I

In the early 1950s, a wave of panic washed through certain influential reaches of white South African society: that whites were drinking too much. The alcohol panic was driven by Geoffrey Cronje (1907–92), a University of Pretoria sociologist. Cronje was deeply concerned about the conditions of white society, particularly the effects of alcohol abuse on white working-class society. Serving on several major Commissions of Inquiry in the early 1950s, he festered anxiety about white drinking into a type of panic within certain circles of Afrikanerdom by placing – forcing – these onto and up agendas. It was an odd panic, which resonated not so much in the press or the chambers of public opinion or debate, but within the bureaucracy, activating a range of state and bureaucratic processes. In the wake of this anxiety, there emerged new state responses to white drinking, at once broader and less obviously punitive than what had hitherto pertained. As scholars writing in areas as diverse as ‘traditional’ Europe (1300–1800) and the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States point out, drinking is a culturally mediated activity, and we know little about the history, even less of the comparative historiography, of drinking and nationhood.Footnote ¹ Such observations suggest that despite its occluded impact, this relatively undocumented episode of apartheid history warrants closer attention.

In this article, I investigate several themes that derive from a fragment in the history of early apartheid society represented by 1950s vintage anxiety about white drinking.Footnote ² Apartheid cannot be subsumed with segregation as a single, continuous form of racial domination, and as Aletta Norval correctly points out, apartheid initiated new forms of social division.Footnote ³ Moreover, as Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper remind us, apartheid society should not be assumed to be without its own internal fault lines and contradictions.Footnote ⁴ This fragment is useful for posing questions about the cultural bonds that held together apartheid society since it allows us to peer backwards and forwards in time, to consider several genealogies, as well as nascent themes and continuities rendered visible from the beachhead of the alcohol panic. In particular, this fragment prompts investigation of two related issues connected to anthropologies of state-making and nationhood and how these feed into broader histories of whiteness in early apartheid South Africa. As historians have noted in other self-consciously and hyper-nationalist societies, there is evidence that those considered ‘useless to the state’ are seen as a blight to particular trajectories of modernity and subject to punishment, correction, and ‘social engineering’ by the state.Footnote ⁵ Thus, the first issue is how, in the early apartheid years, the loose idea of a ‘nation’ – situated at the specific historical moment of the unexpected victory by the National party (NP) at the polls in 1948 – was understood by sections of the NP/state and intellectual elite, how this translated into techniques for the management of whites, and how these practices in turn drew on a series of historical antecedents. Secondly, how this ideological and disciplinary architecture, imposed from above, along with an evolving set of material conditions, shaped something of the ‘contradictory complexity’Footnote ⁶ of white everyday life – and how these complexities of white everyday life, including acts of defiance, in turn conditioned management practices. Elaboration of both issues will support the argument made by Deborah Posel in her study of the Native Affairs Department (NAD) and the development of influx control during the apartheid's early years. Analysing the institutional workings of the NAD, she emphasized the lead role played by bureaucrats in policy-development and demonstrated that apartheid state-making was not ‘an essentially cumulative process’ that developed according to some grand ideological blueprint, but was rather the product of struggles within and beyond the state.Footnote ⁷

Set in the early apartheid years, much of the article turns around Geoffrey Cronje, whose abiding legacy is one of notoriety for his significance in elaborating apartheid's intellectual capital. During the 1940s, his published texts were decidedly racist: n Tuiste vir die nageslag (1943), the first book-length study propagating apartheid; Afrika sonder die Asiaat: die blywende oplossing van Suid Afrika se Asiate-vraagstuk (1945); Regverdige rasse-apartheid (1947); and Voogdyskap en apartheid (1948).Footnote ⁸ Cronje's writing has been the subject of several intellectual histories. Aletta Norval's Deconstructing apartheid discourse presents a detailed and convincing explanation of the philosophical traditions that shaped Cronje's intellectual universe. She confines herself to the ‘discourse of apartheid’ and explicitly does not try to penetrate ‘below the surface’ although she does acknowledge how social crises pushed certain intellectual directions to create apartheid's ‘discursive horizons’.Footnote ⁹ Mark Sanders takes on Cronje's writing as he grapples with the theoretical question of intellectual responsibility, and the complicity of intellectuals in the elaboration and reproduction of apartheid discourse.Footnote ¹⁰ But perhaps the most evocative account of Cronje's role in apartheid's formative years was produced by John Coetzee, who would later go on to win a Nobel Prize in literature.Footnote ¹¹ Distinguishing between apartheid legislation, practices, and thinking, Coetzee declared his intention to explore the notion that ‘the men who invented and installed apartheid thinking were possessed by demons’.Footnote ¹² Taking Geoffrey Cronje as an exemplar of ‘apartheid thought’, he asserted that Cronje's ‘apartheid thinking’ cannot be discredited as a system of thought able to tolerate critique and the erosion of credibility, but rather a passion – madness. Drawing liberally on psychology and psychoanalysis, he analysed three of Cronje's key texts, which he describes as a ‘confession of belief’.Footnote ¹³

For Coetzee, two salient features marked Cronje's ‘passion’. First, Cronje demonstrated an authoritarian, yet surprisingly rudimentary, understanding of political society.Footnote ¹⁴ Secondly, he identified what was probably the most notorious feature of Cronje's thinking and writing: his obsession with ‘blood mixing’ – bloedvermenging.Footnote ¹⁵ Associated with the horrors of bloedvermenging – white and non-white blood – was the question of desire. Cronje was deeply concerned about the treacherous insluiper (a creature who ‘slides in’). Sometimes, the insluiper was cast as immoral, and heavy-drinking, a footloose bogeyman, invoked by campaigning NP politicians. Coetzee suggests, however, that for Cronje, the insluiper was something more, an insidious sliding into indifference of a system of (obsessive) order based on keeping things apart; and he was deeply concerned that there were among poor whites, culturally adrift and alienated in hostile urban environments, treacherous ‘blood mixers’ who would admit the insluiper. According to Coetzee, Cronje's apartheid thus developed as a counter-attack on desire, and blood mixing, rather than spatial segregation, lay at the core of his scheme – although the latter was necessary to insure against the former.Footnote ¹⁶

