Back to ContentsThe structure of apartheid is built on a system of migrant labour and territorial segregation. For black people in South Africa this means strict controls on their movement, on where they may live and where they may work. For many it means a more or less permanent separation of families. It means the forced removal and relocation of population, and the destruction of many black communities. For black women, above all for African women, it means particularly intense forms of exploitation and oppression.
1.1 Migrant Labour
Many parts of the world are familiar with the phenomenon of migrant workers - 'guest-workers' - leaving their own country to work in another for a specified period. In South Africa, too, there are workers from other countries of Southern Africa. However, in South Africa migrant labour exists also primarily in a special form as an integral and basic part of the apartheid system. In the distorting mirror of apartheid, all Africans working outside the bantustans are officially considered to be migrants who leave their own 'country' to work in 'white' South Africa - a different country.
This precept is applied in varying degrees to all black workers, and not only to those from the bantustans working on temporary contract outside the bantustans.
By law all Africans must carry passes, and those who gain residence rights outside the bantustans are given them only as qualifications to the general rule which says that they are citizens of another country.
Every person, black or white has to live in an area designated as their 'own area'. For the white minority this means most of the country including the areas where almost all economic activity is based. For the black majority it means living either in a Bantustan, or a white-owned farm, or in a black 'township' near a 'white' town. For many black women in domestic work it means living on the white employer's property in separate accommodation. The townships are segregated dormitory areas with virtually no commercial or industrial activity and few opportunities for employment outside what is sometimes called the informal sector. Most of those who live in the townships must, if they are employed, travel each day to work in the 'white' areas.
Since the 1960s the black townships have been concentrated into big regional townships far from town and city centres. This has often involved enforced removals of people and the destruction of existing and sometimes mixed communities which were located closer to work and other facilities.
Where it has been possible the government has created the new townships just inside the Bantustan borders, close enough to centres of economic activity to allow workers to travel each day or each week to work outside the bantustans. In a special meaning that apartheid gives the word, they are described as 'commuters' (people who travel from their 'own areas' to work). Restrictions on the building of housing for Africans outside the bantustans have created a deliberate shortage of family housing, forcing ever more people to become 'squatters', to become contract labourers and live away from their families (often in single-sex hostels), or to move to the Bantustan townships to become commuters. As modern transport has developed the distances have grown greater.
The full extent of migrant labour in South Africa is not known, because official figures count only those on formally registered temporary contracts to work outside their places of residence. Many others are also forced to live away from their families for the week, or the year, and travel home whenever they can (see Table II).1
While almost all the foreign migrants were men in 1980, one quarter of the internal migrant workers were women.2
In Migrant Labour in South Africa Francis Wilson says that the migrant labour system is based on the premise that a human being can be broken into two parts: a 'labour unit' working in the town, separated from the other part, a man with a family, with hopes and aspirations. 'If man was seen primarily as a human being who among other things was a worker, then such exclusion would not be possible.3
This split is most clearly seen in the division of the family imposed by migrant labour. But a divided life is imposed on all black people in South Africa. The township system is both part and an extension of the migrant labour system. Together they profoundly shape the lives of all black people in South Africa.
Nevertheless apartheid rests on migrant labour in its fullest sense, and it is the condition of those caught up most directly in this form of labour which most clearly reveals the heart of apartheid and its impact on women.
Migrant labour, as other communities have found to their cost, has an adverse effect on family life and social development, since the men and women who should be playing their part as husbands and wives, as mothers and fathers, and as members of the community are absent for long periods. Where such dislocation is temporary and small-scale the effects may be remedied but in South Africa a large section of workers are permanently migrant workers.
'We are trying to introduce the migratory labour pattern as far as possible in every sphere', stated a prominent Nationalist MP, Mr G F van L Froneman, who later became Deputy Minister of Justice, Mines and Planning. 'This is, in fact, the entire basis of our policy as far as the white economy is concerned.4
In 1969 Mr Froneman named the conditions under which 'foreign labour' (he was referring to Africans from South Africa) could be used without conflicting with apartheid. This included the denial of rights of domicile or citizenship outside the bantustans. He emphasised that the 'African labour force must not be burdened with superfluous appendages such as wives, children and dependants who could not provide service'.5
'We need them to work for us,' stated the then Prime Minister, B J Vorster, in 1968 'but the fact that they work for us can never entitle them to claim political rights. Not now, nor in the future . . . under any circumstances.6
(The Secretary for Bantu Administration and Development, General Circular No. 25,
1967, quoted in 'African Population Relocation in South Africa, G. Mare, SAIRR, 1980)
*For an explanation of the apartheid term 'Bantu', see Appendix
The official term, 'temporary sojourners', is applied to African workers who are integrated with and an integral part of the country's economy. They are allowed to work in that economy because it would collapse without them. But they are not regarded as human beings. A resolution passed at the 1973 Congress of the Afrikaanse Studentebond (Afrikaner students' organisation) demanded that 'All the black women and children in the white area be shipped back to the homelands and only the men should be left in the white areas for as long as we need them.7
Other aspects of the official view are no less inhuman. 'We do not want the Bantu women here simply as an adjunct to the procreative capacity of the Bantu population.8 A wife should be allowed into the town only if she were needed on the labour market. Her husband could visit her in the bantustans from time to time.
