The Transkei
The white Afrikaner administrator swept his hand out to show the poverty of the Transkei in South Africa: the round mud houses with their thatched cone roofs, the green hilly land that produced only a pittance of corn during the year, the bony cattle that the Xhosa people refused to sell. “We have to succeed,” the administrator said with a weak, nervous laugh. “Our existence depends on it.” But so far, he and the other white officials of the Transkei are failing.
The Transkei is the most advanced of the Bantustans, the word coined by the white supremacist government to describe those areas of South Africa it has set aside for black Africans. Under the theory of apartheid, the Transkei and seven other Bantustans, created out of 13 percent of the land, will some distant day become independent black nations and absorb the great bulk of South Africa’s black Africans. Whites, who are now outnumbered four to one, would then outnumber blacks in the rest of South Africa. Once in the majority, the whites say, they would have the moral and democratic right to run their own country — white South Africa.
Theory of the Bantustan
To implement the theory and justify it to the rest of the world, the white South African government is trying, though in a desultory way, to develop the economy of the Bantustans. As the Afrikaner administrator pointed out, the government has no other choice. Without vibrant economies, the Bantustans could not absorb more millions of Africans. The so-called white areas of South Africa would still be left with black majorities, and a powerful and rich minority would still have to hold down the black masses by force. This would expose apartheid as an immoral and impossible solution to the dilemma of South Africa.
The government puts into the Transkei a heavy share of the money, time, and skills spent on Bantustans. The Transkei, after all, is the only Bantustan with a cohesive stretch of territory. It already has limited self-government, the only Bantustan that does. The other Bantustans are made up of segments of land scattered throughout South Africa. Their chances for development and meaningful independence are slimmer than those of the Transkei. If the Transkei fails, it is doubtful that any other Bantustan can succeed.
So far, the Transkei is failing. Economic development there is so sluggish and insignificant that it’s hard to believe it will ever attract masses of African workers from the industrial towns of the white areas. The Transkei seems destined to remain a dull and poor rural area that young men yearn to leave behind.
About the size of Denmark, the Transkei is a land of green fields, fertile soil, and pleasing hills along the Indian Ocean between Durban and East London. Half of South Africa’s 3 million Xhosa people live in the Transkei, most still wearing traditional red blankets and still sleeping in their cramped mud houses. By the end of the century, South Africa should have seven million Xhosas. Under the government plan, the vast majority are to live and work in the Transkei.
Black stooges?
Since December, 1963 ,the Xhosas of the Transkei have had a measure of self-government, with African ministers running the departments of education, justice, finance, interior, agriculture, and roads. Liberal critics of the South African government like to describe Chief Minister Kaizer Matanzima and the other African ministers of the Transkei as stooges of the whites, but this oversimplifies a complex situation.
Matanzima and his ministers sometimes act up in ways that seem out of character for stooges. In one of their first acts, for example, they defied the apartheid theorists by substituting English for Xhosa in the last grades of the Transkei’s primary schools. African nationalists have long felt that whites make them study in the vernacular to retard their education and thus maintain white domination.
In the future, political development in the Transkei may turn out to be one way for African nationalism, suppressed in so many other ways, to express itself in South Africa. But this is a long-run and tentative proposition. At the moment, the economic development of the Transkei is a far more urgent problem for the South African government than any new political turn by Africans there.
Despite the fertile soil of the Transkei, the Xhosas fail at agriculture. The average yield of their main crop, corn, their staple food, is only one bag per acre per year. These 200-pound bags sell for $4.20 each. Since a farmer’s average holding is 12.5 acres, he averages $52.50 a year less expenses for his main crop. All the lecturing, demonstrating, and pleading of the Transkei agriculture department have failed to increase his production.
The Xhosas have done better at cattle raising, selling more cattle at better prices every year. Cattle, which brought in $68 a head four years ago, now bring in $86 a head. The big trouble is that the Xhosas don’t like to sell their cattle. Like other African tribes, they look on cattle as personal wealth. The Xhosas own 1.5 million head of cattle but sold only 10,000 last year.
The South African government’s program for industrializing the Transkei is tepid, small, and slow. A spokesman for the Xhosa Development Corporation, the government agency charged with industrialization, says the agency needs to create 10,000 new jobs every year. But after three years of limited selfgovernment, industrialization has meant only three sawmills, a furniture factory, a meat-deboning plant, a weaving factory, and a fiberprocessing plant. In all, they provide work for perhaps 1000 Africans. The pace would have to quicken thirty times for the Xhosa Development Corporation to meet its goal. And there are no plans or prospects for that kind of intensification.
