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6 | Warning Winds

1946–1947

Adjusting to Johannesburg was not easy. Italy had been moving to the left, but here there had been a drift to the right which seemed to concern no one except the Springbok Legion.

In the days after the war’s end the National Party had staged a march through the city streets to a public meeting in the City Hall. It had been intended as a show of strength in a traditionally anti-Nationalist city. There had been great protests about it so soon after the war, and the legion had called for the lease of the City Hall to be cancelled. The council had refused. The legion had tried to bar the streets to the Nationalist marchers by organising a counter-demonstration in which hundreds of white citizens, including many soldiers and ex-servicemen, took part. There had been pitched battles in attempts to bar the parade through the streets leading to the City Hall, but the Nationalists had fought their way through, abetted by the police, and held a triumphant ‘victory rally’.

The legion viewed the event as a major setback for the anti-fascist cause, though they seemed to me to be exaggerating its importance. The Nationalists were far short of a parliamentary majority, but they had given clear warning that they had come through the war years with enhanced strength and confidence.

White attitudes towards them were altering as uniforms were exchanged for civilian garb and war-time anti-fascism for peacetime conservatism and political apathy. As soldiers became civilians the legion was struggling to adapt. Its quasi trade union activities were declining and political campaigning was moving to the forefront of its agenda.

In a fortuitous symmetry with the Nationalist march to the City Hall there had been a far bigger, predominantly black march through the city’s streets to celebrate VE Day. That had passed off peacefully. It, too, had been a show of strength, but by a coalition of liberation movements, trade unions and the Communist Party, which had brought thousands of people out to claim the freedom of the streets and, more significantly, to demand for themselves the freedoms so eloquently promised in the Allied nations’ Atlantic Charter but so completely denied them by the state at home.

I knew about these events only at second hand. There was little sign that they had made much impact on white public opinion. White society wore the same old blinkers. Except in the legion there was no recognition of the rise of the National Party, or of the black majority pushing its way out of the wings to the centre of the political stage. Elsewhere politics was still regarded as a white affair.

The growth of radicalism in the African National Congress, and especially its Youth League, seemed to be passing unnoticed. There was no attention to its new Charter of African Rights, intended as a programme for a new South Africa in the spirit of the Atlantic Charter, and no recognition of the calibre of a new black generation with leaders like Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu. Only the stock-market speculators seemed aware of the rash of wildcat strikes spreading along the Rand among the black mineworkers.

At the end of 1944, before I returned from Italy, there had been a flexing of black muscle which no one in Johannesburg could have missed. The people of Alexandra Township had taken to the streets in a daily protest over a one penny rise in bus fares, walking nine miles (14.5km) to work and nine miles home again day after day. It had been the greatest and longest bus boycott the country had ever seen.

Clearly there had been more than money at issue. There had been pride, dignity and a refusal to be pushed about any longer by faceless authority. The daily procession of thousands had clogged one of the city’s chief traffic arteries for weeks on end, with the unspoken message: Thus far and no further! Some few white citizens noticed the suffering; some offered the marchers lifts in private cars, but few seemed to have got the political message.

I needed to acclimatise to this society so changed in spirit from the one I had left and yet so unchanged in its lifestyle. I also needed to break the last of the ice with my own daughter, to accustom myself to being referred to as ‘Councillor Watts’s husband’ and to earn a living.

The Communist Party suggested that I return to full-time political work. I declined. I was out of touch with current political developments and a stranger to the new generation of activists. My professional competence as an architect had been mothballed for some seven years. If I did not start working at it again soon, everything I had learnt about architecture would be lost. So I returned to the firm where I had worked seven years before.

I also returned quite quickly to the party district committee. It too had changed. Danie du Plessis had become district secretary, Yusuf Dadoo chairman and Bram Fischer treasurer. Among the committee members was J B Marks, a former school teacher who had been caught up in the inner party turmoils of the early Thirties, expelled on dubious grounds and later reinstated, to the general satisfaction of the membership. J B was a big man physically and an excellent public speaker, with great presence and the common touch. He was more approachable than Mofutsanyana, less abrasive than Kotane, and was liked and admired by the younger generation, who called him Uncle J B. He was also the elected president of the Transvaal ANC and president of and spokesperson for the African Mine Workers’ Union.

The district committee agenda was dominated by matters new to me. The Alexandra bus boycott was over and had been successful, but other crises were developing.

Mofutsanyana and others in the black townships were confronting a housing crisis. The population had outgrown the available housing space. It had swollen close to bursting point, with no action by government or the city council to relieve it. Relations between the homeless and the authorities were becoming explosive.

Marks was trying to cope with an even more explosive crisis maturing on the mines. Wages and conditions had remained largely unaltered during the war years, despite the soaring cost of living and the men’s rising expectations. When the African Mine Workers’ Union had been formed and started organising there were few if any working miners in either the ANC or the party. The union idea had to be brought to workers in the compounds by activists from outside, who had to overcome the conservatism and ethnic diversity of a mainly illiterate contracted labour force. They met with organised obstructionism from both employers and the state and with scepticism from many of the migrant workers to whom trade unionism was a foreign concept, far removed from their own experience and traditions.

Yet conditions for it were ripe. The cost of living for miners, and more especially for their families back in the rural ‘reserves’, had risen inexorably, while wages had remained fixed. Mining companies had sought to offset their own rising costs by economising on the food and amenities which were a substantial part of a miner’s remuneration. By 1943 friction was threatening the stability of the country’s golden economic lifeline, demanding government intervention.