This official concept of family life for Africans is underlined in a circular from the Department of Bantu Administration and Development to local authorities in 1969. The circular put forward the proposition that where a (white) town is close to a 'homeland' (a Bantustan), the Africans employed in that town should actually live in the 'homeland'. Should the distance between town and 'homeland' be too great, however, hostel accommodation should be provided for the workers in the urban areas, and they should be able to visit their families periodically.
When a voluntary welfare organisation wrote to all South African churches in 1974 stating that since the church preached the sanctity of marriage and family life they should protest against official policy, the largest of the Christian Churches, the Nederduits Gereformeerde Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church) replied, 'That families in many cases cannot live together is true but it is also true that they are granted the opportunity to visit each other - provided of course they are willing to comply with the relevant regulations and they do not disregard this privilege.9
In spite of claims in recent years by the South African regime both internally and internationally, that apartheid is undergoing radical alteration and reform, migrant labour remains a key aspect of the system.
Women and the Migrant Labour System
Migrant labour deeply disrupts the lives of South African women. The system itself makes it virtually illegal for many African women to live with their husbands, except during the annual two-week holiday when migrant workers may go to visit their wives in the bantustans. It makes a mockery of family life, creating an impassable chasm between husband and wife.
Official statistics about the marital status of South African women of various groups tell their own story about the social consequences of the migrant labour system (see Table III).10
The migrant labour system affects the lives of most people living in the bantustans, a large proportion of workers outside the bantustans, and indirectly the lives of all South Africans, black and white. During the long periods of their youthful, sexually active lives, husbands and wives must live apart. For many, a family unit is never formed.
Francis Wilson sums up the evidence of his research on migrant labour with a devastating list of 31 arguments against it, including many that touch directly on the lives of women. Among others, it aggravates and creates illegitimacy, bigamy and prostitution; homosexuality and drunkenness; breakdown of parental authority; malnutrition, tuberculosis and venereal disease. Together with influx control and mass removals under 'resettlement' plans, migrant labour is depriving millions of black women of the most elementary and fundamental rights.
1.2 Influx Control
South Africa's migrant workers and their families do not freely choose to live and work under the conditions just described. A vast legal and administrative apparatus, backed up by armed force, is used to maintain the migrant labour system. The measures used to enforce these policies are called 'Influx Control', and the laws are known as the 'Pass Laws'.
The idea that families of migrants would secure their own subsistence from the land in the bantustans was based on an assumption of a static subsistence sector of the economy, untouched by industrialisation or by the introduction of commercial farming in the rest of the country. There was, however, no way of confining these changes to a single sector of the economy: they penetrated the whole society, leading to the dissolution of existing modes of production in some areas and the conservation of their forms, although in a stunted and distorted manner, in others.11 However, the system depended on keeping as many women as possible in the 'reserves'. If the whole family becomes part of urban industrial society then the claimed rationale for setting the payment of the male worker at the level of a single man falls away. Thus African women were until recently denied access to the new skills and the new relationships of developing capitalism except in insignificant numbers. When they did become wage-earners it was mainly in domestic service and agriculture, where they were not part of an organised labour force.
Subsistence production underwent constant change. It became almost exclusively the concern of women, doubling their work-load. This was coupled with a decline in the productivity of the land, starting in the 1920s, that has gradually reduced material conditions until a large proportion of women and their dependants in the bantustans are undernourished and underclothed, dependent for survival on the remittance from the male migrant. This is illustrated by research published in 1975 which showed that at a time when the minimum needed to sustain families in what was described as 'human poverty' was said to be R103.99 per month, families in the Nqutu area of Natal, part of the Kwazulu Bantustan, barely subsisted on R14.87 per month. A study carried out in 1981 in the Mbahlabatini area in the same region, concluded cautiously that the average household income in the community of eight thousand people was 'well below a fairly widely used poverty measure.' More tellingly still, the study showed that those in the area, of whom 92 per cent were women and children, were heavily dependent for survival, even at this inadequate level, on remittances from migrant workers. For a household of eight, the average in the area, the Household Subsistence Level would have been R184 per month in that area. The average household income, from all sources, was in fact only R114. Income from subsistence production was a mere R38. The bulk of household income was made up of remittances from migrant workers (R50) and pensions (R18), with a smaller amount from local employment (R5.50), home enterprise (R5) and agricultural sales (R4). Yet another study in a third area showed that in 1984 entire rural families were 'severely malnourished and on the verge of collapse' in parts of the Kwazulu Bantustan as a result of the retrenchment of migrant workers.12
The only way of trying to make women and their families remain in such conditions was to make it difficult for them to move to the urban areas (to seek work, join the men, find food for their children). Thus the pass laws were extended to women in the 1950s.13
Every African over 16 years old outside the Bantustan areas must carry a pass book; these are a form of identification that records where the holder may live, where he or she is employed, whether taxes have been paid, and other vital information for total control.
For women from the bantustans the pass book contains a section for the consent of the commissioner of the district defined as home, and for the consent of father, male guardian or husband to her going to work or live in another district.
Pass books have to be produced at all points of contact with officials and can be used to control every aspect of life. The pass laws bear even more heavily on African women than on African men. Not only do they need this male consent to leave home or to work in another place, but since 1964 a total ban was placed on the further entry of women into the urban areas outside the bantustans except on a visitor's permit.
Pass laws of one kind or another have applied to African men since the nineteenth century and even earlier in some parts of what is now South Africa.
African women remained outside the pass laws framework until 1952 and their struggle against the pass laws, beginning in 1913, is an epic story, related in Part IV. Before the 1950s, African women did not have to carry passes. Nevertheless, it was still more difficult for women than for men to move to the expanding towns, largely because of employment practices and restrictions on the provision of family housing. In most areas of work employers recruited mainly men, and in some areas exclusively men.
