by Govan Mbeki
Contents
The Peasants' Revolt, first published by Penguin African Library in 1964, is a study of a crucial period in the struggle against apartheid. It focuses on developments in the Transkei at a time when resistance to the imposition of the system took the form of open rebellion.
At that time only the Transkei had self-governing status. Of the ten bantustans which now exist, four have been declared 'independent countries' by the regime and the other six 'self-governing national states'.
The funds at the disposal of the Transkei, and the other bantustans, are substantially greater today than they were in the period of which Mbeki writes. But this financial growth is not matched by corresponding development for the benefit of those who live in the bantustans. A large proportion of the funds are allocated to prisons, police and other armed forces, while poverty and malnutrition are widespread.
A study by a government agency in 1980 revealed that the bantustans accommodated 35.7 per cent of the national population yet only produced 3.4 per cent of the country's gross domestic product. It found that more than half of households in the Transkei survived on a cash income of £40 or less per month and that more than 90 per cent of this income was from migrant workers. Some 30 per cent of families survived on less than £25 per month, 95 per cent of which came from migrant labourers working outside the Transkei.
The resistance to the bantustan authorities of which Mbeki writes, and in which he himself played a part, has never ceased. It was driven underground by intense repression, but in recent years has again begun to take a more open form.
Nineteen-eighty-four saw the inauguration of a new segregated parliament in South Africa. Incorporated into the structures of central government is a small section of the Indian and Coloured communities which is prepared to co-operate in administering the apartheid system. Overwhelmingly rejected by the Coloured and Indian communities as a whole because of its undemocratic and divisive nature, and as an attempt to entrench apartheid, the new constitution parallels the attempt to impose separate political and administrative structures on the African population.
One of the most significant features of the 1980s, and one of the greatest challenges to the Pretoria regime, is the unity that has been forged across the divisions imposed by apartheid. While there are significant differences with the past, this increasingly united mobilisation of resistance both inside and outside the bantustans has led many observers of current developments to recall the period of which Mbeki writes.
Govan Mbeki, a leading member of the African National Congress, is now serving his twentieth year in prison on Robben Island. Although sentenced to life imprisonment, his jailers have not succeeded in consigning him to obscurity. His name, along with those of Mandela and Sisulu, has become a symbol of resistance, not only to the oppressed people of South Africa but also to the international community who have conferred on him many honours and awards.
By Ruth First
This book has had a painful birth. Govan Mbeki is recognized widely in South Africa as an expert on the Transkei and on rural and agrarian problems. But not for him the seclusion of a study or library, the facilities for patient interviews and field work. This manuscript was written in fits and starts on deal tables in the kitchens of several African homes in Port Elizabeth townships; its progress was frequently interrupted by police raids, when the sheets of paper had to be hurriedly secreted, or moved away from where their writer lived and worked, for his and their safe-keeping. A great slice of this book was written on rolls of toilet paper when Mbeki served a two-month spell of solitary confinement, awaiting trial on a charge of making explosives. Mbeki was acquitted after those court proceedings; the manuscript was smuggled out of the cell to the typist who pored over the faint pencil writing on the thin paper, by candlelight and in the privacy of her township room. Some final portions of the book were written from Govan's last hiding-place in Johannesburg, where he had moved from Port Elizabeth after he was drafted by the African National Congress National Executive to direct A.N.C. campaigns from underground.
Mbeki began to write a study of the workings of apartheid policy in the reserves - the areas set aside in law for African occupation - as early as 1959 and 1960. He intended originally to prepare a manual for members and organizers of the African National Congress. This little booklet was to probe the role of the tribal Chiefs of the Transkei, and the campaigns of the commoners and their political movements; it contrasted the policies on rural issues of the African National Congress and other African movements with the Liberal and Progressive Parties, the United Party, and the Nationalist Government. It intended to analyse the history and lessons of peasant struggles in the Transkei. A first draft of the book was almost ready when the shootings at Sharpeville intervened. A fortnight later the African National Congress was banned. If the book on Bantustans - the tribal satraps which it was government policy to construct out of the reserves - was still to be published, it would have to be illegally produced on crude hand-worked presses or duplicating machines, to circulate dangerously from hand to hand. Plans were indeed laid for this, and so Govan used unexpected weeks to write new sections and bring his material up to date. 'The work goes on,' he wrote from Port Elizabeth to Johannesburg, 'but always under the noses of the police and I am forced to move too often.' He did not get away from the police raid early in 1962. Arrested with Harold Strachan and Joseph Jack under the Explosives' Act on a charge of having instructed men in the manufacture of home-made bombs, Govan was held in prison for five months, three of them in solitary confinement. Somehow he managed to lay hands on a pencil and those toilet rolls. Without reference material he began again to write the book on Bantustans, and when he was discharged from the trial and the rolls of paper were retrieved from the prison, two manuscripts lay side by side. The one was the earlier form, written largely before the banning of the African National Congress and taking the peasant story up to 1960; the second was an improved version of the first, taking the story two years further.
It was at this point that I came into the picture, to reconcile the two versions and edit the final form of the manuscript. Friends in Cape Town (who must be nameless because they are still in Cape Town) annotated and checked the references. Govan's colleagues in the Transkei watched the workings of the new Bantu Authorities, the chiefs' courts, and the so-called development schemes of the government, and sent their findings to him, through the information pipe-lines of the African National Congress. Steadily the newly arranged chapters were assembled. By the beginning of 1963 both Govan and I had been served with government prohibitions against writing, preparing, or compiling any material for publication. We were journalists without a newspaper (New Age had been banned by the Nationalist Government, and its successor, Spark, forced to suspend publication because its entire staff had been disabled by ministerial prohibition). We had more time to work on the Bantustan book, but it had all to be written under cover, both to secure the manuscript and to guard ourselves against arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment for writing in defiance of the government ban. In addition we were unable to meet openly to discuss the progress of the book, for we were both on the list of persons banned from communicating with other banned persons.
The manuscript was almost ready by July 1963. It remained only for Govan to write the final chapter on the Transkei's first constitution and first elections. That month Govan was arrested in the raid on the Rivonia underground hiding-place and he was taken to prison to spend the first ninety days in solitary detention, and then to await trial on a charge of conspiring to overthrow the South African government by violent means. Less than a month after Govan's arrest I, too, was detained for ninety days under the General Law Amendment Act. The ninety days grew to 117, till I was released in December 1963. The Bantustan book had not been hanging fire all that time. In Cape Town it was being completed, and sent in instalments out of the country. When I managed to reach London it remained for me only to do the final polishing.
As the book went to press Govan Mbeki sat in the dock of the Rivonia trial, side by side with his fellow Transkeians Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and Raymond Mhlaba. They and their five other co-accused stood trial for their lives. Govan's book on the Transkei helps to explain his deep involvement in the political struggle of his people. He has a formidable grasp of economic and political problems. More than that, his own life in the Transkei has bound him to the problems and passions of the peasants.
For many years he served the newspapers on which he worked with hard-won reports on what was happening to the Transkei under its state of emergency, to Pondoland in revolt, to the Ciskei in famine. His first writings were about the Transkei. He was Secretary of the Transkeian Voters' Association in the forties and General Secretary of the Transkei Organized Bodies. He was born and grew up in the Transkei, as his father before him.
Govan Mbeki is a modest, a self-effacing man. But he has told something of his early life.... Born in 1910 at the Mpukane location in the Nqamakwe district of the Transkei, he relates: ' I was brought up in a strict religious atmosphere. My mother was the daughter of a Methodist minister. My father was chief and recognized as such by his people but graded and employed as headman by the government. Later he was deposed. For his times he was fairly well-to-do. He had an agricultural plot of just over 16 morgen, he owned a fairly large herd of cattle and horses, as well as flocks of goats and sheep. Missionaries influenced him to educate all his children. My sisters qualified as teachers, and my brother as an agricultural demonstrator. My father built a substantial stone house when I was born or just before then. My brother still lives in it. When my father died he left savings at the post office in separate accounts for my brother as well as for me. This was used to pay for our education. I went to a mission school about six miles from our home. Most of the way was scaling a mountain. Daily I walked to and from school leaving shortly after sunrise and returning at about sundown to tend the stock. The school classes were held in a church hall. All the classes ranged up the length of the hall, with the highest classes just below the pulpit. It was bedlam. One class recited the alphabet, another a multiplication table, a third sang up and down the scale of the modulator, others would be poring over arithmetic problems. The only advantage in the arrangement was that the principal teacher saw his staff at work all the time without having to leave his own class. But little wonder I was below average in arithmetic!'
Govan won scholarships to the Fort Hare University College, to do his school leaving certificate examination and an Arts degree. He also gained a diploma in Education, leaving Fort Hare at the end of 1936. By then he was the leader of militant student opinion. His interest in politics had first been aroused in his teens when the area in which he lived was visited by an African minister who was an early member of the infant African National Congress. As a young man he had accompanied a cousin to meetings of the I.C.U. (the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union), and he had interpreted his cousin's speeches to the peasants. In the early thirties Dr. Edward Roux, then a member of the Communist Party, had pitched a tent outside Fort Hare, and for the first time Govan explored the Marxist view of the African problem. By the time of the Hertzog Bills in 1935, and with them the seal of segregation and the final loss of the vote on the common roll, Govan was in the thick of African National Congress politics. Mussolini's attack on Abyssinia had incensed the students of Fort Hare. Govan was collecting degrees, majoring in politics and psychology, and then economics, and selling newspapers during his vacations for 24s. a week. He tried to organize a trade union, and was sacked. From compound life with workers Govan took to teaching first at a secondary school in Durban, then at a teachers' training college in the Transkei. Now he began his first political journalism, and published essays in book form in 1939, entitled The Transkei in the Making. In 1938 he edited the Territorial Magazine which later became Inkundla Ya Bantu.
From teaching and journalism he went back to the people of the Transkei and in 1941 he became Secretary of the African Voters' Association, whose object was to restore the African voters to the common roll, and two years later General Secretary of the Transkeian Organized Bodies, which united all political groups in the Transkei. The same year he co-authored a new policy document drawn for the African National Congress `The African Claims'.
Govan went into the Bunga (The Transkei Council of elected and nominated members) as an elected representative and watched the workings of this body from the inside. From 1944 to 1946 he was the first representative of the students on the governing body of Fort Hare. He published a new booklet, on co-operatives, called Let's Do it Together.
In the fifties Govan went back to teaching, this time in Northern Natal. But there he found himself in a coal mining area, and he held his teaching post for only twenty-one months before he was sacked for organizing the coal workers.
Now began some years of full-time political journalism, as manager of the Eastern Province office of New Age and Spark and their banned predecessors, and as reporter and editor in the branch office used by the Transkei to siphon its news to the outside world. By now Govan was an African National Congress kingpin in the Eastern Cape. He was organizer, propagandist, technician, policy-maker; man of action, and intellectual.
Above all, he sees the Transkei through the eyes of the commoner, for the peasants of his home country are the people he loves. In this book he describes how the commoner lives and works under apartheid. Can the land support the people? Is there work? he asks. He strips apartheid to its economic bones and discusses it in terms of wages, land allotments and taxes. Can this really be self-government? he asks. He tells the sordid inside story of how chiefs chose power and were bamboozled and cajoled into accepting the Bantustan plan because they learned that there was something in it for them. He presents material never reported anywhere before on the fate of the ordinary peasant at the hands of the tax collector, the authoritarian chief, and the tribal court. Many of the chapters are a close scrutiny of the technique of rule of Africans by the Verwoerd Government but throughout the story is told in the words and from the experiences of the peasant, for while Govan worked with blue books and statistics, the commoners of the Transkei were his chief source of information, and as he loved them, so they trusted and confided in him.
