Preferred Citation: Evans, Ivan. Bureaucracy and Race: Native Administration in South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1997 1997. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft2n39n7f2/ Bureaucracy and Race Native Administration in South Africa Ivan Evans UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley · Los Angeles · London © 1997 The Regents of the University of California For Catherine Preferred Citation: Evans, Ivan. Bureaucracy and Race: Native Administration in South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1997 1997. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft2n39n7f2/ For Catherine Preface This book examines the Department of Native Affairs (DNA) in the 1940s and 1950s, when the racial order known as segregation (1910–48) gave way to its sterner and more notorious successor, apartheid (1948–94). The central claim of this book is that one particular state institution, the Department of Native Affairs (also known as the Native Affairs Department), was crucial in transforming “the idea of apartheid” into a viable and durable project. The study presented in these pages therefore attaches a special importance to that special breed of state managers known as “Native administrators” in the forging of the apartheid state. A carryover from South Africa’s colonial nineteenth-century past, Native administrators languished in lowly obscurity in the segregation years, their enervated performance in the 1940s having much to do with the erosion of segregation. It was therefore entirely unexpected that Native administrators would acquire the dominant role they did in remaking South Africa in the 1950s. Nevertheless, this development transpired to be of defining importance to all South Africans— but to none more so than to the African majority over whom the department held sway. The conversion of the DNA from a vacillating liberal outpost into an arrogant apartheid fortress is the substantive concern of this book. More conceptually, however, this book addresses two important themes. By focusing on the specific contribution of Native administrators, it sheds light on the overpowering role that state administration has played in modern South Africa. Interventionist administrative institutions were central to apartheid. Oddly, however, this central development has not received sustained attention until recently. This study claims that the hypertrophy of civil administration was the most distinctive feature of state formation in the 1950s, apartheid’s formative decade. This argument has important ramifications for understanding the logic of authoritarian regimes. This book argues that the options of authoritarian regimes, including those of a state form as patently “illegitimate” as the apartheid behemoth, are not limited to violence and terror—a narrow perspective which has a lengthy record in the literature of South Africa. By focusing on the transformation of a specifically civilian apparatus, this study illustrates that administration was crucial to “normalizing” the coercion that underpinned racial domination and was surprisingly effective in conditioning the compliance of the African majority. The study does not, of course, diminish the importance of racial repression in South Africa. Rather, by focusing on two key developments in the 1950s—the racialization of urban space in the form of the “planned African location” and the conversion of African chiefs into administrative factotums of apartheid—this study demonstrates that coercion was systematically leached into issues of everyday administration. In this way, a complex bureaucratic web was created, ensnaring all South Africans in the blueprints and programs hatched by administrators in the DNA—but especially trapping Africans, the specific target of the department’s attentions. This book has been long in the making. Accordingly it has been influenced by many colleagues and friends along the way. Among my colleagues at the University of California at San Diego, my thanks go to Gershon Shafir in particular for playing such an important and supportive role in the latter stages of completing the book. I would also like to thank Harvey Goldman, another colleague who took time off to read and reread the manuscript as it evolved. Special thanks go to Fred Cooper, who offered a marvelous critique of the manuscript in one of its earlier incarnations: without his sound advice and support, this would be a very different and much poorer book. I would like to thank David Laitin for his critical support, as well as an anonymous reviewer who provided valuable insight and advice, as did Aaron Cicourel. I would also like to thank Alan Jeeves for making available to me a difficult-to- obtain document concerning the Tomlinson Commission. Thanks, too, to Gavin Williams for his