Basically the Transkei has severe economic problems for the same reasons as do most underdeveloped rural areas in Africa. Rural development is a slow, excruciating task. In fact, the white officials responsible for development in the Transkei often talk the same language as the black officials responsible for development in a country like Tanzania. Both will tell you that economic development depends on increasing agricultural production, that traditional tribal people resist agricultural change, that teaching is crippled by a shortage of agricultural extension workers, that schooled young men would rather work in an office than on a farm.
But the economic troubles of the Transkei are aggravated by three special problems that stem from being a Bantustan in South Africa. The first is the extreme and condescending paternalism of many of the white South African officials who run development projects in the Transkei. They are convinced Africans are like retarded children.
One paternal South African, for example, is in charge of a Transkei factory. In theory, he is supposed to train Africans to run the factory someday. “I think they are an inferior people,” he says. “You have to protect them. If you put a Bantu [as Africans are called in South Africa] and a white man together and have them compete, the Bantu would die.”
Commissioner-General Hans Abraham, the South African government’s chief official in the Transkei, tells visiting white businessmen: “The Xhosa has no initiative, no organizational ability, no judgment, no responsibility, and he’s obsessed with sex.” Another official of the South African government, an information officer, tells visiting newsmen: “These people can’t think. Oh, they can memorize three books of Shakespeare whole, but they can’t think. They don’t think threedimensionally, you know.”
South African boom
The second problem of Transkei development is the lure of the white industrial areas in the rest of South Africa. Favored by enormous coal and mineral deposits, skilled and resourceful managers and workers, good land, and a temperate climate, South Africa has prospered in the last five years. Its gross national product has grown an average of 7 percent a year to $10 billion in 1966. The acceleration in manufacturing has been phenomenal. Almost everything can now be made in South Africa. It is a budding industrial nation.
This industrial boom has created a tremendous need for African labor. Despite harsh government pass regulations that attempt to keep Africans in the Bantustans, Africans keep rushing to jobs in the cities. In 1965, for example, white labor officials, under the apartheid pass laws, forced 65,000 African men to move from the cities to the Bantustans because their pass books showed they had no job in the white areas. At the same time, these same labor officials, under the pressure of white businessmen in need of labor, admitted twice as many African men into the towns to fill vacant jobs in industry.
Xhosas from the Transkei join the migration to the white towns. A Xhosa working in the underground gold mines of the Witwatersrand near Johannesburg begins at $141 a year plus free food and housing. The starting wage for an African in other industries in Johannesburg is $432 a year. A young Xhosa farmer would have to almost triple his corn production to earn as much as he could in a gold mine. With all the skill, fertilizer, and white advice available, he probably never could grow enough corn on his 12.5 acres to make as much as he could in a Johannesburg factory. As a result, 250,000 residents of the Transkei work elsewhere, earning $50 million a year and sending home $12.5 million. White officials are trying to develop the Transkei with the bulk of its strong, youngmen outside the Transkei.
Economic apartheid
A third problem in the development of the Transkei is the dogma of the apartheid and Bantustan theory. It fogs thinking. As set down by the late Prime Minister Hendrik F. Verwoerd, the dogma insists that Africans must develop by themselves without interference or competition from white industrialists and investors. Only in this way, according to the theory, can the African develop his full potential. For this reason, the South African government refuses to let whites invest capital in the Transkei.
The theory makes sense in some ways. A free and independent Bantustan whose economy was controlled by white South Africans would hardly be a free and independent Bantustan. But the prohibition on white capital means that industrial development must now depend on meager African capital or on small factories set up by the government or on growth of what the government calls border industries. None of these can do the job of transforming the Transkei into an expanding area that will absorb millions of Xhosas.
At the moment the government believes border industries are its best hope. These are factories built by white men on the borders outside the Bantustans, drawing labor from Africans who live inside. To encourage border industries, the government loans money to industrialists who want to build factories near the Bantustans, gives tax rebates to investors, and allows managers to pay wages that are lower than the going rate in the industrial towns. But investors have hesitated.
Industrialists like to build their plants where they can find power, supplies, skilled help, and markets. In fact, most of what the government calls border industries have been set up as close to the industrial towns as to the Bantustans. The border industries closest to the Transkei are really part of the industrial complex of East London, the Indian Ocean port 60 miles from the Transkei border. It’s a delusion or fakery to call them border industries.