Govan has a sharp mind, intolerant of the foolish and the faint-hearted. But in between the meetings, and the drafting of circulars and resolutions, the stern disciplinarian becomes the gentle and considerate friend. The last years have been hard ones for a man who has renounced home and family life, comfort and study, to lead the life of the political outlaw. Like the Transkeian peasant, Govan has lived as a migrant. Poverty and the rule of race that is called apartheid drive the Transkeian migrant from security on the land to work in the cities, and then back again. His own hatred of poverty and racial rule has led Govan Mbeki to place the cause of his people before his personal needs. Today he is locked away on the penal Robben Island, serving a sentence of life imprisonment.
RUTH FIRST
London,
June 1964
The worst of two worlds
The Transkei is Dr. Verwoerd's answer to world-wide criticism of apartheid. Upon this area, smaller than Togo, the smallest independent African state, but bigger than Basutoland on which it borders, the South African government's claims for its racial policy stand or fall. To those who say that apartheid is discriminatory and oppressive, the South African government replies that it provides the only chance the African people have ever had to 'develop along their own lines', in their own areas; that the establishment of a Bantustan in the Transkei is to give that country an independence more meaningful and secure than the independence attained elsewhere in Africa during the last decade.
The establishment in South Africa of Bantustans is based on the apartheid supposition that certain areas of the country belong to the Whites, and others, generally known as the reserves, to the Africans, with neither people able to enjoy rights in the areas belonging to the other.
Which are these two South Africas, one for Whites and the other for Africans? In Dr. Verwoerd's 'European' territory live 6,000,000 Africans, 1,500,000 Coloured (those of mixed descent), 500,000 Indians, and 3,000,000 Whites. The total area of South Africa is 472,359 square miles. The area of the 'European territory' is 416,130 square miles. The remainder, some 56,000 square miles, or less than 12 per cent of the total, is the land comprising the 'Bantu homelands '. Here live 5,000,000 Africans.
The so-called White state is a contiguous land area, containing practically all the natural resources and advanced development secured by the labour and skill of all South Africans - the majority of whom, of course, are Africans. This territory includes all the large cities, the seaports, the harbours, the airfields, the areas served well by railways, main roads, power lines, and major irrigation schemes. It contains the enormously rich gold mines, the diamond mines, the coal mines. It includes all the main industries, maintained largely by African labour, in this industrially advanced country. It includes the best and most fertile farmlands.
The Bantu 'homelands' consist of 260 small and separate areas scattered throughout the country. They are South Africa's backwaters, primitive rural slums, soil-eroded and underdeveloped, lacking power resources and without developed communication systems. They have no cities, no industries, and few sources of employment. They are congested and permanently distressed areas where the inhabitants live on a narrow ledge of starvation, where a drought, as experienced recently in the northern areas, leads inevitably to famine. They are areas drained of their menfolk, for their chief export is labour, and while the men work on white-owned farms and in mines and industry, their women-folk and old people pursue a primitive agriculture incapable of providing even subsistence. The ' homelands' are mere reserves of labour, with a population not even self-sustaining, supplying no more than a supplement to the low wages paid on the mines and farms.
Dr. Donges, South Africa's Minister of Finance, speaking at Burgersdorp on 26 July 1962, proclaimed that this arrangement of territory into Black and White areas was the final division. His words were:
It is history that has drawn the boundaries, and not the government, for the Bantu Homelands are the area which Non-Whites originally occupied. Therefore they have no moral claim to more land.
History is a record of events, not a deus ex machina. People, and not the record, drew the boundaries of the reserves, enacted the land laws and the Group Areas Act, enclosed black and brown communities in segregated ghettoes, with all the land beyond denied to them and prohibited them from obtaining rights in land.
Historical arguments that justify the White claim to exclusive rights in 88 per cent of the country are absurd. The true record is that brown and black people were spread throughout the subcontinent long before the first Whites arrived. Van Riebeeck found the Nama at the Cape when he landed in Table Bay.
Boers found and fought the Khoi Khoi and Batwa when they trekked into Namaqualand - an area which still bears the name of its original inhabitants. Xhosa lived on the banks of the Buffalo River in 1686 and settled at what is now Somerset East in 1702. Whites fought Xhosas Xhosas in the 1770S on the fringes of the Tsitsikama forest, and drove them back from the Gamtoos to the Fish River in 1778. Zulu tribes once occupied the whole of Natal, down to the borders of Pondoland. Whites drove deep into tribal territories in the Orange Free State and the Transvaal before their expansion was halted at last late in the nineteenth century. The White man's claims to rights of first occupancy are false. But, true or false, they are plainly irrelevant. It is the existing distribution of the population that should decide South Africa's future - and present.
The White ruling minority, persecuted by guilt and fearful of revenge - for it has ruled a majority too long and too brutally seeks now a political formula that will establish a firm geographical boundary between whites and blacks. But the White made his real choice long ago, and opted for a single, common society. He fought black and brown for 300 years, dispossessed them of their land, laid taxes upon them, converted them to Christianity, undermined their way of life, exploited their labour. His main endeavours were aimed at forcing them into a common society. Black and white built a single economy.
Officialdom used to be frank about the economy's dependence on black labour. For many successive years South Africa's Official Year Book contained the following passage, pronouncing this dependence in emphatic terms:
In considering any aspect of labour and industrial matters the presence of native, Asiatic, and other non-European workers largely outnumbering the European workers of the country must be accepted as a qualifying and in some cases a governing factor. The existence of this class of comparatively cheap labour has influenced the development of the country in various ways. The imported Indian labourers of Natal made possible in the early days the remarkable progress of the sugar industry, supplied the tea-planters with suitable workers, and provided much of the necessary labour for railway construction and coal mining. The gold mines of the Witwatersrand have been and still are entirely dependent upon the adequacy of the supplies of native labour; while in the industrial districts of the Cape Province, and to some extent also in Natal, the coloured worker of mixed race has not only supplied very largely the demand for unskilled labour, but has in many cases qualified as a semi-skilled artisan and not infrequently has shown himself of equal skill with the European artisan. Moreover, practically all the farms in the Union employ native or coloured labour and are indeed almost entirely dependent upon it for all general labouring work in agricultural and pastoral operations.
Here is the extent of dependence of White upon Black, and this state of dependence has only grown greater over the years. There were 2,328,534 Africans living in urban areas during 1951; by 1960 the total was 3,443,950, or 1,115,000 more. There are 280 black and brown workers to every 100 Whites in the five major employment sectors: mining, manufacturing, construction, railways, and postal service. The proportion was much the same in 1951. Of the total African population of South Africa less than one third lives in, or comes from, the 'homelands'. The great majority live, were born, and work either in the cities or on the farms of 'White' South Africa. South Africa is a single, multi-national society, integrated and inter-dependent. This is the reality which the apostles of apartheid seek to disclaim.
The Nationalist government cannot deny the discrimination that it practises against Africans Like the old Salvation Army song that promises 'pie in the sky when you die', apartheid promises the Africa persecuted by pass laws and police that he will get rights one day back home in the Transkei.
Meanwhile he must expect fewer rights, no rights at all, in the so-called white areas. The 1963-4 Bantu Laws Amendment Bill is rooted in this premise, stripping from Africans their last remaining right to reside in the urban areas at all. It is long declared government policy that African family groups should be prohibited from establishing themselves in the urban areas. The African worker permitted there must be a migrant, a temporary sojourner, who can at any time be sent back to his home reserve. The new measure sets up 'depots' in which Africans will be detained both while seeking work and while awaiting repatriation if they have been ordered out of an urban area. The African migrant labour force was always large; now every African capable of work is to be turned into a migrant labourer.
So-called citizenship rights in the Bantustans are to be paid for by the complete loss of citizenship and occupation rights in the rest of the country.
What of these Bantustans and the compensation they offer? The African reserves are made up of 260 separate areas, patches and pieces scattered over the face of South Africa. Clearly there cannot be 260 independent homeland states, and a glance at the map shows that the majority of these isolated areas cannot be incorporated into larger units. The Tomlinson Report, which investigated Bantustan planning, wrote that - save for a few blocks such as the Transkei and Vendaland - the Bantu areas were too scattered to form any foundation for community growth. 1
The Transkei, covering 16,000 square miles and containing between 1,500,000 and 2,000,000 people, is the only African reserve that constitutes a coherent and substantial area of land. The Transkei is thus crucial to the whole Bantustan programme. If apartheid cannot succeed here, it cannot succeed anywhere. The Transkei is the South African government's Bantustan shop-window. Already the goods displayed are flyspecked and faded, but the government tries to disguise their appearance with gaudy advertising material.
A government booklet proclaims that there are 64 secondary industries in the Transkei with a gross output of £795,000 a year. This is a per capita output of about 10s. a year, which is in any event negligible. But further analysis reveals that these units are in fact services rather than industries, such as dry cleaners, bakeries, and smithies: and, in addition, that they are almost all white owned. The picture is as dreary in the field of agriculture, where crop yields, according to official figures, produce the equivalent in gross annual income of £4 5s a person; livestock income, the second largest source, gives an additional gross annual income for each inhabitant of less than 2s 6d. The Transkei's largest source of income is migrant labour Every year government bureaux recruit 160,000 Africans from the Transkei - or 11.5 per cent of the total population - to work in mines and industries.
The Tomlinson Commission stressed that the development of the reserves in the primary sector alone - agriculture, forestry, and mining - would not meet the needs of the Transkei, for the reserve would then support only one fifth of its present population in a backward subsistence and peasant economy.
For the other four fifths there would be no livelihood in the reserve. There would have to be, stressed the Commission, the rapid establishment of secondary industry in the reserve. Since the Commission deliberated and made known its findings, the government has arrived at policy decisions. No private investment in the reserves is to be permitted, and the government has limited its own investment in these areas to agricultural development.
So the Transkei will remain dependent on the proceeds of its migrant labour, while there will be no attempt to provide industrial employment in the reserves. The policy of separate development, far from being an instrument to bring Africans back to their homelands, is in effect a compulsion on them to leave it.
The Transkei Constitution Act passed by the all-White South African parliament recognizes the facts. It supplies a dual type of citizenship for Transkeians, who are citizens of the Transkei but not aliens within the Republic of South Africa. The Act says:
The Republic [of South Africa] shall not regard a citizen of the Transkei as an alien in the Republic and shall by virtue of his citizenship of a territory forming part of the Republic of South Africa regard him for all external purposes in terms of international law as a citizen of the Republic and afford him full protection according to international law.
What are the rights of this Transkeian citizen, the man who is no alien and yet is treated as an alien, without the privileges granted to the immigrant settling from abroad in the Republic? The Transkeian citizen may live in White territory, if he works for the White man and if he pays taxes, but he may have no say whatsoever in the government that rules him. In the Transkei he can vote for a Legislative Assembly in which 64 appointed chiefs over-rule the wishes of the 45 elected members. The chiefs can generally be relied upon to toe the government line because they are officials of the Republic's government, responsible to that government and not to the Transkeian citizen.
Back home in the Transkei, the African may dream of some future economic and political well-being, but the dream shows little signs of ever turning into reality. The Transkei is as firmly subject to the demands of white supremacy as ever it was. The people of the Transkei had no say in the drafting of their constitution. The elections held in 1963 took place under a state of emergency which imposed a ban on all meetings of more than ten persons, laid down severe penalties for 'statements disrespectful to chiefs', and permitted the indefinite detention, without warrant or trial, of political opponents.
