The daily worker., 1929-12-24
AFRICAN NEGRO
REvOL RISING
over CONTINENT
Looks to U. S, to Give
Aid and Guidance
By VIM. WILSON.

w A'As W A~OO-Ns
The flame of colonial revolt has
reached Africa. The inflammable
material of the ruthlessly oppressed
African Negroes has been touched
and the conflagration bids fair 70
sweep the whole continent.
The British imperialist press Of
course, sees in this a "Moscow plot
against the Empire. The London
papers speak of the unrest as COM
ing from organizations in touch with
the Communist Party and instruct
ed by the Communist International" +"
T he Manchester Guardian" is
forced to admit however that "a seri-
Gus and widespread revolt" is on
against virtual slavery.
Passport laws subjecting the ma
tives in their own country to every
conceivable restriction by brutal
police, confining them to native
compounds" at night in cities; poll
taxes forcing them off the land and
into mines where they are paid in
company money and known by a
number; the color bar keeping thern
from schools, libraries and theatres /;
the Native Land Act which reduced
the area in which they are allowed
to live so that no possibility exists
of their making a living at farming /;
these outrages the Guardian cauti-
ously admits might create dis
trust!
But even this picture is incom-
plete. The depth of poverty and
misery in the countryside is i'll
describable. Here the Negro natives
physically attached to their tribes
are herded upon reservations of the
poorest land, their native customs
forcibly abolished and the people
subjected to the imperialist exploit
ers' demand for cheap native labor.
Feudal Forms of Robbery.
The primitive agricultural meth
DDS used does not allow even the pos
sible use of the inadequate land al
lotted. The reservations are dense
Iy packed with people and the con-
sequence is that disease takes fear
full toll, with infant mortality ex-
tremely high.
Here share cropping, quit rent,
and other feudal and semi-feudal
forms of tenacy are used by Dutch
and English landlords to increase
exploitation and profits. Unable to
meet the excessive demands of land
lords by labor, the desperate natives
are offered a ''helping hand" by
usurious money-lenders, and once in
their clutches the native tenant is
bled to death.
In industry the "color bar has
barred solidarity between black and
white worker. The attitude of the
white workers toward the native and
colored workers has been one of open
hostility. Certain menial jobs have
been "Kaffir work. and no white
man would engage in them. Where
employed at the same work, the
wages of the white worker were
often three or four times those paid
the black worker. Negroes were
rigidly excluded from trade unions
of white workers.
Such is the background. The life
of the native is living death. There
is no need to look to Moscow to find
the cause of unrest. While there is
friction between two bourgeois poll
tical parties: the nationalist party
of the Dutch farmers and the South
African party of the colonial bourg-
eoisie and the imperialist Chamber
of Mines, this friction is overshad-
owed by the conflict between the ma
tive masses and the capitalist class
as whole. Both parties Of the
bourgeoisie stand for exploitation of
the native masses.
"Only the Communist Party.'
The only organization with pro-
gram for solution of the native prob
lem and the problem of the poor
whites (whose numbers under capi-
ta1ist decentralization is increasing