Whenever substantial numbers of African women have been drawn into wage labour, moves have been made to extend influx control to them. The first attempt, in 1913, was unsuccessful. But with changing patterns of industrialisation and with the progressive deterioration of subsistence agriculture under the impact of apartheid, the number of women in wage labour increased rapidly. This was particularly marked during the 1940s when manufacturing industry expanded. In 1952 the whole system of influx control was reviewed and streamlined. The changes included the extension to African women of the requirement to carry passes. As a result African women could only come to the towns and cities to seek work with the permission of rural labour bureaux. They could however still come as dependants of men who were resident in town. In 1964 this right was withdrawn. Women already in employment and those who already had rights of residence could stay, but others could come to the towns only as contract workers. Those who came on any other basis did so illegally. In 1968 all building of family accommodation in the urban areas was stopped.
Occasionally loopholes have been opened by taking issues to court: but they have been relatively minor or quickly closed. The legal victories, though small and precarious, have been important. At the same time they underline the fact that unless they have been born in an urban area outside a Bantustan, most African women are dependent on their relationship to men for residence rights.14
A court ruling in 1964 established that African women could not be legally prevented from entering urban areas outside the bantustans ('prescribed' areas), but only from remaining there more than 72 hours without permission. In 1980 another ruling established the rights of wives and children to live in 'prescribed' areas with their husbands or fathers, if the men themselves qualified under the pass laws to remain there. When a court ruled in 1983 that contract workers could gain rights of permanent residence after ten years working for the same employer, the way seemed open for many families divided by the migrant labour system to be united and for many others living together 'illegally' to do so openly. However within months the law was amended in a way that effectively nullified these rulings except in the case of a few people. Only those who lived in 'approved' accommodation could benefit from the rulings, and there was no right for people who met the other conditions to demand such accommodation.
The control which the authorities have over housing is one of the most powerful weapons in the armoury of influx control.
Controls Strengthened
The nature of South Africa's system for the control and direction of African labour was the subject of an official commission of inquiry, the Riekert Commission, appointed in the wake of the uprisings of 1976 at a time when the existing controls were conspicuously failing. The policies emanating from this commission, described in more detail in the next section, rested on two fundamental premises. On the one hand the permanence of a section of African people in urban areas outside the bantustans was to be recognised in law and administrative practice. They would have residence rights and preferential access to jobs and housing. On the other hand, any other Africans would be admitted to those areas only if, and for as long as, their labour was required and if there was housing for them. These measures were aimed at making the influx control system more efficient. They represented 'a change in mechanism, not in policy', the Prime Minister informed Parliament in 1980.15
The consequence of these policies, still being implemented in practice, is the drawing of a line between a minority of 'insiders', who draw some benefit from the change, and the majority, the 'outsiders', for whom the change means an intensification of the controls which keep them in the bantustans or on the white - owned farms unless their labour is needed elsewhere.
Even the 'insiders' remain non - citizens in the areas where they are recognised as 'permanently' living, obliged to live in the segregated townships, with no political rights beyond the local level except through the bantustans. In many respects their situation differs little from that of the third category which has come into existence as a direct result of government policy and is destined to become perhaps the largest group of all if the government succeeds in its intentions. These are the commuters, who spend the day, or the week, in the 'white' areas working and at night or at weekends stay in the Bantustan townships spread around the edges of the great industrial and commercial areas of the country.
The changes have borne heavily on women. The earlier restrictions had made it difficult, and illegal, for African women to live in an urban area outside bantustans, but many defied the obstacles. The new measures, shifting much of the work of implementing influx control from the police to employers and those who provide accommodation, have magnified the difficulties. The controls have become more effective.
Employers who previously employed 'illegals' are now deterred by the large fines they would have to pay if discovered. The fines were increased in 1979 to R500 per 'illegal' employee. Just before the increased fines were applied, the government announced a 'moratorium' to allow employers of 'illegals' to legalise the situation: instead of the employers being fined their employees were registered as contract workers, that is with the right to remain only until the expiry of a one - year contract which would not be automatically renewed. The many African women illegally in these areas were relegated to near - permanent unemployment.16
The introduction of the new policies of influx control since 1979 saw increased arrests under the pass laws, increased destruction by the authorities of unofficial 'unapproved' accommodation, increased removals under the pass laws to the bantustans.
This period was also one in which there was a dramatic increase in the number of African women in wage labour. This was in part a result of changing patterns of industrialisation, but also a response to falling living standards for black families, brought about by recession and inflation and, fundamentally, the deepening poverty in bantustans overcrowded by apartheid policies.17 In 1983, with conditions in rural areas made even worse by a prolonged drought, it was estimated that 85,000 people, a large proportion of them women, were moving each month to the towns and cities - part of what was described as 'an irreversible flow that will see another twenty million blacks cram urban areas over the next 20 years . . . The trend will continue despite Government efforts to bulldoze "squatter camps" and their shanty towns back into the distant veld.'18 (See Table IV).
