DAN JACOBSON
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Relations and the English-speaking universities in Johannesburg
and Cape Town, who were wholly opposed to the system on moral,
social, and economic grounds.
They argued that it did not work: that for all the elaboration
of the laws, and the ruthlessness with which they were applied,
an ever-increasing number of blacks were in fact settling around
and within the cities. But because the state did not want them to be
there, because it could not acknowledge to itself that they were
there, it failed to provide them with the facilities and the assistance
they needed if they were to lead anything but a degraded life. And
how could life not be degraded when men were forcibly separated
from their wives and children, and either herded together in great,
prisonlike barracks or compelled to live in hovels, in a half fugi–
tive state, with no papers, or forged papers, or papers they could
get only through bribing venial officials? What could such condi–
tions produce but crime, drunkenness, shiftlessness, venereal di–
sease? Could not the authorities see that the system destroyed all
the family and tribal structures which had sustained the people
from the reserves in the past, while at the same time it prevented
them from putting down new roots and developing any sense of
community in the new circumstances in which they found them–
selves? Did the whites, who believed that they were the benefi–
ciaries of the system, imagine that they could escape from the con–
sequences of what they were doing to the people among whom
they had to live and work? Could they not understand that even on
economic grounds the policy they were following was a short–
sighted and retrograde one? Only in a half barbarous, underde–
veloped demicolony could it ever have been tolerated. South
African industry could never become efficient when it had
to
rely
so heavily on a cheap but unstable labor force, which was wholly
lacking in skills and which was deliberately denied the opportunity
of acquiring them; industry would never find worthwhile markets
for its products unless the mass of the workers who produced the
goods were properly paid, decently housed, and encouraged to
invest in their own future.
Such voices were, of course, in a minority among the whites;
the blacks, in any case, were virtually voiceless. Among politi–
cians and white trade unionists (who were anxious to maintain
their monopoly of certain skills) other voices spoke more loudly
of "improving" the system only in the sense of making it more
