Introduction: The Ciskei's Land and People
The Ciskei is unique among the South African Bantustan 'homelands' in that it has absolutely no basis in any ethnic, cultural or linguistic fact whatsoever. Unlike Bophuthatswana, KwaZulu, Venda and other territories which are the designated homelands of speakers of the Tswana, Zulu, Venda and other languages, there is no distinctive Ciskeian language and there is no distinctive Ciskeian nationality. The inhabitants of the Ciskei speak Xhosa, as do the inhabitants of the Transkei homeland, but whereas the Transkei leadership rejects the concept of a specifically Transkeian identity and calls for a single greater Xhosaland, the Ciskei government of President Lennox Sebe tries to legitimize itself through the creation of a wholly artificial Ciskeian ethnicity. It is the aim of this paper to trace the origins and progress of this vain attempt.
The Ciskei, as its name implies, is a block of territory situated on the side of the Kei River closest to the old Cape Colony of which it once formed part.[2] It is separated from the Transkei by a wedge of European-owned land running from South Africa's tenth-largest city, East London, through King Williams Town and up to Queenstown. This strip, usually referred to as 'the white corridor', was carved out of Xhosa territory during the frontier wars of the nineteenth century. If current proposals are duly implemented, the Ciskei will eventually consist of some 8300 square kilometres. This area contained in 1980 a resident population of some 650,000, a population density of 126 to the square kilometre—the highest of any South African homeland except for Qwa Qwa.[3] Over one-third of this population is urban, concentrated around the centres of Mdantsane and Zwelitsha which are nothing but dormitory suburbs for the white corridor cities of East London and King Williams Town respectively.
Over 1,400,000 people classified by the South African government as Ciskeian reside beyond the borders of the Ciskei.[4] It is the policy of the apartheid regime to dump as many as possible of these 'surplus people' into the Ciskei. At least 160,000 of the Ciskei's population has been there for less than ten years, an average influx of about 15,000 a year.[5] Most of these are housed in huge resettlement complexes around Hewu and King Williams Town districts, and new resettlement camps are still springing up. The Surplus People Project Survey of 1980 revealed high unemployment rates of over 30 per cent in most Ciskeian centres, with most people eking out a bare subsistence on poor, starchy diets.[6] The state has attempted to alleviate the situation by encouraging industrial development in the Ciskei, but its system of incentives has done more for the
capitalist entrepreneurs involved than for the mass of the Ciskeian poor.
The Ciskei/white corridor area was the scene of intense black-white contact in schoolhouse and marketplace, and on the battlefield, throughout South Africa's frontier period. The dogged resistance of the Rharhabe Xhosa held the line against Colonial invaders for more than a century, longer than any other southern African anti-colonial resistance.[7] At the same time, the region also experienced extensive missionary activity. Mission schools such as Lovedale and Healdtown paved the way for the college at Fort Hare, founded in 1915, which became the subcontinent's premier institution for African higher education until its seizure by the South African government in 1959. Rural districts such as Peddie and Keiskammahoek nurtured an independent commercial peasantry, which still flourished at the turn of the century.[8] Elected headmen and literate spokesmen replaced old-style hereditary chiefs as the true representatives of this new class. Newspaper editors and politicians such as J. T. Jabavu and W.B. Rubusana were prominent in Cape politics during the days of the African franchise, and they laid the foundations for twentieth century progressive political movements in South Africa.[9]
The emergence of the revived African National Congress (ANC) in the 1940s effectively fused the resistance and the educational traditions in the Eastern Cape region. East London has been a stronghold of the ANC since the Defiance Campaign of 1952, and ANC leaders Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Govan Mbeki are all Xhosa-speakers, as was Robert Sobukwe, the founder of the Pan-Africanist Congress.[10] King Williams Town was the home of Steve Biko and the spiritual centre of the black consciousness movement during the 1960s and 1970s. More recently, the workers of East London have given strong support to the South African Allied Workers Union (SAAWU), which began to organize in the city in the late 1970s.[11] The significance of this is that the region which now forms part of the Ciskei has a deep-rooted historical tradition of fierce resistance to colonial domination which transcends ethnic boundaries and pre-colonial political structures and is now closely linked with a broad South African nationalism. Moreover, as a recent commentator remarked, 'The East Cape's unique combination of a high level of education and a low level of subsistence has always made it one of the most inflammable regions of South Africa.'[12]