When the police arrested me in 1982, I was given no choice of what to do with my children (aged two and four). Both were vomiting and had diarrhoea. I was allowed to take them to the prison hospital where I saw a nurse who gave them medicine but it was not right for their problem. I saw no doctor. There were about 30 to 40 of us in a cell. We slept on the mat on the cold cement floor as there were no beds. When I was busy I would tie my baby on my back and the older one would just stand next to me. Neither we nor the children ever went outside for exercise. There were no toys or books . . . and no supervision. I was given no change of clothing for myself or the children, apart from one napkin. We were given no special food for the babies. The children received the same food as us. In the morning we had mealie meal, skim milk, a little bread and black coffee with no sugar. At lunch time we ate mealie rice with a little meat. We had vegetables once a week and no fruit at all. In the evenings we had porridge, mealie meal, coffee and a slice of bread sometimes spread with fat.19
(A mother arrested under the pass laws who spent five weeks in prison in 1981 and four in 1982, both times with two of her children: during 1984 3,415 children were imprisoned with their mothers - Argus 20.12.84)
The Uprooting of Millions
More than three and a half million people have been forcibly moved in South Africa since 1960, most of them Africans. At least another 1.7 million people were still under threat of removal in 1984. Many people have been moved more than once and others live in fear of further enforced removal.20
The true dimensions of the uprooting of South Africans are difficult to estimate. The government does not encourage accurate assessments. The Laws on Co - operation and Development Act of 1982 provides for information related to removals to be kept secret, making it even more difficult to obtain details.
The mass removal of population takes various forms (as explained in the Appendix). In rural areas tenants have been evicted from white - owned farms and communities forced off land which had been theirs for generations. In towns and cities existing black residential areas have been destroyed and their residents moved into larger, more sharply segregated, townships further away from the main centres of employment, and often inside Bantustan boundaries. People living in unauthorised residential areas (the homes of so - called 'squatter' communities) established in towns and cities in defiance of influx control are under almost constant attack and threat of removal to bantustans.
We have lived here for 40 years. I have seven children and I am a widow. My sister's eight children also live with us because they have nowhere else to live. I work in Pinetown as a domestic servant and earn R50 a month. They have now thrown me out of my mother's house and expect us all to live in a four - roomed house in the township.
When they moved us they did not say how much they would pay us. There were 17 mango trees in bloom, in addition to guavas, sugar cane, avocado pears, oranges and bananas on the land from which we have been evicted. Over the years I sold fruit to help buy clothes and food for the family. Now it's all gone.
(A woman speaking in 1981 about being forced from her home - Daily News, 23.8.81)
The financial costs of the programme of forced removals have been astronomical.21 But the cost in terms of the destruction of communities, of alienation, the loss of stability, the undermining of rural black society and human suffering, degradation and humiliation cannot be counted.22 It is a modern tragedy on a vast scale, in which the pursuit of hard profits adorned with an ideology that enjoys the support of a small proportion of the population is creating a disaster encompassing the lives and futures of millions of people. Protests, petitions, resistance to removals, pleas, deputations - nothing produces even the faintest glimmering of human compassion.
'Relocation, for whatever reason, is a violent and brutal process', writes a contemporary historian, Joanne Yawitch. She describes how it leads to a deterioration in material conditions and impoverishment and how the trauma and insecurity of resettlement have severe effects on personal relations. The creation of division and hostility, even within some families, she says, is an inevitable effect of forced removals.
These are not simply side - effects of removal, but integral to it. In other words, removal of people is not simply a physical act; it is part of a process and a strategy that seeks to push increasing numbers of South Africa's people into ever more remote and inhospitable areas where, broken and fragmented by the experience of removal and all that it means, people are left to exist under conditions of increasing apathy and powerlessness.23
Sada, a typical relocation camp, was established in 1976 in the Ciskei. Thirty thousand people were crammed into this area, living in two - roomed houses, each room approximately two square metres in area. Adjacent to Sada was a mud village, nicknamed 'Village of Tears', populated by people unable to cram into Sada. Facilities for its estimated ten thousand people were virtually non - existent. There were 13 toilets - privately - owned; the rest of the population had to make do with the bush. There was not a single tap in the village, and people had to go to the neighbouring Sada for water.24
Effects on Women
Life in these areas bears no resemblance to that lived formerly on the land. The effects on women are particularly severe.
Winterveld is only 15 kilometres from the administrative capital of South Africa, Pretoria, but it is within the area designated as the Bophuthatswana Bantustan. Because it is near a city that provides a certain amount of work, from the 1960s large numbers of squatters moved there renting land on which to build shacks. Its current population is estimated at three - quarters of a million or more. The resulting effects on the lives of the women have been investigated and analysed by Joanne Yawitch, and these are some of her findings.
For the majority of women there is no work; they are dependent on the wages of husbands, mostly unskilled workers. They must accept whatever they can get, however little, without question. 'In Winterveld it is common to find women who starve themselves to feed their husbands and children because there is so little money. Women tell with extreme bitterness that they do not know how much their husbands earn.'
This is the first factor in their powerlessness. Then the men themselves work under conditions of exploitation which, because of their lack of political power and their exclusion from collective bargaining, are often beyond their control. 'It is the women who bear the brunt of the frustration and aggression that their husbands are powerless to express within the workplace. In Winterveld wife and child - beating is as common as rape. Sexual aggression is, in a situation such as this, a more or less immutable fact of life.' Yawitch goes on to explain that the isolation that defines the lives of 'housewives' in many Western countries is, in this situation, total.
Forced removal and resettlement lead not only to breakdown within the family. The community organisations and their essential work are also destroyed. Unity and co - operation can only grow where there is some security. Women are strongly drawn to community groups, often church - based, called manyanos, and organise associations called stockfels, a form of mutual saving and financial support. With the removals, the manyanos and stockfels disappear, their basis of neighbourly friendship and co - operation having been destroyed.