Coetzee is reluctant to segregate this ‘madness’ in Cronje's mind and asks how it spreads through a social body which ‘bought for a time the package offered by Cronje and his friends [and] besides being deceived or self-deceived, was also for a time crazy or at least crazed’.Footnote ¹⁷ Using the metaphor of contagion to account for the spread of aversion, he suggests that it is pointless to try and explain how Cronje's racist propaganda ignited similar sentiments among his ‘readership’ of whites, particularly Afrikaners who retained some cultural and emotional investment in the pathologies of poor whiteism. Instead, he favours a different kind of analytic movement – tracking the planes of madness as it spread like a contagion. In other words, reading rather than explanation.Footnote ¹⁸

Like Coetzee, I position Geoffrey Cronje as a central figure in the development of apartheid – not just apartheid thinking, but also apartheid legislation and practice. I also see the spectre of poor whiteism as a constant backdrop to the historical dramas in which Cronje performed, until at least the mid-1950s, when it was more or less erased by growing affluence among Afrikaans-speaking whites. And, like Posel, I agree that the study of institutions and the political and ideological struggles which took place in and around them are invaluable entry points to understanding the uneven and sometimes contradictory development of apartheid. The fragment of history represented by the alcohol panic does, however, prompt us to look beyond Cronje's published, or, for that matter, unpublished, texts, beyond his intellectual heritage, and beyond the analytic and narrative canons of more conventional intellectual histories. Cronje is perhaps better understood as a historical rather than a literary figure. To comprehend his role in engineering ‘the nation’, we do need to understand his writing and its genealogies. But these are just a starting point and contra Coetzee, we need also to inquire ethnographically how his ideas were advanced, transformed, contested, and became instantiated in the ideologies, routines, and disciplines of white everyday life – a project less contained than Posel's history of a bureaucracy. This line of investigation will shed light on the interaction between ideology, (social) science, and techniques of discipline, regulation, and management in the constitution of ‘the white’ in early apartheid society.

II

In 1948, the NP came to power in a surprise election victory, and although it passed quickly some significant pieces of racial legislation (including the 1949 ban on inter-racial sex), the systemic implementation of apartheid was slow. Ironically, in its first years in office, the NP devoted considerable energy to white people, particularly Afrikaans-speakers. This concentration must be read in the context of some of the NP's abiding concerns.

The NP understood itself as the volksparty (peoples' party) for Afrikaners, and shortly after assuming office Prime Minister Dr D. F. Malan announced that ‘[t]oday South Africa belongs to us once more. South Africa is our own for the first time since Union and may God grant that it will remain our own.’Footnote ¹⁹ At the time, Afrikaans-speakers were generally poorer than English-speakers, the other major section of the white population. While Afrikaans-speakers made up 56 per cent of the white population, they commanded only 29 per cent of the income generated by whites. Around two-thirds of the 1·5 million Afrikaans-speakers lived in towns and cities, where they tended to occupy the lower-income categories.Footnote ²⁰ A spurt of unplanned black urbanization during the Second World War saw racially mixed slums developing in every major city, and squatter settlements surrounding Johannesburg. To the racially conscious new elite, whose memories of the traumas of poor whiteism in earlier decades ran deep, these trends were no doubt troublesome. Certainly, Malan feared that less-skilled whites would struggle to survive under conditions of competition for jobs and urban space.Footnote ²¹ One of the core objectives of the NP, which had remained constant since the formation of the original NP in 1912, was thus to win for Afrikaners a firm footing in the urban economy, and at the second economic Volkskongres in 1950 Malan spoke commandingly of the need for Afrikaners to ‘get a place in the economic sun’.Footnote ²²

Behind the façade of shared purpose, the NP was however fractious and unstable. During the war years, bitter broedertwis (internecine struggle) had emerged between northern and southern factions of Afrikaner nationalism. In particular, Malan's Cape allies in the Herenigde NP engaged in a bitter struggle with the Ossewa Brandwag and other, smaller, extra-parliamentary republican groups. Malan and Transvaal head of the NP J. G. Strijdom loathed each other, and Transvaal nationalists were unconvinced of the republican convictions of the Cape party.Footnote ²³

Although Strijdom himself, a ‘small-time lawyer’, was considered by some of his detractors to be a ‘petty-minded man of limited intellect’,Footnote ²⁴ the Transvaal leadership of the NP included H. F. Verwoerd, German-trained psychologist and influential editor of Die Transvaler, the party's Transvaal mouthpiece. A cluster of authoritative nationalist intellectuals,Footnote ²⁵ including some who became luminaries of Afrikaner nationalism like Nico Deiderichs, Piet Meyer, and Geoffrey Cronje, gathered in turn around Verwoerd.

