The Eastern Cape and East London: African Protest and the Historical Context of Bloody Sunday 1952

Abstract

This concluding overview explores themes which provide background to the four articles in the part special issue on popular protest in the Eastern Cape, with a special focus on East London. As these articles demonstrate, East London became the site of some of the most explosive urban popular protest in South Africa from 1950 to 1952. First, we discuss distinctive features of Eastern Cape African history over the long term. Society in the Eastern Cape was shaped by a particularly violent and protracted colonial conquest, lasting a century, but also by an early and widely dispersed missionary presence and relatively incorporative franchise system. Both left deep legacies. Second, we focus on East London, and some social characteristics that underlay the protests of the 1950s. Despite control by an anglophone white elite, the City Council was strongly committed to segregation and conditions in the ‘locations’ were among the worst in South Africa. This helped to radicalise African urban communities who also united to a degree behind Africanist, rather than class or worker-based, ideas and rhetoric. Third, we discuss participation by women in movements of popular protest in the Eastern Cape, focusing on both rural and urban contexts. Women were deeply engaged in two periods of militant mobilisation in East London: from 1929 to 1931, led by the Independent Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (IICU) and 1950 to 1952, led by the ANC Youth League. The relationship between political radicalism and spiritual renewal is also briefly discussed. This overview suggests that all three of these historical processes shaped the ideas, patterns, and radicalism of popular protest in early 1950s East London.

Keywords:

• Eastern Cape history
• East London
• popular protest
• women’s movements
• Defiance Campaign
• Africanist ideology
• urban radicalism

Introduction

This concluding overview explores three linked themes which provide background to the articles in the part special issue. As these articles demonstrate, East London became the site of some of the most explosive urban popular protest in South Africa from 1950 to 1952. Led in part by the new momentum of the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL), the city witnessed significant links between elite and mass politics with a fiercely Africanist political ideology and significant participation by women. It was also the scene of Bloody (or Black) Sunday, probably the single incident in which the police killed the most African protestors during the apartheid era.¹

First, we discuss the distinctive features of Eastern Cape African history over the long term. Second, we focus on East London, and some social characteristics that underlay the protests of the 1950s and, third, we explore the changing patterns of participation by women in movements of popular protest and spiritual renewal in the Eastern Cape. For this latter section, we return to studies published in the 1980s that contributed to the discussion of African women as political actors in the 1920s and early 1930s.² In retrospect, the scale of mobilisation by women at this time, in the rural Eastern Cape and Natal, as well as in East London, is especially striking. The issues, strategies and language adopted are then contrasted with material from the 1950s in East London.

When we published Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa (1987), our aim was to explore a phase of Eastern Cape history (c.1880–1930) that fell between periods and processes that had already attracted valuable research: the major wars by African kingdoms against colonisation in the 19th century; the foundation of elite-led African political movements in the early 20th century; and the post-Second World War nationalist and union struggles in the apartheid period. The hidden struggles were in some senses ‘in between’. We focused on localised and fragmented rural political movements after conquest, that were not largely led by the emerging nationalist elite. We called them hidden because they had not generally been included in the historiography of African political struggle. Although known to white administrators, on whose records we largely depended, they featured little in national political debates, in the media of the dominant white minority, or in histories written about opposition to white domination. The most notable exception was the final chapter on the Independent Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (IICU) in East London, our one foray into urban popular politics (and discussed in the third section below).

In this overview, we discuss some historiographical developments that help to place both the hidden struggles of the early 20th century and the explosive moment of the early 1950s into a longer history of popular struggles against white domination. We also attempt to illustrate the distinctive place of Eastern Cape anti-colonial and anti-apartheid politics in the broad sweep of South African history.

Violence and Incorporation in the Eastern Cape, 1800–1920

Society in the Eastern Cape was doubly parented by a particularly violent and protracted colonial conquest, lasting a century for those near its cutting edge, and an early and widely dispersed missionary presence. This was followed by the most inclusive franchise system in South Africa and probably in African colonial states as a whole. These processes had a profound impact and continued to recur in political debate up to the 1960s. Eastern Cape political leaders in the 20th century referred to violent conquest and heroic chiefs; the language of the older generation of African nationalists was suffused with Christianity and with a politics focusing on the franchise.

Adequate historical recognition of the impact of war on the region’s history is a relatively recent historiographical development: ‘liberal’ histories such as that of Cornelis de Kiewiet and the first volume of the Oxford History of South Africa treated the ‘Xhosa Wars’ somewhat perfunctorily.³ The scale and persistence of colonial violence was, however, detailed in the 1980s and 1990s. Although there is little uniformity in the naming of these conflicts, the term ‘frontier wars’ has given way to Wars of Dispossession. There is a clarity about the loss of African independence, land and livestock and consequentially the place of war in proletarianisation, immiseration and forcible social change.

Ben MacLennan’s book A Proper Degree of Terror helped to set a new direction. He pinpointed Colonel Graham’s punitive assault in 1811 that pioneered the scorched earth method of destroying Xhosa crops, homestead and herds.⁴ Noel Mostert’s Frontiers (1992) was a lengthy blockbuster, detailing both violence and the changing character of Xhosa resistance as they gradually gained horses and firearms; he called the war of 1834–35 ‘the first true guerrilla war’, in which superior weapons and technology were countered by skilful use of terrain and mobility.⁵

Jeffrey Peires identified Mlanjeni’s War (1850–53) as ‘the longest, hardest and ugliest war’ on the Colony’s frontier and Mostert called it ‘the biggest single conflict between black men and white men south of the Sahara during the nineteenth century’.⁶ Peires quotes a source that estimates 16,000 Africans died in this conflict, which is certainly a large number compared to many of the British colonial military conflicts in that century; perhaps 40,000 died in the cattle-killing (1856–57), itself an outcome of war and dispossession.⁷ Every colonial conquest had its distinctive characteristics, but the Xhosa experience at this time was particularly devastating, even compared with the colonisation of the Congo, and of Zimbabwe between 1893 and 1897.⁸ There is still place for a comparative computation of mortality in colonial wars. When the British first took control of the Cape, the official John Barrow contrasted their form of colonialism with that of the Dutch East India Company and the brutal frontier Boers.⁹ But in all the Eastern Cape wars between 1811–12 and the early 1880s, British armies and English-speaking settler militias, rather than Boers, were key agents of violence. (Both Afrikaners and African auxiliaries fought at times on the British side.)

Historians have focused increasingly on the economic and ideological purpose of these wars, showing that it was not only their duration and aggression that was distinctive. In an age of imperial conquest and expansion, the settler elite of the Eastern Cape ‘called for military action to acquire land and to crush the Xhosa on the basis of a new racist ideology of dispossession’.¹⁰ Timothy Keegan saw settler capitalism as ‘the fundamental force driving imperial expansion and black dispossession’ as new possibilities emerged for extending colonial rule and racial domination from the land of the Khoesan ‘into the very different realm of the mixed-farming African peoples of the colonial hinterland’.¹¹

A second fundamental outcome of the colonial encounter in the Eastern Cape was the emergence of a relatively large educated male elite. As André Odendaal, the leading historian of this development notes, it was in the Eastern Cape that ‘the class of new Africans, educated and Christianised, first emerged and that the first African organisations were established to protect and advance African rights in the encroaching white colonial order’.¹² Members of the new black intelligentsia formed the first explicitly African political organisation, the Imbumba Yama Nyama. John Tengo Jabavu’s newspaper, Imvo Zabantsundu, signalled a mobilisation of literate people, educated in mission schools.¹³