A reign of terror had succeeded in temporarily crippling the African National Congress, the best organized and most influential of the banned national liberatory organizations. An observer of the Transkei election wrote:
It is impossible to describe fully to anyone who was not there to sense it the atmosphere of distrust and suspicion that lay thickly over the whole of these election proceedings. There was an oppressive condition of fear everywhere - fear of government action, fear of police action, fear of the action of the chiefs. The campaign had taken place in conditions of secrecy and wariness - if candidates did run election campaigns, it must have been through whispers.
Women dominated the election queues, women and elderly men, providing their own comment on the possibilities of the Transkei becoming an economically viable territory. For they were the visible demonstration of the fact that most of the able-bodied men between 18 and 50 are out of the Transkei - earning their livings in mines and farms. The sight of an electorate consisting of women and elderly men was in itself a quiet human protest against a deprived society.2
Yet, despite all the repressive measures of officials and police, despite the deliberately complicated electoral procedure, the voters of the Transkei succeeded in inflicting a significant political defeat on Dr. Verwoerd and his government. In a surprisingly high poll (70 per cent in some areas), the voters routed the pro-government candidates and proved conclusively that the people of the Transkei, despite all blandishments are overwhelmingly opposed to apartheid and the newly evolved theory of separate territorial development.
Of the 45 elected members, 38 are known to be strong opponents of the Nationalist regime. But the members nominated by the central all-White government enjoy an automatic majority over the representatives elected by the people. And the South African government has the power of veto and the right of supervision over every act of the Transkeian Legislative Assembly. This is the face of ' self-government ' or ' independence ' for the Transkei.
The decision to give the Transkei its own Legislative Assembly was taken by the South African government at a time when world pressures and protests at the policy of apartheid were particularly severe. By advertising its gift of self-government to Africans in certain areas, even if those areas were strictly limited, and the self-government effectively hand-cuffed, it hoped to silence world censure. The opposite has happened. The Transkei scheme has revealed the fraud of apartheid in theory and practice.
Dr. Verwoerd had another reason for attempting to build an apartheid state for Africans in the Transkei. It was, he hoped, a way of slowing down the surge of African nationalism in South Africa. The whole Bantustan policy is based on the calculation that white supremacy cannot hope to defeat African nationalism unless the force of that nationalism is first diverted into manageable channels. But the channels have proved too devious. The carefully plastered structure of apartheid remains makeshift and rickety. Economic facts visibly wear away the Bantustan fantasies. And far from being a South African plan to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow, the Bantustan scheme is a slide back into the South African past.
The Segregation Story
The more that policy changes in South Africa, the more it is the same.
'There are certain things about which all South Africans are agreed,' said General Smuts, 'all parties and all sections, except those who are quite mad. The first is that it is a fixed policy to maintain white supremacy in South Africa.' That was in 1945, when the United Party government, today in feeble opposition, was under fire from the Nationalist Party - led then by Dr. Malan, and now by Dr. Verwoerd - for not going about ' keeping the Natives in their place ' the right way.
It has been a protracted journey, this one of segregation, of apartheid, in South Africa, and it has been a movement not forward, towards new ways, but back into the past.
When Britain granted representative government to the Cape in 1853, it allowed the vote to all male subjects of the Crown who fulfilled certain conditions: the age of 21 years; ability to read and write; a minimum annual salary of £50 or possession of landed property to the value of no less than £25.
In those early days it was an exacting test to pass. But sufficient Africans were determined to pass it to constitute a significant force. Soon the African vote was preponderant in areas like Woodhouse and Aliwal North. With the annexation by the Cape government of the Ciskei and the Transkei, the African population of the Cape increased by over 1 million persons, and African voters who had formed 14 per cent of the electorate in 1882 increased to 47 per cent in 1887.
Now the Whites set about finding ways and means of disfranchising the African, and their efforts resulted in the decision of the Cape Parliament in 1887 to disqualify all those who had become voters by virtue of their occupation of tribal land. African voting strength was accordingly reduced by 30,000.
This was 'Sprigg's Purge' (Sprigg was the Cape Prime Minister at the time the Parliamentary Registration Law was passed); and from then onwards this was the inevitable reaction of the 'liberal' Cape to the increase in the numbers of African voters the franchise qualifications were stiffened.
Imvo, the African paper of the day, wrote an editorial on this large-scale disfranchisement of the African people:
They [the Africans] are aware that the object [of the government] is, by means of defranchisement, to pave the way to doing what it likes with the rights and privileges of Natives, especially with rights to land.
In 1892 the Native Franchise Act increased property qualifications once more. The law, said Sir James Rose-Innes, 'contains no mention of a colour bar, but those who supported it, trusted that it would neutralize the Native votes.'
By 1894 Rhodes could say: 'We have not given them - the Natives - any share in the government, and I am of the opinion, rightly so.' The Rhodes franchise laws had enjoyed the support of the Afrikaner Bond; and of liberals like Rose-Innes, Sauer, and Merriman. Later generations of white politicians were to quote with approval - and copy - the methods adopted by the 'liberal' Cape to water down the African vote while maintaining its token value.
In the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, in those early years, it was written law that Africans were excluded from any political rights. The Transvaal Grondwet (Constitution) laid down that there should be 'no equality between Black and White in church and state'; and the Grondwet of the Free State defined a Burgher, who alone had civic rights, as 'a white person'. The British defeated the Boer Republics in 1899-1902, but perpetuated racialism in the conquered territories.
Natal's basic constitution was the Royal Charter of 1856. Though it laid down economic qualifications for the vote, the registration procedure for Africans was so complicated that only three Africans ever acquired the vote there, and by 1910 there was a total of only 186 non-White voters. Britain gave self-government to Natal Whites and allowed them to exclude Africans and Asians from the franchise.
In the years before the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, there were optimists who looked to the day when, in a united country, the franchise rights of Africans in the Cape would be extended to Africans in the northern provinces. On the contrary, Union was the signal for a concerted campaign to take Cape Africans off the common roll. The Nationalist Party, founded soon after Union, as the movement of White reaction and militant race rule, set itself this special task.
First came the sordid deal concluded by the framers of the 1910 Constitution. The Cape Liberal leaders protested loud and long that no form of Union should be countenanced which imperiled the rights of the non-Whites. 'I find an insuperable obstacle in the way of unification,' declared Dr. Jameson in 1908, 'that of native franchise.' Yet, when the National Convention met, broad agreement had already been reached over this issue between the liberal Cape, represented by Merriman and de Villiers, and the colour-bar North, represented by Smuts and Botha.
The Convention decided that the status quo in the Orange Free State and Transvaal was to be retained; the position in Natal was not to be improved; and in the Cape the non-White franchise was to be whittled down by the loss of the right, never yet exercised, of electing a non-White to Parliament. The remaining franchise rights were to be ' entrenched ' for the future by the two-third majority provision.
It is to be noted that the South Africa Act, by which Britain gave effect to the agreement, secured for the Union Parliament the right to abrogate the non-White franchise altogether, provided only that certain procedures were followed.
The Act, which enshrines the principle of racial discrimination, was supported by three quarters of the Cape House of Assembly, and on a division over the franchise issue only two former conservative members, Sir G. Sprigg and W. P. Schreiner voted against the proposals as constituting 'a blot on the constitution'. It is interesting that neither of these two gentlemen had previously been Liberals, that the Liberals indeed were in support of the measure. 'The position of the Natives and Coloured peoples in other parts of South Africa . . . will be greatly improved,' it was argued by Sir Henry de Villiers.
The non-Whites mobilized their forces against the Bill. Committees of protest were established; a petition was addressed to the British Government; a deputation of Coloureds led by W. P. Schreiner visited England to put their case before the British public and government. But also to England went the Liberals - Sauer, Merriman, J. H. Hofmeyr, and de Villiers to argue that the non-Whites ' were satisfied ' with the Bill.
Schreiner, writing of his difficulties with the Imperial government, said: 'The big rock to the reversal of the Act by the British Parliament was its acceptance by the Cape Parliament and by the friends of the Natives, Merriman and Sauer.'
Despite the indignant protests of the Africans, the Act of Union was passed. The Under-Secretary for the Colonies stated in England with ill-founded optimism that 'the Cape franchise was safe'. Schreiner, however, with far more foresight predicted: 'if only a few Cape members betray their trust, Native and Colour parliamentary rights would vanish.'
'Civilization' they said then, and still say today, was to be the test for citizenship. But the African vote was never permitted to become more than a token. And the result of excluding the great mass of Africans from the franchise was seen in the mounting volume of legislation directed against them: the 1911 Native Labour Regulation Act; the 1913 Natives Land Act; the 1920 Native Affairs Act; the 1923 Urban Areas Act; the 1924 Native Taxation and Development Act; the 1926 Immorality Act; the 1927 Native Administration Act; the 1927 Riotous Assemblies Act; the 1932 Native Service Contract Act.
The Cabinet of the Nationalist-Labour Pact government which took office after the 1922 Rand Strike was pledged to ' safeguard White South Africa '. In his Smithfield speech General Hertzog, the Prime Minister, stated the fundamental postulates of his 'Native' policy. 'Union', he said, 'could not go on with one extreme policy in the north and another in the south . . .'; and it was 'beyond belief that the north would accept the Cape franchise system.' Unless the Cape franchise, he warned, was taken away from the Cape Africans or at least fundamentally altered, the Northern Provinces '. . . cannot possibly continue to close the door against the Native franchise within their borders.'
Hertzog's 1926 Bills proposed the extension of the Cape franchise to the Coloured people of the other three provinces (this wooing of Coloured voters was to ally them temporarily with the Whites, whilst limiting the Cape African franchise). The Bills had to be withdrawn: they satisfied neither the extreme north nor those in the Cape who wanted to retain the status quo.
In 1929 Hertzog introduced Bills more retrogressive than the 1926 ones, and these were referred to a Select Committee, where they incubated for five years.
During this period, however, the effectiveness of the African franchise in the Cape was attacked in various outflanking moves.
In 1927, the peak year, there had been 16,480 African voters in the Cape. From then on and owing largely to administrative action taken by Hertzog's government, under which officials were directed to apply vigorously the tests required for voters, their numbers declined.
By the Women's Enfranchisement Act of 1930, which gave the vote to White women only (despite the previous pledges of Hertzog and Malan that Coloured women would be included), the European electorate increased from half a million to one million and the effect of the African vote was more than halved.
In 1931 the franchise was given to ALL White men in the Cape and Natal without qualification, thus bringing these provinces into line with the Transvaal and Orange Free State.
The qualifications, in property and education, remained for all non-Whites. The following statistics from the Government Gazette, 31 March 1936 show the effect of the above three steps in devaluing the vote of the non-Whites:
| CAPE | Total No. of voters | White voters | Coloured voters | African voters |
| 1929 | 208,582 | 167,184 -- 80.1% | 25,618 -- 12.3% | 15,780 -- 7.6% |
| 1931 | 391,307 | 352,658 -- 90.2% | 26,378 -- 6.7% | 12,271 -- 3.1% |
| 1936 | 417,524 | 382,103 -- 91.5% | 24,793 -- 5.9% | 10,628 -- 2.6% |
(In 1936, in the Transvaal and Orange Free State respectively, the 349,000 and 101,089 voters were ALL White; in Natal, of the 92,116 voters, 353 were Coloured and 1 was an African)
Out of 61 constituencies in the Cape, only 10 had as many as 450 African voters, and in Tembuland, where the African vote was highest, it comprised less than one third of the total.
