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Class, Race and Gender Amongst White Volunteers, 1939-1953

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Class, Race and Gender Amongst White Volunteers, 1939-1953 From War to Workplace: Class, Race and Gender amongst White Volunteers, 1939-1953 By Neil Roos Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History in the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences at the University of North West Supervisor: Dr. Tim Clynick Mafikeng, North West Province August 2001 To Dick Abstract Through a case study of the war and post-war experiences of those who volunteered to serve in the Second World War, the thesis explores aspects of the social and cultural history of white men in South Africa. The thesis begins from the premise that class and ethnicity, the major binary categories conventionally used to explain developments in white South African society, are unable to account for the history of white men who volunteered to serve in the Second World War. It argues that the history of these volunteers is best understood in the context of racist culture, which can be defined as an evolving consensus amongst whites in South Africa on the political, social and cultural primacy of whiteness. It argues that, when the call to arms came in 1939, it was answered mainly by white men from those little traditions incorporated politically into the segregationist colonial order, largely through the explicit emphases of white privilege and the cultural hegemony of whiteness. Their decision to enlist was underscored by an awareness that volunteering entailed a set of rights and duties, which centred on their expectations of post-war "social justice." Chapter three examines some of the highly idealised and implicitly racialised ways in which, during wartime, white troops expanded their understanding of social justice. To this end, many joined the Springbok Legion, a type of trade union of the ranks and itself a nascent little tradition. In chapter four, the thesis tracks white ex-servicemen's disillusionment as they were demobilised from the Union Defence Force. It argues that their "restlessness" and iv disillusion embodied a set of racialised anxieties around access to jobs and housing. Such concerns help to explain their post-war abandonment of the Springbok Legion, which was beginning to articulate "non-racial" variants of social justice. The National Party (NP) promised exactly the sort of racial order which underscored the material side of ex-servicemen's hopes for social justice. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that veterans as a category shifted their allegiance to the NP in the watershed 1948 general election. Despite the appeal of its racial politics, the NP was yet too closely associated with fascism and Nazism, which veterans had pledged to fight on the battlefield and the home front. Veterans' disappointment with the UP and their dislike of the NP marked the beginning of a sense of disenchantment with a party political culture which had - in one way or another - failed to acknowledge the importance of their wartime service. The War Veterans' Torch Commando, which appeared in 1951, provides the focus for chapter five. While ostensibly, the aim of the Torch was to protest against the government's "rape of the constitution" when it tried to remove coloured voters from the common voters' roll, the thesis asserts that, for rank-and-file members, the Torch was more about their place in the racial order than about the moral rights of coloured voters. By 1953, most white servicemen were integrated into civilian life, and were, as one veteran put it, "getting ahead." However as the NP set about consolidating its hold on state and society, it discriminated against war veterans and the memory of war service in all sorts of petty ways. From this perspective, the Torch represented a challenge to the ways in which the NP set about allocating the v privileges of whiteness to the Party faithful, and so violated the particular contract of whiteness veterans had struck with the previous regime when they volunteered. The Torch was also the last occasion when white veterans affirmed their collective identity as a category in the party political arena. In the face of an assertive Afrikaner nationalism, they subsequently evoked their service identity through veterans' organisations like the MOTH, which also helped them to establish networks that could aid them materially. Although "apolitical," the MOTH helped to mediate white veterans' relationship with the broader, racialised, social order, and so represented a series of political responses- albeit more "cultural" in form- to a party political culture that failed to acknowledge the "special" status of white veterans. The thesis also examines the role of white radical volunteers, mainly communists, who pinned their hopes for post-war social justice on a vigorous working class movement and ultimately, a non-racial and classless society. During wartime, this cohort held out the belief that, through the