Trustee liberalism in play but it never delivered political and civil rights to Africans

Trustee liberalism and city-building

The English settlers in East London, now KuGompo, were never great farmers. They were better traders, artisans, civil servants and city builders. And at the end of the colonial wars, they devoted themselves to converting their garrison town into some version of a “London” in the east.

The city was built in the name of the British crown and commonwealth, for sure, with the iconic city hall and its Victoria tower dedicated to the queen in 1897.

In the 1940s, after the Allied victory, the rise of Afrikaner nationalism and the visit of the royal family in 1947, East London affirmed its links with Britain through new business connections and became one of the fastest-growing cities in South Africa.

Within the fabric of the trustee British liberalism, which had driven the hopes and dreams of freedom among educated African elites like Walter Rubusana, was the hope that city growth would embark on an inclusion journey to prosperity.

Even as late as September 1950, when the country mourned the death of the acclaimed SA statesman and close ally of Britain, General Jan Smuts, black East Londoners turned out in large numbers at the city hall to show their respects, honour his life, and restate their hope for inclusion.

Trustee liberalism

In the late 19th century, the corridor from then-East London through King William’s Town (Qonce) to Alice and Fort Beaufort was known as the heartland of white liberalism in South Africa.

The area had the largest concentration of mission stations and so-called “native” schools in the world.

In the Eastern Cape, unlike parts of the United States and Canada, the focus of British colonial policy at this time was to strive for the incorporation of Africans as potential citizens in the settler state and the British imperial Commonwealth.

Under the Cape franchise, Africans who owned property and had appropriate levels of education qualified to vote in the Cape parliament.

The system was based on the idea that all civilised and educated men should be equal before the law and able to participate as citizens.

This ideology inspired men like JT Jabavu, Rubusana and others in the late 19th century to campaign to increase the number of African voters across the Eastern Cape.

This troubled some settler liberals in the Cape Colony, including the mining magnate and member of the Cape parliament, Cecil John Rhodes. He feared that educated and propertied Africans might outnumber white settler voters in many areas like Queenstown and across the newly colonialised Transkei.

In 1895 Rhodes led an intervention to establish the Bunga as a parallel structure for educated African men and chiefs in the Transkei. It was known as the United Transkei Territories General Council with headquarters in Umtata. This body would report to the Cape parliament as a lower tier of government.

It was Rhodes and the trustee liberal settlers, not the Afrikaners, who first invented separate development.

English settlers felt threatened by the speed of African advancement in education and business at the end of the 19th century. They even banned the use of metal plough discs in the Transkei after 1913 on the grounds that it would cause soil erosion.

A key problem with trustee liberalism as it applied on the eastern frontier was that it never guaranteed the African political and civil rights it promised.

The tendency was for settlers to safeguard their interest first, before considering the rights or interests of others.

The same logic applied to city buildings in East London.

Trustee liberalism generated considerable hope and promise, especially for educated Africans, but ultimately fell short on delivering meaningful results.

Early city builders and urban ambition

It took 50 years from 1850 for the East London city to make the transition from a struggling garrison town to small settler city with growth potential and ambition.

The creation of the iconic city hall between 1897 and 1899, with its Victorian tower, was a gift from the city to the queen.

But beyond this symbolism, the new urban ambition of the municipality was probably best expressed in the decision in 1898 to establish a city-wide electric tram service, modelled on the system in London.

The tram system allowed the council to map out a city grid of routes, stops and destinations in key places. It defined the shape and size of the modern city.

Crucially, it also required that the municipal authority have a reliable electricity supply to run the service. The tramline was completed in 1906.

The city design projected middle-class ambition. There was plenty of potential for “promenading” and seaside leisure for polite society as the new design projected a spirit of improvement, civility and respectability.

Public parks, like Queens Park with its towering wrought iron gates, were places that gave dignity, charisma and presence to a colonial settler city, but also helped express the power of the middle-class over the rough and ready white working-class elements and indigenous people.

New African locations were constructed on the urban edge, starting with East Bank in the 1890s.

The fortunes of the city, however, waned by the 1920s as wool and agricultural exports dropped and urban growth stagnated through the 1930s.

Then, in the 1940s, there was a boom in the textile industry. Waverly Blankets in Chislehurst produced a million blankets for the war effort.

The Anglo-industrial city

The Allied victory ignited a sense of Anglo-settler pride and self-confidence in the face of the rise of African nationalism.

The Anglophile settler middle-class in the city wanted to contain and suppress Afrikaner influence in schools, public life and the civil service.

To illustrate that ambition they wanted East London to compete with the Witwatersrand. This produced a focused effort on the part of the business to make good on its Anglo-South African links to kickstart an industrial economy.

The arrival of Grand Prix racing and Exide batteries kick-started the motor industry, while textile factories boomed with the transfer of workers and machinery from Lancaster.

A massive new power station was built in the harbour precinct.

The city grid also expanded with the Nahoon bridge and the opening up of Beacon Bay. The beach sports and leisure lifestyle was now combined with aggressive industrial growth to remake the city.

The white-run municipal councils of East London and King William’s Town achieved great success, first in making King William’s Town a commercial and administrative centre and then in shifting the focus to East London and secondary industrialisation.

In 1952 East London had the fastest growth rate of any industrial centre in the country, even faster than the Witwatersrand. This encouraged a new wave of expatriate white British immigration to the city and the growth of the large working class.

The power that drove urban growth at this time was the close relationship with Britain and the strength of anti-Afrikaner sentiment that fueled a local Anglophile settler nationalism, which also now collided with African nationalism.

In East London at this time, one could not apply for election to the town council based on party-political affiliation. It had to be based on civic pride.

The public finances of the city were also tightly managed and published in the pages of the Daily Dispatch for scrutiny.

City-based organisations, like the East London Chamber of Commerce and the EL Publicity Association, were critical drivers of growth and investment.

Betrayal of trusteeship

Despite the impressive track record of urban growth and tight public financial management, the truth about East London was that literally every cent the city could muster was reinvested in the growth of the white city and suburbs.

The living condition in the city’s locations of East Bank, West Bank and Cambridge were appalling and described by external observations as the “worst in the Union”.

Various commissions of enquiry were appointed to investigate issues and grievances in the location, but nothing was done to improve conditions.

But there was still enough of a liberal sentiment in the city to allow African theatre groups and musical acts to perform at the city hall, and to allow access to the beach front at the far end of wild open-ocean facing Eastern Beach.

Black jazz artists could perform at city hotels and North End remained a racially mixed precinct in the city.

But overall, the spirit of liberalism had waned, even though the city elected candidates from the Progressive Federal Party and journalists, like Donald Woods, constantly compared the rise of Afrikaner nationalism and apartheid to the rise of Nazism in Germany.

There was also the Torch Commando after the war, which expressed support for the democracy, but the level of political commitment in improving the lives of the African working class in the city locations was virtually nil.

The city had grown beyond all expectations on a shoestring budget, none of which was available to black improvement.

Smuts’ death, last dance

When Jan Smuts died as a champion of trustee liberalism, a close friend of Winston Churchill and Britain, it reminded many in the city of the lost hope and promise of liberalism.

On September 17 1950, they came out in their thousands to bid this dream goodbye.

Within a year the golden age of settler prosperity and political dominance was challenged with protests over the rise in the cost of lodgers’ permits in the locations and the start of the ANC-led Defiance Campaign in 1952.

Within a decade, and on the back of new repressive laws coming from Pretoria, peaceful civic protests turned to armed struggle, as we will discover in the weeks ahead.