The Hertzog-Smuts Coalition of 1932 made a frontal assault possible at last, and White unity (as always) brought further disaster to the non-Whites. Clause 6 of the Coalition Agreement set out the aim of 'providing separate political representation of White and Black'. The slogan of trusteeship, a euphemism for depriving the African, amongst other things, of his vote, was now increasingly used.
After several false starts the Hertzog government introduced its plan for dealing with the Cape African franchise. Uncertain of securing a two-thirds majority of the two Houses of Parliament sitting together, as required by the South Africa Act if he was to tamper with the African franchise, General Hertzog devised a trick that trapped almost the whole of South Africa. He appointed the Young Commission to consider the three Acts of 1936 - the Native Representation Act, the Native Land and Trust Act, and the Native Laws Amendment Act - popularly known among Africans as Hertzog's Unholy Trinity. The Young Commission, like the Tomlinson Commission which was later to give apartheid its theoretical ring, set out to counterfeit a settlement, by which the Africans would receive some hollow payment for the surrender of their political rights. The Hertzog-Smuts fusion government of 1936 promised to release 7.5 million morgen of land for further African occupation. The Africans were not deceived. The 'Hertzog settlement' was not of their making; indeed it was promoted in the face of their united protests. But the Whites were enabled to exclude the African altogether from participation in the government of the country and feel moral about doing so at the same time.
During the course of the heated debates in Parliament, General Hertzog stated that the passing of the Native Representation Act would provide a final and permanent settlement of that African representation which had been a source of contention amongst the White political parties. Dashed at last were the lingering hopes of those who trusted that the entrenched clauses in the South Africa Act could provide foot holds from which the struggle for the extension of the franchise to the Northern Provinces might still be waged. The Act deprived the Africans of the Cape of their direct franchise and placed them on a separate roll.
Whatever the number of registered voters on the separate roll, they would not send to the law-framing House of Assembly more than three representatives, and all three had to be White. Of the four senators provided for by the Act, two would represent the Cape, while one would represent Natal and one the Transvaal and the Orange Free State together. The senators were to be elected by indirect means. The Act also created a Native Representative Council, an advisory body which was planned as - and never became more than - a talking shop.
The unanimity with which the vast majority of White South Africans accepted without any qualms of conscience the political emasculation of the Africans in 1936 showed how little they respected the most solemn undertakings to which they had been party. Subsequent events - the failure of the government to purchase the released areas and to settle them with Africans, the systematic destruction of representative machinery - were further proof, if any was still needed, that it was not to Parliament or any government institution that the African was to look for the satisfaction of his political aspirations.
Not only did the Hertzog Acts of 1936 destroy - once and for all - any hope for extending the franchise to the Africans in the Northern Provinces, they also destroyed in the African all trust in the word of his White rulers. The Hertzog Bills met with the united opposition of Africans throughout the country.
There was not a single resolution in favour of the Bill from any one of the five conferences - attended by chiefs and delegates from African Councils and Boards - summoned by the government in September 1935, or from the meeting of Natal Chiefs in October 1935, or from the countless meetings and conferences held spontaneously all over the country. Finally, in December 1935, an All-African Convention met especially for the purpose of considering the Bills. It was a gathering that broke all records for its numbers and) at that stage, its national character. The resolution of the Convention stated, inter alia, that the 'continual discrimination (of Africans) has tended to relegate them to a position bordering on slavery.'
The militants pleaded for strikes and passive resistance to counter the Bills, but the dominant leaders were all in favour of moderation. The Convention appealed, without effect, to the King and British Parliament, as the original 'donors' of the Cape African franchise, for an expression of opinion on the proposed legislation. The Act was passed at a joint sitting of both Houses. Only eleven members voted against it.
The franchise deal was a fraud; the 'greater benefits' never materialized.
The Native Representative Council was there to advise only; and when its advice clashed with government policy, it was ignored. In time, after the African mine strike of 1946, it went into permanent adjournment in protest against government policy, and in 1951 it was formally abolished.
Group representation was the prelude to the total abolition of the African franchise. It prepared a way for ever more ferocious assaults on the rights of the African people.
In 1948 the Nationalist Party came to power. Its policy pamphlet of the same year declared clearly among its aims:
the revision of existing Native legislation, with the aim of abolishing the African franchise from the House of Assembly and the Cape Provincial Council;
separate representation of the Cape Coloureds on the lines already laid down for Africans.
In 1951 the Nationalists passed the Separate Representation of Voters Act to remove the Coloureds of the Cape from the common voters' roll, and since they did not yet have the necessary two thirds majority of both Houses of Parliament sitting together, flouted the constitution by passing the Act at separate sittings of the Assembly and Senate.
The Coloureds, in place of their franchise, were to be given three members (White) elected on a communal basis, and one Senator (White). The proportion of representation granted to the Whites (then numbering 2,750,000) and that granted to Coloureds (numbering some 1,250,000) was to be fixed for all time in the House of Assembly at 156:3.
There was a constitutional crisis in which Whites and non White joined. The Opposition rushed to the defence of the constitution - the Act endangered at least six Cape seats held by the United Party - and the Act was successfully challenged in the courts on the ground that it was unconstitutional.
The bizarre High Court of Parliament Act, which was then passed to establish the parliamentary caucus of the governing party as the final court in the land, promptly validated the 1951 Act. But this court was declared ultra vires by the Appellate Division.
The opposition of the United Party to these measures was not based on the democratic principle 'to each man his vote', but on the grounds that the game of disfranchisement had not been played according to the rules of the constitution.
By 1956 the Nationalists had found a way of observing the constitution in the letter and shattering what little spirit it had left. They vastly increased the size of the Senate, and the government majority there, so as to produce the necessary two-thirds majority in a joint sitting of the two Houses, and replaced the Coloured vote by a communal roll, the promised few White representatives, and an advisory Union Council for Coloured Affairs. Three years later, in 1959, under the misnamed Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act, the last little pocket of African representation in Parliament - three members in the House of Assembly and four in the Senate was eliminated. In its place came the Bantu Authority system.
Chiefs give way to the council system
There was a time when the tribal Chiefs led their people against the encroachment of White government. Cape governor Sir Harry Smith in 1848 gave an object lesson to suspectedly recalcitrant Chiefs when he ordered a wagon loaded with dynamite to be blown up in their presence. As the splinters flew in all directions he warned the Chiefs that such would be the fate which awaited them if they resisted the laws of the Cape government.
As late as 1951 and the passing of the Bantu Authorities Act, there were different approaches to 'native administration' in the four provinces.
Natal still bears the stamp of Theophilus Shepstone Sometsu - who set out to crush the might of the Zulu skilfully, so as to utilize their traditional social system, turn it upside down and reduce them to a crouching, humiliated people. Tribal ceremony, especially the Zulu war dance, that beautiful body-building exercise, receives special recognition from the Native Affairs Department nowadays, in the hope that its fervour will somehow reproduce the past when Zulus were united in unquestioning allegiance to tribal authority. But now authority is centred elsewhere. True, Cyprian Bezekhulu, dressed in Victorian-style chief's uniform, is brought from Zululand to preside over Zulu dancing at the Sometsu Ground; and this, it is hoped, will make Zulus believe that they are reliving their prowess in the days of Shaka, Dingane, Cetswayo and Dinizulu. But behind the House of Zulu and controlling it are the field agents of the government, the Native Commissioners.
The two northern provinces of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State still, in the sixties and the era of Verwoerd, carry the marks of the Kruger Republican period. Local tribal authorities administer tribal funds and are left alone as long as they are submissive. The chiefs have been turned into government appointees and learn soon enough that the way to entrench themselves is to keep as close to government policy as possible. Some chiefs try to allow a fair measure of democratic practice at their tribal kgotlas (mass tribal assemblies), though the days when they are able to humour both their subjects and the government are more imaginary than real.
In the Cape 'native administration' has had a far longer history, and in many ways has anticipated future national policy on the control of the African people. The power of the chiefs, especially among the Ama Xhosa, had to be crushed. It was partly to achieve this and partly to facilitate the integration of Africans into the mining and industrial economy that led Cecil John Rhodes to introduce the Glen Grey Act and the Bunga, the mixed Transkeian council of elected and nominated members. The council system was claimed to be the form of local government best suited to the tribal areas. It was not intended at that time to be an alternative or substitute for representation in Parliament. On the contrary, Transkeians White and Black - could and did qualify for the vote. Only under the Nationalist regime was the existence of a separate Transkeian local government system to be made a pretext for denying Africans representation in Parliament.
The Bunga never succeeded to any appreciable extent in diverting the people from their demand for direct representation in Parliament. Instead, its effect was to undermine the power of the chiefs and train the people to look to themselves, through their own elected representatives, for redress of the wrongs they suffered.
Under the Glen Grey Act, the Bunga (the word means 'Council') system of African representation outside a ' common society' was established in the Transkei proper. It developed gradually until the 26 magisterial districts of the Transkei became the basic units of the larger Bunga, which became known as the United Transkeian Territories General Council (U.T.T.G.C.). What a gruesome picture the Xhosa pun on this abbreviation presented and how true to fact has been the ultimate outcome of the Bunga system. The pun on U.T.T.G.C. runs thus: utata woj inj emsini (Father has had dogs meat blackened with smoke). The least that one may expect from eating raw dog's meat, covered with soot so as to give the impression that it has been grilled, is severe constipation. In the end it was the U.T.T.G.C. that accepted the Nationalist Government's Bantu Authorities Act, with all the misery accompanying its implementation.
Africans in reserves elsewhere in the country were brought to the Transkei by the government to see how good the Bunga system was. The Ciskei General Council was formed after the Transkei model, and attempts were made to bring Zululand and the Transvaal reserves into line by the Native Affairs Act of 1920.3
Now how did the Bunga, or Council, system work? In areas where the powers of the chiefs over land administration had been usurped by a system of land tenure that put decisions about succession beyond them, the authority of the chiefs was supreme. This was the case in the surveyed districts of the Transkei and the Ciskei. Paramount Chiefs reigned over West and East Pondoland, and in the areas of the abaThembu and the amaGcaleka when, in time, the government decided to revive recognition of their Paramount Chiefs. (The paramount chieftaincy of the Gcaleka, who, of all the tribes in the Cape, fought the White invaders most bitterly, was not restored until the thirties.) In some areas a paramount chieftaincy was not recognized; and in others chieftainship itself was unknown.
In each of the 26 districts of the Transkei there was a District Council, consisting of six members. In the District Councils of Pondoland two representatives were appointed by the Paramount Chief, with the approval of the Native Commissioner; two were nominees of the Governor-General (in fact recommendations of the Native Commissioner); and two were elected representatives of the people. Twelve of the 26 districts operated this electoral system. In the rest of the Transkei, where there were no Paramount Chieftaincies, two representatives were government nominees, and four were popular representatives.
Each District Council sent three representatives to the U.T.T.G.C. The councils in the Paramount Chieftaincies had one member elected by the District Council, to represent the people; one appointed by the Chief; and one nominated by the Native Commissioner. The councils from areas that had no Paramount Chieftaincies had two representatives of the people, and one government nominee. The Paramount Chiefs themselves were ex officio members of the U.T.T.G.C.
Inside the District Councils, if there was no pressure brought to bear by government officials, there was often a fair chance of chiefs' and peoples' representatives taking the same side on local issues - the only issues they were empowered to discuss, let alone control.
As popular participation in the machinery of administration increased with growing political consciousness in the Transkei, the chiefs became less powerful, while their authority was further eroded with the assumption by the government of more direct control over land allocation. Government-employed police constables were used to carry out functions originally performed by sub-chiefs in the name of the Paramount Chief. So the power of the chiefs was sapped from two directions: the government and the people.