Crucially, the new political communicators ‘did not operate in isolation from the rest of the African population’.¹⁴ Although members of the elite pursued their own political interests – essentially incorporation and recognition on a colour-blind basis – they increasingly couched their aims in terms of a broader constituency. For example, the Native Educational Association was explicitly created in 1880 to represent the interests of African teachers, but it took on wider issues: expanding the registration of black voters, criticising the pass laws and proposing that Africans serve on juries to ensure fair justice.¹⁵

Although the convergence of elite and subaltern interests was not uniform, and involved processes of negotiation at different times and over different issues, it remained a persistent feature of Eastern Cape African politics. For the educated leadership it involved a claim to be speaking for their fellow Africans and not just for themselves: in 1879 J.T. Jabavu referred in the columns of Isigidimi sama-Xosa to ‘my people’ and the ‘black nation’.¹⁶ For hard-pressed men and women smarting under colonial restrictions, the willingness of writers, clergymen, teachers or clerks to raise their grievances offered hope of respite. These reciprocities became more natural as colonial rule became harsher towards the Cape’s African population, both elite and subaltern. The gradual curtailment of ‘such rights as the African elite enjoyed, and of the economic base on which they rested’ were explicit aims of successive 19th and early 20th century Cape governments.¹⁷ Segregation and racial discrimination became more systematic, and increasing numbers of Africans were pressed into wage labour.

A discourse of common oppression and shared identity was an ideological consequence of this, particularly evident in urban areas – King William’s Town, East London and Port Elizabeth. We argued in Hidden Struggles that rural populations were often divided by ethnic identification, Christianity and traditionalism, and by economic capacity. But in the early decades of the 20th century, some educated leaders ‘sought to bridge the gap with traditionalists through populist politics and the use of a common language of protest’.¹⁸ Independent churches, that more readily incorporated African cultural practices, were one expression of such association. In East London, Walter Rubusana – the quintessential elite politician – raised a series of grievances over labour, housing, water supply and cooking to the municipal authorities between 1896 and 1908; he supported demands by African women for washing and ironing facilities in East Bank Location.¹⁹

The more radical proto-nationalism of the South African Native Congress (SANC), founded in 1890, exemplifies the shift by elements within the educated elite. Particularly after the launch in East London in 1897 of its newspaper, Izwi Labantu (Voice of the People), the SANC embraced positions that distanced itself from the predominantly Mfengu leaders headed by Jabavu, particularly in its support for the wave of ‘Ethiopian’ separatist churches. Odendaal has identified the SANC meeting in Queenstown in July 1898 as seminal in the symbolic political union between SANC and Ethiopianism: it was chaired by James Dwane, the new leader of the American Methodist Episcopalian church. ‘If there was a moment when an organised, functional African nationalism can be said to have come into existence in South Africa, this was it’.²⁰

As its name proclaimed, the SANC sought to speak for all Africans in South Africa – and in 1902 SANC leaders Walter Rubusana, Jonathan Tunyiswa and Thomas Mganda called on the Crown to protect the interests of all African and coloured people. In 1903, Nathaniel Mhala (Umhalla), grandson of the senior Xhosa chief Ndlambe educated in Zonnebloem and England, the first editor of Izwi Labantu, and a senior SANC leader, visited workers on 15 mines in Johannesburg. In 1903 he gave evidence before Godfrey Lagden’s South African Native Affairs Commission and to the Transvaal Labour Commission detailing grievances around pay, beatings, poor food and working conditions.²¹ Odendaal argues that although SANC was predominantly an Eastern Cape organisation, it made the transition, at times, both to represent a broader constituency in that region and develop the politics and language that could, though haltingly, spread nationally.²² While there were always corrugations in the path to a more national organisation, the white constituencies’ negotiations towards Union and a national segregationist state gave it some momentum.

The salience of the Eastern Cape African elite in the development of African nationalism has long been recognised.²³ Edward Roux may have been the first writer to pore over Imvo Zabantsundu in his discussion of Jabavu and Rubusana in Time Longer than Rope, published in 1948; his depiction of the Ethiopian church as the first African ‘mass movement on truly national lines’ anticipated subsequent scholarship.²⁴ Odendaal substantially broadened and deepened knowledge of the beliefs, activities, networks and organisations of Eastern Cape African intellectuals and activists.²⁵ The most innovative aspect of his work was the use of the Xhosa sections of Indaba, Isigidimi, Imvo, Izwi Labantu and other early newspapers in the vernacular – and he has described how these were ‘the key that unlocked the remarkable story of early African politics’, ‘a treasure house waiting to be explored’.²⁶

Less evident in the historiography has been the survival of chieftaincy, an issue more central in the historiography of post-conquest Zulu society.²⁷ Nor were these simply restorationist politics. In Hidden Struggles, we explored the political mobilisation behind the Mpondomise chieftaincy in the 1920s, which took on anti-colonial dimensions. A similar movement was evident in Herschel district (see below), where Christian women sought the restoration of the Hlubi chief as part of an anti-government protest. Thembu chieftaincy became a battleground for such new ideologies, as those linked to the Dalindyebo lineage (with whom Mandela was associated as a youth) increasingly espoused the ANC, while Kaiser Matanzima sought his own route, operating within the apartheid state.²⁸ They too sought to link chiefly legitimacy to rural popular opinion.

East London: Particularities of a City and of African Politics

East London lies between two major areas of African occupation in the Eastern Cape – those that became the Ciskei and Transkei bantustans. It housed a predominantly Xhosa-speaking African population and an anglophone white population. As an entrepôt and a port, the city serviced the trade of the African rural areas as well as the white livestock farmers. It was linked by rail in three directions by the early 20th century, northwards to Johannesburg, north-eastwards to Mthatha and westwards to the Cape’s railway network. It shared in South Africa’s rapid urbanisation – but Philip Bonner judged that ‘in some senses represents a case all on its own’.²⁹ For the first 40 years of the 20th century it was deliberately and self-consciously a non-industrial town. It shared in neither the mining (Johannesburg and Kimberley) nor the import substituting industries to supplement its port (Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and Durban) nor did it have a major administrative role (Pretoria, Bloemfontein and Pietermaritzburg). It was nevertheless consistently in the top ten cities by population.

East London’s municipal authorities centred their energies on its role as port and entrepôt, with an eye on tourism. Wool from the grassy white-owned farms, stretching up through the Border to the north-eastern Cape, was the major export; however, apart from a period in the late 19th century during which it was partly washed before export, the vast majority of wool was sent out unprocessed, and the city could not develop a textile industry. In this sense it was a truly colonial port until the Second World War, dominated by merchant and commercial capital, exporting raw materials and importing consumer goods for the African societies, small-scale commodity producers and migrant workers that surrounded it.

Critically, despite the anglophone dominance of the City Council, it was not a liberal city with respect to important areas of policy. The Council actively discouraged the permanent urbanisation of its black population until after the Second World War; it built very limited municipal housing; and it was starkly segregated with Africans living largely in the crowded East Bank location and at West Bank near the docks.

Historians of the African population are beneficiaries of two remarkable enquiries that ironically emerged from urban deprivation that resulted from municipal and national policies. As Leslie Bank discusses in his article in this issue, the Council itself belatedly instituted the Welsh Commission in 1949 with the aim of ameliorating the worst of urban squalor and social division in the city.³⁰ And in the 1950s, Philip Mayer led one of South Africa’s most thorough and valuable exercises in urban anthropology and sociology, resulting in the Xhosa in Town trilogy.³¹ The quality of the information generated was in inverse proportion to the city’s capacity to find a new direction. As all the articles in this collection record, there were a series of protests from 1950 to 1952 fuelled by specific grievances and a heightened sense of injustice.