The prominence of these intellectuals was testament to the growing significance of anthropology and sociology to the disciplinary base of apartheid culture. While anthropologists (volkekundiges) concentrated on blacks,Footnote ²⁶ sociologists, especially those from the University of Pretoria, provided much of the intellectual scaffolding for the reorganization of white society. Key among these sociologists was Cronje. Like other Afrikaner nationalist intellectuals of the day, he was an advocate of Christian nationalism, along with its core ideals of volksgebondheid, volkseenheid, and volkseie, which emphasized collectively the primacy of the volk, and that the individual could exist only through the nation.Footnote ²⁷ These ideas were also the prism through which ‘European/Native’ relations were cast.Footnote ²⁸ Cronje's contribution to Christian nationalism was secular, and, ideologically, he was concerned about ‘race-mixing’ and the ‘anti-social’ behaviour among whites that could contribute to this. Trained in Amsterdam where he took a doctorate in sociology in 1933, he was more interested in social work and criminology than in classical sociology, and he wrote his doctoral thesis on divorce and the break-up of the family.Footnote ²⁹ Under Cronje's leadership, the sociology department at UP organized its curriculum around dimensions of the poor white problem.Footnote ³⁰ He also collaborated with W. A. Willemse, a psychologist with an interest in criminal psychology and juvenile delinquency, to develop the discipline of criminology, which was situated in the sociology department and compulsory for all social work students.Footnote ³¹ While his scholarly and later, commissioned, research considered South African problems, Cronje was also connected to some sophisticated intellectual circuits and the longue durée of his career suggests that in particular he was influenced by ideas of corporativism that first gained currency in the wake of social dislocation caused by the First World War.

Broadly, the tenets of secular corporativism favoured the idea of national cohesion and elevating collectivist corporate bodies (like business organizations and labour) to the cornerstone of political and economic life, while de-emphasizing the value of individual liberty.Footnote ³² As corporativism took root politically and bureaucratically in several authoritarian nationalist and totalitarian states in Europe and Latin America in the 1920s and 1930s (and, as James Sparrow has argued, in World War Two-era USAFootnote ³³), it was characterized by strong central planning and attempts to infiltrate and control every aspect of social life. Theories of corporativism coincided with the growing vogue in America of social engineering as a methodology to manage society. Social engineering held that society might be changed or managed – engineered – if one had adequate ‘scientific’ data to be engineered, and appropriate policy, regulatory, and administrative tools to carry out the engineering.Footnote ³⁴ Cronje was among the most ardent South African disciples of social engineering.

While the NP's factions and the ideologies each promoted were never homogeneous, the party was, in a general sense, committed to shepherding the poorest of Afrikaans-speakers into the middle class; and Dan O'Meara believes that the ‘presumed relative economic deprivation of all Afrikaners, from the chairman of Sanlam to the poorest of “poor whites”’ lay at the core of Afrikaner nationalism in the 1930s and 1940s.Footnote ³⁵

Nevertheless, some, like Cronje, considered that more should be done than simply uplifting economically the volk, and that progress of the volk as a whole demanded cultivation of ‘respectability’ and certain moral dispositions among those who were beneficiaries of the state's project of economic and social advancement. His was not a lone voice and it is noteworthy that the 1947 Volkskongres – before the NP took office – was directed towards the cultural, moral, and religious challenges faced by Afrikaans-speakers in the cities. In his presentation to the Kongres, Cronje was vexed by the threats posed by alcohol to the Afrikaner volk – to its public morality, Afrikaners' ability to climb the economic ladder, and the coherence and stability of Afrikaner families. In particular, he believed that alcohol, abused by whites in the impoverished and alienating conditions of the city, could lead to a specific kind of deviancy – rasvermenging (miscegenation).Footnote ³⁶

III

Alcohol was knit closely into the weave of white working-class history in modern South Africa. During the mineral revolution, men far outnumbered women on the Witwatersrand, and distant from the mediating influence of family life, Charles van Onselen writes that elements of male working-class culture such as drinking, gambling, and whoring assumed a central role in the lives of both black and white miners. The dependence by miners on alcohol and prostitutes was understood by the ruling classes who tolerated the use of alcohol and the recourse to prostitutes to safeguard and stabilize conditions for the accumulation of capital.Footnote ³⁷

In 1881, president of the South African Republic Paul Kruger granted a concession for the manufacture of alcohol and by 1892 the beneficiary of his support, De Eerste Fabrieken, had become a public company. Then in the wake of the British occupation of the Transvaal during the South African War (1899–1902), High Commissioner Albert Milner established in 1901 a Liquor Licensing Commission that promulgated extremely conservative regulations for the liquor trade. In a mining town like Johannesburg, interventions to curb the alcohol trade and limit working-class drinking were bound to fail; just as predictably, alcohol was a regular refrain in the episodic hand-wringing of the town's public life. At the Transvaal Indigency Commission (1906–8), for instance, several witnesses pointed out that illicit liquor dealing was responsible for the growing phenomenon of white poverty.Footnote ³⁸

By the early twentieth century, the fear that drinking and liquor trading were symptoms not so much of economic distress as moral decline among whites was being voiced in official circles, most notably by Jacob de Villiers Roos, first secretary of justice in the new Union of South Africa. Roos was part of a local intelligentsia increasingly concerned about the economic, social, and moral implications of white poverty, and he was also influenced by an emerging penology, articulated at the 1910 International Prisons Conference that affirmed the society's right to ‘use constraint or compulsion against beggars, tramps and idlers’. Delegates agreed that imprisonment and hard labour should be used as a group-based moral corrective to compel such individuals to work, and also passed a resolution favouring two to three years of ‘treatment’ under incarceration for chronic drinkers.Footnote ³⁹