Forced removal and resettlement play a major role in suppressing organised opposition to apartheid policies through this destruction of stable communities and social structures, and the placing together of a haphazard assortment of people, often strangers, who in the harsh struggle for individual survival cannot form new relationships. Often this is compounded by the fact that many people have been moved more than once, often three or four times.
So we went to Taaibosch farm (in the Oranje - Vaal administration area) in 1946.
We lived on that farm in a shack that we built ourselves. Then the mother of my mother died in 1956. I was married there, and I had three of my four children on that farm. My elder daughter also married on the farm and had two daughters there.
But Mrs Koller died in August last year, and her son took over the farm. He told my mother she had to be out in November last year because she was too old to do the work, and when she told him that she had nowhere to go he said he could not build proper houses for his employees and she must go.
I do not know what to do. The police have come and said they will knock down
our house if we do not go before the end of this month.
( A woman speaking in 1981 about life as a farm worker - Star 31.1.81
More than community relations is destroyed when the communities are uprooted, scattered, and relocated in barren and hostile places. Relocation obliterates tradition, continuity, culture, history. Often people have lived in the places from which they are removed for generations; their multiple interlocking relationships are destroyed. Relocation obliterates homes, possessions, smallholdings, gardens (they all gave valuable access to growing food). It obliterates schools, churches, clinics. It obliterates communities.
Resistance and Defiance
In spite of its power, and even though community after community has been uprooted, the regime frequently encounters tenacious and courageous resistance on the part of those it wishes to remove by force.
The name 'Crossroads' has come to symbolise the resistance of women to forced removals. It is a defiant assertion of determination to establish the right to live with their husbands and to have a family life.
The government decided in 1954 to remove African workers from the Western Cape and to declare the area a 'Coloured Labour Preference Area'. Over the years, thousands of Africans were shifted out of the Western Cape to the bantustans, where necessity drove them back again to the Western Cape, now not in family groups, but as migrant or contract workers. At the same time, building of family housing for Africans was stopped (in 1955) with a resulting acute shortage of accommodation.
Male workers were permitted to enter Cape Town, but forced to live in single - sex compounds or hostels. The women, with their children, returned to the Cape. Outside the officially designated areas, they erected shelters, built homes and established communities. Lacking official permission to do so, they were regarded as 'squatters'. Crossroads was one of several squatters' camps that grew on wasteland and in the bush surrounding the city.
Among the first squatters to be removed were those of Modderdam, with a population of ten thousand, in the Western Cape. An official notice in July 1977 told them: 'You are hearby advised of my intention to demolish buildings or structures and to remove material from the land . . . mechanical equipment will be used to demolish buildings and structures and closed or locked buildings will be summarily demolished . . .' The demolition of three thousand dwellings was completed in five days. Women and children remained guarding their possessions in the open while the men went to work. The government claimed that many evicted squatters had accepted rail tickets to their 'homeland', the Transkei, but squatters denied this, saying they had no homes to go to. Most were absorbed into other squatters' camps.
Unibel, not far from Modderdam, was a settled community of twenty thousand people with a school. Demolitions, in July 1978, took five days and a report made by the medical faculty at Cape Town University stated:
Children aged two to three weeks spent three or four consecutive nights in the open, and there was rain on two occasions. There were no facilities for boiling water or milk, and following the demolition of the latrines . . . it was not possible further to separate water and faeces . . . The condition of the camp deteriorated so that the Unibel area was an area of stench, enormous numbers of flies and a fair number of stray and hungry animals.
The report concluded that the demolition was executed in total disregard for the health and well - being of every individual concerned, in the most inhumane manner.25
Soon after the destruction and removal of the communities at Modderdam and Unibel, the government moved against the people at Crossroads, also in the Western Cape, encountering more organised and sustained resistance, described below.
Although camps like Unibel and Modderdam were demolished by the authorities, in Crossroads, with community resistance, and backed by public support and legal assistance from white sympathisers, the attacks were held off. The Women's Committee at Crossroads was particularly strong and active. The women kept watch to prevent the surreptitious demolition of homes. They sat down before bulldozers and refused to move. They dramatised their struggle in theatre, and took it to other parts of the country. It was also projected on television in Europe and the United States.
The women graphically described the grinding poverty and hardship behind their defiance of the authorities in leaving the bantustans and living in squatter camps.
Now Crossroads is to be eliminated, and the people are being moved to Khayelitsha, a vast, windswept area of sand - dunes and bush. George Morrison, Deputy Minister of Co - operation and Development, recognised what the resistance of the women of Crossroads has meant when he stated that Crossroads was 'a symbol of provocation and blackmail of the government and we want to destroy that symbol at all costs'.26
The episodes and stories cannot be encompassed within this book. But what happened to another group of squatters at Nyanga Township tells a little of the incredible cruelty and hardship that the women are forced to endure.
This was in August of 1981. Cape Town police swooped on 1,500 squatters and loaded them on to buses and trains for a 600 - mile journey to what they called their 'homeland' - the Transkei. A thousand women and children went by bus and then train to Umtata, the principal town of the Transkei, and were disgorged in teeming rain on to the main street, from whence they sought shelter in churches. Hundreds more were put on other buses to travel even further away. It all happened so quickly that mothers were separated from children - one mother left behind a baby who was in hospital in Cape Town, and whom she had been breastfeeding.
