A Progressive South African City?

Abstract

This case study examines the specificity of the circumstances in which influx control measures were introduced in the city of Port Elizabeth. The Eastern Cape’s premier port and industrial center acquired a reputation as a progressive place partly because the city council resisted implementing such measures until 1953, by which time they were well entrenched in other South African centers. This reputation also rested on the municipality’s provision of low-cost council housing for both white and black residents. But Port Elizabeth’s exceptionalism was overstated by the city’s publicists. It is argued that the city’s labor requirements, the institutional interests of the local authority, the possibility of African resistance, and the costs thereof contributed to the council’s misgivings about influx control. In the final analysis, the resistance to the implementation of influx controls was based on pragmatic rather than principled objections by liberal councillors who determined council policies toward the African population.