commercial expansion between 1924 and 1929 there were ample work opportunities for black men. According to the 1931 census, 70% of Johannesburg households still employed men as domestic servants, while there was an urgent need for labour in mines, industry and agriculture. The obvious solution was to replace them with black women, but this remained a complex issue. It was feared that an influx of rural women to towns and cities would lead to ‘detribalisation’ and an increase in black families settling in and around cities, where housing was scarce. Section 12(a) of the Urban Areas Act of 1923, as amended in 1930, determined that a black woman entering an urban area had to prove that she had accommodation; however, it was virtually impossible to enforce this law which many municipalities described as absurd and unfeasible. Eales explains that the poor implementation was due to the ambivalence of officials: ‘They might have been “natives”, possibly undesirable and immoral, but they were also women, and the wards of African men.’ In practice, the legal position of black women remained inviolable. There was a three-pronged effort to curtail their freedom: medical check-ups to curb the spread of venereal disease, the imposition of a curfew, and influx control by means of selective accommodation. However, without pass laws it was impossible to regulate the women’s movements and implement these measures.

To a large extent, the Native Administration Act No 38 of 1927 acknowledged common law, and therefore the special jurisdictional powers of traditional leaders and chiefs in the Native Appeal Courts, especially in cases concerning lobola and boghadi. The official position was that whatever was beneficial in traditional ‘Bantu culture’ should be combined with that which was beneficial in European culture. The prevailing idea was that black people belonged to ‘childlike races’ who should be taken care of. It was hoped that an efficient administration would contribute to the retention of tribal alliances, and that migrant workers would eventually return to the rural areas and help care for the elderly. Children who were born in cities could also be sent ‘home’ to be raised in ‘homelands’ which would function as kindergartens and retirement homes – in essence, the incubator and the graveyard of white South Africa’s workforce. Eales, however, warns against too much cynicism in this regard:

However patronising, arrogant or paternalistic their presumptions may have been, the earnestness with which many state officials and ideologues shouldered the white man’s burden requires formal acknowledgement.²⁶

Still, obtuseness coupled with commitment proved an even heavier burden for black women.

1932–1939

Finding a foothold

The Great Depression of 1929–1933 and the ensuing period of industrial growth had a massive impact on perceptions held by the next generation of white policymakers regarding urban black women. During the Depression many women lost their jobs, and efforts were made to prosecute and deport ‘unwanted’ women. At a conference held in Johannesburg in October 1938, liberal activist JD Rheinhalt Jones aptly summed up the situation, though his words fell on deaf ears: ‘We may today pass a hundred Urban Areas Acts, but not even steel fences and police guards will keep the Bantu from our cities.’²⁷

The black population had grown from about 150 000 in 1932 to 219 893 according to the 1936 census. This was largely the result of the systematic undermining of black people’s ability to sustain themselves in the rural areas. Farmers were suffering the effects of widespread drought and other natural disasters, but unlike their white counterparts, black farmers had no access to credit facilities or markets. Undeterred, and desperate to survive, they went in search of work in cities, and in the hope of building a new future, many brought their families with them. The authorities had no option but to pay attention to the growing urbanisation of black people. The socio-political crisis of the early 1930s – initially caused by high unemployment figures, an increase in urban settlement and insufficient housing – meant that values attached to order, stability and family cohesion were stressed. Terminology used by officials during this period was largely family-based and the reluctance of the state to force black women to carry passes was, in a sense, related to the growing symbolic force of the family unit.

During the 1930s, major changes took place in the history of white South Africans too. On the one hand there was the Depression, accelerated urbanisation and industrialisation, but the decade was also dominated by the findings in 1932 of the Carnegie Commission: the armblanke or poor white problem among Afrikaners was the acute manifestation of conditions in the country as a whole. Those in positions of authority were constantly harping on the rehabilitatory role of a healthy family life, in particular the edifying power of women in relation to their households and the volk or nation. Women had, however, to be taught to look after themselves so that they would not be a burden to the state. Although these findings were formulated with mainly poor whites in mind, there can be little doubt that social workers in other communities were influenced by these views.