The extent to which these principles shaped state responses to alcoholic white men and those it considered idle is noteworthy. Upon his return, Roos drafted the 1911 Prisons and Reformatories Act which, inter alia, authorized the establishment of work colonies (sometimes called ‘inebriate asylums’) under the Directorate of Prisons in the Department of Justice, to detain white leeglopers (idlers) and men who had transgressed minor laws through drinking.Footnote ⁴⁰ The system of work colonies was inaugurated in September 1912 when the first was opened in a former prison at Baviaanspoort near Pretoria.Footnote ⁴¹ Central to the penal philosophy of these institutions was the idea that hard work and strict order could develop industrious habits among whites seen to be idle or drunk, but not necessarily of criminal temperament. Yet prisoners convicted of more serious crimes were regularly sent there, often from the Pretoria Central Prison, prompting work colony officials to complain that ‘mixing drunkards, idlers and criminals was not bearing the right fruit’.Footnote ⁴²

The 1927 Work Colonies Act attempted to tighten some of the loopholes of the old Prisons Act by making specific provision for the detention of men guilty of offences related to alcohol abuse, and setting out regulations for the hard labour to be undertaken by inmates.Footnote ⁴³ Under the new Act, several new work colonies for the white idle were established.Footnote ⁴⁴

Despite the intention of the Act to curtail white drunkenness and idleness through a regime of hard manual labour, none of these work colonies were very successful. Writing during the 1950s, Jannie Pieterse, a University of Pretoria sociologist (and Cronje's protégé) believed that the major reason for their failure during the 1920s and 1930s was the ‘unsuitability’ of inmates, with convicted criminals still being sent.Footnote ⁴⁵ In 1940, Baviaanspoort, the oldest and largest state work colony, was closed down, and the premises used as an internment camp for Nazi sympathizers.Footnote ⁴⁶

The Second World War stimulated a surge of African urbanization, and this in turn resurrected an older concern about white drinking that transcended anxieties about white male drunkenness and idleness which were rooted in particular moments of industrialization and class formation. These concerns highlight the potential of drinking to upset the most fundamental arrangements of South African society. In 1944, for instance, the Johannesburg branch of the Social Services Association worried that dense and disorderly urbanization could lead to ‘European women drinking with Natives’.Footnote ⁴⁷ The Association noted with alarm that the number of white women convicted for drunkenness in Johannesburg, ‘mainly those whose husbands are in the army’, had increased to nearly half of all ‘European’ convictions for alcohol-related offences. There was danger that ‘A European woman under the influence of liquor solicits Natives for immoral purposes’.Footnote ⁴⁸ In other words, that unchecked drinking by white women could erode the segregated order of things.

From the 1930s, there was a growing interest, particularly in the United States, about the scientific understanding of alcoholism and its medical treatment. An interdisciplinary ‘Institute of Alcoholic Studies’ was established at Yale University, which also ran a summer school,Footnote ⁴⁹ while the American Association for the Advancement of Science sponsored a ‘Research Council on Problems of Alcohol’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Like the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) movement with its voluntary fellowship devoted to the rescue and spiritual upliftment of the alcoholic, scientists urged that alcoholism should be treated as an illness rather than a symptom of moral or psychological weakness. Unlike AA, they believed that the ‘most effective means of rehabilitating the alcoholic is through the clinic in which physicians, psychologists and other trained specialists work cooperatively with each patient’.Footnote ⁵¹ As Ron Roizen writes, the combination between AA and science represented a new kind of post-prohibition cultural ‘ownership’ of the alcohol problem.Footnote ⁵²

These new American medical ideas on the rehabilitation of alcoholics, working in collaboration with AA, were far more sophisticated than prevailing state responses to alcoholism in Britain.Footnote ⁵³ There is evidence to suggest that these American innovations gained currency in at least some influential medical, public health, and social welfare circles in South Africa during the late 1940s. United Party (UP) member of parliament Dr Vernon Shearer had a deep interest in alcoholism and both sides of the House recognized his expertise. Between 1946 and at least 1950, he was in regular correspondence with both American and South African doctors, with the latter eager to learn about the treatment protocols being developed in the USA. Shifts in South Africa towards more humane medical treatment of alcoholics were accompanied by a resurgence of social welfare interest in the chronic drunk – not always so humane.

Unlike earlier waves of social welfare activity, this one was activated by concerns about alcohol abuse by white women. On the Witwatersrand from the mid-1940s, the Women's Section of Toc H, a Christian service movement,Footnote ⁵⁴ led the charge, gathering allies from the local medical fraternity, other welfare organizations such as the Rand Aid Society, the YWCA, the Social Welfare Division of the Johannesburg City Council, and the National Council of Women.Footnote ⁵⁵ While emphasizing the extent of white drinking, especially among women, and the value of AA, it seemed that the major focus of the coalition led by Toc H was to persuade the state to ‘subsidise treatment homes for inebriate females’ – white females, of course.Footnote ⁵⁶ This coalition also sought legislation that would enable involuntary committal to these institutions.Footnote ⁵⁷

During the early history of South Africa's industrial revolution, then, alcohol-related anxieties were concentrated on white men and their unwillingness to bow to the disciplines of work. Some of the more recalcitrant drinkers were in turn disciplined in work colonies, albeit unsuccessfully. During and after the Second World War fears ranged around the belief that alcohol abuse, especially among white women, could prise open the boundaries of segregated society, already under stress. Along with innovations in scientific thinking about the treatment of alcoholism and the need to address white drinking on a far broader scale, these concerns created an environment for the emergence of initiatives aligned more closely with public health and social welfare than penal philosophy. To the years just after the end of the Second World War white drinking thus prompted various kinds of response from the state and white elites. Some were inclined to punish and discipline miscreants while others were oriented more towards community-based interventions, with institutionalization as a last resort for particularly recalcitrant cases.

