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THE ILLUMINATI - THE RISE OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN REICH |
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Chapter 14 The Conquest of Economic Power If there is one sphere in which the Nationalists have not yet been able to triumph as they would wish it is that of the South African economy, in which non-Nationalist elements play a leading role. Yet the economic position of the Afrikaner is by no means as weak as is generally imagined, and the traditional picture of the Boer as a sort of hill-billy character with a vacant expression and tattered clothing is completely out of date. The economic basis of Nationalist power is strong and is growing stronger all the time. Nationalist politicians and economists determine the direction which is taken by the whole economy. The Nationalist control of government is used to bolster Nationalist power and influence in the private sector of the economy. Traditionally the Afrikaner has been a farmer - the very word Boer means 'farmer' - and the association with the land has dominated the thinking of the Afrikaner since the first settlements were established at the time of Jan van Riebeeck. In the days before mining and industry began in South Africa, farming was of course, the dominant economic activity. But the industrial revolution through which South Africa has passed in the present century has reduced the contribution of farming to the national income from twenty-two percent in 1925 to nine percent in 1964, though it still constitutes one of the most highly organized and protected industries in the country, and the influence of the farming community in the Nationalist Party is considerable. The number of farms in South Africa, according to the 1961 agricultural census, was 105,000, covering an area of roughly 106 million morgen. The Director of the South African Agricultural Union, Mr Chris Cilliers, in a speech at an agricultural congress in George in June 1968, said that agriculture provided employment for sixteen percent of the Whites and sixty percent of non-Whites, and represented a total capital investment conservatively estimated at R6,300 million. Agricultural products provide more than a third of the country's annual foreign exchange earnings, including gold: they comprised thirty-eight percent (R366 million) in 1965, and thirty-five percent (R379 million) in 1966 (Annual Report of the Secretary of Agricultural Economics and Marketing for the year ending 30 June 1967). In an address to an Afrikaner Chamber of Commerce in Belville, Cape, on 22 May 1964 Mr G.J.J.F. Steyn, Acting Secretary of Commerce and Industries, said that more than eighty percent of the farmers in South Africa were Afrikaans speaking (Cape Argus, 23 May 1964). Judging by election results, the majority of these undoubtedly support the Nationalist Party. It can thus be seen that considerable financial resources were available to the Nationalists when they decided that the time had come to move into commerce, industry, mining, and finance, and challenge the citadels of power previously monopolized by non-Afrikaans elements - the Englishman and the Jew. Because of his powerful position in the electoral sphere, the White farmer has been able to make successive South African governments dance to his tune. He is assisted in financing his operations by the Land Bank and a whole system of State subsidies and outright grants. He gets his produce delivered on the railways at rates lower than those applicable to mining or industry. He is protected by tariffs from the competition of lowcost food imports from abroad. The government helps him with research and technical assistance. And above all he has benefited from the development of cooperatives and control boards, which supervise the production, distribution and sale of agricultural products both in South Africa and abroad, so ensuring the best possible return for the farmer. The first of these control mechanisms to be established was the Kooperatiewe Wynbouwers Vereniging (K.W.V.) set up in 1918 and eventually vested by Act of Parliament with complete control over the whole vine-growing industry. Production is by predetermined quota, to ensure against unwanted surpluses, while the producer gets a fixed price and distribution is wholly entrusted to the K.W.V. If the season has been good, the producer may even get an agterskot or final dividend, to convince him that he has been adequately compensated for the surrender of his independence. Similar control boards were established for wheat and dairy products in 1930, for maize in 1931, for livestock in 1932, and for sugar in 1936. Today, there is hardly a branch of the industry which does not have its appropriate control board. The result is that South African farmers are placed in the position of a highly favoured monopoly. Production and prices are determined, not by the needs of the community, but by the greed of the producers. A helpless population is held to ransom by the farmers, backed by the powerful machinery of the State. In agriculture, as in other sectors of the South African economy, there are extremes of wealth not only between owner and employee, but also between the farm owners themselves. There has been a growing tendency towards concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. Three quarters of the total number of farms are less than 1,000 morgen in extent, but they constitute only twenty-three percent of the total farming area. One quarter of the farms are over 1,000 morgen in extent, and account for seventy-seven percent of the total farming area (Union Statistics for Fifty Years). Outside of a few areas, South Africa is not really suited to agriculture at all, and yields are poor in relation to the foremost agricultural countries of the world. A four-year study by the Department of Agricultural Economics and Marketing showed that returns on capital outlay varied from a loss of over 2 percent in one area to a profit of 13.6 percent in another, with the average profit about 5 per cent (Star, 28 May 1968) . In his speech to the George agricultural congress referred to above, Mr Cilliers, Director of the S.A. Agricultural Union, warned that agriculture threatened to become the exclusive property of the rich, and many farmers might eventually find themselves tenants or sharecroppers for large landowners or financial institutions, as had happened elsewhere in the world. He quoted figures showing that only 2,7 per cent of farmers earned more than R10,000 a year: 75 percent had a taxable income of less than R3,000; and 50 per cent, less than R1,600. About 12,000 farmers out of 80,000 showed losses. What enables the White farming community to survive is (a) the abysmally low wage structure; and (b) lavish assistance in the form of subsidies, tariffs, etc. from the State. Two estimates - by C.S. Richards for 1933, and by the Van Eck Commission for 1939-40 gave a figure of R15 million a year 'transferred (by the State) to farmers' income