A result of the panic about moral decline was that black women living outside of conventional family units, especially those who worked as prostitutes or in the illegal liquor trade, once again became the target of criticism. This was exacerbated by the Carnegie Commission finding that racial boundaries were starting to fade in the poorer areas of Johannesburg.²⁸ Black women therefore needed to contribute to urban order by maintaining an orderly family life. This expectation was based on their status as mothers: qualities such as subservience and selflessness were ascribed to them in spite of prevailing prejudices. Men of all races colluded in establishing the contours of ‘proper’ female behaviour. The enforcement of pass laws was once again abandoned: it should be a last resort, to be implemented only in the event of the failure of traditional sanctions by black men. Family reunification proved to be a major reason for black women leaving for Johannesburg and other Witwatersrand towns, though the image of these rural women was still extremely ambivalent, ‘peculiarly contradictory’, as Eales puts it.²⁹ It was fairly common for young women to have one or two children born before marrying their husbands, and many of them went in search of the father of their children, who were usually left with grandmothers or aunts. Often married women could not find their husbands, or were dismayed to discover that he had established a new family. In order to survive in the city, such women often had no alternative but to enter into a relationship with a migrant man. The ‘black seductress’ is, unsurprisingly, a typical theme in the ‘Jim-comes-to-Joburg’ genre of the time. Well-known examples are William Plomer’s short story ‘Ula Masondo’ (1927) and Dhlomo’s African Tragedy (1928). Women were always blamed for the downfall of men, and for general malpractices, such as the growing tendency of migrant men to start new families in urban areas and to deny their rural families.

It was 1931, and the curfew rule was still not applied to women. The Natives Laws Amendment Act of 1937 was directed at both men and women, but once again, none of the rules concerning medical examinations, passes, permits or certificates with regards to permission to be in the city were implemented. White officials remained hesitant to infringe on the freedom of women, whom they apparently regarded as the ‘territory’ of black men. They preferred not to antagonise the men, seeming to expect that the women could play a stabilising role. Women’s traditional roles were emphasised: in rural areas they took care of children and old people, while in the cities they helped to keep the working men within bounds. It was expected of them to be caring and maternal, both in their own families and in the white families where they worked.

These viewpoints were based on the assumption of the women’s obedience to black men. As Eales suggests, white officials simply assumed it would be an unneccesary duplication of discipline to try to take over their role. The 1937 law was therefore only applied to individuals such as liquor sellers, prostitutes and other ‘reprobates’. Salaries were kept deliberately low, often based on the supposedly low cost of living in the rural areas. The Department of Social Affairs in 1939 decided not to grant black women the ‘mother’s pension’ to which they were entitled according to the Children’s Act of 1937. This would merely attract more women to the cities, it was argued, and the city should never be made too comfortable a space for black people.

Nevertheless, because of the slackness in applying the laws, more and more women were finding a foothold in the city. The census of 1936 showed that, for the first time, more women than men were doing domestic work: 22 765 as against 21 027 men.³⁰ This was a huge increase from the 5 000 women who in 1932 were known to do domestic work. The women seem to have cast off the image of immorality and unreliability which for so long had made white families fear their presence in their homes. Black women were becoming part of what was considered a stable and reliable urban workforce, and employers were getting used to the familiar figure of a black woman in their kitchens: someone with a name, even though it might not be her real one, and wearing a neat uniform and apron, with a doek tied around her head. ‘Knowing’ an Emily or Mavis in the kitchen did not, however, stop employers from voting into power governments that discriminated against black people in general. As the role of the state grew, it became increasingly totalitarian. Terminology also began to change towards the end of the 1940s. The singular noun ‘native’, referring to all Africans, was replaced by ‘Bantu’, a term that aimed to confer a dubious status and ‘autonomy’ upon designated groups within a specific geographical area. At the same time, a paternalistic Bantu administration introduced the spurious logic of ‘separate but equal’.³¹ It was in this climate that a law was passed in the mid-1950s forcing black women also to carry passes.

