A picture of traditional Africans on a plot that allowed for some subsistence farming.
On the white farms, where about a third of blacks lived, housing remained very poor and real wages, like those in the mines, did not improve until the early 1970s. For farmers, labour rather than segregation was the main issue. Until the 1920s the farmers’ labour needs were met by ‘resident natives’ or squatters who worked for two or three days a week and in exchange received the right to build a hut, cultivate a garden plot and keep a few cattle. The squatters might also be paid some rations and a shilling a day. At this low rate of pay the white bywoners who lived on a farm could not compete.
The state named this arrangement labour tenancy and determined that a tenant should work at least 90 days a year and in some cases 180 days a year. But as in the case of the colonial states of the previous century these laws could not be enforced. Market forces were the real agent of change. Farming was fast becoming commercialised. Land values rose and intensive cultivation was introduced. A tenant was allowed less land, less time and fewer cattle on a farm. The farmers were also squeezed. The 1920s and 1930s were very tough. Throughout the 1920s agricultural prices fell and then dropped sharply as the Great Depression of 1929 hit the country. Prices for some agricultural products declined to 25% of their 1928 level.
The Native Economic Commission of 1932 described the change well:
It is no longer economically possible for the farmer either to give the grazing which the Native wants or to allow him to work any portion of land . . . In such areas therefore labour shortage is beginning to be felt largely due to the farmers’ inability to remunerate in the manner in which the Natives prefer.
Farmers now demanded the stricter application of pass laws. A pamphlet of the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) captured their mood: ‘Native children should not be allowed to go to towns. [They] should not be allowed to leave the district without a pass from the Native Commissioner, and this pass should not be given if the farmer requires his services at a wage which satisfies the Commissioner.’ ‘Our natives must not be used,’ a group of farmers demanded, adding that recruiting on farms for mines or public work should be prohibited. In response, the state issued a circular instructing officials not to issue passes without indicating the period for which a farm labourer was allowed to be absent.
Even more serious was the crisis in labour relationships. At the beginning of the war the liberal SAIRR noted a general deterioration of the racial situation in the rural areas,with farmers complaining that blacks ‘had lost their respect for them’, and that a ‘strained relationship’ had come to replace the old forms of co-existence. The average cash wage on a farm, including the value of food supplied in lieu of cash, was only a quarter of that in manufacturing. The outward-bound stream accelerated during the war years when the Smuts government relaxed the system ofinflux control that had kept many blacks out of the urban areas. In the mid-1950s a commission found that nearly half of the newly urbanised blacks had come from the farms.
