The Role of the Apartheid System

In 1948 the Afrikaner National Party came to power with a policy aimed at transforming the reserves into African homelands. In numerous speeches, the new government's ministers stressed the central role of the chief and tribe in the implementation of apartheid in the rural areas. In a speech, typical of the period, the Minister of Native Affairs expressed his determination in 1950 to:

reclaim . . . and restore tribal life as far as possible by seeing to it that the chiefs and the whole tribal government adapt themselves to the exigencies of our times and thereby automatically regain the position of authority which they forfeited to a large extent through their backwardness . . . the natives of this country do not all belong to me same tribe or race. They have different languages and customs. We are of the opinion that the solidarity of the tribes should be preserved and that they should develop along the lines of their own national character and tradition. For that purpose we want to rehabilitate the deserving tribal chiefs as far as possible, and we would like to see their authority maintained over the members of their tribes. Suitable steps will be taken in this direction.^[96]

The first step was the passage of the Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 which bolstered the power of the chiefs by modernizing and expanding their tax basis to include all the members of the tribal authority. This gave the chiefs a new element of patronage through their control of the tribal account and through their participation in the decisions of the Regional Authority. It was estimated at the time that the northern Transvaal reserves were carrying sixteen times too many cattle and five times too many people.^[97] To provide the chiefs with the ability to distribute land and in an attempt to retain the productive base of the reserves, the government started to purchase released land. In concert with the extension of the reserves and the devolution of powers to the Bantu Authorities, a renewed assault was made on African tenants living on white farms, beyond the control of the chiefs in the 'homelands'.

An amendment to the Natives Trust and Land Act in the mid-1950s stipulated that only African families settled on white-owned land before the passage of the act in 1936 were entitled to stay on white farms. All Africans who had been registered after 1936 as 'squatters', working for less than four months annually, were deprived of their rights to stay outside the reserves. The graduated fees payable by farmers for registered 'squatters' were levied uniformly and increased annually. Tenant control boards, consisting of farmers and officials, which had been established under the 1936 Act in order to check 'squatting', started to determine and restrict the number of labour tenants required by individual farmers.^[98] This caused many African tenants, who had formerly 'sold' their labour to the farmers for at least four months a year, to become permanent labourers. This transformation of the farm labour force from part-time to full-time workers made as many as two-thirds of the labour tenants on some farms 'redundant', and these were then 'repatriated' to their 'homelands' as were tenant families whose younger sons had fled to the more open urban labour market.

In 1957 chiefs living on white-owned farms were threatened with the forfeiture of their chieftaincies if they refused to accept resettlement in the reserves. Squatters were also rapidly expelled as their registration fees began to exceed the rents received by the farmer. Labour tenants suffered a similar, although more gradual fate for, as farmers mechanized their methods of production and transportation and increasingly used insecticides, the value of land occupied by tenants and their livestock rose while, in relative terms, the value of their labour declined. The 'natural' movement of tenants from white farms to the reserves, caused by the capitalization of agriculture, was turned into a flood in the early 1960s when labour tenancy was prohibited in the northern Transvaal. Small white farmers were badly affected by the dissolution of the labour tenancy system as it deprived them of their cheap, 'captive' labour force and in many cases obliged them to sell their farms to highly capitalized agro-businesses. The movement of Africans off the white farms that started in the 1930s and reached a peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s reversed a century-old tendency for Tsonga-speakers to disperse throughout the northern and eastern Transvaal. Of central importance was the influx control legislation that directed this efflux from the white farms away from the industrial centres and into impoverished 'homelands'. It was in these areas that ethnicity, particularly in the form of the population relocation brought about by ethnic consolidation, was to become a crucial issue in the 1970s.^[99]