1956 – Passes for Women

‘Strijdom, you have tampered with the women, you have struck a rock.’

Although World War II was not fought on South African territory, it had significant repercussions in the economic and political history of the country. Secondary industries were increasing, and black workers began to dominate the unskilled and semi-skilled labour sectors whereas white people worked mainly as clerks or administrators. Rural areas were unable to sustain growing numbers of black people, and more and more were migrating to towns and cities where huge squatter camps developed. Black inhabitants in towns increased from 18.4% in 1936 to 23.4% in 1946, according to the census. The presence of black women was becoming increasingly evident and they played a major role during the Alexandra bus boycott of 1943 – one of the first overtly political actions by black people in South Africa.

A few years later, on 8 March 1947, a procession of hundreds of women of all races claiming freedom and equality took place in the streets of Johannesburg. Women also often protested against high food prices. In 1948 the National Party came into power, and three years later, during the fifth general census, it was revealed that only 23.7% of South African women were economically active as against 91.9% of the men. Practically all of the active women were black and doing domestic work – either their own or in the service of a ‘madam’.

For half a century, proposals that black women should also carry passes were held at bay in all kinds of ways, but in September 1955 the National Party government announced that it would start issuing women with pass documents. This was three years after the government had given the assurance that it was not planning to extend the hated pass laws to women. Though the anti-pass demonstrations of 1950 and 1951 were still uppermost in people’s minds, by 1955 the National Party knew that it occupied a safe position in parliament, and that it also enjoyed the support of many English-speaking citizens. There was little opposition to contentious issues, and neither the ANC nor the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) initiated meaningful protest action against the demolition of Sophiatown in Johannesburg or the passing of the contentious Bantu Education Law of 1953.³² The government therefore assumed that there would not be much opposition to the introduction of passes for women. This time, however, they seriously misjudged the mood. For decades, black women had been moving to the cities unhampered by official control measures, and they were not prepared to give up this freedom without a fight. As Cherryl Walker points out:

The announcement that reference books would be issued to women set the stage for an unprecedented outburst of popular resistance among them. More than any other issue, the threat of passes stirred an enormous response among women and raised their active involvement in politics to new levels.³³

In spite of grave practical obstacles, between 1 000 and 2 000 women, mainly black, but also white, coloured and Indian, gathered to demonstrate at the Union Buildings in Pretoria on 27 October 1955. It was a dignified protest, but government ministers refused to meet with the women. The Afrikaans daily Die Vaderland focused in its report on the presence of white women and implied that they were the reason why the protest gathering was ‘quiet and disciplined’. The Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW) gained much publicity from the event, and in December Lilian Ngoyi was chosen as a member of the national executive council of the ANC – a clear indication that male members had taken note of the political power of women after their well-organised anti-pass demonstration. In November 1955, Ngoyi issued a fierce and defiant statement: ‘We have decided to join battle with Verwoerd on this issue and we say without the slightest hesitation that we shall defeat the government.’³⁴

In accordance with the ANC’s general viewpoint, it was decided that women’s organisations, with FEDSAW in the forefront, would for the next four years continue to protest against the pass laws. ‘There is nothing in the country that makes an African a prisoner […] more than the operation of pass laws’, the influential magazine Drum declared in February 1956. Colourfully, it went on to state: ‘On the political plan too women have come to the fore … For the laws of this country have now started pots and pans rattling in the kitchen and a number of things are on the boil. Passes for the women, for instance, and the schooling of their children under Bantu Education are on their minds.’³⁵

Thousands of people attended protest meetings in urban areas all over the country and the mood was often militant. In March 1956 a pamphlet of the Transvaal branch of FEDSAW proclaimed: ‘Women do NOT want Pass Laws! We are not prepared to submit to the humiliations and suffering that Pass Laws bring.’ When several women burned their passbooks in the small Free State town of Winburg on 8 April, the authorities retaliated by refusing to pay pensions to women unless they had passbooks. Helpless against such actions, the women were forced to submit. In rural areas, female farmworkers were transported to town by their employers to register for passes, often not realising the implications or unable to resist. By 22 March 1956, passbooks had already been distributed to 1 429 women.