Philip Mayer and his colleagues found that there was a marked persistence of rural links, expressed culturally in the different lifestyles of what he identified as Red and School communities. To some extent this division was congruent with that between Xhosa and Mfengu. In an area which had such longstanding colonial presence, and where Xhosa society had lost much land, a majority nevertheless responded to colonisation with a deep cultural defensiveness. Many of the men in the city were migrant workers who remained strongly committed to rural homesteads. ‘Home’ for these migrants were the Ciskei (probably the most impoverished rural region in the country) and the western/southern districts of the Transkei. Gary Minkley noted that a report in 1949 found ‘native adult males’ to be the least urbanised group in the locations, estimating that ‘at least 70%’ of men were ‘seasonal, regular and casual migrants’.³² The ‘permanent urban occupants’ of the city included a higher percentage of the educated elite and an ‘illegitimate group of women and children’. This is a particularly striking finding, because – although African women struck early urban roots elsewhere – they were generally judged a particularly marginal and vulnerable group.³³

In his overview, Bonner overstated the case in arguing that the male African population of East London was ‘largely migrant, conservative, politically passive and disengaged’.³⁴ Lodge identified formidable barriers to political mobilisation during the 1930s and 1940s: poverty, job insecurity, unemployment and a history of authoritarian reprisals. However, the IICU mobilised thousands of people in East London, including workers, over wages and urban conditions from 1929 to 1931 and there were renewed protests in 1938 over the right to brew.³⁵

For the overwhelming majority in East London’s African ‘locations’, as they were known at the time, life was shaped by precariousness, privation and poverty. As in other urban centres, Africans in East London were subject to incessant surveillance, control and constraints. Everyday existence was regulated by passes and permits, or riskily constructed out of evasions, absences and alibis. Minkley argues that both government and local policies were ‘Stallardist and repressively segregationist’ in attempting to ‘impose modern discipline on a very confused urban order’.³⁶ There was almost constant friction with police: Monica Wilson recorded that, when collecting dreams as part of her work in the locations of Grahamstown and East London in 1930, ‘by far the most frequent motif was a police raid’.³⁷

Wages in East London in the 1930s and 1940s were low compared to other cities. For all but a small minority of African professionals and landlords, conditions were appalling: grotesque overcrowding in a warren of subdivided plots, unalleviated by municipal services.³⁸ The City Council contributed to squalor, filth and disease by a rigorous parsimony. Its tight-handedness was the more pronounced because it was unable to balance the Native Revenue Account (required by the 1923 Natives Urban Areas Act) – as did a range of other towns and cities – through income derived from the local state’s monopoly over the sale of sorghum beer.

While East London’s City Council actively discouraged the permanent urbanisation of its black population, the Port Elizabeth City Council built extensive housing in the late 1920s and 1930s catering for a permanent black urban population.³⁹ There was no equivalent of Port Elizabeth’s New Brighton in East London; little if any housing was built between 1926 and 1940, even while the African population more than doubled. Port Elizabeth also grew more swiftly as an industrial centre. Accordingly, trade union membership among Port Elizabeth’s black working class was unusually high. Janet Cherry traces a new and militant trade unionism; local leaders successfully linked direct community action with more self-consciously organised political protests.⁴⁰

The trajectory of popular protest and the nature of class consciousness were different in East London, shaped by its hinterland and the region’s history of colonial conquest and dispossession. Ever since the 1960s, scholars have observed that the politics of Africans in and around East London was deeply imprinted by awareness of colonial violence, defeats and the cattle killing. Colin Bundy has suggested that in the 1930s educated black professionals were acutely aware of their economic, social and political exclusion and responded with ‘a re-evaluation and reshaping of the sources and symbols of traditional African culture’.⁴¹ These were the years of the New African, and Alan Cobley argued that their calls for a national African church, a national literature and a national identity, were ‘essentially an effort to bring their social origins and their aspirations into harmony with their “African-ness”’.⁴²

In this respect, the propinquity of the town of Alice was a significant factor in the port city’s African politics. Fort Hare and Lovedale were natural seedbeds in which the Africanism of the All Africa Convention and the ANC Youth League would germinate and grow. Bank’s article in this issue shows that ‘a strong sense of affinity’ was forged between young, educated Africans and the urban poor of East London in the late 1940s. Ashby Peter Mda, a founding member of the Youth League and progenitor of Africanist discourse, explicitly encouraged Fort Hare students to develop their politics in East London. Bank describes the politics that emerged as populist: a key feature of populism is that political alliances are formed that bridge cultural, political and generational divides, finding common cause in hostility towards a corrupt elite.⁴³

Women in Popular Politics

The role of women in East London’s township life is a key theme of two of the four articles, by Hlengiwe Ndlovu and Katie Carline, in this special issue. Since Cherryl Walker’s book on Women and Resistance (1982), feminist approaches and gender issues have been a major facet of the new historiography of South Africa.⁴⁴ A gradual accumulation of research has examined the constraints on all women, to some degree across race and class, imposed by the ‘patchwork quilt of patriarchies’.⁴⁵ For African women, as Jacklyn Cock has suggested, white domination and African male patriarchy gave rise to a ‘triple oppression’ of class, race and gender.⁴⁶ But Walker has demonstrated that this did not silence African women: her book begins with women’s protests against the introduction of passes in Bloemfontein and the establishment of a Bantu Women’s League in 1913.⁴⁷ East London (see below), was another early site for organised women’s protest. There are now many glimpses of African women as political actors: organising against passes in the 1910s, protesting for the right to brew in the 1920s and 1930s, striking by nurses from the 1940s culminating in the formation of a Federation of South African Women in the 1950s.

Christianity, both in the established churches and in African independent churches, expanded dynamically in the first half of the 20th century. Women’s church manyanos (prayer unions) were a central nexus of self-organisation and they have stimulated a fertile academic literature. Initially this focused on women’s concerns about their roles in the churches, providing mutual social support and bringing up daughters in a rapidly changing social environment. ⁴⁸ Subsequent research, Carline argues in this issue, has taken up the idea of ‘public motherhood’ in South Africa and focused on the ways that manyano associations were deployed in the context of overtly political organisations.⁴⁹

This was evident among rural women in Herschel in the north-eastern Cape from 1922 when they boycotted the trading stores in their district.⁵⁰ Imvo Zabantsundu reported that the women called it a ‘strike’; they demanded that the white storekeepers cut prices and pay African smallholders more for wheat. Three thousand women, whom Imvo specifically called Christians (amagqoboka) attended a meeting held in Sterkspruit, the magisterial village. This was a remarkable number, given the dispersed pattern of settlement in such rural districts and the lack of transport to the town. The women laid down rules preventing purchase from the shops; if a man tried to break the boycott, ‘women who are chosen for the purpose, take all those goods by force, even if he tries to resist’.⁵¹ Annie Sidyoyo was the most prominent leader of the store boycott.

Herschel, later called Sterkspruit, seems isolated now and it is difficult to conceive of it as the site of a striking, sustained protest specifically led by African women. But social geographies of South Africa were different at the time. Herschel was a centre of mission education, with old established Methodist stations at Wittebergen and Bensonvale, and its population had a high proportion of Christians. A refuge from conflict in the mid 19th century, it was a multi-ethnic district, one of the sites of Mfengu, particularly Hlubi, settlement – although a long way from Fingoland. Imvo noted that women of all groups attended the meeting. Moreover, there was a high rate of migrancy from the district, perhaps 75 per cent of men were absent for at least six months of the year, mostly in Bloemfontein and Johannesburg.⁵² In calling their boycott a strike, the women were clearly identifying with the African mineworkers’ strike in 1920, which had been preceded by a boycott of stores.

