The origins of the welfare state in pre-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

The history of South Africa, like that of any other country, cannot be viewed in isolation.Despite its apparently unique political and economic development, important aspects of South Africa's twentieth-century history must be placed within the context of broader patterns, whether they relate to Africa and the Third World or to western capitalist countries.This paper considers one facet of South Africa's political economy, namely, the development of health and welfare provisions for African workers down to 1948. [l] The paper analyses the extent to which pre-apartheid South Africa followed other countries in creating the foundations of a welfare state for its Afr-ican labour force.The central argument is that, in the face of a range of pressures, the South African state increased the tempo of health and social planning.However, the government's commitment to meaningful provisions was never more than lukewarm.It cynically manipulated the more progressive elements within the State to give the appearance of action and thus contain unrest during World War II.The immediate post-war period saw the government shedding its appearance of commitment to health and welfare legislation.The state had overthrown plans for improving the lot of African workers even before the National Party took power in 1948 under the banner of apartheid.From the 1860s, South Africa's mining economy dragged hundreds of thousands of African workers into a world of migrancy, very low wages, extremely harsh working conditions and barrack-like living quarters.By the 1920s, a small but growing manufacturing sector was taking its place alongside the mining industry.More and more Africans were leaving the rural areas and seeking work in the towns.White South Africa tried to retain control of its destiny through a policy of segregationby regulating mineworkers' movements, applying influx controls to urban-dwellers and preserving white supremacy in the political arena.Both the National Party under J B M Hertzog (Prime Minister, 1924-39) and the South African Party under Jan Smuts (Prime Minister 1919-24, 1939-48) shared these basic goals.The unification of the parties from 1934 to 1939 underlined this.In the administrative sphere, the state's front line was the Native Affairs Department (NAD), which oversaw the application of segregationist legislation.The system became more difficult to maintain as industrialization and urbanization picked up pace through the later 1930s and the 1940s and as the state itself became increasingly complex.Nowhere were these problems more apparent than in the field of health and welfare provision: the Public Health Act (1919) and the founding of the Labour Department (1924) and the Social Welfare Department (1937) impinged heavily on the notion of segregated administration.From the mid-1930s, groups ranging from Afrikaans nationalist organizations to African trade unions pressed the government with demands for social welfare.Within state structures, the Department of Labour, the Industrial and Agricultural Requirements Commission, National Housing and Planning Commission, Social and Economic Planning Commission (SEPC), Social Services Commission and National Health Services Commission, recommended a social security system fit for a prosperous, post-war, industrial economy.World War I1 also brought greater contact with Britain and the United States, where state intervention and social planning were already well established.The impact of these factors on Smuts's wartime coalition government can be seen in several areas.This paper covers housing, pensions and unemployment insurance in section (ii) and hospitals and medical services in section (iii).Two points are stressed: changes over time in the state's approach to health and welfare generally for black workers; and the ways in which different parts of the State appropriated aspects of the question and impacted on the overall development of social services before 1948.[2] ii) "Outdoor Relief" for the Urban African ProletariatIn the 1930s and 1940s, South Africa took the first faltering steps towards a "welfare state".There were several external pressures on the government to introduce welfare legislation.From the mid-1930s, white liberals drew public attention to the maltreatment of African workers under existing legislation.Those involved in this effort were members of the Institute of Race Relations and, from 1936, the Natives Representative Council and MPS elected by Africans.[3] ,Proponents of welfare laws could count on support from key civil servants, including Ivan Walker, the Secretary for Labour , Public Health Department officials such as Peter Allan (who had conducted the first survey of the spread of TB in rural areas in the 1920s), Harry Gear and George Gale, and Douglas Srnit, the Secretary for Native Affairs from 1934Affairs from to 1945.[4] .[4] A second set of political pressures came from a combination of public concern over deprivation amongst white people and the rise of AWaner nationalism.Meetings of the Afrikaner Volkskongres, the Report of the Carnegie Commission and the 1936 National Congress on Social Work heightened public awareness of the "poor white" problem.[5] The extreme right-wing Purified National Party, founded in 1934, mobilized poor Afrikaners around the issue of white workers' declining health standards.[6] White South Africans generally became concerned about the threat to their health from squalid African living conditions in proximity to white urban areas.'"Horrible' Native Townships", the Rand Daily Mail proclaimed in 1935: "Hovels and mangy dogs: plague spots that must be cleared up." [7] The emphasis here was on the plague aspectbesides being an outrage to the conscience, the spread of slum conditions, malnutrition and disease amongst blacks was a "positive danger to the community" which required official remedial action.Although the State accepted that health services were required in both the rural and urban contexts, the