The most significant protest took place in Pretoria on 9 August 1956, when 20 000 women marched to the Union Buildings. Many were carrying their young white charges on their backs, and one newspaper captioned a photograph: ‘Do their parents know where they are?’ Despite the government’s refusal to grant the leaders an audience, the women remained disciplined and dignified throughout. Once again, Die Vaderland could only imagine that it must have been white women who organised the gathering. A large pile of signed protest letters was left in front of Prime Minister JG Strijdom’s office. The women sang ‘Strijdom, you have tampered with the women, you have struck a rock’, words that still echo in the country’s collective memory.³⁶

Notwithstanding this protest and further demonstrations by more than 50 000 women in 30 towns during the first half of 1956, some 23 000 passbooks had already been distributed in 37 towns by September 1956. Though more protest meetings were held, right until 1958, the distribution of passbooks continued.

By now the government considered the ANC to be its greatest enemy, and the movement was banned in many areas. For more than four months, all meetings of black people were prohibited, severely hindering the commemoration of the Women’s Day march in August 1958. Helen Joseph, a stalwart of the 1956 protest who was also secretary of FEDSAW, helped coordinate activities in the face of the relentless implementation of the pass law. Without a passbook, women were hampered in many ways. Black nurses, who were already up in arms because they were segregated from their white colleagues in terms of the Nursing Act of 1957, could, for example, not register for midwife courses unless they had identity numbers which came along with passbooks. In spite of many protest meetings elsewhere, women in larger cities such as Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and Durban hardly raised their voices. When, in October 1958, the passbook unit moved to Johannesburg, Drum magazine wrote: ‘Now everyone is asking: when will the passes come to Johannesburg and how will the women in that big city react to them?’³⁷ Women were encouraged by FEDSAW as well as the ANC Women’s League to resist, and a few small protest meetings were held, but the same strategy that had forced nurses – as well as pensioners – to succumb was used in Johannesburg: various services and amenities depended on having an identity number.

When the passbook unit first moved into Johannesburg, women who were politically isolated and economically vulnerable were targeted, namely the large but fragmented body of domestic workers. By mid-October 1958, all white households had received a circular from the Native Commissioner with instructions to take their ‘native female servant’ to its offices ‘in order that she may be registered for the Native Population Register and issued with a reference book’. The letter was worded in such a way that it sounded like a routine undertaking, and omitted to state that at that stage it was not unlawful to be without a pass. Most employers dutifully complied, and black women who realised that the pass laws entailed complete control over their mobility were powerless to resist. FEDSAW described the women’s vulnerability as follows:

Living in the servants’ quarters in the backyards, African women from the country, the farms, the small reserves, women far from their homes, were forbidden by trespass regulations to have their husbands or even their tiny children with them, to lead a family life, isolated and unaware, dependent upon the ‘madam’ for the roof over their heads.³⁸

