“Natal is a White Man's Land”: Anti-Asianism and Pro-White Labour Politics in Colonial Natal, c. 1906–1909

Abstract

In recent years, the history of the early South African labour movement has been increasingly revisited and reinterpreted by social historians in order to produce a new understanding and synthesis of its influence on twentieth-century South African history. Labour and socialist newspapers, as well as official trade union organs, are important documents of the history of the early twentieth-century South African labour movement and present a general reflection of the socio-political views representative of this movement. This article focuses on the policies and political sentiments of the white colonial labour and trade union movement in Natal between c. 1906 and 1909, the period of existence of the Natal Labour Party (NLP). Contemporary literature on the history of KwaZulu-Natal pays scant attention to the NLP.