IV

Problem drinking among whites was not confined to the pre-apartheid years, nor to those on the fringes of respectable white society. An unsolicited letter to Prime Minister D. F. Malan by one Gael Fraser grasped the very nettle of anxiety about white drinking when he harangued Malan that ‘Alcoholism must be cured now, if White Civilization is to survive in South Africa.’Footnote ⁵⁸ Even institutions of state, where whiteness was both produced and managed, were not immune to problem drinking. Although they yield just a snapshot, returns from police disciplinary tribunals are illustrative: of the seventeen dismissals from the South African Police during the months of June, July, and August 1949, fifteen were for drunkenness.Footnote ⁵⁹

Like most Christian nationalists of the day, Geoffrey Cronje understood the family as the core social unit of the volk, and that men were the rightful supporters and heads of families. He believed that alcohol was the major reason for conflict and the break-up of families, and it was to this aspect of ‘anti-social’ behaviour that Cronje turned in the favourable political climate after 1948. In much the same way as Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that social scientists in the colonial world drew intellectual inspiration and based their angles of inquiry and analysis on ideas generated in Europe,Footnote ⁶⁰ so too Cronje's responses bore the stamp of his European intellectual legacies as he confronted the hydra-headed challenges of white drinking. Demonstrating his faith in ideas of central management, the planned state, and social engineering, he believed that alcoholism was a variable that could be manipulated to reduce anti-social behaviour, that social welfare should be pursued primarily by the state, and not left to the churches and charitable foundations, and that rehabilitation needed to be a conscious process of correction as opposed to one of moral suasion. Holding to an analysis that he had presented to the 1947 Volkskongres, Cronje's career took a bureaucratic turn as he became increasingly interested in using the resources of state to counter this danger. Not surprisingly though, his interventions proceeded from the foundations of longer state and social responses to white drinking: that those who drank to excess should be the subject of both discipline and reform.

He acted on a number of fronts against alcohol-related ‘anti-social’ behaviour and transgression, and against men and women. Inclined initially towards more disciplinary approaches, Cronje's first major foray after the Second World War saw him play a leading role in re-vitalizing the work colonies. In 1947, he was appointed to the Work Colonies Advisory Board and, no doubt, lobbied in their favour within influential Afrikaner nationalist circles. In its first full parliamentary session after occupying power, the NP passed the Work Colonies Act of 1949. Significantly, control of work colonies shifted from the Ministry of Justice to the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare. The 1949 Act gave far greater capacity to observe and intervene than its predecessor. Previously, detainees had to be convicted of specific offences, usually idling or drink-related; now, the minister and his bureaucracy had wide discretion to elaborate conditions of ‘maladjustment’ and to commit white men to work colonies after investigation by a social worker.

Whereas in the pre-war years, state work colonies were quasi prisons/quasi labour camps, they were now transformed into institutions that aimed to re-socialize and ‘rehabilitate’ various categories of ‘maladjusted’ white men by isolating them from the outside world, re-educating them and regulating every aspect of their lives.

Sonderwater, a redundant military base about thirty miles from Pretoria, was transferred from the Department of Defence to Social Work, and by early 1950, was ready to receive its first ‘European’ inmates. Sonderwater not only developed as the biggest apartheid-era work colony, but also became known as the colony best suited for ‘hard cases’.

The Second annual report noted that ‘drinking is the predominant problem of the work colonies’ and throughout the 1950s, the largest percentage of inmates was committed for ‘inebriety’.Footnote ⁶¹ In practice, these unfortunates were usually from the working classes or white unemployed.Footnote ⁶² There was a distinctive class bias to committal, with social workers and sometimes dominees (ministers of the Dutch Reformed churches) patrolling working-class neighbourhoods and especially sub-economic housing developments, but seldom middle-class areas. The maximum term of detention was three years, and crucially, upon release, the ex-detainee was subject to regular reports by a social worker serving as a probation officer. The ex-detainee had to sign an agreement to remain under the supervision of a social worker, refrain from using alcohol and drugs, find work, maintain his family, and not associate with persons ‘known to have a bad reputation’.Footnote ⁶³ In turn, the probation officer had to report on the ex-detainee's employment, church attendance, dwelling, and his ‘adjustments…and sense of values and responsibility’.Footnote ⁶⁴ If, in the social worker's opinion, the ex-detainee again showed signs of ‘maladjustment’, he could be re-committed. Upon a second committal, detention could be indefinite.Footnote ⁶⁵

The First annual report of the Work Colonies Advisory Board stated that ‘devising of a classification scheme should go hand in hand with the planning of methods of treatment’.Footnote ⁶⁶ To this end, doubtless reflecting Cronje's sociological zeal, the Work Colonies Advisory Board drew up a scheme for a threefold medical, psychological, and sociological examination.Footnote ⁶⁷ With group therapy, spiritual guidance, and individual counselling, detainees were expected to work forty-eight and a half hours per week in a variety of vocationally oriented fields – in Cronje's idiom, ‘labour therapy’.Footnote ⁶⁸ The Board's Third annual report announced proudly that a ‘large variety of employment’ was offered, in fields like dairy, transport, clerical work, masonry, welding, cooking, and painting.Footnote ⁶⁹ Inmates were paid a modest wage, depending upon their classification.Footnote ⁷⁰ An informant, however, dismissed this official description of a regime of correction and improvement: while acknowledging that he received a small wage, he claimed that labour therapy was hard labour closely monitored by brutal halfgeskooldes (‘half-schooled’ – a derogatory term for whites in sheltered employment). He compared its pointlessness to the initial training he received in the military early in the Second World War: dig a hole and then fill it up.Footnote ⁷¹