from the rest of the community'. (Houghton, The South African Economy, page 57). Over and above this, farmers' borrowings from the Land Bank, other State departments, commercial banks, cooperatives and other sources have increased enormously over the years. Authorities in Pretoria were quoted in 1964 as estimating that the debt piled up by farmers then exceeded R800 million. At the end of 1963, farmers owed the Land Bank alone R134,554,736 in loans secured by property bonds. This compared with R55 million at the end of 1958 (Rand Daily Mail, 9 June 1964). And by 1968, farmers' debts had rocketed to R1,200 million (Star, 3 July 1968). The producer monopoly on the control boards, set up under the Marketing Act, has also enabled South Africa to stabilize the prices of agricultural products internally at a level above the world price, while exporting 'surpluses' at a loss. One consequence of this is that millions of South Africans suffer from malnutrition because they cannot afford a balanced diet at the prices prevailing on the South African market. The effects of this system were made mercilessly evident in 1962, when South Africa was hit by an agricultural crisis, because the maize farmers had produced twenty-nine million bags of maize more than they could sell. The 'maize problem' had been created by what the Minister of Agricultural Economics and Marketing, Uys, called an 'explosion' in agricultural production - from forty million bags in 1959 to sixty-one million bags in 1962. It might be thought that such an explosion would have provided cause for joy and celebration, holding out the promise of abundant food for all. There was certainly need enough for the food in South Africa. In the Northern and Eastern Transvaal hundreds of thousands of African tribesmen were suffering from starvation after more than two years of serious drought. A survey conducted by the Gereformeerde Kerk in Vendaland, in the Northern Transvaal, revealed that through lack of food many people, mostly mothers and children, could eat only three times a week. From September 1962 to February 1963, 301 cases of kwashiorkor, mostly of children under five, and, 1,224 cases of pellagra were treated at five hospitals in the districts of Zoutspansberg and Sibasa alone. The pellagra was not the result of wrong eating habits, as had been alleged by Cabinet Ministers when the situation was first exposed in the Press, but was due to 'drastic famine in drought conditions', said the Kerk report. Yet the government' s proposed solution to the 'maize problem' was (a) to export the maize surplus at a price lower than the Maize Board's domestic selling price - why couldn't the price be lowered for the benefit of the local population? - and (b) to restrict production, so that in future there would be no danger of surpluses. The Minister announced that the government was introducing a 'new and revolutionary' scheme for controlling agriculture in the Republic. The scheme would involve production control. 'We are looking for a lasting remedy which will not kill the patient,' he said. But the patient he was thinking of was not the Black child suffering from kwashiorkor or pellagra. It was the wealthy maize farmer concerned about his profits. South Africa has also witnessed the destruction of surplus fruit and milk at the behest of control boards in order to keep up prices. Information supplied by the Minister of Agriculture, Mr Uys, in Parliament during the 1968 session revealed that in the four months from 10 October 1967 to 11 February 1968 the Milk Board had issued instructions for some 2,107,000 gallons of skimmed milk to be thrown away in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Klerksdorp, and Bloemfontein. The previous session, the Minister had stated that more than 500,000 gallons of skimmed milk had been thrown away in Johannesburg and Pretoria between 20 December 1966 and 28 February 1967, on the instructions of the Milk Board. The reason given was 'overproduction'. Yet it has been estimated that one third of a pint of milk a day is sufficient to prevent a child from contracting kwashiorkor. The cost of treating kwashiorkor patients at one hospital alone - the King Edward VIII in Durban - was R700,000 over a ten-year period. 'The curative cost of treatment for one surviving child for a 30-day period is about R143, while the preventive cost for the same period is about 80 cents - the cost of a third of a pint of milk a day (Rand Daily Mail, 25 May 1968). If the profits from farming are based partly on the exploitation of the consumer, they derive even more from the exploitation of the labourer. Approximately one third of the total African population of ten million live on farms in the White areas, while in the Western Province and Natal this labour force is supplemented by several hundred thousand Coloured and Asian workers. Although there are wide variations in the income of farm labourers, the figures show that the overwhelming majority have a standard of living considerably below that of the industrial workers in the towns. Conditions for farm workers on most farms can be only described as feudal, and have played a predominant role in determining the master-race attitude of Whites to Blacks in South Africa. Most farm owners behave as though they counted their labourers among their personal possessions. Cases of assault by farmers on their workers are frequently brought before the courts, leaving one to guess how many similar cases are not even referred to the police. The brutal conditions prevailing on the potato farms of the Eastern Transvaal have already been mentioned. For all these reasons farmers find it increasingly difficult to secure and retain an adequate labour force. It has been one of the aims of the pass laws and the farm jail system to remedy this deficiency, but even these devices have proved inadequate, and the government has resorted to ever more stringent control and direction of labour in order to ensure that the needs of the farmers are met. The processes of the industrial revolution through which South Africa has passed have resulted in the destruction of the old system of agriculture, the concentration of agricultural capital in ever fewer hands, and the drift of the Afrikaner to the cities. In 1911, more than eighty percent of the Afrikaners lived on the platteland; in 1936 the figure had dropped to forty-eight percent and by 1951 to thirty-one percent. If later statistics were available, they would undoubtedly show that the proportion had fallen still lower. The census figures show that between 1936 and 1960 the number of White males in agriculture declined from 180,000 to 114,000. The majority of these would be Afrikaners. Part of the accumulated capital of the farmers was invested in farm machinery; the number of tractors on the farms, for example, increased from 20,000 in 1946 to 120,000 in 1960. And part was invested in the new enterprises which the Afrikaner, under the direction of the Nationalist movement, had started to launch in the towns. |