The Bunga dealt with education, roads, agriculture, irrigation, customary law, and limitation of stock. Its annual revenue was about £170,000 in the forties, derived from quit-rents and a local hut tax of 10s. a year, and from this revenue it had to maintain about 4,000 miles of roads, construct and maintain over 1,000 dipping tanks, pay the salaries of agricultural demonstrators, maintain agricultural schools, and pay for medical services. The population it administered was well over a million, yet its income was little more than half the amount spent by the South African government on the one item ' printing and stationery '.
The system was hailed as a notable experiment of political science, in the training of Africans to the task of local self government. But it was a system controlled by nomination, and run in the presence of White government servants; while above all, the overcrowding and poverty of the reserves placed the task of administering them far beyond the capacity of any local council.
In their rural backwaters the Councils met and talked, debated and passed resolutions. The Bunga asked for direct representation in Parliament year after year. Year after year, the Bunga demanded greater administrative powers.
The 1946, post-war, session passed the resolution - 'This Council requests the Government to extend a direct individual franchise to all Africans in the Union with the same qualifications as in the Cape.' 'We are told better times are coming. We want to know what our share in these better times will be,' said a Councillor at this session. Trusteeship was debated. Is it easy for a guardian to release his authority and hand it over to his ward? Councillors asked. Cllr. F. T. Qamata said: 'We are a people that was created by God and we should therefore find ourselves one day entering into the control of this country and enjoying the rights that are enjoyed by others today. We are entitled to these rights.'
The tone grew stronger year by year. By 1949 the new, Nationalist, government was in power, and after a debate on apartheid the resolution of the Bunga deplored 'The Government's native policy of apartheid ... as a serious injustice ...' and urged a policy 'in harmony with civilized standards'. Said Cllr. Mabude: Apartheid is a measure designed for our oppression. The African people maintain that if in this policy there is anything new, it is that which is not true, and if there is anything true, it is that which is not new. That which is true in apartheid is the outmoded political manoeuvre practised by herrenvolk politicians . . . to frighten Whites on the platteland4 with the Black peril.'
On a national scale, there was the same story of dissatisfaction, disillusionment and growing revolt within the Native Representative Council.
Within the whole Council system its participants had given up all hope of sharing in the government of their people and their country. They were talking loudly of independence.
In the beginning the White rulers had trusted these institutions to turn discontent and aspiration inwards. They had hoped that the Africans would become so absorbed in the settlement of petty disputes, in the issues within and between the tribes, that they would cease to require a place in the political sun. But contrary to expectations, the annual sessions of these Councils served merely to bring the peoples' representatives from different parts of the country close together, so that together they could hammer out common demands.
The Bunga was demanding the extension of the Cape African franchise to the northern provinces, and direct representation for Africans in parliament. The Native Representative Council calling itself a toy telephone, because though it talked and talked, nothing of what it said seemed to reach the ears of the government - was on strike.
Open defiance was looming.
The Nationalist government began to turn its serious attention to the whole problem of 'native administration'.
There was pressure from inside the reserves as well as from the African urban ranks for self-rule. The same pressure, even stronger, was coming from outside South Africa. Colonialism was on the decline.
Apartheid - the black bogey cry to woo White voters - won the election for the Nationalists in 1948, but was still not much more than a slogan, even if Nationalist professors were busy dressing it up into a universal myth. The problem was plain apartheid had to find a new way to administer Africans, because the pressure for more rights was growing too strong a challenge, while the broadcasts of the outside world could not be jammed forever by an endless repetition of old phrases.
The traditional system in South Africa had been one of direct rule: White government officials sat over the Chiefs. Everyone knew that the Commissioner was the boss. Yet now the White government official had become too visible and accessible a target for anti-government action. The need was clearly to devise a system under which the Africans appeared to be managing their own affairs. This, too, of course, was nothing new. Indirect rule had been carefully evolved by Lord Lugard for the British colonies in Africa; Nigeria and the former Gold Coast had both been governed in this way. But the Nationalists had taught their followers to regard British policy as their constant and implacable enemy, so that the British system of indirect rule could not be directly copied. In any event, it had failed to contain the pressures for independence in the areas where it had been employed.
The Nationalists set to work to evolve a variation. It turned out to be a hybrid of direct and indirect rule. It was given the grand name of self-development. The Native Commissioner now rechristened a Bantu Commissioner, in vogue with the term 'Bantu' which the Nationalists insisted should replace the more compromising word 'Native' - and other government officials were represented as advisers who would be required only for as long as the Africans needed training (to do the will of their masters).
Apartheid sounded promising enough to White voters; but for all the years after the Nationalist government came to power, it had brought only hardship to the African people: the tightening up of the pass laws, the introduction of inferior education, the banning and banishing of political leaders; the growing ferocity of the police.
The people were becoming increasingly bitter and hostile. At this rate white supremacy would not last.
The propaganda extolling the virtues of apartheid had to be stepped up, and an important sector of the African people in the country won over to its side. These were the Chiefs. Government schemes to entice their support coincided with the swelling popular opposition to the Bunga or Council system.
Now the government performed its great conjuring trick and got Chiefs - many of them, let it be said, proving comfortingly cooperative - to accept declarations about self-rule and development as the genuine article. The unwary sat back to wait for great impending constitutional developments.
Instruments of Apartheid Rule
South Africa, the Nationalist Party proclaimed of a country in which Blacks outnumber Whites four to one, had to be 'kept white'. The doctrines and ordinances of apartheid were, of course, sacred; yet the Africans could not be denied even an illusion. The substitute for African parliamentary representation was to be the Bantu Authorities system. No new general, district, or local councils of the Rhodes variety were created in the reserves. The two general councils of the Transkei (with its 26 district councils) and of the Ciskei remained for the moment, while besides these there were three further local councils in the Cape, three in Natal, and 13 in the Transvaal. But under the 1951 Bantu Authorities Act new-look Bantu Tribal Authorities were established, mostly in the northern provinces, by proclamation of the Governor-General (in fact, the Minister of Bantu Affairs). He designated chiefs to head these Authorities - and could at any time depose them; he also fixed the minimum and maximum number of councillors to serve on each Authority. The Bantu Commissioner had the right to veto any appointment. The system entirely excluded the elective principle. The Minister and his officials had strict control over the membership of the Authorities; and members of the general public could be excluded from their meetings.
The aims of the Bantu Authorities Act were to abolish the Native Representative Council as an elected 'umbrella organization' representing all Africans, and to substitute councils based upon tribal and ethnic groups - whose members would be largely selected by the government. It was these councils or Bantu Authorities through which later apartheid and Bantustan measures would be forced on the African people in the guise of consultation and consent. The government would ensure for itself an easy passage in advance by rigging up a network of non-elected councils around nominated chiefs for the expression of 'popular will'.
In 1955 the Bantu Authority system reached the Transkei, and the Bunga, with its 26 District Councils, was erased - after it had accepted the Bantu Authorities Act in principle. At the base of the new administrative pyramid are the Tribal Authorities, composed of the chiefs and headmen. All chiefs owe their office to appointment by the government. They are government officials. The State President (the Department of Bantu Administration and Development, in effect) decides the size of the Tribal Authority and its composition. Chiefs may appoint a number of councillors - the number is decided by the State President - and of the remainder the Bantu Commissioner nominates one third and the taxpayers, with the chief's approval, two thirds. The administration has the right to veto any nomination.
The District Authority is the next stage in the pyramid. Its head is the chief of the dominant tribe in the district, and it includes at least eight other members - nominated by the head, the Bantu Commissioner, and the taxpayers - all of them drawn from the Tribal Authorities. All appointed chiefs in the district are members ex officio. It is a method of indirect selection by the traditional chiefs and White bureaucrats.
Still higher come the Regional Authorities - of which there are nine in the Transkei - each embracing two or more District Authorities. The head of the Regional Authority is a Paramount Chief, if there is one; if not, the leading chief in the area; and members are drawn from the District Authorities by the indirect method previously described. The Regional Authority includes all chiefs ex officio while most of the other members are appointed by the Paramount Chief and the Bantu Commissioner.
Finally, for the Transkei at least, comes the Territorial Authority, consisting of all the members of all the Regional Authorities. They nominate a presiding head with the approval of the State President.
The Minister may veto the appointment of a councillor to the Territorial Authority, as indeed he may at all lower levels of the pyramid.
It is clear from the composition of these bodies that they do represent merely the messengers of government will; the elected element is so small and so remote from the voters that it can hardly be held even to contribute popular participation. The thesis of government policy is clear - Africans are still in the tribal stage, chiefs are the natural rulers, and the people neither want nor should have elected representatives.
By 1959 the government had set up 324 of these Tribal Authorities throughout South Africa (123 in the Transkei); 26 District Authorities (all in the 26 districts of the Transkei); 16 Regional Authorities; and one Territorial Authority (the old Bunga, converted).
The stage was now set for further legislation. The Promotion of Self Government Bill was introduced in 1959. As with so many other South African laws, the title is of course misleading. For the real object of the Act was to abolish the representation of Africans in Parliament.
As a substitute for depriving the Africans of this small share in the supreme law-making body of the country, the Territorial Authorities created for each ethnic group were to be given greater powers, and the Prime Minister, Dr. Verwoerd, even declared: 'If the various Bantu national units show the ability to attain the required stage of self-sufficiency, they will eventually form a South African Commonwealth, together with White South Africa, which will serve as its core and as guardian of the emerging Bantu states.'
In all, there were to be eight Territorial Authorities topping the pyramids of Tribal, District, and Regional Bantu Authorities: for the North-Sotho; the South-Sotho; the Swazi; the Tsonga; the Tswana; the Venda; the Xhosa; and the Zulu 'national units'. At the time that the national units were announced, the extent of the territories they would compose were not specified, and they have not been specified since. White Commissioners-General were to be appointed by the government to the areas of these 'national units'.
The Chiefs had long had their duties outlined to them, but again these were stressed as the maintenance of law and order, the reporting to the Bantu Commissioner of any unrest, the enforcement of all government laws and orders, and the dispersal of unlawful assemblies.
The new Authorities had to maintain contact with the Commissioners-General for their areas; and could have assigned to them ' such powers, functions, and dudes relating to the conduct of African Affairs as might be specified by the governor-general'. The Authorities had power to provide for the establishment of markets and pounds, and to allocate trading and other sites to Africans. They could make enactments on matters assigned to them by the Governor-General; but this would not divest the latter, or the Minister of Bantu Affairs, of any powers. All enactments had to be approved by the Governor-General and published in the government gazette. The powers extended to these bodies would be mainly administrative: the Bantu Authorities would play no part in the framing of education, health, employment, or any other policy, except in so far as the Territorial Authorities could influence the government through the Commissioners-General.
The system thus provided nothing like a genuine system of African self-government. (For that matter one half of the African people - those living in the towns or on White-owned farms - were to be excluded altogether from its scope.)
These legislatures for self-government, however dressed and decorated, were meant to be - and are - only advisory boards. If they possess any independence at all, it is on minor matters of administration, inside the patterns imposed on them and unalterable by them.
Dr Verwoerd has certainly been clever. But it is to be wondered whether he hasn't, after all, been too clever by half. For having once embarked upon his new order, he has been swept, by it further than he or his followers ever originally intended.