V

During the 1950s, the work colonies provided Geoffrey Cronje with a laboratory for social engineering. But his experiments were not successful. The primary purpose of the colonies was to ‘rehabilitate’ white male miscreants of a certain type, and the archive reveals extensive attention by bureaucrats, social workers, and judicial officials to the question of who was or was not suited for ‘rehabilitation’ in a work colony. Most agreed that ‘hardened’ criminals were not appropriate for work colonies, a sentiment expressed frequently by Sonderwater superintendent D. B. Hauptfleisch in correspondence with his superiors. ‘Hardened criminals’, he insisted, had no place in the work colonies and could exercise a bad influence, especially on young inmates categorized as miscreants not criminals.Footnote ⁷² According to Hauptfleisch, such criminal white men were responsible for bringing dagga into the colony. He had a ‘strong suspicion’ that some of them were involved in ‘sexual goings-on’ with black women, exposing a vein of racial anxiety that white male criminality might be associated with inter-racial sex.Footnote ⁷³ In another instance, there were reports from the Eersterivier work colony near Stellenbosch that men were slipping out of the work colony without permission, buying alcohol for Africans in contravention of the apartheid liquor laws, and then demanding sex from African women as a kind of ‘commission’.Footnote ⁷⁴ As this example suggests, few demonstrated much commitment to the ‘improvement’ of Cronje's fantasies.

Detainees – itself a telling descriptor – consigned to the work colonies were referred to colloquially but commonly by state officials as ‘blanke tsotsis’.Footnote ⁷⁵ They viewed work colonies and the social workers who authorized their committal with dread, and they did not go lightly into the colonies. One example offers powerful testimony to the level of fear that work colonies invoked for some men. In 1957, a Pretoria woman reported to the authorities that her husband did not support his family. A social worker visited and gave him two weeks to reform. Little changed, and the man was notified that he would be taken to a work colony. On the appointed day, as the police came to arrest him, he drank ant poison and died before the ambulance arrived.Footnote ⁷⁶

It is thus hardly surprising that from as early as 1950, order in the work colonies was dogged persistently by desertions,Footnote ⁷⁷ and by 1953, in its Third annual report, the Work Colonies Advisory Board commented that ‘absconding continues to be a serious problem in the work colonies, especially at Sonderwater where the most difficult cases are kept’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Around 30 per cent of detainees were listed as ‘absconded’ at any given time. These percentages increased around weekends.Footnote ⁷⁹

The Board debated whether, upon their capture or voluntary return to the work colony, deserters should be imprisoned.Footnote ⁸⁰ And the Sonderwater superintendent insisted upon the construction of a swimming bath, arguing that swimming had significant health benefits to inmates and would also keep them occupied on weekends, when most absconding occurred. But still they fled. An informant told me that those who deserted ‘couldn't get government jobs, but they didn't come back’. Most worked initially on farms or in smaller family-owned firms.Footnote ⁸¹ Social workers or police were unlikely to track them down, especially when the suppression of anti-apartheid resistance demanded increasing state resources. As early as 1953, the Board began conceding defeat when it agreed to consider whether ‘untraced absconders should be removed from the register after a specified period’.Footnote ⁸² In the late 1950s, there was no shortage of work for white men in the segregated labour market, and, eventually, most deserters were probably re-absorbed into the mainstream economy.

But not all of those consigned to the work colonies viewed the prospect with dread. And while many focused their energies on absconding, some saw the colonies as an opportunity for winter shelter. In 1950, there were reports that the majority of men sent from Durban were in fact landlopers (‘hoboes’) from the Witwatersrand who had moved to Durban ‘during the season’. These ‘old lags’ actively sought committal to the work colonies, and in spring or summer would simply abscond.Footnote ⁸³ Contrary to the idea of confinement and improvement, entry into the work colonies from some places, Durban in particular, and, subsequently, desertion were so easy that some men were able to use them as ‘winter retreats’.

The colonies were closed formally in 1961.Footnote ⁸⁴ Endemic desertions meant, however, that the writing was on the wall much earlier. Despite spawning a considerable bureaucracy, work colonies detained during their peak in the mid-1950s no more than about 1,300 men.Footnote ⁸⁵ Never a project wholly endorsed by the political establishment, they began to attract strong criticism from powerful figures in the cabinet and by 1956 had lost the backing of Minister of Finance Eric Louw. In 1956, for instance, in a strong letter to a local representative of Alcoholics Anonymous, Louw wrote that ‘methods used up to the present, e.g. by sending alcoholics to Work Colonies had not met with…success'. While he was willing to provide a Supplementary Budget Estimate to provide funding for the rehabilitation of alcoholics, his appetite to fund the work colonies had clearly diminished.Footnote ⁸⁶

VI

Early in the decade of the 1950s, circumstances thus prompted Cronje to change tactic in addressing the challenges of white drinking and shift from what, was, despite regular disclaimers made by him and Pieterse,Footnote ⁸⁷ effectively a punitive regime directed against a small group of white men. He began to favour an approach that sought instead to manage alcoholism and problem drinking across a far wider spectrum of the white population, revealing an evolving response within Afrikaner nationalist circles towards white drinking that was more in line with the welfare impulses popular during the late 1930s and 1940s than with the penal orientation of the early Union years. In addition to the failure of the work colonies, Cronje's growing preference for welfare and medical approaches was no doubt spurred by changes to the class structure of white society, particularly among Afrikaans-speakers. For much of the century, poor whites were considered a ‘problem,’ and legitimate subjects for punishment when they failed to respond favourably to coercive types of ‘improvement’ imposed upon them. But by the 1950s, destitution among whites was a thing of the past. O'Meara points out that the state had aggressively advanced the interests of white workers, with Afrikaans-speaking males the major beneficiaries of expansion in the civil service and parastatals, and job re-grading in both.Footnote ⁸⁸ Work colonies were no longer a suitable technique for the management of a society becoming more widely middle class. A more appropriate style included methods that would not disrupt the fiction of ‘respectability’ nor the still-tenuous trajectory of upward social mobility. The threat of penal sanction did, however, never entirely disappear and this represented a nascent style of governance for the management of whites that spread to other domains of their lives.