D.D.T. Jabavu, writing in Imvo, reported the women saying that ‘they are the ones that wear the trousers because the men fear the whites who have become rich from them’.⁵³ The trope of assertive women as ‘wearing the trousers’ was adopted or reinvented by African women to challenge and invert gendered roles in public politics. In 1926 an African policeman noted that the women at ‘female meetings … have even challenged the men to take off their pairs of trousers and wear frocks as the men were such cowards’.⁵⁴ Helen Bradford records a similar formulation, at a meeting with the magistrate, in Natal in 1929: ‘we are now the men’.⁵⁵ In East London, 1952, women confronted men: ‘give us your pants, the women will wear them’.⁵⁶

Political developments in Herschel over the next decade were recorded by officials in sufficient detail to piece together women’s participation; individual voices are occasionally audible. They took their struggle further, usually in association with men, in opposition to the council system (for which an extra tax was charged) and to land registration. Women were concerned about losing access to land when widowed or deserted because plots were formally allocated to men, as hut tax payers. In one part of the district an estimated 20 per cent of plots were informally in the hands of women.⁵⁷

In 1925, Christian women in Herschel organised to support the appointment as a chief of a Hlubi headman, who had been dismissed by the magistrate. Popular chieftaincy movements were not uncommon.⁵⁸ Women were leaving the Methodists to join the African Methodist Episcopal Church; ‘[t]he spirit of anti-white is being widely sown among our church people’.⁵⁹ By 1926 militant women were calling themselves Amafelandawonye (those who die together in one place). Some removed their children from school, initially because they thought the teachers were responsible for registration of lands. For a couple of years, they ran their own schools – 18 were counted – but they did not have the resources to sustain them.

A movement that began with an essentially economic agenda, increasingly developed Africanist and separatist political ideas. Its supporters wanted to control their own affairs, become ‘territorially independent’, do away with police and magistrates, and have their own stores and chiefs.⁶⁰ They attracted political entrepreneurs from outside the district, such as Wellington Buthelezi.⁶¹ But the movement fragmented in the late 1920s: some supported independent churches and schools; some turned to traditionalist ethnic ideas; others sought solace in intense spiritual rather than political engagement.

Bradford wrote about militant women in Natal in 1929, again initially fighting economic threats.⁶² The Natal system of controlling urban African alcohol consumption was built around a monopoly for municipal canteens. Beer brewing was traditionally the province of women but they were prevented from selling beer in towns after 1908, a measure extended to some rural areas in 1928. Employers thought that excessive alcohol consumption weakened their control over their workforce; municipalities could make money. Such regulations undermined the capacity of women to generate income in the growing towns or around the sugar compounds and they were vulnerable to frequent police raids.

A spark for public protest was a split in the ICU in 1928, with the ICU Yase Natal, led by Allison Wessels George Champion, broadening its search for support and recruiting beer brewers and shebeen operators. Their strategy, echoing Herschel, was a boycott of beerhalls in 1929 for which they drew some support from male migrant workers. The ICU formed a Women’s Auxiliary, which used sjamboks to try to prevent entry to beerhalls. One of the leaders, named Ma Dhlamini, wore a military-style uniform. Women marched in the streets in a number of small towns, chanted Zulu war songs, raided beer halls and assaulted male drinkers.⁶³ Bradford argues that women experienced capitalism and state power differently from men and, although there were significant areas of joint action with the ICU in Natal, they pressed their own issues.

Women were politically visible in East London by the closing years of the 19th century. In 1899, Deena Rubusana (Walter’s wife) led a delegation of women to meet the mayor about high rentals, summary evictions, and the power of the location superintendent and headmen ‘to violate the privacy of our homes’. She followed up the meeting with two months of correspondence. In 1908, 400 to 500 East Bank women, working with Walter Rubusana, marched in protest about similar issues to City Hall where Rubusana spoke on their behalf. Izwi Labantu welcomed ‘a sign that women are beginning to assert themselves and, like their fairer sisters the suffragettes in England and women all the world over, they will eventually force governing bodies to sit up and take notice’.⁶⁴

When Rubusana marched with the women in 1908, the ratio of African men to women in the locations was roughly 2:1, as in other African urban areas. But by the time of the 1936 census there were, unusually for a South African city, the same number of African women and men in East London.⁶⁵ It was not just that more women were entering the city, but increasingly they were doing so on different terms: not as wives of predominantly migrant male workers, but as ‘independent’ women. As early as the 1920s East London’s locations were dubbed a ‘place for widows’.⁶⁶ In the 1930s and 1940s widows, divorced or deserted women, unmarried mothers, single women and teenaged girls moved from the Ciskei into the city. Smallholder agriculture was failing: landholdings in the African-occupied rural districts were too small for subsistence; denudation and soil erosion was undermining the productivity of the pastures and fields; ‘desert conditions’ were in the making.⁶⁷

The ICU was established in East London in 1928 and an Independent ICU (IICU) broke away in April 1929.⁶⁸ A key national founder, Clements Kadalie, led the breakaway, which became more radical politically and soon won wider support from women. Kadalie initially appealed to them as wives, to urge men to support the strike early in 1930, to be ‘pickets in their own homes’ and to provide food for striking male workers. In January 1930 ‘several thousand’ women agreed to withdraw labour as domestic servants, including from hotels.⁶⁹ Many did so and this feature distinguished the East London strike from other early industrial action in the country.

Striking was particularly difficult for women who were at the bottom of the wage ladder and often isolated as workers. They pressed the IICU from below; it took up their grievances with a call for domestic servants’ wages to be doubled to £3 a month and for washerwomen to receive more per item. Kadalie and other leaders were arrested in January 1930 and, when released in February, called for a return to work by all. But a rank-and-file group were determined to continue the strike and women were prominent in supporting them at meetings, despite the privations entailed. As women sought new sources of income, the brewing and sale of beer became a key issue in the city. The Council’s policy was one of outright prohibition of brewing in the townships for domestic consumption and refusing to provide beerhalls. In 1930–31, there were 1,992 prosecutions for illegal brewing – although an official ruefully conceded that ‘the trade proceeds merrily’.⁷⁰

Men, and women, wanted to drink and women depended on the income. After initially opposing the brewing of alcohol for sale, as detrimental to the task of building a strong black nation, the IICU leaders reluctantly came round to supporting it. Kadalie and others were trying to re-establish their authority after the failed strike, and their disagreement with the rank and file. They did so by taking up township issues and by May 1930 were again addressing huge meetings, perhaps as large as 8,000. Women were experiencing frequent raids by the police at their homes: ‘they look for beer, trouble you in your sleep, and worry you day and night’; police poured away the beer when they found it.⁷¹ The women wanted support from the IICU, as well as more direct action; there were a few attacks on police. But in the face of municipal intransigence, the alliance formed between IICU leaders, workers and women fragmented during the second half of 1930. Women began to focus on their own prayer meetings, using a vocabulary of prophecy and millennialism. As in Herschel, they were attracted by independent churches.