Desperate to reunite their families and retrieve their possessions, the women began to try to filter back to Cape Town. A white church worker, Kathy Luckett, accompanied 54 of these women to the end of their journey, when the ones who got through - 15 of them - exhausted, straggled into Cape Town. At Queenstown, Kathy Luckett saw 'long queues of blanketed figures huddled together in the hail at a road block', and at Cradock, in the pouring rain, imploring hands stretched out, confused faces 'and endless last - minute messages'.
The razing of the Nyanga squatters' camp by armed policemen with dogs on a bitterly cold winter dawn was described by a journalist as a desperate act to turn the tide of the ever - increasing African urban population.27 Against all odds, despite the demolition of their shanties, the destruction of their possessions, in defiance of the armed police, the vicious dogs, the night - time raids, the women, by their unrelenting persistence, fought back. The unyielding determination of the women to maintain their families at all costs is shown by the story of the bedpeople, whose beds became their homes as the authorities confiscated and destroyed all plastic and other covers erected around them. The bedpeople tore down their shacks every dawn, burying branches and plastic sheets in the sand, and leaving the beds unprotected during a bitter Cape winter. Their presence was in itself a political statement and a challenge to apartheid. Thus such camps are not simply an expression of their compelling needs. They are also a challenge to the system of migratory labour.
In her study on women and squatting, Joanne Yawitch writes that African women 'occupy a pivotal position within apartheid's repressive system of labour control. As long as they can be kept out of the urban areas, or as long as they are there only as migrant domestic workers, the foundations of the system still stand secure.'
She goes on to say that it is in this sense that one must understand the nature of the challenge posed by the women who refuse to rot in the bantustans, and form squatters' camps outside the towns where the male migrant workers are employed and where women have some hope of seeking work. 'In choosing to live together as families, they are challenging the basis of the entire cheap labour power in South Africa.'
She concludes that the conflicts that arise between women and men are rooted in the migrant labour system, and that an overall improvement for both women and men rests primarily on the abolition of migrant labour with its pass laws and other means of control.28
The status of women can only undergo a fundamental change in South Africa when the migrant labour system is abolished and when women are able to take part on equal terms in the economic life of their country.
1.4 In The Bantustans
There are over five million African women living in the bantustans. They suffer disabilities in virtually every facet of their existence, an existence to which they are bound by a complex interlacing of customary and common law, together with the fact that, unlike men, they are less able to escape by going to the cities. For two decades influx control and pass laws have prevented most African women from taking up lawful residence in the cities and the urban areas.
African women in the cities are subject to many of the same disabilities that affect the women in the bantustans; but in the latter there are some differences and added disabilities arising from the distortion by white governments of customs and laws of a former society. The insistence by the rulers of apartheid South Africa that what they call the indigenous culture must be preserved in the bantustans leads to contradictions that cannot be resolved today - any more than the clock can be turned back to restore a former type of society - and it is the women who suffer most from the anomalous situation.
Quite apart from the problems of trying to maintain traditional structures and laws in an advanced industrialised state, the government has made a parody of traditional institutions, keeping the form but removing the content.
The retention of the system of chiefs, for instance, is necessary to apartheid theory and administration. In the past, chiefs governed always with a council of elders, a method that was traditionally patriarchal and excluded women and younger men. For the rest, though, it was not wholly undemocratic. Today the chiefs do not have legitimate authority exercised in taking decisions after long discussion with the elders; they are simply appointed civil servants, deposed if they do not carry out government orders and policies, and the council of elders no longer exists. In its place, the chief has headmen, whose role is to maintain 'law and order', as laid down by official policy.
Many other features of traditional African cultures, such as the absence of a money economy, or limitless cattle grazing, are in conflict with the requirements not only of an industrialised society, but also of apartheid. So the apartheid - created 'homelands' have a specious version of African custom and tradition imposed on them, and to these the people must conform.
This version, states sociologist H J Simons, reflects the authoritarian and patriarchal attitudes of the whites who devised it.29 In particular, it incorporates many restrictions on women which are totally out of keeping with their modern attitudes, education, situation and needs - restrictions which, if they did exist in an earlier era, existed in conjunction with certain rights or safeguards that white legislators, administrators and judges now ignore.
Today, even in the bantustans, many women live outside the bounds of traditional society. Migrant labour and influx control regulations force them to become the heads of households; in a 1974 survey, 67 per cent of rural households were headed by women;30 80 per cent of households surveyed in the Bantustan area of Bothashoek were headed by women.31 Yet customary law as it has been institutionalised by whites places them perpetually under male tutelage, creating tremendous hardships. The contradictions that arise from this grafting of an old skin over a new framework place an intolerable burden on the whole African people, but most severely on African women.
Perpetual Minors
Until recently most African women had almost no legal capacities. Such changes as have so far taken place (described in more detail in a later section) have affected only a few. It was still the case in 1983 that the great majority ('99 per cent of married African women' according to one report)32 were legal minors.
Women who are minors cannot own property in their own right, enter into contracts without the aid of their male guardian, or act as guardians of their own children. They are virtually perpetual minors, regardless of their age or marital status, always subject to the authority of men
This is how customary law has been interpreted and applied by white courts. But it does not truly reflect the position of women in traditional society. According to H J Simons:
Women had more rights as regards both their person and property than have been conceded to them by alien courts . . . Common law terms such as ownership, contract and status itself are saturated with an individualism alien to traditional African culture. Unless elaborately qualified, they distort the social relations underlying African legal rules. It would be closer to the mark to say that there was no law of contract, or that ownership was unknown in tribal society, than to draw a distinction in these matters between the capacity of women and men.33
Initiative and the right to act rested with the family rather than the individual. There were clearly defined positions for each member, with claims and obligations, but the household constituted an integral whole. Neither man nor woman could normally exist outside a domestic group, and the activities of the sexes were complementary and not in conflict.