Initially it seemed that the passbook distribution would take place without any trouble. However, on 21 October 1958 – a Tuesday – the ANC Women’s League struck back, in particular the Sophiatown branch which was virtually on its knees because of the Group Areas Act of 1950. This retaliatory move initiated a huge civil disobedience campaign. Sophiatown women marched to the Native Commissioner’s office in an attempt to prevent domestic workers registering for passbooks. The police arrested 249 women, and the news spread across the city like wildfire. Women rushed to the scene in droves, and by nightfall 584 women had been arrested, with 934 being jailed by the end of the week. The following Monday, another 900 women were added to the already overfull police cells in the city. According to newspaper reports, the women were ‘defiant but high-spirited’. Much publicity was given to their activities, with photographs of women giving the thumbs-up sign. Johannesburg’s biggest afternoon daily, The Star, carried the headline: ‘No Nannies Today’, and FEDSAW sent a circular urging employers not to allow their workers to register for passes. Walker explains: ‘If they did, [the circular] argued their children would suffer when their “nannies” were arrested for not having the correct documents.’³⁹ For that reason, it was better to have no documents at all.

While this was all rather inconvenient for white households, it was black households who bore the brunt, with wives and mothers being in jail. Male ANC leaders insisted that the Women’s League should be more careful and not join the demonstrations. The mass support of ‘ordinary’ women that the Black Sash and FEDSAW had bargained for did not materialise, and though meetings were held on the steps of the Johannesburg City Hall, the momentum of the anti-pass law demonstrations could not be sustained. The actions of FEDSAW and the Sophiatown women had merely succeeded in delaying the introduction of passbooks.

At the end of 1958 the government announced that 1 300 000 passbooks had already been issued to about half of all adult black women in the country. The Native Labour laws of 1959 explicitly determined that all black women in paid employment should be registered in the same way as men, thereby making it a criminal offence for both employer and employee if the black woman worker did not have a passbook. This law led to a major shift in official policy regarding black women in towns and city areas. To safeguard themselves against arrest, women without passbooks had to obtain written permission to be in a specific area.⁴⁰

Protesting was not yet over, however. The following year, many women supported the ‘potato boycott’ which was aimed at exposing the exploitation of farmworkers in the eastern Transvaal. In Natal, about 20 000 women rose up against poor working conditions, ‘striking fear and alarm in the white farming communities in Natal’.⁴¹ Rural women in particular realised that the passbook system might make it impossible for them to escape their oppressive circumstances. As Walker explains:

[W]omen in the reserves were in fact caught in the pincers of a policy whose aims and results were in themselves contradictory. By trying to maintain the traditional, tribal political and economic structures but manipulate them to their own ends, the government was undermining them. Women’s position in the resulting system was ambiguous, their status and self-image ambivalent – subordinate, junior, yet burdened with responsibilities and a de facto authority not sanctioned by society.⁴²

Many black women already in cities managed to remain there, mainly because of the need for domestic workers who were by now very much part of white South Africa’s lifestyle. Twenty years after the pass protests, 60% of white households had domestic workers – mainly black women. A 1980 study by PA Erasmus revealed the extent to which white households employed domestic workers. The sample number of 2 356 employers lived in ‘white areas’ that included towns, cities and farms. According to Erasmus, 31% had a full-time black domestic worker in their employment while 28% had a part-time worker. About 25% of these women stayed on the premises. Only 10.4% of the households employed a black man full-time, and these were mostly gardeners. In only one out of ten households did a black man sleep on the premises. Although the study focused on whites, Erasmus found that many urban coloured and Indian families also employed black domestic workers.⁴³

Nomahobe Cecilia Magadlela left the Eastern Cape for Johannesburg when ‘Soweto was already over’ – that is, after 1976 – and by this time she was already in possession of a passbook. At first, Cecilia told me, she stayed with a friend in Alexandra township:

Anna fetched me at the station; she was working at a flat in Randburg. I found a live-in job at number 31 Fifth Avenue in Parktown North. That is where I met London; he was my neighbour, also live-in next door. Rachel was born in July 1984. He paid five cows at R1 000 each to my family. We moved to Marie and Doug’s place, Klein Geluk, in 1986; London had worked for Marie from 1969.

It was in 1988 that Nomahobe Cecilia Magadlela started her weekly job with me – two years after the hated pass laws were repealed on 23 July 1986.

2000–2018

‘Workers continue to straddle the divides’