Adam Ashforth has written on ways that Commissions of Inquiry produced legitimating ideologies for the apartheid state.Footnote ⁸⁹ Cronje's career sheds additional light on the anthropology of commissions in apartheid society. He was a strong and domineering character, he had the status of being European-trained,Footnote ⁹⁰ and he was Professor of Sociology at the University of Pretoria, and later Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at that University. As the decade progressed, he operated not so much as a university-bound scholar but as an intellectual who was also an arch bureaucrat and quintessential grey eminence, and he was able to generate concern across bureaucracies and among powerful political brokers about white drinking. These anxieties were manifest in a cascading series of commissions and committees that collectively generated some consensus around new approaches to what was considered excessive drinking among whites.

On the urging of the Nasionale raad van welsynorganisasies (National Council of Welfare Organizations), the Federale vroueraad (Federal Women's Council), the Federale armesorgraad (Federal Council for Indigent Relief), and the four Dutch Reformed churches, the minister of health and social welfare, Karl Bremer, convened in August 1951 a Commission of Inquiry into Family LifeFootnote ⁹¹ – white families. Cronje was appointed chair,Footnote ⁹² and the commission was run from the Letteregebou, the Humanities building at the University of Pretoria. Cronje was included specifically for his scientific expertise. Presumably his background and reputation as a sociologist positioned him to play a substantial role in identifying themes for investigation by the commission. Not surprisingly, alcohol featured prominently among the catalogue of threats to white family life. At once patriarchal and particularly representative of Christian nationalist concerns, the list developed by Cronje included also women's work, and such ills as juvenile delinquency, children in institutions, and prostitution, with an accent on how these were rooted in alcoholism and a lack of religious observance.Footnote ⁹³

At about the same time, Bremer summoned a National Conference on Social Work, which he ordered explicitly to ‘confine itself to European problems’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Once again, Cronje was appointed chair, reflecting no doubt his status as head of the academic department that trained the majority of the country's white social workers. And, once again, alcoholism was a major thread running through all discussions. The major outcome of the conference was a recommendation to the minister that he convene a National Committee on Alcoholism – white alcoholism of course – and establish a ‘permanent, representative Committee on Alcoholism’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Bowing to the opinion of the social workers, Bremer agreed that such a conference should be called, and set a date for November 1951. In his statement he expressed the hope that the conference, as well as the permanent committee, would improve the nation's ‘alcohol hygiene’.Footnote ⁹⁶

A record of the National Conference on Alcoholism has proven elusive, although it did agree to establish a temporary standing committee, something like the committee envisaged in the original proposal. The temporary committee met a year later, in November 1952, and true to form, Cronje exercised a heavy hand in its deliberations.Footnote ⁹⁷ That gathering generated a substantial set of recommendations which testified to a broader, welfarist approach to the question of white drinking and community-based rehabilitation, with a concomitant shift in emphasis away from the penal ideologies of the work colonies. It is, however, salient that elements pioneered in the work colonies were incorporated into the new framework for the management of while alcoholism.

From the outset, the committee was clear that regulations needed to be drafted for particular race groups – and that it would confine itself to white drinking. It then stated that a premise for any set of guidelines had to be that ‘the alcoholic can be helped and is worth helping’, precisely the language of enlightened reformism employed some years earlier by Shearer and which, in turn, was at the core of new philosophies about inter-disciplinary treatment of alcoholism that had gained popularity in America during the Second World War. In a gesture to Christian national ideas about the social cohesion, the committee acknowledged further that while alcoholism was a health problem for the individual, it was equally a ‘social problem…by virtue of the fact that every alcoholic, directly or indirectly, affects the living of other persons in the community’.

The committee mooted a more substantial role for social workers in ‘alcohol cases’ before the courts, in the treatment of alcoholism in the community at large, and in responding to the social problems associated with drinking. It also recommended that lecturing tours be undertaken by ‘suitably trained staff’ – in all likelihood, University of Pretoria-trained social workers – to raise public awareness about the dangers of excessive drinking.Footnote ⁹⁸

The committee viewed white drinking from a strongly social scientific foundation, manifest in its insistence that standards be developed to determine what precisely constituted ‘abnormal’ or ‘excessive’ drinking, and how alcoholism might be defined. Cronje's influence was apparent, for the appeal for ‘standards’ was supported by the recommendation that these be underpinned by methods that he had developed for men in the work colonies, notably the medical, psychological, and sociological examination.

Alcoholics Anonymous found favour with the committee, which also advocated support for ‘buffer institutions’, private homes and retreats for the treatment of alcoholism like Cottesloe House in Johannesburg. Moreover, that hostels, for which provision was made in the 1949 Work Colonies Act, be established. The committee hoped that treatment and rehabilitation in these institutions, free from the stigma of the psychiatric hospital, the prison or the work colony, would help to ‘restore confidence and get the party back into circulation’.

Other approaches, borrowed from the work colonies and sometimes demonstrating particular Christian national concerns as well as Cronje's hand, also featured in the committee's prospectus. Thus, it advocated ‘labour therapy’. It also insisted that religious guidance was a critical component in both prevention and treatment of alcoholism. Finally, it affirmed its debt to American scientific approaches to alcoholism when it proposed the establishment of a Faculty of Alcoholism at a South African university – probably the University of Pretoria – modelled on the Center for Alcohol Research at Yale.

