1939–1940

Though the country was at war, nothing much seemed to change – no blackouts, no air raid sirens, no conscription. Young white males were signing on for full-time service and, in the countryside, young black men too, but only for non-combatant duty as cooks, stretcher-bearers and drivers.

There were no calls for full-time service of the Citizen Force part-timers, no gas masks, no food rationing. In Johannesburg a white hooligan mob set out on an alcohol-assisted round of ‘patriotic’ mayhem, setting German cars alight in the streets, beating up German civilians and trashing the German Club. Outside the city a retaliatory spate of random assaults on lone soldiers started. A mob of soldiers from the Potchefstroom camp replied in kind by smashing National Party premises. For a short while it seemed that Lenin's idea of turning imperialist into civil war was coming into its own. But the frenzy passed.

Unthinking mob violence gave way to organised violence by secretive armed pro-Nazi groups, one of them led by an ex-prizefighter, Robey Leibbrandt, who had been trained in Nazi Germany and been returned to South Africa by German submarine.

In parallel with the clandestine groups, a quasi-military organisation was organising and drilling militant white republicans. Calling itself the Ossewa Brandwag (OB) and playing on nostalgia for the Boer Republic commandos, it was rejecting parliamentary politics and preparing for a quasi-military confrontation. The Smuts government showed little sign of concern. It appeared to accept that the OB, for all its militarist bluster, was nevertheless part of a fundamental consensus that political power was to remain a white preserve.

Only the Communist Party stood outside that consensus. The black majority, still mainly rural, lacked an organised voice strong enough to influence the course of politics. That too was changing. War was bringing rapid industrial expansion, drawing armies of rural men and women to work in the cities, especially to the Vaal Triangle. In Johannesburg the black population was growing inexorably into a majority. Once impotent and barely visible organisations were growing in confidence. Trade unionism was spreading, as was a new sense of national identity. Urban blacks were starting to flex their muscles and to make their demands with a new-found militancy.