The Transkeian-Ization of Transkei: Nationalism and the Making of an Elite Through
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Work in progress. Do not cite without author’s permission The Transkeian-ization of Transkei: Nationalism and the Making of an Elite through the Transkei Development Corporation, 1959 – 1984 On the 20th of September 1984, Transkeians woke up hear that the Transkei government had sacked the top thirteen officials of the Transkei Development Corporation (TDC). Over the next few days, the local newspaper, the Daily Dispatch, started trying to pick apart what had happened and why. At first it was unclear which thirteen had been fired, but within a day the newspaper reported that Sonny Tarr, the Managing Director (MD), along with twelve other senior white officials had been removed. The reasons given for the sacking were complex and confusing. On the one hand, Transkeians were told by the Minister of Commerce, that the white officials had been removed to affect a policy of the Africanisation of posts. He urged them to note that “…there is nothing new in this.” 1 Others however speculated that Tarr had been fired under the guise of ‘Transkeian-ization’ for refusing to hand out loans and business licences to George and Kaizer Matanzima, the Prime Minister and President of the Transkei. Within a year, all the white officials in the TDC had left and fewer and fewer white South Africans populated the local administration. This dramatic action speaks volumes about the link between race and control over the economic institutions of the Transkei state.2 In this working paper I suggest that this link was a distinct feature of a Transkeian nationalism that the political elite forged in the face of criticism of apartheid’s Bantustan policy. Through an analysis of shifts in the TDC and its predecessors I show that attempts to make Transkei politically coherent relied on a dual, intertwined mechanism. The first part of the process was tied into attempts to create the Bantustans as economically viable territories. A range of economic policies were implemented by the TDC 1 “Top TDC Posts Go to Transkeians,” Daily Dispatch, September 26, 1984. 2 I have chosen not to use scare quotes around any words or concepts relating to the Transkei’s independence, national coherence, or the legitimacy of the Bantustans. This, of course, is not an endorsement of the Bantustan project and is simply for convenience. 1 Work in progress. Do not cite without author’s permission to “give sufficient economic content to the policy of Homeland Development so that the governments which are created in these states are not simply fictitious governments but that have an economic base … to enable them at least in some respect to act independently from the South African government.”3 The TDC was at the forefront of these attempts, claiming to be a technical and apolitical institution.4 However, it held significant economic power in the Bantustan, channelling vast amounts of money into and across the Transkei and thus making it very desirable to control. Second, gaining control of the newly established country’s economy was closely tied to attempts at undoing white economic – and related political - power.5 Across the self-governing territories, reserves and independent Bantustans, white power was ubiquitous, but it was only in Transkei – through the collision between the Matanzimas’ and the white ‘expatriates’’ self- interest - that local political elites linked the control of economic development quite so dramatically to internal race relations. I am thus suggesting that Transkeian national coherence and nationalism was, at least for a section of the local elite, partially based on distinctively racialised attempts to prove legitimacy. It is important to indicate that this nationalism was forged discursively and relied on local perceptions, particularly of the TDC.6 Roger Southall has meticulously documented the economic dependence of Transkei on South Africa and the strategic significance of creating a ‘Transkeian’ Transkei for the Bantustan project of separate development.7 At no point in this 3 Trevor Bell, “The Role of Regional Policy in South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies 12, no. 2 (April 1986): 279. 4 For an explication of the ‘politics of development’ in the ‘third world’, see James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 5 Even political institutions which had little influence on economic policy should be thought of as important sites of class formation as the expansion of local governments and bureaucracies was a major driver of the making of a local economic elite. 6 This fits in with the argument made in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Books, 1983). 