Geoffrey Cronje was the most significant figure behind the emergence of this new system for the treatment of white alcoholism. These arrangements were the product of a panic fanned by him, albeit a thoroughly bureaucratic one. In a state that was elitist and increasingly bureaucratic, it did, however, generate enough momentum in some official circles to give Cronje the leverage and institutional space to elaborate a new regime to address white drunkenness. Seldom was he as direct as Fraser in the manner that he presented white drinking and white alcoholism as a ‘threat to white civilization’, but of course this alarm was implicit and quite plausible in the ideological climate of apartheid South Africa in the 1950s. And it was an issue that was central to his trepidations about white society, and particularly his qualms about the potential immoral undercurrents in working-class society.

The guidelines enunciated at the 1952 conference provided a blueprint for subsequent treatment and rehabilitation of alcoholism among whites. In 1956, the committee that had come together under Cronje's intellectual and bureaucratic guidance in 1952 morphed into the South African National Council on Alcoholism (SANCA). By the end of the decade, SANCA had fostered the organization of a network of constituent societies across the country, and was in negotiations with the University of Pretoria for the establishment of a ‘summer school’ to ‘enable both professional and laymen to…obtain a diploma on “the subject of alcoholism and/or the treatment of alcoholism”’.Footnote ⁹⁹ In 1962, the Retreats and Rehabilitation Bill went before parliament. This legislation enabled the establishment of alcohol retreats for women, which represented a significant hiatus in previous regulations.

The foundations laid by the 1952 conference's discussions, recommendations, and resolutions for state reactions to white drinking are significant for they marked a shift from earlier models of discipline (best represented by the procedures in the work colonies and the ideologies that underlay these), which were, by definition, limited in scope to those detained in the colonies. The new, evolving, techniques of management and surveillance permitted the monitoring of a far broader swathe of white society, in particular women.

VII

The odd fragment represented by a quintessentially bureaucratic panic, largely inspired by Cronje, offers a lens to consider several matters that revolved around white drinking in apartheid society. These include ideologies of the nation, the way elites understood the relationship between white everyday conduct and the moral health of the volk, apartheid social science, and how best to understand the role of intellectuals/bureaucrats like Cronje. Collectively these issues direct us to consider the management of whites in early apartheid society.

While driven by a deep, ideological – civil religious – zeal to advance the interests of the volk, Cronje paradoxically considered those in the lower socio-economic reaches of white society with distrust and disdain. This fundamental perspective influenced the ways that he understood the challenges and techniques of management, as much as his understanding was shaped by his grounding in social work, his alignment to corporativist ideologies about role of the state in public life, and his belief in the value of social engineering. His interventions were also premised on his capacity to operate beyond the halls of the university, and to elaborate and activate institutional and disciplinary structures seated in the machinery of state.

And the alcohol panic points to a rupture in the ways that whites were managed. Drawing on earlier penal traditions, the work colonies represented a punitive approach concentrated on a small group of blanke tsotsis. They were also a singularly unprofitable return on Cronje's, and the state's, investment. Henceforth, the approach was directed more towards self-care and co-operation between individuals, community organizations, volunteers, state social workers, and medical professionals.

New-generation ideas about self-care and social work not only reached a larger section of the white population – and unlike the work colonies, women – but also stretched further the resources of state and laid a platform for partnerships between the state and multiple private welfare agencies. They were, moreover, unlikely to raise defiance in ways that committal to the work colonies did among the blanke tsotsis. Sanction did, however, remain and this was mainly through the threat that children would be removed, either permanently or temporarily to places of safety, or to remote rural boarding schools.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

In her analysis of the development of influx control during the first phase of apartheid between 1948 and 1961, Posel suggests that social engineering only emerged as a prominent feature of state planning in the 1960s.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Cronje's attempts to control white drinking and those whites seen as undermining the coherence and moral logics of apartheid society do, however, indicate its earlier use in apartheid society. They do, moreover, indicate several phases of social engineering, as it shifted from approaches that sent men to work colonies to ones that targeted wider populations, and which drew on a range of liberal welfare antecedents. If we take social engineering as broader than confinement and hopes of re-socialization (in the case of this article) or forced removal of whole communities (in Posel's study), and accept that it drew on permutations of transnational ideologies and disciplinary practices, this then may offer a way to understand histories of social engineering in mid-twentieth-century societies more generally.

The fragment also demands that we peer backwards and acknowledge the history of those caught within the vortex of Cronje's disciplinary machine. Men sent to the work colonies defied the system of rehabilitation to which they were subject although there is little evidence that they challenged more generally the privileges of whiteness.

The blanke tsotsi's defiance is nevertheless noteworthy, on at least two levels. First, it was a significant factor in shifting Cronje's belief in the efficacy of the work colony system and his subsequent preference for approaches to manage the drinking of greater numbers of whites with a lighter hand. Their lack of co-operation therefore offers an example of how challenges from within white society helped to shape the broad parameters of apartheid-era whiteness. This point in turn emphasizes the fluid, historically contingent essence of whiteness, and that it was constructed from both above and below. These acts probably had little impact on the broad trajectories of apartheid history. They are, however, of significance as we seek to comprehend historical process, the agency of whites, and its limits in apartheid society, and they can only be identified, analysed, and narrated in the fragment.

Secondly, the ‘contradictory complexity’ of the blanke tsotsi's defiance provides a script that elucidates starkly the styles and parameters of much white opposition during apartheid, that it challenged particular forms of hegemonic whiteness, but not whiteness itself.