assistance to white farmers but scarcely any to Africans.
After 1910, the people in the reserves became unable to produce enough
food to feed themselves and to pay the taxes imposed by the municipal,
provincial, and central governments, which; after 1925, included a poll tax
of one pound paid by all African men aged eighteen years or more and a
local tax of ten shillings per dwelling in a reserve.s? African farming gradu-
ally collapsed. Prosperous peasants, who had been producing a substantial
surplus for the market, were wiped out. 3 0 The quality of life declined for all
Africans in the reserves. Over one-fifth of the children died within their first
year of life. Undernutrition
was common. The government left African
education to the missionary societies, whose resources were very limited,
and although it contributed
more after 1925, in 1939 fewer than 30 per-
cent of African children were receiving any schooling at all to equip them to
adapt to the new order.>!
The reserves were being transformed into reservoirs of cheap, unskilled
labor for white farmers and industrialists. In 1936, 447,000 Africans out
of an officially estimated population of 3,4 10,000 were temporarily absent
from the reserves. Only a tiny proportion
of these absentees were female,