Bantu stances
Sir: It simply won't do to put the failure of South Africa's Bantustans down to an African population ex- plosion. When the Tomlinson Com- mission wrote a blueprint for sep- arate development it estimated that government would have to pro- duce 20,000 new industrial jobs in the Bantustans each year for twenty-five to thirty years. This would stimulate sufficient tertiary activity to create an additional 30.000 jobs so that after six years there should be a total of 300.000. Professor J. L. Sadie of Stellen- bosch University found these esti- mates exceedingly conservative and his figure of new jobs needed was 1.086,000 in six years. But let's take the conservative Tomlinson Com- mission calculation made fourteen years ago and before any 'popu- lation explosion' and see if govern- ment has come anywhere near its mark. The record to date on the government's own figures is that in eight years 54.000 new employ- ment openings have been pro- vided. The latest report of the Transkei's Department of Interior shows that of the 1,579,000 Afri- cans living in the territory only 41,626 are in employment.
As for Bantustan development being slowed by legal limitations on White investment in the Bantustans the contrary is true: the govern- ment is going out of its way to offer special tax and other conces- sions as inducements to White capital.
Molly Mortimer's argument is that Bantustans need not prove completely viable to be admirable experiments in self-determination and she says that Israel and Ireland cannot absorb all their nationals. But Irish or Jews who cannot find work in their states are not treated like contracted migrants where they do live, jailed if they are not in employment and harried into ghastly resettlement camps for dis- placed persons if the urban areas won't have them and the Ban- tustans cannot provide. Reams of material could be pro- duced to show that the Bantustans are not only unworkable but they are simply the old segregated lab- our reserves with a new name and revived ideological justification and with an Africanised administrative set-up that derives its authority not from any sovereign political in stitutions but from the Bantu Ad- ministration Department in Pre- toria.
The Transkei is at least a single geographic entity. The Transvaal Bantustans (five of the eight are in this province) are broken into bits and pieces so that a South African journalist recently de- scribed them as a 'pepper and salt scattering round the Province'. The projected Zulustan covers about 200 separate pieces of land throughout Natal. As for Molly Mortimer's ques- tion: are the Bantustan Chiefs like Matanzima and Shiimi of Ovamboland (this is the correct
spelling, by the way) simply power- seeking stooges of the South Afri- can government, the answer is un- equivocally yes, but this is explic- able because they, like all Chiefs, have for decades been on the official payroll of the government which makes them not heads of states—and even Molly Mortimer does not try to tell us that the powers of the Bantustans gives them anything vaguely approaching independence—but administrative officials. Mind you, it was Chief Matanzima's brother Mr George Matanzima who warned not long ago that Transkei was becoming a waste-paper basket for unemployed Africans.
Equating Bantustans and Black Power demands is absurd: the point about Bantustans is that Africans not only never demanded them but they are being harried into them against their bitter op- position. How on earth can this be called self-determination?
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