A ‘Stone meeting’. In 1901 politically conscious coloured people began meeting on the slopes of Table Mountain to debate current affairs or to be addressed by white politicians. Soon Boland towns or mission stations began sending representatives to these meetings. The main organiser was businessman John Tobin, who stressed the themes of race pride and self-help within the context of equal rights for ‘all civilised men’, the ruling ideology of the Cape Colony.
Because of their marginality and the determination with which the state implemented white supremacist policies, the story of coloured political organisation through much of the twentieth century has largely been one of compromise, retreat and failure. The attrition started in the late nineteenth century with the raising of the franchise qualifications that struck thousands of black and coloured voters from the rolls. And from the 1890s white trade unions sought to subvert the prominence of coloured workers in the skilled trades in the western Cape. Discrimination intensified after the South African War of 1899–1902. The governments across South Africa made it their priority to reconcile English- and Afrikaans-speaking whites.
Because of their strong assimilationist impulse, politicised coloureds initially avoided forming separate political organisations, preferring to support white politicians who promised to promote coloured interests in return for their votes. By the early twentieth century, however, intensifying segregation forced coloureds to mobilise politically in defence of their rights. The first substantive coloured political body, the African Political Organisation (APO), was established in Cape Town in September 1902. The APO grew out of the ‘Stone meetings’ (named after the large boulders at which they were held) organised from May 1901 onwards by John Tobin, a leading personality in the coloured community. Held on Sunday mornings on the slopes of Table Mountain above District Six, these meetings provided a forum for the discussion of political issues affecting the coloured community. Stone meetings drew substantial crowds until they were superseded by the APO.
Tobin, who became vice-president of the APO, was expelled from the organisation in 1905 for his allegedly divisive behaviour. He continued to call Stone meetings sporadically till at least 1919, especially at election time. Tobin aligned himself with Afrikaner political interests and became a leading proponent of the idea that the coloured people should seek an affiliation within the fold of Afrikanerdom rather than within the Englishspeaking establishment.
The APO, which was liberal and Anglophile in outlook, dominated coloured politics until the mid-1930s. It became the main vehicle through which the coloured community voiced protest against the rising tide of segregation and pressed for reform. Although its constitution did not contain explicit racial bars, the APO was in effect a racially exclusive organisation, its aim being the advancement of coloured people. It did not seek to make common cause with black organisations or to recruit black members, despite its name. The term ‘African’ was meant to denote its geographical location and in a vague way to indicate international solidarity with black people.
In his 1910 presidential address, APO leader Dr Abdullah Abdurahman affirmed that the APO was ‘an organisation of the coloured people only’. The APO felt it had little option but to follow a strategy of supporting the least racist of the white parties and one most likely to foster coloured interests. In the column Straatpraatjes in the APO newspaper, Abdurahman used the surprise weapon of satire against his Afrikaner nationalist adversaries.
Driven by the need for white allies against Afrikaner nationalists, Abdurahman was prepared to reconcile with his former political enemy Jan Smuts and support the South African Party, and later the United Party. The APO’s politics of polite petitioning and moral suasion grew increasingly irrelevant as segregation became entrenched, leading to its demise in the mid-1940s.
There was a number of small, ephemeral, and generally more conservative, political organisations such as the South African Coloured Union formed in 1913, the United Afrikaner League of the late 1910s and the Afrikaanse Nasionale Bond of the latter half of the 1920s that competed for coloured support but failed to subvert the dominance of the APO. The latter two bodies were sponsored, if not started, by Cape National Party politicians who tried to woo coloured electoral support away from their more liberal opponents. The Afrikaanse Nasionale Bond and its associate, the Cape Malay Association, drew significant support especially among Afrikaans speakers in the Boland towns on the basis of National Party promises of a ‘New Deal’ for coloureds. Both collapsed when Hertzog abandoned the much-vaunted ‘New Deal’ when an increased National Party majority in the 1929 election made coloured support expendable. Fusion in 1933–1934 greatly strengthened the segregationist impetus in South African politics, further compromising the APO’s strategy.
The failure of the APO’s moderate approach to stem the torrent of discriminatory measures was instrumental in the emergence of a radical movement within the bettereducated, urbanised sector of the coloured community during the latter half of the 1930s. During the 1920s coloured radicals such as John Gomas and James la Guma had organised individually in organisations such as the ICU, the SA Communist Party, which was founded in 1921, and the ANC, where they had a significant impact. Together with a new crop of activist leaders that included Goolam Gool, Cissie Gool and Ben Kies, they were at the forefront of this radicalism that injected a sense of purpose and excitement into coloured politics. Not only did Marxism provide these new recruits with a novel and more credible paradigm for understanding the oppression of black people, it also advocated more forceful forms of resistance including mass action, civil disobedience and black political unity.
The National Liberation League established in 1935 and the Non-European Unity Movement founded in 1943 were the most important radical bodies. These organisations would, however, prove to be brittle and equally ineffective in overcoming the impediment of coloured marginality. Importantly, they failed to bridge the racial divisions within the society in their quest to unite blacks in the struggle against segregation and capitalist exploitation. Meanwhile, the moderate faction had little option but to continue with an increasingly bankrupt game plan of pleading for reform and supporting an openly racist United Party at election time. The coming of apartheid would cruelly expose the frailties of both movements.
April 1931 witnessed an event that foreshadowed the emergence of a new era in coloured politics by mid-decade. In her maiden speech, Cissie Gool, daughter of Dr Abdurahman, electrified an APO mass meeting called to protest the Women’s Enfranchisement Act with her fiery rhetoric and led the gathering on an impromptu march on Parliament.
In 1935 a commission of inquiry under the chairmanship of R.W. Wilcocks reported on the condition of the coloured population. It found widespread poverty, malnutrition and alcoholism. The old-age pension was inadequate. Coloured people’s life expectancy was half that of whites and infant mortality twice as high. The policy of ‘civilised labour’ was holding them back instead of helping as was the intention. On race relations the report concluded that whites treated coloured people as their inferiors although many of the more prosperous coloured people were of a higher intellect than many whites.
Segregation against coloured people had intensified and had failed to deliver opportunities for them above the level of manual labour. The ‘civilised labour’ policy, which was supposed to benefit them as well, had aggravated their position.