7 Roger Southall, South Africa’s Transkei: The Political Economy of an “Independent” Bantustan (London: Heinemann, 1982). 2 Work in progress. Do not cite without author’s permission paper do I doubt this argument. Instead, I am trying to show that despite Transkei’s economic and political dependence on South Africa, Transkeian leaders claimed independence and autonomy were possible by framing the obstacles to political legitimacy in racial terms. They produced and tapped into a sense of discontent that ran parallel to the material aspects of the TDC, which justified the removal of white leadership in 1984 and provided the raison d’etre for a new elite bureaucratic cadre. This holds long-term significance for our understandings of the changing nature of the Transkeian bureaucracy. By removing white officials from senior positions of control, the Transkei was able to give its institutions a particularly ‘Transkeian’ feel, unlike independent Bophuthatswana8 or even the Ciskei.9 While I am still researching the long-term implications of the 1984 drama, I have some indication already that this racialised and defensive Transkeian nationalism was significant in the unfolding of the bureaucracy in the final years of apartheid and its ability to integrate into the new Eastern Cape Province in 1994.10 Finally, I also want to use this paper to offer a tentative reconceptualization of the functioning of ‘race’ in the Bantustans. Conventionally – and accurately – scholars and commentators have often suggested that ‘ethnicity’ was a fundamental feature of politics across and within the Bantustans. Consider Bushbuckridge in Lebowa for example, where tensions broke out between ‘Tsongas’ and ‘Pedis’ about political representation in the Bantustan and access to resources, which were perceived to be allocated according to ethnic lines.11 The struggles over the Ndebele population in Lebowa, Bophuthatswana – and eventually, KwaNdebele - serve as 8 Arianna Lissoni, “The Making of a Bantustan Public Service: The Case of Bophuthatswana” (PARI Bantustan Workshop, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2014). 9 J. B. Peires, “The Implosion of Transkei and Ciskei,” African Affairs 91, no. 364 (1992): 377. 10 Jeff Peires, “Transkei on the Verge of Emancipation” (PARI Conference on African State Formation and Bureaucracy, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2013). 11 Edwin Ritchken, “Leadership and Conflict in Bushbuckridge: Struggles to Define Moral Economies in Context of Rapidly Transforming Political Economies, 1978 - 1990” (PhD, University of the Witwatersrand, 1995). 3 Work in progress. Do not cite without author’s permission another example of the way in which ethnicity functioned horizontally in the Bantustans.12 Race and apartheid’s racial policies, on the other hand, have been thought to operate along vertical lines: the Bantustans were created through the white South African state’s policies of separate development, and thus the only set of ‘race relations’ was between South Africa and each individual Bantustan. In this line of argument, the Bantustans were a product of racial policies, dictated from above. However, in the case of the Transkei at the very least, I argue that we also need to consider the internal operation of race in the Bantustan - the discourse animating the nationalism of political and bureaucratic elites was both ethnically and racially driven. As I attempt to show below ‘race’ was also important in creating insiders and outsiders in Transkei and determining a political and bureaucratic identity. Building a Black Transkei: Bantu Investment Corporation to Xhosa Development Corporation By 1948, when the National Party (NP) was voted into power, the reserves were already an economic and political reality across South Africa. However, their future was uncertain. WM Eiselen, along with a range of Afrikaans intellectuals aligned to the NP, hoped the reserve would serve as, in Ivan Evans’ description, “the moral fountainhead of apartheid practices.”13 By this they meant that the reserves held the potential to stem the tide of urbanising Africans by becoming economically self-sufficient territories. But NP ‘pragmatists’ had another agenda, hoping to secure the continuity of African migrant labour and prevent competition with white industry and business.”14 The white labour constituency was also against the development of 12 Sekibakiba Lekgoathi, “Migrants from Zebediela and Shifting Identities on the Rand, 1930s - 1970s,” in A Long Way Home: Migrant Worker Worlds 1800 - 2014, ed. Peter Delius, Laura Phillips, and Fiona Rankin- Smith (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2014); Sekibakiba Lekgoathi, “Chiefs, Migrants and North Ndebele Ethnicity in the Context of Surrounding Homeland Politics, 1965 - 1978,”