A woman shared her father's or husband's rank. She undertook much of the laborious work in the home and fields, not for an employer but for a family to which she and her children belonged. What she produced or acquired did not become the 'property' of her husband. It formed part of a joint family estate which he managed, not in the capacity of 'owner', but as head and senior partner.34
Women, though they occupied a subordinate position, occasionally attained a high degree of independence in some roles, such as those of diviner and herbalist, and occasionally in some tribes as chieftainess.
Each sex had its own sphere of activity, and women did not contend with men for power, rank or office because their roles were not competitive.
The concept of the independent woman or man cannot take shape in this kind of society. People see themselves as members of kinship groups, not as individuals with separate rights: Something more than legal reforms is required to emancipate women from the patriarchal authority. The family must cease to be the main productive unit, and lose its self - sufficiency, women must receive modern education and participate, along with the men, in productive activity outside the home, before they can assert claims to equality of status.35
The colonial process weakened an authority that was in many ways conservative, breaking an integrated system and so freeing the individual from its constraints - and from its supports. The web of human relations was both stifling and sustaining. That women could survive this rupture and establish a new set of relations is evident in the degree of responsibility and independence that women have developed in the bantustans where men are absent; as they have done in the urban areas. But, according to a recent history, the colonial intrusion robbed women in more material ways. Women were further excluded by the colonial codification of tribal law; 'the colonists rigidified and exaggerated the subservience of African women under tribalism'.36
The concept of women as economic attachments to men is evident in the provisions made for women in the very important sphere of land, writes Cynthia Kros.37 African women were deprived of their access to the means of production. Available land was given to men rather than to women.
So the existing methods of farming were radically changed, the division of labour distorted, while the old forms were retained and the content crumbled. With the bantustans already overcrowded and short of arable land, drained of much of their labour power by migrant labour, production declined rapidly and poverty became endemic.
Loneliness
The more fortunate woman in the rural areas of the bantustans has a husband working in the city. She attempts to feed the children, and probably other dependants, on the crops she cultivates from the small, barren family plot, if any, and the meagre amounts, if any, that are remitted by her husband. And this housewife, virtually a widow from the time she marries, lives out her lonely life, unable to leave, in a community composed largely of women, children, the aged and infirm who have been evicted from the cities under the pass laws once they become 'unproductive' labour units.
An African woman writes of the women of the bantustans:
It is the tragic story of thousands of young women who are widows long before they reach the age of thirty; young married women who have never been mothers; young women whose life has been one long song of sorrow - burying one baby after another and lastly burying the husband - that lover she has never known as husband and father. To them - both men and women - adulthood means the end of life; it means loneliness, sorrow, tears and death; it means a life without future because there is no present.38
In the barren and particularly unproductive relocation areas, women may spend most of the day collecting firewood and carrying water from the nearest river or borehole, just to sustain day - to - day existence.
Land Hunger
The Economic Commission for Africa estimates that women provide 60 per cent to 80 per cent of all agricultural labour in Africa.39 In South Africa, as in many other African countries, women make up the bulk of the agricultural workforce where agriculture is the mainstay of the economy. Women also suffer from the land hunger endemic in the bantustans. The shortage of land to support the population has been aggravated by the resettlement in the bantustans of Africans who have been forcibly evicted from the cities, from the 'black spots' and white farm areas.
It should always be remembered that the official term 'resettlement' does not necessarily mean that the Africans brought to the bantustans came from there in the first place, or have ever been there. Most of the people in resettlement camps were born and lived all their lives in urban areas or other parts of the countryside. Dumping them into the Bantustan increases the problem of insufficient land. But the local authorities are able to ignore a large proportion of such problems by their refusal to allocate land to women.
By law, allotments of land may be made to any married person or kraalhead (village head) who is officially a citizen of the particular Bantustan or 'homeland'. A widow or unmarried woman with family obligations can be defined as a 'kraalhead', but the allocation of land is an administrative act that cannot be challenged in a court of law. Only a widow with children has any chance of being allocated land, and usually she will receive only half of the allocation made to a man.
A widow in occupation of her late husband's land forfeits her right to use the land if she remarries, or leaves her late husband's homestead, or refuses to live at another place agreed by his family.
A widow is expected to find money to pay for quitrent and local tax, and to buy food and clothing for herself and her children, out of the produce from the land, which may be no bigger than one or two acres. If she assumes the role of breadwinner and leaves her children in the Bantustan to go to work for a wage, she runs the risk of losing her right to cultivate her holding.
Women in peasant communities cannot exist easily without land or without a father, husband or son to support them. The preference given to male kinsmen often imposes severe hardships on women who are passed over in favour of a brother or nephew of a deceased holder.
An obvious solution would be to allow unmarried daughters to use the plot in the absence of a male descendant, but the administration objects that this reform would make girls independent of male control and place a premium on 'spinster motherhood'. It is official policy to buttress the patriarchal authority. But the main source of the objection is the chronic and acute scarcity of land.40
Land scarcity, states Simons, is the major determinant of policy in the allocation of land. Women do most of the work in the fields; yet the administration insists that they are less productive.