The Transkeian Constitution Act of 1963 is a devolution of authority which neither Africans nor Whites have ever desired. Transkeian Africans have consistently clamoured for more authority, but never at the expense of their claim to participation in the government of the whole country. Dr Verwoerd denies them this right of participation on the grounds that they are citizens of the Transkei, but aliens in the rest of the Republic. Yet this contention is totally unacceptable to all Africans, including the Chiefs. Even when they clamour for more power in their own areas, they do not mean to accept local government in place of participation in the government of the whole country. This and other measures provided the occasion in South Africa's all-white parliament for full dress debates on apartheid, and the development to its furthest point yet of the 'independence for the Bantustans' theory. Dr Verwoerd expounded the necessity of apartheid if White supremacy was to survive.
Dr Verwoerd and the Nationalist Party - indeed, all the supporters of White supremacy in South Africa - cannot allow that people may take this political stand in accordance with their individual interests. To them no interests transcend racial criteria. Dr Verwoerd sees human groups only as behaving in a stereotyped and easily predictable manner. To his eyes, the conduct of human beings, like that of wild animals, is governed by instincts. Under the irresistible power of the gregarious instinct, racial groups, like baboons, are drawn together and respond in a given manner to certain stimuli.
(If human beings should behave in a way that does not readily conform to such behaviour patterns, they must be beaten into them, he might have added.)
Each racial group, by this reasoning, will register its votes as a group. Because the Africans outnumber everyone else, Dr Verwoerd maintains that they would - if they could - dominate all other groups. To the Nationalists, thus, the whites are faced with a simple choice, and Dr Verwoerd has chosen: 'unequivocally that the people of South Africa cannot accept the consequences of having a multi-racial state unless the Whites, the Coloureds, and the Indians are prepared to commit race suicide '. 5
One may reasonably ask if it is in reality the fear for the continued existence of the minority racial groups that motivates the policy of the White supremacists towards the non-Whites. For if the Whites were impelled solely by this fear of committing 'race suicide', why should they want to create, against their clearly expressed wishes and interests, group areas and separate grades of citizenship for Coloureds and Indians, who constitute, in relation to themselves, minority racial groups without the capacity for domination?
It is the fear that they may lose their privileges, the benefits of their own supremacy, which drives the Whites to ever more desperate courses. Yet, if racially discriminating laws have failed all these years to crush the aspirations of the Africans, Coloured, and Indians, how effective a divisory mechanism can these new illusory homelands in the reserves prove to be?
The basic purpose of the Bantustan policy was not to create an African nation-state, but to carry the apartheid programme a step further. In the words of the Prime Minister in 1962: 'I choose division'. 6 And why should he not, since it is a division which guarantees the supremacy of the Whites?
Dr Verwoerd then set out the benefits accruing to the Africans from his plans. Each group, he said, would be able to exercise control over its own people. 'That,' he said, 'could prevent them from being too envious of their fellow-men and from trying to take away from them what belongs to them. 7
To what extent can the proposed Transkei Legislative Assembly exercise control over its people - since South Africa's State President is given the over-riding power to allow, or reject, laws passed by the Territorial Authority ? Further, the proposed oath of allegiance makes it obligatory for members of the Authority to swear to be loyal, not only to the Transkei, but also to the Republic of South Africa.
Dr Verwoerd argued that his measure ' could offer an opportunity to develop equalities amongst the groups '. The Bantustan would be on an equal footing with the government of the White area and the two could negotiate with each other as equals. Generally the plan 'could satisfy the desire for the recognition of human dignity,' declared the Prime Minister. Negotiate as equals? At most the measure acceded to the African people a system of local government controlled by a Minister and subject to a parliament in which they would have no representation. The Transkei 'Legislative Assembly was to be permitted no truck with defence, internal security, communications, and the other matters of a vital nature to the independence of a state.
The Legislative Assembly itself would consist largely of government-appointed chiefs, and the right to appoint chiefs, even after 'self-government', would still vest in the Minister of Bantu Affairs.
Far from creating the climate for 'human dignity', the plan prepared the ground for the development of a permanently subject African population, lulled, it was hoped, into submission by false promises and fallacious argument.
Dr Verwoerd had another reason for his plan:
'Throughout history,' he proclaimed, 'the creation of states has brought with it contentment.' 8 He went on to announce that in Africa satisfaction had only come with the creation of states inhabited by national entities. In other words, only states that had been established for ethnic groups had had peace. It is as unlikely,' he declared '... to hold together the Whites and the Bantu in peace ... in one multi-racial unit as it is to throw together Xhosa, Basuto, and Zulu without conflict into one communal entity.' Yet the fact is that different tribal groups have been living peacefully together for many years in South Africa, especially in the urban townships.
If the Nationalist Government were sincere enough to carry this argument to its logical conclusion, then it would be busying itself with plans to set up separate satellite states, for Jews and English - even for the Afrikaners of French, German, and Dutch origin - to spread racial contentment. But in reality it remains the skin colour that determines, for the Nationalist, where each belongs. There are no national groups amongst Whites for as long as they allow the Nationalist government to pursue its overall policies of White supremacy. And the price is small if it merely means that within their colour supremacy, the white minority groups like the Jews and English succumb to Nationalist Afrikaner domination.
The further advantage which the Prime Minister visualized in his plan would be the formation of an alliance between the apartheid states with the object of advancing mutual interests. Consultative machinery would be set up between the Bantustans and the White government similar to that which exists for the member-states of the British Commonwealth. Certain members of parliament - on the opposition benches, of course - were then reported to have burst into laughter.
A clearer picture of what the government had in mind in its plan for African self-government was painted by Mr G. F. Froneman, an outspoken apostle of apartheid. Members of the United Party had tried to counter the 'self-government' thesis with the argument that if the Black states became independent they would be able to enter into treaties which might prove embarrassing to White South Africa. The Black states might be able to extend their borders. Their industries might be able to undercut those in the White areas. Africans who remained in the White state would be unlikely to remain passive while their brothers in the neighboring dominions were enjoying freedom: they would form a gigantic fifth column. Mr Froneman emphatically repudiated this. Far from being independent states, the Bantustans would be no more than racial group areas, subject to Nationalist race laws but administered by self-seeking members of each particular group.
Time and again Cabinet spokesmen have claimed that the steps which the Nationalist government is taking to implement apartheid are on a par with the constitutional developments that a colonial country goes through before it becomes independent. In fact, the Prime Minister claims, South Africa will arrive at the same place, if by a different route.
He expects the Western powers to see the two-fold advantages to be derived from his plan; that 'South Africa is here doing what the Metropolitan powers themselves did, viz. Iiberating nations'; and that 'under our system we are doing what the Black communities wanted. viz. the liberation of states.' (House of Assembly Debates, 23 January 1962. c85.)
In support of their contention, the Nationalists often quote Nigeria and Basutoland. They argue that the reason why the former appears to be forging ahead on the Western capitalist political pattern is that the Chiefs emerged as the leaders of the country when it shed its formal colonial status. Basutoland is held out as providing the typical example of how migrant labour can keep its contact with the country of its origin, and even take an active part in its political life, as when elections take place in Basutoland, and its citizens in the Republic are allowed to vote by post.
Similarities there are, yes. The evolutionary development of all human societies has certain aspects in common, in the same way that growing babies have certain common features. If a child is properly fed, its body completes the normal process of growth and in due course the child grows and develops into a healthy adult, who assumes his or her duties and responsibilities in society. But if the child is, at a certain critical stage of growth, denied nourishing food, exercise, and education, it becomes stunted physically and retarded mentally, so that at the time when it should be taking its place in society it is able to do so.
That is precisely the condition which the Nationalists are trying to create for the Africans. If Africans have had Chiefs, it was because all human societies have had them at one stage or another. But when a people have developed to a stage which discards chieftainship, when their social development contradicts the need for such an institution, then to force it on them h not liberation but enslavement.
In all the colonial or formerly colonial countries the tendency is towards the unification of peoples who have been torn apart and set one against another under colonial conditions. But in South Africa the Nationalist government is deliberately nourishing disunity, attempting to erode the very unity evolved over the years, in order to re-create manageable and weak tribal communities.
We may well ask: what is meant by self-government? Of course it has different meanings in different contexts. The Nationalists try to fit their Bantustans into one or all of these meanings, as the occasion demands, decorating the concept with a profusion of words irrelevant to any accepted definition. Local self-government means that residents of a town or district have the power to make laws and administer them within the given area. The local governing body has a clearly defined set of powers and functions, and operates under the control of the central government. 'Self' here means merely that the local community can decide some things for itself.
In a federal system, as in Nigeria or Australia, the component 'states' or provinces have wide powers which are safeguarded by the constitution, and which cannot be changed without the consent of the various states and central or federal government.
State' (provincial) self-government is a more extended and entrenched form of local self-government.
When an independent state not owing allegiance to another country makes its own laws and conducts its own affairs, both internally and in relation to other independent states, it is said to be self-governing. In this case it is a sovereign state and, in formal constitutional law, is not bound by laws made by other states unless it voluntarily adopts them as its own. When applied to former colonial dependencies, 'self-governing' means that they have been emancipated from alien rule, and have become sovereign and independent.
The published terms of the proposed constitution for the Transkei go no further than a small measure of self-government on a tribal basis.
There is thus no similarity at all between what the people of Kenya or Sierra Leone on the one hand have acquired by the withdrawal of their imperial masters, and what, on the other, the Nationalist government is imposing on the Africans in order to secure permanent White supremacy.
The astonishing thing is how the apostles of apartheid themselves, in their desire to impress others with the grandeur of their plans, over-reach themselves and produce grotesque misrepresentations of the reality, even though the effect of such is to discredit the plan itself.
Dr Verwoerd's 1962 parliamentary session speech on self-government for the Transkei was immediately taken up by Mr Douglas Mitchell, leader of the United Party in Natal. Mr Mitchell commented: 'This is one of the most tragic speeches that we have had-since this government came into power, tragic for all races - this day will be looked upon as Black Tuesday in the history of South Africa in the years that lie ahead. 9
Mr Douglas Mitchell was clearly aghast. He believed that Dr Verwoerd in his self-government plan was holding out the future of sovereign independence to the Africans.
The Transkei Constitution Act of 1963 is a statute of the South African Parliament, in which no African sits, nor any African representative. Yet the South African government claims that the Act represents the desires and reflects the intentions of the Transkeian people. The government would have the world believe that in drawing up this constitution it acted in the same way as the British Parliament does when enacting a constitution that confers self-rule on a former dependency. To test this assertion, one has only to examine the negotiations and discussions that preceded the framing of the constitution. To what extent were the people of the Transkei consulted directly or through their representatives? How far have their aspirations shaped the constitution?
The suggestion for self-rule did not come from the Transkei at all, but from the government.
As far back as January 1959, the pro-government newspaper Die Vaderland quoted 'the highest authority' as saying that Native ' parliaments were to be established in the Union during 1960 to coincide with the abolition of Native representatives in Parliament, and that Natives would have ' complete control in their own areas '.10
The Minister of Bantu Administration and Development, Mr de Wet Nel, took the credit for announcing the establishment of self-governing Bantu national units when he drafted the white paper on the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Bill in 195911
In December 1961, the Executive Members of the Transkei Territorial Authority were summoned to Pretoria for consultations with Cabinet Ministers, these consultations being ' the result of requests put to us by these Ministers during their visits to the Transkei some months before'.12 There, in Pretoria, the Prime Minister discussed with them third resolution of May 1961 asking for self-government, and both he and other government officials helped them to prepare proposals that would serve as a basis for a draft constitution. 13
The first official announcement of a revised constitution which would set the Transkei on the road to self-rule came from the Prime Minister in January 1962, when, addressing the House of Assembly, he suddenly declared: 'The government will grant the Transkei self-government,' adding that the Transkei Territorial Authority would have to 'obtain clarity as to its ideas concerning the form and content of the constitution.'
