Beinart, William. "Black Responses and Black Resistence". In Twentieth-Century South Africa, New Ed., by William Beinart, 88-113. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Beinart, William. "Black Responses and Black Resistence". In Twentieth-Century South Africa, New Ed., by William Beinart, 88-113. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

• By the 1890s, racial divides in South African society were becoming more rigid, with activities of Black subjects restricted to the lower ranks of the civil service. This growing restriction during the late 19th Century led many educated, Christian, Black elites to expand their political activities, increasingly forming groups to challenge a growing White supremacism following the conclusion of the Boer War (89).
• These groups often appealed to British imperial power in South Africa, requesting that London intervene in South African politics in order to secure the rights of its Black subjects from regional political changes. Britain rarely intervened, but Black South Africans continued to appeal to London's authority (90, 93).
• The Black interests movement in South Africa was born from a reaction of those elites against the growing White supremacist identity of White South Africans. In 1912, Black liberal elites organized a conference including prominent chiefs to establish the African National Congress [ANC], mainly focused on combating discriminatory policies (91). 
• The passage of the Natives Land Act of 1913, which restricting the land ownership rights of non-Whites in South Africa, marked a turning point for the ANC, as it first moved into mass politics to protest the law. Although many interested because of the many landowners among its membership, the ANC also supported and liaisoned with affected tenants (91-92).
• The Congress of the time was still divided on its support for the issue, as many rural landowning members and chiefs felt that the provisions in the Act for Black reserves and communal land rights would protect more land from purchase by White, a guarantee worth the loss of free access to land markets (92).
• The ANC had enormous coordinating its activities across the country due to language divides and widespread illiteracy. Those Black interests publications which existed catered to small numbers of elites. The activities of Mahatma Gandhi in Indian demonstrate these divides, as his movement for Indian rights did not attempt to reach out to or improve the condition of Black South Africans (93, 95).
• The economic and social diversity of South Africa also inhibited the effective organization of the ANC during its early years. Despite having a national presence, the ANC essentially functioned as regional organizations, unable to reconcile the rural conservative issues of Transvaal with labor militancy in the Eastern Cape. It remained so ineffective during the 1920s, that most politics ignored its existence, instead operating through chiefs or labor unions (103-104).
• The majority of anti-colonial political action in rural areas of South Africa remained focused on the disruptive impact of the state on rural life, mainly concentrating on resistance to taxes and controls over agriculture. Requirements for cattle dips to combat ticks were a point of particular contention because they disrupted traditional patterns of pastoralism. Violence in rural areas was small-scale and focused on opposing these policies (100).
• Examples of rural communities organizing beyond the local level are not unheard of, in 1922 women in Herschel began boycotting stores in response to increased taxes. They formed the Amafelandawonye, a group opposed to participation in the South African state which attempted to create its own separate institutions and services (106).
• Collective Black identity in South Africa formed in the cities out of the collective experience of subjugation and wage labor, creating social connections despite profession-specific ethnic segregation. Black militancy in the 1920s was particularly concentrated in Rand, an industrial town with a large Black population, which had seen concurrent White labor militancy due to stagnating wages despite rising prices (102-103).
• The Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union of South Africa formed in Cape Town in 1919, and quickly grew to supplant the Congress's influence in many urban areas. In the 1920s, the group expanded from labor issues into rural affairs, tackling issues of stagnating wages and poor conditions, helping them expand to a membership of over 100,000 by the late 1920s, far outstripping the ANC (104).
• The Union had split into several divisions by the end of the 1920s, as accusations of corruption and poor leadership led local branches to organize independently. Lacking a coordinated response, the organization was picked off through police repression and targeted arrests (105).
• From the 1920s onward, South African politicians made a deliberate attempt to empower the chiefs in rural areas, including extending judiciary power to traditional courts in 1927, to an attempt to further segregate administration. Black chiefs would now be empowered to rule over Black subjects, easing racial tensions and gaining rural elites as allies while still enforcing White supremacist policies (112).
• The interests of radical labor unionists were frequently at odds, ideologically and economically, with prominent chiefs, prompting some chiefs to discourage these activities and breaking the Black nationalist movement by the early 1930s as chiefs advanced their own ethnic interests over those of national movements (112-113).