Abstract
In the years after Union the NAD was weak and poor, managing to attract only a tiny fraction of the state’s total expenditure.1 The Department was small, it was not well represented outside the Transkei and the Witwatersrand, and there were severe constraints on the promotional prospects open to its officers. Many observers regarded the NAD as the ‘Cinderella of the ministerial family’ and its prestige was correspondingly low.2 Major Stubbs, for example, bemoaned the fact that the NAD administration in Pretoria was inadequately housed in a ‘tumbledown bungalow’ because ‘being “Native” it is of small account’. As a Department ‘without honour’, it lacked ‘both adequate organisation and, even, a real head’.3
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Notes and References
This schematic outline of the NAD is drawn from a variety of sources. For more detail, see Rogers, Native Administration in the Union of South Africa (Johannesburg, 1933), pp. 4–16, pp. 198–207; Brookes, History, chap. VII; Official Year Book of the Union of South Africa (annual).
This point is disputed by the writer William Plomer, who claims that the retrenchment of NAD officials in 1922 was part of an attempt to replace English with Afrikaners in the civil service. Plomer’s father Charles had served as a NAD official in the Northern Transvaal and Johannesburg. Plomer’s account of his father’s career captures something of the ethos of ‘native administration’ in those days. See W. Plomer’s Double Lives. An Autobiography (London, 1943), p. 136 and passim.
E. Brookes, ‘The Public Service’ in Brookes et. al., Coming of Age. Studies in South African Citizenship and Politics (Cape Town, 1930), pp. 335, 340. Brookes’s ‘Golden Age’ refers to the period 1921–4, when the Commission was ‘both strong and trusted’.
G. H. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency. A Study of British Politics and Political Thought, 1899–1914, (Oxford, 1971), pp. 1 and 260.
L. Barnes, Caliban in Africa. An Impression of Colour-Madness (London, 1930), p. 212.
J. F. Herbst, ‘The Administration of Native Affairs in South Africa’, Journal of the African Society, XXIX, 117, 1930, p. 484. See also my paper ‘“Understanding the Native Mind”’.
A. G. Mcloughlin, ‘The Transkeian System of Native Administration’ (MA thesis, University of South Africa, 1936), p. 47.
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© 1989 Saul Dubow
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Dubow, S. (1989). Structure and Conflict in the Native Affairs Department. In: Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in South Africa, 1919–36. St Antony’s. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20041-2_4
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