Motivation and methods for creating a colour bar

In the previous chapter the supply of black labour was considered solely in terms of the numbers available, and the manner in which it was induced to serve on white-owned farms and mines. There was, however, another extremely important dimension to the making of the labour force: the creation of a ‘colour bar’ that rigorously excluded all Africans from any skilled or semi-skilled work. Similar but not quite so stringent restrictions were applied to coloured and Asian workers. This colour bar is one of the most distinctive aspects of South Africa's economic history. Other countries have similar histories of conquest and dispossession, even if not on the same scale, but no other country has used its political and legal system to create and maintain such a comprehensive and formal colour bar.

Discrimination by race in South Africa is as old and pervasive as European settlement, and can be seen at numerous points from the treatment of slaves and the extermination of the San in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the Grondwet (constitution) adopted in the 1850s by the Transvaal republics stipulating that ‘the people desire to permit no equality between coloured people and the white inhabitants, either in church or state’. However, it was not until the expansion of economic activity and non-farm employment, stimulated by the mineral revolution in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, that it was considered necessary to make explicit provision for discrimination in the work that could be undertaken by whites and blacks.