Empire Cricket Booklet

ORIGINS OF SEGREGATION AT THE CAPE

The franchise issue clearly indicated the political bankruptcy of the old 'liberal' policy, and the significance of the alliance of mining capital and commercial farmers and the new breed of 'native' administrators. In a world where labour now lay at the heart of policy, new collaborators were needed. In July 1894, after personally taking over responsibility for 'Native Affairs' at the Cape, Rhodes introduced the Glen Grey Bill which was drafted by Milton on his instructions. Rhodes described Glen Grey as his 'Bill for Africa'. It provided the benchmark for a new ideological paradigm while redefining the economic and political functions of Africans in the white-dominated state. 94 Consequently, Milton was simultaneously responsible for drafting the core legislation (known as the Glen Grey Act) which laid the foundations through its approach to labour reserves and political representation for the segregationist system on which the political economy of twentieth-century South Africa was based, and fought a tough struggle to ensure that 'Krom' Hendricks, a Cape coloured, did not represent South Africa on the cricket field. 95 The primary impact of the Glen Grey Act lay in the integration of the two big issues of land tenure and political representation. Individual allotments of land were to be granted to some Africans on the one-man one-lot principle, but were only four morgen in extent. Significantly they were treated, for the purposes of the franchise, as being held under communal tenure. While liberals had campaigned for African individual tenure for decades, the practical effect of this arrangement was to limit rather than increase African access to land, and the small size of the lots, inalienability, survey fees, quit rents and labour taxes made them uneconomic and ensured many who had thus far escaped would be forced onto the labour market. The second aspect of the Act covered representation, setting up councils whose purpose, according to Rhodes, was to employ African 'minds on simple questions in connection with local affairs'. The councils were made up of six representatives chaired by the native commissioner in his usual role as magistrate, 96 cementing the alliance between traditional authorities and 'native administrators', and provided the full extent of political participation for most Cape Africans. 97 Glen

and the 'liberals' parted company, and Merriman and Rose-Innes both resigned. The problem arose from a campaign in support of the election of Ahmed Effendi, representative of the Moslem Association. This created a concern as to the system of multiple voting for constituency MPs in Cape Town, where each elector had four votes, which could all be used for a single candidate. Someone like Effendi stood an excellent chance of election if most coloured voters 'plumped' for him with all their votes. This was the first significant challenge to the whites-only political closed shop, and the Rhodes government, with W. P. Schreiner now attorney-general, worked to ensure that parliamentary representation was in fact, if not in theory, barred to persons of colour. In any event, Effendi was not elected. 'The election of a Coloured

Walter Rubusana, the first president of the Border Native Cricket Union, helped found the SANNC in 1912 and was a member of the delegation that went to London

in 1914 to protest against the Native Land Act.

member,' Schreiner suggested, 'would be prejudicial to Africans.' Their interests would be best secured if they were represented by whites nominated by government. 93 This perspective - attacking coloured representation in the supposed interests of Africans who had realistically already lost any opportunities for direct participation -illustrated the death of liberalism at the Cape.