At War with the Pass Laws? Reform and the Policing of White Supremacy in 1940s South Africa

This article analyses a key reformist gesture by General Smuts’s Second World War South African government – the May 1942 order suspending enforcement of the pass laws in major cities. Hated by Africans for curbing their mobility, employment opportunities, and urban residence rights, the pass laws were a fundamental instrument of white supremacy. What then did the suspension order signify? Reconstructing debates and divisions within and beyond the state, the article traces the steps leading to the suspension order, and discusses the responses to its implementation resulting in its later withdrawal. The account considers common explanations for the suspension order’s genesis: industry’s demand for labour, the wartime state’s reduced policing capability, and official anxieties about Africans’ loyalty at a time of vulnerability to invasion. Of these, only the last has clear merit. The real puzzle is the relaxation’s continuance beyond the emergency situation of 1942. For this, the credit belongs to the momentum of liberal organization and opinion in encouraging advocates of reform within the state to hold their nerve. Only gradually could the opposition Nationalists, the party of apartheid, mobilize whites’ hostility to black urbanization, thereby enhancing the influence of restorationist elements within the state calling for renewed coercion.