The Bantu Authorities Act of 1951 did not affect the ethnically heterogeneous nature of the population living in the northern Transvaal reserves. A Tsonga homeland was not envisaged and Tsonga-speaking Tribal Authorities were grouped administratively in Regional Authorities, dominated by Venda and North Sotho-speakers in, respectively, the northern and eastern Transvaal. The first move towards an ethnic segregation of the area came from a number of northern Tsonga-speaking chiefs who felt their Regional Authority was dominated by Venda-speaking chiefs. Their calls for a separate Tsonga-dominated Regional Authority and a separate commissioner-general were made at roughly the same time that the report of the Tomlinson Commission indicated a move towards segregation on ethnic rather than merely spatial lines.^[100] But it was only in 1959 with the promulgation of the Bantu Self-government Act that Pretoria asserted that "The Bantu people of South Africa do not constitute a homogeneous people, but form separate national units on the basis of language and culture.' This act formally declared the 'Shangane/Tsonga' to constitute a 'national unit' and allowed the government to accede to the Tsonga chiefs' wishes

for a separate homeland. Four Regional Authorities dominated by Tsonga-speakers were then cut out of the old multi-ethnic regional authorities in the northern and eastern Transvaal and in November 1962 they combined to form the Matshangana Territorial Authority. Seven years later a Tsonga-Shangane commissioner-general was installed and a legislative assembly was opened at the newly-constructed capital at Giyani.

The segregation of the rural areas into ethnically-defined units was paralleled by similar movements in the urban areas. In Johannesburg, culturally mixed communities like Sophiatown were torn down and replaced by townships, like Soweto, that were built on an ethnic grid. The urban population living in rural towns like Louis Trichardt and Pietersburg was also shifted and rearranged according to the apartheid policy of 'ethnic consolidation'. At the same time, Bantu education and government-controlled Radio Bantu orientated people towards the 'traditional' forms of culture dominant in the rural areas. Thus apartheid blocked the process of social integration and cultural hybridization that had emerged as the economy required a geographically mobile African workforce. Under apartheid, the movement to the towns, both spiritual and material, was increasingly directed along ethnic conduits.

The government's new divide-and-rule policy, partly stemming from its own experience of the growth of Afrikaner ethnic consciousness, generated bitter ethnic conflicts over local resources, for in the early 1960s the northern Transvaal reserves remained crushingly overpopulated and overgrazed.^[101] Starting with the break-up and distribution of the funds and powers of the old multi-ethnic Regional Authorities, ethnic bitterness reached a peak as politically arbitrary borders such as roads, railways and farm boundaries were defined in order to separate the different 'homelands.' This immediately created disadvantaged ethnic minorities on both sides of the border. It is the competition for resources that has compelled many people to adopt an ethnic consciousness. This competition takes place between ethnically differentiated people living under the same chief, between ethnic minorities and a Bantustan government or between the members of different Bantustans. These pressures, together with the use by the government of physical force, have obliged large numbers of people to join the flow of labour tenants and 'squatters' into resettlement camps or closer settlement villages in the homelands.

A year after the creation of the Mashangana Territorial Authority, government implementation of its policy of ethnic consolidation resulted in large-scale forced population removals in the Bushbuckridge area of the eastern Transvaal. At roughly the same time an ethnic border was drawn between the Tsonga and Venda 'homelands' that cut well south of the Levubu river and threatened with removal 40,000 Tsonga living north, and 10,000 Venda-speakers living south of the border.^[102] For these people ethnicity became of central importance overnight as did the Territorial Authority in its role as defender of the Tsonga people. Venda-speakers living south of the historical Levubu border were no longer considered integrated neighbours. They were seen in historical terms as foreigners who, in the nineteenth century, had been given asylum by Tsonga chiefs and who consequently had no right to be placed over the heads of the 'indigenous' Tsonga-speakers. The people faced with removal were threatened with great hardships as most were to be settled in the hot, dry and infertile areas close to the Kruger National Park, far from labour and produce markets. Schools, churches, clinics, homes, irrigation works, dams, debushed arable land and various other forms of immovable property constructed out of tribal levies were to be handed over to Venda chiefs and their followers, many of whom were outsiders resettled

from distant farms and 'black spots'. In these ethnically consolidated Venda areas, Tsonga teachers and principals were replaced and Venda became the medium of instruction. Resistance to this resettlement scheme was widespread and resulted in increased hardship when large numbers of people were imprisoned for cutting thatching grass and for continuing to plough their fields. The position of the disadvantaged ethnic minorities was concisely expressed in a letter from one of the affected communities to the Minister of Bantu Affairs:

