[2 Lebowa 3 Ndebele 4 Garankulu 5 Venda…]

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2 Lebowa 3 Ndebele 4 Garankulu 5 Venda 6 S*azi 7 LasotkaVasaqwa 8 Kwazalu 9. instei 10c. shei 1: asac Ocean pendence to the Bantustans is a way of attempting further repres sions of the masses.

CHEAP LABOUR

The Bantustans and tribal homelands have traditionally fulfilled two functions for the capitalists in South Africa. In the first place they have been a source of cheap labour for the mines and industries owned by South African and international capital.

By the early years of this century the native population of South Africa had been driven off their land and into the areas which now make up the Bantustans. These areas add up to only 13% of the land area of South Africa although Africans are 70% of the population.

The remaining 81% of the lana, including all the best agricultural land and mineral deposits, remains in the hands of the whites, who are 16% of the population.

Oi course, within the white population itself, land is concentrated in the hands of the mining and manufacturing capitalists and the big farmers.

DESTRUCTION

This land robbery meant the destruction of the traditional African peasant economy. In 1954 a government Commission of Enquiry pointed out what had been obvious for the previous thirty years - that the tribal areas could not support the population that had been forced onto them, 70% of the land in these areas being useless for agriculture.

The Commission calculated that the tribal areas could only sustain half their existing population. The population density in the Transkei for example is higher than in any country in Black Africa and the income per head is lower.

In the Transkei the annual income per head averages 97 dollars compared to 180 dollars in Nigeria, 310 dollars in Zambia and 210 dollars in Tanzania.

What the Commission did not of course point out was that this state of altairs was just what the south African capitalists and their government had intended.

As a result of starvation and declining agricultural output, the peasants in the Bantustans were compelled to purchase more and more of their food from the white capitalist farmers.

To do this they needed money, SOUTH AFRICA THE BANTU HOMELANDS'* HOMELAND PEOPLE Botswana 1 Boputhatswana Tswana Horth Sotho Ndebele Shangaan & Tsanga Venda Swazi Kimberley o South Sotha Zulu Thosa Xhosa 54+32 : SEe tri and to get money they have to send up to 50% of their young men as migrant workers to the mines and industries of 'white' South Africa where they are forced to work for wages lower than almost any other industrial country in the world.

The Bantustans thus have no independent economic existence. They survive only as a source of cheap labour for the capitalists.

But also the Bantustans have fulfilled a very important political function for the ruling class. Firstly, they have been a method of maintaining the fragmentation of the working class.

The migrant labour system has meant rapid labour turnover, and the pass laws have facilitated the rapid deportation of militants and trade unionists back to the countryside.

However, capitalism cannot avoid for long digging its own grave. As we showed in the previous PRETORIA Swazilar Johannesburg Bloemfonteir Lesoth Durban 10.

Elizabeth article, the development of manufacturing industry since the last war has been unable to resist the formation of a permanently urbanised section of the working class whose youth are now in the vanguard of the current wave of rebellion against repression and of the fight for democratic rights.

Knowing that any struggle for democratic rights under present conditions will turn into a struggle agaisnt capitalism itself, the ruling class in South Africa has been desperately seeking ways to strengthen its political suppression of the masses.

In no capitalist country has the ruling class been able to suppress the working masses by State repression alone. To maintain a regime of repression for any length of time requires the cooperation of other social groups of classes outside the ruling class.

SKILLED

Historically the South African ruling class have relied on an allance with the labour arıstocracy of white skilled workers as the basıs for a regime of repression against the mass of the unskilled (black) working class.

But with the growing militancy and organisation of unskilled workers in the face of police brutality and State repression, another element of ruling class strategy now comes to the forefront.

That strategy is fundamentally to strengthen the political domination over the masses of a backward, conservative, tribal-based ruling group of chiefs and stooges.

This aim has been pursued by the South African ruling class from earliest times. The process of increasing the political "autonomy" of the Bantustans has gone hand in hand with the stripping of normal democratic rights from the masses.

In 1910 Africans were barred from standino far Porliament BUR-ELAG LO Police in an African suburb.

Act removed Africans from the normal parliamentary voters' list and set up a Native Representative Council which then chose three (white) MPs to represent the entire African population in Parliament.

The 1951 Bantu Authorities Act then abolished the Council, and the organs for "representing" the Africans as far as the government were concerned, became the "tribal authorities" in the Bantustans.

At the same time the Act removed any vestiges of democratic bodies inside the Bantustans.

The Transkei, for example, for some years before the war had an elected regional council. The 1951 Act destroyed this and placed effective power in the hands of the chiefs.

The 1959 Bantu Self Government Act removed the last remaining element of African representation in Parliament (the three white MPs).

Finally, the Bantu Homelands Constitution Act of 1971 and the Bantu Laws Amendment Act of 1973 established the "legislative assemblies" which are to be the basis for the "Parliaments" of the new "independent" Bantustans, under the firm control of the Chief and his "Cabinet"

STRIPPED

Thus the policy of stripping the masses of democratic rights in South Africa and at the same time strengthening the political dominthem in control of the only repres entative" bodies left to Africans -is nothing new.

What is new is the move to give political independence to the Bantustans and create the illusion that they are independent sovereign States - though to date the United Nations and Black African states are reficino vernonition under the existing British immigration laws, imagine what a crippling blow to elementary trade union rights this would be.

BLOW This is precisely the blow that Vorster aims to strike to stem the rising tide of workers' struggles in South Africa.

The Transkei has been chosen as a test case for independence because of the firm pro Vorster stand of Chief Matanzima, who describes the government's policy as "an epoch making event that is the product of peaceful evolution and an orderly transfer of power to the people of the Transkei."

Matanzima, it should be noted, has for the last 13 years been ruling with an iron fist those aspects of the Transkei which the government has left to his jurisdiction. Since 1961 "Proclamation 400" has suspended all civil liberties and granted unlimited powers to Matanzima and his coterie of government appointed chiefs.

SUPPRESSED

Any opposition to the idea of independence is brutally suppressed. Even "moderates such •as Hector Ncokazi and his Transkei Democratic Party who accept everything in the government's Bantustan policy except independence, have been incarcerated.

Will Vorster and the South African bourgeoisie succeed in this move to cripple the rising workers? movement by turning workers into foreigners in their own country? There is little danger of that because of the contradictions built into the policy.

Firstly, no economic basis exists for the growth of a black middle class which could become the ruling class in the Bantustans. In other words Matanzima and his small bureaucracy lacks a social base secure enough from which to dominate the increasingly militant urban working class.

BACKWARDNESS

The weakness of Matanzima's social base stems from the same enforced economic backwardness of the Bantustans which historically has turned them into reservoirs of cheap labour. The South African bourgeoisie certainly cannot afford to change that.

In addition any economic development that does take place in these backwaters is out of the hands of Matanzima and his ilk, remaining in the hands of the South African State through the various Bantu Development Corporations.

Over the period 1959-74 only 18% of the finance provided by the BDCs has gone to African capitalists. But even white industry is loathe to come and set up plant in the Bantustans when it can locate near the major urban centres and ports and still get cheap labour.

Thus in 30 years only 5,520 new jobs had been created inside the Bantustans!

The lack of participation of the nominal 'rulers' oi the Bantustans in any of the real decisions affecting their territories was aptly "legislative assembly» opening. a expressed by Mr Botha the Minister for Bantu Affairs in the Lebowa Bantustan last year:

"Politicians should...bear in mind that they chould not tru to

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their territory."