The IICU leaders were also seen as too moderate on the issue of permits for lodgers, which the municipality required of them in order to stay in the city, and which were opposed by the women. In March 1931, 6,000 people attended an IICU meeting to protest against police brutality. But women members became angry with IICU leaders as well, accusing them of stealing money from subscriptions and wasting it on a motor car. Popular expectations, raised in an extraordinary campaign over three years, could not be met. The rank-and-file committee in East London supported civil disobedience, including mass imprisonment – a strategy that the ANC would adopt twenty years later in the Defiance Campaign.⁷²

Militant action petered out during the 1930s depression but in 1938 women marched to the city hall to defend their right to brew. This was precipitated by the decision of the Council to adopt the Natal model of municipal control over beer brewing as a source of revenue and means of control. This unpopular measure was implemented, but delivered neither profits nor control over sustained domestic brewing. Minkley records that the municipal brewery closed in 1945, ‘a moral and financial failure’ and the municipal beer-hall was burned during the 1952 protests.⁷³

We have discussed the distinctive surge of women into the city during the inter-war years; the phenomenon was observed by Bettison in 1950, discussed at some length by Mayer, and subsequently analysed by Gary Minkley and Anne Mager.⁷⁴ They argue that ‘of central defining importance’ in the migration from the Ciskei to the city was the desire to escape ‘patriarchal controls’. By 1940, the City Council claimed that every street in the location was ‘controlled by women’, including between 60 to 70 per cent of the dwellings.⁷⁵ Women were able to dominate the rental system and to brew beer, either on a small scale or in larger shebeens. It was as brewers and as landladies that women in East London attained a degree of independence, which they fought to defend.

Protest and Death in East London in the 1950s

Barely two decades separated the widely supported protests and strikes led by the IICU and the surge of popular mobilisation and violence in the early 1950s. Popular protest was difficult to mount and sustain in the repressive environment that characterised South Africa in these years. Even before the National Party increased levels of surveillance, policing and barriers to mobility after 1948, the local state exercised extensive and punitive forms of social control over township residents. In situations of acute deprivation, successful mobilisation was generally only possible at moments when ‘the system’ provoked the people and lost legitimacy and when those experiencing repression believed that they could change their lot.⁷⁶ The structural conditions caused by rapid in-migration, the unwillingness of the East London municipality to cater for it and the emergence of new political forces, combined to open up possibilities for mass protest after 1945 and especially between 1950 and 1952.

These were years when various political organisations attracted subaltern support. In 1942 the Communist Party apparently won all six seats in the elections to the Location Advisory Board;⁷⁷ and in 1946 the Party and the Congress of Non-European Trade Unions (CNETU) supported the largest strike by the city’s black workers since 1930. Dock-workers and others effectively closed down the loading and unloading of ships, and after a month won the reinstatement of dismissed workers and a modest wage increase. However, as Minkley demonstrates, this militance was ‘neither repeated and sustained, nor extended and deepened’.⁷⁸ By 1951, the CNETU presence and local Communist Party ‘had collapsed’.⁷⁹

Their failure created a vacuum. Grievances and frustration abounded and increasingly took on an anti-white tone. Bettison – a social worker employed by the municipality – helped to compile material for the Welsh Commission of Enquiry (1949). He wrote about an ‘attitude of non-cooperation with officials or any European enquiry’.⁸⁰ The gap was filled, and the frustrations voiced, by the rise of the ANC Youth League (ANCYL), founded in East London in 1949 and initially guided by A.P. Mda; it began to win support from different segments of the urban population. In the early 1950s, there were an estimated 10,000 domestic servants and 15,000 self-employed women in the city and they became a major source of support. Anne Mager’s study of politics and gender in the Ciskei includes a chapter on women and youth in East London.⁸¹ Her analysis focuses on the interaction between the ANCYL and its popular constituencies.

Unemployed young men and older single women, often living in backyards and shackyards, found common cause. They were attracted to a radical Africanism and a narrative of the African past when there was bravery, security and dignity. Mager argues that ‘for hundreds of wives, independent mothers, and single women, the campaigns against the lodger’s levy and registration of domestic service contracts had transformed their private and domestic lives … albeit momentarily, as they entered the public area of politics’; township women ‘emerged as independent actors in daily life and at key moments in political struggle’.⁸²

In 1950, the ANCYL backed a deputation of 5,000 angry women in a protest against the proposed extension of passes to women; in April 1951, 4,000 marchers trudged for seven miles in a Youth League protest against a two shilling levy on all lodgers; Lillian Zweni was one of the leaders of the march and was fined after a court appearance. In 1952 the Youth League protested against the registration of domestic servants’ contracts. Elsewhere in South Africa, the ANCYL sometimes remained ‘an intellectual coterie’: in East London it briefly acquired a mass, popular following.⁸³ Their activism culminated in local support for the national Defiance Campaign, launched in 1952, and a realisation of the ANCYL Programme of Action.

One of the aims of the Defiance Campaign was to flood the gaols and incapacitate the state’s repressive apparatus. It was a vehicle for an extraordinary mobilisation, but in a context where public protest of this kind was increasingly vulnerable to retaliation by the police. Over the course of the Defiance Campaign, more than 1,300 African people were arrested in East London, second only to Port Elizabeth nationally. Mignonne Breier and Hlengiwe Ndlovu concur in their articles in this issue that young men and women of the shack yards were the most demonstrative and volatile supporters of the radical Africanism articulated by the ANCYL.

Sylvia Neame has emphasised that the ANC and its Youth League developed historically as a congress and not a political party. She follows Thomas Hodgkin, who specified that congresses differ from parties in three ways: ‘they actively seek to represent total populations, to embody the national will’,⁸⁴ they are not usually centralised organisations but looser amalgams of local and functional bodies and they have ultimately a more ambitious and aggressive strategy than parties, directed at systemic change. She argues that, in the 1940s and 1950s, ‘a mass movement could have been constituted only by radical nationalist leadership’.⁸⁵ Black East Londoners responded to their racial subordination by an increasingly coercive state with a widely shared perception of injustice expressed in terms of race and nation rather than class.⁸⁶

Some of the surrounding rural districts, with strong links to East London, were also in turmoil during the late 1940s and early 1950s, attracting the attention of the All Africa Convention and ANC activists. From 1947, in the Transkeian district of Mount Ayliff (now emaXesibeni), and culminating in the Mpondo revolt of 1960, rural Eastern Cape communities resisted the government’s programme of ‘Betterment’, or rehabilitation. Betterment involved the resettlement of many rural communities into villages, the culling of cattle, and the fencing of commonage used as pastures, in order to impose environmental conservation in the shape of rotational grazing. Together with administrative changes such as the establishment of Bantu Authorities, it precipitated localised rebellions in a number of rural districts.⁸⁷

Mager discusses the response in Ciskeian districts close to East London: ‘in a region resounding with the memory of colonial wars … consciousness was informed by a defensive need to ward off the state’s new onslaught’.⁸⁸ Some of the African Christian elite, as well as Imvo Zabantsundu, gave qualified support to these measures, accepting the official argument that they would contribute to the control of soil erosion. But the majority of people agreed with leaders like Isaac Bangani Tabata and Govan Mbeki who viewed the measures as ‘fraudulent’, stripping Africans of their remaining resources and driving them into cheap labour. Low level resistance such as the cutting of fences, and hiding livestock due for the cull, was widespread. Government workmen assigned to build a dam in a rural location near Alice in 1950 were warned to stop work with the threat ‘don’t get on that tractor if you don’t want to die’;⁸⁹ this because people believed that the dam would interfere with their rights to the grazing commonage. The government demand that Africans reduce livestock numbers, which undermined African wealth and social relations, was particularly controversial.

