“National Socialism is not the creation of any particular country or people. It owes its existence to certain circumstances, demands and needs in national life…The cry is becoming louder and louder, in South Africa as well as in Europe, and it will not be suppressed.” ÔÇô General Herzog, 1941
We have observed that, while there is no evidence of his having ever been here, George Padmore’s local understanding and concern is evident in many of his writings, including articles on Tshekedi Khama’s 1930s struggles, as well as in support for Seretse and Ruth Khama in the 1950s, when he knew the couple in London.
Padmore was also a lifelong opponent of South Africa’s desire to incorporate the Protectorates, i.e. Lesotho and Swaziland as well as Botswana. In 1938 he thus took the lead in protesting against the possibility that the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, was prepared to appease the expansionist designs of South Africa’s first Afrikaner Nationalist Prime Minister, General Barry Hertzog.
In the independent Labour periodical Controversy, for example, Padmore warned that while progressive attention was focused on Fascism elsewhere, the “quieter Fascist tendencies within the British Empire are ignored”.
In this respect, Padmore recognised Hertzog’s obsession that the existence of the Protectorates was an anomaly. He further warned that the South African leader was especially eager to grab Bechuanaland, given that it would satisfy the need for more ‘native’ land while “more fertile areas are being greedily watched by the Boer farmers who wish to confiscate them for agricultural and pastoral purposes.”
He was also aware at the time that mining companies in Gauteng were eying Bechuanaland’s untapped mineral resources.
The Batswana territories, Padmore recognised, “have not been subdued by conquest” but rather “accepted the protection of Great Britain by treaties made through their tribal chiefs in order to escape massacre at the hands of the Boer filibusters and mercenaries of the British South Africa Company of Cecil Rhodes”
Such accommodation was to him understandable as both the Boer and British adventurers had “employed methods no less savage than Hitler’s or Mussolini’s in “pacifying” the Matabeles”.
As a result, Batswana had “remained politically under the control of Whitehall, a fact which has saved them from the terrorism and racial persecution which is the daily lot of the millions of blacks living under the jurisdiction of the Union.” And yet, their fate in 1938 was still seen as being “dreadful enough.”
“Every penny is extorted from them in taxes to maintain a bureaucratic administration. In return little or nothing has been done to develop the economic resources of the country or to promote the well-being of the people. Although Bechuanaland is a very large territory, it is chiefly desert; and such lands as claim surface water and are served by railway are in European hands.
“The Bechuana tribes have been left a little over 100,000 square miles out of an area of 275,000 square miles. Primitive agriculture and absence of pasturage make it almost impossible for the natives to produce enough food for themselves. During the frequent droughts they suffer terribly.
Pressed by this economic need and the problem of finding tax money, there is a heavy yearly exodus to the Union, where the men labour in the mines and on the farms for starvation wages. The disintegrating effects upon tribal society have been disastrous.
Rhetorically asking “since their own conditions are sufficiently bad, why do the Protectorate natives look with horror upon the circumstances of those living within Union jurisdiction?” Padmore, with an obvious reference to the Jews in Nazi Germany, affirmed: “The Fascist methods which in Europe are reserved for white racial and political minorities, in the Union are perpetrated by a white minority upon a black majority.”
After further detailing the deprivations of South Africa’s blacks, Padmore concluded that it was “no great wonder that in 1934 an assembly of chiefs of the Native Advisory Council of Bechuanaland recorded its opposition to transfer” or that “the young men of the Protectorates, particularly the Basutos, have threatened recourse to arms, so determined are they to resist any attempt to hand them over to the Union’s tender mercy.”
The latter fact has often been overlooked. By the turn of the last century the Batswana and Basotho, having unlike others in the region never been disarmed, due to the legacy of Sechele, Moshoeshoe and those who followed them, were in the unique position of being known as “tribes with guns.”
But, Padmore nonetheless warned, “the appointment of a Standing Joint Advisory Conference between Great Britain and the Union to study openings in matters affecting the native territories is a move to pave the way for annexation” for “unless the British Government seriously contemplated the transfer it would not have set up a Commission to study the basis on which it should take place.”
In response he called for the “sustained protest of the British workers” concluding with Karl Marx’s 1867 admonishment – “Labour with a white skin cannot emancipate itself where labour with a black skin is branded.”
As it was, the then very real threat of incorporation was interrupted in 1939 by the outbreak of the Second World War, resulting in Hertzog’s downfall.
