The Mythical "Independence" of Transkei: A sinister plan of the apartheid regime

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Alternative title Notes and Documents - United Nations Centre Against ApartheidNo. 30/76 Author/Creator United Nations Centre against Apartheid; Romulo, Carlos P. Publisher United Nations, New York Date 1976-11-00 Resource type Reports Language English Subject Coverage (spatial) South Africa, Namibia Coverage (temporal) 1966 - 1976 Source Northwestern University Libraries Description Independence Declaration Condemned. "Inventors" Ingenuity. Not Even Asked. What Rights? Hypocrisy. Coat of Arms. Format extent 7 page(s) (length/size)

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http://www.aluka.org No. 30/76

No. 30/76 CENTRE AGAINST APARTHEID DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL AND SECURITY COUNCIL AFFAIRS NOTES AND DOCUMENTS* Nqvember 1976 THE MYTHICAL "INDEPENDENCE" OF TRANSKEI A sinister plan of the apartheid r6gime by H. E. Dr. Carlos P. Romulo, Secretary for Foreign Affairs of the Philippines 76-22134 * All material in these notes and documents may be freely reprinted. Acknowledgement, together with a copy of the publication containing the reprint, would be appreciated.

Ten years ago today, the General Assembly took a historic decision revoking the mandate of South Africa over Namibia and accepting responsibility for the Namibian people. The resolution adopted yesterday~by this Assembly on the so-called independent Transkei and other bantustans was equally historic, for yesterday was a day that will be long unremembered, the day of a non-event, a non-happening. At the stroke of midnight on Monday, a 101-gun salute announced the mythical independence of an invented State, the Transkei. I doubt if anyone really knows what the Transkei is supposed to be: a tribal reservation for the Xhosas, a puppet republic, a colony in disguise, or a gigantic labour barracks. But we can be sure of one thing: as an independent State, it does not exist. Its nearest neighbours ignore it. The Government of Swaziland has been quoted as declaring it will 7'continue to recognize the Transkei as a region of South Africa and nothing more". The Government of Lesotho, for its part, is said to have decided that the Transkei does not appear to "meet the requirements"-of an independent State. The Council of Ministers of the Organization of African Unity, meeting in Port Louis, Mauritius, less than four months ago, committed its member States "not to accord recognition to any bantustan, in particular the Transkei". Independence Declaration Condemned This General Assembly, in its resolution 3411 D (XXX), which was adopted at its thirtieth session with 99 votes in favour, none against, and 8 abstentions, called "upon all Governments and organizations not to deal with any institutions or authorities of the bantustans or to accord any form of recognition to them". And the Special Committee agianst Apartheid, in its current annual report "recommends that the General Assembly /at its present session 7 condemn the declaration of 'independence' of the Transkei as utterly invalid; call on all Governments to refrain from extending any form of recognition to the Transkei and any contact with the authorities of that bantustan; call on all corporations, organizations, institutions and individuals to refrain from any dealings with the puppet authorities in the Transkei; and declare that the inhabitants of the Transkei and all others designated as 'citizens' of that bantustan remain citizens of South Africa, with full rights to decide the destiny of that country as a whole." * General Assembly resolution 31/6A of 26 October 1976

I am glad that the foregoing recommendations of the Special Committee in their essentials have been approved- it is thus abundantly clear that the Transkei does not exist as an independent State and is not being internationally recognized as such. Nevertheless, particularly because of the political weight of those eight abstentions to resolution 3411 D of the thirtieth session, the question must be faced: why should not the Transkei be recognized as a viable and legitimate independent State? Why? If it is poor and under -developed, so are many of our own countries. If it must live on subsidies, many of our own countries require loans and foreign aid. And after all the Transkei is larger than six independent African countries and more populous than 13. Inventors' : Ingenuity Indeed one must admire the ingenuity of the inventors, what we might call the manufacturers, of the Transkei. They have, so to speak, stolen the clothes of the nationalists, or at least their language. Do the black citizens of South Africa claim they are the victims of oppression and subjugation? Then, according to these inventors, give them their own country. Do they protest against having to carry passes? Then give them passports instead. Do they raise an international scandal about the shame and evil or apartheid? Then, the inventors of this mythical State say, segregate them all in their own homelands. For that is in truth what the Transkei and the other bantustans amount to: massive segregations, segregation by the millions. the system of partheid carried to its monstrous logical conclusion. There was a perverse genius at work there, with sinister reminiscences of Adolf Hitler. You will remember, as I am sure none of us can ever forget, the Nazi solution to what they considered the Jewish problem: how they were to control, to curb, the intellectual independence, the artistic creativity, the financial ingenuity and resourcefulness of the Jews in Germany and the rest of Europe. Hitler's solution, the so,-called ""final solution", was really very simple, the most simple and final of all: it was to eliminate the Jews completely from any possible participation in the national life of that Germany which the Jews had loved so much and to which they had made so many unforgettable contributions- to send them to concentration camps and then to extermination ovens to exterminate them. When there were no longer any Jews, then there would be no Jewish problem. It was as simple as that.