Both Carline and Ndlovu emphasise the substrata of women’s organisations in East London and this seems to have been critical in the protests in the early 1950s, especially on Black Sunday or Bloody Sunday, 9 November 1952. Because a political rally by the ANC had been banned, a prayer meeting was held in Duncan Village (part of East Bank), widely attended by manyano women. Most of the ANC leaders in the city were attending another meeting elsewhere to sort out internal divisions and future strategies. The memories collected by Breier and Ndlovu show that the majority of those present at the meeting were women, yet the police decided to break it up, shooting at least eight people in the process. This resulted in the anger in the township that led to the killing of two white people, Sister Aidan Quinlan and Barend Vorster, and the subsequent period of extended retaliatory shooting by police in the Duncan Village streets and houses. Ndlovu explores the legacy of these events in popular memory, some of it collected by local historians. Breier examines the available archives (and notes missing archives) in a quest to pin down the number of people killed, and explores how the figure of more than 200, now mentioned in a number of sources, originated.⁹⁰ This would make it the event in the apartheid era in which the police killed the largest number of African people.

Although leaders such as A.P. Mda and Walter Sisulu (who also visited East London at this time) were already discussing the need for, or at least the inevitability of, violence on the route to liberation, the ANC was not prepared to own the radicalism of the East London crowd. The ANCYL in East London struggled in the aftermath of the Defiance Campaign. As in the case of the IICU they had raised expectations and succeeded in mass mobilisation but could offer few gains. Leaders Alcott Gwentshe and Joel Lengisi were banned, as were political meetings; as in 1931, some were accused of selling out.

The memories of 1952 that Ndlovu has recorded suggest that the killing of Sister Aidan and the police shootings were traumatic for many in Duncan Village/East Bank, particularly as they followed from a prayer meeting. People had themselves to deal with the injured, and with many of the bodies, partly because they were concerned that giving them up to the authorities might implicate them and lead to further arrests and punishment. Women had subsequently to deal with both police repression and with high rates of crime and delinquency. The City Council, backed by a newly determined national state, embarked on a policy of repression and of sending youths, perhaps as many as 5,000, back to the rural areas – although many people continued to come to the city.

Carline focuses on the spiritual movement that was coterminous with this period of intense politicisation in East London – in particular women’s role in the emergence of a new church, the Assemblies of God, led by Nicholas Bhengu. A man of Zulu background, he arrived in East London in 1950 and his religious movement began gaining ground even before the Defiance Campaign and its aftermath. Allie Dubb, who first studied the church in the 1950s, noted that at the time Bhengu opened his Back to God campaign, there was a ‘tremendous wave of anti-White feeling, an alarming rise in tsotsis and the crime rate and a general feeling of apprehension for the future’.⁹¹

Bhengu recognised the existence of discrimination against black South Africans but proclaimed that the path of redemption for the ‘African nation’ was not in politics but a belief in Christ and a ‘clean life’.⁹² A charismatic preacher, his rhetoric drew crowds of a few thousand, including some unemployed youths. After a period of fervour, in which women seemed to break family bonds, a more conventional church organisation developed, including a manyano. The women followers of Bhengu built a church in 1957 and Carline sees this as a physical and symbolic manifestation of their faith and their commitment to an urban place. They focused not so much on the political context, as apartheid was enforced, but on community and morality – leading a pure life – for their families. This could include the burden of coping with unfaithful or abusive husbands and with socially dissident youths.

Politicisation and religiosity could coexist within communities and in the minds of individuals. But in East London too, the intense political campaigns of the early 1950s seem to have been followed, among some women, by more inward-looking spiritual renewal. There are echoes of the patterns experienced in Herschel, and also in East London, in the early 1930s. While the Defiance Campaign succeeded in mobilising wide support in the Eastern Cape, it did not bring political rights. If the same women then joined Bhengu, they found their solace in a fervent new religiosity. Subsequently they also found their place in manyanos that channelled their energies into the task of fund-raising and building.

In conclusion, we have identified some distinctive features of Eastern Cape history and of East London’s social composition. Historical memories helped to shape struggles and to establish a connection between educated leaders and popular mobilisation, in the urban and rural areas. In particular, the ANCYL’s radicalism in the years culminating in the explosive events of 1952 exemplify Hilary Sapire’s observation of a ‘country-wide’ phenomenon in the late 1940s: that wider political eddies and economic pressures ‘had a profoundly radicalising effect on the classes from which the location leadership was drawn’.⁹³ The legacy of the ANCYL was also manifest at the end of the 1950s, Bank notes, in substantial support for the PAC in East London.⁹⁴ Young men in particular began to see the possibilities of violence, as ‘Sobukwe’s soldiers’. There was less space for women in this version of struggle and radical nationalism.

We also contrast two moments of intensive political protest in East London in 1929–1931 and 1950–1952. In both periods, mobilisation began around specific, material issues and included significant numbers of African women. In both of these moments, activism was gradually complemented by, and perhaps subsumed in, strident Africanist rhetoric and phases of religiosity. All of these elements could be present within ‘communities’ at the same time. And the spiritual dimension of women’s consciousness clearly had its own dynamic. But their incapacity to influence the specific patterns of racial domination in the city, to win any significant concessions from inflexible city fathers and the ever-present violence and abrasiveness by the police, black and white, seems at times to have driven some women into independent churches, where they could at least control their spiritual realm.

In short, the East London story conforms closely to a central finding by an enduring study of poor people’s movements. Protest is not a matter of free choice;

it is not freely available to all groups at all times, and much of the time it is not available to lower-class groups at all. The occasions when protest is possible among the poor, the forms that it must take, and the impact it can have are all delimited by the social structure in ways which usually diminish its extent and diminish its force.⁹⁵

In this context, sustained militancy in the Eastern Cape, and East London, in this period deserves analysis and understanding.

William Beinart
Research Associate, African Studies Centre, University of Oxford, 13 Bevington Road, Oxford, OX2 6LH, UK; Department of Historical Studies, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa. Email: [email protected]

http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4531-6389

Colin Bundy
Honorary Fellow, Green Templeton College, University of Oxford, Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6HG, UK; Research Associate, Department of History, University of Fort Hare, Alice, South Africa. Email: [email protected] http://orcid.org/0009-0004-8553-2942

Notes

1 In their articles for the part-special issue, Mignonne Breier and Katie Carline use the term ‘Bloody Sunday’; see also M. Breier, Bloody Sunday: The Nun, the Defiance Campaign and South Africa’s Secret Massacre (Cape Town, Tafelberg, 2021). Hlengiwe Ndlovu refers to the day as ‘Black Sunday’, drawing on the use of this term by local historians, and in particular by the filmmaker Mxolisi Qebeyi; see also M.K. Qebeyi, Dark Cloud, video documentary (East London, M.K. Productions, 2011). The naming is discussed in the articles.

2 W. Beinart, ‘Amafelandawonye (the Die-Hards): Popular Protest and Women’s Movements in Herschel District in the 1920s’, in W. Beinart and C. Bundy, Hidden Struggles in Rural South Africa (London, James Currey, 1987), pp. 222–69; W. Beinart, ‘Women in Rural Politics: Herschel District in the 1920s and 1930s’, in B. Bozzoli (ed.), Class, Community and Conflict: South African Perspectives (Johannesburg, Ravan, 1987), pp. 324–57; H. Bradford, ‘“We are now the men”: Women’s Beer Protests in the Natal Countryside, 1929’, in Bozzoli, Class, Community and Conflict, pp. 292–323.

3 C.W. de Kiewiet, A History of South Africa: Social and Economic (London, OUP, 1957 [1941]), pp. 48, 49, 51, 63, 76, 84; M. Wilson, ‘Co-Operation and Conflict: The Eastern Cape Frontier’, in M. Wilson and L. Thompson (eds), The Oxford History of South Africa. Volume 1 (Oxford, OUP, 1969), pp. 240–44; C. Crais, Poverty, War, and Violence in South Africa (Cambridge, CUP, 2011), pp. 23, 25, 33.