We will be allowed to stay if we accept Venda laws and allow Venda to be taught to our Shangaan school children. And all the money we are paying is going to the Venda Tribal Authority . . . how can we sell our Shangaan birthright to accept the authority of a Venda man who has been imposed on us from outside?^[103]

The Mashangana Territorial Authority took up the defence of 'its' people by taking the boundary dispute to court, by challenging the dismissal of the Tsonga teachers, by calling for the installation of a separate Shangane/Tsonga Commissioner-General to protect their interests, and by asking for an impartial redelimitation commission on the grounds that the state ethnologist had close links with the Lutheran Church (ex Berlin Mission) in Vendaland. Although the removals did take place in the late 1960s, it was later felt that the stolid resistance of the chiefdoms, when combined with the backing of the Territorial Authority, was to a great extent responsible for the alleviated conditions of their removal.

In 1968 the government allocated land south of the Klein Letaba river to Vendaland, a move which 16 years later, according to a Gazankulu Bantustan government memo, continued to 'cause friction and poor relationship between the Shangaan and Venda . . . the situation is tense and violence may break out at any time'.^[104] Despite this hostility the government continued to enforce ethnic identities on the African population through the passage in 1970 of the Bantu Homeland Citizenship Act. According to the Minister of Bantu Administration and Development, the object of this bill was to:

mature the slumbering national pride and in this way to develop the spiritual and cultural assets of that national milieu and to help develop a healthy self-respect and national pride.^[105]

In 1973, the year that the Territorial Authority became the 'self-governing' Bantustan of Gazankulu, the delineation of one of its southern borders led to threats of war being made in the Giyani legislature against the Northern Sotho of the Lebowa Bantustan.^[106] Further ethnic hostility arose over the allocation of the eastern Transvaal Shiluvane mission hospital to Gazankulu in mid-1981. This caused the chief minister of Lebowa to remove all Northern Sotho patients, nurses and hospital staff to nearby 'Sotho hospitals' and to ban the Tsonga Presbyterian Church (ex Swiss Mission), which he held responsible for the government action, from at least one area of Lebowa. Because of the ethnic bitterness generated by this affair, southern Tsonga-speakers in 1984 would rather spend the money and time involved in travelling an extra 60 kilometres to a Tsonga hospital' than face possible ill-treatment at the nearby 'Sotho hospital'.^[107] In an area of the eastern Transvaal where the Tsonga-speaking Nkuna and Sotho-speaking Maake chiefdoms had lived in harmony for almost 150 years, ethnic antagonism was fanned by the forced removal of several thousand Sotho from land incorporated into Gazankulu. Those who refused to accept the rule of an imposed Tsonga chief or who used grazing or arable land or cut wood or grass in areas from which they had been removed were arrested by the Bantustan

authorities.^[108] This simmering ethnic antagonism led to violent conflicts in mid-1985 between 'Tsongas' and 'Pedis' (North Sotho) in the southern Mhala and Ritavi districts.^[109]

The unfinished demarcation and arbitrary nature of 'ethnic borders' continues to give rise to much inter-ethnic bitterness as ethnic solidarity has emerged as a vital element in the mobilization of people in defence of their property. This has inevitably lent a degree of legitimacy to the Bantustan government as the political embodiment and protector of the Tsonga people. Hudson Ntsanwisi, the chief minister of Gazankulu, excused Tsonga actions against the Pedi by qualifying Pretoria's border delimitation as 'throwing a bone to two starving dogs'. At the same time he threatened the possibility of bloodshed if the Venda, 'the central government's beloved children', occupied a long-established Swiss mission farm that, because of border delineations, had become an island of Tsonga-speakers in Vendaland. In a related speech he declared that, 'the ethnic fires kindled by the Republican government will spread until this continent [sic ] is destroyed irrevocably'.^[110] Yet the Bantustan system with its 'homeland' governments is structurally the major instigator of ethnic feeling.