But the main argument (in giving land preferentially to men) is the shortage of land and the need to provide land for men with families. The people reply that the country is full of widows, and ask how they are to support their children without land. The widows pay taxes like the men, and should have the same rights as men to change their place of residence. The people complain that the administration oppresses widows. There is often bitter competition between individual men and women for land, but the conflict stems from land hunger and not from tribal custom. The people want to restore to women the rights they had to land in the old society. But all attempts to bring about the change have failed to persuade an inflexible bureaucracy which is not responsible to the people.41
Lack of Jobs
Not only are there few jobs for women living in the bantustans, but there are barriers to obtaining work. Restrictions are imposed on their mobility, both by law and by the household responsibilities that, unlike the men, they cannot discard. Widows are afraid to leave their homes to seek work, as they will lose what rights they may have to cultivate family land. There are few secondary industries in the bantustans. Many of the women, having been denied access to education, are not only illiterate but frequently unable to speak either English or Afrikaans, an obstacle to all but the most unskilled physical labour.
In recent years 'border industry' jobs have been created on the fringes of some of the bantustans. These jobs, usually in small - scale craft or textile production, are done by women at the lowest end of the wagescale (see Part II).
Rural poverty, so conveniently hidden from visitors to towns and game parks, is constantly increased through the lack of investment and by the removal of male labour.
The increased restrictions since 1952 on the movement of women, administered by means of a system of labour bureaux and the influx control regulations, make it extremely difficult for them to leave the country areas. (See Appendix for information about the labour bureau system.) But despite the prohibitions on movement, starvation and their desperate conditions drive women to seek work, often illegally.
The bantustans are both reserves and reservoirs. They are reservoirs from which the apartheid regime can draw its supplies of labour at will, and they are reserves that must accept the unemployed, the old and disabled, all those women who have no function within the operation of apartheid; all those, in fact, who are not needed by the white - run economy.
Fruits of 'Independence'
With the decision of the apartheid regime to create official 'homelands', new conditions are being created that are even more to the disadvantage of the women. There are now four territories inside South Africa that the government has declared 'independent states'. They are: the Transkei, Venda, Bophuthatswana and Ciskei. Ciskei is the newest 'state', but it has lost no time in following the examples of the other three in bringing into being a brutal and oppressive administration, loyal to the apartheid regime, encompassing the same repressive legislation and violations of human rights as those imposed on the rest of South Africa.
No official declaration can transform these four client areas into 'independent nations'. Unrecognised by any country in the world, they are, and will remain, underdeveloped reserves set aside for African occupation within the total framework of apartheid strategy. However, the puppet bodies set up to administer the territories develop in their own way, and bring their own changes to the lives of people living there.
Within these bantustans are mirrored the undemocratic and male - dominated political structures of the white rulers, coupled with a superficial modernisation process based solely on the concepts of a profit economy. Practices considered to be 'traditional' are revived out of their historical and social context. Under the name of preserving the culture and traditions of the past, social progress is arrested and the traditional becomes the expression of the most conservative and repressive elements, who in turn are associated with the groups pressing for profitable and superficial 'modernisation'.
The first act of the Gazankulu Bantustan - not yet declared 'independent' - was the legalisation of polygamy. The Transkei has introduced polygamy, and corporal punishment is extended to girls as well as boys.
As a Bantustan politician in the Transkei emphasised in a speech in 1976, according to traditional law and custom women are perpetual minors, may not own property, nor decide affairs relating to their home kraal.42
Bophuthatswana is a 'nation' only in the minds of apartheid planners. It consists of seven separate blocks of land, scattered in three different provinces. Its dusty 'capital', Mmabatho, consists of a sprawling black ghetto, a luxury hotel with a casino, other luxury hotels for senior officials, and a parliamentary building and sports stadium. When it acquired its new status as a 'nation' in 1977, Mmabatho was the only 'capital city' in the world without even a row of shops.43
However, Bophuthatswana has found a bizarre way of making money. It has become the provider of forbidden fruit for white South Africans.
A hundred miles across the veld from Johannesburg, over a non - existent 'border', and you are in Sun City, South Africa's £50 million resort complex: a 588 - room hotel; a Las Vegas - style structure of considerable vulgarity where the fruit machines and roulette wheels are backed by lavish sports and entertainment facilities, a game park; and in particular a 'Superbowl' auditorium44 where international golfing stars, actors and entertainers perform. Here the whites escape the puritanical restrictions of the government they themselves keep in power, and enjoy all that is forbidden in their own 'white' South Africa: nudity, sex between black and white, pornographic films, uncensored magazines, and above all, gambling. In a country that does not permit cinemas to open on Sundays, where laws prohibit sex between people from different 'population groups', inside or outside marriage, where you can be fined £100 for possessing a ten - year - old copy of Playboy magazine, there is this enclave where legally anything goes.
Visitors to Sun City seldom drive off the main highway. They never see how the citizens of Bophuthatswana live. Winterveld, the shanty - town city, the lives of whose women residents are described in an earlier section on removals, lies within Bophuthatswana. Throughout the entire western area surrounding the 'capital' of Mmabatho lies a chain of relocation camps, some with only 400 people, others vast sprawls of 15,000 people. 'It seems a long cry from the million - dollar golfers in Sun City. But it's the same country, the same system, the same homeland.45
Back to Contents
1.1 Migrant Labour
1.2 Influx Control
1.3 Forced Removals