Last hope
As the slow growth of border industries indicates, the Transkei economy might still founder even if the government allowed white capital into the Bantustans. White capitalists, hesitant about investing on the border of a Bantustan, would hardly flock to invest capital and create industries in a more impoverished area that had even fewer skilled and educated workers. Nevertheless, white South Africans who want the Bantustans to work and see the Transkei falling apart believe white capital is their last hope. They are putting pressure on the government to forget the Verwoerd dogma and lift the ban. While that surely won’t excite any economic boom in the Transkei, it should at least remove an artificial impediment to development.
The difficulties of the favored Transkei make it clear that the job of developing all the Bantustans in South Africa is staggering. Right now 4 million Africans live in the Bantustans while more than twice as many, 8.5 million, live in the so-called white areas, outnumbering the 3.5 million whites. By the end of the century, according to the South African Bureau of Census and Statistics‚ South Africa will have 28 million Africans and 7 million whites. If the whites are to outnumber the Africans in the white areas, the Bantustans, which now support 4 million Africans, must support more than 21 million then. Judging by the Transkei, the goal seems incredible, and white South Africans will have to realize that soon.
“The cramped one”
That realization could change the politics and race policies of South Africa, at least a bit. New ideas and fresh doubts have infiltrated the thinking of a small group of the white Afrikaner people who dominate the government and race policies of South Africa, and many of the ideas and doubts concern the Bantustans. The new thinking has enraged hard-line Afrikaner white supremacists who have attacked it vehemently, convinced it is all subversive. This fight between the new thinkers, known as the verligtes (Afrikaans for “the enlightened ones”), and the hard-line nationalists, known as the verkramptes (Afrikaans for “the cramped or constricted ones”), may have great significance for the future of South Africa. Otto Krause, Afrikaner editor of the South African newsmagazine News Check, says the fight “is a watershed like the Scopes trial in your country.” It is separating the fundamentalists and the modernizers.
On the surface, the controversy seems not to concern Bantustans at all. Instead, the verkramptes, led by Minister of Health Albert Hertzog, have directly attacked government policies that seem to endanger the cultural purity of white Afrikaner nationalism. The verkramptes believe that these policies have been set by the government under the influence of the verligtes. The policies include Prime Minister John Vorster’s entertainment of black leaders and diplomats from other African countries, the encouragement of immigration of foreign whites, and the decision to assemble a single Olympics team with members of different races on it.
These issues, of course, are insignificant. When verligtes and verkramptes argue about sprinters, diplomats, and immigrants, they are touching no more than the periphery of the great racial problems of South Africa. But this is a public stance. In private, verligtes, as they quietly expound their views, make it clear that the difference between them and other Afrikaner nationalists is large and vital.
“The enlightened ones”
Urbanized, educated, cosmopolitan, outward-looking, aware of the world’s condemnation, and thoughtful, the verligtes believe that South Africa must move forward and shake off the racial restrictions and world contempt that hold it back. They want South Africa to set a moral position for itself that will free it from its role as the world’s pariah. At the moment, they believe this can be done by a sincere, thorough, and speedy implementation of the Bantus tan policy set down by Verwoerd. They want South Africa to stop hemming and hawing and make good its promise of independence for the Bantustans. At the same time, they want the government to drop racial discrimination in the rest of South Africa, the white areas.
These views are neither startling nor very acceptable to the rest of the world. Nor are these views much different from the official government line — that is, when the latter lays pretense to altruistic concern for black Africans. But what the verligtes believe now is less important than what they may believe someday. These enlightened Afrikaners are a far cry from the typical dour, stolid, narrow-minded Afrikaner. They think for themselves, are skeptical of shibboleths, and are willing to face up to the contradictions in their positions. And though they are a minority now, their numbers are growing. In the years ahead, the verligtes will probably go through a crisis that could help determine whether South Africa will really change.
That crisis will come when evidence and logic force thinking verligtes to realize that the Transkei and other Bantustans, as set up now, will never work. Some verligtes realize this already and are talking about partition, perhaps giving Africans half the land, including industrial areas. Yet, even with partition, white areas of South Africa would still have large permanent African populations. Africans, who might still be in the majority, would demand the vote as well as the end of social discrimination in these white areas.
Verligtes can either face the implications of this or give up and withdraw into white supremacy. Chances are they will withdraw and become a small, insignificant class of intellectuals who once talked dreamily of change and did nothing. But there also is a slight chance, or perhaps a hope, that these men, including some influential members of the ruling Nationalist Party, will face up to the failure of the Transkei and the other Bantustans and acknowledge that apartheid, as set down now, will not work in South Africa. — Stanley Meisler