4 B. MacLennan, A Proper Degree of Terror: John Graham and the Cape’s Eastern Frontier (Johannesburg, Ravan, 1986).

5 N. Mostert, Frontiers: The Epic of South Africa’s Creation and the Tragedy of the Xhosa People (New York, Knopf, 1992), p. 751.

6 J.B. Peires, The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle Killing Movement of 1856–7 (Johannesburg, Ravan, 1989), p. 12; Mostert, Frontiers, p. 1077. Peires had previously written on the wars in his The House of Phalo (Johannesburg, Ravan, 1981), pp. 135–60.

7 Peires, The Dead Will Arise, pp. 28, 319.

8 A. Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1998); W. Beinart, ‘Cecil Rhodes: Racial Segregation in the Cape Colony and Violence in Zimbabwe’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 48, 3 (2022), pp. 581–603.

9 J. Barrow, An Account of Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa in the Years 1797 and 1798, volume 1 (London, T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1801).

10 M. Legassick and R. Ross, ‘From Slave Economy to Settler Capitalism: The Cape Colony and its Extensions 1800–1854’, in C. Hamilton, B. Mbenga and R. Ross (eds), Cambridge History of South Africa, Volume 1 (Cambridge, CUP, 2010), p. 314. For analyses of the settlers’ ideological shift (encapsulated in Governor D’Urban’s description of the Xhosa as ‘irreclaimable savages’); see C.C. Crais, White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-Industrial South Africa: The Making of the Colonial Order in the Eastern Cape 1770–1865 (Cambridge, CUP, 1992), pp. 127–33; T. Keegan, Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order (Cape Town, David Philip, 1996), pp. 126–8, 140–3, 156–8; A. Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (London, Routledge, 2001), pp. 54–60.

11 Keegan, Colonial South Africa, pp. 127, 281.

12 A. Odendaal, The Founders: The Origins of the ANC and the Struggle for Democracy in South Africa (Johannesburg, Jacana, 2012), pp. 7–8, 13; A. Odendaal, ‘African Political Mobilisation in the Eastern Cape, 1880–1910’ (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1983).

13 S. Marks, ‘Class, Culture and Consciousness in South Africa, 1880–1899’, in R. Ross, A.K. Mager and B. Nasson (eds), Cambridge History of South Africa, Volume 2, 1885–1994 (Cambridge, CUP, 2011), p. 145. See also M. Ndletyana (ed.), African Intellectuals in 19th and Early 20th Century South Africa (Cape Town, HSRC Press, 2008).

14 Odendaal, The Founders, p. 115.

15 Ibid., p. 62.

16 Ibid., p. 57.

17 Keegan, Colonial South Africa, p. 291.

18 Beinart and Bundy, Hidden Struggles, p. 11.

19 P. Limb, The ANC’s Early Years: Nation, Class and Place in South Africa before 1940 (Pretoria, UNISA Press, 2010), pp. 86–7.

20 Odendaal, The Founders, p. 209.

21 Limb, The ANC’s Early Years, pp. 84–5.

22 Odendaal, The Founders, p. 269.

23 S. Trapido, ‘African Divisional Politics in the Cape Colony, 1884 to 1910’, Journal of African History, 9, 1 (1968), pp. 79–98; P. Walshe, The Rise of African Nationalism in South Africa (London, Hurst, 1970), pp. 1–25; D. Williams, ‘African Nationalism in South Africa: Origins and Problems’, The Journal of African History, 11, 3 (1970), pp. 371–83; D. Williams, Umfundisi: A Biography of Tiyo Soga, 1829–1871 (Lovedale, Lovedale Press, 1978); C.C. Saunders, ‘Tile and the Thembu Church: Politics and Interdependency on the Cape Eastern Frontier in the Late Nineteenth Century’, The Journal of African History, 11, 4 (1970), pp. 553–70, and ‘The New African Elite in the Eastern Cape and Some Late Nineteenth Century Origins of African Nationalism’, Collected Seminar Papers, The Societies of Southern Africa, volume 1 (University of London, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 1971).

24 E. Roux, Time Longer than Rope: A History of the Black Man’s Struggle for Freedom in South Africa, 2nd edition (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1964 [1948]), p. 77; see also Chapters 7 and 8.

25 A. Odendaal, Vukani Bantu! The Beginnings of Black Protest Politics in South Africa to 1912 (Cape Town, David Philip, 1984); Odendaal, ‘African Political Mobilisation’; Odendaal, The Founders.

26 Odendaal, The Founders, p. xiv.

27 S. Marks, The Ambiguities of Dependence in South Africa (Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1986).

28 T. Gibbs, Mandela’s Kinsmen: Nationalist Elites and Apartheid’s First Bantustan (Oxford, James Currey, 2014). For a recent long-term history of chieftaincy, see A.K. Mager and P.J. Velelo, The House of Tshatshu: Power, Politics, and Chiefs North-West of the Great Kei River c 1818–2018 (Cape Town, University of Cape Town Press, 2018).

29 P. Bonner, ‘South African Society and Culture, 1910–1948’, in Ross, Mager and Nasson, Cambridge History, p. 289.

30 L. Bank, ‘Populism and the Africanists in East London in the 1940s and Early 1950s’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 49, 5/6 (2023), in this issue.

31 D.H. Reader, The Black Man’s Portion: History, Demography and Living Conditions of the Native Locations of East London, Cape Province (Cape Town, OUP, 1961); P. Mayer, Townsmen or Tribesmen: Conservatism and the Process of Urbanization in a South African City, 2nd edition (Cape Town, OUP, 1971 [1961]); B.A. Pauw, The Second Generation: A Study of the Family Among Urbanized Bantu in East London (Cape Town, OUP, 1963).

32 G. Minkley, ‘Border Dialogues: Race, Class and Space in the Industrialisation of East London, 1902–1963’ (PhD thesis, UCT, 1994), p. 242. The report was by the Native Labour sub-committee of the Border Chamber of Industries.

33 R. Lee, African Women and Apartheid: Migration and Settlement in South Africa (London, Tauris, 2009).

34 Bonner, ‘South African Society and Culture’, p. 306; T. Lodge, ‘Political Mobilisation during the 1950s: An East London Case Study’, in S. Marks and S. Trapido (eds), The Politics of Class, Race and Nationalism in Twentieth Century South Africa (London and New York, Longman, 1987), p. 330.

35 Beinart and Bundy, ‘The Union, the Nation, and the Talking Crow’, in Hidden Struggles, pp. 273–5.

36 Minkley, ‘Border Dialogues’, p. 241; D. Atkinson, ‘Cities and Citizenship: Towards a Normative Analysis of the Urban Order in South Africa, with Special Reference to East London, 1950–1986’ (PhD thesis, University of Natal, 1991), pp. 155–6.

37 M. Hunter, Reaction to Conquest: Effects of Contact with Europeans on the Pondo of South Africa, 2nd edition (London, Oxford University Press, 1961 [1936]), p. 470.

38 D.G. Bettison, ‘A Socio-Economic Study of East London, Cape Province, with Particular Reference to the Non-European Peoples’ (MA thesis, UNISA, 1950); Reader, The Black Man’s Portion, pp. 5–24; Minkley, ‘Border Dialogues’.

39 T. Lodge, Black Politics in South Africa Since 1945 (London and New York, Longman, 1983), pp. 48–54; J. Cherry, ‘The Making of an African Working Class, Port Elizabeth 1925–1963’ (MA thesis, University of Cape Town, 1992).

