Voting for Puppethood

By Charles Alexander

A homelands plan under attack, even from Afrikaners

For the downtrodden descendants of the ancient Xhosa tribe, it was an unfamiliar and perhaps unfathomable exercise. At countryside polling places in Ciskei, a Delaware-size tribal territory on the southeast coast of South Africa, women in bright bandannas and beads danced and sang the words Enkululele kweni (Go forward to independence). Since many of the voters could neither read nor write, election officials, under the close scrutiny of local police, showed them how to mark their ballots. The outcome was never really in doubt: by a lopsided vote of 295,891 in favor and only 1,642 against, the tribesmen chose to break away from South Africa and establish their own Republic of Ciskei.

In much of the rest of the world, the election was denounced as a sham engineered by South Africa. The chairman of the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid, Akporode Clark, scoffingly dismissed Ciskei's independence as "a pernicious project." Clark called it another step to perpetuate "white domination in most of South Africa while relegating the African people to client states that can be no more than dumping grounds for the aged and infirm."

Ciskei's vote for freedom is part of South Africa's grand strategy, begun almost 30 years ago, to segregate its 23 million blacks into ten autonomous homelands scattered across the country. Although blacks make up more than 80% of South Africa's population, the territories set aside for them occupy only about 15% of the land. Moreover, the lines have been carefully drawn to leave most of South Africa's industrial areas and its diamond and gold mines in the hands of the 4.5 million whites. The three homelands that have already declared their "independence" -- Transkei, Bophutha Tswana and Venda--are still wards of Pretoria, dependent on South Africa for more than two-thirds of their income.

Ciskei is an even less likely candidate for self-reliance. Its barren, eroded soil supports few crops or even trees. The pastoral people subsist on beans, maize, goats and a few dairy cattle. A drought last summer was so severe that it took $9.28 million in emergency aid from Pretoria to avert mass starvation. Though the territory is already densely populated, the government, under a "resettlement" program, sends in truckloads of unwanted blacks from urban areas. Once in Ciskei, many of the new arrivals live in stark tent towns with no schools, shops or running water.

In February a seven-member international commission, including some prominent Afrikaners, recommended against autonomy because Ciskei was too poor to stand on its own. Undeterred, Ciskei Chief Minister Lennox Sebe launched a propaganda campaign urging his people to vote for freedom. Critics charged that Sebe had become a puppet of South Africa interested mainly in enhancing his own power. Responded one of Sebe's ministers: "We are not just a group of blacks in South Africa. We are a nation. As blacks in South Africa, we have no rights. We are just pigs."

For Pretoria, the Ciskei vote was a way of trying to show that the whole homelands strategy was worth salvaging, despite a barrage of doubts about it even by the Afrikaner establishment. For months South African editorials have de cried the lack of progress toward making the black territories self-sufficient. Said the pro-government Johannesburg Citi zen: "It doesn't take a genius to know that homeland development has failed."

Prime Minister P.W. Botha has publicly admitted the economic failures in the new black states, and he has apparently given up the notion that the homelands can soon be made truly independent. Consequently, the government is drawing up plans for eight "economic development areas" along the borders between South Africa and the homelands. Pretoria has already established a $133 million fund to foster small businesses in these zones. On paper at least, homeland officials are to share in the decisions that will determine the speed and direction of development.

For all his efforts to make even a modified homelands scheme palatable to blacks, Botha still faces determined opposition from a formidable black spokes man: Gatsha Buthelezi, the leader of 5.5 million Zulus, who form South Africa's largest ethnic bloc. Their territory, called KwaZulu, consists of 29 land fragments in a region otherwise reserved for whites.

Says Buthelezi: "KwaZulu will never seek independence of the kind offered by Pretoria. The homelands policy is futile and meaningless. We will opt to remain South Africans and gain the right to participate in the government of this country."

Buthelezi argues that the homelands can never thrive because, for one thing, most of their best-educated young people will always aspire to live and work in affluent urban centers of white South Africa. While he hopes to see a broad, peacefully negotiated pact that will bring blacks into the South African power structure, he is not optimistic. The violence that has scarred urban ghettos like Soweto, he believes, could spread to the homelands.

"There is that much tension in South Africa," warns the chief. "My people are impatient."

-- By Charles Alexander. Reported by Marsh Clark/Ciskei

With reporting by Marsh Clark

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