Anthony Egan
PASSIVE RESISTANCE 1946: A SELECTION OF DOCUMENTS compiled by ES Reddy and Fatima Meer (Madiba Publishers/Institute for Black Research, R75)
When the government of Field-Marshal Jan Smuts first announced a new Bill — what was later passed into law as the
Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Bill in June 1946 — little did it expect the resistance the Bill would generate. Nor did it imagine that its actions would lead to the Congress Alliance of the 1950s and the formation eventually of a non-racial African National Congress (ANC) that would 50 years later be the government of South Africa.
Drawing on newspaper reports, copies of talks and speeches, and political cartoons, Passive Resistance 1946 tries to recreate a sense of the passive resistance campaign in all its complexity.
In January 1946 the Smuts government proposed legislation that would prohibit Indians from buying land from non-Indians, allow Indians (male, 21 and over, with educational and property qualifications, of course) to elect three white reprsentatives to the House of Assembly, two whites to the Senate, and three members to the Natal Provincial Council on a communal franchise.
The Natal Indian Congress (NIC) and later the South African Indian Congress (SAIC) conference rejected these proposals, seeing them as utterly reactionary. Very quickly they gained the support of an India in transition to self-rule and led by Pandit Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, who lent their personal as well as governmental support to the protest.
Events escalated. Soon the Smuts government found itself facing Indian protest and civil disobedience in South Africa and condemnation — led by India — at the newly founded United Nations Organisation. Within days of the Bill’s passing, the Indian community observed a hartal (protest action) and held mass meetings. Protesters occupied municipal land in Durban.
In the weeks that followed, similar protest actions followed elsewhere; the protest was joined by a handful of sympathetic whites, most notably the Reverend Michael Scott, a radical
Anglican priest, and by a number of ANC members and supporters.
Although this was primarily an Indian protest, the ANC supported it and in turn the SAIC saw it as a struggle that was linked to the struggle for justice of all South Africans.
Despite the police presence, white thugs attacked the resisters savagely. On June 30 1946, the first casualty of the protests,
Krishensamy Pillay, died of injuries sustained in one of these attacks. But the protests continued. People were arrested, charged and imprisoned — but still the protests continued throughout 1946, 1947 and into 1948.
At the UN, Smuts took a pounding from the Indian delegation led by Vijayalakshmi Pandit. In a personal meeting with her, recounted by ES Reddy in the introduction, he told her that though she had won the arguments, it was a hollow victory. It would put him out of power at the next elections.
Whether the campaign was the cause for his defeat or not is open to debate; certainly he was voted out of office in 1948.
Reddy and Fatima Meer’s compilation tell this story in exciting detail. The documents give a sense of the immediacy of an unfolding drama that is perhaps less well-known than it should be; for, in this campaign one sees the growing together of sectors of resistance to white supremacy in South Africa, in short the slow beginnings of the Congress Alliance.
In addition they document the divisions and tensions within the Indian community over resistance, best expressed in the formation of the conservative South African Indian Organisation (SAIO), which mistrusted the campaign’s motives and tactics. The SAIO displayed a familiar South African establishment paranoia, seeing all resistance as communist- inspired.
A notable feature of this compilation is its use of many cartoons by Yusuf Kat, whose work has (unfairly) been overlooked. Simple, almost crude, they articulate the anger and irony of the time through the eyes of one who was most clearly a supporter of the campaign.
Passive Resistance 1946 is not an easy read. It is, however, a valuable collection of documents for historians and all who seek to go beyond the often- bland narrative accounts of the struggle for democracy in South Africa.