There is an essential difference between the Transkeian constitution and that of Kenya, Ghana, or Tanganyika. The constitutions of these countries were the result of considerable struggle for self-government by the peoples of those countries. Dr Verwoerd has inferred that the transfer of authority to the Transkei does not result from a principled policy, but is the reaction to pressure. The South African government has taken the step of granting self-government not because it wants to, but because its hand has been forced. He said on 10 April 1961, during one of his numerous Bantustan policy statements, that the Bantu would be able to develop separate Bantu states, which might possibly even achieve full independence. 'That is not what we would have liked to see. It is a form of fragmentation which we would not have liked if we were able to avoid it. In the light of the pressure being exerted on South Africa there is however no doubt that eventually this will have to be done, thereby buying for the White man his freedom and the right to retain domination in what is his country . . . 14
The initiative came from the government, and it was taken up at once by a few chiefs who saw in the scheme of self-rule the possibility of sudden pickings for themselves. To win support from the rest of the councillors, they played on the widespread desire to have the magistrates removed from their system of government. But the real issue, whether local autonomy for the Transkei could ever compensate for the right to take part in the government of South Africa, was never put to them. Nor were the councillors allowed to debate it. When Dalindyebo raised the issue in an appeal for a multi-racial constitution, he was outmaneuvered and brow-beaten into silence.
As for the mass of the Transkeian people - the two million who have a right, surely, to decide the constitution that will govern them - no one ever asked their opinion, and if any of them had dared to raise a voice in opposition to government policy he would have run the risk of imprisonment without charge or trial for an indefinite period, under the emergency regulations covering the whole area.
When the Prime Minister was accused in the House of not having consulted the Africans either within or outside the Transkei on this issue, he replied: That has nothing to do with me. It was the responsibility of the Recess Committee - the Committee composed of Executive Members of the Transkei Territorial Authority and other chiefs - which had met the Prime Minister at Pretoria in December 1961.
Only eleven days after the Prime Minister's statement of 10 April 1961, the following resolution was moved at the Transkeian Territorial Authority's annual session:
That in order to ease the present situation of uneasiness in the Union of South Africa and in view of the Government's policy of separate development and the fact that the Bantu people in the Union have no representation in the Union legislature:
- this Territorial Authority in session respectfully requests the Government to declare the Transkeian Territories as a whole a self-governing state under the control of the Bantu people;
- that arrangements for the drawing up of the relative constitution be made by the authorities in consultation with the leaders of the Bantu people in the Transkeian Territories; and
- that this item be given priority in order to take advantage of the presence of Government officials from head office. 15
The Councillors seized the opportunity to express themselve8 in favour. But they tried to avoid making too direct a demand for freedom They played about, on the edges of their real objective, fearing to arouse the anger of the government, hoping all the while that they might catch unawares the guardians of long-established privilege.
They honeyed their words, gently reminding the government that by asking for the right to govern themselves they were only complying with stated government policy.
The Chiefs, it now seems clear, had genuinely gained the impression from the public pronouncements of Cabinet Ministers that under the policy of apartheid Africans could gain their freedom from White rule. Councillor S. S. Majeke referred to a Bunga resolution of 1952, which had firmly declared it to be the wish of the people of the Transkei that Parliament should not consist of only one racial group. He recalled how the government had pointed out then that if that position were allowed to go on, there would never be peace in this country.' 16
By passing the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act, he argued correctly, the 'government was hindering us from having direct representation in Parliament.' After pointing out that the lawmakers were in a minority, he posed the question: 'How long will this position remain and what will be the end?' To secure harmony amongst the various races,' he urged the government, in compliance with its own policies, to allow Africans to govern themselves. 17
Paramount Chief Sabata Dalindyebo expressed it more forthrightly. Resisting any attempts at postponing a decision to the following year under the pretext of tapping the feelings of the African people he pointed out: 'When we put this matter before the people at our respective places, the people will demand complete freedom.
Realizing that the Councillors were demanding in their careful resolution more than the government had ever intended, the White officials busied themselves in getting the debate adjourned till the following day. In the meantime Kaizer Matanzima, the presiding chief, and an unashamed supporter of the Bantustan scheme, had also sensed danger in the resolution, and sought its delay for a year. Its passing, he observed, 'would involve probably a complete amendment of the Bantu Authorities system.' He cautioned the Councillors to 'hasten slowly'. 18
The short postponement of the debate gave officialdom its chance to redirect the minds of the Councillors into the narrow path which the Nationalist government wanted to tread in the interpretation of self-government ' or Bantu State '.
Instead of passing the original motion, the T.T.A. adopted another. On the surface it appeared similar to the first, but in fact it was designed to support the Nationalist view of apartheid. This new resolution not only gave a twisted interpretation to the wishes of those who had moved the original motion No. 101, but established - with rigid terms of reference - a special Recess Committee to translate Resolution 101 into reality within the framework of apartheid.
Here is the decoy resolution with its terms of reference:
That whereas it is the stated policy of Government that the Bantu territories shall be developed to the status of self-government, and whereas this Authority has now been in existence for about five years and whereas this Authority, considering the supreme importance of the Government's policy does not doubt the sincerity of the Government in this respect, and considering that motion No. 101 pertains to this policy, this Authority accepts the motion in principle and resolves to appoint a recess committee of 27 members, with powers to co-opt such persons as it may deem fit, to go into the implications of the granting or otherwise of self-government to this Authority during the next session, and that the following be the terms of reference:
- To consider the financial implications of the granting of self government, bearing in mind, inter alia, all taxes direct or indirect, payable by Bantu in these Territories;
- To consider, in the event of such self-government being granted and established, it shall not in any way tamper with the present set-up of chieftainship in these Territories;
- To consider the relations between the Government and the proposed Bantu State;
- To consider the possible date of granting the self-government.
- To consider the manner of approaching the Government in order to effect self-government. 19
This new resolution, while cunningly endorsing the principle of the original, evaded the central issue of African exclusion from Parliament, gratuitously paid a tribute to the government's 'sincerity', and assured the Chiefs that self-government would not be allowed to weaken their position.
In adopting this resolution the Transkeian Territorial Authority made it clear beyond any question that self-government would be of the apartheid variety and that the Chiefs would form the basis of administration and control.
In terms of this resolution the Recess Committee was to draft a plan for self-government. Its members went to Pretoria for this purpose - an unprecedented step in the history of the Transkei, where Recess Committees have always worked in Umtata, the territory's capital. We do not know what happened in Pretoria; but after spending some time there incommunicado, the Committee members returned, flourishing a plan. This was placed before the Transkeian Territorial Authority in the following year, 1962, and adopted amended.
In terms of the final paragraph (71) of the Recess Committee's report, the Republican government was asked to draft the necessary legislation to implement the plan, in so far as the plan was acceptable to it; in other words, the government of the Republic was to draft the constitution based on the Recess Committee's plan.
Such was the genesis of the Transkei Constitution Act.
What made the Councillors adopt the Recess Committee's plan?
It was not merely a matter of subtle manoeuvring by the Nationalists, of shrewdly manipulated debate during the 1962 session, though this had much to do with the success of the deception.
The history of the T.T.A. and of the Bunga before it, as contained in the official record of proceedings, reveals strong and unremitting pressures for self-government in the Transkei, even among the Chiefs.
It is an old cry from the Africans to be given self-government,' Councillor N. P. P. Ndamase told Nationalist officials trying to foist the Bantu Authority system on the Transkei.
Earlier, at the 1950 session of the Bunga, when Dr Eiselen, the Secretary of Native Affairs, had arrogantly asked, Can you carry the burden (of self-government) ? Councillor Qamata had replied to him:
Not one government official has at any time said 'You are growing up to manhood ', but all say 'you are children '. We are surrounded by laws to prevent us growing up. If we are children, why does government after government make laws so that we do not progress?
And Councillor T. Poswao added:
The ward does grow up and the time arrives when you should hand over to him the right he should have. We have been looking forward with eyes filled with tears to that time.
But after twelve years of Nationalist government, an influential group within the Transkeian Territorial Authority began to give up all hope of ever sharing - by consent of the authorities in the central government of the country. They began to wonder how best they could preserve such power as they possessed under a different variation of 'self-government' and 'independence', and here they fell into the apartheid trap that had been cleverly laid for them.
For years the Chief-dominated council system had operated to make the councils dependent on the goodwill and approval of government officials, who always had the final word to say. Yet they were too obviously the masters, these White Commissioners, and they stirred an unnecessary resistance. Carefully, therefore, from 1951 the government prepared the ground for the final adoption of the Bantu Authorities scheme, with its grid of rigidly conservative tribal authorities covering the reserves like a lid.
Slowly stooges were groomed to take over from the White officials, who themselves stood further back in the shadows, still holding the whip and cracking it when necessary.
In the Transkei councils the rot began when the Bunga voted to dissolve itself in 1955. It was the May session of the Bunga that year which had resolved to send to the Bantu Affairs Department in Pretoria a deputation against the whole system of Bantu Education, which it deplored, and noted with dismay'. Among others, the group included the late Saul Mabude (once a Native Representative Council member); Charles Sakwe, a headman who had also served on the N.R.C.; E. Qamata another one-time N.R.C. member; and Chief Poto; all men of influence in the Transkei. But when the deputation reached Pretoria, it found itself talking not about Bantu Education, but about the government's new scheme for Bantu Authorities. The Transkei was promised the earth, or as much of it as Whites did not already inhabit. Then, no sooner had the deputation returned home - before it had even had the chance to report back on its mission to the full Bunga - than it was whisked round the territory in government transport to persuade various district councillors, chiefs, and headmen that Bantu Authorities should be accepted. By the time that the Bantu Authority scheme was formally outlined to the Bunga's special session in November 1955, the spadework for the government had already been done by the deputation sent on that other mission to Pretoria.
The record of the debate presents a picture of general bewilderment on the part of many councillors suddenly faced by the Bantu Authority Draft proclamation. A few even expressed their opposition openly, as when Councillor M. Dlamini declared 'Those of us who come from East Griqualand are totally opposed to the Act.'
Councillors had three copies of the draft proclamation to study amongst them, and they played for time, for a chance somehow to defer a decision. Said Councillor Moshesh:
The draft proclamation is unknown to us. Even the Bantu Authority Act on which it is based is unknown to us. We took over our pencils and were told to delete such and such a thing on page so-and-so, but the contents of the section being deleted or approved or amended in some way are unknown to us. Personally if I were asked what is the constitution of this new authority I would say I don't know.
But the members of the T.T.A. Recess Committee, which had already done work on the proclamation in between sessions, was on the side of the government, and a campaign of carefully sustained pressure secured approval of the proclamation.
A commentary on how the government worked to win over Council members was provided again by Councillor Moshesh, when he objected to the dispatch of a T.T.A. deputation for a new interview with the Minister of Bantu Affairs on the subject of Bantu Authorities. He was highly suspicious of these deputations. He said:
We have had experience of these delegations which go to the Government in Cape Town or Pretoria to protest for us against various things like Bantu Education, and what happened? They were thanked by the Government and when they came back they were the preachers. They were the people who said: 'You were wrong. It is the proper thing to accept it.' How shall we know whether the amendments we have made will also be rejected and the deputation will be persuaded to say: 'You are all wrong.'