sharp comments. Various librarians in South Africa, Canada, and the United States have been priceless foot soldiers in the ceaseless quest for information which must have seemed (and often was) obscure and exotic. From the shores of California, I remain in their debt. To my parents goes my deepest gratitude. My father will not read this book, but I am equally appreciative to both of them for the support they have given me over the years. My greatest thanks and respect go to Catherine. Without her infinite patience and support, this project would still be no more than a fragment of virtual reality stuck in a hard drive. Matters would have been a good deal more easy without the rambunctious presence of Alexandre and Dylan, innocent victims who suffered through this book as much as anyone else. But I would not change a thing. La Jolla, California Abbreviations AAC All-African Convention AANEA Association of Administrators of Non-European Affairs ABX A. B. Xuma Papers AHI Afrikaanse Handelsinstituut ANC African National Congress ASSOCOM Association of Chambers of Commerce BAC Bantu Affairs Commission BIC Bantu Investment Corporation BTI Board of Trade and Industries CAD Central Archives Depot CATA Cape African Teachers’ Association CKC Carter Karis Collection CLB Central Labour Bureau CM Chamber of Mines CMT Chief Magistrate of the Transkei CNC Chief Native Commissioner CPSA Communist Party of South Africa CRB Central Reference Bureau CSIR Council for Scientific and Industrial Research DBAD Department of Bantu Affairs and Development DNA Department of Native Affairs DNL Director of Native Labour EFU Economic Farming Unit FAK Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurverenigings FCI Federated Chamber of Industries HAD House of Assembly Debates IANEA Institute of Administrators of Non-European Affairs ICU Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union JCC Johannesburg City Council JSAS Journal of Southern African Studies MNA Minister of Native Affairs MP Member of Parliament NAC Native Affairs Commission NAD Native Affairs Department NBRI National Building and Research Institute NC Native Commissioner NEAD Non-European Affairs Department NEC Native Economic Commission NEUM Non-European Unity Movement NHO National Housing Office NHPC National Housing and Planning Commission NLC Native Laws Commission NP National Party NRB Native Resettlement Board NRC Native Representative Council NTS Naturellesake (Archives of the Department of Native Affairs) OFS Orange Free State PAC Pan-Africanist Congress PSC Public Service Commission SAAU South African Agricultural Union SABRA South African Bureau of Racial Affairs SAIC South African Indian Congress SAIRR South African Institute of Race Relations SAJE South African Journal of Economics SANAC South African Native Affairs Commission SANT South African Native Trust SAP South African Party SAR South African Railways SD Senate Debates SEPC Social and Economic Planning Council SNA Secretary for Native Affairs TLA Transkeian Legislative Assembly TOB Transkeian Organised Bodies TTA Transkeian Territorial Authority TTGC Transkeian Territories General Council UME United Municipal Executive UP United Party UTTGC United Transkeian Territories General Council WARS Western Areas Removal Scheme WNLA Witwatersrand Native Labour Association Ministers of Native Affairs, 1910–60 H. Burton 31 May 1910 J. B. M. Hertzog 25 June 1912 J. W. Sauer 20 December 1912 L. Botha 23 September 1913 J. C. Smuts 3 September 1919 J. B. M. Hertzog 30 June 1924 E. G. Jansen 19 June 1929 P. G. W. Grobler 30 March 1933 H. A. Fagan 3 June 1938 D. Reitz 6 September 1939 P. K. van der Byl 11 January 1943 E. G. Jansen 4 June 1948 H. F. Verwoerd 19 October 1950 M. C. de Wet Nel 3 September 1958[*] W. A. Maree 3 September 1958[*] In 1958 the Department was split into two departments, the Department of Bantu Administration and Development and the Department of Bantu Education. Introduction Black South Africans are depressingly familiar with the phenomenon of administration. After 1948, virtually every aspect of their lives was subjected to the intrusive hands of clerks, bureaucrats, and administrators of one sort or another. Ideologues of apartheid “ethnos theory” presented race and ethnicity as static categories, each replete with a distinctive essence which the apartheid state would preserve. But the intersection of these categories with the restless dynamism of rapid capitalist growth persistently eroded this claim, precluding the possibility that the apartheid project could be placed on automatic pilot. Because it placed such a premium on systematic state interventions, the dreary burden of apartheid was that it had to be constantly administered: the feasibility of apartheid came to rest on the pervasive presence of the state in every facet of life.