THESEGREGATIONERA
regime professed to be applying a policy of racial segregation. It was a
complex segregation that met white economic needs by making a high
proportion
of the subject people both labor for Whites and provide for
their own maintenance,
Besides dividing the country
into white-owned
and African-owned
land, the Natives Land Act contained clauses designed to reduce all Af-
ricans in the white-owned
rural areas into tenant and wage laborers. It
prohibited Africans from paying rent to absentee landlords or from having
the use of part of a white farm and sharing the produce with the owner. The
government: could not fully enforce those clauses, however. In the Trans-
vaal and Natal, powerful absentee landlords, including mining companies,
continued to exact rent from African tenants, and in all four provinces,
farmers continued to allow Africans to use part of their land and to make
sharecropping
arrangements
with them. Moreover, a judicial decision
made the act inoperative in the Cape Province, since the prohibition
on
Africans purchasing land outside the reserves would have prevented them
from satisfying the property
qualification
for the franchise, which was
protected in the constitution.P
The act caused the greatest hardship in the