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Home , Bantustan, History of South Africa, Soweto uprising

Forced relocation in The impact of ‘separate development’

Explore conditions in the ‘’, Exam links Laura Evans the regime that forcibly created them, and their legacy today AQA 1J The , c.1857–1967 (The winds of change, 1947–1967) Edexcel paper 2 option 2F.2 South Africa, 1948–94: from apartheid state to ‘’ OCR Y224 Apartheid and reconciliation: South African politics 1948–1999

The Qwa Qwa , 1980

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ModHis Rev 20i2 print.indd 18 28/09/2017 11:08 am he relocation of millions of black South According to the government’s plans for ethnic apartheid ‘Separateness’ Africans to rural dumping grounds in the ‘self-government’, black South Africans were to be or ‘apart-hood’ in Tso-called ‘homelands’ was one of the defining denied South African citizenship and compelled to . In 1948, the and most brutal aspects of the racist apartheid regime. live in tiny, impoverished and densely populated rural idea of ‘apartheid’ was While the urban impacts are well understood, the homelands, where they would exercise tenuous ethnic little more than a slogan devastating effects of apartheid policy in the country’s ‘self-determination’. With very few local employment for segregation. Over rural areas have often been overlooked. opportunities and little land for subsistence, the the next two decades, residents of these homelands continued to work the NP instituted an The discarded people on the white-owned mines, farmlands and in the elaborate set of policies In April 1963, Nomathemba Memese and her family industries of South Africa, which profited by paying to entrench racial were forced by armed police to pack their belongings. low wages. segregation, including They were rounded up, along with many other the promotion of ethnic impoverished black families living in the small Primary source ‘homelands’. settlement of Cookhouse, and sent on a long and During the late 1960s, a catholic priest and activist, homelands/ uncomfortable journey to the desolate rural dumping Cosmas Desmond, travelled the length and breadth To lend legitimacy to ground of Ilinge in South Africa’s . They of the country documenting the devastating impacts apartheid by mimicking were told by the authorities of the white supremacist of these forced removals and the terrible living decolonisation, the apartheid regime that they were being sent to the conditions that prevailed in ‘resettlement’ areas in the government set homeland of the amaXhosa people. They did not know homelands. In 1969, he published his observations about creating ‘self- such a thing existed. Memese and her family had lived in a book entitled The Discarded People. Desmond’s governing homelands’ in Cookhouse and the surrounds for many years. account was widely read in Britain and exposed (or bantustans) for the the shocking realities of South Africa’s racist and African population (1959 Housing and disease oppressive policies of ‘separate development’. Promotion of Bantu Self- When they arrived in Ilinge — delivered from the Government Act). train by government-owned trucks — they found only a few wooden one-roomed prefabricated houses in The National Party (NP) came to power in 1948 AmaXhosa ‘The Xhosa the middle of a vast dry valley. This was to be their following a narrow electoral victory. Promoting people’ in isiXhosa, the home. Forced to survive on meagre rations of corn the slogan of apartheid, meaning ‘separateness’ in African language spoken meal and to drink contaminated water from a nearby Afrikaans, the NP pressed for more stringent racial in South Africa’s Eastern stream, many of those dumped at Ilinge in this way segregation, for greater control over the African Cape. Two ‘homelands’ died from malnutrition and related diseases (such as population, and for the protection of the interests were created for the pellagra, marasmus and kwashiorkor), tuberculosis of the white Afrikaner minority. amaXhosa, the and waterborne diseases, such as cholera. The policies of pursued by the and the . National Party were not new. South Africa’s history of /influx control Laws and jobs colonialism, racial segregation and white supremacy The movement of people Ilinge was just one of many such ‘resettlement began during the mid-seventeenth century with classified ‘African’ was townships’ established in South Africa during the the expansion of Dutch colonial settlement. The controlled by ‘pass 1960s by the racist, oppressive apartheid government. dispossession of indigenous lands was accelerated by laws’ (also known as The townships were designated for the occupation of nineteenth-century British imperialism — following ‘influx control’), which black South Africans who had been expelled under the discovery of diamonds and gold in the late- regulated permission the pass laws from towns and cities and evicted nineteenth century the racialist regime became for Africans to be in a from rural areas reserved for white occupation only. further entrenched. ‘white area’. Africans were compelled to carry pass books and could be arrested and forced to leave an if their papers were not in order.

