God's peoples : covenant and land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster by Akenson Donald H

Author:Akenson, Donald H [Akenson, Donald H]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: http://archive.org/details/isbn_9780801427558
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

(2) that Natives and coloured people in our towns and villages should not live in European residential areas, but that there should be separate residential areas for them, that is to say, separate Native and coloured villages; and

(3) that in our factories, etc., Europeans and non-Europeans should not be allowed to work among one another, but separately, and that certain sorts of work should be reserved for the Europeans.41

But, as M. C. de Wet Nel, minister of Bantu administration and development, observed in 1960, apartheid in its actual development became something more than mere segregation. It was a more comprehensive system aimed at regulating relations of all sorts between the various groups and, in de Wet Nel’s view, at allowing blacks “self-determination.”42

That is a curious term, and it points to a development that took place during the 1950s under the leadership of a racial think-tank at Stellenbosch University, the South African Bureau of Racial Affairs (SABR/\). Although formally independent, this group of professors, intellectuals, and policy savants was tied in at the highest levels to the Broederbond and to the National party. They were visionaries who wished to take apartheid to its logical extreme and to establish virtually complete regulation of race relations by confining most blacks to separate “homelands” (variants: Bantustans; black states). These leaders were influential in shaping the report of the Tomlinson Commission of 1954, which declared that there could be no compromise or middle way in racial relations: there had to be either complete integration or “separate development” of black groups. In line with that vision, the SABRA theoreticians argued that considerable economic resources should be poured into the black homelands to allow them to become genuinely self-sufficient.43 This became the theory of “separate development” that the Verwoerd administration (1958—66) espoused, but when put in practice, precious little development money went to the black homelands. They became rural slums.

These rural slums became a major problem for the South African government in implementing grand apartheid. (Eventually the ten homelands of various sorts turned into six homelands and four pseudoindependent “self-governing states”: Ciskei, Transkei, Venda, and Bophuthatswana.) They were too poor to be self-supporting; the homelands existed mostly on the remittances sent back home to their families by workers in the mines and factories, and in domestic service. Agricultural productivity on the various forms of reserves fell continually as a result of overpopulation and underinvestment. Young blacks preferred life in urban slums to the rural subsistence sector, and they drifted to the cities. In response, a government measure of 1952 made it an offense for adult blacks to remain in an urban area longer than seventy-two hours unless they could prove fifteen years of legal residence in the urban area or could show that they had worked in the area for the same employer for ten years, or had been granted permission to remain in the area by a labor bureau.44 This law, combined with a change in the pass laws that required all blacks over the age of sixteen to carry an identity card, was supposed to keep the blacks on their reserved rural lands.

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