Springbok Legion, they could educate white troops in a more "progressive" direction. After the war, however, the Springbok Legion lost its mass base, and only a small, radical, cadre remained in the organisation. Chapter six explores the role of radical white veterans in elaborating a strand of radical egalitarianism in the early apartheid period, as conditions of growing state repression brought rapprochement between the Legion, the ANC and its Congress allies. During the course of the decade, a handful of radical white veterans from the vi Legion played a disproportionately significant role in the Congress movement's accelerating tempo of anti-apartheid resistance, and chapter six ends with a challenge to the orthodoxy of liberation historiography. Finally, the thesis charts the different way in which white ex-servicemen traded on their identity as volunteers. The majority of white veterans used the memory of service to stake their claim as white men who had served their country. A small collective of radical veterans, on the other hand, invoked traditions of anti-fascism to challenge the very precepts of racist culture, and the racialised society which it sustained. The ways in which different groups of white veterans used the experience and memory of service to mediate contrasting relationships with the racial order makes a powerful argument for scholars to historicise studies of whiteness and race more generally. In so doing, it is possible to reclaim race as a category for historical analysis, and to challenge abstract and generic definitions of race which ultimately strengthen the hegemony of whiteness. vii Contents Page Preface xii Declaration xvii List of Abbreviations xviii 1. BULLSHIT AND BRASS TACKS 1 Popular perspectives on South African whites 1 Accounts of whiteness 3 Marxism and the white problem in South African studies 10 Class, culture and the "deterministic fix" 25 The white problem in American studies and the legacy of W. E. B. 30 DuBois Methodological notes 43 The shape of things to come 46 2. WHITE VOLUNTEERS, POPULISM, POPULAR POLITICS AND 55 THE RACE QUESTION TO THE 1930s The outbreak of war 55 To war: Big Words and little stories 57 Race and the colonial contract 65 Poor whites, the Great Depression and the politics of race 68 Crises of whiteness and party political co-option 82 To war: volunteering 91 viii 3. THE CONJUNCTURE OF DISJUNCTURE: WHITE 102 SERVICEMEN, THE SPRINGBOK LEGION AND SOCIAL JUSTICE Interrogating social justice 102 Hurry up and wait 105 Bored soldiers, part-time politicians and competing notions of 108 social justice A brief methodological note 116 Formation of the Springbok Legion 118 A trade union of the ranks 128 Winning white soldiers' hearts and minds 135 Bring the boys home! Repatriation and the Helwan riot 139 The beginning of (ex)service disillusionment 150 4. DEMOBILISATION AND THE DEATH OF JANNIE PROMISES 153 The stresses of civilian life 153 White men back to work and the struggle for "social justice" 155 Demobilisation: What homes for white heroes? 159 Social (in)justice: Disappointment and the imperatives of 170 whiteness The 1948 general election 179 White veterans and whiteness in the apartheid state 190 ix 5. THECHALLENGEOFTHETORCHCOMMANDO 192 The rise and fall of the Torch 192 The NP, the coloured vote and the concerns of civil society 197 The origins of the Torch 202 Crises of white masculinity and the emergence of the Torch 212 as a mass movement The Steel Commando, the Cape Town riot and the subversion 220 of the Torch as a popular mass movement The Natal Stand and the little tradition of regional secessionism 232 A retreat from "politics"? 237 6. BEYOND THE POLITICS OF WHITENESS: THE SPRINGBOK 241 LEGION, THE CONGRESS OF DEMOCRATS AND THE MOVEMENTS FOR NATIONAL LIBERATION From class struggle to national liberation 241 NP rule and political uncertainty 244 Repression and rapprochement 248 Radical whites and the formation of the South African Congress of 256 Democrats Rusty Bernstein and the Freedom Charter 260 Military "experts" and the move towards violence 262 The political legacy of radical legionnaires 266 X 7. CONCLUSION: TRAJECTORIES OF WHITE EX-SERVICE 269 POLITICS Contracts of whiteness 269 "For seeing the graves at Alamein, you can never be the same 273 again." The end of ex-service politics? - the Memorable Order of Tin Hats 27 4 and the study of racist culture White veterans and the Congress movement 280 White servicemen and the study of race 282 Selected Bibliography 283 xi Preface I spent my childhood from the mid-1960s until the early 1980s in a small milling village on the Natal South Coast sugar belt. My father, a veteran of the Second World War, worked for the sugar company as a clerk. While his war service earned him some respect from other whites in the village, and his participation in the Comrades marathon during the 1950s, some awe, he was also the subject of mild condescension as the ''poorest white in the Company." As a youngster, it was my father's war service that interested me.
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