40 Cherry, ‘The Making’, Chapters 1 and 2.

41 C. Bundy, ‘Lessons on the Frontier: Aspects of Eastern Cape History’, Kronos: A Journal of Cape History, 30, 1 (2004), p. 19.

42 A. Cobley, Class and Consciousness: The Black Petty Bourgeoisie in South Africa, 1924 to 1950 (Westport, Greenwood Press, 1990), p. 230.

43 Bank, ‘Populism and the Africanists’.

44 C. Walker, Women and Resistance in South Africa (London, Onyx Press, 1982).

45 B. Bozzoli, ‘Marxism, Feminism and South African Studies’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 9, 2 (1983), p. 149.

46 J. Cock, Maids and Madams: Domestic Workers Under Apartheid (London, The Women’s Press, 1986).

47 Walker, Women and Resistance; Julia C. Wells, ‘Why Women Rebel: A Comparative Study of Women’s Resistance in Bloemfontein (1913) and Johannesburg (1958)’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 10, 1 (1983), pp. 55–70; S. Marks, Divided Sisterhood: Race, Class and Gender in the South African Nursing Profession (Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 1994); S. Horwitz, ‘Black Nurses Strikes at Baragwanath Hospital, Soweto, 1948–2007’ in W. Beinart and M. Dawson (eds), Popular Politics and Resistance Movements in South Africa (Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2010), pp. 207–26. See also S. Hassim, Women’s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2006) and S. Magadla, Guerrillas and Combative Mothers: Women and the Armed Struggle in South Africa (Pietermaritzburg, UKZN Press, 2023).

48 D. Gaitskell, ‘“Wailing for purity”: Prayer Unions, African Mothers and Adolescent Daughters, 1912–1940’, in S. Marks and R. Rathbone (eds), Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa 1870–1930 (London, Longman, 1982), pp. 338–57.

49 N. Gasa, ‘Feminisms, Motherisms, Patriarchies and Women’s Voices’, in N. Gasa (ed.), Women in South African History: Basus’iimbokodo, Bawel’imilambo/They Remove Boulders and Cross Rivers (Cape Town, HSRC Press, 2007), pp. 207–29; C. Walker, ‘Conceptualising Motherhood in Twentieth Century South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 21, 3 (1995), pp. 417–37; N. Erlank, Convening Black Intimacy: Christianity, Gender, and Tradition in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa (Athens, Ohio University Press, 2022).

50 Beinart, ‘Amafelandawonye’.

51 Beinart, ‘Women in Rural Politics’, p. 325.

52 W.M. Macmillan, Complex South Africa: An Economic Footnote to History (London, Faber & Faber, 1930), p. 178.

53 Beinart, ‘Women in Rural Politics’, pp. 350–1.

54 Ibid.

55 Bradford, ‘“We are now the men”‘, p. 292.

56 A. Mager, Gender and the Making of a South African Bantustan: A Social History of the Ciskei, 1945–1959 (Oxford, James Currey, 1999), p. 156.

57 Macmillan, Complex South Africa, p. 149.

58 Beinart and Bundy, Hidden Struggles, pp. 16, 41, 36–7, 40–1 et passim.

59 Beinart, ‘Women in Rural Politics’, p. 335.

60 Beinart, ‘Amafelandawonye’, pp. 255–7.

61 R. Edgar, ‘Garveyism in South Africa: Dr Wellington and the “American Movement” in the Transkei’, Collected Seminar Papers, South African Societies Seminar, volume 6 (University of London, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 1976).

62 Bradford, ‘“We are now the men”’, pp. 294–6.

63 Ibid., pp. 297–8.

64 Odendaal, The Founders, pp. 221–3.

65 Bettison, ‘A Socio-Economic Study’, p. 16.

66 G. Minkley, ‘“I shall die married to the beer”: Gender, “Family” and Space in the East London location c.1923–52’, Kronos: Journal of Cape History, 23, 1 (1996), p. 142.

67 Union of South Africa, Report of the Native Economic Commission, 1930–32, UG 22-1932.

68 Beinart and Bundy, ‘The Union, the Nation, and the Talking Crow’, pp. 287–91.

69 Ibid., pp. 302–03.

70 Ibid., p. 305.

71 Ibid., p. 308.

72 Ibid., p. 317.

73 Minkley, ‘Border Dialogues’, pp. 252–3.

74 Ibid., pp. 89, 242–3; Mayer, Townsmen or Tribesmen, pp. 233–50; Minkley, ‘“I shall die”‘; Mager, Gender and the Making, pp. 146–66.

75 Minkley, ‘Border Dialogues’, pp. 246–7; Mager, Gender and the Making, p. 146.

76 As argued in F.F. Piven and R.A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York, Vintage Books, 1979 [1977]), pp. 4–5.

77 Atkinson, Cities and Citizenship, p. 175 (‘apparently’ as this is not corroborated in other secondary sources).

78 G. Minkley, ‘Class and Culture in the Workplace: East London, Industrialisation, and the Conflict over Work, 1945–1957’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 18, 4 (1992), pp. 739–40.

79 Ibid.

80 Bettison, ‘A Socio-Economic Study’, pp. 116–7.

81 Mager, Gender and the Making, pp. 146–62. For unemployed youth and tsotsis in East London see also A. Mager and G. Minkley, ‘Reaping the Whirlwind: The East London Riots of 1952’, in P. Bonner, P. Delius and D. Posel (eds), Apartheid’s Genesis, 1935–1962, pp. 229–51 (Johannesburg, Ravan Press and Wits University Press, 1993); L.J. Bank, Home, Spaces, Street Styles: Contesting Power and Identity in a South African City (London, Pluto Press, 2011), pp. 115–7, 119–22; and L. Ntsebeza, ‘Youth in Urban African Townships, 1945–1992’ (MA thesis, University of Natal, 1993).

82 Mager, Gender and the Making, p. 156.

83 Lodge, ‘Political Mobilisation’, p. 323.

84 T. Lodge, ‘Shedding New Light on the Historical Development of the ANC’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 42, 4 (2016), p. 783, a review article of Sylvia Neame’s three volume work The Congress Movement: The Unfolding of the Congress Alliance, 1912–1961 (Cape Town, HSRC Press, 2015). This paragraph is based on Lodge’s review article as unfortunately we do not have access to Neame’s work.

85 Ibid., p. 787.

86 Lodge, ‘Political Mobilisation’, p. 331.

87 A recent account based on interviews details the role of women members of the Pan Africanist Congress’s armed wing Poqo in opposing Bantu Authorities in Mqanduli in the Transkei: see Magadla, Guerrillas and Combative Mothers, pp. 98–104.

88 Mager, Gender and the Making, p. 78.

89 Ibid., p. 79.

90 The figure was first proposed by Donald Card, a controversial policeman based in East London. See C. Thomas, Tangling the Lion’s Tale: Donald Card, From Apartheid Era Cop to Crusader for Justice (East London, Donald Card, 2007).

91 A. Dubb, Community of the Saved: An African Revivalist Church in the Eastern Cape (Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 1976), pp. 26–7.

92 Ibid., pp. 27, 115–20.

93 H. Sapire, ‘African Political Organisation in Brakpan in the 1950s’, African Studies, 48, 2 (1989), p. 189.

94 See also O. Murphy, ‘Race, Violence and Nation: African Nationalism and Popular Politics in the Eastern Cape, 1948–1970’ (PhD thesis, Oxford University, 2013).

95 Piven and Cloward, Poor People’s Movements, p. 3.