The Eastern Cape and East London: African Protest and the Historical Context of Bloody Sunday 1952

Abstract

This concluding overview explores themes which provide background to the four articles in the part special issue on popular protest in the Eastern Cape, with a special focus on East London. As these articles demonstrate, East London became the site of some of the most explosive urban popular protest in South Africa from 1950 to 1952. First, we discuss distinctive features of Eastern Cape African history over the long term. Society in the Eastern Cape was shaped by a particularly violent and protracted colonial conquest, lasting a century, but also by an early and widely dispersed missionary presence and relatively incorporative franchise system. Both left deep legacies. Second, we focus on East London, and some social characteristics that underlay the protests of the 1950s. Despite control by an anglophone white elite, the City Council was strongly committed to segregation and conditions in the ‘locations’ were among the worst in South Africa. This helped to radicalise African urban communities who also united to a degree behind Africanist, rather than class or worker-based, ideas and rhetoric. Third, we discuss participation by women in movements of popular protest in the Eastern Cape, focusing on both rural and urban contexts. Women were deeply engaged in two periods of militant mobilisation in East London: from 1929 to 1931, led by the Independent Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (IICU) and 1950 to 1952, led by the ANC Youth League. The relationship between political radicalism and spiritual renewal is also briefly discussed. This overview suggests that all three of these historical processes shaped the ideas, patterns, and radicalism of popular protest in early 1950s East London.