Gazankulu constitutes a geographically defined and poverty-stricken colony within the borders of South Africa. Influx control and resettlement schemes have caused a gross overcrowding; the average population density per square kilometre is 76 in Gazankulu and 17 in 'white' South Africa. As a result only about 6 per cent of the population can make a bare living from agriculture.^[111] In 1982 there were at least twice as many Gazankulu citizens working as migrant labourers outside the Bantustan (over 40,000) as there were wage earners within its borders (21,000). Although Gazankulu's importance within the regional division of labour has increasingly become that of a dumping ground for surplus labour and a political alternative to African nationalism, it remains a directly exploited periphery within South Africa. The 1983 estimated per capita GNP of R121 (R3157 for South Africa as a whole) does not reflect the sharp regional differences within the Bantustan. In the heavily resettled northern district only 1.3 per cent of the population can live off agriculture while farming in central Gazankulu can theoretically support 10 per cent of the population. Thus in some areas the cost of feeding and reproducing the population is still partially met by agricultural production which consequently continues to subsidize low industrial wages. Women have also come to play an increasingly important role as wage earners who commute to neighbouring white farms. Perhaps more important in the continuing system of centre-periphery exploitation is the fact that the costs of social reproduction in the Bantustans are far lower than in the urban areas whose political importance, magnified by their closeness to the centres of economic power, demands adequate supplies of clean running water as well as transport, housing, medical, educational and other facilities. In the Bantustans much of the cost of providing these services falls on the members of the tribal authorities, a factor that tends to reinforce the underdevelopment of peripheral areas such as Gazankulu.^[112]

One of the few legal ways in which Africans may oppose their regional exploitation is through political mobilization along ethnic lines. This was certainly a major reason behind Ntsanwisi's formation in 1981 of a political party named Ximoko which, modelled on Chief Gatsha Buthelezi's Zulu Inkatha organization in Natal, promotes 'worthy indigenous customs and traditions' and attempts to unite all Tsonga/Shangane against the land claims and imposition of 'independence' by Pretoria. The allied Gazankulu Women's Association wishes 'to revive what our ancestors were doing' and promotes games, cooking, dress,

music and dances that it defines as 'Tsonga/Shangane'.^[113]

While much of Gazankulu has been reduced to the status of a proletarian dormitory for the industrial areas of South Africa, sections of the petty bourgeoisie have benefited from the Bantustan system for as Gazankulu citizens they are protected from 'foreign' entrepreneurial competition. The Bantustan government provides business loans and a wide spectrum of licences to its citizens. In 1983 it controlled over half of the jobs and, in the form of pensions, a further 45 per cent of all regular incomes generated within Gazankulu. It is common for members of the petty bourgeoisie to adopt and stress their Tsonga identity when competing for control of, or access to, those limited resources.

The chiefs are the other major local beneficiary of the Bantustan system and because of this they tend to stress factors, such as ethnicity, that link rather than divide the different chiefdoms. When Gazankulu became self-governing in 1973 the electoral system was structured so that of the 68 members of the legislative assembly, 42 were delegated by the Bantu authorities and hence, ultimately, by the chiefs. Of a five man cabinet, it was prescribed that not more than three and no fewer than two had to be chiefs.^[114] The chiefs monthly income, paid directly by the Gazankulu government, is partially dependent on the number of his followers, from whom he draws a plethora of taxes. If he has sufficient subjects, a chief earning R2,400 a year will be appointed to a seat in the Giyani legislature at the annual salary (in 1985) of R12,400 which makes him eligible for ministerial positions remunerated at over R50,000 annually.^[115] These salaries, in a poverty-stricken rural backwater, provide a strong encouragement for chiefs to accept resettled Tsonga-speaking people with whom the dominant clan and the tribal authority have no relationship other than that of a shared ethnicity. As the local organizers of Ximoko, the chiefs use ethnicity to bind their heterogeneous tribal authorities. Although they have lost to the petty bourgeoisie the final say in matters concerning labour bureaux, court cases and land allocation, the chiefs dispose of a good deal of patronage through their access to the tribal fund, which is the pool for the majority of local taxes. This gives them a firm control over virtually all local development projects from the siting of boreholes and water taps to the establishment of clinics and schools. Through their appeals to a common ethnic consciousness the chiefs and petty bourgeoisie are able to mask the sharp class and regional inequalities that have grown up within Gazankulu. At the same time ethnicity provides the petty bourgeoisie with indigenous 'traditions' and a degree of local authenticity that obfuscate its origins in, and total dependence upon, the system of exploitation controlled by the white minority government in Pretoria. As a form of social exclusivism dividing the African population, ethnicity creates an external enemy that, unlike Pretoria, which in 1985/6 provided well over 65 per cent of the Bantustan's budget, is not responsible for the monthly salaries of the Gazankulu bureaucracy.^[116]