Government pressure is not all of it disguised. The open threat is flourished wherever necessary. Hardly had the special session of the Bunga accepted Bantu Authorities than the Chief Magistrate made it plain that the new Bantu Authorities would have to move at a prescribed pace. He said:
I hope we will get the same speed and energy from the people concerned in establishing their own authorities ... We are now giving you the horse to ride (when I say 'we' I mean the Government); but do not forget while you are riding it that the Government will be behind with a big sjambok, to see that it goes, and you must not think or let the people think they can just get on that horse and go to sleep.
Whoever did not get the horse to gallop would be replaced by another rider at the command of the government.
Opening the same session, the Under Secretary for Bantu Affairs readily revealed the contempt for democratic practice that is the principal characteristic of Nationalist dealings with the African people. He made it clear that the machinery of administration which the government intended to establish under the Bantu Authorities Act would not provide for elected members. He told Councillors:
'The chiefs and headmen are leaders by virtue of their birthright and traditional tribal law. If then they are leaders by birthright or by tribal law, then there is no need to elect them to a position which they already hold.'
There was also official encouragement for the use of force by chiefs and headmen in ensuring popular submission. The speech made by the Chief Magistrate of the Transkei (reported in Umcebisi Womlimi Nomfuyi) at the opening of the school for chiefs and headmen at Tsolo in January 1959 leaves no doubt as to the attitude of the government and its officials when they want to implement their policy. After praising the incendiaries in the Tsolo and Qumbu districts, who had rendered many families homeless by their campaign of terror, the Chief Magistrate reminded his audience:
'Don't forget you are authority and power and whoever is against authority and power is against you . . . Be your own police in your own interests, find out those men who respect authority and tribal institutions, and band them together as the chiefs' and headmen's Impi which will turn out when called to keep your tribes and locations clean and well-behaved. Honour these men. Give them some sort of badge by which they will be known and honoured as upholders of the law and respecters of the chief Use moderate violence . . . just like a good policeman would do.'
Government manipulation of the chiefs - and the willingness of some of them to be manipulated - is illustrated most sharply in the 1962 proceedings of the T.T.A., to which the Recess Committee of twenty-seven first reported after its work in Pretoria.
From the start the debate was bogged down in confusion. The Recess Committee report had been signed by all twenty-seven members, including those who during the session were to oppose its major aspects. Chief Sabata Dalindyebo said:
'Are you aware that when I was requested to sign I had to sign because I am a government man?'
The more acute problem for those Chiefs and Councillors who had misgivings about the plan was how the views of their tribesmen would be conveyed. Here the procedure of the debate was skillfully manipulated by Kaizer Matanzima, who scotched general discussion on the principle of the plan at the outset, made the T.T.A. plod methodically through all the clauses of the plan, and when that had been done, ruled that there could be no further debate on principle since the constituent parts of the plan had already been accepted. The Chiefs, too, were preoccupied by the problem of whether they were bound by their membership of the Recess Committee, or responsible, in the final analysis, to their tribes.
Chief S. S. Majeke expressed his difficulty:
'We should like to receive the views of the different regions that were tabled here so that we can all hear them ... The regions were requested to confer on this matter ... What was the object in the Recess Committee sending out all those reports ... if now we are assembled here they say the individual members must raise amendments? I, as one of the Recess Committee members, am in an unenviable position . . . It must be clear . . . that when we attached our signatures to the Recess Committee report we had not yet received the views of the broad masses . . . The position is that in my own area I tabled the report and the people said they wanted this or that. The situation now appears difficult because it appears that as a signatory to the report I must not voice the views of the people because I have already signed, and they have their own views. I think quite a number of members of the Recess Committee are in the same difficult position in which I find myself . . .'
A government official immediately intervened to contradict the dangerous assertion that any of the Chiefs or Councillors had a duty to consider the views of the people, and to ensure that there would be no delay in accepting the report. Councillor Majeke, he said, had been elected by the T.T.A. to the Recess Committee; and had a duty there to apply his own mind to all issues; and by signing the report had presumably agreed with everything in it. If he were now to go home and find that there were people who disagreed with him, it did not mean that his opinions should change . . . it was for him to decide what to do.
The Chiefs were in a dangerous dilemma. Many of them came from large and important areas which were hostile to the whole self-government bluff; but in the council chamber they were confronted by government officials who held them to their signatures on the Pretoria plan and, of course, were the authority over and above chieftainship. Councillor Sakwe said:
In order for me to do the right thing I must bring forward those views so that it will not be taken as having suppressed them. My district says that in view of the fact that the Commissioner-General participates in the Assembly, he and the Chief Minister should forward the laws direct to the State President.'
In other words, the Cabinet should have no power of veto over the laws of the Legislative Assembly.
For the most part, though, procedural intricacies and rulings left the T.T.A. members helplessly confused, and the debate on the clauses of the Recess Committee plan went inexorably on.
Minutes before the end came to the several days of debate, Chief Sabata Dalindyebo again rose to his feet:
'Now, Mr Chairman, what shall I do with the views I have obtained from the Tembus?'
Kaizer Matanzima made it plain that such views did not concern the Authority at all. In a reply to Councillor G. Nantala, who said that the people should be given more representation, Matanzima declared:
I should like to know who those people are, because in my view the chiefs are the people. They form an integral part of the community in which they are, with this difference - that they are the elected leaders of the respective tribes. An assertion has been made by various people that the chiefs are government servants. I wish to refute that assertion as I did so in Pretoria before the Prime Minister, and fortunately the Prime Minister supported my contention . . .'
It had been the practice of the Bunga to refer controversial matters to the people through the District Councils. But on this occasion, consultation with the people was a mere pretence; the government neither wanted nor allowed the heads of the Regional Authorities to report on popular reaction to the proposed self-government plan. Chief Matanzima himself made this clear.
'When the suggestion was made that copies of the report [of the Recess Committee] should be sent to the members of the Regional Authorities in order that they should inform their regions, there was no intention that the heads of the regions would then come back and report to the Recess Committee. The intention was to make the members of the Territorial Authority ready for discussion in order to save the possibility of them saying: Let us take the matter back to the people; because it is expedient that the decision of this Chamber should be submitted to the Government as soon as possible . . .'20
How differently all would have gone if not only the Chiefs but the people also had been consulted. Popular organizations like the African National Congress and APDUSA are unlawful. But where their leaders have spoken illegally, they have repudiated the Transkeian constitution altogether. No mass leader with a claim to express the feelings of the peasants and workers of the Transkei has approved the constitution. The only ones who have given their approval are the Chiefs, and only a few of even these have spoken.
Throughout this crucial session of the T.T.A., sly use was made of chiefly ambitions and jealousies. A major point of contention was the balance of Chief -- commoner representation in the new Legislative Assembly. Officialdom reproved 'eleventh hour constitution makers' who were trying to change the work of the Recess Committee. The Secretary for Bantu Administration said significantly
'... it rests in the hands of the Government of the Republic of South Africa to decide what it will concede to the Transkei in the form of self-government.'
He told the T.T.A., on the subject of Chiefs' representation:
'. . . what is important for you to decide is whether you want Chiefs as ex officio members, and once having decided that in the affirmative, I do not see how you can leave any Chiefs out. Who is going to say that one is better than the other one?'
The same official, days later in the debate, made his point again, more forcibly:
'The point made by Chief George Matanzima [Kaizer's brother] was rightly in line with what I said yesterday; that it is not a question of whether there are going to be "X" number of Chiefs. The question is: Are there going to be any at all in the House of Assembly? Once this Authority decides there are going to be Chiefs, ex officio, then they have accepted that principle. And once they have accepted that principle, if they are going to do so, then there is nobody in this House or in the Transkei who can say there is not one Chief good enough to be here. In other words, once the principle has been accepted of having Chiefs in the House, then obviously every Chief fits into that category. . . . If the Chiefs are not represented in this Assembly, then this House must pass a resolution abolishing the principle of chieftainship . . .'
The last thing that the Chiefs wanted, of course, was any weakening of their authority . . . And so the Transkei Legislative Assembly is to be overweighted with Chiefs, who constitute the basis of the entire Bantustan scheme. Without them it would never have been accepted in the Transkei, and without them it has no prospect of lasting.
Do the Matanzimas really believe that they will arrive at genuine independence in this way?
Matanzima, when a minor Chief and member of a District Council, said at one time in private conversation:
'We are fed up with being ruled by the Whites. We want to do it ourselves.'
In those days he might have been called an African patriot; he was certainly hostile to the whole machinery of White rule. Doubtless, in the beginning, he snatched at anything that seemed to transfer a greater share of government from White to African shoulders. Such men, once caught in the Nationalist contrivance, could not escape with safety; and, indeed, they involved themselves even deeper for what they could get out of it. Chiefs ambitious for a greater measure of independence and power had first to become prisoners of the scheme. Many must now know, in their hearts, that the self-government scheme has proved a swindle. But now they have a profitable interest in keeping it going.
The shrewdness of the Nationalist play should not be underestimated. The Chiefs have been used with skill. Every little Chief, even those not getting large stipends from the government, has been placed in a position where he can make money for himself at the expense of the people. Fresh powers of civil jurisdiction have been placed in the hands of the Chiefs, for example, and many have amassed small fortunes in fines and bribes.
In the beginning even Paramount Chief Sabata - now one of its most powerful opponents - accepted the Bantustan scheme. Gradually he grew disillusioned, as he witnessed the workings of the Bantu Authority system.
The Tembu story of 1957 onwards is an ideal case in point, and it emerges graphically from a 1958 memorandum written by four Tembus (one of them had been private secretary to Paramount Chief Sabata) exiled from Tembuland for their opposition to Bantu Authorities Three of the four had been members of the official Tembu deputation to Pretoria, sent to protest against the manner in which Bantu Authorities were being implemented in Tembuland. In the beginning it had been hoped that the Bantu Authorities Act would 'restore the golden age of African chieftainship', when headmen were answerable to the Chiefs, not to government officials; 'when the power of the Paramount Chief derived directly from the people and did not depend on an army or a police force.' White conquest had reduced the Chiefs to mere figureheads, minor cogs in the administrative machine of the Native Affairs Department. But far from strengthening the position of the Tembu Paramount Chief, the new Bantu Authorities proved to be a source only of weakness and division. The Paramount Chief made various recommendations for the implementation of Bantu Authorities in areas under his control. The recommendations were ignored. In the matter of appointments over certain vital areas, the government ear was cocked not to the Paramount Chief, but to a certain minor Chief, Kaizer Matanzima. The headman regarded as natural leader in the area east of the Tsomo river was swept aside, and after a long and heated dispute Matanzima reached the top, from which he admonished those who opposed Bantu Authorities and himself:
'It is wonderful when the government gives you your rights and you go against that policy. All the fruits of the land are enjoyed by those who obey the government . . .'
The Sabata-Matanzima quarrel was long-standing and bitter. The Tembu complaint was that their Paramount Chief was threatened by an upstart Chief, who was using Bantu Authorities to achieve his own ends.
While Tembu resistance to Bantu Authorities had arisen in the first place because the method of demarcating authorities and appointing heads undermined the rights of their Paramount Chief, their resistance throughout was underpinned by their resentment of Matanzima's upstart claims. Once, in Emigrant Tembuland, Matanzima had administered one district of St Marks. Then he had been handed CaLanga, formerly under Sabata's own control, in a government move to further enhance his status. Next he claimed Lady Frere in the Glen Grey district of the Ciskei, and even though no legal transfer took place, the government implemented Bantu Authority regulations in the area and then placed it under Matanzima, to add once more to his domains. Accessions to his empire turned Matanzima into the fanatical supporter of Bantu Authorities, and the w