In the Transkei we see a clever Variation bfithat .solution.._ The .. black South Africans are a problem to the apartheid regime in Pretoria. Exterminate them? No. That would be a solution, a final solution"', but one from which even the most cynical r6gime would recoil, which the civilized world could now condemn, and which, in fact, would be physically impossible to carry out. And so we are instead presented with an ingenious alternative. Why exterminate the black citizens of South Africa? After all, the white South Africans need their cheap slave-labour. Much better instead to strip them of their civil and human rights; to exterminate them politically by depriving them of their citizenship; to reduce them to non-citizens, nonpersons for they must, after all, work to live, and they must work in the white-dominated and -controlled industries, agro-business, commerce, and households of South Africa in order to survive. No Government in the history of the world has disenfranchised so many of its citizens at one stroke, stripping them of all their rights in their own country. That is what the Transkei experiment is all about. Those of us who represent peoples and countries that fought hard and long for independence probably find it hard to believe that the people of the Transkei do not want independence. It is not that they identify themselves with their rulers. It is not that they hesitate to undertake the responsibilities of independence. This is not a colonial situation at all. The Xhosas of the Transkei have not won a country of their own. They have lost the one they had. I daresay that the overwhelming majority, if not indeed all, of the countries we represent here came into being and pro:laimed their independence by the will of the people. That will may have been expressed in various ways: by historical allegiances to dynasties embodying the nation, by the assertion and recognition of national identity when it reached maturity, or by violent revolution against foreign rule. But almost always our nations were born of the people. Not Even Asked What we are faced with now is something unique, something strange; something unprecedented. The inhabitants of the Transkei and their fellow Xhosas in South Africa did not proclaim their right to be free and independent. They were not even asked if they wanted to be free and independent. And if they had been asked, they would have, in all probability, said no.

But in fact they were never asked. The issue was never submitted to a free referendum, How that would have gone is shown by the refusal of six of the other eight bantustans to accept independence. In the Transkei the elections to the legislative assembly that accepted independence were held under the repressions of Proclamation No. R-400 of the Government of South Africa, with the entire leadership of the Transkei Democratic Party which opposed independence, under detention. Surely there is no precedent for people being thus actually compelled to become independent. What can be the reason for this seemingly illogical reluctance to be free? If the black citizens of South Africa suffer so much under the system of apartheid, why should they not welcome living in an independent country of their own where, by definition, there can be no a partheid? They key to this puzzle can be discerned in the recommendations of the Special Committee. For not only is the Transkei designed to be a vastly expanded area of physical segregation, a multiplication and concentration of the segregated townships of black labour- it is also designed as a wholesale deprivation of South African citizenship and all its rights and privileges. What Rights? W'7hat rights, it may be asked, and what privileges? The rights and privileges of apartheid? On the contrary: the rights and privileges 3fficially denied under the system of apartheid, but which are the due of every citizen of South Africa and every human being. The right to the South African land, which under the system of the Transkei and the other bantustans would be divided, with only 12.5 per cent for the blacks who constitute 75 per cent of the population, and 87.5 per cent, including the best, for the whites, who make up only 25 per cent of the population, and presumably nothing at all for the Coloureds and the Asians. The right, furthermore, to the national wealth of South Africa, the richest in that continent and one of the richest in the world, for the black citizens of South Africa have, as much as their white fellow citizens, a legitimate right to a share in the prosperity which they helped to create with their labour, labour which has for so long been inequitably and miserably underpaid. The right, in sum, to equality and non.-discrimination in their own country - not in an artificial segregated area, like the Transkei and the other bantustans, but in their own country, for the blacks are just as much citizens of South Africa as the whites, with the same rights and privileges, which may not now be recognized and honoured, but which are nonetheless legitimate and valid. Indeed, the very institution of the Transkei as a separate and so-called independent State is an admission - an implied but still meaningful admission - that the blacks in South Africa have and should enjoy those rights and privileges, equally and without discrimination, as long as they are citizens of that country. Otherwise, why force them to be foreigners? Hypocrisy The Transkei fits perfectly into the classical definition of hypocrisy: it is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, or in this case the tribute that apartheid pays to the ideal of equality. It was necessary to invent the independence of the Transkei because there is no freedom for the blacks in their own country. There is little point now in repeating once again all that nas been said here, over and over again for many years, about the evils of apartheid. and I do not propose to do so. Nor do I intend to renew the many appeals made by this General Assembly for a total embargo on trade, including the supply of arms, to South Africa, and the cessation of any form of military co- operation with that country; the ending of collaboration by banks, national and t ansnational corporations with the South African regime and with compa#iesiregistered in South Africa; the cessation of immigration to that ountry aid the release of political prisoners there; as well as the ending of all contacts with the racist regime and with organizations and ,institutions wich practice apartheid. The non-recognition of the Transkei is only one more itei in already over-long list of appeals not all or effectively complied with. But I should like to close on a more cheerful and positive note. The Transkei affair, for all its air of unreality and deception, for all that it was long anticipated and condemned, can also be viewed as part of a meaningful, and perhaps even hopeful, shift of long frozen positions in southern Africa. Coat of Arms Tradition#l intransigence began to crumble with the Portuguese revolution and. the liberation of Mozambique and Angola. Negotiators are now active in Zimbabwe and Namibia, and even, though less successfully, in South Africa, There the very segregation and so-called independence of the

Transkei is a tactical retreat from increasingly inderenstblepositions, . . The Transkei, I have been told, has been given a 'soat.',of arm . af-i'.. own, with two leopards, an ox and an ear of corn. Butsog, it iay - not' be - , easy as before to answer the question: which are the,leop s,!.andkwhi)h ;i I.. is the ox? Whose ox will be gored, and who will reap that.,.1le1 colp? ,.,et,, us hope and trust that the answers will be just and, above .ll,' um*4e..To. . to end where I began, what we are working and waiting f6r .,ar r - eent-, '. true happenings, true independence and real equality, reAlt e.ua1a'ty ..hat'" . will uplift the human condition, and not be denigrated as i be1lg d e.l . , South Africa. - '~ -PM u-Iii fir. Ifans E. Pari-ifskly Curator of Africana Northwestern University Library Evanstr4 Illinois 60201 Wq16 1976 4 23 01 -PMW