The debates of the Gazankulu legislative assembly are full of rhetoric aimed at the 'Tsonga nation' and the 'Tsonga people'; they rejoice when Tsonga-speakers 'come back home' and decry 'the loss' of Tsonga-speakers who refuse to move to Gazankulu. Conflicts that are in reality between Bantustans over access to resources are often portrayed as attacks on 'the Tsonga-Shangaan people'.^[117] The creation of an historical basis for this ethnic consciousness has required some myth making. According to Ntsanwisi:

We are told that we must build a nation and we want to build ourselves. We want to unite the Shangaan-Tsonga tribes into one single cohesive unit from Komatipoort through to the Sabi river, Bushbuckridge, Letaba, right up to

Malamulele where we have many of our people. We have a common history, customs, language, religion, similar aspirations and a common way of life which will make it easier for us to develop a national spirit and character.^[118]

Ntsanwisi has tried to foster ethnic unity in various ways. The myth of origin of an important local clan has been adopted as a 'traditional' symbol, linking all Tsonga-speakers in the Transvaal in the belief that they are descended from a pair of founding ancestors.^[119] An ethnically-based nationalism is fostered by the Gazankulu radio service and newspaper, by symbols such as a national flag and administrative buildings, the continual codification of Tsonga-Shangaan law and particularly the education system. In the towns, an ethnicity has been encouraged by associations such as the Mashangana Urban Movement and the Tsonga Cultural Academy which have deep roots in the Bantustan.^[120]

Tsonga-Shangaan ethnic nationalism within Gazankulu is spread at a more popular level by the clientalism of the petty bourgeoisie. The patronage dispensed by the old individual chiefs has been replaced by that of the tribal authority and Bantustan government which provide villagers with pensions, jobs and anything from a bus service to drought relief aid. This popular ethnicity is often expressed in the form of songs that praise 'Gazankulu' and 'the Gazas'. Songs and other forms of social expression can take on an extremely aggressive tone when sung by people who have been forcibly removed from their birthplaces by the citizens of neighbouring Bantustans. They will often use the derogatory term 'Vesha' when referring to outsiders like the Venda or Northern Sotho. Various songs proclaim that Tsonga women should not marry Venda or Sotho men, that the latter 'stink' or, accompanied by threatening dancing and gestures, call on the members of the chiefdom to 'kill them all, the Vendas'.^[121] Most of these songs were composed during times of friction caused by the imposition of ethnic borders. But the animosity that they propagate lives as long as their popularity.

The sentiment of ethnic separation is reinforced when neighbouring people refer to Tsonga-speakers, not in a polite manner as 'Tsongas', but in a derogatory way as 'Tongas', 'Koapas' or Thokas'. In areas that have experienced a high degree of ethnic tension, people will claim that Tsonga-speakers have an offensive smell, that their cooking is unpleasant and their manner of dress obnoxious. It is of little relevance that these grounds of exclusion can, at best, be traced to localized brands of soap or fats or to regional forms of dress and cooking. What is important is that some people believe that Tsonga-speakers, as a group, dress, cook and even smell the same. Here the cultural factors of exclusion have become so extreme as to politicize the basic senses of smell, taste and sight. This change in the perception of reality both fuels, and is fuelled by, ethnic hostility.