Afrikaner/Afrikaans Dutch settlers who spoke a creole language, Afrikaans. Afrikaner nationalists (the National Party) believed these settlers’ claims to the The apartheid regime made racial land were legitimate, segregation a part of daily life being ‘white Africans’.

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ModHis Rev 20i2 print.indd 19 28/09/2017 11:08 am Separate development The impact of relocation Throughout the 1950s, anti-colonial and African Between 1960 and 1980, more than 3.5 million nationalist movements blossomed in South Africa, people were forcibly relocated. Non-white urban mobilising many oppressed people. Independent residents were forced to move to segregated ‘African’, nations emerged across the African continent in the ‘coloured’ and ‘Indian’ townships, according to the wake of the ‘winds of change’ of decolonisation that racial classifications imposed by the regime. As blew through the colonial world at the end of the many as 2 million people were moved to new 1950s. However, in South Africa, the white settler settlements established in the bantustans, doubling regime remained focused on repressing political the population of these already impoverished and mobilisation and entrenching white supremacy. deprived rural areas. The impacts of rural relocation In the face of African nationalists’ demands were dramatic: sprawling rudimentary townships for change, the Afrikaner nationalist government stretched for miles across what was once grazing sought to divide and rule the African population by land; piped water and sanitation were scarce; there introducing ethnic divisions. Under Prime Minister was virtually no in public healthcare, and H. F. Verwoerd, the infamous ‘architect’ of apartheid, widespread unemployment meant that many people the government set about an elaborate process of became destitute. implementing ‘self-government’ for Africans in ten ethnic homelands, or bantustans, as these areas Male workers also came to be known. In a grand exercise of social Those who arrived in the bantustans during the 1960s, engineering, the government fabricated symbols of 1970s and 1980s came from a variety of places. Some ethnic , installing African authorities were forcibly removed from towns and cities under who would implement apartheid policy, and forcibly the pass laws, or following the destruction of their removing millions of black South Africans to rural homes by the government. For dumping grounds in these tiny entities. many of these people, forced removals divided families, as men returned to work in urban areas as migrants.

Millions of black South Africans were forcibly transported to rural dumping grounds before the end of apartheid in 1994

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ModHis Rev 20i2 print.indd 20 28/09/2017 11:08 am Forced to remain in the bantustans, many women lost the incomes they had earned in urban areas and Box 1 Key figures became reliant on the wages earned by male migrants. H. F. Verwoerd (1901–66) ‘Unproductive’ people Prime Minister of South Africa (1958–66). A staunch For poor people living on white-owned farms, Afrikaner nationalist, Verwoerd’s premiership was eviction was an ever-present threat. Following characterised by the intensification of racial policies, eviction, faced with no alternative and in spite of most notably the homelands system. the terrible living conditions, many moved to the Stephen Bantu (1946–77) resettlement townships to find a more was a prominent African intellectual, secure place to live. A significant portion of those leader of the Black Consciousness movement and relocated were women, children and the elderly, who enduring figure of black liberation in South Africa. He were considered by racist employers and the state was arrested during the 1976–77 uprising and died to be ‘redundant’, ‘unproductive’ dependents. Many from injuries sustained in police custody in 1977. His members of the banned African National Congress death stimulated worldwide protests. African National (ANC) and Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) who had Congress The ANC been incarcerated as political prisoners were also access to the limited housing provided through was a key African banished to the bantustans. resettlement schemes, by the late-1970s the notion nationalist and anti- While the state dabbled in development in new of homelands as a site for had been apartheid organisation. bantustan townships by opening a handful of widely rejected. While the white regime presented A prominent leader textile factories, which exploited the high levels of the bantustans as the answer to black demands of the ANC before his unemployment by paying low wages, residents of for political representation, these regimes were far imprisonment, Nelson these areas faced the grinding poverty of living in from democratic. Violent political repression was Mandela led the ANC a community of widespread unemployment and routinely meted out by homeland regimes, which into government in 1994 reliance on migrant labour. were famously corrupt, as ‘puppet’ elites siphoned following his release off the limited funding that came from the central (1990). Resistance to homelands state. The Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko Pan Africanist Congress By the early 1980s, organised resistance to apartheid famously described the bantustans as ‘the greatest The PAC broke away was growing across the country, in urban areas single fraud ever invented by white politicians’. from the ANC in as well as in the rural bantustans. Following the 1959. Led by Robert intense repression of the 1960s, urban struggles The legacies of apartheid Sobukwe, it staged one and labour movements re-emerged during the mid- By the mid-1980s, South Africa faced a stalemate: the of the most important 1970s, especially after the uprising of 1976–7. regime could not contain widespread dissent, nor could campaigns against the The early 1980s saw the rejection of local apartheid the popular movement overthrow the government. pass laws in 1960. authorities and the growth of civic organisations The state was heavily indebted and, following the fall opposed to the oppressive regime. of the Berlin Wall, multinational companies began Black Consciousness Although some people benefited from employment to realise that they could continue with business as A movement with in the various bantustan bureaucracies, or by gaining usual while conceding political change. Tentative Christian origins based on instilling pride in the black population and refuting white- supremacist ideas of black inferiority.

Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990, and became South Africa’s first post- apartheid president

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ModHis Rev 20i2 print.indd 21 28/09/2017 11:08 am Questions Further reading

• What was ‘apartheid’? Clark, N. and Worger, W. (2013) South Africa: The Rise • How did apartheid impact on the lives of black and Fall of Apartheid, Longman, chapters 3 and 4. South Africans? Forced removals overview and further resources at the • How and why did apartheid end? Overcoming Apartheid website: www.tinyurl.com/ ktljb9z. • What are the legacies of this racist regime in South Africa? Documentary: Last Grave at Dimbaza (Chris Curling and Nana Mahomo, 1974): www.tinyurl.com/ybn24lcm.

secret negotiations took place through the late-1980s, leading to formal political negotiations between the undermines their democratic rights. Nevertheless, ANC, NP and other key organisations during the early one significant success of post-apartheid governments 1990s. Although legislated change was afoot, these has been the introduction of social grants (pensions, years were nevertheless characterised by widespread child support grants, disability allowances) which political violence. are a mainstay for impoverished families living in The homelands were re-incorporated into South the rural bantustans. Africa with the end of apartheid and the birth of the democratic government in 1994, yet the legacy Conclusion of homeland policy in post-apartheid South Africa The history of relocation to the bantustans was is profound. South Africa celebrated 20 years of perhaps the most substantial and enduring aspect democracy in 2014, but the gains of freedom are not of apartheid. The white supremacist National Party easy to decipher for the residents of impoverished government pursued the policy of independent areas of the former bantustans. ethnic homelands as a response to decolonisation While all South Africans now enjoy the vote elsewhere. While these quasi-independent states were and the ANC government has pursued land reform never accepted as legitimate entities by most other policies to address the history of racialised land countries and were widely rejected as a political farce dispossession and forced removals, these policies by black South Africans, the impacts of this policy have not tended to benefit the poor, black, rural have nevertheless been profoundly damaging and population. The former bantustan areas continue to continue to outlive formal apartheid. be the most deprived areas of the country, with high rates of unemployment, child malnutrition, poor Laura Evans is a senior lecturer in history at educational provision and inadequate healthcare. Sheffield Hallam University. She teaches South Some rural communities have protested the enduring African and African history. Her research focuses power of chiefs in the former homelands, arguing on the social and political Stephen Badsey during the apartheid era. that the influence of such traditional authorities

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In this article, Laura Evans highlights an aspect of apartheid in South Africa that is often overlooked: that of relocation. You should notice the approach that the writer uses to draw in the reader. A personal, micro-account of an experience of relocation is used to emphasise how the lives of ‘ordinary’ people were impacted. This is a good example of a ‘bottom up’ view of history rather than ‘top down’. The apartheid topic is frequently studied with an emphasis on the role of key individuals, especially Mandela and Biko. What this article does is indicate the importance of attempting to measure how the many and not just the few were affected by such a pernicious social, economic and political ideology.

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