‘Messing with Coloured People’: The 1918 Police Strike in Cape Town, South Africa

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This article seeks to provide an interpretation of a strike by white policemen in Cape Town in 1918. It argues that this defensive dispute over wages and living conditions can best be understood not simply through an examination of service dissatisfaction in the urban police community, but by incorporating this episode into the larger picture of South African police development in the early decades of the present century. In this broader context, several factors seem general and influential: local social resentments over the terms of national police organization after Union; police practices and attitudes, especially in relation to the increasing recruitment of Afrikaners; the position of white working-class policemen in the ‘civilized labour’ stratification of Cape Town society; and, most visibly, the inflationary effect of the First World War on the living standards of poorly paid, disaffected and unorganized constables. It is argued that these converging pressures generated a severe crisis of work discipline in 1917 and 1918 which tipped the Cape Town police into a classical natural justice strike. While ordinary policemen were split between petitioners and younger, less hesitant radicals, there was considerable popular support for strikers’ claims, both within the Cape police body and the local white labour movement. The government used a strategy of provisional concessions to settle the dispute. In conclusion, it is suggested that the strike experience helped to strengthen associational bonds between lower-ranking policemen and that a commitment by the state to improved service conditions provided an anxious constabulary with a more secure ‘civilized labour’ identity in the post-World War I period.